is a new, more detailed Education Sentimentale.
M. Proust has a conception of his art as high as Flaubert's. Their
minds are the same kind of diamond, but whereas Flaubert's was
shaped in a few facets, M. Proust's glitters innumerably. He is
in some respects a Flaubert indefinitely elaborated. And his highly
complex form of narrative should have no difficulties for those
who have assimilated Ulysses and Mary Olivier and Miriam's in
terminable impressions. M. Proust is more coherent than Mr
Joyce, more urbane, less preoccupied with slops and viscera. His
scale is more gigantic than anything Miss Sinclair has yet at-
tempted. And he is not merely an impressionist like Miss Richard-
son. He can be an impressionist, a marvellous impressionist when
necessary, he can use that almost fabulous virtuosity one admires
in Miss Richardson's work, but he can do so many things more.
You could furnish a new Rochefoucauld and another volume to
Montaigne from his pages. With all one's admiration, one can not
say that of Miss Richardson. And though M. Proust can describe
a public convenience with a precision and verve which would have
aroused the jealousy even of Flaubert, he is devoid of that acrid,
Tertullian-like spirit which, in Mr Joyce, makes one uneasily con-
scious that he is engaged in the moral vulgarity of disparaging the
universe. M. Proust has the urbanity, the fine manners nature
denied to Mr Joyce when she gave him genius; he has the vast
scheme of civilizations which Miss Sinclair has not yet tried to
render; he has a significance we look for in vain in Miss Richardson.
M. Proust's admiration for Ruskin is one of the typical, dis-
tinctive characteristics of his mind. It is not the affected admira-
tion for Ruskin's "purple periods," which Wilde professed, and
it is certainly not a sympathy for Ruskin's peculiar views on art.
It is an admiration directed towards Ruskin's essential apprecia-
tiveness, his capacity for the assimilation and understanding of
beauty, his reverence for the arts as symbols and expressions of


346 THE APPROACH TO M. MARCEL PROUST
civilization. Often, especially in modern Paris, you will find an
art looked upon as something self-supporting, as if it had an ex-
istence of its own, independent of the civilization in which it lives
and by which it should be nourished and of the past from which
it grew. This error, which is being cleverly though perhaps un-
consciously exposed by the young Dadaistes, leads inevitably to
death and is profoundly repulsive to M. Proust. We can observe
it in a thousand little points of his writing. He finds it as un-
pleasant to repudiate a dead artist as he would the memory of a
relative. Perhaps one of the most useful things proved by his
books is that a mind steeped in tradition, a mind almost fastidiously
respectful, has nevertheless created one of the most original novels
of the time.


SAINT-LOUP: A PORTRAIT
BY MARCEL PROUST
SAN
>
AINT-LOUP came up fidgeting all over, his monocle flying
before him; I had not sent up my name, I was impatient
to enjoy his surprise and his pleasure.
"Oh, what a bore” he cried out suddenly catching sight of me,
and went red to the ears, “I've just taken my week's leave and
won't be able to get out for another eight days."
And, preoccupied by the thought that I would have to be alone
this first night, since he knew better than any one my agonies at
night, which he had often noticed and soothed, he broke off com-
plaining to turn in my direction, giving me little smiles, and un-
equal tender looks, some coming directly from his eye, others
,
through his monocle, all alluding to his emotion at seeing me again,
alluding also to that important thing which I did not always
understand but which was imporant to me now, our friendship.
“Oh Lord, and where are you going to sleep? Really I don't
advise the hotel where we are boarding, it's right next to the Ex-
position, the shows are going to begin and there'll be a wild crowd
of people. No, you'd better go to the Hôtel de Flandre, it's an
ancient little palace of the eighteenth century, with old tapestries.
That 'makes' quite an ‘old historic mansion.'”
Saint-Loup always used the word "make" for "seem” because
the spoken language, like the written language, from time to time
feels the need of such alterations in the meaning of words, of such
refinements of expression. And just as journalists often do not
know from what school of literature the "graces” they use are
derived, so the vocabulary and even the diction of Saint-Loup
were imitated from three different aesthetes, none of whom he
knew but whose fashions of speech had been indirectly imposed
on him. “Besides," he concluded, "this hotel is particularly good
for your auditory hypersensitiveness. You will have no neigh-
bours. I know that that's a paltry advantage and as after all
another traveller may come in to-morrow, it would not be worth
while to choose that hotel for such precarious results. No, it is
>



348
-SAINTPORTRAIT
-LOUP: A A
on account of its appearance that I recommend it to you. The
rooms are very sympathetic, all the furniture is old and comfort-
able, and that is something reassuring.” But for me, less of an
artist than Saint-Loup, the pleasure a pretty house could give was
superficial, almost non-existent, and could not calm my rising
distress, as painful as that I felt long ago at Cambray when my
mother did not come to bid me good-night, or at Balbec, the day
I arrived, in the room that was too high and smelt of bent-grass.
Saint-Loup understood from my stare.
“But you don't give a hang for this pretty palace, my poor
child, you're quite pale; what a big brute I am to talk to you
about tapestries which you haven't even the heart to look at. I
know the room they'll give you very well, and personally I think
it's rather gay, but I realize that for you, with your sensitiveness,
I
it's not the same thing. You must not think that I don't under-
stand you. I do not feel the same way, but I put myself exactly
in your place.”
A subaltern who was trying a horse in the courtyard, intent on
making him jump, disregarding the soldiers' salutes but firing off
volleys of curses at those who got in his way, just then turned and
smiled on Saint-Loup and seeing that he had a friend with him,
saluted. But his horse reared up to his full height, foaming.
Saint-Loup flung himself at the horse's head, took him by the
bridle, managed to calm him, and returned to me.
“Yes” he said to me, “I assure you I am aware of it and I suf-
fer for what you must go through; it makes me unhappy,” he ad-
ded, putting his hand affectionately on my shoulder, “to think
that if I had been able to stay with you, perhaps by being near
you, by talking with you until daybreak, I could have relieved
your distress a little. I would gladly lend you books but you
couldn't read in your state.
And I'll never be able to get some
one to take my place here. I've just done it twice in succession
because my little girl came down.” He knit his brow with an-
noyance and because he was trying, like a doctor, to find what
remedy he might prescribe for my malady.
“Run up and make a fire in my room,” he said to a passing
soldier. "Faster than that-get a move on.”
Then, again, he turned to me, and again his monocle and his
myopic gaze alluded to our great friendship.



MARCEL PROUST
349
a
"No, I can't believe my eyes that you are here in the barı acks
where I have thought of you so much. I think it is a drea.n.
Everything considered, is your health better? You must tell me
all about it presently. We'll go up to my room, we won't stay
too long down here, there's a devil of a wind. I don't feel it any
more but you are not used to it, I am afraid you must be cold.
And about work, have you got down to it? No! What an odd
one you are! If I had your inclinations I think I should be writ-
ing from morning until night. But you have a better time doing
nothing. What a misfortune that mediocrities like myself are
always ready to work, and those who can do not want to. And I
haven't asked for news of your grandmother yet? Her Proudhon
is still with me.”
An officer, big, handsome, majestic, came down the stairway
with slow and solemn steps. Saint-Loup saluted him and im-
mobilized the perpetual instability of his body long enough to
hold his hand on a level with his képi. But he had fung it up
with such force, stiffening with such a crisp movement, and as
soon as the salute was over let it fall with such a brusque galvanic
snap, changing the positions of his shoulder, his leg, his monocle,
that the moment was less one of immobility than of a vibrant
tension in which the movements just produced and those about to
begin neutralized each other. However the officer, without com-
ing nearer, calm, benevolent, dignified, imperial, representing in
sum everything that Saint-Loup was not, also, but without haste,
lifted his hand to his képi.
Many enlisted men of other squadrons, young rich bourgeois
who had never entered into aristocratic society and knew it only
from the outside, were moved to admiration by what they knew of
Saint-Loup, and this feeling was doubled by the prestige which
came from seeing the young man, when they went to Paris on
leave, Saturday night, often dining with the duc d'Uzès and the
prince d'Orléans. And on account of that they had found some-
thing “chic” in his handsome face, his loose gait and jerky salute,
the perpetual darting of his monocle, the “fantasy” of his ex-
cessively high képi, of his trousers, the cloth excessively fine and
too red—a “chic” which they were sure was wanting in the most
-



350
SAINT-LOUP: A PORTRAIT
>
elegant officers of the regiment, even the majestic captain who
seemed, in comparison, too solemn and almost vulgar.
Some one said that the Captain had bought a new horse. “Let
him buy all the horses he wants. I met Saint-Loup in the Allée
des Acacias, and he was riding with a different chic,' ” said
another; and with justice, for these young men who belonged to
another class and did not have the same set of acquaintances in
society, were like the aristocracy in knowing all the elegances which
can be bought for money. In all that concerned clothes, for
example, theirs had a sort of excessive study, were more impeccable
than the free and negligent elegance of Saint-Loup which so pleased
my grandmother. It was a little sensation for these sons of great
bankers or stock-brokers, when they were eating oysters after the
theatre, to see the subaltern Saint-Loup at a table close to theirs.
And what stories were told in the b'arracks on Monday when they
came back from leave, by a soldier in Saint-Loup's squadron,
whom he had greeted “very courteously” or by another, not in the
same squadron, but who believed that in spite of that he had
been recognized because Saint-Loup had levelled his monocle two
or three times in his direction.
One evening I wanted to tell a rather amusing story about
Mme. Blandais, but I stopped at once because I remembered that
Saint-Loup already knew it and that when I had wanted to tell it
to him the day after I arrived he had interrupted me with, "you
told me that at Balbec.” So I was surprised to see Saint-Loup
urging me to continue, assuring me that he did not know the story
and that it would amuse him very much. I told him, “You are
forgetting for a moment, but you will soon remember it.” "But
no, I swear you're confusing me with some one else. You never
told it to me. Go on." And all through the story he feverishly
fixed his enchanted gaze now on me, now on his comrades. Only
when I had finished, when every one was laughing, did I under-
stand that he fancied he would give a fine idea of my wit to his
comrades and that was why he pretended not to know the story.
That is friendship.




H)
SONNET-MAKING.
BY DONALD CORLEY.






w
,
10
B
T
M
ETUDE CHINOISE.
BY DONALD CORLEY.


"




0
11
UA
ETUDE CHINOISE. BY DONALD CORLEY.






-
MARY
TAMATA)
DueUOS
AN
ATTIC FUNERAL.
BY DONALD CORLEY.





TWO POEMS
BY PADRAIC COLUM
THE SISTER'S LULLABY
You would not slumber
If laid at my breast:
You would not slumber.
My thoughts are strayed birds,
My blood is possessed:
You would not slumber.
The rain-drops encumber
The hawthorn's crest:
You would not slumber.
The river flood beats
The swan from her nest:
You would not slumber.
Times without number
Has called the woodquest:
Times without number.
As oft as she called
To me you were pressed:
Times without number.
Now you'd not slumber
If laid at my breast
Times without number.
O starling reed-resting,
I'll rock you to rest :
So you will slumber!


352
TWO POEMS
!
LEGEND
There is an hour, they say,
On which your dream has power:
Then all you wish for comes,
As comes the lost field-bird
Down to the island lights.
There is an hour, they say,
That's woven with your wish:
In dawn or dayli’gone,
In mirk-dark or at noon,
In hush or hum of day,
May be that secret hour.
H
A herd-boy in the rain,
Who looked o'er stony fields;
A young man in the street,
When fife and drum went by,
Making the sunlight shrill;
A girl in a lane,
When the long June twilight
Made friendly far-off things,
Had watch upon the hour:
The deaths they met are in
The song my grand-dam sings.


A CONTEMPORARY OF THE FUTURE
BY EVELYN SCOTT
S
TENDHAL, called the first realist, might better have been con-
sidered the first naturalist, though either epithet is over exact
when applied to this figure of transition. Balzac, generalizing in
motives rather than emotions, has most of the vulgarity of the
romantic. His deficiencies of temperament alone save him from a
grandiose fate. It was Flaubert who, with the consistency of in-
tuition rather than logic, united the incidents of his moods so that
they completed themselves in his audience—the true resolution of
the creative act.
However, though he sought to translate to us, through suggest-
ive means, the indefinable experience of emotion, an attitude of
philosophical skepticism influenced and limited his art, leading him
to consider emotion only as the response to an elementary stimulus.
Emotion as a quality of feeling forcing itself into expression,
though it frequently follows as the direct result of a sensory stimu-
lus, is not nearly always a mere subjective elongation of what the
senses register, but is complicated again and again by the conflict
of mentally stored impulses. Yet the naturalistic writers treat the
brain of the civilized human, with its accumulated complexities,
exactly as though it were the brain of a dog or a savage.
In Madame Bovary, for example, there does not result in
Emma's mind that accumulation of perception, dim though it may
be, which would serve to heighten the tragedy of the book and
fortify the author's intention. The mental and emotional ex-
periences of Flaubert's heroine remain apart. Except that her
banal ideals are indicated in a general way, she suggests nothing
complex to us or to herself. In the exquisite instant of feeling we
are aware of the moment, radiant, impalpable, unduplicatable as
a rainbow or a cloud. It passes over her futile soul as a reflection
over a lake, leaving, contrary to all records of the psychology of
even moderately self-aware beings, not even the intellectual residue
of itself stored up in her soul to complicate the future with its
thinly distilled direction.


354
A CONTEMPORARY OF THE FUTURE
1
a
sea.
Naturalism is sometimes described as the logical obverse of
romanticism, but there is a difference. The romantic ideal of
beauty and moral perfection was incorporate in romantic art as a
soul in a body. Naturalism, on the other hand, took no ultimate
shape, and was no more than a theory of limitations. As such it
restrained rather than moulded individual expression, developing
inhibitions which resulted in a kind of aborted realism.
To Flaubert, as to our modern George Moore, all moments are
as one. They reflect their sense impressions with oriental lucidity
and quiescence. No psychological interactions are possible in this
atmosphere of timelessness. And as there is little conscious re-
sponse to life in their work, there is little tragedy. Moore writes
like a man in a trance. His voluptuous sentences carry us forward
indefinitely, and their rhythm is the rhythm of waves in a tideless
No confused impulses strike like contrary rays of light on
this huge surface. Pathos with its quality of obliviousness gives
the character to Moore's writing. In Evelyn Innes, for example,
there is no real struggle between the religious and the secular im-
pulse. Emotional nuances, shed like dim rays from a hidden sun,
tint the receptive yet negative personality of the heroine, and we
acknowledge her the medium for this or that feeling, but it is the
emotion living through her and not by her that we apprehend, and,
when the emotion passes, the loss we sense is rather our loss than
hers.
As the character of feeling displayed by Emma Bovary and
Evelyn Innes is that of minds controlled in their operations by no
experience of the past or anticipation of the future, it is the type
of feeling which psychology has associated with the mentality of
the child; and when James Joyce, in his Portrait of the Artist as
a Young Man, gives us the early life of Stephen Dedalus in a
similar vein we find exquisite appropriateness in the method so
used. It is a mind which has not yet developed complexities that
responds so simply yet so delicately to the obvious aspects of its
surroundings.
Here is the whole pathos of the child's life. Strange yet famil-
iar objects are grouped about the little boy and their newly acquired
nomenclature suggests to him relations as yet clouded with the
emotional obscurity of the first contact. The relative depth of
the emotional values which illuminate Stephen's environment are


EVELYN SCOTT
355
proven, I should think, in the memory of almost any one's child-
hood. Thus Irish politics are nebulously conceived and only
crystallize in Mrs Riordon's green and maroon backed brushes.
The association of phrases from The Litany of the Blessed Virgin
with the little girl of the cool hands have just that naïve and re-
mote harmony with their inspiration which is born of feeling
rather than thought. The little boy is as much a poet as the
author of The Song of Solomon, and in the same manner. To
heighten the heart-rending effect of Stephen's simplicity, we are
given bits of childish humour often permeated with a grotesque
and subconscious sensuality. When Jesus told his followers to
become as little children he established in the minds of the nar-
rower ascetics who came after him the convention of innocence as
a kind of bomb-proof indestructible blankness of the senses. This
misinterpretation, responsible for most of the tragedies of child-
hood and adolescence, has captured even the vision of art and made
it, in this direction, quite generally myopic.
Occasionally some determinedly courageous writer like Miss
May Sinclair, who, in her recent study of Mary Olivier, has shown
us the evolution of an individuality from childhood to maturity,
attempts to assert the irresponsibility of her senses as against what
I should call, were I in ignorance of Miss Sinclair's liberal philos-
ophy, her Presbyterian conviction of sin. In perusing Mary
Olivier, however, we are never free from an impression that the
author is doing her duty by the flesh. She is a conscientious
spinster in the confessional and we blush with her, not that her sins
are many, but that they are few. Miss Sinclair, it would seem,
has an incurably virginal outlook and we dislike being forced to
this mistaken emphasis of the weaker incidents of a personality
which, on its intellectual side, so entirely commands our respect.
The consciousness of virtue exists to assert a consciousness of sin
in the soul which requires a witness for its acts. As an artist Mr
Joyce, unlike Miss Sinclair, is able to dispense with the moral
audience—even with the self that sits in judgement before it can
give absolution.
Stephen's home, family, and early associates pass from us dis-
tantly in a procession of fate. Poverty, a meaningless word to the
child, becomes concrete in the repeated sight of moving vans, the
thumbed and grease-marked pawn tickets, and the meagre disarray



356
A CONTEMPORARY OF THE FUTURE
of ill-assorted china on a clothless board. It is effectively hinted
to the reader by such trivial things as the wondering remark of an
elderly aunt and the admiration of the small cousin who looks at
the picture of the variety artist as at a lovely being of another life.
It is because Stephen has not catalogued these people that they
live for us in his imagination. From his contact with Mr and Mrs
Dedalus, Mrs Riordon, Uncle Charles, and Eileen is sprung the
first spark of self-awareness. That part of our environment which
lives is the part which makes emotional demands on us. When
the figures of childhood fade from Stephen's emotional vision, they
cease to exist, and the vitality of the father and mother and the
priests and boys at Clongowes is transmuted into the vitality of the
whore in the mean street.
One's childhood impressions have the significance of an occasion,
but it is the impersonal nature of the first stirrings of sex which
make the whole world live in the adolescent's spirit. Over-
powered by the magnitude of this counter-self, the youth grasps
at the defence of an ideal with which to hold his own turgid soul
at bay. Clutching the easiest acceptable generality, he describes
himself in its terms. So the power of the word gradually elimin-
ates from his consciousness those inconvenient propensities which
do not coincide with his definition.
The period of growing pains is the time in which the emotional
capacities of the individual have reached their full and have not
yet been brought under control of this sub-conscious hypnosis. In
the case of the average man with an easy facility for self-deception,
lingering uncataloguable traits are, in some manner only to be ex-
plained by the subtleties of sophist reasoning, soon made to appear
a confirmation of his conception of a simplified self. If the
machinery of a theory be logical, only the exceptional person will
trouble about the premise on which it is built, and even this extra-
ordinary being, without an ideal of himself would be forced to face
a world of unrelated values, a reality of pure emotion, in fact, and
so a kind of madness.
Art preserves itself through its conventions, but these conventions
justify themselves only when the artist makes use of them paradox-
ically, so that they are a kind of negation of all they represent.
To achieve a practical purpose one defines one's self positively.
For the purposes of art there are only negative definitions. So in


EVELYN SCOTT
357
the manner of his denial, through the order of a sophisticated
technique, he may assert that magnificent disorder that preceeds our
small perfections.
When Stephen Dedalus casts off the thraldom of the religion
which has dominated his childhood, he becomes a man, and probab-
ly a great man-certainly an artist—by asserting himself in this
negative sense. In the freedom of denial which never belongs
fully to any one but the artist, he is able to feel the life about him
with exquisite and intimate detachment. For ever apart from
him, the clouds, the sea, the young girl with the long white legs like
a stork's, are intimate, perfect, and indivisible incidents of his
being.
If only Mr Joyce had possessed the artistic courage to end his
book with these most intense paragraphs of emotional realization,
and had not diffused the effects of a priceless moment in some one
hundred pages of brilliant but disintegrating comment! The
aesthetic formulas which originate in Stephen's maturing mind
articulate so small a part of the reality which is Stephen, a reality
which we have not touched curiously from the outside but have
entered into.
However, as extraneous as is Mr Joyce's exposition of art to the
very effective impressionism of the creation which goes before, he
gives us, on the lips of the maturing adolescent, more than one hint,
from the critic standpoint, of a tendency which later fulfils itself
in Ulysses, the first imaginative attempt at a complete history of
consciousness.
Mr Joyce might be described as the only artist who has seen
himself through. Even in his volume of poems, Chamber Music
-made
up of plaintive little Elizabethan numbers of irrelevant
perfection—there is discernible that balance between sense and
consideration which should characterize the seeker for reality.
One imagines it impossible for Mr Joyce to intoxicate himself with
the approximate expression; and the clarity of his vision, always
so precise, is at the same time quietly and endlessly intense, like a
continuous pain.
Mr Joyce is still a young writer, but even in Dubliners, one of
his first published volumes, there is in his style an extreme lucidity
and composure which give one the impression of fulfilment rather
than promise. In this book he broke no new ground, but at least


358
A CONTEMPORARY OF THE FUTURE
1
a
he showed us that the absence of spiritual nuance in most of the
prose written in the English tongue was not due to any lack in the
potentialities of the language, but was rather the result of a
crassness of mentality in the people who used it.
To-day, when this author's technique has developed unique
aspects that threaten to indicate a revolution of style for the future,
the spirit of his work suggests the culminaion of a long and slowly
evolving line rather than the ebullition of a fresh impulse. Most
of the Dubliners are presented to us statically through a quality of
mind comparable only to the poetic quality in emotions. That is
to say these are true sketches which escape the suggestion of direc-
tion; though occasionally one moves toward an irrevocable climax
in the manner of the short story formula.
No man is wholly himself who is wholly aware of himself, and
it is only through the delicacy of his method that the most exquisite
ironist escapes a taint of complaisance. Mr Joyce, who in this
single instance resembles Chekhov, is sometimes ironical, and on
these occasions is, one might say, almost imperceptibly obvious.
Some of the studies seem a bit opaque, like faithful transparencies
which require the gilding of sense to throw them into relief. There
is more than one hint of that submerged drama in which half of the
human race is still-born—the drama of the incomplete act. The
man without imagination is able to act entirely; but our past asserts
itself through our refinements and chains us in a sterility of the
emotions.
Mr Joyce's mentality is as complex as that of the Russian realist
and expresses itself in paradox, so that one suggestion modifies
another and subtly evades that polarity in idea in which the simple
or romantic emotions have a tendency to concentrate.
It is the
intelligence which forces us to live alone, however, and the Irish
writer's moods, even when most of the earth, are cloistral, so that
he echoes himself as from an infinite distance.
In a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man the material is broad
and simple and the author's triumph, as in Dubliners, is in his
superior application of a method already half established by prece-
dent. When Mr Joyce set out to write a play, on the contrary, he
initially distinguished his effort by his daring selection of a theme
which is exquisitely complex. And in presenting his situation he
dares to express himself through the medium of a vis-à-vis who is
a


EVELYN SCOTT
359
a perfect equality-emotional and intellectual—with his
creator. Very few dramatists can resist the advantage which comes
through an intellectual simplification of their creatures, for the
emotional reactions of a complex mentality are elusive almost be-
yond dramatization. For the sake of an emphasis which expressed
his philosophy of life, Ibsen again and again embodied his drama-
tic conceptions in small-minded individuals.
Before reading Exiles, Mr Joyce's work, I looked upon Strind-
berg as the single instance in contemporary and nearly-contempo-
rary drama, of the artist able to include the finest counter-currents
of reaction in the general forward motion of the drama, without
halting or impeding the culmination of this movement. Strind-
berg's effects were achieved through the instinct which made him
cling to his very limitations—so to hold himself together against
the dispersion of his personality in the temperamental winds of
madness. Not once was he able to see through to the clear side
of self-realization, nor were his characters.
When Mr Joyce drew Richard Rowan, however, he gave us a
character highly self-perceptive and ruthlessly so, one whose ex-
perience of life is complete, each instant born of the senses dying
a beautiful and perfect death in the mind. So clearly does Richard
Rowan appreciate the value of moments detached from each other,
as they must be in realization, that he is no longer capable of what
might be termed the lie of action. Action is a simple and entire
expression of the individual, and becomes possible only through a
temporary obliviousness to complex values. The tendency of a
high state of perception is to arrest the motive force which is
behind the will.
Action is self-assertion. It gathers into one the forces of un-
resolved impressions, which then contribute to proclaim the actor.
If a man be receptive, and take into himself a thousand moments
which he can not express, he gradually becomes a disassociated
personality. Overpowered by opportunities for selecting his as-
sertion, he remains in such slavery to truth that he has not the heart
to proclaim one reality over another.
When the Bible states that it is more blessed to give than to re-
ceive, the prophet might well be poetically announcing the superi-
ority of the actor over the acted upon. But art has an advantage
which is beyond philosophical professions, and even religions


360 A CONTEMPORARY OF THE FUTURE
bound to the definitions of their creeds: it permits one to assert
an infinite number of truths without forcing them into logical re-
lationship
Richard Rowan's is essentially the type of mind which must flee
to art to save itself; and when we are told that he is an author,
we are given another example of the accuracy of Mr. Joyce's in-
stinct. Just as it seems most plausible that Richard should wield
his pen according to his fancy, it is also in the nature of men that
Robert Hand, his friend for many years, should have taken to the
readier profession of journalism. Robert's inclinations are practi-
cal. Action for him is easy and spontaneous. Feeling no prudent
obligation to truth, he ends, through all his trickery toward others,
in being, of Joyce's group, most true to himself. Mr Joyce juxta-
poses Robert Hand and Richard Rowan as the lie which creates
and the truth which destroys. Richard's inhibitions first pro-
claim themselves in his aversion to moral responsibility, the sub-
jective equivalent of action.
Nine years before the play begins Bertha has made an independ-
ent decision to cast her lot with Richard. He neither accepts nor
refuses her gift of self; but after this time together, with the bur-
den of the child she has borne him, he finds himself irked and in-
tangibly bound to her and, through her unsolicited abandon, made
responsible in spite of himself. The object of sacrifice is always
a victim, and this is a drama on the motive of self-sacrifice modi-
fied by subtleties of sex feeling. Where Ibsen describes the ac-
cidental motive that incites to sacrifice and the irony of its particu-
lar result, Joyce shows us what sacrifice is as a gesture of mind be-
fore it is translated in the conventions of religious or sexual vanity
—the ego's attempt to elude restraint. As such it is the response
to a deep but unconsidered psychological need.
Richard, to deny the bond imposed on his will and binding him
to Bertha, carnally betrays her again and again, each time, by re-
fusing to lie to her, denying his obligation to preserve their re-
lationship. He gives her the frankest knowledge of what she has
suffered through him, and so forces upon her the repeated resolution
of their common attitude. Richard has not realized that on the
moral plane passivity is as positive as action, and that in this sense
there is no such thing as a negative decision.
Again Bertha entraps him by refusing to resent her burdens.


EVELYN SCOTT
361
The desire for irresponsibility can be entirely gratified only when
one is acted upon in a manner against which volition has no de-
fence. Richard encourages Bertha to accept the amorous atten-
tions of Robert. If she accept Robert for her lover, then by her
act against Richard she admits his freedom, having injected into
their relationship an element over which he has not even potential
control. Bertha, in her love affair, clutches the Christian's ad-
vantage. She will accept Robert if Richard wills it. Even in
this triangular situation she will remain quiescent.
Again we have Richard on the defensive, obliged to initiate.
At a crucial point he revolts and his nihilism is so complete that
Bertha, without the courage to follow him, finds herself again
bearing the burden which he has eschewed. She is bound by
necessities inherent in her sex, while Richard, more superfluous in
Nature's device, has liberated himself.
Further detaching himself from the circumstances he has
evolved, Richard gives to Robert, also, freedom to decide his future
with Bertha. Thus the parties to the contemplated liason are
stripped even of the comfort of a sense of wrongdoing. Sin, in-
ferring an assertion of some authority over the sinner, is the con-
firmation of the individual's dependence—and dependence is a
relatively irresponsible condition. Richard leaves Robert and
Bertha as free as the gods, and so reduces them, for the time being,
to his own state of inanition.
With a fatalistic conviction of wrongdoing strong in her soul,
Bertha might be imagined as yielding herself abandonedly to
Robert's caresses; but shame has been taken away from her.
Shame is an emotional resolution. Richard forces Bertha to in-
tellectualize her surrender and so destroys its counterpart in her
emotions. Her relation to Robert has, after all, never been more
than an attempt to evaluate through another the quality of her
devotion to Richard. Indeed, she and Richard have both used
Robert to work out the theory of another love.
Richard, when he invited Bertha to betray him, flayed her vanity
and forced her to recklessness. In the last act we see her so pained
by the consciousness that he has destroyed her moral superiority,
that, for the moment, she regards him with a defensive hatred.
He, too, in his heart is resenting her docility, for she has yielded to
his suggestion that she betray him. His self-love has invented a


362
A CONTEMPORARY OF THE FUTURE
torture to prove itself through her, and she has failed. The re-
criminations and counter-recriminations of the two confirm the
hopeless authenticity of all special pleading.
The woman's conserving instinct stirs in her an aversion to this
fatal dalliance with truth, and she demands of man the lie that
will make her whole. To him she looks to justify, by an exagger-
ated gratitude for what she is, her necessity to live even in the
depths of her humiliation. This is what Richard refuses.
Bertha's profound doubt of herself impels her to heighten the
obstacles between her and Richard in proportion as she aches to
see them demolished. If he overthrows them, he will establish
a faith which has the dimensions of her disbelief. Her tragedy
becomes sordidly simple when she sees that Richard's yearning for
escape is half the cloak of a perplexed desire for a woman as yet
uncontaminated by his moral uncertainty—a woman whose virgin
will shall force him to a contradiction of himself.
Of incidental defects, this play has a few. The character of
Beatrice Justice is utterly without insistence. It is the projection
of a passive personality which endures dramatization, but offers
no interchange of life to the characters which surround it. The
child, too, by very obvious, unindividual tricks of thought and
speech, is recognizable as a member of the genus child. There are
other things, more or less inconsequential, like Bertha's intimate
postures with her son—trivial acts often repeated—which, with
their permanent aspect and their ephemeral significance, leave a
catch in the throat.
One after another Ibsen's characters, to continue our previous
comparison, die or are resurrected to witness a lie of living-a lie
toward themselves, made manifest in the falseness of an external
relationship. Only in The Wild Duck is fidelity to truth given
as the proof of failure. Yet The Wild Duck is illustrative only
allegorically. In creating Richard Rowan, Joyce goes a step
further and identifies the doubter with his doubt, in a literal
psychological sense. The principal character of Exiles reveals
to us that, not by his action but by his being, the truth-seeker
destroys himself and those whom he would impregnate with his
vanity.
Truth is a never-finished revelation. To be always aware of
this unending thing, one must preserve a continuous detachment


EVELYN SCOTT
363
toward one's experience of self. There is the shadow or expression
of what one is from moment to moment, and there is one's con-
sciousness of the shadow. The consciousness is the ego. As long
as the shadow falls, rejected, before or behind, one may perceive
it; but at midday the shadow disappears, and one only feels the
light, seeing no longer. The light of midday is the moment of ac-
ceptance—the highest moment of being—and all of the elucidation
that follows is a lie, since it pretends to reflect an identical image
of that vanished instant.
Richard Rowan perceived understanding to be an approximation
of the thing understood. In his vanity he preferred to hold him-
self always apart from the realization that extinguishes the egoistic
sense, and his gaze remained fixed on the shadow which assured
him that he existed.
Mr Joyce approaches psychology, not as a study of the means
through which life comes to us, but as a revelation of life itself,
all inhering in the quality of mind. Our socially cultivated
imagination revolts from the spectacle of human beings sacrificed
to truth, and our sympathies often incline toward Bertha and
Robert as the crasser attitude of these two provides Richard with
the luxury of absolute integrity of feeling. If Richard had killed
himself, we could have forgiven him in the sensation of release,
for tragedy provides us with an expulsive channel for the emotions.
But Mr Joyce writes a tragi-comedy and allows a tension to ac-
cumulate which he does not resolve. His last page leaves us as
baffled as the characters themselves, weary even in understanding.
In doing so he ignores orthodox requirements of audiences of the
drama, but he completes consummately an extraordinary study.
At present his latest work, Ulysses, is available only in the first
instalments of the serial form in which it has been brought out
simultaneously by The Little Review in this country, and in Eng-
land by the London Egoist. Just now one may consider no more
than the effectiveness of its detail, for the scope of the whole can
as yet be no more than a matter of conjecture.
Ulysses is a slice of life in a new sense, a cross section of the
mind in action. This action might be diagramatically represented
as wave-like, a fluid motion toward articulation which only
momentarily achieves itself. The quality of minds intensely
heated by feeling is thinly flowing, constantly mounting toward


364 A CONTEMPORARY OF THE FUTURE
the crest of climax. If the emotional mind be intellectually
subtle, it may preserve itself in immanence over long periods, and
the final burst of escape in expression be shatteringly explosive.
Mr Joyce's very wonderful technical feat in this book is the man-
ner in which he is able to indicate to us the quality and tempo of
many distinct streams of consciousness, while preserving the com-
parative immediacy of his effect.
Of authors who would inundate us in the current of a single
being, there have been a few, and among these Miss Dorothy
Richardson offers, in her method, the most consummate example.
In Interim, which is representative of her usual style of approach-
ing a subject, she holds us as if head downward in the ambiguous
jelly of Miriam's mind, which flows over us almost as imperceptibly
as a glacier, never reaching a point at which it might crystalize in
permanent self-recognition.
The quality of an individual is best recognized by the type of
idea in which his emotions culminate. In the purely sensuous soul
the undulation of being is voluptuously monotonous, and only dim
perceptions light the ebb and flow. But persons who exist entirely
on the plane of sensation are infants or senile people, abortive or
defective. There are indications that Miss Richardson's heroine
is a rounded human and we resent somewhat being forced to regard
her existence as if passed for ever under water.
She is not once
allowed to come up for air. Miss Richardson has admirably
achieved the intimate impression; but she wilfully curtails the
intellectual processes of her creatures in order to preserve indefi-
nitely for her readers the moment of emotional intensification which
preceeds realization.
To behold life for ever as if from the depths of the sea becomes
fatiguing. Here the shapes about us are distorted in the swell of
waters which bear us onward, waters which we can not see,
waters that roar in our ears. And whether we are submerged in
the consciousness of one heroine or another we come finally to the
moment when we desire escape toward oxygen. Miss Richardson
has a colour register of the emotions which she may call by a
hundred different names, but it remains always recognizable
through its limitations.
Mr Joyce, in Ulysses, preserves all the advantage which inheres
in subjective immersion without suffocating us in the closeness of


EVELYN SCOTT
365
a
prolonged immediacy. The succession of rapidly dissolving cli-
maxes which occur in the minds of Stephen and Mr Bloom affect
us in a very direct manner, while we are at the same time per-
mitted to preserve an exterior and critical consciousness of life.
Stephen's subtle psychology allows him an attenuated awareness
of self even when his senses are at white heat. Mr Bloom's mind
suggests a fluid that is colder and thicker. It congeals readily in
recognition of the concrete, and his massive senses are fired to slow
intensity only by a fleshly contact. His mental processes are quick
and simple, and he preserves, in his outlook on life, a kind of
chastity of common sense.
In Stephen's finely strung being there is a continual turmoil, and
a swell of confusion which carries the residue from one incomplete
crisis to lift the crest of another, where he reaches the peak of an
almost insupportably clear vision. For the most part hyper-
responsiveness has frayed his sensations thin, so that the jargon of
his unleashed thought rarely articulates sensation.
Yet this thinness of sense is only the fatigue of a too precious
pain, as we feel through the poignant scene in Episode X, where
he encounters his sister surreptitiously fondling the coverless French
primer which she has purchased at a second hand booth. Through
the mist of his brooding reflections Stephen echoes her poverty-
stricken ambition, the counterpart of his aesthetic hunger. In her
shamed eyes he reads their common conviction of a hopeless future.
Old Simon Dedalus swaggers again through this book, as crassly
alive as he was in the first pages of the Portrait, a man with a happy
obliviousness to subtleties which permits him successfully to assert
himself over his spiritual betters. He is the type of male who has
fostered in women their defensive deviousness—a handsome and
a
benevolent skunk, ingratiatingly proud of its stink.
Through the haze of Stephen's mental suffering we see, looming
large and menacing, as shapes in a field on a grey day, the sordid
outlines of the Dedalus environment; and a few reflective phrases
revive for us the horrid commonplace of Mrs Dedalus's death.
Many minor characters in the pages of Ulysses appeared first in
Dubliners, and in their reincarnation their lineaments are once more
distinct. .Mr Joyce's parsimony of method is in a sense the mark
of his lavishness, for he uses the stuff of the whole world to prove
one man.


366
A CONTEMPORARY OF THE FUTURE
a
a
a
In Ulysses there is the touch of a Rabelaisian humour, felt occa-
sionally in the Portrait, but entirely missing from Exiles and
Dubliners. It furnishes a base in permanent and simple require-
ments for the super-structure of refined perceptions; and contradicts
the tendency of the sophisticated mind toward a sterile disassocia-
tion from essentials. In the literature of an average intelligence
is the tradition of a humour which would be flavourless without
the conventions, the humour of man's astonishment when Nature
intrudes.
Mr Joyce's humour anticipates the conventions. It is the
humour of dirt, of Nature herself as she regards man in his fas-
tidiousness. This is the humour of the god and of the child. It
does not discriminate in a secondary sense, and is not surprised by
a disarrangement of particular conventions, but by the phenomena
of convention as a single incongruity. This is expressed in the
freshness of Bloom's curiosity as he examines his sensations, and,
with an added sharpness, it is in Buck Mulligan's contemplation
of himself and his friend. I do not know of any contemporary
prose writer of specious gusto whose work shows a hardihood which
could sustain it. Certainly the red-blooded littérateurs of America
would faint with the odour of Mr Joyce's sanity.
After the first several episodes, Ulysses changes tempo and takes
on a quality of intricacy which can be neither condemned nor justi-
fied until we are presented with the volume entire and are able to
gauge
the
scope of its pretensions. In representing mass-conscious-
ness by cross current impressions of individuals reacting almost
simultaneously to a common stumulus, Mr Joyce sometimes arrives
at a doubtful effect; but putting aside an end, which at this writing
is still beyond us, there remain the means through which the Irish
artist is recreating a portion of the English language.
By a compounding of nouns with adjectives and even of ad-
jectives with adverbs—“Eglintoneyes, looked up shybrightly,” and
so forth—he conveys to us a simultaneous rather than a cumulative
impression which has these components. The established conven-
tions of the English tongue have hitherto permitted us to represent
only in artificial sequence the composition of a single moment.
Mr Joyce is developing a theory of harmonics in language, some-
what equivalent to the harmonics of musical form. By his agglu-
tinative method of printing words we become aware, as in an actual
a


EVELYN SCOTT
367
occurrence in which the senses coöperate, of many qualities at once
as if they were one, and the result is a reaction that is simple yet
full of nuance.
In attributing quotations he also places the adverb of modifica-
tion before rather than after the name of the person speaking, which
is, except in the shock of meeting on a street corner, the true order
of recognition. Again convention falsely lays the emphasis of
our attention on a recognition of the speaker's identity.
There is no great courage that does not reflect a porportionate
fear. The dauntless self-recognition of the great artist is the
despairing protest of his egotism. Against the blankness of emo-
tion with which one must regard annihilation, are thrown into relief
the sharp details of existence. If James Joyce were not clear-
thinking and deliberate in his pessimism, he could not register so
exquisitely the delicate ramifications of living.
It is the defect of many a compelling and responsive personality
that it intoxicates itself with life until it cannot longer make ac-
curately the great distinction between this world and the next.
This is the psychology of the martyr's triumph. James Joyce
escapes the intoxication of self through the marvelous fineness of
his psychological balance.
The human race accepts slowly its subconscious convictions,
which then rise almost imperceptibly to the lips of its great artists
and become articulate in their work. James Joyce, to my mind,
expresses, more clearly than any other writer of English prose in
this time, the conviction of modernity—a new and complex know-
ledge of self which has passed its period of racial gestation and is
ready for birth in art.
a


DUST FOR SPARROWS
BY REMY DE GOURMONT
Translated by Ezra Pound
26
The need which intelligent men have for hearing good music
is only a pretext for lifting themselves above prosaic reality into
the world of agreeable sensations, of beautiful ideas and chimeras.
27*
There are memories like old mirrors with part of their quick-
silver gone. Recollections take, in them, an admirable clarity,
but they are full of wholly empty lacunae.
28
Man is no longer the centre of creation. Yet subjectively he
has not yet abandoned that centrality, seeing that the universe
still exists solely for him, in so far as he is the sole being who
transforms sensation into consciousness.
29 *
But for the nervous system we might consider all our body as
an exterior world.
30
Since perfect psychic health is as impossible as absolute physical
health our best course is to seek out the defects of our intelligence,
and if incurable, to circumscribe or neutralize them by will or by
any appropriate moral system.
31
The source of what good there is in confession may come from
the fact that many mental defects, being sins, are curable by the
shame of avowal and the punishment of the penance.


REMY DE GOURMONT
369
32
Certain monomanias are presumably, in the mental mechanism,
about what hernias are in the intestines; they do not disturb the
general functioning, but they are an annoyance and may cause
serious accidents.
33
At times, and even very often, we are set upon by unthought
about memories of days, of particular places; memories to which
we attach no significance. By what association of ideas are these
reminiscences brought us? We can not make out, for what is pro-
duced is an association of sensations. A grey cold bit of weather
without wind, or some other bit equally characteristic brings us the
recollection of an analogous day which had given us a special im-
pression. What happens for times happens also for places, and
for all impressions which travel in pairs.
34
In ageing, at the memory of the innumerable days when we
have been caught by the sight of trees naked with autumn, or
spring bourgeoning, it seems that we are millenarians. Each rev-
olution of the earth is, as the ancients thought it, a poem com-
plete: each day of spring or winter which remains out in the
memory is recalled as a season, as a year.
35
Images are not decisive arguments, but, as engravings for a
complicated text, they may well serve as a prop or as a guide to
intelligence.
36 and 37
The superstitions of incurable gamblers clearly indicate the men-
tal defect from which they suffer, for, utterly incredulous, they
attribute providential virtues to hazard, and prove that phobias
and tics are very closely akin. Among their prejudices there is
however one which is, at bottom, justifiable, and there does seem
to be some truth in the idea of the run of luck (veine), of the
favourable moment: chance, which rules the world according


370
DUST FOR SPARROWS
to mysterious laws, has caprices. If we throw a thousand black
and a thousand white balls into a glass globe and whirl it around
vigorously, we see that the colours do not arrange themselves in
symmetry, but form, on the contrary, groups of each colour on
an asymmetrical background. In life as in the game of chance,
things do not arbitrarily follow each other; but neither, on the
other hand, do they show the logic of an architecture.
38
The wisdom of antiquity tries to inform us that there is no
great intelligence without its grain of folly. There would prob-
ably be more exactitude in saying that for an intelligence to give
its full measure it needs the spur-point of some taint from which
it must deliver and redeem itself.
39
A solid and well-balanced intelligence in a healthy body will
always be content with doing no more than is necessary to pre-
serve its happy vegetative condition.
40
In great characters the explosive interior force proceeds not
from a natural equilibrium, but on the contrary, from an active
energy which keeps continual watch lest it escape save at the op-
portune moment and in the required degree.
41
The best psychological method for a writer who wants veridically
to describe the deeds and actions of criminals or to linger over
any other point contrary to morality, is to feign having dreamed
the matter. In this way one may, temporarily and without fear
of law, lay hold on the conduct, and reconstruct the sensibility
of a bandit.
42
It is annoying, but true, that nearly all the superior men who
are pleasing by their own fireside, are so not because one likes
them, but because one admires them, flatters them, and accepts
their dictatorship.


E. POWYS MATHERS
375
V
0
C
I have seen a small proud face brimming with sunlight;
I have seen the daughter of the king of Qulzum passing from
grace to grace.
Yesterday she threw her bed on the floor of her double house
And laughed with a thousand graces.
She has a little pearl and coral cap
And rides in a palanquin with servants about her
And claps her hands, being too proud to call.
I have seen a small proud face brimming with sunlight.
a
before me,
"My palanquin is truly green and blue;
I fill the world with
pomp
And am not as young a girl as you pretend.
I am of Iran, of a powerful house, I am pure steel.
I hear that I am spoken of in Lahore.”
I have seen a small proud face brimming with sunlight.
I also hear that they speak of you in Lahore,
You walk with a joyous step,
Your nails are red and the palms of your hand are rosy.
A pear tree with a fresh stem is in your palace gardens,
I would not that your mother should give my pear tree
To twine with an evil spice tree or fool banana.
I have seen a small proud face brimming with sunlight.
The ray
“The coins that
my
father
gave me for my forehead
Throw rays and light the hearts of far men;
of light from my red ring is sharper than a diamond.
I
go
about and about in pride as of hemp wine
And my words are chosen.
But I give you my honey cheeks, dear, I trust them to you.”
The words of my mouth are coloured and shining things;
I have seen a small proud face brimming with sunlight.
And two great saints are my perpetual guards.
There is never a song of Nur Uddin but has in it great achievement
And is as brilliant as a young hyacinth;


376
FIVE AFGHAN LOVE SONGS
I pour a ray of honey on my disciples,
There is as it were a fire in my ballades.
I have seen a small proud face brimming with sunlight.
Nur UDDIN


BELPHEGOR
Essay on the Aesthetic of Contemporary French Society
BY JULIEN BENDA
SPECIAL CASE IN WHICH ART DEALS WITH THE
HUMAN SOUL:
DESIRE THAT ART DEAL WITH NO OTHER SUBJECT
BUT
UT their will to get pleasure from art becomes most violent
when art takes the human soul for its subject.
And first of all, it appears according to them, that art should
no longer treat any other subject. Of course, there never was a
time when good society gave first place to works which did not
have to do with this passionate material: the poem of Lucretius
attracted practically no attention among its author's contempora-
ries, and neither the Entretiens sur la Pluralité des Mondes nor the
Principes de la Physique de Newton was so well received as La
Nouvelle Héloise. Nevertheless these writings of Fontenelle and
Voltaire were keenly appreciated in their time, not only in the
way certain "vulgarizations” (Fabre's work on the insects, for
example) are relished as mere expositions of fact, but as literary
productions. As for the Epoques de la Nature, they excited a
real enthusiasm. Where, to-day, is the good company that would
lose its head over such works? Who would regard as "literary"
writings not dealing with the human soul (always excepting those
which deal with it in the guise of “life of the bees” or “intelligence
of the flower”)? This is true to such an extent that every mod-
ern aesthetic precept applies exclusively to art which deals with
the human soul ("the artist must place himself inside the subject
he treats,” he must espouse its “life principle," and so on), and
this, though unformulated, is perfectly understood, so far are our
contemporaries from imagining that art might occupy itself with
another matter.
[Note: The only material out of which we feel capable of mak-
ing something is that material ever new and palpitating: man, man,


378
BELPHEGOR
and again man. At a time like this when one risks not being
recognized at all without some badge on one's hat, shall we not
choose a slogan? It will be Life first of all, life, long and patient,
active, laborious, hard, life drunk with being human.-Les Jeunes
Gens d'Aujourd'hui: la jeunesse littéraire; letter of M. Jacques
Copeau.]
However, the Entretiens of Fontenelle would be despised to-
day, not because they treat the inanimate, but because they treat
it from the outside. Let us be very sure that l'Esprit des Lois or
the Cité Antique, dealing indeed with mankind, but from the out-
side and by the way of analysis, would scarcely be found sym-
pathetic now. Whereas communion with Sirius "in its interior
heart-throbs” would seem very commendable.
And it is not in art alone that they expect to find nothing be-
sides the human soul, it is in philosophy, in science. One is famil-
iar with their enthusiasm for that philosophy, the "true” philos-
ophy, the "only" philosophy, which consists exclusively in the
description and exaltation of a certain soul-state (“duration");
with their veneration for that "biology” whose whole affirmative
intent is to identify the evolution of life throughout the ages with
the evolution of an individual consciousness. One realizes this
to be the entire thesis of Creative Evolution. In passing let us
call attention to their express desire to name these activities
"philosophy” and “biology," and not quite simply and properly,
the first “psychology,” the second “poetry.” Always this double
will to live in pure sensation and still keep up, from a sort
of academic necessity, the intellectual appearances.
Need we say that this attitude of our contemporaries has noth-
ing to do with that of the Seventeenth Century, when it likewise
took the human being as the principal object of its attention and
declared with Bossuet that "to become a perfect philosopher, man
need study nothing but himself”? These men of another time
were thinking, like Socrates, of a perfectly objective and scientific
grasp of our nature; it had never occurred to them to refresh
themselves with a particularly “palpitating” material, "drunk
with being human.” In the same way, too, the Seventeenth Cent-
.'
ury appears not to have admitted any literary material except
man; certainly the readers of the Maximes or the Caractères,
>


JULIEN BENDA
379
to
would never, like their predecessors, have classed with the "lit-
terateurs” a Montchrestien writing on political economy, or, as
their descendants did, a Galiani writing about the wheat trade;
but, in their case, this was due to a belief in the preeminent dig.
nity of our species, not to a desire to drown themselves in it.
Moreover, this thirst of contemporary society for the human
soul, this will to know nothing else, shines out clearly in all con-
temporary activities. One may say that all the talk one hears
here, whether it be revelations as to the amours of Mme. X ...
or the intrigues of her rival, or the machinations of Z.
achieve power or the Academy, consists exclusively in drinking in
the human soul. And no doubt, to some extent this was always
so in the salons. Still there were society women once who asked
one another what the rouge was made of which they put on their
cheeks, and how the stockings they wore were woven; they have
even been known to fling themselves on the books which gave
them this information, harass the minister who suppressed them,
force him to authorize their publication. The ministers of our
democratic era on the other hand are quite undisturbed; they can
perfectly well suppress all Encyclopedias and everything enlight-
ening to the mind; so long as they do not touch the things that
thrill the heart, the governing classes, at least, will not expostulate.
Imagine the mistress of the chief of state to-day demanding that
the government authorize the publication of Larousse.
DIGRESSION: EMOTION OF SYMPATHY AND
AESTHETIC EMOTION
This desire-common, after all, to all ages—that art deal only
with the human soul, brings to light the following truth: What
the majority are seeking in works of art is the opportunity for
communion with human movements, the chance to feel the
emotion of sympathy; what they want is to love with des Grieux,
hate with lago, tremble with Desdemona, sigh with Phèdre, die
with Werther. Furthermore they enjoy the description of those
feelings only which they are capable of experiencing: do not go
showing the suburbs the drama of a righteous conscience, or
women the tortures of a seeker of ideas. For the same reason
they go in especially for the theatre among art forms, since it


380
BELPHEGOR
permits them to espouse human emotion even in its physical as-
pect, to commune with gesture, to feel what has been called or-
ganic sympathy. Is there any need to add that the emotion of
sympathy is not at all the same thing as aesthetic emotion?
What, then, is aesthetic emotion, for us? Perhaps it is time
to say. Aesthetic emotion is the emotion caused by the idea one
forms of the truly artistic properties of a work of art; for example,
the life of the work (its life is quite another thing from the life
of the characters it presents), its unity of meaning, the adjust-
ment of form to content, the happiness of proportion, the gradation
of effect, and so on. A good example, if you will, to borrow one
from society people, is presented by Mme. de Sévigné, who en-
joyed in Esther “la perfection des rapports." Obviously this
emotion is of the loftiest and rarest: it presupposes in fact: 1,
the ability to form abstract ideas (what more abstract, for instance,
than the idea of perfection de rapport?); 2, that these ideas re-
main not at all pure ideas in the mind of their creator, but
determine his emotions. The aesthetic emotion is the type of the
emotion based on intellect.
We admit, however, that the aesthetic emotion does not exist
in its pure state, and that the strongest feeling of the purely
artistic value of Tristan, for example, could not fail to be affected
by the anxiety which comes from seeing Isolda's misfortunes or
hearing the chromatics. Only primary emotions are capable of
purity.
We have just seen in the emotion of sympathy a feeling pro-
duced by the contemplation of a work of art which has nothing
in common with aesthetic emotion. Others may be cited: for
example, that caused by the spectacle of a lovable person in dis-
tress; that caused by sensing the tenderness of the author for his
hero (Chateaubriand's, for instance, for Chactas burying Atala);
the emotion caused by evoking the existence of the brain which
created the work of art, of the will behind this canvas, in command
of all these threads (the need of this emotion explains one's wanting
Homer to have existed; for the aesthetic emotion, the Homeric
poems, authorless, would suffice); the emotion resulting from a
bond which one imagines between the work of art and what it meant
in the life of its creator; I confess that I have never watched the
curtain fall on the studio act of The Meistersinger without imagin-


JULIEN BENDA
381
ing that it was falling on twenty years of the life and thought of
the master, and being moved by this; and so on. ... All that,
to repeat, has nothing in common with aesthetic emotion.
ART SHOULD PRESENT THE PARTICULAR SOUL
But let us discuss their insistence that art, in dealing with the
human soul, procure for them sensation rather than any intellect-
ual state at all.
First, then, art must present only particular souls, not general
types that might give rise to thought. Down with the classical
.
writers who wipe out the individual variations of their characters
and show us the species only! To think that Molière does not
even say whether Harpagon is a noble or a bourgeois! Whether
Arnolphe is a provincial or a Parisian! Honour, on the other
hand, to the masters from over the channel who tell us the weight
of their hero, what he eats for lunch, what bed-clothes he sleeps
under; who show us in fact “living” beings.
Let us not confuse this tendency of the moderns with that of
a Saint-Evremond, asking the author of Mithradate and Bajazet
for “more particularity in his pictures,” or of a Segrais praising
Corneille because in his works "the Roman talks like a Roman,
the Greek like a Greek, the Indian like an Indian.” In these
critics it was the mere care for truth, not at all the desire to enjoy
the concrete out of detestation for general ideas. Besides, the
whole "particularity” with which they wanted a hero to be pic-
tured amounted to this: he must “belong to his epoch and to his
country.” Which still leaves considerable play to generalization.
It must be admitted that our contemporaries are badly enough
served, in their insistence on the particular in art: the French art
of our time, notably that of the theatre, continues, in spite of its
pretensions, to draw the individual badly; characters like those
in La Marche Nuptiale or Maman Colibri, to cite an author most
frequently hailed as the creator of "living" beings, seem to us
about as particularized, treated, in fact, about as symbolically,
as those of Molière or Dumas fils even. Not every one is a
barbarian that wants to be.
Somebody will object here and point to the taste of our con-
temporaries for the "symbolic” theatre of M. Maeterlinck. Is it


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BELPHEGOR
necessary to reply that what they are looking for in this work is
the sensation of uneasiness, the dream-state produced by the spec-
tacle of what is absolutely unconditioned? It would be hard to
maintain that the taste for spectacles like The Blue Bird or
Pelléas et Mélisande is founded on a desire to form ideas about
the human soul. Here, actually, is the soul state that presides
over the taste for this theatre:
“There is an island somewhere in the mist, and on that island
is a castle, and in the castle there is a great room lighted by a small
lamp, and in the great room there are people who are waiting.
They are waiting for what? They do not know. They are wait-
ing for some one to knock at the door, they are waiting for the
lamp to go out, they are waiting for Fear, they are waiting for
Death. They talk; yes, they speak words which trouble the
silence for an instant, then they listen again, leaving their phrases
unfinished, their gestures interrupted. They listen, they wait.
Perhaps she will not come? Oh, she will come. She always
It is late, she will not come until tomorrow, perhaps.
And the people assembled in the great room round the small lamp
begin to smile and to hope. Somebody knocks.
And that is all :
it is all of a life, it is all life.” (R. de Gourmont, le Livre des
Masques: Maurice Maeterlinck.)
comes.
One sees that the thirst for general ideas counts for little enough
in the taste for this "symbolic” art.
ART SHOULD PRESENT THE HUMAN SOUL BEYOND
ALL LAW: HATRED OF DETERMINISM :
SEARCH FOR SURPRISE: THIRST FOR NOVELTY
Another aspect of their insistence on getting excitement from
the depiction of the human soul is the desire that the artist present
the soul of his hero beyond all law, that each new manifestation
of it appear unpredictable from those which preceded. “The great
observers of the soul,” announces one of our aesthetes, "whether
it be Stendhal, Tolstoy, or Meredith, have never attempted to


JULIEN BENDA
383
>
write the natural history of a temperament or to treat it as an
anatomical preparation. In painting a character they limited
.
themselves to watching him live and surprising him at every turn.
When Fabrice makes his way into a church and prays God to aid
his projects in simony, we perceive a new trait which completes
what we already know of his character but is not mechanically
related to his previous acts. No matter how familiar we may
be with the generous impulses of Pierre Besoukhof we experience
a real astonishment when we see him with such charming ingenuity
preparing to assassinate Napoleon.” Our aesthete candidly con-
fesses that this is a sheer desire for surprise, quite distinct from
any aesthetic desire, for he adds: “This element of surprise, which
the scientific mania of the last century banished from the novel, is
resuming its place to-day. We find it with joy in such works as
Romain Rolland's Jean Christophe. In future, perhaps, the novel
will cease to be a pedantic theorem and become again the faithful
mirror of life.” (Note: The philosophic Testament of William
James, by Philippe Millet, in Le Temps, August 8, 1911. The arti-
cle is of the utmost interest for our thesis: in it we catch a represen-
tative of mundane culture in the very act of embracing the anti-
intellectual doctrine, and perceive his real rebellion against the
scientific spirit, at least as applied to things of the spirit.] This
“scientific mania,” this taste for the "pedantic theory,” are simply
a concern to make art not "the faithful mirror of life" but an at-
tempt to understand life. But that is precisely what our people
will not have at any price.
It would not be fair to set against a worldling of our time the
judgement of the seventeeth century in the person of a humanist
like Boileau and to quote his famous lines:
“D'un nouveau personnage inventez-vous l'idée?
Qu'en tout avec soi-même il se montre d'accord,
Et qu'il soit jusqu'au bout tel qu'on l'a vu d'abord.”
Let us rather oppose him by a man of his own condition, who
praises Horace "for having taught that if an author undertakes to
write a tragedy the subject and the personages of which are en-
tirely unknown, he owes particular attention to the character which
he gives to each one. He must sustain this character from begin-


384
BELPHEGOR
ning to end, without contradicting himself in the smallest detail.”
(Charles de Sévigné, in his dissertation on the Ars Poetica of
Horace).
Let us take note, moreover, of their hatred for psychological,
and more generally for all, determinism. We know their adoration
for that philosophy which insists that psychological phenomena
are not determined by heredity, by environment, by any exterior
element, but solely by themselves; which holds, specifically, that
a work of art or even of speculative thought, though it be indige-
nous (and romanticism admits no others), shall not depend in any
way on the social and political conditions in which it is borne, but
"solely on the personalities which arise at a given moment” and
must be "absolutely unpredictable.” (So Bergson in reply to a
“
questionnaire on "literature before and after the war” in the Cor-
respondant of December 15, 1915. See, too, the article in Le
Temps already cited: “They [Bergson and James] have at last
delivered us from the nightmare of determinism." We cite further
this
cry from another man of the world: "Our admirable Bergson
has just smashed determinism”—P. Loti in Un Pèlerin d’Angkor.)
Every one will recognize the sensational and moving quality in
this evocation of the psychological fact, this "absolute beginning"
as well as in the belief in the total autonomy of our personality in
its relation to the whole world, past and present. All the same
let us remember that thirty years ago Taine's doctrine of total
determinism also gave romantic souls the chance of having great
sensations. "I accept my determinism” was a favourite theme
(see the early books of M. Barrès); in those days they used to
swoon over the idea of the fatality of the ego. Almost any idea is
agreeable to romanticism except a moderate one.
It is to be remarked that in repudiating Taine's determinism
they have rejected the determination of the ego by environment
but have preserved determination by the past (“the dead hand
rules”) and also by race. That is because the two latter are lyric
themes and occasions for sensation—the former is not.
Finally, they want to see the entire cosmos exempt from law.
Not the least relished article in the philosophy which composes
the breviary of our men of the world is that in accordance with
which the intimate essence of the world is of the same nature as our
own consciousness, so that each of its moments, too, is unpredict-


JULIEN BENDA
385
able from what has gone before. The idea of a world organically
disordered is a source of emotion of which, it seems certain, no
previous French society had ever dreamed.
Let us note moreover their distaste, in any field, for admitting
the existence of a law, their pleasure in noting the exception. Du
you mention the chivalrous spirit of the kings of France? They
bring up Louis XI; the orderly character of French literature in
the Seventeenth Century? they cite La Fontaine; the rationalist
tendency of French philosophy? they strike you down with Maine
de Biran. It is evident that they are irritated by the idea of a
rule, of a continuity. The tranquillity of general ideas, the calm
you enjoy therefrom, exasperates them. They feel
a
“Le caprice inquiet et le désir moqueur
De renverser soudain la paix de votre coeur
Comme un enfant renverse un verre.”
And then, the idea of the exception is productive of paroxysms of
emotion. Spinoza was intoxicated with eternity; the laity of our
time are in their element when they are intoxicated with the
inimediate.
Our contemporaries' search for the element of surprise in art
assumes another form which we will not discuss because it is so
natural to them that they are unconscious of it: it is desire that
the subject of a work of art should be new. Let us only say that,
no matter what people frequently pretend, this desire is not u
known in the most sober times. Undoubtedly in the seventeenth
century men of the world like Bussy, like Charles de Sévigné,
frankly set invention below composition. An amiable ecclesiastic
(Father Rapin) wrote in 1670: “In eloquence it requires less
genius to invent things than to arrange them”; Boileau's contempt
for invention seems to have received the official favour of his
time; Pascal, La Bruyère evidently hold originality of subject
matter of small account when they say: "the selection of thoughts
is invention,” (Pascal) and "the subject matter is not new but
the disposition is,” (Le Bruyère).
All the same, Corneille remarks in one of his dedications: "You
know the spirit of our French people; they love novelty and I am
hazarding non tam meliora quam nova on the hope of diverting


386
BELPHEGOR
them better”; in his Examen du Menteur he says himself that “he
would give his two best plays if he could have invented the sub-
ject”; La Fontaine in the preface to his Fables writes (not without
some bitterness): "What do they want nowadays? They want
novelty.” By the end of the century Fénelon is almost the only
one who persists in holding a low opinion of novelty. For Perrault,
one of the proofs of the superiority of the moderns over the an-
cients is that “there is ten times more invention in Cyrus than in
the Iliad.” Soon La Motte will plume himself because his fables
have the merit of invention and La Fontaine's have not. Finally,
according to La Harpe, Greek tragedy suffers a real aesthetic
blemish because of the Prologue which destroys surprise. The
faculty of not demanding the shock of something new from a
work of art seems to have been in all ages the property of a very
small minority of sober temperaments.
Not alone the subject must be new nowadays: the author's
style, his method of composition, his conception of the genre he
employs, his manner, all must be likewise. The infatuation with
Péguy is evidently due in great part to his writing “as no one ever
wrote before," and I know a young review which recently re-
proached Anatole France for having "half-soled the shoes of the
centuries,” meaning for not having created himself a manner of
his own. This aesthetic, too, dates from far back in France. Vol-
taire praised the authors of the seventeenth century because almost
all their works were “in a genre unknown to antiquity”; Marivaux
declared even before he had found any subject that he was re-
solved to present a new form of comedy, preferring, he said, "to
sit humbly on the last bench in the little troup of original authors,
rather than to be proudly placed in the first line of the populous
menagerie of literary monkeys.” (These "monkeys” are sometimes
called Molière or Racine.) Here is stated, in full consciousness
of itself, the romantic religion of originality in art. Let us not
forget that recently we had, with certain disciples of Moréas, the
no less vibrant religion of non-originality (the poet must deal only
in commonplaces, and so on).


JULIEN BENDA
387
DESIRE THAT THE ARTIST LIVE THE EMOTION HE TREATS
OF, WITHOUT RISING ABOVE IT THROUGH
THE UNDERSTANDING
But the most significant thing in their wish to get thrills and
nothing but thrills from the depiction of human souls, is the de-
sire that the artist should "establish himself in the heart" of the
emotion he is handling, that he should “espouse the principle of
its internal activity,” that he should “become” and “live” this
emotion; and not that he should live it in order to understand it
the better, but live it and stop at that, quite out of reach of inter-
vention by that cursed intelligence which “arrests the movement of
life.” We know their scorn-formulated—for the analytical novel
where the author remains “exterior” to the soul he paints: and on
the contrary their great esteem for those works in which the artist
seems “to identify himself with the passion of his character” be-
yond any inclination to judge. Says one critic, by way of prais-
,
ing an illustrious contemporary, "the novelist has been conquered
by his heroine; he has married her madness. Although at first he
condemns or approves of his characters, as soon as he begins to
paint Alissa, Michel, or Candaule, he has lost the power of judg.
ing.” A poet of Jeanne d'Arc or the Virgin Mary is exalted to
the skies because it seems he has become one with the emotion of
his heroine through "pure action," "the pure urge from within,"
to the exclusion of all contribution of arrangement or order in
the description of this emotion. Let us admit that the desire for
thrill was never more inventive. What, in fact, is more moving
than to watch the very exercise of human passion? And what
impudence, what novelty, in asking such a spectacle from Art.
That is something which not Alexandria, not Byzantine Rome,
nor Tyre, nor Carthage, nor any "romantic" society had ever im-
agined. There is, after all, something new under the sun. "I
intend,” says a poet whom Aristophanes would have loved to
ridicule, "I intend to marry the soul of my characters. If I paint
women, I must acquire their habits. Ah yes! if I compose Phèdre,
I must set about making love." That is an author who should have
the devotion of our aesthetes. In Athens, three thousand years
ago, he would have been the laughing stock of porters and sailors.
The progress is visible.


388
BELPHEGOR
-
This desire that the artist unite with the active principle of the
emotion he depicts has nothing to do, of course, with that of Saint-
Evremond praising Corneille for having “gone to the depths of
the souls of his characters in order to discover the principle of their
actions,” for having “descended into their hearts to see their pas-
sions forming and to discover the most hidden of their move-
ments.” For the critic of the seventeenth century it was a ques-
tion of seeing the principles of action, of discovering the forma-
tion of passions, not of marrying or living them outside of all
judgement upon them.
The desire among our people that art should be emotion itself
and not an observation of it, takes still another form: art, they
say, must present the emotion in the "indivisible flow” in which
it appears to itself, not in the divisions and disarticulations ap-
prehended by the intellect from the outside. Again an infinitely
exciting reality—the concept of which, moreover, was very diffi-
cult for men and women of the world—and one which no previous
society, however romantic, had dreamed of demanding from art.
At the most they would have demanded it from mystical activity.
Let us note that in this "indivisible flow" there are two human
emotions, the idea of the flow is a source of sensation for them and
that of indivisibility is another; our aesthetes know how to bathe
in each of them separately, as well as in their confluence.
This desire that art should be life itself and not a view of life
taken by the intellect is manifested in several symptoms which
are worth commenting upon:
First is the incredible proportion in contemporary literature of
novels written in the first person, where the hero says I, tells his
emotions and thus re-lives them under the eyes of the reader. This
genre, in which the author denies himself (except by artifice) those
reflections on the passions which would have been the chief glory
of a Lafayette or Stendhal, seems to be the novel par excellence
among our contemporaries.
There is also their religion of the theatre in so far as that form
of art presents us human emotions in the direct mode, seems to
show us life itself, and allows us, more freely than any other, to
forget the understanding through which we see it. Let us observe,
in this connection, that what is new in French society is not its
passion for the theatre. It has always had this passion and per-


JULIEN BENDA
389
haps more at other times than now; the poorest "collation" in the
eighteenth century had its comedy; the duchesse de Bourgogne
never moved without a troupe of comedians; the maréchale de
Belle-Isle built herself a mansion with an auditorium. What is
peculiar to-day is the aesthetic religion for the theatre; the desire
to see in it a superior form of art. That the art of Tabarin or of
d'Ennery, simply because it is the art of the theatre, is superior
to the tale or the novel is a thing we should have hardly made our
ancestors—or even their women-admit.
It will be hard to say to what an extent contemporary aesthetics
is finding its logical consummation in the apologia for the theatre.
Does not the theatre seem to be par excellence "life itself and not
an idea of life?” “reality and not a distortion of life made by the
intellect?” Moreover some of our aesthetes have become conscious
of it. One of them salutes the movement he imagines he perceives
by which "the novel would begin to adopt the custom of the thea-
tre.” (H. Bernstein-it is true he is a master of the theatre-
concerning a novel by M. Binet-Valmer. Wagner, another man
of the theatre, utters similar sentiments.) All the same the con-
summation more necessary still to this aesthetic "of life itself” is
the apologia for the comedian; the very commandments of this
aesthetic creed imply this apologia: “It is necessary,” says one of
”
the inspirers of contemporary doctrines of art, "to relive the ex-
istence of the people who dominate you ...
to coincide with
them; to cease to be a spectator and become an actor." (Essais
sur les données immediates de la conscience.) Moreover they exalt
a cognition of life ("intuition”) which should be "lived rather
than represented,” "played more than thought.” (Evolution crea-
”
trice). However, either because they are still imperfectly con-
scious of their own desires, or for some other reason, the supremacy
of the art of the comedian over all the other arts is not yet formally
proclaimed by our contemporaries. That is a step forward which
the aesthetic of life still may take. Evidently they would con-
sider a comedian the supreme artist in so far as he espoused the pas-
a
sion he represented without rising above it to understand it-in
exact opposition to the famous Paradoxe of Diderot. Nothing is
better proof than the Paradoxe that the eighteenth century, what-
ever some people say, was profoundly intellectualist.
Finally, another form of their veneration for the art which


390
BELPHEGOR
presents life itself is their enthusiasm for certain products of the
spirit which are in effect nothing but a pure “vital urge” which
has no way of changing from its state of "vital urge” either to
judge itself or to express itself well: chronicles, memoirs, re-
miniscences, intimate letters. (“For such of these letters-of
soldiers in 1914–I would give the most beautiful lines of the
most beautiful of poems” says Romain Rolland in Above the Bat-
tle. It is true that the author explicitly declares his contempt for
art.) There is, especially, their cult of the work of Saint Simon, a
model of pure passionate action, perfectly emancipated from the
duty of turning inward to regulate or arrange itself—which is ad-
mired as such; they are not satisfied with being moved by it, but
confer upon it a real value in art which some even accept as a
model. Read the definition which this author gives of his style:
“Repetitions of the same word too close to each other, synonyms
too frequent, obscurity which often rises from the length of the
phrases or perhaps from some repetitions.” Does it not seem that
one of our new masters, fallen on the field of battle in 1914,
would have worn himself out trying to merit the honour of signing
this programme? Likewise the esteem—the literary esteem-of
these Memoires, by reason of the pure passion of which they con-
sist, does not date from our dishevelled age; sixty years ago a
critic quite sedate—although he always cared more for humanity
than for art in works of the intellect-compared the work of Saint-
Simon with that of La Bruyére and barely conceals his higher con-
sideration for the “living” writer who “returns home in a passion
and there, pen in hand, without stopping to rest, without re-read-
ing, creates in full life on the paper. .” (Saint-Beuve). In
the Portraits de Femmes the same critic dares to mention the style
of these Memoires in the same line with that of Bossuet or of
Sévigné. In this case also we must go back to non-democratic
times to find people capable of understanding that the moving
power of a work of art has nothing to do with its value as art;
people capable of saying in the same breath that these Memoires
have "pleased them inexpressibly” and that they are “badly writ-
ten,” that they have "carried them away” and “their style is
abominable” (Mme. du Deffand). For a woman of the mod-
ern world a work which "carries her away” has by that fact alone
the highest value as art; that is even the sole true criterion.


JULIEN BENDA
391
Let us note this judgement by a woman of the eighteenth
century on a style which our contemporaries, we know, consider
one of the most beautiful in the world. Nothing, besides, char-
acterizes their aesthetic better than this supreme estimation of a
style swarming with striking phrases, effective as so many blows
of the sword, but whose syntax proves that the author was so in-
capable of understanding the relation of his ideas that he some-
times fails to complete his sentences.
Saint-Simon himself, by
the way, does not share in this aesthetic of style. “I do not pride
,
myself,” he says, "on knowing how to write well.”
Let us also take note of our contemporaries' taste for exhum-
ing rough drafts, preliminary sketches, their veneration for dis-
ordered work, work not composed, in which the author did not
with his reason “alter the flow of his emotion”; for the Sermons
of Bossuet, for example, because they are only sketches; above
all for the Pensées of Pascal “because they are unfinished.” Here
they exalt a writer (Péguy) because instead of giving us his com-
pleted thoughts he invites us to be present at his gropings; in-
stead of showing us the house he takes us out "on the scaffolding.”
There they rebuke an editor (M. Gaspard-Michel who brought out
Baudelaire's Spleen de Paris—I have been present at some of
these vituperations) for suppressing the variants he possesses when
publishing the work of a master. Their dogma in all this is that
“in disciplining emotion, you lose it.” As if the whole problem
of art is not precisely this: to discipline without losing it. As
if the author of the Confessions or the author of the Memories
of Combourg failed to hold all the emotion while imposing a
discipline upon it. As if art did not consist in being able to recog-
nize, in the tumult of passions which press upon us in any given
action, which is the central passion, in being able to discern the
bond which unites that one to the others, in organizing the others
in relation to the centre, realizing, in brief, the command of the
great master, "Force derives from order” (Taine). But apparent-
ly our aesthetes do not even suspect that the problem exists at all.
To be continued


A POEM
BY TYMOTHY MOSKOWITZ
[EDITOR's Note: After notable hesitation we have decided to
open our portal, for the nonce, to one of those humble adjuncts
of The Dial upon whose integrity we none the less depend—the
office-boy. Morally as well as physically set-up by service over-
seas, his loyalty to our house and nation was by a recent attack at
once upon ourselves and upon our country decisively outraged.
We shall not offend the sensibilities of our readers by more than
alluding to the strange concept of America as “led by the ear."
The slur upon our personal solvency, in the light of this larger in-
sult to our country, we pass over.
We confine ourselves to stat-
ing, as a simple matter of record, that The Dial will continue
to register the mellow sunlight of Modern Art and that America,
as Senator Harding might so splendidly have put it, is capable of
leading herself.
At first blush a cursory reader of the journal in which these in-
nuendoes occur might take undue umbrage, especially since the
sheet is a foreign one and since it quite brazenly flaunts upon its
cover the head of the God of Commerce. At first blush we say,
for printed squarely above the trench-helmet of that all too mercur-
ial god we read the honest name of an honest man, Mr J. C. Squire.
Quite rightly indeed did Mr Squire leave uncensored A Letter from
America, appearing as it does above the name of one of the most
distinguished of the editors of a journal well-known for its almost
admonitorily high character. If only every editor spoke as cir-
cumspectly as do these good men, the phrase "free speech” would
never have acquired that unfortunate flavour which has of late
years become attached to it. Nor, however we may feel as re-
gards the deportment of an American citizen visiting even scrip-
turally a foreign country, can we wholly blame the writer of this
Letter for his brash libel upon our financial credit. The tempta-
tion, at any time to an enterprising editor considerable, was at this
juncture peculiarly acute. We have reason to know that a business
,
representative of his journal was at the time in that same country,
a


TYMOTHY MOSKOWITZ
393
busily functioning. The temptation to throw a discreet fistful
of dust in those frank English eyes was too great. That is all.
When Tim, for such is our office-boy's Christian name, his young
face flushed by the noble emotion of loyalty, brought me these sin-
cere if halting verses, I was thrown in a quandary. And no sooner
had I made up my mind that sincerity rather than a mere technical
dexterity must for ever be the aim of Modern Art and so of our
own dear magazine than the more profound ethical question of
truth to fact, quite apart from the artist's personal conviction,
flopped up. To begin with, Mr Hackett is no longer so "young”
as he was say ten years ago, neither did I (and this one regrets)
this season espy him sporting the “sailor-jacket” of a more boyish
period, nor has he of late been, so far as I know, except when writ-
ing about fiction and verse and drama and philosophy, “at sea.”
To the contrary, he continues in the back-parlor of his veteran
road-house—that going-concern-prodigiously on tap. Neither,
and this is far more important, did he devote anything like nine-
tenths of the Letter to his own forthright journal. A far smaller
fraction covered the bill. But the fine old tradition of free-speech,
true or false, we, like Mr Squire, yet do cherish. So here goes.]
>
AT INSTANCE OF COUNSEL.
SUPPRESSED BY PUBLISHER
[Editor's Note: This has been a sad business. Our office-
boy has left in dudgeon for the open-spaces of Cuttyhunk, while
our publisher has withdrawn in a pet to his estates in the Crimea.
And only nine months ago we three set out together, our hearts
alight with so comely an ideal.]


ITALIAN LETTER
September, 1920
O
F all our writers, d'Annunzio's influence upon our literary
youth was the greatest and he had a large number of imitators.
During the first decade of our century there appeared a multitude
of novels and poems of an erotic and egotistic content, in a slov-
enly, declamatory style, a hodge-podge of wantonness and con-
ceit-ridiculous imitations of our Abruzzian bard. It was a
pestilent cloud-burst which the first breezes of the war were
enough to drive off, sending the last vapours of it into the market
of cheap patriotic speech-making or the cinematograph.
But even before the war the Virgilian poetry of Giovanni
Pascoli, a Livornian writer and professor, contemporary of
d'Annunzio, a truly religious nature nurtured on Greek and Latin
poetry, had already shown signs of restoring our literature to
natural feeling and sober expression. Pascoli was, that is, the
Wordsworth of Italian poetry. He had an exquisite taste for
realistic scenes, for the domestic sentiments of the common people,
for country life. His poetry was brief:
His poetry was brief: a stroke of faultless
grace in which often the gentleness of the religious idyll and the
buoyant gracefulness of Tuscan expressions united in short
cadences of popular rhythm or in rapid pictures of peasant life.
But Pascoli did not at first enjoy much popularity, and his first
volumes, Lyricae and Poemetti, really his best, were almost un-
noticed by the public. But little by little the better class of
people, weary of the thunder-striking muse of d'Annunzio, turned
to this modest son of Virgil and even our government came at last
to recognize his high merits by bestowing upon him the Chair of
Italian Literature at the University of Bologna. It was at that
time that Pascoli published his Poemi Conviviali, which added
much to his fame.
On the death of the poet and after the war was over, Benedetto
Croce, our great Neapolitan philosopher and critic, bitterly at-
tacked the works of Pascoli in his review La Critica and let loose
upon the Peninsula a shower of differing opinions on the merits


CARLO LINATI
395
of Pascoli's poetry. Magazines and reviews echoed the call and
La Ronda, the most aggressive of them, began a referendum
which after all did not result in favour of Pascoli. It is possible
that Pascoli, in his determination to write with scrupulous im-
pressionism of domestic sentiments, often strayed into untruth
and mannerism, but this much can not be denied, that the perfect
clearness and precision of his poetry, the skilful use of Tuscan
rhetoric and, above all, his profound poetic vision of country life
have created in our young writers a new feeling, an aspiration
towards a clearer and more elegant art of writing. The present
attempts in verse and prose which are being made in Italy on the
ruins of the d'Annunzian and futuristic schools bear the sign of
a nobler foundation laid down by Pascoli.
Among the youths who displayed the more caustic opinions on
Pascoli's work is Vincenzo Cardarelli, unquestionably the most
promising Italian writer of our time. Cardarelli is a refined
product of culture and enthusiasm. His personality is modern
and complex. He aspires to something European. And since
his greatest admirations next to Leopardi are Goethe, Baudelaire,
and Nietzsche, he attempts in his writings, mostly fragmentary,
to be versatile and universal at once. He is something of the
essayist and the poet, his prose is sapient and rhythmic, and his
criticisms are contemptuous. This lyric form of criticism is not
infrequent in our literature and Renato Serra has written some
delightful pages in his Saggi Critici. Those written by Cardar-
elli in his Prologhi and Viaggi nel Tempo are of his best. Side
by side with his lyric writings there are in these volumes some
subtle metaphysical discourses upon Socrates, Don Giovanni,
Women, Decadence, and Genius, of such prophetic and unearthly
beauty that they resemble the murmurings of a Mephistopheles.
Unlike Leopardi, Cardarelli is not a hopeless dissenter, but a
cordial, though ironical, believer in beauty and life, seeking to
find its highest expression among the young. He is associated
with the poet Aurelio Saffi in the management of the review La
Ronda, published in Rome, to every issue of which he contributes
fragments of fantastic fables of Genesis, pathetic pictures of
events of the Old Testament intermixed with a Hamlet-like
soliloquy by the Lord upon his handiwork and his intentions.
This writer, more than any other, illustrates our assertion that


396
ITALIAN LETTER
our literature is retracing its steps towards the undefiled fountain
of poetry given us by the divine Dante, Petrarch, and Leopardi.
The same tendency, though somewhat less pronounced, per-
vades the works of the Florentine writer and painter, Ardengo
Soffici. He has now to his credit five volumes of art criticism
and eight volumes of impressions and research. He is a spontan-
eous writer with a free adventurous spirit. He lived for seven
years in Paris, frequenting the ateliers of the neoimpressionists
and the country places of Guillaume Apollinaire and Remy de
Gourmont. During the war (he was twice wounded) he wrote
two books, Kobilek and La Ritirata del Friuli, which for vigour
and clearness of tone are the best Italian books on the war.
Soffici was the first in our country to establish fragmentarism,
that is, writing in short strokes, giving brief impressions like the
items of a diary. In this manner of writing he succeeded marvel-
ously well because his language is nimble and abrupt and he is
gifted with felicity of expressions, the experience of a rover, and
the delicate eye of the painter. In fact, the greatest merit of
Soffici is in his language. It is full of elegance and virility and
whether he demolishes the fame of some academic painter, exalts
the art of some obscure neoimpressionist, some Tuscan dabbler or
cubist, or gathers into a bright cluster the impressions, ideas, little
scenes of Tuscan life, his pages are always filled with light and
breathe the healthy freshness of the woods of the Florentine
country.
CARLO LINATI






Courtesy of the De Zayas Galleries
BY PAUL GAUGUIN
SELF-PORTRAIT.


MODERN FORMS
This department of The Dial is devoted to exposition
and consideration of the less traditional types of art.
GAUGUIN'S RE-BIRTH
BY HENRY MCBRIDE
IT
T was inevitable that the discovery made by so many Americans
last winter that an artist by the name of Gauguin once existed
should have been followed by the printing of a mass of memorabilia
for Sunday supplement consumption and also by a reissue of Noa-
Noa, the fantastic and partly autobiographical prose poem that M.
Charles Morice had punctuated, re-spelled and seen through the
press in the days of the author's first renown. To those who had
vainly talked Gauguin into deaf ears at the time when the colour-
ful canvases hanging in Vollard's shop with 1200-franc price-labels
on the best of them were the whole of the story, the easy credit that
Gauguin obtained last year with a public that had come to believe
him great as an artist as he was ruffian, thanks to Mr Maugham's
novel making the villainy if not the art comprehensible, was not the
least of the season's surprises; particularly as this public heretofore
has loved only virtuous artists.
Possibly it was an entirely new section of the community that Mr
Maugham awakened to an interest in art.
Be that as it may, all of the advance-guard, those who knew ten
years ago that Gauguin was great, smiled sub-acidly at the situation.
Though they saw that the événement was all to the good, they saw
too that it was not of their making; it was not for them to shout
“hiurrah.” Certain sticklers for facts exclaimed against the too
fervent admiration that the young people in Greenwich Village
lavished upon Noa-Noa, holding that however well the artist
painted he was not a writer, and that if the book had merit it must
be due to the touching up it had received at the hands of M. Morice,
a professional scribbler. There was no especial debate upon the


398
GAUGUIN'S RE-BIRTH
.
subject, but after the first and somewhat vulgar enthusiasm of the
novel-readers had abated, this remained one of the points that the
advance-guard felt that it might, without loss of self-respect, look
into; this and the insufficiently explained re-birth of the artist at
the age of twenty-eight, or thereabout, from counting-house clerk
to painter.
To acquire mastery of an art after one has become an adult is
rare. It is so rare that some positivists hold that it does not occur.
There is, of course, the case of Victor Hugo who began making
drawings in pen-and-ink when much advanced in years and who ar-
rived finally at considerable ease of expression in that medium,
though without being acclaimed a master of it. The late Will
Price, architect—a somewhat emotional thinker—was converted in-
to a belief in the re-incarnation of souls merely by a study of the
precocity of Mozart, so he told me. “You know very well, if you
know anything about art,” he added in his combative way, "that
mastery of
any technique comes only after an immense amount of
labour. Now somebody must have laboured to have acquired that
technique, but Mozart didn't. It is clear enough to me that the soul
of some great musician lived again in that boy.” It was not at all
clear to me, however, and I recall experiencing distinct disappoint-
ment at this explanation of Mr Price's theosophy—for at that time
I rather wished to be a theosophist myself, if it were possible,
theosophists appeared to have such good times with their beliefs-
but all I said was: “How interesting!”; for to Mr Price it never
paid to be combative in return. A little later in reading Mozart's
life I saw that it was not necessary to call upon the supernatural in
diagnosing his "case.” To have been born of a musical father, to
have been talked to in the cradle with violins, to have participated
age
of three in an elder sister's music lessons, to have begun
one's own lessons at four-and it is no longer a surprise to learn
that a finished education in an art had been obtained by an infant
---nor that the little Wolfgang, after a while, was bored by the
games of his neighbour's children “unless they were accompanied
by music.”
In the Gauguin instance something vastly more mysterious oc-
curred. Victor Segalen, in his hommage accompanying the Gauguin
Letters to De Monfreid cooly says: “Que le lecteur daigne enfin
s'étonner: dans cette chronique d'un grand peintre âgé dès lors de
at the
a


HENRY MCBRIDE
399
-
plus de vingt-huit ans, il n'a pas été question de peinture.” M.
Segalen apparently believes in miracles. In the twinkling of an
eye the counting-house clerk, aged twenty-eight, became a master-
painter. M. Morice and the other chroniclers of this life also be-
lieve in miracles, in this miracle-only-I am not in a hurry.
There are still some things to be looked into.
For instance, in M. Morice’s book it is related that early in
Gauguin's history, when he was yet a child in Peru, or perhaps
shortly after the return from Peru, a maiden aunt or some other
prejudiced observer, remarked, after an inspection of a bit of the
boy's wood-carving: “Tiens, some day he will be a great sculptor.
There is a hint, here, that the germ of the art fever was already work-
ing in the youngster's veins, for children so praised are apt to work
at least for more flattery, even if the impulse be not ingrained. The
"beau Dimanche” that M. Segalen mentions as the beginning of the
career may not have been the only “beau Dimanche." It is a mat-
ter for regret that Gauguin's biographers have slurred over the in-
duction into professionalism, for if modern conditions may still
work miracles we should love to revel in the details. Besides, the
"how" a great artist came to be great is the most interesting part.
I have heard the letters called “harrassing," but to me they are
not, in spite of the heroic and unequal struggle with disease, poverty,
and death. The drama is too perfect to be depressing. The note
of doom is sounded at the beginning and after that the letters march
with a Grecian implacability to the inevitable end. Gauguin ap-
pears to have been a complete artist. (He could never have been
a complete counting-house clerk.) In a burst of admiration he
once said that Degas was a rare example of what an artist ought
to be.” Degas, who knew that soul freedom was as necessary as air
to geniuses, would, I am sure, have said the same of him. But
many of Gauguin's envious rivals called him “Monsieur sans-gene.”
His special type of honesty is a thing the narrow-minded never
understand. It is death-bed honesty and far outclasses in mere
genuineness the out-pourings of Jean-Jacques for whom honesty be-
came a métier and therefore, in spite of himself, artificial. But
it is not likely that skeptics will arise to dispute the paternities of
Gauguin. He seemed to scatter infants about the earth with the
careless ease of an Adam and had difficulties with Eves only when
they happened to be civilized.


400
GAUGUIN'S RE-BIRTH
cassé.
.
“Ah! oui, le mariage, vous en savez quelque chose mon pauvre
Daniel, comme moi: on ne s'en tire qu'avec quelque chose de
Voyons ce qu'est la loi: Vous avez un enfant adul- .
térin qui vous ressemble et qui vous donne entière satisfaction
_IL
ne peut hériter.-Par contre vous avez un enfant légitime qui res-
semble comme deux gouites d'eau à votre concierge et qui est un
atroce gredin.-11 hérite legitimement, apres avoir été éduqué de
droit, de force, Morale!!”
Bitter, bitter as that is, the sensible can only laugh at it. It is
like the “bad word” that even Emerson permits to the philosopher
who discovers that he has a nail in his shoe. Gauguin had some-
thing more serious to think about than the succession.” Besides,
the experienced know that there are more systems of morality than
one, and the chief business of man is to get located in the one that
suits.
Victor Segalen says this honesty of Gauguin's extended even to
his handwriting, which drooped or prospered according to the hour,
with distress or hope. “It became vigorous in the testamentary
moments or when explaining questions of art. It was literally poor
and with a borrowing air when it concerned money affairs or dis-
counted bills. When Gauguin touched his little inheritance,' one
saw plainly by the writing that he had money in his pocket.” Con-
tacts with money, however, in Gauguin's case, appeared to be singu-
larly momentary, and the letters are one long appeal for cash, tubes
of colour, and what not. There was only Georges-Daniel De Mon-
freid to whom to appeal, and the demands upon him are incessant
enough to make the careless feel that there must have been some-
thing in the "sans-gêne" epithet of Gauguin's enemies. But here
again the generous may look between the lines at a solid friendship
that warranted such dependence. Gauguin relied upon De Monfried
with a perfect and beautiful simplicity that can be matched in mod-
ern annals, perhaps, only in the correspondence of Wagner with
Liszt. De Monfreid is so excellent a friend that the student of
Gauguin emerges with the idea that the story contains two heroes.
It seems, almost, that without a De Monfreid there would not have
been a Gauguin.



8
A FIGURE.
BY CARL SPRINCHORN






CS.
A FIGURE.
BY CARL SPRINCHORN


1



А
FIGURE.
BY CARL SPRINCHORN





THEY RIDE THROUGH THE
OLIVE GARDEN
BY DUDLEY POORE
On the rocky hillside
under the olives
I heard their voices.
Through the level sunlight
a doe fled past me
panting with terror,
and after her, leaping
through the shining gorse flowers,
a dappled jaguar
neared her and caught her,
clung with burnished talons of bronze
to her shuddering back,
sank thirsty teeth
deep in the warm red flesh of her neck.
Then she threw back her head
sharply, baring her teeth,
pawing with tiny ebony hoofs,
and cried and stumbled.
Then I heard their voices
and suddenly
I was among horsemen,
among a flashing
of silver and scarlet
brocaded raiment,
among spearsmen marching
with bannered spear shafts. .
From a hidden turn
of the rocky pathway
they were upon me;


402 THEY RIDE THROUGH THE OLIVE GARDEN
they poured upon me
in shining raiment,
huntsmen and retainers
with a shouting and clatter of tongues,
with a snarling of trumpets,
blaring of horns.
In the narrow way
they bore upon me
with a clangour of bridle bells,
with a brazen shouting
of huntsmen backward-straining
at the taut leashes
of slim, tugging greyhounds,
with a waving of polished
crimson spear shafts.
Sharp hoofs rang close upon me, ,
foaming bits spattered froth over me.
Choked by the hot bitter dust,
jostled by the spearsmen
against the hot wet necks and flanks of the horses,
blinded by the smarting,
sunlit and billowing dust clouds,
I was falling
beneath sharp prancing hoofs.
Then a hand grasped me,
drew me back by the garment and flung me
free of the press,
free of the sharp prancing hoofs,
and the dust and the tumult.
Then I leaned and watched them.
Dazzlingly sun-splotched
they were passing before me,
hawk on wrist,
in proud raiment,
with smiling inscrutable faces,
with the beautiful calm eyes of princes. .
From under feathered crowns
they gazed down at me curiously


DUDLEY POORE
403
and passed with bridle bells ringing,
amid laughter and tumult,
holding ever their downward tumultuous course,
bearing with them the slain, doe.
to the baying of hounds,
whining of spotted hunting cats,
snarling of jaguars in dappled golden coats,
screaming of falcons.
Then came in their train,
daintily stepping,
laden horses in twos
and tawny swaying camels bearing high bales.
The wind of their passing
was heavy and sweet
with cassia and cinnamon.
Pungent amber-coloured dust was sifting
out of spicy bales
tossing on the tawny backs of the camels,
bales covered with coloured cloths
of
orange
and apricot,
with chattering monkeys perched upon them,
gibbering and grimacing,
with black, leathery palms
pulling at the rents in the bales,
with wizened fingers
setting sharp white teeth in the firm, juicy flesh
tearing the dusty, sweet figs out of their packing,
of the fragrant, bright-rinded fruits.
And after these, trooping on foot,
with a chatter of tongues,
came young men and old
in peaked hats, in round hats, in turbans,
in hoods and in bonnets,
in robes of russet and vair and primrose
trimmed with the skins of ferrets,
walking in pointed shoes
with a mincing gait,


404 THEY RIDE THROUGH THE OLIVE GARDEN
nodding their peaked hats
in disdain.
Then I called them, saying:
O Worships, who is it you follow,
treading so daintily
on such fastidious toes,
to the tune of baying hounds and of trumpets ?
But they only mocked and pointed
and would not answer,
only laughed and nudged each other,
saying spitefully:
He wished to be trampled on by the horses.
So they passed and the rocky way hid them.
The tumult of their passing grew fainter,
blowing along the wind
up the olive-silvery slopes,
till at last, far below me,
round a spur of the hillside,
they broke again into the late sunlight,
winding ever downwards
in a twisted, golden line,
like a shining lizard
curving his jewelled body
against the dun-coloured slope.
a
Then my heart grew small and tight,
twisted and troubled by their beauty,
constricted with tight cords of desire
to follow them in their journey
whithersoever it might lead,
over what seas and plains,
over what distant mountains,
even to the gate of a fabulous city.
Wherefore I hurried after
in the gathering twilight
down the way they had taken,


DUDLEY POORE
405
but they were nowhere.
I stood alone on the dark hillslope.
Then the olive trees shivered
and the moon rose.


THE ISLAND OF PARIS: A LETTER
September, 1920
PARI
a
ARIS, the paradise of artists irrespective of their merit or de-
merit, lying like the background of Rodenbach's portrait, in-
vites one to anything but a critical attitude. Conversation still exists
there, and at least one "salon où l'on cause” continues so naturally
and with so little furry and waving of semaphores that one is
skeptical about its being the last. There might be one in the next
garden; for gardens—not back-gardens, but gardens—still exist
within two stones-throw of the river, as do fifteenth century stairs
and remnants of sixteenth century classic ornament, and sphinxes,
in the styles of both before and after the Egyptian campaign.
There are indeed two under my window that might almost have
grinned back at Voltaire.
In the faces of whom one comes seeking the triple extract of
literature for export purposes; seeking a poetic serum to save
English letters from postmature and American telegraphics from
premature suicide and decomposition.
Alfred Vallette is very tired and thinks, probably rightly, that
the now lifeless Mercure will continue through its own inertia,
and that no one else will be able to start a rival publication in
France.
André Gide presents an interesting facial mask even if one be
more than inclined to agree with the pungent contributor to Can-
nibale that “La Nouvelle Revue Française me fait penser à une
maison de santé dont les pensionnaires s'ils n'y meurent pas, ne
peuvent sortir qu'idiots—."
Paul Valery bears unquestioned the symbolic and ghostly plaid
shawl of Mallarmé:
“Un fruit de chair se baigne en quelque jeune vasque
( Azur dans les jardins tremblants), mais, hors de l'eau,
Isolant la torsade où se figure un casque
La tête d'or scintille au calme du tombeau."


EZRA POUND
407
ور
Valery's style continues in its own, that is to say in somewhat
Parnassien, somewhat symboliste tradition. The author of that
excellent prose Soirée chez M. Teste [to appear shortly in The
DIAL) has come out of his original frame even less than Mr Yeats
has. He represents the poetry of his generation (born 1872) in
its purity, absolutely unaffected by journalism, absolutely unaffect-
ed by popularist rhetoric, absolutely and blessedly without "bondis-
sants tocsins.”
And at the antipodes André Spire (born 1868), represents the
most uncomprising vers libre, vaunting itself better than regular
verse on the sole ground that "if it is bad it is just nothing and
that if regular verse is bad it has the impertinence to deceive people
by pretending to be something or other."
And the severest critic can be no more severe than Spire
himself, saying “I come off in about one poem in twenty. (I
have not counted the successes in Spire's new volume Le Secret,
but it contains abundant proof that André Spire is a poet, however
much time he may spend in being a Zionist, or in the bonds of
necessity.)
The promise of Paul Morand's Lampes à Arc is simply fulfilled
in his Fueilles de Temperature (Fever Chart). The style is rough-
ly that of the modern stuff in my own Lustra and so far as I know
he is the only man who uses that modus better than I do; possibly
because he derives from the broader tradition and has not relied
upon Lustra as sole source and stimulation; I take it, in fact,
that he has not relied on Lustra at all but has evolved in a direc-
tion in which any one familiar with French poetry up to 1910-14
might normally and plausibly have seen fit to let it evolve.
Which brings us to the young and very ferocious. The young
and very ferocious are going to "understand” Guillaume Apollon-
aire as their elders "understood” Mallarmé. They have raked up
Mallarmé's Jeu de Dés, which was published in an Anglo-Inter-
national periodical called Cosmopolis before the Futurists had cut
their eye-teeth.
The young began in Zurich about two years ago, they have pub-
lished papers which are very, very erratic in appearance, and which
contain various grains of good sense.
They have satirized the holy church of our century (journalism),
they have satirized the sanctimonious attitude toward “the arts”


408
THE ISLAND OF PARIS: A LETTER
(toward the arts irrespective of whether the given work of art
contains a communication of intelligence). They have given up
the pretense of impartiality. They have expressed a desire to
live and to die, preferring death to a sort of moribund permanence.
They are so young and so healthy that they still consider suicide
as a possible remedy for certain troubles. (Note that the middle
aged invalid and hypocondriac seldom commits this error of
enthusiasm.)
They talk about “metallurgie” and international financiers
whose names are never mentioned in the orderly English press.
They have as yet no capital sunk in works and they indulge in
the pious hope that their remains will not be used to bore others.
(One should at this point quote the apposite lines from Horace,
but the only passage I can find is
"cur tantum diffuderit imis
Oblivionem sensibus,"
which is not the citation I was looking for.)
Louis Aragon, Phillippe Soupault, André Breton, Drieu La
Rochelle contribute to Littérature and are published Au Sans
Pareil. They are, I think officially, on good terms with Tristan
.
Tzara, Picasso, Piccabia.
One wonders, a little vaguely, how to introduce them to a society
where one is considered decadent for reproducing pictures by
Cézanne.
Aragon presents the equivalent of the hokku or of a Chinese
"short-stop” in Casino des Lumières Crues
“Un soir des plages à la mode on joue un air
Qui fait prendre aux petits chevaux un train d'enfer
Et la fille se pâme et murmure Weber
Moi je prononce Wèbre et regarde la mer.”
He presents Trigonometry and acrobats,
“Oh
qui me donnera seulement à macher
les chewing-gums inutiles


EZRA POUND
409
qui parfument très doucement
l'haleine des filles des villes.”
Carrying on the satiric heritage of Laforgue, and of symboliste
sonorities this group is already taking its place in the sun, by right
of intelligence, more than by right of work yet accomp!ished.
Despite which the Nouvelle Revue Française is the edifice which
chiefly greets the enquiring visitor, and its tone, to change the
metaphor, suggests rather London “Bloomsbury” in mélange with
rather stale strawberries and rather left-over cream.
Proust is undoubtedly a fine writer, his vignettes of people are
indubitably entertaining, he has undertaken the by no means tri-
fling task of reenriching impoverished French literature-after a
diet of Dickens, Dostoevsky "and the Russians,” and Balzac, and
he has iced his compost “deliciously” with symboliste "nacre";
and the result is the nearest the French can get to Henry James,
whose complete works would be in process of translation and
publication were it not for the paper shortage and the high cost
of production.
If this view of Proust is superficial, I can but record it as my
state of opinion for the moment. Proust, when objective, is a
master of style and expression. I have yet to be convinced that
he has the centre and weight of James Joyce, as more habile, more
easy, more accomplished.
Morand writes in his early ode to Proust:
"Ombre,
née de la fumée de vos fumigations,
le visage et la voix
mangés
par l'usage de la nuit,
Céleste,
avec sa rigeur, douce, me trempe dans le jus noir
de votre chambre
qui sent le bouchon tiède et la cheminée morte.
“Derrière l'écran des cahiers,
sous la lampe blonde et poisseuse comme une confiture,
votre visage gît sur un traversin de craie.


410
THE ISLAND OF PARIS: A LETTER
Vous me tendez des mains gantées de filoselle;
silencieusement votre barbe repousse
au fond de vos joues,
Je dis :
-Vous avez l'air d'aller fort bien.
Vous répondez:
-Cher ami, j'ai failli mourir trois fois dans la journée.
“Vos fenêtres à tout jamais fermées
vous refusent au boulevard Haussmann
rempli à pleins bords,
comme une auge brillante,
du fracas de tôle des tramways.
Peut-être n'avez vous jamais vu le soleil?
Mais vous l'avez reconstitué, comme Lemoine, si véridique,
que vos arbres fruitiers dans la nuit
ont donné leurs fleurs.
Votre nuit n'est pas notre nuit:
C'est plein des lueurs blanches
des catléyas et des robes d'Odette."
All of which smacks a little of Huysmans and A Rebours and is
excellent literary criticism as well as capital verse.
Against the Nouvelle Revue, Julien Benda plays a lone and
quite skilful hand; it may be that Schopenhauer had pre-con-
demned most of the Rue Madame writers, where he says that
when men won't put down their thought briefly and clearly the
reader may rouse his suspicion. Certain questions, like that of
vice and of the Roman Catholic church are wholly irrelevant to
literature. The Nouvelle Revue has been stamped “succursale
to the Vatican” and even Gide's Au Caves has not wholly dis-
sipated this accusation. If Proust writes of Sodome and Gomorrah
we may be certain, or fairly certain, that he will write as "a
physician, as a savant, as an historian.”
For the rest one is very glad of Benda's analysis of the symp-
toms of "corryphées”; if Benda is not the rich loam in which a
new literature may germinate he is at any rate a fine disinfectant.
No foreigner has the patience, no foreigner wants to or will take
the time to analyse a decadence which he, himself, can easily avoid;


EZRA POUND
411
a
.
and if one has had any sort of Faith in France one can but be
refreshed and delighted when in the midst of a rather depressing
jungle one finds this clearing of common sense, this place open to
wind and light.
Gourmont in Les Livres des Masques had been faced with a differ-
ent problem: that of establishing a whole new generation of writers;
he did the work admirably with a method suited thereto; and
since abused. To it's abuse Benda is an excellent corrective. He
.
is not on the other hand an upholder of the new pseudo-classic
“movement,” though classicists in search of support have leaned
upon some of his writing.
Parenthesis: (To get the fine flavour of Benda's acumen one
should perhaps know a little more than the foreigner is likely to
know; and to convey the trend of this, or to convey a little the
aroma of just that Nouvelle Revue Bloomsbury, I can perhaps do
no better than to quote, even without changing the order from the
French sentence to English, the words of a travelling Belgian, much
impressed. He said "He”. [I won't say that "he" wasn't
Suares, and I have, in sincerity, forgotten whether it was or was not
another of the great lights of the Rue Madame].
He said, “Oh he is wonderful, that man.'
And I said, “Poet ?''
"Oh... No."
And I said, “Prose ?''
And he said, “Oh no, he can not write une seule line of poetry.
He can not write a single line of prose.
And I: “What the devil does he do? Critic?
"Oh no, he can not write a seule ligne de critique.”
And I: “But ... eh!!
?
And he: “No, no, no-o-o, he can not write a single line, he can
make the critique, mais vous lui donnez une idée et il le developpe
...il ...il DEVELOPPE!
And whenever I tell that story in Paris, I hear:
“Voui, ah ... c'est l'image tout crachée de.... And then
the name differs, for the portrait fits several heads.
It is the symptom of the pre-dada epidemic. I learn they are
taught to do it in the schools.)
EZRA POUND
.
.
.


BOOK REVIEWS
CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL THEORY
Social Theory. By G. D. H. Cole. 12mo. 220 pages.
Frederick A. Stokes and Company. New York.
.
ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY. By C. H. Douglas. 12mo. 144
pages. Harcourt, Brace and Howe. New York.
LAW IN THE MODERN STATE. By Leon Duguit. Trans-
lated by Frida and Harold Laski. 12mo. 248 pages. .
B. W. Huebsch. New York.
NATIONAL GuildS AND THE STATE. By S. G. Hobson.
12m0. 406 pages. The Macmillan Company. New York.
PARLIAMENT AND REVOLUTION. By J. Ramsay Mac-
donald. 12mo. 180 pages. Thomas Seltzer. New York.
I Die res varied in the generic question:
T is surprising how many of the practical questions of life could
be restated in the generic question: What is the individual's
proper relation to society?
Should the Lever Act be used as the basis for an injunction
against the coal-miners? Should college presidents encourage stu-
dents to take jobs as strike breakers? Should the current skepticism
about the effectiveness of political action lead one to remain away
from the polls? Should union compositors on reactionary news-
papers refuse to set up copy they know to be false?
These are samples of the particular interrogations which arise as
we discuss to-day the general problem of the individual's relation to
those about him. Any week's news will suggest as many more, quite
as interesting and important.
The way the problem is put is in itself significant. We are not so
much interested to-day in the sanctity of institutions or of estab-
lished concepts or of current forms of procedure, as we are in getting
to the heart of the whole problem and in asking: what is the pur-
pose and aim of all social activity? And the answer, as it is re-


ORDWAY TEAD
413
flected in representative fashion in the five books listed above, is re-
markably unanimous. The individual is recognized as being at the
centre of things. It is for individual people and their satisfaction
that the social turmoil is ultimately endured-if indeed it is endured
for any reason at all! To be sure, the values in personal life are
not of equal worth. There are the instrumental and the intrinsic
values; the non-productive and the productive; the permanent and
the transitory. And the life and happiness of this generation can
not be sensibly considered and adjudged without relation to future
generations. The individual life clearly gets its meaning from its
social implications in the future no less than in the present. Per-
.
sonality may be safely regarded as sacrosanct only when the person-
al life is conceived in terms sufficiently broad, positive, creative and
re-creative to assure that people's social qualities and impulses are
cultivated. For we know that personality, in so far as modern
psychology is helping us to understand it, is a resultant of native
and acquired, possessive and creative powers, all of which require
play if there is to be wholeness to life.
By asking of social activities whether they make or mar personal-
ity we are not, therefore, setting up a narrow or mean criterion.
We have passed the point in social theorizing where happiness is
confused with "individualism"-where that means every man for
himself. We have rather reached a point where the development
of the individual life in power of self-control, aesthetic appreciation,
creation, and affection is recognized as basically desirable. Quality
in living, abundance of life, freedom and fulness of intellectual and
spiritual growth—these are the infinitely valuable purposes of
social activity. And they are purposes which can be realized only
as he individual is in an intelligent and cordial relation with his
fellows. No one has said this better than Professor Dewey.
“Democracy means that personality is the first and final reality.
It holds that the spirit of personality indwells in every individual,
and that the choice to develop it must proceed from that individual.
From this central position of personality result the other notes of
democracy, liberty, equality, fraternity-symbols of the highest
ethical idea which humanity has yet reached--the idea that person-
ality is the one thing of permanent and abiding worth, and that in
every human individual there lies personality.”


414
CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL THEORY
Yet after all there is not much quarrel to-day with this type of
personalism. There is a growing sympathy for a "conscious experi-
mentalism” in which personal happiness is the result sought. The
difficulty is rather with methods. The writers here being consid-
ered are discussing methods in three related but separable fields: in
political affairs, in industry, and in finance.
The central problem from the political angle concerns the indi-
vidual's relation to the state and the state's power. And the sec-
ondary question relates to the machinery under which safe and
sound relationship among members of the state may be maintained.
The problem of state sovereignty is to the fore because of the practi-
cal importance which the state has assumed in the last fifty years.
And in the recent war years the consequences of the state's display
of power have been especially conspicuous. Conscription, com-
pulsory arbitration, governmental operation and control- these
have all precipitated the question: wherein does the integrity of
the individual lie if the state can exercise complete power over him?
Is a sovereign state a safe state if we hold this purpose of personal
fulfilment prominently in view? Indeed, does not the very size of
the modern state make it impossible to avoid centralization, bureau-
cracy, uniformity, stagnation? And does it not create problems
which by their very magnitude stagger the intelligence and render
the individual impotent to live his life because of their overpower-
ing weight and insistence?
There are big questions to which an answer is not quickly
reached. The tendency exemplified by Cole and Duguit is toward
a denial of state sovereignty, and a substitution of plural or federal
sovereignties. But this idea is manifestly repugnant to Ramsay
Macdonald and to S. G. Hobson. It is well, therefore, to have the
main difference in point of view outlined.
The writers who deny the validity of absolute sovereignty base
their position on a change in relationship which they claim has al-
ready largely taken place in fact. The state is in fact so impaired
in its exercise of absolute and ultimate power by church, by triklo
unions, by organized civil servants, by professional associations,
that it is idle any longer to impute absolutism to it. There is a
whole world of economic affairs which gives every evidence of being
beyond the effective power of the state. Moreover, such a collapse
of unified authority and the consequent building up of special au-


ORDWAY TEAD
415
thority within the several groups which continue to exist because
they perform an indispensable function, is a process which augurs
well for individual autonomy. Each group has necessarily that
fraction of the ultimate power which it requires in order to perform
its acknowledged function. Sovereignty, in this view, is power to
command within the field that a service is being rendered; the
amount of authority exercised is limited to that needed to render the
service effectively. Thus the individual instead of being at all
points subject to the state, is subject at various points to the several
groups of which he is a member. Because the sovereignty has been
distributed—federalized—the autonomy of the individual stands a
far greater chance of being assured.
To all of which the reply is that such exhibitions of power as are
to be seen in functional groups to-day are derivative. They are
granted either explicitly or implicitly by the people as a whole or-
ganized and speaking through the state. Just because they happen
to have a degree of necessary authority within their own jurisdiction
does not prove that the community's ultimate power over its mem-
bers has been diminished.
Moreover in the event of deadlock in the discussion of issues be-
tween groups, there must be some appeal body, some arbitrating
agency, and such an agency should be representative of the interests
of the people as a whole-a phrase which is, by the way, particular-
ly hateful to the pluralists.
Unless, also, there is a common purpose animating the different
groups of which society is to-day composed, their clash of interests
must end in compromises in which every consideration but the pub-
lic good is given weight. It is hard to conceive that a mere balanc-
ing of the claims of consumers versus producers, for example, would
result in stability and justice unless other than selfish motives had
play. And there is, of course, as Professor Morris Cohen said in a
recent address, always the chance that a strategically situated min-
ority can take things into its own hands and become the de facto
sovereign group.
Out of the controversy one conclusion rises clearly. All are
agreed upon the desirability of restricting within reasonable limits
the powers which the state can ordinarily exercise. The manner
of doing this is subject for discussion. And we find Ramsay Mac-
donald taking a resolute, and I believe unanswerable, stand in be-


416
CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL THEORY
half of the efficacy of political institutions as the fundamentally
necessary expression of public opinion and judgement. His discus-
sion is a kind of modern addendum to Mill's great essay on Rep-
resentative Government. The following paragraph well illustrates
the quality and content of his thinking:
“Therefore, at the very outset, in expressing disappointment with
the results of Parliamentary government, we must begin by admit-
ting that the first point to be made against it belongs not to itself,
hut to the masses. They have not been intelligent enough to use it.
Now, nothing can take the place of intelligence. We can have a
revolution by force, we can have a temporary dictatorship of the in-
telligent democracy, but continued progress must before long come
back to its source in the minds of the masses. We cannot substitute
new forms of government for present ones, but unless the people be-
come 'the governing classes’ in fact as well as in name, the rotten
foundation will show itself by cracks in the superstructure. Further-
more, we can by an interesting academic analysis show how compli-
cated is modern Society, how difficult it is to create one sovereign
authority in the State effectively claiming both a political and an
economic allegiance, but none of that, nor all of it put together,
helps us to get away from the difficulty which the absence of wisdom
in the use of power creates. Where there is no intelligence there
will be no unity. Where there is no comprehension of unity and no
conception of how political action can secure it, a mere change of
systems of government is like a change in style of architecture with-
out discarding the rotten bricks which made the previous building
uninhabitable. Socialists, revolutionary or evolutionary, can never
get away from this. It dogs them like shadows; it dooms all their
efforts and schemes to futility until they change it. If the people
do not understand Parliament, better government is not secured by
splitting up its functions.”
Duguit's idea as to the way to save the individual from oppres-
sion at the hands of the state is arrived at by a wholly different ap-
proach. His emphasis is upon duties rather than rights. The duty
of the state is broadened by the need for "industrial service.”
“Our most basic needs, our postal system, railway transportation,


ORDWAY TEAD
417
our system of lighting, are satisfied by organizations of such eco-
nomic complexity that a moment's difficulty in their operation
threatens the foundations of social existence.”
A sound theory of state action in relation to individual welfare
must therefore now turn from consideration of rights to performance
of services. And in the performance of services power necessarily
resides in the group which is serving to a sufficient degree to enable
it to carry out effectively its responsibilities.
"So it is that the idea of public service replaces the idea of sov-
ereignty. The state is no longer a sovereign power issuing its com-
mands. It is a group of individuals who must use the force they
possess to supply the public need."
And by Mr Cole the application of his favourite ideas of "organ-
ization by function” and self-government, is held to give personality
maximum scope in social life. For organization by function means
that there naturally grow up distinct groups or associations to per-
form necessary services. There are associations for political pur-
poses, for vocational, religious, sociable, intellectual, and other pur-
poses. And to each association the individual concedes a degree of
power over his action in its particular realm. But the sole basis for
the exercise of such power is the group's competency to function and
fulfil its obligation in a manner which the individual is bound to
respect.
This brings us to the second aspect of the political problem.
What is the mechanism for relating individual desires to state or
other associational actions? It is this necessity of consulting the
wishes of its constituent members which creates every group's prob-
lem of representation. Hence to methods of securing representa-
tion, political and economic, the attention of social theorists is
turned. Ramsay Macdonald advocates a second chamber for Eng-
land which shall be a vocational body subordinate to the present
House of Commons, but elected from vocational groups.
Mr Cole believing that it is impossible for the individual to be
represented as a totality, argues for division of the representation
upon a functional basis; "what the representative professes to rep-
resent is not the whole will and personalities of his constituents, but


418
CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL THEORY
merely so much of them as they have put into the association, and
as is concerned with the purposes which the association exists to ful-
fil.” As an alternative to a complete and single delegation of
rep-
resentative power to be displayed at three different stages—legisla-
tive, executive, judicial, he proposes that “each functional form of
association has and is its own legislature and its own executive."
This need for representation in determining upon the action of
"functional association” is not satisfied to-day. Consideration of
the practical issues which this need raises leads us on to a discussion
of the individual's and the state's relation to industry, since there
we find the biggest of the functional associations. That there must
be a representative government in industry is conceded by all these
writers, and there must further be a representative structure which
shall relate the economic to the territorial activities. But the place
of the consumer in all this representative government presents a
problem on which wide divergences of opinion appear. Mr Hob-
son contends that the state can not represent the consumer; Mr Cole
holds that it can. Mr Macdonald finds the distinction between
producer and consumer too "academic” to follow, when used as a
basis for governmental organization.
The Webbs once made a distinction which admittedly must be
recognized. They said that the producer was predominantly inter-
ested in how production took place and under what conditions, but
that when it came to considering what was to be produced, how
much, the quality and the price, the consumer was an indispensable
party. If, then, as Duguit suggests, state action as public service
is replacing the notion that state action is in fact power exerted in a
private interest, the task of discovering and having foreknowledge
of people's needs, desires, and demands might very conceivably be-
come a state function for which suitable administrative bodies
would be created—as indeed they were created by the several states
which engaged in the Great War.
If, however, the state through some intelligently constituted ad-
ministrative organ is to voice the public needs and represent the ul-
timate consumers, it has by implication a function that involves it
in the financial and credit problem. It is this phase which engages
Mr Douglas exclusively and Mr Hobson in part. Their problem
is the socializing or democratizing of the power over accumulated
wealth and over the extension of credits to new enterprises. That


ORDWAY TEAD
419
a new outlook on this confusing question is required to make head-
way toward its proper understanding, will be clear to those who
,
have graphed Mr Douglas' thesis—or indeed to those who are fam-
iliar with the writings of our own Professors Veblen and Mitchell.
Yet Mr Douglas is by no means clear as to the details of his case,
although his general contention has substantial force.
My own understanding of the problem is this. Present produc-
tion is always being carried on with goods and materials made avail-
able by past labours. Future production can only be carried on as
there is an excess of goods produced over those immediately distrib-
uted. For, while people are producing in the future there must al-
ways be the means of their contemporary support. This surplus of
past and still unused goods and materials is what we are really re-
ferring to when we speak of capital. And capital is obviously se-
cured by retaining out of present production something over and
above that which is being immediately consumed.
The cash value of these saved goods is stated in terms of dollars;
and the amount of capital which society thinks of to-day in terms
of dollars, is in reality a supply of goods which are made available
for use by those who hold the capital, whenever, as we say, credit is
extended. But credit is extended only on terms which give the
holder of the capital a return over and above the return of the actual
value of his capital. The cash tokens of this excess return are dis-
tributed as interest and dividends; they accumulate in banks; they
are held by corporations as undivided surplus.
By a process of consolidation which has proceeded even faster in
banking than in industry, the money representing our present social
surplus of production over consumption, comes more and more un-
der the control of relatively few in the community. These few thus
become the actual controllers of the economic life of their fellow
citizens. For it is they who do this extending of credits; it is they
who say where productive energy shall be applied. And the con-
sideration which guides them in their decision is the degree of profit-
ableness of the contemplated enterprise. And by profitableness is
meant the probable excess of surplus which remains to be secured
after actual costs are met. The larger this surplus can be, the more
credit they can extend subsequently on the same profitable basis to
other presumably profitable ventures.
Under this arrangement, as Mr Douglas points out, cost is al-


420
CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL THEORY
a
ways cumulative. For cost always includes not only the actual
charges for material, labour, and interest charges on the required
capital, but also the accumulated charges made by the whole series
of past lenders of the capital which has gone into the making of the
materials and all the resources which are needed and are available.
The price of an article is, of course, the sum of the actual cost plus
the profit. And that profit becomes part of the cost of all articles
subsequently made to the extent that the first article is necessary and
contributory to the making of them. Yet even if this does not take
place, the recipient of the profit (that is of the present goods avail-
able to be used while new ones are in process of manufacture) can
reinvest his profits for a return, which means again that the cost of
the goods made with his capital are enhanced by the amount of his
return in additional profit.
But the situation is in reality by no means so simple as this; for
our discussion thus far has assumed that the available capital rep-
resented actual goods. Unfortunately, the problem is complicated
by the methods of inflating credit now in use. If the banker can ex-
tend credit for a consideration even though he has not in hand capi-
tal representing bona fide savings out of past production, he can
earn more money; although in the process of such inflation the
credits that he extends buy less and less actual goods—due of course
to the fact that his credit manipulations have not succeeded in in-
creasing the actual stocks of goods on hand which are available for
use during the process of the future production.
The banker can under present conditions build up in various ways
a credit structure which gives him a fictitious volume of credits-
fictitious in the sense that they do not represent goods; which gives
him also control of production and future profits of production, and
thus progressively makes him the recipient of the world's purchasing
power.
The present credit machinery in thus in a decidedly unwholesome
way. It operates in a manner which is socially expensive, unscien-
tific, and undemocratic. Yet when it comes to the remedies, Mr
Douglas' book is weak. He occupies less than twenty pages with
his proposals, and those are by no means clear. His service is none
the less a signal one; for he calls attention in a truly novel way to
the problem which is increasingly engaging the thought of social en-
gineers, as of central significance in economic organization. For


ORDWAY TEAD
421
the individual's relation to the state and industry is indeed shorn of
most of its possible vitality and developmental value, if at the
centre of the social labyrinth stands an odd monster who by credit
control, literally governs the productive life of the community.
Whoever will point out any of the ways in which this control is
now exercised, is making it possible for us to fore-arm ourselves
for a profound struggle.
There is genuine insight, candour, and practical helpfulness in
contemporary social theory. It is recognized that the
.
of
the state, as Aristotle said, is to foster the good life. And that
good life has never been better characterized than when he also
said that "happiness was the activity of the soul in the direction
of excellence in an unhampered life.” It is recognized increasingly
that quality in the individual life is a supreme aim. It is recognized
that we can afford to subordinate abstractions to people because we
know more and more of the promise of human life of the possible
splendour of personality. Indeed, while the doctrine of the “per-
fectability” of human nature has fallen into desuetude, social theory
to-day assumes the essential integrity of human nature and seeks
eagerly through a social organization soundly motivated to buttress
individual and social life against those beclouded moments when,
as Paul said, though we would do good, evil is present with us.
purpose
ORDWAY TEAD


SUPER SCHOOLMASTER
INSTIGATIONS. By Ezra Pound. 8vo. 388 pages.
Boni and Liveright. New York.
I
.
T has been observed that Mr Ezra Pound's critical prose is,
as a rule, neither prose nor criticism; and this one is willing
to admit, in order to save time and because Mr Pound has ad-
mitted it himself with embarrassing frankness. (“This essay on
James is a dull grind of an affair, a Baedeker of the conti-
nent. .") There are still several fixed ideas in Instigations and
a number of repetitions of cadence that have not been attacked.
But a brief and belated review is scarcely the place for this sort
of thing, nor for the defence of Mr Pound's method, or lack of it,
in judging, which I should some time like to undertake.
An important point, however, about Mr Pound's critical writ-
ings, which has been generally neglected, is this: they do satisfy
two very conspicuous demands of the American public; the de-
mand for "constructive criticism," and the demand for "first rate
school teaching."
In his essay on James, Mr Pound makes an academic distinction
between prose and poetry.
"Most good prose arises, perhaps, from an instinct of negation;
it is the detailed, convincing analysis of something detestable; of
something one wants to eliminate. Poetry is the assertion of a
positive, that is, of desire
1
Well, Mr Pound is a poet. He doesn't write prose; we have
admitted that. His destructive remarks are limited to funny oaths
and insults; no reasoned attack, no analytic slaughter of the enemy.
His time, his energy, he applies to stating, without much fuss,
what he finds good, and why.
That people, stupid or not, should demand affirmations and
constructive criticism, if only as a novelty, when our young writers
are all so busy writing advertisements for a living as to make it
impossible for them to praise anything in their bff hours, is not


W. C. BLUM
423
surprising. The odd thing is that people should not take pleas-
ure in affirmations when they are handed them. And yet they
decidedly do not. We pretend that it is the destructive activities
of the Russians of which we disapprove; we were indeed shocked
when they murdered the Czar. But we only became really indig-
nant when they began to improvise a government. Thoroughly
popular affirmations, one believes, are always either destructive
in intent, like patriotism, or insincere, like advertising. Insincer-
ity of tone is the first lesson for the advertiser to learn. Consider
the slogans of the day before yesterday: “All the news that's fit
to print.” “Make the world safe for Democracy.”
All this is intended as an explanation of Mr Pound's failure
to impress the multitudes who ask for "constructive criticism.”
If he would wrap up his prejudices in cosmic tendencies and add
a little sensational gossip to his technical discussion, he might put
over those very unpopular causes, classical learning and modern
literature, to a somewhat larger public. But he agrees too well
with that public's avowed belief in the necessity for good school-
teaching, to do his work in other than schoolmasterly fashion.
Apparently he has in mind a special public, a class of students,
almost, to whom he is engaged in delivering this correspondence
course of lectures. The idea of this class sustains and encourages
him. All through Instigations we find him admonishing his stu-
dents: "Laforgue is an angel with whom our modern poetic Jacob
must struggle.” “If James had read his classics. . .
He never doubts for a moment that in order to write permanent
work, in order to discriminate between permanent and bad work,
a man must know the classics from Homer to Gautier. As fast
as he can get round to it Mr Pound is filling up the gaps in the
curricula of his misguided but indispensable colleagues, the pro-
fessors; and at the same time he is carrying forward their work
from the point where they always leave off and wait for a literary
man to clear the way.
Is nobody aware that a contemporary writer is actually giving
a course on the Comparative Literature of the Present, that a first
rate literary man, a poet, with the rarest gift for translation is
bothering to teach school ? Poetry lovers may grieve, but Dr
Flexner would do well to take notice.
W. C. BLUM
” and so on.


WEARY VERSE
GEORGIAN Poetry. 1918-1919. Edited by E. M.
12mo. 196 pages. G. P. Putnam's Sons. New York.
.
.
IT
is a profound labour to read this book. Not because, let me
hastily say, there is nothing good in it, but because it is all so
dreadfully tired.
Is this the exhaustion of the war, or is it the debility of an old
habit of mind deprived the stimulus of a new inspiration? It is
an interesting question, for the fatigue is undeniable. Here are
nineteen poets, in the heyday of their creating years, and scarcely
one of them seems to have energy enough to see personally or forge
a manner out of his own natural speech. They are all respectable
poets, each knows his trade and can turn out good enough verse
on an old model, but how strangely one man's contribution dove-
tails into the next man's! This is happily not true of all, but it
is true of the majority. Try it-for instance, who wrote:
“But this shall be the end of my delight:
That you, my lovely one, shall stoop and see
Your image in the mirrored beauty there."
And did the same man write:
“And Cleopatra's eyes, that hour they shone
The brighter for a pearl she drank to prove
How poor it was compared to her rich love:
But when I look on thee, love, thou dost give
Substance to those fine ghosts, and make them live.”
Is this he again, or another:
“Thy hand my hand,
Thine eyes my eyes,
All of thee
Caught and confused with me:
My hand thy hand,


AMY LOWELL
425
My eyes thine eyes,
All of me
Sunken and discovered anew in thee."
And who is responsible for this:
“Dear Love, whose strength no pedantry can stir
Whether in thine iron enemies,
Or in thine own strayed follower
Bemused with subtleties and sophistries,
Now dost thou rule the garden ..."
If the reader will play fairly and guess a bit, I think he will
find himself sufficiently bewildered. The answer to the riddle is
purely arbitrary. The book says that Francis Brett Young is the
author of the first quotation, and the other names, in order, read:
W. H. Davies, John Freeman, and Edward Shanks. But, for
all we can see to the contrary, the names might be jumbled about
in any order without causing the slightest confusion in style or
The reason is quite plain, Mr Young, Mr Davies, Mr Freeman,
Mr Shanks, are merely taking the place of our old friends, Brown,
Jones, and Robinson; or, to telescope the whole after the manner
of a composite photograph, we might name them collectively, John
Doe. In other words, these gentlemen are not writing at all, it
is their poetic ancestors who are writing, they have made them-
selves ouija boards for the recrudescence of a dead song.
There are notable exceptions to this, I am glad to say, and I
shall come to them later, but on the whole, the book seems pale
and spectre-like, haunted by the ghosts of England's vanished
bards.
There is really no excuse for this, for even if these English poets
choose to ignore the fresh vigour of American poetry, they have
Masefield in England, and Ralph Hodgson, and Aldington, and
Sassoon. It is stuff and nonsense to try and raise such echoes into
the dignity of a poetic creed as Mr Squire and Mr Shanks are con-
stantly trying to do. All literature is against them, good poets
are not echoes and never were, and that is the long and the short
of it. I am told that Mr T. S. Eliot is having a great influence
in England, and although I am not a complete admirer of Mr


426
WEARY VERSE
Eliot's style, I can well believe that he is needed in a country
where Mr Young stalks abroad mellifluously bemoaning the duress
of poethood in such a new and striking phrase as: "Whither, O
my sweet mistress, must I follow thee?” His own words, farther
on in the same poem, are more than portrait; they are prophecy:
“The pillared halls of sleep echoed my ghostly tread.”
He is a wonder, this Mr Young, I can hardly tear myself away
from him. What a memory he has, to be sure.
Where have we
“With all the joy of Spring
And morning in her eyes”?
It is foolish to ask where; it would be much more sensible to put
it “where not.” Certainly Mr Young challenges the spectres right
smartly. He speaks of "snow upon the blast,” of the “livery of
death”; his moon is quite comfortably “hornéd,” with the accent
all nicely printed over the last syllable. But let us give him his
due, his cacophony is original. Read this aloud:
“The frozen fallows glow, the black trees shaken
In a clear flood of sunlight vibrating awaken.”
>
But we must not leave Mr Young alone in a glorious isolation,
that would be to do him too much honour, for does not Mr Davies
speak of “Yon full moon,” and Mr Abercrombie complacently
watch while "The sun drew off at last his piercing fires”; even Mr
Gibson, who is usually above such diction, permits himself to call
the sea "the changeless deep."
One could go on poking fun for ever, there is matter for it, but
the thing is not funny; on the contrary, it is desperately sad.
They want to be poets so much, these young men. They know
they have something to say, they feel it doubtless, but they are like
people uttering words in a dream; in the cold light of day, it comes
perilously near nonsense, because it is nonsense to repeat by rote
a thing which does not express one's thoughts. There is atrophy
here; this stale stuff is not merely stale, it is pathological. We
know what these young men want to say, the strong spirits among
them have told us they want to say how deeply they love England,
how much the English countryside (the most beautiful countryside
in the world) means to them; they detest war, and long for the
a


AMY LOWELL
427
past which can not come back, and they hope fiercely for a future
which, if they can, they will see to it shall be better. But the
power to set down all this has been weakened by strain. They
have not the energy to see personally, or speak with their own
voices. The will to do so is strong, the nervous strength necessary
for the task (and it requires much) is lacking.
The English countryside is here, but in all the old tones and
colours. Surely never book was so swayed over by the branches
of trees. Nightingales and thrushes abound, but seldom does the
poet get them alive on the page; he loves them, but he slays them,
and more's the pity.
This is not always true.
Mr Drinkwater's Chorus from Lincoln
is very England, although not quite so fine as his In Lady Street,
which is not in this volume, and so is Mr de la Mare's Sunken
Garden, and Mr Monro's Dog is fully successful. Even Mr
Davies gets himself sometimes, since he can write:
"Blink with blind bats' wings, and heaven's bright face
Twitch with the stars that shine in thousands there."
Mr Davies tries to be himself, and it is unfortunate that we often
wish he would not. When he describes a lark as "raving” above
the clouds, we feel that his vocabularly is unwarrantably scanty,
and it is nonsense to speak of the "merry sound of moths” bump-
ing on a ceiling. Merry-watching the tortured struggles of
the poor things to get out-merry! He tells us that he is the
“dumb slave” of a lady who brings "great bursts” of music out of
a harpsichord; "deaf” I think should be the word, for I doubt
if even a Liszt could force that frail and delicate instrument to
"great bursts.” Or, perish the thought, was the lady really play-
ing on a piano, and did Mr Davies merely think “harpsichord”
more poetical ?
Yes, they do try, but often only to make a mess of it. When
the nightingale does not sing, Mr Shanks observes: "Nor has the
moon yet touched the brown bird's throat,” which is mighty fine
writing of a kind usually found in Parlour Albums and Gems
from the Poets for Every Day in the Year. Mr Nichols has
been reading the dictionary, his boughs are "labyrinthine,” the
blossom of a lime-tree is a "hispid star of citron bloom," and
"sigils” are burned into his heart and face. A sort of passion for


428
WEARY VERSE
the archaic seems to have got hold of him, we have "fittest, prof-
ferest, blowest, renewest,” all in four lines. Most of these poets
love "thees” and “thous,” that horrible second person which every- •
day speech has happily got rid of. But Mr Nichols is a good poet,
only he does not hold himself up. To speak of the trunk of a tree
as “splitting into massy limbs” is excellent, but he spoils it by hav-
ing the branches "bowered in foliage,” and yet the man is often full
of insight. Of a squirrel, he can say: "He scrambled round on
little scratchy hands,” and what could be finer than the "peaked
and gleaming face” of the dying man in The Sprig of Lime? That
whole poem touches a very high mark, and sets Mr Nichols quite
apart from the John Does.
As one glances through the four volumes of Georgian Poetry,
one can not help wondering on what principle they are edited.
Scarcely on that of presenting all the best poetry of the moment,
it would seem, since Richard Aldington, F. S. Flint, the Sitwells,
and Anna Wickham, have never been included. Mr James
Stephens, who has been in since the beginning, has vanished, which
is a great loss; and Mr Hodgson, who appeared in the second and
third issues, has also gone. It is understandable why Mr Chester-
ton, as belonging to an older group, has left; but Mr Masefield,
by all the laws of literary relationship, should surely have re-
mained. Is the editor, Mr Marsh, sole arbiter, and if so, why?
When former contributors disappear, do they remove themselves,
or are they assisted to depart? And again, in either case, why?
It is horrible to reflect on the power of an editor. Poets, at the
mercy of editorial selection, may well tremble, reflecting on the fate
of the Dutch painter, Vermeer, who vanished for nearly three
hundred years from the knowledge of men because a contemporary
writer, with whom he was so ill-advised as to quarrel, omitted him
from a list of painters which was destined to become the text-book
of future generations.
Mr Marsh edits with well-defined prejudices, evidently, but, on
the whole, he has accomplished much, for he has brought the auth-
ors of his anthologies a wide publicity. For those who go out,
others come in. Mr Graves and Mr Sassoon, who, with Mr Squire,
appeared first in the 1916-17 anthology, are the chiefs of the new
comers. The most powerful poem in the book is Mr Sassoon's Re-
pression of War Experience. The war made Mr Sassoon a poet.
He needed to be torn and shaken by a great emotion; he has found
а
.


AMY LOWELL
429
this emotion in his detestation of war. Nothing stronger than these
poems, which are the outgrowth of his suffering, has been written
in England since the war “stopped our clocks.” It would be hard
to make a selection of them, and really it does not matter, one side
of a heart is a good deal like the other side provided it be a real
flesh and blood heart. In this case, it is, and wherever you take
it, you get the same sensation. There is no rhetoric here, we are
not treated to erudite expressions nor literary artifices, and for that
reason these poems, and Repression especially, come perilously near
to being great. I say “perilously,” for what is Mr Sassoon going
to do now? When was Everything Sang written? Perhaps that
points a new departure.
Mr Sassoon and Mr Graves feel so much that they can afford to
joke about it. Mr Sassoon's joking is a shade more bitter, more
ironical. For instance, What Does It Matter? is a trifle harder
and heavier than Mr Graves' It's a Queer Time, which unfortunate-
ly is not in this volume. Neither is I Wonder What It Feels Like
to be Drowned. But one can not have all a man's collected works
in an anthology, and we have got that fine thing, A Frosty Night,
and the possibly even finer, The Cupboard. Mr Graves is that de-
lightful being among poets, a faux naif. He runs his ballad forms
hard, but so far they do not fade upon the palate.
Miss Shove is a notable edition to this year's anthology. She
has originality and a saving sense of the grotesque and macabre.
The New Ghost is excellent.
Of the original contributors, Mr Abercrombie's poetry is always
a strange mixture of the quick and the dead. He builds live tales
on a pattern of rusty pins. The result is according as one feels
.
about the vexed question of subject and treatment. I confess that
I find Mr Abercrombie worthy of respect, but dull.
Mr Davies has ardent admirers, and I am quite aware that my
making him sit as part portrait for the highly estimable John Doe
will probably cause much offense. If only Mr Davies would al-
ways write poems like A Child's Pet, would always keep to such
natural speech as that in the first four lines of England, I would
readily subtract him from the sum total of my composite hero.
But Mr Davies has read books, and they have remained in his mind
alien and undigested. Therefore he must give his quota to John
Doe, and I regretfully beg his pardon.
Mr de la Mare is scarcely at his best in this volume, although The


430
WEARY VERSE
a
Sunken Garden is very charming. But I can not forgive him his
last line with the false rhyme. False rhyming is often a most hap-
py device, but scarcely here, where there have been no other such
rhymes in the poem, and for the last line-particularly when he
had a perfect rhyme in his adjective! Clearly the sound did not
trouble Mr de la Mare's ear, but it teases mine horribly.
Mr Drinkwater is a poet who must be read in a certain mood.
His poems do not yield all their fragrance if they are hastily ap-
proached or violently attempted. They grow on the reader as of
something becoming conscious. They seem extraordinarily sim-
ple, by every preconceived canon they should be dull, and behold,
they are neither the one nor the other. The best of them, that is, and
two of the best are here: Moonlit Apples and Habitation, while
Chorus from Lincoln, the first half especially, is nearly as good.
What is Mr Drinkwater's charm, how does he escape the sensation
of echo, considering that he chooses to write in a traditional mode?
To analyse it with any care would take up too much space here;
in brief, I think it lies in his utter abandonment to his poem, in his
complete sincerity in regard to it; in his straightforward, unself-
conscious love of what he is writing about. He is a quiet poet, he
keeps his drama for his plays, but his dramatic sense has taught him
the secret of creating atmosphere. Moonlit Apples is beautifully
moony. But this simplicity and this atmosphere are not ac-
cidental; they are built up with delicate touch after touch through-
out the poem. One could wish that In Lady Street had been in-
cluded and Southampton Bells left out, but, on the whole, his se-
lection is one of the best in the book.
Mr Gibson's Cakewalk is a good poem, and so is the first stanza
of Parrots; the latter is a complete poem by itself, the second
stanza adds nothing, it even detracts appreciably. Why must Mr
Gibson bring in his heart? The Parrots did so well without it.
Mr Lawrence's Seven Seals is in his most mystical and passion-
ate vein. The poem is serious and exalted, but it is a pity that it
should be his only contribution; it would stand better were it com-
panioned. As a poet, Mr Lawrence is rising in stature year by year;
his last volume, Bay, is the best book of poetry, pure poetry, that
he has written, although it does not reach the startling human
poignance of Look! We Have Come Through. It is unfair to
Mr Lawrence to be represented by one poem, the editor should
take heed and give us more of him in future.


AMY LOWELL
431
Mr Monro improves steadily. I have already mentioned his
beautiful and exceedingly satisfactory Dog. I wish I had space
to quote it. It is not only good poetry, but good dog. Mr Mon-
ro's work is gaining in muscle. Beauty it has often had, but now
there is a firm structure under the beauty—see, for instance, Man
Carrying Bail. The Nightingale Near the House was a bold chal-
lenge to Fate, but Mr Monro has come through fairly successfully.
His nightingale lives and sings, and not too reminiscently, which
is much for a modern nightingale to do.
For the newer men, Mr Squire is a clever fellow. His criti-
cisms, even if one disagree with them, are always interesting. His
poetry is clever too, and that is not so useful an attribute in poetry.
But he has done some good things. August Moon, with its
marvelous description of moonlight on water, is not here (really
we must quarrel with the editor for leaving it out) but another of
his best things, the Sonnet is. Few modern sonnets are so good
as this; the last two lines are magnificent. Rivers begins well,
with an original and fluctuating rhythm which gives the lapsing
and flowing of a river to a remarkable degree, and the slight change
a
between the first and second stanza is well conceived. But then he
becomes tangled in his own creation, the metre stiffens into a con-
vention, becomes hard, unimaginative, and cold, and the poem
loses itself in a long and rather stupid catalogue.
Mr Turner, who appears for the second time, has a nice little
quality--he has his own turns, and a very pleasant whimsical
touch:
“The thronged, massed, crowded multitude of leaves
Hung like dumb tongues that loll and gasp for air”
gives an effect we have all seen, most vividly. “Tinkling like
polished tin” has the thin sharpness of tone of a small stream, and
"old wives cried their wares, like queer day owls” is very nice.
Silence is a good poem, but the best of those here is Talking With
Soldiers, with its refrain "the mind of the people is like mud,” and
then the dreaming iridescence.
Of the remaining poets—but why catalogue the virtues or record
the faults of John Doe?
Amy LOWELL


BRIEFER MENTION
THE CHORUS Girl and Other Stories, by Anton Chekhov, trans-
lated by Constance Garnett (12mo, 301 pages; Macmillan).
As is usually the case with Chekhov, so in these eleven sketches
and one full length story ignominious humanity gets caught in
its particular fact and character; not with much charity, but in
a great manner of seeing and by a fine hand for execution. The
vital traits of narrow lives and their daily scene are set down
with delicate, considered specificity, and with some ironical pity,
but no illusion; romance would need less native concentration
upon fact and event. The tales have each it sspecial sharpness,
but how little are they a moralizing and how much a sophisti-
cation, an enrichment of experience! Romance to the fluffy,
scriptures to the Pecksniffs, Chekhov, realist, we hear saying
merely, but how incomparably: "Such fools!"
26 Jayne Street, by Mary Austin (12mo, 353 pages; Houghton
Mifflin), holds the mirror up to American unrest with a steady.
hand, occasionally so absorbed in the reflection that it forgets the
story, but succeeding in the end to a definite emotional expression
of its theme. Both in subject and in treatment, Mrs Austin's
work discloses its kinship to the social novel of Wells.
True Love, by Allan Monkhouse (12mo, 375 pages; Holt), ad-
heres to a course as conventional as its title, unrelieved by plot
invention and unredeemed by emotional significance. It is the
last word in war novels merely in the sense that it is the most re-
cent. The same mould has been used before with similar results.
Margot's Progress, by Douglas Goldring (12mo, 334 pages;
Seltzer), is vigorous, varied, and colourful. There is driving
power behind Mr Goldring's inspiration; he peoples his novel
with positive creations, and sees to it that things actually happen.
Even where his skill is not yet in full focus, one feels the momen-
tum of his purpose. Margot's Progress is vividly conceived and
keenly developed.


BRIEFER MENTION
433
The Husband, by E. H. Anstruther (12mo, 301 pages; Lane), is
another example of a type of volume rapidly gaining great vogue
in England, in which conversation is composed of such gems of
repartee as “Really!”, “Oh, come!”, and “That's splendid!”
In further accordance with the formulae, Penelope is very refined,
as is proved by her hanging "an exquisite Dürer” alongside
of her roommate's "two lurid, allegorical posters.” And she is
proper to the end, waiting until the author kills the wife, when
she consents to marry the Husband.
Woman, by Magdeleine Marx (12mo, 228 pages; Seltzer), never
quite fulfils its magnificient gesture. The author has undertaken
the rôle of surgeon in a psychic clinic, standing with glittering
scalpel poised above the feminine ego, and we turn from page
to page with bated breath, momentarily expecting that mysteri-
ous organ to be laid bare. But in the end we have to content our-
selves with diagnosis; the operation is not performed. A febrile
study in temperament, unmistakably French.
WINDMILLS, by Gilbert Cannan (12mo, 188 pages; Huebsch), is
a heavy-footed satire on the war; its chief interest lies in the fact
that it was written in 1914 and not in 1920. Mr Cannan sets
up a simulacrum of the British Empire and throws soones at it;
after the idol is satisfactorily demolished the British Empire re-
mains and Mr Cannan is still scolding away in an excited voice.
Yet what he says is inexpugnably true; it is only his prose which
is ineffective.
The Release Of The Soul, by Gilbert Cannan (12mo, 166 pages;
Boni & Liveright). An English novelist's attempt to release his
soul from the bondage of novel writing has resulted merely in
enmeshing the soul of his latest book in the cobwebs of pseudo-
mysticism. Art, Work, and Religion, according to Mr Cannan,
are the only paths which lead out from the jungle depths of
stupidity and materialism. There is little Art in his exposition,
and less evidence of Work. And it takes more Religion of a
charitable nature than Mr Cannan preaches to restrain one from
saying that the author of this work has released his soul so very
successfully that it has disappeared.


434
BRIEFER MENTION
POEMS 1916-1918, by Francis Brett Young (12mo, 99 pages;
Dutton), shows the influence of nothing that has been written
since the death of Tennyson. Evidently Mr Young set out to re-
capture the old beauty; he has achieved his aim exquisitely,
without a false rhyme, a colloid sentiment, or a misplaced
apostrophe. His poems form more than a book; they are a Ten-
a
dency; the goal toward which the Georgians are progressing.
Country SENTIMENT, by Robert Graves (16mo, 140 pages;
Knopf), lacks the full richness of Fairies and Fusiliers, but re-
mains a delicious collection of ballads and lyrics. Hawk and
Buckle, After the Play, and A Song for Two Children give a fair
taste of Graves' humour, sense of words, and ability to create at-
mosphere in phrase. Country at War puts to shame so vulgar
a hymn of hate as The Picture Book. Graves is better at fairies
than he is at fusiliers.
Some Soldier Poets, by Sturge Moore (12mo, 147 pages; Har-
court, Brace & Howe), is a volume of belated comment on the
work of Grenfell, Ledwidge, Brooke, and others. Within a fixed
circle, Mr Moore's criticism is honest and impassioned, but his
vision is limited by the horizons of the nineteenth century and he
abhors anything modern or irregular. Even he goes out of his
way to say of Yeats that his verse skims on the surface of prose. .
“You watch the skater as the surface warps under his swift pas-
sage, and expect that in another moment he will be in it, flounder-
,
ing like any Walt Whitman.”
>
The MODERN Book of French VERSE, edited by Albert Boni
(12mo, 299 pages; Boni & Liveright), is an excellent anthology
of translations, although one asks why both Swinburne's and
Lang's versions of Villon's Ballade des Pendus are included when
Swinburne's is the better Villon, and why Ernest Dowson's
rendering of Verlaine's Le ciel est par-dessus le toit is preferred
to Alfred Noyes' more Gallic one. The volume will please any
lover of France and should be valuable in courses in comparative
literature for the manner in which the many translators from
Chaucer to Ezra Pound unite in giving a concordant impression
of the French genius.


BRIEFER MENTION
435
Jehovah, by Clement Wood (12mo, 116 pages; Dutton), won the
Lyric prize of five hundred dollars for 1919. Aside from this
distinction, the poem boasts that of a rather vigorous vocabulary.
But if it won the Lyric Prize, it was hardly for its lyrism. The
dispute between the Israelites and the Kenites in the days of
David is not very thrilling when a dispute between the Bolshe-
viki and the British is going on in our own days. And the inevit-
able contrast with Scriptural poetry is inevitably discouraging.
Still, the poem is dramatic, the characterization interesting, and
some of the passages genuinely powerful.
The Life of LORD KITCHENER, by Sir George Arthur (3 vol.,
Illus., 8vo, 1095 pages; Macmillan), is the official biography,
done with infinite pains, with a slow-moving impressiveness of
detail, and with the proper attitude of defending or glossing over
the errors and weaknesses of the subject. One fails to discover
the mythological strong man, as one fails to discover the great K.
of K. whose myth did, before his death, call an army into the
field. As a representative of the course of Empire Kitchener is
more interesting than as a personality; the biographer has not
attempted to reverse this order and the book is therefore good
history but not light reading for hero-worshippers.
MY CAMPAIGN, by Major General Charles Vere Ferrers Towns-
hend, K. C. B., D. S. C. (2 vol., 8vo, 719 pages; McCann), is
a book of extraordinary fascination. The commanding officer of
those British forces which fought Kut and Ctesiphon, were be-
sieged and finally surrendered, writes a magnificient story without
patches, and with considerable literary skill. His all too brief
chapter on strategy and his speculations on war and politics, as
well as the humaner interests of his campaign will absorb chief
attention—which is a pity because the layman ought to read the
technical chapters and learn what war is. Legislators might
read between the lines to discover how policy—and not the most
intelligent policy-can destroy men and armies in fruitless en-
deavours and how gallantry and heroism can still give a fair of
decency to war.


THE THEATRE
TA
HE good critic always begins the Season with a capital S and
gradually is worried into the lower case, ending about mid-
May with "the run of the theatre.” That may be the result of sheer
mental incapacity to react. It may be that the best plays open
earliest.
In any case they opened too early this year for me to see more
than one bad play and early enough for one very good one.
The
knowledge that O. P. Heggie is playing in HAPPY-Go-Lucky and
that The Bat is becoming something of a municipal mystery, that,
in fact, some thirty pieces are with some success holding the boards,
can be put down as so much information. There are other mat-
ters for reflection.
One of these is the lingering superstition that a foreign hit can
be made over and put over in America. It has happened, but I
think that a majority of our huge financial successes were native.
In the case of SPANISH Love I do not know how much Mrs Rine-
hart and Mr Hopwood took out or put in. What they offered,
in a production which is uncertain between the glamour of the new
style and the security of the old, is the flesh and blood without the
skeleton of a melodrama of passion. They love that way
in Spain,
but they do not play that way in the American theatre. The pres-
ence of Russ Whytal, so cool, so faultless, and of James Rennie,
chosen for type, made visible the impossibility of the play itself.
a
a
Enter Madame is the work of Miss Gilda Varesi, as part author
and star, and of Mr Brock Pemberton as producer. It is exceeding-
ly to their credit, and it is good to know that its success was im-
mediate. The play is intelligent rather than smart. So was The
Concert, which the plot of Enter Madame neatly reverses. The
moments of profound humanity in Bahr's masterpiece are not re-
produced, perhaps because Gabor Arany was so much less of a
stunt and so much more of a person, than Mme. della Robbia.
The scheme of the play is not original; for the woman who gets
her man back is, on the stage at least, a commonplace. The ex-


GILBERT SELDES
437
hibition of a tempermental artist in a huge battle for the rights of
domesticity, without sacrifice (not of her art but of her privileges)
is the best thing in the play except Miss Varesi's acting. That, a
little over-pointed, a little too excited on the second night, is very
fine. It, too, has behind it the intelligence which synthesizes small
strokes and makes character.
The moving picture, I am given to understand, is no longer a
mortal enemy of the stage, and the fresh orientation ought to give
our enthusiasts for the theatre something to think about. For
the embrace of the moving picture threatens to be the final clutch,
the close-up and the fade-out-of the theatre. As an enemy the
moving picture put the theatre through its paces, a little. As a
friend it is simply going to insist that no play be produced (and
eventually that none be written) without the picture in mind. I
have even heard that a well established publishing house has been
sold to the cinema, in the sense that hereafter its many and multi-
coloured magazines will serve the ends of the picture producers,
be storehouses not of sensation but of scenarios.
Frankly it does not matter half of one bit. At least it wouldn't
if the movies got anything like a decent return for this, for the
popular art which can not persist in the face of a little adversity
is hardly worth saving. The dramatists will still write bad plays
.
for the theatre; the scenario writers will still furbish them up for
the screen.
And we shall be very much where we were before
until some one comes to galvanize our playwrights and make them
at least fit companions for the real artists of the theatre whom we
are producing
GILBERT SELDES


COMMENT
B.
Y far the most entertaining publication we have seen in many
years is a broadside called Le Coq issued in Paris by a group of
musicians who like each other. Darius Milhaud, whose ballet,
Le Boeuf sur le Toit, has been produced at the Coliseum in London
under the Americanist title of The Nothing-Doing Bar; Erik Satie;
Jean Cocteau; Francis Poulenc; Georges Auric; and the Swiss
Honegger are among the names.' As to music, little of it appears,
but these men have a gift of phrase and an exuberance of imagina-
tion which is almost terrifying. After furiously asserting that
they found no school and issue no manifesto, they reproach Dada
for timidity. No Dadaiste has yet committed suicide, they com-
plain, nor killed a spectator. Under the rubric Dernières Nouvel-
les we find that the six musicians are no longer interested in har-
monic counterpoint, and these verbless declarations: Fondation
de la Ligue Anti-Moderne. Retour à la poésie. Disparition du
gratte-ciel. Reapparition de la rose. We doubt whether they can
do it, but they can write epigrams. As, for example: “Ravel
refuse la Légion d'Honneur mais toute sa musique l'accepte,” M.
Satie's possible proof that truth and beauty are not necessarily the
M. Raymond Radiguet writes “Depuis vingt on me force
à penser. J'en ai mal à la tête.” And M. Satie gives the psy-
chological clue to the whole in his precious confession that all
through his youth people told him that he "would see” when he
was fifty. "I am fifty. I have seen nothing."
same.
It is perhaps the virtue of the foreign tongue which makes so
many French and Italian experiments in literature acceptable to
the English-speaking panjandrums of literature. Since we are the
commanding races, without a doubt the success of these ideas will
ultimately depend on us, and F. T. Marinetti will do well not to
translate "Les Mots en Liberté futuristes" into Futurist Words
at Liberty. For then we would understand and might object.
Signor Marinetti can hardly be accused of vagueness, at any rate.
He proposes to set words free by destroying syntax. The verb
must be used exclusively in the infinitive, because that form alone


COMMENT
439
can give the sense of the continuity of life. The adjective and
the adverb go. No more punctuation—to give place and direction
we will use certain mathematical signs. All order is condemned
as a product of our underhand intelligence and therefore our images
must be orchestrated with a maximum of disorder. We are to ar-
rive at an intuitive psychology of matter and at a wireless imagina-
tion.
It was in an aeroplane that Signor Marinetti arrived at these
conclusions—for poetry only. He uses the common terms in ex-
plaining the ideas which we have sketched here. It is hardly
necessary to comment upon them—M. Benda's Belphégor is suf-
ficient analysis and a sufficient statement of the traditional attack.
We should only like to add-and we have some experience in the
matter—that the typographic revolution proposed in the same book
would go far to relieve an editor from the harrassment of mis-
prints. He could in time persuade himself that they were ex-
ceedingly well meant.
The Italian Letter which appears elsewhere in this issue of The
DIAL was written from the islet of Comacina in the Lake of Como.
This happy place has passed through the hands of two monarchs
since it was bequeathed to Albert of the Belgians by Signor Augusto
Caprani, and is now to be made into a private little kingdom for
artists of every kind, and, we trust, of every nationality. Such is
the intention of the King of Italy, and the imagination boggles a
little at the thought. That artists should be free does not neces-
sarily imply that they should be rent-free. Even that blessed con-
dition (we are dimly aware of a housing shortage but we think it
more decent to say nothing about it) might be spoiled a bit if all
the artist's neighbours were equally artists and equally unable to
show their paintings to the landlord or read their plays to the
slavey. Still Como, delectable vocable as it is, will have, on
Comacina, halls for exhibitions and recitals, so life will not be all
wine and roses. The artists will have to observe each other, and
cursed capitalism will undoubtedly invent other tortures for them.
AMONG the books which are nice to take in hand and which al-
ways yield a surplus of pleasure because they are well and intel-
ligently made, are those on photography. The 1920 issue of


440
COMMENT
Pictorial Photography (published by Tennant and Ward) has
ornamented a none too tidy table for marty months; Arthur Ham-
mond's Pictorial Composition in Photography (issued by the
American Photographic Publishing Company) is a more scientific
volume, since the former is composed almost entirely of specimens,
and the latter uses reproductions only to illustrate the very sound
and interesting principles which the author has worked out. There
is still much of the tawdry and the meretricious in photography, .
but there is such a growing dominance of craftsmanship that the
ancient controversy about photography being an art has virtually
ceased to exist. The portrait photographers have learned much
from moving picture lighting, but the best of them have learned
more from the capacities of their own instruments and from the
willingness of their sitters to abide by expert judgements. The
thing that makes one so confident about photography is the respect
which good photographers have for the other arts—an attitude of
mind not too frequently found among practitioners.






1
After G. C. Bingham.
COUNTY ELECTION IN MISSOURI.
BY JOHN SARTAIN



THE INDIAL
OXXIIO
NOVEMBER 1920
THE POSSIBILITY OF A POETIC DRAMA
BY T. S. ELIOT
THE
THE questions—why there is no poetic drama to-day, how
the stage has lost all hold on literary art, why so many
poetic plays are written which can only be read, and read, if at
all, without pleasure—have become insipid, almost academic.
The usual conclusion is either that "conditions” are too much for us,
or that we really prefer other types of literature, or simply that we
are uninspired. As for the last alternative, it is not to be enter-
tained; as for the second, what type do we prefer? and as for the
first, no one has ever shown me "conditions” except of the most
superficial. The reasons for raising the question again are first that
the majority, perhaps, certainly a large number, of poets hanker for
the stage; and second, that a not negligible public appears to want
verse plays. Surely here is some legitimate craving, not restricted
to a few persons, which only the verse play can satisfy. And sure-
ly the critical attitude is to attempt to analyse the conditions and
the other data. If there comes to light some conclusive obstacle,
the investigation should at least help us to turn our thoughts to more
profitable pursuits; and if there is not we may hope to arrive event-
ually at a statement of conditions which might be altered. Possibly
we shall find that our incapacity has a deeper source: the arts have
flourished at times when there was no drama; possibly we are in-
competent altogether; in that case the stage will be not the seat,
but at all events a symptom, of the malady.
From the point of view of literature, the drama is only one among
several poetic forms. The epic, the ballad, the chanson de geste,
the forms of Provence and of Tuscany, all found their perfection by


442
THE POSSIBILITY OF A POETIC DRAMA
a
serving particular societies. The forms of Ovid, Catullus, Proper-
tius, served a society different, and in some respects more civilized,
than any of these; and in the society of Ovid the drama as a form
of art was comparatively insignificant. Nevertheless, the drama
is perhaps the most permanent, is capable of greater variation and
of expressing more varied types of society, than any other. It
varied considerably in England alone; but when one day it was dis-
covered lifeless, subsequent forms which had enjoyed a transitory
life were already dead too. I am not prepared to undertake the
historical survey; but I should say that the poetic drama's autopsy
was performed as much by Charles Lamb as by any one else. For
a form is not wholly dead until it is known to be; and Lamb, by ex-
huming the remains of dramatic life at its fullest, brought a con-
sciousness of the immense gap between present and past. It was
impossible to believe, after that, in a dramatic “tradition.” The
relation of Byron's English Bards and the poems of Crabbe to the
work of Pope was a continuous tradition; but the relation of The
Cenci to the great English drama is almost that of a reconstruction
to an original. By losing tradition, we lose our hold on the present;
but so far as there was any dramatic tradition in Shelley's day there
was nothing worth the keeping. There is all the difference between
preservation and restoration.
The Elizabethan age in England was able to absorb a great
quantity of new thoughts and new images, almost dispensing with
tradition, because it had this great form of its own which imposed
itself on everything that came to it. Consequently, the blank verse
of its plays accomplished a subtlety and consciousness, even an in-
tellectual power, that no blank verse has developed or even repeat-
ed; elsewhere this Age is crude, pedantic, or loutish in comparison
with its contemporary France or Italy. The nineteenth century
had a good many fresh impressions too; but it had no form in which
to confine them. Browning and perhaps Wordsworth hammered
out forms for themselves—personal forms, The Excursion, Sordello,
The Ring and the Book, Dramatic Monologues; but no man can
invent a form, create a taste for it, and perfect it too. Tennyson,
who might unquestionably have been a consummate master of minor
forms, took to turning out large patterns on a machine. As for
Keats and Shelley, they were too young to be judged, and they were
trying one form after another.


T. S. ELIOT
443
These poets were certainly obliged to consume energy in a pur-
suit of form which could never lead to a wholly satisfying result.
There has only been one Dante; and after all Dante had the benefit
of years of practice in forms employed and altered by numbers of
contemporaries and predecessors; he did not waste the years of
youth in metric invention; and when he came to the Commedia he
knew how to pillage right and left. To have, given into one's hands,
a crude form, capable of indefinite refinement, and to be the person
to see the possibilities—Shakespeare was very fortunate. And it is
perhaps the craving for some such donnée which draws us on toward
the present mirage of poetic drama.
But it is now very questionable whether there are more than two
or three in the present generation who are capable, the least bit
capable, of benefiting by such advantages were they given. At
most two or three actually devote themselves to this pursuit of form
for which they have little or no public recognition. To create a
form is not merely to invent a shape, a rhyme, or rhythm. It is also
the realization of the whole appropriate content of this rhyme or
rhythm. The sonnet of Shakespeare is not merely such and such
a pattern, but a precise way of thinking and feeling. The frame-
work which was provided for the Elizabethan dramatist was not
merely blank verse and the five act play and the Elizabethan play-
house; it was not merely the plot-for the poets incorporated, re-
modelled, adapted, or invented as occasion suggested. It was also
the half-formed inn, the "temper of the age” (an unsatisfactory
phrase), a preparedness, a habit on the part of the public, to respond
to particular stimuli. There is a book to be written on the common-
places of any great dramatic period, the handling of Fate or Death,
the recurrence of mood, tone, situation. We should see then just
how little each poet had to do; only so much as would make a play
his, only what was really essential to make it different from any
one's else. When there is this economy of effort it is possible to
have several, even many, good poets at once. The great ages did
not perhaps produce much more talent than ours; but less talent was
wasted.
Now in a formless age there is very little hope for the minor poet
to do anything worth doing; and when I say minor I mean very
good poets indeed: such as filled the Greek anthology and the
Elizabethan songbooks; even a Herrick; but not merely second-
a
a


444
THE POSSIBILITY OF A POETIC DRAMA
a
rate poets, for Denham and Waller have quite another importance,
occupying points in the development of a major form. When every-
thing is set out for the minor poet to do, he may quite frequently
come upon some trouvaille, even in the drama: Peele and Brome
are examples. Under the present conditions, the minor poet has
too much to do. And this leads to another reason for the incompe-
tence of our time in poetic drama.
Permanent literature is always a presentation: either a presenta-
tion of thought, or a presentation of feeling by a statement of events
in human action or objects in the external world. In earlier liter-
ature—to avoid the word "classic"-we find both kinds, and some-
—.
times, as in some of the dialogues of Plato, exquisite combinations
of both. Aristotle presents thought, stripped to the essential
structure, and he is a great writer. The Agamemnon, or Macbeth
is equally a statement, but of events. They are as much works of
the "intellect” as the writings of Aristotle. There are more recent
works of art which have the same quality of intellect in common
with those of Aeschylus and Shakespeare and Aristotle: Education
Sentimentale is one of them. Compare it with such a book as
Vanity Fair and you will see that the labour of the intellect con-
sisted largely in a purification, in keeping out a great deal that
Thackeray allowed to remain in; in refraining from reflection, put-
ting into the statement enough to make reflection unnecessary. The
case of Plato is still more illuminating. Take the Theaetetus. In
a few opening words Plato gives a scene, a personality, a feeling,
which colour the subsequent discourse but do not interfere with it:
the particular setting, and the abstruse theory of knowledge after-
wards developed, co-operate without confusion. Could any con-
temporary author exhibit such control ?
In the nineteenth century another mentality manifested itself.
It is evident in a very able and brilliant poem, Goethe's Faust.
Marlowe's Mephistopheles is a simpler creature than Goethe's. But
at least Marlowe has in a few words concentratd him into a state-
ment. He is there, and (incidentally) he renders Milton's Satan
superfluous. Goethe's demon inevitably sends us back to Goethe.
He embodies a philosophy. A creation of art should not do that:
he should replace the philosophy. Goethe has not, that is to say,
sacrificed or consecrated his thought to make the drama; the drama
is still a means. And this type of mixed art has been repeated by
a
a


T. S. ELIOT
445
men incomparably smaller than Goethe. We have had one other
remarkable work of this type: Peer Gynt. And we have had the
plays of M. Maeterlinck and M. Claudel. (I should except the
Dynasts. This gigantic panorama is hardly to be called a success,
but it is essentially an attempt to present a vision and “sacrifices"
the philosophy to the vision as all great dramas do. Mr Hardy has
apprehended his matter as a poet and an artist.)
In the work of Maeterlinck and Claudel on the one hand, and
that of M. Bergson on the other, we have the mixture of the genres
in which our age delights. Every work of imagination must have
a philosophy; and every philosophy must be a work of art-how
often have we heard that M. Bergson is an artist! It is a boast
of his disciples. It is what the word "art" means to them that is
the disputable point. Certain works of philosophy can be called
works of art: much of Aristotle and Plato, Spinoza, parts of
Hume, Mr Bradley's Principles of Logic, Mr Russell's essay on
Denoting: clear and beautifully formed thought. But this is not
what the admirers of Bergson, Claudel, or Maeterlinck (the philo-
sophy of the latter is a little out of date) mean. They mean pre-
cisely what is not clear, but what is an emotional stimulus. And
as a mixture of thought and of vision provides more stimulus, by
suggesting both, clear thinking and clear statement of particular
objects must disappear.
The undigested "idea” or philosophy, the idea-emotion, is to be
found also in poetic dramas which are conscientious attempts to
adapt a true structure, Athenian or Elizabethan, to contemporary
feeling. It appears sometimes as the attempt to supply the defect
of structure by an internal emotional structure. “But most impor-
tant of all is the structure of the incidents. For Tragedy is an
imitation, not of men, but of an action and of life, and life consists
in action, and its end is a mode of action, not a quality.” (Poetics:
VI, 9. Butcher's translation.)
We have on the one hand the "poetic” drama, imitation Greek,
imitation Elizabethan, or modern-philosophical, on the other the
comedy of “ideas,” from Shaw, to Galsworthy, down to the ordi-
nary social comedy. The most ramshackle Guitry farce has some
paltry idea or comment upon life put into the mouth of one of the
characters at the end. It is said that the stage can be used for a
variety of
purposes, that in only one of them perhaps is it united


446 THE POSSIBILITY OF A POETIC DRAMA
with literary art. A mute theatre is a possibility (I do not mean
the cinema); the ballet is an actuality (though under-nourished);
opera is an institution; but where you have "imitations of life” on
the stage, with speech, the only standard that we can allow is the
standard of the work of art, aiming at the same intensity at which
poetry and the other forms of art aim. From that point of view the
Shavian drama is a hybrid as the Maeterlinckian drama is, and we
need express no surprise at their belonging to the same epoch. Both
philosophies are popularizations: the moment an idea has been
transferred from its pure state in order that it may become com-
prehensible to the inferior intelligence it has lost contact with art.
It can remain pure only by being stated simply in the form of general
truth, or by being transmuted, as the attitude of Flaubert toward
the small bourgeois is transformed in Education Sentimentale. It
has there become so identified with the reality that you can no
longer say what the idea is.
The essential is not, of course, that drama should be written in
verse, or that we should be able to extenuate our appreciation of
broad farce by occasionally attending a performance of a play of
Euripides where Professor Murray's translation is sold at the door.
The essential is to get upon the stage this precise statement of life
which is at the same time a point of view, a world; a world which
the author's mind has subjected to a process of simplification. I do
not find that any drama which "embodies a philosophy of the
author's (like Faust) or which illustrates any social theory (like
Shaw's) can possibly fulfil the requirements—though a place might
be left for Shaw if not for Goethe. And the world of Ibsen and
the world of Chekhov are not enough simplified, universal.
Finally, we must take into account the instability of any art-
the drama, music, dancing—which depends upon representation by
performers. The intervention of performers introduces a compli-
cation of economic conditions which is in itself likely to be injurious.
A struggle, more or less unconscious, between the creator and the
interpreter is almost inevitable. The interest of a performer is al-
most certain to be centred in himself: a very slight acquaintance
with actors and musicians will testify. The performer is interested
not in form but in opportunities for virtuosity or in the communica-
tion of his “personality”; the formlessness, the lack of intellectual
clarity and distinction in modern music, the great physical stamina


T. S. ELIOT
447
and physical training which it often requires, are perhaps signs of
the triumph of the performer. The consummation of the triumph
.
of the actor over the play is perhaps the productions of the Guitry.
The conflict is one which certainly can not be terminated by the
utter rout of the actor profession. For one thing, the stage appeals
.
to too many demands besides the demand for art, for that to be
pos-
sible; and also we need, unfortunately, something more than re-
fined automata. Occasionally attempts have been made to "get
around” the actor, to envelop him in masks, to set up a few “con-
ventions” for him to stumble over, or even to develop little breeds
of actors for some special Art drama. This meddling with nature
seldom succeeds; nature usually overcomes these obstacles. Pos-
sibly the majority of attempts to confect a poetic drama have begun
at the wrong end; they have aimed at the small public which wants
"poetry.” (“Novices,” says Aristotle, “in the art attain to finish
of diction and precision of portraiture before they can construct the
plot.”) The Elizabethan drama was aimed at a public which
wanted entertainment of a crude sort, but would stand a good deal
of poetry; our problem should be to take a form of entertainment,
and subject it to the process which would leave it a form of art.
Perhaps the music hall comedian is the best material. I am aware
that this is a dangerous suggestion to make. For every person who
is likely to consider it seriously there are a dozen toy-makers who
would leap to tickle aesthetic society into one more quiver and gig-
gle of art debauch. Very few treat art seriously. There are those
who treat it solemnly, and will continue to write poetic pastiches of
Euripides and Shakespeare; and there are others who treat it as a
joke.
a
a


HOW HÉLOÏSE PASSED THE WINTER OF 1117
WITH HER UNCLE, CANON FULBERT OF
NOTRE DAME, AND HIS GOOD
SERVANT, MADELON
BY GEORGE MOORE
A
S they came down the stairs Madelon spoke of a wolf-hunt,
saying that the hunters were waiting for the full moon to
beguile the pack into the city. Madelon says there's going to be a
wolf-hunt, the Canon said, throwing open the study door. From
whom didst get the news? Héloïse asked.
Héloïse asked. From whom indeed?
Madelon replied. Why, all the town is talking of it; nor are
,
there two in the town except your two selves who don't know of it.
And as uncle and niece begged of her to remove their ignorance, she
began to tell that the wolves had been in the streets lately after
nightfall, picking up what they could get in the way of stray cats
and dogs, and emboldened by hunger, for the snow was falling fast,
they would soon come into the streets as they did in Brittany, for
had she not seen a child eaten by an old grey wolf in her own vil-
lage street? And lest the same disaster should fall out in Paris, as
well it might if the wolves were not to be persecuted, the towns-
folk were about to begin to rid themselves of the large pack that
came down from the Orléans forest every night, a matter of fifty
miles. But what is fifty miles, she said, to a wolf? Just no more
than a little trot round to ourselves across the island from bridge
to bridge. The squealing of a pig tied to a post by the Little
Bridge will soon be heard, and the wolf that hears it will let off a
howl to his comrades, a dozen or twenty, for no one knows the size
of the pack, and these will soon be growling and fighting over piggy.
Another will be tied within the island some yards behind the bridge,
and he too will be eaten; and three nights from now, being full
moon and the night almost as clear as day, a dozen wolves or more
will be seeking for food beyond the bridge, and when they are well
within the city the bridges will be held by spearmen. So let us pray
for a fine night, for clear moonlight means the death of the pack.
a


GEORGE MOORE
449
a
It will be a clever wolf who will escape with his life. So said
Madelon, and it was as if God had answered their prayers, for on
the night of the full moon a blue stream of light shone right across
the island, and a dozen wolves were hunted through it, shapely grey
animals with bushy tails, pretty triangular ears and long jaws filled
with strangely devised teeth, harmonizing in their variety; exquisite
instruments of torture that would delight our executioner. Again
and again the wolves escaped the spearmen in the street, but all the
doors were closed against them and large dogs tracked them and
drove them out of their hiding-places, and they were done to death
in couples and singly, with spears and great beams of wood sharp-
ened and hardened by fire, not dying, however, without a fight.
But the wolf that stayed to bite was hewed down or pierced with a
sword, till at last the remnant began to see that only by swimming
the stream could they escape. Some five or six plunged in and swam
valiantly, but archers were placed along the left and the right banks
behind the poplar and the willow trees, and when a wolf reached
the middle of the stream an arrow struck him; he went under, the
current swilled him away, and from their high balcony Héloïse, the
Canon, and Madelon watched the shooting from the right bank, see-
ing one grey, courageous animal reach the bank despite the mortal
He is the last one, Héloïse said, but at these words a beauti-
ful young wolf galloped down their street and, catching sight of
Héloïse on the balcony, he laid himself down against the door, and
howled for it to be opened to him; and she might have risked being
bitten, but before there was time to ask for the Canon's consent
some hunters appeared in the street and the young wolf was slain
in a corner, a big beam being driven through him.
There's no better covering than a wolf-skin to wrap round the
knees, said one of the hunters. But I can not sit reading with the
skin of the animal about my knees that howled to me for help,
Héloïse said. We thought, said the hunter, that the skin came to
you by right, he that wore it being killed at your door; and as
Héloïse would not buy the wolf, he was slung over the beam and
carried away for other knees.
arrow.
a
The news of the hunt in the streets and markets next morning
was that eleven wolves had been killed. The twelfth had escaped,


450 HOW HELOISE PASSED THE WINTER OF 1117
and this was looked upon as part of the general good fortune, for
he, so it was said, would tell his comrades of the danger of ventur-
ing into men's cities, especially those built on islands. It was hoped
that the snow, which had begun to come down again, would not
fetch further wolves out of their forests; it was hoped, too, that it
would not be long upon the ground; a week was spoken of as likely,
they being now in February. But almost while the folk were talk-
ing of the coming of spring, the blue sky darkened to a dun grey
overhead; copper and sulphur it was along the horizon, betokening
more snow. The wind rose and shrieked all night about the pointed
towers and the peaked gables; and in the morning snow was falling
thickly, large flakes more wonderful than any leaf or flower or shell,
for nothing compares with the large, white friable snow that passes
into a drop of water almost as soon as it falls into the hand that
catches it. But in eleven hundred and seventeen it lay on the frozen
ground, deepening every hour, day after day filling the roadway and
the roofs, whitening the tops of the towers, bearing down the
branches of the trees; a wonderful sight truly is a city seen through
the white flutter, falling relentlessly, falling always, as if the sky
sought to bury the world. Will the flakes never cease from fal-
ling? was the thought in everybody's mind, and looking out of their
narrow windows, the folk saw little else but snow. It will snow
all night, they said; and if it snows all to-morrow and the next
night we shall not be able to open our doors. But at last the snow
ceased to fall, and shovels were again heard clearing the streets, pil-
ing the snow up on either side of the roadway, the ditches rising to
seven, eight, and even ten feet high.
It was often on the tongue that if a thaw came quickly water
would ooze and trickle down the walls of the houses through the
ceilings, bringing them down and littering the floors; and God be-
gan to seem ungrateful to all, for the armies that had been sent to
Palestine to rescue the Sepulchre from the Infidel were in every-
body's mind. Even the prelacy could not put their doubts aside,
and so weary were all of the cold that it came to be said that the
Seine might rise and drown them without anybody caring; better
drowning than freezing; and the fear, too, was prevalent that great
packs of wolves were assembling in the Orléans forest, and would
come one night across the ice and devour the half-starved, who were
without power to fight them. Be this as it may, from near and far


GEORGE MOORE
451
a
the wolves howled their hunger over frozen fields, and under all
their blankets the shivering folk bethought themselves over the
animals lolloping through the streets, quarrelling over the watch-
men and then waiting for the doors to be opened, or giving occasion-
al chase to houseless cats and dogs, and when these lacked fol-
lowing the ducks and geese that had come up from the sea, and
grabbing starveling birds hardly able to fly. Very often a fox,
sneaking along the river-side in the hope of picking up a rat or two,
was picked up himself by the wolves and eaten, despite cousinship.
Hawks and hooded crows were about, glad to get a bit of entrail or
skin left behind by the wolves, and as for the birds, Héloïse said,
they seem all to have come out of the woods and fields hoping to
find warmth and food in the city, for though there is not much of
either in Paris, still Paris must be warmer than the country, and we
always have a few crumbs for them. Do they tell each other? she
asked herself, as she overlooked the feathered company gathered
about on Madelon's balcony,green and gold finches, sparrows, robins,
blackbirds, and thrushes, bull-finches, and even wrens, and as she fed
them she caught sight of all the country beyond the river. Never
did the drama of life and death cease, taking unexpected turns. A
great grey bird came down the sky one day, the silver lining of his
wings showing as he wheeled, a heron in search of an open pool, she
said; and it was not long before she saw the bird strike at some-
thing, but what the capture might be the wriggle along the bank
did not express. Was it newt or frog? she asked, or a rat per-
,
chance? And after swallowing whatever might have been his break-
fast, the bird disappeared into the sedges, raising from time to time
a watchful, ecclesiastical head. He has found a pool where the cur-
rent is likely to break up the ice to-morrow or the day after, she said;
he would not have settled himself in the sedges, chosen that corner,
if he did not sense a thaw. Ah, a fox is lurking, and will get the
heron and the rat together. But the watchful bird rose, escaping
capture, leaving behind a hungry fox who watched the grey wings
aloft, carrying the bird, it seemed, no faster than himself could run.
If I had made my rush a little sooner I might have got him, the fox
is saying to himself, Héloïse said, as she entered the house, with the
intention of seeking more bread in the kitchen; for there is no end
to my beggars, she added. On her way thither she met Madelon
returning from the market with a long tale to tell that no food had
a


452 HOW HELOISE PASSED THE WINTER OF 1117
come into Paris that morning, carts having been delayed on their
way by the snow, which had become like ice. The horses slipped
and slithered, she said, unable to get their loads along, and the city
farriers were gone to reshoe the horses, but the frosting will soon
wear down. And then the farriers will have to reshoe the horses,
Héloïse réplied; a remark that Madelon seemed to resent, for she
retired growling.
Nobody stirred out of doors who could remain within, but walls
are poor shelter from great masses of snow piled along the streets,
grimy heaps that might be dust-heaps but for patches of white here
and there; snow soon loses its beauty in the city. The sky dark-
ened again and the yellow rim over the horizon told of more snow.
As soon as it ceased to fall men were at work raising the ditches
higher. It began to be felt that none could redeem the city but
God. To win him over, Masses were announced, and for these the
Canon had to struggle up the street, he and Héloïse supporting each
other, and, losing their shoes from time to time in the snow, they
spoke, whilst they sought them, of the cities of the North, whose
fate it was to lie three or four months of the
year
under snow.
But the North has sledges, the Canon said, and great stoves in
the houses; we are unprepared against the snow and must pray for
a thaw. The noise of stamping feet almost silenced the celebrant,
and the preacher could only beg the folk to put their trust in God,
and to his exhortations the folk answered only: what have we done
to deserve this plague? We are not Egyptians who keep the Lord's
people in captivity. Have we not sent the flower of France to
Palestine? Of what good to be good if a winter like this is our
one reward? God is laughing at us. Such was the talk in the rue
des Chantres as the folk went back and forth from the Cathedral
through the thin wintry day, a small passage of daylight between
the long nights.
It is in our legs that we suffer, Fulbert said; one can keep the
body warm but not the legs. And Héloïse thought of the wolf-skin
she had refused as they sat watching the spluttering log, not daring
to ask Madelon for another, knowing well she would say: if you
ask for any more logs it will be the worse for you; you'll be with-
out dinner in three weeks, for there is no telling that the snow won't
be with us till then.
The last time they asked for a log she told them that she had seen


GEORGE MOORE
453
a
snow lying on the ground in Brittany for months at a time, and that
whilst the snow lasted no logs could come up from the forest. Only
in our beds are we warm, Héloïse said, speaking at the end of a long
silence; but we can not remain in bed all day and all night. She
had a little pan that she kept within her muff, for her finger-tips
burned so bitterly that she could not fix her attention on her book.
The Canon had long ago ceased to read, and sat stamping his feet
on the cold hearth in which there were but some glimmering ashes,
careless whether Héloïse was reading Plato or Aristotle, or had re-
turned from philosophy to poetry; nor had he any longer thought
of her future, whether she should return to the cloister or marry one
of the great nobles that came up from the provinces for the Easter
ceremonies at the Cathedral. And giving utterance one day to the
hope that if she did marry she would live in a well-wooded country,
a
she asked him if he would like to see her a comtesse or an abbess,
and they talked for a while on the married and the celibate life,
without much interest in these questions, a burning log having be-
come more important.
It may be that a change is come; let us go and see, said the Canon.
,
.
The stars were shining, alas! and they went to their beds disconso-
late, thinking of a completely frozen river, for if this last calamity
were to fall out then indeed they might say their prayers and pre-
pare for paradise. Or hell, Héloïse said, and the Canon had no
heart to reprove her for her levity.
But the frost they detected in the air did not last. The wind
changed, clouds began to gather, and once more they were living in
a moist atmosphere, but the cold was not less than before, for the
streets were full of snow. Dirty, ignominious, earth-disgraced
snow, the Canon said, and leaving the rest of his thoughts to be in-
ferred from the context, that the fallen snow and the fallen soul
were comparable, he started to wade through mud and water to the
Cathedral, stopping on his threshold to remind Héloïse that news
had not come from Palestine for
Have the Crusaders
been defeated? he asked. Is the Sepulchre again in the hands of
the Saracens?
The rain poured and the wind howled. Now and then the sky
blackened a little, giving token of another down-pour, and an icy
flood carried by a whirling wind swept about the streets.
back in the original marsh, the people said; the earth is without
many weeks.
We are


454 HOW HELOISE PASSED THE WINTER OF 1117
green and the sky without blue. Not a streak of blue for many
months. A late spring, said another, and his words were under-
stood as ironical. God indeed seemed angry with his people, for at
the beginning of March snow began to fall again and an old willow,
the one, Héloïse said, in which the bees had made their nests, crashed
into the storm and was carried away by the swirling water. Made-
lon, who thought more of honey than of the bees, said: we have
lost many pounds of honey. Not many, Héloïse answered; for the
bees perhaps died this winter for lack of honey; we may have taken
too much from them. Of that I know naught, Madelon said; they
are gone and the tree with them. But Madelon, said Héloïse, are we
going to get any spring this year? It doesn't look much like it at
present, Madelon answered, the snow still on the ground and we in
March. And Héloïse, who had not seen many springs, fell to think-
ing that the prophecy that the world would end in the year one
thousand was about to be fulfilled. The prophets had miscalculat-
ed the date of the end by a hundred years, that was all. The be-
ginning of the end is at hand, she said; and next morning she awoke
to find that she was mistaken, the sky was blue, the air warm, and
before evening the passengers were walking in the middle of the
street to avoid the drip, talking about the rising river and saying
that boats would soon be plying about the Cathedral. But the
river sank despite the melting snows, and every morning an almost
summer sun was busy drying up the streets, turning the marshes into
fields again, the genial warmth and gaiety of the sky permitting
Héloïse to sit in the company-room without a fire, a rug about her
knees, reading in the window, hearing (in her mind's ear, of course)
the great minstrel Orpheus singing as the galley pranced over the
curling waves, through the Hellespont, passing island after island,
the Chorus telling new stories of adventure, enchantment, and
prophecy, that new worlds shall be discovered in the age to come,
that the imprisoning ocean shall be thrown open till there shall be
no land alone, no ultima Thule.


TEN POEMS
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
MICHAEL ROBARTES AND THE DANCER
He
a
Opinion is not worth a rush;
In this altar-piece the knight,
Who grips his long spear so to push
That dragon through the fading light,
Loved the lady; and it's plain
The half-dead dragon was her thought
That every morning rose again
And dug its claws and shrieked and fought.
Could the impossible come to pass
She would have time to turn her eyes,
Her lover thought, upon the glass
And on the instant would grow wise.
She
You mean they argued.
He
Put it so;
But bear in mind your lover's wage
Is what your looking-glass can show,
And that he will turn green
with
rage
At all that is not pictured there.
She
May I not put myself to College ?


456
TEN POEMS
He
Go pluck Athena by the hair;
For what mere book can grant a knowledge
а
With an impassioned gravity
Appropriate to that beating breast,
That vigorous thigh, that dreaming eye?
And may the devil take the rest.
She
And must no beautiful woman be
Learned like a man?
He
Paul Veronese
And all his sacred company
Imagined bodies all their days,
By the lagoon you love so much,
For proud, soft, ceremonious proof
That all must come to sight and touch;
While Michael Angelo's Sistine roof
His Morning and his Night disclose
How sinew that has been pulled tight,
Or it may be loosened in repose,
.
Can rule by supernatural right
Yet be but sinew.
She
I have heard said
There is great danger in the body.
Не
Did God in portioning wine and bread
Give man His thought or His mere body?


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
457
She
My wretched dragon is perplexed.
He
I have principles to prove me right.
It follows from this Latin text
That blest souls are not composite,
And that all beautiful women may
Live in uncomposite blessedness,
And lead us to the like-if they
Will banish every thought, unless
The lineaments that please their view,
When the long looking-glass is full,
Even from the foot-sole think it too.
She
They say such different things at school.
EASTER 1916
I
I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,


458
TEN POEMS
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
II
That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers ?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse.
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vain-glorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
III
Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter, seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream
The horse that comes from the road,


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
459
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute change.
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim;
And a horse plashes within it
Where long-legged moor-hens dive
And hens to moor-cocks call.
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.
IV
a
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death.
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead.
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse-
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
September 25th, 1916


460
TEN POEMS
UNDER SATURN
Do not because this day I have grown saturnine
Imagine that some lost love, unassailable
Being a portion of my youth, can make me pine
And so forget the comfort that no words can tell
Your coming brought; though I ac