we have
left behind us. But another has risen to take its place; the absence
of discrimination among patrons and directors; and the new peril
is perhaps the more to be dreaded. Taste alone affords protection
against the most insidious enemy of the arts, the little clever fake
who arrives in the train of genuine experimentation. He comes
imitating the elements of new style, turning a few tricks with
them; and as he has nothing new to say, his efforts find a ready wel-
come. Besides, he is never unaccompanied by his critics. These,
sometimes in all gosling simplicity, strive to forward him by dis-
crediting with fantasias of technical jargon men who have laboured
for their positions. Learned comments on their young god's in-
tellectualism, dynamism, mysticism (? missed-icism?) or any
other ism which happens to possess a timely glamour, appear; and
the issues are beautifully confused. Finally, the little clever fake
is himself rejected; unfortunately never before he and his prophets
have succeeded in discrediting the entire movement with which they
have sought to associate themselves, and established in people an
ill will directed alike against the true and the false. The poetry
movement has been successfully discredited by these gentlemen,
and we perceive they are now at work preparing a similar fate for
the new music. And there exists no group sufficiently discrim-
inating to stop them doing it.
In the year 1993, Captain Lazare Saminsky, of the good ship


88
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
The Lament of Rachel, returned to Europe and announced that
he had discovered the existence of two new continents lying ap-
proximately halfway between the old world and India, and that
gin lands of the new hemisphere were sparsely inhabited by
aborigines with red skins. The news was later published in the
November issue of the League of Composers' Review, under the
title The Downfall of Strauss, and created quite a sensation.
Shortly afterward, Einstein announced his celebrated theory con-
tradicting our belief that there exists a single all-embracing time
in which the events of the universe have their place, thus explain-
ing how it comes that certain clocks are so perpetually behind.
PAUL ROSENFELD


ANNOUNCEMENT
Ring, for the scant salvation!
Emily Dickinson
HAVE the honour to announce that our annual acknowledge-
ment of distinguished service to American letters this year
recognizes the unusual literary virtue of Miss Marianne Moore.
In thus singling out for the moment one whose already published
work will so beyond mortal hap single her out through generations,
one who seems to us so incomparably, since the death of Emily
Dickinson, America's most distinguished poetess, we esteem that we
fulfil in an especial degree our functions of criticism and of propa-
ganda, those twin functions wherefore we exist: the function of
discrimination between the one and the so very, very—the so very
lamentably—many; and the function of exhibiting—so widely as
may lie within our strait means—that single one. We so esteem
in this case especially because on the one hand the work of Miss
Moore is itself of so inordinate and of so patent a value; and be-
cause on the other hand it has hitherto remained, among the un-
fortunate American public, so meagrely relished and so signally
unacclaimed.
We cannot set right the balance; we cannot turn over the whole
misinformed continent. Nor can we annihilate the gross and the
lax. Nor can we perceptibly diminish the exuberance of the vul-
gar, dead and-practically—living. We can but light our beacon,
and—for a worth-while moment-flare a name worth flaring.
We do so not primarily in tribute to Miss Marianne Moore.
I imagine she had chosen, for herself, to rest unflared. (She does
not go in for personal flaring.) And anyhow, she has now for
some years lived and worked without possibility of evading the
knowledge of that esteem in which she is universally held. I write
the word "universally" not without attention. The extant uni-
verse of those competent to judge in matters of contemporary Eng-
lish and American prosody is not conterminous with the physical
universe of Sir Isaac Newton. ... Mr Thomas Eliot, of London,
is one who, notoriously, does not extend credit to any fly-by-night


90
ANNOUNCEMENT
or wild-cat poet or concern: the London banker is a conservative
animal. And Mr T. S. Eliot, in ranking Miss Moore among the
half-dozen most “exciting" contemporary European and American
poets, rightly worded the consensus of opinion of those qualified
to judge. He rightly and merely expressed the considered judge-
ment of the informed literary middle-of-the-road.
We flare not in glorification; we flare in practical service. Serv-
ice not to that Juggernaut, the Reading Public,—that Juggernaut
which is well served in being served badly. Service rather to the
Imaginative Individual, to him who is in our world always the
Marooned Individual. The towns, the villages, the prairies and
the sandbars, of this North American Continent support many such.
For since neither by the public pictures nor by the family radios
are the hungerings of imagination appeased, therefore have these
their being for ever in isolation, for ever shut and cut off. There-
fore have these sharp eyes, the sharper for long fasting, eyes
which, I have been encouraged to believe, are wont to pick out
and to follow our own irregular and unchartered sailings. And
it is for these important eyes that we run up, as one does a gala
pennon, this blithe and gala name, this meadow-lark and white-
heeled name, this name of Marianne Moore. . . . And it is to the
hearts of these-being neither gross nor lax—that I do hereby
commend the admonitory asceticisms of Miss Marianne Moore.






Made in Germany
STILL LIFE. BY HENRI MATISSE



THE V
IT
DIAL
DIY
IX
OXX ITO
FEBRUARY 1925
THE PAINTED WAGON
BY T. F. POWYS
M HE people of Dodder could never lose their interest in
I Deadman's Tree nor in what had once hung there. And any
Dodder child could always be got to behave itself if the mother
said "Thee'll see they hanging feet on tree if 'ee be so tiresome."
The hanging feet-and the children could easily fancy what
they looked like_once belonged to young Walley White, a modest
lover, who had chosen a tree at the corner of the lane that led down
into Dodder, to hang himself upon when crossed in love.
Walley lived in those far off days, when, as Anthony Vine used
to say, "they wicked man traps were laid about in wood.” When
Anthony spoke of Walley or the man traps he would be sure to
look at his little girl Phyllis, who had been always most strictly
brought up in the fear of those dangling feet upon Deadman's
Tree; and who was always being reminded, when the night wind
howled and shook the cottage, of the swaying body that had once
been suspended there. When Phyllis was eighteen she ran ex-
citedly in to her father from the garden gate where she had been
one evening loitering, and perhaps looking at the stars, and said,
“Tommy Duck don't believe they feet be ever seen, but Willie
Allen do say ''tis true,' and they be fisting one another."
Anthony Vine, the rabbit trapper and sometime poacher, lived
in a tiny cottage on Giddy Green, exactly midway between the
Grange farm where Tommy Duck lived and Mr Allen's dairy.
Anthony possessed a Bible and a picture, and would look at each
in turn when resting in his chair. The picture represented the
Duke of Wellington riding upon a white horse, and holding his


92
THE PAINTED WAGON
sword as if he were afraid of it. The Bible was a weighty one,
and Anthony would open it and read aloud if any company
happened to come to the cottage that he didn't like.
Near to Anthony's cottage there was a pretty knoll where cowslips
grew with long stalks, so that Phyllis was able to gather enough
to make a fine wreath for her mother when she died.
Besides finding the knoll so useful for the dead, Phyllis also
liked it for the sake of the living. And she would stand upon it
and watch young Tommy Duck watering his father's horses at
the pond; or else if Tommy didn't happen to be in sight, there
would nearly always be Willie Allen driving his father's cows
in the opposite direction. Either of the boys who happened to
be there would be sure to whistle, and Phyllis would reply by
waving her hand and blowing kisses to them. No girl could
have looked prettier or more inviting than Phyllis did in cowslip
time, standing upon the knoll, as the fresh spring wind blew her
frock about while she threw out her kisses.
Her young men now began to visit the trapper's cottage in the
evenings, one from one direction and one from the other, and the
first come would be the best served, that is, given the chair nearest
to Phyllis, where he could sit and watch her knitting, with one
leg innocently crossed over the other.
Old Anthony had no love for these visitors, for he never would
allow that his daughter had any right to marry while he lived,
and so, when the young men came he would stare hard at the great
Duke for some moments, and then take up the Bible and read in
a loud and angry tone from the book of Leviticus. If Leviticus
couldn't get rid of his daughter's suitors, he would begin to talk
in an ominous and gloomy manner about poor Walley White.
The spring always appeared to return to Phyllis quicker than it
did to other people, and when she was nineteen she stood upon the
knoll, and watched the cowslips and felt the wind blow her clothes.
She had come to the knoll to decide whom to marry. Neither Willie
nor Tommy could be seen that afternoon, and Phyllis wasn't sorry,
for she fancied that she could decide the better when they were
away. She chose Willie Allen.
That evening she said to her father, “I don't mind so much
about buying the bicycle, but I do want to be married.”
Anthony Vine looked up at the Duke; the words of his daughter
manne


T. F. POWYS
93
W
astonished him as much as if the Duke had let his sword fall, and
had remarked loudly to the armies behind him, "let's all run away.”
Anthony took up the great Bible and read in a loud and angry
tone the fifth Chapter of Deuteronomy. But Phyllis paid no heed to
him, she opened the cottage door and listened. Beside the knoll there
was its own shadow made by the setting sun, and in a thorn tree
near by a blackbird was singing. A little further off two young
men were fighting in the lane, Phyllis heard them with pride in her
heart because she knew they were fighting about her.
Tommy Duck had been the victor in the fight, that had been a
bloody one, and he now intended to overcome his rival in another
way too. He bought a new spring wagon that was painted a
bright red. He thought Phyllis would be sure to accept him, if
he invited her to ride with him to the town in the midst of such
colour. Tommy had already tried hat pins and a wrist watch,
but he discovered in church, by getting as near to Phyllis as he
could, that she always wore Willie's hat pins, and what was
worse still, Willie's ring.
But the painted wagon was a new idea, and Tommy set great
store by it, for it would shine red a long distance away and be
noticed by all, whereas Willie's plain milk float was hardly looked
at by any one.
It may have been the sight of this painted wagon as it stopped
near to the cottage, when Tommy would invite Phyllis to ride to
town with him, that started old Anthony in reading from the
book of Kings, and also in giving out as his well considered opinion,
that the hanging feet of Walley White were no more real than
the Duke's sword.
“'Tis a pretty wagon,” said Anthony when he first saw his
daughter helped into it by Tommy, "and 'tis 'e thee best marry."
But even though Phyllis accepted a ride now and then, she
would often steal a half hour to rest upon the knoll and to
watch Willie working in the field.
Willie was often there haymaking, and would pitch a load
with his white arms showing, and when he turned towards the
knoll in the course of his work, Phyllis would imagine that he
looked at her, and would kiss her hand. Although Willie never
came to see her now, Phyllis fancied in the innocence of her mind,
that the reason for his not coming was only that he was sure that


94
THE PAINTED WAGON
she loved him, and that he merely left it to her to fix the day for
the wedding.
On coming in one evening after catching his rabbits, and before
taking up his Bible to read the second epistle general of Peter,
Anthony Vine told his daughter that he had met someone who
still believed that the feet of Walley could be seen dangling
from the tree in the darkness.
“ 'Tis all silliness,” said Phyllis.
“Willic Allen do say 'tis true,” replied Anthony. ...
When the autumn came Phyllis decided that she would marry
Willie at Christmas, but she didn't wish to tell him so, until
she had bought her wedding clothes, because she knew that as
soon as the truth of her choice was out, her rides in the painted
wagon would end.
She wished to go to the town once more and she went. Anthony
watched the start as usual, and when he saw Tommy Duck kiss
his daughter after helping her in, he decided to begin reading
the Acts of the Apostles that same evening for his own pleasure.
When the painted wagon passed under Deadman's Tree Phyllis
was surprised to see a paper pinned upon the trunk, the same sort of
paper that folk spoke of as being pinned there by Walley in the
time of the man traps. The girl saw written upon the paper her
own name “Phyllis.”
“Oh, it's only Willie's silliness," she said, and Tommy drove on.
On the way to town Phyllis was settling in her own mind to
go and visit Willie at his home that same evening.
"It's leap year and so I may ask him to marry me," she said to
the noise of the painted wheels as they spun round.
Heavy clouds gathered in the sky that afternoon, as if winter
intended to hide under the cover of darkness all the ill things
he was bringing to mankind. For some reason or other Tommy
Duck didn't leave the town as early as usual. He carried no
light, and when the painted wagon neared Deadman's Tree,
neither Phyllis nor he spoke one word.
Phyllis never knew how she came to do it, but when she was
exactly under the tree she held up her hands to feel if anything
was there—and felt two dangling feet. She screamed with horror
and the horse galloped, and the red wheels spun. Later in the
evening when Phyllis went to the dairy to ask for Willie, she was


T. F. POWYS
95
told that he had led a black bull to market very early in the morning
and that he hadn't so far returned. ...
In Dodder the folk stood about in groups talking in hushed tones
about Willie Allen; and when Anthony brought the news to his
daughter, he said, “Willie Allen did always say 'twere a true story,
and 'e've been and hanged himself same as Walley did to prove
'twere true."
Phyllis fainted.
Willie had only been buried a little more than three months,
when Phyllis said to Tommy Duck—"Father do read Numbers
now, and so 'tis best we be married.”
But Tommy excused himself.
"I can't marry no girl who have ever touched they dangling
feet," he said.
And Phyllis, after watching Tommy drive off alone in the
painted wagon, turned mournfully to the knoll and gathered a
bunch of cowslips for Willie's grave.


NOTES ON TOLSTOY AND OTHER
RECOLLECTIONS
BY MAXIM GORKI
Translated From the Russian by William A. Drake and Max Stetsky
001
ITE overtook me, one hot summer day, on the slope of a hill.
1 He was riding his horse—a Tartar breed-in the direction
of Livady. His grey, tattered clothes and his mushroom-shaped
white felt hat gave him the aspect of a gnome.
Pulling in his horse, he began to talk; and I, walking beside the
horse near the stirrup, remarked that I had received a letter from
Korolenko. Tolstoy shook his head in annoyance.
"Does he believe in God?”
"I don't know.”
“The most important thing, you do not know? He believes,
but is ashamed to confess it before the atheists!"
Tolstoy was querulous and irritated, and his eyes puckered
angrily. It was apparent that I was disturbing him; but when I
turned to leave, he detained me.
"Where are you going? Am I not riding slowly enough for
you?”
He resumed his grumbling.
“Your Andreyev, too, is ashamed before the atheists; but he
also believes in God, and fears Him."
We had come to the boundary of the estate of Count A. M.
Romanoff. The Romanoffs—the owner, Aitodon, Serge, and a
third one, I think Peter Nikolaevitch from Dulber, all important-
looking personages—were standing close to each other in the road,
chatting. The riding horse of the one and the two one-horse
droshkys of the others blocked the road, so that Leo Nikolaevitch
could not pass. He fixed his stern, commanding eyes upon the
Romanoffs, but they apparently had already recognized him, and
turned away. The riding horse, however, moved aside, permitting
Tolstoy's mount to pass.
He rode for a few minutes in silence; then he exclaimed:


MAXIM GORKI
97
“They recognized me—the fools!”
And a minute later:
“But the horse understood that it is necessary to give way for
Tolstoy."
(A saying of Tolstoy):
"Spare yourself first for yourself; much then will be left for
others."
To Chekhov, on the telephone:
"All is so well with me to-day, and my soul is so full of joy,
that I want you to be as happy. Especially you. For you are a
very good man.”
(Tolstoy once observed):
"What is meant by knowledge ?"
"Here, I know that I am Tolstoy, a writer. I have a wife, chil-
dren, grey hair, a homely face, a beard—so much is remarked in
the passports. But in the passports they do not speak of the soul.
One thing I know about the soul—the soul desires nearness to God.
And what is God? That of which my soul is a particle. That is
all. Those who have learned to reason, find it difficult to have
faith: and to live in God is only possible through faith. Tertullian
has said that 'Reason is an evil.'”
Despite the simplicity of his doctrines, this remarkable man was
many-sided. To-day in the park, talking with a Tartar from
Gaspri, Tolstoy conducted himself like a confident simpleton of
a rustic, who had come to give a thought to his last days. Small
as he is, he seemed to have shrivelled even more; and beside this
husky, upstanding Tartar, he looked like a very old man whose
soul had for the first time awakened to the problems of existence,
and who feared the questions that arose within him.
Raising his bushy brows in wonder and shyly blinking his sharp
little eyes, he extinguished their penetrating little fires. He fixed
his immobile glance on the Tartar's broad face, and his pupils lost
the sharpness that is so often embarrassing to people. He put
childish questions to the Tartar concerning the meaning of life, the
soul, and God, varying his arguments with extraordinary ease from


98
NOTES ON TOLSTOY
verses from the Koran to verses from the Bible and the Prophets.
In reality he was playing. But he was doing so with that astonish-
ingly versatile skill which is possessed only by great artists and
great seers.
And a few days ago, conversing with Tanyiev and Suler about
music, he spoke rapturously as a child of its beauty. He was
manifestly pleased with his own rapture, or rather with his capacity
for rapture.
He remarked that Schopenhauer wrote of music better and more
profoundly than any one else. Incidentally, he related an anecdote
about Fet, and spoke of music as the silent prayer of the soul.
"But why silent?” Suler asked.
“Because it is without words. There is more soul in sounds than
in thought. Thought is the purse in which one keeps one's coppers,
whereas sound is not contaminated by baser contacts and remains
essentially pure.”
Later, quite unexpectedly, smiling into his beard, he added
softly, caressingly:
"All musicians are foolish people. The more talented the mu-
sician, the more limited he is. It is a quaint fact, that almost all of
them are religious.”
When one expresses a point of view with which he cannot agree,
Tolstoy listens, but he does not believe. He really examines,
rather than inquires. Like a connoisseur of rarities, he accepts
and retains only that which is unlikely to disturb the harmony of
his collection.
Once, while looking through his mail, Tolstoy remarked:
"They bustle about and write to do me honour; but a year after
I shall have died they will ask, "Tolstoy? Was that the Count
who tried to make boots, and something happened to him? Was
that the one ?!"
When I presented the cemetery watchman, Brodyagin, with his
long-yearned-for harmonica, he-one-eyed and tattered-pressed
his right hand forcibly upon his breast and, radiant with happiness,
closed his solitary charming and often sad eye, and exclaimed:
"Ekh! ..."


MAXIM GORKI
99
Excitement took away his breath, and he shook his bald head.
“When you die, Leksei Maksymitch,” he whispered, “I'll cer-
tainly look after you!"
He would carry the harinonica with him even when he was
digging graves; and when he grew tired of work, he would play
a certain polka, the notes quiet and subdued and each one lingered
upon with affection. This was the only piece he could play. Once
he began to play while a priest was conducting a funeral service
near by. The priest called for him after the service, and berated
him for his behaviour.
"You are offending the deceased, you beast!" he began.
Afterwards Brodyagin complained to me:
“I know I did not do the right thing, but after all, how does he
know what offends the dead?”
Brodyagin was certain that there is no hell. The souls of the
good, he would say, fly away after the death of the body into the
"purest” paradise; while those of sinners remain in their corpses
and abide in the grave until the body has decayed. Then the earth
renders them to the winds, which mingle them with the insensible
dust.
When they buried Nikolaev's little six-year-old girl, after the
cemetery was deserted, Kostya Brodyagin, smoothing the grave
with his shovel, endeavoured to comfort me.
"My friend, do not mourn. Perhaps in the next world they
speak more happily, more happily than we do. And it may be
they do not speak at all, but only play the violoncello."
Music he loved to a ludicrous, and often dangerous, self-
abandonment in its presence. When he heard the sound of a mili-
tary band, street organ, or piano, he would prick up his ears and
crane his neck in its direction, clasp his hands behind his back,
and become perfectly motionless. His single dark eye would open
wide, as if he were listening with it. Sometimes this would happen
in the street, so that twice he was knocked down by horses, and
often some coachman whose warnings he had not heeded would
cut him with his whip as he stood, oblivious to danger.
"When I hear the sound of music,” he would explain, “it is as
if I had fallen to the bottom of the river.”
He had certain negotiations with a beggar-woman of the ceme-
tery, one Sorokin, a drunken old hag about fifteen years his senior-
and he was forty.
S as


100
NOTES ON TOLSTOY
"What do you want with her ?" I once asked him.
"Who then will comfort her? I love to comfort the most hope-
less. I have no misery of my own, so I try to overcome the misery
of others.”
We were talking under a birch tree, sheltering ourselves from a
June shower which had unexpectedly come upon us.
Kostya shuddered pleasurably beneath the strokes of the rain
upon his bare, sharply squared head, and murmured, “I feel happy
when a word of mine can dry a tear.”
It was obvious that he had a cancer in his stomach, for his breath
bore the stench of a rotting corpse. He had no appetite and often
vomited; but he went about his work none the less cheerfully, and
was quite jocund in the cemetery. He died suddenly, while play-
ing a game of cards with another watchman.
A street woman, whom I met in the restaurant Peckar, once
asked me:
“That book you have by Blok-is it by the famous Blok ?”!
Then she explained:
"I also knew him, though it is true I met him only once. I was
walking. It was very late, you know, and the weather was nasty,
nasty. It was nearly midnight by the Duma clock. I was fearfully
tired, and was about to start for home, when suddenly on the corner
of Italyansky Street I was accosted by a well-dressed man.
"He was so handsome and his face was so haughty that I thought
he must be a foreigner. We walked away together. Near by was
number 10 Karavan Street, where there were rooms to be had for
assignations, and it was there we went. I had to do all the talking,
for he was silent. It soon became unpleasant, you know, the
situation was so queer. I don't like impolite people.
"When we had arrived, I asked for tea. He rang the bell, but
the servant did not come. Then he went for it himself into the hall,
and I was so tired, you know, and so numb from the cold that I fell
asleep where I sat on the couch. Then, presently, I awakened and
saw him. He was sitting at the table opposite me, leaning with his
head in his hands and gazing at me so sternly. He had terrible
eyes. I was horribly ashamed.
“ 'Oh, my God, this must be a musician! I thought. His hair
was curly.
“ 'Oh, pardon me!' I said. 'l'll undress at once.'


MAXIM GORKI
101
"But he only smiled. “Don't trouble yourself,' he said. 'It is not
necessary.
“He came to me, took me upon his knees, and caressed my hair.
“ 'Come, now,' he said, “sleep a little longer.'
"And-imagine it!—I fell asleep again. It was scandalous! I
realized, of course, that this was not the right thing to do, but I
couldn't help it. He held me so tenderly, and I felt so comfortable
in his arms. When I opened my eyes, he was smiling quietly. Then
I must have fallen fast asleep.
“Presently he shook me cautiously.
“ 'You must get up,' he said. “It is time that I should go.'
"He put twenty-five rubles on the table.
“ 'Oh, come! How is that?' I cried. I was naturally much
embarrassed. I apologized. It was all so strange. But he just
smiled, pressed my hand, and kissed me.
"After he had gone, the servant exclaimed, 'Do you know who
was with you? Why, it was Blok, the poet. Look!' he said, and
showed me the portrait in a magazine. I saw that it was true; they
were the same. My God, I thought, how absurd it all had been!"
And surely enough, on her flat nose, her spiteful face, in her
roguish eyes that were like a homeless dog's, there came an expres-
sion of profound grief and humiliation. I gave the young woman
all the money I had with me, and from that moment I felt that Blok
had become more comprehensible and closer to me. I remembered
his face, which resembled that of a Florentine of the Renaissance.
To-day I observed a small, blonde woman, with a face as am-
biguous of expression as that of a little girl, standing on the
Troitzky Bridge and clutching the rail with her grey-gloved hands,
as if she were about to hurl herself into the Neva. She was gravely
extending her little, pointed tongue at the moon. The fox of the
heavens, which was slinking through a cloud of thick smoke, ap-
peared gross and red-faced, as if she were drunk. The lady was
teasing her, very seriously, and it seemed to me almost vengefully.
This incident has brought to mind a few of the "queer” traits that
have puzzled me, when I have had occasion to observe how various
people conduct themselves when they are alone. For some of these
eccentricities I can find no other designation than "insane."
My first discovery, as a boy, was that the clown Rendal, an Eng-
lishman, when passing through a dark and unfrequented corridor


102
NOTES ON TOLSTOY
of the circus, would invariably stop at a mirror, remove his hat,
and with elaborate politeness bow to his own image in the glass.
Upon this occasion the corridor was quite deserted, but by some
chance I had concealed myself in a large barrel near the mirror,
and, though I had not heard his steps, I happened to protrude my
head at the moment to view these proceedings. Rendal's strange
behaviour plunged me into a dark and unpleasant bewilderment.
Afterwards I concluded that he was both a clown and an English-
man, and as either it was natural that he should be eccentric.
But I once came upon Chekhov, sitting in his orchard, vainly
endeavouring to capture a sunbeam in his hat. It was evident that
the failure of his design exasperated the hunter of sunbeams. His
face became darker and darker with anger, and he ended by striking
his knees despondently with his hat, pulling it viciously down upon
his head, squinting his eyes obliquely at the sky, and walking off
in the direction of the house. When he saw me waiting for him on
the porch, he smiled. "Hello!” he cried; "have you read in Bal-
mont that 'the sun smells of grasses'? It is silly. In Russia the sun
smells of Kasan soap, and here it smells of the sweat of the Tartars."
Upon another occasion I saw him trying, with patient diligence,
to insert a thick pencil into the neck of a very small bottle. This
determined endeavour to oppose himself to the laws of physics
Chekhov pursued with all the calm and stubborn persistence of an
experimenter.
Tolstoy once asked a lizard, “Are you happy?” The lizard was
warming itself on a stone, in the bushes beside the road to Dul-
berand, and Tolstoy was standing in front of her, his thumbs locked
in his belt. The great man looked cautiously around, then confessed
to the lizard, “I am not...."
Professor Tichvinsky, while sitting in my dining-room, asked his
reflection in a brass tray: "Well, brother, are you alive?” The re-
flection made no answer. He sighed heavily, and began energetically
to rub it off with the palm of his hand. But the image only frowned
and made unpleasant movements with its nose, which resembled an
elephant's trunk.
I am told that someone once observed Lyeskov at a similar occu-
pation. He was sitting at a table, and every now and then he would
drop a bit of cotton into a porcelain tray filled with water and, bend-
ing his head close to the surface of the water, would try to catch the
sound of the impact.
as


MAXIM GORKI
103
Father Fyodor Vladimirsky placed a boot before him, and ad-
dressed it earnestly. "Well, go ahead!” he demanded. “You can-
not?” he concluded, with dignity and conviction; “that is precisely
the point. Without me you cannot go anywhere!" "What are you
doing, Father Fyodor?" I asked, as I entered the room. Gazing
at me attentively, he explained, “This boot is worn out. Nowadays
they do very poor work.”
I have frequently observed how people will laugh and weep when
they are alone. Once I remarked a prominent writer, who was quite
sober and in fact seldom drank, weeping as he whistled a street-organ
melody, As I Start Alone on the Road. He whistled it atrociously,
for he was sobbing like a woman, and his lips were trembling. The
tears flowed slowly down his cheeks and lost themselves in his beard
and moustache. This occurred in a hotel room; and he was stand-
ing, his back to the window, swinging his arms as if he were swim-
ming, his movements slow, weak, and unrhythmical. But weeping
and laughter are not strange or disconcerting, for they are expres-
sions of moods familiar to all of us. Nor are the lonely prayers of
people in the fields, in the woods, or by the sea. It is only the un-
natural that gives us a definite impression of insanity.
001
A landowner from Voronezh, who lived in the room adjacent to
mine at the Hotel Knizhny Dvor, entered my room by mistake
one night, half-dressed, but quite sober.
I was in bed and the lamp had been extinguished, but the room
was flooded with moonlight; and I could see his tart, smiling face
through a hole in the curtain and hear him talking to himself.
“Who is there?"
"It is 1.”
“This is not your room.”
"Oh, pardon!"
“There is no harm.”
He paused, glanced around the room, smoothed his moustache,
and, looking into the mirror, began to sing:
“I got into the place, place, place:
How did it happen, eh?”
After this, it would seem, he might have had the grace to leave
me in peace; but instead he took a book from the table, put it down
again back upwards, and looking out at the street, said in a pained


104
NOTES ON TOLSTOY
voice, as if he were reproaching someone: "It is light as day, yet the
day was dark and nasty. Ekh, what an order of things!"
Then he left the room on tiptoe, balancing his body with his
hands. He closed the door behind him, very quietly and with
great care.
It is not strange to see a child trying with his fingers to pick up
a picture from a book; but it is decidedly queer to watch a learned
scientist applying himself to such an endeavour, listening and glanc-
ing around to be certain he is not surprised.
The professor had apparently persuaded himself that it was pos-
sible for him to lift a printed picture from the page and put it into
his pocket. Several times he apparently thought he had succeeded,
for he would seem to take something from the page, hold it in two
fingers as if it were a coin, and try to put it into his vest pocket.
Then, glancing from his fingers to the picture, he would frown and
resume his attempts. At last, foiled, he angrily Aung the book
across the room and stamped out through the door.
I recovered the book and, upon examining it, found it to be a
technical work in the German language, with many illustrations of
dynamos and their parts. There was not a single pasted illustration
in the volume, and it is obviously impossible to remove a printed
image with one's fingers, and put it into one's pocket. Doubtless
the professor knew this, or in any case he presently learned it, al-
though he was not a technical specialist, but an humanitarian.
Women not infrequently talk to themselves, especially when they
play patience (a card game) and when they make their toilet.
Once for five minutes I watched a certain cultured lady who, as
she sat alone eating chocolates, would say to each piece of the con-
fection as she caught it with the pincers, “And I will eat you up!"
Then, having eaten it, she would exclaim, “What! And did you
really eat it?” This formula she repeated several times. Thus she
occupied herself, sitting in a comfortable chair at the window, at
about five o'clock on a summer afternoon, while from the street out-
side the noise of the city drifted in. Her face was grave, and she
kept her grey-blue eyes fixed upon the box of chocolates on her knees.
Another time, I remarked a lady in the lobby of a theatre. She
had arrived late, and was arranging her hair at a mirror. Sternly
and quite audibly she demanded of someone, “And must we die ?”


MAXIM GORKI
105
I was the only other person in the lobby, for I also had arrived late;
but she had not seen me, and if she had I am certain she would not
have asked me such an irrelevant question.
Yes, I have observed many such eccentricities. Once I met Alex-
ander Blok, while standing on the steps of the Vsyemirnaya Litera-
writing something in the margins of a book. Sud-
denly, with excessive politeness, he stepped aside to make room for
someone. I could see no one there. I was standing at the top of the
steps; and when his eyes, following the imaginary personage whom
he had deferentially allowed to pass, met mine, which were doubt-
less filled with amazement, he dropped his pencil in confusion and,
stooping to pick it up, anxiously inquired, "Am I late ?"
Gershner was shot by a nineteen-year-old youth, Alexander
Nikiforov, son of the once famous Tolstoyan and translator of Leo
Nikiforov—a man whose destiny was dramatic, since each of his
four sons perished tragically.
His eldest son, a Social Democrat, wasted away in prisons and
finally died of disease. Another poured kerosene over his clothing
and burned himself to death. The third poisoned himself, and the
youngest was hanged for the assassination of Gershner.
Alexander murdered Gershner in full daylight, almost at the very
door of the Defence Department, where he found his victim walk-
ing arm in arm with a lady. Sasha overtook them, calling out, “Oh,
gendarme!" When Gershner turned around, Nikiforov fired twice,
his shots taking effect in the face and in the chest.
Sasha was apprehended, convicted, and sentenced to death; but
the criminals in the Nizhny Novgorod prison unanimously refused
to undertake the shameful business of hanging him.
Finally, however, a police inspector named Paure, a creature of
Baranoff, the Governor, a braggart and a drunkard who claimed to
be the brother of the caricaturist Karan d'Ash, persuaded the bird-
catcher Greshka Merkuloff to hang Sasha, for a consideration of
twenty-five rubles.
Greshka was also a drunkard, about thirty years old, tall, gaunt,
with swollen veins and grotesque tufts of dark wool growing on his
horse-like jaws, and dull, half-drowsy eyes that peered out from
beneath his pointed brows. Having hanged Nikiforov, he bought
himself a red scarf and wound it around his long neck (which had an


106
NOTES ON TOLSTOY
enormous Adam's apple) gave up drinking, and affected a very
sedate and ostentatious cough.
"Why do you put on such airs, Greska ?” his friends would ask.
“Because I am engaged in secret business for the Government,"
he would explain.
But when he once disclosed that he had hanged a man, his friends
avoided him. Some of them even beat him. Thereupon he appealed
to the inspector of the Defense Department, Kevdin, for permission
to wear a red jacket and trousers with red stripes, "so that civilians
might know me as an exterminator of criminals, and fear to touch
me with their filthy hands.”
Kevdin commissioned him for other executions; and subsequently
he went to Moscow, where he also hanged a man. After this, he
became confirmed in his self-esteem. But on his return from Mos-
cow, he went to Doctor Smirnoff, the occultist and practitioner of
black magic, and complained that an "air bubble” had developed
beneath the skin of his chest, and that it was constantly pulling him
upwards.
"It pulls so hard that I can hardly keep on the ground,” he com-
plained. “I must always hold to something, or I should be for
ever jumping up into the air and making myself ridiculous. It first
happened one night after I had hanged a rascal—I felt that some-
thing within me had been ruptured and was gradually becoming
inflated. And now it has become so bad that I can hardly sleep.
All night long it pulls me up towards the ceiling. It is terrible. I
pile all the clothes I possess upon myself, and I even fill my pockets
and sleeves with bricks; but nothing helps. I place the table across
my chest and tie myself to the bed; but all my precautions make no
difference-it is for ever pulling me up. Most humbly I beg you
to cut open the skin and let out the air. If you do not, I shall soon
be unable to walk on the ground.”
The doctor recommended that he submit himself for treatment at
the psychopathic hospital, but Greshka angrily declined to go there.
"My trouble is in the chest, not in the head,” he remonstrated.
Soon afterwards, Greshka fell from a roof, breaking his spinal
column and fracturing his skull. "Will they bury me with music?”
he asked the doctor, Niphont Dolgopolov, as he was dying. And a
few moments before he expired, he was heard to sigh and mutter,
"And now I am rising . . . rising. ..."



yana
THE YOUNG ACROBAT. BY EUGEN ZAK






IN THE WINE CELLAR. BY EUGEN ZAK






LANDSCAPE. BY EUGEN ZAK


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THE MILLER. BY EUGEN ZAK





"IT IS IN TRUTH A PRETTY TOY”
BY CONRAD AIKEN
I SUPPOSE in any era the proportion of "love-poetry" to the
1 total, the appalling total, of poetry published, is high. Nine
people out of ten, ordinary people who read poetry to amuse them-
selves when other amusement is not available, normally assume
that poetry and love-poetry are indeed interchangeable terms:
they consider poetry an affair of Cupids, kisses, hearts; grandiose
griefs, light-headed ecstasies, tuneful complaints. They think of
a raffish Byron as the typical poet; a rose and azurc stained-glass
vision of Dante and Beatrice; or vaguely remember something a
little exciting (and at the same time a little reprehensible) about
that "burning Sappho.” And our present era, in American letters,
is as good a case as any. If one judged by the poetry in magazines,
one would conclude that love-poetry, and love-poetry of the most
sentimental kind, forms about ninety per cent of the total. And
then one would be struck by the fact that so little of it is good.
And so one would come to the somewhat interesting question of why
this should be so—and whether it is always so.
The answer to the latter question is, of course, negative. The
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of English literature were quite
extraordinarily rich in madrigals and sonnets—every sort and
length of metrical celebration of love; ranging from the tiniest of
tinkling conceits, set to music, to the most magnificent of
cpithalamiums. But after that—what? One is embarrassed by
the difficulty; startled a little by the sudden discovery that since
the seventeenth century there is practically no first-rate love-poetry
in English. Byron, Shelley, and Wordsworth each give us a few
poems which will stand comparison with Elizabethan love-songs:
at their best they keep a good deal of the Elizabethan fulness and
freedom of sound, combined either with a convention richly worked
or with an excellence and accuracy of thought. With Tennyson,
it is perhaps just to say that the degeneration begins, though it is
possible that one ought not in this regard to ignore Moore and
Campbell. At any rate, by the middle of the nineteenth century


108 “IT IS IN TRUTH A PRETTY TOY”
the tradition of the love-poem has lost its virtue. It has been
smoothed out-vigour has been forgotten, thought begins to occupy
a minor place, wit has disappeared; and where the sixteenth century
“conventions” of love-poetry persist at all, they are half-hearted
and unfelt. Perhaps Rossetti is to be excepted—he used the con-
vention, certainly, and with some skill and charm; though where
the Elizabethan was robust, he was epicene. But, in general,
Cupid and Campaspe are no longer living; they are felt to be ab-
stractions; and when used, are used neither with conviction nor (as
in the seventeenth century) with art. Bow and arrow are soiled
stage properties, Lycoris is a maid of wax. And, on the other hand,
one looks in vain for any first-rate love-poetry of a more personal
sort—the candid statement of a profound individual insight.
Browning had this candour occasionally, as in Porphyria's Lover;
but he seldom kept it up, or gave it unmixed. Dover Beach had
this candour. Swinburne, also, in a wholly different way, tried to
make the poetry of love a living thing—his notable contribution, I
think, is (extraordinary as it may sound) a moral one. It was
Swinburne who first, in England, added to the love theme the Puri-
tan sense of guilt and sin. Love, as Swinburne apprehended and
liked it, was immoral because fleshly. Its fascination lay in its
mixture of beauty and baseness; and every passion was a guilty
passion. We may not like this—quite apart from Swinburne's
prosody—but it is arguable that his love-poetry is in consequence
the most alive since Donne, and the most individual in temper.
Patmore is more individual in mood, more modern, but Patmore,
except in one or two instances, lacked power. Meredith, in Modern
Love, however, is both powerful and "modern.” More than any
other poet he brings the full awareness, anxious, probing, and a
little tired, of modern consciousness into his treatment of the theme.
He shares a little with Swinburne the habit of seeing Love as some-
thing a little meretricious; but his contribution matches that of
Swinburne in point of definite addition to the tradition, and it is
the only one that does. Francis Thompson, quite as important as
either, was nevertheless not in the same sense a contributor: he was
an anachronism, a belated Jacobean. And the rest is not even
silence—it is rubbish.
For unfortunately the love-poem, and particularly the lyric, both
in England and America, has not been much influenced by the few


CONRAD AIKEN
109
genuine modern shapers of it, but rather by the Longfellow-Tenny-
son dynasty and its emasculate compromise between the Ecstatic
(with a touch of the Spasmodic School) and the Conventional.
Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Browning both fell victims, in
part, to this weakened tradition, and carried it on. In our own
day, we have seen Mrs Meynell pursuing the degeneration even
farther. The love lyric has been stifled with sentimentality.
It need not have been, of course; and it is interesting to ex-
amine the work of Miss Teasdale,' who enjoys a considerable repu-
tation as a writer of love-poems, in search of some sort of light
on the subject. Miss Teasdale has devoted herself almost ex-
clusively to the writing of love-songs, and as she does so with
a commendable degree of skill, she affords a really capital example
of the present status of the love-poem “tradition.” There would
probably not be much question, in America, that Miss Teasdale
gives us the best version of the present "tradition”; or that at
any rate she more consistently does so than any of her contempo-
raries. That she does so is, in the upshot, her undoing. For one
cannot examine her work very long or very carefully without
discovering that she is emphatically that sort of poet who, equipped
with a very striking technical skill, yet lacks what we loosely
term “personality” and perforce relies wholly on a convention.
That is in itself in no sense a condemnation. The history of
literature is full of poetic "schools” which did practically nothing
but turn out variations on a given set of symbols, and in so doing
produced very beautiful work. The question, in such a case,
assuming the particular practitioner to be sufficiently master of
his craft, is simply "How good is the convention? And what
does he make of it?” The excellence producible in such circum-
stances we can see admirably and richly illustrated in Elizabethan
sonnet-series and in the later development of the love-poem in
the hands of such poets as Herrick, Crashaw, Suckling, Marvell,
and Donne. But the convention is purest in the Elizabethan
song-books, and it is a convention which has coloured practically
all love-poetry written since. In 1600 it was fresh, and was prac-
tised with delight. It was believed in, and readily, therefore,
yielded beauty.
1 Love Songs. FLAME AND SHADOW. RiverS TO THE Sea. Published
by The Macmillan Company: cloth $1.60, leather $2.25, the volume.


110
"IT IS IN TRUTH A PRETTY TOY”
Unhappily this convention, which suffered during the nineteenth
century a gradual process of dilution and abstraction, as we have
scen, reaches Miss Teasdale in a pretty flabby form. It is in fact
so flabby that it is no longer, in its present state, sufficiently
vigorous or fresh to support such a poet as Miss Teasdale, whose
impulse is merely to “merge" herself in it. Miss Teasdale takes
it unquestioningly—she takes it as Tennyson and Elizabeth Brown-
ing and above all as Christina Rossetti left it; nor does she reject
that part of it which, alas, has been added by the American mag-
azine. Tennyson's "Ask me no more” is a part of it. Christina
Rossetti's "When I am dead, my dearest,” and
“Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget,”
is a part of it. Elizabeth Browning contributes to it her
"I saw, in gradual vision through my tears,
The sweet sad years, the melancholy years. ..."
and her
“Yet love me—wilt thou? Open thine heart wide
And fold within the wet wings of thy dove."
Christina Rossetti, again, adds her
“Somewhere or other there must surely be
The face not seen, the voice not heard,”
and
"Her pulses fluttered like a dove
To hear him speak.”
In all this we see the ecstatic and sentimental compromise be-
tween the original convention on the one hand and vivid reality
on the other. It is a new and very feminine and somewhat weak
“convention,” midway between Meredith's "Up the sharp scale


CONRAD AIKEN
111
of sobs, her breast did lift” (or Drayton's great sonnet) and the
pure convention of Campion's
“Rose-cheeked Laura, come:
Sing thou smoothly, with thy beauty's
Silent music, either other
Sweetly gracing."
Miss Teasdale uses this degraded nineteenth century convention
pretty competently. She manages gracefully her Strephons and
Colins (in which she comes closest to the Elizabethan manner)
and she does adequately enough the Rosetti touch in—
"When I am dead and over me bright April
Shakes out her rain-drenched hair,
Tho' you should lean above me broken-hearted,
I shall not care.
I shall have peace, as leafy trees are peaceful,
When rain bends down the bough.
And I shall be more silent and cold-hearted
Than you are now."
Not so well she approximates Mrs Browning's version, in
“Oh sensitive shy years, oh lonely years,
That strive to sing with voices dimmed in tears."
Again, she does the Rosetti version of the convention excellently
in The Answer:
"When I go back to earth
And all my joyous body
Puts off the red and white
That once had been so proud,
If men should pass above me
With false and feeble pity,
My dust will find a voice
To answer them aloud,


112
“IT IS IN TRUTH A PRETTY TOY”
‘Be still, I am content,
Take back your poor compassion,
Joy was a flame in me
Too steady to destroy;
Lithe as a bending reed
Loving the storm that sways her-
I found more joy in sorrow
Than you could find in joy.'”
That, of course, is about the best that can be done with this
particular mode. But Miss Teasdale is not often so successful.
She pads a great deal. She ruins a slight theme by stretching it
to twice its legitimate length, as in Leaves, in which she expands
to eighteen lines, without improvement, the idea of the two coup-
lets, which begin, and end the poem, respectively-
"One by one, like leaves from a tree,
All my faiths have forsaken me. ...
Now for the first time I know
Stars above and earth below."
One does not mean by all this to deny or belittle Miss Teasdale's
many excellencies. She can on occasion be epigrammatic; and if,
choosing rather as she does to adopt a convention, she delves little
into the psychological labyrinth, discovers few paths and no mon-
sters, she at any rate does, now and then, light charmingly enough
for us the familiar. Unfortunately, her touch is very unsure. She
will admirably suggest a mood in one stanza only to wreck it with
some boyism of phrase or thought in the next. Very seldom does
she achieve anything as sharp as “The wheel of a locust leisurely
grinding the silence.” Her sense of metrical fitness is decidedly
intermittent. How can she permit herself such an infelicity as
"Child, child love while you can
The voice and the eyes and the soul of a man.”...?
It reminds one of the fish that talked in the frying-pan. ...
And in general she adopts with this impoverished tradition of the


CONRAD AIKEN
113
lyric “cry” (hideous term) much that is merely ululatory, vague,
imprecise, and sentimental. Sentimentality has been amusingly de-
fined as “other peoples' feelings.” More exactly, it might be defined
(aesthetically speaking) as the betrayal, on the writer's part, of
a greater intensity of feeling than his poverty of expression (pro-
sodic and verbal) can express, or arouse in the reader. Miss Teas-
dale is conspicuously a victim of this error. Her vocabulary is a
little too abstract, lacks sensitiveness; her rhythms have just that
shade too much of the easily and cloyingly dactylic; her exclama-
tions are too frequent and facile; her self-pity has about it too often
the echo of a simper. One tires of her immensities, purities, eter-
nities, vastnesses—her fondness for "naked flames,” spaces, “be-
yond the sun,” love, death, Beauty, windy graces, starry calls, cups
empty or full. "O Beauty,” she exclaims,
"Out of many a cup
You have made me drunk and wild
Ever since I was a child."
The vicious essence of this epicene tradition may be seen in
“What do I care, in the dreams and languor of spring,
That my songs do not show me at all?
For they are a fragrance, and I am a flint and a fire,
I am an answer, they are only a call.”
1
What does this mean exactly? "Fragrance” could be interchanged
with “Aint” and “fire," or "answer" with "call,” and apparently
the stanza would be unimpaired. Conspiciously here, and conspic-
uously throughout Miss Teasdale's work, charming and graceful and
skilfully turned however it may be, the thought is careless, vague,
or abandoned headlong for a worn romantic phrase or exigent
rhyme.
And it remains to say that it is just here, in the exact utterance
of exact thought, or in the sharp apprehension of a feeling for which
a very precise, even if artificial, symbol is found, that the early
convention of the love-song could still be valid. We are not yet
too far from Campion's "Then tell, oh tell, how thou didst murder
me," or Marvell's
CON


114
“IT IS IN TRUTH A PRETTY TOY”
"My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow.”
And we could profit by something of the rigorous pattern-making
(in which wit has its part) of such an anonymous trifle as
"Crowned with flowers, I saw fair Amaryllis
By Thyrsis sit, hard by a fount of crystal,
And with her hand more white than snow or lilies,
On sand she wrote ‘My faith shall be immortal:
And suddenly a storm of wind and weather
Blew all her faith and sand away together."
Or-
“And love itself is but a jest
Devised by idle heads
To catch young Fancies in the nest
And lay them in fools' beds;
That being hatched in beauty's eyes,
They may be fledged ere they be wise.”
It is certainly legitimate to prefer this small neatness of thought
and fancy to "Ask me no more" or such a falsity as “Come with
lips pursed up to cling.” The alternative is Donne's—
“Whoever comes to shroud me, do not harm
Nor question much
That subtle wreath of hair about mine arm:
The mystery, the sign you must not touch,
For ’tis my outward soul,
Viceroy to that which, unto heaven being gone,
Will leave this to control
And keep these limbs, her provinces, from dissolution.”
Or Meredith's-
“We are betrayed by what is false within.”



COM
A DRAWING. BY ADOLPH DEHN






A DRAWING. BY ADOLPH DEHN





MICHAEL FIELD
BY LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH
IT is a curious experience to find that one has lived through an
important literary epoch and never known it. When I now
read about the decadent Nineties, the paganism and impropriety of
that epoch, its enthusiasm for style and form, and the baleful
countenance it gave to Art for the sake of Art, I wonder a little,
for I remember those years which led on to the war in South Africa
as a period of imperialism and of Kipling's glory; a decade through-
out which a strong east wind of Philistinism blew over England,
without any remission or gentle shifting to the south. I can recall
no evidence of popular enthusiasm for Art, no encouragement given
to the cultivation, however guiltless, of literary form. I was at
Oxford in the 'nineties, but I think I can say (and who could say
it now?) that I made the acquaintance of only one poet during
my sojourn there. Afterwards, it is true, I did meet three or four
writers who cultivated letters in a disinterested spirit—some of
them refugees, like myself, from the still more bleak climate of
America. But it was in considerable isolation that we lived; unknown
disciples of Flaubert and Walter Pater, we wrapped our cloaks
about us, we tended the lamps of our humble sanctuaries, and grew
middle-aged on our meagre incomes, without any kind of encourage-
ment from the world without. Between literature and money there
was for us but the most remote and ideal relation; no editors wel-
comed our contributions, no publishers our books; if we printed,
we printed at our own expense, nor had we the slightest prevision
of the glorious sunshine of literary enthusiasm which was destined
to illumine the late afternoon of our lives.
Such a recondite cult of letters, such an unrewarded devotion to
the labour of the file, would no doubt be laughed at now; our
poets, with their early laurels, our already famous undergraduates,
who expound their opinions in the weekly papers, would look
indeed with pity and contempt upon a way of life so unencouraged,
so unremunerated, so obscure. If it is not my purpose to recom-
mend it, it had no doubt its secret joys, but it was not on the
whole an exhilarating existence. We would have liked success,
unrew


116
MICHAEL FIELD
and the rewards of success; and a chill of discouragement fell each
time more heavily upon us, when, over the parapets of our ivory
towers, we dropped our little, laboured masterpieces, one after the
other, into abysses of silence that seemed to have no bottom.
Whether the present warm atmosphere of laudation is more favour-
able to enduring achievement; whether it is the broad popular way,
or the high, difficult path among the rocks, which leads to excel-
lence, is a question not for me, but for Posterity to settle; my
purpose is at present to recall, however dimly, the figure of one
of the strangest of most obscure and frustrated pilgrims of that
lonely path, the poet Michael Field. I say strangest, for Michael
Field was not only a double personality—“a double-headed night-
ingale," as an American critic elegantly phrased it—but also be-
cause the literary figure dimly known at the time, and now still
more dimly remembered by that masculine appellation, was com-
posed in private of two maiden ladies, an aunt and niece, Miss
Katherine Harris Bradley, and Miss Edith Emma Cooper. These
ladies came from Birmingham, and were endowed with a modest
but sufficient income derived from a tobacco-factory in that city.
They were united by the closest bond of a passionate adoration
for each other, and by a common enthusiasm for high and pas-
sionate verse. They have told the world how, “indifferent to
heaven and hell,” they early dedicated their lives to poetry and
love.
1
“It was deep April, and the morn
Shakespeare was born;
The world was on us, pressing sore;
My Love and I took hands and swore,
Against the world, to be
Poets and lovers ever more”;
and the history of that never-violated vow is the inner history of
their life. Its external circumstances can be briefly told. From
the suburbs of Birmingham they went to live near Bristol, where
they prepared themselves for their high career by classical and
other studies, and where they wrote their first play, Callirrhoë. This
play, on its publication in 1884, made a considerable stir in literary
circles, and was highly praised by Robert Browning. Although


LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH
117
wa
the cup of success was soon dashed from their lips, they never
forgot its intoxicating taste; it proved, as early success so often
proves, a poisoned draught, and the dismal failure of all their
future publications was made all the more bitter for them by the
memory of the sweet praise which had once been theirs. To sup-
pose however that they were in the least daunted by failure would
be to mis-estimate the vast ambition and intrepid spirit of these
ladies. Steadily, year after year, for almost thirty years, they
went on writing tragedies in verse; they wrote in fact twenty-eight
of these dramas, full of grandiose passions, dreadful deeds of lust
and horror, incest and assassination, hells of jealousy, and great
empires tottering to their fall. These sombre and fiery volumes,
with eight volumes of fiery lyrics, which they published, mostly at
their own expense, fell all of them, one after the other, into blank
oblivion; the British public took no notice of them, the literary
journals gave them scanty consideration; only once, when they
gave the world a volume of paraphrases of Sappho's verse, this at-
tempt to breathe once more the air of Lesbos was answered by a few
brickbats, Aung at them by the press in a somewhat perfunctory
manner. Believing that they were the victims of a conspiracy and
boycott, they published most of their later volumes anonymously,
which however did not avail to break the spell. But this deepen-
ing gloom of non-appreciation only served to increase their belief
in themselves; posterity, they were passionately convinced, was
to pay them in full requital the fame which their contemporaries
had denied; and pilgrims, in future ages, were to visit with reverent
steps the suburban shrines where they had once resided. When I
first made their acquaintance their home was at Reigate, where
they lived, within easy reach of London, with Miss Bradley's
brother-in-law, and Miss Cooper's father, in a modern and com-
fortable villa-residence called Durdans. In 1897 this elderly,
retired merchant, Mr Cooper, disappeared in the Alps; and Michael
Field, after commemorating that tragedy in a sombre sonnet-
sequence, and after attempting to move heaven and earth to revenge
what they chose to regard as mysterious and international assas-
sination, changed their residence to a little house on the river at
Richmond, where the rest of their life was spent. This transporta-
tion Miss Bradley described in her characteristic style of letter-writ-
ing—she was a writer of amazing letters.


118
MICHAEL FIELD
In
"It was suggested that we should be drawn by pards to Richmond
in a golden chariot. The pards was a detail not carried out; but of
Thee, O Bacchus, and of Thy ritual, the open landau piled high
with Chow and Field and Michael, doves and manuscripts and
sacred plants !-all that is US was there."
The quiet of their old-maidenly life at Richmond was in striking
contrast to the seething passions and awful events of the dramas
they went on undauntedly publishing; but in 1907 an awful event
befell them. It is difficult to describe this calamity in terms which
will convey an impression of its crushing nature, for it was, ex-
ternally considered, nothing more than the death of the dog Chow,
mentioned in the above-quoted letter. The death of this beloved
animal (celebrated in another sombre sonnet-sequence) was a loss
from which these now elderly ladies never really recovered, and
which, Mr Sturge Moore tells us, was largely the cause of their
abandonment of the Bacchic cult of their early lives, for the
doctrines, in which they found refuge, of the Roman Catholic
Church. Their last years were spent in religious exercises and in
the writing of devotional poetry.
In 1913 Miss Cooper died of cancer, being devotedly nursed by
her aunt, Miss Bradley, who was herself stricken with the same
malady, but who heroically concealed it from her companion, and
only broke down at the latter's funeral (how well I remember that
bleak funeral!) to die herself from the same cause, not long after.
These ladies had not many acquaintances; there were however a
few friends who would be now and then summoned to Reigate or
to Richmond, where they held, like fantastic royalties in exile, their
imaginary Court. Though I was not one of the inner circle, I too
was sometimes summoned, and my occasional pilgrimages to their
shrine (though now and then performed I regret to say with some
reluctance) now remain as memories of strange exaltations and
initiations, of a kind that I shall never know again. No, never
again on this flat earth shall I step out into a transfigured dusk,
closing behind me in a quiet suburban lane the great portal of a
pagan Temple, of an insolent tower of ivory, a royal palace of the
mind.
The strangeness of these initiations was weirdly heightened by
what seemed at first their commonplace character. One received


LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH
119
a politely-worded invitation to afternoon tea, or to high-tea in
the evening; one went by train or bus to Richmond; one rang
the suburban bell, and found in the little house an aunt and niece
of pleasantly old-fashioned primness; Miss Bradley being a slight,
ruddy, vivacious, grey-haired lady full of small talk and mild gos-
sip, and Miss Cooper a rather shy gentle spinster of fragile health
and little conversation. One felt at first as if one might be almost
taking tea in Cranford; but this was the maddest of illusions.
Never in Cranford was heard talk like their talk when once their
inspiration fell upon them. Miss Bradley would begin to speak of
the soul of their sacred dog, or of a flower-a white periwinkle,
perhaps, which had blossomed in their little, their immense garden
-or of a precious adjective; I remember her enthusiasm for the
phrase, “the eagle-hurried Ganymede," which they had found in
an old copy of Poole's Parnassus I had lent them, and which,
mosaicked into one of their tragedies, made them happy for a week.
Gradually the Sibylline Miss Cooper would be roused from her
dreamy lethargy; and as their voices rose and mingled in a kind
of chant, the two quietly attired ladies would seem to undergo
the most extraordinary transformations, and would resume the
aspect and airs of the disinherited Princesses, the tragic Muses,
the priestesses of Apollo, the Pythonesses upon their tripods, the
Bacchic Maenads they really were, and even for there were no
limits to their imagination, and they were by no means all com-
pact of kindness—of the sorceresses they sometimes seemed, Weird
Sisters, who were about to mount their broom-sticks with shrieks of
malevolent laughter, and fly up the chimney or out of the window
on some unimaginable errand.
These were extraordinary and precious experiences, and like all
precious things, they had to be paid for: the price was sometimes
high. A summons to Richmond was a royal command; the excuse
of other engagements was not tolerated for a moment; an invita-
tion refused, or any fancied want of sympathy in their often
imaginary woes, was followed by instant and contumelious excom-
munication. “Out of our lives you go!" they would fulminate
in awful letters; and at their great bereavement, although we
exhausted ourselves in agonies of commiseration for the death of
Chow, we were all, I think, cast off as cold and cruel-hearted world-
lings: the great palace-gates at Richmond were closed against us


120
MICHAEL FIELD
ds
all. It was only after years that I, at least, was received back into
a kind of chilly favour. Vainly since I have regretted that I did
not assume on this occasion an air of even more unmitigated woe-
that all through the years of this incomparable acquaintance, I
did not prove myself a still more obsequious courtier to these be-
witched Princesses, these inspired, autocratic, incredible old maids.
This regret has become all the more poignant since I have read Mr
Sturge Moore's Selection from the poems. Like the world in
general, and like, I am afraid, most of their few acquaintances, I
did not, when I knew them, read their books. The inexorable
and unremitting output of their tragedies in verse (that deadest, to
my mind, of all dead forms of art) the impossibility of giving them
sufficient praise, made me-made I am afraid most of us adopt
the cowardly expedient of not reading them at all. But now,
looking through this volume, and opening their unopened books of
verses on my shelves, I rub my eyes at the poignant beauty of
their lyrics, I almost wipe away a drop or two from those hard-
ened orbs when I think that I never gave—what I could, had I
known it, so gladly and so honestly have given a meed of appre-
ciation which might have pleased those difficult, dear ladies. I
can now, alas, only proffer it in vain propitiation to their scornful,
neglected shades.
It is a certain intensity of lyric feeling and splendour of diction
which, as I now read it, seems to give their best work a beautiful
distinction.
"I love him-Fountains of sweet marge,
'Tis as when night-stocks blow!
Follow me not, ye stars, for I must go
As one that fares alone, and in the large
Soft darkness scent my woe.”
Mr Sturge Moore does not include these magical lines in his
rather meagre selection, nor those in which Michael Field cele-
brated that touching beauty of the beautiful Miss Kinsella which
glows in so many of Conder's pictures, and forms the subject of
Whistler's last great portrait. Our poets saw her once in passing,
and wrote the following lines which show that they felt, in her
loveliness, the presage of her too-early death:


LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH
121
"CAMELLIAS
And one of them how lovely in her mode -
One of them had the magic power to die;
Slid from the stem where she abode
With mournful violence: her petals lie,
Broke on the sudden from their mass, and all
The action stately as a funeral.”
The following lines on Old Age should, also, I think, have been
included:
"Among the hills I trace the path that I must wend;
I watch, not bidding him farewell, the sun descend.
Sweet and of their nature vacant are the days I spend
Quiet as a plough laid by at the furrow's end.”
Perhaps the most interesting of these verses are the little poems
in which, as in translucent amber, they have enshrined some little
incident of their quiet lives.
Thus for instance they walk in the winter woods:
“The woods are still that were so gay at primrose-springing,
Through the dry woods the brown field-fares are winging,
And I alone of love, of love am singing.
I sing of love to the haggard palmer-worm,
Of love 'mid the crumpled oak-leaves that once were firm,
Laughing, I sing of love at the summer's term.
-Of love, on a path where the snake's cast skin is lying,
Blue feathers on the floor, and no cuckoo flying;
I sing to the echo of my own voice crying.'
On going out from their house at night they hear the whine of
the beloved Chow within:
"A cry-my knowledge of the heart it wrings
Has held me many years from liberty,


122
MICHAEL FIELD
From Anet, and from Blois; and, as I live,
The motion of that tender vocative
Shall stay my foot from all those dreamed things,
And all the diverse kingdoms over sea.”
Or Miss Bradley, leaving her niece and going to London for
the afternoon, writes what is surely the prettiest poem on shopping
in our language, A Miracle:
“How gladly I would give
My life to her who would not care to live
If I should die!
Death, when thou passest by,
Take us together, so I sigh,
Praying and sighing through the London streets
While my heart beats
To do some miracle, when suddenly
At curve of Regent Circus I espy,
Set ’mid a jeweller's trays of spangle-glitter,
A tiny metal insect-pin, a fly.
This utter trifle for my love I buy,
And, thinking of it on her breast,
My heart has rest.”
A Poet, so these ladies defined him, was
“A work of some strange passion,
Life has conceived apart from Time's harsh drill,
A thing it hides and cherishes to fashion
At odd bright moments to its secret will!
Holy and foolish, ever set apart,
He waits the leisure of his God's free heart.”
Such a poet, they passionately believed, was Michael Field, whose
fame would triumph over time. Is it possible that they were right
after all; that their fine passion, and their verse, "so lovely in
its mode,” will be remembered, when we, who would sometimes
smile among ourselves at their vast pretensions, have all been long
ago forgotten? I wonder.


THE LOST LAND
BY EDWIN MUIR
And like a mist ere morning I am gone.
My whispering prow through silence furrows on;
I fare far in through circles vast and dim,
Till a grey steeple lifts above the rim,
From which a chime falls far across the waves.
I see wind-lichened walls the slow tide laves;
The houses waver towards me, melt and run,
And open out, in ranks, and one by one.
I see the prickly weeds, the flowers small,
The moss like magic on the creviced wall,
The doors wide open where the wind comes in,
And is a whispering presence, salt and thin;
The still church standing lonely on the mound,
The leaning tombs which slumber with no sound.
Here would I live, thus dreaming, evermore,
And watch the white ships flocking to the shore.
I look again. Alas, I do not know
This place, and alien people come and go.
Ah, this is not my haven; oft before
I have stood here and wept for the other shore.
And now it lies ten leagues across the sea,
And smiles, and calls on me perpetually;
But mountains and abysses lie between,
And I must fare by uplands coarse and lean,
Where towering cliffs hem in the thin-tongued strait,
And far below like battling dragons wait
The serpent-fangèd caves which gnash the sea,
And make a hollow barking constantly;


124
THE LOST LAND
And where in pale moon-charmed valleys stay
Dreadful and lovely mists at full noon-day.
I gather giant orchids, light and dead,
And make a pallid garland for my head,
And sleep upon a green and watching mound
Which some child's wizardry has girdled round,
And I have been here many times before,
And shall return hereafter many more,
While past huge mountains and across great seas
That haven lies, and my long-sought release.
There tranquil spirits stand forevermore
And see the white ships flocking to the shore.


A STRUGGLE FOR LIFE
BY LLEWELYN POWYS
0
0
III
IT was in the month of November of the year 1909 that I first
I discovered I was suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis. Up
till that time, although I had been conscious of feeling unwell,
I had never suspected the serious nature of my malady. Prob-
ably it was fortunate that the disease so early in its advance broke
a blood vessel. I was immediately examined by a doctor who
declared that I must leave England for a health-resort in Switzer-
land as soon as ever I was in a fit state to travel. Meanwhile
the windows of my bedroom were removed from their frames and
for three weeks I lay on my back contemplating the bare elms
and misty autumnal roof-tops of the town of Sherborne, from,
as it were, some open barn-loft unprotected from the weather.
Always of a nervous temperament, the doctor's diagnosis had
been no small shock. As each morning I was waked from my
sleep by the ringing of the bell of the convent in Long Street it
seemed incredible that it was I who had been selected as a victim
to this terrible disease, selected almost certainly to die young, I,
already so inordinate a lover of life.
I feel ashamed now when I think of how I dramatized the situa-
tion, talking incessantly of what it felt like to be dying, to be
dying of consumption! My five brothers came to my bedside and
with each of them in turn I discussed my fate. And as the rain
drifted gustily in onto the bare deal floor, which in consequence
gave out continually the curious chilled smell of a room where
scrubbing has lately been in progress, they would lend their atten-
tion to the subject with philosophic detachment, treating it in a
tone as frank and shameless as my own, for all the world like
five disillusioned jackdaws gathering about one of their kind who
has been winged by a sportsman's gun. I used to declare emphat-
ically that if I lived to be thirty I should be satisfied. The excite-
ment of going to Switzerland kept me in good spirits; though
occasionally, it happened, in spite of all my bravado, that I
became conscious of a dull uneasy sense of lonely apprehension


126
A STRUGGLE FOR LIFE
COV.
as though I were about to set out upon a journey the length and
weariness of which I could not foresee. For example, when a
workman from the village at home who had come to visit me
casually remarked that I had a "churchyard cough” I felt myself
immediately wide awake to the reality of my predicament, a pre-
dicament devoid of sentiment, bereft of drama, bleak, bare, unpre-
tentious, and natural.
The first few months of my stay in Switzerland saw me recov-
ering rapidly. My temperature became normal and my expectora-
tion ceased completely. If I had had the wit to return to England
then, all might have been well, instead I allowed myself to be
persuaded to stay on through the summer so as “to make sure
of my cure.” Immediately I became careless and spent time divert-
ing myself in the company of patients who were sick in bed. I
believe by this means I reinfected myself, for otherwise, I can
in no way account for the fact that my sickness, quite unexpectedly,
took a turn for the worse. The disease now advanced more rapidly
than it had ever done. All the dreaded symptoms of consumption
began to show themselves. I felt poisoned, listless, and would
easily fall asleep only to wake up drenched with sweat. Each
night my cheeks burned with an ever increasing fever. Each time
that I was weighed it was found that I had lost several pounds.
In a few weeks I became so thin that I could easily enclose
my thigh at its thickest in the small circle made by holding my
two thumbs and two first fingers together. My decline had been
so rapid that it seemed certain I should be dead within a few
months. I could tell by their discreet manners that the Sanatorium
doctors thought as much. Every time I coughed, with a sickening
sense of impending physical disaster, I tasted corruption, as though
at its very centre my body harboured some foul mildew.
My attitude to mortality has always been childish. Invariably
when I contemplate death my thoughts turn to the fate of my
cadaver, as though my timorous consciousness would still be aware
of what happens to my body after I am dead. Looking now into
the future I shivered, my mind recoiling desperately from the
thought that before the Christmas of 1910 I would be a member
of that recumbent congregation of all nationalities who lie on
their shoulder blades, under the mountain snow, row upon row of


LLEWELYN POWYS
127
127
them, to the right and left of the black-spired Protestant church
of Davos-Platz.
Then it happened that on the night of July 11th I had a
haemorrhage. The shock of it caused me to tremble from crown
to heel, but I believe, for all that, it saved my life, clearing away
much diseased tissue and allowing me, as it were, to make a fresh
start in my struggle for life. In the early part of the night the
doctors were at my bedside constantly injecting me with gelatine.
Later, they were called away to a neighbouring room to attend a
young English boy called Burton who also had been taken suddenly
ill. All through that night my abrupt fits of coughing, the par-
ticular significance of which could not be mistaken by any one
acquainted with the sickness, were answered by the abrupt fits of
coughing of my friend, as he also struggled for breath, in his small
hygienic room on the further side of the white corridor. Towards
morning the blood ceased to flow and I lay on my back not daring
to move, watching a moth crawl up and down the flat impassive
face of a large window-pane which already had received upon its
surface the first pale indications of dawn. After the haemorrhage I
remained in bed for four months. Throughout this time I was
under the care of a Norwegian nurse to whose tireless devotion
I have always felt I owe my life. Three weeks after the attack
I was allowed to see my friend Wilbraham. I asked for news of
Burton. “Burton! Why Burton has been dead and buried_three
weeks ago.”
Slowly, very slowly, my temperature came down. For months
I lay quite still looking out at the broken edge of a mountain-top
on the other side of the Frauenkirk Valley. I looked at it in the
morning when it was bleak and hard, I looked at it in the evening,
when, long after the setting sun had left the white roof of the
hospital in which I lay, its lofty clefts held fanciful rose-red
shadows. The bare outline of this particular mountain suggested
the exact shape of a woman lying on her backher nose, her
breasts, her knees, her toes even, limned against infinity. “Queen
Victoria in bed” the more vulgar English patients called her.
I can well remember when I first, with the support of a serving.
man, tried to get out of bed only to find my legs give under me
like bent straws. The fact that my temperature was coming


128
A STRUGGLE FOR LIFE
down and my pulse improving filled me now with renewed hope. I
was determined if possible to avoid a relapse. Slowly I grew
better. I managed to get downstairs for the Christmas dinner.
Each small advance I made filled me with exultation. So nervous
was I, lest I should have another haemorrhage that for months
whenever I was dressed and moving about I would unconsciously
be pressing my fingers against the right side of my chest, in an
absurd endeavour to hold my damaged lung together as one might
some precious fragile vessel. I wore a curious hole in a good serge
waistcoat by this trick. An X-ray examination revealed that
both my lungs were affected, but the right lung worse than the left.
By the end of January I began once more to take walks out of
doors. At first a distance of a hundred yards would be sufficient
to send my temperature up, but I soon discovered that such exer-
cise-fever would come down as a rule after half an hour's rest
on my lieger chair. This encouraged me to lengthen my walks,
each day going a little further, but keeping all the time a careful
watch on my temperature which after rest would drop to normal.
If it did not drop then I concluded I had done too much and
would in consequence reduce the length of my walks. Following
this method I went first as far as the Kurhause, then as far as the
cattle shed where the crisp frosty air would be so pleasantly
tainted; then, eventually, by the end of March, as far as the old
white mill which stands by the river where the road winds its
way down to the Frauenkirk village. Indeed, so proud was I of
this last achievement that I remember marking one of its walls
with my pocket knife.
It was now decided that I should return to England. My
brother, J. C. P., came to fetch me. I well remember how impressed
he was by the spectacle of the Davos “main street,” every balcony
of every house filled with prostrate human figures. An English
clergyman passed us on his way to the skating rink. “Aye!" my
brother exclaimed, "how one would like to see Our Lord come
round that corner where the sleigh stands, with the twelve follow-
ing behind him disputing amongst themselves over some nice
theological point.”
We landed in England on May day. I was overjoyed to be
back again. After the snow-clad mountain landscape of the


LLEWELYN POWYS
129
Engadine the fresh green of the Somerset meadows seemed won-
derful. I found myself as sensitive to the sights and sounds and
smells of the countryside as a brown hare in a field of sprouting
corn. I remember one day meeting Fred Chant, the woodcutter,
as I came out of that little back lane where the poplars grew and
where Will Hochey's old grey mare used to graze. “They doctors
can mend ye, Master Llewelyn,” he said, “but they cannot cure
ye, patch ye up for the summer, may be, but you'll soon be wearing
a green coat for all thick there syrup ye sip.” The wearing of a
green coat I knew referred to the grass of the churchyard which,
so he anticipated, would soon be covering my bones. It was not
to be. To the astonishment of everybody my walks continued to
lengthen. Until I came to regard it as absolutely necessary for
my health to walk at least ten miles each day, no less a distance
being sufficient, so I considered, to bring about the required re-
actions. During that summer I came to know every lane and
bypath around Montacute, the character of each field gate,
whether it was stiff or easy to open, the places where there were
gaps in the hedges, and the places where the banks of the deep
muddy Somerset streams fell away so as to allow of a drinking
place for the cattle and a crossing for me. Under this combina-
tion of steady exercise and periods of complete rest my physical
condition became extremely robust. It seemed that in a short
time I would be quite well again.
The autumns in South Somerset are always damp. The woods
at that time of the year give out the curious smell of those small
yellow toadstools that grow at the foot of decaying trees. My
brother T. F. Powys realizing this asked me to stay with him in
Dorset. He lived at that time as, indeed, he does still, in the
tiny smuggling village of East Chaldon which lies hidden some
three miles inland from the wild stretch of coast between Lulworth
and Weymouth. I remained well through that autumn. I con-
tinued to take enormous walks in all weathers, scrambling about
those high chalk cliffs with the sea-blown rain lashing against
my face. I came to know every rock, every high guillimot ledge,
every projecting promontory. Sometimes on clear nights my
brother and I would walk together to an old stone circle which is
situated on the shoulder of the downs above the farm-house called
One


130
A STRUGGLE FOR LIFE
Poxwell or Puck's Well as it should more properly be written.
And standing there in the centre of that grey Druidic Ring we
would listen to the surge of the distant sea, peering up, meanwhile,
at the great Square of Pegasus, like two conjured spirits with red
beards wagging.
As I still coughed it was now suggested that in order "to finish
my cure” I had better pay one more visit to Switzerland. This
time I selected to go to the small winter resort of Arosa. On my
arrival I found that I had a slight temperature and in consequence
lay still for a few days. However, I soon grew impatient and,
excusing the fever on account of the rarified air, once more took
to walking. With the help of a pair of Canadian snowshoes I
was able to leave the paths and climb along the higher mountain
slopes.
Now, it happened one day as I was carelessly looking at a map
of Switzerland hung up in the hotel vestibule that I was astounded
to observe the word Davos-Platz almost touching that of Arosa
and, on examining the map more closely, found out that, although
by train the two places were separated by a twenty-four hour
journey, as the crow flies only some fifteen miles of mountain
lay between them. Indeed, I discovered that I had actually been
looking at the other side of “Queen Victoria in bed" each after-
noon as I sat taking tea on the hotel balcony. The discovery
affected me like one of those dreams when familiar places, far
distant from each other, suddenly merge; when the hard walls
of a gravel school-yard, let us say, open unaccountably into the
paddock or rose garden of one's home. The mountain opposite
now began to obsess my imagination. I found myself continually
stopping in front of the map to study the minute topographical
markings near the words Furka Pass. I cannot tell you how
fascinating it was to me to know that I was looking at the other
side of that range, every contour of which had been indelibly
printed on my memory. I kept imagining myself coming down off
the very slopes whose beauty, as seen from my bed, had so often
beguiled for me the end of a long afternoon. It was mad, but
I made up my mind to cross the mountain range.
The day I selected for the adventure was cloudless. I confided
my purpose to no one. I took some sandwiches with me and


LLEWELYN POWYS
131
d
walking slowly and steadily soon found myself above the timber.
line and confronted by smooth sheets of sparkling virginal snow.
The crows in the dark trees below croaked a warning, but I gave
no heed to them. The actual Furka Pass, as I remember, was
about fifty feet wide, a steep slope of snow that went down into
I knew not what abyss. I found, however, that by stamping I
could break through the frosty crust and in this way secure a
firm footing. Once across I found myself on a mountain plateau
surrounded by rocky peaks. All was glinting white, all was silent.
No track of animal traversed that high expanse, no flight of bird
was seen to pass across the blue rarified ether through which I
plodded. I did meet with one live thing—a tortoiseshell butter-
fly! It came fluttering over those eternal snows with the light
carelessness which seems characteristic of this particular species
of butterfly, and which may perhaps account for the fact that one
so often sees them, with wings frayed, tragically imprisoned,
against the dusty coloured-glass of church windows. I kept look-
ing up at the sky. I very well recognized the danger of being
caught in a snow storm. On I went over that high mountain level,
leaving behind me a strange webbed track, as though some fabulous
grebe had waddled across the white plateau. I was very excited.
Would I ever reach the other side? I felt my pulse. It was
racing. And as each hour passed I became more and more con-
scious of the hot flush of my sickness tingling under my skin.
Had I undertaken too much? And then suddenly I was rewarded!
I had come to the top of the last ridge and there far down below,
across the valley, stood Clavadel Sanatorium, fretted with bal-
conies, and looking like a tiny trig doll's house against that
stupendous landscape. I was exultant. I walked along that high
ridge in an ecstacy. Well I knew that I was passing over those
cusped slopes which a year ago had seemed to me as remote as
the furthest rose-tinted cloud. I found my way down to the
timber and before long came upon a chalet where mountain hay
had been stored. A woodcutter's path led from this remote barn
so that in half an hour I was down in the Frauenkirk village.
I hired a room in the little inn and made my way slowly up to
the Sanatorium. The dinner-gong had sounded and the patients
had already collected in the spacious dining-room each corner of


132
A STRUGGLE FOR LIFE
which had been made so neatly concave. My appearance seemed
miraculous, my story unbelievable. With my face tanned to an
unhealthy blazing red I walked from one familiar group to
another; the young German doctor, in his white coat, following
me about and asking me to explain to him by what new method
I had cured myself. And all the time while I received their con-
gratulations I could feel my heart knocking against the walls
of my ribs. Before long I left the noisy hall and stepped out into
the cold moonlight which, with so curious an effect, was illumined
by those sad flaunting windows.
Once back in the little inn I went to bed. I flooded the room
with frosty air and lay down to sleep. I could not sleep. Nervous
thoughts kept scurrying through my skull like mice in a pantry.
Hour after hour went by and then what I had been unconsciously
anticipating actually happened. With a wretched sinking at the
pit of my stomach I suddenly recognized the intolerable bubbling
sensation in my chest indicative of a haemorrhage. I turned on
the light, hoping against hope. I coughed, I looked, and once more
I saw blood! Slowly the dawn came. News of my relapse was
sent to Clavadel and a black sleigh arrived to carry me back to the
Sanatorium, the greatest fool in all that dolorous citadel.
Over a month elapsed before I was strong enough to travel
back to England. For a year after this I remained at home fol-
lowing out a rigid routine of life and in this way managing to
hold my sickness in check. The summer of 1912, however, again
found me on the Continent. This time I visited Italy with J. C. P.
We stayed in Venice. During those strangely exciting weeks I
never for a moment was unaware of the presence of my dread
complaint. When before breakfast I strolled out into the garden
for the pleasure of watching the lizards chase each other behind
the rose bushes which were trained to grow against the hot white
wall of the hostel I knew of it. And again I knew of it when
during languid summer nights we drifted along the canals with
dark water, so startlingly evocative of the smells of an obscure
antiquity, lapping against the bottom of our gondola and against
the green-stained masonry of walls and stairways, the supporting
piles of which had been laid in place on the muddy rush-grown
bottom of an open lagoon, how many years ago! On one occasion


LLEWELYN POWYS
133
2.
I saw a young Venetian girl, her head covered with a black lace
shawl, eating a bunch of red currants on the steps of a marble
palace, and even then I did not forget, no, nor when, from the
merciless meshes of a fisherman's net I disentangled the hard
crinkled body of a sea-horse, so exquisitely manufactured, and
now left to perish on hot Adriatic sands.
Very well I remember, also at this time, sitting on a seat with
my friend Louis Wilkinson and listening to his wise saws about
death coming to all of us and it being absurd to worry whether
it came late or soon. Such chat meant nothing to me.
From Venice we went to Milan and put up at the Hotel Roma.
Tired after the journey I took a very hot bath, always an unwise
thing for a consumptive to do. In a quarter of an hour I was
once more coughing up blood. For weeks I lay on my back
unable to move. To add to my misery I underwent a severe attack
of kidney stone. This was the first time I had been a sufferer
from this cleverly devised disorder and I was simply amazed at
the pain I was supposed to endure. It was like having a rat
gnawing at your entrails. Fortunately a most civilized Italian
doctor was quite prepared to inject me with as much morphia
as I wanted. He was the first doctor to declare that I might live
for years if, as he added, I gave up "climbing mountains." He
confided to me that his own age was sixty-five. “Sixty-five!” he
said, "that is not very nice for me," and he gave me the dry
whimsical look of a philosopher who understands many things.
Apparently the houses across the street from my hotel were occu-
pied by light women of the town. I used to watch them tiring
themselves at their mirrors all through the hot summer afternoons.
It was depressing to contemplate the shallow monotony of their
existence. Sometimes one or other of them would come to the
window and look out in the direction of the Cathedral and I used
to wonder in what light they regarded that ornamental monu-
ment which had known so many of their kind pace backwards and
forwards over echoing paving stones so far below its spiral
pinnacles. I had no idea that the girls had marked my presence
or troubled their pretty heads about me one way or the other.
However when the doctor at length allowed me to get up they
crowded to their window-sills like so many coloured birds in an


134
A STRUGGLE FOR LIFE
aviary and began calling and clapping, overjoyed at my recovery.
I waved and kissed my hand at each of them in turn. As a matter
of fact I don't believe I have ever received a demonstration of
affection that has touched me more to the heart than this display
of sympathy from these generous hearted daughters-of-joy the
tedium and frivolity of whose existence I had been witnessing for
so many weeks.
We sailed from Genoa, calling at Lisbon. I wanted to visit
the grave of Henry Fielding, but did not dare to go on shore,
having caught a villainous dysentery at Tangiers. I did not leave
England again till 1914. Once more I concentrated my whole
attention upon fighting my sickness, resting and regulating my
walks and being nourished with bowls of fresh creamy milk, the
rich produce of the half dozen cows I used to watch each summer
moving placidly about through buttercups and shadowed grass,
as I lay on my boy-scout bed at the top of the terrace walk not
far from the phloxes, whose divine fragrance, on a sultry August
afternoon, always seemed to me to suggest in its delicate luxuriance,
the sun-warmed velvet-soft abdomens of peacock butterflies. The
farmer's wife across the lane used to give me every few days a
basket of fresh turkeys' eggs. I must have consumed a countless
number of these eggs. I would make a tiny hole at one end
of their mottled shells and suck them with all the care and
dainty precision of a punctilious white-bellied weasel. In spite
of all my pains however my complaint seemed to gain ground.
An old man in the village who had at one time been our coach-
man advised me to rub my chest with goose grease. I procured a
pot of this precious balsam and my sister Gertrude every night
would anoint me with it as I lay in my bed under the stars.
Often on these occasions we would remain quite still listening,
listening to the distant barking of some dog who had heard
the muffled footsteps of a traveller on the turnpike road, listen-
ing to the calling of a corncrake in the neighbouring field “put up
for hay,” listening to the singular sound made by a hedgehog in
its prickly advance from one flower-bed to another.
Alas! goose grease and turkey eggs proved of small avail. I
grew worse. My brother Willie now wrote from Africa begging
me to come out to him. It seemed risky, but not more risky than


LLEWELYN POWYS
135
staying where I was. I left the Port of London in September
1914 having spent my last week in bed with blood spitting, a
condition which at that time seemed to have become almost
chronic with me.
I sailed round Africa by the Cape of Good Hope, my zest for life
seeming to be keener than ever as I handled the flying fish which in
the early morning would sometimes get stranded on the deck near
where I lay. I used to stand at the end of the vessel and watch an
albatross which followed our course, sweeping backwards and for-
wards with tireless white wings outspread. And then I would
cough and as the morsel of coloured spittle was caught in the dark
rollers of that vast ocean over which the bird was flying, I would
marvel at the tenacity of this sickness which it was my destiny to
carry about with me over the ends of the world. The altitude
of the highlands of British East Africa where my brother lived
was 7,000 feet above sea level and the air in consequence, baked
by the tropical sun, was very dry. My condition responded im-
mediately to the change of climate. I was in Africa for five
years and during all that time I never spent a day in bed. I still
coughed, still expectorated, but in spite of all the hardships in-
cident to a pioneer's life I continued, out of all reason, to remain
well. Towards the end of my exile I migrated with the sheep to
fresh pastures. My brother had come back from the war and we
slept together in one tent. After this long armistice I used to
regard myself as practically cured, and yet for the sake of hy-
giene I found it was necessary, in the place of the white china
sputum cups we used in the Sanatorium, to dig a small hole at
my bedside in the dry African soil.
Once back in England I bought a revolving shelter made of
wood. I had it hauled by a farm wagon up to the deserted
overgrown garden of a ruined cottage situated on the very crest
of the hill called Jordan which lies to the east of Weymouth.
Like a hermit I lived in this shelter for a year, walking down to
the town each night for my dinner, but returning to my lonely
habitation before midnight. In the early mornings I would
wake to look upon a small still bay with rocks and rippling pools
and drifting sea-weed transmuted by the dawn. Little hedge
birds would begin to twitter on the grey stone wall near the


136
A STRUGGLE FOR LIFE
was
CIG
empty nettle-filled well, while over a restless sea, behind the
outline of a corn field, black hungry cormorants would follow
each other on their way to their distant feeding places. I was
in England for a year.
On the 13th of August, the thirty-sixth anniversary of my
birthday, I sailed with my brother to America. The first winter
spent by me in New York was encouraging. We lived at that
time on Twenty-first Street opposite the Anglican Seminary in
old Chelsea. Each night I would carry my mattress onto the
roof. From first to last I have derived extraordinary satisfaction
and consolation from sleeping on the roofs of New York houses.
What a sweet restorative influence resides in those dim aerial
spaces above the great city! How unspeakably refreshing after
the racket of the streets or after contact with shallow society
people to emerge through a trap door into a dark inaccessible
region under the stars! One comes to know the chimneys as if
they were trees, sheltering now behind this one, now behind that,
according to the quarter from which the wind is blowing when
one first comes up. A few spots of rain would always wake me;
but I found I often continued to sleep after it had begun to
snow, opening my eyes to discover the roof and my own blankets
hidden under a cold fleecy coverlet. I would wake sometimes
very early, at that curious time of each day when in a cold
grey light sea-gulls pass rapidly over Manhattan on some un-
known quest. Indeed, I know few things that I have found more
liberating to my imagination than the spectacle of a common
gull crossing the sky above New York at the hour before dawn.
The following summer I spent with my brother in California.
We stayed in Sausalito. A week after our arrival we walked
over the downs to the Pacific Ocean. I was full of eagerness to
dip my hands into its waters. It was a hot day and although
our walk was a happy one, with spring flowers thick upon the
sloping hills, it proved too much for me. I began once more to
spit blood. It was now that George Stirling persuaded me to
take electrical treatments from Dr Abrams. I was conducted to
the sanctuary of this modern Faustus by the poet himself, who
looked to me as I walked by his side up Sacramento Street like
Dante, if Dante had been not a human being but a light-footed
11


LLEWELYN POWYS
137
10
100S
faun. The "doctor” impressed me. I judged him to be half a
charlatan and half a genius. I received ten treatments and then
was dismissed as cured. I suspected the reassuring verdict-you
cannot catch old birds with chaff! But apparently the treatments
did do me good. It is a curious fact and one I modestly tender the
consideration of the opponents of this dead physician that after
the conclusion of those ten singular sessions I had no more fever
or blood-spitting for two years. However, by the beginning of
1924 I was once more running a slight evening fever. Early in
May I accepted an invitation to go on a hunting expedition after
grizzly bear in the Rocky Mountains. The offer was too tempting
to be refused. I was in the mountains for a month. During this
time I saw much that interested me extremely. I saw a porcupine
nibbling at the broad horn that a moose had shed and which it
had found lying on the sun-warmed pine needles of a sloping
forest. I saw a bitch badger bringing her offspring down to drink
in a mountain stream. I saw a bear. I saw elk and moose and,
indeed, got a hundred intimate glimpses of nature such as are
so refreshing to a man who for long months has suffered the
ignominious privations of an invalid's bed.
I got back safely to New York, but as the days passed it
became more and more evident that the camp food, the hard
riding, and perhaps still more my immoderate love of walking,
had done damage that it would take months to repair. I left for
the country. Before I had reached my destination, however, I
was having a haemorrhage. Being extremely unwilling to attract
the attention of my fellow passengers I kept as still and silent
as I could. Between each choking fit my eyes would look out
at rock-strewn Connecticut meadows drowsy in the late July sun-
shine. Was the end of my long journey approaching? On my
birthday I sent a cable to my brother in England to show him
that I had at any rate reached forty years without “wearing a
green coat." And I must confess as I now lie in bed looking over
these Norwalk garden trees, to where the masts of a schooner so
unexpectedly appear through green foliage, I find that my distaste
for dying is as great in middle life as ever it was in my youth.
I don't want to die. I want to live to a great old age like my
father and grandfather and great-grandfather did before me. I
TOIC


138
FONTAINEBLEAU
want to live till "the grasshopper has become a burden.” Indeed,
if I could have my way, my own way, I would still be about and
abroad on the 13th of August 1984, still able to shuffle to a
back stoop when the night was clear, still able to look up at the
Great Square of Pegasus with all the ineluctable egoism of one who
from childhood recognized that however prolonged his life might
be it would pass by him as swiftly as the flight of a wild sea bird
crossing from horizon to horizon of a great city in the hour before
dawn.
FONTAINEBLEAU
(Autumn)
BY SARA TEASDALE
Interminable palaces front on the green parterres
And ghosts of ladies lovely and immoral
Glide down the gilded stairs;
The high cold corridors are clicking with the heel-taps
That long ago were theirs.
But in the sunshine, in the vague autumn sunshine
The geometric gardens are desolately gay;
The crimson and scarlet and rose-red dahlias
Are painted like the ladies who used to pass this way
With a ringletted monarch, a Henry or a Louis,
On a lost October day.
The aisles of the garden lead into the forest,
The aisles lead into autumn, a damp wind grieves;
Ghostly kings are hunting, the boar breaks cover,
But the sounds of horse and horn are hushed in falling leaves,
Four centuries of autumns, four centuries of leaves.


Mentor
LS
A DRAWING. BY PABLO PICASSO


-
-
-


PARIS LETTER
January, 1925
THE death of Joseph Conrad was deeply felt in France. His
I fame among us is quite recent. He was introduced more than
ten years ago to a chosen few by André Gide and Robert d'Hu-
mières. Later there came to him a wider French public of seden-
tary readers easily allured by tales of adventure, delighted to find
a master of sea-lore who spoke of what he knew best and they
least. I called on him in England in 1916, to invite him to visit
our front, but his rheumatism already forbade his travelling. He
spoke to me of his studies for his captain's papers at Marseilles,
of his three years on board a French sailing vessel, and of The
Nigger of the Narcissus, written in 1896, partly in France.
His friend, Saint Léger-Léger, the French poet, is not well
known. In 1911 he gave the Nouvelle Revue Française a book of
poems entitled Eloges, strange poems, disclosing a colonial in-
fluence, of a romanticism full of colour yet in a style as strictly
disciplined as if purely classic. Now, after thirteen years of silence
and after a long stay in China, he gives us Anabase, also through
the N. R. F., this time under the pen-name of S. J. Perse. In this
work he continues the tradition of Francis Jammes and of the
Rimbaud of Le Bateau Ivre. This too-silent writer appears also
in the pages of a new quarterly review of literature called Com-
merce—that is to say, "exchange of ideas”-along with Paul
Valéry, Larbaud, and Joyce. This review, of which the first num-
ber appeared recently, is of evident importance.
Beasts, Men and Gods, by the Pole, Ferdinand Ossendowski,
which was favourably received in England and enthusiastically
acclaimed in Germany, is now meeting with great success in France.
Those strange lands of Mongolia, those interviews with gods,
those terrible prophesies, that far-off struggle with Bolshevism,
those adventures in Asia, brought the author much attention; and
he was warmly received when he passed through France a month
ago on his way to Africa, where André Gide, who is leaving for
1 Published by E. P. Dutton and Company, 1922.


140
PARIS LETTER
Timbuctoo, intends to make researches which cannot fail to pro-
duce interesting results. The appearance of Gide's latest book,
Corydon, has caused some excitement. This discreet writer, this
austere Protestant, has lifted the veil after his fiftieth year and,
leaning upon natural history, has made an apologia for practices
which, among men at least, are unnatural. It is to be feared that
Gide, with his nimble mind, has somewhat strained not only
nature, but also natural history. André Gide has also published
his Souvenirs de la Cour d'Assises. I hasten to add that no un-
fortunate connexion should be made between the two books.
Le Perroquet Vert is the title of the latest volume by the Princess
Bibesco to be published in Paris. It is a charming, melancholy,
and fanciful book, written in a graceful French, with the latest
improvements in French style. The name of Bibesco, related to
the noblest French families and to Anna de Noailles, the poet, is
one of the greatest of Roumanian names, and one of those which
is dearest to us. In Washington it is synonymous with culture
and wit. Princess Elizabeth Bibesco, a cousin of the author of
Le Perroquet Vert, though she writes her impertinent and implac-
able soul-analyses in English, is liked in this country, whose spirit
she reflects so perfectly. Her husband, Prince Antoine Bibesco,
the present Roumanian Minister to the United States, was indeed
one of the first and most intimate friends of Marcel Proust, of
Montesquiou, of Vuillard, a tireless explorer of literature; and
it was through the encouragement of his lamented brother, Em-
manuel, one of the rarest spirits I have ever met, that I dared
publish my first writings.
Jean Giraudoux gave us, just before the holidays, a short novel
entitled Juliette au Pays des Hommes. The author thought of
giving it a sub-title, Ou, la Véritable Histoire de la Garçonne.
I urged him to do so. He decided not to, renouncing the glory I
promised him. His book is the account of several sentimental
journeys into the lairs of men, undertaken by a young woman on
the eve of her wedding. This very loose scheme gives Giraudoux
free play for his fantasy, and if, once the book is closed, the
characters he has evoked vanish like figures in a dream, it should
not be regretted too much, since these fragile and artificial creations
of a subjective mind that merely plays with reality and the con-
crete, are of the very nature of his talent. One of the chapters,
entitled Prière sur la Tour Eiffel, is not without a resemblance to


PAUL MORAND
141
Ernest Renan's Prière sur l'Acropole. Both authors are scholars
drunk with spring and with many memories of women and studies.
Alfred Fabre-Luce, who alternates between political writings
and imaginative works, has published a book ironically entitled
La Victoire, which, on the eve of the French elections, shows
remarkable perception. It is a triumph of pacifist ideas. The
first part, treating of the origins of the war, seems to me debatable
and too favourable to our enemies, but the rest of the book dis-
closes an international spirit of exceptional elevation, as does
l'Eveil d'une Ethique Internationale, a new work by Pierre de
Lanux, who is well-known to the American public.
I turn to a different but important subject in announcing an
interesting number of Les Feuilles Libres (Number 36) devoted
to drawings and poems by children. I cannot resist quoting a
perfect poem by Françoise D. V., aged five, entitled Le Ciel :
“Le soir est doux, la nuit tombe sur les soldats
Faisons notre prière à l'air solennel; disons
Que Dieu est prêt: il attend la prière.”
A remarkable exposition of Swiss art, "from Holbein to Hodler,"
was on view recently in the Tuileries. The museums of France
and Switzerland contributed. One could see Holbeins that had
never before appeared together, Erasmus' portrait of Baron
Maurice de Rothschild and that of the Louvre. The Christ Mort,
from the Basle museum, dominated everything. And what an
exquisite painter is Liotard, the French-Swiss Watteau!
An important review, La Revue des Arts Asiatiques, is evidence
of the French interest of recent years in the East, after Germany.
It is under the direction of Edmond Jaloux. The books of Guénon,
Orient et Occident, and Grousset's L'Histoire de l'Asie, already
mentioned here, continue to receive public favour. A great work
on Daumier, in ten volumes, to contain four thousand reproduc-
tions, has begun to appear in the Collection Delteil. I mention
in passing the first publication of The Map of Christopher Colum-
bus, in colours, with French and English text, issued by Charles
de la Roncière. It is edited by Champion, the learned editor, and
reproduces the original of the famous illuminated map of the
world which inspired Columbus to make his voyage of discovery.
Paul MORAND
ce


BOOK REVIEWS
THE POSSESSED
BLACK Bryony. By T. F. Powys. 12mo. 184 pages.
Alfred A. Knopf. $2.
DLACK BRYONY is a book to read as one reads poetry or the
work of some visionary. Reading it as a novel I thought of
it as having inconsequent action and unrealized characters. But I
read on because there was on every page a sentence that showed a
strange insight. And then I came upon a sentence that really re-
vealed the quality of the book; after that what was inconsequent
in the action and unrealized in the characters did not disturb me.
The sentence has to do with Matthew Hurd, the schoolmaster.
“Once, as he walked beside a wonderful patch of blue flowers, he
heard the voice of God speaking to him out of the flowers, and he
fled.” In T. F. Powys' book all the characters seem to have heard
the voice of God coming to them from some place, and to be fleeing
from it. It is for this reason that they are unrealized as men,
women, and children; they are fugitives from the voice of God. It
is said of the child that was left on the rector's door-step, "perhaps,
after all, this little one was not without blemish. Perhaps it, too,
had an aged earthy history like the others.” There is no distinct
plot in Black Bryony; all T. F. Powys does is let us see the move-
ments of the fugitives he has watched.
There is Mary Crowle, Salvation Army preacher and wanton;
there is Hugh Crossley, with his callousness that makes him seem
a sort of elemental being; there is Matthew Hurd to whom "the
perfect stillness” called; there are the gnome-like school-children;
there is the Rev. James Crossley who believes that wind, or sea, or
fire can carry man's prayer up to the higher regions of the immortal
godhead; and there is his wife whose life is spent over her house-
keeping books: “she thought herself her own mistress when she
counted up or subtracted the figures, yet the truth was that she
must have evoked, by her constant brooding over her accounts forces


PADRAIC COLUM
143
VAL
that bound her as their slave.” They are all running along a path
of their own. The story that is concerned with them has no con-
sistent plot: what T. F. Powys does is to give each character an
orbit of his own or her own; what he shows is not the human action
and reaction of his characters, but one and then another coming
within an orbit other than its own.
Mary Crowle is the only one who can be spoken of as a central
character. She is like a soul that has become obsessed by a body
that it is partly outside of; she talks of her girlhood as if it was all
strange to her. “Even though I'm a preacher I can't help being a
girl, too,” she says to Matthew Hurd, the man she had once given
herself to, “I made a bet with another Army girl I could entice more
young men than ever she would to the shadow of that old wall. I
wonder if girls made bets in the time of the Romans? ... Oh, we
girls have colder blood than you men!" And she says, “Mr Cross-
ley talked to me about that one day. I always remember what he
said, 'Don't expect to be always the same, because you never can be.
God alone is always the same.'”
The people in Black Bryony are, to use the phrase as Dostoevsky
uses it, "the possessed.” Some demon has got into them; or rather,
they are souls deflected from their right incarnation. Even the
children are possessed. One of the little girls makes an obscene
drawing of a man that is passed around the school. "Matthew
knew quite well that she had drawn the picture, because Letty had
been staying in a neighbouring village under a great prehistoric
giant that was carved in the chalk downs." And the earth they
move on, although it is our earth, is vegetative and rank; it is an
earth of radiance and shadow. In that vegetative world even the
Roman wall seems hardly ancient, and the English village is hardly
old-world. Like Thomas Hardy, T. F. Powys has his chorus of
village elders; these elders are homely enough, but we never see
them as we sometimes see Hardy's gossips “under the greenwood
tree.” They, too, have the radiance of that shining piece of “im-
mortal matter," the moon, upon them. “Having apparently satis-
fied himself that the man in the moon had no cup to fill, John
shuffled indoors.” “'Tis best to be merry in the night-time," one
of the gossips says, "who do know what be about in this old world;
'taint safe, this world ban't.”
But although there is little consistent action, there is a crisis in
la


144
THE POSSESSED
the book that is dominant; in keeping with the rest of the book it
has an elemental significance. It is a burning at night. The Rector
has thought of a flame that would carry up the prayers of men to
God; for God, to his mind, was a raging fire that devours all evil.
“He saw all dissolution as a cleansing fire, a burning that strips
the flesh from the bones and destroys the bones in due time. ...
All nature, thought Mr Crossley, is on fire, all burning. The climb-
ing plant in the hedge, the great trees, all drawing up the hot flame
in their roots.” At last he makes his burning. He puts into it the
pages of the book he had given his lifetime to; he puts into it the
money of his parishioners. His fire makes the world a wonder,
and he watches the fiery tongues “asking for the same release, beg-
ging for the same deliverance, as he himself was, from the base
thraldom of matter.” And then to his surprise Mr Crossley finds
that his burning has taken in his house and the little child that he
loved; finally it takes himself in; the last we see of this possessed
one is with his hands raised to the heavens to where the smoke
was rolling.
No book that I have read for a long time so well repays re-read-
ing as does Black Bryony. A first reading is necessary to get out
of our minds the idea that it is a novel. The second reading reveals
it as a sketch-book made by a remarkable visionary. And yet I
have to say that by the standards that it of itself imposes there is
much in the book that suggests that T. F. Powys has not yet mas-
tered his curious material. Often he is circumstantial where he
should be briefly revealing, and often he is curt where he should be
sustained: the episode in the beginning dealing with the break-
down of Mr Balliboy's car is inordinately drawn out; on the other
hand the episode of the fire is rendered in paragraphs that are too
jerky and too few. And T. F. Powys makes the great mistake of
giving a scene by a quotation from another writer. We do not want
to see Mr Crossley as an Empedocles on Etna. Mr Crossley's soul
gathers power as he looks upon the mounting flames, and then we
have Mr Crossley's creator give a stanza from Matthew Arnold.
T. F. Powys is not a professional novelist, and that is all to the
good; but now and again he lets the amateur handle an incident,
and that is something that this strange visionary should get over
doing. These Children of the Dark Star are his, and he must dis-
cipline himself to write vibratingly about them.
Padraic COLUM


STATESMAN AND SPORTSMAN
THE LIFE OF LORD ROSEBERY. By E. T. Raymond.
8vo. 254 pages. George H. Doran Company. $3.
O
.
TR RAYMOND'S Life of Lord Rosebery is by no means a
companion volume to his Mr Lloyd George. The latter is
a narrative of fact; the former, an essay in interpretation. There
is nothing in Mr Lloyd George's character to make it surprising
that he should have turned Mr Asquith out of the premiership in
1916; the only question is as to the facts. On the other hand, there
is nothing unknown about Lord Rosebery's accession to the premier-
ship in succession to Gladstone, or his partial repudiation of home
rule, or his retirement from leading his party, or his effort to reor-
ganize it on the issue of liberal imperialism, or his refusal to return
to responsible service in it. Doubtless Mr Raymond overestimates
the ease with which Lord Rosebery could have resumed the leader-
ship of the Liberal Party, reunited by the reaction against the Boer
War, and Campbell-Bannerman's policy of conciliation toward
South Africa. But aspiration toward such leadership was the only
thing which could give meaning to Lord Rosebery's campaign in
the Liberal League; and a share in the councils of the party was a
sure way and the only way to prevent results which he looked on
with abhorrence. Mr Raymond does not exaggerate when he esti-
mates the momentous consequences of his decision or indecision.
Had Lord Rosebery returned to office, “There would have been no
Budget of 1909, no constitutional struggle, nothing more than a
normal Irish problem, only a very limited Lloyd George, and per-
haps no Great War.” Why did Lord Rosebery fail?
Mr Raymond explains Lord Rosebery largely through two facts,
he was an aristocrat and he was a Scotchman. As an aristocrat he
was barred from the House of Commons and never subjected to that
process of rough hewing which would have fitted him into an
“English scheme of things.” He resented this exclusion. He once
declared to Mr Gladstone that he would cheerfully have sacrificed
his peerage for a seat in the House of Commons. As a Scotchman
he had no reverence for that English institution, the House of
Lords. He would no less cheerfully have sacrificed the whole
Sure
0
0


146
STATESMAN AND SPORTSMAN
Oman
hereditary chamber to his ambition, and indeed he attacked it long
before its existence had become a question of practical politics. Mr
Raymond has some extremely penetrating observations on the con-
trasting English and Scotch conceptions of aristocracy and democ-
racy which make it clear how Lord Rosebery through the intensity
of his Scotticism remained psychologically unacclimated to the Eng.
lish scene. As Mr Raymond remarks: “If the English aristocrat
may be called an enlarged squire, the Scottish aristocrat is rather a
reduced king.” It was as a reduced king that Lord Rosebery exer-
cised his independence of party considerations when in the first days
of his premiership he blurted out his real opinion of home rule for
Ireland; as a swollen landlord that he emphasized his freedom from
party responsibilities by opposing the Budget of 1909.
Mr Raymond shows no less clearly the Scotch origin of Lord
Rosebery's most permanent set of political convictions, his im-
perialism. He reminds us that Lord Rosebery himself compared
the union of Scotland and England to the marriage of a poor man
with an heiress, “harmonious because founded on interest. ..
moulded into love by the beauty of its offspring.” To the Scotch-
man the alliance with his hereditary foe was primarily justified by
the splendour of the dowry and the increase of progeny. Hence the
Scotch have played the aggressive male part in developing the
wealth of the family by conquest, and its fecundity by colonization.
A Scotchman cannot be a Little Englander. There is nothing for
him in the patriotism which finds its inspiration in the spacious
days of Queen Bess. His “lesser patriotism” is for Scotland; his
"larger patriotism,” for empire.
There is another sentence in which Mr Raymond goes far to ex-
plain Lord Rosebery's career when he speaks of his "passion for
sport, his fancy for politics." The two terms express aptly the
quality of his adherence to the two functions of the aristocrat. In
an address on Sport at the Gimcrack Club, on the occasion of his
winning the Gimcrack stakes, he playfully assumed the character of
a Laodicean on the turf. But in that speech he remarked on the
disapprobation which his racing brought him within his party, the
fact that when he won the Derby with Ladas in the first year of
his premiership it caused peculiar pain to the nonconformist con-
science which could have borne to see his horse run second or third
or last; and that notwithstanding he proceeded to win the Derby
again the next year. Clearly Lord Rosebery must have had in the
an ca


ROBERT MORSS LOVETT
147
scales of his mind the Derby and the premiership, and the latter
kicked the beam. It was as a reduced king that he refused to be
bound by other men's consciences and paraded his addiction to the
sport of kings.
Indeed for Lord Rosebery his fancy for politics was a form of
sport, and in this respect above all he marks his difference from the
prevailing statesman of his day and his reversion to an earlier type.
Readers of the political novels of Disraeli ånd Trollope will re-
member how the parliamentary battle is invariably represented as
a sporting event like a great public school game of football. It was
Lord Rosebery's lasting regret that he was excluded by birth from
the big field. But his participation in politics, nevertheless, had
constant reminiscences of sportsmanship. His first political ad-
venture was to lend his house at Dalmeny for Mr Gladstone's head-
quarters during his Midlothian campaigns, and though merely keep-
ing the corner of his champion and refreshing him between rounds
with sponge and bottle, how he enjoyed it! When as leader of his
party in the House of Lords it fell to him to introduce the first
Home Rule Bill to its defeat, it was under the figure of a bull fight
that he gracefully submitted the doomed measure to Lord Salis-
bury as matador. In the days of his leadership when he was ex-
hibiting all the temperament of the thoroughbred, the description
of him which most took the fancy of his contemporaries was Mor-
ley's epigram of the “dark horse in a loose box.”
In Lord Rosebery's writings on political leaders the conception
of politics as sporting life quite unconsciously persists. His fond-
ness for Bonaparte is the ungrudging admiration of the amateur for
the professional. One of his best known essays is that on Sir
Robert Peel. Now it fell to Peel's fortune as prime minister to
pass two measures which he had been given power for the explicit
purpose of defeating, Catholic emancipation and the Repeal of the
Corn Laws. It is with all the gravity of a steward of the jockey
club that Lord Rosebery delivers judgement. “Granted that he was
right in the first transaction, he should not have repeated it: the
character of public men cannot stand two such shocks: we incline,
as it were, to the old verdict of Not guilty; don't do it again.'” It
is as a gentleman sportsman, concerned with the high standards of
the turf, that he declares, “The year 1846 was destined to be fatal
to high principle in politics.” In much the same manner he reviews
Lord Randolph Churchill's ambiguous career, particularly passing


148
STATESMAN AND SPORTSMAN
upon his dealings with Parnell in 1885. He has a connoisseur's
appreciation of the technical qualities involved in the parliamentary
game, of which to his mind oratory was the chief. He compares
the points of his champions like a connoisseur of the prize ring. He
becomes almost garrulous in recalling incidents, coincidences, and
anomalies of the sport. Over against his reprehension of Sir Robert
Peel's action in breaking the technique of party loyalty is his de-
light in reading the roll of Tories who were at heart Liberals, and
Liberals like Mr Gladstone, who began as “ 'the hope' of 'stern and
unbending Tories,' who led the Liberal party with such renown,
but who was proud to own to the Conservative temperament to the
end of his life.” Above all he admires the statesman to whom
politics was only one form of distinction among many. There is
almost a personal note in his description of Windham, “a statesman,
an orator, a mathematician, a scholar, and the most fascinating
talker of his day." He delights in Carteret for his association of
learning with politics; but the title of his own essay, Bookishness
and Statesmanship, betrays the amateur. It is not scholarship,
but bookishness that he admires.
It is with these statesmen of an elder day that Lord Rosebery
belongs—the amateur, the connoisseur, the sportsman. He lives to
illustrate Matthew Arnold's courteous reservations about the
aristocracy as a governing class, and his qualification of its members
as Barbarians. “The Barbarians brought with them ... that
passion for doing as one likes.” “The Barbarians, again, had the
passion for field sports.” “The chivalry of the Barbarians with its
characteristics of high spirit, choice manners, and distinguished
bearing—what is this but the attractive commencement of the po-
liteness of our aristocratic class ?” This culture, Arnold goes on
to point out, is external; it consists in outward gifts and graces, and
leaves unawakened "a whole range of powers of thought and
feeling.” “The one insufficiency of this class ... was an in-
sufficiency of light,” not “that it perversely cherishes some dismal
and illiberal existence in preference to light, but it is lured off
from following light by those mighty and eternal seducers of our
race which weave for this class their most irresistible charms—
by wordly splendour, security, power, and pleasure.” When
Arnold wrote, his perfect illustration was still at Eton: other-
wise we might think that he had in mind Lord Rosebery himself.
ROBERT Morss LOVETT


CATULLUS AND HORACE
CATULLUS AND HIS INFLUENCE. By Karl Pomeroy
Harrington. 12mo. 245 pages. Marshall Jones
Company. $1.50.
HORACE AND HIS INFLUENCE. By Grant Showerman.
12mo. 176 pages. Marshall Jones Company. $1.50.
DROFESSOR HARRINGTON'S book on Catullus is rather a
1 curious document: it shows that it has now become possible
to devote one's life to the study of the classics and yet to write
like the Daily News. One had been in the habit of taking it
for granted that an acquaintance with Greek and Latin literature
promoted a superior standard of precision and elegance in the use
of English, and it had been partly for this reason that one had
been reluctant to see the classics dropped from the university
curriculum. But apparently the standards go on sinking in the
presence of Apollo and the Muses themselves. Catullus, says
Professor Harrington, “believed that Lesbia and he were 'soul-
affinities,' and no artificial ties of man-made wedlock should stand
in the way of a marriage 'made in Heaven!'” Of Shakespeare
and Catullus, he writes: "In each case there was for a time com-
plete devotion to the flashing eye, the elegant manners, and the
genteel coquetries of the fascinatress. In each case there resulted
the soulful poetry of real genius.” Of the Sirmio poem: "Mild
was the breath of spring, past were the equinoctial gales, and
eagerly did the soul of the poet leap within him as he neared once
more 'home, sweet home.'” “Yet Catullus was a lovable young
fellow, and true blue to his friends, to whom he addresses about
fifteen poems." "Her (Lesbia's) gay life, her freedom with her
many friends, in short the abandon with which she led the most
advanced ‘society' set of the day, were the sources of growing
scandal.” If the teachers write like Professor Harrington, what
can be expected of the students? Still, Mr Dreiser has already
produced some serious novels in this style and now that it has
become a medium for classical scholarship one begins to feel that
it may well turn out to be the literary language of the future.
DUTO
sca


150
CATULLUS AND HORACE
Professor Harrington writes precisely like the chapter of
clichés, the cabman's shelter chapter, in Ulysses. His approach
to his subject is sympathetic and he conveys a certain amount of
information about it; but here, too, he is suggestive of Mr Bloom,
who might almost have written Professor Harrington's book. “Too
often, alas!” he observes, “the same fervency of nature that is
responsible for such poetry carries the singers into social relations
at which society officially shies, though when it is merely in
‘fatigue uniformit condones them. Some of the loving of a
Catullus, a Burns, a Byron, or a Shelley, to say nothing of poets,
playwrights, and actors of our own day, will not bear the critical
eye of the moralist; but masterly expressions of this elemental
passion appeal, as does nothing else in literature, to the human
heart.”
Professor Showerman's book on Horace is, to be sure, written
in decent English, but it is disappointingly dull. One may admit,
however, that it is rather difficult to make an exposition of Horace
interesting. Horace was a great writer really, who expressed a
valuable point of view in one of the most durable and accomplished
literary styles in European poetry. But it is almost impossible
to paraphrase his ideas without making them appear banal. Even
Herrick and Ronsard robbed him of some of his weight; the
eighteenth century, which devoted so much attention to him, tended
to make him a little too complacent; and the tendency among us
to-day is to turn him into a sort of Roman Locker-Lampson, a mere
writer of vers de société. What is difficult to convey is the tone
of sincerity which makes Horace's recommendations to snatch the
day and enjoy such unambitious satisfactions as are possible for
our brief and imperfect life-where black care mounts behind every
horseman on the roads of the world—together with his insistence
upon the discipline of the traditional Roman virtues, amount to
a real confrontation of the problems of life and an honourable
attempt to meet them; and what is almost impossible to repro-
duce is the artistic intensity and precision with which he fixes his
effects. Professor Showerman has tried to tell all this, but he
has only made Horace sound boring. But then, as I say, it is
rather hard to do anything else. Professor Tyrrell once succeeded
in writing a highly entertaining essay on Horace; and he only did
it by setting out, rather unfairly, to expose him as an impostor.
emo


EDMUND WILSON
151
Only less than half of each of these books is occupied with a
discussion of the poet and his work; the rest is devoted to a history
of his influence on European literature. It now becomes evident
that the purpose of the volumes on individual writers in the
Our Debt to Greece and Rome series, in which both these essays
appear, is chiefly to provide such histories. One fears they may
become a little monotonous. It is agreeable enough to read a
chronicle of the editions, translations, and imitations of one or
two classical authors, but to go through with them all in this
way is too much for the ordinary reader, to whom the series is
presumably addressed. Mackail's book on Virgil’ was profitable
because it was a good introduction to Virgil and went rather lightly
on the question of “influence,” to which it devoted only one chapter.
But the books of Professors Showerman and Harrington exhibit
the dangers of the method; with the best will in the world one
must fall somewhat short of sharing the conviction of the editor
of the series that “the story of the Influence of Catullus is as
fascinating as any novel"; and Professor Harrington's book, at
least, reveals the fact that a classical specialist writing about the
influence of his author may develop a tendency similar to that of
the medical specialist who insists upon assigning the cause of every
disorder to the organ of which he has made a particular study.
Professor Harrington seems to have arrived at a point where he is
ready to believe that any lyric poem which mentions an object or
gives expression to a feeling—however universal or commonplace-
also touched upon by Catullus, must have been inspired by him.
Thus he credits Burns' To a Mountain Daisy to Catullus on the
strength of the fact that the latter compares his love for Lesbia
to a flower cut down by the plough, and tries to affiliate Baudelaire
to Catullus on the evidence that they both mention sand—though
in quite different connexions. The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
he finds "very much in the spirit of Catullus.” Is this really the
most profitable way of indicating our debt to Greece and Rome?
Would not a fairly thoroughgoing description of the man and his
achievements, such as you get in Mackail's book on Virgil, do far
more to convince the reader that he owed the writer in question
1 Published by Marshall Jones Company. $1.50 per volume.
2 VIRGIL AND His MEANING TO THE WORLD OF TODAY. By J. W.
Mackail. Reviewed in the November, 1923, issue of THE DIAL.


152
CATULLUS AND HORACE
something, than a mere brief prefatory notice followed by a long
catalogue of his imitators? Since it is contemplated to include in
the series an essay by Professor Shorey, dealing in a general way
with the influence of Roman poetry upon European culture, I do
not see why the consideration of this question might not appro-
priately be confined to this volume.
Partly, I feel, because of this insistence on the question of “in-
fluence,” the books of the series which deal with general subjects
seem so far more satisfactory than the ones which deal with indi-
vidual authors. There have already appeared Mathematics by
David Eugene Smith, Greek Biology and Medecine by Henry
Osborn Taylor, Roman Politics by Frank Frost Abbott, Greek
Religion and Its Survivals by Walter Woodburn Hyde, Language
and Philology by Roland G. Kent, and Warfare by Land and Sea
by Eugene S. McCartney; and some of these, such as Professor
Smith's Mathematics and Professor Kent's Language and Phil-
ology, furnish exceedingly interesting brief accounts of subjects
which, so far as I know, have not been similarly treated elsewhere.
They perform a real service in rendering special departments of
classical scholarship more easily accessible to the ordinary reader.
The volumes of the Our Debt to Greece and Rome series are
unusually attractive in appearance; printing and binding are
admirable. One is only at a loss to understand by what freak of
the typographer's taste Roman capitals, instead of italic ones, have
invariably been used with the italicized passages of poetry: the
rigid rectangular initials break the fineness of the running line.
EDMUND Wilson


ARCHITECTURE AND CIVILIZATION
STICKS AND STONES. By Lewis Mumford. Tomo.
247 pages. Boni and Liveright. $2.50.
IR LEWIS MUMFORD has systematically exposed the
1 degradation of the American scene as revealed by the archi-
tectural march from the simple beauty of Puritan communism to
the monstrous ugliness of the contemporary city. Sticks and Stones
is a book of first importance, not only by reason of its historical
truth, but also because of its intelligent blending of aesthetics and
humanism. In reading these essays, I was continually impressed
by the author's perceptive balance: the fact that a young Utopian
like Mr Mumford should have written with such charm and hope-
fulness while presenting the most sordid and bombastic phases
of our civilization, is, I take it, indicative of his faith in the
future. Beginning with a reconstruction of life in the early New
England village, where building was co-operative and architecture
an organic growth, he goes on to elaborate the stupid land-
butchery of the pioneers, the importation of culture in the shape
of bastard romantic and classic styles, the development of the
Imperial Façade, as typified by the White City of the Chicago
Exposition in 1893, and last of all, the age of the machine with
its standardized horrors. And what conclusion are we to draw
from his survey? Simply this: that the element of beauty in
architecture has been debauched by the craze for material profit;
that the very utility in which the American glorifies his inventive
skill has been used against him by the capitalist; that the present
city-dweller has forfeited his lawful right to aesthetic surroundings,
and has become a machine-slave altogether as ignominious as the
puppets of Samuel Butler's Erewhon.
Assuredly such a prospect is an unhappy one to contemplate, but
I do not see how any right-minded critic can quarrel with Mr
Mumford's point of view, or reverse his carefully prepared judge-
ments. To the average American, of course, who regards economic
expansion as an unqualified sign of progress, the book will be only
an impudent heresy. What right has anybody to say that the


154 ARCHITECTURE AND CIVILIZATION
American city has devised human sewers through which the mass
of plebians can be dragged daily back and forth from their dor-
mitories and factories? Or that the skyscraper is purely a product
of engineering, that it has nothing to do with the human arts
of seeing, feeling, and living, and that it is an architecture for
angels and aviators? The average reader believes in the sky-
scraper—the higher the better—and in the imposing silhouette
of the serrate skyline, but in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred
he never sees this beauty. He only remembers it—and the photo-
graphs in the pictorial supplements of the Sunday newspapers con-
firm his opinions. While gazing on pictures entitled Woolworth
Building Greets the Sun, or Towers of Lower Manhattan Bathed
in Mist, he is inclined to resent Mr Mumford's contempt for the
cathedrals of commerce. It does not occur to him that beauty,
in a larger sense, is not limited to structures of genuine aesthetic
significance, and he forgets what nature, under certain atmospheric
conditions, does for the tenements, and even the garbage heaps.
He remembers the impressiveness of the skyscrapers, and that at
some time or other he has found them beautiful; by a common
psychological process he attributes these natural appearances to the
structures themselves, and like all good apostles of "progress,"
fails to distinguish between mathematical science and aesthetic
building. On the other hand, the man of artistic tastes, as well
as the thoroughgoing Philistine, when confronted with the archi-
tectural problem, is unwilling to delve into the more profound
issues of motives and tendencies—he cherishes a vague notion that
the American builder, if he has not as yet accomplished his pur-
pose, is on the way to achieve some vast and superior form of art,
and that any criticism of his activity is, at this time, premature.
The sociologist has always been looked upon as a dissatisfied
critic with a grievance against society. And so he is. His attitude
toward art and life is a challenge to the complacency of popular
"success," and to the moral pretentiousness that accompanies it.
But all the same, his method is the only adequate tool for digging
into the sources of modern architecture, and for working out
aesthetic values. The sociologist attacks the problem at its roots;
indeed, much to the discomfiture of the proud and sentimental
wreckers of civilization, he shows, in this case, that order, decency,
and purpose in the arts have been smothered by chaos, squalor, and
ranc


THOMAS CRAVEN
155
extravagant futility. Mr Mumford has not been taken in by the
staggering effects of American engineering, or the intricate juggling
of materials. He has not attempted to deprive the engineers of
their rewards, and he has been at pains to note the audacious beauty
of the “draped cube" wherever it has sprung up; but he is inter-
ested primarily in buildings that can be seen, felt, and lived in,”
and for this reason has discussed technology only so far as it
relates to motives. By proceeding from motives to the resultant
mechanistic expression, the historian can readily determine the
functional value of the completed forms—for it is only in terms
of function that the constituent parts of a form can be justified.
Are the structural elements essential ? Do they fulfil a genuine
need? In modern painting and sculpture, which are, I am sorry
to say, more or less divorced from an objective and social use,
the difficulty of following motives forces the critic into an investi-
gation of general psychological tendencies and the vagaries of
temperament and desire. Form, in this connexion, is the expression
of individual needs, or at best, of a limited collective need, and
function refers to the essential fitness of the constituent parts. In
architecture, however, the creative business is on a more objective
plane. Motives are tangible, and the value of the structural
elements can be easily ascertained. With this particular problem
I feel that Mr Mumford has been a little too summary. He has
frequently touched upon the relation of function to aesthetic values,
but has not sufficiently stressed the importance of this interaction.
The difference, for example, between the grain elevator and the
skyscraper which aspires to more than a perforated shell, is simply
one of significant parts. In the elevator each component, down
to the smallest detail, is indispensable-patently so—while the
skyscraper offers to the eye of the man in the street only meaning-
less ornamentation, and to the aviator a miraculous flouting of
Newton's laws. Mr Mumford is aware of this, but he has over-
looked a vital point in aesthetics: to appreciate a work of art, one
has need to recognize the essentiality of the parts, and to follow
a structural rhythm to its conclusion. We will remember that the
Greeks allowed nothing to interfere with the basic lines of their
buildings. Ornament, no matter how complex or beautiful in itself,
never interrupted the reasonable and stable progression of the
several parts. The significance of every line in a Greek temple


156
ARCHITECTURE AND CIVILIZATION
is felt. It is a sensuous reality. This, of course, is a requisite of
all true masonry. The rhythm of a stone structure cannot be
disguised—for good or ill its qualities are obvious. Mr Mumford
shows how modern stone work is little better than a mask to
conceal the modern skeleton—a dress Aung over it—and he also
points out that the improved appearance of the later skyscrapers
is the result of aligning this dress with the steel frame. The dupli-
cation of the steel line is a form of adaptation rather than creation,
but the device is at least a sensible one, and prevents such out-
rageous efforts as the Flatiron Building, where the heavy, arched
masonry at the top belies the unsubstantial appearance of the
middle stories. The disguising of means has always accompanied
bad art. Modern sculptors, who support acrobatic postures by
means of complicated hidden armatures, kill all sense of stability
in their work. They are akin to modern builders.
Mr Mumford is neither a reformer nor a prophet. He has
written the most interesting and authoritative work on architecture
that has yet come out of America. “If we are to have a fine archi-
tecture,” he explains, “we must begin, not with the building itself,
but with the whole complex out of which the architect, builder,
and patron spring." True, but how? Mr Mumford, in his brief
conclusion, would seem to put his trust in the garden-city, a com-
munity organized in the spirit of permanency and humanity with-
out rhich there can be neither art nor beauty. But how are these
garden-cities to be planned, and for whom? For millionaires ?
And will the taste of the parvenu be any better to-morrow than
it is to-day? I leave these questions for the author of this enlight-
ening study to solve in his next book.
Thomas CRAVEN


BRIEFER MENTION
These CHARMING PEOPLE, by Michael Arlen (12mo, 302 pages; Doran:
$2.50) is airy as an eiderdown quilt; it makes a bright-hued and piquant
counterpane for the somewhat ornate couch of wilful sophistication upon
which Mr Arlen composes at full length. No attempt is made to disguise
the conscious cleverness either of the characters or their creator; he is
happy to knock their heads together and share with the reader his enjoy-
ment of the egg-shell percussion.
SEACOAST OF BOHEMIA, by Louis Golding (12mo, 288 pages; Knopf:
$2.50). A roughly written satire upon the modern art crowd that drifts
in and out of the Café Royal, London. It is built upon the familiar
Aldous Huxley model, though doubtless Mr Huxley will deny this as
strenuously as Mr Golding. The incessant use of the loud pedal is
infinitely wearying and only the insensitive will pursue the tale to its
bitter end.
model, thought, London. Itidern art crowd tha
The Judge, by Maxim Gorki, translated by Marie Zakrevsky and Barrett
H. Clark (12mo, 105 pages; McBride: $1.50). Although Maxim Gorki
has selected a theme capable of the most powerful dramatic treatment,
he has not made his characters speak in the unmistakable accent of life;
there is an artificial ring to all they do and say, reminding one of a
phonographic reproduction wherein metallic sounds mingle with the pure
tones of a singer. The fault would appear to be that the author has
endeavoured to develop an idea rather than to develop his characters
according to the logical and inherent laws of their own nature.
C, by Maurice Baring (2 vols., 12mo, 355 pages; Doubleday, Page: $5).
This novel is said by some to be a "failure," but in that case it must be
allowed to be a failure with a difference. Certainly the writing has an
easy sobriety that is infrequently met with in the novels of the day and
is calculated to give pleasure to the sensible. Its only weakness lies
in what the movies call continuity. It starts out, apparently, upon the
theme of The Way of All Flesh—the inadequacy of parents—but contents
itself in the end with merely being a picture of society. However, that is
something, is it not? Besides, the book is interesting.
In Lawless LANDS, by Charles J. Finger (12mo, 292 pages; Kennerley:
$2.50) is a book of short stories of uneven but more than average interest
and merit. The narratives of primitive existence in South American
jungles are excellent. The characters and plots are admirably adapted
to the short story form and never repeat one another. The portraiture
is convincing mainly by virtue of simplicity. The last story is a
delightful interpretation of a native girl, notable for its originality as
well as its manifold charm.


158
BRIEFER MENTION
JUDGMENT Eve, by H. C. Harwood (12mo, 299 pages; Constable & Co.,
London). A startlingly clever set of short stories by an author who
appears to be capable du tout. He is as weird, at times, as Poe; as con-
cise, at times, as De Maupassant; and as mischievous, at times, as Fir-
bank. His stories begin in the middle, usually, with an arresting dialogue
like those occasionally overheard upon crowded thoroughfares, but the
reader, who is at first fascinated against his will, finally understands.
That is, he understands enough to be profoundly troubled by Mr
Harwood's world.
The BAZAAR AND OTHER STORIES, by Martin Armstrong (12mo, 287 pages;
Knopf: $2.50). This collection of short narratives by the former Literary
Editor of the Spectator lacks intensity. One feels that the subjects of
these stories appealed to him chiefly as pretexts to write, and that he was
more engrossed in "style,” in a drawing-room virtuosity, than in prose
as a means of exact expression. Consequently, though the stories are not
fantastic, they are ephemeral; though they are never obscure, they are
wearisomely vague-like an “art photograph,” slightly out of focus.
The New Spoon River, by Edgar Lee Masters (12mo, 368 pages ; Boni &
Liveright: $2.50). The genius of Edgar Lee Masters hovers like a dark,
sardonic, but not unkindly angel over these dead bones; and, in the cases
where it clothes them once more in phantasmal flesh and blood, we
remember the old thrill. But too often, in this new compilation, in place
of that familiar resurrection of pathetic humanity we hear only the voice
of the weary Satirist using these monuments as so many platforms from
which, in the bleak hour before the dawn, to preach to dust and ashes
of what was and is to come. Tantalizing enough are the queer ramshackle
names of these homely dead; for one looks for the remembered vignettes
of mysterious human magic; and finds only wise and shrewd discourse
upon the troublesome problems of our age.
The SKIPPERS OF NANCY GLOUCESTER, by Percy MacKaye (12mo, 49 pages;
Brick Row Book Shop: $2) is an imaginative evocation of three famous
Gloucester mariners, written for the tercentenary of the Massachusetts
Bay Colony. The poem is vigorous, trim, and quaint, like the frontispiece
of the little book; it is a fine example of the formality of celebration,
infused and transcended by its spirit.
APPLES HERE IN MY BASKET, by Helen Hoyt (12mo, 82 pages; Harcourt,
Brace: $1.50). In a book which urgently proclaims with mongrel metrical
inconsequence, the lordship of the flesh, it is a pleasure to find three well
wrought poems, the content of which is movingly poetic.
THE FOREST, by John Galsworthy (12mo, 115 pages; Scribner: $1). A
laboured piece for the theatre without a spark of style. The "curtains,"
however, are attended to, and however obvious a "curtain” may be it is
at least something for impressionable theatre-goers to seize upon. It is
not unlikely, therefore, that this exposé of the horrors of big business
will have a success of sorts.


BRIEFER MENTION
159
AFRICAN CLEARINGS, by Jean Kenyon Mackenzie (12mo, 270 pages; Hough-
ton Mifflin: $2.50). The publishers' advertisement of this book declares
that it offers "an interpretation of the native mind and soul comparable
in its vividness and beauty to Hearn's studies of the Japanese.” Need-
less to say this is an exaggeration. Miss Mackenzie has spent several
years ministering to the black population of West Africa and has the
faculty of recording her experiences in sound sentimental prose. She is
obviously an alert and understanding person and one quick to catch and
put on record any proverb or significant utterance that she has heard
issue from black lips.
THE INNS OF THE MIDDLE Ages, by W. C. Firebaugh (8vo, 274 pages;
Covici : $7.50) spoils a fine subject, as, a bad cook may ruin a fine roast.
Here is neither fish, fowl, nor good red herring. It pretends to scholar-
ship, as it pretends to wit and to style, and as its make-up pretends to
sumptuousness. It has none of these qualities. To recount its defects
would be to go beyond the limits imposed by a Briefer Mention. The least
of them is the author's ignorance of the language in which he writes. It
would be difficult to find worse proof-reading.
A THREAD OF English Road, by Charles S. Brooks (illus., 8vo, 303 pages;
Harcourt, Brace: $3). Mr Charles S. Brooks has long been known to us
as one of those authors who is under the impression that a facetious
account of every commonplace thought that happens to enter his head
during each hour of his sterile and unimaginative days, is for some
reason interesting to other people. This last volume is a travel book
of England. One yawns over Mr Brooks's descriptions, one blushes over
his jokes, and subconsciously registers a resolution most carefully to avoid
in one's own excursions every market-town and village that is as much
as mentioned in the pages of this chatty hand-book.
LATITUDES, by Edwin Muir (12mo, 222 pages; Huebsch: $2). In his
new book of essays, the author of We Moderns has advanced from
the position almost of a disciple of Nietzsche to a very original and
interesting point of view of his own. He is a psychologist whose style
is always precise, concrete, and lucid, a “good European” with a tough
Scottish basis and a critic for whom the test of thought and letters is
whether they stimulate the will to live in a universe that is frankly faced
as a chaos. He is "against" many things, as the titles of some of his
essays suggest: Against the Wise, because conscious wisdom denies the
life which the unconscious affirms; Against Optimism and Pessimism,
because they spring from a desire for harmony and stability, whereas
life desires discord as well; against the "profound” novelists who descend
into the unconscious and remain there, because they prefer darkness to
light. But what he is “for" is never in doubt: he is for Robert Burns,
for the Scottish Ballads, for the city of Prague, for Stendhal, Mozart, and
Dostoevsky, and for everything which, as Hafiz says, “breaks up the
ponderous roof of heaven into new forms." No contemporary essayist
writes with more agility and penetration than Mr Muir; to read him is a
bracing intellectual exercise.


160
BRIEFER MENTION
THE LATIN GENius, by Anatole France, translated by Wilfred S. Jackson
(8vo, 315 pages; Lane and Dodd, Mead: $2.50). The universality of
Anatole France's genius is nowhere more apparent than in this book.
When reading it the Englishman forgets his differences with the French
and even Racine becomes a brother. And as for Scarron, he is positively
more English than Swift and Congreve! The style, of course, is delicious.
IMAGINARY Lives, by Marcel Schwob (12mo, 256 pages; Boni & Liveright:
$2.50) is a collection of biographical portraits ranging from Empedocles
to Captain Kidd, from Clodia to Pocahontas. The author, a modern
Petronius, confuses obscenity with humanity, and crime with originality,
and selects an appropriate group of passionate derelicts to prove his
thesis. M Schwob's conviction, however, is both genuine and poetic, and
his candid and economical book is an excellent example of the growing
tendency among authors to incorporate their fictions and philosophies into
the lives of historical characters.
SPECULATIONS, by T. E. Hulme (8vo, 271 pages ; Harcourt, Brace: $3.75)
is a book of stimulating suggestion rather than a treatise of accumulative
logical power. Mr Hulme thinks at the sword's point. His opinions
resolve themselves into a positively ferocious statement of two opposed
sets of antipodal ideals; the first to be denounced in terms of opprobrium,
such as "sloppy," "messy," "sticky," "slushy"; the second to be commended
in terms of emphatic praise, such as “Byzantine," "applied Egyptian," "cu-
bistic,” “non-vital.” The two sets of ideals are applied to art, ethics, religion,
and politics, and may be summed up thus. What is reprobated is described
as romantic, democratic, humanistic, naturalistic. What is eulogized is
described as classical, geometrical, traditional, hard, dry, and cheerfully
tragic. The "new Weltanschauung" he advocates has something in com-
mon with that of Heraclitus; but more with that of L'Action Française.
THE LAND OF JOURNEYS' ENDING, by Mary Austin (8vo, 459 pages; Cen-
tury: $4). In her closing chapter the author tells of some young men
who set out in sport to imitate an Indian dance, but suddenly, in the midst
of their dancing, “the men of Prescott were pierced through with under-
standing.” This may serve as a summary of Mary Austin's writings on
the Southwest, and of her belief that the aboriginal culture, refined by the
soil, may transmit its symbols of expression to the American invaders, once
they too have been penetrated by the “land of journeys' ending." While
treating of flowers, winds, rainfalls, forgotten cities, this book addresses
itself subtly to our sense of combat, and herein probably lies the efficacy
of its style: “The thin air and the coarse soil drink the snow with such
rapidity, that, even while it falls, it may be seen disappearing around the
pine-boles like water lowering in the trough of a thirsty horse.” And
if it is hard to conceive of Americans climbing out of their Fords to
make offerings annually to the gods of the rain, the hunt, and the
smutless corn, it is easily felt how the author might derive such faith
in her compatriots by spending much time away from them, alone in this
country of rich fragmentary history and austere landscapes such as she
describes.


BRIEFER MENTION
161
(12m0, 2ch out. It contative reviews of Le to take the Machen apparno do
THE GLORIOUS MYSTERY, by Arthur Machen, edited by Vincent Starrett
(12mo, 219 pages; Covici-McGee: $2.50) is something no Machen-lover
will do without. It contains one admirable essay called A Secret Language,
many amusingly destructive reviews of so-called pious books, and every-
where, on every page, beauties of style to take the breath away. Not
everyone can be so complete a mediaevalist as Mr Machen apparently
demands in these studies of the search for the Holy Grail, but those who do
resolutely finish them will have been rewarded with many nuggets of
purest gold.
The INNOCENCE OF G. K. CHESTERTON, by Gerald Bullett (12mo, 233
pages; Holt: $2.25) applies a nimble yardstick to the major dimensions
of its subject; the resultant cubic contents are far from bulky and certainly
most readable. Unlike some of Chesterton's critics, who have assumed
that since they were aiming at a large object, they could not possibly miss
the target, Mr Bullett has measured his distance and consequently come
closer to the centre. His estimate of the man is suave and balanced; his
tribute that of unmistakable and admitted-imitation.
BARRETT WENDELL AND Hıs LETTERS, by M. A. DeWolfe Howe (8vo, 350
pages; Atlantic Monthly Press: $4.50). On page 185 Mr Howe records
this characteristic anecdote: "Towards the end of his life Barrett Wendell
was fond of telling the story of a little colloquy between himself and his
younger friend, Professor Merriman of Harvard. Thus it ran: 'In all
the twenty-five years you have known me, Roger, have you ever heard
me utter one liberal sentiment ? To which came the reply, Not one,
sir,' followed by Wendell's devout ejaculation, 'Thank God!'" Yet
Barrett Wendell was singularly influential as a teacher, and many of
his pupils have ironically become identified with radical thought. As
revealed in his letters, his ideas were always illiberal, always academic,
but he managed to make them temporarily effective by a certain acidity
of expression.
Wendellprenep, nown mearvard between Barrett i recor
lan: $2.50 cappointing and blunter
RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE OF JOHN HUMPHREY Noyes, Founder of the Oneida
Community, compiled and edited by George Wallingford Noyes (12mo,
416 pages; Macmillan: $2.50). As a portrait, as a study of mystic
mentality, this biography is disappointing. The biographer's reverence
seems to have darkened his understanding and blunted his scalpel. He
has, however, provided for some future portrayal a generous mass of
documentary materials. One is dismayed by the obscurity produced by
the number of obsolescent words, such as “sin," "salvation," "devil,” "per-
fection”—a dark, wild obscurity, tumultuous with ghostly warfare and a
slaughter of souls.
MARGARET ETHEL MacDonald, by J. Ramsay MacDonald (12mo, 239
pages; Seltzer: $2.50) deals almost exclusively with Mrs MacDonald's
courageous and highly useful public career. Mr MacDonald's almost
formal references to his wife are, on the whole, eloquent. That despite
his reticence he has been able to infuse something of her spirit and charm
into this portrait proves he is no incompetent biographer.


162
BRIEFER MENTION
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF An Idea, by Louis H. Sullivan, foreword by Claude
Bragdon (12mo, 330 pages; Press of the American Institute of Archi-
tects : $3). Mr Sullivan's idea is an idea that has been more ably pre-
sented by Professor James—the power of man. Mr Sullivan worships
engineering and achievement in general, but his inexperience as a writer
makes the recital of his enthusiasms ineffective. His one good moment
depicts the resolution and real intelligence with which he hastily crammed
in Paris for his Beaux Arts examinations. The same sort of clarity in
writing would have made his comments upon the re-building of Chicago
worth while.
PERSONALITY OF Plants, by Royal Dixon and Franklyn E. Fitch (12mo,
222 pages ; Boullion Biggs : $2.75). This is a most fascinating book and
one that should be put into the hands of those "hard boiled” human
beings who trample through life oblivious to the delicate grace of the
vegetable world. A copy should also be forwarded to all florists, to those
soft-voiced, velvet-heeled gentlemen who daily torture with sharp wire
the fragile unfortunates with whom they traffic. From the cedar of
Lebanon to the hyssop that grows on the wall each tree and weed has, the
authors contend, a distinct consciousness of its own.
The First TIME IN History, by Anna Louise Strong (12mo, 249 pages;
Boni & Liveright: $2). These articles offer the most informative and the
most convincing picture of Soviet Russia published thus far. We come
away from Miss Strong's book delivered of the illusion that revolution
can be right or wrong, good or bad. Like the weather, revolution simply is.
MEDICINE, MAGIC AND RELIGION, by W. H. R. Rivers (12mo, 146 pages;
Harcourt, Brace: $3.75). In this volume are assembled for the laity
the lectures delivered by the author some nine years ago before the Royal
College of Physicians of London, together with a lecture on Mind and
Medicine delivered in 1919. Professor Rivers develops at length the
relation between primitive leechcraft and present medical practice, describes
the concepts of disease underlying both, and, in the final paper, shows
how profitably modern medicine is in a measure co-operating with religion
in influencing the mental factors in disease. The extreme nicety of Pro-
fessor Rivers' definitions is no less an intellectual delight than the ethno-
graphical and psychological facts which he is at pains to present. Alto-
gether the book is a source of that profound satisfaction which comes of
contact with the genuinely scientific mind.
POLYCHROMY, by Leon V. Solon (8vo, 157 pages; Architectural Record:
$6) is a plea for the revival of colour as an architectural accessory.
Mr Solon possesses an exhaustive knowledge of the methods of the
Greeks of the Sixth and Fifth Centuries, and his argument that colour
should be used, not pictorially, but solely to enhance the structural unity
of buildings, is aesthetically sound. Unfortunately his English is in-
volved and cumbersome, and his argument obscured by many repetitions.
The volume is excentionally well illustrated.


THE THEATRE
Sea
T ENORMAND'S L'HOMME ET Ses FANTÔMES, presented here
U by Gémier, is a play of considerable interest of which I have
seen no satisfactory account. One gets the impression that the
reviewers either did not understand it or that they shied at dis-
cussing it. Yet it is certainly one of the few plays seen this
season which deserves serious consideration. Lenormand has
attempted to interpret Don Juan in the light of modern psy-
chology: the legendary figure used by Molière, whose Don Juan
Lenormand closely follows, is not merely an amiable libertine and
scoundrel, like Casanova, for example, of whom Havelock Ellis
says that he never left a woman unhappy, but a cold-blooded im-
moralist who deliberately defies Heaven and abandons the women
he has seduced with unnecessary harshness. Lenormand finds the
key to such a character in a psychological maladjustment, in a
"complex”: Don Juan really detests women; that is why he leaves
them so soon. He has never felt for them either genuine affection
or genuine desire; yet he cannot forgive them their failure to rouse
in him the love that he is always looking for. It then appears that
without his having known it, his real tastes are homosexual: he
has himself the temperament of a woman, with all a woman's
curiosity and cruelty; "son corps réclame la femme et son âme,
Ľhommemil cherche dans la femme le fantôme de l'homme." But
the realization of this fact reaches him too late to do anything but
shock and demoralize him and you are given to understand that
he would not have been any happier even if he had known. In the
meantime, the consciousness of the sufferings he has caused—the
inevitable consequence of his character-has been torturing his
sensitive nerves; and toward middle life he goes to pieces amid the
hallucinations of neurasthenia. Lenormand, in developing this
theme, has followed the modern penchant for classic correspond-
ence and arranged an ingenious parallel with Molière: Sganarelle
becomes a Parisian valet, Elvire goes insane instead of taking to
religion, the libertine's mother, instead of his father, is made the
object of his filial impiety, and Don Juan's Beggar appears as a
poor old woman who refuses his alms, not because she is un-
willing to pay the price of blasphemy, but on the perhaps rather


164
THE THEATRE
unlikely grounds that the alms of the rich bring bad luck. For
the statue of the Commander, Lenormand has substituted the ghost
of a Swiss girl whom his hero has seduced and who is brought on to
the twentieth century scene through the machinery of a spiritual.
istic séance. Like his prototype, the modern Don Juan invites her
to visit him; and her arrival with her sister victims, announces the
hour of his agony. The light shed by this parallel is not so much,
as in the case of Ulysses, on the differences between the environ-
ments and adventures of the characters compared, but rather on the
difference between the points of view of the authors in regard to
similar characters doing the same things. To Molière, Don Juan
is the rebel intellect repudiating religion, obligation, and humanity,
who has spirit enough to maintain his insolence even in the face of
Hell; to Lenormand, he is merely a sick man, a poor devil who mis-
understands himself, as much a martyr to the sufferings he has
inflicted as the victims themselves. Molière's hero is the abstrac-
tion of a human attitude, which, by divine judgement, is con-
demned; Lenormand's a type-case whose avenging phantoms are the
externalized obsessions of his mind. Molière's is stricken down in
his pride; Lenormand's collapses.
Two definite criticisms might be brought against the complete
artistic success of L'HOMME ET SES FANTÔMES. One of these
would arise from M Lenormand's addiction to the technique of
the Grand Guignol, in which he served his apprenticeship to the
stage: from the technical point of view, L'HOMME ET Ses Fan-
TÔMES falls into a succession of Grand Guignol shockers and its
rather wearingly humourless tone suggests less the gravity of great
tragedy than the professional grimness of the Grand Guignol pre-
paring a nasty shock. The same influence may perhaps also account
for the disproportionate length of the spiritualistic episode, which
is so elaborately developed as to distract interest from the real
theme of the play. The other criticism to which Lenormand lays
himself open is a reliance on science rather than imagination: one
feels sometimes that he is interested rather in demonstrating a
psychological hypothesis than in producing an artistic creation; his
premises are perhaps a little too simple and their consequences
follow too exactly. One sticks a little at admitting that human
character can so easily be reduced to a complex. Yet, on the
whole, L'Homme Et Ses Fantômes is a remarkably impressive
play, with far more genuine tragic sense of life than one ordi-
an
IME E


EDMUND WILSON
165
narily finds nowadays. The scenes with women in the first two
acts are particularly good; after that, the dramatic movement is
rather sacrificed, in a long series of conversations, to discussions
of Don Juan's malady and the phenomena of spiritualism. At
the end, however, when his cast-off mistresses appear to him as
furies and declare the truth about his relations with them—“Si tu
as connu le dégoût de la volupté, c'est que tu n'as pas connu la
volupté," et cetera—there is another effective passage. I thought
Lenormand's most popular play, LES RATÉS, rather a mediocre
exploitation of a stale formula of naturalism; but L'HOMME ET
SES FANTÔMES, in its application to a classic theme of the ideas
of modern psychology and in a certain non-naturalistic instinct for
dramatic poetry, is both interesting and new.
Mme Simone, during her last week in New York, performed
those two admirable comedies, LA PARISIENNE and AMOUREUSE.
The former of these, on the opening night, was diversified by a
scene of broad humour never contemplated by Becque. The curtain
rose immediately after falling on the second act to disclose a com-
mittee from one of those bi-patriotic organizations for promoting
the Franco-American entente cordiales, presenting Mme Simone
with the largest and clumsiest bunch of flowers I have ever seen. An
old gentleman who stated that he was a former singer stepped
forward and intoned a salutation in the grand manner of French
oratory. Then another Frenchman delivered an interminable
address in very bad English: he congratulated France and America
on having been able to establish what he described as their "friend-
shipness," not merely by the visit of Mme Simone, but also by the
American moving-picture production of such masterpieces of
French culture as The Two ORPHANS, THE THREE MUSKETEERS,
and THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME. Mme Simone replied
with a little speech of thanks in surprisingly perfect English and a
faltering orchestra was heard to launch forth upon the Marseillaise.
Everybody in the audience had to stand up and one gentleman
insisted upon singing the words intermittently, like an imperfectly
adjusted radio trying to catch the music of a concert. After the
Marseillaise, everybody started to sit down, but the orchestra
proceeded to the Star-Spangled Banner and, losing the thread
about half way through, struck off some acrid and eery passages
suggestive of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire. The gentleman con-


166
THE THEATRE
tinued to sing; the committee stood about the monstrous bouquet,
which they had up-ended on the stage like a shododendron bush.
And finally the curtain came down amidst laughter and applause.
There is something peculiarly irritating about this sort of thing-
of which the Gémier run, too, had its share-in connexion with
literature and the stage. One resents having Becque and Molière
made the agents of official propaganda. If their art by itself is
not enough to correct any unreasonable national prejudices which
may have been inspired by French foreign policy, it is scarcely
likely such ceremonies as this will be effective in disposing of them.
The opening matinée of the revival of CANDIDA by the Equity
Players was signalized by such a fury of clapping when any of the
actors either entered or left the stage as positively to impede the
progress of the play and suggest that the audience were inspired less
by an enthusiasm for the drama than by a warm personal feeling for
the cast. Not that the performance was not a good one: the women
particularly-Miss Clare Eames and Miss Katharine Cornell-
were excellent. But this indiscriminate clapping, aside from its
interruption of the play, is a dangerous habit: it very often turns
out at these family matinées that the actors are no good after all.
Something of this kind occurred at the first matinée of PAOLO AND
FRANCESCA: the performance opened with wild applause and closed
amid deep depression. This was perhaps not altogether the fault
of the actors, to whom the lifeless and flavourless characters of
Stephen Phillips probably gave little opportunity to act. In any
event, the only feature which enlivened this latter occasion was
a programme note written by a lady who had apparently confused
Paolo and Francesca with Tristan and Isolde and was under the
impression that the regrettable scandal in the Malatesta family
was an extremely ancient piece of folk-lore of mysterious origin.
Close HARMONY, by Dorothy Parker and Elmer Rice, is rather
in the vein of The Porters, The ADDING MACHINE, and Sinclair
Lewis' novels; but among its hideous caricatures of domestic life
it sometimes warms to scenes of an ironic tenderness quite unusual
in this genre. One can hardly-on the evidence of The ADDING
MACHINE-attribute these scenes to Mr Elmer Rice; so it must be
assumed that the honour for the best things is due to Mrs Parker.
EDMUND Wilson
e
.


MODERN ART
a
mom
THE best exhibition in town passes unnoticed. A percentage
I of the connoisseurs, those most closely allied with current
affairs in Paris, have seen the Seurat paintings in the Joseph
Brummer Galleries, but the public has been unaware. Four of
the more important canvases are lent by the estate of the late
John Quinn, but most of the works have been brought from
France. They are for sale, but in the third week of the show
Mr Brummer reports that not a single individual has inquired a
price. In a land where money speaks, so deep a silence is sig-
nificant of much. Mr Brummer is a shrewd man, shrewd in
judging pictures and shrewd in judging men, yet he is frankly
puzzled—as well he may be. Seurat, now, is an acknowledged
European master and a rare one. The total number of paintings
is not large and the first American exhibition of the work might
reasonably have been imagined creating a flurry, yet the Hudson
River was never for a moment in danger of conflagration. If
anything, it froze.
Looking at the matter now with hind-sight, I find that our
public, after all, ran true to form. The pictures are small, they
are not new, they are quiet. How raise a sensation over things
so essentially unsensational ? Who is there here who buys a
picture as a woman does a hat in a shop, because it has suddenly
become a soul-necessity? No one. We buy because "the others”
are buying or because some unevadable salesman has talked us into
it. Seurat didn't murder any one nor run off with somebody's
wife. He is not a figure of romance. All he did was to paint
studiously a few good pictures and die young. And good pictures
in America do not make their own réclame.
I can see why two classes of society "failed” with Seurat. Even
to the students who acclaim him he is not a subject of debate. He
is not only twenty years dead, but twenty years known. He pops
up casually in studio conversations, just as Blake, Redon, or Dela-
croix do, to illustrate a point, but like them, he is indubitably of
the past. He is not in present-day politics. He may prove, for
historians, the line of succession from Cézanne to Picasso and


168
MODERN ART
Braque, but what our talkers desire to know is who is to do the
bridging out from Picasso and Braque into the future. They
hustled up quickly enough last year to Wildenstein's to see the
Greek Picassos, for it seemed likely, then, that they would all
have to turn Greek, for they know quite definitely that when they
do turn it will not be for a mere matter of twenty years back-
ward. So much for our students.
The other reason is more delicate. Perhaps I shouldn't mention
it. I have a disturbing fear it was given me by one of our great
picture dealers in strictest confidence. But on my life I cannot
recollect which art-dealer! So I'll chance it. Besides, sooner or
later, you'd have to know it anyway. It seems that great classic
art is no longer sold in public in America. Everything is done
secretly. When the picture has been surreptitiously acquired then
the great millionaires are let in singly to view it. If persuaded
that no other millionaire has cast eyes upon the chef-d'æuvre in
question he buys it instantly. If not so persuaded, everything is off,
the millionaire departs in a huff, and the Rembrandt, or what-
ever it is, is taboo. It is either deposited in the ash-can or pre-
sented, with the dealer's compliments, to some western museum.
Why this should be so I cannot fathom. It is millionaire psychol-
ogy, however, and it is only because I am not a millionaire that
I do not understand it. But with such a state of affairs in this
country you can see why nobody asked the price of the Seurats.
Seurat is not a fresh discovery of the long-haired students, to be
gobbled up instantly by the half-dozen who like to be in on the
first of everything, and he must appeal, if he is to appeal at all,
to the wealthy acquirers of classic art—and how could these formal
connoisseurs violate their own code by actually picking canvases
off the wall of a public gallery? You see the difficulty.
Mr Brummer smiled at himself sub-acidly, I fancied, as he
recounted his lack of success with this show, but there are some
failures that are more honourable than some successes. In the
end I think he will have added to his prestige with the adventure.
I ought to add, to be honest, that my own pleasure in the work
is quiet. With the best will in the world I see nothing over which
to make a pertinent hullabaloo. And it is the first time, too,
that I have encountered a thorough exposition of the Seurat prin-
cipe, with its rise in the quiet but good student work to the quiet


HENRY MCBRIDE
169
masterpieces of the later years. The pleasure is that which one
takes in a sober, well-made book by a real person, the sort of
book one goes back to continually for steady entertainment, but
which never bowls one over. Even the satire of Seurat is quiet.
It is satire, of course, though the Seurat enthusiasts of my acquaint-
ance do not dwell upon it much. They are all for the workman-
ship-and in Mr Pach's case, chiefly for the link in the chain
of history. The distinctly plump young woman engaged in pow-
dering herself is seen with humour, but with the correct satirical
humour that Baudelaire insists upon, that is more than half
sympathy. It is indeed amazing that so enduring and architectural
an arrangement can have been evolved from such contorted furni-
ture as the young woman owns and surrounds herself with; and
that the effect is not arrived at impetuously is self-evident. Every
touch is calm and unhurriedly exact. In the final, best work,
the Circus, which now, by the will of Mr Quinn, goes back to the
Louvre, the wit struggles through the Seurat repression to a point
that is almost bitter. The Mephisto touch re-appears like a
Wagnerian motif all over the canvas, not only in the moustache
of the ring-master, but in the chignon of the equestrienne and the
traits of those attending sprites, the people of the audience. One
suspects the scene to be an outside attraction at a not-too-cruel
modern inferno, but those of us who are hipped on the subject of
good painting are not permitted to suspect too much. We are soon
seduced by the perfect balance achieved between unlikely lines and
the freshness of a colour which is as much a testimony to Seurat's
old-fashioned thoroughness of method as anything he puts forth,
being apparently as lively now as on the day it was applied.
HENRY MCBRIDE
IOW
IS


MUSICAL CHRONICLE
THE pity Karol Szymanowski possesses no greater capacity for
form! He has so liquid a touch on music, so genuine a
lyricism! The violin concerto played in Philadelphia and New
York by Paul Kochanski and the Philadelphia band is a brilliant
and jewel-like thing. You banquet upon high, light, and delicate
sonorities rich in effect, upon a refined romantic melodic, and
definite musical ideas and statements that in all their breadth are
held from commonness by bold harmonic strokes. The tapping of
the resources of the violin which distinguished the three Myths is
continued in the concerto. The composer dandles his solo instru-
ment with affection and glee, discovering its remote and secret
timbres. In the final movement he gives a cantabile theme entire
to the white whistling harmonics. And the fantasy and elegance
of sound which he wakens from the old stringed box is spread over
the accompanying orchestra. Whatever Szymanowski touches
becomes aesthetic; you find yourself grateful to him for the sound
of music which he always gives. Nevertheless, it is never entirely
possible to bestow the fullest consent on what he brings, and the
concerto for violin does not vary the rule established by other of
his compositions. The music is too ultraviolet, like the orchestral
compositions of Scriabine. There is somewhat of a want of
balance between the refined and forceful elements. The former
predominate overmuch. The pitch of the concerto seems a trifle
strained, held up not without effort in the tenor range. The rougher
and more acrid notes are present: the brisk piping march-movement
which ushers in the work recurs throughout it; some sharper tones
relieve the ubiquitous sweet; yet one yearns for a genuine counter-
weight of Brahmsian brushwood and harsh rude sound. And the
ecstatic Tristanesque lyricism is out of relation. This romantic
melodic of Szymanowski has met with some disparagement, been
accused of want of distinction. There is no doubt its present con-
dition is not satisfactory; we merely disagree that the fault lies in
the intrinsic value of the ideas themselves; and give the blame to
the form. The slow sensuous mood seems to us insufficiently inter-
woven with the fabric of the concerto. The transitions are either


PAUL ROSENFELD
171
nonexistent or inferior. As a result the ecstacy descends on us with-
out appropriate preparation and without the inevitability of neces-
sity; and grows less welcome the more persuasive it threatens to
become. One imagines a pair of lovers who swoon almost before
they have come together; indeed who seem to have come together
because each desires to pass out in burning swoonfulness and swoon-
ful burningness. And one feels a too-luxurious silken life behind
this easy ecstasy, a European luxuriousness removed from the earth,
and existing exclusively on the labour of others. Probably the
want of balance and the consequent incapacity for form is a racial
deficiency; there is too much pastel in every Pole. Nevertheless we
find ourselves hoping it is not, and capable of remedy. For Szyman-
owski is a rich real talent, one of the few immediately in relation
with musical means; and it is precisely against ultraviolet art
that Old Man Time is found levelling the blade of his scythe.
We have very heartily to congratulate ourselves upon Carl
Ruggles. Men and Mountains, presented at the December con-
cert of the International Composers Guild, has authentic indubi-
table movement. If the compositions of this Cape Cod American
offered in other seasons by the Guild gave evidences of an energy
struggling for expression, the new suite for small orchestra re-
veals a living powerful touch upon material. We cannot yet
advance Carl Ruggles as a musician in complete possession of his
idiom. He is still bluntly building through Schoenberg and the
German classicists toward his own expression. Nevertheless, Men
and Mountains exists as a living self-sufficient object. Its three
movements are not mosaics carefully pieced together. There is
an inner necessity; and they appear like something naturally
evolved, moving very nakedly and directly and establishing a
strong line. Ruggles' sonorities are always magnificent, and in the
first few measures of his suite he seems to us to have succeeded
in giving fluently, tersely, and easily what Prokofieff gives all too
laboriously in the close of his Scythian Suite: the sensation of a
vast glittering metallic sheet. The weaving violins of Lilacs, the
second section, are conducted with great eloquence and simplicity:
it is not inexplicable that we should have felt through the pleading,
hesitating, yearning tones of the strings the curious American nos-
talgia and smothered passion, or received the entire movement as


172
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
a cry for life. The last section is particularly interesting for its
rhythm; the “surprise" ending momentarily takes one off one's
balance. And it was not by default that Ruggles towered so that
evening above the other musicians represented with him upon the
programme. Ravel, Goossens, and Egon Wellesz are all dis-
tinguished musicians. But none of them, with the exception of
Wellesz, appeared to be striving to give what moved them.
Goossens seems to have allowed himself to be misled by the
chatter of Strawinsky. His Fantasy shows him trying to make
music outside himself bit by bit as though it were mosaic-work.
Ravel is diverting himself in Tzigane with well-worn vaguely
Oriental motives. Ruggles alone is setting out to give what it is
that compels him. He has something to express; and for that
reason we see a career stretching far ahead of him.
Apropos of Ruggles, it seems we shall have to count Mr Law-
rence Gilman out of the ranks of the music-critics. Unlike Mr
Ernest Newman, he does not indulge in British booricisms. Unlike
Mr Olin Downes he does not seek to strike to the ground music
which leaves him uncertain, by pretending that applause roused by
it comes from coteries, cliques, and persons prepared to be en-
chanted. Unlike Mr Deems Taylor, he does not fail to put in his
appearance at important concerts of new music. He has genuine
learning, general culture, a revered spirit; life has a chance with
him; and do not his omissions and his commissions both set him
outside the ranks of musical criticism as it is known to us in
New York?
Too bad we have to be ungracious and remonstrate with Mr
Stokowski in the matter of Hyperprism. For the careful prepara
tion and performance of Varèse's work places us heavily in his
debt for a red-letter evening. Nevertheless it seems to us some-
what a mistake not to have repeated the composition at the close
of the concert: to have informed the audience the repetition would
take place, a few minutes for retreat being granted those who did
not wish to refine their hearing. The style of the Italo-French
composer is so advanced that it can be easily accessible to no one;
hence the twenty-odd rehearsals devoted to the preparation of Hy-
perprism did not in a single public performance fully realize their
objective, the presentation of the work. Not that the few minutes


PAUL ROSENFELD
173
ting his of performance were not crammed with new experiences. You
Le of
c heard sounds coming in waves; a single sound advancing; then,
red so as it faded, another rising to take its place; a process recalling the
an upa: manner in which the ear synthesizes the vibrations of the world.
real'. You perceived a quality of sound that conjured up quite invol-
Eception untarily inside you fragments and vistas of the port and the
ved the industrial world invested with a magic never had by them before.
ed b: Varèse undoubtedly has done as much with the aural sensations
E to of contemporary nature as Picasso with the purely visual ones. And
osair. you perceived an extreme relaxation of movement, quiet, gay, and
Al jazzy, an extremely artistic and discreet use of the astounding
wbiz: battery of anvils, slapsticks, Chinese blocks, lion roars, rattles,
for a sleighbells, and sirens; and magnificences such as the introduction
of the sleighbells in the sudden calmato a tempo, and the brass in
M: L the last overpowering measures. The musician could reinforce his
impressions by an examination of the score, and receive additional
Le indications of the nature of the form, the polyphony of rhythms,
the telegraph-style sharpness and concision of phrase, the continual
emotional modification of thematic material, with the result that no
e bez single experience had by the auditor is ever left to recommence.
Indeed, there was so much of living novelty that one had no time
for that deepest experience the experience of form. So although
it is obvious that Edgar Varèse is using new tones to express the
movement in which he has his being, that he is setting down a
system of relationships as far removed from Strawinsky as
Strawinsky is from Debussy, and setting down great masses of it,
we cannot estimate how much of it he has already gotten, in any
single piece, and whether his forms are complete or fragmentary
only, until we have had ampler opportunity to steep ourselves in
each one of his amazing symphonies.
Paul ROSENFELD
couset
ХҮГ-


COMMENT
"Compression is the first grace of style.”
Democritus.
ATE have decided to endeavour to keep alight, anyhow
V through these glum winter months, our beacon for Miss
Marianne Moore.
I should here like to expose certain literary fragments, torn
jaggedly from the hard context, fragments which, being felt out
with the hammer of our intellect, return the consistency of rock-
crystal, fragments which, being thrown upon the hearth of our
sympathetic understanding, betray the immense, the salt-veined,
the profoundly-premeditated, chromatization of enkindled drift-
wood.
INICI
"It is a far cry from the 'queen full of jewels'
and the beau with the muff,
from the gilt coach shaped like a perfume bottle,
to the conjunction of the Monongahela and the Allegheny,
and the scholastic philosophy of the wilderness
to combat which one must stand outside and laugh
since to go in is to be lost.”
Was there ever a sentence so packed? Has any other poet ever
given us, in such abundance, examples in "the first grace of style”?
And if there be any so thoughtless as to boggle at the word “poet”
applied to one who composes sentences of this nature-in the
popular mind the poetical Aux goes on and off at a tangent of
her own sweet own-let him collate these Observations of Miss
Moore with the Essays of one who exhibitsin a degree not second
to that of Miss Moore—the same “first grace of style": let him
weigh the ponderable sentences of Sir Francis Bacon. There also
speaks a master: but there speaks, Miss Moore's generous lauda-
tion of him notwithstanding,' not what I myself should denom-
inate a "poet.” Both in the verse of Miss Moore and in the
1 Cf. Sir Francis Bacon, by Marianne Moore. The Dial, April 1924.
U
.
nne
ore.


COMMENT
175
prose of Lord Bacon the intellect is always in the saddle, squarely.
But in Lord Bacon this rider has his own way always; it is his
dominance we note. He rides like a Roman Emperor: and the
horse, like the wife, of Caesar shall be above suspicion. The
mount of Caesar may be furnished with blinders; and the saddle
and the harness may rightly be of iron: for the life of an im-
perial mount is neither in the eyes nor in the body; it may legit-
imately go on only in the head of the imperial rider.
Not so the mount of a poet: not so the mount of Miss Moore,
And if sometimes the manoeuvres of her intellect are difficult of
comprehension, this is not for any equestrian deficiency in the
more than Caesarhood of that erect mind. This is because Pegasus
himself is party to each manoeuvre. Those immortal eyes are
open to this world; those immortal nostrils flare to every world-
born gust; those immortal ears have apprehended the apposite
dissonances of wilding stars; that immortal tail plumes on its
unemperored own. There are wild oats in that stout belly; and
those prepotent wings will not lie meek. A winged horse will
dart for beauty; a winged horse will have his winged shy. Intellect
in the saddle-yes, squarely—but an intellect
"incorps'd and demi-natur'd
With the brave beast.”
An intellect which is part and parcel of the body. An intellect
which smells the May. An intellect susceptible of seduction.
One may sit a long time in the mullioned and leaded and
Tudor embrasures of that Lord Keeper of the Great Seal before
one makes out a "beau with the muff” or a "gilt coach shaped
like a perfume bottle.” Nor, if you do espy such, will you likely
espy them in the predicament of a confrontation with the conjunc-
tion of the Monongahela and the Allegheny.” ... In other
words, you will not generally uncover in those deeply spaded
Essays wild images of the imagination, images that have been
culled abroad, and encompassed here for their own sweet-smell-
ing sakes; still less will you find such intricately juxtaposed to
one another, with the odd, quizzical, poet's appetition for the show-
ering criss-cross of quite inextricable and quite soul-dissolving
overtones. Miss Marianne Moore and Sir Francis Bacon alike


176
COMMENT
possess the analytical mind: Miss Marianne Moore possesses an
analytical nose also, and is (as a woman should be) inclined to
follow it. And her analyses, inordinately ordinate as they so
victoriously are, subserve an end beyond analysis: their admirable
elbows admirably ad hoc, their high rearings and higher boltings,
their altogether porcupinity impeccable,—these are just Miss
Moore's private ways of delivering Miss Moore's aesthetic fact.
“By their fruits ye shall know them”: and by their poetical
end are these wanderingly suspended periods constituted a poetical
technique as legitimate as the traditionally ordained verbal com-
plication of a Provençal sestina.
"I remember a swan under the willows in Oxford
with flamingo colored, maple-
leaflike feet. It reconnoitered like a battle
ship. Disbelief and conscious fastidiousness were the
staple
ingredients in its
disinclination to move. Finally its hardihood
was not proof against its
proclivity to more fully appraise such bits
of food as the stream
bore counter to it; it made away with what I gave it
to eat.”
After the consciously articulated analysis of one who exhibits,
upon such an occasion of state as this, the consciously beauti-
ful and fastidious assurance wherewith that swan itself aloofly
floats, the words "made away with”—Have you seen a swan
do it?
“the lucid movements of the royal yacht upon the learned
scenery of Egypt—"
How that yacht veritably coils! Like the sophisticated and fine-
bolted—as white flour has been fine-bolted—cousin to the agility
of a conger-eel! And how the pyramid and the sphinx, obedient
to the quiet exorcism of Miss Moore, block in the appropriate back-


COMMENT
177
ground! It is all of one piece: it exhibits, in a more defined
medium, the solidity of a line from Tacitus.
"Spectacular and nimble animal the fish,
Whose scales turn aside the sun's sword with their polish.”
This of New York harbor:
rom
“the square-rigged four-rigged four-master, the liner,
the battleship like the two-
thirds submerged section of an iceberg; the tug
dipping and pushing, the bell striking as it comes; the
steam yacht, lying
like a new made arrow on the
stream;"
Has any one ever described an ironclad battleship before? And
have you ever observed a tug poke, manifoldly pulsating, up the
North River? Have you ever seen a long, slim, low, American-
designed steam-yacht stretched and combed and strained by the
current whereon and -in she lies? Have you ever seen a new-
made arrow on a stream?
“Springing about with
froglike ac-
curacy”
I cite this fraction from an exhaustive discussion of the intra-
mural and the extra-mural activities of a feline gentleman (nomine
Petrus) because it exhibits, in a startling fashion, what alarming
effects Miss Moore can, from her severe and individual literary
form, upon occasion draw. We have all observed, perhaps upon
a flowered Aubusson, a cat "springing about,” but until Miss
Moore had developed her individual technique of typography,
that technique in accordance with which a word is often run
from one line into, or rather onto, another, and in some cases, as
here, even from one stanza or strophe onto another—until this


178
COMMENT
development had been achieved, Miss Moore herself could not
have startled us into this proximity almost too immediate to her
aroused cat.
"the mouse's limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its
mouth”
And in the poem entitled To Military Progress the phrase applied
to the quick-gathering crows
“Black minute-men.”
The Observation To a Steam Roller is, in America, of social
interest:
“You crush all the particles down
into close conformity, and then walk back and forth
on them.
Sparkling chips of rock
are crushed down to the level of the parent block.”
Miss Moore is herself a “Sparkling chip,” but of too hard a wild-
ness to be ever "crushed down."
"and the fractional magnificence