and scrawny German insensuality are still to be charged against
Hindemith as represented in his concerto for orchestra. Over the
first of the four movements he has written "Mit Kraft, ohne Pathos,
und stets lebendig," but the music is overfilled with inferior ex-
pressions of feeling, of the sort of sarcasm, grimaces, and bitter-
ness. Yet here for the first time his music is transcendental in
spots, neither illustrational nor controlled by ancestral posturings.
A state of objectivity seems actually begun. The music says some-
and scraws represented in
a written "Mit kralen inferior ex-


442
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
ove
thing which has no name as yet, says it harshly, brutally, but dis-
interestedly, and works on us not through association but through
form. The pages of the twittering violins in the second movement
approach a major music.
5. Two movements of Schoenberg's uncompromisingly con-
trapuntal work for flute, oboe, clarinet, French horn, and bassoon
were also persuasive. These were the grave emotive lento and the
dynamic rondo, blasty with Varèsian toots. No work by Schoen-
berg makes following more difficult. In none is the movement more
abrupt and seemingly arbitrary. The style is pellucid, indeed.
Each instrumental voice is treated with magistral clarity and defi-
niteness. The material is unified and condensed: for the binary
form Schoenberg strives to substitute the excessively ingenious
exploitation of a single theme; and he disregards harmonic con-
siderations completely in behalf of relentlessly logical part-writing.
Unfortunately, the bald sallow skull of the theorician again ob-
trudes. The idea of holding the first two movements down to
minute volumes of sonority has been carried out too mechanically,
and to the exclusion of musical feeling. Again Schoenberg has
confused an emotional with a technical issue, and lost the effect of
smothered life. The latter two movements, freed of the aprior-
istic form, manage to release the artist.
6. Toch's Dance Suite for its part is unimportant. But it moves
divertingly and lightly, has atmosphere of a not too Wagnerian
sort, while the concluding waltzlet shows some of the delicious
ingenuity we very properly admire in the sugar-castles behind the
windows of certain confectioners.
7. When Bloch's Three Psalms were played in Boston several
years ago, Philip Hale called them music worthy of a pilgrimage.
The praise must have recommenced in many minds during Kous-
sevitzky's performance of the Three Jewish Poems there and here,
so sacred is the inspiration of these pieces, too. They create a
temple about them, and under its dome a noble worship proceeds
with solemn sensuous ritual. Figuration of Bloch as the het man of
a tribe of unusually ferocious chimpanzees is so inevitable that it is
easy to forget that the tenderest, most reverend spirit in contem-
porary music issues from him. While not the most definitive of
his compositions, the Three Poems, free in form, remain among his
most daring and splendidly sonorous. It is possible to detect the
eve


PAUL ROSENFELD
443
influence of Moussorgsky in the vibrating violin figures. The
scintillant orchestra is developed from Debussy's: the hieratic
music of the Dance calls up Salammbộ sheathed in the jewels of
Tanit. Yet with the Rite, the metallic sonority of hollow bronze
begins to obtain. Accents as unconsolably bitter as those of the
Book of Job fill the stately Funeral March. And all of the poems,
particularly the latter two, stir with a purity and depth of expres-
sion, a priestly rapture attained by modern music only in pages of
Parsifal.
Paul ROSENFELD


COMMENT
IT is true that “peculiar style must precede peculiar expression”
I and that literary fastidiousness is for the most part, implicit
in precise, brilliant thinking. Nevertheless, there is a kind of
virtuosity or prodigiousness of diction which is distinctly associated
in one's mind with some rather than all, good writers. We at-
tribute to let us say Machiavelli, Sir Francis Bacon, John Donne,
Sir Thomas Browne, Doctor Samuel Johnson, a particular kind of
verbal effectiveness—a nicety and point, a pride and pith of ut-
terance, which is in a special way different from the admirableness
of Wordsworth or of Hawthorne. Suggesting conversation and
strengthened by etymology there is a kind of effortless compact-
ness which precludes ornateness, a “fearful felicity,” in which,
like the pig in the churn, imagination seems to provide its own
propulsiveness. We have it in Gabriell Harvey's “right Iuggler, as
ful of his sleights, wyles, fetches, casts of Legerdemaine, toyes to
mocke Apes withal, odde shiftes, and knauish practizes, as his skin
can holde,” and in Sir Thomas Browne's “Bees, Ants, and Spiders”:
"In these narrow Engines there is more curious Mathematicks”—
than in whales, elephants, dromedaries, and camels—"and the
civility of these little Citizens more neatly sets forth the Wisdom
of their Maker.”
Perfect diction is not particularly an attribute of America.
We have it, however, in the geometrically precise, snow-flake forms
of Henry James. In Poe's criticism, there are crystals if not
absolute symmetry, and Whistler is our perhaps outstanding ex-
ample of verbal esprit. There is in Wallace Stevens a certain
irony, dignity, and richness: in Ezra Pound, a vigilant exactness:
and E. E. Cummings is admirably synthetic. It is true that in
America, we sometimes lack altitude and as masters of slang, we
do, as we are often told, excel.
To a recent tract of The Society for Pure English," Doctor
1 S. P. E. Tract No. XXII. The Nature of Human Speech. By Sir
Richard Paget, Bart. On the Use of Italic, Fused Participle, etc. By
H. W. Fowler. Reviews & Miscellaneous Notes. By Robert Bridges.
Brochure. 8vo. 68 pages. The Oxford University Press, American
Branch, New York. $1.20.


COMMENT
445
-
-
--
--
Robert Bridges contributes an article upon Anglo-American
Vocabulary, in which most rewardingly he quotes Professor F. N.
Scott: "Where,” it is asked, "will the Englishman learn the
esoteric meaning of 'key-noter,' 'he's the berries,'” and “how will
he translate our 'poor’ series,—'poor fish, poor shrimp, poor dub?! ”
Of the three suggested classes of vernacular, "the idiom of slang
or 'violent colloquialism,'” of “the idiom of commonplace reality,”
and of "the idiom of intellectual interests," he quotes Professor
Scott as saying that “in all the words and patterns of speech used to
express the profoundest and most useful ideas ... the two
languages differ slightly, if at all.”
“The literary as distinguished from the learned,” will find
these tracts of The Society for Pure English, persuasively fastidi-
ous. We have in the present issue a consideration by Mr H. W.
Fowler of "the use of italic,” and of "fused participle”; also
notes on various words—replace and substitute, standpoint, onto,
due, and Mahomet. Apropos of standpoint, point of view, or
viewpoint, “the perplexed stylist,” says Mr Fowler, "is at present
inclined to cut loose and experiment with angle.” New spellings
are recommended, among which we find malease for malaise,
memorandums for memoranda, medieval for mediaeval, and peony
for paeony.
A “rough but reliable statement of the Society's finances” is
offered so pleasantly that it cannot share the fate of most tables
of statistics, and one is impelled also by the method of the follow-
ing paragraph with regard to the price of the tracts, to quote it:
1се
"Times have been unfavourable to cheap production; and the
decent style which we consider indispensable has had an enhanced
value since 1914. But one gentleman wrote that in his experience
‘Tracts' were usually given away. That is true in some depart-
ments of Tractation, especially of such Tracts as no mortal would
dream of buying: but, though one cannot tell what prosperity or
calamity may be in store for us, it seems unlikely that we shall
ever embrace this desperate expedient of philanthropy."
In Sir Richard Paget's article, The Nature of Human Speech,
despite a special application to Great Britain, there are, for any
reader, potent provocations to discussion and to reflection. “A
cat Britain, there are, for any


446
COMMENT
pure language,” says Sir Richard, “may be compared with a pure
style in architecture,” in which “similar structural problems are
dealt with by similar methods.” The “I be, thou be, we be,
you be, they be,” of the West Country, he finds "a far more
advanced form of Pure English than the "I am, thou art, he is, we,
ye, or they are” of Standard Southern English. “Again,” he says,
"there is another criterion by which language may reasonably be
judged, viz. the audibility of its elemental sounds. In this respect
we find our Standard Southern English very inferior to the Wes-
sex' dialect, and it is actually worsening."
In the comment following Sir Richard's article, the question
is asked, would it be possible to discard unvoiced sounds and if so,
“would it be well to do so ?" To do so is impossible, it is an-
swered, "unless the recent mechanical reproductions of speech ...
should supplant them by their voiced forms.” “As for the second
question—whether the discarding of these sounds would be aes-
thetically an improvement or improverishment of the language:
this is an aesthetic question, on which our prejudices are so strong
that we can scarcely trust our opinion; but it does seem to us un-
mistakable that if z, v, and dh, were substituted for s, f, and th,
wherever these occur in our speech, the result would be a great
loss of lightness and variety with a definite effect of trammelled
monotony. It is, however, impossible to imagine every one saying
vah ov for far off. ... And we utterly repudiate the principle
that speech should be made only of sounds which can be easily
heard fifty yards off.” “The displacement of larboard by port,
was secured by an Admiralty instruction of 1844 because the dis-
tinction between starboard and port is so much more marked.'
But ... conversation and what is called table-talk cannot be
ruled by the wide acoustics of a ship's bridge in a gale, or of
public halls and monster meetings.”
When in Maine the harbour-master is the habber-masta, when
in New York seabirds are seaboids, when as in the negro vernacu-
lar, the tenth becomes the tent, certainly is certainy, and Paris is
Parus, the curiosity of the unprofound, with regard to the acoustics
of speech, may seem like that of Esquimaux listening for the first
time to a phonograph. Our completely fascinated interest in these
matters is, however, not to be disguised and our desire to know
what topics may occupy the attention of the fastidious, is genuine.






USERS
23
GO
.
K
R
LE
ead More
Sopoutsa
.
SH
IR
ELLE
BE
Made in Germany
GOLD FISH. BY HENRI MATISSE



THE OXXII
IW
N
INDIAL
JUNE 1926
INTRODUCTION TO THE METHOD OF
LEONARDO DA VINCI
NOTE AND DIGRESSION
BY PAUL VALERY
Translated From the French by J. H. Lewis
Pourquoi l'auteur, dit-on, a-t-il fait aller son personnage en
Hongrie?
Parce qu'il avait envie de faire entendre un morceau de musique
instrumentale dont le thème est hongrois. Il l'avoue sincèrement.
Il l'eût mené partout ailleurs, s'il eût trouvé la moindre raison
musicale de le faire.- From the Preface to La Damnation de Faust, by
Hector Berlioz.
May I apologize for so ambitious, for so really deceptive a
title. When I affixed it to this little essay, I did so in youthful
innocence. But twenty-five years have passed and with so much
time to cool off in, I find it a little strong. The pretentious title,
then, would be modified. As for the text—could one now think
of writing it! Impossible!
Having reached the nth move in the chess game with knowledge,
a man flatters himself that he is being instructed by his adversary;
he imitates his adversary's manner; he becomes severe toward the
NOTE: To the essay entitled an Introduction to the Method of Leonardo
da Vinci, written in 1894 and dedicated to Marcel Schwob, was added in
1919, the Note and Digression which appears in this issue of THE DIAL.
The present translation is published by permission of Harcourt, Brace
and Company who will shortly bring out a translation of the volume,
Variété, in which this essay is included.


448 INTRODUCTION TO LEONARDO DA VINCI
SO
youth whom he must endure as his grandsire; he finds in him in-
explicable weaknessess that were once audacities; he realizes how
naïve he was. At such times one becomes more foolish than ever
-inevitably, through reasons of state. There is no temptation
more piquant, more intimate, or more fruitful than that which
tempts one to a disavowal of self. Each day is jealous of other
days, and to be so is its duty; thought desperately defends itself
against ever having been stronger; the clarity of the moment does
not wish to illuminate moments in the past clearer than itself;
and the first words which are stammered by a wakening brain
brought into contact with the sun, resound through this Memnon:
Nihil reputare actum. ...
To reread then: to reread after forgetting—to reread oneself
without tenderness, without parental solicitude; coolly and sharply
critical, in a mood disastrously conducive to ridicule and scorn,
with a cold, detached air and a destructive eye—thus one re-
commences, or at least foresees that one would recommence one's
labours quite differently.
The task which would be worth the trouble, has always tran-
scended my strength and it is as well that I have never undertaken
it: this little paper owes its life to Madame Juliette Adam, who,
towards the end of the year 1894, at the gracious instance of
Monsieur Léon Daudet, requested that I write it for her journal,
La Nouvelle Revue.
Even at twenty-three, my perplexity was great, aware as I was
that I knew Leonardo much less than I admired him. I saw in
him the principal personage of that Intellectual Comedy which
has not yet found its poet, which would be still more precious to
my thinking, than La Comédie Humaine or indeed, The Divine
Comedy. I felt that this master of his media, this master of design,
of images, and of calculation, had found a central attitude, pro-
ceeding from which all the enterprises of knowledge and all the
procedures of art were equally possible--an attitude which renders
rewarding exchanges between analysis and action singularly
probable: a wonderfully exciting thought.
But a thought not sufficiently general-worthless, infinitely
diffuse, interesting to discuss, but hardly worth writing about.
Body and soul, this Apollo possessed me. What more fascinat-
ing than a god who excludes mystery, who need not base power


PAUL VALERY
449
wa
upon a confusion of the senses; who need not exert his magic upon
our darkest, most obscure, and tender depths; who forces us to
agree rather than to submit; whose miracle it is to elucidate; whose
profundity is a well contrived perspective? Is there a better
mark of authentic, legitimate power than that of not having to
function behind a veil? Never had Dionysus an enemy more
deliberate, more pure, more radiantly accoutred than this hero who
strove not so much to bend monsters and break them as to discern
their motivating springs; who could so penetrate with questions
that he could be contemptuous of piercing with arrows; who was
a superior more than a conqueror; who intimates that there is no
triumph more perfect than that of understanding one's opponents
almost to the point of reproducing them, in which case, having com-
prehended them, one coolly abandons them, having reduced them
derisively to the category of special cases and comprehensible
paradoxes.
Imperfectly as I had studied him, his drawings and manuscripts
were to me dazzling. I derived from these thousands of notes
and sketches the extraordinary impression of an hallucinating
burst of sparks, struck out by most diverse blows in some fantastic
forging. Maxims, recipes, self-communings, essays on an argu-
ment always under revision; sometimes a finished description, oc-
casional remarks addressed familiarly to himself.
But I had no desire to reiterate that he was this thing and that
thing-painter, geometrician, and . . . And, in a word, artist of
the world itself. Everyone knows that.
I was not sufficiently versed in such matters to think of dis-
cussing the detail of his researches (to try, for example, to deter-
mine the precise sense of that Impeto of which he makes so much
use in his dynamics; or to expatiate upon that Sfumato, to which
he has been faithful in his painting); nor did I find myself
learned enough nor impelled to try to be learned enough to aug.
ment even meagrely the facts already known. For deep research,
I had not the necessary fervour. Marcel Schwob's astonishing
conversation won me to Leonardo's great charm more than to his
sources. I drank of the draught till it was gone. Mine was the
pleasure without the pain. Finally I woke: my inertia resisting
the labour of discouraging readings, of infinite verifications, of
those scrupulous methods which ward off certitude. I told my
friend that learned men are subject to more risks than others are,


450 INTRODUCTION TO LEONARDO DA VINCI
since they lay wagers while we stay uninvolved; that there are
two ways of erring; ours, which is easy; theirs, which is laborious.
Even when they are so fortunate as to have results to offer us, the
very material truths retrieved, endanger the reality which we seek.
Truth now is, so to speak, falser than falseness. Documents give
us at random the rule and the exception. Even an historian prefers
to recount the singularities of his epoch. And those facts which
are true of epochs or persons do not always enable us to know
them better. No one thing is identical with the sum total of its ap-
pearances; and which of us has not said or done something that is
not his? Now imitation, now a slip of the tongue-or the occasion,
or just the accumulated weariness of being precisely what one
is, distorts truth momentarily; we are sketched dining; the drawing
passes to a posterity wholly inhabited by the erudite, and there
we are, stamped for all literary eternity. A face photographed
just as a grimace appears on it, is unquestionably a document.
Show it to the friends of the unfortunate subject, however, and
they will not recognize it.
Other sophistries were at the beck of my disinclinations, so
ingenious is one's repugnance to protracted labour. Yet I might
have conquered reluctance, had I felt that in doing so I should
achieve my desire. In the depths of my heart I loved the secret
law of the great Leonardo. I did not wish to know his life, or
just the creations of his thought. ... Of that brow, on which
rested many crowns, I dreamed only of the kernel.
Drunk though I might be with intellectual pride and acquisitive-
ness, what could I do, variously impeded as I was?
Work myself up? Give myself a literary fever? Foment
delirium?
I burned for a glorious subject. How ineffectual!
Thirst without doubt creates for itself refreshing visions; it
acts upon some mysterious element as light upon Bohemian glass
which contains uranium; it lights up the desired object, it sets the
jars sparkling, it renders the flagon opalescent. . . . But concocted
draughts are specious, after all: I found, and still I find it unfitting
to write merely out of enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is not the proper
state of a writer's soul.
Powerful as the fire may be, it becomes useful only when it


PAUL VALERY
451
propels the mechanism of art. Well placed checks must create
obstacles to its quenching and an adroit delay imposed upon the
inevitable return to equilibrium must render the subsiding of
ardour, not quite futile.
If it is a question of discourse, the author in premeditating it,
is conscious of being at once his own inspiration, director, and
admonitory influence. One part of him is propulsive; another
looks ahead, composes, moderates, supresses; a third, comprising
memory and logic, is possessed of data, preserves connexions,
and guarantees some duration to the whole concept. Since to
write is to construct as solidly and as exactly as possible the
machine of language, so that the release of the stimulated intelli-
gence may overcome real resistance, the writer should be divided
against himself. Only and thus strictly is the entire man, the
"author.” What remains is not his, but a part of him escaped.
Between emotion, the initial impulse, and the final achievement-
the omissions, the confusion, the vagueness which are the inevitable
outcome of thought-it is his business to introduce the contradic-
tions which he has created, so that inserted, they may contend
with the purely transient nature of inner phenomena for a measure
of renewable action and independent existence.
Perhaps I made too much in those days of the self-evident
defect of all literature, of its never satisfying the whole intelli-
gence. I did not like the idea that certain of our powers should
be unengaged while others were being employed. I may say too
(it is saying the same thing) that I set nothing above consciousness;
I would willingly have exchanged many masterpieces that seemed
to me dictated by impulse, for one page that was obviously con-
trolled by the mind.
These errors, which it would be easy to defend, and which I do
not even yet find so sterile but that I sometimes return to them,
frustrated my efforts. All my precepts, too present and too definite,
were at the same time too universal, to in any instance serve me.
Many years are requisite that fashioned truths may become our
very flesh!
So, instead of finding in myself those conditions, those obstacles,
comparable to external forces, which permit one to advance in


452 INTRODUCTION TO LEONARDO DA VINCI
opposition to one's first impulse, I encountered malicious chicanery;
I deliberately made things more difficult than they ought to have
seemed-to eyes however young. And I perceived, on the other
hand, vague wishes, possibilities, a disgusting facility: a nexus
of free associations, vain as those of dreams, stirring and blend-
ing an infinity of commonplaces.
If I hazarded a word on paper, it was something which only
testified to the impotence of thought: genius, mystery, deep ...
attributes that are equivalents of nothingness and tell us less about
their subject than about the speaker. I tried in vain to delude
myself—such a mental policy was short-lived: so promptly did I
pass pitiless sentence upon my budding hypotheses, that at each
instant the sum total of my exchanges was nil. As a crowning
misfortune, I worshipped precision, confusedly but passionately:
I had a vague belief in the possibility of controlling my own
thinking.
I felt, to be sure, that we must of necessity take into considera-
tion the accidental: made for the unforeseen, the mind gives it
and receives it; "taking thought" is without direct result, and the
voluntary or regular operations of the mind are useful only after
the event—as in a second life, afforded by the mind to its most
essential part. But I did not believe in the power of delirium
per se, in the necessity of ignorance, in flashes of absurdity, in
creative incoherence. What we get by chance, has somewhat the
character of chance. Our revelations, I felt, are but events of a
certain order and these events which know must still be inter-
preted. The interpretation is always necessary. Even the happiest
of our intuitions are inexact: by excess, in relation to our everyday
comprehension; by falling short in relation to the infinite com-
plexity of small objects and actual situations, which they are
supposed to have brought under our control. Personal merit-
after which we sigh-does not so much consist in submitting to
our intuitions as in seizing them; nor so much in seizing them,
as in weighing them. . . . And our parrying of the attack of
"genius” is sometimes preferable to its own thrust.
We well know, besides, that the chances are against this demon:
the mind whispers shamelessly a million stupidities for one fine
idea that it imparts; and the unanticipated boon is not ultimately


PAUL VALERY
453
worth a straw, save as treatment shapes it to our end. It is
thus that ore of no significance in its vein or bed, acquires im-
portance when brought to light and subjected to manipulation.
It is then by no means their intuitiveness which makes works
of art great; remove the works themselves and your "flashes” will
be no more than mental accidents, lost in the statistics of local
cerebral activity. Their real value consists not in the obscurity
of their origin, nor the reputed depths from which we may naïvely
like to think of them as issuing, nor in the sudden ecstasy they
give us; but rather in their correspondence to our needs, and
finally in the conscious use we shall be able to make of them—that
is to say, their contribution to the whole personality.
But if it be true that our profoundest insight is blent with the
greatest chance of error, and that the average of our thoughts
is in a sense insignificant, the selecting and organizing faculties
must incessantly be exercised. As for the rest, which depends on
nobody, it is as useless to invoke it, as rain. You consecrate,
glorify, vainly torment it: nothing results but even further
hallucination and false appearance-things so naturally united
with mental ambition that one hardly knows whether they be
principle or derivation. The disaster of mistaking a hypallage for
a discovery, a metaphor for a demonstration, a surcharge of words
for an outpouring of torrential beauty, and oneself for an oracle-
that is innately our misfortune.
Leonardo da Vinci is not to be associated with such chaos.
Among the many objects of veneration from which we may choose,
as at least one to be exalted above others, he sets himself as an
ideal, an unvarying Precision-exigeant, unique. And such an
ideal in being the least gross, must of necessity be unsympathetic
to all others.
This precision once fixed upon, a true liberty is possible, ap-
parent liberty being only opportunity to obey each chance impulse;
the more we enjoy it, the more we are enchained pivotally, like a
cork on the water, held by nothing, solicited by everything, an
object for dominion over which the powers of the universe contend,
frustrated.
The entire method of the great Vinci is uniquely derived from
his broad objective. As if a particular personality were not in-
une.


454 INTRODUCTION TO LEONARDO DA VINCI
volved, his thought appears universal, circumstantial, consistent,
and detached; in no way pertaining to an individual. The really
great man is never eccentric. His personality is as concealed
as possible. There are in the man of genius few uneven levels
of attainment, no intellectual superstitions. No vain apprehen-
sions. There is in him no fear of analyses; he carries them, or
rather they lead him to illusory consequences; he returns effort-
lessly to the real. He imitates, he innovates; he never abjures the
old because it is old; nor the new, because it is new; but finds in
each, something eternally of the present moment.
He is in no degree aware of that so gross and so badly defined
opposition which, three half centuries after him, forced a man,
entirely insensible to the arts, to make an unfavourable distinc-
tion between sensibility and the spirit of mathematics—a man
who could not imagine a delicate but natural junction of diverse
kinds of ability; who thought painting, vanity; who felt that true
eloquence dispenses with eloquence; who launches us on a quest
from which all delicacy and all geometry are exiled; and who,
having changed his new lamp for an old, wasted himself in sew-
ing papers into his pockets, when it was time to accord France
the honour of a calculus of the infinite.....
No supernatural revelations for Leonardo. No yawning chasm
beside him. An abyss could only make him dream of a bridge.
An abyss would merely serve for the trial flight of some huge
mechanical bird. ....
He could well have thought himself an ideal animal, beauti-
ful and intelligent, absolutely supple and responsive, endowed
with many kinds of motion, able at the slightest whim of the
rider, without check or hesitation, to change from one kind of
progress to the very opposite. The mind of the wit, the mind
of the geometrician, he assumes it or abandons it, as the clever
horse does its successive rhythms. The being that is perfectly
co-ordinated need only impose upon himself certain secret, very
simple modifications of the will, and at once he passes from the
limitations of purely formal changes and symbolic acts to the realm
of imperfect knowledge and of spontaneous reality. To possess
the freedom required to accomplish such profound changes, to make
use of so wide a register of adjustments is merely to realize man's
integrity as we imagine the ancients realized it.


PAUL VALERY
455
C
.
Such superior elegance disconcerts us. Absence of embarrass-
ment, of prophetism, of pathos, ideals of precision, the nice balance
between curiosity and power always maintained by this master
in equilibrium, disdain of illusionism and artifice, and in the case
of the most inventive of men, ignorance of the theatre, are to us
scandalous. Than this combination of qualities, nothing is harder
to imagine for such creatures as we, we who make of "feeling”
a sort of profession, who think that we can reduce everything to a
few elemental effects of contrast and nervous resonance, and that
we seize the essence of everything when we enjoy the illusion of
identifying ourselves with the iridescent, shifting substance of our
temporal existence.
But Leonardo, proceeding from discovery to discovery, becomes
quite easily the continuously more perfect squire of his own nature.
He submits his powers of thought to an infinite discipline, exercises
his attention, develops his actions; equally well with either hand, he
makes the most exact drawings; he alternately develops and collects
himself, making ever closer the bond between Will and Potentiality
and without ever sacrificing grace, applies to the arts, logic.
So detached an intelligence arrives at strange attitudes in its
movement-just as a dancer astonishes us by taking and preserving
for some time, poses of pure instability. His independence offends
our instincts and makes light of our predilections. Nothing freer,
that is to say nothing less human than his judgements on love, on
death. We can divine from several fragments in his note-books,
what they were.
"Love in its fury,” he says in effect, “is so ugly a thing that the
human race would die out-la natura si perderebbe-if those who
practise it could see themselves.” This contempt is indicated by
several sketches, since the height of scorn for certain things is, in
fine, to examine them at leisure. Here and there, then, we find
among his drawings cross-sections which are shocking to love. The
erotic machine interests him, the mechanical animal being his pre-
ferred domain; but a combat of the sweatings and pantings of the
operanti, a monster of clashing muscularities, a beast-like trans-
figuration, all this seems to excite in him merely repugnance and
disdain.
His judgement on death must be drawn from a quite brief text
—but a text of a fullness and antique simplicity, which should
IT SCYCI
re.


456 INTRODUCTION TO LEONARDO DA VINCI
find a place perhaps in the Treatise, never finished, on the Human
Body.
This man who dissected ten cadavers to follow the course of half
a dozen veins, dreams thus: the organization of our body is such
a marvel that the soul, though a divine thing, separates itself not
without the keenest pangs, from the body that it has inhabited.
And I really think, says Leonardo, that her tears and grief are
not unjustified.
Let us not seek to understand fully the strange doubt heavy
with meaning which lies concealed in these words. It is enough
to contemplate the enormous shadow cast by some idea in the
process of formation. Death, interpreted as a disaster for the soul!
The death of the body, as a diminution of that divine thing!
Death, causing grief to the soul by destroying her most precious
handiwork, the edifice which she had built, that she might dwell
in it.
I am not anxious, from these reticent words, to deduce a meta-
physic according to Leonardo, but I shall permit myself a some-
what facile comparison, which has come to me unsought. To such
an amateur of organisms, the body is not a mere piece of rubbish:
it has so many properties; it resolves so many problems; it pos-
sesses so many functions and resources that it cannot but answer!
to some transcendental need, sufficiently powerful to have called
it into being, yet not sufficiently powerful to dispense with its com-
plexness. It is the work and instrument of someone who has need
of it, who does not readily cast it aside, who deplores the loss of
it as one would the loss of power. ... Such is Vinci's feeling.
His philosophy is wholly naturalistic, averse from the supernatural,
quite attached to the literal physico-mechanical explanation; with
respect to the question of the soul, observe him discoursing quite
like a philosopher of the church. In so far at least as it is Thomist,
the Church does not accord the separated soul an altogether en-
viable existence. Nothing so poor as this soul which has lost its
body. It is scarcely more than mere bare being—a logical micron
having a sort of latent life, which makes it to us and probably to
itself, a something scarcely conceivable. It has discarded every-
thing: power, will; knowledge perhaps? I do not know even if it
may recall having been, in time and somewhere, the form and act of
its body! To it is left the honour of its autonomy. . . . So


PAUL VALERY
457
vain and insipid a condition is happily but a transitory one—if
that word, beyond the bounds of temporal existence, retains any
meaning: reason implores and dogma insists upon a restitution of
the flesh. The qualities of this transcendent flesh will doubtless
be quite different from that which flesh has had. I think that
here one must conceive a thing quite unlike the simple reversal of
Carnot's principle, the realization of the improbable. But it is
useless to venture beyond the confines of physics, to dream of a
radiant body whose mass would have a relation to the law of
gravitation quite different from that of our present body's, while
at the same time it would perhaps vary in such ratio to the speed
of light that the agility foretold of it would be realized. ...
However that may be, according to theology, the naked soul
must recover a particular functional life in a particular body,
and through that new body, a sort of matter which will permit
it to operate and will crowd its empty intellectual categories
with incorruptible marvels.
Dogma which thus concedes a barely secondary importance to
the corporeal organization, which notably minimizes the soul,
which forbids us to imagine it and thus spares us the folly of
imagining it, which goes so far as to oblige it to be reincarnated
in order that it may participate in a complete eternal life, this
dogma so exactly contrary to that of supernaturalism, separates
the Church, in the most obvious way, from the generality of the
other Christian confessions. But it seems to me that for two or
three centuries, there has not been in religious literature, a tenet
which has been so slighted. Apologists, divines scarcely touch
on it. . . . For an explanation of this approximate neglect, I am
at a loss.
To be concluded


THE PICNIC
BY ALYSE GREGORY
N OW the day to which Sylvia had been looking forward for a
IV whole week, had arrived. She and Marcel were to have their
first picnic together in the woods and Bridget had prepared a lunch
for them to this end. She was off, across the lawn, through the
hedge, past the apple-tree where her first meeting with Marcel had
taken place, and a second later was calling his name under the
open window.
"Marcel, viens, c'est moi.” They often spoke French together,
using the intimate personal pronoun. She noticed when he ap-
peared two very neat darns in his coat and that his features under
his soft felt hat were more poetic than her floating memory of
him ever quite retained, the high forehead, the curved nostrils, and
slightly parted lips seeming to share among them an expression half
severe, half voluptuous. They had some discussion as to who
should carry the lunch basket, but she yielded at last.
Now it seemed to her that all of life was only just beginning
to flower in these moments; that it was an inestimable privilege to
be walking with so intense a companion, one so proud and self-
sufficient, so undefiled by convention, so purged of insignificance,
and at the same time she was conscious of some obscure restless
power within, a power that moved in delicate, inscrutable vibra-
tion, peering sportively up from some separate depth in herself,
irrepressible, jocund, folâtre.
Past the stone house they walked to an old-fashioned garden
where white phloxes inclined sedately toward them holding out
their fragrance like an uncertain gift, and zinnias, as brazen as a
band of Madrid dancers at a New England village fair, tossed up
their painted heads in flaunting relish of the day. Two tiny blue
butterflies pursued each other in volatile transport in and out of this
voiceless symphony of colours and scents, while in the background,
one gigantic sunflower seemed to trumpet attention to its solitary
existence.
Note: The Picnic is a chapter from a novel entitled She Shall Have Music,
to be published by Harcourt, Brace and Company.


ALYSE GREGORY
459
“Choose your flower, Marcel.”
He looked deliberately about, taking a few slow steps, his glance
resting for a moment on some marigolds, then continuing on to a
row of cockscombs. “I choose the cockscomb because I especially
admire cockscombs, envy them, in fact.”
She stooped to pick the tasselled, wine-coloured flower. “Why
do you admire cockscombs?”
"Because there is something free and good-natured about a
cockscomb, his very vanity ensures his good nature.”
. “Oh, but no, Marcel, he would betray his deepest convictions
for a moment's success, and this flower has no perfume, no essential
reserve of its own. It is as empty as the plume on an officer's hat.”
“But a cockscomb is the proudest symbol of the male animal.”
“But why should the male animal be proud? Proud of what?
He should be proud of overcoming his male instincts, of his
subtlety, compassion, of his creative impulses finding expression in
work, and not of his tyranny and vanity, and his sex which he
shares in common with the beasts.”
“Oh, but Sylvia,” he was deprecatory. “Don't you see? Surely
you must see that all these things are merely offshoots of the instinct
underneath, the same instinct that makes that butterfly chase the
other far up in the sky, that makes the crickets pursue each other
in and out of the grass, an instinct which is vigilant and mobile,
treacherous, yet light of approach, and never, no never to be com-
pletely left out of account.” He saw her nervous, perplexed, ar-
rested expression under her drooping hat, as if she had been sud-
denly snared, and was gathering her forces to escape, and he felt
a certain exultation combined with concern. “Any knowledge
that does not have as its foundation that knowledge, that inner
knowledge of the treachery, strength, and beauty of sex is empty.
Don't you agree with me? You don't mind my saying this, do
you? You are not offended? Surely you would agree with me.”
“Offended! Of course not.” She flashed him a look of proud
distress. “What on earth would make me offended?” She was
seeking in her mind to face his words, stealing up to them secretly,
not daring not to agree, until she had had time to reflect upon them.
one by one, yet certain that she would in the end find some partial
refutation. Little walls in her mind were shaking as if they were
about to crumble, then with sudden suspicion she wondered if per-
haps men and women did not have a different morality, as she had


460
THE PICNIC
been always led to believe, and if even with Marcel she had not
better be on her guard lest he should want to steal some pleasure
which might in the end destroy the quality of their companionship.
Then she stored wholly away these reflections and reclined in the
moment, letting the September sun fill her being with a soft
languor.
“I shall make you wear it as a symbol while we are together of
your fickleness, and I shall choose in opposition a forget-me-not
for constancy."
She was surprised in the act of putting the flower into his button-
hole by Bradford who, with a watering-can in his hand, emerged
from behind a fuchsia bush like a heavy-footed toad hopping sud-
denly out from under a rhubarb leaf. In the look he gave Marcel
she seemed to detect some curious repugnance as if he despised, yet
for some obscure reason, feared him too.
“So you young people are enjoying the day? Watch out Marcel
doesn't get into mischief, Miss Brown, won't you? Don't let him
hurt himself.” Marcel made no reply, merely standing aside, im-
passive and polite, to let his father proceed, but it was some mo-
ments before they could with ease resume their conversation, for
the young man retracted under the covert insult in his father's
words, as if he were held up to ridicule for his lack of physical
strength.
"I suppose he thinks because you like books better than hoes that
you are unnatural ?”
“Yes, perhaps. I really don't know. After all I get all the books
I want and more tutors than I know what to do with. I have
never understood my father, nor my mother either for that matter.”
They passed under the row of poplars and came to a winding
grass-grown road where two Guernsey cows in an adjoining field
came up to gaze at them over parallel bars, their sad dull eyes
becoming suddenly bold, their horned heads blunt and fixed.
Sylvia stooped to pick some blueberries which she held out to her
companion. He snatched her wrist lightly in his fingers and bend-
ing forward let his lips rest for a second on her palm. She laughed
and turned away feeling some soft yielding response in her pulse.
"Why do you say you choose forget-me-not for constancy? Con-
stancy is the dullest of virtues and should be banned by lovers
altogether. Only the moment matters." He had caught a glimpse


ALYSE GREGORY
461
se
ITTOV
of her cool, smooth arm above the elbow and burned to touch it
with his lips. They passed a field of Queen Anne Lace which like
Etruscan silver, threaded in a thousand airy patterns, intersected
and separated, each stalk, as it upheld a glittering ornament, rising
in single elegance from a vast sea of emerald green.
"And who was talking of lovers? I know nothing of lovers.”
She said it without coquetry. Something in her felt broken and
sad. He does not really love me, she thought, yet she was happy
too with a wilful, intemperate happiness that held the passing
second in delicate leash as it sped through the narrow clearing of
her mind.
They had to kneel down to pass under a barbed-wire fence.
Marcel went first, catching his coat so that she had with nimble
fingers to detach it for him. She followed, turning round at the
last to lie looking up at the floating clouds, one of which seemed
to advance like an angry elephant, proboscis curled outwards, while
her companion, seeing as he stood over her the shape of her firm
young breasts under her thin blouse, felt his desire leap furtively
within him.
“Let me help you,” but she was on her feet in a second evading
his outstretched arms. Finally they came to an old stone quarry
part of which had been made into a pond. Skirting this by a nar-
row ledge and disturbing in their act a bullfrog, who, with a wild
jump, leapt into the water, they came to an open space hollowed
out of the solid rock where they seated themselves on a flat boulder.
"Have I told you that my mother and I may sail soon for
France? She has been wanting me to go with her for a long time.
Will you be sorry, Sylvia? Will you miss me?" He looked
down in front of him, his hands clasped loosely between his two
knees, hesitating to glance into her averted face.
If with one swift stroke delivered by an invisible hand the sun
had been suddenly transformed before her very eyes into a disk
of ice she could not have been more surprised, more chilled with
dismay. She sat for a moment in complete silence, then in her
usual quiet voice from which she had endeavoured to banish all
agitation she replied, “How splendid that would be for you, Mar-
cel. I do envy you. You will go, of course. You simply must.
But when, when will you start ?”
He was disappointed, offended even. He had expected her to


462
THE PICNIC
was
protest, perhaps even to shed a few tears, then he would have told
her that it was only because he wanted to be near her that he had
not gone before. "You wouldn't care if I left to-morrow, I
suppose."
“But you just said constancy was not for lovers.” Then she
could have died, have hidden forever like the brown lizard under
the flag at her foot which remained as silent as an Egyptian carving.
What would he think? That she was encouraging him to make
love to her? Or that she was in love with him, or perhaps that
she was merely trivial. “Do let's go on.” She rose impetuously.
“You are sorry I am going, or you wouldn't have said that.”
"Said what? I was only in fun anyway." He had to hurry to
keep pace with her as she mounted the uneven steps which led into
the woods. They had hardly reached the top of the ascent before
Sylvia noticed that the lunch basket had been left behind and in a
flash she had turned and was flying down for it again, her white
petticoat under her lilac dress fluttering like a slackened sail in the
breeze. When she joined him once more he was humiliated, apolo-
getic. “Don't punish me by not letting me carry it now.”
She found a place for them to sit by a stream under the branches
of a willow-tree. It was as if the clear water of her thought were
whirling within itself behind some obstructing wall, and could not
flow over into his territory. She longed to keep this relationship
devout, yet her whole being was pervaded with the memory of his
lips on her palm.
“Look, look, there is a trout," and rising suddenly she knocked
over the basket containing their lunch which with one convolution
rolled into the water frightening the glistening spotted fish into
immediate flight. He caught it out in a second with the crook of
his walking-stick and they both burst into laughter; and now she
felt relieved, happy once more, looking at him, and untying the
little package of damp sandwiches. She would not drink from his
palms, afraid to trust herself, but leaned down and put her lips
into the crystal water, watching meanwhile the shadow of the
mint reflected on the white shining pebbles at the bottom of the
stream.
"Do you really want to go to France? It is foolish of you to
ask if I should miss you. You know how much I would.” She
was too proud to say that he was all that made life affluent for her.
“But you mustn't hesitate. Really you mustn't.”'


ALYSE GREGORY
463
He was disarmed by something tender and genuine in her tone,
and they sat eating their sandwiches and fruit in transitory accord. ·
About them the leaves of the trees were already beginning to turn
to autumn colours, here a patch of russet, there a trailing scarlet
vine, again an edging of citrine, as if under the earth a magic fire
were gaining strength, a fire that would transform the green foliage
to a thousand multi-coloured torches, torches that would announce
in one last vibrant coruscation of beauty their rapidly approaching
decay. Only the gushing of the water over its pebbly bed, the
stridulous cries of the crickets like busy fret-saws cutting into
the air, and the murmur of the wind in the trees broke the perfect
stillness.
After burying the remnants of their lunch under a stone they
went in search of blueberries, filling the basket almost to its rim.
“I promised to bring some home to Uncle Horace, and oh, I must
take him some of those toadstools. Do see how beautiful they are,
Marcel—that one there the colour of aquamarine, and the pearly
one, and oh how lovely, do come and see, I must have that orange
one! Uncle Horace will know all their different family names.”
Too quickly the hours passed and the moment for parting drew
near. She went with him back to the very door of his study, but
he could not persuade her to come in.
“But you will promise to go out again with me right away, won't
you, Sylvia ?” he expostulated. “To-morrow, well, then Thursday?
Why can't we go to the sea-shore next time, to Whitman's Point ?
Do say you will. We may never have another chance together."
So it was agreed that in two days' time they would meet at the
station and take a train journey together, regardless of any bitter
consequence, and as with failing heart she came nearer and nearer
to her mother's presence, this knowledge that soon she and Marcel
would be setting out with another unpredictable day ahead of them,
seemed to give her strength and nonchalance.


ON AN OLD PAINTING OF PORTSMOUTH
HARBOR
REPRODUCED IN THE DIAL, AND PERUSED IN
EUROPE BY AN EXPATRIATE
For Alyse Gregory
I too, a child, have known those waters
Ungenerous to fledgling limbs,
No weedy god nor green-got daughters
Have eased the waves where cold dawn swims.
Where morning bites in ribbed reminder
That fish, not men, were gendered here,
And where the very sea is blinder
That Europe is not ever near;
That she wherein my heart was cradled
By song and speech of sweeter men
Shall not by all the ships be ladled
To answer my wan heart again.
Though I should stand upon the binding
Of that cement and rock-torn coast
And every well-wrought ship be minding
That brings us Europe's hard-won boast,
Though all those ships be smooth like apples
And packed inside with Gothic worth,
Chuck to the gills with Gothic Chapels-
Shall that then give us Gothic Earth?
You cannot plant the inward sorrow
That grows in European hills,
Nor can you buy, nor steal, nor borrow,
The rooted oak of Northern wills.


ON AN OLD PAINTING
465
You cannot pluck a sprig of heather
And stick it in your foreign cap
And think that you have got your tether
About the sober moorland's lap.
There is no sense in buying pictures
And swimming them across the sea:
The sun and moon have laid old strictures
On what a continent shall be.
There is no sense in trying to furnish
A continent against its will,
There is no love will ever burnish
A stream, though gold, to run up hill.
Nor is there use to clip and narrow
Your heart from your ancestral tree:
You may expunge your noblest marrow-
You shall not scotch the sundering sea.
Give over the ridiculous battle,
Leave Portsmouth Straits to narrower men;
Nor count the cost, nor list the tattle,
Of what new pain shall follow then.
Give up the lilacs which your sorrow
Had woven round the grim, spare house,
Give up the twilight, loose the morrow
Of scarlet Fall and backwood grouse.
Forget the singing on the river
When girls are wild, and water black,
Forget the gift, forgo the giver-
For girls, as mad, shall never lack.
The lilac blooms in holier gardens
Wet from a sea as nobly salt,
The twilight is alive with pardons
Wherever you may call your halt.


466
ON AN OLD PAINTING
The heart of Europe shall accept you
And hold you closelier for your pain,
For all the foolish miles that kept you
Beyond the foolish, idle main.
You shall sit down, and almost wonder
If you are not come home at last,
You shall sit down, and almost sunder
The pain that ties you to your past.
. . . . . . . .
The dear assent of each child's laughter
Has made that pain but straightly clear:
I shall not be my whole, hereafter,
Because I was a boy not here.
Because I swam in Portsmouth Harbor
And naked strove with fishes there,
Because I sat in a spruce arbor
And sniffed and munched a Bartlett pear;
Because I gathered huckleberries
On hills where only boulders grow,
Because I climbed for blackheart cherries
Among black boughs where white winds blow;
Because I played Old Cat at Baynter's
And Prisoners' Base in Portsmouth streets,
Because I spoke a girl at Painter's,
And sailed toy boats in Holbrook's fleets;
Because I cracked horsechestnuts gladly,
Because I lit Jack-lanthorn men,
Because I loved my Portsmouth badly,
Because I loved all Portsmouth then;
Because I played with agate marbles
And packed my nails with Portsmouth dirt,
Because it is old play which garbles
And ties the soul beyond desert,-


ON AN OLD PAINTING
467
Therefore the Portsmouth Light has made me
What I cannot leave off to be;
Therefore my birth had once betrayed me
Before I saw the Portsmouth Sea.
The heart of Europe shall accept you
And hold you closelier for your pain,
For all the foolish miles that kept you
Beyond the foolish, idle main.
You shall sit down, and almost wonder
If you are not come home at last,
You shall sit down, and almost sunder
The pain that ties you to your past.
The dear assent of each child's laughter
Can make that pain so subtly clear:
I shall not be my whole, hereafter,
Because I was a boy not here.
I have no home, unless it be
The wide esurience of the sea.
I have no home, unless it be
The tortured excellence of the sea.


BOHEMIA
BY CHARLES SEARS BALDWIN
DOHEMIA has been for a hundred years a figure of speech. Is
the figure an allegory, a myth perhaps embodying a vision; or
is it only a stale fiction? It began, at least in error. The French
language had fathered upon earnest Bohemia the footloose, whether
nomads or vagabonds, who transgressed boundaries. English liter-
ature added another error, famous because it was adopted by
Shakespeare. In the Winter's Tale he gives to Bohemia a sea-
coast. The real Bohemia has no sea-coast. Neither has the meta-
phorical Bohemia, that fabulous home of those who will have no
home. What have nomads in vans or tents or garrets to do with
harbors? A port ends the voyage. Bohemians hate to lay a
course. The metaphor holds for a port as a way out. Women
especially, when they yield to gypsy yearnings, find that the land
of homelessness has no sea-coast. They cannot readily sail away;
and the men who welcomed them as adventurers cannot help them
as travellers. Whether or not this ought to be so, it is so. But the
difficulty of escaping from escape is dangerous enough for men too.
For either women or men the entry into Bohemia is without pass-
port, and the sojourn at their own risk. Men are still permitted
by society to risk more or longer; but they too find that risk pro-
longed is only habit after all. For him who cannot sail away, as
for her, there is no sea-coast.
Bohemia has no sea-coast because it has no geography-except
for those who trade. They, indeed, for their trade wish us to be-
lieve that it is bounded by the Moulin Rouge, the Chat Noir, the
Frère Perdu, and the Théâtre des Folles, within which they stimu-
late and satisfy curiosity at rates above the market. But you could
not live there without discovering that the people whom you
guessed to be irregular artists and naughty poets are either tourists
or third-rate actors who cannot find better parts. Bohemia has,
indeed, a commercial geography; but it has no other. We fancy
it must have a local habitation on Montmartre because we live in


CHARLES SEARS BALDWIN
469
Passy. Since obviously it is not on Amsterdam Avenue, we hope
it is in Greenwich Village. When we cannot find it in Ohio, we
sneer at the Middle West and seek Bohemia in France. We might
better seek castles in Spain. That young dream is less troubled.
The dream of Bohemia is troubled because it is false. It pre-
tends that relaxation can be prolonged, even fixed. Relaxation
on the contrary is rhythmical, the unbending of the bow, the slack-
ening of taut muscles and nerves, the mind's unfixing. Its func-
tion is to store energy for bending again, for tightening, for return
to focus. Recreation prolonged artificially brings its own stale-
ness. When the indoor routine of towns threatens to stun and
blunt us, we stir our bodies in the open, tramping and camping as
Americans, not subscribing to Bohemia. For Bohemia is even more
unhealthily indoor. It can endure neither fresh air nor sunlight.
Cliff-dwellers will not gain by cave-dwelling.
The release of the mind, beyond what is given by the escape of
the body, comes through imagination. Imagination, though stirred
more by Bohemia than by moving pictures or fat clubs or board
walks, is not developed. It relapses when the first excitement is
prolonged in patterns repeated by tired souls. To set it free for
growth is a function of art. Architecture itself, not the random
habits of Beaux Arts tyros, is to give our daily living vision
Painting, not the whims of painters, would reveal a new earth if
we did not leave it to schoolgirls, tourists, and professional critics.
Here is music; and Bohemia offers instead spasms of dubious ex-
otic noise. Here is poetry; and Bohemia invites us to gossip at
round tables with poetasters. For release why choose this blind
alley?
Because it is blind; because it does not lead. Art will lead us
on to stretch and supple imagination, that we may re-enter the
human scene more observantly, more sympathetically, and so in
the end more actively. Bohemia tempts us to let somebody else ex-
cite us, that we may forget. The devil is in it. Yes, the ultimate
cause is moral. To dispel the Bohemian illusion through art de-
mands more than art. Man shall not live by bread alone. What
he needs further, says the devil, is escape from bread-winning to
Bohemia. But what he really needs further is to open himself
more and more to every divine utterance.


470
BOHEMIA
The term paradoxides bohemicus, though not applied by science
to the illusion of Bohemia, irresistibly suggests to the sage an old
germ at last isolated, and gives his cursing appropriate diction.
For imaginative precision trust your scientist. Paradoxides! No
one else could have so damned in a word.


A GENT (MEDITERRANEAN). BY ADOLF DEHN






靈負重
​A GENT (POMERANIAN). BY ADOLF DEHN





GUEST
BY ELIN PELIN
Translated From the Bulgarian by Stoyan Christowe
1
ve
THE company of volunteers, in which Uncle Stoyan was serv-
I ing, followed in the train of the advancing army, doing duty
at times as a garrison in the cities, sometimes as patrol at the
posts, sometimes as guard of supply trains and railroad tracks, and
sometimes as escort for the conveyance of prisoners of war..
From town to town, from village to village, enveloped in his
mottled cloak, armed with a rifle, Uncle Stoyan had traversed all
of the newly occupied territory and had settled down for a longer
period somewhere at the other end of the world as a guard of the
bridges on an important highway.
The place was remote and deserted; even during the breath-
less quietude of an evening, when the river itself was asleep, not
even the vigilant barking of a dog or the poor voice of a rooster
reached it from the distant hamlets.
Uncle Stoyan remained with the others to guard the bridges.
They constructed a warm underground hut, with a chimney and
a hearth, hung their clothes and knapsacks inside, made them-
selves beds of straw, and set about the fulfilment of duty.
Their austere, speechless figures, heavy like rocks, stood guard
day and night at the observation points with such faithfulness
that not even a bird could pass unnoticed.
On both sides of the muddy road crawled endless caravans of
supplies. The oxen gravely and submissively dragged heavily-
laden carts, their effortful movements speaking of the common,
the great elemental force of the war by which every creature was
impelled. During their long co-labour with the people, the animals
had felt the hardships of the journey and had instinctively per-
ceived the importance of the goal; so that they hauled the wagons
uncomplainingly. They did not wait for the entreating voice of
the drivers or the threatening swing of the goad. In the heavy
gait of these noble aids and comrades of the peasants, of these


472
ĠUEST
was
CON
beautiful, silent, poetic symbols of duty and labour, there was
earnestness and voluntary exertion. Like their masters, they too
were fulfilling soldiers' duty as if they knew that what they
dragged was not a plough.
Uncle Stoyan, covered with his perennial cloak, with his rifle
near his feet, followed so closely with his eyes these endless pro-
cessions of carts that he did not miss a single detail. The oxen,
the drivers, the wheels, the racks, the ingenious contrivances
which some inventive driver had improvised during the long
journeys, all were subjected to the scrutiny of his small eyes,
overhung by drooping brows.
At times Uncle Stoyan would make remarks in a loud voice, as
if he were speaking to deaf people:
“Hey, boy, are you asleep! . . . Pick up that halter . . . the
ox will step on it and tear it to pieces.” Or: "Hey, uncle, you'll
lose your tar-jug."
Off duty, when he was enjoyably warming himself with his
comrades near the fire in the hut, and the conversation revolved
about the day's events, Uncle Stoyan would once more reproach
unknown, vaguely remembered drivers whom he had caught in
negligence: “His wagon loose and crooked like drunk! ...
Tighten it up, man, tighten it up! ... Is that the way to drive
on a road like this? ..."
In the political discussions which frequently took place in the
hut, Uncle Stoyan did not participate. He sat bent over the fire,
smoked his short pipe, listened, and every now and then, stirred
the firebrands.
The weather was rainy and foggy. For days the sun did not
open its eye. One could not tell when it was dawn and when
night was falling. This made the nights seem long and oppressive.
No one had a watch. Uncle Stoyan was not inconvenienced, for he
had got along without a watch for a great many years, but one
of his comrades, a village grocer, could think of nothing but the
time and would ask it of every person he met.
Finally Uncle Stoyan said to him, “I'm going to get you not
a watch, but a whole alarm-clock!"
And one day, as soon as he was relieved from duty, he went off,
got lost somewhere, and did not return until nightfall.
"Here is your alarm-clock, boys," said Uncle Stoyan, smiling to
his ears, as he produced from his cloak, a big rooster.



e
NA
XXX
Collection Jacques Doucet
JEU DE PELOTE. BY JEAN MARCHAND






Courtesy of the Galerie Marseille
LA CHAPELLE ST MICHEL A VENCE. BY JEAN MARCHAND





ELIN PELIN
473
They made a place for the rooster in the hut, where they shut
him in every evening. This duty was always attended to by
Uncle Stoyan, who would say, "Now, let me wind up the clock."
Punctually every evening, and especially at dawn, the clear voice
of the rooster resounded through the vicinity, announcing the hour
to the old soldiers.
One evening a supply train was unyoked for the night near
the hut. Bonfires were built, bagpipes shrieked, and the deserted
place was alive with activity.
Uncle Stoyan went to the drivers to ask them the usual ques-
tions, where they had come from, where they were going; to hear
some news and to look over the oxen and the carts-especially the
carts.
“I see,” he muttered to himself, “they are not from our part
of the country. Strange make—Zagorean. Good make, strong."
He turned around, examined the carts minutely, pulled the draft-
bars, and patted the racks approvingly, as if he were patting the
back of a friend.
When he was examining a beautifully carved and painted yoke,
the ox which lay there ruminating sweetly, stretched out his neck
and blew at Uncle Stoyan's face.
“Yea! Beltcho! That's our Beltcho!" Uncle Stoyan called
out, full of joy and excitement. “He knows me! ... Hey, he
knows me! ... What do you think of that! My wife wrote
that he was requisitioned and I thought to myself, farewell, we
shall never see each other again. But . . . Darling Beltcho .:.
Go ..0..0.. d Beltcho!"
Uncle Stoyan squatted in front of the ox and began to caress
him gently and to comb his forehead. The animal put his head
out and laid his slobbery mouth on the knee of his old friend.
"He knew me! ... He remembers me,” he said to the drivers
who had flocked about him. Uncle Stoyan's comrades came too.
“Here's Beltcho that I was telling you about!” he said to them;
“Look! I have a guest. And I thought I'd never see him
again. Wonderful animal! Isn't he? And how he pulls, how
he can pull!"
Uncle Stoyan began to pet the ox: “Dear Beltcho, he too has
gone to war. He can do anything! ..."
"Hey, boy,” he turned to the driver, “Take good care of him,
do you hear? Give me that curry-comb."


474
GUEST
Uncle Stoyan took the iron comb from the driver and began
to brush his guest, who had brought him so much joy.
“Get up, Beltcho, rise! That's it. Lift your tail now. Oh,
how dirty you are!" And while he was speaking affectionate
words, Uncle Stoyan most attentively and painstakingly cleaned
him, combing him and dusting him with the broom. After this
he looked about for some bran, mixed it with salted warm water,
fetched it to Beltcho, and stepped back to look at him. The
tired animal ate—ate with enjoyment, licked himself, and di-
rected pleading eyes toward his friend, who clung to him, as it
were, unweanably.
"Ha, I understand, you are cold,” said Uncle Stoyan, looking
at the sky on which quivered cold, frozen stars.
"Here, warm up. ... You are my guest,” he said, as he took
off his cloak, “I don't want you to freeze!” and he covered the
animal with his garment. “There now! We don't forget good-
ness, do we?"
It had long ago begun to grow dark and the old soldiers slept
near the fire in the hut; but Uncle Stoyan still hovered near his
guest.
He came to the hut late and could not sleep all night. In his
soul, awakened now by his affectionate meeting with Beltcho, was
stirred up every gentle and beautiful memory of home, of the
children, of the soil. ...
In the morning he did not have to be awakened by the rooster,
but rose and again went to Beltcho.
When the caravan of ox-carts once more started on its journey,
Uncle Stoyan marched along by Beltcho for a distance. At part-
ing he stopped him, patted him, and kissed him on the forehead.
"Good-bye, my Beltcho!” he said to him. Then turning to
the driver, he said: "Boy, look after him, take care of him.”
And thrusting his hand deep in his bosom he pulled out his
money bag, untied it, and took out a grosh which he handed
to the boy. “Here . . . Treat yourself to something. And take
care of the ox. Clean him. Feed him.”
Then the caravan passed on; Uncle Stoyan looked after it for
a long time, and returned to his comrades full of sadness. It
was as if he had just parted from his closest friend.


XENOPHON
BY GEORGE SAINTSBURY
1 THETHER 'tis nobler in the soul to take opportunity or to
Y make it, who shall decide? According to the motto
which the heralds gave to Mr Gilbert Glossin, temporarily of
Ellangowan, “He who takes it makes it," so there is no difference:
but this motto was not held up for admiration. On the other hand
in the special case of opportunity, I think there is something to be
said in favour of taking. Your opportunity-maker is occasionally
a criminal, and very frequently a nuisance. And it so happens that,
in the present instance, an opportunity has been offered to me of
doing something which I have long wished to do without any but
a partial chance of doing it—that is to say of writing a few words
about the elder of those two Xenophons, one of whom was cer-
tainly our first, if not the first historical novelist, while the other,
after a long interval of time, has been thought to be our oldest
existing novelist in prose of a type not in the least historical. The
opportunity itself I owe to an amiable editorial utilization
of the Loeb translation of the lesser writings of the author of
the Anabasis.
I believe that, since the days when I myself learnt and taught
the classics, there has been a good deal written about Xenophon
in the usual way of text-recension, discussion of authenticity, et
cetera. I cannot pretend to full acquaintance with this; but as
I have pointed out, more than once, and sometimes but not always
to the horror of my fellows, this does not incapacitate me at all
for the business that I myself undertake. That business now is the
consideration of the literary value of a certain body of literary
work-generally if not universally attributed to a person called
Xenophon-an Athenian, as it would seem, of the last half of
the fifth and the first half of the fourth century before Christ; a
1 The Loeb Classical Library. Xenophon. Memorabilia and Oeconomicus.
With an English translation by E. C. Marchant. 16mo. 532 pages.
Scripta Minora. With an English translation by E. C. Marchant. 16mo.
464 pages. London: William Heinemann; New York: G. P. Putnam's
Sons. $2.50 each volume.


476
XENOPHON
S
friend and disciple of that other most interesting person (or myth
if you like) called Socrates: and one who left (or is said to have
left) a rather unusually various body of writings—the military-
travel-book already mentioned as the Anabasis; the historical or
political novel called the Cyropaedia; the contemporary history
called the Hellenica; the curious collection generally entitled
Memorabilia (which is not exactly “Memoirs”) of Socrates; and
a still more curious collection as a collection, though no one of the
single sections may be as important, of “Minor” works including
a little treatise on House-and Farm-management; an account of a
Symposium or banquet (Socratic again) at Athens; a dialogue be-
tween the not wholly tyrannic “tyrant” Hiero of Syracuse and the
Poet Simonides on the comparative advantages of sovereignty and
private citizenship; an enthusiastic biography of King Agesilaus
II of Sparta, Xenophon's personal friend; three equally spirited
and practical tractates on cavalry-training, Horses as horses, and
Hunting; with one or two directly political and economical pamph-
lets. With all of these in Greek I am acquainted, as well as with
some of them in English. I need not say that the Loeb Library
most properly provides its stuff in both.
One of the chief things which have made me wish to testify
about Xenophon is the old, but I think by no means obsolete habit
of talking of him in a patronizing manner and indulging in that
most uncritical of critical or uncritical tricks-depreciating com-
parison with others. The Anabasis, says one, is all very well but
it has no “fire,” no “energy” about it. The Cyropaedia, says an-
other, is sadly unhistorical. The Hellenica, says a third, “follows”
no doubt Thucydides in one sense, but what a long way off it
follows him in another! How commonplace is the Socrates of
the Memorabilia and the Minors when you compare him with
Plato's! Sometimes they go further: “Isn't it rather shocking
that we find him so often on the side of his country's enemies ?”
“Isn't it more shocking still when he simply raids the unfortunate
Persian at the end of the Anabasis to fill his own and his men's
pockets?” “Isn't he almost Victorian in his constant talk about
kalokagathia “gentlemanliness'?" And, worst of all, doesn't he
make Ischomachus lecture his wife about housekeeping and the
beauty of boots in tidy rows, and even the use of blanc-de-perle
and its opposites. Lastly, did not the late Mr Ruskin admire
chief things wit I think by no nd indulging


GEORGE SAINTSBURY
477
VO
Xenophon? and is not the late Mr Ruskin (except with a certain
section of politicians) entirely out of fashion?
Well: I never adopted anything that Mr Ruskin said in my life,
though I may have been frequently charmed by the way in which
he said it; and as a matter of fact I liked Xenophon long before
I knew, or could have known, what Mr Ruskin thought of him.
But let us very briefly examine the above depreciations in them-
selves. Most of them, as will have been seen, are merely examples
of the Fallacy of Comparison above indicated. Perhaps "fire"
and “energy” are not exactly Xenophon's strongest points: though
the famous “Thalatta” episode, with the Euxine bursting on the
eyes of seafarers by blood and custom after months in the plains
of Mesopotamia and the rocks and glens of Kurdistan, can hardly
be said to be lacking in either. Perhaps also (as I think is also
said) there is not much of technically military tactics or strategy
in the book. But why should there be? What business have you
to ask it to be anything but what it is? And it “is” a very pleasant
and a by no means unprofitable thing, good and early travel-
writing with some fighting, not a little character; excellent descrip-
tion; and (if it be not treason to mention this with praise in
America) the first chronicle of Beer!
But the Cyropaedia is unhistorical ? Now really at this time
of day there is no excuse for this sort of folly. Perhaps the
ancients, except a very few keen wits like Lucian, did not very
clearly distinguish fact from fiction: and it is part of the charm
of mediaeval writers that they seem frankly incapable of doing
anything of the sort. But it is part of the Burden of Modernity-
laid upon it or Sinbad-like assumed by it as you like—to know
the difference: and if anybody finds it a very severe burden to
know the difference between the Cyropaedia and history, he must
be an exceedingly weakminded person. Then the Hellenica is not
so good as Thucydides. What is? Let idle paradoxers gainsay
as they may, Thucydides is one of the greatest of all historians,
and probably the greatest of all historians of things contemporary.
It is no disgrace to be beaten even in a canter by him. In the
Socrates matter at least the wisest judges have generally admitted
that, if Xenophon's man has not, as he probably has, more of the
real original in him than Plato's, he is at any rate an invaluable
complement or supplement. If it wrings any one's withers to hear


478
XENOPHON
about somebody else being a gentleman, there is nothing to be said
except that there are many writers with whom he will not be
troubled in this way. And as to the advantages and beauties of
a row of boots in good condition and well cleaned it surely is not
necessary to urge that! But perhaps it is. Far too few people
seem to know that seven pairs of boots wear much longer than
seven times as long as a single pair; afford much more comfort
in proportion; and look much better than a succession of single
pairs worn in all weathers without time to recover themselves.
But enough, or almost enough, of mere defence. No doubt, in
point of depth of thought and height of style Xenophon could
no more have written the close of the Platonic Apology than Addi-
son could have written the close of the Hydriotaphia. No doubt
he cannot tell an anecdote as Herodotus or Izaak Walton can.
But why not have them all for what they can do instead of re-
jecting, or at any rate grumbling at some of them on account of
what they can't? Now Xenophon can do a rather unusual num-
ber of things, and can do most of these things rather unusually
well. So useful is his "middle style” (to glance at Addison once
more) that it has received, unless I mistake, the rather doubtful
compliment of being taken as the model of the artificial language
called literary modern Greek. Real-that is to say ancient-
Greek prose is always pleasant to read. It has at once more form
than English and more substance than French: less stiffness than
classical Latin and less want of backbone than modern Italian.
As for German, in prose, comparison would be absurd. But for
what we may call a certain average of its good qualities you cannot
go to any one more safely than to Xenophon. And he always
applies his style to his matter competently: while it cannot be too
often repeated that, for variety as well as competence, he, perhaps
partly by favour of fortune and survival, is rather exceptional.
The merits of the Anabasis have been already dealt with-indeed
it is difficult to think that they could ever have been questioned
if the book had not had the worst of all books' fates—that of
being made a school-book, and one usually read at a time when
purely literary enjoyment is very rare indeed. To the dull the
Cyropaedia may be dull: certainly not to those who can by a surely
pardonable act of literary squinting, keep one mind's eye on it and
the other on Waverley and the Trois Mousquetaires and Esmond!


GEORGE SAINTSBURY
479
To another or the same partner in the creation of dulness the
Hellenica may assist in providing it. But the truth is that, after
the great tragedy which appropriately reached all but the fall of
the curtain at the Goat's River, Greek history is rather dull till
the meteoric rise of Macedon. And Xenophon at least provides
you with no little puff or burst of amusing partisanship when he
talks of "the fire-breathers”—those Boeotian parvenus who had
the impudence to get the better for a little of Athens and Sparta-
meeting with a check.
Next we come to the "common-place” dealings with Socrates
and lo! there are many agreeable finds. To think of its having
been Socrates who originated the excellent modern contention that
men should use no perfume but eau de Cologne! Not indeed that
he specifically mentions the product of those manufacturies of
Farina and others which very likely were not at the moment work-
ing. Even Julian who knew the Rhine and whom eau de Cologne
would have much benefited, says nothing about them centuries-
some three parts of a millennium-later. But Socrates argues elab-
orately and convincingly at the beginning of the Symposium that
men's perfumes and women's perfumes ought to be different. From
this the application to the doctrine about eau de Cologne is suffi-
ciently obvious. But it is curious that Xenophon, like others of
us gentlemen of the literary kind who write about various sub-
jects, goes near to contradicting himself elsewhere. For when that
wife-lecturing Ischomachus rebukes his spouse for employing-
let us say Rachel and other coloured powder on different parts
of her face, he asks her what she would think of him, if he adopted
these means of making himself beautiful? To which of course, if
she had read the Symposium she would only have had to answer
“Yes: but you yourself have laid it down that men's and women's
cosmetics are different.”
To speak more seriously, the point which has always made me
like Xenophon so much-it is a point which, I am glad to see
Mr Marchant has by no means neglected—is the extent (though
"point" and “extent” do not, at least Euclidically, go well to-
gether) to which our author shews us the mind and character of
a Greek of average qualities, but possessing more than average
of expression in literature. To look for any such she
in the great epic or tragic writers would of course be absurd: and


480
XENOPHON
our earlier lyric remnants are too fragmentary and not sufficiently
miscellaneous, while the bulk of the Anthology (or Anthologies)
is too late and too literary—epithets which fit, still more tightly,
the Romances. The historians and the pure philosophers have
their own business to attend to. There are touches in the orators
but only touches. Aristotle is too encyclopaedic. Theocritus and
Menander are in different ways rather "made up": and Lucian,
besides being “late and literary” is a cosmopolitan rather than a
pure Greek.
There remains of course Aristophanes, Xenophon's own con-
temporary, a Greek of the Greeks, as great a realist as he is a
great idealist, and a far greater man and writer than our good
colonel of cavalry and gentleman-farmer by any scale of com-
putation or valuation. But that is just it; he is too great. Aristo-
phanes—like Shakespeare if within a smaller range—is constantly
getting beyond the national, beyond even the cosmopolitan, into
the pure human. In his naughtiest and his most trivial as well
as in his most political and most poetical passages he is largely if
not wholly of, and for, all time as well as all place. Now you
can't say this of Xenophon. On the contrary he is eminently if
not wholly of his time and his place: and accordingly he tells you
curious things about them. Take for instance that at first sight
odd piece of information given in the Agesilaus and possessing a
sort of unintended comment or explanation in the Hiero that the
Spartan King would not himself keep or run horses for the chariot-
race, but quite approved of his sister Cynisca doing this. Inci-
dentally, this is interesting at the present moment when there are
probably—in England at least—more ladies keeping racing stables
than there were in the whole course of the nineteenth century put
together. But its original and lasting interest is much less limited
than that: and it is only one of numerous things that you must
go to Xenophon to find out about. That is to say you must if
you really want to understand some of the most interesting people
in the world's history—not least interesting because their wisdom
is so essentially like our wisdom, when we have any, and their
foolishness, when they have any, so apparently different from the
foolishness of which we have so much.
e


DETACHMENT
BY ANNIE WEBSTER NOEL
0
m
IT was too bad, she remarked, that such a lovely cup was chipped.
1 She did not mean anything by that. She just mentioned it to
excuse it. And now as she drank her tea, she admired the bursting
milkweed pods on Mary's desk.
“But why,” she asked, "have them on your desk?”
She did not mean by that that Mary should understand that she
thought the living-room needed dusting. Certainly not. That was
why she had laid the emphasis on desk. Her own tea-cakes,
when Mary came to her house, had no icing; but she must not think
from that that she was inhospitable. There were so many things.
Whatever you might think of Mary's housekeeping, she certainly
had lovely children. Now the leaves on the lawn were untouched
though so many had fallen. But was that the boys' fault? Or
Mary's? She did not decide; she felt she had no right to. But
the leaves having fallen from their proper place on the tree-
Their proper place, Mary was answering as she poured another
cup of tea, became the ground on which they fell. They were
lovely—brown and gold on the green grass. In spite of herself,
Frances recoiled. But just at that minute, two of the milkweed
seeds, detached by a faint breeze from the window, sailed across the
room. Mary, leaning forward, blew them on. An absolutely per-
fect thing, she mused, as full of joy, they sailed on shining wings
through space. They lighted on the bookcase, futtered, and fell
behind it. In spite of herself, Frances glanced at the books. There
was no dust on them. Mary took one down and blew across the
top of it although there was no dust on it. Irises she was reading
thoughtfully, had best be transplanted in September.
This was September. Could it be that Mary was going to give
her some iris roots. In a way, Frances acknowledged, it would be
like Mary.
Mary took a trowel from her desk and glanced about the draw-
ing-room for her market-basket. Frances wondered if the basket


482
DETACHMENT
were not perhaps in the kitchen or on the cellar-shelf. But Mary
thoughtfully rejected the idea, and in fact, they found it under the
cherry-tree, still with the soap and the baking-powder in it. Mary,
profoundly relieved at having found the baking-powder at last, re-
membered as they came to the irises that Frances had liked the pure
white, the pale blue, and the bronze ones. It was like Mary,
Frances acknowledged, to have remembered that from June, when
Frances had seen them, to September. Frances did not like all
irises, herself. Here was something in bloom, as they walked down
the carefully tended grass walk-golden-rod, yes, in a garden.
And something that looked like a thistle. She had seen thistles in a
fence corner and had admired their great purple upreared heads
But in a garden. Could it be a thistle? Yes, it looked like one.
And it was a weed but there were no weeds in Mary's garden. Just
then with the trowel still in her hand from taking up the irises,
Mary began to dig about it.
"The house is so depressing," said Mary, "let's sit here on this
grass-path in front of this thistle.”
But Frances had to get home. Yet could she leave that way?
The irises were safe in her basket and she paused. Mary scooped up
some lily-of-the-valley roots and laid them in Frances' basket.
"It really ought to rain,” said Mary, taking note of the dry roots.
Lilies-of-the-valley and irises safe in her basket, Frances stood
hesitating, speechless.
ISO


LEO ARROGANS
Honi soit qui mal y pense.
My heart is angry at your small delays.
I would lap up the memory of the sun.
I cannot give you either blame or praise,
You having neither stoutly stood, nor run.
You having edged and dodged in piteous corners
And made my trust in you your only shield,
You being men and curs, dupes and suborners,
Of the last gutter the most dismal yield.
On legs, by the odd clemency of heaven,
You yet shall eye the sun, which is not yours,
On legs—or two, or six, or is't eleven,
Whereon the cockroach makes his nightly tours?
No part or parcel in the wind or rain,
No staking in this Mother Earth is yours;
No high desert, and yet no rearing pain
Shall stamp your heart within these earth-fast moors.
You shall not wax in multitudinous ocean
And try your valour on the firm-dyked land,
You shall not wane, the solitude of motion,
Touched by the wind's wide, low, and honest hand.
Nor rain nor sun nor wave nor earth shall mingle
In that sad draught which is your heart's disease,
And with no stars shall your disaster tingle
When you blow sloven down the sloven breeze.
DO0Q0000000-00cc_cooooooO
OO.OOO
000000000000vna9000000000OOOOOO
1 Two stanzas have here been omitted.


484
LEO ARROGANS
So you may play your tricks against the moon
And be well gulled, and gull the gullible,
And you may worry me, and not be chewn,
And tell the tale that I shall never tell.
Upon a different desert I was born,
And to a different end I ope my jaws,
And on a different quest my heart was sworn,
And in a surlier heart than yours my claws.


adal Deland gebog
LEO STEIN. BY ADOLF DEHN






adell Delson
LE BYRON DE NOS JOURS. BY ADOLF DEHN





THE SONG OF THE STORM-PETREL
BY MAXIM GORKI
Translated from the Russian by Benjamin Block
BLUSTERING wind amasses storm-clouds above the grey
A plain of the sea.
Between sky and sea, proudly soars a Storm-Petrel. He re-
sembles dark lightning.
Now skimming the waves, now arrow-like shooting to the clouds,
he is clamouring; supreme joy is heard by the clouds in the bird's
fearless cry.
In that cry there is thirst for the storm! The clouds hear in it,
anger's rage, keen flame of passion, and sure faith in triumph.
The sea-gulls groan upon the eve of the storm-groan and fly
over the waves, and in the sea yawning depths are ready to hide
their fear of the impending storm.
Denied the joy of life's heroic battle, the grebes shriek too; the
crash of the thunderbolt fills them with fear.
The foolish penguin uncourageously hides its little oval body
in the nooks of the cliffs.
The proud Storm-Petrel alone soars free and daring over the
foam-hoary sea.
Now darker and lower, the clouds scowl upon the sea; the billows
sing and wail, rising high as if to meet the thunder, which roars
and rattles and seethes with wrath. -
The groaning waves dispute with the wind.
Seizing a whole flotilla of waves in its powerful grasp, in the
madness of its anger, the wind hurls them against the cliffs, crash-
ing and scattering into dust and spray, the mass of emerald water.
Darting and shouting, the Storm-Petrel, resembling black
lightning, pierces the clouds like an arrow, dashing the foam from
the waves with his pinions.
He soars like a demon, black and haughty-a demon of the
storm, laughing and sobbing.


486 THE SONG OF THE STORM-PETREL
He laughs upward at the clouds, he sobs with joy!
In the wrath of thunder, the keen bird had long since detected
weakness; he knows that the clouds will not hide the sun-they
will not!
The wind is howling! ... The thunder is crashing!...
Like blue flames blaze myriads of clouds above the roaring
ocean.
Arrows of lightning are caught by the sea and quenched in its
fathomless immensity.
The reflections of these lightnings are fiery snakes, writhing as
they vanish forever in the depths of the sea.
The Storm! Soon the Storm will break!
Yonder is the fearless Petrel soaring proudly amid the lightning
above the roar and anger of the sea; what you hear is the voice
of the Prophet of Victory:
"Let it burst with more fury! Let the Storm break.!" ...


NOTES ON THE DIRECTOR IN
THE THEATRE
BY GILBERT SELDES
(UTE, INGLORIOUS. Dramatists, actors, owners of theatres,
architects, patrons, critics, orange-girls, all have left their
names in history—if not always in the history of the stage. But
who can recall the name of a single director of a century ago? Did
all the great actors direct their own companies and were they good
directors? Pages on Garrick in his rôles and not a word about
the production of the play—but who could write of Barrymore's
Hamlet without allusion to Hopkins and Jones? As a new, or
renewed, force in the theatre, the director is of exceptional
significance.
DIVIDED Duty. The director is permanently a buffer between
hostile groups. He stands between the play and the actor's inten-
tions; between the financier and the public. Like all men in the
theatre he must have talent; unlike some he cannot dispense with
intelligence. His intelligence makes clear to him the nature of
his play; his talent devises fresh and suitable means to com-
municate what his intelligence has discovered. And if he is to
have integrity, he will need also character and will, to subdue all
the other talents, including the financial, to his purpose.
The function of the director is not precise in the American
theatre. He is not actually a régisseur and if the financier of
the play has himself had experience in the theatre, the director
dwindles into a stage manager; if his authority is less limited, he
approaches the artist in the theatre, commanding not only the
business of casting and rehearsal, but settings, costumes, lights,
The director aspires to dictatorship which in the theatre is a name
for freedom, the condition of creative labour. The artist in the
theatre, a free man theoretically, has control of all his material,
from the play to the audience.
AN INTERRUPTED SYMPHONY. Comparison of the director to the


488 NOTES ON DIRECTOR IN THE THEATRE
leader of an orchestra is only ideally accurate. Able and active as
Maecenas (the many-headed, democratic Maecenas, of course)
may be in the interpretation of music, he has, so far, only chosen
the programmes and not forced his readings on the conductor whom
he pays; nor does the bassoon player protest that a composition
will be ruined unless he plays longer and louder than any one else.
HIDDEN MYSTERIES. The work of the stage-director is supposed
to be wrapped in a special and mysterious technique. In the gen-
eral run of plays, however, the principles are simple enough. The
director seeks to make the written word and the imagined stage
business effective. A play which is quite good reading may be
absurd when played, and even a witty dialogue becomes dull if
the characters are not wittily disposed. Schnitzler and Shaw can
set their people on chairs and let them talk; the average dramatist
needs (as a minimum) the average director to give his dialogue
movement and to create physical movement giving an effect of
life without interrupting speech.
Clichés of direction: during an important speech of one actor,
no other actor shall move; the actor covered by another is respon-
sible for remaining in the spectator's line of vision; no actor shall
leave the scene without an exit speech; no group shall be silent
even in concentrating attention on the principals. All of these
are artificial conventions, their sum not equalling the value of the
axiom that gesture should be on the beat of speech, not before it
or after it. The good director knows these conventions and ob-
serves or disregards them as the occasion requires, having always in
mind that any momentary awkwardness in a scene is preferable to
rigidity and a recognizable artificiality of devices. He creates an
atmosphere in which all his characters plausibly exist; the details
then fall into place.
ever
ACTUAL MYSTERY. A far greater problem is how directors arrive
at the tone which they give to their plays. Robert Milton, abetted
by Lee Simonson, made HE Who Gets SLAPPED elaborate, pic-
turesque, and lush. As an obscure refuge for He, the circus was
as useful as the steps of the Public Library; the play was unbal-
anced by the richness of the décor, by the savoir faire of the circus


GILBERT SELDES
489
people, by the want of hardness which produced a want of inten-
sity. Arthur Hopkins produced MACBETH in a hard, matter-of-
fact system of acting exactly opposed to the spirit of the Jones
settings before which it was played. Frank Reicher produced
THE TALE OF THE Wolf as if it were small-town drama, the clever
Mr Molnar having fooled him by using all the elements of that
type for a quite different psychological effect. Philip Moeller's
versions of Shaw are uniformly good in exploiting Shaw's farce
and uniformly neglect Shaw's purpose in using the farce; Shaw
being one of the rare dramatists who can use any style and any
expedient in the service of his themes, Mr Moeller catches the
surface of the style, especially of farce, so that the theme is for-
gotten. This is permissible if one really thinks of ARMS AND
The Man as a satire on militarism (hence, costume drama, since
our own feelings on the subject are, presumably, so much keener)
but does not serve so well if the conflict between romantic and
realistic temperaments is at issue, as Shaw suggests. The Messrs
Shubert produce (director unknown to me) Gilbert and Sullivan
as a revue; at nearly the same time Macgowan and Jones pro-
duce PATIENCE with a tiny orchestra, little singing, and little
dancing, yet the result is good because it is in the proper style
of operetta. The DYBBUK, as I noted recently, was described by
its author as a realistic play about mystical people, and produced
as a mystical play about unreal people.
as a
LE STYLE C'EST L'HOMME. John Reed reported a performance
in Soviet Russia of “Hamlet, a Study in Danish Imperialism.”
Hamlet can be produced as a study in a great many things; aberra-
tion, vengeance, the Oedipus complex, young love, and the divided
will, among others. The spectator will reject no one of these at
the moment of production if the appropriate style has been em-
ployed. Not the acting of one player, but the whole production
would have to be changed to convey a changed general meaning
in the play. Thinking over the enjoyable HAMLET in plain
clothes, looking for some internal reason for its failure in New
York, I find myself wondering what the style was supposed to
make of the play. Perhaps a mixture of straight melodrama and
a study of unconscious motives was intended, but I do not think


490 NOTES ON DIRECTOR IN THE THEATRE
that the whole production carried it. Basil Sydney, longing a
little for costume, worked against the superficial integrity of the
play (he has been rewarded with The JEST); Lawford was, as
universally noted, in the modern vein. But the vagueness of aim,
or perhaps the effort to combine two aims, allowed for so many
varieties of style that the whole thing fell apart, especially in
the early acts, before the drama asserted itself openly. The
Hopkins-Jones-Barrymore production was in this respect superior;
Barrymore seems to engender excitement, to throw off sparks which
set fire to his surroundings. There have been occasions when Mr
Hopkins' whole idea of directing seemed to be to quench every
flame; in the HAMLET, as I remember it, he fed them.
It is not difficult to distinguish in practice between a style and
a series of mannerisms. As a general thing David Burton's direc-
tion of The Swan had style, had the style of the play. An ironic
undertone to a sentimental theme was rendered by a few artificial,
even cynical touches, in a romantic treatment. In an earlier pro-
duction directed by him (The Texas NIGHTINGALE, I think) one
character, being "oblique” to his world, always stood on the bias
and presented an angry profile to the audience; unintegrated, as
it was, it remained a mannerism, the whole production having no
definite style into which it might fall.
III
evo
Gods, Not HIRED MEN. The word “artist” is somewhat loosely
construed in Longacre Square, but even so it is long since I have
heard it applied to David Belasco. Belasco began to be famous
because he had—what few other directors then had-a definite
theory of production, the centre of which was the detailed presen-
tation of the actual on the stage. He was also a pioneer in some
developments of stage-lighting. But with acting; with use of
voice, of body, and relations between voice and voice, body and
body; with significant freshness in the rhythm of a produced play,
he has had nothing to do. Actresses still go to him to learn a
number of useful tricks; but the fusion of all of the tricks still
leaves him less than an artist.
George M. Cohan is another producer-director, who has been
called an artist, but for his acting. In THE SONG AND DANCE
Man his production was so fluent, so easy, that I was altogether


GILBERT SELDES
491
ERIC
unaware of tricks until Cohan pushed one under my nose in a
sort of comic parallel to the Moscow Art Theatre's handling of
groups. In AMERICAN BORN Mr Cohan forgot that in the theatre
it is better to be neat than natty and offered a terribly snappy
production with himself and a small replica of himself, both in
the cast and both acting very briskly. To Mr Cohan directing
is dictatorship. The director rewrites the play either to “bring out
the idea" or to bring in the crowd. This process is of course
familiar in Europe where directors take liberties with classic pieces
and are often rewarded. Gémier, Reinhardt, and Tairoff have in
different ways recast Shakespeare, Goldoni, and Racine, in each
case producing a play which, seen with no preconceptions, would
be recognized as a unit, a successful rendering of the idea. This
instant persuasion is the director's business; if he is an artist as
well, the persuasion will resist our later questions.
All these are among the gods of the theatre and the differences
in them are great. It is a reasonable deduction that freedom
in itself is insufficient to make a director great; but certainly with-
out it, he is only half himself.
PREVENTING THE ACTOR. Directors, as far as I know them, look
forward to association with good actors; actors, by report, prefer
indifferent directors. The reason, apart from trivial tempera-
ments, is that part of the duty of a director is to prevent the actor
from acting. Except in the great ensemble companies, acting is
considered an entirely individualistic and competitive endeavour,
leading to a personal triumph (a “bit” or a “great part”). Actors
of business intelligence therefore tend to get the most out of every
line and piece of business, and this is not only instinctive, it has
elements of propriety. Even the most expert of dramatists may
write indifferent lines to which the eager actor gives point. But
there is a danger. A manuscript, well made for the stage, has
moments of low vitality; the actor tries to bridge them by his own
fervour. That these moments are necessary it is the director's
province to discover, and he must prevent the actor from destroy-
ing them by touching them up. Also from "feeling the rôle” or
imagining that it is his obligation to feel it. Also from doing too
much. To the question "What shall I do?" the best answer is “As


492 NOTES ON DIRECTOR IN THE THEATRE
little as possible” (which does not, of course, mean the cant of
restraint) and the next best is “Whatever feels right” which has
reference to the actor's feeling about acting, not to his feeling
the rôle.
ce
ELECTIVE AND COMPULSORY STUDIES. The assumption that in-
telligence and a general culture are good things for actors has not
been proved. Acting is a talent, let us say indefinable; we see
it as the work of the imagination and of the will, the full opera-
tion of both being as often checked as aided by metaphysical
speculation or the possession of sound economic theories. The
director, however, must have enough intelligence and general
knowledge to understand his plays and to supply whatever the
actor will need. Proper pronunciation of both English and foreign
words, for example.
The special studies of a director would include painting and
sculpture, to learn how to dispose the bodies of his actors; not to
imitate either art, but to learn from them the possibilities of his
own; music, because it is the art from which an understanding of
rhythm is most quickly learned; the use of the human voice and
the principles (I suppose they exist) of enunciation; mathematics
and logic, the first because like all unerudite people I ascribe to
it a purifying effect on the soul, the second to act as opposition to
the essential illogicality of the actor, his immediacy, his strength
which comes from not being too reasonable.
ILLUSTRATIVE INCIDENT. During the rehearsals of a revue
recently one of the chorus men said, “I am Omar Khayyam.” The
director (in accordance with the paragraph before the last) cor-
rected him so that thereafter and until the dress-rehearsal the
actor declared himself “Omar of Khayyam.” A high-brow finally
persuaded the director that this was wrong; he therefore called
out to the actor, “Cut out that 'of'—this scene is too damned long
anyhow.”
Rhythm. The rhythm of a production will not be measured by
the rhythmic gestures of the actors or the movement, as if to music,
of groups. Both of these have their place and are good or not


GILBERT SELDES
493
good—i. e., they are not absolutes, but depend on their purpose
and on the perfection with which they are accomplished. The real
rhythm of a produced play is something less visible; I think we
are aware of it more through our "nerves," our motor-centres. It
consists of a series of relations. The actual time occupied by a
scene depends partly on its length and partly on the pace in which
it plays; our sense of rhythm will be our awareness of the changes
in pace and at the same time our feeling of the comparative dura-
tion of scenes. There must be a progression and a variation in
the text; the director will see to it that the production follows
in its rhythm (in its comparative durations) the beat of the play
itself.
Scene, in non-technical language, is the division marked by a
change of place or by the lapse of time or by the falling of a
curtain. The French scene division, a fresh scene at the entrance
or departure of any character, is closer to what the director has
to consider: the scene as the smallest unit of action. An obvious
example: the moments between Hamlet and Ophelia just before
the play-scene begins. In contemporary plays these scenes vary
in length and significance and as they are neatly dovetailed the
variation in tempo must be minutely studied-beginning with the
question whether any variation is indicated; there can seldom be
a decided and sudden change unless the act-break coincides, as in
many good plays it does, with an internal change in the action.
The little scenes need to be built up and then worked into the in-
clusive rhythm of the whole play. One could make a beat-
analysis of a good production in this way.
wa
EXAMPLE. I choose BEGGAR ON HORSEBACK as an example, won-
dering, since I did not try it, whether an actual metronomic com-
parison would stand. The opening, until the arrival of the Cadys,
was in several sections, all of them in the romantic key, the tempo
declaring the nervousness which was to underlie the next scene
(change of key, contrast of small rhythms between Cadys and
Neil) leading, with interludes which seemed a little drawn out,
to the opening of the dream. The dream scenes, taking them to-
gether as one act, were of two general types; the exciting and
humorous, the strained and almost tragic. Between these two was


494 NOTES ON DIRECTOR IN THE THEATRE
the pantomime, the andante movement which, like many andantes,
was too long, and was followed by a sort of scherzo, the end of the
trial scene, leading to the maestoso, or at least lamentoso, of the
prison scene, and the coda when the dream ended. Making up this
general scheme, to which one could easily put time signatures, were
about three dozen scenes in each of which a tiny variation of pace,
a small syncopated relation to the main tempo, was necessary. I
can hardly say that these variations actually existed, but I suspect
that they did because the general effect was so good. Dudley
Digges's production of The Wild Duck would be more difficult
to analyse, because the changes in scene, as I have used the word,
are hard to place; but one felt how exquisitely the pace and dura-
tion of the comic scenes were arranged to make the tragic scenes
more effective.
APOLOGIA. Our perception of the relation between parts is a
secondary pleasure, i. e., a refined one. The satisfaction we have
in a production of Hamlet must be primarily in Hamlet, in the
play. That satisfaction is enriched in proportion as the director
makes the play accessible to us, its poetry, its melodrama, its ideas,
making HAMLET a complete thing. But after this there is another
pleasure, of being aware of the structure, of sensing the pulse of
its existence. This pleasure, to some people, destroys the primary
one. They feel it supercilious and possibly immoral to care for
the aesthetic nature of any phenomenon; they may be right about
morals and politics; but in bare logic, one ought to be allowed
aesthetic pleasure in a work of art.
Note: A second essay by Mr Seldes, entitled The Artist in the Theatre,
will follow.



En
Collection John Quinn
A DRAWING. BY AUGUSTUS JOHN





CHANSON GAIE
BY SCOFIELD THAYER
Tell me not the heart tells wrong,
For I would tremble all day long,
Tremble and break in a Flower of Song.
Tremble and kiss the Rose's bed,
Tremble and touch the Sun's great head,
Tremble and break, and Sing instead.
Tremble over the Moon's bright hair,
Waste my tears on the valleys there,
And touch at breakfast Stars and Air.
Take that wild and sunken thing
With the twisted head and the blemished wing
And make it Madrigals, to Sing.
I tremble the heart as it were a Tree.
I blow it wide with Minstrelsy.
I cry the rooted Morning Free.
I ask what of it, So Song Be?


MINA LOY
BY YVOR WINTERS
M
R
SACHEVERELL SITWELL once wrote a very long
poem, two lines of which stay in my memory:
V
“My natural clumsiness was my only bar to progress
Until I conquered it by calculation."
As I go through such of Miss Loy's poems as I possess, this seems
to describe her. If she has not actually conquered the clumsiness
which one can scarcely help feeling in her writings, she has, from
time to time, overcome it; and these occasional advantages have
resulted in momentous poems. Or perhaps it is not clumsiness,
but the inherently unyielding quality of her material that causes
this embarrassment. She moves like one walking through granite
instead of air, and when she achieves a moment of beauty it strikes
one cold.
More intent on the gutter and its horrors than any of the group
with which she was allied, and more intensely cerebral, perhaps,
than any save one of them, her work ordinarily presents that
broken, unemotional, and occasionally witty observation of un-
deniable facts that one came to regard as the rather uninviting
norm of Others poetry. (Let me hasten to explain that I do not
wish to appear to disparage Others, but norms, which are useful
only as definite places from which to escape. Others seems to
me the most interesting single group manifestation that has yet
occurred in American verse.) Her unsuccessful work is easier
to imitate than that of any of the three other outstanding members
of her set-Miss Moore, Dr Williams, and Mr Stevens—and be-
yond a doubt has been more imitated. Rhythmically, it is elemen-
tary, whereas the metres of Miss Moore and Dr Williams are in-
finitely varied and difficult, and those of Mr Stevens are at least
infinitely subtle. Emotionally, Dr Williams is no farther from
what one might regard as some sort of common denominator than
Miss Loy, and he has covered—and opened to poetry—vastly more


YVOR WINTERS
497
territory, so that the likelihood of his becoming the chief prophet
of my own or some future generation is probably greater. Already,
in fact, he is something of this nature, as the Dada movement has
added to the principles that he has at one time or another stated,
indicated, or practised, nothing save a few minor vices. Of all
contemporary poets, he is, I should say, the closest in spirit to
Miss Loy. Miss Moore, on the other hand, as a point of departure,
is unthinkable like Henry James, she is not a point of departure
at all, but a terminus. Her work suggests nothing that she herself
has not carried to its logical and utmost bounds. And Mr Stevens,
with his ethereal perversity, inhabits a region upon which one
feels it would be a pity to encroach.
And yet I think that few poets of my own generation would
deny that these writers as a group are more sympathetic, as well
as more encouraging, than either the Vorticists or the Mid-Ameri-
cans. Their advantage over the professional backwoodsmen con-
sists in part, perhaps, in superior intellectual equipment, but mainly,
I suspect, in a larger portion of simple common-sense—they have
refused from the very beginning to consider themselves in any way
related to Shawnee Indians or potato-beetles, and have passed
unscathed through a period of unlimited sentimentality. Their
advantage over the Vorticists consists not so much in their having
superior brains, but in their having used their own brains exclu-
sively. Had their own brains been unequal to the task, this would
have been but little advantage, as Mr Pound, Mr Eliot, and H.D.
are formidable rivals, and, it seems to me, genuinely great poets,
but the courage of the Others group appears, by this time, to have
been pretty thoroughly justified. It was a hard-headed courage,
and little repaid by adulation, and is nearly as admirable as its
poetic outcome. One can find little in contemporary poetry of a
similar sturdiness except in the work of Messrs Hardy and
Robinson.
Of the four Mr Stevens and Miss Moore deserve the least com-
passion for their struggle, if compassion is to be meted out—one
suspects that they always knew they could do it; and Dr Williams,
hurling himself at the whole world with the passion of the former
bantam-weight champion who bore his name, has achieved a blind-
ing technique and magnificent prose and poetry by sheer excess
of nervous power. And indeed compassion is scarcely the proper


498
MINA LOY
offering to bring Miss Loy—one feels timorous in bringing any-
thing. She attacked the dirty commonplace with the doggedness
of a weight-lifter. Nearly any one might have written her worst
poems, and innumerable small fry have written poems as good.
Her success, if the least dazzling of the four, is not the least im-
pressive, and is by all odds the most astounding. Using an unex-
citing method, and writing of the drabbest of material, she has
written seven or eight of the most brilliant and unshakably solid
satirical poems of our time, and at least two non-satirical pieces
that possess for me a beauty that is unspeakably moving and pro-
found. Satires like The Black Virginity and the piece on D'An-
nunzio need give little if any ground before the best of Pope or
Dryden, and poems like Der Blinde Junge and the Apology of
Genius need, in my judgement, yield ground to no one. And then
there is the host of half-achieved but fascinating poems like Lunar
Baedecker. One cons them--with the author's pardon—as one
might a rosary, and is thankful if the string doesn't break, but
most of the beads are at the very least spectacular:
“Delirious Avenues
lit
with the chandelier souls
of infusoria
· · · · ·
Onyx-eyed Odalisques
and ornithologists
observe
the flight
of Eros obsolete"
They are images that have frozen into epigrams. It is this move-
ment from deadly stasis to stasis, slow and heavy, that, when unified
and organized, gives to her poetry its ominous grandeur, like that
of a stone idol become animate and horribly aware:
wa
“Lepers of the moon ...
unknowing
How perturbing lights
our spirit


YVOR WINTERS
499
on the passion of Man
until you turn on us your smooth fool's faces
like buttocks bared in aboriginal mockeries
In the raw caverns of the Increate
we forge the dusk of Chaos
to that imperious jewelry of the Universe
--the Beautiful ..."
Such an apology is in itself a proof of genius—and of a genius
that rises from a level of emotion and attitude which is as nearly
common human territory as one can ever expect to find in a poet.
Mr Rodker once said that she wrote of the SOUL (in four capital
letters, unless my memory betrays me) but the word doesn't mean
much, no matter how one spells it. One might substitute the
subconscious (which Mr Rodker doubtless meant) but this word
is nearly as frayed. Whatever tag one fastens to it, and regard-
less of what happens to her emotion in passing through her brain
(which, being a good brain, is responsible for her being a good
poet) one can scarcely help sensing at bottom a strange feeling
for the most subterranean of human reactions, of a padding animal
resentment, and of a laughter that is curiously physical. This
habitation of some variety of common ground, although it may
have no intrinsic aesthetic virtue, yet places her beside Dr Williams
as one of the two living poets who have the most, perhaps, to
offer the younger American writers—they present us with a solid
foundation in place of Whitman's badly aligned corner-stones, a
foundation which is likely to be employed, I suspect, for a genera-
tion or two, by the more talented writers of this country, or by a
rather large part of them. This suggested development is not a
call to salvation, nor even a dogmatic prediction, but simply a
speculation. If it materializes, Emily Dickinson will have been
its only forerunner.


WINTER
BY MAX ROBIN
RUSSIAN winter. Hooded and booted, with mitts on his
11 hands and a shuba atop of a polushubok, the driver sits deep
in his sleigh. The frost stings; the sun shines and the glare of the
snow is enchanting; but it is cold, fiercely cold, and the sting of
the frost is increasing.
It is much better during a snowfall. The wooden sleigh sails
through the snow, sails through the drifting snow. You are not
cold. The flakes circle, flutter, and float. A far-spreading silence
enfolds you, a silence with which you soon merge and dissolve.
Till, at length, fatigued with a pleasant contentment, you sink
into oblivion. You want to ride and ride and ride. ....
But the blizzard—oh, the merciless blizzard! The housewife
back from the shed with an armful of wood, moans "Cold-cold!"
as she blows into her hollowed hands. While here and there it
is asked:
“What does one do in the field now?"
Yes, what does one do in the field? One perishes, most likely,
The snowstorm rages, never giving quarter. The hapless wayfarer
has been flung out of his course. And he sees not a sign of habita-
tion. A stump rising, a pole. What unremitting, howling enmity,
an enmity for all that lives and dares to intrude at this time. What
has become of the steppe—so friendly, although it can be gloomy,
in the spring and summer? The steppe is mad, madly destructive-
but what glorious madness!
Envy the little hut, with its fire. Envy the folk on the stove
and in bed. A hovel, a home ... Hold to it, that a blizzard like
this may not overtake you on the road. ...
Flaming cheeks, red noses, the beard hoary with frost; the boots
stiff and the fingers inflexible, the mouth shut, the tongue immov-
able. And still there is life, warm and palpitating, inside this layer
of clothes, beneath this frozen, crusted surface. ...
They are building fires in the market-place, large fires, scattered



A DRAWING. BY OSKAR KOKOSCHKA





MAX ROBIN
501
a ser
over the deserted square. Even the darting, crackling flames seem
cold. About, are the stores, the doors so sealed you would think
there is no one in them. But here, in the open, fires burn.
Someone has just dashed across the square. He is running to one
of the fires. The body, life, is in need of fire; the body is cold.
He is a flour-carrier running in the evening frost to the large
fire, a big man running. His stiff clothes are white with flour.
Ah-they welcome him as he joins the circle round the fire.
“Throw him in-roast him alive—hep!”
A fresh log is hurled into the flames. A million sparks are leap-
ing. Then again the fire burns cheerfully. It reaches the carriers'
boots. And the carriers are still.
Sit and look with them into the fire. You will lose a sense of the
night about you. You will forget the world. All of you, afflicted
with distress, come over and join the circle at the fire. Come and
forget your ills, the misery of your lot, your homewhat a home!-
with a wife and children depending on your broad but helpless
shoulders. Come!
And how much happier you are now. You sit and look into the
fire. Look, look; you have to! The fire warms; it draws and it
holds you. It has instilled a fresh life into you. Confess: you do
feel happier now! If only the wind would cease to blow on your
back.
The Dnieper is frozen. But the charm, though frozen, is there.
Behold the Dnieper by day! It is white and still, with a faraway,
deep, luring stillness. You can walk on the Dnieper. You can
penetrate those woods. What a small, solitary figure you seem
from afar! But within yourself you cannot be small. Within you
a power is stirring. You are happy and buoyant and brimful of
hope in the resistless assertion of your exuberant youth. Think of
the past that haloes these places. You are in the Ukraine, the
region of the Cossack, so faithfully rendered by Gogol.
Night falls early. The red and the purple are no more in the
sky; through the trees you have stood and helplessly marvelled as
the colours faded. Now night is falling, falling over the Ukraine.
The Dnieper is still. No moon will illumine its stillness to-night.
A pity! You would be lifted to a mood of worship; for if there
is anything to worship, why not this, the romance of nature? But
zel


502
WINTER
-you might forget to go away, and the frost would be waiting
for you. Beware of the moon in winter!
It is dark, dark above, white below and still. Not a trace of
life, not an echo. But listen-Don't you hear the trees groan?
Listen.
It is your own soul groaning. You have become possessed,
captivated by the charm, the inimitable majesty of nature. You
are only a human being and you seem to have come from this nature.
What is there between you and those groaning trees? The same
life, the same impulse, the same purpose. And there is a likeness
in the eternity of spirit, in one as in the other mounting to God,
groping for the lost source, reaching out blindly for the hidden
goal. ...


PARIS LETTER
April, 1926
D AUL VALERY has written: "It was my idiosyncrasy to love
... in art only the creative process.” This saying might
well be inscribed as epigraph upon the last page of André Gide's
new novel, Les Faux Monnayeurs, in which Edward who is
Gide himself observes similarly: "I make notes day by day of the
progress made by my novel in my mind, keeping as it were a sort of
diary. Imagine the interest which such à note-book from the pen
of Balzac or Dickens would have for us! An account of the pre-
natal origins of the novel would be more absorbing perhaps than
the novel itself.” Although Les Faux Monnayeurs is long-it con-
tains nearly five hundred pages and this is long for a French
novel—it is never tiresome. Possibly piqued by recent attacks
upon him, it would seem that Gide has, while retaining his more
familiar characteristics, made a point in this book of appearing
sauve and even amusing. The book comprises five or six inter-
related plots which far from confusing and tiring the reader are
cleverly developed and maintained, thanks to the central char-
acter, Gide himself, who with extreme clarity and self-awareness
follows step by step the progress of his book, ridiculing its faults-
none of which escapes him and disarming all possible criticism.
In the first plot, a young man finds that he is an illegitimate child,
and leaves home. His subsequent travels, diversified by many
dangers, form a theme upon which have been embroidered the phil-
anderings of a vain, unscrupulous adventurer. By comparison with
other portraits in an excellent gallery of contemporaries, the por-
trait of Lady Griffith, the English inamorata, seems lifeless and
artificial. To compensate for this disappointment, we have in each
of the other situations, one unforgettable caricature: Count de Pas-
savant whose artistic tastes and snobbish respect for so-called
“advanced” talent, not to mention morals, have placed beyond
the pale of society—a composite photograph of two well-known
1 Cf. Entretiens avec Paul Valéry, by Frédéric Lefèvre.


504
PARIS LETTER
Parisians, recognizable to everyone and whom as a matter of fact
everyone has recognized; and the old music-teacher, La Pérouse, a
touching figure, over whom hovers the genius of Dostoevsky.
Starting from the same point, Valéry and Gide advance toward
diametrically opposed solutions of the literary problem. Valéry
posits as his goal pure, gratuitous intellectual energy, the gratuitous
activity of disinterested mind, indifferent to the very content of its
thought and reduced to "the supreme poverty of purposeless
power." His theory is explicit in Une Soirée avec Monsieur Teste?
and in Introduction à la Méthode de Léonard da Vinci.? This ideal
activity is in sharp contrast to the ideal passivity with which Gide
meets the external world—a world envisaged as a neutral ground
where causes are generated and effects derived while the work of
art matures as indifferently as a plant. Gide even denies having
selected special characters. “I did not seek them,” he asserts
ruefully; “They happened to be ahead of me in my path, and I
followed them.” Rather, he followed himself through the laby-
rinths of his curiosity, a curiosity that has grown stronger each
year until it has become identical with human sympathy; though
when we consider his refusal to summon a doctor on the occasion of
Olivier's suicide, we must admit that this sympathy is tempered
by a fair share of prudence. Perhaps it is after all only a kind of
scepticism, intelligent, uncourageous, keeping him always, in spite
of everything, on the edge of life. Because he has desired above all
else plasticity, he has ceased to exist. Once again in Les Faux Mon-
nayeurs there is that Gidesque mingling of protestantism and
paganism which permeates all his work from L'Immoraliste to
L'Enfant Prodigue. After all we must continue to take Gide as we
find him. Even people who appear to themselves extremely unstable
never really change. They never rid themselves of their failings-
and that is excellent; for when we seek to improve ourselves, we
succeed merely in substituting for natural vices artificial virtues.
And only what is natural matters.
In Les Faux Monnayeurs we have a definition of the ideal novel,
1 Published in The Dial, February 1922, under the title, An Evening
with M Teste.
2 Cf. Note and Digression, appended to Introduction to the Method of
Leonardo da Vinci, and published in this issue of THE DIAL, pages
447-457.


PAUL MORAND
505
which begins: “A novel which would be at once as true and as re-
mote from reality, as human and as fictitious as Athalie ..."
What Gide describes thus, and what he will himself never create,
for he lacks that true sympathy for human beings which is the first
requisite of a novelist, has been achieved by Proust, whose sudden
fame so disquieted Gide. La Prisonnière, the two volumes of M
Proust's new book, concludes the long series of A La Recherche
du Temps Perdu, which began in 1913 with Du Côté de Chez
Swann. There still remains to be published Le Temps Retrouvé.
The first volume of La Prisonnière, in which we learn of the sudden
death of Albertine, is a long analysis of the suffering caused by
the death of a dearly loved person, especially of the forgetting that
ensues. In 1916 I left for Rome. “I am very sorry," Proust
said to me, "first because you are leaving, but especially because I
know I am going to forget you.” The whole of La Prisonnière is
contained in this ironic sally. In the second volume we again en-
counter Gilberte, Swann's daughter, whose love-affair with the
author, one recalls, fills a large part of the first book. She is now a
Gilberte grown worldly, and avid for social position, which she ob-
tains and transcends by marrying Saint Loup; the marriage turns
out badly. Reading these last volumes, in which the brilliant
aristrocrats of the early books have become adventurers, perverts,
feeble puppets in the hands of their secretaries and their servants,
has a curious effect on one. Certainly we recognize here Proust's
appreciation of the aesthetic value of social contrasts, the obligation
laid upon the novelist to show how society evolves, how the great
are brought low and the humble raised up. But the lesson of
Proust's world derives from something more personal than the
exigencies of art. Implicit in his conclusions is a lust for sacrilege,
a compulsion to defile and degrade that aristocratic society which
was once worshipped by him to excess, and to be thus washed clean
of the taint of servility. His passionate interest in servants can
be explained perhaps as a form of the spirit of revolt inherited from
Jewish ancestors. In short his preoccupations can be traced to
mysterious, deep-rooted emotional trends which would justify ex-
haustive study. The essay on death with which the first volume
opens is a prolonged lament in which the very depths of grief
are plumbed. These pages, the essay on the jealousy of Swann, and
D


506
PARIS LETTER
the chapters devoted to the inconstancies of the heart, must
surely place Proust with Montaigne and Meredith. Even in the
unfinished, tentative condition of a posthumous work (for we all
know how carefully Proust revised his proofs) we recognize in
reading this book the exaltation of the great immortals. Proust
employs no pretentious literary devices: he describes, he indulges
in reminiscences, he initiates chains of association, he makes us
forget Albertine by tempting us to meditations upon universal
themes then ends each paragraph with the simple words:
But Albertine was dead-words which explain everything, and
efface everything. It is impossible to describe the solemn grandeur
of this veritable Dies Irae. It recalls the liturgical chants of the
Jews before the Wall of Lamentations, in which unconsoled by
the hope implicit in other religions we seem to touch the pro-
foundest depths of human woe. The darkest, the most desperate
annihilation has for Proust this same irresistible attraction.
To these two books of supreme importance to French letters
there has recently been added a third, Bella by Giraudoux. A
novel which has firmly established the reputation of its talented
young author, it has provoked a storm of controversy in France
and created a sensation abroad, particularly in Central Europe.
Giraudoux has beyond doubt been successful in this first attempt
of his to treat a subject of wide implications and of such immediate
contemporary interest that it is, as it were, still hot to the touch.
The book is a Romeo and Juliet of modern life. We have a
poetic simplification of the Capulets and Montagues in the families
of two French statesmen, the din of whose quarrels has re-echoed
throughout France during the past ten years the Poincaré and
the Berthelot. The son of the latter (called by Giraudoux the
Durandeau) has fallen in love with Bella, the beautiful daughter
of the Poincaré-Rebendart, and Bella, like Juliet, by dying con-
trives the dénouement. This novel is a welcome innovation in
Giraudoux's work, for with Juliette au Pays des Hommes, his
next-to-the-last book, he had exhausted the possibilities of his
early method; we had grown weary of his exquisite but ghostly
creatures, beyond words aerial and unearthly. In Bella the author
abruptly breaks with the tradition to which his readers had be-
come habituated and creates figures of substance and weight, in-
controvertibly flesh and blood. Employing qualities of social


PAUL MORAND
507
CO
satirist and political cartoonist which few of us had suspected, he
has given us not only a remarkable political pamphlet but a great
work of art.
André Maurois has published this week a collection of three short
stories, Meïpe ou la Délivrance. The curious word Meïpe which
has no meaning in any language, and is neither the name of a place
nor of a person, is used by him to designate an imaginary planet,
an unknown land, and is an invention of the author's little
daughter. Thither she retreats when our unromantic life becomes
too tiresome. “In Meïpe it never rains, everyone has a good time,
fathers do not read all day long, and never say when they are
asked to play Old Maid, I have to work. Children in that
country go to a shop and choose their own parents.” Maurois
himself draws the conclusion: “Only artists who are truly great can
create a world as unpredictable as the real one." The three stories
are like three trains travelling at different rates of speed, all bound
for Meïpe. In one railway-carriage Goethe is our fellow-traveller.
He tells us of his youth and recounts in a series of sentimental ad-
ventures, in which he was both actor and spectator, the conception
and growth of Werther. In the second tale, we have a young man
who models his behaviour upon Balzac and patterns his love-
affairs after those of an imaginary hero of the great novelist (for
other books also serve to transport us to Meịpe). The last-and
best-story depicts the life of the beautiful Mrs Siddons, so daring,
so virtuous, and, as one said in those days, so "sensible.” In that
kind of vivid, animated, poetic biography, whose secret was first
captured by Strachey, the author recreates the past and its vanished
personages. The English-speaking public of whom Maurois is so
fond and who reciprocates his affection, will be sure to read his
new book with a satisfaction equal to our own.
Pierre Benoit, world's champion of one hundred and one
dramatic situations, alternates purely fictitious so-called "novels of
adventure” with novels of psychological adventure where rapid,
highly-simplified emotions are generated, brought into contact, and
in the end reciprocally destroyed. Such feminized emotions are
less simple and more perverse than the majority of the unsophisti-
cated readers of this popular novelist would believe. Lacking the
1 Mape: The World of Illusion. By André Maurois. Translated by Eric
Sutton. 10mo. 247 pages. D. Appleton and Company. $2.50.


508
PARIS LETTER
psychological dexterity of Mademoiselle de la Ferté, which is
Benoit's finest book, Alberte is nevertheless a very engaging
younger sister.
Turning to works of literary criticism, I should like to note
Figures Etrangères by Edmond Jaloux: studies of Cervantes, Wal-
pole, Shelley, Jane Austen, Whitman, Meredith, Chekov, et cetera.
Jaloux who has read everything written in French and has also
gained much from association with foreign authors (in any case
more than most of his compatriots) appears in this book what he
really is—the most impartial, the most intelligent, and the most
thoroughly-informed critic that we have.
The book on Péguy by the Tharaud brothers is not only the
pious discharging of a debt to friendship but also the best biography
of Péguy that has been published. Péguy exercised a notable in-
fluence upon the group of young intelligences which was before
the war united under the aegis of the Cahiers de la Quinzaine. This
review was discontinued in 1914—upon the rim of disaster. (Is
it not upon the edge of precipices that geologists study to best
advantage the strata of the earth?)
Jean Cocteau, in Le Retour à L'Ordre, has assembled in one
book a number of articles published since 1920: Le Coq et L'Arle-
quin," Carte Blanche, Le Secret Professional, Picasso, et cetera —
a series of illuminating and witty commentaries on the modern
battle of the arts. These essays date from yesterday; the title which
suggests a reaction on the part of the temerarious writer is of to-
day. There is not perhaps between the two so intimate a connexion
as the author would like to think and the curve of progress is
more sinuous than consistent; but the book remains none the
less a very useful contribution to the history of the years since
1920, years so vital for France and so chaotic for us all.
I noted recently the important work of Monsieur L. Duchâtre
entitled La Comédie Italienne. The same author, in collaboration
with Monsieur R. Saulnier, has just had published by La Librairie
de France a book, beautifully illustrated, entitled L’Imagerie
Populaire. It will, I hope, be followed by other books on the
printing of broadsheets, particularly on this art of the people as
practised in Spain, England, and Italy.
1 Published in The Dial, January 1921, under the title, Cock and
Harlequin.


PAUL MORAND
509
:
American bibliophiles should lose no time in securing French
fine-paper editions if they wish to take advantage.of the present
low prices. In France we shall soon have a state of affairs like
that which prevailed in Germany immediately after the War, for
the increased cost of raw materials and of manual labor through-
out the world is now being felt here and will eventually affect the
production of choice editions.
As for the theatre, M Bernard Zimmer has given us Le Veau
Gras and Les Zouaves, two plays which La Nouvelle Revue
Française has published in one volume-virulent satires on con-
temporary society written with a ferocity which places the author
in the direct tradition of Mirbeau. M Bourdet's play, La Prison-
nière, bears not altogether inappropriately the title of Proust's
book, for it presents a similar problem of jealousy, a man's jealousy
of a woman who eludes him to return to previous amours in
which he, as a man, can have no part. M Bourdet has had the
courage to present for the first time upon the stage a subject which
has hitherto been treated only in the discreet and shadowy con-
fessional of the novel.
Paul MORAND


BOOK REVIEWS
LEONARDO AS A MAN OF SCIENCE
THE MECHANICAL INVESTIGATIONS OF LEONARDO DA
Vinci. By Ivor B. Hart. 8vo. 240 pages. The
Open Court Publishing Company. $4.
QOMEONE ought to write a book on "How Great Men have
made a living"; it would throw light upon an important
question, namely: What do the mass of mankind regard as services
deserving of reward? Caesar was a political boss, who had bor-
rowed so heavily from rich men that only by his success could
they hope for repayment. Kepler lived by astrology, Berkeley
by episcopacy, and Hume by bad history; the two Mills lived by
administering the system which led to the Indian mutiny. I
know a man in our own age, not devoid of intelligence in philos-
ophy, who can only extract a living out of a capitalist world by
writing against capitalism. How Leonardo made a living is told
in his famous letter to the Duke of Milan applying for a job:
"Having, most illustrious Sir, seen and considered the experi-
ments of all those who profess to be masters in the art of inven-
tion of the apparatus of war, and having found that their instru-
ments do not differ materially from those in general use, I venture,
without wishing injury to any one, to make known to your Ex-
cellency certain secrets of my own.”
This preamble is followed by three or four hundred boastful
words about his prowess in regard to artillery, high explosives, et
cetera. At last, as a kind of afterthought, he mentions the fine
arts:
1 Note: The Editors regret having specified $5 rather than $35 as the price
of The Paintings of William Blake by Darrell Figgis reviewed in The
DIAL, May 1926.


BERTRAND RUSSELL
511
"In times of peace, I believe that I can compete with any one in
architecture, and in the construction of both public and private
monuments, and in the building of canals. I am able to execute
statues in marble, bronze, and clay; in painting I can do as well as
any one else. In particular, I will undertake to execute the bronze
horse in the eternal memory of your father and of the very illustri-
ous house of Sforza.”
Even here, the atmosphere is hardly that of "art for art's
sake.”
Dr Hart's book tells of the purely scientific investigations of
Leonardo, as recorded in his note-books. His work is judicious, and
shows sound critical judgement. It is clear that Leonardo was a
man of first-rate genius in mechanics. Dr Hart claims that he
rejected the Ptolemaic astronomy, on the basis of a note (circa
1489) saying “Il sole non si muove.” There is nothing historically
improbable in this; Copernicus got his ideas in Italy, in the same
atmosphere in which Leonardo lived. But the evidence seems not
quite conclusive. There are passages which seem to anticipate
the first law of motion, usually attributed to Galileo, but on this
subject he failed to arrive at consistency because he still thought
that a force was proportional to the velocity it produced, not
to the acceleration. This error prevented him from becoming the
founder of theoretical dynamics.
His note-books (of which I possess facsimiles in six large
volumes) are written from right to left, with many abbreviations,
so that they are very difficult to decipher without the help of a
transcription. This method suggests a desire for secrecy; but
against such an interpretation is to be set the fact that there are
innumerable diagrams and pictures which would give the clue to
any intelligent plagiarist. (Leonardo, by the way, was an in-
timate friend of the elder Cardano, father of the prince of plagiar-
ists.) See, for instance, the charming picture of a parachute, re-
produced by Dr Hart on page 151. In the picture there is a man
descending by means of it, but there is no evidence that Leonardo
risked an experience such as he represents in the picture; the first
recorded descent in a parachute was in the year 1783. Aviation
interested Leonardo greatly; Cardano the mathematician (son of
Leonardo's friend) says that he "attempted to fly, but misfortune
befell him from it.” The author of this remark, however, was not


512 LEONARDO AS A MAN OF SCIENCE
remarkable for veracity. Dr Hart gives a translation of Leonardo's
manuscript On the Flight of Birds, which is most interesting
and contains suggestions for mechanical wings capable of making
human beings fly. These suggestions could not have been success-
ful, because he had to rely upon human muscles as the sole source
of power for working the wings, but the manuscript none the less
shows considerable insight. It seems clear that he hoped to be able
actually to fly by constructing a "great bird.” The manuscript
ends with the words:
Ice
“The great bird will take its first flight, on the back of its
great swan, and filling the universe with stupor, filling all writings
with its renown, and glory eternal to the nest where it was born.”
are
It seems evident that he would rather have been known to
posterity as the inventor of a flying-machine than as a painter.
From a scientific point of view, the best things in the note-books
are concerned with statics-pulleys, toothed wheels, methods of
determining the centre of gravity, and so on. There are mistakes,
which may seem to the modern man rather elementary; but there is
also a sound mechanical instinct.
Leonardo's manuscripts remained practically unknown until
Napoleon brought them to Paris after his Italian campaign of
1796. By that time they could no longer serve for the advance-
ment of science; they have therefore exerted no influence on the
progress of knowledge. It is singular that he published nothing of
a scientific nature in his lifetime, though there are evidences,
mentioned by Dr Hart, that he contemplated doing so. It is
a notable and painful example of waste, all the more surprising
from the fact that Leonardo's genius was by no means obscure
and was recognized by his contemporaries. Gratitude is due to Dr
Hart for making his work in mechanics easily accessible to all who
are interested in his unique and astounding many-sidedness.
BERTRAND RUSSELL


THE LINCOLN OF THE PLAINS
ABRAHAM LINCOLN, THE PRAIRIE YEARS. By Carl
Sandburg. Two volumes. 8vo. 062 pages. Har-
court, Brace and Company. $10.
TINCOLN began his famous Cooper Union speech with a
U “Mr Cheerman” that made Noah Brooks, the star reporter of
The New York Tribune, squirm in his seat. “No, old fellow,"
he said to himself, “this may do for the wild and woolly west
but it won't go down in New York.” But after the lecturer got
under way there came a change. The shambling gait, the angular
frame, the garments creased by travel, all were forgot. Some-
thing of the immaculate honesty of Lincoln's rustic soul became
visible to the city people. At the end there was an ovation, hats
and handkerchiefs were waved in the air, and Mr Noah Brooks
rushed away to write: “The tones, the gestures, the kindling eye,
and the mirth-provoking look defy the reporter's skill. No man
ever before made such an impression on his first appeal to a New
York audience.”
Shortly after the Cooper Union speech, but by no means be-
cause of it, Lincoln became the Republican nominee for the presi-
dency. Events then were swift and it is not too much to say
that Lincoln woke up to find himself president, with war declared,
and himself the storm centre for all the opposing and extraordinary
political currents of the country. In a time when all vision
seemed astigmatic he was one of the few who saw truly and
clearly. His was a strange mixture of practicality and morality
and he knew how to safeguard the first without compromising the
second. (Were not the events so serious in which he became en-
meshed his chief political virtue might be summed up in the light
word, “tact.") But with all his care the ship of state sailed
so precariously through the troubled seas, and the people were so
profoundly frightened, that when finally, the "fearful trip is
done” and Walt Whitman's “captain" victorious, the people, and
perhaps rightly, conclude him to have been mysteriously endowed
by heaven. To confirm them in this notion came the martyrization.


514
THE LINCOLN OF THE PLAINS
In a single night the common people saw “Old Abe” transfigured.
Superior persons, such as Mr Noah Brooks, and the Mr Henry
Adams who noted at the time of the inaugural ball that the com-
pulsory wearing of white gloves spoiled the evening for Lincoln,
superior persons such as these, I repeat, were doubtless able to
keep their balance in the midst of the deplorable events that closed
the Civil War, but the common people, the common people of
whom Old Abe was one, frankly idealized him into an awesome
symbol to be spoken of always with bated breath. He became “Mr
Lincoln” and remained so firmly until just a year or two ago.
Even the Anglicized Henry James thinks it safer when some of the
James family letters are given to the public to strike out a
reference in one of them to "Abe Lincoln,” insisting, but not too
convincingly, that back in the old days the James family always
said “Mr Lincoln.” . . . This sentimentalism is nothing to be
ashamed of particularly. It recurs over and over again in history
and will continue to re-occur whenever great communities are
deeply stirred; but it passes.
It seems now to have quite passed. What has happened?
Have we at last grown up? Have our great post-war riches en-
abled us at last to face our past with equanimity? At any rate
we now do markedly revel in ourselves more than we used to and
instead of covering up spots that we were not quite sure of, throw
the blankets aside and exhibit ourselves almost as shamelessly
as the Europeans do; but not quite. When the great hullaballoo
was raised several years since about the provincialism and lack
of "ton" of George Gray Barnard's bronze Lincoln, I could not
but wonder then what our puritans would have said had the
sculptor chosen, as he had the right, to have done our martyred
president in the altogether.” The French see their Napoleon,
their Victor Hugo, and even the late Anatole France, stripped
of fashion's trappings without a murmur—but we have yet a step to
go before reaching that state of detachment.
But only a step! Mr Carl Sandburg, in his new Life, shows
a tendency to tell everything, to stand for everything. He admits
the shady stories, glories in them. Every man in America knows
and always has known that Lincoln had a passion for risqué stories
but it would have been as much as a Memorial Day orator's life
was worth to have so much as hinted at such a thing. Mr Sand-


HENRY MCBRIDE
515
burg does more than hint. He helps you to identify the anecdotes.
He admits, too, the shambling gait, the shabby clothes, the rustic
speech. Heavens, in restoring to us “our Abe” what does he not
ask us to accept as Abe's idiom! The “Mr Cheerman," alas, was
véridique. Also, he said "idee" for "idea," and "s-a-a-ly" for
“really.” Well, what of it? Are you laughing? With sympathy,
I hope. If not, you may clear out of this, Mr Sandburg's story is
not for you. In your innocence did you think you and Henry
James had outgrown your accents? Of course Abe had his. All
Americans have accents and always will have. The fastidious
Edward Fitzgerald felt one even in the tales of Poe. He never
denied the man genius but said he couldn't stand the rusticity of
the English and had to read the tales in French translations.
Mr Sandburg aims, in short, to give you the complete Lincoln.
The emasculated version so much in favour with Civil War
veterans is now quite as dilapidated as they are, and the new
era requires a more lively image. This is it, and may remain it,
unless a sharp Stendhalian intellect comes along to put more
emphasis upon the Lincoln brain than this writer does. Lincoln
had, by the way, one of the requisites Stendhal insisted upon for
geniuses, a sturdy memory. He said himself, “My mind is like
a piece of steel-very hard to scratch anything on it, and almost
impossible after you get it there to rub it out.” Mr Sandburg
intended to keep himself out of the picture and very nearly does
so. He meant, in these two big volumes, to give everything that
went to the making of the man; the landscape, the forbears, the
pioneer existence, the gradual softening of conditions, the elec-
tioneering, the preaching, the seething moral ferment that finally
produced the Rebellion; and he succeeds astonishingly well. He
succeeds best with the landscape and what may be called the
Lincoln "atmosphere," the thousand and one little details of
pioneer conditions that had so much to do with forming Lincoln's
famous “common sense.” He makes long lists, in Walt Whit-
man's best style, of everything in the early life. There is a con-
siderable passage enumerating all the slang names for the whiskey
of the period, advertisements of everything in the country store,
and every little rough-and-tumble village fight is gone into en-
thusiastically. The atmosphere, indeed, is laid in plentifully and
at times obviously. At any recurrence of the word "nature,” Mr


516
THE LINCOLN OF THE PLAINS
Sandburg stops a moment and puts some in. When the young
Abraham Lincoln becomes engaged temporarily to Ann Rutledge,
the little chapter closes thus:
“The cry and the answer of one yellowhammer to another, the
wing flash of one bluejay on a home flight to another, the drowsy
dreaming of grass and grain coming up with its early green over
the moist rolling prairie, these were to be felt that spring together,
with the whisper, ‘always together.'
He was twenty-six, she was twenty-two; the earth was their
foot-stool; the sky was a sheaf of blue dreams; the rise of the
blood-gold rim of a full moon in the evening was almost too much
to live, see, and remember."
are
This is suspiciously like "fine writing," and there are many
such touches, particularly in the first volume, but on the other hand
there is such a genuine love for everything in our system that
produces Lincolns when called for, and such a relish for the soil
on which this particular great one flourished, that I can imagine
only the hypercritical chiding. In fact, this first volume might
easily pass as a best-seller especially in the mid-western region
thus sympathetically held up to public gaze.
The second volume is drier, dealing as it does with legal and
political procedures which are not, apparently, Mr Sandburg's
meat. Nevertheless, the vast data of the period have been
thoroughly and intelligently marshalled and the Lincoln-lover's
heart stops beating at critical moments in the approved fashion
and there is no place in it where the reader puts the book down.
Lincoln still says "jist” and “sich" instead of “just” and “such,"
but a scholarly individual who heard the Springfield reply to
Douglas compared his impassioned manner to that of a Martin
Luther; and among thousands of plain people, thinking the matter
over, was born "an instinct, perhaps a hope, that the voice was
their voice."
The plain people, Mr Sandburg makes it abundantly clear, were,
for once, right.
Henry McBRIDE


THE TRANSATLANTIC MIDDLE WEST
TRANSATLANTIC STORIES. Selected from The Trans-
atlantic Review. With an introduction by Ford
Madox Ford. 8vo. 259 pages. Lincoln MacVeagh,
The Dial Press. $2.50.
M HESE stories are transatlantic from two points of view. Of
1 the sixteen authors eight are Europeans and eight Americans.
Of the Americans one was born in Poland and one near New
York, one in Nebraska and one in South Dakota, the remaining
four being credited to Chicago. All the Americans, however, seem to
have moved eastward to New York or points beyond, except
the scion of South Dakota, who lingers in the literary atmosphere
of Indiana.
In spite of the various origins of the writers, the stories are
singularly alike, obviously expressing the preference of the editor.
The tone is set by the predominance of Middle Western writers,
but Mr Ford defines "Middle Westishness” as a state not of geogra-
phy but of mind. He explains:
“Middle Westishness does not confine itself to Illinois, Ne-
braska, the two Dakotas, Indiana and the rest of the states geo-
graphically situated in the Middle West of North America. It
is as present in the suburbs of Cardiff in Wales as in the country
that surrounds Lincoln in the state of Nebraska; it is as prevalent
in the suburbs of Birmingham where the steel comes from as in
the outskirts of Indianapolis which, if I am not mistaken, produces
wheat.”
This state of mind Mr Ford analyses as an “enormous disillu-
sionment-and an enormous awakening”—a disillusionment with
regard to the romantic past, with regard to pioneering and the war,
with regard to education and knowledge, an awakening to the fact
that the world is a dull and limited place, and that the best chance
of relieving that dullness is by art. And the most immediate op-


518 THE TRANSATLANTIC MIDDLE WEST
portunity which art affords is in the clear-sighted discrimination
of the essential facts of our experience and the incisive etching of
them in vivid prose or verse. Only by close scrutiny can the
differentiating qualities of human experience be discerned; only
by keen penetrating style can they be presented; only by such
presentation can they be serviceable to us in relieving the mortal
malady of sameness from which the world is bound more and more
to suffer.
The prevailing theme in the present volume is boredom. Nathan
Asch's clerks become more conscious of their ennui when the firm
goes down and they are free to pause and think. Ivan Beede's
Nebraska farm wives find relief for a moment, one by torture of the
helpless, the other in a catastrophic thunder-storm. Mrs Ellis'
Frances flees from her lover with “his insistent anxious fixed in-
terests” and intelligent conversation to the life of the animal king-
dom. In her London Night the banal conversation on top of a
London bus is pierced by the word Valparaiso, and for a moment
a light falls, the lives about are exposed in their drab nakedness.
Djuna Barnes's ancient princess, withering in her palace among
her memories, Donald Stewart's Mrs Gordon-Smythe, a rotting
vessel moored to a continental hotel, Ellen Du Pois Taylor's
Martha Whipple, who after thirty years in the treeless flatness
of Burnside is promoted to the middle class of Spearhead, all are
victims of the same malady. Mr Garman's Spouncer on his visit
to his sick wife at the hospital looks before and after down such
a perspective of ennui that neither the anticipation of holding her
in his arms again nor the revelation that she is dying can break
it. Most of these stories follow the same method, the reflection
of the thought of the characters; and whether it is Hannah Ber-
man's fallen gentleman reflecting on how to start begging or
Carlos Drake's diver poising his mind for his plunge, they convey
an acute sense of the tragedy of consciousness. Most of the stories
are static. In Mr Coppard's The Higgler and Mr Dos Passos'
July, it is true, the experience includes movement and action;
and Mr Hemingway's A Story and Kennon Jewett's Running
Away are dramatic vignettes. From such a summary it is possible
to deduce clearly what in Mr Ford's opinion are the significant
qualities of fiction to-day. First of all, it remains close to human


ROBERT MORSS LOVETT
519
experience. It relieves the monotony, the sameness of life, by dif-
ferentiating this experience through its reflection in the individual
consciousness. And more and more it must depend for effect on
good writing. It is the business of fiction to give emphasis to
reality. Clearly as life sinks toward a level and experience loses
dramatic contrast, the task of giving distinction to individual
manifestations will call for a subtler and more penetrating art.
To differentiate the qualities of monotony, to distinguish the shades
in the drab of ennui, is a test of such art to which Mr Ford has
summoned his young writers as to a competition. They come off
with honourable mention. If first money must be awarded it will
be to Mr Coppard, the veteran of the company.
ROBERT Morss Lovett


BRIEFER MENTION
THE PLUMED SERPENT, by D. H. Lawrence (1omo, 445 pages; Knopf:
$3). Like the theme of a symphony which recurs again and again in the
midst of shifting harmonies Mr Lawrence's idée fixe shows itself in
each of his succeeding books. Here is the same love motif, the dark
“sex-alive" male, savage yet childish, and the disillusioned, sophisticated
woman craving sex domination. Together, as usual, they "flash” in
"strange reciprocity.” The background of the present novel is that of
modern Mexico, and we are initiated, with Mr Lawrence's customary
imaginative insight and versatility, into the various activities of this
sensational country. If one is interested in the revival of ancient religious
cults, in bullfights, and in revolutions, there is much that is instructive and
entertaining in this volume, but if one's chief interest is Mr Lawrence
there is nothing new to learn.
The Sailor's RETURN, by David Garnett (12mo, 189 pages; Knopf: $2).
Mr Garnett has a formula. He asks you to take one astounding leap into
fantasy with him and once there he so beguiles you with plausible facts
that you forget the original obliquity of the plane to which he has ac-
customed you. The present story is as delightfully written as its pred-
ecessors and moves you to tears, as they did, with the desire to compel
poor humanity to shed its bigotry. A white man marries an African
princess, fetches her home to England, and is more cruelly treated than
any foreigner would be by savages in a like situation.
GLORIOUS APOLLO, by E. Barrington (12mo, 371 pages; Dodd, Mead:
$2.50) is biography made palatable for those to whom a pound of revelation
is worth more than an ounce of illumination. Taking his fable ready-
made, the author has been quite ingenious in clothing it with fancied
conversation, plausible intrigue, and all the tears and sighs and re-
criminations which might reasonably be deduced from the known facts
of the Byron history. The story is somewhat drawn out, and the prose
is occasionally sugary, but the narrative is—as a whole-ingenious and
readable, and fairly faithful to historic truth.
SANINE, by Michael Artzibashev, translated from the Russian by Percy
Pinkerton, with a preface by Ernest Boyd (10mo, 327 pages; The Viking
Press: $2.50) here presented in the twenty-first edition of the English
translation, stands well the corrosion of years. Taken exception to upon
its first appearance in 1907 by the Russian social radical and aesthete
alike—the one deeming it a libel on revolutionary youth; the other, only
a second-rate novel at best-our perspective of time and place can per-
haps, without indulgence be more considerate. The discontent of the
former camp falls away utterly; the criticism of the latter, while doubtless
justified to an extent, failed to acknowledge flashes of understanding
and vivid narration whose edge not even our English translation can dull.


BRIEFER MENTION
521
MR PETRE, by Hilaire Belloc, with 22 illustrations by G. K. Chesterton
(12mo, 276 pages; McBride: $2.50). A satire of modern get-rich-quick
methods upon the Stock Exchange, the scene of which is quite unneces-
sarily laid fifty years hence, since the accents are all of to-day. The
style of the book is agreeably easy but there are such palpable flaws
in the argument that even those who detest modern finance more than
anything else in modern life will suspect Mr Belloc to be an inadequate
David. He scarcely knows enough of the giant to slay him.
ALL THE SAD Young Men, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (12mo, 267 pages;
Scribner: $2). So long as Mr. Fitzgerald's young men make love and
money with such confident facility, the wistful mantle which he throws
over their shoulders somehow does not fit. There isn't room enough
in all the high-powered roadsters nor upon all the polished dance floors
for the requisite melancholy, and the author's endeavours to reconcile his
people and their emotions serve but to make both appear artificial. By
the time they are thirty, these young men are saturated with a weariness
which Sherwood Anderson reserves for the middle forties, and it must be
confessed that when they weep and say—“Long ago, long ago, there was
something in me, but now that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone,
that thing is gone. I cannot cry. I cannot care. That thing will come
back no more.”—the note is a little forced. Writing in other moods-
as in The Baby Party and Hot and Cold Blood-Mr Fitzgerald displays
the sureness and insight which distinguish his best work.
SPANISH BAYONET, by Stephen Vincent Benét (12mo, 268 pages ; Doran:
$2.50). Of this historical romance, it is unnecessary to say—in the
hackneyed phrase—that it recaptures the past, for there is in it no sense
that the past has escaped. Whatever preliminary research it may have
involved--and that manifestly must have been considerable—none of
it lies embedded in the story in its raw state; every detail has been
fused in a polished and richly wrought narrative, gleaming with tropical
colours. Mr Benét has sustained a mood of poetic irony, in which an
admirable lightness is imparted to the glamour of adventure. Even the
familiar eavesdroppings, fortuitous discoveries, and miraculous escapes,
which form the indispensable framework of all such tales, are treated
in such a way as to give them an unexpected air of newness. Mr
Benét appears to have mastered one of the fundamentals in the novel
of romantic adventure—the art of writing breathlessly, yet of never
becoming winded.
In a sort of explicit humdrum, RELATIONS, by Sir Harry Johnston (12mo,
303 pages; Harpers : $2) represents the life of a young Australian English-
man, and of his innumerable relatives, during the years 1900-1925 A.D.
Occasionally something of the aboriginal inscrutability of Australia
drifts through the chapters, but mainly the book appears to be a reliable
record of decorous British marriages, respectable British births, and
impecunious British relatives. It might be worth reading for its expression
of the scientific and worldly cultivation of its author, had we not, in
his previous novels, a better witnessing to that characteristic.


522
BRIEFER MENTION
Noah's Ark, by Amabel Williams-Ellis (12mo, 320 pages; Doran: $2).
The first part of this book is about an intelligent young woman who
baulks at marriage, fearing its deadening effects on two positive tempera-
ments. The second half is about the same young woman, who—having
married-has a baby. The author, having stated her theorem with un-
usual grace and vivacity, neglects to demonstrate it, and the forces which
keep her two young people apart at the beginning are never seen in opera-
tion after they finally decide to brave the risks of marriage. Thus the
story seems to poise on a springboard and then go back and wade in
somewhere else--not a fatal volte-face by any means, but one which, in
a work of so many excellences, might have been avoided. If the novel
had finished on the note with which it begins, it would have been more
exciting. As it stands, it has freshness and wit, style and discernment
-which is perhaps enough. Certainly it is more than one usually gets.
PROSE AND POETRY OF THE REVOLUTION, edited by Frederick C. Prescott
and John H. Nelson (12mo, 258 pages; Thomas H. Crowell: $1.50) is
an anthology which fairly represents the period involved (1765-1789),
and yet obliges one to remark how little literature lends itself to partisan
purposes. Unless we have historic feeling sufficient to image the lives
and minds of the revolutionaries, to whom the matter was real, we shall
find little to detain us in these rather faded flowers of controversy-
little beyond a few selections from Thomas Paine and Philip Freneau.
.
THE DOOM OF ATLAS AND OTHER POEMs, by William Jeffrey (12mo,
47 pages; Gowans and Gray: 5/). Any four poems-upon respectively,
Atlas, Nature, Christ with Mary Magdalene, the cosmos prior to human
life-may well seem less than august, and the four poems which comprise
this book suffer from what seems an absence of epic affilatus. If, however,
“frailsome," "tremulant,” "ruth," and "wizard passion" are poetically
unwary, power manifests itself in “the stinging scent of the eternal sea,”
"the cedar takes the storm within its boughs," a "thong drawn careless
o'er the dew.” There is an impression in these poems, of competence,
of poetic body, of reserve power, of new eyes upon old themes, and one
could not but approach with eagerness, other examples of this author's
work.
The least to be said of ELIZABETHAN Lyrics, chosen, edited, and arranged
by Norman Ault (12mo, 535 pages; Longmans: $3.50) is that it is a
work of satisfying scholarship. The diligence of the editor has taken him,
not to prior anthologies, but to sources, to the manuscripts or the oldest
extant editions, wherever they could be found—not only in English libra-
ries, but in libraries or collections in Edinburgh, Dublin, and Hamburg,
as well as in those of certain American private collectors. By careful
study he has been able to date the lyrics, or at least assign them to definite
periods, and has arranged them in chronological or developmental order ;
so that one has in panorama the whole splendid season of Elizabethan
lyricism-a shining April (1530-1550), a glowing May (1550-1590), a
glorious June (1590-1610).
shining Aprirama the whole logical or devel. them to det


BRIEFER MENTION
4523
THE LE GALLIENNE ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN VERSE, edited and with an ·
introduction by Richard Le Gallienne (10mo, 402 pages ; Boni & Liveright:
$3.50). Richard Le Gallienne gives us in his introduction a justification for
the inclusion in his anthology of much verse that is quite obviously second-
rate. We cannot help wondering how he would explain the omission from
his exhaustive study of such names as E. E. Cummings and Marianne
Moore. With the exception of such yawning gaps this famous survivor of
the wreck of the 'Nineties has presented us with an interesting volume.
Two Lives, by William Ellery Leonard (12mo, 109 pages; The Viking
Press: $2), a sequence of more than two hundred sonnets, forms a com-
plete novel. The undertaking was difficult, almost unique, and is gen-
erally successful; the story marches; the emotion is too poignant to
dissect. As for the author's technical problems and their success, one
might say, “To tell a connected story in sonnets-yes. To avoid
monotony without breaking a set form, to achieve variety without anarchy
-yes. To create an idiom capable of passing from the commonplaces of
domestic life to the heights of tragic emotion, and expressing the two of
them-no."
As biography EDGAR SALTUS The Man, by Marie Saltus (10mo, 324 pages;
Pascal Covici : $3) leaves about everything to be desired; but as a highly
personal view of his somewhat volcanic domesticity, it persuades us that
the man is set down quite as the most successful of his wives really saw
him. It accords, too, with the impression one gets from his books, an
impression of impatient sophomoric cleverness, ill-digested culture, and
deficient self-criticism—the impression, in short, that though he was a
hack of parts, he was nevertheless a hack.
IRISH MEMORIES, by E. CE. Somerville and Martin Ross (12mo, 343 pages;
Longmans: $2.75). The Martins, about whom this book is written, once
owned nearly all Connemara. In proof of which a postern gate by the
Galway river remains, and the ruins of a courtyard and of a manorial
dove-cote. The book is made up of a number of tales, very brief and
astonishing, about happenings in Ireland—about the little old woman
who lived in the dark wood, about Koko, a certain merry little dog who
steals the dinner, and about Patsey, whose heart is framed equally for
love or war.
RECOLLECTIONS OF A HAPPY LIFE, by Maurice Francis Egan (10mo, 385
pages; Doran: $2.50) is so full of reminiscent gusto as to persuade the
reader that here was a man robust enough to enjoy himself very nearly all
the time and everywhere. How he did this enjoying is not so clear, except
that he had the gift of private levity, as well as the sound Irish faculty of
being ready for anything, from lyric poetry to the invention of standard-
ized conversation for diplomatic dinners; or indeed for those ticklish
negotiations, mentioned very casually and merely, of which a conclusion
was reached, in the purchase of the Danish West Indies by the United
States—from a Denmark not overwilling to sell.


524
BRIEFER MENTION
RHYTHMIC PROSE, by John Hubert Scott (brochure, 8vo, 192 pages; Uni-
versity of Iowa: $2). In the companion volume to his Rhythmic Verse,
Mr Scott sums up all the theories, ancient and modern, concerning the
rhythm of prose, and lays the foundations for his study of the rhythm
of verse by his contention that the two follow identical laws, allowing
only for such variation as may be demanded by the metre of poetry. De-
structively analysing the theories of the "timers," the author substitutes
for these, his own theory: that the rhythm of prose and of verse is de-
termined by the phrase; and the phrase, in turn, is inseparable in its natural
form from the thought expressed. Ingenious and for the most part con-
vincing illustrations form a part of this book which, like Rhythmic Verse,
is scholarly but not intimidating. Most agreeable to the present reviewer
is the author's contention that the modern attempt to be natural by re-
ducing all literature (as in the case of the modernized Bible) to the
speech of everyday is, in reality, destroying the natural rhythm of the
idea and thus producing an effect not only unnatural but wholly without
aesthetic value.
RHYTHMIC VERSE, by John Hubert Scott (brochure, 8vo, 216 pages; Uni-
versity of Iowa: $2). This is a particularly valuable and interesting
study, scholarly, yet simple, vigorous, and free from the hocus-pocus of
academic phraseology. The author contends that the main rhythms of
verse, like those of prose, are dictated by the idea to be expressed. As a
metrist, Mr Scott stands firmly for the accentual principle in verse as
opposed to the time principle much emphasized by recent theorists. He
has made out a striking case which can not fail to impress deeply the
"timers” who may read the book. Yet the present reviewer finds himself
more in sympathy with the moderate stand of Dr Baum, while conceding
to Mr Scott a most absorbing exposition of his theory. Among a diversity
of stimulating passages, especially to be recommended are those dealing
with free verse and with the natural music of folk poetry, particularly in
its relation to the Elizabethan lyric. We regret the absence of an index
as a guide to the many lively digressions.
BEYOND HATRED, by Albert Leon Guerard (12mo, 298 pages; Scribner:
$3). In this book, which is as interesting as it is difficult to classify,
the author takes his stand on very high ground, not merely beyond hatred,
but above nationalism. As an uprooted Gaul who has lived in America,
liking his new home, but never losing his French lucidity and critical
amusement, he is the more able to do this. Instead of railing at our
various attitudes to the negro question, he inspects our biases one by one,
and dispassionately pokes holes in them. His chapter on A Pluralistic
Utopia renders the same service to the objections of those who are unable
to see any good come out of Europe. Mr Guerard has some quiet fun
over similarities between Voltaire, Carlyle, and Wells, as well as an
appreciation of the humanistic philosophy so variously developed in the
three. In the final chapter, which gives the book its title, he dissects
prevalent ideas of equality, and comes to the wise conclusion that what
men are is not equal, but incommensurable, and that doctrines of exclusion
are doctrines of evil.


MODERN ART
NONTINUING my "Americana” where I left off last month:
there have been shows by Joseph Stella, Charles Demuth,
and Charles Burchfield. These three certainly must be cited in
any list of distinguished contemporary local painters. I always
intend to catalogue each year the dozen or two dozen talents in
which it is civilized to have an interest and sometimes in the rush
at the end of the year I forget it. With the season dwindling
visibly and only a month to go, I may as well do this duty now.
I don't pretend to be the arbiter of taste but merely urge a frank-
ness in these matters. I should have used a "we" but for incor-
rigible modesty; “I” being to my ears less important than the
authoritative "we.” But whenever the question of art springs
up in a social gathering an accusing conscience is sure to lead some
sluggish New Yorker to ask, “Well who are they, these newer
artists whom we must like ?” and my reply is apt to include such
names as the three above, with the Marin and O'Keefe of last
month, and Gaston Lachaise, Max Weber, Kuniyoshi, Charles
Sheeler, Louis Bouché, Oscar Bluemmer, Preston Dickinson, Glenn
Colemann, R. W. Chanler, Robert Laurent, Abram Walkowitz,
Florine Stettheimer, Victor Canadè, Alexander Brook, Niles
Spencer, and Leon Hartl. The list could be extended a trifle with-
out prejudicing “our” case. But these are those who begin to have
a following. “Take 'em and leave 'em”; and you face or dodge
the issues of the day.
The Joseph Stella exhibition in the Dudensing Galleries has
just opened and it is impossible to foresee at this moment the de-
gree of favour it will receive. Stella deserves luck. He is a
manly, courageous painter and attempts to take New York, and
life in general, in an imaginative way. He puts New York in his
debt yet New York scarcely seems aware of the obligation. I
seem to run across notable instances in English history of poets
and painters who were pensioned but do not read of the like in our
own history. Stella gives several years of his life to a noble effort
to sum up the outward aspects of the metropolis of the new world
—and the new world apparently doesn't give a hang. Were it not
OM


526
MODERN ART
for an amiable dealer there would not even be a glimpse of these
pictures for the insistent few who demand modern art for moderns.
To be sure, a permanent place for the huge canvases, as full of
perpendicular lines as the city itself, is difficult to imagine. I
can only think of the glass-roofed, iron-supported train entrance
in the Pennsylvania Station as being “in character," but even in
it, I fear, there is no proper wall space. No matter. Let a place
be built. Our architects appear to believe we are still living under
Louis Quatorze and our church-builders are so remote in spirit from
modern sinners that it is not surprising that the latter so seldom
venture into the hollow shams that are constructed.
I am all the more impatient with the tardy philanthropists who
refuse to make Stella's career possible in that, as a critic, I do
not say an instant "yes” to everything he produces. Such work,
delved out of a man's inner consciousness, sometimes requires
time upon the part of the spectator. I can be Stella's philosopher
and friend but not his guide. Who could presume to know his
way about in the unknown world that lies inside another's brain?
Who would advise William Blake and Henri Rousseau to do this
and not to do that? Only fools. Just because Blake and Rous-
seau have already lived they seem to suggest rules to other poets,
but Stella will pay no attention to them, nor to me, I hope, when
I say I am sometimes worried by his trick of putting on paint in
flat places as though he were a designer and not a painter. Picasso
put paint on flatly but it was always precious in the sense of
painting; and I never saw a Rousseau that wasn't plastic. But
Stella will go on listening to his "voices.” What I am eager
for, is a wider public for these strange new pictures, so that those
more psychic than I happen to be, may test out their powers
thoroughly.
As it is I apprehend easily enough something mystical in the
decoration called The Rose. Who was that saint of Peru who has
something to do with roses? This might very well serve as her
banner. The rose is poised in the centre of the composition against
a clear, cerulean sky, with a queer light streaming from back of
it. The artist has lavished all sorts of devotions upon the various
divisions of the painting. Such plants as never were stretch forth
their leaves to the heavens and birds that seem like votive offerings
are ever so nicely placed upon the lower levels, and the whole


.:
i.
HENRY MCBRIDE
PRIDE
527
ems.
e
AI
thing is shiny new as though the artist had insisted upon the best
of material for everything.
What does it mean? Quién sabe? It is so unquestionably
exotic that my mind wavered between St Rose of Lima and the
new religion that D. H. Lawrence says, in The Plumed Serpent,
is being planted upon Mexico. For a land in search of a new
religion, and more especially a religion stuffed with symbols and
thus appealing to artistic natures, the state of Mexico, it seems
to me, could easily do worse than to adopt this Stella panel, as is.
Clear, cool, intellectual, nothing could be in greater contrast
to the art of John Marin than the water-colours of Charles Demuth
which follow his in the series of exhibitions in the Intimate Gallery.
Marin grows more and more tempestuous; Demuth, more and more
restrained. The opposing currents of modern life beat in upon
Marin's spirit relentlessly. He feels each jerky, jazzlike force
that comes along and, to the death, must translate it into rhythms.
He is another melancholy Dane who says “Oh cursed spite," but
always in the end accepts the challenge and wars it out with nature
to tragic but triumphant conclusions.
Demuth, doubtless with the aid of science, wraps himself in
some sort of a transparent cloak and shields himself from the
contrary winds. He is like those deep-sea experts who sink be-
neath the wave encased in glass, to come back, when the supply
of oxygen is exhausted, with reports of wonders. Not a ripple
from the upper airs is allowed to disturb the intensity of his study.
But this scientifically induced calm is by no means stagnation.
There is life to be observed from the point where he has taken
up his station, and since science secures you from fogs, he gets it
straight.
The Demuth colour is like light that has glanced through jewels
on its way to the paper. This artist always had most definite
intentions but grows more and more severe upon himself. He is
now loath to admit the public to half-confidences. Everything
must not only be finished but finished to kill. The jewels he
handles are allowed to have no flaws.
Henry McBRIDE


MUSICAL CHRONICLE
A MERIQUES by Edgar Varèse affords a delicate glimpse of
m American life. Brontosaurus wallows in a prehistoric
swamp, sluggish, eating, and filthy, lethargically drawing an oc-
casional hoof up from the ooze. Fafner was a fairy in comparison,
all gauze and wings. This reptile gem is monumentally inert,
belches softcoal smoke, and is unamusingly destructive and dull.
A Swiftian caricature for the swollen orchestra; a travesty in tone
by the prophet Jeremiah; a musical parody outdistancing the
mockeries of Till Eulenspiegel. Yet since the illimitable bur-
lesque-show the United States, itself a caricature, renders all absurd
exaggeration of its characteristics ineffectual, all ridiculous in-
congruities in its depictions inadequate, Amériques holds an ex-
cellent likeness of a general aspect.
Was it the inertia of a continent, all guts and no mind, unable
to sing, to dance, to move, that the composer had in mind in 1921,
or merely the look of that assemblage of unmusical gargoyles, the
New York audience of the Philadelphia Orchestra, who heard his
work April 13th? Was he thinking of the impotence of privileged
America, incapable of creating an environment favourable to the
superior being, or did he anticipate the musical criticism of Messrs
Chotzinoff and Downes? We do not know; it is possible all the
items contributed an impetus, though any one alone might easily
have produced it. Wildly alarming fire sirens, smothered trip-
hammer thuds, clattering honkey-tonk, the ground-bass of the
street with its whipping, mocking, crushing sounds, probably made
the sense-connexion. With the aural sensations, the feel of the
sodden downpull of America doubtless asserted itself, the feel
of the living principle never coming to self-assurance, invariably
ruthlessly interrupted and dissipated, finally resolved into the
movement of the headless herd and through it released in vicious-
ness. Years of maladjustment, the immigrant's disillusionment
with America and apprehension of a vast, cruelly indifferent reality
too alien to comprehend must have become clairvoyant and ob-
jective while the raucous, sluggish symphony with its immense
metallic sonorities, sharply appreciated vulgarities, outcries, and
wild mockery found its form.


PAUL ROSENFELD
529
Travesty in the Menckenese spirit, Amériques never is. Varèse
has his song to sing. The music is not an external copy but an
interior, transcendental matter. Its objectivity is achieved through
the legitimate exploitation of a material. As a partial portrait, it
is, necessarily, no major form. You cannot make a silk purse
out of inferior feelings, and caricature, even of a subject itself
caricatural, partakes of the incompletude of the devil its parent.
Rhythms as oafish and hideously mechanical as those of the
“apotheosis” of Amériques must ever address themselves to the
feelings largely through the analytical faculty. Compared merely
as a thing of its class to Hyperprism, Intégrales, and the other
experiments in the simpler, directer, more positive forms made
later by Varèse, Amériques takes a secondary place. The inner
coherency is weaker than that of the cooler successors, and a
somewhat arbitrary opposition of volumes of sonority, a some-
what too regular alternation of monstrous tutti with thinner pas-
sages results. Echoes of the Sacre momentarily obtrude, in the
initial theme for low flute and bassoon, and in certain elephantine
rhythms. Amériques is perhaps the transition between the series
of tone poems produced by the young Varèse in Europe before the
· war, and those born of the experience of the new world.
It is in its extraordinarily novel sonority that Amériques most
closely approaches its younger, formally and spiritually more
complete and lovely brethren. The title, eternal symbol of new
worlds to discover, is justified of the orchestral language: it is
strangely both metallic and strident, and aerial and lyric, like
the reflection of a prairie sunset on steel rails. Amériques contains
Varèse's first realization of percussive music; the battery, daringly
augmented, forms a choir in itself and in several passages plays
alone. The bars with the triangle pianissimo amid the full percus-
sion are particularly bewitching. So too are the effects gotten from
the suspended cymbal struck with the triangle's metal rod. Per-
haps the most original writing appears half-way through the
piece, where the violins die away in very high minor ninths over
the pedal of the horns and basses. It is probable that in Edgar
Varèse we have another virtuosic genius with the orchestra in
his veins.
Because of its independence of the significancy of music, the
dancing of Angna Enters compels mention among musical events.


530
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
is
vas
A deal of her miming is done before no musical backdrop at all.
Some of it is executed to piano pieces by Frescobaldi, Beethoven,
and Debussy, and a few of the dance-forms are accompanied by
voice and piano in folk-songs and songs by Bruneau. The two
sorts of settings are indistinguishable. The first involves the
servitude of music no less than the second. Miss Enters' mimetic
creates a form, leaning on that of no composer and taking up
into itself and reissuing again the musical accompaniment. This
is not interpretative, but creative work.
It is “music," what most dancing is not. Save in her moments
of preparation and repose, Isidora Duncan never fused with her
composers to set them and herself free. The personal isolated
her movements; there was no real form. A great friend of ours
accurately observed that while Walter Damrosch conducted the
Seventh Symphony for her it was evident neither of the two was
interested in Beethoven. The unlucky Titan strained at the load.
Several mimes, technically accomplished, more recently have shown
a greater sensitiveness to the music and a greater desire to unify the
elements of their art. Several have danced as effectively to the
piano as to no accompaniment at all. No one has created moments
especially vital or otherwise worthy of note. But Angna Enters,
uniting in herself the woman and the artist, assembles and forms
experience with an inclusiveness, distinction, and freshness in her
dancing, that reconciles the musician with her use of musical art,
little different from the conductor or pianist's creative one. The
spirit of the music receives an extension through a medium other
than tone, none the less closely related to the musical through the
common bourne of motor activity.
Miss Enters' waltz creates toward Johann Strauss whose Ge-
schichten aus dem Wiener Wald accompanies it. She experiences
life through his voluptuous measures and creates an authentic and
delicious counterpoint to it in bodily rhythm, facial play, and
ultra-Viennese costuming. One almost hears the words whispered
to the Fraülein impersonated as she dips and swings. That is
the Gothic cathedral, in the Moyen Age danced to Frescobaldi;
architecture measuring the infinite in yawning vasty reaches. Or
a progress of sculpturesque volumes through a stately draped body.
Not only the bodily pose, the facial play, the costume, and the
music are made part of this artist's idea: the play of light upon


PAUL ROSENFELD
531
the body and the stuffs is carefully considered and exquisitely sub-
servient. The unaccompanied Dance of Death-dead black dress,
dead white face, crown of ghastly flowers, hectic trapped move-
ments—perfectly exploits a medium.
A juxtaposition of Angna Enters to Yvette Guilbert is in-
evitable. The young Dutch-American dancer is possessed by a
penetrative sympathy for life closely resembling that of the “singer
of the pity of unpitied human things.” The frivolous, the simple,
become poignant objects, beneath her mind. Only, the integrity of
this young artist is a little greater; for Angna Enters spreads
over the whole of the programme which sets her dances her feeling
for art. It has no personal limits.
Paul Rosenfeld


ANNOUNCEMENT AND COMMENT
I AM happy to announce my resignation from the editorship of
| THE DIAL. I am also happy to announce that Miss Mari-
anne Moore has accepted the invitation of Mr Watson and myself
to become the Editor of The DIAL.
S. T.
lan
We are often reminded that the civilized world is uncivilized.
The malevolence of a protective tariff seems to be as great as
that of the “trust.” We are begged to realize that among human
beings, “there should be no power to exploit and no fear of being
exploited.” We sometimes scrutinize our national charitableness
and wish that we could cancel the indebtedness to us of our various
foreign debtors—not that we might buy good-will, but that we
might enjoy the sense of friendliness.
The world of art also is assailed by a spirit of domination,
gainfulness, or expediency. “No one,” says Roger Fry," "how-
ever much he admires a bronze on purely esthetic grounds, fails,
if he is going to purchase it, to find out how many exactly similar
pieces the artist purposes to make. Its rarity is part of its value
to almost any owner.” And depressingly but justifiably he defines
as an "opifact," "any object made by man not for direct use but for
... various forms of ostentation.”
An even less veiled accentuating of one's “personal worth either
in his own or ... in others' eyes," we have in our present eco-
nomically irresponsible detailed ornateness and cleverly demure
exalting of what is anatomically decorative. Clement of Alex-
andria with the averted eye of the jailer, deplored as it were
prophetically, an admiration for green stones and for pearls and
wished that “our life might be anything rather than a pageant.”
Anton Theodor Hartmann's The Hebrew Woman at her Toilette,
and in her Bridal Character, "weeded” by De Quincey “of that
1 The Hogarth Essays: Art and Commerce. By Roger Fry. 10mo. 23
pages. The Hogarth Press. 2/6.
2 Toilette of the Hebrew Lady Exhibited in Six Scenes. By Thomas De
Quincey. 10mo. 64 pages. Edwin Valentine Mitchell. 60 cents.


ÁNNOUNCEMENT AND COMMENT
533
SI
wordiness which has made the original unreadable,” is as readable
as it is modern in its complement of reticulated foot-wear, of
trellis-work sandals, of veils, and bijouterie. What but con-
temporary is the mania of which we read, for “Suns and Moons"
and “half-moons,” for “golden snakes" and pigments—a “black
rim” being “traced about the eyelid . . . to throw a dark and
majestic shadow over the eye”; to give it "a lustrous expression;
to increase its apparent size; and to apply the force of contrast to
the white of the eye.”
When persons contribute to the support of a hospital or to a fund
for eastern relief or to the support of orphans, some point out
that charity is advertising and that benefactors to causes in which
there may be Jewish orphans or invalids, are probably Jewish,
and are in a sense giving to themselves. Civic projects for enter-
taining industrial workers, or feeding children in tenement dis-
tricts, are deprecated as being a subterfuge on the part of ostenta-
· tious people, to amuse themselves or to make themselves prominent.
In his voluntary poverty as in his conviction that “industry must
be spiritualized” Mahatma Gandhi can, however, scarcely be
thought to have resorted to a clever means of enriching himself.
The late William Rockhill Nelson, unhamperingly so far as one can
see, provides that the presidents of three universities shall appoint
trustees to establish and maintain in Kansas City under one of
the largest art foundations in this country, an art museum. The
wish of Mr Rockefeller that there should be a new museum of
antiquities in Egypt seems generous; and what species of self-
exaltation is evinced by the recent anonymous gift to one of our
universities of a million dollars for the establishing of an art
school? Sir Henry Lunn has created a foundation to promote
unity among the churches of the world and peace among the
nations of the world. Adding to it himself, Samuel Yellin has
made the Philadelphia Award received by him this past year, a
fund for assisting ironworkers to go abroad to study beautiful
metal-work in museums and buildings in Europe. The John
Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowships for Ad-
vanced Study Abroad have been established: “To improve the
quality of education and the practice of the arts and professions
in the United States, to foster research, and to provide for the
cause of better international understanding." It does seem to us


534 ANNOUNCEMENT AND COMMENT
that there is active to-day, an altruism which is disinterested.
Can it be possible that we are stupendously naïve in the face of
whąt is merely sublime knavery?
If Phoenician trivịalities seem to find more favour with us than
The Barnard Cloisters, early American furniture, or the records of
The Smithsonian Institute, a lugubrious conclusion need not be
drawn. The Huxley Memorial Medal has been for the second
time awarded by The Royal Anthropological Society of Great
Britain, to an American. Certain German chemical discoveries;
the steam engine made in England; the telephone, the airplane,
and certain noted electrical inventions of America, are not local
property. To part with a valuable thing without losing it, be-
speaks for this thing, a very special kind of value,
The basic selfishness of human nature, the elaborate crookedness,
and the irrelevant lightness of civilization are, of course, not a
myth. “No deed of ours, I suppose, on this side of the grave,”
says Lewis Carroll, "is really unselfish.” In view of events of
the past year, however, it is not so Alice-in-Wonderland-like as it
may sound, to say that no deed of ours does look to us in its every
aspect, selfish..
M. M.











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