n a transitional stage. His mind is so open that
the behaviourists have hopes of convincing him that he is wrong
about the image. Having done so, they further hope that when he
comes to write his “true metaphysic” he will take them along with
him to the journey's end.
JOHN B. WATSON


BRIEFER MENTION
IF WINTER COMES, by A. S. M. Hutchinson (12mo, 415 pages; Little, Brown:
$2) is a highly popular novel, highly praised by many well known critics.
Without perversity one may record the fact that Oliver Onions established,
or developed, the genre many years ago; to such an extent that the trial of
Mark Sabre is entirely in accordance with the evidence. It is a neatly plot-
ted work, well written in the English manner, which is not half bad, and
everything in it is seen through deliberately tearless eyes. The title of the
book suggests that the disposition of light and shade must be highly Dicken-
sian, and so it is, for the freshets of Spring burst full on the hero when Win-
ter is at its darkest. Mr Boom Bagshaw and the antiphonal daughters of
Mr Fargus are highly humorous and there are moments of life for each
character, but not enough.
To Let, by John Galsworthy (12mo, 317 pages; Scribners: $2) completes
with gravity and distinction and a deep tone of despair what Mr Galsworthy
himself calls the Forsyte saga. The social implications of these books are
clearer to British readers; the last of the series seems as certain, as skilfully
constructed, as affectingly sentimental, as any of those which preceded. Yet
this, possibly, is the one in which another method of presentation might have
been used, in which everything could have been seen by Soames, as every-
thing centres round him. He is a singularly perceptive character, and every-
thing important in the story of the Forsyte properties and of the Forsyte
loves, might have been most effectively rendered through him. The shifting
of centres, however, permits an easy presentation of the Romeo and Juliet
theme which is essential to the working of the plot.
AUTUMN, by Robert Nathan (8vo, 198 pages; McBride: $1.75) gives us
homespun philosophy and sentiment by a man who seems to have read much.
"Sorrow,” says Mr Jeminy from whose plaintive lips the philosophy flows,
“is the emotion of a gentle and courageous spirit," and the book rather
luxuriates in that emotion, a more sophisticated Thanatopsis done into
prose. Its author has felt profoundly the autumnal charm of a dying coun-
tryside, and has assimilated certain reflections of saint and sage; but there
is in the book some evidence of that definite act of the spirit which brings
forth a new thing out of its assimilated experience and wisdom.
The China SHOP, by G. B. Stern (12mo, 286 pages; Knopf: $2.50) is the
story of one who was obsessed by a name—by three generations bearing that
name, each of which became a challenge to his own freedom. The first
shadowy Larry is immeasurably more effective than the second, the rival,
equal in years to the narrator; the third is a highly dramatic expedient. It
is only in the fairly delicate implications of the boyhood friendship of the
two children that the book is noteworthy; the plot is better than good melo-
drama ; the atmosphere, created with much difficulty, fades into that of four
or five other contemporary English novels.


104
BRIEFER MENTION
THE GIRLs, by Edna Ferber (12mo, 374 pages; Doubleday, Page: $1.75).
Since the literary centre of America seems to have shifted from Boston to
Chicago, Edna Ferber's new book has at least a geographical interest. It is
a character study, fashily written, with an endless enumeration of unin-
teresting detail in the lives of three women. There are a few articles of
underwear used by the modern flapper that F. Scott Fitzgerald forgot to
mention and now Miss Ferber has beaten him to it-or them. The book
is plotless, leaving one with the disappointed feeling that Edna Ferber has
sold her narrative gift for a mess of mannerisms.
SIGNS AND WONDERS, by J. D. Beresford (12mo, 151 pages; Putnam: $1.75).
Beresford is an incorrigible experimenter. Whether he will ever succeed in
hewing out a form of his own is a question. Some of these stories, The Per-
fect Smile, for instance, are reminiscent of Hawthorne, except that they
stand out in the indiscriminate light of noonday, instead of being invested
with a fantastic garment of light and shadow. All of them show his ca-
pacity for wonder, his habit of speculation, his inveterate striving to drag a
new idea out of the formless void and to crystallize it in words. In all of
them the artist is subsidiary to the man playing with his ideas. They are
not emotionally fused, but it is almost out of place to mention the fact for
these stories and sketches are too abstract for emotion in any case.
THE BRIARY BUSH, by Floyd Dell (12mo, 425 pages; Knopf: $2.50) fulfils
the promise of chaos and failure which was by no means the most obvious
thing in The Moon Calf. If one may join for a moment the hortatory
school of critics one would say to Mr Dell, “Drop everything and read
Henry James."
9
DANGEROUS Ages, by Rose Macaulay (12mo, 242 pages; Boni & Liveright:
$2). This very "spotty" novel is an effort to reflect the approach to life of
youth, middle age, and old age. The result is that the twenties, the thirties,
the forties, the sixties, and the eighties are represented by types rather than
by individuals, and that the only genuine thing in the book is the author's
insistence on the episodic character of "human life on this minute and
perishing planet." One concludes the volume with a certain sympathy for
Pam, who has the last word: "'I certainly don't see quite what all the fuss
is about,' said Pamela."
THE LAUGHING Prince, by Parker Fillmore (illus., 12mo, 286 pages; Har-
court, Brace: $2.50) is a collection of southern Slavic stories, told in simple
and engaging and fluent English, almost entirely in the authentic manner of
the great tellers of fairy tales. Once in a while there is a lapse into arch-
ness, but it is quickly corrected. The nonsense story and the story of the
little lame fox (a parallel to Mr Moore's Peronnik the Fool) are eternal
fairy story stuff; others give more the feeling of the locality and the folk
which produced them; they are admirable stories to read aloud. Mr Jay
Van Everen's pictures are successful adaptations of an individual, thor-
oughly modern style, notable for expressive treatment of mass and form, to
the purposes of fantasy.


BRIEFER MENTION
105
KING COLE, by John Masefield ( 12mo, 87 pages; Macmillan: $1.50). While
his latest narrative poem lacks the vividness and force of Reynard or the
Round-House, and does not quite attain to the poetic vibrance of the son-
nets, in King Cole Masefield reasserts his authentic gift. The story itself
is unimportant—as trivial and as perfect as a fairy-tale whose hero and
heroine live happily ever after. Yet it carries one along with the gay and
leisurely progress of the circus-van around which it is built. There are
passages of genuine glamour. There is the recurrent note of grief touched
with beauty which often makes Masefield's work "Lovely as evening stars
o'er seas in trouble.” And, in spite of too many laming inversions and an
occasional lapse into easy sentimentality, there is the magic of life intimate-
ly sensed and resonantly recreated. The illustrations by the poet's daugh-
ter are so neutral in character as not to mar a text which they do not help.
THE PIER-GLASS, by Robert Graves (16mo, 63 pages; Knopf: $1.25). Graves
seems to have built himself a house of fantasy, furnished it with ballad
themes, decked it out with patterns familiar to his readers, and then quietly
gone to sleep in it. With very few exceptions, The Pier-Glass affords un-
interesting variants on earlier whimsies and leaves no freshened image nor
quickened thought. If the poet does not soon wake up and go out walking
he must resign himself to a slumber undisturbed by critical attention.
THE GOLDEN DARKNESS, by Oscar Williams (12mo, 76 pages ; Yale Uni-
versity Press : $1.25). This tenth volume from the Yale Series of Younger
Poets belongs to the series too obviously to be anything more than promis-
ing. It is, however, that. In spite of a preoccupation with death and sin
which render the volume not only rather naïve but quite monotonous, the
young poet has managed to convey something of his emotion and his thought
in phrases which are more striking and memorable than either. He is, if
anything, too completely lyrical.
A PENNY Whistle, by Bert Leston Taylor (16mo, 129 pages; Knopf: $1.50)
reveals a light verse talent no longer hidden under the bushel of daily jour-,
nalism. In his tenderer moods, a kinship with Eugene Field and R. L. S.;
in his topical themes, a deft and satirical touch. It is the posthumous work
of the colyumnist deservedly the best loved and most admired by his fellow-
professionals.
Nets To CATCH THE WIND, by Elinor Wylie (12mo, 47 pages; Harcourt,
Brace: $1.50). Between the covers of her first volume Miss Wylie has
tried to catch something as cold as wind and as hot as fire. She recalls the
imagery of Blake, the intensity of Emily Dickinson, and she remains secure
in her individual approach. She is a more attentive technician than either
of the artist-mystics whom her work most clearly recalls. But she is little
less immediate for that. Her nets are strong and subtle. The wind she
catches sometimes breathes of storm and stars. Naturally, not all the poems
strike the high places of The Eagle and the Mole, Escape, Valentine, Sun-
set on the Spire. But any of these would give distinction to any first
volume of verse.


106
BRIEFER MENTION
TWENTY-FOUR PORTRAITS, by William Rothenstein (large 8vo, unnumbered ;
Harcourt, Brace: $7.50) are, many of them, already well known. They are
beautifully reproduced here in collotype, and each of the subjects is faced
with a gently appreciative page of text. There is neither malice nor criti-
cism in the letterpress, nor is there in the fine studies which Mr Rothenstein
has made. This is one of the few well-made books of this season; internal
evidence is that it was made in England.
EDGE OF THE JUNGLE, by William Beebe (8vo, 294 pages; Holt: $2.50). The
publishers tell us that Mr Beebe's poetic and unusual point of view has re-
minded reviewers in turn of Fabre, W. H. Hudson, Kipling, Stevenson,
Burroughs, and Thoreau. In that case the reviewers do this writer an in-
justice. He is no placid imitator of other men's excellences, although he
writes in the prettified harness of the quality magazine essay. His prose is
sonorous and imaginative rather than nervous, and like all imaginative
prose which tries continually to go beyond its own limitations, becomes
sometimes overblown and ridiculous, as when he calls the pocket lens the
infant of the miscroscope; but his lapses are few and forgivable. Also it
must be added that when he leaves the jungle to comment on the Bolsheviki
and their like, he gasps for breath like a fish out of water. In his own prov-
ince, however, he is wholly delightful. He meditates upon an army ant or
a jungle beach until he makes the first more significant than any hero of a
last season's best seller, and vividly recreates the mysterious charm of the
other.
a
The FRUITS OF VICTORY, by Norman Angell (12mo, 338 pages; Century:
$3) is a controversial book by the leading publicist (except those who are
dramatists) of our moment. Since most people refute Mr Angell without
troubling to read him, he has made his book vivid, readable, and on the of-
fensive. The offensive is strategic enough but it does not entirely conceal a
few confusions of thought, some of them neatly exposed in a recent issue of
The New Age. Yet the book is commendable and one sentence in it ought
to be immortal:"the worst features of the Treaty were imposed by popular
feeling.” The incidence of popular feeling in a society governed by engines
of publicity is worth studying.
Mr Punch's HISTORY OF MODERN ENGLAND, by Charles L. Graves (2 vol.,
8vo, 662 pages; Stokes : $10). Two further volumes of this seriously en-
tertaining document are still to be issued; they will complete the story of the
change from “the most honourable phase of Punch's history, his champion-
ship of the poor and oppressed” to the Punch which devoted a full page,
during the war, to a cartoon on the German corpse-reclaiming-lubricant-fac-
tory. One thinks of lapses in Punch to avoid excessive sentiment about its
remarkably steady high humour; and the completed four volumes will do
nothing to subtract from the opinion given by these two, of a social chron-
icler and satirist unequalled in the Anglo-Saxon world. The History is one
of the few essential books which are also readable, and they are no less val-
uable to the historian than to the intelligent man who refuses to live im-
mured in one age with so many others to minister to his sense of the past and
to the multiplication of his pleasures.


BRIEFER MENTION
107
DECADENCE AND OTHER ESSAYS ON THE CULTURE OF IDEAS, by Remy de
Gourmont, translated by William Aspenwall Bradley (12mo, 231 pages;
Harcourt, Brace: $2). As an essayist, de Gourmont's virtue lies in his dis-
covery that ideas are regularly coupled for accidental reasons, rather than
through any inherent or logical affinity. Thus, by analysing the accident,
we break the connexion. The process is laid down fully in the opening
essay of this volume. The following essays are devoted to applying the
process. . There are certain writers whose work could be summed
up in a sentence; and others whose individual books could be summed up in
a sentence; but with de Gourmont, one could not even sum up one of his
paragraphs in a sentence. Suffice it, therefore, to cite at random: artistic
excellence is in no way connected with greatness, which is an accident of
society; the word “decadence” means the exact opposite of “decay"; "an
ignorant mass forms a magnificent reserve of life in a people," whereas uni-
versal education aims at "an immense field of little flowers which exhausts
the earth's vigour for the sake of a senseless effulgence." .. In all,
this is a representative—and excellently translated—volume of essays by
the greatest of diagnosticians.
A DEFENCE OF PHILOSOPHIC DOUBT, by the Rt. Hon. Arthur James Balfour
(12mo, 355 pages; Doran: $5). After showing how the law of universal
causation is accepted on faith—for it is inferred from the accumulation of
particular instances, while these particular instances can be taken as evi-
dence only if "what we have observed is not due to chance or the accidental
collocation of causes, but to the direct operation of causation"—the author
goes on to entangle science in its own premises. At each step he modifies
his position as some new phase of the logic of science becomes untenable,
and in the end, when he has slain every one, the most rebellious must lay
low as he directs his thoughts in peace to ethics and religion. In the Rt.
Hon. Mr Balfour science has found a very troublesome Zeno.
THE REIGN OF RELATIVITY, by Viscount Haldane (12mo, 430 pages; Yale
University Press: $5). The greatest lesson that philosophy can yield to-day
“is that the relativity of knowledge has among its consequences this, that
all forms of knowledge are reconcilable if construed as aspects within one
entirety.” Reality is one with its meaning, subject and object are indenti-
cal; but whereas complete knowledge is foundational to reality, we divide
them owing to our finite methods of approach. Thus, if we can never quite
catch up with knowledge, we are at least on the heels of it, in opposition to
the old "bifurcation" principle of primary and secondary qualities, where-
by man could not know reality at all, but merely that distortion which the
one who saw made of the thing seen. God, then, is the pyramiding of knowl-
edge, while “the consciousness of man is not a different thing from the con-
sciousness of God." But if knowledge is foundational to reality, then val-
ues are also foundational to reality; thus, beginning with relativity, we see
the way out towards absolute standards. In all approaches, however, we
must think in terms of the one genre of approach ; life, that is, manifesting
a purposive activity, cannot be interpreted in terms of causality, which is a
concept of physics. All approaches, by remaining strictly within their
proper terms, will be found to lead towards knowledge.


MODERN ART
S.A
OME people think that criticism consists in shouting an inces-
sant“No” and after a month of goings up and down Fifth Ave-
nue I almost begin to agree with them. Certainly, after seeing the
art shows of the moment, I feel the strongest possible inclination to
practice what these precisians preach. I'd like to say one loud “No”
from the roof tops and call that my review of the early art season's
output.
But, unfortunately, I had bargained in advance for three pages of
space; three pages might be filled up entirely by the mere list of
the exhibitions that we have had. We have been busy, but alas!
not to a purpose. One of our museums—to be named later-has
made a commendable effort to catch up with the times in one of its
departments; one of our millionaires has spent a shocking sum of
money in acquiring a picture that Sir Joshua Reynolds in his day did
not approve of; and one of our younger artists has improved some-
what upon his past performances. But there is nothing of a con-
structive nature to be signaled, no new spirit either sacred or profane
seems to be struggling for human expression, and nobody has talked
about anything. To be sure, the art season, like the racehorse Mid-
dlestride in Mr Sherwood Anderson's story, takes some time in
which to untrack itself, but unlike Middlestride it doesn't inspire
bystanders with the belief that it ever could go some were it once to
start. The "fat weed that roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf,” a
weed that was new to Shakespeare else he would have named it for
us, will be rooting itself all over our art season, if we don't watch
out. And by that I don't mean that the Academy will be owning
the whole place, either. On the contrary, the poor old Academy
seems to be withering away into thin air—which constitutes still an-
other worry for me. I hold that the Academy has a very real use not
only as a rejector but as a contrast for live issues. Live issues must
always be rejected at first by somebody, else how are we to know
they are live issues? And whose job is this so distinctly as the Acad-
emy's? No, the Academy must be kept up at all costs, and I believe
I am right in promising the aged institution, that if things become
too desperate, the modernists, who however are notoriously not rich,


HENRY MCBRIDE
109
will back it to the limit. They will do everything, I am sure, that
Christians can do, except exhibit with it.
The BROOKLYN MUSEUM undertook a commendable task and suc-
ceeded with it. It put on an exhibition of representative water-
colours by Americans that decidedly appealed to the native pride.
It was not only the best collection of such things that had ever been
seen here, but a few of us felt that we should like to call a confer-
ence of the other nations and ask them if they could do as well.
Somebody connected with the Museum's staff did good work. The
series of drawings began with what we now regard as our classics,
the works of Winslow Homer, Robert Blum, and John La Farge,
and continued without omitting any of the conspicuous figures of
the day, until it encountered such causes of war as John Marin,
Charles Demuth, Arthur B. Davies, and Charles Burchfield—and
never flinched. It included them, and others of the like; and aston-
ishing to say, the effect of the rooms was not riotous, but partook of
true museum sobriety.
However, I am not too eager to get these new people into the mu-
seums, or into such museums as we have at present. They do not
shine there. It is too soon to hang Marins and Demuths on the same
wall with Homer and La Farge, although eventually it can and will
be done with impunity. Homer and La Farge are sharply identified
with their periods, but Demuth and Marin are still young men and
the period they live in cannot be defined by anybody. To fold them
up and frame them away into the mummified atmosphere of a Met-
ropolitan Museum, whilst still alive, would be inartistic, to say the
least. Had we a trying-out place, a Luxembourg, where they could
be backed up by all their own crowd of hustling contemporaries, it
would be different. The Brooklyn Museum, faute de mieux,
wouldn't be a bad Luxembourg; although, unfortunately, it has so
much individuality that it would never consent to play what it
would consider second fiddle to the Metropolitan. As a Luxem-
bourg, you know, it would be forced to cough up its best Marins and
Demuths, after twenty years, to the Metropolitan. Fancy the
Brooklyn Museum ever doing that! But there is no doubt that
Brooklyn, for some reason, has an aptitude for the modern. Only
a few
years ago, it got up an exhibition of American oils that was
surprisingly resourceful, liberal, and representative, although it did,


110
MODERN ART
it is true, turn the door that time against the very new men. It was
such a show, though, that could be recommended to the foreigners
passing through town, as giving our measure. At present, we've no
such show.
We've simply got to have a Luxembourg some of these days.
C. BERTRAM HARTMAN is the young artist I referred to as having
improved upon himself. He has been doing the New York scene
and has been doing it boldly and with communicable enjoyment.
Rudolph Ruzicka, known for his wood prints, has also been doing
the New York scene, and has also improved upon himself. These
two are as different as possible. Mr Ruzicka works with the finesse
of a jeweller although his effects are sure and intelligent and never
fussy. Mr Hartman, on the contrary, takes our amazing down-town
structures in such masses that he scarcely deigns to put a window
in. Mr Hartman ascended to some of the highest of our roofs and
looked down upon the next highest buildings so that his perspective
lines were presumed to meet in the centre of the earth. The fact
that he was doing the unusual evidently exhilarated him, and his
drawings, as I said before, had a new strength. Mr Ruzicka’s New
York views, however, sold better. The little red stars were thick
upon
the frames in his exhibition at the Anderson Galleries. And
deservedly so, too.
From foreign parts we have had but two collections. The Bel-
maison Gallery at Wanamaker's brought forwards all that is agitat-
ing in the Paris of the present. There was a great turn-out of our
intellectuals to see what might have happened since Matisse. They
made the acquaintance of an interesting person named Chirico whose
picture called Les Deux Soeurs, portraying apparently two deep-sea
divers, in the costumes of their metier, with oxygen tubes, et cetera,
seemed to suggest that the artist was not far from the path of the
arch-dadaist, Picabia. The abstract paintings of Survage, Utrillo,
,
Herbin, and De Togores, were considered refinements upon things
that had gone before, but not stronger. Braque, Metzinger,
Vlaminck, Matisse, Dufy, Marie Laurencin, and Derain remain the
dominating figures, as they were before.
The other foreign contribution was the work of Frank Burty,
whose landscapes from the Pyrenees met with much quiet appre-
ciation.
HENRY MCBRIDE


MUSICAL CHRONICLE
SCH
CHOENBERG'S Five Orchestral Pieces, presented in New
York for the first time nine years since their publication and
nine years since Sir Henry Wood performed them in London, mod-
elled the sketchy portrait of the enigmatical and piercing singer left
long in us by the inertia of conductors. The bizarre and elusive mu-
sic brought it in upon us with new vehemence that when the uncouth
and wondrous pierrot leaves off theorizing and utters the rustle and
tumult in his choked breast, he becomes as troubling, capricious, and
seraphic an artist as any the world holds to-day. It was the part
ultra-Tristanish, part grotesque, lyricism announced by the Kam-
mersymphonie and the Quartet Op. 7 that, sharpened, clarified, and
given diaphanous pinions, was shaken loose by the Philadelphia Or-
chestra the night late in November. Not that traces of the grating,
wingless, Schoenberg of the nine piano pieces were entirely obliter-
ated. The fifth of the orchestral pieces, like its brethren of Op. 11
and Op. 17, remained heavily aground, an unfriendly, leaden, post-
Brahmsian mass. One was minded of the theorizing, insensitive
state always ready pitfall-like to swallow the Viennese musician.
But, fantastically and abruptly in the first and fourth numbers,
Vorgefühle and Péripétie; ecstatically and with almost painful ten-
derness in Vergangenes and Der Wechselnde Akkord, the instru-
ments gave forth quivering modern life, and made Schoenberg the
penetrating, the subtle, the clairvoyant creator vivid as never before
over us.
Two facets of Schoenberg's originality stand out from the many
fleeting impressions left by the performance. The one remains as a
memory of grotesque starts, abrupt sudden flights of sound, trilling
of brasses in their lower register, fluttering of woodwind, sudden
roaring climaxes of sound, followed by equally sudden silences. They
recall the silent and atrocious music that goes on in the body during
bad quarter hours. A sudden twinge of fear. Another, more pierc-
ing quirk. Then, the dead weight plunged suddenly into the entrails.
The heart jumps a beat, commences pounding. The Schoenberg or-
chestra meshed in the nerves begins a clamour, a mad fiddling, shrill-
ing, and blasting. It was as an image of those states of sick presenti-


112
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
ment that the first of the five pieces became reality. The fourth,
Pérepétie, seemed to imagine another such iron livid hell, one of
those that are about us in the hours when we suddenly find ourselves
caught in an inevitable catastrophe of life; when some unexpected
crushing news is brutally transmitted; when the ruthless decision of
some needed creature strikes us to the earth. Savage tearing arpeg-
gios of brass and woodwind in contrary motion. In the interstices of
the grinding storm, the muted horns sing a voiceless, broken song;
speak some nightmare consciousness of the cruelty of fortune; make
a moment of aching relief in the lashing whirlwind. Again a blow;
a flight of clarinets; and the world topples in.
The other facet that remained underscored was Schoenberg's al-
most ecstatic voluptuousness. The swooning sensuousness was always
evident in him, even when he used an idiom not yet wholly personal.
It gives the sextet its mordant, soprano-like delicacy, its moonlit tex-
ture. One hears it, grown graver, more biting, in the penultimate
section of the quartet Op. 7. But in the second and third of the five
orchestral pieces, it utters itself with a poignancy grown almost in-
supportable. Schoenberg appears to have inherited all of the refined
burning sensuousness of Wagner, of Debussy, of Scriabine, and to
have expressed it anew. His orchestration has a softness, an aerial
dreaminess of harps, celesta, muted strings that remind one of the
first encounters with the second act of Tristan, with the tower and
murder scenes of Pelléas. A terrific tension expresses itself in him in
slow, overlapping phrases, in almost imperceptible changes of har-
mony, in immense, far-flung chords, that reach far out into overtones.
The celesta murmurs against solo strings; the chord of the wondrous-
ly still, ecstatic third piece twitches rathermore than changes; the
orchestra sings with a strange, contained, many-voiced passion. The
music seems to lead us back into some moment when tenderness be-
came almost a searing flame, an agony; when the whispering voice
became laden with glamour; when the touch of a hand thanked as
no words can. With Schoenberg, it is either ecstasy of pain, or ec-
stasy of pleasure; and the two become wellnigh one.
What in others remains half-conscious, moving like a dim silent
sea, breaking only at moments into definite perceptions, that in
Schoenberg's mind becomes tone. He has some contact; for the
quivering of his fine modern nerves, the delicate perceptions, intima-
tions, the atrocious contractions and stoppage of breath, the singing
of the past in him are issued again into the world as life. What he has
a


PAUL ROSENFELD
113
experienced suddenly becomes the playing of the instruments of the
band, a new melody, rhythm, tone-colour. Gestures appear, that
make him feel certain curves, certain combinations of instruments,
and set him categorically the task of realizing them. It is this im-
perative he is seeking to explain when he says “Der Künstler tut
nichts, was andere für schön halten, sondern nur, was ihm notwen-
dig ist.” He hears in almost epigrammatic rapidity; jumps processes
of relation which to others appear necessary, feels a dominant pitch
in what to others may seem a succession of dissonances. He hears, it
would seem, primarily tone-colour; his instruments play in families;
he has increased the number of clarinets, say, in order to be able to
retain whole passages in a precise timbre. The fragmentariness of
his early work, Verklärte Nacht and Gurrelieder, is transcended.
The life communicated by the music was in every one of the audi-
tors in Carnegie Hall that Tuesday evening. And still, the assem-
blage sat like patients in dentist chairs, submitting resignedly to a
disagreeable operation. What probably deterred from a more posi-
tive expression of distaste was a memory of certain hasty and mis-
taken prejudices, entertained in the same place. None of the audi-
tors was old enough in the flesh to remember the days when the
terrible Dr Hanslick of Vienna had found Wagner's music like the
screeching of tomcats. But everyone there doubtlessly remembered
the days when a certain Richard Strauss, who has since been discov-
ered the tamest of domestic animals, an old dog who likes to lie in the
sun sleepily, blinking, wrote "crazy-music" and was “an anarch of
art.” Still, at the conclusion of the Schoenberg, the entire assem-
blage almost to a man fell into trap neatly laid for them by Dr Sto-
kowski. As the bugle call of Wotan's Abschied sounded, a storm of
clapping arose. Fools! they did not perceive that they were ap-
plauding the very man whose music sounded just as dull and cacoph-
onous to their grandparents as that of the Viennese had but an in-
stant before sounded to them.
It was the old inability to receive the new at the moment when re-
ception is a creative act that was evidenced. The newspaper critics
showed it most. They were like a crowd of morons forced to act, say,
to take a bath. The older ones fell to quoting the Bible. The
younger accused their Mercury of unmentionable things.
Meanwhile, one begins to entertain respect again for Dr Stokow-
ski. If only he would repeat the splendid dose! One might find one-
self admiring him as of yore.
Paul RosenFELD
a
a


THE THEATRE
WH
a
HEN the direction of The Neighborhood Playhouse goes in
for the serious drama it is not always so fortunate as it has
been this year. The revelation of The MADRAS House, in a well
directed and well acted performance, was, to my mind, a more sig.
nificant success than any other production of the season.
Few of those who had read the play suspected that it would have
all its fascination on the stage; and in that few cannot be counted
the producing managers. (I assume that an enterprising agent has
tried to place it before.) For three and a half of its four acts The
MADRAS House was almost breathlessly interesting; and the great-
est interest came in the third act, after the Dickensian humours of
the first act and the drama of the second were thoroughly exhausted.
The appearance of Constantine Madras, a most appealing person
whom Mr Granville-Barker subjected to a fine cruel defeat in the
end, makes that act, in which literally nothing happens, a miniature
masterpiece. The final fifteen minutes of the play are appalling;
they are the highest point reached by the serious drama, I suppose;
they sound like a two-part arrangement of Joan and Peter.
The acting of the piece was capital. The six terrible Huxtables
were handled like a moving picture crowd, with effective flashes for
relief; the principals of the play were in admirable juxtaposition. I
do not think that anything can be done to save Philip Madras in the
last act, and can forgive Mr Gamble for leaving him cold, after
a most promising opening; Mr Rutherford carried Constantine
through to the bitter end, suggesting with much delicacy how pagan-
ism can be wronged by the higher morality without losing its fasci-
nation or its humour. The play was directed with much more life
and variety than one has seen before on this stage, and the other
actors, Miss Carrington, Miss Woodward, Miss Lascelles, and
Messrs Kane and Powers, took advantage of new liberties to display
new restraints and new strength. It was highly entertaining.
I CANNOT say that A BILL OF DIVORCEMENT gave me the same
degree of pleasure. The emphasis was continually shifting about,


THE THEATRE
115
and the fact that Miss Clemence Dane had written a play about
complicated, if not subtle, characters, was taken to warrant the pres-
entation of wholly inconsequent characters. The thought of the
piece is not profound; the drama is swift and effective; and, as here
produced, with Miss Janet Beecher thoroughly left out, Mr Allan
Pollock and Miss Katherine Cornell jumbled and sacrificed all the
emotions they were able to evoke. These were many, for they are
both expert. But I should like to see them in the same play directed
to create a curve of emotion and not a series of points.
a
Mr Irving Berlin's Music Box Revue is the best thing of its
kind since his pre-war productions. It is staged in the usual manner,
with the usual effects, all brought to the highest pitch. I question
Mr Hassard Short's taste in certain places; he seems to have little
sense of time and lets a five minute sketch run fifteen to drive home
its fun; the fun by that time has gone out to see a man about a dog.
Mr Collier and Mr Bernard go through a first act of mad irrelevance
and humour; there are any number of other comics and dancers and
beauties and singers and stunts. Through the whole of it runs Mr
Berlin's music. I find the entire score more inventive and more in-
genious and much less tuneful than that of Stop! Look! Listen!
but I do not think that the composer of All by Myself and Say It
With Music has lost his gift for a pleasing air. He has progressed
from the song to the scene and his destination in some variant of
operetta seems more assured than ever. The particular stage which
he is joining to music sets limitations upon him. He is too enam-
oured of its smartness and knockabout to divorce himself from it.
He has made that stage far more entertaining than most, and I am
grateful to him. But I keep on wishing that he would study the bal-
let of the last ten years or so, particularly abroad, and come back
with his discoveries of freedom.
It may be noted that the theatre in which this revue is housed is
one of the most agreeable buildings in the Longacre district.
Good Morning Dearie is Mr Kern's affair, consistently enter-
taining, the music effective but not exciting, Mr Harlan Dixon's
dancing as always a small miracle, and a well trained special lot of
ponies quite the best in town.
G. S.


COMMENT
“THE
HE earlier announcement by The Dial that it would offer
an annual award of $2,000 in recognition of the service to
letters rendered by some young American writer was important and
intelligent; equally important and intelligent is the first award it-
self, which for 1921 goes to Sherwood Anderson.
If The
Dial's award each year finds an artist so promising and helps assure
him a period of leisure for further work it can become a priceless ele-
ment in American literary life.”
.
The generous and encouraging statement is made by The Nation
and is the first comment to come to us after the announcement of
our award in the press during the first week of December. We have
some reason to hope that it sums up the attitude of intelligent Amer-
icans to the award; for, although we are writing too soon after the
event to have complete returns, we have seen, and wish to acknowl-
edge, the enthusiasm with which the announcement was recog-
nized as news of high significance by both news and literary editors
throughout the country. There has been an immediate recognition
of the essential thing which is not The Dial and not the award as
money and not the suitability of Mr Anderson, but the beginning of
a new relation between the American creative artist and the Ameri-
can people. In furthering that relation The Dial acts only as a me-
dium; it is happily able to do a thing which many thousands of
Americans clearly want to have done.
No one can be more aware than ourselves of the "untouched res-
ervoirs” of indifference and hostility to any manifestation of the
artistic spirit in America. We know that if a work of genius is
neither a scandal nor a stunt, if it happen not to be the very largest
statue ever made and if the sculptor has not last week (but not much
longer than last week) murdered his wife, the American people will
simply not have heard of it. The same thing is probably true of
other countries and our special American case is distinguished by
quite other elements. Centuries of civilization have given other
countries a relatively greater number of people who care with more
intensity for art as a portion of civilized existence. And civiliza-


COMMENT
117
tion or low vitality may have made it possible for their minds to be
not, as ours are, cluttered with trivial and ugly things. The artist
emerges there as a natural phenomenon; with us he is still something
of a portent.
Certain of his place, assured, before he utters his first word, of at-
tention and of intelligent criticism, the artist in a civilized com-
munity is spared the destructive conflict with things which when
they are conquered cannot serve him. His encounters with his time
and place are Antaean; he takes his place as an artist precisely be-
cause he can leave his background without the moral feeling of an
obligation unfulfilled, of having lost his own shadow. The back-
ground, the environment, the circumstance for an artist consists no
less in the demands his contemporaries make upon him than in the
freedom they allow him in selecting the mode of his response. Amer-
ica, for many generations, has been neither generous in its liberties
nor notably severe in its requirements.
It is to the creation of an attentive and critical environment, re-
ceptive and demanding, that The Dial's award testifies. If the ne-
cessity did not exist the award would be an impertinence; if it had
been met by any hostile spirit it would have been simply another
forlorn hope. The actual welcome, both of the award in itself and
of Mr Anderson's name in the connexion, indicates that there is in
America a reasonably large number of individuals who want the
artist to develop freely and who are particularly anxious for him not
to develop in relation to the commerce and publicity which are close
to being the dominating elements of our artistic life.
The encouragement and increase of that community is the condi-
tion of our own success; and just as we bear witness to the indiffer-
ence of millions, we are peculiarly able to report on the steady
growth of the number of those who are so far from indifferent as to
support us practically and morally and with a warming enthusiasm.
We think it is because we put into action their own principles and,
on their behalf, are both asking more of American artists than has
been asked, and allowing more.
We have not considered it necessary to discuss Mr Anderson's
work in this place. Two essays appear elsewhere in this number,
and, in addition to them, we refer our readers to a review by Mrs
Mary M. Colum in The Freeman of November 30th.


118
COMMENT
а
More than a year ago friends of the MacDowell Colony in Peter-
borough began to collect funds to insure the permanence of the work
which has until now depended upon the tireless efforts of Mrs Mac-
Dowell alone. The object has not yet been achieved; meanwhile it
is necessary that there be no break in the continued existence of the
Colony. The connotations of the name may be unhappy, but it is
accurate and there should by this time be no misapprehensions about
its character. It is a settlement, not a group; a place, not a set of
principles. To this place writers, painters, and musicians come to
work. The number which can be received there at any time is lim-
ited and a choice of applicants must be made; we have more than
enough evidence that the selection is liberally made. Those who
come there work as individuals; there is no Peterborough School of
poetry, painting, fiction, dramaturgy, or music; they live under no
institutional scrutiny and there is no artistic assessment of their
achievement while they are there. The weekly payment made by
each Colonist is ludicrously small and the heavy continuing charges
must be met from other sources.
These are the plainest statements and they should suggest a re-
spectful hearing to whatever appeal the friends of the Colony may
make. The place has made it possible for many men and women to
begin or to continue creative work and those who have been there
can report the felicity of its days. The courage and the wisdom
which have carried it through so long can ask that the tradition of
the place remain unbroken.
There seems no reason for believing that the Western govern-
ments will do anything unusual, by which we mean anything in
practical politics, to help Russia this year; while they mature their
plans, or discard them, the Russian social experiment passes through
many phases, few of them clear to us. What is clear is that the ar-
tistic and intellectual life of Russia is threatened with extinction.
If the certainty that whatever one sends will go directly to an artist
can add anything to the urgency of the case, it is now granted. We
have learned from Mr Hoover's relief organization that money may
be earmarked so that its equivalent in food and clothing will go to a
member of any specified profession. Enough has come out of Rus-
sia to suggest the advisability of helping to keep a few more Russian
artists alive.


)



MOVEMENT: NEW YORK. BY JOHN MARIN



THE UNDIAL
IX
VI
W
OXXIII
FEBRUARY 1922
1
I'M A FOOL
BY SHERWOOD ANDERSON
IT
T was a hard jolt for me, one of the most bitterest I ever had to
face. And it all came about through my own foolishness too.
Even yet sometimes, when I think of it, I want to cry or swear or
kick myself. Perhaps, even now, after all this time, there will be
a kind of satisfaction in making myself look cheap by telling of it.
It began at three o'clock one October afternoon as I sat in the
grand stand at the fall trotting and pacing meet at Sandusky,
Ohio.
To tell the truth, I felt a little foolish that I should be sitting
in the grand stand at all. During the summer before I had left my
Home town with Harry Whitehead and, with a nigger named Burt,
had taken a job as swipe with one of the two horses Harry was cam-
paigning through the fall race meets that year. Mother cried and
my sister Mildred, who wanted to get a job as a school teacher in
our town that fall, stormed and scolded about the house all during
the week before I left. They both thought it something disgrace-
ful that one of our family should take a place as a swipe with race
horses. I've an idea Mildred thought my taking the place would
stand in the way of her getting the job she'd been working so long
for.
But after all I had to work, and there was no other work to be
got. A big lumbering fellow of nineteen couldn't just hang around
the house and I had got too big to mow people's lawns and sell news-
papers. Little chaps who could get next to people's sympathies by
their sizes were always getting jobs away from me. There was one
fellow who kept saying to everyone who wanted a lawn mowed or


120
I'M A FOOL
a
a cistern cleaned, that he was saving money to work his way through
college, and I used to lay awake nights thinking up ways to injure
him without being found out. I kept thinking of wagons running
over him and bricks falling on his head as he walked along the
street. But never mind him.
I got the place with Harry and I liked Burt fine. We got along
splendid together. He was a big nigger with a lazy sprawling body
and soft, kind eyes, and when it came to a fight he could hit like
Jack Johnson. He had Bucephalus, a big black pacing stallion that
could do 2.09 or 2.10, if he had to, and I had a little gelding named
Doctor Fritz that never lost a race all fall when Harry wanted him
to win.
We set out from home late in July in a box car with the two
horses and after that, until late November, we kept moving along
to the race meets and the fairs. It was a peachy time for me, I'll
say that. Sometimes now I think that boys who are raised regular
.
in houses, and never have a fine nigger like Burt for best friend, and
go to high schools and college, and never steal anything, or get drunk
a little, or learn to swear from fellows who know how, or come
walking up in front of a grand stand in their shirt sleeves and with
dirty horsey pants on when the races are going on and the grand
stand is full of people all dressed up— What's the use talking about
it? Such fellows don't know nothing at all. They've never had
no opportunity.
But I did. Burt taught me how to rub down a horse and put the
bandages on after a race and steam a horse out and a lot of valuable
things for any man to know. He could wrap a bandage on a horse's
leg so smooth that if it had been the same colour you would think it
was his skin, and I guess he'd have been a big driver too and got to
the top like Murphy and Walter Cox and the others if he hadn't
been black.
Gee whizz, it was fun. You got to a county seat town, maybe
say on a Saturday or Sunday, and the fair began the next Tuesday
and lasted until Friday afternoon. Doctor Fritz would be, say in
the 2.25 trot on Tuesday afternoon and on Thursday afternoon
Bucephalus would knock 'em cold in the "free-for-all” pace. It
left you a lot of time to hang around and listen to horse talk, and
see Burt knock some yap cold that got too gay, and you'd find out
about horses and men and pick up a lot of stuff you could use all


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
121
the rest of your life, if you had some sense and salted down what
you heard and felt and saw.
And then at the end of the week when the race meet was over,
and Harry had run home to tend up to his livery stable business,
you and Burt hitched the two horses to carts and drove slow and
steady across country, to the place for the next meeting, so as to
not over-heat the horses, etc., etc., you know.
Gee whizz, Gosh amighty, the nice hickorynut and beechnut and
oaks and other kinds of trees along the roads, all brown and red,
and the good smells, and Burt singing a song that was called Deep
River, and the country girls at the windows of houses and every-
thing. You can stick your colleges up your nose for all me. I guess
I know where I got my education.
Why, one of those little burgs of towns you come to on the way,
say now on a Saturday afternoon, and Burt says, "let's lay up here.”
And you did.
And you took the horses to a livery stable and fed them, and you
got your good clothes out of a box and put them on.
And the town was full of farmers gaping, because they could
see you were race horse people, and the kids maybe never see a nig-
ger
before and was afraid and run away when the two of us walked
down their main street.
And that was before prohibition and all that foolishness, and so
you went into a saloon, the two of you, and all the yaps come and
stood around, and there was always someone pretended he was
horsey and knew things and spoke up and began asking questions,
and all you did was to lie and lie all you could about what horses
you had, and I said I owned them, and then some fellow said "will
you have a drink of whiskey” and Burt knocked his eye out the
way he could say, offhand like, "O well, all right, I'm agreeable to
,
a little nip. I'll split a quart with you.” Gee whizz.
a
But that isn't what I want to tell my story about. We got home
late in November and I promised mother I'd quit the race horses
for good. There's a lot of things you've got to promise a mother
because she don't know any better.
And so, there not being any work in our town any more than
when I left there to go to the races, I went off to Sandusky and got
a pretty good place taking care of the horses for a man who owned


122
I'M A FOOL
a
1
4
a teaming and delivery and storage business there. It was a pretty
good place with good eats, and a day off each week, and sleeping
on a cot in the big barn, and mostly just shovelling in hay and oats
to a lot of big good-enough skates of horses, that couldn't have trot-
ted a race with a toad. I wasn't dissatisfied and I could send money
home.
And then, as I started to tell you, the fall races come to Sandusky
and I got the day off and I went. I left the job at noon and had
on my good clothes and my new brown derby hat, I'd just bought
the Saturday before, and a stand-up collar.
First of all I went down-town and walked about with the dudes.
I've always thought to myself, "put up a good front” and so I did
it. I had forty dollars in my pocket and so I went into the West
House, a big hotel, and walked up to the cigar stand. “Give me
three twenty-five cent cigars,” I said. There was a lot of horsemen
and strangers and dressed-up people from other towns standing
around in the lobby and in the bar, and I mingled amongst them.
In the bar there was a fellow with a cane and a Windsor tie on,
that it made me sick to look at him. I like a man to be a man and
dress
up,
but not to go put on that kind of airs. So I pushed him
aside, kind of rough, and had me a drink of whiskey. And then he
looked at me, as though he thought maybe he'd get gay, but he
changed his mind and didn't say anything. And then I had an-
other drink of whiskey, just to show him something, and went out
and had a hack out to the races, all to myself, and when I got there
I bought myself the best seat I could get up in the grand stand, but
didn't go in for
in for any of these boxes. That's putting on too many
airs.
And so there I was, sitting up in the grand stand as gay as you
please and looking down on the swipes coming out with their horses,
and with their dirty horsey pants on and the horse blankets swung
over their shoulders, same as I had been doing all the year before.
I liked one thing about the same as the other, sitting up there and
feeling grand and being down there and looking up at the
yaps
and
feeling grander and more important too. One thing's about as good
as another, if you take it just right. I've often said that.
Well, right in front of me, in the grand stand that day, there
was a fellow with a couple of girls and they was about my age. The
young fellow was a nice guy all right. He was the kind maybe
a


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
123
that goes to college and then comes to be a lawyer or maybe a news-
paper editor or something like that, but he wasn't stuck on himself.
There are some of that kind are all right and he was one of the
ones.
7
He had his sister with him and another girl and the sister looked
around over his shoulder, accidental at first, not intending to start
anything—she wasn't that kind—and her eyes and mine happened
to meet.
You know how it is. Gee, she was a peach. She had on a soft
dress, kind of a blue stuff and it looked carelessly made, but was
well sewed and made and everything. I knew that much. I blushed
when she looked right at me and so did she. She was the nicest girl
I've ever seen in my life. She wasn't stuck on herself and she could
talk proper grammar without being like a school teacher or some-
thing like that. What I mean is, she was O. K. I think maybe
her father was well-to-do, but not rich to make her chesty because
she was his daughter, as some are. Maybe he owned a drug store or
a drygoods store in their home town, or something like that. She
never told me and I never asked.
My own people are all O. K. too when you come to that. My
grandfather was Welsh and over in the old country, in Wales he
was—But never mind that.
The first heat of the first race come off and the young fellow set-
ting there with the two girls left them and went down to make a
bet. I knew what he was up to, but he didn't talk big and noisy and
let everyone around know he was a sport, as some do. He wasn't
that kind. Well, he come back and I heard him tell the two girls
what horse he'd bet on, and when the heat was trotted they all half
got to their feet and acted in the excited, sweaty way people do
when they've got money down on a race, and the horse they bet on
is
pretty close at the end, and they think maybe he'll come
on with a rush, but he never does because he hasn't got the old juice
in him, come right down to it.
And then, pretty soon, the horses came out for the 2.18
pace
and
there was a horse in it I knew. He was a horse Bob French had in
his string but Bob didn't own him. He was a horse owned by a
Mr Mathers down at Marietta, Ohio.
This Mr Mathers had a lot of money and owned some coal mines
up there


124
I'M A FOOL
you wanted
or something, and he had a swell place out in the country, and he
was stuck on race horses, but was a Presbyterian or something, and
I think more than likely his wife was one too, maybe a stiffer one
than himself. So he never raced his horses hisself, and the story
round the Ohio race tracks was that when one of his horses got ready
to go to the races he turned him over to Bob French and pretended
to his wife he was sold.
So Bob had the horses and he did pretty much as he pleased and
you can't blame Bob, at least, I never did. Sometimes he was out
to win and sometimes he wasn't. I never cared much about that
when I was swiping a horse. What I did want to know was that
my horse had the speed and could go out in front, if
him to.
And, as I'm telling you, there was Bob in this race with one of
Mr Mathers' horses, was named “About Ben Ahem” or something
like that, and was fast as a streak. He was a gelding and had a
mark of 2.21, but could step in .08 or .09.
Because when Burt and I were out, as I've told you, the year
before, there was a nigger, Burt knew, worked for Mr Mathers and
we went out there one day when we didn't have no race on at the
Marietta Fair and our boss Harry was gone home.
And so everyone was gone to the fair but just this one nigger and
he took us all through Mr Mathers' swell house and he and Burt
tapped a bottle of wine Mr Mathers had hid in his bedroom, back
in a closet, without his wife knowing, and he showed us this Ahem
horse. Burt was always stuck on being a driver but didn't have
much chance to get to the top, being a nigger, and he and the other
nigger gulped that whole bottle of wine and Burt got a little lit up.
.
So the nigger let Burt take this About Ben Ahem and step him
a mile in a track Mr Mathers had all to himself, right there on the
farm. And Mr Mathers had one child a daughter, kinda sick and
not very good looking, and she came home and we had to hustle and
get About Ben Ahem stuck back in the barn.
I'm only telling you to get everything straight. At Sandusky,
that afternoon I was at the fair, this young fellow with the two
girls was fussed, being with the girls and losing his bet. You know
how a fellow is that way. One of them was his girl and the other
his sister. I had figured that out.
a


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
-125
“Gee whizz,” I says to myself, “I'm going to give him the dope.”
He was mighty nice when I touched him on the shoulder. He
and the girls were nice to me right from the start and clear to the
end. I'm not blaming them.
And so he leaned back and I give him the dope on About Ben
Ahem. “Don't bet a cent on this first heat because he'll go like
an oxen hitched to a plough, but when the first heat is over go right
down and lay on your pile.” That's what I told him.
Well, I never saw a fellow treat any one sweller. There was a
fat man sitting beside the little girl, that had looked at me twice
by this time, and I at her, and both blushing, and what did he do
but have the nerve to turn and ask the fat man to get up and change
places with me so I could set with his crowd.
Gee whizz, amighty. There I was. What a chump I was to
go and get gay up there in the West House bar, and just because
that dude was standing there with a cane and that kind of a neck-
tie on, to go and get all balled up and drink that whiskey, just to
show off.
Of course she would know, me setting right beside her and letting
her smell of my breath. I could have kicked myself right down
out of that grand stand and all around that race track and made a
faster record than most of the skates of horses they had there that
year.
Because that girl wasn't any mutt of a girl. What wouldn't I
have give right then for a stick of chewing gum to chew, or a lozen-
ger, or some liquorice, or most anything. I was glad I had those
twenty-five cent cigars in my pocket and right away I give that
fellow one and lit one myself. Then that fat man got up and we
changed places and there I was, plunked right down beside her.
They introduced themselves and the fellow's best girl, he had
with him, was named Miss Elinor Woodbury, and her father was
a manufacturer of barrels from a place called Tiffin, Ohio. And the
fellow himself was named Wilbur Wessen and his sister was Miss
Lucy Wessen.
I suppose it was their having such swell names got me off my
trol-
ley. A fellow, just because he has been a swipe with a race horse,
and works taking care of horses for a man in the teaming, delivery,
and storage business, isn't any better or worse than any one else.
I've often thought that, and said it too.
a


126
I'M A FOOL
But you know how a fellow is. There's something in that kind
of nice clothes, and the kind of nice eyes she had, and the way she had
looked at me, awhile before, over her brother's shoulder, and me
looking back at her, and both of us blushing.
I couldn't show her up for a boob, could I?
I made a fool of myself, that's what I did. I said my name
was Walter Mathers from Marietta, Ohio, and then I told all three
of them the smashingest lie you ever heard. What I said was that
my father owned the horse About Ben Ahem and that he had let
him out to this Bob French for racing purposes, because our family
was proud and had never gone into racing that way, in our own
name, I mean. Then I had got started and they were all leaning
over and listening, and Miss Lucy Wessen's eyes were shining, and
I went the whole hog.
I told about our place down at Marietta, and about the big stables
and the grand brick house we had on a hill, up above the Ohio
River, but I knew enough not to do it in no bragging way. What I
did was to start things and then let them drag the rest out of me.
I acted just as reluctant to tell as I could. Our family hasn't got
any barrel factory, and, since I've known us, we've always been
pretty poor, but not asking anything of any one at that, and my
grandfather, over in Wales—but never mind that.
We set there talking like we had known each other for years and
years, and I went and told them that my father had been expecting
maybe this Bob French wasn't on the square, and had sent me up to
Sandusky on the sly to find out what I could.
And I bluffed it through I had found out all about the 2.18 pace,
in which About Ben Ahem was to start.
I said he would lose the first heat by pacing like a lame cow and
then he would come back and skin 'em alive after that. And to back
up
what I said I took thirty dollars out of my pocket and handed it to
Mr Wilbur Wessen and asked him, would he mind, after the first
heat, to go down and place it on About Ben Ahem for whatever odds
he could get. What I said was that I didn't want Bob French to see
me and none of the swipes.
а
Sure enough the first heat come off and About Ben Ahem went off
his stride, up the back stretch, and looked like a wooden horse or a
sick one, and come in to be last. Then this Wilbur Wessen went


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
127
down to the betting place under the grand stand and there I was with
the two girls, and when that Miss Woodbury was looking the other
way once, Lucy Wessen kinda, with her shoulder you know, kinda
,
touched me. Not just tucking down, I don't mean. You know how
a woman can do. They get close, but not getting gay either. You
know what they do. Gee whizz.
And then they give me a jolt. What they had done, when I didn't
know, was to get together, and they had decided Wilbur Wessen
would bet fifty dollars, and the two girls had gone and put in ten
dollars each, of their own money too. I was sick then, but I was
sicker later.
About the gelding, About Ben Ahem, and their winning their
money,
I wasn't worried a lot about that. It come out O.K. Ahem
stepped the next three heats like a bushel of spoiled eggs going to
market before they could be found out, and Wilbur Wessen had got
nine to two for the money. There was something else eating at me.
Because Wilbur come back, after he had bet the money, and after
that he spent most of his time talking to that Miss Woodbury, and
Lucy Wessen and I was left alone together like on a desert island.
Gee, if I'd only been on the square or if there had been any way of
getting myself on the square. There aint any Walter Mathers, like
I said to her and them, and there hasn't ever been one, but if there
was, I bet I'd go to Marietta, Ohio, and shoot him to-morrow.
There I was, big boob that I am. Pretty soon the race was over,
and Wilbur had gone down and collected our money, and we had a
hack down-town, and he stood us a swell dinner at the West House,
and a bottle of champagne beside.
And I was with that girl and she wasn't saying much, and I wasn't
saying much either. One thing I know. She wasn't stuck on me be-
cause of the lie about my father being rich and all that. There's a
way you know. ... Craps amighty. There's a kind of girl, you see
just once in your life, and if you don't get busy and make hay, then
you're gone for good and all, and might as well go jump off a bridge.
They give you a look from inside of them somewhere, and it aint no
vamping, and what it means is—you want that girl to be your wife,
and you want nice things around her like flowers and swell clothes,
and you want her to have the kids you're going to have, and you
want good music played and no rag time. Gee whizz.
There's a place over near Sandusky, across a kind of bay, and it's


128
I'M A FOOL
it
a
called Cedar Point. And when we had had that dinner we went over
to it in a launch, all by ourselves. Wilbur and Miss Lucy and that
Miss Woodbury had to catch a ten o'clock train back to Tiffin, Ohio,
because, when you're out with girls like that you can't get careless
and miss any trains and stay out all night, like you can with some
kinds of Janes.
And Wilbur blowed himself to the launch and it cost him fifteen
cold plunks, but I wouldn't ever have knew if I hadn't listened. He
wasn't no tin horn kind of a sport.
Over at the Cedar Point place, we didn't stay around where there
was a gang of common kind of cattle at all.
There was big dance halls and dining places for yaps, and there
,
was a beach you could walk along and get where it was dark, and we
went there.
She didn't talk hardly at all and neither did I, and I was thinking
how glad I was my mother was all right, and always made us kids
learn to eat with a fork at table, and not swill soup, and not be noisy
and rough like a gang you see around a race track that way.
Then Wilbur and his girl went away up the beach and Lucy and I
set down in a dark place, where there was some roots of old trees, the
water had washed up, and after that the time, till we had to go back
in the launch and they had to catch their trains, wasn't nothing at
all. It went like winking your eye.
Here's how it was. The place we were setting in was dark, like I
said, and there was the roots from that old stump sticking up like
arms, and there was a watery smell, and the night was like—as if
you could put your hand out and feel it—so warm and soft and dark
-
and sweet like a orange.
I most cried and I most swore and I most jumped up and danced,
I was so mad and happy and sad.
When Wilbur come back from being alone with his girl, and she
saw him coming, Lucy she says, "we got to go to the train now," and
she was most crying too, but she never knew nothing I knew, and
she couldn't be so all busted up. And then, before Wilbur and Miss
Woodbury got up to where we was, she put her face up and kissed
me quick and put her head up against me and she was all quivering
and-Gee whizz.
a
Sometimes I hope I have cancer and die. I guess you know what


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
129
I mean. We went in the launch across the bay to the train like that,
and it was dark too. She whispered and said it was like she and I
could get out of the boat and walk on the water, and it sounded
foolish, but I knew what she meant.
And then quick we were right at the depot, and there was a big
gang of yaps, the kind that goes to the fairs, and crowded and milling
around like cattle, and how could I tell her? "It won't be long be-
cause you'll write and I'll write to you.” That's all she said.
I got a chance like a hay barn afire. A swell chance I got.
And maybe she would write me, down at Marietta that
way,
and
the letter would come back, and stamped on the front of it by the
U.S.A. "there aint any such guy,” or something like that, whatever
they stamp on a letter that way.
And me trying to pass myself off for a bigbug and a swell—to her,
as decent a little body as God ever made. Craps amighty. A swell
chance I got.
a
And then the train come in, and she got on, and Wilbur Wessen
come and shook hands with me, and that Miss Woodbury was nice
and bowed to me, and I at her, and the train went and I busted out
and cried like a kid.
Gee, I could have run after that train and made Dan Patch look
like a freight train after a wreck but, socks amighty, what was the
use? Did you ever see such a fool?
I'll bet you what-if I had an arm broke right now or a train had
run over my foot-I wouldn't go to no doctor at all. I'd go set
down and let her hurt and hurt-that's what I'd do.
I'll bet you what-if I hadn't a drunk that booze I'd a never been
such a boob as to go tell such a lie that couldn't never be made
straight to a lady like her.
I wish I had that fellow right here that had on a Windsor tie and
carried a cane. I'd smash him for fair. Gosh darn his eyes. He's
a big fool—that's what he is.
And if I'm not another you just go find me one and I'll quit work-
ing and be a bum and give him my job. I don't care nothing for
.
working, and earning money, and saving it for no such boob as
myself.
a


A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF E. A. ROBINSON
BY AMY LOWELL
WHY
a ?
HY does any one want a "collected edition” of anything?
That is a question I often ask myself when I turn from the
shelves in my library where the collected editions, each in the full
panoply and monotony of its uniform binding, stand in august and
unsympathetic splendour, to those other shelves, crowded with faded
and alluringly well-read volumes, the first, or at least the early,
unpretentious editions before the halo of “collected” was wrapped
about the author's head. And yet, even as I leave the half-calf, sev-
enteen volume Browning for Paracelsus in boards and Men and Wo-
men in faded green cloth, I know full well the answer; for all of us
are not sentimental book-collectors or connoisseurs of literary vin-
tages, and even those of us who are, at times, these reprehensible
things, may be, at other times, critics and students, and to critics and
students the "collected edition” is a handy tool. Still, if a critic
wish to run his author to ground, he can by no means ignore the
earlier issues of his author's books. So book-collectors are of some
use other than the sentimental, after all.
Lazy readers like collected editions because, in buying them, they
are sure of getting all of an author's books without the trouble of
knowing their titles beforehand. Impecunious readers (by far the
largest class everywhere at all times) get much for little, and this
last is reason enough to account for the fondness of publishers for
this particular article. Yet I can never help feeling that a "collected
edition” is something like a tombstone set at the head of its author's
“six feet of earth.” Of course, there is really nothing to prevent an
author's adding new books to those already collected, nothing at all.
But the very fact of their being a collection proclaims to the world
not only that a man has done something, but that that something
will, in all probability, be the major part of his production. If to
call the “collected” a tombstone already in place is going a bit far,
we can at least consider that with it the "six feet” are at any rate
pre-empted, and the tombstone designed, with nothing lacking but
the inscription.


AMY LOWELL
131
a
Mr Robinson's Collected Poems does not intimidate by its volu-
minousness as Browning's seventeen volumes certainly do. But, as
I heave its weight off the table beside me and strain my eyes over its
narrow-spaced type, I sigh for the charming little volumes in which
I am wont to read him; and, having collated the contents of this big
book with the eight little ones, I put it down and read the poems for
their poetry in the smaller volumes.
This Collected Poems is valuable only for its cheapness, it costs
less than the eight separate volumes put together, but there its value
stops, unless we take it in some measure as accolade—an accolade by
no means needed by the poet-and it is a little jarring to find a tomb-
stone preparing for so very much alive and active a person as Mr
Robinson. Not only is he not written out, he is producing more rap-
idly every year. As to accolade, is it possible for any man to receive
a greater tribute from his contemporaries than the spontaneous ap-
preciations printed by the New York Times on the occasion of his
fiftieth birthday, two years ago?
Mr Robinson has always been extremely reticent in, what I may
call, propria persona. He writes poems for publication, never prose.
He has given us no hint in any paper or review of his opinions of his
fellow poets or himself, he has never put on record in ordinary speech
his reactions to the literature of the past. He places no prefaces be-
fore his books; he and his poetry are indivisible, what we make of
him is what we make of that, if we are the public. But it is just be-
cause of this that the collected edition becomes of real value to the
student, for his exclusions and inclusions in the matter of
poems
open up a certain insight into his mind. And what we chiefly make
out is that Mr Robinson started fully-fledged and fully armed, that,
to continue my extremely mixed metaphor, he has grown very few
new feathers in the course of years, and that his sword has not only
not been stropped since the beginning, it has not needed stropping.
There are various ways of collecting poems. The horrible way of
the Browning editors has been to group together poems of a species,
thus losing all the aesthetic value of the juxtaposition of a poem of
one type with a poem of another type. Wise authors compose their
books to obviate weariness. In a grouping by types there is no es-
cape for a reader but to close the book. Another way of collecting is
the quasi-chronological, followed by Buxton-Forman in his Keats
editions—the early poems come first and each book is given intact in
do
a


132
A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF E. A. ROBINSON
the order of its first appearance. Still another way is the strictly
chronological, in which separate books are entirely ignored and the
poems are placed in the order in which they were written.
Mr Robinson's plan has been none of these exactly, and, for a col-
a
lection published in the poet's lifetime, the method he has adopted
is excellent. He has kept his books intact throughout, but he begins
with The Man Against the Sky and follows it with his first volume,
The Children of the Night. After this, the books succeed one an-
other in the sequence of their publication, except that Merlin is in-
terpolated between Captain Craig and The Town Down the River,
for no reason that I can see unless to separate it from Lancelot.
Here we are at once at a bit of personal criticism. For it is evi-
dent that Mr Robinson agrees with the majority of his critics in con-
sidering The Man Against the Sky his best book. He has made no
changes in it, no changes in the order of the poems, that is. I have
not sought for textual changes in many of the poems, but in those I
have examined minutely there are none. In fact, the only volumes he
has felt called upon to edit are The Children of the Night and The
Town Down the River, and it is significant that he has dropped thir-
teen of the original poems from The Children of the Night and only
one from The Town Down the River. A man who shows himself not
averse to excisions on occasion, and yet who finds all he wishes to
make (with one exception) in his earliest published work, proves his
artistic career to have been singularly of a piece. This fact is evi-
dence that if he and his creative faculty started together, his power
of self-criticism has grown, for he has made no mistake in his exci-
sions. The poems he has left out need cause no reader regret, except
possibly the title poem of The Children of the Night, and that is not
so important as poetry as it is as revelation. Without it, the critic
must begin with Mr Robinson in mid-air.
Four years ago, I wrote an article on Mr Robinson which was after-
wards reprinted as the first chapter of my Tendencies in Modern
American Poetry, and nothing since has caused me to alter the opin-
ions I there expressed. I have no space here to recapitulate the steps
by which I reached my conclusions, but I can write nothing on Mr
Robinson without stating as a point of departure the main theme of
my argument.
Let us begin at once by acknowledging that Mr Robinson is the
most finished and settled of the poets alive in America to-day. By
a


AMY LOWELL
133
a
"finished,” I mean accomplished, polished, master of his medium;
by “settled,” I mean fixed and oriented in his own point of view and
expression. If a contemporary dare to say that any living writer is
sure to rank among the most important poets of his nation, I dare to
say this of Mr Robinson. Granting that, then, and admitting that
contemporary judgement is a hazardous undertaking, let us see how
and why he is what he is, and briefly consider that he is—what?
The main theme by which I set such store is that Mr Robinson is a
sort of temporal Colossus of Rhodes; he straddles a period. It
seems to me almost impossible to understand Mr Robinson without
some knowledge of the society into which he was born. Recollect
what Puritanism has meant to America, the good and the bad. Re-
member how long it held sway, and realize that this sway persisted
much longer in the small towns and country districts than it did in
the large cities. Mr Robinson grew up in the 'seventies and 'eighties,
and if any reader can recall from personal experience country New
England in the 'seventies and 'eighties, no more need be said. This
growing up of Mr Robinson's took place in Gardiner, a most charm-
ing little town on the Kennebec River in Maine. I love Gardiner
myself, but I can imagine what it must have been like in the 'seven-
ties and 'eighties. How Mr Robinson could have started, as he did,
in the heart of Gardiner, we cannot even conceive until we know
more of him and his antecedents than we know now. From Gardiner
he went to Harvard, and Harvard in the early ’nineties I do remem-
ber. Need I say that no one would have picked it for a forcing bed
for Mr Robinson's genius, but still it must have been an improve-
ment on Gardiner.
Now Mr Robinson is a dyed-in-the-wool New Englander, and
that must never be forgotten. His tenacity of purpose is thoroughly
New England, so is his austerity and his horror of exuberance of ex-
pression. His insight into people is pure Yankee shrewdness, as is
also his violent and controlled passion. He is absolutely a native of
his place, the trouble was that he was not a native of his time. He
was twenty years ahead of his time, and that advance has set the seal
of melancholy upon him; or, to speak in the cant of the day, it has
wound him in inhibitions which he has been unable to shake off.
This is why The Children of the Night (the poem, not the book)
is so important. It shows Mr Robinson avowing a creedless religion.
a
I say a creedless religion advisedly, for I do not imagine Mr Robin-
a


134
A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF E. A. ROBINSON
a
a
a
a
son to be either an agnostic or an atheist. But a creedless religion in
Gardiner must have made the holder of it feel as though branded
with the mark of Cain. Now evolution, in religion as in other things,
is a sane and salutary process which leads to no bitterness and is
merely the door to freedom. Revolution, on the other hand, is the
bread of sorrow and the wine of despair. To be called upon to do in
oneself in a few years what nations take centuries in bringing about,
means a severe wrenching of intellect and emotion. Read Matthew
Arnold's Dover Beach and see what the admitting of a creedless re-
ligion means to a man brought up to a formal order, or, indeed, read
The Children of the Night. There is gain, of course, but that is dim;
there is loss, and that is present and overwhelming.
Mr Robinson could by no means be Gardiner, he could by no
means be America at that moment. He began to see life with a touch
of irony because it was not his life. His life was nowhere, he with-
drew mentally within himself; he withdrew more and more, but he
would not compromise. He would be himself regardless of conse-
quences, but that self was an outsider. And, all the time, the old
order was holding him, shackling him; again and again he escaped,
but it was one continuous fight between himself and himself, be-
tween the old Puritan atavism and the new, free spirit. Every poem
that Mr Robinson writes is his dual self personified. If he thought
his own thoughts, he could in no wise control the form in which he
set them; if he spoke his own direct speech, he could put it to no un-
restrained or novel music. The luxuriance he innately feared, he
drove away; to him, it was an intellectual scarlet woman. He could
not be happy, but he could be strong. He could mutter "Courage!"
and nerve himself to endurance. He looked to no future, he had no
time to build a new order and never guessed that he was building it,
he strove to keep himself, his point of view, above water, and he
strove magnificently. This is what we read in The Children of the
Night, Captain Craig, and The Town Down the River. He raised
for himself an altar-the success of failure and at this he warmed
his heart. It is a meagre flame, but it has sufficed him, and we must
not quarrel that the pedestal is gaunt and severe.
Then, suddenly, in 1912, a new interest in poetry began to mani-
fest itself. Mr Robinson very likely did not think of himself as a
part of it, at first; and I am sure that with much that has come to pass
since he has been heartily out of sympathy. But, whatever he may


AMY LOWELL
135
.
have thought, he was its forerunner; he was even more than that, he
was its oldest and most respected exemplar. And however the “new
poetry” may have affected Mr Robinson, it brought his audience in
its train. He had always been admired by a few, now that few wid-
ened to many. It is good for an artist to be admired, and The Man
Against the Sky, published six years after its predecessor, The Town
Down the River, shows a heightening of power
in
every
direction.
Before, he had written almost defiantly, now he is satisfied to write,
now he has the contact of an audience to spur him on.
There is no new departure in The Man Against the Sky-Mr
Robinson struck his gait in The Children of the Night and he has
scarcely varied it since—but there is a greater ease and abundance.
Flammonde is one of the most beautiful poems in stanza form that
Mr Robinson has done, Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Strat-
ford probably the best of his monologues. The Man Against the
Sky itself, an advance over The Children of the Night. That poem
was a cry, this is a question. The excellence of his early vignettes,
John Evereldown, Cliff Klingenhagen, Richard Cory, could hardly
be surpassed, but there is a greater delicacy in Fragment, a deeper
tenderness in The Poor Relation, an extraordinary weirdness and
horror in Stafford's Cabin. Captain Craig contained Isaac and Archi-
bald and Aunt Imogen, and nothing could be better in their kinds
than these, but John Gorham far outdoes The Woman and the Wife
and The Book of Annandale,
Mr Robinson is always at his best in contemporary scenes, and
among contemporary people, with the brilliant exception of Ben
Jonson. His historical monologues are seldom apt as portraiture.
An Island, in which the dying Napoleon is the speaker, is false to its
original in every line. Saint Paul addressing the Romans in The
Three Taverns is a daring attempt which utterly fails. Lazarus
lacks everything except its excellent execution. In Rahel to Varn-
hagen, Mr Robinson has been able to feel that his characters are con-
temporary, and to deal with them as though he had created them,
and the result is a triumph of two people and an atmosphere.
Two people and an atmosphere is Mr Robinson's forte. Crowd
his stage as in Captain Craig, or parts of Merlin and of Lancelot, and
his edge becomes blunted. It may be objected that Captain Craig is
virtually a monologue, but we can never forget the chorus of young
men who are talked at, and the shadowy recorder who is occasionally


136 A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF E. A. ROBINSON
a
a
a
permitted to speak. Mr Robinson needs to feel his characters in in-
timate contact, which is very natural. Emotions run deeper and
higher between two people who are in close relations with each other
than they do in any other sort of grouping except that of a mob
swayed by some over-mastering impulse. Mr Robinson is too selec-
tive and secret to find inspiration in a mob. We cannot imagine his
poems become the marching cry of a multitude. He builds his poetic
world out of a series of poignant incidents, and by the deftest of lit-
tle touches. The crumbling of Merlin's world is shown more vividly
in the old man's appreciative dalliance with Vivian than in his
weary reception of the king's agonized questions. In Lancelot, the
hopeless fate of King Arthur's realm does not lie for us on the battle-
fields strewn with dead knights; it is not in the king's chamber at
dawn, where Arthur, Gawaine, and Bedivere await the first stroke of
what all are aware is doom; it is not even in the conversation between
Lancelot and the dying Gawaine. It is in the meeting of Lancelot
and Guinevere in the garden, in their terrible interview by fire-light
with the rain streaming over the deserted battlefields outside. It
should be also in the final parting of Lancelot and Guinevere in the
convent parlour, but it is not, for the single reason that the poem is
already spent emotionally before the end is reached. This chill fi-
nale Mr Robinson surely expected to be an epitome of the whole
tragic tale, but the parting of the lovers is too cool in its outward as-
pect to rouse his invention, and the final scene is a succinct, but rather
stereotyped, winding up.
In spite of Mr Robinson's fine gift of irony, he has a real liking for
the melodramatic. Where the human element is very powerful, this
urge towards melodrama is not too evident, it merely mutters like a
coming storm outside the scene on which the event is staged; but
where the human element is, for any reason, weakened to the poet's
mind, melodrama runs foaming over the story. The worst example
of this is Avon's Harvest, but there are many other cases in which the
same thing happens in a greater or lesser degree: London Bridge, for
example, or The Valley of the Shadow, or The Return of Morgan
and Fingal. There is not the slightest objection to melodrama as
such, but when Mr Robinson can skate the edge of it so successfully
as he often does, to plunge in seems a lowering of technique. I be-
lieve that the reason for this sensation of lowering is because the
poet's peculiar tenderness and pity are drowned out when mere event
becomes too strenuous. For melodrama is circumstance due to exter-
а


AMY LOWELL
137
nal happening; tragedy is circumstance due to human emotion. A
melodramatic occurrence such as Macbeth's murder of Banquo may
rise to tragedy through its result upon human character. Shake-
speare is for ever using melodrama as the spark to light his tragedy,
but with Mr Robinson melodrama, when he indulges in it, is itself
alone. Perhaps I should qualify this, as Stafford's Cabin, Richard
Cory, and many other poems skirt melodrama all the time by virtue
of their subjects, but in these cases it is so obviously subordinate to
the human scheme as scarcely to deserve its name.
I have spoken of Mr Robinson's feeling for atmosphere. Never
were pictures drawn with more economy than those he gives us, but
they are unforgettable. Since the first day I read it, I have never
forgotten how
“The cottage of old Archibald appeared.
Little and white and high on a smooth round hill
It stood, with hackmatacks and apple-trees
Before it, and a big barn-roof beyond;
And over the place—trees, house, fields and all-
Hovered an air of still simplicity
And a fragrance of old summers."
Again, take the house in Fragment:
“Faint white pillars that seem to fade
As you look from here are the first one sees
Of his house where it hides and dies in a shade
Of beeches and oaks and hickory trees.”
a
Merlin is full of pictures, and they are no longer of New England;
we feel the difference at once, not only in the scenes themselves, but
in the more elaborate wording with which they are presented:
“Gay birds
Were singing high to greet him all along
A broad and sanded woodland avenue
That led him on forever, so he thought,
Until at last there was an end of it;
And at the end there was a gate of iron,
Wrought heavily and invidiously barred.


138
A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF E. A. ROBINSON
a
1
He pulled a cord that rang somewhere a bell
Of many echoes, and sat down to rest,
Outside the keeper's house, upon a bench
Of carven stone that might for centuries
Have waited there in silence to receive him.
The birds were singing still; leaves flashed and swung
Before him in the sunlight; a soft breeze
Made intermittent whisperings around him
Of love and fate and danger, and faint waves
Of many sweetly-stinging fragile odours
Broke lightly as they touched him.”
57
People are sketched quite as briefly and inevitably as places. Mr
Robinson has the gift of epigrammatic expression. Flammonde
comes from
"... God knows where,
With firm address and foreign air,
With news of nations in his talk
And something royal in his walk.”
Richard Cory "glittered when he walked.” Aaron Stark's
.
thin, pinched mouth was nothing but a mark;
And when he spoke there came like sullen blows
Through scattered fangs a few snarled words and close,
As if a cur were chary of its bark.”
Mr Robinson is a master of brevity and exact, straight-forward
speech in his poems, and that makes his frequent habit of circumlocu-
tion appear not a little odd and contradictory. It almost seems as
though Mr Robinson were, at times, afraid of his own theory of
straight-forward speech. He refers to the characteristics of a certain
gentleman as “his index of adagios,” he speaks of billiard balls as
“three spheres of insidious ivory," and calls a hypodermic syringe “a
slight kind of engine." I believe this sort of verbal juggling is an
atavistic impulse; the same fear of the commonplace which produced
the old poetical jargon which Mr Robinson has done so much to ban-
ish from present-day poetry.
9


AMY LOWELL
139
a
Allied to this tendency is the cryptic quality of much of his work.
Although I do not believe for a moment that he realizes it, this cryp-
tic quality is merely a poetic trick. All poets have their technical
tricks, and all good poets make use of suggestion, but suggestion
which has to be worked out like a puzzle, and half-statements con-
fused in their own windings, are tricks carried a little too far. Brown-
ing was obscure because of a certain difficulty of expression; he tri-
umphed in spite of it, not because of it. But Browning was crystal
clear compared to Mr Robinson in these cases. And Mr Robinson
has never the slightest difficulty in expressing himself. No, this is a
poetic manner due to atavism, it is an evidence of the “shackling” of
which I have already spoken.
Edwin Arlington Robinson is a man of stark and sheer vision. He
found his voice at a time when America was given over to pretty-
prettinesses of all kinds. Some curious instinct for a harsher diet
turned him to Crabbe. That alone would show how solitary a thing
his development has been, for few poets have been more persistently
neglected than George Crabbe. Mr Robinson's sonnet on him begins
by admitting the neglect:
“Give him the darkest inch your
shelf allows,
Hide him in lonely garrets, if you will,
But his hard, human pulse is throbbing still."
It is just the "hard, human pulse” that Mr Robinson craved for his
own work. He is a far better poet than ever Crabbe was, because
Crabbe saw only what is, while Mr Robinson has a deep insight
into why it is. In this, he is more akin to Thomas Hardy, whom he
has celebrated in another poem in The Children of the Night, omit-
ted in this collected edition. In this poem, he speaks of himself as
longing “to feel once more a human atmosphere” and this he finds in
the "grand sad song” which is Hardy's, given under the figure of a
river. The poem ends :
"Across the music of its onward flow
I saw the cottage lights of Wessex gleam.”
The hard, human pulse in Thomas Hardy is mellowed and deepened
by a poetry of soul which Crabbe had not. `Mr Robinson has this


140
A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF E. A. ROBINSON
poetry of soul to a far greater extent than Crabbe, but he has not yet
attained to the reach of Thomas Hardy. Hardy is no such poet-
ical technician as Mr Robinson, but he has a more probing under-
standing. Hardy touches his characters reverently, even as he dis-
sects them; Mr Robinson is not reverent, his nearest approach to it
is a dry-eyed pity. Mr Robinson has resisted life; Hardy has sub-
mitted to life as to a beloved master. Hardy is a great architect of
tales and poems, The Dynasts is monumental in conception and ar-
rangement, but the details are inadequate; Mr Robinson is a rare
craftsman of detail, but his vision is pointillistic.
I have dwelt so long upon the juxtaposition of these two poets be-
cause such a juxtaposition makes clear what Mr Robinson has and
what he lacks. Thomas Hardy is a product of evolution, Mr Rob-
inson of revolution. His own lines in Lancelot sum up his position
not too badly:
“God, what a rain of ashes falls on him
Who sees the new but cannot leave the old.”
Mr Robinson has left the old, but the dust of it on his shoes still im-
pedes him at times; and he has struggled laboriously out of the rain
of ashes, although the white powder lingers on his coat.
Some critics have professed to find in Mr Robinson's work the
beating of the knell of doom. I think that is to mistake his attitude
and the subtlety of his thought. Doom there may be, but it is an ad-
junct, not a preoccupation. His preoccupation is with the unan-
swered question: Is the Light real or imagined, is man dupe or proph-
et, is faith unbolstered by logic an act of cowardice or an expression
of unconscious, pondering intellectuality? There are poems of his
to illustrate all these angles of vision. He doubts himself into cyni-
cism, and rises from it through the conception of unexplained beauty.
He seeks below life for the undercurrents by which he
its meaning. Sometimes he finds one thing, sometimes another; but,
whatever he finds, the innate Puritan fortitude and spirituality keep
him to his quest. He has not reached his goal nor found his Grail,
but he never turns aside from the search, continuing it always with a
wistful nobility of purpose which our literature has not seen before.
The arrival of a belated admiration has had a twofold effect upon
the poet. It has induced a more abundant creation, and it has urged
may discover
a


AMY LOWELL
141
his ambition to attempt things of larger scope. Here I think we can
say that Mr Robinson has possibly not been wise. The technique of
the short or semi-long poem, he has mastered completely; for the
long poem, he has been obliged to seek models. Merlin as a series
of intervals (particularly lyric intervals) is excellent. As a whole
long poem, it is inchoate and without direction or climax. These
faults do not appear in Lancelot, but something else does. Mr
Robinson himself abdicates in favour of many masters of the past.
The poem is built, not after a pattern, but to a pattern. It is fine,
moving, dramatic, but it is so in just the manner hallowed by time.
Mr Robinson does manage to creep in here and there, but, as a rule,
some one else takes his place, not any particular person, Mr Robin-
son does not plagiarize, but a fusion of dramatic poets all speaking
a
at once.
Mr Robinson's old gospel of failure serves him again in Lancelot.
The "Light” he has always believed in shines somberly across the
poem, but, more than in Merlin, it seems a will-o'-the-wisp gleam.
The only hint of poignance in the end of the poem is the very failure
of the “Light” to emit any warm glow. Lancelot riding away, seek-
ing to comfort himself by this wan flame, is a pathetic figure.
Mr Robinson's poetry is pathetic, even when it is most vigorous.
There is infinite pathos in the lot of the pioneer. Mr Robinson is
rather more an outcast from an old order than an enthusiastic ad-
herent of a new. He is preoccupied with the effort and pain of es-
cape. Recognition has come too late for him to experience the sharp
joy which lies in conscious upbuilding. It is almost as though he
regarded his achieved position with something akin to wonder. He
has always believed in his work, but it is a new sensation to believe
in the public, and he seems scarcely to dare to surrender himself to
the thought of success. Success is a heady wine. In Mr Robinson's
case, fearful as he is to find himself sipping it, it has induced both a
greater desire to write and a greater self-consciousness, but it has also
lulled his critical faculty somewhat, a not uncommon result of the
beverage. Would he have written Avon's Harvest ten years ago?
Avon's Harvest appears to be a mere tale. A "detective story,"
as Mr Robinson has called it, told for the pleasure of the telling. In
many other poets, this would be enough, but it is not enough where
Mr Robinson is concerned. If the poem could be taken as a psycho-
logical study of fear, it might justify its existence—as far as theme
a


142
A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF E. A. ROBINSON
is concerned, its execution is, of course, admirable—but the evidence
of the very tangible dagger on the dictionary, and the presence of
the man passing before the house, are too obviously real to leave the
fear in the realm of psychology. No, Mr Robinson's bugbear has
fairly got him in this book. It is melodrama pure and simple, and,
no matter how well it is done, melodrama shorn of suggestion is not
worthy of Mr Robinson. I may point out what melodrama can do
when used as the veneer for ethical and psychological truth in even
so recent a book as Mr Aiken's Punch. I have already cited Mac-
beth as an example, Faust is another, but there are so many exam-
ples they have only to be thought of.
I believe that Avon's Harvest is the direct result of Mr Robinson's
deserved success. Some poets thrive best on lack of recognition; let
us hope that Mr Robinson is not one of these, for of all living poets
he is the one most assured of his future. He can never again com-
pose in a sympathetic seclusion, but he must shut his ears to glaudits
and censures, he must forget his assured public and seek again the
silence of his own personality which seems the only condition under
which his genius can freely create.
Mr Robinson's is not a wide or inclusive art; it is narrow and
deep. He has almost no early failures to look back upon with regret.
His later work shows no marked advance over his earlier, even in the
matter of technique. More than any other poet I can think of, he
gained his full stature remarkably young, and we can scarcely expect
any considerable increase of cubits to come. Mr Robinson is a poet
of extraordinary, if restricted, achievement, he is at the fulness of
his power, and that he will add many more to these collected poems
,
is certain, but, more or not, he has won a high and permanent place
in American literature.
.


AN EPISODE
BY D. H. LAWRENCE
A.
a
a
S he lay thinking of nothing and feeling nothing except a cer-
tain weariness, or dreariness, or tension, or God-knows-what,
he heard a loud hoarse noise of humanity in the distance, something
frightening. Rising, he went on to his little balcony. It was a sort
of procession, or march of men, here and there a red flag fluttering
from a man's fist. There had been a big meeting, and this was the
issue. The procession was irregular, but powerful, men four abreast.
They emerged irregularly from the small piazza into the street, call-
ing and vociferating. They stopped before a shop and clotted into
a crowd, shouting, becoming vicious. Over the shop-door hung a
tricolour, a national flag. The shop was closed, but the men began
to knock at the door. They were all workmen, some in railway-
men's caps, mostly in black felt hats. Some wore red cotton neck-
ties. They lifted their faces to the national flag, and as they shout-
ed and gesticulated Aaron could see their strong teeth in their jaws.
There was something frightening in their lean, strong Italian jaws,
something inhuman and possessed-looking in their foreign, southern-
shaped faces, so much more formed and demon-looking than north-
ern faces. They had a demon-like set purpose, and the noise of their
voices was like a jarring of steel weapons. Aaron wondered what
they wanted. There were no women—all men—a strange male,
—
slashing sound. Vicious it was—the head of the procession swirling
like a little pool, the thick wedge of the procession beyond, flecked
with red flags.
A window opened above the shop, and a frowsty-looking man,
yellow-pale, was quickly and nervously hauling in the national flag.
There were shouts of derision and mockery—a great overtone of
acrid derision—the flag and its owner ignominiously disappeared.
And the procession moved on. Almost every shop had a flag flying.
And every one of these flags now disappeared, quickly or slowly,
sooner or later, in obedience to the command of the vicious, derisive
crowd, that marched and clotted slowly down the street, having its
own way.
a


144
AN EPISODE
a
Only one flag remained flying—the big tricolour that floated from
the top storey of the house opposite Aaron’s hotel. The ground floor
of this house consisted of shop-premises—now closed. There was
no sign of any occupant. The flag floated inert aloft.
The whole crowd had come to a stop immediately below the hotel,
and all were now looking up at the green and white and red tricolour
which stirred damply in the early evening light, from under the
broad eaves of the house opposite. Aaron looked at the long flag,
which drooped almost unmoved from the eaves-shadow, and he half
expected it to furl itself up of its own accord, in obedience to the will
of the masses. Then he looked down at the packed black shoulders
of the mob below, and at the curious clustering pattern of a sea of
black hats. He could hardly see anything but hats and shoulders,
uneasily moving like boiling pitch away beneath him. But the
shouts began to come up hotter and hotter. There had been a great
ringing of a door-bell and battering on the shop-door. The crowd
the swollen head of the procession-talked and shouted, occupying
the centre of the street, but leaving the pavement clear. A woman
in a white blouse appeared in the shop-door. She came out and
looked up at the flag and shook her head and gesticulated with her
hands. It was evidently not her flag--she had nothing to do with
it. The leaders again turned to the large house-door, and began to
ring all the bells and to knock with their knuckles. But no good
there was no answer. They looked up again at the flag. Voices
rose ragged and ironical. The woman explained something again.
Apparently there was nobody at home in the upper floors—all en-
trance was locked—there was no caretaker. Nobody owned the
flag. There it hung under the broad eaves of the strong stone house,
and didn't even know that it was guilty. The woman went back
into her shop and drew down the iron shutter from inside.
The crowd, nonplussed, now began to argue and shout and
whistle. The voices rose in pitch and derision. Steam was getting
up. There hung the flag. The procession crowded forward and
filled the street in a mass below. All the rest of the street was empty
and shut up. And still hung the showy rag, red and white and green,
up aloft.
Suddenly there was a lull—then shouts, half-encouraging, half
derisive. And Aaron saw a smallish black figure of a youth, fair-
haired, not more than seventeen years old, clinging like a monkey to
the front of the house, and by the help of the heavy drain-pipe and


D. H. LAWRENCE
145
a
the stone-work ornamentation climbing up to the stone ledge that
ran under ground-floor windows, up like a sudden cat on to the pro-
jecting footing. He did not stop there, but continued his race like
some frantic lizard running up the great wall-front, working away
from the noise below, as if in sheer fright. It was one unending
wriggling movement, sheer up the front of the impassive, heavy
stone house.
The flag hung from a pole under one of the windows of the top
storey—the third floor. Up went the wriggling figure of the pos-
sessed youth. The cries of the crowd below were now wild, ragged
ejaculations of excitement and encouragement. The youth seemed
to be lifted up, almost magically on the intense upreaching excite-
ment of the massed men below. He passed the ledge of the first
floor, like a lizard he wriggled up and passed the ledge or coping of
the second floor, and there he was, like an upward-climbing shadow,
scrambling on to the coping of the third floor. The crowd was for
a second electrically still as the boy rose there erect, cleaving to the
wall with the tips of his fingers.
But he did not hesitate for one breath. He was on his feet and
running along the narrow coping that went across the house under
the third-floor windows, running there on that narrow footing away
above the street, straight to the flag. He had got it—he had clutched
it in his hand, a handful of it. Exactly like a great flame rose the
simultaneous yell of the crowd as the boy jerked and got the flag
loose. He had torn it down. A tremendous prolonged yell, touched
with a snarl of triumph, and searing like a puff of flame, sounded as
the boy remained for one moment with the flag in his hand looking
down at the crowd below. His face was odd and elated and still.
.
Then with the slightest gesture he threw the flag from him, and
Aaron watched the gaudy remnant falling towards the many faces,
whilst the noise of yelling rose up unheard.
There was a great clutch and hiss in the crowd. The boy stood
still unmoved, holding by one hand behind him, looking down
from above, from his dangerous elevation, in a sort of abstraction.
And the next thing Aaron was conscious of was the sound of
trumpets. A sudden startling challenge of trumpets, and out of
nowhere a sudden rush of grey-green carabinieri battering the crowd
wildly with truncheons. It was so sudden that Aaron heard nothing
any more. He only saw.
In utmost amazement he saw the greeny-grey uniformed carabin-


146
AN EPISODE
a
ieri rushing thick and wild and indiscriminate on the crowd: a
sudden new excited crowd in uniforms attacking the black crowd,
beating them wildly with truncheons. There was a seething mo-
ment in the street below. And almost instantaneously the original
crowd burst in a terror of frenzy. The mob broke as if something
had exploded inside it. A few black-hatted men fought furiously
to get themselves free of the hated soldiers; in the confusion bunches
of men staggered, reeled, fell, and were struggling among the legs
of their comrades and of the carabinieri. But the bulk of the crowd
just burst and fled-in every direction. Like drops of water they
seemed to fly up at the very walls themselves. They darted into any
entry, any doorway. They sprang up the walls and clambered into
the ground-floor windows. They sprang up the walls on to window-
ledges, and then jumped down again, and ran—clambering, wrig-
gling, darting, running in every direction; some cut, blood on their
faces, terror or frenzy of flight in their hearts. Not so much terror
as the frenzy of running away. In a breath the street was empty.
And all the time, there above on the stone coping stood the long-
faced, fair-haired boy, while four stout carabinieri in the street be-
low stood with uplifted revolvers and covered him, shouting that if
he moved they would shoot. So there he stood, still looking down,
still holding with his left hand behind him, covered by the four re-
volvers. He was not so much afraid as twitchily self-conscious be-
cause of his false position.
Meanwhile, down below the crowd had dispersed—melted mo-
mentaneously. The carabinieri were busy arresting the men who
had fallen and been trodden underfoot, or who had foolishly let
themselves be taken: perhaps half a dozen men, half a dozen pris-
oners; less rather than more. The sergeant ordered these to be
;
secured between soldiers. And last of all the youth up above, still
covered by the revolvers, was ordered to come down. He turned
quite quietly, and quite humbly, cautiously picked his way along the
coping towards the drain-pipe. He reached this pipe and began, in
humiliation, to climb down. It was a real climb down.
Once in the street he was surrounded by the grey uniforms. The
soldiers formed up. The sergeant gave the order. And away they
marched, the dejected youth a prisoner between them. ... The
.
scene was ended.
a
a


1

BABY'S HEAD. BY MINA LOY





THE CORRESPONDENCE OF FLAUBERT
BY KENNETH BURKE
W
.
a
HEN, after about fifty years of letter writing, Flaubert saw
for the first time the correspondence of Balzac, he was rea-
sonably disgusted. Here was a man who had followed—to Flau-
bert's way of thinking, at least—the most glorious trade in the
world, and yet whose private communications showed not the least
concern with art. The love of the general which distinguished Flau-
bert was completely lacking; in its place there was a preponderance
of minutely personal debits and credits. The novel to Balzac per-
formed the same functions as politics or the stock market: it was in-
tended to procure for him some considerable social station, to make
him a Parisian celebrity.
Flaubert had always looked upon art as an existence-in-itself.
“L'art est assez vaste pour occuper tout un homme," he had written
to one friend who was evidently getting a good deal of complacency
out of fast living. Shakespeare he found, "not a man, but a conti-
nent.” He seemed to feel that the artist closed one door and opened
another, that the artist possessed something which was unintelligi-
ble to the non-artist. Flaubert, in his own bulky, broad-shouldered
way, was certainly one of the tour d'ivoire school of writers. Art
was not something to pick up and lay down, like a magazine; it was
something to live in, like Shakespeare, like a continent. In his first
letter, written at the age of nine, he tells of writing comedies. In
the next it is novels, while the third mentions des histoirre.” The
first also speaks of New Year's day as "bête,” thus forming the sum
and substance of about sixty years' correspondence. Flaubert was
born in 1821; by 1835 he had a pseudonym: Gustave Antuoskothi
Koclott.
We enter quickly on a highly documented adolescence. If, as it
is claimed often enough, everyone has the making of an artist as a
child, it is even truer that everyone has the artist's temper as an
adolescent. In revenge, when studying the adolescence of an artist
like Flaubert, who was not only not precocious, but had shown signs
almost of imbecility during childhood, one finds himself in a well-
a
CC


148
THE CORRESPONDENCE OF FLAUBERT
a
tracked labyrinth. Flaubert at eighteen had all the earmarks of a
promising young genius in revolt against Ohio, destined to come to
New York and get a job with some advertising agency. One might
catalogue the phase, briefly, thus:
(a) The cult of the illicit. (“Also, I admire Nero; he is the cul-
(
minating man of the antique world. Misfortune to him who does
not quake in reading Suetonius! Recently I read the life of Helio-
gabalus in Plutarch. He has a different beauty from that of Nero.
He is more Asiatic, more feverish, more romantic, more unbridled.
He is the evening of the day; he is a delirium of torches; but Nero is
more calm, more beautiful, more antique, more poised, all told, su-
perior.”)
(b) The cynicism of analysis. (“I dissect unceasingly; that
gives me amusement; and when finally I have uncovered the corrup-
tion in something which was thought pure, the gangrene of lovely
places, I raise my head and laugh.”)
(c) Diffusion, frustration, renunciation. (“Oh, how much I
would give to be either more stupid or more clever, atheist or mystic,
but something complete and entire, an identity, something, in
short.” Or, “I dreamed of glory when I was a mere child, and now
I do not even have the pride of mediocrity as to writing, I
have renounced it totally.")
(d) Exuberance of conceptions, intoxication of talk, love of
plenitude. (“I want a mass of fun, of riot, of violent activity, the
whole thing dumped pêle-mêle, in a heap, without order, without
style, as when we talk together, and the conversation walks, runs,
gambols, when we become elated, when we burst out laughing, et
cetera.”)
(e) Escape. (“Oh! if I had a tent made of reeds and of bamboo,
along the shore of the Ganges, how I would listen all night to the
noise of the water in the rushes, to the cooing of birds perched on the
yellow trees.” A nostalgia for which poor Emma Bovary was to
suffer some years later.)
(f) Insanity. (“A few days ago I met three poor idiots who
were begging; they were hideous, revolting with ugliness and cre-
tinism; they could not talk; they could scarcely walk. On seeing me
they began making signs that they loved me; they smiled, put their
hands to their faces, and threw me kisses. At Pont-l'Évêque my
father owns a farm, the care-taker of which has an imbecile daugh-


KENNETH BURKE
149
ter. The first time she saw me she also evidenced a strange attach-
ment. I attract animals and the insane.” Also, calling to wit his
earlier Mémoires d'un Fou.)
This may not be the adolescence of everyone. But it is certainly
the adolescence both of those who knock and are admitted and of
those who knock and are not admitted. Some, becoming sensible
with years, outgrow it as thoroughly as pimples. More or less sul-
lenly, the artist retains it. In any case, Flaubert went no further;
his work is a refinement, a subtilization, of this identical equipment.
a
The elations and renunciations, with time, were patiently beaten
down to a minimum; in 1845 he wrote, although perhaps a little
hastily, "I notice that I rarely laugh now and that I am no longer
unhappy; I have matured.” This was part of Flaubert's Potsdam-
nation of the spirit. After La Tentation de Saint-Antoine, we see
his method becoming steadily more deliberate, until, in writing Bou-
vard et Pécuchet, he read one thousand five hundred books to pro-
duce one. “One must write more coldly,” he advised Louise Colet,
his much neglected mistress, and an admirer of Flaubert's arch-ana-
thema, de Musset; "Let us distrust that sort of warmth which is
called inspiration and in which nervous emotion figures much more
frequently than muscular force.” This distrust of the “poetic”
method of attack, however, did not modify the background of his
interests, which retained their adolescent warmth. Along with his
insistence that art be given “with methodical relentlessness, the pre-
cision of the physical sciences,” one finds an almost naïve joy in ex-
purgenda. He writes, for instance, to the de Goncourts while work-
ing on Salammbô, “Ainsi je suis parvenu dans le même chapitre à
amener successivement une pluie de m— (sic) et une procession
de pédérastes."
There is also the possibility, however, that the pugnacity of Flau-
bert's material came of an instinctive demand that he arrest his read-
ers in spite of himself. In any case, it is true that he reached his
public in just this way. Madame Bovary could hardly have set a
nation to buzzing over its technical triumphs of form and its micro-
scopic style: this was accomplished by the prosecution for obscenity.
Salammbô, in like manner, created its stir among outraged archeolo-
gists and moralists protesting against the paganism involved. La
Tentation de Saint-Antoine was the occasion of sermons preached
against the author, and L’Education Sentimentale was so redoubted


150
THE CORRESPONDENCE OF FLAUBERT
.
for its treatment of political issues that of the hundred and fifty per-
sons to whom he sent complimentary copies, only thirty dared to an-
swer him! . . . Thus, we have the phenomenon of a man deeply
interested in things which were imperceptible—and completely im-
material—to practically his entire public, and yet who, for purely
extrinsic reasons, acquired an almost academic pre-eminence.
Between adolescence and the formal sitting down to a life of writ-
ing, Flaubert passed through one more tentative period, his first trip
to the Near East. Error, unwieldy ruins, the human herd trampling
the human herd, prostitution, corruption; we see his preference
for contemplating things of this nature, a preference which was to
justify itself later in Salammbô, while his most penetrating letters
are written from the Nile, where history had been envisaged minute-
ly and commemorated by the colossal, a distinctly Flaubertian pro-
cess. On returning to France, he wrote his first Tentation de Saint-
Antoine, and then began Madame Bovary. From now on he settled
definitely into a monotonous life, fulfilling his own requirement that
the artist “live as a bourgeois and think as a demi-god,” and putting
art as the matter of prime importance in life. He would delay see-
ing Louise Colet for even months, until he had “finished a chapter,'
and when she became too importunate he dismissed her entirely. Un-
til about 1870, whatever minor incidents occurred did not produce
any noticeable change in his attitudes. From the time of the Fran-
co-Prussian war, however, he became decidedly more acrid, at times
even querulous. One by one his friends died off, leaving him lonely,
and with a sense of being a left-over, of sacrificing himself to an
ideal which was being universally betrayed. His own constitution
was ruined; he suffered from headaches and nausea. In 1880 he
died suddenly of apoplexy, while engaged in the most enormous of
all his enormous labours, Bouvard et Pécuchet.
I have not, up to this point, discussed the really essential subject
of the letters: the relation they bear to the study of his aesthetics.
The final testimony of the letters seems to be that Flaubert never
succeeded in arriving at an aesthetic amenable to his temperament.
Indeed, the very fact that he did not write the low-visioned letters
of Balzac is a testimony. Balzac had reached a complete expression
in his art; therefore he felt no need of putting anything other than
his personal ambitions and disappointments into his correspondence.
Flaubert, on the contrary, sensed an unconscious need of some com-


KENNETH BURKE
151
plement to his fiction. I do not mean to signify by this that Flau-
bert's work is inferior to that of Balzac. Balzac had the brain of a
petty official, and wrote like one. Flaubert had something about
,
him of that quality he attributes to the greatest masterpieces, a sort
of slow "stupidity,” like the products of nature, like animals and
mountains. He was, as he said of himself magnificently, “bas, bouf-
fon, obscène tant que tu voudras, mais lugubre nonobstant."
The most striking implication of the letters with respect to his
art-methods is that his emotions are paralyzed by his intelligence.
He writes to Bouilhet from Constantinople, for instance, after hav-
ing shown how three plots he is planning resolve themselves into
much the same thing:
"Alas! it seems to me that when one dissects so well the children
still to be born, one is no longer in shape to create them. My meta-
physical fineness terrifies me. It is inevitable, nevertheless, that I
keep coming back to it.”
a
Over against this, however, he reacts in exactly the opposite di-
rection, wonders whether he ought not give up trying to write “un
livre raisonnable” and abandon himself to whatever "lyricism, vio-
lence, philosophico-fantastic eccentricity" that might occur to him.
At another time, he finds in himself two contradictory intentions:
one, a love of “all the sonorities of a sentence and of the ideal sum-
mits”; the other, a desire to make the reader feel things “almost ma-
terially.” In the last analysis, however, he comes back to the intel-
ligence: "If you know precisely what you want to say, you will say
it well.” While a passage like the following shows how readily he
inclined to make of literature a study, the posing and solving of a
problem, which is primarily an intellectual process:
a
"I have fifty consecutive passages where there is not a single
event. It is a continuous picture of a bourgeois life and an inactive
love, a love all the more difficult to depict in that it is at the same
time timid and profound, but alas! without any internal complica-
tions, since this gentleman is of a temperate nature. In the first part
I had something similar: my husband loves his wife somewhat after
the same fashion as my lover; they are two mediocrities in the same
environment, and yet must be differentiated.”


152
THE CORRESPONDENCE OF FLAUBERT
Since the formulation of Bergsonisme, and that wide pest to Berg-
sonisme, Bendaisme, and now the final philosophical placing of Ben-
daisme in Spenglerismus, the nature of Flaubert's disturbances be-
comes reasonably clear. It is simply that he was trying by the exer-
cises of processes which were primarily intellectual to write under
an aesthetic whose processes were primarily intuitive.
He cites, for instance, this sentence of La Bruyère: “Un bon es-
prit croit écrire raisonnablement,” and adds, "That is what I ask for,
to write with reason, and that is a good deal of ambition.” He goes
on to complain, however, that he builds his pyramids with little
pebbles, while those of the great are in one single block. Which re-
calls Bergson's statement of the impossibility of arriving at motion
from an infinity of stationary points, whereas given a motion, an in-
finity of stationary points can be deduced. Thus Flaubert, by the
exercise of the intellect, was attempting to produce the same gen-
eral complexion of literature as Victor Hugo or George Sand, which
manifestly signifies a mis-direction of his faculties. Emotion, like
motion, is something which is readily stiffened by the critical con-
sciousness. If one wants to walk, let him arise and walk, and not
.
think too clearly on the subject; otherwise he will find his shoulder-
blades feeling like corsets and his arms as incommodious as carbun-
cles. On the other hand, if one wants, not to walk, but to dissect
walking, so that each process is clearly demarcated from every other
process, so that at any given moment the balance of one set of mus-
cles against another is clearly indicated, so that beginnings, transi-
tions, suspensions, attainments, are brought out as clearly as on a
chart, and taken as an interest in themselves, if one wants to do that,
he will find the intellect of primary value. And there is plenty of
evidence that this is exactly what Flaubert did want to do.
The intuitive writers, then—the “prophetic” temper over against
the "critical” temper—are in their province in trying to produce an
"emotional" literature. But the anomaly of Flaubert's attempt to
follow this same aesthetic is shown by such a statement as this,
written while he was working on Madame Bovary:
(He has been writing a very analytical letter.) “I incline a good
deal towards criticism. The novel I am writing has been sharpen-
ing that faculty of mine, because it is above all else a work of criti-
cism, or rather, of anatomy.” And then he adds this tremendous
a


KENNETH BURKE
153
heresy against his own work-shop: “The reader will not be aware, I
hope, of all the psychological travail hidden beneath the form, but
he will sense the effect."
Is it any wonder that he said of the book after it was published,
“Tout ce que j'aime n'y est pas." Yet why should everything that
”
he cares for in a book be lacking? Or why should he want to con-
ceal the psychological travail, which was the real triumph of the
book? “On me croit épris du réel, tandis que je l'exècre; car c'est en
haine du réalisme que j'ai entrepris ce roman.” The book (Madame
Bovary) was written, he goes on to say, out of considerations of
parti pris, of a theme; the rest was merely incidental.
The point resolves itself about the art-to-conceal-art aesthetics,
since that is the ultimate basis of feminine, or intuitive, writing.
Flaubert, although interested primarily in method, in processes, ac-
cepted it without question that the purpose of art is to conceal these
processes. With a mind highly endowed for charting the forms of
walking (in other words, for centring on the processes of art) he
tried rather to produce an exact simulacrum of walking itself (in
other words, tried to make us forget the processes in the fact of
movement). Flaubert, who was always exposing some new infalli-
bility-of-the-Pope, never stopped to question whether art-to-conceal-
art might not be his infallibility-of-the-Pope. Here we are certain-
ly at the chief tenet of modern aesthetic orthodoxy. Even in Flau-
bert's time the tendency was well-grounded, the tendency, that is,
which was later to express itself in the charming Procrustean
occupation of making Shakespeare's art-to-display-art proscenium
speeches fit as Ibsen art-to-conceal-art conversations.
Or, to approach the question from another angle, if Flaubert had
driven his art-for-art's-sake doctrine to its conclusion, if he had pur-
sued to its farthest the assumption that art runs counter to all util-
ity, he would be forced to admit that art should exist on a stratum
of excellence outside the compulsion of an audience. Or, more clear-
ly, that art should exist without any exterior results other than our
reception and comprehension of its phenomena. Or, by analogy:
the thorough disciple of art-for-art’s-sake, if he were sowing a field
in what he considered an arresting manner, would sow not seed, but
sand, since it was the process and not the result that he was stressing.
The modern French painters of ideal machinery understand this in
that they paint, not linotype machines or dynamos, but purposeless


154
THE CORRESPONDENCE OF FLAUBERT
conceptions of bolts, screws, shafts, belts, and the like. In the same
way an engineer with an authentic aesthetic impulse would give us
some gigantic, purring mechanism, with driving pistons, tiny mo-
tions of steel here and there, parts appearing and disappearing into
the interior, and yet, which produced nothing. The feminine aes-
thetic would demand that this machine at least produce either a song
or a tear; the masculine aesthetic would be interested in the triumph
of its parts per se, the system of lubrication, the percentage of ex-
ploitation of fuel values, the rating of the torque, and the like.
Now, this is exactly what Flaubert wanted to do, but sapped as
he was by the cancer of an unconsciously accepted aesthetics, one of
his own horrible “idées reçues,” he had to content himself with com-
plaining that he wrote like someone playing the piano with a ball of
lead on every knuckle. He finished each successive book with a
sense of revulsion, of frustration. While looking continually for an
ideal form, he devoted years on end to the patient accumulation of
detail, of matter. The anomaly of the situation would have wearied
any one but this ox of art. In pure theory, however, he could throw
over the entire muddle, and contemplate an art of almost metaphys-
ical triumphs, divorced from those minute fixations which his disci-
ples look upon as the basis of his intentions (and which he himself,
at a moment of faith in them, called of secondary importance) free
of all matter; since matter is incidental to movement and form-
which are the artist's essential interest—and therefore detracts from
the pure beauty of those forms.
I
quote part of a letter, ,
written in 1852, in which this is brought out most plainly:
.
“What seems beautiful to me, the thing that I should like to do,
would be a book about nothing, a book without any exterior tie,
which would sustain itself by the internal force of its style
a book which would have almost no subject, or at least in which the
subject would be almost invisible, if that is possible. The most beau-
tiful works are those which contain the least matter. . . . I be-
lieve that the future of art is in these channels."
.
>
Flaubert's ideas remained constant, since he never outstripped
them. Twenty-four years later, in a letter to George Sand, we find
him saying:


KENNETH BURKE
155
“I remember having experienced thumpings of the heart, having
felt a violent pleasure, in contemplating a wall of the Acropolis, a
wall stark naked.... Eh bien! I wonder if a book, indepen-
dently of what it says, cannot produce the same effect? In the pre-
cision of its groupings, the rarity of the elements, the polish of the
surface, the harmony of the ensemble, is there not here some intrin-
sic virtue, a kind of divine force, something eternal as a principle?”
.
From working so constantly and intimately with his medium, Flau-
bert arrived at a stage wherein he saw the art-product as pure tech-
nique; he realized that there was no such thing as that great discov-
ery of modern journalism, "mere technique,” but that, on the con-
trary, technique was the profoundest element of art, sitting imme-
diately against the deepest roots of the art-nature.
Further,
he realized that he would find no understanding among the critics,
those critics who, in the meantime, were crawling all over Europe
with their “very fine analyses of the milieu in which a book origi-
nates, and the causes which brought it about,” but fighting quite shy
of "composition, method, inherent poetics.” The situation has not
changed considerably since then.


TWO POEMS
BY WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
THE BULL
It is in captivity-
ringed, haltered, chained
to a drag-
the bull is godlike
Unlike the cows
he lives alone, nozzles
the sweet grass gingerly
to pass the time away
He kneels, lies down
and stretching out
a foreleg licks himself
about the hoof
then stays
with halfclosed eyes:
Olympian commentary on
the bright passage of days.
-The great sun
smooths his lacquer
through
the glossy pinetrees
his substance hard
as ivory or glass-
through which the wind
yet plays-
Milkless


WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
157
he nods
the hair between his horns
and eyes matted
with hyacinthine curls.
THE JUNGLE
It is not the still weight
of the great trees, the
breathless interior of the wood,
tangled with wrist-thick
vines, the flies, the reptiles,
the forever fearful monkeys
screaming and running
in the branches-
It is
a girl, waiting, all at once-
shy, brown, soft-eyed-
to guide you
Upstairs, sir.


AN EVENING WITH M TESTE
BY PAUL VALÉRY
Translated by Natalie Clifford Barney
F
VOOLISHNESS is really not my forte. I have seen many
people, a few countries; taken my share in diverse enterprises,
without liking them; had almost my fill of food, and women.
I now recall a few hundred faces, two or three great events, and
perhaps the substance of twenty books. I have neither retained
the best nor the worst of all these things, chance remnants have stuck
a
to me.
Speculations of this kind spare me the bewilderment of growing
old. I could also count the glorious moments of my mind, and im-
agine them united, riveted together—forming a chain of felicity
about my life. ... On the whole I think I have always summed
myself up correctly. I have rarely lost sight of myself; I have hated
myself; adored myself; and so I and myself have aged.
I have also thought that everything was over, and even aided the
forces of extermination, in the hope of clearing some painful situa-
tion. This gained for me but the knowledge that our own thoughts
are reflected back to us, too much so, through expressions made by
others. Since this realization, the myriad words that have buzzed
at my ears have rarely impressed me according to their intent, and
the wild words to which I have given vent became, through utter-
ance, distinct from my thought: invariable.
If I had applied a usual judgement, I should not only have
thought I was their superior, but should have seemed so! But I pre-
ferred to be myself. He who is called a superior being is a being
who has deluded himself. To be impressed by him one must see
him, and to see him, he must make a show of himself! This show,
the mania of his renown, possesses him. Thus each great man is
tinged with an error. Each powerful mind wears, as it were, the
livery of this initial blunder, by which it has made itself known.
For a public fee, he gives his time in exchange, focussing himself
into the public's perception, that still further his energy may be dis-


PAUL VALERY
159
sipated in preparing and transmitting the outward satisfaction of
his entity. He even loses himself enough to prefer the featureless
dummy of fame to the secret joy of feeling himself unique—the de-
light of being an individual and apart.
9
From these thoughts I mused onward; the best minds, the most
sagacious inventors, the greatest connoisseurs of the inner-man, must
have been unknown genius, misers of themselves, who have died,
their unminted treasures unconfessed! Their existences seemed
even proved by the glint of riches of those others: those commer-
cializers of a less solid wealth.
This induction was so easy that I saw, at each moment, its out-
come. It was sufficient to think of the ordinary great men, pure of
their first mistake, or even to make a starting point of this mistake
to conceive a degree of more elevated consciousness, of less gross,
more liberated, intellects. Such surmises delivered up to me curi-
ous realms, as though I had descended into the sea.
Through the sparkle of published discoveries, in touch with
those discoveries which commerce, fear, ennui, or poverty leave un-
recognized each day, I seemed to discern hidden masterpieces. So
I amused myself, obscuring the notorious in favour of the anony-
mous.
These solitary beings, though invisible through the deep trans-
parency of their lives, certainly possessed an awareness keener than
the rest of the world. In their luminous effacement they seemed to
double, triple, multiple each surface celebrity.—Disdainful of op-
portunity, they would never deliver up their chances into a bubble
of personal results.—I even felt that they would refuse to consider
themselves as separate and distinct, but rather as a conscious part
of things.
These ideas came to me in October, '93; in those moments of
leisure when our thoughts play at the game of existing.
I had about given up these intellectual diversions when I made
the acquaintance of Monsieur Teste. (I now meditate upon the
vestiges a man leaves upon the little space in which he moves.) Be-
fore knowing M Teste, my attention had been caught by his quiet
original ways. I had studied many of his outward expressions:
his eyes, his clothes, the slightest of his undertones to the waiters
of our café. I wondered if he felt himself observed. I quickly


160
AN EVENING WITH M TESTE
.
ceased looking at him only to detect his looks following mine. I
picked up the papers he had been reading, mentally going through
the slightest movements that had escaped him-noting that no one
else paid any attention to him.
We began our acquaintance when observations could teach me
no more. We met only in the evening: once in a questionable re-
sort, often at the theatre. I had been told that he lived by medi-
ocre transactions on the Stock Exchange. He took his meals in a
small restaurant, rue Vivienne; swallowed his food as he might a
physic—with alacrity. Elsewhere, on occasion, he permitted him-
self a long and excellent dinner.
Monsieur Teste was about forty years old. His speech was ex-
traordinarily rapid and his voice muffled. Everything about him
effaced itself: his eyes, his hands. Yet he had a military turn of
shoulder, an astonishingly regular gait.
He never moved his arms when he spoke, not even so much as a
finger: he had killed the marionette. He neither smiled, nor said
good-day nor good-bye; and seemed not to hear one's "how do you
do?"
His memory was to me a matter of much surmise. The feats,
by which I was allowed to judge of it, made me imagine him capa-
ble of unrivaled mental gymnastics.
It was with him not so much the exaggeration of a natural facul-
ty, as a faculty educated and transformed to suit his requirements.
We have it in his own words: "I haven't owned a book for
twenty years. I've burnt all my papers. I even erase and cor-
rect the living text. I retain only what I need. But the difficulty
is to know and keep what I shall need to-morrow! ... With this
end in view, I've sought an automatic eliminating sieve
By dint of thinking about it, I arrived at the belief that Mon-
sieur Teste had discovered many spiritual laws which we ignore.
He had surely given years to these researches, quite certainly years
upon years had been employed to perfect his inventions and turn
them into instincts. To make discoveries is relatively easy—the
difficulty lies in adding them to ourself.
The delicate art of time, its organization and distribution be-
tween things well chosen to foster their growth separately-was
one of his great preoccupations. He watched over the varied re-
currences of certain fundamental ideas, making them thrive innu-
.
.


PAUL VALERY
161
a
merably. This helped his studies in consciousness to achieve, final-
ly, almost mechanical applications. He even sought a résumé of
the process, often muttering to himself: "Maturare!"
Surely his singularly adequate memory secured for him only such
parts of impressions as our imagination is incapable of creating:
if we imagine a voyage in a balloon, we can with sagacity, and even
most powerfully, produce a great many of the probable sensations
of an aeronaut, but there will lack something peculiar to the real
ascension—and this difference shows the superior methods of a
M Edmond Teste.
Early in life this man had recognized the importance of what
might be termed human plasticity. He had explored its limits
and its mechanism. How often he must have meditated upon his
own malleability!
I suspected sentiments in him so vertiginous, so obstinate in the
pursuit of exciting experiences that I trembled for him. I never
saw a being so absorbed in the study of his own variations, one who
could so become his own system, so utterly give himself up to the
terrible discipline of free thinking, where one joy is hunted down
and killed by another joy—the weakest by the strongest, the tender-
est, the most ephemeral, born of the moment, by the fundamental
one-or by the hope of the fundamental.
So I felt him to be the master of his mind—I write down in good
faith this absurdity.-For the expression of a faith is absurd.
Monsieur Teste had no opinions, no crystallizations. I believe
he could invent his own passions, and make them serve a definite
end. What had he achieved, how did he consider himself? He
had banished all expressions of mirth or sorrow from his counten-
ance. He had a particular aversion for melancholy.
He spoke, and one felt mixed with the very essence of things:
one gained retrospect and objectivity, became a part of the concrete
as well as of the dimensions of space, even in detail participating
in the shifting colours and shades of the streets, as well as feeling
oneself a part of their corner-stones . . . and words so directly in
...
touch with us were called forth from us, words that made one feel
that the eternal wall between beings had been removed. . . . He
even superlatively knew how they would have touched someone
else. As he spoke, without being able to seize exactly the motifs or
the extent of his conceptions, I yet realized that a great number of


162
AN EVENING WITH M TESTE
words had been banished from his discourses. The words which he
used most readily, were either so changed or illumined by his utter-
ance that their tendency seemed altered-gaining new values.
Sometimes he even robbed them of their usual sense, they seemed
merely to fill an empty space, the adequate meaning of which was
still doubtful or unforeseen by language. I've heard him designate
some material object by a group of names or abstract words.
What he affirmed was irrefutable. He killed even polite acquies-
Conversation proceeded by fits and starts that in no wise
astonished him.
cence.
If this man had changed the object of his self-centred medita-
tions, if he had turned the steadfast strength of his mind against
the world—nothing could have resisted him. I am loath to speak
of him as of one to whom statues are erected. Too well do I feel
the difference—the weaknesses that separate the average "genius”
from so real and new a being. So pure of all dupery and glamour
-so isolated in his gem-like hardness. Even my own enthusiasm
cheapens him. . .
Yet how repress enthusiasm for one who never said anything
indefinite? who declared calmly: “I appreciate in all things only
the facility or difficulty of their achievement. I take the greatest
care in measuring these degrees, and avoid being bound, for why
should I be held by what I've completely mastered ?"
How not abandon oneself to an intelligence which appeared to
transform all that exists—and that operated, as it were, everything
put before it: moving and mixing, interchanging, communicating,
and, within the scope of its knowledge, dividing, cutting up, en-
lightening, cooling off or warming up at will, destroying or pro-
moting into consciousness what hitherto had lacked even a name,
leaving to forgetfulness, lulling into insignificance or heightening
into colour this or that.
I grossly skim over impenetrable premises. I dare not convey
all that my subject suggests. Logic forbids.
But, each time that I put to myself the problem concerning the
quality of Teste's brain, strange productions are conjured up.
Sometimes he appears to me quite distinctly, proposes himself
to my memory, seems next to me-I breathe the smoke of our ci-
gars, he speaking, I, sceptical. At other times the random reading


PAUL VALERY
163
of a paper I happen to meet with brings me up against some pre-
sage of him—that a recent event had justified. At such times I
attempt to invent delusive experiences that were the enchantment
of past evenings together-in other words I conjure up, and asso-
ciate with him, circumstances that never occurred.—How would he
be in illness-in love-how would he reason ?- Could he be sad?
What could frighten him ?-I would hold the complete image of
this rigorous man trying to make it answer my questions before it
faded.
No doubt he loves, and suffers, and is bored. Everyone goes
through these feelings. But to the usual sighs and elemental
groans I wish him to blend the methods and figures of his whole in-
dividual spirit.
Exactly two years ago to-night I was at the Opera with him, in
a box lent to us. This reminiscence has haunted me all to-day.
I recall him standing up beside me and a golden column of the
Opera. He only looks at the audience, flushed and breathing in
the human warmth rising up from the house.
A great bronze female separates us from the murmuring assem-
blage beyond the electric glare. In the vaporous distance gleam
naked fragments of women-soft as polished pebbles. Diversely
handled living fans fluttered on peopled darkness—billowing up
to meet the upper lights. My gaze brought back to me hundreds
of little faces; fell on a bent sad head, ran along arms, and then
over people indiscriminately, finally burning itself out.
Each occupant of each seat, free only to move sparingly in a
limited space.—Keenly aware of the system of classification, an
almost theoretic simplicity of the assembly—the social order—I
had an agreeable impression that all the breathing entities of that
vast cube, following the laws of collectivity, would burst forth
in great circles of uniform laughter, be moved in masses to feel
things intimate and unique-vibrate in unison, rise up in a pinnacle
of unavoidable feelings. I soared from tier to tier from gallery
to gallery of living beings, in my fantasy ideally joining together
all those sharers of identical diseases, vices, or theories. . . . An
abundant wave of music bathed us altogether and then subsided.
It died out.-M Teste muttered: "Beautiful or extraordinary only
for each other: devoured by each other!”


164
AN EVENING WITH M TESTE
The last word rang out above the silenced orchestra. Teste
breathed audibly, his face ablaze, pulsating with heat and colour,
his wide shoulders, and even his blackness caught, into the dark-
gold light, the whole block of his vestured form propped up by the
thick column. His absorption reabsorbed me. He lost not a par-
cel of the slightest variation, ever-changing in that ruddy golden
space.
I watched the bald crown of his head acquaint itself with the
jutting angles of the capital, his right hand cool itself against the
gilt, and, lost in the purple under-shadows of its base, the great
feet supporting him. From the depth of the theatre his eyes came
back to me: his lips uttered: “They are not badly disciplin-
ed ... it's a beginning.
As I had nothing to answer, his deep voice went on quickly:
“Let them enjoy, and obey!”
As he said this, his gaze fixed a young man seated just in front
of us, then a lady, then a whole group in the upper gallery who
were leaning over the rim in clusters of five or six ardent faces-
then the whole assembly, the theatre full as the heavens, ardent,
fascinated by the stage, that we did not see. The general fixity
and arrested stupidity of the others revealed to us that any sort of
sublime thing was again on. We watched the slow extinction of
that strange daylight made by their innumerable faces. And when
the light, without radiance, grew dimmer, then quite low, there re-
mained visible only the vast phosphorescence of those thousands of
faces. I felt that this forced twilight made all these people pas-
sive. Their attention balanced the growing darkness. Even I
was necessarily attentive to all this attention.
Teste spoke: “The supreme simplifies them. The chances are,
they're all tending, more and more, towards the same state.—They
will all be equalized in a common climax-or limit. Besides, this
law is not so simple—since it omits me—yet I'm here, with them.”
He added: “They're held by a change of light.”
I said laughingly: "So are you?”
He added: “So are you!"
"What a dramatist you would make," I said to him. “You
seem to be watching some experience on the border-lines of all sci-
ence-I should like to see a theatre inspired from your medi-
tations. .
>


PAUL VALERY
165
er.
a
He answered: "No one meditates!"
The applause and the turning on of the lights drove us on.
We circulated, descending.
Outside the passers-by had an air of freedom.
M Teste complained slightly of the chilly midnight air-allud-
ing to his past ills.
As we walked some almost incoherent phrases escaped from him.
I followed his words with much difficulty—trying at least to re-
member them, for the incoherence of a speech depends on the listen-
One's mind is fashioned in such manner as not to be able to
be incoherent for itself. This reflection prevented me from clas-
sifying Teste amongst the insane. Besides I discerned vaguely a
connecting thread between his ideas—I never detected a contradic-
tion amongst them; and then too I would have feared a too simple
solution.
We went through night-softened streets, turning at right-angles,
choosing, as by instinct, our way through—now larger—now small-
er—now larger-spaces; his military step in command.
"Still, is one to escape from such powerful music," I replied,
"and why? for I find in it a peculiar intoxication, a sort of stimu-
lant not to be disdained. I find in it the illusion of an immense
work that all at once becomes possible to me. It gives me abstract
sensations, delicious imageries of all that I love-change, move-
ment, blending tides of transformation. You do not deny that
some things are anaesthetics? That there are trees that drug us,
men that strengthen us, women that paralyse us, skies that render
us speechless ?”
M Teste interrupted quite loudly:
"Eh, Monsieur, what do I care about the talent of
your trees-
and so forth! ... I am in my own domain, I speak my own lan-
guage. I hate the extraordinary: that necessity of weaklings.
Take my word for it: to have genius is easy, to have fortune is
easy, to realize divinity is easy—I simply mean to say that I know
how these things are brought about, it is easy.
“Long ago—about twenty years back—I considered anything re-
markable accomplished by another than myself as a personal de-
feat. I seemed to see in the past nothing but ideas stolen from
me! How stupid! We are not indifferent to our own entity.
In these imaginary duels we treat ourselves too well or too badly.”
.


166
AN EVENING WITH M TESTE
a
He coughed: “What can a man do?” and added: “You at
least know one who is aware that he does not know what he says!"
We had arrived at his door. He invited me to come in and
smoke a cigar.
We entered a small furnished flat at the top of the house. Not
a book was visible. Nothing betrayed the traditional work at a
table or writing desk, near a lamp, in the midst of paper
and
pens.
In the greenish room that smelt of mint, the candle light showed
but the indispensable and almost abstract furnishings: the bed, the
clock, the wardrobe with mirror doors, two chairs—like rational
entities. On the mantelpiece a few newspapers, a dozen or so
visiting cards, covered with figures, a bottle of chemicals—I never
had a stronger impression of the usual haphazard lodging, as non-
descript as reduced, as impersonal as a figure in geometry, and as
useful. My host existed amongst the most ordinary of generali-
ties. I thought of the hours he must spend in that chair. I even
feared the infinitude of sadness that seemed possible in a place so
simplified, so banal. I have lived in like rooms, but could never
think of them as permanent—without horror.
M Teste spoke of money—I cannot reproduce his special elo-
quence: it even seemed less precise than usual. Fatigue, the grow-
ing silence of the small hours, the bitter taste of cigars—the solitary
power and potency of night seemed to act upon him. His voice
lowered and he spoke more slowly, yet the candle light danced be-
tween us, as he enumerated wearily great numbers: Eight hun-
dred ten millions seventy-five thousand five hundred fifty. .
I listen to this strange music without following the calculations by
which he communicated to me the tremor of the Stock Exchange,
and the long strings of named numbers seized me by their rhythms,
held me as poetry. He compared events, industrial phenomena,
public tastes and passions, figures, saying: “Gold is like the spirit
of society.”
Suddenly he interrupted himself. He was suffering.
I again examined the cold room, the commonplace aspect of it
all so as not to look at him. He took up the bottle from the man-
telpiece and drank from it. I got up to go.
“Stay a bit,” he said, "you're not bored. I'll get to bed. In
a few moments I'll be asleep, and you'll take the candle to see your
way down-stairs.
.


PAUL VALERY
167
-
He undressed quietly. His lean body immersed in sheets, simu-
lating death. Then he turned, and stretched out further in the too-
short bed.
He smiled, saying: “I'm afloat. I feel an imperceptible roll-
ing under me—and an immense rhythm? But I'll only sleep an
hour or two, I who love navigation through the night. Often
my thoughts were unrecognizable to me before sleep——I do not
know whether I've been asleep or not.—As I used to drop off I'd
think of all those who had pleased me, faces, things, moments. I
summoned them up that my thoughts might be as soft as possible- ,
soft as bed. ... I'm old now. ... I can prove to you that I feel
old. . Remember !—When one's a child one discovers oneself,
one slowly discovers the space of one's own body, one realizes its
corporal particularities by series of efforts, I suppose? One twists,
and one finds oneself-then one refinds oneself—and one is aston-
ished at first only to touch one's heel, to seize one's right foot with
one's left hand, one realizes the coldness of the foot by the hand's
warmth. Now I know myself by heart—the heart as well!
“Bah! The whole earth is marked out, possessive pinions over
each territory My bed remains. I like this tide of sleep
and cool linen, these sheets that stretch and crumple—that cover
me like sand, when I play at death, that ripple about my rest. It's
of a very complex mechanism. In the way of the thread, the woof,
a
or chain, the slightest deformation ... Ah!"
He again seemed to suffer.
"What's the matter," I ventured, "what can I do?”
“Nothing much," he said, “I've a tenth of a second which
shows.
There are instances when my body is il-
lumined. It's very curious. Suddenly I can see into my-
self! I distinguished the depths of the layers of my flesh—I feel
zones of pain, links, poles, aigrettes of pain. Can you see these
vivid images, this geometry of my suffering? Flashes such as
these resemble the sparks of ideas. They make one understand
from there to here—the links—yet they leave me uncertain. Un-
certain is scarcely the word—when this is about to occur I find in
myself something confused, somewhat diffused. Places are made
in me hazy and indistinct. There are regions which make their
appearance. Then I choose a question, take from my memory any
problem, and I sink down. I count grains of sand, and as long as
wait ..
•


168
AN EVENING WITH M TESTE
I see them .. But the pain getting more intense claims my at-
tention. I think of it, and only await my own scream; and as soon
as I've heard my cry—the object, the terrible object, waxes smal-
ler-escapes from my inner vision.
“What can one do? I fight everything-save the suffering of
my own body—when it reaches a certain intensity. Yet it's there
I should begin. For to suffer is to give to something an overwhelm-
ing attention—and I'm rather a man given to attention. I remark
that I saw the illness that was coming. I'd even thought with pre-
cision about that which others take for granted.— I think that this
capacity to discern probable events of the future should be a part of
education.—Yes, I had foreseen what is now beginning to take
place—then it was an idea, like other ideas. So I was able to follow
it up."
He calmed down-turned over on his side, half closed his eyes,
and in a minute began again to speak. But he was dropping off,
his voice was but a murmur lost in the pillow. His flushed hand
seemed already asleep.
He pursued. “I'm still thinking, but it doesn't disturb me—I'm
alone. How comfortable is solitude. Nothing over-sweet weighs
upon me.
The same reveries here as in the cabin of the boat, the
same as at the Café Lambert If the arms of a Bertha seem
important to me, I'm robbed of myself—as through pain! He
who speaks to me and cannot prove what he asserts—is an enemy-
I prefer the flash of the slightest fact. I am, being and seeing,
seeing myself see myself and so forth.—Let me think it out closer!
Bah! any subject lulls one to sleep, and sleep continues no matter
what idea.
He snored gently. Still more gently I took the candle and went
out with stealthy feet.
.


LE JOCKEY. BY EMANUEL FAY


A



自​.
a
nnn
MC
חחח
PP
nnnn
12
The
15
П
Bunyit stund
0)
JUUUU
FAT
Th
CANAL ST MARTIN. BY EMANEUL FAY






ma
ППП
חל
חר
nu
CEO
구구​국
​Rie
e
UNE GARE. BY EMANUEL FAY


7
1
.
1
1
1
|



JOB ET SES AMIS. BY EMANUEL FAY


學
​


CHILDHOOD TRAITS IN WHITMAN
BY EMORY HOLLOWAY
*
by a single essay in the Gentleman's Magazine, published two
months after the poet's death in 1892. And yet she remains to this
day the only writer who has called particular attention to the char-
acteristics of childhood mentality in the Leaves of Grass, an aspect
which the newer psychology is certain to investigate with more or less
important results. She herself was, apparently, unacquainted with
the then rudimentary psychoanalytical method, and so wrote, as it
chanced, much better than she knew. When this method will have
been employed with more sympathy and charity than has been as yet
manifested by the left wing of Whitman biographers, and with more
open-mindedness than has characterized his apotheosis at the hands
of the right, we may hope to achieve a story of his life and work
which will by its total truthfulness satisfy both the mind and the
heart, both the reason and the imagination. My desire in the prest
ent brief essay is to illustrate the possibilities of such a method by
indicating how not a few of the characteristic traits of the mature
poet, both those which have occasioned praise and those which have
evoked censure, can be better and more justly understood when they
are regarded as results of what the Freudian school terms the repres-
sion, the perversion, or the sublimation of his child nature. In doing
so I run small risk, I hope, of seeming to affirm that so influential and
so germinal a poet is mentally a mere child, still less that he is child-
ish. And yet he puts to himself the poser: "What am I after all but
a child, pleas'd with the sound of my own name ?''
In the first edition of the Leaves of Grass, consecrated to the re-
cording of the poet's inner life up to the date of publishing the vol-
ume in 1855, Whitman describes how as a child he went forth in the
world, beholding in wonder and joy its various shows, characters,
and experiences, and how these all in turn became indestructibly a
part of the child. Nothing could be more naïve or refreshing. But
although the book was not issued until the author's long life had
reached its chronological meridian, nothing in it traced his mental


170
CHILDHOOD TRAITS IN WHITMAN
development very much beyond this initial stage. To be sure, he
mentioned, in the preface to the 1876 edition, his ambition to con-
tinue the record, and his poems written after the Civil War do reveal
an increasing maturity. Nevertheless, as late as 1865, when he was
forty-six years old, his verse still overflowed with a child's delight in
a
a
“Beginning my studies the first step pleas'd me so much,
The mere fact consciousness, these forms, the power of mo-
,
tion,
The least insect or animal, the senses, eyesight, love,
The first step I say aw'd me and pleas'd me so much, ,
I have hardly gone, and hardly wish'd to go, any farther,
But stop and loiter all the time to sing it in ecstatic songs.
rin hier
а
A study of The Sleepers will indicate how this mystical capacity for
embracing Nature as a mistress affords, through a kind of subcon-
scious sublimation, a sorely needed outlet for a great deal of sex emo-
tion which, as we shall see, was thwarted in its normal development
and expression. Even when, though reluctant to abandon the facul-
ties and the disposition of a child in the midst of a world filled with
romance, Whitman finally adopts something like a serious and defi-
,
Inite relation to his environment, he elects the rôle of seer and prophet
whose task it shall be to impress upon less childlike men the won-
drous goodness of creation. He is the eternal poetic child set in the
midst of "reasonable” and cynical Philistines. In his copy of the
1847 edition of Shelley's works Whitman marked, as if with his ap-
proval, the following passage in the brief essay on Life: "What a
distinct and intense apprehension we had [when children] of the
world and of ourselves! We less habitually distinguished all that
we saw and felt, from ourselves. They seemed to constitute one
mass. There are some persons who, in this respect, are always chil-
dren.”
Shelley and Whitman belonged to a class of poets whose fancy at
times becomes so vivid that the poets themselves experience difficulty
in distinguishing it from the reality it was meant to spiritualize. In
Whitman this love of romance, and of romancing, was stimulated by
an early reading in Scott and Cooper and the classics, and found re-
peated expression in his own fictions, the tediousness of whose im-
Х


EMORY HOLLOWAY
171
me
a
a
probable and melodramatic narrative can be lessened only by read-
ing them as commentaries on the mental development of the youth-
ful author. But unfortunately the same tendency at times appeared
in the man as well. The story of Whitman's romancing to Emerson
concerning the rapid sale of his own first edition (possibly sincere,
because a subconscious fulfilment of a deep desire) and his later flat
contradiction of that romance, and the (as many are disposed to be-
lieve) exaggerated story about his six children, to say nothing of the
obvious deception in publishing anonymously reviews that he had
written of his own poetry, or in republishing, over assumed initials,
as an original novel, a story that had been formally issued four years
previously—all this can be more easily understood if we allow him
to have retained a child's fondness for fabrication. And it may not be
amiss to note, in passing, that this mental state is but a step removed
from those mystical moods in which he identifies himself with all
manner of suffering folk in his frenzied verse-concerning which
more will presently be said
. His childlike fondness for romancet
colours all his early poetry. In his ante-bellum writings, whether
editorial, essay, or poem, Whitman expresses himself most charact
teristically when he loafs along Broadway or on the Brooklyn Ferry
or on the New Orleans levee or by the seaside or in the fields and
woods, merely observing and taking a meditative, but unreasoning,
unquestioning, delight in what he observes. He will not allow him-
self to be disconcerted by the man's question, "Why is evil ?” and he
is only intrigued by the child's “What is the grass ?" His much-
ridiculed catalogues are but the more or less emotional record of
these impressions, their only unifying principle being the fairly con-
stant joy with which they are perceived and reported. Manifestly
they have no more necessary limits than a child's account of a picnic,
since they do not pretend to be “finished specimens” and since they
profess to conform to no real architectonic plan. And even when,
under stress of a recent experience, Whitman does outline a fairly
complete picture or episode, it is the experience that he suggests
rather than its meaning; for to him, as to a child, all genuine mean-
ings were mysteries.
Notwithstanding an acquaintance with the masterpieces of Greek,
Latin, and English literature more intimate than can be claimed
for the average college graduate to-day, and notwithstanding a pro-
phetic, because spiritual, response to the challenge of modern science,


172
CHILDHOOD TRAITS IN WHITMAN
a
there remained in Whitman a strain of superstition, such as Profes-
sor N. W. Stephenson has recently pointed out in Abraham Lincoln.
His early Quaker associations, his sensitiveness to the wave of tran-
scendental enthusiasm which passed over American literature in his
adolescence and young manhood, together with a natural bent to-
wards self-reliance, fostered in him a type of mysticism that the stu-
dent of literary and religious history associates with youth rather
than with maturity. Whitman's biography is full of such expres-
sions as “I feel to say this” or “I felt to show myself [at a public
gathering] but not to say anything," or his declaration that Children
of Adam was written because of an inward compulsion, or, most typi-
cal of all, his well-known account of how he determined to go his
own way, not at all disturbed, but rather set at peace, by Emerson's
unanswerable arguments against the publication of these poems. All
inspired poets owe fealty, of course, to their patron muses, whoever
the latter may be; but when such reliance appears without the sanc-
tion, even if not with the support and under the control, of that ma-
turest of man's faculties, the reason, it is yet a childlike inspiration.
And if one know not whither he moves nor why, but only that he is
guided, like Bryant's lone waterfowl, by some inscrutable Purpose
which speaks to his subconscious soul, then his peace is in the keeping
of his faith, and in moments when that faith ceases to be child-
like and unquestioning, his peace vanishes. That Whitman had
known such unhappiness he has himself testified. There must have
been more of the joy of an ancient vates than of a modern artist in
the creations of a soul which, acutely aware of the "something be-
hind” the best that his words could do, had nevertheless to rely upon
this shadowy something to see to it that his various and vari-coloured
impressions should "always fall properly into their places.” Of
such a mind it is useless to expect a systematic philosophy. In mid-
life he roughly classed himself as a Hegelian, it is true, but the elec-
tion of this philosophic system was itself a manifestation of a tem-
perament that was far from systematic. Hegel afforded him a maxi-
mum of peace in his contemplation of a discordant self in which more
than one ugly passion fought its way, in one guise or another, to the
surface of his thought and even into his verse. According to Hegel,
even these had their function in the making of a soul. Thus he was
assured that all was, or was to be, right with the world while he
piped, each morning, his "morning's romanza."
a
a


EMORY HOLLOWAY
173
In an earlier number of The Dial I have pointed out how lonely,
t
how little understood, how hungry for affection Whitman was as a
child. Even his mother, to whom he was passionately attached un-
til her death, looked upon him as a mystery. His mysticism doubt-
less increased this loneliness, and his associations in rural Long
Island did little to mitigate it. An early poem has been found in
which the poet, complaining of unreturned affection, declares his
loss of hope for human happiness:
“And so the heart must turn above,
Or die in dull despair.”
The youth found, however, another way out. I do not mean his
somewhat abnormal emotional attraction to his mother, and the fem-
ininity which may have resulted from a sort of imitation of her. Nor
do I mean his romantic attraction to other men, which some psycho-
analysts might consider a subconscious defence mechanism against
the mild Oedipus complex just mentioned. But I refer to his discov-
ery of the path Narcissus took. A powerful, but repressed sexual
nature was, I think, largely responsible for Whitman's "egotism,"
which no explanations concerning its vicarious character have ever
succeeded in rendering quite attractive. At first this self-esteem was
recognized as foreign to his ego, but the struggle to repress was at
length given up, and proof was offered of its unselfishness by extend-
ing to the reader the privilege of being equally egotistic! He wrote:
a
“Nobody, I hope, will accuse me of conceit in these opinions of
mine own capacity for doing great things. In good truth, I think the
world suffers from this much-bepraised modesty. Who should be a
better judge of a man's talents than the man himself? I see no rea-
son why we should let our lights shine under bushels. Yes: I would
write a book! And who shall say that it might not be a very pretty
book? Who knows but that I might do something very respect-
able?"
a
One aspect of this childish egotism appears in his much-discussed
poems of nakedness. For writing them he advanced reasons based
on aesthetics, eugenics, and even morality, and we need not doubt
that these reasons were sincerely held. Yet the larger question re-


174
CHILDHOOD TRAITS IN WHITMAN
a
.
mains, Why should the subject have appealed to this particular poet
with such strength and persistency? And the simplest answer that
psychology can give is that it is a survival of what in childhood may
be a not abnormal exhibitionism, a Narcissic admiration of his own
well-formed body first, and a later extension of this unabashed ad-
miration to well made and well functioning bodies everywhere. “I
dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious.” The
Sleepers, already referred to, is particularly suggestive in this con-
nexion. Thinly disguising his real desire by professing an intent to
paint a realistic picture of the human mind at work in dreaming,
Whitman in reality gives, of course, a sample of his own dreams—or
perhaps many samples, jumbled, dream-wise, into one. Much of
this imagery can be identified as his personal “past-reading.” It is
therefore significant that this double entendre poem should contain
such a surprising proportion of nudes. ... With a child's dra-
matic instinct-a faculty which our dreams preserve more or less for
us all-Whitman identifies himself with these dream characters, not
least often with women, young or old. Thus he often imagines him-
self as exerting a truly feminine charm over other men, just as he
has felt the charm of woman upon his own life. Most of his biog-
raphers—Bucke and Burroughs and Binns, Perry, De Selincourt,
Bazalgette, and Edward Carpenter-emphasize his possession of
something of the nature of a woman in addition to, rather than in
lieu of, his proper masculinity, and he himself expected Leaves of
Grass to be better understood by women than by men. Obviously
this personal comprehension of both sexes increased the range of
Whitman's sympathy by preserving in him the child's impartial de-
mocracy in social matters. Indeed, some of the most enthusiastic
Whitman admirers, such as Edward Carpenter, Havelock Ellis, and
John Addington Symonds, have urged this peculiarity, this psycho-
logical "amphigenous” inversion, as one of the poet's greatest assets,
affording him the artist's opportunity to interpret one sex to the
other and, without rising out of his deepest self, to address his pa-
triotic, artistic, and religious appeal alike to men and to women.
It is sometimes asserted that Whitman lacks a sense of humour.
He has the more sympathy; and is not sympathy feminine humour,
not content with the passive perception of another's viewpoint, but
entering with active joy into his experience? The underlying cause
of this unusual psychology is to be sought in the many passages, both


EMORY HOLLOWAY
175
in the published writings and in the private notebooks of the poet, in
which he bewails the hopelessness of his personal affections. Failing
to find normal expression as they grew stronger, they were arrest-
ed in their development, so that they might claim, at least in verse,
childhood's privilege of expressing sex emotions without reference
to the conventions which hedge about the loves of the civilized adult.
One need not share the surprise of a certain biographer that the Cala-
mus poems should have been inspired, so far as our knowledge of
Whitman's friendships goes, by a longing instead of a lover. As a
matter of fact, Whitman's passion for his fellow men, in its most
embracing aspects, is to be sought rather as sublimated personal
affection in his verse than in his individual relation to his fellows.
Aside from his years of voluntary service in the Washington hos-
pitals, where he remained more because he enjoyed the emotional ex-
penditure he was so effectively making than from a sense of patriotic
duty ("If I didn't like it I wouldn't do it”) and aside from many in-
dividual instances of his tenderness to the unfortunate and to the
sinful, there were well defined limits to his personal affection which
never appeared in his verse. And when we observe this sympathy,
in his poems, leading him to take upon himself the woes of the hunted
slave, or of the sensitive, slighted ones of earth, it is not to qualify
our admiration for his messianic tenderness to perceive in it, psycho-
logically, a sublimation of the sadism normal in childhood.
If Whitman's mind, in so many ways, reveals the characteristics
of arrested development, then that part of his nature which he him-
self considered to be most fundamental, his sex impulses, may be ex-
pected to be more or less like a child's. Otherwise we should be con-
fronted with one of the greatest paradoxes of literary biography, a
man who was in many ways but a child being, nevertheless, driven
on by a highly developed sexual nature. And when the psychologist
has done his best, some of this paradox will doubtless remain. Yet
it tends to reconcile the two wings of Whitman biographers to ac-
count for the fact that the same man wrote the twenty-six amorous
pages of Children of Adam and the twenty-five "adhesive"
of
Calamus by saying, with the Freudians, that his sex nature, like a
child's, was bifurcated, or rather that it was never normally special-
ized and differentiated as he grew up—that it was “polymorph-per-
verse,” or reversibly bisexual. That to Whitman himself sex meant
something of this sort, rather than the specialized emotions of nor-
pages
a
a


176
CHILDHOOD TRAITS IN WHITMAN
mal maturity, at once appears when he begins to generalize on the
theme. The following passage provokes a wonder whether Freud
may not have caught a hint from Whitman in formulating his
theory:
"Sex contains all, bodies, souls,
Meanings, proofs, purities, delicacies, results, promulgations,
Songs, commands, health, pride . .
All hopes, benefactions, bestowals, all the passions, loves,
beauties, delights of the earth ..."
a
It may well be doubted whether sex plays so engrossing a part in
the life of the average man, but perhaps it does in the life of the
child, provided only that we follow the Freudians in conveniently
stretching the definition of sex to cover the entire libido, or the un-
mixed stream of subconscious desires of all sorts, as when they assert
the hunger for food and the hunger for sex to find simultaneous sat-
isfaction when a child is nursed at the breast. Whitman's passion
for democracy (which led us into this consideration of his sexual
make-up) can be roughly described as a highly emotional child's at-
tachment of his affections, his more or less ungratified sex impulses,
to the whole race of man. It is only with the heart of youth that one
can love so and not fall into insincerity. But of course this inflexi-
ble condition for entering into such a kingdom of heaven is nothing
new, though few there be that meet it.
Akin to his humanitarian democracy is Whitman's gospel of per-
sonal comradeship. But this comradeship, which he takes to be the
true cement of a republic, turns out to be a comradeship in loafing-
poetical and philosophic loafing, if you will rather than a comrade-
ship in labour. Yet it is the comradeship of those who labour in a
common cause, whether of peace or of war, that is the true, self-for-
getting comradeship of the mature man; the comradeship of sport,
of leisure, of receptivity, is that which takes a man back to his boy-
hood. It is difficult to understand how a republic can live its worka-
day life upon Open Roads, even though they should run through the
'heart of a city. And this idea of comradeship as distinguished from
co-operation is not accidental with Whitman. He himself lost three
or four newspaper positions because he had never learned success-
fully to co-operate with others. In short, he was a child who, if he
a


EMORY HOLLOWAY
177
f
must work, preferred to work alone, but who could appreciate a
boon companion when he was in a mood to tramp his “perpetual
journey."
Finally, in his attitude towards the future, Whitman takes his
stand upon the faith of childhood. No poet, ancient or modern, has
expressed a more certain conviction-apprehension, even—of the
immortality of the soul than did he. Though occasionally he al-
lowed himself to drop into argument about it, as in the debate with
Robert Ingersoll, his belief did not rest upon argument. It was an
experience of immortality, or, if one prefer, a sense of the inexhaust-
ible fulness of life. Common observation renders superfluous Haz-
litt's reminder that such a feeling is, unfortunately, the almost ex-
clusive possession of inexperienced youth. That in Whitman, how-
ever, this feeling of eternal life was not conditioned upon youth or
upon the accident of superb bodily health, but rather upon the
somewhat unusual constitution of his mind, is clearly shown by
the fact that it diminished neither with illness nor with age.


THE HOLY GILDE
BY S. FOSTER DAMON
The night was deepening with snow, whose thick
Blurred hush clung to the clotted window, swelled
The underbrush to shapelessness, until
Each dessicated bush was lost under
The drift. At times a muffled rush sank
From the turret-roofs; or into the gushing brook
A branch in the forest bowed, and slid its ponderous load.
A soft wet web was wound about the towers
Of the nunnery under the mountain, until they seemed
Like waxen, forest flowers. The dark whiteness
Filmed the oaken doors, and pushed its fingers
Between their iron hinges into the halls.
The grey stone walls melted into the sky
That soaked
up
the murmurs of the world.
Before the altar of the inmost sanctuary
Knelt Sister Gilde for perpetual adoration.
The hours had passed into eternity
While the cold flagstones burned and bit her knees.
Eternity had fluctuated with hours
While the snow rattled and clicked at the black windows.
Some time in the dull dawning there would come
Another nun to kneel in adoration,
Another nun to kneel, until she fell
Exhausted, before the sempiternal presence.
Her mind was weary of the ceaseless effort
Of casting out all thought, until the Christ
Could enter in, and fill her with His presence.
Once she had been a simple, worldly girl,
Who loved the easy life her parents led.


S. FOSTER DAMON
179
Her days were spent with music in the meadows,
Or making tiny paintings for the tales
Written by monks on white-skin manuscripts.
She had liked children, flowers, pageants, dancing;
But ever, in the very midst of pleasure,
The emptiness would roll upon her mind
Until her parents told her she was marked
For holiness by God himself; and then
They had brought her to this grey-stone nunnery
Under the mountain. Was it many years
Or was it many days? She could not tell.
She thought how, when they destined her to the nunnery,
They had given a final dance for her.
And then, as the white-bosomed dawn awoke,
They brought her, with the violins before
Playing the last pavane, to the convent.
They stopped before the gate. A voice cried:
"Who is it knocks ?”
She answered as they taught her:
"A maiden seeking refuge from the world,
Desirous to be the bride only of Christ.”
The oaken door opened. She was pushed forward
To stand upon the threshold. A grey robe
Fell over her laces. Her hand was taken;
She was led in. The great door closed. She heard,
Dimly, the music vanishing away.
How many years ago?
She could not tell.
She was not sure that she was called by God.
Yet twice or thrice while she was humbly kneeling
Before the altar, gazing into infinity,
She had seen the darkness spreading in bright circles
And heard the bells of silence ringing in her ears,
Until her very flesh yearned all for God.


180
THE HOLY GILDE
Then on her heart she was perceptibly kissed
By the sweet lips of the little infant Christ,
While in her breast bright melodies uncurled
Like glittering incense of another world;
And the whole meadow of her soul was strewn
With burning roses. ...
The vision swooned
And faded, till she was left all alone
And very desolate.
A muffled rush sank from a turret roof.
The thick snow clicked.
When all the daily tasks of convent life
Were done, the meals eaten, the cells cleaned,
The masses sung, they set their Sister Gilde
To illuminate the heavy manuscripts
That Sister Genevieve lettered and rubricated;
For Gilde had studied in her former life
To mix the paints, to fix the gold, and burnish it.
To-
morrow she would paint the child, Saint Vite.
She had planned the entire picture so carefully
That she could see it glowing in the dark.
Below in the palace hall, dancers paused
Weary of pleasure, while in the tower above
The incorruptible boy danced with the angels.
Gilde saw him, clothed in blue of fleurs de lys,
Pavaning, while the twelve celestial spirits
Made music on their rose-bound violins,
With Hylas falling, blinded, in the door.
For wicked Hylas was Vite's pagan father
Who, when his son embraced no other faith
Than that of the Church Militant and Triumphant,
Had let his son, although but twelve years old,
Be beaten by Valerian's Roman slaves;
But the slaves' arms withered, and the blessed Vite
Healed and forgave them. Then the wicked father,
Yet unconvinced of Christ's ultimate victory,


S. FOSTER DAMON
181
Endeavoured to corrupt his son with ease,
Clothing his delicate body in coloured silks,
Burning perfumes about him everywhere,
Feeding him strange foods, letting wait upon him
Three maids with violets in their yellow hair
And vervaine where their unfolding breasts were bare.
But Vite sat sideways from them, wringing his hands;
And ever his tiny tears fell; ever he cried:
"Have mercy upon me, have mercy upon me, Christ!"
(Gilde's heart grew big with pity for his hands.)
Then Hylas, the bad father, gave a banquet;
Among the dark mosaics, women moved
Like blowing fields of flowers. There was music
And purple wine. But Vite refused to dance;
So Hylas shut him in his darkest tower;
And Vite wept for the music and the wine,
For he was very young. Then Christ took pity
And sent twelve angels, fair as twelve white trees,
With cymbals and violins and gilded fruits;
And in the tower they held a feast with him,
Lighting the chamber with their own bright robes.
And then Vite danced.
(Gilde heard the music
Slowly uncurling, very far away,
Like a thin stream of incense in the dusk,
While softness sank upon her soul like snow.)
Vite danced, and all the angels clapped their hands,
Their violins sang, and the tabors beat,
The little cymbals rang like flowers of glass,
And to the heavenly cadence, the young Vite
Moved in his tunic of blue on springing feet
That seemed to walk on pied meadow-grass.
.
Gilde did not like to pass beyond this part
Of the holy story. She could not bear to feel


182
THE HOLY GILDE
Dark Hylas creeping up the spiral stairs,
To hear his young son sobbing in the night;
Her breath caught when she thought of the fierce blaze of
Glory bursting through Hylas' eyes, and he
Writhing in agony before the heavenly dance.
Gilde could not think of this; instead, she danced
Herself, behind the last rank of the angels.
She breathed but with the beating of her heart
Until the music entered her, like a Presence.
Her feet beat time, her heart became a tabor,
Her body quivered, a vibrant violin,
While young Vite danced and danced about for ever.
Now he leapt, like a young goat in the meadow,
Now he swayed slowly, like a wind-blown birch-tree;
But all the while she danced, she danced about him,
The silver horn that trembled with the joy,
The feet that stamped until they stung with sound,
The hands that clung fast in the whirling round
About the blue-clad figure of the boy.


IDYLL
BY HERBERT J. SELIGMANN
SHE
HE felt, just before she stepped into the ball-room, deliciously
contained in this gold dress that gave to her whiteness so free
a movement. Voices and moving figures enveloped her as she stood
for a moment, hesitant, on the threshold. She was numbed and be-
wildered. She looked for faces; someone took her arm; she heard
names and bowed and smiled--then there was, quite distinct, before
her, smiling, his face.
She felt awkward dancing, big and unsubdued by the music. He
did not seem to mind. He could be talked to. She heard herself;
her words seemed to pour out from her as if an ice-bound stream
had suddenly turned spring freshet. The dance, the orchestra, these
solemn black-and-white men and absorbed women faded in this
stream of communication.
— and I wonder if I'll ever know spring again. There was a
terrible loss this winter for me. It seems so strange to be here
dancing. I feel out of place. It is always so I am really afraid
to go among people. As a little girl it cost me agonies. Some-
times I went and hid. Always I felt as if something were wrong
about my dress or my hair or—”
She did not mind now. He was accepting her and her mood
calmly, even that she had not learned to dance. He had seemed
aloof a year ago. She knew vaguely about him. It was irresistible
to move towards him to find out what was behind that lined face
with its dark eyes gazing quietly through glasses at her. She
danced with others and forgot him.
At supper he sat beside her. He turned and asked her to walk
with him the next day. Yes, she would, and something leapt with-
in her. Later, the dance was left behind. They turned from the
hotel into the park. It was a March night, delicious with the bril-
liant heavens of retreating winter and the winds of promised spring.
She stopped him to look at the stars.
“That red one,” he said, "is Aldebaran."
“Somehow,” her voice said, "you seem to me so much more real
than the stars."


184
IDYLL
II
a
a
There had been a day's walking and they were sitting on a rock,
sunlit, among trees. A rim of ice fringed a pool of water below
them. Voices calling and laughing echoed at a distance.
"You see,” he said, “even those voices suggest her. I can't hear
them without wondering whether she will come walking out into
that clear open space. It is an obsession, I know. She haunts me.
It's been all over for a month. One's mind is reconciled-one's feel-
ings leap like a beast caged.”
She could not quite imagine that, she said. There came to her
mind one to whom her girlhood had gone storming, enveloped in
the mist of desire to give—one who had retreated behind torment-
ing friendliness. It was an old pain half remembered, half for-
gotten, inwoven in the texture of frustrated years, now throbbing
in this deeper loss of which she had spoken the night before, a loss
she could not yet know because it was too close and cast ominous
shadows. Youth seemed to have gone with it and ironic, half-
exasperated laughter, intimacy that lay in tastes shared and words
unspoken.
"You have so much to live for,” she said smiling,"friends, a
life among people
your work"
She heard him then persuading her that life was miraculous if
one moved out to meet it open-handed.
>
III
They were sitting before her fireplace, in the semi-darkness of
glowing embers.
There had been others there. The two sat alone now before
the fire.
"I am drawn to you,” she said, in wonder at what he would do.
"I know." He did not move. “Tell me about the sorrow of
this winter.”
"I can't,” came her frightened whisper—"I can't—and I'm
afraid.” Her pain seized her in sudden relentlessness, held before
her vision the inscribed wall of memory, then passed shadow-like
in the tortured movement of her lips. This must be blotted out.


HERBERT J. SELIGMANN
185
She flung out a hand which he held in his own, drawing her slowly,
unresisting, to him.
“Tell me,” he repeated—"about him and the others.”
"I left him—I left him," came a quick whisper, "and now he
is dead. The other
he was sweet, kind. It was years ago. We
wrote saying good-bye.”
“And now?" His voice stirred her.
“Life seemed ended until you came.
Now- But it must not
be again. No love."
"Are you afraid?” his voice insisted.
'
"I-don't know.”
" “Do you want me?” '
“Yes.”
He was gone. She sat as if suspended in the time until he should
come again. When she had undressed she lay sleepless, in the
darkness, thinking of the suddenness of life. This man was real,
nevertheless that one who was dead lived on too.
IV
Gulls and glancing waters playing with light and sky colour-
He stood there like some dark accompanist of spring, watching
her. She wondered what he saw. He was so intent. It was deli-
cious to be alive. She had sloughed winter and memory.
“Oh, the gulls, the lovely white birds," she cried. "See that
"
one dip and float so daring in the wind. There's nothing in the
world like gulls—I wish I were free.”
She was taken aback when he kissed her, madly, as though he
were the automaton of a passion.
V
They woke late. "Three o'clock,” he said after turning up his
watch, "of a spring Sunday. Aren't you ashamed ?”
"No," she said laughing, Aung out of bed and stood white in
the sunlight that flowed through the windows.
"You have a lovely body, Dürer woman,” he said.
like it?" And she caught up her hair and moved out
of his view.
“Ah, you


186
IDYLL
VI
He was gazing at her, maddeningly.
“Then you did spend the time with him when
you
said
you were
shopping ?” It was spring still and the same voice that had whis-
pered in her ear.
She hated at the moment those dark eyes, peering through the
glasses. The voice that had seemed to pour sunlight into her being
now exasperated her. She wanted to flee, to go somewhere-
"Well, if you must ask direct questions, you can't expect the
truth always.”
Suddenly she found herself weeping, uncontrollably. She hated
him, she knew that. He bored her frightfully.
VII
She was putting on the gold dress again. This time she looked
close in her mirror to see if all was well at the corners of her eyes.
How many memories there were. Some of them hurt. There is
.
always somewhere to go away from memories. Only the memo-
ries come back. They follow. They leave you and are as though
they were not. Then a mere name, a flower, a hyacinth—they used
to have hyacinths those interminable Sundays when they break-
fasted gloriously at three o'clock-how the acrid, sweet odour of
hyacinths or his name heard suddenly could evoke the stabbing
realization that then and now are separated by gulfs wider than
centuries, deeper than any abyss. She wanted to weep. Life was
terrible. The gold dress again. She looked at this stately figure
in the glass. Men would tell her she was beautiful, a Greek god-
.
dess. They would flatter and she would unfold, yield herself like
some giant flower endowed with a fierce passion of blossoming.
Some would even dare to love her. Let them, at their peril. Some-
thing there would be for each—if only an awakening of unquench-
able thirst. Life is always new beginnings. She wanted to weep.
There was not time. She had to go to the ball.



CARL SPRIN CHORS
Courtesy of the Galleries of Mrs Albert Sterner
WOMAN IN EVERGREENS. BY CARL SPRINCHORN


1
r


-

Courtesy of the Galleries of Mrs Albert Sterner
THE FEAR FOREST. BY CARL SPRINCHORN





PARIS LETTER
January, 1922
F
RANCE Honours Noted Writer: Flaubert Centenary: Brillat-
: . .
You couldn't, as Cocteau says, get any further with, I think it was,
Diaghilef, because he had taste; that is to say he was afraid of any-
thing newer than the style of ballet with which he had made his first
hit. Paul Gsell has shown several kinds (of taste) in his sometimes
oily and nearly always clever presentation of Les matinées de la
Villa Saïd: Propos d'Anatole France, for which nineteen thousand
people have already shown—and quite wisely—their gratitude.
The Master says “They are accused of not believing. Il faudrait
savoir d'abord si la crédulité est une vertu et si la véritable fermeté
n'est pas de mettre en doute ce qu'on n'a nulle raison de croire." He
recalls the Duc de Broglie, qui était chrétien. “Il avait été d'une
complexion ardente. Un jour, son médecin lui avait conseillé de
prendre une maîtresse pour ménager sa femme d'une santé fort
précarie.
“Le duc refléchit et soudain: 'Hé! ma foi, cher docteur, j'aime
beaucoup mieux perdre ma femme que mon âme.'
Several shovelfuls of ashes descend upon the somewhat untended
grave of the French Academy: “Mes mignons,” said Louise Colet,
lady-friend of Victor Cousin, to two of her guests, Flaubert and
Bouilhet, "you must save my life.” The Academy had set the sub-
ject Immortality, and Louise had not got her poem done in time.
.
The Guests were then shut in her study, Bouilhet occasionally inter-
rupting the conversation. “'Zuť, répond Flaubert,” but near mid-
night he is stirred into action, and pulling down a Lamartine he reads
aloud two hundred lines to Bouilhet, who copies them. "Now add
the title: Immortality.” The lady thanked them in the words:
“You haven't sprained yourselves (Vous ne vous êtes pas foulés)
but it'll do.” The Academy granted her the usual wreath.
This anecdote
may
be taken as M Bergeret's contribution to the
Flaubert centenary.
Professor Brown next seeks the secret of
رو د
>
a
>


188
PARIS LETTER
genius, and Maître Anatole defines the savant as "a thundering bore
who studies and publishes, on principle, everything fundamentally
lacking in interest.” Gsell's collection of gossip can be quoted on
most subjects from philology (poison of university systems) to the
Russian revolution. If the recent meeting called at Bonn to de-
mand the freedom of the Rhineland has been little discussed and
that little in complete nationalist misunderstanding of denational-
ist ideas—we can find Anatole with “La patrie, if you mean by that
the sum of great ideas and profound feelings which differentiate one
country from another.” One reacts with C. H. Douglas' "The na-
tion economically is the difference between the credit it possesses as
a whole and the sum of the little credits possessed by its individual
members”; but Maître Anatole continues “It is abominable to op-
pose these national consciousnesses. In their calmest expressions
they are, on the contrary, completions each of the others; but un-
fortunately la patrie is not merely a gathering of radiant ideas, it
is also the social reason for a mass of financial enterprises, many of
which have little to recommend them."
In margin, I can still hear the pleasant voice of a hale, hearty
chap, who was selling torpedo-boats to Russia back in 1912 or ’13:
“Peace? Nao, not while yew hav' two billions of money invested
in the making of war machinery.” That is about the size of it; and
there is also the problem of usury, and mankind's incapacity to
grasp the simple equation 65-6=1. In the face of which Maître
Anatole sits in his somewhat ecclesiastical surroundings meditating
on civilization, and Brancusi dreams of a perfect form which shall
reveal the infinite beauty of the universe and bring a saeculum no-
vum of super-Christian benignity and kindliness; and Paris perhaps
remains the meeting point for those who have cast off the sanctified
stupidities and timidities and are in defiance of things as they are.
If there has been a shift of idea, of aspiration one might find it in
Gourmont's protest against submitting woman to an ideal "foreign
to her own sensibilities”; or in Douglas' damning of the "claim for
the complete subjugation of the individual to an objective which is
externally imposed on him; which it is not necessary or even desir-
able that he should understand in full."
Note that Kipling, who represents both Potsdam and Dorking
and the dead past, in his Night Mail is all out for centralization, for
the punishment, by superior and expensive machinery, of a com-
a


EZRA POUND
189
a
munity which “contracts out,” which wants to lead its own life.
Shaw is a tympan equally hollow. The problem of civilization is to
keep alive a sufficient number of individuals who can not and will
not be subjected to machines, or to the clichés of tyranny; a non-
exploitable minimum of men who give, but who cannot be milked,
who are neither afraid of, nor yoked under, ideas.
Madame Trotsky is arranging excursions of Soviet children to
special museums, in order that those who prefer etchings to pottery
shall in future etch and not pot. Professor Ribera is or should be
bringing out his deductions from a tenth century music MSS.
Ramon Gomez sits in Pombo writing, so far as I can judge, excellent
Spanish. A journalistic admirer of Mr Kreymborg wants to know
what I think about Mr Kreymborg's wanting to make his magazine
international. Valery Larbaud lecturing here on Joyce's Ulysses
made the now usual comparisons of Joyce's genius to that of Swift,
Sterne, and Fielding; he repeated the phrase from his Nouvelle Re-
vue article: "With Ulysses, Ireland makes her triumphal re-entry
into European literature,” and continued "Joyce has done for Ire-
land what Ibsen, Nietzsche, Ramon Gomez, and Strindberg have
done for their countries of origin."
Ett Portratt av Forfattaren som Ung, translated by Ebba At-
terbom, is received from Hugo Gebers Forlag, Stockholm; and col-
lectors of Joyce bibliography should notice the article on Ulysses by
Silvio Benco, in Il Secolo, for November 18th. The die-hards in
Dublin are offering an £100 prize to any one who will write a novel
showing Dublin in softer light.
The Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune in an editorial, The
Progress of Organized Bigotry, discusses a further attempt to re-
strict the U. S. postal service. We suggest the deportation of the
Reverend Wilbur F. Crafts and his friends, and we also think fur-
ther publicity might be given to some of our existing crank laws, as
for example that literary curiosity, Section 211 of the U.S. Crim-
inal Code:
а
"Every obscene, lewd, or lascivious, and every filthy book, pam-
phlet, picture, paper, letter, writing, print or other publication of an
indecent character and every article or thing designed, adapted, or
intended for preventing conception or producing abortion, or for any
indecent or immoral use; and every article, instrument, substance,


190
PARIS LETTER
drug, medicine, or thing which is advertised or described in a manner
calculated to lead another to use or apply it for preventing concep-
tion or producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral purpose;
and every written or printed card, letter, circular, book, pamphlet,
advertisement, or notice of any kind giving information directly or
indirectly, where or how, or from whom, or by what means any of
the hereinbeforementioned matters, articles, or things may be obtain-
ed or made, or where or by whom any act or operation of any kind
for the procuring ... of abortion will be done or performed, or
how or by what means conception may be prevented or abortion pro-
duced, whether sealed or unsealed; and every letter, packet, or pack-
age, or other mail matter ... fined not more than five thousand
dollars, or imprisoned not more than five years or both. . .
ور
I have tried that passage in four European countries and it never
fails to bring down the gallery. The fine distinction between a
"thing” and an "article”; the schismatic differentiation of "packet"
“
from “package” the question of sealed and unsealed abortions.
And there is as much again of the Section; which in its very wording
proclaims a contempt for the concision and economy of the classics
and a disdain of latinity. A sense of style would protect the public
from a number of troubles if they could ever be persuaded to attain
it. We are, perhaps, as a people pleasanter than our law-makers,
but should claim this character from time to time lest the stranger
misjudge us. We are not, thank Heaven, law-abiding, and our of-
ficials are usually ignorant of the statutes. We are patient, we are
long-suffering; in the mass we tolerate imbeciles with the stoicism of
Basutos.
The French are also long-suffering, but comment upon the matter
more freely, and in the personae of their great men (Flaubert, Ana-
tole France) with a greater agility. The points of national insensi-
)
tivity vary: the English are presumably insensible to death, dead-
ness, pourriture; they go on writing weeklies in the style of the Duke
of Kent, as quoted by Lytton Strachey. We presumably put up
with all sorts of purely mechanical reactions so long as they are ver-
bally shiny and rapid. The French seem able to stand more palaver,
oiliness that may once have been ceremony or politeness. In each
case the root is in stupidity, in inattention; insufficient concentration
of awareness upon a given surface of words.


EZRA POUND
191
“Yo creo" mi dice Padre X... "que los reyes disparecen.”
The verbal cliché wears out, the cliché of life and of type wears
out. In trying to synthesize the change of the last years of ca-
lamity we may find that the type "gentleman” is played out, that
the term should take its place with corteggiano, muscadine, courtier.
A"courtier en laine" is a wool-broker. The suffragette writers used
to publish treatises on The Decline of the Lady, to which one
paid no attention. The question comes, with the supposed increase
in the general psychology, whether we don't want something with
more wealth of motive, more largesse, more intelligence; whether
the thing isn't like a good Lombardo pattern, cut first in marble, and
since imitated in too many stuccos, leads, and cast-irons; whether
it is now adequate, any more than the type galan from the XVIIth
century plays of capa y espada would be adequate to take the main
rôles in life; whether one does not demand some caste debarring
that inaction, that mental timidity, that defensiveness, that general
nullity so wholly compatible with, and even invited by the gentle-
man-mould specifications; whether Henry James wasn't the last
pilgrim who could honestly seek that “gentler civilization,” those
"debating societies of splendid aloofness,” that "five o'clock that
never sounded for him on the timepieces of this world”; whether we
haven't to turn to and build rather than scratch round for remnants
and bric-à-brac. All through Gsell's fragments of Anatole one feels
perhaps the latter's failure to make a circle; he was there with all
the necessary setting, Gourmont came, but apparently no one else
of much interest; possibly a symptom of the time, possibly a symp-
tom of Anatole France, a symptom to set in rank with the apparent
enigma: Maître Anatole's “advanced ideas” and his literary eigh-
teenth-centuryism. Flaubert and the Goncourts acted as a sort of
wind-shield, Maître Anatole reverted towards 1790, even his ad-
vanced opinions would not have scandalized Danton's generation.
One may say that no cause is ever wholly gained, that there is
wisdom in keeping up the discussion on old issues, simply because
each generation is ready to slip back into the rut of its grandfathers,
that no public will make any effort whatever to save any form or
parcel of personal or intellectual liberty that it hasn't itself attained
by acute and violent effort. Paris also in his, Anatole's, young days
may have presented almost a surfeit of milieu; the generations have
changed; ideas are for us only the tracks between one sensitized


192
PARIS LETTER
point and another; we fight to prove what one would think obvious:
that the wires are there for the electric lights, and not the light bulbs
for the wires; our envy must be for a period when the individual
city (Italian mostly) tried to outdo its neighbour in the degree and
intensity of its civilization, to be the vortex for the most living in-
dividuals. Gli uomini vivono in pochi. Voltaire was printed in
Holland, and the Bourbons deliquesced: Ulysses on the schedule of
Paris events.
Robt. McAlmon's A Hasty Bunch also seems to come into my
province "printed at Dijon" instead of in Cincinnati. The stories
show little skill, but they do show a very considerable determination
to present, or at any rate a capacity for presenting, the American
small town in hard and just light, no nonsense, no overworking, no
overloading, either psychologically or with the various brands of
romanticism and genteelness demanded by the ten, fifteen, and twen-
ty-five cent magazines. The attempts at Bohemian circles and arty
types are much less interesting. The Goncourts were more modest,
they began on simple types, like Elisa, and hoped to work up to the
complex. McAlmon has written in the American spoken language.
He, or his printer, even goes to the length of using "had went,” not
in the person of a character but in that of author; this is, if inten-
tional, a daring effort to maintain the atmosphere.
This year's Prix Goncourt is not likely to receive the freedom of
the American mails unless the vigilance society is as ignorant of the
French language as it is of art, literature, history, and other matters
of kindred importance.
EZRA POUND
a


BOOK REVIEWS
SEA AND SARDINIA
SEA AND SARDINIA. By D. H. Lawrence. Illustrated.
8vo. 355 pages. Thomas Seltzer. $5.
WHAT
a
HAT is it that makes the difference between, say, Eothen
and The Aran Islands, between Travels in Arabia and Into
Morocco? The difference is, I think, between days and years, be-
tween impression and experience. In Synge's book, in Doughty's
book there is a whole lifetime; in Kinglake's and in Pierre Loti's
there is only a period in a lifetime. The Bible in Spain, too, is a
book that has a lifetime in it.
The great travel-books have in them something more than the
record of a journey into a country; in them there is the journey into
the writer's self, in them is the quest that is rarely spoken of—the
secret quest. The Bible in Spain, The Aran Islands, Travels in
Arabia, have this secret quest. Eothen has it not. Into Morocco
has it not.
The secret quest is in Sea and Sardinia, but it does not dominate,
it does not give a character to the book. The quest is for a male
civilization. D. H. Lawrence finds Europe, not human, all too hu-
man, but feminine, much too feminine. He flees the ultra-femini-
zation of Italy. Is there, in some land outside Europe, as the Bas-
que lands have been outside Europe, a survival of the old male civili-
zation? Is there still a place where an Iliad might be projected—an
?
Iliad with a defiant Briseis? Sardinia may have such a survival.
Anyway, it is unknown. Andiamo! Let us start out for it.
He had realized that it is not enough to live in a country. There
are certain countries that one must penetrate into. Italy, for the
writer of Sea and Sardinia, is such a country. “Penetrating into
Italy is like a most fascinating act of self-discovery-back, back,
down the old ways of time. Strange and wonderful chords awake
in us, and vibrate in us again after
years of com-
plete forgetfulness.” It can be said of Italy: "Man has lived there
many
hundreds of


194
SEA AND SARDINIA
а
a
and brought forth his consciousness there and in some way brought
that place to consciousness, given it its expression, and really fin-
ished it. The expression may be Proserpine, or Pan, or even the
strange 'shrouded gods' of the Etruscans or the Sikels, none the less
it is an expression.” But then, in Italy, it is all worked out; it is all
known. D. H. Lawrence is moved to make search in another coun-
try: he has an obscure feeling that he must go seek for the Father-
land of the Future.
It would have been wonderful if, like Odysseus come to Ithaka,
he had been able to kiss the soil of Sardinia. But love like that did
not flow up in him; the great recognition did not come to him. And
so the excursion into Sardinia remains only a memorable excursion.
There is momentary recognition. “But it is a wonderful place,” he
cries, after he has watched the procession of Saint Anthony of Padua
and has longed for the presence of a few thorough-paced infidels,
“it is a wonderful place. Usually the life-level is reckoned as sea-
level. But here, in the heart of Sardinia, the life-level is high as the
golden-lit plateau, and the sea-level is somewhere far away, below,
in the gloom, it does not signify. The life-level is high-up, high and
sun-sweetened and among rocks.” And again, towards the end, re-
cognition comes at the sight of a village between the black rocks and
the almond trees and over the Mediterranean. “Oh, wonderful
Orosei with your almonds and your reedy river, throbbing with light
and the sea's nearness, and all so lost, in a world long gone by, ling-
ering as legends linger on. It is hard to believe that it is real. It
seems so long since life left it and memory transfigured it into pure
glamour, lost away like a lost pearl on the east Sardinian coast. Yet
there it is, with a few grumpy inhabitants who won't even give you
a crust of bread.”
Sea and Sardinia has not the comprehension of the great travel-
books, but it has apprehension-quite a wonderful apprehension.
In its writing there is a startling immediacy. This record of an ex-
cursion into an unknown island is written in a way that suggests the
art of the most revealing of the modern painters. The writer makes
patterns that draw us right in to the thing looked upon. And the
sense of immediacy is communicated by the sort of sentence that D.
H. Lawrence has come to make—a sentence sharpened by the
frontal position given to the verb. The idiom is not new as Dough-
ty's idiom, as Synge's idiom, is new, but it is greatly freshened. And


PADRAIC COLUM
195
if one reads it as an excursion, one must be delighted by a record that
is so blithe, so brilliant, so full of significant suggestion.
Everything is apprehended, everything is vividly rendered—the
trains, the inns, the steamers; the men and women in the towns and
the fields; the processions; the plains and the hills. There is that
stream that he comes upon in high Sardinia:
a
a
“There is a stream: actually a long tress of a waterfall pouring
into a little gorge, and a stream-bed that opens a little, and shows a
marvellous cluster of naked poplars away below. They are like
ghosts. They have a ghostly, almost phosphorescent luminousness
in the shadow of the valley, by the stream of water. If not phos-
phorescent, then incandescent: a grey, goldish-pale incandescence of
naked limbs and myriad cold-glowing twigs, gleaming strangely. If
I were a painter I would paint them: for they seem to have living,
sentient flesh. And the shadow envelops them.
“Another naked tree I would paint is the gleaming mauve-silver
fig, which burns its cold incandescence, tangled, like some sensitive
creature emerged from the rock. A fig tree come forth in its nudity
gleaming over the dark winter-earth is a sight to behold. Like some
white, tangled sea anemone. Ah, if it could but answer! or if we
had tree-speech!”
These things are notes of the quest—the thing that is “cold-glow-
ing,” the thing that has "cold incandescence.”
The girls of Cagliari—those girls that are sufficiently out of the
atmosphere of ultra-feminization—are made to step out before us
in the most vivid way:
“They are amusing, these peasant girls and women: so brisk and
defiant. They have straight backs, like little walls, and decided,
well-drawn brows. And they are amusingly on the alert. There is
no eastern creeping. Like sharp, brisk birds they dart along the
streets, and
you feel they would fetch you a bang over the head as
leave as look at you. Tenderness, thank heaven, does not seem to be
a Sardinian quality. . When the men from the country look at
these women, it is Mind-yourself, my lady. I should think the
grovelling Madonna-worship is not much of a Sardinian feature.
These women have to look out for themselves, keep their own back-
.


196
SEA AND SARDINIA
bone stiff and their knuckles hard. . . . In these women there is
something shy and defiant and un-get-at-able.”
The women have their rose and madder-brown costumes; the men
are in black and white; they are solitary in the fields, and look like
magpies:
“Sometimes, in the distance one sees a black-and-white peasant
riding lonely across a more open place, a tiny vivid figure. I like so
much the proud instinct which makes a living creature distinguish
itself from its background. I hate the rabbity khaki protection-
colouration. A black-and-white peasant on his pony, only a dot in
the distance beyond the foliage, still flashes and dominates the land-
scape. Ha-ha! proud mankind! There
you
ride!"
Then comes the sea and the return: return we must, for we have
given hostages to Europe and the femininity thereof. D. H. Law-
rence gets back to Sicily. And then we have, as an Epilogue to his
quest, the description of the Marionette play in the little theatre in
Palermo. There is a Castle with an evil witch in it; heroic paladins
strive to take the Castle and burn with fire the image with which the
witch's life is bound. In the play the paladins succeed. But in life
it is different. The paladins have not burnt the image, and the Castle
is still dominated by the witch.
It may be so, and there may be matter for despondency in it all. But
we are satisfied to have looked upon Etna, pedestal of heaven, "with
her strange winds prowling round her like Circe's panthers, some
black, some white," and to have seen the rare Sardinian males in
their flashing black and white costumes, walking the streets of little
towns, or solitary, like magpies in their fields. What a remarkable
writer D. H. Lawrence is! He has been able to make the record of
a few days' excursion into a Mediterranean island an odd adven-
ture for us, and he has put into our memory the figures of strange
,
men and women and a bleak and heartening landscape. The coloured
pictures by Jan Juta that illustrate Sea and Sardinia are remarkable.
With their bright colour, their concentratedness, their dimensional
design, they give a real revelation of an odd, an unfamiliar life.
a
PADRAIC COLUM


HEAVEN'S FIRST LAW
Sour GRAPES. By William Carlos Williams. 10mo.
78 pages. The Four Seas Company. $2.
.
I "
а
had once been my privilege to see a page written by William
Carlos Williams on which he undertook to reproduce nine times
the lovely sunshine thought, "Order is Heaven's first law.” Now,
by the fifth time, the poet became noticeably impatient, and from
the seventh on the copy was completely unreadable. The ninth
version was a mere wavy line, broken in four places. At first I took
this to be quite damning; but on second thought, what use could
Williams make of order? He thinks in an entirely different set of
terms. To add organization to his poetry would have no more mean-
ing than to insist that his lines begin in alphabetical rotation.
What Williams sees, he sees in a flash. And if there is any cor-
relation whatsoever, it is a certain determined joyousness in a poet
who would find it awkward to weep. For as his arch-enemy has
noted, Williams is a bad Freudian case whose poetry is certainly not
allowed to come out the way it came in. But beyond this very
reasonable pudency, which he shares with no less an artist than Flau-
bert, consistency falls away.
No, Williams is the master of the glimpse. A line of his, sud-
denly leaping up out of the text, will throw the reader into an unex-
pected intimacy with his subject, like pushing open a door and ad-
vancing one's nose into some foreign face. Given a subject, he will
attack it with verve, striking where he can break through its defence,
and expecting applause whenever a solid, unmistakable jolt has
been landed. It would be mere idleness to give his ars poetica in
more presumptuous terms. The process is simply this: There is the
eye, and there is the thing upon which that eye alights; while the re-
lationship existing between the two is a poem.
The difficulty here lies in conveying the virtues of such a method.
For the method itself is as common as mud. The minute fixating
of a mood, an horizon, a contrast; if one finds there any unusual
commendation for Williams it is not in the excellence of his poetics,
but in the excellence of his results. His first virtue, therefore, lies
a


198
HEAVEN'S FIRST LAW
in the superiority of his minute fixations over those of his ten
million competitiors. He is a distinguished member of a miserable
crew.
a
Honest people who really think highly enough of words to feel
unhappy when they are vague will rejoice that Williams' new vol-
ume, Sour Grapes, is more sober in this respect than the Improvisa-
tions. For the Improvisations were not finally satisfactory. Clear
notes were there in abundance, but they were usually preceded and
followed by the usual modern data for mental tests. (How beau-
tiful the association of ideas would have been in art if used in one
work, by one man, for one page, and for some end other than that
of a beautiful association of ideas.) True, by the mere dissatisfac-
tion of their context, such momentary beatitudes of expression re-
ceived their full share of enthusiasm, but having twenty sentences
of chaos to heighten one sentence of cosmos is too much like thank-
ing God for headaches since they enable us to be happy without
them.
Sour Grapes, however, skips a generation and takes after the
volume, Al Que Quiere. And in these two works, it seems to me,
Williams is at his best, since here he is not handicapping his remark-
able powers of definition, of lucidity. You may wonder, perhaps,
just why the poet is going off in some particular direction; but you
are always aware just what this direction is. Here also his invet-
erate lustiness is up to par; for Williams knows Walt Whitman's
smile down to the last wrinkle. If there are logs in the grate, he
puts a match to them; if it is a warm Easter morning, he throws off
his coat. And if, behind it all, there is evidence of a strong ten-
dency towards transgression, towards, let us say, the mountains of
Tibet or a negro harem in Madagascar, such things are there as an
irritant rather than as a subject. The face value of the poems will
always remain the definition of the poet's own gatepost. His pecul-
iar gifts of expression, if nothing else, dictate this simplification.
Williams evidently realizes that his emotions are one thing and his
art another, and that those who wish to go beyond his minute fixa-
tions can find a great deal more implicated in them; but in the
meantime, let the minute fixations suffice.
I should say, therefore, that Williams was engaged in discover-
ing the shortest route between object and subject. And whether it
is a flamingo befouling its own tail, or the tired ogling at little
í


KENNETH BURKE
199
girls, or trees stark naked in a wind, one must always recognize the
unusual propriety of his poetry, the sureness and directness with
which he goes at such things. A fact with him finds its justification
in the trimness of the wording.
If a man is walking, it is the first principle of philosophy to say
that he is not walking, the first principle of science to say that he
is placing one foot before the other and bringing the hinder one in
turn to the fore, the first principle of art to say that the man is more
than walking, he is yearning: then there are times when scientist,
philosopher, and poet all discover of a sudden that by heavens! the
man is walking and none other. Now, a good deal of this discov-
ery is in Williams' poetry, and, if I understand the word correctly,
is contained in his manifesto praising Contact in art. For I take
Contact to mean: man without the syllogism, without the parode,
without Spinoza's Ethics, man with nothing but the thing and the
feeling of that thing. Sitting down in the warmth to write, for
instance, Kant might finally figure it out that man simply must have
standards of virtue in spite of the bleakness of the phenomenon-
noumenon distinction, and that this virtue could be constructed on
the foundations of a categorical imperative. But Williams, sitting
down in the warmth to write, would never get over his delight that
the wind outside was raging ineffectually; and, in his pronounced
sense of comfort, he would write:
JANUARY
Again I reply to the triple winds
running chromatic fifths of derision
outside my window:
Play louder.
You will not succeed. I am
bound more to my sentences
the more you batter at me
to follow you.
And the wind,
as before, fingers perfectly
its derisive music.
Seen from this angle, Contact might be said to resolve into the


200
HEAVEN'S FIRST LAW
counterpart of Culture, and Williams becomes thereby one of our
most distinguished Neanderthal men. His poetry deals with the
coercions of nature—and by nature I mean iron rails as well as iron
ore-rather than with the laborious structure of ideas man has erect-
ed above nature. His hatred of the idea in art is consequently pro-
nounced, and very rightly brings in its train a complete disinterest
in form. (Note: Form in literature must always have its begin-
nings in idea. In fact, our word for idea comes from a Greek word
whose first meaning is "form.") The Contact writer deals with
his desires; the Culture writer must erect his desires into principles
and deal with those principles rather than with the desires; the Ur-
phenomen, in other words, becomes with the man of Culture of less
importance than the delicate and subtle instruments with which he
studies it.
Williams, however, must go back to the source. And the process
undeniably has its beauties. What, for instance, could be more
,
lost, more uncorrelated, a closer Contact, a greater triumph of anti-
Culture, than this poem:
THE GREAT FIGURE
Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
firetruck
moving
with weight and urgency
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city.
KENNETH BORKE


ACHILLES
THE MIND IN THE MAKING. The Relation of Intelli-
gence to Social Reform. By James Harvey Robinson.
8vo. 235 pages. Harper and Brothers. $2.
TH
HE image of Achilles sitting within his tent while outside the
battle raged has been with me ever since I opened and read
the first hundred pages of Professor Robinson's volume. This book
means a new chapter in the life of one of our few great historians.
His days as the purveyor of textbooks have come to an end. The
amiable and eminently safe dissertations upon the New History,
the articles discussing the pitfalls of historical generalizations, will
not have any sequels. The Professor has left the pleasant academic
tilting yard for good and all. He has put on his armour for more
serious business. A mighty warrior is coming into his own.
The publishers (after the habit of their kind) blurb pleasantly
and insist that this volume is a detached study of the subject of the
"Mind in the Making.” May Saint Paul and the other Antiochian
Saints help us! It is nothing of the kind. The book is a bomb. A
more dangerous bomb than any that ever disturbed the peaceful
slumbers of our Mr Burns or our late Mr Palmer. It is loaded with
the most dangerous and destructive of all explosives—the TNT
of logical reasoning. It is a magnificent piece of work but it is
couched in terms which will completely baffle the illiterate slubber-
degullions of our local sbirreria. Indeed, aforementioned flatfeet
will dismiss it contemptuously as "some more highbrow stuff” and
will then proceed to discover why Anton Scpnk who works in the
stock-yards has taken such a sudden and violent interest in the
speeches of Abraham Lincoln.
That all is not well in the State of Denmark (speaking in the
language of the immortal William and with all due admiration for
the country of the pure butter and the free folk-school) has long
been patent to many honest but otherwise harmless observers. A
few of them have marched forth into the highways and byways to
give public utterance to their doubts and misgivings. At once they
found themselves surrounded by an ill-kept mob of sincere half-wits


202
ACHILLES
a
and their more intelligent but less guileless leaders. They did not
like this company and hastily returned to their homes. In this way
they managed to make things more comfortable for themselves, but
their retreat did not improve the general state of affairs. On the
contrary. It encouraged the fury of the Apostles of Safety and
Sanity. And the poor devils outside who still clamoured for a more
reasonable world were left without any leadership at all.
Now comes the book of Professor Robinson. It quotes Tenny-
son, the old and the young Bacon, the Bible, Plato, Condorcet, St
Augustine, and many of the other worthies who wrote in tongues
which are no longer familiar to this generation. Next it proceeds
to make a search at once penetrating and incontrovertible of our
present social system. It leaves that mushroomy excrescence as
naked and as exposed as a dried leaf in a botanist's herbarium.
Then it stops. This book which is supposed to discuss the rela-
tion of intelligence to social reform fairly shrieks its horror at the
waste of human lives and human happiness and human decency
which continues in the name of Business and a Favourable Balance
of Trade. It is an exceedingly bitter book. It shouts at the top of
its voice "can such things be?” It grins like a man in an agony of
'
pain. But in the final chapter we see the author shrugging his
shoulders with a helpless gesture and we hear the question "what is
the use ?” The question is as old as the human race.
No new generation ever could give an answer without a mighty
struggle.
Once more the battle is raging.
But one who by sheer intellectual grasp and the renown of his
past achievements could be a mighty leader sits in his tent and waits.
And that is a great pity.
HENDRIK WILLEM VAN LOON


THE POEMS OF H. D.
HYMEN. By H. D. 8vo. 47 pages. Henry Holt and
Company. $1.75.
THE
HE poems of H. D. do not lend themselves to convenient clas-
sification, as Poems of Passion and Emotion, Poems of Reflec-
tion, Poems of the Imagination, and Poems Descriptive, and so on.
In all of them, passion, emotion, reflection, and the image, the sharp,
vivid image that does the work of description, are fused together in
the burning unity of beauty. One or more element (it is hardly ever
reflection) may predominate, but it is never alone. You may call
The Tribute, Pygmalion, Eurydice, The Cities, The Look-Out, The
Cliff-Temple poems of reflection if you like. They are few and in
none of them is the concept thinned away to an abstraction. H. D.
invariably presents her subtlest, most metaphysical idea under some
living sensuous image solid enough to carry the emotion. The air
we are given to breathe may be rarefied to the last degree, yet we
are moving always in a world of clear colours and clear forms. Like
every devout imagist she is intolerant of thinness. Look where you
will
you
will find everywhere the same joy in vigorous movement,
the same adoration of divine visible beauty.
In H. D.'s work there is a rich sensuousness which has nothing
florid about it or cloying, that has even a certain lucid, clean, auster-
ity. Everywhere she cuts clean, she finishes. No loose ends, no
blurred edges. There is, perhaps, no contemporary poet who has a
finer sense of outline, none who can so constrain rich sensuousness to
supersensuous form.
She has been reproached for her obscurity. She is certainly not
afraid of the dark when darkness serves her purpose, where it is the
essence of her subject or her mood. We must distinguish here be-
tween obscurity of thought and obscurity of feeling. Whereas un-
clarified thought means shallow thinking, emotion at a certain depth
is obscure. It is only in her maturer work, if anywhere, that we find
this quality. Her earlier poems have all the finite Greek perfection.
Nothing can be added to or taken away from them. Every stroke is
laid on with a hand that never hovers, never hesitates. Now, when
a


204
THE POEMS OF H. D.
a writer achieves formal perfection he is in danger either of standing
still, repeating his finest effects till he becomes his own irreproach-
able plagiarist, or of going back and back in a horrible decline. The
test of an enduring talent is its power to survive this moment. Tech-
nical perfection exists at the mercy of the unfolding spirit. At any
minute a flash of metaphysical vision can destroy it.
H. D. has escaped this disaster.
After the lucid, sharp simplicity of Sea-Roses, Sitalkas, and Her-
mes of the Ways, we have the comparative intricacy of The Tribute,
the comparative obscurity of Egypt, the largeness and mystery of
Demeter. The first named are poems of transition, and they may
well have these transitional defects. Nothing easier than to insist
on such blemishes; and nothing more unprofitable, since they are of
the kind the casual reader may be trusted to discover for himself.
When they begin to appear in the work of a poet distinguished for
the opposite qualities, the plain business of the critic is to search for
the causes of the change, and decide whether it signals the break-up
of a talent or some process of new birth.
Now, not one of H. D.'s earlier poems shows any tendency to
vagueness and obscurity. She has been, from the first, the perfect
imagist. And if the critic will go further and actually take the
trouble to find out what she is trying to express in these later forms,
the obscurity he complains of will vanish. He will see that, at the
worst, under the stress of a profounder vision, she is trying to put
into the image more than it can well convey.
But for the most part her medium, plastic and utterly obedient,
adapts itself. There is nothing tentative and experimental about
these last poems. They may stand for the final, accomplished ex-
pression of H. D. Comparing them with her earlier work, even ad-
mitting that they have lost something of its sharp simplicity, one
sees that she has gained immeasurably in depth and range.
Talents have died before now of their own growth for lack of a
form that allows expansion. I don't want to raise again the ques-
tion whether good verse is, as Mr Flint and Wordsworth maintain,
nothing but good prose. Only whereas with the writer of good
prose, however uninspired, language and meaning go evenly togeth-
er, the purely lyric poet who rhymes and metres is apt to be over-
taken by a dark rush of winged words before he is aware of his mean-
ing. For he is at the mercy of rhyme and metre. Not so the vers


MAY SINCLAIR
205
librist. He is free to follow his thoughts in their own movement.
Instead of twisting themselves in unnatural inversions or halting for
the cadence and the rhyme, his thoughts are free. Before the dan-
gerous inspiration is upon her H. D. has clarified her thought to its
last transparency, and her future work should stand as high or higher
than her past.
But here is her latest volume, Hymen.
I do not know which of these poems the London Times' critic was
thinking of when he "experienced a difficulty in extracting any
meaning from many of them.” He names but two: Egypt and "Not
Honey.” I do not see that they justify his complaint; but I confess
that at a first hasty reading I found certain passages in Demeter ob-
scure. I even sent to the London Library for Miss Jane Harrison's
Themis and Prolegomena to Greek Religion, in the hope that schol-
arship would throw some light. They have not come yet, and mean-
while I have read Demeter again more attentively and the darkness
has lifted.
What puzzled me was Demeter’s references to "her.”
"she is slender of waist,
slight of breast, made of many fashions;
they have set her small feet
on many a plinth;
she they have known,
she they have spoken with,
she they have smiled upon,
she they have caught
and flattered with praise and gifts.
You will observe the obscurity was mine. It is clear as daylight
that this is Aphrodite, and that Demeter, the Earth Goddess, is pro-
claiming herself older, more august and mysterious than the graceful
Olympians.
"Sleep on the stones of Delphi-
dare the ledges of Pallas
but keep me foremost,
keep me before
you,
with
you,
never forget when you start
after you,


206
THE POEMS OF H. D.
for the Delphic precipice,
never forget when you seek Pallas
and meet in thought
yourself drawn out from yourself
like the holy serpent,
never forget
in thought or mysterious trance
I am greatest and least."
.
The baffing, cryptic touch is deliberate, a device for evoking
magic, for suggesting the unspeakable mysteries.
This fine poem just misses perfection owing to the abruptness and
comparative insignificance of its close.
But in the others there is nowhere any falling off. I find it hard
to choose among so many perfect things. For one you take you might
have taken almost any other. I cannot pass over the vigorous Sea-
Heroes with its sea-sound and sea-swell:
“Crash on crash of the sea,
straining to wreck men, sea-boards, continents,
raging against the world, furious .
And there is the slender song rhyming on one note, The Whole
White World. There are Simaetha and Phaedra and She Rebukes
Hippolyta.
And there is Circe:
“Panther and panther,
then a black leopard
follows close-
black panther and red
and a great hound,
a god-like beast,
cut the sand in a clear ring
and shut me from the earth,
and cover the sea-sound
with their throats,
and the sea-roar with their own barks
and bellowing and snarls,


MAY SINCLAIR
207
and the sea-stars
and the swirl of the sand,
and the rock-tamarisk
and the wind resonance-
but not your voice.”
These are the poems that the critic of The Times found meaning-
less, "deadening and monotonous,” indistinguishable from "prose
sentences capriciously cut into strips.”
Sea-Garden, the six Choruses, a score of scattered things, and Hy-
men, about seventy-six poems in all (in nine years) and the remark-
able thing is that any six, selected almost at random, would be
enough to establish H. D.'s reputation. The significant thing is
that with each year she has achieved a wider range, a greater depth
and intensity of vision. Whether she is judged by that quality or by
her technical perfection, or by the sheer beauty of her form, there
can be no doubt that her place in literature is secure. No doubt that
matters.
Only, a slight effort of attention is needed to get at the magic and
the significance of such poems as I have quoted.
The creator of strange new beauty has a right to demand so much
from anybody who undertakes to pronounce judgement. Is it too
much to ask? I don't imagine, for example, that my own fair for
strange new beauty is special and extraordinary, a thing that could
not be cultivated by any lover of old familiar beauty who honestly
desires to cultivate it. For beauty is ageless, eternal and one, recog-
nizable under all differences of form. Therefore it is inconceivable
that any devout lover of it should miss the divine quality of H. D.'s
poetry. There is certainly nothing in contemporary literature that
surpasses these later poems, at first sight so splendidly dim, at last
so radiant, so crystalline. An austere ecstasy is in them. They have
the quick beat of birds' wings, the rise and fall of big waves, the
slow, magical movement of figures in some festival of Demeter or
Dionysus, carrying the sacra.
As for her detractors—"If beauty could be done to death” they
would have killed her long ago, when first she appeared among the
Imagists.
MAY SINCLAIR


ANOTHER OUTLINE OF HISTORY
History Of Art (Volume I, Ancient Art). By Élie
Faure. Translated by Walter Pach. Illustrated. 8vo.
304 pages. Harper and Brothers. $6.
AR
RT, according to Élie Faure, is the plastic poem. Upon this
concept he has constructed the most interesting and seductive
history of the subject that has yet appeared. No other writer has
succeeded so well in creating the illusion of the ancient world, the
illusion of fabulous antiquity; in tracing the remote explication of
those religious and social forces which have conspired to liberate the
unitary rhythms imprisoned in the soul of man. His pages gleam
with brilliant images—sharp and startling like the realistic meta-
phors of Conrad: Egypt lives in a spiritual background of colossal
silences; we see the glory of Hellenistic pantheism when its sculp-
tured gods have become anthropomorphic; we feel the descriptive
intimacy of the Tanagras and are charmed with the Frenchman's
love for the female figure when it glows with the beauty of artistic
life; we are made to understand the voluptuous madness and sensi-
tive barbarism of Mesopotamia, and the bombastic strength of
Rome; even the prehistoric epochs, which most writers approach
with timid speculations, are brought before us with a logical swift-
ness and certainty of detail that are inescapable.
All this, of course, is quite amazing; but no complete history of
art can be produced by a philosophy which goes back to the deter-
minism of Hegel by way of the specious method of Taine. History in
its highest manifestations is a form of art: based on an individual-
istic conception it calls narrative to its aid; it employs representa-
tion and relies on dramatic emphasis to stir the emotions; in short,
it re-creates the life of the past by imaginative processes. Artis-
tically considered M Faure's book is most distinguished. He con-
verts archaeology into impassioned imagery, and his narrative gifts
are remarkable—but his thesis is misleading. He posits the de-
velopment of man as revealed by art, and being a mystic he assumes
that art contains the sum total of all reality. The individual is
cast aside; only spiritual records are taken into account, and reason-
ing a posteriori from the object to the environment, M Faure at-


THOMAS JEWELL CRAVEN
209
a
a
tempts to explain not only the genesis of art but also to write the
history of the society that gave it birth.
How much of the life of the past is embodied in art? Periclean
Athens, if we are to believe Mr H. G. Wells, was like a modern
music-hall; it swarmed with rascals and political mountebanks;
hounded its leader from pillar to post; branded Aspasia a strumpet
and allowed Phidias to die in prison. The Athens of M Faure is the
idealized city erected not so many years ago by Taine. It does not
matter that the Englishman is biased and the Frenchman a poet-
the point is that Mr Wells has fashioned a structure that we must ad-
mit has a convincing reality, and that he has not quarried his ma-
terials from artistic sources. Are we then to infer that the corre-
spondence between art and life is a fallacy? that art lives and moves
in a separate kingdom of its own, springing from its own origins,
governed by its own laws, fighting its own revolutions and suffering
its own decays and reincarnations? By no means.
There never
was and never will be an art independent of time and circumstance.
It is the spiritual activity of man that finds its creative voice in art,
and to present a comprehensive view of this activity the historian
must have at his command a liberal aesthetic.
The aggregate spiritual life of civilized communities has been in
all periods comparatively feeble. We are tempted to believe that
the past has been exceedingly rich in religious impulses until we read
an author like Mr Wells: ages, like individuals, differ quantitative-
ly; every man houses at least a spark of this fire; the great figures,
Phidias, Giotto, Michael Angelo, supremely spiritual, blaze forth
through all time, arousing in every living soul responses propor-
tionate to personal capacity. Deterministic philosophy leads on the
one hand to cold scientific synthesis, and on the other, as in the case
of M Faure, to poetic illusion which neither accounts for art nor
gives an adequate picture of the conditions which inspire it. We
must begin with individual psychology, not necessarily with the
analysis of any conspicuous workman--the artists of Egypt remain
for ever anonymous—but with the examination of intuitions, of the
motives underlying production and the psychic factors bound up in
aesthetic organization. Proceeding from the individual to groups
of men with kindred sympathies we arrive at communal psychology
and put ourselves in position to understand plastic developments,
the relation of art to life, the actions and interactions of historical
movements, the reasons for artistic rebellions, and the nature of ac-
а


210
ANOTHER OUTLINE OF HISTORY
complishments. With the addition of objective criticism our method
reaches completion.
Objective criticism is usually a meaningless worship of master-
pieces, a catalogue of technical monotonies, or an arid formalism.
With M Faure it is none of these useless labours. A sustained and
genuine love of beauty inspires him to marches of vivid eloquence
and fills his treatise with extraordinarily effective interpretations.
But it is a literary love, a sort of sensuous mysticism which makes
one feel that form possesses a fleshly counterpart, and which never
quite separates the enduring beauty of composed masses from the
associative stimulus of physical beauty. The result is dazzling
and art-values are lost in dithyrambic generalizations.
Determinism robs art of its fundamental right to exist—of its
autonomous expression. It sweeps the individual into the crowd
and makes the crowd subservient to inflexible forces; it overlooks
man's consciousness of his place in the universe; forgets his tempera-
mental preferences and reduces him to a mechanism through which
blind life operates as best it can to no conclusion—it takes no heed
of the teleology which gives art its glorious significance, its imper-
ishable beauty. M Faure makes much of those nameless Egyptian
slaves who executed the most impressive monuments that adorn this
planet. Nameless they were, and slaves, too, no doubt; but they
were men with an unlimited freedom of spirit. We cannot believe
that they carved and wrought at the merciless dictates of some old
Pharaoh who was afraid to die. They were great artists and they
approached their work as such—since that time there has been no
progress in the sense of superior productions; only rises, culmina-
tions, and new beginnings—they conquered their slavery by creat-
ing new worlds; they saw in granite the possibilities of stupendous
images; they discovered the severe rhythms of flat design and chal-
lenged heaven with their pyramidal achievements. Their history is
the history of all art-man's struggles to give unified expression to
his experiences.
Mr Pach's translation of this brilliant conspectus is in every par-
ticular most excellent. His qualifications for the task are many: he
has a scholar's training; he is a painter of eminence; and as a critic
he has for many years conscientiously applied his knowledge to the
appreciation of art, both ancient and modern.
a
THOMAS JEWELL CRAVEN


DOCUMENTS
SELECTED LETTERS OF FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE. Ed-
ited, with a preface, by Dr Oscar Levy. Authorized
translation by Anthony M. Ludovici. 12mo. 364
pages. Doubleday, Page and Company. $3.50.
.
The NIETZSCHE-WAGNER CORRESPONDENCE. Edited
by Elizabeth Foerster-Nietzsche. Translated by Caro-
line V. Kerr. Introduction by H. L. Mencken. 12mo.
312 pages. Boni and Liveright. $4.
I .
T is very hard to deal fairly with these two collections of
Nietzsche's letters. Each is edited by one whose devotion to
Nietzsche is unquestionable, and each contains material from the
Nietzsche-archive which cannot help being important in any study
of the culture of our time. There is one sense in which everything
which Nietzsche wrote is important, because discerning readers will
learn to understand his work better by studying his easy sketches and
will, perhaps, recognize some obscure intention because they have
identified the same movement of his mind in a clearer fragment. Yet
the danger is obvious even in such a statement, for the clarity of the
fragment is misleading; it may disclose a motive which the elab-
orated work has discarded; it may have paid for its simplicity by a
touch of falsehood. Beyond that, if the sketch is taken and the fin-
ished work neglected, the evil is unmitigated. I am afraid that this
may happen in Nietzsche's case; I cannot see how these letters can
possibly persuade any one to read his works, and I cannot see how,
without his works, these letters can fail to undermine Nietzsche's
position as a critic and even as a creator of contemporary civilization.
It is the effect of these letters to make thinking about Nietzsche
almost impossible, the accumulation of trivialities is so great. In
the case of Frau Foerster-Nietzsche's collection, the reason is ap-
parent:
“This little book closes with the cessation of the correspondence
between Wagner and my brother. All later observations and senti-


212
DOCUMENTS
ments, written after the break in their friendship, must be looked for
in other places. In this birthday book (the German edition was is-
sued on the seventieth anniversary of Nietzsche's birth] I wish to set
in vibration only the tenderest chords of the closest friendship which,
even though they be written in a melancholy minor, at least reveal
no harsh dissonances on either side."
That is more in the tone of Wagner's message, six months before
his death: "Tell your brother that I am quite alone since he went
away and left me,” than in the tone of Nietzsche's splendid vale-
dictory:
"We were friends and have become as strangers. But it is best so
and we will neither conceal this nor draw a veil over it as if we had
a
any cause to be ashamed. . . . The law governing our lives has de-
creed that we should live, henceforth, as strangers; but just by rea-
son of this, we shall become more sacred to one another! . . . Our
lives are too short, and our powers of vision too limited, to permit us
to be friends other than in the sense of this lofty possibility.
27
.
Frau Foerster-Nietzsche's book closes with Wagner's message and
this aphorism, indications, if one needed any, that the end of the
friendship and the thoughts of Nietzsche and Wagner after it had
ended were at least as significant as anything in the preceding years.
The harsh dissonance was, in fact, an exceptionally subtle and har-
monious chord in Nietzsche's own nature, and if one takes the friend-
ship at Nietzsche's own valuation is as fundamental as that single
perfect chord in e-flat major with which Das Rheingold begins.
It should be noted that a number of Nietzsche's letters to Wagner
were destroyed "for some reason utterly inexplicable” and that their
place is taken by rough drafts; a few letters from Nietzsche to others
than Wagner are given; it would have been well if more letters from
Wagner, in which Nietzsche was the subject and not the correspon-
dent, could have been presented. One wonders despairingly what
Wagner really was thinking of Nietzsche during all this time.
The larger collection is more varied (it contains no letters to Wag-
ner) as it begins with letters from school in 1856 and continues until
December 1888, the time of Nietzsche's collapse; the letters are ad-
dressed to sixteen men and women, in addition to his mother and


GILBERT SELDES
213
.
.
sister. Here, according to Dr Levy, Nietzsche comes "down to the
familiar plain ..
... assumes a human form and a human speech
. . exhibits a human heart and a human sympathy.” We see here
"another Nietzsche a good friend, a devoted son, an affec-
tionate brother.” And, even more: the great anti-Prussian! One is
almost led to believe, in all seriousness, that the whole purpose of
this book was to publish (I quote textually; the indication of omis-
sions is the editor's) the following:
To His Mother and Sister
Bâle, December 12, 1870.
Dear Mamma and Lizzie:
... I am gradually losing all sympathy for Germany's present
war of conquest. The future of German culture seems to me now
more in danger than it ever was
With heartiest greetings,
Your Fritz.
.
What, I wonder, is the use of publishing that, written at the age of
twenty-six, by the man who was to destroy David Strauss, and in-
vent the phrase "culture-philistine,” and dissect every civilization,
and write Beyond Good and Evil, and be, in short, Friedrich
Nietzsche. What persuasion is there in the private letter which is
lacking in the man's life work? And how necessary, in justice to
Nietzsche, was it to destroy the legend of his “reputed responsibility
for the World War”? Dr Levy has, since the publication of this
work, been the victim of what seems a particularly paltry injustice
caused by the war and one can sympathize with him, in a harsh
world, drawing his breath in pain, to tell this story. One is none the
less oppressed by a sense of futility.
One word more. I can conceive the pertinence of Nietzsche's
“human” qualities to those discussions of his philosophy which begin
and end with a few misquoted aphorisms; to his real work, which, as
I have said, is a criticism of existing culture and a contribution to the
civilization of the future, those qualities are simply irrelevant. It
does not bear on the case to say that the discoverer of Christianity as
slave-morals was himself an exemplary and Christ-like person, that
the author of The Birth of Tragedy was a disappointed composer, or
that the creator of the superman discloses a distinctly snobbish strain
>


214
DOCUMENTS
in writing of royalty. What bears on the case is the truth and sig-
nificance of the things he has said. The documents in the case-
which may include the social and political history of the time as well
as the private history of the individual-can help us to explain why,
at a given moment in our history, such a figure as Nietzsche ap-
peared; they cannot in any degree help us to criticize his ideas. He
worshipped strength, one hears, because he was weak; and loved
discipline because he was destined to a disordered brain; and had
strange notions about the Greek mother because he had never loved.
I do not challenge these statements because, so far as I know,
Nietzsche has not been competently criticized by the method of
psychoanalysis. I quarrel only with the applicability of even the
most profound of such analyses. The clear conscience which Nietz-
sche tried to restore to humanity by destroying Christ seems already
to require another champion, and again a critic. The snappers-up of
a .
unconsidered trifles have already forgotten, or not yet learned, that
the analysis of an emotion can neither fortify nor destroy whatever
that emotion has produced.
M Julien Benda has more than hinted that our preoccupation
with the letters of great men is due to our unwillingness to think
about their work. I think he is right and think also that, in such a
case as Nietzsche, the small things contribute very little to our un-
derstanding of the great. Almost every profound thing in these let-
ters exists, in its proper form, in the collected edition. The rest, the
betraying, “revealing" things, the material for amateur analysis,
the data for oculists and experts in diet, I submit is worse than
worthless. It is not because Nietzsche must remain a hero that I
protest against these things, but because his readers ought to remain
men.
GILBERT SELDES


BRIEFER MENTION
MONDAY OR TUESDAY, by Virginia Woolf (12mo, 116 pages; Harcourt,
Brace: $1.50). Virginia Woolf joins with Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy
Richardson, and T. S. Eliot to mark the four compass points of ultra-
modern tea, she and Mr Eliot, perhaps, bringing it all closest to meta-
physics. In her present volume of sketches Mrs Woolf becomes much more
arty than in her novels, although she never surpasses the technical superb-
Aess of The Voyage Out. The most alluring feature here is to be found in
the exciting knack she has mastered of starting anywhere and arriving any-
where. But when form is vague, one has a right to ask for more frequent
minor illuminations, whereas these stories too often give the effect of Wil-
liam Carlos Williams' Improvisations with the sudden flashes left out.
Perhaps no brief quotation could give a better idea of the attack than this
gem of cosmic dialogue: "Good night, good night. You go this way?”.
"Alas, I go that."
STASH OF THE MARSH COUNTRY, by Harold Waldo (12mo, 347 pages; Doran:
$2). In England and in Ireland, where the literary landscape is not favour-
able to the coining of pat categorizing terms, the phenomenon of expres-
sionism has for some time been manifest and gone begging for a name.
James Joyce is a pioneer, May Sinclair, Clemence Dane, and Dorothy Rich-
ardson stand for what some critics choose to call the "introverted novel," a
series of episodes, if you like, seen through the blurred glass of personal
emotion, sensation, and feeling. In Stash of the Marsh Country, by Harold
Waldo, a young Californian, we have the same phenomenon. Mr Waldo
in his first book presents the world to us through the romanticising eyes of
his main character, a young sensitive Polish lad. It deals with the vari-
coloured life of the Polish colony around Detroit. Waldo is essentially a
poet; at least Stash gazes out upon the earth-colours of life with the naïveté
of a poet who is also a child. Stash is both real and unreal, but that is best
explicable by the fact that to the boyish and unformed Stash, life shows two
faces: that which might be at grips with that which is.
a
a
DREAMERS, by Knut Hamsun, translated by W. W. Worster, with an intro-
duction by W. W. Worster (12mo, 176 pages; Knopf: $1.75). Rolandsen,
the telegraph operator, is working in secret on a fish-glue, which he does not
have enough money to patent. Also, he is a bit of a rake on the side, balanc-
ing one rebuff in love against another, or leaving an illegitimate child when
he has the opportunity. When, owing to circumstances arranged in the story,
he can get four hundred Daler by confessing to a theft he never committed,
he does so, thus securing the money to push his fish-glue, the next step being
his betrothal to the richest girl in town, the daughter of the man from whom
the money was stolen. This plotty tale gives the impression of a hundred-
page working scenario made from a three-decker novel, while it further goes
to show that even winners of the Nobel prize can twiddle their thumbs. The
book contains a very comprehensive introduction, covering the entire range
of Hamsun's work.
a


216
BRIEFER MENTION
Success, by Samuel Hopkins Adams (12mo, 553 pages; Houghton Mifflin:
$2) is an exceptionally up-to-the-minute roman à clef, totally unimportant
because in all its ravelling of a personal romance into the story of a yellow-
journalist it presents neither characters nor types nor any milieu effectively.
It is the boy reporter, brought up to the size, but not to the significance, of
Mr Arthur Brisbane. There are a few sentimental newspaper men in the
story who occasionally say something true about the press. But Mr Bris-
bane may well follow his wont and quote the classics or Alice in Wonder-
land and say that some day he will appear in a book.
Rich RELATIVES, by Compton Mackenzie ( 12mo, 296 pages; Harpers : $2) is
much less of a f