erit, but is undeniably obscure. Of
George Sand the more we know the less we approve. George Eliot
was led into evil ways which not all her philosophy can excuse.
The Brontes, however highly we rate their genius, lacked that in-
definable something which marks the lady; Mrs. Browning was a
married woman; Jane Austen, Fanny Burney, and Maria Edge-
worth have been done already, so that, what with one thing and
another, Mary Russell Mitford is the only woman left. This is no
vain parade of erudition; we are trying to find out what considera-
tions had weight with Miss Hill when she decided to write Mary


CLIVE BELL 453
Russell Mitford and Her Surroundings. Two emerge from the rest
and may be held of paramount importance. In the first place Miss
Mitford was a lady; in the second she was born in the year 1787.
"'Surroundings' as they are called, are invariably eighteenth cen-
tury surroundings, Bonaparte is the limit of the imagination on one
side, and Monmouth on the other. It would be fatal if fancy took
to toying with Prince Albert or sporting with King John. To do
her justice, fancy knows her place; she keeps strictly to the eight-
eenth century. The other question is more obscure. What is it to
be a lady? At any rate one must not raise one's voice. Of a lady
it is enough to say 'Here Mary Russell Mitford passed sixteen
years of her life, and here she got to know and love not only their
own beautiful grounds but also every turn of the surrounding shady
lanes.' Her loves were vegetable and her lanes were shady. She
was educated at the school where Jane Austen was educated; she
visited Lyme Regis; she saw London from the top of St. Paul's.
Several distinguished literary gentlemen paid her compliments and
came to tea. When the dining room ceiling fell down it did not
fall on her head; when she took a ticket in the lottery she did win
the prize. But how dangerous a thing is life! Can one be sure
that anything not wholly made of mahogany will to the very end
stand empty in the sun? Even cupboards have their secret springs,
and when, inadvertently we are sure, Miss Hill touches this one,
out, terrible to relate, topples a stout old gentleman. In plain
English Miss Mitford had a father. There is nothing actually im-
proper in that. Many women have had fathers. But Miss Mit-
ford's father was kept in a cupboard; that is to say he was not a nice
father. Gluttonous, bibulous, amorous, old Dr Mitford was any-
thing but nice."
This is intellectual and witty.
"If that mark was made by a nail, it can't have been for a pic-
ture, it must have been for a miniature—the miniature of a lady
with white powdered curls, powder-dusted cheeks, and lips like red
carnations. A fraud of course, for the people who had this house
before us would have chosen pictures in that way—an old picture
for an old room. That is the sort of people they were—very inter-
esting people, and I think of them so often, in such queer places,


454 VIRGINIA WOOLF
because one will never see them again, never know what happened
next. She wore a flannel dog collar round her throat, and he drew
posters for an oatmeal company, and they wanted to leave this
house because they wanted to change their style of furniture, so he
said, and he was in process of saying that in his opinion art should
have ideas behind it when we were torn asunder, as one is torn from
the old lady about to pour out tea and the young man about to hit
the tennis ball in the back garden of the suburban villa as one
rushes past in the train."
That is a flight of fancy. Meanwhile, we have left Virginia
Woolf—Virginia Stephen to be exact—writing brilliant reviews
and articles, which fly on the wings of imagination certainly, but
take long rests on the telegraph wires of intellect and the broad
roofs of erudition even; and who, all the time, is trying to create
works of pure imagination. As these are not entirely successful, we
must assume that she is trying for something, which she can reach
perhaps, but not yet grasp. For what is she trying?
Her first novel, The Voyage Out, does no more than adumbrate a
reply. In my opinion it was a remarkable failure: a failure partly
.because, like a sauce that has over-simmered, it had been writing
too long and had grown stiff; partly because one felt some dis-
crepancy between the comic and tragic parts. Yet both were parts
of the same vision; and it was of that vision the author was trying
to express her sense. Here was her problem. What made the book
remarkable, apart from the extraordinary beauty of the prose, was
that the vision was her own. Neither did Mrs Woolf accept the
ready-cooked, hot and strong, cinematographic world beloved of
modern novelists, nor yet that amalgam of nicely tested instances
and inferences which for the ordinary cultivated person—for Mr
Galsworthy to take a modern example or Thackeray to take a more
ancient—does duty for a picture of life; she had her peculiar
vision. What is more, I do not recall, fatiguing though it must be
to remain for ever perched on that minute pinnacle which is a per-
sonal point of view, a single occasion—even in this first novel—on
which she observes her characters through one of those street-corner
telescopes up which we can all have a squint for tuppence.
In 1917 Virginia Woolf published at the Hogarth Press The
Mark on the Wall. This is perfect in its kind; and, till the publi-


CLIVE BELL 455
cation of Jacob's Room remained for me her masterpiece. It is the
expression of one continuous state of mind—a day-dream. And
the realized impression of a subtle and various consciousness float-
ing on deep and slightly ruffled waters with no hand at the rudder
is so close, that at first reading one is tempted to exclaim, "This is
no sculpted form, but a life-mask." One would be wrong, how-
ever. This is no realistic study, no miracle of observation. I have
no notion what a psychologist would say about it, nor I fancy could
an intelligent psychologist feel that any professional comment
would be in place; for what we have before us is not the description
of a reverie, but the equivalent of a reverie—a work of art that is
to say. Only we cannot help noticing the peculiar beauty of the
mind that dreams, the unexpected though fundamentally rational
transition from mood to mood, while we are moved by the shapes
in which the moods clothe themselves.
". . . To show how very little control of our possessions we
have—what an accidental affair this living is after all our civiliza-
tion—let me just count over a few of the things lost in one life-
time, beginning, for that seems always the most mysterious of all
losses—what cat would gnaw, what rat would nibble—with three
pale blue canisters of book-binding tools? Then there were the bird
cages, the iron hoops, the steel skates, the Queen Anne coal-scuttle,
the bagatelle board, the hand organ—all gone, and jewels too.
Opals and emeralds, they lie about the roots of turnips. What a
scraping paring affair it is to be sure! The wonder is that I've any
clothes on my back, that I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this
moment. Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must
liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour—
landing at the other end without a single hair pin in one's hair!
Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over
heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched
down a shoot in the post office! . . ."
Here, it seems to me, whatever our aesthetic theories, we cannot be
indifferent to the mind of the writer. It is the sense of a mind at
once concrete and imaginative that we are given, a mind logical in
its most lively flights and intensely sensitive to the essential ab-
surdity of every situation in which human beings play a part.


456 VIRGINIA WOOLF
Night and Day is, I think, her most definite failure. She chose
a perfectly conventional, a Victorian, theme, the premiers amours
of five young people: it is all about a pair of engagements. Nat-
urally this shocked the novelists of the red-flower-of-passion school,
most of whom write reviews also—a convenient habit in many
ways. She should have written about the quatre-vingt-dixieme to
make her work strong and passionate and real (the grand desidera-
tum) ; she should have written about Life. Intelligent people know,
of course, that there is no sort of reason why an artist should not
choose a conventional theme if it happens to suit him: many of the
greatest artists have. Before taking exception to the subject, our
young tigers and yours, Mr Editor of The Dial, should have med-
itated Jane Austen more profoundly. A conventional theme is as
good in itself as another; for art consists not in theme, but in ex-
pression, a truism which to the student of contemporary fiction
may well come as a surprise. The only question about subject to
be asked is—has the artist chosen one the matching of which with
his aesthetic experience will call forth all his powers and gallop the
last ounce out of them? I thought we had agreed years ago, when
we used to wrangle about painting, that, qua subject, a pot of flow-
ers is as good as the crucifixion. From which it follows that a con-
ventional theme may be as good as an unconventional, and an un-
conventional as a conventional. Only, when an artist relies on the
nature of his theme for producing what passes for an aesthetic ef-
fect, as Gautier and Poe, Mr Masefield and Dostoevsky, Greuze
and Blake seem to do, there is some reason for suspecting him of
artistic feebleness. That way melodrama lies. To feel a need for
violent and surprising subjects does seem to imply inferiority in the
artist, and a coarse palate in the critic: to feel the need I say, not to
feel that, in a particular case, such a subject affords the only appro-
priate medium of expression. Mrs Woolf, at any rate, has no need
to stun us with her subject, since she can move us to the limit of our
sensibility by her art.
Yet the theme of Night and Day was ill-chosen: it was ill-chosen
because it cramped and choked the natural deflagration of the ar-
tist's mind. She chose the time-honoured complication: A thinks
he is in love with B, who, thinking this is as much as can be ex-
pected of life, accepts him; C appears on the scene and is at once
recognized as the right man for B, but in despair almost marries D
for whom he feels rather what B feels for A; arrives, to save the


CLIVE BELL 457
situation, E who turns out to be just the girl for A. Here is a sub-
ject for Jane Austen, into which she could have fitted all her curi-
ous knowledge of the upper-middle-class heart. But Mrs Woolf is
not a born story-teller: wherefore, so much of her energy had to go
into manipulating the stiff little levers of her machine, so consider-
able an effort was required to keep in hand all the straining weights
and compensations of her narrative, that, though she often con-
trives to let her fancy roam, rarely does she find space and energy
to drive it to the limit of its endurance. She is cramped by her sub-
ject. Given the theme, the story has to develop along lines of strict
probability, off which on one occasion—the scene where Katharine
is discovered in an alcove and the grand manner—it rather alarm-
ingly jumps. To bring all her chickens home to roost is a job too
exacting to allow of many pranks by the way. We seek—not in
vain—but seek we must those exquisite digressions which, if I may
be allowed what at first looks like a paradox, are an integral part
of Jacob's Room, of which—to go a little further in perversity—
The Mark on the Wall is an example standing alone, a digression
from nowhere. All which notwithstanding, in this as in the first
novel, you will find scene after scene of exquisite beauty and sur-
prising depth, and one—that between Rodney and Katharine on
the road to Lampsher—hardly to be matched in contemporary lit-
erature.
Follow several short stories and sketches, brought together and
published in 1921, under the title of Monday or Tuesday. This is
Virginia Woolf practising. Apparently, she herself was dissatis-
fied with Night and Day and felt the need of discovering an appro-
priate form. Hence, I presume, these experiments: of which one,
A Society, is quite beneath her genius; and another, A Haunted
House, in style at any rate, seems to me unfortunately redolent of
contemporary influences: by the way, in this volume is reprinted
The Mark on the Wall. She is in search of a form in which to ex-
press a vision—a vision of which she is now perfectly sure. That
is the problem of which Jacob's Room is the brilliantly successful
solution; but before attempting to analyse the solution I had better
try to formulate, what so far I seem only to have fumbled, my no-
tion, that is, of the vision to be expressed.
What makes Virginia Woolf's books read queerly is that they
have at once the air of high fantasticality and blazing realism.
And the explanation of this is, unless I mistake, that, though she is


458 VIRGINIA WOOLF
externalizing a vision and not making a map of life, the vision is
anything but visionary in the vulgar sense of the word. Her world
is not a dream world; she sees, and sees acutely, what the reviewer
in a hurry calls "the real world"—the world of Jane Austen and
George Eliot, of Madame Bovary and War and Peace if you want
to be agreeable, of Mr Wells and Mr Bennett if you want to be
comprehensive. Emphatically the world of her vision is not the
romantic world of Balzac, Meredith, or Hardy, nor the melodra-
matic of Dickens or Dostoevsky. It is a perfectly comprehensible
world in which no one has the least difficulty in believing; only she
sees it through coloured, or I had rather say oddly cut, glasses. Or
is it we who see it through stained glass—glass stained with our
ruling passions? That is a question I shall not attempt to decide.
Only let me give one example of the difference between her vision
and ours. When we—most of us I should say—see a pair of lovers
sitting on a seat we feel—if we feel anything worth writing about
—not purely the romance of the scene, or of the situation even: to
some extent we share the feelings of the lovers. Our emotion, I
mean, is not purely aesthetic; it is sympathetic in the strictest sense
of the term. And it is because we to some extent share the excite-
ment of the actors that, more often than not, we miss the full aes-
thetic import of the drama. We fail to feel some things because
we feel others too much. Now Mrs Woolf sees more purely or, if
you will, less passionately. At all events her emotion is not in the
least self-regarding. She watches life, as it were through a cool
sheet of glass: let those who dare, call the glass distorting. She
knows what the lovers are saying; she knows (not feels) what they
are feeling; she misses not one subtle, betraying, gesture. Assur-
edly, she feels the romance of the situation, but she does not share
the romantic feelings of the actors.
No one could be more conscious of the romance of life. Open a
book of hers almost anywhere and catch her expressing a vision of
the country or, better still, of the town: not Flaubert, in that fa-
mous scene in L'Education Sentimentale, gives a stronger sense of
the romance and excitingness of a great city than Mrs Woolf has
given in half a dozen descriptions of London. But when Jacob
and Florinda are together in the bedroom, and when Jacob walks
out "in his dressing-gown, amiable, authoritative, beautifully
healthy, like a baby after an airing," and Florinda follows "lazily
stretching, yawning a little, arranging her hair in the looking-


CLIVE BELL 459
glass," we have not had the thrill we couldn't help expecting: we
have not been given a love scene as we understand it. Nothing of
much consequence, we feel, has been going on behind that door; or
rather, something of consequence only in relation to Mrs Flanders'
letter which is lying on the table. Nor is this surprising when we
reflect that it was not the love affair, but the effect of the love af-
fair, which really interested Mrs Woolf. What was going on in
the bedroom caught her imagination not as an end, but as a means.
And though it is a particular Jacob and a particular Florinda that
she sees, acutely, beautifully, through her wall of glass, it is in rela-
tion to a comic, poignant, familiar little tragedy, which beginning
in Scarborough spreads round the world, that she sees them.
Take two other love-scenes from Jacob's Room—one happy, the
other pathetic: Clara Durrant picking grapes and dimly realizing
that she is in love with Jacob; Clara Durrant walking in the park
with kind Mr Bowley and realizing that Jacob is not in love with
her. Each is all over in a page or so—large print too: in the first
there is more lyricism than a nineteenth century poet would have
got into a hundred stanzas; and an eighteenth century novelist
would have allowed himself half a volume at least to give a less
devastating picture of a broken heart. Both are scenes of affecting
beauty—I use these two grave words as seriously as it is possible
for a notoriously frivolous person to use them: neither is passionate.
Both are seen with unsurpassable precision; both are rendered by
means of touch and elimination attainable only by an artist of
genius; both give a vision—I use the word again and advisedly—
of someone feeling intensely; but the feeling which the artist has
observed and expressed she has not shared. Also, if I understand
her art aright, she does not intend us to share it: she intends us to
appreciate, to admire. Her emotion comes from her sense of the
scene, and ours from reacting to that sense. This pure, this almost
painterlike vision is Virginia Woolf's peculiarity: it is what dis-
tinguishes her from all her contemporaries.
Of course a first-rate literary artist can never really be like a
painter; for it is out of words that literary artists have to create
the forms that are to clothe their visions, and words carry a signif-
icance altogether different from the significance of lines and col-
ours. Certainly Mrs Woolf's vision, and superficially her style,
may remind any one, as they reminded that sound critic M Abel
Chevalley, of the French impressionists—of their passion for the


460 VIRGINIA WOOLF
beauty of life, loved for its own sake, their abhorrence of symbol-
ism, their reputed inhumanity, technically of their little touches
and divisions of tones. To our joy we are all familiar with the way
in which Renoir and Claude Monet express their sense of a garden
blazing in the sun. It is something which comes to them through
shapes and colours, and in shapes and colours must be rendered.
Now see how an artist in words deals with a similar experience.
". . . How hot it was! So hot that even the thrush chose to
hop, like a mechanical bird, in the shadow of the flowers, with long
pauses between one movement and the next; instead of rambling
vaguely the white butterflies danced one above another, making
with their white shifting flakes the outline of a shattered marble
column above the tallest flowers; the glass roofs of the palm house
shone as if a whole market full of shiny green umbrellas had opened
in the sun; and in the drone of the aeroplane the voice of the sum-
mer sky murmured its fierce soul. Yellow and black, pink and
snow white, shapes of all these colours, men, women, and children
were spotted for a second upon the horizon, and then, seeing the
breadth of yellow that lay upon the grass, they wavered and sought
shade beneath the trees, dissolving like drops of water in the yellow
and green atmosphere, staining it faintly with red and blue. It
seemed as if all gross and heavy bodies had sunk down in the heat
motionless and lay huddled upon the ground, but their voices went
wavering from them as if they were flames lolling from the thick
waxen bodies of candles. Voices. Yes, voices. Wordless voices,
breaking the silence suddenly with such depth of contentment, such
passion of desire, or, in the voices of children, such freshness of sur-
prise; breaking the silence? But there was no silence; all the time
the motor omnibuses were turning their wheels and changing their
gear; like a vast nest of Chinese boxes, all of wrought steel turning
ceaselessly one within another the city murmured; on the top of
which the voices cried aloud and the petals of myriads of flowers
flashed their colours into the air."
No one, I suppose, will deny the beauty of this. No one—no
one who counts at all I mean—ever has denied that Mrs Woolf
chooses and uses words beautifully. But her style is sometimes ac-
cused, injuriously, of being "cultivated and intellectual," especially
by people who themselves are not particularly well off for either


CLIVE BELL 461
culture or intellect. Cultivated it is, in the sense that it reveals a
finely educated mind on terms of easy acquaintance with the finest
minds of other ages—a privilege reserved for those who have been
at pains to learn Greek. And, perhaps, it is cultivated also in the
sense that to enjoy it thoroughly a reader must himself have been
well educated. It makes, no doubt, unobtrusive references to and
recalls associations with things of which the unlettered dream not.
Intellectual? Yes, it is intellectual, too; that is to say, words are
used to affect the understanding rather than the senses. It is nearer
to the last act of Figaro (though colder far—a love-scene by Vir-
ginia Woolf never put any one into the mood for a love-affair)—
to the last act of Figaro which gives you an ethereal sense of a sum-
mer night's romance than to the second act of Tristan which gives
you . . . Well, an over-sexed person will never appreciate
the art of Virginia Woolf; nor will a fundamentally stupid. But,
of course, her style is never intellectual in the sense that the style
of what are called philosophic writers is: not for ideas, but for vis-
ions does she find equivalents. And, as a vision is neither an idea
nor a sensation, her prose can be at once cool and coloured: no
need for those deep drum notes which endear the style of Mr D.
H. Lawrence to the half-educated and protect him, for all his sham
science, from the charge of intellectuality. Also, her prose, though
it is sometimes witty besides being fantastically humorous, is never,
or rarely, pointed. In Monday or Tuesday it strikes me, as I have
said, sometimes as being needlessly unfamiliar in arrangement; but,
generally speaking, one may say that any difficulty which a moder-
ately intelligent person may find in following the movements of
her mind comes, not of eccentricity of expression, but of the com-
plexity of what is being expressed. Those who call her style "bi-
zarre" or "outrageous" are—unless merely thick-witted—making
the mistake that was made by the more enlightened opponents of
impressionism. They are puzzled by a technique which juxtaposes
active tones, and omits those transitions which have no other func-
tion than to provide what the impressionists and Mrs Woolf and
many other modern writers hold to be unnecessary bridges. For my
part, I shall not deny that I am a little old for jumping, and that
in literature I love a bridge, be it merely a plank. My infirmi-
ties, however, are unimportant. The important thing is that Mrs
Woolf's tones are chosen deliberately, with exquisite tact, and that
they form a whole which perfectly envelops her vision: that,


462 VIRGINIA WOOLF
though some come from the imagination and others from the intel-
lect, none flies from the object merely to the shell of her mind and
thence ricochets onto the page: in a word, that her prose is not
violent, but vibrant.
It is not quite true to say that the form Mrs Woolf discovered
for herself and employed in Jacob's Room was a development of
The Mark on the Wall. That form contained admirably well a
single vision, complete in itself; what she now needed was a form
to match that series of visions, glimpses and glances, stunning
crashes and faint echoes, fainter perfumes and pungent stinks,
which we, God forgive us, are pleased to call life. . . . "Who saw
life steadily, and saw it whole."
Well, Mrs Woolf is not Sophocles, nor Matthew Arnold either;
so she wanted something to hold together in a unity her series of
fragmentary revelations, glimpses, glances, and scraps of glances:
she wanted a thread that could be cut and knotted at both ends.
Obviously, the only principle of unity in her kaleidoscopic experi-
ence was her own personality, and no great wizardry is needed to
see that an equivalent for this in a work of imagination would be
an imagined personality—a hero in fact. The question was, how
to establish an equivalence between the various and disinterested
aesthetic experience of a contemplative artist and the early life and
adventures of a kinetic, not to say strapping, young gentleman.
Her solution is charming and ingenious. The hero is gradually to
be built up out of other people's reactions to him: other people's
reactions and, I must be allowed to add, the reactions—if reactions
are what they have—of places. We are gradually to infer the
character of the cause from the nature of its effects on persons,
places, and things. Here is impressionism with a vengeance: if the
technique consisted in "little touches," the composition is a matter
of "frank oppositions" and the whole will dawn on us only when
the last harmony is established.
Jacob's character, Jacob's temperament, Jacob's way, Jacob's
personal appearance, Jacob in fact, must always be present to hold
together the bright fragments which are the author's sense of life—
not of Jacob's life, but of the life in which Jacob moves. We shall
find him first an active ingredient in his mother's world, then con-
ditioning a scene or two at Cambridge, a source of feeling and
speculation in a country house, in what the Sunday papers call
"Bohemia," in the hearts of men and women, in London, Paris,


CLIVE BELL 463
and Athens. And all the while Jacob is not merely affecting, he
is being affected: reverse the engines, the principle of unity works
just as well. Jacob is growing up, Jacob is being revealed: the
men and women who love or are loved play their parts; Cambridge,
Cornwall, London, Paris, and Athens play theirs; the trains, the
taxicabs, the omnibuses, the changes of season, St Paul's Cathedral,
jute-merchants, charwomen, the crowds crossing Waterloo Bridge,
all add their quota to that vision of the young man who for one
second stands revealed before he vanishes in the war for ever.
Down he goes; leaving a pair of shoes to wring the hearts of a man
and woman as they rummage in the characteristic disorder of
Jacob's room.
The form which Mrs Woolf evolved in Jacob's Room gave her
a freedom she had not enjoyed in either of her preceding novels.
The coherence of the work is assured by the fact that the author
cannot leave go of the thread without losing interest in her theme.
Jacob is the sole theme; and since Jacob is to be built up gradually
and so revealed, however discursive she may be in giving her sense
of his surroundings she dare not cease to be for ever looking to the
beginning and the end. And the reader too feels that he must keep
tight hold; for in the pieces given he knows that he must see the
whole, and the pieces will not be given twice. Yet, for the author,
compared with the difficulties of such a novel as Night and Day
(the difficulty of keeping each thread on a separate finger and
weaving all together at the appointed moment) the difficulty of
grasping this one thread firmly is child's play. For there is but one
thread; and since she has no fear of losing it, she can venture to ex-
plore every corner of her vision. Anywhere, on anything, Jacob
can leave his mark and so relate it to the whole. Best of all, so
pervasive is the hero's temperament, so wide the sphere of his in-
fluence, and so easily can he be kept moving towards his goal—
which is our enlightenment—that Mrs Woolf cannot only fly to
the ends of her vision and back again, but, without stepping outside
the charmed circle of an artistic unity, can, from time to time, hush
the instruments of her orchestra to make, in her own voice, her own
cool, humorous comment. She has found a form in which to be
completely herself.
It is notorious that art conditions life at every turn. Alfred de
Musset created a new type of Parisian, Rossetti and Burne-Jones
a new English type. In cultivated society discussions of other


464 VIRGINIA WOOLF
people's characters and feelings still follow the lines of a Henry
James novel. People fall in love and still more fall out in ways
they would never have dreamed of before the publication of The
Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl. And we are just be-
ginning, not only to express, but to collect, our sense of a restaurant
or of an evening party in terms of Marcel Proust. I would like to
conclude an already exorbitant essay by giving Mrs Woolf a taste
of her own treatment; by making a Jacob of her, and catching her
in the act of affecting other people's perceptions through her own.
Here is an extract from a letter which reached me not ten days ago.
It was written by an exquisitely civilized lady of fashion, herself a
charming but too rare author, and will give better, I think, than
could any set encomium, an idea of the way in which Mrs Woolf's
vision—her sense of comedy especially—is beginning to influence
the most sensitive and highly civilized of her contemporaries.
". . . and then the odd lady in the train. In spite of all she
was a pleasure. I must tell you I was alone in a first-class carriage
with the old thing; she was, I suppose, well off, though she had had
the greatest shock of her life (in a life full of shocks) last year
when the bank failed. And her luggage was curious—a hold-all
on which was strapped a cardboard box, a holland parasol, and a
small bag crammed with objects—chiefly packets of writing-paper,
and on the top about a quarter pound of butter. This was literally
her conversation—could Virginia have invented better? Her first
remark to a maid who had come to see her off: 'Gracious! I'm not in
a lavatory carriage! I shall burst before I get to Portsmouth!' Then
to me later: 'Do you happen to know of rooms at Cowes? I only
need a bedroom. You see I have a share-holder's ticket in the
steam-packets. I go the round on one of them every day. I love
the coast. The cake they provide for tea is very bad. I wrote to
the manager about it last year. Do you see my finger? It's dis-
located; never been set; I fell down a companion ladder last year.
And would you believe it, six years ago I fell down and broke ex-
actly the same finger on the other hand. I like seeing the royal
family at Cowes; I like seeing the flags. Unfortunately I have a
very bad chest. I cough almost all the time. I went twenty-eight
voyages with my husband. I have been round the world. My hus-
band is dead. So are all my children. So are my brothers and
sisters; I have hardly a friend, every year another one dies. I have


GUY CARLETON DREWRY 465
cataract. I didn't know it till the other day. My oculist never
told me; he said I had had quite enough trouble. I should be so
glad if you would come to tea with me—if you hear of a nice flat
I should be so pleased if you would let me know. May I give you
my card? May I know your name?' We were drawing into
Chichester station—I should have said Miss Flinders, but somehow,
in the confusion, I stammered 'Mrs H 'and her last words
were really these—how is it that Virginia would have known?
'Not a relation of the Mrs H who was eaten by a tiger?'"
Note: The following books by Mrs Woolf have been published in Amer-
ica: The Voyage Out, Night and Day (George H. Doran and Com-
pany) ; Monday or Tuesday, Jacob's Room (Harcourt, Brace and Com-
pany).
LIFE
BY GUY CARLETON DREWRY
Men are blown
Like particles of sand
From the surf of an unknown sea
Endlessly
Along the beach of the world.
They come
With the beat of unfamiliar blood
Heavy and quick in their veins.
They come with the sea's mad monody
Muffled and strange in their ears.
They pass,
With slow lips mumbling forth in broken mimicry,
Into the blur of time.
But History has a name for each:
She squats on a towering crag
And scribbles in her thickening book
The diminutive records
Of monstrous agonies.


MISS ORMEROD1
BY VIRGINIA WOOLF
THE trees stood massively in all their summer foliage spotted
and grouped upon a meadow which sloped gently down from
the big white house. There were unmistakable signs of the year
1835 both in the trees and in the sky, for modern trees are not
nearly so voluminous as these ones, and the sky of those days had
a kind of pale diffusion in its texture which was different from
the more concentrated tone of the skies we know.
Mr George Ormerod stepped from the drawing-room window
of Sedbury House, Gloucestershire, wearing a tall furry hat and
white trousers strapped under his instep; he was closely, though
deferentially, followed by a lady wearing a yellow-spotted dress
over a crinoline, and behind her, singly and arm in arm, came nine
children in nankeen jackets and long white drawers. They were
going to see the water let out of a pond.
The youngest child, Eleanor, a little girl with a pale face, rather
elongated features, and black hair, was left by herself in the draw-
ing-room, a large sallow apartment with pillars, two chandeliers,
for some reason enclosed in holland bags, and several octagonal
tables some of inlaid wood and others of greenish malachite. At
one of these little Eleanor Ormerod was seated in a high chair.
"Now Eleanor," said her mother, as the party assembled for
the expedition to the pond, "here are some pretty beetles. Don't
touch the glass. Don't get down from your chair, and when we
come back little George will tell you all about it."
So saying, Mrs Ormerod placed a tumbler of water containing
about half a dozen great water grubs in the middle of the malachite
table, at a safe distance from the child, and followed her husband
down the slope of old-fashioned turf towards a cluster of extremely
old-fashioned sheep; opening, directly she stepped on to the ter-
race, a tiny parasol of bottle green silk with a bottle green fringe,
though the sky was like nothing so much as a flock bed covered
with a counterpane of white dimity.
1 Founded upon the Life of Eleanor Ormerod, by Robert Wallace Murray.
1904.


VIRGINIA WOOLF 467
The plump pale grubs gyrated slowly round and round in the
tumbler. So simple an entertainment must surely soon have ceased
to satisfy. Surely Eleanor would shake the tumbler, upset the
grubs, and scramble down from her chair. Why, even a grown
person can hardly watch those grubs crawling down the glass wall,
then floating to the surface, without a sense of boredom not un-
tinged with disgust. But the child sat perfectly still. Was it her
custom, then, to be entertained by the gyrations of grubs? Her
eyes were reflective, even critical. But they shone with increasing
excitement. She beat one hand upon the edge of the table. What
was the reason? One of the grubs had ceased to float: he lay at
the bottom; the rest, descending, proceeded to tear him to pieces.
"And how has little Eleanor enjoyed herself?" asked Mr
Ormerod, in rather a deep voice, stepping into the room and with a
slight air of heat and of fatigue upon his face.
"Papa," said Eleanor almost interrupting her father in her
eagerness to impart her observation, "I saw one of the grubs fall
down and the rest came and ate him!"
"Nonsense, Eleanor," said Mr Ormerod. "You are not telling
the truth." He looked severely at the tumbler in which the
beetles were still gyrating as before.
"Papa, it was true!"
"Eleanor, little girls are not allowed to contradict their fathers,"
said Mrs Ormerod, coming in through the window, and closing her
green parasol with a snap.
"Let this be a lesson," Mr Ormerod began, signing to the other
children to approach, when the door opened, and the servant
announced,
"Captain Fenton."
Captain Fenton "was at times thought to be tedious in his
recurrence to the charge of the Scots Greys in which he had served
at the battle of Waterloo."
But what is this crowd gathered round the door of the George
Hotel in Chepstow? A faint cheer rises from the bottom of the
hill. Up comes the mail coach, horses steaming, panels mud-
splashed. "Make way! Make way!" cries the ostler and the
vehicle dashes into the courtyard, pulls up sharp before the door.
Down jumps the coachman, the horses are led off, and a fine team
of spanking greys is harnessed with incredible speed in their stead.


468 MISS ORMEROD
Upon all this—coachman, horses, 'coach, and passengers—the crowd
looked with gaping admiration every Wednesday evening all
through the year. But to-day, the twelfth of March, 1852, as the
coachman settled his rug, and stretched his hands for the reins,
he observed that instead of being fixed upon him, the eyes of the
people of Chepstow darted this way and that. Heads were jerked.
Arms flung out. Here a hat swooped in a semi-circle. Off drove
the coach almost unnoticed. As it turned the corner all the out-
side passengers craned their necks, and one gentleman rose to his
feet and shouted, "There! there! there!" before he was bowled
into eternity. It was an insect—a red-winged insect. Out the
people of Chepstow poured into the high road; down the hill they
ran; always the insect flew in front of them; at length by Chepstow
Bridge a young man, throwing his bandanna over the blade of an
oar, captured it alive and presented it to a highly respectable elderly
gentleman who now came puffing upon the scene—Samuel Budge,
doctor, of Chepstow. By Samuel Budge it was presented to Miss
Ormerod; by her sent to a professor at Oxford. And he, declaring
it "a fine specimen of the rose underwinged locust" added the
gratifying information that it "was the first of the kind to be
captured so far west."
And so, at the age of twenty-four Miss Eleanor Ormerod was
thought the proper person to receive the gift of a locust.
When Eleanor Ormerod appeared at archery meetings and
croquet tournaments young men pulled their whiskers and young
ladies looked grave. It was so difficult to make friends with a
girl who could talk of nothing but black beetles and earwigs—
"Yes, that's what she likes, isn't it queer?—Why, the other day
Ellen, Mama's maid, heard from Jane, who's under-kitchenmaid
at Sedbury House, that Eleanor tried to boil a beetle in the kitchen
saucepan and he wouldn't die, and swam round and round, and
she got into a terrible state and sent the groom all the way to
Gloucester to fetch chloroform—all for an insect my dear!—and
she gives the cottagers shillings to collect beetles for her—and she
spends hours in her bedroom cutting them up—and she climbs
trees like a boy to find wasps' nests—oh, you can't think what they
don't say about her in the village—for she does look so odd, dressed
anyhow, with that great big nose and those bright little eyes, so
like a caterpillar herself, I always think—but of course she's won-


VIRGINIA WOOLF 469
derfully clever and very good, too, both of them. Georgiana has
a lending library for the cottagers, and Eleanor never misses a
service—but there she is—that short pale girl in the large bonnet.
Do go and talk to her, for I'm sure I'm too stupid, but you'd find
plenty to say—" But neither Fred nor Arthur, Henry nor William
found anything to say—
". . . probably the lecturer would have been equally well pleased
had none of her own sex put in an appearance."
This comment upon a lecture delivered in the year 1889 throws
some light, perhaps, upon archery meetings in the 'fifties.
It being nine o'clock on a February night some time about 1862
all the Ormerods were in the library; Mr Ormerod making archi-
tectural designs at a table; Mrs Ormerod lying on a sofa making
pencil drawings upon grey paper; Eleanor making a model of a
snake to serve as a paper weight; Georgiana making a copy of the
font in Tidenham Church; some of the others examining books
with beautiful illustrations; while at intervals someone rose, un-
locked the wire book case, took down a volume for instruction or
entertainment, and perused it beneath the chandelier.
Mr Ormerod required complete silence for his studies. His
word was law, even to the dogs, who, in the absence of their mas-
ter, instinctively obeyed the eldest male person in the room. Some
whispered colloquy there might be between Mrs Ormerod and her
daughters—
"The draught under the pew was really worse than ever this
morning, Mama—"
"And we could only unfasten the latch in the chancel because
Eleanor happened to have her ruler with her—"
"—hm—m—m. Dr Armstrong—Hm—m—m—"
"—Anyhow things aren't as bad with us as they are at King-
hampton. They say Mrs Briscoe's Newfoundland dog follows
her right up to the chancel rails when she takes the sacrament—"
"And the turkey is still sitting on its eggs in the pulpit."
—"The period of incubation for a turkey is between three and
four weeks"—said Eleanor thoughtfully looking up from her cast
of the snake and forgetting, in the interest of her subject, to speak
in a whisper.
"Am I to be allowed no peace in my own house?" Mr Ormerod


470 MISS ORMEROD
exclaimed angrily, rapping with his ruler on the table, upon which
Mrs Ormerod half shut one eye and squeezed a little blob of
Chinese white on to her high light, and they remained silent until
the servants came in, when everyone, with the exception of Mrs
Ormerod, fell on their knees. For she, poor lady, suffered from a
chronic complaint and left the family party for ever a year or two
later, when the green sofa was moved into the corner, and the
drawings given to her nieces in memory of her. But Mr Ormerod
went on making architectural drawings at nine p.m. every night
(save on Sundays when he read a sermon) until he too lay upon
the green sofa, which had not been used since Mrs Ormerod lay
there, but still looked much the same. "We deeply felt the
happiness of ministering to his welfare," Miss Ormerod wrote,
"for he would not hear of our leaving him for even twenty-four
hours and he objected to visits from my brothers excepting occa-
sionally for a short time. They, not being used to the gentle ways
necessary for an aged invalid, worried him . . . the Thursday
following, the 9th October, 1873, he passed gently away at the
mature age of eighty-seven years." Oh, graves in country church-
yards—respectable burials—mature old gentlemen—D.C.L., LL.D.,
F.R.S., F.S.A.—lots of letters come after your names, but lots of
women are buried with you!
There remained the Hessian Fly and the Bot—mysterious in-
sects! Not, one would have thought, among God's most triumphant
creations, and yet—if you see them under a miscroscope!—the Bot,
obese, globular, obscene; the Hessian, booted, spurred, whiskered,
cadaverous. Next slip under the glass an innocent grain; behold
it pock-marked and livid; or take this strip of hide, and note those
odious pullulating lumps—well, what does the landscape look like
then?
The only palatable object for the eye to rest on in acres of
England is a lump of Paris Green. But English people won't use
microscopes; you can't make them use Paris Green either—or if
they do, they let it drip. Dr Ritzema Bos is a great stand-by. For
they won't take a woman's word. And indeed, though for the
sake of the Ox Warble one must stretch a point, there are matters,
questions of stock infestation, things one has to go into—things a
lady doesn't even like to see, much less discuss in print—"these, I
say, I intend to leave entirely to the Veterinary surgeons. My


VIRGINIA WOOLF 471
brother—oh, he's dead now—a very good man—for whom I col-
lected wasps' nests—lived at Brighton and wrote about wasps—he,
I say, wouldn't let me learn anatomy, never liked me to do more
than take sections of teeth."
Ah, but Eleanor, the Bot and the Hessian have more power
over you than Mr Edward Ormerod himself. Under the micro-
scope you clearly perceive that these insects have organs, orifices,
excrement; they do, most emphatically, copulate. Escorted on
the one side by the Bos or Warble, on the other by the Hessian Fly,
Miss Ormerod advanced statelily, if slowly, into the open. Never
did her features show more sublime than when lit up by the can-
dour of her avowal. "This is excrement; these, though Ritzema
Bos is positive to the contrary, are the generative organs of the
male. I've proved it." Upon her head the hood of Edinburgh
most fitly descended; pioneer of purity even more than of Paris
Green.
"If you're sure I'm not in your way," said Miss Lipscomb un-
strapping her paint box and planting her tripod firmly in the path,
"—I'll try to get a picture of those lovely hydrangeas against the
sky—What flowers you have in Penzance!"
The market gardener crossed his hands on his hoe, slowly twined
a piece of bass round his finger, looked at the sky, said something
about the sun, also about the prevalence of lady artists, and then,
with a nod of his head, observed sententiously that it was to a
lady that he owed everything he had.
"Ah?" said Miss Lipscomb, flattered, but already much occupied
with her composition.
"A lady with a queer sounding name," said Mr Pascoe, "but that's
the lady I've called my little girl after—I don't think there's such
another in Christendom."
Of course it was Miss Ormerod, equally of course Miss Lipscomb
was the sister of Miss Ormerod's family doctor; and so she did no
sketching that morning, but left with a handsome bunch of grapes
instead—for every flower had drooped, ruin had stared him in the
face—he had written, not believing one bit what they told him—to
the lady with the queer name, back there came a book "In-ju-ri-ous
In-sects," with the page turned down, perhaps by her very hand,
also a letter which he kept at home under the clock, but he knew
every word by heart, since it was due to what she said there that


472 MISS ORMEROD
he wasn't a ruined man—and the tears ran down his face and
Miss Lipscomb, clearing a space on the lodging-house table, wrote
the whole story to her brother.
"The prejudice against Paris Green certainly seems to be dying
down," said Miss Ormerod when she read it.—"But now," she
sighed rather heavily being no longer young and much afflicted
with the gout, "now it's the sparrows."
One might have thought that they would have left her alone—
innocent dirt-grey birds, taking more than their share of the break-
fast crumbs, otherwise inoffensive. But once you look through
a microscope—once you see the Hessian and the Bot as they really
are—there's no peace for an elderly lady pacing her terrace on a
fine May morning. For example, why, when there are crumbs
enough for all, do only the sparrows get them? Why not swallows
or martins? Why—oh, here come the servants for prayers—
"Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass
against us. . . For thine is the Kingdom and the power and the
glory, for ever and ever. Amen—"
"The Times ma'am—"
"Thank you, Dixon. . . The Queen's birthday! We must
drink her Majesty's health in the old white port, Dixon. Home
Rule—tut—tut—tut. All that madman Gladstone. My father
would have thought the world was coming to an end, and I'm not
at all sure that it isn't. I must talk to Dr Lipscomb—"
Yet all the time in the tail of her eye she saw myriads of spar-
rows, and retiring to the study proclaimed in a pamphlet of which
36,000 copies were gratuitously distributed that the sparrow is
a pest.
"When he eats an insect," she said to her sister Georgiana,
"which isn't often, it's one of the few insects that one wants to
keep—one of the very few," she added with a touch of acidity
natural to one whose investigations have all tended to the discredit
of the insect race.
"But there'll be some very unpleasant consequences to face,"
she concluded—"Very unpleasant indeed."
Happily the port was now brought in, the servants assembled;
and Miss Ormerod, rising to her feet, gave the toast "Her Blessed
Majesty." She was extremely loyal, and moreover she liked
nothing better than a glass of her father's old white port. She
kept his pigtail, too, in a box.


VIRGINIA WOOLF 473
Such being her disposition it went hard with her to analyse the
sparrow's crop, for the sparrow she felt, symbolizes something of
the homely virtue of English domestic life, and to proclaim it
stuffed with deceit was disloyal to much that she, and her fathers
before her, held dear. Sure enough the clergy—the Rev. J. E.
Walker—denounced her for her brutality; "God Save the Spar-
row!" exclaimed the Animal's Friend; and Miss Carrington, of
the Humanitarian League, replied in a leaflet described by Miss
Ormerod as "spirity, discourteous, and inaccurate."
"Well," said Miss Ormerod to her sister, "it did me no harm
before to be threatened to be shot at, also hanged in effigy, and other
little attentions."
"Still it was very disagreeable, Eleanor—more disagreeable I
believe, to me than to you," said Georgiana. Soon Georgiana died.
She had however finished the beautiful series of insect diagrams
at which she worked every morning in the dining-room and they
were presented to Edinburgh University. But Eleanor was never
the same woman after that.
Dear forest fly—flour moths—weevils—grouse and cheese flies—
beetles—foreign correspondents—eel worms—ladybirds—wheat
midges—resignation from the Royal Agricultural Society—gall
mites—boot beetles—Announcement of honorary degree to be
conferred—feelings of appreciation and anxiety—paper on wasps
—last annual report warnings of serious illness—proposed pension
—gradual loss of strength—Finally Death.
That is life, so they say.
"It does no good to keep people waiting for an answer," sighed
Miss Ormerod, "though I don't feel as able as I did since that un-
lucky accident at Waterloo. And no one realizes what the strain
of the work is—often I'm the only lady in the room, and the gen-
tlemen so learned, though I've always found them most helpful,
most generous in every way. But I'm growing old, Miss Hartwell,
that's what it is. That's what led me to be thinking of this diffi-
cult matter of flour infestation in the middle of the road so that I
didn't see the horse until he had poked his nose into my ear. . . .
Then there's this nonsense about a pension. What could possess
Mr Barron to think of such a thing? I should feel inexpressibly
lowered if I accepted a pension. Why, I don't altogether like writ-
ing L.L.D. after my name, though Georgie would have liked it.


474 MISS ORMEROD
All I ask is to be let go on in my own quiet way. Now where is
Messrs Langridge's sample? We must take that first. 'Gentle-
men, I have examined your sample and find . . .'"
"If any one deserves a thorough good rest it's you, Miss Orme-
rod," said Dr Lipscomb, who had grown a little white over the
ears. "I should say the farmers of England ought to set up a
statue to you, bring offerings of corn and wine—make you a kind
of Goddess, eh—what was her name?"
"Not a very shapely figure for a Goddess," said Miss Ormerod
with a little laugh. "I should enjoy the wine though. You're not
going to cut me off my one glass of port surely?"
"You must remember," said Dr Lipscomb, shaking his head,
"how much your life means to others."
"Well, I don't know about that," said Miss Ormerod, pondering
a little. "To be sure, I've chosen my epitaph. 'She introduced
Paris Green into England,' and there might be a word or two about
the Hessian fly—that, I do believe, was a good piece of work."
"No need to think about epitaphs yet," said Dr Lipscomb.
"Our lives are in the hands of the Lord," said Miss Ormerod
simply.
Dr Lipscomb bent his head and looked out of the window. Miss
Ormerod remained silent.
"English entomologists care little or nothing for objects of
practical importance," she exclaimed suddenly. "Take this ques-
tion of flour infestation—I can't say how many grey hairs that
hasn't grown me."
"Figuratively speaking, Miss Ormerod," said Dr Lipscomb, for
her hair was still raven black.
"Well, I do believe all good work is done in concert," Miss
Ormerod continued. "It is often a great comfort to me to think
that."
"It's beginning to rain," said Dr Lipscomb. "How will your
enemies like that, Miss Ormerod?"
"Hot or cold, wet or dry, insects always flourish!" cried Miss
Ormerod energetically sitting up in bed.
"Old Miss Ormerod is dead," said Mr Drummond, opening The
Times on Saturday, July 20th, 1901.
"Old Miss Ormerod?" asked Mrs Drummond.



Courtesy of the Keppel Galleries
STANDARD OIL BUILDING. BY JOSEPH PENNELL






Courtesy of the Keppel Galleries
THE LATEST TOWER. BY JOSEPH PENNELL





"I'IŞININGIAI II.IŞISO T \ſi ' I 'ON : CIN VISI NGILVLS ‘SHAIV HAA IVOO,





"I'IŞININGI I HÆGISOT X8. 'SSIN NGHI ONGITIVA HVGIN ZIJ VOSCIN VI
satualidae) fø44øy øſ, ſo «søyano：





AN OCTOPUS
BY MARIANNE MOORE
of ice. Deceptively reserved and flat,
it lies "in grandeur and in mass"
beneath a sea of shifting snow dunes;
dots of cyclamen red and maroon on its clearly defined pseudopodia
made of glass that will bend—a much needed invention—
comprising twenty-eight icefields from fifty to five hundred feet
thick,
of unimagined delicacy.
"Picking periwinkles from the cracks"
or killing prey with the concentric crushing rigour of the python,
it hovers forward "spider fashion
on its arms" misleadingly like lace;
its "ghosly pallor changing
to the green metallic tinge of an anemone starred pool."
The fittrees in "the magnitude of their root systems,"
rise aloof from these manoeuvres "creepy to behold"—
austere specimens of our American royal families,
"each like the shadow of the one beside it.
The rock seems frail compared with their dark energy of life,"
its vermilion and onyx and manganese blue interior expensiveness
left at the mercy of the weather;
"stained transversely by iron where the water drips down";
recognized by its plants and its animals.
Completing a circle,
you have been deceived into thinking that you have progressed,
under the polite needles of the larches
"hung to filter not to intercept the sunlight"—
met by tightly wattled spruce twigs
"conformed to an edge like clipped cypress
as if no branch could penetrate the cold beyond its company";
and dumps of gold and silver ore enclosing The Goat's Mirror—
that lady-fingerlike depression in the shape of the left human foot,
which prejudices you in favour of itself


476 AN OCTOPUS
before you have had time to see the others;
its indigo, pea-green, blue-green, and turquoise,
from a hundred to two hundred feet deep,
"merging in irregular patches in the middle lake
where like gusts of a storm,
obliterating the shadows of the firtrees, the wind makes lanes of
ripples."
What spot could have merits of equal importance
for bears, elk, deer, wolves, goats, and ducks?
Preempted by their ancestors,
this is the property of the exacting porcupine,
and of the rat "slipping along to its burrow in the swamp
or pausing on high ground to smell the heather";
of "thoughtful beavers
making drains which seem the work of careful men with shovels,"
and of the bears inspecting unexpectedly
ant hills and berry bushes.
Composed of calcium gems and alabaster pillars,
topaz, tourmaline crystals, and amethyst quartz,
their den is somewhere else, concealed in the confusion
of "blue stone forests thrown together with marble and jasper and
agate
as if whole quarries had been dynamited."
And farther up, in stag-at-bay position
as a scintillating fragment of these terrible stalagmites,
stands the goat,
its eye fixed on the waterfall which never seems to fall—
an endless skein swayed by the wind,
immune to force of gravity in the perspective of the peaks.
A special antelope
acclimated to "grottoes from which issue penetrating draughts
which make you wonder why you came,"
it stands its ground
on cliffs the colour of the clouds, of petrified white vapour—
black feet, eyes, nose, and horns engraved on dazzling icefields,
the ermine body on the crystal peak;
the sun kindling its shoulders to maximum heat like acetylene,
dyeing them white;
upon this antique pedestal—


MARIANNE MOORE 477
"a mountain with those graceful lines which prove it a volcano,"
its top a complete cone like Fujiyama's
till an explosion blew it off.
Maintaining many minds, distinguished by a beauty
of which "the visitor dare never fully speak at home
for fear of being stoned as an impostor,"
Big Snow Mountain is the home of a diversity of creatures:
those who "have lived in hotels
but who now live in camps—who prefer to";
the mountain guide evolving from the trapper,
"in two pairs of trousers, the outer one older,
wearing slowly away from the feet to the knees";
"the nine-striped chipmunk
running with unmammal-like agility along a log";
the water ouzel
with "its passion for rapids and high pressured falls,"
building under the arch of some tiny Niagara;
the white-tailed ptarmigan "in winter solid white,
feeding on heather bells and alpine buckwheat";
and the eleven eagles of the west,
"fond of the spring fragrance and the winter colours,"
used to the unegoistic action of the glaciers
and "several hours of frost every midsummer night."
They make a nice appearance, don't they,
happy seeing nothing?
Perched on treacherous lava and pumice—
those unadjusted chimney-pots and cleavers
which stipulate "names and addresses of persons to notify
in case of disaster—"
they hear the roar of ice and supervise the water
winding slowly through the cliffs,
the road "climbing like the thread
which forms the groove around a snail-shell,
doubling back and forth until where snow begins, it ends."
No "deliberate wide-eyed wistfulness" is here
among the boulders sunk in ripples and white water
where "when you hear the best wild music of the forest
it is sure to be a badger,"
the victim on some slight observatory,


478 AN OCTOPUS
of "a struggle between curiosity and caution,"
inquiring what has scared it:
a stone from the moraine descending in leaps,
another badger, or the spotted ponies with "glass eyes,"
brought up on frosty grass and flowers
and rapid draughts of ice water.
Instructed none knows how, to climb the mountain,
by "business men who as totemic scenery of Canada,
require for recreation,
three hundred and sixty-five holidays in the year,"
these conspicuously spotted little horses are peculiar,
hard to discern among the birch trees, ferns, and lily pads,
avalanche lilies, Indian paintbrushes,
bears' ears and kittentails,
and miniature cavalcades of chlorophylless fungi
magnified in profile on the mossbeds like moonstones in the water;
the cavalcade of calico competing
with the original American "menagerie of styles"
among the white flowers of the rhododendron surmounting rigid
leaves
upon which moisture works its alchemy,
transmuting verdure into onyx.
Larkspur, blue pincushions, blue peas, and lupin;
white flowers with white, and red with red;
the blue ones "growing close together
so that patches of them look like blue water in the distance:"
this arrangement of colours
as in Persian designs of hard stones with enamel,
forms a pleasing equation—
a diamond outside; and inside, a white dot;
on the outside, a ruby; inside, a red dot;
black spots balanced with black
in the woodlands where fires have run over the ground—
separated by aspens, cats' paws, and woolly sunflowers,
fireweed, asters, and Goliath thistles
"flowering at all altitudes as multiplicitous as barley,"
like pink sapphires in the pavement of the glistening plateau.
Inimical to "bristling, puny, swearing men
equipped with saws and axes,"


MARIANNE MOORE 479
this treacherous glass mountain
admires gentians, ladyslippers, harebells, mountain dryads,
and "Calypso, the goat flower—
that greenish orchid fond of snow"—
anomalously nourished upon shelving glacial ledges
where climbers have not gone or have gone timidly,
"the one resting his nerves while the other advanced,"
on this volcano, with the bluejay her principal companion.
"Hopping stiffly on sharp feet" like miniature icehacks—
"secretive, with a look of wisdom and distinction, but a villain,
fond of human society or the crumbs that go with it,"
he knows no Greek, the pastime of Calypso and Ulysses—
"that pride producing language,"
in which "rashness is rendered innocuous, and error exposed
by the collision of knowledge with knowledge."
"Like happy souls in Hell,"
enjoying mental difficulties,
the golden grasshoppers of Greece
amused themselves with delicate behaviour
because it was "so noble and so fair";
not practised in adapting their intelligence
to eagle traps and snowshoes,
to alpenstocks and other toys contrived by those
"alive to the advantage of invigorating pleasures."
Bows, arrows, oars, and paddles for which trees provide the wood,
in new countries are more eloquent than elsewhere—
augmenting evidence for the assertion
that essentially humane,
"the forest affords wood for dwellings and by its beauty stimulates
the moral vigour of its citizens."
The Greeks liked smoothness, distrusting what was back
of what could not be clearly seen,
resolving with benevolent conclusiveness,
"complexities which will remain complexities
as long as the world lasts";
ascribing what we clumsily call happiness,
to "an accident or a quality,
a spiritual substance or the soul itself,
an act or a disposition or a habit


480 AN OCTOPUS
or a habit infused to which the soul has been persuaded,
or something distinct from a habit, a power—"
such power as Adam had and we are still devoid of.
"Emotionally sensitive, their hearts were hard";
their wisdom was remote
from that of these odd oracles of cool official sarcasm,
upon this game preserve
where "guns, nets, seines, traps, and explosives,
hired vehicles, gambling, and intoxicants are prohibited,
disobedient persons being summarily removed
and not allowed to return without permission in writing."
It is self evident
that it is frightful to have everything afraid of one;
that one must do as one is told
and eat "rice, prunes, dates, raisins, hardtack, and tomatoes"
if one would "conquer the main peak" of Mount Takoma—
this fossil flower concise without a shiver,
intact when it is cut,
damned for its sacrosanct remoteness—
like Henry James "damned by the public for decorum";
not decorum, but restraint;
it was the love of doing hard things
that rebuffed and wore them out—a public out of sympathy with
neatness.
Neatness of finish! Neatness of finish!
Relentless accuracy is the nature of this octopus
with its capacity for fact.
"Creeping slowly as with meditated stealth, ♦
its arms seeming to approach from all directions,"
it receives one under winds that "tear the snow to bits
and hurl it like a sandblast,
shearing off twigs and loose bark from the trees."
Is tree the word for these strange things
"flat on the ground like vines"?
some "bent in a half circle with branches on one side
suggesting dustbrushes, not trees;
some finding strength in union, forming little stunted groves,
their flattened mats of branches shrunk in trying to escape"


MARIANNE MOORE 481
from the hard mountain "planed by ice and polished by the
wind"—
the white volcano with no weather side;
the lightning flashing at its base,
rain falling in the valleys, and snow falling on the peak—
the glassy octopus symmetrically pointed,
its claw cut by the avalanche
"with a sound like the crack of a rifle,
in a curtain of powdered snow launched like a waterfall."


THE DOWNFALL OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION
BY OSWALD SPENGLER
Translated From the German by Kenneth Burke
VII
THE scheme "antiquity, middle ages, modernity" is a creation
of the Gnostics, transmitted by the Church—and thus is the
result of the Semitic, and especially Syrian-Jewish cosmic attitudes
during the Roman Empire.
Within the very narrow boundaries which form the spiritual
proclivity of this significant conception, it arose with perfect jus-
tice. Here neither Hindu nor even Egyptian history falls within
the sphere of observation. Universal history means for these
thinkers a single, highly dramatic act whose stage was the land-
scape between Hellas and Persia. This gives expression to the
strictly dualistic cosmic feeling of the Oriental—not polaric as in
the metaphysics of the time with its opposition of soul and mind,
but periodic,1 seen as catastrophe, as the turning-point of two ages,
between the creation of the world and its exhaustion—while all
factors were left out of account which were not established by
Ancient literature on the one hand or the Bible on the other. This
cosmogony offers as "antiquity" and "modernity" the then tangible
contrast between heathen and Christian, Ancient and Oriental,
statue and dogma, nature and mind in a temporal aspect, as the
process of one overcoming the other. The historic transition bears
the religious marks of a redemption. This outlook was undoubt-
edly narrow, and rested on thoroughly provincial attitudes; yet it
was logical and self-contained, and while it adhered to the people
and the landscape of that time, it was not capable of any natural
extension.
This view did not develop a tendency towards movement until
the annexation of a third age {our "modernity") on Occidental
1 In the New Testament the polar aspect is represented more by the dialectics
of the apostle Paul, the periodic by the Apocalypse.


OSWALD SPENGLER 483
soil. The Oriental original was static, a closed antithesis vacillating
in the balance, with a single past divine act as centre. This steri-
lized fragment of history was taken up and carried on by an entirely
new type of man; and without any one's becoming aware of any-
thing bizarre in such a change, it was now suddenly spun out into
the form of a line which led from Homer or Adam—the possi-
bilities to-day are enriched by the Indo-Germans, the stone age,
and the ape men—over Jerusalem, Rome, Florence, and Paris,
either up or down, in accordance with the personal taste of the
historian, thinker, or artist who interpreted the tripartite vision
with unlimited freedom.
To the complementary concepts Paganism and Christianity—
both understood as successive, as ages—there was added the con-
cluding one of a "modernity" which, comically enough, does not on
its part allow a continuation of the process, and after having been
repeatedly "stretched" since the Crusades, seems incapable of a
further extension. Without saying so explicitly, people were of the
opinion that here beyond antiquity and the middle ages something
definitive was beginning, a third empire harbouring somehow a ful-
filment, a culmination, an aim, which everyone from the scholastics
up to the socialists of our day claimed that he alone had recog-
nized. This outlook upon the course of things was both com-
fortable and flattering to its author. The spirit of the Occident
had been quite simply interchanged with the meaning of the uni-
verse. Out of a spiritual necessity great thinkers thus made a
metaphysical virtue, in that they took this scheme, sanctioned by
the consensus omnium, as the basis of a philosophy, and looked to
God as the author of each "world plan." The mystical trinity of
ages had something highly seductive to metaphysical taste. Herder
called history an education of the human race, Kant an evolution
of the concept of freedom, Hegel a self-development of the world
spirit, and so on. But the historical faculty has already exhausted
itself in projects of this sort.
The idea of a third empire was already known to the Abbot
Joachim of Floris (died 1202) who related the three phases to
the symbols of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Lessing, who
frequently characterizes his times simply as a later phase of the
Ancients, borrowed the idea for his Erziehung des Menschenge-
schlechts (with the stages of childhood, youth, and manhood) from


484 THE DOWNFALL OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION
the doctrines of the fourteenth-century mystics. And Ibsen, who
treated it thoroughly in his drama Emperor and Galilean (where
the Gnostic attitude protrudes directly, in the figure of the sorcerer
Maximo) did not advance a single step farther in his well-known
Stockholm Address of 1887. Apparently it is a requirement of
the Western European ego that it should erect its own presence
into a kind of conclusion.
But it is a completely untenable procedure to interpret universal
history by giving free reign to one's own political, religious, or
social convictions, and letting the three phases, which one dares
not question, move in the direction of one's own standpoint, pos-
tulating intellectual maturity, or humanity, or the happiness of
the majority, or economic evolution, or enlightenment, or race
freedom, or the subjugation of nature, or the scientific attitude,
and so forth, as the absolute criterion for judging thousands of
years which, one shows, failed to understand or attain the proper
thing, whereas in reality they simply wanted something different
than we do. "In life we have to do quite plainly with life, and not
with any result of it"—that is a saying of Goethe's which should
be opposed to all inane attempts to solve the secret of historical
form by a programme.
The same picture is drawn by the historians of every single art
and science, not forgetting political economy and philosophy. Here
we see painting from the Egyptians (or cave men) up to the im-
pressionists, music from the blind singer of Homer up to Bayreuth,
social organization from the lake dwellers up to socialism—each
conceived in a linear progression to which is imputed some perma-
nent tendency, without any consideration of the possibility that
arts possess a limited lifetime, that they are bound to one land-
scape and one definite type of man as a specific expression, and
that these collective histories are merely a superficial accumulation
of a number of unrelated phenomena, of isolated arts which have
nothing in common except their name and some elements of tech-
nical excution.
This conception is not without its comic aspect. In every other
field of living nature we claim the right to deduce from the
phenomenon itself (whether empirically or by an intuitive grasp
of the inner character) the form which underlies its existence. We
know that the phenomena in the life of an animal or a plant permit


OSWALD SPENGLER 485
us to draw conclusions about the phenomena of related species,
that everything alive contains a mysterious arrangement which has
nothing to do with law, causality, number—and from this we
derive the morphological consequences. Only here, where we are
dealing with man himself, we accept without question the historic
form of his existence which was laid down at one time or other,
and we force the facts, for better or worse, into the preconceived
scheme. If they don't fit—it is so much the harder on the facts.
We treat them with disdain, like the history of the Chinese; or
we don't even give them a glance, like the Maya culture. They
have "contributed nothing to the structure of universal history"—
a charming expression.
Of every organism we know that the speed, form, and duration
of its life and of each individual manifestation of that life are
determined. No one will expect of a thousand-year-old oak that
it be only now in a position to begin the true course of its develop-
ment. No one expects of a caterpillar which he sees growing
daily that it may possibly continue this for a couple of years.
Here everyone has with absolute certainty the feeling of a limit,
which is identical with the feeling for organic forms. But where
the history of higher humanity is involved, there is a boundlessly
trivial optimism with reference to the future. Here all psycho-
logical and physiological experience drops away, so that everyone
discovers in the random present some "preliminary" to an espe-
cially remarkable rectilinear "further development"—because he
wishes it. Here unlimited possibilities—never a natural end—are
reckoned with; and out of each passing situation a highly naive
continuous structure is projected.
But "humanity" has no aim, no ideal, no plan, any more than
the genus of butterflies or of orchids has an aim. "Humanity" is
an empty word. If one banishes this phantom from the sphere
of history's form-problems, he will see emerging an astonishing
wealth of real forms. Here is an incommensurable fulness, depth,
and movement of the living, which has been concealed heretofore
by a phrase, by a barren scheme, by personal "ideals." Instead of
the monotonous vision of rectilinear universal history which one
can maintain only by shutting his eyes to the preponderant num-
ber of facts, I see the phenomenon of a multiplicity of mighty cul-
tures: these flourish with a primeval power in the midst of a fos-


486 THE DOWNFALL OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION
tering landscape to which each of them is rigidly bound for the
entire course of its existence; each of them impresses its own form
upon its materials and its mankind; and each of them has its own
idea, its own passions, its own life, will, feeling, its own death.
Here there are colours, lights, movements which no intellectual
eye has as yet discovered. There are flourishing and aging cul-
tures, peoples, languages, truths, gods, landscapes, just as there
are young and old oaks and pines, blossoms, twigs, leaves—but
there is no aging "humanity." Each culture has its own possi-
bilities of expression, which sprout, ripen, wither, and never re-
turn. There are many modes of plastic art, painting, mathe-
matics, physics, which are at bottom entirely different from one
another: while each is of limited duration, each is enclosed within
itself, just as every species of plant has its own blossoms and
fruits, its own type of growth and decline. These cultures, living
organisms of the highest rank, grow up in exalted aimlessness,
like flowers of the field. They belong, like plants and animals,
to the living nature of Goethe, not to the dead nature of Newton.
I see in universal history the vision of an eternal formation and
transformation, a marvellous rising and passing of organic forms.
But the standard historian sees it as a tapeworm which is the "pre-
liminary" to inexhaustible epochs.
Meanwhile the combination "antiquity, middle ages, mod-
ernity" has finally lost its efficacy. As smugly narrow and inane as
it was, yet it represented the only concept we possessed which had
some semblance of philosophy; and to this is due whatever philo-
sophic content there is in the literary systematizations which are
offered as universal history. But the outside number of centuries
which could be encompassed by this scheme has already been reached.
The traditional outlook begins breaking up into an unmanageable
chaos, owing to the rapid accumulation of historic material, par-
ticularly material which falls beyond these classifications. Every
historian who is not totally blind sees and appreciates this; but
he clings desperately to the only scheme he knows, in order not
to be wholly submerged. The term "middle ages," coined in 1667
by Professor Horn at Leyden, must cover to-day an amorphous,
continually expanding mass which is defined purely by negation
and by those elements which afford no pretext for inclusion under
the two other passably ordered complexes. The uncertain treat-
ment and evaluation of Late Persian, Arabic, and Russian history


OSWALD SPENGLER 487
are examples of this. Above all, the fact can no longer be con-
cealed that this ostensible history of the world actually confines
itself at the beginning to the region of the eastern Mediterranean;
and later, after the migrations, with a sudden change of scene to
West Central Europe, it centres on a purely local event which is
important for us alone and is thus greatly magnified, while Arabian
culture is already left out of account. In all simplicity Hegel
declared that he would ignore the peoples which did not fit into his
system of history. But that was an honourable admission of the
assumptions in method without which no historian arrived at his
goal. To verify this one need only examine the procedure of all
historical works. Indeed it is a question of scientific tact to-day
which of the historic phenomena one seriously includes, and which
not. Ranke is a good example of this.
VIII
We think to-day in geographical divisions. Only our philoso-
phers and historians have not yet learned this. What can thoughts
and perspectives which are offered with a claim to universal validity
mean to us when their horizon does not reach beyond the intellec-
tual atmosphere of the Western European?
Consider in this respect our best books. When Plato speaks of
mankind, he means the Hellenes in contrast to the barbarians.
That corresponds thoroughly with the anhistoric style of Ancient
life and thought, and by this one assumption leads to consistent
results. But when Kant philosophizes, on ethical ideals for in-
stance, he asserts the validity of his propositions for people of all
kinds and types. But he does not say this expressly, because it is
all too self-evident to him and his readers. In his aesthetics he
does not formulate the principles of the art of Pheidias or the art
of Rembrandt, but of art in general. Yet what he establishes
as the necessary forms of thought are simply the necessary forms
of Occidental thought. A glance at Aristotle and his basically
different results should have indicated that here a mind is reflecting
on itself which is not less clear, but differently constituted. The
cosmic solipsism x which underlies Kant's critique of reason (every
theory, no matter how abstract, is the expression of a cosmic feel-
1 It is already latent in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzeval and Dante's
Divina Commedia.


488 THE DOWNFALL OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION
ing) and which makes it the truest of all systems for the Western
European, is unintelligible to Russian philosophers like Soloviev;
and for the modern Chinese and Arabian, with their entirely dif-
ferent types of intellect, Kant's doctrine has merely the value of
a curiosity.
That is what the Occidental thinker lacks, and what he of all
people should not lack: the insight into the historic-relative char-
acter of his results, which are the expression of this one existence
and this one only; the knowledge of the necessary limitations of
validity; the conviction that his "impregnable truths" and "eternal
observations" are true only for him and eternal only in his cosmic
aspect, and that it is his duty to attempt going beyond these things
and thinking of what the man of other cultures has uttered with
the same certainty. This is required for the completion of a
philosophy of the future. Through this alone we can understand
the form-language of history, of the living world. Here there is
nothing permanent and universal. Let us no longer mention the
forms of all thought, the principle of the tragic, the task of the
state. Universal validity is always the illogical step from oneself
to another.
The picture becomes much more serious when we turn to the
thinkers of Western European modernity since Schopenhauer, at
that stage when the main emphasis of philosophy shifts from the
abstract and systematic to the practical and ethical, and the prob-
lem of knowledge is replaced by the problem of life (the will to
live, to power, to act). Here the subject of observation is no
longer the ideal abstraction "man" as with Kant, but the real man
who inhabits the earth's surface in historical times, grouped
racially as a primitive or as a man of culture. And it is ridiculous
when there too the scope of the highest concepts is confined by the
scheme "antiquity, middle ages, modernity" and the local limita-
tions which go with it. But that is the case.
Let us consider the historical horizon of Nietzsche. His ideas
of decadence, nihilism, the transvaluation of all values, concep-
tions which are deeply rooted in the character of the Occidental
civilization and are thoroughly vital to its analysis—what was the
basis of their formulation? Romans and Greeks, Renaissance, and
European present, with an added hasty side-glance at the (mis-
understood) Hindu philosophy; in short: antiquity, middle ages,


OSWALD SPENGLER 489
modernity. Strictly speaking, he never went beyond this; and the
other thinkers of the period did no more than he. But is that the
foundation of a world philosophy? Is that really treating human
history at all? Is it any wonder that when Nietzsche, without
knowing anything of Egypt or Babylon, Russia or China, passes
from isolated observations to generalities—such as his ideas on the
morality of the rulers, the blond beast, the superman—he imme-
diately arrives at summary, supposedly all-inclusive constructions
which are in reality quite provincial, entirely arbitrary, and even
comic?
What reference does his concept of the Dionysian have to the
interior life of the highly civilized Chinese in the time of Con-
fucius, or of a modern American? What does this type of super-
man mean for the world of Islam? Or what significance should
the concepts nature and mind, heathen and Christian, ancient and
modern, have as formal antitheses in the soul of the Hindu or the
Russian? What has Tolstoy, who from the depths of his nature
rejected the ideology of the West as something foreign and remote,
to do with the "middle ages," with Dante, with Luther? What
has a Japanese to do with Percival and Zarathustra, or a Hindu
with Sophocles? And is the system of ideas in Schopenhauer,
Comte, Feuerbach, Hebbel, Strindberg any the more extensive?
Despite all cosmic aspirations, is not their total psychology of
purely Occidental significance? How comic is the effect of Ibsen's
feminist problems, which are offered with a claim to the attention
of all "mankind," if instead of Nora, a metropolitan lady of
Northwestern Europe whose horizon is suited to a Protestant edu-
cation and a house rent of two to six thousand marks, one substi-
tutes Caesar's wife, Madame de Sevigne, a Japanese, or a Tyrolean
peasant woman? But Ibsen himself possesses the horizon of the
metropolitan middle class of yesterday and to-day. His conflicts,
whose psychic factors have been present since about 1850 and will
hardly last beyond 1950, have already ceased to be those of the
haut monde and the lower classes, to say nothing of cities with a
non-European population.
These are all local and episodic values which are restricted mostly
to the intelligentsia momentarily inhabiting the metropolises of
Western-European type; they are anything but universal and
eternal. And no matter how essential they are to the generations of


49o THE DOWNFALL OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION
Ibsen and Nietzsche, yet it would involve miscontruing the sense of
the term universal history—which does not represent a choice, but a
totality—if one were to subordinate the factors lying outside mod-
ern interests, and were to underestimate or neglect them. And
that is the case to an unusual degree. Heretofore whatever has
been said and thought in the Occident concerning the problems of
space, time, motion, number, the will, marriage, property, tragedy,
or science, remained narrow and doubtful, because people were al-
ways concerned with finding the solution to the problem, instead of
perceiving that many inquiries call forth many answers, that a
philosophical question is only the concealed wish to uphold a
definite answer which is already included in the question, that one
cannot conceive the great questions of an age ephemerally enough,
and that consequently one must admit a group of historically con-
ditioned solutions, and only by surveying them all—with the elimi-
nation of his own convictions—does he arrive at their profoundest
meaning. For the genuine thinker there is no absolutely right or
wrong standpoint. When facing such weighty problems as those
of time or marriage, it is not enough to question one's inner voice,
or reason, the opinions of ancestors or contemporaries. In this
way one finds what is true for himself, for his own times, but that
is not enough. The phenomena of other cultures speak different
languages. For other men there are other truths. For the thinker
all or none are valid.
It is obvious how much the Occidental criticism of life can be
extended and deepened, what must be drawn into the sphere of
observation besides the harmless relativism of Nietzsche and his
generation, what delicate sense of forms, what degree of psychology,
what negation and independence of practical interests, what free-
dom of outlook must be attained before one dare say that he has
understood world history, the world as history.
IX
Over against all this (these arbitrary, narrow forms which come
from without, are dictated by personal interest, and are imposed
upon history) I oppose the natural, "Copernican" structure of
world events which is latent deep within them and reveals itself
to the unprejudiced view.


OSWALD SPENGLER 491
1
I recall Goethe. What he called living nature is exactly the
same as what is here called universal history in its widest reaches,
world as history. Goethe, who as artist constructs life again and
again, who shows the development of its forms, shows it in fluc-
tuation rather than rigidity, as Wilhelm Meister and Wahrheit
und Dichtung testify—Goethe hated mathematics. Here the
world as mechanism stood opposed to the world as organism, dead
nature to living nature, law to form. Every line which he wrote
as a natural scientist was intended to display the forms of growth,
"imprinted form, which develops in living." Sympathy, intuition,
comparison, immediate inner certainty, exact sensuous imagina-
tion—those were his means of approaching the secrets of objects
in movement. And those are entirely the means of historical re-
search. There are no others. This divine vision enabled him to
say by the campfire on the eve of the battle of Valmy, "At this
place and on this day a new epoch of world history begins, and you
can say that you were present." No army leader, no diplomat,
to say nothing of philosophers, has so directly felt history in the
making. It is the profoundest judgement which was ever pro-
nounced on a great act of history at the moment when it was
transpiring.
And just as he followed the growth of the plant form from the
leaf, the origin of the vertebrates, and the development of geologi-
cal strata—the destiny of nature, not its causality—in the same
way from the abundance of all visible details we shall evolve the
form-language of human history, its periodic structure, the breath
of history.
In other respects man has been counted among the organisms of
the earth's surface, and for good reasons. His anatomy, his natural
functions, all his material manifestations, everything is part of a
more comprehensive unity. But here an exception is made, despite
the deeply felt relationship between the destiny of a plant and
the destiny of man (an eternal theme of the lyric) and despite the
resemblance between all human history and the history of every
other group of higher organisms (a theme of countless tales, sagas,
and fables). Here let us compare by letting the world of human
cultures work freely and profoundly upon the imaginative facul-
ties, not by forcing it into a preconceived scheme. Whereas the
words youth, growth, flowering, decay were always considered here-


492 THE DOWNFALL OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION
tofore, and to-day more than ever, as expressing subjective evalua-
tions and purely personal interests of social, moral, or aesthetic
nature, let us now see them as objective characterizations of or-
ganic conditions. Let us place the Ancient culture as a self-con-
tained phenomenon, the embodiment and expression of the Ancient
soul, alongside the Egyptian, Hindu, Babylonian, Chinese, Occi-
dental cultures; let us discover what is typical in the vicissitudes
of these vast units, what is inevitable in the rich riot of chaos; and
we shall finally see unfolded before us the vision of a universal
history which is natural to us, the people of the Occident, and to
us alone.
Returning to our narrower theme, from this universal approach
we are to determine morphologically the structure of the present,
especially between 1800 and 2000. We must fix the time of this
epoch with relation to the total culture of the Occident, fixing its
meaning as a cross-section of biography which must necessarily be
met with under some parallel form in every culture, and establish-
ing the organic and symbolic significance of the political, artistic,
intellectual, and social aspects proper to it.
At this point the similarity of the period to Hellenism is mani-
fest; and especially at its momentary apogee—characterized by
the World War—when it parallels the transition of the Hellenistic
era into the Roman. With a rigorous sense of facts, devoid of
genius, barbaric, disciplined, practical, protestant, Prussian, Rome
will always provide us with the key to an understanding of our own
future when we turn our attention to comparisons. Greeks and
Romans—therein lies the distinction between the destiny which
has already been completed for us and that which is yet in store
for us. For we could and should long past have found in an-
tiquity an evolution which forms a complete counterpart to our
Western-European evolution, different in every surface detail, but
wholly similar as to the inner pressure which drives the great or-
ganism to its completion. Trait for trait, from the Trojan War
and the Crusades, Homer and the Niebelungenlied, through the
Doric and the Gothic, the Dionysian movement and the Renais-
sance, Polycletus and Sebastian Bach, Athens and Paris, Aristotle


OSWALD SPENGLER 493
and Kant, Alexander and Napoleon, up to the stage of the metrop-
olis and imperialism in both cultures, we should have found here
a constant alter ego of our own reality.
But the interpretation of the Ancient historic prospect which was
here a necessary preliminary—how one-sidedly it has always been
undertaken, how superficially, with what prejudice, how incon-
clusively! Since we felt ourselves all too closely related to the
Ancients, we made our task all too easy. In the superficial simi-
larity lies the danger which befell all investigations of antiquity.
It is a lasting prejudice, which we should finally overcome, that
antiquity has any close inner relationship to us, since we are sup-
posedly its disciples and descendants, but are in fact only its wor-
shippers. All the work of the nineteenth century in religious
philosophy, the history of art, and social criticism was necessary,
not to give us finally an understanding of Apollo and Dionysus,
the dramas of Aeschylus, the doctrines of Plato, the Athenian state,
and Caesarism (from all of which we are far removed) but to make
us feel how immeasurably foreign and remote it all is to us in its
essence, more foreign perhaps than the Mexican gods and Hindu
architecture.
Our notions of Greek-Roman culture have always moved be-
tween two extremes, in which the scheme antiquity, middle ages,
modernity has invariably predetermined the perspective of all
"standpoints." Some of us, especially people in public life, politi-
cal economists, politicians, jurists, find "present-day humanity" in
full progress, rate it very highly, and measure everything earlier
by its standards. There is no modern party by whose principles
Cleon, Marius, Themistocles, Catiline, and the Gracchi have not
been "evaluated." Others, artists, poets, philologists, and philoso-
phers do not feel at home in such a present; they choose from
some past period an equally absolute standpoint and from that
judge the present with the same dogmatism. The ones see in
Greece a "not yet," the others in modernity a "no longer," always
under the suggestion of an outlook upon history wherein the two
phenomena are brought into a straight line.
It is the two souls of Faust which have found expression in this
contrast. The danger of the one lies in an intelligent super-
ficiality. Of all that Ancient culture and the splendour of the
Ancient soul stood for, nothing is left in their hands but social,


494 THE DOWNFALL OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION
economic, legal, political, physiological "facts." The rest takes
on the character of "secondary issues," "reflexes," "attendant phe-
nomena." Their books do not mention the mythic pressure in the
choruses of Aeschylus, the colossal earthy power of the older plastic
art, the Dorian column, the ardour of the Apollonic cult, or even
the profundities of the Roman emperor-worship. The others, pri-
marily belated romantics, as the three Basle professors Bachofen,
Burckhardt, and Nietzsche, succumb to the danger of all ideology.
They lose themselves in the cloudy regions of an antiquity which
is purely the reflection of their philologically ordered sensitivity.
They abandon themselves to the reliques of the old literature, the
only testimony which is noble enough for them—but no culture
has ever been more incompletely represented by its great writers.1
The others rely predominantly on the prosaic source material of
legal documents, inscriptions, and coins (which Burckhardt and
Nietzsche particularly had neglected much to their disadvantage)
and subordinate to this the surviving literature with its frequently
minimal sense of truth and facts. Thus, neither faction took the
other's critical groundwork very seriously. I am not aware that
Nietzsche and Mommsen paid the slightest attention to each other.
But neither has reached the height of observation from which
this contrast falls into nothing, although this would have been
possible. This was the punishment for transferring the causal
principle from natural science to the study of history. A pragma-
tism was arrived at which superficially imitated the scheme of
physics, but which, instead of clarifying the very differently con-
stituted form-language of history, obscured and confused it. On
all sides, in subjecting the mass of historic material to a deepened
and orderly arrangement, no one knew anything better than to
set up a complex of phenomena as primary, as causes, and treat the
rest accordingly as secondary, as results or effects. Not only the
practical-minded, but also the romantics took recourse to this, be-
1 The selection of remains is decisive since it is determined, not by accident,
but by a profound tendency. The Atticism of the Augustine age, weary,
unfruitful, pedantic, retrospective, has moulded the concept of the classical
and has recognized a very small group of Greek works up to Plato as
classical. The rest, among it all the rich literature of Hellenism, was
discarded and became almost completely lost. This group, selected by a
clerkish taste, has for the most part been preserved and has determined the
imaginary portrait of classical "Antiquity" in Florence as well as for
Winckelmann, Holderlin, Goethe, and even Nietzsche.


OSWALD SPENGLER 495
cause history did not disclose its own logic to their limited view—
and the need of settling on some immanent necessity whose pres-
ence was felt was much too strong, unless like Schopenhauer one
wanted to turn his back sullenly upon history altogether.
XI
Let us speak without further ado of a materialistic and an
idealistic manner of seeing antiquity. In the former it is asserted
that the sinking of the one scale has its cause in the rise of the
other. It is shown that this is the case without exception—doubt-
less a telling bit of evidence. Thus we have here cause and effect,
and—of course—we represent the social and economic and espe-
cially the purely political phenomena as causes; the religious, in-
tellectual, artistic as effects (in so far as the materialist allows
these latter to be termed facts at all). The idealists, obversely,
show how the rise of the one scale follows from the sinking of the
other, and they show it with the same precision. They plunge
into cults, mysteries, customs, into the secrets of verse and of the
line, and they deign hardly a passing glance at common everyday
life, the wretched issue of earthly imperfection. Both demonstrate,
with the causal nexus plainly in view, that the others obviously
do not or will not see the true interrelationship of things; and
they end by abusing one another as blind, superficial, stupid, ab-
surd, or frivolous, as queer old codgers or crass Philistines. The
idealist is horrified if any one takes money problems among the
Hellenes seriously and, for instance, instead of discussing the pro-
found utterances of the oracle at Delphi, speaks of the extensive
financial operations which the priests of the oracle undertook with
the sums deposited there. But the hard-headed laugh knowingly
at the man who squanders his enthusiasm on sacred formularies
and the costumes of Attic ephcbi, instead of writing on the Ancient,
class-struggles in a book brimming with up-to-date catchwords.
The one type is already foreshadowed in Petrarch. He created
Florence and Weimar, the concept of the Renaissance, and Occi-
dental classicism. The other is in evidence since the middle of the
eighteenth century, with the beginning of civilized, economic-
metropolitan policies, and thus first in England (Grote). At bot-
tom the attitudes of the cultivated and the civilized man here stand


496 THE DOWNFALL OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION
opposed, a contrast which is too deep, too human for the in-
feriority of both standpoints to be felt or completely overcome.
In this matter materialism also proceeds idealistically. Un-
wittingly and unwillingly it has made its views dependent upon
hidden desires. Indeed, our best minds have all without exception
bowed in reverence before the image of antiquity and in this one
case renounced a thorough-going criticism. The analysis of An-
tiquity has always been obscured by a certain timidity. In the
whole of history there is no other example of such a passionate cult
maintained by one culture for the memory of another. That we
should unite antiquity and modernity ideally by a "middle age,"
across a thousand years of undervalued, almost despised history, is
simply one expression of this unthinking devotion. We Western
Europeans have sacrificed to "the Ancients" the purity and inde-
pendence of our art, in that we did not dare to create without one
eye on the lofty "prototype." We have always added to, or read
into, our idea of the Greeks and Romans what we lacked or yearned
for in the depths of our own soul. Some day an ingenious psycholo-
gist will relate to us the history of our fatal illusion, the history of
what we always honoured as Ancient. There are few tasks which
would be more helpful to an intimate understanding of the Occi-
dental soul from Emperor Otto III to Nietzsche, from the first
victim of the South to the last.
On his Italian journey Goethe speaks with enthusiasm of the
architecture of Palladia, whose frosty academicism we approach
to-day with the greatest scepticism. He then sees Pompeii and
speaks with undisguised dissatisfaction of its "strange, half-un-
pleasant effect." His remarks on the temples of Paestum and
Segesta, masterworks of Hellenic art, are flat and insignificant.
Obviously he did not recognize antiquity once it stood before him
corporeally in its full power. That characterizes the essence of
our feeling for history: we do not desire impressions of the foreign,
but expressions of ourselves. This "antiquity" has always been
the horizon of an historic panorama which we created and nourished
with our best blood; it is a receptacle for our own modes of expe-
rience, a phantom, an idol. Among the intellectuals and in poetic
circles there is a vogue for the bold descriptions of big-city life in
Aristophanes, Juvenal, and Petronius, for Southern smut and vul-
garity, turmoil and violence, catamites and punks, phallic worship


OSWALD SPENGLER 497
and imperial orgies—but the same slice of reality in present-day
metropolises is avoided with grumblings and turned-up noses. "To
live in cities is bad: here there are too many of the passionate."
Thus spake Zarathustra. They praise the national-mindedness of
the Romans and despise any one who does not to-day avoid all
contact with public affairs. There is a class of connoisseurs for
whom the difference between toga and overcoat, Byzantine circus
and English athletic field, Ancient alpine roads and transcontinental
railways, triremes and express trains, Roman lances and Prussian
bayonets, even between the Suez Canal built by a Pharaoh or by a
modern engineer, possesses a magic power which securely numbs
any independence of vision. They would not admit the steam
engine as a symbol of human passion and an expression of vital
energy unless it had been invented by Hero of Alexandria. It
is blasphemy to them if, instead of the cult of the Great Mother
of Mount Pessinus, one mentions Roman book-keeping and central
heating. Yet the Greek word for money was d<pop{iri, starting-
point, and Thucydides praises the Athenians of his time (I, 70)
because they knew no festivals except the plying of their trade.1
Yet the others see nothing but this. They think they are ex-
hausting the nature of this culture, so foreign to us, when they treat
the Greeks forthwith as in every way similar to us; and, when they
draw psychological conclusions, they move within a system of iden-
tities which absolutely fails to touch the Ancient soul. They do
not even suspect that words like republic, freedom, property indi-
cate in these two fields things which at bottom do not have the
slightest relationship. They ridicule historians of the Goethean
period for expressing political ideals by writing histories of an-
tiquity and, with the names Lycurgus, Brutus, Cato, Cicero, Augus-
tus, concealing private programmes or personal enthusiasms beneath
defences or condemnations; but they themselves cannot write a
chapter without betraying with what political tendency their morn-
ing paper is allied.
But it is all the same whether one views the past with the eyes
of Don Quixote or of Sancho Panza. Neither road leads to the
goal. In the end each of them has permitted himself to place in the
1 The Roman otium cum dignitate is to be understood primarily as the
obverse of a large-scale and energetic public activity, not as private lyrical
and cultivated idling, which is not described until very late in the letters
of the younger Pliny.


498 THE DOWNFALL OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION
foreground that part of antiquity which happened to fall in best
with his own intentions: Nietzsche pre-Socratic Athens, political
economists the Hellenistic period, politicians the republican Rome,
and poets the empire.
Not that religious or artistic phenomena are more fundamental
than social and economic ones. Nor the reverse. To whoever has
attained here an unqualified freedom of outlook, beyond all per-
sonal interests of any kind whatsoever, there is absolutely no kind
of dependence, no priority, no cause and effect, no difference of
value and importance. The single phenomenon acquires its rank
simply by reason of the greater or lesser purity and strength of its
form-language, the power of its symbolism—aside from good and
evil, high and low, utility and ideal.
XII
The Fall of the Occident, so considered, means nothing less than
the problem of civilization. We here face one of the basic ques-
tions of all history. What is civilization, conceived as the logical
result, as the conclusion and outcome of a culture?
For every culture has its own civilization. Here for the first
time these two words, which were used previously to signify a vague
ethical difference of a personal character, are grasped in a periodic
sense, as expressions of a strict and determined organic sequence.
Civilization is the inevitable fate of a culture. Here the point is
reached from which the ultimate and most difficult questions in the
morphology of history become solvable. Civilizations are the
outermost and most artificial conditions of which a superior type
of man is capable. They are a conclusion: they follow upon the
growing as the grown, upon life as death, upon development as
rigidity, upon the countryside and spiritual childhood (shown in
Doric and Gothic) as intellectual old age and the petrified, petri-
factive metropolis. They are an end, irrevocably; but they have
been arrived at again and again through the deepest necessity.
Only in this way will the Roman be understood as the successor
to the Hellene. Only in this way does the latter phase of antiquity
come into a light which exposes its profoundest secrets. For what
does it signify—and it can only be combated with empty words—
that the Romans were barbarians, not barbarians preceding a great


OSWALD SPENGLER 499
florescence, but concluding it? Soulless, unphilosophic, without
art, animal to the extent of brutality, clinging relentlessly to ma-
terial successes, they stand between Hellenic culture and annihila-
tion. Their inventiveness with its highly practical turn—they
possessed a religious law regulating the relationship between gods
and men as between private individuals, but not a trace of myth—
is a faculty which is not met with at all in Athens. Greek soul
and Roman intellect—so it stands. Such is the difference between
culture and civilization. This does not apply to Antiquity aione
Again and again this type of hard-headed, completely unmetaphysi-
cal men emerges. The intellectual and material destiny of every
terminal period is in their hands. They perfected Babylonian,
Egyptian, Hindu, Chinese, and Roman imperialism. In such
epochs Buddhism, Stoicism, and Socialism have matured to ulti-
mate philosophic attitudes which are capable of comprehending
and symbolizing once more the total substance of a dying humanity.
Pure civilization as an historic process consists in a gradual exhaus-
tion of forms which have become dead and inorganic.
The transition from culture to civilization takes place in an-
tiquity in the fourth century, in the Occident in the nineteenth.
From then on the great intellectual decisions no longer fall, as at
the time of the Orphic movement and the Reformation, in the
"whole world" where in the last analysis not a single village is
quite without importance, but in three or four metropolises which
have absorbed the total content of history and in contrast to which
all the country districts of the culture sink to the rank of provinces
having for their part simply to nourish the metropolises with the
reliques of their higher humanity. Metropolis and province—with
these basic concepts of all civilization a whole new form-problem
of history comes to the fore: and we of the present are living in
the very midst of it without even remotely grasping the full extent
of its meaning. Instead of a world, we have a city or a point in
which the whole life of large territories is assembled, while the rest
grows dormant; instead of a morphotic people growing with the
earth, there are the new nomads, the parasites, the dwellers in the
big city, the pure traditionless men of hard facts who come forward
in a formlessly fluctuating mass, irreligious, intelligent, with a pro-
found distaste for the peasantry (and its highest form, the landed
gentry) and thus an enormous stride towards the inorganic, the


500 THE DOWNFALL OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION
end. What does that mean? France and England have com-
pleted this step, and Germany is in the process of taking it.
Syracuse, Athens, Alexandria are followed by Rome. Madrid,
Paris, London are followed by Berlin. It is the fate of entire
countries which do not lie within the radius of one of these cities
to become provincial, as formerly Crete and Macedonia and to-day
the Scandinavian North.1
At one time the struggle for the ideal possession of an epoch
was enacted in the field of universal metaphysical problems dealing
with matters of cult or dogma; and this was waged between the
rustic spirit of the peasantry (nobility and priesthood) and the
"mundane" patrician spirit of the old, small, famous cities, during
the Doric and Gothic early periods. Such were the battles over
the religion of Dionysus—for example under the tyrant Cleisthenes
of Sicyon2—and over the Reformation in the German imperial
cities, and in the wars of the Huguenots. But as the cities finally
conquered the country—a purely urbane outlook is met with as
early as Parmenides and Descartes—so in turn these cities were
conquered by the metropolis. That is the intellectual process of all
terminal periods, Ionic as well as Baroque. To-day, as in the time
of Hellenism—whose beginning is marked by the establishment of
a great artistic (ergo, alien) city, Alexandria—these culture-cities
(Florence, Nuremberg, Salamanca, Bruges, Prague) have become
provincial cities which offer a hopeless intellectual resistance to the
spirit of the metropolis. The metropolis means cosmopolitanism
in place of the "home," * the cool sense of facts instead of reverence
before the traditional and the inveterate, scientific irreligion as the
petrifaction of the earlier religion of the heart, "society" in place
of the state, natural rights instead of acquired right. Money as an
inorganic abstract factor, freed of all reference to the sense of the
1 Which should not be overlooked in the development of Strindberg, and
especially Ibsen, who was always merely a guest in the civilized atmosphere
of his problems. The motif of Brand and Rosmersholm is a remarkable
mixture of innate provincialism and a theoretically acquired metropolitan
outlook. Nora is the prototype of a provincial woman derailed by reading.
2 Who forbade the cult of the local hero Adrastos and the recital of the
Homeric songs, in order to deprive the Doric nobility of the roots of its
spirituality (circa 560).
* A profound word which receives its meaning as soon as the barbarian be-
comes a man of culture,'and loses it again as soon as the civilized man
accepts the "ubi bene, ibi patria."


OSWALD SPENGLER 501
fertile soil, or to the basic values of living—the Romans have this
advantage over the Greeks. Henceforth a distinguished attitude
towards life becomes also a question of money. Not the Greek
stoicism of Chrysippus, but the late Roman stoicism of Cato and
Seneca presupposes wealth as a rudiment;1 and not the social-
ethical attitude of the eighteenth century, but that of the twentieth,
is a matter for millionaires (if it desires to become a reality, some-
thing more than a professional salaried agitation). To the metrop-
olis belongs not a people, but a mass. Their blindness to all tradi-
tion, whereby they combat culture (the nobility, the church, privi-
lege, the dynasty, the conventions in art, the limits of knowledge
in science) their cold sharp intelligence with its superiority to rustic
prudence, their naturalism (in an entirely new sense, which goes
back far beyond Socrates and Rousseau in all sexual and social
matters and links up with primitive instincts and conditions) the
panem et circenses which appears again to-day under the guise of
the wage-war and the athletic field—all this indicates (in oppo-
sition to the finally concluded culture, the provinces) a wholly
new, late, and futureless, but inevitable form of human existence.
That is what will be seen, not with the eyes of the partisan, the
ideologist, the time-serving moralist, from the angle of some par-
ticular "standpoint," but from a timeless elevation, with the gaze
directed upon the world of historic forms across thousands of years
—if one desires to really grasp the great crisis of the present.
I see symbols of the first order in the fact that at Rome (where
about 60 B. C. the triumvir Crassus was the first speculator in real
estate) the Roman people, who were vaunted in all inscriptions and
before whom the Gauls, Greeks, Parthians, and Syrians trembled in
the distance, were housed with enormous misery in many-storied
tenements of the dark suburbs2 and took the successes of military
expansion with indifference or a kind of sporting interest; that
many of the great families of the old nobility, descendants of the
conquerors of the Celts, Samnites, and Hannibal, were compelled
1 For this reason the first to yield to Christianity were the Romans who
could not afford to be Stoics.
2 In Rome and Byzantium six- and ten-story lodging houses (with a street
frontage of three metres at the most) were erected; and in the absence of
official building regulations these would often, collapse with their inmates.
A great part of the cives Romani, for whom "panem et circenses" provided
their entire life-interests, had only a dearly paid-for sleeping place in the
antlike swarming "insulae."


502 THE DOWNFALL OF WESTERN" CIVILIZATION
to give up their ancestral homes and move into poor rented quarters
because they did not take part in the disastrous speculations; that
while the burial monuments of Rome's financial magnates "monu-
ments which we still marvel at to-day) towered along the Ma
Appia, the corpses of the populace, together with dead animals and
the refuse of the metropolis, were tossed into a gruesome common
grave, until under Augustus the place was filled in to avoid plagues
and Maecenas then laid his famous park here; that in depopulated
Athens, which lived on the visits of foreigners and the endowments
of rich aliens (as the Jewish King Herod) the transient mob of
Romans which had grown rich too quick gaped at the works of the
Periclean age which they understood as little as the American visi-
tors do Michael Angelo's Sistine Chapel, after all movable art-
works had been carried away or bought up at fantastic fashionable
prices and colossal and presumptuous Roman buildings had been
placed alongside the profound and modest works of the old period.
These things, which the historian has neither to praise nor blame,
but to consider morphologically, bring immediately to light, for
whoever has learned to see, an idea.
To-day, as then, it is not a question of whether one is by birth
Germanic or Latin, Hellene or Roman, but whether one is by train-
ing cosmopolitan or provincial. That is more decisive than all the
specific facts. Here we find as the expression of a new style of
living, a new general attitude which is complete within its own
terms. A metamorphosis is being accomplished which is highly
significant, and is invariable in all instances available up to the
present. One of the most important reasons why we had not dis-
covered the real structure of history in the confused panorama of
the historic surface has been that we did not understand how to
separate the form-complexes of cultivated and civilized existences
after their mutual interpenetration. A criticism of the present faces
here its weightiest task.
For it will be seen that from this moment on all great conflicts
in philosophic attitude, in politics, art, science, and feeling are
marked by this one contrast. What is civilized politics of to-mor-
row in contrast to cultivated politics of yesterday? In antiquity
rhetoric, in the Occident journalism, and always in the service of
that abstract quantity which represents the power of civilization:
money. It is this spirit which unnoticeably permeates the historic


OSWALD SPENGLER 503
forms of a people's manner of living, often without altering or dis-
turbing it in the least. From the elder Scipio Africanus until
Augustus the mechanism of the Roman state remained stationary to
a much greater extent than is usually supposed. But at the time
of the Gracchi, as in the twentieth century, the great parties,
vehicles of a worn-out form of political life, are only apparently
the central factors in decisive actions. In reality it was of no mo-
ment to the Forum Romanum how the forum at Pompeii was dis-
cussing, deciding, and voting; and in our own future the three or
four leading papers will determine the opinions of the provincial
press and thereby the "will of the people." There is a small num-
ber of superior brains (their names are perhaps not the best known
at this moment) who decide everything, while the great mass of
second-rate politicians, rhetoricians and tribunes, deputies and jour-
nalists, a selection to conform with the provincial horizons of the
submerged, maintains the illusion of a popular independence. And
art? Philosophy? The ideals of the Platonic and Kantian periods
were thoroughly suited to a higher humanity. Those of Hellenism
and the present, especially Socialism, Darwinism (genetically so
closely related to it) with its so very un-Goethean formulae of the
struggle for life and natural selection, and the likewise related
feminist and marriage problems of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Shaw,
the impressionistic leanings of an anarchic sensuousness, the whole
lump sum of modern yearnings, excitements, and pains, whose ex-
pression is in the lyric of Baudelaire and the music of Wagner—
these do not fall within the experience of the small-town man and
particularly the natural man, but exist exclusively for the metro-
politan man of brains. The smaller the city, the more meaningless
its preoccupation with such painting and music. To culture belong
gymnastics, tournaments, the agon; to civilization, sport. That
also distinguishes the Hellenic palestra from the Roman circus.1
Art itself becomes a sport—that is the meaning of Vart pour Part
—for a highly intelligent public of connoisseurs and buyers,
whether it is concerned with the mastery of absurd instrumental
tone-masses and harmonic obstacles, or with the "doing" of a prob-
lem in colour. A new philosophy of hard facts appears which has
1 German gymnastics, since 1813 and the highly provincial indigenous forms
which Jahn gave it at that time, has been rapidly developing into sport.
By 1914 there was very little difference between a Berlin athletic field on
a gala day and a Roman circus.


504 THE DOWNFALL OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION
nothing but a smile for metaphysical speculations, a new literature
which is a necessity for the intellect, the taste, and the nerves of
the metropolitan, but is incomprehensible and detestable to the
provincial.1 Neither Alexandrian poetry nor plein-air painting
touches the "people." Then, as now, the transition is marked by
a series of scandals which are to be met with only in such an epoch.
The indignation of the Athenians against Euripides and the revolu-
tionary painting of Apollodorus, for instance, is repeated in the
resistance to Wagner, Manet, Ibsen, and Nietzsche.
One can understand the Greeks without talking of their economic
affairs. It is only through these that one can understand the
Romans. The last battle over an idea was fought at Chaeronea
and at Leipzig. In the first Punic war and at Sedan the economic
moments can no longer be overlooked. It was the Romans with
their practical energy who first gave slave labour and the slave trade
those gigantic proportions which for many are the decisive factor
in defining the Ancient type of living. Similarly, it remained for
the Germanic, and not the Romanic, peoples of Western Europe
to develop the steam engine into a major industry which is altering
the aspect of the nations. One will not overlook the relationship
of both deeply symbolic phenomena to Stoicism and Socialism.
Roman Caesarism (which was foreshadowed in Caius Flaminius
and took form for the first time in Marius) first taught within the
Ancient world the exaltedness of money—in the hands of firm,
highly capable men of affairs. Without that neither Caesar nor
Rome is at all comprehensible. Every Greek has a touch of Don
Quixote, every Roman of Sancho Panza—all else that they were
retreats behind this.
1 Whatever in the way of literary battles has taken place in Germany since
1880 is nothing but the struggle (waged, it may be added, among people
of small importance) between cosmopolitan and provincial poetry (fire- ,. "l
side art).
To be concluded
4



SAINT CASSIEN. BY LUCIEN JACQUES






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PARIS LETTER
November, 1924
OF late Paris has been a fair of literary and artistic samples.
The abundance of books and sights is such that I must choose
at random and, as my space is limited, must of necessity omit
much. Let me, however, mention that a little while ago one
could witness at the Champs-El ysees the novelties of the Russian
Ballet: Les Facheux, by Auric, Les Biches, by Poulenc, Le Train
Bleu, by Milhaud, of which I told you on the occasion of their
appearances at Monte-Carlo last winter. At the Opera, Chaliapin
sang Boris Godounov and when he put his hand on the head
of the young Czar we felt all at once ten years younger. At the
Cigale, the Count of Beaumont presented Salade, by Milhaud;
the Beautiful Blue Danube, with music by Strauss and a decor after
Constantin Guys; Mercure, a very important score by Satie, and
the Romeo by Jean Cocteau. This Romeo has aroused great public
interest. It is a very free and very intelligent adaptation, modern
both in spirit and language. Some thought it too free; a critic ac-
cused Cocteau of having "organized a promenade among Shake-
speare's ruins." But the success that the simplified decors and
above all the marvellous costumes of Jean Victor Hugo and his
wife, grandchildren of the poet, scored is indisputable. The Hugos
have brought the historical costume into its own again. The house
cried: "Hugo! Hugo!" and one could have imagined oneself at
the opening performance of Hernani, in 1830. To continue:
Rubinstein played at Gaveau's. The Vienna Opera scored a
triumph with Mozart, chiefly owing to Selma Kurz in L'Enleve-
ment au Serail. Braque and Picasso exhibited curtains and decors
not only at Rosenberg's, but also at certain theatres, where, to an
experienced public, they revealed at last the new secrets. The Men-
gelberg concert, of Amsterdam, with the Passion Selon St-Mathieu,
gave a severe lesson in choral discipline and an unforgettable per-
formance; after Damrosch and his Beethoven festivals, Wanda
Landowska, back from the States, performed, with Barrientos,
works by Mozart and Bach. Lastly, Honneger with his Roi David


506 PARIS LETTER
triumphed at the Champs-Elysees. This Oratorio, with its im-
portant choirs, is treated with extreme simplicity which has insured
its success with the general French public, known to be so reac-
tionary in music; Honneger is, with the Milhaud of the Choephores,
the one amongst our young musicians who has a real sense of
grandeur. If we add to all this the spectacle of the Olympic
games, that are of no less perfect an art, many of them fortuitous,
like the singing of the Uruguayans on the evening of their world's
victory in association football, amongst all the lighted candles in
their Olympic lanterns, or—whether on the lawn or at the pond
of Tourelles—the enthusiasm of the American athletes for their
coming victories, you have a conception of the Parisian spring of
1924, frivolous and dramatic.
In one of my recent letters to this magazine I told you how the
crisis of adolescence hastened the breaking-up of Dada and rather
quickly induced some to acknowledge, others to revoke, and, lastly,
a few (these being rare) to persist. Moreover, as Dada is the
cult of negation, all literary production infringes on it. Never-
theless, they all write. A certain parallelism in their destinies
(because with these young men Life has not yet intervened with
its infinite variety of catastrophes and benefactions) threaten
monotony in their literary adventures. You know how I liked
Le Bon Apotre by Soupault; A la Derive, his new novel (and
also Terres Etrangeres by Marcel Arland) is quite its equal as a
study of this "mal du stecle" of which Gide, with his Paludes,
became the father on the French literary stage. One cannot but
enjoy the wilful neglect of plot, the excessive bareness of style,
the cult of the unconscious, and above all, the "moral aim" that
all these young men strive for. (See the controversy between
Jacques Riviere and Marcel Arland, mentioned in my preceding
letter.) Unluckily all these books resemble one another. The
case of Andre Breton and of Aragon is more complicated; I said
about Clair de Terre, the book of poems by Breton, how important
it appeared to me. La Nouvelle Revue Franchise has brought out,
under the title, Les Pas Perdus, a series of essays by M Breton
written since the armistice, of which the first one, the Confession
Dedaigneuse, is absolutely necessary for whosoever wants to under-
stand the actual development of the pure literary idea. First a
high conception of art: "I publish in order to find men"; contempt


PAUL MORAND 507
for "culture" and yet preoccupation with the moral question; good
essays on Apollinaire, Lautreamont, Chirico, Max Ernst. One of
the most curious tendencies of the advanced schools seems to me
the pursuit of obscenity. Whether picturesque, as in Delteil,
already more complicated in Joyce, pedantic in the disciples of
Freud, artistic in Larbaud, of a popular or scholarly source as in
Apollinaire, it is, in Aragon, adorned by a vivid taste for the
French "petits makres" of the eighteenth century and particularly
Restif de la Bretonne. In this respect the last essay of the Liber-
tinage, entitled La Femme Francaise, is an exceedingly remarkable
literary piece, and transposed in the bitter taste of to-day, is equal
to the finest pages of the Liaisons Dangereuses.
The Academie Francaise—I haven't the art of transition—has
just given to M Abel Bonnard, whose talent is as yet not enough
known in the States, its Grand Prix de Litterature for his book
En Chine. This is an important honour that now rewards an ex-
cellent and discreet artist, the author of this philosophic book of
travels. M Bonnard, who went to the Far East two years ago,
has not brought us back mellow romantic impressions, but a com-
pact, useful, and exact work. Bonnard holds pessimistic views
on the condition of China; but we hold optimistic views on the
future of Abel Bonnard the traveller. In justice to his reading,
his knowledge, his bitter and distinguished intelligence, he owes it
to himself to continue contributing to this great inquiry into uni-
versal geography which will be the literature of to-morrow.
The last book of the brothers Tharaud, L'An Prochain a Jeru-
salem,1 one of their best (who said that the French don't travel?)
leads us among the fields of Palestine and the sombre passages of
Zionism where these Occidental Gods, Lord Rothschild, and Mr
Balfour, sparkle with an Asiatic fire.
With the last book of Robert de Traz, a writer of Suisse
Romande, we return to pure literature. As De Traz is geographi-
cally located at the same distance from France and from Central
Europe, he is better informed than anybody else; American readers
who want impartial, audacious ideas about Europe should read
his Depaysements. The same honesty, the same schematic elegance,
1 Published in English by Robert M. McBride and Company under the
title When Israel Is King, translated from the sixty-fourth French edition
by the Hon. Lady Whitehead. (i2mo. 248 pages. $2.)


508 PARIS LETTER
the same seriousness will be found in his imaginary works. Com-
plices, his last book, contains an excellent short story, Le Visage
Different. Lastly, M Corbeau, whose first book, Le Gigantesque,
Monographic Litteraire d'un Arbre,1 has had a tremendous success
in the English-speaking countries, now gives us L'Heure Finale,
a study of the last hour of a dying man, in which certain lyric
passages reach heights of grandeur.
With reference to Abel Hermant's book, Xavier ou les En-
tretiens sur la Grammaire, I mentioned to you the taste of the
French for this old sport which they have practised with a unique
passion since the seventeenth century; here we have a new book by
Jacques and Andre Therive, the Soirees du Grammaire Club. This
book, though just published, is in its fifteenth edition. It is a
peculiar document on the French spirit.
Jacques Riviere, who directs and maintains on such a sure course
La Nouvelle Revue Franchise, the importance of which remains
so considerable in foreign countries, has just republished his Etudes,
which, when they appeared in 1912, drew attention to him and
won him disciples at an age when, at least before the war, one
still was learning. Essays on Baudelaire, Claudel, Gide, Rameau,
Bach, Moussorgsky, Debussy, Ingres, Cezanne, et cetera. There one
sees, considering the epoch, the proof of a rather sure judgement!
The essay on Paul Claudel, that genius whom fashion has so un-
justly driven into oblivion, certainly is the most remarkable one.
Besides, we owe to Riviere the publication this month of post-
humous fragments by his brother-in-law Alain Fournier, the author
of Grand Meaulnes, of whom everything was expected when he
was killed in the war.
Finally, I want to report an important exposition of native art
of the French Colonies, at the Musee des Arts Decoratifs. Negro
art has attained the rights of citizenship with the general French
public since 1919. There were to be seen remarkable masks from
Guinea, idols of the collections Haviland and Paul Guillaume,
statues from Dahomey, the Sudan, Gabon, and the Congo, together
with sculptures from French Indo-China, loaned by the Musee
Guimet.
Paul Morand
1 Published in translation by Harper and Brothers, New York, under the
title, The Forest Giant. (8vo. 139 pages. $2.)


BOOK REVIEWS
A BOOK ON MODERN ART
The Masters of Modern Art. By Walter Pach.
Illustrated. 8vo. 118 pages. B. W. Huebsch, Inc.
IT is in a definitive manner that Walter Pach's book fixes the
essential realities introduced into painting by the artistic
evolution of the last hundred years. I do not know any other
book which gives so just, so clear, and so exact an idea of the
extraordinary movement in plastic art for which nineteenth-
century France was the central focus and which the future will look
upon with as much of admiration and of surprise as it will the
Italian quattrocento and cinquecento. To select a special point,
I can imagine nothing more perfect than the author's exposition
of the line of continuity among ideas and techniques through-
out the incomparable dynasty of the masters studied by him. If
one adopt his idea that there was, every twenty years in France,
a generation charged with revealing to the elite the latent forces
concealed within the desires and the faculties of the multitude,
all of his views assume for us the weight of irresistible evidence.
And it is this idea, precisely, that we cannot avoid adopting, even
if we know but slightly the work of these masters and the way
in which their influence has extended to-day throughout the whole
world. David, Ingres, Corot, and Delacroix, Courbet, Cezanne
and Renoir, Seurat and Matisse, and Cubism stand like so many
lighthouses marking the stages along the route of thought. The
foreigners of greatest significance: Jongkind, Pissarro, Sisley,
van Gogh, and Picasso, whatever their personal genius, have been
unable to do other than enter this admirable movement, as iron
filings go to a magnet. This is a fact for all those who have
penetrated, behind the mask of the official schools and of fash-
ionable reputations, to the true countenance of art. And another
fact, to be established one day, is the constant parallelism of this


5io A BOOK ON MODERN ART
evolution of French painting with the philosophic and social life
of the whole world.
The work of a generation, Walter Pach tells us, is not really
understood before the coming of the generation which follows.
Hence the resistances which meet it, hence also its own energy
in affirming the totality of its victory, even when it is no longer
there to behold it. He shows us that the explosion (the word
is not too strong) of great French painting coincides exactly with
the coming of democracy to the French people, which explains
also, through the diffusion of bad taste and false culture, the special
failure to comprehend that explosion. (How indeed, when the
weather is fine and silence is everywhere, should an explosion do
otherwise than surprise you?) It is easy, therefore, from the
point at which we find ourselves, to situate and estimate its effects,
as well as to fix their outer limits, one of which is the French
Revolution and the other the World War, two formidable events
that one must never lose sight of, if one wants to know the sources
of modern art and to draw conclusions as to it. Walter Pach, I
imagine, has written his book for those Americans, above all, who
are beginning dimly to suspect the grandeur of the intellectual
drama which has been going on in the Occident for over a cen-
tury. But the American people has no need of the education which
he is trying to bring to it: it is creating. It is creating and in
every domain. It is inaugurating a grandiose energy in constructing,
for which plastics is, precisely, an unexpected expansion, a new
one, and one that is taking a direction unsuspected even by the
first initiators of the great painting of France, but again one
toward which their ideas conduct irresistibly: I am thinking
of those colossal factories whose architectonic power and logic
recall those of the Aztec and Egyptian temples. But if the Amer-
ican people can get along without the education here offered, the
elite of America is demanding it, precisely because the American
people is newer than the people of Europe and because its brain
is aspiring to penetrate to the why of the growing organism which
it expresses and to which it is, at the same time, giving order.
Thus it is that one cannot give too much importance to the
famous movement of Cubism—prepared, says Walter Pach, by
Odilon Redon, who is credited with having rehabilitated the vision
of the inner world, and on this one point I am not entirely of his


ELIE FAURE 511
opinion. In fact, Cubism in our day is attaining a conception of
plastic construction in which only a very relative accounting for
"nature" subsists, and thereby, clearly, it approaches the great
architectural principles toward which the art of the engineers—
and particularly the American engineers—is being directed. After
the Impressionists' analysis of the elements of the object, and after
the effort through which Cezanne and Renoir achieved a utiliza-
tion of that analysis, Matisse in constructing with colour, Picasso
with line, and Derain with form, have gradually substituted the
plane of the mind for the objective plane so powerfully established
by Courbet. The plastic elements alone remain objective, and not
the objects, transported, as they are, to the plane of the mind
where they evolve new combinations which the architect finds
ready to his hand. We must renounce once for all, if not nat-
uralism, at least that disastrous idea that the imitation of nature
is the goal of the art of painting. The great problem of the
present generation is to overcome that prejudice. It found in
Oriental and African art an unshakable point of support for this
essential conquest, which explains the immense favour which they
enjoy in our day. And, through an admirable chain of inner cir-
cumstances which belongs to genius alone, it was the great classic
and naturalistic French painters of the nineteenth century who
prepared this field: hence the enormous influence which Delacroix
exerted on his period, an influence which has not ceased to make
itself felt, as a subterranean force, throughout Courbet's Natu-
ralism, through the whole of Impressionism, through Post-Impres-
sionism, and the powerful constructions of Cezanne and Renoir.
Delacroix, Daumier, and Barye (the greatest sculptor that Europe
has seen since Michael Angelo, as I think Walter Pach has said—
and I know, in any case, that he thinks so, as I do) all of them,
in their making from Romanticism a new incarnation of French
Classicism, bind up the most solid tradition of European art
with the contemporary revolution which must soon result in a
new spiritual architecture. It is in this that I see the testament
which Europe is passing on to her American heir.
Walter Pach shows clearly that the Occidental mind which,
since the Renaissance, had not ceased to exert upon art an influence
sometimes fruitful and sometimes disastrous, has finally, through
respect and honesty toward itself, renounced the attempt to impose


512 A BOOK ON MODERN ART
its supremacy on art. A profound idea, recalling that of Nietzsche,
discovering in morality, isolated from God by pure reason, the
new function of destroying its own domination and bowing before
the advent of the pessimistic and tragic reality of the mind. Art
is regaining its veritable domain, which had been obscured by the
Renaissance, despite the greatness of that period, a greatness mani-
fested exclusively, it is true, through the genius and the energy of
individuals. And art can furnish anew to the religious spirit of
the world the power of communion which it demands in order to
establish itself in depth and to extend in area. I must close here,
fearing that my admiration for this book will sweep beyond the
limits set for this article. We believe, Walter Pach and I, that
the universe itself is a vast poetic ensemble for which art, in all
its forms, is a sovereign language, and for which science is only one
of the means.
Elie Faure


DELIGHT AND TEARS
The Apple of the Eye. By Glenway Wescott.
i2mo. 2Q2 pages. Lincoln Mac Veagh. The Dial
Press. $2.50.
I SHALL not forget the feeling of astonishment and—shall I
say?—well-being with which, some months past, I read the
opening of Glenway Wescott's Bad Han when it appeared in The
Dial.1 Within three sentences Mr Wescott had established his
mood, a mixture of ruggedness and lyrism. The abrupt change
from these four lines to the name of his heroine served to clinch
his effect. Here, in the purest sense, was action. For such move-
ments, it seems to me, are the essence of action in art.
Mr Wescott's novel, The Apple of the Eye, is a continuation of
the story Bad Han as it appeared in The Dial. The novel has
a kind of tripartite arrangement, in each part the focus being
placed upon a different character, while the parts are held together
by certain parallelings and interactions of plot and emotion. The
first part is the story of Bad Han; the second centres about the
love-affair between a delicate young girl and a farm-hand whose
wanderlust is temporarily quieted by his attachment to this girl.
In this second part a young boy, Dan, has been brought into the
story; the third part now settles upon this boy, but treats him in
the light of the parts preceding. One feels the reward of Mr
Wescott's method: the story does have a cumulative effect, and the
ending is made richer by its strong reliance upon what has preceded.
All of which is very vague, and in no wise conveys the quality
of Mr Wescott's story. It is a book almost exclusively of emotional
propulsion. Indeed, it even becomes a drenching in emotions,
those softer, readier emotions which we designate usually as
"feminine," an experience purely of "delight and tears" (to bor-
row one of his chapter heads) and is thus a kind of revival in
letters, an atavism, albeit a revival which is done with such force,
such conviction, that one is caught unawares, and before he knows
it is deeply involved in these partings (by death or locomotion),
1 January and February, 1924.


5 H DELIGHT AND TEARS
this girl like wilted flower left to perish, these stutterings of love,
the sleep-walking in the moonlight, the call, or lure, of the city
over the hills and plains. The machinery of pathos is well
utilized—which, once again, fails to convey the quality of the
story, for it is so obvious that the author did not think in terms of the
"machinery" of pathos. His book, if it makes few demands upon
the intellectual equipment of the reader, is a profoundly appealing
piece of emotional writing, or one might better call it an emotional
experience, for the reader's participation in the author's plot is
intense enough to leave him in possession of the story's overtones
much as one is left with the overtones of some dream or some
actual event which has occurred in one's own life.
The principal objection I find to Mr Westcott's book is its
failure to widen the field of our aesthetic perceptions. And I use
the word "aesthetic" very broadly here, to signify simply all per-
ceptions which engage what Goethe calls the organs of art. Such
perceptions are of two categories: method, technique, discoveries
of procedure within the medium itself; and the far more important
discovery of symbols which adequately summarize for us the emo-
tional and ideological complexities in which we are involved.
In method, Mr Wescott's chief contribution is the bringing of a
greater and more sensitive vitality to a type of book in which
the typical novelist could feel very much at home. In subject-
matter, the author has re-seen for us certain stock figures and
situations of the contemporary story, re-seen with a keener eye,
but no new angle of vision.
Yet this in itself becomes a kind of virtue. Our latent famili-
arity with the mould sets us for it so perfectly, that when Mr
Wescott does his act with such vigour we are able to follow him
without a wrench. There is a point whereat the average suddenly
transcends into the natural, and at times Mr Wescott seems re-
warded by precisely this illumination, so that his book becomes
something of a racial experience, adjusting itself with sensitive-
ness to our desires for both satisfaction and frustration. The
greatest book ever written will probably be so for the same reason.
And it is here that Mr Wescott is rewarded for having kept the
commandments, and the law as the apple of his eye.
There are certain writers who, in addition to the absolute values
of their work, have for me a sort of barometric interest. Such


KENNETH BURKE 515
writers, for instance, as Joyce, Eliot, or Cummings, always strike
me as facing an issue, as being on the verge of some new decision.
I speculate on what they will do next. I feel this way also with
reference to Wescott. Will his next book be a continuation of
his present one (The Apple of the Eye ends as the somewhat auto-
biographic hero leaves the farm for college, and thus it could be
projected into further volumes of the same sort); or will it, in
some form or other, suffer that strange critical deflection (an equiva-
lent to epistemology in philosophy?) which has started so many
modern artists through some personal migration parallel to Joyce's
curve from Dubliners to Ulysses?
It might be said that if Mr Wescott chooses to repeat his pres-
ent formula, we may expect him to repeat it with that creative
vitality which he has already displayed. Yet the issue is much
deeper; perhaps it is just as hard to-day to retain one's fire in the
fidelity to artistic orthodoxy as is the case with religious or polit-
ical orthodoxy. This is no mere accident; it is the result (both
the' flowering and the absurdity) of that modern specialized man-
ner of living whereby art itself tends to become the predominant
experience of the artist (his keenest hours being devoted to the
perceptions of technical procedure and his weaker hours being left
for the perceptions of life in general) so that he makes extensions
and discoveries within his field of experience which are simply
unseen by specialists in other fields who have not paralleled his
experience.
But to return—Mr Wescott is of a much more highly critical tem-
per than his first book would seem to indicate. He is, therefore, by
no means immune from the Dubliners-to-Ulysses temptation.
While on the other hand the brilliancy of his first book would
certainly justify him in trying to develop in the avoidance of more
specialized channels.
In any case, we may for the time being content ourselves with
this opportunity to welcome a work of such keen emotional appeal
and stylistic vigour as are displayed in The Apple of the Eye.
Kenneth Burke


THE GOOD OLD DAYS
The Inquisition. A Political and Military Study
of its Establishment. By Hoffman Nickerson. 8vo.
258 pages. Houghton Mifflin Company. $4.
THE cult of the Middle Ages, so far as English letters are con-
cerned, began with the Romantic Revival, with that human
incubator of cape-and-sword fiction, Sir Walter Scott. It would,
however, be a mistake on the part of the modern mediaevalist and
neo-Catholic to carp overmuch at Scott. He was a mere writer of
serials, but each one was worth its weight in gold as reviving a cer-
tain attitude toward the mediaeval past which had its most sensa-
tional expression, a few years later, in the placid bosom of the
Anglican Church, in the Oxford Movement. The founders of
mediaeval romanticism, as applied to the Established Religion,
turned their faces squarely toward the past as a Mohammedan
toward the unknown Mecca. Protestantism was all wrong; so was
Liberalism; the Reformation was an act of corporate treason to
mankind; the whole modern and industrial world was out of joint,
and it was clearly up to a few bright young men from Oxford to
put it right again.
Up to that moment it had been universally held by intelligent
spirits that the cause of religious toleration, so lately and hardly
won, was one of the major victories of civilization. But the in-
stinct of the mediaevalists was by no means for toleration. "It
would be a great gain to this country," wrote Keble, "were it vastly
more bigoted, more superstitious, more fierce in its religion than at
present is the case." The shining and illustrious model of the whole
Oxford school was, of course, the Unreformed Church. "Incessit
patuit Dea" wrote Newman in a splendid passage, "the self-con-
quest of her Ascetics, the patience of her Martyrs, the irresistible
determination of her Bishops, the joyous swing of her advance, both
exalted and abashed me." Thus the idealization of the Middle
Ages which began in the bookish dreams of a few poets and writers
whose embroidered instinct loved simply.


CUTHBERT WRIGHT 517
"The sword, the mace, the crown imperial,
The intertissued robe of gold and pearl,"
became the serious business of clergymen and historians, colouring
their politics and their religion, in brief, their whole attitude to-
ward life.
Of course the dilemma of the High Church school was and still
is obvious. It was not long before people began to say to them:
"If you are so keen about the Church as it was under the supremacy
of Rome, why on earth don't you go there?" Recently the Roman
Church has had the dubious honour of converting Mr Chesterton,
so long a perfect godsend to witty Anglican clerics. Sancho Panza
is now of the same household of faith with his master, but, strange
to say, the conversion has had no effect on his style which waddles
as foolishly as ever in the wake of the far-famed Bellocian prose.
We have said enough to indicate that there does exist a school
of people who see the Middle Ages almost completely en rose and
the Catholic Church like "the great Vision of the guarded mount,"
glimpsed across weltering seas of misunderstanding, Protestantism,
and modern industrial life. In the realm of publicism they have
learned to call Socialism "the Servile State," and talk about the
Guild System, a condition which it would be just about as possible
to fasten upon modern society as it would be to reduce New York
to the dimensions of Paris under Philippe Auguste. In poetry they
write darling verses to our Lady Mary and the Gothic Rose. In
ordinary life they compose books apologizing for the Inquisition,
and evince an enormous veneration for the Person of the Lord and
the sanctity of beer.
Mr Nickerson's book is an interesting example of this category.
His attention was first drawn to religious interference with liberty
by the efforts of Prohibition lobbyists in the days when he was a
conscript father at Albany. He cast about for some parallel similar
to the Prohibition Movement and found it in the Inquisition. After
that there was only one thing to do, and that was to write a book
about his discovery. But in the meantime, probably in the course
of composition, a strange thing happened to the discovery. His
hatred for Prohibition remained unabated, but . . . was it possible
that he was beginning to feel, well not precisely an admiration, but
a sort of fellow-feeling for the horrid phenomenon he had set out to


518 THE GOOD OLD DAYS
expose as similar to Prohibition and equally indefensible? If we
are right in assuming such a development of Mr Nickerson's atti-
tude, there were only two things to do. Either he could abandon his
book, in which case a great deal of valuable time, not to say a
genuine historical passion for his subject, would be wasted, or he
could revise it with a double thesis to the end of proving that the
Inquisition was, after all, a good thing in theory, and that Prohibi-
tion is wholly damnable. He chose the second alternative, not re-
flecting apparently that he has rather unskilfully combined in a
single volume two theses which, if the author inclines ever so little
to one, turn and rend each other.
The Inquisition, as everybody ought to know, was a corollary of
the Crusade against the Manichaeans of the French Midi, those
interesting heretics who believed, among other things, "that no one
could sin from the navel downward." The military end of the busi-
ness was carried out by the famous Simon de Montfort, a prig of
the first Catholic water, whom Mr Nickerson might perhaps have
assailed as a Puritan did not Mr Nickerson see all good things in
the Middle Ages as Malebranche saw them all in God. Later,
under the aegis of the Dominicans, the Inquisition began to interfere
systematically with human freedom, availing itself of the use of
torture. After reading Mr Nickerson's book twice through loyally,
we cannot yet make out whether in effect he approves of this practice
or not. All we can say is that the tone adopted by him in regard to
this question is ambiguous and indulgent, and hence highly dis-
pleasing to the civilized mind. The total impression seems to be
that torture can be minimized, if not excused, so long as it is prac-
tised in a good cause. Were one to inquire what Mr Nickerson
means by a good cause he would probably reply: "The cause in
which I believe." Thus a Puritan fanatic who utilized torture to
wring from some convivial victim the admission that he had downed
six highballs in three minutes would be an enemy of the human
race, whereas the Catholic bishops under good Queen Mary Tudor
who burned Ridley and Latimer because the latter sought to dis-
tinguish between Transubstantiation and the Real Presence, were
meritoriously sustaining "the moral unity of Europe" or some such
Bellocian phrase. From this dilemma there is really no escape for
Mr Nickerson; the Marian bishops were upholding "the moral unity
of Europe" every bit as much as Arnaut Amalric and the Bishop of


CUTHBERT WRIGHT 519
Beziers, while in the matter of personal ferocity they compare very
favourably with the horrible old men who conducted the Albigen-
sian Crusade. Either he must accept them all as choice and master
architects of moral unity; or disavow them all as a gang of worth-
less fanatics, in which opinion we certainly concur.
The plain truth about all this, unobscured by that peculiar
nuance of unction and bow-wow which is Mr Belloc's legacy to his
literary disciples, is that all cruelty is unforgivable, and more than
that, it never succeeds. The one tangible result of the Catholic
persecutions under Mary is that England is a Protestant country
to this day, to the great disgust of Mr Nickerson and his whole
faction. Protestantism thrives on persecution; persecution is the
only thing that would revive it to-day as a living force. People
who practise physical cruelty whether to preserve "the moral unity
of Europe," or to effect military discipline like the American officer
who invented the water cure, are, in the sphere of their vile activi-
ties, plain sadists, perverts, whose disease is of such a nature that
the doings usually falling under that term seem the merest baga-
telles in comparison. And the thing that makes much of Mr Nicker-
son's attitude in this matter especially preposterous is that he him-
self is not even a member of the one religious body to-day which can
be said to stand for moral unity, or for anything very definite.
Speaking from the standpoint of the Church and period he so much
admires, he is himself a Protestant, a heretic. Had he lived in
1535 he would have been forced to throw away "moral unity" al-
together so that his descendants in 1924 could call themselves
"Episcopalians by birth and Anglo-Catholics by preference." Or,
had he stuck by the guns of moral unity, he would undoubtedly have
shared the fate of Father Forrest, burned like a mere Protestant,
because he could not understand how the first Anglican king could
also be his own Pope. The experience would have been painful for
all of Mr Nickerson's friends; but it certainly would have modified
Mr Nickerson's own views upon the suitability of torture.
Cuthbert Wright


GULLIVER
The White Oxen. By Kenneth Burke. i2mo.
297 pages. Albert and Charles Boni. $2.50.
THE motives for which men write have changed in emphasis,
especially during the last thirty years. Once they became
authors to perpetuate their dreams, record their observations and
ideas, perhaps more simply out of vanity or empty purses. These
reasons will always retain their force, but good writing to-day is
regarded more and more as an adventure. We seek those terri-
tories of the imagination which lie across the border of the last
formula. We are driven forward by a quotidian fever which.
Kenneth Burke likes to call "a perpetual grailism"; though perhaps
a better comparison would be that of travellers, not like Columbus
over real seas, but like Gulliver. A book like The White Oxen is
a voyage of discovery, and its fifteen short stories mark the suc-
cessive landings.
For this reason its unity cannot be one of attitude or method,
which change continually; instead it has unity of direction. "I
see these stories," Burke writes in a prefatory note, "as a gradual
shifting of stress away from the realistically convincing and true
to life; while there is a corresponding increase of stress upon the
more rhetorical properties of letters. It is a great privilege to do
this in an age when rhetoric is so universally despised." One
might add that his progress is even more in the direction of a
personal expression.
The volume opens with a novelette in the manner of Flaubert.
The characterization is good, the construction without a flaw, but
the story as a whole is almost completely anonymous. Flaubertian
realism has become a commodity: any trained writer can manufac-
ture it, and any editor, if he desires, buy it across the counter.
Burke's reaction must have been something of the sort, for his next
long story (Mrs Maecenas appeared some years ago in The Dial)
is written with an aim of satire which is already beyond the limits
of pure realism.
If one can distinguish between the terms, it might be said that


MALCOLM COWLEY 521
the method of the stories which follow Mrs Maecenas has changed
from realism to accuratism. Though events are reported with a
detail which becomes increasingly exact, the aim is no longer to
make an image of life; but rather, through the combination of
observed facts, to create another reality corresponding to nothing
outside the author's mind. The naturalism of stories like David
Wasserman is almost a pretence. At a certain point (on page 169,
to be exact; near the end of My Dear Mrs Wurtelbach) he tires
even of this pretence; gathering his puppets, he sweeps them into
the wings and declaims from the centre of the stage, in his own
voice.
The voice bears some resemblance to Dean Swift's; with the
same note of irony, the same bitter understatements, and even little
tricks of style in common. Of more significance is their feeling of
the unclean and the clean. Swift, the neatest man that ever wrote
English prose; the most careful, in his conversation, never to shock
the ear, was driven by pure aversion to write pages as foul as any
in our literature. He was outraged by the filthiness of human
motives. "I hate and detest that animal called man," he wrote
to Pope.
He adds, "although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and
so forth." Instead Burke's hatreds are directed at these individuals
of the species: such "compleat gentlemen" as are described in Por-
trait of an Arrived Critic, or literary Don Juans like the Clarence
Turner who serves as dubious hero for The Death of Tragedy.
Their pretensions and mean niceties drive him to extremes like
those of Swift, and his moral indignation is the same. "Let us
erect," he says, "a dirty little monument to these intellectuals."
The resemblance is strongest in Mrs Wurtelbach and the four
stories which follow. They are full of travellers, men without
character, great recording eyes like Gulliver. These pilgrims
wander into all four corners of the imagination. It was Yul who
found a square city of grey granite, where people with grey eyes
slipped in and out of the oblong holes which served as doors.
Christ walked on Broadway; whereas Mr Dougherty, the financier,
was lassoed from a window by Indians in aeroplanes, and carried
off to be eaten on an island in the South Seas. None of these
impossible adventures seems out of place, for each of them adds a
quality demanded, in its particular place, by the structure and


522 GULLIVER
movement of the story. This obviously is what the author meant
when he referred to a progress away from the realistically con-
vincing and toward "the more rhetorical properties of letters."
There is a stage in the career of every successful writer when
he finds a medium which seems exactly suited to his equipment.
Such was the fortune of Kenneth Burke in this group of later
stories. His aim was to make them a sort of sophisticated lyric,
and in this aim his success was complete. Still he remains unsatis-
fied. He casts about for other qualities: more depth, a clearer logic.
Eager for new discoveries he moves on; he destroys his edifice of
theory and moves on; "the Prince crashed a rock through their
little house, and the three moved on across the face of the earth,
across its nose, mouth, cheeks, and hair."
Prince Llan, coming at the end of the volume and described with
incredible care, should be the greatest of Burke's characters; indeed
he is not the least. He does interesting things, delivers speeches
of a fine bluster, but he remains a shadow: somebody moving, in
quest of some Olympus, from dreams into a dream. Two hundred
pages or seven years before, the hero of Burke's first story, after
suffering the depths of tragedy, looked up: he saw the hills beyond
the river, the cloud over the last hill, and felt suddenly that his
life still lay before him. The end of Prince Llan is to go wander-
ing down corridors in a half-sleep, till having pushed open a last
door with the remnant of his forces, he catches the glimpse of
another corridor, another door.
It is the close not merely of Prince Llan's adventures, but of a
cycle in the life of his author. Burke can write adventure stories
or psychological novels; abandon fiction for poetry or metaphysics;
go Dada or Gaga, but his grailism makes him incapable of going
back. The virtue of The White Oxen is to be unique; not even its
own author could write it again. Meanwhile the great lump of
the country rolls on, "with Howard swiping apples out of the
cellar, and a high-school sophomore pimpled with pubescent love,
and elderly men dressed up to apply for jobs, and unexecuted
rapes . . . half-ambitions . . . fractional insights . . . while as
for Clarence Turner, his book—thank God!—had already reached
its eighth edition."
Malcolm Cowley


BRIEFER MENTION
Within a Budding Grove, by Marcel Proust (2 vols., i2mo, 752 pages;
Seltzer: $5). Mr Scott Moncrieff's English translation of A l'Ombre
des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs satisfies us as completely as did his translation
of Du Cote de Chez Swann. Mr Moncrieff follows each tergivisation,
each intellectual involution of his hyper-sensitive master with all the
devotion and accuracy of a neophyte recording upon a virginal tablet the
priceless utterances of some High-Priest of Beauty. To a lover of
literature who still has before him the princely pleasure of reading the
work of Marcel Proust for the first time the two volumes of Within a
Budding Grove will be found more precious than a scarlet heap of red
May-tree petals held out to him in the ivory cup of a young girl's hand.
So Big, by Edna Ferber (i2mo, 360 pages; Doubleday: $2). The heroine
of Miss Ferber's latest best-seller is the daughter of a gambler and the
wife of a truck-farmer and becomes in good time the mother of a banker.
She had vainly hoped, for her son, a bigness not of the checking account,
but of the spirit. Miss Ferber appears to be more astonished at the
phenomenal success of her book than is her heroine at that of her small-
souled son. Is the author unaware that a facile naturalism is greatly in
vogue, that her pictures of Chicagoan society are equal to the best the
Saturday Evening Post can provide, and that she puts no strain on either
the emotional or the intellectual equipment of her very gentle readers?
The Pitiful Wife, by Storm Jameson (i2mo, 336 pages; Knopf: $2.50)
takes its place among novels of enduring value—among those in which
the fundamental stuff of human relations is handled with a sustained
and moving vision. Miss Jameson writes with eloquence and maturity;
her people—projected against a background admirably contrived—are
drawn with vitality, in a work which has every evidence of careful think-
ing. Surface emotions play a small part in this romance; it is a creation
reflecting the craftsmanship of a genuine artist.
The Philosopher's Stone, by J. Anker Larsen, translated by Arthur G.
Chater (i2mo, 379 pages; Knopf: $3) which received in Denmark a
prize of fourteen thousand dollars, is an old-fashioned novel in which the
spiritual development of a large group of persons is followed from infancy
to maturity or death. The numerous faces, in spite of vigorous charac-
terization, merge in a dim composite face, as they do in one of Rembrandt's
guild pictures. The author has not constructed his book about a single
protagonist, but shifts illogically from character to character, revealing
the introspection of each. Since The Philosopher's Stone deals with the
occult, this loose procedure is doubly unsatisfactory. It records an aspira-
tion toward unearthly orderliness and harmony, but fails in almost every
respect to be orderly or harmonious.


524 BRIEFER MENTION
Saint Joan, A Chronicle Play in Six Scenes and An Epilogue, by Bernard
Shaw (i2mo, 163 pages; Brentano: $2.25). Like Tolstoy, Mr Shaw
willingly sinks the artist in the teacher, though unlike the great Russian
he seems to prefer teaching the primary classes. To upper-class students
the continual dragging in of morals is as irritating as the too-conscious
translation of ancient speech into contemporary slang. Nevertheless, Mr
Shaw has a way with him and however difficult it may be to read his
books twice, he at least compels the whole world to read them once.
The Difference and Other Poems, by Harriet Monroe (i2mo, 123 pages;
Covici-McGee: $2) are very delicate ambrosia. Coming from an editor
whose prose can be so biting and swift, they will surprise those expecting
fermented wine or spectacular display of poetic fireworks. Though the
verse is not showy the gentle charm of nature and people is expressed in
pastel imagery, often exquisite, and a use of free verse almost anecdotal
in its casualness and whimsicality. So delicately articulated a structure
is always in some danger of breaking down, as in parts of the Prado, a
most interesting experiment.
A Basket of Poses, by George S. Chappell, pictures by Hogarth, Jr. (illus.,
4to, 109 pages; Albert & Charles Boni: $2). Amusing vers-de-societe. Mr
Chappell is one of our cleverest makers of light verse and Mr Rockwell
Kent, here disguised as "Hogarth, Jr.," proves a worthy accompanist.
Very few of the passing metropolitan enthusiasms of the day escape these
burlesquers and so the volume, in its way, attempts history.
The Lowery Road, by L. A. G. Strong (i2mo, 143 pages; Boni & Liveright:
$1.75). Although abounding in that which is ethically valuable, exhibit-
ing now and then a vivid, gracious aspect of the natural world, or a facet
of mental significance, these poems present unpoetic analogies and mixed
symbolism which are disaffecting, a choice of subject too frequently super-
ficial, and workmanship which is with few exceptions, conspicuously
undisciplined.
Storm in Harvest, by Edward Steese (i2mo, 93 pages; Brick Row Book
Shop: $1.50). At least one of these poems appeared in the London Mercury,
and all of them are in the manner of the Georgian, or landscape, school
of poets. The author is a Princeton undergraduate. He writes capably,
to easy melodies, but risks no phrases which are new, profound, felicitous,
or awkward enough to lift his first volume out of the commonplace.
House of Ghosts, by John Grimes, introduction by Vincent Starrett,
decoratively interpreted by James Cady Ewell (i2mo, 75 pages; Robert O.
Ballou: $2). A sensitive assertiveness, precise vision, and philosophic
hardihood characterize these poems, the which while not evincing a super-
latively trained mind nor faultless craftsmanship, are indubitably the
product of high intelligence and literary gift. The book, fastidiously
made and printed, is, in its inclusion of certain concentratedly felicitous
compositions, not one of those indifferent excellences which one respects
and does not read, but an instant and rewarding companion.


BRIEFER MENTION 525
Moods of Earth and Sky, by E. L. Grant Watson (nmo, 223 pages;
Boni & Liveright: $2.50). Here is a book that certainly whets our appe-
tite for more and for better writing in this fascinating genre. Dignified,
accurate, full of a grave leisureliness, these little sketches approach the
fringe of a literature of a lasting order. That they do not quite reach
that margin seems due to a certain honourable stiffness in the author's
sensibility. He is capable of large and noble reactions to the punctual
procession of English seasons, following one another across English
landscapes. In his freedom from jocosity, from egotism, from every sort
of affectation, in his austerity and his reserve, he satisfies our most exact-
ing demands as to what such writing ought to be. A little more imaginative
daring, a little more originality, and such pages would undoubtedly have
a long life.
Ariel: The Life of Shelley, by Andre Maurois; translated by Ella
D'Arcy (i2mo, 335 pages; Appleton: $2). Impatience with this ultra
traditional, heedlessly translated life of Shelley, is moderated by an
occasional eloquently imaginative conceit, a sometimes acute adjective,
and a number of justly tart comments upon human behaviour. The nar-
rative is firm, continuous, actual; wish to as one may, however, it is
impossible to attribute to this Ariel of the biographer—"the Beauteous
Harriet's 'doctrinaire husband'" "discussing some profound question or
other"—capacity for artistry, elevation of spirit, or passion for thought.
Dino Dong Bell, by Walter de la Mare (i2mo, 79 pages; Knopf: $1.75)
is quite unworthy of the genius of Walter de la Mare. One never
imagined that this poet's writing could fall under a suspicion of vulgarity,
but this small volume comes perilously near it. How can Mr de la Mare
make jocular allusions to Mrs Grundy, to umbrellas, to goggles, after
quoting such memorable passages from the old masters as are to be found
on the first few pages of his book? Is the familiar Chestertonian manner
to invade the work of the few real artists left amongst us? A train passes
full of school children. "They were chaunting at intervals" writes Mr
de la Mare, "the profoundest question Man can address to the Universe:
Are we downhearted? No?" The epitaphs of course form the best part
of the book, but even these are disappointing. Why quote at all those
few great words of John Wyclif "Crist sparid not to visyte pore men . . .
in the colde grave" if they are to be followed by such trivial doggerel as
is here presented?
Modern French Music, by Edward Burlingame Hill (i2mo, 406 pages;
Houghton Mifflin: $4) based upon a series of Lowell Lectures, is an
encyclopaedic study of French composers since Cesar Franck. Essentially
(and admirably) informative rather than critical, Professor Hill's enthu-
siasm implies a Golden Age. The book would have been more pleasing
to a literary palate if it had been salted with an occasional distaste; and
one is convinced that mutually exclusive opposites could not please the same
listener so unreservedly if his sensibility were ideally keen; but with its
scrupulous dates and generous lists of compositions, it is an invaluable
book of reference.


526 BRIEFER MENTION
In examining the Tendencies of Modern English Drama (8vo, 320
pages; Scribner: $3) Mr A. E. Morgan does more than give a lucid,
lively account of the themes, the fables and the heroes of British and
Irish dramatists from the early Victorians to the latest of the Georgians.
His meaty chapters, especially those on Shaw, on The Drama of Revolt,
and on More Poets, present, what is so often lacking in such histories as
this, a point of view and a point of attack. Mr Morgan, as he himself
says of Mr Shaw, "has an almost unequalled faculty for seizing the kernel
of truth out of the thoughts of others." And, again like Mr Shaw, he is
no "mere philosophic anthologist," but a creatively-minded critic. His
book, while not to be swallowed whole, is tonic for playwrights, their
critics and their public.
Psychoanalysis and Aesthetics, by Charles Baudouin, translated by Eden
and Cedar Paul (8vo, 328 pages; Dodd, Mead: $4). Here the author
studies the images in Verhaeren's poems and gives them a fuller content
by showing their origin in Verhaeren's psychological development; that
is, he considers the poem as a "waking dream" and applies the psycho-
analytic mechanism to its interpretation, tracing how Verhaeren's internal
conflicts took substance in his art. But he does not show wherein the
poet's substance in turn affects his readers, wherein a symbol ceases to
be individual and becomes universal—while it is precisely here that psy-
chology might contribute most to aesthetics. Yet M Baudouin himself
is so aware of the present breach between psychology and criticism (be-
tween "existential judgements" and "judgements of value") that he seems,
of all psychoanalysts, the one most likely to formulate that general logic of
the emotions which should pass with greatest justice under the title
of Psychoanalysis and Aesthetics.
Democracy and Leadership, by Irving Babbitt (i2mo, 349 pages; Houghton
Mifflin: $3) is a study of the present collapse of political idealism, with
an extended affirmation of a personal "will to refrain" as the means of
salvation. Professor Babbitt advocates, in the interest of humanism,
almost the same discipline with which the Pauline epistles answered the
question, "What shall I do to be saved?" The book is both an historic
survey and an argument; the survey does not seem perfectly impartial,
and the argument rests more heavily upon professorial logic than upon
the contagion of brilliance; his humanism is Socratic, but he is scarcely a
Socrates. That the present state of affairs is bad does not in itself demon-
strate that Professor Babbitt's remedies are divinely inspired. His rather
drab prophetic zeal may move minds as cultivated as his own; but it is
difficult to conceive how a chilly, scholarly loftiness can effect the popular
foolhardiness and inertia which have horrified him into writing this book.
The Logic of Conduct, by James MacKaye (i2mo, 486 pages; Boni &
Liveright: $3) is a novel and excellent book of philosophy. Its dialogue
form is inspired by Plato, and part of its content by Bentham; but its
conciseness and practicability, as well as the free inquiry it initiates
and progressively satisfies by profound reasonableness, are eminent achieve-
ments of the author's.


THE THEATRE
EXHIBIT A this month is Mr Alexander Woollcott, dramatic
critic of The Sun. Mr Woollcott has the gift of enthusiasm
and seems to think that Sir James Barrie's Mary Rose is the finest
flight of the imagination recorded in the English language since
Shakespeare wrote The Tempest. Of The Second Mrs Tan-
queray he wrote that Miss Ethel Barrymore "is so stirring and
so fine in its familar crises that, by the force of her indisputable
power, "The Second Mrs Tanqueray' becomes again what it was
in the beginning, is now, and may never be again—a play you all
must see."
It was in the beginning a bright play—in comparison with a
deal of dulness then prevalent; the brightness has worn off, and
Pinero's most famous play (woefully inferior to The Gay Lord
Quex) shifts from stupidity to claptrap and back again, with ap-
propriate grating of the gears. It is produced very badly by Mr
Hopkins: loudly and heavily. Messrs Lionel Pape and G. P.
Huntley do all that can be done to make us believe that Cayley
Drummle wasn't sent down to second table from any one of Oscar
Wilde's plays and that Sir George Orreyed isn't the dullest drunk-
ard in the world. Margot Kelly, too, struggles against a banal
part; the rest of the cast doesn't even struggle. The second act is
cheap and pointed vulgarity, and this Miss Barrymore did as if
with relief from the drama of the first and, by instinct, of the
last. It is all deplorably dull and unaffecting, its moral problem
smothered in cheap dramatics. Apart from the second act nothing
Miss Barrymore did had the slightest grace, the slightest interest.
The whole production is, to quote again, "a play that you all must
see" in order to believe that it is as bad as it is said to be, and in
order to measure how far beyond that sort of drivel even our second-
best playrights have gone.
Exhibit B is a fatuity of my own, but I spare myself the pain of
quoting verbatim. Sufficient that after the first invasion of Broad-
way by Shuffle Along and its followers, I wrote that these negro
shows had a great deal to teach the more hardened Broadway


528 THE THEATRE
producers, but that they would always lack the sophistication and
the technical skill in production of, say, Ziegfeld's Follies. The
Chocolate Dandies (a good show of the type) fails to show me
wrong; but Dixie to Broadway, in which Florence Mills is
starred, makes me out a fool. Still, I wrote what I hoped even
more than what I thought; and although Dixie to Broadway is
a fine show, its best things are not essentially of the Follies type,
and its worst ones are. Even Miss Mills is set to singing a quite
uninteresting song about Dixie Dreams which becomes tolerable
only when the chorus begins to warble and catcall over the melody;
even the ancient induction scene, entitled this time, The Evolution
of the Colored Race, with tableaux, recurs; and there is a tedious
wedding which spoils a good tune. The chorus is much better
dressed, the overalls are cut down to pants and are of silk, the
elaboration of the whole is mighty close to the Music Box and the
New Amsterdam; the high-yallers are positively pink and cream.
In the end it doesn't matter, for there is superb dancing, and Cora
Green's singing, and a good orchestra playing good jazz, and
Florence Mills ever so much her hard and arrogant and irresistible
self. Indeed she seems much funnier, much more of a cut-up now,
than ever; and her grotesque dancing and even the way she walks
are full of boundless energy and a smart grace.
No one else, apparently, can make a chorus so interesting; but
Earl Carroll comes closest, perhaps because he employed Dumb
Doras (the voiceless beauties who walk intensely off and on) per-
haps because he hasn't cared a hang about making his Vanities
polite. He uses the stage of the Music Box to much greater advan-
tage than Hassard Short who had it for three years and did every-
thing with it except make it interesting. John Murray Anderson's
Greenwich Village Follies are more intelligent, but they are
also duller; and Moran and Mack who are as good as ever aren't
equal to Joe Cook who doesn't surpass himself as a grand total, but
who has new bits of fun which are in his private vein of madness,
extremely attractive.
Gilbert Seldes


MODERN ART
THAT not too-extraordinary female with the preposterous name
who comes into bloom in the early pages of L'lle des Penguins,
the novel, I have always insisted, that was the true cause of the
great war, God, when he had read it, recognizing that all the beans
of this particular period had been spilled, and saying, with a shrug
of his shoulders, "well then, let it happen"—that not too-extraor-
dinary female, I say, who was seized and ravished by the leading
cave man of the period and so struggled for by subsequent cave
men that she became the first figure of fashion in history, must have
struck all the readers of the book as a supreme symbol of the per-
sistence of all things good and evil, both quick and dead, in this
world. There was no getting to the end of her. Even in the
ominous days of 1910 and thereabout, when lips were painted,
eyelashes reinforced with some gluey black substance, and not a bit
of simple nature was left anywhere in the world, she lingered, so
Anatole France said, in the boudoirs of the demoiselles, in the
shape of gilded, or perhaps enamelled, statuettes. Even the cubists
did her. As a tradition she was unkillable.
The Academy, our New York Academy, has not been going so
long as St Orberosia, but I vow I begin to believe, now she may.
There is a temptation, after such an association of ideas, to refer
to the Academy as "she." But whether a "she" or an "it," I was
amused to notice last spring that our Academy had taken on a new
lease of life, and this, in a rather remarkable manner that deserves
notice here, as a principle seems indicated that may have a wider
application. The Academy for a long while had been creaking at
the joints. It felt its age terribly. In spite of having money in
its purse sufficient for its own sustenance and in spite of being
the dispenser of considerable cash prizes it seemed to cut less and
less figure in the world and the annual sales of the so-called works
of art on display diminished almost to the vanishing point. Sev-
eral reasons might be adduced for this change of fortune, but the
first one, doubtless, was that the Academy, since the appearance
upon the scene of the Society of Independents, could no longer
claim to be the arbiter of the destinies of young artists. Besides


53° MODERN ART
there were too many clever dealers in art alive to the fact that the
public was interested in the new forms if the Academy wasn't. The
brilliant artists that the intelligentsia talked about were to be
found outside the fold. From this it was but a short step to the
feeling that it was compromising to show at the Academy at all
and positively fatal to gain one of those tainted prizes. This was
the status until last winter. But along towards spring Academi-
cians began to exchange significant glances with each other and to
appear in public more frequently and with more confidence than
before. Upon investigation, it appeared that a large streak of
luck had come their way.
Business, big business, had come to their aid. The Grand Central
Galleries in the great railway terminal were avowedly founded to
bring the new business principles to the sale of art. There were
to be no preferences among the schools, the salesmen said at first,
but all kinds of art were to be sold. The reason why works of art
were not selling, it was explained, was, simply, that the public had
not had its attention called to art. They would see that art and
the public were brought together. There was much scoffing at
first, naturally. Strangely enough the loudest scoffers were the
regular dealers in art. Finally a truce of sorts was established, the
new galleries were opened and found to be excellent as galleries,
and the pictures on the walls were, laughably enough, the very
works that the poor Academy had been struggling to sell for years.
The "new" art was notable for its absence and some say this absence
is a story in itself, but not for me, since genuine talent is so usually
put through all the tests of hardship that one can no longer be sur-
prised at tales of exclusion, and besides my concern for the moment
is merely in the processes of selling art, for in this matter the Grand
Central Galleries immediately proceeded to enlighten me.
The attack upon the public was not a frontal attack, but, as
General Pershing might say, a flank movement. It seems that some
of the Grand Central Galleries had had affiliations with a town in
Illinois, called Aurora. Perhaps they were born there. At any
rate they knew the place well and its inhabitants, and pulled off
the sort of thing we came to know during the war as a "drive." So
many people of Aurora were cajoled into buying paintings that it
became a news item that was used in all the papers in the land and
Aurora in return was so flattered at being in this way placed "on



HENRY MCBRIDE. BY JULES PASCIN





HENRY McBRIDE 531
the map," at being held up as a centre of light, that she gave a
grand banquet in her best hotel to the enterprising seller of the
pictures. I am told that the mayor and other chief personages of
Aurora attended this festivity, that the walls of the hotel were
lined for the occasion with a fresh lot of academic canvases, and
that the announcement that a second "drive" had resulted in a
still more memorable sale of art to Aurorans was greeted with
cheers. When news of the event sifted back East the sceptics
refused to grow excited and said that these Westerners can do any-
thing with their home towns and that the affair was just a fluke.
However, late last spring, an advance was made upon another
outlying point and just as great a success was reported. This time
Atlanta, Georgia, was put upon the map. This city, it may be re-
membered, had been flattered into a state of wakefulness, by annual
visits of the Metropolitan opera, the only Southern city so favoured,
so there was already an element of pride to work on. With a
whoop and an hurrah the Grand Central Galleries descended upon
Atlanta, Georgia. There was again, I believe, a banquet with a
mayor at it, a large collection of academic pictures, and a "drive."
This time some of the artists assisted in person. A private car,
lent by a sympathetic magnate, conveyed them from New York to
Atlanta, and there were little addresses by the actual men whose
names signed the canvases. Atlanta, like Aurora, fell heavily.
Many, many pictures were sold for very respectable prices indeed,
the artists who made the addresses being those who sold most.
Now all this is most illuminating. I have not attempted to colour
the tale with mirth. Indeed if there is a joke connected with the
affair it certainly is not upon the Grand Central Galleries, is it?
And far be it from me to make a mock of human nature as it is
practised in these United States. The idea, however, has not been
patented. Its success, as has been said, has rejuvenated a number
of old Academicians, but there's nothing to prevent its being ap-
plied in what I must consider a more practical direction. What a
crimp, for instance, would be put in Atlanta's pride, were a car-load
of our most modern artists to descend upon the mayor and chief
hotel-parlours of Birmingham or some other rival Southern town!
Henry McBride


MUSICAL CHRONICLE
WE have recently made an important discovery guaranteed
original. It seems there exists in America a secret political
organization, The League for the Preservation of Inferior Material,
and that it is already vaster in size than the Ku Klux Klan can
ever hope to become. For whereas the membership of the Klan
is prelimited by the crystalline idea of its founders to the
number of citizens whose veins run demonstrable red white
and blue, The League for the Preservation of Inferior Material
is not so cruelly exclusive. It is open to all persons resid-
ing within our borders; at the present writing it includes the vast
majority of the inhabitants, and seems destined shortly to include
them to a man. One is born to membership, indeed. Membership
is in the blood. We consider this great discovery one of major
importance, particularly because of the misery it is certain to
abolish. No longer will the great number of events occurring
within our borders torment us with unanswerable "wherefores":
"why in the name of Sam Heck must everything go so stupid, so
wasteful, so vulgar, so nasty, so destructive a way?" The exist-
ence of the League explains everything. It explains why all things
whose plasm retains a little moisture have so difficult a time sur-
viving here, and perish so quickly. It explains why an entire
nation is the stuff for satire. Are you crushed by the newspapers
and what they broadcast? Does it sicken you that magazines
begin by supporting what is still in the process of formation and
therefore interesting, and then turn stodgy and support what is
already arrived and complete? Are you outraged at seeing
Sunday literary sheets, built up into something halfway fresh by
Burton Rascoe, turned over to Stuart P. Sherman and become a
Ladies' Home Journal overnight? You have but to say "The
League for the Preservation of Inferior Material," and all is well
again as after some perfect musical cadence.
It was during the festival inaugurating Chickering Hall on Fifty-
seventh street, the evening devoted to the compositions of Mr Leo
Sowerby, that the great Knowledge came on us. The music of Mr
Leo Sowerby, it is not unknown, is not precisely full of merit.
The Time Spirit has cruelly neglected making his home in this


PAUL ROSENFELD 533
serious young man. His compositions are a sort of heavy-handed
musical rhetoric developed from MacDowell and Debussy: the
melody and rhythm somewhat Peterborough, the harmony more
Parisborough. Not a few "Poissons d'or" go over the falls in Mr
Sowerby's Cascades. Sometimes it appears that an English folk-
tune has heard Petrushka. If in one of Mr Sowerby's songs, The
Sea Bird to the Wind, an authentic musical sensation records itself
in the brilliant treble music which commences the piano accompani-
ment, the life quickly fades into the prevailing rhetoric; and the
vapid sonata for piano and cello is quite outside anything real.
An Intellectual born. Our immediate impulse was to say "See
here, old man, this really will not do. Do you know, you are
fooling yourself? You're just diddling along." But long before
the words were plain in us, we found ourselves quite dissuaded of
making the attempt to speak. It occurred to us that Mr Sowerby
had been offered the American Academy's three-year Prize of Rome,
and having rejected it had been made the recipient of a two-year
prize created specially for him; that it was he who had been chosen
among young Americans to inaugurate the Chickering music-room
with an evening of compositions; and what reason was there to
believe that the perpetuation of Mr Sowerby's daydream was not
a national concern and hence unhinderable? There seemed to be
a secret conspiracy to help work of the sort of which his was, per-
haps, an ideal and exalted example. The encouragements, honours,
distinctions, prizes went to it; the authors of the superior sort were
either starved or exiled or broken. There were always plenty of
professors to go on committees and crown it lord of all: indeed
no work was so tawdry that you could not get some professor,
William Lyon Phelps at the very least, to contribute his benedic-
tion. It is obvious the American feels comfortable only in the
presence of inferior materials and a jerry-built universe; probably
his stock was archaic long before it quit the European continent.
Of course, a League for the Preservation of Inferior Material
situated entirely in the unconsciousness of a nation and operating
as a sort of reflex, is a little hard to conceive. But since indi-
viduals remain happily unconscious of the motives of many of
their most decisive actions, why should one not be permitted to
conceive a community conducting its principal business quite as
innocently and economically?
Paul Rosenfeld


COMMENT
"He who builds a factory builds a temple, and he who works
there worships there."
Calvin Coolidge
MR WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS in that engaging account
of his recent visit to Stockholm which it was our honour to
publish—under the happy, the nobly vowelled and nobly Yeatsian
title, The Bounty of Sweden—bestowed praise upon the Town
Hall of Stockholm. Mr Yeats also wrote:
"I think of but two comparable buildings, the Pennsylvania Ter-
minus in New York, and the Catholic Cathedral at Westminster,
but the Pennsylvania Terminus, noble in austerity, is the work of
a single mind elaborating a suggestion from a Roman Bath, a
mind that supported by the American deference to authority has
been permitted to refuse everything not relevant to a single domi-
nating idea. . . . 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 decoration, the
most ignoble of all planned and paid for by my countrymen."
Our esteemed contemporary, The New York Times, quoted
these two sentences, and commented upon them, interestingly, as
follows:
"Since when did 'American deference to authority' become, as
Mr Yeats's casual reference to it implies, a matter of common
knowledge? Most of our foreign critics and commentators deny
to us that quality altogether.
"And, while Mr Yeats was talking about New York railway
terminals, why did he not mention another which also was the
work of a single mind, or at any rate of a single group of minds,
which also was 'permitted to refuse everything not relevant to a


COMMENT 535
single dominating idea'—the idea of making a railway station
and not an imitation, close or remote, of a Roman bath?"
Do we then find ourselves empaled upon the horns of a for-
midable dilemma? Must we either repudiate the observation of
the most distinguished of living practicers of the Art of English
Poesy, or must we repudiate the judgement of those other "foreign
critics and commentators," among whom there have been, one is
aware, also men of distinction? I believe this dilemma to be
illusory.
In those matters about which one really cares one is willing and
able to halter that Hydra-necked Egotism which in more trivial
matters one allows its heads. One is willing to apply this halter
not only to the extent of curbing one's tongue, of checking one's
more impulsive and less pertinent self; one is willing to go the
whole hog: one is willing to stand aside and let the things "about
which one really cares" be administered by the man who knows
how. When undergoing a major operation one does not insist
upon having one's own finger on the knife. In the stock exchange
one does not refuse a valid tip because it emanates not from one's
own prized intuition. Whenever one's affairs necessitate travelling
in a railway train, one does perforce consent to bate, if grudgingly,
one's individual hauteur; anyhow to the extent of not insisting
upon the location of one hand about the locomotive throttle.
So peoples, like individuals, bow, when they find it worth while,
their proud necks. The Spaniard, noble and innocent barbarian
that he was, took the Christian Faith to heart. And he handed
over direction in this matter to men competent: he employed the
Office of the Holy Inquisition. The German, noble and innocent
barbarian that he was, took the Patriotic Faith—a, to be sure,
definitely less engaging and imaginative myth than the superseded
Christianity—to heart. And he entrusted direction in this matter
to men efficient: he acquiesced in the hegemony of the Kingdom of
Prussia. Men had fought the Wars of Religion: men learned to
fight the Wars of Nationalism. And since Religion no longer
mastered their hearts, men progressed to Religious Tolerance: and
since Nationalism now mastered their hearts, men progressed from
the Cultural Tolerance of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Cen-


536 COMMENT
turies to the barbed-wire encooped, head-in-the-sand Domestic
Ostrichism of to-day.
Now the Ego of the American People is indeed signally Hydra-
necked. Armed by the intellect and will of abandoned Europe,
we have made short work of the relatively unarmed savage abo-
rigines; likewise of the only casually armed Forces of Nature. The
intellect of Europe has in these things—as would God it might in
all things—triumphed. And the boy who pressed the button—
the American People—is, not surprisingly, much set up. It has
become with him A Matter of Faith that all things are, by A
Divine Dispensation, provided with, and subject to, small round
shiny buttons. And it is his to press, ad lib.
Now there is no point in choking down one's Ego when oneself—
as well as the next gent or gal—can press the button. Rather
permit her long necks to wobble; rather permit them to coruscate
in the glad sunlight. There is here a space for everyone; and a
space for everyone to stretch and simmer.
America, for all her savage inhibitions and her piteous taboos,
to the average man or woman spells to-day, as she spelled three
centuries ago, LIBERTY. Not always, perhaps, free play for
the natural instincts; not always, certainly, free play for the honest
mind. But—as the aborigines and their continent have been pro-
gressively mowed down—an open field to that Vital Vanity—elan
vital, I imagine, M Bergson would, with French tact, call it—that
Vital Vanity which, alike from the study of human history and
from the study of human psychology, would appear to be the cen-
tral, tough, Superlatively and Indomitably Colloid Neck of Man.
And in America, where this has reared unharnessed—unconverted
to that end to which, being but rightly subjected to the solvent of
intellect, this force is best capable of conversion, unconverted to
the impersonal heightening and acceleration of Art and Science—
in America Vanity has waggled unrestrained.
This Vital Vanity, genus Americanus, having been initially
swollen by the easy conquest of an, under the circumstances, easy
thing, id est, an unprepared continent, has, by force of that inertia
latent in every moving body, persisted in the identical track of
increasingly even less resistance—the track of material conquest.
It has, understandably, taken no chances on humanizing—or indeed
in any other wanton fashion complicating—so God-sent a simple


COMMENT 537
and natural fairway. This Vital Vanity now at last emerges,
now at last harnessed—or shall I not in this instance rather say
caparisoned?—in the direct-drive mechanism of Universal Finance.
And here in this activity which in America has swallowed all
others (and precisely because it has—and so intransigently—
swallowed absolutely everything else worth swallowing) here we
at last discover the dream of the Philosophers—the dream of the
Holy Saints, too, in a different way—perfectly, ay, blessedly, con-
summated: an absolute, an incorruptible, unit of value, a unit
implying the transmutation of all values through and to it, has
been—and by the simple abrogation of what we had hitherto
envisaged as Humanity—quietly achieved. THE DOLLAR IS.
Where in a less naive Barbarism—or Civilization, if you will—
Vital Vanity is always obfuscated, and indeed restrained, by the
multifarious branchings of disparate interests and values, here that
mill-race—of Universal Finance, that mill-race swollen by Vital
Vanity—wholly functions; every drop of it. Oneself—a drop of
power—has but to sit tight. One shall most certainly emerge the
clear singing of an elect cog.
Yet should victory—by some inverse miracle—not crown desert,
there sit always ready the Ford Car and the Fourth of July. In
America noise is the loyal anodyne, the stalwart asylum, of worldly
defeat: in this element the last shall be first. We can boast a
continent whereon all may try to make money, and whereon all
may succeed in making noise. . . . And what element more hap-
pily tempered than this latter to the continued prosperous sub-
sistence of such particles of that same Vital Vanity as have, by
inverse miracle, evaded the saving channel of Universal Finance?
Is it any wonder that we hold the good name of Enemies of
Authority, a good name we hacked out for ourselves as Puritans
and Pioneers, a good name we keep sonant somewhat otherwise?
In no other realm than the financial are we sufficiently engaged to
care intensely whether we succeed or not. If the Religious Life
does not matter, why recognize the Supremacy of the Church?
If the Political Life does not matter, why support the Centraliza-
tion of Government? If the Social Life does not matter, why
foster the Refinement of Manners? If the Sexual Life does not
matter, why cherish the Significance of Love? If the Intellectual
Life does not matter, why respect the Freedom of Thought? In


538 COMMENT
all these things—and they comprise everywhere but in America
most things—we are indeed not deferent to authority. "Live and
let live," we observe, easily.
Thus "our foreign critics and commentators," habituated to
the consideration of a culture under these categories, constate no
deference to authority.
But the poet Yeats, dealing not in categories, felt and saw our
deference. And among men and women of his sort—among sen-
sitive people, that is—"American deference to authority" is "a
matter of common knowledge." For Americans are—like other
people—in the affairs that matter to themselves only too ready
to lay down their proud necks before authority. Thus we behold,
it having been established by the most eminent Medical Experts
that hard drink is not, take it by and large, a BUSINESS ASSET,
there has been inscribed above the thronged gateways of ten thou-
sand American factories these authoritative words: "Abandon all
hard drink, ye workmen who enter here!" And the workmen,
honouring business, obey. Thus we behold, it having been estab-
lished by the most eminent Efficiency Experts that bobbed hair is
not, take it by and large, a BUSINESS ASSET, there has been
inscribed above the thronged gateways of ten thousand American
department stores these authoritative words: "Abandon all bobbed
hair, ye saleswomen who enter here!" And the saleswomen, hon-
ouring business, obey. Thus we behold, it having been established
by the most eminent Engineering Experts that Gothic cathedrals
are not, take them by and large (it has been found impractical
to run railroad tracks up their towers) a BUSINESS ASSET, there
has been inscribed above the thronged gateways of ten thousand
American railroad presidents' exceeding private offices these author-
itative words: "Abandon all Gothic cathedrals, ye architects who
enter here!" And the architects, honouring business, obey.
These railroad presidents themselves have in their turn obtained
their authority because in the field of their work—a field so central
to the whole system of Universal Finance—efficiency is essential;
and because in any such activity of a corporate nature authority is,
for efficiency, requisite. And the men who have squeezed up to
be railroad presidents have the sense to like clean jobs, too: and
they know better than to think they can get clean jobs if the men
charged therewith have not single authority.


COMMENT 539
And because in a society which is at once enormous, and enor-
mously and avidly commercialized, the interlockings of the business
life are so multitudinous; therefore in such a social system every
business field becomes almost equally central. And in America you
will find, in all business affairs, deference to the man on top.
Now what about the architecture of our churches? Vulgar
imitations, ignorant backslidings, from the Middle Age. Of our
universities? Degraded adaptations—as if to house an infinity of
Yale Dictaphones and Harvard Classics—from the Renaissance.
Of our drawing-rooms? Either blatant heapings of the mutually
disgusting, or that summary and forthright dismissal of all social
life termed "period." Of our state and federal buildings?
Chicago World's Fair . . . And in all these things every widow,
every graduate, every salesman (called increasingly "interior
decorator"), and every tax-payer and politician has one finger.
. . . Why in folderols Authority?
But where were the Great Historic Fortunes of our Great Heroic
Period hauled in? Where did those words Vanderbilt, Harriman,
Gould, et ad majorem Dei gloriam hoc genus omne put on phos-
phorescence? What have been and are the Vertebrae of our Com-
mercial Life? Ask the intelligent, healthy, normal, American boy
to define the word, to give the hallmark of, Civilization. And
what does Bobby answer? . . . He answers: "RAILROADS."
And if now and then you turn up that anomaly, a Modern
American Church not indecent; and if now and then you come
upon a Modern American Office Building, or Factory, or Railroad
Station, that is inappositely Gothic—such irregularities demon-
strate only that also. in America Inveterate Nature, howsoever
unholily on her last legs, is not yet—even here—down and out.
But a railway station remains—limp Nature as she must—the
Direct Expression of a Higher Will. It possesses and exhibits,
granitely, significance. It is appropriate the noblest example
should be an elaboration—not, by the by, "an imitation, close or
remote"—of a Roman Bath: such also, in their way, signified.
John Ruskin, a Humanist, rightly stated that a railway station
should be bare of ornament. Our writer for the Times is not a
Humanist. Else he would not go on to wonder that Mr Yeats
should not "mention" the Grand Central Terminal Railway Sta-


540 COMMENT
tion. Zodiacs on the Ceiling are always cozy, to be sure; but such
groups of figures as that gummed on the south front of this building
are not mentionable. Nor seeable either. For my part, if my route
is to take me uptown over the otherwise, I believe, reputable
Pershing Viaduct, I am condemned to the nuisance of having to
hunt up a species of taxi-cab which in New York City does not
abound: I am condemned to the nuisance of having to hunt up
a taxi-cab with shades that work. And, entering the Pershing
Viaduct, I draw these shades incontinent.






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