knowledge I have gone
On a fantastic ride I swear my horse's flanks were spurred
By childish memories of an old cross Pollexfen
And of a Middleton whose name you never heard
And of a red-haired Yeats whose looks, although he died
Before my time, seem like a vivid memory.
You heard that labouring man who had served my people. He said
Upon the open road, near to the Sligo quay-
No, no—not said, but cried it out—"You have come again
And surely after twenty years it was time to come.”
I am thinking of a child's vow sworn in vain
Never to leave that valley his fathers called their home.
November, 1919
SIXTEEN DEAD MEN
I
O but we talked at large before
The sixteen men were shot,
But who can talk of give and take
What should be and what not?
While those dead men are loitering there
To stir the boiling pot.
II
You say that we should still the land
Till Germany's overcome;
But who is there to argue that
Now Pearse is deaf and dumb?
And is their logic to outweigh
MacDonough's bony thumb?


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
461
III
How could you dream they'd listen
That have an ear alone
For those new comrades they have found
Lord Edward and Wolf Tone,
Or meddle with our give and take
That converse bone to bone.
THE ROSE TREE
I
“O words are lightly spoken,”
Said Pearse to Connolly,
“Maybe a breath of politic words
Has withered our Rose tree;
Or maybe but a wind that blows
Across the bitter sea.”
II
“It needs to be but watered,”
James Connolly replied,
“To make the green come out again
And spread on every side,
And shake the blossom from the bud
To be the garden's pride.
III
“But where can we draw water?,”
Said Pearse to Connolly,
“When all the wells are parched away;
O plain as plain can be
There's nothing but our own red blood
Can make a right rose tree.”


462
TEN POEMS
ON A POLITICAL PRISONER
I
She that but little patience knew,
From childhood on, had now so much
A grey gull lost its fear and flew
Down to her cell and there alit,
And there endured her finger's touch
And from her fingers ate its bit.
II
Did she in touching that lone wing
Recall the years before her mind
Became a bitter, an abstract thing,
For thought some popular enmity,
Blind and leader of the blind
Drinking the foul ditch where they lie?
III
When long ago I saw her ride
Under Ben Bulban to the meet,
The beauty of her country-side
With all youth's lonely wildness stirred
She seemed to have grown clean and sweet
Like any rock-bred, sea-borne bird:
IV
Sea-borne, or balanced on the air
When first it sprang out of the nest
Upon some lofty rock to stare
Upon the cloudy canopy,
While under its storm-beaten breast
Cried out the hollows of the sea.


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
463
TOWARDS BREAK OF DAY
I
Was it the double of my dream
The woman that by me lay
Dreamed, or did we halve a dream
Under the first cold gleam of day?
II
I thought "there is a waterfall
Upon Ben Bulban side,
That all my childhood counted dear;
Were I to travel far and wide
I could not find a thing so dear.”
My memories had magnified
So many times childish delight,
I would have touched it like a child
But knew my finger would have touched
Cold stone and water.
I grew wild
Even accusing heaven because
It had set down among its laws
Nothing that we love over-much
Is ponderable to our touch.
III
I dreamed towards break of day
The cold blown
spray
in
my
nostril.
But she that beside me lay
Had watched in bitterer sleep
The marvellous stag of Arthur,
That lofty white stag, leap
From mountain steep to steep.


464
TEN POEMS
DEMON AND BEAST
I
For certain minutes at the least
That crafty demon and that loud beast
That plague me day and night
Ran out of my sight;
Though I had long pernned in the gyre
Between my hatred and desire
I saw my freedom won
And all laugh in the sun.
II
The glittering eyes in a death's head
Of old Luke Wadding's portrait said
Welcome, and the Ormonds all
Nodded upon the wall,
And even Stafford smiled as though
It made him happier to know
I understood his plan;
Now that the loud beast ran
There was no portrait in the Gallery
But beckoned to sweet company,
For all men's thought grew clear
Being dear as mine are dear.
III
But soon a tear-drop started up
For aimless joy had made me stop
Beside the little lake
To watch a white gull take
A bit of bread thrown up into the air;
Now gyring down and pernning there
He splashed where an absurd
Portly green-pated bird
Shook off the water from his back;


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
465
Being no more demoniac
A stupid happy creature
Could rouse my whole nature.
IV
Yet I am certain as can be
That every natural victory
Belongs to beast or demon.
That never yet had freeman
Right mastery of natural things
And that mere growing old, that brings
Chilled blood, this sweetness brought;
Yet have no dearer thought
Than that I may find out a way
To make it linger half a day.
V
O what a sweetness strayed
Through barren Thebaid,
Or by the Mareotic sea
When that exultant Anthony
And twice a thousand more
Starved upon the shore
And withered to a bag of bones:
What had the Caesars but their thrones?
A MEDIATION IN TIME OF WAR
For one throb of the Artery,
While on that old grey stone I sat
Under the old wind-broken tree,
I knew that One is animate,
Mankind inanimate phantasy.


466
TEN POEMS
THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon can not hear the falconer;
Things fall aparti the centre can not hold,
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
А
gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That thirty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?


HUNGARIAN NIGHT
BY PAUL MORAND
“I
like the tall one with the big hips,” said Jean, in drunken
obstinacy.
The other was clothed in lean muscles, corded veins, ligaments
that showed like bracelets, shadows of bone, and the face of a
sacred animal.
In preferring her, I felt the easy superiority of a dream, and as if
dreaming I took a puerile delight in this formula.
“She pleases me as the product of a unicorn and a red ass.”
A dahlia fell into my open mouth to the gullet. Battle of
flowers. A garden passing in the air.
Sustained by Schubert's Militär Marsch, the two Jewish girls
danced on the stage, nervous, pathetic, paying no attention to our
drunken stare, to the smoke lassoos, or the sparkle of the glasses
which persons with their heads shaved blue were emptying with a
sucking sound, like wash basins.
When the Hungarian orchestra had succumbed, the Sisters Häjyz
Nanas came to pay their respects, Jean's preference, wig in hand,
offering to laughter the cranial vault of a merchant of Tangier.
"It's a man, you were fooled.”
"I was fooled..
In spite of a ceremonious entrance, two palm trees, an admission
charge of two hundred crowns, and a doorman like a noble father
at the An Der Wien theater, having the manners of an archduke (he
was actually the General von H. of Przemysl), the Jardin de Paris
was a chop-house. But the only one of any importance open in
Vienna during July, the days when there was no bal masqué at the
Belvidere.
Irritated by the lights, the chandelier rolled, a cut-glass porcu-
pine, in the midst of Venetian mirrors, which reflected the red
damask walls and rococo loges copied from Schönbrunn. Irrecon-
cilable as a jazz band and a symphony orchestra, the women in short
skirts affronted the women in long skirts. The former had in their
favour a certain insinuation of the thighs; a way of saying "mon
a


468
HUNGARIAN NIGHT
a
”
cher”; pendants which opened revealing the donor, a grand duke,
since hanged, preserved in the glitter of brilliants, their souvenirs
of Nice; they recalled some luncheons of the Archduke Otho at
Negresco's, some parties of the Queen of Naples, with adieux from
their nodding aigrettes, their big, noble Lewis hats, and a bitterness
in their soft cheeks which the Greek nouveaux riches used to ap-
propriate.
The young ones had nothing to offer but energy, nervous excesses,
and those amenities which led the others to call them "modernists."
When
my dancer came up I offered her the imitation tokay which
oscillated in a flask on our gold table.
"Where are you from?”
She answered with her name. “Zaël."
She was from Pesth. Between us we had only a few words of
German.
“And you ?"
"From Paris.”
“Schlecht Paris,” she said, putting out her tongue.
Italian lieutenants blocked the doorway, pink carnations in their
cartridge belts. Roumanian captains who had come to commandeer
cattle, were choosing ladies with sheep heads. The Reparations
Commission was surveying the local champagne.
“My friend really believed that your partner was your sister.”
“We are not related. He is from Gratz and his name is Samuel
Ehrenfeld. Do you want me to get him? Why do you laugh,
little uncle?”
“In French it is funny to call oneself Samuel Field-of-Honour.”
For two hundred and eighty crowns we had cigars of dry grass
and saucers of currants. Zaël impaled them on a straw.
“What do you say?"
“That you've a nice little mug,” said Jean, circumscribing his
face with a finger, as they do in pantomimes.
Zaël balanced on her chair with difficulty the body of an Israelite
sylph, no breast, back a little rounded, arms ending in nervous,
practical hands, too well developed for their seventeen years (we
have yearly at least one like this at the Conservatory), but a fine
skin and the wild air of an exile and a pick-up.
“What do you think of Bela Kun?” asked Jean suddenly start-
ing an interview.


PAUL MORAND
469
a
"Bela Kun!” she praised him in Yiddish. “He is in Vienna. But
he was King of Hungary, little uncle. He is very rich. Soon he
will be King in Vienna too. Ehrenfeld says he is much liked in
Moscow, and that he will also go to Italy. They will hang all the
Hungarians who throw Jews into wells.”
At half past eleven the Jardin de Paris closed, and Zaël suggested
the Moulin Rouge with its special entrance on St Petersplatz. It
was a Secession mausoleum, in black marble with stylicized gold
cords and a ceiling of silver squares, ornamented with turquoise.
The proprietor, formerly a captain of the Guard, had the fine, in-
significant face of a tennis champion; he seated us at the edge of
a black carpet sown with roses. We ordered a violet liqueur. Zaël
made friends with some little foreigners in pearl gray cutaways,
pumps, and white socks.
Dressed in a frock coat, with side whisk-
ers framing his porcelain face, an old ministerial manager was pas-
sing hard-boiled eggs in a gilded basket.
I started to blow my nose. Zaël flung herself, with an exclama-
tion, upon my cashmere handkerchief. The silk drove her mad.
“Little uncle, I implore you, give me this for a present!"
“It will be a good-bye present. We are leaving to-
morrow for
Budapesth: by the Danube, because of the strike.”
“Take me with you,” she cried excitedly, “I want to see my
grandfather. He is the sexton at the synagogue.”
“You have no passport.'
"I know a Russian who makes them near the station; his name
is Apotheoz.”
Something about her is irresistible. Except when she bites my
arm to the bone, out of happiness. I protest.
“The Eternal said: “Thou shalt not eat that which is impure.”
She listens, her body motionless to the eyes; but in her eyes are all
the promises. Jean also admits it is sorcery. We go into one of
the special rooms, where a red lamp grows congested among satanic
black curtains.
“Drei cocktails.”
Roaches run about on gold-lacquered tables. Zaël lets herself
be kissed without its deflecting her argument.
“Take me along. My grandfather is so old, so sick. I have’nt
seen him for eighteen months, and if you don't, I never shall see
him. I am his star. It is written 'Misfortune will come to
a
.
.


470
HUNGARIAN NIGHT
him who watches not over his ancestors, and whose feet stay not at
home.' The old man never goes out for fear of being murdered.
A year ago one of my brothers was knocked on the head with a night-
stick at Szegedin. Samarie, the other, is in New York. He writes
articles in favour of our race; we are suspected by the police. All
the same I'll go with you, little uncles; you are foreigners with
white
passports, and no one will dare to say anything to me.”
a
We were going down the river, laid flat by the north wind, be-
tween elevators standing erect like trumpets of cement, connected
by little cars on wheels. For a moment more, the green domes, the
palace facades, the broken windows, reviewed by equestrian bronz-
es; among gasometers and in the midst of mobs of unemployed
Vienna was bowing like a dowager in distress. We passed lighters
loaded with war material, filled to the sinking point with unbeliev-
able iron junk, ornamental iron work, wheels, rust; a whole country
continuing to give herself up by pieces. Then the Danube spread
out, as all rivers do, accepted only the sky, setting willows between
itself and the plain, taking a base from the grainless mills, swift,
fleeing the bridges.
Zaël was lying between Jean and myself in a steamer chair. She
had put on her silk dress for the journey; round her forehead was
a white satin ribbon; her legs were bare in velvet slippers. Over-
head on the awning which snapped in the wind, the smoke rolled
black shadows.
“I am happy to be with my little uncles.”
Then the plain of Hungary, with its reverberation of ripe grain,
cut by firm belts of acacias, weighted with mills, gave place to
mountains. The river narrowed. Pine woods stood in separate
blocks, keeping their rank in spite of the slope, dark from the edge
like posters. Glimpsed villages, gathered about a bulbous steeple.
As we approached Pesth, red and naked men and women appeared,
bathing and shouting along the banks. Boats loaded with the wails
of accordions rolled in the wake of the steamer. Apricot-sellers in
embroidered tunics, climbed on board. After the Czecho-Slovak
frontier, Hungarian subalterns in threadbare dolmans with twisted
moustaches, long starving teeth, and eyes of Turkish mercenaries.


PAUL MORAND
471
gun
The sun plunged finally into a peacock's tail of clouds. Pesth
made itself known by an odour of breweries and tanneries; then an
elbow of the river disclosed Buda, with its Regency hotels, its ter-
raced gardens, its puerile, theatrical, barbarous palace. Big hotels
with every window lighted were moored the length of promenades,
suspended from the sky by the strawberry glow of the roof gardens.
At the Ungaria Jean and I occupied the same room. Zaël's
opened into it. The walls were still riddled with machine bul-
lets, stripped of plaster by the enfilade fire of monitors. A thick
warmth was forgotten in the peppery dishes, which perforated one's
cheeks and were only appeased by a little white wine from Pres-
bourg, tasting of silex. We slept through the day, blinds shut
against a tawny, incandescent Danube, which calcined the bastions
of the Burg, at the feet of parched gardens where coloured glass
balls blossomed alone.
Then, in the evening, the city woke.
the city woke. In the restaurants the
gipsy orchestras began their commentary: sorrowful altos, cellos
with lethargic chests, cymbalums voiceless like harps lapidated with
whips of felt. The women, dressed in muslin, in light pongee, their
faces and arms burned by the sun, watched, indifferent to klaxons,
the armoured motor cars patrolling the city, while the drivers
leaned out to pinch them.
After the second day, rather ugly faces began to prowl around us.
In spite of our remonstrances the porter failed to return Zaël's pass-
port, pretending that the police had kept it. We were advised not
to leave the hotel at night. Strong in the impotence of the authori-
ties, bands of unpaid officers roamed the streets, holding up pedes-
trians, sandbagging Jews and strangers.
We accompanied Zaël to the synagogue. The Jewish quarters
witnessed our visit with anxiety. If we stopped too long in one
place, we became aware of furtive eyes looking at us from behind
counters. The shops were closed. Galician Jews in gabardines
with greasy skull-caps pulled down over their ears, their shoulders
covered with dandruff, were selling pamphlets on Zionism, wax
candles, and dyed sheepskins. In court-yards, which communicat-
ed like subterranean passages, and had a balcony projecting from
each floor: a tree, an unharnessed horse, green children.
"The synagogue!” cried Zaël, sniffing with wide nostrils the Jew-
ish odour of the staircase. “Wait for me a minute.”


472
HUNGARIAN NIGHT
>
a
She came down again, not having been able to get in. The old
man was shut up inside and didn't dare to open the door. Ragged
soldiers stood at the head of the stair, barring the entrance, and had
driven her away.
“Their feet run to do evil,” she said, "and they hasten to shed
blood.”
Coming back to the hotel, we noticed that we were followed.
We went to bed about midnight. Zaël came to our room for a drink
and a smoke, asking us to leave the door open between. She seemed
as usual. She took another of my handkerchiefs and danced a
mazurka in her chemise.
In the middle of the night Jean woke me.
“I don't hear anything, but I have a feeling that something has
happened while we were sleeping.'
We turned on the electricity. It was three o'clock. I jumped
out of bed and looked into the next room. Zaël was no longer
there. The door into the corridor was open, the sheets thrown
back, clothes on the ground. The impression of a man's foot re-
mained on the pillow. The odour of some drug hung in the air.
“Chloroform,” said Jean.
. No one answered. At daybreak the night watchman
appeared: he was a Neapolitan with the clay-tinged face of one
who is ageing. He had heard nothing, seen nothing. Nobody had
left the hotel.
"It is inadmissable that any one should disappear in these times
from a hotel like this,” I said. “We shall go to the police.”
The Neapolitain watchman smiled.
“The place must be searched from cellar to attic."
“There isn't any attic, sir. As for the cellar . .. the Ungaria
is of course a palace, but I don't know of anybody who would risk
going down into it in the present state of things. The cellars are
very extensive. And they communicate with the Danube. Be-
lieve me, sir, I don't wish to frighten you, but it would be much bet-
ter to look about in a few hours in the neighbourhood of the dam at
St Margaret Island."
We rang
a
.



-1
☺
Bollen Brommers
KNEELING GIRL.
Courtesy of M. Knoedler and Co.
ARTHUR B. DAVIES


5.*?


WALT WHITMAN'S LOVE AFFAIRS
BY EMORY HOLLOWAY
THAT the centennial year of America's most autobiographic
poet
should have come and gone
with students still
very
much
in the dark concerning some of the fundamental mysteries of his life
and work is perhaps less strange than paradoxical. Walt Whit-
man's Leaves of Grass may be assumed to reveal, as it professes to
do, the whole personality of the author; but not every reader knows
how to take that revelation, where to allow for the author's con-
scious or unconscious distortion of fact or for his sublimation of
experience. I do not myself attempt to set forth in this article the
whole story, or even a complete theory, of his affaires de coeur; but
a great deal of research has unearthed a considerable amount of new
evidence, which I shall present as consistently as I can.
It is a matter of immeasurable bad fortune that we know so little
of Whitman's friendships before the age of twenty. He who was
later to write Calamus and Children of Adam must have craved
such attachments during adolescence, but just how far this craving
went unsatisfied no one knows. A poem of his twentieth year, how-
ever, as well as some of his early essays, indicates that he had al-
ready known the pangs of unreturned affection so often that they
found utterance in his verse. So despondent did he become as to
long for death, hoping in another world to find his soul's mate:
"O, mighty powers of Destiny!
When from this coil of flesh I'm free-
When through my second life I rove,
Let me but find one heart to love,
As I would wish to love:
“Let me but meet a single breast,
Wherein this tired soul its hope may rest,
In never-dying faith: ah, then,
That would be bliss all free from pain,
And sickness of the heart.


474
WALT WHITMAN'S LOVE AFFAIRS
"For vainly through this world below
We seek affection. Nought but woe
Is with our earthy journey wove;
And so the heart must look above,
Or die in dull despair.”
Were there space in this article to linger amid the juvenilia of
this chaste, affectionate, wistful youth, it could be shown that out
of this unreturned affection grew both Whitman's Narcissian "ego-
tism” and also his catholic humanitarianism. The turn in both of
these directions, but especially in the latter, became more pro-
nounced during his twenties, a period in which he "shivered a lance
in the lists of high debate” on many questions of reform. This was
an expression of the puritan idealism he had inherited from his New
England ancestry. But he was epicurean as well, a rare and exact-
ing hedonist, a poetic "caresser of life.” I suppose we shall never
know the story of Whitman's intimacies during the days of his early
journalism in New York and Brooklyn (1841-1848), but the only
biographer who appears to know anything authentic about it (John
Burroughs) traces to this period of 'body-jolliness' poems of both
the Children of Adam and the Calamus types, that is to say, poems
inspired by women and poems inspired by men. However, there
is no record of any dominating friendship or romance in this period
of his life, an age at which many passionate poets are oscillating
between a mistress and the muse. But when, at the age of almost
twenty-nine, Whitman left New York for a three months' residence
in the "seductive South,” legend has it that he encountered a genu-
ine rival to his art.
Biographers who believe that there was a very significant Whit-
man romance in New Orleans in 1848 have based their theory
largely on the following bits of evidence:
In reply to persistent and disconcerting queries from his
English admirer, John Addington Symonds, concerning the inner
meaning of some of Whitman's poems of affection, the poet wrote,
on August 19, 1890, the following sentences, so cryptic as to give
his biographers more trouble than any other he ever put on paper:
“My life, young manhood, mid-age, times South, etc., have been
jolly bodily, and doubtless open to criticism. Tho' unmarried I
have had six children-two are dead-one living, Southern grand-
a
1.


EMORY HOLLOWAY
475
child, fine boy, writes to me occasionally-circumstances (connect-
ed with their fortune and benefit) have separated me from intimate
relations.” Horace Traubel records a number of rather indefinite
allusions to the matter made to him by Whitman during the very
last years of the poet's life, and both he and Mr T. B. Harned men-
tion the old man's promise to give them, his literary executors, a
deposition concerning the facts of his "secret”-a promise which,
.
however, he never found the right mood to keep.
2. Whitman's departure from the congenial Southern city, in
which he had pleasant employment, was sudden, and the reasons he
gave for it have seemed inadequate and incomplete; hence some
biographers have surmised that the real reason lay in a romance
which threatened his prophetic and artistic independence.
3. Until recently none of Whitman's characteristic verse could
be traced back beyond the 1848 journey to New Orleans, so that the
experiences of this journey are sometimes taken to be the inspiration
which liberated his song.
4. A poem, Once I Pass'd through a Populous City, seems to
describe a transitory residence in some picturesque city of which
the poet can recall only the passionate attachment of a woman who
detained him there and was broken-hearted at his parting.
From these facts Mr H. B. Binns, M. Leon Bazalgette, and
others have elaborated a fairly complete theory, though not without
individual variations; with the result that it is now quite common-
ly assumed that Whitman did have a liaison in New Orleans in
1848. A young man of fine personal presence—so the story goes
- he was seen by a Southern woman of high social standing, for
whom to see him was to love him. This attachment, the responsi-
bility for which is usually placed at the lady's door (despite Whit-
man's confession of his own culpability), in time bore fruit. An
obstacle to an open marriage with the penniless Northern journalist
had been encountered, however, in the pride of the inamorata's
family. Accordingly, in some versions of the story, a secret mar-
riage is hypothecated (again despite the evidence of the letter to
Symonds) and Whitman is required to give a pledge of secrecy con-
cerning his connection with the proud and aristocratic family of
his lover. Then, having in three months learned the mysteries of
love, Whitman returned north and began the Leaves of Grass in
the inspiration of his first great romance.


476
WALT WHITMAN'S LOVE AFFAIRS
Now, Whitman
may
indeed have had a serious love affair in New
Orleans, but in the light of new evidence we shall have to modify
this explanation of how it all occurred and perhaps assign it to a
later journey to the South, even if we are not compelled to abandon
the common theory altogether. I have examined a manuscript
diary of the poet in the Bucke collection of Whitmaniana which
proves conclusively that the cause of his precipitate departure from
the South was an estrangement between him and his employers and
a difference over money matters. Thus it appears that the early
and unexpected termination of his sojourn in New Orleans had no
connection with romance. Moreover, the name “Whitman” does
not appear as that of the father to any child whose birth was entered,
as the law required, on the records of the city's Health Department
—at least not before 1850. Nor is it in the archives of the old
St. Louis Cathedral, whose baptismal records included the great
majority of the births in the city, both legitimate and natural.
Neither of these records, however, is at all complete. And as to
the a posteriori evidence of the maturer and more poetic composition
which followed the New Orleans residence, it may be true that the
first rhythmical lines of the Leaves were written just after the re-
turn north rather than just before departing for the South; but they
appear in a notebook bearing the date 1847, to which year, for var-
ious reasons which can not here be set forth, we must assign his first
definite efforts to compose the unique volume which was to see the
light of print in 1855. The latter part of this notebook contains,
.
to be sure, the first draft of the Song of Myself, Sections 28-29,
which deal with sexual ecstasy; but Whitman's letter to Symonds
and John Burrough's Notes (1867) both imply that the period of
Whitman's body-jolliness' covered his earlier years (1840-1855)
as well.
There remains the evidence of the poem, Once I Pass'd through
a Populous City. Those who are familiar with Whitman's un-
chronological grouping of his poems will recall that in each edition
(since 1860, when it first appeared in print) this lyric has been
placed in the Children of Adam section, devoted to the celebration
of love between the sexes. But when, a few years ago, I discovered
the original manuscript of this poem in a private library in New
York, I found that, historically, it belongs next I Saw in Louisiana
a Live-Oak Growing, among the Calamus poems, which glorify that


EMORY HOLLOWAY
477
intimate friendship of man for man which in mid-life Whitman
preached as a sort of sentimental-religious democracy. I quote the
manuscript, omitting only words stricken out in
process
of composi-
tion—words which give no hint of the alterations to appear in the
published version.
“Once I passed through a populous city, imprinting
my brain, for future use, with its shows,
architecture, customs and traditions
But now of all that city I remember only the man
who wandered with me there, for love of me,
Day by day, and night by night, we were together.
All else has long been forgotten by me--I remember,
I say, only one rude and ignorant man, who, when
I departed, long and long held me by the hand
with silent lips, sad and tremulous.”
a
I
suppose his reason for disguising the emotion which gave birth
to this poem was the poet-prophet's desire to avoid a charge of
effeminacy. But the important point for the student of Whitman's
verse is the fact that a poem of tenderness addressed to a “rude and
ignorant man” (doubtless an early counterpart to the Pete Doyle
whom he was to meet in Washington) could, through slight
emendations, be transformed into a lyric of man's love for woman
(or is it woman's love for man?) on which biographers might un-
suspectingly build a romantic story. The history of the poem goes
far, I think, toward showing that Whitman retained in his maturity
some of the sexually indiscriminate affection of childhood. And
his ability to direct his romantic sentiments toward man as well as
toward woman accounts, perhaps, for a certain indefinable attrac-
tion which healthy-minded men like Dr Bucke and healthy-minded
women like Mrs Gilchrist have felt in his verse. The artist is ex-
pected to pass in his imagination from the man's point of view to
the woman's and back again at will; Whitman is unique among
the great poets of the world, unless Shakespeare be an exception,
in his power to do this with his heart. This peculiarity, he seems
to have thought, indicated his kinship with the great religious
teachers of the world. But he also knew that such a nature as his
would be misunderstood by most men, and that it might even prove


478
WALT WHITMAN'S LOVE AFFAIRS
a
dangerous to him. In an unpublished manuscript memorandum of
1868 he thus admonishes himself: “Depress the adhesive (manly
love) nature. It is in excess, making life a torment.” Earth, My
Likeness is a poetic cry from this inner conflict.
It is now clear that if there were a romance during Whitman's
first visit to New Orleans, its existence, its date, and its character
must be established by new evidence. A few scraps of such evi-
dence exist. Nine days before Whitman left New Orleans he pub-
lished in the Daily Crescent, on the staff of which he was employed
at the time, a humorous skit describing his experiences at a masked
ball where he met, at his own insistent request, and instantly fell
in love with, a charming lady; but she, to his discomfiture and great
dismay, soon proved to be already married. The sophisticated
reminiscence concludes with a perplexed meditation on the ironies
of human mating:
"It is very evident that she was the one [the ideal lover whom
he had sought in vain since his eighteenth year]; and yet it aston-
ishes me how she could take her present husband for me. There is
no similarity, whatever, between us. She was still young, and no
chance of being an old maid; while he appeared as careless of his
wife's charms as I did of his existence. I wish them both much
happiness, altho’ I am the sufferer by it.”
This might be passed by as merely an exaggerated, if indeed not
a fictitious, account of the ludicrous mistake of an impulsive youth,
who could screen himself behind a nom de plume, but for the curi-
ously corroborative testimony of one of Whitman's more intimate
friends. In the Philadephia Record, August 12, 1917, Mr Francis
Howard Williams, who was acquainted with Whitman for fifteen
years previous to the latter's death, is reported in an interview as
saying:
“Walt was sensitive when people asked him why he never mar-
ried. He talked pretty freely to me about his early personal af-
fairs. There was one woman whom he would have married had
she been free; that was the married woman he met in his sojourn
in New Orleans when a young man.
Her husband knew of their
love, too, I believe."


EMORY HOLLOWAY
479
If this may be taken as an accurate report of Whitman's statements,
and if it be not a mistaken allusion to another romance presently
to be mentioned, then it may of course bear upon the interpretation
of the Crescent article and it may likewise account for the journey
or journeys which Whitman is now known to have subsequently
made to the South.
In the Atlantic Monthly, June, 1907, appeared some very inter-
esting personal recollections of Whitman written by the late Mrs
Ellen M. Calder, formerly Mrs William Douglas O'Connor. In
the Bucke collection of Whitmaniana I saw, some three years ago,
what appeared to be an earlier draft of this article, in which I noted
the following hitherto unpublished passage:
“He (Whitman) had met a certain lady, and by some mischance
a letter revealing her friendship for him fell into her husband's
hands, which made this gentleman very indignant and jealous, and
thereupon, in the presence of his wife and another lady, he abused
Walt. All that excited Walt's sympathy for the lady, over and
above the admiration and affection he felt for her, so that in telling
about it, he said, 'I would marry that woman to-night if she were
free. Correspondence was kept up between them for some time
after that, and he was very strongly attracted to this lady. This
is the only instance I have known where he was strongly attracted
toward any woman in this way. It was this lady for whom he
wrote the little poem in Children of Adam beginning: "Out of the
rolling ocean, the crowd.”
Describing this lady to me he said that she was quite fair, with
brown hair and eyes, and rather plump and womanly and sweet and
gentle, and he said that she bore herself with so much dignity and
was so keenly hurt by what her husband had said, that I think that
drew her to him more. It was in '64 (?).
In connection with the above:—The idea that he conveyed to me
was that he did not think it would have been well for him to have
formed that closest of ties, he was so fond of his freedom; would
have been a great mistake if he had ever married. He said to me
many times that he did not envy men their wives but that he did
envy them their children. He often used this expression, Well, if
I had been caught young I might have done certain things or formed
certain habits.'»
ܕ


480 WALT WHITMAN'S LOVE AFFAIRS
I possess letters written to Whitman in 1863 by an army surgeon
which refer to the former's having a mistress in Washington at that
time. Possibly she was the one whose story Whitman confided to
Mrs O'Connor.
Now, some biographers are inclined to question Whitman's
statement that he was a father, while others reduce the estimate
of his illegal progeny; in any case, their existence rests solely
on Whitman's own testimony given at an age when, it is
pointed out, he may have been subject to hallucinations. But if
there were a child, or children—the number of his supposititious off-
spring concerns students of Whitman's verse less than does the
history of his emotional and moral nature—and if by any chance
it were born into the family of another, with or without the knowl-
edge of the husband, then we should be less puzzled by the odd
phraseology of the letter to Symonds. The three parties to this
hypothetical tragic triangle might have agreed to sacrifice their own
feelings in order to safeguard the legal, social, and financial stand-
ing of the innocent child, allowing it to pass for legitimate on the
condition that Whitman should forego the "intimate relations” to
which he alluded in his confession. Some colour is given to this
hypothesis by the fact that each bit of new evidence we have
examined in this article relates to Whitman's attraction to a mar-
ried woman. And yet I must add that after wide researches and
much study I find it not impossible to doubt the existence of Whit-
man's children.
Our knowledge of the history of the Washington romance is of
course fragmentary. Without here attempting a detailed analysis,
I would suggest, however, that several poems of the period seem to
bear upon it, notably I Hear You Solemn-Sweet Pipes of the
Organ (1865-6), a beautiful lyric which I take to be a companion
to Out of the Rolling Ocean the Crowd (1865), Not Youth Per-
tains to Me (1865), To a Certain Civilian (1865), O Me! O Life!
(1865), Ah Poverties, Wincings, and Sulky Retreats (1865), and
Tears (1867). The last of these but one is clearly the defiant
battle-cry of a strong man struggling for his self-respect with the
unconquered animal nature which made him a "child of Adam.”
I feel confident that this poem, particularly, had a definite auto-
biographic genesis because of its marked similarity to passages in a
Whitman diary of 1868, hitherto unpublished, which put the whole


EMORY HOLLOWAY
481
matter of Whitman's disregard of conventions in a new and more
human light. They indicate that the course of love in this war-
time romance did not run smooth for the poet-unless, indeed, they
refer to some other amour! A page is torn from the diary, the next
one beginning in the middle of a sermon to the author himself on
the subject of his “pursuit” of some one, whose initial has been care-
fully erased from the page and replaced by a number:
“cheating, childish abandonment of myself, fancying what does not
really exist in another, but is all the time in myself alone—utterly
deluded and cheated by myself & my own weakness—Remember
where I am most weak, & most lacking. Yet always preserve a
kind spirit & demeanor to 16. But Pursue Her No More. A
cool, gentle (less demonstrative) more UNIFORM DEMEANOR-
give to poor, help any,--be indulgent to the criminal & silly and
low persons generally & the ignorant—but say little—make no ex-
planations—give no confidences--never attempt puns, or plays
upon words, or utter sarcastic comments, or (under ordinary cir-
cumstances) hold any discussions or arguments."
This frank record is as painful as it is interesting. Even the
hostile critic must recognize here no poseur, but a hapless and hum-
bled man.
However "open to criticism” Whitman's relations with
women may have been, he renders such criticism by others at once
superfluous and unkind by confessing himself (under the circum-
stances, what other confessor or judge could he have had ?) and
sternly meting out his own penance. Again, as in his early youth,
we see private disappointment converted into humanitarian sym-
pathy. But he was to learn that such passion as his could not be
subdued by a single sermon to himself. A year and a half later
he writes:
“June 17—It is IMPERATIVE, that I obviate & remove myself (and
my orbit) at all hazards, from this incessant enormous, & abnormal
PERTURBATION.”
A month afterwards he approves this resolution, and rewrites it:
"TO GIVE UP ABSOLUTELY & for good, from this present hour, this


482
WALT WHITMAN'S LOVE AFFAIRS
feverish, fluctuating, useless undignified pursuit of 164—too long,
(much too long) persevered in-so humiliating-It must come at
last & had better come now—(It cannot possibly be a success)
LET THERE FROM THIS HOUR BE NO FALTERING, NO GETTING-
(word erased] at all henceforth (not once, under any circum-
stances)—avoid seeing her, or any talk or explanations or ANY
MEETING WHATEVER, FROM THIS HOUR FORTH, FOR LIFE.”
This is abundantly unclear, but it appears to be the resolution of a
proud and passionate character to swallow the bitter realization
that its love is unreturned, and to accept the fact that something
has occurred for which explanations would be futile. How little
could the O'Connor household have understood Whitman's fond-
ness for Cowley's quatrain,
“A mighty pain to love it is,
And yet a pain that love to miss;
But of all pains, the greatest pain
It is to love, but love in vain!”
His own heart was the “noiseless, patient spider," throwing out
filament after filament of its fine-spun life in a quenchless but un-
satisfied hope to make the "ductile anchor . . . catch somewhere.”
But, bcause he was a genius, out of his poverty he could enrich
the world. As early as 1860 he had learned to sing, like Heine,
“I love a certain person ardently, and my love was not returned;
Yet out of that, I have written these songs.
Probably these 1868-9 notebook memoranda, wet with the tears of
secret shame, mark the exit of the "love of woman" from his life.
When, in the fall in 1869, his "noblest woman friend,” Anne Gil-
christ, offered to him her affection in letters of unusual beauty and
depth of feeling, he seemed to have had little more personal love
to give her than to any other reader of his verse, whom he assures,
“I have loved many women and men, but I love
None better than you.”


EMORY HOLLOWAY
483
man.
At any rate, from this time forth we have an altered Whit-
The Man and the Missionary in him have waged a
long war, but Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun (1865) has
already indicated that the Missionary is ultimately to dominate.
In Passage to India, Section 5, (originally written as a separate
poem, some time before January 20, 1869) the Poet—the “true son
of God”—is promised, whose songs will tell the secret, soothe the
never-happy hearts of men, and respond to their unappreciated af-
fection. Other re-affirmations of his mission we have in Pioneers!
O Pioneers! (1865), in Darest Thou Now O Soul (1868), and in
Prayer of Columbus (1874). Battered in body and bruised in his
affections, poor and generally rejected of critics, Whitman hence-
forth has less to say in praise of untrammelled natural impulses, but
more and more to sing of democracy, of immortality, and of the
soul.


DUST FOR SPARROWS
BY REMY DE GOURMONT
Translated by Ezra Pound
49
It is observed that the doctors most in public esteem are those
in whom the minimum of talent is joined to the greatest astute-
ness.
50
It is a fact, established by science, that idiots understand
animals better than any one else.
51
Any one can verify the dementia of a raving lunatic; but is it not
strange that there are learned men to decide upon the feebleness or
surety of the intelligence of slightly unbalanced persons? Is the
plenitude of mental faculties conceivable? Have people not, on
the contrary, concluded that genius and madness are equal?
52
What is most admirable in music is the hearing and soul of men.
53
Hearing being the instrument by which all the loftiest ideas and
sensations reach our consciousness; the art related to this sense is
that which most exalts the mind and goes deepest down into the
heart.
54
Is it not curious that for the coldest and most skeptical tempera-
ments, for those most given to buffoonery or calculation, a day


REMY DE GOURMONT
485
comes, the Bonaparte appears, and they find themselves embarked
upon most extraordinary adventures ?
55
There are souls whom one can bless like the sun, which sheds
prodigal his warmth and pleasure upon all he lightens.
56
There are people born debtors by temperament. Between them
and the creditor there is an unclimbable wall, a wall over which
nothing passes.
57
Heroes have not the tendency to complaint. They are not snivel-
lers albeit having acquaintance with tears. Were this not so they
would be monsters, inadmirable. There would be nothing in them
but pride.
58
Love of children is the greatest of loves, for though it is egoistic
in its essence, it has no equal in abnegation.
59
Games which excite one because, like cards, they bank on one's
amour-propre, are doubtless an excellent school for character. They
call for invaluable faculties, and furnish arms for the struggle for
life, especially for politicians and parliamentarians. One might
designate them as sedentary fencing.
60
Pious works unmask the Pharisee. But it would be a grave er-
ror to misudge noble souls who have suffered human weakness. To
make literary and historical psychology from this, would be like
showing a room with tapestries turned face to the wall.


486
DUST FOR SPARROWS
61
There is a woman with whom we never attain complete sincerity,
even though we know that she knows us inside out and that we, our-
selves, may count on her benevolence.
63
In their normal state the English overdo their respect and atten-
tions to women in order that, thus, acquired habit may preserve
them from indecency when they lose control of themselves.
64
It is nearly evident that those who advocate the death penalty
are in closer affinity to the assassins than those who oppose it.
65
There are people deeply convinced that there exists between them
and the proletariat a veritable difference of quality, which makes
these latter bear without suffering the miseries of life to which they
are accustomed.
66
There is nothing more perverted by convention than the sense of
smell. Analogous odours produce different impressions according
as they have one source or another.
67
The origin of certain repulsions which we feel from things which
animals find excellent, lies probably in certain confusions in the
,
child mind and even in the man's mind, between shame and dis-
gust; between virtue and dirtiness; vice and bodily cleanliness.
68
Physical disgust begins as instinctive repulsion; it becomes in-
superable in becoming a moral prejudice.


REMY DE GOURMONT
487
69
[Manuscript undecipherable. E. P.]
70
Milan, the moral capital of Italy, its most active centre of
thought, art, and industry, was, in the old days, pregnant of the
modern, the monastic, and conventual city par excellence.
71
The head of one lunatic genius may contain more wisdom than
those of one hundred thousand idiots.
72
There are words so ordinary, and which have assumed in our
minds an aspect so characteristic and precise, that on hearing, they
almost give us the sensation of the things which they designate.
73
I have known very religious men in all the professions, as I have
known also convinced deists and spiritualists, who were neverthe-
less quite intelligent, very enlightened, very well-balanced in all
manifestations of practical activity. Which may, all of it, serve to
demonstrate that when one passes out of the realm of the knowable
the knowledge of atheist and believer are of perfectly equal
equivalence.
74
I have observed that when we Latins have an altercation with
Anglo-Saxons we look at the position of their hands before attend-
ing to their speech.
75
It is evident that religion does not ameliorate people's characters.
I have known many almost devout persons who were none the less,
in ordinary life, very nasty, especially to their inferiors.


488
DUST FOR SPARROWS
76
It has been, perhaps, profound wisdom on the part of the Church
not to make herself the paladin of all the great human causes, and
even to sanction certain crimes, such as slavery, but it is certain that
this conduct has alienated from her all generous hearts, all those
who thirst for justice.
77
It is evident that for the English, the most important part of
their religion is that it is Anglican. Most young Englishmen would
without much difficulty renounce their part in paradise if they knew
that one does not speak English in heaven, that one does not play
tennis, that bull-dogs are not admitted, and that one does not have
tea with little cakes daily at 5 P. M.



Albert It
Courtesy of M. Kuoedler and Co.
OLIVIA.
BY ALBERT STERNER


1
!
1
1
1


THE SINGERS IN A CLOUD
BY RIDGELY TORRENCE
Overhead at sunset all heard the choir.
Nothing could be seen except jewelled grey
Raining beauty earthward, flooding with desire
All things that listened there in the broken day;
Songs from freer breathers, their unprisoned fire
Out of cloudy fountains, flying and hurled,
Fell and warmed the world.
Sudden came a wind and birds were laid bare,
Only music warmed them round their brown breasts.
They had sent the splendours pouring through the air,
Love was their heat and home far above their nests.
Light went softly out and left their voices there.
Starward passed for ever all that great cry,
Burning, round the sky.
On the earth the battles war against light,
Heavy lies the harrow, bitter the field.
Beauty, like a river running through the night,
Streams past the stricken ones whom it would have healed
But the darkened faces turn away from sight.
Blind, bewildered nations sow, reap, and fall,
Shadows gather all.
Far above the birdsong bright shines the gold.
Through the starry orchards earth's paths are hung;
As she moves among them glowing fruits unfold,
Such that the heavens there reawaken young.
Overhead is beauty, healing for the old.
Overhead in morning, nothing but youth,
Only lovely youth.


BELPHEGOR
Essay on The Aesthetic of Contemporary Society
BY JULIEN BENDA
THAT THE "PURE EXERCISE” OF EMOTION IS
ITSELF INTELLECTION
Oº
UR aesthetes are at great pains to contrast with disorganized
works which are full of material, works which are well com-
posed but utterly empty. They take the writings of Montaigne
which are so little arranged that often the title of a chapter has
nothing to do with its content, and to these "uncultivated but so
fertile fields” they oppose the “beautiful symmetrical gardens
where there is nothing." But what of the beautiful symmetrical
gardens where there is something? Those of Buffon? Of
Spinoza ? of Taine? They take care never to mention them!
A curious thing: this pure exercise-expressly unintellectual
-of the human emotions, is itself the intellection of emotion!
We know that according to our aesthetes the “pure vital urge,
unconscious in its essence and free from the understanding, be-
comes, by its own "dilation and expansion" "conscious of itself
and capable of reflecting on its object.” (Creative Evolution.) In
other terms, the passion of Phèdre becomes, by expansion of it-
self, the activity which produces the tragedy by Racine, and the
upward thrusting of trees the activity which composes treatises
on botany. Here also the will of our people is novel only in de-
gree; sentimentalists of every age wanted to believe that senti-
ment was itself the science of sentiment, was its only science; Mme.
de Staël asserted that "we understand the mysteries of the human
soul more surely by love than by the most subtle of metaphysics”
and Michelet announced that it was "by sympathy for humanity"
that Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire discovered the true principles of bi-
ology.” (The passage is worth quoting. After having told of
the devotion displayed by the great savant in trying to save the
unfortunate priests during the September massacre, Michelet adds:
“As reward to him who had shown such sympathy for humanity


JULIEN BENDA
491
God granted that he should penetrate into the mystery of life,
should understand its transformations, as no one had before.
This heroic tenderness revealed nature to him; he understood it
through his heart.”) Moreover we conceive that it would be
sweet to say to ourselves that by the (comparatively easy) cir- /
cumstances of living a passion we become profound observers of
it; it is obviously agreeable for Mimi Pinson to think that by
the mere throbbing of her little heart she is achieving, in power,
deeper thoughts on love than those of Stendhal or Spinoza.
Their argument in favour of this desire that the real comprehen-
sion of a feeling should be the prolongation of the feeling itself is
that, historically, those who have held the most profound views con-
cerning any human emotion are the ones who experienced and lived
that emotion. We admit the fact. But the real question is this: is
the activity by which they formed these profound thoughts of the
same nature as the activity by which they lived their emotion?
Can one pass from one to the other by “dilation,” that is, by con-
tinuity? Or is there, in spite of the fact that the second is per-
haps an indispensable antecedent to the first, is there a duality of
origin and a hiatus between them? That is one of the questions
which need only be asked to be answered. I admit that because a
Lespinasse had lived the torment of unrequited love she could
make this profound observation on a movement of the human
soul: “Most women do not need to be loved; they want only
to be preferred.” But I believe that she discovered this not by
a pure prolongation of her suffering but by appealing to an entire-
ly different function, namely a singularly acute faculty for form-
ing concepts and relating them to each other; I venture to believe
(pardon this lèse-democracy) that the little shopgirl who possesses
nothing but her sorrow may “dilate” it to the end of her days with-
out finding anything of the sort. I concede, too, that du Bartas
achieved his admirable description of a horse because he exercised
each morning by getting down on all fours: prancing, neighing,
kicking, being a horse; I still think that the elaboration of his pic-
ture is an entirely different kind of activity from his neighing. No
one has ever denied that living an emotion is a good preparation for
understanding it, although it remains disquieting to remember that
a Froissart who never left his monastic armchair wrote the best de-
scriptions of battles, that a Balzac's presentation of the sufferings
a


492
BELPHEGOR
of an anxious mother is unequalled by the product of any woman's
pen, and that a description of a horse at least as happy as that of
du Bartas was written by Vergil who, according to every probability
never once got down on all fours.
At other times we hear of a vital urge which instead of "dilat-
ing” to become intellectual activity, “turns upon itself.” We
ask: Where of its own motion does the vital urge acquire the
simple desire for such a movement? Isn't that desire alone a
sufficient break between the "pure urge” and its own proper na-
ture? an alien importation? properly an infection with the
critical spirit? Besides the doctrine formally proclaims: In-
stinct alone will find, but it will not seek, these things (elements
of the "profound life”). Let us distinguish again, in all this, the
double aspiration of our aesthetes, to bask in pure emotion and to
retain at the same time the advantages which they continue to at-
tach to the intellect.
At the bottom of this will that the artist become one with
his hero there are desires for other sensations than those
which arise from contact with emotion in action. There is, first,
the desire we mentioned before, of witnessing the spectacle when
distinctions are abolished and two objects are fused into one-a
spectacle singularly disquieting when the two objects are two souls.
(Our contemporaries' taste for this sort of spectacle is manifested
in their rage for those soi-disant Catholic teachings (Ed. Le Roy)
which explain that the world derives from God by His “élans,"
allowing no break in the continuity of the source of life and life
itself. However they may protest in their moments of embarrass-
ment, the systems they build upon this idea are only brilliant mod-
ernizations of Alexandrian Emanation.) Then there is the desire
that the artist, no longer external to his subject, should not be
superior either. We are here touching upon a very general emo-
tion. We may call it hatred of the idea that the author's relation
toward his subject should be one of transcendence. It is a hatred
which is always keen, no matter what the subject may be, because
transcendence implies judgement and freedom of the mind, and
it becomes particularly exasperated when that subject is the human
heart. [Note:To-day the public seems to say to an author: “You are


JULIEN BENDA
493
>
presenting human emotion; your part is done; you, the intermedi-
ary, must disappear.” That is evidently one of the reasons for
their love of the theatre, where this disappearance seems to be ac-
complished. Specifically it is one of the reasons for their taste
for the plays of M. de Porto-Riche (a taste unavowed only for
political reasons) in which a critic recently remarked the inten-
tion to give "life directly, life itself, without symbolic transposi-
tions," and, consequently, the possibility of the spectator's being
unaware of the author's thought. For the contrary preferences
expressed by the seventeenth century for the artist as intermediary
between life and ourselves, see M. Lanson's penetrating pages on
Boileau.]
This hatred appears in broad daylight when they attack
analysis which they have no love for even when it is applied
to the inanimate and which they pursue with fury when it attacks
the human heart. May we quote here a passage from one of their
leaders, already mentioned, which smells marvelously of their
spite:
"When we read such proclamations of the intellect bent on show-
ing the existential conditions of absolutely everything, we feel-
quite apart from our legitimate impatience at the somewhat ridic-
ulous swagger of the program, in view of what the authors
(Spinoza and Taine) are actually able to perform-menaced and
negated in the springs of our innermost life. Such cold-blooded
-
assimilations threaten, we think, to undo our soul's vital secrets,
as if the same breath which should succeed in explaining their
origin, would simultaneously explain away their 'significance.”
(William James, Varieties of Religious Experience.]
Who does not feel that even if the explanations of “these auth-
ors” were better, the author of this passage would not be more
content and that he is exasperated by analysis not because it ex-
plains feelings badly but because it pretends to explain them at
all ?—Finally, in this determination that the artist should be
united with his hero, more precisely that he should be "conquered”
by his hero, “should lose all capacity to judge him” they want
to see the author, far from transcending his subject, dominated,
struck down, overwhelmed by it; a spectacle which is obviously


494
BELPHEGOR
very pathetic. Here, too, the most curious thing is that this de-
sire should become conscious, formal, organized. Let us add that
this is one of the elements making for the success of the literature
of women, who are commonly as I heard a critic remark by way
of praise, “dominated by their subject instead of dominating it.”
RELIGION OF SUBJECTIVE ART
Desire that the artist identify himself with the soul he
presents leads naturally to the wish that he present his own
soul. For with whom could he become more completely at one?
That is the religion of subjective art, a religion which was formu-
lated by the romantic era but of which we may say that only our
age has become fully conscious. It has become almost a precept
that an artist ought not to express anything but himself; the major-
ity of our respected authors have in the last twenty years expounded
nothing but their souls; people have venerated more than ever, and
systematically, those works which are "of the same substance with
their authors and their authors' lives” (Pascal, Nietzsche). More
than this, they have tried to define, in the heart of the self, a self
more profoundly self, more unique, more individual, more incom-
municable (the self of our pure sensibility, purged of all idea,
especially of every general idea) and have desired that the artist
express this self alone. (Hence the violent preference for Baude-
laire over the romanticists of 1830.) Finally they have decreed
that the expression of his self can not be properly accomplished
by the artist's intelligence examining his heart, but only by a mystic
communion of the artist with himself, by a sort of aphasic and
unintellectual self-embrace, the evocation of which-like that of
the "incommunicable” ego-is evidently something infinitely dis-
quieting. It is clear that the desire of French society to enjoy the
subjective has made some progress since Le Lac and Souvenir.
The aesthetic of the subjective, too, is so ingrained in the minds
of our contemporaries that they do not even conceive of the possi-
bility of any other. Our young people will be as stupefied to think
that a master could have written the following lines, as we might
be to learn that societies could have existed without venerating
honour and courage:


JULIEN BENDA
495
“... C'est là qu’un grand peintre, avec pleine largesse,
D'une féconde idée étale la richesse,
Faisant briller partout de la diversité,
Et ne tombant jamais dans un air répété:
Mais un peintre commun trouve une peine extrême
A sortir dans ses airs de l'amour de soi-même;
De redites sans nombre il fatigue les yeux,
Et, plein de son image, il se peint en tous lieux.”
Molière.
a
It is clear that these reproaches would pass as so many compli-
ments to-day. The expression "a common painter" is worth not-
ing. Attachment to one's self considered as a sign of spiritual
vulgarity! Sic transit. .
Here, let us note again, our contemporaries' taste (surely on the
decline since the war) for the cult of the self; I mean for authors
who are devoted to themselves, not so much in a mystic and furious
embrace as in the manifest pretension to a considered self-enjoy-
ment and an elegant “dilettantism.” In the tranquil pleasure of a
soul inhaling itself there is a spectacle"if not moving" at least heady
like a perfume, and we can easily understand its attraction for cer-
tain advanced sensibilities; the author of Le Jardin de Bérénice,
unsavoury enough in his much praised ideologic lyricism, evidently
is still able to please by the aroma of his vanity. Moreover this
trait has other aspects quite as remarkable. For example, that a
French society, heir of those who used to say not only “the ego is
detestable” but “it is ridiculous to be always talking of one's self,
even if only to one's self” (Saint-Evremond), should relish authors
whose sentences begin with “I like ... I am pleased ... I
feel .. —that is something which will not fail to surprise the
man who is to write the history of education in our country. More
than that, a writer's avowed intention to outrage the decencies of
his readers is an evident recommendation to the modern public (it
is clearly one of the elements in the success of Péguy or Claudel);
and apart from the fact that the arbitrary is always exciting, we
know that certain delicate souls feel a voluptuous pleasure in being
despised. (See the annals of eroticism.)
>
.


496
BELPHEGOR
DESIRE THAT ART PORTRAY THE ELEMENTARY SOUL
We may note a refinement unforeseen by any of their predeces-
sors in this mania of our people for being thrilled by the exhibition
of the human soul: I mean their desire that art should treat of the
soul in that infinitely disquieting region where it is “pure instinct,”
"pure desire,” “pure act.” We are familiar with their veritable
religion for that art (Maeterlinck, certain Russians) which deals
exclusively with the most elementary feelings—surprise, anger, fear,
above all the sexual instinct--and which is pleased to treat them in
their entire purity of instinct, that is without the participation not
merely of any moral feeling, far less of any idea, but even of any
organization, any emotional continuity, any fixity of direction (all
“intellectual” things); an art which attempts to show these feel-
ings in their perfect "mobility,” in their pure quality of “nascent
states,” of “soul-disquiet.” Clearly, for our aesthetes the ability
-
to portray these exciting regions is the true criterion of art. I have
before me a passage in which a popular critic (M. Maurice Donnay,
apropos of l’Entrave of Mme. Colette Willy) notes the skill of one
of our authors in portraying the feminine soul in its purest mobility;
very evidently in the eyes of the critic the success of this effort im-
plies the summit of art far more than the ability to portray Julien
Sorel or Baron Hulet. Even better! according to modern aesthetics
pure instinct is, fundamentally and beyond discussion, the artistic
material par excellence, the true material. “Among all the
heroines in my plays,” says one of our most respected dramatists,
“there are three for whom I must confess a certain predilection:
Jeannine in l’Enchantement, Maman Colibri, and the heroine of La
Marche Nuptiale. Jeannine, perhaps, before all the others, be-
cause she is pure, unadulterated instinct.” The author adds no
word of explanation, so certain is he that such a reason will suffice
in the minds of his contemporaries to justify his preference.
We know that one of the reasons for the special devotion of our
contemporaries to the art of music is precisely its monopoly of the
power to express these elementary soul-states. And now they want
it never to express any others. The soul of Isolda is far too “org-
anized.” And what has music to do with Hans Sachs, "the herr
professor,” or Wotan, “the sociological chatterbox!” This aesthetic
of the elementary soul leads naturally to the portrayal of women


JULIEN BENDA
497
and children exclusively; has led to this in the art to which we
have alluded.
Do not misunderstand us. We are not trying to contest the prime
right of the "pure instinctive” as the subject matter of art. We
even think that it is one of the glories of this age to have introduced
it. We do denounce the modern desire that it should be the sole
subject-matter of art, should be, at least, the subject-matter par ex-
cellence. Because, you may say, it is the sole reality? As if the
intelligence were any less real! As if the soul of Goethe were less
real than that of Mélisande! Because it is “the root of being ?”
But where have you learned that art must be concerned exclusively
with that region? Then tell the real reason: because it is more
exciting!
The desire to express elementary soul-states exclusively is often
combined in our authors with a desire to express their own souls.
Thus they express themselves in their elementary states of being,
a genre in which women excel, and of which the following is a good
example:
"I was there, but mutinous, out of harmony and silent, on account
of a lizard which appeared and disappeared by magic, on account
of an aigrette of lavender swaying under a wasp furred with brown
and orange, because of the cry of an invisible shepherd, because of
the latticed shadow which moved beneath an olive tree.'
We know not only the pleasure but the quite special literary
esteem--the admiration-evoked by this manner.
We have just pointed out one more genre which is in general de-
mand and in which women excel. We shall see that all the literary
attributes exalted by modern aesthetics are those which women pos-
sess in the highest degree, and which are virtually a monopoly with
their sex:
the absence of general ideas, religion of the concrete,
of the circumstantial, rapid and entirely intuitive perception, frank-
ness about sentiment alone, interest devoted to the self, to the most
profound, the most intimate, the most incommunicable part of the
self, and so on. The whole modern aesthetic is made for women.
The men struggle. Many of them try to imitate the literature of
their rivals. Alas! they must be resigned: there is a degree of un-
.
intellectuality and immodesty which they will never attain.


498
BELPHEGOR
We do not speak of the desire of our contemporaries—which
seems so natural to them that they do not even express it in words-
that the portrayal of the human heart consist in the portrayal sole-
ly of love. This is a three hundred year old attitude of French
society. Let us nevertheless remember that in the seventeenth
century there were some who protested, and not only artists like
Corneille who were none too expert in depicting this sentiment; not
only Churchmen like Rapin or Bouhours; but men and women of
the world: Bussy, the Abbé de Villars, Subligny, Saint-Evremond,
Mme. de Sévigné. Do we see any society woman of our time pro-
testing against the plays of M. de Porto-Riche because they deal
too exclusively in love?
Their desire that art should paint the elementary soul is, more-
over, only an episode in their demand that art be profound, that it
depict the profound regions, the profound recesses of the soul. As
if great artists like Ronsard or La Fontaine were profound!
In so far as it venerates the portrayal of those regions where
speech silently yields to "pure feeling” and “pure act,” contempo-
rary aesthetics tends directly toward the religion of the play-actor.
Moreover the religion of the player as pure gesticulator is quite de-
finitely formulated nowadays: I have before me a passage in which
a player is exalted for his “back” in a certain scene. Let us note, too,
how dramatists are associating the player more and more deliberate-
ly with his effect on the public, and this as pure pantomimist.
There was a man with an incredible capacity for contempt who
was as bad a writer as he was a skilful dramatist. He never con-
ceived a phrase without associating it mentally with the comedian
who was to play it; he replaced the logic of the passions with the
passions themselves, substituted gesture for discourse and thwacks
for repartee. He was acclaimed not only by the pit but by what
was supposed to be the most intelligent society. And his detrac-
tors imitated him.
The contemporary cult for elementary life, the scorn for life
which has evolved, appears elsewhere, too.
In their views of the
living world, their "biological philosophy,” the only life which in-
terests them is elementary life, the life of protoplasm. To that
life alone, although they do not think it necessary to warn us of this,
apply all their definitions of life (“incessant change of direction,"
“incommensurability with ideas,” etc). Life which tries to go be-


JULIEN BENDA
499
a
yond this moment, to stabilize change, to acquire consistency (the
effort, for example, of an animal to become vertebrate) does not
impress them; it seems to them to be a defection from life, a return
to inert matter. (From this point of view nothing is more suggest-
ive than a comparison between the biologic philosophy in vogue
nowadays and that of Herbert Spencer favoured by our fathers.
Creative Evolution sets the attribute of mobility in almost exclusive
relief in the phenomena of life; in the Principles of Biology it
was the attribute of organization.) Likewise they believe that only
the elementary and unorganized facts of consciousness merit the
deliberate attention of the psychologist and his exceptional methods
("overthrow of ordinary cognition,” “catastrophe of Thought”).
'
It seems that the most banal methods will suffice to comprehend the
facts of a soul which has evolved, which functions through concepts
-the activity of Descartes' spirit, for example, when it formed the
idea of substance. But the most significant thing is, in their daily
lives, in their worldly judgements, their supreme cult of mobile, im-
pulsive, "living” people, their contempt for thoughtful people.
(I say contempt; they are not considered boresome but inferior.)
I know a young countess, the ornament of our salons, whose whole
thinking is only an orgy of unconnected bounds, whose reasoning
is a cyclone of impressions, her judgement a jumble of images; she
gave a measure of her intellectual powers when she compared the
profile of the illustrious wife of a poet to a fish-knife and one of the
hirsutes of the Institute to a squirrel with list slippers. Society was
not satisfied to love her and to entertain her like a child; she was
discovered to be a human being superior to Newton.
This young countess sometimes makes one think of the passage in
Proudhon:
“I have a little daughter, three years old, who is trying to find
names for the things she sees and calls a corkscrew, key to the bot-
tle; a lamp shade, hat for the lamp; the elephant at the Zoological
Garden, nose-foot; an icicle, stone of ice; the teeth of her comb,
fingers of the comb, and so on. That child has all the philosophy
she will ever have and all that any woman can acquire by her own
motion; approximations, analogies, false similes, drolleries; no
definition, no analysis, no synthesis, not an adequate idea, not the
shadow of a concept.”


500
BELPHEGOR
A systematic esteem for people because of their vivacity and not
of their judgement is a quite recent thing in French society. It
seems to have been unknown before the nineteenth century. Retz
declares that Mme. de Chevreuse was the only person he ever saw
in whom "vivacity took the place of judgement,” and he does not
appear excessively partial to this order of merit. Every one knows
that Mlle. de Scudéry's portraits place justice of the intellect far
above fancy, that she means to praise a woman by saying that "how-
ever prompt her imagination, it never anticipated her judgement.”
And let us meditate on the valuation shown in these lines:
:
“Her mind (the duchesse du Maine's) makes no use of turns or
figures, nor of anything which can be called invention. Vividly
struck by images, she renders them as a mirror reflects them, without
adding, without omitting, without changing anything. So I have
great pleasure in listening to her.” (Mme. de Staal-Delaunay.)
Can anything distinguish the French society of other days from
our own better than this eulogy of the objective spirit, written about
one society woman by another?
DESIRE THAT ART SHOULD BE EXALTED-
PERFECTION OF LYRIC MATERIAL
Another aspect of our contemporaries' desire to experience excite-
ment through the products of the intellect is the extraordinary, the
almost exclusive, taste they display for literature which is exalted
or at least pathetic. We may say
We may say that with a very few exceptions
(M. Anatole France is one and his fortunes have suffered for it) all
the authors favoured by the public in the last twenty years—MM.
Barrès, Maeterlinck, Romain Rolland, Suarès, Claudel, Péguy, ,
Adam, L. Bertrand—are vibrant authors, most of them extremely
keyed up in tone, constantly under pressure. It seems that temper-
ate and reasonable writing has lost all aesthetic value in French
society, a singular thing for the descendants of those who welcomed
the writings of La Bruyère as we know they did, and called for
eighteen editions of Montesquieu in two months. We wonder


JULIEN BENDA
501
a
а
where we could find to-day a woman in society who fancied she was
humiliating an author by saying that “his clearness is that of light-
ning and his warmth that of fever," as Mme. du Deffand did of
Rousseau. However, the most interesting thing is the veritable
science shown by present-day society, using its writers as a medium,
in perfecting the arsenal of literary exaltation and in multiplying
tenfold this source of sensation.
To begin with they have furiously intensified the natural sources
of lyricism, those from which it has flowed from the beginning and
which De Blosseville, a romanticist, once enumerated with all de-
sirable candour: love, religion, patriotism, melancholy. As for
the lyricism of love, we need only refer to that of our “dionysians”
to determine whether we have been able to coarsen it since the days
when the berquinades of a Desbordes-Valmore were considered the
last word in erethism. In religious lyrics let us admit that the
ecstasies of a Lamartine are the orisons of a little girl in comparison
with the "immolation in divinity” into which our people plunge
with a Verlaine or the thunders of Jehovah which they brandish
daily with a Claudel. The war songs of a Barbier, a Delavigne,
even of a Déroulède? The blaring of a child's horn beside that
fanfare of Gallicism, that ferreting out of the foreigner, sounded,
at the hearthstone, with M. Rostand. Moreover the emotional
power of patriotic lyricism has been multiplied a hundredfold by
skilfully combining it with others which are not necessarily a part
of it: the lyricism of race, of “keeping faith with the dead,” of
“national determination,” together with historic romanticism. As
for the lyricism of melancholy, it may be asserted that as a producer
of voluptuous dissolution it is the invention of our time. What
are the disenchantments-purely oratorical—of an Olympio, the
purely plastic sorrows of a Chateaubriand, compared with these
really extensive soul-states, these lassitudes inaccessible to all brac-
ing, to all vertebration, in which our contemporaries are swooning
with M. Barrès? What is the wholly linear, wholly conceptual
cult of Death in Leopardi or Leconte de Lisle beside the intoxicating
swoon of self, pure emotion free of all idea, which they savour in
La Mort de Venise and which, fifty years ago, a moralist seemed to
foretell in these words:
“Listen to wailing death, the priestess equivocal, vague and soft,


502
BELPHEGOR
drifting on the stream of reveries, mingling with sorrow a some-
thing we love, sweet and holy tears, mourning? pleasure? we
know not.” (Michelet.)
a
The literature of death would seem to be a gift to France from
our contemporaries.
They have also much intensified another traditional source of
pathos: the lyricism of mystery. We may even say that they
created it. Compare the two. There is the lyricism of mystery
in our masters of 1830 for whom things are "mysterious” among a
hundred other adjectives in the romantic bric-a-brac, almost auto-
matically, as in Homer the dawn is always "rosy-fingered” and the
counsels of Zeus "incorruptible.” And there is the sombre insist-
ence of our bards on deriving a quite special consciousness from this
aspect of things, to such a point that sometimes (Maeterlinck) they
devote whole works to it. Add to that their intention, greatly ap-
plauded by their public, of being interested exclusively in those
aspects of nature which seem mysterious, their rejection as un-
worthy of interest of everything they can understand. In Le
Voyage de Sparte one of their most faithful representatives says,
“I throw away a book as soon as it has lost its mystery.” They
would certainly say, reversing a famous mot, "the only thing of
which one grows tired right away is understanding." Let us note,
in addition, the extraordinary extension of this field of lyricism; to
the mysteries which satisfied our parents (love, women, children)
they have added others no less moving: the mystery of race, of
crowds, of animals, and we can not forget the more and more intense
exploitation in literature of the Christian Mystery. But the most
remarkable thing is their definite desire not that art give them the
idea of mystery, but that it transport them into that state where,
when all ideas vanish, they can rejoice with eyes half closed and lips
half open, in the eternal unknowability of things. With Victor
Hugo people wanted to speak of mystery; with Maeterlinck they
want to swoon in it. One perceives the progress.
But the most significant thing in this whole affair is the creation
of an entirely new and marvelously fecund source of lyricism:
namely moral, pr, perhaps better, moralistic lyricism. By a veri-
a
table stroke of genius they realized what an admirable chance for
pathos lay in getting excited over some moral, political, or aes-


JULIEN BENDA
503
thetic fashion, and they opened up for lyric exploitation the
idea of value or primacy of one or another manner of living or feel-
ing. At once they began to vibrate: with Nietzsche for the prim-
acy of warlike morality; with M. Barrès for the primacy of the
will; with M. Bourget for that of tradition; with M. Maurras for
that of culture, of intellectual discipline, of reason; with M.
Romain Rolland for that of non-culture and the spontaneous, and
so on.
At the same time, and by another master stroke, it was decreed
that the superiority of a moral or aesthetic fashion was not a de-
monstrable thing, but a thing felt and loved; that therefore, the
apostle of a Value was not held to any proof, logic, or coherence.
The door was thus opened to distracted prophecy (of which Péguy
and Claudel are very good examples) to affirmations as peremptory
as gratuitous, as strident as contradictory, a veritable catapult of
words, of which societies most avid of sensation had never dreamed.
We
say that they began to vibrate for the primacy of the reason.
In effect one does not see why the love of Reason should not be a
lyric theme as well as any other. It is clear that one can rest one's
hand on the sword-hilt, assume a Castillian attitude, and pronounce
the words, “I am a classicist”; like the hero of a contemporary novel
a
who brandishes a chair over the cranium of his interlocutor, crying
out, “I, monsieur, am a moderate republican.” The romanticism
of reason was indicated. It was only necessary to think of it.
However, let us note, apart from this taste for moralistic lyricism,
a real moralism, a real absorption in the moral passions, among our
contemporaries. Every one knows that the prattle of the boudoirs
is nourished infinitely more by moral and political than by intellec-
tual or literary discussions. Let us note above all a desire for
gravity and dogmatism in the treatment of questions, a total rejec-
tion of lightness (in the best sense of the word). We have alluded
(in Les Sentiments de Critias) to that author, eminently capable of
wit as shown by the works of his youth, who has for twenty years
denied himself a smile, never quitting the solemn, out of deference
to the beau monde. It has not been sufficiently noted that long be-
fore 1914, when there was no sense of the gravity of the occasion,
French society no longer understood irony.
Finally another stroke of genius in the same direction was the sur-
render to lyric exploitation of certain scientific and philosophic


504
BELPHEGOR
ideas capable of lyric treatment, simplified, of course, and reduced
to their bare elements, as is appropriate to the method. In this way
Taine's idea of determinism was given over to literary exaltation,
and especially racial determinism (lyricized by M. Barrès), the
theory of the conservation of matter (lyrically treated under the
name of the Eternal Recurrence by Nietzsche and M. Maeterlinck)
the theory of biologic constants (Quinton), lyricized by M. Bourget,
the theory of the unconscious (lyricized by M. Maeterlinck). This
scientifico-philisophic lyricism is also an effect of the pretension al-
ways made by romanticism of being familiar with high abstract
thinking and of protecting it.
protecting it. We know that as they embrace
Siena and Grenada, our bards cheerfully quote Kant and Schleier-
macher, thus satisfying those two desires whose synthesis character-
izes democratic society: the first for emotion and for pedantry.
One result of this aesthetic has been that many a contemporary
author has condemned himself to lyricism when his nature was any.
thing but frenzied. “They all carry the thyrsis” says Plato, “but
few are possessed by the God.” So we have witnessed the birth of
a castrated lyricism, a sort of saturnalia of institutors, of whom M.
Romain Rolland is a good example. It is the story of Rollin at
Capri. For the rest, in spite of their efforts, the critical spirit still
clings to these Pindars of ours,
“Qui rampe dans sa fange et s'y croit ignoré.”
“
Hasn't M. Paul Souday indicated, in the works of one of the most
terrible bullies in this manner, certain bits (perhaps his best) which
are pure criticism? Oh, pitiless analyst!
To be continued






Courtesy of ActioN.
A FIGURE. BY JACQUES LIPCHITZ


MODERN FORMS
This department of The Dial is devoted to exposition
and consideration of the less traditional types of art.
THE AMERICAN SHYNESS
BY HENRY MCBRIDE
AINTERS in America have grievous cause for quarrel with
the writers of America and are strangely patient under it. I
refer to the indifference of the writers to the studio output, an
indifference so complete that it would be insolent were it not also
weak. To be sure, Americans of all sorts are indifferent to this
output but that only makes the crime of the writers—who have
less excuse than our pork-packers for burying their talents in a
napkin—the more aggravating.
A former generation fared better, and no more pleasing spectacle
may be found by the American who loves to hope the best for his
country than the spectacle of those two blithe spirits, Margaret
Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson, bending ecstatically over port-
folios of engravings and coming to naïve and altogether charming
conclusions in regard to the Art of Flaxman, Raphael, and even,
alas, Canova. Neither Margaret nor Ralph went very far—the
latter's essay upon Art is as droll as possible to modern ears and
imperishable for all that—but as far as they went they went with
all their hearts and souls-and I for one love to think that those
excursions of theirs to the Athenaeum had as much as anything
to do with the general élan that finally presented Winslow Homer,
Thomas Eakins, Jimmy Whistler, Sargent, and St. Gaudens to
this public. For without a stir to the populace it is impossible to
have geniuses, and what is a writer for if not to make a stir?
The direct occasion of these remarks is a reading of the Letters
of Henry James, letters which reveal that writer to have been as
mute in the presence of a good picture or a good building, as the
least of his contemporaries. The "hyphenation” he underwent


506
THE AMERICAN SHYNESS
at a tender age-or perhaps it was born in him—and his visits to
Rome lead one unconsciously to expect a degree of at least inquiry
upon his part. But—there was nothing doing in the line men-
tioned-or almost nothing. James saw Pope Clement VII and the
estimable Cenci family in Rome but not Michelangelo; he saw
Savonarola in Florence but not the equally worthy Peruzzi; and
do you suppose, had he felt any ecstasies before works of art he
would have blurted them out with the freedom of a Stendhal or a
Shelley? Not he! It appears that in spite of the famous expatri-
ation, he was too American for that.
Shelley in Rome said of Michelangelo's Bacchus:
a
.
.
“The countenance of this figure is a most revolting mistake of
the spirit and meaning of Bacchus. It looks drunken, brutal, nar-
row-minded, and has an expression of dissoluteness the most revolt-
ing. On the other hand, considered only as a piece of work-
manship, it has many merits. The body is conceived with great
.
energy and the manner in which the lines mingle into each other,
of the highest boldness and truth. It wants unity as a work of
art- as a representation of Bacchus it wants everything.”
Bold of Shelley? H’mm, merely out-spoken. A Shelley has
as much right to exist as a Michelangelo, and until he asserts that
right he does not exist—as an artist. Stendhal wept with joy at
the sight of a picture by Bronzino and was practically paralysed
by one of the now obscure Volterrano's works. “En sortant de
Santa Croce,” said he, "j'avais un battement de coeur, la vie était
épuisée chez moi, je marchais avec la crainte de tomber.” So remote
are both Volterrano and Bronzino from the present stream of life
that the travelled New Yorker would no sooner weep with them
than with the latest young American actress portraying the woes
of Medea—but how deliciously right it was of Stendhal to have
wept! To be permanently right upon a question of taste is not
obligatory upon writers, since no one is that, but it is in the highest
degree important and perfectly simple and easy to be Stendhalian
if one happens to be a Stendhal.
Henry James' nearest attempt at a crise de nerfs over art came
when he sat for his portrait to Sargent, but he was as cautious as
possible when approaching the emotion.


HENRY MCBRIDE
507
terms.
“It is, I infer, a very great success; a number of the competent
and intelligent have seen it, and so pronounce it in the strongest
In short it seems likely to be one of S's fine things.
Of course I'm sitting a little askance in the chair. The canvas comes
down to just where my watchchain (such as it is, poor thing!) is
hung across the waistcoat; which latter, in itself, is found to be
splendidly (poor thing though it also be) and most interestingly
treated. Sargent can make such things so interesting-—such things
as my coat-lappet and shoulder and sleeve, too! But what is most
!
interesting every one is agreed, is the mouth-than which even he
has never painted a more living and, as I am told, 'expressive'!”
When told, you see, H. J. knew how good the portrait was. H.
J., in fact, appeared to act appallingly under advisement in regard
to the fine arts, and the only two other pronouncements of note in
the two huge volumes of letters picture his wrath at the bombard-
ment of Rheims Cathedral and his joy at the success of Gaudens'
bronze relief to the memory of Colonel Robert Shaw for the Boston
Common, both of them in sufficiently Jamesian accents though both
as evidently “told to him.” The edict against the Germans at
Rheims would have brought joy to the hard-pressed newspaper cor-
respondents of those days:
“But no words fill the abyss of it-nor touch it, nor relieve
one's heart nor light by a spark the blackness; the ache of one's
howl and the anguish of one's execration aren't mitigated by
a shade, even as one brands it as the most hideous crime ever perpe-
trated against the mind of man. There it was—and now all the
—
tears of rage of all the bereft millions and all the crowding curses
of all the wandering ages will never bring it back!"
Which as passion is early-Florentine, but as art-stuff is nil. One
touch of comprehension or attempt at comprehension of Rheims
would have illuminated those blatant words like a torch. But per-
haps it isn't fair to hold a mortal to account for war-talk. The
only allowed war-talk is the manufactured article and the gist of
this protest is against the manufactured.
Arthur B. Davies has secured as detached a position among the


508
THE AMERICAN SHYNESS
artists of the day as may be imagined but seems to know how to
unite this desirable detachment with prosperity. He is a poet-
which is perhaps only another way of hinting at detachment from
modern conditions—and has, during a career which now begins to
have some length, been subjected to divers influences which have
coloured but not changed his outlook upon life.
.
He began under the protection of William Blake, who gave Mr
Davies titles if not essential ideas for many of the canvases that
used to shock the hoi-polloi in the cellar gallery at Macbeth's years
ago. It is difficult now to see why academicians should have been so
scandalized by these innocent works which were undeniably pleas-
ant in colour and playful in a Mozartian way with the develop-
ment of the theme, but they were: and at any moment during the
run of these exhibitions, sticklers for propriety could have been
seen rushing from the gallery with eyeballs raised to heaven and
waved arms protesting against contamination-much as later, the
same individuals protested against cubism.
As it happened, Mr Davies himself, after having conquered the
philistines simply by jingling a few coins in his pocket-it is odd
but academicians do succumb to any art the moment they are con-
vinced it sells (par exemple, Greco; all academicians love Greco!);
as it happened, I say, after it became positively the fashion to ad-
mire Mr Davies' poetic canvases, he turned cubist!!
Gracious heavens, what a row was there! This time the situ-
ation was complicated by the fact that the artist's signature had a
money value. Nice people now owned Davieses and nice people
are never averse to seeing their possessions augment in selling power
--but could nice people countenance a cubist? That was the rub.
But just at the critical moment,Mr Davies always was a lucky
creature-some of the best known cubists in America, driven to
frenzy by the coin that still jingled in Mr D's pocket, united and
cried with loud voice that that gentleman was not a cubist, not a
real one at any rate.
Hearing these words, investors became reassured, and the before-
cubism pictures are as much in demand” in the Fifth Avenue shops
as ever: and as no art row lasts for ever, the rival cubists seem to
have forgiven Mr Davies his imposing clientele, and at present his
prospects seem serene. He appears to be the most privileged char-
acter upon the native heath.


THREE POEMS
BY H. D.
HELIOS
Helios makes all things right-
night brands and chokes,
as if destruction broke
over furze and stone and crop
of myrtle-shoot and field-wort,
destroyed with flakes of iron,
the bracken-stems,
where tender roots were, sown
blight, chaff and waste
of darkness to choke and drown.
A curious god to find,
yet in the end faithful;
bitter, the Kyprian's feet-
ah, flecks of whited clay,
great hero, vaunted lord
ah, petals, dust and windfall
on the ground-queen awaiting queen.
Better the weight, they tell,
the helmet's beaten shell,
Athene's riven steel,
caught over the white skull,
Athene sets to heel
the few who merit it.
Yet even then, what help,
should he not turn and note
the height of forehead and the seal of conquest,
drawn near, and try the helmet;
to lift-reset the crown


510
THREE POEMS
Athene weighted down,
or break with a light touch
mayhap the steel set to protect;
to slay or heal.
A treacherous god, they say,
yet who would wait to test
justice or worth or right,
when through a fetid night
is wafted faint and nearer-
then straight, as point of steel
to one who courts swift death,
scent of Hesperidean orange-spray.
PHAEDRA REMEMBERS CRETE
Think, O my soul,
of the red sand of Crete;
think of the earth, the heat
burnt fissure like the great
backs of the temple serpents;
think of the world you knew;
as the tide crept, the land
burned with a lizard-blue
where the dark sea met the sand.
Think, O my soul-
what power has struck you blind-
is there no desert root, no forest-berry,
pine-pitch or knot of fir
known that can help the soul
caught in a force, a power,
passionless, not its own?
So I scatter, so implore
Gods of Crete, summoned before
with slighter craft;
ah, hear my prayer:


H. D.
511
Grant to my soul
the body that it wore,
trained to your thought,
that kept and held your power,
as the petal of black power
the opiate of the flower.
For art undreamt in Crete,
strange art and dire,
in counter-charm prevents my charm,
limits my power:
pine-cones I heap
grant answer to my prayer.
No more, my soul-
as the black cup, sullen and dark with fire,
burns till beside it, noon's bright heat
is withered, filled with dust,
and into that noon-heat
grown drab and stale,
is sudden sound of thunder and swift rain,
till the scarlet flower is wrecked
in the slash of the white hail.
The poppy
soul was,
that
my
formed to bind all mortals,
made to strike and gather hearts
like flame upon an altar,
fades and shrinks, a red leaf-
waste and drift of the cold rain.


512
THREE POEMS
PHAEDRA REBUKES HIPPOLYTA
Swift and a broken rock
clatters across the steep shelf
of the mountain-slope,
sudden and swift,
and breaks as it clatters down
into the hollow breach
of the dried water-course;
far and away
(through fire, I see it,
and smoke of the dead, withered stalks
of the wild cistus-brush)
Hippolyta, frail and wild,
galloping up the slope
between great boulders
and shelves and circles of rock.
I see it, sharp, this vision,
and each fleck on the horse's flanks
of foam, the bridle and bit,
the silver--the reins,
held fast with perfect art,
the sun, striking athwart
the silver work,
the neck, strained forward, ears alert,
and the head of the girl
flung back and her throat.
Ah, burn my fire, I ask
out of the smoke-ringed darkness
enclosing the flaming disk
of my vision-
I ask for a voice--an answer-
was she chaste?
Who can say,
the broken ridge of the hills


H. D.
513
was the line of a lover's shoulder,
his arm-turn, the path to the hills,
the sudden leap and swift thunder
of mountain-boulders, his laugh.
She was mad-
as no priest, no lovers' cult
could grant madness;
the wine that entered her heart
with the touch of the mountain-rocks
was white, intoxicant:
she, the lithe and remote,
was betrayed by the glint
of light on the hills,
the granite splinters of rock,
the touch of the stone
where heat melts
toward the shadow-side of the rocks.


CASE: MALLARMÉ
BY FERNAND DIVOIRE
M : .
ALLARMÉ: Is surrounded by friends. His friends like
him very much; when he shows them his verse they think
him a lunatic. Catulle Mendes so informed me, and he was very
fond of Mallarmé; he thought him a charming fellow.
Next: some people begin to admire Mallarmé's verse. They
become Disciples. That is to say: they become disciples of a cer-
tain type of verse.
If Mallarmé then wishes to make other verses, he must find new
disciples for this new form. Otherwise the people about him who
have taken the name Mallarmists, and who would have liked to im-
prison the poet in a section of himself, will do their best to prevent
his evolution; to prevent his emerging from the Mallarmism with
which they are already acquainted.
If their idol commits a work which projects beyond the form
which they already admire; they will not merely cease to be interest-
ed, not merely refrain from an interest in this work; on the con-
trary, they will try to get it into the frame of their cult-or they
will veil a modest mysteriousness.
Thus one might see part of an artist's work discipleless until long
after his death.
Imagine the author of Un coup de dé living in our time. We
should expect him really to produce poetic symphonies rich in
sonorities and with distinct architectonic form; symphonies which
would have routed the Mallarméens of 1880.
Mallarmé came to the threshold of this art. He saw over the
threshold. But all his age, all his surroundings, every thing that
he had formed, combined together to prevent him from incubating
the
egg
he held in his hand. The Coup de dé was forty years be-
yond the time in which it was written. It comes to us young with
all the future it contained, weighted with the defects of the time in
which it was put together.
If there is among us any one who can shed his friends and dis-
ciples three times running.
Gain: 40 x 3= years 120.



GRO POSR-
THE CONDUCTOR. BY WILLIAM GROPPER






Groom
ili
A BEGGAR.
BY WILLIAM GROPPER


1
1
.
!



Groporr
POLITICAL CHARACTERS. BY WILLIAM GROPPER


1
1


stopala
SECOND-HAND ROMANCE. BY WILLIAM GROPPER





THE ISLAND OF PARIS: A LETTER
October, 1920
NDISTURBED by any of the matters dealt with in my last
letter, Guy Charles Cros continues his vitreous and impec-
cable versification:
UND
"Je suis seul au milieu de tout comme une pierre au milieu du
courant
qui ne bouge ni à droite ni à gauche et qui reste là cent ans;
une pierre au milieu de l'eau, de l'eau qui tremble et qui frissonne.
Je n'ai rien qui soit à moi et je ne suis à personne.
Etre tout seul, seul à jamais, le reconnaître et le savoir,
est-il un rêve qui vaille cette certitude sans espoir?
L'eau qui coule sans remous est lente et profonde.-
Ai-je cru un seul instant à la réalité du monde?”
There is the authentic voice, fashions divide and go by. Ten years
ago Cros' first book brought us the evidence of his existence: a man
who would not tell lies or make pretence of possessing emotions not
in him. Here in his later work is the superb sense of a writer
who knows that enough is enough and who understands how small a
thing can uphold eternity; that a painting is not estimated by its
acreage.
Two interesting books of verse have already come from La Belle
Edition, where François Bernouard is reviving the art of steel colour
engraving
They are Quelques poèmes des saisons by Vanderpyl, possessing
in no small degree the qualities usually ascribed too exclusively to
his friend, once of L'Abbaye, Charles Vildrac.
“Etre fort, c'est à peu près
tout ce que je veux être;


516
THE ISLAND OF PARIS:
être bonne est à peu près
tout ce qu'elle veut être:
qui de nous aura raison
au temps rouge des moissons?”
(Vanderpyl)
His ally Marville has an equal simplicity in Kou-Singa, Vander-
pyl's hearth is as simply presented as Marville's African coasts and
backwaters:
“Des brumes sont sur le fleuve
au-dessus des Rapides.
Les monts sont loin,
les monts sont bleus
et gris.
Kaï! Kaï sur l'eau
couleur de ciel
où pleut des gouttes
de lumière.
Le courant fuit
sous la pirogue
avec un frisson d'étoffe froissée."
(Marville)
a
The droll morgue of Maurice Vlaminck shows in the poems printed
in Action (No.4). So far as it lies within me I do not praise men's
writing merely because I happen personally to like the authors
themselves, and I have, I think, reasonably praised work and "put
up with” various inconveniences from “creators” whom I have not
especially liked.
Yet it may pass for legitimate that a man's personality should re-
inforce one's judgement, and make one ready to take risks of expres- .
sion. And for what it may add or detract, I may as well set it
down in black and white that Vlaminck is one of the finest things,
humanly speaking, that I have seen during two visits to Paris: this
huge bulk, like a piano-mover with leanings toward the prize-ring;
this basis for Vanderpyl's thundering and oft tub-thumped dictum
that “a painter, thunder of the thunders of god, is a great stupid
brute sweating paint.”
And of the other fine human objects is Fritz Vanderpyl himself,
1


A LETTER
517
6
perched reading on his balcony, his head like a round dreaming
cannon-ball atop the stubby structure of his person; "obèse” as the
foreign legion discovered him to be after months of quandary as how
to feed him to cannon. And they took him out because he was too
"obèse" to fit into the active army.
And perhaps my richest half hour of the two visits: in Vla-
minck's studio: Vlaminck impassive, presenting the company with
:
the seat of his breeches, enormous, like the gable end of a barn;
Cros, as usual, quiet as brook water moving over a smooth-sanded
bottom and Vanderpyl booming and crackling “thunder of the
thunders of god.” (This is not translated verbatim.)
All of which means that I don't ask any one to take my word for
this
part
of my essay, if the verse doesn't bear out my statements;
if the sense isn't there in Vlaminck's verses: (Action, edited by
Florent Fels, 18 rue Feydeau).
"Quand Jean Pierre Marie
Fils de Marie Jean Jules Pierre
Vint au monde
Il comprit qu'en somme
C'était une mauvaise affaire
On l'avait invité
Sans lui mettre son couvert.
Sa mère était pauvre,
Son père était décédé
Sans rien lui laisser.
Or of Jean-Jules-Marie Pierre
.... Il dit: j'ai de quoi payer!
Entra dans un bistro
Où mangeaint des cochers
Et dégusta du gigot.
En appelant le patron
Il cria: l'addition!
Fier,
Sur le zinc,
Il posa sa croix de guerre,
En pensant: ça vaut beaucoup!


518
THE ISLAND OF PARIS:
Le patron le regarda de travers:
- Cette monnaie là, dit-il,
Ne vaut plus rien du tout,
La guerre est finie!
Ça passe pour cette fois-ci
Mais ne reviens pas ici!
Et il ajouta d'un air bonasse:
-Qu'est-ce que tu veux que j'en fasse!"
Or Marie:
“Elle était coquette et pas belle
Elle s'appelait Marie
Comme la Vierge et les bonnes.
Les bonnes s'appelent Marie
La Vierge aussi.
Elle était coquette et pas belle.
Son père était tourneur
Il était mort à la peine
Avant la journée de huit heures.
Sa mère faisait les ménages
Marie ne pensait qu'à l'amour
Toujours.
Ca devait finir très mal pour elle
Elle était coquette et pas belle.
Un matin je l'ai recontrée
Elle avait beaucoup de chagrin,
Elle était enceinte d'un Americain
Qui reprenait le train."
Five lines of Vlaminck are worth all the forty volumes of Barrès;
all the rhetoric that has been spouted during the past six years; all
the official publications about the “land fit for heroes” and the safe
place for democracy. They have, beyond this, a robustezza and
they make a music for singing.
EZRA POUND


BOOK REVIEWS
AN ARISTO-DEMOCRAT
MY DIARIES. By Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. Part One,
1917. Part Two, 1920. 8vo. 1023 pages.
Martin
Secker. London.
THE
a
a
HE Education of Henry Adams has found its counterpart in
England in the Diaries of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, of which the
second and concluding part appeared this year. Both Adams and
Blunt belonged to the patrician class, and both were compelled to
live in a democratic world which they distrusted and despised. Both
were born to the amplest opportunities which Anglo-Saxon civili-
zation offers. Both served an apprenticeship in practical life long
enough to gain a knowledge of the machinery of the modern world,
and to surround themselves with a circle of active spirits from whom
they drew a constant stream of confidential information as to the
manipulators of that machinery and the forces which impelled them.
Both were cosmopolitan, at home in the society of the capitals of the
world. Both had an extraordinary experience of modern life, and
both kept a spiritual aloofness from it that enabled them to look be-
fore and after. Both were intensely curious about the detail of
life of their contemporaries, but both were fundamentally concerned
with the eternal question of the world, Quo Vadis. Adams gave
to his experience a plot or pattern by applying, half humorously,
the formula of an inquiry into its value in terms of the education
of the individual. Blunt has left his in the raw material of personal
narrative, conversations, reports, comment. The advantage of form
is with the American, and his book will remain one of the great auto-
biographies of the world with the Confessions of Saint Augustine,
Benvenuto Cellini, and Rousseau. On the other hand, Wilfrid
Blunt, it may be prophesied, will be reckoned among the great ob-
servers of times and the affairs of men—with Saint-Simon, Horace
Walpole, and Crabbe Robinson.
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt has recently celebrated his eightieth birth-


520
AN ARISTO-DEMOCRAT
day. He was born three years after the accession of Victoria.
Educated at a Roman Catholic School, he seems to have imbibed
something of the errant chivalry which survives among old Catholic
families—the Howards and the Digbys. His initiation into life,
like Adams', came through diplomacy. He was attaché at Frank-
fort, Madrid, Paris, Athens, and other places, and he lived more
widely and intensely than his American counterpart. No one can
doubt it who has read the Love Sonnets of Proteus by which he is
chiefly known, at least to the generation that was at college in the
eighties. Love and poetry were not his only avocations; he speaks
of copying Velasquez while at Madrid. At thirty he married and
settled on his estate, Crabbett, in Sussex, which became the annual
meeting place of a group of les jeunes, the Crabbett Club, whose
names recall the hopes and failures of the late Victorian age-
George Curzon, Harry Cust, Lord Crewe, Frederick Locker, Alfred
Douglas, George Wyndham, Loulou Harcourt-and, "on a single
occasion,” Oscar Wilde. His political ambition was wrecked by
an act of sheer Quixotism. He threw himself into the Irish cause
which was then in the phase of the Land War, and expiated his se-
dition by a year in Kilmainham jail. On his return he found him-
self estranged, as he says, “from most of my personal friends, my
blood relations and those I loved best.” His patrician prejudices
were “shocked by the incongruity of being met at my door on my
return from Kilmainham by a deputation consisting of three Irish
M.P.'s and Langridge, our local cobbler and only Radical.” Hence-
forth he realized the full nakedness of the land on any lines but
those of silence and abstention.” “I resolved to look no more to
action at home but to seek in other ways what I still felt to be my
mission in life, that of pleading the cause of the backward nations
of the world, and especially those of Asia and Africa, from their
slavery to Europe.” It is at this point, 1888, that My Diaries be-
gin.
Already Blunt had become interested in the imperial questions of
English control of India, and especially Egypt. He was a strong
supporter of Egyptian nationalism, a friend of Arabi Pasha, and a
bitter critic and foe of the English occupation. He had an estate
near Cairo, at which for many years he spent the winter, in close
communication with Egyptians of all parties—the Khedive, the
Grand Mufti, Zaghloul, and other leaders of the nation—and a


ROBERT MORSS LOVETT
521
sharp thorn in the flesh of Lord Cromer. In England he acted as
a sort of unofficial ambassador of Egypt, and fought in the press a
weary and losing fight against the greed of the few and the indiffer-
ence of the many which combine to make up public opinion. What
discouraged him most—what tears the heart out of every sincere
fighter for national morality—was the fact that peoples have no
conscience, that for nations there is no repentance. On July 11,
1912, he records: “Anniversary of the bombardment of Alexandria
thirty years to-day, and there is no sign of repentance in this coun-
try. I am the only person left who remembers that abominable
event and who still protests.”
His sympathy extended to all subject peoples; he judged white
civilization by one standard, its treatment of the black, brown, yel-
low races; and he looked at international politics chiefly from this
point of view. He lost faith in the Arbitration and Peace Society
for the same reason that others have lost faith in The League of
Nations:
“I found the ideas of the Society would be of no profit if realized
to the backward races of mankind, or to prevent wars by white men
against them, whereas a general war in Europe might possibly give
them a time of peace on the principle that when thieves fall out
honest men come by their own.”
He looked hopefully to a general war between the Dutch and Eng-
lish in South Africa as likely to "alleviate the condition of the only
people whose interests I really care for in the quarrel, namely, the
blacks." He found hope for Islam in the alliance between Ger-
many and Turkey. He condemned John Redmond's leadership of
the Irish party in Parliament for “abandoning the cause of India,
Persia, and Egypt, and backing up Grey and the Whigs in all their
iniquitous doings abroad in payment for Irish Home Rule.” And
on the rumour that the Pope was supporting the atrocious Italian
campaign in Tripoli he pronounced solemn anathema. "If true,
“I
can only say what I have never in my life said, or thought to say,
'To Hell with the Pope.'
With this fundamental attitude it was natural that Blunt should
be a pronounced anti-imperialist, a Little-Englander. Whenever
the British Empire was in question he was a thorough defeatist.


522
AN ARISTO-DEMOCRAT
Speaking of Rosebery's scheme for the partition of the Ottoman
Empire he hoped “that under Providence it may result in the parti-
tion of that other Empire for the sake of which we in England have
sold our old principles of freedom and respect for International
right.” He looked upon the Boer War as the "first nail driven into
the coffin of the British Empire.” He sent £ 50 to the Stop-the-
War Committee with reluctance because "if the war goes on another
six months it really may smash up the British Empire.” He exult-
ed in the Boer victories as “every honest man, English or not, would
rejoice.” He held, on the other hand, that "the British Empire is
the great engine of evil for the weak races now existing in the
world,” because though other nations “do harm in the world they
are not able to do it so effectively as we do through their lack of
those qualities that make of Englishmen an administrative race.”
And on the other hand, he saw the decay of British national char-
acter under the "gangrene of empire.” There was the crass stu-
pidity which finds in bloodshed the great engine of administration,
as witness the conversation between Winston Churchill and Moore,
the premier of Natal, apropos of India—with its ghastly prophecy
of Amritsar.
"Well, Churchill, I suppose you'll have to bleed them soon; there's
I
nothing like it. Next time they have a demonstration ride them
down, and if that isn't enough pour in a volley. You'll bleed a few
thousands of them, but it will be better for them in the long run;
there's nothing like bleeding.”
And there was the ghastly hypocrisy that permitted the extermina-
tion of the blacks of South Africa while holding meetings to de-
nounce the Sultan for destroying the Armenians. "Was there ever
a nation like ours? Never, since the world began.” He found
comfort in Herbert Spencer's acquiescence in his opinion that “it
would need a foreign army landed on our shores to bring us quite
to our sober senses."
It was not because of lack of pride in his race that Blunt flouted
the empire. He never repudiated the sonnet on Gibraltar-that
thrilling call of national glory, to find the like of which we must
go back to the Elizabethans:


ROBERT MORSS LOVETT
523
“Ay, this is the famed rock which Hercules
And Goth and Moor bequeath'd us; at this door
England stands sentry. God! to hear the shrill
Sweet treble of her fifes upon the breeze,
And at the summons of the rock gun's roar
To see her red coats marching from the hill."
It was because he was by inheritance an Englishman of Englishmen,
Pharisee of the Pharisees, that like St Paul he repudiated the false
pride of his race. To him “the Empire is a poor cockney affair in-
vented hardly twenty years ago”; and he declared "I am myself
the extremest of all possible Little-Englanders and would cheerfully
return to the 'spacious' days of Queen Elizabeth when we held not
a foot of land outside the kingdom.”
It was with a quite peculiar horror that he saw the example of
England finding an imitator in America. When McKinley's ulti-
matum made certain the war with Spain he "hopes that Spain may
be able to hold her own, not that Cuban independence lacks my sym-
pathy but because between Spain and the United States I am obliged
to be on the side of the older and more barbarous country. The
Yankees as the coming race of the world would be worse even than
ourselves.”
In spite of his defeatist attitude on every question of foreign or
imperial affairs for forty years Blunt retained the personal friend-
ship of many of his class. Through them he was able to help, in
sinall ways, Indian, Egyptian, Irish, and other victims of imperial
rapacity, and through them he had an unexampled knowledge of
what was going on in the world. With Sir William Vernon Har-
court, George Wyndham, and later Winston Churchill his relations
were particularly close. He saw much of Hilaire Belloc, Henry
Labouchère, Frederic Harrison, and other keen observers of public
affairs. Lady Galloway, sister of Lord Salisbury, and Margot
Tennant were his friends and gossips. He had known the capitals
of Europe during his diplomatic apprenticeship, and year by year
on his way to Cairo he visited the Duc de Wagram at Gros Bois.
From his residence in Egypt he was in contact with the Moslem
world, not only on the surface which it turns to Europe, but in its
inner mysterious depths. He visited the Bedouin tribes of the
desert, and made one journey of extreme interest to Siwah to gain


524
AN ARISTO-DEMOCRAT
event.
direct knowledge of the Senussis, the primitive sect from which may
come the regeneration and rehabilitation of Islam. Altogether his
range of interest was enormous, and his opportunities commensurate
with it.
Not only in politics and foreign affairs but also in sport, society,
art, poetry, science, and religion Blunt followed the currents of his
time with undiminished zest. His innate chivalry is perhaps sym-
bolized in his love of horses. He established a stud of Arabians at
Crabbett, where each year he held an auction that became a public
He recalled a day's hunting or a coaching party with the
gusto of Squire Western. He enjoyed lunching with Margot Ten-
nant, and hearing the latest gossip of the Souls. He wrote a play
for Lady Gregory's theatre. He followed the Modernist Move-
ment in the Catholic Church, the excommunication of St George
Mivart, and the career of Father Tyrrell to his death. Through his
friendship with Wilfrid Meynell he had Francis Thompson as his
guest, and has given an unrivalled account of that mysterious per-
sonality. “He has the smallest head and face of any grown man I
ever saw, colourless, except for his sharp nose where all light is con-
centrated, and his bright eyes. It is the face of a Spanish sixteenth
century Saint, almost that of a dying child.” He adds, by a happy
touch, that though Thompson knew nothing of nature he recognized
one flower. “Ah that's a poppy' he cried, as if greeting a friend."
Equally unforgettable are his recollections of the last days of
Cardinal Newman, of Herbert Spencer, and William Morris-
“really our greatest man.”
Superficially the chief interest of My Diaries is doubtless in the
secret histories of which Blunt's indefatigable curiosity made him
Certain venerable shams he took an eager delight in de-
molishing. There is George Leveson Gower's refutation of the
myth that Lord Cardigan led the charge at Balaclava—"Cardigan
being at the time, on board his yacht, and only arrived on the field
of battle as his regiment was on its way back from the Valley of
Death.” Certain obnoxious matters like the desecration of the
Mahdi's tomb at Omdurman and the Jameson Raid turn up again
and again as Blunt collected details and extended his sources of in-
formation. The story of the Raid told by the brother of one of the
participants represents it as a "regular drunken frolic” with an
amusing side. “Jameson had told off three men to cut the telegraph
master.


ROBERT MORSS LOVETT
525
a
a
wires, but they were in such a condition that they mistook a barbed
wire fence for the telegraph and cut off a hundred yards of it and
carefully buried it instead of the other.” There is exquisite malice
in his preservation of Lady Tennant's reminiscence of Gladstone's
grandfather, a baker who spelled his name Gladstanes, and was
locally known as “licht bap” on account of selling his loaves at
short weight. There is a touch of the splendeurs et misères des
cardinaux in the account of the way in which Bishop Vaughan (now
cardinal) coerced Manning, who had no immediate intention of dy-
ing, into receiving the last rites for a dying archbishop. There is
Gallic pungency in the anecdote of Carolus-Duran who explained
that though not an ascetic he no longer made declarations of love
at fifty-four. “Out of timidity ?” asked Lady Castletown. “Non,”
he answered "c'est par pudeur.”
Blunt's judgements of his contemporaries were coloured by his
prejudices. Between Liberals and Tories he saw little difference
except that "while both rob with the cry of 'your money or your
life' the Liberals would like the money given up peaceably, the
others after a fight.” Still, on the whole he preferred the Tories
as being less tainted by hypocrisy. Gladstone, Rosebery, Morley,
Dilke, he blamed for their weakness; Salisbury, Chamberlain, and
Balfour for their cynicism. He gives an illuminating contrast be-
tween Balfour and Asquith as drawn by Winston Churchill. "He
[Asquith] is simple-minded and good. Arthur, on the contrary,
is in his nature hard; he could be cruel. The difference between
him and Arthur is that Arthur is wicked and moral, Asquith is good
and immoral.” Churchill's final summing-up of Balfour is singu-
larly just. "He takes too scientific a view of politics. He knows
that there has been an ice age and that there will some day be an
ice age again.” There follows in the same conservation an amus-
ing account of the collapse of Asquith under the temptations of
London society, and his rehabilitation by the Lloyd George Budget,
which “put a stop to his social career.”
For the professed empire builders Blunt had only bitter words.
Stanley he cited as an example of degradation of character like that
pictured by Conrad in The Heart of Darkness. Cecil Rhodes
he thought a lucky gambler who "after a series of
gross
blunders
was unscrupulous enough to save most of his own money at the ex-
pense of a war and ruin for everyone else.” He noted curtly in
6


526
AN ARISTO-DEMOCRAT
1911, “The birthday honour list gives Jameson a baronetcy who
ought to have had a rope.” Roosevelt on the occasion of his Cairo
speech he marked as “a buffoon of the lowest American type-a kind
of mad dog roaming about the world.”
The characters for whom Blunt felt most sympathetic apprecia-
tion were Father Tyrrell, William Morris, Sir Wilfrid Lawson, un-
compromising upholders of lost causes, and especially the group
of
younger men in Parliament, George Wyndham, Winston Churchill,
Harry Cust, Loulou Harcourt, aristocrats like himself whom he felt
at times that he had almost persuaded to adopt his own generous
view of imperial renunciation and to "stand out for justice” to
India, Egypt, Ireland. Alas! They were all bound to the in-
fernal machinery of politics, swept on by the momentum of a popu-
lar tide as impossible to stem as the fight of the Tartars. How
clearly they understood the nature of the problem is shown by a con-
versation with George Wyndham in 1909.
“He is inclined to agree with me that England would be better
without her Indian Empire. In old times, when England was gov-
erned by an oligarchy, the administration of India might have been
gradually transferred to the natives—but not now. A Minister
purposing to do so could not remain a month in office. This of
course, is true, but it is the same thing as admitting what Gordon
said, that no reform was possible in India except by a revolution.”
An aristocrat in a democratic world—this is Blunt's final judge-
ment of himself. He saw in this fact his likeness to Gobineau, who
was like himself “an orientalist out of harmony with received orient-
al ideas, a poet who was never popular, and an artist who was never
more than an amateur.” And he read clearly his failure in the
cause to which he had given his life. In vain were generosity, cour-
age, pity, loyalty, honour, all the virtues of that chivalry which
Blunt inherited and professed, in a blind, hypocritical, selfish,
predatory, democratic world. As the shadows gathered about him
in 1913 he wrote:
“I am alone just now here, and in this dark world I am over-
whelmed with woe-I realize how little I have accomplished, how
little I have affected the thought of my generation in spite, as I am


ROBERT MORSS LOVETT
527
still convinced, of the soundness of my view of things, and of some
skill and courage in expounding it. I have made almost no con-
verts in Europe, and am without a single disciple at home to con-
tinue my teaching after I am dead. Even in the East, though my
ideas are bearing fruit and will one day be justified in act, I have
founded no personal school where my name has authority.”
One final blow was reserved for him, the catastrophe of 1914,
which showed finally and incontestably the world in the colours in
which Blunt had so long seen it. About the war he could have no
illusions. His information on this point as on others was from
first hand sources.
“The real cause of our quarrel with Germany I well knew was
no more honourable a one than that of our dread of a too powerful
commercial rival and the fear of Kaiser Wilhelm's forcing France,
if we stood aside, into commercial alliance with him against us in
the markets of the world ... In this madness I would take no
part. That these were the true causes of the war and not the pre-
tended altruistic ones I have since acquired a certain knowledge
from one of its chief promoters.”
.
Here end My Diaries. What else is there to record save that
the Great War was not the cleansing which Wilfrid Blunt had
sometimes hoped it would be, that the demon by which the world
was possessed, and which rent and tore it, was not cast out, but has
taken seven devils worse than itself to enter in the name of
peace,
so that the last estate of that world is worse than the first?
Robert Morss LOVETT


PRIMITIVE HUMANITY AND
ANTHROPOLOGY
Primitive Society. By Robert H. Lowie. 12mo. 463
pages. Boni and Liveright. New York.
HOW
OW exhilarating are the words “primitive man!"
The
natural man, free from the fine-spun intellectual entangle-
ments and the deadening inhibitions of a maturer, sadder world,
the man bent on the satisfaction of every clean, strong-flowing im-
pulse-savage, if you like, cruel, perhaps gloriously run amok!
What of that, if only he be free, if only he breathe? Or, if this
rhapsodical prelude suit not the reader's temperament, how de-
pressing, dark, sinister are the words “primitive man!” For do not
evolutionary anthropology and social psychology, double-headed
Cerberus to the study of man, teach us that the individual is
as naught in the pristine strata of human society, that he is but
the unresisting sport of such tyrannical social compulsions as we
of the mild to-day hardly dream of, that he and his society are but
a drop in the powerful current of evolutionary law that does duty
for man's earliest history? Here are two splendid superstitions
for a critic's lance. Of course field ethnologists, Indian agents,
and artists resident in Tahiti have long known that savages are
very mild-mannered, comfortable people indeed. To be sure, one
might have his skull broken in by a spiked club. This is not nice.
But, then, there is such a thing as getting caught and mangled to
death in the running gear of a machine, or getting yourself in-
carcerated in an evil-smelling "institution” for any one of several
thousand reasons. Even European wars are known to happen.
Were it not for science, we should have naïvely supposed that
there was no such thing as "primitive” man in the sense of a fun-
damentally distinct psychological variety of this animal species.
We would still have recognized, of course, that the specific patterns
of social life, the concrete cultural elements that fashion the warp
and woof of daily living, the extent to which effective scientific
knowledge has been gained and utilized by the social group—that
all these differ enormously as we pass from civilized to primitive
societies. But do they not differ just as truly, in however less


EDWARD SAPIR
529
degree, as we pass from Zion, Illinois, to New York, and from New
York to Peking—nay, from Chelsea to the Back Bay precincts?
What need had we of positing a specifically primitive mentality,
a peculiar mode of apprehending the universe, a radically distinct
type of behaviour? As I have indicated, anthropological science
would not have it so. Evolution was in the air. Everybody felt
that it would be perfectly splendid if we could find a primitive
stage of thought from which we had “evolved.” Perhaps we could
even find stages and play the game of the stratigraphic geologist.
Of course we could not get hold of "primitive” man in the chrono-
logical sense of the term. Of his mentality we knew rather less
than of the introspective psychology of the anthropoid apes. But
there was nothing to prevent our identifying this hoary primitive
with his present-day "survivals.” We could study or theorize
about the South-African Bushman, the Andaman Islander, and the
Eskimo, and in this easy and thoroughly scientific manner we could
gradually build a really dignified structure of evolutionary social
law. The classical school of anthropology grew up and alternately
bewildered and delighted a public that was at first inclined to be
a little skeptical but that is now so accustomed to the idea of
archaic stages of human psychology and of correlated stages of
social evolution that the new variety of the game known as the
Freudian interpretation of primitive custom is played with quite
becoming seriousness. Laws of social psychology and evolutionary
schemes have been desperately hard at work. Rousseau's state of
nature, with which we could at least sympathize most pleasantly,
has been snowed under by a perfect fury of strange forces, with the
strangest, the most unlooked for consequences in their wake. Prim-
itive man became painfully unfamiliar and aloof, with a mad-
dening Frankenstein-like tendency to play the ghost of civilized
humanity's regrettable past.
Things finally came to such a pass that certain anthropologists
grew nervous— especially such as had seen primitive man from a
closer vantage-point than the ivied seclusion of Oxford. They set
about the task of testing out the laws. At first they made humble
suggestions for revision, then they questioned the validity of the
particular laws that had been “discovered” from time to time, now
they are actually going to the length of denying the possibility of
arriving at any laws, psychological or evolutionary, that would ex-


530
PRIMITIVE HUMANITY AND ANTHROPOLOGY
.
plain primitive culture. For the culture of a primitive people,
they tell us, is a historical datum, a thing of time, of place, of
contiguity, of that divine accident that results from the intertwin-
ing of thousands of antecedent factors that are themselves of time,
of place, of contiguity, of that divine accident
In short,
primitive culture is history, and history knows no laws that are
not either irrelevant platitudes or myths. And this, as I understand
Primitive Society, is where Dr Lowie stands. His book brushes
away, not captiously but with all the sweeping power of theoretical
argument and accumulation of descriptive fact, the whole cobweb
screen of anthropological law. Primitive humanity now stands
revealed as what we had always sneakingly felt it was—simply
ourselves, caught in the net of other geographical and historical
circumstances. Its psychology is our psychology, no more archaic
and no less variable. And, furthermore, neither its psychology nor
our psychology nor any psychology "explains” just that grandiose
pageant in the sequence of things that we call the history of man,
any more than all the laws of physics and chemistry "explain” just
what takes place in the woods of Quebec on a certain day in June,
1920. Anthropology, to put it technically, is not a conceptualizing
“science,” it is merely (but why "merely"?) a conveniently ab-
breviated record of what really takes place and has taken place in
more or less arbitrarily selected societies. The principle of selec-
tion is of no philosophic profundity. Anthropology merely treats
those societies that are not sophisticated enough to have drawn the
specialized attention of local students of culture history, such, say,
as study the Renaissance or classical Greece. If the horrified reader,
loving his neatly labelled sciences, thinks this too flippant a charac-
terization, let him set to and find a better.
The principle of selection being essentially arbitrary and quan-
titative, it follows that “primitive man” is no absolutely valid
historic concept. There is this “primitive” society and there is
that one, and the only real justification for grouping them at all
would be a possible historical connection that research may establish
to have obtained between them. Failing this, they are to be studied
as utterly distinct historic entities. But the historical connection
referred to is of course equally possible between a civilized society
and a primitive one. This means that, historically considered, the
line of demarcation running between, say, European civilized soci- .
)
a


EDWARD SAPIR
531
eties and African primitive societies on the one hand and aboriginal
American societies on the other may be of antecedent importance
to that which separates the two Old World groups of societies. The
theoretical instance is here also an actual one. Europe and Africa
share a host of cultural features—the iron-smith's art, the cultiva-
tion of certain cereals, the tendency to monarchy, the development
of elaborate judicial procedure, the proverb and the narrative with
a moral point, stringed instruments—which are unknown in abo-
riginal America. It is safe to say that as our study of primitive
societies becomes more clearly animated by the historical point of
view, the very notion of "primitive societies” as such will be aban-
doned as but a temporarily convenient omnium gatherum. Social
psychology may go blithely forward, but it need have no expecta-
tion of getting anything of exclusive significance out of the doings
of primitive folk.
As one passes, in Dr Lowie’s reviews of the parallel or contrast-
ing features in the social organizations of various primitive com-
munities, from continent to continent and from tribe to tribe, one
gets a cumulative sense of the essential effectiveness of human life
at any level of sophistication. Primitive folk suffer from no
greater handicaps than their "more fortunate” brethren of civilized
communities. What they actually possess and enjoy in the way of
cultural goods is a thousandfold surrogate for what they have not
and have never heard of. If they have no alphabet, they have
.
impassioned oratory and orally transmitted folk-literature none the
less. If they have not the steamboat, they have some other way
of getting down stream or over to a distant island, and once there,
they are pretty certain to engage in some activity that is culturally
at least as significant as the pursuits of excursionists or business
agents. There is no sentimentality in all this. The layman does
not begin to grasp to what an extent any society is moulded by
historical inertia, by conventions. There is not a feature in primi-
tive society, be it human sacrifice or cannibalism, that can not be
shown by historical analysis to be a perfectly intelligible phenome-
may not in the consciousness of the folk be raised to the
status of a rigid necessity, an ideal.
The insight into primitive societies thus gained reacts, it goes
without saying, on our evaluation of the fundamental elements
in our own culture. Here also the ways are thick-strewn with
non, that


532
PRIMITIVE HUMANITY AND ANTHROPOLOGY
convention. There is barely an institution, a usage, a belief, an
ideal that has not about it the stigmata of convention, of historic
accident. A moderately well-read student of comparative culture
could suggest a dozen satisfactory alternates for any of them. It
makes little difference how necessary we feel them to be, how un-
thinkable we regard their absence. Such a book as Primitive So-
ciety opens our eyes, if only by implication, to the overwhelmingly
"artificial” cast of our lives; it does much to dispel our secure
rationalism about ourselves and our institutions. Nothing can be
taken for granted. If anthropology shows the most absurd of
beliefs, the most revolting of practices, to have an explicable his-
torical background, to form part and parcel of the unquestioned
cultural legacy of those very estimable people who hold such be-
liefs and practise such enormities, if, in other words, to the anthro-
pologist's eye they assume a cultural dignity comparable to the
beliefs and practices of civilized communities, it conversely enables
us to see as “primitive,” as irrational and halting, hundreds of
warmly cherished elements in our own social lives. It is all a
matter of point of view. The important thing to remember is
always this—that there is no psychological necessity about any of
these cultural features, whether we find them in primitive societies
or in our own levels. The psychological necessities of man are
capable of an infinitely multiform solution. The truth is that
culture is not a psychologically determined response to the basic
needs of life, it is something much more elusive and satisfying than
that. It is the fine art of living, enshrined in the heritage of gen-
eration to generation.
There is something ironical about the history of anthropological
points of view. The early anthropologists, adopting psychological
determinism and evolution as their guiding principles, were dis-
trusted by the conservative historians of their day. These were
regarded, by way of return of the compliment, as moss-backs in-
capable of assimilating the powerful methods that biological evolu-
tion was opening up. If an Egyptologist hesitated to label as
totemic survivals the peculiar animal cults of ancient Egypt, he
was likely to be accused of hopeless unfamiliarity with the new
historical methods and interpretations due to anthropology. Now
historians and sociologists have become pretty thoroughly anthro-
pologized. Every sociological whipper-snapper bandies about the


EDWARD SAPIR
533
clan and the totem. Unfortunately for the camp-followers of
anthropology, anthropology itself is now elaborately backwatering.
It is itself rapidly drifting to the anti-evolutionary, historical
method that it at one time affected to despise as an amateurish
plaything. Of course the circle is not a closed one.
The course
traversed by anthropology may more aptly be described as one up-
ward turn of a spiral staircase. Anthropology is back with history,
but the constant preoccupation with large issues and comparative
data has given it a perspective and a technique that it could never
have gained from the old history.
Dr Lowie's book may be recommended as the most informative,
lucid, and keenly critical introduction to the study of primitive
social organizations that the reviewer is aware of. It deserves
the most careful study. Fortunately for the non-professional
reader, Primitive Society is an eminently readable book. The style
is crisp and rapid. It has none of that stodgy long-windedness in
which the writers of books on social science seem to delight. The
reader will also be grateful for the occasional gleams of humour
and irony that enliven Dr Lowie's pages. They do not in the least
detract from the book's level of high seriousness.
EDWARD SAPIR


GEORGE SANTAYANA
LITTLE Essays. Drawn from the writings of George
Santayana by Logan Pearsall Smith. 12mo. 290 pages.
Charles Scribner's Sons. New York.
Tin
HE title of this book, Little Essays, is in one respect just
and descriptive: any one who has a taste for short essays
will find a good feast provided for him; the promise of compre-
hensive and balanced thought is fulfilled, while for craftsmanship
in diction and style, without which an essay is unworthy of its
name, this author may take rank among our best writers. But
in another respect the title is deceptive, and a reader may be sur-
prised to find a complete system of philosophy sprung upon him,
conveyed with a skill quite remarkable in literary art; for while
the essays can well hold their own as detached disquisitions on
special subjects, they form a catena of thought which hangs logic-
ally together, exposing a rational philosophy in a scheme so care-
fully contrived that even the necessary definitions of doubtful
terms-imagination, reason, perception, and the like-are readily
supplied without any appearance of machinery as soon as the
reader begins to need them.
The book has, therefore, two claims, literary and philosophical;
and, as it may be guessed from the preface that it was the literary
element that first gave occasion for publication, so this will be
perhaps the first to attract attention: for although the earlier phil-
osophers of the English school were punctilious scribes and proud
of their pens, and most of them masters in their manner, their
tradition has been ill maintained so that, in spite of some bril-
liant exceptions, we are not now accustomed to look for even
complacent dignity or severity of style in a philosophic treatise,
much less to expect a prose which is delightful for its own sake.
Indeed it has been said that George Santayana has imperilled the
recognition of his philosophy by the fine robes in which he has
consistently presented it; and that his readers have been distracted
from the sincerity and depth of his purpose by the perpetual flow
of his eloquence, his rich vocabulary, and the pleasant cadences


ROBERT BRIDGES
535
of his sentences, with their abounding imagery, incisive epigrams,
and jovial humour. Epigram and humour are indeed danger-
ous tools; but how should an honest philosopher forgo humour?
Humour, as it seems to me, is the natural courtesy which passes
between our instinct and our reason. The conscious and subcon-
scious mind are like two men of different nationalities who have
long lodged together in the same house, and from not knowing
each other's speech have been reduced to expressing their sym-
pathy and goodwill by bowing and smiling to each other on the
stairs. They mutually recognize that they understand the awk-
wardness of the situation, and they good-humouredly make the
best of it: as our author somewhere says, “A well-bred instinct
meets reason half-way”; and if it is anything like this, how can
their own recognition of their own status be denied its place in
an honest treatment of human life? Because it is playful perhaps
or too amusing, and philosophic seriousness not feeling quite sure
of its pretentious dignity can not venture near a joke. And it is
true that, as there are occasions which forbid trifling, there are
also thinkers so incapable of levity of any sort that they can not
laugh without dishonouring themselves. William Cowper was as
convinced of sin as St Paul was, and confessedly far more des-
pondent of salvation than he; but if among the authentic remains
of the Apostle's writings a ballad in the manner of John Gilpin had
come down to us, what should we think of his Epistle to the Galat-
ians? I have not detected Mr Santayana in abusing his humour:
he exercises it chiefly when dealing with barbarism and vulgarity, or
in exploding the fallacies (as he holds them to be) of those schools
of thought to which he is essentially opposed, or, again, on those
rare occasions when he relaxes to speak of himself. No one read-
ing his account of Kant would wish that he had sheathed his satiric
weapons, for on that topic he is quite as amusing as Heine. He
does not feel kindly towards dialectical systems, and says somewhere
that such philosophers do not proceed as honest searchers after
truth would, but much rather like lawyers who labour to make the
best of a case to which they are professionally committed. To me
such philosophies have seemed like the schoolboy's definition of a
net, "A lot of holes tied together with string.” Whatever may be
thought of Mr Santayana's meshes, it must be granted that his
string is a fine silk. Here is an example:


536
GEORGE SANTAYANA
“Since the ideal has this perpetual pertinence to mortal strug-
gles, he who lives in the ideal and leaves it expressed in society
or in art enjoys a double immortality. The eternal has absorbed
him while he lived, and when he is dead his influence brings others
to the same absorption, making them, through that ideal identity
with the best in him, reincarnations and perennial seats of all in
him which he could rationally hope to rescue from destruction. He
can say, without any subterfuge or desire to delude himself, that
he shall not wholly die; for he will have a better notion than the
vulgar of what constitutes his being. By becoming the spectator
and confessor of his own death and of universal mutation, he will
have identified himself with what is spiritual in all spirits and
masterful in all apprehension; and so conceiving himself, he may
truly feel and know that he is eternal.”
a
a
In reading this extract it requires some attention to dispel the
impression that we are dealing with a platonist; indeed, for the
manner and the vocabulary it might be a translation of some pas-
sage in the Socratic dialogues: but whatever inspiration the
author may owe to Plato for his particular doctrine of ideas, he
recognizes Spinoza and Democritus for his immediate masters,
and his philosophy might perhaps be described as a building up
of idealism—that is, the supremacy of the imagination-on a na-
turalistic or materialistic basis. Mr Santayana takes man as he
“is known” to be from observation and experience, accepting all
that is convincing in skepticism, and all that he deems proven in
mechanical physics; and this may be called a basis of “common
sense”: and in thus renouncing what is termed “Epistemology"
he incurs the reproach of materialism. How far he would himself
accept and allow this description of his thought must be judged
from his own statements in the fifth and last division of this book,
which is entitled On Materialism and Morals. And materialism
is a questionable label: if the word “matter” had changed its
form as much as it has changed its connotation, not all the Grimms
of Germany could ever have discovered laws enough to enable a
philologist to identify it.
With this reliance on common sense the riddle of consciousness
gives our author no trouble:


ROBERT BRIDGES
537
“Nothing is more natural than that animals should feel and
think. The relation of mind to body, of reason to nature, seems to
be actually this: when bodies have reached a certain complexity
and vital equilibrium, a sense begins to inhabit them which is
focussed upon the preservation of that body and on its reproduc-
tion. To separate things so closely bound together as are mind
and body, reason and nature, is a violent and artificial divorce, and
a man of judgment will instinctively discredit any philosophy in
which it is decreed.”
و
Reason, which follows consciousness upon the scene, harmonizes
the various instincts and impulses, and establishes an ideal of good
—that is, it corrects instinct by experience “with a view to attain-
ing the greatest satisfaction of which our nature is capable.” It is
“'essentially subsidiary,” “in the service of a finite organization,”
and it becomes "the ultimate conscience."
There is, perhaps, the same difficulty in Santayana as in Spinoza
of reconciling the religious attitude with the metaphysical or phi-
losophical tenets. In both of them Christ is the wisdom of God and
also merely a supreme offspring of human imagination: and for
many a like notion the later philosopher seems to me to deserve from
the papal Curia no better treatment than Spinoza got from the
Synagogue. I have been confidentially informed that within the
Roman Church (to which our author owes allegiance) such freedom
of thought is allowed to its members, but not the promulgation of
it. If there is still space for another name on the index librorum
expurgandorum, I should judge that Professor Santayana has quali-
fied for whatever distinction it may yet confer. I was myself
much comforted in soul to see opinions so similar to my own so
frankly advocated by a son of the Church; because since I edited
the poems of Digby Dolben and Gerard Hopkins I have been as-
sailed by the animadversions of Roman Catholic journals. “Bridges
était déjà très éloigné du Christianisme,” is a phrase which still
echoes in my household. I was frightened to see my defenceless
name pursued by such a thick arrowy flight of accents grave and
acute; and that little amateur excommunication was but the best
plum in a good pie. But I was perplexed when the other day an
eminent English writer reproached me for being so blindly devoted
to Christianity as to be unable to sympathize with other religions;


538
GEORGE SANTAYANA
and he held up for my example my two great predecessors in office,
Wordsworth and Tennyson, who (so he asserted) were not Christ-
ians, très éloignés du Christianisme; and this gentleman's view was,
I take it, the same with that of another writer—whom I as highly
esteem for his talent as I pity him for the misfortune he fell into
when he contracted to write my “life” without even any acquaint-
ance with its meagre materials—who described me, I believe, as a
child of the English Prayer Book: while only the other day an
American professor again upbraided me for my "incredible parochi-
alism of outlook"; as if because a man would strain out a pope he
must swallow a Reformed Church! I wittingly filch an inch or
two of my allotted space in this Journal to make a public acknowl-
edgement of gratitude to my mentors.
Of religion, about which there is much in these essays, Santayana
has this eloquent vindication:
“There must needs be something humane and necessary in an in-
fluence that has become the most general sanction of virtue, the
chief occasion for art and philosophy, and the source, perhaps, of
the best human happiness.”
His philosophical examination of Christianity is full, and he does
not profess faith in its universal acceptance:
“The sciences are necessarily allies, but religions, like languages,
are necessarily rivals. What religion a man shall have is a historical
accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak. ... The
attempt to speak without speaking any particular language is not
more hopeless than the attempt to have a religion that shall be no
religion in particular. A courier's or a dragoman's speech.
So travellers from one religion to another, people who have lost
their spiritual nationality, may often retain a neutral and confused
residuum of belief, which they may egregiously regard as the essence
of all religion, so little may they remember the graciousness and
naturalness of that ancestral accent which a perfect religion should
have.”
In his essay on Protestantism he says many shrewd and some un-
expected things of it:


ROBERT BRIDGES
539
“Protestantism has the unmistakable character of a genuine
religion. ... It is in correspondence with the actual ideals and
instincts of the believer."
.
"It is a religion of pure spontaneity, of emotional freedom, deep-
ly respecting itself, but scarcely deciphering its purposes.
It mistakes vitality, both in itself and in the universe, for spiritual
life.”
He seems to think its connection with Christianity to be accidental:
it is a purely Teutonic product; and, as he never shrinks from his
conclusions:
“This underlying Teutonic mood, which we must call Protestant-
ism for lack of a better name, is anterior to Christianity and can
survive it."
His contrast between the spirit of Protestantism and the spirit
of the Gospel is uncompromising and as disconcerting as Mr Bar-
low's (that is, Mr Day's) harangue in Sandford and Merton: but
when he speaks of the philosophy of modern Germany as a devel-
opment, a very flower of Protestantism, we feel that he is assum-
ing too summarily what the essence of these "ideas” really is, and
we would disallow his major premiss. One might assert, per
contra, that Protestant London in the nineteenth century was more
essentially Christian than Catholic Rome was in the fifteenth; and
are there not hundreds of thousands, nay, millions of Protestants
in England and Germany, to say nothing of America, who have
held, in the main, to the Gospel and to Christian life without danger
of any taint from this Teutonic philosophy? Again, when he says
that Protestantism nowadays “bids fair to apply itself to social
life,” may not that be an essential fruit of the Gospel? It is con-
ceivable that time may yet show that these men--très éloignés du
Christianisme, as he holds them to be, and its possible survivors-
these very men were the carriers of it. And when they would
have thrust him down from the hill whereon their city was built,
he escaped out of their hands.
This essay ends with a brilliant dictum which sums up one
aspect of the Reformation unforgettably:


540
GEORGE SANTAYANA
>
“The symptoms have been cured and the disease driven in.”
He does not fail to point out that Christianity was an Oriental
"idea,” and was not naturalized in Europe without a considerable
dilution of paganism; and this because
"The Oriental mind has no middle. It oscillates between ex-
tremes, and passes directly from sense to mysticism and back again.”
How well this expression illuminates our repugnance towards the
forms in which Oriental art has figured the gods of Indian myth-
ology! It is a good example of the pleasure which this author can
give. Such dicta and aphorisms are on every page, and yet they
never crowd:
"If pain could have cured us, we should long ago have been
saved.”
“That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions,
and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.”
9
To set such things together jostling in a row is to take the fresh-
ness out of them. They flow from the writer just where they have
full force:
“Plasticity loves new moulds because it can fill them, but for a
man of sluggish mind and bad manners there is no place like home.”
For an example of his steady paces, a section from The Knowl-
edge of Character may be taken. It gives incidentally his estimate
of Rousseau:
“If Rousseau, for instance, after writing those Confessions in
which candour and ignorance of self are equally conspicuous, had
heard some intelligent friend like Hume draw up in a few words
an account of their author's true and contemptible character, he
would have been loud in protestations that no such ignoble charac-
teristics existed in his eloquent consciousness; and they might not
have existed there because his consciousness was a histrionic thing,
and as imperfect an expression of his own nature as of man's.


ROBERT BRIDGES
541
When the mind is irrational no practical purpose is served by stop-
ping to understand it, because such a mind is irrelevant to practice,
a
and the principles that guide the man's practice can be as well
understood by eliminating his mind together. So a wise governor
ignores his subjects' religion or concerns himself only with its
economic and temperamental aspects; if the real forces that control
life are understood, the symbols that represent those forces in the
mind
may
be disregarded. But such a government, like that of the
British in India, is more practical than sympathetic. While wise
men may endure it for the sake of their material interests, they will
never love it for itself. There is nothing sweeter than to be sym-
pathised with, while nothing requires a rarer intellectual heroism
than willingness to see one's equation written out.”
Sixty pages are devoted to Religion and forty-four to Art (that
is, aesthetics or the fine arts) and Poetry; then follow sixty pages
on Poets and Philosophers, in which religion again comes in for a
good deal of handling: and its prominence in the book is the ac-
count of its prominence here.
A system of philosophy which sets out to establish a high spiritual
ideal of life on the basis of the emotions will take its most persua-
sive support from the idea of beauty; whence the section on Art
(that is, aesthetic) must be of primary importance. In the wider
sense of the term we should say that Religion, Morals, and
Aesthetics are, all of them, branches of Art—(it is to be wished
that journalists would give over using the word Art for Painting;
it is mere slang)—and though the Aristotelian supremacy of politics
is acknowledged, there is in this book comparatively little discus-
sion of its scientific branches; or I should say that my reading gave
me the impression that social development was deferred in sub-
ordination to individual perfection.
The aesthetic section I shall represent by typical quotations,
which will be better than any attempted summary: but I confess
that this method is also the resource of despair, for the subject is
overwhelming, and any one of these seventeen little essays would
provide sufficient matter for a whole review: but I may venture
a few remarks.
Morals, so Mr Santayana holds, requires only the harmony of
each life, and that harmony is the same as happiness and wisdom.


542
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Aesthetic has to be limited by prudence or utility in the interests
of happiness: thus the fine arts are "superficial superadded
activities.”
Accordingly as this harmony is induced in a man he will clarify
his ideals, and may even come to a vision of perfection. Such
moments of inspiration are the source of "the arts,” and a work of
art is the monument of such a moment.
And here we are suddenly confronted by an essay entitled Stars.
Why is this? It would seem that, the "ideal” having been re-
solved into a balance of relativities, it is necessary to look abroad
for some more stable foundation, and it is asked whether the beauty
of the starry heavens has not a sensuous character which is sublime
in itself: and so the next essay is on Music, because music makes
excursions into ultra-mundane regions, and reveals delicacies of
feeling which in ordinary life are not isolated or perceived, and,
in giving them definite form, may be said to create them, and thus,
like the stars, proves that something "non-relative is very near the
heart.” It is possible that the selected essays are not wholly ex-
plicit at this point:
“That art is prima facie and in itself a good can not be doubted.
It is a spontaneous activity, and that settles the question. In the
actual disarray of human life and desire, wisdom consists in know-
ing what goods to sacrifice and what simples to pour into the su-
preme mixture. The extent to which aesthetic values are allowed
to colour the resultant of highest good is a point of great theoretic
importance not only for art but for general philosophy.”
“Beauty gives men the best hint of ultimate good which their
experience as yet can offer; and the most lauded geniuses have
been poets, as if people felt that those seers, rather than men of
action or thought, had lived ideally and known what was worth
knowing. That such should be the case, if the fact be admitted,
would indeed prove the rudimentary state of human civilization.
The truly comprehensive life should be the statesman's.”
"When we consider further the senseless rivalries, the vanities,
the ignominy that reign in the “practical” world, how doubly
blessed it becomes to find a sphere where limitation is an excellence,
where diversity is a beauty, and where every man's ambition is con-
sistent with every other man's and even favourable to it.”
7


ROBERT BRIDGES
543
“Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom
affords in concrete experience—the union of life and peace.”
“The value of art lies in the making people happy."
“If Sybaris is so sad a name to the memory—and who is without
some Sybaris of his own ?-if the image of it is so tormenting and
in the end so disgusting, this is not because we no longer think its
marbles bright, its fountains cool, its athletes strong, or its roses
fragant; but because, mingled with all these supreme beauties
there is the ubiquitous shade of Nemesis, the sense of a vacant will
and a suicidal inhumanity. The intolerableness of this moral con-
dition poisons the beauty which continues to be felt.”
“Nothing but the good of life enters into the texture of the
beautiful.”
“No atheism is so terrible as the absence of an ultimate ideal, nor
could any failure of
power be more contrary to human nature than
the failure of moral imagination, or more incompatible with healthy
life. For we have faculties, and habits, and impulses. These
are the basis of our demands. And these demands, although
variable, constitute an ever-present intrinsic standard of value by
which we feel and judge. The ideal is immanent in them; for
the ideal means that environment in which our faculties would find
their freest employment and their most congenial world.”
Such sound and convincing teaching is much needed. Here are
a few extracts from the essays on Literature:
“To turn events into ideas is the function of literature. ... It
looks at natural things with an incorrigibly dramatic eye, turning
them into permanent unities (which they never are) and almost
into persons, grouping them by their imaginative or moral affinities
and retaining in them chiefly what is incidental to their being,
namely, the part they may chance to play in man's adventures.'
“It comes to clarify the real world, not to encumber it ... it
can not long forget, without forfeiting all dignity, that it serves
a burdened and perplexed creature, a human animal struggling to
persuade the universal Sphinx to propose a more intelligible
riddle"
“Our logical thoughts dominate experience only as the parallels
and meridians make a checker-board of the sea. They guide our


544
GEORGE SANTAYANA
voyage without controlling the waves, which toss for ever in spite
of our ability to ride over them to our chosen ends."
“To the art of working well a civilized race would add the art of
playing well.”
a
The next section of the book is on Poets and Philosophers, and
to many readers it is likely to be the most attractive, for the esti-
mates are plainspoken and very pointed with their exact diction and
exultant humour. Admirers of Robert Browning will be disgust-
ed; on the other hand, lovers of Dante should be satisfied, for he
is set on a high pedestal. Mr Santayana thinks that Lucretius and
Dante took the right view of a poet's function. Professor Royce
once told me, when talking of the position of philosophy in Amer-
ica, that the function of a philosopher was so understood there that
he found that he was expected "to emotionalize the district.” It
is Mr Santayana's opinion that it is the function of poetry to
emotionalize philosophy; and that the great poem must be the
aesthetical exposition of a complete theory of human life, so far as
that is understood; and that there is therefore at present a finer
opportunity for a great poet than the world has hitherto offered.
Since Dante's view of the situation is nowadays exploded, and
indeed was already somewhat old-fashioned in his own day, it
would follow—though Mr Santayana does not say so—that his
poem must now be obsolete: but I could not think that I am less
enthralled by his poetry than his first hearers were; I should say
that its "its loveliness increases.” And, again, Paradise Lost, when
“.
it was new, was admired for its justification of the ways of
God to man, and yet the admiration of those first admirers is far
transcended by our own, although we set by its argument as absurd,
and love the poetry in spite of it-unless it should be true that the
poetry gains by its romantic abstraction from the actual accidents
of present conditions: whence I should conclude that poetry will
use philosophy rather than be used by it. But such a poem as Mr
Santayana desires and foretells, if ever it should be written, will
necessarily be written by a great poet, and he will write good poetry.
From these subjects we pass to the final section of the book,
headed Materialism and Morals, and whatever summary the author
allows us of his system may be looked for here.
It would be presumptuous in me to attempt to criticize Professor


ROBERT BRIDGES
545
Santayana's philosophy, and my readers will probably rejoice with
me that I can not undertake it; but I can avouch that his system
justifies itself pragmatically as a vehicle for lucid discourse; and if
things are to be judged, as he would have them, by their human
values, this book should go far to accredit it: for the lucidity with
which the spiritual interests of life are handled in these essays can
not easily be rivalled: certainly I know of no other book in which
there is so much teaching of things that English people need to
learn, nor where the teaching is so genial, persuasive, and perspicu-
ous, and so free from the flaws of fashionable prejudice and false
sentiment. The philosophy, as I understand it, is very consonant
with my own thought: there is no pretence of hiding the unsolved
riddle of life. The Sphinx lurks in all systems; different schools
only hustle her from pillar to post, and if she is to be driven into
any corner where her presence is obvious, her best refuge is in the
unsearchable atom. And this is an honester method than that of
dismembering her and seeking to hide her mutilated fragments by
dispersal, as a piano-tuner will distribute the error of his wolf all
up and down the scale: for whatever immaterial agency there may
be, or even should we come to be convincd that all ultimate agency
was immaterial, our minds would be unable to conceive of its mode
of action except in material terms.
I remember the story of a skipper, the old servant of a mercan-
tile firm, who respected him as their most experienced and trust-
worthy agent. He was fond of horse exercise, and whenever he
brought his ship into port, which happened very frequently in those
days of short coal-storage, he would enjoy a day's riding, and charge
the hire of his hack on the ship's bills. One day when he had pre-
sented his accounts before the Board some cheeseparers objected,
and the chairman was constrained to remonstrate with the captain
and explain that the Board regretted that they had no authority to
supply him with mounts at the expense of the shareholders. The
skipper bowed to their decision, and at their next interview was
thanked and congratulated on his prompt attention to their instruc-
tions, “And we are glad to see, Captain Davidson, that the horse
no longer appears in your accounts.” “No, gentlemen,” replied
the skipper, “he no longer appears, but, though you mayn't see
him, he's there."
ROBERT BRIDGES
9


BRIEFER MENTION
The Power Of A Lie, by Johan Bojer, translated by Jessie Muir
(12mo, 311 pages; Moffat, Yard), grapples with human values,
impulses, and emotions with clear vision, and welds them into a
compact, significant narrative. Here is a novel of compelling
power and dignity, illuminated by a bleak beauty like that of
the aurora borealis. A tragedy, to which Hall Caine supplies
comic relief by explaining-in his introduction—how much bet-
ter he could have done it.
ATLANTIDA (L'Atlantide), by Pierre Benoit, translated by Mary
C. Tongue and Mary Ross (12mo, 303 pages; Duffield), was
proclaimed a best novel by the French Academy. It might, too,
have been awarded a prize as a best satire. The narrative is
somewhat Haggard: Antinea had probably read She. Benoit
has learned from Anatole France to display erudition but the
translators make a sad mess of it. What they do to classical
names should be a warning to reformers of the curriculum. The
title is the most glaring example. “Atlantida” means nothing.
“L’Atlantide” means “The Atlantide” or “The Daughter of
Atlas,” which is sensible and has something to do with the story.
6
The Young Physician, by Francis Brett Young (12mo, 520
pages; Dutton). Another English school-boy threading his self-
conscious way through school, turning somewhat from type by
entering medical school—which allows the book to attain a “big
moment” in a pregnancy scene. "Well-written” as the expression
is, but as provocative as a chart, as vivacious as a diagnosis, with
the hilarity of a prescription.
Half Portions, by Edna Ferber (12mo, 315 pages; Doubleday
Page), ripples through the channel cut by O. Henry, stirring that
rich human sediment without unduly muddying the current.
Miss Ferber's talents go to polishing the bright pebbles of life,
rather than to touching the bedrock of reality, but there's no deny-
ing the world would be duller without an occasional pretty pebble.


BRIEFER MENTION
547
The Great AMERICAN STORIES, by William Dean Howells
(12mo, 432 pages; Boni & Liveright), is probably as catholic a
selection as any other editor would have made. All anthologies
are desirable and all anthologies are disputable; this one should
be welcomed on both counts. A nice adjustment of personal pref-
erences to inevitable inclusions is here revealed, in a list which
embraces Dreiser, Twain, Henry B. Fuller, and George Ade.
FLEUR-DE-Lys, by Wilfrid Thorley (12mo, 336 pages; Houghton
Mifflin), is an earnest anthology of translated French poetry
from the twelfth century to the beginning of the twentieth.
The book has both critical and historical introductions, and notes
on the individuals translated. As might be expected of any one
with the courage to attempt so large a problem, Mr Thorley dis-
plays more earnestness than achievement. Also, the volume is
marred by inverted word-order, conventionalized poetic diction,
and the evident striving after rhymes.
a
Jewish CHILDREN, by Shalom Aleichem (12mo, 280 pages;
Knopf), is a collection of stories and sketches of child life in the
Russian Pale-studies at once tentative and precocious, executed
with a rare economy and a vivid understanding. Moods are
evoked as if by the striking of a chord; the effect is instantaneous
and sharp, yet softened with queer overtones of feeling.
Realism, A Study in Art and Thought, by Arthur McDowall
(12mo, 298 pages; Dutton). Resigned to the inevitable per-
,
sistance of the term “realism” in the critical vocabulary of art,
Mr McDowall devotes this long, earnest book to its definition.
And at the end convinces us to our relief that the effective, potent
critic of the future will line himself with the ranks of those who
have still hope of its permanent suppression. Often the book is
murky with the philosophical abstractions, crystallizing into
dogma. He has the caution of the scholar, and not the audacity
of the artist. He avoids the impertinences of brilliance, but also
its decision. Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Zola, serve him of course in
his query, but on the Georgians, whom he finds too much impli-
cated in the perplexities of living, he exerts himself to his most
relevant comment.


548
BRIEFER MENTION
The CHILDREN OF Opin, by Padraic Colum (12mo, 282 pages;
Illustrated; Macmillan), is the most gallant retelling of Norse
mythology. The old Sagas and Nordic legends, scattered bit by
bit through the poetry and drama of England and Germany, have
been woven into a magic tale of Asgard and its gods. Willy
Pogany's pictures of shaggy horses dashing across the sky, Iduna
with her golden apples and the young Sigurd braving the flames,
are excellent.
The Little School, by Sturge Moore (12mo, 63 pages; Har-
court, Brace & Howe), is an extremely charming book of poems
for children. They are poems about children for grown-ups too,
.
and have a quiet lyrism and a lovely fantasy which the latter will
be more apt to enjoy. The traditionalism which makes the author
cling to inversions, forced and accented rhymes, and the like, adds
a certain quality to the book which is here not amiss.
The Story of Doctor Dolittle, by Hugh Lofting (Illus.; 1 2mo,
180 pages; Stokes), is the history of the peculiar home life of a
lovable old doctor who likes animals better than he does the best
people,” and his astonishing adventures in the high kingdom of
the Jollijinki. An invigorating, fascinating tale, its quaintness
enhanced by the droll illustrations, done by the author himself.
ELIZABETH, Her Folks, by Barbara Kay (8vo, 289 pages; Double-
day, Page), is a book for girls, recounting the visit of a rather
snobbish
young miss of fourteen to the home of her Cape Cod
grandparents, and the salutory changes wrought in her character
by her contact with them. Elizabeth, Her Friends (8vo, 237
pages; same author and publisher), relates further adventures of
the same youthful heroine during a winter in New York. Ex-
cellent style and vigorous characterization place these books
rather above the level of the average "juvenile.” They are proof
of the fact that a book for children need not seem to have been
written by one.
In A Book of Boyhoods (12mo, 302 pages; Dutton). Eugénie
M. Fryer avoids the twin curses of giving information without
ideas and of spoiling great lives by making them intolerable to


BRIEFER MENTION
49
씨
​the young. It is in essence a history of the imagination in the
boyhoods of men so diverse as Leonardo, John Woolman, Nelson,
James J. Hill, Pater, and MacDowell. To have written a book
which will offend no healthy boy and make no boy feel priggish
for reading it, is a good thing.
Scott Burton On The Range, by Edward G. Cheyney (12mo,
303 pages; Appleton), follows the life of Scott Burton, Forester,
in his efforts to prevent sheep smuggling into the National forests
and to keep the U. S. Forest Service free from graft. It is an
exciting and rather naïve tale, with the details of forestry and
forest life neatly woven into the story and vouched for by the
author's experience as a teacher of forestry.
La Femme Assise, par Guillaume Apollinaire (éditions de la Nou-
velle Revue française). Apollinaire mort, les haines tombèrent
comme par enchantement. Aujourd'hui au milieu de l'admi-
ration générale paraît ce roman aussi divers et aussi faux que la
vie. Un homme au carrefour du monde écoute mille rumeurs
sans liens et les redit. Tout à coup des voix depuis longtemps
oubliées remontent de la nuit des temps. Il n'y a pas de plan qui
tienne, il faut qu'elles arrivent à nous. Ce livre est un enseigne-
ment libérateur pour l'esprit esclave de la froide composition
depuis quarante ans à la mode. Avec lui la littérature se re-
trouve en plein-air.
Les Champs MAGNETIQUES, par André Bretonet Philippe Sou-
pault. (Editions “Au Sans Pareil”). Le téléphone, le phono-
graphe transmettent la parole, mais la machine à faire-les-poèmes
crée mécaniquement la pensée. Le premier livre produit par cette
surprenante invention, “Les Champs magnétiques”, bouleverse
la conception moderne de la poésie: il remet en honneur l'inspi-
ration niée par les critiques et les poètes laborieux du dernier de-
mi-siècle. Aveclui on commence véritablement à instruireles procés
du langage et de la pensée. Avec lui l'image retrouve sa dignité,
redevient le mode courant d'expression qu'elle était dans les lan-
gues primitives. Cent ans aprés les “Méditations poétiques”,
une nouvelle date marque dans la poésie française une étape nou-
velle de l'exploration de l'esprit.


MUSICAL CHRONICLE
INTROIT
A -
grey musty presence inhabits the American concert-hall.
It is a sort of melancholy enervating atmosphere filling the
place, swagging from the ceiling like a rain-heavy cloud, clinging to
a
walls, to balconies, to chairs. It lives on year after year, apparent-
ly too heavy to be lifted, too firmly established to be expelled.
Trumpetings of ruddy brass, roaring of horns, hymns of joy, tri-
umphal marches, conductors waving their arms, pianists smiting the
“great black piano appassionato," thunderclaps of applause, all the
seeming fire and movement and ecstasy of the season, do not dimin-
ish it. It is there before the lights are lit for the reception of the
concert audience. And when the music ceases, and the audience
departs, it remains, strong, undefeated. Even the closure of the
concert hall during the summer months does not appear to affect it.
For when the doors open again in the fall, and the season recom-
mences, the first to enter the place find it there, heavier, denser,
mustier than before, ready to overwhelm with its torpor all who
venture into the cavern.
The dun presence is but the sign of the unnatural condition of
the American concert-hall, the condition of a human organism exist-
ing in an environment with which it has no vital contact. It is the
unreality of the place, its artificiality, its unresponsiveness to the
needs of very life, become palpable. The vivid world that hurtles
without the thin walls, the world in which men get their living, and
breed and die, does not enter the place. There is no interpenetra-
tion of the concert-hall and the daily life, here in America. Men
do not bring into the room their quotidian existences, and take Bach
and Mozart out again with them into their affairs. The experien-
ces had in the compelling floods of tone are separate, distinct utter-
ly, from the experiences had beyond the walls. Music in America
is a rich cloak men wear for a few hours each week, and then throw
off again. The concert is brother to the Christianity of Sunday
morning, to the "up-town” morality of New York City. The
music-hall is that unnatural thing, a void. For only among men
who believe in the supreme value of passion, is it anything else.
a
a


PAUL ROSENFELD
551
So we,
Only among men who seek to be guided by the promptings of their
passion, and come to the great deposits of human passion that are
the works of musical art, to relume their own, and refine and purify
that which they know to be good, does it become a part of daily life.
Only among men who seek, however bunglingly, to realize in their
existences something of the clean fiery dreams of great artists, to
carry the impulse received from art into action, and thus round the
experience, does the healthy interpenetration of atmospheres take
place.
And we poor Americans do not believe in passion. We here in
the west have been born heirs, unwilling heirs, to a machine, a nice
nickeled shining machine, to which the passions are hostile. The
passions hate mechanization. They clog the wheels, loosen the
bolts. They wish to be free to re-invent, free to re-create.
who have identified ourselves with the machine, are afraid of the
passions. If we do not quite see in them the enemy, the devil in
the world, as did the Puritans, spiritual forbears of us all, out of
whatever house we be, we nevertheless feel in them a useless and
meddlesome force. They are bad for business, for they make men
dissatisfied with business. But, since they spring to life incessantly
in every bosom, since they crowd up and clamour for release with-
out intermission, we have found it well to indulge them discreetly,
patronizingly—in off hours. We have learned to toy with them,
to flatter them, to prettify them, to parody them, to waste them in
a myriad different fashions. We have even become in our search
for methods of riddance, a fairly “musical” folk. We support great
musical organizations, long musical seasons. For we have dis-
covered that although music rekindles and refines the passion of
men who believe in passion, it wastes and dampens the passion of
those who do not believe in it. For it is innocent, and does not de-
mand to know for what purpose it is being used. Like all strong
stuff, it is capable of becoming a principle of evil as well as of good.
It works for good only to "them that love God.”
So in the concert-hall there has come to be the lugubrious, musty
presence. It is the sign of the misuse of music, the deposit of all
the emotion wasted there. It is the residue of vast floating masses
of undirected, disinherited, bastard emotion. The passions of a
thousand composers, misused, averted, undelivered, have gone to
feed the torpid swagging cloud. The emanation of millions of
hard, closed bodies, unused to passionate expression, and submitted


552
MUSICLE CHRONICLE
suddenly to the melting, limbering influence of music, has swollen
it. Men have come in the evening to live for an instant what their
world does not permit them to live out in it, and then gone again
submissive into the world. Women have crowded here afternoon
after afternoon, purchased a little solace, expressed for a hour what
the world without will not let them express, then gone again to
bondage, to hunger and emptiness. And the swagging cloud under
the dome is evidence of all this pale sickly life. The walls, the
columns, the seats, the stuffy smell, are evidence of it. The desire
was not lovely even at the moment it was cast upon the air. It
came forth ugly from having been denied so long, cowardly and
feeble from having been beaten and repressed, feverish, sallow,
without strength. But the fate that has met it, the rude denial
that has greeted it the moment the music ceased, the desuetude in
which it has been left to wander about aimlessly under the roof
of the hall, have rendered it uglier even, greyer, more decadent.
But it is not alone the misused passion of the audiences that has
gone to bloat the stilling presence. The musicians, too, have con-
tributed to making the American concert-hall the place it is. The
American's disbelief in his emotions has debauched the artists, too.
For in order that he may give himself, a musician must believe,
must know, that the emotion he is striving to communicate will be
carried out into the world by the folk to whom he is addressing him-
self. It is life, the buildings, the people, that the violinist is try-
ing to make vibrate when he draws his bow athwart the strings.
Take away from him the hope of changing the face of the world by
his labour, and you take away his ability to draw upon all his
energies. And that is what America does to so many artists. That
is why America is the ruin of so many of them. They feel, half-
consciously only, perhaps, that they are operating in a void. But
they feel the uselessness of their efforts. The grey presence
descends
on them, too, stifles them. And they begin to play half-heartedly, be-
gin to substitute tricks for art, to cultivate the mannerisms that ob-
tain with the passionless public, to prostitute themselves. Violin-
ists make up programs upon which the cheapest, tawdriest pieces
figure prominently. Conductors arrive from the other shore of the
Atlantic, sell themselves, permit rich women to dictate to them their
programs. But even into the playing of those who struggle against
the atmosphere there creeps a deadness, a flatness. They, too, con-
tribute to the smoke of stale feeling rising from the auditorium,


PAUL ROSENFELD
553
There are times when one would like, if one could, to close the
concert-hall entirely and banish the musician crowned with roses
beyond the frontier of the republic, so much has music helped rivet
on us our bad old system. What, it appears, should pour out one
of the great countercurrents to materialism, has itself been captured
by materialism, and made its confederate. The place that should
be a sort of pure high peak midmost the city, glad with light and
rarest air, has been turned into a sort of spiritual opium-den, into
which folk crawl to forget their defeat. And still, there are other
times when one is glad that one can not, even if one would, destroy
the concert-hall and banish the musician. For, without surcease,
eternally fresh, there springs into the minds of those who love music
the faith that in the battle for America, the flank of the enemy, if
not his centre, can be driven back in the concert-hall. For if the
machine has invaded the place, and helped entrench itself by means
of the meretricious power of art, one finds oneself reasoning, why
can not the process be reversed? Why can not the creative power
of art war upon the machine as the machine has warred upon it, and
conquer the machine? For if there is part of us all that says "yea"
to our form of civilization, there is another, weak as yet, but grow-
ing stronger all the while, that says “no.” And why should not
that portion of us become self-conscious and self-assured through
art, through music, and begin to dominate the other as once it was
dominated? Could not the artist, together with his ally the
social reformer, destroy the machine and create life anew? Could
not Mozart triumph over Rockefeller, as Rockefeller, or the
form of soul symbolized by him, has hitherto triumphed over
Mozart?
It is this dream that justifies the criticism of music, and embold-
ens the critic to his task. For it makes him hope that, in devoting
himself to the problems of the musical world, he is seizing hold not
on narrowly technical problems, but on the problem of life in
America itself. It makes him feel that in seeking to draw attention
ceaselessly to the vital impulse of music, to the direction of com-
positions, to the will of the composers; in warring to the best of his
ability on those musicians who submit without struggling to the de-
sires of the American crowd; in calling out thanks to the men who
are fighting for the integrity of their art, he is battling for the life
of the republic itself. It makes him know that the greatest rewards
await him, that can he but help dispel the grey devastating pres-


554
THE SHOW
ence that hangs over the concert room, and make it indeed the place
of refreshment and consecration which it should be, the battle will
be won, the world without the walls be reformed and purified.
And a worthier fight no man can ask for.
Paul Rosenfeld
THE SHOW
M.
.
ECCA is surely a three-ring show, especially the bacchanale:
“the Imperial Morris Gest”... “the man who dreamed and
produced it, whose theatre instincts, whose passion for color and
movement, whose boundless ambition, whose curious genius ..."
(I quote from The New York Times) Mr Gest may always be de-
pended upon to do one well. One was glad of his appearance-
albeit somewhat tumbled before the curtain. What the large
gentleman with the bland voice called “Mr Gest's dear public”
was relieved to hear that a cable had already conveyed to Mr Oscar
Asche the important news of how a world's première” had "sped.”
One of what the same bland gentleman with the soft dress-shirt
called “these exquisite young American girls” really did take the eye.
She and her assorted entourage floated down and up the rather
complicated looking stairway like old hands. But them, if not her,
one suspected of having grown up in a more Spartan pre-escalator
period. Miss Hannah Toback as Zummurud was too soppily in-
génue to keep up her end of what, at least in costumes and curtain,
aimed at the exotic. But Mr Lionel Braham as her old dad over-
came all comers. The Chinks, the goats, the camels, and the pick-
aninnies were very much too good. The music, if a bit English,
was nevertheless serviceable and, on the whole, kept its place. Mr
Gest, to everybody's disappointment, gave us one novelty—a slave-
market with no even would-be beautiful slaves, Greek or other-
wise. Perhaps this event may be taken to signalize the closing of
the Hiram Powers period in American Art.
Mr Tappé was observed among the auspicious audience whence
he himself observed upon the stage several good openings for his
own slick Art.
S. T.


THE THEATRE
W
HEN Mallarmée wrote, “La chair est triste, hélas, et j'ai
lu tous les livres," he hardly meant that reading even all
the books was the cause of his tristesse. But if the line had read,
“et j'ai vu toutes les piéces” how well one could have understood
him! Not that unaided one can see them all; nor that unguided
one can bear seeing even many. It is not a good season.
Now The TAVERN which Mr Cohan made over from melo-
drama and left a melodrama devouring itself with parody might
just have saved the day. For this is precisely the sort of thing
Mr Cohan does enormously well. He did it in Seven Keys, he has
done it in at least one private playlet. He is so much of the
theatre that he can satirize himself and leave the result most
agreeably theatrical. The TAVERN just fails to come off not be-
cause its intentions fail of consistency, but because the production
is inconsistent.
It was
The master producers, by worshipful consent in New York, are
the members of the Theatre Guild and it is always very hard to
say that they haven't quite pulled if off. It is even a bit disrespect-
ful to use the phrase, and yet the Guild isn't so exclusively preoc-
cupied with art as to justify a special vocabulary. The TREASURE
was a difficult piece for an American producer to put on.
written in Yiddish for Jewish audiences, and to a Jewish audience
the appearance of a crowd of typical Jews is no more disturbing
than the appearance of twenty typical Frenchmen to a Parisian
audience. The Yiddish theatre in America has usually the fault
of presenting types instead of characters; but a hardened audience
can use its imagination and make characters out of the types. The
Guild production erred in doing exactly what the Yiddish theatre
can do successfully. Played in English, played with the intention
.
of exposing the human qualities and the artistic niceness of Mr
Pinski's work, The Treasure fell short because of the touching
fidelity of the producers to the idea of typical Jewishness.
It is a serious error and since the Guild always can count on a
a


556
THE THEATRE
harmony of tone, since the actors always understand the atmosphere
of production, it invalidates criticism of any of the individuals.
Suppose they all were perfect types—which they weren't. That is
what they were foredoomed to try to be. Even Fred Eric's Judke
(the half-wit son of the house) can win no special praise for being
essentially human and not essentially racial. As production The
TREASURE simply dissatisfies.
But as play it is delightful. An irony not at all desolate and a
baldness of humour which Anglo-Saxons find rather disquieting,
are set in an exciting framework of comedy. The pace and direc-
tion of the play were excellent; Mr Simonson's settings, especially
the graveyard, were very good. The courage of the Guild in
producing a comedy, after all these tears, is noble.
I do not know what madness occasionally sweeps over the crit-
ical world in New York and, sharing in it at times, no doubt, I feel
a certain delicacy about it. But it must be said, in all fairness,
that the talents of Mr O. P. Heggie are not only foresworn and
trampled upon in Happy-Go-LUCKY; they are quite insufficient to
take that play out of the rut. A nice comedy, for sure. But dull.
Far too dull when you remember that a whole lower middle class
English family walks its boards. The crowds have kept away from
this play not because it is too subtle, too lovely, or too dear. They
have kept away because it is not entertaining enough. The producer,
Mr A. H. Woods for whom I have an enormous respect, implies
that if they will not come, he must give them what they want.
That argument applied to Too MANY HUSBANDS last season would
have been reasonable. What has happened to HAPPY-GO-LUCKY
is that two classes of audiences have kept away. Those who dislike
stupidity when it is vulgar and those who despise stupidity when
it isn't.
The first act of The Mirage which opened the luxurious Times
Square Theatre quite overcame your reporter.
It was like a fire
and there was almost as big a crowd. But the fumes were too
much. The heroine of The Easiest Way did not (as a notable
New York critic made her out) commit suicide. But then, she
didn't have to play in The MIRAGE
GILBERT SELDES


COMMENT
a
TI
WHERE ought, at least, not to be any uncertainty about chil-
dren's books. A whole week of November will be devoted to
them, and since the week is adequately removed from the triumph
of politics, it ought to do some good. Hesitation can only be be-
tween the ideal of letting children read no books at all, toward
which we have a distinct leaning, and letting them read everything
which their elders find interesting. Ourselves having read A Flat-
iron for a Farthing at the tender age of twenty-four we have no
fears about recommending it to our young readers, and if we could
only persuade the little ones who ask us for guidance to read Alice
or Edward Lear we should really feel very proud and uplifting.
A strong radical tendency exhibits itself in our young. They are
suspicious of the books handed down and they are, we understand,
becoming critical of the new books written for them. In the latter.
respect they certainly differ from the rest of the reading public.
Yet that is not their only claim to blessedness. They very seldom
read long reviews of books and they hear virtually no poets read-
ing from their own works. Their sophistication is, at least,
natural.
Possibly there will be some confusion in the future between
books for and books by children. It is a pity but it shows one
thing clearly enough. No child's book of the past two years has
been fit for children to read. So if children write for their elders,
we have the quite equal privilege of writing for them.
ܪ
"
We have been informed, on veracious authority, that a certain
cartoon of a very dear gentleman in the June issue of this magazine
was, from the plush chairs of Cambridge, Massachusetts, looked
upon as “unkind.” Neither the artist nor the editor had
any
other
than kindly feelings for the subject of the drawing, each of them
having experienced, the one as a visitor to Harvard University,
the other as an undergraduate, the very genuine sweetness of Dean
Briggs. The question whether this caricature, as is the essence of
all caricatures, exaggerated some features at the expense of others
and whether the result was something expressive of a character


558
COMMENT
considerably different from that of Dean Briggs was, aesthetically
speaking, neither here nor there. The only man who really cares
a pin for art is the man who intuitively and immediately takes a
work of art for what it is. That is to say, he is no more inclined
to check up the details of a picture to see whether they jibe with
the original than is a man whose being is swung by Shakespeare's
genius likely to be influenced in his judgement of Antony and
Cleopatra by any mere historical fact. People of unhealthily re-
fined skins might indeed feel pain that the physiognomy of their
friend when brought into contact with the imaginative subcon-
scious of an artist should, for reasons too delicate and subtle ever
to be thoroughly understood, occasion so savagely unkind a likeness.
But that even these unhappily constituted individuals should hold
this fact against the artist would be--had we not lived to learn-
unbelievable. One suspects in their case, as in that of most people
who preen themselves upon their sensitivity, that this groomed
appanage is only skin-deep, that, in a word, they suffer less from
any peculiar delicacy of organism than from the absence of such
vital fire as in other men responds wholeheartedly to the challenge
of form in art, of emergency in practical life. Nietzsche may have
been exorcizing his own shadow when he wrote Beyond Good and
Evil, but surely some things--and art and science are among them
-have their being Beyond Kind and Unkind.
Of course there are still extant in this world some of us who do
not condemn even conscious malice, so that it be but sharp and
salty to the taste. We can more readily put up with the saliently
unkind Harvey's Weekly than with the kindly tap-water of The
New York Times. We respect and can be amused at the
wry
faces
of Senator Lodge, but at the imbecile mouthings and posturings
of his mare our stomachs finally turn. On the race-track Governor
Cox is at least his own driver. Here among the stars—baseball
and otherwise—we swallow pretty much what our colleges and
our newspapers and our conventions hand out. But one of these
days we are going to bite off a longer and a softer stick of soap than
we can chew. That may be for American art and letters a good
thing. On the day (should it ever dawn) when this American
people wakes up to the full bland horror of that Ohio soap, Pro-
,
fessor Brander Matthews will do well to wrap the drapery of his
couch about him, and lie down to pleasant dreams.






fa
-STUART DAVIS: 1912
COLLOQUE SENTIMENTALE.
BY STUART DAVIS



THE INDIAI
OXXIIO
DECEMBER 1920
IN THE BEECHWOOD
BY JAMES STEPHENS
I
O
NCE there was a man named Friuc. He had a wonderful
art in the fattening of swine and in all that pertained to
swine he was wonderful also. There was no person could make
swine go where he wanted them to go so willingly as Friuc could.
Everybody is aware that a pig would rather run a mile in his own
direction than sidle an inch in the direction counselled by another:
for swine have unlimited confidence in themselves, but they have
no faith in other creatures, nor have they any trust in the gods.
Friuc, however, could do whatever he pleased with a pig. They
used to rub themselves against his leg like pet dogs, and they de-
sired to go to sleep with their heads in his lap. But it is true that
if they loved Friuc, Friuc loved them also.
He might be impatient sometimes with the members of his
family, but he was never impatient with a pig. He might kick
a horse that trod on his foot, but he would almost have let a pig
eat him. However, although a pig will eat anything, there was
not a pig in Munster, whether porker or sow or small little boneen,
that would put a tooth on Friuc otherwise than in love and true
affection.
On account of his mastery over, and his understanding of pigs,
Friuc was appointed Chief Swineherd to Bove the King over the
Shi of the men of Femen in Munster.
It also happened that the King of one of the Shi's of Connacht,
Ochall Oichni by name, had a noted swineherd, one Rucht, and in
all the world this Rucht had na equal in the art of swine-tending,


560
IN THE BEECHWOOD
unless Friuc was his equal. There were some Munster men in
especial who said that Friuc was the better man of the two, but
Connacht men held this to be inexact, and asserted that it was Rucht
who took the branch. Notwithstanding this, there was friend-
ship between these famous swineherds, and they used to meet con-
stantly to discuss abstruse or curious points about their art.
Whenever there was a great fall of mast in Munster, Friuc
would send news of it to Rucht in Connacht, and the latter would
come playing on a pipe and leading his charges behind him to fatten
in the good Munster beechwoods. Friuc did this because he liked
Rucht, and also because he could not bear to think that any pig was
going without his share of what was good for him.
On the other hand, when mast was plentiful in Connacht (which
was not so often) Rucht would invite Friuc and his droves to the
northern forests, and they would come too, and would eat the mast
and grunt at their masters with delight and gratitude.
But the baser sort, both of Connacht and Munster, strove to
arouse ill-feeling between these friends; for there are people who
cannot bear to see friendship or peace anywhere; people whose
hearts are set in ill-humour and violence and war, and these people
succeeded at last in raising bitterness between the swineherds.
II
It happened that there was a wonderful fall of mast in Munster.
Not in the memory of man had there been such a quantity of the
succulent and nourishing fodder. The ground under the beech trees
was a foot thick in mast, and in places, deep in the forest where
growth was thick or the sun had ingress, the ground was covered to
a depth of three feet with mast. And in yet other nooks and
crannies of the loopy wood where there had been a driftage caused
by the wind or by whatever else there were depressions of great
profundity, and in these there was a choke and overflow of mast
also.
The swine of Munster, every pig of the Munster pigs, as well as
those of the King, were led into or let into the forest by Friuc, and
while they were there the sound that arose from among the trees
became so deafening and continuous that all Munster thrilled to
it, and no other sound was heard in the kingdom for seven days.


JAMES STEPHENS
561
When one listened from a distance it seemed as if a violent sea
and a storm of thunder were hammering against a circular rocky
shore and echoing back and forth in mighty distended peals and
clashings; each crash louder than the one that had roared before it,
and yet quieter than the terror that was to follow.
People who lived nigh to the forest went mad from the ex-
uberance of that uproar, and, under the delusion that they were
swine, they bolted into the forest and pigged it among the pigs.
Those who lived further away deserted their dwellings and sought
hospitality afar, and those who resided at still greater distances put
plugs of hay into their ears and were thus enabled to exist in an
outrageous uproar which they came to look upon as silence.
By day and night that noise, which was composed of squeals and
screams, of grunts and gasps, of loud, nosey whistles, and deep
thrilling gurglings, continued; so that at last the only contented
creatures in Munster were the pigs and Friuc.
He moved tranquilly among his friends, looking at this one's
muzzle and at that one's hoof; binding up the ear of this innocent
which had been torn, and examining that boneen which was still at
milk and thriving on it.
He was happy, and he sent a messenger to Rucht to tell of the
good fortune, and to invite him with his droves to the fête.
Rucht came to Munster playing a rustic sweet air upon a pipe,
and the swine of Connacht moved behind him in regiments and bat-
talions and mighty concentrations. Line after line, along a line
that ran out of sight on both hands, they came, and on the tails of
the first line the noses of the second line rested, and, behind them,
further than a crow's eye can peer, the pigs of Connacht were gal-
loping and prancing; sneezing because of the dust they were raising;
yawning after their beloved master, and at intervals making each
one the kind of noise with which he was individually gifted.
They marched into the beech forests of Munster and disappeared
there, but if they disappeared from the eye, the ear lost nothing of
them at all.
III
For what had been a brain-destroying uproar before the Con-
nacht swine arrived was now a noise for which no description can
be found.


562
IN THE BEECHWOOD
Plugs of hay were no longer of any use. The eardrums of people
blew up inside their heads and exploded into the eye of the neigh-
bour who was standing at his proper distance and expecting no such
welt, while those whose ears were tough took to their heels and ran
pell-mell, hodge-podge, helter-skelter, charging into choked roads
and unchoking these by sheer impetus, with the King of the Shi of
Munster in the middle of them, and not a stop or a pause did a man
of them make until they got into Leinster of Learned Men.
From there they surged sideways and westward to Connacht or
fled to the north and on to the grim keeps of Ulster.
It was a marvellous time, a wild time, a time of madness. There
were people who shouted:
"Death to the swineherds."
And others who roared:
“Destruction to the pigs.”
Woe followed then, so that when a man went into a house and
saw a piece of pork hanging from a rafter, he would go backwards
out of the house with a buzz, and would not stop running until his
wind gave out. Or if a man saw a head of cabbage growing in a field
a
it would remind him irresistibly of a slice of bacon, and he would
leap on the cabbage with both feet until the last trace of cabbage-
ness vanished from the murdered plant.
So far for that.
It was all no trouble to Friuc and Rucht. They were where they
liked to be, that is, they were among their pigs. The noise of pigs
was not a noise to them. It was a gentleness, a suitability, a thing
worth listening to. Nor did it silence them either, for they were
aware of the infinite gradation of sounds that is in all sound, and
into these intervals of quietude that were less noisy than the crash
of Doom and only a little noisier than a hurricane, they injected
such remarks as they wished to exchange, and felicitated each other
on the happiness around them.
Thus the first day passed, and at night Friuc and Rucht lay
down to sleep on the back of six large swine who were lying all in
and out and who had eaten so solidly that they could not wag a
hoof, a bristle, or an eye.
Good sleep was with the comrades, and they rested till the dawn.
a
a


JAMES STEPHENS
563
IV
It was the pigs they were lying on that awakened them, and
although the language of swine is not comprehended by all the
world, Friuc and Rucht understood it well.
“Darling of all Darlings,” said they, "and Pet of the Pigs of the
world, get off our backs, for our food is digested, and there is more
of it to be eaten."
They then, with precaution, rolled their masters to the ground
and they became jaws and enjoyment and a new portion of the con-
temporary noise.
Now it is a curious thing that women awaken in the morning un-
comely but gay, while men arise to the new day as though they were
being reborn into unhappiness, for at the dawn a man is ill-temper-
ed, truculent, and a great discoverer of insult. Friuc and Rucht,
being males, were thus constituted. They arose with quietly bad
tempers, and each did his best to look at a place where the other
was not.
a
Also, they had no breakfast, for they had forgotten to bring any;
and that lack assisted their uncheerfulness to become morose.
Rucht, as the visitor, considered that Friuc as the host, should have
provided him with food; and Friuc thought that the man who came
on a journey should have had the common prudence to bring food
with him. But the Connacht man did not quite see his way to open
a subject which must exacerbate his host, and a Munster man is too
polite to refer to a personal grievance until he has transformed it
into something else. Matters were thus, and rage was growing
apace between the friends.
“They say in Connacht,” Rucht commenced, “that you are a
better swineherd than I am.”
“And they tell me here in Munster,” Friuc replied, "that it is
you are the best."
“They are only trying to make trouble between us,” said Rucht
with a sigh. “But they can't do it,” he continued sadly.
"That is true,” Friuc agreed. “They are trying to make us fall
out and we just won't please them. . . . But all the same!” he con-
”
tinued after a moment's pause, and in a deep and thoughtful voice.
"All the same, what?” his companion asked suspiciously.
“O nothing,” Friuc answered, "I was only thinking.”


564
IN THE BEECHWOOD
“I don't like these 'all-the-sames'," commented Rucht stubbornly.
"No one said you did,” Friuc retorted.
"What are you driving at ?” Rucht then demanded hotly.
“I am driving at the thing the Connachtman hit when he fired
at the bird—nothing at all.”
“All the same!” Rucht quoted morosely.
"Well,” cried Friuc, “if you want to know what I was thinking
of I'll tell it to you, I was thinking that the people who say I am
the best swineherd are right even if they are Connachtmen.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” said Rucht, “but I was think-
ing it the other way round.”
"I'll prove that I'm right,” said Friuc.
“Prove it then,” his companion roared.
"Your pigs are here,” Friuc continued, “and they can stay here,
but not an inch of fat will one Connacht pig add to his ribs for all
he eats, and the dear knows that a Connacht pig can eat nearly as
much as a Connachtman.”
And that happened, for Friuc put a spell on the foreign pigs.
The more they ate the thinner they got. It was as though they
were eating hunger, while the swine of Munster throve excedingly.
Each of Friuc's pigs had at first three chins to his jaw, but after
a time they got six chins apiece; and in another while they had
chins all the way down to their hooves. Their stomachs fattened
and descended until they rested on the ground so that they had to
go to sleep standing up. Their eyes were so bolstered up in fat that
they could only look out straight in front of them, and their tails
disappeared in the overlapping rotundity of their hams,
So much for the Munster pigs.
V
But in the matter of the Connacht pig-
The more he ate the leaner he got. He had been jowled like a
Leinster bard, and chinned like a King's baby, but his chins
tumbled off him two at a time and his swagging jowl ran up into
He became gaunt as a winter wolf and spiny as a hedge-
hog. His skull stuck out lean as a hatchet and pointed as a spear.
His legs grew as lanky as a young foal's, and his upper anatomy
was all chest and no stomach, like a coursing hound. His tail
his ear.


JAMES STEPHENS
565
а
poked outwards and downwards like a piece of wet string pasted
on a bone. There was no curl in his tail. And so they all became.
As they grew skinny they became afflicted with a rage for eating
which was terrifying, and with an agility to baffle the eye that
watched them. You could see what they did, but not how they had
done it, for they moved too fast. They leaped into a place where
mast was, scooped it clean in a hundred swift gobbles, and bounded
from there to another place with the bound of a red deer and the
savagery of a bear.
Their hunger was such that they screamed from the rage of it,
and the air whistled through their long lean snouts like the whistle
of a winter gale through a hole.
If the noise had been bad before, what was it now? There were
no people left in Munster but the deaf men, and they recovered
their hearing, that is, they had hearing thrust violently upon them
by reason of the awful noise, and they cursed the gift as they fled.
The people far away in Leinster took to plugging their ears with
wads of hay when they wanted to go asleep but not a wink did they
get. The crows, who for a long time tried to compete with the pigs,
.
caved in, gave up, and emigrated. There wasn't a bird left in a
tree, nor a beast left in a cave. The worms of Munster went far
underground, and maybe they perished there; and the fish in the
streams and rivers broke their hearts trying to swim up stream
against time. They came floating back again with their bellies
turned up, and not a wag left in a fin; dead they were. It began to
rain, too, for the noise brought the rain down; but the Connacht
pigs did not stop. They gave a squeal, a leap, a whistle, and a
gobble, and they did that all day and all night as long as the mast
lasted.
The mast could not outlast that ravage. They cleaned the
forests of mast in a day and a half: then they ate the leaves that
had fallen: then they chewed the bark off the trees; at first as high
as they could reach, but afterwards as high as they could jump:
they rooted up the grass and ate it: they ate clay: they cleaned the
forests of all the droppings of all the pigs: they picked up stones in
their mouths, and mumbled at them until they got the toothache,
and they overturned Munster hogs that were too fat to right them-
selves, and ate their hooves off while they lay helpless. They would
have eaten the young ones only that Friuc stopped them, for he
couldn't stand that.
a


566
IN THE BEECHWOOD
> >
“Be off with your pigs,” he commanded. “Take them out of my
forests and out of my sight and don't let a hoof of theirs or of
a
yours
step in this land again.”
“I'll go,” Rucht replied, “but I know what you did and how you
did it. I can do it myself,” said he. “You can crow here,” he
shouted, “but come to Connacht and crow if you
dare. I'll do as
much to your pigs as you did to mine."
“Get away from here,” cried Friuc, "get out of Munster,” he
cried.
“I will,” Rucht replied, “I'll leave the land where a man doesn't
get his breakfast, and the pigs eat wind."
“Come on with you,” he called then to his swine.
They ran howling, weeping, squealing to him, and he set himself
at their head and started running like a hare.
VI
He did not stop running until he got to Connacht, but the track
of land that stretches from the beechwood of Munster to the Swine
Pens of Connacht was a desert for years after their passing, for the
Connacht pigs ate that land to the butt, and ruined it.
Friuc then took up Rucht’s challenge and followed him with his
swine; but in Connacht the tables were turned on him, and the
Munster swine became so lean that you could only see them by
looking at them very steadily for a long time, and sideways at that,
and, even then, it was only a streak you saw.
That was how enmity began between the swineherds. The pigs
of both were ruined, so that Bove told Friuc he did not want him
any longer as a swineherd, and Rucht's master said the same thing
to Rucht.
But the swineherds were unrepentant: they did not want employ-
ment: they had more than enough to do chasing each other, for that
became their employment, and they went at it day and night.
Wherever they met they fought, and although each stretched the
other at the door of death neither of them was able to push the
other through. They began to change shapes then, thinking that in
another form they might have a better chance; but they were al-
ways equal; one bit and the other tore, and the tear was as bad as


TWO LANDSCAPES
567
the bite; they harried each other out of this shape and into that:
they fought as birds, and in that shape they were known as Talon
and Wing. Then they fought as seabeasts and were called Shark
and Whale. Then they became spectres called Shadow and Woe,
and after that they were Dragons. And in all these shapes they
fought, savagely. Each of them half-killed and three-quarter
killed his rival; but neither could absolutely get the victory over
the other, and they cannot rest until they find out which of them
is the better man.
TWO LANDSCAPES
BY ALICE CORBIN
TREES AND HORSES
Trees stand motionless among themselves;
Some are solitary.
Horses wander over wide pastures;
At night they herd closely,
Rumps hunched to the wind.
BIRD-SONG AND WIRE
The Rocky Mountain blue-bird
Is a point of blue fire;
The meadow-lark
Sings above the hum
Of the telephone wire.
Straight and gaunt
The poles stand;
They walk stiffly
Over a thousand leagues
Of rough land.


BELPHÉGOR
Essay on the Aesthetic of Contemporary French Society
BY JULIEN BENDA
DESIRE THAT CRITICISM, SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY
BE SENSATIONAL : PANLYRICISM
FINALLY, and this is perhaps their prettiest piece of audacity,
our contemporaries have begun to demand excitement, and
nothing but excitement, from criticism, history, science, philosophy.
They have willed that the business of criticism, too, should con-
sist in "sympathizing” with the subject, “coinciding” with the
"dynamics” of his being, outside and beyond every intellectual
function or judgement. Pure mystical unions with the "souls” of
Villon, of Pascal, of Beethoven, of Tolstoi, of Dostoevsky, of St
Augustine, heart-states pure and simple, acts of love, have, for that
very reason, been hailed as the true criticism, the only criticism.
Subjectivism and lyricism have been formally announced as valu-
able adjuncts in this field. One person reproaches a censor for
having misjudged a work of purely critical pretensions (Les Jeunes
Gens d'aujourd'hui by Agathon), in not comprehending the "lyr-
icism and sentimental point of view which are its most interesting
features.” Another, taken to task for the inadequate documenta-
tion of one of his studies which obviously aimed at exegesis (La
Colline inspirée), thinks that he justifies himself by complaining
that it has not been understood in “its flow, its abundance, its
trend”; a third, scolded for the critical inanity of a study of St
Augustine, plainly dogmatic in manner, thinks that he disarms his
adversary by announcing that he wanted to "commune with the
soul” of the great man.
Observe that with our aesthetes it is not a
matter of acknowledging the part which belongs rightly to the
critic's personal sensibilities in his effort to understand human ac-
tions; a part which a certain so-called scientific school —"every-
thing pigeon-holed”-misunderstood: it is a matter of assigning
them the whole, to the exclusion of every other activity. Subject-
ivism is to be the critical method.


JULIEN BENDA
569
In addition, the keyed-up tone, the os magna sonaturum,
which we spoke of a while back, has been extended to in-
clude criticism. They have, to the evident delight of the
entire public, inaugurated a sort of pathetic criticism, a genre
hitherto quite unknown. Here are some examples: “This gaze,
these inflexions, this will (of a hero of Ch-L. Philippe), ah! he
acquaints us not only with the character of a novel but with a
figure still more real,” and so on. Again: “Words! I will not
leave even you, words, and I will continue to call you my debtors
as long as you still have anything to say. We will not leave you,
Lord, until you have blessed us.” (Nouvelle Revue Française,
passim.) At the same time they desire that criticism deal solely
with the individual, proscribing every classification, genre, relation,
law (this is the cult of Sainte-Beuve, at least of the Sainte-Beuve
of the Lundis; they want incidentally to make him out even more
individualistic than he is); and also they desire that criticism con-
sist solely of impressions, of "intuitions,” repudiating all effort at
seeing things whole, all system, everything in short that might, by
ill-luck, give rise to thought. It will be remembered with what
fervour, in the famous tilt between Anatole France and Brunetière
as to the nature of criticism, they embraced the doctrine of the
former, determined not to see that on this occasion the dizzy flights
of Ariel left Caliban's position quite intact, and that a form of
literary criticism is conceivable which is perfectly worthy the name
and which still is something more than a delicious rustle of Aying
impressions.
(Note: Is it necessary to point out that Anatole France's crit-
icism is far from impressionistic and is full of precisely those gen-
eral and co-ordinated views from which the author is so anxious
to appear free? Nothing is more significant of the public taste
than the passionate desire of so many modern masters-Renan,
France, Lemaître—to make us believe they have no organized
ideas.)
Note also their desire-again implicit in the cult of Sainte-Beuve
—that criticism consider psychologic states rather than "literary
phenomena,” souls rather than works. We know how many studies
by illustrious and successful critics are dedicated to authors 'whose
literary importance is practically nil (women, magistrates, court-
esans, soldiers), but whose writings supply the occasion for por-


570
BELPHEGOR
traying a soul. We know, in the case of the masters, how this
criticism seizes upon their works of secondary importance, notes,
rough copies, intimate letters, rather than upon the great works,
which indeed are often much less expressive of their psychology.
This cult of our contemporaries for Sainte-Beuve is complemented
by their hatred of Taine, inasmuch as he, on the contrary, employs
the writer's psychology to explain his work, and "puts back in the
first order of critical study literary works, conceived, properly, as
works of art, which owe their existence to their authors, but which,
after all, have become detached from their authors, and, if they
are not living creatures, at least exist apart in their personal unity
and identity.”
It would be impossible to denounce too strongly this will of our
contemporaries to consider works in relation to the personality of
the author, and never in themselves. It is one of the best proofs
of their insistence on procuring excitement from the products of
the mind, on avoiding every intellectual state. Suppose, for
example, they encounter this pensée: "A woman forgets even her
own favours to a man she no longer loves.” Do you think they
will set themselves to appraising the truth of the observation, dis-
cussing its bearing, admiring the happiness of its expression? Not
at all; they will seek to find out what circumstances in the life of
La Bruyère could have suggested this idea, whether he had been
in love, had been jilted, had suffered. .. But this desire is most
significant when it is a question of works which are concerned
purely with ideas, works like Guizot's, Montesquieu's, Auguste
Comte's. Don't go talking of those ideas for their own sake, of
their effect in the world as ideas detached from their authors; don't
explain in what transformations these ideas are still nourishing us
to-day. All that seems to them tiresome. Tell them rather that
Rousseau hit upon the doctrine of the natural goodness of man
along the road to Vincennes on a visit to Diderot, and that he was
so agitated as not to be able to breathe; or tell them that such and
such a view of Auguste Comte's which turned philosophy upside
down was the result of his relations with Clotilde de Vaux; that,
for them, is real criticism and they applaud it.
And is not that form of criticism, too, pleased less with ideas
than with persons, which makes it its business to display what
exactly was such and such a philosopher's inner and personal


JULIEN BENDA
571
thought, and cares so little about the deformed state in which it
spread through the world? Doubtless, piety requires that we wash
our great men of the excesses with which popular enthusiasm has
endowed them. But is it not their thought, thus betrayed by
popular enthusiasm, that constitutes the true history of ideas among
men? Does not Brunetière give proof of his deep sensitiveness to
the social history of ideas, when he says that "if it be interesting
to know what Descartes thought, it is still more so to know what
his contemporaries believed that he thought”? Is it very im-
portant to know that Jesus condemned property, that Spinoza ad-
mits governmental authority, that Newton did not believe in the
concrete reality of universal attraction, that Darwin never pro
fessed himself an atheist, when it was only in so far as they were
made to say the contrary that the philosophies of these great men
are become ideas embraced by mankind? For that matter, the true
taste for ideas is so rare, even among professional intellectuals,
that a history of ideas, for themselves and as abstractions kept
systematically separate from their authors, has never, so to speak,
been attempted. The Philosophy of the Greeks by Edouard Zeller
remains practically unique, in one's being able to say of it (not
without a tinge of accusation) that “ideas are here presented
stripped of every human element, of everything that could relate
an idea to an individual human soul, to a sensibility, to a con-
science.” Here is something to assure the German critic of a vig-
orous unpopularity among our aesthetes. On the other hand, what
a pity it is that patriotism forbids them to embrace H.-S. Cham-
berlain, for whom philosophical criticism must be exclusively bio-
graphical! (See his study of Kant.)
In the same way they have willed that history, too, consist prin-
cipally in living the heart-throbs of the past. They have pro
claimed with the German master: "All history as though person-
ally lived and suffered; thus alone will it be true. ... No descrip-
tions; every problem translated in sentiment, even to the point of
passion.” They have desired (Péguy and his adepts) that the real
historians be the chroniclers, who live their epoch without wanting
to understand it. They have cried shame on the historian for hav-
ing forced himself to be impartial, for having endeavoured, accord-
ing to the ancient precept, "not to be a citizen”; they have hoped,
with another German (Treitschke), that the historian would repu-
a


572
BELPHEGOR
6
diate that "anaemic objectivity, so rigidly contrary to the true
historical sense,” that he would write "with anger, with indigna-
tion.” They have desired to find in history the soul of the author
no less than of his characters. Here again, the subjectivity which
.
hitherto had been deplored as an unavoidable fault and which
people had tried to minimize as much as possible, has been hon-
oured, sought out, cultivated. For very little they would make it
one of Joinville's merits as an historian that he left some doubt as
to whether he had not rather written his own life than that of his
hero, having, in the charming phrase of his contemporary, therein
“shrewdly enshrined himself as did the sculptor Phidias in the folds
of Minerva's garment.” They have poured contempt on erudi-
tion, not in the sense of Huet, La Bruyère, or Montesquieu, because
it excludes general ideas, but because it "arrests movement,” keeps
one from “laying hold of life.” Finally, they have proscribed
every general view, every co-ordination of facts, every "system,”
everything that could give occasion for thought. Our aesthetes
would give every general view on Carolingian politics or the mean-
ing of the feudal system to know that “John Lackland passed this
way.” That is what is demanded of history by the people whose
ancestors forsook La Barre and Massuet for their "lack of the
philosophic spirit” (Mme du Châtelet), insisted on twenty editions
in a few years of l’Essai sur les moeurs, rebuked a writer of mem-
oirs because he retailed “useless trifles,” and a historian for stating
facts without any references.
Here, again, Sainte-Beuve is the patron saint (though somewhat
misunderstood) of our aesthetes. He formally announces, apropos
of Saint-Simon, the superiority of history that has been lived over
that other history "which is based on the very papers and instru-
ments of state, diplomatic letters, correspondence of ambassadors,
original documents of every kind”; he rebukes the pretension of
this latter to reconstitute the past with its "so-called positive
papers." We recognize once more in this last mot, the ill-will of
this impressionist against every scientific or philosophic essay, at
least in matters psychological. Sainte-Beuve is the incarnation of
that intellectual temper—the deep cut signature of the modern
aesthetic—which would give Kant and Spinoza to possess the mem-
oirs of Aspasia.
They have willed that science, too, should offer only the thrilling


JULIEN BENDA
573
spectacle of sudden and rapid vistas, "intuitions”; and not alone
that science should offer them as merely provisional investigations
as all the savants from Descartes to Duhem desired, but that science
should consist wholly of these movements, ignoring