667 - |- - - -- o40 ftOPERTT Of ARTES SC1ENTIA VERITAS 0.47 /*2+ 2/477 & 32// 16640 Yd.71 "** THE 4 « \ DIAL ^—e-' VOLUME LXXVII July to December, 1924 THE DIAL PUBLISHING COMPANY 16640 qp x Inde x 040 HOPERTT Of I l/wmilvof M wranes s , 1817 ARTES SC1ENTIA VERITAS ^ /;; ■■ /f>f • » « 0F99T " Vri.11 "* + iffofe THE .' > DIAL VOLUME LXXVII July to December, 1924 THE DIAL PUBLISHING COMPANY 16640 x Index 1GG40 INDEX VOLUME LXXVII PACE Bell, Clive Firginia Woolf 451 Budberg, Marie, translator . A Strange Murderer (Fiction) 291 Burke, Kenneth Delight and Tears 513 Deposing the Love of the Lord . 161 Ethics of the Artist 420 Burke, Kenneth, translator The Downfall of Western Civilization 361.482 Colum, Padraic Desert Arabia 336 /Cowley, Malcolm Gulliver 520 Craven, Thomas A Neglected Master 260 The Pageant of Art 342 Publishing the Artist 76 Faure, Elie A Book on Modern Art .... 509 Living Art 330 Frank, Waldo, translator .... Lucienne (Fiction) 1,121,215,299,381 Gilchrist, Helen Ives . A National Target 73 Gorki, Maxim Reminiscences of Leonid Andreyev 31,105 A Strange Murderer (Fiction) . 291 Hillyer, Robert William Blake, the Philosopher . 257 Koteliansky, S. S., translator . . Reminiscences of Leonid Andreyev 31,105 Lovett, Robert Morss .... The Prisoner Who Sang .... 79 Lucas, F. L Few, But Roses 201 Mann, Thomas German Letter 414 Mansfield, Katherine, translator . Reminiscences of Leonid Andreyev 31,105 Miles, Hamish The Flaming Terrapin .... 423 Moore, Marianne The Man Who Died Twice . . . 168 Thistles Dipped in Frost . 251 Morand, Paul Paris Letter 64, 239,505 Mortimer, Raymond London Letter 59 Ortega y Gasset, Jose Spanish Letter 323 Pelin, Elin The Eyes of Saint Spiridon (Fiction) 210 The Mirror of St Christopher (Fiction) 55 Powys, Llewelyn The Thirteenth Way 45 Romains, Jules Lucienne (Fiction) 1,121,215,299,381 Russell, Bertrand Americanization 158 Philosophy in the Twentieth Century 271 Santayana, G The Wisdom of Avicenna ... 91 Sharenkoff, Victor, translator . . The Eyes of Saint Spiridon (Fiction) 210 The Mirror of St Christopher (Fiction) 5 5 iv INDEX : PAGE Smith, Logan Pearsall .... First Catch Your Hare .... 149 Spengler, Oswald The Downfall of Western Civilization 361,482 I7S. 350 155 Stein, Leo, and The Editor . . . Two Letters . Stephens, James Irish Letter . . . Trueblood, Charles K A Responsible Novelist iVan Loon, Hendrik Willem . . . A Shepherd of Light . JWilson, Edmund An Introduction to James Joyce Mr Hemingway's Dry-Points Mr Lardner's American Characters The Seven Low-Brow Arts Woolf, Virginia Miss Ormerod (Fiction) . Wright, Cuthbert The Good Old Days . Yeats, William Butler .... The Bounty of Sweden . The Cat and the Moon 426 163 430 340 69 244 466 516 181 23 INDEX VERSE PAGE Coatsworth, Elizabeth J. Posthumous Respectability 298 Drewry, Guy Carleton .... Life . 465 Hillyer, Robert Black Magic 200 Moore, Marianne An Octopus 475 Sea Unicorns and Land Unicorns . 411 Silence 290 MuiR, Edwin October at Hellbrun 209 Ridge, Lola Mo-ti 147 Sandburg, Carl Flat Waters of the West in Kansas . 44 Simpson, Mabel Lines for All Dead Poets 154 Stephens, James Death 379 The Main-Deep 380 The Rose in the Wind . . . .379 Stevens, Wallace Sea Surface Full of Clouds ... 51 Van Slyke, Berenice K The Pomegranate 104 Wolf, Robert L The Man in the Dress Suit . . . 214 vi INDEX ART Barlach, Ernst In the Stocks November Sleeping Peasant .... November Swordsman November Burchfield, C. E., and J. J. Lankes . Carolina Village .... November The Haymow November The Whirling Wind . . . November Chagall, Marc The Idiot November Dehn, Adolph Two Dancers August The Violinist August Derain, Andre Les Collines October Dobson, Frank Concertina Man October Pigeon Boy October Torso in Wood October Faggi, Alfeo Christ Comforts the Women of Jerusalem September Full Face July Profile July FoRAIN, J. L Duez, Liquidateur des Con- gregations October Grant, Duncan Woman With Ewer September Grigoriev, Boris Brittany Landscape July Gropper, William Two Line Syncopations . . October Jacques, Lucien Cabris December Saint Cassien December Lankes, J. J Old Barber Shop, Buffalo . July Old Stores in Buffalo .... July Lankes, J. J. (See Burchfield, C. E.) Le Fauconnier, Henri Jules Romains July McMillen, Mildred The White Cow August Munch, Edvard Landscape July Nagle, Edward Nude July Pascin, Jules Henry McBride .... December Peck, Anne Merriman .... Chevaux de Bois .... September La Cirque Zanfretta . . . September Pennell, Joseph Coal Wharjs,Staten Island: No. I December Landscape Near Valenciennes December The Latest Tower .... December Standard Oil Building . December Picasso, Pablo Baigneuses August King Lear December A Pastel August Le Pierrot August Le Poete August Robinson, Boardman Bertrand Russell October Seurat, Georges La Baignade September Les Bords de la Seine September Un Dimanche d la Grande Jatte September Signac, Paul La Rochelle August Yeats, Jack B With Wind and Tide . September Zorn, Anders Anatole France .... November INDEX vii BOOKS REVIEWED Authors and Titles PACE Anonymous. Haunch, Paunch and Jowl 265 Artzybasheff, Mikhail. The Savage 264 Auslander, Joseph. Sunrise Trumpets 348 Babbitt, Irving. Democracy and Leadership 526 Hai.z, Albert G. A. The Basis of Social Theory 349 Barton, F. R., editor. Edward Fitzgerald and Bernard Barton: Letters Written by Fitzgerald 349 Baudouin, Charles. Eden and Cedar Paul, translators. Psychoanalysis and Aesthetics 526 Belloc, Hilaire. Sonnets and Verse 172 Bennett, Charles A. At a Venture 438 Blackwood, Algernon. Episodes Before Thirty 85 Bodenheim, Maxwell. Against This Age.—Crazy Man 251 Bojer, Johan. The Prisoner Who Sang 79 Borah, William E. American Problems 85 Boyd, Ernest, editor and translator. Yvette and Other Stories, by Guy de Mau- passant 171 Braun, Otto. Julie Vogelstein, editor. Ella Winter, translator. F. W. Stella Browne, translator of poetry. The Diary of Otto Braun 84 Braybrooke, Patrick. Some Thoughts of Hilaire Belloc 438 Brown, Carleton, editor. Religious Lyrics of the XlVth Century 437 Burke, Kenneth. The White Oxen 520 Burt, Struthers. The Interpreter's House 82 Campbell, Roy. The Flaming Terrapin 423 Canfield, Dorothy. The Home-Maker 346 Cannan, Gilbert. Sembal 346 Chamberlin, Henry Harmon. The Master Knot 82 Chapman, John Jay. Letters and Religion 268 Chappell, George S. Hogarth, Jr., illustrator. A Basket of Poses 524 Chater, Arthur G., translator. The Philosopher's Stone, by J. Anker Larsen . 523 Cheney, Sheldon. A Primer of Modern Art 349 Chesterton, Gilbert K. St. Francis of Assisi 83 Chilton, Helen, and Bernard Miall, translators. The Fortunes of a Household, by Herman Robbers 436 Cimino, Harry, illustrator. Atlas and Beyond, by Elizabeth J. Coatsworth . 172 Coatsworth, Elizabeth J. Harry Cimino, illustrator. Atlas and Beyond ... 172 Collins, Joseph. Taking the Literary Pulse 439 Covan, Jenny, translator. The Don Juanes, by Marcel Prevost 436 Cozzens, James Gould. Confusion 436 Crane, Nathalia. The Janitor's Boy, and Other Poems 437 Crawford, Nelson Antrim. The Ethics of Journalism 439 Damon, S. Foster. William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols 257 D'Arcy, Ella, translator. Ariel: The Life of Shelley, by Andre; Maurois . . . 525 Dark, Sidney. The Story of the Renaissance 174 Davidson, Israel, editor. Israel Zangwill, translator. Selected Religious Poems of Solomon Ibn Gabirol 161 de la Mare, Walter. Ding Dong Bell 525 de la Mare, Walter. Henry Brocken 85 Dell, Floyd. Looking at Life 173 de Maupassant, Guy. Ernest Boyd, editor and translator. Yvette and Other Stories 171 Doren, Carl Van. See Van Doren. Doughty, Charles M. Travels in Arabia Deserta 336 vni INDEX PAGE Ewell, James Cadv, illustrator. House of Ghosts, by John Grimes 524 Farjeon, J. Jefferson. The Master Criminal 436 Farrar, John. The Middle Twenties 266 Faure, Elie. Walter Pach, translator. History of Art: Volume II, Medieval Art; Volume III, Renaissance Art; Volume IV, Modern Art 342 Ferrer, Edna. So Big 523 Ficke, Arthur Davison. Out of Silence and Other Poems 83 Fitzgerald, Edward. F. R. Barton, editor. Edward Fitzgerald and Bernard Barton: Letters Written by Fitzgerald 349 Frank, Waldo. Salvos 84 Fry, Roger, introduction. Living Painters: Duncan Grant 268 Gabirol, Solomon Ibn. Israel Davidson, editor. Israel Zangwill, translator. Selected Religious Poems of Solomon Ibn Gabirol 161 Gobel, Heinrich. Robert West, translator. Tapestries of the Lowlands . . . 174 Golding, Louis. Prophet and Fool 172 Gorki, Maxim. My University Days 173 Gorman, Herbert S. James Joyce: His First Forty Years 430 Grainger, Boine. The Hussy 82 Grant, Duncan. Roger Fry, introduction. Living Painters: Duncan Grant . . 268 Greene, William Chase. The Achievement of Greece 174 Grimes, John. James Cady Ewell, illustrator. House of Ghosts 524 Hackett, Florence. With Benefit of Clergy 436 H\ D. Heliodora, and Other Poems 348 ^/Hemingway, Ernest. In Our Time—Three Stories and Ten Poems 340 Hill, Edward Burlingame. Modern French Music 525 Hogarth, Jr., illustrator. A Basket of Poses, by George S. Chappell .... 524 Holmes, Sir Charles. Old Masters and Modern Art 439 Hudson, Stephen. Tony 265 Huxley, Aldous. Antic Hay 265 Hyndman, Rosalind Travers. The Last Years of H. M. Hyndman 267 Jameson, Storm. The Pitiful Wife 523 Joerissen, Gertrude, translator. The Lost Flute of the Book of Franz Toussaint . 266 Kallen, Horace M. Culture and Democracy in the United States 158 Kennedy, William Sloane. The Real John Burroughs 438 Lardner, Ring W. How to Write Short Stories 69 Larsen, J. Anker. Arthur G. Chater, translator. The Philosopher's Stone . . 523 Lay, Wilfrid. A Plea for Monogamy 174 Loti, Pierre. Samuel Viaud, editor. Rose Ellen Stein, translator. Pierre Loti, Notes of My Youth 438 Lowe-Porter, H. T., translator. Buddenbrooks, by Thomas Mann 420 Lynch, Bohun. A Perfect Day 346 Lynd, Robert. The Blue Lion and Other Essays 349 McElroy, Robert. Grover Cleveland, the Man and the Statesman 73 MacKaye, James. The Logic of Conduct 526 MacLeish, Archibald. The Happy Marriage 437 Mager, Gus. William Murrell, editor. Younger Artists'Series: Volume V . . 76 Mann, Thomas. H. T. Lowe-Porter, translator. Buddenbrooks 420 Mare, Walter de la. See de la Mare. Maupassant, Guy de. See de Maupassant. Maurois, Andr6. Ella D'Arcy, translator. Ariel: The Life of Shelley .... 525 Miall, Bernard, and Helen Chilton, translators. The Fortunes of a Household, by Herman Robbers 436 Miles, Susan, editor. Childhood in Verse and Prose: An Anthology 347 Moncrieff, Scott, translator. Within a Budding Grove, by Marcel Proust . . 523 Monroe, Harriet. The Difference and Other Poems 524 Montague, C. E. A Hind Let Loose 264 Morand, Paul. H. I. Woolf, translator. Green Shoots 171 More, Paul Elmer. Hellenistic Philosophies 84 INDEX ix PAGE Morgan, A. E. Tendencies in Modern English Drama 526 Morton, David. Harvest 266 Moult, Thomas. The Comely Lass 171 Moult, Thomas, editor. The Best Poems of 1923 266 Murrell, William, editor. Younger Artists' Series. Volume V: Gus Mager.— Volume VI: Elie Nadelman 76 Nadelman, Elie. William Murrell, editor. Younger Artists' Series: Volume VI . 76 Nevins, Allan, compiler and editor. American Social History as Recorded by British Travellers 85 Nickerson, Hoffman. The Inquisition 516 Niven, Frederick. Justice of the Peace 264 Osbourne, Lloyd. An Intimate Portrait of R. L. S 267 Pach, Walter. The Masters of Modern Art 509 Pach, Walter. Georges Seurat 260 Pach, Walter, translator. History of Art: Volume II, Medieval Art.—Volume III, Renaissance Art.—Volume IV, Modern Art, by Elie Faure 342 Papini, Giovanni. Virginia Pope, translator. The Failure 173 Paul, Eden and Cedar, translators. Psychoanalysis and Aesthetics, by Charles Baudouin 526 Paul, Elliot H. Imperturbe 171 Pence, Raymond Woodbury, editor. Essays by Present-Day Writers .... 348 Phillpotts, Eden. Cheat-the-Boys.—Cherry Stones.—The Lavender Dragon . . 347 Phoutrides, Aristides, and Demetra Vaka, translators. Modern Greek Stories . . 437 Pope, Virginia, translator. The Failure, by Giovanni Papini 173 Porter, H. T. Lowe-. See Lowe-Porter. Prevost, Marcel. Jenny Covan, translator. The Don Juanes 436 Pritchard, F. H. Training in Literary Appreciation 348 Proust, Marcel. Scott Moncrieff, translator. Within a Budding Grove ... 523 Ritchie, Anne Thackeray. Hester Thackeray Ritchie, editor. Thackeray and His Daughter 267 Ritchie, Hester Thackeray, editor. Thackeray and His Daughter, Letters and Journals of Anne Thackeray Ritchie, with Many Letters of William Makepeace Thackeray 267 Robbers, Herman. Helen Chilton and Bernard Miall, translators. The For- tunes of a Household 436 Robinson, Edwin Arlington. The Man Who Died Twice 168 Rolland, Romain. Mahatma Gandhi 268 Sackville, Lady Margaret. Poems 348 Sadleir, Michael, introduction. An Autobiography, by Anthony Trollope . 438 Seldes, Gilbert. The Seven Lively Arts 244 Seligmann, Herbert J. D. H. Lawrence: An American Interpretation .... 82 Shaw, Bernard. Saint Joan 524 Sinclair, May. The Dark Night 266 Spingarn, J. E. Poems 172 Squire, J. C. Essays on Poetry 83 Steel, Willis, translator. The Long Walk of Samba Diouff, by Jerome and Jean Tharaud 346 Steese, Edward. Storm in Harvest 524 Stein, Rose Ellen, translator. Samuel Viaud, editor. Pierre Loti, Notes of My Youth 438 Strong, L. A. G. The Lowery Road 524 Strong, L. A. G., editor. The Best Poems of 1923 83 Tar bell, Ida. In the Footsteps of the Lincolns 267 Thackeray, William Makepeace. Hester Thackeray Ritchie, editor. Thackeray and His Daughter 267 Tharaud, Jerome and Jean. Willis Steel, translator. The Long Walk of Samba Diouff 346 Thayer, Scofield, editor. Living Art 330 Thomson, J. Arthur. What Is Man? 163 x INDEX w /w PACE Toussaint, Franz. Gertrude Joerissen, translator. The Lost Flute of the Book of Franz Toussaint 266 Treves, Sir Frederic. The Elephant Man 264 Trollope, Anthony. Michael Sadleir, introduction. An Autobiography . . . 438 Vara, Demetra, and Aristides Phoutrides, translators. Modern Greek Stories . . 437 Van Doren, Carl. Many Minds 84 Viaud, Samuel, editor. Rose Ellen Stein, translator. Pierre Loti, Notes of My Youth 438 Vogelstein, Julie, editor. Ella Winter, translator. F. W. Stella Browne, trans- lator of poetry. The Diary of Otto Braun 84 Vorse, Mary Heaton. Fraycar's Fist 437 Wassermann, Jacob. Louise Collier Willcox, translator. Gold 347 Watson, E. L. Grant. Moods of Earth and Sky 525 Waugh, Alec. Myself When Young 173 eirick, Bruce. From Whitman to Sandburg in American Poetry 83 Wescott, Glenway. The Apple of the Eye 513 West, Robert, translator. Tapestries of the Lowlands, by Heinrich Gobel . 174 Whitridge, Arnold. Critical Ventures in Modern French Literature ..... 439 Wignall, Trevor C. The Story of Boxing 268 Wilkinson, Marguerite. The Great Dream 265 Willcox, Louise Collier, translator. Gold, by Jacob Wassermann 347 Wilson, Margaret. The Able McLaughlins 426 Winter, Ella, translator. F. W. Stella Browne, translator of poetry. Julie Vogelstein, editor. The Diary of Otto Braun 84 Wooi.f, H. I., translator. Green Shoots, by Paul Morand 171 Zangwill, Israel, translator. Israel Davidson, editor. Selected Religious Poems of Solomon Ibn Gabirol 161 COMMENT Conrad, Joseph 269 France, Anatole 445 Freud in Bermuda 86 On American Deference to Authority 534 Stein, Leo, and The Editor '75,35° THE THEATRE Chocolate Dandies 528 Crime in the Whistler Room, The 441 Dixie to Broadway 528 Greenwich Village Follies 528 Guardsman, The 440 Mills, Florence 528 Second Mrs Tanqueray, The 527 Vanities, Earl Carroll's 528 What Price Glory 440 MODERN ART American Academy, the, Grand Central Galleries, and The Independents .... 529 Art, Its Situation in America 442 INDEX xi MUSICAL CHRONICLE FACE League for the Preservation of Inferior Material 532 Sowerby, Leo 532 MISCELLANEOUS MENTION Antheil, George 61 Apollinaire, Guillaume. The Poet Assassinated 442 Barlach, Ernst. Der Tote Tag 415 Blanche, J. E 240 Bonnard, Abel. En Chine 507 Brecht, Bert. Leben Eduards des Zweiten von England 417 Character-creation in Fiction 149 Cheney, Sheldon. A Primer of Modern Art 443 Congreve, Webster, and Wycherly on the English Stage 61 Corbeau, Adrien. Le Gigantesque.—L'Heure Finale 508 Daumier, Honore 68 Delteil, Joseph. Cholera 66 Don Quixote 328 Dreier, Katherine S. Western Art and the New Era 443 Elizabethan Plays, as produced in Norwich, England 63 Escorial, The 323 Fisher, William M., publisher of the Younger Artists' Series 77 Flecker, James EIroy. Hassan 61 Fontainas, M. La Peinture de Paumier 68 French Magazines 243 Gide, Andre 66 Grundtvig, Bishop 184 Hermant, Abel. Xavier ou les Entretiens sur la Grammaire Francaise 65 Housman, A. E 201 Irish Drama, Sean CCasey's contribution to 15; Larbaud, Valery 64 Librairie Gallimard. The Books of France 66 Massis, Henri. Jugements 66 Monet, Claude, Retrospective Exhibition of 68 Monk, Nugent 63 Morgann, Maurice. An Essay on the Character of Falstaff 150 Music and Drama in Paris 505 Nobel Prize for Literature. William Butler Yeats 181 O'Casey, Sean. Juno and the Paycock 155 Pennsylvania Terminus 197,534 Poulenc, Francis. Les Biches 67 Pound, Ezra, composer 61 Proust, Marcel 239 Pruna, M 241 Riviere, Jacques. Etudes 508 Sert, Jose Maria 67 Stevens, Wallace 45 Tharaud, Jerome and Jean. When Israel is King 507 Thayer, Scofield, editor. Living Art 443 Wembley, British Empire Exposition at 59 Yeats, W. B. Cathleen ni Houlihan, at the Royal Theatre, Stockholm 198 Yeats, William Butler. Nobel Prize 181 xii INDEX DEPARTMENTS PAGE Briefer Mention 82,171,264,346,436,523 Comment 86,175,269,350,445,534 German Letter 414 Irish Letter . 155 London Letter 59 Modern Art 442,529 Musical Chronicle 532 Paris Letter 64,239,505 Spanish Letter 323 Theatre, The 440,527 HON QIN CINIVACIGI Å8I ‘GIGIVOSCINVT uołą201100 foſq ºſ I. THE DIAL july 1924 LUCIENNE BY JULES ROMAINS Translated From the French by Waldo Frank [Translator's Note: Lucienne, although it is his latest work, serves admirably as a threshold to the mysterious and profound world of Jules Romains. On the surface, it seems quite the simplest of his books. A love story about people who are "just folks" in a provincial town in France, a tale whose theme is the tender dawn of love in unheroic souls . . . this surely is as easy an approach as Romains could have contrived to the terror and mystery of his vision. What that vision is I cannot even begin to discuss in this fore- word. Romains' work is extremely varied, for all its unity. He has written novels, comedy, tragedy, farce, at least one delicious movie entitled Donogoo-Tonka: he has written lyric and epic poetry. He has written aesthetic criticism. In his previous role as a professor and under his right name, Louis Farigoule, he has written a scientific work, La Vision Extra-retinienne, which as- tounded France: it is the result of his own experiments in develop- ing a sense of sight in certain breast cells of the blind. All of this work reveals a single motive vision. To it he gives the name Unanimisme, an enormously misconstrued term by which the critics have grouped under him such significant writers as Duhamel, Vil- drac, Arcos, Chenneviere. Unanimisme is roughly an aesthetic ex- pression for the sense which all these writers variously share, of the actual organic unity of life beyond the conventional units of indi- vidual things and persons. In philosophy and religion, this sense is as old as the Ionians, as the Hindus, as the fundamental Jewish 2 LUCIENNE wisdom that stretches from the Pentateuch to Spinoza. France is creative above all in aesthetic forms. What Romains has done is to give organic experience, and substance in modern terms, to a con- viction which heretofore has remained mostly in the limbo of speculation. His mystical monism is one of the truly great triumphs of modern literary art. In some of his books, Romains sings the organic reality of aggre- gate beings—such as crowds, streets, armies, cities, trains. In others, he depicts the organizing power, within society, of individual events, such as The Death of a Nobody. In La Vision Extra- retinienne he claims to have proven a community of function in the cells of the human body, which traditional science has long since relegated to the protoplasm. In Lucienne the conventional forms of love and family are wondrously revealed as the dwelling-place of forces inscrutably vast and deep. Romains belongs to a tradition of French art not too well known among us. Roughly there have been two major strains, sometimes separate, sometimes merged. The rationalistic strain, including Montaigne, Moliere, Voltaire, Stendhal, Gourmont, is the one most widely known, perhaps because, as Anatole France put it, "a book to reach posterity should travel light." In this traditional current are the contemporary clever and disillusioned works from which the ignorant have once more so glibly deduced the well-advertised French Decadence. There is a whole lineage of artists in whom the rationalistic militates with the mystic. Such were Rabelais and Abelard. More recently, such are Renan and his great successor Andre Gide. But the pure mystical tradition has flowed on, al- though always so brilliantly fleshed that to the Germanic mind (to whom the mystical means clouds) it was at times invisible. Among its masters were Villon, Racine, Pascal, Poussin, Balzac, Baudelaire, Cezanne, and now Romains. It is the child of the Gothic, which is an ars francorum. Indeed, for an analogue to this book of Romains, it is almost easiest to go to painting. Cezanne makes a study of a dish of fruit. To the superficial eye this is as misleading as the homely story of Lucienne. Romains is a mystic. Whether consciously or not, he, like Cezanne and like Goethe, is a follower of Spinoza. By which I mean briefly that his materials, his char- acters, the emotions of his characters are essentially treated as attri- butes of God, as modifications containing the essence and partaking of the dynamic being of the Absolute. It is this revelation which JULES ROMAINS 3 organizes the substance of Lucienne and gives to it its aesthetic significance. Do not fear, however, that Lucienne prove "dry" or "diffi- cult" because it is profound. Should you do so, you would be reckoning without the French tradition of lucidity and simplicity, of which Romains is a full heir. Lucienne is first of all a tender and exciting story of emotional adventure. Its depths steal on you subtly, almost secretly, as might the intoxicating power of some long-mellowed wine. It is the most appealing of its author's many works: and it is perhaps the greatest.] AGAIN I see us seated face to face, Marie Lemiez and me, in the l dining-room of the hotel. A table was reserved for us close to a sort of buffet where the plates were put to warm. The other guests, who were men, filled two larger tables near the windows. Marie Lemiez said to me: "When the question of piano lessons came up, I praised you, as you can imagine. They expect you to- night at about half past five, if you are free. Of course, I told them that you were very busy and that you would find it hard to be there at that hour. Also I said that I wasn't sure that you could give them as many lessons as they wished. It was the best way to swing them." "How many do they want?" "Four a week. You're to work with the two sisters together or in succession, as you like. They're old enough, Heaven knows, but they scarcely know their scales. So they're eager to make up for time lost. But they're a trustworthy sort. You'll still have your pupils in two years, if you care to. . . . And I'll be glad to have you know them. I've already told you a good deal about them all. But I haven't the gift of painting my impressions. Besides, it's not so easy to make a picture of them, nor of their house either." I rejoiced. For two months I had had my worries about money: at least that is how I saw things. Another girl might have been less concerned, for, far from running into debt, I had managed to keep intact a nest-egg of three hundred francs. Still, I had to measure my outlays pretty narrowly. A twenty sou purchase, if it was unforeseen, called for lengthy calculations. 4 LUCIENNE I do not believe, however, that I am stingy. Most certainly I am not, if by stinginess you mean the love of money. I can say without false humility that I fear money and despise it. I should get along very well indeed with a quite bare existence. The two good things about a convent, as I imagine one, are its poverty and its peace. But the young girl who teaches piano in a small city cannot let herself sink into the ease of indigence and rest there. She has to go on struggling: a misery as drear as if one always carried in one's breast the beginning of disease. Marie Lemiez said to me: "They asked me your terms. I said I did not know them, but I was sure they could come to an agree- ment about that. The thing for them was to get you." "That's a bit embarrassing." "Not at all. These people are very well off, even though they do live like retired shopkeepers. Besides, their house is quite far out. Don't put your price too low. I get ten francs for my science lessons. If you ask less, I know them, they'll be disappointed." "But, my dear, you're a graduate, you're a professor of the High School." "Graduate? Do you think they know what that is? Oh, they asked me if you were from the Conservatory. It was inevitable, after my praises of you. I told them the truth: that you were one of the best pupils D— ever had, but that your family had not deemed it proper that you should take the regular Conservatory course. My dear, you can't imagine the good effect those words had on them all. The mother turned toward her two daughters, then toward her husband, then toward me: then she bowed her head once or twice benevolently, like a judge. And I understood what it all meant: 'Mon Dieu, it may have been a little narrow of them. We, for instance, do not consider it improper that our daughters should learn Latin, physics, even anatomy! But the young woman of whom you tell us has evidently had a good up- bringing, and the prejudices which hindered her at the very start of her career are of the most honourable sort.' So you see, my dear Lucienne, you will appear down there, preceded by a saintly reputation." We got up from the table. Marie Lemiez left almost at once to prepare some experiments for her physics course. I was alone on the three-cornered Square which is the heart of the old town. I was a bit light-headed. This windfall in my poverty was JULES ROMAINS 5 sudden, and it half bowled me over. It was fun not to examine it at once, not to figure it out, not to plot the changes it would bring to my every-day existence. Deep down in me, perhaps, a humbler companion of my consciousness, a sort of amiable servant, was hastily calculating for me: but if so, there came to me as yet only a vague sense, a sweet and reassuring echo of the process. I walked around the Square two or three times. Things, it seemed, were much more interesting than they had ever been, or rather I was at last going to be interested in them. ... I was going to do them justice. My attention was not yet on them, but I was getting ready. I had a foretaste of the quiet which I would owe to them soon. As I went round perhaps the second time, this inner bubbling of myself gave way to a more lucid understanding, whose trend was outward on the world. My intoxication had merely made me giddy: now it brought a vivid power to see life straight, my sight no longer flattened on the envelope of things or on the neutral glaze that held them off. It struck straight through to their heart. At the Square's centre was a statue, on one of the sides stood the Town Hall, on the other shops were serried. To-day when I relive that moment I see first a clear green jug: very gay and solid it is, placed on a plank at the height of a man. I see not even the whole jug, only its belly, shining and bursting like a sun from a fog: then comes a whole display of jugs stretching out like the lineage of that first one. Then a woman, seated in the corner of her display, but not passively, not by chance: she is solidly installed there, body to body with her shop, and by her presence the order of her wares grows salient and inevitable, somewhat as a maze of oddly clustered leafage grows clear when one discovers the tree's bole and branches. Next there comes back a rotisserie, a fruit shop, a dry-goods store. All was sharp and fresh. Each little thing—a basket, a cabbage, a strip of cloth—had its own air and way, and moved upon me with a firm assertion as if it clamoured to be seen. Indeed, what ruled me was not the sense of a new-met brilliance upon the face of things. This frail delight I had known often: it brings a sort of holiday to the soul without profoundly moving it at all. Here was a more basal sense; one less delusive, one akin to ecstasy. I looked about me, zestfully, assured. I wanted to make use of my new mood. Too often, I felt, there had fallen between things and me a veil distancing them, making them lie: even the 6 LUCIENNE texture of an iron bar seemed doubtful to me. To-day, things are here indeed, and real indeed, and squarely face to face with me . . . and yet these things are kin! I have joy in their full nature. I want to feel them ripe and plenteous, how their surfaces shine not because light plays on them, not because of the happy eyes that see them, but because they are taut with their own rich substance. I scolded myself. The world could not have changed in a day, it was my fault for waiting so long to win such life from everything about me. Three persons stood in a clothing store. I can explain the joy I had in them, only by saying that their own need at that instant to be alive, to breathe, to stir, to be in that shop, not else- where, to handle precisely the goods that they were handling, to utter the words which I could not hear, but whose passage I felt as if from my own breast . . . their need was my own and was within me, compelling, penetrant, gay. This sense had to be very clear in me to make me know how often unawares I had had the contrary sensation. I had refused to allow the presence and attitude and gestures of persons whom I watched: I had striven to correct their bearing: I had, in fact, struggled wholly against them whence came a mysterious fatigue. Or else, I had been possessed by the neuter, equally wearying sense of being altogether apart from people, of playing no role whatever in their lives, of moving in an orbit out of reach of theirs, even as they stayed out of reach of mine. Not for a moment did it occur to me to patronize my own ex- hilaration with the thought of its humble cause. I think of that only now. Perhaps it should have struck me at once that it was rather pitiful to be stirred so deeply because I had learned ten minutes previous that I was by way of earning a few sous. Is this a lack in me of inherent dignity? I'm afraid I have little of that sort of pride. After all, supposing I were a man and went on parties with my friends, I should accept quite without shame the exhilara- tion of the wine we drank, or the racket we made. Perhaps because she guessed something of this sort in me, Marie Lemiez has told me more than once that I am not moral: and this despite the austere life she has seen me lead and despite my own conviction that I know far more about the meaning of sanctity than she does. What counts, it seems to me, is that the human soul should suddenly know a might and a grandeur which it has never known before. Why quarrel with the pretext? If at all costs you will not admit the purity of an emotion before you are convinced of the purity of its JULES ROMAINS 7 source, how can I be certain that the sweet madness of that hour did not have its true origin in the future? This, I know, is not the usual way to take things: to dare say a thing like that is to risk being absurd. And yet my own experience persuades me that the mere fact of an idea being hard to express in reason is not enough to condemn it as less good than another. These three trips around the Square had been unwitting. Now, equally unaware, I moved into the Rue Saint-Blaise, and as I did so, once more my inner turmoil shifted. I came back to myself, to my problems, to the substantial aspects of my life. I found a childish voluptuousness in making plans: I went over figures again and again, for as they murmured past my lips they left on them a new and lasting savour of security. I had been four months in this city which is less well known on its own account than for the neighbouring baths of F—les-Eaux. My mother, a widow three years since, had just remarried. She had done this with none too great concern about myself. And at once I had taken the challenge of independence. Paris offered the best chances: my teacher D— could readily have brought me pupils: but my one wish was to get away. It seemed that this, would simplify my relations with my mother: perhaps as well the thought of exile indulged my bitterness. Marie Lemiez, an old high-school chum in Paris, was teaching science in the provinces. We exchanged casual letters. I asked her whether there would be room for a piano instructor in the town where she was teaching. I doubt if she made any serious enquiries: she consulted, I suspect, chiefly her own solitude. She wrote that I would certainly find lessons: she herself would introduce me to many families. She welcomed my coming as a godsend. I suppose she was pretty lone- some. So I came on, and the fact was that my start was extremely hard. For an entire month, I had two lessons a week, one hour each, and at the rate of five francs an hour. My earnings that month were forty-five francs. I had expected nothing of this sort on my arrival, and I boarded at the same hotel with Marie Lemiez: I rented a comfortable room not far from hers, and also I rented a piano, since my own remained at my mother's. I was loath to move it until I was certain of staying. All of this came to nearly one hundred and fifty francs a month, in- cluding tips. It was a disaster. At this rate, the viaticum of 8 LUCIENNE five hundred francs with which I had set forth from Paris would vanish in three months. With the second month, I retrenched defensively. I was re- solved to fight it out alone. Three hundred and seventy francs still remained. I withdrew three hundred as a final weapon against want or illness, and placed them well out of reach in a bank. I rented a cheaper room. I stopped boarding at the hotel. I kept only the piano. Of my four pinched months, this second dwells with me most sweetly. The extreme of my poverty and the suddenness of my descent to it brought me a gloomy joy. Self-abstention, if only it be pure enough, gives a stripped beauty to the soul. There lived in me, as doubtless in many, an un- challenged ascetic who was only too glad to be put to the test. On the other hand, a merely moderate privation, the endless need of balancing a mediocre budget, has always impressed me as dreary and as drab. From morning to evening, I lived in a vague shudder; and when I walked, which was often, the shudder moved along, close all about me, making in my ears a deep condolent stir which in the end was song. Each day I skirted the town's ramparts, and turned by the apse of an old church. Even now, as I think of it I tremble. The interior of the church did not entice me. The ritual took place within myself, came forth, and its rebounding life touched on the walls, giving to them an air of saturation as if the solid texture of the walls were invaded and were won by the vibrance of my own spirit. As night fell, this enveloping shudder drew gradually in upon itself, chose its night haven, and I felt it change into a tingling of my eyes and throat. I returned to my room. I cleared the marble of my mantelpiece. With a care at once meticulous and unconscious, I prepared my alcohol chafing dish; I got ready my meal in one of my two utensils . . . perhaps an egg in the small enamel dish, perhaps a potato soup in the doll- sized pot. I set the dishes on a round table halfway between the mantel and the bed. The tingling in my throat and eyes grew greater. There were tears, and the flavour of tears merged subtly with the first taste of the food. I did not try to feel sorry for myself: neither did I fight against these tears which rose in me like the refrain of my day. Of course, Marie Lemiez had noticed my retrenchment. But she was JULES ROMAINS 9 not the kind who perceives the life of any one in detail. She came to see me: she chatted the events of her own life, she questioned me about mine, she retailed some gossip of the school, she asked me to play. One evening she came in just as I was finishing a fried egg which ended my meal, and which had also begun it. Was it the aspect of my menage or some other circumstance? She burst out laughing. When she stopped, she saw my tears. She was ill at ease. And for the remainder of her stay, her manner was more tender than it had been. Probably, at home, the true misfortune of my position at last dawned on her. For the very next day she managed to get me a new pupil. A little later one of my girls made an opening for me in the family of a friend. In the course of my third month I could count on eight hours a week. That was still none too much. The families in which I taught held strictly to the minimum price, and far too often a holiday or a pupil's illness (I took good care never to be ill, myself) left me idle. I was still somewhat short of a grand monthly total of one hundred and fifty francs. But I decided that I could return to the hotel at least for the noonday meal. It seemed a pretty daring whim, but Marie Lemiez urged it so eagerly. At her comfortable distance, my affairs seemed very excellent indeed. If I had refused, I am certain she would have suspected me of hoarding. Besides, I truly needed some escape from the thoughts of my solitude. I had carried out my retreat successfully. I had won from it at first a tremulous peace, a serenity strangely nourished by my tears, a memory that dwells pure with me still. But little by little—in proportion as the exhilaration of distress wore down —this mingled sweetness grew corrupt; I began to be more aware of my discomforts than of my peace. Finally, I came to suffer in a very positive way from what I might call the excessive bear- ing on me of my thoughts. They processioned too close to me, thrust their faces too near into mine. I was no longer sheltered from them by that veil which the course of every-day distractions usually sets up between our thoughts and ourselves. They came too fast, one atop the other. They jostled each other. None of them stayed long enough. Time, it seemed to me, had a fever. The even bustle of the hotel forced my mind back into a more regular stride. And it helped our talks. In my room or in hers, io LUCIENNE Marie Lemiez and I had come to find that we were cheating silence. Even the words we spoke held within them something invincibly lone: what I mean is that they were scarcely more than a thinking aloud before a casual witness. But in the hotel dining- room, this was no longer so. Our conversation was repatriated as if in its natural world: it was revived by the closeness of other conversations: speedily it recovered its own stride. Our words went their way, quite of themselves: almost our words seemed to dispense with us. And even now, I had more than enough time left for my meditations. I was no longer sufficiently in want to indulge in the luxury of being foolish. I had to think of the problem of buying a waist, a pair of shoes. I had to prepare reasonably for it. Or else, the fear came suddenly that I might lose a pupil. A mother's somewhat insistent inquiry about her daughter's prog- ress was enough to make me worry. Shall I confess that I came to know envy, or at least a bitterness very like it? At the time of my greatest need, I had looked on the things of this world with a true detachment: almost, I had ceased to see them. But now that I was in control of a budget of one hundred and forty- five francs per month, I learned once more that there are desir- able things and that there are people who possess them. I no longer could pass a bright shop-window without a glance. Like a weakling I stopped in front of milliners and modistes'. I could not help seeing that other women went in, I could not help follow- ing them with my mind's eye as they touched these perfumed fineries which I was too feeble not to love. Nor could I keep from saying to myself that their sole superior right to these splendours was that they loved them more basely. Evenings above all, I was no longer strong against the bale- ful sweetness which a well-lit shop spreads forth upon the street. I stood within a foot of the great windows, and I am sure that my eyes were the large eyes of a child. Luxurious objects ordered beneath the lights are a spectacle to entice and to amaze us ... a spectacle full of judgements upon life. How can one resist this power that is so close to the power of churches? Yet here, the radiance golden though it be, is marred by a tinge of malice. The luminous coruscations touch the heart indeed, but leave there a trace of poison. Here were four new weekly lessons, and at a rate higher than JULES ROMAINS n any I had ever received. Bringing me this, Marie Lemiez brought me no fortune, but my poverty was at an end. No more need of sordid calculations. I could again welcome thoughts and desires, nearer to my nature. In my casual walk I had been drawn to the neighbourhood of the most important shops . . . shops that mirrored not too dimly the magnificence of Paris. The town was small, but the nearby watering place gave it a cer- tain glamour. Some of these stores were really not bad: I did not avoid them. I examined their displays with a new ease. I was going to have the wherewithal to buy a strip of goods, a ribbon for freshening up my hat, whenever I chose: and this thought saved me from coveting the more splendid fineries that were still beyond my reach. These I watched now without re- lating them to myself, quite as I had often looked at the orna- ments under glass cases at a museum. And so I learned this truth about myself: that I am not insatiate, or at least, that the sort of thing with power to torment me endlessly is not to be found in shop windows. . . . II At five twenty I was at the railroad station. I observed then that I had neglected to ask Marie Lemiez for directions for getting to the Barbelenet house. All I knew was that it was somewhere in the vicinity of the depot, with which M Barbelenet was officially connected. (He was superintendent or assistant superintendent of the shops which, I had heard, were of great extent and employed a numerous force.) But the railroad buildings scattered far and wide. They made up a city almost as large as the other. I had never had occasion to go through them. What I best knew of it all was the platform of the train from Paris: I had been there just once. Night was falling. Even if some good soul had turned up to direct me, I should have had small chance in that scatter of buildings. At best, I was sure of losing considerable time. I was going to get there out of breath, out of countenance . . . and late. I entered the station and espied the news-stand. It was kept by a young soft woman who seemed fated to bore herself all her life through, and not to mind in the least. I asked her if she 12 LUCIENNE knew M Barbelenet and the way to his residence. At once I re- pented of my question. Before she opened her mouth to answer me, she shook her head with so doltish a gesture, she glanced so stupidly at her pile of papers, that I was certain she was going with the utmost goodwill to say something absurd. "M Barbelenet? . . . Sure. Boss at the shops, ye say? Why, sure. You go out by the station, see? And you turn fo your right, see? And then, the second road you find, you turn to your right, again. That's it." It was clear she was making up what seemed to her the most likely place for the house of this M Barbelenet whose name she had never heard before. My impulse was to pay no attention to what she said. But I could not respond like that to the kind- ness of this woman. I felt that she was stubborn. I felt, if I did not go through the motions of following her advice, that she would recall me, repeat her directions with more gratuitous de- tail, if need be even leave her booth and accompany me in person. So I left the station. It was five twenty-five. I was losing time in a ridiculous fashion, perhaps, even, I was seriously hurting my cause. People who do not know us judge us by the most trivial appearances. They would jump to the conclusion that I was not prompt: who knows? they might politely show me the door. I hoped to find some workman on the platform. Not a one. I made my decision. Resolutely, I went back to the station and crossed the waiting-room straight in the direction of a little door which opened on the tracks: all the time trembling lest a voice from the news-stand stop me. I ran into a trainman who stood, lantern in hand, behind the little door. I asked my question. "Oh, it's you, perhaps, the young lady they're expectin' to-night at Monsieur and Madame Barbelenet's?" "It's me." "I was waitin' to take you. You'd never have found it alone." I did not observe to him that only by the luckiest chance had I found him. I was at ease, and pleasantly indulgent. The care of the Barbelenets in sending me this trainman struck me as a good omen. "I'll be walkin' right in front of you, Miss. You'll be takin' no chances if you stick close by me. Stop short every time I tell you. Numbers 117 and 83 are signalled. Number 117 has JULES ROMAINS 13 three lights, a big one and two little ones, triangular-like. Num- ber 83 has only two, a big one and a small one. She's only a local. But Number 117 shoots in fast. You've got to look out. They're still switching freight trains on tracks 11, 12, 13. Less dangerous, sure. But they'd be enough to crush us all the same." While he spoke thus, he went along the platform. A blue pla- card, touched by a sombre light, held aloft the word PARIS. I felt there was a wind, not because of any breath pushing me along, stirring my hair, but because of a subtle disquiet of my entire body. Dimly I saw the people standing here and there with their baggage at their feet. I knew naught of the reasons for their going, nor of the ends of their journeys. I had not shared these farewells they were sharing. But their waiting be- came part of me, the poignance and the spirit of their waiting. "The train comes," I thought with them. "I await its headlight out there in the black, and this night is not brooding and peace- ful like most nights: with the sense of the future it has taken on a solemn and a tremulous being. At the instant that the stranger flame pierces into the station, there will swarm upon the soul a maze of questions. All the racket of the train will be needed to spare the soul from answering. Pathos of change of place! What is there better in the world than an old luminous kitchen with a hearth?" We passed by the farthest traveller. The glass roof no longer held us. The lights also stopped behind: suddenly I found that it had been a vivid comforting presence. The wind was different: the equal currents in which the air had swept the station here were broken up into irregular puffs. The platform stopped. What I had always known as a rail- road station went no further. I was leaving behind an almost hospitable place, a sort of haven where the elemental forces were humanized, and permitted us to move within and about them without too great danger. This region stretching out before me was not made for my walking: a few electric globes, widely dis- tant one from another, floated in the black sky as far as I could see. They did not, at least to my eyes, cast any practicable light. But I was drawn by these little brilliant balls: with a strange fascination I beheld the fragile scintillations in which each was wrapped. It would have been easier for me to pick my way in a night more wholly dark. 14 LUCIENNE "We'll walk on the gravel," said the trainman to me. "There are fifteen tracks to cross. There'd be less if we went up a little higher: but I'd as lief pass here. We're farther from the curve, we can see the express come, better. You'll not stumble on the rails. They're easy to see. Look out, though, for the signal wires, and don't catch your foot in a switch." With these instructions he was satisfied: they freed him of all concern, for he started ahead at once at a usual good gait. His heavy hobnailed boots held well in the gravel. His lantern swung almost at ground level, but he was not using it at all to light our way. Mechanically he strode forward over rail and wire, hold- ing his direction without a turn of the head. I had to be quick and clever to keep up with him. My ankles twisted in the pebbles. Rails and wires flashed for an instant be- fore me, one after the other like so many traps. Anguish grew in my thought of the approaching express. There loomed close a sort of stonework semaphore lost in the midst of the tracks, which seemed to swerve just enough to give it room. I wanted to stop there a moment, in the hope that the express would pass. The narrow platform scarcely heartened me, but the mass of the semaphore itself, so much greater was it than my body, seemed to hold out an obvious protection. I felt almost warmly attached to those rough stones. Even if I were suddenly abandoned in this mechanical desert, and if trains began to roar upon me from all sides, I would be able to hold myself together, here. The word refuge came in a murmur to my lips, and with a richness of meaning that stirred me deeply. My escort, whom I had asked to wait, seemed surprised, but waited. I was ashamed of my fear: I did not dare to ask him if the track of the express was one of those which we still had to brave. I searched the horizon for the triangular light. . . . Like golden manes the tracks sped out before us and crowded close in clusters and rose, as one, toward a point in the inky sky where the stars began. These gilded lines were strained so perfectly, they moved one upon the other in so fair a pace, that eyes were not enough to grasp their harmony. One sought another sense to understand. One felt that with a purer power of attention one might hear, rising from these nocturnal chords, a music. The train did not come. We went on walking. Once more JULES ROMAINS 15 I had to follow the lantern with my eyes and measure with my feet the luminous gashes where rail and wire cut across our path. Suddenly, my guide halts, touches my arm: "Stand still. Here's Number 117." Indeed, from the far end of the line I see a heavy fire coming up at a good rate, and two small lights which only their moving made visible. But the big flame commands and threatens the entire yard. How can one guess which track it is going to choose, or even if it will choose only one? As it comes up it swells, and the menace of its approach sweeps the whole width of the fifteen tracks. "Where will it pass?" "Behind us, pretty sure, on track 7. But since she's late, I'd not be surprised if she takes 10. At any rate, we're between 8 and 9." The fire grew. Already the earth trembled. A roaring rounded the fire like a second halo. The fire came straight on us. I felt the need, not of fleeing it, but of flinging myself upon it. "Here, lean your hand here. Then you'll not be afraid." He pointed to the trellised shaft of a lamp-post which stood up between the tracks. I seized an iron lathe and pressed full against the shaft. A sense of safety mingled with dizzy fear. I kept thinking of my fingers that clasped the iron bit: of the power of my fingers and of my still young flesh; of their obedience and of the resist- ance of the metal and of the steadfast durable aspect of the lamp- post in the flood of tracks: and at the same time I drank in with a delirious hunger the terror which the marching flame plunged to the quick of my flesh. The express hurled by so close that the air it cast struck me like a solid body. My skirts flapped. I felt my cheeks cave in. Of course no hair of my head—as the saying is—was touched. But I had the sense of an invisible devastation, of a violation which drew no blood and from which one did not die, and yet I suffered from it in an inscrutable way as if the space so near the body were not quite separate nor strange from it. Even to-day I cannot think indifferently of my first crossing of those fifteen tracks behind the swinging lantern of the train- man, nor of the house among the rails whither he led me. i6 LUCIENNE III The maid lifted a portiere, opened a door, and showed me in. As I entered, discomfort rose at once within me. Surely I was not dazzled as one often is upon the threshold of a drawing-room. There was nothing here to blind me with its brilliance. A clumsy lamp burned isolate in the gloom. The familiar usualness of fur- niture and ornament blurred only slightly the vision that I had of a train at night or of a tunnel. But I was not frightened; nor was it the room's shadow, its vaguely persistent odour that up- set me. When I seek back for the meaning of that first moment, I come upon the idea of some contact, and I am minded of the sort of contacts which disconcert because they are at once intimate and unexpected. You are dreaming for instance, and a hand is placed upon your neck. Or you step eagerly into the water of a stream and the water is so strangely cold, it presses so close upon your flesh, that you almost stifle with the sheer invasion. . . . But in that room what could there be so sudden, so startlingly direct upon me? When for the first time I am with a group of people, I expose little more than a surface of myself. I watch, I converse, most of all I listen, well at ease. I do not mean that I am really absent: quite the contrary, I strive hard to be in tune with my new surroundings: neither to shock these people nor deceive them. And quite unassumingly I try to see them clear. Yet from all this activity my true being is still removed, and I wonder if the same is not true of others. I go through the motions of giving myself; and yet, without insincerity, my spirit is still slumbering afar as if its truest need was to go on slumbering as long as ever it could. And there are persons whom I have known, with whom I have lived for years, in just this fashion. As I stepped into the Barbelenet house, quite instinctively I was getting ready for this sort of thing. What took place was dif- ferent altogether: more, what took place developed in precisely the reverse order. . . . Next day, I could speak to Marie Lemiez with any true show of interest only of my crossing of the fifteen tracks, only of the adventure with the train. Where had my eyes been while I was in the house? Marie Lemiez often be- wailed her small gift for observing places and people, but it Courtesy of the Albertina, Vienna JULES ROMAINS. BY HENRI LE FAUCONNIER ** JULES ROMAINS 17 was clear she knew many a detail of the Barbelenet house which had escaped me. "Did you notice the extraordinary copper jardiniere at the right of the window, the one on a trivet? What a sight! And the portrait of the uncle of Mme Barbelenet, in judicial robes? Why, over the piano! Certainly you must have had a look at the piano. 'Too bad: he has a head, I tell you. And the wart of the good lady. You say nothing about the wart of Mme Barbelenet? Why all the majesty of Mme Barbelenet resides within that wart. The sidewhiskers of the uncle are in- herent, are concentrated in that wart which has a judicial, a presi- dential, appearance. Really, my dear, I thought you more alive to the curiosities of nature." It was true: I had noticed no jardiniere, no bewhiskered portrait, no judicial wart. Later, I came to be alive enough to their sig- nificance, but through no virtue of mine, since Marie had put them in my head. On the other hand, had I that moment been carried far from the Barbelenet parlour to some meditative place, a cell for instance, and had I explored my own impressions for some knowledge of these people whom I had scarcely glimpsed, I should have been amazed at the exactness of my answers. I was aware only of a strange inner confusion as I came for- ward. It seemed that five persons were there. Two girls got up and moved in my direction, one from each side of the room. A man of mature years arose as well. A lady, not far from the clumsy lamp, remained in her seat. I looked for the fifth person, I saw none. I was troubled. Then I decided that I must have counted wrong, or that the fifth person was myself. The two girls made some perfunctory remarks. I answered mechanically and turned toward the girl at my right. She was not the one who had spoken first, or with the most assurance. At most, I think, she had murmured a few words. The other one was more self-possessed and older. Her look was at once welcoming and searching. It would have meant a certain effort, for which I had no will, to turn toward her just then: toward the younger girl a sort of spiritual incline easily drew my eyes. Spontaneous understanding, if you will. And yet there was less pleasure in it than embarrassment. I was relieved when M Barbelenet came up and began to speak. He had the voice 18 LUCIENNE and features of a peasant. Nothing in him revealed command. I could not place him in his immense workshops, surrounded by men who waited on his moods, studied the pucker of his forehead. It was easier to see him, hat in hand, bringing his rent to the landlord; or explaining to the country doctor who had drawn up his gig at the roadside how one of the family had fallen ill. "Well, mademoiselle" said he, "it didn't scare you too much crossing all that confusion of tracks? I guess my man took good care of you, eh? It's not quite as good here, perhaps, as a house on the sea-shore or on the Champs-Elysees. But you get used to it. You'll see. The very next time, you'll find it lots easier, already." I liked him for assuming that "next time," as if the whole thing were arranged. I dared at last to have a look at Mme Barbelenet, who had not stirred from her arm-chair. "Please be so good as to be seated." She drawled the word please languorously, and with the last word lifted her chin a little, while her right hand floated faintly above the arm of her chair. I sat. All of them sat. There was a silence. The light of the clumsy lamp englobed us. We became a compacted thing. There was between us all a lack of separateness hard to bear. Almost it seemed that there was between these persons and my- self not air, but a body solid and transparent. I faced toward Mme Barbelenet. I watched her as attentively as I could. I held my eyes on her. But I was not aware—let me say rather I was not sensitive to any material detail of her person. What then did I see? I can't remember. There arose in my mind an image of Mme Barbelenet that was wholly spiritual. And it was there, without effort on my part. I am not sure that I can lay hold of that vision any more, to-day. At best I can recall the emotion with which it filled me: a sort of respectful aversion, a sort of trusting fear. The three others got from me little more than a casual glance. There was no question in them, and my attention was not for them. Yet, within my head, spontaneous and still, went on a procession of little thoughts in no way crowding the regnant image of the mother: on they marched, and it was a wonder I did not grow amazed at them since I was so little aware of whence JULES ROMAINS 19 they came. These processioning thoughts told me of the three other Barbelenets in a tone bizarrely confidential. Or did they really tell me only of myself? For their interior chatter dealt with one subject: the way in which each of these three Bar- belenets was discovering me and was accepting me. M Barbelenet sat at the left, a little toward the back.—He is studying me. He is wondering, now that he comes to think of it, how I managed to get to his house so easily, although, to be sure, it never before struck him as particularly hard to get to. He is puzzled where to place me in the hierarchy of human be- ings: near his daughters or near his wife. This makes him waver between two modes of submission: that of a father to his daugh- ters, and that of a husband to a dominant wife. But he is no analyst. Here I am, piano teacher, in the midst of his home: here from now on I shall come at regular times: here, in his house, I shall fill a certain place . . . and all of it has been long since prearranged by fate, and his one job is to get used to the new occurrence, not to stumble against it awkwardly: if possible to win from it some profit and some ease for himself. The younger girl, there at my right, takes pleasure in watch- ing me. I as a piano teacher am but a surface of her thought. What she sees really is a girl, older than herself, a girl with a room of her own, eating, walking, going to bed as she pleases, spending as suits her whims the money that she earns. Who knows? perhaps none too prosperous and a bit too free of family props: she must know certain deprivations, and yet how dear they should be since they throw her into the very arms of life. She rejoices in my being here. No worry in her about this con- ference. She'd like to whisper to me: "Don't be taken in by the grand airs of my mother. It's all decided." At my left, the elder girl sat in such a way that she seemed secret: if indeed the shadow was the cause of it at all. For the lamp glow bathed her almost as much as the others. I felt that the nature of her body was uniformly dark: I should have been glad to have her away. I felt no hostile thoughts in her toward me, and no disdain. I think she found me smartly enough dressed, good to look at, neither too plain nor too elegant a person. Why then did I feel: she has her doubts about my gifts? She thinks this exchange of nothings has lasted long enough. 20 LUCIENNE Her notion is, that I had better get to the piano and play some difficult exercise so they can tell what I'm worth, or some showy piece, and of course by heart. But the talk does not go that way. Too bad. She'll have to make her own gradual examination. And while she is at it, she must be respectful, make a show of submis- sion to my authority . . . mere chance of circumstance. Yes, it is irritating, particularly when the difference in our ages is so slight. But there's something else. My sense of her dark hidden- ness is still there. These thoughts about her have not illumined her. Scarcely at all. The common glow spreads to the left as well as to the right: but here at the left this sombre being, this hidden reef of self . . . and the lamp glow breaks on it. To be sure, there was nothing to frighten me in all this. What counted was to get up from my chair with the title of piano teacher in that house. I could take care of the rest. And things were not turning badly, that was clear. Mme Barbelenet controlled the conversation with measured discretion: but if she went to all this elaborate trouble, surely it could not be for the sake of dis- covering a plausible excuse for sending me away. Her look told me that she had already bestowed my title. But Mme Barbelenet was not the sort of woman who, just because a certain event is bound to come, feels herself freed of the duty of preparing for it. Our conference must be led through the proper channels to the proper conclusion: this was her duty, and as agreeable as it was necessary. I saw that there was to be no bargaining about terms: perhaps the vulgar bare question would be wholly avoided. Everything must come about through scarcely uttered words, through delicate allusions. I could count on Mme Barbelenet to see that the affair be settled decorously, with a gentle breathing space between every other word. Already I rejoiced at the good stride of events, I realized that none of the Barbelenets was hostile to me, each had found a way to accept me or at least to tolerate me. Now suddenly I grew aware that I had no business there, with any single one of them alone, but really with all of them together! Here was a silly notion surely, and yet it held me more and more. What was I after? the sad pleasure of self-torture, of marring my good luck with silly subtleties? Again and again I argued that there was every reason for ease with a particular one among them; at once JULES ROMAINS 21 the other three rose in my mind like an insoluble and formidable mass. And when, to reassure myself, I took to examining them one by one, the sudden revelation came that they were not one by one: they were four! All this struck me as so stupid that I was minded of a friend I had had at school who could never read a name without at once rereading it backwards. Whence at last a subtle disarray, a sense of being falsely placed, which I could not overcome. As usual, I rushed to my own de- fence. I wanted to crowd out this dim confusion with some sharp consciousness of danger. For if I could localize the threat to my good ease, I could meet it and I could defeat it. . . . At very first sight, Mme Barbelenet was the heart of the group. There could be no doubt of that. She sat majestic in her arm- chair. And whoever, like me, came into the room, must inevitably sit in such a way as to face her. It was she, she always, whom my eyes saw, who began the conversation, who led it, who answered me. The lamp glow itself, holding us all so close, lay principally upon Mme Barbelenet, upon the broad expanses of her body. The others rounded the circle of our talk, shared in it, took from it what concerned them, and waited for results. And yet, despite myself, my thoughts deflected toward the elder daughter, much as a stream will flow into a new-made hollow. I was haunted by this darkling presence at my left. If I must search, there, it seemed, was the right place. The body of this girl caused a gap in the room's light: it was by this aperture that I glimpsed the birth of an essential thing. Of course, what counted least was the spoken words. Mme Barbelenet launched her courteous questions. Some were meant merely to mellow the communion between us. Others, quite cas- ually, served to verify what Marie Lemiez had already told her. My strange thoughts did not detach me from the group: rather they gave to my answers a certain calm which I might well have lacked in so serious a conference. I gained by this. It was clear that I was not the sort of girl whose life one saves by giving her work. My attention dwelt just enough with their demands upon me to keep me from absent-minded answers: whence an air of prepossession which had its effect on Mme Barbelenet and con- firmed her judgement that I was a lady of some station. The matter of terms was disposed of so discreetly that I am 22 LUCIENNE certain no one except Mme Barbelenet and myself was aware even that it had come up. A gracious phrase, and we both knew that the terms of Marie Lemiez were agreed on. And now that the day for the first lesson was fixed, I got up. Mme Barbelenet rose slowly: she explained that the state of her health forced her to husband her energies so that she could not take me to the door. I thought of her health. In the well-limned portrait of the lady which our talk had gradually drawn, there was no room for illness. I could not resist showing my surprise, but I turned it gracefully so that she took my words for a mere compliment on her good appearance. M Barbelenet announced that he was going to conduct me back across the tracks. As we passed through the door and the night air met me, I asked myself a question: are you satisfied? It was as if I could choose my answer. Joy and melancholy seemed to wait on my decision, side by side. Was this perhaps the reaction from ex- cited hours of suspense? And yet the melancholy that seemed to close was not kin to fatigue. I know fatigue by its flavour of used-up life, by the indifference which comes with it toward any possible future. "Let's have done" is the sigh of fatigue. This melancholy stood there watchful and lucid like a watcher of signs on the horizon. As to the joy that stood there also, I did not quite dare see it straight, so fearful was I that it prove al- together groundless. It, too, seemed to have no relation with the smiling events of the day. It was an absolutely separate thing from the excitement of the hours before. We reached the first rails, and a voice cried in me that it would be sweet never to go back, to leave that house for ever. Some- thing within me made appeal to my cowardice. If I hearkened to it even for an instant, I was less care-worn, less burdened, all young once more, as if a load of years had fallen from my shoulders. And then I faced my joy. I mean, I looked to see whether the idea of never going back, if I encouraged it at all, nourished my joy or broke it. Like a person spied on, my joy made a bold face at first. And then, alas! I felt it crumple up, and fade away. . . . No more of that, I decided. To be continued NUDE. BY EDWARD NAGLE THE CAT AND THE MOON A Play for Dancers BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS Scene: The scene is any bare place before a wall against which stands a patterned screen, or hangs a patterned curtain sug- gesting St Colman's Well. Three Musicians are sitting close to the wall, with zither, drum, and flute. Their faces are made up to resemble masks. First Musician {singing): The Cat went here and there And the moon spun round like a top, And the nearest kin of the moon, The creeping cat looked up. Black Minnaloushe stared at the moon, For wander and wail as he would The pure cold light in the sky Troubled his animal blood. (Two beggars enter—a blind man with a lame man on his back. They wear grotesque masks. The Blind Beggar is counting the paces.) Blind Beggar: One thousand and six, one thousand and seven, one thousand and nine. Look well now for we should be in sight of the holy well of St Colman. The beggar at the cross- road said it was one thousand paces from where he stood and a few paces over. Look well now, can you see the big ash tree that's above it? Lame Beggar (getting down): No, not yet. Blind Beggar: Then we must have taken a wrong turn; flighty you always were, and maybe before the day is over, you will have me drowned in Kiltartan River or maybe in the sea itself. Lame Beggar: I have brought you the right way, but you are a lazy man, Blind Man, and you make very short strides. 24 THE CAT AND THE MOON Blind Beggar: It's great daring you have, and how could I make a long stride and you on my back from the peep o' day? Lame Beggar: And maybe the beggar of the cross-roads was only making it up when he said a thousand paces and a few paces more. You and I, being beggars, know the way of beggars, and maybe he never paced it at all, being a lazy man. Blind Beggar: Get up.—It's too much talk you have. Lame Beggar (getting up): But as I was saying, he being a lazy man—oh, oh, oh, stop pinching the calf of my leg and I'll not say another word till I'm spoken to. (They go round the stage once, moving to drum taps, and as they move the following song is sung): Minnaloushe runs in the grass Lifting his delicate feet. Do you dance, Minnaloushe, do you dance? When two close kindred meet What better than call a dance, Maybe the moon may learn, Tired of that courtly fashion, And new dance turn. Blind Beggar: Do you see the big ash tree? Lame Beggar: I do then, and the wall under it, and the flat stone, and the things upon the stone; and here is a good dry place to kneel in. Blind Beggar: You may get down so. (Lame Beggar gets down.) I begin to have it in my mind that I am a great fool, and it was you who egged me on with your flighty talk. Lame Beggar: How should you be a great fool to ask the saint to give you back your two eyes? Blind Beggar: There is many gives money to a blind man that would give nothing but a curse to a whole man, and if it was not for one thing, but no matter any way. Lame Beggar: If I speak out all that's in my mind you won't take a blow at me at all? Blind Beggar: I will not this time. Lame Beggar: Then I'll tell you why you are not a great fool. When you go out to pick up a chicken, or maybe a stray goose on the road, or a cabbage from a neighbour's garden, I have to go WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS 1$ riding on your back; and if I want a goose, or a chicken, or a cabbage, I must have your two legs under me. Blind Beggar: That's true now; and if we were whole men and went different ways, there'd be as much again between us. Lame Beggar: And your own goods keep going from you because you are blind. Blind Beggar: Rogues and thieves ye all are, but there are some I may have my eyes on yet. Lame Beggar: Because there's no one to see a man slipping in at the door, or throwing a leg over the wall of a yard, you are a bitter temptation to many a poor man, and I say it's not right. it's not right at all. There are poor men that because you are blind will be delayed in Purgatory. Blind Beggar: Though you are a rogue, Lame Man, maybe you are in the right. Lame Beggar: And maybe we'll see the blessed saint this day, for there's an odd one sees him, and maybe that will be a grander thing than having my two legs, though legs are a grand thing. Blind Beggar: You're getting flighty again, Lame Man, what could be better for you than to have your two legs? Lame Beggar: Do you think now the saint will put an ear on him at all, and we without an Ave or a Paternoster to put before the prayer or after the prayer? Blind Beggar: Wise though you are and flighty though you are, and you throwing eyes to the right of you and eyes to the left of you, there's many a thing you don't know about the heart of man. Lame Beggar: But it stands to reason that he'd be put out and he maybe with a great liking for the Latin. Blind Beggar: I have it in mind that the saint will be better pleased at us not knowing a prayer at all, and that we had best say what we want in plain language. What pleasure can he have in all that holy company kneeling at his well on holidays and Sundays, and they as innocent maybe as himself? Lame Beggar: That's a strange thing to say, and do you say it as I or another might say it, or as a blind man? Blind Beggar: I say it as a blind man, I say it because since I went blind in the tenth year of my age, I have been hearing and remembering the knowledges of the world. 26 THE CAT AND THE MOON Lame Beggar: And you that are a blind man say that a saint, and he living in a pure well of water, would soonest be talking with a sinful man. Blind Beggar: You have no sense in you, no real sense at all. Did you ever know a holy man but had a wicked man for his comrade and his heart's darling? There is not a more holy man in the barony than the man who has the big house at Laban, and he goes knocking about the roads day and night with that old lecher from the county of Mayo, and he a woman-hater from the day of his birth. And well you know and all the neighbours know what they talk of by daylight and candlelight. The old lecher does be telling over all the sins he committed, or maybe never committed at all, and the man of Laban does be trying to head him off and quiet him down that he may quit telling them. Lame Beggar: Maybe it is converting him he is. Blind Beggar: If you were a blind man you wouldn't say a foolish thing the like of that. He wouldn't have him different, no, not if he was to get all Ireland. If he was different, what would they find to talk about, will you answer me that now? Lame Beggar: We have great wisdom between us, that's certain. Blind Beggar: Now the church says that it is a good thought, and a sweet thought, and a comfortable thought, that every man may have a saint to look after him, and I, being blind, give it out to all the world that the bigger the sinner the better pleased is the saint. I am sure and certain that St Colman would not have us two different from what we are. Lame Beggar: I'll not give in to that, for as I was saying, he has a great liking maybe for the Latin. Blind Beggar: Is it contradicting me you are? Are you in reach' of my arm? (swinging stick) Lame Beggar: I'm not, Blind Man, you couldn't touch me at all; but as I was saying— First Musician (speaking): Will you be cured or will you be blessed? Lame Beggar: Lord save us, that is the saint's voice and we not on our knees. (They kneel.) Blind Beggar: Is he standing before us, Lame Man? Lame Beggar: I cannot see him at all. It is in the ash tree he is, or up in the air. WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS 27 First Musician: Will you be cured or will you be blessed? Lame Beggar: There he is again. Blind Beggar: I'll be cured of my blindness. First Musician: I am a saint and lonely. Will you become blessed and stay blind and we will be together always? Blind Beggar: No, no, your Reverence, if I have to choose, I'll have the sight of my two eyes, for those that have their sight are always stealing my things and telling me lies, and some maybe that are near me, so don't take it bad of me, Holy Man, that I ask the sight of my two eyes. Lame Beggar: No one robs him, and no one tells him lies; it's all in his head it is. He's had his tongue on me all day because he thinks I stole a sheep of his. Blind Beggar: It was the feel of his sheepskin coat put it into my head, but my sheep was black, they say, and he tells me, Holy Man, that his sheepskin is of the most lovely white wool so that it is a joy to be looking at it. First Musician: Lame Man, will you be cured or will you be blessed? Lame Beggar: What would it be like to be blessed? First Musician: You would be of the kin of the blessed saints and of the martyrs. Lame Beggar: Is it true now that they have a book and that they write the names of the blessed in that book? First Musician: Many a time have I seen that book, and your name would be in it. Lame Beggar: It would be a grand thing to have my two legs under me, but I have it in my mind that it would be a grander thing to have my name in that book. First Musician: It would be a grander thing. Lame Beggar: I will stay lame, Holy Man, and I will be blessed. First Musician: In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit I give this blind man sight and I make this lame man blessed. Blind Beggar: I see it all now, the blue sky, and the big ash tree, and the well, and the flat stone—all as I have heard the peo- ple say—and the things the praying people put on the stone, the beads and the candles and the leaves torn out of prayer books and the hairpins and the buttons. It is a great sight and a blessed 28 THE CAT AND THE MOON sight, but I don't see yourself, Holy Man—Is it up in the big tree you are? Lame Beggar: Why there he is in front of you and he laughing out of his wrinkled face. Blind Beggar: Where, where? Lame Beggar: Why there, between you and the ash tree. Blind Beggar: There's nobody there—you're at your lies again. Lame Beggar: I am blessed, and that is why I can see the holy saint. Blind Beggar: But if I don't see that saint, there's something else I can see. Lame Beggar: The blue sky and the green leaves are a great sight, and a strange sight to one that has been long blind. Blind Beggar: There is a stranger sight than that, and that is the skin of my own black sheep on your back. Lame Beggar: Haven't I been telling you from the peep o' day that my sheepskin is that white it would dazzle you? Blind Beggar: Are you so swept with the words that you've never thought that when I had my own two eyes, I'd see what colour was on it? Lame Beggar (very dejected): I never thought of that. Blind Beggar: Are you that flighty? Lame Beggar: I am that flighty, (cheering up) But am I not blessed, and it's a sin to speak against the blessed. Blind Beggar: Well, I'll speak against the blessed, and I tell you something more, that I'll do. All the while you were telling me how, if I had my two eyes, I could pick up a chicken here and a goose there, while my neighbours were in bed, do you know what I was thinking? Lame Beggar: Some wicked blind man's thought. Blind Beggar: It was, and it's not gone from me yet. I was saying to myself: I have a long arm and a strong arm and a very weighty arm, and when I get my own two eyes I know where to hit. Lame Beggar: Don't lay a hand on me. Forty years we've been knocking about the roads together, and I wouldn't have you bring your soul into mortal peril. Blind Beggar: I have been saying to myself: I know where to hit and how to hit and who to hit. WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS 29 Lame Beggar: Do you not know that I am blessed? Would you be as bad as Caesar and as Herod and Nero and the other wicked emperors of Antiquity? Blind Beggar: Where'll I hit him, for the love of God, where'll I hit him? (Blind Beggar beats Lame Beggar. The beating takes the form of a dance, and is accompanied on flute and drum. The Blind Beggar goes out.) Lame Beggar: There is a soul lost, Holy Man. First Musician: Maybe so. Lame Beggar: I'd better be going, Holy Man, for he'll rouse the whole country against me. First Musician: He'll do that. Lame Beggar: And I have it in my mind not to even myself again with the martyrs, and the holy confessors, till I am more used to being blessed. First Musician: Bend down your back. Lame Beggar: What for, Holy Man? First Musician: That I may get up on it. Lame Beggar: But my lame legs would never bear the weight of you. First Musician: I'm up now. Lame Beggar: I don't feel you at all. First Musician: I don't weigh more than a grasshopper. Lame Beggar: You do not. First Musician: Are you happy? Lame Beggar: I would be if I was right sure I was blessed. First Musician: Haven't you got me for a friend? Lame Beggar: I have so. First Musician: Then you're blessed. Lame Beggar: Will you see that they put my name in the book? First Musician: I will then. Lame Beggar: Let us be going, Holy Man. (They go out to drum and flute as before.) First Musician (singing): Minnaloushe creeps through the grass From moonlight place to place, The sacred moon overhead Has taken a new phase. 30 THE CAT AND THE MOON Does Minnaloushe know that his pupils Will pass from change to change, And that from round to crescent From crescent to round they range? Minnaloushe creeps through the grass Alone, important and wise, And lifts to the changing moon His changing eyes. Courtesy of the Bourgeois Gallerics FULL FACE. BY ALFEO FAGGI Courtesy of the Bourgeois Galleries BY ALFEO FAGGI PROFILE. REMINISCENCES OF LEONID ANDREYEV BY MAXIM GORKI Translated From the Russian by S. S. Koteliansky and Katherine Mansfield II "A TTACHMENT to things," Andreyev would say, "is the ii fetishism of savages, idolatry. Don't make an idol for your- self; if you do you are rotten, that is the truth! Make a book to- day, and to-morrow make a machine. Yesterday you made a boot, and you have already forgotten about it. We must learn to forget." And I said: "It is necessary to remember that each thing is the embodiment of the human spirit, and often the inner value of a thing is more significant than man." "That is worship of dead matter," he exclaimed. "In it is embodied immortal thought." "What is thought? Its impotence makes it double-faced and disgusting." We argued more and more often, more and more intensely. The sharpest point of difference was our attitude to thought. To me, thought is the source of all that exists; out of thought arose everything that is seen and felt by man; even in the con- sciousness of its impotence to solve the "accursed questions," thought is majestic and noble. I feel that I live in the atmosphere of thought, and, seeing the great and grand things that have been created by it, I believe that its impotence is temporary. Perhaps I am romancing and exaggerate the creative power of thought; but this is so natural in Russia, in a country where there is no spiritual synthesis, in a country paganly sensual, monstrously cruel. Leonid regarded thought as a "wicked trick played on man by the devil"; it seemed to him false and hostile. Luring man to the abysses of inexplicable mysteries it deceives him, it leaves him in painful and impotent loneliness in front of all that is mysterious, and itself vanishes. 32 REMINISCENCES OF LEONID ANDREYEV Equally irreconcilably did we differ in our views on man, the source of thought, its furnace. To me man is always the con- queror, even when he is mortally wounded and dying. Splendid is his longing to know himself and to know nature; and although his life is a torment, he is ever widening its bounds, creating with his thought wise science, marvellous art. I felt that I did sincerely and actively love man—the man who is at present alive and working side by side with me, and the man, also, the sen- sible, the good, the strong man who will follow after in the future. To Andreyev, man appeared poor in spirit, a creature interwoven of irreconcilable contradictions of instinct and intel- lect, for ever deprived of the possibility of attaining inner har- mony. All his works are "vanity of vanities," decay, and self- deception. And above all he is the slave of death, and all his life long he walks dragging its chain. It is very difficult to speak of a man whom you know and know profoundly. That sounds like a paradox; but it is true. When the mysterious thrill that emanates from the flame of another's ego is felt by you, agitates you, you fear to touch with your oblique heavy words the invisible rays of the soul that is dear to you; you fear lest you express things wrongly. You don't want to mutilate what you feel and what is almost indefinable in words; you dare not enclose in your constrained speech that which is the essence of another, even though it be universally valid, of human value. It is much easier and simpler to speak of what you feel less vividly. In such cases you can add a great deal, indeed anything you like, for yourself. I think that I comprehended Leonid Andreyev clearly: to be more exact, I saw that he was treading a path overhanging a precipice, a precipice that leads to the slough of madness, a preci- pice at the mere contemplation of which the light of the mind is blown out. Great was the force of his imagination; but notwithstanding the continuous and strained attention which he gave to the humiliating mystery of death, he could imagine nothing beyond it, nothing majestic or comforting—he was after all too much of a realist to invent comfort for himself, even though he wished it. This preference of his for treading the path over the void was what above all kept us apart. I had passed through Leonid's MAXIM GORKI 33 mood long before—and through natural human pride, it became organically revolting and humiliating to me to reflect on death. The time had come when I said to myself: while that which feels and thinks in me is alive, death dare not touch that power. I had told Leonid of how I had once to endure the hardship of "the prisoner's dream of life beyond the bounds of his prison," of "stony darkness," of "immobility for ever poised"; he jumped up from the divan, and pacing the room, gesticulating with the maimed palm of his hand, he said hurriedly, indignantly, gasping for breath: "It is cowardice, my dear fellow, to shut the book without read- ing it to the end! In the book indeed is your indictment, in it you are denied, don't you see? You are denied along with everything there is in you, your humanism, socialism, aesthetics, love—is not all this nonsense, according to the book? It is ridiculous and pitiable: you have been sentenced to death—for what? And you, pretending that you are not aware of the fact, play about with little flowers, deceiving yourself and others—silly little flowers!" I pointed out to him the futility of protesting against an earth- quake; I argued that protests cannot in the least affect the tremors of the earth's crust; but all this merely angered him. In Petersburg in the autumn we talked in an empty, depressing room on the fifth floor. The city was enveloped in a thick mist; in its grey mass the ghostly, rainbow globes of the street lamps hung motionless, like huge bubbles. Through the thin spare cotton- wool of the mist, absurd sounds rose up from the well of the street. Wearisome above all else were the hooves of the horses drumming on the wooden blocks of the road. Leonid went and stood by the window, with his back to me. I realized keenly that at that moment he hated me as a man who walks the earth more easily and more freely than he, because he has thrown from his shoulders a humiliating and useless burden. Even before this I had felt in him sharp spurts of anger against me, but I can't say that this offended me, although it did alarm me; I understood—in my own way certainly—the source of his anger, and how life was hard on this rarely gifted man, dear to me and at that time my intimate friend. There, below, the fire-brigade dashed along noisily. Leonid came up to me, threw himself on the divan, and suggested: "Shall we drive to see the fire?" 34 REMINISCENCES OF LEONID ANDREYEV "In Petersburg a fire is not interesting." He agreed: "True, but in the provinces, in Oriol say, when streets of wooden buildings are burning and the people dash about like moths—it is nice! And pigeons over the cloud of smoke—have you ever seen that?" Hugging my shoulders, he said smiling: "You see everything—the devil take you! 'Stony emptiness'— that is very good. Stony darkness and emptiness! You do under- stand the mood of the captive." And butting my side with his head: "At times I hate you for this as I do a beloved woman who is cleverer than myself." I said I felt this and that only a minute before he had hated me. "Yes," he agreed, nestling his head on my knees. "Do you know why? I wish you were aching with my pain, then we should be nearer to one another; you really do know how lonely I am!" Yes, he was very lonely, but at times it appeared to me that he jealously guarded his loneliness, it was dear to him as the source of his fantastic inspirations and the fertile soil of his originality. "You lie when you say that scientific thought satisfies you," he said sternly, looking at the ceiling with a dark glance from his scared eyes. "Science, my dear fellow, is only mysticism dealing with facts: nobody knows anything—that is the truth. And the problem—how I think and why I think—is the source of man's greatest torment. This is the most terrible truth! Come let us go off somewhere, please." Whenever he touched on the problem of the mechanism of thinking, he became most agitated. And—frightened. We put on our coats, descended into the mist, and for a couple of hours swam in it on the Nevsky like eels at the bottom of a slimy river. Then we sat in a cafe, and three girls pressed them- selves on us, one of them a graceful Esthonian who called herself Elfrida. Her face was stony; she looked at Andreyev out of large, grey, lustreless eyes, with eerie gravity, while she drank a greenish venomous liqueur out of a coffee cup. From it there came a smell of burnt leather. Leonid drank cognac, rapidly got tipsy, became riotously witty, MAXIM GORKI 35 made the girls laugh by his surprisingly amusing and ingenious jokes, and at last decided to drive to the girls' flat—they were very insistent on this. To leave Leonid was impossible; whenever he began drinking, something uncanny awoke in him, a revenge- ful need of destruction, the fury of "the captured beast." I went with him; we bought wine, fruit, sweets; and somewhere in the Razyezhaya Street, in the corner of a dirty court-yard, blocked up with casks and timber, on the second floor of a wooden out-building, in two tiny rooms, the walls of which were wretchedly and pathetically adorned with picture post-cards, we began to drink. Before he got to the state in which he would lose consciousness, Leonid always became dangerously and wonderfully excited; his brain boiled up riotously, his imagination flared, his speech became almost intolerably brilliant. . . . In the street we took a cab and drove through the mist. It was still not late, about midnight. The Nevsky with its huge beads of lamps looked like a road going downhill, into a hollow; round the lamps flitted wet particles of dust, in the grey dampness black fishes swam standing on their tails, the hemispheres of the umbrellas seemed to draw people up—all was very ghostly, strange, and sad. In the open air Andreyev became completely drunk; he fell into a doze, swaying from side to side. Elfrida, who had accompanied us, whispered to me: "I'll get out. Shall I?" And jumping from my knees into the liquid mud of the street, she disappeared. At the end of the Kamennoostrovsky Prospect Leonid asked, opening his eyes with a start: "Are we driving? I want to go to a pub. You sent her away?" "She went away." "You are lying! You are cunning, so am I. I left the room in order to see what you would do. I stood behind the door and heard you urging the girl to make me go for a drive. You behaved innocently and nobly. On the whole, you are a bad man, you drink a lot, but don't get drunk, and because of this your children will be dipsomaniacs. My father also drank a great deal and did not get drunk, and I am an alcoholic." Then we sat and smoked in the Strelka, under the stupid 36 REMINISCENCES OF LEONID ANDREYEV bubble of the mist; and when the light of our cigarettes flared up, we could see our overcoats covered with dim glass beads of damp- ness turning to grey. Leonid spoke with boundless frankness, and it was not the frankness of a drunken man; his mind was scarcely affected until the moment when the poison of the alcohol completely stopped the working of his brain. "You have done and are doing a great deal for me, even to-day— I quite understand. If I had remained with the girls it would have ended badly for someone. Just so. But it is just on this account that I don't love you, precisely because of this! You prevent me from being myself. Leave me, I want to expand. Perhaps you are the hoop on the cask; you will go away, and the cask will fall to pieces; but let it fall to pieces, do you understand? Nothing should be restrained; let everything be destroyed. Perhaps the true meaning of life consists indeed in the destruction of something which we don't know, of everything that has been thought out and made by us." His dark eyes were fixed sternly on the grey mass around and above him; now and then he turned them towards the wet, leaf- strewn ground, and he stamped his feet as though testing the firm- ness of the earth. "I don't know what you think, but what you always say is not the expression of your faith, of your prayer. You say that all the forces of life spring from the violation of equilibrium. But you yourself are indeed seeking for an equilibrium, for some kind of harmony, and are urging me to seek for the same thing; whereas, on your own showing, equilibrium is death!" I said I was not urging him to anything, I had no wish to urge him, but his life was dear to me, his health was dear, his work. "It is only my work that pleases you, my external self, but not I myself, not that which I cannot incarnate in work. You stand in my way and in everybody's way. Into the mud with you!" He leant on my shoulder and, peering into my face, he went on: "You think I am drunk and don't realize that I am talking non- sense? I simply want to make you angry. You are a rare friend, I know, and you are stupidly disinterested, and I am a farceur asking for alms of attention, like a beggar who shows his sores." This he said not for the first time, and I recognized a grain of MAXIM GORKI 37 truth in it. That is, a cleverly contrived explanation of certain peculiarities of his character. "I, my dear fellow, am a decadent, a degenerate, a sick man. But Dostoevsky was also a sick man, as are all great men. There is a book, I don't remember by whom, about genius and insanity; it proves that genius is a psychical disease! That little book has spoiled me. If I had not read it I should be a simpler man. And now, I know that I am almost a genius, but I am not sure whether I am sufficiently insane. Do you understand? I pretend to myself to be insane in order to convince myself of my talent, do you see?" I burst out laughing. This seemed to me a poor invention, and therefore untrue. When I said so to him he also burst out laughing; and suddenly, with a flexible movement of his soul, with the agility of an acrobat, he leapt into the tone of a humorist: "Ah! Where is a pub, the temple of literary worship? Talented Russians must necessarily converse in pubs. That is the tradition, and without it the critics won't admit talent." We sat in a night-tavern for cabmen, in damp, smoky stuffiness. The "waiters" raced about the dirty room angrily and wearily, drunken men swore, stupendously, terrible prostitutes screamed. "I love shamelessness," said Leonid. "In cynicism I feel the sadness, almost the despair of man who realizes that he can't— do you understand?—that he can't help being a beast; he wants not to be one, but he can't! Do you understand?" He drank strong, almost black tea. I knew that he liked it so, and that it sobered him, and I purposely ordered it strong. Sipping the tarry, bitter liquid, probing with his eyes the puffed-up faces of the drunkards, Leonid spoke uninterruptedly: "With women I am cynical. It's the more truthful way, and they love it. It's better to be a consummate sinner than a righteous man who can't puff himself up into a state of complete saintliness." He glanced round, was silent for a while, and said: "Here it is as boring as an ecclesiastical council!" This made him laugh. "I've never been at an ecclesiastical council; it must be something like a fish-pond." The tea sobered him. We left the tavern. The mist thickened, the opalescent globes of the street lamps melted like ice. 38 REMINISCENCES OF LEONID ANDREYEV "I should like some fish," said Leonid, as he leant his elbows on the parapet of the bridge across the Neva, and continued with animation: "You know my way? Probably children think like that. A child will pitch on a word and begin to pick out words that rhyme to it: fish, dish, butter, gutter—but I can't write verse." After thinking for a while he added: "Makers of children's alphabets think like that." Again we sat in a tavern treating ourselves to bouillabaisse; Leonid was saying that the "decadents" had invited him to con- tribute to their review, Viessy. "I shan't accept, I don't like them. With them I feel there is no body behind their word. They intoxicate themselves with words, as Balmont is fond of saying. He too is talented and— sick." On another occasion, I remember, he said of the Scorpion group: "They outrage Schopenhauer, and I love him, and therefore hate them." But, on his lips, this was too strong a word; to hate was beyond him, he was too gentle for that. Once he showed me in his diary "words of hatred," but they turned out to be merely humorous, and he himself laughed heartily at them. I saw him to his hotel in a cab, and put him to bed. But when I called in the afternoon, I learned that immediately after I left, he got up, dressed, and disappeared. I searched for him the whole day, but could not find him. He drank continuously for four days, and then went away to Moscow. He had an unpleasant way of testing the sincerity of people's mutual relations. He did it like this: suddenly he would ask as if by the way: "Do you know what Z. said about you?" Or he would let you know: "And S. says of you . . ." And he would look into your eyes darkly as if to test you. Once I said to him: "Look here, if you go on like that you will end by setting all your friends against one another!" MAXIM GORKI 39 "What of it?" he replied. "If they quarrel for trifles like that, it only shows that their relations were not sincere." "Well, what do you want?" "Stability, a sort of monumental firmness, beauty of relation- ship. Each one of us ought to realize how delicate is the lace of the soul, how tenderly and warily it should be regarded. A certain romanticism is needed in the relations between friends; it used to exist in Pushkin's circle, and I envy them it. Women are sensitive only to eroticism. The woman's gospel is the Decameron." But in half an hour's time he scoffed at his view of women, as he gave a droll description of a conversation between an erotomaniac and a public-school girl. He could not stand Artzibashev, and at times scoffed at him with crude hostility just for his one-sided presentations of woman as exclusively sensual. Once he told me this story. When he was about eleven he saw, somewhere in a wood or park, the deacon kissing a young girl. "They kissed one another, and both cried," he said, lowering his voice and shrinking. Whenever he told anything intimate, his somewhat limp muscles became strained and keyed up. "The young girl, you see, was so slim and fragile, little legs like matches; the deacon—fat, the cassock on his belly—greasy and shiny. I already knew why people kissed, but it was the first time I saw them crying when they kissed, and I thought it funny. The deacon's beard got caught on the girl's open blouse. He began wriggling his head. I whistled in order to frighten them, but got frightened myself and ran away. On the evening of that very same day I felt myself in love with the daughter of our magistrate, a girl of ten. I touched her: she had no breasts. So there was nothing to kiss, and she was not fit for love. Then I fell in love with a neighbour's maid, a short-legged girl, with white eyebrows, with enormous breasts—the blouse on her bosom was as greasy as the cassock on the deacon's belly. I approached her very resolutely, and she as resolutely pulled my ear. But this did not prevent me from loving her. She seemed to me a beauty, and the longer I knew her the more beautiful she seemed. It was almost torture, and very sweet. I saw many really beautiful girls, and in my mind I 40 REMINISCENCES OF LEONID ANDREYEV well understood that my beloved was a monster compared with them; and yet to me she remained the fairest of all. This knowl- edge made me happy; nobody could love as I did that fat hussy with her white eyebrows and white eyelashes. Nobody—do you understand?—could see in her one fairer than the fairest!" He told this superbly, saturating his account with delightful humour, which I cannot reproduce. What a pity, that he, who in conversation was such a master of humour, neglected or was afraid to enrich his stories with its play. Evidently he was afraid of spoiling with the varied colours of humour the dark tones of his pictures. When I said it was a pity that he had forgotten how well he succeeded in creating out of the short-legged maid the first beauty in the world, that he no longer wished to extract the golden veins of beauty from the dirty mine of reality, he screwed up his eyes comically and slyly, saying: "See what a sweet tooth you have got! No, I am not going to pamper you romantics." It was impossible to persuade him it was just he who was the romantic. In his Collected Works which he presented to me in 1915, Leonid wrote: "Beginning with Bergamot in the Courier, all that is contained here has been written, has passed before your eyes, Alexey: it is to a large extent the history of our relations." This, unfortunately, is true; unfortunately, because I think it would have been better for Andreyev had he not introduced "the history of our relations" into his stories. But he did it too readily, and in his haste to "refute" my views he thereby spoiled his whole. It seemed it was just in my personality that he had embodied his invisible enemy. "I have written a story which you are sure not to like," he once said to me. "Shall we read it?" We read it. I liked the story very much, save for a few details. "That's a trifle, that I'll correct," he said with animation, pacing the room, shuffling with his slippers. Then he sat down by my side, and throwing back his hair, he glanced into my eyes. MAXIM GORKI 41 "Well, I know, I feel that you were .sincere in praising that story. But I can't understand how it can please you." "There are many things on earth which don't please me; yet, so far as I can see, they are none the worse for it." "Reasoning like that, you can't be a revolutionary." "Now, do you regard a revolutionary as did Netchayev, who held that a revolutionary is not a man?" He embraced me and laughed: "You don't properly understand yourself. But, look here, when I wrote Thought I had you in my mind. Alexey Savelov is you. There is one phrase there: 'Alexey was not talented'—this per- haps was wrong on my part, but with your stubbornness you so irritate me at times that you seem to me without talent. It was wrong of me to have written it, wasn't it?" He was agitated, he even blushed. I calmed him, saying that I did not consider myself an Arab horse, but only a dray horse. I knew that I owed my success not so much to my inborn talent as to my capacity for work, my love of work. "You are a strange man," he said softly, interrupting my words; and suddenly, changing the tone of the conversation, he began musingly to speak of himself, of the agitations of his soul. He lacked the unpleasant Russian habit of confessing and of doing penance. But at times he managed to speak of himself with manly frankness, even severity, yet without losing his self-respect. And this was pleasant in him. "You understand," he said, "every time I write something that particularly agitates me, I feel as though a crust had fallen from my soul; I see myself clearer, and I see that I am more talented than the thing written. Take Thought. I expected it would aston- ish you, and now I myself see that it is, essentially, a story with a purpose which, even so, misses the mark." He jumped to his feet, and shaking back his hair, half jokingly declared: "I'm afraid of you, you rascal! You are stronger than I. I don't want to submit to you." And again gravely: "Something is lacking in me, my dear fellow. Something very important, eh'? What do you think?" 42 REMINISCENCES OF LEONID ANDREYEV I thought that he treated his talent with unpardonable careless- ness, and that he lacked knowledge. "One must study, read, go to Europe." He waved his hand: "It isn't that. One must find a God for oneself and learn to believe in his wisdom." As usual we began arguing. After one such argument he sent me the proofs of his story The Wall, and with reference to his Ghosts he said to me: "The lunatic who knocks is myself, and the energetic Yegor is you. You really possess confidence in your powers; that is your obsession and the obsession of all your fellow romantics, idealizers of reason, uprooted from life by their dream." The outcry roused by his story The Abyss unnerved him. People ever ready to cater for the gutter press, began writing all sorts of unpleasant things about Andreyev, going so far in their calumnies as to approach absurdity. Thus a certain poet announced in a Kharkov paper that Andreyev and his fiancee went bathing with no costumes on. Leonid plaintively asked: "What does he think then, that one must bathe in a frock-coat? And he lies, too. I did not bathe either with a fiancee or solo. I have not gone bathing for a whole year—there was no river to bathe in. Look here, I have made up my mind to print and have posted on the hoardings a humble request to readers, a brief one: "Yours is bliss Who don't read Abyss!" He was excessively, almost morbidly, attentive to his press notices, and always, with sadness or with irritation, complained of the barbarous coarseness of the critics and reviewers; once he even wrote to the press to complain of the hostile attitude adopted towards him personally. "You should not do this," he was advised. "Yes, I must. Otherwise these people, in their zeal to reform me, will cut off my ears or scald me with boiling water." MAXIM GORKI 43 He suffered cruelly from hereditary alcoholism; his malady would manifest itself at comparatively rare intervals, but nearly always in a very acute form. He fought against it; the struggle cost him enormous efforts, but at times, falling into despair, he scoffed at his efforts. "I'll write a story about a man who, from his youth onwards, was for twenty-five years afraid to drink a thimbleful of vodka. Because of this he lost a multitude of splendid hours in life, he spoilt his career, and died in his prime through having cut his corn unsuccessfully, or having splintered his finger." And indeed, having come to see me at Nijni, he brought with him the manuscript of that very story. To be concluded FLAT WATERS OF THE WEST IN KANSAS BY CARL SANDBURG After the sunset in the mountains there are shadows and shoulders standing to the stars. After the sunset on the prairie there are only the stars, the stars standing alone. The flat waters of the west in Kansas take up the sunset lights one by one and all— the bars, the barriers, the slow-down, the loose lasso handy on the saddle, the big hats, the slip-knot handkerchiefs, the cattle horns, the hocks and haunches ready for the kneel-down, the sleep of the humps and heads in the grass, the pony with a rump to the wind or curving a neck to a front foot— If a baby moon comes after the sunset it is a witness of many homes, many home-makers under the night sky-shed— and the flat waters of the west in Kansas take up the baby moon, the witness, take it and let it ride, take it and let it have a home. The great plains gave the buffalo grass. The great plains gave the buffalo grass. a M J'. >, O < 5 OS o H a o 'fl a < -i o < to to D M o M W 35 X < o o THE THIRTEENTH WAY BY LLEWELYN POWYS JUST as in the 'nineties, golden quill in hand, Aubrey Beardsley, seated under a crucifix, traced with degenerate wax-white fingers pictures that revealed a new world, a world exact, precise, and convincing, squeezed out, so to speak, between the attenuated crevices of a hypersensitive imagination, so in his poetry Mr Wal- lace Stevens chips apertures in the commonplace and deftly con- structs on the other side of the ramparts of the world, tier upon tier, pinnacle upon pinnacle, his own supersophisticated superter- restrial township of the mind. And it may well be that his eccentric verse does actually reveal more of the insecure fluctuating secrets of the universe than are to be found in other more sedate, more decorous artistic creations. Wavering, uncertain, bereft of ancient consolations, the human race comes more and more to realize that it has won to conscious- ness in a world in which all is relative and undulating. In such a world it is indeed possible that intimations of some incal- culable absolute are more nearly to be come at under the influence of cloud-shadows floating beneath a violet moon than under that of the splashes of actual sunshine lying so confidently on grass, and brick, and stone, and metal. From king to beggar we are aware of our manifold delusions, aware that nothing is as false as the face value of things. We have, alas! grown only too cognizant of the essential mendacity of the physical aspects of a universe that has no bottom. And this being so, it is perhaps in suggestions, in mere phantasms, that we come nearest to the evocations of that fourth-dimensional con- sciousness which may well be furthest removed from illusion. If the surface of the visible world then is nothing, who can tell but that the shadows of the surface of the visible world may be every- thing? And no poet, not Baudelaire, not Edgar Allan Poe even, has revealed with a surer touch, a surer ambiguity, the very shades and tinctures of this indefinable borderland than has this ultra- modern supersubtle lawyer from the confines of Hartford, Con- necticut. 46 THE THIRTEENTH WAY It is impossible for us to read Mr Stevens' poetry without feeling that we are being initiated into the quintessential tapering expres- sion of a unique personality—a personality as original and authentic as it is fastidious and calculating. He stands quite alone amongst the poets of the more modern schools in that each unexpected verbal manipulation conceals some obscure harmony of sense and sound which not only provokes intellectual appreciation, but in the strangest possible way troubles the imagination. Listening to his poetry is like listening to the humming cadences of an inspired daddy-longlegs akimbo in sunset light against the coloured panes of a sanct window above a cathedral altar. Mr Wallace Stevens' poetry is beyond good and evil, beyond hope and despair, beyond thought of any kind, one might almost say. "The soul, O ganders, flies beyond the parks And far beyond the discords of the wind." And yet he is not so far removed from the palpable foundations of existence as to be altogether oblivious to the passing of the seasons. Like other poets before him, his spirit feels the impact of the spring and finds for its emotions unabashed punctilious expression. "Tuneless mother How is it that your aspic nipples For once vent honey?" Very curious, very corrupt, very artificial are the seascape vi- gnettes, the landscape vignettes of his demi-world, artificial and yet pointed and penetrating in their decorative integrity. "In the sea, Biscayne, there prinks The young emerald, evening star. . . . By this light the salty fishes Arch in the sea like tree-branches Going in many directions Up and down." LLEWELYN POWYS 47 "Her terrace was the sand And the palms and the twilight. . . . And thus she roamed In the roamings of her fan, Partaking of the sea, And of the evening, As they flowed around And uttered their subsiding sound." Indeed, as in the last quotation, one continually comes upon passages that seem to suggest a curious sensuality such as one might fancifully associate with certain of the stranger appari- tions seen in the circus ring, a bizarre niggling sensuality in accord with some dainty physical disability: the sensuality of a crotchety detached mind which itself is removed from the object of its adoration by convoluted covert laws of super-refined cerebrations. "To what good, in the alleys of the lilacs, O caliper, do you scratch your buttocks And tell the divine ingenue, your companion, That. . . . Poor buffo! Look at the lavender And look your last and look still steadily, And say how it comes that you see Nothing but trash and that you no longer feel Her body quivering in the Floreal Toward the cool night and its fantastic star, Prime paramour and belted paragon, Well-booted, rugged, arrogantly male, Patron and imager of the gold Don John, Who will embrace her before summer comes." It may be, however, that what I wish to convey will be still better illustrated by a quotation from that enchanting poem entitled Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et Les Unze Mille Vierges, in which God himself is portrayed as being subject 48 THE THIRTEENTH WAY to the most unexpected emotion in realizing, with delicious per- verse satisfaction, that the young girl's sacrifice of "radishes and flowers" in no way interests him. "The good Lord in His garden sought New leaf and shadowy tinct, And they were all His thought. He heard her low accord, Half prayer and half ditty, And He felt a subtle quiver, That was not heavenly love, Or pity." Or does one approach more closely to a clear understanding of Wallace Stevens' hermetic art and finicky preoccupations in con- templating the glazed halls and nocturnal palaces that his eclectic fantasy has set dangling for us in mid-space? There is something terrible about these suspended edifices. They are made of the same stuff, of the same unreal reality, obscure and yet objective, that might disturb the painted dreams of a praying mantis asleep in all its scaly emerald beauty on a linen-laid tropical table. "Then from their poverty they rose, From dry catarrhs, and to guitars They flitted Through the palace walls. They flung monotony behind, Turned from their want, and, nonchalant, They crowded The nocturnal halls. . . . How explicit the coiffures became, The diamond point, the sapphire point, The sequins Of the civil fans!" The construction of such dagobas is no easy matter. , LLEWELYN POWYS 49 "How shall we hew the sun, Split it and make blocks, To build a ruddy palace? How carve the violet moon To set in nicks? Let us fix portals, east and west, Abhorring green-blue north and blue-green south." And none knows better than the poet himself that it is no wise thing to let one's glance wander from these charmed interiors. "Out of the window I saw how the planets gathered Like the leaves themselves Turning in the wind. I saw how the night came, Came striding like the colour of the heavy hemlocks I felt afraid And I remembered the cry of the peacocks." Surely this "Socrates of snails, musician of pears . . . lutanist of fleas" can make us aware of the ghastly lot of our kind with a most exquisite and convincing dexterity. "If her horny feet protrude, they come To show how cold she is and dumb." Clearly enough w.e are made to feel the ultimate fate of that company who, "gaudy as tulips," mount the stairways of those "wickless halls." The worms speak at Heaven's gate: "Out of the tomb, we bring Badroulbadour, Within our bellies, we her chariot. Here is an eye. And here are, one by one, The lashes of that eye and its white lid." But possibly the most perfect example of Mr Stevens' genius is to be found in the poem called The Cortege of Rosenbloom. It SO THE THIRTEENTH WAY defies completely all rational explanations, and yet at the same time tingles with vague imaginative evocations. What strange subterfugitive symphonies of infinitesimal tomtoms titillate the listener's ears as the cadaver of the wry, wizened one "of the colour of horn" is carried to his burial place up in the sky! What sly bemused tambourine cacophony beats upon the ear-drum with the reiterated "tread, tread" of the mourners. "It is turbans they wear And boots of fur." One of Mr Stevens' most impertinent and precocious produc- tions is entitled Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. The sixth of the thirteen ways is described as follows: "Icicles filled the long window With barbaric glass. The shadow of the blackbird Crossed it, to and fro. The mood Traced in the shadow An indecipherable cause." The ninth way after this manner: "He rode over Connecticut In a glass coach. Once, a fear pierced him, In that he mistook The shadow of his equipage For blackbirds." May we not be perhaps permitted to regard Mr Stevens' own poetry as the thirteenth way of looking upon life—the thirteenth way of Mr Wallace Stevens, this "tiptoe cozener": "This connoisseur of elemental Fate Aware of exquisite thought." SEA SURFACE FULL OF CLOUDS BY WALLACE STEVENS In that November off Tehuantepec, The slopping of the sea grew still one night And in the morning summer hued the deck And made one think of rosy chocolate And gilt umbrellas. Paradisal green Gave suavity to the perplexed machine Of ocean, which like limpid water lay. Who, then, in that ambrosial latitude Out of the light evolved the moving blooms, Who, then, evolved the sea-blooms from the clouds Diffusing balm in that Pacific calm? C'etait mon enfant, mon bijou, mon ante. The sea-clouds whitened far below the calm And moved, as blooms move, in the swimming green And in its watery radiance, while the hue Of heaven in an antique reflection rolled Round those flotillas. And sometimes the sea Poured brilliant iris on the glistening blue. II In that November off Tehuantepec The slopping of the sea grew still one night. At breakfast jelly yellow streaked the deck And made one think of chop-house chocolate 52 SEA SURFACE FULL OF CLOUDS And sham umbrellas. And a sham-like green Capped summer-seeming on the tense machine Of ocean, which in sinister flatness lay. Who, then, beheld die rising of the clouds That strode submerged in that malevolent sheen, Who saw the mortal massives of the blooms Of water moving on the water-floor? Cetait mon frere du ciel, ma vie, mon or. The gongs rang loudly as the windy booms Hoo-hooed it in the darkened ocean-blooms. The gongs grew still. And then blue heaven spread Its crystalline pendentives on the sea And the macabre of the water-glooms In an enormous undulation fled. Ill In that November off Tehuantepec, The slopping of the sea grew still one night And a pale silver patterned on the deck And made one think of porcelain chocolate And pied umbrellas. An uncertain green, Piano-polished, held the tranced machine Of ocean, as a prelude holds and holds. Who, seeing silver petals of white blooms Unfolding in the water, feeling sure Of the milk within the saltiest spurge, heard, then, The sea unfolding in the sunken clouds? Oh! Cetait mon extase et mon amour. So deeply sunken were they that the shrouds, WALLACE STEVENS 53 The shrouding shadows, made the petals black Until the rolling heaven made them blue, A blue beyond the rainy hyacinth, And smiting the crevasses of the leaves Deluged the ocean with a sapphire blue. IV In that November off Tehuantepec The night-long slopping of the sea grew still. A mallow morning dozed upon the deck And made one think of musky chocolate And frail umbrellas. A too-fluent green Suggested malice in the dry machine Of ocean, pondering dank stratagem. Who then beheld the figures of the clouds Like blooms secluded in the thick marine? Like blooms? Like damasks that were shaken off From the loosed girdles in the spangling must. C’était ma foi, la nonchalance divine. The nakedness would rise and suddenly turn Salt masks of beard and mouths of bellowing, Would—But more suddenly the heaven rolled Its bluest sea-clouds in the thinking green And the nakedness became the broadest blooms, Mile-mallows that a mallow sun cajoled. V In that November off Tehuantepec Night stilled the slopping of the sea. The day Came, bowing and voluble, upon the deck, 54 SEA SURFACE FULL OF CLOUDS Good clown. . . . One thought of Chinese chocolate And large umbrellas. And a motley green Followed the drift of the obese machine Of ocean, perfected in indolence. What pistache one, ingenious and droll, Beheld the sovereign clouds as jugglery And the sea as turquoise-turbaned Sambo, neat At tossing saucers—cloudy-conjuring sea? C’était mon esprit bätard, l'ignominie. The sovereign clouds came clustering. The conch Of loyal conjuration trumped. The wind Of green blooms turning crisped the motley hue To clearing opalescence. Then the sea And heaven rolled as one and from the two Came fresh transfigurings of freshest blue. THE MIRROR OF SAINT CHRISTOPHER BY ELIN PELIN Translated from the Bulgarian by Victor Sharenkoff FROM early days the soul of Saint Christopher (at that time he was not considered as a saint) was ardent in the fight against evil. The unjust made him angry; sins and crimes em- bittered his heart and altogether disgusted him. Being firm as a stone, he resisted all temptations; strong as a lion and great as an oak tree, he was able to crush at one blow the genius of evil— the devil. From morning until evening he walked the roads and held his hands in readiness for the fight, ardent with the wish to exterminate lurking evil, evil which sprang ever freshly from human passions, like the poison of the adder. At that time this young man under whose great form the earth trembled, stood above the law, because his power was respected by the laws. The hand of Saint Christopher did not falter when he raised it to smite, like a flash of lightning, a dishonest merchant in the market, a liar, a thief, and even a beggar who feigned to be lame in order to induce greater mercy. Always his soul was full of indignation, of a necessity to exter- minate, to suffocate, to tear and crush in his anger all that had the flavour of injustice, vice, and crime. For this reason his beau- tiful face changed little by little and was elongated, his eyebrows fell low, the eyes diminished and filled with blood, the nostrils widened, and the mouth was broadened. He lost the image of God, and his face began to resemble that of a fierce dog. Then the children, who were considered sinless by Saint Chris- topher, began to run away and to hoot him, when he passed along the streets. The dogs whose form he had assumed began to bark at him madly. The women for whom the youth had an unusual affection, because he did not consider either carnal or spiritual love as a sin, and who had sighed for him secretly and 56 THE MIRROR OF SAINT CHRISTOPHER openly, began to keep away from him and to be afraid of him; and they gave him the name “dog-headed man.” The beautiful and passionate widow Lydia, who had loved him and encouraged him in his work, ceased to love him. Discouraged and terrified, Saint Christopher thought that the devil whom he had conquered many times now wanted revenge, and sent all the infernal powers to transform him into a dog in order to deprive him of the only pleasure in life—love of woman. The young defender of justice and truth would now fly into a rage still more readily. And raising his strong fists, he wanted to curse his strongest enemy, the devil; but to his great horror only a dog's bark went out from his toothed mouth. Then the dog-headed man went to a neighbouring wood, cut a green stick, lopped its branches, put it on his shoulders like a cudgel, and left his native town, for whose good he had fought so indefatigably. This torment was terrible. He knew that his face was the visible image of his soul, and the transformation into a dog would not have taken place if his soul had not been a dog's. The poor youth went to an island far over the sea. Through the middle of the island flowed a stormy and muddy river, which nobody could pass over either by bridge or by boat. On one side of the river beautiful fields of corn were growing and ripening; on the other, countless herds of cattle pastured, and the vast forests were full of game. But the inhabitants on both sides endured privations, because they could not cross the large river and barter their goods. The dog-headed man for whom no obstacles had been insur- mountable found himself in misery on the shore of the river. He settled near it, and every day waded across twice to get bread from one side and meat from the other, and satisfy the man and the dog that he was. The stormy and muddy waves engulfed him to the waist and broke in foam against his hard body as against rocks. The inhabitants of both sides crowded around and looked fear- fully at this unknown man with dog's head, and were astonished at his strength. For bread and meat Christopher began to carry people over the river, taking on his shoulders several persons at the same time. But his passion to exterminate the evil ones and ELIN PELIN 57 wrong-doers did not leave him. Very often, stopping in the middle of the river, he took from his shoulders those who were shown him by the secret power of justice to be unworthy, and threw them into the waves like rotten fruit. In the evening, when everybody retired to their homes, he went to a palm tree and fell exhausted on his knees, under which the stones would crackle and turn into dust. He wanted to pray, but his prayer was carried to the starry sky like a dog's howl. With bleeding heart he spoke to God: "My Lord, I wanted my soul to be pure as justice which Thou hast given; why didst Thou make my face shameful like evil, which embitters and angers Thee?" One day a strange old man came to the shore of the terrible river. He asked Christopher to carry him across, and said: "O kind man, carry me to the other side, because the devil is pursuing me. I have neither bread nor meat to repay you with. I shall give you only this small mirror. In it you will see your dog's face as long as you do not perform the greatest and smallest deed to please God." The dog-headed man carried the old man across, took the small mirror, and crossed back again to the other side to await the devil. He looked over the water towards the stranger, and saw him among the ripened corn-fields with an aureole over his head. Then the youth understood that he alone had carried on his shoulders Jesus Christ himself, and was seized by such a fear as he had never had before; and kissing the small mirror, he fell down on his knees and began to knock his head against the ground in such a way that the neighbouring cliffs crumbled and fell with a great noise into the river. From that time on Saint Christopher gave himself up to pro- found meditation. His zeal in fighting evil and in chastising unworthy men was strengthened. But when he looked at himself in the small mirror, with horror he saw his dog's image, and became more cruel. A great sorrow possessed him. He imagined that his under- standing had become clouded and that he was not able to dis- criminate between evil and good. He stilled the riot of his soul; and becoming milder, he tried not to see the vices and not to dis- tinguish them so sharply from virtues. 58 THE MIRROR OF SAINT CHRISTOPHER One day an unknown gloomy man with an ugly face and bloody timid look came to him. Saint Christopher recognized him as the greatest transgressor on the earth, and said to himself: "To crush this man and rescue the earth from the horror of him is the way for my face to become human again." And when he was prepared to smite him with a heavy fist upon the head, the unknown man said with a voice of shamelessness and ridicule: "Powerful dog-headed man, carry me to the other side to save the people. All vices have disappeared there and the virtues are going to die because there is no way for them to live longer." These terrible words made the dog-headed man stay his hand. He was not indulgent, but decided to be patient. He put the repulsive man on his shoulders and began to carry him. When he began to wade over the river he felt an unusual weight on his shoulder like a bag of lead, and even much heavier. His knees began to bend. Christopher was already sure that this unknown man had grown heavy from sins, and several times he thought of throwing him into the waves, but he did not do it. With great effort he carried him to the other side and threw him on the ground. The man got up easily. He did not even groan, shook the hand of the dog-headed man with thankfulness, and went on. Saint Christopher returned quickly to the other side; and trembling with anger that he had not killed this evil-doer, he turned to look at him. He saw on the road where Christ had passed before, the big gloomy horned figure of the devil striding along the corn-fields. Then, being terrified, he took out the mirror; and placing it before his eyes, he saw the beauty of his human face, the purity of his look; and the first thought which illumined his pure coun- tenance surrounded by an aureole was: "I purified myself because I did good to the most malicious." > Id s o u 2 o O aa > aa W < u t/i Q Z < > z < H H M 2S 03 LONDON LETTER June, IQ24 HITHERTO Wembley had slumbered in the obscurity prophe- sied for it by its sluggish, rustic name. It was one of the villages which have recently become suburbs of London. But this summer London is a suburb of Wembley. For in a park there, is an exhibition which is a microcosm of the British Empire. Canada is on your left, Australia on your right, New Zealand faces India, South Africa lurks round the corner, mud-walls from Nigeria fra- ternize with the pagodas of Rangoon, and every odd territory which has been clumsily, half-unconsciously, acquired to the Union Jack possesses its own kiosk or pavilion. It is a subject for the optimistic sonorities of a Macaulay, and our newspapers have not neglected their opportunities. From every quarter of the globe people have come to see this exhibition, and few, I imagine, can be disappointed of those to whom its advertisement has proved a lure. For, indeed, it is a thing unique. Every raw product, every object of manu- facture that the Empire produces is represented in it, and there is little that the Empire does not produce, from kangaroos and cricket- balls to naval guns and negro art. There is even a statue of the Prince of Wales cast in Canadian butter. To inspect at all thor- oughly this prodigious heap of stuff would take weeks, and all the cathedrals of the world are pygmied by the concrete temples of commerce in which it is exposed. Devoutly at first, then jadedly, the pilgrims worship at the shrine, but we unhappy natives wander wretchedly about wondering what the good of it all is to us. The sun never sets upon the Empire that we are so untruly said to own, and we are the most heavily taxed people in the world. It is all, I repeat, very remarkable, and everything is the largest of its sort . ever seen. No doubt if the exhibition had been German, the goods would have been more effectively displayed; if French, the food provided would have been better; if American, the switch-backs would have been even more alarming. But if this extravagant raree- show is in its general effect inexpressibly depressing, it is not because it is British. The exhibition is intended as a boast; it actually is 60 LONDON LETTER a confession. And the failure it symbolizes is not that of the British in particular, but of the whole of Western civilization. In America, I believe, there are still to be found intelligent people who believe in progress. (For cannot man be made perfect by depriving him of all his pleasures?) And I suppose that not even Wembley would change their philosophy. The most beautiful thing to be seen there is a locomotive—and very beautiful it is. The most impressive is a gun. What wonder if some of us are more inclined than ever to believe that industrial civilization is hopeless; that it causes only a deplacement of energy; that nothing can come of it; and that it will destroy itself, leaving the earth not only without civilized men, but without savages, without animals, without even vegetable life, a barren satellite like the moon, which will revolve empty around the sun until at last the poisons that men have invented lose their strength and, if there still survives sufficient heat, out of the new ooze faint stirrings of new life begin to show themselves, and the long process of evolution begins afresh. In face of this despair, what attitude can we decently adopt? To refuse to see at least its possibility, to remain bland, will soon, I think, for an intelligent person become quite impossible. Yet what escape is there? One answer is given by the Youth Movement in Germany, with its naive attendant Nacktkultur; by Mr Sherwood Anderson, I fancy, in America; and in England by Mr D. H. Lawrence and his faithful page, the lucid and engaging Mr Middle- ton Murry. It is an answer which has inspired some admirable art, but in itself is it more than the petulant crying of a child in despair, a child confronted with forces beyond its control or com- prehension, calling for its Nannie, and protesting vainly its belief in it knows not what? If a situation is hopeless, it is better to preserve one's dignity or, at any rate, a sense of humour. But in spite of Wembley it is perhaps as unphilosophical to believe in re- gress as in progress. It is not extravagant to consider Plato an im- provement on Cro-Magnon or Neanderthal man. And if, since Plato's time, the history of man has been comparable to a switch- back, now going down, now going up, there seems no reason why it should also resemble a switch-back in ending always at a lower point. Though we are now in something of a trough, may we not hope again to attain heights like those of sixteenth-century Italy and eighteenth-century France? But there is only one force we RAYMOND MORTIMER 61 can use, and that the very one that many quick despairers would have us cast away—intellect, intellect, and again intellect. I hardly know what small beer I should choose to chronicle, and there has been little else. Almost all English books worth notice are reviewed in The Dial, no painting genius has swum into our ken, and the only interesting new building is the work of an Amer- ican architect. In music, too, you have been in evidence. At a recent concert we have heard compositions by Mr Ezra Pound (can it be that he has deserted his ungrateful other muse?) and Mr George Antheil. Of the former I am the less ready to speak, as I am disagreeably aware of the limitations to my musical knowledge. But to praise needs less assurance than to condemn, and Mr Antheil's works struck me as very promising if still rather imitative. They had at least a physiological effect upon me—my temperature ap- peared to rise—and there is little modern music except Strawinsky's of which I can say as much. In the theatre there has been nothing new worth signalling. Hassan has run for eight months and been a popular success—which is exactly what its author intended it should be. The wanton weakness of its construction is even more apparent when the play is acted than when it is read, and the pretty lyrics which are its principal ornament were so disfigured that they went for nothing. As a spectacle it was artistically much inferior to the less pretentious Chu Chin Chow. Congreve's The Way of the World has had a fair run at Hammersmith, in spite, or rather, I fear, because, of the extreme bad taste with which it was produced, and the Phoenix Society scored its greatest success with Wycherley's The Country Wife. Indeed the growing interest in seventeenth-century plays is one of the few reasons for considering ourselves more civilized than our parents. We learnt from these productions that Congreve reads better than he acts, and that Wycherley acts better than he reads. (But one must take into ac- count that the former makes incomparably heavier demands upon the producer and actors.) As literature there is of course no com- parison between them. The beauty of Congreve's prose is poignant and exquisite as the music of Mozart, and the Bargain Scene in The Way of the World brought tears to the eyes. But Wycher- ley had a sense of the stage which Congreve lacked, and I think The Country Wife almost the most amusing play I have ever 62 LONDON LETTER seen. A lot of nonsense has been talked about its grossness, which, judged by ordinary Continental standards, is in no way excessive. At the same time its production in London and the reception it received from a delighted audience constituted an event in the history of English taste. Twenty years ago certainly, ten years probably, it could not have been given, and even to-day no manager would dare to put it on for public performance. Fortunately, when Sir Robert Walpole established the censorship of plays under which we still groan, he omitted to make it retrospective, so the Lord Chamberlain cannot interfere with sixteenth and seventeenth cen- tury plays. If he could, it is doubtful whether Shakespeare would pass his courtly eye, except in the bowdlerized editions which the Victorian age did not hesitate to put forth. One wonders whether the tendency to allow greater freedom in such matters will con- tinue, or whether reaction is about to begin. The retreating tide of puritanism has so far freed only the upper levels of society. Will it turn and submerge everyone once more? Perhaps the present generation may live to see the censorious young pointing censorious fingers at it, and we shall be considered by our grandchildren dis- gusting coarse old fellows. On the whole it is to amateurs that we in England owe our more interesting performances. Every town in England has its amateur theatrical society, and the possibilities are obviously prodigious. Unluckily in almost every case nothing but the dreariest type of com- mercial play is given, and this in order to enable the vicar's daughter and the local auctioneer a chance to display themselves as rivals of our popular stage-idols—mere outbursts of exhibitionism which can interest only the performers and students of morbid psychology. There are, however, brilliant exceptions. At the University of Cambridge, for instance, there are two dramatic societies, one of which last term gave The Birds of Aristophanes (in the Greek) and is giving Pirandello's Henry IV this summer. The other, the Marlowe Society, devotes itself to old English plays. The last production, which I went up to see, was Webster's Duchess of Main. All the parts were played by male under- graduates. Webster of course wrote the women's parts knowing they would be played by boys, for in his time no actresses were allowed upon the stage, and at Cambridge one could get some con- ception of the effect. The gentleman who played the Duchess gave a most delicate and sympathetic performance, and I do not know RAYMOND MORTIMER 63 which of our actresses could have done it one-half as well; yet it is not, I think, a part for a man or boy to play. The Duchess is a passionate woman as well as a great lady, and her passion has not that dewy quality which a boy is able to impart. A boy can play Juliet or a whore: the full-blown flower of love, neither innocent nor gross, must be beyond him. And it is noticeable that Shakes- peare, with a genius' sense for his material, never wrote a leading part, save Cleopatra's, which made this impossible demand: and it is clear from her speech about seeing "some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness" that he recognized he had in this instance out- stepped his limits. How exciting on the other hand it would be to see Julia, Viola, and Rosalind played by lads. For a boy to play a girl masquerading as a boy seems at first sight an unneces- sary complication. But I have no doubt that Shakespeare's fond- ness for this situation was due to his personal knowledge of the contemporary stage, and I do not believe we shall see a tolerable As You Like It until this original condition is restored. At Norwich, a quiet Cathedral city in the provinces, where one hardly looks for great enterprise, it is possible, again owing to amateurs, to see Elizabethan plays performed in something ap- proaching the original conditions. Here, it is true, women play the female parts, but the general disposition of the Elizabethan theatre, with apron-stage, and a balcony at the back, is used with excellent effect. Even the auditorium is built more or less upon the Eliza- bethan plan, and the plays are given in Elizabethan costume, with Hamlet in a ruff, and Cleopatra in a farthingale. Mr Nugent Monk, who is responsible, is no pedant, and makes very elastic use of these Elizabethan conditions. His actors are the citizens of Norwich, drawn from various social classes, and he has succeeded in preserving them from the infection of professional methods. They neither tear a passion to tatters, nor out-Herod Herod. They speak very clearly and rather fast, with the greatest economy of gesture. In fact it is recognized that the play's the thing, that Shakespeare knew his job, and that the words are expressive enough in themselves without the muttering, screams, and general beastly overacting in which professional actors without exception indulge. The result is that Mr Monk's productions of Shakespeare are much the best that I have ever seen. Raymond Mortimer PARIS LETTER June, 1924 ANEW book by Valery Larbaud is an event, not only in France, . but in England, Italy, Spain, and those two Americas where this exquisite writer has the jealous, faithful, and passionate ad- mirers his art merits. In this art it is useless to look for blustering overtures, or fabulous arithmetic; here is an honest man, and withal a man of taste, who writes with a scrupulous and unassuming pen, a humanist who yet can write to please himself, and one who, ignor- ing all overproduction, restlessness, and disordered nerves, has the art in his own hour of turning out a flawless work. Valery Lar- baud, the translator of Butler, the amateur of belles-lettres, is no cosmopolitan insect, no blind carrier of germs, casting authors of one country at random to the public of another, careless of the consequence. With the consciousness of being useful to an entire generation, he has enabled us to profit by the fruit of his experi- ence, of his reading, in a word, of his taste. He redeems the smil- ing egoism of Barnabooth by a sort of mystical cult of servitude, of translation, of modest proselytism, which he places at the service of the recondite or out of the way author who might otherwise remain unknown beyond his own frontiers. In England, Spain, and South America, Larbaud was the first to speak of Laforgue, Rimbaud, Lautreamont, Peguy, and Giraudoux. At home he introduced Samuel Butler, Joyce, and Ramon de la Serna; and he has made Chesterton, Conrad, Patmore, Edith Sitwell, Walter Savage Landor, and Thoreau almost popular in France. Although fond of the Graeco-Latin and French tradition, he has written in the most recent literary forms, for example, the long subjective monologue in his last book, which has made him loved and sought after by the youth of our time, little given as it is to enthusiasm. His books, Fermina Marquez, Enfantines (the memories of child- hood and adolescence) A. O. Barnabooth, Les Borborygmes, and finally these three exquisite stories the N.R.F. is publishing at the moment under the happy title, D'Amants, Heureux Amants, these should all have a place in the library of an amateur of contempo- PAUL MORAND 65 rary French letters. Larbaud's work is not the chaotic reflection of the inexplicable and mangled life of the present, yet it is no ivory tower of yesterday from which issue helpless invocations to the past; it is more like an exquisite commentary, an introduction to the art of enjoyment and suffering, of self-understanding and of self-mockery. Many others would have given a great deal to possess this amoralism that is his without effort, this feminine las- situde, this sadness which is passionate and yet never false, this simplicity, this sympathy with little girls and lead soldiers, this subtly shaded eroticism, these emotions effaced so quickly save in our memory, which make him a writer set apart, but of the fore- most rank. Larbaud belongs with Giraudoux to the last of the generations possessing the art of writing French perfectly. Afterwards come those who write correctly, nothing more, and then those who write badly, deliberately rejoicing in it, which also has its justifications. Abel Hermant, who belongs to an older age and one more devoted to grammar, has just published in the form of a novel, Xavier ou les Entretiens sur la Grammaire Franchise, a series of grammatical conversations, in the course of which an amusing portrait is drawn of one of these headlong young writers who have appeared since the war. Xavier (for it is he) is reading his first novel: "The novel," M Hermant says indulgently, "seemed to me at least charmingly absurd, not only in plot, but in style. . . . The acro- batics was arresting, even provocative, always unforeseen, and always apt. The young performer, as if from bravado or mockery, jumped from one idea to another—never the one expected, but always the one that ought to have been expected." The French love to discuss grammar as much as the English love to discuss Rugby. It is a national sport. Grammar (M Hermant admits it himself) has never made its appearance except in back- ward or even inferior epochs. Here in France we have loved it ever since the seventeenth century with a devotion which has re- sisted all revolutions. It happens frequently that a newspaper with a great circulation raises a question of grammar, an evening paper takes up the subject, and the dispute becomes general, spreads into the magazines, and lasts one or two months to the greatest delight of 500,000 French people. "Grammar," says Rollin, "is based on four principles: Reason, Age, Authority, and Usage." The last 66 PARIS LETTER three make only one really, and so often do the first and second, a thing being considered reasonable only because it is old. This ex- plains why grammar is of more importance in France than in any other country in the world. In regard to this there are great changes taking place to-day. Cholera, the new novel by M Delteil, following Sur le Fleuve Amour, the book by which the author first won his reputation, completely carries us away in a pure fantasy of subject and style. I find the book less perfect than the preceding one, but it is more personal and more powerful. It is the pursuit of three women in the coloured, mad flight of a dream, rarely paralleled in our litera- ture. I do not know whether M Delteil's books would make agree- able reading for foreigners, but for us, Frenchmen, debilitated by centuries of good taste and beautifully reasoned constructions, it is an infinitely fortifying and stimulating art. M Henri Massis, who with M Marietain may be considered to make up the French criticism of the Extreme Right, has just pub- lished under the title, Jugements, some caustic comments on Andre Gide, Romain Rolland, Georges Duhamel, and Julien Benda. The pages on Andre Gide, in which he accuses him of being demoniac and corrupting the young, published last year in the Revue Uni- verselle, made a great deal of stir, opening the campaign against this writer, who does not however seem to be any the worse for it; on the contrary. I am very far from sharing M Massis' opinions, which do not really constitute a literary criticism, but are rather more in the nature of a political pamphlet. Still, I am very grate- ful to him for flinging his ideas into the furnace with passion, while so many critics are content to arrange mere bibliographical lists or prudently flatter everyone or maliciously wage nasty little wars of spite. Better to be condemned by M Massis than to have incense burned before one by many others. I point out a very interesting bibliographical catalogue, drawn up in English and entitled The Books of France, the first number of which has just been issued by the Librairie Gallimard. The foreign criticism in it will be by J. Middleton Murry, Hilaire Belloc, J. D. Beresford, W, L. George, D. H. Lawrence, Harold Stearns, and Waldo Frank; from the French point of view by Andre Gide, Duhamel, Giraudoux, Maurois, Cocteau, and myself. American readers will find there in a well-classified and condensed form a faithful summing up of modern French literary production. PAUL MORAND 67 A new ballet, Les Biches, by Francis Poulenc, was given with brilliant success at Monte Carlo, on the sixth of January, under the direction of Serge de Diaghilev and Madame Nijinska, with scenery by Marie Laurencin. Poulenc, who has only been known by a few little fragments, exquisitely fresh, but with a grace still a little brief, in this new work (which I heard only on the piano a year ago) has been able to realize completely his personality of a charming young bourgeois Frenchman. The trombone glis- sandos, the bursts of trumpets, the popular influences which have marked Poulenc's work from 1919 until to-day, without being lost, have given place to more melody; and the listener has the delight and pleasure of discovering there a graver line, developments of richer emotion, coming from the heart itself. Everyone returning from the Midi pronounces Les Biches a delight. After years of shameful farce, and opera of incredible ugliness and vulgarity, at last the stage of Monte Carlo returns to authentic art with Les Facheux by Auric, the light opera La Colombe written by Gounod in i860 for the casino of Baden, with Barrientos, and scenery by Juan Gris. The influence of His Highness Prince Pierre of Monaco, who is of our generation and fights the same battles, becomes at length most happily apparent; and it is possible that thanks to his efforts Monaco may one day know the illustrious and brilliant pleasures of Weimar. Jose Maria Sert, the Catalonian painter who has been estab- lished in Paris for many years, invited us to look at his work two weeks ago. Part of it was a series of cartoons for tapestries ordered by the King of Spain for his Chateau de la Granja, the rest, a number of panels destined to decorate a mansion at Palm Beach. No other artist has so taken possession of the art of the rococo and the grotesque as Sert. He has consecrated his life to it. Bavarian chateaux, Bohemian or Saxon manors, Neapolitan or Palermian palaces, Castilian castles, Sert collects them from one end of Europe to the other. In the role of an impassioned artist he pursues the vestiges of those periods when insane inven- tion, decorative licence, and the use of the most unexpected mate- rials reached the limits of the impossible. And he has been able to go even farther. Here is a riot of festoons, luminous balls, bursting balloons, inflamed ostrich plumes, canopies weighted with precious metals, colours of mad daring, under a varnish which lacquers and preserves them with the coldness of porcelain. His 68 PARIS LETTER astonishing decorations at Hythe, the house of Sir Philip Sassoon, his Hindu fantasies on the walls of M Saxton Noble, his decora- tions of Mile Chanel's dining-room are already known, but noth- ing equals the magnificence of the history, in gold and black, of Sinbad the Sailor, which at the moment I write, travels with him on the Aquitania. May the United States, the only people in the world on a scale commensurate with the talent of this decorator, who in short dare to see in the large, give Sert the welcome he deserves. I come away from a retrospective exhibition of Monet's, with- out being able to understand the use of such a disinterment. What a forlorn sight! The nougat of the Cathedrals is melting already in the sun. The Water Lilies, a painting dear to M Clemenceau, and which unfortunately belongs to the French government, dis- solves in the liqueurs of an artificial lake; one or two open-air scenes crumble to pieces (while the paintings of Manet remain like rocks defying time). Probably the works of the generation following Monet will one day appear quite as out of date, but I doubt whether they will leave behind them the infinite sadness and the lesson of mediocrity I carried away with me in leaving this exhibition. Was that, then, all there was to Impressionism, to all that was the substance of our youth? No, aside from the masters like Manet and Renoir who surpassed the school, there remains in the Impressionism of the less brilliant works by Pissarro, Cezanne's master let us not forget, and Sisley for instance, that with which we must console ourselves in time for all this portion of Monet's work, which it is the custom to call his best period. I mentioned in one of my last letters the book entitled Daumier by M Raymond Escholier. To-day it is La Peinture de Daumier by M Fontainas (to whom we already owe a History of French Painting in the nineteenth century) published by the Mercure de France. Though very cheaply gotten out, it fills an immense gap, so meagre are French books on Daumier. There are also an excel- lent Picasso by Jean Cocteau in the collection of contemporaries issued by Stock, a Gauguin by R. Robert, a Renoir by F. Fosca, and a Toulouse-Lautrec by J. Coquiot, all of which, written by specialists on modern art, may be consulted with the utmost confidence. Paul Morand BOOK REVIEWS MR LARDNER'S AMERICAN CHARACTERS How to Write Short Stories. By Ring W. Lard- ner. i2mo. 359 pages. Charles Scribner's Sons. $2. MR RING LARDNER is, among other things, a popular humorist who does regular weekly articles for the New York American and writes the text for a syndicated comic strip. As a result of this, his new book of short stories has been published as if it were a book of popular humour. There is a preface of the vintage of Bill Nye, a jocose introduction to each story in the same vein, and, on the title page, a little cut in the manner of John Held's drawings for Judge; the whole volume is called How to Write Short Stories, in description of the preface, instead of, as it nor- mally would be and ought to be, Champion and Other Stories, or something of the kind, in description of the principal contents. Is it Mr Lardner who is timid about presenting himself, or his publishers who are timid about presenting him, in any more digni- fied role than his comic one? The fact is that this newest book of his, instead of belonging merely, as the title leads one to suppose, to the same department of literature as Irvin Cobb's Speaking of Operations, contains some of the most serious and interesting work which he has yet produced. These stories, he observes in his pref- ace, "will illustrate in a half-hearted way what I am trying to get at." Well, it is not the stories that are half-hearted, but the jokes which he intrudes upon them: the nonsense preface is so far below his usual humorous level that one suspects him of a guilty conscience at attempting to disguise an excellent piece of literature as a Stephen Leacock buffoonery. For, aside from one or two things, like The Facts, which seem a little magazine-made, How to Write Short Stories presents a series of studies of American types almost equal in importance to those of Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis. Indeed, Mr Lardner has certain specific advantages over both 70 MR LARDNER'S AMERICAN CHARACTERS Anderson and Lewis. In those of his stories in which he attempts somewhat the same sort of thing as Anderson's The Egg, and I'm a Fool, he shows a firmer grasp both of the Western vernacular and of the external realities with which he is dealing. In a sense, he is closer to life. It is curious to speculate what would have hap- pened to some of his stories if they had been written by Anderson. Two of his baseball heroes—Alibi Ike and the scout who is will- ing to risk ruining his own team for the sake of a perfect quartette —may almost be described as the victims of neuroses; and a third —the demon batter in My Roomy—is evidently insane. What strange spectres might not Anderson have X-rayed in their deepest spiritual interiors! Is not the mysterious Elliot who insists upon shaving in the middle of the night and cannot sleep unless the water is running in the bathtub a brother to Anderson's John Webster who appeared naked before his daughter and to the girl in Out of Nowhere Into Nothing who used to listen to the water-pail slopping over? With Anderson you are sometimes so far submerged in the spiritual sensations of these people that you lose sight of them as actual human beings in an actual Western community; with Lardner you are shown them only from the outside and in their re- lations with other people.—And when Lardner comes closest to Sinclair Lewis, as in The Golden Honeymoon, he is less likely than Lewis to falsify and caricature because he is primarily interested in studying a person rather than in drawing up an indictment. But where he has, so far, fallen short of both Anderson and Lewis is in artistic seriousness. Anderson has a poet's sensibility; Lewis a satirist's fury against life. But what Lardner may have to match with these he has never yet fully disclosed. For all his saturnine tone, he seems still a prisoner to the newspapers and the popular magazines. He will not even admit that he wants to get out: he compiles a book of the best things he has written and then, with his title and his comic preface, tries to pretend that he has never attempted to write anything good at all. Yet he has qualities which should make it more nearly possible for him than for per- haps any other living American to produce another Huckleberry Finn. For one thing, he has a ready invention—which most Amer- ican realists have not; and for another thing—what is even rarer —he has a special personal accent which represents a special per- sonal way of looking at things. Even such comparatively impor- EDMUND WILSON 71 tant examples of American realism as Main Street and Babbitt are largely put together out of literary materials ready to hand—the pre-war English novel of Bennett and Wells. But Lardner has imitated nobody and nobody else could reproduce his essence: you have to read the whole of a novel of Lewis to realize that there is anything remarkable about it; but there is scarcely a single para- graph of Lardner which, in its blending of freshness with irony, does not convey the sense of a distinguished intelligence and an interesting temperament. Furthermore, he has an unexcelled, an almost unrivaled, mastery of what has come to be known as the American language. Mark Twain, in his foreword to Huckleberry Finn, explained that he had taken great care to differentiate be- tween "the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the back- woods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary 'Pike County' dialect; and four modified variations of this last." So Lardner marks the difference between the prize-fighter's slang and the slang of the baseball-player, can speak the language of the Chicago song-writer who has come to New York to make his fortune, and has at his command the whole vocabulary of cliches of the young girl who writes letters to the song-writer from Chicago and of the middle- aged man from New Jersey who goes to Florida for his golden honeymoon. And he knows the difference between their spoken language and the language they will use when they write. Finally, what is most important, he writes the vernacular like an artist and not merely like a clever journalist—as George Ade or O. Henry did. There is nothing artificial or far-fetched about his slang; it is as natural as it is apt. His language is the product of a philologist's ear and a born writer's relish for words. Will Mr Lardner, then, write his Huckleberry Finn? Has he already told all he knows? If he has, we are already much in his debt for a great deal of entertainment and some excellent writing. It may be that the mechanical repetition of a trick as in the story called Horseshoes and the melodramatic exaggeration of Champion represent a genuine limitation. But you never know: here is a man who has had the freedom of the modern West no less than Mark Twain did of the old one, and who approaches its people not with the naturalist's formula, but with the poet's appreciation —a man who lives at a time when, if one be not sold over for life to the galleys of the Saturday Evening Post, as Mr Lardner seems 72 MR LARDNER'S AMERICAN CHARACTERS long to have been, it is far easier for an artist to find a hearing than it was in Mark Twain's time. If Mr Lardner has anything more to say, the time has now come for him to say it. He has not even popular glory to gain by pursuing any other course. His popular vein is about worked out; and he has always been too much of an artist to be a really great success as a clown; his books have never sold as well as Irvin Cobb's and Stephen Leacock's. When Sin- clair Lewis, himself a professional writer of comic stories for The Saturday Evening Post, took a chance and composed his sour sa- tire on its readers, even the populace gave him their support—it turned out that the time to write as one felt had already arrived. And if Sinclair Lewis could get so far with Main Street, might not Ring Lardner have at least a chance of luck with what, though it could hardly relieve so much resentment, might come much closer to being a masterpiece? Edmund Wilson A NATIONAL TARGET Grover Cleveland, the Man and the Statesman. By Robert McElroy. i2mo. 786 pages. Harper and Brothers. $10. SINCE the death of Grover Cleveland in 1908, some thirty books have been written about him, but this is surely the last, because there is nothing more to be said. Dr McElroy, who knew his hero during his later days in Princeton, and who has had access to state papers and to the private treasures of the Cleve- land household as well, has pieced together the seventy-one years of a remarkable life, and has succeeded in putting before the world something of that rare personality which Cleveland was at such pains to hide in public. So much of his life was spent in office, however, and so many attacks were made upon him at every step of his career, that Dr McElroy has given up the largest part of his book to a consideration of accomplished reforms and to the atmosphere of battle which surrounded Cleveland during the years when he was both right and president, years when he was the target for unlimited abuse from Civil War veterans, Congress, the Democratic and Republican parties, office seekers, Tammany, Bryan, and the Indians. All candidates for the presidency should read this book. It might not cripple their ambition permanently, but it would give them pause. The slogan with which Governor Bragg of Wisconsin launched the first Cleveland campaign was, "We love him for the enemies he has made." They were legion, and this history becomes the more interesting when we try to discover who was left to stand by Cleveland through one term of office, and how it happened that, though the abuse lasted, the tide turned and brought him back to the White House four years after he had left it. His own comment during his third presidential campaign was, "It's a funny thing for a man to be running for the Presidency with all the politicians against him." It is a still "funnier" thing for a statesman, deserted by the spokesmen of his party, to remain firmly entrenched in his con- 74 A NATIONAL TARGET clusions while the opposite camp adopts his issues and marches to victory with them. To explain these matters, this Life of Grover Cleveland has to be a history of the Democratic party, and as such it is tremendously valuable. It covers the period when the United States gradually turned from the Civil War to face new issues and deal with them as one country. The notorious "Free Silver" question probably did more, in the long run, to override local prejudices and bring men of one mind together than anything except the Great War and the dispute over the League of Nations has done since. But in itself, the silver issue was a Democratic calamity. Cleveland was always against it. He had met one serious financial crisis during his first term, had increased the gold reserve, and had seen his work providentially strengthened by the discovery of the Klondike gold fields. When Bryan rose in the West and demanded in biblical terms that the persecution of silver cease, Cleveland stated the case for the opposition. Even when the Democratic party stampeded after Bryan and something that sounded like making sixteen dollars grow where one had been before, Cleveland stood his ground. The matter became a sad bone of contention, Bryan's very own bone which he refused to bury or drop. It won him the presidential nomination in 1896, but there were some Democrats who believed that where Cleveland was, there was the strength of the party; and the Republicans declared against the silver issue. The ticket split, and Cleveland's views went into office with McKinley, while Cleveland himself retired to Princeton and silence, except for one burst of disgust when the Spanish War, which he had managed to avert and which he considered unwar- ranted, was declared and then prosecuted with reprehensible inef- ficiency. Bryan "retired" too with a cadenced cry: "I have borne the sins of Grover Cleveland!" There must have been some worth-while comment from the retiring president when that temporary valedictory was voiced. He had already called Bryan a demagogue and an insolent crusader, and he disliked what he termed "peanut methods" in politics. The usual order is reversed in Cleveland's case. One snatches an estimate of his personality chiefly through a study of his public life. He had little time to be a private citizen. From his early twenties until his sixtieth year, he was almost continuously in HELEN IVES GILCHRIST 75 office. Before that, in his roles of middle child in a family of nine, son of a half-paid country minister, general roustabout in a grocery, and law clerk, Cleveland seems to have been a silent person whose trait of tenacity was well developed. In later years, the wit which made telling epigrams, the genuine friendliness, and the irascible tender-heartedness of the man, and his quality of taking enmity impersonally, had to display themselves in the midst of a clamour which all but drowned them. I doubt if even Lytton Strachey could have rescued a more complete personal impression of a character under similar circumstances than Dr McElroy has done, though the impression is not entirely satis- fying. Strachey could, no doubt, be more amusing about it, could draw his portrait with lighter strokes. American biographers, with some notable exceptions, are apt to stress the traits which would permit their heroes to fit into a sermon, rather than to give full play to the more intimate personal charm of a man. The sermon qualities were what the public wanted stressed, and perhaps authors still feel the popular judgement hanging over them. Daniel Webster, so the New Hampshire farmers say, once gave his ironic advice to a new young congressman who had made a witty speech in the House: "That won't do, young man. If you want to succeed here, be a solemn ass." Dr McElroy has not made Grover Cleveland either wholly solemn or in the least an ass, but neither Dr McElroy nor any one else often discovered Cleveland enjoying a leisure moment during the more vigorous years of his life. Glimpses of his happier hours are rare, records of his witty comment on people and events are few and tanta- lizing. One wishes Cleveland might have had John Hay for secretary in the days when he "had congress on his hands." Helen Ives Gilchrist PUBLISHING THE ARTIST Younger Artists' Series. Edited by William Murrell. Vol. V: Gus Mager. Vol. VI: Elie Nadelman. 8vo. William M. Fisher, Woodstock, New York. $0.75 each volume. THE artist born into this hard, materialistic epoch finds him- self, after long devotion to his work, and many painful experi- ences with vainglorious exploiters, the most isolated and irrelevant figure in modern life. Indeed the scheme of communication between the creator and the general public has become so devious and unsub- stantial that the man who would enrich a great commonwealth with beautiful objects must exist as a parasite or a prostitute. In nine cases out of ten the American artist, big or little, is a man with- out a public; lonely and insecure, he goes on painting with no recognition whatever except the grudging notice of his confreres or the curious glances of a few habitues of the galleries. The aver- age dealer is a cunning merchant intent upon debasing genuine talent into a commercial possibility; the average collector is an esurient parvenu who bullies or wheedles the painter out of years of toil in order to decorate his personality with a spurious interest in the furtherance of art; the academies are clique-ridden and gov- erned by obscurantists; and the public at large, capable possibly of enthusiastic response and even of intelligent appreciation, remains in ignorance of significant work. While it is true that the opportunities for exhibitions in New York are not beyond the reach of the insistent painter, the attendance at the galleries is so limited, and the politics of advertisement, sales, and critical ap- praisal are so formidable and discouraging, that a long time must elapse before the arrival of any sort of fame; and it is more than likely that this fame will fall to the opportunists and financial successes—to the imitator and the sycophant. In Europe the artist fares decidedly better. He has, of course, his struggles, anxieties, and disappointments; like the American he must fight the academies and compete with the dead; but if he has anything at all to say, he can be reasonably certain, at ma- THOMAS CRAVEN 77 turity, of serious consideration. European taste has not been com- pletely vitiated by the iniquities of journalism and jazz; the Continental mind is more susceptible to spiritual influences, and the intelligent layman understands that the emotional experiences derived from the plastic arts are as necessary to enlightenment as those afforded by literature, music, and the drama. Abroad there is at least a moderate demand for painting; and new talent is welcomed, published, and discussed. As a consequence the Amer- ican artist has suffered from an invasion of foreigners. It is a habit in this country to accept the European label, and native painters of brains and competence have too frequently been subordinated to less distinguished foreigners. Scandinavians, Spaniards, and Frenchmen have come to America with great acclaim, forcing men like Ryder, Eakins, and Twachtman into relative obscurity; and with the advent of modernism, the American market has fairly been swamped with French importations. In view of this condition Mr William M. Fisher has conceived a series of monographs devoted to younger artists. Last year four volumes were published; recently he has added two more titles to his list, and with the exception of Nadelman, has introduced to the public artists who have received practically no attention from the dealers. The idea seems to me most commendable: the mono- graphs are inexpensive and neatly bound, and the reproductions excellently engraved. Mr Fisher has had the wit to realize that books of this nature, to gain popular currency, must not be cum- bersome or costly, and that the best cure for the Philistine is a steady contact with new forms of expression. His series will make it possible for a larger criticism to rest upon the artist's work, and will undoubtedly carry the modernist message into new fields— whether for praise or blame does not greatly matter. Furthermore, those who visit official exhibitions will be puzzled to know why these younger artists have been refused admittance, and will rec- ognize the inadequacy of what passes as representative of con- temporary activity in America. In his latest volumes Mr Fisher has presented his artists without a note of explanation, an idea quite in keeping with the plan of the series which, in a word, is that it is better for the layman to look at pictures and draw his own conclusions than to read con- fusing and inferior criticism. It would also have been advisable 78 PUBLISHING THE ARTIST for Mr Nadelman, an American by adoption and a sculptor of exceptional gifts, to have remained silent about his work. His boastful note that a number of his drawings "introduced into paint- ing and sculpture abstract form," that "Cubism is only an imita- tion of the abstract forms of these drawings," and that these arbitrary outlines "have completely revolutionized the art of our time" is not only incredible, but unworthy of Mr Nadelman, and inconsistent with the general sanity of the series. Thomas Craven THE PRISONER WHO SANG The Prisoner Who Sang.1 By Johan Bojer. i2mo. 295 pages. The Century Company. $2. AMONG practising novelists of to-day Johan Bojer keeps most l resolutely to the method of establishing a definite theme through his material. His novels are concertos. The theme is regularly given out by the hero and sustained through the story against the accompaniment furnished by the background of nature and humanity. The method scarcely varies through the series of novels by which Bojer is known in America. In The Power of a Lie, Knut Norby carries his falsehood through the network of family and local affairs until it becomes a part of himself; in The Great Hunger, Peer Holm through a wider and more various experience seeks to satisfy his soul with God; in The Face of the World, Harold Mark sustains his faith in man, though the world of men gives it the lie. These books represent deep and portentous truths of life which vibrate solemnly in the strings and winds of Bojer's orches- tra. In The Prisoner Who Sang he has chosen a lighter theme, and developed it through a less imposing character. He has momentarily forsaken the muse of tragedy for her of comedy—of the grave serious comedy celebrated by George Meredith. And yet it is tragedy which in the death of Andreas Berget completes the purging of our minds through pity and understanding. There are three ways of meeting a situation: to escape, to stand fast, or to attack. Andreas Berget, face to face with life, chose a combination of the first and third. He would attack, but at the same time, by changing his identity with each new assault he would avoid the consequences of defeat. A poor boy sallying forth from his mountain hut, he impersonated a country store-keeper and re- turned laden with goods on credit which he disbursed to his neigh- bours on trust. Made up to look like an old bank messenger, he got away with a large amount of cash on a forged draft. As a planter from Brazil he entered the family circle of a well-to-do physician as the fiance of his daughter. He pursued these ad- ventures with the zest of the artist. The world was to him plastic 1 Published in The Dial in May and June 1921. 8o THE PRISONER WHO SANG material to be shaped by his hands, his fellows like the stone men of Deucalion needing the creative touch. As a boy he swore suddenly and aloud in the midst of a funeral. "He had been suddenly seized with a desire to present all the mournful faces with a new ex- pression." As a man he sought training as an actor, but acting was only make-believe. "There grew a longing in his soul to act out- side the stage, in the streets, in people's houses, on the highroad, everywhere, to change into incredible persons." The artist's urge of creation was upon him. "There were voices within me clamoring for fresh human shapes, and fresh shapes again; it meant to me steady evolution, a longing for life eternal, life itself." And he felt the necessity of submitting his work to the most searching test. When accused of presenting a false cheque at the bank, he repelled indignantly the charge that he did so to obtain money. "It was done to place my work before the severest of all critics, asking: 'Is it alive? Do you believe in it? Does my art give a complete illusion? Is it true to life?'" By giving bodily form to each of the personalities within him, he increased enormously his area of experience and multiplied his interests. "Closing his eyes at night Andreas saw before him a long procession of persons, created by himself, and everyone of them fleeing before the police. Sometimes he grew anxious on their behalf; he was anxious for their safety." Thus in prison he was not lonely. He was a multitude of persons in himself, with stories and memories appropriate to each. He was never bored. He was the prisoner who sang. As everyone has in him something of this impulse of dissociation, this desire to be more than one person, Andreas becomes a uni- versal type, one of the true conceptions of comedy like Don Juan, Till Eulenspiegel, or Peer Gynt, exceeding common mortals merely by the boldness and resource with which he carries out his theme. But the tragic face peers from behind the comic mask. "He that lives more lives than one More deaths than one must die." It is in this nemesis that Andreas most closely approaches Peer Gynt, whom Bojer certainly had in mind throughout. To Andreas appeared a figure in a dream, as the Button Moulder to Peer, to utter his sentence: "Therefore you shall wander from one shape ROBERT MORSS LOVETT 81 to another eternally. You will be your own everlasting ghost in ever fresh disguises. You will learn everything except sincerity, you will find everything except peace." And as in Peer Gynt the feminine principle of fidelity is represented by Solveig, to whom Peer was impelled to return at last, so in The Prisoner Who Sang it is Sylvia, whom Andreas had jilted by a pretended suicide, who drew him by steady faith and led him to build a new, humble, disinterested self in loving service. But the curse was on him. Again he went forth to divide this new self and juggle its frag- ments. And his only return was in death. Robert Morss Lovett BRIEFER MENTION D. H. Lawrence : An American Interpretation, by Herbert J. Seligmann (i2mo, 77 pages, Seltzer: Cloth $.75, Paper $.25). Seligmann has the rare faculty of ascertaining with nicety the pitches of works of art. Coolly, in a sentence, a phrase, he crystallizes the quality, timbre, and force of the object, the novel, painting, or symphony to which he has been exposed. No piece of critical writing done by him is without some swift perceptions of the sort from which sharply living pictures of things are to be devel- oped; and his monograph on D. H. Lawrence, perhaps the most elaborate writing done by him, parallels momentarily with a closeness that is dazzling the creative gesture of the English agonist. Awakenedness, nervousness, and freedom promise work of a water clearer than that of any he has yet produced. No sense of pitch comes unaccompanied by a sense of flow; and Seligmann, to do finely sustained and ordered prose, has merely to hearken, a little more closely than he has done hitherto, to the rhythm in him in the hour of his excitement. The Hussy, by Boine Grainger (i2mo, 300 pages; Boni & Liveright: $2). Though written in the style of popular fiction, there is much in this book that quite obviously has little to do with what is ephemeral. Miss Boine Grainger is well aware of those intricate problems of sex-psychology that so perplex the young people of our generation. We regret that a book possessing so true an undercurrent of philosophic thinking should be marred by so many colloquialisms and words of banal association. The Interpreter's House, by Struthers Burt (i2mo, 445 pages; Scrib- ner: $2) is stronger upon the technical side than upon the human. Mr Burt, a competent fashioner of short stories, has expanded the lessons learned in that field and applied them to a novel. The result is highly read- able, a plausible picture of the contemporary scene, deft and observant, but lacking in some degree the warmth of deep experience. One shares the author's interest in his characters and participates in his examination of them; one does not, however, live with them. Neither does Mr Burt. The Master Knot, by Henry Harmon Chamberlin (i2mo, 130 pages; Cornhill: $2.50) is a volume of poems of considerable interest. Mr Cham- berlin has a philosophic mind and is able on occasions to put the results of his meditations into striking verse. From an orthodox point of view many of his opinions will doubtless be regarded as heretical and this in spite of the fact that he concurs with the founder of Christianity in believing that in Love alone is the ultimate truth to be found. One particularly appreci- ates Mr Chamberlin's response to nature, the obvious delight he feels in contemplating great blue herons, white gannets, or ell-grass growing on the seashore. Perhaps the least impressive portion of the volume is concerned with Anacreonic verse. BRIEFER MENTION 83 The Best Poems of 1923, edited by L. A. G. Strong (i6mo, 225 pages; Small, Maynard: $2) is an anthology of last year's verse compiled by Mr Strong from his fortunate retreat at Oxford. Mr Strong points out in his introduction how difficult his self-imposed task has been. He assures us, however, that each of the poems he finally selected contained "some life, some thing of the quality which we call 'gesture,' " whatever that singularly unpleasant word may mean. As a collection of verse the small volume cannot be said to be either very impressive or very inspiring. The dullest of all the poems is undoubtedly Mr J. C. Squire's contribution, Another Gen- eration, the commonplace tone, or had we better perhaps say "gesture," of which it would be surely hard to surpass. The most lovely and imaginative piece of work to be found in the volume is a poem entitled Water Moment, by Edmund Blunden. Out of Silence and Other Poems, by Arthur Davison Ficke (i2mo, 116 pages: Knopf: $2). In these poems not "so great as to be prolific of greatness," one perceives a finely attuned ear not slavishly obeyed, a not warped if somewhat winter-starved worldly wisdom, an alert apprecia- tion of the peeled willow-wand aspect of woman, and in its exactness, what is a sometimes exciting portrayal of the sea and the rock-bound coast. From Whitman to Sandburg in American Poetry: A Critical Survey, by Bruce Weirick (i2mo, 245 pages; Macmillan: $2) sounds an encour- agingly free and enthusiastic note in the confines of academic appreciation. From his whole-hearted admiration of Whitman the author derives tenets which limit the natural catholicity of his taste; but if his rating of con- temporary poets is frequently injudicious, it is based frankly on prejudice and not loaded with the weight of erudite condemnation. ' Essays on Poetry, by J. C. Squire (i2mo, 228 pages; Doran: $2.50). We have for a long time given up expecting to read anything very original or very distinguished from Mr Squire's pen. He is a kind of Prof. Saintsbury of the Georgian poets, orthodox, conscientious, and very tame. The most interesting essay in this particular collection is the piece on Edmund Blunden's poetry. Here one comes upon passages full of feeling for rural scenes, passages of true beauty no longer written in that swift thin style which seems to belong to the pencraft of this harassed editor. St Francis of Assisi, by Gilbert K. Chesterton (i2mo, 234 pages; Doran: $1.25) is another attempt to capitalize the reaction against modernism. Chesterton is an old hand at the game: remembering Shaw's Saint Joan, he has selected a much easier saint, and has presented his subject in terms of mediaeval joy. St Francis, of course, is treated paradoxically—as a man with a physical passion for an ascetic ideal. The book, on the whole, is thin and unimportant; it is often amusing, but more often tire- some; it is written in a bluff, slovenly manner, and has no respect for historical accuracy. Chesterton is much too materialistic to understand saints—he should leave them to the artists. 84 BRIEFER MENTION The Diary of Otto Braun, with Selections from his Letters and Poems, edited by Julie Vogelstein, translated by Ella Winter, poetry translated by F. W. Stella Browne (i2mo, 363 pages; Knopf: $3.50) is unique among the literary memorials of gifted youths fallen in the war. His was a mind comparable in type, scope, and intent to Leonardo's and Goethe's. In these unstudied fragments we see and marvel at the prepa- ration. Most amazing is the boy's consciousness of a focal point within himself, with reference to which he directed his development, organizing from the mass of his interests a centralized body of knowledge. Critical acumen, amounting to genius, made his receptivity constructive, and gives to this book, not the sensationalism of premature learning, but the im- pressiveness of wisdom that is innate and transcends finite years. There is the mark also of spiritual strength and grace that found in constant growth continual fulfilment and that cannot fail to affect by its beauty every reader of this book. Salvos, An Informal Book about Books and Plays, by Waldo Frank (i2mo, 286 pages; Boni & Liveright: $2.50). This is a collection of miscellaneous papers written between 1916 and 1924. One may call Mr Frank a mystic, since he relates everything which attracts his attention to an almost grandiose scheme of cosmic energies. One receives from his mind an impression of prodigal warmth and tumultuous animation, and he never relaxes into the vulgarity of being bored. But his use of our language is so adventurous that his comments too often seem turgid rather than precise. In his striving after a vital novelty of style, there is repeatedly a suggestion of whimsicality or clownishness which contradicts the pas- sionate sobriety of his convictions. A rigorous study of the mechanics of expression, choosing as his ideal exactness of expression, would make him a more powerful critic. Hellenistic Philosophies, by Paul Elmer More (i2mo, 385 pages; Princeton University Press: $3) is the second of the four volumes in which he will attempt to summarize, and arrange, our Greek inheri- tance, with the aim of finding not so much a philosophy as a religion in the ruins. Though Christian and a Platonist, he resembles Julian the Apostate in this purpose, and discusses him with a little sympathy toward the end of the present volume. The longest of his chapters are devoted to the Sceptics and to Plotinus. His style is a little too arid to be widely read, but the calm and disinterestedness of his views render him a much more important figure than his many and curiously hysterical detractors. Many Minds, by Carl Van Doren (i2mo, 242 pages; Knopf: $2). Mr Carl Van Doren is one of the most valuable critics writing in America to-day. He is not easily thrown off his balance. He is competent to pass sound judgement upon the works of any of his contemporaries, from Theo- dore Dreiser to Stuart P. Sherman, from Edna St Vincent Millay to Mary Austin. His mind is academic, but at the same time liberal, a most rare and useful combination. Possibly the most valuable essay in the collec- tion is the one entitled Smartness and Light, in which Mr Van Doren analyses and estimates Mr Mencken's literary achievements. BRIEFER MENTION 85 Episodes Before Thirty, by Algernon Blackwood (8vo, 348 pages; Dutton: $3) is a vivid adventure in autobiography; Mr Blackwood has never written a better novel. There is an element of suspense in these pages which makes one forget that these are experiences viewed in retrospect; the author relives his Canadian and American years with a full apprecia- tion of their dramatic values—as a good novelist should. The book is packed with impressions and with people—all fascinatingly alive; Mr Blackwood has not permitted the years to dim the outline of events, and if he has at times touched up the features of remembered yesterdays, one does not begrudge him the privilege. The result is as absorbing as it is artistic. Henry Brocken, His Travels and Adventures in the Bich, Strange, Scarce- Imaginable Begions of Bomance, by Walter de la Mare (i2mo, 223 pages; Knopf: $2). Henry Brocken is an early composition, now re- vised and reissued. The protagonist wanders out of time and space to visit Jane Eyre, La Belle Dame, Gulliver, Atheist, "and other heroes of that kidney." The flower-perfect prose delights and cloys. One must be able to be nourished by mere perfume and ripe contours if one is to receive nourishment from books of this type. In the boat in which Henry Brocken voyages dimly on the last page are "an oozing honeycomb, ashy fruits, a few branches of drooping leaves, closing flowers, and solitary on the thwart the wraith of life's unquiet dream;" and in the book is little else. American Social History as Becorded by British Travellers, com- piled and edited by Allan Nevins (8vo, 577 pages; Holt: $4) is an extremely interesting book, a record so varied, of things so interesting, that it can be read continuously or kept by the bed-side. The work is well done, the selection of quotations excellent, and the introductions are bright and useful. One turns first to Mrs Trollope and to Dickens (of the latter the choice is wisely not from the American Notes) and later finds that the two Halls and Gratton and James Silk Buckingham are as entertaining, that Herbert Spencer is wise and the younger Trollope fair. The book admirably combines two qualities: it describes the English attitude toward America and it re-creates America for many of us who are not fully aware of the fact that by 1818 the town of Pittsburgh was enveloped in smoke and America as we know it to-day was coming into being. American Problems, by William E. Borah (i2mo, 329 pages; Duffield: $2) is valuable chiefly for its elucidations of some of the national problems which we all know by name and on which we involuntarily take sides. Senator Borah leaves no doubt of his own stand, but he does, invariably, state the case clearly first, leaving the reader free to disagree with the conclusions drawn from it. The longest and most interesting of the speeches deals with the recognition of Bussia. The detailed comparison of the Bussian with the French revolution is especially good. One could well dispense with some of the purely oratorical devices of the book, but much of it has a more than transient interest. COMMENT WHEREAS the late Theodore Roosevelt, after Egypt, was so unconscionably the late Theodore Roosevelt as to get, and up to his ears, into notably hot water, for expressing Yankee notions as to how, when, and why God and the British Empire [in the agreeable person of His Most Excellent Majesty, Edward the Seventh, by the Grace of God King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British Dominions beyond the Seas, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India (sic) ] could and did (if King Arthurly) err—whereas he in this manner did get exactly into a peck of trouble, we have thought thirty-two times (as we are informed was the appealing habit of William Ewart Glad- stone) before speaking softly. We have privately opined that our recent excursion to that wholly honourable and most lawfully gov- erned Atlantic archipelago known as the Bermudas and duly owing and paying expedient fealty to the gentlemanly sire of that hard- riding poppet of our Republican Sunday Papers, His Royal High- ness, The Prince of Wales—we have privately opined that the privacy of the said excursion might, so to speak, license the mouse, that well-meant criticism (criticism, dear readers, is always "well- meant") of a, we are aware, negligible detail in the functioning of an Empire supreme might be uttered blankly. Previously to the recent unhappy disclosures in Washington we had gone about our daily task illuminated by the quickening consciousness that the naval ratio was (as Mr Harding had wished it) 5-5-3. And, as for 5 against 5, well, we of The Dial had always felt strongly about John Paul Jones. Now, as things stand at the moment, we suppose we must each of us reckon with Horatio Nelson and all that, you know. Nothing, you may well believe us, lies farther from our desires than to be the occasion for the introduction into New York Harbour1 (we sit, here in Thirteenth Street, scarcely a George Washington's Stone's Throw from the, so far as we know, quite Adam and Evely exposed Hudson) into New York Harbour, we were saying, of the entire Royal Navy. We do not desire their 1 Please note the pacific spelling. COMMENT 87 Long Toms buffeting about our already quite sufficiently buffeted about ears. Yet we speak, truly. I had repaired to the Coral Archipelago p.o.m. Amongst other more primarily coralline products, I required fresh milk, butter, and eggs. These not inessential incidentals I found to be, upon this crescent-flung Archipelago (perhaps from a lack of acumen on my own part, or from a lack of resolution, or from I know not what other cardinal invalid's virtue; perhaps indeed from a native de- ficiency in that bull-dog stickativeness which, I am informed, Eng- land expects, correctly, every British invalid to muster) not come- at-able. Air without food being a battle lost anyhow (and the weather being—well, as Bermuda weather is) I withdrew to musty and to mope in The Sessions House of Hamilton, Bermuda. The Supreme Court of Bermuda, at Easter Term, sat. The Chief Jus- tice, His Honour, K. J. Beatty recalled in name the Navy which lowered gleamingly on lucent waters before us. In physiognomy, and indeed in face and figure, he immediately suggested the Doge Giovanni Mocenigo of Gentile Bellini. But if we are to be exact (and that is, at least in these paragraphs, our intention) we must state that the resemblance to the German actor who played the role of the judge in the court scene of The Merchant of Venice in the Reinhardt production of that play in August 1910 in the Kiinstler- Theater in Munich (said German actor evidently being made up after the portrait in question)—that the resemblance to that dried mummer's mask was even more frappant. I suppose the point is, the Doge Giovanni Mocenigo of Venice was not reflecting upon the fact that he looked like the Doge Giovanni Mocenigo of Venice when he was sitting for Gentile Bellini. The aquilinity and dryness of the physiognomy were further picked out and differentiated from the honest-planter and groping-black faces about him by the affixa- tion upon his nose of a peculiarly light ambergris shade of horn-rim spectacles, and upon his finely moulded skull of a white frizzle-wig, too small. The Case of the King against Daisy Sodagreen. In the dock stood a somewhat Great War Poster embodiment of motherhood—hatchet-faced, gaunt, and a bit Woodrow Wilson about the jaw. Her clothes were aggressively genteel rags. Beside 88 COMMENT her sat the Daisy Sodagreen whom the court crier had so authorita- tively pitted against a Blameless King. This young woman had been dragged in sobbing and fluttering convulsively. Her head was below the normal size. She, like the judge, wore a wig. Hers, on the other hand, appeared to be too large. It kept slipping off. Her hands and arms stuck out before her as do the fore-paws of a kangaroo. These hands pattered up and down continuously. Her garments were not dissimilar to those worn by the elder woman. The Attorney General, a sympathetic Lionel Barrymore in The Red Robe appearing Britisher, called witnesses for the Crown. These testified that the younger woman, by intermittent hysterical shrieking, had made her neighbourhood unlivable. A physician was called for the defence. He stated and showed that the woman in question was abnormal, "hopelessly so"; that she suffered, among other things, from hysteria, and from palsy and chorea (the latter, the scientific term for St Vitus' Dance). This woman had, the whiles, become more and more agitated: she was now moving her arms mechanically, and moaning and sobbing in a very symphonic and, at the same time, restrained crescendo. Chief Justice Beatty: "Even though she is suffering from some neurotic complaint I see no reason why she should give way to these bursts of shrieking." The Physician: "But that is chorea, your Honour." Whereupon the woman cried out, in a sharp, but not loud falsetto, "I can't help it." The Judge observed, at once blandly and bleakly, "I see no occasion to make that noise." Then, a little later (perhaps by what is called Vesprit de Vescalier): "Why not get an island to your- self?" And, immediately thereafter, feeling perhaps that this wit (which had occasioned several good-hearted guffaws upon the part of the blacks) was, after all, not wholly in place beneath the Lion and the Unicorn and the Cross, all of which were suspended, in a dignified manner, above his head, The Learned Judge steadied the court with a more considered, with a more solid deliverance. This he addressed to the mother, as being perhaps a more legitimately serious subject: "I'm quite certain that this daughter of yours, that she doesn't try to control herself at all." The twelve men of the jury, being black and white, being good men and true, rendered the verdict—Guilty. Chief Justice K. J. Beatty put on his glasses and wig (the heat and tightness had COMMENT 89 carried off only an inconsiderable triumph) and pronounced sen- tence. Said Daisy Sodagreen should continue unjailed, by the spe- cial clemency of His Majesty's Court, until she should again offend by raising her voice. Should she not practise the customary control over that sometimes regrettably antisocial organ, she must suffer condign punishment. An inapposite corkscrew sob-shriek from said delinquent. "The Court adjourns until two o'clock." I arrived in New York to learn that there had just been conferred upon Professor Sigmund Freud the freedom of the City of Vienna. In the back parts of our esteemed contemporary, The Adelphi, of London, children and readers of The Adelphi discover, amid glee, a little monthly problem. I quote: "Problem No. 12: A labourer is working at the corner of a ploughed field 200 yards long and 120 yards broad. There is an inn at the opposite corner. One minute before closing time he realizes that he is thirsty; he can run at 10 miles per hour along the grass at the side of the field and at 8 miles per hour across the furrows. Can he obtain the drink? "Answer to problem No. 11: £1,362,160,800." That the children of our Dial subscribers may also know glee, that they also may grow up to take an interest in this great, modern, problematical, world of ours, we, glad to pick a leaf from The Adelphi's rich proliferation, we also posit a problem: How many years does a fact require to pass from Berggasse 19, Vienna, Austria, Europe, to the head of Chief Justice K. J. Beatty situate pro tem. in Hamilton, Bermuda, the Atlantic Ocean? But why drag in Freud? 1 "Eine jede krankheit hat ihre eigne Artzney; dann Gott wil wunderbarlich mit den kranken gesehen werden: Al s nemlich in de krankheit des Fallende siechtags/in dem Gehen schlag/in St. Veitstanz/in alien anderen/nit not hie zumelden. Dann Gott ist der da geboten hat/du sollst den Nechsten lieben/als dich selbst und Gott lieben/so mustu auch seine iverck lieben: Wiltu deinen 1 Paracelsus, Das Buch Paragranum, die erste Defension, Basel, 1584, p. 162. 9o COMMENT Nechsten lieben/so mustu nit sagen/dir ist nit zu helfen/Sondern du must sagen/ich kann es nicht/und verstehe es nicht." Problem II: How many centuries does a fact require to pass from Basel, Switzerland, 1584, to the head of Chief Justice K. J. Beatty situate pro tem, in Hamilton, Bermuda, the Atlantic Ocean? By the bye, could some kind person page Voltaire? . J§fc' < Cm n w w a u o M < THE DIAL AUGUST 1924 THE WISDOM OF AVICENNA A Dialogue in Limbo BY G. SANTAYANA THE Spirit of a Stranger Still Living on Earth: To- day you smile, renowned Avicenna. Do you encourage me to approach? Or am I warned that I should be disturbing the sweeter society of your thoughts? The Shade of Avicenna: Neither, yet both. I was smiling at those old feats of lustiness and prowess which I was recounting —and with rare pleasure—when you were last here. The Stranger: It was a rare pleasure to listen. Avicenna: Doubtless a purer pleasure to listen to such exploits than to remember them. I pine