s as having different literary qualities. They
stir my interest by their appropriateness to the men I imagine
myself to be, or by their accurate description of some emotional
circumstance, more than by any aesthetic value. When I begin
to write I have no object but to find for them some natural speech,
rhythm, and syntax, and to set it out in some pattern, so seeming
old that it may seem all men's speech, and though the labour is
very great, I seem to have used no faculty peculiar to myself,
certainly no special gift. I print the poem and never hear about
it again, until I find the book, years after it may be, with a page
dog-eared by some young man, or marked by some young girl with
a violet, and when I have seen that I am a little ashamed, as
though somebody were to attribute to me a delicacy of feeling I
should, but do not possess. What came so easily at first, and
amidst so much drama, and was written so laboriously at the last,
cannot be counted among my possessions.
On the other hand if I give a successful lecture, or write a
vigorous, critical essay, there is immediate effect; I am confident
that on some one point which seems to me of great importance,
I know more than other men, and I covet honour.


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS 183
■
HI
Ten days pass and a telephone message late at night from a
newspaper, and a few minutes later a telegram from the Swedish
Minister in London tell me that I have been given the prize.
Then comes a letter from the Swedish Minister to tell me that
I should be at Stockholm upon December 10th and a letter from
the Academy to say that I may if I prefer, have medal, money,
and diploma sent to me in Ireland.
I question booksellers in vain for some history of Sweden, or
Swedish Literature. Even Mr Gosse's Northern Studies which
I read twenty years ago is out of print, and among my own books
there is nothing but the life of Swedenborg, which contains photo-
graphs of Swedenborg's garden and garden-house, and of the
Stockholm House of Nobles built in Dutch style, and beautiful
with an ornament that never insists upon itself, and a dignity
that has no pomp. It had housed in Swedenborg's day that
Upper Chamber of the Swedish Parliament where he had voted
and spoken upon finance after the ennoblement of his family.
IV
My wife and I leave Harwich for Esbjerg in Denmark, on the
night of December 6th, and find our alarms were needless, for
the sea is still and the air warm. The Danish steamboat is about
the size of the Dublin-Holyhead Mailboat, but the cabins are
panelled in pale birchwood, and when we sit down to supper the
table is covered by an astonishing variety of cold food, most of
which we refuse because we do not recognize it, and some, such as
eels in jelly, because we do. Our companions are commercial
travellers and presently we are known, for somebody has a
newspaper with my portrait, and a man who has travelled in
Ireland for an exporter of Danish agricultural machinery talks
to us at dinner. He was in Munster for the first part of our Civil
War, and had, when the trains were stopped, found himself in
great difficulties, and during parts of his journey, that his motor
might escape capture by the insurgents, had moved at breakneck
speed, but our Civil War was no part of his business and had not
stirred his imagination. He had however discovered a defect in
Irish agriculture that was very much a part. Through lack of


184 THE BOUNTY OF SWEDEN
warm winter sheds and proper winter food for cattle the Irish
farmers had no winter butter, and so Ireland must import butter
from his country. Though, as he said, against Danish interests,
he had pointed this out to Irish farmers. "'But you have a govern-
ment,' they said, 'which looks after these things.'" And now
he became really excited—" 'Put that idea out of your heads,' I
told them, 'it was ourselves that looked after these things, our
Government had nothing to do with it.'"
He asked me why the Irish had so little self-reliance and wanted
the Government to do everything, and I said—"Were the Danes
always self-reliant?" and after a moment's thought he answered—
"Not till the Bishop established his Schools; we owe every-
thing to his High Schools." I knew something of Bishop Grunt-
vig and his Schools, for I often heard A. E. or some other at
Plunkett House tell how he educated Denmark by making exami-
nations almost nothing, and the personality of the teacher almost
everything, and rousing the imagination with Danish Literature
and History. "What our peasants need," he had said, "is not tech-
nical training, but mental."
As we draw near our journey's end an elderly Swede comes to
say "good-bye" and he kisses my wife's hand, bending very low,
and the moment he is out of earshot the Danish commercial travel-
ler says with a disgusted voice, "No Dane would do that. The
Swedes are always imitating the French." I saw that he did not
like Swedes, and I asked what he thought of Norwegians.
"Rough," he said, "and they want everything, they want Green-
land now."
At Esbjerg I find a young man, a distinguished Danish poet,
sent by a Copenhagen newspaper, and he and I and my wife dine
together. At Copenhagen journalists meet us at the railway station
and others at the Hotel. When I am asked about Ireland I
answer always that if the British Empire becomes a voluntary
Federation of Free Nations, all will be well, but if it remains as
in the past, a domination of one, the Irish Question is not yet
settled. That done with, I can talk of the work of my generation
in Ireland, the creation of a literature to express National char-
acter and feeling, but with no deliberate political aim. A jour-


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS 185
nalist who has lived in Finland says—"Finland has had to struggle
with Russian influence to preserve its national culture." I ask
many questions and one journalist says—"Oh, Denmark is well-
educated, and education can reach everybody, as education cannot
in big nations like England and America." And he goes on to
say that in Denmark "You may dine at some Professor's house
and find that you are sitting next your housemaid who is among
his favourite pupils, and next morning she will be your house-
maid again, and too well-educated to presume or step out of her
place." Another, however, a very distinguished man, will have
it that it is all wrong, "for people who should hardly know what
a book is now read books, and even write them. The High Schools
have made the intellect of Denmark sentimental." A little later
he says, "We may have a Socialist Government one of these days,"
and I begin to wonder what Denmark will make of that mechanical
eighteenth century dream; we know what Russia has made of it.
Another Dane speaks of the Danish Royal Family as "bourgeois
and sporting, like the English." But he says, when I ask about
the Royal Family of Sweden, "Oh, such educated and intelligent
people." It is he I think who first tells me of Prince Eugene,
friend and patron of Swedish artists, and himself an accomplished
painter, who had helped to decorate the Stockholm City Hall,
"beginning every day at 9 o'clock, and working all day like the
rest, and for two years." And how at the opening ceremony "he
had not stood among the Royal Family, but among the artists and
workmen," and that it was he who saw to it "that every artist
was given freedom to create as he would." Another spoke much
of Strindberg, and though he called him "the Shakespeare of
Sweden," seemed to approve the Swedish Academy's refusal of
recognition. "They could not endure his quarrels with his friends,
or that astonishing book about his first wife."
A train-ferry brings us across some eighteen miles of sea, and
so into Sweden, and while we are waiting for the train to start
again I see through a carriage window many faces, but it is only
when a Swedish interviewer says just as the train starts, for there
are interviewers here also, "Did you not see all those people gazing
at the Nobel Prize Winner?" that I connect those faces with
myself. Away from the lights of the station it is too dark to see
anything, but when the dawn breaks, we are passing through a
forest.


186 THE BOUNTY OF SWEDEN
VI
At the Stockholm station a man introduces himself, and reminds
me that I met him in Paris thirty years ago, and asks me to read
a pamphlet which he has written in English upon Strindberg, and
especially a chapter called Strindberg and the Wolves. The
pamphlet comes to the Hotel a couple of days later, and turns out
to be an attack upon the Swedish Academy, and an ardent defence
of Strindberg. That outrageous, powerful book about his first wife
is excused on the grounds that it was not written for publication,
and was published by an accident. He describes Strindberg dressed
up according to the taste of one or other of his wives "With cuffs
upon his pantaloons" which means I imagine, that like Mr Pruf-
rock "He wore the bottom of his trousers rolled." I had met the
writer of this pamphlet in the rooms of an American artist who
was of Strindberg's Paris circle, and it was probably there that
I heard for the first time of stage scenery that might decorate a
stage, and suggest a scene, while attempting nothing that an easel
painting can do better. I am pleased to think that something of
it may have come from Strindberg whom I seem to remember as
a big silent man; for I have always felt a sympathy for that tor-
tured, self-torturing man who offered himself to his own soul as
Buddha offered himself to the famishing tiger. He and his circle
were preoccupied with the deepest problems of mankind. He him-
self, at the time I speak of, was seeking with the Furnace and the
Athanor for the Philosopher's Stone.
At my Hotel I find a letter from another of the circle whom I
remember as a fair girl, like a willow, beginning with the sen-
tence:—"God's blessing be upon your wife and yourself through
the many holy men and women of this land."
VII
The Diplomas and Medals are to be given us by the King at
five in the afternoon of December loth. The American Ambas-
sador, who is to receive those for an American man of science who
is not present, and half-a-dozen men of various nations including
myself sit upon the platform. In the body of the Hall every seat
is full, and all there are in evening dress, and in the front row of


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS 187
seats arc the King, Princess Ingeborg, wife of the King's brother,
Prince Wilhelm, Princess Margarita, and I think another Royalty.
The President of the Swedish Academy speaks first, and I
see from the way he stands, from his self-possession, and from his
rhythmical utterance, that he is an experienced orator. I
study the face of the King, intelligent and friendly, like some
country gentleman who can quote Horace and Catullus, and the
face of the Princess Margarita, full of subtle beauty, emotional
and precise and impassive, with a still intensity suggesting that
final consummate strength which rounds the spiral of the shell.
One finds a similar beauty in wooden busts taken from Egyptian
tombs of the eighteenth dynasty, and then not again until Gains-
borough paints it. Is it very ancient and very modern alone, or
did painter and sculptor cease to notice it until our own day?
The American Ambassador goes towards the King, descends
from the platform by some five or six steps which end a yard
from the King's feet, and having received the Diploma and Medal,
ascends those five or six steps walking backwards. He does not
go completely backwards, but sideways, and seems to show great
practice. Then there is music, and a man of science repeats the
movement, imitating the Ambassador exactly and easily, for he
is young and agile, and then more music and two men of science
go down the steps side by side, for they have made discoveries that
are related to one another, and the Prize is divided between them.
As it would be impossible for two men to go up backward, side by
side, without much practice, one repeats the slanting movement,
and the other turns his back on Royalty. Then the English Ambas-
sador receives Diplomas and Medals for two Canadians, but as he
comes from the body of the Hall he has no steps to go up and
down. Then more music, and my turn comes. When the King
has given me my Medal and Diploma and said, "I thank you for
coming yourself," and I have bowed my thanks, I glance for a
moment at the face of the Princess Margarita and move back-
wards towards the stair. As I am about to step sideways like the
others, I notice that the carpet is not nailed down, and this sud-
denly concentrates my attention upon the two parallel lines made
by the two edges of the carpet, and—as though I were hypnotized—
I feel that I must move between them and so straight up back-
ward without any sidelong movement. It seems to me that I am a


188 THE BOUNTY OF SWEDEN
long time reaching the top, and as the cheering grows much louder
when I get there, I must have the sympathy of the audience.
All is over, and I am able to examine my Medal, its charming,
decorative, academic design, French in manner, the work of the
'nineties. It shows a young man listening to the Muse who stands
3'oung and beautiful with a great lyre in her hand, and I think
when I look at it, "I was good-looking once like that young man,
but my unpractised verse was full of infirmity, my Muse old as it
were, and now I am old and rheumatic, and nothing to look at, but
my Muse is young. I am even persuaded that she is like those
Angels who in Swedenborg's vision move perpetually 'towards the
day spring of their youth.'"
At night there is a banquet, and when my turn comes, I speak
of Swedenborg, Strindberg, and Ibsen. Then a very beautiful
stately woman introduces herself with this sentence, speaking
slowly as though English were unfamiliar: "What is this new
religion they are making up in Paris, that is all about the dead?"
I wonder who has told her that I know anything of psychical
research, for it must be of that she speaks, and I tell her of my
own studies. We are going to change the thought of the world,
I say, to bring it back to all the old truths, but I dread the future.
Think what the people have made of the political thought of the
eighteenth century, and now we must offer them a new fanaticism.
Then I stop ashamed, for I am talking habitual thoughts, and
not adapting them to her ear, forgetting beauty in the pursuit of
truth, and I wonder if age has made my mind rigid and heavy. I
deliberately falter as though I could think of nothing more to say,
that she may pass upon her smiling road.
VIII
Next day is the entrance of the new Crown Princess, and my wife
and I watch it, now from the Hotel window, now from the quay-
side. Stockholm is almost as much channelled by the sea as
Venice and with an architecture as impressive as that of Paris,
or of London, it has a finer situation than either. It seems to
shelter itself under the walls of a great palace, begun at the end
of the seventeenth century. We come very slowly to realize that
this building may deserve its great architectural reputation. The


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS 189
windows, the details of the ornaments, are in a style that has spread
everywhere, and I cannot escape from memories of houses at Queens
Gate, and even it may be from that of the Ulster Bank at Sligo
which I have hardly seen since my childhood. Is it not indeed
a glory and shame of that architecture that we have been able to
combine its elements in all sorts of ways, and for all sorts of
purposes, as if they had come out of a child's box of wooden
bricks? Among all these irrelevant associations, however, one
discovers at last a vast, dominating, unconfused outline—a mas-
terful simplicity. The Palace is at the other side of the river,
and away towards our left runs the river bordered by tall build-
ings, and above the roofs of the houses towards our right rises
the tower of the new City Hall, the glittering pole upon the top
sustaining the three crowns of the Swedish arms. Copenhagen is
an anarchy of commercial streets with fine buildings here and there,
but here all seems premeditated and arranged.
Everywhere there are poles with flags, and at the moment when
the Crown Prince and Princess leave the railway station for the
Palace, the salvos of artillery begin. After every salvo there are
echoes, and I feel a quickening of the pulse, an instinctive alarm.
I remember firing in Dublin last winter, the sudden noise that
drew like echoes from the streets. I have to remind myself that
these cannons are fired out of gaiety and good-will. There are
great crowds, and I get the impression of a family surrounded
by loyalty and affection.
IX
The next night there is a reception at the Palace, and the Nobel
prize winners are among the guests. We wait in a long gallery for
our turn to enter the Throne-room, and upon the black coats
of civilians, as upon the grey and silver of the Guards, lie the
chains of the three Swedish orders. Among the black-coated men
are men of learning, men of letters, men of science, much of the
intellect of Sweden. What model has made all this one wonders—
Goethe's Weimar, or Sweden's own eighteenth century court?
There may be, must be, faults of commission or omission, but where
else could a like assembly be gathered? I who have never seen a
court find myself before the evening is ended moved as if by


190 THE BOUNTY OF SWEDEN
some religious ceremony, though to a different end, for here it
is Life herself that is praised. Presently we walk through lines
of sentries in the costume of Charles XII, the last of Sweden's
great military Kings, and then we bow as we pass rapidly before the
tall seated figures of the Royal Family. They seem like stage
Royalties. Just such handsome men and women would have been
chosen by a London manager staging, let us say, some dramatized
version of The Prisoner of Zenda. One has a general impression
of youthful distinction, even the tall slight figure of the old King
seems young. Then we pass through the Throne-room into a vast
hall hung with Gobelin tapestries, which seem in the distance to rep-
resent scenes like those in a Watteau, a Lancret, or a Pater. Their
green colour by contrast turns the marble pillars above into a dusky
silver. At the end of the hall musicians are sitting in a high
marble gallery, and in the side galleries are women in white dresses,
many very young and handsome. Others upon the level of the
floor sit grouped together making patches of white among the
brilliant uniforms and the black coats. We are shepherded to our
places and the musicians play much Swedish music which I cannot
describe for I know nothing of music. During the first long wait
all kinds of pictures had passed before me in reverie, and now
my imagination renews its excitement. I had thought how we
Irish had served famous men and famous families, and had been,
so long as our nation had intellect enough to shape anything of
itself, good lovers of women, but had never served any abstract
cause except the one, and that we personified by a woman, and I
wondered if the service of a woman could be so different from that
of a court. I had thought how before the emigration of our poor
began, our gentlemen had gone all over Europe, offering their
swords at every court, and that many had stood just as I, but
with an anxiety I could but imagine, for their future hung upon
a frown or a smile. I had run through old family fables and
histories to find if any man of my family had so stood, and had
thought that there are men living, meant by nature for that vicissi-
tude, who had served a woman through all folly because they
had found no court to serve. Then my memory had gone back
twenty years to a summer when a friend read out to me at the
end of each day's work Castiglione's commendations and descrip-
tions of that Court of Urbino where vouth for certain brief


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS 191
years imposed upon drowsy learning the discipline of its joy,
and I remembered a cry of Bembo's made years after: "Would
that I were a shepherd that I might look down daily upon
Urbino." I had repeated to myself what I could remember of
Ben Jonson's address to the Court of his time: "Thou art a beau-
tiful and brave spring and waterest all the noble plants of this
Island. In thee the whole Kingdom dresseth itself, and is am-
bitious to use thee as her glass. Beware thou then render men's
figures truly and teach them no less to hate their deformities than
to love their forms . . . thy servant but not slave, Ben Jonson."
And now I begin to imagine some equivalent gathering to that about
me, called together by the heads of some State where every
democratic dream could be fulfilled, and where all men had
started level, and only merit, acknowledged by all the people,
ruled. The majority of governing men and women, certainly all
who had supreme authority, would have reached that age when an
English novelist becomes eligible for the Order of Merit. Times
of disturbance might indeed carry into power some man of com-
parative youth, a man of fifty years perhaps, but I think of normal
times. Here and there one would notice their sons and daughters,
perhaps even their more dutiful grandsons and grand-daughters,
even a timid protege perhaps, but in the eyes of these younger
persons, though not in their conversation, an acute observer might
discover disquiet and a restless longing for the moment when they
could slip away to some night-club's compensating anarchy. In
the conversation of old and young there would be much sarcasm,
great numbers of those tales which we all tell to one another's
disadvantage, the wit of exasperation and attack, for all would
display to others' envy the trophies won in a struggle where alt
fight for party or for self.
Then suddenly my thought runs off to that old Gaelic poem
made by the nuns of Iona. A Swedish or Danish ship had been
cast on the rocks, and all Royalties on board had perished but
one baby. The nuns all mothered the baby, and their cradle-song,
famous for generations after, repeated over and over—praising in
symbol every great man's child, every tested long-enduring stock—
"Daughter of a Queen, grand-daughter of a Queen, great grand-
daughter of a Queen, great great grand-daughter of a Queen."
Nature always extravagant, scattering much to find a little, has


192 THE BOUNTY OF SWEDEN
found no means but hereditary position for sustaining the courage
of those who have not yet started upon the race and are cowed by
the authority of those who lie wearied at the goal. Perhaps indeed
she created the family with no other object and may even now mock
in her secret way our new ideals—equality of man, equality of
rights—meditating some wholly different end. Certainly her old
arrangement, in all pursuits that gain from youth's recurring sway,
or from its training in earliest childhood, surpassed what begins
to be a world of old men. The politic Tudor Kings, and the
masterful descendants of Gustavus Vasa were as able as the Amer-
ican Presidents, and better educated, and the artistic genius of
old Japan continually renewed itself through Dynasties of Painters.
The descendants of Kanoka made all that was greatest in the art
of their country from the ninth to the eleventh century, and then
it but passed to other Dynasties, in whom as Mr Binyon says, "The
flower of genius was being continually renewed and revived in the
course of many generations." How serene their art, no exaspera-
tion, no academic tyranny, its tradition as naturally observed as
the laws of a game or a dance. Nor has our individualistic age
wholly triumphed in Japan even yet, for it is a few years since
a famous player published in his programme his genealogy, running
back through famous players of the Middle Ages; and one day
at the British Museum Print Room I saw a Japanese at a great
table judging Chinese and Japanese pictures. "He is one of the
greatest living authorities," I was told, "the Mikado's hereditary
connoisseur. The fourteenth of his family to hold the post."
May it not be possible that the use of the mask in acting,
and the omission from painting of the cast shadow, by making
observation and experience of life less important, and imagination
and tradition more, made the arts transmittable and teachable?
But my thoughts have carried me far away.
Near me stands a man who is moved also by the spectacle of
the Court, but to a Jacobin frenzy. Swede, Englishman, American,
German, what does it matter seeing that his frenzy is international?
I had spoken to him earlier in the day and found htm a friendly,
even perhaps cultivated man, and certainly not the kind of man


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS 193
who is deliberately rude; but now he imagines that an attempt has
been made to impose upon him. He speaks his thoughts aloud,
silenced occasionally by the music, but persistent in the intervals.
While waiting to enter the Throne-room he had been anxious
to demonstrate that he was there by accident, drifting irresponsibly,
no way implicated, as it were, and so sang from time to time a
little catch "I am here because I am here," had commented abun-
dantly upon all he saw, "The smaller the Nation, the grander
the uniform. . . . Well—they never got those decorations in
war," and so on. He was certain that the breastplates of the sen-
tries were made of tin, but added with a meditative voice, as though
anxious to be fair, "The breastplates of the English Horse Guards
are also made of tin." As we came through the Throne-room I
had heard him say—"One of the Royalty smiled, they consider us
as ridiculous," and I had commented, entangled in my dream,
"We are ridiculous, we are the learned at whom the little boys
laugh in the streets." And now when at a pause in the music, the
Queen passes down the great Hall, pages holding her train, he
says in the same loud voice as before, "Well a man has not
to suffer that indignity," and then upbraids all forms of ceremony
and repeats an incident of his school life to demonstrate his dis-
taste for Bishops.
As I leave the Palace, a man wearing orders stops for a moment
to say, "I am the Headmaster of a big school. I was the Prince's
tutor, and I am his friend."
XI
For the next two or three days we visit Picture Galleries—the
Gallery of the National Museum, that of Prince Eugene, that of
Baron Tiel. At the National Gallery a number of pictures have
been taken down and lean against the wall that they may be
sent to London for an Exhibition of Swedish Art. Some one
exaggerating the influence in London of the Nobel prize winner
asks me to write something to get people to go and see it, and
I half promise, but feel that I have not the necessary knowledge.
I know something of the French impressionism that gave their
painters the first impulse, but almost nothing of German or Aus-
trian, and I have seen that of Sweden for the first time. At a


194 THE BOUNTY OF SWEDEN
first glance Impressionism seems everywhere the same, with differ-
ences of power, but not of sight or mind, and one has to live with
it, and make many comparisons I think, to write more than a few
sentences. The great myth-makers and mask-makers, the men
of aristocratic mind, Blake, Ingres in the Perseus, Puvis de Cha-
vannes, Rossetti before 1870, Watts when least a moralist, Gustave
Moreau at all times, Calvert in the woodcuts, the Charles Ricketts
of the Danaides and of the earlier illustrations of the Sphynx,
have imitators, but create no universal language. Administrators
of tradition, they seem to borrow everything, but in reality borrow
nothing, and not one of them can be mistaken for another. But
Impressionism's gift to the world was precisely that it gave, at
a moment when all seemed sunk in convention, a method as adapt-
able as that box of architectural Renaissance bricks. It has
taught us to see and feel, as everybody that wills can see and
feel, all those things that are as wholesome as rain and sunlight,
to take into our hearts with an almost mystical emotion whatso-
ever happens, without forethought or premeditation. It is not, I
think, any accident that it is an art that has coincided everywhere
with a new sympathy for crowds, for the poor and unfortunate.
Certainly it arrived in these Scandinavian countries just at the
moment when an intellectual awakening of the whole people was
beginning, for whatever I inquire about, I always read, or I am
told, that it began with the 'eighties, and was the outcome of some
movement of that time.
When I try to define what separates Swedish Impressionism
from French, I notice that it has a stronger feeling for particular
places. Monet will paint a group of trees by a pond in every
possible light, changing his canvas every twenty minutes, and only
returning to a canvas when the next day's clock brings up the
same light, but then it is precisely the light that interests him,
and interests the buyers of those almost scientific studies. Nobody
will buy because it is a pond under his windows, or that he passed
in his boyhood on his way to school. I have noticed in some house
where I lunched two pictures of the Stockholm river, painted in
different lights by Eugene Janson, and in the National Museum
yet another with a third effect of light, but much as the light
pleased his imagination one feels that he cared very much for
the fact before him, that he was never able to forget for long


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS 195
that he painted a well loved, familiar scene. I am constantly
reminded of my brother who continually paints from memory
the people and houses of the village where he lived as a small
child; but the people of Rosses will never care about his pictures,
and these painters paint for all Stockholm. They have found an
emotion held in common, and are no longer like the rest of us,
solitary spectators. I get the impression that their work rouses
a more general interest than that of other painters, is less con-
fined to small groups of connoisseurs; I notice in the booksellers'
shops that there seems to be some little paper-covered pamphlet,
full of illustrations, for every notable painter of the School dead
or living, and the people I meet ask constantly what I think of
this painter or that other, or somebody will say: "This is the
Golden Age of painting." When I myself as I leave the museum
try to recall what I have seen, I remember most clearly a picture
of a white horse on the sea-shore, with its tints separated by little
lines that give it a general effect of mosaic, and certain portraits
by Ernest Josephson which prove that their painter was entirely
preoccupied with the personality of the sitter—light, colour, design,
all subordinate to that. The English portrait painter is sometimes
so preoccupied with the light that one feels he would have had
equal pleasure in painting a bottle or an apple. But a prefer-
ence after so brief a visit may be capricious, having some accidental
origin.
XII
On Thursday I give my official lecture to the Swedish Royal
Academy. I have chosen The Irish Theatre for my subject that
I may commend all those workers, obscure or well known, to
whom I owe much of whatever fame in the world I may possess.
If I had been a lyric poet only, if I had not become through this
Theatre the representative of a public movement, I doubt if the
English committees would have placed my name upon that list
from which the Swedish Academy selects its prize winner. Those
dog-eared pages, those pressed violets, upon which the fame of
a lyric poet depends at the last, might without it have found no
strong voice. I have seen so much beautiful lyric poetry pass
unnoticed for years, and indeed at this moment a little book of


196 THE BOUNTY OF SWEDEN
exquisite verse lies upon my table by an author who died a few
years ago, whom I knew slightly, and whose work I ignored, for
chance had shown me only that part of it for which I could
not care.
On my way to the Lecture Hall I ask an academician what kind
of audience I will have, and he replies, "An audience of women,
a fit audience for a poet"; but there are men as well as women.
I had thought it would be difficult to speak to an audience in a
language they had learnt at school, but it is exceedingly easy.
All I say seems to be understood, and I am conscious of that
sympathy which makes a speaker forget all but his own thoughts,
and soliloquize aloud. I am speaking without notes, and the images
of old fellow-workers come upon me as if they were present, above
all of the embittered life and death of one, and of another's
laborious, solitary age, and I say, "When your King gave me Medal
and Diploma two should have stood, one at either side of me—
an aged woman, and a young man's ghost. I think when Lady
Gregory's name and John Synge's name are spoken by future
generations, my name if remembered will come up in the talk,
and that if my name is spoken first their names will take their
turn because of the years we worked together. I think that man
and that woman would have been pleased too had they gone
beside me to the great reception at your Palace, for their work
and mine delighted in history and tradition." I remember as I
speak how deep down we have gone, below all that is individual,
modern, and restless, seeking foundations for an Ireland that
can only come into existence in a Europe that is still but a dream.
XIII
On Friday we visit the great Town Hall which is the greatest
work of Swedish art, and the most important modern building in
Europe. The Royal Palace had taken ninety years to build, and
been the organizing centre of the Swedish art of its time, and this
new magnificence, its narrow windows opening out upon a formal
garden, its tall tower rising from the quayside, has taken ten years.
It too has been an organizing centre, but for an art more imagina-
tive and amazing. Here there is no important French influence;


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS 197
for all that has not come out of the necessities of site and material
no matter in what school the artist studied, carries the mind back
now to some old Swedish building, now to Byzantium. I think
of but two comparable buildings, the Pennsylvania Terminus in
New York, and the Catholic Cathedral at Westminster, but the
Pennsylvania Terminus, noble in austerity, is the work of a single
rnind elaborating a suggestion from a Roman Bath, a mind that
supported by the American deference to authority has been per-
mitted to refuse everything not relevant to a single dominating
idea. The starting hours of the trains are upon specially designed
boards, of a colour that makes them harmonize with the general
design, and all other advertisements are forbidden. Even in the
stations that the trains pass immediately after leaving, or before
entering the Terminus, there are no posters. The mood of severity
must be prolonged or prepared for. The Catholic Cathedral is of
equal, or greater magnificence in general design, and being planted
in a country where public opinion rules, where the subscribers
to every fund expect to have their way, is ruined by ignoble dec-
oration, the most ignoble of all planned and paid for by my coun-
trymen. The Town Hall of Stockholm upon the other hand is
decorated by many artists, working in harmony with one another
and with the design of the building as a whole, and yet all in
seeming perfect freedom. In England and Ireland public opinion
compels the employment of the worst artists, while here the
authority of a Prince and the wisdom of the Socialist Minister
of Culture, and the approval of the most educated of all nations,
has made possible the employment of the best. These myth-
makers and mask-makers worked as if they belonged to one family,
and the great walls of hand-made bricks, where the roughened
surface of the bricks, their carefully varied size and tints, take
away all sense of mechanical finish; the mosaic-covered walls of
the "Golden Room," the paintings hung upon the walls of the
committee rooms, the fresco paintings upon the greater surfaces
with their subjects from Swedish Mythology; the wrought iron
and the furniture, where all suggest history and yet is full of inven-
tion; the statuary in marble and in bronze, now mythological in
subject, now representations of great Swedes modelled naked as
if they had come down from some Roman Heaven: all that sug-
gestion of novelty and of an immeasurable past, all that multi-


198 THE BOUNTY OF SWEDEN
tude and unity, could hardly have been possible had not love of
Stockholm and belief in its future so filled men of different minds,
classes, and occupations, that they almost attained the supreme
miracle, the dream that has haunted all Religions, and loved one
another. No work comparable in method or achievement has
been accomplished since the Italian cities felt the excitement of
the Renaissance, for in the midst of our individualist anarchy,
growing always as it seemed more violent, has arisen once more
subordination, design, a sense of human need.
XIV
On Saturday I see at the Royal Theatre a performance of my
Cathleen ni Houlihan. The old father and mother are excellent,
and the performance differs but little from an exceedingly good
Abbey performance, except for certain details of scene, and for
differences of interpretation made necessary by the change of
audience. Lines spoken by Cathleen ni Houlihan just before
she leaves the cottage always move an Irish audience powerfully
for historical reasons, and so the actress begins at much the same
emotional level as those about her, and then works up to a climax
upon these lines. But here they could have no special appeal, so
she strikes a note of tragedy at once, and does not try for a strong
climax. The management had sent to the West of Ireland for
photographs of scenery, and the landscape seen through the open
door has an appropriateness and grandeur our poverty-stricken
Abbey has never attained. Upon the other hand the cottage and
costumes of the peasants suggest a richer peasantry than ours. The
management has I think been misled by that hundred pound
dowry, for in Sweden where the standard of living is high a farmer
would probably have thought it more necessary to feed his family
and himself, and to look after his daughter's education, than to
save a hundred pounds for her dowry. This affects the acting, for
the peasants are permitted to wear a light buckle-shoe indoors,
whereas they would in reality have gone barefooted, or worn heavy
working boots. Almost the first thing a new actor at the Abbey
has to learn is to walk as if he wore those heavy boots, and this
gives awkwardness and heaviness to his movements. I do not
point this out as an error in the Swedish production, for a symbolic


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS 199
play like Cathleen should, in most cases, copy whatever environ-
ment is most familiar to the audience. It is followed by She
Stoops to Conquer, and by comparison our Abbey performance of
that play seems too slow. Goldsmith's play is not in Sweden, I
should think, the established Classic that it is with us, and so a
Swedish producer is less reverent. He discovers quickly that there
are dull places and unrealities, that it is technically inferior to
Moliere, and, that we may not discover this also, prefers a rattling
pace.
XV
On Sunday morning, while we were packing, a young American
poet is announced who has just arrived. "I have been in the
South of France," he says, "and could not get a room warm
enough to write in, and if I cannot get that room in Stockholm, I
will go to Lapland." I have no doubt that he will find it, for all
the week our furs have been useless. Houses kept warm by steam
heating have had the temperature of summer, and outside it has
been so warm that though snow has fallen it has melted imme-
diately. "You have not seen Stockholm," everybody has said, "un-
til you have seen streets, houses, and trees all white with snow."


BLACK MAGIC
BY ROBERT HILLYER
Three friends of mine who know my heart,
I have decreed your death to-day,
And through what means, and by what art,
Who but yourselves could ever say?
I could not suffer you to part
Flinging my secrets on your way.
Who knows through what impetuous word
My lore escapes your careless lips,
Through what small syllable the bird
That was my golden captive, slips
And sings to those who, having heard,
Will slay it with envenomed quips?
That King of Knossos who would build
A Labyrinth around his thought,
Sagaciously and justly willed
Death to the architects who wrought,
And thus the winged word was stilled
Which once set free is never caught.
Friends whom I love, for fear I might
Have cause to love you less, I stir
Three melting forms of wax, and light
Three tapers for three friends that were,
Till three slim phantoms take their flight
Between the whorls of smoking myrrh.



LA CIRQUE ZANFRETTA. BY ANNE MERRIMAN PECK






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FEW, BUT ROSES
BY F. L. LUCAS
A RECENT writer on Tennyson has suggested as an explana-
tion of the hero-worship of the Victorians that "the more the
scientists shook their faith in God, the more did they invest their
contemporaries with divine attributes." One may suspect that the
cause lay rather in the seriousness with which that age took things
generally. But, at all events, that motive has ceased to work with
us, and in a Cambridge teeming with savants who split, not the
traditional hair, but the atom itself, no devout hand lays wreaths
of bay on the steps of Whewell's Court. And whereas enthusiasts
swarmed stealthily up the very elms of Farringford to watch a
short-sighted laureate disport himself at battledore and shuttlecock,
not a head turns now as down King's Parade passes the author of
the Shropshire Lad. Not that, in this particular case, one would
recommend the most undaunted American "big game" hunter to
attempt closer approaches; or that in general any one need sigh
for Victorian Schwarmerei here again; but there are other extremes.
We have learnt to take Professor Housman for granted as a poet;
perhaps we have learnt the lesson a little too thoroughly. Must we
wait to bury Caesar before we praise him to the full, for the earth
to cover it before we realize how much has meant to us this shadow
of a great rock in the weary land of modern verse, so boundless
and so bare? Professor Housman has given us his "last" poems; so
that we can see his work, it is to be feared, already as a whole, if
not so steadily as posterity. For that posterity will read him, seems
to me as (humanly) certain, as it is dubious if there are more than
two other living English poets of whom the same can be said. When
Last Poems appeared, the reviews paid, indeed, their tributes to
his verse and style and beauty—such tributes as adorn the wrap-
pers of half a hundred other poets, in the inflated currency of
to-day; but when it came to certain other characteristics, there ap-
peared in their criticisms a tone ludicrously like the reluctant testi-
mony of conjured devils. The view of life that breathes through these
poems, the essence of their being, was passed gingerly over, with


202 FEW, BUT ROSES
a mild deprecation, perhaps, of some particularly defiant utterance,
or a pious wish that Professor Housman were less pessimistic—much
as one might sigh what an agreeable play Hamlet might be without
that depressing prince. Indeed, it recalls the advertisement I re-
ceived the other day of a selected edition of Voltaire: "Tout en
reproduisant la physiognomie du poete philosophe, Vauteur s'est
applique avec le plus grand soin a ne rien laisser passer qui put
choquer les susceptibilites de qui que ce soil"—a recommendation
calculated to make the dead chuckle in his grave.
But one cannot believe that posterity, if statesmen allow us that
luxury, will fall into this half-hearted, impertinent folly. Wonder-
ing what the Georgians really thought and felt about existence—
turning wearily from piles of little poets who busied themselves
scrabbling illuminated miniatures in the margin of the book of life,
and with slight disgust from such typical Georgianisms as Sir Oliver
Lodge and Canon Barnes exchanging bouquets of pious nothings
before edified audiences at the British Association—they will find
here one answer to their question, one personality among so many
echoing masks, one reading of life, wrong maybe, but blurred and
corrupted at least with no optimistic emendations, and rendered into
English of a purity that English literature has not surpassed. Some,
rejecting his interpretation, will yet recognize, if they are human,
that in moods, at least, they too have felt the same, and will hope,
if they are wise, that though differing they enjoy him none the less;
and some, sharing his view of life, will know that they enjoy him
yet the more. And nobody will deprecate.
In pre-war Cambridge, which seemed so much more exciting than
it does now (though this is doubtless mere middle-age) one of the
greatest of excitements was the newcomer's discovery everywhere,
in its little red binding, of the Shropshire Lad—the expression, so
long inarticulately wanted, here found at last, of the resentment,
the defiance, the luxuriant sadness (sentiment, I suppose, some will
call it) of youth. With what expectation one waited in the Lecture
Theatre of the Arts School amid an audience that seemed unworthily
sparse, for the first sight of the poet—and in what perplexity one
went away! Could this quiet, immaculate figure, setting straight,
with even-voiced, passionless, unresting minuteness the jots and
tittles of a fifth-rate ancient whose whole epic was not worth one
stanza of his own—could this be the same? Only the lines about


F. L. LUCAS 203
the mouth with their look of quiet, unutterable distaste, only the
calm, relentless, bitter logic, as of destiny itself, with which some
sprawling German commentator was broken into little pieces and
dropped into the void, seemed in the least recognizable features.
One came away feeling as if one had been watching a disguised
Apollo picking the oakum of Admetus—divinely—but oakum!
Had I known them then, I should surely have thought of those lines
of Matthew Arnold to (of all things in this connexion) a Gipsy
Child:
"Is the calm thine of stoic souls, who weigh
Life well, and find it wanting, nor deplore:
But in disdainful silence, turn away,
Stand mute, self-centred, stern, and dream no more?"
And had I been a prophet, I should have thought too of the verse
that follows:
"Once ere the day decline, thou shalt discern,
Oh once, ere night, in thy success thy chain.
Ere the long evening close, thou shalt return,
And wear thy majesty of grief again."
But in those days Last Poems were beyond our hopes, and none
dreamed of a second sunrise that should make the Sphinx of the
desert once more a Memnon of the dawn. It was cause for grateful-
ness enough that the Shropshire Lad was there—that and the poetry
of Morris—to bear one through the war.
Arnold, indeed, the poet-professor of the sister University with
his classicism and his Virgilian majesty of sorrow, is Professor
Housman's nearest kin in English literature; and for a third to join
with these, we must look to the disdainful yet tender brevity of
Landor. In no other three of our poets have the spirits of Greece,
Rome, and England found that happy mixture of their elements
which lives in them—the grace and lucid sadness of the flutes of
Hellas, the proud glitter and the stab of the short Roman sword,
the sweetness and strength of the English countryside. Arnold
doubted more, and wailed because he doubted, till harder men lost
patience with his "nibbling and quibbling" about belief; he was


204 FEW, BUT ROSES
sometimes prim; and, unsurpassed as his best work is, and far wider
in its range, he had not, technically, the sureness of the later poet's
touch. Landor was less subtle and, likewise, less sure. It is a curi-
osity of literature that so late in the development of English poetry
it should have been possible to bring harmonies so new, so invariably
perfect out of some of its most hackneyed metres. Swinburne pro-
duced many of his miracles by brilliant modifications of old metrical
forms. Beddoes recaptured, as no one since has done, the secret
magic of Elizabethan blank verse. But Professor Housman modi-
fies little and recaptures nothing; though the Carolines used some
of his verse-forms to perfection, they are not like him. And when
one sits down and puzzles where one has seen anything really akin
to this Melchizedek, there comes only the unexpected half-answer:
"In Heine." The belief that there is here more than coincidence is
strengthened when one recognizes in the flower of Sinner's Rue no
other than the German's Armesunderblum—the blue floweret that
grows at cross-roads on the mounds of the slayers of themselves.
But this does not go far towards explaining how his effects are
produced; it is easy to docket the artifices he so boldly and openly
uses, such as the assonance and alliteration of:
"Ah, past the plunge of plummet,
In seas I cannot sound,
My heart and soul and senses,
World without end, are drowned.
His folly has not fellow
Beneath the blue of day
That gives to man or woman
His heart and soul away.
There flowers no balm to sain him
From east of earth to west
That's lost for everlasting
The heart out of his breast;"
or the haunting
"From all the woods that autumn
Bereaves in all the world."


F. L. LUCAS 205
It is simple to note the repetition carried even beyond Roman bounds
till, once, it becomes a little self-caricaturish:
"The goal stands up, the keeper
Stands up to keep the goal."
But the charm endures where these devices are not; there are so
many strings to this bow with its sweet swallow-song—pause and
shift of stress, fingering and vowel-play, and, above all, the skill
which keeps the diction of these lyrics so simple and close to the
directness of prose, without ever transgressing that fatal boundary,
by its perfect intermingling of the unexpected word with the speech
of everyday, of the unexpected thought with the looked-for con-
clusion. Indeed, his Shropshire lads talk with just that "wild
civility" for which Herrick praised his love:
"There flowers no balm to sain him . . ."
"From far, from eve and morning
And yon twelve-winded sky . . ."
"But men at whiles are sober
And think by fits and starts,
And if they think, they fasten
Their hands upon their hearts"
But perhaps the supreme example of the sudden sting the verse
leaves in the hearer's heart, as with all the wonder of a serpent's
suppleness it glides away, is in the last but one of all the poems:
"On russet floors, by waters idle,
The pine lets fall its cone;
The cuckoo shouts all day at nothing
In leafy dells alone;
And traveller's joy beguiles in autumn
Hearts that have lost their own."
In the second volume, as a whole, indeed, if there is any develop-
ment, it is an extension of this device of sudden check and unex-
pected pleasure to the rhythm also:


206 FEW, BUT ROSES
"'What sound awakened me, I wonder,
For now 'tis dumb'
'Wheels on the road, most like, or thunder:
Lie down; 'twas not the drum.'"
or, best of all:
"Wenlock Edge was umbered,
And bright was Abdon Burf,
And warm between them slumbered
The smooth green miles of turf;
Until from grass and clover
The upshot beam would fade,
And England over
Advanced the lofty shade."
And, with this, there goes a growing boldness in the surprises of
the thought, a use of metaphors quite "metaphysical," such as that
ironic "foolscap" wherewith night's cone-shaped shadow crowns the
earth eternally, or that last mantle which cured Dick's lifelong
hatred of the cold:
"Fall, winter, fall: for he,
Prompt hand and headpiece clever,
Has woven a winter robe,
And made of earth and sea
An overcoat for ever,
And wears the turning globe."
These things produce their complete effect just because the power
to contrive them is controlled with a rigid economy; so that the
general impression these lyrics leave is of a strength that never needs
to strive or cry, a beauty whose quality is never strained. "Schil-
ler," observed Coleridge, "sets you a whole town afire. But Shake-
speare drops you a handkerchief." And, as there is no strain, so
there are no collapses; if we could spare anything, it would be some
of the poems on soldiers and on gallows. But such exceptions are
few, and the most serious challenge to Housman's position will be
his want of bulk. I do not think that need trouble us greatly; these


F. L. LUCAS 207
poems, as Meleager said of Sappho's, are "few, but roses." The
poems of Catullus are likewise few.
But the spell of this poetry does not live merely in its technical
perfections, in its pure beauty, in the happy way it has won a
province of its own, like Hardy's Wessex, in the heart of England,
in the flowery grace with which it wears its ancient learning, so that
the reader recognizes on Shropshire lips, with a stab of spiritual
homesickness, the well-known accents of Sarpedon and Achilles or
some echo of the laconic fortitude of Rome; and the water, not of
"Nile" only, but of Simois and Scamander, Ilissus and Tiber,
"spills its overflow
Beside the Severn's dead."
It is, as Milton demanded, not only "simple" and "sensuous," but
"passionate" also, as the perfect in style often fails to be; and it is
"criticism of life" after Arnold's heart. Not popular criticism, in-
deed; pessimism so unflinching and inflexible is to be found in few
English poets apart from Hardy and James Thomson. And even
Mr Hardy has sometimes wavered and of late grown mysteriously
to resent the name; there is nothing in Professor Housman's work
that could lend itself to such irony as the recent spectacle of babes
and sucklings chanting a judiciously selected chorus of The Dynasts
in honour of the Prince's visit to Dorchester.
This attitude to life many good people find bewildering and
indecent:
"Terence, this is stupid stuff;
You eat your victuals fast enough."
Browning, at the rare moments when the voice of a groaning crea-
tion pierced his complacent ears, took refuge in the plea that one
could really only speak for oneself and that he found life very
tolerable. To others, life seems like the cave, not of Plato, but of
Polyphemus; to a favoured few the ogre grants the boon of being
last devoured; are they expected gratefully to rejoice in the corn-
mod iousness of the cavern and the courtesy of the Cyclops? The
injuries of existence are deep enough without that insult; and from
the conventional consolations tossed like straws to the drowning,


208 FEW, BUT ROSES
they turn to the last shreds of certainty, their own feelings before
the shadow-pageant of phenomena, their power to appreciate the
irony of the comedy, the beauty of the tragedy of things. A Swift,
frenzied by the spectacle of the "oppression that makes a wise man
mad," cries "Vive la bagatelle":
"And the feather-pate of folly
Bears the falling sky."
A Thomson, again, finds in the defiance of despair despair's one
palliative, as the old king of Pontus in poison poison's antidote.
"Mithridates, he died old;"
and it is not the open eyes of disillusion that stumble worst,
"as you and I
Fare on our long fool's-errand to the grave."
Pessimism is not depressing to those who have faced it, and pride
may be one of the deadly sins, but it gives not the ignoblest human
answer to the menace of eternity. The oracles are dumb, the odds
impossible; but—
"The Spartans on the sea-wet rock sat down and combed their hair."
It is of poetry like this that Cardinal Newman's words are true:
"Poetry is the refuge of those who have not the Catholic Church to
flee to and repose upon." Those who deprecate its pessimism do not
realize that they are asking for the building without the foundation,
the body without the life. If there were not the despair, there could
not be the passion; if there were not the tragedy, there could not be
the majesty of grief.
"The troubles of our proud and angry dust
Are from eternity and shall not fail."


- -
-- - -- ---------
CHRIST COMFORTS THE WOMEN OF JERUSALEM.
Saint Thomas' Church: Chicago
BY ALFEO FAGGI





OCTOBER AT HELLBRUNN
BY EDWIN MUIR
The near-drawn changeless sky, closed in and grey,
Broods o'er the garden, and the turf is still.
The dim lake shines; oppressed the fountains play;
And shadowless weight lies on the wooded hill.
The close-ranked trees rise separate, as if deep
They listened dreaming through the hollow ground,
Each in a single, far-divided sleep,
While few sad leaves fall heedless with no sound.
The marble cherubs in the wavering lake
Stand up more still, as if they held all there,
The trees, the plots, in thrall. Their shadows make
The water clear and hollow as the air.
So still they stand, the statues and the trees,
On the brown path the leaves so moveless lie,
My footfalls end, and motionless as these,
I stand self-tranced between the earth and sky.
For the earth is dumb and empty, and no weight,
Save the shut sky, curved steep, a stone-smooth tomb,
Weighs on it, and no ground upholds its great
Load of tired land and sea, save empty doom. . . .
The slow dumb afternoon draws in, and dark
The trees rise up; grown heavier is the ground.
And, breaking through the silence of the park,
Farther the viewless fountain flings its sound.


THE EYES OF SAINT SPIRIDON
BY ELIN PELIN
Translated From the Bulgarian by Victor Sharenkoff
SAINT Spiridon was a poor shoe-maker. Bent over his low
table on which his tools were scattered, and giving himself to
contemplation of God, he worked all day long. He had rest only
when he sat down to eat his dry bread quietly and slowly, or
when he raised his eyes to look out of the little window at the
beautiful picture of God's world which always was dear t,o him.
The white cold winter and the golden warm summer pleased
him equally well. In the springtime, when the sun melted the
snow, Saint Spiridon was fond of listening to the monotonous
sound of the drops dripping down from the broken roof of his
small shop. He also liked to watch the budding of the lilac and
the blooming of the apple tree in the neighbouring garden in front
of the church. The sweet aroma of the blossoms filled the small
quiet street and entered the narrow shop. On such days Saint
Spiridon thought of the heavens with an unusual joy and hope, and
sometimes he rose from his little chair, and cast a glance up
at them through the window.
At that time he was young and did not belong to the com-
munity of the saints. He considered himself unworthy before God,
although he had never sinned, and his single thought was to purify
his soul to such a degree that it would bloom like the apple tree
in front of the church and its aroma would feed the virtues as the
white apple blossoms fed the bees.
The young man's spiritual beauty was also reflected in his body,
and made him handsome. His face shone with the holy purity of
God himself, and over his forehead flitted almost invisibly rose
and white clouds as over the sky of a morning in May. His blue
eyes, always contemplating heavenly things, had the depth of a
lake in which the reflections of all heavenly things twinkled.
The rich and beautiful young women of the town often passed
this solitary street where the shoe shop of the young man was;


ELIN PELIN 2H
and while ordering shoes on holidays, they looked for an oppor-
tunity to see him. The pious young man was terrified by this,
and when he heard joyful women's voices and the rustle of
silk gowns, he lowered his pure eyes and did not raise them until
calm reigned again in the small street.
To ward off temptation, he put a small box of ashes before
the threshold of his shop. Every woman who came to him for
an order had to step there, and from the imprint left by her foot
he took the measurements for her shoes. In this manner the young
man drove away from his soul every desire for woman, which might
violate his holy blessedness, and he kept his eyes from seeing the
shadow of temptation, and his hands from touching flesh born
of lust.
Once when Saint Spiridon was risen from his three-legged stool
to look through the small window, and gain cheer from a small cloud
with which an invisible little angel was playing in the blue of the
sky, a gilded chariot stopped before the small shop, and a young
Mohammedan woman came down and knocked on the door. Her
veil was open a little, and Saint Spiridon quickly lowered his eyes
to the dusty floor in order that the lure of temptation might not
enter his soul through them.
The woman opened the door slowly and came in. The beautiful
spring day which reigned outside entered with her and remained
in the dark barren workshop. Saint Spiridon heard the watchful
murmur of the fountain, the amorous fighting of sparrows, the song
of a young girl, and the hearty laughter of youths. This cheerful
vanity of life entered with the unknown woman and remained
there.
The young man bent his head still more, and did not know
what to say.
Then the young woman tenderly, softly, and firmly told him
to take the measurements for her new shoes.
"Step in the ashes in the small box. Then I will take the
measurements from the imprint of your step, kind lady," said
Saint Spiridon gently.
The woman gave a short ringing laugh, and it seemed to Saint
Spiridon as though a crowd of young men and women were
standing in front of his small shop and pelting it with thousands
of fresh, sweet-scented flowers. He covered his eyes with his


212 THE EYES OF SAINT SPIRIDON
hands, and repeated his request with such humility that the heart
of the young Mohammedan woman was touched.
"No," she said, and was silent. A little later she added: "I
wish you to take my measure from my foot."
Then Saint Spiridon got up, took the tape-measure, and with-
out raising his eyes approached the unknown woman. Having
gathered up the bottom of her long silk gown, she raised her
pretty foot and stepped on the three-legged stool. Saint Spiridon
unrolled the tape-measure around the bottom of her foot. At that
instant the holy young man lost the clew which united his blessed
thought with God, and absorbed in his work he raised his eyes
to see what the measure was. Then, out of the corner of his eye,
he saw the dainty foot with the delicate dark silk stocking. Some-
thing happened in the soul of the blessed young man. A little
more and he would be lost for ever. But the firmness of his faith
did not leave him. Holiness, which had supported him for a long
time, strengthened his will. It rose up against the awakening
desires; and Saint Spiridon quickly seized the cobbler's awl from
the table, and with a strong hand struck out the eye which had
leaned toward temptation. Even as he felt the terrible pain, Saint
Spiridon heard the rejoicing of the soul saved from ruin, and in
an ecstasy of blessed pleasure once more, he struck harder with the
cobbler's awl and put out the other eye. It was not guilty, but
in his thirst for purity the young man wished to close up the
windows of his soul, by which the rays of sinful and tempting
things could enter.
Having become blind, Saint Spiridon could not work any more.
He closed up his small shop and went to a wood. There flowed a
large river whose banks were overgrown with willow trees and
groves of osiers. Gropingly he cut sticks; and as he sat facing
the sun, he wove baskets which he gave to the peasants who passed
there in exchange for a piece of bread.
Everything around him was wrapped in calmness, tranquillity,
and joy. He listened to the splashing of the little fish, and stood
on the bank for a long time in silence. The buzzing of the bees,
and the delicate sound of the white birch trees which grew all
around, filled his pacified soul with pleasure. When he passed
gropingly from one place to another, he prayed God to direct his
feet lest he trample the ants and the tiny insects creeping in the


ELIN PELIN 213
grass. And every new breeze, blowing in the morning and evening
and dying at noon, gathered sweet aromas from the herbs, flowers,
and linden trees, and carried them to the blind saint, feeding his
soul with enjoyment.
In the midst of this wonderful calm, the thought of Saint
Spiridon, purified a hundredfold, turned to God and contemplated
for a long time His wise forgiving smile over the world.
Only one thing worried the holy man: the amorous chirping of
the birds in the wood. Saint Spiridon heard the pigeons, the
turtle-doves, the nightingales, and other birds alighting on the
branches, and their love-affairs troubled him. He collected and
threw stones at random in the woods. He waved his arms and
tried to drive them away. But they continued to cry, to sing, and
to call to one another. In spite of all his efforts, pictures issuing
from their passionate activities appeared unwillingly in the mind
of the saint; and one day, terrified, he understood that there were
other eyes in his soul, and it was impossible to pluck them out.
And, bent over the basket which he was weaving, he reflected and
understood, that when he had contemplated with his physical
eyes he never had met such great difficulty as at that moment,
when he was contemplating with the eyes of his closed soul. He
was seized by a great anxiety. As he did not know the reason
for it, he thought that he had committed a wrong before God,
and began to spend the days and the nights in prayer. But in time
his soul's peace disappeared entirely.
Once, as he was putting the last touches on a basket, the
polluting picture which had caused him to blind himself ap-
peared to him again. Through the eye of his soul, he saw clearly
standing before him the beautiful woman with her skirt raised
a little, showing the delicate silk-stockinged foot. In vain Saint
Spiridon tried to drive away this polluting vision. Wherever his
blind face turned, he saw this woman and heard her laugh. The
saint began to cry in a loud voice, to pity himself, and to call to
God for help. It was in vain. The impure vision emerged and
took possession of him. He began to see it as he had not seen it
and would not have wanted to see it when his blue eyes were still
gleaming. Terrible wishes began to press the blood in his veins.
He wanted to pray, but words of love went out from his mouth
and echoed through the silent woods, like the cry of an owl.


214 THE MAN IN THE DRESS SUIT
"My Lord, why dost Thou torment me? I plucked out my eyes
to realize Thee, but I am still farther from Thee! Do a miracle,
O God!"
And Saint Spiridon fell to the ground to make obeisance. When
he rose again and raised his head toward the sky, the beautiful blue
eyes, with the depth of a lake in which all the heavenly lights were
reflected, gleamed again.
THE MAN IN THE DRESS SUIT
BY ROBERT L. WOLF
Animal that I am, I come to call
With soft ancestral stride, and smouldering blood,
And guarded nuances of speech that fall
Deftly within the well-bred bounds they should;
While hooded eyes, across a saucer-rim
Of Haviland, with half-insistent stare,
Or insolent slow droop, control and trim
The wick of innuendo in the air.
Pity my brother ape who cannot chat
With one whose smiles so scintillate and arch—
His belly-lusts, his brutal days, and that
Starved ignorance of opera-hats and starch:
But most—for that he crassly snares his mate
In no such spangled web of love and hate.


º
#)
` tº





LUCIENNE
BY JULES ROMAINS
Translated From the French by Waldo Frank
VI (continued)
LUNCHEON brought me face to face with Marie Lemiez. I
J had surely gathered enough material for endless chatter. We
sat at our little table, and all my zest was gone. Words and laughter
and gesture refused to swing into the easy way of friendship.
Usually, when I came in first, the table-cloth, the empty chair in
front of me were beings waiting for Marie, calling her, giving a sort
of visible dimension to my own lack of her and to the want which
I must go through, all alone, until Marie came in. And when it
was I who was late, already at the door I saw my chair propped
against the table, saw it, even before I saw Marie, as calling for me.
Scarcely a moment, and the disturbance of our coming in was over:
the subtle work of getting close once more went on and left no trace.
It was as if we had not been apart: to-day was yesterday's luncheon
going on. The joy and health of our companionship sounded in
the noisy room. The courses were leisurely, and leisured space
came between them for our talk, for our eyes meeting each other,
for our easeful elbows on the table. What we said, the laughter
that leaped from each to each, no jot escaping, made about us a
circle of intimate action like a world quite our own and quite sealed:
and yet this world did not shut us from our share of the life of
the room, any more than it hid us from the eyes of others. We
were there as in the centre of a transparent globe.
But now, the boundary fell sheer between Marie and myself. I
bore her no ill will. And yet this almost palpable bar lay like a
frontier upon the table and marked off the world of Marie from
my own world. I felt like saying as might a child: "My plate, my
knife, my piece of bread." I should have found it more natural
if they had served us, not as usual from a single dish, but individual


216 LUCIENNE
portions. Instinctively, with no effort of concealment, I simply
kept still about everything I had learned. With the freedom to
analyse myself, I should have admitted that it was only fair to
speak of the concert, to mention M Pierre Febvre, to ask Marie
if she knew him or knew about him. But Marie was full of talk.
She had some complicated story to tell me about the girls at the
high school. All that I had to do was to answer briefly; there was
no long pause in her words to force me to suggest a topic of my own,
and to deprive me of this excellent excuse for forgetting all about
the "news" which of course I owed her.
And yet, as we got up from table, it did occur to me that I had
acted strangely, and scarcely like a friend. Just a few days ago,
we had made a pastime of extravagant speculations about the Bar-
bel enets; the least detail had to be offered loyally to the common
game. Why now this reticence? But it was almost too late to
give my report. Would it not seem as if I had thought the thing
over, hesitated about telling it? If I spoke now, would the news
not have a false importance, become almost personal? At the out-
set, it would have been so simple to have said: "Marie, my dear
little Marie, lend me your ears! Here is news. Here is the secret
of the Barbelenets." But to have just thought of it at the close of
our talk? . . .
Marie helped me abruptly out of my discomfort by taking her
leave. She was no sooner out of sight, than the whole problem left
me, and my scruples also. One thought, unhampered, held sway in
my mind: in less than twenty-four hours I shall once more go down
to the station, and cross the fifteen tracks and enter a smoky house
that is luminous with desire. . . .
VII
I had no sooner rung than the door opened. It was as if
I were the doctor called in an emergency, watched for by
anxious faces. The maid was all subtle looks, eye-rollings, half-
stifled sighs. Even her manner of taking my coat and hanging
it up was eloquent of yesterday's talk, of her confessions. I
was no longer an outsider in this hall. I felt clearly that this
entrance commanded an approach to an inhabited house. The
rear door must lead to the kitchen. Solemn good dishes doubt-


JULES ROMAINS 217
less were prepared there. The Barbelenet house was gloomy, if
you like; but not austere, not sterile. I could very well imagine
Madame Barbelenet dealing out succulent slices of roast beef;
or M Barbelenet in his wine-cellar bent above a little lamp and
bottling a superb barrel of Bordeaux. There was something
of an Old Master about this place, blackish at first sight, but
affluent with reds and gold deep sunken in the shadows.
Marthe was alone to receive me in the parlour. She fore-
stalled my question; her sister was not well, she might not
be able to have her lesson, but at all events we were to begin
without her. Marthe seemed embarrassed. Her eyes, more
tremulous than usual, avoided mine. She hurried to the piano,
seeking refuge with her secrets in the drone of scales. But
her actions betrayed her even more than her looks. There is
too much confession in our eyes. Their language is too full,
too crowded, to be quite clear. Here at the keyboard, the soul's
disturbance becomes manifest, however one strives to suppress
it. Marthe's first few measures were usual enough, a little has-
tened at most. Now, irrelevant to the music, there came a sudden
note so poignant that it was like a knife-point pressed gently
to the skin: the skin gives way, the point is in the flesh. . . .
A row of notes followed, wilfully calm, laboriously measured, as if
to delude me, like some one who has suddenly cried out and now
carefully goes on: "What is it? Why do you look at me so?"
I watched with a rather cruel quiet. I watched for the out-
break. Nothing in my mind went warmly to the little girl in her
anguish and helped her in her struggle for self-control. How
much longer will she hold out against this rising panic? I looked
for an explosion, not with curiosity, but with the stranger sense
that I, too, somehow, was in this battle. It was as if I sided with
her panic against Marthe. How long will she hold out?
Suddenly, the girl doubled over the piano as if she had been
struck in the breast: her hands covered her face: she sobbed.
I came and put my arms around her. But I was not really
moved: I was doing the proper thing. I was disgusted with my
own coldness, I who melted so often before far less poignant sor-
row. What was happening to Marthe seemed to me so natural,
whatever its details, that my pity became a mere question of form.
If anything, I think I envied her who, so young, and surely without


218 LUCIENNE
any extraordinary physical charm to call it forth, felt a passion
for which other women must wait, and yearn, for ever.
Marthe huddled close in my arms, her whole body was so given
up to my embrace, so wheedlingly eager for my comfort, that I
was embarrassed. I felt unworthy of this bestowal.
"Sister is wicked," she said at last. "I never did a thing to
her. It is not my fault, what has happened."
"You have been quarrelling?"
"She hates me. She has been saying the most dreadful things.
She said she wants to die, and it's my fault, and she will throw
herself under a train, right in front of the house."
Marthe sobbed. I stood over her, close to the piano. The open
music was flush with my eyes. The bulged page gleamed. Num-
berless black notes, too shiny, too regular, too systematic. The
page made me think of modern improvements, of their tedium.
I saw an endless straight American street, its houses of cement
and brick and stone, its washable walls. I lost no word of what
Marthe was saying, I was so alive to the twinging motions in her
neck and breast that they seemed actually to be trying to extend
to me also, and already my muscles had begun to imitate
them: and still I went on with my far distant reverie. Perched
high in my mind was a witness who watched these two series
of my thoughts, and brought them close and began braiding them
together with a mysterious delight, with a malicious refusal to
prefer either one to the other. . . .
"You know it would be just like her to do it, only to avenge
herself on me, and to make everybody blame me for her death."
"But what is the matter?"
"She hates me. And yet, how can I keep people from finding
out at last that she has a bad character, and from detesting her?
Is it my fault if her face is so hard, and if there are already two
wrinkles at the corners of her mouth? I'll buy her more lotions,
if she wants, and if those she has haven't been enough."
"Come, Marthe. You are saying ugly things."
"Not a tenth of what she says to me all day."
"But what awful thing has happened between you?"
"Oh, it's not so mysterious. You'll see for yourself if it is my
fault, if I could do anything to stop it. You know our cousin,
Pierre Febvre, the man you met here day before yesterday. When


JULES ROMAINS 219
he started coming here, there was no thought of anything, either
on his side or on ours. He's mother's cousin. He had six months'
leave. They had sent him to F les-Eaux. He remembered then
that we lived close by, and he came to pay us a visit. We asked
him to stay to dinner. A week earlier my parents had never thought
of his existence. But they'd already had the idea of marrying
off my sister, and as soon as they saw him he impressed them as
eligible. Pierre has a good place. He is purser on a big Trans-
atlantic liner. My mother approved of him, she likes 'men of
the world,' she has never really gotten used to the simple ways
of Papa. Pierre Febvre had not the faintest notion what was going
on. He's rather thoughtless, to begin with. And he's not in
the least familiar with our small-town world, where everything
that is done has first to be figured out. I guess he was getting bored
at his hotel, he is taking no regular cure there. In our house
were two girls to play with. Ten minutes on the train, and here
he is. That is all. But you don't know my mother's gift for
making people do what they least expect. A month after Pierre's
first visit, it was understood as a fact that he was to marry Cecile.
There aren't many women with her strength, I tell you. Just
think, there hadn't been the slightest declaration, not the slightest
explanation. A masterpiece it was. No need even of any one
saying yes or no."
"But surely the two must have had some understanding!
If your sister and M Pierre Febvre had not been drawn to each
other —"
"You don't see. Cecile is far too gloomy a creature to love
any one . . . what I'd call love. Of course she liked Pierre.
No need of Mama's persuading her. As to Pierre, I tell you he
simply let himself get trapped. As soon as he found it out, he
was sorry."
"Has there been a formal engagement?"
"No. But in Mama's mind, all that remained was to name the
day. For instance: announce the engagement just at the end of
Pierre's vacation, and have the wedding when Papa retires. Then
Pierre began to cool quite visibly toward Cecile. He paid more
attention to me. I swear I never led him on. You know me.
Remember that from the beginning he had paid just as much
attention to me at least as to Cecile; and that, if it hadn't been for


220 LUCIENNE
Mother. . . . Then it got to be just terrible for me, bit by bit.
Now, Cecile accuses me of treachery. There are nothing but scenes
all day long. Just now, she was threatening herself."
"But you, Marthe, what do you say to her?"
"What do you want me to say? At first I told her that Pierre
had a right to his preferences: however strong minded they were,
mother and she, they were not quite strong enough to force love into
a person's heart. But then, when I saw how wrought up she really
was, I promised her to do nothing to win Pierre over to my side,
to do nothing to upset their plans. I don't like dramas. I am
quite ready to give in to my sister, for if I don't the whole house
will go to smash. But that isn't quite enough, it seems. They'll
not leave me alone, until Pierre stops loving me, until I —"
She fell to sobbing, and I was cruel enough to detect a certain
consciousness in her sobs. They were too well timed. I thought
of my mother, a hard woman if ever there was one, who could
never mention her own dead mother without tears.
"But dear, dear Marthe. This is so serious, you must search
deep in yourself. You must! You can't act like a little girl. Are
you sure of your own feelings?"
"My own feelings?"
"Why yes—your feelings for M Pierre Febvre. Are you sure
there isn't in them just a trace . . . how shall I put it? ... a
tiny bit of rivalry . . . just the least wish to oppose your sister
and your family's plans? You care for M Pierre Febvre? Does
he mean more to you than all the world? More than your father
and mother? Does it seem impossible to live without him? Hard,
O impossibly hard to live without him? Is it torture for you,
Marthe, to think of him belonging to someone else?"
Marthe gazed at me with anxious eyes: indeed I listened amaz-
edly to myself. I have little taste, as a rule, for the popular
role of confessor and counsellor. I am too aware of the fatuous-
ness, the hypocrisy, the uselessness, that go with it. I object to
any one's assuming it with me. But this time, I should have defied
any one who had tried to stop me. Marthe glanced away from
my eyes, and answered:
"I think I care for him very much: I think I love him."
Her words and their manner seemed full of reservations. I
should have understood their modesty and their restraint in def-


JULES ROMAINS 221
erence to me. At school, when one of my friends was asked:
"What is the capital of Spain?" or "What is the square of 7?"
she would answer "Madrid?" . . . "49?" with just such a sweet
questioning in her voice, as if to tell her teacher that even the
most obvious fact awaited her approval. . . . But I was not gen-
erous. I preferred to go on thinking that this little girl was
working herself up to an emotion beyond her.
"And M Pierre Febvre?"
"M Pierre Febvre?"
"Yes, Marthe. Do you feel that he too has made his choice,
his final choice?"
"I have confidence in him."
"Perhaps Marthe, if I knew him better, I would not ask you.
There's nothing, nothing whatever, in what you have told me,
in the least against him. But I wonder, does he take things quite
as you do? Sometimes men seek out a girl, show her a great deal
of affection, without the slightest intention of giving up their
freedom. One must look out, dear! You said yourself, that your
mother perhaps too readily assumed that M Pierre Febvre wished
to marry Cecile. What if the misunderstanding had merely taken
another form?"
Marthe did not answer. She bowed her head, sighed, wiped
her eyes. I thought she was getting ready for more tears. Perhaps
she chose not to confide in me more deeply. Perhaps her real
proofs of the love of Pierre Febvre were not for my ears—or
simply did she find it unpleasant to discuss them with me? Per-
haps she preferred to go on nursing her sorrow.
Just then, the door opened and Cecile came in: with her some-
thing that was almost like reproof. Marthe fell hurriedly to
playing, blinked her eyes to catch up the vagrant tears and stuffed
the wet handkerchief into her left palm. I made as if I were
more interested in the score than in Cecile's arrival. Did she
hear us? I asked myself. What have we been saying? Even
if she had her ear to the door, what fault can she find with me?
Of course, I had said nothing that could compromise me. Still,
I felt that Cecile would have the right to resent me because of
Marthe's words, almost as much as if those words had been my
own. I had heard them. What I had listened to was no longer
outside myself, it belonged to me and at least in part I was its


222 LUCIENNE
source. Marthe, meanwhile, went on with her exercise. She was
occupied with the task of keeping countenance and her position at
the piano was of help. The elder girl spoke dryly:
"If you have no objection, Marthe, I should like to play
too . . . when it is my turn."
Marthe said nothing: she got up: and like a child who has been
unjustly punished she marched straight from the room.
Was the same scene going to start afresh? The notion did not
appeal to me at all. My enthusiasm for confession had suddenly
run out. I know already what she'll say, the turn she'll give
to the story. Really, these lessons are getting to be a bit too
much!
Cecile followed her sister's disappearance with a disdain that
held a tinge of pity. Then, turning to me: "I am sorry to have
been late. I had a headache. But I've taken another tablet and
I'm quite ready to work."
And indeed, she played quite as usual, perhaps even a bit less
rigidly, and with fewer false notes. She was very pale; the
firm modeling of her flesh gave to her skin a sort of marbled
glow which did not seem the dull complexion of Cecile. Her
face was ironical and aloof. She aroused me more, troubled me
more deeply than all the tears of Marthe. I could arrive at no
equilibrium with this girl, achieve no sense of her place and of
mine, of the relation between us.
She must have been aware of my mood in some degree, and this
must have influenced her own. But I had no sense of being able
to act easily upon her. I did not ask myself, as I had done with
Marthe: How long will she hold out? At once, a thought
came to haunt me. I recalled her threat to her sister to do away
with herself. Could this false calm be the mask of a quiet resolu-
tion? Despair that shows itself is easy enough to cope with.
But if my suspicions are true, I have no right to make believe
that I know nothing, that I suspect nothing. I cannot hope for
a candid explanation: I dare not ask it, and even if I did she
would probably refuse. I must contrive to find words, innocent
and indifferent enough in seeming, words so freighted with power
and suggestion that they will reach and extinguish her hidden will
to die.
I could not find them. Meantime, a certain artifice in Cecile's


JULES ROMAINS 223
manner weighed on me more and more. There I was rounding
out my phrases, controlling the intonations of my voice as I ex-
plained some trival detail of the exercise. And tiring! Before
an audience, there may be pleasure in "fine talk." But here in
the Barbelenet salon, with the dark Cecile seated at my left, the
portrait of the uncle overhead, and the subdued and morose reflec-
tions of light to and fro between the piano and the brass polished
jardiniere, "fine talk" was a depressing effort, it was like working a
pump in a deep cellar. . . .
The weight of the Barbelenet house was upon me, and I felt
it. It was getting to be a distinct effort, just to stay there. All
my initial work in getting used to the place had availed nothing.
And yet I had grown accustomed to many things in this house-
hold. What now made it all suddenly unbearable and strange?
Toward the close of the lesson, Cecile said:
"Would you mind very much meeting M Pierre Febvre again,
next Tuesday? He is coming."
"Why no! Not at all," I answered. And I showed how much
her question had surprised me. Cecile was watching me, as she
asked her question. Now once more she turned to the piano.
Very faintly, she smiled. And yet her smile was neither wilful
nor mysterious enough to make me feel that it concealed a sar-
casm or a challenge.
I was pondering it still, many hours after. . . .
VIII
Nothing remarkable at first about this meeting. The girls were
alone when I came in. M Pierre Febvre had lunched there and
was on a tour of the shops with M Barbelenet. Doubtless Mme
Barbelenet was resting in her room on the first floor or on the
couch in the dining-room beyond those double doors which I had
not yet crossed. I started the lesson quite as usual. Between
the sisters and me there was a calm pregnant with intimations.
Cecile and Marthe were aloofly courteous to each other like the
girls in those swagger boarding schools where even the most in-
timate friends refrain from calling each other by the more per-
sonal pronoun. But both of them had the air of sharing a secret
with me.


224 LUCIENNE
If Cecile said to Marthe: "I am three measures beyond B,"
her tone meant: "Of course it must be I who am wrong, Marthe
is always right. If by some miracle I did manage ever to play
faultlessly, luck would have it that just then perfection was out
of place." But the warmth of her eyes, the furrow on her brow,
rathermore an inevitable something in her mood, conveyed to
me this thought: "What possible value can the third measure
beyond B have for one who is going to die?" . . . Yes, it was
she who brought the thought back to me, freshened it silently as
if it were our secret understanding. From her body, both vibrant
and dark, this thought came to me. And on the other hand,
it was Marthe whose manner alluded to my meeting with Pierre
Febvre, it was she who searched me, and was a bit astonished, as
if she were uncertain whether to be confident or suspicious.
In the pause after a piece, we heard a sigh in the dining-room.
It was as if the sigh had been there long, only the piano had
hidden it. Faint though it was, this lamentation unnerved me.
The smoke-hued double door took on from it a mournful omen,
seemed to swell visibly with its life. Marthe got up; her face
was a little girl's as she hurried out to her mother. Cecile got up
also, but stayed near the piano. Slowly, Marthe came back, shut-
ting the door behind her.
"It's nothing, Mama says for Eugenie not to bother now about
those new pills. She wants me to help—in there. You will excuse
me, Mademoiselle? I have to go to the kitchen to see about the
tea. You'll not be able to work here, I am afraid: we'll be
disturbing you, Eugenie and I."
Mme Barbelenet appeared after the tea things were laid. I
searched for a sign of that sigh on her face, on her lips: there was
none. The queenly countenance of Mme Barbelenet admitted that
suffering had its place in human life as a sort of test for superior
souls: but the thought was general, it had no bearing on any
particular or recent thing. I could not even make out if Mme
Barbelenet was aware of the rivalry of her daughters, of its
extremely serious extent: or whether she had given in to the fail-
ure of her first plan and was hatching another. Her casual
glances at the girls did not suggest that she was studying them.
It was as if she had no thought beyond a maternal scrutiny of
their dresses, or of their table manners.


JULES ROMAINS 225
At last M Barbelenet and M Pierre Febvre came in. It was
the same group as last time. But I found it hard to realize this
sameness. To begin with my place in it was altogether changed.
Not that I had sunk so deep into the Barbelenet world as to be
a part of it: the thought would have dismayed me. But all the
feelings, schemes, currents of will that played at the centre of the
family group had now their vortex dangerously near my person:
the gyrations grazed me.
With the first look at M Pierre Febvre, I was once more deep in
the ruminant scrutiny which last time Madame Barbelenet had
broken. The process started up at the precise point where it had
stopped . . . like a strip of lace in a machine once more set run-
ning, or like one of those dreams which go on night after night.
—Cheap actor? . . . Servant? ... If I saw him for the first
time in a train, what in him, what feature, would keep me from
taking him for a valet on a holiday? Yes, that is easy. That gleam
in his eye is neither servile nor insolent: nor yet the challenge of a
pride that suffers from position. The lines of his face come and
go freely as his mood prompts, or his choice of response to the
conventions. There he is laughing. His face was childlike for
a moment in its lack of restraint. There was no mask on that
spontaneous gaiety. Actor? . . . Not that, either. . . .
There was this difference. My interior monologue did not draw
me away from my surroundings. It ran on, almost underground,
like a minor theme played by the left hand at the piano. It made
a counterpoint to my spoken words, and to my more social thoughts.
I had a chance this time to talk with Pierre Febvre. We dis-
cussed music. He claimed never to have learned to play the
piano. Perhaps he was sincere in the sense that he had never
seriously studied . . . merely picked up sight reading and the
like. But he showed that he knew a good deal about music. He
struck a few notes on the piano in order to recall certain passages
and I had a clear picture: a cabin on a ship, officers grouped smok-
ing, and Pierre Febvre at the piano ... a handful of young men
haunted by the sea's solitude and stirred by the long swells of
memory. Pierre Febvre among them and the music exalting their
mood into a painful joy. . . . My head whirled a little as we
chatted on. It was so long since I had had a good talk (and in
the presence of others). Marie Lemiez could not sustain a con-


226 LUCIENNE
versation on any difficult subject; and besides what we two said
to each other had no judges beyond ourselves.
The judges here were scarcely formidable. And yet their pres-
ence intensified our pleasure. Suddenly we two, Pierre Febvre
and I, were one within a subtle understanding; we were an
illumined city and the rustic peoples crowded about and gaped
from afar at the mysterious rites. Perhaps Pierre Febvre did not
have the thought as articulate as I, but its meaning touched him.
It was long past the usual hour . . . time to go. But I had to will
my going several times, repeat the order twenty times at least,
before I finally got to my feet and found the proper words for
parting.
Madame Barbelenet said to her husband: "You will accom-
pany Mademoiselle?" But her words were almost cut off by
Pierre Febvre.
"Why, I'm going up to town, too. If Mademoiselle will let
me, I'll be glad to help her across the tracks."
So emphatic was his invitation that there was no time either to
oppose it or consider it. Madame Barbelenet was about to remind
her cousin that he was expected to dinner. But all she managed
to do was to get up and open her left hand and give a little gasp.
As to the girls, I took good care not to look their way.
There we were suddenly past the threshold, M Pierre Febvre
and I.
The same impulse that had brought us together an hour before,
and that had inspired Pierre Febvre's hasty invitation, now made
me say: "It is really not right that I should be taking you from
your fiancee."
We had reached the first tracks. He exclaimed: "You'll
have me run over, if you shock me like that! My fiancee . . .
why . . ." And he burst into a "Ha! Ha! Ha!" ... a kind
of exclamation, very gay and very virile, less corporeal than
laughter, really a pure delighted burst of intelligence, a hint of
all sorts of jolly ways of taking life. I could hear that "Ha!
Ha! Ha!" resounding in the corridor of the ship, on the bridge,
at the peak of a steel stairway. A single glance of a being may
seem to us inexhaustible, may win a sudden shattering dominion
over the will. This "Ha! Ha! Ha!" gave me a strange trust
in myself and in all things, armoured me audaciously in my


JULES ROMAINS 227
approach to the whole human scene. It was like a heady wine.
My flesh drank it in. I envied the man who carried such ebul-
lience in himself. I felt that I was going to want to hear that
"Ha! Ha! Ha!" again.
A few tracks further on: "Who told you I was engaged to
. . . well, first of all to whom?"
"Please excuse me. I'm afraid I've said something very foolish.
There were hints, bits of secrets which I fear I heard carelessly,
and understood all wrong. I am so sorry."
"Please, no excuses. I assure you I am delighted with the
chance to find out certain things for myself, which after all do
concern me. Look here! You have acted like a friend, which
was splendid. Now don't go and act like a diplomat!"
"But what can I tell you that you don't know far better than I?"
"Pardon me. I am convinced that you can tell me a whole
host of things. Haven't you just informed me that I am engaged?
Is that nothing?"
There was room here, I thought, for a new "Ha! Ha! Ha!"
but it did not come. And then, ere I could be disappointed, I
understood that so lyrical an outburst should never come when
one expected it. It would turn mechanical. Its magic depended
on its shock.
"Come, please tell me the rest. What is the date of my wedding?
I really should know that, you see, in order to be there."
"You're making fun of me, and I suppose I deserve it. What
have I meddled in? But surely, you understand, if I've made
this mistake, the least I can do now is to beg your pardon and
keep quiet about how it happened. If one of us is in a position
to correct the other, it certainly is not I."
He smiled and grimaced a bit. The lamp of the semaphore
shone strangely on his smiling. "There's something in that. I
am the defendant, I suppose. Yes: it's all quite as it should
be. . . . The hour of expiation. . . . You are wholly in your
rights when you ask me how it is that I should appear as the
fiance of ... by Jove, of whom? . . . well, of one of the
Barbelenet sisters: let's put it the fiance of the Barbelenet sisters."
He spoke so lightly and his gaiety chimed so deliciously with
my thoughts, that I could not help laughing. "It is up to me to
defend myself," he went on. "Right! Explain myself. . . ."


228 LUCIENNE
I protested.
"Yes, I must. But you'll help me? It's the least you can do.
Certain elements in this affair are beyond me. That's where you
can serve."
We were leaving the station. Before us lay the Square. Sud-
denly he stopped and his voice showed that he was vexed.
"Here I was, about to lead you quite innocently into town.
You'll probably prefer not to be seen alone with a man whose
years are not yet exactly canonical. We're in the provinces,
remember, and your situation ... I understand perfectly. I was
about to act like a fool—once again. Why don't you say some-
thing? Perhaps it's still more foolish for me to be perorating
here in the full magnificent view of the electric lamp."
"Heavens! it didn't occur to me, any more than to you. It's
true. If the mother of one of my pupils saw us on the Avenue
de la Gare, which is rather empty at this time, she'd not put
herself out to think up a charitable excuse."
His black eyes sparkled. He looked at me as one looks at a
friend who has insinuated a good joke.
"This is a bother! And yet I can't let you go without an
explanation. I insist! We can't go back over the tracks, either."
I was strangely held. To me also it seemed important that our
talk should still go on. I say "to me also" for I was certain of
the same almost anxious wish beneath the banter of Pierre Febvre.
Cost what it might, we must remain together. In half an hour,
perhaps, we could part, and our parting would be right. I was
in the mood almost of waiting for the end of a most delicate
experiment: one in which luck and the circumstance of things
played quite as great a role as my own skill, so that I had to
keep my hands off lest I cheat my purpose. "Were you going
into town?" I asked him.
"Yes, I have some purchases to make. Most of the shops of
F les-Eaux are closed at this time of the year. You can't find
a thing."
"Then, let's go this way. I know the street. It's a bit longer
than by the Avenue de la Gare. But there's small chance of
meeting any one."
The street lay in dark shadows: we went in.
"You know," he said, "I am a sailor. ... I belong to the
Merchant Marine. The last time over, at the Azores, I came


JULES ROMAINS 229
down with the influenza. All sorts of trouble followed . . .
anaemia, liver. . . . The Company physician, a good sort, gave
me six months' leave. I was rather glad. I'd been on the go a
long time. The fleet had grown, they were short of men, and
we were all a little overworked. I couldn't loaf at Marseille.
That would look bad. So the doctor formalized my absence by
sending me here, that is to F les-Eaux. Pure chance! I had
been boring myself there for two or three weeks when suddenly
I remembered that there were relatives in the vicinity. The
Barbelenets are cousins on my mother's side: I'm not sure if
they're twice or thrice removed. My mind must have been con-
foundedly empty for them to enter it at all: I must have been
really starving for recreation to have thought of paying them
a visit. For I assure you, I live in mortal terror of bourgeois
circles and bourgeois customs. It's my own family, see? My
disgust for it all comes straight up from childhood, and I think
that explains more than a little why I went to sea. I didn't even
know the Barbelenets' address, but I recalled that the old man
held an important position at the Station. I must tell you, that
I find it very hard to live any length of time without a seaport
or a metropolis at hand. This town does not exactly fit my needs.
But a great Depot with its maze of workshops . . . it's beautiful,
isn't it, all those rotundas, all those rails ... a great Depot is
better than nothing. I think it was that, that brought me here,
a pretext for wandering about the platforms and the yards looking
for Cousin Barbelenet. It's a little like the Arenc and Joliette
basins at Marseille, don't you think? Or perhaps that is only an
illusion, an excuse occurring to me now. At all events, I looked
for my cousin and I found him. And I found his house. His
house, I admit, his house amused me immensely. In Marseille,
there's a sort of platform at the docks, where a number of quays
cross; and here you'll find a tiny bar, lodged away in a perfect
gem of a house. An old codger with a beard pours you Old
Manada at ten of a sunny morning, and the riveters racket away
on the nearby hulls. Well, the Barbelenet house is not as jolly
as that, not by a long shot . . . but it has its charm. I admit
I'd like it even better if it had a bit of a bar for the tracklayers
and the firemen, and if there were an old lady—Madame Barbel-
enet might serve if you rubbed off some of her polish—to pour
you an Old Manada. But we must manage with what there is.


230 LUCIENNE
"I know what you're thinking ... all this beating about the
bush, and no word about the heart of the matter. Yes. The
heart of the matter? Where does it lie, after all? What I am
saying may sound circumstantial and deliberate. Too innocent to
be quite the whole truth, eh? 'Penetrating* persons, when one
tells them a yarn like this, look at one with a smile of . . . pene-
tration. But perhaps even they can go wrong. . . .
"To be sure, there were two girls in the house. I don't pretend
that I was sorry—or indifferent. If I tell you that I like the
company of ladies, I shall be telling you the absolute truth. Has
my work something to do with this? Perhaps. But our situation
in this regard is not in the least like that of the officers in the
Navy. A ship of our sort is always well stocked with brilliant
women and bright girls. There's plenty of chance to see them.
This is particularly true of the purser. In our ears are poured all
the troubles of the journey. We pass on complaints, on pleas for
a change of cabin. In the evening, when we have caught up with
our work, there's nothing to keep us from a round of the salons,
from mixing in the conversation. In fact, it is a part of our
duty. And there's not the least danger that our presence will be
resented. You would never guess what humility can be treasured
away in the breast of a society leader worth ten millions. The
same person who would have the door shut on your face if you
were so presumptuous as to visit her on land will be exquisitely
cordial on board ship. You understand: for all the gilt hangings
and the luxurious carpets and the inviting armchairs, there rises
for ever from below ships a subtle tremor, and this tremor turns
into sober little thoughts that hover always close and keep men's
pride in a fragile state of flux.
"Of course, if one's not fatuous, one is only too well aware of
the shallowness of such relations, and how far they fall short of true
friendship. I don't romanticize them. For the most part, I find
it pleasanter to smoke a cigar with some dull American who
catechizes me about hotels in Florence, or wants to know if the
Italians love their King. . . . Add to this, that these women are
mostly foreign, and that a good part of their interest in talking
with you is their ambition to brush up on French, and you'll under-
stand that I am starved of true feminine society after all. But
what of the Barbelenet girls? Excellent little provincial misses
they are, and besides, my kin. There was no formality between


JULES ROMAINS 231
us. From the start I treated them as friends, and it never occurred
to me to find out if they were used to such ways. The older girl
is not exactly charming, certainly not pretty. The crass traditions
of her family and of her world have left their deposit already
on her soul. But she has spirit! I am often tempted to tell her
exciting things just to see that flare in her eyes, which she at once
puts down . . . the signal of a daring and untamed nature. I
could well imagine her living in the Sixteenth Century and given
over to a gallant life of passion. Ha! Ha! Ha! Differences
in sex make for clairvoyance, eh? Notice that I said Sixteenth
Century. I said nothing of Madame de la Pompadour or the Du-
Barry. The younger girl's a lot more seductive, and probably
there's less to her. To begin with, it is a point of interest that in a
house which resembles no other house in all the world, there should
be a little girl like all the little girls of her age. Can't you see the
seventeen pages of exclamation and antithesis which a romantic
novelist would make of it? First, a description of the Barbelenet
house and your teeth chattering already. Then, a picture of
Madame Barbelenet transmogrified into a Devil's cook. Then:
Tn these shadows trembled a star, in this cavern breathed a
flower . . .' Admit there's something of all that. . . .
"So I don't deny that I enjoyed the companionship of these two
girls. Call it boredom, lack of choice, what you like. The fact
remains; and I came again and again. I was invited to dinner.
And since this is to be a full confession, I must leave nothing out.
Have you had dinner yet at the Barbelenet house? Well, the
Barbelenet dinner is a binding, potent, somberly poetic thing.
Dishes come to the table that seem overcooked, forgotten in the
oven; sauces so black you are quite sure you will never get them
down. The maid does not inspire confidence. She is more like
a scrubwoman, a furniture duster, than a cook. She has none
of the glow and roundness and serenity of your true cuisiniere.
But wait! The first taste puzzles you. It is good, and you
begin to wonder if you are taking a perverse pleasure in the mas-
sacre of your palate. The doubt does not last: a glass of the
wine M Barbelenet has served you with his own hands, and it
is gone. You realize that you are at the beginning of a repast
of the very first rank: one that calls for all your critical attention.
This cuisine may not be subtle, but it is profound! The dishes
are the usual sort: family muttons, family chickens. But you


232 LUCIENNE
find yourself admitting: 'I have never eaten leg of mutton before!
I never guessed what roast chicken could be! '. . . There steals
over you, over the house, over the persons in the house, a gas-
tronomic glow. You watch the servant as she places a platter on
the table, how she envelops it and bundles it up in a last lingering
maternal look. You see the row of druggist boxes at the plate
of Madame Barbelenet, and on the plate itself a thick round por-
tion cut from the very heart of the joint, and in her glass the
copious gleam of rich old Burgundy. Cecile is always rather
saturnine, and Marthe keeps that pout of a worried child, which
you know so well. But listen to Cecile as she tells her father with
a dry twist of her lip in his direction, that the fresh bottle has a
taste of cork—and you had not detected it. Or watch Marthe
compound pepper and mustard into a subtle and precise seasoning
for her sirloin. Oh, I assure you, my partner at table on board
ship is often an Ambassador's wife or the daughter of a millionaire,
but I am exceedingly impressed all the same by the Mesdemoiselles
Barbelenet. It's not to the likes of them that I would dare offer
so generously some of our synthetic ship vintages, nor ask them
to select a slice of our cold storage beef.
"I know what you are thinking: love came to me, as to others
appetite, in eating! For I still seem to fight shy, don't I, of the
main question, the one that has caused all this talk, and that
has taken us all this way into town. Yes, I can be frank with
you, without seeming to be the cynic. I am not one of those
persons who think that love can be born between a man and woman
only in mysterious, and fortunate ways, only after rare harmonious
encounters. Not at all! It seems to me that when a man and a
woman come together, the first natural event between them is love.
I use the word advisedly. I don't mean animal impulse, I don't
mean rudimentary passion. I mean love: the immediate inter-
change of an extremely complex feeling. Time does not count.
At the instant of their first being together, the thing exists. In
fact, it is time that usually spoils it all. For instance: when I
come off the ship after a long crossing, I am extremely sensitive to
everything about me. Marseille pricks me like a briar-bush. Every
wheel on the pavement strikes its individual note. In the streets
are countless men and women passing, overtaking, touching, cross-
ing. Myriad common presences, myriad instantaneous contacts,
myriad flares of love between a man and a woman. This street


JULES ROMAINS 233
on which I have alighted from my ship becomes an astounding
maze of crackling sparks! The next day, I am already worn down
to the land: which means that I see nothing, I go about as blindly
as the next one.
"I believe truly that when a man and woman meet, their first
moment together is a moment of love. But in most cases this can-
not last. The space between them widens at once. They drift
apart at a heartbreaking pace. This woman is already elsewhere. I
was thinking of other things. There was just time to love her, not
even time to see her, not even time to think of looking in the direc-
tion she has gone. Or else, other feelings rush up, protest. Thoughts
of prudence, the conventions . . . all that sort of thing . . . make
short shrift of the ecstasy.
"You think I exaggerate? Perhaps what I say is more generally
true with men than with women. Or rather, men dare take note
of such things in their hearts, whereas women ... At any rate
if you will accept this as my theory, you will understand that I
need not play the hypocrite. I do not deny that there was born
between these girls and me, at the very start, a sentiment like love.
Had it been otherwise, I should have wondered. I say between
the girls and me: it was no more Marthe than Cecile: and what-
ever it was had absolutely no importance, no practical importance.
It led to absolutely nothing.
"I said that at times I am sensitive to what is going on. But
irregularly. I have pitiful gaps when I fail to see things that are
as clear as day. If I ever marry, this is going to prove disastrous!
Ha! Ha! For instance, it was only the other day that I grew
aware of the family net in which I was so gorgeously embroiled.
I discovered that Cecile had made up her mind to marry me: and
that from Madame Barbelenet's eyes there was coming the sort
of glow that is supposed to ripen sons-in-law. My impulse was
to take the next train back to Marseille, and make some friend
swap berths with me on the first out-going liner. What held me
back? Was it mere indolence? Reluctance to decide anything?
Distaste for losing a month's leave? The Barbelenet dinners? No
indeed. You'll say, the might of an unconscious love. No, again!
Rather, the difficulty in slipping out like that without appearing
an ass; the thought that the parents might suspect dreadful things,
might regard me as a seducer who had run away after dishonouring
their home. I could not be sure of Cecile. She might be the


234 LUCIENNE
sort—not exactly to confess to her disgrace in tears, she is not
devilish enough for that—but at least to hint that matters had
gone quite far. If I stayed on, in a few weeks I should be able
to ward off this danger, I should have time to cure the whole
lot of them of their mistake.
"I had the notion of turning cold toward the young girls, from
that time on. I did not. Such an abrupt change would have
made me out a man who sees a little late that he has overstepped
the bounds, and who fears that he may have to pay the con-
sequences. I went on as usual. In order to show the older girl
that she was not my 'heart's desire,' and to show them all that
what interested me was youth itself, rather than any one person,
I began to be on still easier terms with the younger sister. It was
not a question of preference. I wanted my new manner to make
them understand that Cecile was growing up, she was becoming
a woman, she demanded a new kind of respect, and in this fact
she lost what I had chiefly wanted. I harped more on the word
'cousins.'. . . You see? Something collective, something familiar.
I could have patted the maid's cheek, hugged Madame Barbel-
enet in my new expansion. I did not quite go that far.
"Well, I'm beginning to suspect that my tactics have not been
amazingly successful. Good craftsmanship in any line takes exper-
ience. I am afraid these subtleties simply did not get over—or
worse."
"I suppose that's why you left just now, as you did . . . making
a show of going out with me."
"What do you mean?"
"A sort of public demonstration of your independence."
"You know, that's punishing me with interest. What shall I
say? I could answer you ... or rather I might have answered
you in a very curt and feeling denial. But what I've told you
of my theories puts me in a painful position. I feel rather foolish.
I am sorry, more deeply sorry than I have any right to tell you.
Please don't expect me to protest."
"You are excused."
I said these words after a silence. My head was bent low,
my eyes took in the last gleam of the sun lengthening before us
and my voice was suffused tremblingly, as if these trivial words
had had some solemn mastering sense. Did he notice this? Was


JULES ROMAINS 235
this why I was embarrassed? Howsoever, he gave the talk a light
turn and it was at once easier to breathe.
"You have been patient listening to me. It was good of you,
but I am still not satisfied. You promised to help! You have
my version of the story now: you must know the girls' side, more
or less. Who could help me so well? I want to ask some
questions. All you need do is answer them. . . . You said 'your
fiancee.' Of which of the girls were you thinking?"
"Why ... I suppose of Cecile."
"You suppose? I see. Was it she put that in your head?"
"Not exactly. I am afraid I spoke rashly. I must have mis-
understood a number of things that were told me quite by the way.
I was struck by the word 'engaged': I could not have made that
up. But I must have been muddled about its application. Any
way, I was stupid to repeat it."
"I understand. You do not wish to betray the confidences of
these two girls. It is splendid of you. But can't you see that in
helping me you will be helping them? If these good people are
going on to delude themselves about me, I'd best know it."
"Very well. I will speak frankly. I think your strategy has
miscarried. In your effort to undeceive the older girl, you have
. . . how shall I put it. . . .?"
"Deceived the younger one?"
"The word's not right. You transferred the ailment from the
one to the other."
"The devil!"
"Even worse. For the elder one's not cured. The false hopes
have changed place, that's all. But Cecile has no idea that she
builds on absolutely nothing. She simply accuses her sister of
treachery . . . and you of faithlessness."
"And you do not find this shocking? A true sailor's adventure.
Chance lands you on a savage coast. You make friends with the
natives. They welcome you hospitably. You barter glass beads
for mutton. But you don't understand their customs. You scratch
your ear with your little finger, and thunder! by their laws, that
act has a dire magical meaning. You are caught. It's perfectly
true that I came of the provincial bourgeoisie. But such a long time
ago! I have forgotten a good deal. When I was still part of it, I
was of an age at which a boy could play with a couple of girl


236 LUCIENNE
cousins without frightful consequences. What would you do if
you were I?"
"First of all, I'd be absolutely sure that I was not in love with
one of those . . . girl cousins."
"Oh, I see what you are coming to. Excellent thing, pyschol-
ogy. 'Yes, Monsieur, your consciousness tells you that you have
only a most casual affection for Cecile Barbelenet. Even, at times,
you think that you despise her. Rationalization! The truth is,
Monsieur, you are desperately in love.' I'm sorry . . . but it isn't
so. Truly sorry, for these bizarre theories appeal to me."
"Next I would ask myself if the freedom of choice still remains
with me. I mean ... if I have not committed myself to one of
these two girls."
"Committed myself? Why this is dreadful! Cold water is
dripping down my back. You think that, do you? Either I am
a monster, or the customs of these people are monstrous. You
have no idea how it troubles me, that you should have such a
thought."
"But I think nothing about it ... at least I judge nothing.
All I am doing is to raise the question."
"Yes: and why should I not be able to answer it directly? Why,
the question itself is enough to freeze me. If I found it merely
absurd, I could ignore it. I can't. I have to admit that there's some
sense to it. What frightens me is that my conscience may yet
give me over to these people. You see? I have scratched my ear
with my little finger. It's bad enough that the irreparable gesture
should raise up the whole tribe. But if I start suggesting to myself
that in scratching an ear with a little finger I have indeed out-
raged some magical Order, and that I deserve to be sacrificed . . .
why then!"
I was laughing.
"Besides, Mademoiselle, I was complacent enough to count on
your being on my side, which would have helped my conscience
enormously to hold out against these attacks of suggestion. But
now, you too . . . You see, what I need is an expert's advice:
some one who can say to me with authority, 'The local law being
thus and so, you must do thus and so. Here are the precedents.'
With that, I could win back a little confidence in myself. Alone,
I dare decide nothing. It's true, it does seem to me that I've said
nothing, done nothing, of the slightest importance, nothing that


JULES ROMAINS 237
could possibly commit me. But it is my common sense which sug-
gested that, my common sense that knows so little about the local
customs, and yet inspires me with a dangerous respect for
the feelings of people. Man is superstitious. Nothing is so con-
tagious as the notion of magic."
"I was wrong, perhaps, to worry you so. Well, it's only right
that you should know how your cousins are taking things. Perhaps
it is not too late to bring them back to reason. How to go about
it—I haven't the least idea."
We had made more than one detour, quite instinctively, in order
to let our talk go on. But the town was not infinite. It took a
certain collusion even, not to notice that we had twice passed a
little grocer's shop where one round lamp lighted the jars and
bottles so naively that the thought came to me, sharp and delicious,
of my childhood, and of Christmas stockings. Suddenly we were
upon the rue Saint Blaise where it meets the rue de l'Huile. We
had come up from the alley of Devant-de-la-Boucherie, which I
had failed to recognize, and as we stepped from its gloom, the
lighted street blazed in our eyes.
There we were, caught in the very heart of town, and still in
the heart of our talk. I am afraid rather dumbly, we stopped
in the Square and searched for some manner of farewell that would
appear casual to others and to us. Embarrassment and amusement
held us balanced. . . . Suddenly, there was Cecile Barbelenet not
two paces off!
It was she, no doubt, Cecile, the elder daughter of the smoky
house: Cecile the darkling body. She seemed to rise not from
the street, but from our thoughts. And even here in the street's
brilliance, she made a sort of sucking gap, even as in her house:
a gap from which the town's bright movement fell away, dead-
ened: a sort of flaw in the street.
She nodded to us, and passed. I had no time to see the expression
of her face: or rather I did not try to see it. I did not try to see
where she was going.
We went on a few steps. Pierre Febvre's mouth was open:
he looked like a little boy caught at some mischief. But the way
he raised his brow and puckered up his eyes showed charmingly
that he understood the strangeness of the event; on the whole it
amused him more than it disturbed him. Meanwhile, no word:
but we were thinking. My sensation was at once serious and


238 LUCIENNE
delicious. I knew very well that this was unfortunate: I could
foretell the possible consequences, I could even exaggerate them. I
did not quite manage to be depressed.
At last Pierre Febvre, catching sight of the street placard, said:
"The Encounters of the rue Saint Blaise, or The Futile Pre-
cautions . . . You'll admit that this was not natural. Have you
ever seen that girl before in this neighbourhood, at this hour?"
"Never."
"It's at least seven o'clock. The Mesdemoiselles Barbelenet are
not the kind who are sent on errands at seven of the evening.
Here's something to think about. Meanwhile, I admit my peculiar
talent for getting caught. You must be furious at me!"
He stopped and pondered: a flood of little smiles went rippling
round his face as if his eyes were their source.
"Listen!" he went on, "I've made such a good start at com-
promising you ... as they put it ... I had better go on. A
mistake is often a premature truth. I suggest that we dine together
at a little table in the most conspicuous restaurant in town."
"You're joking."
"I am not! This time, I know what I am saying, what I am
doing."
"Well, then—no."
"No?"
"No! This will bear thinking about, also."
"Oh, you want to think it over before you accept?"
"Certainly not. What I mean is that such an invitation would
bear thinking about a little more ... on the part of him who
makes it. I can see that you enjoy the companionship of girls. It's
too bad they can't take things as lightly as you do."
"Lightly? Excuse me. Think what you like of my conduct
in the Barbelenet house. I admit anything. But I promise you
that at this moment I am serious—serious, decisively! You may
say that the difference is not discernible. You know, on board
ship, we would say: 'There's fire in the hold' in quite the same
calm tone of voice as 'The First Class complain about the fish.'
Would the first announcement be a small matter on that account,
would it not . . ."
"Good-bye, Monsieur Febvre. Many thanks for accompanying
me. . . ."
To be continued



Photograph by Druct
LES BORDS DE LA SEINE. BY GEORGES SEURAT





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PARIS LETTER
July, 1924
FOLLOWING closely upon the homage paid Proust by Anglo-
Saxon writers (Marcel Proust, an English Tribute, edited by
C. K. Scott Moncrieff—a touching foreign commemoration, form-
ing a worthy complement to the special number devoted to him last
year by La Nouvelle Revue Franchise) comes Proust's new volume,
La Prisonniere, constituting the third part of Sodome et Gomorrhe
and the sequel to A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Many books
are read, it would seem, abstractedly; we remember the books, but
not the place, circumstance, or state of mind in which we read
them. Proust, on the contrary, puts all our sluggish senses on the
alert, cleanses them, sharpens them, animates them with a genius
that is not our own, inasmuch as it is that of the author; we are be-
come like Proust, for whom a word, an odour, was enough to give
birth to a thousand thoughts, ten thousand memories. I had with
me during these last days in a little hotel on the banks of the Seine
in Les Andelys above Rouen, the two volumes of La Prisonniere.
Henceforward the image of Albertine, captured by the hero and
confined in his apartment, a close prisoner to his distrustful love
and a victim to the vivisection of his jealousy, is not to be sepa-
rated in my mind from a stately landscape of chalk cliffs abrupt
over a slate-blue Seine still ruffled by winter currents, and unmind-
ful of the Parisian scenes it reflected a few hours before, going down
to the sea on an exquisite afternoon of early spring, through the
fat Normandy meadows and the delicately toned hills (that en-
chanted Turner, Boudin, and Sickert, and later delighted Elstiz
and Proust himself) skirting the villages or hamlets of Balbec,
Cambremer, Froberville, et cetera—that Proust particularly loved
and used in the naming of his characters. Of La Prisonniere there
is nothing to say if not that it and Swann are the most beautiful of
Proust's books. Pages like those on Albertine asleep, watched
over by her calm, tender, and implacable lover, the death of
Bergotte, the falling out of M de Charlus with the Verdurins, the
Verdurin soirees, the passages on Hardy and Dostoevsky, and,


240 PARIS LETTER
above all, the principal theme of love-jealousy, the psychological
orchestration of the great dolorous symphony of suspicion—sus-
picion carried here to a diabolic intensity beside which the story
of Swann's jealousy in the first volume grows almost pale—will
add more glory to the name of this, my best friend, whose every
volume, as it brings back his vivid personality, renews my incon-
solable grief at having lost him. But have I lost him? When
I read his books I cannot believe it.
The exposition of the collected work of J. E. Blanche, now being
held in the Faubourg Saint Honore, is also in its way a vast re-
search, sentimental as well as plastic, into the land of lost days. In
his preface to Blanche's book of essays, entitled De David a
Degas, Marcel Proust tells of the astonishment of a mondaine
"that masterpieces could be created by the hands of so well-dressed
a man, so keen and malicious a conversationalist." Save the hun-
dred or so of his canvases at the museum of Rouen and those which
are not in France (the Thomas Hardy of the Tate Gallery, and the
Beardsley of the National Gallery of London) forty years of the
painting of Blanche—and more than an occasional masterpiece—
are here. By means of a nice selection of subjects the artist has ably
builded a veritable iconography of an entire epoch, or rather of at
least three epochs, from 1880 to our own days. There is, first, the
Whistler epoch with portraits of Maurice Barres, Gide, Proust,
Montesquiou. Then a second period with its reminiscences of
Hogarth, Chardin, or Stevens; dead landscapes; delicate poems of
lacquer, flowers, and mother-of-pearl; "Coster girls"; portraits of
Debussy, George Moore, Degas, Rodin, et cetera. Next, the more
recent days of the Russian ballets; Nijinsky, Prince Igor, and the
war pictures. These I do not like so well. Finally, there are the
portraits of to-day: Bergson, Claudel, Giraudoux, Max Jacob,
Radiguet, Cocteau, Mauriac, and myself. Aside from its artistic
interest, the future documentary value of such a collection is in-
calculable. "How we should prize," remarks J. L. Vaudoyer in his
excellent preface, "a gallery of portraits of the eighteenth century;
the likenesses of Voltaire and Diderot, Gluck and Laclos, faithfully
done by a single painter, a reproduction of an entire epoch with its
cafes, its salons, its femmes d'esprit, its adventures and actors!"
Blanche is at home in any field of artistic effort, however audacious,
and has faithful admirers in England and America. Because he


PAUL MORAND 241
has bided his time (he is over sixty and this is his first exhibition)
and because of his rare gifts, his keen intelligence and technique, he
is finally being accorded a well-deserved place in the French art
of the last thirty years.
As I am just now speaking of painting, I want to say a word
about a new painter who has been much discussed in Paris for some
weeks. At the Boeuf sur le Toit or at the Jockey the first words
one hears are always: "You know Picasso has just discovered a
new painter. He is twenty years old; he comes from Barcelona;
his name is Pruna." Pruna is at one and the same time Luini
and the very last phase of Picasso; but he is himself too and always
will be. He has his own definite qualities of composition: a naif
grace, a deft handling of forms, and the introduction of variations
into landscapes, figures, or the eyes of American sailors. You do
not know the Jockey? It is no more the Jockey Club than the
Wagram ball of which Proust speaks in his preface to Blanche's
book is a ball at the Prince of Wagram's. The Wagram ball is a
public dance of the Avenue Wagram and the Jockey is an American
cabaret in Montparnasse, the first of its kind in Paris and ohe of
the strongholds of artists of the advance guard. The Rotonde
itself is being eclipsed. Imagine a single room, papered walls and
ceiling—with screaming posters, insolent programmes of cacoph-
onous concerts, urgent summons to wild exhibitions, and comic
recommendations or injunctions in the Yankee slang of New York's
Bohemia, as for example, "Take care of your coat if you have any,"
et cetera. In this room, blue as a tunnel with stagnant smoke, naive
girls dance with the directors of musical reviews. The costumes
range from the heroic student's cape, lined with red silk, of the
time of Barres or Jean de Tinan and the cravats of the Yellow
Book days to the now prevailing vogue of winter sports clothes much
affected toward midnight by painters—no one knows why. The
pianist plays a descending scale as though it were a bobsleigh slide.
The favourite singer, for whose sake certain femmes du monde
cross the Seine, is a taxi chauffeur during the afternoon. He is of
Polish origin. One of my friends who is infatuated with him met
him the other afternoon on the boulevards. She beckoned and the
chauffeur recognized her and stopped. As they had been dancing
together all night, a quarter of an hour's conversation seemed the
natural thing. Finally she took her leave. "Eight francs seventy-


242 PARIS LETTER
five, Madame" said the chauffeur; for he had lowered his flag for
the period of the interview.
La Nouvelle Revue Franchise publishes in its February number
an article by M Marcel Arland, in which that gifted young writer
of twenty-three sits in judgement upon the generations that
preceded him. M Riviere presents the article in the light of a con-
clusive document. But is it? M Arland's confession seems to me
confused, romantic, and aimless.
Since the breaking up of Dada, the growths that composed it
may plainly be seen taking individual root in a soil common to them
all. There is general agreement to-day that Tzara is a charming
poet, Soupault a charming novelist, Picabia a charming blasphemer;
and that Aragon will have every success. The only case that is
novel and of import seems to me that of Andre Breton, an out and
out extremist, making no concessions and turning his back upon
literature and all the world. His Clair de Terre just published, a
strange, hermetic book full of talent and frenzy, has been one of
his few signs of life. I like Breton's personality.
While the serpents of Lautreamont writhe and threaten to devour
the best of our post-war youth, Jean Giraudoux, a charming
Debussy muezzin, mounts his minaret to say his Priere sur la Tour
Eiffel, a prayer replete with optimism and with deference toward
higher education. Francois Mauriac, in Genitrix, has taken refuge
in the Landes near the Spanish border, thereby sheltering his stark
and honest art against the invasion of passing fashions and modern
crises. Le Paradis a l'Ombre des Epees is an exposition of Henry
de Montherlant's thesis that athletics constitute a mystic rite, a sort
of religious and military training that he considers Spartan, but
that seems to me rather Germanic, in view of the aristocratic basis
of his programme. It is an interesting document nevertheless. I
am not well enough acquainted with young French athletes to know
whether they are all as Montherlant paints them. If so they have
gone far indeed since the days when the most disinterested and
Anglo-Saxon spirit ruled athletics in France.
Bernard Grasset has just re-edited under the title L'Homme de
Cour, the curious book of Balthazar Gracian, a Spanish Jesuit. It
had an immense vogue in the eighteenth century, and was then dur-
ing the nineteenth totally forgotten, save by Schopenhauer, upon
whom it is said to have exercised a decisive influence. I was much


PAUL MORAND 243
interested in this series of maxims moral and immoral, on the achiev-
ing of success through cynicism, by a practice of the art of biding
one's time, and the use of cunning to curry favour with the great.
It is not often that I have space or time to speak of the French
magazines of the advance guard. There are about a score of them
and, especially since the extension of the custom of issuing special
numbers, they often publish important manifestos. Those who
desire precise and detailed information on our contemporary letters
must not miss the special number of Intentions devoted to Valery
Larbaud; that of La Nouvelle Revue Critique on Maurice Barres;
Le Disque Vert (which together with Qa. Ira, Selection, and La
Nervie, forms an important group of Belgian magazines in the
French tongue) on Max Jacob; the Images de Paris on Apollinaire;
the Poet Nicolas Beauduin in Vie des Lettres on the present state of
letters; and Intentions or l'Ane d'Or on modern Spanish literature.
In contrast to the general impoverishment of the modern French
theatre, has been the signal success of Jules Romain's Knock ou le
Triomphe de la Medecine at the Theatre des Champs Elysees, a
success in part prepared for by the reception of his M Le Trouhadec
Saisi par la Debauche last year. It is an excellent satire on doctors.
Though the humour is at times somewhat ponderously synthetic,
it has succeeded in captivating a public ordinarily but little in-
clined to enjoy audacity. I have been amused too by the comic
aspects of La Dame aux Camel i as which, thanks to the exquisite
Second Empire settings of Alex Benois, has been successfully
adapted to modern taste by Melle Rubinstein. La Dame aux
Camelias has not yet given the lie to its reputation as an old
melodrama that after a half century still moves to tears the Chinese
and the Esquimaux. Le Tombeau sous l'Arc de Triomphe by M de
Raynal which has made such a sensation at the Comedie Franchise
is a sinister war epic, full of rhetoric and vulgar eloquence. Then
there is a short sketch, Voulez-vous Jouer avec Moa, with M Marcel
Achard, a very young actor; it is characterized by a charming grace
and novelty and is worthy of particular notice. As for the rest of
the new plays, it is best not to mention them at all. Unfortunately,
save for rare exceptions, it is only the least representative of French
plays that are brought to the American stage for commercial pur-
P°ses- Paul Morand


BOOK REVIEWS
THE SEVEN LOW-BROW ARTS
The Seven Lively Arts. By Gilbert Seldes. Illus-
trated. Svo. 44S pages. Harper and Brothers. $4.
MR SELDES has written a valuable and enormously enter-
taining book on the vulgar arts of vaudeville, jazz music,
newspaper satire, the movies, the revue, the circus, and the comic
strip. He has tried to do for the field of popular entertainment
very much what Mr Mencken has done for philology in his
treatise on The American Language; and everyone interested in
American culture should give attention to the results of his
researches.
Unfortunately, Mr Seldes has not to the same degree as
Mencken the gift of lucid presentation. He does not seem to
realize that the chief function of his book is one of exposition,
the conveying of information and the unfolding of ideas, and
that exposition requires a certain amount of patience and order
on the part of the writer. Instead, Mr Seldes proceeds obliquely
by means of metaphysical discussions of theory and elliptical
literary allusions, jokes, curses, cries of ecstasy, and hysterical
revelations—the whole rather bewilderingly distributed among
chapters, parentheses, foot-notes, and appendices. You have a
feeling that the quicksilver ideas are escaping through the ill-
woven interstices of the sentences. There are many passages in
The Seven Lively Arts which I cannot understand at all, and many
others which I should not be able to understand unless I hap-
pened in the particular case to have some independent knowledge
of what Mr Seldes is trying to tell me about. I cite, for example,
the foot-note on page 336:
"I haven't seen The Covered Wagon. Its theme returns to the
legendary history of America. There is no reason why it should
not have been highly imaginative. But I wonder whether the


EDMUND WILSON 245
thousands of prairie schooners one hears about are the film or the
image. In the latter case there is no objection."
Now what does he mean by this? On the opposite page I find:
"By corrupting the action [of novels and plays which were
being turned into movies] the producers changed the idea; bad
enough in itself, they failed to understand what they were doing
and supplied nothing to take the place of what they had
destroyed."
I can see that a possible sense might be given to this passage
by interchanging the semicolon with the comma, but there are
so many other passages like it that it is impossible to tell whether
this particular one has been misprinted or not. Again:
"You ['the movie magnates'] gave us Marguerite Clark in
films no better than the 'whimsy-me' school of stage plays."
Now I happen to know what Mr Seldes means by the
"whimsy-me" school of stage plays because I happened to be
present on the single night when No-Siree was performed, and
saw the burlesque of A. A. Milne in which the old gentleman
said, "Ah, whimsy me!"; but there can't be more than a few hun-
dred people in the country to whom this passage will convey any-
thing at all. I commend Mr Seldes to the study of the expository
writings of Bertrand Russell and J. S. Mill, and to the author
of Gulliver's Travels and The Conduct of the Allies, whom Mr
Seldes frequently invokes, but seems to have profited little by
reading.
None the less, for all his tendency toward woolly writing, Mr
Seldes does succeed in disengaging some judicious observations:
the chapter from which I have just quoted, for example, contains
admirable criticism of the movies; and the discussion of the
technique of vaudeville is, I believe, equally sound. And, though
his bons mots do not always quite come off, he strikes at his best
a vein of debonair wit—as in his passage on Mr Christopher
Morley—which seems to ignite spontaneously and unexpectedly,
when he is not especially trying for it. But where he is really


246 THE SEVEN LOW-BROW ARTS
most successful, I feel, is in simply reporting the things that he
has seen. It is then that he writes his best prose and produces his
most persuasive effects. The descriptions of the Chaplin films, the
Krazy Kat comic strip, and the antics of the Fratellini really
bring them most vividly before us: we laugh with delight as we
read. Mr Seldes is surest here, I suppose, because he is closest
to his object. As soon as he stops looking at his object he has a
way of being bedazzled by strange fancies, and is almost as likely
to say something wildly inappropriate as something penetrating
and true. How, for example, did he arrive at the following: "It
was odd that in Vanity Fair's notorious 'rankings,' Krazy tied with
Doctor Johnson, to whom he owes much of his vocabulary." In
what way does Krazy Kat's vocabulary resemble Doctor John-
son's? The romantic passages which Mr Seldes proceeds to quote
certainly do not tend to convince one of it. He also describes
Krazy Kat as "a creature more like Pan than any other creation
of our time"—though it is difficult to see how Krazy is much
more like Pan than he is like Doctor Johnson. And on what
evidence does he prophesy that Ring Lardner is capable of becom-
ing a second Mr Dooley? Ring Lardner, so far as I know, has
never shown a taste for political satire; his recent tendency has
been, on the one hand, toward sheer nonsense and, on the other, in
such short stories as The Golden Honeymoon, a sort of realistic
fiction. Nor can I see that the passage about the kittens which
Mr Seldes quotes from Lardner has anything to do with the
"Black Beauty—Beautiful Joe style of writing" of which Mr
Seldes says it is a parody. "It may shock Mr Lardner," says Mr
Seldes, "to know that he has here done in little what Mr Joyce
has done on the grand scale in Ulysses." Well, the reviewer can
testify that Mr Lardner is not the only person surprised by this
statement. And he feels sure that Mr Lardner's shock will be
nothing to the one in store for the composers of I Wonder Who's
Kissing Her Now when they learn that they have "skilfully built
up a sentimental situation in order to tear it down with two
words." Not, however, that Mr Seldes doesn't often hit the mark—
when he suggests, for example, that Mr Dooley, in respect to the
Dreyfus case, was performing precisely the same service for Amer-
icans as Anatole France did for the French. The only difference was,
as Mr Seldes notes, that a different sort of audience required a dif-


EDMUND WILSON 247
ferent vehicle of satire. What Mr Dooley had to say was essentially
no more genial than what Anatole France had to say, but it was
only his geniality and his dialect which made it possible for him
to say it at all. So, in our own generation, when manners have
passed from back-slapping to brutality, we have Mencken using
a bludgeon on a society which understands nothing but bludgeons.
We have never yet reached the day when an Anatole France could
be useful or popular.
Much of the clouding of Mr Seldes' judgement in individual
cases arises, I fancy, from his strangely feverish approach to his
subject as a whole. In his most ecstatic moments he is given to
making extravagant claims for his heroes—as when he asserts that
Herriman and Charlie Chaplin are the only two "great artists"
in America, and that Krazy Kat is our "most satisfactory work of
art"; then, apparently with these excesses upon his conscience, he
will protest for whole chapters at a time that he is not really trying
to compare Herriman with Picasso and Irving Berlin with
Strawinsky, but merely backing them against the "faux bon" the
"bogus" imitations of the fine arts—thus creating, with an im-
mense amount of pother, what is, so far as I can see, very largely
an artificial issue, and one which lands Mr Seldes in a foolish and
inaccurate disparagement of opera and the drama. Why can Mr
Seldes not simply go ahead and write a book about the popular
arts, without all these protestations? They have been written
about before—by Anatole France, for example, who did not think
it necessary to denigrate the theatre in order to justify the cafe
chantant. Well, there is a real reason, I suppose, why the popular
arts present a slightly more difficult problem in America than they
do in a society like the French. The French have a culture which
diffuses itself through all the classes and forms of their activity.
The same thing which you have at its highest pitch of purity and
intensity in a comedy of Moliere is found also in a farce of Guitry,
a revue of Rip, a cartoon in Le Rire, or a conversation in a railway
coach. But in America we have no such homogeneous culture
penetrating our society. We have a whole race that arrives at
maturity with practically nothing that can be called genuine con-
tact with the classic Anglo-American culture which is all we have
for a heritage; and among this race it was inevitable that there
should be individuals who, speaking no other language but the


248 THE SEVEN LOW-BROW ARTS
common slang and obliged to turn their gifts to account in the
practice of some slap-stick form of entertainment, have achieved
extraordinary brilliance or distinction, not only unrecognized by
serious criticism, but scarcely even knowing there was such a thing
as art or realizing that they were artists. Herriman, I suppose, is
such a man; so perhaps is Ring Lardner. And Mr Seldes has per-
formed a feat of some daring in bringing them within the field of
criticism. He has overdone it a little, to be sure, and his case may
suffer in consequence; but I dare say if he had not been capable of
overdoing it, he might never have got so far as to do it at all.
One thing which, I suspect, has had much to do with making
Mr Seldes self-conscious about the popular arts is the fact that,
unlike most Americans, he seems not to have been brought up on
them from boyhood and to have learned early to take them for
granted. He tells us, for example, that he had scarcely ever in his
youth been to either a circus or a vaudeville show; and his failure
to discuss either the early work of Opper (save for a bare mention
of Happy Hooligan) or the burlesque of Weber and Fields, sug-
gests that he may never have known them. This has the advantage
of enabling him to see in the vulgar arts things which escape people
who have grown up with them, and the disadvantage of allowing
him to approach them with a sensibility so sophisticated, that, not,
for example, having enjoyed a given vaudeville act at the mental
age for which it was intended—that is, the age that Mr Seldes was
about twenty years ago and that the average vaudeville audience
is for ever—he tends either angrily to throw it overboard as an
unsuccessful attempt to do something dignified or to read into it
all sorts of profundities which have no actual existence.
This lack of background in the lively arts allows him to neglect
an interesting subject which I should like very much to see dis-
cussed: I mean the revolution in New York humour. In the old
days, Lew Fields used to look at Joe Weber's flowered vest and say,
"Aha, now I know vere de lounge vent!" Nowadays, Joe Cook
says to "the Senator," "How's your uncle?"—and the Senator re-
plies, "I haven't got an uncle." "Fine," says Cook, "How is he?"
The difference is that Fields' joke is a gag, whereas Cook's is
simply idiotic. Fields is fantastic, but there is a point in what he
says; Cook is pointless and insane. I would bring to Mr Seldes'
notice two comedians who seem to have been the transition figures
in this change: Charlie Case and James J. Morton. Charlie Case


EDMUND WILSON 249
was a black-face monologist with a Chaplinesque overtone of
pathos who used to sing curious unrhymed songs to a monotonous
dirge-like accompaniment. Case had a distinguished and personal
vein which was at its best when it was furthest from gagging, and
his death is said to have been hastened by chagrin at his failure
to establish himself with anything like the public he deserved.
If he had been launched only eight or ten years ago he would now
probably have a show of his own—like Frank Tinney who, to my
mind, is far less interesting than Case. I should like to see Mr
Seldes add Charlie Case's two celebrated songs to the appendix of
his next edition; he can get them from F. P. A., who reprinted them
at the time of Case's death. James J. Morton was a large solemn
man in an ill-fitting frock-coat who used to come out and recite
"Hark, mother! I hear the sound of footsteps in the village street,"
to the accompaniment of deafening off-stage noises, and tell inter-
minable pointless stories rather in the manner of Ed Wynn. Both
these men were wholly unlike any other comedians whom I ever re-
member to have seen in that era: the Jimmy Powerses, the Nat M.
Willses, even the de Wolfe Hoppers. They were more personal,
more intellectual, more like the comedians of to-day. In them one
could feel the first faint foreshadowings of the Algonquin school of
humour—the cult of the flat joke, the irrelevant remark, the
sophisticated naivete.
The thing that makes this new American school of humour par-
ticularly interesting is its curious resemblance to Dadaism. The
English, and consequently the Americans, have always had a
penchant for nonsense and, though the nonsense of Joe Cook and
Robert Benchley is quite different from that of Carroll and Lear,
there is nothing surprising about nonsense among us. But that the
French should develop precisely the same thing at precisely the
same moment looks like a case for a sociological critic. For the
French have never been given to nonsense; they have scarcely even
understood it. French jokes, unlike English jokes, are usually
funny, not because they are silly, but because they are true. But
since the war the French have discovered nonsense—Cocteau's
Maries de la Tour Eiffel was an approach to it, and the Dadaists
have gone all the way; and though they have characteristically
made an artistic issue of it, as Mr Benchley or Mr Lardner would
not think of doing, they have arrived at precisely the same vein
of idiocy as the American humorists. Another addition which I


250 THE SEVEN LOW-BROW ARTS
should like to suggest to Mr Seldes for the appendix of subsequent
editions of his work is the text of one of the Dadaist dramas printed
side by side with, say, Mr Lardner's fishing scene from The Forty-
Niners or the play of his which was read by Mr Benchley and Mr
Stewart at the Authors' League Dinner. What this sort of thing
represents in France, I suppose, is the collapse of Europe after the
war and the intellectual chaos which accompanied it; what it repre-
sents in America is something which may perhaps be only another
aspect of the same thing: the bewildering confusion of the modern
city and the enfeeblement of the faculty of attention. People en-
joy hearing long inconsecutive pointless stories told because that
is the way their minds are beginning to work. They have to think
about too many things and too many things whose relation to each
other is not clear: when they sophisticate the humour of this state
of mind they get Joe Cook and the Dadaists.
In any case, however, Mr Seldes' book is a genuine contri-
bution to America's new orientation in the arts which was inaugu-
rated by America's Coming of Age, in 1915, and more violently pro-
moted in 1917 by A Book of Prefaces. His critical ideas seem to
have been thrown into some confusion by his evidently quite recent
realization that it is possible to appreciate Krazy Kat and James
Joyce—and "the Medea of Euripides"—all at the same time; but
his sensibility has preserved for us a really distinguished record of
American popular entertainment. The lively arts may never have
existed as arts, but Mr Seldes has invented them: it is he who is the
artist. He has precipitated the pure crystals of American irony
from the adulterated compounds in which it is usually sold; he has
caught the etherial echos of our music and gaiety as they drift in
the city air. To read his book is to relive the last ten years of
American newspaper and vaudeville and revue, but in a purified
and concentrated form—tasting nothing but the ecstatic tune, the
racy flash of characterization, the moment of insane laughter. As
for the trained dogs and the sentimental soloist, they are made
tolerable by our companion's wit at their expense and by the
scant attention we are obliged to pay to them in his company.
If he were only a little less fanatical, we reflect, about magnifying
the importance of the whole affair, he would be the most perfect
companion in the city.
Edmund Wilson


THISTLES DIPPED IN FROST
Against This Age. By Maxwell Bodenheim. 8vo.
73 pages. Boni and Liveright. $1.75.
Crazy Man. By Maxwell Bodenheim. i2mo. 238
pages. Harcourt, Brace and Company. $2.
MAXWELL BODENHEIM'S work has been honoured in al-
most every notable type of current publication; in that pub-
lished for the politically conservative seriously cultured person, in
the contumaciously aesthetic uncompromisingly intellectual maga-
zine, in the "poets' garland," in newspapers, and in the fashionable
woman's Lady-Book-and-Shopping-Guide. As is to be expected of
a writer for many persons, Mr Bodenheim is many things: social
philosopher, literary critic, novelist, and poet; but it is to be regret-
ted that as a critic of modern life, he goes but part of the way, spar-
ing himself accurate exposition of the things he advocates, impetu-
ously dogmatizing so that one is forced in certain instances to
conclude that he is self-deceived or willingly a charlatan. Our
anger is stirred by his epitome of Christ's "mistakes" in emancipat-
ing humanity. He says Christ approved the repressing of instinct
and that he "told people to believe with their feelings and let their
minds go on a vacation." As it were in passing, Mr Bodenheim
offers definitions which detain without enriching. In comparison
with Chesterton's compact, expansive consideration of mysticism,
his definition of it is not thorough, nor are his definitions indeed
definitions, but assertions. When he says to a grass blade,
"You reach the sky because your face
Is not turned toward it,"
one feels a shrewdness of which the logic is not sound; eventually
one doubts the authoritativeness of opinions which have the effect
of being aphorisms; aphorisms in which there is often the mis-
chievousness of half-statement or a slovenly abandoning of what
at first had seemed to the author to be interesting. "Modern poets


252 THISTLES DIPPED IN FROST
. . . frequently sneer at philistines, hypocrisies, and conservative
postures," says Mr Bodenheim, "and this reiterated attitude reveals
a baffled longing for vengeance." Can a poet sneer? Is not Mr
Bodenheim's interest in retaliation at variance with creative power?
Moreover, side by side with much candour, sensitiveness, and eman-
cipated judgement, this author's concept of woman puzzles one.
Surely there is false perspicacity in an analysis which results always
in the exhibiting of woman's "enticing inferiority"; which finds
her an embarrassing adjunct, "cooing and crawling for your money,"
a creature of perfumed effeteness, of "interminable evasions,"
"waving surrender in the foreground," never other than a receiver of
"men's ornaments and poverties." The writer's altitude of pro-
nouncement reaches its apex in the statement made by one of his
dramatis personae, that there is zest in bagging a woman who is
one's equal in wits; the possibility of bagging a superior in wits not
being allowed to confuse the issue. Suspecting that Mr Boden-
heim has but half sifted the facts in his observations as cited
above, one feels a false approach to life in certain of his ironies.
"Highly imaginative men are accused of being demented, and con-
sequently belittled," he says. If they are, it is perhaps because they
are not laborious—not so severe in judging themselves as in judging
others. In his interpretation of Christ, his attitude to woman, his
impatience with his readers, one feels a grudging view, a lack of
breadth, of noble reverie, of the detachment of faith.
There is more for us, however, in Mr Bodenheim's writing than
cause for objection. In one of his poems he makes the crystal state-
ment that "simplicity demands one gesture and men give it endless
thousands," and he is in his own fiction somewhat stark and em-
phatic, showing dispatch and quick firm action, with that condensed
finality of implication which is an attribute of the genuine narrator.
There is too, an acid penetration which recalls James Joyce's
Dubliners in the statement, "[his] eyes greeted the darkness as if it
were an advancing mob." One values the compactness of, "the sea
had lent her its skin," the power of accurate observation in the
poem, Old Man,
"You turn your hammock and surrender limbs
To sunlight, and increase the hammock's swing,"


MARIANNE MOORE 253
and the pliant irony of some of Mr Bodenheim's underworld
vernacular:
"He asks me to please keep quiet! I said, 'Gee, you've got a big
opinion of yourself, haven't you?' . . . and he answers, 'No, it's
not that, but I know in advance everything that you're going to
say so there's no need of me hearing it.'"
But again we disagree with him when he says, "The novel should
be far more interested in style than in message." It is Mr Boden-
heim's misfortune that he has attained this ideal, since in his work,
there is much to arrest one yet not enough to detain; his work lacks
substance—his unscientifically careless pronouncement for the bet-
tering of fiction, explaining the lack on his own part of a genuine
triumph; for is not style invariably a concomitant of content—the
prototype of personality? Mr Bodenheim says, "Man has a far
more plaintive interior than the sexologist dares to admit." We
agree, and apropos of his further statement that "intellectual curi-
osity, emotional whimsicality, the decorative poetic touch, ironical
strength, and even a plausible realism are . . . absent from Amer-
ican novels of the present," are hopeful of what he may give us,
only to be astounded in his proffer of Crazy Man—a staggering
dream of fleshly discontent.
It is to his poetry that we owe most; although in it, as in his
prose, there is the elected right to be superficial. Aboriginal en-
ticing femininity has been completely written of by the Greeks;
again with freshness, by Restoration poets. Such subject-matter
requires magical treatment if it is to receive a second glance. Emo-
tion, truth, intellect, revenge, money, are topics about which uni-
versal sciences have been built. How then, can we accept a sting-
iness of content in certain of Mr Bodenheim's poems which deal
with these themes, the poet deifying "the workshop of his mind,"
the matter in hand eluding him?
The mechanism of Mr Bodenheim's mind is delicate and his
predilection for "tombstones, skulls, and lilies" is by no means ri-
diculous, nor is it surprising that he should be alive to the beauty
of death; but among poems of distinction, there are some self-con-
sciously macabre conceits, for example Emotional Monologue—


254 THISTLES DIPPED IN FROST
a weightless, miasmal, brittle, "studio" extravaganza in which we
have the hobby for death at its worst.
Waiving the matter of content, Mr Bodenheim's technique varies
in soundness. He says, "No longer do poets linger over their out-
put, seeming to emulate the men who turn out collars and automo-
biles." Then why when expectation has been awakened by the
piquancy and proper reserve of opening lines such as "Gingerly the
poets sit," is it not fulfilled? And how is it that in what one ven-
tures to call a very bad poem, such strokes of excellence occur, as:
"Men sit and feign industrious respect,
With eye-brows often slightly ill at ease—
Cats in an argument are more erect"?
Mr Bodenheim's aloofness from the faults of the day would not
lead one to expect the weak last lines which mar many of his poems
—in some lines, a not sustained effortful crispness of implication
which seems an evasion, a faith in words rather than in logic, and
that pitfall of aesthetic natures, the convention of the bizarre in
which poetry instantaneously and disaffectingly becomes prose.
Mr Bodenheim invents with firmness:
"Black angels and muscular contortions
On panels of taffeta,"
and inquires with what is to the reviewer, engaging esprit,
"Maiden, where are you going,
With impudence that makes your arms and legs
Unnecessary feathers?"
Admitting such a thing as exotic diction, one can sometimes ap-
plaud Mr Bodenheim's "madness" although feeling his most daring
prose to be not entirely cohesive or transparently accurate. As has
been said of his "tall adjectives" and verbal sleights, in one of those
gentle and distinguished analyses that have been accorded him by
literary experts: "Such tricks, although they often steal distinction
from surprise, wear out the power of the brain to respond, and


MARIANNE MOORE 255
eventually develop a resentment toward the kind of verse that leaves
us jaded." A certain form of soliloquy resorted to by Mr Boden-
heim has not one's entire sanction. The soliloquy is, at its best,
creatively a make-shift, and when not used with consummate ad-
dress, has the effect of being a not quite natural, ripe vehicle for con-
veying meaning; for example, Turmoil in a Morgue, Impulsive
Dialogue, Dialogue Between a Past and Present Poet, When Spirits
Speak of Life, A Chorus Girl Speaks in a Dream to a Former Lover.
Perfect diction we have, in Advice to a Blue-Bird:
"Who can make a delicate adventure
Of walking on the ground,"
in that allusion to the "woman in penitent lavender," and in this
interpretation of despair:
"She killed herself, believing
That he might become to her in death
A figure less remote and careful."
Yet why, in prose that is the work of a precisian, should one en-
counter unintentional rhymes: "Their heads cleared and the past
night reappeared," "the sickly brawls and vapid scandals of streets
and halls"? Why in either verse or prose, the words "boresome,"
"peeked," "glimpsed," "tawdrily," the phrase "apt to induce," and
the effete one, "moments of rare insight"?
There is that in Mr Bodenheim's work which is delicately moving,
as when he calls the butterfly, "aimless petal of the wind" and in
". . . you will have a wife
Like a thistle dipped in frost."
". . . your life will
Stand in a desperate majesty."
And far beyond mere sensibility, in certain work, a laconic violence
with exactness persuades one of more than sensory impressionable-
ness, as in the lines:


256 THISTLES DIPPED IN FROST
"An effervescence of noises
Depends upon cement for its madness."
Dissatisfied with the irony and unrest of Mr Bodenheim's spirit,
we await an exposition of that which to him would make life satis-
factory. He writes in one of his poems of a man who in 1962:
". . . died with a grin at the fact
That literature and art in America
Were still presenting a mildewed, decorous mien."
Is the implication accurate? And if it is, is not the best corrective,
an exemplifying at white heat of the accuser's indigenous, individ-
ual genius?
Marianne Moore


WILLIAM BLAKE, THE PHILOSOPHER
William Blake. His Philosophy and Symbols.
By S. Foster Damon. 8vo. 487 pages. Houghton
Mifflin Company. $10.
THE history of attempts to interpret the symbolism of William
Blake would make an interesting volume in itself. There
is, perhaps, no artist whose works have proved more baffling to
critics; certainly there is none who has been more misunderstood,
and upon whom critical emphases have fallen more capriciously.
The first effort to restore the obscure painter-poet to fame was
Gilchrist's biography, William Blake, Pictor Ignotus, which fired
the young Swinburne and eventually resulted in his own volume
on William Blake. Swinburne the poet was far too sensitive not
to inspire Swinburne the critic with a certain suggestive insight
into the spirit of Blake's work; at the same time, the book remains
more enthusiastic than accurate. There is no consistent attempt
to fathom the prophetic books; The Four Zoas is not even
mentioned.
The Prophetic Books, indeed, proved an obstacle in the way
of most commentators. The manuscripts were inaccessible, and
the meaning of the works, to the casual reader, more inaccessible
still. For this reason, all the emphasis on Blake's poetry fell on
the Songs of Innocence and the Songs of Experience; and to
this day most people think of the poet solely in terms of The Tiger,
or Piping Down the Valleys Wild. It was the more unfortunate,
therefore, that when in 1893 Ellis and Yeats compiled their
edition of the Works, they should have seen fit to stretch the
editor's prerogative beyond recognized bounds and to revise the
text so thoroughly that many passages seem completely rewritten.
The Four Zoas was the greatest sufferer from this method. The
corruption of the text was so obvious that it discredited an edition
which should have been the monument to Blake the epic poet.
The unfaithfulness of Ellis' and Yeats' interpretation of the
symbolism, however, was not so easily detected. Often quoted, and
generally accepted, this interpretation, which is the product of


258 WILLIAM BLAKE, THE PHILOSOPHER
enthusiasm rather than scholarly accuracy, has acted as a further
detriment to the clearer understanding of what Blake was trying
to express. The most telling illustration of how far these editors
wandered from the truth lies in their discussion of Blake's thirteen
angels of the American Revolution, which, in their search for
esoteric significance, they failed to recognize as the thirteen original
States.
It would seem, then, that although the legend of Blake the
Madman has long since been done away with, Blake the shadowy,
half-mad dreamer is still in vogue; and his finest work has served
as a sort of mental thicket where visionaries may disport them-
selves according to their fancy, rather than an academe where
a carefully built up and clear-cut system of philosophy is ex-
pounded. Mr Foster Damon's book opportunely destroys the
possibility of further misinterpretation, and restores Blake's system
very much as it was conceived in the mind of the philosopher.
In the first place, the author began his work with a conviction
that a mind as powerful as Blake's could not lose itself in one
of those poetic labyrinths where fog is the prevalent atmosphere
and moments of clarity are a happy accident. He looked for a
logical system of thought, built up, unit by unit, by the various
prophetic books. That he discovered this system by no means
indicates that he read into the text whatever might be most con-
venient to his purpose; his discovery was the result of years of
research during which imagination guided, but never overcame,
scholarly integrity.
That Blake was influenced by Bohme and Paracelsus has long
been recognized. In his careful analysis of these influences, Mr
Damon was led to believe that other sources, hitherto unrecog-
nized, must have entered into the poems, and that the establishing
of these would explain much. Step by step, therefore, he retraced
Blake's reading, the scope of which transpired to be enormous.
The poet was not only familiar with Plato, he was saturated
with Plato. Thomas Vaughan, Henry More, Cornelius Agrippa,
these mystics and many others gave up the keys which were to
unlock the coffer of Blake's mind. The importance of this
knowledge to the commentator lay in its power to illuminate with
their proper meaning the strange names and symbols which have
so long stood guard over the obscurities and profundities of the
poet's thought.


ROBERT HILLYER 259
Besides his cogent explanation of the apparently inexplicable,
Mr Damon has included a complete analysis of the various minor
works, and much biographical material which will disperse many
long-standing doubts and misconceptions. The identification of
some of the characters in the satirical Island in the Moon with
prominent members of the Blue-Stocking and Bohemian circles
of the late eighteenth century, is doubly interesting in its relation
to literary London of that period and Blake's reactions to it.
Many other matters of some importance are settled beyond doubt,
such as the question of Cromek's trickery and the story of the rival
plates for The Canterbury Pilgrims, the recovery of several mar-
ginal notes and the correction of much of the text, Blake's theory
of the sexes, and, particularly interesting, his version of the Lord's
Prayer as contrasted with the satirical form already included in
Ellis and Yeats. Here and there the interpretations are as obvious
as they are ingenious; for example, the identification of Blake's
designs for the Book of Job with the cards of the Tarot. The
volume is concluded with a detailed Commentary which is not only
concise, but pleasantly readable.
It is clear that Mr Damon has written a book which must
serve as a foundation to all future study of William Blake. He
has discovered to us a figure as unlike the madman of popular
fancy as the vague occultist of injudicious enthusiasts. The
system of philosophy unveiled in these pages is of that highest
type of mysticism, which, however deliberately obscure in its
expression, is wholly simple in its significance: the union of the
human soul with that God dwelling in it who must be released
in eventual perfection by a struggle through the imperfections of
material existence. The philosophy in all its ramifications will
offer a chance for much further investigation, perhaps by the
author of the present volume, perhaps by others. But it is
highly doubtful that any of Mr Damon's conclusions will be over-
thrown, or that any essential interpretation will need to be added
to those he has given us. Furthermore, the fact that the thorough
scholarship of the book is reinforced by an excellent style recom-
mends it to the amateur as well as to the specialist.
Robert Hillyer


A NEGLECTED MASTER
Georges Seurat. By Walter Pach. Illustrated.
4to. 3o pages. Duffield and Company. $2.
IT is encouraging to note the increasing popularity of the art
monograph. Painting and sculpture, by the very nature of
their media, must necessarily remain of limited circulation—those
who have the opportunity to enjoy original works being few and
fortunate. Not all the masterpieces of the world are to be found in
Europe, but the average American lives far from the Metropolitan
Museum and the galleries; and such pictures as journey to the
provinces are, for the most part, the execrable refuse of department
stores. Originals denied, the next best thing is the reproduction.
In the making of monographs the Europeans have always excelled,
but at last our own publishers are waking up to the possibilities of
portfolio art. This would indicate a certain public demand—the
American, in his commercial hebetude, is beginning to find a place
for pictures. Mr Forbes Watson has the right idea. In the fore-
word to a new venture which he is editing he says: "The object
of the Arts Monographs is to present in workable, concise and
fully illustrated form, a series of small books on various artists
and subjects of art which shall not be too expensive for general
circulation, and which, in text and illustration, shall stimulate the
lay reader, while at the same time serving the purposes of the more
special student." The first volume is devoted to Georges Seurat,
and in most respects conforms to the editorial purpose of the
series.
The case of Seurat is one to puzzle over. Indubitably a painter
with a remarkable vision and a rare order of intellect, with the
ability to conceive clearly and to execute perfectly, he has been,
we might almost say, deliberately neglected. He has been dead
now some thirty years, and is only just coming into prominence.
During his lifetime, when Neo-Impressionism was a scientific cult,
he was unrecognized except by a narrow circle of admirers; after
his death his sober genius was swamped by the tangential eruption
of Cubism and the childish idiosyncrasies of Futurism. Now that


THOMAS CRAVEN 261
the slipshod, the sensational, and the mechanistic elements of
modernism have run their course, and the trend of art is toward
more human issues than denatured still-lifes and witless abstrac-
tions, the fame of this man is beginning to rise. And it will rise
steadily and high—for it is a fame based squarely upon beauti-
ful design.
In spite of the temporary obscurity which Seurat has suffered
by reason of the more exclamatory developments of recent paint-
ing, it seems that he would have profoundly affected the artistic
world ere this, but for the limited number of his canvases. Quantity
in production, that is to say, the quantity which accrues with years
of genuine creative experiment, is a gauge of prestige, an indis-
pensable factor in determining the weight of a man's influence. In
the field of art, as elsewhere, a vast collection of experiences car-
ries with it an unmistakable authority; and though Seurat's im-
agination was of the highest cast, his influence has been limited
because an untimely death—he was only thirty-one when he died—
stopped his progress. His art is confined to a single conception—
noble and definite, to be sure, but one attitude is hardly sufficient
to grip the world with immediate force. Cezanne overwhelmed the
creative mind by the immense variety of his attacks on the plastic
problem; Seurat, in most of his painting, attained a greater perfec-
tion, a finer and more articulate realization of purpose; but the im-
posing mass of the Provencal's achievements, together with its in-
numerable suggestive facets, has more diversely stimulated in-
quiring students of the younger generation. It has led to a more
comprehensive range of original activity—at least in its immediate
aspects. Judging, however, from the trend of things to-day, we
may say that Seurat, fundamentally, is quite as important, and
eventually will prove to be as beneficial to art.
Seurat's method of painting, the minute Neo-Impressionistic
formula, offers little to the modern student, but his outstanding
characteristics, a constructive intellect and a truly imaginative
temperament, are directly in line with the advancing thought of
to-day. There is nothing in him of the Impressionistic reporter; he
is a composer of experiences in the purest classic sense, and his
pictures, practically without exception, are deliberate, careful,
and sensible designs. One and all bear evidence of long reflection,
of a mind that weighed the value of its materials, studied the pic-


262 A NEGLECTED MASTER
torial possibilities of the subject, and discarded or added to motifs
with profound judgement. Feeling, with Seurat, was not ex-
clusively the effect of an impression; rather was it an accompani-
ment of his whole expressive procedure. He made no attempt to
transfer to canvas some fugitive emotion engendered by a single
scene or circumstance; he built up his world from the harmonious
aggregate of many selected experiences. Lights and colours, the
legs of dancers, masses of foliage, reclining figures, as he ordered
and abstracted them, retained their intrinsic character, but in ad-
dition, became architectural components of design, precisely fitted
to a purposive structure. His men and women are French, his
landscapes are French, but in an idealized fashion that lends them
the stamp of universality. In no instance are they mere transcrip-
tions of particularities in the manner of the Impressionists—they
are solid, conceptual units containing a richness of humanity and
poetry transcending anything possible in the hit-or-miss reportorial
style so deadly to legitimate painting.
It is commonly supposed that the value of art, in the last analysis,
lies in its ability to charm or excite us with new aspects of nature.
Certainly a gravely erroneous point of view. Great and significant
art goes much deeper, and supplies us with new aspects of the
creative tendencies of humanity. Ultimately we demand in pic-
tures knowledge, purpose, and suggestiveness, and we ask that these
qualities be unified, individualized, and aesthetically stated. We
demand a knowledge of life—whether old or new is of no material
difference—and this intelligence must be arranged with a sequential
purpose. Furthermore, art should embody ideas and suggestions
of growth and expansion; it should arouse within us the feeling
that an abundance of fresh creativeness is in store, and that the
way is open to larger possibilities of expression. Knowledge, as
employed in this connexion, does not refer to an accumulation of
accurate data; artistically the term connotes a sort of apperceived
experience of life—of religion, social evolution, books, art mani-
festations, et cetera, presented in relation to personal judgements
of value. For example, anatomical knowledge, as applied to art,
is neither accurate nor scientific—it implies an acquaintance with
a wide variety of muscular actions as they impinge upon the vision.
In a word, it is simply common knowledge intensified by sustained
observation.


THOMAS CRAVEN 263
For knowledge aesthetically adapted, and for design possessing
both a meaning and a purpose, Seurat has no peer among the
modernists. He is a great artist; and though his power to suggest
further growth is hampered by the limited quantity of his work, and
by his technical method, it exists nevertheless, for the discerning
student, in the nature of his attitude. He is essentially the com-
poser, the builder of unified and complete dramas, as opposed to the
clever reporter, and the emotionalist who relies upon the vagaries
of undisciplined feelings.
The volume is of convenient size; and the illustrations, when
one considers the obvious disadvantage of reproducing Seurat in
black-and-white, are satisfactorily engraved. The introduction by
Mr Walter Pach is an admirable piece of scholarly appreciation.
Thomas Craven


BRIEFER MENTION
The Savage, by Mikhail Artzybasheff (i2mo, 213 pages; Boni & Liveright:
$2). It is to be expected that this savage and picturesque book will meet
with extravagant encomiums from those critics who measure the value of
a work of art in proportion to its violence and brutality rather than in
proportion to its profundity and subtlety. To judge Russia by this fero-
cious story would be unfair. The peculiar pathology of a weak and timid
nature gratifying its power-lust by creating scenes of unbridled licence
is so apparent that the sagacious reader remains unmoved as he contem-
plates a series of happenings whose "stark fatality" is so maliciously pre-
meditated. The story is concise, vivid, arresting; but its motive-force is
not that of indignant or penetrating imagination. The emotions it arouses
are not purged by pity or terror.
A Hind Let Loose, by C. E. Montague (i2mo, 264 pages; Doubleday,
Page: $2) is a novel in the Meredithian manner; the dialogue fairly
crackles, and the irony rises to the surface, page after page, like bubbles
in champagne. Mr Montague seldom composes a paragraph without—
in his own phrase—"planing it down and bevelling it off, inlaying it with
picked words of a queer far-fetched aptness." His style has an Alpine
stimulation—"the sting of blown granules of ice." In the present book,
the narrative is subordinate to the theme; the author has spun a spider's
web which is almost too delicate for the clumsy fly which he set out to
capture.
Justice of the Peace, by Frederick Niven (i2mo, 452 pages; Boni &
Liveright: $2.50) is a novel cast in a mould of enduring values—a work
of vitality, of beautiful character studies, and of sustained atmosphere.
Mr Niven has taken the tragic story of a youth endowed with the artist
spirit, whose aspiration so long obstructed, hemmed in, persecuted, is finally
snuffed out by his mother's opposition. In the handling, there is depth and
understanding; his portrait of the mother is masterly. One delights
in its subtlety and in the fine intensity with which a theme which might
easily have proved hackneyed has been made to yield significance.
The Elephant Man, by Sir Frederic Treves (i2mo, 222 pages; Holt:
$2.25). Sir Frederic Treves has long been known as a literary crafts-
man. His volume on the county of Dorset when set against other
guide-book writing of its kind appears in the light of a masterpiece. The
stories in the present book are exceedingly well done. The Idol With
Hands of Clay is a terrible tale told with the greatest skill. The volume
purports to be made up of authentic incidents taken from the author's long
medical career, and there is not a single one of them that does not show how
much of modesty and sensitiveness may be concealed behind the calm
collected countenance of a great surgeon.


BRIEFER MENTION 265
Haunch, Paunch and Jowl. Anonymous. (i2mo, 300 pages; Boni &
Liveright: $3.) It is a piquant experience to read this book and then to
read Antic Hay, by Aldous Huxley (i2mo, 350 pages; Doran: $2). Mr
Huxley is, of course, a much superior artist in the mere magic of words,
and the jazzed-up pessimism of his latest and best book is very different
from the strenuous disillusionment of the autobiography. But we prefer
the life seen by Meyer Hirsch to the life seen by Mrs Viveash and the
other desolating mannikins who tango through Mr Huxley's heady and
electric pages. Work for the Jewish gangster and ward-heeler was an ex-
hilarating necessity, not a means of escape from the mere horror of existing.
Pleasure came to senses which, because deprived, were almost virginal;
compare the diversions of Meyer Hirsch with the sophisticated Schweinerei
of Huxley's unhappy characters. Moreover the background of the auto-
biography is, for us, impellingly evocative . . . the remote, almost un-
imaginable Bowery of the Nineties, the pimps, the cadets, the odalisques
of Allen Street, the gas-lamps burning on the blue sea of wintry nights.
And it all ends up on Riverside Drive in an atmosphere of plush
and pinochle with the protagonists sitting around like pachyderms and
subscribing to the Temple. Only it is not wholly for nothing; in read-
ing this book you have tasted reality, something raw and sweet like the
breath of a dark New York street near the river on a night when one
hears the fog-horns. The real characters of the autobiography may live
like savages and love like animals, but the characters of the novel who
are probably just as real (one of them talks surprisingly like Harry Kemp)
love nothing but adjectives, and they live in an atmosphere of the most
ghastly and unmitigated boredom that the talented pen of Mr Huxley
has ever succeeded in committing to paper. Hence the autobiography,
remote as it may seem from the source of its nativity, was born under
the faint green star of the Satyricon, while Mr Huxley, however witty
he may be, is never really Petronian. He is still very young and he is
prematurely sad.
Tony, by Stephen Hudson (i2mo, 224 pages; Knopf: $2) is the fourth
volume in a sequence of novels dealing with an aspect of wealthy English
society. The four books form a conscientious and brilliant group portrait;
it has a strict validity—the validity for which historians strive and of
which scientists boast. The present volume is in the form of a monologue,
impeccably sustained. The narrator is a sincere rotter; and his cynical
comment illuminates boldly the character of his weak, sensitive brother,
the protagonist of the preceding volumes.
The Great Dream, by Marguerite Wilkinson (8vo, 42 pages; Macmillan:
$1.50). Even when they reach a considerable length, these poems give
the effect of being miniatures. The first of them, a song about Manhattan,
gives promise of reaching more dangerous proportions, but ends in the tiny
fields "where butterflies and lambkins play." As a rule Mrs Wilkinson
prefers to make notations on subjects like A Dull Day, or The First Grey
Hair; writing with a grace, an innocence, a never-ending charm which in
the end takes the appearance of a simper.


266 BRIEFER MENTION
The Dark Night, by May Sinclair (i2mo, 126 pages; Macmillan: $2).
Mistress of the most recondite subtleties of modern metaphysic and modern
psychology, a firm clear competent story-teller, Miss Sinclair proves in this
little book that she can make the poetic string fit her comprehensive bow
as well as the rest. Here is a tale of the oldest and simplest of all human
complications related in unaffected free verse; and though in the too-good-
to-live girl, the wanton seductive bad girl, the appalling poet with his
"songs and dreams," we have characters that lend themselves to the worst
kind of melodrama, our authoress somehow manages to carry it off. It
is a Pansy Novelette for Intellectuals, lapsing again and again into
maudlin sentimentality; yet the hardened critic finds himself reading it with
interest to the very last line of its "happy ending."
Harvest, by David Morton (i2mo, 47 pages; Putnam: $1.75). While
neither piercing nor galvanic, with occasionally a conclusion which is not
a climax and the recurrence as subject matter, of the moon, the spring of
the year, and the pale beauty of woman, these sonnets exhibit genuine poetic
sensibility, delicate imagination, and deft, sound execution.
The Middle Twenties, by John Farrar (i2mo, 74 pages; Doran: $1.50).
Despite poems so impressive as Lucile and Marguerite, one feels in this
book, a lack of poetic machinery commensurate with the gravity of certain
themes which the author has chosen, or has generously consented, to treat.
The fanciful, Fourteenth-of-February arabesques upon jealousy and upon
the marriage of Amaryllis, please most.
The Best Poems of 1923, selected by Thomas Moult (i2mo, 135 pages;
Harcourt, Brace: $2). Like all contemporary anthologies this collection
leaves us provoked, tantalized, unsatisfied. There is just enough of the
genuinely poetic to excite our thirst; not nearly enough to satisfy it. One
thing is noticeable. The verse written by women seems superior to the
verse written by men in this particular twelve-month span. H. D. steps
forth, in her austere and hieratic robe, celebrating Helen of Troy. Sara
Teasdale tosses down from her balcony the familiar handful of little
scarlet petals. Elinor Wylie steals furtively forth "by weed-green lakes"
with her shepherd lover. Phyllis Megroz gives us a fine shiver of terror
with her Silver Bride. George Stirling, like a Ulysses among the Sirens,
seems to be the only male poet who can hold his own in comparison with
the above mentioned ladies. His Young Witch is the best thing in this
volume.
The Lost Flute of the Book of Franz Toussaint, translated by Gertrude
Joerissen (i2mo, 177 pages; Brentano: $2.50). In this collection of
Chinese lyrics, early and modern, the decoratively perfect poetic properties
of the East are like the titles of the poems, themselves, dazzling. The
subject matter of a number of the poems seems insufficient or unworthy,
but there are certain masterpieces, and since the labour of translation has
been undertaken with delight, the reader deplores an ingratitude which
permits him to confiscate the meaning of words with which he quarrels.


BRIEFER MENTION 267
Thackeray and His Daughter, Letters and Journals of Anne Thackeray
Ritchie, with Many Letters of William Makepeace Thackeray, edited by
Hester Thackeray Ritchie (8vo, 340 pages; Harper: $5). These leisurely
journals with their gossip of literary lions make very pleasant foot-notes
to the reading of Browning, Carlyle, Tennyson, and Thackeray. Now
and then, one gets a bit such as "To the National Gallery with Mr
Millais. Millais shook his fist at the Raphael Madonna," and there
are many small revelations delightfully made—Trollope having his man
call him at four in the morning and paying the man half a crown for
the privilege of not getting up, Ruskin's aesthetic fit over a gooseberry or a
feather, Tizzy Revis, the original of Becky Sharp, refusing to point a
moral, and becoming the Countess de la Torre instead, and Herbert
Spencer, ordered to rest and travel with unintellectual people and so
asking the Thackeray-Ritchies if he might go along with them.
An Intimate Portrait of R. L. S., by Lloyd Osbourne (i2mo, 155 pages;
Scribner: $1.50). We imagined that Mr Lloyd Osbourne had very little
left to say about Robert Louis Stevenson, but here is a small volume made
up of further reminiscences. Although he writes in the superficial man-
ner of a man of the world, Mr Osbourne knows his public far too well
to miss any chance of further elaborating the more sentimental and
picturesque aspects of his stepfather's life. We are made to see R. L. S.
as his disciples wish us to see him, eccentric at Davos, romantic at Mon-
terey, constant and dauntless in Vailima. Indeed, during the last days
of his life Mr Lloyd Osbourne would continually notice Stevenson look-
ing up at the peek on the top of Mount Vaea "which is specially beautiful
at dusk with the evening star shining above it," and on such occasions
the abstracted expression on the great man's face, as he paced the verandah,
would never fail to spoil Mr Lloyd Osbourne's game of tennis.
In the Footsteps of the Lincolns, by Ida Tarbell (8vo, 418 pages;
Harper: $4). The Lincoln traditions have been well sifted in this book,
and many of the accepted beliefs about Abraham Lincoln have been
exploded. It is time this happened. The facts are much more worthy of
the man; his influence is less likely to die out with oncoming generations
if his name is not linked with outworn sentimentalities of an earlier era.
The book is not merely a refutation of old myths, it is a well constructed
biography, detailed and light of touch, but valuable perhaps chiefly for its
emphasis on Lincoln's character and his work, rather than on the tragedy
of his death.
The Last Years of H. M. Hyndman, by Rosalind Travers Hyndman (8vo,
326 pages; Brentano: $4) are chronicled by his second wife who was a poet,
a social revolutionist, and a prickly, clever, companionable woman. Her
account is not a history of socialism in England, for Hyndman was never
its leader. He was a splendid ally, and this book brings out well the
attitude of English socialists on the Irish Rebellion and the conduct of the
Great War. For the rest, Mrs Hyndman has given an interesting account
of the half-public life of a pair of pleasant intellectuals.


268 BRIEFER MENTION
Living Painters: Duncan Grant, introduction by Roger Fry (8vo, 24
illustrations; The Hogarth Press) is all that a monograph on art should
be. Beautifully printed, bound with exceptional taste, and containing
three pages of introductory wisdom by Roger Fry, it is a fitting tribute to
one of the most genuine and original spirits in modern English art.
Duncan Grant is likely to last longer than many Continental painters of
wider celebration: the gay plasticity of his talent is essentially inventive,
and he is, as fast as England will let him, carrying the decorative tendency
of modernism into an objective field where it is not only legitimate, but
assured of some chance of survival.
The Story of Boxing, by Trevor C. Wignall (8vo, 319 pages; Brentano:
$6). Between the championship of Jem Ward in 1825 and that of John
L. Sullivan in 1882, the prize ring suffered its most disgraceful days.
Its greatest popularity, if one except the present, was in the time of Tom
Cribb, Tom Spring, or John Gully: the great knuckle fighters of the
Regency. Mr Wignall's history is at its best when he recounts their
battles. These chapters bristle with references to Bunches of Five, the
Fancy, Fistiana, Skying the Sponge, and with their reproductions of old
engravings will be relished by swivel-chair pugilists and by those few
real boxers who are the antiquarians of their art.
Letters and Religion, by John Jay Chapman (i2mo, 132 pages; The
Atlantic Monthly Press: $2.50). It can scarcely be supposed that many
Dial readers will go all the way with Mr Chapman, since he denies the
times we live in and that in their eyes is a cardinal sin. He attributes
all the maladies of the period to the increased tempo, and finds the chief
merit of Christ to lie in the power He has to arrest speeders. He tc-
solves this to a formula: "Pause is religion." That way, to the present
young, no help lies. They know only too well that no amount of taking
thought can stop the motion of the world. . . . To turn aside from Mr
Chapman, however, is positive pain, for more than a note of the ancient
melodies sounds in his phrases. The trouble is this noble Hamlet is too
bruised by contact with the world to correctly gauge it. He ought to have
been a Montaigne living apart in an ivory tower, yet continually is he
tempted to touch the buzz-saw of modern life—and always with disastrous
results.
Mahatma Gandhi, by Romain Rolland (i6mo, 248 pages; Century: $1.50).
It is appropriate that M Rolland should speak for the great public idealist
of the Orient, summarizing his activities and doctrine. Without marked
literary distinction, his little book has great value, for Mr Gandhi has
made history and seems bound to make more, and the world is no longer
very wide. He appears to reject more of life than did the earlier Holy
Men of the East, in whose number he is counted by his admirers. His
scornful puritanism suggests Savonarola and Calvin, and his zeal for
reform has a Western savour. M Rolland, who is also a true Protestant,
shrinks from some of his iciest extremes, but is in general romantically
sympathetic.


COMMENT
JOSEPH CONRAD is dead. His life was so complete and
enviable a one that his death does not shock. He had sought
and won, long since, those "moving accidents by flood and field,"
that indispensable experience of the physical world, which remains
for so many a great writer only the always somewhat wistfully
imagined and always wholly bitterly untreadable stage and prop-
erties of his own howsoever avid imagination. And it had been his
good fortune to attain manhood before the progressive regimenta-
tion of nature as of man had so abominably shorn the wild hair
of the sea. The steamship was yet in her first awkward infancy,
wireless telegraphy was not; and upon the bridge or upon the
quarterdeck, a captain yet carried on his business with winds and
tides and sun and stars, alone. How inexpugnably right that
Polish boy was to elect the sea! And how fortunate that his
courses were so often cast amongst waterways and peoples out-
landish and uncharted; waterways and peoples which that eye
studied with so much richer profit than any charts or tables!
Profit to him and profit to us.
The sea is good to wrestle with and to grow strong upon. But
life on shipboard, whatsoever the subtle and valuable alliances
between the sailor and those natural forces among which he works,
is life at war. And just as there is no good man who does not
desire peace, so there is no good sailor who does not desire the
land. The discipline of the sea, like the discipline of war, is at
once an affirmation and a denial: it affirms, and most signally and
most dramatically, the validity of man's governing will; it denies,
and most signally and most dramatically, all those other only less
central and only less valid impulses which we group under the word
"play." And so the good sailor, he who has not evilly denied and
disowned in himself the child, hankers after the release of the land.
One knows the cottage of his heart, the gingerbread architecture of
impulses long smothered below decks and now up and about, jig
saw in hand; one knows the white scalloped fence, the match-
board gunwale which shall so blessedly keep back all waves; one
knows the hollyhocks (to witness by their stiffness that this garden


270 COMMENT
budges not), the ragged sailors (for plaintive remembrance of a
past well past, of a past therefore poetical with the pathos of
assured distance), the candytuft (for small and lasting companion-
ship); one knows the intricate nookiness, the admirable gimcrack-
iness, the blessed stuffiness and mustiness of that beribboned and
behassocked house. One knows that old sailors are old children,
and that they live by their whims, rightly.
But how singular was the blessedness of Joseph Conrad! To
inhabit a Kentish farmhouse, and to peer through windows at the
land, and to pace up and down upon a floor; and yet to forfeit no
right in the sea, and yet to run wild tides, and yet to gather obscure
scars beneath wry, watery moons! To be at breakfast dry and
neat, to be at breakfast urbane and a gentleman; and to carry in
one's waistcoat pocket, like an odd crystal to pluck out and turn
about and see odd founderings in, now and then, the Indian Ocean.
Such was the rich doom of a Polish boy.
The man of letters eats his heart out for that tough and whole-
some meat of physical adventure not rationed him. The leathern
and indurated adventurer of perpendicular seas in his heart
whimpers after the childishness of those impulsive and random
sprawlings which, since the nursery, fate and ocean have only so
meagrely and only by fits rationed him. Only with the shrinking
of his marrow may he blow his gimcrack bubble of a home: only
by surrendering the sea may he gain whimsical emancipation.
Joseph Conrad whetted his understanding and his will upon
Africa and upon Bankok. And the man whose will had mastered
alien ships and alien men and seas strove with and mastered what
was more difficult of mastery than alien ships or alien seas: our
alien English tongue. And in the fulness of his manhood he
inherited an English house and garden. And his impulses were no
longer responsible to determinate stars; and he permitted them to
rove, and to take the sun, and to gleam hull-down upon calamitous
horizons; and to return for him and for us the invaluable incidence
of imagination. And his will was yet responsible to himself, and
he set it the diurnal task of creating other and divers wills; and
that not one of these might wax dull for lack of the appropriate
whetting-stone he created anew Africa and Bankok.
The boy born in the Ukraine and christened Teodor Josef
Konrad Korzeniowski was well loved of the gods.


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THE H DIAL

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OCTOBER 1924
PHILOSOPHY IN THE TWENTIETH
CENTURY
BY BERTRAND RUSSELL
EVER since the end of the Middle Ages, philosophy has steadily
declined in social and political importance. William of Ock-
ham, one of the greatest of mediaeval philosophers, was hired by
the Kaiser to write pamphlets against the Pope; in those days many
burning political questions were bound up with disputes in the
schools. The advances of philosophy in the seventeenth century
were more or less connected with political opposition to the Catho-
lic Church; Malebranche, it is true, was a priest, but priests are not
allowed to accept his philosophy. The disciples of Locke in eight-
eenth century France, and the Benthamites in nineteenth century
England, were for the most part extreme radicals in politics, and
created the modern bourgeois liberal outlook. But the correlation
between philosophical and political opinions grows less definite as
we advance. Hume was a Tory in politics, though an extreme
radical in philosophy. Only in Russia, which remained mediaeval
till the Revolution, has any clear connexion of philosophy and
politics survived. Bolsheviks are materialists, vhile Whites are
idealists. In Tibet the connexion is even closer: the second official
in the state is called the "metaphysician in chief." Elsewhere
philosophy is no longer held in such high esteem.
The reason for this is simple: bad philosophy has practical con-
sequences, while good philosophy has none—except that traditional
orthodoxies, and the new creeds which are endeavouring to supplant
them, are false, or at any rate without any rational basis. The
practical man may be pardoned if he comes to the conclusion that


272 PHILOSOPHY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
truth is unattainable except when it is unimportant. Since many
philosophers are practical men in disguise, they have drawn the in-
ference that philosophy should not seek truth, but should concoct
plausible reasons for useful error. Much modern philosophy has
been inspired by this great thought.
On the other hand, science, which also professes to pursue truth,
has proved itself extraordinarily useful; it has enabled us to kill
people in far larger numbers than was formerly possible, as well as
to keep them alive if we should so desire. Consequently some phil-
osophers have attached themselves to science, and have endeav-
oured to win some of its prestige for their own studies.
These two tendencies—to make philosophy useful by the propa-
gation of error, or respectable by incorporation in science—have
determined the main cleavage in twentieth century philosophy.
Adherents of the former tendency have discovered nothing true; ad-
herents of the latter, nothing useful. Perhaps the pursuit of truth,
like art, may be justified independently of utility; but no eminent
person would subscribe to such a doctrine.
Academic philosophy, throughout the twentieth century, has
been mainly divided into three groups. The first consists of the
adherents of the classical German philosophy, usually Kant, but
sometimes Hegel. The second consists of the pragmatists and
Bergson. The third consists of those who attach themselves to the
sciences, believing that philosophy has no special brand of truth
and no peculiar method of arriving at it; these men, for conven-
ience, may be called realists, though in fact there are many among
them to whom this name is not strictly applicable. The distinction
between the different schools is not sharp, and individuals belong
partly to the one, partly to another. William James may be re-
garded as almost the founder of both realism and pragmatism. Dr
Whitehead's recent books employ the methods of realists in defence
of a more or less Bergsonian metaphysic. Many philosophers, not
without a considerable show of reason, regard Einstein's doctrines
as affording a scientific basis for Kant's belief in the subjectivity of
time and space. The distinctions in fact are thus less clear than the
distinctions in logic. Nevertheless the distinctions in logic are use-
ful as affording a framework for the classification of opinions.
German idealism, throughout the twentieth century, has been on
the defensive. The new books that have been recognized as im-


BERTRAND RUSSELL 273
portant by others than professors have represented newer schools,
and a person who judged by book reviews might imagine that these
schools had now the upper hand. But in fact most teachers of
philosophy, in Germany, France, and Great Britain, though per-
haps not America, still adhere to the classical tradition. It is cer-
tainly much easier for a young man to get a post if he belongs to
this party than if he does not. Its opponents made an attempt to
show that it shared the wickedness of everything German, and was
in some way responsible for the invasion of Belgium.1 But its ad-
herents were too eminent and respectable for this line of attack to
be successful. Two of them, Emile Boutroux and Bernard Bosan-
quet, were until their deaths the official spokesmen of French and
British philosophy respectively at international congresses. Relig-
ion and conservatism look mainly to this school for defence against
heresy and revolution. They have the strength and weakness of
those who stand for the status quo: the strength that comes of tra-
dition, and the weakness that comes of lack of fresh thought.
In the English-speaking world, this position was only acquired
just before the beginning of the twentieth century. I began the
serious study of philosophy in the year 1893, the year which saw
the publication of Mr Bradley's Appearance and Reality. Mr
Bradley was one of those who had had to fight to win proper recog-
nition of German philosophy in England, and his attitude was very
far from that of one who defends a traditional orthodoxy. To me,
as to most of my contemporaries, his Logic, and his Appearance and
Reality made a profound appeal. I still regard these books with
the greatest respect, though I have long ceased to agree with their
doctrines.
The outlook of Hegelianism is characterized by the belief that
logic alone can tell us a great deal about the real world. Mr Brad-
ley shares this belief; he c