THE CARNEGIE LIBRARY
OF
The Pennsylvania State College
CLASS NO. O 51
1895
BOOK NO. D 54
R
ACCESSION NO.80953








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THE
DIAL

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VI
IX
CXXXIIO
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VOLUME LXVIII
January to June, 1920
THE DIAL PUBLISHING COMPANY
NEW YORK CITY


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THE INDIAL
Vi
VU
VUTO
IX
OXXIII
JANUARY 1920
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHIC CHAPTER
BY RANDOLPH BOURNE
G"
NILBERT was almost six years old when they all — Mother,
Olga, and baby- went to live with Garna in her tall white
house. And his expanding life leaped to meet the wide world, with
its new excitements and pleasures. It was like a rescue, like getting
air when one is smothering. Here was space and a new largeness to
things. Gilbert was freed forever from the back-street.
Garna's house was ridiculous but it was not despicable. For your
meals you went down into a dark basement dining-room, behind a
blacker kitchen. And the outhouse, buried in Virginia creepers and
trumpet-vine, was down a long path bordered by grape-vines, where
you went fearfully at night. Gilbert was afraid of this dark, long
after he was old enough to be ashamed that his mother must come
with him and stand protectingly outside. In winter, the stars shone
at him with icy brilliancy, and the vines made a thick menacing
mass around him.
Back of the house was a pump, painted very bright and green,
where the water came up cold and sparkling and ran suddenly out
of its spout over your shoes unless you were careful. And when
they had finished pumping, the well would give a long, deep sigh,
whether of fatigue or satisfaction, Gilbert never knew. In the dark
kitchen, which you entered down a flight of stone steps, there was
another
pump, but it brought forth, after long persuasion, only rain-
water which to Gilbert tasted uninteresting, and which he was not
allowed to drink, but which they carried in zinc pails up two long
spidery flights, and for Aunt Nan's room, three, so that you could
wash your face in the morning. Only on wash-day, was that pump
1


2
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHIC CHAPTER
interesting when the servant filled great wooden tubs out of it, and
created huge foamy waves in them, and beat and rubbed, and then
filled long clothes-lines with damp white garments which coiled
around you clammily and disgustingly if you ran too close under
them when you were playing.
The dining-room always had a musty smell, and was always cold
in winter, though the door into the warm kitchen was propped open
with a brick. Gilbert would eat his breakfast and run out quickly
to warm his hands at the shining black range. In the summer, it
was close and stuffy, for it was lighted only by two low windows
at the top which were level with the ground and opened into a little
depression, so that the shutters would move freely. In the great
thunder-storms of summer, this hollow would fill with water, and as
Gilbert sat there eating his lunch, thrilling at the loud claps and the
darting lightning, the water would begin to stream over the sill and
down the walls. Then Annie would have to be hastily called, and,
with many ejaculations she would throw her apron over her head,
and rush out with a dish-pan to bail out the hollow. Gilbert would
stand on a chair and see dimly through rain-streaming panes, this
huge slopping figure, throwing pails of water into the path. But
ordinarily nothing happened in the dining-room. Sometimes in the
summer, an odious snail or two would come out of the walls and
leave his track across the worn carpet. In a vast closet were stored
rows of jellies which Garna had put up, and which Gilbert and Olga
would sometimes get a taste of, for a treat. Behind the dining-room
was the cellar, gratefully warm in winter with its glowing furnace,
and cool in summer with its whitewashed walls. Gilbert loved to
spend long summer afternoons there watching Annie turn the ice-
cream freezer, and waiting anxiously until the top was taken off to
be tested, and you got a taste of the fresh churned cream, or licked
the dasher when it was all over. Or sometimes, in winter while
.
Annie shovelled coal into the furnace, Gilbert stood fearfully by
and saw the blackish flame shoot up through the new coal. But on
the whole, the basement was not a pleasant place. The furnace, so
hot when you stood by it, sent only feeble currents of air up to the
little registers that opened into the vast rooms above. And always,
the year round, there was that musty dining-room to descend into
three times a day, with its old frayed chairs, its uncertain carpet, its
stained brown walls.


RANDOLPH BOURNE
3
Nor did the creatures who inhabited the basement attract him.
Annie changed her guise, but not her nature. And she scarcely
changed her guise. If his mother had ever had a servant in the back-
street, Gilbert did not remember it. But in Garna's house one natu-
rally had a servant, and one naturally had a Polish girl. Gilbert
did not at first understand what Annie was doing in the kitchen, this
queer, whitish young woman with many skirts and vast breasts, who
gave a sort of growl-smile when you spoke to her, and always
started incontinently, with alacrity, to do something without know-
ing what it was. Gilbert would come in from the garden into the
fragrant kitchen on baking-day to look for cookies, and find his
mother moving about, with her serious, anxious expression, while
Annie sprawled about, cutting up potatoes, and listened to his moth-
er's earnest expostulations. In a few months there would be another
Annie; her mouth was perhaps crookeder and her hair yellower, but
she would plunge clumsily about in the same old way, and would
take up her education not where the other Annie had left off, but
precisely in that brutish ignorance where she had begun. To Gil-
bert's mother, the living and successive tissue of Annie became the
absorption of life, but Gilbert was not absorbed in Annies. They
were not pretty, and they had a stale odor which Gilbert avoided
when he could. He associated the unpleasantness of this strong,
docile creature, who relapsed in each transformation to her original
brutish ignorance, with the whole unpleasantness of that downstairs
floor, the dining-room which remained always the same, whose dull
squalor nobody ever did anything to take away, for which Gilbert
could not do anything, and for which perhaps nothing could be done.
Upstairs, Gilbert liked Garna's house better. The front parlor
was a vast and cavernous room, the mysteries of which Gilbert pene-
trated only slowly. The back parlor was much more comprehen-
sible. Here the sun shone in, and people sat and lived. When you
entered the front parlor, you involuntarily lowered your voice, and
you moved around subdued, as if someone had died there. Garna
never opened the windows, and the shutters of the bay which looked
towards the east were always kept tightly closed. But in the back
parlor on bright winter days you sent the shade flying up to the top,
and let the sun stream in over the floor all the way to the monster
of a horsehair-covered sofa which stretched along the wall.
Horsehair made you feel almost as puckery as matting to touch it,
a


4
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHIC CHAPTER
a
a
a
a
and, besides, you could not climb up its slippery sides very easily.
,
And once you were perched up there, you began to slide and slide
until
you would fall in a heap ignominiously off that ungainly and
inhospitable bulk of a sofa. So you would go over and sit at Garna's
feet, as she rocked slowly in her great chair, which you must never
tip too far back for fear of the grandfather's clock that stood in the
corner behind it. The clock had a loud and lovely bell which struck
the hours. Gilbert could always tell when it was going to strike,
for a minute or two before the hour there was a sharp click. Then
a little later would begin a vast rumbling from the very chest of the
old clock, as if it were taking a long, deep breath for its pealing song.
When Gilbert was in the room, he always stopped and listened for
the whole long satisfactory performance. It was slow, it was pre-
pared, it was beautiful, and when Garna got a clock for the dining-
room which rattled off a quick little tinkle of a stroke, Gilbert de-
spised it, and would have covered his ears if he had not thought it
would be silly.
Upstairs the rooms were just as vast. There was Mother's room,
into which the sunlight poured, and which was the warmest in win-
ter, though you took turns rushing to the register to dress where it
was warm, before washing in the cold water of the wash-bowl. Just
off from Mother's room was a little room, with nothing in it but a
huge bed, where Olga and Gilbert slept, and a dresser, in which
Gilbert's clothes were kept. On the wall were two old pictures, one
.
representing a donkey in the midst of illimitable and ineffable sum-
mer pastures, and marked, “Everything Lovely!” the other showing
him in the blizzard before a locked stable-door, with "Nobody loves
me!” Against the tall window, at the foot of the bed, were rows and
rows of shelves, on which stood flower-pots all winter long, gera-
niums and begonias, and heliotrope plants, so that they could catch
the full warmth of the winter sun and keep green for summer, when
Mother took them out of the pot and put them out in rows in the
garden again. The window was almost smothered in rich greenery,
and sometimes when Gilbert would wake up early on a winter morn-
ing, when the light was just beginning to come through the leaves,
he would find that the shelves had become a black silhouetted tra-
cery of amazing figures. Queer outlandish heads, - fierce drago-
mans with pipes in their mouths, Chinamen with queues, policemen
with round helmets, or animals like Gilbert had seen at the Zoo-


RANDOLPH BOURNE
5
camels with misshapen humps, elephants with long trunks, the head
of a lion. It was very startling to wake up, lying on one's back and
gazing out where this faint light appeared in the crevices between
these weird figures. The pleasant green plants with which they had
gone to bed had given place to queer apparitions. Yet they must be
plants. But how could plants look so terrifyingly like heads. Every-
where he looked there appeared a bristling, clear shape. The win-
dow was a vast tracery of strangeness. Gilbert was never quite sure
how real they were, and he was always grateful when the advancing
light gradually brought out the greenness of the leaves, and finally
threw them into relief, so that the menacing head would finally dis-
solve into the utterly meaningless juncture of two geranium blos-
soms, and the elephant trunk became a familiar begonia front. Then
he was cheered, and he wondered how he had ever seen anything
else. No wildest forcing of his imagination could make him see the
things he had seen.
It was in this room that Gilbert's mother put the children to bed
every night, and then took out the lamp to her room, leaving the
door just slightly ajar, so they would not be afraid. Everything
was so cosy and comfortable during the undressing. Then would
come the frightening thought, "Perhaps this comforting presence is
going to be withdrawn!” For sometimes you would wake up sud-
denly with a little clutch at the heart. The dim light would be
burning through the crack of the door, but there would be a vast
stillness. You knew that the house was empty, that somehow it was
the middle of a night that would never end, and everybody, Garna,
Mother, and Annie, had gone off to some distant muffled cavern and
would never come again. Olga, sleeping in a little round ball at
your side, her eyes seraphically closed, was of no avail. The light
burned steadily on, only deepening the terror of eternity, of being
lost. Should you call? What would be the use? They were in-
finitely far away, in a sort of Buddha-like trance. So you cried a
a
little, and fell off asleep.
Or if
you did not go to sleep, you waited dumbly, and, after æons
of time, you heard an unmistakable door close softly downstairs,
and in a minute Mother was looking in at you, to see if you were
safe. And you said, “Mother!" in a half-choking voice, while great
waves of relief and happiness surged through you, and you went
sound asleep. So Gilbert got in the habit of asking his mother


6
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHIC CHAPTER
every night whether she was going out. And what assurance and
peace there was when she said she was not. He was safe, no matter
how long the night lasted.
In Gilbert's new house, you could go upstairs in two ways, the
front-stairs, and the back-stairs. The front-stairs were very straight
and very long and very steep, and were covered with a thick carpet.
They went straight down to a little narrow hall and the front door.
The back-stairs were crooked and narrow and covered with oil-cloth.
They ran down to a little passageway which connected the back par-
lour with the “side-door,” right at the opening of the dark, steep flight
that went down into the dining-room. All these regions and passages
in Gilbert's house had names. Gilbert soon learned that he must
never go down the front-stairs, but must always use the back ones.
But one unfortunate day, his cousin George, who was eight, showed
him the delights of sliding down banisters, and Gilbert, although
he could never walk down the front-stairs without a feeling of the
most awful guilt, let himself be seduced into this new and amazing
adventure. The rapturous slide down the long, straight, polished
wood was so safe and gave him such a thrill that he tried it again
and again. But Olga, who by this time was all of five years old,
insisted on riding too, and threatened so instant and tumultuous a
devastation of tears, that Gilbert and George, in a panic at being
discovered, held her up and, having adjusted her little legs and cau-
tioned her as to the way one let one's fingers slide along the slippery
rail, let her go.
Now there was attached to the wall by a bracket a lamp, which
Gilbert's legs just cleared, although he was always conscious of a
fine potential crash. But as Olga went slipping down the rail, it
was inevitable that she should choose just that place to fall off,
which Gilbert had all the morning been thrillingly avoiding. She
fell floppily into the hall, carrying the lamp-shade with her, and
making a crash which brought Mother and Annie from the kitchen
and Garna from her room above. Then there were tears and scold-
ings in a great flood, and a few reluctant whacks; George was sent
home, and the banisters were never slidden on again, at least not by
Olga. Gilbert used them only as a special treat to himself and
only in his most unwatched moments. It was one instance where
his fiercely clutching guilt melted away before the thrill of that
slide.


RANDOLPH BOURNE
7
a
Gilbert's house, however, afforded few excitements. Garna's
big room you did not often enter, though you might on Sunday
while she was putting on her veil and bonnet to take you to church.
Gilbert did not care very much how the rest of the family got to
church, but it was one of the most important things in his life that
he should go with Garna. At nine o'clock the church-bell would
begin to ring, gayly, quickly, sometimes the long peals almost
falling over each other in their eagerness. Then it would stop,
with a final long echo. Now the whole town knew that it was Sun-
day. Then at ten o'clock the great bell would ring again, not quite
so gayly nor so quickly, to let people know that there would be
church that day. Then at twenty minutes after ten the bell would
begin its real earnestness, -slow and solemn strokes, each one ring-
ing its full sonorous note and dying away before the next one began.
At the first stroke of the ten-o'clock bell, Gilbert would rush to
Garna's room, where he would find her putting on her black silk
dress and little lace collar. Her black bonnet with its long crêpe
veil, which Gilbert soon learned meant that grandfather was dead,
would be spread out on the bed. When the last bell began to ring,
and Garna had not yet put on her bonnet, an icy fear gripped Gil-
bert's heart. They would be late! The maddening slowness with
which Garna put the last touches to her bonnet used to send Gilbert
into a delirium of anxiety. Finally they were out on the elm-shaded
streets, Gilbert fairly tugging and straining to get them there before
service began. Mother and Olga were always late, but that was
because Olga cried. He could abandon them. He did not know
what would happen to Garna and him if they were late, but he felt
that it would be something namelessly awful.
But they were never late. They would sit there in the pew sev-
eral minutes while the organ played and the great bell boomed
outside, up in the tower. Then the minister would come in, and a
.
a
sense of security and peace would steal over Gilbert, listening to the
hymn and looking up at Garna, so glossy and placid next him in the
pew.
In prayer-time, Gilbert would have liked to put his head down
on the pew-rail in front of him, just as Garna and all the other
people did, but he could not reach it. So he had to be content with
ducking his head into his hand, and holding his eyes very tightly shut
until he heard the "Amen” which sent them all upright again. Why
a


8
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHIC CHAPTER
а
people had to conceal their faces while they prayed Gilbert did not
know, but it gave him a very solemn feeling to keep his eyes closed,
and an even more solemn one to open them surreptitiously and look
over the wilderness of bent backs.
The ceiling was very far away, and very blue, with queer in-
,
dented squares that shot out reddish lines. Out of it came two enor-
mous chandeliers of brass, with a ring of lights around, which were
sometimes lighted on a dark day and made a chain of dancing lamp-
light. There were galleries running down each side of the church,
held up by slender white pillars. Outside, just at the top of the
pillars, ran a narrow ledge. Gilbert's imagination would perform
perilous adventures along that ledge. You would walk along,
along, and around the back and up the other side, dizzily perched
above the congregation, clinging to the brass rail, and you would
come to the choir behind the minister's desk. From the ledge to
the choir was a gap of a few feet, but Gilbert saw himself jumping
it, and his heart would beat faster. And then he would return pain-
fully, exhilaratedly, around that ledge, holding on so tightly.
When Gilbert got tired of this play he would look up at the
strange figures that were fastened to the under side of the ledge.
They looked like playing-cards, little square raised blocks marked
with black points, at regular intervals down the gallery. Gilbert
sometimes imagined that they were really cards, and that a hooded
figure moving down the aisles would touch them with a wand, and
they would lose their frozen state and fall to the floor. From
where Gilbert sat, lines went out from him in all directions: lines of
the pews, lines of the aisle ahead which went along under the gal-
lery, angles of the walls, lines of the windows. Sometimes, as his
gaze wandered around the church, the line of a pillar would coincide
with the line of a window, and Gilbert would hold them there to-
gether, getting a sudden satisfaction out of holding them in coinci-
dence, and letting them go reluctantly, only when his eye would
mount to the queer people in the gallery, whose bonnets and eyes
and noses you could just see over the brass railing.
Sometimes in the summer when Uncle Marcus's family was away,
Garna and Gilbert sat in their pew at the back of the gallery, a pew
that was as big as a house, with great arm-chairs and cushions for
your feet. In front of you was the clock, the face of which you
could not see, for it looked out straight towards the minister, but
a


RANDOLPH BOURNE
9
whose ticking you could hear. Gilbert felt very public and self-
conscious when he sat there, under the high ceiling, with two long
arms of the gallery, crowded with its two tiers of people, stretching
away on either hand. Yet it was all very august, and religion
seemed to have attained its most solemn worthiness when you sat in
Uncle Marcus's pew.
The minister was very large and very loud, and he wore a white
tie. Gilbert did not altogether like him when he laid his moist and
unctuous hand on Gilbert's head, as he sometimes did in Sunday
School. For after you had gone to church with Garna, you let her
go home, and you stayed to Sunday School. You went into an old
brick building, which stood a little distance from the church. The
light poured through the big windows, and you could see the lilac-
bushes outside. The room swam with very fluffy little girls, but
when they had sung several hymns, Gilbert and half a dozen other
little boys were shepherded into a corner and sat on their little chairs
in a circle around Miss Fogg, while she taught them the lesson for
the day. Gilbert always knew his golden text, and he was often the
only little boy who did. Miss Fogg would smile at him, which
would make him uncomfortable, and he would be glad when they
all stood up and marched around the room to drop their pennies into
a basket which Miss Fogg held while they sang:
a
a
“Hear the pennies dropping,
Listen while they fall,
Every one for Jesus.
He will have them all.”
Gilbert did not doubt that Jesus would have them all, and he was
not in the least interested in what Jesus did with them when he had
them. It was part of the ceremony, to which you resigned yourself
unquestioningly, and when the penny-dropping was over, Gilbert
ran home as fast as he could go, to the wonderful dinner of roast
beef and potatoes that Mother had for them on Sundays.
Sunday School was a neutral, colorless event in his life. Every
Sunday as they left the Sunday School, each child would receive a
little leaflet; those who had known their golden texts would get a
card with a golden star on it. Gilbert always cried a little if he lost
his card while running home, and he cherished his leaflet for a day


10
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHIC CHAPTER
or two. But he never tried to read it, and he soon mislaid his golden
star. Good boys, after they had gotten a prodigious number of
golden stars, were each supposed to receive as a reward a Bible all of
his own. But when Gilbert was seven years old, Garna gave him a
beautiful thick black Bible, with his name-Gilbert Shotwell Har-
den-stamped on the cover in golden letters. Besides, it did not ap-
peal to him to grub along for a prize. Far better to have things,
glorious, imposing, come to you out of the blue sky! Once Aunt
Shotwell promised him fifty cents if he would learn the Westminster
Catechism, but Gilbert never got farther than “The chief end of
man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” Something obscure,
unconscious, revolted in him at the base commerciality of the trans-
action, and although he did not question that this was the chief end
of man indeed, he did not want to be bribed into proclaiming it.
Things were better in the stories he learned from Miss Fogg:
that Adam had eaten the apple and been expelled from Eden; that
Noah had built and taken his cruise in the ark; that Abraham had
offered up Isaac, and Jacob served seven years; that Moses had led
the Israelites into the wilderness, and Joshua made the sun stand
still; that David should have loved Jonathan and killed Goliath;
that Samson should have been shorn of his strength, and Esther got-
ten Haman hanged higher than the housetops;-all in order to teach
little boys and girls to be good, to obey their fathers and mothers
and go regularly to church and Sunday School, seemed to Gilbert
entirely plausible, at least as it was expounded by the patient and
smiling Miss Fogg. He read the stories in his new Bible, but he did
not wonder much about them.
Every now and then there was a temperance lesson, when Miss
Fogg would horrify the little boys with her pictures of the evils of
strong drink. Gilbert had never seen any spirituous liquors, and he
.
could hardly identify them in his mind, but through the vivid and
scandalized exhortations of the minister and Miss Fogg, Gilbert
conceived liquor as a dark, evil-smelling brew, a sort of religious
urine, which foul and wicked men put into their stomachs, so that
at once homes were wrecked, and mothers and children brought to
abject want. The process by which this result arrived was vague in
his mind, but the earliest genuine crime of which he had knowledge
and felt with a shuddering realization of the existence of sin was
this crime of entering a saloon, or of drinking down wine or beer.


RANDOLPH BOURNE
11
One of the golden texts was a special favorite with Gilbert and
Olga, and she would declaim it with great éclat, in a broad, free-
verse style:
“Wine is a maw-aw-ker,
Strong drink is ray-ay-ging,
And whoever is deceived there-by-y,
Is not-wise!"
-
But sin, on the whole, was a very vague idea to Gilbert. He
early learned that God had sent His Son Jesus down to earth to
save us from our sins, and that this was the central fact of life.
Garna told him about it, and so did Miss Fogg, when they later had
lessons in the New Testament. We must all love God very much,
and especially Jesus, who had done so much for us. And in the sol-
emn Sunday afternoons, when Gilbert was told to take his Bible
and sit by the window in the back-parlor and read a chapter, he
would sometimes wonder if he loved God enough, or if he loved
Jesus. God was a majestic old gentleman with a white beard, re-
clining on white cumulus clouds, and Jesus he knew equally well as
a young man in an archaic blue robe, holding a lamb in one arm,
and followed by others. He had seen their pictures long ago, and
whenever either of them was mentioned, these images popped into
his mind, faintly colored by a sense of awe, as in the case of God,
and of tenderness, as in the case of Jesus. But did he love them?
The pastor was certainly a very poor caricature of God, and
yet
with
his beard and square head and loud words, there must be a faint
resemblance. Gilbert certainly did not like him.
Much more nearly like God was his father's father, whom he had
once been taken to see and whom he remembered now as a white-
haired, white-bearded man, very solemn, and yet with something cold
and repellent about him whenever Gilbert had touched him. Gilbert
did not feel that he loved this God, and yet he knew that he ought
to, that it was the most important thing in life that he could do. So
he would sit there and try to screw his heart into an attitude of lov-
ing. He would grow very serious and tighten his muscles, and fix
his thoughts on the majesty reclining on the white cloud, and, pretty
soon, he would feel that indeed he now loved God, and he would be
kept from sin. Jesus, who was tenderer, he might have found easier
to love, but for the fact of those lambs. Gilbert had never seen


12
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHIC CHAPTER
young men carrying lambs, and the picture, whose authenticity he
did not question, aroused no emotion within him. But after he had
come to love God, he tightened his heart towards the benignant
being in the blue robe.
He was always present, because before every meal they would all
put down their heads, so that they breathed upon their plates, and
they would ask Jesus to bless their food. Sometimes Gilbert would
say it, sometimes Olga, and the food unblessed would have tasted
bad in their mouth's. Gilbert would have had a vague presentiment
of something evil. Did Garna and Mother love God? Garna must,
because every day she would put on her gold-rimmed spectacles and
read a chapter in her Bible, and mother would kneel down with Gil-
bert and Olga at night while they said their prayers, and often mur-
mur something fervently with them. The prayers, they understood,
were addressed directly to God in heaven, and were necessary if you
were to show your gratitude to the Heavenly Father and ensure for
yourself a peaceful and secure night. You asked God also to bless
all those people you were fond of, and you knew that if they should
die before they woke, their souls also would be taken to Heaven
with yours.
If it was only with painful effort that Gilbert in his early days of
church and Sunday School loved God and Jesus, whom did he love?
Did he love Mother? He did not know. He loved her very much
at night when he felt her protecting presence in the house, but in the
daytime she was a strange being who did not seem interested in Gil-
bert and Olga. She spent most of her time with little brother, or, if
he were asleep, she would be lying stretched across the foot of the
bed, with her face in her hands. Often there were tears in her eyes,
and if Gilbert wanted her to do something for him, she would say
' piteously that she was not well. There were no more walks on the
village green, but this did not make any difference to Gilbert, for the
wonderful yard in which Garna's house stood was a region that
could never be explored or exhausted.
The one person that Gilbert knew he loved was Garna. You
could not always see her, for she would be shut up in her room; but
when you were let in, how inexhaustible she was, how comfortable
you felt, playing about on the floor while Garna sat always by the
window, sewing, always sewing, looking so wise and jolly and good
out of her gold-rimmed spectacles. Garna was always the same,


RANDOLPH BOURNE
13
and always good to be with and look upon. Gilbert loved to sit in
her lap, and touch her hair, brushed to such silky smoothness and
parted in the middle. As she bent over, he would run both hands
back over it from her forehead, and laugh as she laughed and pre-
tended to arrange it again.
Gilbert liked to have Garna all to himself, and it was fortunate
that Olga was not much interested in Garna. She did not seem to
half appreciate her or her wonderful room. But once in a while she
would take a perverse desire to come in with Gilbert when he went to
see Garna. Olga would have to be prevented with all his weight and
force. How could he stand so outrageous an invasion of his rights?
And Olga would probably hit him, concentrating all her round little
pugnacity into one stout blow, and Gilbert would hit back, and
Olga would scream, and Mother would come running, and there
would be many tears, and Eden would be spoiled, if not altogether
denied him, for that afternoon. On the very threshold, Olga, who
did not really care to be with Garna, had ruined his day with her!
Hateful little Olga! And all the time, Garna would be inside, be-
hind the closed door, serene, unheeding, letting her daughter, Gil-
bert's mother, settle the whole affair, as far away as if she were in
Pampeluna. Gilbert felt the perversity of Fate, the inexorable
aloofness of the gods, the fragility of happiness. Going eagerly to
taste this sweet exhilaration of an afternoon with Garna, the cup,
without any warning whatever, would be fatally dashed from his
lips. But he could not have it shared with Olga!
Between Garna's chair and the window was a high, chintz-col-
oured box which opened into a voluminous cavern of sheets and white
things. In the corner just behind Garna's chair was the tall secre-
tary-desk, with its big doors above that opened on shelves full of
books, and its heavy writing-lid which folded down and rested hori-
zontally on two supports that pulled out on each side. You could
sit on the high chintz-box and write on the secretaire. Gilbert
thought this was one of the most satisfactory spots in the whole
world. At your right was the window looking down through the
black-walnut trees to the street below; just behind you sat Garna,
busily knitting or sewing; you had all the flat, shiny surface of the
lid to make your puzzles on, or practise writing, or draw on; your
legs hung down over the chintz-box, high above the ground; you
were shut in to the most delicious privacy. At the back of the sec-


14
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHIC CHAPTER
retaire were innumerable compartments and pigeon-holes in which
Garna kept her letters and papers; there were old diaries and ac-
count-books, which Gilbert puzzled over, and one compartment
Garna gave Gilbert for his very own, so that he could keep his pen-
cils and paper there, and anything he chose, safe for ever from the
depredations of the marauding Olga, who seemed to Gilbert, when-
ever he thought of her at all from his safe retreat, as a very imp of
lawlessness, of restless and devastating mischief. Sometime, to make
sure that no one interrupted him, he would silently turn the keys in
the doors. But Garna did not like that very much, and it was awk-
ward if Mother or Aunt Nan really came and wanted to come in,
and Garna had to wonder how the doors could ever have become
locked.
In the summer afternoons Garna would take her waist off, and
sit sewing in her bare arms. Gilbert liked to lean over and rub his
face against the expanse of cool flesh, lay his head on the cool shoul-
der, and listen to Garna's stories of when she was a little girl. Gil-
bert learned about her father's house in Burnham, which he should
some day see, but it was a long distance from where they lived now;
about his mill-pond and his mill, where great mahogany logs that
came from the West Indies were sawed up for furniture; about the
canal that was dug, when she was a little girl, through their very
front yard, and on which they saw the very first boat sail grandly by,
the grandfather of those boats that Gilbert had loved to watch
from the porch of the house in the back-street, and which he had
almost forgotten now that he had come to live with Garna.
So he would lean there against her arm, stroking her plump elbow
with its dimples that so fascinated him, and listening to her stories
until, in the drowsy summer air, he sank away indistinctly, and knew
nothing until he woke up towards supper-time on Garna's high bed.
Every now and then, as a great distinction and event, Gilbert would
be allowed to sleep with Garna. How different and solemn it was
from any other sleep! When Gilbert said good-night to Garna in
her big chair in the back-parlour, it was with a "I'm going to sleep
with you to-night!” Then he would get, not into the hard little bed
with Olga, but into the great feathery soft bed in Garna's room. He
would sink off to sleep in billows and oceans of soft pillows and
sheets. Along towards morning he would half wake, perhaps, and
there would be the huge, comforting, dear presence of Garna filling


RANDOLPH BOURNE
15
the bed beside him, as he lay pressed against her warm night-gown.
And when he woke again, Mother would be there standing by the
side of the bed, and she would whisk him off to her room to be
dressed. And life would go on as before.
Aunt Nan seemed to love Garna as much as Gilbert did. And
she liked Gilbert. Often, on summer days, she would take him up
to her room in the third-story, a region to which Gilbert never ven-
tured alone, for there were queer, pitchy-black closets and alcoves
that led far back under the sloping roof, and contained trunks and
boxes, in which and behind which you never knew what menacing
forces of evil might be hidden. At the top of the stairs was a little
hall, lighted by a skylight, through which you saw the blue sky.
Aunt Nan's room was shaped like an L, but the ceiling on one side
ran down so steeply that Gilbert could stand against the wall and
touch the line where it joined the ceiling. Aunt Nan would fix up
a pallet on the floor, soft and comfortable, and on hot days Gilbert
would roll half-naked on it, while Aunt Nan rubbed his hot arms
with a sweet-smelling balsam. Then she would sit and read a great
shiny new book, which Gilbert spelled out as “Psychology. James.”
She had several books on shelves over her desk, and a great bunch of
programs stuck together on an iron hook that hung on the wall. In
the winter Aunt Nan was not in the house. Mother said she was a
teacher, and lived in New York.
Aunt Nan was very tall and very slender and very straight, and
she had very black hair that came over her forehead in a kind of
bang. She always wore black and white dresses, and she always
had a bright fierceness about her that Gilbert liked. She was several
years younger than Mother, and she was very proud. There was a
stiff exhilaration in her walk and in her laugh that daunted Gilbert
a little, but made him like to be with her. Sometimes she would put
the tennis-net across the green lawn and play with a neighbor, dart-
ing so swiftly, like a long black bird, across the green, hitting the
ball so straight and true, and blazing so fiercely with her black eyes
when she missed, that Gilbert sat enthralled, motionless, until the
set was over and they went in to supper. On those days he would
help her mark the court, going to the little barn and watching her
fill the marker with white powdery lime, and then helping her push
it over the closely-mown grass. The long summer days were full
of Aunt Nan. She loved the garden, with its flower-beds, and she


16
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHIC CHAPTER
loved to see the paths all clipped and weeded and raked! Once a
week, a black man would come from somewhere, and spend the
whole day with Aunt Nan, mowing the lawn, digging the vegetable
garden, and weeding the flowers. That was a glorious day for Gil-
bert and for Aunt Nan. How much there was to be done! They
all seemed to be wrestling with the whole yard, to turn it up, to bring
it to a bright, shiny newness. At the end of the day, Gilbert would
walk about the garden on the gravelly paths, with Aunt Nan to sur-
vey their handiwork. She would be immensely contented. Her
bright black eyes would soften; she would be weary and her hands
would be dirty, but Gilbert would feel the peace that radiated from
her at the sight of this freshly burnished garden. The grass would
be smooth like a carpet, the flower-beds and the vegetable-garden all
dark and tumbled with their upturned earth. The paths would be
straight brown indented tracks, or, where they went around the
house, beautifully curved tracks, with the marks of the rake on the
fine earth where George had worked it over. During the week the
grass would grow longer, the weeds shoot up in the flower-beds, the
paths become bedraggled at the edges, the grass grow up rank on
the lawns. But soon Saturday would come with George, and the
fine renovation would take place all over again.
Aunt Nan was neat and quick in her movements. She had a cold
scorn for dirty faces and dirty hands, and Gilbert sometimes became
a little weary trying to satisfy her demands. He was always a little
intimidated by her, but at the same time fascinated by her vibrancy,
her restless passion. He loved to see her coming towards him, be-
cause he knew that she would snatch him away to something inter-
esting. But he was a little fearful, too; subdued by that decisiveness
that made him realize how little what he wanted would count. She
did not kiss or fondle Gilbert much. She would take him on her lap
and put her arms around him.
Mother was never like that. She did not seem to know what she
wanted. Every incident was a crisis. Gilbert found that he and
Olga could resist her by delaying Dirty faces could be grudgingly
and slowly cleaned. One could come in the utmost disapproving
reluctance when one was called. Mother was always distressed that
you did not obey her; she was always distressed about what to do
with you. She would implore you to be good, and you would be
good with a certain chilly haughtiness, because it seemed somewhat


RANDOLPH BOURNE
17
-
a
humiliating to see Mother so distressed and uncertain. Olga did not
usually obey, but kicked and screamed. Gilbert soon got the habit
of ignoring his mother's expressed desires and wearing out her de-
cisiveness. Then he would be left alone to follow his own desires.
That yard, which Aunt Nan loved so much, was for Gilbert a
domain, a principality. It was years before he had really explored
it thoroughly or searched out all its delights. At first it was a rich
and bountiful collection of all the things that Gilbert had missed in
the back-street. He did not know that he had missed them, but now
that he had found them, something down very deep in him told him
that this was what his restlessness and sadness had craved.
You rushed out the side-door- for the front door was just as
heavily interdicted as the front stairs-and you tumbled into a bed
of myrtles and wistaria which climbed out of the flower-bed in thick
stalks and grew steadily over the corner of the house. Across the
path were two tall pine trees, whose branches brushed Gilbert's shut-
ter by his bed when the wind blew loud. Beyond the trees lay the
green, unbroken lawn, covered with velvety grass that even the
lawn-mower could not keep from growing thick and soft like a car-
pet. The lawn went straight up towards the neighbor's fence, but
just before it reached there it turned into a long flower-bed, with
rose-bushes and tangled flowery vines that climbed over and pre-
tended that there was no fence there at all. To the right, and up
near the street corner of the yard were three more lordly pines set in
a triangle, which Gilbert had promptly named “Three Trees Grove."
The floor was covered with needles. It was shady and spacious,
almost as big as Gilbert's room. It could be turned into a house, or
a shop or a church, at a moment's notice. The big trunks stretching
up above Gilbert's head gave it an air of delightful majesty, and he
could not play there enough with Olga and Cousin Ethel.
At the other end of the broad lawn were the grape-arbors, six or
seven lines of them, where you walked between the overflowing vines
and looked longingly at the green bunches which took endless æons,
all through the long golden summer, to ripen, while Gilbert went
every day to examine them. Behind that was the barn, from which
the horses and carriage had vanished, though when Grandfather was
alive, Garna told him, they had had their horses and Aunt Nan had
ridden one of them, and so had Uncle Rob, who was far off in Texas
now. Gilbert could see traces of the carriage road which had led
a


18
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHIC CHAPTER
0
out through the side-gate to the side-street, but which was now all
grass-grown. The barn was now full of rakes and hoes and wheel-
barrows, but there were deep bins where still remained a peck or two
of oats and a measure, and there was a manger which swung back
and forth from the stall to the bin, so you could fill it and then turn
it in to the horse. Gilbert wished that there were still horses to play
with, but it was fun turning the manger and making Olga and Ethel
pretend to be horses.
If you went on beyond the barn you came to a clump of currant
and gooseberry bushes which ran out in a thin line to the fence, which
by this time had lost its rose-bushes and become a prickly tangle of
blackberries. Enclosed by the blackberries and the currants was the
broad expanse of the vegetable garden, with corn in summer that
Gilbert could get quite lost in, and an amazing variety of good vege-
tables to eat. The vegetable garden ran up to Uncle Marcus's barn
and his garden. Straight down back of Garna's house, through the
middle of the yard, ran a path, part way through a grape-arbor of its
own, and then past the currant bushes. At the end of the garden it
joined a path in Uncle Marcus's yard. Along the foot of the path,
where it passed the garden, was a row of rhubarb, and on the other
side Aunt Nan's sweet-peas, which she planted every spring. On the
other side of the path was an open meadow where the grass was
not cut, and where Gilbert sometimes lay on cool summer days and
looked up at great white clouds floating past in the blue sky. Nearer
the house you came to a wilderness of fruit-trees, pears of all kinds
and apples, and as you approached the street the yard broke into
flower-beds and shrubs and bushes. Close to the house grew lilies-of-
the-valley, and a curious ribbon-grass which Aunt Nan could take
between her fingers and blow shrill whistles on. Along the path
which went past the dining-room window were beds of pink and
white peonies and tall white lilies which had a smell so sweet that
Gilbert felt almost faint when he touched them. And along the
whole side of the yard was a beautiful japonica-hedge, with its
white and red flowers in the spring, which turned into sweetly smell-
ing green balls in the summer. There were great maples interspersed
in the hedge, that threw down their keys in the spring. And all
along the front of the yard, close to the house, ran a white wooden
fence just within which was a line of graceful black-walnut trees,
with their thin green clustered leaves and the green nuts which fell


RANDOLPH BOURNE
in heaps on the ground. Aunt Nan and Gilbert would collect them
in sacks and put them in the barn. There they would grow all
black, so that you could strip off the covering and find the crinkled
nutshell within. Then you cracked them on a stone.
The yard was wonderful to Gilbert. The winter was one long
torpor when, as he played with his blocks in the great stretch of sun-
light in Mother's room, the days passed almost in a dream. It was
only when spring came, and he could run about and see the buds
and the flowers come out one after another, that he felt alive again.
And it was good in the endless summer days to have so much to
attend to. He could be playing in Three Trees Grove, and yet have
running in an undercurrent of his mind the sense of the garden or
the japonica hedge, or the manger in the barn. He could go down
to the cherry-tree to see if the cherries were ripe, or to the currant-
bushes, or he could prick his fingers on the rose-bushes, or get him-
self stuck in the gum of the pine-trees. The yard was a world, and
only very dimly did he imagine anything beyond it. What his
mother did in the kitchen or about the house only very dimly con-
cerned him. What they had to live on never entered his mind. His
sorrows were concerned almost entirely with the rebellions of Olga,
or the calamities of weather which would keep them all home from
a walk to the kind lady who lived up the street and gave them cook-
ies when they went to see her. Or the hornets and yellow-jackets.
Sometimes on very hot days, when Mother kept them in the dark-
ened back parlor and the big clock ticked menacingly, insistently at
them, and Gilbert felt sleepy and could not go to sleep, the tedium
vitæ would overwhelm him in a great drenching wave. He was sud-
denly conscious of time, endlessly flowing and yet somehow dread-
fully static. Nothing was ever going to happen again; he was as if
alive in a tomb. The flies buzzed; the clock ticked; Mother was tak-
ing an exhausted nap; Aunt Nan and Garna were away for a vaca-
tion. The world was a great vacuum with nothing to experience
and nothing to do.
And if a summer afternoon could produce so appalling a sense of
eternity, what must heaven be like, where you went so infallibly
when you were dead? Either because lovely Garna and mild Miss
Fogg had kept Gilbert from the terrors of hell, or it was his natural
ego, it never occurred to him that he was not destined for heaven,
or that there was any way of avoiding it. And the thought of


AN AUTOBIOGRAPHIC CHAPTER
eternal life seemed to fuse itself with the long and empty summer
afternoon. The tedium vitæ got transmuted into the colossal ennui
of heaven. Not as a pearly municipality of golden streets
and white-robed choirs did Gilbert imagine heaven, but always in
the guise of those white clouds on which God rode. He saw himself
clearly, seated infinitely high above the earth, to which he should
never be able to come again. Perhaps there was the intimation of a
harp, but what seized Gilbert's imagination was the vast emptiness
of the space around him, the disorientation of everything. Time
and space were no longer fluid and mobile, but frozen; and in the.
hot, sticky afternoon, his slightly feverish body, all alert and sensi-
tive at every pore of time that dripped past him, would be terribly
conscious of this horror that awaited him, of this immobile time in
empty space. It was not the dark or stillness that he feared. On the
contrary, he saw this future state as floating in the clearest, most
luminous light. On certain days, when he happened to look at the
sky, he would see just that pale infinite blue into which you could
look on and on and never reach the end. When it was really blue
or cloudy, it curved comfortingly over you, near and definite like a
bowl. But when it was of a certain paleness, the bowl seemed to
have been removed and you looked through, out into nothingness.
And if in this nothingness there were white majestic clouds floating,
that looked solid as if they could bear you away, then over Gilbert
would sweep again this ennui of heaven, lost and forgotten perhaps
since that ļast afternoon in the darkened parlor. And a vague feel-
ing of homelessness and of fear would fall upon him. His play
would flag until the clouds drifted away again and he forgot that
they had come.
The first break in Gilbert's world came when his mother decided
that he and Olga ought to go to school. Gilbert was seven years
old, and when his mother told him rather worriedly about it, he felt
at first rather pleased at the idea of something so important. What
would they teach him? Mother said Miss Waldron would teach
him. He knew how to read and write and he could spell all the
words he wrote. He read all the books he was given and sometimes
looked into Hawthorne's Wonder Tales, and read a page or two.
When he went back for the book, however, he would forget where
he had left off. So he would read a page anywhere. What did it
matter? He read his Bible in the same haphazard way. He knew


RANDOLPH BOURNE
1
his multiplication table, and he liked to recite it. And he knew all
about the calendar and the hymn-book. Most of these things he had
known since he was four or five, and what good did they do him?
But in the morning he liked taking Olga by the hand, and leading
her out the gate under the big black-walnut trees, and down the
street. Mother always kissed them good-bye with such a serious and
anxious air that Gilbert felt he was setting out on a genuine mission.
At the crossing he would restrain Olga from rushing ahead; then he
could carefully look up and down the street to see if there were any
horses and wagons coming. Then he would dash across, pulling
Olga precipitately behind him. They would go along the upper
green, under the great railroad bridge, and come to Miss Waldron's.
To Gilbert the school was an enormous joke. He could not take
Miss Waldron seriously. Her tall, bony frame and her sad, fierce
eyes touched no springs of affection in him. A lesson or two un-
locked all the latent cruelty in him. She'was there to teach Gilbert
and Olga and the half-dozen other little children who came to the
school-room over the kitchen, and she was determined to teach them.
She knew that children under seven needed to be taught to read and
write and spell and that this was what their parents had sent them
to her for. So she gritted her teeth, and came every morning to her
hard and bitter work.
But Gilbert by that time had read so many books at home that it
seemed absurd that he should be taught to read, and he would rattle
through the lesson while the younger children fidgeted and then tried
painfully to puzzle it out. Gilbert could spell, too, and he raced
through the words, and when he was asked the meaning of words he
would say that "retire” meant "go to bed,” because he had seen it
mean that in a book he had read. And Miss Waldron would
say
he
was a saucy boy, and plead with him to answer nicely. Then he
would mimic her, and watch her fight back the temper in her sad,
fierce eyes. She would stand him in the corner, with his back to the
.
class, and he would look round and wink at the other children to
make them laugh. Miss Waldron's sisters would come up from the
kitchen below, where they were baking, and beg Gilbert not to make
the teacher so unhappy, and promise him a coukie if he would be
good. And Gilbert, drunk with power, would refuse everything,
and ride his high horse until the mill-whistles blew twelve o'clock,
and they all went home for the day.


SEVEN POEMS
BY E. E. CUMMINGS
I
little tree
little silent Christmas tree
you are so little
you are more like a flower
who found
you
in the
green
forest
and were you very sorry to come away?
see i will comfort
you
because you smell so sweetly
i will kiss your cool bark
and hug you safe and tight
just as your mother would,
only don't be afraid
a
look
the spangles
that sleep all the year in a dark box
dreaming of being taken out and allowed to shine,
the balls the chains red and gold the fluffy threads,
put up your little arms
and i'll give them all to you to hold.
every finger shall have its ring
and there won't be a single place dark or unhappy
then when you're quite dressed
you'll stand in the window for everyone to see
and how they'll stare!
oh but you'll be very proud
and my little sister and i will take hands
i
and looking up at our beautiful tree
we'll dance and sing
"Noel Noel”
22


E. E. CUMMINGS
23
II
the bigness of cannon
is skilful,
but i have seen
death's clever enormous voice
which hides in a fragility
of poppies.
.
O
say that sometimes
on these long talkative animals
are laid fists of huger silence.
I have seen all the silence
full of vivid noiseless boys
at Roupy
i have seen
between barrages,
the night utter ripe unspeaking girls.
III
Buffalo Bill's
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death


24
SEVEN POEMS
IV
when god lets my body be
/
From each brave eye shall sprout a tree
fruit that dangles therefrom
the purpled world will dance upon
Between my lips which did sing
a rose shall beget the spring
that maidens whom passion wastes
>
will lay between their little breasts
My strong fingers beneath the snow
Into strenuous birds shall
go
my love walking in the grass
their wings will touch with her face
and all the while shall my heart be
With the bulge and nuzzle of the sea
V
why did you go
little fourpaws?
you forgot to shut
your big eyes.
where did you go?
like little kittens
are all the leaves
which open in the rain.
little kittens who
are called spring,
is what we stroke
maybe asleep?


E. E. CUMMINGS
25
do you know? or maybe did
something go away
ever so quietly
when we weren't looking.
VI
when life is quite through with
and leaves say alas,
much is to do
for the swallow, that closes
a flight in the blue;
when love's had his tears out,
perhaps shall
pass
a million years
(while a bee doses
on the poppies, the dears;
when all's done and said, and
under the grass
lies her head,
by oaks and roses
deliberated.)
1
1
VII
O Distinct
Lady of my unkempt adoration
if I have made
a fragile certain
song under the window of your soul
it is not like any songs
(the singers the others
they have been faithful


26
SEVEN POEMS
1
to many things and which
die
i have been sometimes true
to Nothing and which lives
they were fond of the handsome
moon never spoke ill of the
pretty stars
and to
the serene the complicated
and the obvious
they were faithful
and which i despise,
frankly
admitting i have been true
only to the noise of worms
in the eligible day
under the unaccountable sun)
Distinct Lady
swiftly take
my fragile certain song
that we may watch together
how behind the doomed
exact smile of life's
placid obscure palpable
carnival where to a normal
melody of probable violins dance
the square virtues with the oblong sins
perfectly
gesticulate the accurate
strenuous lips of incorruptible
Nothing
under the ample
sun, under the insufficient
day under the noise of worms


1
I. NATIONAL WINTER GARDEN
BURLESQUE
BY E. E. CUMMINGS


1


IV. NATIONAL WINTER GARDEN
BURLESQUE
BY E. E. CUMMINGS





CHARLES MARTIN LOEFFLER
BY PAUL ROSENFELD
LEGO
EGEND records of Inez de Castro, Queen of Portugal, that she
was dethroned and driven into exile by a rival, and that before
her husband and her partisans could restore her to kingdom, she
had died. But her husband caused her body to be embalmed and
borne with him wherever he went. And when finally he had van-
quished the pretender, he had the corpse decked in all the regal in-
signia, had it set upon the throne in the great hall of the palace of
the kings of Portugal, and vassals and liegemen summoned to do the
homage that had been denied the unhappy queen in her lifetime.
The music of Charles Martin Loeffler is like the dead Inez de
Castro on her throne. It, too, is swathed in diapered cloths and
hung with gold and precious stones. It, too, is set above and apart
from men in a sort of royal state, and surrounded by all the em-
blems of kingdom. And beneath its stiff and incrustated sheath
there lies, as once there lay beneath the jewelled robes and diadem
of the kings of Portugal, not a living being, but a corse.
For Loeffler is one of those exquisites whose refinement is unfor-
tunately accompanied by sterility, perhaps even results from it.
But for his essential uncreativeness, he might well have become the
composer uniquely representative of the artistic movement in which
the late nineteenth century refinement and exquisiteness manifested
itself. No musician, not Debussy even, was better prepared for
bringing the symbolist movement into music. Loeffler is affiliated
in temper, if not in achievement, with the brilliant band of belated
romanticists who adopted as their device the sonnet of Verlaine's
beginning:
“Je suis l'empire à la fin de la décadence.”
One finds in him almost typically the sensibility to the essences and
colours rather more than to the spectacle, the movement, the adven-
tures of things. The nervous delicacy, the widowhood of the spirit,
the horror of the times, the mystic paganism, the homesickness for
27


28
CHARLES MARTIN LOEFFLER
1
a tranquil and sequestered and soft-colored land "where shepherds
still pipe to their flocks, and nun-like processions 'of clouds float
over bluish hills and fathomless age-old lakes” are eminently pres-
ent in him. He is in almost heroic degree the spirit forever search-
ing blindly through the loud and garish city, the hideous present,
for some vestige, some message from its homeland; finding, some
sundown, in the ineffable glamour of rose and mauve and blue
through granite piles, "le souvenir avec le crepuscule.” He, too,
one would guess, has dreamt of selling his soul to the devil, and
called upon him, ah, how many terrible nights, to appear, and has
sought a refuge from the world in Catholic mysticism and ecstasy.
Had it been given him to realize himself in music, we should un-
doubtedly have had a body of work that would have been the veri-
table milestones of the route traversed by the entire movement.
Would not the "Pagan Poem” have been the musical equivalent
of the mystic and sorrowful sensuality of Verlaine? Would not
the two rhapsodies “L’Étang” and “La cornemuse” have transmuted
to music the macabre and sinister note of so much symbolist poetry?
Should we not have had in “La Villanelle du Diable” an equivalent
for the black mass and "Là bas”; in "Hora Mystica” an equivalent
for “En route”; in the “Music for Four Stringed Instruments” a
musical “Sagesse”? Does not Charles Martin Loeffler, who after
writing "A Pagan Poem” makes a retreat in a Benedictine monas-
tery, and who, at home in Medford, Massachusetts, teaches the
choristers to sing gregorian chants, recall Joris Karl Huysmans, the
“oblat” of La Trappe ?
To a limited extent, of course, he has succeeded in fixing the color
of the symbolist movement in music. Some of his richer, dreamier
songs, some of his finer bits of polishing, his rarer drops of essence,
are indeed the musical counterpart of the goldsmith's work, the pre-
ciosity of a Gustave Kahn or a Stuart Merrill. But a musical
Huysmans, for instance, it was never in his power to become. For
he has never possessed the creative heat, the fluency, the vein, the
felicity, the power necessary to the task of upbuilding out of the
tones of instruments anything so flamboyant and magnificent as the
novelist's black and red edifices. He has never been vivid and in-
genuous and spontaneous enough a musician even to develop a per-
sonal idiom. He has always been hampered and bound. His earlier
compositions, the first quartet, the orchestral “Les viellées de


PAUL ROSENFELD
29
l’Ukraine” and “La bonne chanson,” for instance, are distinctly
derivative and uncharacteristic in style. The idiom is derived in
part from Fauré, in part from Wagner and other of the roman-
ticists. The quintette has even been dubbed “A musical ‘Trip
Around the World in Eighty Days.'” Nor is the idiom of his later
and more representative period primarily and originally any more
characteristic. It never seems to surge quite wholly and cleanly
and fairly. The chasing to which it has evidently been subjected
cannot quite conceal its descent. The setting of “La Cloche félée"
of Baudelaire, for instance, is curidusly Germanic and heavy, for
all the subtlety and filigree of the voice and the accompanying
piano and viola. And “Hora Mystica” and the “Music for Four
Stringed Instruments," which have a certain stylistic unity, never-
theless reveal the composer hampered by the gregorian and scholas-
tic idiom which he has sought to assimilate.
Nor has he ever had the power to express and objectify himself
completely, and achieve vital form. In performance, most of his
works shrink and dwindle. The central and sustaining structure,
the cathedral which is behind every living composition and mani-
fests itself through it, is in these pieces so vague and attenuated that
it fades into the background of the concert-hall, is like gray upon
gray. The gems and gold thread and filigree with which this work
is sewn tarnish in the gloom. Something is there, we perceive,
something that moves and sways and rises and ebbs fitfully in the
dim light. But it is a wraithlike thing, and undulates and falls be-
fore our eyes like flames that have neither redness nor heat. Even
the terrible bagpipe of the "Clarinet Rhapsody"; even the cauldron
of the “Pagan Poem," that transcription of the most sensual and
impassioned of Virgil's eclogues, with its mystic dissonant trum-
pets; even the blasphemies of "La Villanelle du Diable,” are curi-
ously bloodless and ghostly and unsubstantial. Pages of sustained
music occur rarely enough in his work. The lofty, almost meta-
physical first few periods, the severe and pathetic second movement
of the "Music for Four Stringed Instruments”; certain songs like
“Le Son du Cor," that have atmosphere and a delicate poetry, are
distinctly exceptional in this body of work. What chiefly lives in
it are certain perfumed phrases, certain eloquent bars, a glowing
winey bit of colour here, a velvety phrase for the oboe or the clarinet,
a sharp brassy pricking horn-call, a dreamy wandering melody for
a


30
CHARLES MARTIN LOEFFLER
the voice there. His music consists of scattered highly polished
phrases, hard, exquisite, and cold. He is pre-eminently a précieux.
Of the scrupulousness, the fastidiousness, the distinction, even,
of Loeffler's work, there can be no question. He is not one of the
music-making herd. The subtlety and originality of intention which
his compositions almost uniformly display, the unflagging effort to
enclose within each of his forms a matter rare and novel and rich,
set him forever apart, even in his essential weakness, from the aca-
demic and conforming crew. The man who has composed these
scores makes at least the gesture of the artist, and comes to music to
express a temper original and delicate and aristocratic, disdainful
of the facile and the commonplace, a sensibility often troubled and
shadowy and fantastic. One cannot doubt the veritableness of his
vocation. And he is eminently not one of the pathetic half-edu-
cated musicians so common in America. He knows something of
musical science; knows how a tonal edifice should be unified; has a
sense of the chemistry of the orchestra. He appears familiar with
the plainsong, and has based a symphony and portions of a quartet
on gregorian modes. Even at a period when the sophisticated and
cultivated composer is becoming somewhat less a rarity, his culture
is remarkable, his knowledge of literature eclectic: Gogol as well as
Virgil has moved him to orchestral works. Above all, he is one of
the company of composers, to which a good number of more gifted
a
musicians do not belong, who are ever respectful of their medium,
and infinitely curious concerning it.
It is only, that, in seeking to compensate himself for his infecun-
dity, he has fallen into the deep sea of preciosity. Endeavoring by
main force to be expressive, to remedy his cardinal defect, to eschew
whatever is trite and outworn in the line of the melody, the sequence
of the harmonies, to rid himself of whatever is derivative and im-
personal and undistinguished in his style, he has become over-anx-
ious, over-meticulous of his diction. Because his phraseology was
colorless, he has become a stainer of phrases, a sort of musical
euphuist. All his energy, one senses, has gone into the cutting and
polishing and shining up and setting of little brightly coloured bits
of music, little sharp intense moments. One feels that they have
been caressed and stroked and smoothed and regarded a thousand
times; that Loeffler has dwelt upon them and touched them with a
sort of narcissistic love. Indeed, it must have been a great labour


PAUL ROSENFELD
31
that was expended on the darkening and spicing and sharpening of
the style in certain of his orchestral poems; the effort to create a
new idiom based on the gregorian modes, to which "Hora Mystica”
and the recent work for string quartet, with its antiphonies for
violin and cello, bear witness, must in itself have been large. But
though in result of all the chasing and hammering on gold, the filing
and polishing, the vessel of his art has perhaps become richer and
finer, it has not become any fuller. His second period differs from
his first only in the fact that in it he has gone from one form of
uncreativity to another somewhat more dignified and unusual. The
compositions of both periods have, after all, the selfsame lack. His
destiny seems to have been inevitable.
And so, in its confused argentry and ghostliness, its crystalliza-
tion and diaphaneity, his music resembles at times nothing so much
as the precious remains and specimens of an extinct planet; things
transfixed in cold eternal night, icy and phosphorescent of hue. No
atmosphere bathes them. Sap does not mount in them. Should we
touch them, they would crumble. This might have been a flower.
But now it glistens with crystals of mica and quartz. These are
jewels. But their fires are quenched. These candied petals are
the
passage from the “Music for Four Stringed Instruments” glossed
in the score "un jardin des fleurs naïves," while this vial of gemmy
green liquid is that entitled "une plaine d'émeraude gardée par des
peupliers.” The petrified saurian there, whose bones have suffered
“a sea-change
Into something rich and strange"
is the Spanish rhapsody for 'cello; the string of steely beads the set-
ting of the “To Helen” of Poe. And the objects that floát pre-
served in those little flasks are some of the popular ditties with
which Loeffler is so fond of incrustating his work. Once they were
“à La Villette,” and the Malagueña, and the eighteenth-century
marching song of the Lorraine soldiery, and flourished under the
windy heaven. But when Loeffler transplanted them respectively
into “La Villanelle du Diable,” into the “ 'Cello Rhapsody,” and
into the "Music for Four Stringed Instruments,” they underwent the
fate that befalls everything subjected to his exquisite and sterilizing
touch.


32
CHARLES MARTIN LOEFFLER
One comes to the conclusion that perhaps the most significant
and symbolic thing in the career of Charles Martin Loeffler is his
place of residence. For this Alsatian, French in culture, tempera-
mentally related to the decadents, writing music at first resembling
that of Fauré and the Wagnerizing Frenchmen, later that of Dukas,
and last that of d'Indy and Magnard, has lived the greater portion
of his life in no other city than Boston. Coming originally to
America for the purpose of playing first violin in the Boston Sym-
phony Orchestra, he has found the atmosphere of the New England
capital so pleasant that he has remained there practically ever since.
He whom one might suppose almost native to the Paris of Debussy
and Magnard and Ravel, of Verlaine and Gustave Kahn and Huys-
mans, has found comfortable an environment essentially tight and
illiberal, a society that masks philistinism with toryism, and man-
ages to drive its radical and vital and artistic youth, in increasing
numbers every year, to other places in search of air. And his own
career, on the spiritual plane, seems just such an exchange, the
preference of a shadowy and frigid place to a blazing and quivering
one, the exchange of the eternal Paris for the eternal Boston. His
music seems the result of just such a banishment. His art is indeed,
in the last analysis, a flight from the group of his kinsmen into, if
not exactly the circle, at least the dangerous vicinity of those ami-
able gentlemen, the Chadwicks and the Converses and all the other
highly respectable and sterile "American Composers.”
a


SAKÉ AND SONG
BY SYDNEY GREENBIE
TWIE
HE Japanese have always been great epicureans, but never
was jollity so rife as when, after the coming of the war, mer-
chants jumped like pawns into positions of commercial power and
prominence. And from the national game was borrowed a word
with which to christen these parvenus, a word by which they are
now known round the world-narikin. The lavish entertainments
these narikin permitted themselves, became the talk of Japan. The
freedom with which they displayed their wealth and the generally
boisterous nature of the Japanese at play, are open to any who cares
to look on.
The house I lived in stood up against a hill overlooking the whole
of the city of Kobe. Immediately beneath it was the finest and
most expensive tea-house, or restaurant, in the city, and it was fre-
quented by officials of the highest rank and the rich in general. It
was there for me to watch day and night, and I made use of my
position. There below were the long, wooden strips of grating
across the length of the room. During summer the paper doors were
removed. Every afternoon at about four, I could see the waitresses,
stripped to the waist, sitting before their little mirrors, making their
toilet for the evening.
From my balcony, late one afternoon, I looked down upon the
From out of the Tokiwa tea-house came two geisha, gor-
geously dressed in their tremendous, richly colored silk obi (girdles)
round their fantastically embroidered kimonos-two tiny mites ab-
solutely smothered in finery. “They are being introduced to tea-
house managers,” the boy in the house informed me. "And the two
men walking behind them are their new masters.”
Then came the usual arrivals of geisha in rickshaws, -attired in
red and gold. The gentlemen narikin came next, and the quiet wait-
resses began to slip about over the mats in their incessant round of
duties. Gradually, as the saké began to take effect, the sounds
would grow more and more audible, all would burst into song accom-
street.
33


34
SAKÉ AND SONG
-
panied by clapping of hands; or games between the men and the
geisha would produce riotous outbursts of laughter-shrieks of
laughter. Games only children would play in the West are here en-
joyed by the grey-haired. Men half drunk pursuing girls who are
not afraid of being caught but are paid for pretending to resist;
or some special geisha, fan in hand, kicking her trailing robes about
in what is thought to be a dance: studied, exact, monotonous; thus
the evening wears on till midnight. The war having produced an
abundance of wealth, merry-making became even more riotous than
the Japanese themselves could stand, and the police ordered that
tea-houses be closed at twelve. Then for an hour more would con-
tinue the calling for rickshaws. A serving maiden would clatter
down the street toward our house where was the bend in the road,
and from there would call out: "Danna San. Danna San. Icho.”
Or Nicho or Sancho as the case might be. She was calling: “Hon-
orable Mr. Rickshaw-man. One round.” Or two or three. That
is, a guest wanted one or two or three rickshaws. And then her little
clogs clattered back again. Sometimes a man would call, and his
bellow wakened the neighborhood. And from the distant rickshaw
shed a voice would answer, sleepily: "Hai,” and some soft, rubber-
soled feet would patter up the slight grade. There were farewells,
and the night would go to sleep again.
The half-dozen little waitresses, having passed in and out
amongst them serving food and saké for hours on end, must be wet
with perspiration. Yet they still have their own beds to spread.
To me, above, they seem to move noiselessly. Hardly caged ani-
mals; yet, not unlike them. For an hour more they go backward
and forward, apparently accomplishing nothing, even as before they
seemed endlessly doing nothing. They loll about on the mats with
quite becoming ease and grace. A long strip commences to unwind
endlessly. It is the obi being put aside for the night-not so gor-
geous as that the geisha wear, but just as long and as conventional.
A match strikes and the quick puff of smoke from the tiny pipe-
and the pinch of tobacco is exhausted. Another is pressed into the
little bowl of the pipe, another and another. Again endless move-
ment with nothing done. What long hours wasted against the need
of sleep, it seems. But even in such slight tasks life finds satis-
faction. The day is long, they seem to say: how shall I pass it
through, how fill the time of living? To-morrow? Oh, plenty of


SYDNEY GREENBIE
35
time for sleep. It will be short and duties come aplenty. They
appear and disappear, nothing immodest in their movements. And
then each creeps between the heavy futon (quilts), rests her head
upon the wooden pillow, and the last one draws the paper sliding
,
window across, leaving nothing but shadows for me to look upon. .
Long after the noise of the tea-house had subsided, I would stand
and gaze out across Kobe, beyond the veil of simple tasks concealed,
over a deep blue gulch to where glittered innumerable lights, to
where the sound of the pneumatic hammers thundered away at the
steel hull of the super-dreadnought—the Ise—which was then being
built at the shipyards. And I would wonder what it was being made
to protect. This? This laughter and hilariousness of narikin who
spend their profits at these tea-houses? And I looked further out
over Japan and saw fifty millions working, or rather trying to do
what specialization and organization have done elsewhere--doing
it in the same slipshod, crude, old-fashioned ways as it was being
done in this very household into which chance had brought me.
But what is it that induces so much noise and laughter? What
can the grown-up Japanese see in these tiny mites or even their more
grown-up sisters, to lavish so much wealth and dignity upon them?
To a sober Western observer it seems the height of absurdity, and
in one way is a splendid commentary on Japanese character.
True, there were more dignified performances, as when the Min-
ister of Communications came to stay there. An elaborate dinner
was given, and the most attractive geisha obtainable were ordered.
As I looked through the thin gauze curtains which hung across the
inner open door-way, it seemed like some fairy setting. A row of
men had squatted upon the mats, eating a meal endlessly various.
There seemed end neither to dishes nor appetite. The saké flowed
freely. Then the geisha commenced to dance, and a more gorgeous
spectacle could not be found anywhere. The minister himself,
though preserving the utmost dignity, was not too disdainful of the
grosser enjoyments. Applause was profuse. But the guests dis-
banded somewhat earlier than usual-at eleven o'clock.
It is customary to observe all sorts of events, business or other-
wise, personal or national, with similar feastings, and frequently
foreigners are invited. Especially was this so during the war, and
when the armistice and peace were celebrated. Then narikin gave
dinners which vied in elaborateness with those of the West.


36
SAKÉ AND SONG
-
But the majority of evenings are spent in riotous carousing in
which Bacchus proves himself no antiquarian.
However much all other forms of Japanese social life may be
closed to him, no foreigner is ever a total outsider to these affairs.
He is bound, sooner or later, to become friendly with some Japanese,
and few Japanese have any conception of entertainment other than
with geisha. And I was no exception. I had gone to Osaka one
day, and there, at a commercial exhibition, met a gentleman who
proved to be my preceptor in the amenities of geishadom. My
friend- for so I may now call him-was a sober little gentleman
devoted to his unusually charming young wife. "You wait for
me half an hour and I be free to go with you show you Osaka. I
will introduce you to my best of friend. You American, I know.
I lived in America ten years. My wife was born in America. You
wait half an hour.” I promised. And that was my beginning.
In a sense the Japanese are the most sociable people in the world,
and I found myself taken in by strangers everywhere, in just such
a free and easy manner. Yet with the men at the boarding-house
I found it almost impossible to become intimate. While home we
were very friendly, but they never asked me to join them in any ad-
venture. Girl friends are things practically unknown to them. Ex-
cept geisha, whom, other than his sisters, is a man to know? During
my stay there, my neighbor once brought up two girls on a visit: one
was Eurasian, the other pure native. The absence of real privacy
in Japanese houses minimizes any suspicion which might attach
itself to such a visit. I was introduced to them. I tried to be so-
ciable, especially as they both spoke English fluently, but my efforts
failed.
Come to the home of the Westerner and his wife will entertain
you. The Japanese girl doesn't get any such training and never
knows what it is to be sociable with men. Therefore the Japanese
cannot understand our courtesies and attention to young women.
Naturally, they put upon it the wrong interpretation.
Among the young men living at the house, the subject of women
seldom came up for discussion. From all appearances, they might
all have been celibate priests. One day, however, we were watching
the girls in the tea-houses across the way, and I led them on to talk
about morality in Japan.
“Do young men ever have girl friends ?" I asked him.


SYDNEY GREENBIE
37
>
“Oh, yes,” he answered. “They are beginning to, more and more.”
“Well,” I ventured, “do they ever bring girls up to their rooms,
at their boarding houses ?”
“No, they don't. It wouldn't be allowed,” he assured me.
The general tone of conversation with these young men was al-
ways restrained and decent. They spoke with a gentility which is
the way of the thoughtful and educated young Japanese. Notwith-
standing that drinking is nowhere taboo, neither of these two, on my
floor, drank. They were not Christian, and even for Buddhism they
had little regard, as is the case with most educated Japanese. Still,
they intimated that they did not look with favor upon licentiousness,
and were chauvinistically ashamed of their restricted districts—the
cages.
“Foreigners,” said one of them, in answer to my question, "are
perhaps on the average more moral than Japanese; but in principle
our ways are just as good as yours. Foreigners, however, seem to
us too proud.” It was curious, for to my way of thinking, he had
completely reversed it. To me foreigners are by no means more
moral. Some are too proud, but it is a different pride from that of
the Japanese. They (the foreigners) are more used to being proud,
but the Japanese ştamps and swaggers because he does not know how
to be proud with dignity. He simulates or emulates too much the
old time samurai officiousness.
I found it impossible to be pals with Japanese. Either the man
is a narikin in the making and takes it upon himself to entertain
you on behalf of his country, never letting you pay; or else he is
poor and unashamed of his poverty, and always lets you pay. And
in both cases it is pride. Yet, he is overawed by any foreigner, and
when he is poor, he makes no pretensions.
One day my friend, Mr. Suzuki, brought his "best of friend”
Hayashi, a Hyogo exporter, with him to my place. We looked
across, as one could not help doing, to the Tokiwa. We chatted
about it. "Have you ever been there?” he asked. I confessed.
"Well, I will take you.” And he was as good as his word. The en-
trance down below was as attractive in its simplicity as a mere en-
trance could be. The waitresses knelt upon the mats at the door to
.
receive their guests. The smooth, unpainted woodwork, the expen-
sive screens, the spacious rooms--one felt he had come into a great
temple turned pagan. Half a dozen geisha had been ordered, and
/
a


38
SAKÉ
SAKE AND SONG
a
we were assigned to an open room on an extension, with an unob-
structed view of Kobe from every angle. It was merely a corner of
the great big, open garden, as it were.
The girls showed they were being taxed unduly, having to enter-
tain a foreigner. I could not speak to them very well, and put my-
self in the hands of my friend. Being new to these intimacies, I
requested that the girls dance for me, as otherwise I should have
been on the outside of the jollity-none of the witticisms which pro-
voked so much laughter being interpreted to me. I thought perhaps
my friend regarded them as too vulgar for the ears of a foreigner.
The geisha is not an over-attractive personality. Her 'grace is
too cramped, too limited. Her movements while dancing are ex-
tremely proper, according to code, and seldom, if ever, rise to any
terpsichorean liveliness as we know it. She turns about on the balls
of her feet, kicking the trailing gowns outward, not immodestly,
and manipulates a fan in definitely prescribed ways. The fan is the
essence of the art, next to which in importance is the movement of
the hands. Otherwise, neither the music nor the dance quickened
my artistic sense to a thrill.
They taught me a song. The melody was simple and so monoto-
nous that it almost wearied me. But the words, when interpreted to
me, made me understand-and then I sang with them, and loved
Japan in that song.
Literally it is this:
“Iso de meisho wa Oharai Sama ro
By a famous beach, O Hara San
Matsu ga miyamasu honobonoto
Pine tree sees faintly
Matsu ga miyamasu iso iso honobonoto
Pine tree sees blithesome faintly.”
a
They seemed to be drunk with the very repetition of the song. To
me it was but a translation, and I could see the picture it presented.
But they sang it over and over again, taught it to me with a patience
which is either childish or sublime, that is, either without under-
standing or with a sense of the oneness of the universe, almost as
though it were a prayer. They repeated it over and over again, and
it was the only song sung that evening with any interest. It seemed


SYDNEY GREENBIE
39
1
1
to be part of them and to emanate as the perfume from the rose, as
color from a sunset.
We were absorbed in this song. The girl who took it upon her-
self to instruct me was most vivacious and attractive. I almost for-
got my surroundings, and paid no attention to those coming or
going Suddenly, into the monotony of the dancing and the sing-
ing came a little girl. She was just fourteen. Her silks and em-
broideries were fabulous, and the artificially white skin was solid
and fresh. · She was a tiny thing, and should be forgiven if
the
gorgeous raiment made her think of herself and feel happy. She
came in with the usual bow, sat down quietly, but the gaze
of
every-
one of us was instantly upon her, and the faces of the other geisha
showed both satisfaction and envy. The little thing felt happy,
and yet dared not find expression for that happiness; so that every
little while a smile would turn on her lips and contract or be sup-
pressed. She was happy, but still it must have hurt her not to be
happy girlishly.
Six months or more later, I met her at another geisha party. She
did not recognize me, but finally recalled the evening. But what a
change! She was already the favorite of a foreigner, with all the
tricks and self-conscious indifference of her profession.
One evening Mr. Suzuki and I decided to go to see more of geisha
life. I could see that his wife did not approve of it, but he was mas-
ter and no argument was necessary. The geisha takes the place of
the club and no woman will dare deny that to her husband. The
geisha is not his companion-she is merely a specialist in the enter-
tainment of men. The wife entertains him at home, the geisha,
abroad, and if he wants a concubine or two, there is no law prohib-
iting it. The present Emperor, himself the son by a side wife, the
lady Yanagiwara, is the first to have adopted monogamy, but his
father had five wives.
We moved along our way through the vast crowd which had
swarmed the streets on its way to a temple, and took to a back street
or roadway along the bank of the Minatogawa. There were neither
·lights nor pavements, and the dust raised by the scraping of the geta
(clogs) was distressing. The dark, starlit night did not minister to
Japanese atmosphere; only the strangeness was real.
We dropped down among the shacks, the dirty ratty places, wan-
dered through narrow alleys amidst squalor and poverty. Not our


40
SAKÉ
SAKE AND SONG
a
kind of poverty, though-not so degraded, but more primitive. In
Japan poverty does not arouse so much sympathy because it is not
so definitely below the general condition. It is so common that one
takes no more notice of it than of a poor horse.
Further on we were in alleys lined with cleaner, better, and more
luxurious houses. This is where the geisha live. They have no
homes, for a Japanese could not be gay in the presence of his parents
or the parents of a geisha. The parents being older, he would have
to sit still and be sober. Consequently, the geisha have their own
quarters. The proprietors of these houses are all “respectable.”
They look after the girls with law-abiding interest.
When we found the appointed place, we entered. The clean,
somewhat charming old woman brought out sheets of paper on
which the names of at least eight hundred girls were printed. When
a girl is hired, a hole is punched with a toothpick over her name;
when she returns, a hole is punched beneath it. The girls are or-
dered from a central office, where a strict register is kept of their
movements. To wander over to one of these offices, reminds one of
a miniature stock-exchange. The atmosphere of intense activity, of
the passing of great possessions from one to another, makes of it the
most lively place in the quarters.
When the girls my friend favored arrived, we were well into the
feast. The normal length of a Japanese meal is about three and a
half hours. I sat with my friends watching the meat and the greens
sizzling on the brazier, eating little pieces at set intervals. It was
tantalizing. I could have devoured the whole of it post-haste, but
had to wait each time for someone to take a chopstickful first. It
was a delicious torture, for each mouthful was worth the waiting
for. Sukiyaki, it is called, which means “enjoyable fry.”
Six geisha came in and sat. Two of them talked, and my stam-
mering Japanese formed part, if not all, of the amusement; but
there was no dancing, playing, or singing. What they were being
paid for under these circumstances I could not tell. It only indi-
cated the real evil of the geisha habit. They were neither friends
nor entertainers, just simply parasites, or, let us give them some
place in life, wall flowers.
My friend asked what I thought of their looks; I indicated which
I considered the prettiest. No, that was not his choice. "The one
to my right,” he said, "forty-five per cent.; the next, thirty-five per
>


SYDNEY GREENBIE
41
a
cent.; then fifty-five per cent. (the one I had indicated), and lastly,
seventy-five per cent.” That is the quairt way they have of passing
judgement on women. Later on, another girl came in. Indeed, she
was the best, and we assessed her at eighty per cenft: She was not a
beauty, being a little too stout, but she had charm and character and
"go.” She did everything, some things a little vulgarly, some charm-
ingly, and some revealing training and education. She was the fa-
vorite. She liked foreigners, knew a few words of English, and kept
the lot of us in a merry mood. What the main topic of conversation
was, however, I never knew. Japanese are most exasperating in this,
for they will carry on miles of conversation even about yourself,
without as much as attempting to bring you into the affair. You
simply have to extract an interpretation, so shy and evasive are they.
Thus another four hours of life passed on. It was not a bore, yet
certainly not interesting. It cost us ten yen, five dollars, each,
dozens of bottles of aerated water and beer, food and fruit, jokes
and laughter. One girl played the violin-an altogether new thing
to them- but one other did not so much as make a remark all
evening. Yet this is what is in so great demand in Japan, so much
so that one must employ these girls days ahead of time if one has
any choice at all. And thus is man's sanity secured.
I had expressed an interest in the historical phase of this life and
reminded my friend that he could show me what life in old Japan
had been like in a vivid way. So a few weeks later he called
upon
me again and asked if I would come out with him for the evening.
This time it was distant from the usual geisha quarters, off from the
old road which before the coming of the foreigners had been the
main street of Hyogo-Kobe's parent city. Even after the coming
of the white man, this road had played its dramatic part, for, to
avoid passing the hated foreign settlement, the samurai and daimyo
had taken to traveling to Kyoto by turning northward and cutting
through the hills over what is now known as Arima-michi (Arima
Highway). To this hidden inn along Arima-michi we went that
evening.
Besides dancing and singing and now more friendly intimacy, the
proprietor brought her store of ancient possessions which she keeps
for just such occasions. Japanese who wish to play samurai, or an-
cient noblemen, can here satisfy their desires. We regaled ourselves
in these old-time costumes and acted scenes and samurai practices so
a


4 SASAKÉ AND SONG
me.
Fomantic to them. Thus, for a few moments, I was a Chinese patri-
afck, árid.then a powerful shogun in glittering gown with a tiny
wife•.to:foļlow: 'me': and obey. Every one paid me the respect
düe a superior: My friend was a valiant samurai dressed in weighty
armour. He depicted a departure for war, the scene between him-
self and his sweetheart, their marriage, and the sad moments of
parting. They acted as though born to it; not, however, without a
conscious show of ridicule.
Saké began to flow and all became cheerful. Even the old wo-
man, the proprietor's wife, imbibed freely at her guests' expense.
She was soon quite gay and avowed most emphatically that she loved
Her old husband finally came in and good-naturedly picked
her up and carried her out of the room. His kindliness completely
whitewashed her helpless coarseness.
The eighty per cent. geisha of the previous party was present.
Her name—that is, her geisha name—was Tamosabura. She was
dark-complexioned and left herself so, for she did not paint. Tamo-
sabura was twenty-five, and admitted it. She was the most intelli-
gent and had the finest character, but hid it. And when I was just
about to forget that she was a geisha, she would make some sugges-
tive remark which made me wish men did not have to be made
"happy” and girls subjected to a training in subtleties to achieve it
for them.
She affected a great liking for me, but I am sure she didn't even
dislike me-a red devil of a foreigner. She pretended to be happy,
but she was not sad. She was slightly curious about me, yet mocked
me. I struggled with Japanese to learn a language, the value of the
usage of which was a vague possibility to me wrapped in a mantle
of promise. She learned a few English words and showed her con-
tempt for the language by using them to amuse the illiterate and
the simple-minded.
She rose to go. It was half past ten but she said she had to keep
another engagement. To put away her samisen (the Japanese guitar
which has no music in it) the others came to her assistance. My
attention was called to this. It was a show of courtesy to which
she, as a superior, was entitled. And with more sweep and motion
than is common with most Japanese women, she slipped out of the
door.
Things fell flat after that, though we did not leave till one in the
-
a


SYDNEY GREENBIE
43
a
a
morning. There was then neither tram nor rickshaw. The concern
for my safety all of them manifested was indeed remarkable. One
woman went ahead and presently returned with a kuruma. With a
kurumaysan they would trust me to arrive unharmed. My way
lay through one of the outer regions of the city. The girls were
most considerate and kindly, a loveliness in feminine character
which always wins Western men's sympathies.
Through the narrow little by-ways of Hyogo my sturdy rickshaw
man bore me. There was so much blackness round about that this
trustworthy coolie shone with human radiance. Alone, it might not
have been altogether well for me to wander away out here. With
him, panting and shifting the place of the shafts, I rode with delight
and composure. The electric lights at every gate seemed sleepy
within their nooks and corners.
I had time and ease in which to reflect on the night and its experi-
ences. One certainly grows to love these people with a melancholy
love. They are not ugly, I thought, but certainly not beautiful;
they are not sad, but certainly not happy; they are not prim, but
certainly not free; they are not refined, but certainly not vulgar.
What are they, then? They are geisha, the product of a feudalism
in which a man might do anything he pleased, aside from real think-
ing. They are a specialized institution. Though the geisha may
easily be a libertine in her profession, still I have yet to see her
nightly employer take any public liberties with her, as is done with
a Western prostitute. Hired for the occasion, to satisfy the pleasure-
seeking, she still maintains her dignity. Whatever her morals, in
appearance she is the most circumspect individual in the world. It
is to the credit of Japanese un-morality that, using their women,
they do not torture them as does the West.
Japanese have no women friends, only wives, servants and geisha,
alias prostitutes. Whereas we would not think of going out for an
evening's pleasure without our girl friends, in Japan the presence of
women must be paid for, though they do nothing at all to earn their
fees. And back home, my friend's little wife and servant were sit-
ting up for him, for she told me that on all occasions she remains up
till he comes, and would not sleep through the night should he
remain away.
One rapidly tires of the geisha and their accomplishments, but the
resident in Japan soon learns to endure with un-patient resignation


44
SAKÉ
SAKE AND SONG
these Oriental amenities. For it is indeed a matter of looking for
a square egg if one tries to find a place without them. Even should
one keep entirely away from their quarters and the tea-houses, the
nights are so full with their shouting and playing that willy-nilly
one has them with him. And when the summer comes, or during
plum-blossom or cherry-blossom viewing, the tumult drifts into the
public parks-and then one must indeed say farewell to peace.
It was while trying to avoid one such place that a friend of mine
and I turned down the street towards the slums and the factories,
instead of taking to the upper paths along the hill. The houses
were monotonously regular, dirty and poor, their only virtue being
that they were low and permitted an almost unobstructed view of
the hills above. Occasionally the landscape opened, disclosing a
glimpse of the sea like the carelessly closed kimono which often
affords a peep at the Japanese woman's breasts.
When we reached the foot of the hills, we turned to the left, be-
cause the way to the right was so prohibitive. The factories, with
their green and brown gaseous smoke, were too much for us. We
had not gone very far when we came upon some buildings which
puzzled us. They looked like barracks or prisons, yet we knew they
could be neither. The window openings were about two feet square,
closed with thin strips pasted over with paper. We were discours-
ing somewhat generally upon the materialism of modern Japan
when a voice, coarse yet sweet, rang out from the nearest aperture.
It made us stop and look each other in the face. Something drew us
close to each other, as though the whole of that which is loveliest in
all Japan had enveloped us. It was immediately followed by a
chorus of voices unutterably sweet and wholesome. Our curiosity
became aroused. The lure was so great that we decided to find out
what these singers were doing.
Entering by way of an open gate in the high board fence, we
came into a yard of picturesque simplicity. In the corner was a deep
well over which stood the old fashioned well-sweep, for all the world
just as it must have stood in the days of the patriarchs. Upon a
ledge stood a Japanese, bringing the water up as rapidly as possible
and pouring it into the buckets of another. That other, when his
two pails were full, shouldered them on his yoke and with a jerky,
swinging gait passed on into the darkened building beyond. The
life was so primitive, the atmosphere so sober, we felt we had sud-


-SYDNEY GREENBIE
45
a
denly slipped out of the modern rush of new Japan into something
we shall probably find at the other end of time when man arrives.
Tremendous tubs, eight feet in diameter, lay about the yards, wheel
after wheel of them. Omar's request that we turn down “an empty
glass” was here but half complied with: these were empty, but on
their sides, waiting to be turned up again. One man picked up a
single bucket of water and strolled across the scene as it is said men
did in Rachel's days. And the bamboo pole see-sawed its way be-
tween heaven and the dark depths of the well, awaking visions of
Eastern life now hardly Oriental.
From this outer yard the doors stood wide into the dungeon-like
saké cellars; we were in a saké-brewing establishment. Here the
tremendous tubs stood upright, six and seven feet high. The sweet-
scented saké bubbled with ferment, and in and about the tubs moved
the men, overgrown dwarfs of a raised underworld.
It seemed for a moment that our coming had broken the charm,
and they would not sing again. For the first time necessity seemed
to me a spiritual parent instead of an earthly one. They had to stir
their tubs, and habit was too closely allied to birth and seclusion to
be interrupted long by a mere visitation of strange foreigners. Slowly
they reverted to song and labours. As they stood on the rims of the
monstrous tubs, their staffs sunk into the thick, white foaming rice
brew, they seemed living monuments of contentment stirring the
cups of forgetfulness for the world.
Then one led off, and his voice rang out clear in that darkened
vault-clear as the thin rays of light which entered through the
cracks in the paper windows. The other three men took up the
strains, and then they followed each other in perfect rhythm to
which they kept time by beating with their staff-mixers on the bot-
toms. The hands holding the staff shot out full length and came
down on the bottom with a gentle thud, were drawn in and raised
again,-one after the other, not a fraction of a second out of time.
The song needed no words of explanation. The paper apertures
threw little light on any details. Songs without words, and atmos-
phere without trifles—and for a moment, a world without progress.
Simple folk whose hearts are free from affectation can make their
untrained voices the envy of great singers, and their wooden tools
the peer of instruments. It was as though all that is lovely in hu-
man aspiration were being held firm to reality by the thud of a staff.
a
а


46
INFERENTIAL
Relief from progress and striving is a thrilling intoxicant;
whether one chooses whiskey or mere illusion, the result is the
same. Whenever I think back to my days in Japan I always feel a
contrast between the vulgarities of the sake-drinking, idle Japanese,
and the loveliness of these happy toilers there in the dark vaults of
Nada.
INFERENTIAL
BY EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON
Although I saw before me there the face
Of one whom I had honored among men
The least, and on regarding him again
Would not have had him in another place,
He fitted with an unfamiliar grace
The coffin where I could not see him then
As I had seen him and appraised him when
I deemed him unessential to the race.
For there was more of him than what I saw.
And there was on me more than the old awe
That is the common genius of the dead.
I might as well have heard him: “Never mind;
If some of us were not so far behind,
The rest of us were not so far ahead."


A TRAGIC END
BY GILBERT CANNAN
Thab
I
HE end was tragic because nothing happened or ever could
happen. Once again life had moved too fast for Digby Tis-
sand, who was one of those people whom everybody likes because
they expect nothing and get what they expect. He was in nobody's
way except his own, but fortunately he was on good terms with him-
self and had inherited a comfortable income. He could do what he
liked but he very rarely liked anything enough to wish to do it. Yet
he was affectionate, though when the affection of others came his
way it hurt him because he knew he did not deserve it. He suffered
from an incurable modesty.
He was a Barrister: that is, he had chambers in the Temple into
which he could take refuge when the idea of entering his club be-
came insupportable, but nobody ever briefed him except his own
family, because he was incapable of speaking with authority and
was always convinced by his opponent's argument. It has to be
added that he was capable of the most passionate admiration but
could never express it, because it seemed to him to be an intrusion
upon the object of it.
Pleasant to look upon, he was good at games and in spite of his
French name was almost overwhelmingly English. He had many
acquaintances but no friends; and he lived in a tiny box of a flat in
Westminster, because that was the place to which he had drifted
when he came to London, for no particular reason except that his
“set” at Oxford had all gone to London. They had succeeded, mar-
ried, become important; but he remained unimportant and thereby
enjoyed a certain distinction. There were times, however, when he
longed for some woman to take him seriously, but that never hap-
pened and by the time he was thirty he had put that hope from him,
and found consolation in adoring the heroines in books. Occasion-
ally he met women who were like those heroines, but they were
nearly always married or engaged or terrifyingly intelligent, and
a
47


48
A TRAGIC END
of relig-
anyhow, in their presence, Digby could not utter a sound. In fact,
their and life's refusal to take any notice of him had become a joke
to which he attached all that he was capable of in the way
ious worship. When people discussed him, which was seldom, they
said that he had a sense of humour.
He had a little brown moustache and absurd steady brown eyes,
and he was always good-natured, never speaking unkindly of anyone
and not knowing enough of what was going on about him to carry
tales or gossip. It was positively indecent how people flirted in his
presence. He saw nothing, because everything was too quick for
him.
No woman ever decided that he ought to be married until Stella
met him, and Stella made up her mind at once. She was young
enough to find everybody as charming as herself, and she found
Digby perfectly delightful. She saw at once that he suffered from
an excessive slowness and keyed herself down to him, took the most
touching pains to reveal to him what was going on in the life about
them, and interpreted for him the people in the house where they
were staying by means of her brilliant gift of caricature. When their
characters were distorted and blown out to grotesque proportions, he
could see them and laughed till he cried at Stella's sallies. In re-
turn, for the benefit of the house-party, she dressed him up and
turned him into a caricature of himself at which they laughed until
they cried and said that dear Mr. Tissand had such a sense of
humour.
Stella was like a dancing sprite of mischief. She was eighteen,
very young at that, most slender, most graceful, pale, and full of a
childish dignity, and to Digby, dressed up as he was one night in
woman's clothes, there came a moment of revelation. She was the
first human being he had ever seen. He smiled all over from top to
toe and she seemed to him a better joke even than himself and all
the worship that for years had been centred upon the joke of him-
self went out to her. From that moment on he knew nothing at all
except that there was a moon and some pine trees and Stella in blue
and himself babbling of love and beauty and Stella's lips, and her
hands were in his and he was kissing them and somehow she seemed
immensely large and her face was very remote, very lovely, with her
head thrown back and a puzzled expression of pain in her eyes.
She
said nothing and he went on kissing her hands, long-fingered and
a


GILBERT CANNAN
49
lovely, because he did not know what to do next. His brain throbbed
as he laboured to find what to say or do and at last, with an astound-
ing emphasis, he said:
“The next thing is to get married.”
“O! I couldn't,” said Stella quietly.
“By God, you shall!” replied Digby with a violence that almost
laid him flat, because he had never had a will before and he felt
uncomfortably and unaccountably that this will was not his own.
She broke into a peal of happy laughter and Digby said:
“Of course you will.”
“
“Of course I will,” she said, tucking her hand into his arm.
He trembled and whispered to himself:
“This is happiness. I am happy."
He wanted terribly to say it out loud but he knew that although
Stella was only a child she knew far more about it than he did. It
was quite extraordinary how, when she had stood with her head
thrown back, there was in her eyes an expression of having gained
something which she had almost lost.
After his startling revelation of will Digby was perfectly help-
less. The vision of Stella that he had had was completely gone, and
he began to see her as a heroine. That was disconcerting because
he could not see himself as a hero, and he stood foolishly fumbling
with finger and thumb at his moustache.
“O! you darling! darling little man !" cried Stella, flinging her
arms round him suddenly. "You are mine, mine, mine."
"
Digby melted into a delicious sense of being a darling, but
through it there came stabbing the knowledge that the charm he had
for her was her own, and that it had all happened because she was
so very young, and so vital, and so unaware of what she was: a
lovely thing, no longer child and not yet woman. He mumbled:
“I don't think we quite know—"
But she pressed her hand over his lips and would not let him
speak, and tears trickled down his cheek and he knew that he was
not a man or anything like one: just a joke, just an oddity. So he
broke into blubbering:
“I adore you. I adore you.”
Stella hugged him for that, took him firmly by the hand and led
him back to the house.


50
A TRAGIC END
II
a
All night long he lay sweating with horror at what he had done.
The idea that he had taken a positive step was a terror to him, but
directly he thought of Stella he was helpless. Her charm oozed over
him, made him glow, stiffen into an unwonted and intoxicating
virility which collapsed at the most inconvenient moments, just, for
instance, when he saw himself as heroic, making a career for himself
for her sake, or writing that comic book he had often thought of to
make her laugh. Not a wink of sleep did he get all night, and he
thought, as the greyest of grey dawns came slinking up the sky:
“This is going to be horrible, horrible.”
He felt that he had not a friend in the world. Not the slightest
desire did he have to get up and face a new day. Once he was with
Stella he knew that he would be safe. She was so strong, so vividly
alive, so quick, but he would have to see her at breakfast with other
people and after breakfast, some time or other, he would have to tell
them. And then of course Stella had a father and mother: and
brothers no doubt, brilliant fellows, who did things and understood
everything that was going on around them: sisters possibly, like
Stella but different, with cleverness instead of knowledge. Astound-
ing how easy it was to construct a whole family out of Stella.
.
At last, gloomily staring out of the window, Digby reached the
conclusion:
“I wish I wasn't such a damn fool.”
That was the best he could do in the circumstances, and it was
enough to get him out of bed and downstairs without further
tremor.
Stella had been up for hours. She was waiting for him down-
stairs with a basket of mushrooms.
"You like them, don't you?” she said. “I'm not going to let any.
body else eat them.”
Her charm this morning was cool and dewy and less than ever
could Digby resist it.
“I didn't expect,” he said, "I didn't expect you to begin at once
to think of feeding me.”
“That is the very first thing I thought of when I woke up,” she re-
a
a
9


GILBERT CANNAN
51
a
plied. “Do let us always live in the country. You look so nice in
flannels.”
“Anywhere you like,” said Digby, “only we ought always to live
in the summer, because you-well-you know you look —” He
became inarticulate with love of her.
At breakfast there was no need to explain. Everybody was de-
lighted. Digby was “such a dear” and the general feeling was that
Stella was safer married, and there was not the slightest tinge of
jealousy to mar the general happiness, because the idea of marrying
Digby had never before crossed any female mind. High spirits pre-
vailed, and Digby found, as other men have found, that once the
idea of his marriage was accepted he had very little to do with it. He
liked that because he was used to living automatically, but he re-
sented Stella's being taken away from him and transformed out of
being Stella into a bride. She escaped every now and then but
never for very long. It seemed that the whole wisdom of her sex
had to be imparted to her. Digby found that life was moving faster
than ever before and gave it up as hopeless. Only with and through
Stella could he cope with it.
She was the first to leave the party, and after she had gone he
found that he could not endure either the place or the people. This
was strange, because he had never before disliked anything or any-
one. So he escaped and found even his adored London, London of
the Temple and the Club and Piccadilly shining like a river on a wet
night, even that home of homès, dull, but acutely, torturingly dull,
and his only occupation in it was and could be to tell his friends that
he was going to be married to Stella. That he loathed doing, be-
cause it made him realize for the first time in his life that no one had
ever taken him seriously. And, without Stella, they would not do
so now.
He was just getting into his tail-coat when he remembered Mrs.
Marwood. He sat down heavily and pulled at his collar.
Mrs. Marwood was a lady some years his senior on whom he had
been in the habit of calling every Sunday since he was eighteen, and
every Sunday he had aired his opinions in her drawing-room, an
apartment sacred to that rite. In no other place was Digby aware
that he had an opinion, but Mrs. Marwood had created the habit in
him and because his experience with her was unique he had liked her.
Occasionally he took her to the theatre or to concerts, but he knew
a


52
A TRAGIC END
>
nothing about her except that she was beautiful and dined with emi-
nent persons and entertained distinguished foreigners when they
came to London. Perhaps, at bottom, that was why Digby liked
her flat, because what pleased him most in London was the num-
ber of people who were doing terribly important things the neces-
sity for which he could never understand. For over twelve years he
had been going to her house, but the things that went on there were
no more intelligible to him than they had been in the beginning, and
Mrs. Marwood remained an admirable mystery.
And now suddenly she had become a menace, the nature of which
Digby could not fathom. Dressed for calling, he called on her-
patent-leather boots, chamois gloves, yellow cane, silk hat. He
stared distastefully at the door of her fat and when it was opened
handed in his card and bolted breathlessly, saying to himself:
“I will write."
He found it difficult to write, but at last squeezed out of himself
a bare statement that he was going to be married, though the words
he used did not in the least describe the process through which he
was passing. They had seemed well enough with his friends and re-
lations, but with Mrs. Marwood they were inadequate; but when
he looked back on it he found that he had always felt that life itself
was just a little inadequate for the lady, whose tragedy it was that,
in her own eyes, she had been born twenty years before her time.
Digby had admired her for being tragic, and when he was very
young he used to sit for hqurs while she talked about it, and told
him the things that great men had said about her: “A woman in
stone watching Time go by.” That was one of the phrases, but the
best were in French, a language which Digby did not understand.
All these things trickled through his brain as he wrote, and filled
him with an increasing distaste and uneasiness. Even writing long
silly letters to Stella did not relieve him, because the more he wrote
the more incredible seemed the thing that had happened to him.
At last the day came when, armed with his solicitor's statement
of his unimpeachable financial condition, he was to visit Stella's
parents. He was received at the door of the modern Jacobean sub-
urban country house by Stella with her arm round Mrs. Marwood's
waist. Stella beamed, Mrs. Marwood beamed. Digby reeled.
“I am so delighted,” said Mrs. Marwood. “I have known Stella
since she was a baby."
a


GILBERT CANNAN
53
That was a shock too. Digby had never thought of Stella as a
baby. She was a thing that shone in beauty under pine-trees and the
moon.
He bowed but could find nothing to say. The situation was over-
whelmingly unexpected, and he had never been in a situation be-
fore. That indeed had been the cardinal fact of his existence until
Stella came to displace it. "I'm I'm glad,” he muttered, "very
glad.”
Mrs. Marwood tactfully left the young people.
“I think she's wonderful,” said Stella enthusiastically. “And she
speaks so warmly about you. Her knowing you has made all the
difference in the world. Dad thought you were just an ordinary
house-party young man.”
Those words rang dismally in Digby's heart. He knew that they
described him exactly, and he stood stupidly wondering if situations
always forced out the truth and if that was why people avoided
them.
"You don't look pleased,” said Stella.
“O! yes. I'm pleased. Only I didn't expect—"
“What?"
“Mrs. Marwood.”
III
How he got married Digby never knew. He had painful flashes
and glimmerings through the whirl of women and clothes and house-
agents’ catalogues which a wedding seemed to entail. It was all
very painful and humiliating and whenever a decision had to be
made it was referred to Mrs. Marwood, until at last by familiarity
it began to be forced upon Digby's sluggish memory that there was
nothing new in all this and that Mrs. Marwood had interfered in
his existence before, had indeed always done so ever since he had
known her, though he could not exactly say how: a subtle process
that had been spread out over so many years that he had no more
suspected it than he had the connection between his income and
what the newspapers called social injustice. For the first time in his
life he was filled with a feeling of active dislike, and as he stood in
his flat, pulling his moustache and slowly cogitating this new sensa-
tion of his, he was astonished to hear himself say:


54
A TRAGIC END
a
“Yes. By Jove. That's it. There are too many women in the
world.”
As America to Columbus was this discovery to him. He stepped
upon the firm but inhospitable land of thought, and was instantly
afraid. His brain twinged in protest, but the adventure was begun,
and he saw himself in a flash of vision as isolated in the wilderness
with Stella and Mrs. Marwood, Stella young and radiant, Mrs.
Marwood faded and worn, and it seemed to him that life had stopped
still, indeed had always been still and that he had been wrong to
think of it as moving too fast for him. He had been right to sit
still and everybody else had been wrong to try and overtake life. It
never moved. It just took shape and slowly emerged, and the only
thing to do was to watch life- just that. How could one do any-
thing else?, After all, there was he, there was Stella, and there was
Mrs. Marwood, Stella like a wood in primrose-time and Mrs. Mar-
wood like the same wood when the leaves have fallen.
“By Jove,” said Digby, gasping with excitement. “By Jove,
I'm a philosopher, and . . . damn it all, I'm a ... I'm a poet.”
...
That exaltation did not last long, and he admitted frankly that
he was after all only a man on the point of being married.
Married he was. Stella was a perfectly adorable bride, and she
revelled in her honeymoon. Not again was Digby troubled with
thought. He smoked, read, talked, boasted, laughed, kissed, wept,
and was the normal husband. Stella teased, cajoled, explored his
temper, his tastes, his humour, his appetites, and put on womanhood
as gracefully as she did her clothes.
When they returned to the world, they had a small house in town,
a
a larger house in the country, a motor car--and Mrs. Marwood,
whom, curiously enough, they never discussed, though nothing was
done without her being consulted. Digby remembered occasionally
that this, in the small matters of every-day existence, had been his
habit, but it irritated him to see Stella emulating him. Yet he could
say nothing. Stella was happy. That was the chief, the only con-
sideration. Sometimes she lost her temper with him for his reitera-
tion of the question:
“Are you happy ?"
Once indeed she lost her temper so violently that when she asked
him why he couldn't assume that she was happy he replied with the
touching frankness which sometimes overcame him:


GILBERT CANNAN
55
.
“I've nothing else to do.”
He was filled with a sense of disaster when Mrs. Marwood
offered him a job in a political organisation. He knew perfectly
well that Stella had consulted Mrs. Marwood, and though his soul
protested against it, he accepted. It meant seeing Mrs. Marwood
continually, and he began to understand the meaning of her mysteri-
ous activities and the atmosphere of importance with which she was
surrounded. He also saw that Mrs. Marwood had been trying to
get him to do this very thing for a dozen years. The glow of tri-
umph in the woman forced him to see that and he marvelled at the
tenacity of
purpose
in women.
Stella grew every day more beautiful and more lovable, and
Digby felt himself growing every day more commonplace and help-
less. Sometimes he was terrified. Here was he living, a solitary
male, in a house with five females, his wife, Mrs. Marwood, a cook,
and two maids. That was an awful thought to him, and it drove
him into a mood of violent hostility which lasted for some weeks
and at last produced the thing for which he had been hungering
-another situation, even though it might be fatal, as, granted his
ill-equipment, it probably would be.
It came one night at dinner. Stella had just told him that she
thought she was going to have a baby. He should have been happy
but was utterly miserable. He wanted a son and was quite certain
the baby would be a girl. Mrs. Marwood dropped in at the last
moment. She looked tired and really old, a woman who had lost
her capacity for physical sympathy. The government was not doing
what she thought it ought to do.
“To hell with the government!” said Digby.
“Digby!” cried Stella.
"To hell with politics!” he continued, and he wanted to send a
good many things after them, but once again he began to think. His
temper vanished. He was filled with a strange clear ecstasy, and
he saw the two women sitting there on either side of him as terrible
monsters who hated and loathed each other and were bound to-
gether in their hatred and in their common concentration upon him-
self, both demanding of him something that was not there, that
could not be there, something that had existed that night under the
moon and the pine-trees, something that was not in him or in any
man, something perhaps that only women of all things created can


56
A TRAGIC END
-
perceive in life, something that turns the terror of existence into
charm. His lips twitched into a ghastly smile, and he was just
about to speak his thought when the ecstasy snapped, and he knew
that he would never think again.
He laughed a little hysterically, and Stella said:
“Is anything the matter, darling?"
“Oh! no,” he replied. “Oh! no. I was just -er-a-” He be-
came apologetic. “A-thinking, what a joke life is.”
“I always did say,” murmured Mrs. Marwood in her sweet low
tone, “I always did say that Digby had a delightful sense of hu-
mour.'
Digby unk into silence. It was over. Everything was over.
Never again for him would there be another situation. Life might
be good to Stella: he hoped to God it might be; but life, which had
never troubled much about him, had finished with him for ever.
Nothing had happened. Nothing ever could happen. He had ex-
pected nothing and had got what he expected.



al
brom Upin
BOARDMAN ROBINSON.
BY IVAN OPPFER






Courtesy of Daniel Gallery
BY BOARDMAN ROBINSON
patrinaal
TWO PRISONERS; RUSSIA, 1915





THE ART OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN
BY WALTER PACH
F
OR the tragedies of the past we are too late-- the individual
has been lost; the free people with its ancient culture has been
destroyed by the brutality and ignorance of the invader; its story
goes into history and literature, and at some distant time the tan-
gible relics of its life are collected and ranged on the shelves of a
museum. Usually the sole value they have there is to serve as
models for the men of a later age, and it is a questionable value, for
they will lead astray the many who see only the externals of the old
works and ideas- the insight which permits a crossing of the barriers
of time and race being reserved for the few who can penetrate to the
spirit of an ancient people and thereby strengthen their own.
But there is another value for history and the museum. If we
cannot intercede in the tragedies of the past, we can see in them a
warning against needless wrong in present times. Such a wrong
may' occur in America, in the case of the Indians of our Southwest.
For most of us the question of the Indian has seemed a thing of the
past. He is on his reservations and should be well treated by the
Government, all will agree, but few of us know that in certain locali-
ties- very considerable ones—his ancient life and culture still exists
-
under the threat of extinction.
Some people will say that the threat comes from circumstance,
from evolution. The West is growing up, and even if the Indians
keep their land, the ideas of the white man must enter their territory
and drive out the old ideas. It is true that the nomadic tribes that
peopled the greater part of America can no longer continue in their
ancient state. But the question of the Indians of the Southwest is
entirely different. Historically they are a sedentary race, like the
Mayas and Aztecs of Mexico and Central America. They are city-
builders, and as such could develop forms of culture and art which
are impossible to rovers. Of the music, the poetry, and the drama
which expressed the ideas of the northern Indians it is not easy to
speak, for much has been lost, and there remain the difficulties of
language, its rhythm and its allusions, which prevent all save a few
57


58
THE ART OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN
.
from following the ideas as they deserve. And if we ourselves un-
derstand them, we do not change the fact that the old conditions for
these people have vanished.
In New Mexico and Arizona, on the other hand, we have Indians
living in the country very largely according to the customs of their
ancestors. Many a person who has admired their work in the Mu-
seum of Natural History in New York or the Field Museum in
Chicago-to say nothing of the great collections in Europe - has
been surprised to learn that these Indians have not degenerated into
the tame pensioners of the reservations, but are in the essentials of
character, very much what they were in the past. The best proof of
this is their art: at its best to-day it is equal to the best they ever
produced. All the centuries of contact with white men have not
sufficed to blot it out or even to give it the hybrid quality that one
finds, for example, with the Hawaiians. The Spaniards conquered
the country in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and priests
from their settlements in Mexico taught their faith to the Indians,
who are Catholics to-day. But the Church has been content with
such acceptance of its tenets as could easily be given by a people who
hold to their ancestral mythology and to the arts which express
their
beliefs of the sun, the clouds, the earth, and their relationships.
So tolerant and gentle was the mingling of the European and
American religions that when the Indians painted certain subjects
they had learned to know from the Spanish priests, they made a
really important addition to Christian art. The Santa Fé Museum
has a number of examples of this imagery; in the Brooklyn Museum
is a St. Francis that shows in impressive fashion the capability of
the Indians to work with a foreign theme. The idea of the work
was derived, doubtless, from some decadent specimen of late Span-
ish painting, for the religious pictures one finds in the region are
characteristic "export articles” of the poor quality that has given
the term its meaning. Nothing more different from such a model
could be imagined than the Indian painting, for the newly aroused
race, direct and vigorous in expression, infuses the work with a
purity and an austere beauty quite worthy of a European primitive.
As interesting as one must find this type of picture, it is the au-
tochthonic art of the Indians that is important. It attains the dig.
nity that inheres in national and religious things, for it belongs to
the whole of the people and informs every phase of their lives, from
a


WALTER PACH
59
the great ceremonies of prayer and thanksgiving to the making of
clothing, ornaments, and the objects of daily use. In reality, there
is no break in the continuity of the Indian's thought and art when
he goes from the sand-painting before his altar to the decoration of
a cooking bowl. The "curio” from the Southwest which gives an
exotic note to many a room is not, like its neighbor there, the old
French helmet, a thing whose reason for existence has long since
passed; still less it is like the batik hanging now so much in favor
where designs are used of whose meaning the decorator knows little
and believes less.
No one having even a slight familiarity with the work of the
Indians ever has to trouble in distinguishing the things they make
according to their own ideas and those they make for the tourist
trade. The loss of beauty which the commercialized work exhibits
is of course due to the loss of idea. For instance, in the band of
decoration the Indian paints around his bowl there must always be
a small opening; this means to him the place where spirits pass from
the lower to the upper world. But as the white man has no inter-
est in that, or thinks the break in the design an imperfection, the
Indian ceases to follow the idea that was alive for him when he
worked for his own people. The Hopi potter will never make a
vessel of perfect roundness, for the perfect thing is to him the sym-
bol of a life that is finished.
The life of these Southwestern Indians is not yet finished. But
how long can it continue? At first the answer would seem so
obvious as to make the question an affront if men were not taking
measures to-day to consummate our last great wrong against the
Indians. It must be our last, for if we “civilize" the Indians of the
Southwest, there will be no more tribes possessing an ancient life of
which we might deprive them. It is not a matter of preserving the
artistic talent of the Americans who have given the best proof that
they possess that quality. This is a precious thing, but I have so
far discussed their art merely as the exponent of their life, as indeed
art is always the thing that tells one most truly the life of a people.
Neither is it the tourist who threatens to rob these Southwestern
people of their old ideas. If they could stand three centuries of in-
tercourse with the Spaniards, they need not fear the effect of occa-
sional sight-seers from other parts of this country, even with the
increasing facility of travel.


60
THE ART OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN
It is the government agents who are at the center of the present-
day problem of the Indians. The men of the pueblos are wanted as
farm-hands, herdsmen, and laborers, the women as domestic ser-
vants. As long as the Indians hold to their "heathenish” beliefs,
they will stay in their villages and continue their "useless” manner
of life. And so the ideas which the Spanish padres allowed to live
until now, must be destroyed by the new missionaries of education
and industry. Charges of immorality are trumped up against the
ancient ceremonies, and no device that could lead to their suppres-
sion and the turning of the Indians into useful citizens is consid-
ered too ugly for use, the end justifying the means: the end and
the means, in fact, being altogether worthy of each other. In some
localities the agents have met with success, the first one of their
lives, in many cases, for they are frequently men who have failed in
other occupations and are sent out to the Indian country to start life
anew. Their attitude toward the people under their care may be
judged by the remark made by one of them to a well known arche-
ologist who, like many of his confrères, had been advising the In-
dians against abandoning their old practices. "If it weren't for you
damned scientists,” said this agent, "we'd soon have the Indians
down off the mesas and at work."
This does not accord with the argument that the change in the life
of the pueblos is simply the march of progress, the evolution of his-
tory, or whatever other phrase we may use to exalt our actions. Per-
haps the ancient life is doomed, perhaps we must see the disappear-
ance of the last of the nations we displaced on this continent.
There is justification for our past acts in the higher needs of the
white race, but no such excuse can be offered for the stupid course
that is now being pursued. The Indians ask only to be let alone.
Surely it is time for us to realize that even backward peoples have
their rights. Undoubtedly we have progressed in our dealing with
the Indians;-to-day it is more our intelligence that needs quickening
than our sense of justice. The important thing is that our new un-
derstanding of the problem come about quickly, for we have only
a limited time in which to correct our policy. The life of a people
is no more to be given back, once it is destroyed, than the life of an
individual.
And the white Americans should realize that a new understand-
ing of the Indians is important, not for their sake only, nor that we
>


WALTER PACH
61
may come with a clean conscience to our place in the international
council that is to uphold the rights of the weaker peoples. We need
to realize that the Indians are not simply our wards, an unfortunate
race to whom we owe something, but that there are great things to
be learned from them if we save-or permit them to save— their an-
cient and beautiful culture.
There is more than one voice crying out in the world to-day that
in the earlier forms of society values were attained that our present
proud condition has lost. One such was noticed lately in these pages,
in the review of Dr. Cram's books. If we were forced to a decision
that the Mediævalism he asks for is impracticable, especially in view
of his lack of understanding of the living and important qualities
of our period, we may well accept his reminder of the greatness of
the
age
of faith. The trend of much latter-day thought, indeed, is
toward concession that in our struggle for scientific knowledge and
material accomplishment we have been overlooking spiritual attain-
ment (one hates to pronounce the words-so generally have they
been monopolized by the weaklings of the intellect). But the spir-
itual thing has been the strong thing again and again in history.
And a sign that it may be so once more lies in the evidence that we
are coming to realize that in the countries and the periods that are
backward in material development there is often a great wealth of
intuition as applied to life and the world's relation to it. The Indian
is a typical case in point, and his wisdom is not for any "little group
of earnest thinkers,” as the young lady of the Sunday supplement
calls them, but for the whole generation of to-day and of to-morrow.
Poets, artists, and those scientists who see that their profession must
take heed of æsthetic ideas are naturally the first to become aware of
the profound value of the Primitive, but it would be contrary to
experience if people in general did not follow the train of thought
along which the specialists have led. Once more let us hope that.
when they have been brought by it, in our own country, to an appre-
ciation of the Indians, they do not find that their study must be con-
ducted from relics in the museums and libraries, but that they may
learn from the living people, – the peaceful and contented men and
women of the pueblos, whom we may know to-day.
Almost unheard of by the general public, many students are work-
ing toward a truer understanding of the Indians. It is a pity that
the results of their fascinating researches should go to technical or
a


62
THE ART OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN
а
university publications instead of to the magazines of large circula-
tion. For if the majority of Americans knew the need of the Indians
and what they mean to us, the response to their need would be im-
measurably better than it is.
The specialists should lay aside the diffidence that is natural to
them when there is a question of popularizing their theme, and use
every opportunity to bring the present-day problem of the Indian
to general attention. Unfortunately not all such means of approach
are available. Last year a proposal was made to the Metropolitan
Museum in New York to organize a great exhibition of Indian art
for that institution, the aid of distinguished authorities and loans
from the most important collections being promised. The directors
of the Metropolitan received the offer in a sympathetic spirit and
agreed that the showing of a folk-art alive in our country to-day
was a matter of great interest. Certain agreements entered into with
the Museum of Natural History, however, leave Indian matters to
the latter institution, and so the project, at least in so far as it con-
cerned the art museum, had to be given up. Those who had con-
ceived the idea of the exhibition felt that it would lose most of its
point if it were held in the Natural History Museum, as the ethno-
logical aspect it must have there would be a matter of no new inter-
est to the general public. What should be the outstanding feature
for the lay visitor to the exhibition is the fact that the Indian has
produced a genuine and valuable art, and that he is continuing to do
so. The exhibition will be held in New York in March, with this
point in view, laying more emphasis on the work of to-day than had
been planned.
After seeing the modern work of the Indians, we shall be better
prepared to go to the collections of the older objects. It is hoped to
open to the public this spring one of the greatest of these, at the
Museum of the American Indian in New York. Familiar to most
of us from childhood as the relics of a savage period, the Indian
things reveal themselves in a startlingly new light if we think of
them as art. To some it will seem at first that only by an extension
of the term can it be applied to the work of the Indians.
Let these people begin a new acquaintance with the sculpture and
the architecture of ancient Mexico— the greatest art which has yet
been produced in the Western Hemisphere. Americans in Italy have
often wondered how it is possible for a people with the work of the


WALTER PACH
63
-
Renaissance on the walls of its old buildings and its museums to
produce the lamentable things one sees in the modern Italian exhibi-
tions. The case is not a parallel one here, since we are considering
a different race from that which peoples America to-day. None the
less, we may feel humble enough if we set anything our sculptors
have done beside those great heads and figures of the Mayas ---art
which may be ranked with that of the Egyptians, the Hindus and
the Chinese.
Working southward in his new discovery of America, the student
finds an overwhelming treasure of art among the people of Central
America, and certainly in the northern part of South America. Ex-
peditions sent out by the Museum of the University of Pennsyl-
vania have recently brought back magnificent pottery made to-day
in the Upper Amazon country, as pure and as sure in design as the
work that was done by the tribes before the time of Columbus. A
climax in American art is reached when we come to the work of the
Peruvians. Certain of their paintings (so to style them) made of
the brilliant feathers of tropical birds carry the use of color to one
of the most remarkable points attained by any artists. .
I permit myself to wander so far afield because it is well to re-
assure ourselves, if only by this summary mention of the accepted
and tremendous monuments of Indian art, that in them the red man
has shown that his race must be accounted one possessing genius for
expression in plastics. To-day no more work of a monumental char-
acter is being done, unless it be, as I have heard reported, among the
Alaskans.
One characteristic, however, runs through all Indian art, ancient
and modern, of monumental or of small size: it has the unbounded
sincerity of a free people. If the language of art has any meaning
whatsoever, then Indian productions of every type say that their
makers believed in them and did them naturally, because they liked
what they did. With the North Americans, as with other really
primitive peoples, there seems to be no question of period of evolu-
tion. The prehistoric mounds of Arizona and New Mexico reveal
pottery of a type similar to that which is being made to-day. Many
of us prefer the recent work of some of the pueblos to that of their
distant forbears. An even more encouraging sign of strength in the
Southwestern Indians is that they have been able to use new mate-
rials, the water colours which they have obtained from the white


64
THE ART OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN
people. This may seem a small thing, but one very frequently finds
that the possession of a different material brings in a change in the
whole character of the work done with it. Such Indian paintings as
I have seen in the new and more complex medium are indeed differ-
ent from any of the old designs, but they have lost none of the old
quality of genuineness. The decadent work done for commercial
purposes which I mentioned previously is rather uncommon, and is
found in only the few places where the pressure of the white man
has finally caused routine performance and a desire for quantity,
in place of that satisfaction of instinct which is the secret of Indian
life and art.
What noble designs instinct produced on the pottery of the Hopi!
As one goes over a collection of several thousand specimens, one is
impressed by their really infinite variety. Here are two pictures of
the Sun-God, the feathers used in the dance to represent his beard
(the rays of the sun) being disposed in almost exactly the same posi-
tion, the same drawing of the face and the same colours being used,
as tradition has dictated. But if the two images were produced by
the same artist, they were produced at two different moments of
time, and that great faculty the Indian has of following his mood
has given to the two works a shade of difference, one from the other,
so that both are living things. Old Nampeyo, blind to-day in her
Hopi village, has handed on her art to her daughter and to other
pupils, and their work may be placed beside that of their ancestors
— not because it is exactly like the ancient pieces, but because it
keeps up their tradition of life. A little habituation permits us to
enter, to a surprising extent, into the significance of the Indian
designs. We appreciate the humour which so many observers have
noted as a characteristic of this people, we understand the quality of
fear certain works are meant to inspire, or we follow the homage to
the elements, which is one of the most constant themes of their sim-
ple and beautiful pantheism.
With such a basis for his art, with a certainty that every one of
his people will understand his work (where is the white artist who
can say the same?) it is not strange that what the Indian has in mind
he says with naturalness and eloquence. There is no appearance of
hesitation, or of correcting. The strokes of his brush are quick and
sure; they move in rhythms like those of the dancers or those eagles
whose flight the dance symbolizes. Or those figures painted on
a


WALTER PACH
65
deerskin: the character, the action of the man is rendered with an
immediacy, for which our painters and poets strive all their lives.
The impedimenta of the endlessly complicated art of Europe has,
in the later decades, proved such a hindrance to the expression of
these simple and powerful ideas that it is small wonder if many men
are trying to throw off the load-and if they delight in the work of
the Indian, whose swift, sensitive line and grasp of composition
yield results near enough to our own for us to understand them,-
different enough from our inbred art to give us the special pleasure
that comes from things that are new to us. Familiar or strange, the
red man's work is beautiful, and in quite the sense of the word that
we have always given to it. The black pottery of the Santa Clara
pueblo has not the measureless refinement that, in centuries of con-
tinuing culture, brought perfection to the Egyptian vases of the
later dynasties, but it has the vigour and largeness of design of the
very early period of the art of Egypt. And to-day-I come back to
the word because what is most important to remember is that this
work is still being produced-certain head-dresses, batons, and fig-
ures used in the religious ceremonies flame with a magnificence of red
and green such as the Hopi country shows in daylight, or glow in
pale marvels of white and gray, like the desert under the stars.


}
THOMAS HARDY
BY ARTHUR SYMONS
TH
HE last letter I had from Hardy- who arrived at the age of
eighty on June the second-reached me in the Isle of Wight, a
letter which showed how tenaciously he is alive.
11th May, 1919.
Max Gate, Dorchester.
Dear Symons:
I am sorry to say that I was in London only four or five days, so
that now your visit to Ventnor ends I am settled down here again,
and unable to meet you as you kindly propose. A chance
later on.
London was not attractive, the crowds in the streets and trains
being wearisome to one no longer young.
Very truly yours,
THOMAS HARDY.
may arise
Reading his letter recalled to me the wonderful week I spent with
him at Max Gate, Dorchester. He took me all over the wild and
ancient and unspoiled Egdon Heath that comes with solemn and
tragic splendour into The Return of the Native. And as he read
me, at night, his verses, there was in his voice something brooding,
obscure, tremulous, half-inarticulate, that of one who meditates
over man, nature and destiny; and also, in the man and in the way
he spoke, that quality which saves his face, in which you see the
brain always working, from being painful by a humourous sense
of external things which becomes also a kind of intellectual criti-
cism. One of his poems curiously impressed me: An August Mid-
night, crabbed, subtle, and strangely dramatic.
Hardy was always very generous in his praise of my verses.
In
one of his letters in regard to The Dynasts what I shall quote
gives a curious insight into his vivid intelligence. “Your theory
that verse should be confined to emotional expression is what I used
66


ARTHUR SYMONS
67
to hold, and was very uncomfortable under. (I believe that a good
many hold it now besides yourself.) What settled it for me was a
super-imposed theory, or view; namely, the theory of contiguity, if
I may use such a word for it; by which I mean that unemotional writ-
ing which has no claim of itself to verse-form may properly be at-
tracted into verse from its nearness to emotional verse in the same
piece. Leave alone plays, some of our best lyrics are not lyrical
every moment throughout, but the neutral lines are warmed by the
remainder. I would even hold that one of Pope's coldest essays
in
verse would be legitimate as such, if it were a section of a large emo-
tional poem, and not an independent piece.”
I shall concern myself here with one of his books of verse and
with The Dynasts. In Poems of the Past and Present almost every
poem has something to say, and says it in a slow, twisted, and some-
times enigmatic manner, without obvious charm, but with some ar-
resting quality, not easy to define or to estimate. It is a grey book,
with sad-coloured landscapes, its outlook on the race of Portland
Bill, that "engulphing, sinister, ghost place,” and on "puzzled
phantoms” questioning
a
"What of logic or of truth appears
In tacking Anno Domini to the years."
In his verse there is something brooding, obscure, half-inartic-
ulate, as he meditates on men and destiny. In one of his poems, an
ironical song of science, Nature laments that her best amusement,
man, has become discontented with her in his self-discontent. Dumb
and blind forces speak, conjecture, half awakening out of sleep,
turning back lazily to sleep again. Here is a poet who is sorry for
nature, who feels the earth and its roots, as if he had sap in his veins
instead of blood, and could get closer than any other man to the
things of the earth. There is an atmosphere not easily to be found
outside this book, a mysterious, almost terrifying atmosphere which
one finds again in the phantom love-poems, the phantom war-poems,
and in certain reflective verses. Abstract thought takes form in
some given symbol, as in The Church-Builder, with its architectural.
imagery, its deliberate building up of spiritual horror. Nearly the
whole book shivers with winter.


68
THOMAS HARDY
"The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I,”
he tells us in The Darkling Thrush, which is a kind of personal
parable.
It is his melancholy severity that gives much of its quality to a
book otherwise of varying merit. Hardy has never written with
flowing rhythms, either in verse or in prose, and his verse often halts
or dances in hobnails. But he has studied the technique of verse
more carefully than most of his critics seem to be aware of, and he
has a command of very difficult metres which, if it were unvarying,
would be really remarkable. But his command of his materials is
uncertain. He crowds syllables together inharmoniously. He is
always experimenting in metrical effects, and he has made some per-
fectly successful experiments of a very unusual kind; but he is too
fond of long lines, in which the cadence gets lost by the way.
He sometimes writes gaily and trippingly, as in the delightfully
naughty jingle of The Ruined Maid, which Congreve could not
have done better.
Neither in verse nor in prose is Hardy a master of style. Both in
prose and in verse he has interesting things to say, and he can say
them in an intensely personal way. He can force words to say ex-
actly what he wants them to. But their subjection is never even
willing, they seem to have spite against him because he is stronger
than they. That is why they have never given him all their souls
along with their services. Some of their magic remains over: his
verse does not sing. But so far as it is possible to be a poet without
having a singing voice, Hardy is a poet, and a profoundly interest-
ing one.
After Hardy carried out his ambitious design, The Dynasts: a
Drama in Three Parts, it was easily seen that his instinct was right
when he brushed aside the remonstrances of his critics and admirers,
and persisted with his plan of making the Napoleonic era the sub-
ject of a vast puppet drama. Those who discouraged his enterprise,
and wished instead for another Tess or Jude the Obscure, owned
that had this world-drama of The Dynasts remained an unrealized
dream or a fragment, they would have missed a manifestation of its


ARTHUR SYMONS
69
author's mind and talent which is a singularly expressive work of
art. Intimations of his mournful creed are scattered through the
novels; no one, for instance, can read such a book as The Return of
the Native without suspecting that he is in the presence of a con-
firmed pessimist, or without feeling that for the writer the forces of
nature are no less essential characters of his tales than its men and
women, and that behind their seeming violences and caprices is
the purpose of an inscrutable will. Hitherto, however, Hardy's
thoughts about his race had been revealed more or less uncon-
sciously. In The Dynasts his gospel of despair is boldly and delib-
erately avowed, and forms, as it were, the atmosphere of the tragedy.
The increase of self-expression involves no decrease of architectural
skill. A drama covering the career of Napoleon was bound to
range over an enormous field; yet never has Hardy's constructive
genius mastered so completely as in his contest with difficulties aris-
ing from mass of material.
The apparatus he employs in connection with these wonderful
series of dissolving views is decidedly original. He is fond of trans-
porting his readers to heights in the air whence they can look down
on the features of countries like so many Gullivers surveying the agi-
tations of Lilliput. He makes use, too, of sundry dry supernatural
characters-Recording Angels and Spirits Ironic and Sinister, Spirits
of the Pities and Spirits of the Years—to comment aloud in choric
fashion on the pranks of his puppets. He has a way even of turn-
ing X-rays, so to speak, upon the stage-crowds to show "brain-tissues
of the Immanent Will” pervading them all, and influencing them
to achieve its blind purposes. This machinery is serviceable so far as
it affords us bird's-eye glances at battles and campaigns and the
movements of huge military forces-in so far as it spreads out be-
neath our feet a relief map of that arena of Europe on which the
drama of Napoleon's life was played. It has its disadvantage in
that the author often keeps us too far away from the actors to allow
of our regarding them as fellow-creatures, and also exacts from us
an almost impossible attitude of neutrality.
But not even Hardy can keep up the pose of aloofness which he
demands from the student of his play. By degrees the philosopher
turns into the sympathetic observer, the pessimist gives place to the
indignant humourist; and except when his choruses express the hope-
less litany of fatalism, his scenes grow warm with natural emotion.


70
THOMAS HARDY
Each passage is happily selected to contribute its share to the general
plan; each is a miniature drama in itself, with its own plot and cli-
max; and it is only the stage directions, as a rule, that remind the
spectator that he is "sitting up aloft.”. At the end of the drama the
author tries to set all his scenes in proper focus, and to relate them to
eternity-exhibits all the fret and fuss of the Napoleonic pageant
as a wrinkle on the face of Time, and Bonaparte himself as but a
"plaything in the hands of the Immortals.” Fortunately Hardy
cannot long deal with human nature without forgetting his theories
in his sense of kinship. For though he may show us from some point
in mid-air the Grand Army crawling "like a dun-piled caterpillar,”
back to shame and disintegration from Moscow, he takes us close
enough to see all the horrors of that retreat-its episode of gallant
soldiers abandoned and driven mad by hunger and frost on the
plains of Lithuania. If, again, we watch from the clouds big
moves in the game of war, such as the Peninsular campaign, we are
permitted to descend and sit by the deathbed of Josephine, and are
given in that scene poetry of an exceeding poignancy. Lastly, while
Hardy can conjure before us in their due perspective the ma-
næuvres and mutations of the struggle at Waterloo, he allows him-
self to turn aside from the clash of battle and present a delightful
picture of old-world Wessex in which "Boney” is burnt in effigy.
The blank verse of the play is not remarkable; it is of the facile,
jog-trot sort, and some indication of its facility is afforded by the
fact that it is employed to paraphrase a debate in the House of Com-
mons. Once, however, it rises to heights of eloquence and pathos, in
the speech put into the mouth of the dying Josephine. Otherwise it
is in the lyrical snatches-in the Wessex girl's song for instance,
My Love's Gone A-fighting, that Hardy's muse is happiest. Such
things as that remind one that it is not only by the wide sweep of his
imagination, but also by the occasional capacity he evinces for giv-
ing perfect expression to a mood, that the author of The Dynasts
may call himself a poet.
a


NINE POEMS
BY EVELYN SCOTT
DESIGNS
I
NIGHT
Fields of black tulips,
And swarms of gold bees
Drinking their bitter honey.
II
NEW MOON
Above the gnarled old tree
That clings to the bleakest side of the mountain,
A torch of ivory and gold;
And across the sky,
The silver print
Of spirit feet,
Fled from the wonder.
III
TROPIC MOON
The glowing anvil,
Beaten by the winds;
Star sparks,
Burning and dying in the heavens;
The furnace glare
Red
On the polished palm leaves.
71


72
NINE POEMS
IV
WINTER MOON
A little white thistle moon
Blown over the cold crags and fens:
A little white thistle moon
Blown across the frozen heather.
AUTUMN NIGHT
a
The moon is as complacent as a frog.
She sits in the sky like a blind white stone,
And does not even see Love
As she caresses his face
With her contemptuous light.
She reaches her long white shivering fingers into the bowels of men.
Her tender superfluous probing into all that pollutes
Is like the immodesty of the mad.
She is a mad woman holding up her dress
So that her white belly shines.
Haughty,
Impregnable,
Ridiculous,
Silent and white as a debauched queen,
Her ecstasy is that of a cold and sensual child.
She is Death enjoying Life,
Innocently,
Lasciviously


EVELYN SCOTT
73
NARROW FLOWERS
I am a grey lily.
My roots are deep.
I cannot lift my hands
For one thin yellow butterfly.
Yet one night I grew up to a star.
My shade swirled mistily
Seven mountains high.
I lifted my face to another face.
The moon made a burning shadow on my brow.
Washed by the light,
My sharp breasts silvered.
My dance was an arc of mist
From west to east.
THE DEATH OF COLUMBINE
White breast beaten in sea waves,
Hair tangled in foam,
Lonely sky,
Desolate horizon,
Pale and shining clouds:
All this desolate and shining sea is no place for you,
My dead Columbine.
The waves will bite your breast;
And the wind that does not know death from life
Will leap upon you and leer into your eyes
And suck at your dead lips.
Oh; my little Columbine,
You go farther and farther away from me,
Out where there are no ships
And the solemn clouds
Soar across the somber horizon.


74
NINE POEMS
AFTER YOUTH
Oh, that mysterious singing sadness of youth,
Exotic colors in the lamp-lit darkness of wet streets,
Musk and roses in the twilight,
The moon in the park like a golden balloon ...
Then to awaken and find the shadows fled,
And the music gone
Empty, bleak!
My soul has grown very small and shriveled in my body.
It no longer looks out.
It rattles around,
And inside my body it begins to look,
Staring all around inside my body,
Like a crab in a crevice,
Staring with bulging eyes
At the strange place in which it finds itself.
DEVIL'S CRADLE
Black man hanged on a silver tree;
White breast,
White face with blood on it,
Down by the river,
Slow river.
Black man creaks in the wind,
Knees slack.
Brown poppies, melting in the moonlight,
Swerve on glistening stems
Across an endless field
To the music of a blood-white face
And a tired little devil child
Rocked to sleep on a rope.
а
7


EVELYN SCOTT
75
THE RED CROSS
Antiseptic smells that corrode the nostrils
Crumble me,
Eat me deep,
And my garments disintegrate.
First my nightgown,
Leaving my naked arms and legs disjointed,
Sprawled about the bed in postures meaningless to the
point of obscenity.
a
My breasts shrivel,
The nipples drawn like withered plums.
To the eyes of the bright young nurse
I am nothing but a dull eye myself,
An eye out of a socket,
Bursting,
Contorted with hideous wisdom.
Eye to eye we fight in the death throes,
Myself and the young nurse.
a
Her firm crisp aproned breast leans toward the bed
As she smooths the rumpled pillow back
With long cool fingers.
ISOLATION WARD
We are the separate centers of consciousness
Of all the universes.
We vibrate statically on a trillion golden wires.
Our trillion golden fingers twine in the weltering darkness
And grasp tremblingly,
Aware in agony
Of the things we can never know.


76
NINE POEMS
IMMORTALITY
Death is a child of stone.
Death is a little white stone goat.
The little goat child dances motionless.
Little kid feet make a circle around the world:
Bas-relief of Death,
Little stone goats capering across the clouds.
а
Perhaps Death is nearest in the spring.
Then Her flower clouds the woods with white blossoms,
Apple blossoms, quince blossoms,
Pear snow.
These are the flowers that drift in the hair of the dead.
The sun shines on stone eyelids
That melt with light.
This smile is a pale happiness which glows motionless
On the rocky hillside and the long stems of trees.
There are no shadows in this happy light:
The glow beat by little goat hoofs
Chiseled across the clouds in motionless delight,
While suns fade behind crumbling hillsides,
And hungry illusions vanish
In generation after generation.



ID
Courtesy of Daniel Gallery
BY CHARLES DEMUTH
A BOX OF TRICKS.





THE SPIRIT OF THE OLD HOTEL
To Edward
BY JOHN GOULD FLETCHER
THI
HE dining-room was very old Nothing, one felt, had been
,
altered in it for a century. From the massive silver cande-
labrum standing exactly in the middle of the buffet with console
legs at one end of the room and seeming to overawe the entire space
with its gleaming majesty, to the tall Etruscan Wedgwood vases
in the lofty window embrasures, all was exactly the same as when
old gentlemen in grey beaver hats and black stocks lifted tired, per-
spiring children out of postchaises, and the mail-coaches for Holy-
head rolled
past
its
open door. Nothing had changed, not even the
position of the tables. The meals were still punctually ten min-
.
utes late, as they had always been; for however near the twentieth
century might creep, there was a spirit which guarded the old hotel.
The mail-coaches for Holyhead no longer rolled by the door, and
around the corner there was the desolation of empty yawning
stables of granite to witness the fact. But the stables had never
.
been torn down, and if any traveller had deliberately entered the
hotel to ask "when the 'bus started for Bangor,” no one would have
known. That was what the old hotel was like! With the move-
ments of such new-fangled matters as 'buses, it naturally had noth-
ing to do; and throughout the green-walled dining-room the meals
were conducted with the stately ceremonial of the past. One felt
that the same spirit must be brooding over the bedrooms upstairs,
for nothing-nothing whatever—had been permitted to disturb it.
True, there were waitresses now in the dining-room, but the young-
est of these was silver-haired. And they said "good afternoon” in
such a manner that one felt certain that they, too, had somehow been
trained, cherished, protected by the hotel itself since babyhood.
We had walked into the hotel casually, my companion and I,
impelled by curiosity to take lunch in this huge rambling structure
with the grey stone columns in the style of the classic revival, facing
its entrance. We had been admitted into the "coffee-room” with-
77


78
THE SPIRIT OF THE OLD HOTEL
a
out realizing the magnitude of our trespass. But the spirit of the
hotel was not long in putting us into our proper places. As we did
not realize the rule about meals' starting late, we were the first to
enter the precincts of the great silver candelabrum, where stood the
Wedgwood vases, the silver pitchers and sugar-bowls, polished
anew every day. We were soon made aware of the fact that taking
a meal here was no ordinary matter. Two minutes after our entry
a gong sounded, and five minutes later the first of the other guests
swept in-a spare, white-haired lady bearing in one hand a dish
with a china cover, presumably containing butter, and with the
other her bottle of medicine. She took no more notice of us than if
we were non-existent; but her companion, a younger woman, simi-
larly equipped with a medicine bottle, cast in our direction a scowl
of contempt. The other guests entered later, each making us feel
in some subtle way what utter aliens we were.
Among the guests were a number of young children. At a table
over to my right, a girk of about three entered, and striving to climb
to her place at the table, upset herself, and emitted a strangled howl.
I was unable to see exactly what had occurred, but one of the guests
near me remarked placidly: “It would have been better to have
kept them in the nursery.” The tears of the young offender were
soon quenched by the father, who carried her instantly out of the
At another table, a second girl entered, aged about five,
bearing a small Union Jack. The fag was carefully arranged in
the midst of the flowers on the table, and the child sat bolt upright
during the rest of the meal, eating and drinking and making faces
over her food with the air of one who was at least forty. It became
a theme of fascination to me to note how all the guests grew mid-
dle-aged as soon as they entered the room. The spirit of the hotel
was at work amongst us, holding us all with easy mastery, subduing
us all into the colours of its faded tradition, weaving us all into the
same pattern, its unbroken magic tapestry stretching back to the
days when men spoke with veiled awe of Nelson and Waterloo.
At the centre table, reserved for special guests, sat a heavy-built
muddy-faced young man in sporting tweeds, whom we readily
placed, thanks to the eagerness with which two waitresses futtered
about him, as being the baronet, heir to the great estates on the hill,
which comprised also the hotel. He was entertaining two guests,
a man and woman similarly attired, who bore the unmistakable
room.


JOHN GOULD FLETCHER
79
signs of not belonging to the landed classes. One of these ventured
to ask him a question which I innocently overheard. She said:
“What do
you
think of the League of Nations ?” And the heavy-
built young man, with the puzzled, half-frightened eyes, replied:
"I don't know-it seems mostly upon p-p-paper, doesn't it?”
Even after the other diners had departed, following, as they came,
in the silent wake of the spare lady who was dieting, we stayed on,
held despite our will by the strange mystic force that had reduced
our voices to a whisper and dazzled our eyes. We ordered coffee,
to provide ourselves with an excuse for lingering as long as possible;
and when the coffee came, after long delay, we sipped the beverage,
with its faint taste of burnt grains, with relish, forgetting utterly
that a few hundred yards further on lay a thirteenth-century castle,
while not many miles away we might penetrate, if we would, into
the baptistery of a tenth-century priory. We lingered as long over
our coffee as we reasonably could, but our stay was cut short by the
watchful waitress, who feared possibly that we might light our
cigarettes, and who therefore hurriedly slipped us our bill. So we
bade her farewell, with a feeling as if we should like to incline our
heads to the great silver candlestick in the shadows of the dark
green wall with its slender Grecian colonnade. We left the hotel, and
a few hours later found ourselves again, transported as by magic,
back to the too familiar surroundings of the twentieth century.
But the sense of the hotel persisted, and that night I had a strange
dream. I seemed to be sitting in the same dining-room, still more
brilliant with candles, silver, glass, flowers, and flags. The wait-
resses were gone, and old men in mutton-chop whiskers, knee-
breeches and blue tail-coats with brass buttons moved from table
to table, noiselessly. Here was sitting a red-faced Marquess with
one leg, the star of some unknown Russian order on his breast; over
yonder was Castlereagh; at the centre table was the great Duke of
Wellington himself. The glasses winked and bubbled with wine,
and I watched the diners, rooted to my seat, unable to utter a sound.
I knew that this banquet had been arranged somehow for
my
bene-
fit, though I had not sought to take part in it. Suddenly Welling-
ton rose to his feet. Glaring at me with intense hatred, he lifted
.
his glass. “Drink,” thundered his voice- "drink to the salvation of
Europe, our Holy Alliance !” I rose— the dream faded away. Out-
side in the darkness I heard the shriek of the midnight train.


EDITH WHARTON
BY CHARLES K. TRUEBLOOD
MA
a
ADAME de Treymes' way of expressing her predilection
for Durham was to say that he was extremely clever; and
casting about to find terms of appreciation for the distinguished
persons the reader discovers in Mrs. Wharton's pages, one can
probably find none more fit than the dictum that whatever else
they may be they are extremely clever. Unqualified, such a remark
is slight enough. The characters of any novelist who tends to psy-
chology are likely to be clever, for considerable cleverness in the
subject is necessary to psychological interest and some cleverness
necessary to any interest. And cleverness must be an elastic term
to cover such diverse qualities as the clairvoyance of Mrs. Ansell, or
the fastidiousness of Justine Brent, or the polished and brittle
worldliness of Mr. Langhope. Again, not all of these persons are
extremely clever: Gerty Farish was not clever at all, and Undine
Spragg was only clever enough to be extremely fashionable; though
here it should be remembered that Gerty Farish was rather patron-
ized by the narrator of her history, and Undine Spragg flayed with
satire. Moreover, one cannot take the measure of an author's quali-
ties, say the last word about his work, in a word; even if it were pos-
sible, cleverness would probably not be the only discoverable last
word about the qualities of Mrs. Wharton. But it is at least an
allusion, and as a first word cannot be unserviceable.
One should, therefore, hasten to add that the cleverness of Mrs.
Wharton's characters is preëminently a social quality; it is the clev-
erness of intercourse, which has been its school and is the means of
its expression. It would as little prosper in isolation and repay
study so as would the originality of Meredith's characters in such
case. Mrs. Wharton's characters hardly belong to a novelist of soli-
tude; they are rarely and not long out of sound of each other; al-
most any two of the leading performers at least would be enough in
themselves for a civilization. Their minds are formed to the maze
of sophistication, and it is a mark of their complexity that they are
a
80


CHARLES K. TRUEBLOOD
81
inseparable. They are like actors who have many times rehearsed a
piece together and know each other's rôles; as in fact they have re-
peated together and know the code of amenity until it has become a
fine instrument to the hand of their cleverness. They might well be
thought of as playing a game, so much are they dependent on their
opponents for their effect, so often does the reader desire to applaud
their strokes; but it is evidently a serious game they are playing.
Their cleverness, thus seen, is considerably fraught with gravity, and
as the characters of a novelist whose every word is significant, for
whom fantasy and gratuity would be ineptitude, they seem respon-
sible even for their particles of speech. One is tempted to say they
feel it; certainly they do not forget the rules of their game: they
take many things very gravely, but they would never do or say any-
thing either irrelevant or "heavy.”
Great and responsible as their cleverness is, however, the origi-
nality which enters into it is dilute. Such a fact is intelligible, for
the more concentrated forms of originality are equivalent to genius
or eccentricity, neither of which phenomena appears among Mrs.
Wharton's characters. These persons, in fact, illustrate the possibil-
ities, remarkably fulfilled really, of responsible cleverness to an art-
ist whose aim is, as one takes Mrs. Wharton's to be, fineness and
significance of effect. Their cleverness is vigorous and varied yet
controllable and never ineffective. It offsets the gravity of a tragic
theme but does not vitiate the representative and typical qualities
of those whose chief characteristic it is; such persons may not be the
most salient figures possible to fiction, but that they may, and do in
these novels, combine importance with sophistication, is not to be
denied. And although the art which depicts such characters is likely
to be individualistic, it is yet more amenable than hostile to classic
principles, for its subject matter is inherently alien to disproportion
and deformity: symmetry and absence of angularity are among the
most obvious characteristics of clever people. Indeed the cleverness
of Mrs. Wharton's characters is not infrequently to be found mani-
fested as sober taste, as excellent sense, of which the conditioning
personal quality is less an abundance of originality, a peculiarly
mental quality, than soundness of temperament.
Temperament is the soul of cleverness; for while the latter may
not in the least, even in its most responsible form, imply intellectual
profundity or great force, it does imply a consciousness heightened


82
EDITH WHARTON
!
and quickened by an abundance of such contacts as are provided
only by alert and delicate sensibility, that faculty so impossible to
the temperamentally inert. How much the reader discovers in the
psychology of Mrs. Wharton's characters of the instantaneous, the
non-logical; one finds them intuitive minded, whether he consider
the native readiness of Mattie Silver or Ethan Frome, or the infal-
lible trained insight of Mrs. Ansell: they see the matter at a glance
or they do not see it ever! The social talent of the great Miss Bart
is here worth remembering for the sake of the prominence which a
delicate sensibility played in her tactical triumphs; her perceptions
were “fine threadlike feelers” that went out to her opponents in the
great game she was playing and made her knowledge of their minds
and characters almost divination. Indeed by her eminence and ex-
cellence-she is the foremost and most typically clever of Mrs.
Wharton's characters-she demonstrates the fact that her creator's
best insight is her insight into the feminine character, and the femi-
nine side of the masculine character, that her best art appears in the
portrayal of the eternal feminine, the most eternal part of which is
temperament.
Mrs. Wharton's characters, however, are superior not so much by
abundance as by differentiation of temperament; for where the con-
sideration is of such cleverness as they possess, it is evident that mere
native sensibility is not a sufficient explanation: there must be a large
element of discrimination present. The zenith of cleverness, in fact,
is to be reached-and they do reach that rather than any other
zenith-only through the intellectualizing of temperament; in
which process the intellect has the visible primacy, though feeling is
the really urgent power. Two stages in this progress of cleverness
can be seen in the artless fervor of Mattie Silver and the fastidious-
ness of Justine Brent. The difference between these two was really
of degree alone: they were alike in that they both felt abundantly;
different, in that Justine, as her author said, "felt with her mind.”
Feeling with their minds is indeed the culmination of their clever-
ness, the best thing Mrs. Wharton's characters do; it is a more deli-
cate spectacle than simple thinking and a far finer material to the
hand of the artist. And thus seen, the sober cleverness of these
emancipated young women and poised young men is really their
most human quality; it is a real refinement of the most fundamen-
tal thing about humanity, namely, its emotions.


CHARLES K. TRUEBLOOD
83
2
Refinement of feeling, with them, has grown up into a fusion
with ethical principle and has given them an aesthetic morality, the
effectiveness of which in general is witnessed by the current saying
that gentility, which is the code of such morality- is not a thing to
be assumed, that it must be a part of character. But this may mean
merely that gentility, being a code devised by persons of accom-
plished feeling for themselves and their coequals, cannot readily be
assumed by those who are not also of temperamental quality. More-
over the aspect of gentility as a code is readily seen when the life de-
clines that vitalized it: it then becomes mere ceremony. At its best,
however, and we see it so in Mrs. Wharton's best characters, it is an
indisseverable ornament of its possessor, like well modulated speech,
and is so mistaken for its animating temperament, for the voice that
utters it. The refinement of Mrs. Wharton's characters, how from
another side it is to be seen as integrity of feeling, could be shown
again by reference to Lily Bart. She had no lack of opportunities
to secure a field for the fitting exercise of her cleverness; how many
times she was on the point of so doing by an alliance with wealthy
stupidity, but how many times recoiled because “at heart she de-
spised” a chance of such a sort! She could never quite, even on the
edge of ruin, bring herself to sacrifice her integrity of feeling
permanently; and although her recoil was as much a matter of fas-
tidiousness as of principle, it was no less energetic for that. Histori-
cally, no doubt, this integrity of temperament has its root principles
among the old and tried rules of conduct, the fundamental social
conventions; but with these individuals such rules are so interfused
with the medium feeling in which they are held as no longer to be
recognizable as anything so abstract as principles. How much a
matter of feeling they are to become is reserved for Ralph Marvell
and his family circle of Dagonets and Fairfords to show. This
group of people is typical of Mrs. Wharton's favourite finely tem-
peramental sort of person, and they behaved typically toward Un-
dine Spragg's suit for divorce: it was an ugly fact in their lives, but
they preserved their integrity of feeling by ignoring it; they turned
their backs upon it; they avoided talking and thinking about it;
they even made a fatal mistake in dealing with it-all to spare their
feelings.
As a matter of fact, among the Dagonets, the Fairfords, the Mar-
vells, the Seldens, the de Chelles, the reader finds himself in an aris-
a


84
EDITH WHARTON
tocracy of temperament. And when such an aristocracy is not the
direct subject of Mrs. Wharton's art, it is her tacit standard, the in-
strument of her criticism, the secret of her detachment, her weapon
of satire. It is not the upper classes merely that she has in mind, but
the upper and inner classes; and in her judgments she is identified
with them. Her standard is never absent from her work, and is usu-
ally held up by a definite bearer, such as Lawrence Selden in The
House of Mirth; and how many and how determinedly held aloft
are the banners of refinement in The Custom of the Country!
Nearly every active character has one except the imperious and inept
heroine, about whom we are kept clear as to the fact that however
high she gets in the upper classes she is never of the inner. The ad-
vantages which such a preoccupation confers upon Mrs. Wharton's
art are obvious and not slight: so, it conforms to the standards of
the best taste, for truly there could be no better taste than old Mr.
Dagonet's or Charles Bowen's. And hers being a society in which
the principles of dignity exclude vagary and extravagance, she is
placed well along, by her choice of matter, toward what is every art-
ist's dream: the maximum of effect with the minimum of means.
Like her own heroine, Mrs. Leath, she does not often “misplace her
strokes."
But while Mrs. Wharton is occupied with an aristocracy chiefly,
the reader is obliged to turn to her earliest novel, The Valley of De-
cision, to see her as anything like a historian of manners. And this,
while not the least charming of her works, is, on the whole, the least
characteristic. Those leisurely Italian journeys, the rich panoramas,
the, for her, singularly abundant spectacle of human affairs, the
very populousness of the novel in accessory figures— these manifold
external impressions are noticed less for their ulterior than their in-
trinsic value. And there is thus a certain plenitude of graceful ex-
teriorization in the novel, but along with greater charm, less of the
acute significance of her best work, less of her very distinct truth of
the human heart-and that truth less particularized than one finds
it in her later work. It is only when one comes to The House of
Mirth, The Fruit of the Tree, Sanctuary, and Madame de Treymes,
or The Reef, that he finds minute interior searching balanced with
exteriorization to produce her characteristic art: an economy of
strokes done with edged tools, such as fine perceptions and that
rather cold but bracing thing, an acute mind, further sensitized by
a


CHARLES K. TRUEBLOOD
85
trained feeling (“trained down” perhaps), and critical to the point
of satire.
If its evidences in her work are justly indicative of its importance,
her critical proclivity must be considered as taking nearly as emi-
nent a place among her powers as her creative faculty itself. Al-
though quite as much temperamental as intellectual in the matter it
deals with, a preoccupation with the touchstones of educated feeling,
a business chiefly of gauging the qualities, the cleverness of persons,
it is yet very cool judgement and accompanies her creative power to
the end of the chapter. Her characters, the stars at least, share
greatly in this power of criticism; it is merely in another capacity of
their cleverness that they estimate themselves and their companions
with precision. And the accuracy of their judgements is equalled by
their finality; they "judge with their characters,” which are notable
for their stability of principle, for their chief principle, namely, cool
and intelligent fineness of feeling, is a remarkable self-preservative.
Their very stability is one of the factors entering into their ease of
estimation; they are indeed stable—so stable that as they were in the
beginning, so they are in the end. Dr. Wyant was an exception, but
one suspects in his degeneration an ulterior architectural purpose.
Certainly with all their mobility they advance in the same plane;
and apparently their movements must remain horizontal, since
neither growth nor decay but rather maturity is the condition of
their temperamental acumen.
The rather cold fineness of Mrs. Leath is an example of this sta-
bility of temperament; her sensitiveness of principle added much to
the poignancy of her situation in that it augmented her torture and
remained to the end a hopelessly irreconcilable element in her com-
promise; she was perpetually crucified by the criticism her instinct
passed upon the anomalous position which her passion for Darrow
compelled her into. Even more notable is the firmness to its prin-
ciples of Justine Brent's warmer but more highly intellectualized
temperament before the heavy shock of old Mr. Langhope's out-
raged feelings and her husband's involuntary recoil. Justine Brent
is in this respect her creator's most distinct figure; no other of Mrs.
Wharton's women is so certain of herself; in none is the native
power of criticism sounder; in none is the integrity of feeling more
absolute; in none is the tragedy much greater. Miss Bart, to whom
the reader naturally turns as the most distinguished of Mrs. Whar-


86
EDITH WHARTON
>
ton's characters, shows ultimately the same infallibility of feeling,
as her friend the rapid Mrs. Fisher so convincingly testified. “I
don't know what to make of her,” that lady said; "she works like a
slave preparing the ground and sowing the seed, and then when it
comes time to harvest she 'either oversleeps herself or goes on a pic-
nic. . . . Sometimes I think it is because she at heart despises the
things she is working for.” Miss Bart's power of criticism was in-
deed very coolly impartial and played over her wealthy acquaint-
ances and herself alike; she knew them and knew herself, and saw
their errors and her own with desperate clarity. But however she
might menace one aspect of herself with another, her fineness with
her cleverness, she did, in spite of herself, “save herself whole from
the wreck of her life.”
Mrs. Wharton's characters are nearly all preoccupied with that
great feat; and some of them, indeed, do so save themselves. Sophy
Viner was “ardently honest” with herself and made it the great
point of her life to be true to her memory of Darrow. Darrow did
not fail to attempt the repair of that breach in his integrity which
the indulgence of the gentleman's code had permitted; and it was
due to the fineness of their textures and finish if the fragments of his
identity repelled further decay when their principle of cohesion was
so largely destroyed. John Amherst and Lawrence Selden, Ralph
Marvell and Raymond de Chelles are so evidently saved whole that
they are saved from the dulness of cold overstabililty only by their
distinction and serious cleverness. The subtly acute drama of Sanc-
tuary lies in the saving whole of the fine feeling which Mrs. Peyton
had instilled into her son Richard, whose lack of natural fineness
had been inherited from his father. Indeed, the likelihood is that
they will all be saved whole, for they are protected from excess by
the power of their self-criticism; they know themselves; they think
with ability and toward the end of preserving their integrity of feel-
ing. Perhaps they have learned their high lessons too well; their
fineness is sometimes accompanied by coolness and they are not in-
frequently critical to the point of satire.
When the question is less of their self-critical quality than of gen-
cral social judgment, the reader readily remembers the accomplished
detachment of Mrs. Ansell. The individual distinction that she
i achieves through her lens-like social insight-she is not surpassed in
this point even by the great Miss Bart-is sufficient nearly to lay


CHARLES K. TRUEBLOOD
87
а
the suspicion that she is a dea ex machina. Her practice of tact on
every occasion, as the most artificial thing about her, is the mark for
ironical animadversions on the part of her author; but her delicate
impartiality and the imaginative quality of her judgment command
respect. She is unique among even the more eminent of Mrs. Whar-
ton's social critics in combining so exact a capacity for estimation
and characterization with apparently so little temptation to use it
ironically. By heredity, by environment, by the force of her own
temperament she was with the enemies of John Amherst; yet she
understood him as none of them did, certainly as the delicately sar-
castic old Mr. Langhope did not. Mr. Langhope was, in fact, even
in his silences and omissions, critical to the point of satire; he is
not the cleverest of Mrs. Wharton's characters, but he is nearly as
typical as any, for he has the generally cool and ironically detached
attitude, such as Miss Bart had for the wealthy and stupid Percy
Gryce, or as Justine Brent had for Westy Gaines. The security of
such an attitude lies in the knowing that one's own sense of fitness is
adequate; and of this they are, properly no doubt, sure. These su-
perior persons are distinguished in their field of social criticism,
which, if it is transient, is yet an art.
The element of critical detachment contributes traceably to pro-
duce the acute definition characteristic of Mrs. Wharton's art. The
fiction of few contemporary writers has so much distinctness; it is
like that produced by many touches of a fine abrasive or a dilute
acid. The edges may sometimes come out too sharp, as in The Cus-
tom of the Country and the most sardonic of her short stories; but
if she does not stop this side satire, if she does not always avoid
angularity, she does achieve distinctness. Indeed Summer, her latest
novel, but one, gives countenance to the idea that the direction of
her art is permanently toward impersonal distinctness as the one
merit. Apparently her former virtues of fineness, which so well
offset the marble-like qualities of her art, are sacrificed to bringing
out the edges, which are as clear and hard as those of Kipling at his
hardest; it is a not too pleasing change from carving in social ivory
to graving in sociological steel. The reader will regret to find that
this is the end apparently toward which the acuity of her stories
points, though his regret will not be that steel engraving is without
worth but that it is worth considerably less than carving. The sub-
ject of her fiction has never before been so utterly harsh, or the dis-


88
EDITH WHARTON
tinctness with which it is depicted so boldly detached, so painful to
the reader. Distinctness, though, is perhaps the only artistic refuge,
except style, from the harsh subject, or that one with which the
artist's sympathies are imperfect. One suspects that distinctness has
sometimes been her refuge in drawing the masculine character.
Aside from the cool, grave cleverness of temperament which is the
primum mobile of their virtues, her men have distinctness as their
chief merit. They are rather more distinct than masculine.
If Mrs. Wharton is anywhere to be found dealing with qualities
decidedly masculine, it would be in the case of Ethan Frome. His
jealousy was a very little modified and very masculine thing, com-
pared to which the complicated emotion of Owen Leath seems some-
what trifling and the violence of George Dorset somewhat hectic.
His rather aboriginal “big talk” is something to smile at, but a
manly failing. His confused stammer when his wife caught him in
his one fabrication, showed a masculine lack of “suppleness in de-
ceiving,” much inferior to George Darrow's capacity for quiet half-
truths. His whole simplicity in the hands of his wife sets him apart
from the average of Mrs. Wharton's heroes: Mr. Langhope, for in-
stance, was managed by his old friend Mrs. Ansell, but only with
difficulty; George Darrow was a subtler person than either Sophy
Viner or Mrs. Leath; even the fascinating Miss Bart was not superior
to Lawrence Selden; and Justine Brent's benevolent imposition on
her husband was possibly less because he was not clever than because
she was extremely clever. Ethan's pleasure in his masculine accom-
plishments, his inarticulateness in the presence of Mattie, his clumsy
wit, his gropings after the proper word-such things bespeak a mas-
culine ingenuousness often submerged and sometimes subverted in
the calm drawing-rooms that figure in Mrs. Wharton's pages.
On another side, however, he shows the qualities that run counter
and ally him with the Dagonets and Fairfords and Madame de
Treymes: he has the undeveloped elements of their cool and sober
cleverness, their intelligence, their fineness of feeling, their soundness
of temperament, and, despite his clumsiness, their delicacy. He
tortured himself as to the fancied vulgarity or inappropriateness of
the things he said to Mattie Silver; he was at a disadvantage in his
quarrel with his wife because of his disgust at its sordidness and
venom. At the end he was held back from seeking his freedom by
his moral integrity.


CHARLES K. TRUEBLOOD
89
"With the sudden perception of the point to which his madness
had carried him, the madness fell and he saw his life before him as
it was. He was a poor man, the husband of a sickly woman, whom
his desertion would leave alone and destitute; and even if he had
had the heart to desert her, he could have done so only by deceiving
two kindly people who had pitied him.
“He turned and walked slowly back to the farm.”
a
a
Mrs. Wharton has more distinguished characters than Ethan
Frome, more involved and perhaps more spectacularly executed
scenes than those grim ones which take place in the cold farm-
house of Starkfield; yet the best of her other work achieves no more
tragic proportions, nor more surely brings the reader back to the per-
manent possibilities of human nature.
Ethan Frome, compared to Mrs. Wharton's other works, although
it presents as most obvious the spectacle of a religiously transferred
technic, still does not convince the reader of the vital importance of
technic. That social criticism which acted as a resolvent of drawing-
room involutions and so well expounded the subtleties of the ultra-
civilized consciousness, has diminished here, and unobtrusively
readapted itself when set to work on the relatively simple souls of
Ethan Frome and Mattie Silver. The rich, involved matter which,
in Pater's opinion, is the challenge and promise of a fine effect, is
no longer here; yet the effect is, and would point the reader to the
obvious conclusion that an artist's technic matters less than the
quality and quantity of his imagination. And in this all-decisive
power Mrs. Wharton has a large share; but it is of the sort better
described as having the characteristic of light than of heat. Its
images and their relationships seem rather the result of deliberate
pause and focus than the blowing up of such a great conflagration
as makes the pages of Frank Norris's Octopus lurid. Light is a
better word than heat to associate with the impersonality and severe
detachment of Mrs. Wharton's imagination, with its very rational
coolness, with the meagreness of its humour, with its very restrained
passion, with its selective tendency to linger upon beauty, with the
clarity of its satiric glance.
It seems, indeed, an eminently interior imagination, of which
Ethan Frome, as the chief digression from its chosen field, but dis-
tinguishes that field more definitely. Topographically, it is not


90
EDITH WHARTON
>
extensive, for though it ranges through two continents, it moves by
an itinerary of drawing-rooms, and the unvarying terminus ad quem
of its travels is a drawing-room. Its embodied images are indigenous
to the drawing-room atmosphere, which, should they walk abroad,
remains a fine aura about them, an air. The reader could hardly
imagine the great Miss Bart “camping out,” and would likely sus-
pect that Undine Spragg's scorn of Apex City is the fruit of her first
lessons in drawing-room perspective. The distinguished gentlemen
and ladies in The Valley of Decision are at their best chiefly in noble
drawing rooms; the soft panorama of northern Italy described in
this novel is viewed evidently with an indoor eye. But this is only
to say that Mrs. Wharton's imagination is subjugated by the definite
taste of those "old families” whose traditional gentility is still fer-
tilized by hereditary cleverness. The inveteracy of such taste is
shown but too well in the mordant irony to which she subjects the
merely fashionable section of her world of drawing-rooms. It is too
sharp, not as satire, but as art, for its obvious extremity, to which
she sometimes pushes it, is caricature. The reader who remembers
the first abode of Undine Spragg in New York as the Hotel Sten-
torian may reasonably reflect that while two such names are well
aimed darts at the socially ambitious of America, to spend much of
one's skill in such marksmanship, is to deviate from the art of fiction.
And one is not long in concluding that these novels are too special-
ized to be the epic of America. They are not spacious enough, or
populous, or noisy, or grandiloquent, or full enough of “energy
divine,” although they are powerful in their chosen direction. One
is surprised to find in any of them the figure of a captain of finance,
but not surprised that when he appears he is on a vacation and that
the financial part of his life is lived elsewhere than in the story.
Mrs. Wharton's treatment of what to Americans is the greatest of
the passions is a shade too mature to fit the American temper well.
She is too acute for sentiment, commercialism, and aboriginality,
some notes of which apparently must be sounded in the future epic,
if we may prognosticate from the vast public appeal of Mrs. Gene
Stratton-Porter, the popular magazines, and Jack London. Mrs.
Wharton's novels are like the well-geared social establishments of
her own inner circle. Their tone is that of rather cool good sense,
fine shades, delicate discrimination, things said without words, of
everything that Undine Spragg would take for plain or monotonous


CHARLES K. TRUEBLOOD
91
- in short, of modulated cleverness. Speed, vulgarity, vastness, un-
conventionality even, if it be excessive, find no place' except the
ironic in her pages.
The art of fiction would seem by now almost a traditional field
for the assertion of feminine emancipation; but if Mrs. Wharton
can be said to assert any emancipation at all, it is only that of the
individual woman who frees herself by the force of her own char-
acter and talent. The emancipation of her sex is a note she does not
sound, doubtless because she believes in equality. For evidence of
her belief that civilized women are on a practical equality with civi-
lized men is to be found in the irony with which she handles the
heroines of the divorce court. That she regards them as both shirkers
and imperialists might reasonably be inferred from the fact that she
makes Charles Bowen describe Undine Spragg as the product of the
“custom of the country,” - the custom, that is, of allowing wives to
shirk the responsibility of an intelligent share in their husbands'
interests, and further, of allowing them to lay violent hands on fun-
damental social conventions for the sake of their own convenience,
to make their first appeal to what should be the court of last resort.
The sharpness of her satire of the vulgar and insensible, the fash-
ionable, the divorced, is significant of the essential conservatism of
her regard for the civilized síatus quo and the conventions of edu-
cated sensibility. Perhaps her eminence as an artist, joined to the
fact that she is a woman, will lead to her being called a New Woman
we are vague about such words. But if she is to be called a New
Woman truly, it will be because she is doing a relatively new thing
for a New Woman to do: namely, defending some of the oldest
things in our civilization.


SELF-GLORIFICATION AND ART
BY MAXWELL BODENHEIM
CERTAIN contemporary critics of literature, when accused of
a
attempting to elevate their individual prejudices into assertions
of superior insight, do not wholly deny this charge but insist that
self-glorification is the natural and necessary source of all expres-
sion. The artist, to them, must inevitably adopt a proudly and
firmly upstanding rôle and gratify, in this way, his insistent desire
for self-respect. In a broad sense the motive-power of all human
acts and words is self-glorification. People must forever shape their
expressions in a manner that will reassure them of their right to
existence; must continually assign at least a minimum value to these
expressions. This fundamental urge toward achieving the striking
—something that other men besides the creator will look at and
listen to-- is the mother of all human movement. But, in some indi-
viduals, it exists as a subconscious minimum, and in others it rises
to a conscious maximum.
In other words, the degree in which it is present determines
whether it is to become a vital and specific element in a human
being's actions and voices. In some persons it utterly dominates; in
others it struggles for authority, with varying success; and in a few
it is merely a passive fundamental, having the same indirect and
weakened effect upon their creations that the earth has upon the top-
most leaf of a tree. Here the substance of this fundamental is
neutralized by its division into many exploring shades- neutralized
until it no longer serves as an active influence but dwindles to a pas-
sive source.
Man is born not only with a desire for self-glorification but with
a longing to evade this self-worship. The exact amount of this op-
posite longing determines whether he is to resolve into an artist or a
financier, and the exact degree in which it resides in his art-activities
will decide whether he is to strive for variations in self-satisfaction
or for different shades of searching and unpretentious unrest. Every
element in man dwells side by side with a contradictory quality
and each is continually striving to slay the other. This battle rarely,
a
92


MAXWELL BODENHEIM
93
a
if ever, ends in one's naturally overcoming the other. A complexity
of environment and chance enters the conflict and imperceptibly
turns the tide. Take two youths of almost equal mental potentiali-
ties; send one of them to an academic college course and allow the
other to browse about, with only indirect guidance, and the first will
resolve into a blind acceptance of the past, while the second will be
more responsive to experiment and pioneering. Sometimes one or
the other will be able to shake off this initial influence, but even
then the slow push of different environments and associations can
never quite remove this first effect. Every human being contains
something which the psychoanalyst or logician cannot utterly ex-
plain away. The only label that would fit this hidden depth is “sub-
subconscious” — it is the unknown part of every being and often
rises to dispute those subconscious qualities which his mind has been
able to unearth. No general philosophy has ever been devised that
could sweep all individuals into its fundamental claims. At best it
must always admit the existence of baffling exceptions and insist
that they merely represent puzzling and undiscovered variations
springing from its general premises. But the greater plausibility is
that man possesses a vast and uncharted area which often enters his
active life and refuses to be governed by the set rules of this activity.
His mind, however, hesitates to recognize any dispute of its potential
supremacy and dismisses the mystery by attempting to include its
seeming manifestations in a new formula. But eventually the mys-
tery becomes such an obstructing contradiction that his ingenuity is
forced to create an even fresher plausibility in opposition-and thus
you have the birth of philosophies. In this way man has elevated
self-glorification into an easy and all-inclusive explanation of his
undercurrents and has swallowed a bitter pill—the renunciation of
his altruistic halo- in order to win another shade of self-assured
clarity. He has glorified his premise of self-glorification by chang-
ing it from a surface and individual trait to one resting in the depths
of all human beings and completely ruling their existence. Thus, he
assumes the rôle of a helpless martyr who must dispense with all
hopeless efforts at slaying his desire for self-satisfied, rigid rules and
his insistence that one trend in expression is indisputably superior to
any other. He wins a dominating stagnation and spends the rest of
his time in tinkering with the details of his fixed beliefs, so that he
may speak with a greater air of authority than the opposite faction
1
a


94
SELF-GLORIFICATION AND ART
1
presents. He need no longer regard his self-complacencies with the
least hesitation. Entrenched in victorious convictions, he is intent
upon giving battle and not upon listening to himself or other peo-
ple. He cannot admit to himself that he is a mere egotist whose
development has exceeded the speed limits; he can only justify him-
self by asserting that he represents the natural outcome of an inevi-
table fundamental. If he is a critic, he flogs all artists whose work
fails to blend into his masterful outlook; he insists that the deli-
cately fantastic poet should be a philosopher, that the philosopher
lacks a delicate spontaneity, that all creations should not be re-
garded in the light of their apparent aim but should be attacked
because they lack something which they did not strive to accomplish.
In other words, a note of persistent censure, and not of illuminating
appreciation, grips his criticisms. To escape this situation the critic
would not be forced to pat all artists on the shoulder and beam with
a meaningless impartiality. On the contrary, he could simply ignore
all artists whose creations gave him no compelling interest and de-
vote his energies to a searching interpretation of all work command-
ing his respect. His occupation of knocking down straw dummies
throws little light upon the trends and specific limitations of indi-
vidual artists. Instead of chiding the trend of the artist, the critic
should praise or blame it for what it is and present all other trends as
something which the artist may have overlooked and not as founda-
tions which he' should have attained.
But, alas, if criticism lost its gesture of brilliant infallibility, the
professional critic would cease to exist, since he derives his suste-
nance and authority from pointing to incontrovertible standards.
He would have to adopt the rôle of an immersed appreciator appeal-
ing to men whose elements resemble his. He would pack up his
crate of indisputable laurel wreaths and use in their place a series
of friendly handshakes and unheated discussions. Whether a tran-
sition of this sort would demand the millennium is beside the ques-
tion. When the critic looks upon the artist as a stimulating lure or
a being to whom he can give no attention, and not as a splendid
target, criticism will attain a wide and exhilarating function. At
present it is merely the superior voice of those who dwell upon an
imaginary mountain peak, but it can be an ardently searching de-
scent into the valley.
-


MODERN POETRY
BY MAXWELL BODENHEIM
HIS business of being a poet has never blended into the gen-
eral mechanism of
any Western age save-perhapsthe Hel-
lenic. The poet's air of quietly aloof reverie and his pursuit of an
abstract will-o'-the-wisp known as beauty-these things have al-
ways excluded him from the rough, back-slapping intercourse of
men hardened by trade, warfare, and manual labour. Life has re-
garded him as an eccentric child and has whipped or pampered him
according to its whim. Among the primitive tribes of Europe he
was the weakling left behind with the women-folk while his stur-
'dier brothers tilled the soil or slew each other with naïve vehemence.
In the Middle Ages he was a wandering troubadour playing under
ladies' windows and in the halls of feudal lords for a handful of
silver-a childlike vagabond tolerated by drunken men and sensi-
tive, repressed women. And up to a very recent period he has been
the protégé of a bourgeoisie which expected him to lull it to sleep
with musical alliterations and dainty heart-lacerations, with rev-
erent tears over old and honoured moral falsities, with a flowery
eloquence which painted the lily three times over and then placed
it in a perfumed urn, with a careful avoidance of terse introspection
and the semblances of actual life. Fantasy in his work was wel- .
comed only when it held an undisturbing Mother-Goose obvious-
ness or a meek, moral varnish.
"If he observed the aforementioned rules, he was well supplied
with food, clothing, money, and the acclaim of the leisure class-all
those things which rape the youth of a man and shape it into the
bland sterility of premature middle age. If he failed to observe
the rules just quoted, life benignly strangled him. And yet he has
ever existed because of the very forces and beings seeking to belittle
and destroy him.
If every poet could pass through a life in which all of his prin-
cipal desires germinated into nervous action, very little
be written it would be lived instead. Written poetry exists be-
cause certain elements are forever trying to mutilate and suppress
a
poetry would
95


96
MODERN POETRY
1
it-it gains life through fighting for life. There is always an in-
adequate market for poetry because it rebels against the sleek regu-
larity of its times, against solemn church-going ways, against the
high-sounding phrases that are forever seeking to hide the inner
reality of things, against tenaciously domineering philosophies-in
short, against the entire surface of the life surrounding it.
Poetry is simply the momentary struggle of those few, recurring
people who cannot fit their imaginations into the accepted emo-
tional, mental, and social patterns of their age. Poetry is a great
cry out of the smooth darkness which isolates people from each
other. The poet is not a being separated from his fellow-men in his
fundamental substances. He is merely a being in whom the un-
broken fundamentals of other men break into myriads of elastic,
expanding branches. He exists, in a major sense, to show other
men what lies beneath their hard outer skin; to reveal to them the
complexities and unfoldings which life has denied them. His is a
brilliantly futile, daring attempt to show men the potentialities
which forever slumber within them, sometimes breaking out in un-
conscious flashes; the exploring, resilient delicateness which their
lives have almost entirely stifled.
He is the mad, insulted preacher among men-not a preacher in
the ordinary sense of the word, not one shouting for some little phi-
losophy, religion, or creed, but one who indirectly tells men what
they could have been, by holding his heart and mind up to them
like an unconcerned child. If men ever join hands with him, he
will cease to exist in his ordinary, past function; he will joyously
lead them into a greater restlessness in which their thoughts and
emotions, moved by an overwhelming curiosity, will meet each
other with the touch that children have when they pat a sand-hill-
a simple, careless reaching out for variations in color and form; a
restlessness too large and quickly moving to be confined within the
narrow lines of any one gesticulating creed. Men are a million
miles away from this state, and even the poet is only enclosed by its
luring shadows. He spies in men and in himself flashes of a begin-
ning childhood in which forms, colors, and substances take on their
actual shapes and throw off the distortions, false grandeurs, and
sleekly emotional lies which men have fastened upon them. And
he strives, whether he sees the whip striking him or not, to make all
things come forth nakedly as wood, stone, light, shadow, curves,


MAXWELL BODENHEIM
97
-
opacity, warmth, motion, coolness, roughness, smoothness-all
things unconnected with that unreality concocted by man to soothe
his baffled life. When he uses fantasy he is not violating the reality
around him; he is merely splitting this reality into probing varia-
tions. Once revealed to itself, the reality of objects finds new shapes
within itself by playing with its outward forms.
This is the poetry that has been concentrated into one pointed
trend during the last fifteen years. The old emotional eloquence,
dramatic ecstasies of phraseology, and suave oratory with which
most poets have always addressed birds, trees, flowers, and the lives
of men, is disappearing, and in its place there has been born a
struggle on the part of the poet to wrestle with the concrete forms
about him, and in the heat of this fight suddenly awake to find that
he has been gripping different parts of himself. This battle, in
which wood becomes wood and stone becomes stone and the poet
sees the wood and stone that lie within himself and breaks them
into articulate variations--this battle is not a new one.
It is a
thread running through all Occidental literature; it has been
achieved in parts of the Bible, in the sagas of the Norsemen, in the
plays of Euripides, in Homer, in novels and plays by Russians and
Frenchmen, but not until the last fifteen years has it ever been gath-
ered into a poetic uprising. It is the actual poetry of life, separated
from material statistics, honeyed emotional subterfuges, ingenious
fiction in which the characters are strained marionettes, and pon-
derous philosophical dictates. It is the abstracted, impersonal glare
of
eyes that do not seek to judge, praise, or blame, but are immersed
in patiently subtracting and multiplying the bare words, expres-
sions, forms, and colors of life, in order to arrive at the nearest pos-
sible approach to the sum total of their essence. The poet must
bring to this task the inevitable, sub-conscious prejudices of his
individuality and the environments that have stained it, but through
completely immersing his energies in an effort to catch the breath,
concealed rhythms, and natural substances of men and inanimate
life, he can reduce these sub-conscious prejudices to an ever-dwin-
dling minimum or a friendly disputant.
And this attempt to unearth an inner reality which often con-
flicts with the surface plausibility and visual falseness which men
have ever called "reality”- this attempt is the actual dividing line
between poetry
and prose: a division which contradicts the old one


98
MODERN POETRY
a
of precise rhythm and intensely emotional sound veiling reality
with a false emphasis. In poetry of this kind a tree is simply a tree
.
- life curving out into the colored mechanism of energy-and not
a sweet, shady bower where lovers may sit, or a cool nook for the
tired wayfarer, or a happy thought of nature, or a symbol of God's
benevolence. This is the poetry that has been crystallized during
the last fifteen years in the work of men such as Stephen Crane,
Joseph Campbell, Ezra Pound, H.D., Wallace Stevens, Carl Sand-
burg, Jean de Boscherre, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams,
Orrick Johns, and others. And if this poetic division conflicts with
the old dictionary definition of poetry, then this definition has be-
come a sterile lie and must inevitably be discarded.
.


MAKING HEAVEN SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY
BY HELEN SARD HUGHES
“Oh, worship the King, all glorious above!
Oh, gratefully sing His power and His love!
Our shield and defender, the Ancient of days,
Pavilioned in splendor, and girded with praise.”
Dº
а
a
pious congregations now sing it in village and city, as they
gather together to render thanks to Almighty God for the end
of a world war and the benefits of a democratic peace?
The protestant minister of to-day faces perplexity as he thumbs
through the hymnal of his church to make selections suited to the
present events. His perplexity is salutary to contemplate, suggest-
ing, as it does, the social archaisms that pervade our hymnology.
To find among "old favorites" hymns unmarked by images of autoc-
racy and military sentiment is somewhat hard; to find, except in the
Gospel Hymns of the extreme wing of modern Dissenters, sacred
songs of service, brotherhood and joyful labor is still more difficult.
So we should not feel surprise to-day if from our family pew we all
join in singing that fine old war song of Bishop Heber's:
“The Son of God goes forth to war,
A kingly crown to gain;
His blood-red banner streams afar,
Who follows in his train ?"
a
as we celebrate the abdication of emperors, the condign punishment
of a militaristic caste, and the prohibition of the red flag of Revolu-
tion.
The material of our hymns has come, of course, to a large extent
from the Bible. For sentiment and imagery the hymn-writer has
ranged through the sacred lore of psalmist and prophet, the gospel
narratives, and the epistles of St. Paul, expressing his own personal
faith and the faith of his time in terms borrowed from a Hebrew
worshipper of a tribal God, from the aggressive promoter of early
Christian theology, and more rarely from the comforting words of
the Founder of his faith.
99


100
MAKING HEAVEN SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY
This impulse by which the singer selects from the wide wealth of
Scriptures specific material suited to his own life and times is more
closely linked with other processes of social psychology and national
life than is commonly supposed. The fact that he selects images of
certain sorts and ignores others shows habitual attitudes and in-
herited points of view which hold their lesson to-day. For it becomes
apparent to any one thoughtfully scanning any standard collection
of English hymns and noting their theme and date that in these
sacred lyrics can be traced not only characteristic marks of literary
movements of the last three centuries, but more than that: salient
lines of political and social thought as well.
Note for example the hymns of the nineteenth century, though
in the century before it the hymns of Addison, Watts, the Wesleys,
and others are equally to the point. The early decades of the nine-
teenth century were, in world politics, the period of the Napoleonic
conquests and defeats, in literature, a period of Romantic triumph;
these were years which stirred the emotions of poets secular and re-
ligious. These poets expressed the age, its visions, hopes, discour-
agements, and disillusionments, with a play of imagination which
heightened hope and despair, giving significance alike to conceptions
vast, fanciful, and remote, and to the minutest details of common
life. Wordsworth's glorification of the "little, nameless, unremem-
bered acts of kindness and of love" finds a counterpart in Keble's
hymn, “New every morning is the love,” simpler and truer than
many more pretentious stanzas, more mindful as it is of "the trivial
round, the common task” which “brings us daily nearer God.”
But in many of the hymns of this time God is regally conceived
of as King, God of Battles, a God of Nations, a veritable tribal
God, imperial and triumphant. The Christian experience is mean-
while figuratively portrayed in a multitude of hymns, not so often
as a pilgrimage or a voyage, but as a strife. Calculated to the in-
crease of holy morale was such a hymn of the Napoleonic era as
“Oft in danger, oft in woe,” with its stanza:
“Let your drooping hearts be glad:
March in heavenly armor clad;
Fight, nor think the battle long,
Soon shall victory tune your song.'
(1812)


HELEN SARD HUGHES
101
Thomas Kelly's hymn after battle is likewise of this time:
“Look, ye saints, the sight is glorious;
See the 'Man of Sorrows' now;
From the fight returned victorious,
Every knee to Him shall bow;
Crown Him! Crown Him!
Crowns become the Victor's brow."
(1809)
Later decades of the same century produced another group of
these militaristic hymns. In the 1860's the spirit of Victorian im-
perialism produced such martial processionals as Onward Christian
Soldiers, We March, We March, to Victory, and Holy, Holy, Holy,
Lord, God of Hosts, Eternal King, and a few years
before:
a
“Stand
up,
stand
up,
for Jesus,
Ye soldiers of the cross!
Lift high His royal banner,
It must not suffer loss.
From victory unto victory,
His army shall He lead,
Till every foe is vanquished,
And Christ is Lord indeed.”
(1858)
The very missionary hymns savor of imperialism and the lure of
the White Man's burden. Bishop Heber's From Greenland's Icy
Mountains, for instance, rich with the same romantic interest in re-
mote lands that inspired in the same year, 1819, James Montgom-
ery's poem Greenland, exhorts a chosen people "whose souls are
lighted with wisdom from on high” to carry to the “heathen in his
blindness” their particular brand of religious kultur.
Mingled, moreover, throughout the Victorian period with such
hymns of the Church Militant, and with songs of the personal
struggle between faith and scientific doubt, are many songs of the
other world wherein the weary earth-dweller may forget sorrow and
doubt and strife, in pleasant courts above. Some of these hymns are
mediaeval in imagery and feeling, akin to the Oxford Movement


102
MAKING HEAVEN SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY
similarly engendered. Such hymns of the romantic escape from re-
ality are Bishop Faber's “O Paradise, O Paradise, Who doth not
long for rest,” and Stone's “Weary of earth and laden with my sin,
I look at Heaven and long to enter in.” Perhaps to this time also
belongs the child's song our mothers used to sing:
“I want to be an angel,
And with the angels stand,
A crown upon my forehead,
A harp within my hand.”
Such songs make us pause and consider this heaven of ours which
poets and sages have upbuilt out of the meager materials of the
Scriptures, a vision kept perennially bright before the eyes of suc-
cessive generations by such hymns as Mother Dear Jerusalem, Jeru-
salem My Happy Home, and the modern version of the medieval
hymn of St. Bernard of Cluny, Jerusalem the Golden. In such
hymns is specifically described that place wherein “no sorrow can be
found, nor grief, nor care nor toil.” In this "sweet and blessed coun-
try ... apostles, martyrs, prophets around their saviour stand,”
the “king who sitteth on his throne”; and round about for his felic-
ity are “harpers harping on their harps” while “angels evermore do
sing." It is somewhat like a bright residential suburb of the uni-
verse, "dear land of rest,” where temptingly the Trees of Life for-
evermore bear fruit by living streams which flow with silver sound
through golden streets. To such a Lotus Eaters' Utopia the Chris-
tian pilgrim has been taught to look, crying as he journeys through
our workaday world:
“Then shall my labors have an end
When I thy joys shall see!"
Was it mere accident that this classic mood found secular expression
of exquisite perfection in the Victorian laureate's song of Ulysses'
mariners who, "propt on beds of amaranth and moly,” sang drow-
sily:
“All things have rest: why should we toil alone. .
O, rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more.”


HELEN SARD HUGHES
103
And does there not lie contiguous to these ancient lands of rest that
pagan Garden of Proserpine of which Swinburne sang:
"Here, where the world is quiet,
Here, where all troubles seem
Dead winds' and spent waves' riot
In doubtful dreams of dreams,"
It is a garden sought of those who "thank whatever gods there be”
“That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea."
Beautiful as apocalyptic vision, but dangerous as a way of life, is
the social state which for centuries men have accepted more or less
literally as the summum bonum of eternal life, as a just recompense
for a variety of good deeds ranging from the ascetic renunciation of
“the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world,”
to a complete sacrifice of self in some one of the world's lost causes.
It is a society of conspicuous leisure and conspicuous waste, idleness,
soft white raiment, and the fine arts, wherein the Children of the
Heavenly King toil not, neither do they spin, and evince no sym-
pathy for those who do. It is a community such as might tempt a
complacent aristocracy and a well-nourished clergy of the Middle
Ages, and a little later the materialist, the fanatic dreamer, and
(paradoxically enough) the morbid, conscientious, Puritan woman,
at the same time that it stirred the primitive imagination of a negro
camp-meeting. But less and less does it seem likely to attract in
-
even figurative guise the self-respecting worker of to-day. Nearer
to our time are Kipling's jolly mariners who reply:
"Must we sing forevermore
On the windless, glassy floor?
Take back your golden fiddles and we'll beat to open sea!”
So, when we finish making the world safe for democracy, can we
not invade our traditional heaven, and dethrone the hierarchical
aristocracy of that Kingdom? When on earth we have beaten our
swords into ploughshares, having broken down economic barriers and


104
MAKING HEAVEN SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY
.
a
a
government by a class, should we not have a heaven which is like-
wise a democratic state, swept clear of sceptred pomp and triumph-
ant might, where no longer inconsistently “armies of the ransomed
saints" to the "ringing of a thousand harps cast crowns before
the feet” of a Prince of Peace who sitteth on the right hand of God?
For such a spiritual potentate attended with majesty's proper cere-
monial and display, such a paternal despot propitiated by offerings
of praise and prayer, such a dictator, rex et imperator, combining in
his own person executive, legislative, and judicial functions, his ad-
ministration safeguarded by the most ancient and complete system
of sedition laws extant, such an imperialistic Commander-in-Chief,
Defender of the Faithful and Scourge of the Unbeliever, surely he
is not the proper head for the ideal state in this theoretically demo-
cratic year of
grace, 1920.
And what of the traditional Christian virtues, official passport to
heaven: humility, unquestioning obedience, and self-preservation at
any cost? These, the cardinal virtues of the loyal subject and the
private soldier in autocracy's ranks, may sound archaic and unfa-
miliar to the citizens of this world, when the millennium by social-
ists foretold shall have been established upon the earth.
Such anachronisms derived from ancient tribal rituals and medi-
aeval dreams of empire may be in part the cause of the rift between
orthodox religion and daily life to-day. The younger generation can
be but little impressed by such obsolescent conceptions, whether
presented as symbol or substance of reality, which serve only to
separate the Church from the State as they know it. The barriers
and lines of demarcation which religious instruction has so often
constructed between heaven and earth, between one's duty toward
God and toward neighbor, have caused heaven, not earth, to suffer in
the estimation of youth otherwise quick to see God's handiwork in
the firmament and his glory in the heavens-youth with an adoles-
cent eagerness for fellowship and service, prone to see in the earth
and every common sight the glory and the freshness of a dream.
That modern realist, too, the Man on the Street - distinguished
by a genuine if covert idealism from his brother the Tired Business
Man-is blessed with a native spirit of reverence and an inarticu-
late yearning for an object of devotion, even while he rejects the
alien arguments of personal salvation, self-abnegation, and the ro-
mantic escape of the other world. To many such, the war seemed
a


HELEN SARD HUGHES
105
a
for a time a terrible answer to prayer, supplying an ideal cause, an
object of devotion palpable and legitimate according to the code of
his own day. It called all men equally to labor, live, or die to make
this world a better place where babes unborn might yet have life and
have it more abundantly. Some such spiritual renaissance certain.
of our soldier-poets have sung, especially in the early days of the
World War. To men like Rupert Brooke the bugles of war
+
)
“Brought us for our dearth
Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain.”
No static heaven, his whose body lies in "some corner of a foreign
field,” his heart,
“all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given.”'
Will some one write us, then, new hymns suited to the social order
and the reverent dignity of our times? We who can no longer sing.
“I'm but a stranger here;
Heaven is my home,”
have sung exultantly the more fitting words of our newest and
greatest national song:
"America! America!
God shed his grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea.”


THE LAWYERS KNOW TOO MUCH
BY CARL SANDBURG
а
The lawyers, Bob, know too much.
They are chums of the books of old John Marshall.
They know it all, what a dead hand wrote,
A stiff dead hand and its knuckles crumbling,
The bones of the fingers a thin white ash.
The lawyers know
a dead man's thoughts too well.
In the heels of the higgling lawyers, Bob,
Too many slippery ifs and buts and howevers,
Too much hereinbefore provided whereas,
Too many doors to go in and out of.
When the lawyers are through
What is there left, Bob?
Can a mouse nibble at it
And find enough to fasten a tooth in?
a
Why is there always a secret singing
When a lawyer cashes in?
Why does a hearse horse snicker
Hauling a lawyer away?
a
The work of a bricklayer goes to the blue.
The knack of a mason outlasts a moon.
The hands of a plasterer hold a room together.
The land of a farmer wishes him back again.
Singers of songs and dreamers of plays
Build a house no wind blows over.
a
The lawyers- tell me why a hearse horse snickers
hauling a lawyer's bones.
106


1
A COMPETENT CRITIC
Books IN GENERAL. By Solomon Eagle. 12mo. 256
pages. Alfred A. Knopf. New York.
TH
HE author of Books in General is a provocative critic and
easy,
but it is hard. He begins, for instance, a note on The Depressed
Philanthropist with the remark:
his
“I do not see why anyone but myself should be interested in the
mere fact that, except in the way of casual reference, I have always
avoided writing a line about Mr. John Galsworthy”;
and it sounds delightfully casual and neat. But suppose I had be-
gun this review of Solomon Eagle with the suggestion that it can
be of no importance to my readers, or to his, but the truth must out
that the publication of Solomon Eagle's book has annoyed me im-
measurably. Would that have sounded so well? I doubt it. I
should have to go on and explain that the reason is not the inade-
quacy of the book-it is like one of those photographs which never
do the subject justice. No. I am annoyed because Solomon Eagle
has been writing since 1913 in The New Statesman and I am the
only person of my acquaintance who has been reading him without
interruption in all these years. He has been an exclusive pleasure
and I have lost him. He is not exactly a playboy of letters but I
feel the pain of his going and, even more, the indelicacy of this
public sale of his effects. And such good effects! We cannot all
have sonnets written about us, but in our little way we can all be
stout, and when we make discoveries we are, like Cortez, inclined to
be silent for a space because we want to keep them to ourselves.
I wish I could have kept Solomon Eagle. Resigning him, I lose
my privatė hold on his other self, Mr. J. C. Squire, the most ver-
satile and, I am told, the most influential man of letters in England.
Mr. Squire's qualities as a poet are discussed elsewhere; his Tricks
of the Trade is proof enough that he stands close to Mr. Max Beer-
bohm as a parodist (his H. G. Wells, with the haunting refrain
107


108
A COMPETENT CRITIC
about “the strange welter of sex . . .” is better than Max's Wells,
and the combination of Edgar Lee Masters and Gray's Elegy pro-
duced the matchless line: "the lewd forefathers of the village
sleep”). Mr. Squire edited The New Statesman in the absence of
Mr. Clifford Sharp; he has just founded The London Mercury, a
monthly review; he writes in Land and Water a page of literary
criticism similar to that in The New Statesman which was the
source of this book; and, during the war, he wrote satires, the gayest
and the bitterest, and incomparably the best satiric verse which
that singularly uninspiring calamity brought forth. The little
pamphlet The Survival of the Fittest may presently be forgot-
ten; such things have happened. But I should rather have written
it than the imperishable works of all our Vigilantes put together.
Finally, the same writer who testifies to Mr. Squire's influence in-
forms me that he is about thirty-six years old and is what we should
call a college man; and I may add, in the interest of thoroughness,
that I have seen a portrait of Mr. Squire and judge that he is not
displeasing to the sight.
This is a fairly large circle to draw around so small a center as
Books in General, but a few points in the circumference are like
little lamps throwing their light on Solomon Eagle. For the sum of
all this activity is that Mr. Squire is forever a critic; his parodies,
his satires, his editorial work, are critical. He seems to be doing
many things, but, except for his poetry, he is always doing one thing,
and doing that thing very well. .
There is no temptation to discuss adventures of souls among
masterpieces or the canons of criticism, in setting down the qualities
of Solomon Eagle. He does give us the adventures of a curious
.
and curiously stocked mind among trivialities such as music hall
lyrics, political songs, Who's Who, typographical errors, and Archi-
bald Henderson. He adds sly foot-notes on Thomas Love Peacock,
because he is not ready to write at length about him, and on Henry
James and James Joyce, possibly because he is paid to write pre-
cisely one page each week, possibly because he is writing elsewhere
a reasoned history of contemporary English letters; I do not know.
I do know that the general effect of this book is one of irritation at
so much triviality, and the effect is heightened by the number of
good things in the book. In some two hundred and fifty pages
there is not a line of slipshod writing nor is there a stupid judge-
а


SGANARELLE
109
ment set down. There are very few epigrams, and there are pages
of Auent and engaging English. What is maddening is for a man
to be so right and so agreeable and so careless at once.
The examples of his rightness are everywhere. When A Por-
trait of the Artist as a Young Man was published, Solomon Eagle
had just the right word to say about the method: “He is a genuine
realist: that is to say, he puts in the exaltations as well as the de-
pressions . . . spiritual passions are as powerful to him as physical
passions”; about the style he was equally precise; and of James
Joyce's future he wrote: “the discovery of a form is the greatest
problem in front of him. It is doubtful if he will make a novelist.”
To-day, with Ulysses pounding in our ears, what have we to add
or to subtract from this? Set Henry James before Solomon Eagle
and he will analyze with inspired accuracy the causes of his obscu-
rity. But he will turn hastily from the magnificence of Henry
James as a subject and like a good diplomat will cause a diversion,
perhaps with the notable poem which contains the lines:
a
“On firmer ties his joys depend
Who has a faithful female friend!”
He resents the personal dulness of Wordsworth and he is impa-
tient with Mr. John Galsworthy's dreariness, but that is as near to
an emotion as he gets. For the rest, he talks entertainingly about
epigrams and table talk and Florence Barclay, on simplified spell-
ing, Anglo-Saxon words, and the Baconian theory.
The entertainment is excellent, but you could never guess that
the man has a passion for good English, for clear thinking, for
sound philosophy, for wit, for an honest presentation of life, for a
thousand good things. Books are almost a wild romance with him.
Only a few weeks ago, when a printers' strike threatened in Eng-
land, he wrote of the books which were already announced:
a
“But if they did not come out, if they remained unfulfilled prom-
ises, I think that in the evenings of those months of our sullen broils
they would gradually for 'me acquire romance. I should begin
thinking of them with that acuteness of unsatisfied longing that is
evoked by the memory of the great lost books of antiquity and of
which one has a tinge when one reads of a work that a great writer


110
A COMPETENT CRITIC
conceived and never carried out. These books, already described
with all the circumstance of size and shape, of cloth extra and demy
8vo, would in my imagination creep up, ascending the highest
heaven of invention, until they took their place beside the noble
and glorious shapes of Sappho's lost lyrics and the unwritten Ar-
thuriad of Milton."
It is not fine writing; it is a real passion which has its utterance
here. And the passage is not exceptional, although nothing like it
has been included in the present collection. At about the same time,
Solomon Eagle (or possibly Mr. Squire under his proper name)
wrote of Samuel Butler. In a passage in his Notebooks Butler be-
littles human effort on the ground that so little that is new and
worthy can be accomplished. The reviewer broke into so sudden,
so'brief, and so violent a storm of emotion at this, in a world where
the few things which are good are perpetually in danger of destruc-
tion or decay, that the page of literary notes became for a moment
prophetical in its intensity.
Heaven knows we have enough of solemnity and bitterness and
fanaticism pushing their way into the quiet pastures of art. And
Heaven, if it is as pleasant a place as I like to think it, probably
appreciates the few intelligent critics who can write about life and
letters without pleading a cause or impressing us with the futility
of art while Great Things are going on. For myself I am pleased
with Solomon Eagle's frivolity just as I am pleased by Mr. Squire's
puns in his satires. And I am complaining only because the other
qualities of those satires are lacking here-I mean the enthusiasm
and passion and energy which carry all living things a little step
beyond mere interest and amusement.
I do not know by what fault of selection they have been omitted
from this book. Perhaps Eagle is a spirit naturally British. Per-
haps he is one of those whom he himself describes as “the grotesque
Englishman who stares at a sunset and then laughs and says it
looks like a fried egg” because he is really “bolting in terror from
the admission that it looks like the flaming ramparts of the world.”
The original bearer of the name was hardly that; he was “a poor
maniac who, during the Great Plague of London, used to run
naked through the streets, with a pan of coals of fire on his head,
crying, 'Repent, repent! The Solomon Eagle of the book neither


SGANARELLE
111
runs nor cries; and he is naked only in spots. He does not bid us
repent, which is a blessing. But I wish he would follow the advice
of another English critic and jump for joy, at times.
His urbanity is a nuisance, but if he lacks fervor and intensity
in this collection, he has, here and elsewhere, the rarer quality of
competence. I do not use the word in the critical sense; "a compe-
tent performance” of almost anything usually means one that is
barely good enough. In the world of affairs the term has a more
flattering meaning and a competent workman is understood to be an
uncommonly good one. In law, according to Dr. Johnson, "a com-
petent judge is one who has a right of jurisdiction in the case,” and
it is precisely in that sense that I call Solomon Eagle competent.
He has the right of jurisdiction because he has the material for
judgement and the hard mind which will not be abused. He can-
not be imposed upon; but unlike those cowardly people who boast
of their immunity, he does not go about in perpetual fear of giving
a critical farthing to an undeserving beggar. He is generous. He
gives the groat or the guinea, according to his mood, but he knows
exactly why he gives it. My clearest impression of the last three
months' reading of Solomon Eagle is that he likes Sax Rohmer's
Fu Manchu stories enormously; he admires their competence; he is
amused and entertained by them. And he praises them. But he is
no more likely to say that Sax Rohmer is the greatest of English
romancers than to deny Euphues or Walter Bagehot or Herrick his
due. His ear for the false note is amazingly keen; he detects it
whether you are praising the Imagistes or dispraising Shakespeare
or suggesting that d'Annunzio could not write. He is amazingly
unmoved by literary reputations, even when they are recent.' He is
notably unconcerned with schools or movements, but he is ready to
run them through the rather fine mesh of his mind, and if he doesn't
grow boisterous about the good that remains, you must grant him
that he never tries to pass off the faux bon in its place.
He has discrimination, which is, I suppose, the beginning and the
middle and the end of culture. (I know it is the end.) And that
is why Solomon Eagle so contentedly stands still. He will have
to stand still until intelligence and his rare kind of competence be-
come a movement themselves:
I do not know how or when that will happen, although I should
like to behold the run for cover which might follow the announce-


112
A COMPETENT CRITIC
ment that even so few as ten, let us say, had come together to make
a fetish of intelligence. It is simply not the business of most of
our critics to judge; they either write reviews to help the sale of a
book, or they are above such things and spend their time proving
that all contemporary things are bad (which is not a hard thing to
do) except the few which belong to the old tradition, or, a few of
them, that all ancient and modern things are bad with the excep-
tion of the work of John Snaffles and Lydia Hesterby, who are the
only geniuses of our time. There are, of course, the critics whose
,
function it is to help drive the world to or from Bolshevism, by the
rough road of Arnold Bennett's humanism or the Freudian implica-
tions in D. H. Lawrence. They differ from the others only in this,
that the others pretend to care about letters. Few of us really do
care and it is hard to forgive Solomon Eagle, who does, for pre-
tending that he does not. He has added another to the many books
about books; there was no need for him to think of it as a sacred
responsibility. You do not have to bring up a book and assure its
place in society. But at least he might have admitted that he was
happy to do it, and he should have put his best into it. As it is, he
will have to publish another.
SGANARELLE.
}


JACINTO BENAVENTE
Plays, SECOND SERIEs. By Jacinto Benavente. Trans-
lated from the Spanish with an introduction by John
Garrett Underhill.' Illustrated. 12mo. 309 pages.
Charles Scribner's Sons. New York.
a
T is a truly Shavian paradox that among contemporary Spanish
dramatists should be found the author whose plays are most like
the plays of Bernard Shaw. The Spanish playwrights have been
influenced only superficially by the intellectual and technical forces
that have been shaping the course of the modern drama, and, save
for a few emphasizing exceptions, the very plays that are held up as
examples of modern Spanish dramatic realism are plays of the clas-
sical Spanish plots of blood-and-honour, coated thinly with a very
brittle veneer of naturalistic speech and setting. Spain is the last
place where one might reasonably expect to discover another Shaw,
for Shaw has been the arch-enemy of those same romantic illusions
that are the stock-in-trade of Spanish playwrights and the chief
protagonist of mental or moral conflict against the physical conflict
in which Spanish audiences so delight. And yet Spain's foremost
living dramatist is more closely akin to Shaw, both as a thinker and
a dramatic craftsman, than any other playwright.
It would, however, be grossly unfair even to infer that Jacinto
Benavente is an imitator of Shaw. He is not even a disciple. But there
are very obvious similarities in the dialogue and technique of their
plays, and the differences in their artistic motives and moral ideals
are chiefly due to their different environments and national tradi-
tions. It is most convenient, therefore, to compare these two great
individualists, although to compare an unknown-and Benavente is
all but unknown in America, with a known like Shaw, about whom
such debatable opinions are so stoutly maintained, is a critical device
fraught with dangers of injustice. It demands at the outset fullest
appreciation of Benavente's robust originality, and it makes neces-
sary the clearest possible definition of each basis of comparison.
Spaniards recognize Jacinto Benavente as their greatest modern
dramatist. Discerning Spanish critics do not hesitate to rank him
a
113


114
JACINTO BENAVENTE,
a
above Echegaray, but the most astute among them have been baffled
in making any complete analysis of his philosophy. This is due
partly to his attitude towards his work and partly to his astonishing
versatility. Like Shaw he is himself a brilliant critic and he delights
in his essays and prefaces to astonish and confuse the other critics
with startling phrase and paradox. At the close of his Introduction
to the Second Series of Benavente's plays, which has just been pub-
lished, Mr. Underhill appends, some of the Spaniard's critical max-
ims, the Shavian flavour of which is very keen. "Prince Hamlet,
although the prototype of doubt, like all sceptics had faith in what
was most preposterous: the probability that a theatrical perform-
ance would disclose anything.” “One-fourth of the morality, recti-
tude, and sense of justice which an audience brings into the theatre
would, if left outside, make the world over into paradise.” Another
often quoted saying of his is: “I do not make my plays for the pub-
lic; I make a public for my plays.” Again, he once said to a friend,
speaking of one of his delightful fairy fantasies, “There is no inner
meaning to the play, except the very obvious outer meaning which
nobody understands.” Such statements are just as disconcerting to
serious-minded critics in Spain as in England or America.
Nevertheless, in the very midst of his most perverse epigrams he
consistently reveals an honest disgust with all shams and poses and
a very firm belief in democracy. As an author, his prodigious indus-
try is the very antithesis of the dilettante airs and graces that some
of his contemporaries assume, and he mocks to scorn the self-styled
genius and his talks of moods and inspirations. As a literary critic,
,
his bête noire is the parlour drama whose failure on the stage is ex-
plained away by saying that it is too intellectual or too artistic for
the populace. As an interpreter of life, in his own plays he holds
fast to this same hatred of all forms of hypocrisy and this same faith
in the ultimate good judgement of the people. In The Evil Doers of
Good, his clever satire of organized charity, his mouthpiece, Don
Heliodoro, exclaims passionately:
>
“You are not handing out alms for nothing. All that you
demand
in return is a profession of faith, an oath of absolute allegiance, so-
cial, religious, political, sentimental-yes, even sentimental. You
are shocked when you find someone who is not willing to sell his
soul, his most cherished beliefs, for whatever you are willing to give


WILLIAMS HAYNES
115
him as charity, and let me tell you this, there are fewer poor men
than gentlemen of the upper classes who will do it. You think that
you are encouraging virtue, but what you are really doing is promot-
ing hypocrisy. You think that you are educating the masses: you
are holding out a piece of candy in one hand and hiding a ruler in
the other hand behind your back.”
There is no need to call attention to the Shavian qualities of the
speech or of the thought behind it, but it is significant that almost
without exception Benavente's satirical comedies, and these are the
most popular and the most important of his plays, are based upon
some sham of contemporary Spanish society. It is a society very
different from ours, different in form and based upon a different
social order, but many of the shams he exposes are universal. La
Gata de Angora holds up to view the idle, pampered, useless woman
of great wealth, the Angora cat as the title calls her, as pretty,
as selfish, and as cruel. Lo Cursi reveals the ugliness of the modern
marriage of convenience. La Comida de las Fieras strips bare the
empty pretensions of the wicked, decayed nobility. And so on,
through a whole series of over forty brilliant plays, Benavente has
satirized the false and the undemocratic in the upper and middle
classes of Spanish society. He is the first specialist of the land in
this particular field, and though he has several imitators, as yet no
worthy rival has appeared.
Much of the success of his satires is due to the skill with which,
in the same play, he will balance frailties and vices with strengths
and virtues. His characters are always an intimate mixture of good-
ness and badness, and while he never leaves a doubt as to their exact
place in his sàtire, still they are easily recognizable as people from
the workaday world. He finds no delight in running the sharp
blade of his wit through a poor dummy stuffed with disagreeable
traits, but he rejoices to make a red-blooded knave or a pious shrew
ridiculous. His specialist's point of view is narrow, but the result
he achieves in his plays has something of the breadth of that greatest
of Spanish satires, Don Quixote. The best Spanish literature has
always been national, and it seems to become universal only when
its national spirit, as in Cervantes' novel, is most intensified. This
holds good of Benavente's satirical comedies. He attacks an un-
democratic, uncommercialized society, and an American winces at


116
JACINTO BENAVENTE
his thrusts. His sincerity and keen insight into Spanish character
enable him to reveal human beings that we recognize readily under
their unfamiliar national costumes.
Like Shaw, Benavente is no respecter of his audiences' feelings.
He apparently enjoys shattering fond illusions, nor does he spare
individuals, even the most powerful. In so closely knit a country
as Spain it is remarkable that the work of a vigorous, active free-
thinker who has taken his place in the world of affairs has not degen-
erated into mere personal lampoon. It is not that Benavente has
lacked the courage, for in Catholic Spain it is just as dangerous to
attack the cherished conventions of caste and religion as it is in Puri-
tan England to show that democracy can be tyrannical or marriage
unhappy, and Benavente has not hesitated to satirize with particular
gusto outworn ideas of personal and family honor, conventional
moral hypocrisy, and devout wickedness.
It is said of this Spanish playwright, as it has been said of Ber-
nard Shaw, that he has no higher aim than to be the super-clever
popular playwright of his day; that he is utterly frivolous; that he
lacks that stability which belief in any carefully thought out and
firmly held philosophy would give him. It is true that we read his
satirical comedies in vain if we look for the kindly admonitions of
a great moral teacher; neither do we find in them the clarion calls
to action of the social revolutionist. There are none of the conti-
nental dramatists' bitter criticisms of contemporary life in his plays
-nor, it must be added, any of the comforting encouragement of
pop-
ular modern philosophers. He does not exhort; he does not preach;
he does not advise. He is content to show us some particular phase
of life as he himself sees it, and then he leaves us to draw our own
conclusions. He does this deliberately, not as a refuge for medi-
ocrity, but because he is convinced that the true function of the
drama is to picture life on the stage, and he accomplishes his purpose
so well that he wins at once extravagant blame and praise. He is
blamed unjustly for lack of a serious purpose, and so lifelike are his
portraits that he has been over-praised as a student of character.
These confused estimates of his work have been fostered by Bena-
vente himself. A dramatist to the core, he appreciates keenly the
theatric effect, and he uses his powers spectacularly to arrest the
attention of his fellow countrymen. He is too sensible and too hon-
est to don a cloak of sobriety which would be unbecoming and un-
a


WILLIAMS HAYNES
117
comfortable. He chooses deliberately the bespangled tights of the
professional acrobat, and so garbed he turns his handsprings with a
nimble dexterity that hides his skill and strength. Benavente does
not underestimate his own powers. Rather the reverse—he some-
times confuses his remarkably keen observation with interpretation.
Benavente does not, however, misuse his powers, for, if he does not
recognize limits to his native abilities, he appreciates finely how to
apply them most effectively.
Much of the great effectiveness of Benavente's plays, both in the
printed page and upon the stage, depends upon his dialogue, and the
selection of the pieces in the new Second Series has been very happy
in showing this characteristic of his at its best. Indeed, the little
one-act sketch, No Smoking, is a perfect example of dialogue, for
dialogue is all that there is. Few dramatists are able to make dia-
logue accomplish so many things at one time as he, and it is not un-
usual to find single speeches that are at once clever bons mots, a keen
revelation of character, and useful exposition of the plot. Such a
speech is Theodoro's in The Governor's Wife: “In such matters
I make it a rule to follow the catechism: the sacraments all in their
proper order. Marriage comes seventh, after extreme unction.” This
uncanny skill in dialogue quickens his plays with the very breath of
life. There are apparently no explanations-certainly no dreary,
talky explanations or obvious exchanges of confidences for the en-
lightenment of the audience—and no quips or witticisms are tied to
the characters like balls and tinsel on a Christmas tree. The best of
Benavente's claims as a depicter of character rest upon his capabili-
ties as a revealer of motives through speeches. Literally his people
are convicted out of their own mouths, and this is surely one of the
rare gifts of the dramatic genius.
In contradistinction to Shaw, Benavente is without any social
conscience. It is impossible to imagine him as a member of any
Spanish Fabian Society, and while he might well have written a
Spanish Widowers' Houses, still it would not have been from any
sociological motive. The point of his attack is the individual, and
his plays have a social significance only because he does not waste
time attacking unique specimens of tyranny, fraud, or deception.
He certainly has to forego the prestige that attaches itself to every
social reformer, but the effect of his work, especially in Spain, is
increased by the mere fact that it is without avowed social purpose.


118
JACINTO BENAVENTE
That he avoids the cramped exaggeration which his intense interest
in the individual and comparative indifference to mass problems
make so easy for him is the best evidence of the real quality of his
genius as a dramatist. His splendid, almost Anglo-Saxon, sense of
fair play has been both a source of inspiration and a balance to pre-
vent his satires swinging into lampoons.
Changes in the thought of a people are subtle and difficult to ap-
praise, and, while we cannot measure the effect now, the plays of
this most popular dramatist are undoubtedly sociological forces at
work in Spain to-day. Their effect upon contemporary Spanish
drama, however, is very apparent, and at least two of the best known
writers of these plays are men of serious social purpose. Although
the classical drama of theatrical romanticism, which has held the
stage of Spain in various forms since the Golden Age of Lope de
Vega and Calderon, was killed in the revolt of 1890, still its spirit
lives, and Benavente is the first Spanish dramatist to write plays
conceived in the modern spirit and executed in modern technique.
Especially is their effect felt upon the young playwrights who are
following the path to serious social drama blazed by Galdós and
Joaquin Dicenta.
WILLIAMS HAYNES.


A CASUAL VIRTUIST
THE QUEEN OF CHINA AND OTHER Poems. By Ed-
ward Shanks. 12mo. 240 pages. Alfred A. Knopf.
New York.
F those who believe in being cultivated and casual at the same
time could have a special poetry, The Queen of China and
Other Poems should find some place in it. The imagery of these
poems is not startling-carefully so-nor exquisite; yet it is pros-
perous. If there are some hints at lèse-morality, the taste is yet
uniformly good. The poems avoid tangential originality; they mul-
tiply the things they do not say; their moods are well found, and
their terms of expression are developed from good traditions; their
verse impressions, to a degree, are those of comeliness and comity.
The lines are pleased and pleasant, not casuistical but still not un-
studied-always and carefully fluent. Mr. Shanks is considerate
with his felicities; he is intelligible as well as sensuous. He is grave
and gay-moderately; and especially he is not betrayed readily into
lines that were better unwritten.
He does not profess the steep enormous moods; nor is he espe-
cially attentive to the subtleties of the spirit. In fact, to anyone
accustomed to Browning these poems will seem rather inadequate
as a record of the heart's seasons. Yet he has apparently an afflu-
ence of the powers that make for competent lines, and he shows on
occasion a fine gravity.
He shows most, from verse to verse and page to page, profit
taken from the study of poetry as it is not usually studied the
study of it not as versification or metaphor, but as modulation. The
far, imported idea and the rare, rich image are rare indeed on his
page. His care seems to be for flexibility and inflection, those es-
sential and inimitable parts of the expressive mechanism. And
surely of all such preoccupations and studies this is the soundest
and least liable to asininity; it cannot be pursued mechanically or
fanatically; it is subject to a sense of proportion in its student, who
cannot master its possibilities except with just intelligence and the
finest attention.
a
119


120
A CASUAL VIRTUIST
Intelligence and fine attention are perhaps the main merits of
these poems. There is to be found in them surely very little espe-
cially penetrating consideration or poignant vision of life; such
matters seem not to be the object of Mr. Shanks's intention. He is
clear-minded; he is consciously cultivated; he is at ease and free.
But he does not attempt the fixing of any horizon-stretching ideas
or the impingement of any tall ideals. And in the exercise of the
poet's particular mightiness, the making of metaphors and visions,
cities, creatures, life, he seems graciously rather than greatly en-
gaged. But he thus never exhausts himself and on every occasion
chooses his best. His quality is not strained; he is careful and wise
as to his limits, and does those things only which he can do evenly
and easily. He is studious, as he should be, in the economy of
means, in the employment of unostentatious materials, in refinding
the endless new textures in old plain-song meanings, in restoring the
lost edges of ordinary expression, in revelation of the forgotten
face of usual and necessary words. In this and in a certain combi-
nation of modesty and ease he might be called a virtuist; for further
studies of this sort should probably lead to the classic offhand excel-
lence of the virtuoso. He has lines that surely seem written in the
thought of the final fine cleanness of virtuosity.
a
“The well made sonnet takes the azure sea
Proud in her beauty as a halcyon,
Her timbers chosen words, and melody
Filling her sails of rhyme.”
The especial creative virtues of these poems seem to be intelligence
and attention rather than emotion and imagination, partly for the
reason that in them command of wholes seems not commensurate
with finish of parts. The second longest poem in the volume, The
Fireless Town, is crowded with excellent parts, but seems rather of
relative consequence totally. The Queen of China is a better poem,
surely a better long poem, for the reason that its parts are con-
strained for the sake of its total effect. As a whole the volume does
not request praise so much for imagination or full emotion as for the
slight and unintrusive many things done, the discovered multitude
of half-secrets that promote the study of comeliness.
CHARLES KAY.
a


AN ILLUSTRATOR
PRINTS AND DRAWINGS BY FRANK BRANGWYN: WITH
Some Other PHASES OF His Art. By Walter Shaw
Sparrow. Illustrated. 4to. 288 pages. John Lane.
Company. New York.
!
PRINT
-
RINTS and Drawings by Frank Brangwyn is Mr. Walter
Shaw Sparrow's second tribute to his master. The value
of the book lies in its numerous and excellent reproductions; the
text is almost unreadable. The author is apparently incapable of
close thinking or criticism; his discursive sentences are clogged with
allusions that have no bearing on his subject and with tiresome ex-
pressions of puerile flattery. One searches in vain for a single
penetrating opinion on art: to Mr. Sparrow, Brangwyn is the fault-
less painter, and in his slow periphrastic style he tells us, with many
a quotation from Shakespeare, whom he calls the "world-brain,'
that the Welsh artist is the “lineal descendant of Titian, Tintoret,
Michael Angelo, Rubens, and Velazquez.” There are other state-
ments equally astonishing, as, for example, those concerning the
modern men-he speaks of “Cezanne, to a certain extent a pupil of
Paul Gaugin,” of the "embryonic art of Matisse,” and of Gaugin
as “an original colourist with a pleasant note in decoration.” It is a
crime to victimize Brangwyn in so expensive and elaborate a fashion
- the text should be deleted and the illustrations published sepa-
rately with simple explanatory notes.
In every art we find men who seem predestined to "success," men
who achieve recognition early and hold it during a lifetime; who
love the pomp
of
oratory, the grammar of pigment and the theatri-
cal phrase; who attempt all things in the province of their respec-
tive arts and carry them off with gusto and skill; who maintain a
high uniformity of excellence, and yet who add but little to creative
wealth. In this category we may put Disraeli, Lord Lytton, Henry
Irving, Besnard, Zuloaga, and Sargent; and here in all fairness we
must place Brangwyn. At fifteen he was praised by William Mor-
ris; at seventeen he was hung in the Royal Academy. He has
proved equally facile with the brush or the burin. He has appeared
by turn as a mural decorator, a book illustrator, a water-colourist, a
a
a
>
121


122
AN ILLUSTRATOR
3
designer of interiors, a maker of book-plates, a lithographer, a
marine painter, and an engraver; he has been everywhere and is
known everywhere; he has innumerable medals and honours; and
now at the age of fifty-two the list of his collected works would fill
a volume. But his productions are not likely to endure: he is dis-
tinguished by an athletic virtuosity in surface effects and by an
unrivalled versatility; his work is never informed by the profounder
human emotions-it is void of great and solid beauty.
Brangwyn has no sense of composition - he has an extraordinary
-
talent for dramatic arrangements. Complete unity of design ob-
tained by the subordination of the integral parts to the whole, by
the interdependence of the parts linearly and voluminally, he does
not understand and seldom attempts. In his oil paintings, par-
ticularly his huge and ambitious works, the eye wanders from mass
to mass, from group to group, unable to find a point of repose or a
centre of balance. To counteract this grave defect he relies upon
subject matter, always choosing a scene definitely illustrative and
striking; the spectator is momentarily deceived, but once the ex-
traneous interest is satisfied the entire content of the picture is ex-
hausted, and the canvas fails to induce a second examination.
Compare The Departure of Columbus with Inter Artes et Naturam
by Puvis de Chavannes. Brangwyn's decoration is crowded with
figures; his desire was apparently to get as many people as possible
into a given space, and as a result the picture, for all its magnitude,
looks small and incomplete. The Frenchman's panel is an example
of perfect elimination of unessentials-each figure is absolutely
necessary to the design. One of Brangwyn's favorite devices is the
collocation of figures in rows, a clever scheme when employed to
emphasize an event, and used on many occasions by the artist to
bring home to us the significance of cruelty or tragedy. But look
at these arrangements carefully- they have a finished technical
symmetry, an appeal legitimate and moving like a frieze, but they
are not composed. Nine times out of ten the attention of the ob-
server is drawn to the foreground and held there; back of a line of
heavy masses there is a waste of vague spotting and scattered shad-
ows-effective, no doubt, but unsatisfying.
One of the greatest benefits conferred on art by modern painting
is the use of pure colour. It has rehabilitated the pictorial vision; it
has led to violent scientific conclusions and crazy applications, and
а


THOMAS JEWELL CRAVEN
123
with many
of the youthful artists it is a sort of diathesis. Their
formula is :
“Colour is form, form colour- that is all
Ye know of art and all ye need to know.”
Pure colour may serve two purposes, either as flat decoration, as in
Gaugin, or to intensify form, as in Cezanne. Brangwyn, whose
mind is not speculative, has not investigated recent pigmental de-
velopments nor explored their intricacies, and judged by old or new
methods, he cannot be called a colourist. His travels in the East and
in Spain and his tendency toward tropical splendour have instilled
in him a love for barbaric contrasts. His colour is brilliant and
harsh, never rich and harmonious; it is theatrical and thin-laid on
as costumes for his figures-never to strengthen tissue or to increase
palpability and depth. One of his most characteristic pictures, The
Brass Shop, is a dazzling array of hot and shining textures. The
pots and pans glisten like mirrors but the colour is superficial-it
ends in reflection and not in volume. Compare it with Renoir's
handling of still-life, or with Cezanne's, and you will see the differ-
cnce between illustration of the highest type and art, between the
metallic luster of swaggering talent and the luminous strength of
genius. Some of his earlier water-colours, done in a grey palette
under the influence of Whistler, are free from his usual fiery style;
the colour is charming and the drawing good, and we find none of
the tricks of the professional decorator of town halls.
Brangwyn is frequently linked with Rubens, a painter with whom
he shares not one aesthetic quality. He resembles the Flemish mas-
ter in his zeal for large canvases and in his fine enthusiasm, but the
resemblance goes no farther. Rubens is the greatest composer the
world has ever seen. His knowledge of the nude in action, his in-
exhaustible variety in types of composition, and his colossal com-
mand of plastic drawing make the work of most of his successors
seem paltering and effeminate. Now bring in “Brangwyn at his
best” (Mr. Walter Shaw Sparrow's familiar phrase), and he re-
mains the big boy of the art school. Brangwyn's academic draughts-
manship is generally disguised by the garb of the navvy, the buc-
caneer, and the soldier. Let us divest it of the trappings that lend
a documentary interest and approach it from the ruthless standard
of formal order. He has rarely painted the undraped animal, but


124
AN ILLUSTRATOR
on one occasion he set out to construct a masterpiece in the higher
manner. The picture is entitled Mars and Venus and should be
viewed by all who think Brangwyn descended from the old masters.
The figures are sprawling and unrelated; the deities are swarthy
Orientals, so conceived to rouse an adventitious interest, and the
drawing is flat and academic. His painting of the nude is some-
thing like Zorn and more like Zuloaga, but not so forceful as either;
and to look at Mars and Venus and then to turn to Rubens' Perseus
and Andromeda (1615) is almost as reasonable as to compare
Daniel Chester French with Michael Angelo.
When he began to etch, Brangwyn, with a predilection for the
grandiose, was dissatisfied with the smallness of the conventional
plates and caused metal sheets to be made several times larger than
the ordinary size. This is typical—too often has he mistaken size
for strength, productivity for creative energy. As an etcher he has
remarkable gifts (his biographer tells us that he scratches his plates
directly from nature), and for sheer ability to render the sordid
phases of penury, or the aspect of old and crumbling towns, he is
unequalled. But he cannot simplify like Millet; while Rembrandt,
on a small plate by means of a few perfectly apportioned patches of
black and white and a minimum of lines summarizing his great
knowledge of the human figure, made etchings that take all the life
out of Brangwyn's pretentious studies and relegate them to their
proper environment, the walls of the Academy and the fashionable
shops in Fifth Avenue.
Brangwyn is at his best in his lithographs, wood-cuts, and small
drawings in black and white. British art has always been rich in
book-plates and illustrations for ballads and fairy tales: Rowland-
son, Blake, Millais, Rossetti, and Beardsley have raised this form
of decoration to a dignity and distinction not found on the Continent
or elsewhere, and Brangwyn carries on the tradition with some of
the skill and artistry of his predecessors. There is a trace of Morris
in his designs, but they are in no respect imitative, and are executed
with surpassing cleverness, both in the disposition of the blacks and
whites and in the delicate feeling for form in outline. In no other
branch of this work has he managed his lines with sensitivity, and
though there is not, technically speaking, organization, there is a
certain structure and stability. Most of these wood-cuts are done
at times when he has no inclination to be monumental and impres-
a


THOMAS JEWELL CRAVEN
125
sive and it is to be regretted that he does not devote more of his
energy to small and genuinely decorative drawings.
His part in the late war must not be overlooked-he is the only
man that made tolerable posters. The British Government,
through some freakish catholicity, commissioned Vorticists along
with Academicians to immortalize the shambles, but its street dis-
plays were even worse than our own. The French work was com-
monplace: Sem and Steinlen hacked out the best appeals in the
conventional style—the modernists were strangely silent. America
entrusted her responsibilities to a bureau of head-hunters, and we
had to put up with epicene madonnas begging for money, and with
the smooth bloodless dolls that adorn the covers of the sensational
magazines. Brangwyn's adventuresome nature and his hatred of
cruelty fitted him well for the task. He attacked the subject with
restless eagerness and his lithographs are powerful and to the point.
As art they leave much to be desired-often his drawing is concen-
trated on two duelling soldiers in the foreground, and in the dis-
tance a swarming legion that would be more effective as an unbroken
mass, but as posters to depict the primeval madness of nations and
the suffering of non-combatants they are inimitable.
Brangwyn will live not as a great creator but as a picturesque
semi-realist and an illustrator of heroic proportions. Though an
eclectic, his many borrowings are submerged by a strong personal-
ity, by a muscularity of drawing that makes him always individual.
Like all men heavily endowed he has paid the penalty for his gifts
and has never raised any department of art to the high pitch of
original genius. He has accomplished what is impossible to the
photographer and beyond the realm of the pure creator— he has
given graphic expression to current events and made valuable rec-
ords of the mechanical activities of the day, the building of ships,
the subservience of man to machines, the sanguinary stupidities,
and the like. In another way he has been of immeasurable service:
he has put his work before the public and made it a living force; he
has demonstrated, to the discouragement of the solitary painter, that
it is possible for pictures to find a vast audience. Competent men
of his stature do more toward the popularization of art than any
amount of special pleading-they help to build up a background
from which the man of genius may emerge. Brangwyn is the best
of living illustrators.
THOMAS JEWELL CRAVEN.


AN ENGLISH LYRIST,
#
115
Poems: First Series. By J. C. Squire. 12mo.
pages. Alfred A. Knopf. New York.
TH
you think
you have
HE business of poetry, like any other, has its minor difficulties
which are hardly ever appreciated by the laity; and not the
least of these is the question as to what you shall call your book when
you have got it together. At the outset of a career, the problem is
comparatively simple. You can call your first book, with chaste
simplicity, Poems, and the second, if you will, New Poems. And
at the end of a career simplicity returns. If
really finished, you can issue your Collected Poems and be done with
it; and your literary executors can truthfully call the volume they
publish, Complete Poems. But the intermediate stages are not so
easy. You can call your third volume Ode to Marshal Foch and
Other Poems, or, more imaginatively, Bread and Nightingales; but
I confess that neither alternative appeals to me very strongly. And
if you want to halt and collect all you have done, weeding out the
useless and rearranging the rest, before going on, what are you going
to call the result?
These reflections have been provoked in me by the almost pathetic
preface which Mr. J. C. Squire has written for his Poems: First
Series. The problem has filled him with perplexity:
CE
“Had the volume been called and Other Poems it might
have given a false impression that its contents were entirely new.
Had it been called Collected Poems the equally false impression
might have been given that there was something of finality about it.
The title selected seemed best to convey both the fact that it was a
collection and that, under Providence, other (and, let us hope, su-
perior) collections will follow it.”
The solution is not an unhappy one; and the readers of this volume
will receive with pleasure the promise of others to come. The sug-
gestion that its successors will probably be poetically superior to it is
126


EDWARD SHANKS
127
well borne out by the book itself, which shows a current of con-
sistent improvement from 1905 to 1917.
One of the most significant signs of this improvement seems to
me to be the charming Song, which was written sometime in 1917:
“Eyes like flowers and falling hair
Seldom seen nor ever long,
Then I did not know you were
Destined subject for a song:
Sharing your unconsciousness
Of
your double loveliness,
Unaware how fair you were,
Peaceful
eyes and shadowy hair.
“Only, now your beauty falls
Sweetly on some other place,
Lonely reverie recalls
More than anything your face;
Any idle hour may find
Stealing on my captured mind,
Faintly merging from the air,
Eyes like flowers and falling hair.”
I do not suggest that this piece is in itself of vast importance or by
any means the best thing that Mr. Squire has written. But com-
pare it with what he was writing in 1912:
“Than farthest stars more distant,
A mile more,
A mile more,
A voice cries on insistent:
‘You may smile more if you
will;
''You may sing too and spring too;
But numb at last
And dumb at last,
Whatever port you cling to,
You must come at last to a hill.


128
AN ENGLISH LYRIST
To take your
‘And never a man, you'll find there
hand
And shake your hand;
But when you go behind there
You must make your hand a sword,
a
‘To fence with a foeman swarthy
And swink there
Nor shrink there,
Though cowardly and worthy
Must drink there one reward.'
I have purposely so chosen as to make the contrast as glaring as pos-
sible; but the contrast is implicit, though not always so obvious, be-
tween Mr. Squire's early work and his later work. He used to be
an elaborate, complicated, abstruse, and difficult poet; and in the
process of years, without losing his power or subtlety, he has gained
in simplicity and much increased his range. The later of these two
pieces, individual in feeling and rhythm, is still a lyric almost in the
Elizabethan tradition. The earlier piece is one which betrays in
form and language the author's too great consciousness of his own
singularity of feeling.
I do not suggest that Mr. Squire, however his development pro-
ceeds, will ever fall into the ordinary tradition of English poetry.
He is by nature, I think, mostly a rather aloof, difficult, and austere
poet. But this fact has ceased to make him angular, awkward, and
gymnastic in expression. The piece which I consider to be his best,
The Stronghold, moves in a sufficiently rarefied atmosphere of
thought:
"Quieter than any twilight
Shed over earth's last deserts,
Quiet and vast and shadow less
Is that unfounded keep,
Higher than the roof of the night's high chamber,
Deep as the shaft of sleep.
“And solitude will not cry there,
Melancholy will not brood there,
Hatred, with its sharp corroding pain,
And fear will not come there at all:


EDWARD SHANKS
129
“Never will a tear or a heart-ache enter
Over that enchanted wall.
“But, O, if you find that castle
Draw back your foot from the gateway,
Let not its peace invite you,
Let not its offerings tempt you.
For faded and decayed like a garment,
Love to a dust will have fallen,
And song and laughter will have gone with sorrow,
And hope will have gone with pain;
And of all the throbbing heart's high courage
Nothing will remain.”
a
But here the expression is simple enough to catch up the reader who
does not dwell naturally in these metaphysical regions, and the
effect is to prove more certainly than before that Mr. Squire is an
original poet with a definite and valid way of looking at life.
With this growth of simplicity he has also extended his power of
doing the simple things, of describing natural beauty; and his long
poem Rivers, here collected for the first time, is a series of extraordi-
narily beautiful pictures, seen or imagined:
“Rivers I have seen which were beautiful,
Slow rivers winding in the flat fens,
With bands of reeds like thronged green swords
Guarding the mirrored sky;
And streams down-tumbling from the chalk hills
To valleys of meadows and water-cress beds,
And bridges where, under dark weed-coloured shadows,
Trout Ait or lie.
..O in reverie I know the Volga
That turns his back upon Europe,
And the two great cities on his banks,
Novgorod and Astrakhan;
Where the world is a few soft colours,
a
And under the dove-like evening
The boatmen chant ancient songs,
The tenderest known to man.”
.


130
AN ENGLISH LYRIST
And these four extracts, though I did not choose them primarily for
that purpose, illustrate what is, after all, the most important item-in
Mr. Squire's poetical equipment. I mean his rhythm. He is one
of those poets who appeal in the first place by their rhythm, just as
others appeal mainly by vowel-melody, and others by the evocation
of pictures. I do not mean that any good poet does neglect any one
of these three constituents of good verse. They are the indispensable
channels through which feeling is conveyed or aroused; but any
given poet will appeal chiefly by one of them, and with Mr. Squire
it is rhythm. He is one of the few living men (Dr. Bridges and
Mr. De la Mare are others) of whom it can be said that he has made
definite and genuine discoveries in this direction. Most of our poets
(and no blame to them) prefer to perform on the instruments which
their predecessors have left them. Others, whom I like less, merely
sit on the keyboard, as Liszt said. But Mr. Squire has made real
discoveries of real value. The lovely, fluent stanza of Rivers, capa-
ble of assuming innumerable different shapes without losing its indi-
viduality, proves the worth of his metrical invention.
EDWARD SHANKS.
.


/
ROMANTICISM ENJOINED
ROUSSEAU AND ROMANTICISM. By Irving Babbitt.
8vo. 427 pages. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.
"THE
THE artist,” wrote Conrad at the pinnacle of the romantic nine-
to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives: to our sense of pity,
and beauty, and pain: to the latent feeling of 'fellowship with all
creation-and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity
that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts to the soli-
darity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in
hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together
all humanity-the dead to the living and the living to the unborn."
No such breadth of understanding-I almost said vision of the artis-
tic problem-illumes the pages of Mr. Irving Babbitt's Rousseau
and Romanticism. Mr. Babbitt the critic is a Puritan, first and last.
He does not like the romantic; that we have known for some time.
He prefers the restrained, the balanced, the decorous, the intellectu-
alized product of classicism. No one can quarrel with him for this;
nor with his main contention that from Rousseau to Bergson “the
analytic intellect” has been sadly held in abeyance. But why, after
Lasserre and a host of others, he should devote 393 pages to give
romanticism its coup de grâce puzzles the expectant reader.
Omnis definitio est negatio. Mr. Babbitt's book is a long account
of what romanticism is not. It is not a return to the Middle Ages;
that of course is merely an incident, a part of the trappings, as it
were, like the blue flower of the German romanticists or the ivory
tower of De Vigny or the red waistcoat of Gautier. It is not the
typical, the commonplace, the broadly and universally human. It
is not the classicism of Boileau and Pope: if they represent reason,
romanticism represents unreason; if they uphold decorum, romanti-
cism destroys it; if they stand for the analytic intellect, romanticism
stands for intellectual confusion. In short, a thing is classical when
representative of a class, "a thing is romantic when it is strange, un-
expected, intense, superlative, extreme, unique.” All this is true
131


132
ROMANTICISM ENJOINED
enough and has long been admitted. Did not Victor Hugo say as
much when, in 1830, he placed in Hernani's mouth the words:
"tu me crois peut-être
Un homme comme sont tous les autres, un être
Intelligent, qui court droit au but qu'il reva.
Détrompe-toi : je suis une force qui va,
Agent aveugle et sourd de mystères funèbres,
Une âme de malheur faite avec des ténèbres,
Ou vais-je? Je ne sais, mais je me sens poussé
D'un souffle impetueux ?”
Certainly it is inevitable, if one is to paint romanticism ade-
quately, to paint it against the pseudo-classical background. Other-
wise one is likely to err and to think, as so many English critics have
done, that the romantic is simply the imaginative. We can be grate-
ful to Mr. Babbitt for upholding the distinctions; for, as he makes
clear, each age has its “imaginative” and “realistic” phases, and the
French seventeenth century has its romanesque writers who, like
Corneille, emotionalized the reason and depicted it imaginatively in
the lives of their characters. Thus Pascal's moi haïssable is quite a
different type from the moi of Hugo's Hernani, for example. And
the point of departure for any study of the romantic is without ques-
tion the sentimental and expansive eighteenth century, no matter
what country we are considering. So that Mr. Babbitt's repetition
of the oft-quoted statement that “romanticism is all that is not Vol-
taire” is again in place.
But if by a series of negations we arrive at the limits within
which the romantic spirit rules, we must everlastingly affirm if the
reader is to get a just idea of what romanticism positively is. "If I .
I.
object to a romantic philosophy," says Mr. Babbitt, “it is because
I do not like its fruits." Well and good, reply “the smart young
radicals" whom Mr. Babbitt would confound, but first show us that
you appreciate the fruits, and cite to us one passage in your book to
set beside the following from the no less negative aperçu by F. Y.
Eccles: La Liquidation du Romantisme (page 7.):
“L'art qui en issu prétend satisfaire à une curiosité diffuse sur tout
l'univers, en égalant l'opulence des rêves à la diversité des choses;


WILLIAM A. NITZE
133
et cette ambition, où des puissances d'observation et de vision jusqu’-
alors atrophiées ont trouvé enfin leur emploi, a enfanté (pour peu
que le génie s'en soit mêlé) des œuvres débordantes de vie, d'une
somptuosite de couleurs prestigieuse et d'une plasticité souveraine.”
This is the art that produced the masterpieces of romantic genius,
that inspired the Hugos, the Shelleys, the Mussets, the Keats, and
even the Baudelaires, Swinburnes, and Claudels. Think of what
literature would be if such as these had never written—and this is
the crux of the matter, with all the emphasis of their expansive per-
sonalities to inspire them! It is futile to condemn an art on the
basis of standards that are not artistic. We can affirm that no art is
good that neglects human nature, and in so far as human nature is
governed by ethical standards art must also reflect them. But just
as we cannot judge science by ideals that are artistic, so we cannot
judge art by ideals that are moral. Le mal romantique may be bad
socially; whether it is bad artistically depends on the extent to
which it destroys the formal control of the artist over his material.
Goethe, as Mr. Babbitt twice remarks, was wont to judge Werther
as "weakness seeking to give itself the prestige of strength”—but
Goethe, just as other romantic geniuses of calibre, had the strength
to objectify his experience and thus keep the poison of life from con-
taminating his art. How far Mr. Babbitt is from grasping the rela-
tion of art to truth, which is the only aspect of art that can be
considered "ethical,” is seen in these singular words on Flaubert:
“Beauty in the purely aesthetic and unethical sense that Flaubert
gives to the word is little more than the pursuit of illusion. The
man who thus treats beauty as a thing apart, who does not refer back
his quest of the exquisite to some ethical centre, will spend his life,
Ixion-like, embracing phantoms.”
Madame Bovary may be a positive evil for those naive persons to
whom all reading is a sensual, subjective experience. For such even
the Sunday-school library has its dangers. But it is sufficient that
Madame Bovary was true to human nature in all of its details to
make it enter that field of a “higher reality" which Mr. Babbitt cor-
rectly attributes to Aristotle in its formulation; and therefore Ma-
dame Bovary belies the words we have just quoted. In this sense


134
ROMANTICISM ENJOINED
.
the true artist always idealizes his subject, whether it is moral or
immoral according to human conventions makes no difference-and
places it where the ethical emotions do not exist.
Another matter, distinct from the artistic one, is the question of
romanticism as a philosophy of life. We may admire the artistic
creations of the romanticists and yet as critics of life reject the ro-
mantic Weltanschauung as a whole. In the latter field Mr. Babbitt
is on more solid ground; and his chapters on Romantic Morality,
Romantic Irony, Romanticism and Nature, are crowded with ob-
servations that are interesting and in large measure sound. As a
rule of conduct, Kant's conception of the thing-in-itself or Faust's
maxim Gefühl ist Alles is a dangerous principle for nine-tenths of
humanity to follow. Far safer is the "supreme maxim of human-
istic morality" as enunciated by Cicero: “The whole praise of virtue
is in action." "Her conduct was reprehensible,” says Rousseau of
Madame de Warens, “but her heart was pure.” Romanticism
abounds in just such sophistries as this; and to a large extent Rous-
seau is the father of them all. The figure of the courtesan who has
been rehabilitated through love, that stock-theme of nineteenth
century dramatists and poets-goes back directly to La Nouvelle
Héloïse. And when it comes to the corrective to such sentimental-
ity, Romantic Irony either cleaves the heart in two, as in Heine; or
leaves us hanging over the abyss of indeterminate desire, as in Bau-
delaire. As to Nature, Mr. Babbitt is equally certain that the ro-
mantic attitude is disastrous, though here his ethical bias again
plays him strange tricks in evaluating literature. He says:
“It should be plain from what has already been said that the
romanticist tends to make of nature the mere plaything of his mood.
When Werther's mood is cheerful, Nature smiles at him benignly.
When his mood darkens she becomes for him 'a devouring monster.'
When it grows evident to the romanticist that nature does not alter
with this alteration, he chides her at times for her impassibility;
or again he seeks to be impassible like her, even if he can be so only
at the expense of his humanity.”
It is true, this projection of the ego into Nature leads in many cases
to the pathetic fallacy: so in Rousseau or Wordsworth or Château-
briand. But along with much that is mawkish, the identification of


WILLIAM A. NITZE
135
nature and man has produced much that is beautiful and true; and
Mr. Babbitt errs in throwing into the same crucible the sentimental
outpourings of a René and such wonderful creations as Shelley's Ode
to the West Wind and Leconte de Lisle's
"Midi, roi des étés, étendu sur la plaine,"
in which the symbolism is a perfect expression of the inner mood.
In other words, "to live dangerously”—as Nietzsche said—is at
once the curse and the blessing of the romantic point of view. It is
only the vitally strong that can stand up under the lust of knowl-
edge, the lust of sensation, and the lust of power, and turn these into
channels in which they will be productive in the highest sense. The
early Renaissance and romanticism have this in common, that they
both subjected temperament to the restraining influence of form;
see Nietzsche himself, whom Mr. Babbitt is leagues from appre-
ciating. And where romanticism fails to do this and strikes out
new forms, our verdict will depend on whether these derive from
the subject treated and are thus the product of an inner necessity,
or whether the form is an empty shell and thus merely rhetoric.
The weakness, therefore, of Mr. Babbitt's book is his moral pre-
occupation, the failure to distinguish between romanticism as an
ethical system and romanticism as an art. Against both of these
aspects Mr. Babbitt invokes not only the pseudo-classical rule of
reason and the classical “insight into the universal” but also the
Buddhistic ideal of moral action. "The man,” says Mr. Babbitt,
"who drifts supinely with the current of desire is guilty, according
to Buddha, of the gravest of all vices-spiritual or moral indolence.
He, on the contrary, who curbs or reins in his expansive desires is
displaying the chief of all virtues, spiritual vigilance or strenuous-
Progress on this path may be known by its fruits-
negatively by the extinction of the expansive desires (the literal
meaning of Nirvâna), positively by an increase in peace, poise, cen-
trality.” The burden of moral responsibility, thinks Mr. Babbitt,
then rests on everyone's shoulders: to this the artist is no exception.
Granted; but not in the sense that the artist must enunciate moral
principles; only in the sense that he must be true to his art and no
more. How far the Western world has drifted away from the Ori-
ental wisdom Mr. Babbitt would have us realize by the catastrophe
ness.
.


136
ROMANTICISM ENJOINED
which has overwhelmed the civilization of modern Europe. Does
Mr. Babbitt forget that Japan, whose art is Buddhistic, has been
a party to this overthrow? No doubt romanticism as the "age of
vital forces” has been too thoroughly discredited to go on as before.
At the same time, let us not forget that during the last four hun-
dred years it was the West and not the