er not at all.
Of course, the score is not entirely uninteresting as an experiment.
One guesses what the composer was striving to perform. Interesting
is the fact that he suppressed all picturesque detail from his music;


PAUL ROSENFELD
443
a
left all illustration, scene-painting, atmosphere in the impression-
istic sense, out of it. Interesting, too, is the fact that he seems to
have sought to compose with the naïveté of a child, strumming out
his little marches, intermezzi, and other of the more set pieces, with
a certain indifference to what folk expect of operatic music, even of
the music of opera bouffes. Amusing, certainly, are the occasional
digs at Debussy; the stupid King of Clubs sings most often in the an-
cestral tone that recalls, impishly, Aërkel. It was certainly a genial
moment that saw the composer decide to make the enamoured cook
in Greonte's castle sing in the tone of a Massenet prima donna. The
parodies of operatic ensemble at the end of the first and last acts are
amusing. But very little came of his intentions. Prokofieff's music
is neither comic, nor very witty. The man's wit is too often limited
to producing flatus-like sounds from the bassoons and the brass. He
may have decided to write like a child; but he possesses none of the
child's wonder. His invention is almost nil; the march is brayingly
empty; the intermezzo, if it catches for a moment in its hurry the
spirit of the comedy, is meagre and redundant. Of course, Gozzi de-
mands a certain nonchalant dryness in his musician; perhaps just
such a dry recitative as Prokofieff has written for his singers; the old
Venetian was sere of heart, certainly. But Prokofieff has caught
nothing of any positive character. He is not even, failing of ro-
mantic irony, destructive. His score is merely flat, dull.
For nothing has happened to this young Russ. Other men, surely,
have felt the excoriating nihilism he has wished in his opera bouffe to
express, seen the whole world an empty nurses' fable, a self-decep-
tion of the ego. But some intensity in them, some passion, has met
the incrushing world, has made of the bitter discovery an experience,
has helped them at least to laugh in the face of the emptiness. Some
capacity for tumescence has helped them to snatch a pleasure out of
the void, and sculpt their nothing into a solid form. But Prokofieff
has not even that intensity, one would say. One knew it when one
heard his empty piano-concerti. One knows it again after watching
his attempt to negate his own boredom by representing it. He has
only little musical pets, sarcasms, caprices of a twelve-year old. We
as human beings are interested in passion, even when it is passion
turned ironical and destructive. All else we pass by as infertile.
And until this composer achieves a fire of some sort, he will continue
to bore us.
PAUL ROSENFELD
a


THE THEATRE
M
R SHAW has taken a strong line with those who have tried
to grow sentimental about him on the occasion of his jubilee.
The affair at the Garrick Theatre marks a quarter of a century in
which Mr Shaw has been contributing to the stage of this country,
which he pretends to despise, more intelligence and more enter-
tainment than any of his contemporaries. It has been a fairly fruit-
less contribution. I suggest a topic for the doctorate: the influence
of Bernard Shaw on the American drama as shown by Augustus
Thomas and Miss Zoë Akins. That is something to grow senti-
mental about.
The strong line is, of course, Back to Methuselah. Few of
the Shavians can stand him at his unmitigated best for three and
four hours at a time. And the producers, with the signal exception
of Mr Lee Simonson, insisted upon making out of this amazing
extravaganza a philosophic drama in dialogue. There are moments
of drama, to be sure. I testify to the thrill which arrived when the
first of the long-livers announced his age. I testify to the emotion
when the tragedy of the Elderly Gentleman was ennobled by the
one gesture of courage which Shaw creates in the whole pentology.
So far, good. But come closer to grips with The Theatre Guild's
interesting project and you find that the play has added only one
thing to the book: the heightened sense of extravagance. Joyce-
Burge in the book isn't, he can't be, half as funny as Joyce-Burge
promenading about in the very image of Ll-G. The added intensity
extends to the drama also; but there an acute reader had less to
gain. Yet the illumination which came from seeing the play is not
trivial. For it is good to learn the true nature of a thing, and the
fact that Shaw was using the form of extravagant fantasy for
the projection of his ideas is interesting. The announcements and
ripostes are like so many riddles in a minstrel show. The long
speeches are like arias in a Covent Garden panto; that the extrava-
ganza is exceptionally intellectual has nothing to do with the case.
Mr Shaw has written a revue and a good one.
And Mr Lee Simonson has been the one to capture that atmos-
phere perfectly. His sets are contributing precisely to the effect
a


THE THEATRE
445
a
of unreality, of beyond life, and are doing it with a beautiful rhythm
of their own. He has used the same medium in the Garden of Eden
and in the scene on Burrin pier; the same method (expressionism,
roughly) in the oasis of Adam and Eve and in the whole of the
fourth play.
Yet the dewy freshness of the Garden of Eden was precisely
without sentimentality, without reverence; just as the pierhead
near Galway was without concrete reality. I am writing before the
third production and cannot guess what this final scene may be.
But I can imagine it as dazzling and serene as a work of pure
imagination requires.
In MADAME PIERRE and in Rags, the latter at the Jewish Art
Theatre, one sees the advantage of having a highly organized past to
use as material. Rags has a richness of colloquial dialogue which
we have not heard equalled in many years. It is exactly the sort
of thing which Mr Anderson successfully created in I Want to
Know Why and I'm a Fool, and which Mr Frank Craven quite
successfully missed in The First Year. The point of interest
in MADAME PIERRE, after its lesson to our dramatists, is the remark-
ably rounded and expert projection of a character by Mr Roland
Young. Miss Estelle Winwood in the same play does a number
of difficult things exceedingly well and completely collapses in
nearly everything else; Mr Young has virtually no moments and
perceptibly enriches what is known as the gallery of character por-
traits visible on our stage.
a
To The Ladies is a much less sophisticated and much funnier
play than Dulcy; it has the structure of a melodrama plus the big
scene of a musical comedy and is exactly the sort of thing which
American playwrights believe American producers are afraid of.
Zuleika Dobson was called by one reviewer "the best type of clean
English novel.” In that sense To The Ladies is probably the best
type of American business play. However, the critics ought not
to forget Mr George M. Cohan, and he just returning to the stage.
The highest moment of the month for your correspondent was
when he heard Mr Al Jolson sing Swanee. That remains.
G. S.


COMMENT
N.
subject of human conversation in our time provokes more
stupidity, prejudice, and nonsense than the general question of
the censorship of works of art. The dulness of the discussions is
admirably set off by violence, as the prejudice is set off by sentimen-
tality (the appeal to God, to the Constitution and the American
family, to the sacredness of the art object, the current moral value
of art). We have felt, for a long time, that the less said of this
matter, the better; but we have counted without the fanatics.
The present position is this: an ex post facto censorship already
exists; it is particularly effective in dealing with mailable matter; its
hand of brass lies not lightly upon exhibitions in art galleries and,
through the police courts, upon the stage. The moving picture is
completely under the domination of several censorships; there is also
a small censorship of ideas. What remains, therefore, is to discover
whether these variously efficient forms of prohibition can be sys-
tematized or made more effective or made in any way intelligent.
For the first two of these, yes; for the third, no. It seems to us
inevitable that a thorough censorship of everything will presently
arrive; equally inevitable that it will be thoroughly corruptible and
unintelligent. Let us make up our minds to that and confess that
one of the reasons why we cannot escape is that the attack upon the
censorship has been not exceptionally intelligent itself. The habit
of jibbing at abstract ideas has played the deuce with us; we haven't,
most of us, talked about the idea of the censorship, but of the abuses
of the institution. Now we shall pay. No one can pretend that the
pure idea would have got us anywhere—this is the twentieth cen-
tury, not the Dark Ages. But the pure idea would have given us
something to go on with.
The eternal argument against the censorship is that it forbids
Mrs Warren's Profession and countenances The Girl With the
Whooping Cough. The up-to-date back-fire against the censorship
is the announcement of self-censorship. The movies tried that; and
now the theatres are supporting movements for cleaner plays. As
a practical matter, presumably, this method has something in its
favour; it usually postpones the blow. But it always concedes the


COMMENT
447
whole point of censorship; it concedes the principle of interference;
and it does not deal with the essential thing in the agitation. Most
of us know that the basis of all these movements for prohibition is
not so much hatred of the thing to be prohibited as love of the power
to destroy. A moderate analysis reveals that one often destroys the
thing one loves.
In this business an intransigeant like A. H. Woods stands like a
giant. He is, at least, frankly not a moralist. He is fighting for
liberty and he takes his fight into the courts. Are his productions
dangerous to the common interest? Then he will suffer the fate of
all enemies of society. But he will not censor himself to comply
with the requirements of any body of moralists. Nor does he pre-
tend that his plays are exponents of the higher morality. He doesn't
even pretend that they are art.
The whole idea of the internal censorship is that a work of art
must be let alone if it subtends, as the philosophers say, a moral pur-
pose; by implication, a work of art may be damned and burned if it
intends nothing but amusement. This would save us Tartuffe and
lose us Ulysses (since current morality is indifferent to the one and
being hostile to the other must assume that no serious purpose can be
involved) and sacrifice L'Habit Vert to Les Hannetons. So much
gained, you say, for the moment. So much lost for eternity. So
much lost because the artist is being made the protégé of a particular
system of morals, of current morals, from which the degeneration
into making the artist subservient to contemporary manners, or the
lack of them, is swift. The self-imposed censorship has already for-
bidden certain picture-makers of our acquaintance to show the
image of a drunken man; we expect presently to be told that the
picture of a man striking a woman (especially if he seems to enjoy
it, and who wouldn't?) is, loosely speaking, out.
We are not, be it noted, pleading for the independence of the
artist; nor are we defending any morality whatever. Independence
of the artist from social control would be desirable if the artist were,
as he sometimes thinks he is, a purely non-social being. The artist
should be independent precisely as the man of science should be in-
dependent; it occurs to us that if a modern Harvey tried to prove the
circulation of the blood by slashing the flanks of young gentlemen as
they passed him on the street there would be precious little talk
about the sanctity of science. If the exposition of any work of art
а


448
COMMENT
drives men mad, society will protect itself and haul the artist off to
a comfortable jail. That cannot be helped.
That cannot be helped. What can be helped,
if one sticks close enough to the idea of moral interference, is the
subjection of the artist's liberty to a moral pressure which has noth-
ing to do with the preservation of society.
As for morals, we find the opponents of censorship a little more
puritan than the censorship itself. Some of them assure us that art
will bring the revolution; and some that art will induce sexual pur-
ity; and some that it will save the Steel Trust and the Y.M.C.A.
The great moral lesson is, we confess, a little obscured for us because
we aren't quite sure what morality is being pushed at any given mo-
ment. We recognize the slow decay of serenity and discipline and
ecstasy and freedom; a sour authority compels us more and more at
every step. Against it we have to fight, but not in the name of a
smug reasonableness a little more loathsome still.
It is very likely, of course, that we are witnessing not the healthy
strength, but the violence in fever of Puritanism. What we have
to assure ourselves is that, when it passes away for ever, we shall not
be subject to the Higher Good. And we can only be sure by mak-
ing no compromises. We shall not escape slavery by a change of
masters.
Mr E. WEYHE has issued an attractive little folder in behalf of
the living artist. It suggests that the work of these artists be bought
now, and it is conceived in the most generous terms:
“We make this appeal in the interest of no special clique of artists
working either in the old or in the new tradition. We invite you to
come to our shop to look at the work of a group whose productions
we happen to have. But there are others whose achievement is
equally or perhaps more significant. Go to other dealers with vision
and intelligence; go to the artists themselves.”
That is good. We refer our readers to Mr McBride's account of
a recent auction of the work of living artists, elsewhere in this issue.
The humour, at least, of the affair was not lost.


16
?


2
Courtesy of the Galerie Paul Rosenberg
BY HENRI ROUSSEAU

LA CARRIOLE DE M JUNIET.



THE IT
VI
VI
IX
V
DIAL
OXX ITO
MAY 1922
MORE MEMORIES
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
A
COUPLE of years before the death of Parnell I had wound up
my
introduction to the selections from the Irish novelists with
the prophecy of an intellectual movement at the first lull in politics,
and now I wished to fulfil my prophecy. I did not put it in that
way, for I preferred to think that the sudden emotion that now came
to me, the sudden certainty that Ireland was to be like soft wax for
years to come, was a moment of supernatural insight. How could
I tell, how can I tell even now?
There was a little Irish Society of young people, clerks, shop boys,
and shop girls, called The Southwark Irish Literary Society, and it
had ceased to meet because the girls got the giggles when any mem-
ber of the Committee got up to speak. Every member of it had said
all he had to say many times over. I had given them a lecture about
the falling asunder of the human mind, as an opening flower falls
asunder, and all had professed admiration because I had made such
a long speech without quotation or narrative; and now I invited the
Committee to my father's house at Bedford Park, and there proposed
a new organization, The Irish Literary Society. T. W. Rolleston
came to that first meeting, and it was because he had much tact, and
a knowledge of the technical business of committees, that a society
was founded which was joined by every London-Irish author and
journalist. In a few months somebody had written its history, and
published that history, illustrated by our portraits, at a shilling.
When it was published I was in Dublin, founding a society there
called The National Literary Society, and affiliating it with certain
Young Ireland Societies in country towns which seemed anxious to


450
MORE MEMORIES
accept its leadership. I had definite plans; I wanted to create an
Irish Theatre; I was finishing my Countess Cathleen in its first
meagre version, and thought of a travelling company to visit our
country branches; but before that there must be a popular imagina-
tive literature. I arranged with Mr Fisher Unwin and his reader,
Mr Edward Garnett-a personal friend of mine—that when our
organization was complete Mr Fisher Unwin was to publish for it
a series of books at a shilling each. I told only one man of this ar-
rangement, for after I had made my plans I heard an alarming ru-
mour. Old Sir Charles Gavan Duffy was coming from Australia to
start an Irish publishing house, and publish a series of books, and I
did not expect to agree with him, but knew that I must not seek a
quarrel. The two societies were necessary because their lectures
must take the place of an educated popular press, which we had not,
and have not now, and create a standard of criticism. Irish litera-
ture had fallen into contempt; no educated man ever bought an
Irish book; in Dublin Professor Dowden, the one man of letters
with an international influence, was accustomed to say that he knew
an Irish book by its smell, because he had once seen some books whose
binding had been fastened together by rotten glue; and Standish
O'Grady's last book upon ancient Irish history—a book rather wild,
rather too speculative, but forestalling later research—had not been
reviewed by any periodical or newspaper in England or in Ireland.
At first I had great success, for I brought with me a list of names
written down by some member of the Southwark Irish Literary So-
ciety, and for six weeks went hither and thither appealing and per-
suading. My first conversation was over a butter-tub in some Dub-
lin back street, and the man agreed with me at once; everybody
agreed with me; all felt that something must be done, but nobody
knew what. Perhaps they did not understand me, perhaps I kept
back
my full thoughts, perhaps they only seemed to listen; it was
enough that I had a plan, and was determined about it. When I
went to lecture in a provincial town, a workman's wife, who wrote
patriotic stories in some weekly newspaper, invited me to her house,
and I found all her children in their Sunday best. She made a little
speech, very formal and very simple, in which she said that what she
wrote had no merit, but that it paid for her children's schooling; and
she finished her speech by telling her children never to forget that
they had seen me. One man compared me to Thomas Davis, an-
.
a
.


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
451
other said I could organize like Davitt, and I thought to succeed as
they did, and as rapidly. I did not examine this applause, not the
true thoughts of those I met, nor the general condition of the coun-
try, but I examined myself a great deal, and was puzzled at myself.
I knew that I was shy and timid, that I would often leave some busi-
ness undone, or purchase unmade, because I shrank from facing a
strange office or a shop a little grander than usual, and yet, here was
I delightedly talking to strange people every day. It was many years
before I understood that I had surrendered myself to the chief temp-
tation of the artist-creation without toil. Metrical composition is
always very difficult to me, nothing is done upon the first day, not
one rhyme is in its place; and when at last the rhymes begin to come,
the first rough draft of a six-line stanza takes the whole day. At
that time I had not formed a style, and sometimes a six-line poem
would take several days, and not seem finished even then; and I had
not learnt, as I have now, to put it all out of my head before night,
,
and so the last night was generally sleepless, and the last day a day
of nervous strain. But now I had found the happiness that Shelley
found when he tied a pamphlet to a fire balloon.
II
At first I asked no help from prominent persons and when some
clerk or shop-assistant would say “Dr So-and-So or Professor So-
and-So will have nothing to do with us” I would answer "when we
prove we can gather sheep shepherds will come.” Presently, come
they did-old, middle-aged or but little older than myself, but all
with some authority in their town: John O'Leary, John F. Tay-
lor, and Douglas Hyde, and of these much presently; Dr Sigerson
who has picked a quarrel with me and of whom I shall say nothing
that he may not pick another; Count Plunkett, Sinn Feiner of late
and minister of Dail Eireann; Dr Coffey, now head of the National
University; George Coffey, later on Curator of the Irish Antiquities
at the Museum of the Royal Dublin Society; Patrick J. McCall,
poet and publican of Patrick Street, and later member of corpora-
tion; Richard Ashe King, novelist and correspondent of Truth, a
gentle intelligent person typical of nothing; and others known or
unknown. We being now important had a Committee room in the
Mansion House, and I remember that even the old Mansion House


452
MORE MEMORIES
butler recognised our importance so fully, that he took us into his
confidence once in every week, while we sat waiting for a quorum.
He had seen many Lord Mayors, and remembered those very su-
perior Lord Mayors who lived before the extension of the municipal
franchise, and spoke of his present masters with contempt. Among
our persons of authority, and among the friends and followers they
had brought, there were many who at that time found it hard to re-
fuse if anybody offered for sale a pepper-pot shaped to suggest a
round tower with a wolf-dog at its foot, and who would have
felt it inappropriate to publish an Irish book that had not harp
and shamrock and green cover, so completely did their minds move
amid Young Ireland images and metaphors, and I thought with
alarm of the coming of Sir Charles Gavan Duffy; while here and
there I noticed that smooth, smiling face that we discover for the
first time in certain pictures by Velasquez, all that hungry, medi-
aeval speculation vanished, that had worn the faces of El Greco,
and in its place a self-complacent certainty that all had been ar-
ranged, provided for, set out in clear type, in manual of devotion
or of doctrine. These, however, were no true disciples of Young
Ireland, for Young Ireland had sought a nation unified by political
doctrine, a subservient art and letters aiding and abetting. The
movement of thought, which had in the 'fifties and 'forties at
Paris and London and Boston, filled literature, and especially poet-
ical literature, with curiosities about science, about history, about
politics, with moral purpose and educational fervour-abstractions
all-had created a new instrument for Irish politics; a method of
writing that took its poetical style from Campbell, Scott, Macaulay,
and Béranger with certain elements from Gaelic, and its prose style
in John Mitchel, the only Young Ireland prose writer who had a
style at all, from Carlyle. To recommend this method of writing as
literature without much reservation and discrimination I contended
was to be deceived or to practise deception. If one examined some
country love-song, one discovered that it was not written by a man
in love, but by a patriot who wanted to prove that we did indeed
possess, in the words of Daniel O'Connell, “the finest peasantry
upon earth,” yet one well-known anthology was introduced by the
assertion that such love-poetry was superior to "affected and artifi-
cial” English love-songs like “Drink to me only with thine eyes”.
"affected and artificial,” the very words used by English Victorians
who wrote for the newspapers to discourage capricious, personal


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
453
writing. The greater number however even of those who thought
our famous anthology, The Spirit of the Nation, except for three or
four songs, but good election rhyme, looked upon it much as certain
enlightened believers look upon the story of Adam and Eve and the
apple, or that of Jonah and the whale, which they do not question
publicly, because such stories are an integral part of religion to sim-
ple men and women. I, upon the other hand, being in the intemper-
ance of my youth, denied as publicly as possible merit to all but a
few ballads translated from Gaelic writers, or those who wrote out
of some personal and generally tragic experience.
III
The greater number of those who had joined my society had come
under the seal of Young Ireland at that age when we are all mere
wax; the more ambitious had gone daily to some public library to
read the bound volumes of Thomas Davis' old newspaper, and tried
to see the world as Davis saw it. No philosophic speculation, no
economic question of the day disturbed an orthodoxy which, unlike
that of religion, had no philosophic history, and the religious bigot
was glad that it should be so. Some few of the younger men were
impatient, and it was these younger men, more numerous in the
London than in the Dublin Society, who gave me support; and we
had been joined by a few older men—some personal friends of my
own or of my father's—who had only historical interest in Thomas
Davis and his school. Young Ireland's prose had been as much
occupied with Irish virtue, and more with the invader's vices, than
its poetry, and we were soon mired and sunk into such problems as
to whether Cromwell was altogether black, the heads of the old
Irish clans altogether white, the Danes mere robbers and church
burners (they tell me at Rosses Point that the Danes keep to this
day the maps of the Rosses fields they were driven out of in the
ninth century, and plot their return) and as to whether we were or
were not once the greatest orators in the world. All the past had
been turned into a melodrama with Ireland for blameless hero; and
poet, novelist, and historian had but one object, that we should hiss
the villain, and only a minority doubted that the greater the talent
the greater the hiss. It was all the harder to substitute for that
melodrama a nobler form of art, because there really had been, how-
ever different in their form, villain and victim; yet fight that ran-


454
MORE MEMORIES
cour I must, and if I had not made some head against it in 1892 and
1893 it might have silenced in 1907 John Synge, the greatest dra-
matic genius of Ireland. I am writing of disputes that happened
many years ago, that led in later years to much bitterness, and I may
exaggerate their immediate importance and violence, but I think
I am right in saying that disputes about the merits of Young Ireland
so often interrupted our discussion of rules, or of the merit of this
or that lecturer, and were so aggravated and crossed by the current
wrangle between Parnellite and anti-Parnellite that they delayed
our public appearance for a year. Other excited persons, doubtless,
,
seeing that we are of a race intemperate of speech, had looked up
from their rancours to the dead Lord Mayors upon the wall, superi-
or men whose like we shall not see again, but never, I think, from
rancours so seemingly academic. I was preparing the way
without
knowing it for a great satirist and master of irony, for master works
stir vaguely in many before they grow definite in one man's mind, ,
and to help me I had already fitting through my head, jostling
other ideas and so not yet established there, a conviction that we
should satirize rather than praise, that original virtue arises from
the discovery of evil. If we were, as I had dreaded, declamatory,
loose, and bragging, we were but the better fitted, that once declared
and measured, to create unyielding personality, manner at once
cold and passionate, daring long premeditated act; and if bitter be-
yond all the people of the world, we might yet lie, that too once
declared and measured, the nearest to the honeycomb:
“Like the clangor of a bell
Sweet and harsh, harsh and sweet,
That is how he learnt so well
To take the roses for his meat."
i
IV
There were others with followers of their own, and too old or
indifferent to join our society. Old men who had never accepted
Young Ireland, or middle-aged men kept by some family tradition
to the school of thought before it arose, to the Ireland of Daniel
O'Connell and of Lever and of Thomas Moore, convivial Ireland
with the traditional tear and smile. They sang Moore's melodies,
admitted no poetry but his, and resented Young Ireland's political


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
455
-
objections to it as much as my generation's objection to its artificial
and easy rhythm; one, an old commercial traveller, a Gaelic scholar
who kept an erect head and the animal vigour of youth, frequented
the houses of our leading men, and would say in a loud voice, "Tho-
mas Moore, sir, is the greatest heroic poet of ancient or modern
times”—I think it was the Fire Worshippers in Lalla Rookh that he
preferred to Homer-or, jealous for the music of the Melodies, de-
nounce Wagner, then at the top of his vogue; “I would run ten miles
through a bog to escape him,” he would cry. Then there was a
maker of tombstones of whom we had heard much, but had seen
little, an elderly fighting man, lately imprisoned for beating a wine-
merchant. A young member of the London Society, afterwards
librarian to the National University, D. J. O'Donohue, who had
published a dictionary of the Irish poets, containing, I think, two
thousand names, had come to Dublin and settled there in a fit of
patriotism. He had been born in London, and spoke the most
Cockney dialect imaginable, and had picked up-probably from
London critics—a dislike for the poetry of Thomas Moore. The
tombstone-maker invited him to tea, and he arrived with a bundle
of books, which he laid beside him upon the table. During tea he
began expounding that dislike of his; his host was silent, but he
went on, for he was an obstinate little man. Presently the tomb-
stone-maker rose, and having said solemnly, “I have never permit-
ted that great poet to be slandered in my presence," seized his guest
by the back of the collar, and flung him out into the street, and
after that flung out the books one after another. Meanwhile the
guest—as he himself told the tale—stood in the middle of the street
repeating, “Nice way to treat a man in your own 'ouse."
>
V
I shared a lodging, full of old books and magazines covered with
dirt and dust, with the head of the Fenian Brotherhood, John
O'Leary. “In this country," he had said to me, "a man must have
upon his side the Church or the Fenians, and you will never have
the Church.” He had been converted to nationality by the poems of
Davis, and he wished for some analogous movement to that of
Davis, but he had known men of letters, had been the friend of
Whistler, and knew the faults of the old literature. We had made
him the President of our Society, and without him I could do


456
MORE MEMORIES
a
nothing, for his long imprisonment and longer exile, his magnificent
appearance, and, above all, the fact that he alone had personality,
a point of view not made for the crowd's sake, but for self-express-
ion, made him magnetic to my generation. He and I had long been
friends, he had stayed with us at Bedford Park, and my father had
painted his portrait, but if I had not shared his lodging he would
have opposed me. He was an old man, and my point of view was
not that of his youth, and it often took me half the day to make him
understand—so suspicious he was of all innovation—some simple
thing that he would presently support with ardour. He had grown
up in a European movement when the revolutionist thought that
he, above all men, must appeal to the highest motive, be guided by
some ideal principle, be a little like Cato or like Brutus, and he had
lived to see the change Dostoevsky examined in The Possessed.
Men who had been of his party—and oftener their sons—preached
assassination and the Bomb; and, worst of all, the majority of his
countrymen followed after constitutional politicians who practised
opportunism, and had, as he believed, such low morals that they
would lie or publish private correspondence, if it might advance
their cause. He would split every practical project into its constitu-
ent elements, like a clerical casuist, to find if it might not lead into
some moral error; but, were the project revolutionary, he would
sometimes temper condemnation with pity. Though he would cast
off his oldest acquaintance did he suspect him of rubbing shoulders
with some carrier of bombs, I have heard him say of a man who
blew himself up in an attempt to blow up Westminster Bridge, "He
was not a bad man, but he had too great a moral nature for his
intellect, not that he lacked intellect.” He did not explain, but
he meant,
I suppose, that the spectacle of injustice might madden
a good man more quickly than some common man. Such men were
of his own sort, though gone astray, but the constitutional politi-
cians he had been fighting all his life, and all they did, displeased
him. It was not that he thought their aim wrong, or that they
could not achieve it-he had accepted Gladstone's Home Rule
Bill—but that in his eyes they degraded manhood. "If England
has been brought to do us justice by such men,” he would say, "that
is not because of our strength, but because of her weakness.” He.
had a particular hatred for the rush of emotion that followed the
announcement of Gladstone's conversion, for what was called "The


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
457
>
>
")
Union of Hearts,” and derided its sentimentality; "Nations may
respect one another,” he would say, "they cannot love." His an-
cestors had probably kept little shops, or managed little farms in
County Tipperary, yet he hated democracy, though he never used
the word either for praise or blame, with more than feudal hatred.
“No gentleman can be a socialist,” he said, and then, with a thought-
ful look, "He might be an anarchist.” He had no philosophy, but
things distressed his palate, and two of those things were Inter-
national Propaganda and the Organized State, and Socialism aimed
at both, nor could he speak such words as “philanthropy,” “human-
itarianism,” without showing by his tone of voice that they offended
him. The Church pleased him little better; there was an old Fen-
ian quarrel there, and he would say, "My religion is the old Persian,
to pull the bow and tell the truth.” He had no self-consciousness,
no visible pride, and would have hated anything that could have
been called a gesture, was indeed scarce artist enough to invent a
gesture; yet he would never speak of the hardship of his prison life
—though abundantly enough of its humours—and once, when I
pressed him, replied, "I was in the hands of my enemy, why should
I complain?” A few years ago I heard that the Governor of the
prison had asked him why he did not report some unnecessary dis-
comfort, and O'Leary had said, “I did not come here to complain.”
Now that he is dead, I wish that I could question him, and perhaps
discover whether in early youth he had come across some teacher
who had expounded Roman virtue, but I doubt if I would have
learnt anything, for I think the wax had long forgotten the seal —
if seal there were. The seal was doubtless made before the eloquent
humanitarian 'forties and 'fifties, and was one kind with that that
had moulded the youthful mind of Savage Landor. Stephens, the
founder of Fenianism, had discovered him searching the second-
hand bookstalls for rare editions, and enrolled him in his organiza-
tion. “You have no chance of success,” O'Leary had said, “but
it will be good for the morale of the country” (morale was his great
word) "and I will join on the condition that I am never asked to
enroll anybody.” He still searched the second-hand bookstalls,
and had great numbers of books, especially of Irish history and
literature, and when I, exhausted over our morning's casuistry,
would sit down to my day's work (I was writing The Secret Rose)
he would make his tranquil way to the Dublin Quays. In the evening


458
MORE MEMORIES
a
any
"
over his coffee, he would write passages for his memoirs upon post-
cards and odd scraps of paper, taking immense trouble with every
word and comma, for the great work must be a masterpiece of style;
when it was finished, it was unreadable, being dry, abstract, and con-
fused; no picture had ever passed before his mind's eye. He was a
victim, I think, of a movement where opinions stick men together,
or keep them apart, like a kind of bird lime, and without rela-
tion to their natural likes and tastes, and where men of rich nature
must give themselves up to an irritation which they no longer rec-
ognize because it is always present. I often wonder why he gave
me his friendship, why it was he who found almost all the sub-
scribers for my Wanderings of Usheen, and why he now supported
me in all I did, for how could he like verses that were all picture,
all emotion, all association, all mythology? He could not have
approved my criticism either, for I exalted mask and image above
the eighteenth century logic which he loved, and set experience
before observation, emotion before fact. Yet he would say, "I have
only three followers, Taylor, Yeats, and Rolleston,” and presently
he cast out Rolleston—"Davitt wants to convert thousands, but
I want two or three." I think that perhaps it was because he no
more wished to strengthen Irish Nationalism by second-rate liter-
ature than by second-rate morality, and was content that we agreed
in that. “There are things a man must not do to save a Nation,” he
had once told me, and when I had asked what things, had said, "To
cry in public,” and I think it probable that he would have added,
if pressed, “To write oratorical or insincere verse."
O'Leary's movements and intentions were full of impulse, but
John F. Taylor's voice in private discussion had no emotional
quality except in the expression of scorn; if he moved an arm it
moved from the shoulder or elbow alone, and when he walked he
moved from the waist only, and seemed an automaton, a wooden
soldier, as if he had no life that was not dry and abstract. Ex-
cept at moments of public oratory, he lacked all personality, though
when one saw him respectful and gentle with O'Leary, as with
some charming woman, one saw that he felt his fascination. In
letters or in painting, it repelled him unless it were harsh and obvi-
ous, and, therefore, though his vast erudition included much art
and letters, he lacked artistic feeling, and judged everything by
the moral sense. He had great ambition, and had he joined some


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
459
established party, or found some practicable policy, he might have
been followed, might have produced even some great effect, but he
must have known that in defeat no man would follow him, as they
followed O'Leary, as they followed Parnell. His oratory was
noble, strange, even beautiful, at moments the greatest I have ever
listened to; but, the speech over, where there had been, as it seemed,
so little of himself, all coming from beyond himself, we saw pre-
cisely as before an ungainly body in unsuitable, ill-fitting clothes,
and heard an excited voice speaking ill of this man or that other.
We knew that he could never give us that one price we would ac-
cept, that he would never find a practicable policy; that no party
would admit, no government negotiate with, a man notorious for
a temper, that if it gave him genius, could at times carry him to
the edge of insanity.
Born in some country town, the son of some little watchmaker,
he had been a shop assistant, put himself to college and the bar,
learned to speak at temperance meetings and Young Ireland socie-
ties, and was now a Queen's Counsel famous for his defence of coun-
try criminals, whose cases had seemed hopeless—Taylor's boys, their
neighbours called them or they called themselves. He had shaped
his style and his imagination from Carlyle, the chief inspirer of
self-educated men in the 'eighties and early ’nineties. “I prefer
Emerson's Oversoul,” the Clondalkin cobbler said to me, “but I
always read Carlyle when I am wild with the neighbours”; but
he used his master's style, as Mitchel had done before, to abase
what his master loved, to exalt what his master scorned. His
historical erudition seemed as vast as that of York Powell, but his
interests were not Powell's, for he had no picture before the mind's
eye, and had but one object-a plea of not guilty—entered in his
country's name before a jury which he believed to be packed.
O’Leary cared nothing for his country's glory, its individuality
alone seemed important in his eyes; he was like some man who
serves a woman all his life without asking whether she be good or
bad, wise or foolish; but Taylor cared for nothing else; he was so
much O'Leary's disciple that he would say in conversation, "We are
demoralized, what case for change if we are not ?" for O'Leary
admitted no ground for reform outside the moral life, but when
he spoke to the great plea he would make no admission. He spoke
to it in the most obscure places, in little halls in back streets where


460
MORE MEMORIES
the whitewashed walls are foul with grease from many heads,
before some audience of medical students or of shop assistants, for
he was like a man under a curse, compelled to hide his genius, and
compelled to show in conspicuous places his ill judgement and his
temper.
His distaste for myself, broken by occasional tolerance, in so
far as it was not distaste for an imagination that seemed to him
atheistical rather than ethical, was because I had published Irish
folk-lore in English reviews to the discredit, as he thought, of the
Irish peasantry, and because, England within earshot, I found
fault with the Young Ireland prose and poetry. He would have
hated The Playboy of the Western World, and his death a little
before its performance was fortunate for Synge and myself. His
articles are nothing, and his one historical work, A Life of Hugh
O'Neill, is almost nothing, lacking the living voice; and now,
though a most formidable man, he is forgotten, but for fading
memory of a few friends, and for what an enemy has written here
and elsewhere. Did not Leonardo da Vinci warn the imaginative
man against pre-occupation with arts that cannot survive his death?
a
VI
When Carleton was dying in 1870, he said there would be nothing
more about Irish Literature for twenty years, and his words were
fulfilled, for the land war had filled Ireland with its bitterness;
but imagination had begun to stir again; I had the same confidence
in the future that Lady Gregory and I had eight or nine years
later, when we founded an Irish Theatre, though there were neither,
as it seemed, plays or players. There were already a few known
men to start my popular series, and to keep it popular until the
men, whose names I did not know, had learnt to express themselves.
I had met Dr Douglas Hyde when I lived in Dublin, and he was
still an undergraduate. I have a memory of meeting in college
rooms for the first time a very dark young man, who filled me with
surprise, partly because he had pushed a snuffbox towards me, and
partly because there was something about his vague serious eyes,
as in his high cheek bones, that suggested a different civilization, a
different race. I had set him down as a peasant, and wondered
what brought him to college, and to a Protestant college, but some-


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
461
body explained that he belonged to some branch of the Hydes of
Castle Hyde, and that he had a Protestant Rector for father. He
had much frequented the company of old countrymen, and had so
acquired the Irish language, and his taste for snuff and for moder-
ate quantities of a detestable species of illegal whiskey distilled from
the potato by certain of his neighbours. He had already—though
intellectual Dublin knew nothing of it-considerable popularity
as a Gaelic poet, mowers and reapers singing his songs from Done-
gal to Kerry. Years afterwards I was to stand at his side and listen
to Galway mowers singing his Gaelic words without knowing whose
words they sang. It is so in India, where peasants sing the words
of the great poet of Bengal without knowing whose words they sing,
and it must often be so where the old imaginative folk-life is un-
disturbed, and it is so amongst school-boys who hand their story
books to one another without looking at the title page to read the
author's name. Here and there, however, where the peasants had
not lost the habit of Gaelic criticism, picked up, perhaps, from the
poets who took refuge among them after the ruin of the great
Catholic families, from men like that O'Rahiley who cries in a
translation from the Gaelic that is itself a masterpiece of concen-
trated passion-
“The periwinkle and the tough dog-fish
Towards evening time have got
into my
dish"
an old rascal was kept in food and whiskey for a fortnight by
some Connaught village under the belief that he was Craoibhin
Aoibhin, “the pleasant little branch,” as Doctor Hyde signed him-
self in the newspapers where the villagers had found his songs. The
impostor's thirst only strengthened belief in his genius, for the
Gaelic song-writers have had the infirmities of Robert Burns. "It
is not the drink but the company," one of the last has sung. Since
that first meeting Doctor Hyde and I have corresponded, and he
had sent me in manuscript the best tale in my Irish and Folk Tales,
and I think I had something to do with the London publication of
his Beside the Fire, a book written in the beautiful English of Con-
naught, which is Gaelic in idiom and Tudor in vocabulary, and
indeed, the first book to use it in the expression of emotion and
romance, for Carleton and his school had turned it into farce.


462
MORE MEMORIES
Henley had praised him, and York Powell had said, “If he goes on
as he has begun, he will be the greatest folk-lorist who has ever
lived”; and I know no first book of verse of our time that is at once
so romantic and so concrete as his Gaelic “Cluster of Nuts”; but
in a few years Dublin was to laugh him, or rail him, out of his
genius. He had no critical capacity, having indeed for certain
years the uncritical folk-genius, as no educated Irish or English-
man has ever had it, writing out of an imitative sympathy like
that of a child catching a tune and leaving it to chance to call the
tune; and the failure of our first attempt to create a modern Irish
literature permitted the ruin of that genius. He was to create a
great popular movement, far more important in its practical results
than any movement I could have made, no matter what my luck,
but, being neither quarrelsome nor vain, he will not be angry if I
say—for the sake of those who come after us—that I mourn for
the "greatest folk-lorist who ever lived,” and for the great poet
who died in his youth. The Harps and the Pepper Pots got him
and the Harps and the Pepper Pots kept him till he wrote in our
common English (“It must be either English or Irish,” said some
patriot editor, Young Ireland practice in his head) that needs such
sifting that he who would write it vigorously must write it like
a learned language, and took for his model the newspaper upon
his breakfast-table, and became for no base reason beloved by
multitudes who should never have heard his name till their school-
masters showed it upon his tomb. That very incapacity for criti-
cism made him the cajoler of crowds, and of individual men and
women; "He should not be in the world at all;" said one admiring
elderly woman, “or doing the world's work;" and for certain years
young Irish women were to display his pseudonym, “Craoibhin
Aoibhin,” in gilt letters upon their hat bands.
.
“Dear Craoibhin Aoibhin . . impart to us,
We'll keep the secret, a new trick to please;
Is there a bridle for this Proteus
That turns and changes like his draughty seas,
Or is there none, most popular of men,
But, when they mock us, that we mock again ?"
To be continued


TWO POEMS
BY WALLACE GOULD
THE GAME
Why do I play at solitaire ?
I think of the Queen of Clubs as reclining on the chest of the bored
King of Diamonds, who is flirting across cards with the Queen
of Spades-
the King of Spades watching them from a corner.
I think of the villainous Jack of Spades
as sprawling on the Queen of Diamonds
and eyeing all the while the lonely Queen of Hearts, who has no
Jack.
I think of the effeminate Jack of Hearts
as waving his yellow symbol at the manly Jack of Clubs.
And I think-
I think of myriad hands at play.
There are the chubby, the lean, the rounded, the scrawny, the fur-
rowed, the fragile, the coarse, the ugly, the symmetrical.
There are the rosy, the pallid, the manicured, the unkempt.
There are the nervous, the deliberate, the hesitant, the playful, the
intent, the cautious, the subtle, the careless-
fingers tapering, fingers blunt, fingers lopped, fingers clenched, fin-
gers motionless-
the hands all doing the very things that mine are doing.
There are the hands of to-day and the hands of other days.
I often think I should like to press them in mine.
But I think of little else,
and that is why I play.


464
TWO POEMS
MATIN
,
In the spring of the first year of the war,
nighthawks in great numbers settled about the city-
came in unprecedented numbers, to remain all summer-
and all night long they swooped into the streetlight, or across the
face of the moon,
and all night long, and often until daybreak, they screamed, in num-
bers unheard of.
And once in June, at dawn, as, drunk and happy, I tottered home-
ward,
I heard them screaming louder than ever, and in greater numbers,
and with them thousands of sparrows shrilling-
a screaming, a shrilling, a babel of screams and shrills, none re-
pressed, all joyous-
the topmost leaves of the maples already glowing, the new translu-
cent leaves.
Sitting on the steps of a church and closing my eyes,
I swayed from side to side, like a savage in the act of mourning,
and swaying thus I sang a song of my own making,
a song to sing with the birds, the late, the early, all.



UE
HO
JACK RABBIT. BY REUBEN NAKIAN





CHANGE
BY MARY BUTTS
WHO
W
HEN I woke up I thought I might do it, cross the belt of villas
I
and the
open
wood, wade
up the sandy lane, climb the hill
to the common where we used to pick fir-cone mushrooms, and enter
the dark wood that overhangs their house. It hangs on a cliff be-
tween the orchard and the house. From it we used to count the
planes of the roof with pigeons walking about on them. Over the
roofs we watched the harbour running.
I did not tell the old people. My washed-out cotton dress said
-
“disinherited”—They gave me a packet of biscuits I did not want
because the child was weight enough to carry.
I thought I might go round by the farm and up the drive, but I
was afraid to meet them in the lanes. The drive up from the sea is
very long. I should have been crushed under the avenue. The fields
would not have hidden me. If one of them had come I should have
crawled into the ditch, or faced them with the embarrassment that
would have degraded the three of us.
I walked up the common. There were mushrooms at the top, but
few and slug-eaten and kicked. I walked confidently because it
would have been easy to hide in the gorse-bushes run through with
secret paths.
When I came to the edge where the wood dropped, it was as
though I could have leaned over and touched the house. They had
so cut the trees that one could look down into the windows. They
were black and transparent. I did not see any one go up or down the
stairs. Outside the harbour was empty of ships. I sat with my
back
against a tree, my feet in an arbutus bush spread out across me. I
could see the orchard and the flower-garden, the box-edged paths
converging on the six wells. There was a new green-house and three
men at work. The trees spread in an oval lunette on to the stables
at the head of the drive. I heard the side door open. The tree hid
a walking body till it came out on to the drive. It was my mother.
.
The flesh on her face was made pink for the morning, her hair was


466
CHANGE
yellow under her hat, her widow's veil hung down straight like a
black pillar following her.
She went up to the stables, and stood in front of the white garage
doors. She did not peer through the grill. She was looking at shut
doors. She began to walk up and down the red cobbles where the
horses used to be washed, and turned and went to where the men
were working, and told one of them what to do. She went from him
to a man with red hair, and made him walk up and down the path
with her, while she explained. He had a green
baize
apron
and
there were times when she took his advice.
She walked away into the rose-garden, and stood by the well with
the lead lions picking at a dead tree.
My brother came out of the front door of the house. He looked
up to see if the sky was clear. His cigarette was in a very long holder
the smoke was so far from his face. He turned about and about.
Once he went back into the porch, once he made off down the drive
to the sea. He tried to crack an almond from the tree on the terrace,
and it shot away under his heel. At last he walked following my
mother very slowly up to the stables. He was not looking for her,
but he knew where she was.
She heard him a long way off. “Boy-oy. Boy-oy.” He began to
drag. He threw away his cigarette and lit another. I saw the flame
a foot away from his face.
“Boy-oy. I'm here. Boy-oy.” She came down to meet him, and
drew his arm into hers, and led him up the garden. She pointed
something out to him, asking for his opinion. After a time he began
to answer, and changed her arm into his. She put a rose in his waist-
coat, he stuck one in her hat.
They stood at the foot of the apple-tree where were the graves of
my animals. Some had grave-stones. The others had been marked
out in patterns with pebbles and marble chips. I could not see what
had happened to them. They called up a man and gave orders for
the tree to be cut down. My brother kicked over my pony's grave-
stone. They moved away and picked plums off a rich young tree.
He asked her for something and she shook her head. He asked again,
and she spread out her hands. She was pouting. He asked a third
time and she shrugged her shoulders. They went down to the house.
I heard my brother speaking at the telephone, and the bell ring off.
A servant I did not know crossed the yard and tore bay leaves


MARY BUTTS
467
from the tree at the back door. There would be a sweet dish fla-
voured with bay leaves. A gardener came down with vegetables. I
remembered our greengrocer up a side street where the fine fruit was
shown in cotton wool. He had a huge cabbage with him for the
knife to split like frozen butter.
Behind the stables there would be figs. I could not go down and
pick. A workman would ask me who I was, and the child would
show. I felt it move. I looked up and saw the harbour streaming
out to sea. I crossed the gorse-field where I had lain with my hus-
band and listened to the pods snicking. The gorse-field led into a
meadow that belonged to a kind cultivated woman who did not like
my mother, but who would have been afraid if she had met me. The
grass in her field was heavy, cool, and wet. I skirted the hedge that
ran alongside our drive. Once I thought she was standing among
her fowls looking at me. There was no one there, and I remembered
that she was almost blind.
When I put my hands down into the pockets of my coat, and let
it fall straight and open, no one would have seen the child under my
loose gown. Then I heard footsteps coming down the drive. I
thought my mother was walking out to the farm. I fell down under
the hedge. They stopped. I never found out about them. I thought
it would be bad for the child not to show courage, and I left the field
and walked down the long drive to the sea.
I looked back every few yards, and each time the house sat higher
on its hill, its lawns were greener, its trees had more shape.
Though they had no car they had spent a great deal of money on
the terrace pots, and inside the house were the cool shining rooms,
and dishes piled with fruit, and mirrors to reflect them, and they had
got rid of me. It had given them some trouble, but they were rid of
me, and I could never go back. There was no getting back. The boy
found it dull, but he was ashamed of me. And I would never go
back
until she gave me money, and he knew that if she did there would
be less for him. She had made him see that he could not do without
money to buy the things with which she had corrupted him. And I
wanted money for clothes and books, and not to be hurt when the
child was born.
The gate was open. I unhooked it and it swung across, as we had
been told not to do, my heavy shoes destroying the paint. I made a
face as I went out. The house was too far up for any one to see it.


468
CHANGE
I went down to the shore. There were the round stones, the sea.
pinks, and the tough grass that was salt and scratched my nose, but
with them I could make free and not with the roses in the shut gar-
den. I walked all round the marsh, and under the trees, and through
the damp lane past the farm.
The sea-wind does not blow there. I grew tired. Round the cor-
ner, by the cemetery where they buried my young aunt who drowned
herself because she could not bear it, I met my brother. His body
was fatter, his face thinner. The pink and white candied face
had green moons under the eyes. His trousers showed how wide his
hips were. His eyes glittered as he was thinking to himself. He said
“O my sister” and tried not to look at my waist. I kissed him and
said “Darling, I'm not a high explosive.” I couldn't remember prop-
erly what had happened about the grave-stone, but that on our left
Aunt Vera was dead and buried, and that they had not been able to
kill me.
.
He took my arm, and we went along together. He said "It is such
fun to see you. I'm so bored. There is nothing to do here and we
have no money. You don't know how awful it is to have no money.
... I suppose you are staying with the old people. I don't know
how you can stand it.”
"They are very kind.”
"I've known people be kind to you and you've not been having
any."
“The old people are all right.
"If it were not for the old hag, I could take you back to lunch.
You ought to try our peaches.
I was pleased to hear him call her that. (She would say, "did you
meet any one on your walk?" and he would answer "that young
bitch, my sister.” Did I mind that? No.)
He was like a ball with an open mouth in it. A ball made out of
a turnip head. I looked round at the coral lips, the high cheek-bones.
We walked through the dust. He begged me not to go too fast. By
the quarries we sat down on a stone. I thought I was precious to him
as he had once been to me. He was sweating more than I.
a
"Does she know that I'm down here?”
“Yes, they told her.”
Was he kind enough to ask "will she help us over the child.” To


MARY BUTTS
469
a
know that, only to know that, to sink into the re-assurance that
opened like a bed bathed in light.
a
Then I knew with exactly what nervous pleasure he would tell me
the truth. I did not care about anything but that in the world. I
was afraid. I could not speak to him about anything else. I could
not speak to him at all.
He began to ask about people we had known in common. I gig-
gled and told him scandal. I should have asked him for an overcoat
and a pair of old shoes. I heard myself ask him, and laughing and
laughing, and laughing, till the sun threw a hot curtain between me
and the huge adolescent.
“Here,” he said, "nothing happens, and nothing ever can till my
guardians pay what they owe. You don't know what it means.”
"Who should know better than I ?".
“O yes. I know that too, but Mother hasn't had an easy time.
We're growing fruit now for the market, and all that I can do is see
that the best of it feeds me. In the evening we hunt for slugs. We
caught one yesterday six inches long and buried it in salt.”
“I hate slugs.”
"It kills them at once."
I had pushed up the dust with my toe, and I thought of the slug
bubbling underneath. He knew.
“Either the slug or the peach had to go under.”
We got up and crossed the last field where the country ends.
“You might remember me to the old people.”
“I will.”
“They're not bad sorts.”
“They are very good to me.'
“I suppose you know that it was all through mother she got that
appointment.”
“Possibly. She is making a great success of it.” You horrible
little kept boy. Your mother's pander-leave Aunt Elizabeth alone.
I wanted to throw him down under the palings where the first villa
began, and kneel on him, and dig into his throat, and score his face,
and pinch him, and get away from him his watch and links and tie
pin and shoes. They would do for my man.
The more there is for you the less for him. Can you wonder? . .
We were at the field's edge. He said gravely, “I don't know that
you have so much the worst of it, Sis. It is awful here. Haven't we
6


470
CHANGE
always known that there is something wicked about the house? I
hate to hang about there all day and listen to the clocks striking."
“Go away and get something to do."
“My guardian won't let me.
“You have friends and books.”
"A lot you'll find people want you when you have no money to
spend on them.”
"A nice set you know.”
“They're not used to beggary.”
“Thank God mine are."
That was it. I was looking at the splintered sphere of that world
that had given us birth. I saw its ruins turned brothel for him to
live and solicit in. An eternal priest. Outside I was working in the
clay. In the woman is the race.
A yellow gravel road ran to the field's edge. There we kissed. I
turned the corner of the hedge, so that I should not have to see him
go, and craned over to watch the hesitant walk.
There was a packet of sweet soft biscuits in my pocket. I sat down
on the curb and munched and listened to the child twitching. To-
morrow I would go back. There would be stairs to climb. Shoes,
an ivory knobbed stick, wine, and a single feather fan. A steak and
peaches. A first class ticket to Town. People to carry my burden
and me.
The yellow-haired hag stole from me ...
.. And always there
would be more stairs to climb
If it died, would it be their
fault? Oh, the ivory and the gold .
A bird flew down and off with one of the crumbs.
.
.



010
CROPPER
FOX-TROT. BY WILLIAM GROPPER


1


kalupy

Glopple-
TOUCH. BY WILLIAM GROPPER


1


THE FOX
BY D. H. LAWRENCE
a
Tan
HE two girls were usually known by their surnames, Banford
and March. They had taken the farm together, intending to
work it all by themselves: that is, they were going to rear chickens,
make a living by poultry, and add to this by keeping a cow, and
raising one or two young beasts. Unfortunately things did not turn
out well.
Banford was a small, thin, delicate thing with spectacles. She,
however, was the principal investor, for March had little or no mon-
ey. Banford's father, who was a tradesman in Islington, gave his
daughter the start, for her health's sake, and because he loved her,
and because it did not look as if she would marry. March was more
robust. She had learned carpentry and joinery at the evening class-
es in Islington. She would be the man about the place. They had,
moreover, Banford's old grandfather living with them at the start.
He had been a farmer. But unfortunately the old man died after
he had been at Bailey farm for a year. Then the two girls were left
alone.
They were neither of them young: that is, they were near thirty.
But they certainly were not old. They set out quite gallantly with
their enterprise. They had numbers of chickens, black Leghorns and
white Leghorns, Plymouths and Wyandots: also some ducks; also
two heifers in the fields. One heifer, unfortunately, refused ab-
solutely to stay in the Bailey Farm closes. No matter how March
made up the fences, the heifer was out, wild in the woods, or tres-
passing on the neighbouring pasture, and March and Banford were
away, flying after her, with more haste than success. So this heifer
they sold in despair. Then, just before the other beast was expect-
ing her first calf, the old man died, and the girls, afraid of the com-
ing event, sold her in a panic, and limited their attentions to fowls
and ducks.
In spite of a little chagrin, it was a relief to have no more cattle on
hand. Life was not made merely to be slaved away. Both girls
agreed in this. The fowls were quite enough trouble. March had
set up her carpenter's bench at the end of the open shed. Here she
a


472
THE FOX
a
a
worked, making coops and doors and other appurtenances. The
fowls were housed in the bigger building, which had served as barn
and cowshed in old days. They had a beautiful home, and should
have been perfectly content. Indeed, they looked well enough. But
the girls were disgusted at their tendency to strange illnesses, at their
exacting way of life, and at their refusal, obstinate refusal, to lay
eggs.
March did most of the outdoor work. When she was out and
about, in her puttees and breeches, her belted coat and her loose cap,
she looked almost like some graceful, loose-balanced young man, for
her shoulders were straight, and her movements easy and confident,
even tinged with a little indifference, or irony. But her face was not
a man's face, ever. The wisps of her crisp dark hair blew about her
as she stooped, her eyes were big and wide and dark, when she looked
up again, strange, startled, shy and sardonic at once. Her mouth,
too, was almost pinched as if in pain and irony. There was some-
thing odd and unexplained about her. She would stand balanced on
one hip, looking at the fowls pattering about in the obnoxious fine
mud of the sloping yard, and calling to her favourite white hen,
which came in answer to her name. But there was an almost satiri-
cal flicker in March's big, dark eyes as she looked at her three-toed
flock pottering about under her gaze, and the same slight dangerous
satire in her voice as she spoke to the favoured Patty, who pecked at
March's boot by way of friendly demonstration.
Fowls did not flourish at Bailey Farm, in spite of all that March
did for them. When she provided hot food for them, in the morn-
ing, according to rule, she noticed that it made them heavy and dozy
for hours. She expected to see them lean against the pillars of the
shed in their languid processes of digestion. And she knew quite
well that they ought to be busily scratching and foraging about, if
they were to come to any good. So she decided to give them their
hot food at night, and let them sleep on it. Which she did. But it
made no difference.
War conditions, again, were very unfavourable to poultry keep-
ing. Food was scarce and bad. And when the Daylight Saving
Bill was passed, the fowls obstinately refused to go to bed as usual,
about nine o'clock in the summer time. That was late enough, in-
deed, for there was no peace till they were shut up and asleep. Now
they cheerfully walked around, without so much as glancing at the


D. H. LAWRENCE
473
barn, until ten o'clock or later. Both Banford and March disbe-
lieved in living for work alone. They wanted to read or take a cycle-
ride in the evening or perhaps March wished to paint curvilinear
swans on porcelain, with green background, or else make a marvel-
lous fire-screen by processes of elaborate cabinet work. For she was
a creature of odd whims and unsatisfied tendencies. But from all
these things she was prevented by the stupid fowls.
One evil there was greater than any other. Bailey Farm was a lit-
tle homestead, with ancient wooden barn and low gabled farm-
house, lying just one field removed from the edge of the wood. Since
the War the fox was a demon. He carried off the hens under the
very noses of March and Banford. Banford would start and stare
through her big spectacles with all her eyes, as another squawk and
Autter took place at her heels. Too late! Another white Leghorn
gone. It was disheartening.
They did what they could to remedy it. When it became per-
mitted to shoot foxes, they stood sentinel with their guns, the two of
them, at the favoured hours. But it was no good. The fox was too
quick for them. So another year passed, and another, and they were
living on their losses, as Banford said. They let their farm-house
,
one summer, and retired to live in a railway-carriage that was de-
posited as a sort of out-house in a corner of the field. This amused
them, and helped their finances. None the less, things looked dark.
Although they were usually the best of friends, because Banford,
though nervous and delicate, was a warm, generous soul, and March,
though so odd and absent in herself, had a strange magnanimity, yet,
in the long solitude, they were apt to become a little irritable with
one another, tired of one another. March had four-fifths of the
work to do, and though she did not mind, there seemed no relief, and
it made her eyes flash curiously sometimes. Then Banford, feeling
more nerve-worn than ever, would become despondent, and March
would speak sharply to her. They seemed to be losing ground, some-
how, losing hope as the months went by. There alone in the fields
by the wood, with the wide country stretching hollow and dim to the
round hills of the White Horse, in the far distance, they seemed to
have to live too much off themselves. There was nothing to keep
them up-and no hope.
The fox really exasperated them both. As soon as they had let
the fowls out, in the early summer mornings, they had to take their


474
THE FOX
saw.
guns and keep guard: and then again, as soon as evening began to
mellow, they must go once more. And he was so sly. He slid along
in the deep grass, he was difficult as a serpent to see. And he seemed
to circumvent the girls deliberately. Once or twice March had
caught sight of the white tip of his brush, or the ruddy shadow of
him in the deep grass, and she had let fire at him. But he made no
account of this.
One evening March was standing with her back to the sunset, her
gun under her arm, her hair pushed under her cap. She was half
watching, half musing. It was her constant state. Her eyes were
keen and observant, but her inner mind took no notice of what she
She was always lapsing into this odd, rapt state, her mouth
rather screwed up. It was a question, whether she was there, ac-
tually consciously present, or not.
The trees on the wood-edge were a darkish, brownish green in the
full light-for it was the end of August. Beyond, the naked, cop-
per-like shafts and limbs of the pine-trees shone in the air. Nearer,
the rough grass, with its long brownish stalks all agleam, was full of
light. The fowls were round about—the ducks were still swimming
on the pond under the pine-trees. March looked at it all, saw it all,
and did not see it. She heard Banford speaking to the fowls, in the
distance—and she did not hear. What was she thinking about?
Heaven knows. Her consciousness was, as it were, held back.
She lowered her eyes, and suddenly saw the fox. He was looking
up at her. His chin was pressed down, and his eyes were looking up.
They met her eyes. And he knew her. She was spell-bound-she
knew he knew her. So he looked into her eyes, and her soul failed
her. He knew her, he was not daunted.
She struggled, confusedly she came to herself, and saw him mak-
ing off, with slow leaps over some fallen boughs, slow, impudent
jumps. Then he glanced over his shoulder, and ran smoothly away.
She saw his brush held smooth like a feather, she saw his white but-
tocks twinkle. And he was gone, softly, soft as the wind.
She put her gun to her shoulder, but even then pursed her mouth,
knowing it was nonsense to pretend to fire. So she began to walk
slowly after him, in the direction he had gone, slowly, pertinacious-
ly. She expected to find him. In her heart she was determined to
find him. What she would do when she saw him again she did not
consider. But she was determined to find him. - So she walked ab-
·


D. H. LAWRENCE
475
а
stractedly about on the edge of the wood, with wide, vivid dark eyes,
and a faint flush in her cheeks. She did not think. In strange mind-
lessness she walked hither and thither.
At last she became aware that Banford was calling her. She made
an effort of attention, turned, and gave some sort of screaming call
in answer. Then again she was striding off towards the homestead.
The red sun was setting, the fowls were retiring towards their
roost. She watched them, white creatures, black creatures, gather-
ing to the barn. She watched them spell-bound, without seeing
them. But her automatic intelligence told her when it was time to
shut the door.
She went indoors to supper, which Banford had set on the table.
Banford chatted easily. March seemed to listen, in her distant,
manly way. She answered a brief word now and then. But all the
time she was as if spell-bound. And as soon as supper was over, she
rose again to go out, without saying why.
She took her gun again and went to look for the fox. For he had
lifted his eyes upon her, and his knowing look seemed to have en-
tered her brain. She did not so much think of him: she was pos-
sessed by him. She saw his dark, shrewd, unabashed eye looking
into her, knowing her. She felt him invisibly master her spirit. She
knew the way he lowered his chin as he looked up, she knew his muz-
zle, the golden brown, and the greyish white. And again, she saw
him glance over his shoulder at her, half-inviting, half-contemptu-
ous and cunning. So she went, with her great startled eyes glowing,
her gun under her arm, along the wood edge. Meanwhile the night
fell, and a great moon rose above the pine-trees. And again Ban-
ford was calling.
So she went indoors. She was silent and busy. She examined
her
gun, and cleaned it, musing abstractedly by the lamp-light. Then
she went out again, under the great moon, to see if everything was
right. When she saw the dark crests of the pine-trees against the
blood-red sky, again her heart beat to the fox, the fox. She wanted
to follow him, with her gun.
It was some days before she mentioned the affair to Banford.
Then suddenly, one evening, she said:
“The fox was right at my feet on Saturday night."
"Where?” said Banford, her eyes opening behind her spectacles.
“When I stood just above the pond."


476
THE FOX
>
“Did you fire?” cried Banford.
“No, I didn't.”
"Why not?”
"Why, I was too much surprised, I suppose.”
It was the same old, slow, laconic way of speech March always
had. Banford stared at her friend for a few moments.
“You saw him?" she cried.
"Oh, yes! He was looking up at me, cool as anything."
“I tell you,” cried Banford—"the cheek!—They're not afraid of
us, Nellie.”
"Oh, no," said March.
“Pity you didn't get a shot at him," said Banford.
“Isn't it a pity! I've been looking for him ever since. But I
don't suppose he'll come so near again.”
"I don't suppose he will,” said Banford.
And she proceeded to forget about it, except that she was more in-
dignant than ever at the impudence of the beggar. March also was
not conscious that she thought of the fox. But whenever she fell
into her half-
musing, when she was half-rapt, and half-intelligently
aware of what passed under her vision, then it was the fox which
somehow dominated her unconsciousness, possessed the blank half
of her musing. And so it was for weeks, and months. No matter
whether she had been climbing the trees for the apples, or beating
down the last of the damsons, or whether she had been digging out
the ditch from the duck-pond, or clearing out the barn, when she had
finished, or when she straightened herself, and pushed the wisps of
hair away again from her forehead, and pursed up her mouth again
in an odd, screwed fashion, much too old for her years, there was sure
to come over her mind the old spell of the fox, as it came when he
was looking at her. It was as if she could smell him at these times.
And it always recurred, at unexpected moments, just as she was go-
ing to sleep at night, or just as she was pouring the water into the
tea-pot, to make tea—it was the fox, it came over her like a spell.
So the months passed. She still looked for him unconsciously
when she went towards the wood. He had become a settled effect in
her spirit, a state permanently established, not continuous, but al-
ways recurring. She did not know what she felt or thought: only
the state came over her, as when he looked at her.
The months passed, the dark evenings came, heavy, dark Novem-
>


D. H. LAWRENCE
477
ber, when March went about in high boots, ankle deep in mud, when
the night began to fall at four o'clock, and the day never properly
dawned. Both girls dreaded these times. They dreaded the almost
continuous darkness that enveloped them on their desolate little farm
near the wood. Banford was physically afraid. She was afraid of
tramps, afraid lest someone should come prowling round. March
was not so much afraid, as uncomfortable, and disturbed. She felt
discomfort and gloom in all her physique.
Usually the two girls had tea in the sitting-room. March lighted
a fire at dusk, and put on the wood she had chopped and sawed dur-
ing the day. Then the long evening was in front, dark, sodden,
black outside, lonely and rather oppressive inside, a little dismal.
March was content not to talk, but Banford could not keep still.
Merely listening to the wind in the pines outside, or the drip of
water, was too much for her.
One evening the girls had washed up the tea-things in the kitchen,
and March had put on her house-shoes, and taken up a roll of cro-
chet-work, which she worked at slowly from time to time. So she
lapsed into silence. Banford stared at the red fire, which, being of
wood, needed constant attention. She was afraid to begin to read
too early, because her eyes would not bear any strain. So she sat
staring at the fire, listening to the distant sounds, sound of cattle
lowing, of a dull, heavy, moist wind, of the rattle of the evening
train on the little railway not far off. She was almost fascinated by
the red glow of the fire.
Suddenly both girls started, and lifted their heads. They heard a
footstep-distinctly a footstep. Banford recoiled in fear. March
stood listening. Then rapidly she approached the door that led into
the kitchen. At the same time they heard the footsteps approach
the back door. They waited a second. The back door opened soft-
ly. Banford gave a loud cry. A man's voice said softly:
“Hello!”
March recoiled, and took a gun from a corner.
“What do
you want ?" she cried, in a sharp voice.
Again the soft, softly-vibrating man's voice said:
“Hello! What's wrong?"
“I shall shoot!” cried March. "What do you want?”
"Why, what's wrong? What's wrong?” came the soft, wonder-
ing, rather scared voice: and a young soldier, with his heavy kit on
a
a


478
THE FOX
a
his back, advanced into the dim light. "Why,” he said, "who lives
here then ?"
“We live here,” said March. "What do you want ?''
“Oh!" came the long, melodious, wonder-note from the young
soldier. “Doesn't William Grenfel live here then?”
"No-you know he doesn't.”
“Do I?-Do I? I don't, you see.—He did live here, because he
?
was my grandfather, and I lived here myself five years ago. What's
become of him then?"
The young man—or youth, for he would not be more than twen-
ty-now advanced and stood in the inner doorway. March, already
under the influence of his strange, soft, modulated voice, stared at
him spell-bound. He had a ruddy, roundish face, with fairish hair,
rather long, flattened to his forehead with sweat. His eyes were
blue, and very bright and sharp. On his cheeks, on the fresh ruddy
skin were fine, fair hairs, like a down, but sharper. It gave him a
slightly glistening look. Having his heavy sack on his shoulders,
he stooped, thrusting his head forward. His hat was loose in one
hand. He stared brightly, very keenly from girl to girl, particularly
at March, who stood pale, with great dilated eyes, in her belted
coat and puttees, her hair knotted in a big crisp knot behind. She
still had the gun in her hand. Behind her, Banford, clinging to the
sofa-arm, was shrinking away, with half-averted head.
“I thought my grandfather still lived here?—I wonder if he's
dead.”
“We've been here for three years,” said Banford, who was begin-
ning to recover her wits, seeing something boyish in the round head
with its rather long sweaty hair.
“Three years! You don't say so!-And you don't know who was
here before you?"
"I know it was an old man, who lived by himself.”
“Ay! Yes, that's him—and what became of him then?”
“He died—I know he died,"
“Ay! He's dead then!"
The youth stared at them without changing colour or expression.
If he had any expression, besides a slight baffled look of wonder, it
was one of sharp curiosity concerning the two girls; sharp, imper-
sonal curiosity, the curiosity of that round young head.


D. H. LAWRENCE
479
But to March he was the fox. Whether it was the thrusting for-
ward of his head, or the glisten of fine whitish hairs on the ruddy
cheek-bones, or the bright, keen eyes, that can never be said: but the
boy was to her the fox, and she could not see him otherwise.
“How is it you didn't know if your grandfather was alive or
dead?” asked Banford, recovering her natural sharpness.
“Ay, that's it,” replied the softly-breathing youth. "You see I
joined up in Canada, and I hadn't heard for three or four years.--
I ran away to Canada.”'
“And now have you just come from France ?”
“Well—from Salonika really.”
There was a pause, nobody knowing quite what to say.
“So you've nowhere to go now?” said Banford rather lamely.
“Oh, I know some people in the village. Anyhow, I can go to
the Swan.”
"You came on the train, I suppose. Would you like to sit down
a bit ?
"Well I don't mind.”
He gave an odd little groan as he swung off his kit. Banford
looked at March.
"Put the gun down,” she said. “We'll make a cup of tea."
”
“Ay,” said the youth. “We've seen enough of rifles.”
He sat down rather tired on the sofa, leaning forwards.
March recovered her presence of mind, and went into the kitchen.
There she heard the soft young voice musing:
"Well, to think I should come back and find it like this!" He
did not seem sad, not at all-only rather interestedly surprised.
“And what a difference in the place, eh?” he continued, looking
round the room.
"You see a difference, do you?” said Banford.
“Yes-don't I!”
His eyes were unnaturally clear and bright, though it was the
brightness of abundant health.
March was busy in the kitchen preparing another meal.
about seven o'clock. All the time, while she was active, she was at-
tending to the youth in the sitting-room, not so much listening to
what he said, as feeling the soft run of his voice. She primmed up
her mouth tighter and tighter, puckering it as if it was sewed, in her
a
>
It was


480
THE FOX
effort to keep her will uppermost. Yet her large eyes dilated and
glowed in spite of her, she lost herself. Rapidly and carelessly she
prepared the meal, cutting large chunks of bread and margarine-
for there was no butter. She racked her brain to think of something
else to put on the tray—she had only bread, margarine, and jam, and
the larder was bare. Unable to conjure anything up, she went into
the sitting-room with her tray.
She did not want to be noticed. Above all, she did not want him
to look at her. But when she came in, and was busy setting the table
just behind him, he pulled himself up from his sprawling, and
turned and looked over his shoulder. She became pale and wan.
The youth watched her as she bent over the table, looked at her
slim, well shapen legs, at the belted coat dropping around her thighs,
at the knot of dark hair, and his curiosity, vivid and widely alert,
was again arrested by her.
The lamp was shaded with a dark-green shade, so that the light
was thrown downwards, the upper half of the room was dim. His
face moved bright under the light, but March loomed shadowy in the
distance.
She turned round, but kept her eyes sideways, dropping and lift-
ing her dark lashes. Her mouth unpuckered, as she said to Banford:
“Will you pour out?”
Then she went into the kitchen again.
"Have your tea where you are, will you ?” said Banford to the
'
youth—'unless you'd rather come to the table.”
"Well,” said he, “I'm nice and comfortable here, aren't I? I
will have it here, if you don't mind.”
“There's nothing but bread and jam,” she said. And she put his
plate on a stool by him. She was very happy now, waiting on him.
For she loved company. And now she was no more afraid of him
than if he were her own younger brother. He was such a boy.
"Nellie,” she called. "I've poured you a cup out.”
March appeared in the doorway, took her cup, and sat down in a
corner, as far from the light as possible. She was very sensitive in
her knees. Having no skirts to cover them, and being forced to sit
with them boldly exposed, she suffered. She shrank and shrank, try-
ing not to be seen. And the youth, sprawling low on the couch,
glanced up at her, with long steady penetrating looks, till she was
'
)


D. H. LAWRENCE
481
>
almost ready to disappear. Yet she held her cup balanced, she drank
her tea, screwed up her mouth, and held her head averted. Her de-
sire to be invisible was so strong that it quite baffled the youth. He
felt he could not see her distinctly. She seemed like a shadow within
the shadow. And ever his eyes came back to her, searching, unre-
mitting, with unconscious fixed attention.
Meanwhile he was talking softly and smoothly to Banford, who
loved nothing so much as gossip, and who was full of perky interest,
like a bird. Also he ate largely and quickly and voraciously, so that
March had to cut more chunks of bread and margarine, for the
roughness of which Banford apologized.
“Oh, well,” said March, suddenly speaking, "if there's no butter
to put on it, it's no good trying to make dainty pieces.”
Again the youth watched her, and he laughed, with a sudden, quick
laugh, showing his teeth and wrinkling his nose.
"It isn't, is it,” he answered, in his soft, near voice.
It appeared he was Cornish by birth and upbringing. When he
was twelve years old he had come to Bailey Farm with his grand-
father, with whom he had never agreed very well. So he had run
away to Canada, and worked far away in the West. Now he was
here and that was the end of it.
He was very curious about the girls, to find out exactly what they
were doing. His questions were those of a farm youth; acute, prac-
tical, a little mocking. He was amused by their attitude to their
losses: for they were amusing on the score of heifers and fowls.
"Oh, well,” broke in March, "we don't believe in living for noth-
ing but work.”
“Don't you ?” he answered. And again the quick young laugh
came over his face. He kept his eyes steadily on the obscure woman
in the corner.
“But what will you do when you've used up all your capital ?” he
said.
"Oh, I don't know," answered March laconically.
“Hire ouro
selves out for landworkers, I suppose.”
I
“Yes, but there won't be any demand for women landworkers,
now the war's over,” said the youth.
“Oh, we'll see. We shall hold on a bit longer yet,” said March,
with a plangent, half-sad, half-ironical indifference.
a


482
THE FOX
а
66
“There wants a man about the place,” said the youth softly.
Banford burst out laughing.
“Take care what you say,” she interrupted. “We consider our-
selves quite efficient.”
"Oh,” came March's slow, plangent voice, “it isn't a case of effi-
ciency, I'm afraid. If you're going to do farming you must be at it
from morning till night, and you might as well be a beast yourself.”
“Yes, that's it,” said the youth. “You aren't willing to put your-
selves into it.”
"We aren't," said March, and we know it."
“We want some of our time for ourselves,” said Banford.
The youth threw himself back on the sofa, his face tight with
laughter, and laughed silently but thoroughly. The calm scorn of
the girls tickled him tremendously.
“Yes," he said, “but why did you begin then ?”
"Oh,” said March, "we had a better opinion of the nature of fowls
then, than we have now.”
“Of Nature altogether, I'm afraid,” said Banford. “Don't talk
to me about Nature."
Again the face of the youth tightened with delighted laughter.
“You haven't a very high opinion of fowls and cattle, have you?"
"Oh, no—quite a low one,” said March.
He laughed out.
"Neither fowls nor heifers,” said Banford, “nor goats nor the
weather."
The youth broke into a sharp yap of laughter, delighted. The
girls began to laugh too, March turning aside her face and wrinkling
her mouth in amusement.
"Oh, well,” said Banford, "we don't mind, do we Nellie?”
"No," said March, "we don't mind.”
The youth was very pleased. He had eaten and drunk his fill.
Banford began to question him. His name was Henry Grenfel-
no, he was not called Harry, always Henry. He continued to an-
swer with courteous simplicity, grave and charming. March, who
was not included, cast long, slow glances at him from her recess, as
he sat there on the sofa, his hands clasping his knees, his face under
the lamp bright and alert, turned to Banford. She became almost
peaceful, at last. He was identified with the fox-and he was here
>


D. H. LAWRENCE
483
in full presence. She need not go after him any more. There in the
shadow of her corner she gave herself up to a warm, relaxed peace, ,
almost like sleep, accepting the spell that was on her. But she
wished to remain hidden. She was only fully at peace whilst he
forgot her, talking with Banford. Hidden in the shadow of the
corner, she need not any more be divided in herself, trying to keep
up two planes of consciousness. She could at last lapse into the
odour of the fox.
For the youth, sitting before the fire in his uniform, sent a faint
but distinct odour into the room, indefinable, but something like a
wild creature. March no longer tried to reserve herself from it. She
was still and soft in her corner like a passive creature in its cave.
At last the talk dwindled. The youth relaxed his clasp of his
knees, pulled himself together a little, and looked around. Again he
became aware of the silent, half-invisible woman in the corner.
"Well,” he said, unwillingly, “I suppose I'd better be going, or
they'll be in bed at the Swan.”
"I'm afraid they're in bed anyhow,” said Banford. “They've all
got this influenza."
"Have they!” he exclaimed. And he pondered. "Well,” he con-
tinued, “I shall find a place somewhere.”
“I'd say you could stay here, only—” Banford began.
He turned and watched her, holding his head forward.
"What-?” he asked.
“Oh, well,” she said, "propriety, I suppose—” She was rather
confused.
“It wouldn't be improper, would it?” he said, gently surprised.
“Not as far as we're concerned,” said Banford.
“And not so far as I'm concerned,” he said, with grave naïveté.
"After all, it's my own home, in a way.”
Banford smiled at this.
"It's what the village will have to say,” she said.
There was a moment's blank pause.
“What do you say, Nellie ?” asked Banford.
"I don't mind,” said March, in her distinct tone.
“The village
doesn't matter to me, anyhow."
“No,” said the youth, quick and soft. “Why should it?-I mean,
what should they say?"


484
THE FOX
€
"Oh, well,” came March’s plangent, laconic voice, “they'll easily
find something to say. But it makes no difference, what they say.
We can look after ourselves.”
“Of course you can,” said the youth.
"Well then, stop if you like,” said Banford. “The spare room is
quite ready."
His face shone with pleasure.
“If you're quite sure it isn't troubling you too much,” he said, with
that soft courtesy which distinguished him.
“Oh, it's no trouble,” they both said.
He looked, smiling with delight, from one to another.
“It's awfully nice not to have to turn out again, isn't it?” he said
gratefully.
“I suppose it is,” said Banford.
March disappeared to attend to the room. Banford was as pleased
and thoughtful as if she had her own young brother home from
France. It gave her just the same kind of gratification to attend on
him, to get out the bath for him, and everything. Her natural
warmth and kindliness had now an outlet. And the youth luxuri-
ated in her sisterly attention. But it puzzled him slightly to know
that March was silently working for him too. She was so curiously
silent and obliterated. It seemed to him he had not really seen her.
He felt he should not know her if he met her in the road.
That night March dreamed vividly. She dreamed she heard a a
singing outside, which she could not understand, a singing that
roamed round the house, in the fields and in the darkness. It moved
her so, that she felt she must weep. She went out, and suddenly she
knew it was the fox singing. He was very yellow and bright, like
corn. She went nearer to him, but he ran away and ceased singing.
He seemed near, and she wanted to touch him. She stretched out
her hand, but suddenly he bit her wrist, and at the same instant, as
she drew back, the fox, turning round to bound away, whisked his
brush across her face, and it seemed his brush was on fire, for it seared
and burnt her mouth with a great pain. She awoke with the pain
of it, and lay trembling as if she were really seared.
In the morning, however, she only remembered it as a distant
memory. She arose and was busy preparing the house and attending
to the fowls. Banford flew into the village on her bicycle, to try
.


D. H. LAWRENCE
485
and buy food. She was a hospitable soul. But alas in the year
1918 there was not much food to buy. The youth came downstairs
in his shirt-sleeves. He was young and fresh, but he walked with
his head thrust forward, so that his shoulders seemed raised and
rounded, as if he had a slight curvature of the spine. It must have
been only a manner of bearing himself, for he was young and vigor-
ous. He washed himself and went outside, whilst the women were
preparing breakfast.
He saw everything, and examined everything. His curiosity was
quick and insatiable. He compared the state of things with that
which he remembered before, and cast over in his mind the effect of
the changes. He watched the fowls and the ducks, to see their con-
dition, he noticed the flight of wood-pigeons overhead: they were
very numerous; he saw the few apples high up, which March had not
been able to reach; he remarked that they had borrowed a draw-
pump, presumably to empty the big soft-water cistern which was on
the north side of the house.
“It's a funny, dilapidated old place,” he said to the girls, as he sat
at breakfast.
His eyes were wise and childish, with thinking about things. He
did not say much, but ate largely. March kept her face averted.
She, too, in the early morning, could not be aware of him, though
something about the glint of his khaki reminded her of the brilliance
of her dream-fox.
During the day the girls went about their business. In the morn-
ing, he attended to the guns, shot a rabbit and a wild duck that was
flying high, towards the wood. That was a great addition to the
empty larder. The girls felt that already he had earned his keep.
He said nothing about leaving, however. In the afternoon he went
to the village. He came back at tea-time. He had the same alert,
forward-reaching look on his roundish face. He hung his hat on a
peg with a little swinging gesture. He was thinking about some-
thing
"Well,” he said, as he sat at table. “What am I going to do?”
“How do you mean—what are you going to do?” said Banford.
“Where am I going to find a place in the village, to stay?” he said.
"I don't know," said Banford. "Where do you think of stay-
ing?”
a
a


486
THE FOX
"Well—” he hesitated—“At the Swan they've got this Flu, and
at the Plough and Harrow they've got the soldiers who are collect-
ing the hay for the army: besides in the private houses, there's ten
men and a corporal altogether billeted in the village, they tell me.
I'm not sure where I could get a bed.”
He left the matter to them. He was rather calm about it. March
sat with her elbows on the table, her two hands supporting her chin,
looking at him unconsciously. Suddenly he lifted his clouded blue
eyes, and unthinking looked straight into March's eyes. He was
startled as well as she. He too recoiled a little. March felt the
same sly, taunting, knowing spark leap out of his eyes as he turned
his head aside, and fall into her soul, as it had fallen from the dark
eyes of the fox. She pursed her mouth as if in pain, as if asleep too.
“Well, I don't know—” Banford was saying. She seemed reluc-
tant, as if she were afraid of being imposed upon. She looked at
March. But, with her weak, troubled sight, she only saw the usual
semi-abstraction on her friend's face. "Why don't you speak, Nel-
lie?" she said.
But March was wide-eyed and silent, and the youth, as if fasci-
nated, was watching her without moving his eyes.
“Go on-answer something,” said Banford. And March turned
her head slightly aside, as if coming to consciousness, or trying to
come to consciousness.
"What do you expect me to say ?” she asked automatically.
"Say what you think,” said Banford.
"It's all the same to me,” said March.
And again there was silence. A pointed light seemed to be on the
boy's eyes, penetrating like a needle.
"So it is to me,” said Banford. "You can stop on here if you
like.”
A smile like a cunning little flame came over his face, suddenly
and involuntarily. He dropped his head quickly to hide it, and re-
mained with his head dropped, his face hidden.
“You can stop on here if you like. You can please yourself, Hen-
ry,” Banford concluded.
Still he did not reply, but remained with his head dropped. Then
he lifted his face. It was bright with a curious light, as if exultant,
and his eyes were strangely clear as he watched March. She turned
>


D. H. LAWRENCE
487
lucid gaze
>
a
her face aside, her mouth suffering as if wounded, and her conscious-
ness dim.
Banford became a little puzzled. She watched the steady, pel-
of the youth's eyes, as he looked at March, with the invis-
ible smile gleaming on his face. She did not know how he was smil-
ing, for no feature moved. It seemed only in the gleam, almost the
glitter of the fine hairs on his cheeks. Then he looked with quite a
changed look, at Banford.
"I'm sure,” he said in his soft, courteous voice, "you're awfully
good. You're too good. You don't want to be bothered with me,
I'm sure."
“Cut a bit of bread, Nellie,” said Banford uneasily; adding: “It's
no bother, if you like to stay. It's like having my own brother here
for a few days. He's a boy like you are."
“That's awfully kind of you,” the lad repeated. “I should like to
I
stay, ever so much, if you're sure I'm not a trouble to you.”
"No, of course you're no trouble. I tell you, it's a pleasure to
have somebody in the house besides ourselves,” said warm-hearted
Banford.
“But Miss March ?” he said in his soft voice, looking at her.
“Oh, it's quite all right as far as I'm concerned,” said March
vaguely.
His face beamed, and he almost rubbed his hands with pleasure.
“Well then,” he said, “I should love it, if you'd let me pay my
board and help with the work.”
“You've no need to talk about board,” said Banford.
One or two days went by, and the youth stayed on at the farm.
Banford was quite charmed by him. He was so soft and courteous
in speech, not wanting to say much himself, preferring to hear what
she had to say, and to laugh in his quick, half-mocking way. He
helped readily with the work—but not too much. He loved to be
out alone with the gun in his hands, to watch, to see.
For his sharp-
eyed, impersonal curiosity was insatiable, and he was most free when
he was quite alone, half-hidden, watching.
Particularly he watched March. She was a strange character to
him. Her figure, like a graceful young man's, piqued him. Her
dark eyes made something rise in his soul, with a curious, elate ex-
citement, when he looked into them, an excitement he was afraid to


488
THE FOX
let be seen, it was so keen and secret. And then her odd, shrewd
speech made him laugh outright. He felt he must go further, he was
inevitably impelled. But he put away the thought of her, and went
off towards the wood's edge with the gun.
The dusk was falling as he came home, and with the dusk, a fine,
late November rain. He saw the fire-light leaping in the window
of the sitting-room, a leaping light in the little cluster of the dark
buildings. And he thought to himself, it would be a good thing to
have this place for his own. And then the thought entered him
shrewdly: why not marry March? He stood still in the middle of
the field for some moments, the dead rabbit hanging still in his hand,
arrested by this thought. His mind waited in amazement—it seem-
ed to calculate—and then he smiled curiously to himself in acquies-
cence. Why not? Why not indeed? It was a good idea. What
if it was rather ridiculous? What did it matter? What if she was
older than he? It didn't matter. When he thought of her dark,
startled, vulnerable eyes he smiled subtly to himself. He was older
than she, really. He was master of her.
He scarcely admitted his intention even to himself. He kept it
as a secret even from himself. It was all too uncertain as yet. He
would have to see how things went. Yes, he would have to see how
things went. If he wasn't careful, she would just simply mock at
the idea. He knew, sly and subtle as he was, that if he went to her
plainly and said: “Miss March, I love you and want you to marry
me,” her inevitable answer would be: “Get out.
I don't want any
of that tomfoolery.". This was her attitude to men and their “tom-
foolery.” If he was not careful, she would turn round on him with
her savage, sardonic ridicule, and dismiss him from the farm and
from her own mind, for ever. He would have to go gently. He
would have to catch her as you catch a deer or a woodcock when you
go out shooting. It's no good walking out into the forest and saying
to the deer: “Please fall to my gun.” No, it is a slow, subtle battle.
When you really go out to get a deer, you gather yourself together,
you coil yourself inside yourself, and you advance secretly, before
dawn, into the mountains. It is not so much what you do, when you
go out hunting, as how you feel. You have to be subtle and cun-
ning and absolutely fatally ready. It becomes like a fate. Your
own fate overtakes and determines the fate of the deer you are hunt-
.
>)


D. H. LAWRENCE
489
any wind of
a
ing. First of all, even before you come in sight of your quarry,
there
is a strange battle, like mesmerism. Your own soul, as a hunter, has
gone out to fasten on the soul of the deer, even before you see any
deer. And the soul of the deer fights to escape. Even before the
deer has
you, it is so. It is a subtle, profound battle of
wills, which takes place in the invisible. And it is a battle never fin-
ished till your bullet goes home. When you are really worked up to
the true pitch, and you come at last into range, you don't then aim as
you do when you are firing at a bottle. It is your own will which
carries the bullet into the heart of your quarry. The bullet's flight
home is a sheer projection of your own fate into the fate of the deer.
a
It happens like a supreme wish, a supreme act of volition, not as a
dodge of cleverness.
He was a huntsman in spirit, not a farmer, and not a soldier stuck
in a regiment. And it was as a young hunter, that he wanted to
bring down March as his quarry, to make her his wife. So he gath-
ered himself subtly together, seemed to withdraw into a kind of in-
visibility. He was not quite sure how he would go on. And March
was suspicious as a hare. So he remained in appearance just the nice,
odd stranger-youth, staying for a fortnight on the place.
He had been sawing logs for the fire, in the afternoon. Darkness
came very early. It was still a cold, raw mist. It was getting al-
most too dark to see. A pile of short sawed logs lay beside the
trestle. March came to carry them indoors, or into the shed, as he
was busy sawing the last log. He was working in his shirt-sleeves,
and did not notice her approach; she came unwillingly, as if shy.
He saw her stooping to the bright-ended logs, and he stopped saw-
ing. A fire like lightning flew down his legs in the nerves.
“March?” he said, in his quiet young voice.
She looked up from the logs as she was piling.
“Yes!” she said.
He looked down on her in the dusk. He could see her not too dis-
tinctly.
“I wanted to ask you something,” he said.
“Did you? What was it ?” she said. Already the fright was in
her voice. But she was too much mistress of herself.
“Why—” his voice seemed to draw out soft and subtle; it pene-
trated her nerves—"why, what do you think it is?”


490
THE FOX
She stood up, placed her hands on her hips, and stood looking at
him transfixed, without answering. Again he burned with a sud-
den power.
"Well,” he said and his voice was so soft it seemed rather like a
subtle touch, like the merest touch of a cat's paw, a feeling rather
than a sound. "Well—I wanted to ask you to marry me.'
March felt rather than heard him. She was trying in vain to turn
aside her face. A great relaxation seemed to have come over her.
She stood silent, her head slightly on one side. He seemed to be
bending towards her, invisibly smiling. It seemed to her fine sparks
came out of him.
Then very suddenly, she said:
“Don't try any
of your tomfoolery on me.
A quiver went over his nerves. He had missed. He waited a
moment to collect himself again. Then he said, putting all the
strange softness into his voice, as if he were imperceptibly stroking
her:
“Why, it's not tomfoolery. It's not tomfoolery. I mean it. I
"
I
mean it. What makes you disbelieve me?” '
He sounded hurt. And his voice had such a curious power over
her; making her feel loose and relaxed. She struggled somewhere
for her own power. She felt for a moment that she was lost-lost-
lost. The word seemed to rock in her as if she were dying. Sudden-
ly again she spoke.
“You don't know what you are talking about,” she said, in a brief
and transient stroke of scorn. “What nonsense! I'm old enough
to be your mother."
“Yes I do know what I'm talking about. Yes I do,” he persisted
softly, as if he were producing his voice in her blood. "I know
quite well what I'm talking about. You're not old enough to be my
mother. That isn't true. And what does it matter even if it was.
You can marry me whatever age we are. What is age to me? And
what is age to you! Age is nothing.”
A swoon went over her as he concluded. He spoke rapidly-in
the rapid Cornish fashion-and his voice seemed to sound in her
somewhere where she was helpless against it. "Age is nothing!”
The soft, heavy insistence of it made her sway dimly out there in the
darkness. She could not answer.


D. H. LAWRENCE
491
А
great exultance leaped like fire over his limbs. He felt he had
won.
а
“I want to marry you, you see. Why shouldn't I?” he proceed-
ed, soft and rapid. He waited for her to answer. In the dusk he
saw her almost phosphorescent. Her eyelids were dropped, her face
half-averted and unconscious. She seemed to be in his power. But
he waited, watchful. He dared not yet touch her.
"Say then," he said. “Say then you'll marry me. Say—say?"
He was softly insistent.
"What?she asked, faint, from a distance, like one in pain. His
voice was now unthinkably near and soft. He drew very near to her.
“Say yes.”
“Oh, I can't,” she wailed helplessly, half articulate, as if semi-
conscious, and as if in pain, like one who dies. “How can I ?”
"You can,” he said softly, laying his hand gently on her shoulder
as she stood with her head averted and dropped, dazed. “You can.
Yes, you can. What makes you say you can't? You can.
.
You
can." And with awful softness he bent forward and just touched
her neck with his mouth and his chin.
“Don't!" she cried, with a faint mad cry like hysteria, starting
away and facing round on him. "What do you mean?” But she
had no breath to speak with. It was as if she were killed.
“I mean what I say,” he persisted softly and cruelly. "I want
you to marry me. I want you to marry me.
You know that, now,
don't you? You know that, now?
You know that, now? Don't you? Don't you?”
?
“What?'' she said.
“Know," he replied.
“Yes,” she said. “I know you say so.”
“And
you
know I mean it, don't you?”
"I know you say so."
"You believe me?'' he said.
She was silent for some time. Then she pursed her lips.
"I don't know what I believe,” she said.
“Are you out there?" came Banford's voice, calling from the
house.
“Yes, we're bringing in the logs,” he answered.
“I thought you'd gone lost,” said Banford disconsolately. "Hur-
ry up, do, and come and let's have tea. The kettle's boiling."
1
>


492
BLOOM
He stooped at once, to take an armful of little logs and carry them
into the kitchen, where they were piled in a corner. March also
helped, filling her arms and carrying the logs on her breast as if they
were some heavy child. The night had fallen cold.
To be continued
BLOOM
BY ALFRED KREYMBORG
When flowers thrust their heads above the ground
in showers pale as raindrops, and as round,
who would suspect that such, before they're gone,
could hold the sun?
So fine a pressure from above can bring
so frail a thing to push its way aloft?
-
through clay, a woman might consider cloth
for constant stitching?
Right straight down and right straight up again,
through holes so close, no manly eye can see
the bloom come out of needles—or can she
be using rain?
And now that she still labours in the gloom,
her room just lighted by the sun turned moon-
need any man be told what flowers are, ,
that hold a star?
a


A STUDY. BY BEN BENN





>
A STUDY. BY BEN BENN





THE COUNTRY OF COCKAYNE
BY CUTHBERT WRIGHT
Tmi
HE other night I had occasion to pass the evening on the sum-
mit of the Butte Montmartre. It had been a long balmy Sep-
tember Sunday, and all that afternoon I had wandered along the
Seine from Epinay to St Denis through a landscape which, despite
the factories smoking on the horizon of the working-suburb, was as
expressive, in its calm light, its monotonous sweetness, of a certain
thing in the life and literature of France as an old song by Béranger.
It was not the real countryside, of course, but it was something more
poignant, and better, the countryside a little stained by the tormented
proximity of the great town, like a nymph desired by a giant. For
centuries, the Seine had uncoiled its silvery course along the flat car-
pet of woods and fields; for centuries, the same sort of people had
eaten and drunk with placid frivolity on the grass, and from this ex-
istence and this landscape had sprung all a literature of songs and
books. In a word, the sentiment evoked by the prospect was con-
servative and untroubling. It developed a mood which accounts for
much excellent conventional poetry and for an optimistic attitude
towards existence. In such hypnotic surroundings, basking in the
smile of the good brown earth, it was easy to feel that art and life
should have the harmonious inevitability of an old chanson or a "ro-
man bien fait.” There was something in the blue air, in the lazi-
ness of the steel-blue stream as it slid past, in the flight of butterflies
over “the happy autumn fields” which invited the soul to avoid re-
volt. Then, suddenly, one looked up and saw surge on the horizon
the Mount of the Martyrs, clothed with dim houses, and the strong
rays of the sunset striking the snowy domes of the Sacred Heart.
By the time I reached the famous faubourg it was already night.
I mounted the hill in the direction of the great church, and per-
ceived, really for the first time, a third Montmartre, distinct from
that which appears in visionary epitome on the sky-line, or that pre-
sided over by the enraged provincials of the Place Constantin Pec-
quet. One was overwhelmed by its disunity, its amazing contrasts,
its air of positively happy absurdity. From every point of view,
,


494
THE COUNTRY OF COCKAYNE
a
down to the very formation of the soil, the Free Commune was def-
,
initely insane. The long balmy day had ended in an evening, the
purity of whose air, experienced at that height, was sharpened by
the intimation of winter. In all directions, through the pure violet
twilight, the little tortuous streets, the crazy alleys, marvels of dim
etching, admirable in their economy of effect, ran off and expired at
the end of actual precipices beyond which were nothing but grey
ocean-gulfs, filled with drowning lights. One skirted, by the light
of an ancient lamp-post, a long blank wall, enclosing moaning trees
and a deserted garden, and suddenly one would be brought up sharp
against a great vulgar caravanserai, seven stories high, blazing with
electricity. Beyond that, would be a country lane with a pair of
bars, and then a stretch of vague green like a rural churchyard. And
towering over all were the gargoyles and domes of the Sacré Coeur.
One was glad, intensely glad in that moment, that no Gallic corre-
spondent of Mr Ralph Adams Cram (and they do not lack here)
had seen fit to provide a great basilica in gimcrack Gothic for the
Sacred Mount. Nothing could be more happily characteristic of
our time than the Sacré Coeur. It is inappropriate and overpower-
ing; it is preposterous and superb; viewed close at hand it invites ex-
asperation, but seen with the eyes of contemplation at sunset it is
wrapped with all the unearthly colours of a dream.
These random reflections express better, perhaps, the spirit of a
recent novel by M Salmon than would a conventional review. It pains
the imagination to conceive a professional notice of La Négresse du
Sacré Coeur. I remember such a notice which appeared recently in
the London Times. The reviewer noted that La Négresse repre-
sented a futurist, one might even say, a dadaist tendency in the art
of the novel. In any case, it was a regrettable tendency, not to be
condoned by the representative of a nation which has produced the
great realist tradition beginning with Richardson and flowering to
its apotheosis in the art of Mr Hugh Walpole. The upshot of it all
was that the author would know and write better when he was a
little older.
It is not surprising that the English reviewer was puzzled by this
novel, or that he could find no better word than “futurist” to express
its indefinable quality. Had literary critics existed in the days of
Rabelais they might have been similarly put out by reading Panta-
gruel and Gargantua. As it is, they have done their best ever since.
a
a


CUTHBERT WRIGHT
495
Mr Saintsbury mentions at least fifteen interpretations of the rev-
erend Curate of Meudon, and there is more than a touch of Rabelais
a
in the mingled anarchy and preciousness of M Salmon's pages. It
certainly represents a new tendency and perhaps a landmark in the
art of the novel, if not indeed a form of dissolution of that art.
The book begins in a pretentious "boîte de nuit,” rue Fromentin,
former studio of “the delicate and detestable Aubrey Beardsley,"
where the author, indulging an access of "spleen canaille,” is drink-
ing in company of the patron and Honoré Gringolle, author of The
Picturesque, Assassin of the Race, and also president of a League for
the improvement, that is, the disappearance, of old Montmartre in
the name of hygiene. A cabaret-artist executes a song: L'enfant qui
traverse la plaine. It is also the title of the chapter. There is no
connexion. A quadroon girl comes out and dances. In the course
of the story, she appears only three times, yet it is she who supplies
the title of the book. Again there is no connexion. It is all very
like life. Later on, we meet a Catholic poet, penniless and almost
starving, but with spotless linen and a monocle. On the wall of his
a
chamber, he has written by way of perpetual memento: Never go to
Vaugirard! We never find out why. There are a couple of comic
old crones and a marvelous child, a little girl who throws herself
from a cliff for love of a truqueur. A German deserter at the risk of
his life descends and rescues the dead body; mounting he lifts into
the light like a sacrifice the child's corpse, and kissing the little
blood-stained fist, he murmurs: “Die Verwandlungen der Venus!”
At the end of it all, Florimond, one of the vague young men who ap-
pear fitfully throughout the story, wanders discouraged before the
effigy of M de la Barre, tortured by the priests for blaspheming the
Host in which, of course, he profoundly believed. A lost dog fol-
lows him.
a
a
• Do you
you wish to be my dog?' demanded Florimond. 'My house is
honest; sometimes one weeps there, but at least one is safe from the
shame which your old masters called the dangerous life.' And con-
templating the statue he adds: 'So the unreal becomes the eternal,
and we know at last that there is only one reality, nourishing, bene-
ficent, everlasting,—the absurd!'”
Nothing could be more unlike the ordinary French book, the tra-


496
THE COUNTRY OF COCKAYNE
ditional French mind, the mind, say, of Voltaire or of Parny, than
the book and mind of M Salmon. It is the difference between the
lucid landscape above Epinay and the tortured and delicious vistas
of the Butte. The irrelevance of the situations; the almost entire
absence of sequence, climax, all the tricks of profession; the way
in
which the characters exchange long enigmatic conversations and
then pass each other in the sumptuous twilight of M Salmon's prose
to be lost in the night; the very titles of the chapters (Flora and
Folklore of Montmartre in 1907–Paris seen from the Sacré Coeur
-Today at Three o'Clock Abolition of Slavery) indicate a ten-
dency to mystification, exhibited in the elaborate fooleries of M
Picabia and Co., but it is, so far, the only book of the school which
says anything, and it says an enormous amount. The author's oc-
casional preciosity might be considered irritating in a novel less
deliberately fantastic. Thus he calls a music-hall song “the Mar-
seillaise of indigent sentimentality," and can write: “They who
might have enlivened this house of the dead were dead themselves,
or long since departed to the zones of forgetfulness of which Time
guards the keys in his cincture of mist.” But he writes far more
often sentences like these:
“They were 'civilised'; the simple Repast of love was impossible
for them. For them, it was a diversion, a 'fête,' as it is everywhere
the shade of the cross extends like Ash Wednesday on the morrow
of Carnival ... The taste of ashes was in their mouths. And
there is in ashes, even when they are white and cold, all the devour-
ing bitterness of fire without the joyous surprise of the flame
Mumu, naked on the groaning bed, was similar to one of those
cowardly poets who doze on the threshold of the Vision, still seek-
ing lazily a cadence worthy of it.”
These translations torn from their context interpret most indiffer-
ently the magnificent precision of this style with its grave over-
tones. By dint of building up his conception out of every sort of
fantastic and irrelevant material, Catholic poets wearing monocles
and dead with cold, verse-writing employes, old women worthy of
a French Dickens, delicious and pathetic street-waifs, the author
achieves moments when, suddenly, the clouds of conscious obscurity
open and the pathos and terror of reality shine nakedly through the


CUTHBERT WRIGHT
497
fabric of absurdity like the tears of Pierrot through the grimace and
grease-paint. Only a step divides the ridiculous from the sublime
in this novel, and the second gains rather than loses by the presence
of the first.
No book has ever so expressed Montmartre. The author has too,
in his fashion, expressed the pathos of the young life of Paris in
1921, of the generation which worshipped Carpentier not otherwise
than the Athenians did the athletes of Pindar, of the artists and
writers who may have or have not known the war, but who are pay-
ing for it now in their cruel vitality for ever unquenched and unsatis-
fied, their incapacity for ideas, their lust for sensation, their horror
of work, even the work which men once adored. They "burn always
with that hard gem-like flame,” they maintain, in some sort, that
ecstasy, but it is maintained without permanence, perhaps at in-
calculable cost. M Salmon must have experienced a poignant pleas-
ure in writing this novel. It could have only been written by a
young man and a young man of our time. It has the sense of the
present.


THE FALL F SOISSONS
BY CLARKSON CRANE
IT
was in May 1918, some hours before the Germans entered Sois-
sons, and two days after they had begun their drive, on a black
midnight, all along the line. The ambulance section, that for a
month had been quartered near a dishevelled country-house called
the Château de la Roche, was preparing to retreat, whenever orders
should come from the Médecin Divisionnaire. They had packed the
"garage” into the Fiat, and fastened, behind, the rolling kitchen
with yellow canvas neatly strapped; and now they were waiting, the
Fords all lined up, and listening with gloomy thoughts to the bump-
ing thunder of the barrage. When Robert Rudd went by from Se-
lens, carrying a wounded man in his car, the lieutenant told him to
hurry back as soon as possible so that the remaining baggage might
be placed in his Ford.
He nodded, his pink face very serious, and faced his car. But
just then he thought of something, and went to the kitchen standing
on the road. The following days, he felt, would be very difficult,
and one must be certain that one's system was thoroughly fortified.
It might be wise to eat a slice of bread with sugar spread over it, or
perhaps, since he was putting on flesh, a bit of meat. He lifted the
canvas and peered in thoughtfully, hoping that the mess sergeant
would not come, and for a moment could see nothing. But soon he
made out a white platter solitary in the shadow, and extended an
arm. It contained meat; that was all right-cold meat, rather damp.
Well, how fortunate! When he extracted a slice, he noticed that it
was raw, but that was all right too; for raw meat contained really
an astonishing supply of calories and was easy to digest. Very good
He had once known a man in San Francisco who ate raw
meat.
As he walked towards his car, nibbling vaguely, Tommy ex-
claimed:
“My God, Ruddles, what are you eating ?”
He looked up suddenly, his blue eyes astonished, and murmured:
"It's very good, really very good.” Then he climbed into his car, the
for one.


CLARKSON CRANE
499
meat spread on one ruddy palm, and ticked his helmet against the
black bar that sustained the top.
It occurred to him, however, that he felt thirsty, and so he emerged
once more, very carefully, and unlocking the tool-case on the side se-
lected a bottle of Bénédictine and refreshed himself. One had to be
careful of one's health during these active periods.
When he was under way, driving towards Vic-sur-Aisne, he could
finally settle down and feel himself at ease, warmer, even too warm
on this golden, early summer day, and fairly content. He had been
compelled to hurry so that morning; for the call had come even be-
fore he was awake, and the drivers of the other cars, while he dressed
putteringly, had exhorted him to “show some speed.”
It was always very difficult for Robert to launch himself, because
there were so many necessary articles that he had to assemble and
transport, and frequently three trips were required between the door
of the post and the car. There was his blanket roll, amazingly bul-
bous, to be installed between the hood and the fender; there were his
books, writing materials, toilet set-all needing to be stored away.
And besides, he had a cylindrical gasoline stove called a pipe, the in-
gredients for chocolate, a silver goblet that he had found in a ruined
château; boxes of cigarettes and a tin of tobacco; a bottle of Béné-
dictine and one of Dubonnet; jars of confiture, a can of butter, pack-
ages of wafers; two packs of cards for the solitaire he enjoyed; two
overcoats, a gas-mask, and a walking stick.
He felt, however, as he crossed the Aisne, that he had moved very
rapidly. The main road to Soissons, sombre between two ranks of
trees, was sonorous with the drumming of motors; and Robert had
to steer carefully in order to insert his car among the grinding lorries.
Coming towards him along the edge of the road civilians walked
patiently, carrying bundles and drawing behind them high heaped
carts. Here and there on the roadside infantry waited, their rifles
stacked; sometimes a grey touring car, with neat, calm officers in the
tonneau, slid and zigzagged through the traffic, horn rasping angri-
ly; and occasionally a tank wallowed in the tumult.
When he was standing beside his car near the hospital, one of the
stretcher-bearers peered up from the handles of the litter, his blue
cap on the back of his head, and exclaimed:
"C'est la fin! Pauv' France!"
Robert decided, as he drove again towards the main road, that a


500
THE FALL OF SOISSONS
stimulant might be agreeable; and so he descended and drank once
more of the Bénédictine. The label of the Dubonnet caught his eye,
and it seemed quite natural at the moment that he should go on into
Soissons for a light luncheon—something, for example, at the Hôtel
de la Croix Rouge. One never knew when one would eat again.
And in that case an apéritif would be essential. Placing his helmet
on the running board and smoothing his red hair, he stood with his
head thrown back, swallowing thoughtfully, and then he entered the
car, still holding the bottle, his head covered once more, his blue eyes
intent and his face pink.
The grey streets of Soissons were flecked with the leavings of hur-
ried civilians. Driving under the porte cochère into the hotel court,
Robert emerged carefully from behind the wheel, stepping down
backward on to the ground, and peered about for a while at the closed
door and the walls. Then he knocked lightly.
An old woman whom he had not seen before, standing beyond his
car with a basket on her arm, cried to him:
a
“Parti-tout le monde parti-les Boches!”
He ventured:
“Déjeuner?” his pale eyes questioning, and when the woman
shouted again: “Parti! Parti!” he clambered into the seat, and wait-
ed for a while until the undulation of the vaguely mobile roofs di-
minished.
It was difficult to back from the court-yard into the stream of
traffic, especially when strangely excited Frenchmen waved their
arms at him and shouted. Yet he managed, by leaning well out over
the side and moving slowly, to perceive and occupy an open space,
with only an unimportant scraping of his tool-box against a stone
Voices and horns were so emphatic around him that he
stalled his motor; but an emotional gendarme turned the crank for
him, and he advanced with a jerk, feeling that these French people
were too demonstrative.
“Merci,” he said, leaning politely forward; and the man, red-
faced under his helmet, bawled: “Allez, allez, nom de Dieu!"
Really!
He went on through the murmuring street, feeling hungry, and
soon he remembered a shop where one could buy pastry, made in se-
cret and sold dearly. A month before, after thoughtful research, he
had found the place. It was somewhere, he knew, not far away, up
corner.


CLARKSON CRANE
501
one of those dim streets whose walls moved mysteriously, around a
corner, and then to the left three or four doors. Bumping along, he
became aware of boys around him running frantically, and once of a
woman extremely dishevelled on a door-step; and then he had to
turn sharply to the left to evade a hillock of bricks and mortar that
sloped on to the cobbles. A moment later something thundered not
far away.
a
Before the shop he drew up near the curb and climbed out holding
his stick. The room, when he entered, was very sombre and un-
familiar, with a chair overturned, and white bundles on the floor; but
soon he saw the woman behind the counter and felt better. She was
thin and dressed in black, with hair that was tight and smooth and a
worried face. Pausing, with a cardboard box in her hand, she looked
up and said:
“Ah la la, fa tape!”
Robert beamed and swayed.
“Bon jouah, Madame!”
A battery of seventy-fives went by over the cobble stones. Robert
waited. She said:
"Les Boches arrivent."
He giggled and raised his head:
“Oui, oui, les Boches."
Putting the box on the counter, she leaned forward and cried
loudly:
“Venir-Boches-venir-Jermains!!”
Over there on the shelf behind the door Robert felt certain that
he saw a pie, all round and beautiful; and grasping the counter, he
smiled confidentially and whispered:
“Madame-avez-vous-la-patisserie? Ung petit purr, seule-
ment.”
She straightened up:
“Non, non! Pensez-vous! Allez-vous-en!!”
Leaning on his stick and peering towards the doorway that led
into another room, Robert pointed with a florid hand and asked:
“Là-n'est-ce pas, là, Madame?”
She turned, saw, exclaimed, futtered back, and tossing the pastry
on to the counter, said:
“Prenez, prenez.!”
Glowing like a great, red sun, Robert muttered:


502
THE FALL OF SOISSONS
а
“Combien-dois?"
After he had, very slowly, spread coins on the wood, he bowed,
said: “Merci, Madamemje vous remercie beaucoup. Bon jouah.”
And, holding the pie under one arm, walked towards the street, head
slightly forward, stick tapping repeatedly on the floor.
Most abnormally, his car, when it started, went backward instead
of forward, and there was a crash and shouting behind. But Robert
soon found the proper pedal, and moved in the right direction,
bending crimson with laughter over the wheel. What a ridiculous
thing to do!
After turning a few curves, he saw the sign over the door of a café
he remembered, and wondered if it would not be wise to get some-
thing to steady his nerves. He must not be nervous at this time. As
he stopped his car, a tall, grey geyser crashed upward at the street's
end, spread like a fog, and then subsided, followed by manifold
tinkling of glass. Well! They must be bombarding the town!
The café when he entered, seemed empty, but soon he saw the
girl, broad and ponderous, wearing a green hat. She was bending
.
over a wheel barrow on which an open trunk disgorged clothes.
“Bon jouah, Mademoiselle!” he said, sitting down before a table
and tapping with his cane on the floor.
She looked up, came towards him grinning, and waving a thick
hand before her face, shouted:
“Pas bons-les Boches!!"
Robert giggled, straightened up, and demanded triumphantly:
“Avez-vous cognac?”
When he had finished his second glass, he gazed up at her stand-
ing there stolid and blue-eyed, and suggested:
“Baisez-moi, Mademoiselle!!”
“Eh là!” she answered, and drew back.
He arose unsteadily, removed the bottle carefully from her hand,
and, after refilling his glass, pulled her on to his knees.
“Très jolie,” he said, chortling; and when he had finished the
cognac, kissed her on the mouth. She leaned towards him, her skirt
climbing gradually upward.
Just then a shell exploded nearby and stones rattled. She tried to
move away, but Robert held her, kissed her once more, and then
stood up.


CLARKSON CRANE
503
a
“Bon jouah, Mademoiselle,” he said, walking towards the door.
The air was prickly with burnt powder.
As he reëntered the flow of traffic, he observed arms waving
towards him and heard shouts, but he felt that the excitement of
these people was excusable now because of the offensive, and so he
only nodded pleasantly in return. For a long time he drove on,
watching the tail-board of the truck before him: it moved
away
and
then came closer, and then moved away again. At last he deter-
mined to pass by and take a place farther along in the convoy. He
pumped vigorously on his claxon and turned to the left.
He could discern now the emblem on the truck's side, a giraffe,
painted in yellow and blue. Or was it a rooster? Anyway, it was
so lifelike and so amusing that he could not help laughing. Then he
saw, coming towards him, a lean touring car, with two officers half-
rising in the tonneau. He heard a blare of horns and saw hands wav-
ing, and he slowed down and turned easily into his former place.
There was no cause for excitement.
Under the high trees that made the road a rumbling tunnel, he
felt something go into his eye. It remained there for all his blinking,
sometimes soft and sometimes prickly, and was really most annoy-
ing. He dug for a while with his left fist, and then it occurred to
him that it was a piss-ant in his eye, and that they were very difficult
to be rid of. Most extraordinary! Or perhaps even there were two
piss-ants, who were being amorous.
He heard all around him a light rattling, and was conscious of in-
fantrymen in clusters discharging their rifles upward. Something
brummed over his head. How silly! Shooting at piss-ants! And
he did not bother to look up again until he was crossing the bridge at
Vic-sur-Aisne. His eye was watering.
For a moment, as he penetrated the village, he thought that it
might be pleasant to chat with the American girls who kept the
Foyer du Soldat in the château grounds, but there were so many sol-
diers in the square, and the world wavered so, that he decided to con-
tinue. And then there were the piss-ants. After a shimmering pe-
riod, he found the section just as he had left it, lined up on the side
of the road. He drew up before the lieutenant who was standing
with the sergeant near the touring car, and climbed out slowly, point-
ing at his eye and explaining about the two indecent piss-ants. He


504
THE FALL OF SOISSONS
a
>
heard voices all about, and suddenly found that he was lying face
downward. He arose, laughing sympathetically, and brushed off his
uniform, and then turned back to his car, and began to climb in. But
his shoe kept slipping from the running board. Soon he felt a hand
under his arm and heard the sergeant's voice:
"My God, buck up, Ruddles!”
,
He turned indignantly and exclaimed: “My dear sergeant!
!"
Then he was in his seat, touching the wheel, and he noticed the
lieutenant's face, rather angry, looking at him. He chuckled. Why,
the idea!
Loud thumps came from behind, and his car trembled: somebody
was putting something in. He remembered the pie and groped on the
cushion, but found that he had been sitting in it. He rocked with
laughter. It felt so squashy. Then voices came strangely:
"Ruddles, for Heaven's sake-going to move—front crumbling
-Boches headed for Paris-fighting-outskirts—Soissons.”
—
After a while he was driving forwards once more, going back
down the hill towards Vic-sur-Aisne. Another ambulance before
him threw dust into his face, and the road seemed to writhe occa-
sionally. These retreats were very amazing. There were all kinds
.
of sounds in the air.
It was extraordinary how sick he was beginning to feel : he
shouldn't have eaten that raw meat, or perhaps the dust over the road
was upsetting him. Really! Really! That piss-ant in his eye!
Most annoying. If only he could lie down for a minute!
The rear end of the car ahead, whitely powdered, swayed in an
astonishing manner. What could be the matter with the driver? So
silly! He chuckled for a while, but all at once an imperative feeling
made him swerve towards the roadside, and, without reducing the
speed of the motor, he leaned out sideways over the running board.
Really! Really!
For a long time the road kept on going by swiftly beneath him.
a



Courtesy of Der Sturm
BY ALEXANDER ARCHIPENKO
A FIGURE.






Courtesy of Der Sturm
BY WI.EXANDER ARCHIPENKO
A FIGURE.


|


EIGHTH CANTO
BY EZRA POUND
tears
Dido choked up with for dead Sichaeus;
And the weeping Muse, weeping, widowed, and willing,
The weeping Muse
Mourns Homer,
Mourns the days of long song,
Mourns for the breath of the singers,
Winds stretching out, seas pulling to eastward,
Heaving breath of the oarsmen,
triremes under Cyprus,
The long course of the seas,
The words woven in wind-wrack,
salt spray over voices.
Tyro to shoreward lies lithe with Neptunus
And the glass-clear wave arches over them;
Seal sports in the spray-whited circles of cliff-wash,
Sleek head, daughter of Lir,
eyes of Picasso
Under black fur-hood, lithe daughter of Ocean;
And the
runs in the beach-groove:
Eleanor, ελέναυς and ελέπτολις,
, élévaus
,
and
poor
old Homer blind, blind, as a bat,
Ear, ear for the sea-surge, murmur of old men's voices:
“Let her go back to the ships,
Back among Grecian faces,
lest evil come
own,
Evil and further evil, and a curse cursed on our children.
Moves, yes she moves like a goddess
And has the face of a god
and the voice of Schoeney's daughters,
And doom goes with her in walking,
Let her go back to the ships,
back among Grecian voices."
ave
on
our


506
EIGHTH CANTO
And by the beach-run, Tyro,
Twisted arms of the sea-god,
Lithe sinews of water, gripping her, cross-hold,
And the blue-gray glass of the wave tents them,
Glare azure of water,
cord-welter, close cover.
Quiet sun-tawny sand-stretch, ,
The gulls broad out their wings,
nipping between the splay feathers;
Snipe come for their bath,
bend out their wing-joints,
-
Spread wet wings to the sun-film,
And by Scios,
to left of the Naxos passage,
Naviform rock overgrown
algae cling to its edge,
There is a wine-red glow in the shallows,
a tin flash in the sun-dazzle.
The ship landed in Scios,
men wanting spring-water,
And by the rock-pool a young boy loggy with vine-must,
"To Naxos? yes, we'll take yuh to Naxos,
Cum' along lad.”
“Not that way!”
“Aye, that way is Naxos.”
And I said: “It's a straight ship.”
And an ex-convict out of Italy
knocked me into the fore-stays,
(He was wanted for manslaughter in Tuscany)
And the whole twenty against me,
Mad for a little slave money.
And they took her out of Scios
And off her course
And the boy came to again with the racket, ,
And looked out over the bows,
and to eastward, and to the Naxos passage.


EZRA POUND
507
God-sleight then, god-sleight:
Ship stock fast in sea-swirl,
Ivy upon the oars, King Pentheus,
grapes with no seed but sea-foam,
Ivy in scupper-hole
Aye, I, Acoetes, stood there,
and the god stood by me,
Water cutting under the keel,
Sea-break from stern forrards,
wake running off from the bow,
And where was gunwale, there now was vine-trunk,
And tenthril where cordage had been,
grape-leaves on the rowlocks
Heavy vine on the oarshafts,
And, out of nothing, a breathing,
hot breath on my ankles,
Beasts like shadows in glass,
a furred tail upon nothingness,
Lynx-purr, and heathery smell of beasts,
where tar smell had been,
Sniff and pad-foot of beasts,
eye-glitter out of black air, ,
The sky overshot, dry, with no tempest,
,
Sniff and pad-foot of beasts,
fur brushing my knee-skin,
Rustle of airy sheaths,
dry forms in the aether,
And the ship like a keel in ship-yard,
slung like an ox in smith's sling,
Ribs stuck fast in the ways,
grape-cluster over pin-rack,
Void air taking pelt,
Lifeless air become sinewed,
feline leisure of panthers,
Leopards sniffing the grape shoots by scupper-hole,
Crouched panthers by fore-hatch,
And the sea blue-deep about us,
green-ruddy in shadows,


508
EIGHTH CANTO
And Lyaeus:
"From now, Acoetes, my altars,
Fearing no bondage,
fearing no cat of the wood,
Safe with my lynxes,
feeding grapes to my leopards,
Olibanum is my incense,
the vines grow in my homage.”
1
on
The back-swell now smooth in the rudder-chains,
Black snout of a porpoise
where Lycabs had been,
Fish-scales the oarsmen.
And I worship.
I have seen what I have seen.
When they brought the boy I said:
“He has a god in him,
though I do not know which god,”
And they kicked me into the fore-stays,
And I was frightened,
but I am not afraid any longer,
I have seen what I have seen:
Medon's face like the face of a dory,
Arms shrunk into fins.
And you, Pentheus,
Had as well listen to Tiresias, and to Cadmus,
or your luck will go out of you.
Fish-scales over groin muscles,
lynx-purr amid
sea
.
And of a later year,
pale in the wine-red algae,
If you will lean over the rock,
the coral face under wave-tinge,
Rose-paleness under water-shift,
Ileuthyeria fair Dafne of sea-bords,
The swimmer's arms turned to branches,
Who will say in what year,
fleeing what band of tritons,


EZRA POUND
509
The smooth brows, seen, and half seen,
now ivory stillness.
And So-shu churned in the sea, So-shu also,
using the long moon for a churn-stick...
Lithe turning of water,
sinews of Poseidon,
Black-azure and hyaline,
glass wave over Tyro,
Close cover,
unstillness,
bright welter of wave-cords,
Then quiet water,
quiet in the buff sands,
Sea-fowl stretching wing-joints,
splashing in rock-hollows and sand-hollows
In the wave-runs by the half-dune;
Glass-glint of wave in the tide-rips against sunlight,
pallor of Hesperus,
Grey peak of the wave,
wave, colour of grape's pulp,
,
Olive grey in the near,
far, smoke-grey of the rock-slide.
Salmon-pink wings of
wings of the fish-hawk
cast grey shadows in water,
The tower like a one-eyed great goose
cranes up out of the olive-grove,
And we
we have heard the fauns chiding Proteus
in the smell of hay under the olive-trees.
And the frogs singing against the fauns
in the half-light.


LONDON LETTER
April, 1922
ONDON, after three months, appeared to me quite unchanged:
the same things one liked, the same things one detested, and the
same things to which one was indifferent. I set about to hear any
important news, of books, of people, of productions or events, and
found nothing worthy of mention. This, of course, might happen
anywhere. Nevertheless, after a separation, one is disposed to gen-
eralize about impressions; so I have been led to contemplate, for
many moments, the nature of the particular torpor or deadness
which strikes a denizen of London on his return.
There is certainly, in the atmosphere of literary London, some-
thing which may provisionally be called a moral cowardice. It is
not simply cowardice, but a caution, a sort of worldly prudence which
believes implicitly that English literature is so good as it is that ad-
venture and experiment involve only unjustified risk; lack of am-
bition, laziness, and refusal to recognize foreign competition; a tol-
erance which is no better than torpid indifference; not cowardice
merely, but still a composition of inertias which is usually to be
found in general cowardice. It is facilitated by conditions which are
universal as well, by democracy (in the vague habitual sense of the
word) by the newspapers, the reviewing of books, the journalistic
life; by the actual and by every proposed economic system, which
give so high a place to Security-whether in the form of gilt-edged
bonds or old-age pensions—and so low a place to adventure and con-
templation. But in London these poisons are either more pernicious,
or their effects more manifest, than elsewhere. Other cities decay,
and extend a rich odour of putrefaction; London merely shrivels,
like a little bookkeeper grown old.
This is the principal impression one derives from the considera-
tion of any and every anthology of contemporary verse that appears.
As the two last that I have seen are Methuen and Company's An-
thology of Modern Verse, and Mr Untermeyer's Modern American
Poetry, I fall upon these as text-books for a comparison. With the
merits of the anthologies I have nothing to do; only with a general


T. S. ELIOT
511
impression of English and American poetry. It is very difficult, so
different have the verses of the two sides of the Atlantic become, to
censure the one without appearing to favour the other; nevertheless,
this nice feat should be attempted. Both appear to me to insult the
English language, but in different ways; both appear to me conven-
tional and timid, but in different ways.
The instinct for safety it may be—as in the bird the ostrich, not
always a safe instinct-or a complexity of causes, which seems to
make the English poet take refuge in just those sentiments, images,
and thoughts which render a man least distinguishable from the
mob, the respectable mob, the decent middle-class mob. An appear-
ance of daring, even a real daring in non-literary respects (for politi-
cal courage is still respected) may do no harm, and may even please;
for it makes the reader feel that he is daring too. But a truly inde-
pendent way of looking at things, a point of view which cannot be
sorted under any known religious or political title; in fact, the hav-
ing the only thing which gives a work pretending to literary art its
justification; the having something which the public have not got:
this is always detested. Sometimes it is not recognized, sometimes
it can be ignored; and then a man may have a deserved immediate
popularity; but when it is recognized and cannot be ignored, it is cer-
tainly feared and disliked. The popularity of certain war poems was
due, I think, to the fact that they appeared to represent a revolt
against something that was very unpleasant, and really paid a trib-
ute to all the nicest feelings of the upper-middle class British public .
school boy. But if I had to pick out, from the Methuen anthology,
some poem which more than the rest contained a dignity of the in-
dividual, it would be, I think, Lionel Johnson's Statue of King
Charles. Johnson, however, is hardly to be claimed by the present
literary generation.
We have, then, a large number of writers giving the public what
it likes; and a large body of reviewers telling it that it is right to like
what it likes; and the Morning Post to tell it that everything new is
a symptom of Bolshevism; and the London Mercury to tell it that it
is already such an enlightened public that what it does not like can-
not be really good. I do not say that a more intelligent journalism
would produce better poets; it is a part of the situation, this unin-
telligent press; a part of the so-called modern democracy which ap-
pears to produce fewer and fewer individuals. I mean that some of


512
LONDON LETTER
the same causes that make American poetry what it is have contrib-
uted to make English poetry what it is, only the result in the two en-
vironments is very different. The English language is of course bad-
ly written in both countries. In England it is not ungrammatical, but
common; it is not in bad taste, but rather tasteless. English imposes
less upon the writer than French, but demands more from him. It
demands greater and more constant variation; every word must be
charged afresh with energy every time it is used; the language de-
mands an animosity which is singularly deficient in those authors
who are most publicly glorified for their style.
T lack of any moral integrity, which I think is behind all the
superficial imbecilities of contemporary English verse (imbecilities
which an American public is quite able to see for itself) is disguised
in various ways; the disguise often takes the form of noble thoughts,
and (in serious prose writers also) in an endless pomposity. It is the
mark of the man who has no core, no individual moral existence, to
be possessed with moral notions, to be goaded by the necessity of con-
tinual moral formulations. In this he finds repose. Writers often
start out hopefully, apparently to look out something for them-
selves, but the strain is too great; they relapse into the preacher or
the prophet. I observe that Mr Clive Bell, who used to divert the
readers of The New Republic with his pranks, is lately fallen into
this cathedral manner in addressing the American public; and I hope
that he will not let the practice grow upon him.
I know that the word “moral,” which I have used so often, will
give offence. Well, I have lately perused selections from some of
the American poets, in Mr Untermeyer's anthology, and I think that
the word can be applied here too. Perhaps it is not a representative
anthology; certainly I fail to find one or two of the writers who in-
terest me most. At any rate it contains the most noted; and in sev-
eral of them I seem to find exactly the same weakness as in the Eng.
lish. It does not matter whether they are crude or experimental; I do
not find them either so crude or so experimental as they are said to be.
I am told that Mr Sandburg is now the great American representa-
tive poet. Some of his smaller verse is charming; but appears to be
.
rather an echo of Mr Pound, who has done it better. In his more am-
bitious verse, however, there is just the same surrender as in Eng.
land, to what the people want. You must talk about America, just
as here you must talk about England: only, there are different things


T. S. ELIOT
513
.
to say. It is necessary to pretend that England is a green and pleas-
ant land; at present, you need not say that America is pleasant, you
can make it infernal; but you must make out that it is big, that it is
new, that it contains the germs of a colossal growth. And beneath
this there is commonplace and conventionality. Mr Sandburg may
blame the anthology, but there it is. The same is true of Mr Lind-
say, whose verse has no moral significance; and that of Mr Masters,
whose verse has not enough; and Miss Lowell appears to have noth-
ing that she has not borrowed from Mr Pound or from Mr Fletcher.
Mr Frost seems the nearest equivalent to an English poet, specializ-
ing in New England torpor; his verse, it is regretfully said, is unin-
teresting, and what is uninteresting is unreadable, and what is un-
readable is not read. There, that is done.
I know that if I lived in closer proximity to Mr Burleson, and to
Professor Sherman, and to the Methodist Episcopal Church, I should
probably take a different tone. But if people will admire Whitman
for the wrong things
This should have been a London letter. But Ulysses does not
exactly tumble into it; and must certainly be discussed apart; time
enough to include it here when we are able to mark its effect upon
London. (The London Mercury has already devoted three pages to
Mr Joyce; perhaps London will be revolutionized in three months.)
Wyndham Lewis' art review, the Tyro, has only just now appeared.
In Paris I had the first and most welcome reminder of London in
seeing Mistinguette at the Casino de Paris. She has other rôles which
no English actress could possibly fill; she is versatile; but in herself
she played a part which I thought would have been better under-
stood and liked by an English music hall audience than it was at the
Casino de Paris. I thought of Marie Lloyd again; and wondered
again why that directness, frankness, and ferocious humour which
survive in her, and in Nellie Wallace and George Robey and a few
others, should be extinct, should be odious to the British public, in
precisely those forms of art in which they are most needed, and in
which, in fact, they used to flourish.
T. S. ELIOT


BOOK REVIEWS
THE REVOLUTION IN ETHICAL THEORY
HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT. An Introduction to
Social Psychology. By John Dewey. 8vo. 336 pages.
Henry Holt and Company. $2.25.
a
PETRARCH makes a useful distinction, as I remember
, between
new book belongs emphatically to the second class. It seems to me
that it could be profitably reconsidered with ever increasing illumi-
nation at least twice a year during one's remaining lifetime. It is
like those frames that one sees in studios which serve to set off
past,
present, and future achievements. The function of the frame, I take
it, is to eliminate peripheral irrelevancies and enable the eye to en-
gage itself with the essentials, and this is what Mr Dewey achieves
in the bewildering realm of human conduct. In directing our lives
and changing those of others we are victimized by innumerable out-
lying considerations entirely impertinent, or at least negligible.
As life has become more varied in a world of unprecedentedly
rapid change in environment, much less can be settled by ancient
routine than formerly. There is a rapidly growing distrust of old
rules and standards, which is reflected in current fiction and verse.
Even if principles invoked in the past were once appropriate, we see
that with our modern knowledge and modern conditions they can no
longer be appropriate. It has become apparent that much of our
morality, however deceptive its dignified phrase, is ultimately dis-
reputable in origin and aim. As mankind has been groping for hun-
dreds of thousands of years towards its present still dim and crepus-
cular outlook on life, it has stumbled over roots, fallen trees, and
stones, which it would have escaped had it been able to see more
clearly. To many of these obstacles it accords a sort of veneration,
a
since life might have lost its moral dignity and have become all too
gay and lightsome without them. We most of us, like Bunyan's
Christian, struggle along with heavy packs on our backs filled with


JAMES HARVEY ROBINSON
515
what Tagore calls "crooked scruples.” Our anxious morality clouds
our faces and fills us with useless foreboding.
As one progresses through Mr Dewey's book he finds the straps of
his pack gently loosened, and his face clearing, and his eyes bright-
ening as he is relieved of his old intolerable burden. Terrible male-
dictions which formerly hung over him turn out to be the idle curses
of a peevish old woman. He perceives how unreal and fantastic is
.
the traditional estimate of human character and responsibility.
Life's struggles seem to him no less serious, but far more hopeful.
They no longer invite our grudging subservience to mere taboo, but
challenge us to constructive and creative endeavour. As Mr Dewey
says, for one man who thanks God that he is not as other men, there
are a thousand who bless His Holy Name for being so much like other
people that they can never be subject to blame. Ethics hitherto has
consisted in laying solid metaphysical foundations for a system of
prudent avoidance. It has been its first business to discover what
man ought not to do and to exhort him in the name of virtue and
holiness to resist temptation. Mr Dewey reverses the procedure. He
first studies the nature of man and then attempts to deduce the rules
for his conduct. This is, of course, perfectly revolutionary, as any
one familiar, let us say, with Martineau's Types of Ethical Theory
will perceive. Our author sees no reason for making any distinction
between problems which have been classified as "moral" regardless
of their importance and other decisions and adjustments that we are
called upon to make. He sees that “knowing is carried on through
the medium of natural factors,” including all that scientific dis-
covery reveals to us in regard to our nature and the things about us.
If this be so, then “the assumption of special agencies for moral
knowing becomes outlawed and incredible.” In short, we haven't a
special moral organ, and so-called moral values, regulations, prin-
ciples, and objects do not form a separate and independent domain,
but "are part and parcel of a normal development of a life process.
As for religion, its office “as sense of community and one's place
in it has been lost. In effect religion has been distorted into a pos-
session-or burden-of a limited part of human nature, of a limited
portion of humanity which finds no way to universalize religion ex-
cept by imposing its own dogmas and ceremonies upon others; of a
limited class within a partial group-priests, saints, a church."
The keynote of man's nature is what he calls "habit," a word he
a
a


516
THE REVOLUTION IN ETHICAL THEORY
uses in a somewhat different sense from that usually attached to it.
When habit proves unworkable, a conscious problem appears which
demands the readjustment of habit. This raises the all-important
question of the technique of successfully changing our habits, a mat-
ter hitherto very ill-understood. But it is impossible to analyse the
book here and the reader must be left to master it for himself.
There is no more cheering sign of the times than that Mr Dewey
has emerged as our most conspicuous leader in the reform not only of
philosophy, logic, and ethics, but in the urgent problems of educa-
tion. All his past studies are brought together in the present work,
which happily is expressed in language comprehensible to any seri-
ous-minded and thoughtful reader.
James HARVEY ROBINSON


BONDED TRANSLATION
FIR-FLOWER TABLETS. Poems translated from the
Chinese by Florence Ayscough. English versions by
Amy Lowell. Illustrated. 8vo. 225 pages. Houghton
Mifflin Company. $3.
Thore
HE rendering of Chinese poetry into English has reached that
fortunate stage where translators quarrel little over which of
them came first. Instead they argue the merit of their translation, a
dispute which has no danger and some excitement for the public.
“Except for Mr Waley's admirable work,” says Mrs Ayscough in
her Introduction to Fir-Flower Tablets, "English renderings have
usually failed to convey the flavour of the originals.” It is only one
sentence out of a long treatise, but it may be taken as her gauge of
battle.
As one might expect after this, she and Miss Lowell have not hesi-
tated to make new versions of several poems which had already been
rendered into English. Even, although they exempt Waley from
their charge, they have treated at least one of the poems which he
translated; as a comparison of their two methods it is extremely in-
teresting. The name of it is Once More Fields and Gardens (or Re-
turning to the Fields, if we follow Waley). The author is known
variously as T'ao Yüan-ming and T'ao Chien, but both volumes
agree that he died 427 years after the birth of Christ. The trans-
lations themselves are as diverse as the titles and as the names of the
poet, and yet they both are patently honest and painstaking. Ac-
cording to Waley (I quote only the last few lines):
“Hazy, hazy the distant hamlets of men.
Steady the smoke of the half-deserted village,
A dog barks somewhere in the deep lanes,
A cock crows at the top of the mulberry tree.
At gate and courtyard—no murmur of the World's dust:
In the empty rooms—leisure and deep stillness.
Long I lived checked by the bars of a cage:
Now I have turned again to Nature and Freedom.”


518
BONDED TRANSLATION
It is characteristic of the other version that it should contain more
lines and about a dozen more words. The reason is not a mere ver-
a
bosity; it is the effort made by Mrs Ayscough and Miss Lowell to
express exact shades of meaning:
“The village is hazy, hazy,
And mist sucks over the open moor.
A dog barks in the sunken lane which runs through the village.
A cock crows, perched on a clipped mulberry.
"There is no dust or clatter
In the courtyard before my house.
My private rooms are quiet,
And calm with the leisure of moonlight through an open door.
“For a long time I lived in a cage;
Now I have returned.
For one must return
To fulfill one's nature.”
One or two minor questions arise as to the comparative accuracy
of the two versions; I have no way of judging them. It is obvious,
however, that Miss Lowell's rhythms are more musical and her
words immensely more vivid; in other words that her language is
more the language of English poetry. Waley's translation is that
of a scholar with considerable feeling for English metres; the other
is that of a poet aided by a scholar.
Some of the translations of Ezra Pound are also duplicated in Fir-
Flower Tablets. I quote four lines from a poem which he calls The
River Merchant's Wife: a Letter, and which Miss Lowell entitles
more briefly Ch’ang Kan. Perhaps I have chosen unjustly, for they
are the lines in which Pound strays furthest from his text:
“At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever, and forever.
Why should I climb the look-out?”
Against this Miss Lowell:


MALCOLM COWLEY
519
“At fifteen I stopped frowning.
I wanted to be with you, as dust with its ashes.
I often thought that you were the faithful man who clung
to the bridge-post,
That I should never be obliged to ascend the Looking-for-
Husband Ledge."
Here obviously both translators were confronted with two lines
unintelligible to a Western audience. Pound funked one of them
altogether, and gave only a perfunctory rendering of the other. It
was characteristic of these subsequent translators that they should
repeat both of them literally, and then explain them in their notes.
Their comparison with Pound is not in general one of literary quali-
ty; both renderings of the poem are excellent English and excellent
poetry. Perhaps Pound's is even the more poignant, but it is not so
faithful; it is hardly Li Po.
Thus in these two skirmishes with the enemy, Fir-Flower Tablets
came off victorious; once because it was better Chinese and once be-
cause it was a little better English. But the authors were not con-
.
tent; they went on to fortify their position.
More than any other translators from the Chinese they took pains
to document their work. Three people, as they explain, were actu-
ally concerned in the translation: Mrs Ayscough's native instructor,
who knew his own literature thoroughly but no English; Mrs Ays-
cough herself, who was familiar with both languages; finally Miss
Lowell, who, although she did not read Chinese, had abundant ma-
terial notwithstanding. She received a transliteration of the Chinese
characters into the Roman alphabet (for metre and rhyme scheme)
and beside each word its dictionary meaning. She was given an
analysis of the characters to show their overtones, and lastly their
literal rendering into English with notes to explain the complicated
allusions. With these four methods of approach to the material,
her own task, which was to make an English version in the language
of our poetry, was rendered comparatively easy; nevertheless it was
the keystone of the work.
There is no mystery about this method of translation; specific ex-
amples of it are even given for the benefit of the curious. It is a
method that respects the written word, and that tries to reproduce
this word with its connotations, rather than to concern itself with the


520
BONDED TRANSLATION
sound of the verse. It is a method that requires a great deal of work;
it is apt to inspire a corresponding amount of confidence. By virtue
of it, and by virtue of the careful documentation, Fir-Flower Tab-
lets can present itself as a sort of bonded translation.
Even this victory did not satisfy the authors. They attempted
something much more important: they attempted to present Chinese
poetry as it appeared to its original audience, in other words against
the background of the culture which produced it. The undertaking
is more than a little complex. It requires that we be informed not
only about the poets themselves, but about some details of the his-
tory and geography of China (the translators take our ignorance of
this justly for granted). It requires especially that we be enabled to
enter into the prejudices and superstitions of the Chinese. It re-
quires, in other words, a sort of Encyclopaedia Sinica, lacking
which Mrs Ayscough has outlined its essentials competently in this
one volume.
And indeed, considering the brief limits of the study, little of the
necessary background is omitted. The book begins with a map of
China and ends with the carefully-annotated plan of a Chinese
house. The poems themselves are encased between an Introduction
of seventy-five pages and fifty pages of notes; on this prose they
closely depend.
Out of it I like the notes best. They are full of Chinese customs,
of curious legends, of stories of the beautiful concubines of the em-
perors. There was, for example, the Honourable Lady Chao, the
virgin concubine; a person almost monotonously perfect. Her pic-
ture was painted for the Emperor, who, in his embarrassment of fe-
male riches, had not yet seen her. She would not bribe the portrait
painter; his likeness of her was libellous; she was refused the Impe-
rial Presence and finally given as bride to a barbarian prince. The
Emperor discovered her beauty too late. He could never ransom her
back; she died beyond the Great Wall in the desert, where to this
day her mound is covered with grass. Then there was the despicable
Flying Swallow, and there was Yang Kuei-fei, most sad and sinister
of all beauties, who was killed by the troops in a rebellion, but who
was eternally reunited to her lover on the paradisial island of P'êng
Lai in the Jade-grey Sea.
This from the notes. The information of the introduction is more
a


MALCOLM COWLEY
521
prosy, more encyclopaedic; probably it is even more necessary. Most
essential of all is Mrs Ayscough's brief summary of Chinese mythol-
ogy. The poems can be read without either Introduction or notes;
however they lose something thereby. In reality the volume is tight-
ly bound together, and the impression it gives is not only one of
T'ang poetry, but of T’ang civilization. This is its triumph.
But read the poems; there is a charm about them like looking over
old paintings on rolled and yellow silk. Indeed their art is princi-
pally pictorial, and usually they are pictures of repose rather than
motion (if Western civilization develops Heraclitus, that of China
is pure Parmenides). One sees grass huts in the high hills, turned
red with autumn. Pine trees bending into the sky and white herons
against the moon. Tears fall sometimes unrestrainedly, but usually
the tone is one of subdued sadness. Friends part for ever, holding
drunken tremendous conversations before they go. Cast-off concu-
bines sing their nostalgia for the Master, and exiled scholars for the
brilliance of the court. A tired official retires into his garden, declar-
ing himself content "to be an old man holding a bamboo fishing
rod."
It is a literature that could exercise a beneficent influence on our
a
own. It proves for example—and this contrary to the doctrine of
our romantic Freudians that a great poetry can exist by other vir-
tue than its sexual interest. It offers a resolution of our too-favour-
ite antinome between romanticism and classicism, for it is a litera-
ture both universal and concrete, both human and humanistic; a lit-
erature that is classical without being mummified. American poetry
could learn this from the Chinese; meanwhile it has been content to
borrow nothing except golden love-pheasants and mandarins, with a
bountiful sprinkling of plum blossoms. After Fir-Flower Tablets
we can expect a new and weedy harvest of these regrettable blos-
a
soms.
Malcolm Cowley


PROLOGUE TO AN EDITION
A SURVEY. By Max Beerbohm. 51 Cartoons. 4to.
Doubleday, Page and Company. $4.
And Even Now. By Max Beerbohm. 12mo. 230
pages. E. P. Dutton and Company. $2.
Max BEERBOHM IN PERSPECTIVE.
By Bohun
Lynch. With a Prefatory Letter by M. B. Illus-
trated. 8vo. 185 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $3.50.
IF
>
a
F Mr Beerbohm intends to contribute anything substantial to
our civilization (“or whatever it is”) he had better begin at once.
I notice an unusual exasperation in the reception of his latest works,
and it is clear that the world which has been indulgent to his frivol-
ity for such a long time is at last demanding that he put his gifts to
their proper use. From Mr Bohun Lynch's book one learns that the
series of drawings of scenes in the life of the Pre-Raphaelite Broth-
erhood shows “a tendency. . . to make portraits rather than cari-
catures”; is it enough, when one has turned fifty, to show a tendency
towards the higher good? Can anything solid come out of Rapallo?
The turning of the tide gently against Mr Beerbohm is as interest-
ing as anything in his career. An English critic, irritated by the
Labour cartoons, accuses the artist of vulgarity; an American re-
minds us that, in his writing, he was always bogus. Even those who
are favourable to the later work show signs of strain. Is he as good
as he used to be, if he ever was, they enquire, as critics used to assay
the gold in Caruso's voice each year; and although they answer Yes,
the sense of relief is a little obvious. One recalls the story of Sir
Isaac Newton standing outside the door of his lecture hall, anxiously
experimenting with an apple.
There are two explanations of this attitude. One is the natural
resentment against the legend of Max. Aristides was banished
from Athens for nothing better than being just; since 21 May, 1898,
this man has been "the incomparable.” In a light-hearted moment,
says Mr Beerbohm, G. B. S. called him that. (It must have been
light-hearted, indeed, for Mr Shaw was on that day writing his vale-


GILBERT SELDES
523
dictory as a dramatic critic; but it has made later writing about Mr
Beerbohm unnecessarily difficult.) Two years earlier had appeared
.
The Works with the notorious cedo junioribus; it must be nearly
ten years since Mr Holbrook Jackson, placing Mr Beerbohm in the
Nineties, told us that Max is town. The Nineties were, for a num-
ber of people, Beardsley and Dowson and Lionel Johnson; we came
upon
Mr Beerbohm in The Yellow Book when we were first learn-
ing to know the Oscar Wilde of Salomé; Mr Beerbohm's persistence,
the
way in which his legend imposed itself, were puzzling and, per-
haps, a little indelicate. One felt that he might, at least, have
stopped writing
Resentment against a neatness too long drawn out is, therefore,
natural and silly enough. The other element in the decline of Mr
Beerbohm's prestige is a trifle more complicated. An emphasis has
been put upon the one thing in his career as an artist which is entirely
unimportant. It was always the aristocrat, and not the artist, that
was marked; the patrician, not the individual. His delicacy and
his detachment, his irony, his wilfulness, were not put forth as the
elements of his nature, but as the insignia of his rank. The very
circumstance that he put forth nothing and that Max as an aristo-
crat in letters was created by his admirers was also noted as part of
his superiority. One expected to find him protesting—as Con-
greve did because Voltaire treated him as a man of letters and not
as a gentleman. The whole matter would be only a childish snob-
bery, and so insignificant, if it did not obscure something else, which
is important. Mr Eliot has stated it with accuracy in a paragraph
on George Wyndham:
“The Arts insist that a man shall dispose of all that he has, even
of his family tree, and follow art alone. For they require that a
man be not a member of a family or of a caste or of a party or of a
coterie, but simply and solely himself. A man like Wyndham
brings several virtues into literature. But there is only one man
better and more uncommon than the patrician, and that is the In-
dividual.”
In Mr Beerbohm's case it was even suggested that the patrician
could do no wrong, that he had never published a dull paragraph or a
stupid caricature; it was never suggested that what makes him inter-


524
PROLOGUE TO AN EDITION
esting is his imperturbable habit of being himself. I mean by this
that he has been dull because he has been dull, and not because some
one else, who became famous for it, had been dull before him; if his
manner was laboured, it was because he found no other way to say
what he wanted to say. For a long time he wrote Latin in English,
or, if you prefer, wrote English as if it were an inflected language.
But that was an idiosyncrasy, something highly private, and not a
borrowing. He wrote:
a
"The most sensitive intelligence cannot predict how will be ap-
praised its any treasure by its how near soever kin" ”
and added “This sentence, which I admit to be somewhat mannered”
lest you doubted his ability to write: "how any of its treasures will
be appraised by its kin, howsoever near.” He learned how to write
by observing the habits of others; but he never used anything until
it had become his own, and never unless it corresponded to something
in himself. His work is traditional and affected; but he mastered
the tradition and his affectations are his own. The convention of
ironic discourse is observed in such a sentence as “Though he does
not appear to have treated his inferiors with the extreme servility
now in vogue, George was beloved by the whole of his household";
and the affectation is visible in “For him Sheridan would flash his
best bon-mot, and Theodore Hook play his most practical joke, his
swiftest chansonette”; but the carefully concealed analysis of the
idea-practical joke-accomplished by the superlative and con-
cealed by the following phrase, is decidedly Mr Beerbohm's own, or,
as they used to say, is Max. The relevance of his affectations to
himself can best be seen in his caricatures, where -such things as
tapering legs, sleek hats, and elbow-less arms, become actual conven-
tions of method.
It is because Mr Beerbohm has been with remarkable consistency
himself that one does not mind his lapses. I would be willing to
omit from the canon all but a few pages of More, all but a few para-
graphs of Yet Again. There are a few pages almost dreary in The
.
Works and a few not entirely satisfactory in And Even Now; just
as there are in each volume of caricatures some which please in no
way at all. But there is not, as far as my judgement goes, anything
written or drawn with that peculiar kind of badness which betrays
a


GILBERT SELDES
525
>
imitative and sloppy and dishonest work. Consider the pictures
which are held in least esteem in A Survey. One does not gather
from the Labour cartoons any suggestion that Mr Beerbohm has
thought deeply about the possible future of England under a Labour
a
ministry: his political attitude seems very much like that of The
Morning Post; Mr Conrad gazing upon a snake winding through a
skull on a deserted coast, and saying that “one catches an illusion
that one might forever be almost gay here” reproduces together with
an excellent caricature of Mr Conrad an attitude towards his work
which is as annoying as that in the older picture of Mr Thomas
Hardy composing a lyric. One might suspect from Kolniyatsch
that Mr Beerbohm had been unimpressed by Ibsen; he introduces
himself carefully into the picture as one mildly surprised that the
dear fellow, Bernard Shaw, is still standing on his head. And so
on; analysis will yield anything you desire, but the relevance of these
social and literary criticisms to Mr Beerbohm's own work is still in
question. He has given them a little justification by his preface to
A Survey and there are occasions when something like terror and
something like animus corrupt his urbanity. That is all.
Nothing so sober as the above could have been written about Mr
Beerbohm ten years ago. Then one would have discussed his allegi-
ance to The Dandy in art and letters, with a general reference to the
prose style of the eighteenth century, and promptly proceeded to fill
up with quotations from Max. What I have done, so far, is to in-
dicate that that method is by much the more sensible; for if one man-
aged to say one or two relevant things about Mr Beerbohm's work,
that would be much more entertaining than the many inconsequent,
although very “vital,” things now said in his connexion. I have not
now space left to enjoy the clear conscience I have given myself; and
of the little that is left, most must go to Mr Bohun Lynch. Briefly,
of Mr Beerbohm's two latest works let me say that And Even Now
contains, in addition to the serious and beautiful piece about Swin-
burne, some of Mr Beerbohm's happiest inspirations, and is superb-
ly done throughout, so that even the three or four dull pieces have
the capacity of giving pleasure; A Survey holds fifty-one caricatures
of which one (The King of Spain) is, to one who, never having seen
that Personage, is not distracted by trifles, perfect; at least half of
the others are, for one quality or another, to be counted among the
major works of Mr Beerbohm; and only a few are uninteresting.


526
PROLOGUE TO AN EDITION
Mr Bohun Lynch's book contains more quotations from Max than
any other book of reference and can't help being entertaining; but
it is not interesting until he begins to discuss the caricatures. There
he is on solid ground and really tells something about Mr Beer-
bohm. In discussing the writings he has the unnerving habit of
pointing out the subtleties, sometimes even explaining the jokes.
In an effort to under-rate Mr Beerbohm he has fallen
upon
Zuleika
Dobson for a victim, which is not particularly clever of him; and he
underestimates The Happy Hypocrite and Seven Men. These
three works, with And Even Now and A Christmas Garland, are the
essential things in Mr Beerbohm's prose. Mr Lynch has had the
misfortune to write his book without having seen the copy of Zu-
leika which Mr Beerbohm illustrated; he could not, had he seen it,
doubted its place. (He has also failed to point out among Mr
Beerbohm's engaging errors the statement that no one is known in
history or in legend as having died of laughter. Rabelais and Urqu-
hart are both so known.) The book has much information, carefully
arranged; the most illuminating thing in it is the picture, in delicious
colour, of Max Minimus-at the age of four.
In addition to having had a book published about him, Mr Beer-
bohm is undergoing a collected edition. It is needed.
It is needed. One hopes
that by the time it appears, in all completeness, people will recall
that in spite of reviewers, Mr Beerbohm is a very entertaining man.
a
GILBERT SELDES


FIDES QUAERENS INTELLECTUM
THE RELIGION OF Plato. By Paul Elmer More.
8vo. 352 pages. Princeton University Press. $2.50.
IS
a study of past intellectual currents, there are two elements
involved. First, there is simple exegesis. And, second, there
is the application of one's exegesis to contemporary conditions. In
The Religion of Plato, then, Mr More has sat down to trace for us
how some of the most spiritual elements of Plato have added to
Christianity. And his applied thesis is that an age which can neglect
such spiritual considerations with a few specious sophisms is an
inferior age. Plato is an adequate text for such contentions. The
tracing of Plato's influences is a matter of study and comparison;
while the position of Plato among the Sophists is quite patently
that of a master among thumb-twiddlers, a man with enough fire
and affirmation to renounce at all costs his clever contemporaries.
Further, comparisons between the Sophists and present-day atti-
tudes have become well recognized. Concerning the first contention
we shall say nothing, especially since Mr More's programme in-
volves at least three more volumes. It is the application to con-
temporary conditions which is by far the more exciting.
Mr More, then, is combatting that specious logic whereby the
gods can be looked upon as either non-existent or asleep, and which
results in the characteristically Sophistic outlook on man as the
measure of all things. One can, for instance, by observing that so
many years ago women wore hoopskirts and to-day they wear rolled-
down stockings, affirm thereby the transitoriness of beauty. Or, by
comparing the moral practices of India with those of Europe, one
can inside of two minutes reach the logical conclusion that morality
is nothing other than custom, and is thus not divine, but human.
In some form or other, this is indubitably the contemporary point of
view. One will find it held quite generally in colleges by the intel-
lectual leaders of the Freshman class. Sweet young things will tell
it to one in more or less lisping form. It is, in short, the first pale
blush of thinking. Now, to preserve one's decency, one should
certainly hold to other views, even at the expense of an absurdity.
And it is precisely to an absurdity that Mr More has recourse,


528
FIDES QUAERENS INTELLECTUM
the part
offering it to us under the aegis of Plato. Pure logic, he says, will
always lead to some such denial of standards; for a completely
consistent universe involves the loss of the Good and Evil distinc-
tion, by tossing it among the cogs of causality.
But Plato refused to take just this step, as Mr More will convince
any one by his muster of quotations. The spiritual urge in him
made him prefer an inconsistency in his rational system to the denial
of absolute, or intrinsic, Good and Evil. And it is in this ultimate
distrust of rationalism that Mr More places the glory of Plato.
While it was, further, precisely this distrust of rationalism which
distinguished Plato from the Sophists.
Now, this categorical attack upon rationalism has one particular-
ly unhappy feature. For by it, the intellectual Freshman mention-
ed above, Nietzsche, and the Sophists must be thrown into one in-
discriminate heap with a philosopher like Spinoza. From Mr
More's point of view, all of them would pigeon-hole together: they
all err when judged by the Christian ideal of humility. Thus, meta-
,
physics becomes per se detestable, for it is the attempt to explain the
universe consistently, and thus argues an unpardonable hauteur on
of the human mind. The humble man, with his eye on God,
will reach a point where consistency becomes too much for him, be-
cause his reason threatens to explain away any ultimate need of spir-
itual betterment. And he will sacrifice consistency to spirituality.
Now, if Mr More finds this hauteur categorically opprobrious, it
is hard to answer him in his own terms. To Spinoza, man's search
was not for humility, but for mastery, and in this sense he might be
united with Nietzsche as the enemy of Sklavenmoral. "Et human-
as actiones atque appetitus considerabo perinde, ac si quaestio de
lineis, planis, aut de corporibus esset: I shall treat of human actions
and appetites as if it were a question of lines, planes, and solids."
This is almost a triumphant programme, and is in an entirely dif-
ferent channel of thought from that of the searcher after subjection.
Still, one can point out that Spinoza's doctrine of intellectual domi-
nation is nothing other than the furthering of Plato's reasons-emo-
tions-appetites division of the individual. For in such a division,
both the appetites and the emotions become eschewed as trouble-
some, with the reason alone as the seat of a broad and placid outlook.
a
Nietzsche should, of course, be allied with the Sophists, in that he
made man the measure of all things, in that his attitude involved
the death of God, and in that he could neglect any spiritual (read,


KENNETH BURKE
529
“inhibitory") principle. But if the Sophists were smart, Nietzsche
was pathetic, while Spinoza is a monument to his own philosophy,
the contentment and constancy of his pursuit of it arguing that the
intellect had really given him his mastery. It is, in fact, just this
emphasis on the reason which Nietzsche lacked and which places
Spinoza, the rationalist, within such close range of Plato.
Mr More, however, can see no difference between metaphysics and
eristic, in spite of Plato's respect for Parmenides the metaphysician
and his disrespect for the eristic Sophists. Both are abhorrent to
him in that they deny the spiritual affirmation. That the rational-
ist metaphysician has invariably made some ethical aspiration the
very centre of his system, Mr More escapes rather high-handedly by
speaking of the rationalist's “bastard” spiritually. To be consis-
tent, then, is to be a bastard, while the inconsistent are unquestioned
sons of deacons. Fiat.
Now, when we must approach excellence by such a tortuous meth-
od, it is time to question whether there is not some simpler approach.
It may be found in examining the process of the philosopher. Scho-
lastic philosophy, for instance, has named itself by the apt formula
of fides quaerens intellectum, which might be translated as “an emo-
tional predisposition seeking its parallel in logic.” In this sense,
there is no philosophy but scholastic philosophy, for in the
very na-
ture of things a philosophic attitude must precede the means of
making this attitude logically cogent. Spinoza, in other words, be-
gan with the emotion of his metaphysics, with his fides, and then
sought logical cogency, intellectus, in his method of geometrical
demonstration. And in the same way Plato, insofar as he is a phi-
losopher, has an emotional attitude which he will attempt to restate
in the parallel terms of logic. Which, I believe, is a correctly prag-
matic statement, and therefore in extremely bad taste.
The trouble with the pragmatists, however, lies elsewhere. It is
chiefly in the fact that they attribute to their doctrines primarily an
ethical content, whereas pragmatism-with its extreme emphasis on
the creative—leads directly to aesthetics. If a system of ethic can-
-
not be absolutely true, it can be absolutely beautiful. By the same
fact, Dante or the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas may out-
last the belief in Christianity. Which is simply saying that without
the fear of hell, we can still have an eternal inheritance of beauty in
some powerful description of hell. And that, without even re-
motely experiencing Spinoza's abstractions, we can continue to


530 FIDES QUAERENS INTELLECTUM
enjoy their hard logic. Thus, in the great triad of the good, the true,
and the beautiful, both the good and the true are treated merely as
subdivisions of the beautiful. Reversing Matthew Arnold's formu-
lation of the artistic conscience, we speak of moral taste. (Which is
by no means an unusual procedure. In the applied Neo-Platonism
of the Renaissance, for instance, the virtuous was deduced from the
courtly.) And metaphysics then becomes an examination into a
universal structure in this structure's relation to human standards of
excellence. This is by no means a reverting to man as the measure
of all things. Or at least, it involves a distinction between generic
man and man as an individual. The former reading will lead
us almost inevitably to God (by which I mean some rigidity of
higher standards to which the individual must aspire). The task
would be to prove the existence of permanent principles of beauty
a task, by the way, which is being pursued under the modernized
discipleship of Plato and Pythagoras by Gino Severini, in his book,
Du Cubisme au Classicisme) and with this proved, the moral life
would demand similar feelings for balance and proportion.
Although Mr More may protest, I maintain that he is trembling
on the verge of just such an attitude of aesthetic priority, as any one
must be who chooses to make a study of Plato. In the last analysis,
a demand for spiritual affirmation can be justified on no grounds ex-
cept the one that life is made less beautiful without it. And in any
case, the aesthetic standpoint would have made Mr More's defence
of inconsistency less obnoxious. For Plato is so patently the artist
that his ideology had best be looked upon as subordinate to his love
of beauty. As a creator of beauty who prefers dialectic to narrative,
he becomes a philosopher. But his fides proves too much for his in-
tellectus; his emotion does not attain its complete logical parallel ;
and where the logic fails, it is a failure and none other. The beauty
of the whole may lead us to pardon an imperfection in a part, but
let us not, until we are forced at the point of a pistol, find it praise-
worthy that the tight rope-walker should fall off his rope. The aes-
thetic attitude at least has the virtue of being less strained. And
further, it does full justice to the particular superiority which Plato
manifested over the Sophists: his capacity to touch on permanent
standards at a time when his facile contemporaries could see nothing
but flux. However, so long as we attempt to systematize Plato's
statements from the standpoint of those statements alone, Platon-
izers and Neo-Platonists and Plato-exegetes can pile up ad inf.
KENNETH BURKE


MISS SINCLAIR AGAIN
LIFE AND Death of HARRIETT FREAN. By May Sin-
clair. 12mo. 133 pages. The Macmillan Company.
$1.25.
L'
IKE Mr Waddington of Wyck, Miss Sinclair's new book is a
study of the psycho-pathology of Peter Pan. Neither Mr
Waddington nor Miss Frean ever grew up. In the earlier book this
infantilism took the form of conceited selfishness. In the latter it
takes the form of conceited unselfishness. And since we live in a
post-Butler world, it is of course the unselfishness which causes the
most unhappiness.
The book is about the same length as Flaubert's Un Coeur Simple.
It is the skeleton of a novel. It would be a pity to boil down the
bones. Here are the most important ones.
The blue egg stood on the cabinet, and Harriett felt a real loving
love for her doll, Ida. She believed that her father's house was nicer
than other people's.
Ugly. Being naughty was just that. Doing ugly things. Being
good felt delicious. When she was naughty, their unhappiness was
the punishment. It hurt more than anything. They, of course,
were her parents.
Lectures. Concerts. Longfellow. Mrs Browning.
Connie Hancock was vulgar and told her things.
Prissie was her best friend. She was engaged to Robin. Robin
and Harriett then fell in love. Harriett sacrificed herself—and
him; against his will. “I'm not good. It's only there are some
things you can't do. We couldn't.” They, of course, agreed.
So Robin married Prissie, who soon developed paralysis. Poor
little Prissie! How terrible. Harriett's pity was sad and beauti-
ful, and at the same time it appeased her pain.
When she was thirty, her father failed in business, and died of it.
She couldn't get over the sense of his parenthood, his authority.
“My father was Hilton Frean of The Spectator."
Her mother died. Harriett took the blue egg out of the drawing-


532
MISS SINCLAIR AGAIN
room and stuck it in the spare-room.
Her mind ran back to her
father and mother longing like a child for their shelter and support
and the blessed assurance of herself.
Prissie died. Robin married again. Harriett found he was now
a monster of selfishness. He had used up all his moral capital.
Her servant Maggie had a baby. The beautiful thing would be
to let her have the baby with her. But Maggie nursed it. Harriett
couldn't bear that. She decided Maggie must go. The baby died
of it. She wasn't going to be morbid. All the same the episode left
her with a feeling of insecurity.
Robin's niece learned the story of her giving up Robin, and at-
tacked her for it. “She had thought of herself, her own moral beau-
ty. She was a selfish fool. Prissie had developed illness so that she
might have a hold on Robin. I don't say she could help it. She
couldn't."
Was it true that she had sacrificed them all (Robin and Prissie
and Robin's second wife) to her parents' sense of moral duty? The
feeling of insecurity had grown on her. She learnt her father had
ruined others as well as himself. It showed her father as he was.
Not wise. Not wise all the time.
New people had come to the house next door. They had a cat.
Harriett said "I don't like cats.” Cats were a compromise, a substi-
tute, a subterfuge. Her pride couldn't stoop.
Her sixty-second year. Harriett had her first bad illness. Above
all she loved the comfort and protection of Maggie. She found
shelter in Maggie as she had found it in her mother.
She said “The Spectator is not what it used to be in my father's
time.” Harriett Frean was not what she used to be.
She was happy in the surrender of her responsibility, of the grown-
up
self she had maintained with so much effort. She took the blue
egg out of the spare-room and set it back in its place on the marble-
topped table.
She had an operation, and was delirious. "It's sad—sad to go
through so much pain and then have a dead baby.”
She died.
)
a
You see what a well-conceived study it is, how carefully planned,
how modern and how thoughtful in its psychology. And Miss Sin-
clair is right in the title of her book. For Harriett's death, though it


RAYMOND MORTIMER
533
passage of time.
only occupies a couple of pages, is given with a fine intensity which
makes the book worth reading for it alone.
The book sets out to portray the whole life of an educated woman,
sixty-eight years, in about a quarter of the length of an ordinary
novel. The English Press has greeted the book with a general shout
of "Wonderful Economy.” Economy is fashionable just now. But
is this true economy? Or is it parsimony?
?
Miss Sinclair has not succeeded in overcoming the first difficulty
of her enterprise. She has not given the sense of the slow inexorable
of time. Her Harriett is a child, then suddenly a girl, and
then an aging elderly woman. There are important incidents during
her middle years, but we have no clear vision of her at this period.
Miss Sinclair has added to her difficulties by adopting the James-
ian device of telling the story, not indeed in the first person, but only
as seen by the eyes and as reflected in the mind of one character. This
is a neat method, and may have rich results, but it is surely inappro-
priate to a story like this, the interest of which largely depends up
the reactions of cause and effect between that one character's sub-
consciousness and its surroundings. The result of its use must be
obscurity. We cannot tell how much is conscious, and how much
unconscious in the mind of Harriett Frean. Such a story needs to be
told from the point of view of an exceptionally intelligent third
party, or else in the old way by the omniscient author.
Whenever a new book by Miss Sinclair appears, we wonder what
it will be like this time; or rather whom. For she is exceedingly
alive to new developments both in psychology and the technique of
writing. Indeed when a new author, or still more a new authoress
wins our admiration by an innovation in method, Miss Sinclair al-
ways wants to show us that she can do it herself just as well. In
Mary Olivier she did a Dorothy Richardson. This time it is a Kath-
arine Mansfield.
But with a difference. In her admirable stories Miss Mansfield
gives us usually one, or at most a couple of incidents, and enriches
them with carefully chosen detail which may seem irrelevant but is
never superfluous. From these brilliantly spot-lit points the whole
life of the characters before and after spreads in the reader's imagi-
nation like ink on blotting-paper. That is the art of the short story.
But Miss Sinclair does not set out, she may protest, to write a short
story. Her enterprise is a novel stripped of all irrelevance. But


534
MISS SINCLAIR AGAIN
a
there is a sense in which flesh and blood are irrelevant to a skeleton.
And why not carry the process a little further, strip a little more?
Why not be content with the five hundred or so words (they are
almost all hers) of the story as given above?
How we miss the sudden subtleties of insight that flicker through
Miss Mansfield's work, the momentary glimpses of sharp beauty!
Between the work of these two excellent artists there is a difference,
the difference between condensation and intensity, between a slight-
er and a greater intuitiveness, between great talent and something
rather more. Hoffmann's Poupée had all the movements of life:
Petrouchka in the ballet had life itself, a soul.
The old army of psychological novelists, with Henry James at
their head, left no act of their characters without a clear and con-
scious cause for it, and thereby justly deserved to be called academic.
For life isn't like that. The new army, with Miss Sinclair deter-
mined not to be far from the van, are apt to leave no act without a
clear cause for it in the subconsciousness. This novel in consequence
resembles an X-ray photograph—the facts are there but not the like-
a
ness.
Miss Sinclair's skill is astonishing, her brilliance never failing, but
she writes a priori. She is an academic artist in the truest and least
insulting sense.
RAYMOND MORTIMER


BRIEFER MENTION
A DAUGHTER OF THE MIDDLE BORDER, by Hamlin Garland (8vo, 405 pages;
Macmillan: $2) is the conclusion of the McClintock-Garland story, but
Mr Garland is less happy as he gets further away from his boyhood. This
book is too self-conscious for a saga and too superficial for autobiography.
In his desire to present a faithful picture of his period, he has not spared
his naiveté—the dress-suit episode illustrates with delicious exactitude the
sentiments of the greater part of the country at that time—but there are few
men genial and mellow enough to have recounted it quite as it is here set
down. Many literary figures of the day pass through the pages of the book,
but one has only to remember Hail and Farewell to see how clumsy a hand
at gossip is this incorrigible pioneer who could not resist the lure of the pen,
chiefly, one might think, because its subtleties were as far removed from him
as the ever-receding western horizon.
THE PRISONERS OF Hartling, by J. D. Beresford (12mo, 273 pages; Mac-
millan: $1.75) has all of Mr Beresford's capacity of making the slightly
unreal (which is not the same thing as the impossible) seem exceptionally
credible and interesting. It is the story of a household dominated by the
hope of a legacy, the testator, a very old man, working his position for all
it is worth. Mr Beresford has done rather well the difficult job of distin-
guishing the individuals in this unit of greed and servility and apprehension,
less well the easier characters of the two rebels against authority. The
climax is good and the anti-climax, which the author thoroughly under-
stands how to use, is remarkable. The single fault of the book is a sort of
gentle dulness in several reaches of a none too lively stream.
The Road, by Elias Tobenkin (12mo, 316 pages; Harcourt, Brace: $2)
grasps a fundamental truth about provincialism which managed to elude
the photographic realist of Main Street; namely, that the cure for provin-
cialism, and its attendant mental and moral hobbles, lies in self-realization
and not in the appliqué art method. The materials are not unfamiliar, but
they have been handled with restraint and a constant sense of their fitness.
The industrial background of the story is sharply and significantly render-
ed; there are no documentary patches—consequently no dull ones. A well.
turned piece of writing.
One Man's View, by Leonard Merrick (12mo, 214 pages; Dutton : $1.90)
omits none of the conventional gestures of the triangle story involving the
discontented wife, the busy barrister, and the responsive playwright; the
author hasn't even troubled to hide the strings, or to assume those little ven-
triloquial disguises which are so satisfying to the unexacting. The narra-
tive lacks even the pretence of artistic motivation; it is disclosed in the
baldest manner, and the reader is hurried along the high-road of Mr Mer.
rick's macadamized tragedy with no time to see anything but the guideposts.


536
BRIEFER MENTION
Guest THE ONE-EYED, by Gunnar Gunnarrsson, translated by W. W. Wor-
ster (8vo, 340 pages; Knopf: $2.50). The Icelander author of this book
learned Danish in order to secure a wider audience, and Mr Knopf has
helped his ambitions by having two of his novels translated into English.
Just why, it is difficult to conjecture. The book positively sweats loving
kindness, the fear of God, and northland gloom. By the contagion of en-
thusiasm it manages to convey something of the beauty of that sombre,
silent country which it is unable to express in words, but never did any au-
thor, with better intentions, sentimentalize and emasculate life, or advance
his plot by more astonishingly inept inventions than Mr Gunnarrsson em-
ploys.
PAN AND THE TWins, by Eden Phillpotts (8vo, 239 pages; Macmillan : $1.75)
is a fantasy which tries to link something of Marcus Antoninus with
Horace and whimsy. Since whimsy is as elusive a thing as humour, it
might have been more practical to put salt on its tail than to spread the
elaborate net of slightly archaic and elliptical phrases which Mr Phillpotts
has fashioned. The fallacies inherent in the Christian denial of life are
eloquently pointed out by the goat-hoof God, and the conflict between pagan-
ism and Christianity, from Julian to Theodosius, instructively sketched.
A CHILD OF THE ALPs, by Margaret Symonds (12mo, 330 pages; Stokes :
$1.90) is the amorphous reflection of a cultivated, reflective, and discerning
woman who sees the human scene in a great way, but is a stranger to the
austerities and the swift felicities of great writing. The book is tarred with
a romanticism derived from both the Germans and the English of a genera-
tion which we like to think more naïve than ours, it is wordy, and it per-
petrates one character, a combination of Pan and Mephistopheles, who
would fit into a Griffith morality play. Its author is innocent of the tricks
of mimicry and ignorant of the difficult technique of character presenta-
tion; nevertheless real people emerge laboriously from her pages.
ROSE AND Rose, by E. V. Lucas (12mo, 291 pages; Doran: $1.90) is a gar-
land heavy with perfume—the hothouse souvenir of one who has already
stenciled his rows and rows of books; to be enjoyed chiefly by those for
whom the vinegar cruet is an unthinkable antidote.
BRAZILIAN Tales, translated and edited by Isaac Goldberg (12mo, 149 pages;
Four Seas: $2). Poe's influence, like his reputation, has still to reach its
2
zenith. Meanwhile one cannot turn to contemporary letters in any country
without finding that the short story writers are indebted to the great genius
who achieved his highest expression in the weird confines of superstition and
unreality. Mr Goldberg presents four writers who play delicate, exotic,
and individual variations on motifs furnished by Poe. His choice is in-
telligent though somewhat arbitrary: Machado de Assis, chief of Brazilian
writers, is represented by two tales and an imaginary conversation which
combines the vigour of Poe with the restraint of Landor; characteristic
stories of Medeiros e Albuquerque, Coelho Netto, and Carmen Dolores, and
a short but illuminating discussion of Brazilian literature by the translator
complete the volume.
a


BRIEFER MENTION
537
a
ANTHOLOGY OF Irish Verse, edited with an introduction by Padraic Colum
(12mo, 361 pages ; Boni & Liveright: $3) offers a feast of beauty and a re-
capitulation of the spiritual history of the Irish people. Wholly individ-
ual in its architecture, Mr Colum's anthology is distinguished by an aes-
thetic purpose so profundly effective as to seem almost inevitable. The
selection of material is not representative of the work of individual poets,
but is expressive of dominant racial moods and the themes of racial life
and memory which they have illuminated. In this sense the book con-
stitutes not only a subtle interpretation of the enduring heritage of the Irish
spirit, but the most completely revelant introduction to the body of litera-
ure in which that spirit has achieved one of its noblest dedications. Cer-
tainly Mr Colum's arrangement of the poems demonstrates what critics
have usually neglected to make evident, that the chief preoccupations of
ntemporary Irish literature are integrated in the spiritual syntheses of a
people. Mr Colum's introduction to the volume, as might be expected, is
an essay of characteristic beauty and of exquisite poetic insight; as a criti-
cal evaluation of the progress of Irish poetry from the eighteenth century
to the present it is compactly authoritative. Even more important, how-
ever, is its finely expressive definition of the specific and notable contribu-
tions to modern aesthetic experience made by the poetry of resurgent Ireland.
COBBLESTONES, by David Sentner (12mo, 90 pages Knopf: $1.50) is the first
volume to receive the Alfred A. Knopf prize offered annually for the best
book by an undergraduate of Columbia College. Mr Sentner's book con-
sists chiefly of New York City sketches in free verse, some incisive, some re-
vealing, some as platitudinous as a human-interest newspaper. The best
poems embody social satire. Though not distinguished poetry, the book
shows an interesting and promising personality.
FAIRY BREAD, by Laura Benét (12mo, 40 pages; Seltzer: $1). The best work
in this book is in no way concerned with fairy food, it is rather the expres-
sion of woman's dole-in every sense of the word. Miss Benét speaks for
the betrayed virgin, the bereaved daughter, and the broken grandmother
with tender insight and forceful imagery. It is evident that poignant emo-
tion, not light fantasy, is the field she will exploit to greatest advantage.
ANTHOLOGY OF MAGAZINE VERSE FOR 1921, edited by William Stanley Braith-
waite (8vo, 294 pages; Small, Maynard: $2.25). An anthology must be
held more responsible for what it omits than for what it includes, since the
latter is mainly a matter of taste while the former is unquestionably a test
of artistic perception and courage. Mr Braithwaite, veteran compiler
though he is, still seems uncertain of the validity of his own opinions or un-
willing to face the responsibility of independent judgements. Thus he
omits much genuine poetry because it appears in forms not yet generally
accepted; he also omits some of the best things in the accepted forms because
they have found publication in other than the venerable periodicals which
he considers authoritative. Finally, he subscribes to the popular fallacy
that the Saxon poets are “constructive" in their themes and visions while
“the revolutionists tumble out of the category of this Saxon nomenclature";
naturally, the poems in the book bear out the introduction.


538
BRIEFER MENTION
THE JOURNEY, by Gerald Gould (12mo, 96 pages ; Yale: $1.50) is a book of
poems characterized by beauty, strength, and nobility. A group of odes
and a sequence of fifty strictly Italian sonnets on the journey of love com-
prise the volume. The author's point of view, indicated by such expres-
sions as "childhood's infinite infelicity," is no less modern than his forms
are traditional. Not only in his insight and vision, but in his rhythms and
his precision and clarity of utterance, the author attains distinction.
POEMS AND PORTRAITS, by Don Marquis (12mo, 134 pages; Doubleday, Page:
$1.50). Jazz music and the songs of Schubert would not form a stranger
combination than do the "Poems” and the “Portraits” of Don Marquis.
The latter are blades of satiric verse, often witty, but frequently undistin-
guished and cheap in tone; the former are poems well worthy of the name,
poems marked by a music, an imaginative range, and a reflective quality that
compare favourably with the best that America is producing in the field.
Though occasionally rough in workmanship, they are never wanting in a
beautiful and vigorous rhythm; though sometimes lacking novelty of theme,
they never fail to treat their subjects from an individual point of view that
lends them effectiveness and power.
a
THE LATEST THING, and Other Things, by Alexander Black (12mo, 302
· pages; Harpers: $2) is further amplified on the jacket as "adventures in
seeing and saying.' Mr Black has a pleasant perch, halfway between the
perceptions of a journalist and the perspectives of an essayist. He has
lived long enough to be quizzically indulgent of current foibles; his occa-
sional thrusts are less devastating than diverting. In style, these papers
affect the detached epigram; the manner is Emersonian, but not the mood.
CotswOLD CHARACTERS, by John Drinkwater, with five engravings on wood
by Paul Nash (12mo, 54 pages ; Yale University Press: $1.40). SEEDS
OF TIME, by John Drinkwater (12mo, 68 pages; Houghton Mifflin:
$1.25). These volumes, prose and poetry respectively, lack the eloquence
and the imagery of Brooke's Grantchester but they fulfil their purpose much
better in that they bring conviction through understanding of, rather than
through emotional sympathy with, the place and the types presented. Curi-
ously enough, the best poem in The Seeds of Time is Portia's Housekeeping,
a projection of a literary character like that which Brooke achieved in his
Menelaus and Helen.
A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS, by W. H. Hudson (12mo, 339 pages; Dut-
ton: $3) records Mr Hudson's idly acute observations of the villages he
has rested in and the people he has met in his peripatetic old age. It is more
readable for its revelation of the author's unique personality than for any-
thing else. He seems always to be closer in his sympathies to all winged
things, from birds to wasps, than he is to man. His curiosity about people
is rather that which a bird might feel, not understanding human motive par-
ticularly well, but still strongly attracted by the strange things that human
beings do. And this perhaps explains why Mr Hudson writes so much more
interestingly about birds.
a


BRIEFER MENTION
539
A SHEPHERD's Life, by W. H. Hudson (12mo, 338 pages; Dutton : $3) has
distinctly an English appeal, since American shepherds have not survived a
Norman conquest and developed unwritten laws for themselves and their
dogs, governing the art of poaching. Mr Hudson has made a valuable
record of this stratum of English life, somewhat eroded since the war found
other use for shepherds. The book fails a little in the imaginative quality
which distinguished the author's earlier work, but it has an easy narrative
interest and a few vivid sketches of Davids and Goliaths on the Sussex
downs.
a
MY MAIDEN EFFORT, Being the Personal Confessions of Well-Known Ameri-
can Authors (12mo, 288 pages; Doubleday, Page: $2) issued under the
aegis of the Authors' League, begins in chaos (a preface by Gelett Burgess)
and emerges to creation (Mr Hergesheimer's contribution). In between
are many brands of autobiography, ornamented and unadorned, some wit,
and quite a handful of cash quotations. The last should prove illumina-
ting, if not exactly solacing, to the needy authors for whom the book's
profits are intended.
AN INTRODUCTION TO MYTHOLOGY, by Lewis Spence (8vo, 335 pages; Mof-
fat, Yard: $4) presents mythology as a science, and outlines the subject in-
terestingly, accurately, and fairly. Myths from every primitive people
known have been examined by Mr Spence and are here presented in appro-
priate classification.
The various theories regarding the evolution of the
gods are discussed with critical insight. Useful also is the outline of the
progress of mythical science from Xenophanes of Colophon, the first critic
of myth, through the twenty-five centuries to the scholars of to-day. Al-
though the author lives in England, where such appendages are not in vogue,
the book has an exhaustive index which adds much to its usefulness as a
reference volume.
The MENACE OF THE MOB, by Dmitri Merejkovski, translated by Bernard
Guilbert Guerney (12mo, 115 pages; Nicholas L. Brown: $1.50) is a
good sample of what happens to an author when his emotions get the bet-
ter of his dialectics. A somewhat windy attempt to prove that the mob
is a menace to Christian living rapidly degenerates into such dithyrambic
vacuities that it is quite possible the writer meant to put his case the other
way around. Reading this volume suggests a paraphrase of Lincoln's
famous remark: God must love common writers, He made so many of
them.
THE FALL OF FEUDALISM IN FRANCE, by Sydney Herbert (12mo, 230 pages;
Stokes : $2.75) though its title heads it for the reference shelf, has in a very
high degree the genuine human quality which attracts and holds the lay
reader. It binds history to the soil itself, and gives, with a clearness and
fulness pleasing to follow, that part of the French Revolution which lay
outside of Paris, the revolt of the peasants who demanded the fields they
had been cultivating for centuries, and who knew how to back those de-
mands with better, homelier arguments than the guillotine.


MODERN ART
LFI.
a
IFE as it gets into the newspapers has been decidedly looking up
during the past month. First appeared the Antigonish ghost
that plaited cows' tails together in the barn and ignited strange fires
in the house to such an extent that a Dr Prince who seems to be an
expert in these matters was called all the way from New York to
Nova Scotia to look into the affair. It made nice reading. Then came
the desertion of Mme Matzenauer by her husband whom she once
fondly called 100% man. The opera singer had married a chauffeur
who fled when the lady wasn't looking, with the explanation to the
always convenient reporters that he felt himself to be "below pitch.”
Then came the suicide of those strange lovers in Boston, the young
lady "model" and the Harvard student from Norway, who left be-
hind a note to the police in which occurred a dissertation upon death
that Thomas De Quincey himself might have envied. All these were
wonderful items, instinct with style, worthy of literature and cloth
bindings, and may yet be embalmed in permanent prose; but wonder-
ful as they were, they paled beside something our own Mayor did.
His Honour, in an unguarded moment, listened to an Iago who
told him that the new fountain by Frederick MacMonnies which
was about to be installed in a place in City Hall Park that has been
waiting for it a dozen years, was nothing but a concrete and unmiti-
gated insult to womanhood. The fountain was entitled Civic Virtue
and the protagonist was a rather burly young man rising triumphant
over temptation and trampling it under foot. Temptation, in the
classic manner, was represented by a group of writhing women. Vir-
tuous man escaping from unvirtuous woman, in other words. His
Honour took this intelligence calmly enough until Iago went on fur-
ther to explain that womanhood now had votes and that womanhood
with votes never would stand up for the rôle that the sculptor had
assigned her in this fountain. The full horror of the artist's intention
then burst upon our Mayor. His fury and his language, as it got
into the newspapers, knew no bounds. Never, with his consent,
should such an outrageous calumny upon American women pollute
the atmosphere of City Hall Park. The reporters, as to a man,
turned their backs upon the fleeing husband of Mme Matzenauer
a


HENRY MCBRIDE
541
and the grewsome suicides of Harvard, and devoted all their talents
to an exploitation of the Mayor's feeling. The uproar was so sud-
den and unexpected in art circles that the artist and his friends had
no time to prepare a proper defense. Defense, in fact, was scarcely
so necessary as propaganda, for His Honour, or the reporters, had
dubbed this husky figure that trampled women the “Rough Guy,'
and there was something in the appellation that tickled the public
fancy. It spread with the swiftness of a war-slogan and mere reason,
as we all now know, is powerless against a war-slogan. The Mayor
called a meeting of protest that had all the elements of low comedy.
Some already irate women attended and loudly defended the sex
from Mr MacMonnies' calumnies and were only slightly appeased
when told by certain defenders of Civic Virtue that the Rough Guy
was trampling fish not women. It seems the females that made a
decorative mass for the base of the design were intended as mer-
maids. But this was regarded as subterfuge by His Honour and the
meeting ended noisily in disapproval of the work of one of America's
foremost artists.
It should be added, fully to appreciate the episode, that neither
the Mayor, his Iago, nor the irate ladies had seen the carving in dis-
pute, but had judged from a photograph of it.
The Rough Guy, in fact, had had a rough deal. The matter at
this writing is still under debate but the various art societies of the
town are getting ready for action and influential citizens are assemb-
ling upon committees and doubtless, in the end, His Honour the
Mayor will relent enough to permit a trial marriage of the Rough
Guy to the City Hall Park. Once in place, the voice of criticism will
be stilled for no one in New York ever looks at a piece of sculpture,
good or bad, after it has been installed.
In all of this hubbub nothing in the way of art criticism was heard.
How, indeed, could there have been? Sensible people are not accus-
tomed to judging sculpture from photographs. So there seems no
possible procedure but to erect Civic Virtue and test it upon the hur-
rying thousands who pass through City Hall Park each night and
morning on their way to and from Brooklyn. Should Civic Vir-
tue, as conceived by Mr MacMonnies, seriously interfere with the
traffic of the lower part of the city it may be the means of instituting
a nice precedent, for heretofore no power on earth has ever been able
to banish disapproved statues from the city places.


542
MODERN ART
a
a
AFTER So quiet a season upon the part of our progressives that the
safe and sane school were beginning to put on airs, the modernists
have suddenly swooped in from nowhere and taken possession of the
city. With a unanimity that is probably accidental, but which looks
like a pre-arranged plan of attack the biggest and most important
showing of modern art since the Lexington Armory affair is now ac-
cessible to the public. In the Sculptor's Gallery there is a loan col-
lection of French art mostly recruited from Mr John Quinn's pos-
sessions. In the Colony Club there is an impressive display of the
recent things of the Americans, and this is backed up by similar ex-
hibitions in the Montross and Joseph Brummer Galleries.
Brancusi is the star figure in the French group at the Sculptor's
Gallery which includes such celebrities as Henri Rousseau, Braque,
Picasso, Derain, and Matisse, but this is partly due to his excellent
representation. It was found possible to include twenty-three Bran-
cusis, and although to enthusiasts everything by this master is of
the first water, nevertheless the portraits of Mademoiselle Pogany,
which have now become a series, seem an especial miracle. The first
versions of this young lady that came to us in brass and stone were
already marvels of pure expression, but the latest example in marble
carries the process of simplification still further without sacrificing
the essential spirit of the theme. On the contrary it emphasizes it.
A head in this collection and a hand, both evidently late "releases,"
have the air, at first glance, of having been polished by the sands be-
neath the sea for ages, like certain antiques that have been rescued
from ancient waters with surface details polished off, but all the es-
sential virtues intact. There is something ineffably precious and
tender about these pieces and the workmanship in them is beyond
anything hitherto encountered. Brancusi in spite of his glorification
of the material does not destroy it. But the extreme hush that he
spreads over these recent marbles tempts even his implicit followers
to ask, “What next ?"
HENRY MCBRIDE
a


MUSICAL CHRONICLE
I
N the course of the late great conflict for the liberation of human-
ity, many people here discerned, apart from the usual assorted
atrocities, a particularly grisly business in progress behind the
enemy's line. This differed considerably from the others; for while
they were alleged committed on the living, this felony was done
the dead. The Germans, one had it, were making things out of
corpses. Frankly commercial objects, like as two tacks to those dis-
played in the dusty window of any village Greenbaum! Out of the
dead bodies of their own soldiers and the Allies'; out of those of
ravished Belgians and interned externals! Warlords had sneered,
moustache-twirling, and given heartless orders to goosesteppers that
the poor corpse should be denied its hard-earned rest in kindly earth,
and made to subserve militarism in death as well as life. Out of
bones, buttons. Out of hair, mattress-stuffing. Skin tanned into
gloves for Prussian officers. Flesh, fish, and fowl, they all had their
usefulness.
Well, it appears that it has never been quite positively established
whether the word Kadaververwerthung, used in describing a war-
time German industry, signified the business of converting corpses
or of converting cadavers. Since the armistice, the question has be-
come an increasingly academical one. A great many folk have re-
cently become quite liberally convinced that we were mistaken in
suspicioning such horrendous things. They were merely the bodies
of dead horses and suchlike that were housewifely manipulated by
the Centrals. And anyhow, the whole thing ought to be forgotten,
as hate does no good anyway. But in the meantime, an old, old
trick has played itself again. Another buzzard, first perceived in
the neighbour's orchard, has suddenly appeared in our own to roost.
Nobody can say whether a society for the appreciation of corpses,
as we conceived it during the war, did or did not exist in Germany.
But a number of people are awakening to the fact that here, inside
New York City, more than three years since cessation of official
fighting, a most respectable musical association is commencing to
have the horrid complexion of a frank, bold Kadaververwerthung-
gesellschaft and to hoist us with our own petard. This is the so-
а


544
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
a
.
1
ciety of the Friends of Music. A great portion of its activity the last
season has been very much like that particularly grisly one which
was discerned in progress behind the Wotan line during bad four
years. Since the days of King Cambyses, we are moved to say, there
has not been viewed such a pilling of tombs, such a rifling of the grave,
as that which this society has been about the last winter. Dead hu-
man stuff has been ruthlessly cast upon the air. Poor corpses of
things that should have been granted eternal repose; poor objects
out of which all human life had departed, or which possessed even
in their day no human life, have been exposed to the callous stare
of an indifferent public and to the mockery of a graceless generation.
Dead symphonies and overtures and concerti that demanded noth-
ing of the living save that they pat the mould above their graves and
leave them to the dust from which they never succeeded in differing
much, have been produced and made the subject of attempts to con-
vert them into values. Was there in print insufficient musical life
that
ye had to do this to the poor departed? Could there not be
made a Bodanzkian holiday save at the expense of the deserved
sleep of the Mendelssohn Reformation Symphony and its unhappy
kin? No, it was to the Tomb that they addressed themselves for
material. That, had to give up its contents for appreciation. Ka-
daververwerthung.
Symptoms of the malady have been shown by the Society since
ever Mr Bodanzky bcame its Patiomkin. The scholarly man has
bettered the presentations of the music, which were not too smooth
before he assumed Prime Ministership; but due to his unfortunate
gusto for the feebler and prettier works of the German romantics, he
has been cheapening programmes which since the foundation of the
organization were never very strong or very decided. At least, be-
fore his consulship, nobody got up and sang Infelice. But since its
commencement, they have sung Infelice and unhappier yet; the or-
chestra has played other stirring things by Mendelssohn-Son and
Stranger, for example; and a chorus with four soloists and an orches-
tra gave a performance of a cantata by Schumann entitled Der
Rosenpilgerfahrt, which the unhappy Robert must have written
during the first stages of paresis, just before he tried to drown him-
self in the Rhine. There were also repeated performances of not
very necessary things by Brahms for horn and women's voices, and
a Jessonda or two (a Jessonda appears to be a musical form in which


PAUL ROSENFELD
545
you anticipate every note three bars before it arrives, and when it
arrives it sounds just as tame as you imagined). But, even last
season, the Society of the Friends of Music retained some of the
livelier colour it had once shown, or given earnest of eventually
showing. The organization which one would have wanted it to be,
the organization which one wants for New York so that there shall
be some vital progressive musical life in this great oafish capital, it
never was, it need scarce be remarked. We want in New York a
band of friends to music who are at the forefront of musical culture;
who will bring it about that the veritably new music which is being
produced in the world as well as the unknown classics shall be made
known to the New York that needs to know it; and who so heartily
believe in their work that they will see that many performances, and
not only one, are held, and that unfamiliar work is spoon-fed to the
recalcitrant public as Wagner once was fed to it. Something of the
nature will have to appear if musical New York is ever to cease be-
ing ten years behind Paris and five behind London. This responsi-
bility the Society of the Friends of Music had always rather timidly
evaded. Certain very important services it did, indeed, render the
art of music: its discovery to America of the music of Ernest Bloch
alone puts us everlastingly in its debt. Other rare events, too, took
place through it; one was given to hear the Kammersinfonie of
Schoenberg; one heard ultra-modern recitals by Arthur Rubinstein
and recitals of pre-Bachian piano-music by Harold Bauer; the Phila-
delphia Orchestra found its way through the society into New York.
But single performances of new and strange work seemed to satisfy
the organization's conscience. And the research into the whole field
of music; the presentation of Monteverdi and Purcell and Rameau,
of Scriabin and Strawinsky and the later more acid Schoenberg, and
Bartok and Satie and Ornstein, the unflagging enthusiastic research
the city needed; that, one bitterly missed, and cursed the timidity
or the stupidity that let it go unmade. .
Still, the society was an unicum. It gave one to hear works in genres
neglected by the other established organizations. One was given to
hear Bach cantatas, sinfonias for small bands or for unusual combi-
nations of instruments, a seasoning of novelties. And one hoped
that the timidity, the want of orientation, would end, and the dreamt-
of club flower from the somewhat pallid shoot. An announcement
that the society "would devote itself largely to the production of the


546
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
works of Bach” stimulated a hope inclined with each season to flag
a trifle more. Well, works of Bach have made their appearance
with increased frequency on the programmes of the society; the so-
ciety has a chorus which serves well in the presentation of the can-
tatas; and a flash of colour has been added to the musical life of New
York. But, although green has appeared on one twig, the others
have desiccated. This season, when any association of friends of
music should have seen to it that works like Lieder des Pierrot lun-
aire, L'histoire du soldat, Socrate, and the last sonatas of Scriabin,
and Berg and Bartok and Auric were made known to American musi-
cians, the Society of the Friends of Music has taken one step forward
and two backward.
"Incertitude, ô mes délices
Vous et moi, nous nous en allons
Comme s'en vont les écrevisses,
A reculons, à reculons."
Its novelties reached no further than early and still strongly De-
bussyianizing Ravel. Last year, it at least gave us the Bloch violin
This year, it was work of the unimportance and triviality
of the Korngold incidental music to All's Well; and of Novak's
Slovakian Suite, which reminds one of Goldmark's Rustic Wedding
Symphony and already dates as much, that was shovelled up. Oh,
yes, there were two performances of Mahler's Lied von der Erde.
Moving, but not through aesthetic form. Four sacred choruses by
Lazare Saminsky were also presented. Very scholarly, revealing
close study of Orlando and the other polyphonists; sincere; admir-
able even, particularly the fervent and coloured Ani Hadal; but
without any marked individuality. They might have been written
by any one of the block of Russian Jewish composers bent on reviv-
ing a Hebrew culture. During the choruses one heard oneself mut-
tering continuously “Lazare! Lazare! Lazare! Léve-toi !" For
some of Saminsky's later songs are far more spontaneous and living
than these choruses. His collection of Jewish folk-songs is notable,
and something more positive of the man's could have been found
easily. Also, there was Sam Thewman's choral setting of Schiller's
Der Abend, dedicated to Mr Bodanzky. Sam is stage-manager at
the Metropolitan Opera House, where Mr Bodanzky also works.
And all this in the midst of a Totentanz of symphonic works.
sonata.


PAUL ROSENFELD
547
When there was not Bach or Thewman, there were, at times, some
very interesting classical revivals, a Mozart symphony in c-major,
a Haendel concerto grosso, a Haydn symphony, a Brahms serenade.
But there was also, in the name of classical revivals, a series of
presentations of works such as many composers write, and all super-
sede; a desecration of the tomb such as even the New York musical
season has not seen this many a year. Mendelssohn's dry, shallow,
pedantic Reformation Symphony led off. The little snob, trying to
play the good Protestant! Then came Schubert's symphony in b-flat,
with its praecoxy repetition of phrases and want of movement.
Then a Mozart double concerto for harp, with a chromatic cadence
interpolated in every movement for the benefit of Carlos Salzedo.
Then a Spohr concerto for violin. Then lesser overtures by Mozart
and Weber. What puzzles one is that Mr Bodanzky should have
failed to seize his magnificent opportunity to perform all the sym-
phonies of Gade. Perhaps he is reserving them for next season, and
will revive them then together with music by Sterndale Bennett,
Spontini, and Lortzing.
To-day, the Society seems to exist chiefly for the sake of the op-
portunity it affords Mr Bodanzky. Since Mr Bodanzky wishes to
have an orchestra, its concerts are entirely orchestral. So it has
come to this pass: for, though Mr Bodanzky is a musician of great
value to the city, for he is a solid scholar, and represents a sort of
rock of musicianship among so many of his ignorant confrères, he
has always been more a cerebral than a temperament, and of late the
malady seems to have increased. New York has dried him as it dries
others. He himself has gotten to resemble an abstraction by Picas-
so, say. Have you noticed it? He seems to have been taken into the
mind and issued re-organized more geometrico. There is something
about his coat that is like a metaphysical concept. The relation be-
tween his head and shoulders is purely dialectical. His eyes seem
less eyes than an expression of the will to see. It is well known, of
course, that the more purely mental we become, the more dull our
senses. And so in Mr Bodanzky, the affection for the convention-
ally pretty classics has become a mania as he himself has become
more and more pure intellect. And having found a society which
gives him the opportunity he so craves, he has inundated us with a
flood of dull music, and given promise of a most cadaverous future
for the society of his friends.
Paul ROSENFELD


THE THEATRE
a
THE
HE theory is that if one doesn't know what the artist was
driving at, the art work he has produced is a failure. Surely,
if you cannot tell what he was trying to do, you cannot tell how well
he has done it. The intelligence of the critic is assumed.
In the case of The Hairy Ape, Eugene O'Neill's intention seems
clear enough. In The EMPEROR Jones he composed a stage piece of
the romantic kind; in this of the realistic. (They are perfectly com-
prehensible adjectives and one must learn to use them with a clear
conscience.) The theme of the new play is stated with exceptional
clearness and something that approaches ferocity: the Yank whose
whole tone of life comes from his feeling that he belongs to the
monstrous inarticulate cruelty of coal and steel is dispossessed by a
word and a look; he so violently seeks to belong again, to whatever
he can, as to become obsessed; and dies in the arms of the one thing,
a hairy ape, to which, in the moment of his uprooting, he was re-
ferred. It will be very clear, if one considers how purely psycho
logical is the theme, that no matter from what material basis the
start is made, some sort of symbol, some sort of abstraction, must be
used to present the action. Mr O'Neill begins with the stokers'
bunks on a liner, the air, the language, the emotions equally thick;
and with lapses to be noted proceeds through a gradual conventional-
izing of things, and a slow abstraction of emotions, to a climax in
which he presents as something actually happening, the phantasms
of the protagonist's brain. From that point on it does not matter
how “real” anything appears; what matters only, as always in the
theatre, is what is effective.
The play is launched in the bunk-room and the process of conven-
tionalizing is virtually complete in the third scene, the stokehold.
In order to "fix" (chemical sense) the girl who is to descend into the
stokehold Mr O'Neill has inserted between these two scenes one on
deck, and here, instead of giving us the convention of the bloodless
society-girl-slummer he has given us the cliché. Instead of contrast
between the foul thing which lived in the bunks and the simulacrum
of life on deck, one got an incongruity because Mr O'Neill changed
the method and the process of presentation. The vehemence of
a


THE THEATRE
549
the later scenes carried this off until the moment when the man-ape
appeared in the meeting room of the I. W. W. He had been seeking
his revenge on the girl whose single look had destroyed his life; he
had attacked the impregnable unconsciousness of Fifth avenue; he
had been in a cage in jail. The stream rising higher with each scene,
his destiny became apparent; but here again Mr O'Neill dropped
into another framework. It may have been necessary to show that
even in the supposed violence of the I. W. W. he could not find the
instrument of his revenge on life; my own feeling is that the scene is
unnecessary. But if it is there, it must not turn the spectator's mind
to intellectual activity. It does this and the terrifying scene in which
the ape comes to his own is almost ruined. The interlude after the
meeting room and the scene in front of the cage are so good, however,
that they save the end.
The language in The EMPEROR JONES was to be heard in line;
the terrific outbursts of The Hairy Ape are all mass; they are pal-
pable and take shape; they are really capable of being hurled. The
melody, the linear quality, is faulty; so the play reads badly. The
sound is tremendous. The Yank is, of course, inarticulate; it is not
through words, but through speech, that he finally expresses himself.
Mr O'Neill has had the choice of believing that this play is a com-
plete failure (Mr Heywood Broun) or the most significant produc-
tion of the season, virtually proving the existence of a separate art
of the theatre (Mr Stark Young). I must dissent, in the interests,
for once, of moderation. And I have avoided the adjectives of praise
or blame because Mr O'Neill's powers are well enough known to
himself and to the world; his defects are important because they are
remediable and because they are flaws in a notable talent.
G. S.


COMMENT
T is depressing to see a journal which for nearly a decade has been
I
a
American people. What else can we make of The New Republic in
its attack upon the proposed “American valuation” import duty on
books in foreign languages? We are a little at sea concerning the
motives of our law-givers; but the effect is beyond question. The
tax on all books printed abroad is bound to go up; that on books in
the Continental languages will be prohibitive, according to the com-
ments of The New Republic. At this moment, we understand, Ger-
man publishers are charging several times as much for books to be
exported as they are for the same books for domestic use, counter-
acting, thus, the iniquities of our rates of exchange. When the new
law is passed these books will be assessed here not on their present
value, but on the supposed value of the books in America; the least
that can be done is to assess them according to the pre-war value of
the mark. Collectors, scientists, and libraries will suffer most. In
a small way foreign authors and publishers will suffer also.
A little give and take in the operation of the law will, we feel sure,
correct its worst faults. There can be no mathematical way of fig-
uring out the American valuation; in the end common sense will tri-
umph and the customs inspectors, who never take any one's word for
anything, will determine just how great the value of Professor Ein-
stein's latest book may be to an American reader. A text book on
Engineering, with many plates, will rank high, and costly bindings
will be costlier still before the revenuers get through with them. On
some items we shall be hard; recalcitrant Europe will still bear
watching and learning.” But a good solid incomprehensible book,
a serious or frivolous work of art, will unquestionably be considered
worthless and as such assessed.
And if not? Suppose that the purpose of our Elder Statesmen is
to build such a tariff wall that European authors will all die-of dis-
couragement. How serious will that be? Doesn't one promptly
see that if no European novels can enter this country, the American
product, by the beneficent workings of the law of supply and de-
mand, will be at least twice as great, numerically? We are aware
а


COMMENT
551
that for the present Congress does not dream of the logical end of
the task it has set itself; for the next few years it will be possible to
import one single copy of a book and have it printed in this country.
a
But that weak compromise is only temporary.
What is admirable
in Congress is its remorseless logic. The brain behind the tariff is in
all respects the brain which evolved the notion of protection for in-
fant industries, and who knows better than Congress that in all mat-
ters of art and philosophy we are as infants crying, if one may quote
a foreigner, in the night. We have, once before, protested against
the corruption of our strong, healthy, pioneer civilization by contact
with a Europe which is not only degenerate, but obstinately main-
tains the traditions of its culture. Congress has stepped in, to save
America, to teach American scientists that independence is more
praiseworthy than cooperation, to give a free field to American book
makers. We will thank The New Republic to keep its hands off.
Since we are going in for social questions we may as well add a
corrective footnote to the account, elsewhere published, of the Statue
and the Bust-up. After that article was written and ready for press, ,
a word about art was spoken. We forget the details; a woman's
club was in the affair. The suggestion was revolutionary—that a
work of art should be judged on its merits as a work of art. The
aesthetic attitude not having previously occurred in municipal his-
tory, no action followed. Very few of those who spoke on the sub-
ject in any connexion acquitted themselves.
The nature of The Dial's award, which crowns no book, pro-
claims no best, and in general is exactly what it claims to be, may be
taken as an indication of our attitude towards most prizes and rank-
ings. It is known that the thought of the Prix Teloutel enters the
minds of not a few French authors and we fancy that several Ameri-
can works are written with some specific prize in view. Obviously
those who need that kind of stimulation, need it badly. The condi-
tions of our award make competition impossible, and, as far as we
can see, the plan of the Authors Club is similar. Each year the mem-
bers choose a book, from the lists of the previous year, which “con-
stitutes the most significant contribution to literature by an Ameri-
can writer.” The choice is not “in the air” for the Club proposes to
publish a critical brochure on the work of the chosen author, and, in


552
COMMENT
that way, give practical recognition to him. The first work to be so
noted (for the year 1921) is the Collected Poems of Edwin Arling-
ton Robinson—as significant an example as can be found of the pos-
sibility of doing fine work without the spirit of competition.
One of the things most frequently charged against artists and
those who care for the arts is that they are not dependable people.
But in comparison with hard business men and politicians are these
flighty creatures so bad? Consider that the fluctuations of the Con-
gressional mind have, too late for us to do anything about it, com-
pletely destroyed the applicability of the first paragraph in these
pages of comment. After months in which we were assured (by
equally hard-headed observers) that the hard-headed Congressmen
were going to make law the incredible stupidity of the American
valuation, Congress has neatly wiped the idea from its slate. It is
depressing. Perhaps The New Republic really had something to do
with it; perhaps Congress isn't stupid. Our readers will judge from
the latter of these speculations to what a turmoil of spirit this volte
face of Congress has brought us.
All we can say is that we have now finished with political interest
for ever. We may be moved to write a word here and there; but
only in the hope of being ineffectual. It is a little too much like
playing with hidden forces for us to send a protest to the press
and
have it become out-dated before it has been published. Had the
printer's schedule been less rigid we should have destroyed the
earlier pages and kept secret our shame. As it is, we repent and pray.
1


EN
1



1
Property of A. C. Barnes
ACROBATS. BY CHARLES DEMUTH



THE INDIAL
IX
V
V
OXXIIO
JUNE 1922
MARGINAL NOTES
on Civilization in the United States
BY G. SANTAYANA
TITLE-PAGE
What is Civilization? Porcelain bath-tubs, et cetera? Fine art?
Free thought? Virtue? Peace? Peace, virtue, and free thought
might exist in Arcadia or in the Islands of the Blest, neither of
which would be called exactly civilized. Civilized means citified,
trained, faithful to some regimen deliberately instituted. Civiliza-
tion might be taken as a purely descriptive term, like Kultur, rather
than as a eulogistic one; it might simply indicate the possession of
instruments, material and social, for accomplishing all sorts of
things, whether those things were worth accomplishing or not. If
we insist on taking civilization as a term of praise, we must mean
by it something like institutions making for the highest happiness;
and what such happiness is could not be defined without plunging
into moral philosophy, in which no two persons would agree.
CONTENTS
The list of the thirty American authors of this book, and the
three foreigners, makes me tremble. I know a good many of them
and some (though this is not the moment to boast of it) have been
my pupils. I foresee that I am to hear the plaints of superior and
Note: These marginal notes by Mr Santayana are published in place of a
formal review of Civilization in the United States, An Inquiry by Thirty
Americans, edited by Harold Stearns (8vo. 577 pages. Harcourt, Brace
and Company. $5).
a


554
MARGINAL NOTES
highly critical minds, suffering from maladaptation; and that I
shall learn more about their palpitating doubts than about America
or about civilization. Nevertheless, as they are a part of America
-although they may forget to give America credit for having pro-
duced them—I shall be learning something about America after all;
and if their strictures upon their country sadden me, I can always
I
comfort myself with a fact which they may be too modest to notice;
namely, that civilization can't be at a low ebb where thirty such
spirits can be brought together in a jiffy, by merely whistling for
them.
a
PREFACE
.
O
.
.
‘As long ago as the autumn of last year
we wished
to take advantage of the strategic situation
decided
by majority vote to be good-natured and
urbane
No martyrs, and no one who was merely dis-
gruntled
Slow and careful selection
of like-
minded men and women
in common defense against
reaction.” Quite as I thought. Indignation at the powers
that be is a frequent source of eloquence in Europe; I have not
known it before in America on this scale. I shall be all ears.
Page vi. “There is a sharp dichotomy between preaching and
practice; we let not our right hand know what our left hand doeth.
The moral code resolves itself into
fear of
what people will say." I see the fact which Mr Stearns points to
here, but not as he sees it. The American conscience is not insin-
cere; it is only belated, inapplicable. The sanctities are traditional;
;
sentiment preserves and requires the habits and language of an elder
age; it has all the sincerity of instinct. But it does not exactly fit
the exigences of public life, which has been transformed and accel-
erated in a way which conscience can't keep up with, yet is dazzled
by and has not the heart to condemn; for it has to keep house, as it
were, with an obstreperous younger brother, the conscience of
emancipated human nature, with its new set of illusions and its
pride in its thundering, pushing life. The American intellect is shy
and feminine; it paints nature in water-colours; whereas the sharp
masculine eye sees the world as a moving-picture-rapid, dramatic,
vulgar, to be glanced at and used merely as a sign of what is going


G. SANTAYANA
555
to happen next. Mere man in America hardly has an articulate
logic in which to express his practical convictions, and I doubt if
even this book will supply the want. I won't say that it is itself
genteel; that would enrage its revolutionary authors too much; they
may have forgotten that Emerson and Thoreau and Brook Farm
were revolutionary. But if not genteel and not specifically Ameri-
can, the spirit of these critics is one of offended sensibility. Things
shock them; and their compensatory ideals and plans of reform are
fetched from abstract reflection or irrelevant enthusiasms. They
are far from expressing the manly heart of America, emancipated
from the genteel tradition. They seem to be morally underfed, and
they are disaffected.
Page vii. “American civilization is
not Anglo-Saxon.
Until we begin
to cherish the heterogeneous
elements which make up our life
we shall remain
a polyglot boarding-house.” M Doumic, a French ob-
server, has said that, while the English and Germans are races,
the United States, like France, is a milieu—what American philo-
sophy calls a "situation.” Only in France the memory and dis-
cipline of past situations survives in the different classes and parties,
in the church, army, government, and literature; whereas in
America, apart from a rather pale genteel tradition, only the present
situation counts. It is the present task, the present state of business,
and present fashion in pleasure that create the hearty unity and
universal hum of America—just the unity which these thirty indi-
vidualists resent, and wish to break up. Why not be patient ? Situa-
tions change quickly. Why not enjoy moral variety seriatim in-
stead of simultaneously? A proof that Americanism is the expres-
sion of a present material environment, is that the immigrants at
once feel themselves and actually become typical Americans, more
instinct with an aggressive Americanism than the natives of Cape
Cod or the poor whites in the South. Another consequence is that
the whole world is being Americanized by the telephone, the trolley
car, the department store, and the advertising press. Americanism,
apart from the genteel tradition, is simply modernism-purer in
America than elsewhere because less impeded and qualified by sur-
vivals of the past, but just as pure in Spanish-Italian Buenos Aires
as in Irish Jewish New York. If by cherishing heterogeneous ele-
ments, Mr Stearns means preserving the foreign nationalities in the
a


556
MARGINAL NOTES
.
.
new environment, I am afraid it is impossible. A leading German
whom I questioned on this subject (before the war) assured me
that in New York he could not prevail on his children to speak
German at home, nor to keep up any German traditions. The con-
tagion and rush of the milieu are too strong.
Page vii. "The mania for petty regulation, the driving, regi-
mentating, and drilling, the secret society and its grotesque regalia,
the
material organization of our pleasures and gaieties
painted devils
to frighten us away from the
acknowledgment of our spiritual poverty.” It is not so bad as that,
not at all Satanic. There ought to have been a chapter in this book
on manners and social intercourse. The heartiness of American
ways, the feminine gush and the masculine go, the girlishness and
high jinks and perpetual joking and obligatory jollity may prove
fatiguing sometimes; but children often overdo their sports, which
does not prove that they are not spontaneous fundamentally. Social
intercourse is essentially play, a kind of perpetual amiable comedy;
the relish of it comes of liking our part and feeling we are doing it
nicely, and that the others are playing up as they should. The
atmosphere of sport, fashion, and wealth is agreeable and intoxi-
cating; certainly it is frivolous, unless some passion is at work
beneath, and even then it is all vanity; but in that sense, so is life
itself, and a philosopher who is really a philosopher will not quarrel
with it on that account. What else than vanity could life possibly
be in the end? The point is that it should be spontaneous, innocent,
and happily worked out, like a piece of music well-played. Isn't
American life distinctly successful in expressing its own spirit?
THE CITY
.
Page 9-11. “The highest achievements of our material civiliza-
tion
count as so many symptoms of its spiritual failure.
escape from the environment
exotic architec-
ture
.” It is the common fate of all Christendom that, being
based on revolution and barbarian recalcitrancy, it has a divided
mind. Its arts cannot proceed ingenuously in a straight line of
development, but must struggle on by revivals, adaptations, archa-
isms, and abortions. I think architecture in America is most prom-
ising: the architects are intelligent and well-informed; they are


G. SANTAYANA
557
beginning to be prudent; and public taste is very watchful and
discriminating. It is not in churches nor in great official edifices
that artistic success or originality can be expected, but rather in
engineering works, such as sky-scrapers, or else in ordinary private
houses, such as in England are called cottages and in America
"homes.” Shaded streets of detached villas, each in its pocket-
handkerchief of land, are distinctively American. With a little
more solidity in the materials and a little more repose in the designs,
they might be wholly pleasing; and if sometimes they seem chaotic
and flimsy, as if they were a row of band-boxes laid on the ground
and not houses built on foundations, perhaps they only express the
better the shifting population which they shelter. They are the
barracks of industrialism, which cannot live in the country, but is
spilled out of the towns.
a
POLITICS
Page 21. [A representative
shall be an inhabitant of
that state in which he shall be chosen.] “Find me the worst ass in
Congress, and I'll show you a man (whom this regulation has]
helped to get there and to stay there. Find me the most shameless
scoundrel, and I'll show you another.” I do not think this regula-
tion is at fault; fair representatives might have been chosen by lot
like jurymen. The trouble is that salaries, patronage, and the possi-
bility of re-election have turned them into professional politicians.
These are just as bad when attached to a national machine as to a
local one. Representatives should merely interrupt their private
business, during parts of two years when Congress is in session, and
then return to the plough, the counter, or the work-shop. At the
next election, someone else should be chosen to represent the in-
terests and express the views of his fellow-citizens. In this way
government by the people would not perish from the earth.
Page 23. “The average congressman
is
not
only incompetent and imbecile, but also incurably dishonest.” Why
exaggerate ? "His knowledge is that of a third-rate country lawyer
His intelligence is that