653 в 938,868 16917 PROPERTY OF Usposit of Alichigan 1817 ARTES SCIENTIA VERITAS 16917 051 1.71 29200 D 541 .80 22 THE, DIAL DDB OX XII Πο VOLUME LXXVIII January to June, 1925 THE DIAL PUBLISHING COMPANY NEW YORK CITY 16917 att D54 cena Stack سے ان ا ط - 4 - // tárid laws 216 AP DS4 인 ​(120 Stats tett 11-09-66 Qarin law 16917 Plvia LANDSCAPE. BY EDVARD MUNCH THE OXXIIO O ESES DIAL JANUARY 1925 CONCERNING MISS MOORE'S OBSERVATIONS BY GLENWAY WESCOTT ve M HE world which surrounds us may be divided into two por- I tions: that which we have experienced, and that which we have not—the latter a vague, tedious environment, an infinitude of things in which we have no interest. Gradually we explore that environment; self development is the conscious extension of one's repertory of experiences, the conscious exchange of one's intense but constricted youth for a versatile maturity in w there shall be no boredom. It is not possible to widen indefinitely the range of one's empiric knowledge of life. We are limited by our habits, our circum- stances, and the short duration of life; hence the irreplaceable value of literature as culture; in this sense it is a form of vicarious living—for the reader, not for the writer. As tradition is a gift of the past to the present, a book is the gift of one per- sonality to other persons. By articulating his emotions, by sum- marizing his experiences, a writer contributes to one's memory what is like remembered feeling, remembered thinking, or remem- bered acting. He sharpens one's interest as well, and furthers one's penetration into one's surroundings; for, as Professor Dewey has said, “definiteness, depth, and variety of meaning attach to the objects of an experience just in the degree in which they have previously been thought about.” Certain writers heighten the significance of common emotions or common events, and dispel the dimness of the remote or the seemingly unimportant. Others, by CSS NOTE: Observations, a book of poems by Marianne Moore, has just been published by The Dial Press (12mo, 120 pages ; $2). 2 CONCERNING MISS MOORE'S OBSERVATIONS Ve the singularity of their temperaments or their modes of life, present that of which, but for their work, we should remain in utter ignorance. Miss Marianne Moore is such a writer; her work is the product of a novel intelligence, a strange sensibility, a unique scholar- ship. It is woven, as the curious notes manifest, with phrases from neglected books and poor magazines—Vogue as a source of poetry is phenomenal-studded with zoological observations, and illustrated by conversational episodes. The process by which this miscellany is made to focus about her points of view is fas- cinating—an object lesson in the exploitation of an environment by a mind which, in relation to it, is eccentric. “Art which reveals art,” beauty which displays the methods by which it has been produced, make an artist of him they have delighted; in Miss Moore's work there are abundant beauties which stimulate one's mind to the formation of their counterparts: "Black butterflies with blue half circles on their wings ... lizards glittering and without thickness ... the acacia-like lady shivering at the touch of a hand"; "hounds with waists diminishing like the waist of the hourglass”; "the lucid movements of the royal yacht upon the learned scenery of Egypt"; "a special antelope” standing “its ground on cliffs the colour of the clouds, of petrified white vapour ... the ermine body on the crystal peak.” No con- noisseur of “ 'chessmen carved out of moonstones,'” of “raw silk- ivory white, snow white, oyster white and six others,” of “'Egyptian vultures clean as cherubim, all ivory and jet,'” has produced such a spectacle; yet she is no Beckford of Fonthill, and her book is not a collector's catalogue. This exact magnificence, achieved entirely by a mode of scholarship and a way of seeing, is a vision- ary's reply to the recommenders of wealth. When, in other writers, we find a like luxury, we usually find also a marked feebleness in selection, an excess of colour and a lack of contour. Among equal beauties, one does not dim another only when each has meaning. Miss Moore does not value the mere "acquisition of any one thing that is able to adorn.” She states in vigorous terms that nature has an intelligence, addressing a rose thus, "in view of the fact that spirit creates form, we are justified in supposing that you have a brain.” Concerned with "the exterior and the fundamental structure," she knows that the former displays the latter. Thus, her imagery ornaments less than GLENWAY WESCOTT it illustrates; analogy is not merely a rhetorical means of ap- proximation, a suggestion of what she has failed to define; it is the result of this law: that the forces which have produced a whole animate its smallest parts. Occasionally she shapes her thought into aphorisms which by virtue of their formal excellence remain in the memory, to be tested, to be paraphrased, to be believed: such as, "the conditions of life predetermined slavery to be easy and freedom hard . . . that which it is impossible to force, it is impossible to hinder.” In general, she rejects the happiness which we associate with Greece as effete and a compromise; she is glad to renounce and willing to be denied, admiring discipline and restraint and “the love of doing hard things”-a puritanism “re- lentlessly accurate” and like a "hard mountain.” We have not considered Miss Moore's “observations” as poems; she herself has not called them poems. They are essences of con- versations, though they move in strict and stately cadences, and the discrepant dictions are blended in an energetic, harmonious rhetoric. Then suddenly one finds passages of pure poetry, un- matched in American literature except by Poe. In them there is no analysis, no bewildering wit, no curbed, over-harnessed subtlety; each word conveys an emotion as clearly as if it were a colour. “Plagued by the nightingale in the new leaves, with its silence- not its silence, but its silences ..." “I recall their magnificence, now not more magnificent than it is dim ..." “... When the wind is from the east, the smell is of apples, of hay; the aroma increased and de- creased as the wind changes; of rope, of mountain leaves for florists; as from the west it is aromatic of salt.” "and the eleven eagles of the west 'fond of the spring fragrance and the winter colors'” ... Does one wish that this magic were prolonged, and it were all ? 4 CONCERNING MISS MOORE'S OBSERVATIONS One does not care to wish; the whole is rarer, and might never be less intense. The prototype of Miss Moore's “observation” is the Baconian essay, or the prose of Sir Thomas Browne and Burton. There also Indies of curious scholarship have been plundered; there also capricious ellipses fail to arrest the sonority of an ornate style; and their achievement, like hers, is not pure grace or clarity, but the self-portrait of a mind—to be appreciated, not as a model and not as beauty, but as an experience. However, one must not assume that Miss Moore is quite aloof from the tendencies of contemporary letters. Her art is a baroque art; but the two most striking writers of this period are little less baroque. The styles of both Proust and Joyce are florid and surcharged-whorl upon whorl, volute upon volute, image upon image, manner upon manner. We come close in them both to the chaos of nature; selection as an aesthetic law seems to have been evaded. But the conventional methods of selection had become constrictive and mechanical; books had been written by formula; and the exploration of fresh types of material inevitably culminates in an apparent revelry of expression. Miss Moore is indebted to neither of these men; but lacking a large design, she is sometimes even more difficult to read than they. In spite of the "neatness of finish”—sometimes because of it, when repetitions or awkward appositions, needful for clarity, are omitted—one sen- tence or phrase obscures the meaning of another, and image within image obscures the subject of both. However, the essentials of creative art are there; the novelty and complexity of her work may cause it to be neglected; but her truth, like Truth itself, “is no Apollo Belvedere, no formal thing. The wave may go over it if it likes. Know that it will be there when it says: 'I shall be there when the wave has gone by.'” Courtesy of Scott and Fowles A HEAD. BY HENRI MATISSE -- - -- ---- ---- --- ----- - - - - - m > • - / Okk Courtesy of Alfred Flechtheim, Berlin LANDSCAPE. BY HENRI MATISSE THE CONGER EEL BY LIAM O'FLAHERTY T TE was eight feet long. At the centre of his back he was I l two feet in circumference. Slipping sinuously along the bottom of the sea at a gigantic pace his black mysterious body glistened and twirled like a wisp in a foaming cataract. His little eyes, stationed wide apart in his flat-boned broad skull, searched the ocean for food. He coursed ravenously for miles along the base of the range of cliffs. He searched fruitlessly, except for three baby pollocks which he swallowed in one mouthful without arresting his progress. He was very hungry. : Then he turned by a sharp promontory and entered a cliff- bound harbour where the sea was dark and silent, shaded by the concave cliffs. Savagely he looked ahead into the dark waters. Then instantaneously he flicked his tail, rippling his body like a twisted screw, and shot forward. His long thin single whisker hanging from his lower snout like a label tag, jerked back under his belly. His glassy eyes rested ferociously on minute white spots that scurried about in the sea a long distance ahead. The conger eel had sighted his prey. There was a school of mackerel a mile away. He came upon them headlong, in a flash. He rose out of the deep from beneath their white bellies, and gripped one mackerel in his wide-open jaws ere his snout met the surface. Then, as if in a swoon, his body went limp and tumbling over and over, convulsing like a crushed worm; he sank lower and lower until at last he had swallowed the fish. Then immediately he straight- ened out and Aicked his tail, ready to pursue his prey afresh. The school of mackerel, when the dread monster had appeared among them, were swimming just beneath the surface of the sea. When the eel rushed up they had hurled themselves clean out of the water with the sound of innumerable grains of sand being shaken in an immense sieve. Ten thousand blue and white bodies flashed and shimmered in the sun for three moments and then they disappeared, leaving a large patch of the dark blue water S THE CONGER EEL convulsing turbulently. Ten thousand little fins cut the surface of the sea as the mackerel set off in headlong flight. Their white bellies were no longer visible. They plunged down into the depths of the sea where their blue-black sides and backs, the colour of the sea, hid them from their enemy. The eel surged about in immense figures of eight, but he had lost them. Half-hungry, half-satisfied, he roamed about for half an hour, a demented giant of the deep, travelling restlessly at an incredible speed. Then at last his little eyes again sighted his prey. Little white spots again hung like faded drops of brine in the sea ahead of him. He rushed thither. He opened his jaws as the spots assumed shape and they loomed up close to his eyes. But just as he attempted to gobble the nearest one, he felt a savage impact. Then something hard and yet intangible pressed against his head and then down along his back. He leaped and turned somersault. The hard, gripping material completely enveloped him. He was in a net. While on all sides of him mackerel wriggled gasping in the meshes. The eel paused for two seconds amazed and terrified. Then all around him he saw a web of black strands hanging miraculously in the water, everywhere, while mackerel with heaving gills stood rigid in the web, some with their tails and heads both caught, and their bodies curved in an arch, others encompassed many times in the uneven folds, others girdled firmly below the gills with a single black thread. Glittering they eddied back and forth with the stream of the sea, a mass of fish being strangled in the deep. Then the eel began to struggle fiercely to escape. He hurtled hither and thither, swinging his long slipping body backwards and forwards, ripping with his snout, surging forward suddenly at full speed, churning the water. He ripped and tore the net, cutting great long gashes in it. But the more he cut and ripped the more deeply enmeshed did he become. He did not release himself, but he released some of the mackerel. They fell from the torn meshes, stiff and crippled, downwards, sinking like dead things. Then suddenly one after another they seemed to wake from sleep, they shook their tails and darted away. While the giant eel was gathering coil upon coil of the net about his slippery body. Then at last, exhausted and half-strangled, he lay still, heaving. Presently he felt himself being hauled up in the net. The LIAM O'FLAHERTY net crowded around him more, so that the little gleaming mack- erel, imprisoned with him, rubbed his sides and lay soft and flabby against him, all hauled up in the net with him. He lay still. He reached the surface and gasped, but he made no movement. He was hauled heavily into a boat and fell with a thud to the bottom. The two fishermen in the boat began to curse violently when they saw the monstrous eel that had torn their net and ruined their catch of mackerel. The old man on the oars in the bow called out: “Free him and kill him, the varmint.” The young man who was hauling in the net looked in terror at the slippery monster that lay between his feet with its little eyes looking up cunningly, as if it were human. He almost trembled as he picked up the net and began to undo the coils. “Slash it with your knife,” yelled the old man, “before he does more harm.” The young man picked up his knife from the gunwale where it was stuck and cut the net, freeing the eel. The eel with a sudden and amazing movement glided up the bottom of the boat, so that he stretched full-length. Then he doubled back, rocking the boat as he beat the sides with his whirling tail, his belly flopping in the water that lay in the bottom. The two men screamed, both crying: “Kill him or he'll drown us !" "Strike him on the nable!” They both reached for the short thick stick that hung from a peg amidships. The young man grabbed it, bent down, and struck at the eel. "Hit him in the nable,” cried the old man. “Catch him, catch him and turn him over.” They both bent down, pawing at the eel, cursing and panting, while the boat rocked ominously and the huge conger eel glided around and around at an amazing speed. Their hands clawed his sides, slipping over it like skates on ice. They gripped him with their knees, they stood on him, they tried to lie on him, but in their confusion they could not catch him. Then at last the young man lifted him in his arms, holding him in the middle, gripping him as if he were trying to crush him to death. He staggered upwards. “Now strike him on the nable," he yelled to the old man. But suddenly he staggered backwards. The boat rocked. He dropped the eel with an oath, reaching out with his hands to steady himself. The eel's head fell over the canted gunwales. His snout dipped into the sea. With an im- nan aro THE MONKEY PUZZLER mense shiver he glided away, straight down, down to the depths, down like an arrow, until he reached the dark weed-covered rocks at the bottom. Then stretching out to his full length he coursed in a wide arc to his enormous lair, far away in the silent depths. THE MONKEY PUZZLER BY MARIANNE MOORE A kind of monkey or pine-lemur not of interest to the monkey, but to the animal higher up which resembles it, in a kind of Flaubert's Carthage, it defies one- this “Paduan cat with lizard,” this "tiger in a bamboo thicket.” “An interwoven somewhat," it will not come out. Ignore the Foo dog and it is forthwith more than a dog, its tail superimposed upon itself in a complacent half spiral, incidentally so witty; but this pine-tree—this pine-tiger, not a dog. It knows that if a nomad may have dignity, Gibraltar has had more that “it is better to be lonely than unhappy." A conifer contrived in imitation of the glyptic work of jade and hard stone cutters, a true curio in this bypath of curio collecting, it is worth its weight in gold but no one takes it from these woods in which society's not knowing is colossal, the lion's ferocious chrysanthemum head seeming kind in com- parison. This porcupine-quilled, infinitely complicated starkness- this is beauty~"a certain proportion in the skeleton which gives the best results.” One is at a loss, however, to know why it should be here, in this morose part of the earth- to account for its origin at all; but we prove, we do not explain our birth. 20 com- DU WIN Nieu DU SHIP AND SHELLS. BY MILDRED MCMILLEN TITT THE DOWNFALL OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION BY OSWALD SPENGLER Translated From the German by Kenneth Burke XIII AS to the Roman empire, it is a negative phenomenon, not the H result of a superabundant power on the one side—after Zama the Romans had this no longer—but of a lack of resistance on the other. The Romans by no means conquered the world. They simply took possession of what lay there as spoils for everyone. The rise of the Imperium Romanum was not due to any extreme exertion, as was once the case in opposing Carthage, but to the renunciation of outward self-determination on the part of the old East. One should not be deceived by the apparently brilliant military successes. With a few poorly trained, badly led, ill- nurtured legions Lucullus and Pompey overcame whole empires— which would have been inconceivable at the time of the battle at Issus. The Mithridatic menace, a genuine danger to this never seriously tested system of material strength, would not have been so to the conquerors of Hannibal. After Zama the Romans did not, and could not, conduct a war against any great military power. Their classical wars were against the Samnites, against Pyrrhus and Carthage. Their great hour was Cannae. There is no people which retains its pomp throughout centuries. The Prus- sian-German people, which had the mighty moments of 1813, 1870, and 1914, possessed more of them than others. I advocate taking imperialism as the typical symbol of conclu- sion; while, when they have arrived at the last, petrified stage of imperialism, realms like the Egyptian, Chinese, Roman, and Hindu worlds and the world of Islam can remain standing for hundreds 1 The conquest of Gaul by Caesar was a pronounced colonial war; that is, of one-sided activity. That it nevertheless marked the high point of later Roman military history is proved by its rapidly diminishing yield of real results. 10 THE DOWNFALL OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION of thousands of years, and pass from one conqueror's hands into another's—dead bodies, amorphous dispirited human masses, the used-up stuff of a great history. Imperialism is pure civilization. The destiny of the Occident is inevitably confined to this mani- festation. The cultivated man directs his energies inward, the civilized man outward. For that reason I see in Cecil Rhodes the beginning of a new era. He represents the political style of an ulterior, Occidental, Germanic, highly German future. His ex- pression that expansion is everything contains in this Napoleonic form the most characteristic tendency of every over-ripe civiliza- tion. It applies to the Romans, Arabians, and Chinese. Here there is no choice. Here the conscious will of the individual or of whole classes and peoples does not enter into the decision. The expansive tendency is fated, something demonic and uncanny, driv- ing the man of the late metropolitan era, forcing him into its service and exploiting him, whether he wills it or not, whether he knows it or not. Life is the realization of the possible, and for the man of brains there are only possibilities of extension. As much as contemporary socialism, in its still undeveloped state, re- sists expansion, it will one day, with the vehemence of a destiny, be its foremost agent. Here the form-language of politics—as the immediate intellectual expression of one kind of humanity- touches on a deep metaphysical problem: on the fact (corroborated by the absolute validity of the causal principle) that intellect is the complement of expansion. Rhodes appears as the first forerunner of an Occidental Caesar- type whose era is not due to arrive for some time. He stands half- way between Napoleon and the magnates of the next century, just as Flaminius, who in 232 began exhorting the Romans to the con- quest of the cis-Alpine Gauls and thus to the inauguration of their policy of colonial expansion, stood between Alexander and Caesar. Flaminius was a demagogue, strictly speaking a private citizen who commanded governmental influence at a time when the idea of the 1 The modern Germans are the striking example of a people who have become expansive without their knowledge or desire. They were so when they still thought themselves the people of Goethe. Bismarck did not suspect the deeper meaning of the epoch grounded upon him. He thought he had reached the culmination of a political development. 2 Perhaps Napoleon meant this in his profound words to Goethe: “Why should a man concern himself nowadays with destinyPolitics is destiny." of the people of Goethe. They were who have OSWALD SPENGLER 11 state was weakening to the power of economic factors; in Rome he was obviously the beginning of the type of Caesarian opposi- tion. With him ends the organic authority of the patricians, which is supported by an idea, and the purely materialistic, un- ethical, limitless expansion sets in. Alexander and Napoleon were romantics on the border-line of civilization, and were already touched by its cold clear air. But the former liked to imagine himself in the rôle of Achilles, and the latter read Werther. Caesar was purely a man of hard facts, with an enormous shrewdness. But Rhodes saw nothing but financial and territorial success as the test of successful policies. That is the Roman in him, of which he was very conscious. Western European civilization had not before been represented with such energy and purity. It was only before his maps that he could fall into a kind of poetic ecstasy, he who, born in a Puritan rectory, had come penniless to South Africa and made a gigantic fortune as a strong accessory to his political ambitions. His idea of a trans-African railway from the Cape to Cairo, his project of a South African empire, his sharp control over the mine-owners, steely money-men whom he com- pelled to place their wealth in the service of his ideas, his city of Buluwayo which he, the omnipotent statesman without any de- finable relationship to the state, laid out in regal proportions as a future capital, his wars, diplomatic actions, highway systems, syn- dicates, armies, his concept of the great duty of the man of brains towards civilizationmall this is, in a vast and distinguished aspect, the prelude to a future still in store for us with which the history of the Western European will finally close. Whoever does not understand that this conclusion admits of no alteration, that we must desire this or nothing at all, that we must love this destiny or else despair of the future, of life, whoever does not feel the magnificence which lies in this vigour of the highest intelligences, this energy and discipline of metallic natures, this battle with the coldest, most abstract weapons, whoever goes about with the idealism of a provincial, searching for the style of living in bygone days, he must renounce the desire to understand history, to experience history, to make history. So the Imperium Romanum appears no longer as an isolated phenomenon, but as the normal product of a severe and energetic, 12 THE DOWNFALL OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION metropolitan, eminently practical intellectuality and as the typical instance of a decline which has existed several times before, but had not previously been identified. Let us finally realize that the secret of historic form does not lie on the surface and is not to be found in similarity of costume or scene, that in human history as well as the history of plants and animals there are phenomena of a specious similarity which at bottom have nothing in common- Charlemagne and Harun-al-Rashid, Alexander and Caesar, the Germanic wars against Rome and the Mongols' storming of Western Europe and others which, with the greatest external divergence, are expressions of identical stages, as Trajan and Rameses II, the Bourbons and the Attic Demos, Mohammed and Pythagoras. Let us begin to see that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, supposedly the peak of an ascending rectilinear univer- sal history, are in reality to be proved as phenomena of that culture which is now ripening to a close, not by reason of socialists, im- pressionists, electric railways, torpedoes, and differential equations, which belong simply to the body of the times, but by reason of their civilized intellectuality, which possesses entirely different possibilities of external formation; consequently, that the present represents a transitional stage which is sure to occur under certain conditions; that there are, therefore, fully determined conditions later than those of Western Europe to-day; that in past history these conditions have already existed more than once; and thus that the future of the Occident is not an unlimited movement upwards and forwards in the direction of our momentary ideals and over a fantastic space of time, but an isolated phenomenon of history encompassing a few centuries, strictly limited and un- escapably predetermined in respect to form and duration, a phe- nomenon which can be surveyed with the help of other available examples and can be estimated in its essential traits. XIV If one reaches this vantage ground of observation, then all fruits fall to him of themselves. This one idea includes and readily solves all the isolated problems with which for decades the modern mind has passionately but unsuccessfully been occupied in the fields OSWALD SPENGLER 13 of religion, art, history, epistemology, ethics, politics, and political economy. This idea belongs among those truths which are no longer op- posed once they have been expressed in all clarity. It belongs among the inner necessities of the Western European culture and its cosmological feelings. It is capable of radically altering the attitude towards life of everyone who has completely grasped it, which is to say has inwardly made it his own. It means a great deepening of viewpoint in a manner which is natural and neces- sary to us if the development of universal history in which we are a part and which we had previously learned to consider in retro- spect as an organic whole, can now be studied in prospect also in its broad outlines. Previously only the physicist permitted him- self such an attitude in his calculations. It means, I repeat it once more, the substitution, in history also, of the Copernican aspect for the Ptolemaic—which is an immeasurable widening of life's horizon. Until now one was free to expect of the future what he desired. Where there are no facts, the feelings rule. Henceforth it will be everyone's duty to discover with reference to coming events what can happen and therefore will happen, with the unalterable deter- mination of a destiny, while this is quite independent of our per- sonal or contemporary ideals. If we employ the questionable word freedom, then we are no longer free to do this or that, but only the inevitable or nothing. To feel this as “good” is fundamentally the mark of the realist. But to regret and condemn is not to alter. To birth belongs death, to youth age, to all life a form and the predetermined limits of its duration. The present is a phase of civilization, not of culture. This excludes a whole series of life- contents as impossible. One can regret this and can clothe his regret in pessimistic philosophy and lyrics—henceforth this will be done-but one cannot alter it. It will no longer be permissible to assume unquestioningly the birth or flourishing to-day and to- morrow of whatever one desires, if historic experience speaks loudly enough against it. I am faced with the objection that such an outlook on the world, since it affords certainty as to the general direction of the future and cuts off all far-reaching hopes, would be suicidal and for morrow 14. THE DOWNFALL OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION many would be a doom, if ever it should be more than a mere theory and should become the practical attitude towards life of the group of personalities who will really figure in the formation of the future. I do not share this opinion. We are civilized men, not men of the Gothic and Rococo periods; we have to reckon with the hard, cold facts of a late life, whose parallel is not in Periclean Athens, but in Caesarian Rome. For the Western European there can no longer be any talk of great painting and music. His architectonic possibilities were exhausted a hundred years ago. Only possibili- ties of extension remain to him. But I do not see the disadvantage which could result if an industrious generation filled with un- limited hopes were to learn in time what portion of these hopes must lead to failure. Even though they be the dearest of all, everyone of worth will survive the loss. It is true that for certain individuals the outcome can be tragic, when at the decisive period of their lives they are seized by the certainty that for them nothing more is to be attained in the realm of architecture, the drama, or painting. They must perish. Heretofore it has been agreed to recognize no limits here; it was thought that every age had its problem in every field: this was found, if must be, through per- sistency and distress, and in any case it was not disclosed until after death whether the faith had a justification, whether the work of a life-time had been necessary or superfluous. But everyone who is not a pure romantic will refuse this escape. That is not the pride which distinguished the Romans. Why must we consider those who, when facing an exhausted ore mine, would prefer being told that we shall strike a new vein to-morrow (as the art of the moment does with its totally untrue search after styles) rather than being referred to the rich bed of clay lying available close by? I consider this doctrine as a benefit to the coming generation, for it shows them what is possible and therefore necessary, and what does not belong to the essential potentialities of the age. Up to now an enormous amount of intellect and strength has been squandered on mistaken efforts. The Western European, his- torically as he thinks and feels, is at a certain age not conscious of his real direction. He feels and searches and loses himself, if the outer stimuli are not favourable to him. Here at last the collabora- tion of centuries has given him the possibility of surveying the OSWALD SPENGLER 15 position of his life in relationship to an entire culture and of ex- amining into what he can do and should do. If, under the influ- ence of this book, men of the new generation should turn to technology instead of the lyric, to the navy instead of painting, to politics instead of epistemology, they would be doing as I hope they will—and no one can wish them anything better. XV It still remains to determine the relationship between a mor- phology of universal history and philosophy. Every genuine sur- vey of history is either genuine philosophy or mere ant labour. But the old-style philosopher is involved in a great error. He does not believe in the transitoriness of his definitions. He believes that higher thought possesses an eternal and unchanging subject, that the great problems of all times are the same, and that they can be answered once and for all. But here question and answer are one; and every great question, founded as it is upon the passionate yearning for one definite an- swer, has purely the significance of a life-symbol. There are no eternal truths. Every philosophy is an expression of its time and its time only, and there are no two ages which possess the same philosophic intentions, if one is looking for real philosophy and not some academic trifle or other about forms of judgement and categories of feeling. The difference is not between immortal and transitory doctrines, but between those which live for a time and those which are never alive. The permanence of past thoughts is an illusion. The essential consideration is, what sort of man informs them? The greater the man, the truer the philosophy—in the sense, that is, of the inner truth of a great work of art, which is independent of the demonstrability and even the consistency of the individual sentences. In the greatest instances, it can exhaust or encompass the whole content of an age and, giving it form, embodying it in personality and idea, hand it on for further de- velopment. Here the scientific dress, the erudite mask of a philosophy settles nothing. Nothing is simpler than to found a system in lieu of thoughts which one has not. But even a good thought is worth little if it is pronounced by a numskull. Only its necessity for living decides the rank of a doctrine. 16 THE DOWNFALL OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION Therefore I see the evidence of a thinker's value in his feeling for the important facts of his times. This alone demonstrates whether a person is merely a clever constructor of systems and prin- ciples, whether he is merely skilled and learned in definitions and analyses, or whether it is the very soul of his times which speaks through his works and intuitions. A philosopher who does not also grasp and command reality will never be of the first order. The pre-Socratics were prominent as merchants and politicians. It almost cost Plato his life that he tried to put his political ideas into effect in Syracuse. The same Plato discovered that series of geometrical propositions which first made it possible for Euclid to erect the Ancient system of mathematics. Pascal, whom Nietzsche recognized merely as the "broken Christian,” Descartes, Leibnitz were the leading mathematicians and technicists of their time. And here I find a strong objection to all philosophers of the recent past. What they lack is any decisive rank in real life. None of them has taken any decisive part, with a single act, or one pow- erful idea, in higher politics, in the development of modern tech- nology, commerce, economy, in any kind of great reality. None of them figures at all in mathematics, physics, civics, although this was not the case with Kant. We see the significance of this when looking at other ages. In his writings on the Athenian state Aristotle showed the keenest understanding for the social-political situation of the oncoming Hellenism. He could very easily—like Sophocles—have conducted the financial management of Athens. Goethe, whose activities in public office were ideal and who re- grettably lacked a great state for the sphere of his activities, was interested in the construction of the Suez and Panama canals (which he accurately predicted) and their commercial results. He was always concerned with American economic life, its counter- effect on old Europe, and the mechanical industrialization which was arising at that time. Hobbes was one of the fathers of the great plan to secure South America for England; and even though at that time it progressed no farther than the occupation of Ja- maica, he nevertheless has the reputation of being among the founders of the English colonial empire. Leibnitz, surely the most powerful mind in Western European philosophy, the origina- tor of differential calculus and analysis situs, demonstrated the W OSWALD SPENGLER 17 importance of Egypt for French world politics in a memoir to Louis XIV written to effect political relief for Germany. His ideas were so far ahead of his time (1672) that people were later convinced that Napoleon utilized them in his expedition to the Orient. As early as that, Leibnitz laid down facts which Na- poleon understood more and more clearly after Wagram: that acquisitions on the Rhine and in Belgium could not permanently improve France's position, and that one day the isthmus of Suez would be the key to world dominion. Undoubtedly the king was not equal to the profound political and strategic arguments of the philosopher. It is humiliating to turn from men of such stamp to the presente day philosophers. What personal insignificance! What mediocrity of intellectual and practical horizon! How does it happen that we are moved to positive pity at the mere thought that one of them should have to demonstrate his intellectual calibre as a states- man, a diplomat, an organizer on a large scale, as the leader of some mighty colonial, sales, or commercial enterprise? Yet that is no sign of introversion, but of a lack of power. I look about me in vain to find where any one of them has made a name for himself by so much as one profound and prophetic judgement on an important contemporary problem. I find nothing but provincial attitudes. When I pick up the book of a modern thinker, I ask myself what insight he has (beyond professorial and flatulent partisan gossip worthy of an ordinary journalist, such as we find in Guyau, Bergson, Spencer, Dühring, Eucken) into the actuali- ties of world politics, the great problems of the metropolis, capi- talism, the future of the state, the relation between technic and the close of civilization, Russianism, science in general. Goethe would have understood and loved all that. Not one of the living philosophers observes it. That is, I repeat, not the content of philosophy, but an indubitable symptom of its inner necessity, its fertility, and its symbolic rank. One should not be deceived as to the import of this negative result. Obviously the deeper meaning of philosophic effectiveness has been lost sight of. It is confused with prayer, agitation, feuilleton, or specialized knowledge. They have dropped from the bird's-eye view to the frog's-eye view. We are dealing with noth- ing less than the question as to whether a genuine philosophy is 18 THE DOWNFALL OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION to-day or to-morrow at all possible. Otherwise it would be better to become a planter or an engineer, anything genuine and actual, instead of dishing up old themes under the pretext of a "new renascence of philosophic thought," better to construct an aeroplane motor than a theory of apperception which would be as superfluous as it was new. It is truly a wretched life's work to formulate once again and with minor variations one's views on the concept of will and psycho-physical parallelism, after the example of a hundred predecessors. That may be a "vocation”; it is not philosophy. Those things should be left unsaid which do not grasp and alter the whole life of an age, down to its furthest depths. I love the penetration and delicacy of mathematical and physical theories, in comparison with which the aesthetician or physiologist is a tyro. I would give up all the stylistic trash of the present-day art business, painting and architecture included, for the splen- didly clear, highly intellectual lines of a fast steamer, a steel struc- ture, an instrument of precision. I prefer a Roman aqueduct to all Roman temples and statues. I love the Colosseum and the gigantic vaults of the Palatine, because with the brown mass of their masonry they place before our eyes to-day the genuine Rome, and its engineers' magnificent sense of fact. The empty and pre- tentious marble display of the Caesars, with its rows of statues, its friezes, and overladen architraves, would be of no moment to me if it were preserved. If one looks at the reconstruction of the Imperial Fora, he will find the true counterpart of modern interna- tional expositions: obtrusive, massive, empty, an ostentation of resources and dimensions entirely unfamiliar to the Periclean Greek and the Occidental of the Rococo period; whereas the same quali- ties are displayed in the ruins of Luxor and Karnak from the time of Rameses II, the Egyptian modernity of 1300 B. C. It was not for nothing that the genuine Roman detested the graeculus histrio, the "artist,” the "philosopher," on the soil of Roman civilization. Arts and philosophy no longer belonged to this age: they were exhausted, worn out, superfluous. His instinct for the realities of life told him this. One Roman law amounted to more than all the contemporary lyrics and metaphysical systems of the schools. And I maintain that there is a better philosopher in many an inventor, diplomat, or financier than in all those who ply the dull trade of experimental psychology. That is a situation which OSWALD SPENGLER 19 always recurs at a certain stage in history. It would have been absurd if a Roman of intellectual rank, instead of leading an army as consul or praetor, organizing a province, building cities and highways, or "being the first” at Rome, had wanted to concoct at Athens or Rhodes some new subtlety of the bookish post-Platonic philosophy. Naturally no one did so. This was not in accord with the spirit of the times, and thus could only attract third- rate people, who are always just abreast of the spirit of the day before yesterday. It is a very serious problem whether this stage is already with us, or has not yet begun. A century of purely extensive activity to the exclusion of high artistic and metaphysical production—briefly, an irreligious era, as this is always included in the concept of the metropolitan-is a period of decay. Of course. But we did not choose this period. We cannot alter the fact that we are born at the beginning of the winter of pure civilization and not in the high sun of a ripe culture at the time of Pheidias or Mozart. Everything depends upon one's clarifying and grasping this situation, this destiny; one can deceive himself about it, but cannot disregard it. Whoever does not admit it to himself, does not count among the men of his generation. He remains a fool, a charlatan, or a pedant. Thus, before broaching a problem to-day, one should ask-a question which is already answered by the instinct of the truly elect—what is possible to a man of the present and what he must forbid himself. There is only a very small number of metaphysical problems whose solution is reserved for an intellectual epoch. And already there is a whole world of difference between the time of Nietzsche, when one last touch of the romantic was still alive, and the present, which has definitely parted from all romanticism. Systematic philosophy ended with the close of the eighteenth century. Kant gave its ultimate potentialities a great form which was in many respects definitive for the Western European mind. It is followed, like Plato and Aristotle, by a specifically metropoli- tan philosophy which was not speculative, but practical, irreligious, ethical-social. Corresponding to Zeno and Epicurus, it begins with Schopenhauer, who was the first to place the will to live (“creative vitality") at the centre of his thinking; but the profounder tendency of his doctrine has been obscured by the fact that, under the pressure of a great tradition, he still clung to systematic dis- 20 THE DOWNFALL OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION tinctions such as phenomenon and noumenon, form and content of observation, understanding and reason. It is the same principle which received its Schopenhauerian negation in Tristan, its Dar- winian affirmation in Siegfried, which Nietzsche formulated bril- liantly and theatrically in Zarathustra, which became under the Hegelian Marx the incentive to an hypothesis of political economy and to one of zoology under the Malthusian Darwin (while these two have unnoticeably contrived to alter the Western European metropolitan's attitude towards life) and which, from Hebbel's Judith to Ibsen's Epilogue, has evoked a series of tragic conceptions of the same type, although at the same time it had exhausted the sphere of genuine philosophic potentialities. To-day systematic philosophy is infinitely remote. Ethical philosophy is closed. The Occidental intellect still retains a third possibility, corresponding to Hellenic scepticism; this is dis- tinguished by the hitherto unknown method of comparative historic morphology. A possibility, that means a necessity. Ancient scep- ticism is anhistoric; it doubts, in that it simply says no. That of the Occident, if it is to possess an inner necessity, if it is to be a symbol of our soul nearing its close, must be out and out historic. It marks a close in that it understands everything as relative, as historical phenomenon. It proceeds psychologically. In Hellenism sceptical philosophy is manifested as the negation of philosophy— philosophy is declared purposeless. We on the other hand accept the history of philosophy as the last serious theme of philosophy. That is scepticism. Absolute standards are renounced—by the Greek in that he ridicules the past of his thinking, by us in that we conceive the past of our thinking as an organism. In this book the attempt is made to sketch this "unphilosophic philosophy of the future, which would be the last philosophy of Western Europe. Scepticism is the expression of a pure civiliza- tion; it disintegrates the cosmology of the preceding culture. Here all problems dissolve into the problem of their genesis. The convic- tion that everything which is had a becoming, that an historic ele- ment underlies everything natural and perceivable, that beneath the universe as the real there is an ego as the possible which realizes itself therein; the understanding that not only is there a deep mystery in the what, but also in the when and how long—this leads to the fact that everything, whatever else it is, must also be the OSWALD SPENGLER 21 ass expression of a living thing. “Becoming" is reflected in the "has become.” The old formula esse est percipi contains the primitive feeling that all things must stand in some decisive relationship to the living man, and that for the dead nothing more “exists." But has he “left” the world, his world, or has he abolished it by his death? That is the point of issue. But the thinkers of the sys- tematic period studied the relationship from formal considerations only, timelessly, from the standpoint of man in nature, and thus in the interests of a criticism of knowledge. They thought of "man" in the absolute, not of definite historical men. For the thinker of the ethical period, beginning with Schopenhauer, this question retreats behind the other question (treated in accord with idealism or utilitarianism) as to the value of that which "exists” for the individual or for all. But here also "man” was considered as a type, without examining the justification for such general assumptions. Now, finally, in this stage of historic-psychological scepticism, beginning with the immediate emotions of life, we observe that the whole aspect of the external world is a function of life itself, the mirror, expression, symbol of the living soul, and indeed of each isolated individual soul. Perceptions and judge- ments also are acts of living men. To earlier thought, external reality is the product of knowledge and the basis of ethical judge- ments; to later thought it is first of all a symbol. The morphology of universal history becomes necessary to a universal symbolism. Here also ends the claim of higher thought to the discovery of universal and eternal truths. There are truths only with reference to one definite humanity. Accordingly this philosophy itself would be the expression and reflection of the Occidental soul, as dis- tinguished-say—from the Ancient or Hindu, and even then would apply only to its civilized stage—its content as an attitude towards life, its practical scope, and its sphere of validity being determined by these limits. XVI In closing I should like to be permitted a personal observation. In the year 1911 I intended writing something, from a broader outlook, concerning certain political phenomena of the present and the conclusions as to the future which might be drawn from them. 22 THE DOWNFALL OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION The world war had already become the inevitable external form of the historic crisis, and was then not far in the distance: my purpose was to explain it by the spirit of the centuries (not years) preceding. In the course of this originally slight task I was driven to the conviction that, for a true understanding of the epoch, the range of the underlying principles must be greatly extended, that it was completely impossible to confine an investigation of this sort to a single period and a single sphere of political facts, holding it within the bounds of pragmatic tests and excluding even purely metaphysical, highly transcendental observations, unless one were willing to renounce all profounder cogency in the results. It be- came plain that a political problem cannot be understood from con- siderations of politics alone, and that essential traits which co- operate far beneath are tangibly manifested only in the field of art, or even only in the form of much further removed scientific and purely philosophical ideas. Even a political-social analysis of the last decades of the nineteenth century, a stage of tense calm between two mighty events looming in the distance (one, through the Revolution and Napoleon, has determined the aspect of Western Europe for a hundred years, and the other, of at least the same scope, was approaching with increasing impetus) was found to be impossible unless all great problems of being were to be brought within its compass. For in the universe of history, as in that of nature, not the slightest detail can be considered apart from the totality of profound tendencies which are incorporated in it. So the original theme underwent an enormous extension. An in- finity of surprising and, for the most part, new questions and rela- tionships demanded attention. Finally it became quite evident that no fragment of history could be fully explained until the meaning of universal history in general, or more accurately the meaning of the history of higher humanity as an organic unit of regular struc- ture, had been made clear. And this had hardly even been at- tempted heretofore. The connexion between the forms of architecture and those of war and government, the deep association between the political and mathematical aspects of the same culture, between religious and technical attitudes, between mathematics, music, and the plastic arts, between the manifestations of economics and of perception- from now on more and more of these relationships, which had often OSWALD SPENGLER 23 been suspected, and were touched on now and then, but were never understood, came into relief. The radical interdependence be- tween the most modern theories of physics and chemistry and the mythological ideas of our Germanic forbears, the complete con- gruence in the styles of tragedy, dynamics, and present-day busi- ness methods, the at first bizarre and then self-evident fact that perspective in oil painting, the credit system, book printing, long- range guns, and contrapuntal music on the one hand, and, on the other, the naked statue, the polis, and the gold coin invented by the Greeks are identical expressions of one and the same spiritual principle—this became obvious; and still more important, it became clear that these mighty groups of morphological relationships, each of which represents symbolically a single type of man in the pan- orama of universal history, are of strictly symmetrical growth. This perspective was needed to release the true concept of history. Since it in turn is the symptom and expression of an age, and is thus essentially possible (and therefore necessary) only to the Western European of to-day, it can only be compared, in a remote way, with certain ideas of the most recent mathematics in the field of transformation groups. I had been occupied with such notions for many years, but vaguely and indefinitely, until this incentive brought them into tangible form. I saw the present—the approaching world war—in an entirely different light. It was no longer an isolated constellation of casual facts dependent upon national feeling, personal influences, and economic tendencies, to which the historian gave the appearance of unity and material necessity by some causal scheme of a political or social nature; it was the type of historic act which had its place (biographically predetermined hundreds of years before) in a great historic organism of definitely limitable extent. The great crisis is indicated in a horde of the most passionate questions and atti- tudes which were manifest in thousands of contemporary books and opinions, but which, since they were treated in a scattered and disjunct manner, from the limited horizon of a specialized subject, were able to irritate, oppress, and confuse, but not to liberate. They were known, but their identity was overlooked. I mention the art problems (their true significance was not grasped at all) which underlie the quarrel over form and content, line or space, drawing or painting; the concept of style; the meaning of impres- 24. THE DOWNFALL OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION CO sionism and Wagner's music; the decay of art; the growing doubt as to the value of science; the grave questions resulting from the victory of the metropolis over the peasantry; race suicide; farm emigration; the social rank of the fluctuating fourth estate; the crisis in socialism, parliamentarism, rationalism; the relation of the individual to the state; the problem of property and the asso- ciated problem of marriage; in a seemingly different field the ex- tensive works on popular psychology, on myths and cults, on the beginnings of art, religion, and thought, where the treatment was no longer ideological, but strictly morphological-all of them ques- tions centring about the one puzzle of history which had never come into consciousness with sufficient clarity. There were not countless tasks here, but one single task. Here everyone had had some inkling, but no one had worked from his own narrow stand- point to the one comprehensive solution in the air since the time of Nietzsche, who already had a grip on all the decisive problems without daring, in his capacity of romantic, to face the harsh reality squarely. But herein lay also the profound necessity of a summarizing doctrine which had to come and could come at this time only. It is not a reversal of existing ideas and works. Rather it corrob- orates all that has been attempted and accomplished for genera- tions. This scepticism represents the kernel of everything in the way of vital tendencies which comes up for consideration in all specialized fields, no matter for what purpose. But first of all the one contrast is found by which the character of history can be grasped: the contrast between history and nature. I repeat: man as an element and member of the universe is not only a part of nature, but also a part of history, of a second cosmos which, with a different order and a different content, has always been neglected by metaphysics in favour of the first. I was induced to consider seriously this basic question of our cosmological con- sciousness by the observation that the contemporary historian, in handling tangible events, things which have become, thinks that he thereby grasps history, occurrence, becoming—a prejudice of all who perceive purely with the understanding and not with the in- tuition;' and the great Eleatics involved it in confusion by their 1 For the philosophy of this book I am indebted to the philosophy (the uncharted philosophy) of Goethe, and in a much lesser degree, to the V OSWALD SPENGLER 25 assertion that for the understanding there is no becoming, but only being (having become). In other words, history was looked upon as nature, in the objective sense of the physicist, and dealt with accordingly. This is the root of the fatal misconception whereby the aspect of becoming was obscured by the principles of causality, of law, of system, the structure of rigid being. It was assumed that there is a human culture just as there is, say, electricity or gravitation, with essentially the same possibilities of analysis; and the ambition was to copy the habits of the natural philosopher, so that it was occasionally asked what the Gothic, Islam, the Ancient polis are, but never why these symbols of the living had to appear at exactly that time and in that place, in such a form, and for so long. Whenever coming upon one of the countless similarities among historical phenomena widely separated in time and space, it sufficed simply to register it, with a few shrewd remarks as to the strangeness of the coincidence, speaking of Rhodes as the "Venice of Antiquity” or Napoleon as the new Alexander; yet it was pre- cisely here, where the problem of destiny stands out as the true problem of history (the problem of time, in other words) that the highest seriousness of scientifically regulated psychology should be brought to bear, and the question answered as to what quite dif- ferently constituted necessity (totally foreign to the causal chain) is here at work. That every phenomenon also presents a meta- physical enigma in that the time of its appearance is never without import; that one must also ask himself what sort of living rela- philosophy of Nietzsche. Goethe's position in Western European meta- physics has not been understood. He is not once mentioned when philoso- phy is under discussion. Unfortunately he did not lay down his doctrine in a rigid system; for this reason he is overlooked by the systematizers. But he was a philosopher. He stands in the same relation to Kant as Plato to Aristotle, and it is just as precarious a matter to attempt reducing Plato to a system. Plato and Goethe represent the philosophy of becoming, Aristotle and Kant that of having become. Here intuition is opposed to analysis. What is scarcely to be expressed within the terms of the under- standing is found in isolated remarks and poems like the primitive Orphic formulae, strophes such as “When in the infinite" and "Tell it to no one," which are to be considered as the embodiment of an entirely definite meta- physic. I should hate to see a single word of the following utterance altered: “Divinity is active in the living, but not in the dead; it is in changing and becoming, but not in the rigid and the has become. There- fore, reason, in its trend towards the divine, has to do only with becoming, the living; and understanding with the has become, the rigid, in order to put it to use.” (To Eckermann.) ome 26 THE DOWNFALL OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION tionship exists in the cosmogony (which is the irradiation of the whole man, and not, as Kant held, of the perceptions alone) besides the inorganic relationships of natural law; that a phenomenon is not only a fact for the understanding, but also the expression of the spiritual, not only object, but also symbol, which would apply to anything from the highest religious and artistic creations down to the trivialities of every-day life-such considerations were some- thing new to philosophy. Finally I saw the solution clearly before me, in colossal outlines, with full inward necessity, a solution based on a single principle which was waiting to be found and heretofore had not been found —something which had pursued and attracted me since youth and had tortured me because I felt its existence, felt it as a problem, and yet could not grasp it. Thus, through a somewhat casual motive this work has resulted, as the provisional expression of a new cosmological attitude, encumbered with all the faults of a first attempt, as I am well aware, incomplete, and surely not with- out inconsistencies. Yet I am convinced that it contains the un- deniable formulation of a thought which, I repeat, will not be opposed once it is expressed. The End GERTRUDE AND HER FLOWERS. BY FRANCES CRAN MER GREENMAN TWO POEMS BY MABEL SIMPSON WILLIAM BLAKE Day after day his soul was driven Against the very gates of Heaven. Day after day by waters tossed The seas of Life and Death he crossed. He walked upon the terrible sand, And lo! He gathered with his hand The unwithering flowers of that land. BODY My body is only lent to me, I carry it with me tenderly. I have given it sleep, I have given it sky, So it will not be afraid to die. I have taught it how to lie so still It can hear the heartbeats of the hill. I have given it every gentle care, I have washed its hands, I have brushed its hair. And I think when it goes down with earth Something beautiful will have birth. A bit of grass or a willow tree, My body is only lent to me. VAN WYCK BROOKS: HIS SPHERE AND HIS ENCROACHMENTS BY GORHAM B. MUNSON THE absence of literary critics in America who conceive of 1 literature as an art and who react from it as artists, the absence of critics, that is, who are preoccupied with aesthetics, must be strikingly manifest to one who observes the responses made to the career of Mr Van Wyck Brooks. Mr Brooks for ten years has moved quietly forward, encountering in large measure inattention and in small measure a thorough respect for his writing from a gratifying and devoted audience. But until very recently there has been no disposition whatever to challenge him. The result is that one faces a fairly general assumption that Mr Brooks is exercising in a full and satisfactory manner the function of the literary critic; one meets the floating notion that he is utilizing the whole scope of his profession. He has even his disciples among the younger critics, and on these scores he may be acknowledged as temporarily the dominant force in American criticism. He, more than any one else, more than even Mr H. L. Mencken, has created a certain prev- alent taste in letters, a certain way of thinking about literature. This eminence, though I feel it has been won through default, has certainly been graced by several estimable qualities of Mr Brooks. He has scholarship which becomes imposing when applied to the waste land of American letters. With what incredible pa- tience he has perused Cotton Mather and Bronson Alcott and George William Curtis and Gerald Stanley Lee! He has, I doubt not, surpassed in extent as he has excelled in apprehension the read- ing of Mr John Macy in the same field. This expert knowledge of the tedious minutiae of the geography of American literature as well as the thorough study of the more prominent protuberances has given him a historical consciousness. If we grant the assump- tion that our national letters are to have a unique indigenous fruition, this consciousness places him handsomely at the strategic spot to partake in the “conscious creation of the field of the present out of the past.” Whether or not Mr Brooks has the temperament GORHAM B. MUNSON 29 с for this strenuous undertaking, this application of our special past to a problematical special present and special future, is a question that must be reserved for a space. Happily, Mr Brooks has a style at the service of his erudition and historical consciousness. It is important to discriminate what quali- ties this style does not give. It does not give those sensations of density, of weight, of energy which the writing of a critic like M Julien Benda gives. Nor does it suggest solidity as does the prose of Matthew Arnold from which it is somewhat derived. Such effects are only achieved when the whole stream of one's conscious- ness, the whole stream of one's experience is compelled to force egress through the elaborate resistances of the intellect. And does Mr Brooks' intellect insert a close-meshed strongly-constituted filter between his personal experience and a blank sheet of paper? In The Ordeal of Mark Twain the compact array of informational items gives a specious effect of dense writing, but does it suggest that the pen was wielded by the whole force of the writer? Neither does Mr Brooks convey the feel of purified stripped architectural form, the beauty of clean statement standing by its own strength, the essentialized structure of Spinoza or, to provide more reason- able and closer rivalry for Mr Brooks, that of Mr T. S. Eliot. Is it because he has too few ideas to create a sense of architecture, is it because he has fewer ideas to strip off his central formulae? These hares, too, we must let run for the moment. The charm of Mr Brooks' prose resides in its grace, transparency, and lightness. He is persuasive, considerate, urbane, and dignified. This is engaging and disarming. It is as though Mr Brooks were trying to make it plain to American society that while he is ex- pounding a revolutionary attitude to that society, he is none the less a very amiable well-bred gentleman, and therefore it need not, after all, be so afraid of the changes he proposes. But whether or not his genteel manner is a comment upon the intensity of his feel- ing and thought is a matter that properly belongs to the jurisdiction of his own school. His ideas, again postponing the debate of their validity, profundity, and inclusiveness, are always lucidly pre- sented, while a sense of lightness, of prose rising gently from the page, is achieved by a gift for fresh, exact, and convenient metaphor. In his essay on Randolph Bourne, he says, “I am astonished at the way in which, like a ball of camphor in a trunk, the pungent savor 30 VAN WYCK BROOKS of the man spreads itself over every paragraph.” The simile is so appropriate, so close to its originating object, so inevitable that one can predict its aging into a cliché comparison. Meanwhile it delights as all our clichés must once have done. It is this essay on Bourne that I take to be Mr Brooks' finest prose. Whatever else that essay says or omits, it does say this: “Van Wyck Brooks can write airy, graceful, transparent prose to a charming degree.” The interests which have led Mr Brooks to acquire his erudition and his prose style are perfectly legitimate. They are biographical, psychological, social, historical, and nationalistic. He has always been drawn away from the literary document in front of him to a portrait of its author, or a diagnosis of his or his character's or his nation's psychology, or a dissertation on a state of society, or the recreation of a former epoch, or a programme for American culture. And what he has done in these ways has been so carefully performed, so sound, that it is difficult to meet him in conflict upon his chosen sphere. In order to challenge him, we must discover a basis which takes account of and values his special interests, but which lies underneath and surrounds his position. It is then a case of agree- ment with Mr Brooks up to a certain point, but of finally disputing with him the sovereignty of the whole kingdom of literary criticism. It is, concretely, an affair of testing and measuring the writing of Mr Brooks from the standpoint of an aesthetician. In the last decade Mr Brooks escaped all duels from that quarter. Mr J. E. Spingarn and Mr Willard Huntington Wright were capable of battling with him, but neither upraised his weapons. They were satisfied to write general essays, and rather few essays, based upon quite different assumptions from Mr Brooks', and to let these articles, side by side with his in The Seven Arts, imply their hostility. Mr T. S. Eliot, to the extent of my knowledge, has concerned himself not at all with the studies of Mr Brooks, while Mr Pound has never come nearer than glancing and rather friendly remarks. Since Mr Brooks' work is very localized and Messrs Eliot and Pound have leaped into European literary currents, this is not surprising. There remained Mr Waldo Frank, who sym- pathized so strongly with Mr Brooks' effort to create "a usable past" that he neglected to develop his statement, “Rather an essayist than a critic is Van Wyck Brooks.” Finally, there turned up in The DIAL (May, 1921) the unelaborated suspicion of the pseudonymous Dr W. C. Blum: m 1 GORHAM B. MUNSON 31 “Brooks says that Margaret Fuller was a more significant critic than Poe because she was ‘less interested in the technical aspect of literature and more in its spirit.' The distinction is suspicious; the word 'spiriť more so. And Brooks has gone Margaret Fuller one better by criticizing modern literature without naming work or author. It is all spirit for him.” Does not this record prove a startling paucity of critics in the last decade who were absorbed in the technical problems of litera- ture, who kept their minds focussed on the object, the work of literary art, who felt a sense of responsibility toward their milieu and that milieu's apprehension of the nature and object of literary criticism? A sense of responsibility toward our milieu demands greater extensiveness in the treatment of problems than that which a critic may feel in more developed surroundings. The formative and partially organized state of literary America requires of Ameri- can critics the explicit statement of their implications and even more than that: it requires the definite linking of the crime to the criminal. Mr Brooks, thrusting up into an amorphous and confused literary situation, merited serious attention and conflict. But the aesthetic critic as a rule trusted to the destructive power of his own implications and either ignored Mr Brooks or merely gave him an oblique glance of friendship or of disapproval. This reliance upon the power of implications to work themselves out in the minds of a reading public not yet, beyond an infinitesimal minority, dis- tinguished for its subtlety, rendered less effective the sporadic oppo- sition to Mr Brooks manifested by certain writers in THE DIAL. In spite of such clear statements as that of Mr Gilbert Seldes (THE DIAL, February, 1922) “the analysis of an emotion can neither fortify nor destroy whatever that emotion has produced,” which closed a paragraph admirably applicable to the Brooks type of criticism, the connexion was not generally perceived by editors and critics, let alone by any fair proportion of the public. Conse- quently, arrears of confusion continued to accumulate, and an American wishing to practise an alert precise and fundamental criti- cism finds his public relations heavily clogged. He is forced to think both in terms of his own reactions and in terms of his milieu. That is, he is forced to do so if he assumes that an active and per- ceptive milieu confers stimulating benefits not only upon himself, but upon his fellow workers in all forms of literary art. 32 VAN WYCK BROOKS CO Sa In Vanity Fair (December, 1922) Mr Kenneth Burke sketched a diagnosis of the type of criticism practised by Mr Brooks which was so direct in its application that to many people it was the announcement of a really subversive attitude. Starting with an analogy, “Supposing that A is a lover of flowers, and that I pre- sent him with a flower ... and supposing further, that instead amining my flower, arranging it tentatively against the land- scape, and putting it to his nose, A asks me where I got the flower, why I got it, and how much I paid for it. In other words, let us suppose that A talked of all the accidental features of the flower, and quite neglected the central matter, a judgment of the flower itself,” Mr Burke advanced to point out that the literary critic corresponding to A found a book “not significant as a fact, but as a symptom.” This led to the statement that "psycho-analysis con- cerns itself with the genesis of the art product rather than with its status quo.” Mr Brooks was indicated as an elucidator of genesis, and the article went on to prove that one cannot extract a judge- ment from a genesis. This brief is a point of departure. The testing of it obligates one first to review Mr Brooks' production in order to determine with greater fulness than Mr Burke was permitted if Mr Brooks is throughout a genetic critic, and it obligates one to consider what Mr Burke neglected to take up, the qualifications, hypothetical or otherwise, of Mr Brooks as a critic of the status quo of literary art. We shall be helped if we make a somewhat arbitrary classifica- tion of Mr Brooks' books into social studies and biographical studies. The two types under his manipulation tend to merge, but a waver- ing division between The World of H. G. Wells, The Wine of the Puritans, America's Coming-of-Age, and Letters and Leadership on one side, and John Addington Symonds and The Ordeal of Mark Twain on the other can be recognized. Concerning his social docu- ments, the preliminary statement to be made of Mr Brooks is that he is an adherent of socialism. This borrowed conception he has warmed away from its pristine scientific rigidity and coldness into a pulsing and luminous vision: he has saturated the conception with humanism. Therefore, his book on Wells. In this the natural socialist mind is outlined, its faith expounded, and the psychological difficulties in its path examined. Mr Brooks then has entrenched himself in the socialist attitude toward social organization, and ITV GORHAM B. MUNSON from that intelligent vantage-ground he has released, according to my canvass, the following ideas: 1. The Puritans and their descendants "accustomed themselves to the idea that sustaining the machinery of life was a kind of end in itself . . . American civilization has not yet learned to accept the machinery of life as a premise.” (The Wine of the Puritans) 2. The pouring of the old wine, the humane traditions of Europe, into the new bottle, life in the wilderness, produced a disassociation between the spiritual and the mundane lives: Tran- scendentalism was the aroma, and the dregs became a crass com- mercialization of life. (The Wine of the Puritans) 3. American society is divided between the highbrow and the lowbrow, between the world of theory and the world of action, with no middle usable ground of common experience connecting them. (America's Coming-of-Age) 4. “The general axiom: that a society whose end is impersonal and anti-social cannot produce an ideal reflex in literature which is personal and social, and conversely, that the ideal reflex in litera- ture produced by such a society will be unable to educate its own personal and social instincts.” (America's Coming-of-Age) 5. Artists are the progenitors of successful social revolutions by creating values which act as magnets to give direction to the dissatisfied. “But certainly no true social revolution will ever be possible in America till a race of artists, profound and sincere, have brought us face to face with our own experience and set work- ing in that experience the leaven of the highest culture.” (Letters and Leadership) 6. Literature is "a great impersonal social instrument.” (The Ordeal of Mark Twain) 7. An acquisitive society and a creative life are incompatible. (An underlying thesis in all the volumes of Mr Brooks.) These, I believe, comprise the complete working-stock of ideas employed by Mr Brooks. About them, of course, cluster many auxiliary ideas, applications, reiterations, and beliefs, but I do not think there are any principal statements to be added. They are simple, they are central, and, judging by the way they have saturated and energized American critical writing, they are dynamic. Every- 34 VAN WYCK BROOKS an where, in conversation, in "briefer mentions,” in critiques and articles, in books, one encounters people leaning upon them. Bear- ing in mind the depressing fog of the last decade into which they were liberated like so many bright torches, one can scarcely escape an inordinate gratitude for their expression. I agree with several of them and in this paper cannot undertake to counter any of them beyond suggesting that thesis number three is open to an excep- tionally interesting debate.? The more pressing necessity is to point out that in his social studies Mr Brooks is a genetic critic in so far as he is a historical critic, but that he goes beyond genesis to excellent dissections and judgements of the social situation as it exists to-day. The reader has, of course, observed that he has not touched aesthetics. It is in his biographical studies that Mr Brooks is most purely the elucidator of genesis. He had, to begin with, a shrewdness in psychological matters, and the development of the method of psychoanalysis has given him just the tool he needed to deepen and clarify his intuitive recognitions. For investigation he prefers frustrated and incomplete artists, men like Amiel and Symonds and Clemens. The notion that the real Symonds never got himself ex- pressed in his writing intrigued Mr Brooks, as it was the notion that Clemens was a wreckage of vast potentials that drove him through so much laborious research. To discover the restrictions that hamper creation may truly be declared to be the major impulse of this critic, and it is perhaps fair to ask of a genetic critic with this obsession just why he himself should be so exclusively absorbed in the study of thwarted careers. But since I am endeavouring to 1 Briefly, the argument against it might run as follows: the pioneer- industrial rhythm has stratified; American society has made an adjustment to this rhythm and reacts to it as a constant in its environment; the removal of a too sharp and persistently imminent danger in the activity of this rhythm has permitted a margin of creative ferment; and, therefore, this constant factor, the adjustment and the ferment accreted to it con- stitute a common middle ground of racial experience. But this conducts us to a questioning of the Brooksian assumption that literature and not skyscrapers, jazz, bridges, vaudeville, et cetera, “the seven lively arts," as Mr Gilbert Seldes has named them, is the ideal reflex of America, and it would conclude with an exposition of a new and still nebulous school of writers which I have christened the Skyscraper Primitives—topics for a separate study. ? Mr Brooks is now writing about Henry James, but it is significant that he is treating James as a frustrated artist. GORHAM B. MUNSON 35 e treat Mr Brooks as a fact and not as a symptom, that question may be assigned for pursuit by his followers. In passing, however, it is well to remark that even a genetic critic cannot safely ignore all judgement on the plane of the status quo. We are all convinced that Clemens had great creative energy which got tangled in its direction instead of flowing with its grain, but what of the intellect which guides and cuts through to clarities? Mr Brooks ignores the plain evidence that Clemens had only a mediocre intellect, and the conse- quent deduction that even if he had straightened himself out, his appeal would still have been to rudimentary minds for all the push- ing of his energy in a wholesome direction. The quantitative value of Clemens is undeniable; his qualitative value is dubious. It is also well known that his one masterpiece, Huckleberry Finn, re- ceived very skimpy treatment in The Ordeal of Mark Twain. We are now ready to say that Mr Brooks as a critic does corre- spond to the man who, given a rose, inquires about the soil, the manuring of that soil, the sunshine and the rain, and the economic arrangements whereby that rose finally came into his hands. If I have given no credit to the wistfulness, the yearning for a flowering of the humanities in America which give a glow to his quest, that is because the spirit of Van Wyck Brooks has already been so sym- pathetically memorialized, notably in Our America, by Mr Waldo Frank. I have given only enough to get Mr Brooks, so to speak, into the ring. To get our critic before us, I have noted his present- day eminence in our literary life and the qualities of erudition, his- torical consciousness, and style which, in conjunction with a lack of opposition, explain his leadership. I have stated his ideational ground-plan and classified him as primarily an elucidator of genesis. And I have admitted his validity as such. But there still exists cause for polemics. ar Our concern is with end-products, and the sum of Mr Brooks' efforts may be denoted by the word education. Matthew Arnold, as Mr Eliot has written, spent most of his time in defending and marking out a place for the practice of criticism. Mr Brooks has used his time to defend and mark out a place for the practice of letters in America. Neither writer approaches the goal of his solici- tude directly. These studies of Mr Brooks are valuable just in so 36 VAN WYCK BROOKS far as they make it easy for the artist to perceive what hostile forces he is up against, what his relation to an acquisitive society must be, what escape he can contrive from sterile battles. They are valuable just in so far as they dispose a public to understand and sympathize with creators. But at that point they stop. For what is the particular "good life” that Mr Brooks is con- stantly speaking of? What is his precise conception of the “poetic life”? The terms are general and abused. What significance has he given them? I do not believe it is my fault I cannot answer. For Mr Brooks is irritatingly shadowy on these positive points. His admirable and specific negatives point to a special conundrum, which his occasional references to Goethe solve not at all, and we are left doubting if he himself has any clue to the puzzle. It is time to make a guess about Mr Brooks, and my guess is that while his intellect is radical to the extent that it can unravel social and personal tangles, his emotions are doggedly conservative. What he really wants, I imagine, is a liberation of the American milieu so that its artists may reproduce in their readers certain emo- tional experiences which he has found satisfying and has cherished. Crudely, what he desires is an American Charles Dickens, an Ameri- can Carlyle, an American Thomas Hardy. Certainly, he has re- vealed no friendship for novelty, and if the coming American litera- ture he has announced should turn out to be a new consciousness in new forms, there is reasonable doubt that Mr Brooks would recog- nize his long-awaited Messiah. This conjecture clearly depends upon a discussion of the sensibility of Mr Brooks and raises the query—granted that Mr Brooks is perfectly entitled to eschew judgements upon the artistic fact of literary works, what qualifica- tions or deficiencies would he be likely to display if by some violence he were forced into the role of aesthetic critic? But Mr Brooks has not only eschewed aesthetic judgements, he has actually ruled them out as far as American criticism is con- cerned. He says in John Addington Symonds: "True criticism is not a second best, not, as it is often supposed, a compromise in theory on the part of men who cannot succeed in practice. It is a wholly different function, the intellectual study of origins and relations. It regards the work of art, not as a record personal to the critic, but as a specimen to be investigated dis- GORHAM B. MUNSON passionately, intellectually, in its relation both to art and to life. The difficulty with Symonds at this period was that he could not disentangle the objective and the subjective. He felt every work of art as a poet, and at the same time could not refrain from analysing it. For this reason neither the one impulse nor the other could function properly.” It is good to hear any American critic assert the independence of his function, but a little distressing, is it not, to have that function confined to "the intellectual study of origins and relations"? It is more disturbing to be informed that a critic should not react to a work of art as a poet, that is, as an artist, that is, as a man in the know, a man capable both of appreciating effects and the ma- chinery by which these effects were created. To react as a poet to a work of art is in a measure to see it as its designer saw it, to be aware of his problems and his solutions, to be in direct touch with the thing itself. To debar this intelligent apprehension of literature from criticism is to make criticism simply an exercise in writing away from the subject into other fields. In his essay on Randolph Bourne, Mr Brooks again arouses objections. "If our literary criticism is always impelled sooner or later to become social criticism, it is certainly because the future of our literature and art depends upon the wholesale reconstruction of a social life all the elements of which are as if united in a sort of conspiracy against the growth and freedom of the spirit: we are in the position described by Ibsen in one of his letters: 'I do not think it is of much use to plead the cause of art with arguments derived from its own nature, which with us is still so little understood, or rather so thoroughly misunderstood. ... My opinion is that at the present time it is of no use to wield one's weapons for art; one must simply turn them against what is hostile to art.' ”. These statements contain the extraordinary implication of both Ibsen and Mr Brooks that the essential activity of criticism varies according to the time and the locality in which the critic lives. But if the nature of art is so little understood or rather so thoroughly misunderstood, why, then, is not that very state of affairs a chal- 38 VAN WYCK BROOKS lenge to critics? Doesn't the exploration of the unknown become a desperate necessity? Isn't that a raison d'être for a brave criti- cism? But no, we must devote ourselves to ponderables, we must tilt at the social forces which strive to crush the artist. It is true that aesthetics carried far enough reaches sociology. But Mr Brooks invites us to take a short cut, to begin with sociology as he has done and trust eventually to reach aesthetics. In other words, he has suavely asked us to take his aesthetic sensibility on faith. Can we be good-natured enough to do that? I do not wish to make too much of the following, but in his early book on Symonds, we catch our critic admiring the strained vague and cheap ornamen- tation of his subject's prose. In speaking of the Greek Poets, he wrote: “The book is vibrant with golden pictures and bright phrases, such as this: "The sweetness of the songs of Phrynichus has reached us like the echo of a bird's voice in a traveller's narrative.'” Mr Brooks has, I am sure, outgrown that taste, but since he has also grown silent concerning his mature taste in this very specific mat- ter of shapely sentences, we must hold this early committal against him. For it is an instance of the conviction that style is ornament, that aesthetic form is something exterior, which has persisted with him and found added to it the notion that technic is trickery. In- deed, it seems probable that he holds to a confusion between a technic of art and a technic of salesmanship (that is, a technic so to "put over” a story that the reader will be unaware that it is such). Listen to half a paragraph from Letters and Leadership: "[American literature] has made up for its failure to motivate the American scene and impregnate it with meaning by concentrat- ing all its forces in the exterior field of aesthetic form. Gilding and idealizing everything it has touched and frequently attaining a high level of imaginative style, it has thrown veils over the barrenness and emptiness of our life, putting us in extremely good conceit with ourselves while actually doing nothing either to liberate our minds or to enlighten us as to the real nature of our civilization. Hence we have the meticulous technique of our contemporary 'high-class' magazines, a technique which, as we know, can be acquired as a trick, and which, artistic as it appears, is really the mark of a com- plete spiritual conventionality and deceives no sensible person into supposing that our general cleverness is the index of a really civilized society." GORHAM B. MUNSON 39 Elsewhere he wrote that "nobody dreams of criticising Long- fellow from the point of view of ‘mere literature': the human head and the human heart alike revolt from that.” Now take him read- ing the meticulously precise technical criticism of Poe. He reads: "It is only with the dénouement constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points, tend to the development of the intention.” ... “Carrying its errors into excess—for, however enticing, they are errors still, or nature lies—fancy is at length found infringing upon the province of fantasy. The votaries of this latter delight not only in novelty and unexpectedness of combination, but in the avoidance of proportion. The result is, therefore, abnormal, and, to a healthy mind, affords less of pleasure through its novelty than of pain through its incoherence." But it is not statements such as these that Mr Brooks remembers. Poe, he says, was taken in by the false taste of his epoch, he was irritated by “bad grammar, bad rhymes, and plagiarism.” We are entitled, I think, to be suspicious. We have excellent reason for doubting whether Mr Brooks is as conscious of the way in which an artist manipulates his reader's consciousness as he is of the items that artist drops into it, or indeed we have right even to speculate on his possible lack of an unconscious aesthetic response. For is he not always inclined to emphasize the associative properties of literature at the cost of the whole? “The characters of Cooper lighted up a little fringe of the black uncut forest; they linked the wilderness with our immemorial human world, just as the little figures Piranesi put in his engrav- ings not only give the scale of his Roman ruins and relate them to the observer's eye but also arouse the sense of historical con- nections, the sense of pathos, and of man's destiny."1 The sense of historical connexions, the sense of pathos, and of man's destiny- it is these things he searches for and, once found, he is indulgent towards or oblivious of basic faults in the presentation. This type of sensibility, consequently, has no impediments in reading Charles Dickens: it can, in fact, read him with complete satisfaction. 1 America's Coming-of-Age. 40 VAN WYCK BROOKS What is most amazing is that Mr Brooks has never given recog- nition of the existence of Aristotle's Poetics. It is hard to under- stand how a serious student of criticism can escape at all points from registering any impact whatsoever with the solidities and depths of that truly canonical treatise. Yet if Mr Brooks believes that he is really practising literary criticism and not something peripheral to it, and he implies that he does so believe and his fol- lowing certainly credits him with that activity, then he is assuredly anti-Aristotelian. He has assuredly ignored the centre of Aris- totle's approach to art, and adopted as the centre of his approach a consideration that the Greek aesthetician demonstrated was purely subsidiary. And since the weight of prestige is enormously with Aristotle, it is strange that Mr Brooks has not given explicit justi- fication for his departure. But in a brief survey of the history of criticism, he mentions only Socrates, Lessing, and Sainte-Beuve, significantly omitting Aristotle. At last we can close in on Mr Brooks. ... The difference be- tween the Aristotelian critic and the Brooksian critic is that the former, following his master, endeavours to formulate a universal and permanent basis of art, while the latter is essentially—and I ask the reader to subtract from the words all moral derogation—a time-serving and place-serving moralist, a provincial, for all the nobility of his aim, in time and in place. Aristotle found the permanence of literature to reside in its structure or form, which form was a purification, a completion of life's actions, and was built to conform to known bodily laws of rhythm, balance, symmetry, and proportion, an imitation of nature as he named it. Mr Brooks, in contrast, discovers a contemporary and local basis, when, in dis- cussing American writers, he postulates: “Not one of them, not all of them, have had the power to move the soul of America from the accumulation of dollars; and when one has said this one has ar- rived at some sort of basis for literary criticism.” Not only does this not afford us a basis for literary criticism of the Bacchae of Euripides or the Song of Songs or the Divine Comedy of Dante, but it is not even a unique basis for the study of literature: it is also "some sort of basis” for a criticism of religion or education or science or athletics. It is simply a general moral criterion for our day and our country. Possibly Mr Brooks has felt a bit uneasy about his operations GORHAM B. MUNSON 41 from this transitory and localized criterion: he seems to seek protec- tion for his incomplete formulae by warning us against the appli- cation of more severe criteria. He has, for instance, quoted Thomas Macdonagh with approval. Macdonagh "showed how disadvan- tageous it is to have a full-grown criticism side by side with what he calls a baby literature,” and Mr Brooks has declared that "the only strictly organic literature of which at the moment this country is capable is a literature that is being produced by certain minds which seem, artistically speaking, scarcely to have emerged from the protozoa.” Well, we have had this protozoic literature: we have welcomed Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson for their organic relation with our society: and we have toddled into stag- nancy both of criticism and of fiction. On this point The Dial in its Comment (February, 1922) was vigorous, pointed, and final: "Naturally in a social order which seems almost wholly inhibi- tory he [Mr Brooks] speaks for 'springing loyally to the support of groping minds that bear the mark of sincerity and promise.' He does not invoke so heartily the unsparing judgement which demands that the groping mind discover its path. What has happened in America over and over again is this: the potential artist has stopped halfway because no critic and certainly no public demanded of him the last item of his strength as an artist. The American critic has hit soft and the American writer has gone soft; and the public taste which the critic could have formed has been, for the most part, a series of sentimental enthusiasms. It has almost lost the faculty of intelligent enjoyment. It has asked its authors to repeat, not to create; and has faithfully stood by them as they grew progressively worse." SO American criticism, as our quotation infers, has stunted its growth. It has not been willing to learn that “in a play accordingly they do not act in order to portray the Characters; they include the Characters for the sake of the action. So that it is the action in it, i.e. its Fable or Plot, that is the end and purpose of the tragedy; and the end is everywhere the chief thing." It has with Mr Brooks lauded H. G. Wells for his ideas, and blandly ignored the possibility that Wells' episodic novels might be symptoms and forces of artistic degeneracy, blandly ignored the doctrine: "of simple Plots and 42 VAN WYCK BROOKS actions the episodic are the worst. I call a Plot episodic when there is neither probability nor necessity in the sequence of its episodes.” Too gladly, indeed, has American criticism renounced the test and strain of research for a permanent element in letters: it much pre- fers a sultry atmosphere and opportunist measuring-sticks. For criticism of literature founded on a given social situation loses its validity the moment that given social situation shifts its lines. What is wrong with Mr Brooks and what is wrong with nine- tenths of American critical writing to-day is no less than a deficiency in the sense of proportion. This criticism can talk about characters, about ideas, about its recognition-pleasures, and verisimilar repre- sentation, about moral imports, but it cannot talk about what these are designed to do in a work of art. It cannot talk about harmony, relationships, and organization: it cannot view the end because of its entanglement in the means. It lacks a standpoint which is high enough for the vision of contributory elements melting into a major and vital organism. That is, it is fatally cut off from awareness of an artist's mode of apprehension, which amounts to saying quite flatly that it cannot enter into the workings of the imagination. It would be ungracious, of course, to quarrel with a criticism which wants to be social and genetic, provided that criticism knew what it was about, provided that criticism knew that it was deliberately cultivating a smaller circle within the great circle of aesthetic under- standing. But it is imperative to protest when the smaller circum- ference is substituted for the larger. Against the growing pressure of this circumscription, "the first need of American criticism today is," as Mr J. E. Spingarn spiritedly remarks, "education in aesthetic thinking. It needs above all the cleansing and stimulating power of an intellectual bath. Only the drenching discipline that comes from intellectual mastery of the problems of aesthetic thought can train us for the duty of interpreting the American literature of the future.” Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum GIRL PLAYING GUITAR. BY IVAN MESTROVIC Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum BY IVAN MESTROVIC MADAME RUZA MESTROVIC. Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum MADONNA AND CHILD. BY IVAN MESTROVIC ITALIAN LETTER December, 1924, O NCE more, and truly against my will, as if by a kind of fatality, my letters to The Dial have suffered a long in- terruption. And now, as after each interval of silence, I feel that the task of interpreting the living literature of my country to my American friends becomes harder every day, since every day helps to transform the living, loving, struggling, and palpitating country of my American journey into a fantastic abstraction, and every day gives back to my Italian experiences more of their original intimacy and ineffability. It is on the soil of such purely personal contingencies that we build the images and myths which lead us through the intricacies of a history of which we are either the blind actors or the hardly less blind spectators. America and Europe stand now in my imagination like two friends having separate lives during the day, meeting in darkness only: who still know each other's voice, though the sound becomes stranger and more remote every night, but are rapidly forgetting the lines of each other's face. And again, America lives in the glare of a crude but invigorating light, Europe in a cold, extenuating dusk; and things American, when we think of them here, are like new steel engines in the shadow of an ancient tree: things European in the American light, like Medusae on the shore of a pitiless sea. And still another image haunts me: what we call civilization is a monstrous tidal wave flowing westward, from China and India to Persia, from Greece and Rome to England, from Europe to Amer- ica: what Asia was to us from the fifteenth to the nineteenth cen- tury, we shall be henceforward to you. How, through the im- passable gulf of such desolate images, how shall we, my American friends, hold converse with each other, understand each other's language ? I might be inclined, however, to dismiss these images as mere aegri somnia, if they were not now and then strikingly confirmed by the literary chronicles of the day. The fortune of certain European writers in America, for instance, cannot be explained To we IS 1 ITALIAN LETTER otherwise than through a fundamental misunderstanding, though it is only fair to add that the first source of the misunderstanding is generally to be looked for not in America, but in Europe. That which is thoroughly and peculiarly European, that which still testi- fies of the existence of some authentic energy among the embers of our civilization, has only a limited appeal, a very slow power of diffusion, outside the frontiers of our several countries. Great Italian poets, like Foscolo and Leopardi, are still practically un- known, after a century and more, not to America only, but to the rest of Europe. Among more recent writers, Carducci and Pascoli are little more than names, and d'Annunzio is a spectacular legend. Greatness in poetry, and to a certain extent even greatness in thought, remains purely local, being as untranslatable, in the most literal meaning of the word, as the deepest strata of the particular culture from which it has sprung. The common culture, the super- ficial culture of each country, seems to be the only one that has power to exchange its products. That which is the fashion in Italy to-day, may become the fashion in England or France, and in Amer- ica, to-morrow: true poets write alteri saeculo. Nor is the fact a new one in the annals of literature: the englese italianato (or diabolo incarnato) of Shakespeare's times, had as much reverence, if not more, for such forgotten worthies as Seraphino Aquilano or Baptista Mantuanus, as for Petrarch or Ariosto. Do Americans admire Pirandello as much as we are told? Be- fore the war Pirandello was a recognized second-rate writer of short stories: an indefatigable writer of short stories, a patient collector of little facts, to whom the gifts of the Muses had been dealt out in the most sparing measure. Like all second-rate writers he was an easily classifiable one: he was, not by birth only, a Sicilian, a disciple of Giovanni Verga, that is, of the most vigorous representative of a school of provincial writers who, between the 'seventies and the ’nineties, had naturalized French realism in Italy, drawing their inspiration from the life of the peasantry and of the small bourgeoisie. But, most emphatically, he was a very small poet; and I may be allowed to state here, as a very obvious axiom, that every writer is either a poet or a thinker, or both: now Pirandello was certainly not a thinker. All that could be said of him was that in some of his stories, and in one or two novels, he as RAFFAELLO PICCOLI 45 had shown a remarkable ability in describing or inventing certain forms of imperfect and dislocated consciousness through which life appears as a bad dream or as a puppet-show. But even here the description or invention was one of pathological cases and abstract types: not the creation of living men and women. In order to understand how it was possible for Pirandello to blossom out, after the war, from a second-rate writer of fiction into a supposedly first-rate playwright, it is necessary to take into account a whole series of literary and social facts. Among these, the one that stands out above all others, and is sufficient in itself to explain the miracle, is the deep deterioration of the culture and taste of the Italian public caused by the war. The people who were able to buy a book or to go to a theatre in the years of the social and economic revolution which followed the war, were (and are) a "new band,” totally different from the literary and theatri- cal public of the first years of the century. Old theatre-goers who had been used to see the same faces in the same places year after year, found themselves among audiences constellated by entirely new and unknown jewels, belonging to a very young, a very raw race, for which some equally young and raw critics were just then discovering that the world itself was newly born, together with the said bejewelled race, after the war; that this newly born world was infinitely wiser and more interesting than any which had existed before, its chief privilege consisting in its consciousness of its own unreality or, as the word goes, relativity; and that it was urgent that a new genius should appear to build a new art on the "problem of the age,” that is, on this exquisite suddenness, law- lessness, and unreasonableness, of which the new wealth was the flower (the new wealth: or the new intelligence, the new power, the new policy, the new morality: the new spirit, the Spirit of the Age). To this alteration in the environment, which is fundamental, a few other facts must be added, of a more strictly literary char- acter. We have already had some occasion of speaking of Futur- ism in relation with certain diffuse tendencies of the age, and of Marinetti as of a forerunner. The Futurists had made, even before the war, some very amusing dramatic experiments with the so- called Synthetic Theatre, which was substantially a satire or carica- ture of contemporary playwriting: the mere technical expedient, as 46 ITALIAN LETTER the idolatry of dramatic technique (of which America has heard so much, and to such little use!) was the butt of the new icono- clasts, who had an admirable capacity for reducing a play to its mechanical structure, or even, dismissing all superfluities, to the clever third act climax which so often was the only justification for the existence of the first two acts, and of nine-tenths of the third. The Futurists were not always entirely conscious of the satirical value of their work; sometimes, being after all quite simple and unsophisticated people, they may have taken them- selves a little too seriously: in which case, the satire was only more comprehensive, as it turned against themselves also. But their playlets were generally written between the coffee and the benedictine, and were flung quite good-naturedly, like huge practical jokes, in the face of the indignant Philistine. Almost at the same time with the Synthetic Theatre, another fashion had its short-lived fortune, and a new dramatic genre, that of the grotesque, flourished and perished. The grotesque was mainly due to the imitation of Shaw on the part of a few men who knew no English; and in fact, though its creators were often called, and believed themselves to be, Shaw's disciples, it is very hard, for anybody who has any familiarity with the work of G.B.S., to understand why they should confess such an illusory allegiance. The first grotesque, the one which remains as the classic of its kind, and which gave birth to a large family of more or less fortunate copies, was La Maschera e il Volto, by Chiarelli, a play which I hear is on its way to New York, via London. In La Maschera e il Volto we find for the first time in the Italian theatre a motive which was destined to become extremely popular, if not with the audiences, at least with the playwrights: the motive of the double or divided personality. It is not difficult, if we con- sider one or more characters in a play as endowed with two distinct personalities, to create a number of fanciful combinations, by which the most superannuated dramatic plots acquire a new lease of originality. The protagonist whom we expect to behave according to the usual laws of psychological probability, will confess sud- denly that what we have seen of him is nothing but a mask, and start behaving in a totally different way, in accordance with the nature revealed by his real face. And of course there is no reason why we should stop here: the second face might also prove to be RAFFAELLO PICCOLI 47 NOT a mere mask, and give place to a new face and a new behaviour, and so on, endlessly. It is obvious that such an expedient cannot be criticized in the abstract: a writer of genius might exploit it for a masterpiece, and a pedant can easily prove that some very venerable plays, Hamlet among others, are founded on it. But in the Italian grotesque these fanciful combinations were used simply as a substitute for dramatic imagination: a few aspiring youths, having learnt the recipe and found it easy, inundated our stage with the purely mechanical hamletisms of their skilfully duplicated personalities. They tried also to improve on their model, and mere naked symbols, buried and forgotten since the remote times of mysteries and miracle plays, intruded themselves among the real human characters: an extreme modernism reveal- ing itself, as is often the case, as an involuntary revival of some well-known and justly deprecated mediaeval vice. Some of these plays, and particularly La Maschera e il Volto, may interest even intelligent Americans: but their success will be mainly due to that exotic charm which is to literature what powder and rouge are to an old beauty on the stage. I remember what deep mystical meanings some American critics were able to discover in Benelli's Cena delle Beffe (The Jest) when it was performed in New York: a pleasant little play, undoubtedly, but one which hardly even means what it says. Let us now summarize the ingredients of Pirandello's originality as a playwright: first, his initial preference for partial, tangential, distorted views of life; second, a widespread demand for a super- ficial and at the same time paradoxical image of life; third, the satire of current dramatic technique (Synthetic Theatre); fourth, the motive of the (mechanically) divided personality, as already made fashionable by the writers of grotesques. Every one of Pirandello's plays can be analysed into these four fundamental ingredients, and the residuum of the analysis is, if anything at all, that same bourgeois and realistic drama against which Pirandello's theatre is supposed to be a vehement and uncompromising reaç- tion. Now the difference between the real thing and a substitute, between poetry and non-poetry, is that, while the latter can be entirely explained away through its sources and the circumstances of its composition, the former resists all such attempts at dis- 48 ITALIAN LETTER ar V Me mo ruption, and when you think you know all there is to be known about it, it rises again before you in its unconquerable wholeness. If side by side with Shakespeare's Julius Caesar you read all the extracts from North's Plutarch which he utilized and sometimes almost transcribed in his tragedy, you may flatter yourself, if you have little imagination, that you understand what Shakespeare was trying to do when he wrote it; but a little dose of humility and common sense is sufficient to realize that the critical problem, the business of understanding, only begins, in the case of Shakespeare, where your erudition ends. It may seem unfair to make use of such examples, but on the other hand, what applies to a great poet, ought to apply also to a small, and even to a very small one. The success of Pirandello's plays in Italy has a discontinuous character which is singularly illuminating. Every new play is regularly announced as written in defiance of all laws of common sense and of all accepted standards of theatrical production: the friends of the author are sure, this time, that he has gone a little too far, and that the public will not swallow the new masterpiece. But the public (that very peculiar public which we have already described) are not to be caught napping: they understand that Pirandello's first nights are a kind of intelligence test, and they are always willing to swallow anything rather than to confess their intellectual inferiority. The first nights, however, are never fol- lowed by a long series of performances, because the game is cer- tainly not worth the candle except when it is played under the very special conditions of publicity which only a first night affords. Only the very naïve will consent to play it in the dark, and of such the race has never been poorer than now. The chief merit of Pirandello, according to his apologists, con- sists in his choice of certain philosophical problems, which are supposed to be aspects and parts of the aforementioned “problem of the age.” I shall not quote the extravagant words in which some critics attempt to define these problems: a single example, drawn from an essay by a young critic, who is not one of Piran- dello's most enthusiastic admirers, will be more than sufficient: “In Sei Personaggi in Cerca di Autore a very delicate dialectic problem is attacked by the author: in order to escape from the per- petual mobility of their existence, and from the transitoriness of RAFFAELLO PICCOLI 49 their identity, men ask to be made objective and eternal by art; but even the eternity of art is a mere illusion, and is swallowed up by the overpowering mutability of life, when that which has been imagined in the aesthetic sphere transforms itself suddenly into a living passion. There is no end to this torment which man endures because of his incurable diversity, and of his inability to make a proper distinction between the illusion of art, and reality.” We are not now concerned with the aesthetic treatment of the problem (we have seen already what the aesthetic solution is); but it is well worth while to ask oneself whether such problems do at all exist as problems; and the answer is, obviously, in the nega- tive. Both Pirandello and his apologists deal not with the con- crete spiritual facts of our age, which are the same in kind as those of all other ages, but with complicated machines of words which they mistake for profound thoughts. Through this aspect of their activity they foster another post-war disease of our culture: the philosophic, or pseudophilosophic, mania. A revival of genuine philosophical thought such as we have had in Italy since the be- ginning of the century, is always accompanied by its ghost in the shape of a large diffusion of loose philosophical formulas. We have seen these formulas parading even in the columns of the daily papers, and applied to all kinds of subjects, from literary criticism to political discussion, and fashion, and the sports. They are employed more often by those who are less familiar with their true import, and they owe their popularity to the fact that, while they are supposed to confer a kind of distinction on the writer, they give him, and his reader, the illusion of knowing much more than they actually know. They are intellectual multiplicators. The accepted critical formula for Pirandello is a very simple one: The Poet of Idealism, meaning by Idealism the Italian philosophical movement which has its chief exponents in Croce and Gentile. In regard to Croce, the connexion is a purely fantastic one. As for Gentile, and his Actual Idealism, it might be possible to prove that certain tendencies which find an indirect expression in that school of philosophy, are similar to some of those which we have seen converging into Pirandello's work: but, if so, the similarity would exist only as between that which is not philosophy in Gentile, and that which is not poetry in Pirandello. The dis- 50 ITALIAN LETTER more covery of this interdependence, however, has reacted very strongly on Pirandello himself, who is said to have tried to read Gentile's ponderous volumes, and who is taking himself more and more seriously as a philosophic interpreter of these troubled times. For my part, it is not philosophy that I am accusing here, but its caricature and degeneration; not intelligence, but intellectualism. The innocence of the poet is an Arcadic fable; no excess of in- telligence will ever impair his poetical faculties, if only they are strong enough to stand the weight: a true concept will never spoil a perfect image. And Beauty is still, and will ever be, Truth. But a mechanical, capricious, arbitrary thought is a dangerous enemy to poetry, as to all other forms of human activity: it works from within, and makes creation impossible. It is the source of all disharmony. It is the grave of imagination. Of this kind of thought, of the poetry which only it can produce, of the peculiar Italian life and culture which recognizes itself in that thought and in that poetry, Pirandello is the most authentic, and, in a sense, the most intelligent, representative. RAFFAELLO PICCOLI BOOK REVIEWS A NOTABLE COLLECTION STORIES FROM THE DIAL. 12mo. 330 pages. Lincoln MacVeagh. The Dial Press. $2.50. THE DIAL has published a book which is in a way the world I tournament, the Olympiad of the short story. The American editors, striving for distinction, have given the better part to for- eigners. Let us who are foreign say, then—and that not alone for politeness—that we should have liked to see a few more American authors among us. To continue the sporting allusion, we might say that the short story corresponds to the 880-yard dash, a sort of intellectual sprint: everyone knows that this distance is dreaded by runners, and that it is considered the most exhausting. The pace is stiff from the start; persons, characters, situations jostle; before one has time to put the movement in order the climax comes, the bell rings, and the author must finish his rush between the ropes: that is to say, between the two sides of the columns of the journal, which limit and restrain his effort. Ivan Bunin seems to me to lead with The Gentleman From San Francisco. It is the very simple story of a retired American busi- ness man, who dies while in Italy on a pleasure trip. The chief personage is a synthetic character, stylized in the modern manner, but nevertheless very much alive. The verity of exotic scenes, the cinematographic swarming of episodic crowds, of the Italian riff- raff in the great palaces, are presented with a finished art; and the story of the crossing on the Atlantis is an anthological fragment, full of movement and colour. I will next mention Speed the Plough, an after-the-war story by Mary Butts, and The Porch, by Constance Mayfield Rourke, two short but excellent tales with all the poetry of suburban back- gardens, the latter sober in tone and coloured with a very remark- able light scepticism. To this group must be added Conrad Aiken's amusing The Dark City. IS 52 A NOTABLE COLLECTION Desire, by James Stephens, whose reputation as a poet is known throughout the world, is a singular study in which are mingled realism and fantasy, the two wings of the Irish genius. This story seems to me the most perfect in the book; the dream of the wife, lying beside her dead husband, is a horror that is both beautiful and strange. Padraic Colum's charming The Sad Sequel to Puss in Boots is likewise sprung from Irish fantasy and Drury Lane impressionism. In The Little Master of the Sky, Manuel Komroff has achieved the tour de force of giving us an extremely sentimental story—the history of a village idiot who fancies himself a bird—which nevertheless is free from dulness and secures its most moving effects by means of its treatment, which has the simplicity and crudeness of a primitive painting. Two names as popular as those of Sherwood Anderson and D. H. Lawrence, whose fame has spread beyond the Anglo-Saxon world, would suffice to attract attention to The Dial anthology. In I'm a Fool, the former gives us a story displaying a remarkable technique, which will amaze every writer. Rex is a most charming and poignant story about a fox terrier, a bit of four-footed human- ity, without any repellent sexuality—a type of story which we are not accustomed to expect from the author of England, My England. I very much liked Ghitza, a gipsy story by Konrad Bercovici, which is painted in the raw colours of a Roumanian hut. The scene of the crossing of the frozen Danube, with which the story opens, is a very beautiful passage. So, also, are the Russian scenes of Aleksei Remizov's A White Heart, which recall certain stories of Turgenev, when the latter was under the influence of Maupassant. A. E. Coppard's Hurly Burly recalls Thomas Hardy or Charles- Louis Philippe, rather than Maupassant. The Germanic element is represented by the famous name of Thomas Mann and the popular name of the sympathetic Viennese, Arthur Schnitzler. Tristan is a story at once sombre and comic, of a romantic classicism, if I may so call it, in which, against the background of a very modern sanatorium, are mingled the spitting of blood and the nocturnes of Chopin. Schnitzler's The Greek Dancer is treated in the quick and clever manner of the Viennese, with a method which, though it perhaps belongs to yesterday, yet PAUL MORAND 53 secured the incontestable success of the author of Viennese Idylls and Anatol before the war. Permit me to thank The Dial for having chosen my Hungarian Night. This story, in which, without taking sides, I represent the death of a young Jewish dancer in Budapest, is no more than a purely imaginary episode. When it appeared in French, certain reactionary Hungarian journals accused me of taking sides with the Hungarian Jewish communist refugees in Vienna. God forbid! I am simply an author; and like the Danube, I carry impartially corpses or flowers. To sum up, this Dial anthology, chosen with taste, gay with the flags of all nations, is an infinitely diverse book, truly repre- sentative of the writers of the hour. Paul MORAND THE PROBLEM OF RIMBAUD RIMBAUD, The Boy and the Poet. By Edgell Rick- word. 8vo. 234 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $3.50. LE PROBLÈME DE RIMBAUD, Poète Maudit. Par Marcel Coulon. 12mo. 309 pages. Editions G. Crès et Cie. Paris. 10 francs. 27 TUCH continues to be written about Arthur Rimbaud, but 1 he remains a clouded figure. It is possible that in the end each reader of his poetry will, if he is so far interested, make up his mind for himself about what M Coulon calls the problem of Rimbaud. This problem, which is usually summed up in the question: "Why did Rimbaud abandon literature after only three years of writing?" involves the study of his entire life and the expert psychoanalysis of his personality. His brief thirty- seven years were complicated by too many elements to be included in this review. Certain facts, however, are essential to a com- prehension of the question which these books attempt to answer. Rimbaud was born in 1854. At the age of sixteen, he wrote his earliest known poem. Before he was nineteen years old he had written Une Saison en Enfer, and had done with literature. His childhood was spent in the home of a harsh, illiterate, and devout mother whose ambitions for her son were crassly material. The young boy, with a character as phenomenal as a comet, revolted against everything which was represented by his mother. He hated Christianity, he contemned the ideals of the bourgeoisie, and he despised women. He loved only nature, and boasted that he was without a heart, explaining that because he was heart- less he was superior to those about him. Indeed, his superiority was immeasurable. As in a slow motion-picture, time slackened its speed for him. While others were floating like feathers from the springboard into the pool, Rimbaud had dived in and out innumerable times. He absorbed in a week that which normal children take in only after months of sensory experience and reflection. Separating the Etrennes des Orphelins, his first pub- LEWIS GALANTIERE 55 ver lished poem, from the Saison en Enfer, written three and one- half years later, is a poetic development equivalent to twenty years of another poet's career. His few literary years are marked by shocking material vicissitudes, and excursions into the domains of absinthe, hashish, and homosexuality, in which he had Paul Verlaine for partner. He was determined to enjoy every sensa- tion, and to twist and distort and pervert all of his senses in order to become, as he explained, a seer. It may be said that he succeeded, in a measure, for the greater part of his prose and his verse bears the sign of his aberrations, while his capacity for expression seems at no time to have suffered from his voluntary submission to this curious ideal. Suddenly, in 1873, he disap- appeared from the literary scene. After a few years as a vaga- bond, he became a trader in Abyssinia, contracted in Africa a tumor on the knee, and died in grilling agony at Marseilles in 1891. It is related that he received the last sacrament of the Church. There is no more interesting figure in the history of letters than this miraculously endowed boy, and it is a pity that Mr Edgell Rickword's biography—the first to appear in English-should be so lacking in vigour, so pedestrian in style, and so docile in its unoriginal acceptance of the decisions of its predecessors. This book will be found absorbing, but only because no relation of Rimbaud's life could be uninteresting. Mr Rickword's volume has an air of honest endeavour which inclines one to the belief that he has gone to all the printed sources for the composition of his book; yet the absence of direct references to documents of capital importance, such as the contributions of Messrs Bourguignon and Houin to the Revue d'Ardenne et d'Argonne, of M Georges Izam- bard to Vers et Prose, and of M Marcel Coulon to the Mercure de France are not easily explained away. In Rimbaud's case, moreover, the reader has a right to expect more than mere refer- ence to the literature which has arisen about this poet. Rimbaud is not a poet to be described and estimated, but a problem to be solved. Those who have best known him have written about him, and since their conclusions are so widely divergent, it becomes the task of the writer who would introduce him to England and America to expose and examine with scrupulous care the conclu- sions reached by his friends, his teachers, and his family. His brother-in-law, for example, who employs the pen-name of Paterne -nam 56 THE PROBLEM OF RIMBAUD Berrichon, portrays Mme Rimbaud as a model mother, and Arthur as a chaste and saintly child, debauched by Verlaine. M Ernest Delahaye, his boyhood friend and confidant, seeks to prove that he was a devout Catholic. M Coulon presents his hero as the révolté par excellence and as the antichrist. Other writers have expressed equally definite views of Rimbaud's character. One of the most interesting stories about Rimbaud is that of the battles which have been fought over his corpse; and to neglect this story, as Mr Rickword has done, is to shirk a profoundly significant element in the poet's history. At the same time, a proper study of the Rimbaud problem demands the careful consideration (and in the event of disagree- ment, refutation) of the solutions offered by the writer's prede- cessors. This is the way in which M Coulon proceeds, and the success of his forceful and convincing, though somewhat repetitious, volume is due in a degree to his scrupulous treatment of the opinions of Berrichon, Delahaye, and others. In order to show how varied are the solutions offered, I shall proceed to quotation. Delahaye believes that Rimbaud gave up literature because he discovered that "a democratic ideal of whose success one despairs can only be attained within oneself; this attainment is possible only if we agree to live the mediocre existence which Equality demands. And in order that the act of humility be complete and sincere, Rimbaud esteemed no less logically that the sacrificial victim should say nothing about it.” The witness next in importance, M Paterne Berrichon, asserts that it was Rimbaud's hope of salvation in the bosom of the Church which "made him renounce the art of poetry and try deliberately, by means of positive and remunerative work, to amass the wealth which he lacked and to conquer thereby total independence and the right to the Ideal!" The contribution of M Marcel Coulon to the solution of the Rimbaud problem is autrement sérieux. M Coulon is a provin- LEWIS GALANTIERE 57 cial magistrate, a keen though rather headstrong psychologist, a sound critic, and a fervent admirer of the author of Bateau Ivre. The articles which he published in the Mercure de France during 1914 (and which are collected with additional matter in the book now reviewed) constitute the first attempt to blow away the clouds of legend and hagiography which veil the true Rimbaud. M Coulon's endeavour is to be scrupulously objective, but to speak of treating Rimbaud objectively is a contradiction in terms. He is a subject for exegesis, and the coldest and most analytical writer can only interpret his subject in the light of his own con- victions. M Coulon loses his foothold at one extreme just as M Berrichon does at the other. The fierce pleasure which he takes in proving Rimbaud an atheist betrays his own sympathy with free-thinkers in general, and if he finds that Rimbaud and Verlaine practised homosexuality it is, up to a certain point, because he is proud that this does not prejudice him against their genius, though he makes plain his abhorrence of such practice. In this opinion, as in the matter of atheism, one can only be with M Coulon; the evidence appears all too unequivocal, particularly since there is reason to believe that Verlaine's epicene soul took its delights elsewhere than with Rimbaud. M Coulon puts the Rimbaud- Verlaine "re-invention of love” at the centre of the problem because he is convinced that reas "the violent disgust which Rimbaud manifested toward his work during the nineteen years of life which remained to him after his abandonment of literature, and the definitive character of this abandonment, are due to the fact that this work is the faithful image of an execrated youth. He is ready to vomit when you speak to him of his verse because it presents to his mind with piti- less accuracy not only the sentiments which he had experienced but also the acts which he had accomplished.” Rimbaud's muse, M Coulon continues, did not leave him. “This prodigious creature, who seemed born to live a hundred years, died. Rimbaud ended by killing her.” The realist put out his own eyes in order to become a visionary. The man of intelligence killed his intelligence with his pride. The strong man employed his strength to enfeeble himself. With all the resources of prosody OV THE PROBLEM OF RIMBAUD at his command, he preferred to stammer, to write “of silences.” Bright as the sun, he hunted out the darkness (“j'écrivais des nuits"). A thinker, he ended in absence of thought. He sacrificed his art to hallucination, to coloured vowels, a victim of the spirit of contradiction. In his frenzy for freedom, in his diseased horror of what he called slavery, he treated the laws of literature as he did those of society. He gave up the substance for the shadow. “If he wrote the Saison en Enfer, it was because he was no longer capable of writing.” M Coulon concludes that Rimbaud would never have returned to literature; not if he had lived a thousand years. I have already said that each reader must solve this problem for himself, but it is possible that M Coulon's solution may be the correct one. It cannot be disputed on a basis of fact, but only out of a personal opinion. For myself, I think that M Coulon goes too far. Rimbaud did, after all, compromise in an appre- ciable degree with "the laws of society" which, as an adolescent, he had rejected, and while this of itself proves nothing, it may serve to indicate that if he had lived longer than thirty-seven years, his genius might have found a way to literary expression once more. Let us suppose that he had realized his material ambition, had secured enough capital to permit him to retire, had married as he wished, had enjoyed the leisure to rear the son he desired, and to live in peace. Might he not, like Paul Valéry, have returned to poetry after a silence of twenty years? No one can say, but the hypothesis is not untenable. And in writing of Rimbaud, the imagination is allowed to set its own limits. However this may be, it is not to Mr Edgell Rickword's book that we may look for equally stimulating ideas. Mr Rickword tells us that Rimbaud “always wrote to satisfy a secret impulse. When this impulse failed to find satisfaction in literature, he had no interest to continue writing.” The impulse, we learn, was "the desire for more power, more joy, more entire perfection, in short, for the absolutes of duration and sensation which lure us in Helen's fabled face.” It is impossible to consider with serious- ness a conclusion stated in pseudo-Bergsonian terms of such facile vagueness. Throughout Rimbaud, the Boy and the Poet, we en- counter the same highfaluting uncritical terminolgy: Soleil et Chair is called "strong and simple, sensuous and passionate”; Rimbaud “was filled with the ambition to raise literature above LEWIS GALANTIERE 59 its natural capacities”; "he had well smashed his pen when he wrote Bateau Ivre"; "unadulterated aesthetic enjoyment is not only very rare, after infancy, it is not more desirable than sugar- icing”; Rimbaud "really was in quest of the Beyond-Man”; the Season in Hell is "a refusal to submit to the condition which alone differentiates a human city from a colony of prairie-dogs, slight as that difference may seem.” The language of translation, rather than English, seems to have dictated this charabia: "He is among us like a young chief of barbarians who has sacked all the libraries of a purer world and scorns to warm him- self at our fires and feed from our pot.” “Even then the greater number of poems are of transparent finish, obscure if at all from excess of light, or sometimes marred even by a commonplace Polytechnic pedantism." Comm “Terror came upon him, the terror which comes when we leave the world of Number and peer into the gulf over which that fragile scaffolding has been flung." "Je n'aime point à citer," says Voltaire. "C'est d'ordinaire une besogne épineuse: on néglige ce qui précède et ce qui suit l'endroit qu'on cite, et on s'expose à mille querelles.” Bearing this in mind, I have tried to quote with consideration from Mr Rickword's book, and I believe that, though quotations are as malleable as statistics and may be used to prove anything, I have not traduced him. Limits of space, however, forbid further citation. Mr Rickword's volume is divided into three sections of which the first alone is biographical. The second is composed of an out- line of Rimbaud's poetic development, and consists in the main of quotation and paraphrase of the poet's work. Through faulty proof-reading, or because it may be impossible to find English printers able to set up French verse accurately, there are dozens of minor flaws in the quotations and four or five serious errors or omissions. The third section, containing a selection of Rimbaud's poems in English translation, most of them by the author, is scarcely calculated to induce the reader to learn French in order to become better acquainted with the originals. Lewis GALANTIÈRE JOHANNES V. JENSEN The LONG JOURNEY. 1. Fire and Ice. 2. The Cimbrians. 3. Christopher Columbus. By Johannes V. Jensen. Translated from the Danish by A. G. Chater. 12mo. 294 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $2.50. es N a hotel-register Johannes V. Jensen once inscribed himself "travelling salesman for anthropological goods.” Globe- trotting and the study of mankind indeed have been united by the Danish author into a single act. Voyages to Birubunga and Pekin, Chicago and Singapore; profane knowledge of Seville and Paris have given plasticity to ideas of the physical and mental devel- opment of the human being. Speculation on the origin and customs of races has thrown coloured light on coasts and forests and cities seen, and made an intellectual adventure of steamship and railway travel.—Cloudbursts drench the Indian ocean; the day is torrid under the sun; rain sweeps again; night presses against him like the belly of an animal, and he imagines the earth of the mezozoic period. Crete with its arid rocky sides and misted moun- tain tops recalls characteristics of its culture and suggests bases for its legendary rôle. The bedside lamp in a Berlin hotel-room carries his fancy to the wheel generative of the electric current: he perceives the vast modern towns built about the wheels as bodies are built around hearts, and dependent for life on the revolutions of the metal things. Sitting on the glass-enclosed steamer-chair deck of a liner in winter sunshine, he picks apart in his mind the components of the giant machine transporting him, and glimpses like a bannered history the long development behind each one. It seems he is one of the men who have gotten the best excitements the rapid modern means of communication have to give. Not Kipling nor Morand has gotten finer pleasures from them; Jen- sen's volumes sparkle with the fruits of a mind taken sightseeing. The works in which he has sought to give form to his experi- ences fall into two general classes. Both ambitiously set out to give the picture, the proportions and direction of life as we understand it in our day; but the one seeks to achieve it through direct descrip- PAUL ROSENFELD 61 tion, and the other through the medium of primitive myth. In the first, which comprises the volumes of essays and stories translated out of the Danish under the titles The New World, Our Age, The World is Deep, Exotic Tales, and the two early thrillers, Madame D’Ora and The Wheel, the subject is the modern scene. Jensen is himself the protagonist in several instances, and the matter is playfully autobiographical. In the late ’nineties, he tells us, fresh from the university, he was scribbling dime novels and literary reviews in Copenhagen. And there came over him a hatred for himself, and for a world "for which he was neither bad nor vulgar enough.” “Sick with the northern sickness, incurable longing," he tramped and shipped about the globe. “I was nervous, quiver- ing like a delirious man. The pity of it all was that alcoholism hadn't made me so. Drink, at least, quiets one. The trouble with me was that I was inactively self-conscious, conscious of myself in every nerve, the victim of an unbridled imagination.” That was his Gothic laboratory, and pilgrimage took him out of it. It showed him his time had a beauty. He was among the first to perceive that we are living in a sort of Renaissance. All great ages, Jensen knew, have sought either to turn human energy from the world, or restore it fully to it. The Christianizing centuries were moved by the first of these tendencies. The Renaissance, the Reformation, and the French Revolution sought to bring human energy back to the earth. But the three great attempts at restora- tion were unsuccessful. The impulse of the humanistic revival went into the heaping up of erudition for its own sake, and ended as philology in the library. If Luther in Germany did emancipate, it was merely in order to bind again with other bonds. The revo- lution attempted to transform the human being into an idea. Not so our own day. It alone has rid itself of all theories and con- ceptions which divert man from his earthly existence. It alone has come again to the consciousness, characteristic of the youth of races, of the self-sufficiency of existence, the supreme importance of life itself. The stream of the libido has returned from theories, from hopes of extra-mundane heavens, to the one reality, the struggle with nature. With the re-employment of man's forces, the dreams that have been humanity's since the caveman in his cavern dreamt of flying, have begun to be realized. Other ages dreamt too of power over nature and defiance of natural laws, but 62 JOHANNES V. JENSEN sce they have been content to find satisfaction in myths, and in realiz- ing their wishes in the shape of gods. Ours has begun turning the stuff of dreams into actuality. The earth is young again; and Jensen, gazing out over Paris, pitied Nietzsche, who had lived into himself instead of out “into the world that was far better than he.” The trilogy, The Long Journey, illustrates Jensen's second form. In these “myths,” he has attempted to give his poetic picture of life through a union of anthropological theory with the atmosphere, lyricism, and innocence of the ancient sagas. Each of the sections of Fire and Ice, the first volume, shows primitive humanity at some crisis of its career; but in each of these little romances Jensen has symbolized the life of every man who breaks with the past, returns to the giant realities, and is created anew out of his very struggle with nature for his livelihood. The section called Ice, perhaps the most successful of all, in particular fables the birth of Jensen's own Gothic race. The scene is laid in prehistoric times when the glacier came down over Scandinavia and over- whelmed the tropical forests which once had flourished there. Carl, the protagonist, is the first anarchist. Driven from his tribe which is flying south before hardship and winter, he turns north and combats the cold. In the bitter struggle for life he adapts himself to a new environment. Human will is born. Carl main- tains his life. He learns to make fire. On an island amid the glacier he rears sons and daughters. And, one night in his cave, the First Man dreams. First, he seems to be swimming through a tropical sea. The other animals avoid him in fear; and he rises toward a steaming shore. Then, he is in a mighty city. It is Chicago, alive with machinery and noise and the ferocity of the interhuman combat for existence. And last, Carl dreams of a forest of living trees, rocks of bone, and earth of breathing flesh. Over it floats “the sign of eternal resurgence.” And in his cave, the First Man dies. Another romance, not included in the English edition, and called The Ship sings the day of a race that had the power to destroy life and create it anew. It tells the story of the Danes who con- quered Normandy and England; and again the story is but a symbol for a certain realistic principle Jensen feels in our own time. One episode might stand, the epitome of his idea. A band PAUL ROSENFELD 63 Om of famished lads in search of food has broken into a Norse temple. “For a moment they stood rooted. In the glow of their torches, the Gods, misshapen figures covered with crusts of dried blood, seemed to step out of the blackness and stand staring at them. And for an instant, the young marauders were aghast. It was so silent there. The dread Gods appeared to be gazing at them from all parts of their forms. But at last Germund came to himself. Shaking the sparks from his torch, he stepped forward and boldly cried 'Is any corn hidden here?'” All Jensen's ideas are instantaneous flashing pictures seen from the bridges of ships and platforms of moving trains. Even in Denmark, at his worktable, he is globe-trotting. Hence, scarcely a one of them possesses the solidity born of patient, well-sustained scrutiny. It is entirely in their suggestiveness that their charm and value lie. The man himself has not quite the metaphysical, penetrative power of the artist and scientist of the premier water. His background of anthropological study is not wide, and certain of his impressions reveal themselves a little superficial and sensa- tional. Particularly when writing about America is he too much the dreamer and the sentimentalist. "What stories of mythological wonders can compare with the narration of the life that goes on in America to-day" he told us—a little ante-Cody, ante-dada, and ante-Josephson; and enlarged on the romance of our existence, the poetry of big business, the young sound strength of it all. Well, it may be true that the machines are proof of the fact that man's imagination and power, instead of wandering off into inter- stellar space in the shape of theories and systems, has returned to the world as energy; and that beauty inevitably follows power and results from an economy of means based upon practicality. But to us here in the land of the "new beauty," it appears that Jensen, like some of his epigoni, has in one instance at least mistaken style for significance, and permitted himself to believe a style without content equivalent to culture. Besides, his myths are not thorough objectivities. The heroes are always identical; only their names and external adventures are differentiated. One, brings fire from the mountain and is Prometheus; another survives winter on the glaciers and is Odin; a third invents the wheel and is Thor. But in each case it is the same man who is figured: the big blond genius as he appears to a 64 ; JOHANNES V. JENSEN slightly infantile imagination. The Cimbrians recalls Henty not infrequently. Episodes in Columbus dealing with the conquest of Mexico by Cortez verge on cheapness. As a poetical interpreta- tion of this hideous chapter of history they are by no means as respectable as another imaginative work recently come out of the north of Europe: the Montezuma of Gerhardt Hauptmann. It may be that absence of profundity is merely the inevitable shadow of Jensen's positive gift, and that his particular quality of impressionability and imaginative quickness could not have existed in a system capable of slower, steadier penetration. In any case, the man has turned his superficiality to best account. He has promenaded his epidermis, and registered the sharp and vivid contrasts, the novel sights and sounds and smells to which it has responded. More poetical than Kipling, less specious than Conrad often is, he stands eminent for his descriptions of exotic and pre- historic landscapes; chapters in Fire and Ice are very poems in prose. The World is Deep and Exotic Tales, profane adventures of an anthropologist in Sumatra, Seville, Montmartre, blend sophistication piquantly with Rabelaisian gusto. And men who come with the vision of the proportions and beauty of a day come bringing an impulse to freedom. PAUL ROSENFELD MILK OF DANDELION The HARP-WEAVER AND OTHER POEMs. By Edna St Vincent Millay. 12mo. 94 pages. Harper and Brothers. $2. THE poetry of Edna St Vincent Millay is distinguished from most modern verse in that it is content to carry forward, under the colour of her particular idiosyncratic emphasis, the ancient lyric tradition. She is in search of no new thing, but so spontaneous and natural are her reactions that she is able to evoke with unfaltering sureness that high beauty which has existed and will always exist beneath the bleak manifestations of the most commonplace day. At a time when so much verse is merely the product of the intellect—a matter of unexpected verbal manipulation, of startling cacophony—it is indeed refreshing to come upon poetry which at its best is dependent upon something else than brain. In a dozen delicate lilts this young girl has managed to achieve with a graceful inevitability just what her rivals are for ever straining after. Words with her seem to lose their dragging stubbornness, and become swift handmaidens whose happy task it is to carry to the reader, fresh as beaded dew on a white mushroom, this or that suppliance of delicate song. And yet for all her simplicity, the cast of Edna St Vincent Millay's mind is curiously disillusioned. It has been sprinkled, one suspects, with no lustral water, but rather with the bitter milk of the common dandelion: "Not only under ground are the brains of men Eaten by maggots. Life in itself Is nothing, An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.” It is apparent that she is quite unable to rid her mind of its preoccupation with death; and it is, perhaps, one's consciousness 66 MILK OF DANDELION of this fact that lends such a note of sweet lingering melancholy to her poetical response to our ephemeral planet-existence. Indeed, in spite of her childish gallantry, her childish gaiety, her childish mischief, one is ever aware of the soughing of rain-wet winds against the white window panes of the world. Her rarest poems have in them a note of dim nostalgia such as one might imagine troubling the wild unsettled mind of a goose-girl who recollects in dreary exile certain fond experiences of her barefoot life on the grass-tufted, gorse-grown village common of her birth. It is of course this conviction of hers as to the inherent vanity of our days—each one of them nicked for the market of oblivion like so many plumaged birds—which has made her so provocative a leader for the youth of our time; for that youth which since the war has turned so consistently, so wilfully, towards the in- sidious ancient wisdom which teaches, in a world where all is uncertain, to snatch at pleasure when and where it may be had. And there is, it must be acknowledged, something very engaging, very satisfactory, in the girlish effrontery with which she chal- lenges the accepted standards of the bourgeoisie. For all Mr Padraic Colum's reasonable objection to the idea of a candle burn- ing at both ends, her well-known quatrain has its own symbolic value. And how welcome is the candour of that proud and beau- tiful sonnet which begins “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and when I have forgotten, and what arms have lain Under my head till morning!" The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems contains much besides this sonnet which is characteristic of Miss Millay's work. Once more she shows herself exquisitely sensitive to the sights and sounds and smells of the country; to the colour of prim asters or heavy-headed globular cottage dahlias; to the sound of the wind in ash trees, reminiscent of the reiterated breaking of seaside waves on a certain distant beach; to the scent of drenched hedgerow weeds in the twilight of a rainy day. "Nor linger in the rain to mark The smell of tansy through the dark.” LLEWELYN POWYS 67 She can most wonderfully, most innocently, bring before us the very spirit of each receding season. Which of us does not know the peculiar desolation falling upon the landscape of the eastern states of America during the long months of midwinter? Could this forlornness be better conveyed than by the suggestion of the look of snow lodged upon the hairy dead leaves of nettles? In the same way, four unassuming lines from her pen suffice to put us in the mood to appreciate the long drawn out days of the Indian summer during which the indolent, colonial fruit harvest so slowly progresses. "Now the autumn shudders In the rose's root. Far and wide the ladders Lean among the fruit.” The fact is these snatches of song have about them the suggestive grace of a hundred world-old human associations. They them- selves are like wisps of faintly green midsummer hay, like drifting feathery down from the plant which village people call “old man's beard,” like handfuls of driven snow at the time of the feast of St Stephen! Though her sonnets are undoubtedly distinguished, it may well be that her personality finds its happiest expression in these slighter fragments. Any one who attempts to write sonnets must be pre- pared to enter the lists where only the mightiest have won fame. Yet even so, the fine rapier of this young girl is not to be despised though 'tis raised aloft in a field where only veterans in armour hold their swords to the sky! How certain lines from these sonnets linger in the mind long after they have been read! “That Love at length should find me out and bring This fierce and trivial brow unto the dust." "Wherefore I say: 0 Love, as summer goes, I must be gone, steal forth with silent drums, That you may hail anew the bird and rose When I come back to you, as summer comes.” 68 MILK OF DANDELION “That April should be shattered by a gust, That August should be levelled by a rain, I can endure, and that the lifted dust Of man should settle to the earth again; But that a dream can die, will be a thrust Between my ribs forever of hot pain.” I see in Edna St Vincent Millay's poetry one serious weakness; and this is a certain tendency to allow her childish Narcissism to lapse into the particular note of self-conscious sentimental artifice such as is especially dear to the magazine-reading public. Unfor- tunately there are traces of this in each of her precious volumes. It is as though upon occasions she was not unwilling to risk her birthright of immortality for the gratification of immediate applause. For many readers her charming Prayer to Persephone in Second April is completely marred by its trifling and saccharine ending: “Say to her, my dear, my dear, It is not so dreadful here." In the present volume a flagrant example of what I am trying to indicate is to be found in the poem entitled A Visit to the Asylum, in which the effect of a highly suggestive conception is again spoilt by the last verse. It is amazing how anybody who could write of Bedlam with the following artful restraint “And out of all the windows No matter where we went The merriest eyes would follow me And make me compliment.” should be content to conclude the same poem with lines as "cute" and “sympathy-rousing” as, “ 'Come again, little girl!' they called and I Called back, “You come see me!'” But let us forget the Edna St Vincent Millay of Vassar College, LLEWELYN POWYS 69 of Greenwich Village, of Vanity Fair, and return once more to the true poet whose rash, reticent, and haughty spirit, is, one feels, ultimately incapable of being cheapened at the hands of the world. In the most beautiful of all her poems, she commits her work to the care of posterity. If there yet remains anybody in America who is in doubt as to its high merit, let him turn to the Poet and His Book. “Boys and girls that lie Whispering in the hedges Do not let me die, Mix me with your pledges Boys and girls that slowly walk In the woods, and weep, and quarrel, Staring past the pink wild laurel Mix me with your talk. ... Boys and girls that steal From the shocking laughter Of the old, to kneel By a dripping rafter Under the discoloured eaves. ... Bear me to the light, Flat upon your bellies By the webby window lie, Where the little flies are crawling, Read me, margin me with scrawling, Do not let me die!" LLEWELYN Powys THE HERO LEGEND THEODORE ROOSEVELT. By Lord Charnwood. Svo. 232 pages. Atlantic Monthly Press. $2.50. VA N O four years and the width of an ocean constitute a perspec- tive? One rather wonders about that, on taking up Lord Charnwood's recently published Theodore Roosevelt; and when the book is finished, the inclination is strong to believe that four years are not enough, and that the ocean, in this case, is a disadvantage. On the other hand, it may be that Lord Charnwood has here out- lined the hero legend which we shall adopt for ourselves, some day, but which we are not ready for now. From our present distance, it seems that this book is not a completely justified view of the late statesman. There may have been a sustained philosophy back of his many, sudden, and seemingly contradictory acts, where we incline to believe there was only a policy. There were ends to be gained, and Roosevelt gained them. If they were not in accord with the speeches he had made, previous to that time, then he made more speeches afterwards which were in accord. There were cer- tain impressions to be made, and Roosevelt was adept at making them. Lord Charnwood has tried to make the explanations and the outstanding deeds into a fine and patriotic set of guiding principles. He has, to his own satisfaction, sorted out the utter- ances and the results of the actions. Read by itself, the book is more than plausible. Compared with memories, and with the more intimate American biographies, we still wonder about the four years and the ocean. And yet, despite the fact that Lord Charnwood has not quite established his legend, this is a good book. It has set down fairly enough the matters under controversy. It presents a more unified view of Roosevelt than any other biography has done, and it is better reading than either Thayer or Hagedorn. The facts of Roosevelt's early life are sketched in lightly, the years spent on a ranch in the Bad Lands of North Dakota are given in greater detail and with something of a humorous touch. Lord Charnwood likes his hero's tremendous energy, his exuberant Оге HELEN IVES GILCHRIST 71 fun, his “solemn and harmless vanity of a schoolboy,” his abrupt courage in dealing with professional bad men who, in these regenerate and amended days, call up visions only of a Hollywood lot. The remarkably swift rise of the young man to power occupies a long chapter. His about-face support of Blaine, and his docility in Platt's hands are given the kindliest of interpreta- tions. In this, of course, the biographer is aided by his distance. He has missed the sharp dissonance of Roosevelt's reiterated and incongruous words—as though Fairfax carried Cromwell's sword and kept his powder dry. Again, Lord Charnwood is judging by the fact that, once having become governor, Roosevelt was an excellent executive—wherefore, he must have been excellent before he was executive. We are not saying that yet, but perhaps we shall. Perspective lies so largely in forgetting the impermanent results of a man's life, and Roosevelt's memory has always been cluttered with his inconsequential sound and fury of speech. However, there was never any lack of action to judge. Even America (all except Mr Dooley) forgot to distrust Roosevelt when he returned from the Spanish war. New York elected him governor; and then, for various reasons, he became vice-president. Then, at the death of President McKinley, the last clog upon his action fell away. He was president-dictator almost-of America for seven years. Having seen his hero thus enthroned, Lord Charnwood pauses to discuss the condition of America in the early years of the twentieth century, and this discussion is well worth re-reading. The roots of faulty economic structures are excavated, the process of settling government lands, railroad problems arising from the vast agricultural growth after these settlements were made, immigration, the rise of trusts and labour unions, the negro problem-all these matters are set forth with a packed and illuminating brevity. And then Lord Charnwood "psychoanalyses” Roosevelt, managing, despite the very evident personal predilection he feels for his hero, to be only a little more than fair. Roosevelt, he says, "was not a man of genius, however we define that mysterious quality which, among statesmen of recent times, we see clearly in Lincoln, and which those who remember his living presence must ascribe to Gladstone. . . . He had, none the less, such varied and 72 THE HERO LEGEND extraordinary powers as may perhaps never have been possessed in combination by any other living man.” These powers were used to their utmost. Roosevelt not only threw all he had into any project which engaged him, but he had, to a rare degree, the ability to inspire his co-workers with his own enthusiasm and energy, a fact which Lord Bryce commented upon after his visit to America in 1905. Moreover, Roosevelt was, after Washington, one of the very few of our presidents able to grasp an international point of view, and to deal with the representatives of foreign governments on their own ground. At his death, the English press called to mind that Roosevelt was not, as most American presidents had been, of log cabin stock, that he was by birth of that class which has only just ceased to rule in England. He had many friends in the British Isles, but his first summons to international service came from Russia, his second from Germany when the dispute between that country and Morocco came to a head in 1906. In this, as in his settlement of the peace terms between Russia and Japan, Roosevelt "built up the respect in which America was held.” Even the much criticized speech in London, in which Roosevelt admonished Great Britain as to her behaviour in Egypt, a speech which the English press stigmatized briefly as “impertinent,” Lord Charnwood defends thus: “Considering how English writers from Dickens downwards, have favored America with their admonitions, I do not enjoy recording the fact. It should be known how far it was from impertinent.” As to the minor conflagrations of Roosevelt's régime in America, this book has some entertaining comment, notably that on the Booker Washington incident: "Perhaps it should be confessed that the greatest shock which Roosevelt ever gave his English admirers was when, having invited Mr. Booker Washington to meet his wife and family at luncheon, and set the South in a blaze by so doing, he failed to repeat his offence. But cowardice cannot be suggested in his case; he became sincerely convinced that the sensation, so astounding to him, which he had thus aroused, was hurtful to the negro." HELEN IVES GILCHRIST 73 ma Tsa III Even the matter of Roosevelt's attempt to run for president against his reiterated refusals so to do, and on a “Progressive” ticket when his own party had rejected him in favour of the quietly efficient though colourless Mr Taft, is interpreted as the act of a man desirous only of saving his country at whatever sacrifice of his own feelings. But here one's ability to be convinced falters and then saunters off down another lane, rebelling at the suggestion of lofty motive. Even the conduct of that campaign is too unpleasant in the memory. Perspective and the hero legend fail most signally here. They fall into mere fogginess—the sort of cloud the gods threw about Achilles when his heel was in danger, before Troy. Lord Charnwood neglects also the fact that Roosevelt's action threw the election inevitably to Woodrow Wilson, and considering the biographer's view of Wilson, he cannot regard that as a net gain for America or the world at large. One realizes often in this book, the writer's strongly felt underlying comparison between Roosevelt and Wilson. He makes no secret of his view of the latter—"an evil figure," a man who avoided all consultation with representative Americans, and who, in his peace dealings, “let the instant rights and wrongs and the burning needs of the moment recede into the background, while premature attention was focused on what was not yet ripe for practical discussion.” Lord Charnwood is strongly on the defensive again, concerning the last chapter of Roosevelt's career, when he found himself in the unhappy position of having to watch the country's foreign policy dictated in a way which he could not endure in silence. The field of action was closed to him for ever. The gate to that field was slammed with special vigour when Roosevelt attempted to organize an expeditionary force and take it to France. Certain magazines and newspapers were still open to him, and for these he wrote unceasingly. He was often right, he was undoubtedly displaying genuine courage, but from the standpoint of the times, it was offside play. Each day brought him deeper into disfavour with the country which had pinned its adherence to a later leader, and Roosevelt's constant opposition was held to be on a par with his defection from Mr Taft. He never entirely won his way back to popular favour, though he came nearer to it than any one else could have done, after so spectacular an eclipse. He even con- ciliated the Republican party, and was urged to run again for the governorship of New York. He struck out with the old vigour at Once 74 THE HERO LEGEND wa an editor who had slandered him, and he not merely won his suit-he made friends with the editor! Then with the sinking of the Lusitania, American sentiment swung heavily to the very reac- tion which Roosevelt had been urging, and with that swing came a wave of affection for the old leader. The twin calamities of illness and bereavement which followed, brought out as never before the finer personal qualities of the man, and when he died he was almost ripe for a hero legend; almost, but not quite. All that he had done, good and bad, expedient and noble, braggart and splendid, were in too close proximity to one another and to an interested world, to be judged in their final effect. Lord Charn- wood has chosen the premise that Roosevelt had no serious defects of character, and that his motives, when he had any, were incorrigibly noble. The standpoint is interesting. We are glad to have so pleasant an impression recorded, but, admire Roosevelt as we will, we feel a little shrewd and Yankeelike about it, a little inclined to shake our heads and say, "Maybe so—maybe so." But we rather think there was some crumbly clay in his composition, something of P. T. Barnum in his creed. We are willing to wait another decade in hopes of finding out. HELEN Ives GILCHRIST BRIEFER MENTION LAZARILLO OF TORMES, His Life, Fortunes, Misadventures, translated and introduced by Mariano J. Lorente (12mo, 143 pages; Luce: $2). As- sumed in the introduction which informs rather than pleases, to have been the progenitor of the roguish novel, appearing we are told in 1553, this first Spanish picaresque tale, is in its delicate vagabond wiles of mood and speech, a delighting piece of extravagance—as curiously modern in its pliant dexterity as it is inalienably Spanish in flavour. The LITTLE GIRL, and other Stories, by Katharine Mansfield (12mo, 243 pages; Knopf: $2.50). There is always something a little sad about posthumous collections of heterogeneous fragments from the pen of a dead writer; and this thin sheaf of careful gleanings is no exception. Like some faint ghostly wind, blowing through familiar passage-ways and making the candle-flames bend, this singular young woman's well-known tone, at once irritatingly self-conscious and wistfully naïve returns upon us, as of old, uneasy, embarrassed, tantalized, disturbed. It has been over-rated, this tone; but when we hear it again it still remains unlike the other crepuscular sounds, and we pause to listen; arrested but not spell-bound, for the tone is plaintively thin and there are querulous dis- cords to trouble its quality. The White Ship: Estonian Tales, by Aino Kallas; translated from the Finnish by Alex Matson; foreword by John Galsworthy (12mo, 256 pages; Knopf: $2.50). In this book a forlorn, sea-skirted country and a down-trodden peasant people are transformed into a canvas of noble beauty. The narratives are of the strictest simplicity which at times borrows a Biblical charm; the essentials are told in bare statements and given life by unobtrusive subtleties. The power of such a volume depends to a large extent on the harmonizing of the stories: in this case they are of one substance, moulded variously, but all converging on sorrow, resig- nation, and restraint. Yet The Death of Org and The Sacrifice take precedence over the rest, for they sum up and dramatize the pervasive, singular excellence of the book in the presentation of two unique figures. IN THE MIDST OF Life, by Ambrose Bierce (12mo, 403 pages ; Boni: $2). The clandestine and subterranean reputation of Ambrose Bierce can now be tested by the average reader in a pleasant and accessible volume. One cannot but feel, however, in perusing these blood-curdling tales, that the genius for creating terror and disgust is, at its best, an essentially inferior thing to the more humane and more illuminating forms of art. But such as it is, the dry, stiff, solemn, old-fashioned, economic style, so direct and unadorned, of this remarkable writer lends itself in an especial and pe- culiar manner to the scenes of blood-shed and death with which this volume is crowded. The military episodes ought to form part of the lighter reading of all politicians and statesmen; for it is not the prettier aspects of war that were most interesting to Ambrose Bierce. 76 BRIEFER MENTION The Tattooed Countess, by Carl Van Vechten (12mo, 286 pages; Knopf: $2.50). The presentableness of the lacquered boot, talent for detail, and a sometimes pleasing wit, appear in this would-be romantic novel with the aptly chosen title—to be taken figuratively and literally—of an American woman who, on returning to Iowa at fifty, as the widow of an Italian count, falls in love with a boy of twenty, proposes marriage to him, and is accepted. Our inability to be captivated or really moved by this without- a-touch-of-Paris, frantically-hungry-to-be-French protest against “village moral indecencies” and the cruelty of society to "the sensitive imaginative boy,” is due somewhat to little affronting American banalities of speech, to obtrusively stiff bits of papier mâché dialogue, to the fact that certain attitudes of characters portrayed are not well dovetailed, to a manner of telling impaired by lack of stature and degraded by parentheses, to a moralistic instructiveness at odds with the author's religion of unmoral Epicureanism; to a blight which Mr Van Vechten has placed upon the book, of just that dogged provincialism which he endeavours to exorcise. The TIGER IN THE House: a new edition, by Carl Van Vechten (illus., 8vo, 367 pages; Knopf: $4). In this book about “the domestic tiger," there is an almost painful rigour of insistence that the cat cannot be "owned”— that "he lives in homes because he chooses to do so"; a monotonously frequent use of the words mostly, mystery, puss, pussy; and an irrelevant excluding of the dog from a book about the cat; one's gratitude for research is put off by an unsifted air accompanying the trove; dismay is occasioned by finding the author in the role of mentor to Henry James and approving "the line that saves Shakespeare.” One needs the cat's instinctiveness, patrician insulation, mastery of mechanics, and imperviousness to com- pulsion, in order to pick one's way nicely in and out of the dreary and the bright detail assembled. But one finds here and there, a sinuous quip, an image, a shred of chivalry or superstition salvaged from the past, which delight one; not to speak of “the grace, the idle charm, the magnificence, the essential mystery of the cat," by which one is hypnotically detained. Preceding an index, furthermore, one welcomes a first real bibliography of cats, annotated and arranged under subjects; and although to the captious “felinophile” some of the photographs and drawings of cats will be more rich than sympathetic, the most repining critic must prize with increasing fervour, on the cover of this book, the design of a medal struck in 1725, now in the French National Library. MEMORIES OF MEN AND HORSES, by William Allison (illus., 8vo, 341 pages; Brentano: $5). Ideal gift-book for the horsey man or woman. Impossible for the layman to read it without a gnawing sense of envy for the sportsmen who have this divine frenzy for horses. It appears to be one passion that ages well, for old men give up actual hunting and racing with reluctance and never give up their interest in the twin sports. There seems to be no end to the talk that is possible to the true amateur, and detailed and voluminous as Mr Allison is, with his prices, pedigrees, and anecdotes that run back to the year one, he cannot surfeit the genuine horse-lover. BRIEFER MENTION 77 THE SLEEPING BEAUTY, by Edith Sitwell (12mo, 96 pages; Knopf: $1.75). An accomplished waywardness of mood and execution; prismatic colour; dramatic, narrative, and lyric power are apparent in this most moving and archly elfin poem. Despite an occasional end rhyme less persuasive than the adjacent dainty dissonances, certain conceits which seem not of a piece with the poem's appropriate, exquisitely multicoloured “deceiving of ex- pectation," and an insistent consciousness of the use of simile—despite infinitesimal infelicities—one must be distrait indeed, whom the force and the flavour of The Sleeping Beauty cannot enchant. hi geet deceivine despand WANDERING STARS, Together With The Lover, by Clemence Dane (12mo, 242 pages; Macmillan: $2.25) is like a beautiful old church window of stained glass: the subject depicted may have no appeal for us, but the original, fine conception of the figures, the intricate unity of detail, and the glamorous colours work an incontrovertible magic. Wandering Stars is in every respect the more important of the two stories. RANDOM RHYTHMS, by Rodney Blake (12mo, 79 pages; Publishers Press: $2). The title by no means suggests the temper of this book, full of vehemence, impetuosity, outraged dignity, and ardour, as it is. Both manner and matter seem for the most part "wrong,” but certain poems are well conceived and well constructed, and the author's irrepressible faith in romance and in human nature augurs well. SECRETS, by W. H. Davies (12mo, 48 pages; Harcourt Brace: $1.50). The true poet visualizes an imaginary realness which is more real than actu- ality; therefore one feels defrauded when a gifted writer who arouses the highest expectation, deadens the pretty conceit with bathos, and permits narrowness of understanding to blur poetic vision. The PlayS OF Ivan S. TURGENEV, translated by M. S. Mandell (8vo, 583 pages; Macmillan: $2.50). These comedies, not previously translated, are merely stories told upon the stage-awkwardly constructed, and often theatrically banal. “The beautiful genius" did not regard himself as a playwright. His faultless writing had always a seeming informality; there is here an excess of the homeliness, the air of improvisation, which are to be found in his best work; but his clear apprehension of character gives even to these inconsequential plays a bright vitality. MY LIFE IN Art, by Constantin Stanislavsky, translated by J. J. Robins (illus., 8vo, 586 pages; Little, Brown: $6). Très a la Russe. There is one country, it appears, that continues to hall-mark all of its productions. Mr Stanislavsky's recital is as detailed, as voluminous, as full of colour, as something from Dostoevsky, though, naturally, not so well written. But it is decidedly worth while for all that, and in particular, should be in the possession of all actors and managers. The players will catch an enthusiasm from it and managers will learn much to their advantage. Perhaps the chief moral, for the latter, is the unconscious emphasis upon the necessity for the amateur spirit in all artistic enterprises. 78 BRIEFER MENTION BLAKE AND Milton, by Denis Saurat (8vo, 74 pages; Dial Press: $2). Concerned chiefly with their philosophy, this compact, vigilant, poetically brilliant exposition of "the resemblance in difference between Blake and Milton,” illumines anew, the "harmonious world” of the one, the "wild and populous soul” of the other; the charm, the ordered philosophical equipoise of its logic, the experienced, wiry, differentiating economy of presentation, completely persuading one of “a close relationship in their work brought about by their generous pride, their passionate temperament, their ardour for religion and art considered as one." The Soul Of SAMUEL Pepys, by Gamaliel Bradford (8vo, 261 pages; Houghton Mifflin: $3.50). In this methodical, historically accurate, generously catholic "simplifying” of Pepys' Diary, Pepys is shown to have been “the average man”; he does not, however, transcendently emerge as the extraordinary diarist. One notes two, perhaps three, unforgettably characterizing flashes, but an ineffective, facetious shrewdness and a stub- born adherence to ineptitudes of diction and of syntax smother the reader's proffered cordiality. HOWELLS, JAMES, BRYANT AND OTHER Essays, by William Lyon Phelps (12mo, 206 pages; Macmillan: $2). These essays are neither very dis- tinguished nor very penetrating, but on the other hand they are made up of good sound conventional writing and might very well be of considerable use to young students of American Literature. CASANOVA, An Appreciation, by Havelock Ellis, With Selections From the Mémoires (8vo, 155 pages, Luce: $2). These three selections from the Mémoires of Casanova, collectively and separately prefaced as they are by Dr Ellis' scientifically acute, aesthetically perfect appreciation, will go far toward persuading the reader that the ardently elastic Casanova, "delivering himself bound into the hands of the moralists" as Dr Ellis chivalrously observes—this “consummate master of the dignified relation of undignified experiences”—has left us a record which is valuable "as a mere story of adventure," as "a picture of the eighteenth century,” and as “a veracious presentation of a certain human type.” The Private LIFE OF Louis XV, by Mouffle d'Angerville, annotated and amplified by quotations from original and unpublished documents, by Albert Meyrac, translated from the French by H. S. Mingard (8vo, 364 pages; Boni & Liveright: $3.50). This reign was the prologue to the French Revolution, and the frank, explicit expression of the third estate's approval or disgust over court conduct and state affairs here recorded is tremendously enlightening. NAPOLEON AND JOSEPHINE, by Walter Geer (8vo, 395 pages; Brentano: $5). This is a very complete account of the lives and characters of the First Consul and his first wife. A vast amount of research and a quiet excel- lence of style make this an interesting book. The ménage depicted is tolerant, brilliant, and possessed of a fitful but real harmony which only a dream of empire to be perpetuated could break. BRIEFER MENTION PRINCESSES, LADIES AND ADVENTURESSES OF THE Reign of Louis XIV, by Theresé Louis Latour, translated from the French by Colonel Dutton Burrard (illus., 8vo, 360 pages ; Knopf: $6). So engrossing a book that the skill of the compilation is apt to be lost sight of by “laymen.” All the amazing personages of this most amazing period of French history fit before the dazzled eyes of the reader in full colour. Louis XIV remains something of a hero in spite of the places aux dames and the conviction remains that it must have been a wonderful moment in which to live for those who love drama, and its chief aftermath, gossip. on, ar as Piety and Dre end and purpo Rell and Fry... STRAWS AND PRAYER-Books, by James Branch Cabell (12mo, 302 pages; McBride: $2.50). In this informed but scarcely genial book Mr Cabell rambles on, at once ponderously and preciously, about diverting himself with such toys as Piety and Death. Such gentle diversion is, according to this crotchety treatise, the sole end and purpose of art; Aristotle and Shakespeare being as outmoded on that point as Bell and Fry. All Mr Cabell's own works of art are to be regarded as so much “diverting Biography,” of which this work is the Epilogue. But we need not despair. This epilogue will turn, paradoxically but most naturally, into a Pro- logue; and the heavy bagatelles and solemn persiflage of this writer's peculiar vein continue sans cesse. But Epilogue or Prologue it is necessary to whisper a faint protest in good hour. One grows heartily sick of this expression “creative art”; and one feels that “perfect writing about beauti- ful happenings” is not quite so sophisticated as it sounds. The Creative Life, by Ludwig Lewisohn (8vo, 211 pages; Boni & Live- right: $2.50). The firm clear style of Mr Lewisohn is very refreshing. It is a shock, however, when he tells us that for three modern novels, Clayhanger, Of Human Bondage, The Forsyte Sage, he would give up the whole of Balzac. It confuses us still further when in the Prologue our author champions the pamphleteer against the aesthete and in the Epilogue eulogizes Goethe, who certainly managed to escape both these narrow definitions. LITERARY STUDIES AND REviews, by Richard Aldington (10mo, 252 pages; Lincoln Mac Veagh, Dial Press : $2.50). In these studies of early French poets, of Landor, of Victor Hugo, of Remy de Gourmont, Marcel Proust, Madame du Deffand, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce—of varied types of writing and of writers—an assured, balanced carefulness, a pith, poetic irritability, self-protectiveness, and polish, are opposed throughout to that which is intellectually stupid or sensibly unpleasurable. One detects upon the finely wrought texture of these themes, an occasional reiterative adverb, as in the temper of the writing one feels a stubborn hardihood, an integral unpity; the author's to us most enriching genealogical genius for literary roots and relationships, strays perhaps in its wilfully paternal mistrust of literary benefit from the influence of James Joyce; but we have here, an emotion, a stir, a bibliomania, a conviction of beauty, a valuable indo- cility, a witty practised manner of thought which exemplifies the virtues which it lauds, a mind concerned not with what is merely "chic, but with what is really cultured.” 80 BRIEFER MENTION LAMPS OF WESTERN Mysticism, by Arthur Edward Waite (8vo, 334 pages; Knopf: $5). Thirty-two essays by the dean of modern mystics, collected from various sources, about a dozen being revised from his Studies in Mysticism (1906). Students of occultism who remember Mr Waite's excellent studies of Eliphas Levi, Thomas Vaughan, and others, should be warned that in this volume, the author reaffirms his renunciation of occultism, not because it is untrue, but because it is a labyrinth which leads nowhere. Mr Waite seeks the Grail, not the Caduceus: this series of reverent critiques of celebrated mystics is limited to the orthodox of “Latin” Christianity, the only exception being Böhme. Mr Waite is both intelligent and scholarly, but like many another mystic, he writes for a specialized audience in an exceedingly referential style. Still, even the uninitiated will find some surprisingly suggestive pages. The New VisioN IN THE GERMAN Arts, by Herman G. Scheffauer (12mo, 274 pages; Huebsch: $2). This book, while it is distinctly a salute to Germany in expositing with rich particularity German experiments in new aesthetic media, is not bound by a locality; the author's belief in the ideal of a triumphant beauty is contagious—a belief in this "expressionism" of which he writes, “which acts from within upon the external world”; his unpretentiously learned simplifying of the possibly arcane or unfamiliar, is exhilarating and his intelligent, imaginative, experienced, workmanlike triumphs of particularization as an interpreter, benefit the reader, per se. THE CONDUCT OF LIFE, by Benedetto Croce, translated by Arthur Living- ston (12mo, 326 pages; Harcourt Brace: $2.25). In dealing with human struggles and human conflicts, the philosopher here emphasizes the adjec- tive above the noun. Thus, the laying-bare-of-motives is done with neither sadism nor horror, but rather with that mixture of experience and good- nature which we might expect of a very ripe and devout country doctor. Signor Croce, by his long concern with the appetites and bunglings of man, has no doubt earned the sweet repose, the contented "Such is life,” of this volume. Yet in America, where too many are willing to accept the contentment without the preparatory pilgrimage, the book could be absorbed as a ready justification for things as they are. There is little in this study of human conduct, except perhaps its frequent keenness, to alienate the most conservatively entrenched sweatshop owner or ammuni- tion maker. It is perhaps this aspect of Croce's philosophy which has given it a popularity beneath its merits. PRIMITIVE RELIGION, by Robert H. Lowie (8vo, 346 pages; Boni & Live- right: $3.50) is an attempt to strip from the concept of religion the accumulation of intellectual conceits with which brilliant scholarship has complicated it, reducing it to its common denominator—the apprehension of the Extraordinary or Supernatural. Dr Lowie demonstrates painstak- ingly that no narrower definition will include all the instances, thus rejecting theories put forth by Tylor, Frazer, and Durkheim. As a scientist, he is interested in what the data prove; the lay reader will enjoy, for their own sake, the mysterious customs which he cites to support his contention. THE THEATRE M HE firm of Savo and Allen has split up and one has gone to each of the faltering revues. ARTISTS AND MODELS with a great deal of pep and many funny scenes, of which notably INSANITY must not be missed, gets along without a real star comedian; George White's SCANDALS has Tom Patricola, developed out of vaudeville, and the last word in burlesquing the Mammy song—it is a good revue. The GRAND STREET FOLLIES have at last closed, depriving New York of an entertainment half of which, at least, was miles ahead of its uptown rivals. And that concludes my report on the lighter forms. A For, of course, M Gemier and the players from the Odéon were to be taken seriously and overwhelmed the critics with L'HOMME ET SES FANTÔMES; but their triumph was in LE BOURGEOIS GEN- TILHOMME and in their version of The TAMING OF THE Shrew. Gemier himself was superb as Jourdain and the amount of cleverly conceived stage business with which he filled the play was a caution. It was consistently and uninterruptedly “theatre,” it was action, action, all the way; and the same thing was accomplished, with the assistance of modern interpolations, in Shakespeare. ds More business would have helped THE WAY OF THE World in the few moments when help was needed. The Cherry Lane Players gave Congreve a charmingly artificial production, intelligent and tasteful, but without any too much sense of the theatre as a place for action to take place. It wasn't robust even in the scenes with Lady Wishfort, who is a horrible old harridan, ranting and tearing about, and not a rather pathetic old "body.” Congreve, however, more allows than demands action; he requires taste and elegance in diction, and these things for the greatest part the Players gave him. Mrs Bryan's Millamant was, additionally, delicious to look upon. Two plays similar in theme and varying in almost all other respects came almost simultaneously to the two chief adventuring 82 THE THEATRE theatres of New York. Eugene O'Neill's Desire UNDER THE Elms was produced with almost classical severity by the Province- town Players; THEY KNEW WHAT THEY WANTED, by Sidney Howard, was lush and riotous at the Theatre Guild. In each an old man marries a young girl; in each there is adultery and a child. Mr O'Neill ends his play with a tragedy which reunites the lovers; Mr Howard ends his with something approaching comedy which reunites the husband and wife. The conventions are on the side of O'Neill and his would be the more credible play if he had prepared for, or in some other way made us believe in, the murder of the baby. Mary Morris' performance as the mother- murderess was excellent, but the lines and the actions gave her no way to help us to understand her at the moment when she decides to kill her child to prove her disinterested love. How he could persuade us, by the tone of his scene, by all that went before, by logic, or by hysteria, I do not know. It is a serious collapse in a play which is otherwise intensely honest and remorse- lessly held true to its inner life. It is O'Neill's almost exclusive power to set people walking and talking before us on the stage and to make them do tremendous or terrible things and to make us participate in their lives. Nearly all of Desire has that quality in the highest degree, and has also the quality of evoking a local spirit which is more New England than the accent and the literature which rather disturb than complete the illusion. The best thing in Mr Howard's play is Pauline Lord's acting in the last act—the confession scene handled freshly by the author and with passion and truth by the actress. The scene, aided by Mr Bennett, bowls you over by its sheer vehemence; it is so well done it needn't be true, and it seems true by additional grace. The first act is easy and marks Mr Howard's escape from bad litera- ture into simple comedy; the second act marks a relapse into uneasy comedy which is a little cheap and a great deal too far from the play. The end is a whirlwind. And oddly, Mr Howard too has evoked the spirit of a place—where grapes grow for wine and Italians want to live easily and lazily in California, and only Wobblies are discontented. Mr Howard can now bury the memory of SWORDS and be glad he has written a good show. GILBERT SELDES MODERN ART M A TISSE ascends the social scale in New York. That is to 1 say he ascends the financial scale, the social and financial circles being so closely allied that the terms used in both are practically synonymous. The exhibition of his recent paintings in the Fearon Galleries indicates that his work now has marketable value. This quite apart from the actual prices that are asked and which are said not to be excessive—to be, in fact, French prices. For the Fearon Galleries aim for the Duveen, Knoedler, Scott and Fowles standards and eschew the experimental. In other words, Matisse approaches being considered "safe.” Well, it is high time. In Europe he is no longer an argument. The irritation that existed in the early years against a recognized draughtsman who appeared to throw draughtsmanship overboard vanished as it grad- ually dawned upon the scandalized that, so far from throwing any- thing overboard he had actually added ballast to his equipment as an artist. To see freshly was the aim, and it must be allowed that there was disturbing consciousness in the early efforts to become as a little child. New York Philistines in considerable numbers, ten years behind their French brethren, are still shrieking “insincere,” which is all nonsense. The consciousness, which was slight anyway, has long since disappeared, as well as the in- tellectualism which was also in evidence. Instead there is to be found the most delightful ease in painting to be encountered any- where in the modern world. Young people say he is our Rubens and I find nothing objectionable in the phrase, particularly since I am one of those to whom the painting only in Rubens appeals. Rubens as a searcher of the soul, or even as historian, leaves me cold. Matisse, in spite of his famous casualness as to subject, holds the mirror much more firmly up to nature. I don't think he plunges to the depths, however. He is not of the Ecole Rembrandt. The soul is not much more to him than it is to Rubens. But he at least gives you its cadre. He is French, so very French. As French as Chardin. A Chardin up-to-date. He dares to give you the bad taste of the contemporary French scene. A positive smell of chicory emanates from his canvases. The TOUS 84 MODERN ART 101 small-minded at first thought this a treachery, but it is not. It is purest patriotism. Only when faults are loved is the genuine affection reached. These stuffy interiors of Matisse are killingly funny and at the same time ineffably dear to those who know the bourgeoisie upon which French civilization rests. And how superbly are they rendered! Really, after all, the association of names is a compliment to Rubens. Where in his work can you find things so smashingly presented? And where anywhere is such amazing energy attuned to such equally amazing delicacy? I have no words with which to express my contentment with the new kind of pre- cision in values to be observed in one of the interiors now shown. The room in nature must have been a scream. A red and white striped table cover which comes into terrific collision with a fright- fully red rug and turned, in this picture, into captivating wit by the adroit brush of the artist! The stripes on the table-cloth alone vindicate the doctrine elucidated from St Matthew, 18:3. The scholastic would carefully rule such lines and have them exactly meet the down stripes at the edge of the table. But not so Matisse. With an infant's wild abandon he lets the meeting of the stripes occur as they will, and miraculously an emphatic effect of nature comes to pass. The edge of that table is masterly. Go see it, Philistines, and repent ye, ere it is too late. use S The exhibition of Mestrovic sculptures in the Brooklyn Museum is stupendous in at least one thing—size. There was a widespread desire to inspect these carvings at the time of their London suc- cess in 1915, but the getting to America of heavy sculptures, always a hazardous matter, was doubly so in war times, and no one was willing to undertake the affair. Now that they are come and duly installed in a museum gallery one must wonder that there was enterprise enough in a public institution to induce these works of art in this direction, for there are over one hundred pieces and many of them are very large. In a vague way one hopes that all monies expended in the cause of art will not be expended in vain even when expended in causes with which one is not wholly in sympathy, and one trusts that the Brooklyn Museum will be recom- pensed for the present severe strain upon its purse. But how? Only the Lord in Heaven knows. The public, I think, can be persuaded to visit the show in large numbers. I have done my best VS. HENRY MCBRIDE 85 in the columns of the daily press to encourage an exodus from New York to Brooklyn and Brooklyn itself always turns out well for its own shows no matter what they are; so the public, I think, will see them. But will they buy? Ah, that's the rub. How can they? They really are so big, these sculptures! We have no church anywhere that could support Mr Mestrovic's big figure of Christ in wood. An enthusiast said, “Well then, we should build a church that would hold it.” I regret that I cannot share in that feel- ing. It is charming to have enthusiasms, but the populace doesn't have to justify itself for its furores and I do. I think, however, though we needn't build a cathedral for Mr Mestrovic—we are having a slow enough time, as it is, Heaven knows, building St John's—we might purchase a few of his things, and since private citizens cannot possibly get them into the sitting-rooms of the tiny apartments in which they are obliged to live, it seems to be up to the several museums to purchase a few. Also the various Jugoslav Societies in the various cities might help, as anything that happens in this line redounds to the glory of the new state. If I seem to take a light tone in this matter it is in perverse reaction, no doubt, to the too extravagant claims. Something had been said about Michael Angelo. Mr Mestrovic is by no means a Michael Angelo, though he is Michael Angelesque. He is a good sculptor, one of the best of the exotic band to come here since the war, and he is serious. He is seri- ous, but not profound. How could he be, working at that speed ? Sculptures do not make themselves even in these days of mechanical aid and that a man of forty should already have carved 240 ideas into permanent material is the most disconcerting fact that his biographers have supplied. S A new worker in water-colour is Robert Hallowell, who makes a début in the Montross Galleries with a group of drawings that astonish most, though this seems hypercritical, by the evenness of attainment. There is no evidence of a faltering beginning nor of fumbling reachings-out towards the unknowable. The rooms glow with forceful, manly colour schemes—Mr Hallowell is robust—but it is contained colour. If honesty be the best base upon which to erect a style, Mr Hallowell may confidently expect one, but it cannot be pretended as yet that he touches the secret strings that stir the emotions. Henry McBRIDE MUSICAL CHRONICLE 000 . M HOSE who do not write in the newspapers dote upon the | music of Peter Ilyitch Tschaikowsky; and those who do write in the newspapers dote upon it no less, let it but come wear- ing another signature, that of a musical "wildman,” say. This accounts for the universal success of Pacific 231. “I have always loved locomotives as others love women or horses" murmurs Arthur Honegger, and critics and public alike allow the intensity of the passion, not a soul rising to remark that if others loved horses and women as Arthur Honegger locomotives there would be far fewer horse races in the world, and many more psychoneuroses. Pacific 231 is not a good locomotive. It is well enough made, but it is made of papier mâché. Or perhaps it is a locomotive in the movies. A real out-in-life locomotive makes much grander con- certo starting, steam-beclouded, upon a winter's day. The over- tones of its whistles are always exquisite and bloodcurdling. There is nothing in the world more nostalgic than a distant loco- motive crying across a spring evening for its mate. As for the looks of the thing: the giant bearing down upon you with the blinding eye in his chest-no one, not even Jules Romains, has given that; and Honegger's impression of the general spirit of the machine is pathetically tame. The chorale-like theme for the brass, and the long mounting violin figures are, we have already inti- mated, inferior Tchaikowsky, and might have figured in the dog. fights of the Romeo and Juliet or Francesa da Rimini overtures, or in that of the Fifth Symphony. The "sumptuous chords” which gather and arrest the flight of the music are without genius. The poem is much less worthy than Skating Rink, which of course quite failed to please. Its single distinction lies in the instru- mentation: it is a pity that so good a perception of quality and colour should have been married to so poor a musical idea. Honegger has successfully suppressed all scintillance from his orchestra, and brought an amusing succession of brute sounds: gutturals, rasps, deaf clamours, hoarse roars. Mr Damrosch very cleverly juxtaposed the new piece to the Istar variations, which are all scintillation, and so reinforced the dark rough brown and PAUL ROSENFELD 87 unpolished iron of Honegger's instruments. But he was unable to do anything for the ideas. Music is not yet entirely literature; even though the lengthiness of modern ears is rapidly making it so. mes The first Sunday afternoon concert of the League of Composers introduced two pianoforte pieces by Aaron Copland, and “much shall be forgiven her.” Mr Copland is a young American gen- uinely directed to music. He has a sensitive silvery feeling for the pianoforte, much finesse, and a clear sense of style. If his Passacaglia, and Cat and Mouse lie within limits a little timidly drawn, they nevertheless exist as constructions and objects of distinct quality. They saved the afternoon at the Anderson Galleries; kept not a few of us from going home in disgust. The peril to which the art of music lies exposed to-day is not that of a general inhospitality toward the new forms. That,