of a country-newspaper editor, or
evangelical divine. His standards of honour are those of a country
banker .” Why not? Shouldn't a representative be repre-
sentative? A reformer, a prophet, an expert, a revolutionary com-
.


558
MARGINAL NOTES
a
a
mittee sitting in enlightened New York would not be a fair vehicle
of popular government. Isn’t democracy built on the experience and
.
the conviction that superior people are dangerous, and that the
instinct of the common people is a safer guide? But what surprises
me more than disbelief in democracy, is this hatred of the country-
side. Is agriculture the root of evil? Naturally, the first rays of the
sun must strike the east side of New York, but do they never travel
beyond?
JOURNALISM
Page 43. “I fail to find any evidence of widespread disgust with
the newspaper as it is.” Is it worse than the gossip diffused in the
old days by barbers and porters? A racy popular paper is like the
grave-digger in Hamlet, and I don't blame the people for paying
a penny for it.
Pages 45-48. “All newspapers are controlled by the advertising
department.
Business is behind government and govern-
.
ment is behind business.
It is a partnership of swindle."
Would it be better if government strove to ruin business and busi-
ness to discredit government? And if government is stable and busi-
ness prosperous, how is the nation swindled?
Pages 49-50. “False 'optimism'
about the militar y
exploits of Russia's enemies
Kolchak and Denekin
‘Lying about Lenin' goes merrily on.
The Lon-
don Labour Herald exposed the trick of Lloyd George
the prince of political liars.
Mr. Hughes' idiotic
attitude.” This fairly lets the cat out of the bag. Mr Macy's
objection to the American press is not that it is controlled by busi-
ness or government, but only that this business is capitalistic and
this government not a Soviet Republic.
.
EDUCATION
Page 77. "Faith
in what is called education.” Mr
Lovett calls this the great American superstition, but appears to
have great hopes of it himself, if it could only be directed to spread-
ing enlightenment instead of prejudice. With "management of
institutions of teaching by the teachers” (which he oddly calls
democratic control) "the spoliation of the schools by politicians,


G. SANTAYANA
559
>
a
the sacrifice of education to propaganda, the tyranny of the hier-
archy can be successfully resisted.” Page 91. But wouldn't a guild
of teachers form an irresponsible hierarchy, imposing their ideas on
society when they agreed, and quarrelling among themselves when
they did not? If this syndicated enlightenment were simply offered
without being imposed, people would go to school only as they go
to the dentist, when aching for knowledge; and how often would
that be? Freedom—and young America furnishes a proof of this,
does not make for enlightenment; it makes for play. A free society
would create sports, feasts, religion, poetry, music; its enlighten-
ment would be confined to a few scattered sages, as in antiquity.
What brings enlightenment is experience, in the sad sense of this
word—the pressure of hard facts and unintelligible troubles, mak-
ing a man rub his eyes in his waking dream, and put two and two
together. Enlightenment is cold water. Education is quite another
matter. “The purpose of this college," I heard the Master of Balliol
say in 1887, “is to rear servants to the Queen.” Education is the
transmission of a moral and intellectual tradition, with its religion,
manners, sentiments, and loyalties. It is not the instruction given in
American schools and colleges that matters much, or that constitutes
an American education; what matters is the tradition of alacrity,
inquisitiveness, self-trust, spontaneous co-operation and club-spirit;
all of which can ripen, in the better minds, into openness to light
and fidelity to duty. The test of American education is not whether
it produces enlightenment, but whether it produces competence and
public well-being. Mr Lovett does not seem to remember that
.
mankind is a tribe of animals, living by habit and thinking in
symbols, and that it can never be anything else. If American educa-
tion does not transmit such a perfect human discipline as that of a
Greek city or of the British upper classes, that is not its fault; it
works on a vaster canvas with thinner pigments. But its defect lies
in not being thoroughly and deeply enough the very thing which
Mr Lovett condemns it for being—a transmitted life.
SCHOLARSHIP AND CRITICISM
Page 94. “Spiritual starvation
signs of its restless
gnawing on the face of almost any American woman beyond the
first flush of youth
hopeless craving on the face of almost
any mature American man.”
•
.


560
MARGINAL NOTES
.
.
.
.
a more
.
.
>
Page 98. "Body but no soul
freshness is not there
scholars without scholarship
churches without
religion.” What can be the cause of this dreadful state of things?
There are just three causes: Page 101 (1) “The conception of lit-
erature as a moral influence”; (2) “The
conception of
literature as the
vehicle for a new 'Weltanschauung'”;
(3) “The conception of
‘art for art's sake.' " And there
are just three remedies to be applied: Page 105 (1) “Aesthetic
thinking
The haphazard empiricism of English criticism
and the faded moralism of our own will serve us no more
We must seek purer and deeper streams
Only in this
way can we gain what America lacks, the brain-illumined soul."
(2) “Knowledge
a wider international outlook and a
deeper national insight”; (3) “Training in taste
complete submission to the imaginative will of the artist.” My own
experience does not suggest that Americans are wanting in taste,
knowledge, or aesthetic thinking; on the contrary, a great preoccu-
pation and anxiety about these things, a thirst for culture and a
desire not to miss or misunderstand anything, seem to be a chief
part of their spiritual misery. They are perpetually troubled lest
they should not fully enjoy the morning sunshine and their delicious
oatmeal and cream and cubist painting and the poetry of Miss
Amy Lowell; while their love for Botticelli is a tender passion and
their preference for Michael Angelo over Raphael is a philosophic
conviction. I hardly think that if the aesthetics of Hegel and of
Croce were taught in the high schools the facial muscles of the
nation would relax and they would burst into passionate song, like
Neapolitan minstrels. What I should like somebody to explain is
the American voice and language and newspapers; where taste and
sensibility are hardened to such a pervasive ugliness (or else affecta-
tion) in these familiar things, it is needless to look further for the
difficulties which beset the artist, in spite of his high ambitions and
enlightenment. The artistic idiom is foreign to him; he cannot be
simple, he cannot be unconscious, he has no native, unquestioned,
inevitable masters. And it is not easy for native masters to spring
up; the moral soil is too thin and shifting, like sand in an hourglass,
always on the move; whatever traditions there are, practical men
and reformers insist on abandoning; every house is always being
pulled down for rebuilding; nothing can take root; nothing can be
assumed as a common affection, a common pleasure; no refinement


G. SANTAYANA
561
.
of sense, no pause, no passion, no candour, no enchantment. The
thirty authors of this book, for instance, give out that they are the
salt of the nation: "We have a vitality and nervous alertness,”
they say (page 149) “which
might cut through the
rocks of stupidity
Our cup of life is full to the brim,”
”
and I have no reason to doubt it. Yet none of them seems ever to
have loved anything; that cup must be filled with a very unpalat-
able liquid; and this is how they write: “A scheme of undergradu-
ate emphases, grouped and amended as his triumphant progress
permitted him to check up on his observations.” “A curtailment of
potential scientific achievement through the general deficiencies of
the cultural environment." "Little of this talent succeeds in effectu-
ating itself.” “The fountain-pen with which a great poem is
written.” “Producing and buying art.” “This is not postured for
sensational effect.” “Essayed to boo it into permanent discard.”
“Arrived at a degree of theatrical polish sufficient to boast a little
playhouse up an ulterior mews.” “Sex, save it be presented in
terms of a seltzer-siphon, ‘Abendstern,' or the Police Gazette, spells
failure.” “Exceptions portend the first signs of the coming dawn.”
“Formulaic crisis-psychology.” “Too little faith in the rationality
of the collect to believe that problems can be faced in battalions."
“Let a producer break away from the mantel-leaning histrionism
and palm-pot investiture, and against him is brought up the curt
dismissal of freakishness.” “Scarcely time to admire a millionth
part
before a new and greatly improved universe floats
across the horizon and, from every corner news-stand, smilingly
bids us enter its portals.” Indeed there is scarcely time; and I
should be sorry to seem to break away with the curt dismissal of
freakishness, but I can't help agreeing with what I have marked
on another page, that “our ways of expression are very wasteful”
and that “when these rebels really begin to think, the confusion is
increased."
>
a
.
.
SCHOOL AND COLLEGE LIFE
Page 109. “American
cities are only less identical
than the trains that ply between them.” Yes; when I went to Cali-
fornia I discovered that West Newton, Mass., extends to the Pacific.
Page 112. “Americans are
uniformly charming." In in-
tention they are; they come forward smiling, “happy to meet you,"


562
MARGINAL NOTES
.
.
and apparently confident that the happiness will be mutual; they
beam as if sure to charm; but are they uniformly charming in fact ?
Charm seems to rest on something more than conventional kindness
and effusiveness, on subtle gifts which are not voluntary. Page 113.
“If our convictions
sprang from real knowledge of our-
selves and of our capacities, we should relish egoists, disinterested
critics, intellectuals, artists, and irreverent humorists." Each such
person would relish himself, even if they did not relish one another.
But Americans are diffident, often feigning an assurance which they
are far from feeling, and not able heartily to snap their fingers at
public opinion. The instinct and the ideal of uniformity are very
profound in them; if they are compelled to be rebels, they become
propagandists, like the authors of this book, and if they cannot con-
form to the majority they are not happy until they make the ma-
jority conform to them. Why this passion? Page 114. The teacher
is "a harassed young woman
who has to answer, or
silence, the questions of from a score to three score mouths. So begins
that long throttling of curiosity which later on will baffle the college
instructor.” This is an effect of being taught in classes; we listen
to the droning recitation or lecture as to the patter of rain. I believe
in schools, especially in boarding-schools and colleges, because I
think they are good for the character, and a relief to the family and
from the family; but they are bad for the intellect. A spark, no
doubt, will fly occasionally from the teacher and kindle some
thought or interest in the pupil; but he must depend for stimulus
on what he can pick up from books and from casual contacts. For-
tunately the school or college gives him intellectual leisure and
space, and allows him to brood; so that if there is intellect enough in
him to be worth asserting, it can assert itself. Page 116. "The
American undergraduate is representative of the American temper
at its best
As he thinks and feels, all America would
think and feel if it dared and could.” Yes; and what an immense
improvement it would be! The undergraduate is not devoted to
making money; he is not subject to women; he does, except when
the pressure or fear of the outer world constrains him, only what he
finds worth doing for its own sake. I wish reformers, instead of
trying to make the colleges more useful and professional, would try
to make the world more like the colleges. The things that the world
might find worth doing for their own sake would perhaps be nobler
than those that appeal to the undergraduate, though I am far from
.


G. SANTAYANA
563
confident of that; but in any case, means would no longer be pur-
sued as ends. The world would then shine with what is called
honour, which is allegiance to what one knows one loves.
Science
.
.
Page 151. "In art
mediocrity is worthless and inca-
pable of giving inspiration to genius. But in science
every bit of sound work
counts.” It counts in art also,
when art is alive. In a thoroughly humanized society everything-
clothes, speech, manners, government—is a work of art, being so
done as to be a pleasure and a stimulus in itself. There seems to
be an impression in America that art is fed on the history of art, and
is what is found in museums. But museums are mausoleums, only
dead art is there, and only ghosts of artists fit about them. The
priggish notion that an artist is a person undertaking to produce
immortal works suffices to show that art has become a foreign thing,
an hors-d'oeuvre, and that it is probably doomed to affectation and
sterility. Page 155. "American science
is
hot-house growth.” I am surprised to hear this, as I supposed that
astronomy, chemistry, natural history, and medicine were nowhere
more at home. That science may have practical applications, or
even may be pursued in view of them, does not seem to me to mili-
tate against its scientific purity, nor against a pure enthusiasm for
knowledge. It is again as in art; the thrill, the vision, the happy
invention come to the faithful workman as a free gift, in the midst
of his labour.
a
THE LITERARY LIFE
Page 180. “The chronic state of our literature is that of a youth-
ful promise which is never redeemed.” The fate of the Harvard
poets in my time-Sanborn, McCulloch, Stickney, Lodge, Savage,
Moody—was a tragic instance of this. If death had not cut them
all off prematurely, would they have fulfilled their promise? I
think that Moody, who actually accomplished most, would have
succeeded notably, in that as a dramatist or as a poet with a mission,
he would have secured general attention and respect; but even so, it
might have been at the expense of his early poetic colour and disin-
terested passion for beauty. Stickney, who was the one I knew best,
a


564
MARGINAL NOTES
could never, I am sure, have prospered in the American air. Al-
though he was a Harvard man, he had been well taught privately
first, and afterwards for many years studied in Paris. When he
returned to Harvard to teach Greek, he was heroically determined
to take the thing seriously, and to share enthusiastically the life of
his country; but the instrument was far too delicate and sensitive for
the work; his imaginative (yet exact) learning, his spiritual ardour,
his remote allegiances (as for instance to Indian philosophy) could
not have survived the terrible inertia and the more terrible momen-
tum of his new environment. Not that America does not afford
material opportunities and even stimulus for the intellectual life,
provided it is not merely retrospective or poetical; a man like
William James, whose plough could cut into rough new ground, left
an indelible furrow; but he had a doctor's healthy attitude towards
human ills, his Pragmatism was a sort of diagnosis of America, and
even he would have found it uphill work to cultivate beauty of
form, to maintain ultimate insights, or to live in familiar friend-
ship with the Greeks and the Indians. I managed it after a fashion
myself, because I was conscious of being a foreigner with my essen-
tial breathing tubes to other regions; nor did I really belong to the
irritable genus; I had perhaps more natural stamina, less fineness,
more unconcern, and the spirit of mockery, in the last resort, to
protect me.
a
Music
Page 210. “The American composer
works more or
less in a vacuum. He is out of things and he knows it.” Why should
he mind that? Music is a world above the worlds, and the ladder
into it can be planted anywhere. I suspect the difficulty lies in a
divided allegiance: the musician will not live on music alone, he
is no true musician. Snobbery, the anxiety to succeed, and a sort of
cowardly social instinct stand between the artist and his work. It
is because he wants "to be in things” that he fails, and deserves to
fail.
ECONOMIC OPINION
Page 255. “The idea that knowledge
is essential to
the right to an opinion
is little understood here." Be-


G. SANTAYANA
565
cause opinions are regarded as expressing people and not things.
This is a consequence of modern philosophy, or the principle of it.
All opinions are free and equal if, as modern philosophy maintains,
they have no objects and are essentially opinions about nothing;
the truth can then only be a harmony or a compromise established
among these opinions. You shake the ballots in a hat, and pull out
salvation.
RADICALISM
To be poor
.
Page 277. “Radicalism arises neither from a
desire
for more material goods, nor from
a particular formula
It arises from a desire to be free, to achieve dignity and
independence
is less annoying
than to be moderately well paid while the man who fixes one's
wages rides in a Rolls-Royce
You may challenge (the
workman] to prove that any other system would work better
Reasoning will affect him little. He
wants
power.” If envy is the only motive making for a revo-
lution, the revolution will not come except by force of a great
delusion; because if the people knew that it would bring them no
satisfaction but the satisfaction of envy, they would not want it. As
to power, it is only the leaders who would have it, and would “ride
in a Rolls-Royce” in the people's service; and accordingly it is only
they who would profit by the revolution, since the satisfaction of
envy is no benefit, but a new bitterness, like breaking another child's
toys; you wanted those fine things for yourselves and you have made
them impossible for anybody. It is very characteristic of "radi-
calism” to boast in this way that it is unreasonable and mean and
to ask you threateningly what you will do about it. For my own
part, I can do nothing, except be very sorry for the radicals and for
the people they would feed on the satisfaction of envy.
THE SMALL Town
Page 296. “There obviously cannot be among such a naturally
healthy people a supercilious contempt for sentiment
We may listen to the band concert on a Saturday night in the
Court House Square with a studied indifference
But
deep down in our hearts is a feeling of invincible pride.” Here


566
MARGINAL NOTES
а
at last is a note of affection; also some rays of humour. Per-
haps the extreme complacency about America that is characteristic
of the majority, and the profound discomfort and shamefacedness
of the minority, when it becomes critical, have a common root in
the habit of thinking in terms of comparison, of perpetual competi-
tion; either a thing must be the biggest and best in the world, or
you must blush for it. But only ways and means are good compara-
tively and on a single scale of values. Anything good intrinsically,
anything loved for its own sake, is its own standard, and sufficient
as it is. The habit of always comparing it with something else is
impertinent and shallow. It betrays a mind that possesses nothing,
loves nothing, and is nothing.
THE FAMILY
.
.
.
.
.
.
Pages 334-336. “The asylums are
Crowded
The groundwork for fatal ruptures
is laid
in
the home
Parents
never entertain a modest
doubt as to whether they might be the best of all possible company
for their children
They need themselves to understand
and practise the art of
happiness.” The prevalence of
insanity, of "breaking down," and of "nervous depression" is one
of the most significant things in America. It goes with overwork,
with not having a religion or "getting religion” (which is an inci-
dent to not having one) with absence of pleasures, forced optimism,
routine, essential solitude. An intense family life would prevent
all these miseries, but it would take away personal liberty. The
modern family is only the egg-shell from which you are hatched;
there you have your bed, clothes, meals, and relations; your life is
what occupies you when you are out. But as you foregather only
with chicks of your own age, who are as destitute as yourself, you
remain without the moral necessaries. The test of a good school or
college is its capacity to supply them. It is the only remaining
spiritual home.
ADVERTISING
Page 395. “Outdoor advertising
should be removed
from sight with all possible haste.” A truly radical view. It is not
to the eye only that America would be entirely transformed if a


G. SANTAYANA
567
severe paternal government abolished advertising. The key of the
whole symphony would be lowered, the soft pedal put on. Imagine
the change in speed, if you were reduced to consulting your inner
man before buying anything or going anywhere, and to discovering
first whether you really wanted anything, and what it was! And
imagine, when your inner need had become clear and peremptory all
of itself, having to inquire of some shy official, or of some wise
stranger, whether just the suit of clothes, or the play or the tour
which your soul dreamt of could possibly be brought anywhere into
the realm of fact, or must remain a dream for ever! It would not be
often that geography or theatrical managers or tailors would have
providentially anticipated your wishes, or would consent to realize
them; so that your wants would soon be marvellously reduced and
your soul chastened. But I suppose the idea of these radical re-
formers is that this very paternal government, in abolishing adver-
tising, would supply you with such clothes and such dramas and
such holiday excursions as you ought to want, and when you ought
to want them. It would be a reversion to antiquity, to the pious
peace and leisure of the most remote province in the most backward
country. Personally I should have no objection; but is this the
revolutionary ideal of "civilization in America”?
BUSINESS
with ex-
.
•
.
.
Pages 413-414. “Business is .. blind
travagant reflex powers of accommodation and extension and almost
no faculty of original imagination
It has brought about a
marvellous economy of human effort. At the same time . it
wastes the living machine in recurring periods of frightful and un-
necessary idleness
It wastes the spirit in the effort
to create new and extravagant wants.” Admirable summary; inven-
tions and organization which ought to have increased leisure, by
producing the necessaries with little labour, have only increased the
population, degraded labour, and diffused luxury.
.
O
SPORT AND PLAY
Page 458. "Its true
function is the cultivation of
bodily vigour, with a view to longevity.” Unless this is ironical-
and I am sometimes in doubt how to interpret the style of these


568
MARGINAL NOTES
authors—it is an astonishingly illiberal thing to say. What is the
use of longevity? If you said that the purpose of sport was health,
that would come nearer the truth, because health at least suggests a
good life, and is a part of what makes life worth having as it runs, ,
which the length of life is not. The Greeks would have said that
the purposes of gymnastics were beauty and military fitness; this
too would be a more acceptable thing to say, since beauty and fit-
ness for war and for victory contribute, like health, to the zest and
dignity of existence, while existence lasts. But essentially sport has
no purpose at all; it is an end in itself, a part of that free fruition
of life which is the purpose of other things, when they are good for
anything, and which, when present, can make a long life better
than a short one. Its possible uses are incidental, like those of the
fine arts, religion, or friendship. Not to see this is to be a barbarian.
HUMOUR
.
Pages 463-466. “Belief in American humour is a superstition
The prolongation of a single posture of the mind is intoler-
able
If by a happy stroke of fancy a cow in the dining-
room is made pleasing to the mind with the presentation of
nine cows in nine dining-rooms it has changed to pain.” I agree that
a perpetual search for the incongruous, even if it keeps us laughing
mechanically, is empty and vulgar and disgusting in the end. It is
a perpetual punning in images. And yet I feel that there is a genu-
ine spirit of humour abroad in America, and that it is one of the
best things there. The constant sense of the incongruous, even if
artificially stimulated and found only in trivial things, is an admis-
sion that existence is absurd; it is therefore a liberation of the spirit
over against this absurd world; it is a laughing liberation, because
the spirit is glad to be free; and yet it is not a scornful nor bitter
liberation, because a world that lets us laugh at it and be free is
after all a friendly world. We have no need to bear that serious
grudge against it which we should be justified in bearing if it fooled
us altogether, and tortured us by its absurdities instead of amusing
us and making us spiritually free.



By courtesy of Paul Cassirer, Berlin
MERMAID. BY GEORG KOLBE






By courtesy of Paul Cassirer, Berlin
DANCER. BY GEORG KOL BE





THE FOX
BY D. H. LAWRENCE
II
WH
HEN the logs were all in, the two cleaned their boots noisily
on the scraper outside, then rubbed them on the mat. March
shut the door and took off her old felt hat-her farm-girl hat. Her
thick, crisp black hair was loose, her face was pale and strained. She
pushed back her hair vaguely, and washed her hands. Banford
came hurrying into the dimly-lighted kitchen, to take from the oven
the scones she was keeping hot.
“Whatever have you been doing all this time?” she asked fret-
fully. “I thought you were never coming in. And it's ages since
you stopped sawing. What were you doing out there ?"
"Well,” said Henry, "we had to stop that hole in the barn, to
keep the rats out."
"Why I could see you standing there in the shed. I could see your
shirt-sleeves," challenged Banford.
“Yes, I was just putting the saw away.”
They went in to tea. March was quite mute. Her face was pale
and strained and vague. The youth, who always had the same
ruddy, self-contained look on his face, as though he were keeping
himself to himself, had come to tea in his shirt-sleeves as if he were
at home. He bent over his plate as he ate his food.
“Aren't you cold?” said Banford spitefully. “In your shirt-
sleeves.”
He looked up at her, with his chin near his plate, and his eyes
very clear, pellucid, and unwavering as he watched her.
"No, I'm not cold,” he said with his usual soft courtesy. “It's
much warmer in here than it is outside, you see.”
“I hope it is,” said Banford, feeling nettled by him. He had a
strange suave assurance, and a wide-eyed bright look that got on her
nerves this evening.
“But perhaps,” he said softly and courteously, "you don't like me
coming to tea without my coat. I forgot that.”
a
9


570
THE FOX
"Oh, I don't mind,” said Banford: although she did.
“I'll go and get it, shall I ?” he said.
March's dark eyes turned slowly down to him.
“No, don't you bother,” she said in her queer, twanging tone. “If
you feel all right as you are, stop as you are.” She spoke with a
crude authority.
“Yes,” said he, “I feel all right, if I'm not rude.”
“It's usually considered rude,” said Banford. “But we don't
mind.”
“Go along, 'considered rude,' ” ejaculated March. "Who con-
siders it rude ?''
“Why you do, Nellie, in anybody else,” said Banford, bridling a
little behind her spectacles, and feeling her food stick in her throat.
But March had again gone vague and unheeding, chewing her
food as if she did not know she was eating at all. And the youth
looked from one to another, with bright, watchful eyes.
Banford was offended. For all his suave courtesy and soft voice,
the youth seemed to her impudent. She did not like to look at him.
She did not like to meet his clear, watchful eyes, she did not like to
see the strange glow in his face, his cheeks with their delicate fine
hair, and his ruddy skin that was quite dull and yet which seemed
to burn with a curious heat of life. It made her feel a little ill to
look at him: the quality of his physical presence was too penetrat-
ing, too hot.
After tea the evening was very quiet. The youth rarely went into
the village. As a rule he read: he was a great reader, in his own
hours. That is, when he did begin, he read absorbedly. But he was
not very eager to begin. Often he walked about the fields and along
the hedges alone in the dark at night, prowling with a queer instinct
a
for the night, and listening to the wild sounds.
To-night however he took a Captain Mayne Reid book from
Banford's shelf and sat down with knees wide apart and immersed
himself in his story. His brownish fair hair was long, and lay on his
head like a thick cap, combed sideways. He was still in his shirt-
sleeves, and bending forward under the lamp-light, with his knees
stuck wide apart and the book in his hand and his whole figure ab-
sorbed in the rather strenuous business of reading, he gave Banford's
sitting-room the look of a lumber-camp. She resented this. For on


D. H. LAWRENCE
571
a
her sitting-room floor she had a red Turkey rug and dark stain
around, the fire-place had fashionable green tiles, the piano stood
open with the latest dance-music: she played quite well: and on the
walls were March's hand-painted swans and water-lilies. Moreover,
with the logs nicely, tremulously burning in the grate, the thick cur-
tains drawn, the doors all shut, and the pine-trees hissing and shud-
dering in the wind outside, it was cozy, it was refined and nice. She
resented the big, raw, long-legged youth sticking his khaki knees
out and sitting there with his soldier's shirt-cuffs buttoned on his
thick red wrists. From time to time he turned a page, and from time
to time he gave a sharp look at the fire, settling the logs. Then he
immersed himself again in the intense and isolated business of
reading.
March, on the far side of the table, was spasmodically crochet-
ing. Her mouth was pursed in an odd way, as when she had
dreamed the fox's brush burned it, her beautiful, crisp black hair
strayed in wisps. But her whole figure was absorbed in its bearing,
as if she herself were miles away. In a sort of semi-dream she seemed
to be hearing the fox singing round the house in the wind, singing
wildly and sweetly and like a madness. With red but well-shaped
hands she slowly crocheted the white cotton, very slowly, awk-
wardly.
Banford also was trying to read, sitting in her low chair. But be-
tween those two she felt fidgetty. She kept moving and looking
round and listening to the wind and glancing secretly from one to
the other of her companions. March, seated on a straight chair, with
her knees in their close breeches crossed, and slowly, laboriously
crocheting, was also a trial.
“Oh, dear,” said Banford. “My eyes are bad to-night.” And
she pressed her fingers on her eyes.
The youth looked up at her with his clear bright look, but did not
speak.
“Are they, Jill?” said March absently.
Then the youth began to read again, and Banford perforce re-
turned to her book. But she could not keep still. After a while
she looked up at March, and a queer, almost malignant little smile
was on her thin face.
“A penny for them, Nell,” she said suddenly.
March looked round with big, startled black eyes, and went pale


572
THE FOX
as if with terror. She had been listening to the fox singing so ten-
derly, so tenderly, as he wandered round the house.
"What?” she said vaguely.
“A penny for them,” said Banford sarcastically. “Or twopence,
if they're as deep as all that.”
The youth was watching with bright clear eyes from beneath the
lamp.
"Why,” came March's vague voice, “what do you want to waste
your money for ?"
“I thought it would be well spent,” said Banford.
“I wasn't thinking of anything except the way the wind was
blowing,” said March.
“Oh, dear,” replied Banford. “I could have had as original
thoughts as that myself. I'm afraid I have wasted my money this
time."
"Well, you needn't pay,” said March.
The youth suddenly laughed. Both women looked at him: March
rather surprised-looking, as if she had hardly known he was there.
“Why, do you ever pay up on these occasions ?” he asked.
“Oh, yes,” said Banford. “We always do. I've sometimes had
to pass a shilling a week to Nellie, in the winter time. It costs much
less in summer.”
“What, paying for each other's thoughts?” he laughed.
"Yes, when we've absolutely come to the end of everything else."
He laughed quickly, wrinkling his nose sharply like a puppy
and
laughing with quick pleasure, his eyes shining.
“It's the first time I ever heard of that,” he said.
“I guess you'd hear of it often enough if you stayed a winter on
Bailey farm,” said Banford lamentably.
"Do
you get so tired then?” he asked.
"So bored," said Banford.
"Oh!” he said gravely. “But why should you be bored ?"
”
“Who wouldn't be bored?” said Banford.
“I'm sorry to hear that,” he said gravely.
“You must be, if you were hoping to have a lively time here,"
said Banford.
He looked at her long and gravely.
"Well,” he said, with his odd young seriousness, “it's quite lively
enough for me.”


D. H. LAWRENCE
573
great dark
dark eyes
"I'm glad to hear it,” said Banford.
And she returned to her book. In her thin, frail hair were already
many threads of grey, though she was not yet thirty. The boy did
not look down, but turned his eyes to March, who was sitting with
pursed mouth laboriously crocheting, her eyes wide and absent.
She had a warm, pale, fine skin, and a delicate nose. Her pursed
mouth looked shrewish. But the shrewish look was contradicted
by the curious lifted arch of her dark brows, and the wideness of her
eyes; a look of startled wonder and vagueness. She was listening
again for the fox, who seemed to have wandered farther off into the
night.
From under the edge of the lamp-light the boy sat with his face
looking up, watching her silently, his eyes round and very clear and
intent. Banford, biting her fingers irritably, was glancing at him
under her hair. He sat there perfectly still, his ruddy face tilted
up
from the low level under the light, on the edge of the dimness, and
watching with perfect abstract intentness. March suddenly lifted
her
from her crocheting, and saw him. She started,
giving a little exclamation.
“There he is!” she cried, involuntarily, as if terribly startled.
Banford looked around in amazement, sitting up straight.
"Whatever has got you, Nellie ?” she cried.
But March, her face fushed a delicate rose colour, was looking
away to the door.
“Nothing! Nothing!” she said crossly. "Can't one speak?”
“Yes, if you speak sensibly,” said Banford. “Whatever did you
mean?”
"I don't know what I meant,” cried March testily.
“Oh, Nellie, I hope you aren't going jumpy and nervy. I feel I
can't stand another thing !-Whoever did you mean? Did you
mean Henry?” cried poor frightened Banford.
“Yes. I suppose so," said March laconically. She would never
confess to the fox.
“Oh, dear,” my nerves are all gone for to-night,” wailed Banford.
At nine o'clock March brought in a tray with bread and cheese
and tea—Henry had confessed that he liked a cup of tea. Banford
.
drank a glass of milk, and ate a little bread. And soon she said:
“I'm going to bed, Nellie. I'm all nerves to-night. Are you
coming?"
"


574
THE FOX
"
“Yes, I'm coming the minute I've taken the tray away,” said
March.
“Don't be long then,” said Banford fretfully. “Good-night
Henry. You'll see the fire is safe, if you come up last, won't you?”
“Yes, Miss Banford, I'll see it's safe,” he replied in his reassuring
way.
March was lighting the candle to go to the kitchen. Banford took
her candle and went upstairs. When March came back to the fire
she said to him:
“I suppose we can trust you to put out the fire and everything?"
She stood there with her hand on her hip, and one knee loose, her
head averted shyly, as if she could not look at him. He had his face
lifted, watching her.
“Come and sit down a minute,” he said softly.
“No, I'll be going. Jill will be waiting, and she'll get upset if I
don't come.”
“What made you jump like that this evening ?” he asked.
"When did I jump?" she retorted, looking at him.
“Why just now you did,” he said. "When you cried out.”
“Oh!” she said. “Then !-Why, I thought you were the fox!”
And her face screwed into a queer smile, half ironic.
“The fox! Why the fox ?” he asked softly.
“Why one evening last summer when I was out with the gun I
saw the fox in the grass nearly at my feet, looking straight up at me.
I don't know, I suppose he made an impression on me.” She turned
aside her head again, and let one foot stray loose, self-consciously.
“And did you shoot him?" asked the boy.
''
“No, he gave me such a start, staring straight at me as he did,
and then stopping to look back at me over his shoulder with a laugh
on his face.”
“A laugh on his face!" repeated Henry, also laughing. “He
frightened you, did he ?”
“No, he didn't frighten me. He made an impression on me, that's
all.”
“And you thought I was the fox, did you ?” he laughed, with the
same queer quick little laugh, like a puppy wrinkling its nose.
“Yes I did, for the moment,” she said. “Perhaps he'd been in my
mind without my knowing.”


D. H. LAWRENCE
575
>
"Perhaps you think I've come to steal your chickens or some-
thing,” he said, with the same young laugh.
But she only looked at him with a wide, dark, vacant eye.
“It's the first time,” he said, “that I've ever been taken for a
fox. Won't
you
sit down for a minute?” His voice was very soft
and cajoling.
“No,” she said. "Jill will be waiting.” But still she did not go,
but stood with one foot loose and her face turned aside, just outside
the circle of light.
"But won't you answer my question ?” he said, lowering his voice
still more.
"I don't know what question you mean.'
.
“Yes, you do. Of course you do. I mean the question of you
marrying me."
“No, I shan't answer that question,” she said fatly.
"Won't you?” The queer young laugh came on his nose again.
"Is it because I'm like the fox? Is that why?” And still he laughed.
She turned and looked at him with a long, slow look.
“I wouldn't let that put you against me,” he said. “Let me turn
the lamp low, and come and sit down a minute."
He put his red hand under the glow of the lamp, and suddenly
made the light very dim. March stood there in the dimness quite
shadowy, but unmoving. He rose silently to his feet, on his long
legs. And now his voice was extraordinarily soft and suggestive,
hardly audible.
"You'll stay a moment,” he said. “Just a moment.” And he put
his hand on her shoulder. She turned her face from him. “I'm sure
you don't really think I'm like the fox,” he said, with the same soft-
ness and with a suggestion of laughter in his tone, a subtle mockery.
“Do you now?”—And he drew her gently towards him and kissed
her neck, softly. She winced and trembled and hung away. But his
strong young arm held her, and he kissed her softly again, still on
the neck, for her face was averted.
"Won't you answer my question? Won't you now?” came his
soft, lingering voice. He was trying to draw her near to kiss her
face. And he kissed her cheek softly, near the ear.
At that moment Banford's voice was heard calling fretfully.
crossly from upstairs.


576
THE FOX
“There's Jill!” cried March, starting and drawing erect.
And as she did so, quick as lightning he kissed her on the mouth,
with a quick brushing kiss. It seemed to burn through her every
fibre. She gave a queer little cry.
"You will, won't you? You will ?” he insisted softly.
"Nellie! Nellie! Whatever are you so long for?” came Ban-
ford's faint cry from the outer darkness.
But he held her fast, and was murmuring with that intolerable
softness and insistency:
“You will, won't you? Say yes! Say yes!"
March, who felt as if the fire had gone through her and scathed
her, and as if she could do no more, murmured:
“Yes! Yes! Anything you like! Anything you like! Only let
me go! Only let me go! Jill's calling."
"You know you've promised,” he said insidiously.
"Yes! Yes! I do!” Her voice suddenly rose into a shrill cry.
“All right, Jill, I'm coming."
Startled, he let her go, and she went straight upstairs.
In the morning at breakfast, after he had looked round the place
and attended to the stock and thought to himself that one could
live easily enough here, he said to Banford:
“Do you know what, Miss Banford?”
“Well what?” said the good-natured, nervy Banford.
He looked at March, who was spreading jam on her bread.
“Shall I tell ?” he said to her.
She looked up at him, and a deep pink colour flushed over her
face.
“Yes, if you mean Jill,” she said. “I hope you won't go talking
all over the village, that's all.” And she swallowed her dry bread
with difficulty.
"Whatever's coming ?” said Banford, looking up with wide,
tired, slightly reddened eyes. She was a thin, frail little thing, and
her hair, which was delicate and thin, was bobbed, so it hung softly
by her worn face in its faded brown and grey.
"Why what do you think?” he said, smiling like one who has a
secret.
"How do I know!” said Banford.
"Can't you guess?” he said, making bright eyes, and smiling,
pleased with himself.


D. H. LAWRENCE
577
"I'm sure I can't. What's more I'm not going to try.”
“Nellie and I are going to be married.”
Banford
put down her knife, out of her thin, delicate fingers, as
if she would never take it up to eat any more. She stared with
blank, reddened eyes.
"You what?” she exclaimed.
“We're going to get married. Aren't we Nellie ?” and he turned
to March.
“You say so, anyway,” said March laconically. But again she
Alushed with an agonized flush. She too could swallow no more.
Banford looked at her like a bird that has been shot: a poor little
sick bird. She gazed at her with all her wounded soul in her face, at
the deep-flushed March.
“Never!” she exclaimed, helpless.
“It's quite right,” said the bright and gloating youth.
Banford turned aside her face, as if the sight of the food on the
table made her sick. She sat like this for some moments, as if she
were sick. Then, with one hand on the edge of the table, she rose
to her feet.
“I'll never believe it, Nellie,” she cried. “It's absolutely impos-
sible!"
Her plaintive, fretful voice had a thread of hot anger and despair.
“Why? Why shouldn't you believe it?” asked the youth, with
all his soft, velvety impertinence in his voice.
Banford looked at him from her wide vague eyes, as if he were
some creature in a museum.
“Oh,” she said languidly, “because she can never be such a fool.
She can't lose her self-respect to such an extent.” Her voice was
cold and plaintive, drifting.
“In what way will she lose her self-respect ?” asked the boy.
Banford looked at him with vague fixity from behind her spec-
tacles.
“If she hasn't lost it already,” she said.
He became very red, vermilion, under the slow vague stare from
behind the spectacles.
“I don't see it at all,” he said.
“Probably you don't. I shouldn't expect you would,” said Ban-
ford, with that straying mild tone of remoteness which made her
words even more insulting.
а
)


578
THE FOX
>
He sat stiff in his chair, staring with hot blue eyes from his scar-
let face. An ugly look had come on his brow.
“My word, she doesn't know what she's letting herself in for,"
said Banford, in her plaintive, drifting, insulting voice.
“What has it got to do with you, anyway?” said the youth in a
temper.
"More than it has to do with you, probably,” she replied, plain-
tive and venomous.
“Oh, has it! I don't see that at all,” he jerked out.
"No, you wouldn't,” she answered, drifting.
“Anyhow," said March, pushing back her chair and rising un-
couthly, “it's no good arguing about it.” And she seized the bread
and the tea-pot, and strode away to the kitchen.
Banford let her fingers stray across her brow and along her hair,
like one bemused. Then she turned and went away upstairs.
Henry sat stiff and sulky in his chair, with his face and his eyes
on fire. March came and went, clearing the table. But Henry sat
on, stiff with temper. He took no notice of her. She had regained
her composure and her soft, even, creamy complexion. But her
mouth was pursed up. She glanced at him each time as she came to
take things from the table, glanced from her large, curious eyes,
more in curiosity than anything. Such a long, red-faced sulky boy!
That was all he was. He seemed as remote from her as if his red
face were a red chimney-pot on a cottage across the fields, and she
looked at him just as objectively, as remotely.
At length he got up and stalked out into the fields with the gun.
He came in only at dinner-time, with the devil still in his face, but
his manners quite polite. Nobody said anything particular: they
sat each one at the sharp corner of a triangle, in obstinate remote-
ness. In the afternoon he went out again at once with the gun. He
came in at nightfall with a rabbit and a pigeon. He stayed in all
evening, but hardly opened his mouth. He was in the devil of a
temper, feeling he had been insulted.
Banford's eyes were red, she had evidently been crying. But her
manner was more remote and supercilious than ever, the way she
turned her head if he spoke at all, as if he were some tramp or in-
ferior intruder of that sort, made his blue eyes go almost black with
rage. His face looked sulkier. But he never forgot his polite intona-
tion, if he opened his mouth to speak.


D. H. LAWRENCE
579
March seemed to flourish in this atmosphere. She seemed to sit
between the two antagonists with a little wicked smile on her face,
enjoying herself. There was even a sort of complacency in the way
she laboriously crocheted, this evening.
When he was in bed, the youth could hear the two women talking
and arguing in their room. He sat up in bed and strained his ears to
hear what they said. But he could hear nothing, it was too far off.
Yet he could hear the soft, plaintive drip of Banford's voice, and
March's deeper note.
The night was quiet, frosty. Big stars were snapping outside, be-
yond the ridge-tops of the pine-trees. He listened and listened. In
the distance he heard a fox yelping: and the dogs from the farms
barking in answer. But it was not that he wanted to hear. It was
what the two women were saying.
He got stealthily out of bed, and stood by his door. He could
hear no more than before. Very, very carefully he began to lift the
door-latch. After quite a time he had his door open. Then he
stepped stealthily out into the passage. The old oak planks were
cold under his feet, and they creaked preposterously. He crept very
very gently up the one step, and along by the wall, till he stood out-
side their door. And there he held his breath and listened. Ban-
ford's voice:
“No, I simply couldn't stand it. I should be dead in a month.
Which is just what he would be aiming at, of course. That would
just be his game, to see me in the churchyard. No Nellie, if you
were to do such a thing as to marry him, you could never stop here.
I couldn't, I couldn't live in the same house with him. Oh-h! I feel
quite sick with the smell of his clothes. And his red face simply
turns me over. I can't eat my food when he's at the table. What a
fool I was ever to let him stop. One ought never to try to do a kind
action. It always flies back in your face like a boomerang."
"Well he's only got two more days,” said March.
"Yes, thank Heaven. And when he's gone he'll never come in this
house again. I feel so bad while he's here. And I know, I know he's
only counting what he can get out of you. I know that's all it is.
He's just a good-for-nothing who doesn't want to work, and who
thinks he'll live on us. But he won't live on me. If you're such a
fool, then it's your own lookout. Mrs Burgess knew him all the time
he was here. And the old man could never get him to do any steady
a


580
THE FOX
you. He'll
a
C
work. He was off with the gun on every occasion, just as he is now.
Nothing but the gun! Oh, I do hate it. You don't know what
you're doing, Nellie, you don't. If you marry him he'll just make a
fool of
go
off and leave you stranded. I know he will.
If he can't get Bailey Farm out of us--and he's not going to, while
I live. While I live he's never going to set foot here. I know what
it would be. He'd soon think he was master of both of us, as he
thinks he's master of
you already.”
“But he isn't," said Nellie.
“He thinks he is, anyway. And that's what he wants: to come
and be master here. Yes, imagine it! That's what we've got the
place together for, is it, to be bossed and bullied by a hateful red-
faced boy, a beastly labourer. Oh, we did make a mistake when we
let him stop. We ought never to have lowered ourselves. And I've
had such a fight with all the people here, not to be pulled down to
their level. No, he's not coming here.—And then you see. If he
can't have the place, he'll run off to Canada or somewhere again, as
if he'd never known you. And here you'll be, absolutely ruined and
made a fool of. I know I shall never have any peace of mind again.”
"We'll tell him he can't come here. We'll tell him that,” said
March.
“Oh, don't you bother, I'm going to tell him that, and other
things as well, before he goes. He's not going to have all his own
way, while I've got the strength left to speak. Oh, Nellie, he'll de-
,
spise you, he'll despise you like the awful little beast he is, if
,
you
give way to him. I'd no more trust him than I'd trust a cat not to
steal. He's deep, he's deep, and he's bossy, and he's selfish through
and through, as cold as ice. All he wants is to make use of you. And
when you're no more use to him, then I pity you."
"I don't think he's as bad as all that,” said March.
“No, because he's been playing up to you. But you'll find out, if
you see much more of him. Oh, Nellie, I can't bear to think of it."
"Well it won't hurt you, Jill darling."
.
"Won't it! Won't it! I shall never know a moment's peace again
while I live, nor a moment's happiness. No, Nellie—” and Ban-
ford began to weep bitterly.
The boy outside could hear the stifled sound of the woman's sob-
bing, and could hear March's soft, deep, tender voice comforting,
with wonderful gentleness and tenderness, the weeping woman.


D. H. LAWRENCE
581
His eyes were so round and wide that he seemed to see the whole
night, and his ears were almost jumping off his head. He was
frozen stiff. He crept back to bed, but felt as if the top of his head
were coming off. He could not sleep. He could not keep still. He
rose, quietly dressed himself, and crept out on to the landing once
more. The women were silent. He went softly downstairs and out
to the kitchen.
Then he put on his boots and his overcoat, and took the gun. He
did not think to go away from the farm. No, he only took the gun.
As softly as possible he unfastened the door and went out into the
frosty December night. The air was still, the stars bright, the pine
trees seemed to bristle audibly in the sky. He went stealthily away
down a fence-side, looking for something to shoot. At the same
time he remembered that he ought not to shoot and frighten the
women.
а
So he prowled round the edge of the gorse cover, and through the
grove of tall old hollies, to the woodside. There he skirted the fence,
peering through the darkness with dilated eyes that seemed to be
able to grow black and full of sight in the dark, like a cat's. An owl
was slowly and mournfully whooing round a great oak tree. He
stepped stealthily with his gun, listening, listening, watching.
As he stood under the oaks of the wood-edge he heard the dogs
from the neighbouring cottage, up the hill, yelling suddenly and
startlingly, and the wakened dogs from the farms around barking
answer. And suddenly, it seemed to him England was little and
tight, he felt the landscape was constricted even in the dark, and
that there were too many dogs in the night, making a noise like a
fence of sound, like the network of English hedges netting the view.
He felt the fox didn't have a chance. For it must be the fox that
had started all this hullabaloo.
Why not watch for him, anyhow! He would no doubt be coming
sniffing round. The lad walked downhill to where the farmstead
with its few pine trees crouched blackly. In the angle of the long
shed, in the black dark, he crouched down. He knew the fox would
be coming. It seemed to him it would be the last of the foxes in this
loudly-barking, thick-voiced England, tight with innumerable little
houses.
He sat a long time with his eyes fixed unchanging upon the open
gateway, where a little light seemed to fall from the stars or from


582
THE FOX
a
the horizon, who knows. He was sitting on a log in a dark corner
with the gun across his knees. The pine trees snapped. Once a
chicken fell off its perch in the barn, with a loud crawk and cackle
and commotion that startled him, and he stood up, watching with
all his eyes, thinking it might be a rat. But he felt it was nothing.
So he sat down again with the gun on his knees and his hands tucked
in to keep them warm, and his eyes fixed unblinking on the pale
reach of the open gateway. He felt he could smell the hot, sickly,
rich smell of live chickens on the cold air.
And then—a shadow. A sliding shadow in the gateway. He
gathered all his vision into a concentrated spark, and saw the
shadow of the fox, the fox creeping on his belly through the gate.
There he went, on his belly like a snake. The boy smiled to himself
and brought the gun to his shoulder. He knew quite well what
would happen. He knew the fox would go to where the fowl-door
was boarded up, and sniff there. He knew he would lie there for a
minute, sniffing the fowls within. And then he would start again
prowling under the edge of the old barn, waiting to get in.
The fowl-door was at the top of a slight incline. Soft, soft as a
shadow the fox slid up this incline, and crouched with his nose to
the boards. And at the same moment there was the awful crash of
a gun reverberating between the old buildings, as if all the night
had gone smash. But the boy watched keenly. He saw even the
white belly of the fox as the beast beat his paws in death. So he
went forward.
There was a commotion everywhere. The fowls were scuffling
and crawking, the ducks were quark-quarking, the pony had
stamped wildly to his feet. But the fox was on his side, struggling
in his last tremors. The boy bent over him and smelt his foxy smell.
There was a sound of a window opening upstairs, then March's
voice calling: “Who is it?”
“It's me,” said Henry; "I've shot the fox.”
“Oh, goodness! You nearly frightened us to death.”
“Did I? I'm awfully sorry."
“Whatever made you get up?"
“I heard him about."
“And have you shot him?”
“Yes, he's here," and the boy stood in the yard holding up the
warm, dead brute. "You can't see, can you? Wait a minute.” And
>
>
>


D. H. LAWRENCE
583
>
he took his flash-light from his pocket, and flashed it on to the dead
animal. He was holding it by the brush. March saw, in the middle
of the darkness, just the reddish fleece and the white belly and the
white underneath of the pointed chin, and the queer, dangling paws.
,
She did not know what to say.
"He's a beauty,” he said. “He will make you a lovely fur.”
“You don't catch me wearing a fox fur,” she replied.
“Oh!” he said. And he switched off the light.
“Well I should think you'd come in and go to bed again now,”
she said.
“Probably I shall. What time is it?”
"What time is it, Jill?”' called March's voice. It was a quarter
to one.
That night March had another dream. She dreamed that Ban-
ford was dead, and that she, March, was sobbing her heart out.
Then she had to put Banford into her coffin. And the coffin was the
rough wood-box in which the bits of chopped wood were kept in the
kitchen, by the fire. This was the coffin, and there was no other, and
March was in agony and dazed bewilderment, looking for some-
thing to line the box with, something to make it soft with, some-
thing to cover up the poor dead darling. Because she couldn't lay
her in there just in her white thin nightdress, in the horrible wood-
box. So she hunted and hunted, and picked up thing after thing,
and threw it aside in the agony of dream-frustration. And in her
dream-despair all she could find that would do was a fox-skin. She
knew that it wasn't right, that this was not what she could have.
But it was all she could find. And so she folded the brush of the
fox, and laid her darling Jill's head on this, and she brought round
the skin of the fox and laid it on the top of the body, so that it
seemed to make a whole ruddy, fiery coverlet, and she cried and
cried and woke to find the tears streaming down her face.
The first thing that both she and Banford did in the morning was
to go out to see the fox. He had hung it up by the heels in the shed,
with its
poor brush falling backwards. It was a lovely dog-fox in its
prime, with a handsome thick winter coat: a lovely golden-red
colour, with grey as it passed to the belly, and belly all white, and a
great full brush with a delicate black and grey and pure white tip.
“Poor brute!” said Banford. “If it wasn't such a thieving wretch,
you'd feel sorry for it.”
a


584
THE FOX
a
March said nothing, but stood with her foot trailing aside, one
hip out, her face was pale and her eyes big and black, watching the
dead animal that was suspended upside down. White and soft as
snow his belly: white and soft as snow. She passed her hand softly
down it. And his wonderful black-glinted brush was full and fric-
tional, wonderful. She passed her hand down this also, and quiv-
ered. Time after time she took the full fur of that thick tail between
her hand, and passed her hand slowly downwards. Wonderful
sharp thick splendour of a tail! And he was dead! She pursed her
lips, and her eyes went black and vacant. Then she took the head
in her hand.
Henry was sauntering up, so Banford walked rather pointedly
away. March stood there bemused, with the head of the fox in her
hand. She was wondering, wondering, wondering over his long fine
nuzzle. For some reason it reminded her of a spoon or a spatula.
She felt she could not understand it. The beast was a strange beast
to her, incomprehensible, out of her range. Wonderful silver whis-
kers he had, like ice-threads. And pricked ears with hair inside.
-But that long, long slender spoon of a nose! —and the marvellous
white teeth beneath! It was to thrust forward and bite with
deep, deep, into the living prey, to bite and bite the blood.
“He's a beauty, isn't he ?” said Henry, standing by.
"Oh, yes, he's a fine big fox. I wonder how many chickens he's
responsible for,” she replied.
“A good many. Do you think he's the same one you saw in the
summer?”
“I should think very likely he is,” she replied.
He watched her, but he could make nothing of her. Partly she
was so shy and virgin, and partly she was so grim, matter-of-fact,
shrewish. What she said seemed to him so different from the look
of her big, queer dark eyes.
“Are you going to skin him?” she asked.
“Yes, when I've had breakfast, and got a board to peg him on
“My word what a strong smell he's got! Pooo! -It'll take some
washing off one's hands. I don't know why I was so silly as to
handle him.”—And she looked at her right hand, that had passed
down his belly and along his tail, and had even got a tiny streak
of blood from one dark place in his fur.
"Have you seen the chickens when they smell him, how fright-
ened they are ?” he said.
a


D. H. LAWRENCE
585
“Yes, aren't they!”
"You must mind you don't get some of his fleas."
“Oh, fleas!" she replied, nonchalant.
Later in the day she saw the fox's skin nailed flat on a board, as
if crucified. It gave her an uneasy feeling.
.
The boy was angry. He went about with his mouth shut, as if he
had swallowed part of his chin. But in behaviour he was polite and
affable. He did not say anything about his intentions. And he left
March alone.
That evening they sat in the dining-room. Banford wouldn't
have him in her sitting-room any more. There was a very big log
on the fire. And everybody was busy. Banford had letters to write,
March was sewing a dress, and he was mending some little con-
trivance.
Banford stopped her letter-writing from time to time to look
round and rest her eyes. The boy had his head down, his face hid-
den over his job.
“Let's see,” said Banford. “What train do you go by, Henry?”
He looked up straight at her.
“The morning train. In the morning,” he said.
"What, the eight-ten or the eleven-twenty ?”
“The eleven-twenty, I suppose,” he said.
I
“That is the day after to-morrow?” said Banford.
“Yes, the day after to-morrow.”
“Mmm!” murmured Banford, and she returned to her writing.
But as she was licking her envelope, she asked:
“And what plans have you made for the future, if I may ask ?”
“Plans?” he said, his face very bright and angry.
"I mean about you and Nellie, if you are going on with this busi-
ness. When do you expect the wedding to come off ?” She spoke
in a jeering tone.
“Oh, the wedding!” he replied. “I don't know.”
“Don't you know anything?” said Banford. “Are you going to
clear out on Friday and leave things no more settled than they are ?"
"Well, why shouldn't I? We can always write letters.”
“Yes of course you can. But I wanted to know because of this
place. If Nellie is going to get married all of a sudden, I shall have
to be looking round for a new partner.”
"Couldn't she stay on here if she was married ?” he said. He
knew quite well what was coming.
C


586
THE FOX
a
"Oh,” said Banford, "this is no place for a married couple.
There's not enough work to keep a man going, for one thing. And
there's no money to be made. It's quite useless your thinking of
staying on here if you marry. Absolutely!”
“Yes, but I wasn't thinking of staying on here,” he said.
“Well, that's what I want to know. And what about Nellie,
then? How long is she going to be here with me, in that case ?”
The two antagonists looked at one another.
“That I can't say,” he answered.
“Oh, go along,” she cried petulantly. “You must have some idea
what you are going to do, if you ask a woman to marry you. Unless
it's all a hoax."
“Why should it be a hoax?—I am going back to Canada.”
“And taking her with you?”
“Yes, certainly.”
“You hear that, Nellie ?'' said Banford.
March, who had had her head bent over her sewing, now looked
up with a sharp pink blush on her face and a queer, sardonic laugh
in her eyes and on her twisted mouth.
“That's the first time I've heard that I was going to Canada,” she
said.
"Well, you have to hear it for the first time, haven't you?” said
the boy.
“Yes, I suppose I have,” she said nonchalantly. And she went
back to her sewing.
“You're quite ready, are you, to go to Canada? Are you, Nel-
lie?” asked Banford.
March looked up again. She let her shoulders go slack, and let
her hand that held the needle lie loose in her lap.
“It depends on how I'm going,” she said. “I don't think I want
to go jammed up in the steerage, as a soldier's wife. I'm afraid I'm
not used to that way.”
The boy watched her with bright eyes.
"Would you rather stay over here while I go first ?” he asked.
“I would, if that's the only alternative," she replied.
“That's much the wisest. Don't make it any fixed engagement," ”
said Banford. “Leave yourself free to go or not after he's got back
and found you a place, Nellie. Anything else is madness, madness.”
"Don't you think,” said the youth, "we ought to get married be-


D. H. LAWRENCE
587
fore I go-and then go together, or separate, according to how it
-
happens ?”
“I think it's a terrible idea," cried Banford.
But the boy was watching March.
“What do you think?” he asked her.
”
She let her eyes stray vaguely into space.
"Well I don't know,” she said. “I shall have to think about it.”
"Why?” he asked, pertinently.
“Why?”-She repeated his question in a mocking way, and
looked at him laughing, though her face was pink again. “I should
think there's plenty of reasons why."
He watched her in silence. She seemed to have escaped him. She
had
got
into league with Banford against him. There was again the
queer sardonic look about her, she would mock stoically at every-
thing he said or which life offered.
“Of course,” he said, “I don't want to press you to do anything
you don't wish to do.”
“I should think not, indeed,” cried Banford indignantly.
At bedtime Banford said plaintively to March:
"You take my hot bottle up for me, Nellie, will you."
“Yes, I'll do it,” said March, with the kind of willing unwilling-
ness she so often showed towards her beloved but uncertain Jill.
The two women went upstairs. After a time March called from
the top of the stairs: “Good-night Henry. I shan't be coming down.
You'll see to the lamp and the fire, won't you ?"
The next day Henry went about with the cloud on his brow and
his young cub's face shut up tight. He was cogitating all the time.
He had wanted March to marry him and go back to Canada with
him. And he had been sure she would do it. Why he wanted her
he didn't know. But he did want her. He had set his mind on her.
And he was convulsed with a youth's fury at being thwarted. To be
thwarted, to be thwarted! It made him so furious inside, that he
did not know what to do with himself. But he kept himself in hand.
Because even now things might turn out differently. She might come
over to him. Of course she might. It was her business to do so.
To be continued


PEOPLE'S SURROUNDINGS
BY MARIANNE MOORE
they answer one's questions:
a deal table compact with the wall;
in this dried bone of arrangement,
one's “natural promptness” is compressed, not crowded out;
one's style is not lost in such simplicity:
the palace furniture, so old fashioned, so old fashionable;
Sèvres china and the fireplace dogs-
bronze dromios with pointed ears, as obsolete as pugs;
one has one's preference in the matter of bad furniture
and this is not one's choice:
the vast indestructible necropolis
of composite Yawman-Erbe separable units;
the steel, the oak, the glass, the Poor Richard publications
containing the public secrets of efficiency
on “paper so thin that one thousand four hundred and twenty pages
make one inch,'
exclaiming so to speak, “When you take my time, you take some-
thing I had meant to use":
the highway hid by fir trees in rhododendron twenty feet deep,
the peacocks, hand-forged gates, old Persian velvet-
roses outlined in pale black on an ivory ground-
the pierced iron shadows of the cedars,
Chinese carved glass, old Waterford,
lettered ladies; landscape gardening twisted into permanence:
straight lines over such great distances as one finds in Utah or in
Texas
where people do not have to be told
that “a good brake is as important as a good motor,”


PEOPLE'S SURROUNDINGS
589
where by means of extra sense cells in the skin,
they can like trout, smell what is coming-
those cool sirs with the explicit sensory apparatus of common sense,
who know the exact distance between two points as the crow flies;
there is something attractive about a mind that moves in a straight
a
line-
the municipal bat-roost of mosquito warfare, concrete statuary,
medicaments for “instant beauty” in the hands of all,
and that live wire, the American string quartette:
and Bluebeard's tower above the coral reefs,
the magic mousetrap closing on all points of the compass,
capping like petrified surf, the furious azure of the bay
where there is no dust and life is like a lemon-leaf,
a green piece of tough translucent parchment,
where the crimson, the copper, and the Chinese vermilion of the
poincianas
set fire to the masonry and turquoise blues refute the clock;
this dungeon with odd notions of hospitality,
with its "chessmen carved out of moonstones,
its mocking-birds, fringed lilies, and hibiscus,
its black butterflies with blue half circles on their wings,
tan goats with onyx ears, its lizards glittering and without thickness
like splashes of fire and silver on the pierced turquoise of the lattices
and the acacia-like lady shivering at the touch of a hand,
lost in a small collision of the orchids-
dyed quicksilver let fall
to disappear like an obedient chameleon in fifty shades of mauve
and amethyst:
here where the mind of this establishment has come to the conclusion
that it would be impossible to revolve about one's self too much,
sophistication has like an escalator, cut the nerve of progress.
a
In these noncommittal, personal-impersonal expressions of ap-
pearance,
the eye knows what to skip;
the physiognomy of conduct must not reveal the skeleton;
"a setting must not have the air of being one"


590
PEOPLE'S SURROUNDINGS
a
yet with x-raylike inquisitive intensity upon it, the surfaces go back;
the interfering fringes of expression are but a stain on what stands
out,
there is neither up nor down to it;
we see the exterior and the fundamental structure
captains of armies, cooks, carpenters,
cutlers, gamesters, surgeons, and armourers,
lapidaries, silkmen, glovers, fiddlers, and ballad-singers,
sextons of churches, dyers of black cloth, hostlers, and chimney-
sweeps,
queens, countesses, ladies, emperors, travellers, and mariners,
dukes, princes, and gentlemen
in their respective places,
camps, forges, and battlefields,
conventions, oratories, and wardrobes,
dens, deserts, railway stations, asylums, and places where engines
are made,
shops, prisons, brickyards, and altars of churches,
in magnificent places clean and decent,
castles, palaces, dining-halls, theatres, and imperial audience-
chambers.



Courtesy of the Belmaison Gallery, Wanamaker's
FIGURE DRAWING. BY JULES PASCIN





MORE MEMORIES
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
VII
Spas
>
TANDISH O'GRADY, upon the other hand, was at once all
passion and all judgement. And yet those who knew him better
than I assured me he could find quarrel in a straw; and I did know
that he had quarrelled a few years back with Jack Nettleship.
Nettleship's account had been, "My mother cannot endure the God
of the Old Testament, but likes Jesus Christ; whereas I like the
God of the Old Testament, and cannot endure Jesus Christ; and we
have got into the way of quarrelling about it at lunch; and once,
when O'Grady lunched with us, he said it was the most disgraceful
spectacle he had ever seen, and walked out.” Indeed, I wanted him
among my writers, because of his quarrels, for, having much passion
and little rancour, the more he quarrelled, the nobler, the more
patched with metaphor, the more musical his style became, and if
he were in his turn attacked, he knew a trick of speech that made us
murmur, “We do it wrong, being so majestical, to offer it the show
of violence.” Sometimes he quarrelled most where he loved most.
A Unionist in politics, a leader-writer on the Daily Express, the
most Conservative paper in Ireland, hater of every form of democ-
racy, he had given all his heart to the smaller Irish landowners, to
whom he belonged, and with whom his childhood had been spent,
and for them he wrote his books, and would soon rage over their
failings in certain famous passages that many men would repeat to
themselves like poets' rhymes. All round us people talked or wrote
for victory's sake, and were hated for their victories—but here was
a man whose rage was a swan-song over all that he had held most
dear, and to whom for that very reason every Irish imaginative
writer owed a portion of his soul. In his unfinished History of Ire-
land he had made the old Irish heroes, Fion, and Oisin, and Cuchul-
lan, alive again, taking them, for I think he knew no Gaelic, from
the dry pages of O’Curry and his school, condensing and arranging
as he thought Homer would have arranged and condensed. Lady


592
MORE MEMORIES
Gregory has told the same tales, but keeping closer to the Gaelic
text, and with greater powers of narration and a more original style,
but O'Grady was the first, and we had read him in our 'teens. I
think that, had I succeeded, a popular audience could have changed
him little, and that his genius would have stayed, as it had been
shaped by his youth in some provincial society, and that to the end
he would have shown his best in occasional thrusts and parries. But
I do think that if, instead of that one admirable little book, the
Bog of Stars, we had got all his histories and imaginative works
into the hands of our young men, he might have brought the imag-
ination of Ireland nearer the image and the honeycomb.
Lionel Johnson was to be our critic, and above all our theologian,
for he had been converted to Catholicism, and his orthodoxy, too
learned to question, had accepted all that we did, and most of our
plans. Historic Catholicism, with all its counsels and its dogmas,
stirred his passion like the beauty of a mistress, and the unlearned
parish priests who thought good literature or good criticism danger-
ous were in his eyes "all heretics.” He belonged to a family that
had called itself Irish some generations back, and its recent English
generations but enabled him to see as one single sacred tradition
Irish nationality and Catholic religion. How should he fail to
know the Holy Land? Had he not been in Egypt? He had joined
our London Irish Literary Society, attended its committee meetings,
and given lectures in London, in Dublin, and in Belfast, on Irish
novelists and Irish poetry, reading his lectures always, and yet
affecting his audience as I, with my spoken lectures, could not, per-
haps because Ireland had still the shape it had received from the
eighteenth century, and so felt the dignity, not the artifice, of his
elaborate periods. He was very little, and at a first glance he seemed
but a school-boy of fifteen. I remember saying one night at the
Rhymers', when he spoke of passing safely, almost nightly, through
Seven Dials, then a dangerous neighbourhood, “Who would expect
to find anything in your pockets but a pegtop and a piece of string?"
But one never thought of his small stature when he spoke or read.
He had the delicate strong features of a certain filleted head of a
Greek athlete in the British Museum, an archaistic Graeco-Roman
copy of a masterpiece of the fourth century, and that resemblance
seems symbolic of the austere nobility of his verse. He was now in
his best years, writing with great ease and power; neither I, nor, I
think, any other, foresaw his tragedy.


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
593
a
He suffered from insomnia, and some doctor, while he was still
at the University, had recommended alcohol, and he had, in a vain
hope of sleep, increased the amount, as Rossetti had increased his
doses of chloral, and now he drank for drinking's sake. He drank
a great deal too much, and, though nothing could, it seemed, disturb
his calm or unsteady his hand or foot, his doctrine, after a certain
number of glasses, would become more ascetic, more contemptuous
of all that we call human life. I have heard him, after four or five
glasses of wine, praise St Jerome for freeing himself from sexual
passion by a surgical operation, and deny with scorn, and much his-
torical evidence, that a gelded man lost anything of intellectual
power. Even without stimulant his theology conceded nothing to
human weakness, and I can remember his saying with energy, “I
wish those people who deny the eternity of punishment could real-
ize their unspeakable vulgarity.”
Now that I know his end, I see him creating, to use a favourite
adjective of his, "marmorean” verse, and believing the most terrible
doctrines to keep down his own turbulence. One image of that stay
in Dublin is so clear before me that it has blotted out most other
images of that time. He is sitting at a lodging-house table, which I
have just left at three in the morning, and round him lie or sit in
huddled attitudes half-a-dozen men in various states of intoxica-
tion; and he is looking straight before him with head erect, and one
hand resting upon the table. As I reach the stairs I hear him say, in
a clear, unshaken voice, “I believe in nothing but the Holy Roman
Catholic Church.” He sometimes spoke of drink as something which
he could put aside at any moment, and his friends believed, and I
think he liked us to believed, that he would shortly enter a monas-
tery. Did he deceive us deliberately? Did he himself already fore-
see the moment when he would write The Dark Angel ? I am almost
certain that he did, for he had already written Mystic and Cavalier,
where the historical setting is, I believe, but masquerade.
“Go from me; I am one of those who fall.
What! hath no cold wind swept your heart at all,
In my sad company? Before the end
Go from
my
friend!
me, dear
“Yours are the victories of light; your feet
Rest from good toil, where rest is brave and sweet,


594
MORE MEMORIES
But after warfare in a mourning gloom
I rest in clouds of doom.
.
.
a
"Seek with thine eyes to pierce this crystal sphere;
Canst read a fate there, prosperous and clear?
Only the mists, only the weeping clouds;
Dimness, and airy shrouds.
“O rich and sounding voices of the air!
Interpreters and prophets of despair,
Priests of a fearful sacrament! I come
To make with you my home.”
VIII
Sir Charles Gavan Duffy arrived. He brought with him much
manuscript, the private letters of a Young Ireland poetess, a dry
but informing unpublished historical essay of Davis, and an unpub-
lished novel by William Carleton, into the middle of which he had
dropped a hot coal, so that nothing remained but the borders of
every page. He hired a young man to read him after dinner Car-
lyle's Heroes and Hero-Worship, and before dinner was gracious
to all our men of authority, but especially to our Harps and Pep-
perpot. Taylor compared him to Odysseus returning to Ithaca,
and every newspaper published his biography. He was a white-
haired old man, who had written the standard history of Young
Ireland, emigrated to Australia, had been the first Australian Fed-
eralist, and later Prime Minister, but, in all his writings, in which
there is so much honesty, so little rancour, there is not one sentence
that has any meaning when separated from its place in argument
or narrative, not one distinguished because of its thought or music.
One thought of his youth in some little gaunt Irish town, where no
building or custom is revered for its antiquity, and speaking a
language where no word, even in solitude, is ever spoken slowly
and carefully, because of emotional implication; and of his man-
hood of practical politics, of the dirty piece of orange-peel in the
corner of the stairs as one climbs up to some newspaper office; of
public meetings where one must not speak, where it would be treach-
erous amid so much geniality even to think much less speak of
anything that might cause a moment's misunderstanding in one's


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
595
a
own party. No argument of mine was intelligible to him, and 1
would have been powerless, but that fifty years ago he had made
an enemy, and though that enemy was long dead, his school re-
mained. He had attacked, why or with what result I do not remem-
ber, the only Young Ireland politician who had music and person-
ality, though rancorous and devil-possessed. At some public meet-
ing of ours, where he spoke amid great applause in smooth Glad-
stonian periods to a great audience, of his proposed Irish publishing
firm, one heard faint hostile murmurs here and there, and at last a
voice cried, “Remember Newry,” and a voice answered, “There is a
grave there!” and a part of the audience sang "Here's to John
Mitchel that is gone, boys, gone; Here's to the friends that are
gone.” The meeting over, a group of us, indignant that the meeting
we had called for his welcome should have contained those malcon-
tents, gathered about him to apologize. He had written a pam-
phlet, he explained, he would give us copies. We would see that
he was in the right, how badly Mitchel had behaved. But in Ireland
personality, if it be but harsh and hard, has lovers, and some of us,
I think, may have gone home muttering, "How dare he be in the
right if Mitchel is in the wrong?"
?
IX
He wanted "to complete the Young Ireland movement”--to do
all that had been left undone because of the Famine, or the death
of Davis, or his own emigration; and all the younger men were upon
my side in resisting that. They might not want the books I wanted,
but they did want books written by their own generation, and we
began to struggle with him over the control of the company. Tay-
lor became very angry, and I can understand what I looked like in
his eyes, when I remember Edwin Ellis' seriously-intended warning,
“It is bad manners for a man under thirty to permit himself to be in
the right.” But John O'Leary supported me throughout. When
Gavan Duffy had gone to London to draw up articles of association
for his company, for which he had found many shareholders in
Dublin, the dispute became very fierce. One night, members of the
general public climbed the six flights of stairs to our committee-
room, and found seats for themselves just behind our chairs. We
were all too angry to send them away, or even to notice their pres-
ence, for I was accused of saying at a public meeting in Cork, “Our


596
MORE MEMORIES
books,” when I should have said, "Sir Charles Gavan Duffy's
books.” I was not Taylor's match with the spoken word, and barely
matched him with the written word. At twenty-seven or twenty-
eight I was immature and clumsy, and O'Leary's support was capri-
cious, for, being but a spectator of life, he would desert me if I used
a bad argument, and would not return till I found a good one; and
our chairman, Dr Hyde, “most popular of men,” sat dreaming of
his old white cockatoo in far-away Roscommon. Our very success
had been a misfortune, for an opposition which had been literary
and political, now that it had spread to the general public, brought
religious prejudice to its aid. Suddenly, when the company seemed
all but established, and a scheme had been thought out which gave
some representation on its governing board to contemporary Irish
writers, Gavan Duffy produced a letter from Archbishop Walsh,
and threw the project up. The letter had warned him that after his
death the company would fall under a dangerous influence. At this
moment the always benevolent friend, to whom I had explained in
confidence, when asking his support, my arrangements with my
publisher, went to Gavan Duffy and suggested that they should
together offer Mr Fisher Unwin a series of Irish books, and Mr
Fisher Unwin and his reader accepted the series under the belief
that it was my project that they accepted. I went to London to find
the contract signed, and that all I could do was to get two sub-
editors appointed, responsible to the two societies. One or two
good books were published, especially Dr Hyde's Hi of
Gaelic Literature, and Standish O'Grady's Bog of Stars; but the
series was killed by its first volume, Thomas Davis' dry but inform-
ing Historical Essay. So important had our movement seemed that
ten thousand copies had been sold before anybody had time to read
it, and then came a dead stop.
Gavan Duffy knew nothing of my plans, and so was guiltless, and
my friend had heard me discuss many things that evening; I had
perhaps dispraised the humanitarian Stephen Phillips, already in
his first vogue, and praised Francis Thompson, but half-rescued
from his gutter, or flouted his belief in the perpetual marriage of
genius and virtue by numbering the vices of famous men; this
man's venery, that man's drink. He would not be expected to
remember that where I had said so much of no account, I said one
thing, and he had made one reply, that I thought of great account.
He died a few months ago, and it would have surprised and shocked
a


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
597
him if any man had told him that he was unforgiven; had he not
forgotten all about it long ago? A German doctor has said that if
we leave an umbrella at a friend's house, it is because we have a
sub-conscious desire to re-visit that house; and he had perhaps a sub-
conscious desire that my too-tumultuous generation should not have
its say.
х
>
I was at Sligo when I received a letter from John O'Leary, saying
that I could do no more in Dublin, for even the younger men had
turned against me, were "jealous,” his letter said, though what they
had to be jealous of, God knows. He said further that it was all my
own fault, that he had warned me what would happen if I lived on
terms of intimacy with those I tried to influence. I should have kept
myself apart and alone. It was all true; through some influence
from an earlier generation, from Walt Whitman, perhaps, I had
sat talking in public bars, had talked late into the night at many
men's houses, showing all my convictions to men that were but
ready for one, and used conversation to explore and discover among
,
men who looked for authority. I did not yet know that intellectual
freedom and social equality are incompatible; and yet, if I had,
could hardly have lived otherwise, being too young for silence.
The trouble came from half a dozen obscure young men, who
having nothing to do attended every meeting, and were able to over-
turn a project, that seemed my only bridge to other projects, includ-
ing a travelling theatre. We had planned small libraries of Irish
literature in connexion with our country branches, we collected
books and money, sending a lecturer to every branch, and taking
half the proceeds of that lecture to buy books. Maud Gonne, whose
beauty could draw a great audience in any country town, had been
the lecturer, the scheme was very nearly self-supporting, and six or
seven bundles of books, chosen after much disputation by John
O'Leary, J. F. Taylor, and myself, had been dispatched to some
six or seven branches. "The country will support this work,” Tay-
lor had said somewhere on some public platform, “because we are
the most inflammable people on God's earth,” his harsh voice giving
almost a quality of style to Carlylian commonplace; but we are also
a very jealous people. The half a dozen young men, if a little
jealous of me, were still more jealous of those country branches


598
MORE MEMORIES
which were getting so much notice, and where there was so much
of that peasant mind their schoolmasters had taught them to de-
spise. One must be English or Irish, they would have said. I
returned to find a great box of books appropriated for some Dublin
purpose and the whole scheme abandoned. I know that it was a
bitter moment because I remember with gratitude, words spoken not
to my ear, but for my ear, by a young man who had lately joined our
Society, Mr Stephen McKenna, now well-known amongst scholars
for his distinguished translations of Plotinus, and I seem to remem-
ber that I lost through anger what gift of persuasion I may possess,
and that I was all the more helpless because I felt that even the
best of us disagreed about everything at heart.
I began to feel that I needed a hostess more than a society, and
that I was not to find for years to come. I tried to persuade Maud
Gonne to be that hostess, but her social life was in Paris, and she had
already formed a new ambition, the turning of French public opin-
ion against England. Without intellectual freedom there can be no
agreement, and in Nationalist Dublin there was not-indeed there
still is not-any society where a man is heard by the right ears, but
never overheard by the wrong, and where he speaks his whole mind
gaily, and is not the cautious husband of a part; where fantasy can
play before matured into conviction, where life can shine and ring,
and lack utility. Mere life lacking the protection of wealth or rank,
or some beauty's privilege of caprice cannot choose its company,
taking up and dropping men, merely because it likes, or dislikes,
their manners and their looks, and in its stead opinion crushes and
rends, and all is hatred and bitterness: wheel biting upon wheel, a
roar of steel or iron tackle, a mill of argument grinding all things
down to mediocrity. If as I think minds and metals correspond,
the goldsmiths of Paris foretold the French Revolution when they
substituted steel for that unserviceable gold in the manufacture of
the more expensive jewel work, and made those large, flat steel
buttons for men of fashion whereby the card players were able to
cheat by studying the reflections of the cards.
XI
No country could have more natural distaste for equality, for in
every cle there was some man ridiculous for posing as the type
of some romantic or distinguished quality. One of our friends, a


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
599
man of talent and of learning, whose ancestors had come, he be-
lieved, from Denmark in the ninth century, looked and talked the
distinguished foreigner so perfectly that a patriotic newspaper gave
particulars of his supposed relations in contemporary Denmark! A
half-mad old man who had served for a few months in the Pope's
army, many years before, still rode an old white war-horse in all
national processions, and, if their enemies were not lying, one Town
Councillor had challenged another to a duel by flinging his glove
upon the floor; while a popular Lord Mayor had boasted in a public
speech that he never went to bed at night without reading at least
twelve pages of Sappho. Then, too, in those conversations of the
small hours, to which O'Leary had so much objected, whenever we
did not speak of art and letters, we spoke of Parnell. We told
each other that he had admitted no man to his counsel; that when
some member of his party found himself in the same hotel by
chance, that member would think to stay there a presumption, and
move to some other lodging; and, above all, we spoke of his pride,
that made him hide all emotion while before his enemy. Once he
had seemed callous and indifferent to the House of Commons, Fos-
ter had accused him of abetting assassination, but when he came
among his followers his hands were full of blood, because he had
torn them with his nails. What excitement there would have been,
what sense of mystery would have stirred all our hearts, and stirred
hearts all through the country, where there was still, and for years
to come, but one overmastering topic, had we known the story Mrs
Parnell tells of that scene on Brighton Pier. He and the woman
that he loved stood there upon a night of storm, when his power
was at its greatest height, and still unthreatened. He caught her
from the ground, and held her at arm's length out over the water,
and she lay there motionless, knowing that, had she moved, he
would have drowned himself and her. Perhaps unmotived self-
immolation, were that possible, or else at mere suggestion of storm
and night, were as great evidence as such a man could give of
power
over self, and so of the expression of the self.
XII
When I look back upon my Irish propaganda of those years, I
can see little but its bitterness. I never met with, or but met to
quarrel with, my father's old family acquaintance; or with acquaint-


600
MORE MEMORIES
ance I myself might have found, and kept, among the prosperous
educated class, who had all the great appointments at University or
Castle; and this I did by deliberate calculation. If I must attack so
much that seemed sacred to Irish nationalist opinion, I must, I
knew, see to it that no man suspect me of doing it to flatter Unionist
opinion. Whenever I got the support of some man who belonged
by birth and education to University or Castle, I would say, "Now
you must be baptized of the gutter.” I chose Royal visits especially
for demonstrations of disloyalty, rolling up with my own hands
the red carpet spread by some elderly Nationalist, softened or weak-
ened by time, to welcome Viceroyalty; and threatened, if the Lon.
don Society drank to the King's health, that my friends and I would
demonstrate against it by turning our glasses upside down; and was
presently to discover that one can grow impassioned and fanatical
about opinions, which one has chosen as one might choose a side
upon the football field; and I thought many a time of the pleasant
Dublin houses that would never ask me to dine; and the still pleas-
anter houses with trout-streams near at hand, that would never ask
me upon a visit. I became absurdly sensitive, glancing about me in
certain public places, the private view of our Academy, or the like,
to discover imagined enemies; and even now, after twenty or thirty
years, I feel at times that I have not recovered my natural manner.
Yet it was in those pleasant houses, among the young men and the
young girls, that we were to make our converts. When we loathe
ourselves or our world, if that loathing but turn to intellect, we
see self or world and its anti-self as in one vision; when loathing
remains but loathing, it consumes itself away, till at last we turn
to its mechanical opposite. Popular Nationalism and Unionism so
changed into one another, being each but the other's headache. The
Nationalist abstractions were like the fixed ideas of some hysterical
woman, a part of the mind turned into stone, and all the rest a
seething and burning; and Unionist Ireland had re-acted from that
seething and burning to a cynical indifference, and from those fixed
ideas to whatever might bring the most easy and obvious success.
To be continued


"Hill
1)
Picasso
1005
STROLLING MOUNTEBANKS. BY PABLO PICASSO





233

VELA
Picasso
THE CRIPPLE. BY PABLO PICASSO





SOLILOQUY ON A PARK BENCH
BY CONRAD AIKEN
a ,
a
.
THE
HE model for the afternoon hour was an Italian boy—about
bre as that of the sleeping Medusa, particularly in profile; seen
fully, it was a little stupid. But his torso was what most delighted
her, and this she drew with careful strong strokes, luxuriating in a
new sense of precision. Her pleasure in this was exquisite, was pro-
longed. “Extraordinary!” she murmured, and found herself oddly
frowning at the dark beauty of the skin, the well-muscled shoulders,
and arched ribs, in the April sunlight that slanted from the half-
shaded window. She was sorry when the hour was over. Miss N,
thrusting off her apron, paused beside her and asked if she were
going “down town.” She repressed a shade of annoyance—though
she liked Miss N—and replied vaguely that she "had some things
to do.” This was not true, and she felt a slight contrition when she
saw that Miss N was unconvinced and a little hurt. However!
She put on her hat and escaped into the soft afternoon.
The parkway invited her-it was vague, it was hazily green
with new leaves and buds, the muddy river gleamed sleepily here
and there as it curved among flat gardens and under small stone
arches, and the drowsy quackings and laconic comments of water-
fowls seemed only to add to the immense and melancholy stillness.
She caressed affectionately, with a fugitive hand, as she walked, the
low stone wall that led to a ridiculously conceited little bridge. She
slid two fingers over the white flank of a birch. Further on, she
touched her palm, and scratched it, against a barberry frond, on
which two elfin red-peppers still hung. Why had she rebuffed
Miss N?
Well, really, one wanted, sometimes, to be alone.
Particularly when one was—what? Her eyes wandered
from the word, she paused to watch a duck stand on his head in the
still water, and then walked on absorbed. The benches here were
too crowded. A nursemaid scolded a child, lifting an angry round
eye from her knitting. A small boy was digging in the gravel with a
bit of broken glass, murmuring "It's like this—it's like this.” A
bored perfumed lady waited patiently for her Pomeranian; which
.
.


602
SOLILOQUY ON A PARK BENCH
a
.
.
suddenly twinkled after her as if on wire springs.
The bells
in St Matthew's Church began striking five, and it seemed to her
that the slow deep tones hung afterwards among the trees and over
the water like a mist. White and purple crocuses were sunning them-
selves in a corner by a wall-absurd! She felt suddenly like laugh-
ing at everything, and then, just as suddenly, for no reason, felt
unhappy, as if she had a bird shut in her heart who wanted to
escape. She found a deserted bench and sat down, at the end near-
est the water. Grackles made scraping sounds in the maple tree
over her head-scolding at sparrows. Cruel birds, grackles !
Who was it that had told her of seeing a grackle pursue a sparrow
tirelessly till he had worn it out, and then stab it to death on the
ground? How horrible, and in April
There was a
grackle now. He walked awkwardly by the water's edge—a be-
draggled fellow, getting on in years; but what a beautiful irides-
cence on his black feathers! ... It was Fred Thomas who had
told her. He always came out to smoke his pipe here after lunch.
A curious, a nice thing for a man to do, an unexpected concession-
as if the grackle should pause and admire a crocus! She laughed to
herself, and half shut her eyes to make a picture of the water, with a
round cold cloud in it, and part of the stone arch of a bridge.
It was while she was doing this that a young man walked slowly
between her and the dim picture, looking down at her intently. She
felt ridiculous. She became aware, after he had passed, that she
had gone on screwing up her eyes without the slightest notion of
what she was looking at. She relaxed her forehead, and turned to
glance after him: to her surprise he also had turned, and was irreso-
lutely coming back, still staring. In fact, he came and sat down at
the other end of the bench. He was pale, his clothes were slightly
shabby, his mouth was oddly pursed, one of his eyebrows twitched.
She averted her eyes quickly. How very curious! She felt
!
fushed and confused, and after a second, during which she had
ridiculously held her breath, she could hear her excited brain going
through a preposterous rigmarole of its own—"Grackle under a
white cloud-muddy water-grackle, grackle-muddy water—'It's
ferocious, simply ferocious.'
He was going to speak to her
—but of course she would ignore him of course, of course. She
crossed her knees with exquisite conscious leisureliness, and
smoothed her skirt as if to say, “Young man, you simply don't
exist!” But no: it hadn't been emphatic enough. She assumed an
.
.


CONRAD AIKEN
603
.
.
.
>
expression studiously indifferent, even hostile, and stared supercili-
ously at the water. She glanced to the right, at a small girl pro-
pelling a velocipede, toes blandly turned out. She looked past him,
to the left-examined witheringly the bare boughs of an elm tree.
At that instant, unfortunately, he struck a match, and startled her
into looking too abruptly away again. A cloud of cigarette smoke
drifted warmly over her, the bench shook under his shift of posture,
agreeably stirring her spine, and low words followed the smoke.
“Nice afternoon, isn't it?”
She ignored him, allowing her eyes to follow blindly a passing
pedestrian
So this is how it's done. Prelude to the
afternoon of a faun
More cigarette smoke, another tremble
of the bench
Her heart beat violently, she seemed to have
a red cloud before her eyes.
"Would you like to go to a movie? Be a sport.”
She had an acute desire to reply "But I'm not a 'sport' ”—but she
was silent. Several people passed, and she was embarrassed by per-
ceiving that when she shifted her head to look at them, now to the
right, now to the left, he did likewise, as if they were in concert.
She turned her back towards him, but not too aggressively.
“You don't mind my talking to you, do you?
No harm
in talking, is there ... I haven't talked to anybody all day.
If you're a stranger in a town you don't find anybody to
talk to. You can't stop a cop and talk to him, can you?
a train it's different. You can almost always talk with the man
sitting next to you, or get a game of cards. You look out the win-
dow and say, 'I wonder what they're building there?' and that's
all there is to it.
But it's hard getting to talk with a woman,
unless she's old
You offer her a newspaper or a magazine,
and she says 'No, thank you' in a tone as if you'd insulted her.
And if you're a stranger in a town, how are you going to
meet any girls? That's why, when I saw you here, I thought I'd try
talking to you, just as if I knew you. You don't mind, do you?”
He paused, puffed at his cigarette, looked at her (she knew) be-
seechingly. How quickly, if she responded, he would drop the be-
seeching and become proprietary! She hoped nobody she
knew would come along. Awkward .. But of course she was
paying no attention to him. She felt perfectly indifferent, and, for
no reason, extraordinarily happy.
“Look at that duck-isn't he comical! Funny beady eyes they
.
.
.
.
on
.
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604
SOLILOQUY ON A PARK BENCH
canoe.
.
.
.
.
a
.
.
.
.
have.
Last week I went out on the Concord River in a
Did you ever go out there?
Lots of ducks and
turtles and muskrats.
It's great. After a mile or two you
don't meet a soul-nothing but water and trees, burnt willow
stumps in the water, bushes in the water, red-winged blackbirds in
the bushes. I spread my coat out and the wind carried me
for a long way. When I got hungry, I went ashore and ate a lunch.
I
O say didn't I get scratched in the bull briars! They were a caution.
All the same, it would have been nice if I'd had somebody to
talk to.
It's not much fun going to places if you're alone,”
A man and woman went by, preoccupied. The woman was say-
ing, "Well, he got a broken leg, that's what he got, didn't he.” The
man walked grimly, his eyes on the ground.
“How would you like to go there next Sunday?
... We
could take some sandwiches and a couple of bottles of ginger-ale.
It's pretty scenery
One place, I saw last year, there
was a big sloping field full of tall asparagus—all feathery, you
know—and a man driving a white horse through it, cultivating it.
The horse looked as if he were half lost in a green fog.
It
was like a picture.
Sometimes you find a canoe pulled up
among trees and bushes in a quiet spot, and a man and girl having a
pretty good time.
Maybe you've been up there.
Maybe you don't like the country much? How would you
like to go to a movie? There's a good one a little way from here-
swell music. I go there once in a while. I like to be in a crowd of
people like that, in the dark, and hear them all laughing-did you
ever notice that? The way the laugh goes all over the house.
Well, it's a rest after you've been running a linotype all day
-believe me! Last night I dreamt I went to a movie, all
dark, full of rows and rows of people who looked at me and smiled,
and a girl I had never seen before said 'Why, hello Charlie! (that's
my name). I put my hand on her knee, and then I woke up!
Gee, I felt sad, as if I'd lost my best friend.”
Quack, quack. A duck swam along, followed by a flotilla of in-
dustrious ducklings. The sky was beginning to turn pink.
"Won't you tell me your name?
Come and have supper
with me .. .. I know a Chinese place—the tables have marble
tops and carved legs. Then we could go to a movie. I won't bother
you—all I want is somebody to talk to. Have supper, and then, if
you want, you can leave me
or,
if you want, we can go to
.
.
.
а
.
.
.


CONRAD AIKEN
605
.
a movie.
It's nice to sit close together—you know what I
mean? I like to feel a girl's shoulder against mine, moving when
she breathes. Why is it it feels so good? You feel happy all over, as
if you were melting, and then you touch each other's hands”
She got up suddenly, trembling all over, without having
been aware of any decision to go, and walked rapidly away. For a
moment he did not follow, but then she was aware, half turning
her head, that he had risen and had begun to walk after her, but
with the same odd irresolute step with which he had first approached
her. She quickened her pace, her heart beating. She had a strange
pulsing pain in the side of her throat. When she had turned the
corner she ran and barely caught a street-car which had stopped
there. She looked back and saw him standing at the corner, foolish
and pathetic. Then he turned aimlessly back towards the parkway.
All the way home in the street-car she felt extraordinarily con-
fused, ecstatic, and at the same time ashamed. She wanted to hear
music, to dance, to draw pictures-pictures full of darkness and
depth, with pointed lights and dim people moving among trees
hung with lanterns. She thought of the river, as he had described it.
That had been delicious—especially the white horse in the mist of
asparagus. She thought of the marble-topped tables, Chinamen,
carved legs, and the girl who had said 'Why, hello Charlie!'
When she got to the boarding-house she found that her sister had
left a message, saying that she would not be home till late in the
evening.
Good! . . She ate her supper without talk-
ing to anybody, and then, feeling excited and happy, went out.
She walked, without apparent aim, towards the more crowded
streets, where the lights were brightest and the sound of the idle
stream of people loudest. Everybody wanted to be gay. But she
was getting tired, she couldn't walk about like this all evening-
What should she do? A movie sign caught her eye. Ah!
She was given a seat between two men, both of whom looked at her
with interest. An orchestra was playing loudly, the great shaft of
light poured down to the screen over the dark rows of people. It
was full of narrow rays, crossing and recrossing one another. A
laugh began somewhere and ran irregularly over the house, gather-
ing volume, then died away. She sank back in her chair, sighing.
Her shoulder touched the shoulder of the man at her right, and she
quickly withdrew it, and began, for some reason, to tremble vio-
lently.
.
.
.


PRAISE FOR AN URN
(In Memoriam E. N.)
BY HART CRANE
It was a kind and northern face
That mingled in such exile guise
The everlasting eyes of Pierrot
And, of Gargantua, the laughter.
His thoughts, delivered to me
From the white coverlet and pillow,
I see now, were inheritances-
Delicate riders of the storm.
The slant moon on the slanting hill
Once moved us toward presentiments
Of what the dead keep, living still,
And such assessments of the soul
As, perched in the crematory lobby,
The insistent clock commented on,
Touching as well upon our praise
Of glories proper to the time.
Still, having in mind gold hair,
I cannot see that broken brow
And miss the dry sound of bees
Stretching across a lucid space.
Scatter these well meant idioms
Into the smoky spring that fills
The suburbs, where they will be lost.
They are no trophies of the sun.


THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV—THE
DOWNFALL OF EUROPE
BY HERMANN HESSE
Translated from the German by Stephen Hudson
“NichtS IST AUSZEN, NICHTS
IST INNEN, DENN WAS AUS-
ZEN IST, IST INNEN.”
IT
T appears to me that what I call the Downfall of Europe is fore-
told and explained with extreme clearness in Dostoevsky's works
and in the most concentrated form in The Brothers Karamazov.
It seems to me that European and especially German youth are
destined to find their greatest writer in Dostoevsky-not in Goethe,
not even in Nietzsche. In the most modern poetry, there is every-
where an approach to Dostoevsky, even though it is sometimes cal-
low and imitative. The ideal of the Karamazov, primeval, Asiatic,
and occult, is already beginning to consume the European soul. That
is what I mean by the downfall of Europe. This downfall is a
return home to the mother, a turning back to Asia, to the source, to
the “Faüstischen Muttern” and will necessarily lead, like every
death on earth, to a new birth.
We contemporaries see a “downfall” in these events in the same
way as the aged who, compelled to leave the home they love, mourn
a loss to them irreparable while the young think only of the future,
care only for what is new.
What is that Asiatic Ideal that I find in Dostoevsky, the effect
of which will be, as I see it, to overwhelm Europe?
Briefly, it is the rejection of every strongly-held Ethic and Moral
in favour of a comprehensive laissez-faire. This is the new and dan-
gerous faith, that Elder Zossima announced, the faith lived by
Alyosha and Dmitri, a faith which was brought into clearer expres-
sion by Ivan Karamazov. In the case of Elder Zossima, the ideal
Right still reigns supreme. Good and Evil always exist for him; but
he bestows his love on evil-doers from choice. Alyosha already
a


608
THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV
1
1
makes something far more vital of this new creed, taking his way
through filth and slime with an almost amoral impartiality. He re-
minds us of Zarathustra's vow: “In that day I vowed that I would
renounce every aversion.”
But Alyosha's brothers carry this further, they take this road with
greater decision; they seem often to do so defiantly. In the volumi-
nous book it sometimes appears as though the relationship of the
Brothers Karamazov unfolded itself too slowly so that what at
one time seems stable, at another becomes solvent. The saintly
Alyosha becomes ever more worldly, the worldly brothers more
saintly; and similarly the most unprincipled and unbridled of them
becomes the saintliest, the most sensitive, the most spiritual prophet
of a new holiness, of a new morality, of a new mankind. That is
very curious. The more the tale unfolds itself, the wickeder and the
more drunken, the more licentious and brutal the Karamazovs, the
more brightly the new Ideal glows through the corpus of these raw
appearances, people, and acts; and the more spiritual, the saintlier
they inwardly become. Compared with the drunken, murdering,
violent Dmitri and the cynical intellectual Ivan-the decent, highly
respectable magistrate and the other representatives of the bour-
geois, triumph though they may outwardly, are shabby, hollow,
worthless.
It seems, then, that the “New Ideal” by which the roots of the
European spirit is being sapped, is an entirely amoral concept, a
faculty to feel the Godlike, the significant, the fatalistic, in the
wickedest and in the ugliest, and even to accord them veneration
and worship. No less than that. The ironical exaggeration with
which the Magistrate in his speech seeks to hold these Karamazovs
up to the scorn of the citizens, is not in reality an exaggeration. It
is indeed a tame indictment. For in this speech the "Russian man"
is exhibited from the conservative-bourgeois point of view. He had
been till then a cock-shy. Dangerous, emotional, irresponsible, yet
conscience-haunted; soft, dreamy, cruel, yet fundamentally childish.
,
As such one still likes to regard the “Russian man” to-day, although,
I believe, he has for a long time been on the road to becoming the
European man. And this is the Downfall of Europe.
Let us look at this “Russian man" a moment. He is far older
than Dostoevsky, but Dostoevsky has finally shown him to the
world in all his fearful significance. The "Russian man" is


HERMANN HESSE
609
а
Karamazov, he is Fyodor Pavlovitch, he is Dmitri, he is Ivan, he is
Alyosha. These four, different as they may appear, belong insepa-
rably together. Together they are Karamazov, together they are
the "Russian man,” together they are the approaching, the proxi-
mate man of the European crisis.
Next notice something very remarkable. Ivan in the course of
the story turns from a civilized man into a Karamazov, from a
European into a Russian, out of a definitely-formed historical type
into the unformed raw material of Destiny.
There is a fairy-like dream-reality about the way in which Ivan
slides out of his original psychology: out of his understanding, cool-
ness, knowledge. There is mystical truth in this sliding of the
apparently solid brother into the hysterical, into the Russian, into
· the Karamazov-like. It is just he, the doubter, who at the end holds
speech with the devil! We will come to that later on.
So the “Russian man” is drawn neither as the hysterical, the
drunkard, the felon, the poet, the Saint, but as one with them all, as
possessing all these characteristics simultaneously. The “Russian
man,” Karamazov, is assassin and judge, ruffian and tenderest soul,
the completest egotist and the most self-sacrificing hero. We shall
not get a grasp of him from a European, from a hard and fast moral,
ethical, dogmatic standpoint. In this man the outward and the in-
ward, Good and Evil, God and Satan are united.
The urgent appeal ever rings out from these Karamazovs for the
symbol after which their spirit is striving, a God who is also a Devil.
Dostoevsky's “Russian man” is penetrated by that symbol. The
God-Devil, the primeval Demiurgus, he who was there from the
beginning, who alone stands the other side of the forbidden, who
knows neither day nor night, neither good nor evil. He is the
Nothingness and the All. He is unknowable to us, for we have only
the power to recognize prohibition, we are individual beings, bound
to day and to night, to warm and to cold, we need a God and a
devil. On the other side of that which is forbidden, in Nothingness
and in The All, only Demiurgus, the God of the altogether, who
knows neither Good nor Evil, can live.
There would be much to say about this, but what I have written
must suffice. We have seen the nature of the "Russian man." He
reaches forth beyond prohibitions, beyond natural instincts, beyond
morality. He is the man who has grasped the idea of freeing him-
a
a


610
THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV
self and on the other side, beyond the veil, beyond the principium
individuationis, of turning back again. This ideal man of the
Karamazovs loves nothing and everything, fears nothing and every-
thing, does nothing and everything. He is primeval matter, he is
monstrous soul-stuff. He cannot live in this form, he can only go
under, he can only pass on.
Dostoevsky has conjured forth this creature of downfall, this
fearful apparition. It has often been said that it is a good thing
that his Karamazovs were not developed to their last stage. Other-
wise not only Russia, but mankind would have been exploded into
the air.
But what has been said, though the speaker has not drawn from
his words their ultimate implications, can never be unsaid. That
which exists, that which has been thought, that which is possible,
can never again be extinguished. The "Russian man” has long
existed, he exists far outside Russia, he rules half Europe, and part
of the dreaded explosion has indeed in these last years been audibly
evident. It shows itself in that Europe is tired, it shows itself in
that Europe wants to turn homeward, in that Europe wants rest,
in that Europe wants to be recreated, reborn.
There occur to me two pronouncements of a European who indis-
putably represents for us an age that is past, a Europe which, if it
has not already gone under, is in the balance. I allude to the Kaiser
Wilhelm. The one pronouncement is that which he once wrote
under a somewhat extraordinary allegorical picture. In this he
warned the European nations to guard their "holiest possessions"
against the approaching peril from the East.
Kaiser Wilhelm was certainly not a wise or profound person.
Yet he possessed, as the repository and guardian of old-world ideals,
a certain hereditary insight which warned him against the dangers
that threatened those ideals. He was not intellectual, he did not like
reading good books, and he busied himself too much with politics.
Thus, that picture with its warning to the nations was not, as one
might think, the result of reading Dostoevsky, but of a vague fear of
the Eastern hordes, which through Japanese ambitions, might be
enrolled against Europe. The Kaiser knew but partially the import
of his words and how uncommonly right he was. He certainly did
not know the Karamazovs, he had a horror of profound thought,
but he had an uncannily right foreboding. The danger was coming
a


HERMANN HESSE
621
nearer every day. That danger was the Karamazovs, the contagion
from the East. What he unconsciously but rightly feared was the
staggering back of the tired European spirit to the Asiatic mother.
The second imperial pronouncement which occurs to me and
which at that time made an awful impression on me, is this. “That
nation will win the war which has the best nerves." When at that
time, quite at the beginning of the war, I heard of that pronounce-
ment, it came upon me like the muffled forewarning of an earth-
quake. It was, of course, clear that the Kaiser did not mean it so,
what he really had in his mind was something very flattering to Ger-
many. Very likely he himself had excellent nerves; his hunting and
troop-display comrades also. He knew, too, the old weary story of
effete and degenerate France and of virtuous, prolific Germany, and
believed it. But for those with knowledge, still more for those with
the intuition to sense to-morrow and the day after, that pronounce-
ment was terrible. For they knew that the Germans had in no way
better nerves than the French, English, and Americans, at best bet-
ter than the Russians. For to have bad nerves is the colloquial term
for hysteria and neurasthenia, for moral insanity and for all those
evils which one may regard in different ways, but which collectively
signify the Karamazov. With the exception of Austria, Germany
stood infinitely more willingly and weakly open to the Karamazovs,
to Dostoevsky, to Asia, than any other European people.
Thus the Kaiser too has twice uttered a forewarning, has indeed
foretold the Downfall of Europe
But quite another question is how we are to regard this Down-
fall. Here we are at the parting of the ways. Those who cling
definitely to the past, those who venerate time-honoured cultural
forms, the Knights of a treasured morality, must seek to delay this
Downfall and will mourn it inconsolably when it passes. For them
the Downfall is the End; for the others, it is the Beginning. For
the first, Dostoevsky is a criminal, for the others a Saint. For the
one party Europe and its soul constitute an entity once and for all,
foreordained, inviolate, a thing fixed and immutable. For the other
it is a becoming, a mutable, ever-changing thing.
The Asiatic, the chaotic, the savage, the dangerous, the amoral, in
fact the Karamazov elements can, like everything else in the world,
be regarded just as well from a positive as from a negative point of
view. Those who, from a fear to which they give no name, curse
a
a


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THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV
a
a
this Dostoevsky, these Karamazovs, these Russians, this Asia, this
Demiurge-fantasy, and all their implications, have a hard time be-
fore them. For Karamazov dominates more and more. But they
fall into error by seeing only the obvious, the visible, the material.
They see the Downfall of Europe coming as a horrible catastrophe
with thunder and beating of drums, either as Revolution accom-
panied by slaughter and violence, or as the triumph of crime, lust,
cruelty, corruption, and murder.
All that is possible, all of it is contained in Karamazov. One
never knows what a Karamazov is going to do next. Perhaps he
will surprise us with a death-blow, perhaps with a moving thanks-
giving to God. He consists of Alyoshas and of Dmitris, of Fyodors
and of Ivans. As we have seen, they are not to be identified with
any single character, but with a readiness to adopt any and every
character.
But there is no solace for the apprehensive, in that these incal-
culable people may just as well bring about a good as an evil future,
that they are just as likely to found a new Kingdom of God as one
of Satan. What stands or falls on earth concerns the Karamazovs
little. Their secret lies elsewhere, and the value and fruitfulness of
their amoral nature also.
These new people differ fundamentally from the earlier ones,
the orderly, law-abiding, decent folk, in one vital respect, namely,
that they live inwardly just as much as outwardly, that they are
constantly concerned with their own souls. The Karamazovs are
prepared to commit any crime, but they commit them only excep-
tionally because, as a rule, it suffices for them to have thought of
crime or to have dreamt of it, to have made their soul a confidant of
its possibility. Here lies their secret. Let us seek a formula for it.
Every formation of humanity, every culture, every civilization,
every order, is based upon an endowment of something over and
above that which is allowed and that which is forbidden. Man,
halfway between animal and a higher consciousness, has always a
great deal within him to repress, to hide, to deny, in order to be a
decent human being and to be socially possible. Man is full of
animal, full of primeval being, full of the tremendous, scarcely-
tamed instincts of a beastly, cruel selfishness. All these dangerous
instincts are there, always. But culture, super-consciousness, civi-
lization, have covered them over. Man does not show them, he has
learnt from childhood to hide these instincts and to deny them. But


HERMANN HESSE
613
every one of these instincts must come sooner or later to the surface.
Each instinct goes on living, not one is killed, not one is perma-
nently and for ever changed and ennobled. And each of these in-
stincts is in itself good, is not worse than another. But for every
period and culture there is a particular instinct which it regards with
special aversion or horror. Now when these instincts are again
aroused, in the form of unextinguished and merely superficially,
though carefully, restrained nature-forces, when these beasts again
begin roaring like slaves whose spirit, long crushed by flogging and
repression, is rekindled by insurgence, then the Karamazovs are
upon us. When a culture, one of these attempts to domesticate man,
gets tired and begins to decay, then men become in greater measure
remarkable. They become hysterical, develop strange lusts, become
like young people in puberty or like women in child-birth. Long-
ings for which man has no name, arise in the soul; longings which
the old culture and morality must hold for wrong. But they an-
nounce themselves with so innocent a voice, that Good and Evil be-
come interchangeable and every law reels.
Such people are the Brothers Karamazov. Every law easily ap-
pears to them as a convention, every morality as philistine; they
lightly adopt every licence, every caprice. With ever so great a
gladness they listen to the many voices in their own hearts.
But these souls need not inevitably reap crime and turbulence
from Chaos. As a new direction is given to the interrupted primeval
current, so the seed is sown of a new order, of a new morality.
With every culture it is the same. We cannot destroy the pri-
meval current, the animal in us, for with its death we should die
ourselves. But we can to a certain extent guide it, to a certain ex-
tent we can calm it down, to a certain extent make the "Good”
serviceable, as one harnesses a vicious horse to a good cart. Only
from time to time the lustre of this “Good” becomes old and weak,
the instincts no longer really believe in it, refuse any longer to be
yoked to it. Then the culture breaks in pieces, slowly as a rule, so
that what we call ancient takes centuries to die.
And before the old, dying culture and morality can be dissolved
into a new one, in that fearful, dangerous, painful stage, mankind
must look again into its own soul, must see the beast arise in itself
again, must again recognize the overlordship of the primeval forces
in itself, forces which are super-moral. Those who are fore-ordained,
prepared, and ripe for this event are Karamazovs. They are hys-


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THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV
a
>
terical and dangerous, they are as ready to be malefactors as ascetics,
they believe in nothing except the utter dubiousness of every belief. .
Every symbol has a hundred interpretations, of which every one
may be right. The Karamazovs too have a hundred interpretations.
Mine is only one of them, one of a hundred. This book of Dostoev-
sky's has hung a symbol round the neck of mankind, has erected a
monument for it just as an individual might in a dream create for
himself an image of his warring instincts and forces.
It is phenomenal that one human being could have written The
Brothers Karamazov. Now that the phenomenon has occurred,
there is no necessity to explain it. But there is a profound necessity
to emphasize this phenomenon, to read the writing as completely
as possible, as comprehendingly as possible, to learn as much as pos-
sible of its wonderful magic. My work is to contribute a thought,
a reflection, a commentary to that end, nothing more.
No one must suppose that I set forth these thoughts and sugges-
tions as Dostoevsky's own. On the contrary, no great seer or poet,
even if he had the power, has ever explained his story in its final
significance.
In conclusion I would point out that this mystical romance, this
dream of man, does not merely indicate the threshold across which
Europe is stepping, the dangerous moment of hovering between the
Void and the All. It also discloses the rich possibilities of the New
Life.
In this connexion the figure of Ivan is astonishing. We learn to
know him as a modern, accommodating, cultivated individual,
somewhat cool, somewhat disappointed, somewhat sceptical, some-
what tired. But he gets younger, more ardent, more significant,
more Karamazov-like. It is he who wrote the poem of the Great
Inquisitor. It is he who, after coolly ignoring the murderer whom
he believes his brother to be, is driven in the end to the deep sense
of his own culpability and even to his self-denouncement. And it is
he too who the most clearly and the most significantly experiences
the spiritual explanation of the unconscious. (On that indeed every-
thing turns. That is the whole meaning of the Downfall, the whole
new birth arises from it.) In the last part of the book is a very
singular chapter in which Ivan, coming home from his interview
with Smerdyakov, sees the devil seated there and converses with
him for an hour. This devil is no other than Ivan's unconscious, no
other than the shaken-up content, long submerged and apparently


HERMANN HESSE
615
forgotten, of his own soul. And he knows it too. Ivan knows it with
astonishing certainty and distinctly says so. Nevertheless he speaks
with the devil, nevertheless he believes in him for what is inward,
is outward. Nevertheless he is angered against him, surges against
him, even throws a glass at him whom he knows to come from with-
in himself. Surely no poem has ever set forth with more lucid clear-
ness the communion of a human being with his own unconscious
self. And this communion, this (despite anger) intimate understand-
ing with the devil, this is just the road that the Karamazovs have
been elected to show us. Indeed Dostoevsky shows the unconscious
to be the devil. And rightly. For that which is within us is dis-
torted by our tamed, cultivated, moral vision into something hateful
and Satanic. But some sort of combination of Ivan and Alyosha
would indeed provide that higher, more fruitful foundation upon
which a new world must be built. Then the unconscious will no
longer be the devil, but the God-Devil, Demiurgus, He who was
always, who comes from the All. To find a new Good and a new
Evil is not an eternal matter, is not the concern of Demiurgus. That
is the business of mankind and its humbler and smaller Gods.
A whole chapter would have to be written about another, a fifth
Karamazov, who plays a sinister but important rôle, although he
always remains half shrouded. This is Smerdyakov, an illegitimate
Karamazov. It is he who has assassinated the old man. It is he who
faces an omnipresent God, as a self-convicted murderer. It is he
who has to teach Ivan, the learned, about the most godly and the
most mystical matters. He is the most unpractical and at the same
time the wisest of all Karamazovs. But I find no space to do jus-
tice to him, the most mysterious Karamazov, in this essay.
Dostoevsky's book is not one that you can cut bits out of. I could
go on for days seeking and finding new features all pointing in the
same direction. One, a specially delightful and beautiful one, is
the hysteria of the two Hohlakovs. Here we have again the
Karamazov element intermingled with all that is strange and sick
and bad in two characters. One of them, the mother Hohlakov, is
simply unhealthy. Her behaviour is the result of habit which age
has confirmed; the hysteria is merely illness, debility, and stupidity.
But in the case of the magnificent daughter, it is not weariness
which shows itself as a form of hysteria, but a passionate exuber-
ance. She is haunted by the future. Immaturity and ripe love
oppose each other in the scale. She develops the idea and vision of


616
THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV
evil much further than her insignificant mother and yet the aston-
ishing thing about the daughter is that the innocence and power
behind her most wicked and shameless acts point her towards a
future full of promise. The mother Hohlakov is an hysterical, fit
for a sanatorium and nothing else. The daughter is a neurasthenic
whose illness is the symptom of a noble energy to which expression
is refused.
And do these developments in the souls of imagined characters of
fiction really signify the Downfall of Europe?
Certainly. They signify it as surely as the mind's eye perceives
life and eternity in the grass-blade of spring, and death and its in-
evitability in every falling leaf of autumn. It is possible that the
whole Downfall of Europe will play itself out "only” inwardly,
"only” in the souls of a generation, “only” in changing the mean-
ing of worn-out symbols, in the dis-valuation of spiritual values.
Thus, the ancient world, that first brilliant coining of European cul-
ture, did not go down under Nero. Its destruction was not due to
Spartacus nor to the Germanic tribes. But "only' to a thought out
of Asia, that simple, subtle thought that had been there very long,
but which took the form the teacher Christ gave to it.
Naturally, one can if one likes regard The Brothers Karamazov
from a literary point of view, as a work of art. When the uncon-
scious of a whole continent and age has made of itself poetry in the
nightmare of a single, prophetic dreamer, when it has issued in his
awful, blood-curdling scream, one can of course consider this scream
from the standpoint of a singing-teacher. Doubtless Dostoevsky
was a very gifted poet in spite of the enormities one finds in his
books. From such enormities, a poet pure and simple, such for in-
stance as Turgenev, is free. Isaiah too was an extremely gifted poet.
But is that important? In Dostoevsky, especially in The Karama-
zovs, one finds certain exaggerated and tasteless things. Such things,
which would not do for artists, come about where a man already
stands beyond Art. No matter. Even as an artist this Russian
prophet now and then proves himself, makes himself famous, makes
himself a world-wide celebrity. And one reflects with a strange
feeling that for the Europe of the time when Dostoevsky had al-
ready written all his books, others than he were valued with the
greatest European poets, Flaubert for instance. In comparison with
The Brothers Karamazov Flaubert's work becomes quite a small
artistic affair. Soon, European youth will hate and sneer at him


HERMANN HESSE
617.
a
with their elementary injustice, if only as a punishment for the
exaggerated patronage of their fathers. No, this is no time for
artists, that time has bloomed itself away.
But here I come upon a by-road. Elsewhere will be the place for
me to consider why, at this juncture, Flaubert came disturbingly
across my path and tempted me away from my concept. That too
will have its own special significance. Now I must stick to my chief
concern. I was going to say: perhaps the less such a world-book is
a work of art, the truer is its prophecy. And, besides, it seems to
me that there is so much that is remarkable and yet not wilful, not
the work of a single intelligence, in the romance, in the fable, and
in the invention of the Karamazovs. It seems not to be a poet's
work. For instance, to say the whole thing at once, the most sig-
nificant fact in the whole work is that the Karamazovs are inno-
cents. All these four Karamazovs, father and sons, are dangerous,
incalculable human beings. They have peculiar paroxysms, peculiar
consciousnesses, peculiar unconsciousnesses. One is a drunkard, the
other a woman-hunter, another is a fantastic hermit, the last is a
poet of secret blasphemous verses. These peculiar brothers threaten
much danger to others. They seize people by the beard, they do
people out of money, they menace people with death and
-yet they
are innocent and, in spite of all, none of them have done anything
really criminal. The only murderers in this long novel, which is
chiefly concerned with murder, robbery, and crime, the only guilty
murderers are the magistrate and the jury, the representatives of an
ancient, honoured order, honest and blameless citizens. They con-
demn the innocent Dmitri, they scoff at his innocence, they are
judges who estimate, criticize God and the world according to their
code. And it is just they who err, just they who do fearful injustice,
just they who become murderers from prejudice, from fear, from
shallow-mindedness.
That is not a discovery, it is not a matter of literature. It is not
the work of the smugly efficient literary detective or of the witty
and satirical man of letters playing the social critic. We know all
about that sort of thing and we are distrustful and we have long
ceased to believe in it. No, for Dostoevsky the innocence of the
criminal and the culpability of the judge are not in the least a cun-
ning pretence. It is a fearful thing which stands forth and grows so
surely, is rooted so deeply, that finally, almost in the last stage of
the book, one stands aghast before the fact. One stands and gazes
a


618
THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV
at the whole pain and insanity of the world, at the suffering and
lack of understanding of men, as though one were facing a wall.
I said Dostoevsky is not a poet, or he is only a poet in a secondary
sense. I called him a prophet. It is difficult to say exactly what a
prophet means. It seems to me something like this. A prophet is a
sick man, like Dostoevsky, who was an epileptic. A prophet is the
sort of sick man who has lost the sound sense of taking care of him-
self, the sense which is the saving of the efficient citizen. It would
not do if there were many such, for the world would go to pieces.
This sort of sick man, be he called Dostoevsky or Karamazov, has
that strange, occult, godlike faculty, the possibility of which the
Asiatic venerates in every maniac. He is a seer and an oracle. A
.
people, a period, a country, a continent has fashioned out of its
corpus an organ, a sensory instrument of infinite sensitiveness, a
very rare and delicate organ. Other men, thanks to their happiness
and health, can never be troubled with this endowment. This
sensory instrument, this mantological faculty is not crudely com-
prehensible like some sort of telepathy or magic, although the gift
can also show itself even in such confusing forms. Rather is it that
the sick man of this sort interprets the movements of his own soul in
terms of the universal and of mankind. Every man has visions, every
man has fantasies, every man has dreams. And every vision, every
dream, every idea and thought of a man, on the road from the uncon-
scious to the conscious, can have a thousand different meanings, of
which every one can be right. But the appearances and visions of the
seer and the prophet are not his own. The nightmare of visions which
oppresses him does not warn him of a personal illness, of a personal
death, but of the illness, the death of that corpus whose sensory
organ he is. This corpus can be a family, a clan, a people, or it can be
all mankind. In the soul of Dostoevsky a certain sickness and sensi-
tiveness to suffering in the bosom of mankind which is otherwise
called hysteria, found at once its means of expression and its ba-
rometer. Mankind is now on the point of realizing this. Already
half Europe, at all events half Eastern Europe, is on the road to
Chaos. In a state of drunken illusion she is reeling into the abyss
and, as she reels, she sings a drunken hymn such as Dmitri Karama-
zov sang. The insulted citizen laughs that song to scorn, the saint
and seer hear it with tears.



OC
PIN
exe
TYTT
R
RUNIYO
WORY
HEIFER. BY YASUO KUNIYOSHI


!


DUBLIN LETTER
May, 1922
D.
9)
>
EAN SWIFT (if he was serious) could think of no greater
misfortune than "to be a man of genius and to have been born
in Ireland.” What exactly did he mean? The possibilities of life,
for Swift and most of his friends (Thomas Parnell, for instance, au-
thor of The Hermit, who with equal bitterness upbraided the destiny
which held him in Ireland) were perhaps in the main the chances
which it offered of "preferment,” or as we now say, of “getting on”;
so I suppose he meant merely that in this respect one is “out of it" in
I
Ireland. But the causes which render Ireland at once the teeming
mother and the unkindly nurse of talent are more subtle; they still
persist, and may be expressed in the short formula: the facts of
Irish life are incompatible with its ideals. Since Swift's time, in the
common history of these islands, Irishmen have cropped up every-
where-in literature, politics, philosophy, science, warfare: but it is
to be feared that the doctrine now triumphant-i. e., that the true
Ireland, however composite in race, is an entity spiritually affiliated
to purely Celtic traditions, and that the part which it has taken in
the civilization of the British Islands during recent centuries has
been a deplorable and disastrous mistake-it is to be feared that this
doctrine is hardly likely to bring about the removal of those condi-
tions which made Ireland a hateful place to Swift. Matthew Arnold
praised in Celtic literature its "revolt against the despotism of
fact": but why should Ireland always get its facts wrong? Why
should Irish ideals always be irreconcilable with facts ?
I should like to be the irresponsible and invisible prompter of a
benevolent despot in Ireland. I should endeavour to fill this Caesar
with the vision of an Ireland divided, like Gaul, into three parts,
corresponding to the real and predestinated division of the Irish
population. He would take my word for it that “Ulster" is im-
penetrable to Irish ideals; and he would endeavour to balance it by
a “Munster” equally impenetrable to the spirit of compromise. Be-
tween these two permanently irreconcilable communities, differing
in language, institutions, and, most of all, in religion, would lie the
a


620
DUBLIN LETTER
Anglo-Irish enclave, whose decisive and central importance is al-
ready demonstrated by its power to transform such men as Mr
Arthur Griffith and Mr Michael Collins into prudent and reason-
able politicians.
For special reasons, Ireland has insisted on making an Irishman
of Swift, in spite of his vigorous repudiations of the title; and it is
not too much to say that the country in which he was born and edu-
cated, where his mysterious loves were mostly enacted, where he
chiefly studied human nature, the country which drew him back to
it time after time and laid hold of him until he died in it, the coun-
try, in short, from which he will be called on the morning of the
Resurrection, was, in a special sense, his true country. The fact,
however, that Swift succeeded in literature, while remaining in Ire-
land, is perhaps rather an indication that he was what he said he
was, English; for it is remarkable that while certain Englishmen
(Spenser, for instance) have contrived to write great works in Ire-
land, Irish writers have mostly had to leave Ireland in order to dis-
cover their true capacities. Mr Bernard Shaw says, I believe, that
when he comes to Ireland he cannot work; and Mr George Moore,
who for certain purposes of his own lived here for ten years, sup-
ported himself by the frequent assertion that he was "the only Irish-
man who lived in Ireland from choice.” On the other hand, Mr
W. B. Yeats, who has hitherto lived in Ireland almost as little as
Thomas Moore, has recently been minded to take a house in Dub-
lin. Is this a sign that the "curse of Swift” may at last cease
operate in a “Free State”? that a reconciliation between the fact
and the ideal is at hand in Ireland? A new work by Mr Yeats in
the course of the next few years may perhaps make us feel surer
about this.
In any case, Mr Yeats, who is a master of literary theory, will
have a valuable opportunity for indoctrinating the young Irish
writers who are now coming forward (though I fear they are not
very docile) in a true literary theory. At present there exists a
certain doubt amongst them as to the future of the English language
as the literary medium of this country. They need to be assured
that when there is a great impulse to translation in a literature, as
there has been in Irish literature right down from the early nine-
teenth century, it means that a creative impulse is passing from the
older into the newer medium. Mangan and Ferguson were "great
а


JOHN EGLINTON
621
translators” in the sense in which the term was applied to Chaucer.
Anglo-Irish literature has absorbed so much by way of translation
from the Celtic that we may feel confident that there can now be no
reversal of the process, and that after the many successful versions
from the Irish to be found, for example in Mr Colum's new Anthol-
ogy of Irish Verse, Ireland can no more go back to Gaelic than
England after Chaucer could go back to French or Anglo-Saxon.
Anglo-Irish literature will go forward confidently when it has
learned this lesson, as it presently will, when the incomparable
opportunity offered to a poet in Ireland has been seized by some
unhesitating man of destiny. This is not quite the conclusion drawn
by Mr Colum, in his interesting Introduction, from the beauty and
finality of the many verse-translations from the Gaelic which are
the distinctive feature of his Anthology; though he seems to admit
that many of these translations (for example, Mangan’s Dark Rosa-
leen) are new creations, exceeding in beauty their nominal originals.
One reason of the doubt about the English language as the proper
medium for Irish poetry is that in Anglo-Irish poetry Ireland is
spoken of habitually in the third person, and this again may be due
to the fact that most of our poets have been absentees, and that it
is in moments of homesickness that the image of Erin comes up
before them, to inspire their tearful songs. It is as though the func-
tion of Anglo-Irish poetry were to keep alive the image of Ireland
in the hearts of its exiles. At any rate, to those of us who live in Ire-
land, it is a little depressing to have to read of it as a land "beyond
good and evil,” with a past and a future, but with no present-
except what we read about in the newspapers. Far more than a
"language-movement” do we require a thought-movement. A. E.
may say what he likes about the sacrosanctity of Ireland, but the
sacred places of Ireland have never been discovered. It has no Gras-
mere or Concord.
I do not know whether it is becoming in a contributor to The
Dial to speak unsympathetically of the new work of that distin-
guished Irish exile, Mr James Joyce. Mr Joyce has wished to de-
vise a species of literary notation which will express the interrupted-
ness of life. We cannot hold our minds to any one purpose or idea
for more than a few moments at a time. Even a man who sets out
to commit a murder will not all the while be an Iago or a Rich-
ard III. The outward world will continue to pour in through all his
a
a


622
DUBLIN LETTER
a
2
senses, so that five minutes before the gruesome deed his mind may
be as far away from it as if he were out on a Bank Holiday. The
equilibrium in the faculties of attention will be particularly un-
stable in a mind like that of the hero of Ulysses, intent on self-
culture, aiming at an experience as wide as the world, and in a
continual agony of apprehension lest anything of significance should
escape him in sight, sound, scent, or feeling. One "specimen day" of
such a mind Mr Joyce attempts to set down on paper, with an effort
of concentration which reminds one of the ascetic practices of those
Indian Yogis, who in attempting to recall their past lives, begin
from the present moment, and travelling back laboriously to the
moment of birth, are then able to leap the mysterious gulf dividing
them from their last incarnation. Mr Joyce's feat in this book I
should find admirable, if it were executed with some such practical
purpose: but his purpose is to produce a work of virgin art! And
!
yet they say that art is not the imitation of reality, as Aristotle
naïvely assumed, but an imaginative creation! There is an effort
and strain in the composition of this book which makes one at times
feel a concern for the author. But why should we half-kill our-
selves to write masterpieces? There is a growing divergence between
the literary ideals of our artists and the books which human beings
want to read. Perhaps this divergence will widen indefinitely until
aesthetic criticism is, superseded by a finer physiological criticism
which will recognize that from time to time a man is born to be a
depository of the wisdom or musings of the race, which he will utter
easily and after a manner of his own.
Byron deplored that "a third of life is passed in sleep”: and of
the waking two-thirds, probably at least nine-tenths are passed in
reverie and abstraction, and the drift of associated ideas. Yet the
remaining tenth part of waking life, in which the will is exerted,
our true life, is the subject-matter of art. Even our natural mem-
ories recognize this and work selectively; for in reviewing our past
we discard all but the essentials of our thoughts and actions. To
catch a man in the folly and inconsequence of his casual thoughts is
like snap-shotting Maslova in a single attitude of her swan-dance.
I am by no means sure, however, that I have understood Mr
Joyce's method, which is sufficiently puzzling even where he relates
incidents in which I have myself taken a humble part.
a
.
1
a
John EGLINTON



31
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นี้
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22
Shreat, Deri
JAMES JOYCE. BY STEWART DAVIS
int


1


PARIS LETTER
May, 1922
ULYSSES
Πολλών δ' ανθρώπων ίδεν άστεα, και νόον έγνω: All men should “Unite to
give praise to Ulysses”; those who will not, may content themselves
with a place in the lower intellectual orders; I do not mean that
they should all praise it from the same viewpoint; but all serious
men of letters, whether they write out a critique or not, will cer-
tainly have to make one for their own use. To begin with matters
lying outside dispute I should say that Joyce has taken up the art
of writing where Flaubert left it. In Dubliners and The Portrait he
had not exceeded the Trois Contes or L’Education; in Ulysses he
has carried on a process begun in Bouvard et Pécuchet; he has
brought it to a degree of greater efficiency, of greater compactness;
he has swallowed the Tentation de St Antoine whole, it serves as
comparison for a single episode in Ulysses. Ulysses has more form
than any novel of Flaubert's. Cervantes had parodied his predeces-
sors and might be taken as basis of comparison for another of
Joyce's modes of concision, but where Cervantes satirized one man-
ner of folly and one sort of highfalutin' expression, Joyce satirizes
at least seventy, and includes a whole history of English prose, by
implication.
Messrs Bouvard and Pécuchet are the basis of democracy;
Bloom also is the basis of democracy; he is the man in the street, the
next man, the public, not our public, but Mr Wells' public; for Mr
Wells he is Hocking's public, he is l'homme moyen sensuel; he is
also Shakespeare, Ulysses, The Wandering Jew, the Daily Mail
reader, the man who believes what he sees in the papers, Everyman,
and "the goat”
πολλά πάθεν .. κατα θυμον.
Flaubert having recorded provincial customs in Bovary and city
habits in L'Education, set out to complete his record of nineteenth
century life by presenting all sorts of things that the average man
of the period would have had in his head; Joyce has found a more
expeditious method of summary and analysis. After Bouvard and
his friend have retired to the country Flaubert's incompleted nar-
rative drags; in Ulysses anything may occur at any moment; Bloom


624
PARIS LETTER
suffers kata thumon; “every fellow mousing round for his liver and
his lights”: he is polumetis and a receiver of all things.
Joyce's characters not only speak their own language, but they
think their own language. Thus Master Dignam stood looking at
the poster: "two puckers stripped to their pelts and putting up
their props.
“Gob that'd be a good pucking match to see, Myler Keogh, that's
the chap sparring out to him with the green sash. Two bob en-
trance, soldiers half price. I could easy do a bunk on ma. When is
it? May the twenty second. Sure, the blooming thing is all over.”
>
But Father Conmee was wonderfully well indeed: “And her
boys, were they getting on well at Belvedere ? Was that so? Father
Conmee was very glad to hear that. And Mr Sheehy himself? Still
in London. The House was still sitting, to be sure it was. Beautiful
weather it was, delightful indeed. Yes, it was very probable that
Father Bernard Vaughn would come again to preach. O, yes, a
very great success. A wonderful man really."
Father Conmee later “reflected on the providence of the Creator
who had made turf to be in bogs where men might dig it out and
bring it to town and hamlet to make fires in the houses of poor
people."
The dialects are not all local, on page 406 we hear that:
>
"Elijah is coming. Washed in the Blood of the Lamb. Come on,
you winefizzling, ginsizzling, booseguzzling existences! Come on,
you dog-gone, bullnecked, beetlebrowed, hogjowled, peanut-
brained, weaseleyed fourflushers, false alarms and excess baggage!
Come on, you triple extract of infamy! Alexander J. Christ Dowie,
that's yanked to glory most half this planet from 'Frisco Beach
to Vladivostok. The Deity ain't no nickel dime bumshow. I put it
to you that he's on the square and a corking fine business proposi-
tion. He's the grandest thing yet, and don't you forget it. Shout
salvation in King Jesus. You'll need to rise precious early, you
sinner there, if you want to diddle Almighty God.
Not
half. He's got a coughmixture with a punch in it for you, my
friend, in his backpocket. Just you try it on.”


EZRA POUND
625
This varigation of dialects allows Joyce to present his matter,
his tones of mind, very rapidly; it is no more succinct than Flau-
bert's exhaustion of the relation of Emma and her mother-in-law;
or of Père Rouault's character, as epitomized in his last letter to
Emma; but it is more rapid than the record of “received ideas” in
Bouvard et Pécuchet.
Ulysses is, presumably, as unrepeatable as Tristram Shandy; I
mean you cannot duplicate it; you can't take it as a "model,” as
you could Bovary; but it does complete something begun in Bou-
vard; and it does add definitely to the international store of literary
technique.
Stock novels, even excellent stock novels, seem infinitely long,
and infinitely encumbered, after one has watched Joyce squeeze
the last drop out of a situation, a science, a state of mind, in half
a page, in a catechismic question and answer, in a tirade à la
Rabelais.
Rabelais himself rests, he remains, he is too solid to be diminished
by any pursuer; he was a rock against the follies of his age; against
ecclesiastic theology, and more remarkably, against the blind
idolatry of the classics just coming into fashion. He refused the
lot, lock, stock, and barrel, with a greater heave than Joyce has yet
exhibited; but I can think of no other prose author whose propor-
tional status in pan-literature is not modified by the advent of
Ulysses.
James (H.) speaks with his own so beautiful voice, even some-
times when his creations should be using their own; Joyce speaks if
not with the tongue of men and angels, at least with a many-
tongued and multiple language, of small boys, street preachers, of
genteel and ungenteel, of bowsers and undertakers, of Gertie Mc-
Dowell and Mr Deasey.
One reads Proust and thinks him very accomplished; one reads
H. J. and knows that he is very accomplished; one begins Ulysses
and thinks, perhaps rightly, that Joyce is less so; that he is at any
rate less gracile; and one considers how excellently both James and
Proust “convey their atmospheres”; yet the atmosphere of the
Gerty-Nausika episode with its echoes of vesper service is certainly
“conveyed,” and conveyed with a certitude and efficiency that
neither James nor Proust have excelled.


626
PARIS LETTER
CG
And on the home stretch, when our present author is feeling more
or less relieved that the weight of the book is off his shoulders, we
find if not gracile accomplishments, at any rate such acrobatics,
such sheer whoops and hoop-las and trapeze turns of technique that
it would seem rash to dogmatize concerning his limitations. The
whole of him, on the other hand, lock, stock, and gunny-sacks is
wholly outside H. J.'s compass and orbit, outside Proust's circuit
and orbit.
If it be charged that he shows that provincialism which must
be forever dragging in allusions to some book or local custom,” it
must also be admitted that no author is more lucid or more explicit
in presenting things in such a way that the imaginary Chinaman or
denizen of the forty-first century could without works of reference
gain a very good idea of the scene and habits portrayed.
Poynton with its spoils forms a less vivid image than Bloom's
desired two story dwelling house and appurtenances. The recollec-
tions of In Old Madrid are not at any rate highbrow; the "low back
car” is I think local. But in the main, I doubt if the local allusions
interfere with a general comprehension. Local details exist every-
where; one understands them mutatis mutandis, and any picture
would be perhaps faulty without them. One must balance obscurity
against brevity. Concision itself is an obscurity for the dullard.
In this super-novel our author has also poached on the epic, and
has, for the first time since 1321, resurrected the infernal figures;
his furies are not stage figures; he has, by simple reversal, caught
back the furies, his flaggellant Castle ladies. Telemachus, Circe,
the rest of the Odyssean company, the noisy cave of Aeolus gradu-
ally place themselves in the mind of the reader, rapidly or less
rapidly according as he is familiar or unfamiliar with Homer.
These correspondences are part of Joyce's mediaevalism and are
chiefly his own affair, a scaffold, a means of construction, justified
by the result, and justifiable by it only. The result is a triumph in
form, in balance, a main schema, with continuous inweaving and
arabesque.
The best criticism of any work, to my mind the only criticism
of any work of art that is of any permanent or even moderately
durable value, comes from the creative writer or artist who does
the next job; and not, not ever from the young gentlemen who
make generalities about the creator. Laforgue's Salomé is the real


EZRA POUND
627
criticism of Salammbo; Joyce and perhaps Henry James are critics
of Flaubert. To me, as poet, the Tentation is jettatura, it is the
effect of Flaubert's time on Flaubert; I mean he was interested in
certain questions now dead as mutton, because he lived in a certain
period; fortunately he managed to bundle these matters into one or
two books and keep them out of his work on contemporary sub-
jects; I set it aside as one sets aside Dante's treatise De Aqua et
Terra, as something which matters now only as archaeology. Joyce,
working in the same medium as Flaubert, makes the intelligent
criticism: "We might believe in it if Flaubert had first shown us St
Antoine in Alexandria looking at women and jewellers' windows.”
Ulysses contains 732 double sized pages, that is to say it is about
the size of four ordinary novels, and even a list of its various points
of interest would probably exceed my alloted space; in the Cyclops
episode we have a measuring of the difference between reality, and
reality as represented in various lofty forms of expression; the
satire on the various dead manners of language culminates in the
execution scene, blood and sugar stewed into clichés and rhetoric;
just what the public deserves, and just what the public gets every
morning with its porridge, in the Daily Mail and in sentimento-
rhetorical journalism; it is perhaps the most savage bit of satire
we have had since Swift suggested a cure for famine in Ireland.
Henry James complained of Baudelaire, "Le Mal, you do yourself
too much honour
our impatience is of the same order as
if for the 'Flowers of Good' one should present us with a
rhapsody on plum-cake and eau de cologne.” Joyce has set out to
do an inferno, and he has done an inferno.
He has presented Ireland under British domination a picture so
veridic that a ninth rate coward like Shaw (Geo. B.) dare not even
look it in the face. By extension he has presented the whole occident
under the domination of capital. The details of the street map are
local but Leopold Bloom (né Virag) is ubiquitous. His spouse
Gea-Tellus the earth symbol is the soil from which the intelligence
strives to leap, and to which it subsides in saeculum saeculorum.
As Molly she is a coarse-grained bitch, not a whore, an adulteress,
il y en a. Her ultimate meditations are uncensored (bow to psy-
choanalysis required at this point). The "censor” in the Freudian
sense is removed, Molly's night-thoughts differing from those versi-
fied in Mr Young's once ubiquitous poem are unfolded, she says


628
PARIS LETTER
.
.
ultimately that her body is a flower; her last word is affirmative.
The manners of the genteel society she inhabits have failed to get
under her crust, she exists presumably in Patagonia as she exists in
Jersey City or Camden.
And the book is banned in America, where every child of seven
has ample opportunity to drink in the details of the Arbuckle case,
or two hundred other equodorous affairs from the 270,000,000
copies of the 300,000 daily papers which enlighten us. One returns
to the Goncourt's question, “Ought the people to remain under a
literary edict? Are there classes unworthy, misfortunes too low,
dramas too ill set, catastrophies, horrors too devoid of nobility?
Now that the novel is augmented, now that it is the great literary
form
the social inquest, for psychological research and
analysis, demanding the studies and imposing on its creator the
duties of science
seeking the facts
whether or
no the novelist is to write with the accuracy, and thence with the
freedom of the savant, the historian, the physician ?”
Whether the only class in America that tries to think is to be
hindered by a few cranks, who cannot, and dare not interfere with
the leg shows on Broadway? Is any one, for the sake of two or three
words which every small boy has seen written on the walls of a
privy, going to wade through two hundred pages on consubstan-
tiation or the biographic bearing of Hamlet? And ought an epoch-
making report on the state of the human mind in the twentieth
century (first of the new era) be falsified by the omission of these
half dozen words, or by a pretended ignorance of extremely simple
acts. Bloom's day is uncensored, very well. The foecal analysis,
in the hospital around the corner, is uncensored. No one but a
Presbyterian would contest the utility of the latter exactitude. A
great literary masterwork is made for minds quite as serious as those
engaged in the science of medicine. The anthropologist and so-
ciologist have a right to equally accurate documents, to equally
succinct reports and generalizations, which they seldom get, con-
sidering the complexity of the matter in hand, and the idiocy of
current superstitions.
A Fabian milk report is of less use to a legislator than the
knowledge contained in L’Education Sentimentale, or in Bovary.
The legislator is supposed to manage human affairs, to arrange for
comity of human agglomerations. Le beau monde gouverne-or did


EZRA POUND
629
a
once because it had access to condensed knowledge, the middle
ages were ruled by those who could read, an aristocracy received
Macchiavelli's treatise before the serfs. A very limited plutocracy
now gets the news, of which a fraction (not likely to throw too
much light upon proximate markets) is later printed in newspapers.
Jefferson was perhaps the last American official to have any general
sense of civilization. Molly Bloom judges Griffith derisively by
"the sincerity of his trousers," and the Paris edition of the Tribune
tells us that the tailors' congress has declared Pres. Harding to be
our best dressed Chief Magistrate.
Be it far from me to depreciate the advantages of having a
president who can meet on equal trouserial terms such sartorial
paragons as Mr Balfour and Lord (late Mr) Lee of Fareham (and
Checquers) but be it equidistant also from me to disparage the
public utility of accurate language which can be attained only from
literature, and which the succinct J. Caesar, or the lucid Macchia-
velli, or the author of the Code Napoléon, or Thos. Jefferson, to
cite a local example, would have in no ways despised. Of course it
is too soon to know whether our present ruler takes an interest in
these matters; we know only that the late pseudo-intellectual
Wilson did not, and that the late bombastic Teddy did not, and
Taft, McKinley, Cleveland, did not, and that, as far back as
memory serves us no American president has ever uttered one soli-
tary word implying the slightest interest in, or consciousness of,
the need for an intellectual or literary vitality in America. A sense
of style could have saved America and Europe from Wilson; it
would have been useful to our diplomats. The mot juste is of public
utility. I can't help it. I am not offering this fact as a sop to
aesthetes who want all authors to be fundamentally useless. We
are governed by words, the laws are graven in words, and literature
is the sole means of keeping these words living and accurate. The
specimen of fungus given in my February letter shows what hap-
pens to language when it gets into the hands of illiterate specialists.
Ulysses furnishes matter for a symposium rather than for a
single letter, essay, or review.
EZRA POUND


BOOK REVIEWS
BOMBINATION
Crome Yellow. By Aldous Huxley. 12mo. 307
pages. George H. Doran Company. $2.
THE
a
HE name of Huxley is suggestive. The eminent sceptics of
the Victorian age remained the children of an earlier time.
While they destroyed traditional opinions and beliefs, they retained
themselves traditional habits of mind and of feeling. They re-
mained as earnest, serious, and moral, as their religious opponents.
Now their work is producing its fruit. We have a generation
sceptical and sophisticated beyond the dreams of the destructive
Giants. It has carried the work of its grandfathers to its logical end,
and welcomes the psychological determinism of Freud as the con-
firmation of its deductions. Taking a particular and detached view
of things, it is remarkable for intelligence rather than for intellect.
The centre of interest has shifted. Instead of a division into good
and evil, or fit and unfit, or beautiful and ugly, we have a new
standard and a new dichotomy.
We say that a thing is or is not "amusing.” That does not mean
that it is comic, or even that it is bizarre. A picture by a Primitive,
a sermon by Donne, the music of Rossini, the character of Glad-
stone—these are all “amusing.” If the meaning of the word could
be successfully analysed and defined, it would contribute something
to the critical understanding of much modern work and feeling.
I fancy that the taste for the “amusing" consists largely of an in-
tense and intellectualized appreciation of things for their own sake,
of their ipseity; of what is characteristic in them, and peculiar to
them; of the differentia which makes it possible to label them. Thus
the actions of historical personages are "amusing” just in so far as
they are “mannered," "of the period,” and appear to us to be antics.
It is by reason of the difference between them and ourselves, that
we find people amusing."
“
When the "amusing” becomes the principal interest, and the


RAYMOND MORTIMER
631
only criterion, all capacity and inclination for moral judgement nat-
urally disappears. Its place is taken by a dilettante attitude which
seems eventually to be rather sentimental; it seeks by this intelli-
gent appreciation of things to compensate for an absence of emotion.
The beginnings of this attitude are, I think, perceptible in the
Correspondence of Flaubert, and the Goncourt Journal. It is strong
in Laforgue, and now there are several English writers who in their
different ways are remarkable for it, Lytton Strachey, Norman
Douglas, and Pearsall Smith eminent among them. But Mr Hux-
ley is perhaps the furthest gone. The one thing impossible to him
is any sort of earnestness. To him the world is a vast aquarium
peopled by fantastic goggling creatures; and only in so far as they
goggle, do they interest him.
Mr Huxley has produced a number of poems and a book of short
stories called Limbo. We are now given a desperately clever dis-
cursive novel. Crome is an English country-house complete with
farmyard and village. In it Henry Wimbush and his viraginous
wife, the gorgeous Lady Priscilla, entertain a house-party of some
eight persons. They spend their time chiefly in conversation; and
what they chiefly talk and think about, and dabble in, is venery.
(The word is not used in the sense of la chasse; never was a house-
party less sporting.) The party includes a modern painter, a mod-
ern poet, a New Thought philosopher, and a real philosopher, Mr
Scogan, who is a cross between Cannan's Adrian Stokes and Nor-
man Douglas's Mr Keith; there are also several cultured and nubile
young women. It might be called Foible Farm, you suggest ? Mr
Huxley will admit Peacock in his genealogy. Rather like South
Wind, someone else will murmur. It is certainly collateral; not
that Mr Huxley imitates Mr Douglas. But their subject is similar,
though the scene is different. Characters could wander from one
book to the other without doing much damage, and some of the
Cromians will certainly end in the Bay of Naples. But for the pres-
ent they are in the country. The War is responsible for that. Those
who did not object to it were often billeted on farms: those who
did, performed Work of National Importance on the land. This
return to Nature is very different from that sought by Rousseau and
the makers of the Petit Trianon. “Farming seems to be mostly
cruelty or indecency,” the Cromians declare; not that they have
much objection to either.


632
BOMBINATION
They are disaffected to a degree rarely achieved except by certain
English types who chiefly appear in French fiction, and from whom
they must be descended:
a
“Fantastic English aristocrats. I like to think of them all: eccen-
tric milords rolling across Europe in ponderous carriages, bound on
extraordinary errands. One is going to Venice to buy La Bianchi's
larynx; he won't get it till she's dead, of course, but no matter; he's
prepared to wait; he has a collection, pickled in glass bottles, of the
throats of famous opera-singers.
Others are bound on cru-
sades—one to die miserably among the savage Greeks, another, in
his white top hat, to lead the Italians against their oppressors.
Others have no business at all; they are just giving their oddity a
continental airing.”
.
They are futile and sterile and ironical and delightful. The name
of Crome might after all be Heartbreak House; Shaw would find
them far more heart-breaking than his own characters. He could
not create people so alien to his temperament. Brain has become an
illness, a parasitic growth: in Mr Huxley's own words, it "bom-
binates in the void,” like the Chimaera in Rabelais. It is a machine
that races, having nothing to propel.
But the inhabitants of Crome are not alive; they are fantoches,
with gutta-percha entrails, and behind them is always the enigmatic
figure of Mr Huxley. Listen to him speaking through Mr Scogan's
mouth:
.
'Eros, for those who wish it, is now an entirely free god; his
deplorable associations with Lucina may be broken at will. In the
course of the next few centuries, who knows? the world may see a
more complete severance. An impersonal generation will
take the place of Nature's hideous system. In vast state incubators,
rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with the
population it requires. The family system will disappear; society,
sapped at its very base, will have to find new foundations; and
Eros, beautifully and irresponsibly free, will fit like a gay butter-
fly from flower to flower through the sunlit world.'
“ 'It sounds lovely,' said Anne.
‘The distant future always does.'


RAYMOND MORTIMER
633
“Mary's china blue eyes, more serious and more astonished than
ever, were fixed on Mr Scogan. “Bottles ?' she said. “Do you really
think so ? Bottles..
ور
There is no criticism of Mr Huxley that he does not forestall you
by making himself. You complain that he is too literary. He ad-
mits, and deplores, it. He reckons the books he has read by their
weight in tons. He demands "a mental carminative.” His fa-
vourite subject is the young man so clever and well-read and sophis-
ticated that he is incapable of action. You can divine behind all
this ingenuity and dandysme and pirotecnia, a certain bitterness, a
suffering from the inability to be simple, a deep-rooted feeling of
what the French think we call spleen.
To divert him he has the engaging religion of words. They are
for him as for Villiers, almost miraculous. Ekbatana and Pom-
panazzi are objects of his hyperdulia, and he is even in danger of
repeating his phrases, so piously does he consider them. He is a
master of the just epithet, but when he wants to describe direct and
simple beauty, he is at a loss, self-conscious, blushing, and he gen-
erally fails.
I doubt if he is a story-writer at all. He does not care to concen-
trate, to dig. All the time his fancy, which is monstrously alive,
meanders into attractive side-paths, in pursuit of the “amusing.'
His sensitiveness to the atmosphere of a period or milieu would
make him an admirable critic. But Mr Huxley takes nothing seri-
ously: least of all his own talents. In Mr Douglas and Mr Pearsall
Smith this attitude is the not unbecoming cynicism of men who
were young in the Nineties. In Mr Huxley it is a sort of precocity,
and in one who has published three or four books, precocity is no
longer decent. At the risk of feeling, as well as of appearing, ridicu-
lous, I must insist to him upon the importance of being earnest.
RAYMOND MORTIMER


UP STREAM
UP STREAM. By Ludwig Lewisohn. 8vo. 248 pages.
Boni and Liveright. $3.
I
T is the most rudimentary justice in reviewing a book to admit
among the factors of judgement the author's own account of what
he meant to accomplish by it. Mr Lewisohn offers us "the naked,
if need be the devastating truth,” quite free from "cowardly con-
siderateness and moral stealth.” But what he gives in his auto-
biography is no more naked than liquor is naked in a vase through
which one glimpses its colour and consistency, and remains a
stranger to its taste.
Up Stream is one of those stories of the Jew in ardent effort to
assimilate the American experience, offered with a clarity and re-
straint that renders quiescent that faint suffusion of prejudice with
which the native always approaches the alien point of view. What
Mr Lewisohn believes he is telling us is the story of an Intellectual
Jew working his way hardily Up the Stream of American prejudice
against the shallows of our culture, the cross pulls of our undemo-
cratic social life, and the hidden reefs of a prevailing economic in-
justice; but his medium betrays him. No man can give the major
portion of his life to the study of great masters of literature and
not be touched in the end by the spirit of revelation. What Mr
Lewisohn has actually written is the story of an intellectual Jew
of German · birth, making his way into the stream of American
tendency, against the pull of his own introverted racial tempera-
ment. And because we have all been made to feel, in the degree of
our sensitiveness, alternately irritated or guilty in respect to the
Americanization of our alien-born population, it is a relief to find
a book like Mr Lewisohn's affording terms of interpretation that
make for the relief of the antagonisms unintentionally engendered.
Mr Lewisohn offers himself as an American questioning America,
and in certain aspects, particularly in the disposition to require that
the rest of us should be more like him than that he should be like the
rest of us, he makes good his claim to the national outlook. Through-
out the book he shows himself genuinely democratic in a marked dis-
.
a


MARY AUSTIN
635
content over being obliged to lead the intellectual life without being
at the same time able to induce a great number of other people to
lead it with him. We cannot, however, deny the chief of his bitter-
nesses, that of finding the path to academic preferment choked by
active prejudice against his Semitic origin. All I shall undertake is
to show that this survival of mediaevalism may have, in the whole
complex of American Life, other values and implications than Mr
Lewisohn gives it.
The author of Up Stream is a Jew of pure descent, subject to the
environmental influence of Germany for some centuries. As far as
these things go, they must be taken into account as making for diffi-
culty in assimilation to the mixed—but predominately English-
stock of the Southern town in which the Lewisohn family settled.
We have as yet no adequate concept of the factor of race in mind.
We have only a generalized observation that pure races tend to
form indurated surfaces that render them insensitive to subcon-
scious assimilation of the experiences of other races. The race of
Jews in Europe was cut off from some of the most formative ex-
periences of the European mind, from the best of feudalism, from
Christian mysticism, from chivalry, from the Renaissance. What-
ever there was in those experiences that gave colour and direction
to the mind-stream of Europe, the Jew had to get by intellectual
exchange, or by a sort of osmosis of mind-stuff. We do not actually
know that racial experience can be transferred from one mind-
stream to another except by inheritance through intermarriage; but
the assumption is that by the slow infiltration of long association,
at least the capacity for a more subtle form of adjustment is ac-
quired. I have talked this over with Mr Lewisohn and he admits
that though he has not a drop of Germanic blood, he finds it much
easier to make the personal adjustments which do not depend
wholly on intellectual exchange, with people of Germanic experi-
ence. To have known before he had entered upon the American
scene, that the problem was one of the establishing a subconscious
bridge where no such connexion inherently existed, or could be
expected to grow of itself in one generation, might have given a
wholly different colour and possibly different results to his Ameri-
can contacts. Not knowing, there accrued to him a sense of unwar-
ranted slight and hurt, such as obscurely, among our foreign-born
citizens, too often translates itself into social and political disaffec-


636
UP STREAM
a
tion. Every now and then in his experience the author of Up
Stream bruised himself against this indurated surface, and all his
academic equipment has not been quite proof against a disposition
to interpret it in terms of American obduracy.
By his own account he suffered no more in his youth than is
common to the literary temperament in small towns and straitened
circumstances. But gradually there stole over all the incidents of
that youth the colour of unsuspected racial reactions.
The Jew has a tremendous sense of tribe. Once he has given his
heart to the tribe of the United Staters, he looks for that quick, con-
stant response from the human elements of his environment, a need
for which has been created in him by centuries of enforced solidar-
ity. Instead, he finds the cool space that insures the tap-rooted
American against invasive intimacy. During its first centuries
America was largely populated by men motivated by the desire for
non-interference. Some of us can recall when the actual spacing of
the crowd in Western streets was sharply expressive of the feeling
generalized in the clichés of the mining camps as “Don't Crowd
Me!” Later accessions to the population from thickly populated,
tribal-minded central Europe, are chilled to the marrow by the fail-
ure of personal response, but their efforts to overcome it by effusive
familiarities produce in the native born a disposition to goose-flesh
of the social surfaces. If, as happens in the case of young Lewisohn,
the situation is pointed by some such incident as his tacit exclusion
from the Greek Fraternity organized among his schoolmates, it is
sure to be interpreted in terms of social obduracy.
This discrimination against Jews in College fraternities appears
an undemocratic proceeding that ought to be discountenanced by
the Universities, and one sympathizes with the pang that the sensi-
tive youth suffered from it. But it was nothing to the pang he gave
himself by his inability to adopt the American attitude towards the
financing of his College career. Borrowing money for his schooling
is so usual a procedure for young America, that it is hardly possible
for the reader to enter into the anguish of the author of Up Stream,
particularly as he admits that the business men of his town made
no difficulty about letting him have money to make a beginning.
Whatever gratitude he may have felt, and the natural pride of find-
ing himself accepted as the sort of young man whose name on a slip
of paper makes it negotiable, are swallowed up for him in unforget-


MARY AUSTIN
637
.
•
.
a
table humiliation
a sense of physical nausea and burn-
ing shame. of spiritual nakedness and abasement.
Surely an excess of tragedy when you consider how every year
hundreds of young men confidently take their initiation into finan-
cial responsibility in just this fashion! Mr Lewisohn notes this
quite usual incident as the beginning of what he calls “my passion
for justice," an attitude towards the whole American scheme of
things, summed up by calling himself a radical.
Here we touch the root of something which isolates the possessor
of it from the American outlook more than any two thousand year
old religious prejudice. Roughly, the American attitude assumes
that man comes into society without anything, and that all desirable
things are to be struggled for, the higher education among them.
The only indispensable condition is that you show yourself able to
put up as good a fight as the next one, opportunity to make that
fight on fairly equable terms being guaranteed to you by the demo-
cratic form of government. But in Mr Lewisohn's account of his
struggle, there is the hurt expectation of the radical-
minded that the
really desirable things, particularly the higher education, should
come to him like manna for the gathering of it. It is this attitude
which makes the psychological and temperamental base of such
economic expedients as Socialism and Communism, an effort to put
a wide and illusive space between the higher forms of social life and
the economic consideration. With it goes a belief that has always
had a root in Jerusalem, that the unhappy issues of social living can
be cured by deliberate rationalization of the social organization.
From the time that young Lewisohn enters College his interpreta-
tion of American life is developed with his mind's eye on the Hand
Made Heaven of the born radical. His criticism of existing systems
is the measure of differentiation between what is and what, by a
process of rationalization, could be.
Aside from these two incidents, Mr Lewisohn experiences noth-
ing that is new in the history of poor young men nourished upon
books rather than life, and encumbered by the literary temperament.
He has trouble with his love-life, as young people do when lawful
adjustment is too long deferred. But the devastating truth prom-
ised in the preface is withheld. I am not blaming the author for
this; the difficulty of relating the devastating truth about any love
affair is that only half of it is yours to reveal. But I am disap-


638
UP STREAM
pointed that the author of Up Stream has not been able to give a
more detailed account of his reactions, for I have long suspected
that the general confusion and want of satisfactoriness of the love-
life in America is due to the indurations of established racial strains.
If the individual can only approach his love life within the experi-
ence of his racial inheritance, the unhappiness of so many married
pairs begins to appear at once less blameworthy and more amen-
able. An account of the whole scale of personal reactions of an
individual of pure strain, and of so high a type of intelligence, in
command of so lucid a medium, would have been illuminating.
Two other incidents illustrate the characteristic radical interpre-
tation—by radical I mean a temperamental approach rather than
any particular political bias, for I do not even know what Mr
Lewisohn's political affiliations are. The first is the discovery com-
municated to him with a piffing professional “tact,” that it is
"terribly hard for a man of Jewish birth to get a good position” in
the academic world. Petty as this discrimination seems to be, and
painful to the victim of it, I am unable to see in it the more than
personal significance with which Mr Lewisohn finds it charged. I
recall that just about that time a friend of mine was asked to
withdraw from a position he had accepted on the faculty of an
Eastern University, which had been offered to him before it was
discovered that his wife had formerly been divorced. My friend,
American in the fifth generation, accepted the incident as an item
of the fundamental proposition of American democracy, that the
personally determined group must be permitted to condition its own
makeup. Yet I scarcely recall an immigrant biography which is not
touched with the belief that access to the preferred society is some-
how guaranteed in the Constitution of the United States.
Mr Lewisohn was finally placed in a mid-western university,
where he thought well of his colleagues, seems to have been liked
by them, and was reasonably happy until the outbreak of war.
The trouble with Mr Lewisohn after that was that he still believed
in a rationalistic society and naïvely hoped that America was going
to be it. It is his failure to be reconciled to the almost total lack of
rationalization, as he sees it, and his own incompletely rationalized
conviction that since American society is not going forward towards
a European goal and with a German stride, that it is therefore not
going forward at all, that render the final chapters of Up Stream


MARY AUSTIN
639
a
disappointing. The book ends with a thoroughly American exhorta-
tion for us all to pull together now, but ends also in a dark brown
fog of misconception of the whole scope and trend of the life-issue
in America. In other words, Up Stream is the book of a book-made
man in a world in which none of the values have yet translated
themselves into bookish terms; the book of a sensitive, high-keyed
intelligence, pawing anxiously about in the dessicating leaf stalks of
last year's culture, worried by its empty, rattling sound, but totally
colour blind to the particular shade of young green that is coming
up between them. Nevertheless it is one of the most important
books of its type, since it enables us at last to place its problem out-
side of social obliquity and within the dimensions of subconscious
racial and experiential induration.
MARY AUSTIN


SPAIN FROM THE AIR
ROSINANTE TO THE Road Again. By John Dos Passos.
12mo. 245 pages. Doran. $2.
T For
a
THE late war was an ill wind that blew Spain good. But
foreign markets pass away, and art remains; consequently the
obvious tactic is to whoop up Spanish talent, and above all Spanish
scenery, keeping in mind our Alexandrian taste for travel. Ten
years ago the word Spain was scarcely more than one part of a
pleasant name for day-dreams; never, since the time when Wash-
ington Irving wrote Alhambra into the fancies of our great-grand-
fathers, has Spain so lured the world as now.
Rosinante to the Road Again is something more than a book of
travels. Although the thread of narrative is a walking trip, Mr Dos
Passos has not only seen the land and loved it, manifestly, but
with his deft and whimsical appreciation proves that he has dwelt
there somewhat longer than the tourist's fortnight necessary for the
casual initiation into the circles of globe-trotting correspondents.
So readers who want guide-books in disguise had better not buy
Rosinante, for the author completely omits to insinuate information
as to where to eat or what to find beautiful. Nor does he inculcate
any decent regard for the history of Spain. Romans, Visigoths, and
Saracens are taken for granted, and readers will be only vaguely
conscious of the two great ages of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, of Bonaparte, and the one, inevitable republic. This ex-
clusion ought to bring blessed relief, most persons being, by the very
delicacy of their natures, altogether superior to the reading of his-
tory. Rosinante is an effort to paint up the delight of present days,
an effort at once lively and successful.
Certain captious objections of reviewers persist in obtruding
themselves. Some figures of speech, it might be observed, interrupt
thought no less surely than others continue it. Metaphors, more-
over, like narcotics, wear out their own power. However vexing to
the taste of our times such queries may be, prose fails most un-
gracefully when it tries the splurge and somersaults of poetry. Style,
of course, being nothing more than a trifling matter of character,
might be lightly discarded as the peculiar concern of each literary


STEWART MITCHELL
641
citizen, for man's proudest possession, nowadays, is the boast of a
style of his own. But opinion is quite another thing, being like dis-
ease and habit, accidental and corrigible. Without being so rash as
to posit the existence of the concept Truth, readers may very well
question or even deny the existence of any such things as national
characters, those momentary surface manners by which nations have
been named. Though the admitted purpose of Rosinante be a genial
quest for the gesture of Spain, Mr Dos Passos occasionally drops
into far too social a consciousness of the mere tatters and table-man-
ners of his host. Moreover, as to just how many of us have felt "in
Anglo-Saxon countries that the family was dead as a social unit,
that new cohesions were in the making,” a reviewer can only leave
the world to judge. Such fancies will always charm us even this
loyalty to the nineteenth-century new god of the notion of change.
Since thinking is actually becoming one of the pleasures of the
imagination, critics might just as reasonably smile at Tertullian's
having shied at clean-shaven chins as relics of a pagan world, and
therefore doomed to pass away.
But these vagaries are the exception, not the rule, Rosinante be-
ing a work of unusually good journalism. For a collection of
papers
previously published, this book has many virtues and few vices of
its kind. There is a noticeable absence of flippancy, particularly in
the somewhat sketchy studies of living authors. Machado occasions
the best appreciation and Ibañez the least successful. But Mr Dos
Passos is at his best on the high-road: he paints better than he ex-
plains, and sometimes the reader is almost too conscious that the
author himself is aware of the fact. To have achieved a picture full
of colour—not to have been ashamed of his own sincerity—these
are scarcely the common ways our authors recommend themselves.
For sincerity can be the dearest foe of grace of mind. Mr Dos
Passos, though never hectic with the delirious present-day exploita-
tion of sorrow through sympathy, nevertheless holds up the future
to the steady pathos of hope. Some readers may hesitate, feeling
Spain only one of many lands too dark with the memory of men.
Yet only the carefully stupid reader will miss the cold exhilaration
of mid-air—the sensation of having sailed and circled high up with
a pilot who loves pointing out his pet mountain peaks, a pilot who
for all his diving and spinning, loves life—and words, perhaps, most
of all.
STEWART MITCHELL
a
a


LOVE'S MUENCHHAUSEN
GIACOMO CASANOVA UND SEIN LEBENSROMAN. His-
torische Studien zu Seinen Memoiren. (GIACOMO
CASANOVA AND HIS LIFE-STORY. Historical Studies of
His Memoirs). By Gustav Gugitz. 389 pages.
Eduard Strache. Vienna. Prague. Leipzig. 450 Marks.
NLY the immortals are privileged to live a life of brilliant
adventure after death. And it is especially fitting that an
authentic fortune-hunter such as Giacomo Casanova, instead of
sleeping soundly in his grave at Dux, should still be a hero, still
seduce, swindle, and lie, and still be persecuted in turn. He en-
tered the world as the only son of the pretty actress Zanetta, who
went by the name of La Buranella. Brought up under the care of
a grandmother, he became an abbé, then clerk to a lawyer, and
finally a fiddler in the orchestra of the Grimani theatre. If he did
not follow his mother on the stage, at any rate he developed into
one of the most significant comedians of real life. He was a trouble-
maker and a braggart, breezing his way through Europe and living
on his wits. When, towards the close of his day, he takes pen in
hand to write his reminiscences, he assures us repeatedly that he is
telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Such
writers as Barthold, Baschet, Ancona, and Maynial swear by the
Venetian; and the moving story of the lovely Charlotte Lamotte
goes a long way to justify this faith which they place in Casanova.
In the Memoires of Casanova there is frequent mention of a
Mailander by the name of Antonio della Croce. He was pretty
much of a type with Casanova and might reasonably have left
reminiscences no less gripping than those of the genial Giacomo. In
Spa, which was one of the big gambling resorts for the high society
of those days, Croce had turned up as the Marquis de Santa Croce.
He was accompanied by a charming young girl, Charlotte, of a
good family in Brussels. The Marquis is, of course, a crook; but
luck, which he delights so in improving, is consistently against him.
His dexterity fails; he loses baggage, jewels, and money; he must
disappear, or shoot himself. He decides on flight. But before going


JULIUS VON LUDASSY
643
out into the wide, cold world he entrusts Casanova with his mis-
tress, who is with child. He leaves—silk stockings, lovely apple-
green velvet coat, cane in hand, but no cloak—he leaves for the
uncertain, for new triumphs or new calamities. Poor little Char-
lotte stays behind, sobbing over her love, her sweet disgrace. For-
tunately, Casanova conducts himself towards her in his most courtly
fashion. With a tenderness free of all earthiness, a delicacy of feel-
a
ing which is astonishing in this sensualist incarnate, he devotes him-
self to the abandoned girl. At this point a story of great sensitivity
begins, giving us an early glimpse of the Werther attitude and the
sky-blue romantics. Casanova takes the unfortunate girl to Paris, to
one of those women who lend advice and help to any worldling
daughters who may have transgressed too far; but she dies shortly
after her confinement. The lament which the old adventurer calls
after her many years later at Dux is arresting:
a
"When they looked upon her dead, with her youth and charm-
for not even the hard hand of death could rob her of her beauty-
they would understand her tears and weep for a long time with me.
Finally they all left, and I fell asleep with my head on the bed
where Charlotte's body was lying. I did not leave her until the
grave had swallowed her up."
a
The child was taken to an orphan asylum. The entry is dated
October 20, 1767, and signed by a certain Commissioner Dorival.
About a hundred years after the death of the famous amorist, when
Guède, a penetrating student of Casanova, read this story, he could
not suppress a strong doubt. Especially the name Dorival aroused
his suspicion. “One does not sign himself as Dorival in all serious-
ness!” he exclaimed seditiously; "the name has a flavour of Mari-
vaux about it.” To give Casanova the lie, he began following up
this matter. But lo! in the records of the asylum he finds an entry
Number 4781 which amounts to an officially certified deification
for Casanova: “Jacques Charles Lacrosse, son of Antoine Lacrosse
and Charlotte Lamotte, baptized in the parish church of St Lau-
rent, died on October 31, 1767, Dorival.” From these records
Guède reaches the conclusion that Casanova is not lying.
Gustav Gugitz, however, is of another opinion. He moves be-
hind this tricky spirit like a master-sleuth, examines into his most in-
a


644
LOVE'S MUENCHHAUSEN
nocent-looking statements, and devotes years of labour to amassing
evidence in support of a view which was heretofore reasonable but
unfounded: in actual life Casanova was a cheat, a swindler, and
notoriously glib; and when it came to writing, his character under-
went no transformations. In the light of a pitiless historical method
the formidable Don Juan shrivels up most drastically. Gugitz
plucks the feathers from this peacock until it stands there in
wretched nudity: Casanova has not written all that he lived
through; he did not live through all that he has written; he has,
rather, described himself as he would have liked to be, and thus, as
he really was. His amours ? For the most part carried on with easily
attainable creatures in the same theatrical circles as he himself de-
rives from. He freshens up the ladies he conquers, to make them
more commanding. He invents various fatherhoods for himself.
And some of the gracious women whom he claims to have subdued
have existed purely in his fancy. Yes, it even seems that he dis-
guises defeats as victories, to acquire a vicarious vengeance and at
least carry off those triumphs in his day-dreams which were denied
him in reality. Casanova tells us the fish-tales of love.
Nothing is more indicative of his manner than his relationship to
Therese Imer, the daughter of the theatrical manager Josef Imer
and his wife Pauline. This acquaintanceship with Therese was fa-
cilitated by the fact that Casanova's mother, whom Goldoni praises
as a very comely and clever artiste, was playing at the San Samuele
Theatre under Imer's directorship. Giacomo was about two years
younger than Therese, who was seventeen when the old senator Gas-
paro Malipiero undertook her education in singing and dancing.
His Excellency was already seventy-six, but that did not matter.
At that time Casanova was a young abbé, and tried to console Mlle
Imer for having a suitor so advanced in years. The latter met with
good evidence in his own house of his sweetheart's infidelity. As the
result of this discovery, Therese left for Vienna as a singer, and in
this cheerful city she found many agreeable distractions for her pre-
vious misfortune. The marriage records of the Stephans Church
bear witness; “The noble Herr Angelus Pompeati, a dancing mas-
ter, born in Venice, engaged on February 2, 1745, to the honourable
and virtuous Jungfrau Therese Imer, the daughter in marriage of
Herr Josef Imer and Pauline, his wife." Under the date of Decem-
ber 8, 1746 Khevenhüller makes the following entry in his diary;
“I was ashamed, the play was so wretched and thrown into such


JULIUS VON LUDASSY
645
confusion by the absence of one of the leading actors.” (Precisely
because the singer, Mme Pompeati, had given birth to a child on
her way to the opera house.) After a period of activity in Kopen-
hagen and Hamburg, Mme Pompeati arrives at the court theatre
of the margrave of Bayreuth, who was engaged to the favourite sis-
ter of Frederick the Great. A conscientious sovereign, he made a
dutiful attempt at playing the Apollo and let his eyes fall in con-
tentment on the new star. Consequently it should astonish no one
that Therese, in spite of her husband's absence, on February 14,
1753, about one o'clock in the morning, was blessed with a thriving
little daughter, who was baptized Wilhelmine Friederike in honour
of her magnanimous patron. In the year following, Therese makes
a visit to Venice. On this occasion Casanova, as he tells us, became
aware that his passion for the charming singer glowed again beneath
the ashes, and he believes that as a result she brought still another
child into the world. She named it, rest assured, Giacomo Sophie.
Gustav Gugitz seems to be a very malicious man. For surely
it could have done him no harm to spare poor Casanova his paternal
pride. But no! He proves definitely that Therese did not receive
a visit from the stork after the lapse of time customarily requisite
for such matters; and further, when that remarkable bird did call
on her, none of the blame can be laid to Casanova. Alas! he was in
Paris at precisely the critical moment, and was separated by a
good many miles from his sweetheart in Bayreuth
miles
which thought, yearning, and dream can fly across, to be sure, but it
is an established fact that purely cerebral processes can bear no such
fruits. “Here we stand before a disturbing conclusion,” Gugitz
comments in his sly fashion; "Casanova is better than his reputa-
tion; he has given himself credit for a fatherhood which belongs to
another; and he is reminiscent in this particular of Restif de la
Bretonne who was also obsessed with a positive mania for posing as
the father of as many children as he could.”
Not only children, but also full-grown women spring from the
author's fancy. He simply sucks them from his fingers, pulls them
out of the air, and gives them life by his own power of creation. In
1758 Casanova transfers the scene of his activities to Holland. His
version is that he undertook the journey on a secret mission. And
as a matter of fact he did possess a note of introduction from
a
Choiseul to the ambassador d'Affry. But he did not greatly impress
the ambassador. “He seemed very indiscreet to us in his views,” the


646
LOVE'S MUENCHHAUSEN
a
.
O
.
diplomat writes back to Paris. At Amsterdam Casanova makes con-
nexions with the Jewish merchant Hope. This man's daughter,
Esther, falls an immediate victim to the Venetian seducer, accord-
ing to the latter's testimony. Likewise the famous St Germain, the
son of a Jewish banker in Oporto and incidentally a follower of
Casanova's trade is with Hope, attempting to pawn the French
royal diamonds for a hundred million francs. Gugitz objects that
Hope had only a son, there is no such Casanova-esque daughter at
all! So that we must look upon the beautiful Esther as no less of a
phantom than Sophie Imer. But Gugitz has even worse in
store for Casanova, much worse! The renowned flight from the
Leads, Casanova's big touring number, a piece to which he used to
do full justice everywhere
a maze of lies.
The seed of the reverses which finally landed Casanova in prison
lay in his quarrel with the poet Pietro Chiari. In one of his novels
Chiari had introduced a character who could easily be identified
with the flashy Giacomo. Here the lady-killer is described as a man
of olive complexion and well-formed body; he is always studiously
dressed, affected in his behaviour, of incredible brass, unusually
blatant, and continually trying to shove himself in somewhere. The
portrait is none too flattering, and it is readily understood how
Casanova might want to make a few patches in the testimony at
the expense of the unfriendly abbé. But his Excellency, Antonio
Condulmer, who sat as the Inquisitor in the Council of Ten, took
offence at this. Even in those days business was business, and his
Excellency was a theatrical manager on the side, with Chiari as his
house poet, thus making Casanova an impairer of his property.
Such an individual should be squelched once and for all. The
jeweller Giambattista Manuzzi, a spy of the Inquisition, is put on
the job. According to the reports of this worthy, Casanova was, to
begin with, undoubtedly no better than an Epicurean. But soon the
accusations grow more serious; the suspected man is a sorcerer, it is
claimed, who meddles with the diabolical weapons of the Rosicru-
cians and corrupts young patricians with his revolutionary and
atheistic leanings; in a drinking place he recited a poem to the
triumphant Roland, with a horrible application to religion.
Finally Manuzzi discovers—and at this point the pen falters !--
that Casanova is a Freemason. Naturally that delivers the death
blow to the criminal. Without either trial or sentence he is taken to
the Leads. For how long? On that score justice was none too severe
a
O


JULIUS VON LUDASSY
647
.
with him. Casanova is placed in solitary confinement. His only
intercourse is with a filthy jailer, Lorenzo Basadonna. A month
later other prisoners are let in with him. First, Lorenzo Mazzetta,
valet to the count Giorgio Marchesini; long before Strindberg's
time he had played in Fräulein Julie with a little countess. Next
comes the Jew, Salom. Then the abbé, Tommaso Fenarol. Casa-
nova meditates flight and begins digging a hole in the floor. This
yearning for freedom involves him in a secret correspondence with
the monk Marino Balbi, who is in the cell beneath him. Basadonna
is the involuntary transmitter of the notes. In the night of Novem-
ber 1, 1755, Casanova makes his escape with Balbi. He penetrates
walls which were never built, breaks into rooms which never existed,
lets himself down from heights which tower up only in his brain,
manipulates ladders and ropes, and arrives finally in a hall the door
of which he cannot open. He waits here until a guard lets him out.
This very last item, the guard who allows him to escape, is the one
element of truth. Senator Bragadin, Casanova's friend, had prom-
ised the good Basadonna a hundred ducats for his aid in the flight
of the amiable scoundrel
and Basadonna followed the
promptings of the bribe. All the rest is sheer sound and fury.
Has Gugitz, with his radical investigations, been the cause of
Casanova's second death? Gugitz retains a high opinion of him. He
does not reproach the adventurer, because the account of his experi-
ences is concerned less with fidelity to external fact than with the
inner living truth, because he shows up as a poet who heightened
life with art, and because he felt at liberty to combine characters
and incidents in such a way as to make himself what he was not.
No matter the drink may still undoubtedly intoxicate, but
it is adulterated; and there is a big difference between serving up
reality in the golden bowl of poesy and mixing us a wretched hootch
of bluster, mouthing, smartness, and vanity. If Gugitz is right, then
the glorious Don Juan who strode victoriously through life is gone
for good, and the new incarnation of Casanova is the figure of a
fanfaron de vice played upon by the fine light of comedy, a miles
gloriosus of the erotic. Indeed, the Memoires of the Venetian acquire
their full human significance when one remembers that Count
Waldstein's old librarian assembled them in his shabby little study,
to console himself with a lovely dream for the insults of overbear-
ing lackeys; and his works must be read precisely as they were
written.
JULIUS VON LUDASSY
a
.
.
.


11
BRIEFER MENTION
In THE SECRET GLORY, by Stephen McKenna (12mo, 307 pages; Doran:
$1.75) "a close contact with reality deflates the tumid pretensions of arti-
fice,” according to the author. It is, one understands, the final volume and
as who should say the crown of the study of the Sensationalists, and the
author believes one is justified in devoting three volumes to their "flamboy-
antly conscious egotism.” A singularly depressing piece of business.
C
Calvary, by Octave Mirbeau (12mo, 266 pages; Lieber & Lewis : $2) is
extraordinarily sensitive in its impressionistic picture of childhood, stark
and vivid in its realistic treatment of war, but a shade too shrill in its
eroticism for an authentic climax. As a study in the inevitable degeneration
of a weakling, it is surefooted and sound, but the very intensity with which
the narrative is developed seems to weaken its fibre, and leaves one without
that profound sense of tragedy which one feels should have been its cul-
minating note. The book remains, however, a penetrating picture of Paris-
ian life along the fringe of the underworld and a shrewd study of men
and women dipped in a corrosive acid of sex. The book is, by the way,
the first by a new house which proposes to follow it with other translations.
BIRTHRIGHT, by T. S. Stribling (illus., 12mo, 309 pages; Century: $1.90) is
a genuinely interesting piece of work. The theme is the anomalous position
of the educated mulatto who desires to make the black race alive to its
problems and its potentialities, in a Southern nigger-town. The treat-
ment is simple, straightforward, "photographic” writing, but photography
--especially the work of the moving-picture camera-is not to be dismissed
lightly when it handles scenes we prefer to forget. Mr Stribling, who, as
a Southerner, knows his Hooker's Bend as Mr Lewis knows his Gopher
Prairie, has been as ruthless, and almost as patient, as the recorder of the
life of Main Street. If his novel is not quite as competently done, the lack
is due, it would seem, to a more pressing interest in analysis than pos-
sessed Lewis in his best-seller. On the other hand, there are some excellent
genre pictures in Birthright, and, save for the author's tendency to think
aloud, a feeling for continuity, for actuality, which promises even more
for his future work. Meanwhile, this is worth reading.
:
a
SAINT TERESA, by Henry Sydnor Harrison (12mo, 456 pages; Houghton
Mifflin : $2) tackles with a high degree of earnestness, and a fair degree of
success, one of those complicated sex-and-business themes which are sup-
posed to be significantly reflective of the America of the present day. The
author approaches his problem deliberately, works it up both industriously
and industrially, and reaches the promised pyrotechnics in a man-and-
woman fight, bloody and detailed, but handled with a newspaperman's skill
rather than a novelist's discernment. The book is a good transcription of
the American scene; otherwise its realities stop far short of penetration.


BRIEFER MENTION
649
Two Poems, by John Freeman (8vo, 30 pages; Dunster House : $2.50) con-
tains a long dramatic narrative and the more lyrical account of a dream.
Both poems are above Freeman's average. They are admirably printed;
the book could be used as a text for binders, typesetters, and proofreaders,
and after the hastily-published volumes of the last three years we are badly
in need of such texts.
Esther and BERENICE, by John Masefield (12mo, 205 pages ; Macmillan:
$2). In spite of an occasional carelessness of workmanship, there are flashes
of genuine poetry and scenes of real dramatic intensity in these adaptations
from Racine. John Masefield is perhaps not so etfective in the rôle of
translator as in that of originator, yet he has succeeded in investing these
two plays with the savour and the strength of Elizabethan drama without
marring them by grandiloquence or circumlocution of method.
The LE GALLIENNE BOOK OF ENGLISH VERSE, edited with an introduction by
Richard Le Gallienne (16mo, 561 pages; Boni & Liveright: $3.50) is not
so good a collection as one might hope for from the editor. Indeed, it is
hard to see what need this anthology fills, except as a handy book of refer-
ence for Mr Le Gallienne himself, when the Oxford Book of English
Verse covers the pre-war period so satisfactorily, and the various modern
anthologies present so much more full and honest an account of the post-
war poets. There are, of course, occasional fine things not to be found in
other compilations, but these are overshadowed by the unhappy inclusion
of numerous trivial pieces which may strike the ear or the fancy of the
editor, but which neither per se nor by virtue of the introduction are made
to shine for the reader.
AN ANTHOLOGY OF NEW ENGLISH Verse, edited by Makato Sangu (12mo,
236 pages; Suzuya: Osaka, Japan) is apparently the sifting down of
several American and English compilations for the intellectual improve-
ment of Japanese school-boys. Professor Sangu manifests a catholicity
that warmly gathers to itself such opposites as Evelyn Scott, Ella Wheeler
Wilcox, and Patience Worth. The real joy of the book (at least for
Occidental minds) is to be found in the biographical notes where we learn
that Witter Bynner is “of a spontaneous, gay and humorous nature,” of
Joseph Campbell, “like Colum and other Irish authors, he is simple and
Irish," that Hamlin Garland “has received no school training to be noted,”
and that Edgar Lee Masters is a Democrat.
a
IF, by Lord Dunsany (12mo, 185 pages; Putnam: $1.75) is a play in four
acts which begins astonishingly enough in British suburbia. But it is to
.
be expected that the Irish playwright will not leave us drearily at home for
very long, and the greater part of the play takes place in the East-not
the real East, but that glamorous, fantastic place which Dunsany imagined
for the rest of us to accept thereafter as we accept Wonderland and Brob-
dingnag. The chief charm of the play lies in the irony which dances over
all its surfaces, and which sustains the hero's matter-of-factness through
all manner of amazing adventures. It is a good comedy for the library
and a better one for the stage.


650
BRIEFER MENTION
1
THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC, by Vilhjalmur Stefansson (illus., 8vo, 784 pages;
Macmillan: $6). To Vilhjalmur Stefansson the Arctic is another one of
those places where every prospect pleases and only man is vile. Among
the vilest were some of the members of his own expedition, who ignored
his orders and diverted his equipment, explaining their actions by saying
“Oh, we thought you were dead.” Stefansson has written this book partly
as a history of his expedition and partly to vindicate his theory that
anything anybody asserts as an established fact is doubtless wrong. He
takes nobody's word for anything, be it the report of Nansen and
Peary that there is no animal life in the Polar Sea, or the more common
fallacy that it takes twenty minutes to boil rice. As the proof of the
pudding, even the rice pudding, is the eating, and as Stefansson lived "off
the country” for three years, comfortably housed in "igloos” which he
was told no white man could build, even his enemies must admit that he
proved his theories. But with his contention that the Arctic is a friendly
land it will be hard to agree. Perhaps to a man of superhuman physical
endurance, almost perfect mental control, and an overwhelming scientific
enthusiasm, the Arctic may be a happy hunting ground, but looking at the
record of death and insanity among the rest of the crew, one prefers the
banks and braes of bonny Bronx.
!
1
1
Young Boswell, by Chauncey Brewster Tinker (8vo, 266 pages; Atlantic
Monthly: $3.50). To any one with even a casual, browsing interest in
the greatest unread biography in English, this book will be interesting; to
readers of Boswell it will be engrossing. Once again, and some suspected
as much long ago, the popular verdict on a man of letters has to be reversed.
Professor Tinker leaves with us the picture of a man essentially good-
natured, whatever else may be said of him, and phenomenally talented and
industrious at one part of life to the exclusion of all others. The story of
the interviews with Rousseau and Voltaire is delightfully revelatory of
the Boswell method. The author is to be congratulated on having given
the quietus to another of the less brilliant critical essays of Lord Macaulay.
STREAKS OF LIFE, by Ethel Smyth (8vo, 280 pages; Knopf: $3) continues the
very personal and interesting autobiography which Dame Ethel began and
carried well along in the two stout volumes of her Impressions That
Remained. The new book is frankly fragmentary. Being both a composer
of music and an ardent feminist, Dame Ethel devotes several of its chapters
to her chief preoccupation. But, as in the case of Impressions That
Remained, this book is especially notable for the vivid portrayal of people
whom the author has encountered in her strikingly independent and rather
splendid march through life without reference to music or feminism. Thus,
quite the most delightful chapters are devoted to her recollections of the
Empress Eugénie and of Queen Victoria. Devotees of the Strachey books
will find here two of the great personages of the nineteenth century depicted,
if not with the Strachey system and thoroughness, with a power and bril-
liance of visualization far surpassing his; with a real sympathy, which, in
the case of the Empress Eugénie, whom Dame Ethel knew almost
intimately, becomes particularly appreciative and tender, and with a humour
that at times is absolutely side-splitting. Streaks of Life is the sort of book
that you open at random and put down when you have read it all.


BRIEFER MENTION
651
AMERICAN PORTRAITS 1875-1900, by Gamaliel Bradford (12mo, 248 pages;
Houghton Mifflin : $3.50). These "portraits” of eight eminent Americans
of the period from 1875 to 1900, while intended to portray the souls of the
subjects, indirectly give the reader a pretty good portrait of the mind of
the writer. Perhaps therein lies the chief value of the book; for the
subjects chosen are not, with the exception of Henry James, Henry Adams,
and Mark Twain, by any means the eight most important or most repre-
sentative Americans of the period. In the remaining six volumes of the
proposed series, which will proceed backwards through the nineteenth,
eighteenth, and seventeenth centuries, it is to be hoped Mr Bradford will
be guided in his selection more by historical, literary, or philosophical
importance. In spite of a suggestion of timidity in the treatment of the
characters—the writer seeming to mistrust their more virile traits, as Mark
Twain's pessimism, which apparently shocks and horrifies Mr Bradford
as it might the pious soul of Mr Bryan--the subjects are yet presented
with a delicacy, subtlety, and penetration which are uncommon. The seven
volumes should afford a kind of critical history of American intellectual
life, which, if very light in comparison to a similar work in European
literature by Georg Brandes, will still help to fill a present void. The
men portrayed in the current volume, beside those already mentioned, are
Lanier, Whistler, Blaine, Cleveland, and Joseph Jefferson.
Du CUBISME AU CLASSICISME, by Gino Severini (12mo, 123 pages; J. Pov-
olosky & Cie, Paris) is a new and methodical attempt to submit painting
to the laws of geometry. The cause for the disorder of modern art, says
the author, “can be resumed in a few words. The artists of our epoch do
not know how to measure angles, or how to use numbers or the compass.”
Evidently Severini does. He gives mathematical formulas, discusses the
properties of triangles, and explains how he organized his own pictures,
which are as simple and profound as as the square root of 3. Some
of his ideas have long been current (the mathematical spirit is gradually
conquering all the arts) but no one else has developed these principles so
systematically or to such extremes; decidedly Severini's essay is an impor-
tant document.
AFTER THE WAR, by Lt. Col. Charles à Court Repington, C. M. G., (8vo, 477
pages; Houghton Mifflin : $5) continues the pleasant game which this great
military expert devised during the stress of the war. Society shows up a
little better than in the first of these diaries, because less is told of it; some
of the passages about the Balkans are entertaining. But when Col. Reping-
ton arrives in America he ruins his entire case (for Americans) by what
seems to be a deliberate unconsciousness of anything which doesn't make
trivial entries in the diary. As before, a most essential document for one
kind of historian and writer of fiction.
FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTIONS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS, by A. A. Brill (12mo, 344
pages; Harcourt, Brace: $2.50) is not a striking book, but a full one, and
the amount of new things which it will give to the reader depends entirely
on how much of the recent literature of the subject he already knows. The
condensation is reasonably made, the half-chapter on artificial dreams is
illuminating, the lecture-atmosphere is rather pleasing than otherwise.


MODERN ART
TH
HOSE who lived through the past winter may regard it as an
experience. Bitter periods when successfully surmounted are
often fondly dwelt upon by survivors in the after years, but just at
present most of the dealers at least are yearning merely to forget
what they have just been through. There has been a brave and
costly appearance of activity, but now that the moment of balanc-
ing accounts arrives the sum total of achieved results seems meagre
for “the greatest country in the world” even in an after-war time.
The genuine successes—those that stand a chance of figuring in
next year's discussions—can practically be counted upon the fingers
of one hand. Unquestionably the three most talked about shows
were those of John Marin, in the Montross Gallery, the Brancusi
exhibit in the Sculptors' Gallery, and the memorial to the work of
the late Paul Thevanaz, at the Art Guild. Considerable stir was
caused by the water-colours of Charles Burchfield at the Sunwise
Turn and the paintings of Yasuo Kuniyoshi at the Daniel Gallery;
and the most acceptable collection to the populace was, as usual,
that of the Independents, on the Waldorf Roof. The most success-
ful institutional efforts were the Degas show at the Grolier Club
and the Brooklyn Museum's assembly of American water-colours.
The Thevanaz appeal was largely emotional. He was clever,
young, and—the ladies said-extremely good-looking. His was a
curious instance of an irrepressible youthfulness of spirit that had
not been hurt by subjection to a long course of systematic training
in an art school. He did six years of class work for long hours a
day in Switzerland, but in spite of that he kept his sense of play in-
tact, and on arriving in America immediately made an impression
because of the gaiety of his improvizations. The chances are that
he would not have astonished so much in Europe as he did here,
where food for fantasy is not plenty, but having astonished, he
charmingly responded to applause by expanding his style. In the
last year of his life he made marked progress and the very last
things of all that he did had an authority of rhythm that was irre-
sistible. His friends believed that his death was a tragedy upon the
Chatterton-Keats order and although those who judged the exhibi-
tion freed from the bias of the artist's personal fascinations hardly


HENRY MCBRIDE
653
went so far as that it was nevertheless generally conceded that here
was a definite loss to the modern art movement in America. Thev-
anaz' work was never profound, but it had something in it that
won over many who had been previously blind to the attractions of
modernism.
The éclats that greeted the new things of Mr Marin and Mr
Burchfield have already been written into The Dial's record, but a
word, certainly, is due Mr Yasuo Kuniyoshi. This is a young Japa-
nese who suffered almost as much instruction at the hands of Ameri-
can professors as Thevanaz did from the Swiss and who also escaped
to adorn a tale. These two notable exceptions to the rule almost
force one to readjust one's notions of routine training. At any rate,
Mr Kuniyoshi's paintings are cheery affairs, full of strangeness and
charm. His colour is not monotonous, though it seems to have been
inherited from some of the painters of smoky old kakemonos. Like
Emerson he has written over the door of his study the word
“Whim,” for the lights and lines of Mr Kuniyoshi's compositions
occur as they please. Quite the best of his pictures was one called
Wild Horses and the artist's wife—who is not Mme Kuniyoshi as
you might think, but just plain Katherine Schmidt in the fashion of
the moment-tells me that at first her husband refused to include
it in his show and only finally consented with extreme reluctance.
He laughed tolerantly when a chorus of praise of this picture
reached his ears, and I, thinking to please him, told that Mr Bur-
roughs, the painter, had so liked Wild Horses that he had sought
a photograph of it. Kuniyoshi with characteristic modesty replied,
“It would look better in a photograph.” There was some psychol-
ogy in this modesty, of course. Kuniyoshi, perhaps unconsciously,
was thinking of the long succession of Chinese masters who had
painted wild horses. However, he had as much right to the theme
as they
The Independents were as joyous as ever and the opening recep-
tion brought out all the amusing people in town and most of those
in the environs. There were so many present that it was impossible
to study the pictures deeply, but it is my impression that there was
a higher average of merit than ever before. It is a novel thing in
America to hear shouts of laughter at an art show, but at the Inde-
pendents there seemed to be groups being audibly diverted at all mo-
ments during the evening. This infectious hilarity however was
not powerful enough to seduce from the straight and narrow path


654
MODERN ART
the serious thinkers who, deaf to the shouts and distractions, were to
be found in every alcove strenuously debating upon the given topics.
So hearty and spontaneous a response to art seemed altogether good
to me—but there remain objectors to the Independents who insist
that the institution is a menace to good taste. This objection, need-
less to say, does not come from the young who find the Independents
a first-aid to fame, but from the old and already famous who mis-
takenly feel that there isn't enough fame to go round in this coun-
try. The criticism is not to be taken seriously.
A criticism from within the ranks of the Independents made more
trouble and finally resulted in the secession of some of the officers
and the formation of a new Society. The complaint levelled spe-
cifically at the Independents' officers was that they were nabbing too
much of the publicity of the affair for themselves and not allotting
enough of this delectable stuff to the unknown beginners. This, alas,
seemed a petty quarrel of the sort that may better be thrashed out
in the closet, but it got into the newspapers to the extent of many
columns and the officers received more publicity than ever and the
unknown beginners, for whom the battle was fought, were exactly
as they were. There seems, indeed, no just way in which to give
instant public notice in the correct proportion to the new people who
come from remote places to exhibit for the first time in this curiously
mixed, but entertaining assembly; and the injustice of fate, does
not, in this instance, seem particularly hideous. It is enough for
these new people that, upon payment of a small fee, they get in.
Critics may miss them in the shuffle at first, but sooner or later some
discerning eye lights upon the sincere effort.
The new society that resulted from this disturbance will not ap-
parently interfere with the original company of Independents who
will go on, it is to be hoped, as merrily as before. Its membership is
made
up from among the artists who are known to be committed to
progressive ideas and who should have been banded together long
ago. An annual exhibition of the important things by Gaston
Lachaise, Joseph Stella, Max Weber, Abram Walkowitz, Eli
Nadelman, Samuel Halpert, George Of, Robert Laurent, Glenn
Coleman, Louis Bouché, Florine Stettheimer, the Zorachs, E. E.
Cummings, Thomas H. Benton, and Andrew Dasburg—to mention
but a few of the new group—is sure to fetch the public up roundly
with the problems of the day.
HENRY MCBRIDE


MUSICAL CHRONICLE
IT
a
T is to be hoped that one of the stout young Frenchmen who
appear every week or two in the port of New York and evince
an interest in the symptoms of a native American art second in vi-
brancy only to their interest in the American well-to-do, was present
at the concert given April 29th by the Music Guild. Was such a
double-breast-coated one in the MacDowell Gallery that evening,
it is certain that a single visitor has had his curiosity about Ameri-
can musical production, at least, satisfied, and yet been properly
informed of the quality of the expression. A single visitor will, at
the conclusion of his few months' trip board La France and sail
Parisward and still be unprepared to tell his war-enfeebled home in-
tellects that the blues and jazz are the United States music. It was,
indeed, a rarely compact and truthful picture of American musical
production at the moment when its grand general uselessness is com-
mencing to shrink before sudden unexpected flashes and rumblings
of latent power, that was offered its public by the Guild. Past and
future of native composition, the great dreary empty past and the
young uncertain fitful future, showed themselves beautifully pro-
portionately. The promise of coming years was in the grouping of
the nine musicians who constitute the American Music Guild: for
the first time, it seems, in our story, the younger men are commenc-
ing to work together; individualities are beginning to discover
means of nourishing themselves. But if the future shone in the fact
of this new alliance grown out of the half-serious "Group of Seven"
it was no cheer that came to the heart from the aspect of the mass
which pressed into the Gallery to hear the new works. Your young
curious Frenchman could have seen in the deportment of the well-
dressed, semi-professional audience, friends of the composers,
singers, players, amateurs, hostesses, mothers and intendeds of vari-
ous kinds, a sign of the condition that has made of American music
one of the world's most awful bores. The audience considered itself
very witty, unusually witty, vis-à-vis the exhibition of paintings
belonging to the Société Anonyme which hung, badly lit, upon the
walls. There were rich, lustrous Stellas, Hartleys, Rays, Kandin-
skys, Picabias, in dusky chain about the place; but all over the room


656
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
1
there was giggling and horse-merriment. It was the habit to emit a
smothered laugh as soon as you had given Fred Jacobi your ticket
and entered the room, and to rush up to your friends and have a
good laugh with them, and then gabble just as if you were at the end
of a telephone line. Nobody sat and studied and examined and was
still. Quick, a stroke of some sort to cut off the growing unsettling
interest which might ultimately influence your course of life and
perhaps even make you tell the truth to your wife or your husband!
There were few or no people. For there were no clothes. Some-
thing had stopped before it left the interior of the persons; had not
invaded the stuffs they had draped around them. Perhaps there was
nothing, no rhythm in the persons at all. Of course, it was all tak-
ing place in the interior of the MacDowell Club, and that is not the
godkissed place to search out vividness. But this was much the
crowd from whom the young composers draw their sparks during
the struggling years. It is out of this they come, and to this they
wish to speak. And these persons were not fluid. They were not ex-
pressing themselves even in their apparel. It was all very provincial
looking; one felt New York the small town, full of church singers
and music-teachers who believe in being modern, that is, in drop-
ping all conceptions of "passing notes”; a place of small impor-
tances who would not be important where there was progress; a
sort of alcohol preservative of mentalities which could not exist in
the open air. Once in a while, some clothes entered the room; there
was one very lovely creature in a billowy hat and sort of Little Red
Riding Hood cloak gathered simply at the neck; the fold and line
of her garments sang, and one sang with them as one saw her. She
looked un-American. A Russian, perhaps. But the others were dis-
connected, broken, arrested; no saliences.
Four-fifths of the concert itself made no break with the doleful
tradition. Theoretically, the harmonies sounded were of the im-
pressionist period. Each of the four young composers who led the
procession through the programme had heard Debussy and Strauss
and Bloch, and felt the new idiom. But, in essence, their composi-
tions were not very different from any produced during the last cen-
tury by Messrs the most respectable and the most sterile—the
American composers. Nothing was added to the art of music by
Miss Bauer or Messers Haubiel, Kramer, and Taylor. Charles
Haubiel's part song for women's voices, The Faun, was entirely


PAUL ROSENFELD
657
unpretending and charming, even; Deems Taylor's setting of James
Stephen's night-piece sustained a mood and was pleasing; but one
was given nothing at all that one had not been given before many
times. A witty young friend of ours has said that Griffes' White
Peacock was really The Afternoon of a Peacock, and by no means
the first afternoon the peacock had had. Something of the same
might be said of these sonatas and songs. Certain are better, certain
are worse; but all are clearly music of the sort given out by men who
have very little contact with anything in the world save music, and
who are unaware entirely of the fact. The composers are, there is
no doubt, the most admirable of men. New York cannot afford to
lose many minutes of either Walter Kramer's or Deems Taylor's
time. But they are not, when they compose, moving with what is
moving in life. They are fugitive from their own personalities.
The world in which they breathe does not seep into their composi-
tion, and colour it. Like the audience's, their life remains some-
where within them, and never touches the earth.
At the base of the programme, just above the tail-legend STEIN-
WAY PIANO USED, there ran the line Trio IN ONE MOVEMENT OP.
7-HAROLD MORRIS. This notice should have shed some cheer over
the evening. For the afternoon at Aeolian Hall last year when
Harold Morris, with the assistance of his friend Albert Stoessel,
performed three of his own sonatas, had given one another excuse
for believing that things were about to move in the musical field
this side the billows. The two piano sonatas and the one sonata for
violin and piano of the young Texan had shown themselves much of
the rather loose, floppy, undistinguished sort of music which we are
accustomed to receive at the hands of our Mozarts; but certain
movements, certain passages, had arrested one, and won respect and
even wonder. It was noticeable that the central slow movements,
passive and quiet, had greater plasticity and originality than the
outer. It was, in them, as though gases had suddenly condensed
and formed a solid. The idiom was not personal, to be sure; the
sorcerer was still very much the apprentice; but a black piano chord,
a theme, did something. Here was American music one wanted to
grow to know, not leave and never sight again.
Nevertheless, the evening at the MacDowell Gallery, while the
concert was plodding along, one could not help being a little appre-
hensive. It was, after all, quite possible that the impression gained


658
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
last year had been rosied o'er by some extraneous oversanguine
temper. There was enough in the works that were occupying this
late April evening to make one very tender of believing any move-
ment in progress in musical affairs on this Atlantic shore. Scarce,
however, had Messers Morris, Stoessel, and Lucien Schmitt attacked
on piano, violin, and 'cello the trio, than one knew no extraneous
mood had deceived. The blood jetted smoothly. One had some-
thing to nourish one. Here, at last, was someone who began to
have the weight of a composer. The three years that had elapsed
between the composition of the youngest of his three sonatas, per-
formed last season, and the trio had taken none of the sincerity and
push from Harold Morris and had augmented the power consider-
ably. The excitability was greater; the music denser. The ideas
gushed forth in glorious abundance. The banal element, the ele-
ment which in every young American ought to be called the Mac-
Dowellesque, had been warred on. A sort of savage rhythmical im-
pulse, and a colour influenced by negro spirituals, but not intellec-
tualized as it sometimes is in the work of John Powell, had put in
appearance. Something flat and not quite fine there was in the music,
still. There were many moments when the composer relapsed into
the manner hereditary to the American composer, and proclaimed
the obvious. One does not recall with pleasure the peroration of
the trio, with its "steigerung” and grandiose finish. Besides, the
music seemed a trifle chaotic in order. It seems possible that the
composer's best ideas come to him while he is in the heated process
of composition. Not all the four themes which support the work
are equally racy and interesting. His strong moments seemed always
a little improvisational, as though they had appeared under his pen
suddenly he knew not from where, and made him wonder a little
whether he was not a trifle mad. Morris has some sort of lurking
savage down in the sub-cellar of his being, a wild man part Yank
part nigger part something else. On top the cellar door there sit
sisters and cousins and aunts who do not like the wild man anywhere
but in sub-cellars. But he is commencing to break through with his
complicated rhythms and his savage excitability.
And out into the city night in Fifty-fifth street one rushed, sure
that a new situation was reached in American music. For Harold
Morris is not a solitary swallow. There are others of the same
feather and flock. One is here, one there, several in this place; there


PAUL ROSENFELD
659
a
is one youth from the Trenton suburbs who seems the most music-
ally talented creature this country can have produced. Scarcely a
one has developed a characteristically personal idiom as yet. But
there are several who are using a derivative idiom in the fashion in
which men who have developed their individualities have used,
apparently, in the time of their minority, material of the type al-
ready pretty well developed by their immediate elders. One writes
with a Strawinsky-like aciduity. Another has been impressed by
the formal experiments of Satie. But both have something of indi-
viduality to express, and the personal in them struggles with the
reflected. It is, then, no longer true, go, Stranger, to Sparta tell,
that there is no vitality in the native musical production. What has
been characteristic of the painting and the writing of the land has
now become characteristic of the music. The country can produce
really gifted youth. Society has become sufficiently settled to per-
mit the talent to assert itself; there is even, in this timorous herd,
enough of a real community to permit the musical gesture, the ges-
ture of the interpenetrated group, to be made. What remains unde-
cided, what constitutes to-day the problem of the American musi-
cian, is whether this impulse is sufficiently strong to send the com-
poser through his education in taste his passion unbroken. What has
not yet been proven, is that our young musicians are sufficiently
strong to go to the past, to go to the European experimenters, as
they must in order to develop their purely intellectual comprehen-
sion of their art, and still continue to express themselves freshly. It
has been Morris', as instance, good fortune that he has expressed
uninhibitedly his banal and unrefined facets together with his richer,
truer; for the latter could not have appeared without the former.
To inhibit one is to inhibit both. But in order that he may grow,
it is necessary that he develop his critical powers, his sense of
beautiful form, either through study with a good magister or, if he
can, on his own; and it is highly speculative whether such a course
might not lead to a damming of the impulse. Aesthetic develop-
ment has been the rock on which many a good American talent has
foundered. It is there, surely, that poor Charles Griffes met ship-
wreck. And yet, it is for the Brahmsian assimilation of musical
culture; for the talent that can grow in intellectual mastery and still
utter itself in freshness, that we wait. Such an one alone can give
us the music that will make us, the herd, men indeed.
PAUL ROSENFELD


THE THEATRE
A.
1
NNUALLY, it seems, Maurice Browne and Ellen Van Volk-
enburg come to New York to do something important and
inspiring. Neither in this nor in their previous season have I seen
their offerings complete, and I do not wish to compare them, gen-
erally, with any New York group of players. But once, at least,
each year, they are splendid. This time it was CREDITORS, a
play which I happen thoroughly to dislike and which, in their skil-
ful presentation, was appallingly affecting. Themselves and Mr
Reginald Pole acted this terrible piece which was, I should judge,
reviewed by police-court reporters on some of the local papers. The
play is virtually three duologues: between the husband and the for-
mer husband, the wife and the husband, and the divorced couple;
it is legitimately played, although I believe it is not written, in
three acts. The difficulty of maintaining interest has, fortunately,
been overcome by Strindberg's virtuosity as a dramatist, as well as
by his occasional depths as a psychologist. There remains the diffi-
culty of presentation, of proceeding in any direction after the first
ten minutes; everything that alteration of tempo, and variety in the
incidence of voice and gesture, could do, was done. I should like
to have some of the people who talk about finished performances
forced to see the three actors in this play.
1
a
ELSEWHERE the New York theatres repeated themselves, not
without dulness. But a few pieces have been entertaining and in-
teresting, and of these not the least is MAKE IT Snappy in which
Eddie Cantor plays around at the Winter Garden. One does not
have to ride a Jolson hobby to death in order to make a point-Mr
Cantor is always funniest when he is least like Mr Jolson; that
Jolson is not a "funny man" and that he is really an entertainer are
the obvious converse of this proposition. Why Eddie Cantor with
a definite line, and a line almost unbearably funny in the tailor
shop and the police examination, should occasionally remind us that
another with less violence and more energy, with far fewer gifts
and much greater genius, also comes to the Winter Garden, I cannot
see. And I wish it would stop because as a comic—he manages to


THE THEATRE
661
make himself look like a character out of a comic strip at times—
Cantor is almost alone. He has managed to outdistance Leon Errol
and James Barton by his versatility and by his vitality; he needs
only to stick to his field to be great.
Mr Barton, by the way, is very fine in The ROSE OF STAM-
BOUL. On a scarlet pouffe, the size of a cartwheel, he scratches
and nuzzles like a dog. He is inspired.
a
FURTHER for report, two Jewish plays: The Bronx EXPRESS
and PARTNERS AGAIN. The first is by Ossip Dymow and was played
some years ago at the Jewish Art Theatre. Bottom has apparently
been translated again, for the piece is now advertised as "a worthy
successor to THE BETTER 'OLE.” It is better than that as Mr and
Mrs Coburn know. This is the play in which the subway advertise-
ments come to life in the dream of a Bronx Jew, to teach him the
madness of money and, to an extent, the methods of making money.
The satiric intention is baffled in the end by the effect on the
dreamer, for he determines to let his daughter marry the poor poet,
yet seems relieved to know that the poet has found a job; and he
mercilessly uses the American technique of bluff on his “allright-
nik” friends. The framework of the dream is, therefore, unsatis-
factory; the direct introduction to the dream and the dream itself
are deftly worked out and simply, a little obviously, presented.
The one thing which Mr Owen Davis most succeeded in was in
keeping the dream in the mind of the old man; the one thing he
could not translate away was the intensity of feeling which makes
the play throb in spite of all its awkwardness. It is, essentially, the
same feeling which inspired Rags at the Jewish Art Theatre this
year. And it is precisely the spirit not in Partners Again.
MR J. M. KERRIGAN should be warned that in the company of
amateurs it is not good form to be a fine actor. The fact that he
can't help it only makes it worse. The No-Siree! show in which he
took part also revealed Miss Ruth Gillmore as a highly talented
mimic—and with Ethel Barrymore as subject. Miss Helen Hayes
returned to the stage in a marvelously concise parody of A. A. Milne.
G. S.


COMMENT
I
N the Dublin Letter published in this issue Mr Eglinton says
that he does not know whether “it is becoming in a contributor to
The Dial to speak unsympathetically” of Ulysses. It is, of course,
superfluous for us to state that a critic of Mi Eglinton's distinction
may speak his mind with the utmost freedom in our pages; and it
will not disconcert our readers to find Mr Pound's views placed
beside Mr Eglinton's. We have no wish, at this moment, to declare
an official attitude towards Ulysses; it is enough to note the quick-
ening of the life of the mind which this book has effected, even in
America where but few copies are accessible.
An official, an almost canonical interpretation of the book is to
be found in the pages of La Nouvelle Revue Française where M
Valery Larbaud has published his now famous lecture on James
Joyce. It is not for us, whom M Larbaud has handsomely compli-
mented, to do more than mention the clarity of his exposition. He
has had the advantage of knowing some of the author's thoughts
about Ulysses and he has provided a key to many mysteries.
Yet there is one thing very hard to accept: M Larbaud's state-
ment, independently made, but less drastically, by Mr Pound, that
the reader who has not the Odyssey well in hand will find himself
at a loss with Ulysses. One reason for doubting this is that, having
read the Odyssey-Heaven knows why-almost immediately be-
fore the arrival of Ulysses, we found Mr Joyce's work little illumi-
nated by its prototype and little in need of that illumination. We
mean that however obscure and difficult the book may be, it has an
independent existence-has it, if we may trust its detractors, with
exceptional authority and intensity.
One sees the difficulties of M Larbaud's interpretation at the
very start. “The name of Stephen Dedalus is symbolic” he says,
and delicately modulates from the chord until one finds that
Stephen is St Stephen, Daedalus, James Joyce, and, as the spiritual
son of Ulysses-Bloom, Telemachus (the Greek name signifying
“Far from the War”). It is not easy-although it is not impossible
—to figure Stephen as Icarus and Telemachus at once. And it is


COMMENT
663
late to be impressed by ingenuities when one has long yielded to
the creative energy which has made Stephen himself.
It is, in fact, as a key to the structure of Ulysses that the relation
to the Odyssey is most interesting. “From the moment he re-
created Ulysses,” says M Larbaud, "he was logically bound to re-
create all the personages of the Odyssey” who are concerned with
Ulysses. Logically, yes. In effect the blind man in Dublin bears
small relation to Polyphemus. The plan one can see more clearly.
The Telemachy, the wanderings, the return, are matched definitely
by the episodes of Ulysses. Within them, one gathers, the detail is
symbolic. For example M Larbaud chooses the fourth episode of
the adventures:
“The title is Aeolus: it takes place in the editorial rooms of a
newspaper; the hour is noon; the organ of the body to which it
corresponds: the lungs; the art which it treats: rhetoric; its colours:
red; its symbolic figure: the editor in chief; its technique: en-
thymeme; its correspondences: a personage who corresponds to the
Aeolus of Homer; incest compared to journalism; the floating island
of Aeolus: the press; the personage named Dignam, who died sud-
denly three days before and to whose funeral Leopold Bloom has
gone (which constitutes the episode of the descent to Hades):
Elpenor.”
This is wonderfully persuasive and adds interest to a re-reading
of Ulysses. But it is not on this account-and M Larbaud is clear-
est to say that it is not on this account—that “with Ulysses Ireland
makes a sensational re-entry into high European letters.” That is
M Larbaud's claim and Mr Middleton Murry's strictures on the
phrase are a little unjustified since M Larbaud has himself ex-
plained the last three words by saying that Joyce has given young
Ireland "an artistic physiognomy, an intellectual identity.”
It would not be fitting to omit, even from casual notes on
Ulysses, our congratulations to the Shakespeare Press on the com-
pletion of the work, and something more than that for The Little
Review, the protomartyr of the cause.
Mr Franklin P. Adams, of the New York World, having dis-


664
COMMENT
covered the spiritual identity of W. H. Davies and T. S. Eliot, has
been, we hear, engaged to lecture on other such identities in litera-
ture. The lectures will take place, presumably, every afternoon and
evening at the Palace Theatre, and Mr Adams will draw the names
of any two poets out of a hat and, immediately, proclaim them one.
He will even, as skill grows, allow the audience to shout out names
and, coupling any two, be they Homer and Herrick, compose a
parody of the one which he will declare perfect for the other. Taxis
will be in waiting before the theatre and will make no stops until
they reach the docks of the Companie Générale Transatlantique,
which line, we trust, will offer reduced rates to serious young Ameri-
cans who, having failed to march upon and destroy the World
Building, feel still that a small sign of protest-a certain gesture-
can best be made just after the ship clears from the quay.
Prophecy is not the business of this small department of The
Dial, and gloating, we trust, not our habit. Yet we shamelessly
recall to our readers the comments we made, in our issue of April,
on the proposed self-censorship of the theatre. We said then that
the method usually postpones the blow, but only by conceding the
whole point of external censorship. We declared in favour of fight-
ing the matter out on the high ground of the pure idea and added:
"No one can pretend that the pure idea would have got us any-
where—this is the twentieth century, not the Dark Ages. But the
pure idea would have given us something to go on with.”
And the self-censorship gives nothing to go on with, as Mr
Arthur Hopkins, faced with an attack on The Hairy Ape, admits.
"What right have we,” he cries, "to assist in the perfection of a
machine whose future operations may fill us all with bitterness
and regret ?” Precisely. But that is the position which Mr A. H.
Woods took before the event. Rights are no longer in question, Mr
Hopkins. If you care for the theatre-a rhetorical question, be-
cause you do—you have the obligation to think clearly about it.



fen
Library
TE UNIVERSITY
OF IOWA
7.
THE
DIAL
JUNE 1922
Charles Demuth
G. Santayana 553
Georg Kolbe
Acrobats Water-colour
Marginal Notes
Two Bronze Figures
The Fox
People's Surroundings
Figure Drawing Black and White
More Memories
Two Early Line Drawings
Soliloquy on a Park Bench
Praise for an Urn
The Brothers Karamazov
Heifer India Ink
Dublin Letter
James Joyce Pen and Ink
Paris Letter
Book Reviews :
Bombination
Up Stream
Spain From the Air
Love's Muenchhausen
Briefer Mention
Modern Art
Musical Chronicle
The Theatre
Comment
D. H. Lawrence 569
Marianne Moore 588
Jules Pascin
William Butler Yeats 591
Pablo Picasso
Conrad Aiken 601
Hart Crane 606
Hermann Hesse 607
Yasuo Kuniyoshi
John Eglinton 619
Stuart Davis
Ezra Pound 623
Raymond Mortimer 630
Mary Austin 634
Stewart Mitchell 640
Julius von Ludassy 642
648
Henry McBride 652
Paul Rosenfeld 655
G. S. 660
The Editors 662
VOLUME LXXII NUMBER 6
50 cents a copy


THE DIAL
152 WEST THIRTEENTH STREET, NEW YORK CITY
Scofield THAYER
GILBERT SELDES
Editor
Managing Editor
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
The German sculptor Georg Kolbe whose bronze figures are re-
produced this month was born in 1877. He resides in Berlin.
Hermann Hesse was born at Calw, Württenberg, in 1877, and
now lives in Montagnola, Switzerland. He is one of the best
known of German novelists and critics on the Continent and is
now being introduced to England and America. At the age of
twenty-one he published his Romantische Lieder, and in 1904 his
most famous novel, Peter Camenzind. Under the pseudonym of
Hermann Lauscher he issued what professed to be Posthumous
Prose and Verse. He has written a biography of Boccaccio and
one of St Francis of Assisi.
Stephen Hudson is an English novelist. His Richard Kurt and
Elinor Colhouse have already been published in this country. A
third novel, The Rock, is announced. Mr Hudson has also writ-
ten for The Athenaeum, The Tyro, and The Little Review. He
is at present on the Continent.
Yasuo KUNIYOSHI is a young Japanese painter who has studied in
America, at the Art Students League and particularly under Ken-
neth Hayes Miller. His work is discussed by Mr McBride in
Modern Art of this issue.
Dr Julius von LUDASSy was born in Vienna in 1858. He was for
a long time a political writer for the Viennese press, and during
this time attracted attention with his plays. His novels have
gained him a reputation as one of the best narrative writers in
Austria. With Die Grosse Stunde he won the New-Yorker
Staatszeitung's novel contest. Last year he was awarded the
.
Bauernfeld prize in recognition of his literary activities.
The index to Volume LXXII, which is completed with the present
number, will be ready shortly. It will be printed separately and
will be mailed free to subscribers on request.
1
VOL, LXXII. No. 6 June 1922
The Dial (founded in 1880 by Francis F. Browne) is published monthly at Greenwich,
Connecticut by The Dial Publishing Company, Inc.-J. S. Watson, Jr., President-
Samuel W. Craig, Secretary-Treasurer. Entered as second class matter at the Post Office
at Greenwich, Connecticut. Business and Editorial offices at 152 West 13th Street,
New York, N. Y. Copyright, 1922, by The Dial Publishing Company, Inc.
$5 a year
Foreign Postage 60 cents
50 cents a copy


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