of
how he chanced to be a cripple came out slowly. You are to
remember that my own head was a bit unsteady. In the darkness
the river, very deep and very powerful off New Orleans, was
creeping away to the gulf. The whole river seemed to move away
from us and then to slip noiselessly into the darkness like a vast
moving sidewalk.
When he had first come to me, in the late afternoon, and when
we had started for our walk together I had noticed that one of
his legs dragged as we went along and that he kept putting a
thin hand to an equally thin cheek.
Sitting over by the river he explained as a boy would explain
that he had stubbed his toe running down a hill.
When the World War broke out he went over to England and
managed to get himself enrolled as an aviator, very much I gath-
ered in the spirit in which a countryman, in a city for a night,
might take in a show.
The English had been glad enough to take him on. He was
one more man. They were glad enough to take any one on just
then. He was small and delicately built, but after he got in he
turned out to be a first rate flyer, serving all through the war with
a British flying squadron, but at the last got into a crash and fell.
Both legs were broken, one of them in three places, the scalp
was badly torn and some of the bones of the face had been
splintered.
They had put him into a field hospital and had patched him
up. "It was my fault if the job was rather bungled," he said.
"You see it was a field hospital, a hell of a place. Men were torn
all to pieces, groaning and dying. Then they moved me back to
a base hospital and it wasn't much better. The fellow who had
the bed next to mine had shot himself in the foot to avoid going
into a battle. A lot of them did that, but why they picked on
their own feet that way is beyond me. It's a nasty place, full of
small bones. If you're ever going to shoot yourself don't pick


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
273
on a spot like that. Don't pick on your feet. I tell you it's a
bad idea.
"Anyway the man in the hospital was always making a fuss
and I got sick of him and the place too. When I got better I
faked, said the nerves of my leg didn't hurt, said the nerves up
in my face didn't hurt. It was a lie of course. The nerves of
my leg and of my face have never quit hurting. I guess maybe,
if I had told the truth, they might have fixed me up all right."
I got it. No wonder he carried his drinks so well. When I
understood I wanted to keep on drinking with him, wanted to
stay with him until he had got tired of me as he had of the man
who lay beside him in the base hospital over there somewhere in
France.
The point was that he never slept, could not sleep, except when
he was a little drunk. "I'm a nut," he said smiling.
It was after we got over to Aunt Sally's that he talked most.
Aunt Sally had gone to bed when we got there, but she got up
when we rang the bell and we all went to sit together in the little
patio back of her house. She is a large woman with great arms
and rather a paunch and she had put on nothing but a light
flowered dressing gown over a thin, ridiculously girlish, nightgown.
By this time the moon had come up and, outside, in the narrow
street of the Vieux Carre, three drunken sailors from a ship in the
river were sitting on a curb and singing a song,
10
ms
"I've got to get it,
You've got to get it,
We've all got to get it
In our own good time."
They had rather nice boyish voices and every time they sang a
verse and had done the chorus they all laughed together heartily.
In Aunt Sally's patio there are many broad-leaved banana plants
and a Chinaberry tree throwing their soft purple shadows on a
brick floor.
As for Aunt Sally, she is as strange to me as he was. When
we came and when we were all seated at a little table in the
patio, she ran into her house and presently came back with a
bottle of whisky. She, it seemed, had understood him at once,


274
A MEETING SOUTH
II
as
had understood without unnecessary words that the little Southern
man lived always in the black house of pain, that whisky was
good to him, that it quieted his throbbing nerves, temporarily at
least. “Everything is temporary when you come to that,” I can
fancy Aunt Sally's saying.
We sat for a time in silence, David having shifted his allegiance
and taken two drinks out of Aunt Sally's bottle. Presently he
arose and walked up and down the patio floor, crossing and recross-
ing the network of delicately outlined shadows on the bricks.
“It's really all right, the leg,” he said, “something just presses on
the nerves, that's all.” In me there was a self-satisfied feeling.
I had done the right thing. I had brought him to Aunt Sally.
"I have brought him to a mother.” She has always made me feel
that way since I have known her.
And now I shall have to explain her a little. It will not be so
easy. Our whole neighbourhood is alive with tales concerning her.
Aunt Sally came to New Orleans in the old days, when the town
was alive, in the wide-open days. What she had been before she
came here no one knows, but anyway she opened a place. That
was very, very long ago when I was myself but a lad, up in Ohio.
As I have already said Aunt Sally came from somewhere up in
the Middle-Western country. In some obscure subtle way it
would flatter me to think she came from my state.
The house she had opened was one of the older places in the
French Quarter down here, and when she had got her hands on it
Aunt Sally had a hunch. Instead of making the place modern,
cutting it up into small rooms, all that sort of thing, she left it
just as it was and spent her money in rebuilding falling old walls,
mending winding broad old stairways, repairing dim high-ceilinged
old rooms, soft-coloured old marble mantles. After all we do
seem attached to sin and there are so many people busy making
sin unattractive. It is good to find someone who takes the other
road. It would have been so very much to Aunt Sally's advantage
to have made the place modern, that is to say in the business she
was in at that time. If a few old rooms, wide old stairways, old
cooking ovens built into the walls, if all these things did not
facilitate the stealing in of couples on dark nights they at least
did something else. She had opened a gambling and drinking
ve


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
275
house, but one can have no doubt about the ladies stealing in.
“I was on the make all right,” Aunt Sally told me once.
She ran the place and took in money and the money she spent
on the place itself. A falling wall was made to stand up straight
and fine again, the banana plants were made to grow in the patio,
the Chinaberry tree got started and was helped through the years
of adolescence. On the wall the lovely Rose of Montana bloomed
madly. The fragrant Lantana grew in a dense mass at a corner of
the wall.
When the Chinaberry tree, planted at the very centre of the
patio, began to get up into the light it filled the whole neighbour.
hood with fragrance in the spring.
Fifteen, twenty years of that, with Mississippi River gamblers
and racehorse men sitting at tables by windows in the huge rooms
upstairs in the house that had once, no doubt, been the town
house of some rich planter's family—in the boom days of the
'forties. Women stealing in too in the dusk of evenings. Drinks
being sold. Aunt Sally raking down the kitty from the game,
raking in her share, quite ruthlessly.
At night getting a good price too from the lovers. No ques-
tions asked, a good price for drinks. Moll Flanders might have
lived with Aunt Sally. What a pair they would have made.
The Chinaberry tree beginning to be lusty. The Lantana blos-
soming-in the fall the Rose of Montana.
Aunt Sally getting hers. Using the money to keep the old house
in fine shape. Salting some away all the time.
A motherly soul, good sensible Middle-Western woman, eh?
Once a racehorse man left twenty-four thousand dollars with her
and disappeared. No one knew she had it. There was a report
the man was dead. He had killed a gambler in a place down by
the French Market and while they were looking for him he man-
aged to slip in to Aunt Sally's and leave his swag. Sometime
later a body was found floating in the river and it was identified
as the horseman, but in reality he had been picked up in a wire-
tapping haul in New York City and did not get out of his North-
ern prison for six years.
When he did get out naturally he skipped for New Orleans.
No doubt he was somewhat shaky. She had him. If he squealed
SO


276
A MEETING SOUTH
there was the murder charge to be brought up and held over his
head. It was night when he arrived and Aunt Sally went at once
to an old brick oven built into the wall of the kitchen and took
out a bag. “There it is,” she said. The whole affair was a part
of the day's work for her in those days.
Gamblers at the tables in some of the rooms upstairs—lurking
couples—from the old patio below the fragrance of growing things.
When she was fifty Aunt Sally had got enough and had put
them all out. She did not stay in the way of sin too long and she
never went in too deep, like that Moll Flanders, and so she was
all right and sitting pretty. “They wanted to gamble and drink
and play with the ladies. The ladies liked it all right. I never
saw none of them come in protesting too much. The worst was in
the morning when they went away. They looked so sheepish and
guilty. If they felt that way what made them come? If I took
to a man you bet I'd want him and no monkey business or nothing
doing.
“I got a little tired of all of them, that's the truth.” Aunt
Sally laughed. “But that wasn't until I had got what I went after.
Oh, pshaw, they took up too much of my time after I got enough
to be safe.”
Aunt Sally is now sixty-five. If you like her and she likes you
she will let you sit with her in her patio gossiping of the old times,
of the old river days. Perhaps—well you see there is still some-
thing of the French influence at work in New Orleans, a sort of
matter-of-factness about life—what I started to say is that if you
know Aunt Sally and she likes you, and if, by chance, your lady
likes the smell of flowers growing in a patio at night, Really
I am going a bit too far. I only meant to suggest that Aunt
Sally at sixty-five is not harsh. She is a motherly soul.
We sat in the garden talking, the little Southern poet, Aunt
Sally, and myself-or rather they talked and I listened. The
Southerner's great grandfather was English, a younger son, and
he came over here to make his fortune as a planter and did it.
Once he and his sons owned several great plantations with slaves,
but now his father had but a few hundred acres left, about one of
the old houses—somewhere over in Alabama. The land is heavily
mortgaged and most of it has not been under cultivation for years.
Negro labour is growing more and more expensive and unsatisfac-


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
277
tory since so many negroes have run off to Chicago, and the poet's
father and the one brother at home are not much good at working
the land. "We aren't strong enough and we don't know how,"
the poet said.
The Southerner had come to New Orleans to see Fred, to talk
with Fred about poetry, but Fred was out of town. I could but
walk about with him, help him drink his home-made whisky.
Already I had taken nearly a dozen drinks. In the morning I
would have a headache.
I drew within myself, listening while David and Aunt Sally
talked. The Chinaberry tree had been so and so many years
growing—she spoke of it as she might have spoken of a daughter.
“It had a lot of different sicknesses when it was young, but it
pulled through.” Someone had built a high wall on one side her
patio so that the climbing plants did not get as much sunlight
as they needed. The banana plants however did very well and
now the Chinaberry tree was big and strong enough to take care
of itself. She kept giving David drinks of whisky and he
He told her of the place in his leg where something, a bone,
perhaps, pressed on the nerve, and of the place on his left cheek.
A silver plate had been set under the skin. She touched the spot
with her fat old fingers. The moonlight fell softly down on the
patio foor. “I can't sleep except somewhere out of doors,” David
said.
He explained how that, at home on his father's plantation, he
had to be thinking all day of whether or not he would be able to
sleep at night.
"I go to bed and then I get up. There is always a bottle of
whisky on the table downstairs and I take three or four drinks.
Then I go out doors.” Often very nice things happened.
"In the fall it's best,” he said. “You see the niggers are making
molasses.” Every negro cabin on the place had a little clump of
ground back of it where cane grew and in the fall the negroes were
making their 'lasses. "I take the bottle in my hand and go into
the fields, unseen by the niggers. Having the bottle with me,
that way, I drink a good deal and then lie down on the ground.
The mosquitoes bite me some, but I don't mind much. I reckon
I get drunk enough not to mind. The little pain makes a kind
of rhythm for the bigger pain—like poetry.


278
A MEETING SOUTH
“In a kind of shed the niggers are making the 'lasses, that is to
say pressing the juice out of the cane and boiling it down. They
keep singing as they work. In a few years now I reckon our family
won't have any land. The banks could take it now if they wanted
it. They don't want it. It would be too much trouble for them
to manage I reckon.
"In the fall, at night, the niggers are pressing the cane. Our
niggers live pretty much on 'lasses and grits.
“They like working at night and I'm glad they do. There is an
old mule going round and round in a circle and beside the press
a pile of the dry cane. Niggers come, men and women, old and
young. They build a fire outside the shed. The old mule goes
round and round.
“The niggers sing. They laugh and shout. Sometimes the
young niggers with their gals make love on the dry cane pile. I
can hear it rattle.
“I have come out of the big house, me and my bottle, and I
creep along, low on the ground, 'til I get up close. There I lie.
I'm a little drunk. It all makes me happy. I can sleep some, on
the ground like that, when the niggers are singing, when no one
knows I'm there. I don't know. Maybe they do know I'm there.
"I could sleep here, on these bricks here," David said, pointing
to where the shadows cast by the broad leaves of the banana
plants were broadest and deepest.
He got up from his chair and went limping, dragging one foot
after the other, across the patio and lay down on the bricks.
For a long time Aunt Sally and I sat looking at each other, say-
ing nothing, and presently she made a sign with her fat finger and
we crept away into the house. "I'll let you out at the front door.
You let him sleep, right where he is," she said. In spite of her
huge bulk and her age she had walked across the patio floor as
softly as a kitten. Beside her I felt awkward and uncertain.
When we had got inside she whispered to me. She had some
champagne left from the old days, hidden away somewhere in the
old house. "I'm going to send a magnum up to his dad when he
goes home," she explained.
She, it seemed, was very happy, having him there, drunk and
asleep on the brick floor of the patio. “We used to have some
good men come here in the old days too,” she said. As we went


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
279
Um
into the house through the kitchen door I had looked back at
David, asleep now in the heavy shadows at a corner of the wall.
There was no doubt he also was happy, had been happy ever since
I had brought him into the presence of Aunt Sally. What a small
huddled figure of a man he looked, lying thus on the brick, under
the night sky, in the deep shadows of the banana plants.
· I went into the house and out at the front door and into a dark
narrow street thinking. Well, I was after all a Northern man. It
was possible Aunt Sally had become completely Southern, being
down here so long.
I remembered that it was the chief boast of her life that once
she had shaken hands with John L. Sullivan and that she had
known P. T. Barnum. “We were friends once," she said with a
touch of pride in her voice, speaking of Barnum. “I knew Dave
Gears. You mean to tell me you don't know who Dave Gears
was? Why he was one of the biggest gamblers we ever had in
this city.”
As for David and his poetry it is in the manner of Shelley.
"If I could write like Shelley I would be happy. I wouldn't care
what happened to me,” he had said during our walk of the early
part of the evening.
I went along enjoying my thoughts. The street was dark and
occasionally I laughed. A notion had come to me. It kept dancing
in my head and I thought it very delicious. It had something to
do with aristocrats, with such people as Aunt Sally and David.
“Lordy,” I thought, “maybe I do understand them a little. I'm
from the Middle-West myself and it seems we can produce our
aristocrats too. I kept thinking of Aunt Sally and of my native
state of Ohio. "Lordy, I hope she comes from up there, but I
don't think I had better inquire too closely into her past," I said
to myself as I went smiling away into the soft smoky night.


DR FREUD ON ART
BY CLIVE BELL
CUPPOSE an aesthete, armed with an hypothesis—the hypoth-
D esis, say, that Significant Form is the one thing common
and peculiar to works of art—were to imagine that this hypoth-
esis of his would explain every human activity: suppose, for
instance, he were to tell you that what a poker-player really aims
at is to hold a hand in which reds and blacks, court cards and
plain, achieve a perfectly harmonious and aesthetically satisfying
rhythm, to which end he (the player) discards and draws; sup-
pose he were to add that those persons who hopelessly lack
aesthetic sensibility, who can never establish an aesthetically sig,
nificant sequence, are the irremediably bad players: what would
you think of him? Certainly, you would have to tell him that
he was barking up the wrong tree; but whether you would be
justified in considering that this mania for forcing all nature to
submit to a theory disabled his judgement on all questions is less
clear. I beseech you to think twice or thrice before making up
your mind; for on your decision depends the reputation of no
less a person than Dr Sigmund Freud.
Hark to him:
"He (the artist) is one who is urged on by instinctive needs
which are too clamorous; he longs to attain to honour, power,
riches, fame, and the love of women; but he lacks the means of
achieving these gratifications. So, like any other with an unsatis-
fied longing, he turns away from reality and transfers all his
interest, and all his Libido too, on to the creation of his wishes
in the life of phantasy. ... He understands how to elaborate
his day-dreams." 1
The artist, in fact, is one who has set his heart on driving ex-
pensive women from expensive restaurants in expensive motor-
1 Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis.


CLIVE BELL
281
cars, on getting a title and becoming "a celebrity,” and generally
living sumptuously. This, unluckily, he cannot afford to do. But
he dreams; and he dreams so intensely that he can communicate
his dreams to others, who share them, but cannot dream so vividly.
For, in Dr Freud's words, “to those who are not artists the gratifi-
cation that can be drawn from the springs of phantasy is very
limited; their inexorable repressions prevent the enjoyment of
all but the meagre day-dreams which can become conscious.” But
through "the artist's" "art" the public obtains, in the world of
make-believe, satisfaction for its clamorous needs, and pays the
artist so handsomely for the benefit that he soon obtains satisfac-
tion for his in the world of reality. Art is, to stick to the Freudian
jargon, "wish fulfilment”; the artist “realizes" his own dreams of
being a great man and having a good time, and in so doing grati-
fies a public which vaguely and feebly dreams the same dreams,
but cannot dream them efficiently.
Now this, I dare say, is a pretty good account of what house-
maids, and Dr Freud presumably, take for art. Indeed, the
novelette is the perfect example of "wish fulfilment in the world
of phantasy." The housemaid dreams of becoming a great actress
and being loved by a handsome earl; Dr Freud dreams of having
been born a handsome earl and loving a great actress. And for
fifteen delirious minutes, while the story lasts, the dream comes
true. But this has nothing to do with art. Any artist or any
poker-player may, or may not, have a taste for expensive pleas-
ures, but qua artist or poker-player he has other ends in view.
The artist is not concerned with even the "sublimations” of his
normal lusts, because he is concerned with a problem which is
quite outside normal experience. His object is to create a form
which shall match an aesthetic conception, not to create a form
which shall satisfy Dr Freud's unappeased longings. Neither
Dr Freud's day-dreams of fame, women, and power, nor yet his
own, are what the artist is striving to express; though they are
what Dr Freud and his like wish him to express. The artist's
problem is aesthetic; hence the endless quarrel about happy end-
ings between a popular novelist who is ever so little an artist
and his public. The public wants to have its wishes fulfilled;
the artist wants to create a form which shall be aesthetically


282
DR FREUD ON ART
PS-
right. It is disagreeable for the young lady who has been dream-
ing of herself as Cordelia to be hanged in the last act. Shake-
speare, however, was not considering the young lady's dreams nor
even his own of what would be a nice sort of world: he was
concerned with an artistic problem. Of that problem Dr Freud,
unluckily, knows nothing. He knows nothing about art, or about
the feelings of people who can appreciate art. There is no reason
why he should know anything about either; only, being ignorant,
he ought to have held his tongue.
Art has nothing to do with dreams. The artist is not one who
dreams more vividly, but who is a good deal wider awake, than
most people. His grand and absorbing problem is to create a
form that shall match a conception, whatever that conception
may be. He is a creator, not a dreamer. And we, who care for
art, go to it, not for the fulfilment of our dreams of desirable
life, but for something that life can never give for that peculiar
and quite disinterested state of mind which philosophers call aes-
thetic ecstasy. We ask the artist, not to make our dreams come
true, but to give us a new thing, which comes out of his own
experience.
I once heard Mr Roger Fry trying to explain this to a roomful
of psychoanalysts; and, following in his footsteps, I have at-
tempted the same task myself. I have begged them the psy-
chologists to believe that the emotion provoked in me by St
Paul's Cathedral has nothing to do with my notion of having a
good time. I have said that it was comparable rather with the
emotion provoked in a mathematician by the perfect and perfectly
economical solution of a problem, than with that provoked in me
by the prospect of going to Monte Carlo in particularly favour-
able circumstances. But they knew all about St Paul's Cathedral
and all about quadratic equations and all about me apparently.
So I told them that if Cézanne was for ever painting apples, that
had nothing to do with an insatiable appetite for those handsome,
but to me unpalatable, fruit. At the word “apples," however,
my psychologists broke into titters. Apparently, they knew all
about apples, too. And they knew that Cézanne painted them
for precisely the same reason that poker-players desire to be dealt
a pair of aces.


CLIVE BELL
283
C
As a matter of fact, Cézanne would very likely have preferred
flowers, the forms and colours of which are said by many to be
even more inspiring than those of fruit; only flowers fade, and
Cézanne was extraordinarily slow. It was not till late in life he
discovered that artificial flowers would serve his purpose just as
well as real ones. Apples are comparatively durable; and apples
can be depended upon to behave themselves. It was the steadi-
ness as much as the comparative immarcescibility of apples which
endeared them to Cézanne—a secret which once, by accident, he
betrayed. He was painting a portrait of M Ambroise Vollard,
for which I have heard he demanded not less than fifty sittings.
Now, in the warm Provençal afternoons, M Vollard used to grow
sleepy, and used sometimes to doze. But when the model dozes
inevitably the pose changes. To counteract this danger Cézanne
so arranged the chair on the model's throne that the slightest
movement on the sitter's part would bring him crashing to the
ground. M Vollard's spirit was all right, but the flesh was weak;
lunch was over, the afternoon warm, off nodded the sitter, and
down came the chair. Slightly stunned—the throne was a high
one-M Vollard was picking himself up when he saw and heard
the artist advancing furiously upon him: “Tu ne peux pas te
tenir tranquil, donc ? Pourquoi bouges-tu? Les pommes ne bou-
gent pas." Unhappily, as the only language known to English
psychologists is German, my story, like its subject, fell miserably
flat.
und Freud has made himself slightly ridiculous by
talking about things of which he knows nothing, by imagining
that the books and pictures he likes are works of art, and that
the people who react to works of art feel what he feels for the
books and pictures he likes. Are we, on this account, to conclude
that Dr Freud is not to be trusted on any subject? "Yes," says
Dr Johnson.
"A physician being mentioned who had lost his practice, because
his whimsically changing his religion had made people distrustful
of him, I maintained that this was unreasonable, as religion is
unconnected with medical skill. Johnson.-Sir, it is not unrea-
sonable; for when people see a man absurd in what they under-


284
STORM CENTRE
stand, they may conclude the same of him in what they do not
understand.”
But I doubt the great doctor was a little hasty and, like Dr
Freud himself, something given to generalizing on insufficient
data. To me it seems that Dr Freud may be an excellent psycho-
analyst; but I am sure he had better leave art alone.
Sered himself, som er et do
STORM CENTRE
BY GENEVIEVE TAGGARD
Past noon, past the strong
Hour for full song,
-However late-
Mere silence holds me.
Here are met
Furious winds, and the great
Silence is desperate.
Utterly still they stand locked.
Once only the earth rocked
With the weakening of one.
This is battle, forehead-on.
Barbarous singing follows when
One triumphs. Now the centre
Tightens again,
Closes. None enter-
It is silent where
Wrestles the air.



Permission of Alfred Stieglitz
NEW MEXICO. BY MARSDEN HARTLEY





THE LAST VISIT
BY CONRAD AIKEN
M ARIE SCHLEY sat in the Watertown car by the open
1 grilled window. It was a sunny afternoon, the first Satur-
day in October. Clouds of dust swooped over Mount Auburn
nto the car, made the passengers cough. On the
Charles River, an eight-oared crew was rowing round the blue
turn, crawling like a centipede; the voice of the coxswain could
be heard, the blades flashed irregularly. A subdued, many-
throated clamour came raggedly across the flat fields from the
Stadium, suddenly rose intense on a higher note, then died slowly
away. A football game must be going on there. Yes—there
were the usual kites, flying, flashing, high over the Stadium. How
familiar it all was! It made her feel slightly sad; and yet, also,
she could not conceal from herself that she was much freer to
enjoy its beauty, to enjoy it as merely a spectacle, than had ever
been possible for her in the past. It was familiar; but now that
she lived so far away, and came so seldom, it was also remote.
It had now an "atmosphere”—she said almost aloud-an atmos-
phere. It was no longer so dreadfully a part of her own being.
It was true there had been a time the first year that she was in
Boston, when she was twelve-a time when "going to Watertown
to see Grandmother" was a positive joy. Even that, however,
hadn't been so much a fondness for Grandmother as a delight in
the queer musty old furniture, the antimacassars, the tussocks, the
rosy conch-shells on the grey carpet-of an extraordinary size,
and used as door-fenders—and above all, Grandmother's passion
for good food. The cherries, for which Marie with a pail used
to climb the tree; the "plain apple pie"; the coffee-cake so
richly crusted with spiced sugar (Grandmother always called it
“Kooken")–certainly these had been very important items. Even
then, she had been on her guard, reserved, with Grandmother-
there had never been any question of an intimacy between them.
Grandmother had always been hard and childlike, all her life
she had had that peculiar inaptitude for intimacy and sympathy


286
THE LAST VISIT
meas
which accompanies the child's lack of "consciousness.” Visiting
her during the school holidays, later, Marie had gradually, as
she grew older, seen this hardness clearly enough. Grandmother's
hardness—ah, it was really almost a meanness!—had called forth,
or implanted, a meanness in herself. It had often seemed to her
that Grandmother was cruel. How much those cruelties—which
were wholly of a psychological sort—had been deliberate, or how
much they had been simply the natural effect, unconscious, of a
hard callous defeated old woman on a young and shy and sensitive
one, she had never known. Nor had she ever known, to tell the
truth, whether, if she herself had been less of an egoist, she
might not have discovered more sharply, in her Grandmother, the
shy and affectionate girl, with remarkably nice blue eyes, who
occasionally laughed there and then took flight. Later still, when
she was going to college, she had in a measure “escaped” the
antipathy, had been able to challenge it laughingly, and had
worked a decided and delightful change in her relations with the
old woman. Grandmother's "meanness," she had found, could
often be undermined by laughter: her sense of humour, or at any
rate of the ridiculous, was delicious. She was the only woman
Marie knew who often, and literally, "laughed till she cried.”
Marie, ever since her college days, had used this discovery skil-
fully—she had been “free” to make the discovery and to use it,
in some unaccountable way, just after her return from a trip to
Europe. Was it simply that then at last she had forced Grand-
mother to accept her as “grown up” and an equal? At all events
it had led to a kindliness between them. Yes, they had had a
few pleasant days together. If they had formerly hated one
another, quarrelled savagely—ah, those frightful quarrels over
nothing !quarrels had passed. Grandmother had, growing older,
grown gentler; she herself, feeling herself to be superior, had
learned to tolerate the flashes of cruelty and meanness. And now
it was all to be ended—Watertown was to be rolled away—the
dusty ride along Mt Auburn Street was to become less familiar,
forgotten-Grandmother was going to die. A month-two
months-five-
Watertown was changing extraordinarily. Her sense of its
sharp difference, its newness, was a kind of reproach; for it seemed
to hint that Grandmother had been neglected. If she had come
wa


CONRAD AIKEN
287
oc
W
oftener-seen the new houses being built, new cellars being dug,
new streets being surveyed-she would not, she felt sure, be now
so struck by its complete alteration. How horribly suburban it
was, with all its rows of cheap two-family houses! Loathsome.-
Shoddy little stucco garages; forlorn little barberry hedges; rows
of one-storied little shops, built of garish brick—all this evidence
of pullulating vulgarity, where, in her childhood, had been green
fields, hill pastures with tumbled stone walls, wild cherries, and,
in autumn, thickets starred with the candid blue stars of chicory.
She remembered a walk with Uncle Tom from Harvard Square
to Grandmother's, when she was twelve. What an adventure in
the wilderness! The hills between Belmont and Watertown were
covered with juniper and birch-trees. Skirting Palfrey Hill, they
had come into Watertown past the old graveyard. It had seemed
like coming down from a morning's walk on the Himalayas. And
what were all these changes for? ... What did it lead to? ...
It seemed as if men were determined to trample and vulgarize
every inch of the world. She remembered that seventeenth-or
was it eighteenth century song in an old song book—"By the waters
of Watertown we sat down and wept; yea, we wept when we
remembered Boston.” ... Poor Grandmother! It was as well,
perhaps, that she had so long been a prisoner to her stuffy little
antimacassared room, with its albums of daguerreotypes—she
would have hated this change. Ah, but would she would she! It
was not so certain. Grandmother was a born provincial, a village
democrat-perhaps she would have liked this show of energy, in
which there was no pretence, and nowhere any distinction. It
would perhaps have pleased her to see that Watertown, so palpably,
was growing. ... The churches would thrive. The markets
would improve. ...
Marie got off at Palfrey Street, and began climbing the hill.
The mysterious brook, which used to flow under the street, full
of old rusted pots and lidless tin cans, was gone. She climbed
slowly—not so rapidly as when she used to run up Palfrey Hill
before breakfast to look for wild flowers! Silver rod used to
grow on Palfrey Hill—the only place she had ever seen it. That
was before Grandmother had moved away from the house on
Mt Auburn Street, with the cherry tree, and the pear tree, and
the "owners” (with whom Grandmother perpetually quarrelled


288
THE LAST VISIT
and bickered) living in the other half of the house, “playing
the piano till all hours, and carrying on something awful.” Marie
wondered what they had been like. Probably they were very nice
cheerful people. One of the daughters was a Christian Science
Healer: the son worked in a music store. To Marie there had
always been something romantic about them, and she had never
passed their door in the hall without wanting to knock and go in.
Once, she had gone in; all that she remembered was a plaster
bust of a god or goddess who seemed, on top of the piano, to be
meditating. There had also been a dog, which Grandmother
detested and always shook her apron at. “Phoo! get out, you
dirty beast!” she would cry, an expression of extraordinary hatred
on her face. ... Marie laughed, thinking of this. . . . She
passed the weeping-birch_its leaves were touched with yellow.
... Slightly out of breath, she climbed the wooden steps and
rang the bell.
II
ma
“Oh, it's you, Mrs Schley! How do you do! You're quite
a stranger! ... I think Mrs Vedder's asleep. But I'll go and
see. I'm sure she'll be delighted to see you!"
Mrs Ling was detestable. That she was fearfully overworked,
managing this private hospital, and that she was herself slowly
dying (having lost, in her last operation, “all her insides," as
Grandmother put it) did not make her more likable. A sly white
face, with sly black eyes; a meagre soul. Marie, standing in the
suburban little hall, looked at the pious engravings, the cheap
rugs. Above the mantel, Christ was leaning down, much haloed,
into the valley of the shadow of death, reaching an incredibly long
arm to rescue a lost lamb: over the dark valley hung a dove
with bright wings. A pot of ferns stood on a small high bamboo
table near the piano: the piano was a florid affair of pale oak.
Marie looked at the music—The Holy City, Alexander's Ragtime
Band, Cuddle Up a Little Closer, The Rosary. Here, at any rate,
the piano would not be played till all hours.
“No—your grandmother's awake. Will you go up ?”
"How is Grandmother?”
"Well-about the same. She's very plucky!"


CONRAD AIKEN
289
In the sick-room, with its gloom of lowered blinds, Marie at
first found it difficult to see. The nurse hovered by the front
window, smiling. Grandmother, in the great bed, turned the
small shrunken face on the pillow, turned the pathetic blue eyes
of a child. The forlorn little braid of streaked hair! Marie
stooped and kissed the sunken weak mouth.
“Hello Grandmother!" she shouted, remembering that the old
woman was deaf. “Are you glad to see me?"
Grandmother looked up in a bewildered, slightly frightened
way, as if she were peering up out of a depth.
"What did you say?" The voice was slow and faint.
"I said, are you glad to see me ?''
“O yes, always glad to see you. I'm always glad to see you."
"How are you feeling?"
Grandmother slowly and gently focussed her blue eyes—her
pupils were very wide-on Marie's face. She seemed to be trying
to see. She moved her lips, and then said weakly-
“Very bad. I can't eat.”
“You can't eat? Why's that?"
Marie drew the chair closer to the bedside, determined to be
cheerful. Mrs Vedder fumbled with her thin trembling hand at
the patchwork quilt, fumbled aimlessly, her eyes resting explor-
ingly on Marie's face. It was as if she were struggling, for speech,
with a profound, dark indifference.
“How's little Kate?” she quavered.
"Oh, Kate's fine! She gets all over the house, now, holding on
to chairs and things. ... When we take her to the beach in her
little bathing-suit she crawls right into the water as if it were
her native element. You never saw such courage and energy!"
"I wish I could see her. . . . She ought to be walking, oughtn't
she ?"
"O no-she's not backward at all!"
“No I suppose not. I wish I could see her. Is her hair the
same colour? Her hair was such a beautiful colour—something
like yours when you were little, only not so red. . . . I suppose
you can't bring her up to town.”
"No, it's not very easy, you see.”
Marie, looking through the side window, by the bed, watched
a grey squirrel running along the maple bough.


290
THE LAST VISIT
Pack.
“It's my teethI can't use my teeth-that's why I talk so
badly. The dentist was here last week. He said my jaw had
shrunk, and this set of teeth wouldn't fit any more.”
"Oh! What a shame, Granny! But can't you have them
altered?”
"I can't afford it. ... They charge me so much here. ...
It's wicked what they charge here!" ...
Miss Thomas, the nurse, approached, holding a spoon and medi-
cine glass.
“Time for my little girl to take her medicine!” she said, dipping
the teaspoon.
"What good does medicine do me!"
"Now you take it like a good girl—there! ... That's right!”
Mrs Vedder sank back, exhausted, the blue-veined hands lying
inert. After a moment her eyes filled with tears.
"Little Kate!" she wailed—"how I wish-” she began crying,
weakly and uncontrollably. Miss Thomas wiped her cheeks for
her, Marie drawing back.
"She cries a great deal,” said Miss Thomas in a low voice. “She
gets an idea, you know, and just thinks and thinks about it, and
cries and cries. Especially little Kate! She's always wanting
to see your little Kate. ... Now, Grandmother! Stop crying!
You don't want to spoil your granddaughter's visit, the first time
she's been here in so long! Do you?”
"No!... I can't help it. ..."
Marie began thinking of one Sunday in the Mt Auburn Street
house, seventeen or eighteen years before. They were having an
apple pie for dinner: a warm sunny day, she remembered the
pear tree in blossom. “Your grandfather, whom you don't remem-
ber, always used to say Well, there's nothing I like so much as
plain apple pie.' How furious it made me! He said it because
he knew it infuriated me.” Grandmother snorted, in a rage.
“ 'Plain apple pie'! I said to him, “There's nothing plain about it!
What do you know about cooking? You think a plain apple
pie can be just thrown together by anybody. I'd like to see how
many women could make a pie like this! ... But,” she added,
"he went right on gabbling about plain apple pie, plain apple
pie.” Marie had laughed, and Grandmother, relenting, or shaking
off the past, had suddenly laughed also. . . . On Sundays, Grand-


CONRAD AIKEN
291
mother always played on the little parlour organ, the seven or
eight hymn-tunes she knew, singing in a thin distressing voice.
The organ had been sold when Grandmother was moved to the
hospital. . . . Other things had been sold, too-Grandmother's
possessions had become very few—three or four chairs, the horse-
hair sofa, a whatnot laden with family photographs, a framed
lithochrome of the Rialto brought from Venice, a scrollwork clock
made by her favourite son, who had died young. Presently these
too would be sold.
"She's lost her memory, during this last month or so," said
Miss Thomas, smoothing the fold of sheet over the quilt edge.
“And her interest, too. But she's wonderfully brave. Then,
shouting, “Aren't you, Grandmother!”
Mrs Vedder lay apathetic, her small withered face turned on
one side, a hand under her cheek. Distance was in her eyes.
She paid no attention, or had not heard. She looked at Marie
and the nurse as if they had no meaning or reality. What
was she thinking, Marie wondered. A cornflower blue, her
eyes were, and still so extraordinarily young and innocent. There
was a long silence, during which the squirrel in the maple
tree began scolding-Marie, looking down through the screened
window under the lowered curtain, saw a black cat cross the
lawn, pretending to be indifferent. He sat down, put back first
one ear, then the other, looked up into the tree, blinking affectionate
green eyes, then trudged away, disillusioned and weary. . . . She
ought to have brought something for Grandmother. But then, she
had hardly had time. In the subway, it was true, at that little
shop—but just then the Watertown car had come grinding round
the turn; she would have had to wait fifteen minutes for another.
Besides, Grandmother always had more flowers than she could
use—and what, except hothouse grapes, could she eat? ...
“I meant to bring you some grapes, Granny, but I didn't have
time," she said. Mrs Vedder seemed to go on listening after the
remark was finished, as if she still had it somewhere, and was
giving it, slowly and with difficulty, all her attention.
“Mr Sill gave me those roses," she brought out at last. She
did not turn toward them (they stood on the desk) but simply
assumed that Marie must have seen them. "He was here
yesterday. ..."
Ol


292
THE LAST VISIT
"What's he doing, now that he's left the church?”
“What? ... I don't know. . . . Teaching I think. ...
How's Paul ?"
It always annoyed Marie when Grandmother inquired about
her husband.
"O he's all right.”
"That's good.” Grandmother sighed, and looked away at the
viney wall-paper.
"I went to New York last week, Granny!"
“New York? Went to New York?”
“Yes—to see Alice. And a queer thing happened to me.”
There was no response in the blue eyes. “Do you hear me?"
"No."
“I say a queer thing happened to me in New York. ... While
I was staying with Alice I got a letter from Sarah Allbright-
you remember Sarah Allbright? That little girl I used to play
with in Chicago. I hadn't seen her or heard from her since I
was ten—the last time I ever saw her was the day we played
'hookey' from school and ran off and got lost somewhere out by
Winnetka. We got home about eleven o'clock at night. Well,
in her letter she said she was in New York, for a visit, and won-
dered if I could come down from Fall River to see her! So I
went to see her! Wasn't it exciting! She's huge—very fat. I
think I'd have known her though. She's married to a lawyer,
and has three children, and paints pictures. It was interesting
to hear all about all the Chicago people I knew."
Grandmother stared, immobile.
"Who did you say looked after little Kate ?” she quavered.
"Paul's mother.” Marie felt herself Alushing. Did Grand-
mother intend ... ? But the old face was merely tired and
expressionless.
"What was the queer thing that happened to you in New York?”'
Marie's heart contracted. She moistened her lips and repeated
the story, conscious of Miss Thomas' attention. But Grand-
mother, she saw, did not listen after the first word or two, did
not understand, merely rested her faded blue eyes on Marie's, as
story she was so darkly struggling to under-
stand,
self. What was it she wanted so? What
was it
o see? Life? Her own life, embodied now
in M
ite? Was she trying, dimly, to touch some-
IS
m


CONRAD AIKEN
293
thing which eluded her grasp, to feel something which she could
not see? ... She made no comment. But presently her eyes
again slowly filled with tears, became intolerably bright, and
suddenly she cried out, weeping,
"I can't die! I can't die! ... I want to die and I can't!"
She wept almost soundlessly, the tears running down the wrinkles
of her cheeks. Miss Thomas held up one finger, sternly.
“Grandmother, shame on you! You promised me not to cry.
And now look at you-crying like this for nothing at all!”
nged,” Marie murmured to the nurse. “It
seems to me that she's seriously worse. Don't you think—"
Miss Thomas shook her head.
"O no! She's very strong still. I don't see why she shouldn't
live through the winter.”
A little later, Marie, looking at her watch, said that she must
run to catch her train. “She would barely have time.” She kissed
the sunken mouth once more, patted the cool hand. Out of the
brimmed eyes death looked up consciously and clearly, but Grand-
mother said nothing but “Good-bye, Marie!”.
Irmi
UITS
III
Tom was walking up and down in the little alley that led to
the theatre, looking into shop-windows. When he saw her, he
came towards her, grinning in his one-sided freckled way. She
felt that she had never liked him so much.
"On that corner—a rose, if you like," he said, without pre-
liminaries; "or on this, a cup of coffee."
“Coffee! I've had an awful time.”
"Awful? Was it? Why on earth do you go!"
“Partly because it gives me such a good alibi-everybody thinks
I'm spending the whole afternoon in Watertown.”
Tom smiled at her gratefully. They went into the lunch-room.
“But it's horrible, somehow," Marie went on, after a moment,
stirring the cup of coffee which had been brought to the mahogany
counter. "She's dying. Really dying. She said a most dreadful
thing! ... And I lied cheerfully about the train, and came gaily
away to meet-you- of whom not one of my family or friends
ever heard! ... Don't you think it's horrible?”
Tom stared at his coffee.
om.


294
SALON
“It's the way things are,” he said slowly.
Presently they walked down the sloping dark aisle of the
vaudeville theatre, looking for seats. "Here are two,” said Tom.
A blackface singer, on the stage, was singing coarsely. The blind-
ing disk of spotlight, with its chromatic red edge, illuminated
his bluish make-up, made his tongue an unnatural pink, sparkled
the gold fillings in his wide teeth. "Hot lips,” he intoned, grinning,
“That are pips. ... And no more conscience than a snake has
hips” . . . Tom took her gloved hand, inserted his finger in the
opening, and stroked her palm. A delicious feeling of weakness,
dissolution, came over her. Life suddenly seemed to her extraor-
dinarily complex, beautiful, and miserable. “By the waters of
Watertown we sat down and wept; yea, we wept when we
remembered Boston."
SALON
BY ANTHONY WRYNN
She sent the cold deep chords into the room,
A new Cecilia come in snake-throat grey.
The bit of perfect wrist between the bloom
Of waist-high citron branches slipped away,
Sank as a pigeon stopping sinks, and rose.
The music tided in that damasked lair
And stilled the restless details which propose
A conversation to the lips that flare
In whisper when the keys are struck. Her face
Gleamed frostly white as she bent at the pool
Of deep mahogany as in a place
Of stones and trees.
She spread leaves, thick and cool,
On stubble for our feet. Yet neither the choirs
That reared in sachet'd air, her silent dress
Nor eyes, her tranquil hair nor pallidness
Could hide the gaunt typhoon of her desires.


Erinttiene 1924-
A DRAWING. BY ERNEST FIENE





LIFE IN THE MIDDLE AGES
BY BERTRAND RUSSELL
UR picture of the Middle Ages, perhaps even more than
that of other periods, has been falsified to suit our own
prejudices. Sometimes the picture has been too black, sometimes
too rosy. The eighteenth century, which had no doubt of itself,
regarded mediaeval times as merely barbarous: to Gibbon, the
men of those days would have been our “rude forefathers.” The
reaction against the French Revolution produced the romantic
admiration of absurdity, based upon the experience that reason
led to the guillotine. This engendered a glorification of the sup-
posed "age of chivalry," popularized among English-speaking
people by Sir Walter Scott. The average boy or girl is probably
still dominated by the romantic view of the Middle Ages: he or
she imagines a period when knights wore armour, carried lances,
said "quotha” and “by my halidom," and were invariably either
courteous or wrathful; when all ladies were beautiful and dis-
tressed, but were sure to be rescued at the end of the story. There
is a third view, quite different, though, like the second, it admires
the Middle Ages; this is the ecclesiastical view, engendered by
dislike of the Reformation. The emphasis here is on piety, ortho-
doxy, the scholastic philosophy, and the unification of Christendom
by the Church. Like the romantic view, it is a reaction against
reason, but a less naïve reaction, cloaking itself in the forms of
reason, appealing to a great system of thought which once domi-
nated the world and may dominate it again.
In all these views there are elements of truth: the Middle
Ages were rude, they were knightly, they were pious. But if we
wish to see a period truly, we must not see it contrasted with our
own, whether to its advantage or disadvantage: we must try to
see it as it was to those who lived in it. Above all, we must
remember that, in every epoch, most people are ordinary people,
concerned with their daily bread rather than with the great themes
of which historians treat. Such ordinary mortals are portrayed
in a delightful book by Miss Eileen Power, which ranges from
1 Medieval People. By Eileen Power. 8vo. 228 pages. Methuen and
Company. London. 6s.


296
LIFE IN THE MIDDLE AGES
the time of Charlemagne to that of Henry VII. The only eminent
person in her gallery is Marco Polo; the other five are more or
less obscure individuals, whose lives are reconstructed by means
of documents which happen to survive. Chivalry, which was an
aristocratic affair, does not appear in these democratic annals;
piety is displayed by peasants and British merchants, but is much
less in evidence in ecclesiastical circles; and everybody is much
less barbaric than the eighteenth century would have expected.
There is, however, in favour of the "barbaric" view, one very
striking contrast brought out in the book: the contrast between
Venetian art just before the Renaissance and Chinese art in the
fourteenth century. Two pictures are reproduced: one a Venetian
illustration of Marco Polo's embarkation, the other a Chinese
fourteenth-century landscape by Chao Meng-fu. Miss Power
says: “The one that by Chao Meng-fu) is so obviously the work
of a highly developed and the other by an almost naïve and childish
civilization.” No one who compares the two can fail to agree.
Another recent book,' by Professor Huizinga of Leiden, gives
an extraordinarily interesting picture of the fourteenth and fif-
teenth centuries in France and Flanders. In this book chivalry
receives its fair share of attention, not from the romantic point
of view, but as an elaborate game which the upper classes invented
to beguile the intolerable tedium of their lives. An essential
part of chivalry was the curious courtly conception of love, as
something which it was pleasant to leave unsatisfied. “When in
the twelfth century unsatisfied desire was placed by the trouba-
dours of Provence in the centre of the poetic conception of love,
an important turn in the history of civilization was effected.
Courtly poetry ... makes desire itself the essential motif, and so
creates a conception of love with a negative ground-note.” And
again:
“The existence of an upper class whose intellectual and moral
notions are enshrined in an ars amandi remains a rather excep-
tional fact in history. In no other epoch did the ideal of civiliza-
tion amalgamate to such a degree with that of love. Just as
scholasticism represents the grand effort of the mediaeval spirit
1 The Waning of the Middle Ages. By Johan Huizinga. 8vo. 328 pages.
E. Arnold and Company. London. 16s.


BERTRAND RUSSELL
297
to unite all philosophic thought in a single centre, so the theory
of courtly love, in a less elevated sphere, tends to embrace all that
appertains to the noble life.”
A great deal of the Middle Ages may be interpreted as a con-
flict between Roman and Germanic traditions: on the one side
the Church, on the other the State; on the one side theology and
philosophy, on the other chivalry and poetry; on the one side the
law, on the other pleasure, passion, and all the anarchic impulses
of very headstrong men. The Roman tradition was not that of
the great days of Rome, it was that of Constantine and Justinian;
but even so it contained something which the turbulent nations
needed, and without which civilization could not have re-emerged
from the dark ages. Because men were fierce, they could only
be curbed by an awful severity: terror was employed until it lost
its effect through familiarity. After describing the Dance of
Death, a favourite subject of late mediaeval art, in which skeletons
dance with living men, Dr Huizinga proceeds to tell of the
churchyard of the Innocents in Paris, where Villon's contempora-
ries promenaded for pleasure:
"Skulls and bones were heaped up in charnel-houses along the
cloisters enclosing the ground on three sides, and lay there open
to the eye by thousands, preaching to all the lesson of equality.
... Under the cloisters the death dance exhibited its images and
its stanzas. No place was better suited to the simian figure of
grinning death, dragging along pope and emperor, monk and fool.
The Duke of Berry, who wished to be buried there, had the history
of the three dead and the three living men carved at the portal
of the church. A century later, this exhibition of funeral symbols
was completed by a large statue of Death, now in the Louvre,
and the only remnant of it all. Such was the place which the
Parisians of the fifteenth century frequented as a sort of lugu-
brious counterpart of the Palais Royal of 1789. Day after day,
crowds of people walked under the cloisters, looking at the figures
and reading the simple verses, which reminded them of the ap-
proaching end. In spite of the incessant burials and exhumations
going on there, it was a public lounge and a rendezvous. Shops
were established before the charnel-houses and prostitutes strolled


298
LIFE IN THE MIDDLE AGES
under the cloisters. A female recluse was immured on one of the
sides of the church. Friars came to preach and processions were
drawn up there. . . . Even feasts were given there. To such an
extent had the horrible become familiar."
was
SICS
on W
As might be expected from the love of the macabre, cruelty
was one of the most highly prized pleasures of the populace.
Mons purchased a brigand, solely in order to see him tortured,
“at which the people rejoiced more than if a new holy body had
risen from the dead.” In 1488, some of the magistrates of Bruges,
suspected of treason, were repeatedly tortured in the market place
for the delectation of the people. They begged to be killed, but
the boon was refused, says Dr Huizinga, “that the people may
feast again upon their torments."
Perhaps, after all, there is something to be said for the eight-
eenth-century view.
Dr Huizinga has some very interesting chapters on the art
of the late Middle Ages. The exquisiteness of the painting was
not equalled in architecture and sculpture, which became florid
from the love of magnificence associated with feudal pomp. For
example, when the Duke of Burgundy employed Sluter to make
an elaborate Calvary at Champmol, the arms of Burgundy and
Flanders appeared on the arms of the Cross. What is still more
surprising is that the figure of Jeremiah which formed part of
the group had a pair of spectacles on its nose! The author draws
a pathetic picture of a great artist controlled by a Philistine patron,
and then proceeds to demolish it by suggesting that perhaps "Sluter
himself considered Jeremiah's spectacles a very happy find.” Miss
Power mentions an equally surprising fact: that in the thirteenth
century an Italian Bowdler, outdoing Tennyson in Victorian refine-
ment, published a version of the Arthurian legends which omitted
all reference to the loves of Lancelot and Guinevere. History
is full of queer things, for example, that a Japanese Jesuit was
martyred at Moscow in the sixteenth century. I wish some
erudite historian would write a book called "facts that have
astonished me.” In such a book Jeremiah's spectacles and the
Italian Bowdler should certainly find a place.



Courtesy of J. B. Neumann
HEAD.
BY MAX WEBER






Courtesy of J. B. Neumann
GESTURE. BY MAX WEBER





FOUR POEMS
BY ALFRED KREYMBORG
DIMINUENDO
One might easily try this way,
one could feasibly go that;
for meanwhile, in-between-while,
two grow drowsier and fat
with who's-to-know just-what-to-do
curled round each other like a cat.
Much decision is required,
active energies to carry it,
and when human feet are tired,
more than patience not to harry it
with tender, drooping wits inspired
to hold the mood and marry it.
Why not lazily be flowers
nodding yes to questing showers
caught in cross winds meditating
harmonies in their debating;
be two opposite heads mating,
two no longer separating?
Who's against it if we stay here,
give conjecture all the way here;
let the fanciful horizon
have its earth to lay its skies on;
and if no one else is for it,
who are they if we adore it?
So why get up and say where,
untie ourselves and hie there,
since where might well be better far,


FOUR POEMS
a better than our going there;
The there might be right where we are,
ke two, two one, both sitting here?
PARADOX
A lamb must be a contemptuous beast-
who else lifts his snout with such scorn,
giving vent to a baa quite as long and loud
as a blast from a withering horn?
And yet he might be a diffident soul,
who starts a noise and keeps it going,
lest folk come near with a pruning shear
and find timidity growing.
CALIGRAPHY
Illegibly and ignorant
of what they do across the blue,
The careless clouds, and soon the sun,
scrawl flourishes the winds blow through
And spread where folk with microscopes,
who watch an early crocus bloom,
Consider spring's caligraphy
a witch-like, hokus-pokus broom.
RITARDANDO
(á la Dada)
La-di-da-da-
-di-da-da-
--da-da-
--dum:


ALFRED KREYMBORG
301
Why do Frenchmen
woo a woman
as if women
never resisted?
-Do Frenchmen
find no room in
what a woman
ever insisted?
--Frenchman:
Are you sure you
can allure your
caricature?
Man
like so man-
y a henchman:
Is this all that
you can do?-
Drum a dumb drum,
dromedary—
drum a drum dumb,
oh contrary-


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G. SANTAYANA
303
discovering his own nature and his opportunities, a man was
himself the best explorer, and each nation the best judge of its
own case; so that the control of action by personal impulse or
by popular vote might be the wisest after all. Any external
authority would be sure to rule in some abstract interest, and
to sail by an obsolete chart. All precepts inspired by past
experience are, in one sense, impertinent; they assume that in
the virgin rock of futurity there are no veins unworked and
no glint of anything perhaps more precious than gold.
SOCRATES: You confirm a story I once heard concerning the firma-
ment of your world, that it was an eggshell within which the
soul, already quickened, was not yet hatched; her true life
would begin when that shell was shattered and she found herself
in the open. That warm close universe, with its flashes of
phosphorescence which you call day, has been the womb of all
of us; let us preserve a grateful piety towards our unconscious
parent. You enjoy the singular privilege of partly anticipating
your birth, by putting your callow head now and then out of
the shell and taking a peep at eternity; but you do well to
draw back again quickly, in order to go on growing in the
dreamful safety of your nest, and blindly strengthening your
eyes and feathers: you are not ready yet for the air. And this
last embryonic interval of yours seems to have been particularly
fruitful; you come back in a flutter of rich impulses and divina-
tions, such as embryos should have. But you know the laws
of my Republic in regard to every new birth, no matter how
exalted its parentage. It must be submitted to the magistrate
for inspection, and unless found healthy and perfect it must
be unfinchingly put out of the way. It would not be merciful
to a monster to allow it to live, or merciful to the common-
wealth to suffer monsters to dwell in it. Let us then examine
your offspring together; and may it stand the test.
THE STRANGER: You need not hesitate on my account to condemn
it. I feel no great affection or even pity for this doctrine of
democracy, which came to me not as my own child, nor even
as a foundling left at my door, but as a sort of figment of words
or obsession in a dream; and if you blow on the phantom and
prove it a gas-baby, you will leave me no poorer and more at
ease.


304
ON SELF-GOVERNMENT
SOCRATES: Let us inspect it without prejudice. Sometimes the
greatest discoveries wear at first a disquieting or nebulous form.
Did not people call me a sophist, and was it not out of sophistry
that I plucked the unshakable humility of my wisdom? You
say, then, that external authority is ill-fitted to discern the good,
which is more likely to be revealed by the voice of personal im-
pulse, or of the whole people casting their votes. In respect to
impulse you might point, for instance, to the young of man
and the other mammals, who instinctively save their lives by
taking the breast which the mother, in a smiling torpor, is happy
to give them; whereas if a conclave of astrologers, never having
noticed such lowly things, had been summoned to devise the
right food for infants, not one of those learned men would ever
have suggested a method so strangely elaborate and (as they
would have said) so disgusting as being suckled at the breast;
but if one of them was a follower of Thales, he might have
urged that water, being the substance of all things, was un-
doubtedly in its pure state the most invigorating and the safest
nourishment for a tender life; and another might have sug-
gested that a little wine, the gift of the infant Bacchus, is the
surest cause of warmth and movement in the system, and of
inspiration in the mind; a third might have argued that, lite
being something divine and supernatural, it is best sustained if
the wine is mixed with honey, because then it is called nectar
and is the drink of the gods; another might have prescribed a
diet of fresh grass, saying that grass is the stay of every strong
and blameless animal, such as the horse and the cow, and that
all other foods are the mad contrivance of luxury or of ferocity,
and a sure cause of disease; yet another, a logician, might have
proved that only solids can enlarge solids, so that for the right
growth of a child's body_body being a solid by definition—all
liquids were superfluous; while a rival member of the same
school of thought, admitting that only like can produce like,
might have declared it absurd to expect that life should be sus-
stained upon dead substances, and would have commanded all
infants to be fed on nothing but gnats, fies, worms, beetles,
and caterpillars, to be swallowed alive. Meantime, after all
these sages, and those who listened to them, had died childless,
the vulgar who had ignorantly followed their instinct would


G. SANTAYANA
305
CRAT
have preserved mankind from extinction and repeopled the
earth.
THE STRANGER: How comes it, Socrates, that you are found
to-day making merry at the expense of knowledge ?
SOCRATES: Is it knowledge not to know that milk is for babes?
The childish instinct to cry disconsolately until given suck is a
philosophical instinct. It demands something which is probably
obtainable, and which, when obtained, will prove pleasant and
wholesome. Philosophy could do no better. Now, may I pre-
sume that the instincts which you regard as safe guides in
government are all instincts of this wise kind, playing into the
hands of nature, finding what they seek, and thriving upon it?
THE STRANGER: The natural sanction of instinct is seldom imme-
diate. What I mean is only that an impulse at least points to
some satisfaction, whether obtainable or not, so that every im-
pulse has an initial right to be given a trial, and every vote a
right to be counted.
SOCRATES: Each of those astrologers in council, for instance, would
have a right to make trial of his method, at least on his own
children?
The STRANGER: Your example is grotesque, because everybody
knows what young children require; but if the case were novel,
and experience had not proved the point ad nauseam, it would
be right for every man to try the method which seemed to him
best.
SOCRATES: So long as men are ignorant, their conduct, according
to your principles, is always right, and they must have their
way? Their folly becomes folly only when they discover it
to be so; and only death or disaster can rightly prevent them
from continuing in the courses which, up to that fatal moment,
have been perfectly right?
THE STRANGER: No doubt when a man is disappointed at the re-
sult of his action he may say he has made a mistake, and may
call that action wrong; but it hardly follows that it was wrong
to have made the experiment, or even to make it again, if the
circumstances seem more favourable; and in any case he remains
the judge of his own error, and the corrected course which he
should steer in future is always that which his private instinct,
enlightened by his experience, now prompts him to choose.
Durses


306
ON SELF-GOVERNMENT
Socrates: Meantime, in those political actions which men can
execute only in common, how is the right course determined?
For instance, if there was only one child, the King's son and
heir, to be nursed by all those astrologers, how would you
decide on which of their scientific foods the young prince should
be fed?
THE STRANGER: There would be a ballot, in which each doctor,
after recommending his own nostrum, would indicate his second
choice; and the voting would be continued until everyone being
exhausted by fatigue and sleeplessness, a majority was obtained
in despair for no matter what compromise; and on that expert
recipe the hope of the nation would be brought up.
SOCRATEs: I am lost in admiration at the wisdom of your proce-
dure. In Hellas we made trial of many forms of government-
of all, as we fondly thought, that human ingenuity could
devise; but we underestimated the fertility of time. How I
regret that before framing my ideal Republic I could not have
seen your system at work! For there are occasions on which,
in my ignorance, I cannot imagine how you would apply your
principles. If for instance some monster—for time breeds mon-
sters too should be born among you, and if one day Briareus
should enter your assembly and raise his hundred hands at
once, or if Hydra should shriek a thousand discordant opinions
out of her thousand mouths, would he or she count for one
citizen according to your laws, or for a hundred or a thousand?
THE STRANGER: The case is less mythical than it sounds, and we
actually have something of the sort in our press and our political
parties; but no practical difficulty arises, because our monsters
are not separate beings, but are composed of men and women
packed closely together and compelled to move in unison; and
each of these Trojan horses, as it were, which fight all our
battles for us, counts for as many votes as it carries individuals
tucked under its hide.
Socrates: Ah, yes, your citizen is your only sovereign, and all his
thoughts and motions are dictated to him by some impersonal
organism, to which he is subject he knows not why. But what
are the limits of your citizenship? Does good husbandry,
according to your traditions, consider the interests of all the
in the ant-hills of your country, lest your husbandmen,


G. SANTAYANA
307
certainly far fewer than the ants in number, should unjustly
drive the plough through those ant-hills, trampling on the inter-
ests and passions of the majority? Do not reply too hastily;
for on second thoughts I am confident you would not allow the
small stature or the black colour of ants to prejudice you against
their rights as living creatures; and the accident that they are
too busy at home to come and vote in the agora ought not to
count against them; for I suppose the interests of children and
sick people and old men, who are not able to jostle their way
to the voting-booths, are not neglected in your just democracy,
but your chief magistrate or high priest or some vestal virgin
especially appointed doubtless rises solemnly in your assembly,
amid a general hush, and casts a vote in their name.
THE STRANGER: We are not pious. Nothing of the sort ever
enters our heads.
SOCRATES: That seems very strange to me, when I consider the
principle which you say governs your politics. But there is
another class, so very numerous and important, that I am sure
your legislators must have found a means of counting their votes,
although there may be some material difficulty in doing so:
I mean the dead. For who can have a greater stake in a country
than its founders, whose whole soul and single hope was devoted
to establishing it, that it might last and be true to their thought
for ever; or than the soldiers who in many wars have succes-
sively given their lives to preserve it? Surely, at every meeting
of your assembly, their votes are counted first, which they once
cast so solemnly and sincerely and at so great a sacrifice to them-
selves for your sake, and their veto is interposed beforehand
against any rash measure that might undo their labours, stultify
their hopes, and banish their spirit from the house which they
built and loved.
THE STRANGER: No, the dead have no vote among us. On the con-
trary, we think they have too much influence as it is without
voting, because they have bequeathed institutions to us which
encumber our playground and are not to our liking; and the
inertia which these institutions oppose to our fresh desires seems
to us a hateful force, which we call the dead hand.
SOCRATES: Do you mean that every young rascal, who knows
nothing of the origin and laws of his country and has never
AN


308
ON SELF-GOVERNMENT
done anything in it but be born, may cast a vote, or that for-
eigners fleeing from famine or seeking by trade to enrich them-
selves privately, although in their hearts they may be sworn
enemies to the land that receives them, may cast a vote also,
but that the founders and defenders of it are not suffered to
make their voices heard, because they happen to be dead? I,
who am dead myself, see a great injustice in that.-But let us
return to the living. I suppose when the inhabitants of some
town or quarter wish to rebuild their temple, or to found a new
one, they gather together to draw up the plans; and when, in
response to their living desires, or to those of a majority, they
have chosen the site, selected the materials, designed the struc-
ture, and estimated the cost, they depute one of their own
number, as nearly an average man as possible, to carry out the
project. After six months or a year, they do not forget to come
together again, to revise the plans, and make sure that the site
first chosen is still convenient and the work done so far is still
expressive of the popular taste; and lest the architect formerly
appointed may have been too much absorbed in his official func-
tion, and may have acquired autocratic habits, and notions of
architectural art not drawn from popular feeling, they hasten
to revoke his commission and to appoint a new architect, more
in sympathy with the life of the moment, and not tempted to
execute any work which the assembled people, by a divine
inspiration, have not first conceived in idea.
The Stranger: If the architect was not more fertile in invention
and resourceful in methods than is the average citizen, why
should he be distinguished by that title at all?
SOCRATES: That is a question I meant to ask you, and I expected
you to reply, in the name of your friends, that they were all
equally skilful architects and physicians and generals, and that
each took on each of these titles when he happened to be
exercising that particular art; moreover, that special masters
in any art were required only in ill-governed states, where the
people were not perfectly educated, but that in a model state
all human undertakings would be executed as the ants and the
bees build their cities; for all, or nearly all, of them are build-
ers, unanimous without control, and a common impulse joins
them in labours which prove providentially to be harmonious.
RANG


G. SANTAYANA
309
IS
SO
So I seem to see the artists in your happy society adding each his
niche to the sculptured hive, and making it rich by a divine and
unconscious co-operation. The spirit in them marshals them
without words. Alas, we poor Athenians could practise the arts
only through rare and exceptional masters, not being inspired,
as you all are to-day, to execute the most difficult works spon-
taneously and without instruction. But I am letting my
enthusiasm run away with me, when I ought rather to be asking
you to describe your principles in practice. If for instance
some enemy attacks you and you find yourselves at war, I sup-
pose you seize the weapons which you have at hand, provided
by your private love of contrivance or of the chase, and rush
with one accord upon that enemy, routing him easily at the
first onset by your common ardour and instinctive tactics.
THE STRANGER: No: that is the method of wolves or of savage
tribes; in our states, which are of enormous extent and popu-
lation, the generals and other officers are designated beforehand,
and trained by long study and exercises in time of peace; and
our arsenals are provided with all kinds of engines of war, with
artisans skilful in making and managing them; and even our
common soldiers, if they are not to go like sheep to the slaughter,
must undergo a long discipline at home before they are ever sent
into the battle, in which they must endure all sorts of dangers
and hardships blindly, not seeing the enemy, and trusting to
the word and art of their superiors for every movement and
every hope.
SocRATEs: I am astonished; how can it be that, having such
excellent methods of government, you do not apply them to
the principal function of your government, which is the protec-
tion of your lives? But perhaps war is too rough a business
for such noble principles to work in; they may apply only to
higher things. If, for example, you are not merely building a
temple, but giving a name to the god that is to be worshipped
there, I suppose your people gather in an assembly and elect
their god, and by a common inspiration compose the fable that
is to be religiously associated with his name, as well as the
rites with which, on pain of disaster, he shall be honoured, and
the form the sculptor shall give to his image; and when all this
has been settled by vote, I suppose you vote on a still more
Com


310
ON SELF-GOVERNMENT
important question, and decide it by a majority; I mean, what
benefits this god shall bestow on you, and whether he shall
protect you from drought or from pestilence, or shall inspire you
with martial ardour or with ravishing music, or shall make you
rich, or beautiful, or immortal, or whatever it be that you, or
the majority of you, happen most to desire.
THE STRANGER: I suspect you are laughing at us; but in all
seriousness that is very much how we proceed in matters of
religion. For deities of the earth and sea, for stories of wonders,
for local shrines or images black with age whose origin is lost
in antiquity, we have scant respect; but our prophets and
philosophers discuss angrily what ought to be the nature of God,
whom each defines according to his own preferences; and few
of them hesitate to demolish old temples and old notions of the
gods, or even to deny their existence, and to substitute the idea
which most flatters the mood of the age, and call this new idea
the only true God. And even if we do not vote openly for one
god or another to preside over us, yet by an insensible move-
ment of public opinion we abandon the gods we dislike for
others that we like better, and we never rest until we have
adopted one that lays on us no commandment not to our own
mind, and promises us all we wish.
Socrates: And when you have found such an amiable god, and
abolished all those who were dangerous, I suppose calamities
cease among you, passion and madness no longer distract any
mind, there are no more floods, earthquakes, pestilences, or wars,
and a serene happiness reigns in your hearts and in your cities.
THE STRANGER: Not at all. Human destiny remains precisely
as before, save that religion has a smaller part in it, turns to
private doubts or fancies, or vanishes altogether.
Socrates: Those who worship the statues of the gods, rather than
the gods themselves, are called idolaters, are they not?
The Stranger: Yes.
Socrates: And if a man worshipped an image of some god in
his own mind, rather than the power which actually controls his
destiny, he would be worshipping an idol ?
THE STRANGER: The principle would be the same; but usage
among us applies the word idol to the products of sculpture, not
to those of poetry.


G. SANTAYANA
311
SOCRATES: Then, in principle, your prophets and philosophers
are sheer idolaters?
THE STRANGER: They would be, if they took their religion
seriously, as you did yours in the old days; but their religion
has nothing to do with their business or politics, or with their
practical estimation of good and evil fortune; it is merely the
solace of their dreamful hours. People now are hardly aware
that the object of continual piety and studious reverence in the
most ancient religions was the power that actually and hourly
rules over men, whatever may be its nature or its contempt for
human interests, the very power that still rules the world with-
out human suffrage. This real power we make the object of
science and of profitable art, but not of what we now call
religion.
SOCRATES: But at least in respect to that other luxurious religion
of theirs, which you think is in principle mere idolatry, your
friends apply their fine theory of government by the will of the
governed, deputing some chosen god to legislate for them accord-
ing to their own wishes. Do they apply the same theory, I
wonder, in that humbler region to which religion was addressed
of old, the region of our daily and national fortunes? Do they
apply it, for instance, to the household? Do your little boys
and girls, after playing in the street together, vote to become
brothers and sisters, and elect a father and mother ?—You
smile, as if my question were ironical, but I assure you I am in
earnest, and think it a momentous question. For if the father
and the mother do not hold their office by the consent of their
children, and have not become their father and mother in obe-
dience to the children's will, then according to your principles
of government all parental authority is usurped, and no parent's
command or control is legitimate; and it was an act of selfish
and outrageous tyranny on the part of the father and mother
to beget a helpless child, and bring him up by force in their own
family, when very likely, had he been consulted, he would have
chosen different parents and a finer home. I hardly know what
to admire most, whether the simplicity of your principles, or
the excellence of the society that would arise if they could be
thoroughly applied. After abolishing the old gods (which can
be done with a breath) you will doubtless abolish the ridiculous


312
ON SELF-GOVERNMENT
TO
old methods of animal generation, and establish something more
decent; and by a majority vote you will reform the configura-
tion and climate of the earth, and decide what shall have been
the history of your country, and what shall be its future language
and arts; and you will begin, I hope, by voting yourselves a
much greater intelligence than that with which chance has
endowed you.
THE STRANGER: I blush, Socrates, at the foolishness and impiety
of the views which I might almost have adopted, if your voice
of warning had not reached me in time.
SOCRATES: There is nothing surprising to me in the influence exer-
cised over mankind by those who flatter it with eloquence.
There were sophists in my day too. But I suspect that the
fundamental order of human life is settled for you now, as it
was for us then, independently of pert opinion, by nature and
fortune and divine decrees, sophistry itself being but headiness
in ill-bred mortals, when Apollo has withdrawn to another part
of the heavens. I think too that right conscience in a natural
creature can be nothing but self-knowledge, by which the man
discovers his own nature and the good on which it is set; so
that the margin of free choice and initiative for a man of under-
standing is exceedingly narrow, and grows narrower as the field
of his competence grows wider, and his science clearer, all art
being but nature enlightened and directed upon its natural good.
But doubtless your friends on earth are masters of magic and are
inspired with an infused wisdom which was always denied me.
You will do well to return to them with my doubts fresh in
mind; and after listening to the weighty considerations which
they will doubtless invoke in support of their opinions, you will
be able to form your own at leisure; for it would be of little
profit to have been saved from one error if, under my blind
guidance, you fell into another.
The End
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Will
771
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Permission of the Artist
BY ROCKWELL KENT
ABSOLUTION






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INUU HUDUTTI
TUNUMUWI
Permission of the Artist
NIGHTMARE. BY ROCKWELL KENT






CON
9
Permission of the artist
LITTLE CHILD. BY ROCKWELL KENT





EVENSONG IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY
BY SIEGFRIED SASSOON
Out of the pattering flame-reflective street
Into the Abbey move my adagio feet,
Out of the lofty lamp-lit London dusk
Ferrying through vaulted sanctuaries a head
Calm, vesper-tolling, and subdued to shed
Gross thoughts and sabbatize the intemperate husk.
Gazing around, I glimpse the illustrious Dead;
Assembling ancestries of England loom.
Here, on this Second Sunday after Epiphany,
Milton and Purcell triumph from the tomb;
Spirits aspire on solemn-tongued antiphony,
And from their urns immortal garlands bloom.
Poets, musicians, orators, and Abstractions
Sponsorial, guard the suppliant congregation.
Fame with mum trunrpet, posturing ripe attractions,
Sustains her simpering Eighteenth-Century station;
While Shakespeare, shy ʼmid History's checked polemic,
Muses incognizant of his translation
Into a lingual culture-epidemic.
Charles Wesley; Isaac Watts; each now enjoys
Hymnistic perpetuity from boys
Chanting like scarlet-cassocked seraphim:
Here saintly Keble waits his Evening Hymn,
And hearkens, quiet, confident and humble.
John Gay looks glum. . . . A clergyman ascends
The pulpit steps; smoothes with one hand his hair,
And with the other hand begins to fumble
At manuscript of sermon. We prepare
Patience to listen. But Disraeli bends
Forward a little with his sceptic stare.


314
EVENSONG IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY
Time homilizes on. Grave ghosts are gone.
Diction has turned their monuments to stone;
Dogma has sent Antiquity to sleep
With sacrosanct stultiloquential drone.
But cryptical convulsions of the Past
Pervade the benediction's truce and sweep
Out on the organ's fugue-triumphal tone,
And hosannatic Handel liberates us at last.


DUBLIN LETTER
March, 1925
UR tendency, for 'tis a time of mechanics, is to be inter-
ested in the distributions and periodicities of things: and we
ask, fruitfully or not, if there is a geographical distribution of
talent, and if there are times in which talent is available, and
periods again in which it is reserved. We instinctively agree that
the argument by analogy is about the only valid argument we
possess, and that time and space are our most easily manipulated
concepts. The year and its seasonable changes stand behind a vast
content of human thought, and the north and south of space trans-
late for us to a north and south of things, and to a north and south
of our thinking about them.
Certainly a most curious polarity is developed by every nation.
Whether it be Ireland or England, France or Germany, or Italy,
these countries have all developed a northern and southern tempera-
ment quite irrespective of geography, for the north of any country
is merely the south of its neighbour. A law of the national being
seems to demand that one extreme of the nation shall be hard and
reserved and competent, and that the other end shall be softer, more
confiding, more careless; and, with this idea in mind, a geographical
distribution of talent may reasonably be looked for.
We might even consider that science and painting, the exportable
arts, are to be expected from a national-north, while literature and
music, the home arts, would be properly produced from the south.
No government can be a good one that is not faced by an effective
opposition, and it is perhaps as true to say that no country is stable
or effective to its fullest extent that has not developed its true
internal antagonism or polarity. In Ireland, and in this respect,
we are most happily provided for. We have a stern, unbending,
highly moral and competent north, and we have in the south the
extremes of those virtues. If it be remarked that there is an east and
west in every country, and that these points ought to be considered,
I should assume this to be inexact. East and west are merely geo-
graphical expressions: they have no national significance, for the


316
DUBLIN LETTER
east of a country is merely a prolongation of the north, and the
west is as characteristically southern.
These ideas are true I think of a small country. In a huge coun-
try such as the United States they may seem unproven; but as time
goes on it may be found that America will resolve each of her vast
states into a temperamentally separate entity, and that each of these
sub-nations may evolve the northern and southern characteristics
that appear to be inherent in, or to pass from the soil to, the group
that inhabits it.
I do not think that there is any true centre to a country. I con-
ceive it to be only north and south, and that the central or steadying
or home-holding tendency in a land is southern, while the explosive,
externalizing, adventurous tendencies are northern. The sum of
these, the total tendency or aptitude, is the nation, and is a different
quality for every land.
A place-distribution of talent may thus be conceived, but as to
whether there is a time-distribution is also a question. The me-
chanical argument, the argument, that is, by analogy, is always an
enticing one. The reaction of the earth to the great seasonal changes
is continuous. This happens inevitably, and these and those as
inevitably follow with summer, autumn, and winter. A very an-
cient Irish poet wrote of the spring:
"A wild longing comes upon one to race horses.”
The same longing still comes with the spring. It is not only that
the earth thrills anew to a promise of the sun-the mind is equally
thrilled, and does seem to awaken, and to look as adventurously
abroad as the body does, or as the still withered, but hopeful trees
and clay and animals do. If all that is, is but a mode of mind,
then the seasonable changes are more competently true in a mental
than in a material realm, and a winter and summer of the mind
itself should be discoverable.
One would like to know from various artists if they write or paint
more easily in the summer than in the winter, or if they merely
experience and mature in the summer that which they harvest in
the autumn and record in winter. Is there a winter or hibernating-
period for a man and, by extension, for his nation? No country
wants to fight in winter, the ancient tendency was for opposing


JAMES STEPHENS
317
armies to tuck themselves into winter quarters and fall asleep on a
truce. Is there a national desire to abstain from business in winter,
and do employers notice that industrial production, irrespective of
lack or abundance of raw material, has a seasonable ebb and flow?
In the Spring a Young Man's Fancy, et cetera— Proverbs occupy
themselves greatly with young men and love: they say curiously
little about young women and love. Will some female novelist tell
us if love comes in for them also with the first daisy and the
long-looked-for sprout? Winter has set on us in Ireland, and, so
far as I know, no writer is meditating a new book, nor is any painter
dreaming, with a red and rolling eye, of the canvas that he hopes
to make glowing and astonishing and profitable. Sean O'Casey, our
new dramatist, whose Juno and the Paycock was our great national
event, has written a new play. 'Twas an autumnal harvesting, and
is possibly now finished.
In the winter we must live by bread alone-The Master of Arts
has withheld his sunlight, and the lesser artists must reserve theirs
also. Only the politicians work, gloomily, coldly—'tis a wintry
trade, and might rightly be forbidden for the other three seasons
of the year. ... How sweetly a blackbird's pipe, or a lyric note
from poor dead Ledwidge now would take the ear. But now we
could dislike either of these. They do not belong to the chill day,
and might do uncalled for wrong to the snow, and to the round
red berries of the haw.
JAMES STEPHENS


BOOK REVIEWS
IMPROBABLE PURITY
THE ARTIST AND Psycho-ANALYSIS. By Roger Fry.
8vo. 20 pages. · Published by Leonard and Virginia
Woolf at the Hogarth Press, London. 2/6.
D OGER FRY is very likely the best critic of the fine arts
N writing in English. At least in comparison the others, with
few exceptions, appear ignorant, trivial, or academic; semi-mys-
tical, or very mystical. I do not suppose that many painters out-
side of a few English friends care for what he writes, but when did
they ever care, and anyway what is aesthetic criticism to painters?
What it might be to them is another matter.
Mr Fry's simple clearness with its minimum of cajolery is a
virtue. In his paper on Negro Sculpture he kept to the point
until he had stated without strain some important peculiarities
of his subject-e.g. that the negro artist saw the body as a cylinder
with an egg on top of it. A mystical critic would probably not
have had the perception to make these observations at all, or if
he had been so fortunate, would have gone on hurriedly to the
emotional value of eggs and cylinders. Mr Fry, no doubt, could
have gone on too, but instead he stopped. He had finished an
excellent essay in descriptive science, and if the affective psy-
chology of the matter was beyond him as it appears so far to be
beyond everyone else, why pursue it? Nothing easier to invent
than emotional significances. Mr Rosenfeld, however, asked, not
unjustly, what relation there was between eggs and the feelings
aroused by negro sculpture. One is always asking questions of
critics. My point is that no answer is better than a shaky one.
This refusal of Mr Fry's to leave the last solid piece of ground,
no matter how far it may be from the end of the journey, is agree-
ably apparent in the greater part of his lecture, The Artist and
Psycho-Analysis, now published in book form. He attacks the very
most careless, popular, and transparent position of the psycho-


W. C. BLUM
319
analysts and I think annihilates it. One is only sorry that his
light horse, which is sent out afterward to cut down the fugitives,
gets out of hand, and lays itself open to reprisals by outsiders.
The position which he very properly attacks is stated with
reservations in a notorious paragraph of Freud's General Intro-
duction to Psychoanalysis:
"Before you leave today I should like to direct your attention
for a moment to a side of phantasy-life of very general interest.
There is, in fact a path from phantasy back again to reality, and
that is-art. The artist has also an introverted disposition and
has not far to go to become neurotic. He is one who is urged on
by instinctive needs which are too clamorous; he longs to attain
to honour, power, riches, fame, and the love of women; but he
lacks the means of achieving these gratifications. So, like any
other with an unsatisfied longing, he turns away from reality and
transfers all his interest, and all his Libido, too, on to the creation
of his wishes in life. There must be many factors in combination
to prevent this becoming the whole outcome of his development;
it is well known how often artists in particular suffer from partial
inhibition of their capacities through neurosis. Probably their
constitution is endowed with a powerful capacity for sublimation
and with a certain flexibility in the repressions determining the
conflict. But the way back to reality is found by the artist thus:
He is not the only one who has a life of phantasy; the interme-
diate world of phantasy is sanctioned by general human consent,
and every hungry soul looks to it for comfort and consolation.
But to those who are not artists the gratification that can be drawn
from the springs of phantasy is very limited; their inexorable
repressions prevent the enjoyment of all but the meagre day-dreams
which can become conscious. A true artist has more at his disposal.
First of all he understands how to elaborate his day-dreams, so
that they lose that personal note which grates upon strange ears
and becomes enjoyable to others; he knows too how to modify
them sufficiently so that their origin in prohibited sources is not
easily detected. Further, he possesses the mysterious ability to
mould his particular material until it expresses the idea of his
phantasy faithfully; and then he knows how to attach to this
reflection of his phantasy-life so strong a stream of pleasure that,
ms


320
IMPROBABLE PURITY
for a time at least, the repressions are out-balanced and dispelled
by it. When he can do all this, he opens out to others the way
back to the comfort and consolation of their own unconscious
sources of pleasure, and so reaps their gratitude and admiration;
then he has won through his phantasy-what before he could
only win in phantasy, honour, power, and the love of women.”
III
As Mr Fry points out, Freud is here dealing not with the serious
artist, but with the popular artist-type, the "brilliant, successful,
and essentially impure artist.” For example the writer of serial
stories for the magazines, who does indeed attain “honour, power,
and the love of women” and appreciates them.
"These people," goes on Mr Fry, "have the fortunate gift of
dreaming the average person's day-dream so that the wish-fulfil-
ment which comes natural to them coincides precisely with the
wish-fulfilment of a vast number of the population. ... None
of these conditions apply to any first-rate novel-the novels that
have endured do not represent wish-fulfilment to any considerable
extent. ... To give you instances--no one who hoped to get an
ideal wish-fulfilment would go to Madame Bovary or Anna Kare-
nina or even Vanity Fair."
To the theory of art as wish-fulfilment, Mr Fry opposes his own
rigorous and rather bald theory of art as aesthetic form (inevitable
relations or sequences), with which everybody is no doubt familiar.
This theory is after all a formula, a short-cut, and Mr Fry does
not claim too much for it. It serves here to emphasize how far
the psychoanalysts are from an approach to the aesthetic problem.
It is as if Mr Fry had said, “For the most part you have been
analysing the wrong people, the wrong works, and in touching
the right ones you have not pushed your analysis below a false
surface applied for your own convenience.”
And he stops development, so to speak, with a very able and
typical passage:
"At this point I must try to meet an objection which psycho-
analysts are certain to raise. They will say that in my description
of popular art I have used the word wish in the ordinary sense
of a more or less conscious wish, whereas Freud uses wish of a
desire which has been repressed from consciousness and remains


W. C. BLUM
321
active in the unconscious. . . . I admit that if you adhere strictly
to the use of the word 'wish' in this sense, it is quite possible
that Cézanne's still-life pictures are a sublimation of some such
repressed instincts. But you will notice that Freud himself when
he talks of the artist neglects entirely his own definition of wish.
... In fact I suspect that many difficulties arise from the habit
of psycho-analysts of passing from the strict sense of wish to the
ordinary sense without even themselves noticing how misleading
the results may be.”
This passage, it seems to me, makes it proper for Mr Fry in his
lecture to ignore Freud's real contributions to aesthetic theory,
to be found scattered through The Interpretation of Dreams and
Beyond the Pleasure-Principle.?
It has another purpose besides, which has to do with Mr Fry's
audience. Remember he is delivering a lecture before a body of
psychologists. It is customary when attacking the beliefs of an
audience at one point to flatter them somewhere else or at least to
give them a way home with a little self-respect out of the stupefac-
tion prepared for them. This passage implies that psychoanalysis
may have something to say even about the purest art; that the
psychology of the dream may in a more subtle manner after all be
applicable to creative work.
Imagine then what damage Mr Fry must have done his case
in the minds of the psychologists who formed his audience when
he insisted on the several points which I shall now take up.
IW
"For I come back to this, that nothing is more contrary to the
aesthetic faculty than the dream. The poet Mallarmé foresaw
this long before Freud had revealed the psychological value of
dreams, for in his poem in memory of Théophile Gautier he says
that 'the spirit of Gautier, the pure poet, now watches over the
garden of poetry from which he banishes the Dream, the enemy
of his charge.'”
This is an amazing statement to be upheld by one quotation from
one poet. Dryden and Coleridge among others could, I think, be
1 Beyond the Pleasure Principle. By Sigmund Freud. Translated by
C. J. M. Hubback. Published by Boni and Liveright. $1.50.


322
IMPROBABLE PURITY
quoted to the contrary, if quotations were of any particular use.
I am not questioning the letter of Mr Fry's remarks, however, but
the spirit which will be made clearer by another passage.
"... there is also an art which has withdrawn itself from the
dream; which is concerned with reality, an art therefore which is
pre-eminently objective and disinterested.”
Mr Fry is of course referring to his "pure" or "aesthetic" art,
and claiming for it virtues which psychologists do not believe in at
all except furtively when thinking of their own activities. How-
ever, science, from the commonsense point of view, is called ob-
jective and disinterested because it is supposed to refer constantly
and sternly to fact. But listen to Mr Fry:
"Now I venture to say that no one who has a real understanding
of painting attaches any importance to what we call the subject
of a picture—what is represented. To one who feels the language
of pictorial form all depends on how it is presented, nothing on
what. Rembrandt expressed his profoundest feelings just as well
when he painted a carcass hanging up in a butcher's shop as when
he painted the crucifixion or his mistress."
Quite so: he was painting his “profoundest feelings.” He was
not, we are glad to see, making something out of nothing. But
in this case what, in common sense, becomes of the "objectivity"
and "disinterestedness”?
It seems to me that Mr Fry has got into this jam with his
platitudes by allowing his hatred of "impure” art to invade the
world of his theories. He tries to make out the difference as one
of kind rather than of degree. Common sense, however, speaks of
good things merely as satisfying “deeper needs," and common
sense may be right. It does not appear improbable that the dream
process is the prototype of the unconscious processes not only of
bad art, but of pure art too. Of course if Mr Fry denied that
unconscious processes are important in the making of a work of
art, we should have to begin all over again. He would have
subtracted the only motive power which has so far even been
guessed at.


W. C. BLUM
323
Since writing this review I have read another, a much more
disrespectful and “popular,” attack on Freud's paragraph about
artists by Mr Clive Bell.” “Art has nothing to do with dreams,"
writes Mr Bell among other things. “The artist is not one who
dreams more vividly, but who is a good deal wider awake, than
must people. His grand and absorbing problem is to create a form
that shall match a conception, whatever that conception may be.”
Unlike Mr Fry, Mr Bell does not seem to realize how very
nearly nothing at all his definition of the artists' problem or job
really means, or how little his various books elucidate it. The
metaphors "aesthetic emotion," "significant form," et cetera, are just
the sort of uncomfortable lumps which beg for analysis. To show
what psychoanalysis might do for them I have only to point to
what psychoanalysis has done, in Freud's Group Psychology and
the Analysis of the Ego, for “suggestion” and “herd instinct,”
those apparently irreducible causes about which we heard so much
during the war.
W. C. Blum
· Published in this number of The Dial. See page 280. —THE EDITOR.
? Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. By Sigmund Freud.
Published by Boni and Liveright. $2.


ART AND ADVENTURE
VOYAGING SOUTHWARD FROM THE STRAIT OF MA-
GELLAN. By Rockwell Kent. 4to. 184 pages.
G. P. Putnam's Sons. $7.50.
OTO
m
IT has been the fate of Mr Rockwell Kent to be extravagantly
I praised. A while ago we were informed by a London critic
that Wilderness was "easily the most remarkable book to come out
of America since Leaves of Grass was published,” and only the
other day a local journalist announced in all seriousness that
“Kent writes as if he were divinely mad or super-humanly sane.
One can think of no other American writer whose point of view is
so like God's.” This last sentence is a metaphysical absurdity that
I cannot understand. Perhaps it is only a more impassioned way
of saying that Mr Kent is assured of immortality.
Personally I am unable to write of Mr Kent in such ecstatic
language. I find his new book, on the whole, a more satisfactory
performance than Wilderness, less strained in its use of metaphor,
more interesting as a narrative of unusual occurrences, and less
addicted to meaningless symbolism. But after reading it I am
reminded again of Renoir's remark when he was told that Gauguin
had gone to the South Seas. "Pourquoi? On peint si bien à
Batignolles.” In justice to Gauguin we must admit that his choice
of Tahiti was the logical outcome of an inherent antipathy to
European civilization, and that he was congenitally an exotic
Whether he succeeded in leaving behind him everything modern
except his art is another matter-certainly he strove with a longing
both intense and harrowing to assimilate the simplicity of the
uncontaminated South. But why does Mr Kent go so far away
to paint? He has no quarrel with American life, no protest
against civilization; he is obviously much more contented in the
shelter of his Vermont hillside; he is a healthy man in possession
of a happy family; he has friends, admirers, a publisher, and
official recognition in our museums. What more does he want?
The answer is clear enough. Mr Kent is not only an artist, he
is also a corporation, and those who have taken stock in him must
have returns on their investment. He is obliged to make his art
was


THOMAS CRAVEN
325
pay a dividend, and to achieve this has fallen back on the pic-
turesque. If one cannot find creative material in the vast Amer-
ican scene, then the next best thing is to set out deliberately in
search of local colour, to face the fevers of the jungle and the
perils of the Arctic snows, and to record the dangers in pictorial
or literary form.
It is not my purpose to disparage the success of Mr Kent's voyage
as a physical adventure. In strenuous resolution and fortitude
it was an undertaking worthy of Jack London, in plain words
a fine example of pure Yankee grit. But spiritually the book
reveals little. It has none of the beautiful sympathy with the
wild life of the southern continent such as we find in Hudson, nor
is it characterized by a sophisticated understanding of the Indian
types such as Cunninghame Graham gives us. Beneath its most
ambitious passages, its most elaborate poetic flights, one feels that
the struggle was only an experience that must be turned into litera-
ture and art. I do not doubt for a moment that Mr Kent has
earnestly endeavoured to infuse into his book the strange adven-
tures of the soul-his efforts to do so are conscious to the extreme-
nor do I question the gusto and enthusiasm he displays for danger
and exploration, but his spiritual reflections are turgid and uncon-
vincing. He is at his best when dealing with the objective side
of life, and when he confines himself to straightforward chronicle,
his writing has many virtues, and he becomes a sort of modern
Defoe with an admirable sense of swift and effective detail, and
in addition, with a truly artistic skill in the arrangement of his
descriptions. The drawings of the volume have practically no
aesthetic significance, that is to say, they will not bear separa-
tion from the text, but considered purely as decorations to enhance
the mood of the story, they are all that could be desired. The
poetry of Mr Kent's mind is most fittingly conveyed in black-and-
white, and his linear impressions are not only distinguished as
book illustration, but are much superior to the mannered per-
sonifications of his Wilderness.
After all, Mr Kent has put his artistic talents to legitimate use.
It is true that he has had to travel far for his material, but he has
produced a charming document, and as much cannot be claimed
for those New York painters who spend their time in unhealthy
studios abstracting flowers or copying Matisse and Picasso.
Ice
THOMAS CRAVEN


FESTOONS OF FISHES
Less Lonely. By Alfred Kreymborg. 12mo. 110
pages. Harcourt, Brace and Company. $1.75.
W HERE is much of the 18th century spirit in Alfred Kreym-
I borg, but the fact is generally overlooked; for the rea-
son, I suppose, that his verse contains none of the stage prop-
erties which we associate with the rococo. There are no cockatoos,
apes, ivory, blackamoors, or elegant adulteries in Watteau's
best manner. Indeed, the period of Watteau is hardly the one he
suggests. His proper age is the third quarter of the century,
along with Chardin, Le Neveu de Rameau, The Deserted Village,
the building of the model dairy at Versailles. It was a period of
reaction toward small intimate things. The Opera itself became
a nursery where, in their boxes between the acts, the great ladies
of the time would suckle their children to expose their love for
Rousseau and the humbler virtues. They had found the climax
of sophistication.
There is a similar feeling in the best of Kreymborg's free verse.
One might easily compare it to the false-Chinese panels of the
period with their precise charm and landscapes without perspective;
or to the furniture with its festoons of wooden roses; or again to
someone playing, molto vivace on a tinkling clavecin, a dance
piece by Jean-Philippe Rameau. Always its simplicity seems to
occur at the end of a long line of complicated tradition: a rare
compliment when one considers that the tradition was created by
Kreymborg himself.
His free verse must be judged by its own standards, and the
fact makes judgement dangerous: the best one can do is comment
or explain. Thus, one observes that his rhythms are those of
familiar speech, his lines short, and that in general they give the
effect of rapidity and grace. His favourite device is a repetition
which takes the place of rhyme:
"don't call these things, kisses-
mouth-kisses, hand-kisses,


MALCOLM COWLEY
327
elbow, knee and toe,
and let it go at that!-"
1U
CO-
"And let it go at that!” There is always this deprecatory note,
this return to our muttons or recurrent apology to life, which has
been so widely praised as Kreymborg's "whimsicality.” Too often
its effect has been to limit his vision. His ecstasies rise only
to what historians of 8th century literature have called the
ciel-plafond, the sky in the ceiling, but he can find immense con-
tinents within these plaster horizons. His world is one of familiar
objects—books, thimbles, rings, and monocles—which he endows
not only with life, but the most delicate perceptions. More accu-
rately it is the world of fancy and emotion created by these ob-
jects: a world under the miscroscope with capillary paths of
sensation leading everywhere. About the emotional range of
Kreymborg's free verse there is something astonishing, but the
method of approach is limited, and it must have been this feeling
of restriction which caused him, finally, to experiment with the
traditional English verse forms.
Perhaps it was the conservatism of approaching middle age.
I doubt this, for when a poet has spent his life in experiment with
free rhythms, the iambs or anapests of the older forms are not
reaction, but a new adventure. More likely it was the Italian
sky, so favourable to every type of classicism. He was living on
Lake Maggiore when he wrote the thirty sonnets which, with an
introductory group of poems in other traditional forms and a final
group of free-verse Rondos, compose the present volume.
Less Lonely is not the best of his books, but it has caused the
most discussion. Even before it was published, when the sonnets
began to appear in magazines, it was definitely announced that
free verse was out of style. For there are critics who approach
poetry, like dressmaking, with much talk of Currents and Spring
Tendencies, reporting with fervour its Auteuils and Longchamps.
There are others of less flexible intelligence who hate every mod-
ernism as a disturbing sign of life in arts they prefer to study as
a dead language. Verse without rhymes or capitals is their special
antipathy. When Kreymborg's sonnets appeared they were able
at last, in all their literary supplements, to classify free verse with
Bryanism and Alexander's Ragtime Band.


328
FESTOONS OF FISHES
Se
re 1
The Rondos at the end of Kreymborg's volume have grace and
life enough to disprove such a thesis; indeed I value them much
more highly than his sonnets. Not that the sonnets are written
with too little art or do violence to an established form; their
fault is rather the opposite. They observe too many maxims too
carefully, like guests in a strange house who have studied their
books of etiquette. Or stated more baldly, Kreymborg's sonnets
are too regularly iambic. By containing too many monosyllables
they lose the nuances of accent. Their rhymes also are too pre-
cise, lacking those slight variations in sound which are most pleas-
ing to the ear. The caesuras are weak and there is not a just pro-
portion of run-over lines. The result is that his sonnets lack
resonance and, in spite of the exact daring of their images, are
difficult to remember.
These are purely technical comments which would be impossible
in the case of his free verse, and are justified here only by the
fact that of all English forms it is the sonnet which requires the
most exact attention to technique, the most subtle taste in tech-
nical violations. Moreover such criticism is of a dangerous type;
it does not always apply.
For although Kreymborg's mannerisms are certainly a weakness
in sonnets like the five on Savonarola Burning, where he is attempt-
ing a traditional dignity, there are others where they cease to be
faults, or mannerisms even, and become pure style. They help
him to write quick, limpid verses which are a proper vehicle for
some of his favourite subjects. When he speaks of household
matters or exposes a mild philosophy in phrases which seem to issue
between puffs at a briar pipe, his words take fire, drift upwards
in a ring of smoke:
IS
"Suppose they fashion keys of inquiry,
Unlock the rooms and corridors of dream ..."
"... stones ... like those the earth must yield
To keep the corners of the sea aground ..."
“Among the coral crypts that hold the sea,
Festoons of fishes weave insanity."


MALCOLM COWLEY
329
These lines are by a poet, and the critics were unjust who treated
Kreymborg as a mannequin, a weathervane, or a goose flying low
to announce a mild winter. His sonnets were a personal adven-
ture, a stage in his career. They were not completely successful,
but they left him with a few splendid verses, gathered like edel-
weiss and wreathed above the mantelpiece as the souvenir of
other horizons.
MALCOLM COWLEY


HALF TRUTHS
A STORY TELLER'S STORY. By Sherwood Anderson.
12mo. 442 pages. B. W. Huebsch. $3.
TF a man of letters undertakes autobiographical writing it is
I essential he should tell no half truths about himself, thereby
trespassing upon the recognized province of successful ambas-
sadors, successful pro-consuls, successful generals. The end of
his endeavour should be to record with unaffected candour what
relates to that informal other self which, with the unconcern of
a tomcat in an eclipse, pursues its secretive purposes, indifferent,
nay, totally oblivious to the world and its estimates.
Sherwood Anderson can write simple and beautiful prose. Some
of his short stories have upon them a really lovely light, a light
as lovely and transparent as ever fell across the wide level fields
of Ohio on a midsummer morning. In Winesburg, Ohio, and in
The Triumph of the Egg, one feels confidence in his craftsman-
ship, confidence in the authenticity of his manner of writing. In
truth, his short stories seem to have the solidity of corn cobs, seem
to ring as true as silver dollars, seem to be as indigenous to this
country as the crescent-shaped decorations cut out in the green
wooden blinds of old-fashioned American houses.
In A Story Teller's Story, however, all is different. For some
reason a curious self-consciousness has now crept in so that as
soon as the charming description of Mr Anderson's childhood is
finished one experiences disappointment. Indeed, towards the
end of the book, there is scarcely a page which does not contain a
sentence either slipshod or soft.
Many people will be interested to know that this volume is
dedicated to Mr Alfred Stieglitz, and truly one seems to catch
from time to time an echo of the very mannerisms of speech said
to be in vogue amongst the few favoured artists fortunate enough
to enjoy close contact with the inspired photographer. It is often
hard to detect the particular accent of any given salon, but surely
I cannot be mistaken when I nick with the Stieglitz nick, as in
the old days one nicked the beaks of swans that came from one


LLEWELYN POWYS
331
Reems
VI
particular stretch of water, the following "soulful” expressions. “I
had become a writer a word fellow." "To read the Bible written
by old Jewish word fellows,” or “dear word fellow" in alluding
to his father. Or again “It came with a rush, the feeling that I
must quit buying and selling, the overwhelming feeling of un-
cleanliness," or "Then the morning light streamed in at my window
and my hand trembled so that I could no longer hold the pen.
What a sweet clean feeling!”
There were moments in his career when Mr Anderson felt cer-
tain misgivings about the import and value of his work, “Even
my friend Paul Rosenfeld had called me 'the Phallic Chekhov.'
Had I a sex obsession? Was I a goner?” On such occasions he
would be reassured by the thought that only the superficial feel
confidence in themselves. "It was only the trick men, the men
who worked from the little patent formula they had learned, the
critics who never got English literature out of their heads who
thought they were sure of their ground.” I daresay Sherwood
Anderson's animadversion against these trick men is perfectly
justified, but it also seems clear to me that the mere fact of never
getting English literature out of their heads carries with it a
certain advantage. After all I do not suppose that it would be at
all an easy matter to cajole these same gentlemen trick men into
calling themselves or anybody else "a goner.” Has Sherwood
Anderson no conception of what style means? How can it be
possible for "our best story teller in his best story' to make use
of such a word in such a way? I am sorry to say that in reading
this volume one receives other such shocks. Again and again the
reader is aware of certain affectations which make him long for any
blunt bald utterance that carries with it no literary flavour.
There are, however, plenty of sentences in this book which though
they may not denote a very original mind yet show clearly that
Mr Anderson takes a philosophic interest in all that surrounds
him. For example, he is puzzled by ethical considerations and
discovers that “All morality becomes a purely aesthetic matter.
What is beautiful must bring aesthetic joy; what is ugly must
bring aesthetic sadness and suffering,” or in close contact with a
man of culture he somewhat naïvely questions "Was there a power
greater than obvious power, a power not having in it the disease of
obvious power ?"
e


332
HALF TRUTHS
And set here and there between such honest meditations is also
an occasional passage which shows us that the Sherwood Anderson
whom we have learnt to honour is not dead, but is still able to
convey to us with an unfaltering hand certain glimpses of life
consecrated with the small rain of human tears. An old woman
forgets to wind up the clock, forgets to let out the cat at night,
and in a moment the reader appreciates with complete conviction
how intense is the emotion she is feeling.
When Sherwood Anderson was in New York he used to live in
a hall bedroom, in one of those countless hall bedrooms in which
he has lodged and which would, he declares, be numerous enough
to make a long street of houses if set side by side. In this hall
bedroom he would often lie listening to the sound of the steamers
in the North River. And how wonderfully he creates for us the
mood of those familiar sounds, redolent of I know not what sweet
melancholy. “All night when there was a fog they were like
cows lost in a forest, somewhere out in the Middle West, lost and
bawling for the warm barn.”
Writing of that kind does no shame to the author, but when in
commenting upon The Dial award of 1921 he says, “It had been
offered to me and I wanted it, but thought seriously of investing
in hair dye before going to call on the editors” one can only con-
clude that Sherwood Anderson never meant this book to be taken
as a serious contribution to English literature,
LLEWELYN Powys


INDUSTRY AND PROPHECY
THE PROSPECTS OF INDUSTRIAL CIVILIZATION. By
Bertrand Russell in collaboration with Dora Russell.
12m0. 287 pages. The Century Company. $2.
e
C
OUT
ROBABLY no one understands our civilization better than
1 Bertrand Russell. Certainly no one as well equipped as he
is to understand it has seen it from as many angles, looked at it
as dispassionately, and at the same time with a deep affection
and a desire to save it from its stupidities and its cruelties.
And yet both he and Dora Russell, who is associated with him
in the writing of this book, frankly admit that they do not like it:
“For my part, since I came to know China, I have come to regard
‘progress' and 'efficiency' as the great misfortunes of the western
world.” Yet progress and efficiency are the very lifeblood of
our civilization because ours is an industrial and a business man's
civilization. And to a business man progress and efficiency are
the measuring rods of the business man's efforts. And so Bertrand
Russell sets himself the task of speculating as to the probable ends
to be anticipated by this indulgence in progress and efficiency.
These two have bred monsters in their own image, Industrialism
and Nationalism, which, like the old Greek gods, threaten not
only to destroy their own parents, but everything else with them.
Industrialism soon forgets the purpose of its real existence, namely,
to make life more livable by controlling the environment, and
thinks of itself as an end. “The man who makes a railway is
regarded as more important than the man who visits his friends
by travelling on it, although the purpose of the railway is to be
travelled on.” And so the ends of industrialism are divorced from
human ends and life is viewed in terms of production (or more
properly speaking in terms of price and profit) rather than in
terms of the satisfaction of human wants, “art and thought and
love ... the creation and contemplation of beauty and the
scientific understanding of the world.” All of these things become
impossible because they are industrially meaningless (they do not
pay) and indulging in them is not efficient and progressive.
The same thing is true of nationalism. Its purpose in its in-


334
INDUSTRY AND PROPHECY
Im-
mea
ception in the early days when it was struggling for a foothold
was to protect the group against the danger of absorption by other
groups, the danger of destroying the things which make group-life
precious. But to-day nationalism sees its purpose as the instru-
ment of destruction of other groups and it will end by destroying
itself with the host on which it lives and which it afflicts.
The Russells are passionately in earnest and they are seeking
a way out. They realize that it is out of the question to dis-
pense with industrialism. It has made possible a certain standard
of living through increased production which under no circum-
stances would we be willing to give up. In fact it might even
mean starvation to half the present world population to go with-
out the advantages of modern industrial production. The solu-
tion is in some form of economic organization which will give us
the advantages of industrialism without its vices and cruelties.
Some form of socialism may be the solution, but a socialism con-
trolled to human ends, which will reconcile progress and efficiency
with the most free human purposes. Such a socialism cannot come
out of industrially backward countries like Russia. Hence the
Soviet experiment is nothing but an interesting interlude. It must
come out of industrially advanced countries like England and
America, especially America. Unless this happens, industrial
civilization is doomed to ultimate suicide. Yet it is not at
all impossible that such a socialism should come out of America.
The same factors which have in the past made capitalism so very
attractive to the present generation of trust and pecuniary mag-
nates—namely the free chance to rise from the ranks—now that
capitalism is crystallizing and making this more and more impos-
sible, may send the balked and disappointed, but energetic rail-
road builders and steel barons and coal kings to a questioning of
this capitalist system and a realization of the fact that to-day
it is socialism which may give them what capitalism gave them
fifty years ago. With that will come the beginning of the end
of industrial capitalism.
And when that happens, what will take its place? What should
take its place? A system of living which takes account of the
fundamental things that all mankind wants: instinctive happiness;
friendly feeling; enjoyment of beauty and knowledge. All of these
things can be made the heritage of every human being if only
society can come to see that all its ills are due to a wrong distribution


MAX SYLVIUS HANDMAN
335
of power and proceed to a redistribution of this power. This can
be accomplished ultimately by persuading "average men to claim
their due share of power instead of being content to live in ser-
vitude. ... What stands in the way? Greed. The lust of power
and the tyranny of custom. ... Perhaps in the horror of the
coming years, something of this dross may be purged from our
nature and we may lean to hope as the only alternative of despair.”
I confess to an utter inability to do justice to such a book.
It would, of course, be easy to take issue with it on every point
of fact or on every point of generalization. And particularly so
since many of the generalizations are in the nature of forecasts
or prospects. Just think of the amount of paper that can be
blackened by a debate as to whether or not the would-be coal barons
of the future will be more favourable to socialism than to capital-
ism. But that would be idle speculation of the kind that unfortu-
nately there is already too much of. It is in addition something that
I have no interest in, being a social scientist, if that term be inter-
preted and taken in a very narrow and limited sense. My business
is to spend months and years over only a minute detail of some of
the minor points raised in this book. And so as I read along I have
to pause and halt and ask for details, minute and statistical, for
the things which the authors see established so hopefully by the
aid of the spread of knowledge or by “organization and energy.”
Here is a group of tenant farmers voting year after year for a
man who is simply using their misery to raise and maintain him-
self in power. Certainly a spread of knowledge and organization
and energy might put a stop to this trafficking in their misfortunes.
But how is that to be accomplished? By more education? How
is this tenant farmer going to get that education when cotton sells
for twenty cents a pound and it costs twenty-one cents to market
it? And how is he going to get more for his cotton when the
market will not pay more until spring, by which time he has been
compelled to sell his crop to pay his notes at the bank, buy
feed for his stock, and food for his family?
And yet as I continued to read I saw a brilliant vision of
the whole field of human life, and a sense of exaltation came over
me in the call to a partnership in a task which at the hands of the
Russells becomes suffused with a light comparable to the light
which must have appeared to Paul on the road to Damascus.
Max SyļvỊU HẠNDMAN


BRIEFER MENTION
A Man in the Zoo, by David Garnett, woodcuts by R. A. Garnett (12mo,
119 pages, Knopf: $1.75). This quiet, steady, relentless reduction of
civilized man to the position of an animal worthy of a place in a first-
class zoo would have infuriated former generations, but the present age,
already aware that it is irreligious and possibly soulless, will not mind
much. The book can be heartily recommended to admirers of Headlong
Hall and Erewhon as something in that line. It is full of irresistibly
sly touches and, most likely, is a permanent addition to literature.
The ISLAND OF THE MIGHty, by Padraic Colum, illustrated by Wilfred
Jones (12mo, 265 pages; Macmillan: $2.25). Padraic Colum has done
excellently well in condensing and simplifying the stories of The Mabi-
nogion. The Welsh names of places and people have, so he contends,
prevented these stories, originally translated by Lady Charlotte Guest in
1849, from commanding any wide appeal. How poetical in the true Celtic
sense of that word these tales are, may be seen on the very first page.
The youth Kilhuch is there described as he rides towards the court of
King Arthur. “His horse as it coursed along, cast up four sods with its
four hoofs, like four swallows in the air, about his head, now above, now
below. . . . In his hand was a spear swifter than the fall of a dew drop
from the blade of reed-grass upon the earth when the dew of June is at
its heaviest.” How different such delicate sentences seem from the tough
writing of the "creeping Saxon.”
THE LAND OF THE FATHERS, by Sergey Gussiev Orenburgsky, translated
KAN NEGARA SET
by Nina N. Selivanova (12mo, 298 pages; Lincoln Mac Veagh, Dial
M50*1. Din
Press: $2.50). A Soviet best-seller. Intellectuals may be interested in
seeing the sort of literature that now passes in the land of Dostoevsky.
It has considerable colour and the characterizations that come so easily to
Russian writers, but the thinking, as usual in best-sellers, seems strangely
familiar. It sets out to portray the turbulence that led up to the revolu-
tion, but in milder accents than our newspaper correspondents have accus-
tomed us to.
The White Monkey, by John Galsworthy (12mo, 328 pages; Scribner:
$2). It is only the presence and personality of that charming relic of
Mid-Victorian days, the super-possessive Soames Forsyte, which redeems
this latest novel of Mr Galsworthy and saves it from complete aesthetic
collapse. The main idea of the book, the impression made on the mind
of Soames by the ways of the Post-War generation, is a good one; but
Mr Galsworthy's intellectual limitations, which seem to have been grow-
ing more and more noticeable of late, have hindered his making anything
but a very thin and meagre use of this fine motif. The chatter of his
new intelligentsia is utterly unconvincing; and the book is lamentably
lacking in weight, concentration, and cohesion.


BRIEFER MENTION
337
The HEAVENLY LADDER, by Compton Mackenzie (12mo, 356 pages; Doran:
$2.50). This is an account of what the author supposes to be an ideal
soul as it journeys upward into the arms of Holy Rome: a soul grounded
in feeble mysticism instead of faith, and expressed by fanaticism in place
of the ardour it claims. A church which has been ennobled by a Newman
and strengthened by a Manning cannot but have either the dignity to
repudiate or the good sense to disdain such adherents as Mark Lidderdale
and the gentleman who conceived him. The author resigns the only
value his book might have, when in an appended note he disclaims both
the ability and the intention to produce propaganda.
Poems, by Lady Margaret Sackville (12mo, 63 pages; Lincoln Mac Veagh;
Dial Press : $2). With the distinctness of the spinet and the rigour of
the sermon, restrained without constraint, preserved when they tremble
upon the brink of a banality by that sensibility which recoils from mala-
pert insistence, these erect poems are consistently alluring in their respect
for a freedom that must be permitted in the same measure in which it is
enjoyed; as in their predilection for romance—for flagged paths and
mignonette, for roses by the latticed window, for polished floors and
peacocks of clipped yew.
CHILLS AND Fever, by John Crowe Ransom (12mo, 95 pages; Knopf:
$1.50). Unrewarding dissonances, mountebank persiflage, mock mediaeval
minstrelsy, and shreds of elegance disturbingly suggestive of now this, now
that contemporary bard, deprive one of the faculty to diagnose this
"dangerous” phenomenon to which one has exposed oneself.
A FAR LAND, by Martha Ostenso (12mo, 70 pages; Seltzer: $1.50). Ever
attentive as the reader of poetry must be—to the elf, the witch, the crow,
the duck, the swan, the loon, the leprecaun, to "moonlight and mist,” to
hazel-tree, birch, briar, and hawthorn-he finds them sometimes deftly
placed in these friendly verses. Harmonic inequalities of movement are
disturbing and snared imagination starts at certain words and phrases;
at "most everything," "gloamy," "ghost-rare," "shambly," "youngish,”
and "my mouth on the quiet of your dew sweet face.”
The CHAPBOOK: A Miscellany, 1924, with “Apology” (10mo, 64 pages;
Poetry Bookshop, London). The Apologist's hope that the 1924 Chap-
book may provide “entertainment sufficient for the moment,” is much
more than realized in Doris's Dream Songs, by T. S. Eliot; in Voltaire's
Advice to a Reviewer, translated by Richard Aldington; in Sacheverell
Sitwell's lines, “I sing, stone statue in chill water, never warmed by sun";
in Osbert Sitwell's Sicilian tiger-tamer "and her eighteen Ferocious Debu-
tantes”; in a pen drawing by Paul Nash, in two pen portraits by
McKnight Kauffer, in two woodcuts by John Nash and Eric Daglish,
respectively. The poetaster's now almost universally prevailing vogue for
deity with a small d, puzzles one; and the arithmetical balance of gratitude
for Mr Harold Monro's Midnight Lamentation, is unsatisfactory-four
stanzas being a gain and four, a loss.


338
BRIEFER MENTION
The Week-End Book, A Sociable Anthology. General editors, Vera Mendel
and Francis Meynell; music editor, John Goss (12mo, 320 pages; Lin.
coln Mac Veagh, Dial Press: $2). A perfect book for its purpose—to
beguile, cheer, and possibly uplift an already nice person staying in a
nice house from Friday till Tuesday. The poems, songs, cookery receipts,
remedies, et cetera, have been chosen with great discernment by compilers
who relish wit as well as beauty and it is an extra fillip to find some of
the best of the new poets associated agreeably with the best old ones.
THE GALLANTS, by E. Barrington (illus., 12mo, 308 pages; Atlantic
Monthly Press: $3.50). One is enticed by the glamour of Elizabethan
words and leisure, in Sir John Harrington's letters; and by the poetically
just incquities of chivalry in Dame Petronille's twelfth century account of
Henry II's relationship with Elcanor of Aquitaine and with Rosemonde
de Clifford. In certain of these memorials to passion, however, letters and
conversations imagined as authentic, scem presumptuous; the consuming
flirtations of the Duke of Monmouth, the “shameless amours" of
George IV "best forgot one and all,” yet lovingly lingered over-sug.
gesting by their content as by their manner of narration, the photodra.
matist's portrayal of love's violent duel between the vulnerable heart of
woman and the voracious vagrancy of man.
Getitions of the Dallas authentic, seem to passion, however.
THE JOURNAL OF NICHOLAS Cresswell: 1774-1777 (illus., 8vo, 287 pages;
Lincoln Mac Veagh, Dial Press: $5). Eighteenth century diaries
always possess interest. The brutal frankness belonging to that most
materialistic of all ages at least has the effect of keeping one awake. The
Journal of Nicholas Cresswell is no exception to the rule. The young
Derbyshire yeoman thinks little of resorting to fisticuffs when his doctor
makes a mistake in the medicine he gives him. The book offers a valuable
and revealing picture of what life in the States was like one hundred and
fifty years ago. It presents to the reader a personality rude and uncul.
tivated and yet possessing a sly honesty befitting a youth brought up in
the sheep folds of his father's farm at Edale.
Joseph CONRAD, A PERSONAL REMEMBRANCE, by Ford Madox Ford (12mo,
276 pages, Little, Brown: $2.50) is “a projection of Joseph Conrad as,
little by little, he revealed himself to a human being during many years
of close intimacy.” It is also a projection, with close-ups, of Ford.
Throughout the book Ford rejects the unobstrusive I and writes instead
"the writer,” until Conrad, the writer (and the human being) become
slightly obscured in spite of the radiance which Ford's admiration and
love pour upon him. It is, therefore, best to consider this volume as a
rather longer chapter of those reminiscences which Ford (then Hueffer)
began many years ago and which are among the most witty and enter-
taining memoirs of our time. The Conrad has, in addition, real emotion,
and this makes the perpetual intrusion of Ford's personality irritating.
The errors in the book are amusing and in parallel passages "l'oeil gauche"
becomes “his right eye.” But this is perhaps the fault of the impres-
sionistic method which, by no means incidentally, Ford explains in his
account of his and Conrad's conception (it was the same) of the novel.


BRIEFER MENTION
339
PORTRAITS, Rcal and Imaginary, by Ernest Boyd (12 mo, 265 pages; Doran:
$2.50) are not distinguished by amiability in the imaginary section nor
by any special quality of illumination in the real. The latter, however,
are accurate, fair, considered, and unmalicious reports of a variety of
literary men. Mr Boyd had the honour of having been the first to hear
William Butler Yeats' superb remark about George Moore's love affairs.
Apart from that, and from his history of recent Irish literature, his chief
claim to distinction seems to be that he has corrected T. S. Eliot's French
and irritated Malcolm Cowley. It is doubtful whether all of these
triumphs together qualify the author as a guide to American letters.
The FREEMAN Book, Typical Editorials, Essays, Critiques, and Other
Selections From the Eight Volumes of The Freeman: 1920-1924 (8vo,
394 pages; Huebsch: $3). It is well that Mr Huebsch should have seen
fit to bring out selections from the political, critical, and literary writings
published in The Freeman. The present volume serves its purpose well.
Once more we are given an opportunity to be annoyed by the supercilious
Master-know-all tone of its leading articles, to be instructed and enter-
tained by the Reviewer's Note Book, and to be duly impressed by the
high level of taste and sanity consistently preserved by this most remark-
able experiment in liberal journalism.
NORTH AMERICA, by Rodwell Jones and P. W. Bryan (illus., 8vo, 537
pages; Lincoln Mac Veagh, Dial Press : $5). "An historical, economic,
and regional geography" which reviews the political and economic develop-
ment of North America from the standpoint of physical evironment,
indicating the influence of such matters as mineral wealth, mountain and
water systems, swamp desert and timber lands, wind and rainfall, soil
values, markets, and so on. If man as an individual makes conscious
choices, his collective activities would seem to follow an almost mechanistic
logic, as is readily observable through this engrossing compilation and
co-ordination of data wherein facts, one might say, become sublimated into
factors. Considerations of ethnology, or cultural traditions, are of course
omitted, as only the more material aspects of the continent's progress
are here under discussion; but the authors admirably present their field
of interest in a work which is at once thorough and non-technical.
OUR CHANGING MORALITY, A Symposium, edited by Freda Kirchwey (8vo,
255 pages; Albert & Charles Boni: $2.50.) “Possibly only the woman
in the isolation of the home is able to sustain the double load of her own
virtue and her husband's ideals." All the essays in this book bear directly
or indirectly upon this delightful sentence quoted from Freda Kirchwey's
introduction. Needless to say the value of the articles vary. For ex-
ample Mr Floyd Dell's observations on these vexed questions are hardly
as succinct as those of Bertrand Russell. The latter quotes Müller-Lyer
as dividing the history of civilization into three periods "the clan period,
the family period, and the personal period." The birth of the last period
is apparently painful to conventional-minded people who seem to find
difficulty in attributing any value at all to the modern slogan "No God,
no nation, no family."


340
BRIEFER MENTION
SIGMUND FREUD, His Personality, His Teaching, and His School, by Fritz
Wittels (8vo, 287 pages; Dodd, Mead: $3.50). At last an intelligent
introduction to psychoanalysis. The author, an acknowledged authority
on the subject, was formerly a pupil of Freud, but owing to a personal
difference is no longer associated with the celebrated Viennese, and writes
of his teacher with amazing frankness and insight. Freud is presented
as a genius with Olympian bigotries, but his greatness is never contested,
nor is his importance as a pioneer underestimated. All the theories relating
to the unconscious mind are admirably explained; there are chapters on
dream interpretation, complexes, and narcissism; the revolt of Adler, Jung,
and Stekel is given in detail; and the politics of the movement disclosed
with unusual asperity.
National HEALTH SERIES (20 vols., 16mo, 18,000 words; Funk & Wag-
nalls: $6). The publishers of this series are to be congratulated. Each
volume of the collection contains some useful information with regard to
the preservation of health. Written by recognized medical authorities in a
clear straight-forward style, they should do much to direct a careless and
fond public into that straight and narrow path that leads to personal
hygiene.
Cancer: How It Is Caused; How It Can Be Prevented, by J. Ellis Barker
(12mo, 478 pages; Dutton : $3). One can discount the exaggerated con-
tempt to which this book has been treated in America by medical book
reviewers as the contempt of the professional for the unsubmissive ama-
teur. The author's conclusions are that cancer is caused in most cases
by intestinal “autointoxication” and vitamin starvation extending over a
period of 20-40 years. The logical chain is somewhat as follows: (1)
Cancer is a disease of civilization : "savages” do not have it. (2) Cancer
is known to have been caused by repeated X-Ray burns or by repeated
small doses of arsenic, aniline, and other poisons, after 20-40 years.
(3) The prevalence of cancer after forty, the “cancer age,” is the result
not of changes peculiar to age per se (elderly savages do not suffer from
cancer) but of the lapse of time required for cancer to develop from slow
systemic poisoning. (4) Cancer patients generally give a history of con-
stipation. Vitamine starvation encourages constipation, and can cause
ulcers of the digestive tract from which cancer is known frequently to
develop. (5) Constipation and vitamine starvation, the commonest of
our slow poisons, belong to civilization; they are the accompaniments of
civilization which are responsible for cancer. Moral: Take bran, salad,
exercise, et cetera. Does he prove it? His statistical method is at times
haphazard. A statistician should be able to do something better than
"quote 20 or 30 authorities.” One suspects, however wrongly, that forty
authorities could be quoted in the contrary sense. And he has done no
"laboratory” or “clinical” work. And his chapters on the specific effects
of constipation and vitamine starvation are highly speculative. Never-
theless, I cannot see that his theory of the causation of cancer is at all
as untenable or ridiculous as the American reviewers would have us
believe. If the book did nothing more than insist upon the coincidence
of cancer and civilization, its publication would be completely justified.
For this is a point which can scarcely be overemphasized.


THE THEATRE
CONCERNING PROCESSIONAL there are certain pretensions
which seem to me exaggerated, chiefly that it is a “Jazz
Symphony of American Life," and this, it happens, is from the
playbill and should be set down as a black mark for John Howard
Lawson, the author. There is on the other hand the claim that
this is sheer madness and has no relevance whatever to America,
and to those who hold this view I earnestly recommend the news-
paper reports of the Sunday picnic over the cave in which Floyd
Collins lay entombed a few weeks ago. Ten thousand people
motored to the spot; hawkers gave Kentucky its first experience
of the approach to a Harvard-Yale football game; jazz bands
played; lunches were eaten; the curious approached the pit;
although it was Sunday, the work of excavation went on; and a
good time was had by all. Rumours at the same time circulated
which added zest to the enterprise, for there were those who said
that the victim had gone into the cave for purposes of publicity,
and others who claimed that he was not there at all. The melo-
dramatic touch was added later when the man under the rock in
Kentucky was announced, by telegraph, to be in Missouri.
Or consider the recent exploitation of the fanatical Mr Robert
Reidt who awaited the end of the world in East Patchogue and
had, to cheer him on, a number of radio outfits, a phonograph, and
the assistance of the Ku Klux Klan, with whose intentions for
social betterment the end of the world might interfere. These
incidents are the counterparts in actuality of the wild scenes which
Mr Lawson put into his play and they are precisely in his method.
There you have the mawkish and the disorderly, the tragic and the
grotesque, slapped and dabbed on until the result affects one like
those overworked billboards from which rain has washed the
newest advertisement, leaving streaks and splashes of all those
which went before.
PROCESSIONAL is not played as written, and I have not yet
seen the printed version; but no change of detail can entirely
dislocate the emphasis which the Theatre Guild gave it. They
made it, that is, a play. There is the definite story of the strike


342
THE THEATRE
in the West Virginia mining town and the jail-breaker whose
mother sells herself wholesale to the soldiery for her son's sake,
and the rape which the son commits, and his escape from death,
return, and emotionless marriage to the girl he ruined. Into this
story there are irruptions: the Jew out of burlesque and the comic
strip; the respectable man out of Art Young's cartoons; the Civil
War Veteran out of American fiction; a soldier out of Three
Soldiers; a Sheriff out of Belasco; and the Klan, superbly out of
Mr Lawson. They cut across the story, breaking it in two, or
intensifying its emotion, or twisting it, at the end, into an unex-
pected shape. The one thing they never did for me was to make
the story interesting.
Mr Lawson's whole point would be lost, presumably, if there
were no deep and tragic emotions in his play; but I felt that his
whole point would have been made if these emotions broke into
the fairly homogeneous texture of the comic figures and the jazz.
That is, I should like to see PROCESSIONAL again with the emphasis
exactly reversed, so that the audience would never feel itself called
to weep over the desolate mother and the ruined girl, and would
treat them, perhaps, as they now treat the comically heartbroken
Jewish father, as a figure of fun—which is exactly how Mr Philip
Loeb played him. Or as they accept the newspaper man from Mr
Donald Macdonald, recognizing him as pure "type,” with interest
and amusement. Or as they accept June Walker's jazz girl, with
interest and sympathy and mystification, for there is no logic in
her, only impulse and vitality. Blanche Friderici and George
Abbott played the scene in which the son discovers his mother's
shameful sacrifice precisely as if Mr Willard Mack had written it
and Mr William Brady produced it. And this is a fault to be
divided between Mr Lawson himself and Mr Philip Moeller who
produced the play.
Its virtues and its shortcomings alike make PROCESSIONAL a
very interesting play to think about, even if it was not the most
interesting to see. And most important for Mr Lawson's future
as a dramatist is, I think, the fact that his method is not only
better than his material; his method becomes at times the very
substance of what he is trying to say. A hundred experiments in
the theatre have been met with the sneer that their authors have
VITtue
ROCESSIONAL a


GILBERT SELDES
343
IN
spent a great deal of time inventing a new way of saying what
was not worth hearing in the first place. To me the story of
PROCESSIONAL was always intruding, making strong or weak, but
always irrelevant, appeals. But the method—this apparent
haphazard slamming together of elements, this sudden thrust of
energy from unknown sources obliquely across the whole field of
vision, this creation-and-caricature of emotion—these things did
say something precise and interesting. They said it, moreover,
about America. If the subject-matter, so dear to the theatre-goer,
had been neglected entirely, I should allow Mr Lawson his “Jazz
Symphony of American Life.”
In that case, to be sure, PROCESSIONAL would become vaudeville,
"a night at a burleycue,” with a fresh significance. Mr Lawson felt
bound to give us drama with his developed technique of the vaude-
ville and burlesque houses. I incline more and more to believe
that whenever jazz is mentioned not drama, not opera, not the
spoken or singable word, but dance, to wit, ballet, is indicated. I
think of the great ballets of Strawinsky, of PARADE and MERCURE,
of Cocteau's Tour Eiffel and LE TRAin Bleu, and in all of
them I see endless posibilities if an American will find the proper
adaptation and find also the proper composer.
For if there is one thing certain about jazz it is that it has
carried ragtime away from the spoken word, and carried it, pre-
cisely, toward freedom and elaboration in the dance. There have
been beginnings in choreography: in the KRAZY KAT BALLET and
more recently in a cafeteria scene in The ComiC SUPPLEMENT
(the music by Henry Souvaine). But all the chatter about a
jazz opera will divert the attention of composers and of authors
from the suitable medium. A jazz drama like Mr Lawson's is
not a diversion; but a little bit a waste, for the same materials in
a ballet would have been far more interesting and in a ballet the
spectator would not have been continually worried by the progress
of the drama. The drama, in short, was adequate for just those
portions of PROCESSIONAL which were not interesting; the nearer
the play approached ballet, as in the jazz wedding of the last
act, the sharper became its definition. It was not, on the whole,
well produced, the author and the producer both having hesitated
too often and too long. One or the other might have cut loose


344
THE THEATRE
and given us a ballet-drama, the best that could be accomplished
with the text.
I should note that this is the first of the Guild's productions
this season which was not expected to move to an uptown play-
house. It is, in short, not a great success with the intelligent
theatre-lovers who make up the Guild's audiences. However, I
fancy that the reasons for this have somehow not been expressed
above.
10
I can make no report on the "filth drama” of the month, as it
is being called. All I know is that the plays which every season
lead to the sort of moral exercise which now animates The World
and the Actors' Equity and the Police Department, are usually
singularly dull plays; and the indignation is also a little dull.
For once however the theatre folk have suggested a practicable
way of eluding censorship-by refusing to act in plays they do not
like. They have, then, promptly called the censor in again, because
a committee is to tell them which plays to like and which not.
luse
SUIC
Mr Gilbert Emery can always make the dramatic incidents of
his plays appear as the natural result of the contact of his char-
acters. He did this in Tarnish; and does it in EPISODE. In
Tarnish the father and mother of the heroine had been, you felt,
for years pressing upon her, so that she was directed by them to
act as she did. In EPISODE this sense of pressure—the good old
American business man dulling the edge of his wife's love-is pro-
jected by means of a telephone conversation; the lover is shadowy,
the wife-and-mistress not powerfully rendered. It remains, there-
fore, a play with good things in it, and intelligent. That much,
it goes without saying, would accrue to She WANTED TO Know,
delicately adapted by Miss Grace George from the French of Paul
Geraldy, and also acted by Miss George. The production seemed,
however, crude and inept. And before proceeding to something of
first importance, let me say that Miss Elsie Janis' PuzzLES OF 1925
is as tidy a revue as the season has shown me, Jimmy Hussey and
Miss Janis both being better than ever.
The matter of importance is The Last LAUGH, Ufa's picture
with Emil Jannings. This is a moving picture made not by pre-


GILBERT SELDES
345
tentious titles, elaborate "presentation,” false philosophy, and
personal chatter, but by the camera. The director (the name
seemed to be Mornau as it flashed on the screen) has made a correct
assumption: that in the moving picture the camera must do all
the work, and when, let us say, a sound or an emotion passes, the
only way you can inform the spectator is by showing its result
as that result can be recorded by the camera. Thus when a trom-
bone is played so that it nearly deafens the listener, the mouth of
the instrument grows suddenly so large that it seems to engulf the
tortured man. So when a face terrifies a man you see the face
distorted as the man sees it. So instead of a long subtitle telling
you that good old Gaffer Gaffkins was the little adored deity of the
tenement, you see the old man coming home and, as soon as he is in,
the concierge puts out all the lights. The fantasy in this film is
not of the CALIGARI type; indeed I should say that The Last
LAUGH should have come five years before CALIGARI, and pre-
pared the way for it. The head porter of the Atlantic Hotel sees
in his dream one superb moment when the revolving doors are a
hundred feet high and he dominates them. For the most part it
is not fantasy, but downright good camera work that distinguishes
this picture. And good camera work makes it interesting. The
American experimental film, The SALVATION HUNTERS, was over-
laden with bad symbolism and took too many shots posed after
Whistler's Mother and other paintings. It failed to tell any
story and failed to photograph its widely advertised thought.
The Last Laugh in its simple fashion photographed everything
and eventually conveyed an emotion. It fortifies me in my propa-
ganda—that the American producers of films are entirely on the
wrong track, that they are using unsuitable materials and are
forcing the camera to do things it cannot do because they do not
know how good are the things it can do.
Gilbert Seldes


MODERN ART
THE Max Weber exhibition in the Neumann Print Rooms
1 is a disturbing affair. It seems more should be done about
Max Weber than is. Here is one of the best painters in the
world practically going to waste among us. And nobody gives
a hang. And they say he has become a recluse in the strictly
American, Homer-Ryder-Blakelock-Fuller fashion! Certainly I
have not caught a glimpse of him on the streets in several years,
nor have I received one of his expostulatory letters lately. To be
sure, I am always recommending young people of likely talents
to absent themselves from the madding crowd, but it is a faute-de-
mieux sort of advice. I would prefer them to have the satisfied
joy of commerce with intelligent clients were there such people
to be had—but the few of them that one hears of here and there
shut themselves up also and behind more bolts and bars than even
the scared artists can afford. This thing of patronage is the
desperate problem that faces American artists. There is so dem-
nition little of it at present. And at the same time there are such
oceans of money to burn. It is not so much that I desire con
versations with magnates that terminate with the signing of
cheques as that I sigh for the old-time reciprocity that existed
between Whistler, St Gaudens, Sargent, and their publics, and that
gave each the fortifying sensation of being an artist. Retirement
seems to be necessary for the formation of character and the
rounding out of one's ideas—but once rounded out it is only
natural and not at all harmful for the artist to return to the arena
for the general applause. Max Weber, I am afraid, is one of
those who cut himself off from this, in the earlier stages of his
career, by the forbidding prices he put between himself and his
admirers. He was not alone in this procedure. There were many
other struggling painters who thought and still think it undigni-
fied and un-serious to accept low prices—as though prices had
anything to do with the quality of a work of art! It is the public
demand, in the end, that makes prices, and the public only raises
its demands when it is already in possession and committed to an
artist. So, to be canny, the artist's proper game is to entangle
ocea


HENRY MCBRIDE
347
us.
collectors. It is necessary to be owned, to be in collections. To
accomplish this the wise painter will give away his productions
rather than be thwarted. This may seem unpractical—on the
contrary it is long-range practicality. The first Ryder in the
Sir William van Horne Collection was given by old Mr Cottier
to an at-first unappreciative Sir William, but once safely in the
house the little picture soon began its persuasive work. I was
told this by the Cottier people themselves, so the theory I enlarge
upon is not unknown to dealers. In fact the idea seems to have
been so generally known to armies of successful artists in the past
that I have often been tempted to write an essay upon the pro-
portionate amount of mere push that is necessary to float geniuses
into recognition. It is all very well to be an Emily Dickinson
and to postpone fame until after death, but a certain amount of
ready cash, that every painter is not presupposed to have, is neces-
sary for these leisurely excursions up Parnassus.
All this is sordid of course, and I am all the more ashamed of
the tone, in that it is not the first time that prices have crept into
my discussions of late; but the fact is that the winter has been
so lacking in exhilaration and tales of success, that it has become
impossible to keep my thoughts away from the "business” of art.
By way of moral to this disquisition I might add that when I
asked a well-known dealer in prints which of his men sold best,
he replied, and not much to my surprise, “Oh, Joseph Pennell,
by long odds.” Mr Pennell is one of the best known names in
America, but he has never believed in hoarding his works in
studio closets. His prices are distinctly on the bargain order,
but he cleans out each year regularly, and incidentally, cleans
up, too, a tidy sum. I was almost scandalized at the round figures
my dealer said Mr Pennell earns each year, and I couldn't help
thinking of the contrast in results between his method and those
of several of my friends who have only as yet convinced me and
one or two others that they have genius and who yet insist upon
sticking outrageous and futile price-labels to their work.
But to return to Max Weber's case. The critics have already
done for him all that they can do. In London, Paris, and New
York, they have acknowledged his merit. No other living painter
has had comparable success abroad. As a rule Europe refuses
to consider our artists unless they take up a European residence


348
MODERN ART
OS
and become social-even Winslow Homer is not yet a part of
European culture—but an exception was made in this instance
and Max Weber's painting was found good. Yet in each of the
capitals where the critical few accepted him, it is still only the
critical few who know him. To the world at large he remains
unknown. Upon my visit to Neumann's the rooms were empty.
Fashion seemed unaware that on this third floor back one of the
finest talents of the day was left blooming alone; and not even
the unkempt students were there to berate the absence of fashion.
There was no one. For an alibi, fashion had Zuloaga. Only a
few doors west on the same street and thousands were crowding
the Reinhardt Galleries to see the work of a vastly inferior man.
I don't yearn especially for fashion's approval of any of my
protégés, but it was impossible not to be somewhat dismayed by
this travesty of patronage. . . . The work thus ignored glowed
with distinguished colour. I thought, upon the occasion of a
previous show of this artist's work, in the Montross Galleries,
that this colour was Biblical. It was vivid and rich and seemed
rooted in the immemorial past. I had a vague but persistent
feeling that it illustrated the old testament in modern terms.
Solomon's costliest crockery must have been unearthed by some
antiquarian for the still-lifes, and David's rarest vestments pro-
vided the backgrounds for them. The dramatis personae, for the
most part, were prophets, solemn and remotely grand. I have
often thought of these pictures since-none were sold at the time-
and wondered what they were doing and where. The people of
the new compositions, less fervid than those of two years ago,
hark back still further, apparently, in point of time, to Greek,
or even pre-Greek periods. I am only idly concerned in locating
them. They are gorgeously painted and handsomely composed,
and that's enough for me. The hands of the woman in Gesture
are as beefy as those of an old-fashioned pugilist and the females
in Contemplation are as hefty as the sculptured heroines of
Maillol. The fact that Maillol is already part of French history
and that the Venus de Milo herself is not precisely a rue-de-la-
Paix type helped the French, doubtless, to swallow Max Weber's
art in spite of the solidity of his women. But it halts us! We
have a theory, in spite of Miss Amy Lowell's presence in our
midst, that all women are thin.
HENRY MCBRIDE
me


MUSICAL CHRONICLE
CTRAWINSKY passed an impulse to the Group of Six, and
D the group has paid him back unkindly. It, and the theoriz-
ing, rootless, unaristocratic Paris round about, have afflicted him
with their own incertitude. His recent classicizing Octuor for
brass and reeds, and Concerto for piano and harmonic orchestra
reveal him at work in the field laid out by the young banditti,
and interfering with himself much in their fashion. Some fine
music is in both the pieces; strong music by the author of the
Sacre and the symphonies for wind-instruments. The composi-
tions lie at all moments above the six-men's level. Strawinsky,
it is evident, has the idea. The works proceed out of an analysis
of to-day; strive to avoid all deadwood of musical art-senti-
mentality, descriptiveness, string-vibration; and bring with se-
verity of means something of the spontaneous movement, the
structural form, and serenity of mood which we desire. The
chorale in the Octuor, with its softly blent brass and wood-
wind, is a sustained ethereal magnificence. Passages of speedy
classic architecture appear in the Concerto, particularly in the
first movement. The instrumental combinations are always fresh
and interesting, especially in the latter work, with its puffing
jazzy brass. In the former, the sonorities are not always as
happily balanced: witness, the first entrance of the horns and
trumpets in the first movement. Yet, with all their satisfying
classic hardness and coolness, neither work discharges a genuine
creative impulse. Neither is a music sufficiently organic and
fundamental. It appears that although Strawinsky possesses the
idea, he feels at periods that he has not got it; and in such
hours his compositions verge upon the literature from which he
thinks he is withdrawing music. Oh, sense of aesthetic guiltiness,
you are the comic illness of the time! In years gone by men felt
a sense of moral guilt or ethical guilt, felt themselves theologi-
cally damned, wept for the sin organized within them, and
dreamed of bathing themselves clean within a fountain filled with
blood, Drawn from Immanuel's veins.”
We have passed all that. Yet substitute, for the word salvation,
the word aestheticism, and it is all back again. Men groan with
IS


350
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
a dark sense of aesthetic unhallowedness. Emotionalism, roman-
ticism, the descriptive impulse, are the Unforgiveable Sin. Men
tremble that their works are not acceptable to Heaven as Forms
Suspended in a Void; they ask themselves whether grace has
chosen them to be part of the main trunk of art, or whether they are
predestined to be mere growth of branch or twig or leaf-stem? At
night in their dreams they see Aristotle and the old Chinese, Picasso
and Croce in aesthetic glory at the right hand of God, and yearn
to wash all guilt away in the faultless essence of the Well-Tem-
pered Clavichord or the Sistine ceiling. We even have among us
Methodist exhorters decked out as aestheticians. And Strawinsky
is a man of his age. Hence his worth; but hence also his weak-
ness. He too at times loses the touch and falls into imitative-
ness, alias aestheticism. There are instants in which one feels
the Octuor a pastiche of eighteenth-century turns, processes,
phrases. The subject of the fugue has been called a theme of
Czerny's; but the description is inaccurate. It resembles much
more one of Clementi's. The material of the Concerto, true, is
superior; the principal theme is both coldly and pompously
Handelian and individual and Russian, and the material of the
middle section, so much like the slow movement of a Bach cello
sonata, has poetic quality and abstract emotion. But dead spots
occur throughout the little work, doubtless because of the help-
lessness of many of the transitions; and the last movement, with
its engaging tendency to wander into jazz, is fragmentary. For,
since incertitude is invariably accompanied by the need of cap-
turing the attention of the world with a novelty, both works have
come to us before Strawinsky as he is to-day has rounded a form
for himself, and brought us the living architecture of tones which
he actually has inside him.
Varèse and Salzedo apparently maintain a hatchery for musical
bacilli, where in glass boxes new combinations, voices, racial
utterances germinate. And once or twice a year doctor and asso-
ciate doctor go about their secret forcing-house examining the queer
little growths and assembling those which seem to possess the
power of life; then a concert is arranged and the small experi-
ments are let into the world. For several years these two lads
have been making periodic deliveries of musical germs; and this
year the graduation of the culture was a particularly noteworthy


PAUL ROSENFELD
351
party. The promise of a new musical geography hovered in the
air of the Cave of the Winds, known usually as Aeolian Hall,
the evening of February 8th. The four names new to the musical
world belonged to a Chilean, an Italian from Crete, a negro from
Mississippi, and a Mexican born, bred, and resident in Mexico City;
and the works of the newcomers stood solidly beside that of men
introduced, like Bartok, Cowell, Salzedo, and Webern, in previous
years. Indeed, the substance of the concert was provided chiefly
by the recruits; partly because none of the men better known
was represented by one of his more successful compositions. This
seems to us to have been a mistake in programme-making: for
the reason that programmes of the work of candidates invariably
resemble dinner-parties at which the nourishment consists of some
drops of beef extract and red wine, olive oil and fruit syrup
placed on the tongue with a medicine-dropper; and one pièce
de resistance is required to satisfy the guests. But there was
none on this programme. The Bartok sonatina is a Haydnesque
baby-piece composed in Bartok's Magyar idiom, and it was much
overplayed by Hyman Rovinsky. Henry Cowell, also, has writ-
ten several pieces less unworthy than his Ensemble for small
orchestra and thunder-sticks. The interest of the new composi-
tion is confined exclusively to the novel sound of the religious
instrument of the ancient Americans. But the thunder-stick itself
is an uneconomical tool. Certainly, its timbre is unusually im-
pressive and delicate, resembling that of a wind-machine capable
of subtlest modulation. As far as one could tell, it sounded exactly
like the voice of God the Father. But so much effort is required
in the manipulation of the stick that one feels that Cowell might
more profitably have turned his energies into experimentation with
small electric fans, and sought to get an equivalent for the soaring
sound with regulations of the mechanical device; above all, to
have waited with the production of his new sound for the moment
when he had something of interest to say with it. And of the
three poems by Mallarmé set for piano, voice, and harp by Carlos
Salzedo, only the second, Feuillet d'Album, rendered as an unsup-
ported patter-song, appeared a musical achievement in the veri-
table sense of the word. And the pieces for string-quartette by
Webern were music less heard than overheard. The second,
scherzo-like in character, had colour and movement; but the others,
with their painfully sustained understatements of material and


352
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
sonority, their unrelieved pianissimo espressivos, seemed dry, and,
save at instants, thoroughly static.
But the new recruits had dignity not alone because the others
wanted weight. Their solidity is a positive thing. The Three
Preludes by Acario Cotapos, Chilean vice-consul in New York,
are direct expressions, sincere and moving; the work of a genuine
sensibility. Of the three, the second, The Valley of the Guadel-
quiver, with its sudden piano climaxes, is the most effective; the
third, The Scene of the Transfiguration, appears marred by a
somewhat monotonous conduct of the violins. But the preludes
won sincere respect for their composer. Materia, the piano study
by Massimo Zanotti-Bianco, like Cotapos a resident of New York,
is equally impressive in its sincerity; and has vigour, dramatic
ideas, and a distinct architectural sense. From the Land of
Dreams, the work for small harmonic orchestra and voices instru-
mentally treated by William Grant Still, well known for his
excellent orchestration of many negro reviews, adds another mem-
ber to the growing company of American musical embryonics.
Still has learned much from Edgar Varèse, his instructor, although
he has not yet quite learned to speak out freely: a certain ab-
sence of freedom in the use of his ideas limits one's enjoyment,
and the material of the first two sections of his composition is
insufficiently contrasted. But Mr Still has a very sensuous ap-
proach to music. His employment of his instruments is at once
rich and nude and decided. The upper ranges of his high soprano
have an original penetrating colour. And the use of jazz motives
in the last section of his work is more genuinely musical than any
to which they have been put, by Milhaud, Gershwin, or any one
else. And the Tres Exagonos of Carlos Chavlez, on little Pierrot
Lunaire poems by Carlos Pellicer, came like a whiff of Latin-
American freshness and gaiety and dry sureness of means, and
sent the audience away in some of the good humour that should
have been theirs in much greater quantity.
u more
Ornstein's Double Piano Sonata will doubtlessly make its way in
its new form of concerto for piano and orchestra more freely than
it could have done in its original form. The co-operation of a
pianist and a conductor is to be secured more readily than the
co-operation of two clavier virtuosi. But the gorgeously sounding
thing was born of the pianoforte, and the transformation has dulled


PAUL ROSENFELD
353
its prismatic edge. The passionate and mournful music is still
there. But it comes transmitted partly by an inferior instrument.
Whether an equivalent for the timbre of Ornstein's second piano
is capable of being produced with the orchestra, we do not know.
We do know that the one supplied by the composer, is none. It is
at once too dissimilar in quality from its original, and insufficiently
orchestral. Ornstein's piano writing is both metallic and volup-
tuous, steely and warm. And much of the time his orchestra
sounds thick and soft with string-tone, particularly with that of
violins. Powerfully expressive passages occur throughout the
orchestral fabric. It is possible the second movement was enriched
in transformation. The plangent brass in the finale intensifies the
effect. Indeed, wherever Ornstein employs the harder and less
easily vibrant instruments, he subserves his own idea. Unfor-
tunately, he did not when he wrote place all stringed instruments
smaller than the cello without his reach, and hold his orchestra
crisp and stark, and leave the high notes of the eliminated piano
to the shriller woodwind. It might have done the trick. But not
only did he not devil to the full extent of his native diablerie,
and let out the TNT. He also seems to have transcribed his
material rather literally. Only through essential recreation can
that which sounds dense and sustained upon the piano be made to
sound equally whole in the orchestra; and we suspect that in spots
Ornstein flatly assigned the notes of the piano to the band. For
the orchestral accompaniment not infrequently sounds patchy and
thin. Perhaps a conductor a trifle more sympathetic than Mr
Stokowski could have made more of the interplay: certainly he
dragged the tempi throughout, and seemed unsure of the form.
But it is not to be disputed that Ornstein requires to hear his
own non-pianistic compositions, particularly his orchestral ones,
less infrequently. That the double sonata in its new shape will
nevertheless bring its author much honour, is quite assured. No
one can hear it and remain deaf to the warmth, crude power, and
deep sincerity of Ornstein's lyric vein. It reveals him once again
the one man among the living composers, with the exception of
Ernest Bloch, who works directly from passion, and has deep
passion to express; and passion, in the words of Balzac, “is the
whole of humanity.” But that is inadequate consolation to those
who know the sonata's earlier version. And ultimately it is the
thing that is to be considered.
Paul ROSENFELD
nev


COMMENT
The lion civilly rampant.
MARIANNE MOORE.
HAVE already found occasion to allude to the less ostenta-
tious (but not for that any the less worthy) department in
this orderly volume of Observations. This ancillary department
of “Notes" leaves little for the critic to say. In these indeed we
witness a phenomenon rare in the Annals of English Poesie,-
we witness a poet bringing himself (in this the therefore more sur-
prising instance herself) to book. Clearly, this marks an advance;
and one hopes that now the ground has been broken, other poets
may, in their future ramping, exhibit a parallel civility.
I shall not in this place dwell upon the copious erudition here
displayed, an erudition which, taking off, gracefully, from the
Grave of Adam, and progressing by a natural sequence through
the prophets Amos and Isaiah, does not for that high lineage
disdain the less prophetic learning of Greece and Rome; an eru-
dition which cites Herodotus and Pliny, Democritus and the enter-
prising Xenophon; an erudition which, “treading chasms,"
embraces at once the knowledgeable Robert of Sorbonne, the
inveterate Duns Scotus of Mob Quad, the reprehensible Hegel
of Germany, and the Reverends J. W. Darr and Edwin H.
Kellogg of our own fortunate land; an erudition which ranges
equitably from "At the age of five or six, John Andrews, son of
Dr C. M. Andrews,” to “An old gentleman during a game of
chess”; an erudition which, triumphantly, establishes contact with
our more modern interests, an erudition which relies upon The
Perfect Host, in Vogue (August 1, 1921); Paper-As Long as a
Man, As Thin as a Hair, in The New York Times (June 13,
1921); and Multiple Consciousness or Reflex Action of Unac-
customed Range, in the very reliable Scientific American (Jan-
uary, 1922); an erudition which amazes with the names of Put-
tick, and of Prodgers, and of the almost equally important Mr
W. P. Pycraft.
1 Observations. By Marianne Moore. 12mo. 120 pages. The Dial
Press. $2. Second edition.


COMMENT
355
I confine myself to pointing out a Novelty, a New Thing in
Letters. The Reading Public of Dark and Light Ages has been
familiar with rich and varied species of that important natural
genus, Footnote. I shall not here codify. But in what would
generally be held to be the less noble department of a volume,
like this one, of inspirational nature-in this humble and service-
able department of “Notes”—there dawns upon the attentive and
grateful eye a literary species hitherto unrecorded. It is the liter-
ary species, the footnote species, of further aesthetic unfoldment.
I beg leave to style this, provisionally, the Footnote aesthétique
et noble, or, in our less precise tongue, the Footnote of Aesthetic
Ennoblement.
That dependable poet and critic, Mr Eliot of London, made,
in The Waste Land, “a contribution to modern literature as
important, in its way, as Ulysses itself,” I have been told. And
the footnotes to that important poem, those footnotes which Mr
Eliot and his American publisher, Mr Horace Liveright, rightly
incorporated in the book publication of Mr Eliot's poem, were
the talk of the town. Yet these now date: they belong to the
pre-Moore period: they are content pedestrianly to explain. And
in the Demesne of High Poesie explanations, howsoever needful
and adroit, are wont to be estimated small beer.
Permit me, in illustration of my point, to cite four lines from
Miss Moore's ultimate Observation, and her note thereanent:
And Sir John Hawkins' Florida
“abounding in land unicorns and lions,
since where the one is,
its arch enemy cannot be missing.”
Whence the interested reader gathers that Sir John Hawkins, dis-
covering the Floridian flat-spaces to be tawny with lions, naturally
deduced therefrom the presence of the, one imagines, more farouche
and hardly-come-upon unicorn. But
"abounding in land unicorns”: Violet A. Wilson; "Hawkins
affirmed the existence of land unicorns in the forests of Florida,
and from their presence deducted abundance of lions because of
the antipathy between the two animals, so that 'where the one
is the other cannot be missing.'”


356
COMMENT
Now the Man of Feeling, l'homme sensible, will, upon reading
this pertinent note, be aesthetically bouleversé. It is therefore my
desire to establish this note a "trial-piece” as to one's susceptibility
to the most refined in art: had Mr Francis T. Palgrave had the
anthological advantage of compiling his Golden Treasury a cen-
tury or two later than he did (to wit, after the poetical activity of
Miss Marianne Moore) I make no doubt he would have included in
that invaluable compendium not only the Observation, Sea Uni-
corns and Land Unicorns, but also this ancillary note. And
not apropros the Loss of the Royal George, but apropos this
note (it being taken, of course, in aesthetic conjunction with
the poem) he would have written: “This little [note] might
be called one of our trial-pieces in regard to taste.” And
further he would have continued “He who relishes it may assure
himself se valde profecisse in poetry.” And the Royal George
would have sunk, and W. Cowper would have sung, in vain. ...
It is nice to deduct from the existence of unicorns the presence of
lions—any one of us, properly coached, would have liked to do it.
But to deduce from the established presence of unicorns an "abun-
dance of lions”—this is a privilege reserved by Fate to two very
definite and restricted classes, to the knighted sea-captains of Eliza-
bethan England and to poetesses who read with their eyes open, to
poetesses who have “Ransacked the ages" and "spoiled the climes'
that they may tender us a footnote of wildest caressing loveliness,
a footnote affording a perverse and counter-natural overtone, a
footnote which deducts, by a precise inversion of accepted poetic
usage, from out the metaphysico-mythological the natural-histor-
ical, prosaically.
1 Cf. The Golden Treasury: Loss of the Royal George, by W. Cowper;
and the note thereanent.






BALZAC.
BY AUGUSTE RODIN



THE OXX1
55
DIAL
MAY 1925
HONORE DE BALZAC
BY HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL
Translated From the German by Kenneth Burke
СОЦІ
n NE does not know this great author at all if one knows only
this or that by him. There is no one specific volume contain-
ing the essence of his creative life, in the way that Faust or the
poems encompass the essence of Goethe's life. Balzac is to be read
in the mass; and it requires no art to read him. He is the most
logical reading for people of the world—the words being taken in
their broadest sense from the law clerk or the young man starting
in business, up to the personage of note. For people of the world
(I am speaking of men from all classes, of politicians, soldiers,
commercial travellers, distinguished or simple women, all those
who are not littérateurs or aesthetes, people who read for the
pleasure of exercising the imagination, and not for educational
purposes) a slight effort is required at times to read Goethe, a cer-
tain transposition. It is more than likely that Goethe will fail them
in the most trying and confused moments of their existence; but
Balzac is always open to them. I do not mean this in the literary
sense: for in Goethe the first line they open to is sure to be some-
thing remarkable, a striking of some deep note, a felicity of ex-
pression; and in Balzac they will come upon three or four dull
tiresome pages, not solely at the beginning of a story, but quite
probably at whatever place they happen to open. But as they run
mechanically through these indifferent and almost burdensome
pages, they will begin to feel the effect of something to which the
true reader, the living human reader, must always succumb: the


358
HONORE DE BALZAC
greatest and most substantial imagination that has existed since
Shakespeare. Wherever they open, at a digression on the laws
relating to bills of exchange and on the practice of usurers, at an
excursus about legitimist or liberal society, at the description of a
kitchen, or a scene in married life, of a face, of a drinking den,
they will feel the world, substance, the same substance of which the
daily rounds of their lives are constructed. They will pass imme-
diately and spontaneously out of their own lives and into these
books, out of their personal cares and annoyances, out of their own
love-affairs and financial concerns, out of their trivial problems and
ambitions. I have met the financier who, immediately after his
meetings and his conferences, reached for his Balzac, in which he
had stuck the last jottings of the market as a book-mark; and I have
met the lady of fashion who found in Les Illusions Perdues or La
Vieille Fille the only possible reading which could restore her to
herself in the evening after having been among people or having
entertained, the only reading which is strong and pure enough to
soothe the imagination after the harsh and distracting fever of
vanity, and to reduce the social to the human. This process of
touching one at the very centre of his life, of healing like with like,
of defeating reality by means of a demoniacally heightened reality
- I wonder who among the great authors with which our spiritual
life has to do could rival Balzac in this particular; unless it be
Shakespeare. But to read Shakespeare as other generations have
read the ancients, I mean to read him in such a way that one can get
the whole of life out of reading him, to read him from the stand-
point of living, and to satisfy through him the most pressing es-
sential of one's curiosity—that is no ordinary matter. It is no
ordinary matter to stretch one's sympathy until it reaches across
the distance of three centuries and penetrates all the disguises of a
magnificent but unfamiliar epoch, perceiving behind them nothing
but the eternally true Aux of human action and passion. It is no
ordinary matter, without the aid of the actor, without a quite
definite gift for recreating the original image, to take the most
genial abbreviation and compression which has ever been real-
ized and to spread it out again to such a panoramic breadth that
one can find there both himself and those highly complicated
threads of existence which weave together to give his reality its
meaning.


HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL
359
In a certain sense, Goethe is easier to read; and who does not read
him? Although he was making one of his deep and subtle observa-
tions when he said that his writings were not made to become popu-
lar and that their true content would reach only those isolated peo-
ple who had gone through the same internal experiences, there seem
to be so many of these isolated people to-day that his statement may
no longer apply. But to recover one of his works, to enjoy Hermann
und Dorothea, Wilhelm Meister, Die Wahlverwandtschaften, one
must come to it with the senses already purified. He must leave
behind much of himself, much of the atmosphere of his life. He
must forget the metropolis. He must cut through the myriad
threads of his momentary feeling, thinking, and willing. He must
think only of his "transfigured” body; I mean by that the eternal
part of himself, the pure human, the unconditioned. He must take
into account the eternal stars, undergoing a castigation thereby.
Then to be sure, it is hardly of importance which of Goethe's works
he turns to; through them all he meets the same heightening and
transfiguration of reality. The matter and the form, an idea or the
description of a phenomenon in nature, a verse, or Mignon or Ottilie
--everything is of the same divine and radiant substance. Behind
every line one feels the relation to the whole, to an exalted order.
The enormous peace of an enormous richness lays itself almost
oppressively on one's soul, lifting it immediately afterwards into
a sphere of freedom and light. . . . But this arm which can raise
to the stars does not embrace everyone. Even the living Goethe
gave himself only to a few, and to these few only at certain times.
If one reaches out with an impatient hand, a creation like Die Wahl-
verwandtschaften escapes him, snaps shut like a mussel. To such
people Goethe seems cool, foreign, strange. He impresses rather
than attracts. They put off reading him—until quieter times, until
some journey. Or he makes them yearn for their youth again, for a
sharper receptivity. He seems artificial to them, he who was na-
ture itself; and cold, although he could give warmth to rigid,
primeval stone. They look for some method which will prepare
them to enjoy him. They turn to an exegete, or to the remarkable
letters and conversations in which he annotates himself ... and
it is only by this circuitous route that they get back to his works.
But nothing is more unthinkable than the reader who would arrive
at Balzac by some indirect approach. It is rarely that one of his


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HONORE DE BALZAC
countless readers knows anything at all of his life. Men of letters
know a few trivial anecdotes about him, but they would interest no
one if they did not bear on the author of the Comédie Humaine.
They know of a correspondence with one person, containing almost
nothing but bulletins of an incessant gigantic activity which is be-
yond comparison with anything else in the world of letters. It is
the strongest indication of the enormous drive to his works that we
can read these endless bulletins with the same suspense as a note
of Napoleon's when on one of his campaigns, a note dealing with
Austerlitz, Jena, or Wagram. His readers know his works, and not
him. They say “Peau de Chagrin," and are reminded of a waking
dream, an adventurous experience, not of a poet's inventions; they
think of old Goriot and his daughters, and it does not enter their
minds what the name of the author is. Once they came upon this
world; and ninety out of a hundred are sure to return, after five,
ten, or twenty years. Walter Scott, who was once read with delight
by mature people, has become the reading of boys. Balzac will
remain always (or for a long time; for who dares to speak of
"always”?) the reading for every stage of life, and of men as
well as of women. The war stories and adventures, Les Chouans,
L'Auberge Rouge, El Verdugo, mark for the imagination of a six-
teen-year-old boy the release from his tales of Indians and of
Captain Cook. The experiences of Rubempré and Rastignac form
the reading of a young man; Le Lys Dans la Vallée, Savarus,
Modeste Mignon that of a young woman. Men and women around
forty, who are ripe and not yet impoverished, will hold to his ripest
works: La Cousine Bette, a magnificent book which I cannot call
lugubrious even though it contains nothing but the ugly, the sad,
and the horrible, because it also glows with the fire of life and wis-
dom; and La Vieille Fille, which combines, in a manner beyond
praise, a plastic structure with the most profound knowledge of life,
becoming thereby small, round, comfortable, jovial, in every con-
sideration an incomparable book, a book which would be powerful
enough to preserve by itself alone the reputation of its author
through the centuries. I have heard an old man praise the Contes
Drôlatiques, and have heard another old man mention with emotion
the story of César Birotteau, this steady mounting of a social pillar
from year to year, from bank balance to bank balance, from mar-
riage to marriage. And if there have been people who have cut the


HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL
361
C
Te UI
Bekenntnisse der Schönen Seele out of Wilhelm Meister and burned
the rest, then there have also been people who have cut Séraphita-
Séraphitus out of the Comédie Humaine and made of it a kind of
Bible; and perhaps such a one was that stranger who pushed his
way up to Balzac in a concert hall in Vienna to kiss the hand that
had written Séraphita.
Everyone finds here as much of the great whole of life as is homo-
geneous to him. The richer his experiences, the stronger his imagi-
native powers, the more of these books he will be able to accept.
Here there is no necessity to bring in something from the outside.
All the emotions, impure as they are, are here put into play. Here
one finds his own interior and exterior world, except that it is more
compressed, more unusual, and illuminated from within. Here are
the powers that define him, and the encumbrances by which he is
lamed. Here are the diseases of the spirit, the appetites, the half
unconscious aspirations, the consuming vanities; here are all the
demons which squirm within us. And above all, here is the great
city to which we are accustomed, or the province with its definite
relationship to the great city. Money, the egregious power of
money, the philosophy of money, the myth of money—all this
reaches its embodiment here. Here are the social stratifications and
the political alignments which are still more or less ours; here is
the fever of arrivisme, the fascination of work, the solitary mysteries
of the artist and of the inventor: everything down to the paltriness
of the petty bourgeois, to the watching of every penny, to the fre-
quently and painstakingly repaired glove, to the gossip among the
servants.
The external truth of these things is so great that it can exist
independently of its object, so to speak, and shift like an atmos-
phere. The Paris of Louis Philippe has vanished, but certain situa-
tions (the provincial salon in which Rubempré takes his first steps
into the world, or the salon of Madame de Bargeton in Paris)
applied until recently with astonishing accuracy to Austria, where
the social and political conditions were perhaps very close to those
of the July monarchy. And certain features from the life of Rasti-
gnac and de Marsay are probably truer to-day for England than for
France. But the superficies of this "truth” which is so self-evident
and so convincing to us, the entire first great glory of the modern-
ness in these works—this will pass; yet to-day there is more strength


362
HONORE DE BALZAC
2
and more life than ever in the inner truth of this world (a world
projected by the imagination and touching the ephemeral reality
only for a moment, at thousands of incidental points). This world,
the completest and most fully elaborated hallucination that ever
was, is loaded with truth. Under examination its corporeality re-
solves itself into a system of countless centres of energy, monads
whose nature is the most substantial truth. In the ebb and flow of
these life movements, these love stories, these intrigues for money
and power, these scenes in the country and the small towns, anec-
dotes, monographs of a passion, of a spiritual disease, or of a social
institution, in the jumble of almost three thousand human exist-
ences, the author touches on nearly everything which has a place
in our complicated cultural life. And nearly all that is said
of these myriad things, relationships, phenomena, bristles with
truth. I do not know whether any one has undertaken (although
one might do so any day) to compile a lexicon drawn entirely
from the works of Balzac. It would contain nearly all the
material and spiritual realities of our times. It would be lack-
ing neither in cooking recipes nor in theories of chemistry. The de-
tails on commerce and finance, the most precise and useful details,
would fill columns. Under business and trade one would leam a
great deal which is antiquated, and much more which is eternally
true and highly to the point. And under the proper heading one
could find the boldest presentiments and anticipations of discoveries
which later centuries have made in the natural sciences. Each
treatise compiled under marriage, or society, or politics would make
a book in itself, and each a book without an equal among the
philosophical publications of the nineteenth century. The book
containing the article on love would swing in a bold curve from the
most sinister and impenetrable mysteries (Une Passion Dans le
Désert) through a rich chaos common to all humanity, ending in the
most spiritualized type of angelic love; and by the vastness of its
conception, the range of its diapason, it would overshadow the one
famous book bearing the same name and written by the hand of a
master. But after all, this lexicon does exist. It is spun into a world
of characters, into a labyrinth of incidents; and we are turning the
pages of this lexicon as we follow the thread of a splendidly devised
story. In these volumes the man of the world will find transfigured
the whole range of those situations—so imaginary and yet so real-
e.


NEGA UNEE
PURLIC
ni
HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHALIC LIBIDA A
which go to make up the social element of our lives. The countless
nuances whereby men and women can treat one another well or
poorly; the imperceptible transitions, the relentless gradations, the
entire scale from the genuinely dignified to the half dignified, to the
common-all this is given with flexibility, shot through with the
human, the passionate, in an astonishing manner, and at times re-
duced to its nullity. The man who is earning his living (who of us
does not have to earn his living, or to guard what he already pos-
sesses, or to suffer deprivation?) has his whole life here: all in all.
The great trader on the exchange, the practising physician, the
hungering and the triumphant inventor, the big schemer and the
petty schemer, the progressive business man, the business lawyer,
the usurer, the mere figure-head, the pawnbroker; and not one type
of each, but five, ten types; and what types they are! And with all
their tricks of the trade, their secrets, their remotest truth. There is
a legend among painters that all those final intimacies which are
said of modelling by light and shadow in Le Chef-d'Oeuvre In-
connu must have derived from Delacroix; these truths seem to
them too substantial for any one but a painter, and a great painter,
to have found them out. The thinker who has been given Louis
Lambert as the monograph of a thinker may find the biographical
part weak and may doubt the reality of the character; but as soon as
he comes to the letters and notes with their ideological material,
then the consistency of these thoughts, the substantial power of this
thinker, becomes so convincing that every doubt about the character
is dispersed. One may accept or reject these thoughts, this philoso-
phy, of a spiritualistic dreamer—but they are the thoughts of a per-
sonality, and this brain has functioned. And if the married man
picks up in a meditative hour the Physiologie du Mariage, this
peculiar book which is perhaps demoded somewhat by a certain
half-frivolous tone, he will come upon some pages in which the
truths are as delicate as they are deep and important: true truths,
truths which, when one has really accepted them, expand somehow
and maintain an activity within, with a soft and luminous energy.
They are put forward in a worldly, at times even a wanton, fashion.
Woven in among actions and descriptions, they form the most
spiritual elements in the body of a story, a novel. They are revealed
to us in just the way life itself reveals its content to us: in meetings,
in catastrophes, in the unfolding of passions, in sudden perspectives


364
HONORE DE BALZAC
SS
on
SC
neous
and discernments, in apertures opening with lightning-like swiftness
through the thick forest of appearances. Here is at once the most
passionate and the most complete depiction of life, and a highly
acute and surprising philosophy which can situate its point of de-
parture in any phenomenon of life, no matter how trivial it may
seem. So this whole great work—whose cosmogony is quite as lugu-
brious as that of Shakespeare, and in its sheer mass becomes thereby
so much the more oppressive, turbid, and heavy—is permeated
nevertheless by a spiritual vivacity, yes, a spiritual joviality, a deep
comfort. For how could we call that anything else which-when
one of these volumes falls into our hands—makes us always keep
turning the pages back and forth, not reading, but turning the
pages; for in this act there is a subtler love, full of memories. And
is it not this joviality, this comfort, which can transform for us
the mere counting of the titles of these hundred books, the listing
of the characters who appear in them, into a kind of summarized
reading where the appeal is as complex and as spontaneous as that
of a favourite poem?
The accumulation of so enormous a mass of substantial truth is
not possible without organization. The faculty for order is just as
much a creative one as the faculty for presentation. Or rather, they
are simply different aspects of one and