785 Gen, VERSE OF ALVIS LOW RY Class 050 Book D53 Acc. 181.8.2 V,72 #: '' sc" ಕಕ್ಷತೆಯ ಸಮಿತಿಗಳಿಗೆ 585ಣಿಸಿ 3 1858 028 292 138 UNIVERSITY OF IOWA 76241 མཐ༦ ཙ།) ཀ་ཁ་ནསྨན#| +iཙ11 ། སྒྲ་ཀ་ gfisfin * ར ༧༨ ནི པར 13+། རྒྱུ རྒྱུ 8, W{ ཅི ". 11:41 12223 W! ༧ 3 44 48 - བཙ༧a༣ ༧t eri 050 D53 1.72 Index COISO 1. Bo & van INDEX VOLUME LXXII PAGE AIKEN, CONRAD. ALDIS, MARY ANDERSON, Sherwood Aragon, Louis The Dark City (Fiction) 345 Soliloquy on a Park Bench 601 The Mosque of the Empress (Fiction) 273 I'm a Fool (Fiction) 119 “Madame à sa Tour Monte . (Fiction). Up Stream 634 (6 20 . AUSTIN, MARY Barney, Natalie CLIFFORD, transla- tor 87 BECHHOFER, C. E.. BODENHEIM, MAXWELL Boni, Nell v. L., translator BUFFET, GABRIELLE BUNIN, IVAN BURKE, KENNETH Butts, MARY Colum, PADRAIC 398 465 416 . . COOMARASWAMY, ANANDA COPPARD, A. E.. Cowley, MALCOLM CRANE, CLARKSON CRAVEN, THOMAS JEWELL An Evening with M Teste (Fiction) 158 Russian Letter 69 Isolation of Carved Metal The Beguine Symforosa (Fiction) 365 Guillaume Apollinaire 267 The Gentleman from San Francisco (Fiction) 47 The Correspondence of Flaubert 147 Fides quaerens Intellectum 527 Heaven's First Law 197 Heroism and Books 92 Portrait of an Arrived Critic (Fiction) Change (Fiction) Memoirs of a Midget A New Dramatic Art . 302 Sea and Sardinia 193 Oriental Dances in America 17 Broadsheet Ballad (Fiction) 235 Bonded Translation 517 The Fall of Soissons (Fiction) Another Outline of History 208 Love in Smoky Hill (Fiction) Realism and Robert Henri George Sand 385 Dublin Letter 298, 619 London Letter 510 An American Aristocrat 305 The Brothers Karamazov 607 Childhood Traits in Whitman 169 The Brothers Karamazov 607 The Burning Beard (Fiction) 259 The Gentleman From San Francisco (Fiction) A Study of Language 314 498 1 84 1 . Croce, BENEDETTO EGLINTON, JOHN ELIOT, T. S. HERRICK, ROBERT HESSE, HERMANN Holloway, Emory Hudson, STEPHEN, translator KOMROFF, MANUEL KOTELIANSKY, S. S., translator 47 Kroeber, A. L. IV INDEX PAGE LAWRENCE, D. H.. LAWRENCE, D. H., translator . > 47 Lovett, Robert Morss Lowell, Amy MITCHELL, STEWART . MOORE, EDWARD MORTIMER, RAYMOND POUND, EZRA Powys, LLEWELYN Robinson, James Harvey RosenFELD, PAUL Russell, BERTRAND SANTAYANA, GEORGE SELDES, Gilbert An Episode (Fiction). 143 The Fox (Fiction). 471, 569 The Gentleman from San Francisco (Fiction) The Perfect Tory 412 The Promise of Sherwood Anderson 79 A Bird's Eye View of E. A. Robinson 130 A Century of Shelley 246 Spain From the Air 640 Prague Letter 406 Bombination 630 London Letter 291 Miss Sinclair Again 531 Paris Letter 73, 187, 401, 623 Glimpses of Thomas Hardy 286 The Revolution in Ethical Theory 514 Sherwood Anderson 29 Chinese Civilization and the West 356 Marginal Notes 553 The Art of the Novel The Best Butter 427 Documents Duodecimo, 250 pp. 94 Prologue to an Edition 522 “Madame à sa Tour Monte (Fiction). Idyll (Fiction) 183 Blood and Irony 310 This Side of Innocence 419 The Poems of H. D. 203 Trivia 242 The Beguine Symforosa (Fiction) 365 A Child's History of the World 422 An Evening With M Teste (Fiction) 158 Achilles Love's Muenchhausen 642 The Analysis of Mind 97 The Country of Cockayne 493 More Memories 449, 591 318 211 SELDES, GILBERT, translator 20 SELIGMANN, HERBERT J. SHAW, VIVIAN SINCLAIR, MAY SMITH, Logan PEARSALL TIMMERMANS, Felix TRUEBLOOD, Charles K. VALÈRY, PAUL Van Loon, HENDRIK WILLEM von LUDASSY, Julius Watson, John B. Wright, CUTHBERT Yeats, William BUTLER 201 . INDEX V VERSE PAGE 265 . BODENHEIM, MAXWELL BYNNER, WITTER CRANE, HART CUMMINGS, E. E. 384 Instructions for a Ballet Donald Evans Praise for an Urn . Five Poems Poem The Holy Gilde Napoleon The Game Matin Two Greek Heads Bloom Katydids A Shrine People's Surroundings Eighth Canto Slabs of the Sunburnt West The Bull The Jungle 606 Damon, S. Foster . FLETCHER, JOHN GOULD GOULD, WALLACE KREYMBORG, ALFRED LOWELL, AMY MITCHELL, STEWART Moore, MARIANNE POUND, EZRA SANDBURG, CARL Williams, William Carlos 43 354 178 393 463 464 244 492 16 68 588 505 278 156 157 . VI INDEX ART ARCHIPENKO, ALEXANDER Benn, Ben Bloch, ALBERT Biocн CARLYLE, SIDNEY D. CHRISTIAN, GEORGES CUMMINGS, E. E. Davis, STUART De Lanux, EYRE DEMUTH, CHARLES FAGGI, Alfeo FAï, EMANUEL Gropper, William Herzog, OSWALD KOLBE, GEORG Two Figures Two Studies Interior Street Two Drawings La Sainte Russie Four Line Drawings James Joyce A Portrait Acrobats Dante Canal St Martin Job et ses Amis Le Jockey Une Gare Fox-Trot Touch Geniessen Dancer Mermaid Heifer A Portrait Female Torso Kneeling Girl Mother and Child Baby's Head Movement: New York An Etching A Line Drawing Jack Rabbit Figure Drawing The Cripple Strolling Mountebanks La Carriole de M Juniet The Fear Forest Woman in Evergreens Four Drawings for Woodcuts Two Wood Carvings May May January January April March January June January June · April February February February February May May January June June June March April April April February February April April May June June June May February February March March KUNIYOSHI, YASUO LACHAISE, GASTON LEHMBRUCK, Wilhelm . . . . Loy, MINA MARIN, JOHN Matisse, Henri NAGLE, EDWARD P. Nakian, Reuben PASCIN, JULES PICASSO, PABLO . ROUSSEAU, HENRI SPRINCHORN, CARL. VAN HEEMSKERCK, JACOBA ZORACH, WILLIAM INDEX VII BOOKS REVIEWED Authors and Titles PAGE ABBOTT, LYMAN. Silhouettes of My Contemporaries 218 ADAMS, SAMUEL HOPKINS. Success 216 AIKEN, CONRAD. Punch: The Immortal Liar 130 ÅLEICHEM, SHALOM. See Shalom Aleichem. ANDERSON, SHERWOOD. Marching Men.-Poor White.—The Triumph of the Egg.- Windy McPherson's Son.-Winesburg, Ohio 29, 79 ANGELL, NORMAN. The Fruits of Victory 106 ANONYMOUS. EDEN AND CEDAR Paul, translators. A Young Girl's Diary 325 ANONYMOUS. The Glass of Fashion 328 APOLLINAIRE, GUILLAUME. Alcools.-Le Bestiaire.-Calligrammes.-L'Enchanteur Pourissant.-La Femme Assise.-Hérésiarque & Cie.-Les Peintres Cubistes.-Le Poète Assassiné . 267 ATHERTON, GERTRUDE. Sleeping Fires 432 AUTHORS' LEAGUE. My Maiden Effort 539 Ayscough, Florence, translator. Amy Lowell, English versions. Fir-Flower Tablets 517 BALFOUR, ARTHUR JAMES. A Defence of Philosophic Doubt 107 BEEBE, WILLIAM. Edge of the Jungle 106 BEER, THOMAS, The Fair Rewards 432 BEERBOHM, Max. And Even Now 94 BEERBOHM, Max. A Christmas Garland.—The Happy Hypocrite.—More.—Seven Men.-A Survey.-The Works. Yet Again.-Zuleika Dobson 522 BENCHLEY, Robert. Of All Things! 94 BENÉT, LAURA. Fairy Bread 537 BENNETT, ARNOLD. Mr. Prohack 431 BERESFORD, J. D. The Prisoners of Hartling 535 BERES FORD, J. D. Signs and Wonders 104 BERTRAND, Louis. Flaubert à Paris BLACK, ALEXANDER. The Latest Thing, and Other Things BLAKE, W. H., translator. Maria Chapdelaine, by Louis HÉMON 431 BLOK, ALEXANDER. Scythians.—The Twelve 69 BOJER, Johan. A. R. SHELANDER, translator. God and Woman 323 BOTTOME, PHYLLIS. The Crystal Heart . 324 BOUCHÉ, Louis, and William Yarrow, editors. Robert Henri, His Life and Works 84 BOYD, ERNEST. Ireland's Literary Renaissance. 298 BOYD, ERNEST, translator. The Patrioteer, by Heinrich Mann . 324 BRADFORD, GAMALIEL, American Portraits, 1875-1900 651 BRADLEY, WILLIAM AspenwALL, translator. Decadence and Other Essays on the Culture of Ideas, by REMY DE GOURMONT 107 BRAILSFORD, Henry Noel. The Russian Workers' Republic BRAILSFORD, Henry Noel. Shelley, Godwin, and Their Circle 246 BRAITHWAITE, WILLIAM STANLEY, editor. Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1921 537 BRAWLEY, BENJAMIN. The Negro in Literature and Art in the United States. 435 BRETT-SMITH, H. F., editor. Peacock's Four Ages of Poetry: Shelley's Defence of Poetry: Browning's Essay on Shelley 217 BRILL, A. A. Fundamental Conceptions of Psychoanalysis 651 BROUN, HEYWOOD. Seeing Things at Night 94 Browx, Alice. Louise Imogen Guiney BUNIN, I. A., MAXIM GORKY, and Alexander Kuprin, Reminiscences of Anton Chekhov 219 BYELY, ANDREY, Christ Has Arisen 69 Cecil, LADY GWENDOLEN, Life of Robert, Marquis of Salisbury 412 COLBY, FRANK MOORE. The Margin of Hesitation 94 COLERIDGE, HONOURABLE STEPHEN. The Idolatry of Science 435 401 538 . 220 326 VIII INDEX PAGE 537, 619 640 538 538 211 Colum, Padraic, editor. Anthology of Irish Verse COPPARD, A. E. Adam & Eve & Pinch Me . 323 CUMBERLAND, GERALD. The Poisoner 432 H. D. Hymen 203 DE GOURMONT, Remy. Jack Lewis, translator. The Book of Masks 217 DE GOURMONT, Remy. William AspenwAll Bradley, translator. Decadence and Other Essays on the Culture of Ideas . 107 DE LA MARE, Walter. Memoirs of a Midget.—The Three Mulla-Mulgars 416 Dell, FLOYD. The Briary Bush.-Moon Calf 104 Dewey, John. Human Nature and Conduct 514 Don Marquis. See Marquis, Don. Dos Passos, John. Rosinante to the Road Again DOSTOEVSKY, FEODOR. The Brothers Karamazov 607 Doughty, Charles Montagu. Travels in Arabia Deserta 193 DRINKWATER, John. Seeds of Time . DRINKWATER, John. Paul Nash, engravings on wood. Cotswold Characters Duclaux, MARIE. Victor Hugo 327 DUNSANY, Lord. If 649 EASTMAN, Max. The Sense of Humor 327 Ferber, EDNA. The Girls 104 Faure, Elie. Walter Pach, translator. History of Art (Volume I, Ancient Art) 208 Fergusson, Harvey. The Blood of the Conquerors 216 FILLMORE, Parker. The Laughing Prince 104 FITZGERALD, F. Scott. The Beautiful and Damned.—This Side of Paradise 419 FLAUBERT, Gustave. Aimee McKenzie, translator. The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters. 218 Foerster-NIETZSCHE, ELIZABETH, editor; Caroline V. Kerr, translator. The Nietzsche-Wagner Correspondence FORBES, Rosita. The Secret of the Sahara: Kufara 434 Forbes-Robertson, Philippe, and W. L. George. A London Mosaic 219 Fort, Paul. John Strong NEWBERRY, translator. Selected Poems and Ballads of Paul Fort. 217 Freeman, John. Two Poems 649 Gallienne, Richard Le. See Le Gallienne GALSWORTHY, John. The Forsyte Saga.—To Let . 103 GARLAND, Hamlin. A Daughter of the Middle Border 535 GARLAND, Hamlin. Main Travelled Roads . 79 Garnett, CONSTANCE, translator. Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories, by Ivan TURGENEV. 433 George, W. L., and Philippe Forbes-Robertson. A London Mosaic 219 GIDE, ANDRÉ. Lilian Rothermere, translator. Prometheus Illbound 325 GOLDBERG, Isaac, translator and editor. Brazilian Tales . GORKY, Maxim. Three of Them GORKY, MAXIM, ALEXANDER Kuprin, and I. A. BUNIN. Reminiscences of Anton Chekhov 219 Gould, Gerald. The Journey GOURMONT, REMY DE. See de Gourmont Graves, CHARLES L. Mr Punch's History of Modern England 106 Graves, Robert. The Pier-Glass 105 GreenBIE, SYDNEY. The Pacific Triangle 219 Gsell, Paul. Les Matinées de la Villa Said: Propos d'Anatole France 187 Guerney, Bernard Guilbert, translator. The Menace of the Mob, by DMITRI MEREJKOVSKI 539 Gugitz, GUSTAV. Giacomo Casanova und Sein Lebensroman 642 GUNNARSSON, GUNNAR. W. W. Worster, translator. Guest the One-Eyed HAGEDORN, HERMANN. Roosevelt in the Bad Lands 219 HALDANE, Viscount. The Reign of Relativity . 107 HALL, James Norman, and Charles Bernard Nordhoff. Faery Lands of the South Seas Hamilton, Lord Frederick. Here, There and Everywhere . 536 432 538 536 434 328 INDEX IX PAGE . 435 211 211 634 HAMLIN, TALBOT F. The Enjoyment of Architecture 328 HAMSUN, Knut. W. W. Worster, translator. Dreamers 215 HARDY, THOMAS. The Dynasts 130 HARRISON, HENRY SYDNOR. Saint Teresa 648 Hémon, Louis. W. H. BLAKE, translator. Maria Chapdelaine 431 Herbert, SYDNEY. The Fall of Feudalism in France. 539 HERGESHEIMER, Joseph. Cytherea.- Java Head.—The Lay Anthony.-Linda Condon.-Mountain Blood.- The Three Black Pennys 310 Hudson, W. H. A Shepherd's Life.-A Traveller in Little Things 538, 539 HUTCHINSON, A. S. M. If Winter Comes 103 HUXLEY, ALDOUS. Crome Yellow.–Limbo 630 JARRY, ALFRED. Ubu Roi . 73 Joyce, JAMES. Dubliners.-A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 619 JOYCE, JAMES. Ulysses . 187, 318, 619, 623, 662 KALLEN, HORACE M. Zionism and World Politics . KELLER, ELIZABETH LEAVITT. Walt Whitman in Mickle Street 326 KERR, CAROLINE V., translator; ELIZABETH FOERSTER-NIETZSCHE, editor. The Nietzsche-Wagner Correspondence Kuprin, Alexander, Maxim Gorky, and I. A. BUNIN. Reminiscences of Anton Chekhov 219 LAWRENCE, D. H. Sea and Sardinia 193 LE GALLIENNE, RICHARD, editor. The Le Gallienne Book of English Verse 649 Levy, Oscar, editor; ANTHONY M. LUDOVICI, translator. Selected Letters of Friedrich Nictzsche LEWIS, JACK, translator. The Book of Masks, by REMY DE GOURMONT 217 LEWIS, SINCLAIR. Main Street 79 Lewisohn, LUDWIG. Up Stream Loox, HENDRIK WILLEM Van. See Van Loon. LOWELL, Amy, English versions. FLORENCE Ayscough, translator. Fir-Flower Tablets 517 LOYD, LADY MARY, translator. Danton, by Louis Madelin . 434 LUBBOCK, Percy. The Craft of Fiction 318 Lucas, E. V. Rose and Rose . LUDOVICI, ANTHONY M., translator; Oscar Levy, editor. Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche. LYNCH, Bohun. Max Beerbohm in Perspective 522 McALMON, ROBERT. A Hasty Bunch 187 MCKENNA, STEPHEN. The Secret Glory 648 McKENNA, STEPHEN. While I Remember 433 McKENZIE, AIMEE, translator. The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters 218 MACAULAY, Rose. Dangerous Ages. 104 MACGOWAN, KENNETH. The Theatre of Tomorrow 340 MACKENZIE, COMPTox. Poor Relations.-Rich Relatives . 216 MADELIN, Louis. Lady Mary LOYD, translator. Danton 434 MANN, HEINRICH. Ernest Boyd, translator. The Patrioteer 324 MARQUIS, Don. Poems and Portraits 538 MASEFIELD, John. Esther and Berenice 649 MASEFIELD, John. King Cole 105 MASTERS, EDGAR LEE. The Open Sea 433 MATTHEWS, BRANDER. Essays on English MAUGHAM, W. SOMERSET. The Trembling of a Leaf Mencken, H, L. The American Language 327, 342 MEREJKOVSKI, DMITRI. Bernard Guilbert Guerney, translator. The Menace of the Mob 539 MERRICK, LEONARD. One Man's View 535 METHUEN, A., compiler. Anthology of Modern Verse . 510 Milnes, G. TURQUET-. See Turquet-Milnes. MIBBEAU, OCTAVE. Calvary 648 MORE, PAUL ELMER. The Religion of Plato 527 MORLEY, CHRISTOPHER, editor. Modern Essays 327 MURRAY, GILBERT. The Problem of Foreign Policy 536 211 328 431 220 X INDEX PAGE 2 ! . 211 211 328 536 318 Nash, Paul, engravings on wood. Cotswold Characters, by John DrinkwATER 538 NATHAN, Robert. Autumn 103 Newberry, John Strong, translator. Selected Poems and Ballads of Paul Fort . 217 NEWBOLT, Sir Henry. English Anthology of Prose and Poetry . 342 Nietzsche, ELIZABETH FOERSTER-. See Foerster-Nietzsche. Nietzsche, FRIEDRICH. ELIZABETH FOERSTER-Nietzsche, editor; CAROLINE V. Kerr, translator. The Nietzsche-Wagner Correspondence Nietzsche, Friedrich. Oscar Levy, editor; Anthony M. Ludovici, translator. Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche NORDHOFF, Charles BERNARD, and James Norman Hall. Faery Lands of the South Seas 434 O'Brien, EDWARD J., editor. The Best Short Stories of 1921 427 0. Henry. C. ALPHONSO SMITH, editor. Selected Stories from 0. Henry 427 ONIONS, Oliver. A Case in Camera.-Grey Youth.—The Tower of Oblivion 324 Orpen, Sir William. An Onlooker in France 1917-1919 . 219 Pach, Walter, translator. History of Art (Volume I, Ancient Art) by Elie FAURE. 208 Passos, John Dos. See Dos Passos. Paul, Eden and Cedar, translators. Romain Rolland, The Man and His Work, by Stefan Zweig 92 Paul, Eden and Cedar, translators. A Young Girl's Diary (Anonymous) ' 325 PENNELL, JOSEPH. The Graphic Arts Perry, Bliss. Life and Letters of Henry Lee Higginson 305 PHILLPOTTS, EDEN. Pan and the Twins . Poole, Ernest. Beggars' Gold 323 POUND, Ezra. Poems 87 Proust, Marcel. A la Recherche du Temps Perdu 318 RAKOVSKY, G. N. In the Camp of the Whites . 69 REPINGTON, LT.-Col. Charles À Court. After the War 651 RICHARDSON, Dorothy. Pilgrimage . Robertson, Philippe Forbes-. See Forbes-Robertson. Robinson, EDWIN ARLINGTON. Collected Poems 130 Robinson, Edwin Meade. Enter Jerry 323 Robinson, JAMES Harvey, The Mind in the Making ROLLAND, Romain. Colas Breugnon. 92 Ross, EDWARD ALSWORTH. The Russian Bolshevik Revolution ROTHENSTEIN, William. Twenty-four Portraits 106 ROTHERMERE, Lilian, translator. Prometheus Illbound, by André Gide 325 Russell, BertRAND. The Analysis of Mind 97 Russell, COUNTESS. Vera 324 Sadleir, MICHAEL. Privilege . 324 SALMON, ANDRÉ. La Negrésse du Sacré Coeur 493 SAMUELS, MAURICE. The Outsider 216 Sand, George. Aimee McKenzie, translator. The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters 218 SANGU, Makato, editor. An Anthology of New English Verse SAPIR, EDWARD. Language 314 Sentner, David. Cobblestones 537 SEVERINI, GINO. Du Cubisme au Classicisme 651 SHALOM ALEICHEM. Hannah BERMAN, translator. Jewish Children 432 SHELANDER, A. R., nslator. God and Woman, by Johan BOJER . 323 SINCLAIR, May. Life and Death of Harriett Frean.-Mary Olivier. -Mr. Waddington of Wyck 531 Smith, C. ALPHONSO, editor. Selected Stories from O. Henry 427 SMITH, H. F. BRETT-. See Brett-Smith. SMITH, Logan PEARSALL. More Trivia . 94 SMYTH, ETHEL. Impressions That Remained.-Streaks of Life 650 SOCIETY OF ARTS AND Sciences. Introduction by Blanche Colton Williams. 0. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 427 Soskice, Juliet M. Chapters From Childhood 434 Snow, Royall. Igdrasil 433 201 220 649 . INDEX XI 650 220 536 PAGE SPENCE, LEWIS. An Introduction to Mythology 539 STEARNS, HAROLD, editor. Civilization in the United States, An Inquiry by Thirty Americans 553 STEFANSSON, VILHJALMUR. The Friendly Arctic STERN, G. B. The China Shop 103 STEWART, Donald OGDEN. A Parody Outline of History 94 STREET, JULIAN. Mysterious Japan STRIBLING, T. S. Birthright 648 STRUNSKY, SIMEON, Sinbad and His Friends 94 SUVORIN, ALEXEY. The Korniloff Campaign 69 SYMONDS, MARGARET. A Child of the Alps . TAGORE, RABINDRANATH. The Fugitive. 325 TANNENBAUM, FRANK. The Labor Movement 435 Taylor, Bert Leston. A Penny Whistle 105 Taylor, G. R. STIRLING. Modern English Statesmen 435 THARAUD, J. and J. Tragédie de Ravaillac 401 THOMAS, EDWARD. Collected Poems . 218 TINKER, CHAUNCEY BREWSTER. Young Boswell 650 TOBENKIN, ELIAS. The Road . 535 TOMLINSON, H. M. London River 219 TRAPROCK, WALTER E. The Cruise of the Kawa 94 TRAUT, Elise, translator. Envy, A Tale, by Ernst von WILDENBRUCH 431 TURBYFILL, Mark. The Living Frieze 218 TURGENEV, Ivan. Constance GARNETT, translator. Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories . 433 TURQUET-Milnes, G. Some Modern French Writers 326 UNTERMEYER, Louis, editor. Modern American Poetry 510 Van Loon, Hendrik Willem. The Story of Mankind von WILDENBRUCH, Ernst. Elise Traut, translator. Envy, A Tale WAGNER, RICHARD; ELIZABETH FOERSTER-Nietzsche, editor; Caroline V. Kerr, translator. The Nietzsche-Wagner Correspondence Waldo, HAROLD. Stash of the Marsh Country WALKLEY, A. B. Pastiche and Prejudice 94 WALPOLE, Huch. The Young Enchanted 216 WHARTON, EDITH. The Custom of the Country.- The House of Mirth 419 Wick, Jean, compiler. The Stories Editors Buy and Why 427 WIDDEMER, MARGARET. Cross-Currents. 217 WILDENBRUCH, Ernst von. See von WILDENBRUCH. WILEY, Hugh. Lady Luck 216 Williams, BLANCHE Colton, introduction. O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921, chosen by the Society of Arts and Sciences 427 WILLIAMS, OSCAR. The Golden Darkness 105 Williams, William Carlos. Al Que Quiere.-Cora in Hell.-Sour Grapes 197 Williams, William Carlos. Improvisations 197, 215 WOOLF, Virginia. Monday or Tuesday.—The Voyage Out 215 WORSTER, W. W., translator. Dreamers, by Knut HAMSUN . 215 WORSTER, W. W., translator. Guest the One-Eyed, by GUNNAR GUNNARSSON 536 WYLIE, ELINOR. Nets to Catch the Wind 105 Yarrow, William, and Louis Bouché, editors. Robert Henri, His Life and Works . 84 YEATS, William Butler. Four Plays for Dancers 302 YEATS, William BUTLER. Four Years 1887–1891 . 298 ZWEIG, STEFAN. Eden and Cedar Paul, translators. Romain Rolland, The Man and His Work 92 422 431 211 215 XII INDEX MODERN ART PAGE 108 Loud No-With Exceptions, A Art-Civic and Otherwise Burchfield, Charles Eakins, Thomas. Kelekian Collection, The Marin, John Review Stieglitz Auction, The Tennysonian Exhibits 540 437 221 223 329 652 436 224 MUSICAL CHRONICLE Friends of Music . Music Guild, The Ornstein Two-Piece Sonata, The Prokofieff's Opera, Serge Saint-Saëns, Camille Schoenberg's Five Orchestral Pieces 543 655 332 439 225 III THE THEATRE 444 114 661 230 339 339 660 339 338 548 Back to Methuselah . Bill of Divorcement, A Bronx Express, The Chaliapine, Feodor Chauve-Souris Clavilux, The Creditors Czarina, The Deluge, The Emperor Jones, The First Year, The Good Morning Dearie Hairy Ape, The He Who Gets Slapped Idle Inn, The . Jolson, Al. Krazy Kat Ballet, The Liliom . Madame Pierre Madras House, The . Make It Snappy Music Box Revue No-Siree! . Partners Again Rags Rose of Stamboul, The S. S. Tenacity, The To the Ladies 445 115 548 337 231 445 339 230, 337 445 114 660 115 661 661 445, 661 661 230 445 INDEX XIII COMMENT PAGR 550 551 234 448 "American Valuation” Authors Club, The Award, Not a Prize Buying Contemporary Paintings Creating a Situation for Artists Dial Award, The “... if one is intense' MacDowell Colony, The Oliver Optic and Our Background Review of Sherwood Anderson, A Russia . Self-Censorship Self-Censorship Again Statue and the Bust-up, The Ulysses Valedictory to Politics Valuable Vested Interest, A Why We Leave Home 233 116 232 118 342 117 118 446 664 551 662 552 232 663 DEPARTMENTS Briefer Mention. Comment . Dublin Letter London Letter Modern Art Musical Chronicle Paris Letter Prague Letter Russian Letter Theatre, The . 103, 215, 323, 431, 535, 648 116, 232, 342, 446, 550, 662 298, 619 291, 510 108, 221, 329, 436, 540, 652 111, 225, 332, 439, 543,655 73, 187, 401, 623 406 69 114, 230, 337, 444, 548, 660 B | GENIESSEN. BY OSWALD HERZOG 1 . 3 는 ​1 기 ​치 ​ V VI VI THE DIAL ITV IX IL OXXIII 22116 3 4 5 15 JANUARY 1922 LOVE IN SMOKY HILL BY THOMAS JEWELL CRAVEN THUR HE first day of the harvest was over, and the men, tired and stuffed with food, loitered near the stables, smoking and matching wits. The wheat was ripening fast and Patrick Kilgore kept two reapers in operation. He managed one machine him- self; his son, Leo, another; there were two boys from town who rode the lead-horses, and to accompany each reaper two hired hands who grouped the bundles into shocks. In addition to the men were his wife and two daughters, all labouring from dawn till dusk with a single aim—to get the two hundred acres of grain cut and stacked while the weather was fair. Tressa Kilgore came out of the kitchen with a pail in each hand and went slowly down to the cow-shed. It was past seven o'clock and the milking had been delayed until she had finished the cook- ing; her strong body ached, and she walked with a weary, swaying motion. Still, the work had to be done and she entered the shed, sat down by a big red cow, freshly calved and capable of more than two gallons, and proceeded in her task with submissive industry Her hands jerked up and down in a monotonous rhythm which was broken at intervals when she paused to wipe the sweat from her face with the sleeve of her blouse. Outside she could hear the men talking—their language was not precisely clean, but she was used to farm life. She listened without attention, automatically giving ear to the ribald humour. "Say, that ol' bohunk stood it purty well to-day. I thought he'd lay down before noon." "So did I. They usually does.” 2 LOVE IN SMOKY HILL "Usually does! What the hell d'you know about it? You talk like you'd been raised with 'em. He's the first bohunk I ever seen.” “There's a whole gang of 'em on the section.” . “Get that? On the section! They're all dagos down there. You're a wise lad—can't tell a bohunk from a dago.” a “Shut up.” A roar of laughter, and then Leo Kilgore spoke up: “I'll fix him to-morrow. We'll shift him to my binder. I drive faster 'n the old man. You don't mind changin' with him, do you, Ed?" "Certainly not,” answered a long tough lad of twenty. "And I'll work him to death." “What's his name, Leo ?” “You got me. He can't read nor write-can't even spell. John somethin'. Sounds like Laffter." “Laffter! Say, boys, that's good. We'll call him Laffter. That hobo never smiled in his life.” “And did you see him eat? My God, what an appetite! He drank five cups o coffee, and filled each one of 'em half full o’ cream.” It was growing dark when Tressa emerged from the shed. She took her pails to a bench near the windmill, washed out a number of jars, strained the milk and carried it down into the cellar. One more duty and she was at liberty to go to bed: she crossed the orchard to the hen-houses and fastened the doors of a row of coops, each containing a newly hatched brood of white leghorns. She stopped a moment on the margin of the wheat and sighed. The day was done at last! The night was sultry and fascinating. A warm vapour rose from the fields and spread over the land like smoke, filling the air with the sweet smells of growing vegetation. It was as if the earth, suffocating by day under the hot Kansas sun, had breathed a vast sigh of relief when the molten disk slipped over the horizon, and the stars came out. A fading red wave still lingered in the west and was reflected in the haze; and in front of her, rich and motionless like cloth of gold, lay the ripening wealth of Patrick Kilgore. Not a sound marred the moist quiet of the yellow wilderness and Tressa felt a momentary sensation of complete peace. The land was per- fectly flat; the farm blurred out into a line of high thorny hedges, a THOMAS JEWELL CRAVEN 3 on the other side of which reposed more wheat, then the railway, the Smoky Hill River hidden by cottonwoods, and five miles away the little town with lights flashing in the windows of the flour mills. She saw a figure stumbling through the mown sector; it halted and picked up a sheaf, and then approached. Her father examining the results of the day's cutting. "What you standin' out here for, Tress? It'll be growin' late. Better git to bed." “All right.” She waited for him to disappear and then patiently returned to the house. The men had retired to their bunks in the loft of the big stable, but as she passed the corn-crib she saw the bohunk standing in the doorway alone. The other hands could not tolerate him and his bed was an old mattress thrown under the gable of the granary amongst pieces of harness, paints, scraps of machinery, fly-nets, and rubbish of all sorts. He was hatless and his small peaked head was shaven closely, and in the twilight his scalp appeared blackened with a smut that darted down to a point in the middle of his forehead. He wore a dirty checked cotton shirt with the buttons all gone, and a woolen undershirt equally soiled; Kilgore had given him a pair of denim trousers—he had come to the farm ragged beyond decency—and torn boots of different sizes. He was about thirty years old, mod- erately tall, with enormous shoulders, and long, thick, shapeless He looked at Tressa with a steady, serious gaze—with the simple pathos of an infant that knew little and feared nothing; his eyes were dark and bulging and his expression as piteous as a sheep's. He seemed to want to say something but could only stare with a rigid mute appeal. His loneliness touched her, and a half- hour later, when she flung herself into bed, she thought of him again—his bulky form filling the doorway of the granary, his inno- cent, helpless eyes calling to her, begging her to speak to him. Nature had not been generous with Tressa Kilgore. Her hair was straight and scanty, and of a curious dusty-orange hue like rain-rotted hay. She pulled it back tight from her forehead and pinned it into a knot on the nape of her neck, with short ends straggling over her ears. Her face was narrow and mis-shapen, the cheeks squeezed together in ugly lines; a prominent mole stood out on her chin and another at the corner of her arid mouth; and her 4 LOVE IN SMOKY HILL nose was unpleasantly long. In the half-lights she had no eyebrows at all, but in the sunshine two pale yellow streaks were visible; her eyes were wanting in depth and colour, a soft blue like watery gela- tine; they were set in shallow sockets and the edges of the lids were inflamed. But they served her well enough. She had no desire to read, and besides, the house was destitute of books; she was clumsy with the needle and sewed little; and was not accustomed to observe anything closely. Freckles covered her red skin, running down her back and dotting her throat and arms. Even a sense of humour, a predominant trait in the Kilgores, had been denied her; but in physical strength she was exceptional—her large, lumpy figure was equal to any amount of work, in doors or out, in the blasting summers and in the fierce windy snows. No one noticed her, either to admonish or to offer a comforting suggestion; and the persistent drudgery that had filled most of her twenty-six years made her appear much older. Tressa took every- thing as a matter of course: that her father was getting rich did not concern her—she knew that she was doomed to an unchange- able destiny, to carry slops to the pigs, to plough, to churn, to cook, to go to bed when night came, and to get up with the first peep of dawn. Stupid, shabby, and uncomplaining she had no time for tears and no spirit for laughter; and it seldom occurred to her that life was anything but a cycle of toil. During her five years at the country school she had learned to read and write, and it was no disappointment when she was withdrawn and her quickly matur- ing strength applied to the routine of the farm. Agnes, her younger . sister, was reasonably good-looking and a fair student, and when she had been sent to town to the high school Tressa regarded it as the proper thing to do. A year ago, when Agnes was married to the proprietor of the Star Grocery, Tressa cooked the wedding sup- per and washed the dishes; her brother was building a house on the south forty in preparation for his bride—she would cook and wash the dishes again. It would be very nice for Leo. She had watched men come and go; sometimes they stayed a few months; occasion- ally they remained longer; but not one had smiled on her, or winked at her with a wicked grin, or pinched her arms, or pushed her aside with a significant gesture. One look at her vacuous freckled face and her ugly swaying figure discouraged even the most indiscrimin- ating male. The only adventure that coloured her life was the THOMAS JEWELL CRAVEN 5 a weekly journey to town when the family drove off in the black carriage to the Church of the Sacred Heart. The weather continued hot and clear and the harvest went on with clock-like regularity. Every field in central Kansas presented the same scene: six great Flemish horses walking slowly along in the scorching heat; the avaricious clatter of the knives as they slith- ered through the dry stalks; the insistent discharge of the bundles which were gathered into comely shocks by two plodding figures; sunburnt men in straw hats as big as parasols; and here and there a girl in a blue sun-bonnet trudging over the cut stems with a bucket of cold water. Patrick Kilgore was happy. Gradually rows of upright sheaves were supplanting the flowing golden waves; the wheat was heavy; the quality fine; and his men working harmoni- ously. Even the bohunk had not weakened—the efforts of the son to “kill him off” had proved ineffectual; plenty of food and long periods of sleep had rejuvenated his strength, and the silent Bohemian was the match for any partner given him. He was awkward and slow, but imperturbable, and on the whole his be- haviour was above attack. Tressa watched him cautiously, peered at him from the kitchen as he bolted his heavy meals, turned the corner of her colourless eyes in his direction when she passed him in the driveway, saw him ascend the ladder at night when he clambered up to his grimy hole to rest. Sometimes she fancied he returned her furtive gaze, but reconsidering his glances she construed them to be no more than the same big-eyed, bovine, wondering stare that he projected on everyone. It was too much to expect a man to care for her, even a hobo. Several times the other hired men made him the victim of their original humour; a nest of yellow jackets was concealed in his bed, and a little later, when they heard him thrashing about under the eaves, they laughed themselves sick, but on seeing him issue from the door with a huge lump on his face and aimlessly wander to the pump to bathe the swelling, they became suddenly sobered. His expression was unruffled and he showed no signs of animosity. Once, when he was drinking from a pipe that emptied into a trough, his head was rudely shoved into the water; but he remained as composed as ever, and in a brief time the men ceased to harass him. It was no fun to fool with a subject that was wholly unresponsive. Sunday came, and after cutting till four o'clock the men hurried a 6 LOVE IN SMOKY HILL off to the creek for a swim. To-day the milking could be done before preparing supper and Tressa went down to the pasture to drive in the cows. He was leaning against the door-jamb of the granary; he always stood there with his head slightly tilted upwards and his eyes fixed dispassionately on something far away. He was freshly shaven-one of the men had sold him a razor at an exorbitant profit—but his beard was so thick and dark that the roots made a bluish stain on his cheeks and chin. Tressa thought him very handsome, and as she methodically directed the milk into the pails her mind dwelt on him continually. He was lonelier than she was; she, at least, was a part of the life of the farm and not a stranger—but the bohunk didn't fit in anywhere. A vagrant and a foreigner, his English limited and ludicrous, he could hope for no friendship among those uncharitable farmers. Although he was hard and tireless it pleased her to gather from his humble attitude and his docile eyes that he was kindly and warm-hearted. Perhaps he had a wife on the other side, children, too, maybe—he had dis- closed nothing—or a sweetheart. No, it could not be! Tressa was certain that he was not a man to leave a girl. What was he dream- ing about? and why had he travelled so far? For the first time her heart quickened with a beat that gave her a wavering nervous thrill of sympathy and affection. Her dull wits brought her to the conclusion that he was thinking of her. On her way to the house she followed a path that led her close to him. He saw her coming and his eyes seemed to reach out and plead with her for a sign of recognition. She stood still and the words escaped her with a gasp. “Tired, John?! “No,” he muttered, "never tired.” His thick lips parted and a huge smile spread slowly over his face, a smile that grew bigger and bigger, that beamed with incom- municable joy, then stopped, caught her, and caressed her. A rush of colour mantled her burnt face, and with a sudden bend of the body she grabbed her pails and ran through the orchard, abashed and happy. From that moment life became charged with meaning and excite- ment. She was well aware of the consequences if Patrick Kilgore should suspect her of falling in love with a hobo, and she guarded her actions stubbornly. Small stimulus was needed to stir her THOMAS JEWELL CRAVEN 7 a numbed sensibilities into dreams of uncouth delights, and the most minute display of feeling on the part of the Bohemian was of tremendous importance. Like a schoolgirl who runs breath- lessly for blocks to return a farewell salute from her lover, she would contrive unnecessary errands and useless duties to drink in his smile or listen to a rough, half-intelligible phrase. She had been alive but hardly conscious of it. She became a part of the glad growing earth, and the hot sun that nourished her father's fields into an oppressive fecundity pulsed in her blood with a restless fire. She plucked green apples from the trees, bit into them sav- agely, and was strangely relieved as the acrid juice moistened her hungry lips; she crunched the tender corn with her feet and watched the sap ooze out of the fibres and sparkle in the sun; she lashed her favourite colt with a willow switch until the terrified animal cried with pain, and then she brought the withe against her own legs with stinging blows, and screamed with laughter; her heavy work was performed without effort—all day long she yearned for the man she loved, the first man that had ever smiled on her. Two weeks more and the wheat was cut and stacked. The high school boys had returned to town; three of the men were going away on the morrow to the western part of the state where the har- vests were later; the faithful bohunk was retained. He was not versed in agriculture but he was a handy man about a farm: he was familiar with machinery, understood forging, could shoe horses, and do astonishingly clever work in carpentry. It was late Saturday afternoon and the big farm drowsed in midsummer heat. There was a picnic supper at Crystal Springs, a mile down the meridian road, followed by a rustic moonlight dance in which all of the young people of Smoky Hill township participated. Tressa was alone in the kitchen ironing; Agnes was going home the next day and besides her linen she had to smooth out the starched clothes for the family to wear to mass. She had balanced the board on the sink and the back of a chair by the window so that she might at all times be on watch for him. The day was breathless and a number of plump old hens lay under the rhubarb leaves panting for air; Jerry, the spaniel pup, was busy digging a hole in the damp shade of the trumpet-vines beneath the window. She should have chased him off with a club, but the little dog always called up the bohunk- both of them had the same brown, candid eyes. She longed to go a а 8 LOVE IN SMOKY HILL a outside and talk with the man: he was carving a pipe out of a walnut stick, and frequently he looked up from his bench by the tool-house and seemed to beckon to her. But she did not dare leave the rinsed garments unironed, and she threw herself into the job with all her speed. She watched him eat his supper from a bag allotted him from the picnic supply; he held up a huge piece of chocolate cake and swallowed it in two mouthfuls. Dusk gathered and he disappeared into the corn-crib. Tressa hurried through her work. Her imagination had never bothered her, but to-night she was agitated by a swarm of reflec- tions: Leo would be dancing with his girl, and the Donmeyer boys would be with the MacAuliffe sisters, and Jack Kirtland would be sneaking into the trees with his arm around Irene Schwartz. She named all of them. She folded a white shirt, laid it on top of the pile, turned down the lamp, and went outside. A pale yellow moon lifted a laughing face over a cluster of stacks and bathed the wide valley with a clean, beaming flood. She walked cautiously, with no preconceived plan, but ere long she found herself at his door- way, her lumpy body shaking nervously. She stepped between the bins, tiptoed gently over the scattered husks, and stood with both hands gripping the ladder. A strange patter of words came from the room above her; first a string of syllables cut off sharply and dropping, it seemed, like buttons from a thread; then a quick, huddled group of accents shaped into a moaning cadence. His voice! So low and plaintive! So sad and seductive! What was he doing? She planted her foot on the lowermost rung and noise- lessly mounted the ladder until her head was just above the level of the hole in the floor. The bohunk was crouched on his knees by the square aperture in the gable. He held a chain of beads in his hands, told them again in his queer, pious lilt, and then, twist- ing the rosary into a little bundle, he thrust it into his pocket. Tressa's heart thumped against her thick bosom. She wanted him; she loved him; she had waited years for him. “Hello, John.” Her voice trembled. He rose to his feet with a violent start, and as he faced her his head struck one of the sloping rafters. She climbed higher and sat on the floor with her legs dangling over the trap doorway. “Ah! You come? You here? Hello!” THOMAS JEWELL CRAVEN 9 - She crawled across the cluttered room on hands and knees to his side and Aung her arms about him with a desperate impetuosity. He brought up his immense hands slowly to her shoulders and crushed her with a delicious pressure; her starved lips groped for his big mouth, and the two of them clung together in the yellow light for a long time, motionless and silent. By and by he began to talk, struggling assiduously for English words, and in his excited periods falling back on a mixture of consonantal sounds that beat into Tressa's ears like notes of some wild music. The poor fellow's heart softened. For months he had received nothing but cold com- mands, now in anger, now perfunctorily pleasant, and his eyes blinked with tears as memories of the old country crowded his brain. He gave her disconnected impressions of his native land- tried to assure her he was not despicable. His name was Hlavka, a common name in the northern province of Bohemia where he was born. He had people there, miners most of them, although one branch of the family were foresters. Oh, a beautiful country! Not flat and boiling hot like this one. Not dusty and dry-neither were the barns bigger and finer than the houses. His father's house was small, but nice! With a pretty pointed roof, and oaken beams, and mortised boards painted in bright colours. And there were castles on many of the summits! Bold and solid, of white stone that would last for ever, and high windows and towers. She had never seen a mountain? Ah, poor girl! So big and high, and covered with trees! Magnificent oaks and elms-miles and miles of them on every slope. Here and there were lakes, clear as glass and very deep. Ach, blue and wonderful! He had worked in the coal mines. Hard work and not much money. Some of his kinsmen had emigrated to America, worked in Penn- sylvania, then gone to, what you call him? Col-or-ado. He had come to Pennsylvania about a year ago with a band of friends. All men, all miners. He worked and worked and was on his way to Col-or-ado. In Kansas City he lost his companion. He was drunk. Too bad! He knew that. He wandered alone in those big cattle yards all night. His money was all gone and he had not spent it! America was a bad country. He had walked from Kansas City. Sometimes people gave him food; more often they drove him away. Big dogs that made him run and hide. He was going to his brother's to dig coal. Maybe they raise beets together. He did not a 10 LOVE IN SMOKY HILL know. But here—ah, she was a nice girl! He loved her—very much. When he mentioned his destination again Tressa shivered with apprehension, and clawed at his arms, as if he were already set out on his journey again. "But you won't go now, will you? You can always work here. He answered that he was satisfied to remain on the farm; he was very happy here—with her; the work was not hard, now that the wheat was cut—and she was good. He loved her—very much. “And you will marry me?" she cried out, delivering herself of a thought that was synonymous with love to her. He promised, adding that she was strong and would make him a good woman, and that her father had many lands. Tressa was unable to formulate a single scheme for effecting the alliance. For the present it was enough that she had a lover; she was happy now, unutterably so, and in the fervour of her first love she constructed images of a little house in the corner acres where the alfalfa patch was bordered by a strip of timber, and her own kitchen, and John farming for himself, and by and by children to Sooner or later she would be married-there was no doubt of that. She kissed him again till she could no longer breathe; they pledged secrecy, and she broke away from his heavy grasp and went off to bed. Summer sped by quickly. She had never known the time to glide along so fast. She could scarcely account for a day. Only hard work could keep her spirits subdued and stabilize the tumult of love that surged in her strong body. She performed an incred- ible amount of toil-she preserved more than a hundred jars of peaches, and as many plums and pears; the cellar shelves were lined with jellies; she gathered the early apples and turned the crank of the cider-mill for days at a stretch; she dried green corn on the roof of the back kitchen; dug the potatoes, and varnished the woodwork of the entire house. She found few opportunities to be alone with John: the bohunk was always in the corn rows ploughing, or putting up hay with Leo. Moreover she was very wary now. She experienced a joyous guilt when he was near her; she grew suspicious, imagining the innocent glances of her father and mother to betoken secret knowledge of her mad attachment. nurse. THOMAS JEWELL CRAVEN 11 Her mind ran back perpetually to that intoxicating session in the granary. She prayed for another such ravishing hour, and at length she was tortured by unendurable desires to be married, and resolved to act. One Sunday morning in the second week of September she pre- tended to be ill, with a throbbing pain in her back, and her mother counselled her to remain in bed. She lay still until she heard the wheels grinding through the ashes in the driveway, and then she jumped up, dressed, and hurried out to look for him. She caught sight of him at the lower end of a field—he loved quail, and having no gun, was setting an ingenious box which he had designed as a snare. The bohunk heard her call and joined her at the base of one of those shapely stacks which, before the threshers come, loom up on the plains like gigantic bee-hives. They sat down with their backs against the straw, and without losing a second of the precious time she fell into his arms. The smooth stubble was warm in the lazy sunshine; miles of it opened before them, level as a floor. Rain had fallen a few days past and the fall ploughing was in progress. . The black earth had been turned up round the perimeter of the field, and the land appeared to be a seamless, yellow carpet with a dark, pleated border. She closed her eyes, allowing her body to languish against his massive chest; she opened them and looked into his broad, olive-complexioned face. The bohunk smiled with an expression of indolent contentment, and the one raging, crying idea came to Tressa's lips. "You will marry me, John?” He signified his willingness with a prolonged nodding of the head. He was very obedient. Any time. He said he loved her- a a very much. She clutched his hands, digging her nails into his callous fingers. Her world was a sensory kingdom of physical facts: everything seemed warm and palpable; she could almost squeeze the glowing atmosphere in her hands; the mellow reaches of stubble struck her crude fancy as being a vast piece of toasted bread, golden-brown and crisp and radiating the warm savour of the ovens. She whis- pered the resemblance to John. He laughed, and she apprised him of her plans for the marriage. Sometimes she went alone in the spring-wagon to do the market- 12 LOVE IN SMOKY HILL * ing. He must watch—she would try and let him know the night before; he must walk to town and buy a suit of clothes, black ones, and put them on in the back of Stevenson's Store; her father would let him go—he had not had a day's vacation since he came to the farm—but he must start early so that nobody would suspect any- thing. She would be at Crawford's feed-yard at noon with the team; he must wait for her there, and they would walk to the court-house and be married. “Married! O John, think of it!" She slapped his cheeks affectionately, but the perplexed fellow rolled his eyes and answered with a puzzled inquiry. “What that you say? No priest? In my country no priest, no marry.” She hastened to clarify his bewildered notions: Tressa was following her sister's procedure literally-Agnes had been wedded to a Protestant, and that both families might be propitiated, the ceremony had first been performed by the probate judge, with a reinforcing rite the following day by Father Maher. The bohunk was not particular; it was agreeable to him so long as there was a marriage. She would return to the farm the same afternoon and tell her parents. Her father would be awfully angry; she could not foresay what he would do. He would swear frightfully; he would threaten to send her away, but she was sure he would not do that. She was old enough to run her own house—and her mind was made up. Nothing could dissuade her now. John must stay in town over night; she knew of a rooming house near the depot, right on the road home, where he could get a bed for half a dollar; and by the next morning the family wrath would have cooled. "Married! O John, I can't wait!” She leaped to her feet and ran round the stack. Her lover pur- sued her, caught her by the waist, pulled her hair, and kissed her on the neck. Some weeks later, on a chilly October morning, the bohunk loitered expectantly by an abandoned shop near the feed-yard. He did not dare go inside, fearing the old attendant who looked after the horses. The clothier had sold him a black suit that had been in stock for years, a heavy garment of a furry texture, much too large Te THOMAS JEWELL CRAVEN 13 a for him, and drooping into bags and wrinkles. A bright little plaid cap was pitched on the side of his head, and a dazzling green tie of the permanently knotted variety dangled over his unbuttoned waistcoat. Tressa drove into the enclosure at half-past eleven, and they walked down a back street to the court-house. She was too much disturbed to talk fluently. Her wedding dress was not very elaborate; a white cotton shirt-waist decorated with inserted pieces of coarse lace, a grey woolen skirt held together with safety pins and sagging low in front, and buttoned shoes with the toes newly daubed with blacking. Her battered hat of brown velvet was trimmed with a big pink ribbon; she was uncomfortably warm and carried her shabby cloak over her arm. She trembled lest someone of her acquaintance might see them; she knew that the farmers frequently went to the old stone edifice on mysterious business connected with deeds and mortgages, but fortunately it was near noon, the house was almost deserted. They faltered timidly on the steps, but a young Jew attorney, marching out with a law book under his arm, divined their mission with an acumen that was terrifying, and directed the couple to the proper room. The probate judge, an old man with a bald head and long curling moustaches, was eating his lunch at a table. One of his arms was gone, a disability that had kept him uninterruptedly in office for twenty years; and he was amiable with all visitors. Tressa was amazed at the simplicity of the transaction. The judge laughed good-naturedly at her stammering replies and "guessed she had as good a right to be married as anybody.” He knew Pat Kil- gore very well-remembered when the other girl had been licensed. He drew up the certificate, stipulated a fee, the bohunk sadly handed him a banknote, and the pair were duly and legally pro- nounced man and wife. It was a glorious relief to get out into the cool air again, and they hurried up the street, parting at the corner, John ambling off to a lunch counter, his bride rushing back to sell the butter and eggs and then to go home. Tressa drove along the dusty road assailed by sharp forebodings. The sun was sinking in a veil of smoky clouds and long crimson streaks slanted over the fields. She was cold and sober now and she buttoned her heavy cloak under her throat; she scanned the countryside with a doleful gaze, and as she made out the big red 14 LOVE IN SMOKY HILL > stable of the farm her heart stopped with a sickening, startling accent of fright. Secreted in her bosom was a roll of paper, a docu- ment with a scroll border witnessing her new condition. Married! She could not realize it. Her faculties were dazed; she tried to frame some easy means of breaking the news, but gave it up in , despair. Her duties were executed as usual, and being by nature taciturn, her aching silence was not remarked. How could she tell them? What would lighten the wretched information? She went to bed as soon as the dishes were washed and tossed wearily in an agony of mental awkwardness. She put out the light and waited. Hours passed and she could not sleep. She heard someone tramp- ing up the stairs. Leo was just back from town. She called to him mournfully and he stuck his head into the room and asked surlily what was wanted. She blurted out the intelligence without a word of introduction or apology. "The devil you were,” he scowled. “You're dreamin'. Go on back to sleep, it's after midnight. Painfully, and with many repetitions, she pressed the awful truth upon him, and buried her face in the pillows when she heard him waking her father and mother. The old man, profane and sleepy, rushed into the room, followed by his wife and Leo; and the three infuriated souls pounced on her now in screaming concert, now in single condemnation, as if by sheer lung-power they could undo the events of the afternoon. Tressa grew sullen and refused to admit that she was a fool or crazy or sorry, refused to say any- thing; and the trio, having exhausted themselves, retreated to another part of the house to discuss matters. Next morning the Kilgore family missed church, the first time in many years. On the side porch sat the father pulling anxiously at his flaming red beard; to his left Mrs Kilgore, fat and weeping, and on the lower step the son, cynical and talkative. Two boys from the adjoining farm, who had come over to encourage Leo to go squirrel shooting, stood on the brick walk leaning on their guns. “Of course," remarked the old man, “she ain't really married.” "She is, too,” interposed the son. “By law she is.” "I say she ain't,” roared Patrick Kilgore. “Not accordin' to our way of thinkin'. She has to go to the priest first. But that damned bohunk! That dirty foreign hobo we've helped along! That- > THOMAS JEWELL CRAVEN 15 Tressa, who was sitting by the kitchen stove, heard the remarks and thrust her palms against her ears. The old man raved until he was speechless. At length she heard him call out: "There he comes !" She came to the door and observed the man she loved strolling slowly up the driveway. The bohunk eyed the ominous group by the porch, threw them a welcoming, idiotic grin, and sidled towards the corn-crib. The old man rose to his feet. Looped to the wrist of his right arm was one of those sinister whips used for driving cattle and commonly known as blacksnakes. The Bohe- mian saw him approaching; his knees began to quake with terror, and he lunged forwards to the entrance of the stable. “Come out here,” yelled the farmer. The victim shrivelled up in front of him. "You see that road down there?" He pointed to the section highway. "Now let's see how fast you can kick up the dust.” He drew his arm back, and in a wide swishing arc dealt the bohunk a cutting wound on the legs. The poor fellow, maniacal with pain and fear, started to run. Old Kilgore managed to catch him with another burning crack before he was out of reach, a vicious blow that opened the flesh on his outstretched hand. moment he was flying down the road like a wild animal. The two visitors let out a peal of laughter. "Well, that's the end of Tressa's husband,” said one. “Sure is,” agreed the other. Old Kilgore was far from laughter, but he was proud and lordly, having rid the farm of the dirty, foreign menace. Tressa, who had watched the cruelty from the door, followed the running figure with her tired eyes until it was only a dancing black speck in the dust far-off; then she plunged her head into her apron and sobbed con- vulsively. The old man tramped into the kitchen with the air of a conqueror and bawled out: “Dry up. You're not married. Don't you understand nothin'?” After a while she got up and bathed her face. She remembered that a chicken had to be cleaned and cooked for the Sunday dinner. She went out slowly to the pens, caught a fat yellow hen and carried it over to the chopping-block. She looked up. There was his win- dow! Her husband's room! That one night rushed back to her, In a a a 16 KATYDIDS a the night of ecstasy and love and promises! Up stairs in the bot- tom drawer of her dresser, hidden in a chemise, was a roll of holy paper. Her red bosom shook with sorrow. She swung the axe into the neck of the fowl; the head dropped off clean; the body fluttered in the dust a moment and was silent. Her life was just like that. “Married!” she sighed. And she went into the house for a pot of boiling water. KATYDIDS Shore of Lake Michigan BY AMY LOWELL Katydids scraped in the dim trees, And I thought they were little white skeletons Playing the fiddle with a pair of finger-bones. How long is it since Indians walked here, Stealing along the sands with smooth feet? How long is it since Indians died here And the creeping sands scraped them bone from bone? Dead Indians under the sands, playing their bones against strings of wampum. The roots of new, young trees have torn their graves asunder, But in the branches sit little white skeletons Rasping a bitter death-dirge through the August night. ! ORIENTAL DANCES IN AMERICA 1 BY ANANDA COOMARASWAMY 1 N this country, it is perhaps in dancing, more than in any other art, that one sees the expression of contemporary and national feeling. And in this adventure we can recognize at least three dis- tinct tendencies: on the one hand, the folk-art of the ball-room and the cabaret, and on the other hand, on the stage, the revival of Greek movement and the imitation of Oriental art. It is interesting to re- Hect that of these three, the most artistic, that is to say, the most definite, conventional, and expressive is the folk art: while the dra- matic and archaistic forms are actually far more realistic or human ("all too human”) than their supposed prototypes. It is precisely the same with music: it is the ragtime writer who adheres to definite conventions, and through these expresses the American spirit of to- day, while the academic composer substitutes the rhetorical accent of prose for the metrical accent of verse, striving after realism by the use of unusual rhythms and a deliberate disregard of law. Those who succeed in the deliberately free forms of the dance, or in music, free verse, or in the realistic drama, do so by the force of their per- sonality, rather than by art—it is themselves that they exhibit, rather than the race, and just because of this we demand the exhibi- tion of constant novelty. An art like this, as Mr Lethaby would say, is only one man deep. But the greatest and most enduring art (the Noh dance of Japan was perfected in the fourteenth century, and the Indian nautch perhaps in the fifth) has never been devel- oped in this way: it has arisen when men have felt a need that some great thing should be clearly and repeatedly expressed in a manner comprehensible to everyone. In other words, the inspiration of great art has always been fundamentally religious (in the essential rather than the formal meaning of the word) and philosophic: under these conditions, the theme is more important than the artist, and what we demand is the constantly repeated statement of the same ideas, until the art achieves a classic perfection. In the end, it is true, it may become a mere formula, like the Christian Gothic of the present day: but in this world there is no possible condition of per- 18 A ORIENTAL DANCES IN AMERICA : manence, and those who accept the creation of an art must also ac- cept its death. An ancient art may be a source of inspiration, it may guide us in matters of principle—since beauty is independent of time and place—but it ought not to be regarded as a model for our imita- tion: and so it is rather the theory than the practice of Oriental art that has a real significance for us at the present moment. The prac- . tice (by Western imitators) should be authentic, sensitive, and rare, like a beautiful museum specimen-Ratan Devi's songs were an ex- ample of this: but it is the spirit, rather than the form, that should be our guide to the achievement of ends of our own. The chaotic character of modern Western art is the symptom of its lack of inner necessity: we cannot remedy this by borrowing forms. Let us try to understand the Indian dance from some such point of view as this. It is the gods who are the primal dancers of the universe: the ceaseless movement of the world, the speech of every creature with every other, and the procession of the stars, all these are the gesture, , voice, and garments of the Supreme Actor who reveals himself to men in life itself. It is from the gods, too, that human art is learnt: it is designed to reveal the true and essential meaning of our life. And so that kind of dancing is called "cultivated" or "classic" which, like a poem, has a definite theme, while dances that are merely rhythmic a and spectacular are called "popular” or “provincial.” Here we shall speak only of the cultivated dance: for the folk-dances of any coun- try, like the folk-songs, explain themselves. Indian culture, like the old Greek, employs a single name for the common art of acting and dancing: and this word natya in its ver- nacular form becomes nautch. Nowadays the old Indian drama scarcely survives upon the actual stage, nor has it ever been repro- duced in Europe or America: but authentic Indian acting does sur- vive in the nautch, where instrumental music, song, and pantomime are inseparably connected. Here “the song is sustained in the throat, the theme is demonstrated by the hands, the moods are shown by the glances, and the metre is marked by the feet”—a set of one or two hundred bells is worn on each ankle. The construction is very defi- nite—so many movements to so many beats: and more than this, each gesture has a definite meaning. An Indian handbook of dra- matic technique consists of a dictionary of gesture: we have twenty- four movements of the head, forty-four glances, six movements of the brows, twenty-eight single hands, twenty-four combined hands, a 1 ANANDA COOMARASWAMY 19 a and so forth. Each of these gestures, like a word, indicates an emo- tion, object, idea, or action: so that a sequence of gestures makes a sentence, and an entire dance tells a story. As we said before, this gesture language is constructed on metrical patterns, so that the dance is like a poem with a definite form like a sonnet. By contrast with this, modern Western acting and impressionistic dancing ex- hibit the characteristics of prose. In Western art, even in reading poetry, the meaning, as it were, is underlined: in Oriental art the audience is trusted to know what are the essential motifs and what accessory. The expression of emotion is always strictly dominated by the rhythm: in other words, the art is a conscious utterance, and is never surrendered to the control of personal feeling. Further, the Oriental art is never an amusement, never mere decoration. Neither is it concerned with problems of psychology or conduct or the criticism of life; it is an office, following the movement of the world, whereby men may come to understand that every busi- ness is unstable, and thus attain to full self-consciousness and spiritual freedom. a “MADAME A SA TOUR MONTE .. > BY LOUIS ARAGON Translated from the French by Gilbert Seldes “LA FROIDE MAJESTÉ DE LA FEMME STERILE.' C. B. FOR OR the first time in literature, Matisse is not a Russian prin- cess but a girl with red hair who was born in the Batignolles —more than twenty years ago, however. Her arms are the long- est arms in the world, ending in rough sketches of hands so large that you fancy they were made to support a pensive brow. Hers, low and fretted at the top by a meagre bang, would hardly justify the adjective; her eyes devour it, diminish it excessively, seem to refuse to take any account of anatomy. As she does not wish to be conspicuous and wants you to believe that the immensity of her eyes comes from make-up, Matisse lengthens her palpebral slits with a stroke of black and extends the arches of her eyebrows to the roots of her hair; to acquit them of devouring her cheeks she underlines her eyes with soft shadows. By nature her transparent skin shows the blood underneath, but out of modesty Matisse con- ceals her circulation under a metallic iridescent paste over which she powders green, so that her cheeks harmonize agreeably. Her well-cut, slightly aquiline nose gives a touch of architectural firm- ness to this countenance. The thin long lips are carmined at the centre only and so gain an ambiguous effect, for you think you are seeing two mouths, one little, the other endless, neither of which ever sings the same tune as the other. Matisse has a horror of symmetry and therefore has but one ear, protected, shaded, without a pendant; but on the other side her hair discloses an emerald buckle by way of compensation. Her strongly modelled jaw grows more delicate towards the chin. Her body remembers that it was for her that the expression fausse maigre was invented. Her left hip, more prominent than the other as a resting place for her fist, no 18162 LOUIS ARAGON 21 doubt, gives a roll to her gait which alone betrays the sensuality of this reserved creature so little disposed to reveal her solid tem- perament. The exiguity of her feet is astonishing, until you recall in time to which sex Matisse belongs. She is fond of strong common perfumes, patchoulis of low degree, like masks which bring a hundred contemptuous thoughts in her direction. In this taste, however complicated by modern intentions, you recognize the atavisms of the eastern or western harems in which her forbears used to pass their lives watching the sunlight through the shutters. Emancipated, she still speaks in a soft artificial voice which contrasts oddly with the freedom of her manner. She pronounces with great distinction the vulgar phrases of fashionable young girls, an outmoded slang which sounds as false as the dry laugh with which she accompanies the worn out puns she makes now and then like little social formulas. Nothing in her conversation would lead you to believe that she has read all the good authors, nor, for that matter, that in private she prefers the bad ones. A graduate violinist, she now plays nothing but rag- . time and two-steps; classical music makes her yawn. She is gen- erally supposed to be rich because she has no lover and yet does not get the consideration due to a woman of social standing. As the source of her income is unknown she excites curiosity, but only for a very little while since she offers no food for evil tongues. Furthermore, she does not appear strange except by comparison. Alone, in the street, she does not attract a second glance; but in a crowd she monopolizes attention. Her clothes are less indecent than eccentric; Matisse does not dress in the latest fashion but in the one after that. Three months from now her frock will be worn by all the petites bourgeoises whom it now disturbs. However, no matter what the rage of the day may be, two elements in her costume are constant; always light colours and always long wide gloves caught at the wrist. For Matisse believes that a woman's clothes must be adapted to her body; she knows that she has wretched arms and hides them, too brilliant hair and tones it down. At least she acts as if she thought and knew these things. She adores lace trimmings and is lavish with them, especially when they are least in fashion. So that other women often seem undressed beside her. She speals with a certain repugnance of a bodice through which you can see the siþtons of 22 . “MADAME A SA TOUR MONTE corset-covers or chemises. Lacking information I fancy that under her dress she wears only a combination in green silk. I can say of her stockings that they are uninteresting, but of her boots that Always Matisse's boots, Coloured with life and fashion, Cheerfully equivocate Between the arts and passion. a In addition to the emerald which is nothing but green as the blinds of a house with a tiled roof, Matisse wears two jewels, one a golden tooth mounted in a pendant, to which she attaches no symbolic meaning, the other a pretty Browning automatic in To- ledo steel which she carries in her muff in winter, in her handbag in summer, and which synthesizes for her the devastating action of the past. Her handbag contains, besides, the necessary arsenal for make-up. Also to be found there are a pocket-level, a compass, a kaleidoscope for her hours of ennui, some red pimentos to deceive her hunger, and a little scalpel with no other purpose than to make you think of James Fenimore Cooper. Matisse's apartment is almost entirely furnished with kitchen chairs, drawing-tables, and arm-chairs which have the theoretical form of arm-chairs. You have to look closely to see that they aren't of white wood at all, but of the most precious materials. Matisse hates style. “Style,” she says, “is only a convenient method of getting someone else to judge of the beauty of a piece of furniture.” Some of her chairs are only intersections of feet, backs, and bars; others affect the linear aspect of furniture which is always seen in profile by school children. If Matisse uses electric light she is not ashamed of it and does not try to hide the bulbs in the cornices as do all American millionaires in elaborately mounted films and in the descriptions in Nick Carter. She leaves to mil- liners and romanticists the ridiculous mania for justifying their presence by making them come out of a flower or assigning them a hazardous rôle in a scene from mythology. The electric light seems to her to be an accessory to the furniture endowed with a personal beauty:which mußt.not be spoiled by a useless fixture. For the roořng wikiero che fight must be dimmed, Matisse chooses glazed bulbs.ard.dresses them in those shades, white inside and green out- LOUIS ARAGON 23 side, which are used in business offices. She also possesses a lot of coloured bulbs to replace the usual lights in accordance with the whim of the moment. In the same spirit, instead of hiding the radiators in a box or behind the woodwork, Matisse has placed them in the open, and in her study they run all around the walls like bookshelves in other houses. She loves these great immobile and sinuous serpents whose humour, reserved and cold, or com- municative and ardent, can be regulated by a wooden wheel. In place of wall-paper she has covered her walls with posters which cut into one another so that you cannot read a single one through, so your curiosity is primed and uncertainty lets you dream. Under the glass table-top she has pretty sketches overlaid with inscriptions in honour of a storage warehouse, a trunk factory, and the spring a mattresses made by S. & Co. The fan lying on the table sings the praises of some little Breton village, the drinking cup looks exactly like those you find in the Paris post office stations. Around the neck of the carafe, over the matchbox, on the calendar, you can read business addresses. Finally, at night, electric lettering an- nounces the week's sales in the big department stores. In this little salon Matisse feels vividly excited by the mani- festations of human activity about her and her own inactivity weighs upon her deliciously. She feels the charm of being an ex- pensive animal and like a cat she closes her eyes and purrs. At other times she sets herself in harmony with her furnishings, fights for life, suffers from the advantage which the lighting gives to one poster on the wall to the prejudice of another; she owns stock in the enterprise thus compromised; she grows desperate, cries out that this Mene Tekel Upharsin of a pharmacist is a lie, extinguishes the lamp, lights another, puts in a bulb which makes the invading poster turn grey, and triumphs like a captain of industry in the success of her preferred product. Again, at times, she sticks letters , to the partitions until they seem to dance about her in a fantastic round. On days when her boudoir seems too populous, Matisse goes into her studio to rest. The studio is formed by two superimposed suites which Matisse has united by having the ceiling broken through. You would fancy yourself in a demolished house; the marks left by the flooring remain on the walls and you can see the torn wall-paper of the different rooms. The six windows in two ranks like soldiers look 24 “MADAME A SA TOUR MONTE . a of a down with an air of reproachful melancholy on this interior. On the upper floor the doors seem absolutely silly opening on a void. A corner of the lower room is still fitted out like a bar, a shelf for bottles, adjustable chairs, a counter painted to imitate pink marble with a zinc top to which counterfeit coins are nailed. Here Matisse receives the importunate; they are soon unable to bear the desolate atmosphere of the place any longer and find an excuse to flee. At night Matisse lights up her demolitions with a single lamp hung from the beam, immense shadows are projected upon the ceiling, and Matisse plans novels. She comes an orphan from the village where her parents were solid farming folk to the bar in Paris kept by her uncle, her last living relative, her last hope. Here she is, naïve and pure, helpless before the desires of wheelwrights and men with terrifying faces. What will become of her? She reads her fate in the eyes poor girl being bullied by her lover. Her uncle arranges to turn her over to a Russian prince; it is done, but behold The Unknown who appears and saves her! This mysterious personage, strong, rich, and handsome, has a secret in his life. When it is known the novel will be finished. Or perhaps Matisse is a light woman who has ruined grandees of Spain, driven children to suicide, hurried bankers into bankruptcy, clerks to theft, students to assassination. Dressed as a street-walker she comes to seduce the innocent bottle- washer at a café de barrière. Here the scene becomes realistic and Matisse suddenly perceives a medal round the young man's neck, or a birthmark, or some indelible tattooing; it is her son whom she abandoned one snowy night at the door of a church. After such an adventure she becomes a nun or more likely goes into the bed- room. The bedroom is for rest only; daylight comes in through the shutters whose slats turn according to the time of day and replace ungracious blinds which Matisse has had taken down. In this striped ambiance nothing can disorder the imagination or trouble the senses, lest the slightest over-excitement should banish that sleep of which it is the shrine. Nothing more intimate, nothing more secret than this room; you dare speak only in whispers. The modest chairs hide their skeletons under sombre draperies of red- brown or garnet; not a chair, not a stool, shows its wood. Every- LOUIS ARAGON 25 thing breathes softness and abandon; the skins thrown on the floor deaden your footfall; no mirror in these arcana reflects a luxurious object which might trouble Matisse in her sleep like an eye or might introduce into her dreams the last vision, before she drowses off, of her too lovely nakedness. The immense bed occupies the centre of this room like a ship. A calm sea carries it on; when Matisse lies down she is tempted to recall Morpheus and his myths (her eyelids are the poppies) and this resting place becomes the fulfilment of the world. To make the silence more palpable, near the window, catching the light, a violin lies silent in its mahogany coffin lined with blue plush, and the bow which shares its resting place becomes the bond between this lifeless universe and the world of reality. You catch sight of the world by leaning out of the window: roofs of Paris like grey linoleum, irregular chimneys the beauty of which Matisse could only describe with the Latin word "formosa,” more sensuous than any praise of ours; studios whose windows let you guess the play of dust within; bevelled faces of apartment houses beside which others will be built later; vague lots; in a courtyard the glass shows a servants' stairway mounting like a prayer or like a snail; the vast garages where automobiles come and go, attracted by the capital letters on the facade. The sudden of a train comments on the scene and one learns the name of the quarter: Rome, which links the idea of ancient civilization with the magic of modern cities. The bath-room surprises you as you come out of the torpor of the bedroom. You would think you were coming into an operating room; everything is neat, shining, geometric, brilliant, incisive. The visitor's first thought is to estimate the cubic feet of air in the space. The walls in white enamel, innocent of all covering, cruelly reflect a light which would neither help a wrinkle to deceive nor save a grey hair from being pulled out. Admirably glazed, the apparatus for hydrotherapy and electric massage make you think of the torture chambers of the Middle Ages. On the dressing table there is an army of files, orange-sticks, polishers, scissors, curling- irons, battalions of jars of paint, of colgate, of cold cream, car- mine for the finger nails, phalanxes of rouge-sticks, rabbits' feet, hair combs, of all sizes and for all purposes, awaiting the daily cry 26 . “MADAME A SA TOUR MONTE . combat without any visible impatience. Rubber sponges, the tri- umph of man, are enthroned on the toilet table. The smell of toothpaste completes the scene. If by carelessness you accidentally turn the tap handle in the toilet the wrong way, a trap opens in the ceiling and an iron ladder descends. Matisse could not bear to have an apartment in which she could not hide a criminal, conspire against the safety of the state, or dispose of a corpse. That is why she established this . clandestine communication with the next floor, rented as consti- tuting the upper part of the studio; the other rooms are a hiding place which need envy nothing in detective stories. The one you come into first is empty, as if abandoned, in order to throw visitors off the scent; on the unpainted, unpapered walls workmen have written their names, done sums, set down reflections on life, and outlined their ideal woman; on the windows the masons have scratched in white the symbol of infinity. But the rest of the apartment is a complete arsenal of detective's accessories; micro- phones which let you hear conversations on the floor below; dicta- phones concealed in the desks; photographic apparatus in the chif- foniers, chairs which fold their arms over any one imprudent enough to sit down in them; safes in the shape of beds and imitation safes which ring an alarm when opened or catch the thief in a trap; sliding panels so you can see what is happening in the next room, periscopes to watch the actions and gestures of slaters on the roof (you never can tell when they will try to come down the chimney like telephone repairmen). There Matisse has gathered the latest mechanisms for silent killing, swiftly or slowly. She is particu- larly fond of those which look innocent; there is the curare-ring, the bearer of which can kill any one whose hand he shakes; there are the silent compressed-air-pistol, the boomerang which does its destructive duty and returns intelligently to its master, the vulgar sandbag, the carbon dioxide apparatus which asphyxiates the pa- tient in his sleep; the book with poisoned pages which punishes ill- mannered people for moistening their finger to turn the leaves; the liquid-air bomb for blowing up safes, electric contrivances which forbid entrance to the room on pain of death, radium tubes, tubes with infra-red or ultra-violet rays destroying those on whom they are played; tubes with coloured rays producing madness, co-aenes- LOUIS ARAGON 27 thetic, or febrile states; there is finally and above all the great revolver clock which at the appointed hour kills the detective tied to the chair in front of it, or rather which does not kill him be- cause his cousin arrives disguised as a telegraph operator or because the criminal's daughter falls in love with the fair face of the con- demned (it is not so astonishing when you realize that her mother was a good woman) or again because at one minute of three, the very last second, the house, mined by a devoted assistant or by fire-worshippers, blows up and hurls into the Hudson, which flows right below, the interesting hero of these modern epics. Wrongly would one conclude from the peculiarities of her habi- tation that Matisse is a romantic; like a good stay-at-home woman all she wants is that her home should be ready for all eventualities. In her house you can choke your neighbour, arrange a combine for the Bourse, negotiate a treaty, read a play, or undermine the min- istry; nothing will seem out of place, nothing shocking. How- ever, the mistress of the house has made no provision for amorous adventures. Just as she does not conceive of eating at home, so she does not allow any abandon there to too tender sentiments; it is not only in restaurants that she has her habits. According to her notions, one possesses a residence to receive friends, to think alone, to sleep, or again, for she is afflicted with no prejudice, to display accomplishments. She does not object to having people read at home, but for herself reserves this occupation for her trips in the Metro. Matisse formulates her tastes neatly because she practises them. She never fails to answer the questionnaires which appear in the magazines: Which are your favourite books? What was your strongest emotion ? and a thousand other questions, the puerility of which does not escape her, but which she prides her- self on being the only one to take seriously. She answers them with the fervour of a penitent at confession, and this systematic exploration of herself fills her with comfort. Each time she dis- covers a new corner of her thoughts which had remained unknown to her she laughs like a child looking at herself in the mirror for the first time and registering her discovery. Hereafter she will be able to say when any one tells her about herself, "Well, what do you want? That's how I am.' That's how I am.” For she fears lest someone else should know her better than herself. 28 “MADAME A SA TOUR MONTE a very rich One day Matisse went to the country; the trees, the ditches, the roads, the meadows, bored her; she followed a little stream to keep herself in countenance, but she yawned. Suddenly she saw a factory rising before her; quickly she ran to this Paradise Regained and as soon as she got into the yard she sniffed the good smell of smoke and coal, listened to the whistling, the grinding of machinery, let herself be elbowed about by the workmen, closed her eyes and fancied herself back in Paris. А presumptuous but young man who wanted to inspire Matisse with a passion for himself, gave her, in the belief that a woman of taste must dote on the fine arts, a genuine Rembrandt and a bust by Houdon. She gave the painting to her concierge without telling her its value so that several years later a fortunate expert discovered it and bought it for a song. As for the bust, she painted it black because she found that, stained, it resembled one of her negro grooms. If Matisse were not so coldly reasonable she would soon domi- nate the city, as Ninon once upon a time or Sorel to-day; she is satisfied to live in it. A PORTRAIT. BY EYRE DE LANUX . 1 1 다 ​다​. . 다 ​ 1 SHERWOOD ANDERSON BY PAUL ROSENFELD THESE mon THEY pass us every day, a grey and driven throng, the com- words that are the medium of Sherwood Anderson. In the thick ranks of the newspapers they go drab and indistinct as miners trooping by grim factory walls in latest dusk. Men's lips form them wherever in all the land talk is, but we mark their shapes no more than we mark those of the individual passengers in the subway press, the arm and overcoat jumble, each tired night at six. The objects symbolized by them lie in the range of vision of those who make each day the city trip to the office and workshop and back flatward again. They lie in the range of those who ride dully into country towns over dusty roadways, or work about their barns or in their fields or inside farm cottages. But the walls of the city thoroughfares do not im- pinge on us, or on the men who talk, or on the hacks who write. The earth and board sides and fences and plantations remain in a sullen murk. And the words that signify the things and their simple quali- ties remain in millions of voices dreary dead. Story tellers have come with banner and hallo to lift them out of Malebolge, to burnish them, to write English, and have washed them to no more scintillance than has the tired crowd of Christmas shop- pers in the Chicago loop. Dreiser himself sought to point and sharp- en them, to set them together as squarely as dominoes are set to- gether in the backrooms of German saloons. He merely succeeded in forming a surface like that of water-logged, splintery beams, unfit for any hardy service. It was only Brontosaurus rex lumbering through a mesozoic swamp. In American novels, the words re- mained the dreariest, most degraded of poor individuals. But out of these fallen creatures, Sherwood Anderson has made the pure poetry of his tales. He has taken the words surely, has set them firmly end to end, and underneath his hand there has come to be a surface as clean and fragrant as that of joyously made things in a fresh young country. The vocabulary of the simplest folk; words of a primer, a copy-book quotidianness, form a surface as hard as that of pungent fresh-planed boards of pine and oak. Into the ordered prose of An- 30 SHERWOOD ANDERSON derson the delicacy and sweetness of the growing corn, the grittiness and firmness of black earth sifted by the fingers, the broad-breasted power of great labouring horses, has wavered again. The writing pleases the eye. It pleases the nostrils. It is moist and adhesive to the touch, like milk. No rare and precious and technical incrustations have stiffened it. The slang of the city proletariat has not whipped it into garish and raging colour. Even in his pictures of life on the farms and in the towns of Ohio, Anderson is not colloquial. Very rarely some turn of language lifted from the speech of the Ohio country folk, gives a curious twist to the ordinary English. The language remains home- ly sober and spare. The simplest constructions abound. Few ad- jectives arrest the course of the sentence. At intervals, the succes- sion of simple periods is broken by a compound sprawling its loose length. Qualifying clauses are unusual. Very occasionally, some of the plain massive silver and gold of the King James version shines when biblical poetry is echoed in the balancing of phrases, in the full unhurried repetition of words in slightly varied order. But the words themselves are no longer those that daily sweep by us in dun and opaque stream. They no longer go bent and grimy in a fog. Contours are distinct as those of objects bathed in cool morning light. The words comport themselves with dignity. They are placed so quietly, so plumbly, so solidly, in order; they are arrayed so nakedly, so four- squarely; stand so completely for what they are; ring so fully, that one perceives them bearing themselves as erectly and proudly as sim- ple healthy folk can bear themselves. Aprons and overalls they still wear, for they are working-words. But their garments became starched and fragrant again, when Anderson squared and edged his tools. They leave us freshened as gingham-clad country girls driving past in a buggy do. If they are a little old and a little weary, they hold themselves like certain old folk who wear threadbare shawls and shiny black trousers, and still make their self-regard felt by their port. It is the voice of Anderson's mind that utters itself through the medium of words. It is the voice of his lean, sinewy mid-American mind that marshalls the phrases, compels them into patterns. In this dumb American shoot of the Ohio countryside, a miracle has begun to declare itself. The man is brother to all the inarticulate folk produced by a couple of centuries of pioneering in the raw new PAUL ROSENFELD 31 world. He is the human who has sacrificed, that he might take root in virgin land, what centuries warmed to life in his forbears across the Atlantic. He grew in a corn-shipping town of post-Civil War - Ohio; grew among people who had forgotten the beauty laboriously accumulated in Europe; grew ignorant of the fact that beauty made by human toil existed anywhere on the globe. Around him, too, everything was quantity, not quality; everything urged to personal ambition. He lived the days lived by countless other smart little boys in that meagre civilization; volunteered to fight Spain and typhoid in Cuba; spent the money gained in soldiering in acquiring a little education at a fresh-water college; worked in factories, in bicycle- foundries; set out, driven by the universal goad, to become a success- ful business man; did become a successful business man. And still, in Anderson, in this life, one from out the million of dumb uncon- scious lives, beauty is, as upspringingly as in any stone of Chartres. The hysterical American mouth with its fictitious tumult and assur- ance, its rhetorical trumpeting, is set aside in him, disdained. There is no evasion of the truth in him. There is no pink fog over the truth of the relationship of men and women in this country. There is no evasion of self-consciousness by means of an interest centred entire- ly in the children; no blinding dream that entrance into a house full of spick furniture and nickled faucets will suddenly make life flow sweet-coloured and deep; no thankfulness to God that He has made a universe in which every one, or every one's offspring may climb to the top of the heap and become rich or a leader of the bar, that murderer of nascent sympathy. Nor does he speak Main Street in denigrating Main Street. An element higher than all the land is at work. The great critical power of the race is articulate; the race is crying. Fear, tribal fear, in this man has been overcome. He hears what the other dumb Americans with their protesting voices dare not hear. At the rear of his brain there murmurs audibly the quivering liquid flow always in progress in every being. A quiet stream, a black deep brook of feeling with whispering trickle, faery-like starts and gushes, is louder in this drawling Yankee than is all the senti- mental Niagara of dust with its bellowings of the high state of women in Minneapolis, the efficiency and hygienicness of the cloth- ing factories in Cleveland, the invigorating struggle for existence in New York. What Anderson veritably lives in Chicago and suf- fers and desires, is known to him; what his muddy-streaming com- a 32 SHERWOOD ANDERSON a patriots have done and still are doing to him; what his joys are, and what his pains. In the land where it is always dusk, and shapes are indistinct; in the land of the mind, where the most of us this side the water have with miserable fumbling to grope a wavering way, Anderson moves, with the sureness and calmness of a sleepwalker. Wherever he goes, in Chicago, out on the sandy foggy plain with- out the monster town, in the tiresome burgs where he sells the ideas of the advertising man, the voice of his spare fledgling mind, the echo of the inner columnear movement of his being, is heard of him. It is ever near the surface, ready to spurt. The most ordinary objects glimpsed from an office-window high in the loop; the most ordinary sad bits of life seen in the endless avenues, a tree in a backyard, a layer of smoke, a man picking butts out of the gutter, can start it making gestures. A cake of cowdung rolled into balls by beetles, a flock of circling crows, milk turned sour by hot weather, give Ander- son the clue of a thin grey string, and set him winding through his drab and his wild days to find the truth of some cardinal experience and fill himself. The premature decay of buildings in America, the doleful agedness of things that have never served well and have grown old without becoming beautiful the brutality of the Chicago skyline, open to him through a furtive'chink some truth of his own starved powerful life, his own buried Mississippi Valley, his own unused empire. Or, the health that is left in the fecund soil of the continent, in the great watered spread of land, the nourishing life of forests and plantations, is powerful to make known to him in mad drunken bursts, his own toughness and cleanness, and healthiness, Young corn growing like saplings makes rise and quiver deliciously and soar in him sense of his own resilient freshness, his crass newness on a new earth. Young corn makes chant in him delight in his own unbreakable ability to increase for ever in sensitivity, to transmute the coarse stuff of rough America into delicate spirit-strength, and become in the easy mid-Western shape ever a healthier, sweeter, finer creature. Horses trampling through the grain are to him certitude eternal of the ever-replenishment of the male gentle might that has descended to him intact through his muscled ancestry and makes sweet his breast; of the phallic daintiness that all the stupid tangle and vulgarity of life in the raw commercial centres cannot wear down in him, and brutalize. A thousand delicate and mighty forms of nature are there, to pledge and promise him, the man cut loose from Europe, life abundant. PAUL ROSENFELD 33 a For Anderson touches his fellows of the road and Chicago street. The rigor mortis of the sentimental Yank is relaxing. The man is sensitive indeed. His arms are stretching open to the world. Not alone to the world of the boy, the before-puberty world of Huck Finn. His arms stretch open to the days of the sex-hung man. Life begins to walk a little joyously, if a little crassly, on Michigan Bou- levard; because of the smokiness, it wears socks and haberdashery a trifle exuberant. Walls are noiselessly a-crumble in Anderson. Of a sudden, he is breast to breast with people, with the strange grey American types, men and women he has seen the day previously; men and women, farmers, artisans, shopkeepers he has not glimpsed in the flesh these five and twenty years. What happens only rarely, in- stantaneously only, to the most of us, the stretching of a ligament between another creature's bosom and our own, that happens in Anderson swiftly, repeatedly, largely. A visage, strange, grey, dun, floats up out of the dark of his mind. A man is seen doing some- thing, lying face downward in a field, or fluttering his hands like birdwings. A woman is seen making a gesture, or walking down the railway track. The figure may have had its origin in someone long known, in someone seen but a furtive hour, in someone seen merely through hearsay. It may have its origin in the dullest, weariest crea- tures. But suddenly, the poet is become another person. He is someone who has never before existed, but now, even in a condition of relative colourlessness, has a life of his own as real as those of the straphanging men brushed every day in the streetcars. Anderson is suddenly become a labour leader. He is mad with eagerness to teach stupid labourers to synchronize their steps, to make them un- derstand what it is to march in the daily life shoulder to shoulder as soldiers march, to fill them full with a common stepping god in whom all find their fulness of power. He is a "queer” man working in a shabby little store. The more he strives to explain himself, the more incomprehensible and queer he becomes to his neighbours. He is Melville Stoner, the little long-nosed bachelor of Out of No- where Into Nothing. And is ironically resigned to the futility of seeking to establish a permanent contact with another creature. He is tired to his marrow with the loneliness of existence. Or, he is a farm girl mortally stricken in her breast by the insensitiveness and cowardice of men to whom she turns for expression. Or, the face is . that of the lanky, cold-footed inventor who cannot channel his pas- sion into human beings. To overcome the profound inner inertia, he a a 9 34 SHERWOOD ANDERSON sets himself to doing little definite problems. Machinery is born of his impotence. And then the inventions break loose of his hands, and enslave into a drab world the creatures Hugh McVey wanted to love, and could not reach. Or, it is the face of The Man in the Brown Coat, who sits all day inside a book-lined room and knows minutely what Alexander the Great and Ulysses S. Grant did, that floats up before Anderson. Or, it is merely the figure of the officer of the law who strolled by swinging his billy as the author left his office. He is heard muttering to himself his feet ache; seen at night slowly pulling off his shoes and wriggling his stockinged toes. Then, it is with Sherwood Anderson as it was with the two farm- hands of The Untold Lie who suddenly hear themselves each in the other; hear in the other the voice telling that the assumption of responsibility to women and children is death, the voice tell- ing that the assumption of the responsibility is life. In the peo- ple suddenly known to him through the imagination, Anderson rec- ognizes the multiple pulls of his own will; hears speak in the men known the same pulls; hears in those bodies a voice, and in his own body the self-same murmur. Things long since heard in village stores, in factories and offices, spark with significance. Memories appear from nowhere, carry to him the life of a fellow forgotten long since; and the life against the childhood Ohio background is re- lieved and sharply drawn. Out of the murky, impenetrable limbo, a block, an idea, a shape, has been moved, and in the region of faint grey light stands outlined. What in himself he feared, what he, the fearful rebel in the Yankee flock, thought his own most special in- sanity, his own pariah marking, that is suddenly perceived an uni- versal trait, present everywhere. His loneliness, that he thought a desolation all his own, is sensed in a million tight, apart bodies. His boastfulness, lust, self-infatuation, his great weariness, promptings of the messianic delusion, despair, they are suddenly perceived every- where; they, and not the outer mask that men wear in each other's blind sight, are seen the truth. He knows people writhe; sees them, men and women, so hard and realistic, doing the things he does and then is frightened; he knows the many mad chanting voices in each fact-crowded skull. What he is beholding, what he holds in his hands before him, is himself. It is himself, Sherwood Anderson, the man who looks like a racing tout and a divine poet, like a movie- actor and a young priest, like a bartender, a business-man, a hayseed, a PAUL ROSENFELD 35 a mama's boy, a satyr, and an old sit-by-the-stove. It is himself as his father and his mother, as the people who moved about him in Clyde, Ohio, in his childhood and moved away from him, the many thousand humble and garish lives he has touched, the men he has done business with, the women he has taken, have made him. The floating faces insist he attend upon the voice of the mind, without, within. They will not let him talk big, and ignore it. His heart can no longer leap with the remainder of the country's at thought of the big beautiful business man creating with his strong mind lots of work for poor people. He can no longer turn from wom- en in the dream of an irradiant companion, all mother, who takes the man to her bosom as the nurse the suckling, and gives with crowded hands, and wants for herself nothing but the privilege of serving in a great career. It is too late to avoid humankind with the sentimen- talities of the popular authors, or the self-pitifulness of the Main Street men, the cohort of little haters. The heads will have nothing but full entry into lives, even though he perish in the effort of enter- ing. They want the facts of the relationships of men. It is what he really knows of the truth, what he really knows of what has hap- pened to him, what he really knows of what he has done to folk as . well as what they have done to him, that is demanded of him now. Anderson has to face himself where Freud and Lawrence, Stieglitz and Picasso, and every other great artist of the time, have faced themselves: has had to add a "phallic Chekov" to the group of men who have been forced by something in an age to remind an age that it is in the nucleus of sex that all the lights and the confusions have their centre, and that to the nucleus of sex they all return to further illuminate or further tangle. New faces mount upward continually; sit, as he tells us, on the doorsill of his mind; are driven off by the helplessness of the American artist who has inherited no orientation in art; return and resist the cold and force him to make the effort to take them in. New faces mount up that contain more and more copi- ously the author, more and more copiously humanity, and demand ever finer eyes and ears. Out of the unconscious the style arises, the words charged with the blood and essence of the man. For quite as Anderson hears his own inner flux through the persons of other men, through materials and constructions, so, too, he hears it in the language itself. Words, like corn, like horses themselves, and men, give Anderson pricking sensa- 36 SHERWOOD ANDERSON al tions. Strange and unusual words do not have to be summoned. He hears the thin vocabulary of his inarticulate fellows not only as con- cepts of concrete objects, but as independent shapes and colours. Words are bifurcated in his mind; while the one limb rests on the ground, and remains symbol of the common object by which genera- tions of English speakers have managed to make themselves and their offspring survive materially, the other points into blue air, becomes symbol of the quality of inner life engendered by the material pre- occupations. Corn is the support of the body on the American prai- rie; man and beast lean on it; Anderson, born and bred in corn-ship- ping villages, hears in the word that symbolizes the nourishing stalk the overtones of all the delicacies and refinements that bodily energy produces in him. So, too, with the words bowl and coat, that have a dark and grim resonance in his heart. The necessity of preoccupying themselves with the production of the simple tools of existence had a most definite result on life through the relationship of men and women; and Anderson knows his own life a thing at the base of a bowl, an immense feeding trough, withheld from contacting the liv- ing world, by the high rims. He knows that he has within him a brown coat, that in this conventionally tinted stuff he sits wrapped all his days, cannot wear bright colours of the mind, cannot get out. of this felt garment. He knows that when in writing he searches for touch with his fellows, he feels his way blindly in the dark along a thick wall, the wall left in men when they broke from their own tra- ditions, and came into the presence of other men who too had broken from their traditions, and found no way to contact. All Anderson's artistry consists in the faithfulness with which he has laboured to make these overtones sound in his prose, to relate the simple words so that while remaining symbolic of the outer men, they give also their inner state. At first, in the two early novels, Windy McPherson's Son and Marching Men, the word quality was fairly thin. The author was forced to rely far more on a crude symbolism of action to manifest his inner music than on his medium itself. Still, particularly in the latter book, the inner voice was gathering strength. The language in which the mining town is described in the earlier chapters communicates something larger than the life of towns of the sort. It gives powerfully a sense of a grimy, cold, messy state of pas- sion into which what Waldo Frank has so brightly called the barbaric tam-tam measure of Beaut McGregor's dream breaks as breaks a PAUL ROSENFELD 37 a march rhythm into a sluggish orchestra. In the next book, Wines- burg, Ohio, however, form obtains fully. The deep within Ander- son utters itself through the prose. The tiny stories of village life are like tinted slits of isinglass through which one glimpses vasty space. The man's feeling for words, present always in him, re-en- forced one casual day when someone, expecting to produce a raw ha- ha, showed him the numbers of Camera Work containing Gertrude Stein's essays on Matisse, Picasso, and Mable Dodge, is here mature. The visual images, the floating heads, have fleshed themselves, are automatically realized, by marriage with verbal images that had risen to meet them, and that contained, in their turn, the tough, spare, sprawling life in the poet. So this style, even more than the subject matter, is impregnated with the inarticulate American, the man whose inner dance is as the dance of a bag of meal. For in these words, the delicate inner column of Sherwood Anderson has risen to declare itself, to protest against the ugliness that lamed it down, to pour its life out into the unnumbered women and men. And, in his latest work, in the best of the stories in The Triumph of the Egg, and in the pieces of A New Testament, it works with always simpler means, begins to manifest itself through a literature that approaches the condition of poetry, that is more and more a play of word-tim- bres, a design of overtones, of verbal shapes and colours, a sort of ab- solute prose. There has been no fiction in America like this. Small it is indeed by the mountainous side of the masses of Balzac, with their never- flagging volumnear swell, their circling wide contact on life, their beefy hotness. Anderson, to the present, has been most successful in the smaller forms. The short-stories show him the fine workman most. The novels, the nouvelles, Out of Nowhere Into Nothing, wander at times, are broken in sweep by evasions and holes. A many- sided contact with life is not revealed. The man is not an intellectual critic of society. His range is a fairly limited one. There is a gentle weariness through him. And still, his stories are the truest, the warmest, the most mature, that have sprung out of the Western soil. One has but to compare these fragile, delicate fictions with those of the classic novelists, Poe and Hawthorne, to perceive immediately the reality of his beginning. The two ante-bellum novelists give us in place of flesh, as Brooks so trenchantly showed, exquisite iri- descent ghosts. They themselves were turned away from their 38 SHERWOOD ANDERSON a day, and filled the vacuums in which they dwelt with sinister and rainbow-tinted beams. Their people satisfy no lust of life. Both have only fantasy of a fine quality to offer in its place. And Dreiser's characters ? Golems, in whose breast the sacred word has not been thrust. Anderson, on the contrary, expresses us. He has had, from the first, the power to find through his prose style protagonists in whom every American could feel himself to pulse. Sam McPherson is the truest of all Ragged Dicks. The quaint little mushroom-like heads of Anderson's tales, the uneducated, undigni- fied village dreamers, with their queer hops and springs, straggly speech, ineffectual large gestures, they are the little mis-shapen hu- mans in this towering machine-noisy inhuman land, the aged infants grown a little screw-loose with inarticulateness. The sounds they make as they seek to explain themselves to one another, as they rave and denounce and pray, lie, boast, and weep, might come out of our own throats. They do come out of our own. The author may dub his heads Seth Richmond or Elsie Leander, George Willard or Wing Biddlebaum; they may be seen ever so fitfully; the stories by ineans of which Anderson has created them may set them out in mid-Ameri- can farmland thirty years since. But they are flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone; and through them, we know ourselves in the roots of us, in the darkest chambers of the being. We know ourselves in Anderson as we know ourselves in Whitman. He is about the job of creating us, freeing us by giving us consciousness of selves. For Sherwood Anderson is one in whom the power of feeling has not been broken. He is one in whom the love of the growing green in men, so mortally injured in the most of us, has found a way of healing itself of the wounds dealt it by the callous society in which he sprung. He came, most probably, to suffer from the universal wrong in the common way. A man and woman, perhaps, whom life had wounded, bruised in their sensibilities, hurt him in acting on each other. Or, the passive callousness of the world of outsiders did the deed, starved the nascent gentleness in the child. The society which sheltered the growing lad was one becoming rapidly industrialized. Handicraftsmen remain sensitive more readily than do mechanics. Their immediate relation to the material in which they work pre- serves some sort of nervous fluidity in them. But the factory was eat- ing into rural Ohio during the 'eighties and the early 'nineties. And there was not, what there still is in rural Europe, the reliquary of the PAUL ROSENFELD 39 1 passionate past to buttress anything of fine feeling that remained in the injured boy. No Gothic vault, no painted glass, no soft stone and nourished earth, were there to thaw the thickening ice. There was about him only the shoddy work of men disabled as he had been dis- abled. Indeed, the world might have seemed in conspiracy to make permanent the wound. A gigantic machinery was in readiness to aid any and all to make themselves free of their fellows. The anarchical society, that had come into existence the world over as the growing differentiations of men made sympathy more difficult, and placed a price on narcissistic irresponsibility, was there in its extremest form to welcome another lord of misrule. Everything in raw America stimulated ugly ambitiousness, exploitations of human beings and of the soil, sense of rivalry with all men, devastating sense of god-man- hood The two images that fortify narcissism, the images of the marvellous mother-woman and of the semi-divine all-powerful general or business man, that prevent men from finding much in the woman save the whore, and keep their interests centred on their own persons, were in the very air given the lad to breathe. During a period, Anderson seems to have acquiesced, to have gone the way of all mortified flesh, to have become a smart competing busi- ness man, and to have lived as alone as only a wounded lover can. Only a gift of telling stories, and Anderson was famous in Chicago for his Mama Geigen story long before he commenced to write, re- mained to prove the old power of sympathy that he had brought with him into the world not entirely broken. Some toughness, perhaps, present with all the extreme sensibility, had saved him, given him the power to recuperate. Or, perhaps, someone near him in his first years had guarded him for a while, had stood between him and the all- present evil sufficiently long to give him headstart. One of the stories in Winesburg, Ohio, called Mother, is the incorporation of a sense present in the author of an influence stilly goading him all his days to live his life and not settle down into cheap ambition, to grow and to learn; it is perhaps to this influence that the man owes his art. And Anderson showed he had the power within him to right himself. Towards his thirty-fifth year, he became sick of soul. He commenced to feel the state in which he was living as filthy. He began to per- ceive that his relations with men and with women, through his sunk- en state, were filthy. He began to perceive that he himself was giving out poison to others precisely in the same manner that poison 40 SHERWOOD ANDERSON had been given to him, was still being given to him by his contacts. Business began to become a bore. Business men, with their self-im- portance and gosling simplicity, began to become ludicrous. Sud- denly, it appeared to him that Chicago, the mid-West, all America, was empty. There were no people. The census reports pro- claimed tens upon tens of millions of inhabitants. But there were no people living human lives. There were automatons gyrating about, repeating sentences written by unconsciously lying reporters in the newspapers. No one knew the truth. No one knew what he felt, what the man reading the newspaper next him felt. No one felt, at all. In all the crowded streets and tenements of the titanic town, there was the unpeopled waste of the antarctic night. Sickness of soul took Anderson away from business. Simulta- neously a channel leading in an equally divergent direction opened itself for his energies. The gift of story telling began taking an in- tellectual route. At odd hours, after business, in railway trains, he began to write. And, lo, in the process of writing, the old wound began to close. He commenced to touch people again. He com- menced to enter into lives. The people he met, the people he had rubbed against, were no longer adamant impenetrable surfaces to him. They began to open themselves. They began, when he met them casually, in all the ordinary ways of intercourse, to give him some- thing nourishing to his sense of beauty, and to take from him some- thing he needed to bestow. The sense of dirt, of whoring, of infinite degradation began to pass in his labour. For the business of seeing people without romanticizing them, of drawing them without put- ting himself below or above them, but merely by feeling their lives in all the dwarfishness and prodigious bloom, is to Anderson what it is to all men, an act of love, and, as love, subconsciously initiated. The old godhead that shines in the eyes of every new-born child, re- vives itself through that labour of art. The business of seeing folk clearly, steadily, wholly, is a mystical marriage with the neighbour. It is not love of one's image in the partner; it is the love of all men and women through the body of a spouse. For its motive is the pres- ervation in another of an intact soul. It was not a thing, this power of feeling truly, that sprang full armed in Anderson. It has rather been a gradual growth, a slow, pa- tient learning. The current of life in the country was against it. The current swept inside Anderson himself. We see him, at the close of a > PAUL ROSENFELD 41 Windy McPherson's Son, flinch from drawing the relentless line; loose his contact with life, and return into the fantasy world of the American imperviousness. Marching Men, in its later passages, dem- onstrates a faulty sense of women. Even in Poor White, the ten- dency to stop feeling delicately, to harangue and seek to influence his readers directly shows at moments its cloven foot. But the artist has been solidifying steadily in the man. ' In A New Testament he tells us how each night he "scrubbed the floor" of his upper room. There are miracles of tender, fragile sensibility in Winesburg, in Poor White, in the later stories and poems. For, in this second crisis in Anderson's moral life, there was help at hand. He was no longer entirely solitary in his struggle with the habits of the country. Crea- tures able to strengthen him were about. His mind, like the span of a Gothic arch, in springing upward, met another upspringing span and found support. It was in the guise of the most powerful outward bulwark of his mature life that the work of Van Wyck Brooks came to Sherwood Anderson. In it he encountered another conscious American who spoke his language. Here was a critic, a polished and erudite man, who brought him corroboration in his inmost feelings, and told him that nations had become great, and life burned high, because men had done what he was labouring to do; and that Amer- ica had remained grey and terrible and oafish because men could not within her borders feel the truth. In that voice, Anderson recognized an America realler than the one that, outside and in, strove to deflect him and break his touch. What had happened to Whitman, decay for want of comprehension, was not to happen to him. He was afoot to so remain. Anderson's pledge to himself, the song to himself as he goes his rocky road, is recorded in Mid-American Chants. The lit- tle book is a sort of pilgrim's scrip for those who, in America, are try- ing to keep their faith in the work of the artist intact. And Ander- son can begin writing A New Testament, assured that in setting down the voice of the mind murmurous in him, he is furthering some new religious life dawning in men. The new feeling that is in America, it is only an infant. It is no more than a puny child born in the nadir of the year, a helpless, naked mite. In all the grey winter of the land, under the leaden im- measurable vault, it is a nigh invisible fleck. And still, somehow, it is there, born. You have but to read Anderson, to know it well. Something is different in us since these stories and novels have com- a > 42 SHERWOOD ANDERSON menced to circulate. Something has changed in the scene outside the rooms, in the thoroughfares through which we tread, since he began telling us the railway conductor's daughter walked down the track, the policeman goes thinking how much his feet hurt him. The peo- ple in the street, the ever strange, the ever remote, the ever unyield- ing people in the street, they are come a little out of their drab mist, are become a little less repellent, less hostile, less remote. They have departed a little from their official forms, the forms that are imposed on them by the lie in the brain of all, the Roman lie, with its hier- archies, positions, offices, principles, duties, laws. You will perceive it the next time you pass by the Italian grocer on the corner, that for- merly mealy and uninviting universe. You will perceive it when next the washerwoman comes with her basket of laundry to the door. You will perceive it when you pass the blue-coated, sallow-faced law swinging his club on the corner. They will not know that anything has happened between you and them. They may believe they see you with the old eyes. But they do not. In them as in yourself some- thing has taken place. They have all opened a little, to let you see for a blinking instant into them. You, who have read Anderson, know it. They have all turned gentler for a second, and let you perceive inside their coats, a thing you well know. It is inside the rich fur-collared coat of the stock-gambler in Wall Street. It is inside the old army coat of the grey-faced job-hunting Third-Avenue walker. It is in- side all men and women, that thing that you thought you own alone. It is you in diverse forms, you suffering and egoistic and lazy, you wanting to live and give life to others and exuding venom instead. It is you, dying always by your own hand, always miraculously pro- ducing again the power to live. It seems as though the mysterious Third Person, the being who comes into existence at the moments walls fall between men and men, and dies when they rebuild themselves again, had been given another last chance. FIVE POEMS BY E. E. CUMMINGS I of evident invisibles exquisite the hovering at the dark portals of hurt girl eyes sincere with wonder a poise a wounding a beautiful suppression the accurate boy mouth now droops the faun head now the intimate flower dreams of parted lips dim upon the syrinx II conversation with my friend is particularly to enjoy the composed sudden body atop which always quivers the electric Distinct face haughtily vital clinched in a swoon of synopsis 1 despite a sadistic modesty his mind is seen frequently finger- ing the exact beads of a faultless languor when invisibly con- sult with some delicious image the a little strolling lips and eyes inwardly crisping a 44 FIVE POEMS for my friend, feeling is the sacred and agonizing proximity to its desire of a doomed impetuous acute sentience whose white- hot lips however suddenly approached may never quite taste the wine which their nearness evaporates to think is the slippery contours of a vase inexpressibly frag- ile it is for the brain irrevocably frigid to touch a merest shape, which however slenderly by it caressed will explode and spill the immediate imperceptible content my friend's being, out of the spontaneous clumsy trivial acrobat- ic edgeless gesture of existence, continually whittles keen careful futile flowers (isolating with perpetually meticulous concupiscence the bright large undeniable disease of Life, himself occasionally contrives an unreal precise intrinsic fragment of actuality), > an orchid whose velocity is sculptural III it is at moments after i have dreamed of the rare entertainment of your eyes, when (being fool to fancy) i have deemed with your peculiar mouth my heart made wise; at moments when the glassy darkness holds the genuine apparition of your smile (it was through tears always) and silence moulds such strangeness as was mine a little while; moments when my once more illustrious arms are filled with fascination, when my breast wears the intolerant brightness of your charms: E. E. CUMMINGS 45 one pierced moment whiter than the rest —turning from the tremendous lie of sleep i watch the roses of the day grow deep. IV by little accurate saints thickly which tread the serene nervous light of paradise- by angelfaces clustered like bright lice about god's capable dull important head- by on whom glories whisperingly impinge (god's pretty mother) but may not confuse the clever hair nor rout the young mouth whose lips begin a smile exactly strange- this painter should have loved my lady. And by this throat a little suddenly lifted a in singing—hands fragile whom almost tire the sleepshaped lilies— should my lady's body with these frail ladies dangerously respire: impeccable girls in raiment laughter-gifted. V who's most afraid of death? thou art of him utterly afraid, i love of thee (beloved) this and truly i would be near when his scythe takes crisply the whim 46 FIVE POEMS of thy smoothness. and mark the fainting murdered petals. with the caving stem. But of all most would i be one of them round the hurt heart which do so frailly cling. i who am but imperfect in my fear Or with thy mind against my mind, to hear nearing our hearts' irrevocable play- through the mysterious high futile day an enormous stride (and drawing thy mouth toward my mouth, steer our lost bodies carefully downward) o A LINE DRAWING. BY E. E. CUMMINGS S A LINE DRAWING. BY E. E. CUMMINGS 축 ​4 > 4 1 1 1 THE GENTLEMAN FROM SAN FRANCISCO BY IVAN BUNIN Translated by S. S. Koteliansky and D. H. Lawrence "WE TO THEE, BABYLON, THAT MIGHTY CITY!” -APOCALYPSE. THE HE Gentleman from San Francisco—nobody either in Capri or - Naples ever remembered his name—was setting out with his wife and daughter for the Old World, to spend there two years of pleasure. He was fully convinced of his right to rest, to enjoy long and com- fortable travels, and so forth. Because, in the first place, he was rich, and in the second place, notwithstanding his fifty-eight years, he was just starting to live. Up to the present he had not lived, but only existed; quite well, it is true, yet with all his hopes on the fu- ture . He had worked incessantly—and the Chinamen whom he em- ployed by the thousand in his factories knew what that meant. Now at last he realized that a great deal had been accomplished, and that he had almost reached the level of those whom he had taken as his ideals, so he made up his mind to pause for a breathing space. Men of his class usually began their enjoyments with a trip to Europe, India, Egypt. He decided to do the same. He wished naturally to reward himself in the first place for all his years of toil, but he was quite glad that his wife and daughter should share in his pleasures, too. True, his wife was not distinguished by any marked suscepti- bilities , but then elderly American women are all passionate travel- lers. As for his daughter, a girl no longer young and somewhat deli- cate, travel was really necessary for her: leaving aside the question of health, do not happy meetings often take place in the course of find oneself sitting next to a multi-millionaire at table , or examining frescoes side by side with him. The itinerary planned by the Gentleman from San Francisco was extensive. In December and January he hoped to enjoy the sun of travel? One may 48 THE GENTLEMAN FROM SAN FRANCISCO cer- . southern Italy, the monuments of antiquity, the tarantella, the sere- nades of vagrant minstrels, and finally, that which men of his age are most susceptible to, the love of quite young Neapolitan girls, even when the love is not altogether disinterestedly given. Carnival he thought of spending in Nice, in Monte Carlo, where at that sea- son gathers the most select society, the precise society on which de- pends all the blessings of civilization: the fashion in evening dress, the stability of thrones, the declaration of wars, the prosperity of hotels; where some devote themselves passionately to automobile and boat races, others to roulette, others to what is called flirtation, and others to the shooting of pigeons which beautifully soar from their pens over emerald lawns, against a background of forget-me- not sea, instantly to fall, hitting the ground in little white lumps. The beginning of March he wished to devote to Florence, Passion Week in Rome to hear the music of the Miserere; his plans also in- cluded Venice, Paris, bull-fights in Seville, bathing in the British Isles; then Athens, Constantinople, Egypt, even Japan tainly on his way home. And everything at the outset went splendidly. It was the end of November. Practically all the way to Gibraltar the voyage passed in icy darkness, varied by storms of wet snow. Yet the ship travelled well, without much rolling even. The pas- sengers on board were many, and all people of some importance. The boat, the famous Atlantis, resembled a most expensive European hotel with all modern equipments: a night refreshment-bar, Turkish baths, a newspaper printed on board; so that the days aboard the liner passed in the most select manner. The passengers rose early, to the sound of bugles ringing shrilly through the corridors in that grey twilight hour when day was breaking slowly and sullenly over the grey-green, watery desert, which rolled heavily in the fog. Clad in their flannel pyjamas, the gentlemen took coffee, chocolate, or cocoa, then seated themselves in marble baths, did exercises, thereby whet- ting their appetite and their sense of well-being, made their toilet for the day, and proceeded to breakfast. Till eleven o'clock they were supposed to stroll cheerfully on deck, breathing the cold fresh- ness of the ocean; or they played table-tennis or other games, that they might have an appetite for their eleven o'clock refreshment of sandwiches and bouillon; after which they read their newspaper with pleasure, and calmly awaited luncheon—which was a still IVAN BUNIN 49 more varied and nourishing meal than breakfast. The two hours which followed luncheon were devoted to rest. All the decks were crowded with reclining-chairs on which lay passengers wrapped in plaids, looking at the mist-heavy sky or the foamy hillocks which flashed behind the bows, and dozing sweetly. Till five o'clock, when, renewed and lively, they were treated to strong, fragrant tea and sweet cakes. At seven bugle-calls announced a dinner of nine courses. And now the Gentleman from San Francisco, rubbing his hands in a rising flush of vital forces, hastened to his state cabin, to dress. In the evening, the tiers of the Atlantis yawned in the darkness as with innumerable fiery eyes, and a multitude of servants in the kitch- ens, sculleries, wine-cellars, worked with a special frenzy. The ocean heaving beyond was terrible, but no one thought of it, firmly believ- ing in the Captain's power over it. The Captain was a ginger-haired man of monstrous size and weight, apparently always torpid, who looked in his uniform with broad gold stripes very like a huge idol, and who rarely emerged from his mysterious chambers to show him- self to the passengers. Every minute the siren howled from the bows with hellish moroseness, and screamed with fury, but few din- ers heard it-it was drowned by the sounds of an excellent string band, exquisitely and untiringly playing in the huge two-tiered hall that was decorated with marble and covered with velvet carpets, flooded with feasts of light from crystal chandeliers and gilded giran- doles, and crowded with ladies in bare shoulders and jewels, with men in dinner-jackets, elegant waiters and respectful maîtres-d'hô- tel, one of whom, he who took the wine-orders only, wore a chain round his neck like a Lord Mayor. Dinner-jacket and ideal linen made the Gentleman from San Francisco look much younger. Dry, of small stature, badly built but strongly made, polished to a glow and in due measure animated, he sat in the golden-pearly radiance of this palace, with a bottle of amber Johannisberg at his hand, and glasses, large and small, of delicate crystal, and a curly bunch of fresh hyacinths. There was something Mongolian in his yellowish face with its trimmed silvery moustache, large teeth blazing with gold, and strong bald head blazing like old ivory. Richly dressed, but in keeping with her age, sat his wife, a big, broad, quiet woman. Intricately, but lightly and transparently dressed, with an innocent immodesty sat his daughter, tall, slim, her magnificent hair splendid- 50 THE GENTLEMAN FROM SAN FRANCISCO ly done, her breath fragrant with violet cachous, and the tenderest little rosy moles showing near her lip and between her bare, slightly- powdered shoulder-blades. The dinner lasted two whole hours, to be followed by dancing in the ball-room, whence the men, including of course the Gentleman from San Francisco, proceeded to the bar, where, with their feet cocked up on the tables, they settled the des- tinies of nations in the course of their political and stock exchange conversations, smoking meanwhile Havana cigars and drinking liqueurs till they were crimson in the face, waited on all the while by negroes in red jackets with eyes like peeled, hard-boiled eggs. Outside, the ocean heaved in black mountains; the snowstorm hissed furiously in the clogged cordage; the steamer trembled in every fibre as she surmounted these watery hills and struggled with the storm, ploughing through the moving masses which every now and then reared in front of her, foam-crested. The siren, choked by the fog, groaned in mortal anguish. The watchmen in the look-out towers froze with cold, and went mad with their superhuman straining of attention. As the gloomy and sultry depths of the Inferno, as the ninth circle, was the submerged womb of the steamer, where gigantic furnaces roared and dully giggled, devouring with their red-hot maws mountains of coal cast hoarsely in by men naked to the waist, bathed in their own corrosive dirty sweat, and lurid with the purple- red reflection of flame. But in the refreshment bar men jauntily put their feet up on the tables, showing their patent-leather pumps, and sipped cognac or other liqueurs and swam in waves of fragrant smoke as they chatted in well-bred manner. In the dancing hall light and warmth and joy were poured over everything, couples turned in the waltz or writhed in the tango, while the music insistently, shameless- ly-delightfully, with sadness entreated for one, only one thing, one and the same thing all the time. Amongst this resplendent crowd was an ambassador, a little dry modest old man; a great millionaire, clean-shaven, tall, of an indefinite age, looking like a prelate in his old-fashioned dress-coat; also a famous Spanish author, and an in- ternational beauty already the least bit faded, of unenviable reputa- tion; finally an exquisite loving couple, whom everybody watched curiously because of their unconcealed happiness: he danced only with her, and sang, with great skill, only to her accompaniment, and , everything about them seemed so charming !-and only the Captain knew that this couple had been engaged by the steamship company a IVAN BUNIN 51 a to play at love for a good salary, and that they had been sailing for a long time, now on one liner, now on another. At Gibraltar the sun gladdened them all: it was like early spring. A new passenger appeared on board, arousing general interest. He was an hereditary prince of a certain Asiatic state, travelling incog- nito; a small man, as if made all of wood, though his movements were alert; broad-faced, in gold-rimmed glasses, a little unpleasant because of his large black moustache which was sparse and transpar- ent like that of a corpse; but on the whole inoffensive, simple, mod- a est. In the Mediterranean they met once more the breath of winter. Waves, large and florid as the tail of a peacock, waves with snow- white crests heaved under the impulse of the tramontana wind, and came merrily, madly rushing towards the ship, in the bright lustre of a perfectly clear sky. The next day the sky began to pale, the hori- zon grew dim, land was approaching: Ischia, Capri could be seen through the glasses, then Naples herself, looking like pieces of sugar strewn at the foot of some dove-coloured mass; whilst beyond, vague and deadly whitened with snow, a range of distant mountains. The decks were crowded. Many ladies and gentlemen were putting on light fur-trimmed coats. Noiseless Chinese servant-boys, bandy- legged, with pitch-black plaits hanging down to their heels, and with girlish thick eyebrows, unobtrusively came and went, carrying up the stairways plaids, canes, valises, hand-bags of crocodile-leather, and never speaking above a whisper. The daughter of the Gentle- man from San Francisco stood side by side with the prince, who, by a happy circumstance, had been introduced to her the previous eve- ning. She had the air of one looking fixedly into the distance to- wards something which he was pointing out to her, and which he was explaining, hurriedly, in a reduced voice. Owing to his size, he looked amongst the rest like a boy. Altogether he was not hand- some, rather queer, with his spectacles, bowler hat, and English coat, and then the hair of his sparse moustache just like horse-hair, and the swarthy, thin skin of his face seeming stretched over his features and slightly varnished. But the girl listened to him, and was so excited she did not know what he was saying. Her heart beat with incom- prehensible rapture because of him, because he was standing next to her and talking to her, to her alone. Everything, everything about him was so unusual-his dry hands, his clean skin under which flowed ancient, royal blood, even his plain but somehow particularly 52 THE GENTLEMAN FROM SAN FRANCISCO tidy European dress; everything was invested with an indefin- able glamour, with all that was calculated to enthral a young woman. The Gentleman from San Francisco, wearing for his part a silk hat and grey spats over patent-leather shoes, kept eyeing the famous beauty who stood near him, a tall, wonderful figure, blonde, with her eyes painted according to the latest Parisian fashion, hold- ing on a silver chain a tiny, cringing, peeled-off little dog, to which she was addressing herself all the time. And the daughter, feeling some vague embarrassment, tried not to notice her father. Like all Americans, he was very liberal with his money when trav- elling. And like all of them, he believed in the full sincerity and good-will of those who brought his food and drinks, served him from morn till night, anticipated his smallest desire, watched over his cleanliness and rest, carried his things, called the porters, conveyed his trunks to the hotels. So it was everywhere, so it was during the voyage, so it ought to be in Naples. Naples grew and drew nearer. The brass band, shining with the brass of their instruments, had al- ready assembled on deck. Suddenly they deafened everybody with the strains of their triumphant rag-time. The giant Captain appeared in state uniform on the bridge, and like a benign pagan idol waved his hands to the passengers in a gesture of welcome. And to the Gen- tleman from San Francisco as well as to every other passenger it seemed as if for him alone was thundered forth that rag-time march, so greatly beloved by proud America; for him alone the Captain's waving hand, welcoming him on his safe arrival. Then when at last the Atlantis entered port, and veered her many-tiered mass against the quay that was crowded with expectant people, when the gang- ways began their rattling-ah, then what a lot of porters and their assistants in caps with golden galloons, what a lot of all sorts of com- a missionaires, whistling boys, and sturdy ragamuffins with packs of postcards in their hands rushed to meet the Gentleman from San Francisco with offers of their services! With what amiable con- tempt he grinned at those ragamuffins as he walked to the automo- bile of the very same hotel at which the prince would probably put up, and calmly muttered between his teeth, now in English, now in Italian—"Go away! Via!" Life at Naples started immediately in the set routine. Early in the morning, breakfast in a gloomy dining-room with a draughty damp wind blowing in from the windows that opened on to a little а a 1 IVAN BUNIN 53 stony garden; a cloudy, unpromising day, and a crowd of guides at the doors of the vestibule. Then the first smiles of a warm, pinky- coloured sun, and from the high-suspended balcony a view of Vesu- vius, bathed to the feet in the radiant vapours of the morning sky, while beyond, over the silvery-pearly ripple of the bay, the subtle outline of Capri upon the horizon! then nearer, tiny donkeys run- ning in two-wheeled buggies away below on the sticky embankment, and detachments of tiny soldiers marching off with cheerful and de- fiant music. After this a walk to the taxi-stand, and a slow drive along crowd- ed, narrow, damp corridors of streets, between high, many-windowed houses. Visits to deadly-clean museums, smoothly and pleasantly lighted, but monotonously, as if from the reflection of snow. Or vis- its to churches, cold, smelling of wax, and always the same thing: a majestic portal, curtained with a heavy leather curtain; inside, a huge emptiness, silence, lonely little flames of clustered candles rud- dying the depths of the interior on some altar decorated with ribbon; a forlorn old woman amid dark benches, slippery grave-stones un- der one's feet, and somebody's infallibly famous Descent from the Cross. Luncheon at one o'clock on San Martino, where quite a num- ber of the very selectest people gather about midday, and where once the daughter of the Gentleman from San Francisco became almost ill with joy, fancying she saw the prince sitting in the hall, although she knew from the newspapers that he had gone to Rome for a time. At five o'clock, tea in the hotel, in the smart salon where it was so warm, with the deep carpets and blazing fires. After which the thought of dinner—and again the powerful commanding voice of the gong heard over all the floors, and again strings of ladies, bare- shouldered, rustling with their silks on the staircases and reflecting themselves in the mirrors, again the wide-flung, hospitable, palatial dining-room, the red jackets of musicians on the estrade, the black flock of waiters around the maître d'hôtel, who with extraordinary skill was pouring out a thick, roseate soup into soup-plates. The , dinners, as usual, were the crowning event of the day. Everyone dressed as if for a wedding, and so abundant were the dishes, the wines, the table-waters, sweetmeats, and fruit, that at about eleven o'clock in the evening the chambermaids would take to every room rubber hot-water bottles, to warm the stomachs of those who had dined. 54 THE GENTLEMAN FROM SAN FRANCISCO . None the less, December of that year was not a success for Naples. The porters and secretaries were abashed if spoken to about the weather, only guiltily lifting their shoulders and murmuring that they could not possibly remember such a season; although this was not the first year they had had to make such murmurs, or to hint that "everywhere something terrible is happening.” Unprece- dented rains and storms on the Riviera, snow in Athens, Etna also piled with snow and glowing red at night; tourists fleeing from the cold of Palermo. The morning sun daily deceived the Nea- politans. The sky invariably grew grey towards midday, and fine rain began to fall, falling thicker and colder. The palms of the hotel approach glistened like wet tin, the city seemed peculiarly dirty and narrow, the museums excessively dull, the cigar-ends of the fat cab-men, whose rubber rain-capes flapped like wings in the wind, seemed insufferably stinking, the energetic cracking of whips over the ears of thin-necked horses sounded altogether false, and the clack of the shoes of the signori who cleaned the tram-lines quite horrible, while the women, walking through the mud, with their black heads uncovered in the rain, seemed disgustingly short-legged: not to men- tion the stench and dampness of foul fish which drifted from the quay where the sea was foaming. The Gentleman and Lady from San Francisco began to bicker in the mornings; their daughter went about pale and head-achey, and then roused up again, went into rap- tures over everything, and was lovely, charming. Charming were those tender, complicated feelings which had been aroused in her by the meeting with the plain little man in whose veins ran such special blood. But after all, does it matter what awakens a maiden soul- whether it is money, fame, or noble birth? Everybody de- clared that in Sorrento, or in Capri, it was quite different. There it was warmer, sunnier, the lemon-trees were in bloom, the morals were purer, the wine unadulterated. So behold, the family from San Francisco decided to go with all their trunks to Capri, after which they would return and settle down in Sorrento: when they had seen Capri, trodden the stones where stood Tiberius' palaces, visited the fabulous caves of the Blue Grotto, and listened to the pipers from the Abruzzi, who wander about the isle during the month of the Na- tivity singing the praises of the Virgin. On the day of departure—a very memorable day for the family from San Francisco—the sun did not come out even in the morning. a O . IVAN BUNIN 55 a a A heavy fog hid Vesuvius to the base, and came greying low over the leaden heave of the sea, whose waters were concealed from the eye at a distance of half a mile. Capri was completely invisible, as if it had never existed on earth. The little steamer that was making for the island tossed so violently from side to side that the family from San Francisco lay like stones on the sofas in the miserable saloon of the tiny boat, their feet wrapped in plaids, and their eyes closed. The lady, as she thought, suffered worst of all, and several times was overcome with sickness. It seemed to her she was dying. But the stewardess who came to and fro with the basin—the stewardess who had been for years, day in, day out, through heat and cold, tossing on these waves, and who was still indefatigable, even kind to every- one-she only smiled. The younger lady from San Francisco was deathly pale, and held in her teeth a slice of lemon. Now not even the thought of meeting the prince at Sorrento, where he was due to arrive by Christmas, could gladden her. The gentleman lay flat on his back, in a broad overcoat and a flat cap, and did not loosen his jaws throughout the voyage. His face grew dark, his moustache white, his head ached furiously. For the last few days, owing to the bad weather, he had been drinking heavily, and had more than once admired the "tableaux vivants.” The rain whipped on the rattling . window-panes, under which water dripped on to the sofas, the wind beat the masts with a howl, and at moments, aided by an onrush- ing wave, laid the little steamer right on its side, whereupon some- thing would roll noisily away below. At the stopping places, Cas- tellamare, Sorrento, things were a little better. But even there the ship heaved frightfully, and the coast with all its precipices, gar- dens, pines, pink and white hotels, and hazy, curly green mountains swooped past the window, up and down as if it were on swings. The boats bumped against the side of the ship, the sailors and passengers shouted lustily, and somewhere a child, as if crushed to death, choked itself with screaming. The damp wind blew through the doors, and outside on the sea, from a reeling boat which showed the flag of the Hotel Royal, a fellow with guttural French exaggeration yelled unceasingly: "Rrroy-al! Hotel Rrroy-al !” intending to lure passen- gers aboard his craft. Then the Gentleman from San Francisco, feeling, as he ought to have felt, quite an old man, thought with an- guish and spite of all these “Royals,” “Splendids,” “Excelsiors,” and of these greedy, good-for-nothing, garlic-stinking fellows called > 56 THE GENTLEMAN FROM SAN FRANCISCO a Italians. Once, during a halt, on opening his eyes and rising from the sofa he saw under the rocky cliff-curtain of the coast a heap of such miserable stone hovels, all musty and mouldy, stuck on top of one another by the very water, among the boats, and the rags of all sorts, tin cans and brown fishing nets, that, remembering that this was the very Italy he had come to enjoy, he was seized with despair. At last, in the twilight, the black mass of the island began to loom nearer, looking as if it were bored through at the base with lit- tle red lights. The wind grew softer, warmer, more sweet-smelling. Over the tamed waves, undulating like black oil, there came flowing golden boa-constrictors of light from the lanterns of the harbour. Then suddenly the anchor rumbled and fell with a splash into the water. Furious cries of the boatmen shouting against one another came from all directions. And a relief was felt at once. The electric light of the cabin shone brighter, and a desire to eat, drink, smoke, move, once more made itself felt... Ten minutes later the family from San Francisco disembarked into a large boat, in a quarter of an hour they had stepped on to the stones of the quay, and soon were seated in the bright little car of the funicular railway. With a buzz they were ascending the slope, past the stakes of the vineyards and wet, sturdy orange-trees, here and there protected by straw screens, past the thick glossy foliage and the brilliancy of orange fruits. Sweetly smells the earth in Italy after rain, and each of her islands has its own peculiar aroma. The island of Capri was damp and dark that evening. For the moment, however, it had revived, and was lighted up here and there as usual at the hour of the steamer's arrival. At the top of the ascent, on the little piazza by the funicular station, stood the crowd of those whose duty it was to receive with propriety the luggage of the Gen- tleman from San Francisco. There were other arrivals, too, but none worthy of notice: a few Russians who had settled in Capri, un- tidy and absent-minded owing to their bookish thoughts, spectacled, bearded, half buried in the upturned collars of their thick frieze overcoats. Then a group of long-legged, long-necked, round-headed German youths in Tirolese costumes, with knapsacks over their shoulders, needing no assistance, feeling everywhere at home and al- ways economical in tips. The Gentleman from San Francisco, who kept quietly apart from both groups, was marked out at once. He IVAN BUNIN 57 > а and his ladies were hastily assisted from the car, men ran in front to show them the way, and they set off on foot, surrounded by urchins and by the sturdy Capri women who carry on their heads the luggage of decent travellers. Across the piazza, that looked like an opera scene in the light of the electric globe that swung aloft in the damp wind, clacked the wooden pattens of the women-porters. The gang of urchins began to whistle to the Gentleman from San Francisco, and to turn somersaults around him, whilst he, as on the stage, marched among them towards a mediaeval archway and under hud- dled houses, behind which led a little, re-echoing lane, past tufts of palm-trees showing above the flat roofs to the left, and under the stars in the dark blue sky, upwards towards the shining entrance of the hotel. : . And again it seemed as if purely in honour of the guests from San Francisco the damp little town on the rocky little island of the Mediterranean had revived from its evening stupor; that their arrival alone had made the hotel proprietor so happy and hearty, and that for them had been waiting the Chinese gong which sent its howlings through all the house the moment they crossed the doorstep. The sight of the proprietor, a superbly elegant young man with a polite and exquisite bow, startled for a moment the Gentleman from San Francisco. In the first flash, he remembered that amid the chaos of images which had possessed him the previous night in his sleep, he had seen that very man, to a T the same man, in the same full- skirted frock-coat and with the same glossy, perfectly smoothed hair. Startled, he hesitated for a second. But since long, long ago he had lost the last mustard-seed of any mystical feeling he might ever have had, his surprise at once faded. He told the curious coincidence of dream and reality jestingly to his wife and daughter, as they passed along the hotel corridor. And only his daughter glanced at him with a little alarm. Her heart suddenly contracted with homesickness, with such a violent feeling of loneliness in this dark, foreign island, that she nearly wept. As usual, however, she did not mention her feelings to her father. Reuss XVII, a high personage who had spent three whole weeks on Capri, had just left, and the visitors were installed in the suite of rooms that he had occupied. To them was assigned the most beautiful and expert chambermaid, a Belgian with a thin, firm cor- a 58 THE GENTLEMAN FROM SAN FRANCISCO afgre and a watu che Sant take TER seted figure and a starched cap in the shape of a tiny indented crown. The most experienced and distinguished-looking footman was placed at their service, a coal-black, fiery-eyed Sicilian, and also the smart- est waiter, the small, stout Luigi, a tremendous buffoon, who had seen a good deal of life. In a minute or two a gentle tap was heard at the door of the Gentleman from San Francisco, and there stood the maître d'hôtel, a Frenchman, who had come to ask if the guests would take dinner, and to report, in case of an answer in the affirma- tive of which, however, he had small doubt—that this evening there were Mediterranean lobsters, roast beef, asparagus, pheasants, et cetera. The floor was still rocking under the feet of the Gentle- man from San Francisco, so rolled had he been on that wretched, grubby Italian steamer. Yet with his own hands, calmly, though clumsily from lack of experience, he closed the window which had banged at the entrance of the maître d'hôtel, closing out the drifting smell of distant kitchens and of wet flowers in the garden. Then he turned and replied with unhurried distinctness, that they would take dinner, that their table must be farther from the door, in the very centre of the dining-room, that they would have local wine and champagne, moderately dry and slightly cooled. To all of which the maître d'hôtel gave assent in the most varied intonations, which conveyed that there was not and could not be the faintest question of the justness of the desires of the Gentleman from San Francisco, and that everything should be exactly as he wished. At the end he in- clined his head and politely inquired: "Is that all, Sir?'' On receiving a lingering “Yes,” he added that Carmela and Giu- seppe, famous all over Italy and “to all the world of tourists,” were going to dance the tarantella that evening in the hall. “I have seen picture-postcards of her,” said the Gentleman from San Francisco, in a voice expressive of nothing. "And is Giuseppe her husband ?" “Her cousin, Sir,” replied the maître d'hôtel. The Gentleman from San Francisco was silent for a while, think- ing of something but saying nothing; then he dismissed the man with a nod of the head. After which he began to make preparations as if for his wedding. He turned on all the electric lights, and filled the mirrors with brilliance and reflection of furniture and open trunks. ICO IVAN BUNIN 59 He began to shave and wash, ringing the bell every minute, and down the corridor raced and crossed the impatient ringings from the rooms of his wife and daughter. Luigi, with the nimbleness peculiar to certain stout people, making grimaces of horror which brought tears of laughter to the eyes of chambermaids dashing past with mar- ble-white pails, turned a cart-wheel to the gentleman's door, and tap- ping with his knuckles, in a voice of sham timidity and respectful- ness reduced to idiocy, asked: “Ha suonato, Signore?” From behind the door, a slow, grating, offensively polite voice. "Yes, come in.” What were the feelings, what were the thoughts of the Gentleman from San Francisco on that evening so significant to him? He felt nothing exceptional, since unfortunately everything on this earth is too simple in appearance. Even had he felt something imminent in his soul, all the same he would have reasoned that whatever it might be it could not take place immediately. Besides, as with all who have just experienced sea-sickness, he was very hungry, and looked forward with delight to the first spoonful of soup, the first mouthful of wine. So he performed the customary business of dressing in a state of excitement which left no room for reflection. Having shaved, washed, and dexterously arranged several arti- ficial teeth, standing in front of the mirror, he moistened his silver- mounted brushes and plastered the remains of his thick pearly hair on his swarthy yellow skull. He drew on to his strong old body, with its abdomen protuberant from excessive good-living, his cream- coloured silk underwear, put black silk socks and patent-leather slip- pers on his flat-footed feet. He put sleeve-links in the shining cuffs of his snow-white shirt, and bending forward so that his shirt front bulged out, he arranged his trousers that were pulled up high by his silk braces, and began to torture himself catching his collar-stud under the stiff collar. The floor was still rocking beneath him, the tips of his fingers hurt, the stud at moments pinched the flabby skin in the recess under his Adam's apple, but he persisted, and at last, with eyes all strained and face dove-blue from the over-tight collar that enclosed his throat, he finished the business and sat down ex- hausted in front of the pier glass, which reflected the whole of him, and repeated him in all the other mirrors. 60 THE GENTLEMAN FROM SAN FRANCISCO 1 5 “It is awful!” he muttered, dropping his strong, bald head, but without trying to understand or to know what was awful. Then, with habitual careful attention examining his gouty-jointed short fingers and large, convex, almond-shaped finger-nails, he repeated: “It is awful. ... As if from a pagan temple shrilly resounded the second gong through the hotel. The Gentleman from San Francisco got up hasti- ly, pulled his shirt-collar still tighter with his tie, and his abdomen tighter with his open waistcoat, settled his cuffs and again examined himself in the mirror.. “That Carmela, swarthy, with her enticing eyes, looking like a mulatto in her dazzling-coloured dress, chiefly orange, she must be an extraordinary dancer-” he was think- ing. So cheerfully leaving his room and walking on the carpet to his wife's room, he called to ask if they were nearly ready. “In five minutes, Dad,”—came the gay voice of the girl from be- hind the door. "I'm arranging my hair.” “Right-o!” said the Gentleman from San Francisco. Imagining to himself her long hair hanging to the floor, he slowly walked along the corridors and staircases covered with red carpet, downstairs, looking for the reading-room. The servants he encoun- tered on the way pressed close to the wall, and he walked past as if not noticing them. An old lady, late for dinner, already stooping with age, with milk-white hair and yet décolletée in her pale grey silk dress, hurried at top speed, funnily, hen-like, and he easily over- took her. By the glass door of the dining-room, wherein the guests had already started the meal, he stopped before a little table heaped with boxes of cigars and cigarettes, and taking a large Manila, threw three liras on the table. After which he passed along the winter- terrace, and glanced through an open window. From the darkness wafted a soft air, and there loomed the top of an old palm-tree that spread its boughs over the stars, gigantic-seeming, bringing down the far-off smooth quivering of the sea. ... In the reading-room, cozy with the shaded reading-lamps, a grey, untidy German, looking rather like Ibsen in his round silver-rimmed spectacles and mad as- tonished eyes, stood rustling the newspapers. After coldly eyeing , him, the Gentleman from San Francisco seated himself in a deep leather arm-chair in a corner, by a lamp with a green shade, put on his pince-nez, and, with a stretch of his neck because of the tightness a a IVAN BUNIN 61 a of his shirt-collar, obliterated himself behind a newspaper. He glanced over the headlines, read a few sentences about the never-end- ing Balkan war, then with a habitual movement turned over the page of the newspaper—when suddenly the lines blazed up before him in a glassy sheen, his neck swelled, his eyes bulged, and the pince-nez came flying off his nose. He lunged forward, wanted to breathe -and rattled wildly. His lower jaw dropped, and his mouth shone with gold fillings. His head fell swaying on his shoulder, his shirt-front bulged out basket-like, and all his body, writhing, with heels scraping up the carpet, slid down to the floor, struggling desperately with some invisible foe. If the German had not been in the reading-room, the frightful af- fair could have been hushed up. Instantly, through obscure pas- sages the Gentleman from San Francisco could have been hurried away to some dark corner, and not a single guest would have discov- ered what he had been up to. But the German dashed out of the room with a yell, alarming the house and all the diners. Many sprang up from table, upsetting their chairs, many, pallid, ran to- wards the reading-room, and in every language it was asked: “What, what's the matter?” None answered intelligibly, nobody under- stood, for even to-day people are more surprised at death than at anything else, and never want to believe it is true. The proprietor rushed from one guest to another, trying to keep back those who were hastening up, to soothe them with assurances that it was a mere trifle, a fainting-fit that had overtaken a certain Gentleman from San Francisco. . . . But no one heeded him. Many saw how the por- ters and waiters were tearing off the tie, waistcoat, and rumpled eve- ning-coat from that same Gentleman, even, for some reason or other, pulling off his patent evening-shoes from his black-silk, flat-footed feet. And he was still writhing. He continued to struggle with death, by no means wanting to yield to that which had so unexpect- edly and rudely overtaken him. He rolled his head, rattled like one throttled, and turned up the whites of his eyes as if he were drunk. When he had been hastily carried into room No. 43, the smallest, wretchedest, dampest, and coldest room at the end of the bottom cor- ridor, came running his daughter with her hair all loose, her dressing- gown flying open, showing her bosoms raised by her corsets: then his wife, large and heavy and completely dressed for dinner, her mouth 62 THE GENTLEMAN FROM SAN FRANCISCO a *** a opened round with terror. But by that time he had already ceased rolling his head. In a quarter of an hour the hotel settled down somehow or other. But the evening was ruined. The guests, returning to the dining- room, finished their dinner in silence, with a look of injury on their faces, whilst the proprietor went from one to another shrugging his shoulders in hopeless and natural irritation, feeling himself guilty through no fault of his own, assuring everybody that he perfectly realised “how disagreeable this is,” and giving his word that he would take “every possible measure within his power” to remove the trouble. The tarantella had to be cancelled, the superfluous lights were switched off, most of the guests went to the bar, and soon the house became so quiet that the ticking of the clock was heard dis- tinctly in the hall, where the lonely parrot woodenly muttered some- thing as he bustled himself in his cage preparatory to going to sleep, and managed to fall asleep at length with his paw absurdly sus- pended to the upper little perch. ... The Gentleman from San Francisco lay on a cheap iron bed under coarse blankets on to which fell a dim light from the obscure electric light against the ceiling. An ice-bag slid down on his wet, cold forehead; his blue, already lifeless face grew gradually cold; the hoarse bubbling which came from his open mouth, where the gleam of gold still showed, grew weak. The Gentleman from San Francisco rattled no longer, he was no more: something else lay in his place. His wife, his daughter, the doctor, and the servants stood and watched him dully. Suddenly that hich they feared and expected happened. The rattling ceased. And slowly, slowly under their eyes a pallor spread over the face of the deceased, his features began to grow thinner, more transparent . . with a beauty which might have suited him long ago. ... Entered the proprietor. “Gia, è morto.!” whispered the doctor to him. The proprietor raised his shoulders, as if it were not his affair. The wife, on whose cheeks tears were slowly trickling, approached and timidly asked that the deceased should be taken to his own room. “Oh, no, madame," hastily replied the proprietor, politely, but coldly, and not in English, but in French. He was no longer inter- ested in the trifling sum the guests from San Francisco would leave at his cash desk. "That is absolutely impossible.” Adding, by way of explanation, that he valued that suite of rooms highly, and that IVAN BUNIN 63 should he accede to madame's request, the news would be known all over Capri and no one would take the suite afterwards. The young lady, who had glanced at him strangely all the time, now sat down in a chair and sobbed, with her handkerchief to her mouth. The elder lady's tears dried at once, her face flared up. Raising her voice and using her own language she began to insist, un- able to believe that the respect for them had gone already. The man- ager cut her short with polite dignity. "If madame does not like the ways of the hotel, he dare not detain her.” And he announced deci- sively that the corpse must be removed at dawn; the police had al- ready been notified, and an official would arrive presently to attend to the necessary formalities. "Is it possible to get a plain coffin?” madame asked.—Unfortunately not! Impossible! And there was no time to make one. It would have to be arranged somehow. Yes, the English soda-water came in large strong boxes—if the divisions were removed The whole hotel was asleep. The window of No. 43 was open, on to a corner of the garden where, under a high stone wall ridged with broken glass, grew a battered banana tree. The light was turned off, the door locked, the room deserted. The deceased remained in the darkness, blue stars glanced at him from the black sky, a cricket started to chirp with sad carelessness in the wall. ... Out in the dimly-lit corridor two chambermaids were seated in a window-sill, mending something. Entered Luigi, in slippers, with a heap of clothes in his hand. "Pronto?” he asked, in a singing whisper, indicating with his eyes the dreadful door at the end of the corridor. Then giving a slight wave thither with his free hand: “Patenza!”—he shouted in a whis- per, as though sending off a train. The chambermaids, choking with noiseless laughter, dropped their heads on each other's shoulders. Tip-toeing, Luigi went to the very door, tapped, and cocking his head on one side, asked respectfully, in a subdued tone: "Ha suonato, Signore?” Then, contracting his throat and shoving out his jaw, he answered himself in a grating, drawling, mournful voice, which seemed to come from behind the door: “Yes, come in. When the dawn grew white at the window of No. 43, and a damp . a 64 THE GENTLEMAN FROM SAN FRANCISCO wind began rustling the tattered fronds of the banana tree; as the blue sky of morning lifted and unfolded over Capri, and Monte So- laro, pure and distinct, grew golden, catching the sun which was ris- ing beyond the far-off blue mountains of Italy; just as the labourers who were mending the paths of the islands for the tourists came out for work, a long box was carried into room No. 43. Soon this box weighed heavily, and it painfully pressed the knees of the porter who was carrying it in a one-horse cab down the winding white high-road, between stone walls and vineyards, down, down the face of Capri to the sea. The driver, a weakly little fellow with reddened eyes, in a little old jacket with sleeves too short and bursting boots, kept flog- ging his wiry small horse that was decorated in Sicilian fashion, its harness tinkling with busy little bells and fringed with fringes of scarlet wool, the high saddle-peak gleaming with copper and tufted with colour, and a yard-long plume nodding from the pony's cropped head, from between the ears. The cabby had spent the whole night playing dice in the inn, and was still under the effects of drink. Silent, he was depressed by his own debauchery and vice: by the fact that he gambled away to the last farthing all those copper coins with which his pockets had yesterday been full, in all four liras, forty cen- tesimi. But the morning was fresh. In such air, with the sea all around, under the morning sky, headaches evaporate, and man soon regains his cheerfulness. Moreover, the cabby was cheered up by this unexpected fare which he was making out of some Gentleman from San Francisco, who was nodding with his dead head in a box at the back. The little steamer, which lay like a water-beetle on the tender bright blueness which brims the bay of Naples, was already giving the final hoots, and this tooting resounded again cheerily all over the island. Each contour, each ridge, each rock was so clearly visible in each direction, it was as if there were no atmosphere at all. Near the beach the porter in the cab was overtaken by the head por- ter dashing down in an automobile with the lady and her daughter, both pale, their eyes swollen with the tears of a sleepless night. ... And in ten minutes the little steamer again churned up the wa- ter and turned her way back to Sorrento, to Castellamare, bearing away from Capri for ever the family from San Francisco. . . . And peace and tranquillity reigned once more on the island. On that island two thousand years ago lived a man entangled in . IVAN BUNIN 65 his own infamous and strange acts, one whose rule for some reason was spread over millions of people, and who, having lost his head through the absurdity of such power, and out of fear lest death should stab him from behind, committed deeds which have es- tablished him for ever in the memory of mankind: mankind which in the mass now rules the world just as hideously and incomprehensibly as he ruled it then. And men come here from all corners of the globe to look at the ruins of the stone house where that one man lived, on the brink of one of the steepest cliffs in the island. On this exquisite morning all who had come to Capri for that purpose were still asleep in the hotels, although through the streets already trotted little mouse-coloured donkeys with red saddles, towards the hotel entrances where they would wait patiently until, after a good sleep and a square meal, young and old American men and women, German men and women, would emerge and pile up into the saddles, to be fol- lowed up the stony paths, yea to the very summit of Monte Tiberio, by old persistent beggar-women of Capri, with sticks in their sinewy hands. Quieted by the fact that the dead old Gentleman from San Francisco, who had intended to be one of the pleasure party but who had only succeeded in frightening the rest with the reminder of death, was now being shipped to Naples, the happy tourists still slept soundly, the island was still quiet, the shops in the little town not yet open. Only fish and greens were being sold in the tiny piazza, only simple folks were present, and amongst them, as usual without occu- pation, the tall old boatman Lorenzo, thorough debauchee and hand- some figure, famous all over Italy, model for many a picture. He had already sold for a trifle two lobsters which he had caught in the night and which were rustling in the apron of the cook of that very same hotel where the family from San Francisco had spent the night. And now Lorenzo could stand calmly till evening, with a majestic air showing off his rags and gazing round, holding his clay pipe with its long reed mouth-piece in his hand, and letting his scarlet bonnet slip over one ear. For as a matter of fact he received a salary from the little town, from the commune which found it profitable to pay him to stand about and make a picturesque figure-as everybody knows. . . . Down the precipices of Monte Solaro, down the stony little stairs cut in the rock of the old Phoenician road, came two Abruzzi mountaineers, descending from Anacapri. One carried a a . 66 THE GENTLEMAN FROM SAN FRANCISCO a a bagpipe under his leather cloak: a large goat skin with two little pipes; the other had a sort of wooden flute. They descended, and the whole land, joyous, was sunny beneath them. They saw the rocky shoulder-heavings of the island, which lay almost entirely at their feet, swimming in the fairy blueness of the water. Shining morning vapours rose over the sea to the east, under a dazzling sun which al- ready burned hot as it rose higher and higher; and there, far off, the dimly cerulean masses of Italy, of her near and far mountains still wavered blue as if in the world's morning, in a beauty no words can express. . . . Half way down the descent the pipers slackened their pace. Above the road, in a grotto of the rocky face of Monte Solaro stood the Mother of God, the sun full upon her, giving her a splen- dour of snow-white and blue stucco raiment, and royal crown rusty from all weathers. Meek and merciful, she raised her eyes to heaven, to the eternal and blessed mansions of her trice-holy Son. The pipers bared their heads, put their pipes to their lips: and there streamed forth naïve and meekly-joyous praises to the sun, to the morning, to Her, Immaculate, who would intercede for all who suffer in this ma- licious and lovely world, and to Him, born of Her womb among the caves of Bethlehem, in a lowly shepherd's hut, in the far Judean land. .. And the body of the dead old man from San Francisco was return- ing home, to its grave, to the shores of the New World. Having been submitted to many humiliations, much human neglect, after a week's wandering from one warehouse to another, it was carried at last on to the same renowned vessel which so short a time ago, and with such honour, had borne him living to the Old World. But now he was to be hidden far from the knowledge of the voyagers. Closed in a tar- coated coffin, he was lowered deep into the vessel's dark hold. And again, again the ship set out on the long voyage. She passed at night near Capri, and to those who were looking out from the island, sad seemed the lights of the ship slowly hiding themselves in the sea's darkness. But there aboard the liner, in the bright halls shining with lights and marble, gay dancing filled the evening, as usual. .. The second evening, and the third evening, still they danced, amid a storm that swept over the ocean, booming like a funeral service, rolling up mountains of mourning-darkness silvered with foam. Through the snow the numerous fiery eyes of the ship were hardly IVAN BUNIN 67 visible to the Devil who watched from the rocks of Gibraltar, from the stony gateway of two worlds, peering after the vessel as she dis- appeared into the night and storm. The Devil was huge as a cliff. But huger still was the liner, many storeyed, many funnelled, created by the presumption of the New Man with the old heart. The bliz- zard smote the rigging and the funnels, and whitened the ship with snow, but she was enduring, firm, majestic—and horrible. On the topmost deck rose lonely against the snowy whirlwind the cozy and dim quarters where lay the heavy master of the ship, he who was like a pagan idol, sunk now in a light, uneasy slumber. Through his sleep he heard the sombre howl and furious screechings of the siren, muf- fied by the blizzard. But again he reassured himself in the nearness of that which stood behind his wall, and was in the last resort incom- prehensible to him: by the large, apparently armoured cabin which was now and then filled with a mysterious rumbling, throbbing, and crackling of blue fires that flared up explosive around the pale face of the telegraphist who, with a metal hoop fixed on his head, was eagerly straining to catch the dim voices of vessels which spoke him from hundreds of miles away. In the depths, in the under-water womb of the Atlantis, steel glimmered and steam wheezed, and huge masses of machinery and thousand-ton boilers dripped with water and oil, as the motion of the ship was steadily cooked in this vast kitchen heated by hellish furnaces from beneath. Here bubbled in their awful concentration the powers which were being transmitted to the keel, down an infinitely long round tunnel lit up and brilliant like a gigantic gun-barrel, along which slowly, with a regularity crushing to the human soul, revolved a gigantic shaft, precisely like a living monster coiling and recoiling its endless length down the tunnel, sliding on its bed of oil. The middle of the Atlantis, the warm, luxurious cabins, dining-rooms, halls shed light and joy, buz- zed with the chatter of an elegant crowd, was fragrant with fresh flowers, and quivered with the sounds of a string orchestra. And again amidst that crowd, amidst the brilliance of lights, silks, dia- monds, and bare feminine shoulders, a slim and supple pair of hired lovers writhed and at moments convulsively clashed. A sinfully dis- creet, pretty girl with lowered lashes and hair innocently dressed, and a tallish young man with black hair looking as if it were glued on, pale with powder, and wearing the most elegant patent shoes and > a 68 A SHRINE a narrow, long-tailed dress coat: a beau resembling an enormous leech. And no one knew that this couple had long since grown weary of shamly tormenting themselves with their beatific love-tortures, to the sound of bawdy-sad music; nor did any one know of that thing which lay deep, deep below at the very bottom of the dark hold, near the gloomy and sultry bowels of the ship that was so gravely over- coming the darkness, the ocean, the blizzard. A SHRINE BY STEWART MITCHELL Think in what fashion this one man would rise From cold dust, coffined up against decay, To find his solitary place a way For stupid feet and trivial, staring eyes. These noisy rooks in blue, white-clouded skies Would have recalled for him all rapt delay Pleasure occasions death-and judgement day; His second choice was silence, where he lies. > Seas were not made to swim in: shallow streams Flowing through shadow, dappled with dim light, These be our playgrounds, as the deep sea teems Menacing, sullen shapes that haunt the sight- Now and again divers dive down for dreams To come up calm from knowledge of its night. Courtesy of the Galleries INTERIOR BY ALBERT BLOCH B Courtesy of the Daniel Galleries STREET. BY ALBERT BLOCH . $ 1 RUSSIAN LETTER December, 1921 rior causes. a RUSSIAN USSIAN literature since the Revolution may be roughly di- vided into three classes: (1) that produced by the so-called emigrants who are now living outside Russia in virtually all the big towns of Western Europe; (2) the work of Russian writers in- side Bolshevist Russia; and (3) that produced in the parts of Russia that were at one time or another under Bolshevist government. The nature of the literature is, in each case, different from the others. The old tradition of Russian letters is being carried on by the emi- grants; writers like Merejkovsky, Bunin, Kuprin, Milyukov, and Balmont are all writing very much as they were before the catas- trophe. Their work is always interesting but does not call for much comment at the present moment. More significant are the writings of such younger men as Alexey Tolstoy. He, almost alone of the younger Russian writers, has been able to continue his career as a writer without apparently suffering much interruption from exte- He writes, one fancies, one or two novels, a few poems, and a play or so every year and, curiously enough, he seems to im- prove as he goes along. His work is already being recognized by non-Russian critics; his latest play is to be produced in Paris in the Spring, and his better novels will probably soon appear in English and French translation. Before coming to the writers who have remained in Moscow and Petrograd during the whole of the Revolution, it may be well to deal with the small but interesting output of books in the anti-Bolshevist circles. Political literature, being entirely banned inside Soviet Russia—unless it be pro-Bolshevist, when it usually ceases to be lit- erature—has survived during the last four years only among the emigrants and under the anti-Bolshevist régime of Kolchak, Deni- kin, and others. There histories have been written, or rather pages from history, which help to illuminate some of the more interesting portions of that amazingly complex series of events, the Russian Revolution. Thus the famous Korniloff campaign in the Don coun- try has been exactly described by Alexey Suvorin in his book, The a 70 RUSSIAN LETTER a Korniloff Campaign, which has now disappeared from circulation as a result of the Bolshevists' capture of its stock, and in G. N. Ra- kovsky's In the Camp of the Whites. Similar books have been pub- lished in Siberia describing the incidents of the Kolchak campaign. While all anti-Bolshevist, most of the books of this kind are fairly judicious and critical, and any one who can read Russian has a feast of interest and instruction in them. An interesting attempt is being made at the present moment by M Hessen, a well-known Peters- burg editor in the old days, to collect notes on various phases of the Revolution which he is publishing in Berlin in serial volumes under the general title of Archives of the Russian Revolution. It is natural that most people interested in literature are wonder- ing more about what is being produced inside Soviet Russia than about any other phase of contemporary Russian literature. It is difficult for anybody outside Russia to form a picture of the incred- ibly chaotic state of life there. One has to imagine life bereft of every kind of convenience and luxury and to add to this the difficul- ties of obtaining food, fuel, and lodging, as well as the terrific men- tal demoralization of the whole country. Life inside Soviet Russia is a struggle for existence in the literal sense of the words. It is not as if writers there had been simply reduced to unaccustomed pov- erty, as has been the case in so many countries of Central Europe. Worse than this, they have to spend all their days in struggling to obtain food and shelter for the morrow. In these circumstances it would be foolish to expect any kind of finished work on a large scale to come out of Russia. This explains why it is that virtually every- thing that has been written in Petrograd and Moscow during the last three years has been fragmentary, hysterical, and, for the most part, immature. Two highly significant works have emerged, it is true; and in them not less than in the others are to be seen the traces and effects of the very qualities which have just been mentioned. I am speak- ing of Alexander Blok's The Twelve (and perhaps his Scythians) and Andrey Byely's Christ Has Arisen. The first poem-The Twelve -has been translated into several European languages and has had in addition a huge circulation in its own country—so far as any book has a circulation nowadays in Soviet Russia. It has been harsh- ly criticized both by the Bolshevists and the anti-Bolshevists as a false, or at least partly false, presentation of the scenes and atmos- phere of life in Soviet Russia. When I first came across the poem in C. E. BECHHOFER 71 the Caucasus two and a half years ago it seemed to me that Blok had intuitively sensed the real nature of the Russian catastrophe the medley of brutality and sentimentality, of ideals and violence. I was very much interested to discover in Moscow a month or so ago that this opinion was held by the most acute critics I met there. The "political” significance of Blok's poems—which was never of real importance to anybody except Russians who have been trained by a century of bad criticism to look for the political rather than the ar- tistic merits of any new work of literature—is now no longer com- mented on; instead, people are beginning to realize that Blok's curious fanfare of rhymes and rhythms has wonderfully caught the nature of the time in which he was writing. With the Scythians, The Twelve represents his last important work; he died in August of cancer, his death accelerated by under-nourishment. Andrey Byely's Christ Has Arisen might be described as a projec- tion of Blok's vision of the revolutionary era; it is a still more fan- tastic mingling of revolutionary doctrine and Christian teaching. When one finds the corpse of a railwayman who has been shot in a riot compared with Christ on the Cross, it is obvious that the subject demands very delicate treatment if it is to be successful. While Byely has certainly not succeeded fully in his task he has neverthe- less made his bizarre idea unobjectionable. There are lines in his poem that are excellent, but as a whole it takes rank a long way be- low Blok's masterpiece. The better known writers of prose inside Russia are necessarily silent. Nothing by Gorky, Sologub, Artzibashev, Korolenko is be- ing published. We come now to the younger schools of writers in- side Bolshevist Russia. It must be said, of course, that in dealing with literature inside the Soviet frontiers we are treating almost wholly of verse. Prose cannot be written under present circum- stances inside Russia; only verse, and extremely unpolished verse at that, can possibly come out of this chaos. Where we find poems written in traditional styles, they are the work chiefly of men who, like Voloshin, had a year or so of comparative peace in some part of Russia that was in the hands of the anti-Bolshevists. It is true that there are a few exceptions even to this; Gumilev, who was shot in August at Petrograd by the Bolshevists, produced during the last months of his life a volume of verses written with his usual finish and elegance. More characteristic of the time is, however, the work 72 RUSSIAN LETTER a of such hitherto unknown poets as Yessenin, Shershenevich, Kliu- yev, Mariengov, Mayakovsky, and a few others. With the excep- tion of Mayakovsky, perhaps, all these young men would probably deny with much bitterness that they were Bolshevists. In fact, most of them have at some time or other been imprisoned by Bolshevists, like most other people in Russia. But it is inevitable that the style of their work should be regarded as “Bolshevist.” For the most part it sings the praises of the proletariat and curses the capitalist and the foreigner. Perhaps it would be more exact to say that these poets—especially Yessenin-are, strictly speaking, Left Socialist Revolutionaries rather than Bolshevists, inasmuch as their heroes are rather the peasants of the villages than the workmen of the towns. But their work, readable and significant as it usually is, does not in most cases justify a too careful analysis of their art, opinions, and ideals. C. E. BecHHOFER PARIS LETTER December, 1921 IF F the term “letter” at the head of this rubric is to be anything but a mockery it should imply not only communication but an- swer. To form any sort of porch, vortex, academia, agora there must be at least five or six people sufficiently interested in one an- other's ideas to wish, one need not say, to correct, but to bring them into some sort of focus; to establish not a foot-rule but some sort of means of communication, and some understanding of how a given idea, emitted from the left side of the table (Rome, Paris) may strike someone seated at the other end or opposite side of the board (Denver, London, Rio de Janeiro). Thus “one” is a little surprised to find his Excellenza the Italian Minister for Education still “going on about” Balzac. “One” had supposed that Balzac was a local French necessity; that the search for international literary standards had ceased to find him thereto pertinent . “One” observes with approbation that Excellenza Croce discusses Balzac's art, or lack of it, and not the shape of his bath robe, herein differing from the present or London école de Ste Beuve. One offers the suggestion that Croce is indulging in a bit of purely local propaganda when he compares Balzac to Manzoni in order to glorify Italian genius. An impartial non-national critic would have set Manzoni against Flaubert and found the former, I think, infe- rior , his chief and perhaps only demerit being that he is rather dull, though eminently meritorious, unless my wholly untrustworthy memory is more than on occasion at fault. Mr Wright is, surely, a little hard on Propertius and Ovid or else a little careless in his manner of stating a wholly apposite and com- mendable appreciation of Petronius; and when Señor Santayana says that he likes to hear and to see what new things people are up someone in the company should be permitted to wink, to wink audibly but respectfully, and to cite, perhaps, the Diana of Monte- to," mayor. If the "Letter” is to show even approximately "where in a man- ner of speaking” its author or the milieu which he attempts to com- 74 PARIS LETTER a municate “has got to” it can hardly confine itself to jottings on the five or six latest books, even when there are so many in a season; it should at least try to dissociate certain ideas moving in the ferment or sediment beneath or upon current work. For some years "litera- ture” or at least the "movement” has been more or less regarded as a sort of parasite on the new painting, magazines if at all renovatory were usually “magazines of Art and literature," the phrase goes without needing comment, there is now nothing more to be said about a Bracque than about a Nicholson picture; an abstract mode, or several abstract modes have been established and accepted. I mean that a cubist picture is now an accepted sort of painting, dis- tinct, as say a flower piece or a Dutch interior is distinct from a Raphael or Murillo “Holy Family,” or an English "Historic.” Faced with a given example of any of them, the critic can only say: this is well or ill executed. The mark of the shop is upon a great deal of current production; Picasso experiments, but, lately, in the mode of Michael Agnolo or of Ford Madox Brown. Marie Lauren- cin's rather "eighteenth century charm persists. The main interest is not in aesthetics; certain main questions are up for discussion, among them nationality and monotheism. I mean that there is a definite issue between internationalist and denational- ist thought, and a certain number of people believe that it is a calam- ity to belong to any modern nation whatsoever. I suppose the pres- ent phase of the discussion began with the heimatlos in Switzerland, during the war. It is not a matter of being anti-French or anti-Ger- man or anti-patriotic, it is a question of disapproving fundamentally of the claims of the modern state. Stephen Decatur's words nobly reproduced with the morning Paris issue of the Chicago Tribune re- ferred, let us say, to a group of ideas “my country,” that is to say the liberty of thirteen colonies and the right to think and act as one pleased. The modern state has been defined economically as “The difference between the credit a nation possesses as an aggregate and the sum of the credits possessed by its individual members”; and that tough nut the “intellectual” begins to ask himself at what point this difference in credits has a right to interfere with his thought, his expression, his liberty, his freedom of movement, et cetera. Economics are up for discussion not in their technical, Fabian, phases, but in the wider and more human phases, where they come into contact with personal liberty, life, the arts themselves, and the EZRA POUND 75 conditions aiding or limiting their expression. Back of it all is the Confucian saying "When the Prince shall have called about him all the artists and savants, his resources will be put to full use.” I take it these questions are discussed, at least in their philosophic phases, more freely in France than elsewhere; the French have not the English hatred of ideas, they have not the English instinct warn- ing them against the possible material commotions which may pur- sue the functioning of a given idea, and even if an idea is labeled "dangerous” the French will go on discussing it, “parcequ'ils sont trop bavards." Denationalism is Athens against Sparta, or, better, Athens against Rome; all empires are in the nature of things a little pom- pous and ridiculous. Greece, as I think Maine says, never managed to give laws, for the Greeks were always more interested in the ex- ception, in Phryne for example, than in the flat average; Athens had a civilization, Rome had an empire, and the greatest virtue of that empire was to act as a carrier for Athenian civilization. Athens con- sisted of an open square, a few groves and porches where men met, talked ideas to death, but also talked them into form and into pre- cision; and where. and so forth... the dream has been too often attempted or perhaps not sufficiently often ... the reader may try it for himself. As for monotheism, it is a philosophic shallowness and frivolity to accept monotheism as fact, rather than as a perhaps interesting, at any rate to some temperaments convenient or plausible and to other temperaments sympathetic or apathetic, hypothesis. Convenit esse deos, says Ovid, using the plural. Monotheism is unproven, the Catholic church itself has accepted a paradoxical compromise, and any philosophy which does not begin with a doubt on this point is, to put it mildly, presumptuous. In practice monotheistic thought leads to all sorts of crusades, persecutions, and intolerance. If one is forced by one's reason to accept this hyper-unity as a probability one can also accept it as a nuisance, and the moon is twelve miles out of its course, or else the Paris edition of the Daily Mail is in error; this latter is, of course, highly improbable. Above or apart from the economic squabble, the philosophic wa- vering, the diminishing aesthetic hubbub, there rests the serene sculpture of Brancusi, known, adored, also unknown. Rodin, let us say, broke the academic (Florentine Boy) tradition; 0 . . 76 PARIS LETTER Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska in England instituted a new concep- tion, or reintroduced an old conception of, or appreciation of, form; Brancusi, contemporary of Epstein or somewhat older, is in many es- sentials in agreement with the best work of Epstein and of Gaudier; he is distinct from the futurist sculptors, and he is perhaps unique in the degree of his objection to the “Kolossal,” the rhetorical, the Mestrovician, the sculpture of nerve-crisis, the sculpture made to be photographed; and I think I am quite safe in saying that he is unique among living sculptors in his devotion to and research for an abso- lute formal beauty. That is a large order, and any general sentence falls short of real meaning in dealing with a question of plastic. In writing of work like Brancusi’s for numbers of readers who have not seen the work itself, one is stumped; the formula for expo- sition is to proceed from the known to the unknown; and one doesn't in the least know what is known. A certain number of photos of modern sculpture of ten or twelve different schools have been repro- duced in books having a moderate circulation; there are books on Gaudier, Epstein, and every other modern sculptor of note, save Brancusi. I doubt if even good photos would emphasize Brancusi's distinction. For those who know Gaudier's work, let me put it that Gaudier, killed at twenty-three, never had time to repeat a given composition; he saw, often, chances of improvement, but never had time to put them into execution. Brancusi has had, and taken the time. Gaudier was a genius beyond cavil. From the people I have taken to Brancusi's studio I have collected reactions, bewilderment, admiration, admiration not in the banal degree of tolerant dilettant- ism; “But he is upsetting all the laws of the universe,” or “But it isn't like work of a human being at all”; some of it is indeed like the work of a natural force acting with extreme certitude and felicity, producing the form which is the sort of Platonic quintessence, let us say the "that which is birdlike in all birds,” oiseau qui chante la gloire. Brancusi, in so different a way from Proust, has created a world, or let us say Proust has created a somewhat stuffy social milieu, and Brancusi has created an universe, a cielo, a Platonic heaven full of pure and essential forms, and a cavern of a studio which is, in a very old sense, a temple of peace, of stillness, a refuge from the noise of motor traffic and the current advertisements. M Jean Saltas in his preface to the new edition of Alfred Jarry's a а EZRA POUND 77 9 Ubu Roi informs us that the work contains “The satiric simplicity of Aristophanes, the good sense and truculence of Rabelais, and the lyric fantasy of Shakespeare.” This statement is, to my mind, con- trary to fact. Jarry's juvenile puppet play, with a wooden Falstaff cast for a wooden Macbeth, is a work of admirable verve, and in view of the direction in which theatrical matters have moved or stayed since 1896, Jarry's letter of that date to Lugné-Poe is ex- tremely interesting. He recommends: 1. Mask for the principal personage, Ubu.. 2. Horse's head in card-board to hang from the neck, as in "l'an- cien théâtre anglais,” for the two equestrian scenes, all of these de- tails being in the spirit of the piece, since I wanted to make a "gui- gnol” (Punch and Judy show). 3. Use of a single décor, or rather a background, suppressing the raising and lowering of the curtain during the whole act. Someone in ordinary clothing should come, as in puppet shows, and hang up a placard stating where the action takes place. (I am quite sure of the "suggestive” superiority of a written placard to a painted scene. Neither a painted scene nor a mass of supers will give "The Polish army on the march through Ukrainia.") 4. Suppression of crowds, which are always bad on the stage, and are an insult to the intelligence. Thus, one soldier in the review scene, and one in the hurly-burly where Ubu says "What a mass of people, what a flight . . 5. Adoption of an "accent” or rather of a special "voice” for the chief character. 6. Costumes with as little local or chronological colour as possible (this gives a better idea of something permanent) they should be modern for preference, since the satire is modern; and sordid, since the play will then seem more wretched and horrible. Thus Jarry at the age of twenty-three making suggestions as to the presentation of the work written by him at, we are told, the age of fifteen (and possibly emended?). The child psychologist may compare the suddenness of its transitions to those in The Young Visiters, and the philosophic critic has admirable opportunity of discussing the relation of the "created figure” to literature. Mephis- topheles and Sunny Jim, being figures, also created. 78 PARIS LETTER The other, or another fundamental problem; that of the relation of a nation's literature to its life, is presented by a pile of volumes before me: Cuisinier Moderne; Menus, La Haute Cuisine, et cetera, by Gustave Garlan, 2 volumes, 5,000 items, 700 observations, 60 planches, 330 desseins, 3d edition in grand folio, 640 pages. In contrast the modest Guide Culinaire of Escofier, in large quar- to, 938 pages, 33d thousand, sub-titled an "aide-mémoire.” The Cuisine Classique of Urbain-Dubois and Emile Bernard, 18th edi- tion, 996 pages, royal folio. Fleur de la Cuisine Française, quarto, on art paper, second volume, Cuisine Moderne 1800-1921, offers an- other six hundred pages. A complete civilization recognizes all the five senses, and those who deny the power of the written word may meditate on the relation between the amplitude of these publications and the gastronomic pre-eminence of the French. These, gentlemen, are their cook-books. Ezra Pound BOOK REVIEWS THE PROMISE OF SHERWOOD ANDERSON The TRIUMPH OF THE EGG. By Sherwood Anderson. In clay by Tennessee Mitchell. 12mo. 269 pages. B. W. Huebsch, Inc. $2. SHE (HERWOOD ANDERSON’S published work now includes three novels, two volumes of short stories, and one of poems or chants. It is strikingly alike in substance; it is amazingly un- even in execution; but it is animated by a singular unity of inten- tion. It is all a persistent effort to come to close grips with life, to master it, to force it to give up its secret. It suggests a wrestling match in which the challenger is thrown again and again, and yet each time comes back with thews and sinews braced and muscles hardened to try another fall. In his persistence Mr Anderson is like Jacob with the angel, crying through the night, "I will not let thee go except thou bless me.” And like Jacob he waits until the break- ing of day to triumph: “I have seen God face to face." Let it be said at once that the morning is not yet. Mr Anderson has not completely subdued his material to form, has not thoroughly penetrated it with interpretation. It remains recalcitrant and opaque. But as his work has progressed he has shown constantly a firmer grasp on his problem, a more complete conception of the diffi- culties of approach, and the resources and limitations of his art. In this respect there is something final about The Triumph of the Egg. It by no means represents the attainment of the goal, but it marks a definite accomplishment beyond which the method he has tested may carry him on the next dash, but which remains for the time being a sort of "farthest north.” It is natural to speak of Sherwood Anderson's work in meta- phors of physical achievement, for his struggle is first of all an ath- letic one with the crude stuff of life in a material world. Five years or more ago a former editor of The Dial persuaded him to set down his thoughts about American literature in a paper called An a 80 THE PROMISE OF SHERWOOD ANDERSON Apology for Crudity, in the light of which his fiction should be read. + “For a long time I have believed that crudity is an inevitable quality in the production of a really significant present-day Ameri- can literature. How indeed is one to escape the obvious fact that there is as yet no native subtlety of thought or living among us? And if we are a crude and childlike people how can our literature hope to escape the influence of that fact? Why indeed should we want it to escape? “We talk of writers of the old world and the beauty and subtlety of the work they do. Below me the roaring city lies like a great ani- inal on the prairies, but we do not run out to the prairies. We stay in our rooms and talk. “I know we shall never have an American literature until we re- turn to faith in ourselves, and to the facing of our limitations. We must in some way become in ourselves more like our fellows, more simple and real.” . i This is Mr Anderson's creed. He has tried always to work under its sanctions. He has made it his first object to see American life as it is, without illusion. It is a grim spectacle, and he confesses his inability to see it beautifully. “As a people we have given ourselves to industrialism, and indus- trialism is not lovely. If any man can find beauty in an American factory town I wish he would show me the way. For myself, I can- not find it. To me, and I am living in industrial life, the whole thing is as ugly as modern war." But this reality has interest. We are a crude people, but not dull. In some strange way the human forms which this life assumes have a grotesque quality which makes them as fascinating as gargoyles. Over and over again Mr Anderson has drawn them for us—in Windy McPherson, in Smoky Pete, in Melville Stoner. And the reality tempts always with a demand for interpretation: What is the meaning of it? The answer Mr Anderson seeks from the start- ing point of the people to whom the reality belongs. Instead of using it in illustration of themes already conventionalized in old ROBERT MORSS LOVETT 81 world literature, he tries to let it develop according to its own pat- tern. Instead of imposing upon it an interpretation from old world philosophy he tries to draw from it its own meaning. It is true that Mr Anderson has been influenced by the technical experiments of his predecessors, but in so far as he has yielded to them he has failed. His first novel, Windy McPherson's Son, be- gins with a transcript from middle-Western life so faithful that it seems autobiographic; but having established a complete ground- work of reality the author in an endeavour to maintain interest or to disengage significance has recourse to the romantic formula. The point is clearly perceptible at which his fact passes over into fiction. In Marching Men the substance of the book is indubitably experi- ence, but the material is subordinated to a thesis which is more than a part of the psychology of the hero. Poor White is the best of the three novels. Here the realism in which Mr Anderson works so con- fidently is raised to significance by a symbolism which is so imme- diate in its process that it seems unpremeditated and unconscious. But the large sweep and scope of the story somehow carry it beyond the author's control. Somewhere he loses his grasp on the meaning of events, the clue to their interpretation, and presents them with an emphasis which is misplaced, and with a conclusion which is me- chanical and arbitrary. Winesburg, Ohio revealed Mr Anderson's true vehicle in the short story. As Mr Garland's Main Travelled Roads represented the early practice of realism, so Winesburg, Ohio will be cited as the embodiment of the severity and simplification of its later mode. The stories reveal by flashes the life, the activity, the character of the little mid-Western town as completely as the persistent glare of Mr Sinclair Lewis's searchlight upon Gopher Prairie. The Triumph of the Egg has, through greater diversity of material and wider variety of method and style, the same compelling unity, a unity not geographical, but cosmic. Of the stories which compose this last volume it is not necessary to speak in detail. Several of them, including the longest, the nov- elette, Out of Nowhere Into Nothing, have already appeared in this magazine and are familiar to its readers. But of the impressive unity of their appearance in this volume much may be said. They fall together as if by predetermined arrangement, and answer to each other like the movements of a symphonie pathétique. They combine to give a single reading of life, a sense of its immense bur- 82 THE PROMISE OF SHERWOOD ANDERSON den, its pain, its dreariness, its futile aspiration, its despair. Some- times the theme is expressed in farce, the failure of a trick, as in The Egg; sometimes in grim comedy as in War: again in tragedy as in Brothers. Sometimes it sounds in the thin treble of childhood as in I Want to Know Why; sometimes in the cracking voice of old age as in Senility. And this hopelessness is not an interpretation play- fully or desperately imposed on the phenomena of life from with- out by thought or reason; it springs implicitly from within; it is of the essence of being. It is pervading and penetrating, overwhelm- ing and unescapable. It is as if, to use Cardinal Newman's words, man were implicated from birth in some "vast aboriginal calamity''; only instead of placing the fall of man historically in the Garden of Eden Mr Anderson traces it biologically to the egg. It is characteristic of Sherwood Anderson's art that, instead of seeking escape from life and forgetfulness of it, he grapples with it in an effort to set the tortured spirit free from its servitude to mat- ter. The Triumph of the Egg represents to the full that contest with elemental things which leads one to speak of him in terms be- fitting the wrestler or explorer. And of this struggle of art with na- ture he is entirely conscious. It gives the head-note to the volume in verses which under still another figure express so perfectly Mr An- derson's theory of the function of art towards its material that to quote them makes further exposition superfluous. . “Tales are people who sit on the doorstep of the house of my mind. It is cold outside and they sit waiting. I look out at a window. The tales have cold hands, Their hands are freezing. A short thickly-built tale arises and threshes his arms about. His nose is red and he has two gold teeth. There is an old female tale sitting hunched up in a cloak. a Many tales come to sit for a few moments on the doorstep and then go away. It is too cold for them outside. ROBERT MORSS LOVETT 83 The street before the door of the house of my mind is filled with tales. They murmur and cry out, they are dying of cold and hunger. I am a helpless man--my hands tremble. I should be sitting on a bench like a tailor. I should be weaving warm cloth out of the threads of thought. The tales should be clothed. They are freezing on the doorstep of the house of my mind. I am a helpless man-my hands tremble. I feel in the darkness but cannot find the doorknob. I look out at a window. Many tales are dying in the street before the house of my mind.” a The futility of art is a part of the futility of life. It is a theme personal to the artist: and in Mr Anderson's case it is the source of that lyric strain which recurs like a thread of wistful beauty through- out his book. The first sketch, The Dumb Man, defines with un- canny precision the artist's dilemma in the face of his wavering, elusive, baffling subject matter—and his exasperating impotence. The last paragraph of Brothers is a lyric cry of the artist's soul. The Man with the Trumpet hurls in strident notes the defiance of the ar- tist to his public. All this marks Sherwood Anderson as a thorough- ly self-conscious as well as conscientious worker in literature. He will make no compromises with life and no false claims for himself. He has done with illusions. He has put behind him the conventional armour of fiction. He engages in his struggle naked and empty- handed. And in spite of the melancholy scene in which he finds himself, in spite of the darkness in which he gropes and the dim- ly discerned horrors which he grasps, he preserves in his enterprise the faith of the artist, the soul of a poet. It is in this evidence of a true vocation that one finds in largest measure the promise of Sher- wood Anderson. Robert Morss Lovett REALISM AND ROBERT HENRI Robert Henri, His Life AND Works. Edited by William Yarrow and Louis Bouché. 4to. 35 pages. 40 reproductions. Boni and Liveright. $10. Noche ONE but the most envious of modern malcontents would at- tack the editorial judgement which named Robert Henri as the painter entitled to introduce a new library dedicated exclusively to American art. We must not forget, in the deluge of strange things begotten of Cubism, and of other movements not easy to catalogue, that Mr Henri, too, was once a radical ; that he appeared when the solemn stagnancy of Innes and Chase reigned unassailed; and that he brought life and energy and immense enthusiasm to this country when our art seemed fated to unending dulness. He has not been denied honours and official recognition-he is represented in the Luxembourg, and he is well known in Dallas and Kansas City; it is true that his work is the fruition of the art of yesterday; but we must remember that he has faced the modern uprising cheerfully, sensible of his own abilities and consistently giving us the best that is in him, and that his attitude towards the younger men who have ridiculed his pictures has been one of commendable tolerance, instead of that angry recrimination so characteristic of painters as they inevitably drift into the Academy. Mr Henri has been a force both for good and for ill in the pictorial life of America. With his personality and his blithe activity he has been able to promote the interest of many students and amateurs to a serious consideration of art. During a long period he was regard- ed as a man of advanced ideas and rebellious opinions; he had the qualities of a leader; he established a school and his pupils, now numerous and productive, were fascinated as much by the engaging audacity of his convictions as by his technical cunning. His doc- trine, that of the realist, is sound in so far as it concentrates attention on the concrete world, and provides the student a tangible point of departure. Its limitations arise from its lack of depth. Mr Henri's principle is for the beginner, and particularly the struggling young American who, in most cases, is totally devoid of cultural equipment, and who demands the original stimulus of broad surface ideas. THOMAS JEWELL CRAVEN 85 At present realism is a necessity that cannot be over-emphasized. Something impressive and strengthening by its actuality is impera- tive in modern art; but ideas clearer, more comprehensive and more profound than the postulates of Mr Henri must be inculcated upon the student to carry him beyond his initial concern with objectivity. A true realism, not a mere presentation of surface aspects, is primari- ly and intrinsically constructive. Its logical progress is towards a complete realization of the thickness, the fulness, and the space- filling character of the forms emotionally stirring to the artist. The expedients of correct natural tones and the accidents of texture are imitative devices, and too frequently end in cheapness to be of ser- vice to a world that clamours for a meaning in pictures. Mr Henri's methods terminate in illusion, and while it is but just to say that he is endowed with a sincere vision that is realistic rather than decora- tive, he fails, in the true artistic sense, to distinguish between real- ism and appearance. In the light of aesthetic validity the semi-decorative, non-repre- sentative painting imported to-day from France is not different from a conception which makes possible the extension of form into spaces larger and freer than practicable in sculpture; but in either case the imagination must intervene to insure a result that is significantly ex- pressive and beautiful. The genuine artist reconstructs the world, and a veritable realism is fundamentally an abstraction, and as such must be appraised in the same terms as the French art just referred to—both are conceptions and not literal representations. Mr Henri, first and last a portrait painter, has been occupied with naturalistic accuracy; he limits himself to one figure and the sitter is delineated with a love for pigmental sensations; in place of imagination, which binds the constituents of a picture into a firm synthetic structure, we find a liberal sentiment in search of types—gipsies, Indians, Irish- characters attractive to the spectator largely through the adventi- tious interest of literary illustration. His world is a world of vision and not of mind. We have already noted Mr Henri's respectful patience and sym- pathy with the iconoclastic art emanating from France since the death of Cézanne. He has found himself, in a measure, dispossessed, but he has had the wisdom to continue in his own course and not to undertake problems which his temperamental leanings would make impossible of solution. In this connection it is a pleasure to call at- tention to the reciprocal consideration with which he has been treat- a a 86 REALISM AND ROBERT HENRI ed in the text of the monograph. The editors, young men of distinc- tion in the later tendencies of painting, ambitiously opposed to practically every tenet that Mr Henri stands for, have been neither bigoted nor limited, and have presented their subject with justice and understanding. The biography is complete and satisfactory; Mr Henri's aims and ideals analysed; his work estimated for what it successfully accomplishes and not flouted because it does not hap- pen to be "modern”; and his position in contemporary art stated in the admirable spirit of fairness. This volume is important: its appearance marks the beginning of a new library of art. It takes courage to found a series of books de- voted to men who are neither dead nor European, and it is gratify- ing to record that the publishers feel that an audience awaits their venture. The reviewer, in writing the foreword to the undertaking, said: “The literature engendered by recent art has been abundant and often brilliant, but it has been concerned with psychology and technique, and its specialized dispersions have confused the general movement. The American public, bewildered by so much theoriz- ing, has come to regard its own art as an unintelligible imitation of the French, and its artists as an inhuman class of men blind to the life surrounding them.” This condition has led to the establish- ment of the American Art Library: “Artists of unquestionable accomplishment will first be represent- ed, followed by the younger men as their work takes maturity. I am convinced that a succession of monographs will show that modern American art, while inferior in magnitude, is equal to the European in variety and interest." The book is handsomely bound and its general appearance one of dignity and taste, but the reviewer's copy bears evidence of hasty printing. A more agreeable type than old De Vinne might have been used, Bookman, for instance; the text should have been set in closer for nice spacing and printed on laid book-paper; the engraving is exceptionally clear, but any one of the newer gravure processes would have added to its quality, to say nothing of a few reproduc- tions in colour. THOMAS JEWELL CRAVEN ISOLATION OF CARVED METAL Poems. By Ezra Pound. 8vo. 90 pages. Boni and Liveright. $2. T. HE massive isolation of Ezra Pound has probably not been surpassed by that of any other poet in any other generation, and seldom equalled. His latest volume gives final emphasis to his po- sition. Coolly immersed in the meanings, deeds, designs, lustres, and peoples of past ages, he regards the present civilization only for moments, and then with a dryly satirical chuckle. His poetry is equally separated from the understanding and appreciation of his generation. The Dadaists dislike his mental coherence, removed from the monotone of careless humour to which they bow, and the conservatives feebly attack him, a little frightened at his erudition and vicious sneer. Between these extremes he must look in vain for greetings. The radicals among young poets and critics, much con- cerned with the yearnings and turbulence of their day, or with a decorative escape from this turmoil, find him too hard, too dryly aloof. They can take ecstasy from the violently coloured rhetoric of an Amy Lowell—much ado about blues and reds and greens in their relation to overworked emotional significances—or from the chaste miniatures of an H.D., or from the country-lane gossip of a Robert Frost, but Pound, with a cold fire that darts from the intel- lect, cannot arouse their desire. He insults the surface importance of their own time and their noisily confident relation to this impor- tance; he deals for the most part with past centuries and their con- trast with the present one; and his style demands a feverish mental agility on the part of his reader. This combination does not appeal to a young generation that seeks its wisdom from shallower and more brightly tinted substances. His opaque isolation is one of carved metal standing apart from the thin transparencies of a contemporary world, and this position is sternly disclosed in his latest book of verse. Homage to Sextus Propertius, in eleven parts, leads off the vol- ume, but it is the weakest in the collection. Suggested by the Latin of Propertius, this poem has a wearisome length that obeys no vis- ible purpose save to indicate Pound's deliberate fondness for the par- а а 88 ISOLATION OF CARVED METAL a a ticular subject-matter at hand—a fondness which in this instance -a lures him into the polishing of many barren details. Since Pound is noted for the unusual freedom of his translations—a practice that might be profitably adopted by other translators from the Greek and Latin-his poem should be considered as an original creation rising from the hidden foundation of the original work, and indeed, its wording carries the unmistakable stamp of his own style and mental peculiarities. It deals with a Roman's love for a woman, interspersed with passages in which he comments on Roman and Grecian cus- toms, morals, politics, and legends. The result, a mixture of infor- mative volubility and lyrical sensuality, creates a situation in which each element tends to weaken the other, unless one reads the poem twice and effects the separation which has been ignored by the origi- nal text. Considering the poem as two poems, the informative one in which the lover remonstrates with his background is coldly ver- bose, while the more lyrical one is compact, pointed. The latter re- veals a sensuality that is self-possessed even in its moments of great- est ardour—a quality also peculiar to Pound's unsuggested work- a sensuality that does not revel with spontaneous blindness, in a manner so dear to the cheated emotions of most critics, but takes the mind into its confidence, desiring a detached and satirical under- standing. In its better parts the poem shows an utter absence of rhetoric and a hard, agile style that should not be defended if they have not been detected or appreciated. Criticism should display and embellish without expostulating to those whose ears are bestowed upon other matters, for the latter aim is usually futile and always open to corruption. Realizing this I shall also avoid an open expostulation with my- self in regard to why I do not like Langue D’oc, the next series of poems in this book. Wittily and candidly, in the enlightened man- ner of young, modern book-reviewers, I could remonstrate with my- self for a time and then return to an adroit reiteration of my original position, but the sport does not move me. Preferring the straight line, I will state that I do not relish folk-songs and ballads, trans- lated or originals, when they are not accompanied by actual music, for their naïve meaning alone on the printed page fails to reward my mind. Moeurs Contemporaines follows the ballads and atones for them with its mild, dry humour, its faintly smiling sophistication. Pound is one of the few men who understand that if you seek to de- MAXWELL BODENHEIM 89 molish an individual you must do it with an air of abbreviated in- difference. The sneer, when extended and detailed, always leaves an impression of frantic animosity that defeats its own purpose. Pound is a master of the indulgent sneer. Lightly, wearily, he points to his subjects; grimaces a moment; and strolls away. The result . may be unfair to the person criticized, but it is effective. The attitude is a natural one to Pound and indicative of his lit- erary isolation from a contemporary world. To him the business- men, icemen, and housewives, described by American poets and nov- elists with much detail and emotional gusto, are manikins that bare- ly succeed in becoming amusing at times. This attitude is accentu- ated and the reason behind it clarified in the next group of poems, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (Life and Contacts) which is the personal cry of Pound himself. The second part of the opening shows his conception of the background against which his carefully carved iso- lation stands. “The age demanded an image Of its accelerated grimace, Something for the modern stage, Not, at any rate, an Attic grace. "Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries Of the inward gaze; Better mendacities Than the classics in paraphrase! “The ‘age demanded' chiefly a mould in plaster, Made with no loss of time, prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster Or the 'sculpture' of rhyme.” А Neatly, gravely, he sums up the defects and limitations of most present-day literature and art, and the broader spirit of the world from which they emerge. In truth, this age “demands” creations that can be flippant at its own expense without wounding or probing it too deeply, and also asks for a surface realism—"the mould in plaster”—and a feverish succession of gestures that can soothe the prevailing lack of introspective ease. No longer do poets linger over a 90 ISOLATION OF CARVED METAL > their output. Lady Imagists and novelists, much admired by the younger critics of our day, produce a corpulent volume every year, and often two, seemingly engaged in emulating the men who turn out such an alarming abundance of automobiles and collars in a given period. And this literature, like its more substantial competi- tors, is apt to be rather monotonous in texture and content. In the course of his summing-up Pound has written the most condensed and deftly sardonic account of the war and its causes that has so far ap- peared. In thirty-three lines he states the essence of everything that has been written on this subject, compressing the redundant propa- ganda, realistic horrors, and emotional revolts of all war-poems and novels and stripping them to their effective skeleton. From a vari- ety of emotional motives, most of them surface phantoms, men raced into the strident lies of warfare and then returned to the more pas- sive lies and trickeries of peaceful existence. Their daring, forti- tude, and candour exploded with the last roar of the cannons, and those who were still alive returned to the bland subterfuges that had been temporarily abandoned. And the end attained by the dead? Pound answers. “There died a myriad, And of the best, among them, For an old bitch gone in the teeth, For a botched civilization, Charm, smiling at the good mouth, Quick eyes gone under earth's lid. For two gross of broken statues, For a few thousand battered books." a The upheavals and gambles of the present world form a jest to him, and he seeks to escape them by analysing the perfections and ardours of past centuries and by turning his eyes inward upon him- self—"the obscure reveries of the inward gaze.” This latter aim is the driving-power of the four Cantos that close his volume. At a first reading, even a careful one, they are apt to appear obscure, and they will be ignored and derided by those who approach poetry for mental and emotional caresses, and quick affirmations of judgement, MAXWELL BODENHEIM gi a and not for extremes in mental exercise. Given a mind that is not averse to labouring, provided that a kernel lies beneath the hard shells, you can reach the purpose of these poems. They contain the subconscious matter deposited by years of reading and observation in one man's mind, and in their residence in this sub-conscious state they have blended into the man's mental and emotional prejudices and undergone a metamorphosis, in which they became his visualiza- tion and interpretation of past men and events. Legendary heroes, kings, dukes, queens, soldiers, slaves, they live again as this man would have them live, and speak words that are partly his and part- ly their own, in the manner of übermarionnettes. Their fragment- ary and often tangled existence-quick appearances and vanishings -is a distinctive feature of the subconscious state that enclosed them before they were extracted by the poet. The Cantos represent the nervous attempt of a poet to probe and mould the residue left by the books and tales that he has absorbed, and to alter it to an in- dependent creative effect. In places they are far too long, too much a a mere catalogue of names and countries, but their purpose is a valid one, and they break into many a passage of hard beauty. They sym- bolize a quality that rules the work of Ezra Pound—a carved isola- tion from the men and events immediately surrounding him, and a return to the fundamentals of past creations and ages. He is, in- deed, pictured by the last lines of his Seventh Canto: “Eternal watcher of things, Of things, of men, of passions. Eyes floating in dry, dark air'; E biondo, with glass-gray iris, with an even sidefall of hair The stiff, still features." > MAXWELL BODENHEIM HEROISM AND BOOKS ROMAIN ROLLAND, The Man And His WORK. By Stefan Zweig. Translated by Eden and Cedar Paul. Illustrated. 8vo. 377 pages. Thomas Seltzer. $4. Tden HE predicament of the reformer is this: That if people sud- denly take to standing on their heads, he recognizes how egre- giously silly it is to stand on one's head, how many needless casual- ties are caused thereby, and most of all, how much better off the world would be if people stood on their feet. Then he falls to ex- plaining passionately the functions of the feet. Finally certain peo- ple are convinced, turn right side up, and for them, at least, the re- former's value has ceased. He becomes purely a historical turmoil, while the world, having passed him by, goes about contentedly on its knees, or its elbows. In his present volume Stefan Zweig shows plainly that he appre- ciates this fact even in the case of the reformer he is lionizing. Al- ready we find him defending certain things of Rolland's on the ground that they meant so much more when written, owing to their peculiar adaptability to circumstances which have passed. Rolland and his work are interpreted here almost exclusively in terms of the war. Which signifies a tacit assumption on Zweig's part that Rol- land has a greater historical than artistic importance. Yet looked at from this standpoint we find that Rolland preached against the war, and the war came; that he went on preaching, and the war continued; and that ultimately the war stopped owing to the defeat of Germany. Certainly, this is not participating in history. Rolland, as Zweig shows well, was one of the most passionate cham- pions of common sense during the butchery; but it takes a stupid world indeed to make common sense wise. Or to praise him merely for the elevation of his teachings is like praising Wilson for the for- mulation of his fourteen points. A great statesman is one who, with all the complications of office, can maintain those principles of de- cency which are self-evident to any one outside of a madhouse. If Wilson could have upheld the axiomatic simplicity of his peace pro- gramme, his historical importance would be enormous. But as to KENNETH BURKE 93 . the value of the points per se, any number of Hillquit's supporters in New York City could have outlined fourteen better ones. In like manner, I do not see how Rolland can be assigned any un- usual significance in history. In the light of his inestimable sin- cerity, I am discomforted by the brutality of such a statement; yet I feel that the fact, as a fact in nature, is true. Manifestly, to judge Rolland as an artist would have meant to judge the power of his material and the skill of his workmanship, to judge virtues, in other words, which could have been utilized with as much value to glorify war as to denounce it. Zweig, however, turns constantly away from Rolland's methods to rhapsodize on his message. Then taking Tolstoy's creed that genius lies in the power of suffering, he fits Rolland admirably into this definition. I feel a bit abashed at the suggestion, but still I suggest it: That this em- phasis on suffering has made more idiots than it has ever made ar- tists. In Rolland's case it seems to have made an admirable man, a man of unmistakably heroic proportions, a man who really experi- enced agonies over the abstract thought of war, and who was as large in his distress as others have been in their calm. Taking him as a man, Zweig makes him seem authentically a genius; his most convincing pages are written about this phase of his hero. But so far as art is concerned, to quote one especially delicious artist, André Gide, in a sentence which was applied some years back to Octave Mirbeau, it takes a great deal of talent to make genius supportable. And Rolland is seldom talented, unless we except some parts of Colas Breugnon, a book which, significantly enough, Zweig rates as his most important work artistically. What he gives, he pours out upon us: earnestness, bitterness, love of man, what not. Yet all such qualities are the mere starting point of art. It is in the resolution of such things that art-values are to be found; and this resolution might happen to be the modelling of an egg. Zweig, then, has given us here a great deal more of Rolland as a great man than as a great artist, which I think is an excellent testi- mony to Zweig's judgement even under the stress of an egregious enthusiasm. As to the "world-movements” which Rolland deals with, I think we are too often inclined to place the writer of univer- sal history as categorically above the writer of comic opera; obvious- ; ly, it all depends on the history and the орега. KENNETH BURKE DUODECIMO, 250 PP. Of All Things! By Robert Benchley. Illustrated. 12mo. 234 pages. Henry Holt and Company. $1.75. Seeing Things At Night. By Heywood Broun. 12mo. 268 pages. Harcourt, Brace and Company. $2. SINBAD AND His Friends. By Simeon Strunsky. 12mo. 261 pages. Henry Holt and Company. $1.75. THE MARGIN OF HESITATION. By Frank Moore Colby. 12mo. 229 pages. Dodd, Mead and Company. $2. A PARODY OUTLINE OF History. By Donald Ogden Stewart. Illustrated. 12mo. 230 pages. George H. Doran Company. $1.50. The Cruise of the Kawa. By Walter E. Traprock. Illustrated. 8vo. 146 pages. G. P. Putnam's Sons. $2. PastichE AND PREJUDICE. By A. B. Walkley. 12mo. 300 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $3. More Trivia. By Logan Pearsall Smith. 16mo. 140 pages. Harcourt, Brace and Company. $1.60. AND Even Now. By Max Beerbohm. I2mo. 320 pages. $2. The Same. Limited Edition. $3.50. E. P. Dutton and Company. 1 ALTE LL of these writers and their friends have seen the things col- lected in these volumes subjected to the test of print; with the possible exception of Mr Beerbohm and Mr Pearsall Smith, about whose work I cannot be certain, each of them has omitted from his book some of the things he has published. Yet, with these same ex- ceptions, I cannot help feeling that much would have been gained if the authors had been granted exemption from the inexorable law which decrees that a book, to be a book, must contain about two hun- dred and fifty duodecimo pages. The first five items in the tabulation above are the essence of this critical case. a GILBERT SELDES 95 > It is not brevity, but excision, I am asking. Mr Benchley has a genuine sense of the ridiculous; he passes through the semi-intelli- gent world of the business office, the city room, the theatre, with an amused appreciation of its vanities; he takes an absurd pleasure in his grimaces and horseplay not so much because they make others laugh but because they are required of him by the pompous stupidi- ties of civilized existence. Unhappily he has had to fill two hundred and fifty pages with this sort of thing. In half that number he could have published all of his parodies, including the Christmas After- noon, which is very good, From Nine to Five, Football, a few of his little farces, and all of the pages between the flyleaf and the contents page. He would have succeeded in omitting all of the distressing bits quoted by his friends as the best things in the book. Mark Twain's extravagance was slightly mad; Ward's was frequently ma- licious. Mr Benchley's extravagance is usually only over-develop- ment. Forty-two of Mr Broun's one hundred and twenty-five pages could well go to his review of H. 3rd. In the remaining pages he would have room for The Fifty-First Dragon, which he considers his best work, for Inasmuch, which he used to reprint by request, and for A Bolt from the Blue with its magnificent opening chord: “John Roach Straton died and went to his appointed kingdom. .” He could have omitted most of his essays, and retained all of his excellent puns, and kept from the immortality of print those startling and en- dearing artistic judgements which so exactly touch the taste of lit- erary New York. Mr Broun is at his worst when he is trying to be witty and at his best when he is writing a straight narrative or setting down his ideas; for on these occasions his natural humour diverts him and his sane and agreeably original mind discriminates easily be- tween the trivial and the significant. He is a moderately sophisti- cated and intelligent citizen trying to recover his lost innocence, walking endlessly down dark paths in the hope that he will see a ghost and will be sufficiently pure in heart to be afraid. He is al- ways crying for the stars and always clapping his hands for Lionel Atwill. His loyalty to Cortez is charming. Mr Strunsky and Mr Colby are both expert at writing things which later are put into books. The subject of Mr Strunsky's satire is the first cut above the average (he wrote these papers for The New York Evening Post) and the subject of Mr Colby's delicacies is whatever for a moment pretends to be above the average. Both of > . a 96 DUODECIMO, 250 PP. them, I fear, are slightly obscurantist. They clearly intend to supply correctives for excessive faith in The New Republic or excessive con- tempt for Harold W. McChambers; but they are really supplying ammunition to The Weekly Review (fuit, I know) and to The Book- man. Fierce and holy indignation exists for neither of them; they stroll amok, but neither of them resents a decent, gentle spurt of blood when the dagger is withdrawn. If these books were reduced to one-half a few dull pages would go. The writing of each is tidy and clear. The Cruise of the Kawa and Mr Stewart's parody of everybody except Mr Wells are entertaining burlesques. I am not impressed by the identifications of the former and am a little tired of hearing one paragraph of the latter cited as proof that the book is a great piece of parody. Both of them are too long. The alertness of mind which suggested the subject, and in Mr Stewart's case the precision in which episode and author are combined, are admirable. To find, in a series of pastiches and occasional pieces reprinted from a daily paper, a discussion of the technique of Henry James as lucid, intelligent, and illuminating as the same discussion in Dr Percy Lubbock's Craft of Fiction, is a little startling. It makes you wish that Mr Walkley, who is a civilized human being and appre- hends life intelligently, would not have published in 1921 certain papers on the cinema which must have been written in 1900, and would have omitted the laboriously ingenious series of pastiches which only proves that even the Pickwick Papers might have been stupid if anyone other than Dickens had written them. A friend should direct the attention of Mr Pearsall Smith to the advertisement of his book: "so full of human wisdom, compacted of grace and humour and whimsicality, and yet wholly in touch with life and all it holds." With this book, and Mr Beerbohm's And Even Now, I have arrived at the collections which stand outside the law of two hundred and fifty pages; not all of their pages are equally fine, but I would not have missed one of them for a great deal. GILBERT SELDES THE ANALYSIS OF MIND The ANALYSIS OF MIND. By Bertrand Russell. 8vo. 310 pages. The Macmillan Company. $4.50. AM MONG his many other distinguished accomplishments Mr Russell has learned unwittingly to do one thing that has been the despair of other philosophical writers and that is the way to baf- fle his critics. His rapid transitions from one scientific field to an- other can be followed only by the boldest of scholars. His familiar- ity with mathematics and mathematical logic will keep him from ever sharing the tea-room popularity of Bergson. He is the one modern philosophic writer who is as much at home in the principles underlying physics as in those that are basic to logic, metaphysics, and philosophy as a whole. English training and background some- how produce broader philosophical scholars than our American at- mosphere. The present writer confesses his own inability adequate- ly to review the present volume. All he can do is to single out bits of the book which he can understand and which interest him. In The Analysis of Mind Mr Russell comes into closer contact with psychology than in any of his previous writings. He shows quite clearly that he has read much of American psychology. He is apparently in sympathy with the trend of psychology towards be- haviourism-indeed behaviourism influences considerably the first half of his book. Behaviourism, it may be said in passing, is a move- ment in psychology which started eleven or twelve years ago. Its primary thesis is that psychology can be studied with accuracy only by observing what other people do. If its data were all at hand the behaviourist would be able to tell after watching the individual what the situation or stimulus is that caused his action (prediction): whereas if society decreed that the individual or group should act in a specific way the behaviourist could arrange the situation or stimu- lus which would bring such action about (control). Mr Russell states in his preface that his book has grown out of an attempt to harmonize the behaviourist school of psychology which, as may be inferred, rejects the whole concept of conscious- ness, and the recent movement in physics initiated by Einstein and 98 THE ANALYSIS OF MIND other exponents of the theory of relativity. The behaviourist school. according to Mr Russell, “make psychology increasingly dependent upon physiology and external observation, and tend to think of mat- ter as something much more solid and indubitable than mind.” The physicists, on the other hand, have been making matter less and less material. “Their world consists of 'events' from which ‘matter' is derived by logical construction.” Modern physics lends no support to old-fashioned materialism. Putting it in terms that most of us can understand, Mr Russell attempts to answer the world-old question: What is it that charac- terizes mind as opposed to matter? How is psychology to be distin- guished from physics? Without attempting at this point to follow Mr Russell through any of his intricate arguments we find that he solves the problem, for himself at any rate, by reaching the conclu- sion that psychological and physical phenomena are distinguished by the nature of their causal laws. In the course of reaching this conclusion he modifies our concepts of both physics and psychology. Sensations for him are not neces- sarily conscious phenomena at all and are not necessarily psychologi- cal data, but common both to physics and psychology. The only tru- ly psychological subject matter is images. The laws of their causa- tion are different from those underlying sensation and are different from the laws that govern inert matter. Up to this point the behaviourist and Mr Russell have travelled a common road chatting amicably together. Mr Russell suddenly be- gins to feel that the behaviourist is no longer an adequate companion and leaves him abruptly. The behaviourist feels no need of images either for memory or for thought-holding that the faint throat, chest, and laryngeal movements (movements used in speaking but too small to cause sound or to be objectively observed) actually con- stitute thought-recollection, conception, and imagery. In other words, that these acts differ from tennis playing only by virtue of the fact that the muscles that are at work are concealed from the ob servation of the observer. The behaviourist points out that this hy- pothesis is simpler than any other hitherto advanced that it is ade- quate to account for all the problems which it is called upon to solve —that it has some support from experiment while the other views have not, and is in line with what we know of nervous system activ- ity. Furthermore this hypothesis avoids the usual break between the JOHN B. WATSON 99 data of physiology and those of psychology and throws out of count the very problem that Mr Russell sets himself to solve, namely, the relation of mind to matter. For behaviourism this problem becomes a purely artificial problem. In his preface Mr Russell says psychol- ogy on this basis is materialistic. The behaviourist's answer is that it does not concern him. The behaviourist and the physicist, so far as they use scientific methods, work equally under any metaphysical régime be it idealism, materialism, or realism. Almost at the point where Mr Russell leaves the broad highway of the physical sciences he slips rapidly into the old slough of de- spond -subjectivism—at least so far as his method is concerned. Thus, when he begins to look for imagery, recollection, memory, be- lief, and meaning he finds them, of course, because, having made use of the assumption of the introspectionists, even the self-limited ones like Mr Russell, he has put these things "under the piano” before he began to look there. On page 27 he is candid and brave enough to say after describing what some of the behaviourists say about the identity of thought and language: “It is humiliating to find how ter- rib!y adequate this hypothesis turns out to be.” We are deeply dis- appointed that he finally decided to withdraw from our company but we feel that his defection is due to the fact that his training and habits of mind keep him turned to the notion of the image and are far stronger than any logical need for it on his part. All philosophy, logic, and epistemology is shot through with this notion. To give it up means scrapping many if not all of our present philosophical for- mulations. The destruction seems like vandalism and Mr Russell, I believe, temporizes by clinging to the image. If he had been willing to live behaviourism for two years, working on its hypothesis he would have given us we believe a metaphysical science that would have included all of the behaviouristic tenets. This metaphysical task must and will be done by someone—and preferably by Mr Russell. Had he done this the behaviouristic school would have been more grateful to him even than they now are for being the first philosopher to yield them their place in the sun. Mr Russell has always been progressive enough to change his views when he felt that a change was in line with progress. Has something new been discovered about the image (the basis on his view really of thought, memory, meaning, belief, et cetera) which has so enhanced its importance that he is willing to set it aside as be- 100 THE ANALYSIS OF MIND a longing to a purely mental realm with laws all of its own? To an- swer this let us glance for a moment at how sensations are caused. On the law of causation of sensations he quotes Stout: “One char- acteristic mark of what we agree in calling sensation is its mode of production. It is caused by what we call a stimulus. A stimulus is always some condition external to the nervous system itself and oper- ating upon it.” “I think,” says Mr Russell, “that this is the correct view and that this distinction between images and sensations can be made by taking account of their causation.” Sensations as we know come through the sense organs, while images do not. According to our author we cannot have visual sensations in the dark. Thus sen- sations have an exciting cause but images do not necessarily. On the question as to whether they have not a centrally exciting cause through cortical stimulation (that is through activity initiated in the brain and not by a sense organ) Mr Russell says this is assuming more than is necessary because it takes for granted (page 150) that an image must have a proximate physiological cause. He admits that this may be true, but he prefers to say that images have mnemic causes. He illustrates this: if you listen to a man playing the pianola without looking at him you will have images of his hands on the keys as if he were playing the piano; if you suddenly look at him while you are absorbed in the music, you will experience a shock of surprise when you notice that his hands are not touching the keys. You are here in the region, so far as the production of images is con- cerned, of mnemic causation as opposed to ordinary physical causa- tion. Sensations on the other hand will have only physical causes. The prevailing school in psychology, the parallelists (Titchener, Angell, Pillsbury) hold that brain modifications or patterns laid down by perceptual activity when aroused by whatever means are ac- companied by appropriate images. Mr Russell is not willing to ad- mit the necessity of such a hypothesis, at least until the evidence grows stronger. The behaviourist at this point would like to register a protest against Mr Russell's reasoning on the image. He believes that he can show that what Mr Russell and most psychologists call the "image" has a definite proximate physical cause as truly as does “sensation.” While he has not definitely formulated his position on the image up to now except to deny it in the sense in which it is sup- posed to exist, that is, as a centrally aroused process, he has no trou- ble in finding a means for providing an actual visual stimulus as part 1 JOHN B. WATSON 101 a a of the complex of stimuli which arouse a total reaction to an object not present to the senses. Dunlap, although not a behaviourist, first pointed to the way by claiming that the so-called visual image is only an associated eye muscle strain (muscular "sensation”). In other words, when you are thinking of a definite object (not present to the senses) which the eye has been trained on, "imaging” it, the eye muscle adjustment takes place actually (though faintly) as though you were seeing the object. The behaviourist without giving up his premises—to the effect that a sense organ stimulus is always present in any reaction-admits the associated muscular adjustment of Dunlap and also conditioned reflex eye muscle responses (which may have a different origin from the associated) and if necessary can go still further and say that the associated and conditioned reflex muscular responses in the eye may bring about just enough tension upon the eyeball, and hence upon the retina, to start faint retinal ac- tivity. It is well known that phosphenes, rings of light, “stars," flashes of light, can be produced by pressure and by electric stimula- tion of the eye. The behaviourist can go still further and maintain that in a normal person the retina is a sense organ of such delicate chemical and physical structure and balance that optical sensory im- pulses are always passing towards the brain. He might even argue that centrifugal nerve fibres keep the retina constantly stirred up and supplement in this respect the work done by associated eye muscle responses in causing the arousal of actual retinal impulses. In other words, on the behaviourist's hypothesis, the cause of the "image” falls under Mr Russell's definition, quoted from Stout: it has a perfectly good stimulus external to the nervous system and act- ing upon it. So if he grants this he must admit that there is no pure- ly mental world only the world of "sensation” which is common property both to physics and psychology—the neutral stuff out of which both are constructed (Holt). This would throw him back upon his old position, namely that of the realist, since he admits that he is a realist with respect to sensation. a But as we have seen, Mr Russell refuses to admit that there is an external stimulus in the case of the image. So, far from helping the behaviourist, he rather has made his road more difficult by throwing the weight of his undoubted authority on the side of the existence of this image, which like Banquo's ghost will not submit to a quiet and permanent burial. What does Mr Russell mean by mnemic causation, which is a men- 102 THE ANALYSIS OF MIND tal law? Merely that the “burnt child dreads the fire.” In other words, whenever in order to explain a present reaction (presence of image, memory, or even where sensation details are filled) you have to take account of the past history of the organism, you have an ex- ample of mnemic phenomena. Past occurrences in addition to the present stimulus and the present ascertainable condition of the or- ganism enter into the causation of the present response. Given A, B, and C in the past, together with X now; cause Y now. A, B, and C are the mnemic cause, whereas X is the present occasion or stimulus. Recollection is the clearest case of it in man. A present stimulus leads you to recollect certain occurrences. There is nothing in our minds when the recollection is not occurring to show that we have such memories. We say they are latent. The question is sometimes put in this way: where are our memories of childhood when we are not actually remembering them? Psychologists hitherto have fallen back upon the view that when we are seeking a cause for the order and arrangement of our ideas or images we have to go back to mat- ter, namely modifications laid down in the nervous system. Mr Russell admits this may be true but he says it is a pure assump- tion. If it is true the brain of a man who has seen New York must differ from that of the man who has only seen pictures of it. Such a line of argument as Mr Russell uses here is a strange one to a laboratory man. So far does he carry his hypothesis that he finally says: "But the evidence seems so far from conclusive that I do not think we ought to forget the other hypothesis, or to reject en- tirely the possibility that mnemic causation may be the ultimate ex- planation of mnemic phenomena.” If Mr Russell means what I think he means here he is not so far away from Berkeley as he sup- poses. Possibly a better way to put it is that he is a psychophysical parallelist with the physiological parallel largely if not entirely sup- pressed. I say this with some hesitation since the author expressly denies the usefulness of parallelism. Everyone who reads the book is impressed by the fact that Mr Russell's mind is i