, 239 pages; Boni & Liveright: $2). A volume
of sketches of negro life in the large cities and in the cotton fields. There
is a paucity of material: a frequent return to the same mental states, and
too strict an exploitation of the same settings. Yet Toomer, possibly be-
cause of his negro ear, strikes no false notes, and turns out page after
page of swift narrative prose; although at times he does handle his emo-
tions with a simple good faith which makes us feel the author has stepped
without suspecting that his reader might not follow. Toomer's work shows
the influences of both Waldo Frank and Sherwood Anderson, but the sub-
stance safely remains his own.
Janet March, by Floyd Dell (12mo, 457 pages; Knopf: $2.50) is an in-
teresting likeness of the American garçonne, done in a mood that the author
would disavow, if one may take seriously his implied protestations against
sentimentality. It is reiterated so often throughout the book, and given
as the highest praise of its subject that Janet March is “unsentimental,”
that one suspects her eulogist of attempting to assume a common enough
virtue that he lacks. There is a renewal of hope in a sudden discovery and
rapt contemplation of youth, a legitimate source of inspiration for the
novelist whose illusions are spent (cf. Turgenev’s Spring Freshets) but in
this case the source is very badly clogged with certain stale assumptions of
his own youth which Mr Dell seems not to have wholeheartedly thrown
into the discard. The book will seem to most adult readers merely a sentie
mental celebration of immature passion and unripe ideas.
Young Felix, by Frank Swinnerton (12mo, 439 pages; Doran: $2) is the
story of a boy "triumphing from failure to failure.” The slightest moral
emphasis on this transcendence of high spirits over misery would have
shifted the values of the book from the aesthetic to the inspirational realm.
But there is such artful innocence in this presentation of idealized human
nature that it becomes stimulatingly credible. The illusion of verisimilitude
is deftiy safeguarded by the homely but ingratiating traits of the char-
acters and by an accumulation of slight, plausible incidents. Mr Swinner-
ton is an adept in the exposition of a romantic view of life by the methods
of realism.
Wife of the Centaur, by Cyril Hume (12mo, 372 pages; Doran: $2.50)
is so promising a novel in some respects that one wishes its author had
cut loose from the current preoccupation with that ignis fatuus—the fable
of flappers and poets. Why do so many young writers go to rummage
sales and try to pick up Scott Fitzgerald's mantle at a bargain? Mr Hume
is sensitive, eager, vivid in characterization and competent in the handling
of materials, even when they are trivial. He can write with fervour and
grace; let him turn his back on all the frail phantoms of sophistication and
see what happens.


BRIEFER MENTION
93
JEAN HUGUENOT, by Stephen Vincent Benét (12mo, 292 pages; Holt: $2)
is the third dilution of his lyric virtuosity with the swollen and muddy
waters of the popular novel that Mr Benét has chosen to make. In this
book his talent is very swiftly diffused and lost amid the commonplaces of
the romance à la mode. The idyll of young love which would have been
his appropriate transition from poetry to prose is again aborted; this time
into the trite story of domestic discord and fatuous, sentimentally-justified
adultery, that interlards the advertisements of all the standard magazines.
Writing of Mr Benét's novel of last season, a reviewer expressed it thus:
"Something very lovely is being toned down to meet the light of common
day.” In the case of this latest effort of Mr Benét to suit the public taste,
this "something very lovely” is lost (after a score or more pages of com-
posure and sincerity, of extremely honest and competent execution) in a
high-noon of banality.
CHILDREN OF THE Wind, by M. P. Shiel (12mo, 306 pages; Knopf: $2)
is precisely the sort of narrative which one would expect to be woven
around the adventures of an African queen named Spiciewegiehotiu--
crammed with incident, lavish in the letting of blood, and drawn to a scale
of intricate plot and counterplot. The story is ingeniously told; it has
moments of glamour-even though it fails to cast a complete spell.
THE WORKS OF Li Po, translated by Shigeyoshi Obata (8vo, 236 pages;
Dutton : $3.50). There is no perfect translator of Chinese verse, nor will
be ever; the task is too difficult. By admitting his fallibility, Mr Obata
escapes the ridicule which attached to many of the earlier versions. He
claims only to have published the first volume in English that is entirely
devoted to Li Po. He thanks his predecessors humbly, points their mis-
takes with deference, and proceeds to his own work, which is simple, which
gives the impression of accuracy, and which is marred chiefly by his in-
ability to use the picturesque word.
Today's Poetry, an Anthology, edited by Nelson Antrim Crawford and
David O'Neill (32mo, 126 pages; Haldeman-Julius: 10 cents) appears
in an uneven, but never uninteresting, series of booklets never more
admirable than in this number which is superior to many full-grown an-
thologies in discrimination and taste. That contemporary poets are actually
represented, some with several poems, and that one doesn't immediately
think of a contemporary who has been omitted, testify to the general value.
Mr Crawford has written a concise, necessarily over-simplified, intelligent
introduction.
AMERICAN POEMS, by J. C. Squire (8vo, 55 pages; Doran: $2) is the record
of his journey to America : occasional pieces, the approach to New York
harbour, Niagara Falls, the inevitable Stockyard. There was once a
strar geness and power in his poems; he wrote The Lily of Malud and
Under, but of late years he has turned from metaphysics to the making
of wise saws. “How curious and lovely and terrible is the world!” Mr
Squire, in his American travels, saw nothing which his predecessors had
overlooked, and records it in verses more interminable than eternal.


94
BRIEFER MENTION
DECLASSEE: DADDY'S GONE A-HUNTING: AND GREATNESS-a Comedy, by
Zoë Akins (12mo, 304 pages; Boni & Liveright: $2) fails to answer the
query so pertinently put by a New York dramatic critic—why do people
produce Miss Akins' plays. The plays read exactly as they sound (except
for the ending of Daddy's Gone a-Hunting which is one and indivisible
here, as it was not on the stage) and point the ancient moral again-if
you are going to write artificial plays you must place yourself and your
characters and your audience in a magic circle within which everything may
happen and everything is right. The same thing is true of poetic drama
and of Ibsen plays, but the fatality of failure is greatest where wit and
brilliance are at issue. The first act and a half of Daddy's Gone a-Hunt-
ing remain wholly exceptional in their capacity to stir the emotions.
THE GREAT AMERICAN Novel, by William Carlos Williams (8vo, 79 pages;
Three Mountains Press : $1.50). The poet, this time in prose, stumbles
on through the American thicket. Hardened in the method of writing by
associated ideas, Williams leaps about with the facility of a dream, register-
ing emotions and observations haphazardly. The result is a run-of-the-
mine volume which gets the reader nowhere, but often the tarrying is bril.
liant. On page twenty we learn that bad poetry is made “of sugar and
spice and everything nice,” and good poetry "of rats and snails and puppy-
dogs' tails.” Williams is frequently a very good poet.
FANCIES VERSUS FAds, by G. K. Chesterton (12mo, 274 pages; Dodd Mead:
$3) falls into its proper niche in the Chestertonian repertoire; it is “more
mortar” rather than fresh bricks to the structure which he has built. It
proves—although further proof is unnecessary—that a keen and unclouded
mind is behind all those paradoxes which seem to be the basis of Chester-
ton's essays. No matter how frothy and frivolous the theme, there is a
kernel of fundamental philosophy hidden in it, and Chesterton puts his
agile finger on it.
Aunt Polly's STORY OF MANKIND, by Donald Ogden Stewart (12mo, 281
pages; Doran : $2), is, to use one of the author's telling phrases, a step
forward. Structurally it is not a parody of Wells or Van Loon; it is a
satirical use of the same method, the teller of the story being a mean, con-
ventionally-minded woman for whom the divine event of creation is Uncle
Frederick, the apotheosis of official Christianity and official Democracy.
The story is told to children whose inappropriate questions make startling
parallels between the lauded events of history and Russian revolution, or
bring into too close a juxtaposition the crimes of history and the occupation
of the Ruhr. The satire is frequently sharp, never "good-humoured," and
sometimes obvious; the boycotting of an independent spirit, as the story
of mankind is acted out by the children, is told with heat which almost
generates emotion; and all that one misses is a touch of irony to give the
work specific gravity. Some of the mechanism of the book is creaky, but
the pages of parody, although out of place, are exceptionally apt and
funny. The whole book jabs with a fairly sharp point, leaving one to
wish only that it had been dipped in something corrosive before the proc.
ess began.


BRIEFER MENTION
95
The REAL STORY OF A BOOTLEGGER, anonymous (12mo, 238 pages; Boni &
Liveright: $2) is a direct piece of American prose in a style which makes
Weaver and Mencken seem hopelessly affected. Moreover it supplies the
need for an encyclopaedic manual of bootlegging. The author made a mil-
lion in three years; he "played fair and won.” We believe him when he
says that he owes most of his success to his wife; she is a good woman, but
there is a great deal to be said for his own resourcefulness and for those
seventeen rules for picking the right man which he evolved from his own
experience. The book deserves a wider success.
My GARDEN OF MEMORIES, by Kate Douglas Wiggin (illus., 8vo, 465 pages;
Houghton Mifflin: $5) presents itself invitingly-sunny rather than se-
cluded; the clipped hedge is high enough to ward off the trespasser, yet low
enough so that it invites the casual eye to rest upon the warm and well-
disposed colours within. Both by temperament and by surroundings, Mrs
Wiggin seems to have been comfortably endowed; writing, to her, was
more a social attribute than a disturbing force. Her life fell in pleasant
places; her pen simply traced the outline of a warm sympathy and a cheer-
ful outlook.
SOCIAL LIFE IN ANCIENT EGYPT, by W. M. Flinders Petrie (12mo, 210
pages; Houghton Mifflin : $2) is a handbook by the foremost living Egyp-
tologist, soon to be augmented by a companion volume on religious life in
Egypt. This handbook illuminates the secular life of ancient Egypt by
references to the now only slightly changed land and people and by draw-
ing freely upon Greek and Roman sources. It is sober, concise, and exact,
and valuable as an introduction to the subject, making use of new material
as yet not formally written. The author states that the present work is to
be regarded as the outline of a larger work, Descriptive Sociology of Egypt,
soon to appear in accordance with the will of Herbert Spencer.
SCENES AND MACHINES ON THE ENGLISH STAGE DURING THE RENAISSANCE,
by Lily B. Campbell (8vo, 302 pages; Cambridge University Press : 15 s.)
is a scholarly examination of the influence and adaptation of classical
models in the craft of the Elizabethan stage. The significance of its
"scenes and machines” is revealed by a clever colligation of theories of the
drama itself. She uncovers the falsity of the modern notion that the plat-
form of that rich poetry was bare, identifying innumerable styles of set-
ting, and machinery for "fying up to Jupiter's palace, with a man and his
basket of victuals on her back.” Knowing well that her research is the
genealogy of a modern vice, she must have thought that Mr Belasco was
fathered in the Restoration, but says nothing about it. In all the arts
theories of representation require a curb of moderation, now very rare; they
turn the chief European talent, which is mechanical, into a desperate weak-
ness. Writing a thesis for a university degree, Miss Campbell, like other
experts, is almost exhaustingly deductive, and the deductions are all made
before one's eyes; but fortunately her material is not only quaint, but rel-
evant to serious beauty and modern pleasure. The book is adorned by
numerous plans; those of certain designers, such as Inigo Jones, are ex-
quisite as pure patterns.


COMMENT
WE
E have already published through the press the name of
Van Wyck Brooks as recipient, this year, of The Dial's
award and our announcement followed by a few weeks the news
that our distinguished contributor William Butler Yeats had re-
ceived the Nobel Prize for literature. For the second time in the
four years since The Dial became a journal of art and letters a
writer virtually unrepresented in the pages of other American
magazines has received this international honour-Anatole France
(whose Sous la Rose we shall publish as soon as the manuscript
is finished by that solicitous hand) received the Nobel Prize in
1921, when his La Vie en Fleur was coming to an end in our pages.
It gives us some satisfaction to know that were it not for The DIAL
the Nobel Prize would be going to men whose present thoughts,
whose present creation, would be unknown to America. It is, we
maintain, part of our service to American letters to present the
work of Europeans like these.
Our own award is for an American writer and goes this year to
a critic whose chief interest it is that American writers should oc-
cur, should be able, in the American society, to exist and to create.
One can recognize the supreme importance of such a figure even if
one fails to accept the whole body of his doctrine. For there is in
a critic as far removed as Mr Brooks from the purely aesthetic at-
titude one assertion which underlies all others; it is that the crea-
tive life is the only life tolerable to intelligent men and women,
that the life which is not creative, and more or less fully creative,
is spoiled and stunted and unworthy. There have been eras in
which the fine arts were only the highest type of creative activity,
when politics and trade and everyday existence were blessed in
some degree by the energy of creation. It happens that in our time
the arts are the sole remaining medium for that spirit; if they go
down, as in the Spenglerian hypothesis they must go down, there
is nothing left which can be called creative, and the future belongs,
as Thomas Mann ironically put it, not to such twaddle as art, but
to mechanics, technology, economics, and politics. For us in
America Mr Brooks analysed the course of events before Spengler;
and, as a good American, he refused to accept that course as inevit-


COMMENT
97
able. He holds to the claim of a creative society, against the ac-
quisitive, against the merely constructive. Those of us who de-
spair of curing our society cling a little more fiercely and at times
perhaps pedantically to the fine arts, sure at least of their purity,
and convinced that if we can keep them alive the creative process
will not wholly atrophy. Those with greater courage imagine
again a happier social structure in the classico-mathematical
Renaissance of which Havelock Ellis speaks, a society in which
there are many arts and all are universally practised.
In such a society the poet would still be a phenomenon, but he
would no longer be portentous. For us he is something almost out
of nature, as he is certainly out of the materialistic civilization of
our time. That is what makes the Nobel Prize, especially when
it goes to a poet, so striking, for it seems a tribute to the poet wrung
from
every power hostile to poetry. It seems to testify that even in
the minds of men concerned with everything uncreative, the exist-
ence of a few great artists is of a significance equal, at least, to
that of the noblest workers in applied science. It has been said of
Mr Yeats that he has the apparatus of enchantment; those who
have for a moment been touched by his spell can best bear witness
to the potency with which he uses it. Yet it is not for his magic
alone that Mr Yeats merits the honour he has received. It is be-
cause he has held unyieldingly to the dignity and the sacredness of
his calling, because he is one of the small number of our con-
temporaries who have been great in creation.
For Mr Brooks the appearance of a poet, the recognition of a
poet by society, must be all encouragement, as indications that the
ideal society is not yet outlawed by the death of the creative in-
stinct. In that sense every artist works in his interest and he in
theirs.
With this issue The Dial begins its fifth year. It would be
superfluous to review or to justify the difficult years we have
passed. It is, simply, in our association with events like those we
have discussed above that our justification, and our satisfaction,
must ultimately rest.


THE THEATRE
I
T happens frequently enough that events of capital importance
tell us more about the onlooker than about the principals, and
this is particularly true when the onlookers have not the heroic sta-
ture, or the fineness of texture, to bear the impact of a great event.
Such happenings are rare enough in the theatre in New York; and
the spectacle of the critics crumpling up, as if they had collided
with art instead of observing it, has always seemed to me pathet-
ically easy to understand. Even so, the following lines by Mr
Alexander Woollcott seem inadequately explained:
“It is probable that a play with the infantile plot of 'Oedipus’
would be tittered into limbo if Samuel Shipman had the hardihood
to write it in 1924. One can imagine that even in its own time
the dramatic critics of Athens muttered sullenly about the long arm
of coincidence. And that the Acropolis Evening Gazette not only
spoke severely of the piling of agony on agony, but asked rhetoric-
ally what Master Sophocles expected his fellow citizens to think
of a play based on a man's marriage to his own mother.”
We were quite properly given to feel that the return of Duse
to America was in itself significant; even had she stepped not once
upon the stage, the presence here of a figure so incorruptible, of a
genius so fully realized, of a human being so restless and struggling
and indomitable, would have been inspiring. What remained,
when these things had been deeply felt, was to understand that
the whole art of acting and a goodly portion of the art of the
theatre were in question when she did take the stage. Mr Broun
felt pathetically out of it because he could not fall under her spell,
felt that many who claimed that they did were bluffing, and deter-
mined to tell the truth and shame the devil. It was extremely re-
freshing, but it failed to illuminate. And Mr Stark Young, long
under the spell, felt it again, but left us with the feeling that ten
minutes of Bernard Shaw's cold analysis told us more about Duse
and acting and life, and was, perversely, more poetic in its desperate
halt before the miracle of Duse in the Nineties.
It is a pity that neither those who have the religion of the theatre


THE THEATRE
99
nor those who make a profession of it could tell us how Duse was
following out her own ancient maxim by destroying the thing they
love. Rather despairingly, under the shield of Morris Gest, rather
tenderly, for physical energy has ebbed while the ardour of her in-
telligence remains, she struck at the foundations of the theatre and
tore to little shreds the cheap little fabric we call acting. I am not
sufficiently acquainted with the acting of Continental Europe to
see her relation to the classic French or the classic (or, say, Moscow
Art Theatre) Russian actors. But her relation to our own is sim-
ple; it is a created, and ours a constructed acting, it is living and
ours is galvanic. I do not say hers is living in the sense that it is
realistic and has no tricks, for the first of these claims is irrelevant
and the second untrue. I mean only that the method and the tricks
as well, the chosen gesture, gait, and intonation, grow out of a
specific, intelligent conception of the nature of the play and of the
character presented. Grow, and are not applied externally; exist
because they grow.
I have not yet seen the important pieces of the Stanislawsky
repertoire; but even in The Mistress OF THE INN their devotion
to the theatre was obvious. They believe in the theatre and when
they are on the stage they act in relation to each other. What
ruined THE LADY FROM THE SEA was that the relation of
person
to person on the stage, the relation of all the characters to place
and time were left in chaos. Without harmonious settings, with-
out a cast acting in her own style, later even without plays ade-
quate to her temper and intelligence, Duse played against the the-
atre-against its unity, against its power to create illusion. It
happens that for the greater part of her career Duse has been
checked by an actress who seemed actually to live by the illusion
she was herself creating. The effect of Duse on the theatre has
again and again been nullified by the radiance of Bernhardt; that
is perhaps the explanation of how the theater happened to survive
the presence of the qualities Mr Young admirably singles out,
"her imagination and culture and wise humanity and beautiful
grace of spirit.” For all of them have been directed against the
theatre as we know it; and if, as I fervently hope, Duse can still in-
spire a hundred actors and actresses with her spirit, we shall need
a new theatre to give them scope and the justification of Duse's
own method will come when it will be no longer required, when
there will be genius to work for the theatre, and not against.
G. S.


V my never fully detailed scheme for American dominance in
MODERN ART
ORE than once I must have revealed in these pages hints of
the arts; and now I wish to drop another. The complete plan need
not be divulged since to insist upon it to the last comma would
smack of arbitrariness and as a matter of fact I modify my cam-
paign to suit arising emergencies with the more ease since it is se-
cret. Could I come out into the open-that is to say, were I king of
these United States or monarch even of an income of a million a
year—but that is the least I could do it on—I know that I could
guarantee an atmosphere in this country that would produce artists
within ten years. The lamented Guillaume II of Germany had
that one virtue at least, that he was artist enough himself to see
how necessary atmosphere is, and when the time comes to write dis-
passionately of him it will be allowed that he was practical in that
direction. His artists were coming along by leaps and bounds just
before the war and had not that accident happened he might have
been known as the Lorenzo of his time. As it is he will be just
plain Guillaume II; but as far as I know he is the only one of the
recent or present rulers to have taken thought upon the subject.
Of course I am not fatuous enough to suppose that what we now
call “a drive” can instantly produce geniuses in our midst. Of
course I believe, as you do, that genius is the top-most apple on the
apple tree in a good apple year; or in other words, is the child of
circumstance. Without the circumstance we could not have had
a Lincoln. Looking back the chain of events that leads to him
seems inevitable. All greatness of that kind is inevitable or at
least out of the ken of human beings however they may itch. In
the civil war times, there were trifling persons, not unlike our stu-
dent of Sarajevo, to strike the matches that illuminated all the
potentialities we had for greatness. It's merely that I'm another
of those persons with an itch. I don't throw bombs, but I'm for
ever striking matches. And you must admit the times are ripe. We
have the gold, you know . and why shouldn't we have
glory?
After this rather lurid preamble it may be a relief to know that
.


HENRY MCBRIDE
101
all I'm up to at present is a little advertising—but foreign adver-
tising. As long as our students continue to go abroad for atmos-
phere and instruction I do not see how our patriots can sleep easily.
What I desire instead is that European young people shall come
here for study. California was not obliged, it may be argued, to
coax for students in '49, and good wine needs no bush. There are
plenty of proverbs on the other side. But just the same a reputa-
tion starts somehow, somewhere. I'm for starting ours abroad. I
was delighted when London called our Boardman Robinson. That
was a step in the right direction. The recent attempt of Paul Man-
ship on Paris was not so successful. In fact, to be frank, it was a
flat failure. Paris simply wouldn't see him as a sculptor. But shall
we be discouraged? On the contrary I'm all for trying again, and
at once. I want to try Robert W. Chanler upon them. I think he
would certainly square the unpleasant Manship episode. He is
showing in the Wanamaker Gallery a new screen that is amazing.
Amazing, but beautiful. All of “Sheriff” Chanler's screens are
amazing, but freshly at Wanamaker's came over me the wish to
astonish our European cousins with his art. It would surely bowl
them over. It provides something they haven't got, something
jazzy. It is untutored, care-free, audacious, boastful—lots of Walt
Whitmanish adjectives fit it very well—and besides that it is out-
landish, shocking, and attractive. They say he gets most of his
decorative matter from the library books, that his motifs are slap-
ped raw, in an undigested state, into his compositions. They say
much else besides, but not so much is said about the mysterious sug-
gestion there is in his work, the undoubted rhythm, and the gigantic
reach. He may get his porcupines out of a book instead of out his
head, but he does bang them on to the panel with a force no other
decorator equals. There is something mad about it, too.
The screen at Wanamaker's is a vast arrangement in vivid vermil-
lion lacquers, dull Picasso-blue, and gold. It is a memorial, I'm
told, to the late Charles Cary Rumsey, and in deference to Mr
Rumsey's passion for horses, concerns itself by way of subject with
episodes in legend or history in which horses figure. These incidents
are portrayed in panels scattered in haphazard style over the panels
of the screen, held together by the long lines of fantastic birds. The
drawing of the figures and weird birds is not the drawing of Ingres,
be it noted, nor even the drawing of an average Academician, yet it


102
MODERN ART
passes by rights of its own. For my own part I was only slightly
concerned in the doings in the panels, but took my joy in the im-
mense splashes of brilliant red. These quite filled the room with
splendour. The screen, as must be apparent even in this descrip-
tion, is King Ludwiggy. In Paris that would be no objection. A
Ludwig, or a Paul Poiret would be sure to appear there willing to
build an entire castle to house it properly.
Whether the old-time fury will be unleashed for these new
Picassos is uncertain, but probably it is too late for that sort of
thing. The very respectful attitudes of the rival dealers who flock
to the exhibition, offsets it. It is hard for Americans to vituperate
anything two years in succession and it is doubly difficult for them
to see immorality in a good investment. It appears that Picassos
are going up. They are now quite out of the reach of some of the
earlier investors who sit about hungrily in the beautiful Wilden-
stein Galleries somewhat on a par with the dusty but worshipful
students.
These students would eat the Picassos if they were not watched.
These are the "reactionary," "back-to-Ingres” Picassos that have
been so much heralded and the students wish to see how it is done.
About February, therefore, we may expect to see a lot of local re-
actionary work, which however need not necessarily be more bore-
some than the former imitations of Picasso cubism. As a matter of
fact, all of Picasso's qualities seem present in the new paintings. It
seems idle to label them since saying they are Picasso says all. He
is first and foremost a stylist, as concerned with simplifications and
purities of expression as ever he was; and it is also possible to be-
lieve that he shares in a humorous appreciation of the vogue that
permits him to give many of his admirers the impression that they
have been carried back to Ingres. Like Ingres he is the foremost
draughtsman of his period—but otherwise there is no use dragging
Ingres in. If there is any realism in the new pictures it certainly
But there is again the old power that used to make a
piece of flat blue in a composition forceful to the point of intoxica-
tion. Picasso indeed weights one down. Intellectually all the
other painters of the day pale beside him. But a reformed Picasso ?
Academicians, don't you believe it.
HENRY MCBRIDE
eludes me.


MUSICAL CHRONICLE
HE
AD the Bloch piano quintette and the three pieces for clarinet
by Strawinsky been left alone to comprise the first pro-
gramme of the first season of the League of Composers, one would
not have hurried from the Klaw Theatre the evening of the con-
cert under a pall of exasperation. The entertainment might pos-
sibly have appeared short, skimpy, and fearfully chaste. Never-
theless, the unaccompanied presentation of the Bloch and the
music of the master of the unexpected would have sent one away
refreshed, and spared one the most horrid of sensations: that which
accompanies the shaving down of an impulse pricked freshly up
from life.
For both the quintette and the three little pieces for the reed in-
strument advance the art of music. It is possible that Ernest Bloch
has put himself into other of his works more hotly, more passion-
ately, more completely, than into the quintette. No work of his,
nevertheless, is better formed, and more classical in design than
the new composition; or reveals more fully the maturity of the
artist. The quintette is at once very simple, very large, and very
firm in outline. Like the other of Bloch's works, this streams rich
with barbarous stuffs and colours. The rude and leonine themes,
the penetrating melancholy voluptuousness, or voluptuous melan-
choly, one knows not which, of the suite and the sonata have been
given blood brothers throughout the three movements. In the
opening movement, the viola plays quarter tones. In the finale,
there are themes which stood in a book about the country of the
Amazon once placed in the hands of the small Ernest Bloch in
Geneva, and which slipped from his memory, and suddenly mys-
teriously reappeared upon him in Cleveland while he was in the
process of composing his new work. Throughout the three move-
ments, there is the breath of the ritual of an uncaucasian Venus.
Still, there is a new transparency and severity in the form and a
new length and hardness in the line. The thematic material is very
economically employed; the chief angular theme of the first move-
ments becomes the basis for the second, and reappears in the finale.
The three movements are well contrasted within the limits of a


104
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
single predominantly sombre tone and colour. The first is jagged,
terse, concentrated. The second, which is built about two climaxes,
the one small and tightly held, the other large and extended, melts
with lights of mournful passionate reverie and little human cries.
And the third dances as steel and skyscraping stone might dance
could they break their forms and clap their hands and lift their
tenoned feet; and after a sort of melisma, it is as though a new
quality of light, like dayshine after warm oppressive night, had
been washed over the instruments, for the music subsides into
c-major and closes released in the broad diatonic mode. The in-
struments themselves are treated as becomes the form of the quin-
tette. The four strings are usually made to play as a single enor-
mous fiddle against the piano. Only in the second movement does
the quality of the music become preponderantly gossamer-like, do
the voices of the individual strings open out and speak against eaclı
other. There are two very noteworthy concerted passages sul pon-
ticello.
The work received a very dignified performance at the hands of
Harold Bauer and the Lenox String Quartet. Bloch stands in the
world of to-day much as Johannes Brahms stood in that of forty
years since: for we know that whatever in the future comes from
him must of necessity bear the firm imprint of grave spirit and
musical masterhood.
And the Strawinsky pieces brought life likewise. If the
quintette resembles some elaborate fresco, the coloured convolu-
tions of a Delacroix, say, the capricious melodic lines for the sin-
gle reed are comparable to a drawing of Picasso's; for with entire-
ly dissimilar means both complete a form, and stand comparable.
Petroushka and the Sacre have both demonstrated the perfectness
with which, with a single unsupported instrumental voice, a snare-
drum or reed, Strawinsky can fill a space; and these delightful
grotesques illustrate anew the man's most subtle cunning. Each
of the little musical moments sustains its lyrical momentum, and
yet not a note comes premeditated; even the reiterations of single
notes come as startling surprises. So originally indeed are the tones
and phrases spaced and rested that one has the thrill had long ago
when the prestidigitator drew forth from an innocent silk tile first
a pack of playing cards, then several Easter eggs, and finally a


PAUL ROSENFELD
105
frightened kicking rabbit. One had no sense the clarinet of Mr
Sem Bellison could hold as many different sorts of ravishing toots
and quirks. Forgotten entirely was the bore of the single unsup-
ported instrument. It might have been a small orchestra playing.
Nevertheless, the concert brought one the picture of a vessel
which, intended for long courses and bulky cargoes, had been
boarded by a party of landlubbers turned seamen, and was being
driven about headlessly backward and forward over the ocean.
The Bloch music and the Strawinsky by their quality served mere-
ly to aggravate the sense of an impulse compromised. For every-
thing else which took place was off; and off not as events flowing
from misjudgement or misfortune are, but as those which come
from the admixture of an interest alien to the purpose in hand.
One song with chamber orchestra would have given all one needed
to know of Mr Arthur Bliss, for there are situations where 'tis
folly to be wise; besides, Madam Noy had been chanted two years
ago at the concerts of the International Composers' Guild, and
nothing about the piece suggested that it ought to be given prefer-
ence over other ballads by other living persons. But there had to
be not only Madam Noy, but The Women of Yueh and Rout as
well; and the general effect of the works was enhanced by the man-
ners of Mr Bliss upon the platform before his little band, and by
the externality of the soloist, Miss Lillian Gustavson. But if the
mills of the gods ground slowly that night, they ground with their
usual exquisiteness. The League had given Mr Bliss a mile; and
Mr Bliss, to exhibit his appreciativeness, took two. Mr Bauer
had demanded permission of the directors to repeat at the con-
clusion of the programme the quintette for the benefit of those
who wished to familiarize themselves with the giant work, and
had been refused with the excuse of want of space. But suddenly,
at the conclusion of the performance of Rout, and after some per-
functory applause, to the surprise of the directors far more than of
the audience, Mr Bliss reappeared on the platform with the solo-
ist and orchestra, and commenced going through Rout again.
After that, the evening was permitted to end as best it could. The
last number was a vapid Divertissement for Piano and Wood-
Wind by Albert Roussel; another step was taken backward, and
another shovelful of heaviness thrown on the hearers. But had


106
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
the Roussel had even a grain of salt in it, the grain would have
had not a chance of exhaling its pungence. That had been ren-
dered impossible.
It seems the concert was intended to end lightly. But there is
one way only of bringing lightness. But people can't let life hap-
pen. They cannot feel it. They cannot let it take its inevitable
course. One knows it more every day. The impulses prick up
fresh from the ground. But then they meet human beings. They
have to go through human beings to realize themselves. And be-
fore one has looked again, they lie bleeding on the ground, snapped
somewhere in two.
PAUL ROSENFELD


re
1



KAACKHAS
公會​社​《EWS/
RH
Board
The Dial Collection
THE MARKET PLACE. BY MARC CHAGALL



V
VI
IV
IX
9XXI по
FEBRUARY 1924
NEGA UNEE
PUBLIC LIBRARY
SOME POPULAR FALLACIES IN AESTHETICS
BY LAURENCE BUERMEYER
HE articles entitled The Progress of Painting published in
T
an
the importance of psychological considerations in aesthetics. The
author of those articles, Mr Thomas Craven, offers views similar to
those so brilliantly presented by Mr Roger Fry in his well-known
book Vision and Design. Both writers avow a very great admira-
tion for the Renaissance; they share a tendency, unavowed but
clearly apparent, to judge all art since the Renaissance by the
standards of that time. They are alike in making "form” the
touchstone of the value of a painting and in repudiating the impor-
tance of a picture's subject-matter. Finally, both draw extensively
upon psychology for the foundations on which the structure of their
aesthetics is built. The contention
The contention of this paper is that these
psychological foundations are, in important particulars, seriously
unsound, and that in consequence the aesthetic principles depend-
ent upon them are ambiguous and, in application, misleading.
This ambiguity and confusion relate chiefly to the conception of
form; but additional points in which defective psychology is em-
ployed will be indicated, as illustrative of the distorting effect of
invalid fundamental principles upon aesthetic criticism otherwise
of a high order.
It will be convenient to start with Mr Fry's views, as both more
general and more obviously related to psychology. To much in
them no exception can be taken; nevertheless a complete summary
will facilitate discussion of the points that are controversial. The
thesis of Mr Fry's An Essay in Aesthetics' as set forth in his book
Vision and Design, may be summarized as follows:


108 SOME POPULAR FALLACIES IN AESTHETICS
Art is not an imitation of nature. To understand what it is, and
how it is related to nature, we must give some account of the psy-
chological distinction between the active and the imaginative life.
In both we are conscious of a world of objects, but it is only in the
former that we are obliged to, or in fact can, do anything about
them. In this realm the things of which we are aware contain a
promise or a threat, they are the signals of events to come, which
we are under compulsion to prevent or promote. To this function
as signal or guide, however, many of the qualities of things are ir-
relevant. If the letters on a signboard directing us to our destina-
tion are clear, we need not inquire about the board's shape, size,
age, or material. These features we overlook; and so in general
the world of practice is an abridged and abstracted world. In the
life of imagination, however, there are no practical exigencies, and
we are at liberty to contemplate objects in their concrete fulness.
To embody in permanent form the world thus contemplated for its
own sake is the purpose of art.
Similarly, actual objects occasion emotions, but the intensity and
urgency of these emotions prevent us from giving them detailed at-
tention. We speak of being "overwhelmed with astonishment,”
"stunned with grief.” In imaginative life emotions are called
forth in a weaker form and because of our condition of relative
composure and self-possession they may be viewed clearly and con-
sciously exploited. Such deliberately evoked and studied emotion,
along with the full presentation of the object arousing it, furnishes
the content of a work of art, and represents the consummation of
the imaginative life. That the determining factor in the release of
imagination is the absence of practical activity is shown by the fact
that children, in whom the practical motive has not yet developed,
tend to draw objects, not from nature, but in harmony with their
fancy, their story-telling impulses.
Such being the purpose of a work of art, the qualities required
for the accomplishment of that purpose are unity and variety.
Unity, to give the maximum of clarity in presentation; variety, to
secure the maximum of stimulation. Since, however, objects in
nature may have these qualities, the work of art must possess also
the evidence of purpose, must show the feelings, the intention, of a
conscious contriver, the artist. The sense of understanding or af-
finity thereby established between the observer and the artist is an
essential part of the aesthetic experience.


LAURENCE BUERMEYER
109
An object is beautiful, then, when it is a purposeful synthesis of
varied parts. Beauty, however, has a wider and a narrower sense.
An object is beautiful in the latter sense when it satisfies the con-
dition just noted. To be beautiful in the former sense it must
arouse our emotions, and do so in purposeful and orderly fashion.
If the accomplishment of this involves the sacrifice of beauty in the
object (as in Rembrandt and Degas) the sacrifice does not impair
the aesthetic value of the picture.
"Order" (unity) and "variety" now require further definition.
Merely decorative unity (that required for clarity of perception)
consists of the balancing of the parts of a picture about a centre
line, which causes the eye to remain within the frame of the canvas.
It depends upon such a presentation of the parts as secures that
each shall have a fundamental and harmonious relation with every
other. With merely sensuous unity and variety must be combined
emotional unity and variety, and these are secured by what may be
called the emotional elements of design. They are, first, linear
rhythm or contour; second, mass or inertia; third, spatial magni-
tude; fourth, light and shade, or contrast in illumination; fifth,
colour; and, a possible sixth, inclination of planes, toward or away
from the spectator.
All these qualities, with the possible exception of colour, are
characteristics of importance in real things, whence their emotional
excitingness. They are, however, not particularly exciting in isola-
tion, but only when combined. This fact may provoke the objec-
tion that, since the combination of them is formed by nature, art is
imitation of nature after all, to which the answer is that in nature
the union of qualities is not such as to realize the maximum of ef-
fectiveness. This is to be had only in the artist's recombination.
To sum up the relation of art to nature: there are to be found
in nature at least occasional examples of the fitness for disinterested
contemplation that is characteristic of works of art, but there is
not the added consciousness of purpose that is involved in the aes-
thetic experience at its fullest. The elements and some of the com-
binations found in nature are legitimate raw material for the artist,
but his reorganization of them may depart from natural patterns
in any degree that his purpose may dictate.
So far this outline has followed the first of the two essays above
alluded to. Mr Fry's latest views are embodied in the chapter en-


110 SOME POPULAR FALLACIES IN AESTHETICS
titled Retrospect, wherein he introduces a modification into the
theory. In its earlier form, the assumption is made that the emo-
tional response called forth by a picture is due to the elements re-
produced, whether literally or not, from real things. Considera-
tions urged by Clive Bell now lead to the conclusion that what is
called "significant form” is something over and above all repre-
sented material, something, none the less, which may arouse a
genuine emotion. This, according to Bell, is the only truly aes-
thetic feeling; from the point of view of art all others are adventi-
tious. This view leads logically to the justification of completely
non-representative painting. Mr Fry cannot, therefore, accept it
in its entirety since perception, and so representation, of the third
dimension depends upon memory and experience. Nevertheless, as
shown by the example of Raphael's Transfiguration, there may
be
a pleasure in form, that is, the arrangement of colour, line, and
mass, quite apart from what is represented. The question then
arises: does pleasure in the thing represented heighten the purely
aesthetic pleasure, or is it irrelevant? The latter view seems the
more probable, but the answer is doubtful, and the definition of
significant form which avoids making a definite assertion on the
point is that significant form "implies the effort on the part of the
artist to bend to our understanding some intractable material which
is alien to our spirit.”
Detailed criticism of the theory as outlined may best be begun
by a reminder of its cardinal points. Imagination, including dis-
interested contemplation of real objects, is free from the responsi-
bilities imposed by practice and consequently provides us with a
fuller and richer consciousness than that to be enjoyed in our actual
commerce with the world. To create a work of art is to embody
this imaginative experience in a medium that will convey it to an-
other person; the purpose to convey makes art creative, and the
perception of it on the observer's part is essential to his enjoyment.
Creation and transmission are achieved by form, without which
there would be no emotional value. "Form,” however, can be used
legitimately in a number of senses. It covers, first, the pattern by
which the sensory elements are combined; second, the total purpose
of a work ("significant form”); and third, the combination of ele-
ments ("emotional elements of design”) by which the emotions
excited are harmoniously ordered.
Imagination is said to come into being when practical response


LAURENCE BUERMEYER
111
to a situation is absent. A more detailed consideration of the ef-
fects of practical inactivity will show that Mr Fry's criterion,
though not invalid so far as it goes, omits the differentia of aes-
thetic or creative imagination. Recent investigation in psychology
has made clear the immense part in life played by what is called
“fantasy-building,” i. c., the gratification of real wishes by imag-
ined satisfactions. Fantasy-building may go on in entire isolation
from realities, or it may attach itself to them: we may picture our-
selves wealthy, powerful, and famous in a purely imaginary world,
or we may imagine all the material things about us to be our prop-
erty, turned to our purposes, used for our self-display. Such fancies
involve a different sort of observation from that required for prac-
tical concerns; they arouse emotions which do not compromise us
by their effects and may be enjoyed for their own sake; but they
are really nothing more than a degraded form of practice. They
constitute the resources of those too feeble to dominate the world,
practically, intellectually, or aesthetically. They can be had with-
out pains or effort, and the end of them comes not with exhaustion,
but with boredom. The aesthetic or creative imagination, in con-
trast, involves effort both in the artist and, in lesser degree, in the
person who appreciates art. It is active, not passive. Mr Fry,
however, gives an illustration which actually suggests that what he
means by imagination is simply fantasy-building. A child draw-
ing, he says, does not reproduce reality literally, but follows his
fancies. But a child's fancies, as is well known to all who have
made accurate observations upon children, are usually most prac-
tical in type, even when a means to no practical end. They relate
almost wholly to the uses to which a thing can be put. No one ac-
customed to giving Binet-Simon tests to young children can have
failed to be struck by their tendency to give definitions in the fol-
lowing form: a chair is a thing to sit in, a knife is a thing to cut
with, et cetera. Such are the preoccupations revealed in the draw-
ings of the young. Ability to describe an object in terms of its ap-
pearance or structure comes much later in development. It is
something accomplished, not something which is spontaneous, but
which is ordinarily inhibited by the necessities of life.
Confusion on a point such as this is especially regrettable in an
introduction to aesthetic theory, because so much of what passes for
art, pictorial as well as literary, is a commodity manufactured for
the consumption of fantasy-builders. The melodrama—and nearly


112 SOME POPULAR FALLACIES IN AESTHETICS
all moving pictures answer to this description—is flagrantly con-
structed to this end: its sharp moral classifications and invariable
assurance of triumph to the characters in whom the conventional
virtues are exemplified, invite the spectator to identity himself with
the "hero" of the piece and make the hero's triumphs his own. It
is scarcely less open to question that the paintings of pretty girls
and agreeable domestic scenes, which the public overwhelmingly
prefers, are enjoyed because they provide a point of attachment for
fancies and day-dreams of an entirely non-aesthetic sort. To say
this is not, of course, to suggest that Mr Fry confuses magazine il-
lustrations with works of art; but certainly his criterion of imagina-
tion gives him no authority to make the distinction.
The looseness of definition which facilitates this confusion be-
tween the aesthetic imagination and idle day-dreaming has an im-
portant and disadvantageous effect upon the rest of Mr Fry's
theory. Since all preoccupation with objects which is not domi-
nated by the need for doing something is imaginative in character,
and yet not all of it represents what may in the full sense of the
word be called art, something more is required. This something is
the intention to communicate the emotions which the imagined ob-
jects arouse. Nature, we are told, however pleasing to our sensibili-
ties, falls short of art because it expresses no purpose to please us.
What is not intended to be beautiful is not really beautiful, since
we cannot feel it to be the bearer of a message. That art is always
the bearer of a message, the intentional stimulus to an emotion, Mr
Fry says is the truth to which Tolstoy awakened him. The con-
sequences of this view are surprising. If it is true, a landscape is
beautiful if one believes in a God, the creator and architect of
Nature, but less so, or not at all, if one does not. A face is made
the object of aesthetic appreciation by the application of cosmetics.
To discover the error involved, we must examine more closely the
statement that art seeks to communicate emotion by expressing it.
Mr Fry gives an illustration, taken from Tolstoy:
“Let us suppose a boy to have been pursued in the forest by a
bear. If he returns to the village and merely states that he was
pursued by a bear and escaped, that is ordinary language, the means
of communicating facts or ideas; but if he describes his state first
of heedlessness, then of sudden alarm and terror as the bear ap-


LAURENCE BUERMEYER
113
pears, and finally of relief when he gets away, and describes this
so that his hearers share his emotions, then his description is a work
of art. Now in so far as the boy does this to persuade the villagers
to go out and kill the bear, though he may be using artistic methods,
his speech is not a pure work of art; but if of a winter evening the
boy relates his experience for the sake of enjoyment of his adven-
ture in retrospect, or, better still, if he makes up the whole story
for the sake of the imagined emotions, then his speech becomes a
pure work of art."
A few general remarks about the nature of emotion will serve as
preface to the discussion of the point to be made here. The ex-
pression of emotion is always, originally, a motor reaction. When
angry, we may flush and strike a blow; when afraid, turn pale and
take to flight. Others, not directly affected by the original stimulus,
may feel our emotion contagiously. By-standers at a quarrel grow
tense and irritable, and the cry of fear may start a panic. The ex-
pression of an emotion thus does communicate the emotion; but it
does so because the movements made by the angry or frightened
person directly induce anger or fright in the spectator. Art is an
expression of emotion, however, with a difference so considerable
as to constitute a difference in kind. It seeks to do what no simple
and ingenuous emotion ever does, viz., reproduce the object which
excited it. A man who has been insulted and is angry does not
seek further affronts, nor does one in fear try to run additional
risks. The purpose of the acts to which these emotions give rise is
to rectify, change, put away, or destroy the objects to which they
refer. Only when an emotion is transformed under the influence
of the aesthetic impulse does it attempt to recreate the situation
that brought it into being. It may then perform the function of
communication, but in a way diametrically opposed to the direct
transmission of ordinary emotion. It directs the spectator's atten-
tion to its exciting cause, instead of moving him by its outward ex-
pression, by exclamations and gestures. The example of the boy
and the bear precisely inverts the true order of things. To make
such a story effective a true artist would describe, not his feelings,
his sensations of goose-flesh, dryness in the mouth, quick and shal-
low breathing, et cetera, but the suddenness of the pursuer's appear-
ance, his menacing aspect, the swiftness of his approach, obstacles


114 SOME POPULAR FALLACIES IN AESTHETICS
to flight, visions of claws and teeth and flowing blood. Even if a
described emotion conjures up appropriate images and thus provides
the listener with a concrete picture, it is not the picture in the nar-
rator's mind: communication has failed; the story-teller has not
objectified his emotion or created a concrete and individual object.
The emotion is, perhaps, transferred—not communicated.'
This point has been discussed in detail because the separation of
emotion from the object that excites it, and the transmission of the
emotion to others, are so essential to Mr Fry's conception of the
content and purpose of art. At the bottom of his conception lies
the assumption, already criticized, that the imaginative life, defined
as consciousness of objects without practical responsibility, provides
the material of art. Over and above this material, there must then
be a purpose, which is always to communicate an emotion, because
the imaginative life is in itself not enough. As against this view,
with the difficulties we have seen it to involve, an alternative may
be suggested. Not all play of fancy, not all non-practical obser-
vation of things, is "imagination,” in the sense of the word which
makes imagination the basis of art. Only when we single out and
observe things for the sake of their appeal to a specific interest, an
interest which must be aesthetic from the start, do the things so
observed really form the subject-matter of art. This aesthetic as-
pect, however it may be defined, is ordinarily overlaid by qualities
which have practical importance, and these qualities do not recede
in our attention merely because they are at a particular moment
unimportant. Our habit of conceiving things in terms of the uses
to which they may be put ordinarily dominates us even when we
enjoy a respite from the need to be up and doing. To conceive,
and to see, things from a purely spectatorial point of view is itself
a definite habit, involving a continuous readjustment of other
habits, a fact which explains the expenditure of effort required for
genuinely aesthetic contemplation. This is true when we are con-
templating either nature or works of art.
What is needed, in addition to this persistent and active interest
in the aesthetically appealing aspects of experience, to make the
artist? Not, as Mr Fry suggests, primarily a purpose to communi-
cate with our fellows, to share an emotion. It is only by a figure
of speech that we can talk of the emotion as anything in a work
See Santayana-The Sense of Beauty, pages 44-49.


LAURENCE BUERMEYER
115
of art additional to the work's content. The emotion is present
only in what is portrayed, in the selection of detail and form of
organization; thus, and only thus, can a picture be said to embody
emotion or purpose. And communication seems rather a collateral
result than the primary purpose of the artist. Art, if this is true, is
less a message than a revelation: a revelation primarily to the artist,
and only secondarily by the artist, of the beauty actually or poten-
tially in things. What essentially distinguishes the artist is not
ability to make himself intelligible to others—this is the definition
of craftsmanship—but the ability to see more clearly and pro-
foundly than the average man the aesthetic possibilities of the
world about him. These possibilities may not be realized in actu-
ally existing particular things, and their revelation may consequent-
ly compel modification or distortion of the actual; but the purpose
of the modification is not, as Mr Fry asserts, to leave the stamp
of humanity, of a spirit kindred to the observer's, upon the work;
it is to make a more adequate revelation. It is true, doubtless, that
we enjoy finding a kindred spirit in the artist, but the enjoyment
in appreciation of art at its best may be less that of recognizing
likeness than of recognizing unlikeness, less a discovery of our-
selves in another than expansion of our own mind through the pro-
founder vision of another's. “The light that never was on sea or
land” is not an infra-red or ultra-violet ray, hitherto inaccessible
to human vision. It is the light of our familiar world which we
had seen only through a glass darkly, but which the artist has made
us see face to face. It is this transformation of nature which sup-
plies what justification there is for Mr Fry's sharp distinction be-
tween the beauty of art and the beauty of nature.
The case seems precisely similar to that of the scientist. He
also has a purpose, he creates something, and he communicates
something. But his purpose is revealed in the content of science,
his creation is at the same time a discovery, and his communication
is secondary and incidental.
The next point to be considered is the use, or uses, of the term
"form.” We may take it for granted, as admitted by all critics
and students of aesthetics, that a work of art must possess unity,
that its parts must be dominated by some organizing principle, that
everything in it must be, as we say, "to the point.” Loose ends,
details not completely taken up in the scheme or design of the


116 SOME POPULAR FALLACIES IN AESTHETICS
work, distract attention and destroy the total effect. This unify-
ing principle may be called the "form," and the details selected
and arranged in accordance with it the "matter," whether what is
under consideration be a picture, drama, or symphony. In all
works of art, Mr Fry says, there is aesthetic value in proportion as
both unity in form, and variety in material, are achieved. With
this statement there is no quarrel. Matter without form is chaos,
form without matter is a lifeless abstraction. Form, however, is
infinitely various. The condition that must be satisfied by all
form, that it should dominate and unify the material, may be met
in many ways. One general statement, however, may be made
about all forms: they must be relevant to their material, just as the
material must be selected with reference to the form to be put upon
it. The two are strictly correlative, and when either seems inde-
pendent of the other both unity and variety are impaired.
In speaking of form Mr Fry makes a distinction which in the
light of what has been said can be allowed only a very relative
significance. A picture, in his view, can have two kinds of form.
Its perceptual elements must be so patterned as to facilitate appre-
hension; also, the elements provocative of emotion must be so ar-
ranged that the emotions called forth are harmonious. The at-
tempt to make so sharp a separation between what are termed the
"emotional” elements of design and the “sensuous” elements is a
consequence of Mr Fry's radical distinction between the content of
a work of art and the emotion attaching to it. The justification
for this distinction has already been called in question. Without
sensuous elements there would be nothing in which the emotion
could be embodied. In short, the two elements are fused indis-
solubly in aesthetic experience. No attempt, furthermore, is made
to employ this double criterion in the judgement of particular pic-
tures; and a detailed consideration of the question of form will be
more in place with reference to Mr Craven's views, to which we
may now proceed.
Mr Craven only once, and then in a matter comparatively un-
important, acknowledges obligation to Mr Fry, or explicitly avows
Mr Fry's opinions. Nevertheless, there are many points of re-
semblance between them. Perhaps the most significant is their
common insistence on constructiveness, i. e., avoidance of close
reproduction from nature. "The mysteries of religion,” Mr Craven


LAURENCE BUERMEYER
117
writes, "the grave philosophies of those old painters who had to
live and labour and speculate for their interpretation of the world,
could not be reduced to so shallow a formula as"—to paraphrase
the rest of the sentence—reproduction from nature. The creative-
ness here recommended is to be discovered in the presence of form.
Form, as Mr Craven discusses it, shares with the transmission of
emotion, in Mr Fry's treatment, the quality of lending distinctive
purpose and value to art. The two conceptions are thus cast for
essentially the same rôle. It would involve too lengthy an argu-
ment to attempt to draw a complete parallel between them, but to
the extent that they are the same the considerations adduced against
Mr Fry's view tell against Mr Craven's also, and the inability to do
justice to recent and contemporary painters which we shall discover
in following Mr Craven's account of them will supply confirma-
tion to the judgement already passed upon the theoretical prin-
ciples of Vision and Design.
Mr Craven's theory is disclosed, chiefly through appraisements
of particular paintings and tendencies in painting, in two articles
in The Dial for April and June, 1923, entitled The Progress of
Painting. Since the exposition is historical rather than systematic,
the most convenient way in which to discuss it will be to outline
the general principle which it assumes, and explain at once the ob-
jections to be made. Both the theory itself and the objections to it
can then be brought out in detail in the course of its application.
The essential points have already been indicated. Painting
reaches its height in the achievement of realism. Realism, writes
Mr Craven,
"bears no relation to photographic naturalism; it refers to a unified
abstraction of experience and not to literal reproduction; it is based
upon an imaginative conception of life, creating a new reality by
means of new combinations, and strengthening the appeal of two-
dimensional art by the addition of solidity and depth."
To discover realism at its best, he writes, we must go to the painters
of the Renaissance.
"For a long and magnificent period the genius of the artist was
concentrated on the study of form, and on the sequences of line and


18 SOME POPULAR FALLACIES IN AESTHETICS
mass necessary to hold together groups of objects presented as ex-
istent in the unencumbered depths of actual space. Pure form, as
delineated from Masaccio to Michael Angelo, was an artistic re-
ality. It was not imitative. It imparted to the substance of the
fleeting world a permanent beauty infinitely surpassing anything
merely phenomenal; it embodied the higher reality born of mind.
In the culmination of the Renaissance men were supremely con-
scious of this reality.”
After that time, art fell on evil days. It abandoned the creation
of form for the imitation of surface, of texture, for reproduction of
mere visual appearance. Nothing new and important appeared in
painting until the advent of Impressionism, and this, though new,
was not important. It “left the validity of a formless art uncon-
tested,” it "was utterly subservient to appearances and disintegrated
all form into floating veils of atmospheric iridescence.” (The or-
der of words in this last sentence is slightly changed.) It was left
for Cézanne to restore form and reality to art, to "penetrate the
secrets of Renaissance composition" and to realize again "a full,
rich, tri-dimensional world in whose depth and mass we might en-
counter subjective experiences comparable in force with the experi-
ences of practical life.” Cézanne did not, Mr Craven states, reach
the level of the Renaissance masters, but he came nearer it than any
one else, and “practically the whole of modern art had its origin
in this man.”
The criticism that all this suggests can be stated briefly. Mr
Craven has confused "form" as the unquestioned essential of all art
with "form" in the sense of solidity and extension in three dimen-
sions. He has, furthermore, so understood, or misunderstood, the
"creative” aspect of form as to exclude from art all painting that
follows a model without emphasizing its three-dimensional char-
acter. In consequence of this double ambiguity in the conception
of form, he is blind to the aesthetic quality of painters whose work
is not primarily or at least obviously concerned with depth and
mass, and he fails to grasp the true merits even of the modern
painter whom he most highly commends—Cézanne. It is true that
Mr Craven specifically states that he recognizes the importance of
flat painting, but the recognition is lip-service, as is shown by the
whole series of his specific judgements. To these we may proceed.


LAURENCE BUERMEYER
119
Impressionism is declared to be a mere reproduction of visual ap-
pearances: what produced it was "the eye that could see and do
nothing else, that registered nature impartially like the lens of a
camera, and was not hampered by the action of a critical and in-
quiring mind.” It “made no inquiry into the aesthetics of design,”
"it was utterly subservient to appearances.” There is an issue of
fact that must be settled before the general significance of Mr
Craven's strictures can be made clear. Does he mean that a repre-
sentative impressionistic picture contains no design, no composi-
tion, that the elements in it are simply a disorderly jumble of il-
luminated surfaces, thrown together without rhyme or reason?
This seems scarcely possible. But if design and composition are
present in, e. g., a good Sisley, the confusion of form in general
with solidity and organization in three dimensions seems to be in-
dubitably brought home to Mr Craven. For, as we have seen, form
as essential to any work of art is form in the sense of order, that
which unifies, and this rôle may be taken by design and composi-
tion. And, in some degree, by colour-harmony. When we read
that “the movement flourished for forty years and brought forth
nothing more vital than a number of very real and convincing rep-
resentations of sunlight,” remembering at the same time that this
sterility is attributed to formlessness, we may perhaps be pardoned
for reading "formula” where Mr Craven writes "form.”
The appreciation of Cézanne seems to be derived from study of
his recorded sayings rather than of his pictures. It is undeniable
that Cézanne's pictures contain an intense realization of both mass
(though not sculptural mass) and depth. But the means whereby
this is accomplished are not reminiscent of the Renaissance paint-
ers, they are not modelling and shading of light. Mr Craven
speaks of “Rembrandt's rare understanding of the architectural
value of light and dark masses, of the order of the planes receiving
light,” but this use of light to bring out form is characteristic, not
of Cézanne, but of Renoir, who in this respect is much the closer of
the two to the Renaissance tradition—though Mr Craven never
mentions him. What is distinctive in Cézanne is his realization of
deepened and massive form by means of colour-modulation and ob-
vious distortions, including his violation of perspective, and this is
a radical departure from the practice which, Mr Craven tells us, he
attempted to revive. It can only be this blindness to what in


120 SOME POPULAR FALLACIES IN AESTHETICS
Cézanne lies outside the classical formula, that leads Mr Craven to
say that "he never arrived at the breadth of the Renaissance mas-
ters” and that "his work lacks the completeness of the old art."
Cézanne's works have their own completeness and breadth, but an
experienced observer would scarcely confuse it with the complete-
ness of the Renaissance paintings.
A similar lack of perceptiveness appears when Cubism is in ques-
tion. To say that a Cubist picture is "a solid assemblage of irrel-
evant details,” that it attempts the impossible in seeking “to
translate objects into a congeries of forms, and to give these forms
sequential connexion” is to betray again an incapacity to conceive
of any form but that of Michael Angelo and Rembrandt. Mr
Craven sees in Cubism only an attempt to employ a new technical
means to a familiar end; but the end itself is new, it is the revela-
tion of aspects of form hitherto slighted or overlooked; and for this
purpose the Cubistic technique is essential and distinctive. The
decorations supplied for the Russian Ballet are a sufficient reply to
the assertion that the Cubists have not grasped “the fact that de-
cisive linear variation capable of being followed without strained
attention are indispensable to rhythm.” And when we discover
that "its exponents have failed to see the necessity for the clean
contour,” this statement, with all that it implies, makes it difficult
not to believe that the formal criterion underlying it is not at bot-
tom an affair of geometry or engineering.
The blind-spot induced by devotion to a Renaissance formula is
responsible for the denial to Rousseau of either "technical or philo-
sophical merit.” When it is said that Rousseau has nothing to
offer the mind, is anything meant but that he does not carry the
mind back to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries? In what is not
reminiscent of the Renaissance Mr Craven sees only primitivism,
naturalism, or meaningless abstractionism. Of these the first two
are charged against Matisse, whose resemblance to the Cubists is
denied, and whose later work is pronounced inferior to his earlier.
But in 1914 Matisse produced many paintings obviously cubistic,
while it seems to be the general opinion of connoisseurs that Ma-
tisse's late work is the flower of his rare genius.
Indeed, when Mr Craven says "one can react only to the art
which coincides with one's own feelings and opinions,” the state-
ment seems to be less psychological or critical than autobiograph-


LAURENCE BUERMEYER
121
ical. What he has felt strongly and what he is able to appreciate
in paintings is without doubt important and valuable; but the as-
sertion, or the implication, that pictorial art which neglects the re-
sources afforded by the third dimension is necessarily of inferior
quality, is analogous to the judgement, in the realm of literature,
that
prose
which fails to utilize the resources of rhyme and metre,
is necessarily a lower form of writing than verse.
The shortcomings in the conception of form which we have been
illustrating, the confinement of its meaning within the four walls
of a formula, may, in conclusion, be thrown into relief by a con-
trast with the richer and more adequate conception revealed by the
work of Renoir. Renoir, like the Cubists, "failed to see the neces.
sity for the clean contour.” In some of his paintings he employed
the impressionistic technique and achieved thereby design and form
of great aesthetic value; and though his figures are assuredly not
lacking in solidity, nor are they set in two dimensions only, and the
distortions are not constructive in the sense that Cézanne's are, it is
doubtful whether the violence done to actual things would be suffi-
cient to justify Mr Craven in calling him "imaginative" or "cre-
ative." Yet there is in Renoir an extraordinary wealth and variety
of colour, so chosen and so ordered that aside from the harmonious
accord it achieves in itself, it is both a structural and unifying ele-
ment, and in that sense a genuine form. In his design and com-
position the lines, masses, spaces, and surfaces are brought together
in a well-knit whole: the looseness of his line never interferes with
the distinctness of his figures, never reduces them to pulpiness,
never diminishes their individual, their sensible, reality. And if, as
a whole, a picture by Renoir does not achieve "creativeness” by a
flight from reality, it is nevertheless the expression of a philosophy
and the revelation of something invisible to the untutored eye.
The philosophy is not that of other-worldly supernaturalism which
once dominated the world and which called forth so much of the
painting of the past. It is naturalism, the philosophy of the pres-
ent. And what is revealed by Renoir's creative spirit is that which
we are ordinarily so ready to overlook, the charm of homely, every-
day things, the illumination, the glamour, of the world in which we
live.
In this painting there is form, but not formula; and hence true
art.


CHILDHOOD
BY EDWIN MUIR
Long time he lay upon the sunny hill,
To his father's house below securely bound.
Far off the silent changing sound was still,
With the black islands lying thick around.
He knew each separate height, each vaguer hue,
Where the massed isles more distant rolled away,
But though all ran together in his view,
He knew that unseen straits between them lay.
Sometimes he wondered what new shores were there.
In thought he saw the still light on the sand,
The shallow water clear in tranquil air,
And walked through it in joy from strand to strand.
Oft o'er the sound a ship so slow would pass
That in the black hills' gloom it seemed to lie.
The evening sound was smooth as sunken glass,
And Time seemed finished e'er the ship passed by.
Grey tiny rocks slept round him where he lay,
Moveless as they; more still as evening came.
The grasses threw straight shadows far away,
And from his house his mother called his name.



Borrimanttomson
From Living Art
THE HANDS OF MOSES.
BY BOARDMAN ROBINSON





VIRGINS
BY HEINRICH MANN
Translated From the German by Kenneth Burke
THE
HE last guests came in half-frozen. They were grumbling
about the frost-nipped blossoms, the storm clouds, the black-
ness of the lake. It had snowed on Monte Baldo! Italy filled
them all with bitterness.
"I thought the weather was always good here.”
"Just be patient. At least we have a genuine German stove.
Farther back in the country all culture simply comes to an end, and
people get chilblains.”
The old hunchback excused everything in the name of beauty.
The three daughters, who, united here after travelling from various
points of the compass, were already talking again, had run through
the subject of their wrinkled mother, and were very loudly discuss-
ing concerts they had given, pictures they had exhibited. The
mother of the two little girls would talk of nothing but them. The
councillor's wife was lauding the night-life in Berlin. "My hus-
band knows what's what,” she kept repeating, without considering
what embarrassment one could cause her by the simple question as
to just what it was that he knew. The old hunchback could only
insist that in Vienna also a good deal was doing at night.
"That is not so!" the councillor's wife exclaimed. The hunch-
back was so chagrined that he nearly wailed the words, "How can
you tell me that!" But she asserted once more, “That is not so!"
The editor from Augsburg declared the column with the lion,
on the beach before St Mark's, to be a really charming little work.
And Claire and Ada observed how he showed his teeth when he
said "little work."
Everything astonished them: the bad breeding of the councillor's
wife; and all the rest. They were fifteen and sixteen years old,
had never come down from their country estate before, and now
they were holding their clear eyes up to the unfamiliar world; as
large as mirrors. No one looked in for very long, seeming to find


124
VIRGINS
the mirrors ungentle and rather unprofitable. And when someone's
glance would shift away from them, they smiled to each other
without knowing just why.
They marvelled most of all that their mother was praising them
to other people, and for the most natural things, things which
would not even have been mentioned at home. That one would
relieve the other of some compulsory work, or arrange for the other
to go for a walk: everybody was entertained by this, and it was
precisely as though there had been an exhaustive discussion of the
fact that they were called Ada and Claire. The two names could
only be pronounced together: one without the other would have
sounded quite empty. And so they had never taken a step or had
an emotion unless it was in common. Each put herself in the
other's place; and recently when the governess, who was leaving
them, had said to Claire, “You won't forget me, will you ?" Claire
had answered, “No, of course not, Fräulein. Ada will not forget
you either!” Since the one sister was so good, the other sister felt
trustworthy and full of goodness. And a person who was loved by
the taller, more robust Ada could assume the love of pale, slight
Claire.
Then the door went open with a jerk and suddenly a new man
was standing in the middle of the room, as though a whole sheaf
of sunbeams had tumbled in. He stood manfully erect.
long-tailed woollen coat buttoned up to the neck; his chest was
broad and his hips were small. He threw a captivating smile over
the heads of the guests. His large, golden-blond beard with the
white teeth in it smiled exactly like his flashing eyes. All at once
he stretched out a large, beautiful, golden-haired hand, and hur-
ried up to the old hunchback. “My dear Herr Hermes!"
The giant embraced the pigmy and announced in a magnificent
metallic voice where they had met before. Herr Hermes introduced
him: "Herr Schumann.” And the new-comer looked firmly into
the eyes of them all, one after the other. To the councillor's wife
he said, “Very pleased,” and it lasted a bit longer. He was through
with the two little girls quickest of all.
As soon as he had joined them at the table, he settled everything.
The three sisters who were united here after travelling from various
points spoke more softly and less often, and looked at him almost
meekly. Also, he struck a compromise between the night life of
In a


HEINRICH MANN
125
Berlin and that of Vienna; while he managed to quiet Herr Hermes
completely, he yet gave the prize to Berlin, bowing at this before
the councillor's wife, who thanked him languorously. Immediately
the old hunchback, proud of his tall friend, exclaimed, “And your
voice! He can sing too!"
Forthwith they all wanted to hear him, and he did not wait to
be coaxed. The musician among the united sisters seated herself
at the piano. Herr Schumann stood erect beside her, and sang.
Yet he broke off right at the start and asked to open the door to-
wards the beach. A cold wind blew in, but they stood for it, for
they already knew what he was capable of. His song raged through
the stillness like a true hero on a battlefield where everyone is al-
ready dead. When he had ended, each uttered a word of acknowl.
edgement; only Claire and Ada let their wide eyes rest dumbly on
the mouth which had been open and now was closed. The coun-
cillor's wife said, "It can't be denied, your voice is first class."
And gratefully, with an excess of humility, he drew his chair
over to hers. She whispered something to him, and at this he
nodded, with superior amiability, across at the two little girls.
They blushed, and each turning to the other, told with their eyes
their great admiration for this new gentleman. While he sang, it
had seemed to each of them as though they were being lifted up and
hurled, breathless, out through the open door, into the rich and
stormy night, over the lake, and who knows where else. It was
very remarkable: each had dropped out of the other's mind and
was with herself alone and with Herr Schumann's voice. Now
they were glad to find each other again and to observe that each
had felt the same. They clasped hands under the table-cloth.
But in the night Claire dreamed that she was going out on the
lake in the darkness with Herr Schumann beside her; and he, lean-
ing over her, was singing powerfully—so that she was enclosed in
his voice and his breath, and was all a-tremble. Suddenly it be-
came light, and he drew up a chair beside her, just as devotedly
and understandingly as when he had taken a seat next the coun-
cillor's wife. And Claire tossed about in her sleep for fear that the
councillor's wife, or even Ada, might come between them. A bub-
bling of hatred came over her, hatred for the councillor's wife, and
for Ada. Then she awoke, and was horrified. Ada's breathing
sounded peacefully through the dark room. Claire did not under-


126
VIRGINS
stand what had happened; she sobbed aloud. How much she
wanted to creep over and kiss Ada. But if Ada opened her eyes,
what should she say to her? For a long while she sat up and
listened across. Now something had happened to her which had
not happened to Ada and which she could not tell Ada.
The next morning she was for the first time intentionally pleasant
to Ada. She was so much so that Ada asked, “Just what is wrong
with you ?” When they were dressing for lunch she helped her
sister, advised her against one bow and said that another would
suit her better. But Ada hesitated, looking at Claire searchingly,
like a stranger; “Really?” Claire looked away in terror, and Ada
blushed deeply. Immediately afterwards they fell without a word
into each other's arms.
Herr Schumann greeted them with a passing amiability, and
then during the whole meal he never looked across at them again.
After leaving the table Claire and Ada ran outside; they felt
peculiarly relieved, and embracing each other they chatted for
hours about home and very intimate things. But in the evening
when they were entering innocently, Herr Schumann bore down
on Ada and said, "Fräulein, your blouse is a poem!"
“But it is the same one as this afternoon,” she put in; and only
afterwards did she notice that this was a reproach for his not having
looked at her in the afternoon. She coloured darkly, and glanced
anxiously aside. Claire was standing there, with an expression of
deep unhappiness.
"So ?” Herr Schumann replied. He deliberated for a while and
then passed on without having found anything further.
But now he was to sing. Herr Hermes opened the door himself,
and the councillor's wife said, “We are glad to freeze for art.”
"Air is the main thing,” Herr Schumann explained. “The old
Germans, our fathers, sang in the forest and on the battlefield.”
When he had finished his song, Ada had to face one dreadful
minute; for an imperative sense of duty demanded of her that she
say, “That was very beautiful.” She wished she had been far away
and quietly in her bed. But she had to speak. And she did it, under
the eyes of all, hot and cold. Then Herr Schumann smiled so
straight into her eyes that she lowered them, confused and happy.
Only after everyone had ceased to be concerned with her, she felt
Claire's silence beside her, and it made her uneasy.


HEINRICH MANN
127
They put out their candles quickly and didn't say another word
before going to sleep.
When Ada awoke, Claire was already gone; Ada could imagine
where, and went after her, up the path towards Nago. Claire was
standing there, facing the sunrise out over the lake. The wings of
the mountains opened wide to the infinite; and a blue, reminiscent
of lovely morning dreams, was set against a red and a gold which
made one think of happiness.
Ada walked faster; she might not see Claire standing there. Not
Claire, but Ada had been spoken to by Herr Schumann. Ada alone
had said to him that his singing was very beautiful, and had pleased
him by this. But Claire held some advantage, since she was stand-
ing before this sky and thinking her own thoughts. And finally
Ada broke into a run, as though she feared that Herr Schumann
might get there ahead of her and see Claire standing there.
She said, still out of breath, “Do you find that so beautiful?
I don't!"
Claire's answer came slowly—and that tortured Ada.
"You really don't know what you are saying,” Claire answered;
and Ada: “Oh, very well.”
Then they went back in silence, Ada keeping half a step in ad-
vance. But when the verandah where breakfast was being served
lay before them and they could be seen, they made the same move-
ment simultaneously and laid their arms about each other's hips.
And they began chatting vivaciously.
"An unusually charming pair of sisters,” the editor from Augs-
burg observed as they entered, and the councillor's wife explained,
“They suit each other perfectly.”
Herr Schumann was not present. He did not come until the
councillor's wife had already left; at noon he did not leave the
dining-room at her side; and whereas on previous days they had
walked tirelessly together along the beach, now she joined the three
united sisters, and Herr Schumann sought the company of Herr
Hermes. Frequently he would grant Claire a word, and then again
one to Ada. But soon he withdrew; further, the councillor's wife
had already disappeared.
Then Ada and Claire wandered out into the country, from the
hostile need of being alone together. A blindingly beautiful day
had passed in the middle of a rainy week. They climbed the slopes,
with their banks of grey olive trees. The veils of vegetation closed


128
VIRGINS
softly over the depth of the valley, and the air was flooded with
the soft clear tones of a clock striking in some distant tower.
Claire said, "You have been a dreadful flirt with Herr Schumann.
I don't know; I shouldn't like to be that way.'
Ada replied sharply, "No, really?" and after a slight, significant
pause: "Fräulein said once that you are not good-looking."
Then they both looked straight ahead, frightened. For they
had seen how much separated they were. It became evident that
people had spoken to one of the other as though of a rival. Each
sister noticed that the other sister saw her differently than she saw
herself. And memories were uncovered which each had uncon-
sciously kept to herself and which came from worlds foreign and
unfriendly to each other.
Out yonder the mountains lay behind a violet curtain of air:
it was a dismal sort of splendour, intimidating and oppressive.
Ada and Claire would have liked to turn back, but yet they kept
on climbing—they could not help themselves. A grey chapel was
crumbling behind a grey wall. The picture was enclosed with ivy;
and Claire and Ada felt cold chills on their spines since they did not
know what face might be looking out at them from the vast silence
of the chapel.
Finally they came upon an abandoned house in front of two rock
walls which met at a right angle. In the intervening triangle of
sky, a large green star shot up suddenly and opened like an evil
eye. Then, in fright, they turned back. All at once they noticed
that the sky was full of stars and the valley was grey, with troops
of lights on its edges, and with single ones here and there, hanging
back from the swarm, lost in the country.
Claire looked from one to another and thought, vaguely melan-
choly, that each one, each one would burn and go out all by itself.
She also thought, “Just why am I walking here? There are thou-
sands of streets to walk on. Everything is so vast and hopeless.”
Ada thought of the marionette theatre they had at home, and
remembered how the paper figures had sometimes spoken with
Claire's voice and sometimes with her own. But Herr Schumann
should sing his songs, only to her. And the thought that she could
not bear it otherwise made her wonder uneasily.
The next day the stormy weather continued, and very little was
likely come of the fireworks which were to be set off over by the


HEINRICH MANN
129
fort. Nevertheless, as soon as it was dark Herr Schumann invited
the ladies to cross in the boat. The councillor's wife took Claire
and Ada, one on either side of her, gave an arm to each of them,
and in this fashion they followed Herr Schumann. He worked for
a long while loosening the boat, as the waves snatched the chain
out of his hands again and again, and when he had finally drawn it
up under the quay of the little harbour, it kept bobbing so that
the councillor's wife could not find the right moment to jump.
“Give me your hand!"
But Herr Schumann was seated holding himself firm.
“It is a bit dangerous,” she said. Herr Schumann vowed that
he had managed quite different waves, but she retorted with a dis-
dainful laugh, "As to that I have more confidence in your larynx.”
Herr Schumann had suddenly got his balance; he stood up in the
boat and held out his two hands to Ada and Claire: "Then I shall
go with my young friends. But quick, ladies, before the boat is
driven off again!”
They were in, and he had hardly finished speaking. They almost
threw themselves into the water, they were in such haste.
"Hold still!” Herr Schumann shouted in a completely changed
voice. "We were almost upset!” And immediately afterwards, very
amiably, “And you are not afraid, Fräulein Claire? And you,
Fräulein Ada ?”
Ada was about to protest indignantly, but a strong lurch threw
Herr Schumann against her knee. His big beard brushed cool across
her face, and she could not speak.
He did not excuse himself at all. He spoke, and the words leapt
from him. "We are already outside the harbour, and we are being
driven away from shore. This will not do!" And immediately
after, hard at his task: "Join in and help! I am not anxious to
drown!"
They worked in the darkness. Black water was sprayed into
their faces, and Herr Schumann was panting ferociously. But
as soon as they had fought their way back around the stone jetty,
he acquired a calm superiority. “I was responsible for you to your
mother. You dare not play with life and death, my dear friends.
Now if you will just step out. I shall stay in the boat until
the very last. That is my duty as captain."
Claire set her foot on the step behind Ada. She stumbled; and
inwardly she had completely lost her footing. Her face, which


130
VIRGINS
had been touched by Herr Schumann's cool beard, was now burn-
ing. Her quiet heart opened all its secret places. All laws seemed
overturned, the world was lifted dizzily, in the darkness a great
something was flowering madly. She thought that she had called
out, “My life, Herr Schumann! How willingly I would give it
to you!”
But she had merely whispered; the wind carried her words in
Ada's direction. And Herr Schumann asked, "How? You are a
bit weak from the strain? That often happens; support your-
self on me.”
He stayed to fasten the boat. Ada and Claire went ahead. And
suddenly Ada bent over Claire. "I heard quite well what you said
to Herr Schumann," she hissed. Claire did not answer; but both
began breathing very rapidly. They turned their faces away, in
the terrible certainty that, if their eyes were to meet, they would
rush at each other. In this way they went through a long and
very dark arbour.
Alone, by the first light, the councillor's wife was waiting. What
had they done with Herr Schumann? He came, and she laughed
again. “You are pale. It was indecently rough on the lake. If
you think I want to catch cold ...
"Sing, please," the councillor's wife said; "you might begin
immediately.” Herr Schumann was ready; he was simply waiting
for the door to be opened. She did not do it herself this time. For
to-day she even declared it stupid. But Herr Hermes acted for
his tall friend. "He needs air."
Ada and Claire sat between the lighted stove and the open door.
Each wanted to go for her cloak, but neither would let the other
remain alone in the room where Herr Schumann's voice was rising
and falling. The three united sisters began talking about them.
They did not look well, it was agreed. They had over-exerted
themselves on the lake, and now they were sitting in the draught.
If their mother was here she would not allow it. They ought to
go to bed. But they sat there until Herr Schumann had gone;
and without a word, clung together until they were in their room.
In the morning their heads felt heavy, and they had pains in the
neck. Towards evening fever set in. It mounted steadily, and
in the night they talked and tossed about. Claire saw Ada ride
out on the lake with Herr Schumann. She herself stood powerless


HEINRICH MANN
131
on the shore and shrieked into the storm, “You have always de-
ceived me! You shall not be prettier than I am!” The struggle
to reach her enemy cramped her, stifled her. But then, of a sudden,
she was freed and could run, run over the water, kill the other, kill
her! . . . At this moment she heard Ada shrieking. Ada was
shrieking and beating against the wall. There was a rattling sound
in her throat.
Claire started up; then she became rigid—she did not know what
she had done. Had she done anything? She had killed Ada! She
writhed, her face in the pillow. From far off, out of all the tumult,
she heard Ada: "I will not die! You shall die!"
When Claire came to her senses, Ada's bed was empty. Claire
understood: “Ada is dead!” And slowly she recovered herself:
"That is what I wished for!" But how that could have happened,
and by what devious paths she had reached such an evil wish-
she had lost all that for ever. Herr Schumann lay behind, re-
markably pale, as though he had once been a very beautiful play-
thing which she had fought with Ada about and which they had
torn apart in the scuffle. That did not matter; since something much
more important had perished now that Ada was dead. And every
time Claire thought of it she would have to recall that she had
wished for it. Ada's death and Claire's wish were just as much
brothers as Claire and Ada had been sisters. And they remained so
eternally. Claire lay there, astonished to find that so much could
be endured, astonished to find herself living on, only weary and
desirous of not knowing about anything.
Then she was raised out of the bed, wrapped up, and led on to
the verandah without her speaking a word. As she leaned back in
the chair, the sun on her pale hands, Ada stumbled forward, her
eyes wild and helpless; as she tried to hold back her sobs, she kept
making soundless movements with her lips. She threw herself
down in front of Claire. Through her hands, which she wound
about Claire's hands, the one sister felt the other's anguish at the
thought that she could not be forgiven. Then they let their tears
break out, and they kissed each other.
Now everyone was satisfied with Italy; its lake, its air, its peo-
ple. It was blue and mild; it sang, caressed, and bustled. The
three united sisters were painting everything with condescension,
thoroughly aware that the south offered at best moderate effects.


132
VIRGINS
The editor from Augsburg enjoyed everything as a connoisseur.
Herr Hermes rowed on the smooth water and his hump was sawing
through the morning mist.
Behind the house, in the large vegetable garden, Claire's ham-
mock was hung between two blossoming apple trees. Ada was sit-
ting in front of her on the grass, swinging her, and reading now
and then some sentences from Andersen's fairy tales. But she kept
interrupting to look up at the sky, which was swept with swallows.
A maid passed and advised the young ladies to get into the shadows
as it was becoming hot. Ada and Claire found it as gentle and easy
to live as if they were dissolving into the spring. As gentle as
though they had previously gone through fire.
Of a sudden they heard Herr Schumann's voice up by the sum-
mer house. Without moving they could see through the currant
bushes and make out the councillor's wife struggling in Herr Schu-
mann's arms. Her dog misunderstood her and went after Herr
Schumann's legs. So that he sprang back in terror. She cried, “Lie
down!" and Herr Schumann recovered his confidence. Ada had
pressed her face into Claire's dress and was holding back her breath
desperately. It was high time that Herr Schumann and the coun-
cillor's wife disappeared into the summer house; for Claire and
Ada could not hold back their laughter another second. They em-
braced each other and laughed uncontrollably. Then they became
tired of that, forgot the pair in the summer house, and went back
to their fairy tales.
It was not until at table that they remembered again. What a
pimple this Herr Schumann had on his face. To-day the coun-
cillor's wife talked in a timid squeaky voice; too comic. Herr
Schumann still looked at everyone in turn as though he were the
sun itself and were asking, "Well, are you happy, now that I am
shining on you?” Ada and Claire nudged each other: now it was
their turn. And sure enough, he drank to them, to his little friends.
They burst out laughing; it couldn't be helped; yet he remained
sunny and undisturbed. The councillor's wife asked nervously,
"What is the matter with them anyhow?"
But Claire and Ada had recovered, and now they were holding
their clear eyes up to the unfamiliar world, as large as mirrors. No
one looked in for very long, seeming to find the mirrors ungentle and
rather unprofitable. And when someone's glance would shift
away
from them, they smiled to each other without knowing just why.


S
Bahia
to Dunge on lumana
From Living Art

THE MORIN IN SPRING.
BY ANDRE DU NOYER DE SEGONZAC





FIVE POEMS
BY ELIZABETH J. COATSWORTH
THE OLD MARE
Grey despair
Was on the old mare
Grass turned bitter
Sky a-glare
And gnats like thoughts
And thoughts like gnats
Everywhere.
Her underlip
Hung pendulous wide
Her ears twitched back
Her dusty hide
Heaved with her heavy breathing
And her eyes rolled ominously
To one side.
The mule colt lay
In trampled grass
Slick-tailed long-eared
Bespeaking the ass
Carried so long in her body,
Born in travail and sweat-
Alien, alas.
But staggering
To unsteady feet
The mule colt fumbles
An unknown teat
And the old mare relaxes and sighs
Finding any motherhood
Most sweet.


134
FIVE POEMS
LE TOUR DES FRANCS
Loneliness? when I think of loneliness
I think of the small towers of the crusaders
Built on the treeless mountains of Palestine,
Watch-towers held by half-a-dozen men,
Who were brought up in hamlets beside streams
With woods and meadows near them.
Loneliness? The night coming on,
The night that covers danger,
And hungry stars
Peering from heaven,
And the wind sweeping from ridge to stony ridge,
And a horse neighing with a shiver in it,
And some one tower with half-a-dozen men
Left isolated in a harsh inimical land.
THE OLD HOUSES
I love these old, old, houses
With their toppling roofs,
Their thresholds worn by multitudinous steps,
Their panels shining from the touch of hands
Groping through generations, their steep stairs
Creaking with memories of all the weight
They've carried through the centuries
There's no corner
Where ghosts of happenings do not drift like dust;
The air is thick with manifold presences,
Too thick, you'd think, still to make room for more.
But like the trees of some forgotten orchard,
Hollow with rot, split open, almost dead,
Which yet feel May in blossoms round and merry
As in their first year's blooming-
So old houses
(Until their haunted roof-trees fall in ruin)
Show children's faces at their window sills,
Echo with children's calling through their rooms.


ELIZABETH J. COATSWORTH
135
SAMSON
You need not pity Samson,
He was one
To like his honey ripped from lions' bellies—
Sweetness was stale that did not smell of death.
Unless a woman were made dangerous
With latent treachery, silkier than her hair,
She was not worth his boisterous attention.
He liked to pile the odds against himself
And then at the last moment turn the tables
Roaring his sinister jests above his victims.
He understood the path Delilah followed,
Played with himself and her, experimental
As always at the lip of a volcano.
Well, he was singed, and felt the smart awhile,
But had a death completely to his taste:
Jeers turned to screams had always been his music,
Festivals clinched with blood tickled his humour
You need not pity Samson,
He was one
To like his honey ripped from lions' bellies.
THE PRINCESS
Let us make alliance with the king of France.
He has a thousand warriors
In complete armour,
Some with swords and some with bows,
And twenty horses to ride upon himself.
Let us make alliance with the king of France.
He has a palace with four towers
And a staircase
With a hundred steps of square-cut stone
Up which four men may easily pass abreast.
Let us make alliance with the king of France.


136
FIVE POEMS
He has a daughter who, it is reported,
Reads every day
In a painted Book of Hours
Which hangs from her girdle on a chain of silver.
If her hair is black she shall be married
To my younger brother.
If her hair is brown she shall marry my only son,
But if it is yellow as honey
I myself will be her husband.
Let us make alliance with the king of France!



From Living Art
A GIRL. BY MARIE LAURENCIN





BAD HAN
BY GLENWAY WESCOTT
II
TO THE BAD
WHEN Selma, stepped from the train after a short absence
got in,
Jule regained his content. They had been married three
years. She stepped across the spongy April earth, holding her
skirts in a gloved hand. He untied the little black mare and
clicking his tongue and shaking the reins. Down the wet road from
which, in the sunlight, a vapour arose like a large, premature tiger-
lily, the mare plodded, her feet and the wheels adding to the confu-
sion of the air by flinging upward drops of water and flecks of mud.
On wooden sidewalks elevated a foot above the road the towns-
people loitered, and sighed, breathing the perfume of leafage, wet
mould, hepaticas, dry horse-dung, and smoke. On piazzas the
housewives shook dirty carpets and clothes laterally in the wind.
Sparrows ruffled their feathers in the mixed water and muck of the
gutter; other birds hung in the undulant air. The white frame
church sat among its stone mementoes in a fixed dramatic dotage.
Jule himself had neither aged nor grown fat, but became each
year more prosperously gentle. His rare movements suggested a
fixed path about a fixed pole.
Selma had altered more in the years of their marriage. Her face
had filled with the signs of a passionate, emphatic virtue. The
curious expression had intensified which had come into it in her
father's lamp-lighted house as she listened and seemed almost to
doubt his assurances of love: an expression of lonely courage and
reliance upon hidden strength. It gave to the eyes, flickering a
little under pale-fringed lids, a military keenness, and made of
her lips an inverted crescent.
The little mare, settling into a slow middle-age, indicated some-
thing irrevocable but unobserved in the life of her master. She
drew them at a jog-trot into the open country. Over the watery
fields trees stood very high, dangling tassels or spotted with buds.


138
BAD HAN
Men in blue shirt-sleeves and overalls stalked about the little
pyramids of manure in the fields, now melted and soft, scattered
it loosely over the earth, or as the buggy passed, leaned their stub-
bly chins on the handles of their forks. The manure, soaking in
brown rivulets into the earth, sometimes embittered a gust of the
wind. One man kicked sullenly at the turds with his raw-hide or
rubber boots.
Selma paid no attention to the minute figures in torn coats or
denim, or the trees thick with swollen tubes. Her pale eyes were
fixed on a point where the road disappeared in the distance.
A mud-hen sat on the corrugated surface of the mill-pond, rock-
ing, gyrating. They drove through Bieler; the noon wood-smoke
poured from the short chimnies; they were at home. Selma ran
through the summer kitchen to kneel beside her sleeping baby, tears
of relief falling from her eyes.
Jule's father was dead and they lived in his house. One eve-
ning Jule had discovered him on a box in the sheep-fold beside a
ewe who lay panting on her side. The air was hot with the breath
of a hundred others sleeping in rows and clusters, bitter with the
oil which secretes into their wool and the layers of manure under
the straw. On the windows the frost of dead winter rested, gigan-
tic and graceful. The ewe groaned, rolling her eyes glassy with
fever. The old man nodded to his son; patted the dying animal
and held his ear against her heart.
"I don't seem to be doin' her any good. Come on, let's go to
the house," he said, brushing the straw off his knees with a leather
mitten.
Before the kitchen fire, their large hands, somewhat swollen
with cold, spread out on their knees, he told his father that Selma
would marry him.
“That's right,” he commented in a tired tone. Jule looked up
apprehensively. “Yeah,” he said, “I'm tired. I hauled three loads
of manure into that back field since I came back from mill. ...
Look here. You haven't got that Madoc girl into trouble, have
you?" He turned his hazel eyes cautiously to the side.
“No, I guess not.” His father had never mentioned her before.
The old man nodded wisely over this. “Well I guess she can
take care of herself. Old Madoc ..." His voice faded away as
he peered at a crack in the stove.


GLENWAY WESCOTT
139
A few weeks later Jule found him in the sitting-room by a low
fire, crouched in a chair. "Hello father. Done with your milking
so soon ?"
The answering voice issued from a throat already shrunken.
"It's not done. You'd better do it. I'm sick.” As he hurried out
of the room the dying voice pursued him, “That two-year-old
heifer.
It had taken Jule with two other men a day and a half to dig,
through three feet of snow and ice as well as the frozen clay, a
shallow grave.
Jule and Selma were married two months after his father's
death. He did not want to sell the valuable stock and had to live
at the grey house to care for it. Selma recognized her duty to help
him without delay, and also saw in his bewilderment, as he tried to
take up his father's life, her first opportunity.
The little Rosalia was now two years old. It had pleased Selma,
with her faith in explicit fairness and neat strength, to name her
child after his German mother, a kind of symbolical triumph over
the disordered darkness out of which she had taken a husband.
The April spring being an illusion of light, the setting sun left
the farms clasped in a hand of darkness and wet ominous air.
Jule brought in the milk over muddy spaces that seemed to tilt in
the wind; washed himself, splashing widely; and carried the
drowsy baby up to sleep under the eaves. He sat with his wife,
reading a paper idly as she sat over some stockings. The old house
groaned and swayed as if about to fall.
Selma's eyes were bright. Beyond a semblance of frailty and
pallor her love regarded him, zealous and arrogant; questioned the
strength and intimacy of the bonds which held him to her; medi-
tated others more strong. "Do you remember Hannah Madoc ?”
she asked softly.
“Yes, I do. She lives in Fond du Lac now, doesn't she?"
“I heard of her while I was there. Indeed I saw her once, on
the street. But of course she didn't know me.”
It seemed to him that in the long interval he had not heard her
name spoken. He listened to the wind stalk and crouch about the
house like a vast personage preparing his limbs. He faced his
wife's interest, surprised but cool.
“In Fond du Lac,” she said, “they call her Bad Han.” He knot-


140
BAD HAN
ted his chin angrily. She seemed determined as if by instinct to
taunt him, to subdue him. His resentment clarified: she was good,
he was the purified dross; she was of single purpose, he was diffuse;
she was pure, he was impure.
“Of course I had nothing to do with her,” she continued, "and
indeed shouldn't have known she was there but for poor Mary
Harless. You know her husband is a lawyer. I thought her a fool
to marry him for he never was a strong character."
He heard her continue on a silvery pitch amid the creaking night,
thinking only of Hannah. It was a mediocre story, which he
barely heard, made terrible by his wife's elegant scorn.
“I met her one day going down Main street, in a black sweater
not especially clean, a red straw hat and veil. She strides like a
man with her hands in her pockets. She was looking in some win-
dows. She's rather large; must be at least thirty-five, isn't she ?
Her face was painted.
"They say she worked in Schleger's Hotel when she first went
to Fond du Lac and served at the bar. Probably Boyle got her
the job. And after a while everybody began to hear how she
danced and carried on. Nobody had ever seen her-I mean the
women, Mary's friends."
Jule felt sick. He could see it with strange plainness: the mir-
rors, the tables, the pictures stained with smoke—a woman lying
upon maroon-red clouds. The gas-light rose and quailed. Her
dark hair agog, Hannah danced, doubled in the mirrors; through
the filthy air swayed her hips; above, her full breasts. Men sat
smoking and laughing on the chairs and tables, their arms on each
other's shoulders; they all leaned forward together when she
stooped so that the red dress showed the tops of her breasts.
“Finally one of the men's clubs got her to dance at a banquet
over the Commercial Club. Mary supposes he saw her there; she
is sure he hadn't been going to the saloons and the other places.”
The drunken men smiled on her. One sang with his mouth full;
he subsided desperately. Jule saw her sway upon her heels as she
had always done, stripped of her working clothes, a flower in her
hair, swiftly, without music. She stood still in a litter of dirty
plates and glasses. She looked about at the muddled faces like
fowls sitting in the grey air.
The story went on. The wife overheard her disgrace at a Ladies'


GLENWAY WESCOTT
141
Aid Society. She neglected everything to cry, mopping her red
eyes with a wet handkerchief; she thought she was going crazy.
The wind howled. Jule was cold; something rose and crept
about his legs. He closed his eyes.
Selma's voice rang like some silver bells, sweet and cruel. “He's
still good looking, but his hair is thin on top and he has pouchy
eyes. I talked to him one night and told him how terribly Mary
felt and how wrong it was. Finally he said, 'You don't seem to
realize, Mrs Bier, that I love this woman as I never loved Mary.
I suppose you won't understand, but she's a much bigger woman.
Mary is shallow. She sings if she has what she wants; if she
hasn't, she cries; there isn't anything to her.'
“Of course that's all nonsense and I told him so. I asked him
if he thought a woman like that could possibly love him as much
as his wife did. He didn't answer at first, but finally he said, very
low, 'No, Mrs Bier.'
“I was surprised. Then I said, 'Isn't it likely, this very minute,
that she has other men?' He looked at me coldly and got up to
leave the room. But as he went he said, 'Yes, I think she has.'
"I can't feel sorry for such a fool. I don't know what will be-
come of them!” She arose conclusively and went into the kitchen.
When she returned Jule's head was bent over the table, his face
hidden between his arms. "Jule!" she cried. "What is the matter ?"
He did not move. “Don't, don't," he said.
She moved slowly backward, clutching her throat with one hand.
At last he straightened his body. "You never knew ...” he said
as if in extenuation.
The new situation was abruptly clear to Selma. She did not
stop to renounce her cruelty; the time had come. “Yes I knew,"
she said.
“You knew? What did you know?''
The reply was cool and terse. “I heard of your affair with
Hannah Madoc, from every side. As soon as you began to come
to see me everyone talked about it. Ted spoke finally. I said that
you had told me all about it; I denied that there had been any-
thing-anything dishonourable. I was only afraid that father
would hear of it for then I couldn't have married you.
"As for us I wasn't afraid.”
It took a moment for Jule to master the significance of this,


142
BAD HAN
.
which stirred, thickened, and opened like a flower. He was silent,
in surprise and wonder, and drew her to him as if she might slip
out of his arms.
But she was not done. “Jule, tell me, couldn't you do some-
thing for her?” His imagination was tired. “Wouldn't it be
better if she came back to her father's farm? It isn't rented this
winter, is it?" He was unable to think so far. "You know we've
plenty of money if she needs that kind of help.
He winced and saw that she had triumphed again and was satis-
fied. “Won't you go to Fond du Lac to-morrow and see her?”
Selma concluded.
When Jule arrived in the town he went immediately to an
address which Selma had been able to give him: an old house en-
closed by an ornamental fence and a plot of sparse grass already
faded. As he waited after the noisy bell, he watched a little bright
engine switch, belching soot into the delicate grey sky. The
brakeman sang as he coupled the red cars.
He heard a shrill irritable barking inside the door and the land-
lady appeared, framed in the dim glass. Her feet shuffled in grey
felt bedroom-slippers as she bore with the splendour of excessive
fat down the obscure hall. She unbolted and swung back the door.
Her pale blue dressing-gown revealed her corpulent legs to the
knee. On her uncorsetted hip she carried a pet poodle which con-
tinued to bark meanly, opening with each sound, under its dirty
forelocks, a dripping pale mouth. Jule was dumb before her
sightless, proud stare. Under a blotched red rough forehead, her
eyes shrank from the bright light.
"Well who do yuh want to see ?” she demanded.
“Does Hannah Madoc live here?” He hoped he had come to
the wrong place.
“Why yes, she does, but she's not here now, and I don't think
she'll be back much before night.”
"Oh ..."
Her capacious breasts rolled inside her dirty gown. The poodle
squirmed in one of her fat hands. “Don't stan' there in the door
and let the cold air in on us. Are yuh comin' or goin'?"
“May I leave a message ?” He stepped into the hall foul with
odours which poured down the handsome staircase over its frayed


GLENWAY WESCOTT
143
rug and seeped under the closed doors. As he took a pencil from
his pocket and wrote on a scrap of paper against the wall, the
woman paused on the threshold. She peered hungrily up and down
the street, waved a solemn hand at someone, and slammed the
door. The filthy dog snuffled at his shoes.
It was a little past two. He walked the stale streets without
thought or purpose. The sun descended methodically, a colourless
spot upon the vapours. Alley-cats darted across the city, mounting
posts or trees, their fur fine and unkempt like monkey's.
Farmers drove into the stable-yards behind the hotels and
blanketed their fat horses who had not shed the ragged winter
fur. He went into Schleger's and drank a glass of beer. The bar
was crowded with hoarse-voiced men. The sour odour of beer and
tobacco was mixed with that of rubber-boots, manure, and dirty
corduroy. He talked of the weather and crops with one, and his
eyes roamed over the familiar place; the tables and chairs whose
rigid, spindling legs had been dirtied by many absent feet, the
unclean mirrors and unpolished brass spittoons, on the wall the
begrimed woman spread and undone upon maroon clouds. From
time to time someone would go down to the sheds and untie
the horses sluggish with a winter's rest, and drive away into the
country.
He went out then and wandered through the waning afternoon
toward the north-west, looking wistfully everywhere. Women
rustled past, swaying their huge skirts and gazing querulously
beneath their hat-brims. As the setting sun brought about on the
horizon a pallor like a rising wind-storm, he reached the country.
The prairie stretched westward colourless and vast, and the man
was moved. The hills and marshes about his home were not like
this sea of land. On its dulness the long fences were minute, the
houses and high barns small cubes and pyramids; men and horses
moving from one spot to another were inconsiderable and blessed,
held in the still, indifferent space. Jule stretched out his arms in
surrender and faith.
Then he turned back. Main Street was altered for his com-
prehension. It was straight and sharp, pointed at each end into
the black, emptied prairie. Gas lamps punctured the surface of the
night as it approached. New people were on the streets, lamps


144
BAD HAN
accented unnoticed windows. Between the closed stores uncarpeted
staircases rose like flues, lighted by flickering red and yellow jets.
On the theatre the wind rattled large posters announcing a musical
show with Billie Dowland's Picked Beauties. Young men strutted
with cigars, slapping each other's backs.
On the second floor of a ricketty building some bright windows
bore letters which spelled Chop Suey. Jule walked aimlessly up
the stairs and looked in. The plaster walls were painted with
orange dragons. The uncarpeted floor held up flimsy tables and
chairs among which, in a gliding motion like accelerated snails,
moved waiters with showy yellow faces. One of the women raised
toward him her tulip-coloured cheeks and blacked eyes in a silly,
arrogant stare. When a waiter slid toward the door to usher him
in, he hurried down the stairs.
He turned down a side-street toward Hannah's house. He saw
two negro women, tittering, waving their heads together; the
snowy crack of their teeth as they smiled in the dark. Their voices
curved through the air like two animals playing in a thicket. A
smiling man walked eagerly on thick haunches. Under the night
were caverns and tracks and runways.
A man answered the door-bell and after bawling "Hannah!"
twice in a colossal voice, told him to "go right up-stairs.” Out of
an obscure passage in which a yellow tongue of gas licked the air
incessantly, she admitted him to her warm lamplight.
"Jule, Jule why have you come at last ?" she murmured.
He was bewildered. She was older than his memory, older than
he, older than any one. The face was like a mask of stone, the
torso heavy and soft.
"Sit down my dear,” she said, "over there by the window where
I can look at you.” He sat down, and for a time they kept silent,
in an inventory of aspects and recollections.
Her hair was cut short above the shoulders and combed smoothly
back, its hue marred by streaks of grey. She wore a loose red dress
in which the prodigal Aesh lay as if in a casket. Her look was
bleak and deserted. A compression of scorn narrowed her thin,
painted lips. An awful resentment, a resentment pointless and
humble, rose with her tenderness; to strain his comprehension to
the utmost, to wrench his contentment almost from its place.
When she stood up he knew by her movement that the vast,


GLENWAY WESCOTT
145
beautiful body was tired. It would deteriorate; its fantastic deep
opinionless peace would become gross; its magnitude be mere fat.
She stirred heavily. He seemed to see her in a frayed kimona bear
down a dusky hall in sleepy portliness, her hand licked by a poodle.
The clothes-closet stood open, burst by a chaos of cheap clothes.
The dresser was littered with bottles, cigarettes, ashes, and stubs.
The eyes of a middle-aged man in a picture pinned against the
mirror covered the room with a vain, unsatisfied glare.
Hannah sighed, and attempted a smile, but the bleak mask did
not relax. "Have you had supper? I'm hungry.” Her voice, as it
cleft her maroon lips, was deep, like lowing steers in the marshes.
Her dark eyes swept restlessly the rose-blotched walls.
"No. I forgot to get any. Let's go out.” He picked up his
leather bag.
“Leave it here,” she said, “till we come back.” He hesitated.
"I'm not going to stay here to-night, you know.” He could not
see her face.
“Oh, you're not,” she said lightly.
After supper, as they walked northward toward the lake, men,
standing in front of cigar stores, called Hello to her through the
gusty air, but she did not answer. The sky swung like the top of a
tent as the wind rose up to rain. They came to the edge of Lake
Winnebago. Little, slender, leafless trees stood around and waved
their hands and seemed about to kneel. The waves came up to
the white stone slabs deposited in a wall with the sound of fish
smacking their lips and flicking their fins and tails.
Gathering the cheap fur of her coat up over her face, Hannah
began to cry. The large tears rolled on her rouged cheeks.
It began to sprinkle around them on the thick, budded branches,
striking the sides of the little fish who seemed to lift their fins in
the lake. They hurried arm-in-arm down the street. In the light
jetting from doors and windows they saw the drops fall far apart
in the air out of which the wind had lapsed entirely.
They were glad of the prying light, of the warmth of paper
roses as red as tomatoes, and spread their wet coats on the backs
of chairs to dry.
Then he told her, slowly and methodically, what he wanted her
to do. Curiously, not upon her face, but beneath her face, expres-
sion followed her amazed and excited comprehension. She looked


146
BAD HAN
"
old, untidy, and goaded by petty troubles. The menacing yap of
the poodle bounded up the stairs.
“... you were always a good hand at a garden and
you
could
keep a cow.”
She drifted, a little dazed, into the practical aspects of his plan.
“The farm is so heavily mortgaged. It might be hard .. "
"I've plenty of money since I got married,” he said.
Her eyes widened. “Does your wife know about this ?”
"Yes, she does.”
She took his brown hand in her strangely pale hand, her fat
hand covered with showy rings. She had assumed that the strange-
ness of a new wife had worn away and he had come back to her.
Now a new and difficult concept thrust itself into her thought. She
saw in it an opportunity to cling to him, the only way to cling to
him. She fondled his hard hand.
Her stare was stern. Her liberal breasts shifted and heaved.
To his simple vision everything seemed insubstantial: the flagrant
paper flowers, the lace, the litter, the envelope of cheap red satin,
the overabundance of her flesh to hang loose-ready to be stripped
away.
She lifted her large, thin face, as if she could smell the sour
marsh wind.
LOCAL GOD
Hannah arrived at the house on the marsh in time to put in a
garden: her father's house the green stained walls, the floor
painted grey and pitted with boot-nails, the steep staircase with
the middle of each step worn away. As soon as a bed and a cook-
stove had been set up she moved in, and put on an old black skirt
and a denim jacket.
She stalked up and down in the garden. In the dry loam,
brown leaves were crumpled on their spines. Cabbage stalks rotted
and stunk in orderly rows. In a corner she found some parsnips
and dug them up. She laid them in a tin pan, washed them in the
milky stream of the wooden pump, and sat on the back porch,
cutting and brushing them for her dinner.
She sat on the steps. Through the open door the wind carried


GLENWAY WESCOTT
147
out over her the must of a house closed through the winter. Wild
cucumbers sprouted in the melancholy ground, to drop a speckled
shade upon her in August. Beneath her feet was the spot where
her father fell. She shaded her eyes and saw nothing but vast
husks, and dead pools, with a disturbing sense of hidden move-
ment-of water bubbling through the sod, of sap in the spiny stalk,
and shoots in the rattling clump. The birds seemed to lean over
the ground to hear it with their small, lobeless ears, the sun to bend
a round yellow ear.
The marsh earth seemed fatigued, and bitter that, within its age,
this youth surged. Hannah sighed as she put her parsnips over
the stove.
Then she spaded the garden. When at dusk the old crows
loosed their wings in the lustre of the sun toward the roost in the
oaks, one third of the garden lay black and like plush. The next
day she finished the spading and began to rake and lay it off in rows
and rectangles. She planted radishes, lettuce, beets, cauliflower,
cabbage, and melons, each in its time.
For some time she bought her food: butter, eggs, milk, and meat
from her neighbours; coffee, flour, salt, and sugar from Boyle's.
Whistling to herself the tall woman wandered down the Bieler
street, observing with a cynical smile the alterations in its spiritless
façade, the new sidewalks, porches, the taller trees, the duller or
fresher paint on each flank of clapboards, the unfamiliar faces; and
she saw her former mistress as soon as she passed the church. The
pale woman sat on the cement platform sewing. The baby for
whom she had sewed was dead, and it was the last. When she saw
Hannah she dropped her cloth, her needle, and scissors. Her cry
of amazement brought Boyle to the door of the saloon, where he
stared sleepily; two damp strings of hair dropped from their places
on his bald forehead into his eyes.
She walked among her old neighbours strangely and proudly.
They whispered behind her, not daring to ask questions. Where
did she get the money with which she bought their butter and eggs ?
What did it mean, this rash and unexpected beauty falling away to
a premature old age? They stopped their teams in the road by
her garden to talk. "Well Hannah, so you've come back to live on
the old place.”
“Yes, I've come back. You might have known I would.”


148
BAD HAN
"Shan't
you be lonesome all by yourself in the house ?”
“Oh, no, I'm used to being alone.” And the old man or woman
in a democrat or lumber-wagon clucked to his horses, shook the
reins over their fat or bony backs, and went on, baffled.
In Hannah's ears the creak of axles mingled with the black-
birds on the marshes behind her back. She tried to shake off the
lethargy which seemed to pull her downward, the craving to lie
down. She jerked her arms and struck a clod with her hoe. She
began to tremble with a lust to throw herself flat on the ground,
to roll on the dry loam, to press her loins against the earth, to
crush the lettuce and red beet-tops. The tears came into her eyes
and her curious face was distorted. She dropped the hoe and strode
into the house, her finger-nails cutting her palms.
The afternoon was troubled by a cloud which swelled into a
twilight full of rushing sound. The pale, ivory-stemmed green
trees threshed together along the horizon. Over a black sky strips
of cloud moved like horses. At seven it rained. Hannah stood by
the back door of the barn looking out over the marshes.
The rain beat the drum of the hollow building with many sticks.
The tragic scraps of meaning, the flakes of order and bits of melody
rose and fell; they aroused the ear and were obliterated.
At intervals the lightning revealed that vast plain, tufted with
bogs, spread with water, the minute trees waving their tops, the
cobalt tamarack swamp, the slippery hills like apples of granite;
a vision ethereal and sharp, but so swift that her maddened eyes
could not hold it. She leaned outward, in a dumb agony, suspended
between flash and flash, which denied her, until the rain from the
roof splashed on her face.
The barren woman stretched like a ewe in labour; she sank,
sobbing, to her knees on the barn floor; she lifted her face where the
disturbed, angular bats fluttered up and down.
The next day a woman knocked at her door. The woman
started at the sight of her abrupt eyes and haggard face; she sat
nervously on the edge of a chair, and asked Hannah to work for
her; she was with child, sick and afraid, and needed help.
The younger woman quailed before Hannah's stolid regard.
"So it's your first one and you're afraid?” she repeated harshly.
Then more kindly, and with a certain condescension, “All right,
I'll help you till you get a girl if you like, but I can't come to stay."


GLENWAY WESCOTT
149
The other rubbed her long, chapped hands along her arms.
"I
should think you'd like it better than bein' here alone. Don't you
get awful lonesome ?"
Hannah winced a little. “Oh, no,” she said.
This gave her a profession, the profession of general help. Who-
ever stopped at her door was in trouble, and seemed to prefer her
cynical temper, her coarse pity and relief, to the unruffled sympathy
of better women. She cared for the sick; was not afraid of scarlet
fever; cured sick animals; shot old horses and those with broken
legs; laid out the dead. The doctors tolerated and finally recom-
mended her. She became the established midwife of the poor.
Her aid, invoked at first in practical difficulties, gradually
widened in scope. Women and girls stopped, often secretly, at the
marsh house for instruction and advice. Nevertheless she remained
somehow conspicuously uncompanioned. She remained at her
father's house; and when her irregular occupations took her away
from it, she hired a neighbour's boy to look after the stock.
This had been acquired at an auction a few miles down the road.
Jule was there and they walked together through the barns, talking
as they paused before cattle uneasy and murmuring in the wooden
stanchions, or he ran a practiced hand down a horse's leg for a
spavin.
The women in hats which elevated willow plumes like horses'
manes stared at Hannah-bareheaded, striding with the men.
She thrust her hands in the pockets of an old grey sweater and
tossed her short hair. The women, clustered around the household
furniture on the ragged June grass under some elms, whispered of
her and her friend.
The auctioneer, his unshaven cheek bulbous with tobacco, stood
on a box and began the sale. He shouted in exalted haste, "What
am I bid what am I bid, somebody start it off somebody start it off!
Six who'll make it seven, six who'll make it seven, seven who'll
make it eight
The cattle and horses were led in one by one. The black bull
stared contemptuously at those who stepped back to give him room.
The men glanced over their shoulders in surprise when Hannah
bid in a loud voice. She bought a cow, twelve hens, and a rooster.
The next day she drove her cow home through the winnowed
June air with a long leafy switch; and carried the chickens in a


150
BAD HAN
gunny sack, six at a time. In its season she took her cow to a
neighbour's bull and each spring had a calf to sell. She made
dandelion wine when the first shoots unknotted in the grass.
Often, as he passed to the mill or store, Jule tied his sleek horses
at her fence. If the day was pleasant they sat on the porch over-
looking the swamp. The blackbirds would be flocking, or triangles
of ducks descend in the wet meadows. She spread a red cloth
on the table and set out her oldest wine and a plate of cookies
spotted with carraway. They talked of the crops, of little Rosalia,
of the gossip of their neighbours. The man to whom she rented
her large fields did not manage well; they discussed his mistakes.
Often they sat for half an hour in silence, under the cucumber
vines, the heat ribbing the air over the wild acres. With red,
heavy fingers she stuffed her pipe and sat smoking, tapping her
foot to a tune she remembered. Jule got up and hurried off,
whistling like a boy.
Instinctively she hid from him the signs of her hopeless solitude;
how dry the bread, a little mound of washed stones, for which she
had exchanged every contact and every
illusion.
In the diversity of her activities the years that there were passed
quietly. A doctor taught her to gather ginseng for the market and
sent her into the swamps to hunt the slender, hairy roots.
She bought traps and set them along the marsh river and its
creeks. She arranged them in a circuit and visited them each
morning, trudging in high boots through the drifts. The sun made
a glitter like fallen sheets of metal. Her opaque breath moved
before her. As morning advanced, the glittering ice dropped from
the bare branches, puncturing the crust. She followed yesterday's
tracks, or if there had been a storm, going more slowly, she made a
new mark on the arid expanse.
She knew the footprint of every wild thing. She found a track
by a fence or stone-pile, staked her trap, and baited it with strong
meat, a dead hen or rooster. The wind ruffled the red feathers
on the shell of snow.
Below her house the river current was delayed and a pond
formed between scarred and dying tamaracks. The musk-rats built
their mounds there, like dung-hills, of dead leaves, reeds, and cat-
tails. Mink and ermine, slowly, as greyhounds, leaped to the
water's edge, and peered in the black stream where it babbled from
the frayed ice.


GLENWAY WESCOTT
151
Excitedly, gulping the strong air, she would approach the known
place. Perhaps the bait would be as she had left it, but frozen stiff.
Or the meat would be gone, the iron jaws sprung. Or there would
be a circle cut in the snow, stained with blood as the captive pulled
at its paw in the saw-toothed trap; in the centre a frantic thing,
hissing, snarling, baring its teeth. Sometimes a skunk gnawed its
own wrist and left the paw behind.
When she was hungry for meat she took her gun and went to
the woods. In every season there were rabbits, grey and fox
squirrels, partridge, and infrequently a fat, young coon. The moss
yielded to her wide feet. She rested on a fallen tree, her strong
hips and breasts shaping to the rigid bark, to the iron limbs. The
carved green leaves swung upon her frayed clothes, her dusky,
wrinkling skin.
She had no ambitions and few amusements. In the earlier years
a man would sometimes stop at the marsh house. They would
be drunk, and Hannah would imagine, for a few hours, a fissure of
light in the dulness of her life. It became gradually dim in her
mind, so thin and fleeting was every satisfaction, why she had
chosen this lonely, difficult life, why she had given up the com-
pany and vices by which ordinary terrors are slightly disguised.
In these promiscuous romances, rough, ragged, and cold, a yearn-
ing always arose which answered these questions at a time when
the answers, and the memories which flanked them Jule's dark
face, his curls clustering over his ears like vines, the cut wheat and
horned moon-roused her to anguish. In the night a brief quaver
of revelry came from her house, little and helpless in the loud sigh
of grasses erect in water, of branches overlaid by branches-the
wide fecundity unused and unbeloved.
She listened simply to these replies of circumstance. The idea
of cleaving as closely as she was permitted to Jule, though some-
times tenebrous, was her one personal idea. As she grew older it
worked itself into the grain of her life, and she existed by it auto-
matically.
She became an old woman, feeding her fowls, pushing a wheel-
barrow of corn for her cow, or resting on her back porch in the
bent, evening sunlight. The tokens of August enclosed her: a
few ribbed pie-pumpkins, a festoon of sweet-corn seed tied by the
husk, black crests of dill like feathers in the yellow air. Her
short grey stiff hair gave to her head a square solidity; her crooked


152
BAD HAN
eye-brows bent over two pits, from which thrust her hard, straight
gaze; her broad cheeks hung from the cheek-bones and were veined
with minute red threads. She smoked a pipe, and the smoke swung
upward and hung in the silence like white peonies.
The sun was stained and thickened toward the horizon. The
little cow's shiny horns curved upward together. On the cropped
lawn the first bogs lay like a pile of melons. Beyond, vast, strange,
and dramatic, spread the marsh, Hannah's companion. Its spotted
pools palpitated; its grasses Aickered and troughed; on the horizon
its narrow, wiry-stemmed trees rose and fell like flails. Flocks of
birds blew over it, their pale breasts turning; the air divided into
bundles of their cries. It required no labour; it held out the lure
and responsibility of no harvest; it obeyed no law. It twisted and
stormed, without repentance; it gave what was taken from it with-
out complaint. Only a tract of wet, waste land, traversed by birds,
striped by rivers, tied by harsh grasses, by trees lightning-scored;
only a kind of legendary unity awaiting interpretation.
A woman hurried up Hannah's lane, a child in her arms. Her
face was formed of concave ovals with a blue shadow at the bottom
of each; her yellow hair was split and pulled over her round head;
her pink mouth reckless and resentful. She almost ran to the
porch where Hannah sat.
“Oh, Hannah can't you help me? I don't know what—"
“Let's see,” Hannah interrupted. “You're Annie McKee, ain't
you ?” She knocked her pipe on her heel.
“Oh, I'm so tired. I don't know what'll become of us. She
sank on the edge of the porch, gasping foolishly; the chalk-white
baby whimpered.
“Now, stop your fussing and talk plain. What's the matter
with you
1 ?”
“Well I'm all alone, and six young ones, and the stock—You
see they've put my man in jail for a month. And my sister can't
come for three days”
"What in God's name for ?"
"For whippin' his horses. Oh, my Gawd he's awful with 'em,
I know. Ted Duncan-Mrs Strane--complained. But what can
I do? My sister can't come yet and—”
"And I suppose you've come to get me,” Hannah grumbled
sternly. "Every damned woman in this township runs to me for


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153
everything. One of 'em's big with child and doesn't know what
to do-Lord knows I wasn't to blame for it—another's baby's got
the croup, another's neighbour's dog has stolen her meat ... and
I'm an old woman. And here I have to run round like a chicken
with its head cut off. I'm tired, I tell you.”
"But what shall I do?" the woman wailed.
“Oh, hush, hush! I'm coming. For how long ?”
"Only three days.”
Hannah scolded calmly to herself as she put on a big coat and
took up her knotty stick behind the stove. As she slammed her
door she said, “We'll have to stop and tell Robins' boy to milk my
cow.'
When she returned home she found a boy and a girl on the porch.
The light lay in soft, close plumes and the sky was like a spray
of aster.
The lovers rose awkwardly.
“Willy Robins said you were coming back to-night and we
thought we'd wait.”
“That's all right,” she said, “but I can't sit around twiddling my
thumbs with you two. I've got a cow to milk."
"Well I guess we can help you, can't we?" the boy said.
“Little enough help you'll be.” The cow made a welcoming
vibration, rolling her egg-shaped, velvet eyes. The boy threw
down some hay from the mow and she trotted in. They sat on a
pile of pale straw, the girl's violet apron a splash of colour in the
swinging ball of lantern-light with a yolk of shadow. While
Hannah milked they talked, shyly and nervously at first, and finally
in a cataract of circumstances, difficulties, sensations, and fears.
To her simple eye nothing was degrading, nothing evil; every-
thing formed a single difficult pure coil-moralless and pure. So
she spoke more plainly and more strongly than other men and
women: the faultless, the prosperous, or the strong.
The young faces were enchanted and flushed. She turned the
cow up the lane, carried her milk to the house, lit a lamp, and they
left her, two moving ovals over the veiled grass. Her eyes some-
times filled with tears.
That night she lay, as she often did, sleepless and unsatisfied at
the edge of sleep; and rose before sunrise and began to pull and
stack the bean-vines. She worked fiercely all day, milked her cow
early, and strode down the corduroy road. Her content was


154
BAD HAN
internal and flat, unbroken by satisfactions or events; but over it
often surged these fits of restlessness in which, as the years passed,
her union with the earth was completed.
This August evening held her like a hand. The lake was cov-
ered with three-cornered scales, and under them floated the straw-
berry bass, marked with little leaves and seeds of fire. Light fell
in great flakes and rose again in flakes to the low, amber sun.
Hannah crouched on logs and stones, and watched the round,
enamelled turtles dry and fade, and swim again. A heron heaved
into the sky, its long, lacquer-coloured legs scoring the green bay.
She walked up the river, jumping from bog to bog, from root to
root where the ground was insubstantial. The inflamed air, the
violent hues aged and faded to a passive, enduring twilight. The
little stream threaded among snowy stones between pools of glass.
The great bitterns retreated up stream, their peaked noses declined
between their hunched shoulders. Hannah followed them and they
jumped squawking into the twilight and took refuge in black,
thick trees. She lay down in the warm, rasping grass, and the
bitterns returned, three and three in military order, turning their
heads together to discover her with a row of eyes like the eyes of
fish.
She rose and wandered on, her bushy grey head vacillating
among
shrubs and branches. The dark, when it came, did not con-
fuse her feet, almost a part of twig and stone. Instinctively she
skirted the dangerous mires, singing to herself tunelessly. On and
on, past midnight, among great abrupt blocks of moonlight which
struck the pools and made the scarred tamaracks glitter like angels
over the pitch-black roots.
She came to a wheat-field and lay down in it and slept, pillow-
ing her head on the ribbed bundles. Solitude in the form of
anguish did not exist now, and the face of her former boy lover
appeared and clung to her like dew on a stone.
Her scrutiny of the earth became a kind of introspection, and
she wandered often all night through the woods and fields. When
the autumn or spring nights were cold and wet, she made her bed in
a barn or under a straw-stack. Once she found a herd of cattle on
the brow of a hill and lay down among them.
As she grew old she withdrew from the daily life of the people.
Some hesitated to interrupt the curious preoccupation in which she


GLENWAY WESCOTT
155
COW.
visibly moved; others she repulsed sternly, saying “I have other
work to do.” Her strength did not seem to lapse, but was spent in
obscure hurryings, upon mysterious errands and appointments.
The old woman was faithful to no tangible thing but her cow. In
the common mind she grew legendary, a mad old object of rags
and dirt, a glance direct as an ax, a mop of iron-grey hair. Her
figure agitated against the sunset in empty lanes, or proclaimed
itself with an abrupt shout from a dark thicket or hollow. One
met her on the morning roads, or found her in her garden: straw
in her hair, an ethereal cube of light in her eyes, a serene, incom-
prehensible smile on her square leather-coloured face.
This expression always brought her neighbours back to the
enigma of her existence—her contacts, her episodes, her memories.
The end of her life threw one lurid illumination upon it, but left
the mass in a compelling and endless mystery.
It was late September in her forty-first year that she returned
somewhat late from Bieler, and hurried to the barn to milk her
The fawn-coloured Jersey, the fifth in succession, waited
beside a trough of black water rayed with violet from the hard,
vacant sky. She murmured and trotted to her manger in the barn.
Hannah took down a lantern from its hook and lit it, and stood
by the half-door. A vague farewell radiance was suspended from
the west like a scarf.
Over the cow, across one end of the barn as a shelf in a cupboard,
was a hay-loft about fifteen feet from the floor. She tossed a
pitchfork into it and, with her lantern in her hand, climbed slowly
up the narrow ladder to throw down hay. She pushed it in great
bundles to the floor. Then she dropped the fork into the pile, took
the lantern from a nail, and started down. She caught her foot
on a loose board at the edge of the loft, and fell.
The lantern cut a great arc in the air; ended, luckily, in dark-
ness and a crash of glass. The little cow shook her stanchion and
uttered a long, resonant sound. Hannah lay unconscious on her
back, her face turned upward, her arms thrown out at her sides,
her legs crumpled horribly under her heavy body.
The night was barred with streaks of consciousness. In them
her agony rose and rose in complicated peaks, one upon another,
from which she fell, insensible, from a jagged height into the dark.
The moon came up, and shone through the door in gigantic slabs.


156
BAD HAN
Toward morning the hungry, neglected cow bellowed constantly.
Once she woke in a cool interlude bare of sensation; she seemed to
float and poise, weightless, endless, sorrowless; she drank the cold
early air as if she were the tube of a flower.
That morning was full of balm like a kind of scattered powder.
Along the twisted roads the goldenrod stooped and nodded; and
a girl ran. She turned down Hannah's lane, blanched and pant-
ing; called her name, leaped up the steps, and rapped on the door;
then ran to the barn. The little cow looked up gratefully.
Instinctively the girl realized Hannah's presence in the barn.
Her terror poured out. “Oh, Hannah, mother has a fit and she's
so sick, and pa's away, and can't you come over! We're so scared
and there's nobody to send for the doctor. She's lying on the floor.
Can't
you come, right away,” The shrill staccato of her own
voice stopped her; her gaze dropped to the floor.
She screamed. Hannah had not been able to move. The face
was iron-grey. The mouth was tight across the bottom of it in an
angle, a broken angle. The mouth moved to a voice, small, alto,
and acute. "Don't scream. Don't run away,” it said. “Your
mother'll be all right. I won't. Go to Robins'. Tell the men to
come.'
Almost too sick to stir, the child crept out of reach of the horrible
bright eyes, and in the yard got command of herself enough to run.
A little crowd poured through the barn-door. It divided, and
recoiled in a wide semicircle around the hurt woman. The people
were too terrified, for a moment, to think or move.
In that moment the amazing voice began again. “Carry me
into the house. I'll faint, but it doesn't matter."
The men found a plank, picked up her heavy body, the legs
inert, and laid her on the plank, carried her slowly through the
yard, and put her on a bed. Then the men stood on the porch in
the sun, muttering to one another.
The house was bare, dirty, disorderly. The women hovered
about the feet of the massive, unconscious woman. At last her
hand moved; one leaned toward her. "Somebody'd better go over
to Mrs Bruter's. She's prob’ly still in her fit. The girl told .
Her eyelids flickered together. She collected visibly all her
strength. “Now do as I tell you. It's high time somebody went
for a doctor if anybody's going. And I want him to stop and tell
O


GLENWAY WESCOTT
157
.
Jule Bier. Tell him to come.” Her eyes seemed to whirl in their
sockets, and by a gigantic effort were focussed on the terrified
neighbour.
Jule leaped up the steps into the kitchen. The women, fussing
around the stove, scattered and withdrew to the porch. He fell
on his knees by the bed. He pressed his lips to her coarse stained
inert hands. She did not look at him, but the tears pushed out on
her wide, iron-grey cheeks.
Young Mrs Robins suddenly detached herself from the cluster
of whispering women on the porch, and set out over the fields.
She twisted through barbed-wire fences, hurried down roads and
lanes, her apron folded over her head like a sunbonnet, until she
came into Selma Bier's summer kitchen. She stood there sullenly,
her round face contracted in a pout of suspicion. “Hannah Madoc
is sick, and Mr Bier has come. I've said I'd nurse her, and I
thought I'd tell you, now he has come I don't want to do it if
it's not all right.”
Selma trembled and turned pale. She turned on the other
woman fiercely. “Go right back, Mrs Robins. Of course it's all
right. Hannah is one of our oldest friends. How dare you! Why
she
may
be dying.”
Mrs Robins returned, ashamed and bewildered. The doctor
came. He sat down in the litter around the bed, very brief and
cold. Nothing could be done; the hip was broken, and the other
leg; the heart was too bad to risk setting them; mortification had
already set in. She turned her face indifferently away from him
until he rose. Then she collected some tragic dying syllables and
said, “Good-bye doc-tor.” He took her hand. He paused in the
thick light of the lawn to give medicine and instructions to Jule.
“A good woman, in her way,” he said.
She lived almost two days. Jule did everything for her: lifted
her, fed her, gave her morphine; never left her bed. Selma drove
over for a moment the second morning to inquire and bring pro-
visions.
That morning Hannah asked to be moved to the door. Jule
and Mrs Robins pushed the bed across the room, and piled up
her pillows so that she could look across the marshes.
The air was heaped up like a metallic wheat. Autumn had
fallen on the wide, harvestless acres; a difficult apparition of


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AS IT LOOKED THEN
sumach, of nosegays of blood-red wild leaves, of berries and rose-
haws, of stripped mahogany and silver twigs.
Jule sat close to Hannah. Their eyes, when they did not run
out over the marsh, were fixed upon each other; his gaze abstract,
as if it gleaned then from her sunken, unlighted face her wisdom
and her peace; the dying woman's wistful and proud, who
entrusted her existence, from that moment, to his thought.
The End
AS IT LOOKED THEN
i
BY EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON
In a sick shade of spruce, moss-webbed, rock-fed,
Where, long unfollowed by sagacious man,
A scrub that once had been a pathway ran
Blindly from nowhere and to nowhere led,
One might as well have been among the dead
As half way there alive; so I began
Like a malingering pioneer to plan
A vain return with one last look ahead.
And it was then that like a spoken word
Where there was none to speak, insensibly
A flash of blue that might have been a bird
Grew soon to the calm wonder of the sea-
Calm as a quiet sky that looked to be
Arching a world where nothing had occurred.



WH
From Living Art
THE LAST HOUR.
BY EDWARD MUNCH





ITALIAN LETTER
Naples
January, 1924
I
WONDER sometimes whether the task of a literary corre-
spondent is not an intrinsically contradictory one. A political
correspondent observes and reports upon the internal movements
and the external attitudes of those noble Leviathans which are
called nations and states. But literature or—if we dare to give
its true name to the object of our interest-poetry, is not a function
of the said noble Leviathans except in the sense in which a rose
is a function of the soil in which rosetrees spread their roots, that
is, in an incommensurable and unexpected fashion. Poetry, like
thought, is a universal value breaking through all the bonds of time
and place by the mere fact of its being.
That involution and exasperation of national and political
values which, for the present, are the clearest consequences of the
war in all European countries, might tempt us to forget or disre-
gard this very simple truth, and the duties of our special allegiance.
And even the solicitude with which some of us are now trying to
foster the establishment of a new international commonwealth of
letters, is a weakness. The ancient respublica, not international,
but truly universal, is still flourishing and will be for all times;
in your own minds, you men of little faith, or never and nowhere!
Listen to our old Machiavelli writing from his villa at San
Casciano, where, after the fall of Florence, he spends his idle days
fowling in the mornings and gambling with his host and four
peasants in the afternoons:
“When evening comes, I return home and go to my study; on the
threshold I pull off my ordinary clothes, full of mud and of dirt,
and put on a royal and courtly apparel; and thus becomingly
attired, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, being
very lovingly received by them, I feed upon that food which solum
is mine, and which I was born for."
Where beauty and truth are concerned, a national, or even a


160
ITALIAN LETTER
temporal, qualification is but one way of saying that in a given
work of art, in a given thought, something has not been resolved
into an aesthetic or metaphysical value, and is still a purely
sensuous, natural, unassimilated element. But a literary cor-
respondent is supposed to keep within certain arbitrary limits which
cut violently through the most delicate tissues of his literary con-
sciousness. The writers who appeal to him, and whom he may
call to collaborate in the development of that consciousness, are
not necessarily, at any given moment, either those of his own coun-
try or of his own time. During these months of silence, for one
instance, I have been steering my course towards the ages of
Aeschylus and Petronius, and the countries of Proust and Valéry,
of Borchardt and Hofmannsthal.
Yet all these critical scruples shall not induce me to follow the
example of my eminent confrères, the former correspondents from
Paris and from London. The reader who has not entirely for-
gotten my first two letters, will remember that they dealt sub-
stantially with something that is much more "of the soil” than
either poetry or thought: with religious and moral problems.
Religion and morality are in a sense the soil itself of poetry and
thought: the obscure and temporal workings of the will and the
passions before they reach that clarity of expression which
transcends time. It is through this relationship that the concept of
nationality finds its way into the history and criticism of literature;
and it is because of this relationship that every national history of
literature becomes, when not a mere repertory, the religious and
moral history of a nation. This is most obviously the case for
such books as Taine's English Literature; but even that master-
piece of its kind, De Sanctis' History of Italian Literature, written
by a man who knew what poetry is, is not the literary, but the gen-
eral spiritual history of the Italian people.
It is possible, however, to proceed a little further in the analysis
of this relationship. There are certain facts which are not strictly
literary, in the sense of concerning the actual creation of beauty
and truth, and which yet have a closer connexion with literary
facts than the wider fields of national religion and morality.
Schools, tendencies, movements, theories, prejudices, tastes—the
whole atmosphere of literary production—are still but moral or
economic facts which the literary critic cannot help taking into


RAFFAELLO PICCOLI
161
account, together with such other material elements as language,
rhythm, and technique when regarded as the passive antecedents
of aesthetic creation, and not in the moment of their active realiza-
tion. It is in regard to such classes of facts that we can talk of
national developments in literature, and that the present experi-
ence of one nation may be of interest to men of letters in other
countries. Though in our days literary schools and movements do
frequently overlap national frontiers, yet they may appear under
different aspects and with variable accelerations according to the
quality of the social and intellectual environment; and there are
cases in which we may foretell with sufficient certainty what direc-
tion they will take in the future in one country, by examining
their actual course in another.
This is no mere apology, however. It is an informal way of
stating some principles of criticism which are to be kept in mind
by any one who wishes to understand the rapid evolution of literary
tastes and tendencies in Italy. And it is a programme for the
future: we are now going through an essentially critical and
transitionary stage, and until the breaking of a new dawn there
will be hardly any occasion to consider the majority of our modern
writers otherwise than as illustrations of certain more or less gen-
eral literary fashions and moods.
The source of the main stream of critical thought in Italy to-day
is in Croce's Aesthetics, and more remotely in De Sanctis and Vico.
I have given elsewhere an exposition of Croce's philosophy together
with some indications regarding his predecessors, and I shall not
attempt to summarize my own summary. But Croce's own activity
as a literary critic has received much less attention abroad than his
general philosophic work, and certainly much less than it actually
deserves. This neglect had some excuse as long as Croce confined
himself to the study of writers many of whom might appear as
merely provincial to non-Italians, as in his four volumes of essays,
Letteratura della Nuova Italia; though even this vast collection of
critical evaluations of Italian writers of the last fifty or sixty years
possesses a wide literary appeal, because each one of these writers
was used by Croce as a pretext for the elaboration of his aesthetic
concepts. It is easy to follow in these volumes, in a succession of
individual critical problems, that same evolution of thought which


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is apparent to any one who compares his first Estetica of 1902
with his Nuovi Saggi di Estetica published in 1920.
The
unphilosophical literatus, and especially the Puritan (or his twin
brother, the Antipuritan) who is scandalized by Croce's alleged
destruction of critical standards, would find in these essays a very
safe propaedeutic to literary criticism, and an example of the con-
stant substitution of the living aesthetic standard for the fictitious
standards of rhetorical and moralistic (or immoralistic) criti-
cism. Moreover, such special problems as those offered by the
poetry of D'Annunzio or of Pascoli, not to speak of others, have
a very close resemblance with problems regarding the interpreta-
tion of modern writers of other countries: Swinburne or Claudel,
Péguy or Kipling.
Croce's critical work during the last six or seven years, on the
other hand, affords no excuse for ignorance. His essays on Ariosto,
Shakespeare, and Corneille, his books on Goethe' and Dante, and
now these notes on modern European literature, collected under
the very significant title, Poesia e Non Poesia, are certainly not
provincial even for the most exacting of literary connoisseurs. The
critic is now in the full, pacific possession of his method, and with
very few exceptions (as in the Introduction to the Essay on
Shakespeare, which deals with the distinction between practical
and poetical personality, that is, with one of the most dangerous
stumbling-blocks of criticism) he is no longer preoccupied with
purely theoretical problems. He goes straight to the core of the
lyrical world of the individual writers, and his only intent is the
essential one of severing that which is poetry from that which is
non-poetry, by defining the precise limits and characters of the
individual inspiration, and by reducing to the spheres to which
they belong—of sensuous or practical or logical life, and of
unrealized, merely rhetorical, literary intentions—all those residua
which, even in the greatest and purest of poets, cloud the vision
of the lyrical centre.
It is impossible to give an account of Croce's last book by repro-
ducing in an abbreviated and attenuated form the substance of
twenty-five critical essays, ranging from Alfieri to Carducci, from
Schiller to Ibsen, from Stendhal to Zola. And these pages are so
concise and so closely knit that any quotation would be little less
1 GOETHE. By Benedetto Croce. 12mo. 208 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $2.75.


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163
than a violation. I close the book, and allow this little crowd of
great spirits, who have successively occupied the field of my vision, ,
each of them revealing the secret of his strength and of his weak-
ness, to recede into the depth and shadow of their Elysian grove.
Their absence creates an ideal space which is instantly filled, as if
by a new presence, by the revelation of the light which gives a
common meaning to this procession of contrasting images.
Every book of criticism is a portrait of its author as much as a
portrait of the author or authors which it studies. Every critical
essay is an equation between its subject and its object: though in
these times of wild and confident impressionism, very often the
subject exhibits itself with such vehemence as to obliterate entirely
that which is no longer an object, but a mere pretext. But Croce's
criticism, while conscious of the necessary bounds of a rational
subjectivity, becomes objective through the maturity of his
aesthetic thought, through the catholicity of his culture, and
through the exercise of that rarely mentioned, and still more rarely
practised, critical virtue, humility. When you listen to him, you
can't help feeling cordially ashamed for all those minor, and yet
clamorous, critics, whose business it is to reduce every work of art
to a symptom of a more or less concealed morbidity in the artist:
who revel in the dissection of diseased organs, and in the descrip-
tion of pathological functions, as if the flower of this our mortal
life could not grow anywhere but on the hot-beds of corruption
and decay. A profound moral sympathy, a wide human tolerance
is at work here; but the consciousness also that art, whatever the
torments, the weaknesses, the miseries of the artist, is not a torment,
but a liberation, not weakness, but strength, not misery, but sanity.
It has been said of Croce that he is essentially a moralist; it
would be perhaps more precise to call him an historian, in the most
solemn acceptation of the word. His whole philosophy proceeds
from meditations on the thinking and writing of history, and tends
more and more towards the condition of history. But of history the
central problem is the moral life of man; and it is by a passionate
desire to see the moral principle in its absolute purity that he was
led to those dissociations of art and morality, of morality and
economics or politics, which are the most alarming features of his
thought for the simple-minded. Dissociations which are dialectic
and not empyrical ones, and which therefore, far from allowing


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any sphere of human activity to escape the sanction of the moral
principle, establish it in the fulness of its rights within the proper
limits of each of them, identifying the value of every particular
action with the reality of the action itself. The unity which has
been dialectically negated restores itself, in a perpetual circle,
every time that the spirit of man, pouring its whole self in one of
its essential forms, affirms its own creative power, and makes his-
tory. The poet is not subservient to the prophet or to the legisla-
tor, but is, as Shelley knew, a prophet and a legislator in his own
right, and by virtue of his special vocation.
This critical attitude which regards poetry as one of the
fundamental "Humanities," is a much more truly classical one
than that which is represented by some recent revivals of
Aristotelian canons and rhetorical categories. The latter is closely
associated with a movement which has made its appearance prac-
tically in every European country as one of the many symptoms
of the spiritual exhaustion caused by the war, and which its own
advocates define as a "return to classicism.” In Italy the small
band of writers who edited during the last four years the Roman
magazine, La Ronda, fall under this head. All such movements,
however, are inevitably destined to issue not in a new classicism,
but in something infinitely weaker and paler, to which we shall not
deny the pedantic name of neo-classicism. The distinction is an
obvious one: the birth of a new classicism implies the presence of
an original energy finding its necessary expression in a form that
owes its rigid perfection to the spirit which creates it from within;
but in our latest neo-classicism we are unable to see anything more
than the painful efforts of an insufficient inspiration, no longer
deluded and vicariously satisfied by the formal anarchy of post-
impressionism, and borrowing from an external model a dignity of
form which should help it to conceal its hopeless poverty. The
writers of La Ronda found their model in Leopardi, who was to
them not the truly great and classical and therefore inimitable poet
that he is when at his best, but a kind of literary pedagogue and
expert, a craftsman skilled in the secrets of a lost tradition. They
mistook the “art of writing” for poetry, the shadow for the sub-
stance. Both the group and the magazine are now dead, of sheer
inanition, and it is to be hoped that this death will liberate at


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least one or two real writers (Baldini, Cecchi) who seemed to be
very ill at ease among the rest, and whom we shall probably meet
again in one of our future letters.
Let us now return to our distinction which, though obvious in
the field of creative literature, may still offer some difficulty
in regard to criticism. In this field the classical ideal is too
often linked in our mind not with the true aesthetic thought of
the ancients, but with the late developments of their poetics, that
is, with a body of practical rules and a system of classification
which are mere by-products of that thought. Plato's "mad-
ness," Aristotle's "mimesis” are still living truths, being the first
discoveries out of which all subsequent aesthetics has evolved;
but the Greco-Roman and Renaissance poetics have only an
archaeological value for us. A new poetics, which is no longer a
preceptive, but a purely interpretative science, a new body of con-
cepts adequate to the needs of the new criticism, has been actually
growing during the last century or so (as Croce himself pointed out
not long ago in a short paper, Per una Poetica Moderna) in the
actual practice of literary and artistic criticism. A study of the
works of the great critics, from Schlegel to Coleridge, from Sainte
Beuve to De Sanctis, from Berenson to Croce, would reveal the
progressive abandonment of the old instruments, and the creation
of new ones, which are the true modern literary genres, infinitely
more delicate and flexible than the ancient ones. These new con-
cepts Croce divides into two classes, of valuation and of qualifica-
tion, corresponding to the two moments of every critical inquiry,
in the first of which we ask whether a given work is poetry, and
in the second, what poetry it is. The answer to the first question,
with the only exception of the concept of classical poetry, or poetry
pure and simple ("the poetry of the great poets of all times, or of
those portions of their works which are great") admits only a series
of purely negative concepts, such as romantic, impressionistic,
intellectualistic, didactic, sociological, oratorical, and so on; that
is, all the possible definitions of that which is non-poetry. The
second class of genres constitutes a psychology of the types of
poetic creation, which are so numerous and so variable that I shall
leave the reader to compile his own list for himself.
The elaboration of this new poetics is in a sense a dangerous
process, because the new concepts will slowly but inevitably tend


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to assimilate themselves to the "overdated ceremonies” of the old
pedants. But it will clear the ground of much unintelligent opposi-
tion to the new criticism, by allowing the pedants of to-day to
reduce it in a form sufficiently accessible to their understanding.
The chief problem which confronts this current of critical
thought is not however that of making new adepts among the
critics themselves: there has probably never been so much criticism
in Italy, nor of such consistently fine quality. Creative literature,
on the other hand, with very few exceptions, seems to be the work
of men belonging to another generation, and to a different, and
vastly inferior, culture. Some elements of the higher culture, of
the deeper understanding, succeed in reaching now and then the
lower sphere, in which they appear, however, as in the case of
Pirandello, as grotesque and purely mechanical deformations. But
on the whole the antinomy between the two spheres is radical and
absolute.
We do not believe that the critic, or the philosopher, makes the
poet. In a general way, the reverse is a more probable and more
frequent process. Yet all true poetry is of its own time in the
sense that it can't help reflecting its essential states of mind and
spiritual problems. And in modern times at least, every new
poetical season has been heralded in by a period of critical satura-
tion-every new song has been preceded by a pause of meditative
silence.
There are many signs in the skies from which we might
tentatively infer that Italy is on the verge of a new birth of poetry. .
None so clear as the enthusiastic reception that the first book of a
man almost unknown until a few months ago has been given espe-
cially by the very young, who hail it as the literary gospel of their
own generation. Francesco Flora's Dal Romanticismo al Futurismo
is a very unusual book, being at the same time a kind of vast, and
even prolix “last judgement” of all modern Italian literature, and
the intimate confession of a passionate literary experience. Its
author is not a disinterested, contemplative critic: he is a poet who
is striving to find his own way. And the few who have read his
privately printed Immortalità (a long lyrical poem revealing a
thoughtful and mature poetical personality) know that he has
either found it already, or is very near finding it.


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Flora's origins are futuristic, and his book is on one side a con-
demnation, and on the other an exaltation of Futurism. To him,
Futurism is not only the widely advertised literary and artistic
inovement which owed its success to the brilliant and energetic
leadership of Marinetti; not only, as others prefer to regard it, a
general tendency of our moral and social life before the war; but
the last incarnation, both literary and moral, of Romanticism. Its
central doctrine is the characteristically romantic identification of
art and life; its most representative hero, Rimbaud. With a great
wealth of illustration and analysis, Flora pursues this negative
aspect of Futurism through the intricate meanderings of modern
literary, artistic, and musical production, whether avowedly or
unconsciously futuristic. But that same identification, that confu-
sion of aesthetics with ethics, which is fatal to art, has also a
positive aspect: it leads to the gradual dissolution of all traditional
forms, through a practical and technical criticism which does not
issue, however, as the theoretical criticism of modern aesthetics
does, in a new and deeper conception of art and poetry, but only
in the artificial and arbitrary substitution of new canons, new
forms, new “arts,” in the place of the old and supposedly out-
worn ones. Flora is not blind to the fact that all this feverish
activity has not produced a single great poem or symphony; its
value resides for him in its destructive function. But to the anti-
cultural, anti-philosophic direction which is the source of the con-
structive weakness of Futurism, he opposes an almost religious
spirit of intellectual discipline which draws its inspiration from an
idealistic, and therefore truly humanistic, vision of history and
of art.
BE
In Flora's book a whole cycle of bewildering aesthetic experi-
ments, more curious than fruitful, is digested, justified, and con-
cluded. Henceforward, it will become harder and harder for the
poet or the artist to claim the privilege of ignorance and stupidity;
but on the other hand no critic will have a right to compel him to
look at the world through his own eye-glasses. If it is true that
the world is a perpetual spiritual creation, then everything has to
perpetually re-created, and there is no dawn that is not a new
1
be
dawn.
RAFFAELLO PICCOLI


RUSSIAN LETTER
December, 1923
Tato
WO years ago it looked as though all artistic and poetic
activity had been stifled beneath the Bolshevik régime, and
as though the remaining Russian writers, with a very few excep-
tions, would go into voluntary exile. But what was true two
years ago is true no longer. Conditions are such to-day that one
could speak of two Russian literatures, each quite sharply
differentiated from the other: one in dispersion abroad, and one
in Soviet Russia. The former is represented by the writers who
fled to other countries during and after the revolution; the latter-
as with many other things among the ruins of the Russian empire-
is in the process of becoming.
The difference between these two literatures does not lie, as one
might readily assume, in matters of politics: not all the poets active
in Soviet Russia are Communists, nor do all those abroad stand in
irreconcilable opposition to Bolshevism. The difference is much
deeper, and is determined by the difference of the soil out of which
each grows and draws its sap. While the literature arising outside
of Russia in recent years continues and develops the pre-revolu-
tionary traditions, the literature which has grown on the home soil
turned up by the plough of revolution has entirely new char-
acteristics and has hardly anything but the language in common
with the other. We shall begin with the former, as it is the older.
The Russian authors and savants who fled from Russia during
the terrors of the first years of revolution soon spread over the
whole of Europe, and Russian publishing houses and periodicals
rapidly arose: in Berlin, Paris, Prague, Stockholm, Sophia, even
in America and China. But gradually a new centre of Russia's
extra-territorial intellectuals crystallized in Berlin, which is now
known even in the mother country as the "third capital of Russia”
(along with Petrograd and Moscow). Gradually the representa-
tives of Russian literature, art, and science who were originally
scattered throughout Europe have, with a few exceptions, collected
in Berlin; and they were automatically joined by those who fled or


ALEXANDER ELIASBERG
169
were turned out of Russia later on. The number of Russian pub-
lishing houses in Berlin is already over fifty. Of course, the
reasons for the concentration of so many Russian poets and
savants in the capital of Germany is partially of an economic
nature; but a much greater factor seems to be the present political
transitions of both countries. The Russian publishing houses in
Paris have dropped to one, and there are only four well-known
Russian writers still in France: Merezhkovski, Gippius, Balmont,
and Bunin.
Dmitri Merezhkovski, who succeeded in escaping from Petrograd
in 1920, settled in Paris with his wife Zinaïda Gippius, and soon
began an intensely active campaign of publicity against Bolshe-
vism, to which he is most grimly opposed. In numerous magazine
articles and “open letters," and in his polemical work, The Realm
of the Antichrist, which he issued in collaboration with Zinaïda
Gippius and others, and which is filled with an honest conviction,
but contains many deplorable aberrations (as for instance, the
unfounded attacks on Gorki) he tried to arouse the people of
Europe against the "Antichrist" which is Bolshevism. As he
failed in this, he became convinced that the Western Europeans
also had lost Christ: the poet and thinker withdrew from the God-
less present into the grey, god-filled past, devoting himself to the
study of the religions of ancient Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, Canaan,
and attempting to trace in them the spirit of Christ which the
peoples of antiquity, he claims, had anticipated, but which is
obscured in the present. Mysteries of the East, a patient work
planned to cover several volumes, is appearing as the fruits of
this study. The treatment is not consecutive, systematic, and
scholarly, but is a loose array of selections from documents on the
history of religion, mingled with quotations from Dostoevsky,
Rosanov, and others, and with occasional statements and beliefs
of the author himself which are often surprisingly profound. This
work, which is engrossing throughout, and is permeated with a deep
faith, seems to me the crowning of Merezhkovski's peculiar
religious system. Zinaïda Gippius, who took part in her husband's
anti-Bolshevik campaigns, has published a new volume of poems
some of which, written in voluntary exile, may be said to surpass
in beauty even the earlier works of this great lyrist. Konstantin
Balmont has issued several new books of verse and his first prose


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RUSSIAN LETTER
work, a novel. In the poems there are still a few arresting lines,
but all the rest, including the novel, is insignificant; and the poet
who was celebrated twenty years ago as the greatest Russian lyrist
cannot even command attention to-day. Ivan Bunin, the outstand-
ing continuator of the classical Russian tradition of story-writing,
lives like the others in an implacable, if silent, opposition to every-
thing that goes by the name of Russia to-day; he has written only
a few new stories and poems, every one of which is a gem.
At this point should be mentioned the name of a new writer
who made his first reputation abroad: Georgi Grebenshikov. He
is a born story-teller, but is distinguished from the others by a new
note: he comes from Siberia, belongs to a hardier and more
untouched stock; and every line of his breathes the pure air
peculiar to the boundless forests and steppes of Russian Asia. He
has written a number of stories, and a novel containing uncom-
monly interesting material—the Churayevs, a chronicle of a
Siberian family.
All the remaining writers who fled or were driven out of Russia
have settled in Berlin, the "third capital” of Russia, headed by
the Nestor of the Russian moderns, Nikolai Minski, who will
soon be in his sixties. Maxim Gorki is also living in Germany
now; he produces very little, and only now and then releases bits
of his reminiscences and diaries, which are among the most valuable
things he has written. Aleksei Remizov is displaying an unusually
fertile activity on German soil. Immediately after his fight he
published (1921) a little volume, Russia in Flames, which begins
with a stirring Elegy on the Russian Land. Of his numerous later
works we shall name Russia in Type, a collection of curious glosses
to all sorts of printed and manuscript records in the possession of
the author—a stylistic masterpiece of the first rank—and delight-
ful paraphrases of Russian tales and legends. With the appear-
ance of his novel, The Road to Calvary, in Berlin in 1922, Alexey
Tolstoy steps forth as a mature master. The novel forms the first
part of a projected trilogy, in which the author has set himself a
vast ambition: just as his great namesake gives in War and Peace
a colossal picture of the times of the Napoleonic campaigns, Alexey
Tolstoy is attempting to paint a panorama of the recent years
of war and revolution in Russia, while this serves also as back-
ground for the life history of a Petrograd family—and it must be


ALEXANDER ELIASBERG
171
admitted that he has mastered his task brilliantly. We should not
leave unmentioned an intimate book which appeared at the same
time: Nikita's Childhood, a modern counterpart to the elder
Tolstoy's Childhood, Boyhood, Youth. Alexey Tolstoy's newest
work is the fantastic novel Aëlita. The plot is laid on the planet
Mars and in Bolshevik Petrograd. The distinction from other
Mars novels lies in the fact that the heroes are Russians who
attempt to start a Bolshevik uprising on Mars, and the legend of
sunken Atlantis is brought in with the greatest ingenuity, while
the whole is accompanied by a delicate love melody. Andrei
Byely, who has also come to Berlin, is at work on an auto-
biographical "epic,” and at the same time he is publishing his
extraordinarily important Reminiscences of Blok. This latter
work is much more than its title would indicate: although Blok
really does form the pivot, it deals with the development of the
entire Russian modern movement in the first decade of the
twentieth century, and it contains portraits of the first Russian
“decadents” (particularly Merezhkovski and his wife) and of
other outstanding personalities of the times (for instance, Vladimir
Soloviov) which are so life-like that only a great artist and
creator could have done them. We shall pass over various second-
rate poets who are living in Berlin, and shall give one more
name—it was not entirely unknown before the war, but it first
became prominent abroad, in Berlin. It is Ilya Ehrenburg.
Ilya Ehrenburg, born at Moscow in 1891, at eighteen came as
a political refugee to Paris, where his first volume of poetry
appeared. In this there was a note formerly unfamiliar to Russian
poetry: Ehrenburg had fallen under the spell of the French poet
Francis Jammes, and also took on a bit of his literary Catholicism.
His enthusiasm went so far that he, a Jew by birth, was about
to become a Catholic and enter a Benedictine monastery. At the
start of the last revolution he returned to Russia and joined eagerly
in the Communist movement. But as pure Communism began to
degenerate into Bolshevism and was leading to the same grotesque
results which it had originally combatted in capitalism, Ehren-
burg left Russia, where he had previously issued a volume of
poetry, and retired in disillusionment to Berlin. Here a list of
books by him appeared in quick succession, and he was suddenly
famous. His most significant work is the monumental satire, The


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RUSSIAN LETTER
Unusual Adventures of Julio Jurenito and his Disciples (a French-
man, a German, an American, a Russian, an Italian, the author
Ehrenburg himself, and a little Senegalese negro) in the Days of
Peace, War, and Revolution in Paris, Rome, Moscow, et cetera.
The hero of this satire on the world events of the last ten years,
the Mexican adventurer Jurenito, comes to Europe shortly before
the World War, secures his seven disciples, and unfolds a set of
feverish and secret activities which lead to the well-known develop-
ments following August 1, 1914. With a scepticism surpassing
that of an Anatole France, all the blossoms of modern European
and American culture capitalism and Bolshevism, militarism and
pacifism, nationalism and socialism, Church and State—are picked
apart, and not a single one of the nations is spared. With the
exception of the uncorrupted little negro, the German comes out
best: he is at least thoroughly and unselfishly devoted to his cause.
The work aroused much discussion, and after its appearance was
translated into several languages. Besides the Jurenito, Ehren-
burg published several volumes of short stories, which are filled
with the same spirit of scepticism. As to style and technique,
although he lives abroad he belongs to the new school which is
active in Soviet Russia and which we shall soon discuss.
Of the more important poets remaining in Russia only Valerii
Briussov has officially entered the camp of the Bolsheviks. Before
me lies his volume of poems which appeared in 1919 under the
modest title, Experiments. It is in reality a text-book of versifica-
tion, and the poems are invented purely as illustrations for count-
less rhythmic and metrical possibilities. Some of them are truly
astonishing. Sologub, Ivanov, and Kusmin are in Russia involun-
tarily. Sologub published a new novel, The Snake-Charmer.
Here the "snake's nest” is a morally degenerate capitalist fam-
ily; the charmer is a working girl Vera, trained in the principles
of Marxism. Artistically this novel signals the end of the great
poet Sologub. I have read some touching and melancholy Winter
Sonnets by Vyacheslav Ivanov, who is living in ill health some-
where in the Caucasus. During the war Kusmin produced an
enormous number of short stories and novels which showed a fall-
ing off in quality; later, like all the others, he was condemned to
silence during the first years of Communism, but he has recently
begun publishing verses of great dexterity. Here and there he


ALEXANDER ELIASBERG
173
sounds futurist notes which are not meant in complete seriousness,
but which form a piquant accompaniment to his former consciously
old-fashioned music (Mozart, Rossini).
In the first years of the strict Communist régime all poets
remaining in Russia (with the exception of the officially recognized
futurists, whom we are still to discuss) were condemned to silence.
All literary reviews were suspended, all publishing houses and
presses "socialized” and for the most part also suspended; and the
censorship, which far surpassed that of the Czarist times in
stringency, would not let anything pass through the press which
did not directly serve as Bolshevik propaganda. The lot of the
poets in these hard times is told with beautiful humour by Mikhail
Kusmin in a poem (1922) called The Commission, in which he
asks a "wanderer” who is going to Berlin to tell a certain blonde
Tamara:
... that we are not yet dead but hardened rather
And soon will turn to saints;
We have neither food nor drink nor shoes
And are living on spiritual nourishment.
That we are doing a wonderful business;
Selling everything and buying nothing,
Looking up into the cheerful spring sky
And thinking of our distant friends.
Whether our hearts are weary,
Whether our hands are lamed,
These things shall be learned from our new books,
If ever they appear.
.
.
In the meantime conditions have changed after the failure of
Communism and the return to so-called free trade, that is, the
return to the capitalist order; a great number of public enterprises
began again, and the appearance of works of a purely literary
nature serving the needs of the bourgeoisie was gradually per-
mitted. And now it became evident that not only had the poets
already mentioned written new works in the meantime which were
simply waiting for publication, but also a whole array of previ-
ously unknown or little known poets had matured. These young
people, who had come through all the horrors of war, revolution,


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and the first period of Bolshevism, and whose talents had developed
under the most unfavourable conditions, represent the newest
Russian literature grown on Russian soil; it is as strongly
differentiated from the previous literature as new Russia is from
the old. The most prominent earmarks of this new literature rest
in part on purely exterior circumstances; the following probably
figure among the most important. When the publication of all
works of belles-lettres was permitted again, paper was at first very
rare (as was previously manuscript paper) and the space in the
few periodicals was limited; this forced the writers into the most
extreme brevity, and resulted in the peculiar telegraphic style of
the newest narrative art. Everything which was in the least dis-
pensable was left out; every word had to be clear and essential
in the way that a steel beam is essential in the construction of
a building. Among other things all psychology was looked upon as
dispensable; and so this most important property of classical
Russian literature suddenly dropped away. In the barest and most
precise words only the naked facts are detailed; everything is as
hard and ascetic as all of life in a Communist state; and the con-
struction of the story, unobscured by psychological refinements and
detail-painting, stands out as bare as the steel frame-work in a
modern factory building. It can even be said that between present-
day Russian literature and that of yesterday the same external
difference exists as between a modern American railroad bridge and
a baroque palace.
Along with economy in the use of means of expression and the
renouncing of the psychological, there is a third prominent element
in the newest Russian literature: the strong emphasis on subject-
matter. The poet creates exclusively out of the reality that sur-
rounds him, and consequently the content of his stories is just as
unusual and enormous as this: cannibalism, murder, violation, fear
of hell, and blood, whole seas of blood. The dry circumstantiality
and the laconic style make the horrible seem even more horrible,
and lend the sketches an unusual power of conviction. It is to be
emphasized that this whole literature lacks every tendency to com-
plain or to justify; a poet describes reality as it presents itself to
him, without any additional purpose, and is concerned only with
giving as perfect and as terse a construction as is possible to the
whole. This is the new realism; it shows signs of breaking out in


ALEXANDER ELIASBERG
175
the modern plastic arts also; and it has an element of strangeness.
In Petrograd the new story writers have organized a group and
call themselves the Serapionovy Brothers. Yet with E. T. W. Hoff-
man they have only strangeness in common, although with them
this is not dreamed, but looked upon with calm eyes. The most
significant of the Serapionovy Brothers, Vsevolod Ivanov, usually
describes the terrors of the civil war in Siberia, as in his story
Armoured Train No. 14-69. Another short story, Empty Arabia,
deals with peasants who, driven by the famine of the year 1922,
and led by an insane old man, are moving to a fantastic promised
land and are dying on the way like flies. There is a peasant among
them who is so strong and fat in spite of hunger that he arouses
suspicion that he has concealed provisions somewhere. In the
night the others steal up to him, and while he sleeps they feel him
as they would a fattened animal to see if it were ready for
slaughter. In the story The Child, he tells how Bolshevist
insurgents in Siberia clubbed a White officer and his wife and
appropriated their child. In order to keep this child alive on the
way they steal a Kirghiz woman with a nursing baby and make
her wet-nurse for the officer's child. After some time they become
suspicious that the Kirghiz woman is giving her own child prefer-
ence; they find out by weighing that the White child is really
lighter, and they take the Kirghiz child in a sack into the steppes.
The White child flourishes, and the people now have their
untroubled joy in it and its wet-nurse. All of Ivanov's other
works are just as dismal—which is also true of another brother,
Nikolai Nikitin, who is identical with him and who describes by
preference the terrors of the revolution in the provinces and in the
country. Among the members of this circle Konstantin Fedin and
Mikhail Sostchenko should also be mentioned. They too are
hard to distinguish from the ones already named, as the Serap-
ionovy Brothers form a kind of academy with established traditions.
Of the many new prose writers belonging to no school or
academy we shall name only the most interesting of all, Boris
Pilnyak. His development is not yet quite determined, but it justi-
fies our highest expectations. Like the other young Russian story
writers, he describes reality; yet without the dry circumstantiality
of the Serapionovy Brothers, as he sees with an expressionistic eye.
.
At times his style is reminiscent of Remizov, although it is of great


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originality; and one can readily say that of all the poets of this
generation Pilnyak's work is the most personal. He also lacks the
cool objectivity of the Serapionovy Brothers, being completely
permeated with the spirit of Soviet Russia; although it should not
be said that he writes problem stories. His palette is richer in
colours; and in the steel framework of his constructions there are
many scattered elements of the baroque. But first of all he is, in
opposition to the new Petrograd "academy," a man who is search-
ing and is in ferment. He also likes to describe revolution and
civil war in the villages and the provinces; and one has the impres-
sion that he has touched on the peculiar tone and rhythm of the
Russian revolution better than any one else. In his best work, The
Naked Year, he places the old crumbling passive Russia over
against the new young active and unsentimental Russia, and his
sympathies belong to the latter, although he is certainly not a
Communist. It is not necessary to be one in order to prefer the
living to the dead. We shall also mention that in all his works
the erotic plays a great rôle: naturally, it is not the tender love-
hunger of Turgenev's heroes, but the sinister and strongly animal
eroticism of the new men, whom he characterizes in the follow-
ing passage:
“Men hard as leather, in leather jackets, all of the same stature,
all powerful, all handsome devils with curly hair tumbling from
under their caps and about their necks. Each has a maximum of
will—will and daring—in his hide-bound jawbone, in the creases
about the corners of his mouth, in the movements of his arms,
which are nearly always swinging. The pick of the free and easy
Russian people. That they wear leather jackets is good: thus
they are protected against the lemonade of psychology. We have
foreseen that, we know it, we want it, and so! Further, not a
one of them has read Marx.''
The lyric has held the same important place in modern Russia
which it always held in Russian literature. Several years before
the war futurist influences had already become noticeable; and
among the futurists there was one not insignificant lyrist-Igor
Severyanin. He called himself Ego-Futurist; and, departing from
Balmont, he wrote very musical and relatively tame verses. The


ALEXANDER ELIASBERG
177
only "futuristic” elements in them were new word-formations
which were quite tame and generally understandable. But as they
were not constructed in the spirit of the Russian language, they
are completely unfitted for life, and signify a vitiation rather than
a perfecting of the language. Others wrote poems consisting of
senseless words, syllables, and even letters, and having not the
least to do with art. As far back as that, Merezhkovski had seen
in futurism a menace, or rather the symptoms of an approaching
catastrophe. And when this catastrophe broke, futurists supported
by the Bolshevik authorities in power enjoyed for some time unre-
stricted control. The best known representatives of this official
poetry are Valdimir Mayakovski, Anatolii Mariengof, and Wa-
dim Shershenevich. Mayakovski, who by now passes as the
“classicist” of futurism, is the only really gifted writer among
them. Their poetry, in both form and content, signifies the end of
all art. Every law of prosody is dispensed with as a matter of
course. A rhythm, even a free one, is no longer considered. The
vocabulary (as these poets themselves boast) is derived from the
street, and even from articles on abortion. The content is
blasphemy. Streams of stinking hogwash are poured not only over
the political opponents of the Soviet state, but also over the
bourgeoisie and the priests, and even the Saviour and His Mother.
Pushkin and Raphael are stood up to the wall and shot. All
attempts to enforce Futurist literature upon the subjects of the
Soviet government proved just as ineffectual as many other
Bolshevist experiments. The proletarian masses who were to be
inoculated with this kind of art were the first to protest against
it, and to demand a more digestible fare. Today the futurist
lyric is cultivated only in a few clubs and cafés in Moscow and
Petrograd.
Besides the futurists, writers of peasant and proletarian origin
were also protected by the Soviet authorities, and among these
there are a few real talents. We shall mention first Sergei Yesenin,
who was born in Central Russia in 1895. The son of a peasant,
he spent his boyhood as a true country-boy in a village. Yet it
was not intended that he should become a peasant, but a village
school teacher; he was sent to a religious school. Instead of becom-
ing a teacher, he very rapidly grew famous as a poet. His uncom-
monly powerful and picturesque poems have an outward re-


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RUSSIAN LETTER
semblance to the visions of Ezekiel or the Revelations of John.
But the content is blasphemous, or at least heretical. The prophet
(who is doubtless meant for Yesenin) promises the Russ Land a
new heaven and a new God. In places he reaches the persuasion
and the impetus of the Old Testament writers. Nikolai Klyuyev
also comes from the peasantry. He is famous and over-rated in
Soviet Russia for his Cabin Songs, but his poems which were pub-
lished before the war (with their suggestion of Nekrassov) seem
to me much more significant. As to the so-called "proletarian"
poets, several of them are said not to be genuine proletarians,
but intellectuals of college training who opportunistically mask
as proletarians. Vassilii Kasin is of genuine proletarian origin (by
trade a roofer); he is one of the most interesting young Russian
lyrists. His poems are unusually interesting rhythmically, and
while they betray a thorough study of classical models, they are
entirely original, and modern in the best sense of the word.
Boris Pasternak holds the leading place among the young non-
proletarian Russian lyrists. We see in him the most fitting con-
tinuator of the great line of Russian verse descending from
Pushkin. He was also known before the war, but it is only in
recent years that he became prominent. Pasternak uses classical
forms and meters, preferably iambs, but the inner dynamics of his
verses, the sentence structure and the images, are frequently of
such an unusual and yet quite spontaneous peculiarity that he can
often be recognized in a single one of his lines. This is especially
true of the images, which are so simple and so near at hand, that
his predecessors had overlooked them precisely on account of their
simplicity. Pasternak's best volume of poems is called My Sister,
Life.
Of the remaining modern lyrists let us mention the following:
Ossip Mandelstamm was very highly thought of by connoisseurs
before the war. Like Pasternak, he is a Jew, and the two have
much in common. He is more pathetic than Pasternak, and shows
the influence of Briussov and Vyacheslav Ivanov. Nikolai
Tichonov belongs to the circle of the Petrograd Serapionovy
Brothers, and tries to utilize the peculiarities of this school in the
lyric. Vladislav Khodasevich is somewhat cool, yet profound; he
sings of death in verses as finished as Sologub's.
In closing let us mention two lyric poetesses who stand up


ALEXANDER ELIASBERG
179
favourably with the others I have named. Anna Achmatova has
been known for some time, and is a genuine follower of Blok. All
her poems are formally perfect; there is really nothing feminine
about them. They are filled with a quiet sorrow, and their theme
is eternally old and eternally new: unhappy love. In the most
striking possible contrast to her is Marina Zvetayeva, whose repu-
tation is quite recent. She is completely a woman, with a wild
gipsy-like passionateness, free as the wind, as untamed as the
South Russian steppes. Her verses sound like gipsy music and
robber songs, and are as unrestricted in form as these. In lyric
poetry the divergence between the Russians abroad and those under
the Soviet cannot be followed so clearly as in prose. But if the
spirit of liberated Russia has its expression anywhere in the lyric,
it is first of all in the work of Marina Zvetayeva, although the
poetess lives abroad and is opposed to Bolshevism.
From the preceding sketch it is to be seen that literature in
Russia is by no means dead, as seemed to be the case two years
ago. It is flourishing with undiminished vigour, and is an indica-
tion and a pledge that this country will not go to ruin.
ALEXANDER ELIASBERG


BOOK REVIEWS
LIVING ART
Living Art. Twenty Facsimile Reproductions After
Paintings, Drawings, and Engravings, and Ten Pho-
tographs after Sculpture, by Contemporary Artists.
Folio. The Dial Publishing Company. $60.
In
Living Art Mr Scofield Thayer has brought together within
the covers of a folio the works of those artists whom he regards
as representative of the spirit of modernism. Most of the originals
are in the possession of the editor, and approximately half of them
have been reproduced in black-and-white in the pages of The
Dial; from which it will be seen that the selection has been frankly
formed on personal judgements. Some will complain about the
omission of this man or that; others will weigh relative merits; but
no one with the remotest familiarity with the fundamental issues
at stake will question the character of the undertaking or deny the
validity of the achievement. Here we have a striking example of
an individual who has found himself in the art of his age; who has
followed the diversified tendencies both in Europe and America,
and who having experienced the breadth and beauty of the new
movement, has given us the sincerity of his own preferences in place
of reiterated general opinions. Here is a protest against narrow-
ness, a collection offered solely for its aesthetic value, without
bombast or special pleading, with no purpose to antagonize the
preferences of others.
Living Art defines the contemporary status of plastic expression.
It is a paean to an intense individualism which has risen so rapidly
in a world of strenuous competitive struggles and profound social
unrest, a complicated world wherein the artist has broken faith
with the obsolete standards of the academy and the sentimentality
of the salon, and has summoned the whole of his spiritual strength
in the creation of an art that shall be not only a personalized reflec-


THOMAS CRAVEN
181
tion of modernity, but also a powerful factor in the progressive
experience of the race. In its largest aspects it is indicative of
human values, and this, I take it, is the mainspring of all viable
art. The pictures presented in The Dial folio must be considered
as a definitive repudiation of the cursed fetish of naturalism; in no
instance do they aspire to the rendition of the accidents of textures,
or the superficial display of the atmospheric elements of purely
visual impressions which, because of some momentary appeal, are
only isolated fragments done over again in the manner of the
photograph. It is in relation to the inherent need for human values
that we must look at these works, the need for a significance of
motif over and beyond technical consequences—the demand of
the intelligent mind for exciting emotional nourishment. The col-
lection is comprehensive: in a general way it covers the entire range
of modern attitudes, from Maillol to Matisse, from Picasso to
Marin, though the more searching spirit of reflective composition
seems to me to be most fittingly represented by the sculptors.
So superlatively fine are these prints that one is tempted to
begin numerically and criticize the whole collection. This being
impracticable, I shall have to confine my remarks to only a few.
Matisse, an artist of subtle and unexpected placements, is seen at
his best. The full character of his brilliant decorative style is
summarized in the swinging lines and the sharp, beautiful colours
of La Danse aux Capucines. It is true that he has done more
complex and intricate canvases, but certainly none more typical.
His gift for audacious arrangements in two planes, the dominant
characteristic of his life's work, is almost perfectly exemplified in
THE DIAL folio. The later Matisse, no less an artist, but more
objective, closer to the light and air of actual vision, does not
impress me as quite the influential figure of the earlier period. It
was this swift decorative style, this startling departure from
accepted craftsmanship, that aroused the admiration of young men
a few years ago, and opened up a world of possibilities in combina-
tions of rich and arresting colour and unusual line. Indeed there
is scarcely an artist of modernist leanings who has not been stimu-
lated by the earlier phase of Matisse's work. For this reason I
believe that Mr Thayer's selection is most appropriate, and that La
Danse Aux Capucines is more certain of universal appeal than any
other print in the series. In addition, it is an amazing piece of


182
LIVING ART
colour-engraving, the dry, tempera-like quality of Matisse's oils
lending itself more easily to the printer's craft than most paintings.
Contrasted with the Bonnard, it is decidedly superior, for the latter,
while an excellent picture, loses more in reproduction.
The water-colours and temperas are facsimiles in the true sense
of the word. By a process perfected in Germany it is now possible
to duplicate in inks not only the colours of the original media,
but the technical minutiae of the artist's handiworks: the delicate
transparencies, the flat tones, the charcoal interpolations, and even
the pencillings of the preliminary sketch are all faithfully pre-
served. To represent America in the field of water-colour John
Marin and Charles Demuth have been included. No worthier
examples could have been named, for both of these men have
arrived. There are other Americans whom I believe to be fully
as significant: Hartley, Wright, Benton, and Dickinson, for
instance, have a clear conception of their modernist purpose, and
are by nature thoroughgoing artists, and Georgia O'Keeffe affords
an interesting contrast with the Parisian Marie Laurencin; but
Marin and Demuth, by virtue of the completeness of their expres-
sion in water-colour, and a mastery of the medium that outclasses
anything of the kind I know of in Europe, are the logical
Americans. The superb quality of Marin's work suffers a slight
reduction in its crispness; but the Demuth, though a little darkened
in the transference, is tonally perfect, and about as handsome as
the original. Vlaminck is magnificent in his neat, monochromatic
sketch of a village street. I have always regarded this painter
as much more of an artist in tone-contrasts than in colour or
modelled form, and the Rue à Nesles is a fortunate choice.
Four plates do honour to the genius of Picasso: a study in
tempera; an early etching, somewhat cramped in comparison with
his recent things, but extraordinary from any point of view; a
pencil drawing of unapproachable cleverness—a linear composition
which should, I think, convince all the sceptics of Picasso's pre-
eminence among living draughtsmen; and a sketch in black-and-
white. As regards the tempera and the pen-and-ink there is room
for contention. I might say that the eclectic nature of the Spaniard
is not adequately shown, or that the absence of the mechanistic
classicism of the Cubists is objectionable, but I should have diffi-
culty in pressing my claims. For the title of the folio is Living


THOMAS CRAVEN
183
Art, and the pictures unquestionably justify the designation.
There is Maillol, a born classicist, but in the same breath the peer
of any living sculptor in the strength and palpability of his power-
fully composed stone figures; and Pascin, a wandering Jew, who,
with his curious irregular line, is capable of turning any motif into
living form; and De Fiori, whose sculpture is successful because
it is free from all tricks and mannerisms, and because it is the
honest embodiment of the artist's own convictions. On the other
hand we have Wyndham Lewis and Derain, names militantly
associated with the modernist idiom, and yet as represented here
the least important artists of the collection.
The fact that any one of us, had we the opportunity to make
such a book, would select a different list of pictures and perhaps
other artists, testifies to the immense fertility of the field from
which Mr Thayer has drawn. It is a healthy art that meets the
needs of every temperament, and a variegated movement where
Lachaise, Chagall, and Signac, totally different in vision and
impulse, can intermingle, and where the appreciative spirit can
find a form for every mood. We are moving forward, and the
character of our time is written in the abrupt changes and the
nervous statements of this Living Art. We need more such declara-
tions of beliefs in order to encourage the public, the artist, and
the buyer, and to emphasize the importance of the period. Per-
sonally I believe that we are tending toward a less idiosyncratic
conception of art—to a more monumental expression; but the day
of that expression is not yet at hand; nor will it come until com-
plete acceptance of the revolt has driven our architects and
academies to the recognition of the stupidity and staleness of their
present ideas.
THOMAS CRAVEN


MORALIZINGS ON MORAND
Open All Night. By Paul Morand. Translated by
H. B.V. 12mo. 172 pages. Thomas Seltzer. $2.
Fine
VROM what aspect are we to judge Paul Morand's work? As
the thing in itself that is called a work of art? As a book
whose astonishing success in France makes it a social phenomenon?
As a symptomatic expression of the modern European mind? The
material itself admits of all these approaches, or seems to admit
of them; and the choice between them seems to depend upon the
temperament of the critic.
I freely confess that I am incapable of a calm aesthetic estimate
of Open All Night. When it first came out I was very much
amused by it. It seemed to me then, and seems to me now,
the
kind of thing our own would-be cynical young writers (such as
Aldous Huxley) would like to accomplish, but cannot. For it
really is amusing-provided that you can keep yourself in the
temper necessary to be amused by it. But that requires an effort
which, eighteen months later, I find myself incapable of making. I
am not very raffiné; I should never have been able to appreciate
Nero's technique on the fiddle while Rome was burning. I should
have been wandering about somewhere in the streets with a useless
bucket in
my
hands.
In other words I am as good as disqualified for passing any sort
of relevant judgment upon Open All Night. For M Morand has
improved on Nero. He stands on his head in the midst of the
conflagration playing jazz music on a pocket banjo. It is rather
prodigious. But the noise he makes is not loud enough to drown
the crackle of the flames or the crepitations of collapse. Perhaps
it is that I am too fond of Europe. I am never wholly attending.
Even when I am laughing at one of M Morand's outrageous
epithets, my ears are otherwise intent. I hate Europe for col-
lapsing, for going sick and passive and rotten; I pretend not to be
sorry and make as if I knew it was all inevitable, but all the
same-
And, because of this, in my heart of hearts I cherish a resent-


J. MIDDLETON MURRY
185
ment against M Morand. If there is any dancing to be done over
the European bonfire, I don't want it to be the fox-trot or the
Blues. Let it be something more demonic—whether in exultation
and triumph or howling and lamentation does not matter, only let
it be something of a bigness appropriate to the event.
I suppose very much the same resentment might have been
cherished against Petronius Arbiter (if it was he who wrote the
Satyricon) in the Roman days; and the obvious reply to it is that
Petronius amused himself at a time when there was nothing else to
do. Probably that elegant Roman felt pretty bitter about it all
inside; the chances are that he was a disappointed Republican
idealist whose secret delight was in reading about Cincinnatus at
the plough. At all events I seem to remember in the Satyricon a
smack of the savagery that most often comes of disillusion. Per-
haps if M Morand were a little more savage, I should feel more
at home with him. As it is I don't. At moments I have quite a
violent desire to feed him on a pound of bad bread and one rotten
herring a week for a month or two and see what would happen to
his attitude.
But that is not literary criticism; or if it is, it is literary criticism
of the most primitive and elementary kind. The other sort, which
is far more appropriate to these pages, begins by accepting M
Morand for what he is, and goes on to declare that what he does,
he does very well. It then would speculate upon the precise ex