. And the error of contemporary
criticism lies, likewise, in stimulating this one-sided demand for
soothing syrups and teething-rings and failing to cry out always for
the whole apothecary shop.
Let us take an example. You are, let us say, a high-minded citi-
zen of the United States, intent on national security and the sanc-


270
PREJUDICES
tity of the Seventh Mosaic Law. Full of democratic idealism and a
respect for American womanhood, you observe, in a book you are
reading, that a German spy, by name Schmidt, has plotted for the
overthrow of the American Government and has succeeded, inciden-
tally, in effecting the ruin of a beautiful American girl. You are
disgusted. You are repelled. You are horrified. And as a loyal
citizen of the United States you are patriotically thrilled to learn
that this same German spy is captured on page 256, sentenced on
page 258, shot on page 281, and buried without honours on page
285. Your patriotic soul, forsooth, probably soars into the very
empyrean on discovering that so dastardly a criminal has come to
so judicious and timely an end. But as an artist, as a critic, even as
an intelligent reader, do you care a whit whether Schmidt is dead or
alive? You do not. For as an artist, as a critic, or as an intelligent
reader your politics are neither German nor American, and your
morals are as international as the sun. You may be incidentally
pleased over the vindication of some of your personal beliefs. But
this pleasure is merely the pleasure of the patriot and the moralizer.
In so far as you are an artist your delight is solely in the clash of idea
with idea, the impact of personality on personality, and the battle of
creed against creed. And you realize that to demand the downfall
of iniquity and the triumph of good, as most of our critics are fond
of doing, is equivalent to saying that minor keys in music are very
sad, that sadness often leads to suicide, and that Beethoven's Fifth
Symphony, being in the minor mode, should therefore be suppressed
at once because it tends to depopulate the world.
Such juvenile standards of art criticism are not merely prevalent
in this country: they are well-nigh universal. Fortunately, for
every war there is a hero, for every Hellespont there is a Leander,
and at every critical feast there is at least one guest who knows how
to handle a fork. Mr. Mencken's table manners are frequently as-
tonishing to the epigoni of letters, but his skill in disposing of cur-
rent literature by the mouthful is so obviously neat and effective as
to disarm reproach with admiration. Finding the fare good, he has
bluntly shaken his head in approval; finding the fare tolerable, he
has eaten it with a growl; finding the fare atrocious, he has over-
turned the table entirely and brought all the china crashing to the
floor. His critical vehemence is sometimes alarming. But it always
is healthy, for it bespeaks an insatiable appetite for nourishment, as
a


WINTHROP PARKHURST
271
well as an open demand for the best in the larder, that seldom has
been exhibited either this side of the Atlantic or of the Nineteenth
Century. The author of Prejudices realizes that to err is human.
He knows, also, that critically to forgive is asinine. Therefore he
never forgives, never cleans his plate for the sake of good form,
never makes pretty farewell speeches about having had a good time.
If the food pleases him-as it does occasionally-he eats it at once
and holds out his plate for more. If it displeases him, on the con-
trary-and this happens less occasionally-he rejects it straightway
and stormily goes home to bed. And if the world hears promptly
of his pleasure, the very stars are made privy to his pain.
There is, as I have said, refreshing honesty in this thunderous ap-
proval and denunciation of current American literature. It is hon-
esty, moreover, that has seldom been matched either here or abroad.
Poe, grinding his heel in the dust to hollow out a grave for Long-
fellow, was not more courageous than Mr. Mencken, who has struck
down by name any of his contemporaries whom he considers silly,
weak, or ephemeral. Nor is his onslaught merely brutal. His blud-
geon is fitted with a keen blade. If he lived in the Eighteenth Cen-
tury and wrote with a quill, he would, one feels, be sharpening it
constantly. His opinions are edged with a remarkably penetrating
style; and there is weight behind his blow no less certainly than
there is a knife in front of his axe-head.
With such critical equipment a man is certain to travel far. That
Mr. Mencken has travelled farther in his examination of present-day
literatures than any other American, excepting perhaps Mr. Hune-
ker, is a statement which only the timid would end with an interro-
gation mark and only the blind would not begin at all. That he
suffers from a defect, however, which cripples many of his judge-
ments and warps no inconsiderable part of his views is a statement
which equally demands the light. And the humour and tragedy of
this particular shortcoming are born of the fact that the very evil of
Puritanism which Mr. Mencken continually embattles has infected
him locally with a disease which, if less dangerous, is no less viru-
lent than the one he is seeking to destroy. It is almost as though,
going forth to kill the typhus germ, he had inadvertently contracted
malaria of the soul. His actual theories of criticism are sound; and
his elucidation of the holy business of critics, at the beginning of the
volume, is as compact and forceful an example of zetetical writing
a
a


272
PREJUDICES
a
as his later review of Elsie Clews Parsons' Fear and Conventional-
ity, and his mordant exposure of Clayton Hamilton. It is when he
sets out to apply these theories that all his pent-up hatred of Pres-
byterianism, Puritanism, and the seven deadly virtues comes gush-
ing out in a stream of blinding indignation. There is not room here,
unfortunately, to notice the men he douses under it or the paradox-
ical manner in which the hose sometimes gets partially turned on
himself. I can only advise you to read the book through for your-
self, turning to page 16, where he observes, outraged, that “ This
girl is pretty,' says the artist. “But she has left off her undershirt, '
protests the head-master," and do your own wondering as to whether
or not, if Mr. Mencken took a part in the conversation, it would no
run: “'This girl is pretty,' says the artist. “But she has put her
undershirt on! »
Or, turning to page 26, conclude for yourself.if a critic, reviewing
the later novels of H. G. Wells, and announcing that "once a
critic begins to suffer from a messianic delusion his days as a serious
artist are ended,” might not with equal propriety develop that
aesthetic formula and state frankly that "once a critic begins to
suffer from a diabolic delusion his days as a bigoted critic are be-
gun.”
But these exterior flaws, after all, are more the flaws of critical
vehemence than of actual critical vice. They mar the surface of Mr.
Mencken's prejudices, but they are cracks which give outer indica-
tions of an internal, high-pressure revolt against the stupidities of
the day. They show that his prejudices, inside, are really opinions.
Those opinions are not always tempered with tolerance, and his
defence of the Goethe-Arnold-Spingarn-Croce theory of aesthetics
sometimes talks so loud, as Emerson would have put it, that you
cannot quite hear what it says. But again this is probably less Mr.
Mencken's fault than the fault of the land and age in which he lives.
In a country which has produced little art you cannot expect much
criticism of art that is sober, mature, or restrained. In such a land
you should be grateful if occasionally you discover one more man
who, if only at times, is content to hang the crystal globes of litera-
ture in his window and say, looking at them without rancour and
with very little impatience, “Je n'impose rien; Je ne purpose rien;
J'expose."
WINTHROP PARKHURST
5


BLINDS DOWN! !
The FACE OF THE WORLD. By Johan Bojer. 12mo.
328 pages. Moffat Yard & Company. New York.
THI
HE Face of the World, even more than The Great Hunger,
deals with matters for which the American is likely to have small
patience, if any ear at all. He is, in the first place, scarcely con-
cerned with such recondite problems as the insatiable hunger for
universality of consciousness or with the struggle to maintain a
world conscience. Why the hero of The Great Hunger should keep
on chasing a rainbow like that vision of his, with a good wife
and a fine home, even after he has lost his solid fortune, or why
Harold Mark in The Face of the World should worry himself
into neglect of his profession, loss of his wife, and premature old
age, and bring a great catastrophe upon a decent town through his
fretting over what was happening to the poor Armenians in Turkey
or the natives of Zanzibar or the children of the Dead End, are
concerns not of the news-sheets or the tickers but of an extremely
subjective life which, it has long since been clear, pioneering, world-
wilderness-subduing America has had no time for.
Harold Mark is one who is continually sinking into the sea of
humanity, losing himself in the soul of all mankind, hypnotized by
the rolling panorama of life that sweeps over the face of the world.
This obsessive conscience of unity and responsibility with all men
drives him from pillar to post, leaves him without roots in the ordi-
nary soil of life, turns all the things of common value to dross in his
hands, and finally gives him, indeed, the relative character of a
menace to society. He finds no release in vigorous action; his pro-
fession, medicine, comes to be meaningless; he does not even try to
hold his good, life-loving and life-accepting wife.
And when he tries to root himself again, withdraw to his native
village, a little corner of life where he can work and live in peace, he
finds only new demands upon his conscience. Ivar, the young fel-
low-townsman of Mark, drawn relentlessly to disaster by a fruitless
infatuation, has Mark's brooding fatality and sharpens the other
horn of the dilemma in which Mark struggles. It seems fatal to take
the world upon one's shoulders, but the catastrophe which the pa-
thetic love-maddened Ivar brings upon the town by burning it to


274
BLINDS DOWN!
the ground along with Mark's hospital, shows how equally if not
more futile it is to try to take upon oneself the burden of another
man's soul. It turns to mockery the comforting thought with which
Mark had come back to his mother and his town: "All honour to
the happy people with small horizon, with blinds down towards the
world and the great sea, and the windows open to a tiny garden.”
One can scarcely imagine Harold Mark interesting with any great
degree of sympathy the American fiction reader. Yet, if we but knew
it, his problem is one that, day by day, is coming more sharply home
to America and Americans. Here we were, we happy people with
small horizon, with blinds down toward the world. Is it the better
part of life as a nation that we say with a laugh in the face of the
world, “Come, let us cultivate our garden”? The garden has been
so fair, so flowing with milk and honey; it has been so cosy behind
the lowered blinds. And we have our domestic Ivars to help.
A temptation, but human. Life would be a bleak and wind-
torn thing if it were not for the blinds we can fortunately pull down
upon some of its horizons. Only for those nations and people with
the sturdiest of hearts and the most comprehending and unflinch-
ing of eyes is it given to go through life with all the windows of
their minds open and the blinds of their spirits up. The chances are
nine out of ten that it may accurately be said of the man walking
ahead of you in the street, “There is nothing he wants to know.”
Whether he is the happier man for it, happier that he is not driven
by some merciless impulse to push the boundaries of his knowledge
and sympathy even farther out, over mankind, beyond the stars-
this is the question embodied in the story of Harold Mark.
Are dreams and noble altruisms crimes? Is not the everyday
reality of work ultimate? Is one to take upon oneself the burdens
of the world or to do that task which lies nearest one in humility
and faith? Faith, perhaps; yes, but in what? Mark finds an intel-
lectual resolution of the problem under the inspiration of the Ninth
Symphony. It is a weak one and a poor one, but because it is one,
and because it is the only sort of answer we get out of life, we
put the book down with considerably better feeling than if the
author had ended by having Mark join the Royal Fusiliers and
find his salvation making the world safe, and so forth. That is one
sort of conscience even the American reader would have little pa-
tience with, now.
VIRGIL JORDAN






Ordin
MAETERLINCK LECTURING. BY IVAN OPFFER



THE INDIAL
XXII
MARCH 1920
MARK TWAIN'S HUMOUR
BY VAN WYCK BROOKS
E
VERY one who is familiar with Mark Twain's life will re-
call how reluctant he was to adopt the humorist's career and
how, to the end of his days, he was in revolt against a role which,
as he vaguely felt, had been thrust upon him: that he considered it
necessary to publish his Joan of Arc anonymously is only one of
many proofs of a lifelong sense that Mark Twain was an unworthy
double of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. His humorous writing he
regarded as something external to himself, as something other than
artistic self-expression, and it was in consequence of pursuing it,
we divine, that he was arrested in his moral and aesthetic develop-
ment. He adopted this career, however, because his humour was the
only writing he did in Nevada that found an appreciative audience,
and the immediate result of his decision was that he obtained from
the American public the prodigious and permanent approval his
own craving for success and prestige had driven him to seek. Here,
then, are the facts a discussion of Mark Twain's humour will have
to explain. We must see what that humour was, and what produced
it, and why in following it he violated his own nature and at the
same time achieved such ample material rewards.
It was in Nevada and California that Mark Twain's humour, of
which we have evidences during the whole of his adolescence, came
to the front; and it is a notable fact that almost every man of a
literary tendency who was brought into contact with those pioneer
conditions became a humorist. The "funny man” was one of the
outstanding pioneer types; he was, indeed, virtually the sole repre-
sentative of the republic of letters in the old West. Artemus Ward,


276
MARK TWAIN'S HUMOUR
a
Orpheus C. Ker, Petroleum V. Nasby, Dan de Quille, Captain Jack
Downing, even Bret Harte, sufficiently remind us of this fact.
Plainly, pioneer life had a sort of chemical effect on the creative
mind, instantly giving it a humorous cast; plainly, also, the hu-
morist was a type that pioneer society required in order to maintain
its psychic equilibrium. Mr. Albert Bigelow Paine seems to have
divined this in his description of Western humour. “It is a distinct
product,” he says. “It grew out of a distinct condition—the battle
-
with the frontier. The fight was so desperate, to take it seriously was
to surrender. Women laughed that they might not weep; men, when
they could no longer swear. 'Western humour was the result. It
is the freshest, wildest humour in the world, but there is tragedy
behind it.”
Perhaps we can best surprise the secret of this humour by noting
Mark Twain's instinctive reaction to the life in Nevada. It is evi-
dent that in many ways, and in spite of his high spirits and high
hopes, he found that life profoundly repugnant to him: he con-
stantly confesses in his diary and letters, indeed, to the misery it in-
volves. “I do hate to go back to the Washoe,” he writes, after a few
weeks of respite from mining. “We fag ourselves completely out
every day.” He describes Nevada as a place where the devil would
feel home-sick: “I heard a gentleman say, the other day, that it
was the 'd-dest country under the sun'—and that comprehensive
conception I fully subscribe to. It never rains here, and the dew
never falls. No flowers grow here, and no green thing gladdens the
eye. ... Our city lies in the midst of a desert of the purest-most un-
adulterated and uncompromising-sand.” And as with the setting,
so with the life. “High-strung and neurotic,” says Mr. Paine, "the
strain of newspaper work and the tumult of the Comstock had told
on him”: more than once he found it necessary—this young man of
:
twenty-eight-"to drop all work and rest for a time at Steamboat
Springs, a place near Virginia City, where there were boiling springs
and steaming fissures in the mountain-side, and a comfortable
hotel.” That he found the pace in California just as difficult we
have his own testimony; with what fervour he speaks of the "d-n
San Francisco style of wearing out life," the “careworn or eager,
anxious faces” that made his brief escape to the Sandwich Islands—
“God, what a contrast with California and the Washoe!”—ever
sweet and blessed in his memory. Never, in short, was a man more


VAN WYCK BROOKS
277
rasped by any social situation than was this young “barbarian,” as
people have called him, by what people also call the free life of the
West. We can see this in his profanity, which also, like his humour,
came to the front in Nevada and remained one of his prominent
characteristics through life. We remember how “mad” he was,
"clear through,” over the famous highway robbery episode: he was
always half-seriously threatening to kill people; he threatened to
kill his best friend, Jim Gillis. "To hear him denounce a thing,'
says Mr. Paine, "was to give one the fierce, searching delight of
galvanic waves;” naturally, therefore, no one in Virginia, according
to one of the Gillis brothers, could "resist the temptation of making
Sam swear.” Naturally; but from all this we observe that Mark
Twain was living in a state of chronic nervous exasperation.
Was this not due to the extraordinary number of repressions the
life of pioneering involved? It is true that it was, in one sense, a
free life. It was an irresponsible life; it implied a break with civili-
zation, with domestic, religious, and political ties. Nothing could be
freer in that sense than the society of the gold-seekers in Nevada
and California as we find it pictured in Roughing It. Free as that
society was, nevertheless, scarcely any normal instinct could have
been expressed or satisfied in it. The pioneers were not primitive
men; they were civilized men, often of gentle birth and education,
men for whom civilization had implied many restraints, of course,
but innumerable avenues also of social and personal expression and
activity to which their natures were accustomed. In escaping re-
sponsibility, therefore, they had only placed themselves in a position
where their instincts were blocked on every side. There were so few
women among them, for instance, that their sexual lives were either
starved or debased; and children were as rare as the “Luck” of Roar-
ing Camp, a story that shows how hysterical, in consequence of these
and similar conditions, the mining population was. Those who were
accustomed to the exercise of complex tastes and preferences found
themselves obliged to conform to a single monotonous routine.
There were criminal elements among them too, which kept them con-
tinually on their guard, and at best they were so diverse in origin
that any real community of feeling amongst them was virtually im-
possible. In becoming pioneers they had, as Mr. Paine says, to
accept a common mould; they were obliged to abdicate their
individuality, to conceal their differences and their personal pre-


278
MARK TWAIN'S HUMOUR
tensions under the mask of a rough good-fellowship that found
expression mainly in the nervously and emotionally devastating
terms of the saloon, the brothel, and the gambling-hell. Mark
Twain has described for us the "gallant host” which peopled this
hectic scene, that army of "erect, bright-eyed, quick-moving, strong-
handed young giants—the very pick and choice of the world's
glorious ones.” Where are they now? he asks in Roughing It.
“Scattered to the ends of the earth, or prematurely aged or decrepit
or shot or stabbed in street affrays—or dead of disappointed hopes
and broken hearts—all gone, or nearly all, victims devoted upon the
altar of the golden calf.” We could not have a more conclusive
proof of the total atrophy of human nature this old Nevada life
entailed.
Innumerable repressions, I say, produced the fierce intensity of
that life, which burnt itself out so quickly. We can see this, indeed,
in the fact that it was marked by an incessant series of eruptions.
The gold-seekers had come of their own volition; they had to main-
tain an outward equilibrium; they were sworn, as it were, to a con-
spiracy of masculine silence regarding these repressions, of which, in
fact, in the tensity of their mania, they were scarcely aware. Never-
theless, the human organism will not submit to such conditions
without registering one protest after another; accordingly, we find
that in the mining-camps the practical joke was, as Mr. Paine says,
"legal tender,” profanity was almost the normal language, and
murder was committed at all hours of the day and night. Mark
Twain tells how, in Virginia City, murders were so common that
they were scarcely worth more than a line or two in the newspaper,
and “almost every man” in the town, according to one of his old
friends, “had fought with pistols either impromptu or premeditated
duels.” We have just noted that for Mark Twain this life was a
life of chronic nervous exasperation. Can we not say now that, in
a lesser degree, it was a life of chronic nervous exasperation for all
the pioneers?
But why? What do we mean when we speak of repressions? We
mean that individuality, the whole complex of personal desires,
tastes, and preferences, is inhibited from expressing itself, from
registering itself. The situation of the pioneers was an impossible
one, but, victims as they were of their own thirst for gold, they could
not withdraw from it; and their masculine pride prevented them


VAN WYCK BROOKS
279
even from openly complaining or criticizing it. In this respect their
position was parallel to that of soldiers in the trenches. And, like the
soldiers in the trenches, they were always on the verge of laughter,
which philosophers generally agree in calling a relief from restraint.
We are now in a position to understand why all the writers who
were subjected to these conditions became humorists. The creative
mind is the most sensitive mind; the most highly individualized, the
most complicated in its range of desires: consequently, in circum-
stances where individuality cannot register itself, it undergoes the
most general and the most painful repression. The more imagina-
tive a man was, the more he would naturally feel himself restrained
and chafed by such a life as that of the gold-seekers. He, like his
comrades, was under the necessity of making money, of succeeding
—the same impulse had brought him there that had brought every
one else; we know how deeply Mark Twain was under this obliga-
tion, an obligation that prevented him from attempting to pursue
the artistic life directly because it was despised and because to have
done so would have required just those expressions of individuality
that pioneer life rendered impossible. On the other hand, sensitive
as he was, he instinctively recoiled from violence of all kinds and
was thus inhibited by his own nature from obtaining those outlets
in “practical jokes,” impromptu duels, and murder to which his
companions constantly resorted. Mr. Paine tells us that Mark
Twain never "cared for” duels and "discouraged” them, and that
he “seldom indulged physically” in practical jokes. In point of fact,
he abhorred them. "When grown-up people indulge in practical
jokes,” he wrote, forty years later, in his Autobiography, “the fact
gauges them. They have lived narrow, obscure, and ignorant lives,
and at full manhood they still retain and cherish a job-lot of left-
over standards and ideals that would have been discarded with their
boyhood if they had then moved out into the world and a broader
life. There were many practical jokers in the new Territory.” After
all those years he had not outgrown his instinctive resentment
against all the assaults to which his dignity had had to submit! To
Mark Twain, in short, the life of the gold-fields was a life of almost
infinite repression: the fact that he became a universal butt suffi-
ciently proves how large an area of individuality, as it were, had to
submit to the censorship of public opinion if he was to fulfil his
pledge and “make good” in Nevada.


280
MARK TWAIN'S HUMOUR
Here we have the psychogenesis of Mark Twain's humour. An
outlet of some kind that prodigious energy of his was bound to have,
and this outlet, since he had been unable to throw himself whole-
heartedly into mining, had to be one which, in some way, however
obliquely, expressed the artist in him. That expression, neverthe-
less, had also to be one which, far from outraging public opinion,
would win its emphatic approval. Mark Twain was obliged to re-
main a "good fellow” in order to succeed, in order to satisfy his in-
ordinate will-to-power; and we know how he acquiesced in the sup-
pression of all those manifestations of his individuality_his natural
freedom of sentiment, his love of reading, his constant desire for
privacy—that struck his comrades as “different” or “superior.” His
choice of a pen-name, indeed, proves how urgently he felt the need
of a "protective colouration” in this society where the writer was a
despised type. Too sensitive to relieve himself by horse-play, he had
what one might call a preliminary recourse in his profanity, those
"scorching, singeing blasts” he was always directing at his compan-
ions; and that this in a measure appeased him we can see from Mr.
Paine's remark that his profanity seemed "the safety-valve of his
high-pressure intellectual engine. ... When he had blown off he was
always calm, gentle, forgiving, and even tender.” We can best see
his humour, then, precisely as Mr. Paine seems to see it, in the
phrase "men laughed when they could no longer swear”—as the
expression, in short, of a psychic stage one step beyond the stage
where he could find relief in swearing, as a harmless “moral equiva-
lent,” in other words, of those acts of violence which his own sensi-
tiveness and his fear of consequences alike prevented him from com-
mitting. By means of ferocious jokes—and most of Mark Twain's
early jokes are of a ferocity that will hardly be believed by any one
who has not examined them critically—he could vent his hatred of
pioneer life and all its conditions, those conditions that were thwart-
ing his creative life; he could, in this vicarious manner, appease the
artist in him, while at the same time keeping on the safe side of pub-
lic opinion, the very act of transforming his aggressions into jokes
rendering them innocuous. And what made it a relief to him made it
also popular. According to Freud, whose investigations in this field
are perhaps the most enlightening we have, the pleasurable effect of
humour consists in affording “an economy of expenditure in feel-
ing.” It requires an infinitely smaller psychic effort to expel one's
a


VAN WYCK BROOKS
281
a
spleen in a verbal joke than in a practical joke or a murder, the com-
mon method among the pioneers, and it is infinitely safer, too!-a
fact that instantly explains the function of the humorist in pioneer
society and the immense success of Mark Twain. By means of those
jokes of his— "men were killed every week,” says Mr. Paine of one
little contest of wit in which he engaged, "for milder things than
the editors had spoken each of the other”—his comrades were able,
without transgressing the law and the conventions, to vent their own
exasperation with the conditions of their life and all the mutual
hatred and the destructive desires buried under the attitude of good-
fellowship that was imposed by the exigencies of their work. As for
Mark Twain himself, the protective colouration that had originally
enabled him to maintain his standing in pioneer society ended by
giving him the position which he craved, the position of an acknowl-
edged leader.
For, as I have said, Mark Twain's early humour was of a singular
ferocity. The
very
titles of his Western sketches reveal their general
character: The Dutch Nick Massacre, A New Crime, Lionizing
Murderers, The Killing of Julius Caesar "Localized,” Cannibalism
in the Cars: he is obsessed with the figure of the undertaker and his
labours, and it would be a worthy task for some zealous aspirant
for the doctor's degree to enumerate the occasions when Mark Twain
uses the phrase “I brained him on the spot” or some equivalent. His
early humour was almost wholly aggressive. It began with a series
of hoaxes, “usually intended,” says Mr. Paine, “as a special punish-
ment of some particular individual or paper or locality; but victims
were gathered wholesale in their seductive web.” He was "unspar-
ing in his ridicule of the Governor, the officials in general, the legis-
lative members, and of individual citizens.”. He became known, in
fact, as "a sort of general censor," and the officials, the corrupt offi-
cials—we gather that they were all corrupt, except his painfully
honest brother Orion—were frankly afraid of him. “He was very
far," said one of his later friends, "from being one who tried in any
way to make himself popular.” To be sure he was! He was very
far even from trying to be a humorist!
Do we not recall the early youth of that most unhumorous soul
Henrik Ibsen, who, as an apothecary's apprentice in a little pro-
vincial town, found it impossible, as he wrote afterward, “to give
expression to all that fermented in me except by mad, riotous


282
MARK TWAIN'S HUMOUR
a
pranks, which brought down upon me the ill-will of all the respect-
able citizens, who could not enter into that world which I was wres-
tling with alone?” Any young man with a highly developed indi-
viduality would have reacted in the same way; Mark Twain had
committed the same "mad, riotous pranks” in his own childhood,
and with the same effect upon the respectable citizens of Hannibal:
if he had been as conscious as Ibsen and had not been obliged by that
old pledge to his mother to make terms with his environment, his
antagonism would have' ultimately taken the form, not of humour,
but of satire also. For it began as satire. He had the courage of the
kindest of hearts, the humanest of souls: to that extent the poet was
awake in him. His attacks on corrupt officials were no more vehe-
ment than his pleas on behalf of the despised Chinese, who were
cuffed and maltreated and swindled by the Californians. In these
attacks and these pleas alike he was venting the humane desires of
the pioneers themselves: that is the secret of his "daily philippics.”
San Francisco was “weltering in corruption" and the settlers in-
stinctively loathed this condition of things almost as much as did
Mark Twain himself. They could not seriously undertake to reform
it, however, because this corruption was an inevitable part of a social
situation that made their own adventure, their own success as gam-
bling miners, possible. Had Mark Twain been permitted too long
to express his indignation directly in the form of satire, it would
have led sooner or later to a reorientation of society that would have
put an end to the conditions under which the miners throve, not
indeed as human beings, but as seekers of wealth. Consequently,
while they admired Mark Twain's vehemence and felt themselves
relieved through it—a relief they expressed in their “storms of
laughter and applause” —they could not, beyond a certain point,
permit it. Mark Twain, as we know, was compelled to leave Nevada
to escape the legal consequences of a duel. He went to San Fran-
cisco, where he immediately engaged in such a campaign of “muck-
raking” that the officials “found means," as Mr. Paine says, "of
making the writer's life there difficult and comfortless.” In fact,
"only one of the several severe articles he wrote criticizing officials
and institutions seems to have appeared,” the result being that he
lost all interest in his work on the San Francisco papers. When, on
the other hand, he wrote about San Francisco as a correspondent for
his paper in the rival community in Nevada, it was, we are told,
a


VAN WYCK BROOKS
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a
"with all the fierceness of a flaming indignation long restrained.”
His impulse, his desire, we see, was not that of the humorist; it
was that of the satirist; but whether in Nevada or in California, he
was prohibited, on pain of social extinction, from expressing himself
directly regarding the life about him. Satire, in short, had become
for him as impossible as murder: he was obliged to remain a
humorist.
In an old pamphlet about Mark Twain published in the eighties
I discover the report of a phrenologist, one “Professor Beall” of
Cincinnati, who found the trait of secretiveness very strongly in-
dicated in the diameter of his head just above the ears. Such testi-
mony, I suppose, has no value; but it is surely significant that this
gentleman found the same trait exhibited in Mark Twain's "slow,
guarded manner of speech.”
Mark Twain, once committed to the pursuit of success, was
obliged, as I say, to remain a humorist whether he would or no.
When he went East to carry on his journalistic career, the publishers
of The Galaxy, to which he became a regular contributor, specifically
asked him to conduct a "humorous department”; and after the
success of The Innocents Abroad his publisher, Bliss, we find, "espe-
cially suggested and emphasized a humorous work—that is to say,
a work humorously inclined.” Now whatever was true of the
pioneer society on the Pacific Slope was essentially true also of the
rest of the American population during the epoch of industrial pic-
neering: the business men of the East were in much the same case as
the pioneers of the West. The whole country, as we know, was as
thirsty for humour as it was for ice water: Mark Twain's humour
fulfilled during its generation a national demand as universal in
America as the demand fulfilled in Russia by Dostoevsky, in France
by Victor Hugo, in England by Dickens. We have at last begun to
approach the secret of this interesting fact.
Many observers have spoken of the homogeneity of the American
people during the epoch of industrial pioneering. Mr. Howells has
already related this to the phenomenon of Mark Twain's humour.
“We are doubtless,” he says, “the most thoroughly homogeneous
folk that ever existed as a great nation. In our phrase, we have
somehow all 'been there.' When [our humour] mentions hash we
smile because we have each somehow known the cheap boarding-
house or restaurant; when it alludes to putting up stoves in the fall,
>


284
MARK TWAIN'S HUMOUR
each of us feels the grime and rust of the pipes on his hands.” We
smile because! In that “because" we have the whole story of Mark
Twain's success. The “cheap boarding-house,” where every one has
to pretend that he loves all his neighbours, is the scene of many re-
straints and many irritations; and as for the grime and rust of stove-
pipes, that is a sensation very far from pleasant. Sensitive men, con-
strained by love and duty to indulge in these things, have been
known more than once to complain about them, and even, if the
truth were known, to cry bloody murder. That was Mark Twain's
habitual reaction, as we can see from the innumerable sketches in
which he wades knee-deep in the blood of chambermaids, barbers,
lightning-rod men, watch-makers, and other perpetrators of the small
harassments of life. Mark Twain was more exasperated by these
little annoyances of everyday life than most people are, because
he was more sensitive; but most people are exasperated by them also,
and, as Mr. Howells says, all the American people of Mark Twain's
time were exasperated by the same annoyances. They were more
civilized individually, in short, than the primitive environment to
which they had to submit: and Mark Twain's humour gave them,
face to face as they were with these annoyances, the same relief it
had given the miners in the West, afforded them, that is to say, the
same "economy of expenditure in feeling.” We "smile because”
that humour shows us that we are all in the same boat; it relieves
us from the strain of being unique and solitary sufferers and enables
us to murder our tormentors in our imaginations alone, thus absolv-
ing us from the odious necessity of shedding the blood our first im-
pulse prompts us to shed. Mr. Howells says that “we have somehow
all 'been there,' a phrase which he qualifies by adding that the
typical American of the last generation was “the man who has
risen.” The man who has "risen” is the man who has become pro-
gressively aware of civilization; the demands of the typical Ameri-
can of Mark Twain's time, in short, the demands he made upon his
environment, had become, pari passu, progressively more stringent,
while the environment itself remained, perforce, just as barbarous
and corrupt and unregenerate and "annoying” as ever. But why
perforce? Because it was “good for business”; it was the environ-
ment favourable for a regime of commercial exploitation. Wasn't
the “man who has risen,” the typical American, himself a business
man?
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VAN WYCK BROOKS
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Now, we know that this process of “rising in the world,” of suc-
ceeding in business, is attained only at the cost of an all but complete
suppression of individuality. The social effect of the stimulation of
the acquisitive instinct in the individual is a general “levelling
down,” and this is universally conceded to have been characteristic
of the epoch of industrial pioneering. The whole nation was prac-
tically organized—by a sort of common consent—on the plan of a
vast business establishment, under a majority rule unalterably op-
posed to all the inequalities of differentiation and to a moral and
aesthetic development in the individual that would have retarded or
compromised the success of the business regime. We can see, there-
fore, that if Mark Twain's humour was universally popular, it was
because it contributed to the efficiency of this business regime, be-
cause it helped to maintain the psychic equilibrium of the business
man the country over, precisely as it had at first helped to maintain
the psychic equilibrium of the Western pioneer.
As a matter of fact, Mark Twain has often been called the "busi-
ness man's writer.” In that humour of his, as in no other literature,
the “strong, silent man” who is the archetype of the business world,
sees an aid rather than a menace to his practical efficiency.
But why does he find it an aid and not a menace? Let us put the
question the other way and ask why, in other forms of literature, he
finds a menace and not an aid. The acquisitive and the creative in-
stincts are, as we know, diametrically opposed, and, as we also know,
all manifestations of the creative spirit demand, require, an emo-
tional effort, a psychic co-operation, on the part of the reader or the
spectator. This accounts for the business man's proverbial hatred
of the artist, a hatred that expresses itself in a contemptuous desire
to "shove him off the map.” Every sort of spiritual expansion, in-
tellectual interest, emotional freedom implies a retardation of the
business man's mental machinery, a retardation of the "strenuous
life,” the life of pure action: consequently, the business man shuns
everything that distracts him, confuses him, stimulates him to think
or to feel. Bad for business! On the other hand, he welcomes every-
thing that simplifies his course, everything that helps him to cut
short his impulses of admiration, reverence, sympathy, everything
that prevents his mind from opening and responding to the com-
plications and the implications of the spiritual and intellectual life.
And this is precisely what Mark Twain's humour does. It is just as


286
MARK TWAIN'S HUMOUR
"irreverent” as the Boston Brahmins thought-and especially irrev-
erent toward them!—when they gave him a seat below the salt: it
degrades, "takes down,” punctures, ridicules as pretentious and ab-
surd everything of a spiritual, aesthetic, and intellectual nature, the
recognition of which, the participation in which, would retard the
smooth and simple operation of the business man's mind. Mark
Twain, as we shall presently see, enables the business man to laugh
at art, at antiquity, at chivalry, at beauty and return to his desk with
an infinitely intensified conceit in his own worthiness and well-
being
That is one aspect of his humour. In another aspect, he releases,
in a hundred murderous fantasies, all the spleen which the business
life, with its repression of individuality, involves. Finally, in his
books about childhood, he enables the reader to become "a boy
again, just for a day,” to escape from the emotional stress of ma-
turity to a simpler and more primitive moral plane. In all these
respects, Mark Twain's humour affords that "economy of expendi-
ture in feeling” which, as we now perceive, the business man requires
as much as the pioneer.
Glance, now, at a few examples of Mark Twain's humour: let us
see whether they corroborate this argument.
In A Tramp Abroad Mark Twain, at the opera in Mannheim,
finds himself seated directly behind a young girl :
“How pretty she was, and how sweet she was! I wished she would
,
speak. But evidently she was absorbed in her own thoughts, her own
young-girl dreams, and found a dearer pleasure in silence. But she
was not dreaming sleepy dreams-no, she was awake, alive, alert,
she could not sit still a moment. She was an enchanting study. Her
gown was of a soft white silky stuff that clung to her round, young
figure like a fish's skin, and it was rippled over with the gracefullest
little fringy films of lace; she had deep, tender eyes, with long,
curved lashes; and she had peachy cheeks, and a dimpled chin, and
such a dear little dewy rosebud of a mouth; and she was so dove-like,
so pure, and so gracious, so sweet and bewitching. For long hours I
did mightily wish she would speak. And at last she did; the red lips
parted, and out leaped her thought—and with such a guileless and
pretty enthusiasm, too: 'Auntie, I just know I've got five hundred
feas on me!'
a
a


VAN WYCK BROOKS
287,
This bit of humour is certainly characteristic of its author. What
is its tendency, as the psychologists say? Mark Twain has, one
observes, all the normal emotions of a man confronted with a pretty
girl; he has them so strongly indeed that he cannot keep his mind on
the "business in hand,” which happens to be the opera. He finds
himself actually, prevented as he is from expressing himself in any
direct way, drifting into a rhapsody about her! What does he do
then? He suddenly dashes a pailful of ice-water over this beautiful
vision of his, cuts it short by a turn of the mind so sharp, so vulgar
indeed, that the vision itself evaporates in a sudden jet of acrid
steam. That young girl will no longer disturb the reader's thoughts!
She has vanished as utterly as a butterfly under a barrel of quick-
lime. Beauty is undone and trampled in the dust, but the strong,
silent business man is enabled to return to his labours with a soul
purified of all troubling emotions.
Another example, the famous “oesophagus” hoax in the opening
paragraph of A Double-Barrelled Detective Story:
“It was a crisp and spicy morning in early October.' The lilacs
and laburnums, lit with the glory-fires of autumn, hung burning and
flashing in the upper air, a fairy bridge provided by kind nature for
the wingless wild things that have their home in the tree-tops and
would visit together; the larch and the pomegranate flung their pur-
ple and yellow flames in brilliant broad splashes along the slanting
sweep of woodland, the sensuous fragrance of innumerable decidu-
ous flowers rose upon the swooning atmosphere, far in the empty
sky a solitary oesophagus slept upon motionless wing; everywhere
brooded stillness, serenity, and the peace of God.”
We scarcely need Mr. Paine's assurance that "the warm light and
luxury of this paragraph are facetious. The careful reader will note
that its various accessories are ridiculously associated, and only the
most careless reader will accept the oesophagus as a bird.” Mark
Twain's sole and wilful purpose, one observes, is to disturb the con-
templation of beauty, which requires an aesthetic and emotional
effort, to degrade beauty and thus divert the reader's feeling for it.
To degrade beauty, to debase distinction and thus to simplify the
life of the man with an eye single to the main chance—that, one
would almost say, is the general tendency of Mark Twain's humour.
,


288
MARK TWAIN'S HUMOUR
In almost every one of his sallies, as any one can see who examines
them, he burns the house down in order to roast his pig-he de-
stroys, that is to say, an entire complex of legitimate pretensions for
the sake of puncturing a single sham. And, as a rule, even the
“shams” are not shams at all; they are manifestations of just that
personal, aesthetic, or moral distinction which any but a bourgeois
democracy would seek in every way to cherish. Consider, for exam-
ple, the value assailed in his famous speech on General Grant and
his big toe. The effect of Mark Twain's humorous assault on the
dignity of General Grant was to reduce him not to the human but
to the common level, to puncture the reluctant reverence of the
groundlings for the fact of moral elevation itself; and the success
of that audacious venture, its success even with General Grant, was
the final proof of the universal acquiescence of the race of pioneers
in a democratic regime opposed, in the name of business, to the
recognition of any superior value in the individual: what made it
possible was the fact that Grant himself had gone the way of all
flesh and become a business man. The supreme example of Mark
Twain's humour in this kind is, however, the Connecticut Yankee.
“It was another of my surreptitious schemes for extinguishing
knighthood by making it grotesque and absurd,” says the Yankee.
"Sir Ozana's saddle was hung about with leather hat-boxes, and
every time he overcame a wandering knight he swore him into my
service and fitted him with a plug and made him wear it.” Mark
Twain's contemporaries, Mr. Howells among them, liked to imagine
that in this fashion he was exposing shams and pretensions; but un-
happily for this argument, knighthood had been long extinct when
Mark Twain undertook his doughty attack upon it, and it had no
unworthy modern equivalent. To exalt the plug above the plume
was a very easy conquest for our humorist; it was for this reason,
and not, as Mark Twain imagined, from any snobbish self-suf-
ficiency, that the English public failed to be abashed by the book.
In this aspect, at least, the Connecticut Yankee was an assault, not
upon a social institution but upon the principle of beauty itself, an
assault, moreover, in the very name of the shrewd pioneer business
man.
How easy it is now to understand the prodigious success of The
Innocents Abroad, appearing as it did precisely at the psychological
moment, at the close of the Civil War, at the opening of the epoch


VAN WYCK BROOKS
289
of industrial pioneering, in the hour when the life of business had
become obligatory upon every American man! How easy it is to
understand why it was so generally used as a guidebook by Ameri-
cans travelling in Europe! Pretending only to ridicule the senti-
mental pretensions of the author's own pseudo-cultivated fellow-
countrymen, it ridiculed in fact everything of which the author's
totally uncultivated fellow-countrymen were ignorant, everything
for which they wished just such an excuse to be ignorant where
knowledge would have contributed to an individual development
incompatible with success in business, a knowledge that would have
involved an expenditure in thought and feeling altogether too
costly for the mind that was fixed upon the main chance. It attacked
not only the illegitimate pretensions of the human spirit but the
legitimate pretensions also. It expressly made the American business
man as good as Titian and a little better: it made him feel that art
and history and all the great, elevated, admirable, painful discoveries
of humankind were things not worth wasting one's emotions over.
Oh, the Holy Land, yes! But the popular Biblical culture of the
nineteenth century was notoriously, as Matthew Arnold pointed out,
the handmaid of commercial philistinism; and besides, ancient Pal-
estine was hardly a rival, in civilization, of modern America. "I
find your people—your best people, I suppose they are—very nice,
very intelligent, very pleasant-talk only about Europe,” says a
travelling Englishman in one of Howells's novels. “They talk about
London and about Paris, and about Rome; there seems to be quite a
passion for Italy; but they don't seem interested in their own coun-
try. I can't make it out.” It was true, true at least of the colonial
society of New England; and no doubt Mark Twain's dash of cold
water had its salutary effect. The defiant Americanism of The In-
nocents Abroad marked, almost as definitely as Whitman's Leaves of
Grass, the opening of the national consciousness of which every one
hopes such great things in the future. But, unlike Leaves of Grass,
having served to open it, it served also to postpone its fruition. Its
whole tendency ran precisely counter to Whitman's, in sterilizing,
that is to say, instead of promoting the creative impulses in the indi-
vidual. It buttressed the feeble confidence of our busy race in a com-
mercial civilization so little capable of commanding the true spir-
itual allegiance of men that they could not help anxiously enquiring
every travelling foreigner's opinion of it. Here we have the measure


290
MARK TWAIN'S HUMOUR
of its influence both for good and for evil. That influence was good
in so far as it helped to concentrate the American mind upon the
problems and the destinies of America; it was evil, and it was
mainly evil, in so far as it contributed to a national self-compla-
cency, to the prevailing satisfaction of Americans with a bankers'
paradise in which, as long as it lasts, the true destinies of America
will remain unfulfilled.
So much for the nature and the significance of Mark Twain's
humour. I think we can understand now the prodigious practical
success it brought him. And are we not already in a position to see
why the role of humorist was foreign to his nature, why he was
reluctant to adopt it, why he always rebelled against it, and why it
arrested his own development?
Obviously, in Mark Twain, the making of the humorist was the
undoing of the artist. It meant the suppression of his aesthetic
desires, the degradation of everything upon which the creative in-
stinct feeds. How can a man everlastingly check his natural im-
pulses without in the end becoming the victim of his own habit?
I have spoken of the Connecticut Yankee. We know how Mark
Twain loved the tales of Sir Thomas Malory: they were to him a
lifelong passion and delight. As for "knightly trappings,” he adored
them: think of his love for gorgeous costumes, of the pleasure he
found in dressing up for charades, of the affection with which he
wrote The Prince and the Pauper! When, therefore, in his valiant
endeavour to "extinguish knighthood,” he sends Sir Ozana about
the country laying violent hands on wandering knights and clapping
plug-hats on their heads he is doing something very agreeable, in-
deed, to the complacent American business man, agreeable to the
business man in himself, but in absolute violation of his own spirit.
That is why his taste remained infantile, why he continued to adore
"knightly trappings" instead of developing to a more advanced
aesthetic stage. His feeling for Malory, we are told, was one of
"reverence”: the reverence which he felt was the complement of the
irreverence with which he acted. You cannot degrade the unde-
gradeable: you can actually degrade only yourself, and the result
of perpetually "taking things down” is that you remain “down”
yourself, and beauty becomes more and more inaccessibly “up.”
That is why, in the presence of art, Mark Twain always felt, as he
said, "like a barkeeper in heaven.” In destroying what he was con-


VAN WYCK BROOKS
291
.
strained to consider the false pretensions of others, he destroyed also
the legitimate pretensions of his own soul. Thus his humour, which
had originally served him as a protective colouration against the
consequences of the creative life, ended by stunting and thwarting
that creative life and leaving Mark Twain himself a scarred child.
He had, to the end, the intuition of another sort of humour.
"Will a day come," asks Satan, in The Mysterious Stranger, "when
the race will detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at
them—and by laughing at them destroy them? For your race, in
its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon—laugh-
ter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution—these can
lift at a colossal humbug-push it a little-weaken it a little, cen-
tury by century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at
a blast. . 5. As a race, do you ever use it at all? No; you lack
sense and the courage.” It was satire that he had in mind when he
wrote these lines, the great purifying force with which nature had
endowed him, but of the use of which his life had deprived him.
How many times he confessed that it was he who lacked the "cour-
age"! How clearly we see that if he lacked the courage it was be-
cause, quite literally, he lacked the "sense,” the consciousness, that
is to say, of his own powers, of his proper function! Satire necessi-
tates, above all, a supreme degree of moral maturity, a supreme sense
of proportion, a free individual position. As for Mark Twain, by
reacting immediately to every irritating stimulus he had literally
sworn and joked away the energy, the indignation that a free life
would have enabled him to store up, the energy that would have
made him not the public ventilator that he became but the regenera-
tor he was meant to be. Mr. Paine speaks of his "high-pressure in-
tellectual engine." Let us follow the metaphor by saying that Mark
Twain permitted the steam in his system to escape as fast as it was
generated: he permitted it to escape instead of harnessing it till the
time was ripe to "blow to rags and atoms” that world of humbug
against which he chafed. But he had staked all upon the dream of
happiness; and humour, by affording him an endless series of small
assuagements, enabled him to maintain that equilibrium. “I am
tired to death all the time,” he wrote in 1895, out of the stress of his
financial anxieties. With that in mind we can appreciate the uncon-
scious irony in Mr. Paine's comment: "Perhaps, after all, it was his
comic outlook on things in general that was his chief life-saver."


FOUR POEMS
BY. CARL SANDBURG
HATS
Hats, where do
you belong?
what is under you?
On the rim of a skyscraper's forehead
I looked down and saw: hats: fifty thousand hats:
Swarming with a noise of bees and sheep, cattle and waterfalls,
Stopping with a silence of sea grass, a silence of prairie corn.
Hats : tell me your high hopes.
PENNSYLVANIA
I have been in Pennsylvania,
In the Monongahela and the Hocking Valleys.
In the blue Susquehanna
On a Saturday morning
I saw the mounted constabulary go by,
I saw boys playing marbles.
Spring and the hills laughed.
And in places
Along the Appalachian chain,
I saw steel arms handling coal and iron,
And I saw the white-cauliflower faces
Of miners' wives waiting for the men to come
home from the day's work.
I made colour studies in crimson and violet
Over the dust and domes of culm at sunset.


CARL SANDBURG
293
BROKEN-FACE GARGOYLES
All I can give you is broken-face gargoyles.
It is too early to sing and dance at funerals,
Though I can whisper to you I am looking for an undertaker hum-
ming a lullaby and throwing his feet in a swift and mystic buck-
and-wing, now you see it and now you don't.
Fish to swim a pool in your garden flashing a speckled silver,
A basket of wine-saps filling your room with flame-dark for your
eyes and the tang of valley orchards for your nose,
Such a beautiful pail of fish, such a beautiful peck of apples,
I cannot bring you now.
It is too early and I am not footloose yet.
>
I shall come in the night when I come with a hammer and saw.
I shall come near your window, where you look out when your eyes
,
open in the morning,
And there I shall slam together bird-houses and bird-baths for wing-
loose wrens and hummers to live in, birds with yellow wing tips to
blur and buzz soft all summer,
So I shall make little fool homes with doors, always open doors for
all and each to run away when they want to.
I shall come just like that even though now it is early and I am not
yet footloose,
Even though I am still looking for an undertaker with a raw, wind-
bitten face and a dance in his feet.
I make a date with you (put it down) for six o'clock in the evening
a thousand years from now.
a
All I can give you now is broken-face gargoyles.
All I can give you now is a double gorilla head with two fish mouths
and four eagle eyes hooked on a street wall, spouting water and
looking two ways to the ends of the street for the new people, the
young strangers, coming, coming, always coming.
It is early
I shall yet be footloose.


294
FOUR POEMS
JAZZ FANTASIA
Drum on your drums, batter on your banjoes,
sob on the long cool winding saxophones.
Go to it, О jazzmen.
2
Sling your knuckles on the bottoms of the happy
let your trombones ooze, and husha-
husha-hush with the slippery sand-paper.
tin pans,
go
Moan like an autumn wind high in the lonesome treetops,
moan soft like you wanted somebody terrible, cry like a
racing car slipping away from a motorcycle cop, bang-bang!
you jazzmen, bang altogether drums, traps, banjoes, horns,
tin cans—make two people fight on the top of a stairway
and scratch each other's eyes in a clinch tumbling down
the stairs.
.
Can the rough stuff ... now a Mississippi steamboat pushes
up the night river with a hoo-hoo-hoo-oo ... and the green
lanterns calling to the high soft stars . . a red moon rides
on the humps of the low river hills . . . go to it, О jazzmen. .
.



3
Salus
A FLOWER PANEL. BY WILLIAM E. SCHUMACHER





THE TRIUMPH OF THE EGG
BY SHERWOOD ANDERSON
MY
a
Y father was, I am sure, intended by nature to be a cheerful,
kindly man. Until he was thirty-four years old he worked
as a farm-hand for a man named Thomas Butterworth whose place
lay near the town of Bidwell, Ohio. He had then a horse of his own
and on Saturday evenings drove into town to spend a few hours in
social intercourse with other farm-hands. In town he drank several
glasses of beer and stood about in Ben Head's saloon—crowded on
Saturday evenings with visiting farm-hands. Songs were sung and
glasses thumped on the bar. At ten o'clock father drove home along
a lonely country road, made his horse comfortable for the night and
himself went to bed, quite happy in his position in life. He had at
that time no notion of trying to rise in the world.
It was in the spring of his thirty-fifth year that father married my
mother, then a country school-teacher, and in the following spring
I came wriggling and crying into the world. Something happened
to the two people. They became ambitious. The American passion
for getting up in the world took possession of them.
It may have been that mother was responsible. Being a school-
teacher she had no doubt read books and magazines. She had, I pre-
sume, read of how Garfield, Lincoln, and other Americans rose from
poverty to fame and greatness and as I lay beside her—in the days
of her lying-in-she may have dreamed that I would some day rule
men and cities. At any rate she induced father to give up his place
as a farm-hand, sell his horse and embark on an independent enter-
prise of his own. She was a tall silent woman with a long nose and
troubled grey eyes. For herself she wanted nothing. For father and
myself she was incurably ambitious.
The first venture into which the two people went turned out
badly. They rented ten acres of poor stony land on what was called
Griggs's Road eight miles from Bidwell and launched into chicken
raising. I grew into boyhood on the place and got my first impres-
sions of life there. From the beginning they were impressions of
disaster and if, in my turn, I am a gloomy man inclined to see the


296
THE TRIUMPH OF THE EGG
a
dark side of life, I attribute it to the fact that what should have been
for me the happy joyous days of childhood were spent on a chicken
farm.
One unversed in such matters can have no notion of the many and
tragic things that can happen to a chicken. It is born out of an egg,
lives for a few weeks as a tiny fluffy thing such as you will see pic-
tured on Easter postcards, then becomes hideously naked, eats quan-
tities of corn and meal bought by the sweat of your father's brow,
gets diseases called pip, cholera, and other names, stands looking with
stupid eyes at the sun, becomes sick and dies. A few hens and now
and then a rooster, intended to serve God's mysterious ends, struggle
through to maturity. The hens lay eggs out of which come other
chicke and the dreadful cycle is thus made complete. It is all un-
believably complex. Most philosophers must have been raised on
chicken farms. One hopes for so much from a chicken and is so
dreadfully disillusioned. Small chickens, just setting out on the
journey of life, look so bright and alert and they are in fact so dread-
fully stupid. They are so much like people they mix one up in his
judgements of life. If disease does not kill them they wait until your
expectations are thoroughly aroused and then walk under the wheels
of a wagon—to go squashed and dead back to their maker. Vermin
infest their youths, and fortunes must be spent for curative powders.
In later life I have seen how that a literature has been built up on
the subject of fortunes to be made out of the raising of chickens. It
is intended to be read by the gods who have just eaten of the tree of
the knowledge of good and evil. It is a hopeful literature and de-
clares that much may be done by simple ambitious people who own
a few hens. Do not be led astray by it. It was not written for you.
Go hunt for gold on the frozen hills of Alaska, put your faith in the
honesty of a politician, believe if you will that the world is daily
growing better and that good will triumph over evil but do not read
and believe the literature that is written concerning the hen. It was
not written for you.
I, however, digress. My tale does not primarily concern itself
with the hen. If correctly told it will center on the egg. For ten
years my father and mother struggled to make our chicken farm pay
and then they gave up that struggle and began another. They moved
into the town of Bidwell, Ohio, and embarked in the restaurant
business. After ten years of worry with incubators that did not
a


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
297
>
>
a
hatch, and with tiny—and in their own way lovely_balls of fluff
that passed on into semi-naked pullethood and from that into dead
henhood, we threw all aside and packing our belongings on a wagon
drove down Griggs's Road toward Bidwell, a tiny caravan of hope
looking for a new place from which to start on our upward journey
through life.
We must have been a sad-looking lot, not, I faney, unlike refugees
fleeing from a battlefield. Mother and I walked in the road. The
wagon that contained our goods had been borrowed for the day from
Mr. Albert Griggs, a neighbour. Out of its sides stuck the legs of
cheap chairs and at the back of the pile of beds, tables, and boxes
filled with kitchen utensils was a crate of live chickens and on top
of that the baby carriage in which I had been wheeled about in my
infancy. Why we stuck to the baby carriage I don't know. It was
unlikely other children would be born and the wheels were broken.
People who have few possessions cling tightly to those they have.
That is one of the facts that make life so discouraging.
Father rode on top of the wagon. He was then a bald-headed man
of forty-five, a little fat and from long association with mother and
the chickens he had become habitually silent and discouraged. All
during our ten years on the chicken farm he had worked as a labourer
on neighboring farms and most of the money he had earned had been
spent for remedies to cure chicken diseases, on Wilmer's White
Wonder Cholera Cure or Professor Bidlow's Egg Producer or some
other preparations that mother found advertised in the poultry pa-
pers. There were two little patches of hair on father's head just
above his ears. I remember that as a child I used to sit looking at him
when he had gone to sleep in a chair before the stove on Sunday
afternoons in the winter. I had at that time already begun to read
books and have notions of my own and the bald path that led over
the top of his head was, I fancied, something like a broad road, such
a road as Caesar might have made on which to lead his legions out
of Rome and into the wonders of an unknown world. The tufts of
hair that grew above father's ears were, I thought, like forests. I fell
into a half-sleeping, half-waking state and dreamed I was a tiny
thing going along the road into a far beautiful place where there
were no chicken farms and where life was a happy eggless affair.
One might write a book concerning our flight from the chicken
farm into town. Mother and I walked the entire eight miles—she to
a


298
THE TRIUMPH OF THE EGG
а
be sure that nothing fell from the wagon and I to see the wonders of
the world. On the seat of the wagon beside father was his greatest
treasure. I will tell you of that.
On a chicken farm where hundreds and even thousands of chick-
ens come out of eggs surprising things sometimes happen. Grotesques
are born out of eggs as out of people. The thing does not often occur
-perhaps once in a thousand births. A chicken is, you see, born
that has four legs, two pairs of wings, two heads or what not. The
things do not live. They go quickly back to the hand of their maker
that has for a moment trembled. The fact that the poor little things
could not live was one of the tragedies of life to father. He had
some sort of notion that if he could but bring into henhood or roos-
terhood a five-legged hen or a two-headed rooster his fortune would
be made. He dreamed of taking the wonder about to county fairs
and of growing rich by exhibiting it to other farm-hands.
At any rate he saved all the little monstrous things that had been
born on our chicken farm. They were preserved in alcohol and put
each in its own glass bottle. These he had carefully put into a box
a
and on our journey into town it was carried on the wagon seat beside
him. He drove the horses with one hand and with the other clung to
the box. When we got to our destination the box was taken down at
once and the bottles removed. All during our days as keepers of a
restaurant in the town of Bidwell, Ohio, the grotesques in their little
glass bottles sat on a shelf back of the counter. Mother sometimes
protested but father was a rock on the subject of his treasure. The
grotesques were, he declared, valuable. People, he said, liked to look
at strange and wonderful things.
Did I say that we embarked in the restaurant business in the town
of Bidwell, Ohio? I exaggerated a little. The town itself lay at the
foot of a low hill and on the shore of a small river. The railroad did
a
not run through the town and the station was a mile away to the
north at a place called Pickleville. There had been a cider mill and
pickle factory at the station but before the time of our coming they
had both gone out of business. In the morning and in the evening
busses came down to the station along a road called Turner's Pike
from the hotel on the main street of Bidwell. Our going to the out
of the way place to embark in the restaurant business was mother's
idea. She talked of it for a year and then one day went off and
rented an empty store building opposite the railroad station. It was


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
299
her idea that the restaurant would be profitable. Travelling men,
she said, would be always waiting around to take trains out of town
and town people would come to the station to await incoming trains.
They would come to the restaurant to buy pieces of pie and drink
coffee. Now that I am older I know that she had another motive in
going. She was ambitious for me. She wanted me to rise in the
world, to get into a town school, and become a man of the towns.
At Pickleville father and mother worked hard as they always had
done. At first there was the necessity of putting our place into shape
to be a restaurant. That took a month. Father built a shelf on
which he put tins of vegetables. He painted a sign on which he
put his name in large red letters. Below his name was the sharp
command—“Eat Here”—that was so seldom obeyed. A show case
was bought and filled with cigars and tobacco. Mother scrubbed the
Aloor and the walls of the room. I went to school in the town and
was glad to be away from the farm and from the presence of the
discouraged, sad-looking chickens. Still I was not very joyous. In
the evening I walked home from school along Turner's Pike and re-
membered the children I had seen playing in the town school yard.
A troop of little girls had gone hopping about and singing. I tried
that. Down along the frozen road I went hopping solemnly on one
leg. “Hippity Hop To The Barber Shop,” I sang shrilly. Then I
I
stopped and looked doubtfully about. I was afraid of being seen in
my gay mood. It must have seemed to me that I was doing a thing
that should not be done by one who, like myself, had been raised
on a chicken farm where death was a daily visitor.
Mother decided that our restaurant should remain open at night.
At ten in the evening a passenger train went north past our door
followed by a local freight. The freight crew had switching to do in
Pickleville and when the work was done they came to our restaurant
for hot coffee and food. Sometimes one of them ordered an egg fried
on one side. In the morning at four they returned north-bound and
again visited us. A little trade began to grow up. Mother slept at
night and during the day tended the restaurant and fed our boarders
while father slept. He slept in the same bed mother had occupied
during the night and I went off to the town of Bidwell and to school.
During the long nights, while mother and I slept, father cooked
meats that were to go into sandwiches for the lunch baskets of our,
boarders. Then an idea in regard to getting up in the world came


300
THE TRIUMPH OF THE EGG
a
into his head. The American spirit took hold of him. He also be-
came ambitious.
In the long nights when there was little to do father had time to
think. That was his undoing. He decided that he had in the past
been an unsuccessful man because he had not been cheerful enough
and that in the future he would adopt a cheerful outlook on life.
In the early morning he came upstairs and got into bed with mother.
She woke and the two talked. From my bed in the corner I listened.
It was father's idea that both he and mother should try to enter-
tain the people who came to eat at our restaurant. I cannot now
remember his words but he gave the impression of one about to be-
come in some obscure way a kind of public entertainer. When
people, particularly young people from the town of Bidwell, came
into our place, as on very rare occasions they did, bright entertaining
conversation was to be made. From father's words I gathered that
something of the jolly inn-keeper effect was to be sought after.
Mother must have been doubtful from the first but she said nothing
discouraging. It was father's notion that a kind of passion for the
company of himself and mother would spring up in the breasts of
the
younger people of the town of Bidwell. In the evening bright
happy groups would come singing down Turner's Pike. They would
troop shouting with joy and laughter into our place. There would
be song and festivity. I do not mean to give the impression that
father spoke so elaborately of the matter. He was as I have said
an uncommunicative man. “They want some place to go. I tell you
they want some place to go,” he said over and over. That was as
far as he got. My own imagination has filled in the blanks.
For two or three weeks this notion of father's invaded our house.
We did not talk much but in our daily lives tried earnestly to make
smiles take the place of glum looks. Mother smiled at the boarders
and I, catching the infection, smiled at our cat. Father became a
little feverish in his anxiety to please. There was, no doubt lurking
somewhere in hím, a touch of the spirit of the showman. He did not
waste much of his ammunition on the railroad men he served at
night but seemed to be waiting for a young man or woman from
Bidwell to come in to show what he could do. On the counter in
the restaurant there was a wire basket kept always filled with eggs
and it must have been before his eyes when the idea of being enter-
taining was born in his brain. There was something pre-natal about


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
301
the way eggs kept themselves connected with the development of his
idea. At any rate an egg ruined his new impulse in life. Late one
night I was awakened by a roar of anger coming from father's throat.
Both mother and I sat upright in our beds. With trembling hands
she lighted a lamp that stood on a table by her head. Downstairs the
front door of our restaurant went shut with a bang and in a few
minutes father tramped up the stairs. He held an egg in his hand
and his hand trembled as though he were having a chill. There was
a half insane light in his eyes. As he stood glaring at us I was sure he
intended throwing the egg at either mother or me. Then he laid it
gently on the table beside the lamp and dropped on his knees beside
mother's bed. He began to cry like a boy and I, carried away by his
grief, cried with him. The two of us filled the little upstairs room
with our wailing voices. It is ridiculous, but of the picture we made
I can remember only the fact that mother's hand continually stroked
the bald path that ran across the top of his head. I have forgotten
what mother said to him and how she induced him to tell her of
what had happened downstairs. His explanation also has gone out
of
my mind. I remember only my own grief and fright and the
shiny path over father's head glowing in the lamp light as he knelt
by the bed.
As to what happened downstairs. For some unexplainable reason
I know the story as well as though I had been a witness to my
father's discomfiture. One in time gets to know many unexplain-
able things. On that evening young Joe Kane, son of a merchant
of Bidwell, came to Pickleville to meet his father, who was expected
on the ten o'clock evening train from the South. The train was three
hours late and Joe came into our place to sit loafing about and to
wait for its arrival. The local freight train came in and the freight
crew were fed. Joe was left alone in the restaurant with father.
From the moment he came into our place the Bidwell young man
must have been puzzled by my father's actions. It was his notion
that father was angry at him for hanging around. He noticed that
the restaurant keeper was apparently disturbed by his presence and
thought of going out. However, it began to rain and he did not
fancy the long walk to town and back. He bought a five-cent cigar
and ordered a cup of coffee. He had a newspaper in his pocket and
took it out and began to read. "I'm waiting for the evening train.
It's late," he said apologetically.
>


302
THE TRIUMPH OF THE EGG
>
For a long time father, whom Joe Kane had never seen before,
remained silently gazing at his visitor. He was no doubt suffering
from an attack of stage fright. As so often happens in life he had
thought so much and so often of the situation that now confronted
him that he was somewhat nervous in its presence.
For one thing, he did not know what to do with his hands. He
thrust one of them nervously over the counter and shook hands with
Joe Kane. "How-de-do,” he said. Joe Kane put his newspaper
down and stared at him. Father's eye lighted on the basket of eggs
that sat on the counter and he began to talk. “Well," he began hesi-
tatingly, “well, you have heard of Christopher Columbus, eh?” He
seemed to be angry. “That Christopher Columbus was a cheat,” he
declared emphatically. "He talked of making an egg stand on its end.
He talked, he did, and then he went and broke the end of the egg.
My father seemed to his visitor to be beside himself at the du-
plicity of Christopher Columbus. He muttered and swore. He
declared it was a wrong to teach children that Christopher Columbus
was a great man when, after all, he cheated at the critical moment.
He had declared he would make an egg stand on end and then when
his bluff had been called he had done a trick. Still grumbling at
Columbus, father took an egg from the basket on the counter and
began to walk up and down. He rolled the egg between the palms
of his hands. He smiled genially. He began to mumble words re-
garding the effect to be produced on an egg by the electricity that
comes out of the human body. He declared that without breaking
its shell and by virtue of rolling it back and forth in his hands he
could stand the egg on its end. He explained that the warmth of
his hands and the gentle rolling movement he gave the egg created
a new center of gravity, and Joe Kane was mildly interested. “I
have handled thousands of eggs,” father said. “No one knows more
about eggs than I do."
He stood the egg on the counter and it fell on its side. He
tried the trick again and again, each time rolling the egg between the
palms of his hands and saying the words regarding the wonders of
electricity and the laws of gravity. When after a half hour's effort
he did succeed in making the egg stand for a moment he looked up
to find that his visitor was no longer watching. By the time he
had succeeded in calling Joe Kane's attention to the success of his
effort the egg had again rolled over and lay on its side.
a


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
303
a
a
Afire with the showman's passion and at the same time a good
deal disconcerted by the failure of his first effort, father now took
the bottles containing the poultry monstrosities down from their
place on the shelf and began to show them to his visitor. "How
would you like to have seven legs and two heads like this fellow ?”
he asked, exhibiting the most remarkable of his treasures. A cheer-
ful smile played over his face. He reached over the counter and
tried to slap Joe Kane on the shoulder as he had seen men do in Ben
Head's saloon when he was a young farm-hand and drove to town
on Saturday evenings. His visitor was made a little ill by the sight
of the body of the terribly deformed bird floating in the alcohol in
the bottle and got up to go. Coming from behind the counter, father
took hold of the young man's arm and led him back to his seat. He
grew a little angry and for a moment had to turn his face away and
force himself to smile. Then he put the bottles back on the shelf.
In an outburst of generosity he fairly compelled Joe Kane to have
a fresh cup of coffee and another cigar at his expense. Then he took
a pan and filling it with vinegar, taken from a jug that sat beneath
the counter, he declared himself about to do a new trick. "I will heat
this egg in this pan of vinegar," he said. “Then I will put it through
the neck of a bottle without breaking the shell. When the egg is
inside the bottle it will resume its normal shape and the shell will
become hard again. Then I will give the bottle with the egg in it to
you. You can take it about with you wherever you go. People will
want to know how you got the egg in the bottle. Don't tell them.
Keep them guessing. That is the way to have fun with this trick.”
Father grinned and winked at his visitor. Joe Kane decided that
the man who confronted him was mildly insane but harmless. He
drank the cup of coffee that had been given him and began to read
his paper again. When the egg had been heated in vinegar father
carried it on a spoon to the counter and going into a back room got
an empty bottle. He was angry because his visitor did not watch
him as he began to do his trick, but nevertheless went cheerfully
to work. For an hour he struggled, trying to get the egg to go
through the neck of the bottle. He put the pan of vinegar back on
the stove, intending to reheat the egg, then picked it up and burned
his fingers. After a second bath in the hot vinegar the shell of the
egg had been softened a little but not enough for his purpose. He
.
worked and worked and a spirit of desperate determination took pos-
a
a
a


304
THE TRIUMPH OF THE EGG
session of him. When he thought that at last the trick was about to
be consummated the delayed train came in at the station and Joe
Kane started to go nonchalantly out at the door. Father made a
last desperate effort to conquer the egg and make it do the thing
that would establish his reputation as one who knew how to enter-
tain guests who came into his restaurant. He worried the egg. He
attempted to be somewhat rough with it. He swore and the sweat
stood out on his forehead. The egg broke under his hand. When
the contents spurted over his clothes, Joe Kane, who had stopped at
the door, turned and laughed.
A roar of anger rose from my father's throat. He danced and
shouted a string of inarticulate words. Grabbing another egg from
the basket on the counter, he threw it, just missing the head of the
young man as he dodged through the door and escaped.
Father came upstairs to mother and me with an egg in his hand.
I do not know what he intended to do. I imagine he had some idea
of destroying it, of destroying all eggs, and that he intended to let
mother and me see him begin. When, however, he got into the pres-
ence of mother something happened to him. He laid the egg gently
on the table and dropped on his knees by the bed as I have already
explained. He later decided to close the restaurant for the night
and to come upstairs and get into bed. When he did so he blew out
the light and after much muttered conversation both he and mother
went to sleep. I suppose I went to sleep also, but my sleep was
troubled. I awoke at dawn and for a long time looked at the egg
that lay on the table. I wondered why eggs had to be and why from
the egg came the hen who again laid the egg. The question got into
my blood. It has stayed there, I imagine, because I am the son of my
father. At any rate, the problem remains unsolved in my mind. And
that, I conclude, is but another evidence of the complete and final
triumph of the egg—at least as far as my family is concerned.
.


BALLADE
BY ROBERT HILLYER
The dull-eyed girl in bronze implores Apollo
To warm these dying satyrs, and to raise
Their withered wreaths that rot in every hollow,
Ór smoulder redly in the pungent haze.
The shining reapers, gone these many days,
Have left their fields disconsolate and sear,
Like bony sand uncovered to the gaze,
In this, the ebb-tide of the year.
My wisest comrade turns into a swallow
a
And flashes southward as the thickets blaze
In awful splendour; I, who cannot follow,
Confront the skies' unmitigated greys.
The cynic faun whom I have known betrays
A dangerous mood at night, and seems austere
Beneath the autumn noon's distempered rays,
In this, the ebb-tide of the
year.
Ice quenches all reflection in the shallow
Lagoon whose trampled margin still displays
Upheaval where the centaurs used to wallow;
And where my favourite unicorns would graze,
A few wild ducks make lamentable lays
Of shrill derision desperate with fear,
Bleak note on note, phrase on discordant phrase,
In this, the ebb-tide of the year.
Poor girl, how fast our garden world decays,
Our metals tarnish, our loves disappear;
Dull-eyed we haunt these unfrequented ways,
In this, the ebb-tide of the year.


ALBERT BEAN’S TRANQUILLITY
BY W. S. BROWN
HT
IS loose, angular body sprawled upon a bench in Boston Com-
mon, Albert Bean loafed and accepted the universe. The
clear autumn morning with its brittle sky and brisk wind en-
gendered in his soul an all-embracing interest in the minute and
particular affairs of nature. In each motion of a leaf, of a twig,
he read the secret of being. He became one with the universe and
felt life to be vast, eternal, and purposeless vegetation. He loafed
at ease, regarding a sparrow before him on the walk.
For three hours Albert Bean had lounged on the bench. The
cold wind had guarded his happiness from any intrusion by human
beings, and he had rested and observed nature alone. For three
hours not a soul had appeared along the deserted lanes, except one
tottering old man who had raked up a few dead leaves and stuffed
them in a basket. But the old man had amused Albert Bean, for he
had grumbled and puttered a good deal because the frisky wind had
made the task of gathering the leaves into a heap a difficult one.
However, after a little time the old man had wandered wearily
away with his rake under his arm and his basket, leaving Albert
Bean and the universe to themselves.
Swiftly had the remembrance and despair of yesterday departed
from him. To-day no sharp conscience irritated him into the un-
easy thought that he should stand up with the world and look for
work. No despondency leadened his soul to-day, but yesterday
almost the moment he had placed himself on his customary bench
in the Common, a blunt thought had slugged him into the chill be-
lief that he ought to find work. All day this thought had gnawed
into his happiness like a rat, and an evil rat too, for though he had
searched his mind ever so carefully he had found no more accept-
able excuse for toil than to feed his own body. But he had not been
hungry, and besides he had no family, no friends to support. He
was alone, and yet yesterday duty had troubled him.
But upon this morning he had rolled out of his bunk at the Peo-
ple's Palace full of gay thoughts, and after washing down two


W. S. BROWN
307
a
powdery doughnuts with a cup of over-sweetened coffee, he had
sauntered forth to his bench in the Common. At once the air and
the wind had excited him to an extravagant happiness.
Thus alone on his bench, sprawling happily in his isolation, Al-
bert Bean regarded the sparrow before him, and tapping a tune on
the side-walk with the sole of a dusty and battered shoe, he made
chirping noises to the bird. And he watched the wind sweep along
the long lanes milling the dust and leaves together in sudden whirl-
winds. He contemplated the bare trees, and he watched the dust
rise in brief gestures and the quick, strange dances of dead leaves.
Calmed by the petulant boisterousness of the wind, he communed
with nature.
But in his contemplation he did not see up the lane at a distance
that a paper, tortured into an ecstasy by the wind, was sweeping
down toward him. Dipping, cavorting, pivoting, its flatness leap-
ing and folding, it staggered quickly along the surface of the walk.
Driven by the wind it was about to skid by him, when it lunged,
struck him savagely in the face, and with a soft crash wrapped itself
around his head.
Knocked into a sudden fright, Albert Bean sat rigid in terror.
He snatched at the paper and tore it from him.
For a moment he rested bewildered, unable to do anything more
than clutch the paper tightly in his fist. He was shocked by the
insolence of the wind, hurt, bruised, and insulted by the calamity;
but still slightly afraid that some spectator had witnessed the in-
decency. He stared at the newspaper thickly. Suddenly his brain
tightened with a snap that hurt.
With the newspaper squeezed between his two fists, he leaned
over it and with bulging eyes re-read the title of the page and the
date, for he felt that destiny had made too horrible a mistake. But
destiny makes no mistakes, his first bewildered glance had told him
the cold truth, and his eyes, as if bent and dragged by some impon-
derable weight, read the first item in the first column.
Albert Bean placed the newspaper on his knees. His thoughts
had been split and jolted into new successions. The wind had.
quickly flipped him into a new eternity and he felt he must regain
control of himself or be doomed. The world was herding in upon
him, smashing through the tranquillity of his morning as easily as if
it had been made of glass. Placing the newspaper under his arm, he
а


308
ALBERT BEAN'S TRANQUILLITY
.
.
searched his pockets feverishly for the cigarette butt he remembered
having found somewhere. It would make a good smoke and give
him enough time to level the chaos of a dusty world to his under-
standing. He searched his pockets carefully with stiff, nervous fin-
gers. There was nothing in them and he slid into their emptiness.
Folding the paper meticulously, he slipped it into his pocket and
rose from the bench.
The young clerk wore a pink silk shirt, with thin lines of shiny
green stripes. He pushed back a cuff which protruded below the
sleeve of his coat, and stared at Albert Bean.
“Yes,” he said, yawning softly against the back of his hand, "this
is room 306. What's wrong?”
Albert Bean placed his hat on the counter which surmounted the
rail separating him from the clerk, and pulled out the carefully
folded newspaper from his pocket.
“I am desirous,” he said, holding out the newspaper to the clerk,
"of getting the job I seen advertised in the Globe this morning.”
The clerk took the paper.
“Man wanted. Light work, good pay, apply room 306, City
Hall,” he read to himself. “You want this job?”
“Yes.”
After asking Albert Bean his name and address, the clerk once
again fixed his cuff, and taking a card from a neat pile on his desk,
he flourished the point of his pen over it for a moment. Finally,
writing the information which Albert Bean gave him, he blotted the
card and tossed it on the counter.
“Take this card to Mr. Sullivan,” he said. "You'll find him in
that shed just opposite the corner of Boylston and Tremont Street.”
Albert Bean took the card in a trembling hand. He surveyed it a
moment and then turned it over to study the other side. He was
suspicious, afraid that the immaculate young man before him was a
coadjutor in the jest the wind had invented.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said, raising his eyes to the clerk, “but do
you know what the work is ?”
The clerk turned to his desk and began sharpening a pencil with
a pearl-handled knife he drew from his vest-pocket.
Albert Bean waited patiently for the clerk to reply, but finally
placing both hands on the counter, he leaned forward saying, "Tell
me what the work is, will you?''
a


W. S. BROWN
309
The clerk stopped grinding at the point of his pencil, and hold-
ing it up to the light he said, “You've got me. See Mr. Sullivan.”
Albert Bean paused, but then realizing he would receive no more
information, he reached for his hat and moved towards the door.
“Good day, sir,” he said without looking up.
When he reached Tremont Street from the City Hall, the wind
was more violent than ever, and grasping him by the scruff of the
neck it whirled him along the street like an old hat. It pushed and
shoved him so impetuously that he had to lean backwards and pound
along on his heels. He felt as helpless as he had felt when he was
run out of a Dover Street saloon by a bouncer for falling asleep.
a
He rushed along, flying past stores, past people, past policemen.
He flew over cross streets, continuing in his mad, unpremeditated
haste until he came in sight of the corner where Mr. Sullivan lurked
in his shed of mystery.
The wind howled and whirled him over towards the shed. In a
final violent burst it flung him towards it and slammed him up
against the door. Albert Bean turned the knob and was precipi-
tated within.
But his apocalyptic entrance did not seem to astound a large man
who was leaning back in a dilapidated desk chair reading a news-
paper. This large man merely glanced over the top of his
paper,
and through the greasy spectacles askew on his red nose he compla-
cently watched Albert Bean struggling to close the door. With a
supreme effort Albert banged the door shut, and turned around pant-
ing and embarrassed.
"Well, general, it's a windy day, ain't it,” said the large man.
"Yes, it is,” Albert Bean answered, removing his hat, “and do I
speak with Mr. Sullivan ?"
"You do,” replied Mr. Sullivan, spitting into a cracked china
spittoon to his right.
The room was warm and fetid with a small, smoking kerosene
stove.
“I have a card here for you. They gave it to me up at City
Hall.”
Mr. Sullivan took the card in his soggy leather hand.
“So you want a job?”
“Yes."
"Been out of work?”


310
ALBERT BEAN'S TRANQUILLITY
"More or less."
"Well, is that the reason you come here?”
“Yes, a friend put the advertisement in my hands this morning,"
answered Albert Bean uneasily.
"What can you do?”
“Nothing much. The last job I had was watching a new
building.”
"Well, this job isn't watching, although it might be called look-
ing. Want to start right off ?”
Albert Bean nodded his head, and Mr. Sullivan raised himself
with some difficulty from his chair.
“Follow me, general,” he said.
He meekly followed Mr. Sullivan into a small dark room, clut-
tered with hoes, rakes, shovels, axes, and other agricultural imple-
ments. Albert Bean's heart failed as he regarded these symbols of
toil, but he felt rooted to the spot in morbid terror. The jest had
gone far enough, he knew, but he was powerless to move.
From outside the shed came the noise of the roar and rush of the
wind; the wind that had ripped the calm of his morning to a bleak
and tattered afternoon. He heard the swish of the crisp leaves on
the walk and the dry hiss of the dust. An orgy of dancing papers
whirled in his head.
“This is one fine municipal job,” Mr. Sullivan said, lifting an
empty potato sack off a large pile. “There's nothing like working
for the public. After forty years you'll get a pension, so in this job
you don't have to worry about the future. You done wise to come
.
here.”
"I know I done wise,” Albert Bean answered. ...
An hour later, with a bulging potato sack slung to his waist, and
a spiked staff like a trident clutched in his fist, Albert Bean at-
tempted to spear a muddy piece of paper. But he was not adroit
enough, for a gust of wind caught it and away it sailed, frisking
across the brownish grass of Boston Common.
“I'll get that damn paper,” he muttered aloud, and pressing his
hat firmly onto his head, he whirled away after it, the sack bumping
and flying behind him. In the twinkling of an eye he had disap-
peared over the crest of a little hill.



HEAD OF A POLISH GIRL. BY DJUNA BARNES





A CRITIC OF THE THRESHOLD
BY EVELYN SCOTT
THESE
HE “Belgian Shakespeare” is among us. A man not yet in his
years,
he comes to us shrouded in the dust of glory stirred
by the feet of worshippers. When we see a genius so acclaimed by
his contemporaries we smell death. The crowd has the propensities
of a jackal. Is it possible that this robust man, this sage with the
white hair and vaguely benevolent face, is already dead without
knowing it? One fancies that Death would approach this always
half somnolent being luxuriously, imperceptibly, with the leisure
of familiarity.
In eighteen eighty-nine this good but inspired burgher of Ghent
published his first book, Serres Chaudes, and in the same year The
Princess Maleine cajoled from the pen of Octave Mirbeau the im-
mortally inappropriate epithet which compared the young Belgian
to the Bard of Avon.
From the center of an emotional conviction we may express that
conviction in its own terms, terms of the senses, of the subcon-
sciousness which the senses feed. Then our thoughts, liquid with
emotion, unfurl mysteriously from the depths like aquatic plants
seeking the light. When we speak in this manner we become poets
whether the medium of our utterance be the pen, the chisel, or the
brush. That Maeterlinck-the Maeterlinck who gave us, in eighteen
,
ninety, The Sightless; in eighteen ninety-one, The Seven Princesses;
in eighteen ninety-two, Pelléas and Mélisande; and in eighteen
ninety-four, Alladine and Palomides, The Intruder, and The Death
of Tintagiles—was a poet of sluggish but powerful feeling, no one
will deny. These are twilit dramas in which objectified human
beings do not exist. Their language is musically repetitive and the
tendency of this emotionalized monotony is to excite our receptive
faculties while benumbing our powers of expression. Of life noth-
ing less than all can be taken. While we live our give and take is
but an adjustment of emphasis. And Maeterlinck, by reducing self-
awareness to the vanishing point, leaves the individual intact but
enlarges the background of his subconsciousness, so that he is able


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A CRITIC OF THE THRESHOLD
at the same time to sleep and to remain awake. The artificiality of
this method, however, is in a sense more somnolent than sleep itself,
for dreams, uncontrolled by the will, are turgid, broken by flashes
of spontaneous logic, while the movements of this trance-weaver are
in unshattered undulations. In The Seven Princesses in particular, ,
the seven sleepers, the old queen, the prince returning from a voyage
too late are figures of a wilful delirium. Maeterlinck here seems to
refuse to recognize himself in order to pity his own confusion. When
we approach the atmosphere of Pelléas and Mélisande the sleep is
more natural, more profound, and we are able to enter more deeply
into the torments of the life of feeling. The silences unroll like
dim canvases crowded with worn scenes and half distinguishable
faces. The oppression of nightmare increases. Golaud finds the
strange princess weeping by the well into which her crown has fallen.
He takes her home and marries her. Pelléas, the brother, is called
to remain at the castle by his father's bedside. He and Mélisande
meet. They love each other. They do not know why. “Why” be-
longs to the outer world. It is the subjective reflection of our prog-
ress through space. Here time and space are non-existent. The
lovers struggle for a moment to beat back the iron darkness, but are
broken against it. However, it is in The Death of Tintagiles that
the nightmare, which has progressed through so many scenes under
the titles of different plays, reaches its most excruciating height. The
cry of Ygraine before the unyielding door is the cry of the darkness
itself bewildered and asking for light. The voice of the stolen child
.
as he calls to his sister, the little voice thin through the impenetrable
partition, stabs one like the ray of a star that strains through the
distance in the infinity of night, the distance that separates the dead
from the living. So much has been denied and given over to chaos
that this purposefully tiny affirmation is like a shrieking thread of
silver woven on limitless blackness. “Monster, Monster! Curse
you! Curse you!” shrieks Ygraine. “I spit on you!” So she chal-
lenges the hidden tormentor. Exhausted by her emotions she sinks
down and continues to sob softly, her arms outspread against the
gate in the gloom. And at the moment when his pen visualized for
us this last picture of despair, somewhere before the year eighteen
ninety-four, it is to be presumed, Maeterlinck abandoned the chaste
rôle of creator. Two years later he definitely began to preach.
Our consciousness exists only in opposition, not alone to the


EVELYN SCOTT
313
is
а
objective world, but to its own underlying elements. We cannot
intellectually realize our most intense moments until we have
escaped from them. It is the instinct for spiritual self-preservation
that demands and justifies the critic. His is the gesture of destruc-
tion that opposes art but at the same time permits us to remain
artists and live, for he continually reaffirms the half vanishing ego
and saves it to behold itself. Perhaps it was the unanalyzed instinct
to escape inundation from a purely emotional outlook that drove
Maeterlinck from his vague art to the outposts of analysis. And here
at the outposts one may say he has halted ever since, for even in his
essays his resistance to the soft overflow from his emotional make-
up very slight. He remains a critic only long enough to halt the
annihilation of his intellectual faculties. Here and there, for a
,
paragraph perhaps, appear a few harshly consistent lines, but imper-
ceptibly his argument changes, and from appealing to the intelli-
gence detached from the senses, his style relaxes and almost without
knowing it we find ourselves borne onward in the easy flow of a
fatuously gracious technique.
In eighteen ninety-five Maeterlinck published The Disciples at
Sais and The Fragments of Novalis, and at the same time a transla-
tion of John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, under the title Anna-
bella. A year later he presented us with The Treasure of the
Humble, his first volume of letters in the characteristic manner
which has made his present day fame, though his style and point of
view have since undergone modifications. It is here one might say
Maeterlinck begins to grow cool, for at thirty-four the Death, which
I hope may long be merciful to his flesh, had already imprinted
upon his emotions the first petrifying kiss. True, Aglavaine and
Selysette appeared the same year and Monna Vanna, Joyzelle, and
Mary Magdalene were written sometime later. Nevertheless the
sad appearance remains that after the year ninety-six M. Maeter-
linck began to think and painlessly to acquire that knowledge of the
world in which he grew out of communion with the superior igno-
rance from which his inspiration had hitherto been drawn. It is a
strange thing that this man who, when enveloped in a mask and
domino, speaks with the wisdom of the sphinx, has no more than to
remove this trivial disguise and talk to us in his own person when
all that he utters is marked with the blight of superficiality. In The
Treasure of the Humble we have the repeated gesture of one draw-


314
A CRITIC OF THE THRESHOLD
a
a
ing his robes about him and speaking from a height, and the mysti-
cism which in the dramas seems inscrutably profound here comes to
us echoed in the language of lazy and complacent grandiloquence.
When Tolstoy began to preach, those of us who believed that art
could embrace religion were downcast, seeing that he had forsaken
the larger for the more restricted gesture. Tolstoy, it is true—espe-
cially in his transitional period—has, like most Christian writers,
mirrored the reverse image of suffering in the desire for a heaven
which should be a better earth; but his logical “instinct was fearless
and in its intensifying light his pessimism became more and more
stark. More and more he ceased to confuse his intention by a' min-
gling of affirmation and denial. Art fell away at last and only dog.
matic criticism remained. One can truly say that in his relentless
extremism he was as great a destroyer as a creator. M. Maeterlinck,
on the contrary, emerges from his abandoned creations half formed,
on his features the reflection of the monotonous confusion to which
he has accustomed himself. He is like a Millet peasant suddenly
become educated and remains somewhat impressive in spite of the
incongruities in which he has wrapped himself, but the effect which
he produces is not what he intends. In all that he aspires to be he
has become ridiculous.
In eighteen ninety-eight comes Wisdom and Destiny; in nineteen
one, The Life of the Bee. The prophet is now fully aware of his
mission. He is his own audience, and with that mixture of guile
and guilelessness with which children and wise men deceive them-
selves, he plays to himself. The Life of the Bee is a terrible thing.
In it Nature, the victim of the pathetic fallacy, is debauched with
all the vices and virtues of men. The bees work for the future with
the conscious self-abnegation of Christian moralists. More than
that, the bees work for M. Maeterlinck, for mankind who tempts
them with kindness in order to destroy them and steal their honey.
The nobility of the bees is so persistently a conscious expression of
Christian ideals that we begin to wonder if this is an argument for
reincarnation with man in the scale of descent. Everywhere in
handling those physical facts which are most simple, if perhaps
least obvious, M. Maeterlinck uses the too delicate touch of a spin-
ster anxious to attract attention away from her virtue. But what,
in a biological sense, can be hoped from the man who in a later
essay, called Old-Fashioned Flowers, speaks like this?
a


EVELYN SCOTT
315
"We should, it is true, in nature have other splendid manifesta-
tions of luxury, exuberance, and grace; other dazzling efforts of the
superfluous forces: the sun, the stars, the varied lights of the moon,
the azure and the ocean, the dawns and twilights, the mountain, the
plain, the forest and the rivers, the light and the trees, and, lastly,
nearer to us, birds, precious stones, and woman. These are the
ornaments of our planet ... which belong to the same smile of
.
nature.
.
a
Has Bernard Shaw lived in vain that the public still accepts with
avidity such innocent profession of belief in the harmlessness and
superfluousness of a beautiful exterior? Simplicity of soul is an
admirable thing. The emotions eliminate complexity by their very
intensity, which concentrates all in a single instant of feeling. But
reflection at once detaches happenings and connects them with each
other, and through the very angularity of relations growing more
and more remote in a complex intelligence the past emotion is illu-
minated as with a prismatically refracted light. As we become more
and more aware of self, our fastidiousness increases and we wish
to be equally appraising of the thing we desire and the thing we
refuse. So emotional surrender becomes more and more difficult as,
at the cross-roads of action, we are crucified on the two arms of this
double recognition, transfixed between the opposite appearances of
paradox like a Messiah between two thieves.
Maeterlinck is totally lacking in this fastidious awareness of self.
His impulse toward self-analysis might be described as one huge
futile undulation toward the light. Like the hippopotamus, the
mammoth survival of another age, he is amphibious. Never truly at
home in the arid soil of exposition, he remains always by the side of
the pool where he may sink to rest, or float voluptuously at will on
the surface of the subconsciousness. It seems difficult to believe that
this huge being floundering in platitudes was capable, before he
abandoned his most familiar element, of such delicate movements
and such subtle recognitions. In the dream life of Pelléas and
Mélisande and even in Aglavaine and Selysette, this creature was
aware not only of passion, but of love, that appreciation of some
common weakness which unites human beings. When love enters
into a relation between the sexes it is because of something in the
lovers that stands outside of their abandon so that each may per-


316
A CRITIC OF THE THRESHOLD
ceive in the other his own helplessness before their common desire.
In the triangular problem of Aglavaine and Selysette, Maeterlinck,
the formless thinker, intrudes himself, and his huge shadow blurs
the tableau of these three persons who find it impossible to endure
life together even though they do not hate. This conception
of the two women who love the same man, yet are able to regard
each other with a generous vision, does not properly belong to the
dramas of the half darkness. It is an Ibsenesque motif in which the
reactions of the individuals toward each other are modified by com-
plex reflections. No such detachment as these two women exhibit
could blossom in the formlessness of the submerged mind. In treat-
ment it needs the mingling of subjective and objective themes which
we have in The Master Builder, When We Dead Awaken, or Little
Eyolf. The mediaeval setting seems to connote something erroneous,
and the emotions of the trio involved are thinned by the meagre
quality of their falsely simplified intelligence.
It is the genius of certain natures, chiefly Latin, to appreciate
without analysis. This is the true metier of art, and perhaps it is
the Anglo-Saxon alone who believes that abstractions hold the only
depths. He is the victim of his analytical tendency. Analysis devel-
ops only in the consideration of parts; and this mania for regard-
ing each manifestation of life as separated from all that has gone
before, and at the same time a part of something else, has prevented
him from appraising individuality which is complete in itself. So
it is that he demands a moral or useful basis for art, something which
shall relate it to the practical phases of life. Maeterlinck seems to
have come more and more under the influence of the utilitarian
genius of the English. His later essays, where he is not indulging
in Jesuitical pleading for spiritism, are made up of pleasant and
apparently irrelevant descriptions which lead in the end to the
cautious injection of a moral. Not that the moral is ever very clear.
On the contrary, M. Maeterlinck is pleasingly vague with the gen-
erosity of an indolent soul. It is a moral for every day, an accom-
modating moral which we are encouraged to obey where it is not
too difficult. This man who dedicates one of the most typical pro-
ductions of his pen to Silence has none of the austerity which is bred
in the poverty of a lonely spirit. Success sucks the passion from his
veins. She is like the spider whose triumphant sting paralyzes her
victim so that he lives on numbed and allows her to consume him.
a


EVELYN SCOTT
317
A dead man may be judged by his works, and if his creations have
elusive components these are accepted with reverence as expressions
appropriate to a posthumous existence. Having himself passed on to
final inscrutability, it is meet that there be in what he has left some-
thing too large for the judgement of the times. But to write well
for one's contemporaries one must be resigned to the necessity of
defending oneself against a continual suspicion. The first impulse
of a narrow egoism when it is confronted by something new is an
impulse of destruction, the instinct to take the thing to pieces and
catalogue its parts. Curiosity is defensive. It is this strong instinct
of defense, that inheres in creatures conscious of their weakness,
which makes women the more curious of the sexes. And on the
purely subjective plane what is commonly regarded as understand-
ing is the mental image of the typically annihilating act. The new
mental experience is looked at fearfully, is destroyed into its parts,
and is laid away in the limbo of facts where it ceases to menace, for
once it becomes fact it remains eternally extraneous and our per-
sonality is safe from its invasion. Thus the helpless curiosity of .
the American woman of the nouveau riche who desires to understand
art! Through the cultivation of luxurious perceptions, foreign as
yet to her self-sacrificing mate, she has become aware that art exists,
and so she organizes clubs for its defeat; for her frantic pursuit of
culture is inspired by nothing further than the age-old terror of the
unknown. Once she has performed the mysterious psychological
feat which is equivalent to an outwardly destructive act she may
become as oblivious to superfluous creation as are her English sisters
bred in familiarity with it. The gorgeous social events celebrated
in honour of Maeterlinck's American visit are rather like propitia-
tory offerings to the representative of an unknown God; for Maeter-
linck has been an artist. However, when he decided to write for his
own generation instead of posterity he was arranging an anti-climax,
and he now continues a suicidal progress by way of the lecture plat-
forms from which he elucidates himself.
In The Measure of the Hours there is an essay on drama which
is of interest to the psychologist who would study the unconscious
elements of genius, for in it Maeterlinck, with unbelievable obtuse-
ness, displays the contradiction of his own method. “Of all the
ancient weapons, not one is left,” he mourns. “... The further
we penetrate into the consciousness of man the less struggle we dis-
a


318
A CRITIC OF THE THRESHOLD
cover.” And it is with Romeo and Juliet that he illustrates his text.
“All the poetry, the splendour, the passionate life of this desire
result from the glamour, the nobility, the tragedy of the environ-
ment in which it has come to flower ... for it is not in the kiss
itself that the sweetness and beauty are found, but in the circum-
stance, hour, and place wherein it was given.” To be consistently
objective he should have more faith in the mechanical operation.
What a text for Belasco! A suggestion for the production of The
Seven Princesses with all the mediaeval paraphernalia authentically
duplicated! And this from a man whose dramatic instinct is all, as
it were, under water, for not once, except for a brief while in Monna
Vanna, is Maeterlinck's inspiration drawn from the hour or circum-
stance. What we presume that he feels is the necessity for a concrete
symbol of evocation and for this purpose the material conventions
of mediaeval life have suited him best. But how entirely Ibsen has
proven that emotion may be as easily concentrated or exalted by
the commonplace as by the unfamiliar object! Interwoven with the
dreary detail of The Wild Duck we have an exquisite and almost
unmatched symbolism, and Gerhart Hauptmann, in his Assumption
of Hannele, has staged his drama of plaintive and involuntary self-
confession against a sordid contemporary background which throws
into relief the riotousness of the mediaeval Christian's imagination.
“The adventure of the modern Romeo,” continues the plaintiff for
the past—"to consider only the external events which it might
provoke-would not provide material for a couple of acts.” Nor
would the external events of The Sightless or The Intruder provide
either material or external interest for the one short scene which
constitutes each. In The Intruder what happens? An old blind man
complains, a scythe is sharpened off stage, an infant cries and a sister
of charity, entering the room, announces the death of a mother.
Yet the struggle depicted is tense. Here is Death, that power that
would act, and here are all the frantic instincts of the living oppos-
ing it to the last instant. When the end arrives it is the true solution
of an inevitably propelled climax.
Of all Maeterlinck's plays Monna Vanna, produced by a tempo-
rary resurrection of talent which occurred eight years after the
demise of his glory, is the only one which lives up to a conception
of the drama inspired from without, and even this has its best mo-
ments not in the action as it transpires, but in its secondary effects.


EVELYN SCOTT
319
Most people are familiar with what Mr. Archer calls the blind alley
theme of Monna Vanna's attempt to save a city; her visit to Prinzi-
valle, the chieftain of the opposing camp, where, clad only in her
cloak, she spends the night in his tent to emerge from it with un-
scathed honour but tarnished reputation. For a dualist to illustrate
the frailness of the flesh by an appeal to the senses smacks a trifle
too much of the respectable moralist to be altogether agreeable to
an audience of serious-minded artists; and the second act of Monna
Vanna is very like the Broadway manager's production of a white
slave play at which, in order to remain chaste, one enjoys a vicarious
license. We are apparently engrossed in the details of a noble en-
counter but our underlying and most vital attention is constantly
arrested by the precarious fastenings of the heroine's cloak. We
tolerate the spectacle of loquacious virtue through an entire act,
chained to our places by our anticipation of the moment which de-
pends entirely on the lasting qualities of a pin or a button.
It was the author's preoccupation with plot that permitted the
most arresting outcome of its complications to escape his foresight.
The motif of a struggle which promises tragedy and certainly
demands a relentless solution is introduced with inferior emphasis
in the last act. It is the struggle of Guido's sincerity between a
former notion of his wife and the contradictoriness of her later
action. Whether her virtue be untouched or not is of secondary in-
terest, but she has sown in his mind ineradicable seeds of doubt
which are bound to flourish. The psychological situation evolved
for Guido is the same which confronts the husband of Strindberg's
Laura when she permits him to doubt the paternity of her child.
Laura we can frankly hate, and if Maeterlinck had a sharper vision
of values he might have punctuated the double futility of Vanna's
sacrifice with a grinding shriek of irony: As it was, it is probable
that a dramatic impulse led him to a conclusion far from the goal
he had anticipated. The Vanna who is so moved by the warm un-
reason of her sudden passion for her erstwhile captor that she will
lie for him and save him by the betrayal of her husband's very com-
prehensible rage is certainly not to be reconciled with the inhuman
creature of the first scene who, without one ray of understanding of
what her act implies to those nearest her, stalks heroically off stage
to fulfil an impossible rôle of self-abnegation. Maeterlinck was
side-tracked by the insistence of reality, and the consequence is a


320
A CRITIC OF THE THRESHOLD
climax which tortures the conventions of art to no purpose. He
treats his audience like sheep who are unmercifully urged along a
certain road only at the last, without warning, to be rudely turned
in an opposite direction. Their sympathies which have been pro-
jected ahead of them pull them forward and it requires more than
the brief time allotted before the fall of the curtain for them to
recover their balance and pursue the new direction so abruptly in-
dicated. In antithesis to the tableau of Guido's sufferings is the
spectacle of Vanna and Prinzivalle in a new version of Paolo and
Francesca, or innocence made guilty by the suspicions which encom-
pass it. Vanna begins her confession truthfully. She has come from
the besieger's quarters unharmed. However, since Guido will not
have the truth, she resolves to give him the acceptable lie which shall
liberate her. Here one might have fancied a suggestion of Cordelia
and Lear but that Monna Vanna, having more than herself to save,
has not dared to be obstinate. And she has no sooner told the lie
than, in the transition of feeling she experiences, it becomes half
truth, or at least she desires it to become true and anticipates its
fulfilment. In the erudite moral sense she is already guilty of the
act which she falsely states as having been accomplished. Here is
more than the stereotyped romance of the woman who becomes
enamoured of the ruthlessness of her erstwhile captor. The miracu-
lous falsehood which makes itself true is companion to the prophetic
doubt which beholds already the end of destruction. They are the
truly significant outgrowths of this turgid and grandiloquent play,
and neither is peculiar to the circumstances of a lively external
setting. Indeed nothing results from this mediaeval environment
which cannot be produced from the surroundings of the present day;
for (and I quote M. Maeterlinck again) “... the passions and
feelings of a modern poet must, in despite of himself, be entirely
and exclusively modern. ..." However, we confess our inability
to follow the motions of this mental prestidigitator whose tricks
create the illusion of surmounting inconsistencies impassable to the
mind which depends for its effects on the ponderous mechanism of
.
reason.
Maeterlinck's art persists in a continuation of mystery, it is true,
for mystery is the term we apply to all that is nameless; but the
more accurate our classification of our experiences the more they
are likely to remain outside us. We fancy that the key to under-


EVELYN SCOTT
321
standing is in the new name which we search for vainly, but as a
matter of fact names are the means which we use to separate our-
selves from the immediate actuality; and when we perceive the
primary mission of nomenclature we will agree that the term myste-
rious can be correctly applied only to those things which we know
with all our souls because we experience them in the very depths
of our being. “And yet,” says Maeterlinck in Our Eternity, “I
would not wish my worst enemy, were his understanding a thousand-
fold loftier, a thousandfold mightier than mine, to be condemned
eternally to inhabit a world of which he had surprised an essential
secret and of which, as a man, he had begun to grasp the last atom.”
In the light of such observation what may we think of his yearning
toward profounder things, of his desire to penetrate beyond this life
into another? Even death becomes voluptuous to those who ap-
proach it deliberately and without necessity, as some men and
women approach love. Is this the mood which the apostle of optim-
ism brings to a serious discussion of our future state? Then surely
he must have ceased to believe in death, for faith is an ideal and no
ideal survives the repeated warm baths of a torpid sensuousness.
So the easy sensualist ceases to believe in the passion which absorbs
his life. Nevertheless we prefer to go behind M. Maeterlinck's
words, which are merely words, and seek their contradiction, as
before, in the art of which he no longer deserves to be the author;
for the mystery in which his art springs to life is the mystery of
which we have spoken, nameless because so intimate.
“And what poetry—if we probe to the root of things—what
poetry is there that does not borrow nearly all of its charm, nearly
all of its ecstasy from elements that are wholly eternal ? . . . Last
of all there is no longer a God to widen or master the action: nor
is there an inexorable fate to form a mysterious, solemn, and tragical
background for the slightest gesture of man; nor the sombre and
abundant atmosphere that was to ennoble even his most contempt-
ible weaknesses, his least pardonable crimes. Accidental, adventi-
tious beauty exists no longer: there remains only an external poetry
that has not yet become poetic."
Here again are direct quotations, though I confess to taking ad-
vantage of their sequence and rearranging the order to stress the


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A CRITIC OF THE THRESHOLD
>
a
incompatibility of their combination. In the first line quoted we
are told that poetry is born of externals and in the last line external
poetry falls short of being poetic. Truly language in the absence
of psychological guide-posts seems created for bewilderment. And
in all M. Maeterlinck's available writings there is not one line to
indicate the moment of transmutation which might link his first
interrogation to his final statement of regret! Is M. Maeterlinck's
poetry in the soul of the poet or does it exist independently in his
environment as a dryad inhabits a tree? The truth seems to be that
in interesting himself in spiritism, as he has of late, M. Maeterlinck
is not desiring to extend mystery but to destroy it; for by becoming
further and further aware of an objective life he is locking out the
reverse of it which is within him. To the inexact mind the extension
of etherealized bodies into distant perspective connotes a profounder
understanding of life than is included in a narrow radius. But if
one examine the vocabulary of spiritism, or of spiritualism, and
analyze the articulation of supernormal or supernatural experiences,
one may realize that in the projection of bodies freed from the law
of gravity farther and farther into space nothing unique is realized.
Rather does our outlook become more and more extroverted to meet
these extraneous demands and our more intimate knowledge grows
less and less. A curtain that has been lowered raises itself without
visible means and the dimensions of the accustomed stage are aug-
mented. We feel very small and inadequate in the midst of such
vast horizons, and perhaps that is what we desire to feel, for, from
this greater accent on life as something continually beyond man's
encompassing, there results a conviction of irresponsibility and a
corresponding sense of freedom and exaltation. Reason is liberated
and emotion reigns without conscience; for to discover that an end
is impossible of realization relieves us from the obligation to accom-
plish it. Perhaps this is what M. Maeterlinck seeks without being
aware of it, using these means to overawe himself and woo again
the lost naivete of his soul.
“A drama is not really true until it is greater and finer than life,"
is another gem of paradox which, in The Measure of the Hours,
springs from M. Maeterlinck's unconscious wit. Are we alive then
only in the commonplaces of objective incident? Does M. Maeter-
linck consider art as a representation of this truth which does not
exist, and, being nothing, cannot be true, or is it an evocation of that
6


EVELYN SCOTT
323
>
which is and therefore is true and has life? But to reply fully to all
this is beyond us who have not M. Maeterlinck's eloquence. It is at
any rate certain that life indivisible, which is symbolized in the God
of omnipotence, could only be evoked since it exists everywhere, and
contains everything, so that it may only represent itself, and in
imagining an eternity which arises from this conception we are able
to see but a succession of mirrors each reflecting the other along an
infinite distance. And so one might think of the attempt of religion-
ists who desire to elongate space indefinitely. Space, non-existent in
Maeterlinck's plays, or at least interchangeable with time as two
appearances of an identical operation, is a dogmatic reality to his
more conscious intellect. Yet he thinks it as impossible for us to
believe in an infinity that has limitations as to conceive of a noth-
ingness. As a matter of fact infinity can be represented only by a
succession of limitations each bounding and exceeding the other until
the mind grown weary in pursuit relaxes and admits that accession
of chaos comprised in the suggestion of nothingness.
In Maeterlinck's plays there is a true evocation of the illimitable,
like the religious emotion which is the elusive perfume of longing
and unsatisfied sense. No doubt his latterly acquired admirers have
it that he has escaped from the sensuality of a primitive outlook
into a true perception of spirit. Regarding spirit as they do as a kind
of dilution of flesh, they would base this assertion on the thinning
texture of his emotions. And in their judgement of effects they
would be correct. The richness and warmth of sensuous inspiration
have gone from his work, even from such things as The Blue Bird
and The Betrothal, which offer themselves as spontaneous produc-
tions of the imagination. The Blue Bird is a sophisticated masque-
rade of guilelessness, the kind of thing that, poorly done, was cir-
culated in the church libraries of a generation ago. The privilege
of a fairy tale is to make appealing those traits to which we all
confess with a secret inner longing but which society has arbitrated
out of frank speech. The fairy tale preserves for us the innocence
of our faults, and a specious fairy tale in which the protagonists are
educated to desire only what is best for the group is an attempt to
rob us of the last treasure of language which remains to depict so
plaintively our fundamental irreconcilability to the compromise
which society has forced upon us. The Blue Bird and The Be-
trothal belong to that most awful category of fairy tales for grown-
a


324
A CRITIC OF THE THRESHOLD
ups, and I hope that defenceless children-little girls in particular
on whom they are educationally inflicted will survive the ordeal
of growing up and arrive at a point of emancipated opinion from
which they may burn in effigy the author of such a libel on the good
a
old traditions of barbarousness. Think of injecting beneath the
tender skin of a little girl of eight or nine years the poison of the
cult of self-sacrifice! Enough of that for the future when it is
already too late to lead an independent life!
“Let us start fairly with the great truth: for those who possess
there is only one certain duty, which is to strip themselves of what
they have so as to bring themselves into the condition of the mass
that possesses nothing," is the introduction to an argument in which
we are nonplussed by assumptions. Having begun so near the end,
it seems difficult to stop, and we wonder how America, the land of
luxurious automobiles and perfect plumbing, dares welcome enthu-
siastically one who comes with such destructive utterance on his lips.
We descendants of humble Puritans bred on hardships have not
yet acquired the arrogance of our unaccustomed predatory state.
Through our former necessity for each other conscience has absorbed
us, and now, when there is no longer anything to be afraid of, the
,
habit of fear remains. We must arrange between ourselves and the
Deity something that will justify a delayed indulgence in the good
things, the comfortable things, of the earth. The flesh-pots steam
odorously but we dare not begin the feast without a ceremony of
propitiation. And so the priest, the professional arbitrator, is ever
received with open arms in our midst. If M. Maeterlinck were less
gracious of compromise we might not be so ready to take him to our
hearts, but he finally disposes of our original obligation by pointing
out our disinclination to follow it. “Let us therefore,” he advises,
“'seek other roads than the one direct road-seeing that we have not
the strength to travel by it—that which, in the absence of this
strength, is able to nourish our conscience.” Truly the conscience
of the average man is a hardy and promiscuous beast able to subsist
on the most meagre fare! And liberating, obliterating optimism,
which America struggles to arrive at through religious experiments,
patent medicines, and memory courses, has found its inspired
exponent.
It must in no wise be supposed that this new religion whose God
is relegated to the second place is without persecutors. In fact a


EVELYN SCOTT
325
most cursory conspectus of Maeterlinckiana brings to light the bitter
experiences which the prophet has passed through and the shrewd
blows he has suffered at the hands of his enemies. Alfred Fouillée,
Louis Dumont-Wilden, and Frank Harris are, among others, guilty
of reflections which should bring legions of the faithful rushing for-
ward in defence of infallibility. In the somewhat bitter words of
Dumont-Wilden: “Le succès permet toujours aux hommes de lettres
de supporter très bien l'angoisse métaphysique, et Maeterlinck, grâce
à ses admirateurs et à ses amis, était devenu un homme de lettres.”
We could forgive a newcomer'a feeble attempt to translate death
into life, but for the sake of the artist who has intermittently sur-
vived since eighteen ninety-four we strip the laurel wreath from the
brow of the seer.


MICHAEL
BY A. E.
A wind blew by from icy hills,
Shook with cold breath the daffodils,
And shivered as with silver mist
The lake's pale leaden amethyst.
It pinched the barely budded trees
And rent the twilight tapestries:
Left for one hallowed instant bare
A single star in lonely air
O’er rocky fields the bitter wind
Had swept of all their human kind.
Ere that, the fisher folk were all
Snug under thatch and sheltering wall,
Breathing the cabin's air of gold,
Safe from blue storm and nipping cold.
And, clustered round the hearth within,
With fiery hands and burnished chin,
They sat and listened to old tales
Or legends of gigantic gales.
Some told of phantom craft they knew
That sailed with a flame-coloured crew,
And came up strangely through the wind
Havens invisible to find
By those rare cities poets sung
Cresting the Islands of the Young.
How do the heights above our head,
The depths below the water spread,
Waken the spirit in such wise
That to the deep the deep replies,
And in far spaces of the soul
The oceans stir, the heavens roll?
Copyright, 1920, by George W. Russell


A. E.
327
Michael must leave the morrow morn
The countryside where he was born,
And all day long had Michael clung
Unto the kin he lived among.
But at some talk of sea and sky
He heard an older mother cry,
The cabin's golden air grew dim:
The cabin's walls drew down on him:
The cabin's rafters hid from sight
The cloudy roof-tree of the night.
And Michael could not leave behind
His kinsmen of the wave and wind
Without farewell. The path he took
Ran like a twisted, shining brook,
Speckled with stones and ruts and rills,
'Mid a low valley of dark hills,
And trees so tempest-bowed that they
Seemed to seek double root in clay.
At last the dropping valley turned:
A sky of murky citron burned.
Above through flying purples seen
Lay pools of heavenly blue and green.
From the sea rim unto the caves
Rolled on a mammoth herd of waves.
And all about the rocky bay
Leaped up grey forests of wild spray,
Glooming above the ledges brown
Ere their pale drift came drenching down.
Things delicate and dewy clung
To Michael's cheeks. The salt air stung.
From crag to crag did Michael leap
Until he overhung the deep;
Saw in vast caves the waters roam,
The ceaseless ecstasy of foam,
Whirlpools of opal, lace of light
Strewn over quivering malachite,
Ice-tinted mounds of water rise


328
MICHAEL
Glinting as with a million eyes,
Reel in and out of light and shade,
Show depths of ivory or jade,
New broidery every instant wear,
Spun by the magic weaver,
Air.
a
Then Michael's gaze was turned from these
Unto the far, rejoicing seas
Whose twilight legions onward rolled,
A turbulence of dusky gold,
A dim magnificence of froth,
A thunder tone which was not wrath,
But such a speech as earth might cry
Unto far kinsmen in the sky.
The spray was tossed aloft in air:
A bird was flying here and there.
Foam, bird, and twilight to the boy
Seemed to be but a single joy.
He closed his eyes that he might be
Alone with all that ecstasy.
What was it unto Michael gave
This joy, the life of earth and wave?
Or did his candle shine so bright
But by its own and natural light?
Ah, who can answer for what powers
Are with us in the secret hours!
Though wind and wave cried out no less,
Entranced unto forgetfulness,
He heard no more the water's din;
A golden ocean rocked within.
A boat of bronze and crystal wrought
And steered by the enchanter, Thought,
Was flying with him fast and far
To isles that glimmered, each a star
Hung low upon the distant rim,
And then the vision rushed on him.
The palaces of light were there


A. E.
329
With towers that faded up in air,
With amethyst and silver spires,
And casements lit with precious fires,
And mythic forms with wings outspread,
And faces from which light was shed,
High upon gleaming pillars set
On turret and on parapet.
The bells were chiming all around
And the sweet air was drunk with sound.
Too swift did Michael pass to see
Ildathach's mystic chivalry
Graved on the walls, its queens and kings
Girt round with eyes and stars and wings.
The magic boat with Michael drew
To some deep being that he knew,
Some mystery that to the wise
Is clouded o'er by Paradise,
Some will that would not let him stay
Hurried the boat away, away.
At last its fiery wings were still,
Folded beneath some heavenly hill.
But was that Michael light as air
Was travelling up the mighty stair?
Or had impetuous desire
Woven for him that form of fire,
Which with no less a light did shine
Than those with countenance divine
Who thronged the gateway as he came,
Faces of rapture and of flame,
The glowing, deep, unwavering eyes
Of those eternity makes wise.
And lofty things to him were said
As to one risen from the dead.
What there beyond the gate befell
Michael could never after tell.
Imagination still would fail
Some height too infinite to scale,
Some being too profound to scan,


330
MICHAEL
Some time too limitless to span.
Yet when he lifted up his eyes
That foam was grey against the skies,
That same wild bird was on the wing,
That twilight wave was glimmering.
And twilight wave and foam and bird
Had hardly in his vision stirred
Since he had closed his eyes to be
Of that majestic company.
And can a second then suffice
To hurry us to Paradise ?
What seemed so endlessly sublime
Shrink to a particle of time?
Why was the call on Michael made?
What charge was on his spirit laid?
And could the way for him be sure
Made by excess of light obscure?
However fiery is the dream,
How faint in life the echoing gleam!
And faint was all that happed that day
As home he went his dreamy way.
7
And now has Michael, for his share
Of life, the city's dingy air,
By the black reek of chimneys smudged
O'er the dark warehouse where he drudged,
Where for dull life men pay in toll
Toil and the shining of the soul.
Within his attic he would fret
Like a wild creature in a net,
And on the darkness he would make
The jewel of a little lake,
A bloom of fairy blue amid
The bronze and purple heather hid;
Make battlemented cliffs grow red
Where the last rose of day was shed,
Be later in rich darkness seen
Against a sky of glowing green.


A. E.
331
Or he would climb where quiet fills
With dream the shepherd on the hills,
Where he could see as from high land
The golden sickle of the sand
Curving around the bay to where
The granite cliffs were worn by air,
And watch the wind and waves at play,
The heavenly gleam of falling spray,
The sunlit surges foam below
In wrinklings as of liquid snow.
And he could breathe the airs that blew
From worlds invisible he knew :
How far away now from the boy!
How unassailable their joy!
So Michael would recall each place
As lovers a remembered face.
But, though the tender may not tire,
Memory is but a fading fire.
And Michael's might have sunken low,
Changed to grey ash its coloured glow,
Did not upon his hearing fall
The mountain speech of Donegal,
And that he swiftly turned to greet
The tongue whose accent was so sweet;
And found one of that eager kind,
The army of the Gaelic mind,
Still holding through the Iron Age
The spiritual heritage,
The story from the gods that ran
Through many a cycle down to man.
And soon with them had Michael read
The history of the famous dead,
From him who with his single sword
Stayed a great army at the ford,
Down to the vagrant poets, those
Who gave their hearts to the Dark Rose,
And of the wanderers who set sail
And found a lordlier Innisfail,


332
MICHAEL
And saw a sun that never set
And all their hearts' desires were met.
How may the past, if it be dead,
Its light within the living shed?
Or does the Everliving hold
Earth's memories from the Age of Gold?
And are our dreams, ardours, and fires
But ancient unfulfilled desires ?
And do they shine within our clay,
And do they urge us on their way?
As Michael read the Gaelic scroll
It seemed the story of the soul
And those who wrought, lest there should fail
From earth the legend of the Gael,
Seemed warriors of Eternal Mind,
Still holding in a world grown blind,
From which belief and hope had gone, ,
The lovely magic of its dawn.
a
Thrice on the wheel of time recurred
The season of the risen Lord
Since Michael left his home behind
And faced the chilly Easter wind,
And saw the twilight waters gleam
And dreamed an unremembered dream.
Was it because the Easter time
With mystic nature was in chime
That memory was roused from sleep,
Or was deep calling unto deep?
The Lord in man had risen here,
From the dark sepulchre of fear,
Was wilful, laughing, undismayed,
Though on a fragile barricade
The bullet rang, the death star broke,
The street waved dizzily in smoke,
And there the fierce and lovely breath
Of flame in the grey mist was death.
Yet Michael felt within him rise


A. E.
333
The rapture that is sacrifice.
What miracle was wrought on him,
So that each leaden-freighted limb
Seemed lit with fire, seemed light as air?
How came upon him dying there,
Amid the city's burning piles,
The vision of the mystic isles ?
For underneath and through the smoke
A glint of golden waters broke;
And floating on that phantom tide,
With fiery wings expanded wide,
A bark of bronze and crystal wrought
Drawn forth by the enchanter, Thought.
And noble faces glowed above,
Faces of ecstasy and love,
And eyes whose shining calm and pure
Was in eternity secure,
And 'lofty forms of burnished air
Stood on the deck by Michael there.
And spirit upon spirit gazed,
And one to Michael's lips upraised
A A cup filled from that Holy Well
On which the Nuts of Wisdom fell.
And as he drank there reeled away
Vision of earth and night and day,
And he was far away from these,
Afloat upon the heavenly seas.
I do not know if such a band
Came from the Many-Coloured Land:
Or whether in our being we
Make such a magic phantasy
Of images which draw us hence
Unto our own magnificence.
Yet many a one a tryst has kept
With the immortal while he slept,
Woke unremembering, went his way,
Life seemed the same from day to day,


334
MICHAEL
Till the predestined hour came,
A hidden will leaped up in flame,
And through its deed the risen soul
Strode on self-conquering to the goal.
This was the dream of one who died
For country, said his countryside.
We choose this cause or that, yet still
The Everlasting works Its will.
The slayer and the slain may be
Knit in a secret harmony.
What does the spirit urge us to?
Some sacrifice that
may
undo
The bonds that hold us to the clay
And limit life to this cold day?
Some for a gentle dream will die:
Some for an empire's majesty:
Some for a loftier humankind,
Some to be free as cloud or wind,
Will leave their valley, climb their slope.
Whate'er the deed, whate'er the hope,
Through all the varied battle cries
A Shepherd with a single voice
Still draws us nigh the Gates of Gold
That lead unto the Starry Fold.
So it may be that Michael died
For some far other countryside
Than that grey Ireland he had known.
Yet on his dream of it was thrown
Some light from that consuming Fire
Which is the end of all desire.
If men adore It as the power,
Empires and cities, tower on tower,
Are built in worship by the way,
High Babylon or Nineveh.
Seek It as love and there may be
A Golden Age and Arcady.
All shadows are they of one thing
To which all life is journeying.


VAUDEVILLE
BY MARSDEN HARTLEY
I
HAVE but recently returned from the vaudeville of the cen-
turies. Watching the kick and the glide of very ancient per-
formers. I have spent a year and a half down in the wonderful desert
country of the Southwest. I have wearied, however, of the ancient
caprice, and turn with great delight to my old passion, vaudeville.
I return with glee to the ladies and gentlemen and pet animals of
the stage, including the acrobats. Is there one who cares for these
artists and for their rhythmical gesture more than myself? I can-
not think so. I have wished with a real desire to create new sets for
them, to establish an altogether new tradition as regards the back-
ground of these charming artists. If that were the chosen field for
my aesthetic activities, I should be famous by now for the creation
of sets and drops by which these exceptional artists might make a
far more significant impression upon the type of public they essay
to interest and amuse.
I would begin first of all by severing them from the frayed tradi-
tions of worn plush and sequin, rid them of the so inadequate back
drop such as is given them, the scene of Vesuvius in eruption, or the
walk in the park at Versailles. They need first of all large plain
spaces upon which to perform, and enjoy their own remarkably de-
vised patterns of body. I speak of the acrobats, the animals, the
single and double dancers who perform "down in one” more espe-
cially. The so-called headliners have their plush parlours with the
inevitable purple or rose lamp, and the very much worn property
piano just barely in tune. Only the dressmaker and the interior
decorator can do things for them, as we see in the case of Kitty
Gordon. It is to be hoped that a Beardsley of the stage will one
day appear and really do something for the dainty type of person,
or the superbly theatric artist such as Miss Gordon, Valeska Suratt,
and the few other remarkable women of the vaudeville stage.
I am more concerned with the less appreciated artists. I would
see that they glitter by their own brilliance. Why, for instance,
should a fine act like the Four Danubes and others of their quality
а


336
VAUDEVILLE
be tagged on to the end of a bill, at which time the unmannerly
public decides to go home or hurry to some roof or other, or dining
place?
I should like seeing the Brothers Rath likewise, perhaps as refined
acrobatic artists as have been seen on our stage for some time, in a
set that would show them to better advantage, and give the public
a greater intimacy with the beauty of their act than can be had be-
yond the first six rows of the Winter Garden. They are interposed
there as a break between burlesques, which is not the place for them.
I would "give" them the stage while they are on it. Theirs is a
muscular beauty which has not been excelled. I have no doubt that
if I attempted to establish these ideas with the artists whom I spend
so much time in championing, they would no doubt turn aside with
the word "highbrow" on their lips. They would have to be shown
that they need these things, that they need the old-fashioned ideas
removed, and fresher ones put in their place. I have expressed this
intention once before in print, perhaps not so vehemently. I should
like to elaborate. I want a Metropolitan Opera for my project. An
orchestra of that size for the larger concerted groups, numbers of
stringed instruments for the wirewalkers and jugglers, a series of
balanced woodwinds for others, and so on down the line, according
to the quality of the performer. There should be a large stage for
many elephants, ponies, dogs, tigers, seals. The stage should then
be made more intimate for the solos, duets, trios, and quartets among
the acrobats. I think a larger public should be made aware of the
beauty and skill of these people, who spend their lives in perfecting
grace
and power of body, creating the always fascinating pattern
and form, orchestration if you will, the orchestration of the mus-
cles into a complete whole. You will of course say, go to the circus,
and get it all at once. The circus is one of the most charming places in
existence, because it is one of the last words in orchestrated physical
splendour. But the circus is too diffused, too enormous in this coun-
try to permit of concentrated interest, attention, or pleasure. One
goes away with many little bits. It is because the background is
made up of restless nervous dots, all anxious to get the combined
quota which they have paid for, when in reality they do not even
get any one thing. It is the alert eye which can go over three rings
and two stages at once and enjoy the pattern of each of them. It is
a physical impossibility really.


MARSDEN HARTLEY
337
а
I think we should be made aware in finer ways of the artists who
open and close our bills. Why must the headliner always be a talk-
ing or a singing person who tells you how much money he needs, or
how much she is getting? There is more than one type of artistic
personality for those who care for vaudeville. Why doesn't a team
like the Rath Brothers, for example, find itself the feature attrac-
tion? Must there always be the string of unnecessary little men
and women who have such a time trying to fill up their twenty-two
minutes or their fourteen? Why listen forever to puppy-like song
writers when one can hear and watch a great artist like Ella Shields?
My third visit to Ella Shields convinces me that she is one of the
finest artists I have ever heard, certainly as fine in her way as Guil-
bert and Chevalier were. It is a rare privilege to be able to enjoy
artists like Grock—Mark Sheridan-who is now dead, I am told.
Mark, with his “They all walk the wibbly-wobbly walk, they all
wear the wibbly-wobbly ties," and so on. Mark is certainly being
missed by a great many who care for the pleasure of the moment.
When I look at and listen to the aristocratic artist Ella Shields, I
feel a quality in her of the impeccable Mrs. Fiske. And then I am
thinking of another great woman, Fay Templeton. What a pity
we must lose them either by death or by decisions in life. Ella
Shields with her charming typification of “Burlington Bertie from
Bow.”
The other evening as I listened to Irene Franklin, I heard for cer-
tain what I had always thought were notes from the magic voice of
dear old Fay. Unforgettable Fay. How can one ever say enough
about her. I think of Fay along with my single glimpses of Duse,
Ada Rehan, Coquelin. You see how I love her, then. Irene Frank-
lin has the quality of imitation of the great Fay without, I think,
the real magic. Nevertheless I enjoy her, and I am certain she has
never been finer than now. She has enriched herself greatly by her
experiences the last two years, and seems at the height of her power.
.
It was good to get, once again, little glimpses of her Childs waitress
and the chambermaid. It seemed to me that there was a richer
quality of atmosphere in the little Jewish girl with the ring curls
and the red mittens, as also in her French girl with, by the way, a
beautiful
gown of rich yellow silk Frenchily trimmed in vermilion
or orange, I couldn't make out which. The amusing French girl,
who having picked up many fag-ends of English from her experience


338
VAUDEVILLE
with the soldats Américains got her “animals” mixed-"you have
my goat, I have your goat, et—tie ze bull outside," and so on. I am
crossing Irene and Fay here because I think them similar, only I
must say I think the magic was greater in Fay, because possibly Fay
was the greater student of emotion. Fay had the undercurrent, and
Irene has perfected the surface. If Irene did study Fay at any time,
and I say this respectfully, she perhaps knows that Fay went many
times to Paris to study Rejane. The light entertainer is, as we know,
very often a person of real intellect.
If you want distinction, then, you will get it in the presence of
Ella Shields. Her “Burlington Bertie” is nothing less than a chef
d'oeuvre; “Tom Lipton, he's got lots of ’oof-he sleeps on the roof,
;
and I sleep in the room over him.” Bertie, who, having been slapped
on the back by the Prince of Wales (and some others) and asked
why he didn't go and dine with “Mother,” replied—“I can't, for
I've just had a banana with Lady Diana. . . . I'm Burlington
Bertie from Bow.” Miss Shields shows also that she can sing a
sentimental song without slushing it all over with saccharine. She
has mastered the droll English quality of wit with real perfection.
I regret I never saw Vesta Tilley, with whom the old tops compare
her so favourably. Superb girls all these, Fay, Ella, Cissie, Vesta,
as well as Marie Lloyd, and the other inimitable Vesta-Victoria.
Among the “coming soon,” we have Miss Juliet, whom I recall
with so much pleasure from the last immemorable Cohan Revue. I
wait for her. I consider myself fortunate to be let in on James
Watts. We thought our Eddy Foy a comic one. He was, for I
remember the Gibson girl with the black velvet gown and the red
flannel undershirt. I swing my swagger stick in the presence of Mr.
.
Watts by way of applause. His art is very delicately understood
and brought out. It has a fine quality of broad caricature with a
real knowledge of economy such as Grock is master of. The three
episodes are certainly funny enough. I find myself caring more for
the first, called “June Day,” since he reminds me so strongly in
make-up of the French caricaturists in drawing, Rouveyre and Tou-
louse-Lautrec. Mr. Watts's feeling for satirical make-up is a fine
shade of artistry in itself. He has excellent feeling for the broad
contrast and for fierce insinuation at the same time. If you want real
unalloyed fun, Mr. Watts will supply you. Nor will Grock disap-
point you. Quite on the contrary, no matter what you are expecting.


MARSDEN HARTLEY
339
I do not know why I think of vaudeville as I think of a collection
a
of good drawings. Unless it is because the sense of form is the
same in all of the arts. The acrobat certainly has line and mass
to think of, even if that isn't his primal concern. He knows how he
decorates the space on which he operates. To make another com-
parison, then, Grock is the Forain of vaudeville. He achieves great
plastic beauty with distinguished economy of means. He dis-
penses with all superfluous gesture, as does the great French illus-
trator. Grock is entirely right about clownery. You are either
funny or you are not. No amount of study will produce the gift
for humour. It is there, or it isn't. Grock's gift for musicianship is
a singular combination to find with the rest of his artistry. It goes
with the remarkably refined look in his face, however, as he sits upon
the back of the seatless chair, and plays the little concertina with
superb execution. There are no "jumps” in Grock's performance.
His moods flow from one into another with a masterly smoothness,
and you are aware when he is finished that you have never seen that
sort of foolery before. Not just that sort. It is the good mind that
satisfies, as in the case of James Watts, and Miss Shields.
From elephants carrying in their trunks chatelaines of Shetland
ponies, curtseying at the close of the charming act like a pretty miss
at her first coming out, to such work as the Four Danubes give you
as the closing number, with Irene as a lead, you are, to say the least, ,
carried over the dreadful spots, such as the young man who sways
out like a burlesque queen and tells you whom he was with before
Keith got him. His name should be "Pusher," "Advance Man," or
something of that sort, and not artist. What he gives you, you could
find just as well if not better done on Fourteenth Street. He has a
ribbon-counter, adenoid voice production that no really fine artist
could afford. He will “get by,” because anything does, apparently.
One turns to the big artist for relief, even though minor artists
like The Brown Sisters charm so surely with their ivory and silver
diamond-studded accordions, giving very pleasing transitions from
grave to gay in arias and tunes we know. Accordions and concertinas
are very beautiful to me, when played by artists like these girls, and
by such as Joe Cawthorne, and Grock.
There are more dancing men of quality this season, it seems to
me, who are obscured by dancing ladies of fame, and not such war-
rantable artistry. Perhaps it is because male anatomy allows of


340
VAUDEVILLE
greater eccentricity and playfulness. There are no girls who have
just such laughing legs as the inimitable Frances White. It is the
long-legged American boy who beats the world in this sort of thing.
The lovely bit of hockey which James Barton gives is for me far
more distinguished than all the rest of his work in the Winter Gar-
den Revue. He is a real artist, but it is work that one sees rather
a deal of this season, whereas the hockey dance is like nothing else
to be found. A lovely moment of rhythmic leg work. We are now
thoroughly familiar with the stage drunk, as we have long been
familiarized by Weber and Fields with the stage Jew, which is for-
tunately passing out for lack of artist to present it. Leon Errol is
good for once, even twice. He is quite alone in his very witty falls
and runs. They are full of the struggle of the drunk to regain his
character and manhood. The act lives on a very flat plane other-
wise. It has no roundness.
I have come on my list to Mijares and Co., in “Monkey Busi-
ness.” We have the exquisite criterion always for the wire, in the
perfect Bird Millman. “Monkey Business” is a very good act, and
both men do excellent work on the taut and slack wire. “Monkey,"
in this case being a man, does as beautiful a piece of work as I know
of. I have never seen a back somersault upon a high wire. I have
never heard of it before. There may be whole generations of artists
gifted in this particular stunt. You have here, nevertheless, a mo-
ment of very great beauty in the cleanness of this man's surprising
agility and sureness. The monkey costume hinders the beauty of the
thing. It should be done with pale blue silk tights against a cherry
velvet drop, or else in deep ultramarine on an old gold background.
The acrobatic novelty called “The Legrohs” relies chiefly on its
most exceptional member, who would be complete without the other
two. He is most decidedly a virtuoso in vaudeville. Very gifted,
certainly, if at moments a little disconcerting in the flexibility and
the seemingly uncertain turns of his body. It is the old-fashioned
contortionism saved by charming acrobatic variations. This “Le-
groh” knows how to make a superb pattern with his body, and the
things he does with it are done with such ease and skill as to make
you forget the actual physical effort and you are lost for the time
being in the beauty of this muscular kaleidoscopic brilliancy. You
feel it is like "puzzle—find the man” for a time, but then you
fol-
low his exquisite changes from one design into another with genuine


MARSDEN HARTLEY
341
a
delight, and appreciate his excessive grace and easy rapidity. He
gives you chiefly the impression of a dragon-fly blown in the wind of
a brisk morning over cool stretches of water. You would expect
him to land on a lily-pad any moment and smooth his wings with his
needle-like legs.
So it is the men and women of vaudeville transform themselves
into lovely flower and animal forms, and the animals take on sem-
blances of human sensibility in vaudeville. It is the superb ara-
besque of the beautiful human body that I care for most, and get
the most from in these cameo-like bits of beauty and art. So brief
they are, and like the wonders of sea gardens as you look through the
glass bottoms of the little boats. So like the wonders of the micro-
copic, full of surprising novelties of colour and form. So like the
kaleidoscope in the ever changing, ever shifting bits of colour re-
flecting each other, falling into new patterns with each twist of the
toy. If you care for the iridescence of the moment you will trust
vaudeville as you are not able to trust any other sort of a perform-
ance. You have no chance for the fatigue of problem. You are at
rest as far as thinking is concerned. It is something for the eye
first
and last. It is something for the ear now and then, only very sel-
domly, however. For me, they are the saviours of the dullest art in
existence, the art of the stage. Duse was quite right about it. The
stage
should be swept of actors. It is not a place for imitation and
photography. It is a place for the laughter of the senses, for the
laughter of the body. It is a place for the tumbling blocks of the
brain to fall in heaps. I give first place to the acrobat and his asso-
ciates because it is the art where the human mind is for once relieved
of its stupidity. The acrobat is master of his body and he lets his
brain go a-roving upon other matters, if he has one. He is expected
to be silent. He would agree with William James, transposing
"music prevents thinking” into "talk prevents silence.” In so many
instances, it prevents conversation. That is why I like tea chit-chat.
Words are never meant to mean anything then. They are simply
given legs and wings, and they jump and fly. They land where
they can, and fall flat if they must. The audience that patronizes
vaudeville would do well to be present at most first numbers, and
remain for most or many of the closing ones. A number, I repeat,
like the Four Danubes, should not be snubbed by any one.
I have seen recently, then, by way of summary, four fine bits of


342
TO LOVE IMPUISSANT
artistry in vaudeville—Ella Shields, James Watts, the Brothers
Rath, and the Four Danubes. I shall speak again of these people.
They are well worth it. They turn pastime into perfect memory.
They are, therefore, among the great artists.
TO LOVE IMPUISSANT
BY EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY
Love, though for this you riddle me with darts,
And drag me at your chariot till I die-
Oh, heavy prince! oh, panderer of hearts !-
Yet hear me tell how in their throats they lie
Who shout you mighty: thick about my hair,
Day in, day out, your ominous arrows purr,
Who still am free, unto no querulous care
A fool, and in no temple worshipper.
1, that have bared me to your quiver's fire,
Lifted my face into its puny rain,
Do wreathe you Impotent to Evoke Desire
As you are Powerless to Elicit Pain!
(Now will the god, for blasphemy so brave,
Punish me, surely, with the shaft I crave!)



பாடு
C
“NA-KA-VO-MA": HOPI SNAKE DANCE. BY FRED KOBOTIE






w
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"VELINO SHIJE," SIA PUEBLO: THE LEGEND OF THE DEER






了​。
CORN DANCE. PUEBLO INDIANS, NEW MEXICO





NOTES ON THE INDIAN WATER-COLOURS
BY WALTER PACH
SUFET
UFFICIENT interest has been shown in the article on the art of
the Indians published in The Dial for January, to warrant
our returning to the subject. But the best justification for so doing
is the beauty of the paintings which we reproduce. Their exquisite
colour disappears, of course, through their translation into black
and white, but their amazing pattern persists, and, above all, the
pure and intense expression through which they take their place
among the great Primitives.
They are Primitives in the true sense of the word, their form and
content deriving from an immediate response to the scenes they de-
pict, the simple means of execution being suddenly raised to their
intensity of effect by the conviction and enthusiasm of the artists.
The conception of these pictures does not come, as it does with the
so-called Primitives of Europe, from traditions evolved through
many centuries, nor is the execution the result of the accumulated
wisdom of a long series of schools. These paintings were done by
untaught young Indians working with a medium unknown to their
ancestors—the water-colours obtained from white artists at work in
their villages. What we have before us is therefore that precious
thing—the instinctive rendering of things seen. The effect of in-
stinct is at once apparent if we consult the older arts of the Indians:
the great paintings on skins, the pottery with its decoration, the
katchinas or dance effigies, the textiles, and so on. Always one has
a sense of the Indian frankness, of his saying the thing he means, lit-
erally and exactly—his lyric, epic, or humorous quality entering
only unconsciously to give a certain tone to the scene and to make
the "justness of his vision the more convincing, for no art so sponta-
neous could fail to bear with it the impress of the artist's mood.
In the picturing of the Mah-pe-wi ceremony the mood is clearly
one of exhilaration. The legend is that at a time when food seemed
no longer obtainable, a beautiful maiden went into the forest and
by her singing brought the deer back to places where the hunters of
a


344 NOTES ON THE INDIAN WATER-COLOURS
her people could again provide food for the hungry villages. The
dance retells the story, whose interest for the Indian is perennial.
When he comes to picture the dance, a lively rhythm goes through
his whole design, and his colours are light and joyous. The shirts
of the drummers at the left of the painting are of vivid but delicate
hues, most nearly recalled by the colour of the Persian miniaturists.
A remarkable sequence-red, orange, and yellow in the figures in
the first row, with the cooler tones serving as foils in the surrounding
figures—shows how the instinct of these children of nature carries
them forward at a bound to a use of colour which any “civilized”
artist might be proud to have achieved. The action, both of the
deer-dancers and of the maiden and the hunters, is beyond all praise.
Not the least remarkable feature of the picture is what Maurice
Sterne calls its abstract quality—the sudden appearing out of white
space of the horns, faces, feet, and so forth, of the figures-only
those things which stood out before the artist's mind as essential.
And so they arrange themselves in the vivid, vital design and the
picture is perfect in its completeness.
The mood of the Corn Dance picture is given in the opening lines
of Verlaine's Offrande. Simple and static lines prevail; the larger
spaces of colour are a flat warm black in the flesh of the men and
in the hair and part of the clothing of the women. Contrasting with
this black and the white of the background comes the glow of luxu-
riant greens in the corn stalks and leaves, in the melons and other
fruits, while the most extraordinary note in the picture is furnished
by the head-dresses of a royal blue, relieved by reds and yellows.
The drawing of detail is, as in the preceding picture, of a fairy fine-
ness, even where the ensemble is most massive. The richness of the
whole is worthy of a great Oriental school, but this work is different
from the Oriental and nearer to us: it is American! I believe I may
be permitted to return once more to my former thesis—that it be-
hooves us other Americans to fight to the limit of our strength
against the agents and missionaries who are to-day striving
to end the conditions of Indian life that make these beautiful
works possible.
The Hopi Snake Dance picture, Na-ka-vo-ma, has, to my mind,
an element of grandeur that should make all comment unnecessary.
The colours are of great simplicity in the figures, almost nothing
save an orange-red and black in varying quantities, while the


WALTER PACH
345
astounding burst of strength and beauty in the hedge at the right
side is formed by two tones of the same green.
Where can one find a row of figures forming one simple and im-
pressive rhythm such as here, until one has gone clear back to the
painting of the Egyptians? And the nobility of gesture and of
grouping in the other figures—but I have said they needed no com-
ment and so I leave them.
These pictures form part of the group of contemporary Indian
art which will be shown at the annual exhibition of the Society of
Independent Artists at the Waldorf-Astoria, in New York, from
March eleventh to April first. They are a novelty in such an exhi-
bition but the directors of the Society felt that its work must cer-
tainly include the showing of the Indian pictures. Readers of The
Dial who recall the article on the Schamberg Memorial Exhibition
last year will be interested to learn that the sale there of the painter's
work created a fund which, donated to the Independents by the ar-
tist's family, permitted the holding of the present exhibition of the
Indian paintings.


MRS. MAECENAS
BY KENNETH BURKE
I
Ego vox clamantis in deserto.
WORDS OF St. John.
a
A
FTER many years of faithful service, the professor had become
president of the university, taken him a somewhat scandal-
ously younger wife, and died, leaving a string of pompous titles to
the wind, and a flourishing widow over thirty to the world. The wife
of the head of the physics department, who was usually well up on
such things, had prophesied that the president's widow would soon
quit the little town for ever, but contrary to expert opinion, she
continued living in the same house, nay, even maintained her former
connections with the university. The unexpressed consensus of opin-
ion was that this woman was too charming to be beyond suspicion,
but
yet her scutcheon was radiant with blotlessness. Propriety had
been observed with a rigidity that was perhaps even a bit dogmatic,
as in the case of her dismissing the chauffeur. And besides, she was
left with a little girl, which was even more reassuring.
After the fitting period of black, and another fitting period of sub-
dued colours, she gradually drifted into a superbness of attire which
was perhaps not quite so fitting, but was still within the code. For
she never appeared again in smart clothes; in fact, even the most un-
friendly had to admit that she was almost matronly. A big-busted
woman, she carried herself with firm dignity, and talked with a
Southern accent in a voice that was rich and deep, and might even
indicate that she had once been an instructress in elocution.
Within two years after her husband's death, she had acquired a
unique position in the life of the university. There were fussy young
girls who, as the expression goes, just idolized her. She was the un-
failing chaperon at all school functions, since she had succeeded in
the difficult task of both entering in with the feelings of the stu-
dents and yet making them remember that she was not one of them.


KENNETH BURKE
347
If she appeared at any of the games, the students, at a sign from their
cheer-leader, would doff their caps, and cheer for her. There is no
greater tribute to her tact than the fact that she was honorary head
of both the Athenian Literary Society and the Society of Fine Arts,
two organizations which were always facing each other with backs
hunched and teeth bared. It was as patroness of these two organiza-
tions that she acquired the flattering nickname of “Mrs. Maecenas.”
For of all her interests in student activities, her guidance of "the
arts" had been most faithful.
In the course of her five years at the university Mrs. Maecenas
had judged twelve debates on the single tax, fifteen on the inferior-
ity of women to men, and nine on various phases of prohibition,
state, national, and locally optional; and to her credit be it said that
her verdicts were not always the same on the same subjects. Mrs.
Maecenas had read a gross of horror stories that had received good
grades in English Composition 22, and were written after the man-
ner of Edgar Allan Poe; and another gross or two that had been
cribbed from O. Henry. Mrs. Maecenas had gone through thousands
of rhymed documents on pubescent and adolescent affections, still in
her capacity as a protectrice of the arts. And when the war started,
and a big man in the German department had called the French a
degenerate nation, Mrs. Maecenas had written a charming letter to
the school paper in which she denounced the Huns and spoke very
beautifully of modern French poetry.
But the truth is that Mrs. Maecenas was getting weary. She had
seen ten semesters of the university, and her hopes of mothering a
little renaissance out here in the wilderness had gradually pined
away as the engineering and agricultural schools grew steadily more
vigorous. Everywhere, everywhere, typical young Americans were
springing up, sturdy tough daisy-minds that were cheerful, healthy,
and banal. How could art thrive here, she asked herself, in a land
so unfavourable to the artist's temper! These lusty young throats
that cheered her at the football games, they were miserably sane and
normal. And Mrs. Maecenas found herself entertaining uncharitable
feelings towards these fine young men and women who thought so
much of her.
Under the plea of ill health, she began to appear less at school
- festivities. Also, her child was getting older now, and the need of
giving it more attention added motivation to her retirement. She
a
a


348
MRS. MAECENAS
a
became less kindly in her opinions of the stories and verses she was
given to criticize, until this burden had decreased almost to a total
nullity. As a consequence, within another year Mrs. Maecenas was
hardly more than a widow with a little daughter. An occasional at-
tack of her old weakness for genius-hunting would lure her now and
then to one of the literary clubs, but she usually returned from them
with such a feeling of exhaustion and disgust that she wondered how
she ever could have stood it.
Mrs. Maecenas settled down to be the voice of one whispering
very quietly in the wilderness. The great machine of the university
could dump its annual output of standardized "leaders of America,”
could ship them off every commencement day labelled "with all the
advantages of a college education”; the alumni could put up a sun-
dial or a gate, or an iron railing, every year in sacred memory of
their dear Alma Mater; the great auditorium could tremble with
cheering and shouting when big Dick Halloway, handsome blond-,
haired Dick, the hero of the university, shot the winning goal; all
this could go on if it would—but Mrs. Maecenas got farther away
from it all, and nearer to her books and her piano. The uni-
versity became healthier, and she quietly blushed for the future of
America.
And then it was that her genius came. By the purest chance she
had gone to the Athenian meeting. She found the room peculiarly
astir. Little groups were talking quite low together, glancing now
and then towards one corner of the room. In this corner, with his
back turned towards the members of the Athenian, a rather gawkily
formed young man was reading a yellow paper-covered volume
which Mrs. Maecenas recognized to be a French novel. There was a
slight smell of whiskey in the room.
Mrs. Maecenas knew she had found her genius. Yet at this time
Siegfried was barely seventeen.
a
1


KENNETH BURKE
349
II
Ecce quam bonum et 'quam jucundum
habitare fratres in unum!
PSALM 132.
Siegfried presented himself at the home of Mrs. Maecenas late the
following afternoon. He was just as gawkily formed as the night
before, and another yellow-covered book was in his hand, but his
breath this time smelled strongly of coffee-beans. In spite of the
coffee-beans, however, Siegfried had had no more whiskey; with
peculiar astuteness in these matters, he had realized that it would
probably be a false step to exhale the same shocking odour of the
previous night, but on the other hand, to exhale the standard de-
stroyer of this odour might give the precisely proper variation. Sieg-
fried selected his breath with as much care as less imaginative souls
give to their neckties. The door was opened by the widow herself.
“Mrs. Maecenas, I believe ?''
"Oh, Siegfried, won't you come in?” She had always insisted on
calling the students by their first names.
He stepped into a dark reception hall, and then followed her to
the left into her library, Mrs. Maecenas having dispensed with the
small-town parlour. “I am very glad you came to see me, although
and here she laughed with her widow roguishness, “although
I'm not so sure that I ought to be.”
Siegfried was startled. He had not hoped to be taken so freely.
But he skimmed the cream of the occasion, and cast away the yoke
of his youth in the quality of his equals-to-equals answer, “Throw
all caution, etc., I implore you, Mrs. Maecenas, and be less churchly
and more Christian. I have come to you as a last hope; deliver me
from this American captivity.” He began looking over her books
without further formality. Mrs. Maecenas sat down tentatively on
the piano stool, facing away from the piano, and her two arms
stretched back on the key-board.
"Your remarks might lead me to conclude that you are not an
American yourself, my dear boy, but nevertheless I'll risk my life
that
you,
like me, were raised under the tutelage of the chopped-
down cherry tree.” At this Siegfried turned suddenly, like an ill-
tempered dog.
.


350
MRS. MAECENAS
“Ugh! My father was an alumnus of this university. Is that
credentials enough?” And then just as suddenly cherubic again:
“But you have them all, every one! I might think I was by the
"
Pont Neuf.”
“The books? Yes, and I should be pleased to lend them to you,
if
you should ever want any of them.”
“And no George Sand! And no Sandeau! And no Bourget!
Why, Mrs. Maecenas, I am in the library that I shall own some day.
Oh, please let me come here, in this modern thébaïde, in this eleva-
tion above the chewing-gum and sarsaparilla of our beloved country-
men. God bless them, they have carried their Monroe Doctrine into
culture. And what a beautiful set of Flaubert!"
“Shhh! Et les bouquins! Viens!” With mock caution she led
him by the hand to a corner where something square was standing,
covered with a drapery of dark purple. She lifted this slowly, dis-
closing another bookcase. “Popery!" And she slipped out two heavy
breviaries, with black leather bindings, and rich gilt edges. She
opened one of them at random, and displayed a beautiful front of
red and black, with illuminated capitals. Then she pointed to a
Dutch edition of Boethius's De Consolatione Philosophiae, in the
russet-leather of the seventeenth century. There was the Vulgate in
five volumes, the Peristephanon and Psychomachia of Prudentius;
Siegfried's eyes followed her hand as it brushed along the books. "I
must admit,” she said, “I did not collect these. They were my hus-
band's. We spoke of them in secret, as though they were the limbs
of a child we had pulled apart and stuffed up the chimney.” There
was also a copy of Huysmans's Sainte Lydwine de Schiedam in
Gothic type, Remy de Gourmont's critical anthology of mystic Latin
verse, and Saint François de Sales's Introduction à la Vie Dévote in
a paper cover of ludicrously innocent blue.
“Popery, bah!" Siegfried exclaimed. “The de Gourmont gives
you away. And that, down in the corner, that Petronius! Madam,
you are a pagan, for who but a pagan would own such lovely tomes?
Nay, you are worse than a pagan; you are a lover of art. I am scan-
dalized. I shall expose you before the world!”
Mrs. Maecenas laughed. “Art was once loved; then it was toler-
ated; and now it will soon be prohibited, so that we must express
our devotion to it in secret, deep in the catacombs. Those are,
more or less, the words of de Gourmont. And so you must come


KENNETH BURKE
351
here often, Siegfried, and we shall kneel together before the clan-
destine altar.”
After this, they knelt together no less than twice a week. Although
Siegfried was more cautious, Mrs. Maecenas plunged headlong into
her epithets, and described their evenings as "something rare and
wonderful.” Love, art, death, renunciation, the beautiful—the two
of them drank long draughts of these deep-red vintages, for they
each loved art eloquently. Huddled darkly in the crypt, they would
discuss all eternal and universal things, and he would read her his
prose and verses. She didn't write herself, but what a tender critic!
Perhaps no evening was more wonderful than that sleety night
before the holidays. Siegfried had struggled against a persistently
vindictive slashing of hail, and arrived with his overcoat feeling like
a hulk of iron. As he turned from the street towards the widow's
home, he saw the subdued red of the drop-light, "their light,” glow-
ing in the window. He felt so deliciously conscious of his health, of
his strength, as he stamped on to the porch. Mrs. Maecenas opened
the door before he could ring.
"Whew!” he exclaimed, “how many enemies I have out in this
night!” He knocked the drippings from his hat, and shook his coat,
then stepped into the warm hallway. “I was hardly more than a
primitive out in that storm, battling savagely with all the little
gods.
She took his coat. "Ah, you have noticed that? It is so easy to
understand, when one is fighting a storm, just how the original man
had to imagine the world peopled with demons. A cutting wind in
your face soon seems like a challenge aimed at you personally, just
as a fist in the face might. And you can't walk against it five min-
utes without squaring your jaw, or even shouting as though you were
a fiend yourself.”
Thus was the platter handed to Siegfried. He returned it gra-
ciously as they stepped into the library: "And then, to continue the
same viewpoint, think how extraordinarily secure this original man
must have felt when he had gained his cave, where there was fire,
and light, and warmth to reassure him that he had outstrided the
demon. ... Perhaps that is why I feel so peculiarly comfortable
now as I see those logs where I can warm my hands.” He laughed.
“Congratulate me; I feel that I unwound a pretty statement there.


352
MRS. MAECENAS
O
.
But as to the warming of hands, it is a pleasure to warm them
before a log fire even when they are not cold.”
"Once the hands are warmed before the fire of logs, we can then
warm them before the fire of life," and the widow had acquitted
herself.
“Ah!” After which, for no defined reason, he thought this a time
to summon all his boyishness in a toss of the head, and a patent
care-free laugh. “How fortunate it is that Landor is not popular.”
“Yes, if I were deprived of that lovely quatrain! How right a
thing to compose on one's seventy-fifth birthday!"
“Isn't it? It must gratify a man to evolve so perfectly concomi-
tantly with his years, to write patriarchally when he is old, to be so
complete an entelechy.”
“The entelechy, I always felt, was one of Aristotle's most valu-
able conceptions,” Mrs. Maecenas fell in, thereby advancing the
conversation another stage. They were gratified with the way they
were talking this evening; already they had, by logical steps, moved
from the storm to Aristotelianism, and Siegfried's feet were hardly
warm yet. And this in the light of the fact that they had begun with
the most deadly of conversations, the weather. Nor had either of
them failed to note that the weather itself had been done satis-
factorily.
Siegfried was worthy of his task. "Aristotle came centuries too
soon. If the divine chronology were in perfect ordination he should
have come now, after man had flopped and floundered for so long
and so distractedly. For if he came now, and offered his massive
sanity to the world, men would open their eyes with wonder. But as
it is, this astonishing cure for dark thinking was propounded before
we began to think darkly, so that we are still waiting for someone.
If the world should"
"Pardon me for interrupting you, Siegfried, but I have been
watching you. I have been watching your eyes. Siegfried, do you
,
suffer from headaches?"
Siegfried was content; the interruption was significant. Remarks
like this had been an ever-swelling note in their song of late. But
one must be cautious. “My eyes—yes–Aristotle . .. oh! Do I
suffer from headaches? Why, I suppose they are headaches. I had
an aunt who went mad, but I don't suppose ..
“No, no, no—nothing like that. Don't say it, Siegfried!” And
.


KENNETH BURKE
353
.
Mrs. Maecenas stopped her ears, so that Siegfried noticed her full
white arms.
There was a lull in the conversation, as was
fitting. The big clock in the hall suddenly became important, and
flooded the library with its ticking. Siegfried looked lugubriously
into the fire, religiously observing the ceremonies of the situation.
After a time, the widow ventured a timid triad. It was delicious to
be pampered this way! Siegfried was basking in the warm sun of
sentiment. Then, as if putting aside a great burden; she broke the
silence: “Did you bring anything to read to me this evening, my
a
boy?"
i
“Some more of my Bible. I did good work on Chapter 37 of the
Second Epistle of Josephat. And I have the Forty-first and Forty-
third Psalms of Obad. But the latter are too rough yet. You would
accuse me of excessive youth. I brought only the Josephat.”
“You have been working hard, Siegfried.” And she closed her
eyes in voluptuous expectation as Siegfried opened his brief-case.
Siegfried returned and sat down by the fire. He prepared to read,
then put down the paper again to clear his throat. He cast a quick
glance in the direction of the widow; she was ready:
“Second Epistle of Josephat.
Chapter 37, Verses 9-17.
9 And the prophet Mehovah, when he was come out of the dry
places of Arabia, lifted his voice before the multitude assembled,
saying:
Many are the sorrows that beset the ways of sinners and those
that trespass against the Lord, for His eyes of vengeance are mani-
fold, and His wrath endureth forever.
He shall slake their thirst with salt, and feed their hunger
with the dry bones of His laughter; their bellies shall be empty,
and the tongues parched of those that have sinned against Him.
12 He shall smite them until they cry out with madness, and gape
and blubber at the sight of seven moons.
13 And they shall be made to run naked in fields of thistle, where
the thistle barbs shall prick them, and strike out at them like hissing
snakes.
14 And they shall wander in night as black as their iniquity; in
the blackness of night, beasts shall brush against them, and unknown
things, and voices shall whine out of the funnel of darkness.
10
1
11


354
MRS. MAECENAS
15 And they shall wend from the valleys up into the mountains,
and from the tops of the mountains back into the valleys, and find
not what they seek; no, not even shall they know the things they
are seeking.
16 All these evils and many others shall visit the sons of Belial,
and Belial's daughters, but for those blessed with righteousness there
shall be playing of harps and dulcimers, and an abundance of honey.
17 And when Mehovah had said these things, he turned again into
the desert.”
“Excellong!" the widow cried out immediately. “Let me have
them. And you recited so beautifully!” Siegfried handed her the
manuscript. Glancing through it, she made her criticisms. “The
delicate irony of the prophet coming up out of the desert just to
deliver a speech of about a hundred words, and then going back
again, is the kind of thing we love to find out for ourselves. France
would have loved to do it. And how much more capable your
prophet was of imagining tortures than bliss; the point is ferociously
well made. But, Siegfried, I am afraid of you, with your eager
sadisme littéraire. Your mind is so gloriously unhealthy, so à la
Baudelaire. If Le Mauvais Vitrier were not already written, I am
sure you would do it sooner or later. Or some of de Gourmont's
Oraisons Mauvaises. You are an incipient Giles de Retz. And-
pardon me—so young! But why aren't you younger still, Siegfried,
so young that I could throw my arms around you and kiss
you
for
this magnificent performance ? Siegfried, you are going to redeem
America in the eyes of the world.”
Siegfried nursed the moment in silence. Mrs. Maecenas went on.
“But there are things lacking yet, Siegfried, big things.” Thought-
fully: "If you can do this much without experience, on air, as it
were, great Heavens, what will you come to when you have lived! !
Sometimes I feel it is my duty to-to-aid you, Siegfried, to be
a—a real Maecenas, or a real Mrs. Maecenas rather.” Then ex-
plosively: "Oh, Siegfried, my poor, dear boy, the wonderful things
you are still to learn.” Abruptly: “Think, Siegfried, you haven't
even been in love yet!” He said nothing. "Have you?''
“I'm not sure, but there's a charming little prissy in one of my
classes whose delicate-pink cheeks I should love to slap."
"Faugh! How young you can be at times! To know no more


KENNETH BURKE
355
about oneself than that! You will begin by loving an older
woman.” With a laugh: “But we both know that you must find out
all these things for yourself.” And with the echo of this interlude
still rumbling in the far valleys, the conversation turned again to
art.
As he ploughed back through the slush that night Siegfried at-
tempted to place his relationship with Mrs. Maecenas, and finally
contented himself with the conclusion that the general was leading
to the specific. Or there might be room for some sort of a syllogism
somewhere: he needed Experience; Mrs. Maecenas wanted him to
have Experience; ergo ...
but that didn't quite fit together. In
any case, on the whole the thing had a slight savour of the Aphro-
dite-and-Adonis, with him playing Adonis merely because he didn't
know how to play any one else. He hated to be so frank about the
thing, but it did look as though the day was approaching when he
could face the sun stolidly, and proclaim with firmness, "I have be-
come a man.” But the important thing was that these evenings were
excellent, and it was delightful to be so worried over.
III
a
Nemo mundus a sorde, nec si unius
diei vita ejus sit in terra.
Воок OF Јов.
1
A week later. The dim red drop-light was burning in the window,
which might have told the world that this was one of Siegfried's
nights. Outside, a soft snow was sifting quietly, making a mystic
haze about the street-lamps. Siegfried had just finished playing the
Moonlight.
For a moment he sat motionless, still facing the piano. The big
clock in the hall, ever on the alert for such times, promptly loomed
up again. The flames of the gas-fire climbed noisily over the asbes-
tos. He turned slowly towards the widow. “And just think, Mrs.
Maecenas, one isn't allowed to like the Sonata Quasi una Fantasia
any more! . . . But who knows? Perhaps I shouldn't either if it
were literature and not music. ..." She was looking out the win-
dow, and made no answer. He let a few moments more go by, then
O
>


356
MRS. MAECENAS
.
.
instinctively, he plunged into another direction. “You are looking
out into the night? ... It meant a lot to me to come to you through
?
a night like that. It felt as though I were stealing to you. Or as
though I were here by the special dispensation of a good fairy who
had warned me that I must be home again by the stroke of twelve.
..: The night is full of whisperings about Cinderella. . . . I had
to play the Moonlight, you see. But I am silly? Yes ?”
“A little, Siegfried—but pleasantly so.” They both thought her
answer had a sweetly Shakespearean flavour.
“But you should forgive me. We who have not had the big
things of life yet, you will find that at bottom we have a horrible
amount of silliness; silly little dreams, silly little expectations, silly
little longings. Perhaps we are not so pure as the little girls in a
convent, but we are every bit as silly.
‘Little Doris of twelve, what is sillier, Dorrie?
Is it you, or is it I,
Or the silly little morning-glory?'
O
Yes, they are mine; but I never brought them around.
I never
dared to."
She turned and faced him, having contrived dexterously to keep
the divan from creaking. “You should have, Siegfried. I was com-
ing to think of you as a monster. And after all, are we not peculiarly
close in our present predicaments? You have not had the things of
life, and I ..." with an uncertain sigh, then explosively, "I have
passed them by, I suppose.”
Siegfried was sure the flower was in full bloom, but in spite of
him, Adonis answered: “Yet we always hold back. There is some
sickly longing in man to deprive himself of those things which mean
most to him. We are proud, not when we have been happy, but
when we have wallowed in misery. If any one have anything of
which he is especially fond, let it be taken from him. That was, I
believe, one of the rules of the Benedictines. It is a sentence that is
very beautiful to me, and yet there is no sweeping simile, no bril-
liance of epithet, nothing but bare bleached bones. It is its sheer
austerity which makes it alluring, the mere conception of these self-
flagellating temperaments so eager in harvesting their tortures. ...
We no longer have religion, if by religion one means the hierarchy


KENNETH BURKE
357
a
.
.
a
of the angels, and a Janitor Coeli, and a God to sit massively on his
throne, but ah! ... how appealing the instincts of religion still are
to us! I could take the vows of an anchorite, not to attain some ulti-
mate Kingdom of the Blessed thereby, but merely through a vague
urge towards asceticism, even though I have nothing for which to be
ascetic. For we are all tinged a bit by the stench of holiness,
sanctitatis odore. Perhaps I might be ascetic for my art, but
you tell me that the artist must live, not flee from life. Blind
mouths, as Milton has put it. Blind mouths! We are like frail little
kittens hardly a day old, nosing around for the mother's teat.”
Siegfried was dissatisfied for once, even though his rhetoric had been
faultless. Still, he had ended the flight happily enough, it might
prove.
There was a long silence. Then the widow began speaking very
slowly. “My eloquent child, my baby Nestor, have you ever seen
Thackeray's cartoon of Louis XIV? You remember the one draw-
ing of the little runt of a king, old, sallow, dried, hideously devoid
of kingliness. Then steps forth Louis the Great, the official Louis,
Louis the Emperor Augustus of France, Louis the State, the King of
Corneille, of Racine, of Molière. He is stilted, and bejeweled, and
sumptuously robed. He is draped and decorated. He is magnified
with scaffolds. And behold, he is Regal! In the same way, Sieg-
fried, I should love to make a cartoon of what you have just said.
For you have done nothing other than Thackeray says was done to
Louis. You have taken a condition that is devoid of interest and
value, and
you have decked it with royal purples. . . . No, Sieg-
fried, you can say what you like about the beauty of asceticism; but
after
you have perverted and twisted and beautified to your heart's
content, at bottom the original thing remains. ... For
your
art's
sake, for America's sake, you must get up and move. ...
.. The Muse
is a woman, Siegfried, and the formula is that the worse you treat
a woman the more she loves you. You may find that if you forget
art long enough to live, your art may be all the stronger for it
afterwards."
Siegfried was content. He found it pleasant to be exhorted, and
pled with. But he wished for a way to get off this Adonis strain. He
cursed himself for his praise of asceticism; it might have been too
discouraging. But while she was making cartoons, why didn't she
make another, showing his true attitude towards Experience? Tak-
.


358
.
MRS. MAECENAS
.
ing the royal purples off his "urge to asceticism” might reveal an
urge of an entirely different sort. Siegfried had no essential objec-
tion to being Experienced. But, hell ... there was plenty of time.
Yet it was disagreeable to think so practically about these things.
“But the play, Siegfried! We have wasted all this time, and I
am determined to hear the entire play this evening. The little
snatches you have told me of it ... I am mad to hear it all.
Begin it immediately.”
Siegfried rose from the piano, and went out into the hallway for
his brief-case. Mrs. Maecenas pulled a chair up to the light for him,
and fixed herself on the sofa, with eyes closed. Siegfried returned
and took his seat by the light. He paused. Mrs. Maecenas read-
justed her pillow, glanced down at the white of her exposed neck,
and then over at Siegfried.
“But, Siegfried,” she cried out in sudden horror, "what is the
matter with your face?”
He looked up in astonishment. Then he thought he understood;
she was pampering him, no doubt. “The paleness? Am I unusually
pale to-night? I was smoking a lot to-day.”
“Uh.
y-yes. Why, yes, the pallor.” Then she seemed to
recover. “But that is not unusual, I suppose. The artist's temper
nervosity : . . pallor would be natural.”
Siegfried understood now. It was not the pallor, then, but the
redness. Nemo mundus a sorde; nature is such a tyrant. Yesterday
they had broken out, and to-day they were all over his chin. But
how annoying that she should react so to pimples!
A few more sentences were offered. She seemed very tired. Sieg-
fried decided tentatively to remember an engagement. “Oh, I am
awfully sorry, Siegfried.” She would let him go so easily, then? ...
.
.
a
A few months later they passed on the street, and she nodded to
him very sweetly. They even exchanged a couple of words.
She hoped he was getting on well, she said.



Courtesy of the Babcock Galleries
PRIMITIVE BATTLE.
BY S. WITKEWITZ





DOROTHY
BY ALFRED KREYMBORG
I
HER EYES
Her eyes hold black whips-
dart of a whip
lashing, nay, flicking,
nay, merely caressing
the hide of a heart-
and a broncho tears through canyons-
walls reverberating,
sluggish streams
shaken to rapids and torrents,
storm destroying
silence and solitude!
Her
eyes
throw black lariats-
one for his head,
one for his heels-
and the beast lies vanquished-
walls still,
streams still,
except for a tarn,
or is it a pool,
or is it a whirlpool
twitching with memory?


360
DOROTHY
1
II
HER HAIR
Her hair
is a tent
held down by two pegs —
ears, very 'likely
where two gypsies-
lips, dull folk call them-
read your soul away:
one promising something,
the other one stealing it.
If the pegs would let go,
why is it they're hidden? -
and the tent
blow away-drop away-
like a wig-or a nest-
maybe
you'd escape
paying coin
to gypsies-
maybe -
-
III
HER HANDS
Blue veins
of morning glories -
blue veins
of clouds
blue veins
bring deep-toned silence
after a storm.
White horns
of morning glories-
white flutes
of clouds
sextettes hold silence fast,
cup it for aye.


ALFRED KREYMBORG
361
Could I
blow morning glories-
could I
lip clouds
I'd sound the silence
her hands bring to me.
Had I
the yester sun
had I
the morrow's
brush them like cymbals,
I'd then sound the noise.
IV
HER BODY
--
Her body gleams
like an altar candle-
white in the dark-
and modulates
to voluptuous bronze-
bronze of a sea-
under the flame.
-


A MODERN QUIETIST
BookS AND THings. By Philip Littell. 12mo. 283
pages. Harcourt, Brace & Howe. New York.
M
R. PHILIP LITTELL'S Books and Things is a surprise.
We did not know that he was writing, thought of writing, or
could write a book. It may be suspected that he did not know it
himself, that the extempore freshness and casual opportunism of
these essays as they appeared in the New Republic were the result
of the irresponsibility which is the charm and the reward of the
ephemeral. But if so, Mr. Littell was practising an art of which he
was unconscious. No one who has merely read the New Republic
since its advent has read Books and Things.
Mr. Littell's selection includes essays political, social, literary,
and a few on the war, but it would be wrong to insist on this or any
classification. For it is the essence of the book which Mr. Littell.
has made that the same attitude and spirit characterize them all.
That spirit Mr. Waldo Frank has stated with his usual bluntness in
Our America:
“Philip Littell is enamoured of the seclusiveness of art. He
comes by his love, of an old tradition. Bravely he seeks to carry it
into the present. He ventures forth into the modern havoc and
makes his Quiet there.”
Just so. The tradition by virtue of which Mr. Littell is admitted
to be "enamoured” is that in which he grew up and achieved his in-
tellectual competency, the tradition of the last decade of the last
century. Lately someone saw his name in a printed list with the
number 90 after it, and wondered whether the figure represented his
actual age or, more delightfully, his "expectancy.” It appeared
that the list was not one of beneficiaries of life insurance but of
recent distinguished graduates of Harvard University; the 90 hap-
pily marks Mr. Littell's accomplished beginning, not his still remote
end. It is his answer to the question:


ROBERT MORSS LOVETT
363
“What shelter to grow ripe is ours?
What leisure to grow wise?”
Mr. Littell grew ripe and wise under the happy auspices and mild
reign of the bland Victorians. He was brought up in the straitest
sect of the Pharisees and sat at the feet of Gamaliel. In these
days of "change, alarm, surprise,” reflecting themselves in the exi-
gencies of weekly journalism, he must often feel with his readers in
the New Republic the special application of the stanza which
follows:
“Like children bathing on the shore,
Buried a wave beneath,
A second wave succeeds, before
We have had time to breathe.”
It would be quite wrong to think of Mr. Littell as looking back
wistfully to his past or murmuring plaintively about it. He is
robustly of his present, and it is his significant quality that he has
made his past useful to his present, adroitly and in all sorts of un-
expected ways. For Mr. Littell is nothing if not adroit-rich, as it
were, in the second intention. So accomplished is he in using his
background that his happiest touches seem to flash forth from it by
accident, unconsciously and inevitably. Take, for example, those
fossils of quotation which are caught by the swift depositing of the
strata of his sentences, and lie neatly imbedded, to the delight of
the historical-naturalist reader. In the day of Chivalrous Richard
the Lion-Harding there is place for “A perfect dinner, nobly
planned.” The Way of All Flesh is declared to be "well printed,
price a dollar and a half, a book to buy, to read, to keep, and not to
lend.” The hiccoughing orator at a Dry Dinner refers to the occa-
sion as “the centenary of one of those immortal dead who live again
in minds made absent by their presence.
With a heavier accent,
as befits Omnipotence, God is described thus, in Somewhere in
Heaven, when receiving Mephistopheles's gibes anent his self-ap-
pointed partner: “On the Lord's cheek the flush of rage o'ercame
the ashen hue of age. “And this of me?' He said.”
This is the most obvious way in which Mr. Littell draws upon his
tradition, but there are others no less explicit. In the perfect urban-
ity of his controversial habit one sees the influence of a tolerance
>>


364
A MODERN QUIETIST
which is not of our day, and in the deadly precision with which he
pays out the rope for his opponent to hang himself one suspects an
art which Mr. Littell learned from his masters. He has bettered
their instruction. He is lighter of hand than they, more repressed,
more economical. A single repetition of Mr. Bryan's “reasons
which lead me to believe that Christ has fully earned the right to
be called the Prince of Peace” does its deadly work as completely
as Matthew Arnold's half-dozen citations of the bishops who wanted
"to do something for the honour of our Lord's Godhead.” But even
in Mr. Littell's mercy there is malice. We feel that Mr. Bryan is
treated with gentleness because he needs it. To Mr. Hughes the
wind is less tempered. In the concept of "absolute campaigning,
like absolute painting, absolute music, absolute poetry,” of which
he is the inspiration, and of the ideal candidate "who could take
the stump and stay on it without saying anything about any subject
upon which his opinion could conceivably be an occasion of curiosity
to any son or daughter of woman,” there is something of the more
boisterous parody of De Quincey. The accent of Murder as a Fine
Art is hauntingly implicit in the passage on Mr. Hughes's fall:
“Because of his slip about the Lusitania. He ought not to have
been so definite. He spoke against his will, I admit, and after a
wonderful delay, beautifully sustained. But I hope he won't do it
again. Somebody in the crowd that heard him is said to have
shouted, 'You said something! These words must have made him
realize, in bitterness, that he had fallen short of his ideal.”
Mr. Littell's indirect approach is shown by his disposition to test
his characters by a maxim current in his youth: the style is the man.
He uses this with pronounced success in the case of Mr. Wilson.
In the consideration of the President's address to the Confederate
veterans (the essay is called Providence the Wise) the staleness of
a mind which nourishes platitude as an ornament to speech and a
guide to life is agreeably suggested; but the collection shows an
unaccountable omission of the essay which appeared in the New
Republic July 2, 1919. There, in the conception of the war to
make the world "safe for edible man,” and of the peace in which
the allied savages eat their vanquished opponents in order to end
cannibalism, the danger in the use of rhetoric as poison gas for a


ROBERT MORSS LOVETT
365
political offensive is revealed in satire worthy of Anatole France.
A change of wind, and the utterer of the gas is suffocated in his own
breath. Another whose speech bewrayeth him is the Kaiser. In
separating himself from the too assertive partnership of this pre-
tender God resorts to the test of style: “My worst enemies ...
have seen nothing in my words which resemble either William's
egotistic bluster or his arrogant whine.” Another hero has his fus-
tian pierced by the same test. "Soldierly curtness is admirable in
the Duke of Wellington, to whom it came natural, but the imitation
article runs a risk of sounding like General Leonard Wood.” But
the most complete reduction is of Richard the Lion-Harding. The
essay is a masterpiece of under-statement. There is barely suggested
the obscene trail left by the pandering journalist across the infinite
tragedy of war. Mr. Littell contents himself with remarking:
"Something deeper than prejudice against Mr. Davis, some mean-
ness in one's own grain, is the only valid explanation of sneers at
him for letting us know, indirectly, that he is a brave man. In no
way can a war correspondent whose heart is in his work avoid im-
parting this kind of information."
He leaves the perfect rebuke to the essay which follows, on Victor
Chapman's Letters.
Mr. Littell is at his best when he looks back upon his past from
the superior vantage-ground of his present. He writes of the au-
thors of his youth-of Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Swinburne,
Butler, Tolstoi, Shaw, Henry James-of none more modern than
George Moore and Schnitzler. He writes of them as part of his
own experience. Nothing in his book is more engaging than the
mental picture of his initiation into things Russian, which began
with Russia leather, of his discipleship of Matthew Arnold, or of
his immersion in Swinburne, along with the rest of Harvard in the
nineties. One realizes that he has genuinely lived in his past, and
lived beyond it. Accordingly his criticism has both understanding
and authority. It is both penetrating and conclusive—and ex-
pressed with a deftness that defies cavilling. What better can be
said of Tennyson than: “If Tennyson was a tame animal in the
moral world he was a dead shot at wild nature.” Of Browning:
“By his incessant curious interest in life he acquired a momentum


366
A MODERN QUIETIST
which carried him past his signals plump into a belief in immor-
tality.” Of Swinburne's poems: “They are like blown fires that
spread without arriving, like champing swift horses always in the
same place, like huge elusive bellying sails that the wind cannot
furl.” Of George Moore's vanity: "It is not a devouring egotism.
It doesn't always come to the table three regular times a day, but
it does a good deal of nibbling between meals.” Of a story by
Henry James: “Reading it was like watching Henry James watch-
ing through a knot-hole somebody who was watching somebody else
through a knot-hole.” These obiter dicta have the same happy cer-
tainty that characterizes Mr. Littell's manner always: they seem
not to spring from his observation but rather to be thrown out as
qualities of the things observed.
From what has been quoted the reader will have no doubt of the
leading characteristic of Books and Things—its intelligence exer-
cised in a variety of moods from quiet amusement to noisy gaiety,
but always with tact, good humour, and charm. Without these
qualities, indeed, the book would lack its chief distinction and rea-
son for being. It might easily seem an impertinence to establish a
zone of quiet, as Mr. Frank remarks, amid the havoc of the modern
world. The impatient passers-by might well resent the interruption,
and bawl “Who's sick ?” Not Mr. Littell certainly. He has merely
excluded the traffic from his block in order to command an undis-
turbed view of it in the main thoroughfare. And it is all so cour-
teously managed that the traffic submits without the interference
of the police, as to an entirely reasonable proceeding. Meanwhile
Mr. Littell opens his windows wide and looks out, murmuring:
“It is my crown to mock the runner's heat
With gentle wonder and with laughter sweet.”
Only let it be said again that the wonder is always gentle and the
laughter sweet in our ears.
ROBERT Morss Lovett.


A PACIFIST PATRIOT
I 2mo.
UNTIMELY Papers. By Randolph Bourne.
230 pages. B. W. Huebsch. New York.
RANI
.
DANDOLPH BOURNE would have repudiated the role of
Cassandra-except perhaps in his moments of malice; he was
too ardent and vital a person to linger among emotions no longer
fresh and too much the artist to be trapped into self-exploitation.
The reader of Untimely Papers, however, cannot fail to recognize
the pertinence of the ungrateful role to the single American writer
who succeeded, even partly, in expressing minority opinion about
American participation in the war of 1914-1918.
It was in August 1917 that Bourne wrote: “We entered the war
with no grievances of our own. . . If we were unable or unwilling
to press the Entente toward an unmistakable liberalism . . . our
..
justification for entering the war became seriously impaired. For
we could then be charged with merely aiding the Entente's ambigu-
ous scheme of European reorganization. ... The liberals felt a
naive faith in the sagacity of the President to make their strategy
prevail. They looked to him single-handedly to liberalize the liberal
nations. . . . The President's Flag Day Address . . . registers
the collapse of American strategy. . . . In the war we are a rudder-
less nation, to be exploited as the Allies wish, politically and ma-
terially, and towed, to their aggrandizement, in any direction which
they may desire.” In the Senate controversies of the past year over
the Treaty of Versailles there have been many cross currents; but in
the country at large are not attitudes of opposition to the Treaty or
half-hearted acquiescence in it due to the feeling that American
strategy did indeed collapse in Europe and that it is time for America
to be suspicious of Entente policies?
The recent deportations of those who have been the latest victims
to satisfy our chronic appetite for devils, and the still more recent
act of "white terrorism,” as Bourne would have called it, the exclu-
sion of a minority party from political representation, no doubt seem
to all sections of opinion the outcome of the war temper, and to
hostile critics of those occurrences they seem to be the very conse-
.
.
a


368
A PACIFIST PATRIOT
a
quences Bourne may have had in mind when he wrote over two
years ago: “Willing war means willing all the evils that are organ-
ically bound up with it. A good many people still seem to believe
in a peculiar kind of democratic and antiseptic war. The pacifists
opposed the war because they knew this was an illusion, and because
of the myriad hurts they knew war would do the promise of democ-
racy at home.” Yes, Bourne foresaw, even if he came by his fore-
sight by the facile ways of the non-participator, the ways of the
man out of sympathy with his group
The loss of sympathy came hard to him as to others. In the early
days of American participation in the war he felt so aloof from the
drift of public opinion that he refused to credit the drift. He was one
of the supporters of the movement to take a nation-wide referendum
on going to war, and he never forewent his belief that the outcome
of the referendum would have been for the negative. In the most
subtle and penetrating of the Seven Arts papers now republished,
Below the Battle, he flatly declares that it was "the American gov-
ernment rather than the American people who got up the animus
to fight the German government.” He had little interest in the ,
government, but in the people he was loth to lose faith. And so,
adding a variant to the familiar doctrine that it was the German
government and not the German people who were responsible for
the war, Bourne constantly reiterated the opinion that the American
democracy merely "consented to be led into war."
It must have been about the time of writing these words that
Bourne took a journey through New England to Berkshire County,
Massachusetts, and even what he saw from the car window and in
our drives through the countryside-every little house with a flag
out—failed to convince him that the heart of the people beat for
war. And later when Bourne had faced the psychological facts of
war, or many of them, he could still refer to war as an upper-class
sport and argue that the masses were driven into it with no more
enthusiasm than into industry—as an unmitigated intellectual, his
understanding of irrational groups, wage-earner as well as million-
aire, remained limited. How meagre a part thought plays in social
life he came in a measure to understand; but of the emotions that
take the place of thought he had little grasp, nor of the emotional
gratifications that are brought by war to the irrational.
Bourne's analytic power increased as his group sympathy de-


ELSIE CLEWS PARSONS
369
a
creased. By 1918 his hold on his group was so loosened by events,
that in his unfinished essay on the State we find him reckoning
straightforwardly with the facts of war psychology. He writes:
“The nation in war-time attains a uniformity of feeling, a hierarchy
of values culminating at the undisputed apex of the State ideal,
which could not possibly be produced through any other agency than
war.” And again: “The gregarious impulse acts not only to produce
concerted action for defence, but also to produce identity of opinion.
Since thought is a form of behaviour, the gregarious impulse floods
up into its realms and demands that sense of uniform thought which
war-time produces so successfully.” No longer does he seek to ex-
ternalize the force for war; he is aware of that almost irresistible
need of feeling like your neighbour which accounts so largely for
war as well as for many other facts in society.
That need can be denied, to be sure, but not with impunity.
Bourne denied and paid. His bitterness towards the intellectuals in
the war was a consequence of the frustration of his own gregarious
impulse. He suffered more from the sense of their renegation as a
group, I think, than he did from any experience of personal exclu-
sion. Of all the pusillanimous expressions of the war temper I can
recall none to equal the letter of a certain monthly magazine editor
in rejecting a purely literary article Bourne had sent him, on the
ground that their political opinions were at variance. But Bourne
showed me the letter without any of the scorn we know he bestowed
without stint upon the liberals who claimed so naively that they had
"willed the war."
"
Bourne had an unlimited capacity for scorn, but he steadfastly
rejected that state of dismay over lost values with no compensation
in sight which we call cynicism. Bourne was keenly conscious of lost
values, but he was resourceful in compensations. In his essay on the
State he had begun to battle for distinctions between State, Nation,
and Country, in which the State became the conceptual scapegoat
for the sins of patriotism, leaving Nation and Country immaculate
and worthy of devotion. Bourne clung to Country as “a funda-
mental fact of our consciousness” and his Americanism was acutely
developed. "For many of us,” he wrote in the War Diary of
September 1917, "resentment against the war has meant a vivider
consciousness of what we are seeking in American life.” And the
following month he went on: "Irritation at things as they are, dis-


370
A PACIFIST PATRIOT
gust at the continual frustrations and aridities of American life,
deep dissatisfaction with self and with the groups that give them-
selves forth as hopeful-out of such moods there might be hammered
new values. ... Malcontentedness may be the beginning of
promise.”
But to this end there must be from time to time a term to mal-
contentedness. Were Bourne with us to-day, were he to return next
year or some year thereafter, would he continue to talk patriotically
of American promise, or would he seek refuge from cynicism in tak-
ing the concept not only of State but of Nation and Country less
gravely and as but a part, from time to time indeed quite a negligible
part, of that range of modern culture that the individual must roam
about in if he wishes to retain a sense of freedom or to think of him-
self, as A. A. Goldenweiser, our philosopher-anthropologist, has
phrased it, as the carrier of culture rather than its freight?
Would such a philosophy of social errancy be accepted by Bourne
as leading to new gods for new generations or rejected as a sign of
blight on the present generation, a token that "the only genuinely
precious thing in a nation, the hope and ardent idealism of its
youth,” has indeed been crushed out? Such queries go unanswered,
but for those of us who had the privilege of knowing Randolph
Bourne they have the virtue of recalling long discussions of the
place of nationalism in the good life and of keeping our friend
with us.
ELSIE CLEW PARSONS


INTRODUCING MODERN ART
INTRODUCTIONS: Painters, SCULPTORS, AND GRAPHIC
Artists. By Martin Birnbaum. Illustrated. 8vo. 136
pages. Frederic Fairchild Sherman. New York.
THE
a
THE clue to the art of one artist may open the doors of all art to
an enthusiast. Professionals as well as amateurs have to begin
somewhere. Lovers of ideas like lovers of emotions usually begin
with a big one; and the imprint is often savagely bitten in so that
the soul becomes an unalterable die and always thereafter mints out
emanations of the original strain. St. Paul's ecstasy tempered by the
blinding light took on a complexion that remained permanent.
Renoir, a more modern example, painted to his dying day the always
recurring face of his first rapture. Professionals as well as amateurs
have to begin somewhere. Martin Birnbaum, who came to art as St.
Paul did to religion, after a first essay at the practice of law, began
his worship at the many-candled shrine of Aubrey Beardsley.
The exaltation to be obtained at such an altar might not appear
likely to be permanent to old-fashioned thinkers, but modern science
inclines more and more to the comforting belief that the Bretons are
not the only human beings on earth who love but once ("Le Breton
n'aime qu'une fois.”—Mme. la Comtesse de Fontenailles), and if an
exaltation be a first-rate one, it endures. Mr. Birnbaum's was.
Straightway he spoke as one with authority, and many of the most
serious people in the city, those with money in their purses, listened
to him, and also worshipped Beardsley. Furthermore, they followed
him willingly into what most rich Americans without such a guide
would have called a labyrinth—the study of contemporary art. And
such art and artists as they found there! Leon Bakst, Elie Nadel-
man, Jules Pascin, and Charles Conder were some among them.
Think of such a constellation being lit from the rays of one Aubrey
Beardsley candle! But so it was, and solid ranks of New York's
hardest business men and softest fashionable ladies ambled in and
out among these drawings, understanding everything, liking every-
thing, and buying everything. Mr. Birnbaum, in short, was that
most practical of constructive critics, the director of a commercial
-
a


372
INTRODUCING MODERN ART
art gallery, but his direction was so inspired that the emporium
became, as has been hinted, a chapel. The success was as remark-
able as anything of that kind that has occurred here, and deserves
being studied, not only by those who love success in the abstract,
but by those who burn to do likewise. Fortunately this can now be
done, since Mr. Birnbaum's teachings have been collected into a
volume and beautifully printed.
To those who haven't tried it, nothing seems easier than arrang-
ing a series of attractive art exhibitions, but though some succeed in
an occasional show, few there are to pull off whole series of such
entertainments, succeeding with them to such an extent that consid-
erable numbers of people form the strict habit of seeing each par-
ticular presentation.
Long before Mr. Birnbaum dreamed of a gallery, it seems, he
knew his Beardsley well. Whilst yet in law he succumbed to this
glittering genius and collected him. He secured everything; writ-
ings, prints, association material, everything; not that he thought
each morsel of equal value but that he was possessed with the col-
lectors' fury to obtain a complete set. There are, as every student
of Beardsley knows, some dubious items on this list, but Mr. Birn-
baum allowed himself to be revolted by nothing. He collected all.
So it came about that when the necessity arose for a catalogue for
the Beardsley exhibition Mr. Birnbaum undertook as soon as he
found himself with an actual art gallery upon his hands, no one
seemed more clearly indicated as the writer of the introduction to
this catalogue than the director of the gallery himself. Certainly
no one in America could have written it from so full a knowledge
of the subject. There are two ways in which to write well. One
is to know nothing of your subject—the other is to know everything.
Poets and theologists prefer the first method; practical people, the
second. Mr. Birnbaum wrote a little essay on Beardsley. It was
straightway acclaimed by all the other people who knew about
Beardsley and was extensively copied into the newspapers. Mr.
Birnbaum assumed an unmoral attitude towards Beardsley perfectly
fitting in a writer who at least mentions Felicien Rops, the Marquis
de Sade, Baudelaire, and Josiah Flynt, but the astonishing glimpse
of the eleventh-hour repentance of the dust-stained English Pierrot
that Mr. Birnbaum found in a volume of letters published in Ger-
many proved so electrifying to a society that had unconsciously
a


HENRY MCBRIDE
373
grown to feel that a soupçon of wickedness was good form, that the
effect was wholly moral. This is the letter, addressed to the pub-
lisher, Smithers:
MENTONE
Jesus is our Lord and Judge
Dear Friend:
I implore you to destroy all copies of Lysistrata and bad draw-
ings. Show this to Pollitt and conjure him to do the same. By all
that is holy—all obscene drawings.
AUBREY BEARDSLEY
In
my
death agony.
Beardsley was already a subject upon which it was fashionable to
have an opinion, and his peccadilloes were generally known, but the
above little document pierced complacency like a dagger, and so
everybody read the little brochure, went to the gallery, and then
talked of the dead artist in whispers. This was a genuine triumph
for the new writer. It would have been triumph enough for an
older one. The essay is worth placing on the bookshelf with Arthur
Symons's little study upon the same theme. From the point of
.
view of searching analysis there is nothing in Mr. Birnbaum's tale
that is so haunting as Mr. Symons's description of the Beardsley
personae: “It is always the soul and not the body's discontent
only which cries out of these unsatiable eyes, that have looked on all
their lusts, and out of these bitter mouths that have eaten the dust
of all their sweetnesses, and out of these hands that have laboured
delicately for nothing, and out of these feet that have run after
vanities. They are so sorrowful because they have seen beauty, and
because they have departed from the line of beauty.” But on the
other hand there is no statement of the “Beardsley Case" extant
that is at once so compact and so fitted to prepare the casual student
for a sympathetic acquaintance with this weirdest of recent geniuses,
as Mr. Birnbaum's.
The study of Beardsley brought in its train an acquaintance with
the art of Charles Conder, and the opportunity to show some of the
Conder paintings upon silk to New Yorkers obliged another essay.
The second was as good as the first and contained an excellent Whis-
tler story that was new even to writers on Whistler:


374
INTRODUCING MODERN ART
“Seeing him on the Boulevard one afternoon, Conder caught up
with Whistler and bowed, but only received a blank stare in return.
'I am afraid you don't remember me, Mr. Whistler?' the young man
remarked modestly, ‘my name is Conder.' 'Conder? the Butterfly
whispered, apparently to himself, 'Conder? ... Then loudly, 'Oh,
yes! Of course! Conder -Good-bye, Conder!, and strolled negli-
gently away."
1
To have told a new Whistler story in these publicity-mad days
was almost a greater achievement than to have spotted bluer lights
upon the Beardsley death scene than had previously been used; and
so after these two introductions to exhibition catalogues, Mr. Bir-
baum was so generally accepted as a critic that the essay was ac-
cepted as part of the show and came to be looked for as a matter
of course. There have now been enough exhibitions to provide a
complete volume of "Introductions," and with them the author
comes knocking at library doors and shows a disposition to drop the
exhibitions upon which he mounted into literature. This is the
more a pity in that no one appears to take his place as artistic entre-
preneur. The libraries are fuller of books than the galleries are of
pictures that may be talked of; so the task of compelling a consid-
erable portion of the public to talk about art will devolve upon
another.
This new person, whoever he may be, must profit by Mr. Birn-
baum's experience. He may not write himself, but essays for his
catalogues he must have. For one thing, the writers for the daily
press now depend upon them. They rise to a catalogue introduction
as do carp in a pond for cake, and whatever your private opinion
of newspaper scribblers may be, it cannot be denied that the serious
people already referred to, those with money in their purses, are
greatly affected by them. That most astute observer of things as
they are in the art world, Mr. Thomas E. Kirby, of the American
Art Association, is fond of saying that there are but two or three
hundred people in the country who buy expensive pictures. Never-
theless he is delighted to see things in print about his exhibitions
and to have to elbow his way through the hoi-polloi in his galleries,
for both crowds and “notices” are good things that properly impress
the real two or three hundred who buy.
The Aubrey Beardsley and Conder Introductions may be taken


HENRY MCBRIDE
375
a
as the perfect models for this form of art. Mr. Birnbaum, himself,
never quite arose to the same plane of detachment in his later writ-
ings. He acquired all the data in existence in regard to Leon
Bakst, Edmund Dulac, and John Flaxman (the cool Flaxman
seems an anomaly in Mr. Birnbaum's somewhat tropical galère), but
in the monstrous rush of a New York season he did not succeed in
getting far enough away from his facts. One must know all, but
one must not tell all. The citations, though brilliant, become too
incessant and the authorities parading through the pages scarcely
give each other elbow room. The feats of memory displayed are
prodigious, comparable to those of Mr. Huneker. In fact, stylisti-
cally, there is more than a suspicion that Mr. Birnbaum is Mr.
Huneker's child. There is the same love of jewels and the willing-
ness to travel to the Himalayas for the sake of a sensation. All
that is missing is the fun. Mr. Birnbaum quotes jokes of others but
never jokes himself. Upon the whole, however, it is fair to assume
that Mr. Huneker has become a father.
Henry McBride
.


IDIOSYNCRASY AND TRADITION
THE COMPLETE POEMS OF Francis LEDWIDGE. With
introductions by Lord Dunsany. 12mo. 291 pages.
Brentano. New York.
IE
as contemporary psychology practically enjoins upon us, we
reduce the distinction between the “rich” poetic nature and the
“shallow” one wholly, or almost wholly, to the matter of sensibility,
we are, of course, only making the most elementary of beginnings,
and the further problems which arise before us, whether we approach
as psychologists or as critics, are endless and baffling. This we are
indeed prepared for. We do not pretend, as some seem to think we
do, to have solved, with this simple hypothesis—or even, for that
matter, with the more fundamental Freudian hypothesis of which
it is a corollary—the nature or limits of poetry. We make only a
beginning: and one which shows in some regards singularly little -
advance from the Aristotelian doctrine of catharsis. Our "begin-
ning” is more importantly a matter of attitude: we do not shrink,
we see no reason for shrinking, from inquiry, even into the nature
and function of poetry; and we believe that there is no valid reason
for withholding from this sphere of man's activity the power of
analysis which he has employed in others. It should be enough that
we admit the speculative character of our undertaking, and admit
that what at most we hope to accomplish is, as it were, to carry the
first lantern or two into the cave—perhaps only to indicate its size,
its ramifications, or even the fact that in so airless a place few lights
are of
any value.
For of the complexity, the ramifications which result from even
so simple a hypothesis as our matter of sensibility, the briefest
glimpse affords testimony. . . . If we suppose our hypothesis to be
true, then perhaps, in its light, we shall see the main stream of
poetry, as it flows down to us from the past, a little more freshly.
Without meaning, for the moment, necessarily to attach undue value
to the term “breadth,” do we not see this stream "broadening” as it
comes nearer to us? Poetry, it is clear, must have begun very sim-
ply: Homer represented a stage of it already highly complex; Eurip-


CONRAD AIKEN
377
ides represented a stage elaborate and sophisticated. And while
every so often in the history of poetry has arisen a great figure, or
group of great figures, and while it is by no means certain that those
figures are progressively “greater” each than the last (it might be
argued quite the other way), yet it is incontestable that in a certain
sense the stream of genuine poetry, in proportion as man has ex-
tended his experience, whether outward or inward, has constantly
widened. The process is one of accretion. What the first poet says,
.
what he renders “conscious” cannot, obviously, be repeated word for
word by the second poet: the second poet, unhappily, will find cer-
tain areas already explored, and he must choose between making
good his claim to those areas by making finer use of them than was
made by his predecessor, and finding new areas of his own. And here
we come to the matter of “sensibility.” For these areas are the areas
of potential awareness; and in the shadowy struggle between poet
and poet, for possession of this or that area, sensibility is the only
weapon. The first poet found it sufficient to say "tree": but the
second poet was compelled to be more specific.
And this necessity to be more specific has been the lot of the poet
ever since, a necessity which becomes always more tyrannous. Poets
now come into a world in which, at first glance, it would seem that
the areas of potential awareness have been all but exhausted. Tract
after tract has been explored, exploited, rendered commonplace,
"traditionalized.” Old elements, it is true, can be re-combined to
give new effects, to yield areas which are, in fact, new; but can that
process go on indefinitely? It would seem that there must be some
limit. One
ne may also derive a temporary hope from the variability of
"environment” (in its richest and most complete psychological
sense) since that may well be considered ambivalent with sensi-
bility. But temporary, surely, that hope must be when we observe
with what amazing rapidity all the forces of society tend towards a
levelling, a uniformity, of environment—by law, by education, by
tradition, by language, and finally by the inheritance of the art
itself, the inherited poetic consciousness, which would seem to be
rather terrifyingly complete.
How complete this is, this exhaustion of the areas of potential
awareness, is made clear to us by the extraordinary, the ever-increas-
ing number of excellent poets who, despite their excellence, produce
poetry which we call “commonplace," poetry too repetitively in the


378
IDIOSYNCRASY AND TRADITION
tradition. Some of them, had they lived a thousand years ago, when
the inherited poetic consciousness might be said to have stood in
ratio to ours as one to five, might have been great: to-day they are
overwhelmed. Most of them would have been as unsuccessful then
as now, temperaments in which not even the most favourable of
environments could arouse the extra iota of sensibility which results
in the new contribution. There was a time when merely to be a poet
was, ipso facto, to be "original,” since unexplored poetic continents
lay on every hand, and merely to hoist sail was to find India. Now-
adays the poet who is "original" is the exception. It would seem,
therefore, that the number of poetic precipitates inducible from the
various arrangements of sensibility and environment is not infinite.
And it might be further contended that we have already obtained a
seriously large proportion of such possible precipitates, and perhaps,
also, those that are of greatest value.
Assuming at any rate that this situation is true, and leaving out
of account the occasional "great” or approximately "great” or sa-
liently successful poet (the poet who finds a relatively broad new
area of the potential awareness, or sheds across an "old" broad area
a sharp light from a new quarter), let us perceive with sympathy the
predicament of the lesser but genuine poet who faces it. He lacks
the power for re-shaping any large area of the consciousness he in-
herits: he lacks the gift of seeing any large area which is new. The
material with which he most passionately desires to deal has been,
alas, beautifully dealt with a thousand times before. If he is to
avoid being a mere traditionalist (and by assuming that he is a
genuine poet we assume that he will) how will the slight but clear
"newness" of his sensibility manifest itself? The answer is obvious:
it will manifest itself precisely as a refinement of an aspect or aspects
of the inherited poetic consciousness; and whether this refining is
aesthetic or kinesthetic or ethical or philosophic, if he carries it far
and sharply enough it will leave him for us as one of the long line of
idiosyncratic poets, the poets of unique temperament, brilliant, but
lacking final power on a broad basis, the poets whose function it is,
iota upon iota, to widen our stream of consciousness. These are the
poets who illustrate for us most clearly the slow process by which
poetry is extended to embrace all that man is capable of feeling or
perceiving. It is no ignoble fate. For in this class belong all poets,
with the exception of the dozen or so who are transcendent.


CONRAD AIKEN
379
It is with some such prelude in mind that we should approach the
poetry of Francis Ledwidge—a young poet who died in the war,
and whose slight volume of collected poems has been edited by Lord
Dunsany. In a preface written in 1914, Dunsany remarks that he
has always looked for a poet to arise from among the Irish peasantry,
because there “there was a diction worthy of poetry," and the
"metaphors fresh: in London no one makes metaphors any more, but
daily speech is strewn thickly with dead ones. ..." In this, per-
haps, Dunsany is mistaken. The Irish peasant diction is charming,
fresh, but only from our point of view, being really static: it is not
in the provinces that language is re-created, but in the clash of the
metropolis. The Irish “peasant” diction, in so far as Ledwidge used
it, has already been thoroughly traditionalized — Yeats, Synge,
Joseph Campbell, O'Shaughnessy, Lady Gregory, “A.E.,” and a
hundred lesser poets in Ireland, in England, and in America, have
worn it out to the last thread. And it is fortunate for us, as for
Ledwidge, that Dunsany has very greatly exaggerated the extent to
which Ledwidge adopted this tradition.
That he did adopt it somewhat, of course, there can be no ques-
tion. The Irish legendary heroes are here, the Irish tradition of
oppression, the epithets of endearment which are becoming as com-
monplacently sentimental as rhymes in "June . . . moon.” But
these, as a matter of fact, are not "peasant” properties, and for any
peculiarly "peasant” diction or sharpness of metaphor we search
here for the most part in vain. Ledwidge has not at all for us the
charm of the poetic ingénu: he is quite clearly a poet of the lit-
erary species. And, oddly enough, it is not the usual Irish tradition
with which he had most to struggle for emancipation, but the Eng-
lish tradition, and in particular that strain of it which has come
down to us by way of Spenser and Keats.
And it is above all as an “emerging traditionalist in this line that
we must see Ledwidge: he is a nature poet, melancholy, much given
to the crepuscular mood, richly sensuous, but for the most part seeing
the Irish landscape rather too much as Keats might have seen-it,
giving it rich phrase and full-vowelled rhythm rather too much as
Keats might have given it. Let us grant that his temper, his sensi-
bility, was very like that of Keats, that to see and phrase his land-
scape in this way would have been natural for him even had he not
known the odes and sonnets: the fact remains that as Keats did
1


380
IDIOSYNCRASY AND TRADITION
precede him, it would have been vital for Ledwidge to have found,
in the long run, some way of escape. There is little in the slight
evidence before us to indicate that he would have made his place
by sheer power: his success, had he lived, and had he obtained it,
would have been of the idiosyncratic sort. And success of this sort
he would, I think, no doubt have obtained. For through all his work
runs a strain of lyric magic, now of tone, now of phrase; and if this
is sometimes a little precious, or sentimental, or, in the literary sense,
abraded, it is nevertheless, also, often sharp and sweet. The general
average is extraordinarily high. And there are at least a dozen lyrics,
and one or two very short narrative episodes, which represent in the
best way what we call the “refinement” on the traditional the
traditional plus the singular, idiosyncratic bitterness or sweetness.
These things have great beauty, are in a small way perfect. And
they raise further the tantalizing problem of the extent to which
Ledwidge would have freed this note from among notes less his
own, or even, perhaps, discovered in himself
a
yet others.
CONRAD AIKEN


1
EASTERN LIGHTS
COLOURED STARS. VERSIONS OF FIFTY Asiatic LOVE
Poems. By E. Powys Mathers. 12mo.
Houghton Mifflin Company. Boston.
62 pages.
Black MARIGOLDS. Translated by E. Powys Mathers.
12mo. Blackwell. Oxford.
.
The
VRANSLATION is almost always something of a poetic effort.
For poetry is discovery, and withal its touchstone is a richness
of associations: echoes and overtones. Like the poet, the translator
has to do with things foreign and wonderful. Like the poet, he
must find in them something not altogether strange, something that
will stir recognition and bring them into touch with our familiar
experience. But whereas these two elements are the very stuff and
body of poetry, translation is no such simple matter. One of its
chief difficulties is the natural confusion of what is commonplace
in the original with what is extraordinary in translation.
This confusion is especially apparent in the ubiquitous transla-
tions from Eastern literatures. A Hindu poet tells the story of how
he never tired of wondering, as he sat in meditation with his Master,
at the English who hastened so busily along the road. And one
day, having sat in contemplation for a long time, and seeing an
Englishman mạrch briskly by, the poet turned to his Master and
asked, "Why is it, Master, that the English seem always to be in
such a hurry?" "It is because they believe that there is an end to
the road,” returned his Master, “and they wish to be the first to
reach it.” This ironic comment is fairly typical of the impossible
difference between the passive wisdom of the Orient and the naive
activity of Western civilizations. And the difference in philoso-
phies, whether accented or transcended, is one of the first difficulties
in the way of understanding. A community which bestows wealth
and power upon advertisers and bankers cannot readily meet the
minds of those who seek the strange satisfactions of contemplation
and the making of songs.
But putting aside for the moment this fundamental question,


382
EASTERN LIGHTS
there remains the more obvious problem of the poetry itself. Meta-
phor is its breath of life. But the metaphor that comes strong with
the simplicity of daily things for the Oriental brings us no more
than the charm of Eastern perfumes and exotic harmonies. This
shows out again and again in such books as those of Arthur Waley.
Listen to these lines from More Translations from the Chinese
(Knopf). Of trees in winter:
(
“At the year's end the time of great snow
Stamps their branches with a fret of glittering jade.”
The following is full of double meanings for its author, Ou-Yang
Hsiu, because executions took place in autumn: "For autumn is an
executioner, and her hour is darkness.” Even in ordinary state-
ments there is a recurrence of words and phrases that take on a new
and startling character in the English version. Lines like these, in
the description of an official journey:
“High and low the riders' torches bobbed;
Muffied or loud, the watchman's drum beat."
And the name of the street and the picture of the horses in this
lament:
“As we walked our horses up Dragon Tail Street
We turned our heads and gazed at the Southern Hills.
Since we parted, both of us have been growing old;
And our minds have been vexed by many anxious cares.
Yet even now I fancy my ears are full
Of the sound of jade tinkling on your bridle-straps.”
In spite of these contradictions of experience, and in spite, too,
of other more patent faults of translation, a goodly number of para-
phrases from Oriental literatures exist. And more appear with
every season—almost with every poet. The East exercises a fasci-
nation over our contemporaries which drives them to the subtlest
flatteries. Especially China, with its vast wealth of ancient lyrics,
draws men to try, with patience and passion and skill, to open up
her treasure-house to the Western world. Chinese poetry is distin-


BABETTE DEUTSCH
383
guished, if the solecism is permitted, by an extreme simplicity.
If
its forms are stricter than our own, and if what is familiar to the -
Chinese strikes us with a false sense of strangeness, still these lyrics
must conquer us by their very homeliness. The lament of the old
exile over his lost youth and his distant companions, the joy of soli-
tude in spring country, the release that lies at the bottom of a cup
of wine, a journey, a home-coming, the flight of birds through an
autumn evening. these are the stuff of which it is for the
most part made. There seems to be comparatively little erotic
poetry in Chinese literature. The love poems are more often such
as one friend would address to another at a distance, and the plea-
sure of friendly intercourse seems to be celebrated more heartily than
the excitements of love. David and Jonathan, sent by imperial
mandate to opposite ends of the kingdom, and lonely in their sepa-
ration, come into Chinese poetry with a frequency that shames the
Catulluses and the Sapphos of the Mongol court. And for all its
concreteness, it dwells rather upon impersonal things, with a poign-
ancy that the tenderest lover cannot address to his mistress' eye-
brow. That is the measure of its simplicity, and the secret of its
undiminished power.
That it is possible, however, to translate a love poem from an
ancient foreign tongue into English, and, without losing its curious
beauty, give it a worthy place there, is evidenced by the work of
E. Powys Mathers. This English journalist and traveller in the
Orient is best known to Americans by his Coloured Stars. The vol-
ume, which is a collection of some fifty Asiatic love poems, has been
severely criticized as an anthology of peculiar perversity. It is said
that the author has juxtaposed the classics of Oriental poetry to the
merest street-songs; that the old and the new have been hopelessly
strung together in a chain whose bright glass beads cheapen the true
jewels. Whether this criticism be just or not, something is to be
said for a man who admits frankly enough that his collection is
"haphazard as such books must be until some polyglot scholar gives
a whole life to the matter," and who does such a literal labour of
love as to gather Chinese and Japanese, Hindu and Persian lyrics
into "the first general English anthology of Asiatic verse.”
Interestingly enough, one of the most vigorous among these
poems is an undated War Song from the Altai. It is included in
the book perhaps because every stanza is rich in allusions to love,


384
EASTERN LIGHTS
over which war is ever to be preferred. Here are two stanzas, the
first and the last:
“To bodies straight as palm trees,
To hips supple as reeds,
We prefer the straight staffs of our banners
Where suppl’ly floats our oriflamme of Sun,
Our banners gilt like cimitars
That catch the sunset.
“To bodies yielding under the struggle of love
And rearing under the red fire of kisses,
We prefer our horses tricked with silver and gold,
Our horses that yield not beneath us
And bound only at the sight of the blood of battles.”
The fierce beauty of these images, the colour, the melody, and the
overt sensuousness of the lines, is carried by nearly every lyric in the
small ash-brown book. This takes its title from a Chinese song
-
a
of the last century:
your little
from my
“You would climb after nectarines
In
green jacket and puffy white drawers;
So that
you
fell and I caught you.
You made as if to break away,
And then settled wriggling in my arms,
All your lightness and softness were pressed against me,
And your face looked
up
Puckered with amusement.
It would be something of the sort
If our clear blue night full of white stars
Turned to a night of coloured stars-
Red and purple and green to the zenith,
And orange and light violet and lemon,
And bright rose and crimson all about the sky."
my breast
This is to be contrasted with another poem of the same period, by
an American-born Chinese, which in its “stop-short” effect, its terse
and delicate imagery, is so much closer to what we have been led to


BABETTE DEUTSCH
385
expect from this race of poets. It is called Being Together at
Night:
“By black water and dark blue water,
Making the wide tree balance its branches
Between us and the moon,
We stood close. As close among the leaves
Small green diamonds of rain
And the far stars."
The Envoy is an unembarrassed apologia from the Burmese:
“The night before last night
I heard that to make songs to girls
And to make prayers to God
Were of equal value
In the eyes of time;
Provided, that is,
That the prayers
Are sufficiently beautiful.”
a
But the fine proof of this is to be had not so much in these volup-
tuous street ballads as in a later book by Mr. Mathers, which con-
sists of an English rendering of a love poem from the Sanskrit. It
is called Black Marigolds, and bears this legend on its title-page:
"And sometimes we look to the end of the tale that there should be
marriage-feasts, and find only, as it were, black marigolds and a
silence.”—Azeddine el Mocadecci. The story goes that Chauras, a
young Brahmin poet who lived about the year 1000, loved Vidya,
the daughter of the King. Their love being discovered, the poet
was imprisoned, and shortly thereafter put to death. The night
before he died he spent in the making of this Chaurapanchasika:
The Fifty Stanzas of Chauras. It is one of those rarities of Asian
literature, a long lyric, but it is rather like a series of briefer lyrics,
and the translator has well compared it to Rossetti's sonnet series.
Mathers says in his brief introduction that there are verses “of di-
rect, almost literal, translation,” but that "it would be fairer to
consider it, in its entirety, as an interpretation rather than a
translation ... ; an attempt to bring over into an English poem


386
EASTERN LIGHTS
the spirit of mournful exaltation which informs his Sanskrit leave-
taking.”
Accepted in this spirit, the poem remains a thing of extraordi-
nary beauty. It is unrhymed, and its rhythms, always approaching
blank verse, are freer and more lingering. But its sustained emo-
tional unity, the hopeless joy of remembrance, and the sheer lyrism
of its numbers, do, as their translator hopes for them, "reinvigorate
a few very old leaves of sad writing.”
Here the elements of discovery and familiarity are brought to-
gether in potent fusion. “Even now," sings Chauras, "If I saw her
lying all wide
eyes
a
•
.
“Then would my love for her be ropes of flowers, and night
A black-haired lover on the breast of day.”
But it is his utter simplicity, rather than any richness of vivid meta-
phor, that takes the heart. There are indeed lines all reminiscent
of the pretty fancies of the English Renaissance:
“O whitest so soft parchment where
My poor divorcéd lips have written excellent
Stanzas of kisses, and will write no more."
But the more moving rhythms are those in which the poet, too full
of sorrow to be else but quiet, sings of his lover's loveliness, and of
their ended joy together, with perfect limpidity. The very opening
has this effortless charm, which grows stronger and more suggestive
as the poem moves to its splendid close. For this power of quiet-
ness the forty-fifth, -sixth, and -seventh stanzas are perhaps the
finest. One cannot forego quoting these:
"Even now
Spread we our nets beyond the farthest rims
So surely that they take the feet of dawn
Before you wake and after you are sleeping
Catch up the visible and invisible stars
And web the ports the strongest dreamer dreamed,
Yet is it all one, Vidya, yet is it nothing.


BABETTE DEUTSCH
387
bed;
“Even now
The night is full of silver straws of rain,
And I will send my soul to see your body
This last poor time. I stand beside
your
Your shadowed head lies leaving a bright space
Upon the pillow empty, your sorrowful arm
Holds from your side and clasps not anything.
There is no covering upon you.
“Even now
I think your feet seek mine to comfort them.
There is some dream about you even now
Which I'll not hear at waking. Weep not at dawn,
Though day brings wearily your daily loss
And all the light is hateful. Now is it time
To bring my
soul away.”
“Now is it time to bring my soul away.” The commanding and
'
dismissal of the soul is one of the arts of the Orient, whether white
magic or black, who shall say? It may be that the dalliance of
science with the unconscious is bringing the Western mind en rap-
port with the long brooding of the ancient East. The wise trans-
lator is he who goes to these sanctuaries aware of his estrangement
from these preoccupations of the old world. His too is the certainty
that he will be neither the first nor the last to reach the end of the
road; his, the indifference to every end save the momentary capture
of an intransient and fugitive spirit.
BABETTE Deutsch


THE RITUAL OF REALISM
The THEATRE THROUGH Its Stage Door. By David
Belasco. Illustrated. 8vo. 246 pages. Harper and
Brothers. New York.
CON
NONSTANT swinging of the censer in the temple of his art has
imposed a strange fate upon Mr. Belasco. Perhaps he has
himself inhaled too deeply of the pleasant perfumes intended for
the nostrils of his public, or possibly the incense, curling upward in
blue threads of realism, has subtly invaded his sense of humour. Or
perhaps the mere act of swinging the censer, originating as the ex-
pression of an aesthetic idea, has slipped unconsciously into the arc
of hypnotic rhythm—a rhythm which will not permit itself to be
exposed-even through the stage door-save in the trappings of
legerdemain.
Every sleight of hand performer holds the option of two technical
methods. He may minimize the difficulties of the trick, and make it
appear ridiculously simple, or he may surround it with simulated
effort, and give it an air of utter painstaking. In one instance, the
spectator is invited to marvel at the revelation of dexterity, while
in the other, his sympathies are aroused to foster the illusion of
tremendous obstacles overcome.
Contrary to our hopes, it is to the latter school of sleight of hand
that David Belasco adheres, with an adhesion almost fanatic. Not
for an instant during the course of his book does he depart from his
rôle. Iconoclasm, even if it involves no destruction more real than
the shattering of papier-mache idols, has its uses, but it has not been
allowed to transgress the cloistral security of the producer's emi-
nence. Mr. Belasco seems blissfully unaware of the many things in
his plays which he might have illuminated out of the storehouse of
his experience. We should like to have had him unmask the admi-
rable storm which starred in Tiger Rose. We should like to know
the producer's feelings toward the horse in Dark Rosaleen—the
horse who played the title rôle and invariably got a hand on his en-
trance. But instead, we find Mr. Belasco playing a rôle of master
martyr at the stake of his art, slyly adding fuel to his own bonfire


LISLE BELL
389
the oxygen
under the guise of giving away the show. If he does finally, after
many pauses and passes, pull the rabbit out of the hat, you are asked
not merely to applaud the elevation of the hare, but you must be
awed by the artful manner in which the personality of the rabbit
blends with the contours of the hat. Furthermore, you must realize
the days and nights of untiring preparation and the long search for
the exact rabbit for the rôle. You must picture Mr. Belasco going
from hutch to hutch, from hatter to hatter, ere he discovered pre-
cisely the hare and precisely the headgear he wanted. Only in this
manner is that precious realism attained.
If everything set down in these pages were to be taken in the
solemn fashion in which it is stated, we fear that the theatre would
wither amid the thin gases of its own self-importance, cut from
of a saving humour. In his playhouses, Mr. Belasco has
much traffic with comedy; in his revelations, he will have none of it.
He cannot forget that he has been called a wizard of stagecraft,
and—Midas-like-everything that he touches turns into mystery.
Not even the curtain escapes. For, he says, “one who is not familiar
with the little touches, apart from the play itself, which aid the gen-
eral effect of a dramatic production may not realize how important
it is to have the curtain work in harmony with the feeling of the
scene upon which it rises and falls. I have sometimes experimented
with a curtain fifty times, raising and lowering it rapidly, slowly, or
at medium speed. The curtain men must be taught to feel the
climaxes as keenly as the actors and to work in unison with them.”
Baffling and elusive have been the difficult problems of lighting
which have been mastered. As much as five thousand dollars has
been spent in a single attempt to reproduce the delicate hues of a
sunset, only to have the whole thing discarded in the end. “When I
produced The Girl of the Golden West, I experimented three
months to secure exactly the soft, changing colours of a Californian
sunset over the Sierra Nevadas, and then turned to another
method. It was a good sunset, but it was not Californian.” Mr.
Belasco puts a sunset upon such a high moral plane of exalted en-
deavour that the work of the Almighty in the same field appears
hasty and slipshod by comparison.
Not alone the scenery but the actors as well have had to undergo
this ordeal. David Warfield's experiences, for example, entitle him
to be regarded as little less than a living sacrifice on the altar of
a
a


390
THE RITUAL OF REALISM
Belascan lighting. At one time, the producer "sent for fifty bolts of
cloth” and wrapped Warfield successively in their folds. At an-
other, “I kept Warfield in New York all summer, standing alone
on the stage for hours at a stretch, while I threw various lights upon
him.” The star must have come through this ordeal wearing a well-
defined halo. "It may be possible for others to copy my colours,”
Belasco admits, “but no one can get my feeling for them.” Thus is
all spurious incandescence cast, into outer darkness.
Do not imagine, however, that the author of this volume has been
any less exacting upon himself than upon those who serve him. Far
from it. In working out The Return of Peter Grimm, he fortified
himself by "studying with diligence such standard works as Prof.
James H. Hyslop's Psychical Research and The Resurrection and
Fremont Rider's Are the Dead Alive?" He also had "several long
talks with Professor James.” Moreover, when preparing The Man
Inside for the stage, he was personally conducted through China-
town, and "even went down near the Tombs Prison at 2 A.M. to
listen to sounds in the vicinity, such as the clocks striking the hours.”
Justification for such conversations and excursions is to be found in
the conviction that “when art intrudes upon the domain of science,
it should have authority for everything it appropriates.” ”
In his selection of actors, Mr. Belasco is guided in his choice by
"youth and temperament" rather than beauty, and he finds the hum-
bler by-ways of life the stage's best recruiting ground. “I can deck
my stage much better," he says, "with girls from the milliner shops
than from the schools where polite deportment is taught.”
Critics of the ritual of realism with which Mr. Belasco adorns his
theatre will find themselves dogmatically answered in a sentence.
“He who goes direct to nature for the effects he introduces on the
stage can never be wrong, because nature itself is never wrong.”
With a fine gesture, half commercial and half artistic, the producer
swings his censer, inhales the potent fumes, and proclaims his in-
fallibility. We find the semi-clerical garb of Mr. Belasco's habitual
pose thoroughly in harmony with the message of his book. In the
theatre, he has done many things, and many of them exceedingly
well; but in talking about it, he dons the vestments of a high-priest
of hocus. And none of the Belascan lighting effects, be it remarked,
is more skilfully stage-managed than the one which suffuses his own
personality. We wonder if he went direct to nature for that.
Lisle Bell


"I TOO HAVE BEEN IN
GUN FODDER. By A. Hamilton Gibbs. 8vo. 313 pages.
Little, Brown, and Company. Boston.
A PRIVATE IN THE GUARDS. By Stephen Graham. Svo.
340 pages. The Macmillan Company. New York.
CONFESS that these two books have puzzled and impressed
me; the one by Hamilton Gibbs is as superficial, the one by
Stephen Graham as wrong-headed, as any book may be, but I think
that even the reader who remains unaware of these faults will con-
fess that he is both bewildered and affected. It would be an imper-
tinence to discuss the books impersonally, because each is a highly
personal record of one man's activities and emotions during the war
and the reader's response to them will depend only on what he him-
self has experienced. As one who was expert in the nineteen sepa-
rate positions of the manual of arms and as one who at least knew a
duckboard from a Verey light, I pay a reluctant tribute to the
graphic accuracy of these war books; as one who knew distantly but
poignantly some of the brutalities and the cruelties of the war, I
render the authors, both, the homage due to their honesty. For the
moment, that is enough.
There is something more important. I think that no one can read
these books, or any other war books which may be honestly written, ,
without a feeling of strangeness, as if they came from another
world. No doubt an effort will be made to throw glamour over the
beastly dirtiness of the war—not the political filth out of which it
rose, but the actual physical ordure in which it was prosecuted. It
may be necessary, at some time, to revive Mr. Kipling's unhappy
phrase about "the lordliest life,” and I should hate to be one of
those who sought to mitigate the smallest item of horror in the
whole business. But the pathos of distance is intensified by the
tragic disillusion which has come to the world since the end of the
war and the feeling that those who write in the spirit of the war are
alien to us is justified. Because they are messengers from a time
and place not ours, living by ideals which we have lost, and the


392
“I TOO HAVE BEEN IN
>
meanest of their daily concerns has a dignity and a spiritual fine-
ness which put to shame the pitiably small affairs of a world re-
deemed. The war was supposed to be the disorientation, if not the
destruction, of everything great and noble in human life; but read-
ing these books and looking upon what has followed I am moved to
wonder whether it was not in reality the last high moment of human
endeavour, the final magnificent movement of which humanity is
capable. It was brutal and wanton and beastly; but for millions
of simple men it was honest. It was a demand upon them for every
moral and physical energy, and in the exhaustion of all human
power it gave, fitfully, a certain happiness. So it may be sug-
So it
gested without too much irony that the war was a time of Arcadian
felicity which may never come again.
All the more because both Hamilton Gibbs and Stephen Graham
describe the war in terms of hellishness. Gibbs, the amateur of life,
obviously considers that the last turn of the screw in the infernal
torture is the knowledge that the whole thing was unnecessary in its
beginning and futile in its end; the fanatic democrat and Christian,
Graham, wills the means because he has willed the end, and consoles
himself variously. I have already suggested and am perfectly
willing to state openly that the stuff of both books is insignificant.
What makes them important is the serious candour with which both
reproduce for us something which we have too soon forgot—the in-
tolerably glorious background of the war. I beg you to believe, dear
war lords and pacifists, that it is not a phrase. For in any decent
civilization it is humanly intolerable that war should be glorious.
I am sure that Mr. Gibbs's book will be promptly forgotten, but
it is none the less a triumph for life against all the evil in the world
that he was spared to write it, for the war seemed to cut with a
particularly vengeful accuracy at youth and health, and if one held
beauty sacred he seemed foredoomed to death. Mr. Gibbs was never
a poet, but he was always an amateur. I figure him a youth in flan-
nels and blazer; doing a bit of acting and a bit of writing, talking
English slang, inoffensively well-bred and competent. He and his
kind must have been the despair of Rudyard Kipling and the empire-
makers, just as he and his kind were the despair of the high-minded
pacifists who saw them go forth “with mingled loathing and ela-
tion,” but without thought, to die for King and Country. For them
the summer of 1914 seemed imperishably halcyon and gentle, and


SGANARELLE
393
-
the first rude blows of the war made only more precious the quiet
comfort of their lives. And then something happened. It is amus-
ing to note that Mr. Gibbs does not know what happened to himi
There was no crisis, no case of conscience. He heard about Belgian
women, wondered about Englishwomen, and behold him a trooper!
"The whole business had been done in a rush of exaltation that
didn't allow me to think.” He thought enough thereafter.
Mr. Gibbs took his training well. It was part of his code to go
through with it—the uncleanliness of food, the foulness of word and
thought, the indescribably annoying tyranny of non-coms. He took
it well and he got out of it promptly, so that he was never engaged
as a trooper but saw his first action as an officer of artillery. The
men were good to him and good to each other, for the most part;
it was a volunteer army, the war was young and one suffered what
one had to suffer. The flaneur was seeing life, at any rate, and if
he saw it with no philosophy, his emotions were deep. At the end
of a note on leave he writes: "Partir, c'est mourir un peu.—Un
peu.God!”
Mr. Gibbs's progress through the appalling blundering of Salon-
ika to the Western Front is fairly interesting stuff. His description
of the work of a battery of guns before a raid is admirable. The
record of sentiments is almost painfully amusing until at long last
Mr. Gibbs comes suddenly to grips with one of the things which the
harrowed imagination of civilians had foreseen long before. I mean
death. Ah, yes, I suppose that when he came home on leave someone
I
did ask him whether he had actually seen a dead German and he
replied yes or no. He knew well enough that this monstrous engine
which was working day and night was fed by human lives. But he
was so unimaginative himself. He was like the excellent public in
all countries which took comfort in a terrible word like "nibbling'
because it lacked the colossal proportions of the word "push.” He
was willing to see it through until the time came when he had to see
it face to face, and his confrontation was only a pair of boots stick-
ing in the mud, the mortal remains of his substitute as battery
commander, the man who had been killed doing Gibbs's work while
he himself was by accident away.
I am glad that Mr. Gibbs put down all of his emotions, even the
exceedingly little one of cursing the men who sent others out to die
while they made speeches in the House of Commons. Because all


394
“I TOO HAVE BEEN IN
these small emotions point the honesty and the depth of his great
one. "From that moment my mind turned and twisted like a com-
pass
needle that had lost its sense of the north. The days were an
endless burden blackened by the shadow of death, filled with empti-
ness, bitterness, and despair.” I pass his ultimate tribute to the
conscientious objectors, because he praises them for courage and
not for soundness of judgement; I note his frank confession that
the desire to get out of active service tormented him incessantly and
that he used every undue influence he possessed to arrange a trans-
fer to a safe and "cushy" job; and again, because I think that Mr.
Gibbs thinks superficially and carelessly, I quote from his final
pages:
“The world travail was over, and even at that sacred moment
when humanity should have been purged of all pettiness and mean-
ness, should have bowed down in humility and thankfulness, forces
were astir to try and raise up jealousy, hatred, and enmity between
England, France, and America.
"Have we learnt nothing? Are these million dead in vain? Are
?
we to let the pendulum swing back to the old rut of dishonest hypo-
critical self-seeking, disguised under the title of that misunderstood
word 'patriotism'? ... What is the world travail for? ... What
does the present hold out to us who have been through the Valley
of the Shadow ?"
.
I break off here because, regrettably, Mr. Gibbs answers his ques-
tion, the most poignant question, which any man may ask, with a
description of the world as it was five years or so ago; namely, a
godless Church, a blind Justice, a corrupt Press, a charlatan faculty
of medicine, “a Theatre whose stage doors are the tombs of virtue”
(oh, I assure you this is verbatim), and Eugenics and Education,
which Mr. Gibbs profoundly does not like. He does not like the
thought of Allied officers, on the night of the armistice, going out
from prison camps and carousing with German prostitutes. Appar-
ently Mr. Gibbs is not an internationalist!
I do not wish to be unfair, and since I am almost done with Mr.
Gibbs, I must say that the undertone of his protesting is not so
meagre as his expression. His brother, far more expert in writing,
has summed up the pacifist philosophy—and approved of it-in his


SGANARELLE
395
foreword, and has enlisted the soldier in the new struggle, to make
real the objects of the war. Mr. Gibbs has yet to see that the real
tragedy of the war is not that it left the world unchanged. Quack-
ery and hypocrisy and "the Hell of whoredom since the world
began”—the war did not destroy them. Why should it have de-
stroyed them? The pacifist and the jingo are equally unable to un-
derstand the tragedy because the one did not share in the war's ideals
and the other does not know how they have been betrayed. For the
tragedy of the war is that it brought into being and even into action
a fair deal for human endeavour and then betrayed its own cre-
ation. It has robbed the world of its youth.
Youth! How much of ït remains after the merciless self-exposi-
tion of Stephen Graham, which begins with the axiom that "the
sterner the discipline the better the soldier" and is such a record of
the means by which discipline is instilled as to turn the heart sick?
My feeling that Mr. Graham is wrong-headed is due to his ex-
traordinary fidelity to the fetish of Anglo-Prussian discipline. He
refers to the dispersal of the Russian army after the Revolution as
proof of the value of discipline based on "responsibility,” which
he seems to confuse with authority. Mr. Will Dyson has already
taken Mr. Graham down for his blundering references to the Aus-
tralian troops; but someone with more historical knowledge than
I possess ought to give Mr. Graham the records, as fighters, of the
unprussianized democratic armies which have fought from time im-
memorial and will always fight when their rights are invaded.
When George Washington complained of his soldiers it was not
because they did not fight well but because they went home to
gather crops. The soldiers of the martinet Kolchak did not prevail
against the democratically directed troops of the Reds. The Cana-
dians may have sacrificed themselves in their own barrages, but it
was with highly disciplined troops that some of the worst military
failures of the war were achieved. I am convinced that because Mr.
Graham went into the best disciplined regiments of the British
Army, the Guards, he has felt it necessary to make out a case for
the intolerable sufferings he went through. His entire book is an
eloquent disproof of the comparative value of discipline, if one cares
for humanity at all; and he gives his case away on the first page
"sternly disciplined troops know that if they
run from the face of the enemy they will be shot down from be-
when he says


396
"I TOO HAVE BEEN IN -"
3
.
hind ... they do not entertain the hope of escape and conse-
quently their minds are at rest—as the mind of the machine gunner
voluntarily [sic] chained to his machine may be said to be at rest.
. . . Stern discipline can manufacture collective heroism.” I con-
ceive it to be the duty of a book reviewer not to let pass such an
impudent illogicality as is contained in the word I have noted, nor to
labour further a point which the author so handsomely yields.
As soon as Mr. Graham gives over defending the discipline based
on the fear of death (or disgrace) and begins telling the truths of its
methods, he becomes admirable, becomes in fact the Stephen Gra-
ham who wrote with insight and prejudice running apace of Rus-
sians and the poor and depressed everywhere who believe in Christ.
What we have liked in Mr. Graham is that he could always fortify
his own faith by the faith of those who suffered far more than he.
As a private in the ranks he suffered more than his fellow-men, and
I am glad that his faith triumphed in the end. I am glad that he is
not romantic about the men, glad that at last some one has spoken
the truth about the foulness and the obscenity of speech, the sicken-
ing dirtiness of human intercourse as one learns it in the barracks
and on the drill field. Mr. Graham finds the precise word: they
are "frantically repulsive.” I am well aware that the civilian
reader will imagine that I allude to the practice of telling smutty
stories and I do not know how to undeceive him except by the flat
statement that soldiers do not tell smutty stories at all. They talk
dirt, which is quite another matter. In a hundred nights spent in
the orderly room of as representative a company as the American
army brought forth, I never heard one indecent “story,” but the foul
impurity of the discourse held there is in my nostrils still and I think
I know what Mr. Graham means when he cries out, "Oh the grief
in the secret places of the heart when . . . perchance, in a moment
of confraternity, a man says an indecent thing about his own wife.”
Elsewhere in Mr. Graham I sense the prig, but here I understand
him fully because he knows what I know, that this impurity was not
healthy, it was not naive and frank and Greek—such are, I believe,
the terms of honour. No. It was corrupt, rotten, and it was endless.
The second point on which Mr. Graham's testimony is valuable
concerns the tyranny of the drill sergeant. Mad Lear once defined
the image of authority in the words “a dog's obeyed in office.”
Mr. Graham does not admit that it was the duty of the drill sergeant
.


SGANARELLE
397
to crush out the spirit of the men to such a point that a commanding
officer might cheerfully prepare for the slaughter of a quarter of a
million men. He does not analyze the corruption which comes with
undeserved authority, perhaps because he never became a sergeant
himself and never saw the sickening spectacle of men who had tried
to bully him before come cringing for his favour. The Guards regi-
ments made their promotions slowly; by his own account Mr. Gra- ·
ham was the only man in his battalion who might have qualified for
a commission. Authority, therefore, was permanent and its symbol
was brutality.
.
.
“I used to think courage and verve and human idealism made the
real driving power of the army in time of war. ... The real driv-
ing power lay in brutal thought and word and act. The open sesame
of the army was the characteristic of brutality. . . That the driv-
ing power of the army arose from courage and voluntary sacrifice
was the first illusion to fall. The second was that of chivalry.
The regimental tone absolutely forbade admiration of anything in
connection with Germans.”
Mr. Graham recounts at least one instance in which leave was given
by a commanding officer to shoot prisoners ("to avenge my brother's
death,” said the sergeant who asked the privilege) and gives it as
the common experience of all soldiers that they are trained to kill
the wounded. Thus:
“ 'The second bayonet man kills the wounded.'
“ 'The army provides you with a good pair of boots; you know
how to use them.'
“'At this point the Germans come out of the machine gun nest
holding up their hands, and the man with the Lewis gun forgets to
take his fingers off the trigger.'
To this let Mr. Graham write his own epilogue:
“As yet they remember all too well the brutal aspects of it all, the
cruelty and sordidness, the petty tyranny and the impurity, but the
time will come for many when, recalling the way and the march and
the Spirit in the midst, they will ask of us old war-comrades as did


398
"I TOO HAVE BEEN IN-
one apostle of another at Emmaus, 'Did not our heart burn within
us while He talked with us by the way!
Mr. Graham's faith is a point of prime importance, but only for
him and for those who share it. It is interesting to be assured of the
vitality of such a Christian faith but Mr. Graham carefully avoids
thinking of the purpose of the war and of its results; he enters no
defence; his whole book condemns utterly the system which pro-
duced the war, the system which carried it through and by implica-
tion the social system which was strengthened by it. He has much
to say of the goodness and greatness of the men in battle; he has
nothing to say for the harassed and drunken and limited lives they
led before they entered the Guards. When he has to face a disagree-
able thing he faces it boldly; but he can always turn to the thought
of the King or to the thought of God. And without desiring to
belittle either of these attitudes of mind I would point out to Mr.
Graham that to meet a fact by a thought, instead of by a deed, is a
sin against man if not against the God who made man.
I have a silly suspicion that those who are preparing for the next
war are discouraging the sale of books like these two. It should be
stated, therefore, that both authors were volunteers, that both
fought with honour, and that both believed in the war as long as
they could. Mr. Gibbs wishes that he had been a pacifist long ago;
Mr. Graham, I take it, hopes that the world will be pacifist a long
time from now. If barricades rise in the streets these men will be
on opposite sides; and that, too, is one of the war's little ironies, for
they suffered much together and for the same high purpose, and they
are for ever asunder. . . .. Nor is the irony exclusively theirs.
SGANARELLE


BRIEFER MENTION
The Worldings, by Leonard Merrick (8vo, 334 pages; Dutton),
would not bear reprinting except in this complete uniform edition
of the author, of which it is the sixth volume to be issued. It
is best-seller stuff—a commonplace yam of financial intrigue,
almost devoid of the Merrick grace and humour. Neil Munro's
introduction, a little more discerning than the description on the
jacket, will make it no more palatable to the Merrick taste.
Souls Divided, by Matilde Serao ( 12mo, 298 pages; Brentano), is
probably a better novel than the translator has managed to pro-
ject, yet even with this allowance its theme and substance tend
toward emotional futility. The story of a "sudden, fantastical,
and absurd love” is developed through a man's letters; but there
is a lack of subtlety and stamina in the performance.
The Professor's Love-Life: Letters of Ronsby Maldclewith
(12mo, 182 pages; Macmillan) is a group of letters made public
at the wish of a woman of the old South who died some years
ago. They express with a simplicity rarer than their theme the
.
courage and the devotion of the young man who, because of pov-
erty and ill health and a quixotic regard for the conventionalities,
is unable to marry the girl he loves.
The ROLLING STONE, by C. A. Dawson-Scott (12mo, 383 pages;
Knopf). "You wanted what other men wanted; not for its own
sake, but because they wanted it. And you wanted it just as long
as you had to fight in order to keep it.” That is the spirit which
animates the hero of this deftly handled narrative.
THE BLOWER OF BUBBLES, by Arthur Beverley Baxter (12mo,
338 pages; Appleton), is a collection of short stories of love and
adventure with the war as a background. They are whimsically
written. But the regularity with which the various characters
undergo a metamorphosis under the stimulus of the patriotic im-
pulse becomes wearisome.


400
BRIEFER MENTION
BROOME STREET STRAWS, by Robert Cortes Holliday (12mo, 310
pages; Doran), is a collection of light essays chiefly concerned
with characters found in lodging and boarding houses of lower
Manhattan, with an intermixture of subjects as far apart as
England and Indiana. In one article, The Pub, Mr: Holliday
creditably meets Thomas Burke on his own ground. The book
is patterned after Walking-Stick Papers, but while it has a
pleasant, mellow flavour, it falls somewhat short of the earlier
volume both in spirit and in substance.
Dust of New York, by Konrad Bercovici (illustrated, 12mo,
239 pages; Boni & Liveright), is a series of sketches of the
Jewish, Spanish, Roumanian, Greek, Italian, and French quar-
ters of the city. Though occasionally it is to be regretted that
the introductions have been awkwardly performed, one must ad-
mit that Mr. Bercovici has caught and held the overtones in the
dust of New York.
a
The AdventURES OF A Nature Guide, by Enos A. Mills (illus-
trated, 12mo, 271 pages; Doubleday, Page), dwells in the high
places. Mr. Mills brings down his observations with a keen pair
of eyes rather than a shot-gun, and presents his experiences in
modest narrative, avoiding the pitfall of the nature writers whose
verbal extravagance puts them in the position of patting nature
on the back.
Sweden's LAUREATE: Selected Poems of Verner von Heidenstam,
translated by Charles Wharton Stork (8vo, 159 pages; Yale
University Press), is a commendable addition to Mr. Stork's
enterprise of acquainting Americans with the Scandinavian poets.
Among the earlier poems are narratives of oriental colour,
chiefly epicurean in philosophy, and some puerilely gloomy sub-
jective pieces. Through a middle period of ripening, the poet
passes into warmer, more vigorous feeling and greater under-
standing. He has an ironic humour of a taking sort. Mr. Stork
anticipates criticism of the collection as rendered by saying that
Heidenstam allows "his verbal music” to be "overruled by his
substance," and that his poetry is below the average of the best
Swedish work in melodic beauty. The translations bear him out.


BRIEFER MENTION
401
A Book of BURLESQues, by H. L. Mencken (12mo, 235 pages;
Knopf). Reviewers of Mr. Mencken's work either try to be as
clever as he or are stupid in order to show their contempt of his
cleverness. He is not contemptible even when he is cheap—and
he has not resisted that temptation in this book. A real free-
lance without philosophy or piety, but graced with much wit.
The epigrams are vile, the concert-programme is excellent, but
the best chapter is called vers libre. The great difficulty about
this book is that it will not irritate the intelligent and none but
the intelligent can be amused by it.
9
The GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN Life, by Charles Gray Shaw
(12mo, 593 pages; New York University Press), is an ethical
polemic against "sociality" and "scientism” by the advocate of a
purged and reinvigorated individualism. It is a new attempt to
establish “The Ego and Its Place in the World.” In the back-
ground Professor Shaw presents a rich landscape of literary ex-
perience; in the middle distance stalks his thesis; and in the fore-
ground lies a heavy mist of philosophic jargon-obscuring all.
A GENERAL SKETCH OF EUROPEAN LITERATURE IN THE Cen-
TURIES OF ROMANCE, by Laurie Magnus (12mo, 411 pages;
Dutton), is the first of a trilogy which aims to supply an "out-
line map” of European literature from the twelfth century to
the present. This volume is well informed, well organized, and
not badly written; but it is too pedagogically cautious, too emi-
nently accurate, to be, even accidentally, anything more than a
reference convenience. The author has accomplished his aim
with devastating thoroughness.
9
A Book of R. L. S., by George E. Brown (illustrated, 12mo, 298
pages; Scribner), raises the question of how long Stevenson will
survive segmentation, mutilation for mottoes, and vivisection in
calendars, without impairment of his literary vitality. This vol-
ume, fortunately, is a dictionary rather than a dissection.
a
Stevenson's stories and essays, his friends and his travels, are
listed in alphabetical order, and the interesting data relative to
each is set down in concise and entertaining paragraphs. An
invaluable handbook for the Stevenson fan.


402
BRIEFER MENTION
Elizabeth Cary-AGASSIZ, by Lucy Allen Paton (illustrated,
12mo, 423 pages; Houghton Mifflin), is a biography of the first
president of Radcliffe College, who was also the wife of the scien-
tist. The author gives a full account of the external details of
Mrs. Agassiz’s life; and conveys an excellent idea of her person-
ality by including a number of letters she wrote to her husband
and friends.
Debs: His Authorized Life and Letters from Woodstock Prison to
Atlanta, by David Karsner (illustrated, 12mo, 244 pages; Boni
& Liveright), throws a number of intimate, journalistic sidelights
upon a man who never better upheld the banners of traditional
Americanism than when, upon trial under the Espionage Act, he
threw away the possibility of a favourable verdict in order more
forcefully to declare his convictions. Karsner's memorabilia may
some day prove ironically to be a contribution to the literature
of American patriotism.
a
Horace Traubel: His Life and Work, by David Karsner (illus-
trated, 12mo, 160 pages; Egmont Arens, New York), though
its subject wrote its introduction and pronounced it a "bit of
genuinely good work,” is too jealously addressed to Traubel ad-
mirers, too undiscriminating in its appraisal to be the biography
deserved by that robust, intransigent humanitarian with a double
genius for friendship and unpopularity. He will be longest re-
membered, no doubt, as Walt Whitman's Boswell; but his
own full life and his timpanic pen should challenge a more de-
tached critic.
a
A QUAKER Singer's RECOLLECTIONS, by David Bispham (illus-
trated, 8vo, 401 pages; Macmillan), is the autobiographical
,
story of America's most popular and dramatic barytone. The
style, unfortunately, is plainly that of a singer, and wavers con-
tinually between the exclamatory and the sentimental. But since
there is little attempt at literary distinction, the book, in fairness
to music lovers and to Mr. Bispham, should be read not as a
literary memoir but as the informing gossip of a man who, by re-
maining original, has supplied the United States with the best
imitation extant of the German lieder singer, Ludwig Wüllner.


BRIEFER MENTION
403
MEMORIES OF A Musical Career, by Clara Kathleen Rogers (il-
lustrated, 8vo, 503 pages; Little, Brown; Boston); is a deliber-
ate and detailed chronicle, its reminiscences spanning approxi-
mately fifty chapters and two continents. Out of her girlhood,
her musical education, her wide acquaintance and varied experi-
ences as opera and concert singer, Mrs. Rogers weaves an unemo-
tional, and rather quaint, autobiography; but its appeal is for
musical and retrospective readers.
Between You and Me, by Sir Harry Lauder (12mo, 324 pages;
McCann; New York), retains both the dialect and the informal
flavour which have been so successful beyond the footlights.
Sir Harry tosses neither knighthood nor discretion to the wind,
but his narrative touches reality at those responsive points where
the homely virtues lie close to the surface. To a life story
founded on fact, he brings a literary art founded on folk.
Irish IMPRESSIONS, by G. K. Chesterton (12mo, 222 pages;
Lane), has had other reviewers who have noted the justice of
Mr. Chesterton's contention that, to understand Ireland, one
should view it as an hitherto undiscovered country. No English-
man has done this, and with all his good will, Mr. Chesterton is
an Englishman. With expected tact he gives a just impression
of Irish religion and speech, but for the rest the book is a series
of turgid formulae strung together on the exasperating principle
that if to say a thing in a certain way is clever, to say it twice is
twice as clever.
The MORAL Basis of DeMOCRACY, by Arthur Twining Hadley
(12mo, 206 pages; Yale University Press), consists of nineteen
sermons, delivered to Yale Students over a generous space of
years, in an atmosphere at once strenuous and sabbatical. Plati-
tudes are generously reinforced by illustrations from the Civil
War, which are scattered through the pages with the stolid mean-
inglessness of the post-bellum monuments one finds in New Eng-
land towns. "Gentlemen of the Graduating Class” are the fre-
quent targets for President Hadley's exhortations. Need Gen-
tlemen of the Graduated Classes be reminded that for them at-
tendance at Chapel is optional ?


404
BRIEFER MENTION
The PsychOLOGY OF NATIONALITY AND INTERNATIONALISM, by
W. B. Pillsbury (12mo, 314 pages; Appleton), is not the book
political scientists, sociologists, and statesmen have been eagerly
hoping for. There is still too great a hiatus between the author's
picture of the animal pack, encircled for defence, and that com-
plex of traditions, conventions, memories, institutions, slogans,
boundaries, and tomtom beats which has brought us finally to
the conception of a nation in arms. Professor Pillsbury has not
clarified, for example, the relations of nation and state. His
belief in the integrity of the national state does not take into
account that growing regionalism which challenges the authority
of the state at the same time that it denies the false unity of bel-
ligerent nationalism. And the temperate lucidity of the author's
psychological exposition does not equate his superficial examina-
tion of the historical groundwork of Nationality and Interna-
tionalism.
The UNSOLVED RIDDLE OF Social Justice, by Stephen Leacock
(12mo, 152 pages; Lane), is a readable and frequently keen
analysis of industrial society. Professor Leacock's delicately
manipulated scalpel cuts perilously close to the heart of the Price
System, in his perception of the paradox of value-namely, that
"the world's production is aimed at producing 'values,' not in
producing plenty." While the honest sunlight of criticism de-
clares the insufficiency of individualist economics, the light that
Professor Leacock throws upon Socialism-taking Bellamy's
bleak vision of bureaucracy as sample—is almost a Moonbeam
from the Larger Lunacy.
STABILIZING THE DOLLAR: A Plan to Stabilize the General Price
Level Without Fixing Individual Prices, by Irving Fisher (8vo,
305 pages; Macmillan), sums up the author's plea for a “goods