organized ideas
as well as reasoning and discursive reflection. They have a re-
markable horror-peculiarly odd when it comes to science of the
spirit of geometry or “of system”; they worship only "the spirit
of finesse.” They have rejected, more or less candidly, every
method in research, every a priori concept, which might point the
way to experience. They have adored groping in so far as it
served, according to Bacon's profound opinion, to astonish men
rather than enlighten them. They have willed that the savant,
too, "should fuse his soul" with the soul of his subject, that he
"should think biologically of the biologic fact,” “religiously of the
religious.” At the same time they suddenly discovered that science
gives only views of things, arbitrary conceptions formed of them
by the intelligence, substitutes symbols for reality, proceeds by
concepts, and “congeals” reality! They desired that, henceforth,
science give the things themselves, in their reality, in their "Auid-
ity.” And they willed that science, or at least the science of life
(the only one they honour anyway), should consider phenomena
not in their similarities but in their differences, in their non-repeti-
tion, even to saying with the poet: “Nous n'aurons plus jamais
notre âme de ce soir."
In a word they willed the extraordinary, but plainly thrilling
thing: a science without abstraction, a science of the individual,
what am I saying? of a minute of the individual. And observe
that all the while they haven't said: “We want only to feel, we
laugh at science.” They say: "We are the true science.”
Finally they have willed that the philosopher, too, should be a
troubled and troubling creature, not a thinking one. They have
hailed as the true form of philosophy those jumbles of “intuitions,"
ejaculated without order, without coherence, without criticism
(Nietzsche, Péguy, Sorel), a species of verbal actions, at times most
compelling, “Vive comme un éclair qui durerait toujours," and
avowedly intended, to result in acts and not in thought (contempt
for logic, acceptance of the contradictory, and so on). They have
decided that a philosophical work counts because of the art it dis-
plays (Boutroux), the talent it inspires (Renan), because of "the


574
BELPHEGOR
results it provokes indirectly” (Péguy, Sorel), because of its fight-
ing power (Péguy), never because of its intellectual content.
They have decreed that reasoning has no place in philosophy, that
an artistic style alone is proper to it, much better! that a meta-
phorical style is just the thing (E. Gilson, Revue de métaphy-
sique et de morale, 1916). They have required that philosophy,
too, present the thrilling spectacle of a wholly subjective, a lyric,
activity (this is the age of panlyricism), that the thinker who deals
with life become life, that his method consist in a mystic union
with its “evolving principle.” Finally, as with history and crit-
icism, they have willed that philosophy should be innocent of
general ideas, and know only the individual; should give no longer
the mind's idea of things, but the things themselves, no longer an
idea of love, but love itself, no longer an idea of courage, but cour-
age. This last trait, this hatred of philosophy, in so far as it gives
only ideas of our dear desires, is not new in the sal.ons. It is now
three centuries since a guest of Ninon's abused the author of an
analytical essay on psychology in a way to make you believe you
were listening to one of our own Bergsonian females:
“What! Is that all that can be said of the passions, of all those
movements that agitate your life! There surely is a great ocean
locked in a very narrow space. Nothing so beautiful nor so full as
love, and this book makes of it a dry skeleton, without flesh or
colour.”
And yet Ninon's guests, even while they demanded that we em-
brace things in themselves, seem not to have thought that this em-
brace constituted philosophy. The formal concept of a pathetic
philosophy is indeed a conquest of our own age.
II
Whence comes this craze of contemporary French society for turn-
ing the products of the mind into a source of excitement?
Certain people have advanced an explanation which according
to them precludes the need of any other; the presence of the Jews.
There, surely, is a seductive theory. If one might, by a fine dis-


JULIEN BENDA
575
tinction, doubtless not to be expected of those who talk to the
crowds, differentiate two sorts of Jews: the severe, moralistic Jews,
and the Jews greedy for sensation-symbolically, the Hebrews and
the Carthaginians, Jahveh and Belphégor, Spinoza and Bergson-
one could not deny the passion of the Carthaginians for literature
creative of emotion, their cult of the theatre, of the player, their
(Alexandrian) thirst for the indistinct, indefinite, mysterious, for
the confusion of the subject and object; nor could one fail to see
a relation between the aesthetic of contemporary French society as
we have described it and the large part which these Jews have for
some time occupied therein.
Certain races seem to bring with them at birth this rage for sen-
sation which others develop only with time, just as certain species
of animals have by nature a virus which others must acquire. Never-
theless this explanation seems to us very inadequate.
First, because it is hard to see wherein people not in daily con-
tact with Jews are any less tainted with the convulsive aesthetic
of which we are speaking; hard to see, for example, that anti-
Semitic or even a-Semitic salons are less in love than others with
mystery or the infinite, make less fuss over the theatre or the play-
ers, the drama of love or of Mélisandes. But above all because this
explanation, like every explanation that attempts to explain the
disease of an organism by the mere presence of a foreign body, over-
looks this principle: the receptivity of the organism, the pre-exist-
ing condition of decay in which it must already have fallen of its
own accord, before the action of the foreign body were possible. I
grant that contemporary French society was precipitated into
Alexandrianism by Jewish intervention, as were the contemporaries
of Philetas of Cos and those of Juvenal. But it is because this
society was Alexandrian already. The same reagent would not
have produced the same effect two centuries earlier. A foreign
crystal does not precipitate a liquid body unless they share the same
nature.
The effect of the Jews on twentieth century society only throws
back the problem. Why was society capable of undergoing this
action? Why was it Alexandrian? One may ask primarily
whether this society's Alexandrianism was not simply the result of
its age; whether every society after two or three centuries of exist-
ence, does not become Alexandrian by the mere fact of its duration,


576
BELPHEGOR
without any other explanations being necessary; whether the search,
ever more and more exclusive and intense for what is sensational
in the products of the mind, is not the natural way such companies
have of growing old, just as hair grows white and arteries harden.
It is surely striking to observe how in all countries where there were,
properly speaking, "societies,” in Greece, Rome, Italy, France, it
was in this form that they showed their senescence, whereas the na-
tions where time never worked this change so plainly, Germany,
England, are those in which there never was a society, properly
speaking.
It would even seem possible to demonstrate this fact a priori.
What actually is a “society” (a “good society”)? It is an ensem-
ble of privileged persons in whom an indolent and refined existence
has created a special necessity to feel. What do they come seeking
in works of the mind? One more opportunity for satisfying this
need. In other words, Alexandrianism is implicit in the very de-
finition of a good society, as decomposition is implicit in the for-
mula of a chemical combination, authoritarianism in that of gov-
ernment, and intolerance in that of faith. Held in check during
the grand or classic age by the forces of severity and decorum, (it
was precisely the preponde ance of these forces which constituted
its youth), the disease sprea is with the organism's senescence, when
these muscles relax, and the society, like an ageing man, displays
itself unreservedly in its true nature. But let us not take too ser-
iously these analogies between the development of societies and
of individuals.
More important, we believe, to the explanation of our society's
aesthetic, is the decline of culture; especially the disappearance
from the atmosphere where they had their growth of theological
education and the cult of ancient literature. We are speaking of
atmosphere, and not pretending that all society people formerly
were properly interested in theology like Tréville, or instructed in
the humanities like Sévigné, but only that this training made in
some measure the air which enveloped them, impregnated them as
a climate does (this appears in the writings of the least of them),
and we are pointing out the more and more complete eclipse of
such a state of things.
As to the relation between the abandonment of such training
(notably Latin) and the failure of intellectual decorum, of the love


JULIEN BENDA
577
of the distinct, of the taste for clear-cut outlines, of the "plastic”
sense, this will be admitted even by those who despise it.
The decline of culture in French society, besides the numerous
causes which have been assigned to it (growth of sports, reading al-
most exclusively of newspapers, and so on) admits still another ex-
planation: the accession to the ranks of society of persons of another
class, whose minds are, properly speaking, in a state of nature (com-
mercial, industrial, and financial parvenus, and so on. How much
more true since the war and its "nouveaux riches!"). We believe
in a general way, that such social changes are not sufficiently credit-
ed in explaining the decay of taste in societies; it is not made suf-
ficiently plain that in this decadence it is not only a matter of a
class transforming its values, but of a new personnel (of uncultured
persons), which by grace of political changes comes and partly re-
plenishes the ranks of the class, bringing with it its own values.
The arrival of the taste for romance in French society, for instance,
was not due merely to a change of taste in the descendants of Caylus
and Rabutin, but to a whole world of successful bourgeois entering
the ranks of “good company” and bringing along their aesthetic.
Just as one can say that the triumph of Christianity is the substitu-
tion of slave morality for master morality, one can also say that the
triumph of romanticism is the aesthetic of natural man, replacing,
in good society, the aesthetic of the civilized.
As to the natural man's aesthetic being romanticism, one will be
sufficiently convinced of this by considering the literary taste of our
maids and janitors. Certain of our contemporaries, it is true,
protest concerning the French race: the Frenchman is nature's
classicist, the friend of order, of reason, of measure in art; he would
never have abandoned these virtues, had it not been for foreign in-
fluences. Shall we recall what the Frenchman was before the
breath of ancient literature had visited him, his formless
poems
of
twelve thousand verses, his taste for truculence and thaumaturgy?
But let us revere the patriotic passion under whatever guise.
Another condition that seems to explain further the aesthetic of
our society people, especially their religion of life, and their hatred
of judgement (also their moralism) is this: to an infinitely greater
extent than their predecessors they are a prey to life itself. First,
most of them work. Many persons of quality, so-called, only man-
age to keep up their retinue, to-day (and how much truer this has


578
BELPHEGOR
become since the war), at the price, if not of work, at least of a
thousand combinations, intrigues, maneuvres, worries, in short
their whole application. This makes sufficiently natural their dis-
dain for disinterested activity.
We see the dawning of a day, when, in the eyes of “good society”
the man who spends all his effort on “good definition and good por-
trayal” will seem a child, at whom one cannot help smiling. Add
the constant anxiety created by the insecurity of fortune, of social
position, of all that makes a "position”; the perpetual state of
tension resulting from the aggravation of the struggle in every walk,
from the excess of difficulties now encountered in getting positions,
honours, in placing one's children, in "getting there,” in astonishing,
in dazzling. Note also how much more extensively our contempo-
raries are involved in love, due to excess of temptation, by the
facilities afforded by divorce, by the disappearance of religious feel-
ing, by the advance of love's age requirements (people to-day, begin
their love careers at sixty). Finally, remember that now they are
going to war, and what a war! And you will not be able to deny a
prodigious extension among the elegant classes of the exercise of
life and the passions. Does this not explain their detestation for
the individual who judges those passions? Is it not exasperating,
when one vibrates, when one suffers, when one weeps, when one
loves, to see people who calmly classify your emotions and define
them, like those monsters whom Renan postulates, busying them-
selves solely, amid the rending of our planet and the extinction of
humanity, in correcting their cosmological conceptions?
I have an idea that when Bonaparte's soldiers, devoured by thirst
in the desert of Egypt, believed that they had at length reached the
end of their sufferings, only to find a horrible stretch of sand in the
spot where they thought they had seen a sheet of water, they must
have been somewhat annoyed at the thinker in their midst who
calmly spent his time in evolving the theory of the mirage.
This heightening of the exercise of life is to be observed as well
in the world of letters, and produces there the most serious results.
Men of letters in addition to going to war or at least being called
to war, descend every day, for reasons which are beyond their con-
trol, from the condition of clerics to that of the laity. “The major-
ity of us have a trade,” a correspondent of Agathon informs us.
More and more they are coming to know the cares of a household,


JULIEN BENDA
579
a
and of a double household, and of the head of a family, and the pre-
occupations about money for the necessities and luxuries even, which
their worldly condition increasingly demands. The growing sec-
ularization of our men of letters seems to explain pretty completely
the character of contemporary literature: exempt more and more
from the care for beautiful forms and high decorum, human in-
creasingly, and "alive,” moralistic. The fact that writers are no
longer pensioned affects not only the time and trouble which they
spend on their work, but the conception of life to which they give
expression. The relation pointed out by a German thinker between
the character of a literature and the economic condition of its
creators, seems not to have been at all beside the point.
point. But the
gravest thing is that this intenser claim of life has spread to the
philosophers. To-day, they too marry, have children, are involved
"in life.” Once more the word has been made flesh. We have
detailed elsewhere (Sur le succès du Bergsonisme, page 207) the
evil results of this secularization of the philosophers: the collapse
of philosophy into morality, its desertion of the study of nature
and of the great disinterested speculations. Philosophy, also, to
be well served requires celibacy of her priests.
Still another cause of the aesthetic of our contemporaries, espe-
cially of their will to experience sensation from the products of the
mind, is the immense development of luxury in modern times, more
exactly, the development in the surroundings of the rich of what
is caressing and tickling to the senses. Observe, too, that it is
primarily in this caressing quality that the luxury of the upper class
can be said to have progressed during the last three centuries. In
point of magnificence, it has rather gone backward. In point of
splendour of dwellings, number of servants, luxury of the table,
importance of the suite, what is a “big man” of to-day beside a
Mazarin, a Fouquet, a Seignelay? There again, it might be said
that the luxury of ancient society was above all plastic, while that of
our contemporaries is more and more musical. And it is of this that
their aesthetic seems to be a direct consequence. One day having
been called in by a society woman who had some order to give me,
I was waiting in her salon. Looking about me I was impressed
with the fact that everything—the stuff and colour of the hangings,
the carpets, cushions, bric-a-brac, the shape of the furniture, the
arrangement of the lighting-had been carefully disposed with a


580
BELPHEGOR
view to flattering the senses and sparing them every harsh impres-
sion. Having then been led to examine the library, I conceived
very clearly that the works which I found there—"sensuous” novels,
disordered poems, vaporous philosophy-were the exact projection
into the literary order of the caressing quality which I saw on the
wall and in the sofas. It was plainly impossible that, in this chapel
,
of the fused, any one should care to set his teeth on a pebble of La
Bruyère.
Finally, one of the crucial reasons, we believe, for the aesthetic
of modern French society being what we have seen, is that it is
made entirely by women. Many a writer will tell you that he
works solely for the women, that nobody else reads any more. Any
one can make the following experiment: suppose people are talking
about art, literary doctrines, aesthetics in a salon after dinner; if
you except very young men and professionals, not a man will take
part in the conversation. The man of the world who is also a great
amateur and quasi-director of belles-lettres, like Luynes, Liancourt,
Saint-Evremond, Bussy, Lamoignon, Hénault, is actually a lost
species. One may say that, to-day, because of the economic changes
that force the man of the world to kill himself in work, leaving him
no time or inclination for any aesthetic activity, the supervision of
the things of the spirit belongs, in good society, entirely to women.
Of course, this feminine dictatorship always existed in France to
some degree, and would therefore not suffice to explain the phenom-
enon in question. In the seventeenth century, too, the aesthetic of
the beau monde, was really the work of women; and yet it was not
the same thing at all. The difference is that the women of that
time respected the masculine mind, and valued themselves in rela-
tion to it; whereas the women of to-day (this is a turning point
in the history of custom) have decreed contempt for the mental
structure of men and are belligerently established in their veneration
of the feminine soul. The former esteemed their sex because it too,
they said, is capable of reason; the latter prize it because it is ex-
empt from reason, because it is “all passion, all instinct, all intui-
tion.” One can imagine that their practice differs.
It would be well to observe that these attributes of contemporary
French society, in which we believe we see the cause of its aesthetic,
run deep and have small chance of disappearing. No one imagines,
we believe, above all with this war, that society is to become more


JULIEN BENDA
581
cultivated, less a prey to life, that people are going to begin to have
leisure, or women be no longer able to make their taste supreme.
Which is to say, in our opinion and contrary to the opinion of some
others, that this aesthetic is not at all a fashion, but on the contrary
that it is destined to endure, to intensify. This without denying
the probability of some backward cast toward a violent “classicism,”
which will indeed be a fashion, and a special form of the need for
excess into the bargain.
a
III
Having in mind this aesthetic attitude (destined to endure, we
believe) of good French society, what shall we conclude in regard
to the future of art? That the divorce will only go on deepening
between that company and the intellectualistic artist, whether he
is so named because of his presentation of ideas like Montesquieu,
Taine, Renan, or because intelligence and judgement preside more
than sentiment at the composition of his work, as in the case of
Racine or La Fayette. A divorce which will be new only in degree,
since the temporal success of such masters has always managed to
be far from violent. (This does not apply to Taine, but for polit-
ical reasons.) Understand: we do not wish to say that such an
artist will lack readers; we believe, on the contrary, that with the
growing diffusion of books, with the more and more intense inter-
communication between citizens, there will be, there are already,
a much greater number than before; but they will be among the
intellectuals by profession, among the solitaries, curious in matters
of the spirit, not, certainly, among people of the world. And
haps one may fear that the definite renunciation of their interest
will little by little discourage the care for grace and delicate forms,
which is one of the conditions without which art cannot exist in the
world of ideas. And further, in view of the apparent future of social
life and culture, it may be asked whether even the appearance of
such a brain, at once artistic and intellectual, is still a possible thing;
whether we shall not see, eternally separate, “regarding one another
with an angry stare,” on one side the savant, a perfect stranger to
his "age,” on the other, the man of the world, quite shut against all
discipline of the mind; whether the synthesis in a single head of
And per-


582
BELPHEGOR
the scientific spirit of the Italian Renaissance, and the artistic spirit
of Greece, that marvellous combination which was kindled in our
country in the seventeenth century, is not a hearth forever extin-
guished, whose last glow will have been Taine, Renan, and France;
“O soleils descendus derriere l'horizon!"
As for society itself, it may be foreseen that this care to get sen-
sation from art will in turn become a cause and will make the thirst
for this pleasure more and more intense, the concentration on satisfy-
ing it more and more zealous and perfected. The day is in sight
when good French society will repudiate the little it still puts up
with of ideas and organization in art, and will no longer become
enthusiastic over anything but the gestures of comedians, impres-
sions of women and children, lyric bellowings, fanatical ecstasies.
All things of small matter for public alarm, whatever a few scolds
may say, if one reflects how little this intellectual anaesthesia has
been able to prevent our society from fulfilling its civic duty in the
present circumstances, has perhaps assisted it; if one reflects that a
nation-clichés to the contrary notwithstanding—may prosper
mightily in force and wealth (the Roman Empire bears witness)
with a governing class deprived increasingly of all intellectual dis-
cipline; and finally, what is more, if one reflects that this society
is placing the governing power to a larger extent every day at the
disposal of other classes, which are not less intellectual, but only
have a different manner of being so.
a
The End


MALGRÉ LUI
BY OSBERT SITWELL
The voices weave a web of futile sound;
A fan is dropped by Lady Carabas;
Restored to her; but Mrs Kinfoot frowned,
Guarding the door, as Cerberus his pass.
But suddenly great waves of sound obtrude
Upon the pleasant party in this room;
While we enjoy the music's interlude,
Outside there swells the trumpet call of doom.
Mosaic tombs or unmarked graves—asunder
They all are rent. King Dodon from the dead
Arises; while the quivering heavens thunder,
He smoothes his robe, and calmly shakes his head
Free of the ages' dust; but now the voices
Of those condemned (for judgement will not tarry)
Shrill out in woe; but one, alone, rejoices,
For Mrs Kinfoot scents another quarry.
The army of the dead are on the march
To meet their Maker on His ivory throne.
He sits beneath the rainbow's radiant arch,
Dispensing judgement. Oh, atone, atone!
,
But Mrs Kinfoot saw a sailor-sinner
-With one arm-leave St Paul's and walk away;
And Mrs Kinfoot longed to give a dinner
"To meet the Judge upon the Judgement Day!”
Above God's Head a dozen suns kept guard
Like sentinels. Her erring feet were led


584
MALGRE LUI
Up to a crowded hill, where God's regard
Was fixed upon her, and He gravely said:
"Anne Kinfoot, worthy mother and good wife,
Your weakness and
your
faults are all forgiven.
Go you, my child, to everlasting life,
And take your husband also up to Heaven.”
But she could see the Counsellors and Kings
And brilliant bearers of a famous name,
Tangled with snakes and horrid crawling things,
Sent down to torture and eternal flame.
Then Mrs Kinfoot lied in agony: “Oh, Lord,
I am as others of my class and station.”
She cried: "Oh, have me bound and burnt and gored,
Oh, send me down to suffer my damnation!
“I swear I beat my children.” Oh! despondent
She was.
"I am a sinner; I will tell
How I escaped a ducal co-respondent
Last year. My God, I must insist on Hell!”
But the great Judge was not deceived. He knew
The worthy virtue of the Kinfoot line;
Yet as she went to Heaven, constant, true,
To principle, she murmured: “Will you dine
To meet .. But dragged away, she dwells on high
And notes, but rather disapproves, the eccentricity
Of Saints and early Christians who try
To lessen the burden of her domesticity.
She has to play upon a golden harp,
Join in the chorus of the Heavenly choir;
Her answers to the Saints are sometimes sharp,
She longs to singe her wings and share the fire.


OSBERT SITWELL
585
Night never comes—so when she tries to flee
To that perpetual party down below,
The angels catch her, shouting out with glee
“Dear Mrs Kinfoot. You are good!
We know!"


THE SECOND-ORDER MIND
BY T. S. ELIOT
to a
10 any one who is at all capable of experiencing the pleasures
of justice, it is gratifying to be able to make amends
writer whom one has vaguely depreciated for some years. The
faults and foibles of Matthew Arnold are no less evident to me
now than twelve years ago, after my first admiration for him;
but I hope that now, on rereading some of his prose with more
care, I can better appreciate his position. And what makes Arnold
seem all the more remarkable is, that if he were our exact con-
temporary, he would find all his labour to perform again. A
moderate number of persons have engaged in what is called
"critical” writing, but no conclusion is any more solidly estab-
lished than it was in 1865. In the first essay in the first Essays in
Criticism we read that
"it has long seemed to me that the burst of creative activity in
our literature, through the first quarter of this century, had about
it in fact something premature; and that from this cause its pro-
ductions are doomed, most of them, in spite of the sanguine hopes
which accompanied and do still accompany them, to prove hardly
more lasting than the productions of far less splendid epochs. And
this
prematureness comes from its having proceeded without hav-
ing its proper data, without sufficient material to work with. In
other words, the English poetry of the first quarter of this century,
with plenty of energy, plenty of creative force, did not know
enough. This makes Byron so empty of matter, Shelley so in-
coherent, Wordsworth even, profound as he is, yet so wanting
in completeness and variety.”
This judgement of the Romantic Generation has not, so far as I
know, ever been successfully controverted; and it has not, so far
as I know, ever made very much impression on popular opinion.
Once a poet is accepted, his reputation is seldom disturbed, for
better or worse. So little impression has Arnold's opinion made,


T. S. ELIOT
587
that his statement will probably be as true of the first quarter of
the twentieth century as it was of the nineteenth. A few sentences
later, Arnold articulates the nature of the malady:
“In the Greece of Pindar and Sophocles, in the England of
Shakespeare, the poet lived in a current of ideas in the highest
degree animating and nourishing to the creative power; society
was, in the fullest measure, permeated by fresh thought, intelligent
and alive; and this state of things is the true basis for the creative
power's exercise, in this it finds its data, its materials, truly ready
for its hand; all the books and reading in the world are only
valuable as they are helps to this.”
At this point Arnold is indicating the centre of interest and ac-
tivity of the critical intelligence; and it is at this perception, we
may almost say, that Arnold's critical activity stopped. In a so-
ciety in which the arts were seriously studied, in which the art of
writing was respected, Arnold might have become a critic. How
astonishing it would be, if a man like Arnold had concerned himself
with the art of the novel, had compared Thackeray with Flaubert,
had analysed the work of Dickens, had shown his contemporaries
exactly why the author of Amos Barton is a more serious writer
than Dickens, and why the author of La Chartreuse de Parme is
more serious than either? In Culture and Anarchy, in Literature
and Dogma, Arnold was not occupied so much in establishing a
criticism as in attacking the uncritical. The difference is that while
in constructive work something can be done, destructive work must
incessantly be repeated; and furthermore Arnold, in his destruc-
tion, went for game outside of the literary preserve altogether,
much of it political game untouched and inviolable by ideas. This
activity of Arnold's we must regret; it might perhaps have been
carried on as effectively, if not quite so neatly, by some disciple (had
there been one) in an editorial position on a newspaper. Arnold
is not to be blamed: he wasted his strength, as men of superior
ability sometimes do, because he saw something to be done and no
one else to do it. The temptation, to any man who is interested
in ideas and primarily in literature, to put literature into the corner
until he has cleaned up the whole country first, is almost irresist-
ible. Some persons, like Mr Wells and Mr Chesterton, have suc-


588
THE SECOND-ORDER MIND
ceeded so well in this latter profession of setting the house in order,
and have attracted so much more attention than Arnold, that we
must conclude that it is indeed their proper rôle, and that they
have done well for themselves in laying literature aside.
Not only is the critic tempted outside of criticism. . The criticism
proper betrays such poverty of ideas and such atrophy of sensibility
that men who ought to preserve their critical ability for the im-
provement of their own creative work are tempted into criticism.
I do not intend from this the usually silly inference that the "creat-
ive” gift is “higher" than the critical. When one creative mind
is better than another, the reason often is that the better is the
more critical. But the great bulk of the work of criticism could
be done by minds of the second order, and it is just these minds of
the second order that are difficult to find. They are necessary for
the rapid circulation of ideas. The periodical press—the ideal
literary periodical-is an instrument of transport; and the literary
periodical press is dependent upon the existence of a sufficient
number of second-order (I do not say "second-rate," the word is
too derogatory) minds to supply its material. These minds are
necessary for that “current of ideas,” that "society permeated by
fresh thought," of which Arnold speaks.
It is a perpetual heresy of English culture to believe that only
the first-order mind, the Genius, the Great Man, matters; that he
is solitary, and produced best in the least favourable environment,
perhaps the Public School; and that it is more likely a sign of
inferiority that Paris can show so many minds of the second order.
If too much bad verse is published in London, it does not occur to
us to raise our standards, to do anything to educate the poetaster;
the remedy is, Kill them off. I quote from Mr Edmund Gosse in
the Sunday Times of May 30th, 1920:
6
“Unless something is done to stem this flood of poetastry the art
of verse will become not merely superfluous, but ridiculous.
Poetry is not a formula which a thousand flappers and hobblede-
hoys ought to be able to master in a week without training, and
the mere fact that it seems to be now practised with such universal
ease is enough to prove that something has gone amiss with our
standards. . . . This is all wrong, and will lead us down into
the abyss like so many Gadarene swine unless we resist it."
.


T. S. ELIOT
589
We quite agree that poetry is not a formula. But what does
Mr Gosse propose to do about it? If Mr Gosse had found him-
self in the flood of poetastry in the reign of Elizabeth what would
he have done about it? would he have stemmed it? what exactly
is this abyss ? and if something “has gone amiss with our stand-
ards,” is it wholly the fault of the younger generation that it is
aware of no authority that it must respect? It is part of the busi-
ness of the critic to preserve tradition—where a good tradition
exists. It is part of his business to see literature steadily and to
see it whole; and this is eminently to see it not as consecrated by
time, but to see it beyond time; to see the best work of our time
and the best work of twenty-five hundred years ago with the same
eyes. It is part of his business to help the poetaster to understand
his own limitations. The poetaster who understands his own
limitations will be one of our useful second-order minds; a good
minor poet (and that very rare) or another good critic. As for
the first-order minds, when they happen, they will be none the
worse off for a "current of ideas”; the solitude with which they
will always and everywhere be invested is a very different thing
from isolation, or a monarchy of death.


MAURICE VLAMINCK
BY FRITZ VANDERPYL
VLAN
LAMINCK belongs with Henri Matisse and André Derain,
with Dunoyer de Segonzac, Friesz, Dufy, Bracque, Marquet,
Rouault, and Jean Marchand, to the better known painters of the
present French school.
Born in the years of Impressionism (1876) when Monet, Renoir,
and Sisley were waiting for their days of glory, he did not take
a very active part in its reaction, called vaguely Cubism. But
just the same he was influenced by that reaction.
Since 1900 exposing at the Salon des Indépendants, indifferent
to all technique, his atavism, coming from a northern source,
pushed him to the rude sentimentalism and manner of masters like
Rembrandt and Frans Hals. But French by three generations
(his ancestors were from Flanders and Holland) he arrived at
the same degree of common-sense virtues and realism as the great
Fouquet, the father of French painting, as the brothers Lenain
(1593-1677), as Philippe de Champaigne (1602-1674), as
Chardin (who is one of the prophets of the French Revolution
by the intensity of his still lives and interiors), as Gericault, and
as Manet.
Vlaminck's colouring is pure, his drawing is spontaneous, his
composition based on synthetical effect. There is a certain noise
in his work as there is a certain noise everywhere in the world
of to-day, even in old France. In the smallest of his canvasses,
portraits, landscapes, or still lives you find an echo of the modern
social drama.
For that reason, had he not always lived in the country of Balzac
and Verlaine, he could have been a Russian or an American painter,
as Russia does, but as Chicago, New York, or San Francisco do not
yet, possess. He is farther away from what was, and newer in his
subjects and in their execution, than any old or living painter of
the United States: Whistler or Sargent or Harrison or William
Dannat or Breckenridge or Samuel Halpert or Jerome Blum or
>



1
38
♡
$
a
A PAINTING.
BY MAURICE VLAMINCK






A PAINTING.
BY MAURICE VLAMINCK






A PAINTING.
BY MAURICE VLAMINCK


|


FRITZ VANDERPYL
591
Van Deering Perrine or Stuart Davis. Mr Davis, in his black
and whites, comes nearer than any one to the spirit of Vlaminck
(plus près de l'esprit).
There is in Vlaminck the flavour of a fresh spring garden and
at the same time the smell of any industrial agglomeration.
Critics reproached him that his blacks look like shoe-black, his
whites like cream-cheese (fromage à la crème), and his reds like
bottle-wax.
The truth is that his values are so justly established, that his
reds and blacks and whites and greens and yellows remain as
they are. He has found the secret of what Delacroix wanted
when he advised to avoid mixed tints which become dirty; what
the Pointillists obtained by placing their mixtures in spots and
not blended together. This makes it possible for Vlaminck to be,
of all living painters, I am sure, the most free from Italian dogma.
“Intelligence is international, stupidity is national, and art is
local” ... wrote Maurice Vlaminck, the clean-shaven giant with
the profile of a Roman emperor from the Louvre collections,
Tiberius or Nero.
He possesses a small country-house near Paris where his three
fair-haired daughters busy themselves—when they don't sing or
paint or act on the stage-growing fruits, flowers, and vegetables,
or by keeping rabbits, chickens, geese, a lamb, a goat, perhaps a
very young white calf.
He likes to talk about Walt Whitman and wrote, since the
war, some extraordinary poems published in different magazines
of Paris. He has a great admiration for Lenin and Beethoven
and Cézanne and African wood-carving. But he never possessed
anything looking like a stiff collar or a cut-away.
To find agreeable conversation he travels third class; to have
the food he desires he goes to first-class restaurants. There is no
contradiction in these facts because he wants everybody to have
the best, and the only kind of discussion he hates is the bourgeois
one.
His art is without small preoccupations, without reticences,
without vain tricks. It seems entirely disencumbered from any
tradition and ... that last point seems to me the equivalent of
a definition: Was that not in fact what I owed to the reader?


MEMORIES OF LITTLE BREECHES
BY MARVIN LEAR
PRELUDE
a
The
a
HE embers in the grate are like a basketful of red roses. The
kettle sings above them as merry and saucy as a cricket. A
rich glow is over the hearth and the rug. My knees are crimson
with reflected light, my knees and the arms of the great easy chair.
Behind me are shadows. It is very cozy and warm. One would
hardly think it is snowing outside. The kettle is merry. It is my
only companion-for the Prince of Pipes is a preacher, and no
merry fellow at all. Bye and bye we shall make a toddy, we two.
I sit with the Prince of Pipes between my finger and thumb. It
was once white as foam and my hair was brown as a chestnut. Now
it is all over a rich brown and it is my hair that is white as foam.
“You are old, you are old,” sings the kettle.
I am old. None knows it better than I. One cannot live forever.
And after all, as has been said, growing old is the only way that
has
yet been discovered to live a long time. I am content.
I
“You are a fool, you are a fool,” sings the kettle.
I am a fool. None knows it better than I. But what would you
have? I was born in the world, the son of a woman. I do not
complain. "I am old, and a fool.” I accept my destiny.
I fill the Prince of Pipes with moist, aromatic tobacco. I light it
with a lucifer which sputters blue and yellow between my face and
the fire. I puff white rings of cloud that float gracefully toward the
kettle. If it were not for the steam which beats them back, they
would noose the spout.
“You must know first and above all,” says the Prince of Pipes
with a deep breath, "that the world is mad.”
I nod my head, for I know this, and blow a tremendous volume
of smoke which mounts and hovers quietly in shadowy layers above
)
a
my head.
“And you must know secundly,” says the Prince of Pipes, "that
the world is vain."


MARVIN LEAR
593
I know this too. I knew it long before the Prince of Pipes was
moulded. But I say nothing. He must be humoured. It is his
one refrain.
The kettle sings in the embers.
Time past seems brief as a fash of lightning and life like the
click of a camera. Three-and-sixty years, at the end of them, are
as frail a thing in memory as three-and-sixty minutes. The world,
as I have known it, lies in my mind's eye whole and distinct like a
a
picture; it has been registered as by photography upon the sensitized
paper of my heart.
The Prince of Pipes is right. What need to debate with him?
The world is mad and the world is vain. Three-and-sixty years
have taught me that. There is no conceivable reason for it. Even
the pageantry of the seraphim at the feet of God is but a fitting
of marionettes, a fluttering of vain things, in the shadow of eternity.
What need to debate? The world is vain. Yet I love it none the
less. Though the planets swing ridiculously round the suns for ever
and ever to no purpose and to no end, though men spawn upon the
earth by myriads to no purpose and to no end, though it is alto-
gether futile and vain, it is yet beautiful—beautiful, one might
say perhaps, like a forlorn hope on the field of battle. I have loved
the world and its beauties. I have loved life. I confess it.
The Prince of Pipes has great contempt for the world, that it is
mad and vain. He has no patience with me, nor with the kettle.
We shall come to a bad end. Like John Knox, he preaches and
vomits fire. It is all very well. We shall lay him aside bye and
bye and make a toddy, we two. Les aristocrates à la lanterne!
And now, for whomever it might please to read, I shall write my
memories of little breeches.
a
MOTHER
It was grey all over the world, a summer evening, quiet, and dim
with twilight. The great trees across the way were shadowy and
monstrous like giants. And I was playing with blocks upon the
verandah, placing one upon another as high as I could build, taking
keen pleasure in their inevitable downfall. I was building Towers
of Babel and I was very small.
Within the house, inside the window which was open for more


594
MEMORIES OF LITTLE BREECHES
air, I could hear my mother speaking in a low voice. No doubt
there was company, some lady from near by. They were talking
very softly. Perhaps some one was ill. I did not know. Perhaps
it was my mother who was ill; for she died soon. I was too small
to know anything. I could not see her. She was within the house
and I, sitting upon the verandah, was much too small to peep over
the window-sill. I cannot remember ever to have seen her. She
died soon.
I was two-and-twenty before I learned where she was buried. As
I grew older and came to know some little of death and learned the
purpose and the significance of the green plots set with white and
solemn stones which seems always to be found near every town, I
watched and listened to learn where her grave might be. I dared
not ask. I was supposed to know. Had I asked my father, it
would have pained him. It was horrible to confess to my sister,
who could have told me, being three years older than I, that I did
not know. I kept my peace, wondering, because I was ashamed.
I can remember still halting sometimes in my play to wonder-
when some playmate spoke of his mother-in what cemetery in
what city my mother was.
My new mother was tender and kind. My father loved her
dearly, and I. It was not well to speak of the dead. At times, to
be sure, my father spoke of my mother, and invariably with tender-
ness, but never to mention her grave. I dared not ask. I was
ashamed. And I compacted with myself in the course of years that
my mother was buried in a small town four hundred miles away,
where I knew very well that my brother was buried, for I had been
taken there for his funeral. Having decided this, there was no more
doubt in my heart. I ceased to wonder. I could picture the mound
of
grass and flowers, the railing round it, and the white stone.
When I was twenty I visited in that little town. The brother
and sister of my mother had lived there for more than thirty years.
As I stayed with them, I waited day by day to be taken to the
cemetery where I might put flowers on my mother's grave. But
they never spoke of her. They never led me to the cemetery. And
when it came time for me to go and I told them good-bye, I realized
with a queer feeling of loneliness that my little dream had been all
wrong—that my mother was buried not there but in another place,
the name of which I did not know.


MARVIN LEAR
595
I learned in the end. It was two years later. I planned a tramp
in the mountains. There was always a rare delight for me in the
hills. I had been penned within doors for two summers and winters.
I was to go on foot through the mountains—they were not large
mountains—for two hundred and fifty miles.
“If possible,” said my father to me one night-it was near morn-
ing and we were preparing for bed, “you should go through X-
I looked up, surprised. The city was far out of the hills.
"Why?" I asked. “There is no one in X- that I know."
“No,” he said, speaking very slowly, “I suppose not.—No one
but kinfolk.”
His voice was hoarse and the tears welled up in his eyes. Two
trickled down his cheek. And it was then that I knew for the first
time where my mother was.
“I shall go through X- if possible,” I said.
”
There were tears in my father's eyes as he extinguished the light.
I had pained him deeply, but I could not explain. The truth would
have pained him much more than my apparent indifference. I went
to sleep in silence.
It was not possible for me to go through X-, for
my
funds
were limited. And as things befell, I was five-and-thirty before I
placed my flowers upon that
grave of which I had so often dreamed.
And my one memory of my mother, living or dead, remains the
,
sound of her voice one summer evening, when she sat within the
house at the window and I sat on the verandah in the twilight build-
ing Towers of Babel with blocks of wood—I, who have been build-
ing Towers of Babel, either with blocks or words, since I was a child.
GRANDMOTHER
I remember my grandmother.
When my mother died it was my grandmother who came to care
for us, my sister and I, for my father did not marry again for several
years. She was a lovable little woman and, as it seemed to me then,
infinitely old. She was a Methodist, the widow of a Methodist
minister. And for four years—as one might expect—while she had
us in charge, I was steeped in Methodism as cucumbers are steeped
in vinegar. It was the air I breathed. It was the world I lived in.
There was no escaping it. This world, which seemed so desirable


596
MEMORIES OF LITTLE BREECHES
with its flowers and birds and clouds, had but one purpose in the
universal scheme: it was a door-mat before the glittering gates of
heaven; a place to clean one's feet. This world, this earth, was in
.
itself nothing, less than nothing, the habitat of the devil. It is an
old story; there is no need to repeat. My grandmother was a
Methodist of the old school which is rare to-day. The race, it seems,
is fast becoming extinct-like the Dodo, which was too good for
chis world.
I cannot remember that she ever read us anything but Bible-
stories. (My father bought us Grimm's Fairy Tales and the
Arabian Nights and Gulliver's Travels, but I could not read them.
He told us, too, about Jack and the Bean-stalk, and the Giant-
killer. I planted a bean in the back-yard, but it did not grow.) In
those days I knew by heart the fables of the Witch of Endor and
the chariot of fire and the Tower of Babel, the parables of the
talents and the tares, the enchanting history of Balaam's ass and of
the ark. We were taught all this lest we go astray in the world and
wander at last to hell. For my grandmother was very devout. One
could not inform her. There was a red hell. She knew. And
there was a devil.
This devil, indeed, was a very real personage to me then. I held
many a dramatic rehearsal of encounters with him. What, I won-
dered, would I do should I meet him suddenly face to face in the
middle of the road, him standing there red as a lobster, switching
his tail, smiling and twirling his moustache? At times, I believe,
when I had imagined too much and too vividly, I ran and hid
myself under the bed. At other times I greeted him in a very gentle-
manly manner. I cannot remember ever to have had contempt for
the devil. Either I feared him as I feared ghosts and bears: or I
respected him as I would respect the Sultan of Turkey.
My grandmother took us to church three times on Sundays, and
to prayer-meetings during the week. My father went too on Sunday
mornings. He seemed to go for the same reason as we, because he
had to. He did not seem to be enchanted with the sermons, but of
course he could not go to sleep, as I could. I believe we had a feel-
ing of fellowship in discomfort, though it was never expressed. In
Sunday school they gave us coloured cards with pictures of Jesus
Christ and the Apostles—very gaudy and bright-and sometimes
with the Almighty God in the corner, dressed in purple and white,
a


MARVIN LEAR
597
sitting in a chair or on a cloud against a background of cobalt blue.
And at the morning service I was allowed to drop a penny in the
plate. These things I enjoyed.
When missionaries to China came to our church to lecture, we
were taken to hear them. I was always delighted with the beauti-
ful costumes and trinkets they showed. The silks in extravagant
colours entranced me, for I was always a lover of butterflies and
flowers and rainbows. It must be wonderful, I thought, in China
where people walked upside down and dressed like butterflies.
Nevertheless in those days I was very sorry for the Chinese. Be-
cause they were damned.
Nearly everything, it seemed, was wrong in this "very miserable
world.” As near as I could make out, the only thing which was
unquestionably right was to go to church and say the catechism.
(In those days I knew the catechism!) I had no doubt that if I
attempted to play and be happy on Sunday, the lightning would
leap from the sky and annihilate me in mid-career. However, the
Almighty God was kinder than I knew, for I have since played
often of a Sunday, and am not yet dead.
There could be no doubt that card-playing was an invention of
the devil of hell. We had our grandmother's word for it. A play-
ing-card, frankly, was nothing other than a passport to damnation.
One day we found, my sister and I, a pack of cards scattered on the
floor of my father's office. We were very worried for fear this was
an indication that my father was in league with the devil. But
with the cards it was possible to make furniture for dolls' houses.
So we carried them home and bent them into tables and chairs. My
grandmother found us conducting this operation. Without a word,
her face overspread with a profound sadness, she gathered the cards
from the floor. She burned them grimly in the kitchen stove, with
a gusto which now reminds me of the stories of mediaeval fanatics
who made merry round the stake of burning heretics. When they
were thoroughly burned, she said: “You must never touch a card
again.” We replied that they were our father's. She said nothing,
but shook her head sadly. I had long been aware that she looked
upon my father much as she looked upon the Hindus. There could
be no doubt that he was in league with the devil. (I believe, how-
ever, that from that day my faith in the eternal moralities was
shaken.)


598
MEMORIES OF LITTLE BREECHES
The régime in our household was very strict. I was spanked, I
should hazard the estimate, some four or five times a week. My
crimes were of all varieties. Like the villains of modern novels,
for one thing, I “lied glibly.” But my punishment was nearly al-
ways swift. My grandmother had that weird second sight which
Dean Swift longed for—"the art of second sight for seeing lies, as
they have in Scotland for seeing spirits.” One could not deceive
her. My lie was detected offhand and I was summarily spanked
with the flat side of a hair-brush. Then my mouth was carefully
washed out with soap and water. But it was not merely for lies.
I was very wicked. I spoke disrespectfully of old people. I uttered
vile phrases which I had learned from Master Thomas Depaw, who
was older than I. It was evident that I was very wicked. If I had
died abruptly at the age of seven years, I should have fallen in-
dubitably into the arms of Beelzebub, who was expecting me. I
was very wicked. I stole matches from the kitchen-cabinet, and
was handsomely spanked.
As I have said, that atmosphere of hell and the devil which
pervaded our home was purely an adjunct of my grandmother.
Wherever she went was an aura of Methodism. My father was
different. He came at evening and played with us—told us ghost
stories. He gave us credit at the ice-cream parlour and tickets to
ride on the merry-go-round. He was the kindest man in the world
and had a long moustache that was funny to play with. As soon as
he earned a red cent, we should have a Shetland pony. But he, of
course, let my grandmother have her way in the house. She loved
us more than any one else: our mother was dead. So she was
mistress in the household and if she chose to introduce into it the
devil of hell, the catechism, and the iron rule of Methodism, he had
nothing to say. He viewed all the religions of the world—Meth-
odism, Mohammedanism, or Shintoism—with a kindly pagan
tolerance.
Only once can I remember to have rebelled against this rule of
iron. I cannot know now why I did, for the minds of children work
queerly. But I rebelled—that much is certain. Doubtless I had
heard too much about the Heathen. Poor damned souls! At any
rate, one day I gathered together some copper-wire and a discarded
tomato-can and a blossom of the four-o'clock and some fragments
of chipped coloured glass and some handsome pebbles: and I raised


MARVIN LEAR
599
.
an altar of sand in the yard and erected an idol. I cannot recall his
name. He was some strange god that no one has heard of, for I
created him. And I fell on my knees before him and prayed in
gibberish. I thought-I hoped—that perhaps a tongue of fire
might come down sizzling from the sky and lap up the blossom of
the four-o'clock that rested upon the tomato-can. I was praying
very solemnly, bowing up and down like a Chinaman, when the
ritual was suddenly interrupted by my sister Virginia. She should
tell my grandmother. She should most certainly tell my grand-
mother. Here, as might be expected, I incontinently changed my
supplications from Golmagolga, or whatever strange divinity mine
was, to Virginia. In the end, but only after much soulful entreaty,
she agreed not to tell my grandmother of my iniquity, and I prayed
to that god no more.
I have sometimes wondered if I ever worshipped the Good God
of
my grandmother. I cannot be sure. But I fear that
my
frail
affections wandered always, as they wander still, to strange gods of
whom she never dreamed.
And as I sit, with my kettle singing above the fire, watching the
flames leap and beckon in the grate, I cannot repress a smile to think
I
how surely damned I am, if that stern relentless God of my grand-
mother be really upon his throne. If that God is reality, if his
throne is not-as I have always said-a vacant and abandoned seat
in barren space, if all these fables I have laughed at for three-and-
sixty years are solemn truth-then surely the grim joke is on me.
But I flatter myself that I am not as Pompey, called the Great,
who could not take a jest. I shall not complain.
THE HOUSE
We lived in a small green house that was low and squat, with
window-casings and eaves of a dark brick-red. It was not beautiful,
but it was cosy, which is a better thing. (My father was never
wealthy. His ships—and they were wonderful as the galleons of
Spain-never came in. I think he often found it difficult to pay
the rent even for this tiny cottage of five rooms.) It was not
beautiful. It was no palace like those of the Arabian Nights. But
across the front of it was a porch screened completely with morning-


600
MEMORIES OF LITTLE BREECHES
glory and moon-flower: and these the Caliph Haroun-al-Raschid
had to live without.
The yard was a mass of flowers, four-o'clock and hollyhock. At
either side of the steps in front was a rose-bush. Under the holly.
hocks and four-o'clocks long gourd-vines rambled in and out. The
pathway from the front-door to the gate was of sand, and the four-
o'clock flowers on the right and left were nearly as high as my head.
As for the hollyhocks, they were monstrous—I could not stand tip-
toe and reach to the top of them. It was on that sandy path
between a hollyhock and a four-o'clock that I erected the altar of
Golmagolga.
My sister and I sometimes in the late afternoons strung necklaces
of flowers, threading them upon twine. I could never make a
wreath or a necklace that looked like anything. I was not clever
enough. But my sister made beautiful ones, and set them round
her neck and on her hair.
There was a hammock on the porch which was excellent to swing
in. I sat in it when there were storms and amused myself by watch-
ing the clouds. Toward dusk at night they were wonderful, because
then, when the lightning broke, I could see between the thunder-
heads for miles and miles along the golden streets of heaven. I
could see it all very plainly, the turrets and steeples of the churches,
beautiful and resplendent: a city of flame and fire. Somehow I did
not conceive of heaven as anything but a city of churches. I was
very small. In three-and-sixty years I have altered sadly. Now,
when the lightning breaks, I see nothing but plunging fire, no streets
magnificent with minarets. I see nothing but fire. And I pray
there are no churches in heaven.
By day I sat in the hammock and deciphered pictures in the
clouds. I discovered charming misty faces which faded as soon as
found. I made out terrible faces that metamorphosed into queer
animals and figures like the ghosts in Japanese fairy-tales. I saw
tigers and lions and elephants. I saw Indians with tomahawks and
dying gladiators and chariots-of-four. I saw plumed warriors on
foaming horses plunging headlong from a cloud.
And once I saw looming in the sky above me a huge horned
mystical figure which could have been nothing but the Devil.


MARVIN LEAR
601
THE DREAMS
There are more than four-and-twenty hours in a child's day.
There are more nearly two hundred and forty. The distance in
time between breakfast and lunch is infinite (sufficient for the erec-
tion and destruction of cities and empires in the sand, which are at
noon as if they had never been). And dinner-dinner is lost in
mythical futurity like the coming annihilation of the world by fire:
which shall be in due time, certainly, but not yet.
It would be totally vain to attempt to catalogue the adventures
of a child between morning and evening. I shall not tell any of
mine. For adventures are common to man. It was only in my
dreams that I differed from other children in kilts and curls, as it
was only in my dreams that I differed from other children in knee-
pants and blouses. And as it is only in them that I differ now from
other men of three-and-sixty years who are somewhat bald and who
suffer from rheumatism.
Adventures are common to man. We have all been born. We
have all struggled and won; all struggled and failed. We have all
loved women and figured in battles of some sort. We have trav-
elled; we have remained at home. We have ridden upon stick
horses, worn our first trousers, trumpeted upon tin horns. We have
all had our first kiss of love, and we shall have our last. We have
lived, and we shall die. As to experience, certainly, we are as
like as donkeys.
And children are as like as puppies. The children of Nineveh
threw stones at sparrows and paddled mud pies. The children of
Tyre and Rome did as much. There is no difference. In all ex-
ternals, life is but repetition, "an old song." Love is the common-
est thing in the world, and death. But no two dreams were ever
the same.
The kettle chuckles contentedly over the coals. I cannot help
but wonder what merry dreams it has to make it laugh forever. If
it should express them in articulate speech, the human humorists of
two thousand years would surely be put to shame. But luckily for
Aesop and Rabelais and Monsieur Anatole France, the kettle con-
fides in nobody: it laughs to itself.
On the well-curb in the back-yard I sat in silver slippers, green
breeches, and a turban the colour of wine, smoking a hookah. For
.


602
MEMORIES OF LITTLE BREECHES
.
.
this splendid attire I was indebted to my imagination. The hookah
was a catalpa-bean. I was an oriental potentate of some sort. I
cannot now remember whether I was a pasha or a sheikh or a
bashibazook. Perhaps I was only a maharajah or a mogul. I am
not sure. But I believe I was a bashibazook. I was sitting upon a
throne with cushions of purple velvet, surrounded by black men in
golden girdles who fanned me with fans, and I was condemning
crusaders, whom I had conquered with a scimitar, to work in the
date-orchards and haul sand in the desert.
I was a missionary in the South Sea Islands and was in grave
peril of being cooked in a pot and eaten—but was luckily called to
dinner before I arrived at that.
I went down under the sea like a pearl-diver and moved about
among the fishes: saw black octopi, and sea-elephants, and mer-
maidens swaying in the weeds.
I was a crusader with a coat-of-mail and a broadsword, and cut
off the head of a heathen bashibazook in green breeches who was
smoking a hookah. I set it above the northwest gate of the city of
Jerusalem as a sign and portent for unbelievers.
I mounted upon a broom-stick after the fashion of the wizards,
and drifted at will about the star-spangled heavens. The stars were
of different colours and larger than eggs. I cannot understand now
why I gathered none for my grandmother. I went to the moon, but
I have forgotten what I saw there.
Marco Polo, the Baron Munchausen, or Sir John Mandeville
could read me no lessons in adventure in those days. I was a citizen
of the world, equally at home in Afghanistan or the Islands of the
Sea, under the earth or in the air.
All this in the day-time. In sleep I was pursued by the wraiths
of the dead. My father's ghost stories were responsible for this, as
they were responsible for the apparition of the Black Cowl (which
I shall tell of), which haunted me between waking and sleeping.
In dreams at night the wraiths of the dead pursued me persistently,
seeking terribly to clutch me into the ghostly world.
It seems strange to me that these ghostly apparitions were always
malignant. They pursued me doggedly with a blind malevolence.
I should have been lost undoubtedly, had they not been so pitifully
stupid. But I developed a ruse upon which I prided myself very
much and by means of which I always escaped. (It is
very
subtle,


MARVIN LEAR
603
for I came by it in a dream.) Ghosts are stupid; they can be hood-
winked, thwarted. When one approached me in the world of
dreams I was frozen with fear. To run was impossible. I could
only wait. And when the wraith stood over me peering at me with
its blank and vacant eyes, I worked my ruse. It was this:
Ghosts are stupid. Their brains have been eaten away by worms
and their power of reason is hopelessly paralyzed. They have no
originality. And, like monkeys, they will imitate one. So when
the ghost stood over me, although I was physically unable to escape
or make any nimble movements whatsoever, I looked nonchalantly
up at the sky as if I saw something splendid there-like, say a
chicken-hawk or a red-white-and-blue kite, or a shooting star. Che
wraith would of course look up, too, exactly as I did, for they are
hopelessly simple. And then very cautiously I would take a step
backward. The wraith would do likewise. Then I would take
another, and another. Walking thus mutually backward, we in-
creased the distance between us gradually until in the end I turned
suddenly and fled with as much speed as the wind. This ruse was
invariably successful. (But it was essential to put a great distance
between myself and the wraith; for the ghosts of the dead run
faster than elephants.) I was always excessively proud of this
trick, as it reflected honour upon me and ignominy upon the wraiths.
And I am quite convinced now, as I was five-and-fifty years ago,
that had it not been for it, I should have long ago been carried away
bodily into that ghostly commonwealth of malignant spirits which
lies we know not where on the other side of the grave.
I was persecuted in dreams, also, but to a lesser degree, by
Indians, and tigers, and bears, and all those other hereditary
cnemies of imaginative children. But from these I escaped without
subterfuge. I escaped in a way which I learned a million years ago
when I was a little bobolink or buzzard: I flew. When my pur-
suers were upon me, I rose calmly into the air and sailed away
through space, precisely as birds do: except that I did not flap my
That would have been too ridiculous.
a
arms.
THE BLACK COWL
All children when they lie abed at night see pictures in the dark.
The room is peopled with grotesque and uncomely beings. It is an


604
MEMORIES OF LITTLE BREECHES
unfathomable mystery why they should be so, but these figures of
the night are mostly terrifying. I have never, to my knowledge,
spoken with a person who can remember to have seen in childhood
beautiful or faery beings swarming in his bedroom. It is inexpli-
cable. The angels which—we are told—watch over little children
in their trundle-beds are rarely visible: in their place one sees apes
and bears, hobgoblins and devils.
I was no exception. As I lay abed, unable to sleep, I saw dancing
ghosts—which were only white window-curtains bellying in the
wind, and couchant beasts—which were only arm-chairs, and God
alone knows what other strange and unnatural figures, not yet or
ever to be found in natural histories. I have forgotten them now
and have of them but vague visual images. But all the terrible
beasts of the Western world, I am sure, and beasts that were not of
the world, came filing into my bedroom when every one else was
asleep-filing in as solemnly and methodically as the beasts of
creation marched into Noah's Ark. It was very trying for a child
of six
years. But horrible visions at night are common to children.
In one way only my nocturnal reveries were original. I was
haunted by a figure in a black cowl.
I am still at a loss to account for it. Two reasons I can find,
neither complete or sufficient. One was the huge book of Biblical
illustrations by Gustave Doré, which my grandmother kept always
on the table in the living-room. The other was the series of ghost-
stories which my father told to us in the evenings.
The pictures of Gustave Doré I admired hugely. I would spend
hours turning the pages of that book of my grandmother's, study-
ing the sombre scenes again and again. The volume was black with
golden, elaborate lettering upon the cover.
It fascinated me.
There was a gloom in it, a melancholy and stupendous gloom, like
the twilight of the gods. I loved the pictures from one end of the
book to the other—the expulsion of Adam and Eve, the death of
Jezebel, Hagar, the widow's mite. But the last in the series, the
Rider on the White Horse, the skeleton-death, impressed me most.
It was horrible and intoxicating. Yet as I recall them now, I can-
not remember that I found in any of them a figure in a black cowl.
Even the Rider on the White Horse, I believe, was not so dressed.
The ghost-stories that my father told to us continued for an en-
tire winter, when I was five years old, or six. He amused us with


MARVIN LEAR
605
>
them regularly every evening. I have often wondered how he suc-
ceeded in telling us new ones every night, for he never repeated
except by request. Mostly the stories he told us were selections
from the unwritten literature of the Anglo-Saxon race—tales which
he had heard when young and which have been current for genera-
tions, but which have not yet been set in print. Most people, I
have since learned, are familiar with them, though no one has found
them in books. They are ghastly and facetious romances of the
dead which have been passed by word of mouth from generation to
generation perhaps for a thousand years. He told us, too, a great
number of plantation ghost-stories—the inventions of superstitious
and imaginative negroes of the south, full of animals that spoke
and thought. We took a morbid delight in these tales. We could
never hear enough. But the result of them was the acquired hor-
rible and sickening fear of the supernatural, of the dead, and of the
dark. I believed in ghosts until I was nearly grown.
But the ghosts in all these stories were shrouded in white. In
none of them was there a figure in a black cowl. And yet this figure
in the black cowl haunted me more persistently than ghosts or
beasts. My dreams in sleep were turbulent with shrouded spectres,
weird and white. But asleep I never saw figures in black. Awake,
I rarely saw-except in the bellying of white curtains or in streaks
of moonlight along the wall—any white ghosts whatever. Awake,
I was haunted (so far as ghostly apparitions are concerned) solely
by a figure in a black cowl.
On dark nights when the blackness was such that I could not see
the fingers of my hand before my face, this figure would enter at
the farthest door. I could not see it, of course: I merely knew that
it was there. It would walk slowly toward me with terrifying,
deliberate steps. I could not move, nor utter a sound. I could only
.
lie in abject horror with sweat creeping out over my face, and wait.
And invariably the figure in the black cowl would advance slowly
across the room to me and stand for a moment by my bed, and
bend over me terribly as if it were near-sighted and were trying to
see my face. The cowl was not ten inches above me. I could have
touched it with my hand. Then after a time the figure would stand
a
erect and depart as it had come. It seemed as though it had
appeared purely to see if I were there and, having satisfied its
curiosity, had gone away content.
a


606
MEMORIES OF LITTLE BREECHES
It was only on nights of pitchy darkness, however, that the figure
bent over my face. On moonlight nights it stood awfully in the
shadows of the doorway or in the far corner of the room and did
not advance. It seemed always to be eyeing me, watching me,
guarding me, lest I escape from what, I do not know. Though I
could not see it, and never saw it-for it moved only in darkness-
I could describe it and knew it as if by sight: a tall, gaunt figure,
over six feet in height, lank as a skeleton, and draped in black with
a huge cowl over its head-a cowl so huge that I could not imagine
what face was under it, whether of life or death.
In the end, of course, I broke the spell and it tyrannized over me
no longer. One night at the moment when the figure bent over me,
I did the unbelievable. I reached up to touch it with my hand, and
it was not there.
In after days I puzzled often as to why this ghostly figure should
have haunted me for so long a time, for over seven years—or, for
that matter, why this particular apparition in a black cowl should
have haunted me at all. And once I asked my friend, whom I call
when I write of him, though never in speech, John o'Gaunt, what it
might signify. He pondered for a moment.
“A black cowl, eh?” he said. “It is very simple. You were born
to be hanged."
But that I cannot believe. For I am three-and-sixty years of
age,
and John o' Gaunt is dead, and his fellows, and I have not yet been
hanged.


THE BAROQUE
BY RAYMOND MORTIMER
Tokie
a
a
HE history of taste is entertaining enough; but it makes for
skepticism. After years of neglect the architecture of Ver-
sailles has again won general admiration. Men appreciate the expres-
sion which it gives to the characteristics of the grand siècle, the un-
troubled order which springs from a monarchy, and the good taste
which distinguishes an aristocracy; they admire its majesty, and
find even its pompousness agreeable. But they neglect the fact that
at the same time there was another court which rivalled Versailles
as a centre of civilization, fresh, like it, from a victorious struggle,
hierarchically organized, proud of its power, and full of its impor-
tance, another court which had developed an artistic style to reflect
its glory, the court of Rome. This style is known as the Baroque.
All travellers must frequently come across examples of it, for it
spread from Rome all over the Continent. It is a style that has not
yet known a revival. It remains in the disfavour into which in the
course of time it fell, and the judgements of critics discredited in all
else are still quoted against it. Later critics have never studied it;
so they speak of it, if at all, with contempt. There was the inevit-
able reaction of taste in the next age, when the classical revivalists
under the leadership of Milizia attacked it for its neglect of the rules
of Vitruvius and Palladio: Canova and simple elegance were all
the mode. Then came an onslaught on the other flank; the next
age reacted, again naturally against the classicists, the purist was
succeeded by the puritan, and the Gothic, hitherto regarded as an
elegant diversion for the dilettante, was raised by Pugin, Viollet-le-
Duc, and Ruskin, from a joke to a gospel. But the Baroque gained
nothing from this revolution of taste. Both parties agreed only in
its abuse; and so it continues. Baedeker takes up the wondrous
tale, and a million visitors to Rome are hurried in obedient scorn
past its most beautiful and characteristic buildings with a pedantic
quotation from Burckhardt or an irrelevant moralization from The
Seven Lamps. Hasten then to join them, unless it should happen
to strike you that most of the buildings, churches, palaces, and


608
THE BAROQUE
fountains, which give its familiar aspect to this city, this Rome
you so fervently admire, belong to the despised Baroque age and
style, and that it is they, more than the excavations of the Forum
or the skeleton of the Colosseum, which make up its strange fas-
cination. In face of this discovery, you may then ask how did this
art arise, who are its masters, what its means, and what does it seek
to express.
The milieu first: in the latter part of the sixteenth century
Europe, and especially Italy, was still trembling from the earth-
quake which we call the Renascence and the tidal wave which we
call the Reformation. Many time-worn institutions had succumbed,
and the Church was in the greatest danger. How was it to be
saved? It was necessary to fight on two fronts, to stem both Pagan-
ism and Protestantism. It was enabled to carry out this Counter-
Renascence and Counter-Reformation by the Spanish supremacy in
Italy. The Papacy was no longer a small Italian state, the rival
of Florence and Milan and Venice, nor was it embarrassed by the
quarrels of Hapsburgs and Valois. Spain at length had given an
invaluable if ignoble peace to Italy and to the Papacy the material
strength which it so much needed. The interior life of the Church
was rebuilt by a series of reforming Popes, first Paul IV (Caraffa),
then Pius IV, the uncle and instrument of St Charles Borromeo (a
new sort of nepotism, this!), and Pius V, a personal ascetic. The
decrees of the Council of Trent were their weapons, and the new
Order founded by Ignatius Layola their army.
Of the Jesuits it is enough here to say that it was chiefly by means
of their educational work that they exerted their strength in the
Counter-Reformation movement. It is incorrect to call Baroque the
Jesuit art. They had little more than any other Order to do with
its development and success; but it is true that the architecture of
the Seicento originated in the numerous churches built during the
last part of the sixteenth century. Many were Jesuit, and the first
was the Gesù in Rome (the headquarters of the Order), built by
Vignola in 1568. The style employed is of a severity that suggests
Jansenism rather than Jesuitry: it is distinct from the Baroque. At
the outset it should be made clear that Baroque is a name often ap-
plied without distinction to three separate styles, (a) this Jesuit or
Counter-Reformation style, (b) the Baroque proper, and (c) its
descendant the Rococo.


RAYMOND MORTIMER
609
These Counter-Reformation Churches were built essentially for
the practical purposes of religion, spacious, unencumbered, suitable
for preaching, with sober interiors and solemn façades, bare of orna-
ment. The church of the Escorial is an admirable example of this
style, modified, or rather, in its austerity exaggerated, by a Spanish
architect working for Philip II. The present interior decoration of
most of the Roman churches of this age is misleading; it almost al-
ways belongs to a later period, that of the Baroque proper.
The victory of Lepanto in 1571, comparatively unimportant as
it actually was, was greeted as the symbol of present recovery and
omen of ultimate success, and during the five years of his pontificate
(1585-1590) Sixtus V and his architect Fontana prefigured the ap-
proaching great age of building by the churches, fountains, and
obelisks with which they adorned the city. Twenty years later the
time of danger was over. The Reformation had been stemmed,
and has never spread since. After alarming vacillations France
had shown herself heartily Catholic, the discovery of America and
of the sea route to the East was bringing under the spiritual power
of Rome lands large enough to compensate for her losses in North-
ern Europe, and the unswerving religion of Spain had consolidated
the position of the Papacy in Italy; so that when Camillo Borghese
became Pope in 1605 under the title of Paul V, the restraint that
marked the Counter-Reformation art of the last forty years was no
longer appropriate. Rome was ready for a new art which should
proclaim to the world that she had triumphantly re-established her
charters Tu es Petrus and Ubi Petrus, ibi Ecclesia.
Paul V and Urban VIII, the Barberini Pope, made the city of
Rome what it still is, what the Kingdom of Italy has not suc-
ceeded in preventing it from being. In their reign and under
their immediate patronage sprang up palaces, villas, fountains,
and above all a whole floraison of churches, all in a new style.
Rome had once more entered upon great days, and now for the
first time for centuries she, and not Florence or Venice, became the
artistic centre of Europe. In spite of the polished secular civili-
zation to which the life of Christina of Sweden at Rome at this
time bears witness, the triumph of the Italian seventeenth century
is its religious art, above all its religious architecture.
The original meaning of the word “baroque” is obscure, but
in any case probably pejorative. It is often thought to be syno-


610
THE BAROQUE
1
nymous with tasteless. This bad name was given to Seicento
art because in its striving after expression, it refused to be pedantic.
Classical antiquity was no longer the object of a blind worship,
and the prerogative of infallibility had passed from the laws of
Vitruvius to the decrees of Trent. There was more room in the-
ology than in aesthetics, it was thought, for hard and fast rules.
Marino, a contemporary poet, said "The only rule worth think-
ing of is to know how, and when, and where, to break all rules.”
The originator of this audacious spirit, and indirectly of the
Baroque, was Michael Angelo. Della Porta (1541-1606) and
Fontana (1543-1607), the architects of the Counter-Reforma-
tion, carried on the tradition, and Maderna (1556-1629) con-
tinuing the movement became the first great architect of the
Seicento, that is of the period of the Baroque proper. But Bernini
was its genius, Bernini whose long life from 1598 to 1680 de-
mands separate study. Bernini who like Michael Angelo was
architect and sculptor and painter, and who as architect and
sculptor rivalled him, Bernini who by the boldness, fertility,
and triumphant success of his genius has left a greater and more
impressive mark on Rome than any other man.
In the first enthusiasm of their discovery of the splendour of
antique art, men aimed only at emulating its beauties by copy-
ing its methods. Bramante and Palladio were at once too good
artists and too much men of their age for their art to be merely
imitative, but the weakness of this Renascence art is that in its
inspiration it is only a revival. The new art, the art of Bernini
and Borromini has meaning - it is Christian, it aspires. In its
pursuit of expression it uses classical motifs to procure Gothic
effects, order is piled upon order to give a vertical movement,
domes are elongated and spires joined to cupolas. Its aim is above
all to move, to affect, to startle.
“E del poeta il fin la meraviglia”: to the terribiltà of Michael
Angelo must be added the ecstasy of Santa Teresa. In face of this
desire nothing is illogical, or rather only what is illogical can suc-
ceed, and it was often to their genius for the sudden use of the
irrational and the unexpected that the architects of the time owed
their most magnificent achievements. Their art, like their faith,
had the semblance of absurdity, and the substance of truth.
Take as an instance of their methods, the decoration of their


RAYMOND MORTIMER
611
churches: it was directed by the central and inspiring idea of
Catholicism, the idea that earth and heaven, the visible and the
invisible are inextricably confounded, and that the Church Mili-
tant is inseparable from the Church Triumphant. The Sanctuary
is the Porta Coeli, the Holy Place where Christ is corporeally
present, the Palace of the Host. Everything in these Seicento
churches expresses rapture, on every side are saints sculptured in
attitudes of ecstasy, the walls are lined with tombs that loudly
proclaim “Death, thou shall die,” there are pictures everywhere
of miracles and visions, and in marble and stucco, at every corner,
flying and hovering and settling are the imagined hosts of Heaven,
and the air resounds:
“With Saintly shout and solemn Jubily
Where the bright Seraphim in burning row
Their loud up-lifted Angel trumpets blow,
And the Cherubick host in thousand quires
Touch their immortal Harps of golden wires
With those just Spirits that wear victorious Palms.”
Mediaeval church-decoration was educative: mosaics and frescoes
replaced books. But now the Religious Orders, and especially the
Jesuits, used other means for their educational work; and just as
they used the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius to bring mystical
experience to every one, they aimed in their churches at sweeping
men off their feet, and on to their knees.
To achieve this the artists of the Seicento needed all their skill.
There were no means which they disdained to procure their effect,
and their technical knowledge was as great as their inventiveness.
They used their science of perspective, and abused it, they re-
sorted to every variety of trompe-l'æil, and committed a thou-
sand extravagances which were only justified by their success.
They gloried in magnificence of material, according to the tradi-
tion of their country; they covered the altars of their churches
with lapis lazuli and malachite, hung their walls and carpeted
their floors with precious marbles—"hung” and “carpeted” almost
literally, for the use of marble to imitate drapery and even pat-
terned stuffs is characteristic of the time. A passion for poly-
chrome possessed the architects of the Baroque proper, as con-


612
THE BAROQUE
trasted with those of the Counter-Reform and Rococo periods,
who despised colour, or feared it. In their pursuit of motion and
élan they used the curve as it had never been used before. Not
content with building churches circular, oval, or in the form of a
Greek Cross with truncated arms, they made the façades concave,
or convex, or even undulating, and invented in detail an endless
diversity of twisted columns, spiral scrolls, and broken pediments.
Striving still after variety and picturesqueness, they applied chi-
aroscuro to architecture, influenced perhaps by Caravaggio and
the other Neapolitan tenebrosi. A most important innovation of
the Baroque was to set the columns of the façade out from the
walls. Maderna in his church S. Susanna (1605) was the first
to attempt this, and the effective use of light and shade to which
it led is apparent in SS. Vincenzo e Anastasio, the little church
opposite the Trevi Fountain, where the picturesque façade is en-
livened by rows of columns. These Roman façades are so excel-
lent in design and were so well executed in the beautiful traver-
tine, that criticism of them for bearing no relation to the interiors
would seem pedantic, even if it were not based on a confusion of
thought.
Painting is an integral part of Baroque architecture and the
influence of each upon the other was very strong. The beginnings
of the new spirit which was to revolutionize Italian architecture
are first noticeable in Venetian paintings. The Assumption which
Titian painted for the Frari is already Baroque in feeling, and
the work of that "mighty rushing wind” Tintoretto, though he
died in 1594, already displays that mixture of poetry and realism,
of tenderness and violence, of emotion and decorativeness which
characterizes Baroque art. The interesting but neglected Italian
seventeenth century painters, chiefly of the Bolognese and Nea-
politan schools, did a great part of their work for the churches
of the period. The painters, however, whose work is most archi-
tectural and most Baroque were Pietro da Cortona (1596-1669),
Baciccio (1639-1709), and Fratel Pozzo (1642-1709) whose
work can best be seen in the respective ceilings of the Chiesa Nuova,
the Gesù, and S. Ignazio. Pietro was the greatest artist, but the
others are especially interesting because in their eagerness to fuse
their own decoration with that of the architect, they make their
figures impetuously rush out of their frames and vaults, to hold


RAYMOND MORTIMER
613
colloquy with the stucco flights of angels around and below them.
It
may
be illegitimate: it is certainly exhilarating.
Tintoretto has been called a scene-painter, and Baroque art,
which inherited his qualities, also is attacked for being theatrical.
It has the faults of its qualities; being emotional, it often fell
into rant, being decorative, into vacuity. Bernini used hidden
windows at the side of his altar-pieces to cast as it were a lime-
light on to the figures. This is another of the methods which
may be called tricks, but which succeed in making their effect. The
first breath of Baroque decoration is perceptible not in a church,
but in a theatre, the theatre built at Vicenza by the purist Pal-
ladio. Before being applied to permanent buildings, experiments
in the elaboration of Seicento art were tried in catafalques and
machinas the temporary nature of which excused their theatrical
extravagance. To be theatrical is not necessarily to be bad: every
church is a theatre, and every altar a stage, for the drama which
Christianity has made the centre of its religion, the Mass.
The result of all this unorthodoxy and carelessness of tradi-
tion was an art so exotic that the conviction grows upon one that
oriental and especially Chinese influences have played their part,
introduced no doubt by Jesuit missionaries. It is an art of pro-
digious vitality, as well as of bewildering variety and freshness.
One is never allowed to forget that there is passion behind it. Also
---and this is the most important point—with all its dubious
methods and short cuts to effect, it consciously pursues, at least
in its best examples, the most important of artistic ideals, unity
--the subordination of everything to design or composition.
The influence of the Baroque continued throughout the eight-
teenth century. As late as 1730 work in the best Seicento man-
ner was being done in Rome by such artists as Galileo Galilei
(1691-1737), a pupil of Wren, and Salvi (1699-1751), who
were respectively responsible for two of the most magnificent ex-
amples of the style in Rome-the facade of St John Lateran and
the Trevi fountain. It is remarkable that the feminine talent of
Borromini, with his love of delicate mouldings and whitewash,
had a larger and more productive influence than the impetuous
genius of Bernini, and it was from the tradition of Borromini that
French architects in the time of Louis XV developed the Rococo,
a delicious style, but in its facility, frivolity, and unimpressive


614
THE BAROQUE
elegance quite different from the Baroque. The student can trace
the offspring of Baroque in a number of collateral branches. The
French architects adapted their version of it to German surround-
ings and produced the bizarre architecture of Salzburg and Prague.
In Spain and Spanish America after inspiring much that is happy
and individual, the style disintegrated into what is known as the
Churrigueresque. But since Baroque found its inspiration in the
triumphant Catholicism of Rome, the further it spread, the more
it lost its original spirit, until its remote connexions are only of
importance to its genealogist.
Baroque succumbed, as have so many styles, to an excessive
passion for adornment. Already in the seventeenth century ex•
amples had appeared in Venice of the degradation into which the
style must fall if its great principle of unity of design was ne-
glected. The grotesque got out of hand, and ornament bolted.
The classical purism of the end of the century was, like most re-
actions, as necessary as it was excessive.
Whether it means anything, and whether it properly expresses
that meaning are two questions by which all art can be tested. The
best works of the Baroque style can stand the test. But whether
you are deeply affected by the art of the Seicento depends upon
whether you can approach the religious feeling of the age with
sympathy or, at any rate, with understanding. For magnificent
as are its many-windowed palaces, and beautiful its gardens with
their sponge-stone grottoes and elaborate fountains, it was espe-
cially a religious age, an age that sought expression in the build-
ing of innumerable churches. No one will claim for Baroque,
as Ruskin claimed for Gothic, that it is eminently adapted to
every sort of modern English building. Yet its language is not
obsolete. It expressed admirably the spirit of the age which
gave it birth, and to-day it still proclaims that Rome is the
centre and fountain of civilization, that there is a cosmopolitan-
ism that is not arid, and an Internationale that is not dissoluble;
and this is an idea which is valuable independently of your
belief
in it, for ail art is dependent upon a symbol and a mythology.


DUST FOR SPARROWS
BY REMY DE GOURMONT
Translated by Ezra Pound
79
Modesty is the essential characteristic of mankind. The history
of religions proves it, for man adores everything, positively every-
thing before adoring himself.
80
The progress realized by the physical sciences permits us to con-
ceive mechanical contrivances far superior to Vaucasson's famous
duck; mechanisms endowed with the rudimentary sensibility which
is found in the lower organisms, lacking a brain, but provided with
will and a memory.
To what point will this unlimited scientific progress attain?
Will it discover the automaton of greater and still greater sensibil-
ity, and get more intelligent? And if so, what rôle will this ma-
chine play in politics?
81
If love did not contain the secret of life, it would be but the
most egoist of the passions, or an agreeable pastime in perhaps
debatable taste.
82
There are insects whose life is more logically proportioned than
ours; one act for eating, one for sleep, one for l'amour. For the
first act they have a sort of repugnance; for the second they fold
up, seem oldish, become dry as one's boot soles, but for the third
they put on their finest raiment, and having suppressed the horrors
of digestion, they can hardly be persuaded to suck the honey from
flowers to keep from dying of thirst.


616
DUST FOR SPARROWS
83
Women who call in all the sciences to correct the troubles of
their exterior life, rarely attempt to appease within themselves the
tragedies of nutrition.
84
Ignorance is the name generally given to non-knowledge of the
names of things. Anent which: A patient arrives. The doctor
examines him and prescribes. The patient starts to leave discon-
tented, turns at the door with, “But, Doctor, what is the trouble
with my ear?” The Doctor reflects a moment and then pro-
nounces the generic technical term for all ear troubles: "Otitis.”
The patient goes out calm and satisfied. "Ah, it is an 'otitis’!”
85
The great majority of people who travel by electric tram-way
are totally ignorant of the mechanism, yet one must not on this
account call them ignorant. There is no middle in such a case
between the ignorant and the savant, one either understands or
does not understand the technique. As for the phenomenon in
itself, it is a mystery in one case as in the other.
86
There are quite honourable people who go in terror of judges;
as others in terror of bandits.
87
A confessor with whom I enjoy conversation upon dubious topics,
told me that the aversion from soap, displayed by the pious, is
justified; and that he had observed that the tendency to sin had
increased in proportion to the popularization of bathtubs and such
like utensils.
88
As scoundrels are everywhere more numerous than honest people,
it is but natural that the "decrees of justice” are more often legal
swindles than acts enforcing the right.


REMY DE GOURMONT
617
89
Nothing seems to me more touching or more ludicrous than a
poor devil mourning for a millionaire's death. It is a bullock
weeping for the death of Gargantua.
90
Young and pretty women detest old women who try not to ap-
pear old, not because they fear traitorous competition, but because
no one likes to see himself grotesquely caricatured.
90-a
Humanity is composed not only of two sexes. It is formed of
three, which do not love one another: the child, the adult, and
the aged.
91
There are men who dye their hair not from coquetry, but for the
same reason they have their boots polished: that is, the bureau-
cratic sense of the fitness of things.
92
one.
It is completely false to say that cosmetics and dyeing fool no
The first gives an illusion of beauty, prolongs youth, and
seduces by revealing, be they feigned or real, the secret anxieties
of a temperament. As for dyes, they at least lead toward an error.
When we see a woman whose age we do not know, if she is care-
fully dyed we give her, in any case, fewer years than are hers. .
93
If abnegation is the basis of friendship, it is not exaggerated
to say that friendship constitutes the basis of all great human
affections.
94
Kindness redeems the greatest defects, almost as the purity of
its lines and the immaculate whiteness of its material preserve a
statue against time's ravages.


618
DUST FOR SPARROWS
95
The man whom I have heard discourse most abundantly about
women and love was one of my servants, and neither I nor any one
else was able to learn that he had ever had more than one love
affair, and that with a German woman who made eyes for mechan-
ical dolls.
a
96
Everything is miraculous except the things labelled miracles.
Most miraculous the transmission of thought through air; if the
invention had been cleverly and secretly worked the pretenses of
supernatural agency would have taken in fools; on the other hand
the real miracle once known and stripped of novelty, becomes only
habitual fact, and lacks all miraculous prestige.
97
The governing classes have exploited every hoax for the domina-
tion of the masses. This has not prevented these very classes from
falling into their own trap with the course of years; and the shadow
of centuries, joined to the initial mystery has apotheosized all the
charlatans and mountebanks.
98
Neither science nor metaphysic has carried us a hair's breadth
beyond the boundary of the knowable. This absolute ignorance
of the beyond, this impenetrability of the shadow which on all sides
circumscribes us is the last hope which sustains man's boundless
anxiety. If no one knows anything, why not take this anxiety into
account (that is, as a factor in the problem)?
99
Behind almost every egoistic high living old bachelor there hides
a weeping sentimentalist.
100
There are people who by force of mediocrity, by absence of tem-
perament, lack of natural taste for anything whatsoever, give the
impression of austerity. They have the air of following auto-
inatically and without any effort the strict line of a discipline.


THREE CONRAD NOVELS
BY JOSEPH CONRAD
AN OUTCAST OF THE ISLANDS
A
N Outcast of the Islands is my second novel in the absolute
sense of the word; second in conception, second in execution,
second as it were in its essence. There was no hesitation, half-
formed plan, vague idea, or the vaguest reverie of anything else be-
tween it and Almayer's Folly. The only doubt I suffered from, af-
ter the publication of Almayer's Folly, was whether I should write
another line for print. Those days, now grown so dim, had their
poignant moments. Neither in
Neither in my mind nor in my heart had I then
given up the sea. In truth I was clinging to it desperately, all the
more desperately because, against my will, I could not help feeling
that there was something changed in my relation to it. Almayer's
Folly had been finished and done with. The mood itself was gone.
But it had left the memory of an experience that, both in thought
and emotion, was unconnected with the sea, and I suppose that part
of
my moral being which is rooted in consistency was badly shaken.
I was a victim of contrary stresses which produced a state of im-
mobility. I gave myself up to indolence. Since it was impossible
for me to face both ways I had elected to face nothing. The dis-
covery of new values in life is a very chaotic experience; there is
a tremendous amount of jostling and confusion and a momentary
feeling of darkness. I let my spirit float supine over that chaos.
A phrase of Edward Garnett's is, as a matter of fact, responsible
for this book. The first of the friends I made for myself by my pen,
it was but natural that he should be the recipient, at that time, of
my confidences. One evening when we had dined together and he
had listened to the account of my perplexities (I fear he must have
been growing a little tired of them) he pointed out that there was
no need to determine my future absolutely. Then he added: “You
have the style, you have the temperament; why not write another ?”
I believe that as far as one man may wish to influence another man's
life Edward Garnett had a great desire that I should go on writing.


620
THREE CONRAD NOVELS
At that time, and I may say, ever afterwards, he was always very
patient and gentle with me. What strikes me most however in the
phrase quoted above which was offered to me in a tone of detach-
ment is not its gentleness but its effective wisdom. Had he said,
“Why not go on writing,” it is very probable he would have scared
me away from pen and ink for ever; but there was nothing either
to frighten one or arouse one's antagonism in the mere suggestion
to "write another.” And thus a dead point in the revolution of my
affairs was insidiously got over. The word "another” did it. At
about eleven o'clock of a nice London night, Edward and I walked
along interminable streets talking of many things, and I remember
that on getting home I sat down and wrote about half a page of
An Outcast of the Islands before I slept. This was committing my-
self definitely, I won't say to another life, but to another book.
There is apparently something in my character which will not allow
me to abandon for good any piece of work I have begun. I have
laid aside many beginnings. I have laid them aside with sorrow,
with disgust, with rage, with melancholy, and even with self-con-
tempt; but even at the worst I had an uneasy consciousness that I
would have to go back to them.
An Outcast of the Islands belongs to those novels of mine that
were never laid aside; and though it brought me the qualification
of "exotic writer” I don't think the charge was at all justified. For
the life of me I don't see that there is the slightest exotic spirit in
the conception or style of that novel. It is certainly the most
tropical of my eastern tales. The mere scenery got a great hold on
me as I went on, perhaps because (I may just as well confess that)
the story itself was never very near my heart. It engaged my
imagination much more than my affection. As to my feeling for
Willems it was but the regard one cannot help having for one's own
creation. Obviously I could not be indifferent to a man on whose
head I had brought so much evil simply by imagining him such as
he appears in the novel—and that, too, on a very slight foundation.
The man who suggested Willems to me was not particularly in-
teresting in himself. My interest was aroused by his dependent
position, his strange, dubious status of a mistrusted, disliked, worn-
out European living on the reluctant toleration of that Settlement
hidden in the heart of the forest-land, up that sombre stream which
our ship was the only white men's ship to visit. With his hollow,


JOSEPH CONRAD
621
clean-shaved cheeks, a heavy grey moustache, and eyes
without
any
expression whatever, clad always in a spotless sleeping suit much
befrogged in front, which left his lean neck wholly uncovered, and
with his bare feet in a pair of straw slippers, he wandered silently
amongst the houses in daylight, almost as dumb as an animal and
apparently much more homeless. I don't know what he did with
himself at night. He must have had a place, a hut, a palm-leaf
shed, some sort of hovel where he kept his razor and his change of
sleeping suits. An air of futile mystery hung over him, something
not exactly dark but obviously ugly. The only definite statement
I could extract from anybody was that it was he who had brought
the Arabs into the river.” That must have happened many years
before. But how did he bring them into the river? He could
hardly have done it in his arms like a lot of kittens. I knew that
Almayer founded the chronology of all his misfortunes on the date
of that fateful advent; and yet the very first time we dined with
Almayer there was Willems sitting at table with us in the manner of
the skeleton at the feast, obviously shunned by everybody, never
addressed by any one, and for all rcognition of his existence getting
now and then from Almayer a venomous glance which I observed
with great surprise. In the course of the whole evening he ven-
tured one single remark which I didn't catch bcause his articulation
was imperfect, as of a man who had forgotten how to speak. I was
the only person who seemed aware of the sound. Willems sub-
sided. Presently he retired, pointedly unnoticed-into the forest
maybe? Its immensity was there, within three hundred yards of
the verandah, ready to swallow up anything. Almayer conversing
with my captain did not stop talking while he glared angrily at the
retreating back. Didn't that fellow bring the Arabs into the river!
Nevertheless Willems turned up next morning on Almayer's
verandah. From the bridge of the steamer I could see plainly these
two, breakfasting together, tête-à-tête and, I suppose, in dead
silence, one with his air of being no longer interested in this world
and the other raising his eyes now and then with intense dislike.
It was clear that in those days Willems lived on Almayer's char-
ity. Yet on returning two months later to Sambir I heard that he
had gone on an expedition up the river in charge of a steam-launch
belonging to the Arabs, to make some discovery or other. On ac-
count of the strange reluctance that every one manifested to talk


622
THREE CONRAD NOVELS
a
about Willems it was impossible for me to get the rights of that
transaction. Moreover, I was a newcomer, the youngest of the com-
pany, and, I suspect, not judged quite fit as yet for a full confidence.
I was not much concerned about that exclusion. The faint sug-
gestion of plots and mysteries pertaining to all matters touching
Almayer's affairs amused me vastly. Almayer was obviously very
much affected. I believe he missed Willems immensely. He wore
an air of sinister preoccupation and talked confidentially with my
captain. I could catch only snatches of mumbled sentences. Then
one morning as I came along the deck to take my place at the break-
fast table Almayer checked himself in his low-toned discourse. My
captain's face was perfectly impenetrable. There was a moment
of profound silence and then as if unable to contain himself
Almayer burst out in a loud vicious tone:
“One thing's certain; if he finds anything worth having up there
they will poison him like a dog."
Disconnected though it was, that phrase, as food for thought,
was distinctly worth hearing. We left the river three days after-
.
wards and I never returned to Sambir; but whatever happened to
the protagonist of my Willems nobody can deny that I have re-
corded for him a less squalid fate.
a


JOSEPH CONRAD
623
LORD JIM
When this novel first appeared in book form a notion got about
that I had been bolted away with. Some reviewers maintained
that the work starting as a short story had got beyond the writer's
control. One or two discovered internal evidence of the fact,
which seemed to amuse them. They pointed out the limitations of
the narrative form. They argued that no man could have been ex-
pected to talk all that time, and other men to listen so long. It was
not, they said, very credible.
After thinking it over for something like sixteen years I am not
so sure about that. Men have been known, both in the tropics and
in the temperate zone, to sit up half the night "swapping yarns.'
This, however, is but one yarn, yet with interruptions affording
some measure of relief; and in regard to the listeners' endurance,
the postulate must be accepted that the story was interesting. It is
the necessary preliminary assumption. If I hadn't believed that it
was interesting I could never have begun to write it. As to the mere
physical possibility we all know that some speeches in Parliament
have taken nearer six than three hours in delivery; whereas all that
part of the book which is Marlow's narrative can be read through
aloud, I should say, in less than three hours. Besides-though I
have kept strictly all such insignificant details out of the tale—we
may presume that there must have been refreshments on that nig
a glass of mineral water of some sort to help the narrator on.
But, seriously, the truth of the matter is, that my first thought
was of a short story, concerned only with the pilgrim ship episode;
nothing more. And that was a legitimate conception. After writ-
ing a few pages, however, I became for some reason discontented
and I laid them aside for a time. I didn't take them out of the
drawer till the late Mr William Blackwood suggested I should give
something again to his magazine.
It was only then that I perceived that the pilgrim ship episode
was a good starting-point for a free and wandering tale; that it was
an event, too, which could conceivably colour the whole "sentiment
of existence” in a simple and sensitive character. But all these
preliminary moods and stirrings of spirit were rather obscure at the
a


624
THREE CONRAD NOVELS
time, and they do not appear clearer to me now after the lapse of
so many years.
The few pages I had laid aside were not without their weight in
I
the choice of subject. But the whole was re-written deliberately.
When I sat down to it I knew it would be a long book, though I
didn't foresee that it would spread itself over thirteen numbers of
“Maga.”
I have been asked at times whether this was not the book of mine
I liked best. I am a great foe to favouritism in public life, in priv-
ate life, and even in the delicate relationship of an author to his
works. As a matter of principle I will have no favourites; but I
don't go so far as to feel grieved and annoyed by the preference
some people give to my Lord Jim. I won't even say that I "fail
to understand. .. No! But once I had occasion to be puz-
zled and surprised.
A friend of mine returning from Italy had talked with a lady
who did not like the book. I regretted that, of course, but what
surprised me was the ground of her dislike. “You know,” she said,
“it is all so morbid.”
The pronouncement gave me food for an hour's anxious thought.
Finally I arrived at the conclusion that, making due allowances for
the subject itself being rather foreign to women's normal sensibili-
ties, the lady could not have been an Italian. I wonder whether
I
she was European at all? In any case, no Latin temperament would
have perceived anything morbid in the acute consciousness of lost
honour. Such a consciousness may be wrong, or it may be right, or
it may be condemned as artificial; and, perhaps, my Jim is not a
type of wide commonness. But I can safely assure my readers that
he is not the product of coldly perverted thinking. He's not a
figure of Northern Mists either. One sunny morning in the com-
monplace surroundings of an Eastern roadstead, I saw his form
pass by-appealing-significant-under a cloud-perfectly silent.
Which is as it should be. It was for me, with all the sympathy of
which I was capable, to seek fit words for his meaning. He was
"one of us."


JOSEPH CONRAD
625
NOSTROMO
Nostromo is the most anxiously meditated of the longer novels
which belong to the period following upon the publication of the
Tpyhoon volume of short stories.
I don't mean to say that I became then conscious of any impend-
ing change in my mentality and in my attitude towards the tasks
of my writing life. And perhaps there was never any change, ex-
cept in that mysterious, extraneous thing which has nothing to do
with the theories of art; a subtle change in the nature of the inspira-
tion; a phenomenon for which I cannot in any way be held re-
sponsible. What however did cause me some concern was that after
finishing the last story of the Typhoon volume it seemed somehow
that there was nothing more in the world to write about.
This so strangely negative but disturbing mood lasted some little
time; and then, as with many of my longer stories, the first hint for
Nostromo came to me in the shape of a vagrant anecdote completely
destitute of valuable details.
As a matter of fact in 1875 or ', when very young, in the West
Indies or rather in the Gulf of Mexico, for my contacts with land
were short, few, and fleeting, I heard the story of some man who was
supposed to have stolen single-handed a whole lighter-full of silver,
somewhere on the Tierra Firme seaboard during the troubles of a
revolution.
On the face of it this was something of a feat. But I heard no
details, and having no particular interest in crime qua crime I was
not likely to keep that one in my mind. And I forgot it till twenty-
six or seven years afterwards I came upon the very thing in a shabby
volume picked up outside a second-hand book-shop. It was the life
story of an American seaman written by himself with the assistance
of a journalist. In the course of his wanderings that American
sailor worked for some months on board a schooner, the master and
owner of which was the thief of whom I had heard in my very
young days. I have no doubt of that because there could hardly
have been two exploits of that peculiar kind in the same part of
the world and both connected with a South American revolution.
The fellow had actually managed to steal a lighter with silver,
a


626
THREE CONRAD NOVELS
and this, it seems, only because he was implicitly trusted by his em-
ployers, who must have been singularly poor judges of character.
In the sailor's story he is represented as an unmitigated rascal, a
small cheat, stupidly ferocious, morose, of mean appearance, and
altogether unworthy of the greatness this opportunity had thrust
upon him. What was interesting was that he would boast of it
openly.
He used to say: “People think I make a lot of money in this
schooner of mine. But that is nothing.
But that is nothing. I don't care for that.
Now and then I go away quietly and lift a bar of silver. I must get
rich slowly-you understand.”
There was also another curious point about the man.
Once in
the course of some quarrel the sailor threatened him: “What's to
prevent me reporting ashore what you have told me about that
silver ?"
The cynical ruffian was not alarmed in the least. He actually
laughed. “You fool, if you dare talk like that on shore about me
you will get a knife stuck in your back. Every man, woman, and
child in that port is my friend. And who's to prove the lighter
wasn't sunk? I didn't show you where the silver is hidden. Did
I? So you know nothing. And suppose I lied? Eh?”
''
Ultimately the sailor, disgusted with the sordid meanness of that
impenitent thief, deserted from the schooner. The whole episode
takes about three pages of his autobiography. Nothing to speak
of; but as I looked them over the curious confirmation of the few
casual words heard in my early youth, evoked the memories of that
distant time when everything was so fresh, so surprising, so venture-
some, so interesting; bits of strange coasts under the stars, shadows
of hills in the sunshine, men's passions in the dusk, gossip half-for-
gotten, faces grown dim. ... Perhaps, perhaps, there still was
in the world something to write about. Yet I did not see anything
at first in the mere story. A rascal steals a large parcel of a valu-
able commodity—so people say. It's either true or untrue; and in
any case it has no value in itself. To invent a circumstantial ac-
count of the robbery did not appeal to me, because my talents not
running that way I did not think that the game was worth the
I
candle. It was only when it dawned upon me that the purloiner of
the treasure need not necessarily be a confirmed rogue, that he could
be even a man of character, an actor and possibly a victim in the
a
a
a


JOSEPH CONRAD
627
changing scenes of a revolution, it was only then that I had the first
vision of a twilight country which was to become the province of
Sulaco, with its high shadowy Sierra and its misty Campo for mute
witnesses of events flowing from the passions of men short-sighted
in good and evil.
Such are in very truth the obscure origins of Nostromomthe
book. From that moment, I suppose, it had to be. Yet even then
I hesitated, as if warned by the instinct of self-preservation from
venturing on a distant and toilsome journey into a land full of in-
trigues and revolutions. But it had to be done.
It took the best part of the years 1903-4 to do; with many inter-
vals of renewed hesitation, lest I should lose myself in the ever-
enlarging vistas opening before me as I progressed deeper in my
knowledge of the country. Often, also, when I had thought myself
to a standstill over the tangled-up affairs of the Republic, I would,
figuratively speaking, pack my bag, rush away from Sulaco for a
change of air and write a few pages of the Mirror of the Sea. But
generally, as I've said before, my sojourn on the Continent of Latin
America, famed for its hospitality, lasted for about two years. On
my return I found (speaking somewhat in the style of Captain Gul-
liver) my family all well, my wife heartily glad to learn that the
fuss was all over, and our small boy considerably grown during my
absence.
My principal authority for the history of Costaguana is, of course,
my venerated friend, the late Don José Avellanos, Minister to the
Courts of England and Spain, in his impartial and eloquent History
of Fifty Years of Misrule. That work was never published—the
reader will discover why—and I am in fact the only person in the
world possessed of its contents. I have mastered them in not a few
hours of earnest meditation, and I hope that my accuracy will be
trusted. In justice to myself, and to allay the fears of prospective
readers, I beg to point out that the few historical allusions are never
dragged in for the sake of parading my unique erudition, but that
each of them is closely related to actuality; either throwing a light
on the nature of current events or affecting directly the fortunes of
the people of whom I speak.
As to their own histories I have tried to set them down, Aristo-
cracy and People, men and women, Latin and Anglo-Saxon, bandit
and politician, with as cool a hand as it was possible in the heat and


628
THREE CONRAD NOVELS
>
clash of my own conflicting emotions. And after all this is also the
story of their conflicts. It is for the reader to say how far they are
deserving of interest in their actions and in the secret purposes of
their hearts revealed in the bitter necessities of the time. I confess
that, for me, that time is the time of firm friendships and unforgot-
ten hospitalities. And in my gratitude I must mention here Mrs
Gould, “the first lady of Sulaco," whom we may safely leave to the
secret devotion of Dr Monygham, and Charles Gould, the Idealist-
creator of Material Interests whom we must leave to his Mine-
from which there is no escape in this world.
About Nostromo, the second of the two racially and socially
contrasted men, both captured by the silver of the San Tomé Mine,
I feel bound to say something more.
I did not hesitate to make that central figure an Italian. First
of all the thing is perfectly credible: Italians were swarming into
the Occidental Province at the time, as anybody who will read
further can see; and secondly, there was no one who could stand
so well by the side of Giorgio Viola the Garibaldino, the Idealist of
the old, humanitarian revolutions. For myself I needed there a
man of the People as free as possible from his class-conventions,
and all settled modes of thinking. This is not a side snarl at con-
ventions. My reasons were not moral but artistic. Had he been
an Anglo-Saxon he would have tried to get into local politics. But
Nostromo does not aspire to be a leader in a personal game.
He
does not want to raise himself above the mass. He is content to
feel himself a power-within the People.
But mainly Nostromo is what he is because I received the inspira-
tion for him in my early days from a Mediterranean sailor. Those
who have read certain pages of mine will see at once what I mean
when I say that Dominic the padrone of the Tremolino might under
given circumstances have been a Nostromo. At any rate Dominic
would have understood the younger man perfectly—if scornfully.
He and I were engaged together in a rather absurd adventure, but
the absurdity does not matter. It is a real satisfaction to think
that in my very young days there must, after all, have been some-
thing in me worthy to command that man's half-bitter fidelity, his
half-ironic devotion. Many of Nostromo's speeches I have heard
first in Dominic's voice. His hand on the tiller and his fearless eyes
roaming the horizon from within the monkish hood shadowing his
a


JOSEPH CONRAD
629
face, he would utter the usual exordium of his remorseless wisdom:
“Vous autres gentilshommes!” in a caustic tone that hangs on my
ear yet. Like Nostromo! “You hombres finos!” Very much like
Nostromo. But Dominic the Corsican nursed a certain pride of
ancestry from which my Nostromo is free; for Nostromo's lineage
had to be more ancient still. He is a man with the weight of count-
less generations behind him and no parentage to boast of. ... Like
the People.
In his firm grip on the earth he inherits, in his improvidence and
generosity, in his lavishness with his gifts, in his manly vanity, in
the obscure sense of his greatness and in his faithful devotion with
something despairing as well as desperate in its impulses, he is a
Man of the People, their very own unenvious force, disdaining to
lead but ruling from within. Years afterwards, grown older as
the famous Captain Fidanza, with a stake in the country, going
about his many affairs followed by respectful glances in the modern-
ized streets of Sulaco, calling on the widow of the cargador, attend-
ing the Lodge, listening in unmoved silence to anarchist speeches at
the meeting, the enigmatical patron of the new revolutionary agita-
tion, the trusted, the wealthy comrade Fidanza with the knowledge
of his moral ruin locked up in his breast, he remains essentially a
man of the People. In his mingled love and scorn of life and in
the bewildered conviction of having been betrayed, of dying be-
trayed he hardly knows by what or by whom, he is still of the Peo-
ple, their undoubted Great Man—with a private history of his own.
One more figure of those stirring times I would like to mention:
and that is Antonia Avellanos—the “beautiful Antonia.” Whether
she is a possible variation of Latin-American girlhood I wouldn't
dare to affirm. But, for me, she is. Always a little in the back-
ground by the side of her father (my venerated friend) I hope she
has
yet
relief enough to make intelligible what I am going to say.
Of all the people who had seen with me the birth of the Occidental
Republic, she is the only one who has kept in my memory the aspect
of continued life. Antonia the Aristocrat and Nostromo the Man
of the People are the artisans of the New Era, the true creators of
the New State; he by his legendary and daring feat, she, like a
woman, simply by the force of what she is: the only being capable
of inspiring a sincere passion in the heart of a trifler.
If anything could induce me to revisit Sulaco (I should hate to
a


630
THREE CONRAD NOVELS
a
see all these changes) it would be Antonia. And the true reason
for that-why not be frank about it?—the true reason is that I have
modelled her on my first love. How we, a band of tallish school-
boys, the chums of her two brothers, how we used to look up to that
girl just out of the schoolroom herself, as the standard-bearer of a
faith to which we all were born but which she alone knew how to
hold aloft with an unflinching hope! She had perhaps more glow
and less serenity in her soul than Antonia, but she was an uncom-
promising Puritan of patriotism with no taint of the slightest world-
liness in her thoughts. I was not the only one in love with her; but
it was I who had to hear oftenest her scathing criticism of my levi-
ties—very much like poor Decoud—or stand the brunt of her aus-
tere, unanswerable invective. She did not quite understand—but
never mind. That afternoon when I came in, a shrinking yet de-
fiant sinner, to say the final good-bye I received a hand-squeeze that
made my heart leap and saw a tear that took my breath away. She
was softened at the last as though she had suddenly perceived (we
were such children still!) that I was really going away for good, go-
ing very far away-even as far Sulaco, lying unknown, hidden from
our eyes in the darkness of the Placid Gulf.
That's why I long sometimes for another glimpse of the "beauti-
I
ful Antonia" (or can it be the Other?) moving in the dimness of
the great cathedral, saying a short prayer at the tomb of the first
and last Cardinal-Archbishop of Sulaco, standing absorbed in filial
devotion before the monument of Don José Avellanos, and, with a
lingering, tender, faithful glance at the medallion-memorial to
Martin Decoud, going out serenely into the sunshine of the Plaza
with her upright carriage and her white head; a relic of the past
disregarded by men awaiting impatiently the Dawns of other New
Eras, the coming of more Revolutions.
But this is the idlest of dreams; for I did understand perfectly
well at the time that the moment the breath left the body of the
Magnificent Capataz, the Man of the People, freed at last from the
toils of love and wealth, there was nothing more for me to do in
Sulaco.






}
IL
VILLAGE OF ST MARIE.
BY VINCENT VAN GOGH


MODERN FORMS
This department of The Dial is devoted to exposition
and consideration of the less traditional types of art.
VAN GOGH IN AMERICA
BY HENRY MCBRIDE
IN
N this year of our Lord, 1920, New Yorkers are being invited
into the Montross Galleries to view the works of the great
“modernist,” Vincent van Gogh, who died in 1890. The oppor-
tunity is not so perfect a one as might be imagined, for during the
thirty years' nap in which our museum directors and collectors have
been indulging, amateurs upon the other side of the water have not
been asleep. The pictures by van Gogh that most directly inspired
his fame are in private galleries in Europe and it does not now
appear likely that the Metropolitan Museum will ever own as
representative a group of his paintings as it does, say, of Manet.
This is the age of "speed” most students of the times admit, but it
does not appear, for all that, that we in America are in any immi-
nent danger of catching up with art. The Lady with the Parrot
and the Boy with the Sword by Manet which are now two of the
chief glories of the Metropolitan were, metaphorically speaking,
smuggled up the back stairway into the museum by the late Alden
Weir, whilst impressionism was still young. The museum itself
was also young in those days and there were not so many defenders
of the entrances as at present and they were not so vigilant. To
get past the guards now with a bit of genuine "modern” art re-
quires more than agility—it calls for intrigue. To have bolted
the doors so long against van Gogh, to have kept aloof from him
during all the years in which he was, so to speak, upon trial, does
not appear to throw a pretty light upon our museums; it does,
indeed, seem to indicate that their practices are not what the public
has a right to expect; but is not after all so lurid a scandal as
t'would be were van Gogh an American. The actual van Gogh


632
VAN GOGH IN AMERICA
tragedy is a matter for French consciences to ponder over-it is
for us to think up some way of wriggling out of the infernal official
provincialism that keeps our public thirty years away from live
issues. I for one feel a sense of shame in trying to get heated over
ashes that are thirty years cold—but as an American art student I
am seldom permitted nearer the actual combustion than that.
Van Gogh as an issue is dead since his cause is won.
Mr Montross, however, puts us under obligation. It is some-
thing to have van Gogh even thirty years after, and the peculiar
character of the collection gives it an especial interest for those
who have already acknowledged the power of this artist. It comes
from the artist's family and includes everything of his they still
possess—studies from models, landscape drawings in ink, early
academic paintings whilst still tied to the formal teachings of the
schools, watercolours, and finally the landscapes and portraits of
the whirling brushes in full revolt against the fashions of the now
far-away period. There is a self-portrait, not the equal of that
a
wonderful one in the fur cap, and smoking a pipe, but fine for all
that, as Vincent, like Cézanne, for some reason, was always pecu-
liarly great in doing himself.
The early works, as often happens in early works of great men,
give few indications of the style he was to develop later, although
when examined closely, the character, with its odd combination of
the feverish, the fantastic, and the homely is already there. Later
on van Gogh was to develop a peculiar series of paintings of con-
fessedly ugly themes, such as concrete railway bridges, asphaltum
roadways, and the like, which, through sheer intensity of purpose, ,
were rendered beautiful. One of these, of the dreary corridors of
that hospital at Arles that occupies so large a place in the artist's
history, is included in the present exhibition, and is an amazing
instance of van Gogh's technical skill. Its colour is strangely
vivid, powerful, and unanalysable. There are also two flat, decor-
ative portraits, the Zouave and the Postman, done in the robust
manner of the famous Berceuse that Mr De Zayas brought here
some years ago and possibly took back again to France. All lovers
of van Gogh have a especial affection for these portraits, there is
so evident in them the ardent desire of the artist to speak directly
to minds like those of his sitters, and in terms of painting com-
prehensible to them. Van Gogh's friend Gauguin yielded to the


HENRY MCBRIDE
633
like ambition at times, and nothing pleased him more than praise
and comprehension from some of his Tahitian friends.
So, if we have not with us the very greatest van Goghs, the ones
that would bowl over, willy-oilly, the opponents to the cause, we
have at least a collection that will afford comfort to sinners that
have already repented, and the fact that there are examples in it of
all the styles and periods, will give plenty of data for the pleasant
disputes that go on among the knowing. The studios, in fact, will
take note of the exhibition, and it is to be hoped, after the show,
will read the artist up. There is a strain in all the published ut-
terances of van Gogh that is uplifting. It is the sort of jargon
that “invites the soul” as Emerson used to say. Whistler had it,
Gauguin had it, Degas had it. Virtue, of course, cannot be taught
-but I do maintain it is as contagious as vice-and the talk of a
van Gogh or a Degas makes one feel, what one is sometimes inclined
to doubt in this country--that art is worth while.
The galleries are opening, the American art season begins, and
we have three exhibitions of French art, that of van Gogh, of
Boutet de Monvel in the Kingore Galleries, and official art of the
vrai Salon at the French Institute. (I refuse to think of van Gogh
as Dutch, just as I refuse to consider Sir Benjamin West an Amer-
ican.) There are, you see, no signs that we are getting loose from
the apron strings of Paris.
Boutet de Monvel's show, like van Gogh's, is retrospective, but
he has the advantage over the latter in one thing, he is able to put
his best foot, Jeanne d'Arc's foot, to be exact, forward. But if
the cause of Vincent seems vieux jeu at present, how vieux does
not Boutet's seem? And the vrai Salon des Artistes! Heavens,
what incentive for backward glancings is there! It carries one
even beyond the era of Marie Bashkirtseff and her Bastien-Lepage.
Both the de Monvel and the Salon exhibitions are semi-official
in character, the work of committees who seem to have been fussed
by the avalanche of what they consider the wrong kind of French
art that comes here. Under the circumstances, of course, every
one will have to be polite. People may even buy. To assist in
this possible contingency, M Reitlinger, the official agent of the
Salon in Paris, has come in person to attend the exhibition, so the
extreme seriousness of the committees may be judged.


THE WAVE
BY BAKER BROWNELL
A sling of taloned green
Wind frayed, a crest
Upward, a frantic white,
Up from the sea
Trips on the threshold beach,
Thunder and spray,
A sprawl of spattered light,
Battering of foam.
A wave, Walt Whitman, gone aground
In emerald confusions, sprays
Of upturned lacy lingerie,
A silken rush over the sand,
Lost, ebbed, gone to sea again
Just water and no more a wave,
A self ebbed back to sea-
Is this the answer, Walt Whitman?
Are you, Walt, a wave,
An urgency, rolling through experiences
Like a storm
To ebb, traceless
To the imperturbable sea?
The wind droops and the sea
Is silence;
Being faints from the waves
In dreaming whispers,
Fading, sinking
Into the entrance of calm.
Each wave fades
Into imperturbable Being
Beneath.


)
-
A DRAWING.
BY EDWARD P. NAGLE


1
1
1



A DRAWING. BY EDWARD P. NAGLE


1
!
1



A DRAWING.
BY EDWARD P. NAGLE


1
要
​


THE ISLAND OF PARIS: A LETTER
November 1920
I
have called these briefest of notes The Island of Paris with sym-
bolic intent, for the literary life of Paris is insular. They know
even less of the outer world than do the elder generation of English,
though not less perhaps than the Georgians. Paris is possibly more
pan-continental than London without being the least bit more
mundane. There are still the international rubrics in the old
Mercure, but they have had no real information about anything
more recent than Gosse's Life of Swinburne; they hardly know
that Gosse has become a sort of symbol for the past (granting that
his corpse as regularly carried about in the London Mercury is prob-
ably more alive than the bodies and minds of the pall-bearers).
The dadaists travel and claim an international interest and inter-
communication, but they converse solely with dadaists, and seek
that small scattered tribe through the nations-a research perhaps
fairly reasonable, or for which it might not be over difficult to find
adequate justification, but which hardly commits them to great
catholicity.
In recompense for which they are, these Parisians, more serious
in experiment and more thorough than other people. If there is a
dearth of great authors there is, with equal certainty, a far greater
number of groups, unanime or polyanime, in a state of pleasing and
possibly pregnant fermentation.
Thus in a grenier on l'Isle St Louis, in a gathering of young men
for the most part allied to Lettres Parisiennes and to René Doyen's
revue Connaissance I heard André Wurmser read his Denise, with
perfectly modest doubts as to whether it had any literary value
whatsoever, but with an execution which demonstrated that he had
thought perhaps more about verbal orchestration or at least felt
more than any one else in Europe.
I found there was nothing historic in this, he had apparently not
heard of Arnaut Daniel, or the Provençal rhyme sequences. In
parenthesis I have heard all about and about it, and the ballades
of Fort, and the symboliste technique, and so on, and onomatopoeias,


636
THE ISLAND OF PARIS: A LETTER
I simply state that Wurmser had thought more about these things
than have the others; his Denise compares to Arnaut Daniel's work
as a Beethoven symphony to a Bach fugue; the modes are not
mutually exclusive.
Wurmser had considerable doubt as to whether any graphic rep-
resentation of his opus was possible, it departs from the modern
modes, it approaches the chantefable, he lifted and lowered his
voice, he sang, and the whole thing with its four distinct sections
or movements made an entirety, of extreme interest to any one who
had sufficient musical and verbal knowledge to follow it. One can-
not too clearly distinguish between the rhapsodic and lyric art and
the art of literature.
Great lyric periods, like that of Provence in the twelfth century
may be almost destitute of literary sense and of literary criteria;
this sense and these criteria might even have prevented the periods.
To save confusion and escape sloppy formulation one must recog-
nize that there are a half-dozen arts of poetry and that these may
-
exist separately, or almost separately, or in fusion. It is possible,
though perhaps a little Wagnerian, to imagine a poetry which
should be a synthesis of the lot.
The visual art in poetry reached its zenith with Li Po; onoma-
tapoeia and rhythmic art are perhaps at their best, or have at any
rate never been higher than in parts of Homer, Bion, and Sappho.
One still goes to the Greek for word melody.
As one goes to the Provençal, and to Arnaut in particular for a
of contrapunto of line-terminations, rhyme in its most devel-
oped arrangements.
Alliteration is best exemplified in the otherwise utterly free
Anglo-Saxon verse.
The literary sense perhaps existed in Ovid and Propertius, but
was absent, almost wholly absent, from the poetry which intervened
between them and the French prose writers of the last century,
though good poets like Cavalcanti and Villon have found in all
periods the mot juste.
It is undeniable that the graces of rhetoric have flourished abun-
dantly in other eras, and that ornamentation has undergone various
changes, sometimes with very felicitous consequence.
The art of fitting words to tunes is not to be confused with the
art of making words which will be “musical” without tunes. All


EZRA POUND
637
of which statements will greatly bore Mr Cummings, but it can't
be helped; English and other criticism is constantly vague and en-
tangled for the lack of a few such uninteresting dissociations.
Historically, the symbolistes occupied themselves greatly with the
tonality and musicality of their verse; this research continues in
the books of Robert de Souza, who has apparently no literary
merits whatever.
There is however one success in his last work Terpsichore (pub-
lished by Crès, 1920) in the poem Ombres d'Or, les petites Javana-
ises, d'après un souvenir de 1889.
Songes
.
or sur bronze,
'gong!
Métal en flamme et soies tropicales;
graves.
- Gong!
ombres d'ambres,
songes
.
elles apparaissent du fond des iles jaunes,
chaudes,
Songes
jeunes ondes,
gong !
et sur l'écran de notre jeunesse,
mues
— Gong!
hanches, jambes,
songes
comme par un lourd, rigide, bercement,
DANS UN RÊVE IMMOBILE, ..."


638 THE ISLAND OF PARIS: A LETTER
The entire Terpsichore is an attempt, by no means particularly
successful, to present the various qualities of the dance verbally.
The lines given have a certain suggestibility; I doubt if they
really give anything as satisfactory as the opening of Stuart Mer-
ril's sonnet, which begins
“En casque de cristal rose les balladines,
Dont les pas mesurés aux cordes des kinnors . ..."
There are no prohibitions, there are only questions of degree.
Mallarmé's Jeu de dés is permissible, one does not perhaps con-
sider it as a New Light or the basis for the only possible poetry of
to-morrow.
Every one has been annoyed by the difficulty of indicating the
exact tone and rhythm with which one's verse is to be read. One
questions the locus of degrees, sic: at what point is it more ex-
peditious to learn musical notation and to set one's words to, or
print them with the current musical notation, rather than printing
them hind-side-to and topsy-turvy on the page.
And musical notation? Has been of all man's inventions the
slowest to develop, and people have tried various devices from our
very unsatisfactory own, to the circular bars of the Arabs, divided,
like unjust mince-pies, from centre to circumference.
Yet Souza has in Terpsichore presented a method of printing
which might record a good deal of Wurmser's orchestration, and
there are possibly changes of voice, manners of speaking, and intona-
tion which are not expeditiously transcribable by the present con-
vention of "music”: minims, quavers, tonic sol fa, and the like.
All of which is a very nice play-ground for "technical kids,” but
it cannot be dismissed in its entirety as unworthy of the serious
author's attention.
I admit that many people did "dismiss” l'Abbé Rousselot; it is,
for example, impossible to imagine God's own Englishman with one
tube pushed up his nose, reciting verse down another, and God's
own Parisian, and God's own supporter of the traditional alexan-
drine made a good deal of fun of the phonoscope; until M l’Abbé
made such handy little discoveries for the locating of boche cannon,
and for the locating of submarines, and until his star pupil was so
amiable as to locate hostile air craft.


EZRA POUND
639
.
"voui . j'ai fait des découvertes qui n'ont pas été
utiles aux Allemands".
Precisely. The cannon is just a large beast that roars, and the
submarine is some one walking who cannot absolutely muffle the
sound of his footsteps.
And my friend Mlle S. saw some one perched on the top of the
bath-house in the Seine, under an umbrella, and it was M l'Abbé,
aetatis suae somewhere about seventy, in his slender black soutane,
white-headed, listening to a little machine he had down in the river.
And it was not the least useful to the Allemands. Since when
the scientific justification of vers libre, and the scientific proofs that
a lot of "rules” and “laws” of prosody as taught in the text-books,
have no sort of relation to spoken reality has been taken a little
more seriously.
And this little machine with its two fine horn-point recording
needles, and the scrolls for registering the “belles vibrations” offers
a very interesting field of research for professors of phonetics, and,
I think, considerable support, for those simple discriminations
which the better poets have made, without being able to support
them by much more than “feel” and “intuition.”
For example the “laws” of Greek quantitative prosody do not
correspond with an English reality. No one has succeeded in writ-
ing satisfactory English quantitative verse, according to these
"rules,” though, on the other hand, no English poet has seriously
tried to write quantitative verse without by this effort improving his
cadence.
Given the phonoscope one finds definitely a reason why one can-
not hear the in th in a phrase like in the wind, as a "long.” It isn't
long. Whatever the Greeks may have done, one does not hear the
beginning consonants of a word as musically part of the syllable of
the last vowel in the word preceding; neither does the phonoscope
so record them. All of which with many other finer distinctions
can now be examined with great saving of breath and paper, when-
ever the questions are considered of sufficient interest, either by
professors, or by neophytes in the arts of versification.
EZRA POUND


BOOK REVIEWS
THE FIRST WORLD WAR
THE FIRST WORLD WAR. By Colonel C. A'Court
Repington. 8vo. 1240 pages. Houghton Mifflin Com-
pany. Boston.
THER
THERE is no doubt this is the great book of the war and it is
written by a central and typical figure. Like a sort of inky
Moloch Colonel Repington sat making out the butchers' bills,
counting the corpses, calculating the possible corpses, and reduc-
,
ing it all to those inoffensive ciphers in which the official mind
loves to disguise its own waste and wantonness. But it is more
than a book about war. Colonel Repington was not only high in
strategy before the war but grew high in Society during the war.
If his account of the blundering generals, the callous espousement
of stupidity by statesmen, the febrile and hysterical disputes be-
tween the war leaders will about finish War as a fine art, his lapses
into Society and account of Society patois will certainly finish off
London Society! A Society can survive the exposure of its vice
or flaming orgies, as they add to the colour of history and to the
Pharisaic self-enjoyment of the Middle Classes. But no Society
can survive a diary in which its most pointless vulgarisms are
elaborated in the setting of two grandiose volumes. The moun-
tains travailed and were delivered of a trifling puke! Colonel
Repington moves between a blood-bath and a stale spittoon, and
is apparently prouder of dipping his pen in the latter than in the
former. The world was full of military experts, but there was
only one who could retire from his labours into the company of
Doris Keane, “Bee” Herbert, Mrs Leeds, “Alice," and other Society
Queens with whom Repington bandied chaff.
His constant reference to women by their Christian names re-
calls the French climber whom a sprig of the ancient noblesse
thus addressed: "The difference, Sir, between us is slight, but it
is noticeable that whereas I call Madame La Marquise so in pub-
1


SHANE LESLIE
641
lic and by her Christian name in private, you use her Christian
name in public but are constrained to call her Madame La Mar-
quise to her face.” The jests retailed by Repington of society are
such that they cannot even be jested about. They are not even bad
jests, which have a redeeming folly, but are simply vulgar, stale,
and unprofitable. Will it sooth or stir the world to know that a
bashful hotel-waiter asked by an arriving guest for Lady Lavery
whispered—“Downstairs and first to the Right!” Another astound-
ing mot is laid to the credit of Field-Marshal Robertson. After see-
ing Lady Stewart-Richardson dance with bare legs he uttered the im-
pressive anatomical remark that her leg was like any other damn
leg! From pretty byplay of this kind we turn to the red pulp of
unstrategical massacres which made up the First World War and
rather exhausted material for a second. The book does not con-
demn the gallant Colonel; for what he was, he is and ever more
shall be so, but it damns the society which received him or which
he believed received him. Likewise his account of the war arouses
only pity for the anonymous units, the heroic individuals, who
passed away believing that their leaders had the souls of Crusaders
and that the structure of society they died to uphold was intimately
related to civilization and Christ. But what are we to think of the
jealous squabbling leaders, as ignorant and squally as children.
Kitchener, for instance, at a Cabinet "opened a furious attack on
L. George ... upon which L. G. turned on him white with rage
and tore the figures to pieces. K. gathered up the
papers
dragged back by the coat tails.” And what is one to think of the
mentality of the Admirals of the Grand Fleet who "in turn went
to see the fortune teller," and came out with eyes agleam when "the
lady prophesied great careers for them all!” The good King George
is kept in the background, but Colonel Repington introduces him in
the feeble rôle of visiting a collection of indecent (“coarse but
virile”) German postcards, the sweet and hard-won trophies of the
iron guardianship of the seas! Between the most appalling battles
and torrents of blood the wonderful optimism and lightheartedness
of the strategists continued. For instance, “It is generally supposed
Bolo will be shot, in which case I shall win my bet—with the post-
mistress!” And there is comfort for the Allies in hearing that
“Mrs Keppel and I defeated the American Army at bridge.”
However, it is impossible to go through Armageddon note-book
was
.
.


642
THE FIRST WORLD WAR
was.
in hand and not record some straws of wit or interest, and by dilig-
ent sifting of the massive two volumes an epigram or an anecdote
will be found suitable to the taste of any.
Seton-Watson is de-
scribed as having the soul of a mid-wife in his anxiety to deliver
Europe of new nationalities, especially in the breedy Balkans. We
hear of Belloc and Chesterton as so absorbed by the brilliance or
dulled by the profundity of their own conversation that they did
not hear the bombs during an air raid. We hear of Balfour ac-
knowledging the loss of a thousand guns in the cheerful words
“What a bore.” It depends perhaps what the bore of the guns
This is our brilliant addition to several otherwise witless
pages. Very seasonable, however, it is to learn that seven Cabinet
Ministers warned futurity in their wills that Margot Asquith's
stories about them in her Diary would be found untrue! But for
a little chaff like this, was it worth the while of Destiny or Fate or
Fame (or whatever damnatory powers were concerned) to ply the
monstrous winnowing fan of four years' war? Would a subter-
restrial edition even add to the sarcastic bitterness of the dead?
But Colonel Repington marks an era in writing which even
Margot's Memoirs had not achieved. The flood gates are open
now, and no one knows what Diary may not be published next. If
a woman can make up the letters and sentiments of her inamorati,
dead and alive, into material for the Sunday Papers, and a serious
military writer can record the feeble vulgarity of people who enter-
tained him in exchange for his military impressions during the war,
we may expect that the last mask or mystery will be torn from Eng-
lish Society.
But we have not appraised the military and historical value of
portions of the book, which are at least out-spoken and probably
most true when most disconcerting to popular idols like Kitchener
and Lloyd George. Repington had decidedly the qualities of his
defects. There is nothing he will not blurt out like an honest fish-
wife, whether he has got hold of the wrong end of an after-dinner
story or the wrong Christian name of one of the innumerable social
puppets who dance into his bulky Index. But not having the pleas-
ure of Colonel Repington's acquaintance, may we out of impolite
curiosity ask who the devil is “Mr Sidney Leslie?” and likewise
who the hell is “Stephen Leslie?” They are unknown and un-
related to
Shane Leslie
a


“SPIRITS FROM THE VASTY DEEP”
WORDSWORTH. An Anthology. Selected and arranged
.
by T. J. Cobden-Sanderson. 8vo. 254 pages. Alfred
A. Knopf. New York.
ADVICE. By Maxwell Bodenheim. 16mo. 85 pages.
Alfred A. Knopf. New York.
NOW
COW that no inconsiderable portion of the critical faculty of
our time has been burned out-consumed, for the most part,
,
in very questionable disputes over the technicalities of form, and
so forth-one with a weakness for platitudes might reasonably be
expected to venture out—and with impunity, the deep things hav-
ing all been said-follow unnoticed on the heels of these multitudes
of curious and subtle judgements. Yet not to doubtful disputa-
tions as to whether or no there shall be rhyme, metre, punctuation,
and all the rest—whether it be better, in short, to “kiss a post or
throw it into the fire”; for these tedious pros and cons seem only
trivial and remote in the presence of the immediate matter of crea-
tion. One must, of course, go cautiously over the naked hillsides
of these days, lest, stirring a single stone, he bring down the
avalanche.
For that ultimate caprice of the personality called taste--
ephemeral and scant of breath-has never ceased, much to the con-
fusion of the age, to pretend to permanency, even immortality, and
all this in the face of the most obvious and frequent deaths. Thus
it is that Mr. Cobden-Sanderson's new anthology of Wordsworth
is supremely interesting: as the infallible evidence of dissolution.
To pass over, only casually, even, these apt and thoroughly justi-
fiable selections from that rather indiscriminate mass of literary
remains with which Wordsworth saddled his race, is to feel the
distance of a hundred years and sense a longing, almost, for those
idyllic days of English verse when more than one poet wrote blank
verse to landscapes and nevertheless preserved intact all the fresh
innocence of magnificent minorities. Though we have departed
these shrines, we seem not altogether content with our own.


644 “SPIRITS FROM THE VASTY DEEP"
Even considering our advanced youth we are beginning to use
exceptional intelligence in these affairs. If Wordsworth, the
Grand Cham of 1820, be so quietly dead, our own futures are as
plain as family albums. What becomes of the gospel of taste if
none of them who once adored The Solitary Reaper and Tintern
Abbey can now be found? Either death or deception is abroad,
for there stand the Ode and Laodamia in Cobden-Sanderson as they
once were written and admired. In puzzling over the problem
of what a century has done to Wordsworth, we may honourably
reflect on our own future. This is only discretion: we must be
dreadful lest we, too, one day be considered a preposterous im-
position. It must be certainly understood that we freely chose to
exchange the strenuous solemnity of Wordsworth for our own
potent irony, our unerring accuracy, our intellectually compli-
mentary reticence of suggestion, or the future, to which, of course,
we shall indubitably be abstruse or platitudinous, will write us all
down fools: metaphysical or realistic. For let it never be written
of ours as of the also forgotten poets of that other age: “Their
wish was only to say what they hoped had never been said before,”
as the legend of the resentment of some excellent old man. And
of vast importance, too, for to posterity are given privileges—and
the greatest of these is ridicule.
Mirth, then, being our supreme concern, were it not to consider
too curiously, we should arrive at a return to frankness, grandeur,
landscape, and what not-out of sheer reason and desperation.
For were irony and suggestion, those twin and great virtues, as
has been noticed, of contemporary poetry, to continue functioning,
how our descendants would be troubled with our platitudinous
personal resentments to the German War, our prognostications-
so fearfully and wonderfully made—as to the well-being of our
thoroughly comfortable and profitable social system. To them
Peele Castle may read better-then.
The current observation that Wordsworth created the taste with
which he was appreciated—and somewhat later installed among
the embalmed dignitaries of literature—becomes sanctified as a
truism only as one realizes with increasing clarity, that the taste
of any given age is apt, for the more part of men contained within
it, to be either an artificial imposition or a hypocritical assent. А
comparison of Mr Cobden-Sanderson's selection from the poems of


STEWART MITCHELL
645
Wordsworth with that of Matthew Arnold's, for instance, would
enlighten one, by means of a notation of additions and subtrac-
tions, as to the difference between the accidents of fancy of that
day and this. Indefatigably let us suppose the essential nature of
poetry, platonically, to remain immutable: for the heart of the
whirlwind, as it were, would be the residence of the absolute poem, ,
meaningless, quite naturally and utterly, to all but its creator.
From this point of view the poetry of Wordsworth is a frank, pos-
sibly an artistically indecent, compromise: in and of its very being
a conditional surrender of the intelligence to the nice necessities
of self-expression. Having passed into our bone and sinew, his
influence, even as we revolt against it, comprises one of our inevit-
able intellectual activities.
The poets of the nineteenth century, it was, who first pre-
sumed to put on dog, with the result that each one of them in his
turn, for the space of two or three years, was widely heralded, in
his own circle, as the head and fount of English verse. Somewhat
less naïve, refusing to write or worship others as our elders, we
have begun to realize that inasmuch as our appropriate charac-
teristic is self-consciousness, our distinct creation should be satire.
Thus, in his book of notes and sketches called Advice, Mr Boden-
heim plays with satire and sentiment in turn: scorning the things
men achieve the very while he visits pity on the men themselves.
His unfailing sentiment for things-street pavements, grass-blades,
pools, and steam-boats—leads him at moments whimsically to in-
dulge both word and thought with frantic gestures, even occasion-
ally with unworthy figures of speech. Such tricks, although they
often steal distinction from surprise, wear out the power of the
brain to respond and eventually develop a resentment toward the
kind of verse that leaves us jaded, verse to which we can return
only as we have thoroughly forgotten it. But it must be observed
that Mr Bodenheim has not made a habit of these literary capers;
as occasional lapses, his can be condoned. But reading:
“Then she surrenders her hand
To the welter of the garbage can”
makes one feel uneasy until one suddenly recalls, apparently with-
out reason, our great but unacknowledged patron saint: John Lyly.


646 "SPIRITS FROM THE VASTY DEEP”
And there are other verbal gymnastics, curious strainings after some
particular felicity, or infelicity, of phrase that recall the antique
charm of Alexander and Campaspe or Endymion. If these moun-
tains of effort do not always bring forth their mice, one can be only
disappointed that every poem is not so good as To a Man. When
Mr Bodenheim tells us:
“Apples race into appetites:
The unswerving mechanism of the table
Hurries through the last dish of supper.”
he reveals a tendency, not derivative but recurrent, to rearrange
words for their own sake and thus commit the seven deadly sins of
decadence. His adjectives are usually indisputably tall; his ad-
verbs cunning though effectual.
These poems are comments, for the most part, strung on the
thread of a grey-eyed bitterness; snatches of story and description
that would reveal the trivialities of life and its futility. Over
cities this poet would cast the shadow of his despair at factories,
boarding houses, slums, and Fifth Avenue. And yet despair would
seem to come only from a love for the wounded thing:
“Hopes that lie within their grave
Of submissive sternness,
Have spilled their troubled ghosts upon this mouth,
And a tortured belief
Has dwindled into tenderness upon it ..
If Mr Bodenheim has taken notes on life, it is in his moments
of deduction, of recourse to the abstract, his moments of imagining
the sentiments of things, so-called, that he acquired adequate
mastery of himself. Advice to a Forest, by all odds one of the
finest
poems
of the book, or :
“The sloping lines of your shoulders
Speak of Chinese pagodas.
They clash with your western face
Where child and courtesan
Clasp each other in a feigned embrace.


STEWART MITCHELL
647
Life, to you, is a liquid mirror.
You stand with delicate, perpetual amazement,
Vainly seeking your reflection.”
called Advice to a Woman, are of the mood and manner that cul-
minate in To a Man and To Orrick Johns, the latter a sonnet,
and incidentally rather than consequently, the best verse in a book
distinct and memorable. But passing judgement on poems is too
much like playing Polonius to the clouds: one is fated, sooner or
later, to put his foot in it, and more especially if he be rash with
praise and preference. Were there no other evidence, finally, one
could bring a case for Mr Bodenheim on the common charge of an
uncommon love for certain words.
The actual output of verse at the present time, in point of quan-
tity, leads one to interesting comparisons. Evidently poets, taking
cognizance of the keen competition now existing, have determined
to discriminate; their resolve is reflected in their volumes. When
one pauses over the one hundred and seventeen titles that Mr Cob-
den-Sanderson is endeavouring to save out of the sum-total of a
fecund eighty years, the vision of that eventual English Anthology
a thousand years hence-only stray poems from stray centuries-
troubles the mind. One had best be brief, earnest, and above all
things, poetic-according to his lights, lest he, too, go the way of
Waller. It is an humble opinion to hold that strenuous solemnity
survives: neither catalogues, resentments, epics, nor pictures—but
the West Wind, The Hound of Heaven, and Laus Veneris, with
one or two others. In so far as a poet forgets his dread of ridicule
and lays himself open to surprise and laughter, having dared to be
sonorous, he ought to survive, by sheer lung-power. Inasmuch as
the creative artist, from the very nature of things, is inevitably
funny to the world at large, forgetting that "all the complaints
that have ever been made of this world are unjust,” he will grin
and bear his destiny for immortality. For the poet's is the preten-
sion of Glendower—with Hotspur at his heels.
STEWART MITCHELL


LITTLE LIGHT AND LESS HEAT
ALTRUISM: Its Nature and Varieties. By George Herbert
Palmer. 12m0. 138 pages. Charles Scribner's Sons. New York.
N Emerson Hall at Harvard there recently was hung a painting
I
painting is of William James, George Herbert Palmer, and Josiah
Royce, three members of the department of philosophiy which a
dozen years ago had no rival in American universities. To-day
James lies in Cambridge cemetery, Royce in Mt Auburn, the re-
mains of Münsterberg await transportation to Danzig, and San-
tayana has left our shores for a more congenial environment. Only
Palmer remains to uphold the great tradition. This in itself would
lend more than ordinary interest to the recent publication of his
book, Altruism: Its Nature and Varieties, the substance of a series
of lectures delivered at Union Theological Seminary in New York.
Professor Palmer's book demands attention for another reason.
It is a study of the problem which, although for the most part dis-
regarded, underlies the profoundest agitations of the hour—the
problem of the nature and development of the self. For what are
the struggles between labour and capital, radicals and reactionaries,
suffragists and antis, peoples and races, but so many magnified forms
of the desire for self-realization? Of introspection we have had
enough and too much. Nothing more certainly makes for spiritual
ill-health than to be, like Emerson's philosopher, "lined with eyes
within.” The soul has need of privacy no less than the body. Of
objective studies of the self there is a corresponding lack, studies
useful for the creation of social conditions most conducive to the
natural, co-operative development of human potentialites.
Especally is there need for such studies since the doctrine of evolu-
tion has rendered obsolete the classic concepts still intimately as-
sociated with the subject of human psychology.
Not only is the problem disregarded, but thanks to centuries of
misinstruction we operate in every-day life with an erroneous and
most unfortunate conception of the self and consequently an equal-
ly erroneous and unfortunate conception of self-development. The


M. C. OTTO
649
most serious issue of this misconception is the identification of the
highest moral attitude with what we call self-sacrifice. Strictly
speaking, self-sacrifice is a fiction. What happens in a case of so-
called self-sacrifice is that a certain type of self makes way for
another type, or, that certain characteristics of a self give place to
others. That is to say, self-sacrifice is at the same time self-asser-
tion. One self must decrease in order that another may increase.
Obviously, then, the important consideration is not the movement
of surrender or the movement of realization as such, but the kind of
self that is being created. And this, which in reality should deter-
mine our evaluations of conduct and character, is precisely what we
consistently ignore because of our misty and untenable theory of
self-sacrifice.
Professor Palmer deals directly with this question. His book,
he says, "seeks to call attention to a section of ethics in regard to
which the public mind greatly needs clarifying. Altruism and
egoism, socialism and individualism, are in our time sentimentally
arrayed against one another as independent and antagonistic agen-
cies, each having its partisans.” But careful examination, he thinks,
will show that this is an error; that the one has meaning only when
in company with its supposed rival. There is no such isolated, ab-
stract self as men and women tacitly take for granted. Every self
is a "conjunct self” in which ego and alter participate jointly in
varying degrees. “If through my notion of a conjunct self,” he
justly concludes his introductory remarks, “I have made this curious
partnership plain I shall count it no mean contribution to our gener-
ous, sacrificial, self-assertive, and perplexed time.”
The error in question has the backing of orthodox moral philoso-
phy. The trouble with the various moral theories is, according to
the author,
"that each of them looks upon man in his original state as a
self-centered being, a distinct ego. By degrees this single
person discovers other persons about him and learns that he must
have relations with them. The relations may be altruistic or ego-
istic but they are subsequent and supplemental. In himself he is
separate and detached.” But “none of us come into the world in
separateness, nor have separately remained here. Relations have
encompassed us from birth. Through them we are what we are,


650
LITTLE LIGHT AND LESS HEAT
a
social beings, members of a whole. While it is true that the ties
of parentage loosen as the child matures, these drop away only be-
cause others now more formative, take him in charge. Before we
have a separate consciousness we know ourselves as members of a
family, of a state, of the community of human kind.”
This is headed in the direction of truth. To be sure something
remains to be cleared up, for Professor Palmer evidently still holds
to a self logically though not practically separable from its relations,
and so encourages the conception of the self as a distinct entity.
Moreover, he continues the use of some of the conventional meta-
phors generally found in discussion of the self, the chief function
of which is to perpetuate the confusion of ideas associated with the
subject. As a result the book is considerably less illuminating
than it might have been, and the author is led to the deplorable con-
clusion (which must be more fully noticed in a moment) that the
less definite the end aimed at the more commendable the desire.
After all, however, the book presents with ingenuity and force the
conception of selfhood which, no matter how we try, we cannot de-
tach from its surroundings—from things and animals and people.
The reader can scarcely fail to get from it a new sense of the com-
plexity of the self and the inevitable interrelationship of men, and
perhaps this is about all that may be hoped for as a first step.
The most informing part of the study for the general reader will
be its discussion of the stages of the conjunct self.
"While no one is a separate but always a social self, the degree
and kind of attention accorded to the latter marks the stage of
moral maturity at which man or nation has arrived. In certain un-
developed forms of social life the conjunctive elements are but
slightly emphasized, while the separate self bulks large. With the
advance of morality the opposite principle obtains. Wider and
more subtle relationships are seen to make our lives our own.”
The stages of the conjunct self are treated under the head-
ings, Manners, Gifts, and Mutuality, and it is shown that as we
pass from one to the other we enlarge the extent to which an in-
dividual incorporates in his interests the interests of others. When
a man comes into the presence of another, neither he nor the other


M. C. OTTO
651
acts precisely as when alone. There is to some extent an adjust-
ment of one personality to another. An acknowledgement of a cer-
tain community between them must be established before either can
be at ease.
If this is thought out it will be found to involve regard
for the other for his own sake. The form of self-surrender seen in
manners is further extended in the giving of gifts. Giving covers
a wide range of attitude all the way from the desire for mere self-
amusement, self-profit, or the satisfaction of pride, to disinterested
philanthropy or the practically complete absorption in the welfare
of the recipient of the gift, as for example in the case of parents who
merge their selfhood with the opportunities of their children.
While manners and giving recognize and honour man's relation
to man they are imperfect expressions of the conjunct self because
both may be egoistic in aim. This defect is overcome in what Pro-
fessor Palmer calls mutuality, “the recognition of another and my-
self as inseparable elements of one another, each being essential to
the welfare of each.” Mutuality is the partnership principle freed
from restriction to a particular set of interests or a limited period
of time as are business partnerships, athletic groups, and various
other associations of men. In these the associates may have noth-
ing in common aside from the purpose of the association. Mutual-
ity appears to better advantage in friendship with its merging of
personalities. But here, also, there is limitation of interests. “I
“I
take John for my friend on account of his wit, James for his
scholarship, Henry for discussions of art, Charles for theology.
Outside these matters we have little in common.” It is in love that
mutuality apears with a lucidity, power, and moving appeal shown
in none of the other partnerships. In love "the lives are identified
throughout their full depth and extent. They do not merely col-
laborate for a specific purpose.
Yet even love is an imperfect expression of mutuality. Love is
selective; it chooses one and leaves another. It cannot permeate
the whole of life, organizing society and the state.
“Selective love,
then, hampered by its need of acquaintance, nearness, and knowl-
edge, can never become a universal principle, binding mankind to-
gether. It shows, however, what we want.” The final expression
of the conjunct self will possess the altruistic fervour of love and
will be free from its limitations. This combination is found in the
impersonal extension of love, in the "noble public love” which the


652 LITTLE LIGHT AND LESS HEAT
author calls Justice. It is shown by the honest business man who
seeks his profit in a way also profitable to his customer; by the
workman whose chief reward is in work well done; by the physician
who is moved primarily by interest in the healing art. And so on.
Thus far Professor Palmer seems to be saying that the test of
moral personality is breadth of interests and fervour of devotion to
them. This, however, is only the case if "breadth of interests” be
taken in a special sense. It soon transpires (and looking back one
discovers hints of it from the beginning) that a man broadens his
interests as he becomes less and less concerned for specific interests.
That is why, according to the author, professional responsibility
after all may not be taken as the moral standard. The lawyer, the
doctor, the teacher, the butcher, the grocer, no matter how perfect
in his kind, yet aims to serve only a section of men, namely, those
conscious of special needs—the need of legal advice, of health, of
instruction, of beefsteak, of breakfast food. Consequently, a purer
form of mutuality is shown by those who overcome this final limita-
tion by aiming at the good of mankind in general, somewhat as Mr
Warner aimed at the bear he missed. (The comparison is not Pro-
fessor Palmer's). This is where the men and women who aim at
developing persons more fully as persons—artists and scientists,
for example, nose out. They do not purpose to serve any specific
set of interests; indeed, they do not know precisely what they shall
contribute to mankind. They are "ready to sacrifice themselves for
possible human betterment.” But not even they are victors in this
moral marathon. That glory is reserved for those whose goal is
more abstract still. For although artists and scientists intend that
their work shall benefit the public in the long run, they do in fact
follow specific interests of their own to attain this end. Which
brings us finally to this conclusion: that the highest stage of moral
personality is reached through sympathetic identification with the
fundamental social institutions of mankind, such as the family,
property, and democracy, “those fairly permanent relations between
persons which past experience has established for the promotion of
human welfare and successive generations have approved.” In the
service of social institutions "not only does the public receive a
benefit, it fixes also what our work toward bringing it about shall be.
Personal choice, therefore, altogether disappears. The action is
conjunct throughout.”


M. C. OTTO
653
It would seem to be a natural inference from this philosophy that
full moral stature is attained only through unquestioning surrender
to some established rule of life; in other words, that the truly moral
persons are nuns, monks, and those who blindly follow prevailing
customs. Consciously or unconsciously, however, the author fore-
stalls this deduction in the last few pages of the book-by taking
back the essence of what he has all along contended for. Social in-
stitutions must be scrutinized, he assures the reader. They are too
liable to decay if left uncriticized, and to maintain a social custom
when it no longer serves its purpose is to be unfaithful to it. How
this function is to be exercised by one who so identifies himself with
social institutions that personal choice altogether disappears; how
one is to practise that noble, superpersonal love which has reference
to no specific concrete end and at the same time engage in that con-
structive criticism which is constantly required if institutions are
to be kept sweet and wholesome,” the author leaves the reader to
discover.
A final word remains to be said about the book. In spite of all
his verbal contact with affairs the author stands aside from the
moral conflicts of the time. The extraordinary aggressions of ruth-
less personalities, the deep rumblings of mass discontent, the chal-
lenging voices of outstanding social leaders, these do not disturb his
philosophic calm. Once, it is true, he speaks with direct reference
to present conflicts, but only to show how thoroughly out of touch
with them he is. Speaking of the reforming of social habits, he
says:
"Presumptuous, indeed, is he who will attempt to stand outside
any of our fundamental institutions. The setting up of his in-
dividual will against the general will proves him no true socialist.
He shall remember that since everybody is wiser than anybody, his
first business is to conform to the institutions into which he is born,
then to study elaborately their meaning, and finally to persuade his
fellows to join in readjusting them with a view to their more
effective working.”
What does this mean? Who is this everybody that is wiser than
anybody? There are somebodies who are wiser than other bodies;
there are somebodies who think they are wiser than anybody; and


654 LITTLE LIGHT AND LESS HEAT
there may actually be somebody who is the wisest body of all; but
this everybody who is wiser than anybody—where or what is he?
What is he but the hypostatized status quo?
Similarly of the formula for changing social institutions. How,
as a matter of fact, is moral progress brought about except through
some individual who has the courage to step outside an accepted
institution and to lead men to a better insight? Professor Palmer
is thoroughly orthodox at this point. He agrees with other high-
minded folks who say: Moral progress ? Certainly; by all means.
But woe to him through whom it comes! Or, perhaps he means to
suggest (his language permits of such an interpretation and college
professors are prone so to believe) that the need and nature of social
changes should be left to the cogitations of moral experts. At all
events, there is little light and less heat in such doctrine. So
while the book deals with a subject of great social importance and
looks in the right direction, while it is done in splendid spirit and
by a man of many and various contacts, it was grown under glass
and not in the open spaces. One regrets to conclude that it is not
likely to be prized by those who need most to be enlightened.
M. C. OTTO


THE REAL HUYSMANS
En Route. By Joris-Karl Huysmans. Translated by
C. Kegan Paul. 12mo. 463 pages. E. P. Dutton and
Company. New York.
TO
O build again in fancy the personality of J.-K. Huysmans
is almost as difficult a task as to reconstruct the Gothic Paris
of Villon and Louis XI. It would be easier to revoke the milieu
of the Sun-King itself. Architecturally, at least, the French have
learned little that is new since the seventeenth century; the some-
what foolish architectural ideals advanced in that period have,
with certain modifications of time and fashion, remained all but
stationary, and after allowing for things like tram-cars and taxi-
cabs, a courtier of the Grand Monarch might well feel himself
perfectly at home on the Rue de Rivoli or the Boulevard de la
Madeleine. The childish obviousness, the pitiless regularity of
those broad smiling avenues, shaded by their bright theatric
greenery, terminating in the inevitable obelisk or arch, the urbs
beata of the late Baron Haussmann, the apotheosis of a glaring
bourgeois opulence, the architectural ideal of an adjutant or a
housemaid, all this exasperated the soul of Huysmans, a man of
another age, who said that, thanks to the Americans, Paris was
fast becoming “a sinister Chicago.” A phrase, one may add, that
is fair, neither to Chicago nor to Paris. But it was ever the tragedy
of this brilliant and unhappy artist, not that he was satisfied with
so little, but that he was never satisfied with anything. The most
active years of his literary life were spent in the eighties and
nineties, when the taxi and the metro still slumbered in the pla-
tonic limbo of unrealized ideas, and it is a melancholy fact that
he did not know when he was well off. It is pleasant, by way of
change, to turn back to that other post-bellum city, which he him-
self has evoked in marvelous pages, and to that fascinating period
of intellectual débâcle and moral exhaustion which produced, not-
withstanding, so memorable a literature.
Huysmans himself lived, at the time of his first success, in a
former convent, Number 11, rue de Sèvres, now a noisy monotonous


656
THE REAL HUYSMANS
street, full of the shriek and din of tramcars and trucks. He has
fully described the monastic edifice in his book De Tout, now out
of print, and it was there that he wrote his early volumes, includ-
ing the admirable Croquis Parisiens and A Vau l'Eau. Of all his
lodgings, it was this one that he loved the most, and he often re-
gretted it in the days after his conversion, when ill-health, and a
habit of running about half the Benedictine houses of France,
forced him to abandon it. In that still unregenerate time (1891),
he had already written La-Bas, which gained him an exasperating
notoriety with all sorts of spooky and uneducated people (New
Thought, they would be called handsomely in America), but he
still remained an unknown and poorly-paid clerk, lost in the
Dantesque glooms of the Ministry of the Interior. He had been
there since 1866. Miracles like that happen. The author of
A Rebours, a misanthrope, a perverse, highly sensitized hypochon-
driac, all nerves like a cat, lived for twenty-five long years in a soul-
destroying office, surrounded by a world of sorry functionaries, the
imbecility of whom no one who knows French bureaucracy from
the inside will be at all likely to doubt. And during that interval,
he was able to write incomparable books, of a narrow range, dom-
inated by a few ideas, but books which have become a permanent
portion of nineteenth century literature. He even wrote them in
his bureau. When he was ultimately decorated, not, one notes,
as a man of letters, who had enhanced with a special lustre the
glories of French prose, but as a "serious and punctual” public
servant, who was incidentally a man of letters, no one was more
dumbfounded than his colleagues in the office. They had not even
known that he wrote. And after the first shock, their astonishment
was grudging and short-lived. “Did he write for the journals à
grand tirage? No? Oh well, he was probably of no great account
after all.”
It was in his little cell on the Rue de Sèvres, or at a cabaret, La
Petite Chaise, 36, rue de Grenelle, that Huysmans revealed himself
to a few intimates as a witty, acid, and, on the whole, a very charm-
ing talker. He did not think very highly of much of the great
literature of the past, and he made no bones about saying so.
Though a man of extraordinary erudition in certain directions, he
was the antithesis of a pedant, at least in those days. The patron
saints of French classicism, Racine and Corneille, bored him to


CUTHBERT WRIGHT
657
tears, and he put in the same wearisome category, Dante, Schiller,
and Goethe.
“I have read them with attention, these solemn pontiffs,” he
said, “and I have never failed to ask myself in what their interest
consisted."
In the same connection, praising the verse of Tristan Corbière,
he said that "there was nothing faultless about it, in other words,
soporific.”
As for most of contemporary literature, he tried not to think of
it at all. According to him, his great master Zola, to whom he
remained always more or less loyal, through the wreck of conver-
sion and the abandonment of the good ship of naturalism, accord-
ing to Huysmans, Zola knew nothing whatever about art, which
appears to have been the truth.
“Turgenev,” cried Huysmans once with heartfelt emotion.
"What a tub of tepid water!"
The two writers whom he respected the most in his century were,
naturally, Baudelaire and Barbey d'Aurevilly, and the only thing
that displeased him in the case of the latter was his entourage.
“He had a whole gang at his coat-tails,” said Huysmans, "and it
was impossible to chat with him five minutes without seeing a
Bourget jump out of the chimney-cupboard.”
His preferences in painting had many of the same affinities and
rejections. Though he began as a collaborator in Les Soirées de
Médan, and never wholly abandoned the basic truths of natural-
ism, he turned more and more, both in literature and art, to the
mystical, the fevered, and the perverse. For him, it was the same
.
thing; a kind of spiritual naturalism, a malady of the soul. Thus
he had little taste for the large, the serene, and healthy in paint-
ing; the joyous and heady canvasses of the Renaissance, the
"golden colour-music" of the Venetians, for instance, left him
cold. He ridiculed Da Vinci with his pretended profundities;
Raphael bored him like Racine, as well he might; and he even
disliked Botticelli with his Venuses masquerading as Virgins.
Though he railed at modernity and detested “his vile century,
he turned for consolation to some of its more sickly and talented
children. He profoundly admired Odilon Redon, Gustave
Moreau, Raffiélli, Felicien Rops. Like his contemporary, Octave
Mirbeau, with whom, despite the latter's hatred of Catholicism,


658
THE REAL HUYSMANS
he had much in common, Huysmans was a brilliant, if not always
fair, critic of painting. He was always too much afraid of being
taken in, and his horror of insincerity and self-deception, his dis-
taste for the merely beautiful, to say nothing of his malady of
Carlyle, led him often into ungenerous excesses. His favorite
school was the German and Flemish Primitive, his favourite paint-
ing the marvelous and horrible Crucifixion of Grünewald in the
Cassel museum.
In 1884, appeared A Rebours, a ludicrous and ghastly book,
resembling in its structure nothing so much as the artificial heaven
of glass and ivory in which its hero withdraws from the inescap-
able horror of his life. A Rebours is the chart by which one may
study the extreme ravages of the aesthetic disease, the complete
breakdown of the great theory that charmed the men of the nine-
ties in two hemispheres. Nor is Huysmans a farceur fooling a
foolish public in this meticulously composed and terrible book. No
one was less equipped for that sort of game than he, no one was
more self-revelatory, more sincere; he was really Des Esseintes,
just as he was the lamentable Folantin in A Vau l'Eau, and was to
be, unmistakably, Durtal in the trilogy of conversion. A Rebours
represents the spiritual Land's End, the aesthetic hell to which ennui,
disgust, ill-health, exacerbated individualism, the egotism of the
aristocratic artist, as Mr Huneker would admiringly call it, had
conducted this honest and unhappy man. After A Rebours,
what? He was a celibate, in all probability despising the
demands of the senses and yet wedded to them. For women,
considered as anything but the objects of physical need, "the
eternal feminine of the eternal simpleton,” he had the contempt
of a coenobite. One has only to read the two masterly and shame-
ful chapters X and XIII of La-Bas for a capital illustration of
the pessimism and ignobility of Huysmans' attitude in these
things. “Mon Dieu, que c'est donc bête," sighs Durtal, as he
awaits Mme Chantelouve, and “My God, how stupid it is,” is
wholly descriptive of their creator's sentiment in regard to the
chief of human pleasures.
And if the blasphemies which he offered to love are shocking,
what can be said of these addressed to humanity, to life?
“Quelles trombes d' ordures soufflent à l'horizon!” murmurs Dur-
tal charitably of the approaching century on the last page of La-


CUTHBERT WRIGHT
659
Bas. “What is there to hope of the future?" replied Des Hermjes,
"Do you expect the kids issuing from the fetid bourgeois of this
soiled time to be clean themselves? I often ask myself what it
is they will do in life.” “They will be like their parents,” said
Durtal, “They will fill themselves with tripe and they will empty
the soul by the abdomen!"
Even his art, the spes unica of many similar men, had ceased
to interest him. He had given up naturalism, as it was com-
monly practised and understood, "an art that investigates only
below the navel,” he called it, and La-Bas proved to be anything
but a worthy example of the manifesto delivered in the first pages.
For humanity in general, he had nothing but loathing, especially
in its aspects of suffering and sin; he had practically no friends
who did not bore him; he was a man without love. There must
be something else, something that rises luminous and undying
above the everlasting welter and filthy din of “our vile time.”
He had always loved certain dim corners and moments of the past,
in “the dolorous and exquisite end of the Middle Ages," for
instance, he found something that infinitely pleased him; there he
was at home. And what was at once the radium and the beacon-
light of that feverish and delicious period? An individualist to
the end, passionately intent on his own salvation, this convict of
life, alone in the thick darkness, looked up in despair, and as if
in sudden starlight, he saw the face of Jesus Christ. “I have
wept and I have believed,” said Chateaubriand.
The result was En Route, in certain respects his best book, and
with it we enter on the ultimate stage of his pilgrimage, such as
The psychology of conversion, depicted so poignantly in
its beautiful pages, is interesting, but it would not interest every
“He speaks of sin, of salvation, of redemption, and con-
version, as if these things were realities,” said Renan of a similar
case. Huysmans was drawn to Catholicism primarily through its
art, “that art which has never been surpassed, and which is its
true proof.” It was his passion for beauty and his disgust for
existence, he says frankly, complicated by solitude and inactivity.
"What remains incomprehensible is the initial horror, the horror
imposed on each one of us of living; that is a mystery which no
amount of philosophy can enlighten. And when I think
of this horror, of this disgust for life, which year after year
it was.
onc.
.
.


660
THE REAL HUYSMANS
has mounted in me, I can understand why I have inevitably
drifted to the only port where I could find shelter; the Church.”
Nothing could be more precise-or more sad.
He began by haunting the churches on the left bank, at first
St Sulpice, whose vast Jansenist ugliness and appalling horde of
bourgeois devots did not repel him, as long as he could sit in the
shadows on a November evening, and listen to what was and still
is the only well-trained choir in Paris. “It seemed to him that at
St Sulpice, divine grace had mingled with the eloquent splendours
of the liturgy, and that supernatural appeals on his behalf had
passed into the marvelous sadness of the voices; thus he felt a
gratitude wholly filial to this church where he had passed so many
sweet and sorrowful moments."
Then, on the afternoons when he had dreamed before the can-
vasses of the Primitives in the Louvre, he took refuge in the
thirteenth century church of St Severin, whose charming belfry
with its little golden cock could be seen above the masses of old
roofs and blackened chimneys from the Place St André des Arts.
Huysmans has devoted some magnificant pages to this church, one
of the most exquisite in Paris. He speaks of “that melancholy
delicate apse, planted like a desolate garden with wintry trees,
rare and a little mad.
Even as St Agnes remained
immaculate in the brothels, this church has rested intact amid its
villainous surroundings, when all about it, at the Château Rouge,
at the Crémerie Alexandre not two steps away, the modern riff-
raff of pimps and blackguards prepare their misdeeds, swigging
with prostitutes innumerable absinthes and triple-sixes.” Only
the war prevented the archeologists from stripping St Severin of
its
rags
and decking it with trees in the prison of a square, a project
of long standing since Huysmans refers to it in his book. “It
was an oratory for the poor, a church on its knees, and it would
be the most absolute nonsense to remove it from its surroundings,
to disengage it from its eternal twilight, from the dim hours which
enhance its beauty of a handmaiden, kneeling at prayer behind the
infamous hedge of brothels."
Listening in such touching surroundings to the Missa Orbis
Factor or the Missa Alma Redemptoris, to that incomparable
anonymous music which he is correct in saying has never, in its
way, been surpassed, “he ended by being moved to the quick,
.


CUTHBERT WRIGHT
661
choked by nervous tears; all the concentrated bitterness of his life
mounted in him; full of vague fears and half-formed resolutions,
he cursed the ignominy of his days, and swore to overthrow the
charnel-house of his desires."
After En Route was published, Huysmans spent much of his
time wandering over Paris in the effort to find the perfectly
formed sanctuary or the perfect choir, much as another type of
gourmet devotes a lifetime to the quest of the impeccably cooked
chop. Finally his confessor told him that the Benedictine nuns
of the Rue Monsieur, near the Invalides, sang Plainchant in a
manner to satisfy the most simon-pure; he went there and hardly
ever left it afterward.
Naturally, Huysmans lost much of his art on the road to
Damascus. From the author of La Cathédrale to the author of
Carnival I have never known the inevitable complement to con-
version to fail, and if George Moore were not the worst dialecti-
cian in the world, he could have made out a strong case for his
contention that, since the Reformation, a Catholic has produced
not one good book.
A lifelong sufferer from dyspepsia and neuralgia, Huysmans
was attacked by the malady he has often described, and which
killed him a few months later. Mme Miriam Harry, the author
of La Petite Fille de Jérusalem, has published some of his last
letters to her in the Revue de Paris. One of them recalls the
touching prayer of the Puritan Cromwell, quoted in Carlyle's
Life :
"Il m'a rendu la vie pour travailler, mais un point, c'est tout.
Neuralgies du front et du cuir chevelu, rages de dents, çà n'arrête
guère. Et il faut s'estimer content-car l'important en effet, c'est
de voir clair.
“C'est égal, le cher Seigneur, il m'en a donné! Si, comme
j'espère, vous avez un peu d'influence sur lui, demandez-lui un
peu de répit pour son pauvre serviteur qui est tout de même, en
dépit de toute sa résignation, un peu las .!”
M Blandin has described the miscellaneous crowd that waited
under the porch of his last home, Number 31, rue St-Placide, and
followed his coffin to the church. ... "Never was there seen


662
THE REAL HUYSMANS
such a funeral. I can still see old Communards, with their pic-
turesque disorder, always a little conscious, side by side with the
soutanes of numerous priests and monks, and here and there the
scarlet ribbon of some high dignitary.”
I do not know what drew "the criminals of the Commune” to
the obsequies of this Christian hedonist and icy anti-socialist,
unless it was that he never spared their bourgeois masters in his
writings, especially when they were his own co-religionists.
Certainly he possessed no love for them, nor for the humanity in
the cause of which they suffered. And yet, there are certain pages
in an early book, Croquis Parisiens, which seem to disengage a
special perfume, a sense of pity that was later to be stimulated,
in a degree, by his recovered Christianity. His descriptions of
the infinite sadness of poor working quarters near the fortifications,
of the lost river Bièvre, long since extinct under warehouses and
factories, “The joyous and sorrowful tumult of grand poor
streets,” the dolorous charm of the banlieue, are among the most
moving and magical that he ever wrote. Perhaps there was more
hidden in this illustrious and wretched writer than the spiritual
aristocrat turned Catholic epicurcan.
He said many notable things, among them, that all the chatter
about schools in art was beside the point; either you had talent
or you had not. And again: “Contrairement à l'opinion reçue,
j'estime que toute vérité est bonne à dire." And I like to recall
his sentence in the preface to Marthe, his first book: "I write what
I see, what I feel, and what I have experienced, and I write it as
well as I can: that is all.” He has written extraordinary books in
a chiselled and jewelled prose, some of which will endure, princi-
pally, I think, because, within their limits, they leave nothing
unsaid. He was a man of great intellectual honesty, many virtues,
and one sin, perhaps the most unpardonable—his ingratitude to
life.
In the quarter which he loved, near the Church Notre Dame des
Champs, from which he was buried, they have cut through a new
street, doubtlass demolishing a garden and convent or two in
passing. The street is short, plain, ugly, lined on either side with
apartment-houses of Boche design and more than American
smartness; it is called the rue Huysmans.
CUTHBERT WRIGHT
1
1


BRIEFER MENTION
Mountain, by Clement Wood (12mo, 355 pages; Dutton), is a
,
heterogeneous mass of capital and labour, love and catastrophe.
The characters and characterizations are respectively sacrificed
to bullets and bedlam. Mr Wood's masterful portrayal of the
negro race, however, furnishes a background which puts his
high-lights to shame and leaves us the hope that he will visualize
the white race with equal clarity—and someday give us a novel.
CANAAN, by Graça Aranha, translated by Joaquin Mariano
Lorente (12mo, 321 pages; Four Seas, Boston). This is an
awful example of that terrible species—the metaphysical novel.
A youth nurtured in idealistic and anarchistic philosophy seeks
Utopia in Brazil, with the inevitable result. The author is a
diplomat of wide European culture. Brazil has produced a few
good indigenous novels, but of all books known to the writer
Canaan is the last one that should be chosen as being in any
sense typical. The dreary abstract discussions irritate one much
as do the sonnets of Mme de la Tour.
a
Caliban, by W. L. George (12mo, 420 pages; Harpers), is an-
other novel of the rise of a great English newspaper proprietor
who understands pep and calls it "zip.” It is superior in many
ways to Courlander's Mightier Than the Sword and has nothing
whatever to do with Gibbs' Street of Adventure. But it is a
falling off from Mr George's superb Blind Alley and proves that
calling Northcliffe Bulmer doesn't make Bulmer Northcliffe.
One After Another, by Stacy Aumonier (12mo, 273 pages;
Macmillan), though reminiscent of Butler and Bennett, is of
the very recent type, the vegetable school, that deals pleasantly
with mediocrity at its best. Here, for example, Tom Pur-
beck, distinctly, a "nice boy,” is permitted to give at length his
reactions in crossing a well-mapped section of novelist country,
There are novelties in the matter of setting and in the method of
advancing the story in a series of pictures.


664
BRIEFER MENTION
Blood of Things, by Alfred Kreymborg (12mo, 151 pages;
Nicholas L. Brown), has a title that belies it. It is neither
bloody nor is it "thingy.” At all events what one feels when
one has finished the book is the blood-beat of a perceiving mind
rather than anything more fleshly, and a search for the ding-an-
sich which is warmed by the mystic's ardour. It is not so much
a book as a whispering jar, and what one chiefly misses is the
keen accompaniment of the author's sensitive mandolute.
OCTOBER, and Other Poems, by Robert Bridges (12mo, 63 pages;
Knopf), exhibits the same scholarly architecture as Mr Bridges'
earlier poems with here and there a suggestion of very modern
influence. Distant bells on a snowy night are constellated
sounds that run sprinkling on earth’s floor, and the quatrain
called Ghosts is written in images exquisitely effective.
effective. Some
few of the poems are best described as laureate verse. Others,
distinct from the few, keep to a certain archaic diction and
mystic trend of thought. The collection is hardly representa-
tive of Mr Bridges' best work, but at its least, it is good verse.
Modern British Poetry, edited by Louis Untermeyer (12mo,
234 pages; Harcourt, Brace & Howe). This anthology exists
on a high plane—that of the moral and muscular "yea-sayer.”
With seventy-nine versifiers present (all active since 1885) it is
well no less democratic and more aesthetic criterion should have
been employed. The introduction and the paragraphs with
which the very various poets are ticketed suggest that the editor
had in mind class-room consumption.
THREE PLAYS OF THE ARGENTINE, translated by Jacob S. Fassett,
Jr., edited by Edward Hale Bierstadt (12mo, 148 pages; Duf-
field). The Witches' Mountain is the only one of the three
plays included that conforms to the canons of real drama.
Juan Moreira and Santos Vega, however, are legitimate dramas
criollos in the sense that they commemorate the epic passing of
the gaucho of the Pampas. They are naïve melodramas which
have grown up among a frontier people, their genesis being
comparable to that of the acting versions of Uncle Tom's Cabin
so dear to childhood memory.


BRIEFER MENTION
665
Books IN GENERAL, Second Series, by J. C. Squire (12mo, 273
pages; Knopf) is a continuation of that fireside-and-slipper
gossip about literature at large which originally appeared under
the pseudonym Solomon Eagle. The fifty-six essays comprising
this second volume roam from a discourse on the mystical prose
of Thomas Traherne to a discussion of the oratorical vers libre
of Lloyd George. Mr Squire's style is distinctly conversational.
The fluent grace of such table-talk, however, neatly disposes of
the adage that all men talk in prose.
INTERPRETERS, by Carl Van Vechten (12mo, 201 pages; Knopf),
is a réchauffé of the author's study of contemporary interpre-
tative artists which appeared as part of an earlier work. It
makes an appetizing meal if your critical hunger lies along the
line of warmed up operatic facts. If it lies along other lines-
The Complex Vision, by John Cowper Powys (12mo, 370 pages;
Dodd, Mead). Accusing the philosophers of an ungracious nar-
rowness of mind, Mr Powys discovers an instrument of research
which fuses all our faculties into one curious and burning acuity,
The Complex Vision of Man. With its aid he discerns a new
natura rerum, and formulates it in statements which cannot fail
to seem arbitrary to reason, since reason here has only one vote
in twelve. Immortality, for example, he rejects not as illogical
or improbable, but as contrary to love and good taste. His
argument, therefore, is religious rather than philosophical, ad-
hering by an act of faith to a world where great works of love
and art shall never become unnecessary or ridiculous.
A GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO PsycHOANALYSIS, by Sigmund
Freud, translated by G. Stanley Hall (8vo, 406 pages; Boni &
Liveright). This is a series of lectures delivered by the father
of psychoanalysis, covering the whole field of his own technique.
It makes ponderous reading, and suffers from a lack of tolerance
toward the author's pupils who have departed from or enlarged
upon the innovator's technique. At the same time, it is a well-
developed, exhaustive, and informative treatise upon the various
vistas of the subject. As a graduate course after some simpler
introduction to the subject it may be recommended.


666
BRIEFER MENTION
The PRINCIPLES OF Aesthetics, by DeWitt H. Parker (12mo,
374 pages; Silver, Burdett & Company), a volume of aesthetic
philosophies compendiously restated for use in the class-room.
Like most text-books it offers no original theories and no unifying
thesis, but for the beginner it is as satisfactory a work as has yet
appeared. An excellent bibliography is appended.
Epstein, by Bernard van Dieren (4to, 132 pages, 50 plates; Lane).
The text of this notable book is largely devoted to anathematiz-
ing Epstein's detractors, but the author, in his moments of
sobriety, shows himself capable of appreciating the pre-eminent
virtues of his master. The reproductions are beautiful in the
profoundest sense, and establish the artist's supremacy among
living sculptors. The fifty plates are representative of the work
of genius: in Epstein all the forces of Modernism are concen-
trated and let loose with tremendous plastic vitality. Mr Van
Dieren demolishes the prevalent opinion that his distinguished
subject is archaic and insists that the medium determines the
creative idea. Epstein's position is among the big men, and the
present volume is an accessible enrichment to the world of art.
EssentiALS IN Art, by Osvald Sirén (illus., 8vo, 157 pages;
Lane). The author inclines to the Chinese and the primitives,
but does not misinterpret the importance of the Renaissance.
Most of the book is objective criticism of the highest order; the
essay on Rhythm and Form is both penetrating and remarkable.
Professor Sirén understands art his volume is a distinctive con-
tribution to aesthetics.
My Second COUNTRY (France), by Robert Dell (12mo, 323
pages; Lane), is the work of one who lived long and deeply in
France, who suffered indignities from French officials because he
was loyal to the France of Voltaire and Montesquieu, and who,
for the first time as far as we know, writes of France as a posit-
ivist and a socialist sees her. The elements in French character
and the strength and weakness of French society which have
been neglected by French publicists and politely ignored by
official friends, are here expounded. A book of real illumina-
tion, one wonders whether any one will really like it.


MUSICAL CHRONICLE
THE NEW, OR NATIONAL, SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
D
URING the early summer, the New Symphony Orchestra
changed its name, and announced its programme for the
coming season. It styled itself the National Symphony Orchestra,
and promised a full and extended season of concerts, fuller and
longer by far than even the last, the guest-conductorship of M
Willem Mengelberg, leader of the Concertgebouw Orchestra of
Amsterdam, and the première of Mahler's Third Symphony. One
took notice of the change of name without any special wonder, of
the plans without any great enthusiasm. The very promise of the
visit of the famous Dutch conductor did not excite hope, as it
might, under other conditions, have excited it. For, during its pre-
liminary season of concerts, two springs ago, one had gotten an im-
pression of the nature of the organization, which, re-inforced by
the impressions of last winter, convinced one that this particular
rose would smell very much by one name as it did by another; that
called the National Symphony Orchestra it would remain one of
the provincial New York orchestras, just as, called the New Sym-
phony, it had proved itself practically the old Symphony; that even
now, with the shape of M Mengelberg appearing above the horizon,
no solid achievement could be expected of the organization, since
the Dutch leader would in all probability find blocking him obsta-
cles similar to those which the unfortunate Gustav Mahler found in
his way when he assumed the conductorship of the Philharmonic
Orchestra of New York a little over ten years ago.
It declared itself, during that preliminary season, by no means
the direct response to the demands of the orchestral situation which
it pretended to be. It declared itself, on the contrary, the creature
of a number of good-natured persons without vital interest in the
problem with which they concerned themselves, without veritable
respect for the art of music, and in consequence, without the power
,
of shaping an instrument. There had been need, a long while,
of another orchestra in New York, when the formation of the New
Symphony was first announced. Neither the Philharmonic Oro
a


668
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
chestra nor the Symphony Society, because of the inferior musician-
ship of their conductors, used orchestral music as orchestral music
is to be used. There was no one, in New York, who could produce
harmoniously and truly what lay buried in the scores of the musical
masters; no one who had a catholic and modern apprehension of
musical literature. For long, the performances of the resident
bands had been a manner of higher organ-grind—the dull, vulgar,
and often frankly incorrect productions of a number of composi-
tions narrow in range and uneven in value. It was apparently in
answer to this pressing need that M Edgar Varese was entrusted by
the founders of the New Symphony Orchestra with their new crea-
tion and bidden perform programmes composed of the music of
Bach, of Rameau, and of the ultramoderns. One's suspicions were
aroused immediately the devotion of the organization to the per-
formances of new music was announced. We here in New York are
far too hard-ridden, too ignorant of ourselves and of the world we
inhabit, to comprehend the composers truly of our own time, and the
new-found affection of the founders for contemporary art seemed
too sudden an orientation to be completely accredited. And when
M Varese mounted the podium and limped pitifully through com-
positions by Bach and Debussy, Casella and Bartok, and then,
later, when M Varese "willingly resigned” and Mr Bodansky rush-
ed to the rescue with a performance of the c-minor symphony of
Brahms and the Tannhäuser overture, one knew one's worst fears
justified.
One knew that the orchestra had been created more in reaction
to the personality of a young Frenchman eager to conduct than out
of any apprehension of the needs of the community, the needs of
musical art. It was all too apparent that what had not been expend-
ed in the creation of the instrument was brainstuff. The problem
of orchestral music, of the art of the conductor, the tendency of the
programmes, the composition of the band, had by no means been
faced with intensity before the many thousands of dollars needed to
permit M Varese to conduct had been spilled. The persons who had
found these sums had no means of gauging his powers as a leader,
for they seemed even more surprised by his exhibition of feeble-
ness than did the public invited to hear him. Apparently with-
out reason, they had supposed him far more capable on the podium
than he proved to be, and confessed their complete deception by


PAUL ROSENFELD
664
permitting his instant resignation, and turning to Mr Bodansky
and his more energetic baton for aid. The devotion to classical
and ultramodern music, for which the band had allegedly been
called into existence, also proved itself fictitious, merely the result
of the glamour of M Varese who was eager to make propaganda
for the newer composers, and considered himself of their number.
With the preferment of Mr Bodansky, whose affection for the
elegancies of Mendelssohn and the other German romantics is un-
disguised, it ceased. And the instrument itself was poor, far duller
and coarser than either the orchestra of the Philharmonic or the
Symphony Society.
The leadership of Mr Bodansky further intensified the sense of
the irresponsibility of the control. Whatever benefit of doubt one
gave the sponsors after the misadventure of M Varese, for even the
best advised of persons err grotesquely, and it seemed possible that
the mistake proved nothing, one refused at the conclusion of last
season. For, under the conductorship of Mr Bodansky, the New
Symphony, instead of bringing fresh air into musty Carnegie Hall,
and giving performances of the sort that are bitterly needed, did
little else than add to the already large number of unsatisfactory
concerts offered New York each year. To be sure, Mr Bodansky
is in several respects a better musician than either Mr Damrosch
or Mr Stransky. He has a certain scholarly grasp of the composi-
tions which he conducts. He is invariably correct; he knows the
tempi at which his selections must be played; he does not stretch
L'après-midi d'un faune to fill twenty minutes, till the poor tor-
tured thing dies of a broken spine. His interpretations have virility
a
and sobriety; he does not make melodrama of Tod und Verklä-
rung. Unfortunately, his apprehension of style is largely an intel-
lectual one. He is not a poet. It is doubtful whether he feels his
music as experience. The compositions he directs remain for the
greater part strangely juiceless, strangely without aroma, strangely
tough and dun. He appears to be careless of sonority, for the or-
chestra plays very coarsely and hardly under him. Besides, Mr
Bodansky is not the brave that the true artist invariably is. “Der
Künstler tut nichts, was andere für schön halten," says Arnold
Schönberg in his treatise on harmony, “sondern nur, was ihm not-
wendig ist.” But Mr Bodansky at the very beginning of his tenor-
ship announced that the conductor is obliged to “take into account


670
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
his audience,” and immediately proceeded to temper the musical
wind to the shorn lamb that is the New York public with a not quite
reassuring zest. His programs have not been truly catholic. The
great classics, Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Rameau, have been
either completely neglected or unsatisfactorily represented. The
modern spirit was recognized only as far as the Iberia of Debussy
carried it; Bloch was represented only by the comparatively insig.
nificant Hiver-Printemps. Moreover, Mr Bodansky has indulged
somewhat unrestrainedly in the cotton-wool romantics of the gen-
tile, well-fed eighteen-forties. So, after all, one finds it difficult
to discover just what it was that recommended him for the post
of
conductor of the New Symphony above his competitors.
What, indeed, the National Symphony Orchestra has declared it-
self to be is nothing, after all, but one of the innumerable conse-
quences of the fact that in America musical organizations have
patronesses more often than they have patrons. Great musical
bodies cannot exist in America to-day, it is a commonplace, with-
out subsidies. The wealthy founder is an inevitable necessity. But,
in our civilization, the man is not interested in art. The Major
Higginsons are the exception. The great business men do not be-
lieve in life. Very often, funds are given musical organization
with ends other than aesthetic in view. There is one middle-west-
em city, at least, where funds are solicited and procured from busi-
ness men for the support of the resident orchestra with the plea
that musical performances will help stave off a social revolution.
The control of the purer forms of music are almost entirely left to
the distaff side. The wives alone have the leisure to interest them-
selves in the arts of expression. But, unfortunately, the control by
women of art is not the health of art. Whatever the cause, and it
is scarcely possible here to enter into any discussion of the funda-
mentals of so complex a matter, it is only in the rarest of instances
that the interest of the woman in the expressive arts is other than a
peripheral one. It may be genuine as far as it goes. But it remains,
for all genuineness, an outer and secondary or even tertiary activity.
The woman who goes to art as to her primary, her directest, activity,
is a thing for wonder, even to-day, when one begins to perceive
the lady with slightly increasing frequency. In consequence,
artistic activity remains, for the majority of those who engage in
it, a lightly social expression. It remains always something of an


PAUL ROSENFELD
671
amusement, a pastime, a not quite serious business. The vital en-
gagement which alone permits the individual to develop through
expression, and to develop at the same time his medium, is absent.
Very often, the interest of the patroness goes, innocently enough,
more to the artist than to his art. In consequence, the apples fall
into the hands of those who know how to place themselves to ad-
vantage underneath the apple tree more often than they do into the
hands of those who most deserve them. It is the artist of personal
charm, of social manner; the man who wears a frock coat of perfect
lines, and is brilliant over the teacups, that benefits chiefly by the
regiment of women. And the artist of the type
of
poor
Gustav
Mahler, who has neither the inclination nor the time to engage very
steadily in the light social guerrilla, is liable to find that, instead of
having allies in his founders, he has, in his very camp, incalculably
insurgent and hostile forces.
It may be that there are musicians who are at once great artists
and men of the world sufficiently astute to master the situation cre-
ated by the regiment of women in the concert hall. It may be that
M Mengelberg is such a one. We would be glad indeed to find
him able to escape poor Mahler's fate and ride the waves in safety.
Nevertheless, his success upon this element, were he victorious,
would by no means disprove its perilousness to the cause of musical
art, of all art, in this land. A peril to art, and therefore to life, it
remains, despite exceptional experiences. And it will remain one
for long. It roots too directly in a form of civilization which can
make no practical use of art, to be readily eradicable.
PAUL ROSENFELD


THE THEATRE
TEM
HEARTBREAK House Mr John Galsworthy had, for a brief
moment, the serious drama of this season all to himself. The
reverent but inexpert hands of the Neighborhood Players pro-
duced The MOB; hands presumably outstretched to the box-office
were responsible for the much better, but still imperfect, produc-
tion of The SKIN GAME.
It is not the taint of the war-allegory which makes the people
in The Skin GAME a little unreal. They pursue an end which
seems trivial enough with a tremendous intensity; they are ter-
ribly human in their virtues. And they would be real, too real
to be tolerable perhaps, if Mr Galsworthy let us see that their
virtues, and not the accidental vices they enjoy, are the cause of
the tragedy. At the point of the sword Mr Galsworthy drew
back and invented. It served him right that his invention was
the same as that used so charmingly by Somerset Maugham in Too
Many HUSBANDS. It served him right that just when we should
have most believed, and suffered, we were inclined to laugh.
Only a word need be said for the incomparable delicacy of
Mr George M. Cohan's performance in The MEANEST MAN IN
THE WORLD. Verve, smartness, abundant talent, an impeccable
sense of the theatre, Mr Cohan has always had. In this play, for
the first time and thank Heaven, he adds a certain grace, a gentle-
ness, a humility, which are incredibly endearing. It is an atrocious
play, but it is magnificent.
G. S.
Three Live Ghosts is the sort of play the public likes and
it has therefore been promoted to an up-town theatre: on the
stage as well as on the counter shell-shock proves even more sale-
able than war itself. After such lines as "We'll win because we're
right” and “She hasn't a crooked hair in her head,” we are not
further jogged that coincidence should so take the bit in her teeth
and canter. Percy Helton as the scampish lover is laudably ex-
plosive and empressé; Beryl Mercer as Mrs Gubbins shows what
real charm gin can develop in the no longer young.


THE THEATRE
673
Ladies' Night is the kind of thing that can get along without
such new-fangled notions as shell-shock. John Cumberland plays
Parsifal in and out and in The Larchmont Baths; the lingerie is
furnished by Lande & Mishkind.
Stage-settings which culminate in a delectable apotheosis of
soap-suds, the sparring eye-brows of Frank Tinney, the precise,
nervous, and intelligent legs of Frances Grant, and the young
person who neither looks nor acts nor talks like a Lady of the
Chorus make of Tickle Me a really jolly show.
The Winter Garden is as bleak as a cow-barn without cows.
Al Jolson is the only man living who can warm it up and in
The Broadway Brevities Eddie Cantor by trying to jig in The
Great Al's own way only intensifies the vacuum. Bert Williams
and his great white-gloved, inhibited hands and his "gallopin’
dominoes” and his wide, slow, long smile (why between-whiles does
he not munch hay?) would warm any other place than The Winter
Garden. And did this same Bert really “conceive” the pantomime
and music for Alexis Kosloff who as "an officer of the Guards craves
the Kiss of Youth ... invades the
invades the sanctuary ... and ravishes
the kiss from Youth”? The case of William Sharp was small
beer to that of Bert Williams.
a
John MURRAY ANDERSON deserves high praise for this year's
GREENWICH Village Follies. The scenery and costumes are
even more than divine dabs of colour: they are definite notes in an
effective scenic organization. The cynicism of Constance Farber
is as fine as ever, Florence Normand as The Black Cat could show
a thing or two even to Poe, with a native sallow intensity Pee Wee
Myers forever establishes the Arkansasness of Arkansas, James
Clemons dances the way Cruikshank drew, the coarse vulgarity of
Bert Savoy is in that grand manner which since the Renaissance so
few have achieved, and Margaret Severn, wearing the masks of W.
T. Benda, gives as fine an exhibition of interpretative dancing as I
have seen.
After her rectilinear angularity in the male mask her
baby dance is all the more astonishing: but not quite so unbeliev-
able as what I am told of Benda, i. e, that when he designed his
own he had not previously seen the Noh masks of Japan.
S. T.


COMMENT
THE
THE Case Jurgen has achieved proportions quite unusual and
an entertaining book entitled Jurgen and the Censor has
been issued about it. Obviously most of those whose protests are
recorded are of the opinion that Jurgen is a work of great artistic
merit, a disputable statement, no more capable of immediate proof
than the original charge against the book, that it is lewd, immoral,
and lascivious, or tends to make its readers so. Mr Cabell's own
statement of the case is the best but one in the book; the best one
being Mr Lawrence Gilman's "to hell with them (the suppressors]
on all counts.” That we hold the New York Society for the Sup-
pression of Vice, when it interferes with work which is artistic even
in intention, to be a blasphemous and outrageous thing, a monstros-
ity in this sixtieth odd century of recorded time, we have previously
made clear. It ought to be at least equally clear that any claim
for the book, on the ground that it is moral, uplifting, and inspir-
ing, is so much grist for the Society's remorseless mill. Opinions
of this sort do not matter; what matters is liberty, and we agree
with Mr Arnold Bennett in believing that the police alone, as the
regularly constituted guardians of liberty, should be privileged to
prosecute; and they should be compelled to prove, in accordance
with Plato, that the offending work constitutes an absolute menace
to the public good.
The suppression of The Little Review for printing Episode XIII
of James Joyce's Ulysses has not attracted so much attention, but
is likely to be longer remembered. One does not begrudge Mr
Cabell his supporters, nor is one annoyed that where money is there
a certain mild freedom is also. It is very nice that Messrs Schubert
.
and Ziegfeld, The International Studio, The Police Gazette, and
Vanity Fair are permitted to display the simpler facts of human
anatomy and even of human physiology, but it is probably not very
important to the greater glory of life. Mr Joyce, however, is an
artist, and imbeciles who try to interfere with the circulation of his
work are a nuisance.


COMMENT
675
No disconcerting drive for funds has been made by the Edward
MacDowell Association, but an appeal for money, to take the
burden of supporting the Colony from Mrs MacDowell, is being
circulated, and it ought to have some effect. The sober business
man will be pleased to learn that, as Mr Edwin Arlington Robin-
son puts it , "neophytes and wrecks are alike ineligible” to the com-
forts and joys of the place; and those who have any care for creative
work in America will be equally pleased to learn that the only quali-
fication for admission is that the applicant shall, beyond reasonable
doubt, be possessed of the creative faculty and have the intention
to work. Mr Robinson's own case, made public in an article which
the Association has sent out, is sufficiently conclusive of the desir-
ability of the Colony. It will have its difficulties and its "duds”
of course; but it will remain a place to which artists can, without
fuss or bother, go to do their work. It is interesting to note that
of those who have worked at the Colony, only a very few can qual-
ify as the leading artists of our time. On the other hand the at-
mosphere of the place seems to be hostile to great popularity. There
isn't a best-seller in music, literature, or painting, among them.
In the October number of The London Mercury A. Clutton-
Brock discourses admirably upon The Problem of Wordsworth.
He points out that Wordsworth himself realized the progressive
dessication of his being and that it was this realization which led
him to idealize childhood. Mr Clutton-Brock attributes the poet's
inability to express anything approaching sexual love to a violent
suppression of his natural instincts following upon an unhappy
love affair and the bloody fiasco of the French Revolution. "He
had been in love, not only with one woman but with the universe,
and he had been jilted; so he cut the very capacity for such love,
in its completeness, out of his mind.”
The good Freudian will of course suspect a neurosis contracted
in the first childhood to which this later revulsion of feeling gave
merely the final mould. Does this not perhaps give us a clue to
Wordsworth's notorious penchant for the infantile both in rhythm
and in thought? His emotivity remaining in his unconscious
fixated to some infantile impression, the mature Wordsworth
could not warmly feel; but by shutting off his developed intellect
he could tap that reservoir and, in however maudlin a fashion, love.


676
COMMENT
In these strange poems there on occasion can blossom upon the most
gracious of lil'ts the loveliest of images.
COLLECTORS of such remnants of colour as are left in this modern
cinematographic world are glad prize-fights exist. Those of
us who last month battled out to Jersey City, who there first set
eyes on "the pugilistic marvel of the old world,” who stood up and
pretended to sing the Marseillaise, who there saw his sparring part-
ner, the great darky, Joe Jeannette (for all the world like a figure
in the background of a Venetian painting), who saw, too, that
referee in the arsenic-green jersey, and who wondered at the grace
of the Frenchman's carriage—we are all hand in glove with Fate.
We remembered it was not so many years since Georges Carpen-
tier used to wander about Paris with a little carpet under his arm,
used to unroll it at the street-corner and there tumble through his
tricks. We admired the brutality of the great electric lights smash-
ing down upon the crude platform. We observed how far away
they made the stars look and how the stars in their turn tinged with
a weak and futile pathos this arbitrary mechanism. The red,
white, and blue elastic ropes about the ring did not have the bright
gaiety one associates with those colours—they were crass, almost
sinister.
About the fight itself there is little to be said: fights share this
characteristic with some other crises. In the case in hand Car-
pentier's opponent looked groggy almost from the start; he had
the manner of an animal trying vainly to "get" the situation.
As we went out someone said "A punk fight” and someone answered
"You tell the world” and a mounted policeman yawned behind
the back of an immense hand.
An exhibit of books, largely the run of commercial publications,
is an institution with the National Arts Club of New York. This
year, it must be confessed, the exhibit of early American printing
quite took the edge off the modern books as fine examples of the
printer's art. The exhibit, however, served its purpose of acquaint-
ing those who came with the variety and luxury of the season's
offerings.


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Idg.
ID:000020203221
051054 v.69 July-Dec. 1920
The Dial
Browne, Francis F. (F
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