oud mouth-
ings of the imperialists, the music of Pizzetti and Malipiero prove
it. It is not alone because they have begun to express themselves
with some fluency in the sphere of instrumental music, and shown
themselves independent of the cumbrous machinery of opera on
which their forbears relied so exclusively, that one feels their radi-
calism. One feels it because their music reveals them, whatever
their powers, men of a sort fundamentally different from the Puc-
cinis and the Leoncavallos and the Montemezzis. These are not
base natures, calculating effects, pouring out syrup for flies, eyeing
the gallery as they strike their melodramatic poses and hurl forth
their impossible Italian rhetoric. These are aristocrats, concerned
not with effects, but with their proper integrity. They are eager
to develop their art in subtlety, to refine their own language.
Though it cost them their popularity, they will express themselves.
Not merely a solitary musician or two, but an entire band of in-
trepid adventurers have set forth to root out of themselves the
meretricious tendency that has made the world for long suspect
every Italian composer who comes bearing gifts. These young
composers have begun making war on the Puccini in themselves,
turning for example and support to the noble Italian instrumental-


PAUL ROSENFELD
361
ists of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Something
within them has rendered odious to them the practices of their oily
forbears. Perhaps, who knows, they still dream of the sort of
popular success with which the composers of La Tosca and Pag-
liacci met. But because of the mind growing in them, not a one
of them can attain, or will attain, it.
Nevertheless, even though one rests assured that a force is gather-
ing in Italy able to give again the nation a veritable musical life,
one remains a little afraid to prophesy it an immediate success, for
all the latent power of certain of the radicals. Nor is the state of
Europe, that threatens us all, all that makes one hesitant. The
task before the young Italian composers is rendered particularly
difficult by the internal as well as the external situation. All these
young men are sophisticated. They are not working from their
own centres. They have utmost difficulty in discovering their
own formulas. Their condition is that of all men who are obliged
to do the work of pioneers and blaze roads in wildernesses. For,
cut off from a society which cannot nourish them, and which aids
and abets the enemy, the Puccini, within, they are obliged to per-
sist unrooted, to seek to create for themselves out of themselves an
atmosphere conducive to production even while they ought to be
applying their entire strength to their work. They must with one
hand uphold the walls of their dwellings while with the other they
feverishly seek to model. Much of their potency is lost to them.
Unable to contact their fellows, floating like so many wretched
rafts, they are left over-dependent for the stimulus that ought to
be forthcoming from the life about them, on foreign models and
foreign ideas, and over-sensitive to the atmosphere of Paris.
Casella, Pizzetti, Malipiero, every other talented member of the
group, shows in his work under how adverse a condition he has to
create, how profound is his sophistication.
Casella shows it most classically. He is distinctly the cerebral.
He is a man of the sort so uprooted that he cannot permit life to
approach him directly. The instinctive element is weak in him; he
appears to commence with an abstraction, a theory, and to set about
incarnating it in music. He seems never so much the intellectual-
ist as when, in Italia, he tries to be vulgar and instinctive, and,
being an Italian, outrageously spaghetti. Then, because of the
challenge to Chabrier and Bizet, we are made all the more sharply


362
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
conscious of the smell of the lamp in his intendedly rhapsodic gusts.
Because of his unending apprenticeship to many modern composers,
from Liszt to Strawinsky, he has even been accused of being an op-
portunist. But the accusation is an unfair one; Casella has always
worked seriously in music; the Notte de maggio, if it proves noth-
ing else, proves the sincerity of his struggle. If he has not despite
his brilliance produced anything that is quite warm, quite spontan-
eous, it is principally because he is obliged invariably to commence
with an abstraction, a literary idea.
He might become the critic necessary to the welfare of the group
were it not for the fact that, like so many cerebrals, he intellectu-
alizes everything except his thought. As a critic, he is responsible
for many of the grotesque sophisms current in the musical world.
Pizzetti and Malipiero are, of course, talents of a fresher cast.
Both are men for whom the future may have much in store. And
yet, neither of them is completely “on their own.” The violin and
piano sonata of the former shows him beyond a doubt a man who
goes to music because he has to speak. The crying, lamenting,
cutting tones of the violin, the noble melodic line of the music, its
vehemence, are truly racial, make one think of a modern Corelli.
But Pizzetti, in this work, at least, has not quite managed to re-
main on his own base. If he has, in distinction to Casella, kept
himself free of foreign influence, he has, nevertheless, been sucked,
at moments, into Charybdis. The middle movement of his sonata,
the Preghiera per gl’innocenti, descends into some very broad
Puccini. Again Floria Tosca warbles her Visi d'arte, visi d'amore,
while Scarpia cracks peanut-shells and prepares a rape. One
dragon or another seems to wait its moment to spring out on every
one of these young composers, and never to have to wait for long.
It is on the Scylla of foreign form and foreign idiom that
Malipiero has been battered. His exquisite sensuality, his delight
in the timbres of his instruments, his keen awareness of the re-
sonances of the orchestra, have never achieved a quite individual
expression. At moments he recalls the Miroirs of Ravel, the
Petrushka of Strawinsky, even, in Poemi asolani, the piano-pieces
of Schoenberg. Personal elements appear; then disappear again.
One knows in him, of course, a veritable musician; the dissonances
of the bell tones in the Colloquio di campane of the second Impres-
sioni dal vero, the clown-like rhythms of the grotesque, the moment


PAUL ROSENFELD
363
a
when the piccolo shrills above the sudden descent and black rumble
of the piano's tones in that composition, the strumming of the fiddles
in the quartet, mark him among the living colourists. Unhappily,
his compositions are never entirely clean, entirely whole. The
form of the Impressioni dal Vero, of the grotesque and the Rispetti
e Strombotti, is always a little uncertain, wavering. The string-
quartet, indeed, is dead several minutes before the composer con-
cludes. It may be, of course, that Malipiero's opera, Sette Can-
zone, produced last summer for a short while in Paris, and forced
off the boards by the intrigues of Saint-Saëns, Bruneau, and other
"patriotic” French musicians, is what the Parisian critics pro-
claimed it, an entirely authentic work. One would like to hear the
opera. And yet, one persists notwithstanding in one's conviction
that Malipiero has not yet discovered himself. The grotesque
and the quartet, more recently composed than the Canzone, would
not be quite what they are, had he in a work previously completed
found his own idiom, his own form.
Consequently, despite one's awareness of the significance of their
appearance, the respectability of the work already completed by
them, one finds oneself a little shy of proclaiming the young Italian
symphonists sure of achieving the national musical expression they
have set forth so intrepidly to create. Still, whether or not they,
in person, in our own time, succeed in writing the music of which
they dream, their labours remain some of the most important being
performed in the musical world. For, even though they them-
selves may never succeed in transcending their sophisticated situa-
tion, they will, through their struggle, unless the coming cataclysm
washes everything of us away, create the atmosphere which will
enable their successors to realize themselves unhampered. What
they themselves want, what seems through its absence to be pre-
venting them at present from expressing themselves massively, will,
because of them, not be wanting the new people, the young strang-
ers, coming, coming, always coming.” And if they succeed in ef-
fecting merely that, who will be able to say that Pizzetti and his
companions will not have had the success which they, after all,
most desired?
PAUL ROSENFELD


THE THEATRE
The revival of ERMINIE is full of lessons to the youngsters.
Miss Madge Lessing shows us what our musical comedy has lost-
and how dear and attractive, how gently prepossessing she makes
it appear. Contrariwise Mr Norman-Bel Geddes shows us what
we have gained, particularly in one setting of quite unequalled love.
liness. Whereas Messrs Francis Wilson and De Wolf Hopper
show us what we have had, have, and, please Heaven, shall always
have, with variations. Mr Marc Connelly, having had the job of
going through what must have been an exceedingly dull book, has
recovered and made much of it pungent. But a new hand was no
less needed for the music—and was not in evidence.
G. S.
WILLIAM ARCHER, having spent upon the hard-tack of Ibsen a
wholly honourable youth, decided it was his turn. Having taken
a very deep breath and with a deliberate abandon not unbecoming
to one of so austere an age, he plunged. Old men do that sort of
thing. The Green Goddess is the whole hog, and thereof George
Arliss is the guts. As the divine and demoralized (he had been
educated at Cambridge: tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner)
Raja of Rukh, that accomplished feline won all hearts. And his
spit was as good as his purr. He was coppered to a T: in checks
.
and turban the chic crashed: it was like one of God's own wonders,
and with His immanence all zigzagged and acrack. If our matinée
idols could tint so magisterially, we should stop at nothing, no, not
at playing débutante. When one saw shuffle past that file of native
priests, one regretted Sir Beerbohm Tree: as leader of The High
Church Party he would, with a navel orange, so consummately
have filled the bill. To be fair to the honourable melodramatist,
it should be stated the scenario too possesses considerable crackle.
The DIAL, ever on the lookout for unrecognized talent, takes par-
ticular pleasure in being able to hand Mr William Archer both
wit and humour. Since the three feringhee are not to be put to
death until tomorrow the Raja bestows upon them the run of the
palace. And he dubs it, blandly, “Liberty Hall.”



THE THEATRE
365
In Tamura, a Japanese Noh, at The Neighborhood Playhouse,
Michio Itow is, according to his wont, distinguished. LA BOUTIQUE
FANTASQUE, which follows the Noh, instead of people who act like
mechanical dolls (Japanese, to be sure, indicative, and O. K.)
gives us dolls who act like people. Yet they retain, blessedly, doll-
hood. Thus the playing-card dolls are even more like cards when
they move than when at rest; this is not only because cards gen-
erally do move, but more particularly because these particular cards
move with corners. When the stage is darkened to represent the
toyshop at night, things sag. We miss the brittle glare which
should accompany staccato acting and we miss the colours too.
And it is in this twilight that two dolls, by making love, overstep
the bounds of doll-propriety; they unwisely approximate human-
kind. Dolls should be dolls.
.
Good Times at The Hippodrome is chock-full of novel effects:
chorus girls express their heads and faces from between the ele-
phant-ear petals of uncannily unreal flowers. And some of these
girls sport sure-ons. When we realize that this chorus numbers
many hundred young women, we begin better to understand the
underlying causes of the present servant-girl shortage. Mr Dilling-
ham has much to answer for. (By the way, how does it come the
cast never resort to sou’westers? With their smokeless megaphones
these would go well.) One man gives a xylophone concert: his
notes are as thin as his hair. Another makes to fing a stool at
painfully hired gentleman in a front box. The gent, overcome,
upsets backward, chair and all. The auditorium collapses. This
affair should be put under glass and preserved at The Smithsonian
Institute: when we consider whence these good people, the specta-
tors, come and how very ill at ease they honourably are (in Baby-
lon) we perceive there is not likely ever again to be staged so im-
portant a demonstration of Professor Dr Sigmund Freud's theory
of laughter. There are some very sleek diving girls.
Tickle ME REVISITED: For the benefit of the provinces, among
which Frank Tinney is now said to be circulating, I have here to
The lady with "the precise, nervous, and intelli-
gent legs” is, unfortunately, called Olga Mishka. Frances Grant's
are quite another story.
correct an error.
S. T.


COMMENT
TO S. T.
Your childish notice I have read
Oh Callow Youth! scarce past your teens:
And though I've wracked my weary head
I cannot fathom what it means :
The grand omniscience you
Aaunt
I frankly own has made me gape,
For I, poor actor though I be,
See through the culture that you ape.
Your classical allusions, too,
Are just what I'd anticipate
Of any half-baked schoolboy who
Had learned how to articulate
And con “Maecenas atavis"
And “Gallia Omnis” in fair shape,
And “Arma virumque cano”—
How dare you all this culture ape?
The artist's craft you plainly show
Attracts your glib, precocious tongue.
How clever of you too to know
A quartette when you hear one sung!
As for that touch of steak Bearnaise,
Your gourmet's knowledge none can 'scape
And yet, S. T., it leaves me cold-
This blatant culture that you ape.
Willie HOWARD
When so distinguished an ornament of the boards as Mr Willie
Howard honours us with his attention, we take care our subscribers
shall know it.
Those who recall the paragraph which so stimulated Mr Howard
may find themselves by his allusion to “classical allusions” a trifle
fogged. We hasten to state that we understand the poet-player
(Willie Shakespeare, too, by the way, wrote trenchant verses)


COMMENT
367
here refers to the line from Ossian. According to Mr Howard's
penetrating view (and many of our most cultivated readers will
see eye to eye with him) this line, of howsoever humble an origin,
had, through the agency of The Great Schoolmaster,' classicism
thrust upon it. There are some things about which Mr Howard
cares deeply.
Just the other day I had dropped in at our Statistical Bureau to
have a look at the charts, and what I had there seen had consider-
ably shaken (I confess it freely) my announced resolution to go on
speaking the truth, so help me God, about the Winter Garden and
David Belasco. For among Thespians I had found the suicidal
curve to have taken a most alarming shoot: Stutz Motors at their
hottest showed a trend scarcely less vertical. That is why this
poem made me happy: it showed that Mr Willie Howard for one
was not going to sulk.
“Und wenn der Mensch in seiner Qual verstummt,
Gab mir ein Gott, zu sagen, wie ich leide.”
It is not only among the followers of Garrick and of Booth that
a grave tendency has of late years become manifest. Painters,
poets, sculptors, architects, composers, piccolo-players, and prose-
men have all of them given signs of a strange depression. No
doubt The Dial must shoulder the whole responsibility for hav-
ing among Roscii applied the match to this powder, but an ex-
plosive despair is all about us. Should Mr Munsey, for example,
inaugurate a campaign of truth-speaking about, say, the Poetry
Society and Cale Young Rice, another of our charts would, we be-
lieve, register a parallel mounting. Months ago we set upon this
problem, that of determining the provenance of this despair, our
very best corps of soci „logical investigators; and by these trained
gentlemen the entire trouble was authoritatively traced to a quite
small conclave of conspicuously solemn and plump young men.
Psychoanalysis had at last anatomized (so these latter owlishly
hooted) the artist and his art. The whole affair was simple if un-
pleasant. If a man were an artist, that meant he was incapable of
normal healthy activity and so had sought a substitute outlet among
words, sounds, or colours. If the man were to be treated by their
.
system, he would at last leap forth the real thing and would auto-
matically and happily find himself as an artist impotent. Art was
"On the Study of Celtic Literature. Matthew Arnold. London. Smith,
Elder and Co. 1867.
1


368
COMMENT
a disease and the artist a sorry dog. No wonder genius drooped,
no wonder razors climbed, no wonder the red lines mounted.
But God reigns and the government at Vienna still lives. In
the same mail with Mr Willie Howard's reassuring verses, there
was brought me a communication from quite another big-wig. I
refer to him who has (the Swiss Guard loyalism of Mr Thomas
Eliot notwithstanding) as The Master of Those Who Know
so disquietingly displaced the for so long a session not-to-be-
sneezed-at, ancien régime Aristotle. Immediately taking action
upon the report outlined above, I had grasped the bull by the horns,
had gone for the facts to the right party, had written Dr Freud
about the whole affair. My question to him had been summed up
in the following sentences:
“Do you hold that if an artist is successfully psychoanalyzed
he thereupon ceases to be an artist? For example, do you believe
that if Leonardo da Vinci had been successfully psychoanalyzed
he would thereafter have ceased to paint pictures of as great aesthe-
tic value as those he had previously painted ?”
Writing on January 10th from 19 Berggasse, Vienna, Dr Freud
was so generous as to reply. In the last paragraph of his letter he
pretty definitely settles the hash:
“Our experience, although not very rich in the analysis of paint-
ers and poets, has regularly brought out the fact that these artists
are through analysis helped in their work. A Leonardo da Vinci
has, however, not as yet undergone analysis.”
Having glimpsed a certain pathos or wistful quality in Dr Freud's
closing sentence, The Dial has organized a small group of domes-
tic Leonardos. These, it is proposed, shall (when the weather
turns more seasonable) be shipped direct to Berggasse 19. We
anticipate that our little undertaking will benefit the Leonardos not
less than Dr Freud. Applicants (the group is fortunately not yet
complete) should present themselves at our Fifth Avenue Office.
An American birth-certificate and an affidavit as to personal clean-
liness (to be had from The National Academy of Design) are to
acceptance sine quibus non.
Artists may again hold up their heads.
their heads. As for certain smart
Alecs


dre
nred
Live
-Tic
10
vom
he ha
DIES
road
nike
مال
1
.
1
هم مع
E
$
가
​



THE PEACOCK.
BY GASTON LACHAISE



THE NDIAL
OXX1
APRIL 1921
:
THE HURLY-BURLY
BY A. E. COPPARD
TH
HE Weetmans, mother, son, and daughter, lived on a thriving
a
been a turbulent place of abode. For the servant it was: “Phemy,
do this,” or “Phemy, have you done that?” from dawn to dark, and
even from dark to dawn there was a hovering of unrest. The
widow Weetman, a partial invalid, was the only figure that mani-
fested any semblance of tranquillity, and it was a misleading one
for she sat day after day on her large hams knitting and nodding
and lifting her grey face only to grumble, her spectacled eyes trans-
fixing the culprit with a basilisk glare. And her daughter Alice,
the housekeeper, who had a large face, a dominating face, in some
respects she was all face, was like a blast in a corridor with her
“Maize for the hens, Phemy!—More firewood, Phemy!—Who has
set the trap in the harness room?—Come along!—Have you
scoured the skimming pans?—Why not!—Where are you idling?
Come along, Phemy, I have no time to waste this morning, you
roally must help me.” It was not only in the house that this
cataract of industry flowed; outside there was activity enough for
a regiment. A master-farmer's work consists largely of a series
of conversations with other master-farmers, a long-winded way of
doing long-headed things, but Glastonbury Weetman, the son, was
not like that at all; he was the incarnation of energy, always doing
and doing, chock-full of orders, adjurations, objurgatives, blame,
and blasphemy. That was the kind of place Phemy Madigan
worked at. No one could rest on laurels there. The farm and
the home possessed everybody, lock, stock, and barrel; work was


370
THE HURLY-BURLY
like a tiger, it ate you up implacably. The Weetmans did not
mind—they liked being eaten by such a tiger.
After six or seven years of this Alice went back to marry an old
sweetheart in Canada, where the Weetmans had originally come
from, but Phemy's burden was in no way lessened thereby. There
were as many things to wash and sew and darn; there was always
a cart of churns about to dash for a train it could not possibly
catch, or a horse to shoe that could not possibly be spared. Weet-
man hated to see his people merely walking: “Run over to the
barn for that hay-fork,” or “Slip across to the ricks, quick now,”
he would cry, and if ever an unwary hen hampered his own path
it did so only once—and no more. His labourers were mere things
of flesh and blood, but they occasionally resented his ceaseless
flagellations. Glas Weetman did not like to be impeded or con-
troverted; one day in a rage he had smashed that lumbering loon
of a carter called Gathercole. For this he was sent to jail for a
month.
The day after he had been sentenced Phemy Madigan, alone in
the house with Mrs Weetman, had waked at the usual early hour.
It was a foggy September morning; Sampson and his boy Daniel
were clattering pails in the dairy shed. The girl felt sick and
gloomy as she dressed; it was a wretched house to work in, crickets
in the kitchen, cockroaches in the garret, spiders and mice every-
where. It was an old long low house; she knew that when she
descended the stairs the walls would be stained with autumnal
dampness, the banisters and rails oozing with moisture. She
wished she was a lady and married and living in a palace fifteen
stories high.
It was fortunate that she was big and strong, though she had
been only a charity girl taken from the workhouse by the Weet-
mans when she was fourteen years old. That was seven years ago.
It was fortunate that she was fed well at the farm, very well in-
deed; it was the one virtue of the place. But her meals did not
counterbalance things; that farm ate up the body and blood of
people. And at times the pressure was charged with a special ex-
citation, as if a taut elastic thong had been plucked and released
with a reverberating ping.
It was so on this morning. Mrs Weetman was dead in her bed.
'
At that crisis a new sense descended upon the girl, a sense of
a


A. E. COPPARD
371
.
1
responsibility. She was not in fear, she felt no grief or surprise.
It concerned her in some way, but she herself was unconcerned, and
she slid without effort into the position of mistress of the farm.
She opened a window and looked out of doors. A little way off a
boy with a red scarf stood by an open gate.
“Oi ...oi, kup, kup, kup!” he cried to the cows in that
field. Some of the cows having got up stared amiably at him,
others sat on ignoring his hail, while one or two plodded deliber-
ately towards him. “Oi ... oi, kup, kup, kup!"
“Lazy rascal, that boy,” remarked Phemy, "we shall have to get
rid of him. Dan'l! Come here, Dan'l!” she screamed, waving
her arm wildly. "Quick!"
She sent him away for police and doctor. At the inquest there
were no relatives in England who could be called upon, no wit-
nesses other than Phemy. After the funeral she wrote a letter to
Glastonbury Weetman in jail informing him of his bereavement,
but to this he made no reply. Meanwhile the work of the farm
was pressed forward under her control, for though she was revelling
in her personal release from the torment she would not permit
others to share her intermission. She had got Mrs Weetman's
keys and her box of money. She paid the two men and the boy
their wages week by week. The last of the barley was reaped, the
oats stacked, the roots hoed, the churns sent daily under her super-
vision. And always she was bustling the men.
“O dear me, these lazy rogues!” she would complain to the
empty rooms, “they waste time, so it's robbery, it is robbery. You
may wear yourself to the bone and what does it signify to such as
them. All the responsibility, too! They would take your skin if
they could get it off you—and they can't!”
She kept such a sharp eye on the corn and meal and eggs that
Sampson got surly. She placated him by handing him Mr Weet-
man's
gun and a few cartridges, saying: "Just shoot me a couple
of rabbits over in the warren when you got time.” At the end of
the day Mr Sampson had not succeeded in killing a rabbit so he
kept the gun and the cartridges many more days. Phemy was
really happy. The gloom of the farm had disappeared. The
farmhouse and everything about it looked beautiful, beautiful in-
deed with its yard full of ricks, the pond full of ducks, the fields
full of sheep and cattle, and the trees still full of leaves and birds.


372
THE HURLY-BURLY
She flung maize about the yard; the hens scampered towards it and
the young pigs galloped, quarrelling over the grains which they
groped and snuffed for, grinding each one separately in their iron
jaws, while the white pullets stalked delicately among them, picked
up the maize seeds, One Two Three, and swallowed them like
ladies. Sometimes on cold mornings she would go outside and give
an apple to the fat bay pony when he galloped back from the
station. He would stand puffing with a kind of rapture, the wind
from his nostrils discharging in the frosty air vague shapes like
smoky trumpets. Presently upon his hide a little ball of liquid
mysteriously suspired, grew, slid, dropped from his flanks into the
road. And then drops would begin to come from all parts of him
until the road beneath was dabbled by a shower from his dew-
distilling outline. Phemy would say:
“The wretches! They were so late they drove him near dis-
tracted, poor thing. Lazy rogues, but wait till master comes back,
they'd better be careful!"
And if any friendly person in the village asked her: “How are
you getting on up there, Phemy?” she would reply, "Oh, as well
as you can expect with so much to be done—and such men.” The
interlocutor might hint that there was no occasion in the circum-
stances to distress oneself, but then Phemy would be vexed. To
her, honesty was as holy as the sabbath to a little child. Behind
her back they jested about her foolishness; but, after all, wisdom
isn't a process, it's a result, it's the fruit of the tree. One can't be
wise, one can only be fortunate.
On the last day of her Elysium the workhouse master and the
chaplain had stalked over the farm shooting partridges. In the
afternoon she met them and asked for a couple of birds for Weet-
man's return on the morrow. The workhouse was not far away,
it was on a hill facing west, and at sunset time its windows would
often catch the glare so powerfully that the whole building seemed
to burn like a box of contained and smokeless fire. Very beauti-
ful it looked to Phemy.


A. E. COPPARD
373
II
The men had come to work punctually and Phemy herself found
so much to do that she had no time to give the pony an apple. She
cleared the kitchen once and for all of the pails, guns, harness, and
implements that so hampered its domestic intention, and there were
abundant signs elsewhere of a new impulse at work in the estab-
lishment. She did not know at what hour to expect the prisoner
so she often went to the garden gate and glanced up the road. The
night had been wild with windy rain, but morn was sparklingly
clear though breezy still. Crisp leaves rustled about the road
where the polished chestnuts beside the parted husks lay in num-
bers, mixed with coral buds of the yews. The sycamore leaves
were black rags, but the delicate elm foliage Auttered down like
yellow stars. There was a brown field neatly adorned with white
coned heaps of turnips, behind it a small upland of deeply green
lucerne, behind that nothing but blue sky and rolling cloud. The
turnips, washed by the rain, were creamy polished globes.
When at last he appeared she scarcely knew him. Glas Weet-
man was a big, though not fleshy, man of thirty with a large boyish
face and a flat bald head. Now he had a thick dark beard. He
was hungry, but his first desire was to be shaved. He stood before
the kitchen mirror, first clipping the beard away with scissors, and
as he lathered the remainder he said:
"Well, it's a bad state of things, this, my sister dead and my
mother gone to America. What shall us do!”
He perceived in the glass that she was smiling.
"There's naught funny in it, my comic gal,” he bawled indig-
nantly, "what are you laughing at!”
“I wer'n't laughing. It's your mother that's dead.”
“My mother that's dead, I know."
“And Miss Alice that's gone to America.”
“To America, I know, I know, so you can stop making your
bullock's eyes and get me something to eat. What's been going
on here?”
She
gave
him an outline of affairs. He looked at her sternly
when he asked her about his sweetheart.
“Has Rosa Beauchamp been along here ?"
"No," said Phemy, and he was silent. She was surprised at


374
THE HURLY-BURLY
the question. The Beauchamps were such respectable high-up peo-
ple that to Phemy's simple mind they could not possibly favour an
alliance, now, with a man that had been in prison; it was absurd,
but she did not say so to him. And she was bewildered to find
that her conviction was wrong, for Rosa came along later in the
day and everything between her master and his sweetheart was
just as before; Phemy had not divined so much love and forgive-
ness in high-up people.
It was the same with everything else. The old harsh rushing
life was resumed, Weetman turned to his farm with an accelerated
vigour to make up for the lost time and the girl's golden week or
two of ease became an unforgotten dream. The pails, the guns,
the harness, crept back into the kitchen. Spiders, cockroaches, and
mice were more noticeable than ever before, and Weetman himself
seemed embittered, harsher. Time alone could never still him,
there was a force in his frame, a buzzing in his blood. But there
was a difference between them now; Phemy no longer feared him.
She obeyed him, it is true, with eagerness, she worked in the house
like a woman and in the fields like a man. They ate their meals
a
together, and from this dissonant comradeship the girl in a dumb
kind of way began to love him.
One April evening on coming in from the fields he found her
lying on the couch beneath the window, dead plumb fast asleep,
with no meal ready at all. He flung his bundle of harness to the
flags and bawled angrily to her. To his surprise she did not stir.
He was somewhat abashed, he stepped over to look at her. She
was lying on her side. There was a large rent in her bodice be-
tween sleeve and shoulder; her flesh looked soft and agreeable to
him. Her shoes had slipped off to the floor; her lips were folded
in a sleepy pout.
“Why, she's quite a pretty cob,” he murmured. "She's all right,
she's just tired, the Lord above knows what for."
But he could not rouse the sluggard. Then a fancy moved him
to lift her in his arms; he carried her from the kitchen and stagger-
ing up the stairs laid the sleeping girl on her own bed. He then
went downstairs and ate pie and drank beer in the candle-light,
guffawing once or twice, “A pretty cob, rather.” As he stretched
himself after the meal a new notion amused him: he put a plate-
ful of food upon a tray together with a mug of beer and the
a
>


A. E. COPPARD
375
candle. Doffing his heavy boots and leggings he carried the tray
into Phemy's room. And he stopped there.
III
The new circumstance that thus slipped into her life did not
effect any noticeable alteration of its general contour and progress,
Weetman did not charge towards her. Phemy accepted his mas-
tership not alone because she loved him but because her powerful
sense of loyalty covered all the possible opprobrium. She did not
seem to mind his continued relations with Rosa.
Towards midsummer one evening Glastonbury came in in the
late dusk. Phemy was there in the darkened kitchen. “Master,"
she said immediately he entered. He stopped before her. She
continued: “Something's happened.”
"Huh, while the world goes popping round something shall al-
ways happen.
"It's me—I'm took—a baby, master,” she said. He stood
stock-still. His back was to the light, she could not see the ex-
pression on his face, perhaps he wanted to embrace her.
“Let's have a light, sharp,” he said in his brusque way. “The
supper smells good but I can't see what I'm smelling, and I can
only fancy what I be looking at.”
She lit the candles and they ate supper in silence. Afterwards
he sat away from the table with his legs outstretched and crossed,
hands sunk into pockets, pondering while the girl cleared the table.
Soon he put his powerful arm around her waist and drew her to sit
on his knees.
“Are ye sure o' that?” he demanded.
She was sure.
“Quite ?”
She was quite sure.
“Ah, well then,” he sighed conclusively, “we'll be married.”
The girl sprang to her feet. “No, no, no—how can you be mar-
ried—you don't mean that-not married—there's Miss Beau-
champ!” She paused and added, a little unsteadily: "She's your
true love, master.”
“Ay, but I'll not wed her,” he cried sternly. “If there's no gain-


376
THE HURLY-BURLY
saying this that's come on you, I'll stand to my guns. It's right
and proper for we to have a marriage.”
His great thick-fingered hands rested upon his knees; the candles
threw a wash of light upon his polished leggings; he stared into
the fireless grate.
“But we do not want to do that,” said the girl, dully and doubt-
fully. “You have given your ring to her, you've given her your
word. I don't want you to do this for me. It's all right, master,
it's all right.”
“Are ye daft?” he cried. “I tell you we'll wed. Don't keep
clacking about Rosa. I'll stand to my guns.” He paused
before adding: “She'd gimme the rightabout, fine now-don't you
see, stupid—but I'll not give her the chance.”
Her eyes were lowered. “She's your true love, master.”
“What would become of you and your child? Ye couldn't bide
here!"
"No," said the trembling girl.
“I'm telling you what we must do, modest and proper; there's
naught else to be done, and I'm middling glad of it, I am. Life's
a see-saw affair. I'm middling glad of this.”
So, soon, without a warning to any one, least of all to Rosa
Beauchamp, they were married by the registrar. The change in
her domestic status produced no other change; in marrying Weet-
man she but married all his ardour, she was swept into its current.
She helped to milk cows, she boiled nauseating messes for pigs,
chopped mangolds, mixed meal, and sometimes drove a harrow in
his windy fields. Though they slept together she was still his
servant. Sometimes he called her his "pretty little cob” and then
she knew he was fond of her. But in general his custom was dis-
illusioning. His way with her was his way with his beasts; he
knew what he wanted, it was easy to get. If for a brief space a
little romantic flower began to bud in her breast it was frozen as a
bud, and the vague longing disappeared at length from her eyes.
And she became aware that Rosa Beauchamp was not yet done
with; somewhere in the darkness of the fields Glastonbury still met
her. Phemy did not mind.
In the new year she bore him a son that died as it came to life.
Glas was angry at that, as angry as if he had lost a horse. He
felt that he had been duped, that the marriage had been a stupid


A. E. COPPARD
377
sacrifice, and in this he was savagely supported by Rosa. And
yet Phemy did not mind; the farm had got its grip upon her, it was
consuming her body and blood.
Weetman was just going to drive into town; he sat fuming in
the trap behind the fat bay pony.
“Bring me that whip from the passage," he shouted; "there's
never a damn thing handy!"
Phemy appeared with the whip. “Take me with you,” she said.
.
“God-a-mighty! What for?
What for? I be comin' back in an hour.
They ducks want looking over and you've all the taties to grade.”
She stared at him irresolutely.
“And who's to look after the house? You know it won't lock
up-the key's lost. Get
up
there!”
He cracked his whip in the air as the pony dashed away.
In the summer Phemy fell sick, her arm swelled enormously.
The doctor came again and again. It was blood-poisoning, caught
from a diseased cow that she had milked with a cut finger. A
nurse arrived but Phemy knew she was doomed, and though tor-
tured with pain she was for once vexed and protestant. For it was
a June night, soft and nubile, with a marvellous moon; a night-
ingale threw its impetuous garland into the air. She lay listening
to it, and thinking with sad pleasure of the time when Glastonbury
was in prison, how grand she was in her solitude, ordering every-
thing for the best and working superbly. She wanted to go on
and on for evermore, though she knew she had never known peace
in maidenhood or marriage. The troubled waters of the world
never ceased to flow; in the night there was no rest-only darkness.
Nothing could emerge now. She was leaving it all to Rosa Beau-
champ. Glastonbury was gone out somewhere-perhaps to meet
Rosa in the fields. There was the nightingale, and it was very
bright outside.
“Nurse,” moaned the dying girl, "what was I born into the world
at all for ?!


THE CRUCIFIXION OF NOËL
BY MARSDEN HARTLEY
The situation is blue and white,
Inevitably.
High on the snowy hill, cramped with persistence of frost,
Stands the little tree, all smiling with blue fruits,
Trickling with moss, made of tattered strings
Of moonlight.
i
Blue fruits, from the October of infinite twilights,
Ripe fruits fallen from the lush branches of renascent skies.
Blue fruits,
Cheeks of pale ladies, overcome with wakeful worshipping.
I saw them fall one evening, from "her” cheeks, when the mountain
Of her love approached.
She was all blue then, all blue with height of sky submissions;
It was autumn time among the icebergs.
Blue plenteousness,
Multitudinous curves of white parapluies
Overtaken with shower-lusts of new summer afternoons.
What a beautiful harvest, I ventured.
Persimmons—from the highest branches of the midnight
Of the south,
Leaning toward the mouth of the infant,
Orizaba.
Eyes from under the brows of the ever-credulous;
Snowladen foreheads of both sexes, pallid with faith
In fiercely imagined joys;
Virginhood, in its time of glaring,


MARSDEN HARTLEY
379
Flaring certainty.
1
Sunbrushed antelopes leap in and out of the fervours
Beyond the light blue boughs;
On their young, velvety horntips-steel coloured birds
With clipped, radiant plumage, sit fanning out their wings,
Whispers of many a commiserating dusk.
The airs that hum, have the hilarity of Aurora's smile,
At the blue apex of midnight.
All about the branches of the Noël tree,
Pass buoyant funerals of rainbows,
Aged with pain of summer.
Hush, baby of the incredible Friday-doom!
See! All the foreheads of the world have flashes
From the eyelids of the midnight, upon the pressed curves
of them;
The girls and boys are dancing, with darts of dying rainbows
impaled in the flesh of their knees.
I hear the ting-ting of the blue cymbals
Upon the white fingertips of the crucifixion crew;
They are floating—the ting-tings-
Over the breasts of adolescent icebergs
In my polar rendezvous.
A blanched cygnet glides across the frozen lake,
under the Noël boughs.
The swan-child has in her beak a blue fish from the nets
a
Of the night fishermen.
Cygnet's eyes are still, blue fruits, and her back
Is strewn with clips of frozen sunshine from a virginal
blue morning.
Ting—ting! Ting—ting! Ting-ting!
Blue raisins are dropped from the chilled boughs.
Ashes from the snowy hill are sifting into blue eyes,
And the wind carries the rune away.


380
THE CRUCIFIXION OF NOEL
Ting-ting! Ting-ting! Ting-ting!
А
rope
of ice has been stretched from the white earth
To the bluest arc in the sky.
The arms of Noël have been nailed with spikes of sapphire.
How white is Noël to-day!
Was he ever so white, as in this last hour
Of his vanity?
Ting-ting! Ting-ting!
Ting-ting!
Blue drops falling from sapphire nails,
Just where they pierce the white, white flesh of Noël.
Is there pleasure perhaps, in the dropping
of the drops?
Little cymbal tones, falling in circles
Upon thick pavements of ice
Noël is crucified !!!
The fishermen of the night are whispering
With the awakened ones among the nets-
Noël is beautiful in his new position.
Ting-ting!
Ting-ting! Ting-ting!
The cymbals now have whitened.



A WATER-COLOUR. BY MINA LOY


i



i
i.
A WATER-COLOUR. • BY MINA LOY



1



ADULT OR INFANTILE CENSORSHIP?
BY ERNEST BOYD
W
HEN the censorship of art and literature is discussed in
this country the question is usually presented in the form
of a dilemma, the God-fearing taxpayer being invited to contem-
plate the horrors of a state of society unprotected by the eternal
vigilance of such organizations as the New York Society for the
Suppression of Vice. As the documents published in connection
with the Jurgen case show, there are people who, while reluctant
to endorse certain specific activities of these moral gladiators, are
equally unwilling to urge that this corps d'élite be disbanded.
They have some vague notion, apparently, that the alternative is
the abandonment of this moral Republic to the wiles of pornog-
raphers, and the insidious wickedness of intellectual immoralists.
It is in vain that one recalls the procedure in the no less virtuous
realm of England, where, without the assistance of these self-con-
stituted guardians of public morals, the arts are preserved from the
contamination of sin. It does not seem to occur to those concerned
in this censorship debate that, since the law of the land covers the
offence of indecency, the natural procedure would be to rely upon
the properly constituted authorities to see that no offence is com-
mitted. Once the anarchical system is permitted, whereby unqual-
ified private persons arrogate to themselves the right to undertake
the duties of the State, to see to the enforcement of the laws, then
there need be no limit to this species of lynching party. Why not
a special organization for every possible offence against the laws
of the United States? This would provide immense scope for the
modern witch-burners.
There can be little doubt that, if the professional vice expert
were eliminated, the coercion and intimidation of literature in
America would be appreciably lessened. The “smuthound,” like
the spy and the agent provocateur, has to justify his existence by
results; he cannot face his employer empty-handed. Hence the
attack on Jurgen and, more recently, upon The Little Review.
Few people will seriously contend that these cases would have ex-


382 ADULT OR INFANTILE CENSORSHIP?
isted, had the literature in question been left to take its chance
with the general public. Neither James Branch Cabell nor James
Joyce is a writer whose work could be regarded as constituting a
public scandal of the kind which might be expected to fall within
the intentions of the law. In both instances the offence had to be
ferreted out by the smuthounds, whose noses are so much more
sensitive than those of the disinterested majority, which is supposed
to be injured by the mere existence of such works as Ulysses and
Jurgen. The fact that almost invariably suppressions are made at
the instigation of organized vice crusaders, and rarely as the result
of the normal interference of the law, is significant. La pudeur
anglaise is so notorious all over the world that it is hardly necessary
to prove that English literature is as inhumanly virtuous as the
most race-conscigus Anglo-Saxon could desire. Yet, with the
single exception of D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow, no work of
any importance has come into conflict with British law during a
period which has seen the suppression in America of a very consid-
erable number of books. Since there can be no question of greater
laxity in England, it must be obvious that the ordinary operation of
the law, in the hands of the rightful authorities, is sufficient to safe-
guard the standards of decency upon which the mass of public
sentiment is agreed.
Criticism of the censorship in America and in England has
usually taken the common form of a general indictment of the sys-
tem, as if it ere the same in the two countries. Whereas here a
special and definite aspect of the problem is provided by the im-
punity with which irresponsible groups of self-determined moral-
ists usurp the functions elsewhere reserved to the community as a
whole. The first step towards freedom should, therefore, be in
the direction of a frank challenge to the very existence of these
organizations. With characteristically ungrammatical barbarism,
Comstock expressed his aim as being “MORALS, not Art or [sic]
Literature,” but in the society of civilized men all three are im-
portant, and this puerile differentiation is in itself sufficient to dis-
qualify an association with such an aim from being heard on this
issue of morality and art. The question to be considered is not
whether there should or should not be a censorship, but whether,
admitting its existence, the censorship shall be exercised by the
adult or the infantile mind, by the aesthetically illiterate, or by



ERNEST BOYD
383
the educated? Just as the timorous puritans imagine that there
is no alternative to repression but licence, so their opponents con-
stantly argue as if the countries where art and literature are eman-
cipated from the morbid restraints of puritanism were all happily
innocent of censorship. France is probably the country most fre-
quently cited by both parties to the discussion. The mere ad-
jective "French” is enough to provoke the most obscene ideas in
every self-respecting Anglo-Saxon puritan. To his enemies it is
symbolic of all the freedom for which they vainly sigh. French
literature, however, has had to fight hard to preserve its indepen-
dence. When Kistemaeckers, the celebrated Belgian publisher,
was issuing the early work of such men as Maupassant, Huysmans,
Lucien Descaves, Camille Lemonnier, and Georges Eekhoud, the
French Republic was greatly perturbed by the immoral literature
from Brussels, and great efforts were made to keep these books out
of France. Even Casanova's Memoirs were prohibited.
This access of official prudery coincided, curiously, with the
domination of the Naturalistic school in French literature, but,
as the results show, it was powerless to effect that bowdlerization
which would certainly have followed repressive measures here.
Kistemaeckers was tried no less than eighteen times and was ac-
quitted by the jury on each occasion. In addition to these cases
heard in the lower courts, he appeared before the supreme court
on five criminal charges at different periods of his stormy career,
but was condemned only twice. On one occasion, when Louis
Desprez, the author of a Zolaesque novel, Autour d'un clocher, was
summoned in Paris for the inevitable “outrage aux bonnes moeurs,”
Kistemaeckers refused to plead Belgian citizenship to escape the
jurisdiction of the court. As a matter of literary principle he de-
cided to stand by his author, and he had a memorandum drawn up
and signed by six of the most distinguished men at the Belgian bar.
An édition de luxe, on hand-made paper, was printed, of which
copies were presented to the judges and to each member of the
jury. In spite of these amenities he had to pay a heavy fine, while
the author was sent to jail for one month and fined one thousand
francs. Clemenceau, Zola, Daudet, and Goncourt made vain ef-
forts to have this sentence commuted, but the authorities confined
Desprez "with the common thieves," as Zola reports, and after his
release he died of the hardships to which he had been exposed.



384
ADULT OR INFANTILE CENSORSHIP?
The classical case in modern French literature, of course, is the
indictment of Flaubert's Madame Bovary in 1857. This trial is
worth a brief examination, because of the light it throws on the
history of such publishers as Kistemaeckers, who was the victim,
in the 'eighties, of similar prosecutions. The case for the prosecu-
tion differs in no way from the methods employed to-day. There
is the usual charge of lewdness, blasphemy, and lasciviousness,
based upon the reading of excerpts, although, to do the prosecutor
justice, he has the elementary honesty to confess at the start that
isolated passages are hardly a fair test of a whole work, and that
the expression, “offensive to religion and public morals” is rather
“vague and elastic.” He proceeds, however, on the convenient
assumption that the reading of the whole of Madame Bovary is
out of the question. The defence is more interesting, for it par-
ticularly illustrates the advantage of entrusting the discussion of a
work of literature to people capable of understanding all that is at
stake. Flaubert's lawyer at once raises the case to the level of a
debate amongst cultured people. He not only analyses the inten-
tion of the book, but he insists upon its being examined, not as if
it were a dirty postal card, but as a part of a literature which has
been endowed with certain rights and privileges. He is not obliged
to explain elementary words to the judges, and to hear allusions in
the approved smoke-room manner to the underclothing of Emma
Bovary, although the scenes in which she undresses are so frequently
the point of the prosecution's attack. The result is a judgement
which has a peculiar dignity in the light of the recent decision
against The Little Review:
“Whereas the work of which Flaubert is the author is one which
has been long and carefully prepared, as a piece of literature and a
study of character; the passages cited by the prosecution, though
reprehensible, are few in number when compared with the extent
of the whole work.
Whereas the book does not appear,
like some, to have been written for the sole purpose of satisfying
sensual desires, and the spirit of licence and debauch, or to bring
into ridicule things deserving of general respect
..
“The court therefore acquits the prisoners of the charges brought
against them.”


ERNEST BOYD
385
1
It is impossible to study the documents in this Flaubert trial
without concluding that the ineffable buffoonery and low phil-
istinism of similar trials in America are not necessarily a part of
the censorship of literature. This business can be carried out in a
civilized or an uncivilized manner, and when the former is the
case, the result, as experience in France has shown, is usually to the
advantage of the artist. So long as the initiative in these matters
is vested in professional puritans the censorship will be the ex-
pression of the infantile, undeveloped mind. Where the French
author is strong is in the consciousness that he is not at the mercy
of literary lynching parties, and that his indictment must come at
the instance of responsible public officials, against whom he can
count for support on enlightened opinion and the active good will
of his colleagues. While American literature remains unorganized
against its enemies American writers will never be able to fix upon
their censors the responsibility of adults. The abolition of lynch
law in the arts is the condition precedent of ultimate freedom
within the law.


384 ADULT OR INFANTILE CENSORSHIP?
གཉིས་ཀྱི་པ
The classical case in modern French literature, of course, is the
indictment of Flaubert's Madame Bovary in 1857. This trial is
worth a brief examination, because of the light it throws on the
history of such publishers as Kistemaeckers, who was the victim,
in the 'eighties, of similar prosecutions. The case for the prosecu-
tion differs in no way from the methods employed to-day. There
is the usual charge of lewdness, blasphemy, and lasciviousness,
based upon the reading of excerpts, although, to do the prosecutor
justice, he has the elementary honesty to confess at the start that
isolated passages are hardly a fair test of a whole work, and that
the expression, "offensive to religion and public morals” is rather
"vague and elastic.” He proceeds, however, on the convenient
assumption that the reading of the whole of Madame Bovary is
out of the question. The defence is more interesting, for it par-
ticularly illustrates the advantage of entrusting the discussion of a
work of literature to people capable of understanding all that is at
stake. Flaubert's lawyer at once raises the case to the level of a
debate amongst cultured people. He not only analyses the inten-
tion of the book, but he insists upon its being examined, not as if
it were a dirty postal card, but as a part of a literature which has
been endowed with certain rights and privileges. He is not obliged
to explain elementary words to the judges, and to hear allusions in
the approved smoke-room manner to the underclothing of Emma
Bovary, although the scenes in which she undresses are so frequently
the point of the prosecution's attack. The result is a judgement
which has a peculiar dignity in the light of the recent decision
against The Little Review:
.
"Whereas the work of which Flaubert is the author is one which
has been long and carefully prepared, as a piece of literature and a
study of character; the passages cited by the prosecution, though
reprehensible, are few in number when compared with the extent
of the whole work.
Whereas the book does not appear,
like some, to have been written for the sole purpose of satisfying
sensual desires, and the spirit of licence and debauch, or to bring
into ridicule things deserving of general respect.
“The court therefore acquits the prisoners of the charges brought
against them.”



ERNEST BOYD
385
It is impossible to study the documents in this Flaubert trial
without concluding that the ineffable buffoonery and low phil-
istinism of similar trials in America are not necessarily a part of
the censorship of literature. This business can be carried out in a
civilized or an uncivilized manner, and when the former is the
case, the result, as experience in France has shown, is usually to the
advantage of the artist. So long as the initiative in these matters
is vested in professional puritans the censorship will be the ex-
pression of the infantile, undeveloped mind. Where the French
author is strong is in the consciousness that he is not at the mercy
of literary lynching parties, and that his indictment must come at
the instance of responsible public officials, against whom he can
count for support on enlightened opinion and the active good will
of his colleagues. While American literature remains unorganized
against its enemies American writers will never be able to fix upon
their censors the responsibility of adults. The abolition of lynch
law in the arts is the condition precedent of ultimate freedom
within the law.


THE LITTLE MASTER OF THE SKY
BY MANUEL KOMROFF
EF
VEN idiots it seems have their place and purpose in society,
or as a chess player would say tapping his fingers on the
board—“That pawn may cost you your queen.
The little vil-
lage of M— only realized this after it was too late.
The police of M— all knew that Peter, a half-wit, or “Silly
Peter” as he was called, was perfectly harmless; even though at
times he would litter the streets and market-place with bread
crumbs. But the pigeons of M— soon cleared the walks.
Peter, it seems, had at an early age dedicated his silly life to
the pigeons. All his cares and sorrows were bound up in the lives
of the birds. In fact it seemed as though he himself became bird-
like. He could flap his arms to his sides and produce that same
dull, penetrating note that was given only to this particular species
of bird when they flapped their wings.
At an early age he was left without parents and managed to
grow up among the horses and cows in the barns. But these larger
animals were entirely out of his sphere—he did not understand
them.
One day when the lad was about seven years old, the village
folks suddenly noticed that he was lame. When asked about it,
all he would reply was: “The pigeons made me lame.”
Luba, a farmer's fat cook, once told at the market-place how
Peter became lame. She told of how the boy stood on the roof of
her master's barn flapping his arms in imitation of the birds en-
circling his head; how he sprang in the air in a mad attempt to
fly, and fell to the ground. But Luba had a reputation for being
a liar, and none believed her although all enjoyed listening. “Such
good imagination,” they would say, after she was gone.
Peter grew up a little lame, but this defect seemed only to add
to his nimbleness. He could climb a telegraph pole sideways like
a parrot walking up a stick. Once on top he would swing his good
leg around the cross beam and wave his hat--and from below a
flight of flapping and fluttering birds would arise.



MANUEL KOMROFF
387
In this way he lived and grew to the age of sixteen, although
his small, protruding bones and round, child-like eyes kept him
looking younger. Where he slept and where he ate, all remained
a mystery to the village folk; but this mystery was not near as
great as another..
The schoolmaster once noticed that at times the pigeons seemed
all grey, and at other times the greater number of them carried
large pink breasts; also at times there were few, while on other
days the streets and market-place were thickly dotted with nod-
ding, pecking birds; also that never could they find the very young
ones.
It seemed as though only Peter knew the secret—but when
asked about it he would show a silly grin and shy away, pretend-
ing to be much occupied chasing the birds that ever flocked about
him.
He would travel about from barn to barn collecting the feed
that fell from the bins of careless animals. He would sometimes
travel along the back yards, twist his mouth and call to nobody
in particular: “A few crumbs for the birdies, lady?" And pres-
ently through an open window a crust would fly, and with this
buried in his hat he would be off.
Only among the poor would he hobble about. He never ven-
tured up the hill where the better people lived; and it is perhaps
for this reason that he was seldom disturbed.
To himself Silly Peter was monarch of the air. In his own
distorted mind he was master of all creatures that flew. Worldly
cares he left to those who had inherited worldly material; as for
himself, he was concerned only with the aerial strata and with
the feathery creatures thereof. Nobody wanted it; so he acquired
it as he acquired the cast-off hat that he wore. He fathomed it,
tasted it, drank it, navigated his creatures through it, and even
fanned life into it by fapping his bony arms.
He understood the air and the sky, and it all belonged to him.
Every atom of sky that poured itself over the village of M-
belonged to Silly Peter. It seemed as though he purposely limped
lightly over the ground that was foreign to his nature; for he was
captain and master of the sky.


388
THE LITTLE MASTER OF THE SKY
II
.
“We must first loosen the ground,” said a petty officer. “If the
soil is too hard, then the action will drag. And quick action and
a brisk finish always make for a better picture.
"Hey, you !" commanded the Captain. "Go get another shovel
and help dig."
While two soldiers stood digging in a rectangular plot in the
market-place, the camera-men had set up and were adjusting a
motion picture apparatus. Twenty-five feet away stood six sol-
diers leaning on their rifles talking and laughing.
“Enough digging!" shouted the Captain. “Turn the loose earth
back into the pit.” The soldiers obeyed.
“Are you ready?” he said as he turned to the camera-men.
“All ready,” came the reply.
“Now," said the Captain winking maliciously to two of his
"You run around and pick me up a beggar.”
The soldiers started off, pushing their way through the sheep-
ish crowd and into a side-street. After walking a few hundred
paces one remarked to the other: “When you don't need them, a
hundred are upon you.
When you want them—the devil take
it.”
At last they came upon Silly Peter and decided that he would
men.
answer.
“Come along, boy; the Captain wants you,” they said, taking
hold of his arms.
“Let me go!” The boy struggled. “I did nothing."
"Come along, you fool!"
They brought Silly Peter to the square, placed him on the spot
that smelled fresh with upturned earth, placed a shovel in his
hands and told him to dig his grave.
When they stepped aside, the terrified boy could see the camera
before him and the six soldiers standing at attention a few paces
away. Already the clicking handles started turning.
“Dig!" shouted the Captain.
“I don't want a grave," whimpered the frightened creature as
several pigeons approached. “I don't want a grave,” as he turned
up the loose earth with trembling shovel-strokes. “I don't want
a grave,” and tears ran in trickling rivulets down his silly face.


MANUEL KOMROFF
389
Even an idiot could understand. At one side of him he was
confronted with death for no apparent reason at all. And on the
other side of him flew his pigeons.
Suddenly the signal was given; the six rifles were raised, and
a volley of blank cartridges shot at the boy. The frightened birds
flew into the air as the twisted frame of Silly Peter sank into the
soft, upturned earth.
When the smoke had cleared, a soldier came up and shouted:
"Hey fool! Get up!-You're not dead.” But the boy only sobbed,
with his face beside the shovel in the fresh earth.
The soldiers were dismissed, and the Captain climbed into his
carriage and drove away. The sheep-like inhabitants of the vil-
lage of M— feared to venture near the spot of military
maneuvre.
Presently an old farmer, driving his horse across the square,
stopped, lifted the boy, and said: “Don't cry, Peter. It is only a
little joke. See, you're not dead-here, pick up your hat. See all
the pigeons are around us—you're not dead.”
The boy seemed numb and twisted like the limb of a tree as
the old man following his horse helped him across the market-place
and through the lane.
“Don't be foolish, Peter. You're not dead. See the pigeons;
see the sky. Look, here is Luba-she will bring us soup.”
But the boy squinted at the sun through a film of tears and with
his one-sided mouth mumbled: “I don't want a grave.”
III
The Captain lit a cigarette as he leaned back in the carriage.
The horses snorted as they drew up the hill. “Why,” he asked
himself, "are people afraid of dying? For many, life can hold
little attraction, yet even an imbecile fears death as though it
were the devil himself. Yet each man nurses his own pet fears."
The carriage rocked from side to side as it climbed the hill,
and the Captain turned his mind to his young wife. “It's all
imagination; that's what I think,” he said to himself. "It's all
in her mind. Now she's afraid of this and afraid of that, and
in this way she worries herself ill.



390
THE LITTLE MASTER OF THE SKY
.
“And the doctor thinks he knows it all, but he knows nothing.
He should have given her iron,' she's too pale. Now we shall
have to call him again. It is all a trick that doctors have. Yes,
each man looks out for himself. But I will call him again and
say to him: 'Don't you think a little iron would be good for her,
she is so pale? And he will reply: ‘Yes, it can't harm.' But I
'
would have to say this to the doctor when he is putting on his coat
in the hallway so that Vera does not hear.
"No. Vera must not hear that I think her pale. It would worry
her and she might become worse. Then she would have to go to
bed again, the doctor would come again, and the servants would
do as they pleased. And Vera would grow worse and more nervous
and"
“Here we are!" called the coachman, and the Captain stepped
out upon his own lawn.
The house was built of stone, and although its architecture was
plain, it had the solidity of a castle. Even the vines that grew
up the lattice-work and walls seemed to intertwine their curly
branches into a living network that helped fortify the stone nest
a
of the Captain and his beautiful Vera.
The lovely creature was passing her hands lightly over the key-
board of the piano as the Captain entered.
“It is only I,” he called, but she was startled nevertheless.
“I am glad you came,” she said as she rose to meet him, and
placing her pale head on his decorated breast added—“I am afraid
to remain here alone.”
“But where are the servants, my
dear?"
“Oh, servants don't count.”
"Well, well, my darling," spoke the Captain, petting her. “You
have nothing to fear. It is all imagination.”
“But I am so nervous.”
“Come, my dear. Let's have tea and I will tell you a funny
story."
Presently they were seated at the table drinking tea, and the
Captain began his story.
"You know, my dear,” he said; "we are going to put an end to
all this foolish political talk and people's committees. Any beggar
forms a committee, and they do what they like. Civil authorities
and military authorities are all alike to them.”


MANUEL KOMROFF
391
"Oh, I am so afraid of beggars,” interrupted the beautiful Vera.
"Well, my dear; soon there will be nothing to be afraid of; a
propaganda council was organized at headquarters this morning,
and what do you think? This morning two men arrived with a
moving picture camera to take pictures of our orderly town, and in
the afternoon we took an object-lesson picture. I marched the sol-
diers into the square and we dug up a plot so that the earth might be
soft.
“Then we had a beggar dig his own grave as we took the pic-
ture. When he had dug enough, I gave the signal and the firing
squad drew up their rifles and blazed away.”
“Why did you kill him?"
“
“No, my dear; we only pretended to kill him. I myself was
careful to see that the leads were taken off the cartridges. But
you see we could not tell the beggar that he was not going to die
because we wanted to make the picture look realistic--he might
have run away in the middle and ruined the film.
“Well, my dear, to make a long story short, the fool beggar fell
into the pit, believing himself really killed. It will make a fine
picture. It will be shown in all the surrounding towns as an ob-
ject lesson, and before the picture itself appears on the screen it
will be entitled—I suggested it myself—it will read—This is
what happened to a fool who thought he could oppose the military
authorities, and then will be shown the picture of the beggar dig.
ging his own grave.
“It will be a great lesson and education to the people whose
heads have been turned. It will be sent all over the country and
.
if the results are favourable and it pleases headquarters who can
say,” at this point he clasped his wife's pale hand, “who can say
that I will not receive another decoration, or perhaps a promotion ?
Who can tell, my dear? Things move so quickly these days.”
In the evening as they were eating, Vera looked up from her
plate and spoke: "You know, if it happened to me, I think I should
die.”
“Don't talk nonsense,” replied the Captain angered by the idea.
“How could it happen to you?”
“Well, supposing the revolutionists took control, and then—"
"Supposing! Supposing the sky should fall,” he interrupted,
and smiled on his lovely and delicate Vera,


392
THE LITTLE MASTER OF THE SKY
IV
1
1
1
Silly Peter refused to eat the bowl of soup that Luba placed out
for him, but he went aloft in the barn and cried in his dull, monot-
onous tone: “I don't want a grave—I don't want a grave," until he
fell asleep.
Then over his simple, slumbering brain came a vision.
He saw himself standing on an elevated place and over him
rested the great ultramarine dome of sky. About him he could see
the horizon as though it were a white circle of foam.
Gradually this circle grew smaller and smaller and rose up like
a sparkling and living halo. As is came nearer, he discovered that
the circle was composed of hundreds of white doves.
Soon they were close over him encircling the elevation on which
he stood, and he could hear the wild beating of the wings as though
they were rolling a tattoo on muffled drums. Then suddenly the
circle broke, and rose like a puff of smoke against a sky of blue.
With startling rapidity it rose until it rent and perforated the
sky, and was lost from sight. Only a large oval opening of light-
grey nothingness remained overhead-a hole in the sky-an open-
ing to heaven.
Then from all quarters came a loud uproar; a thousand piercing,
whistling yells; a rackety, rumbling, rattling commotion mixed
with the beat and swish of wings. This was followed by an up-
ward rush which darkened the sky.
Peter saw himself standing like a monarch reviewing his nation
from an elevated platform. Around him flew the feathered tribes
of the air. From the fluttering starling to the giant albatross, all
were liberated and each paid homage to him—the master of the
sky-before they shot upward and through the oval opening
in the rent heaven. It was a grand and colourful sight to behold.
Finally they were all gone and he saw himself take a last look
about him as he stood alone on his elevation. He then craned his
neck and turned his face to the oval nothingness—flapped his
arms, and with a thrilling sensation flew heavenward. His body
went through the air a little side-ways—but it flew, and the rest
did not matter.
Poor Peter awoke to find himself in the loft of the barn among
his cages of pigeons, confronted with the sordidness of material


MANUEL KOMROFF
393
reality. He opened a small window and then flung open the
cages.
Through the night he limped from barn to barn, darting under
wagons, and between the legs of slumbering horses, opening doors,
boxes, and even barrels. He was liberating the imprisoned, full-
breasted creatures.
The little village of M— slept soundly as it was being flood-
ed with fluttering birds. Only the hyper-sensitive Vera was dis-
turbed by the monotonous beating of restless wings.
V
No longer was there any mystery regarding the pigeons. In the
morning the streets were covered with pink-breasted birds as well
as grey. Besides this, there were breeds and species of pigeons
that the villagers of M-- had never seen before. Wherever one
turned, one saw pigeons. They were on the ground and in the
sky, as well as upon the roofs. Their colours were mixed, and
their leaders were lost.
Silly Peter ran joyfully about the streets waving a little white
flag at the disorganized flying tribes, waving a white flag as though
it were a truce to the sky.
For some reason or other, an extra large number of birds took
refuge on the gable and chimney of the Captain's stone house on
the hill.
Late in the afternoon, as the charming Vera was playing at the
piano, a dark shadow crept over her page of music, and this was
accompanied by a scrambling noise from outside. As she turned
about, she could see through the corner of her eye a struggling
figure across the window, clambering on the vines. The body was
silhouetted against the sky.
One glance was sufficient—her throat let loose a piercing scream
as she ran from the room into the kitchen. “A man! A man is
climbing up the house-quick, send for the police!” she shouted
breathlessly to the servants.
Holding her throbbing temples with both hands, she waited
with the servants in the kitchen. Soon two policemen arrived,


394
THE LITTLE MASTER OF THE SKY
having been told that a robber had entered the house, but they
found nothing excepting Silly Peter on top of the roof, propped
against the chimney, waving his flag and signalling to his birds.
“He's harmless,” said the officer. “I can't make him como
“
down, madam. I'm a policeman, not a fireman.” And with this
they went away, leaving Vera with her servants and Peter with
his pigeons.
Presently the Captain came home, raved and shouted as he
swung his arms—but Peter sat with his back against the chimney,
making bubbles with his mouth and holding two new-born birds
close to his face in order that they might prick the bubbles with
their little soft beaks and drink.
“Come down from my house, you beggar!” But this did not
even frighten the birds that flocked about Silly Peter in ever-in-
creasing numbers.
At length he came into the house, and took a rifle from his case.
"Just wait till it grows dark,” he mumbled. But the lovely Vera
jumped from her chair and, with tears in her eyes, cried: “No!
No! God will see you. He will never forgive us. After all, what
harm does the boy do? He did not intend to frighten me, I am
sure. Put it away, my dear-God will never forgive us if you
don't."
Who could resist a pleading tear from lovely Vera? Surely
not the Captain
"You are right, my dear. He can do us no harm,” he finally
allowed.
At night there was a noise and commotion on the roof. Vera
awoke, but then all was silent again. A fearful silence hung over
the house, interrupted only by the heavy breathing of her devoted
soldier husband.
She remained awake until morning and was glad when she heard
the servants stir. Then thinking that a little music might be
restful, she dressed herself lightly and went down to the drawing
room, opened the piano, and finally opened the shutter. There
beneath her on the ground lay Peter, with his face up-dead. His
round, child-like eyes stared heavenward as his birds sat about in
mournful groups of twos and fours.
The unfortunate Vera again rushed into the kitchen and sent for
the police before she ran, terrified by the sight she had just be-


MANUEL KOMROFF
395
held, to awaken her husband. In about an hour, although it seemed
longer, the poor folk of the village arrived and carried the body
from the yard. Fat Luba insisted upon halting the procession long
enough so that she could kiss the white forehead of the little dead
master of the sky. A ring of pigeons swirled around the procession
as it marched down the hill.
VI
Vera nursed up a little fever for herself and was put to bed,
while Luba, the cook, stood in the market-place and with tears in
her eyes told everybody that the Captain killed her little Major
of the Birds—"and now nobody will look after them, and they will
make dirt everywhere. And people will have to move away. And
he is such a bad man to take the crumbs away from little doves.
And if he has any children, I wish them the best of everything for
they surely will be unfortunate.”
Marking the spot where Peter fell were two new-born birds
crushed beside the stone house on the hill. Through the air swung
a grand flight describing an oval in the sky. At each end of the
oval the pigeons beat their wings as they rounded the curve. With
mournful thuds they beat, as they circled over the old farmer's
house and again over the solid stone house on the hill.
All day they flapped a tattoo with their wings and beat their
sorrowful dead sounds into lovely Vera's ears. In the evening
the Captain sent for the doctor.
All night long the uncontrollable feathery tribes encircled the
town with their monotonous beating and swishing of wings.
The next day Vera grew worse, as Luba in the market place
kept insisting that the Captain killed her Little Master of the
Birds; until a committee of three workingmen took it upon them-
selves to investigate. They started for the hill, but stopped off
in order to induce the schoolmaster to join them.
The schoolmaster, however, did not allow himself to be dis-
turbed. He was playing chess with a friend, and kept tapping
the dull-sounding table with his fingers, and repeating in a
monotone: "If he disturbs that pawn, he may lose his queen.'
»



396
THE LITTLE MASTER OF THE SKY
As the committee went on to the hill, they were overtaken by
the doctor in his carriage. At last they arrived at the stone house
and found the doctor walking briskly up and down the drawing
room smoking a cigarette—he had not yet told the Captain.
Upstairs they could hear the Captain in Vera's darkened room,
kneel down beside the bed.
“Do you know, my darling,” he spoke. “I have never kept any-
thing from you—but the other day when I told you about the beg-
gar, I should have told you that he was—Are you listening, my
dear? I should have told you that he was the same boy—the poor
boy that lived with the pigeons.
"See; we have already been-are you listening, my dear? God
has already punished us—now you can get better and we will go
away from here. We will go to some quiet place.—Are you
listen-
ing, my dear? We will go to some—do you hear me, Vera? My
darling girl, don't sleep now. Tell me, what did the doctor say?
Wake up, Vera.”—But the hand of Death had already passed over
,
Vera.
The Little Master of the Sky didn't need a grave and didn't
But they dug one for him just the same, at the end
of the town. While his pigeons encircled the sky and swished
the air, the villagers straightened his twisted, little body and
slipped it into a narrow box, and lowered him down. The poor
folk gave him a little grave, but he doesn't need it for he never
,
-
want one.
uses it.




BY ROBERT EDMOND JONES
ACT V.
SCENE I.
MACBETH :



نم نم به دادا


STIEGLITZ
BY PAUL ROSENFELD
LFRED STIEGLITZ is of the company of the
great affirmers
of a sense of the significance of animate and inanimate things as
catholic as any which man has ever possessed. He is not only one
who, like the illuminated sage of the Hindus, “regards with equal
mind an illuminated, selfless Brahmin, a cow, an elephant, a dog,
and even an outcast who eats the flesh of dogs.” For the man
who out of the black box and the bath of chemicals produced these
cool dynamic prints, there seems to be scarcely anything, any ob-
ject, in all the world without high import, scarcely anything that is
not in some fashion related to himself. The humblest objects ap-
pear to be, for him, instinct with marvellous life. The dirt of an
unwashed window pane, a brick wall, a piece of tattered matting,
the worn shawls of immigrant women, horses steaming in the
smudged snow of a New York thoroughfare, feet bruised and de-
formed by long encasement in bad modern shoes, seem, for this
man who has shoved the nozzle of his camera so close to them, as
wonderful, as germane to his spirit, as the visage of a glorious
woman, the regard of ineffable love out of lucent unfathomable
eyes, the gesture of chaste and impassioned surrender. A foolish
Victorian parlour with a cast of the Venus de Milo in the corner
contains the universe as fully in his sight as do a pair of hands of
warmest ivory; a back yard hung with clothes-lines and cut by fire-
escapes as fully as the breast and torso of a woman. Indeed,
Stieglitz' rich shadowed prints, his surfaces of pearl and milk and
bronze, his black and platinum planes and segments of planes, are
built up by means of the forms of objects most often humdrum,
banal, common. He has found universal, found forming a related
design, the wheelrims and the sides of carts, sign-painted walls, the
storm-light of a feverish August afternoon in New York, rippling
lake-water and rain-drops, typewriters and paper packages and
pipes stuffed with burning tobacco, all sorts of common materials,
all sorts of rough clothing. He has felt the life of every portion



398
STIEGLITZ
of the body of women, based pictures not alone on faces and hands
and backs of heads, on feet naked and feet stockinged and shod, on
breasts and torsos, thighs and buttocks. He has based them on the
navel, the mons veneris, the armpits, the bones underneath the
skin of the neck and collar. He has brought the lens close to the
epidermis in order to photograph, and shown us the life of the
pores, of the hairs along the shin-bone, of the veining of the pulse
and the liquid moisture on the upper lip.
How clearly all these things sing for him, how chock-full of life
they are for him, how naturally they compose themselves for him
into a rounded work of art, that the quality of his prints attests.
There have never before been such photographs. Never before have
such completely organized surfaces, such robustly living and func-
tioning bodies, been born of the photographic processes. Out of
the forms and textures of the myriad humdrum objects, the myriad
confused objects attacked by the lens, there has been made an ex-
pression ideal as is music; an order as pure, as complete, as that
of Cézanne or of any of the great masters of the aesthetic pictural
organization. Some of the prints, no doubt, deserve to rank with
the work of the great masters of polyphonic music. Clothes-lines
and hands, white shirts and leafing trees, gutter and gallery of 291
set daintily with Brancusi sculptures, have all been taken into the
photographer and issued again, suffused utterly with his own law
and revelatory of it. There is no vagueness, no indecision in them.
.
Every particle of them is active. The entire chaos and pellmell
that rolls all time before our eyes, is issued out of Stieglitz defined,
related, firm; and expressive of the high significance of which he
has caught sight through them. A man is coiled, ineluctably,
within the white borders of these spotted, machine-
made objects.
The impalpable thing that is an individuality, speaks out of each
of them sonorously, simply, directly. Indeed, the prints of Stieg-
litz are among the very sensitive records of human existence. So
vivid and delicate are they that one wants to touch them. So
highly sensitized is the medium, so drenched with a personality,
that one feels present in the work the very natural forces which
have created man, and which he, in turn, is striving fitfully to
make part of his body. The prints are like the Chinese concerted
pieces in which one hears sing not only the human being, but the
animal kingdom and the mineral kingdom as well. Workers in


PAUL ROSENFELD
399
other media, it is possible, have produced objects greater in amount,
in volume, in passion. But it remains doubtful whether any one
has approached the dark wet quick of man more nearly than
Stieglitz. Neither the pigment of the Chinese nor the water-colour
of Cézanne, neither the orchestra of Debussy nor the dialogue of
Schnitzler, records more subtly, more delicately, the quality of the
life in a man, the movement always in progress within him. Be-
fore Stieglitz' work we are made to think perforce of the writing
of a needle sensitive to the spiritual gravity of a man, to the tem-
perature of his passion, the pressure of his blood, as the seismograph
is sensitive to the minute vibrations of the crust of the earth.
These forms recall not so much the picture-making of other times,
as they do highly complex mathematical and chemical formulae.
But the photographs of Stieglitz affirm life not only because they
declare the wonder and significance of myriad objects never before
felt to be lovely. They affirm it because they declare each of them
the majesty of the moment, the augustness of the here, the now.
They attest in clearest tones that life is present fully in every in-
stant of time; that the present contains both past and future; that
there is no instant of time not fully bound and related to every
other. For they themselves are but the record of moments. The
camera can record nothing else. It is able to "take” nothing but
the objects before it. For it, nothing exists save what is before the
lens, no moment save the moment when its shutter is opened to the
light. But each of the instants fixed by Stieglitz and his machine
have the weight of a sum of life. Stieglitz has caught many mo-
ments, some apparently the most fugitive, some apparently the
most trivial. He has caught fleeting facial expressions, sudden
twitching smiles, momentary flashes of anger and pain. He has
arrested apparently insignificant motions of the hands, motions of
hands sewing, gestures of hands poised fitfully on the breast, motions
of hands peeling apples. And in each of them, he has found a sym-
bol of himself. For he himself, so his works attest, has always been
willing to live every moment as though it were the last of his life,
the last left him to expend his precious vitality. He himself has
always been willing, in order to fix the instant, the object before
him, and to record all that lay between him and it, to pour out his
energy with gusto, with abandon. His life appears always to be
present at the surface of his body. All is squeezed out, nothing


400
STIEGLITZ
!
2
left; the aesthetic form of his pieces, their convexity, their grand
double movement, that of penetration into the background and that
of receding and hollowing and opening, their steady progress from
the lower edge of the print up toward the higher, demonstrate the
completeness of the release. So, out of the brief sudden smile or
fixation of the gaze, out of the restless play of the hands, Stieglitz
has made something that looks out over the ages, questioningly,
wistfully, pityingly. Out of a regard of weariness and kindness
and gentle chiding laughter, he has made a sort of epilogue to the
relations of women and men. Sphinxes look out over the world
again. Indeed, perhaps these arrested movements are nothing but
every woman speaking to every man.
Never, indeed, has there been such another affirmation of the
majesty of the moment. No doubt, such witness to the wonder of
the here, the now, was what the impressionist painters were striv-
ing to bear. But their instrument was not sufficiently swift, suffi-
ciently pliable; the momentary effects of light they wished to record
escaped them while they were busy analysing it. Their “impres-
sion” is usually a series of superimposed impressions. For such im-
mediate response, a machine of the nature of the camera was
required. And yet, with the exception of Stieglitz, not a one of
,
the photographers has used the camera to do what alone the pho-
tographer can do, fix the visual moments, register what lies between
himself and the object before his lens at a given moment of time.
All have been concerned not so much with the object, with the mo-
ment, as they have with the making of an “artistic photograph,
and so failed to use their instrument properly. They have not
been thinking so much of what it is they feel, as what it is Whistler
or Degas or Boecklin would have felt at such a moment, had Whist-
ler or Degas or Boecklin photographed in place of painting and
etching. They have been “looking before and after,” and pining for
what is not. They have been striving away from the moment to
the moments in the past in which the individuals who made certain
works of art, lived. What it is that has kept them from expressing
the here, the now, is perhaps nothing other than the unwillingness
to accept fully the pain of existence, to embrace voluntarily the
suffering of life. For unless one consent in the suffering, there can
be no complete living of the present. There can be no complete
draining of the cup of the now by him who is unwilling to empty


PAUL ROSENFELD
401
1
it if perchance it contain hemlock in place of wine. There can
only be a vague floating to some otherwheres which perhaps never
existed, or will never exist. There can be no facing of what is
directly before one by him who is unwilling at every instant of his
life to look his fate fully in the eye, to dare to summon his entire
man, perhaps in vain, to solve the problem immediately before him.
Perhaps, indeed, the acceptance of the present is nothing else than
a resolution to be solitary, if need be, always; to suffer, if need be,
always; to accept a grim fate, if that be hidden in one's bowels.
We here in America have long since forgotten this simple and holy
truth, and it is well that this photographer, who knows it well,
comes with his platinum prints to remind us of it.
Had Stieglitz expressed himself through any of the accepted
media of art, instead of through photography, his affirmation could
not have been anything but a great one. But the fact that he has
used a machine, a complex modern mechanism, to record himself,
makes it one doubly so. For, in using the camera, he has demon-
strated the power of man. He has made the very machine dem-
onstrate the unmechanicalness of the human spirit. For a century,
the machines have been enslaving the race. For a century, they
have been impoverishing the experience of humanity. Like great
Frankenstein monsters, invented by the brain of human beings to
serve them, these vast creatures have suddenly turned on their
masters, and made them their prey. It is not so much the fact
that men have used these great implements in manufacturing that
has manacled them, as the fact that the mass production permitted
by the use of arms of steel has succeeded in mechanizing human life.
The lazy human being, always on the qui vive for some method of
saving himself the fatigue of brain work, discovered that whereas
it was even more difficult to make sensitive the hand of steel than
the hand of flesh, it was possible, without applying much brain-
power, to produce vast quantities of necessary and unnecessary
articles with the machine. The vast quantities of necessities, the
quickness of production, increased the population; the increase of
the population in turn increased the need of the establishment of
the criterion of quantity in place of that of quality. Then, how-
ever, the machine turned on its masters. It forced them to forgo
experience for the sake of repeating incessantly a few gestures; it
forced them to repeat their old experiences over and over; to numb



402
STIEGLITZ
their desire for improving themselves through improving their
crafts; to think principally of greater and cheaper production,
rather than of finer and more durable work. It caused them to
seek to root out of themselves all interest in experience, because
of the pain of relinquishing desire, were desire once to establish it-
self; it caused them to seek to regard objects only with the eyes of
commerce and industry, and not with those of the earth-loving,
nature-loving, green-and-growth-loving spirit. The machine should
have rendered more subtle, more conscious and powerful the human
brain; it succeeded, during the nineteenth century, in rendering it
more inert than ever. Instead of making free, it had reduced the
greater part of the community to doing work fit for morons.
Particularly in America had life become mechanized. The
pioneers had of bitter necessity surrendered all interest in experi-
ence, all desire for self-culture, all thinking that was not narrow or
utilitarian. The triumph of industrialism had further narrowed
life. The human being was repressed in America as he had not
been repressed in Europe for many centuries. The whole of society
was in conspiracy against itself, eager to separate body and soul,
to give the body completely over to the affairs of business while
leaving the soul straying aimlessly in the clouds. A sort of fury
of disdain for nature took hold of the whole of the community;
forests were ruthlessly devastated, waterfalls were drained of their
water, palisades blasted away. The will to be machines seemed
to fill all folk. The Book of Genesis was rewritten, and made to
declare "In the beginning, God created the heaverts, the earth, and
industrial competition.” In New York Harbour, on an island,
there was erected a statue intended originally to represent Com-
merce and Industry at the entrance to de Lesseps' Panama Canal.
With justice it was called the Statue of Liberty. For, in America,
the right of humanity to its life, to its experience, to liberty to
develop, to free play, was become its right to be born and to en-
gage, during the natural term of its existence, in commerce and in
industry. So completely had the machine suceeded in producing
here a sort of man as little individual as any which Western civili-
zation had seen for long, that America seemed in truth the greatest
of the many great disappointments of humanity.
And yet, it had been a future of another sort that the old world
had wished the new. It was a high dream, that the old lands


PAUL ROSENFELD
403
had called America. It had nursed a hope, the old world, of a
fresh sort of life for all men in the new. A race of individuals was
to appear on the other side of the Atlantic. For the first time,
loosed from the hierarchies and the concepts of the old world, the
human being was to become the freed man. Fair play to man and
all his faculties, right to his life and to his selfhood, right to experi-
ment, perfect freedom of soul-that, in the marvellous dream of
Europe, the new world was to secure each individual. Beings were
to be permitted to expand their natures in “numberless and even
conflicting directions.” Out of herds, out of political states, out
of races, out of all the categories of the past, there were to develop,
not Englishmen nor Germans, not Catholics nor Protestants, but
democratic men, each one an entity, a state, a race, each one polar-
ized, each one the possessed of his own religion, each one as jealous
of the individuality of his neighbour as of his own. Whitman,
announcing “the great individual, fluid as Nature, chaste, affection-
ate, compassionate, fully armed,” announcing "a life that shall be
copious, vehement, spiritual, bold,” announcing “myriads of youths
beautiful, gigantic, sweet-blooded,” and “race of splendid and sav-
age old men,” was merely uttering again the music that had swelled
the hearts of Europeans a century before him, as their eyes gazed
out over the Atlantic.
It is not at all strange, therefore, that the subjugation of the
complex modern mechanism should first have been accomplished
in the name of the human spirit by one who, like Stieglitz, was
born in the land most ravished by mechanical civilization. Here,
in America, the machine most boldly challenged to combat those
who believed in life, those fledged ready to welcome with open arms
experience. In America, it most tyrannously threatened to rob
them of their birthright. And there was always the promise of
the States made their young, made the men of every land, and re-
peated loudly and glibly in every one of their official proclama-
tions, to make all who were fully co-ordinated and ready to feel to
the utmost the hot life in them, savagely resentful of the state of
affairs. Especially was this true of one who, like Stieglitz, was
sprung of folk not long out of Europe. For the dream of a new
world on the west coast of the Atlantic was dreamed most passion-
ately just in revolutionary Europe, and the children of the vision-
aries were most predisposed to accept in earnest the words so glibly


402
STIEGLITZ
1
their desire for improving themselves through improving their
crafts; to think principally of greater and cheaper production,
rather than of finer and more durable work. It caused them to
seek to root out of themselves all interest in experience, because
of the pain of relinquishing desire, were desire once to establish it-
self; it caused them to seek to regard objects only with the eyes
of
commerce and industry, and not with those of the earth-loving,
nature-loving, green-and-growth-loving spirit. The machine should
have rendered more subtle, more conscious and powerful the human
brain; it succeeded, during the nineteenth century, in rendering it
more inert than ever. Instead of making free, it had reduced the
greater part of the community to doing work fit for morons.
Particularly in America had life become mechanized. The
pioneers had of bitter necessity surrendered all interest in experi-
ence, all desire for self-culture, all thinking that was not narrow or
utilitarian. The triumph of industrialism had further narrowed
life. The human being was repressed in America as he had not
been repressed in Europe for many centuries. The whole of society
.
was in conspiracy against itself, eager to separate body and soul,
to give the body completely over to the affairs of business while
leaving the soul straying aimlessly in the clouds. A sort of fury
of disdain for nature took hold of the whole of the community;
forests were ruthlessly devastated, waterfalls were drained of their
water, palisades blasted away. The will to be machines seemed
to fill all folk. The Book of Genesis was rewritten, and made to
declare "In the beginning, God created the heavents, the earth, and
industrial competition.” In New York Harbour, on an island,
there was erected a statue intended originally to represent Com-
merce and Industry at the entrance to de Lesseps' Panama Canal.
With justice it was called the Statue of Liberty. For, in America,
the right of humanity to its life, to its experience, to liberty to
develop, to free play, was become its right to be born and to en-
gage, during the natural term of its existence, in commerce and in
industry. So completely had the machine suceeded in producing
here a sort of man as little individual as any which Western civili-
zation had seen for long, that America seemed in truth the greatest
of the many great disappointments of humanity.
And yet, it had been a future of another sort that the old world
had wished the new. It was a high dream, that the old lands
1
;


PAUL ROSENFELD
403
had called America. It had nursed a hope, the old world, of a
fresh sort of life for all men in the new. A race of individuals was
to appear on the other side of the Atlantic. For the first time,
loosed from the hierarchies and the concepts of the old world, the
human being was to become the freed man. Fair play to man and
all his faculties, right to his life and to his selfhood, right to experi-
ment, perfect freedom of soul—that, in the marvellous dream of
Europe, the new world was to secure each individual. Beings were
to be permitted to expand their natures in "numberless and even
conflicting directions.” Out of herds, out of political states, out
of races, out of all the categories of the past, there were to develop,
not Englishmen nor Germans, not Catholics nor Protestants, but
democratic men, each one an entity, a state, a race, each one polar-
ized, each one the possessed of his own religion, each one as jealous
of the individuality of his neighbour as of his own. Whitman,
announcing "the great individual, fuid as Nature, chaste, affection-
"
ate, compassionate, fully armed,” announcing "a life that shall be
copious, vehement, spiritual, bold,” announcing “myriads of youths
beautiful, gigantic, sweet-blooded," and "race of splendid and sav-
age old men,” was merely uttering again the music that had swelled
the hearts of Europeans a century before him, as their eyes gazed
out over the Atlantic.
It is not at all strange, therefore, that the subjugation of the
complex modern mechanism should first have been accomplished
in the name of the human spirit by one who, like Stieglitz, was
born in the land most ravished by mechanical civilization. Here,
in America, the machine most boldly challenged to combat those
who believed in life, those fledged ready to welcome with open arms
experience. In America, it most tyrannously threatened to rob
them of their birthright. And there was always the promise of
the States made their young, made the men of every land, and re-
peated loudly and glibly in every one of their official proclama-
tions, to make all who were fully co-ordinated and ready to feel to
the utmost the hot life in them, savagely resentful of the state of
affairs. Especially was this true of one who, like Stieglitz, was
sprung of folk not long out of Europe. For the dream of a new
world on the west coast of the Atlantic was dreamed most passion-
ately just in revolutionary Europe, and the children of the vision-
aries were most predisposed to accept in earnest the words so glibly


404
STIEGLITZ
and loudly uttered by official America. To be sure, the directest
fashion of forcing America to make good its lightly proffered
promises would have been capturing the new manufacturing imple-
ments of humanity, and using them to free instead of further to
enslave the brain. There can be no doubt that, had any sort of
success in utilizing industrial machinery in order to set free society
lain open to the single solitary individual, it would have been in
the world of manufacture that a man of the sort of Stieglitz, little
mechanical in his body, would have found himself. He had an
undoubted flair for machinery; before discovering the camera, he
went to Berlin and inscribed himself at the Polytechnik as a stu-
dent of mechanical engineering. Indeed, for a while, he did ven-
ture into the market-place of New York as head of a business
concern which used photo-mechanical processes. But he found it
impossible to make headway against “down-town” morals.
But in the camera, Stieglitz found his instrument. In the
camera, he found the means to the solution of his conflict. Up to
the moment he had discovered it as a student in the Polytechnik
in Berlin, he had been unorientated. Supposed to be studying
mechanical engineering, he had, in fact, spent most of his time
playing billiards, practising piano, and standing through perform-
ances at the opera. But once acquainted with that mechanism, his
will quickly formed. Why it did so, that he was far from guess-
ing at the time. But there can be no doubt that he had half-
consciously realized that, by using the camera to express himself,
he could meet his environment on its terms, and at the same time,
on his own. Here was one of the complex modern mechanisms into
the making of the like of which so much Yankee shrewdness had
been poured. But here, at the same time, was an instrument, still
resistant of man, for neither Hill nor Mrs Cameron had begun to
explore the photographic medium, which could be made to do by
a single solitary individual what industrial machinery could not.
The camera could affirm the human values which America had so
gravely promised to foster. The camera, so the young polytech-
nician with the American flag in his pocket must dimly have sur-
mised, could give him what the legend of America had promised
him and what the industrialism of America had denied him. Per-
haps a predilection for black helped attract him to photography.
But chief of all incentives to use it, must assuredly have been the
:
!


PAUL ROSENFELD
40.5
knowledge that the camera would permit him to rejoice with the
world in its new arms and hands and feet and eyes, and yet permit
him to experience life, to develop his own latent strength and
vision.
What Stieglitz began doing with the camera immediately he be-
came interested in it, was precisely what the folk of the industrial
world of America were failing to do with their implements. He
began attempting to make it a part of his living, changing, growing
body. They were seeking, whether or not they were aware of the
fact, to make themselves like the dead mechanism. He began
making the act of photography an experience. He had no theories
of his art; he did not even know whether it was art that he was
setting about creating. He had only a curious intuition of what
the black box and solarization and developers and printing paper
might be made to do; above all, a savage desire to make the re-
bellious machine record what he felt, to make the resistant dead
eye of the camera register that which his animal eye perceived.
The machine people were content to repeat ad infinitum the achieve-
ment of the machine; Stieglitz began boldly attacking the prob-
lems of plastic representation, convinced that he could in some way
learn to make his instrument obey his wishes. Every one of his
photographs, one can say with assurance, is an experiment. There
is no repetition of past experience in them. They contain, of
course, restatements of much that had already been stated by men.
But they each of them are the result of a complete summoning of
all the strength and science gained through past experience, for the
sake of solving the problem immediately before the photographer.
They are the results of complete re-considerations of what exposure,
developing, paper can do to solve a problem. The prints them-
selves are sometimes the results of fifty, of one or even two hundred
attempts at printing satisfactorily. Each of them is a daring cast
into the future; a daring attempt to discover new land for the
human soul. Each one, is the attempt to further sensitize the
medium; to make it include more and more of life in its scope.
And in liberating the medium, Stieglitz managed to liberate him-
self. The earliest of his photographs, it is true, have aesthetic
form; it is surprising to what an extent the photographer, entirely
unconscious, at the time, of the laws of plastic representation, man-
aged to make his prints three-dimensional, to interweave fore-


406
STIEGLITZ
ground and background. But, as time passed, Stieglitz managed
to press more and more power into his work without sacrificing its
purity, to get greater and greater amounts out of line and form.
More and more massive become the shadowed squares and oblongs.
More and more weight he pressed into the forms, till in some of
them we seem to feel the pressure of the whole weight of a man.
Menhirs and monoliths design themselves clearly within the white
mats; great coils of life lie brazen and terrible upon the walls.
Some of the prints are like sculpture. Some recall flesh-polished
ivory; others satin; others copper and silversmith work. Breasts
and arms become like pieces of primitive sculpture, simple and
gigantic. A head is heavy as a cannon-ball. Lines are elegant
and sinuous as Ingres'; dramatic and vehement as Ingres' never are.
Great simple rhythms co-ordinate the parts of the picture. In some
of the later examples of his work, Stieglitz has achieved a sort
of plastic polyphony; a counterpoint of great masses. A human
force plays at ease within these limits; a man has been fully regis-
tered by a new art.
Not only what the industrial machinery was deemed incapable
of doing, but what had hitherto, because it was thought only the
human hand could move so finely, been given only the old rudiment-
ary instruments, pencil and chisel and brush, to do that, so the mast-
ery of Stieglitz definitely proves, can be done quite as well by the in-
struments that require only at intervals the application of the hand.
The objects that, thanks to the liberality of Mr Mitchell Ken-
nerly, hung before one at the Anderson Galleries, during the two
weeks in February last, when some hundred and forty-five of his
prints were exhibited, machine-made though they were, were an
expression of life the like of which has scarcely before been made
in America. Save for Whitman, there has been amongst us no
native-born artist equal to this photographer. Indeed, it was a
sort of Yankee Comédie Humaine that was crowded against the
walls of the two rooms. Here, as scarcely ever before, one saw the
quality of life in America as it has been lived during the last forty
years. It is a record full of tragedy, full of suffering and defeat,
and yet, marvellously and beautifully free of resentment, of bitter-
,
ness, of egotism. An individual life has been used in making it,
and yet has been used in the most selfless fashion. Only the hu-
man spirit speaks in this utterance; it lays before the eyes of all
men facts arrived at with almost scientific objectivity, speaks as
1
1
1


PAUL ROSENFELD
407
though it were all men speaking to all men. And through it we
see—not Stieglitz, but America, New York, ourselves. After a
short prelude, a European prelude with happy gentle children
standing by the sides of old houses, sturdy peasants labouring in
harvest fields amid golden grain, the pure snow-crags of the Swiss
mountains, the curtain rises upon New York. There are people
aplenty in the photographs taken by Stieglitz during his joyous
Wanderjahre abroad. But the photographs of New York are well-
nigh empty of human beings. If people appear in them at all,
they are separated terribly from the photographer. A glittering
hard white bridge thrusts back the nose-picking men and ape-
mothers of The Steerage; the folk crowded in the yawning mouth
of the ferry-boat are separated from the foreground by an abyss
of water. Once in a while some simple workman, a street-cleaner,
a horse-car driver, a teamster, is included. But generally, it is an
inhuman world that is shown us. Stone-work vaults ambitiously
'gainst heaven, steam shoots forth white and shrill; far across a
waste of water, a line of fairy towers design themselves against the
sky; a lonely night stretches away blue and cold through the trees
of snowy Central Park; a sapling tree stands tenuous and feeble
in the drizzly light of April on Fifth Avenue. Where man should
have been, there are only locomotives belching columns of filthy
smoke, steel rails cutting sharply through the murk and smoky
air, the heavy piles of giant office buildings, the hard glitter of lit
uncurtained office windows in the cold night. All life is ambitious,
vaulting, hard.
People come into the photographs. The series of portraits be-
gins; for during the years of the little gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue,
something of what was human in New York began to take definite
form. There were a few individuals, a few individuals fighting
desperately for their lives. But what the photographs of the city
piles and railway yards revealed, is repeated, as in another key, in
the portraits of the group of workers that centered in 291. Men
these are, but men strangely tied, strangely contorted. They seem
a new sort of fish peering through aquarium walls of glass. One,
his neck wrapped in a muffler that is like a vice, gazes out of his
shell in fright and in hopeless straining to be loosed. Another, a
ghastly Greco whiteness on his shirt, sits in a chair as if that chair
were the electric executor in the death-house at Sing-Sing. An-
other, a sort of young Albrecht Dürer, slumps dejectedly; still an-


408
STIEGLITZ
ܘܒܳܚܚܤܛܬܪܝܼ
1. A
other peeps timidly and elfishly out of a silvery murk. Others
seem pressed in upon themselves by black weights, sit folded up in
themselves, hold up their heads into a white aureole of mad con-
ceit, stand minuscule amid a debris of pictures, shoulder their ways
a
ruthlessly and uncouthly, appear on the point of coming to pieces
and drifting away into nowhere. Only one, a negro, gazes out in
warm, unselfish devotion.
Once again, in still another key, perhaps in its most essential
form, the same motif is repeated. The third great group of
Stieglitz's photographs is chiefly the portrait of a woman, for what
goes on in the outer world is active in its most naked form in the
relation of the sexes, and what lies between men and women from
moment to moment eventually comes to pass in mundane affairs.
Here, symbolized by the head and body of a woman, herself a pure
and high expression of the human spirit, there is registered some-
thing of what human spirit, there is registered something of what
human life was, not only in America, but all over the globe, during
the last few years; perhaps, also, something of what human life al-
ways is. Sometimes, it is a tree, a noble, dying chestnut, or a little
apple tree standing pearled with raindrops in autumn wind-stillness
and not a head or pair of hands or torso, that is used in these in-
finitely poignant, infinitely tragic, expressions. But, whatever it is,
woman or tree, it makes surge in us the same flood of wonderful and
sorrowful emotion, the same tragic recognition. Feet are worn
and crucified; hands stretch suffocatingly to the light falling
through a window as aquatic plants waver to the surface of the
water; a woman, pitiful resignation in her face, holds up her two
hands in the effort to sustain life pure and intact, holds them up as
though she would forgo all the world, give up all joy, all reward,
if only it be granted her to keep ever fresh in her the sense of the
wonder and of the tragedy of existence. A torso, the hip-bone a
point of suffering, stretches itself in a parched and arid land; itself
an Arizona, a waterless, verdureless, clime. A palm lies open,
candid and generous, there is no concealment. A magnificent chest-
nut, a great powerful trunk of life, seared and gnarled, holds aloft
its dying branches. Pain coils a human being in its brazen hell,
as an arm coils about a recumbent form. Sorrowful and knowing
eyes gaze out; the navel is a centre of anguish, the point of an
anguish that eats away the life within; a human being at bay flares


PAUL ROSENFELD
409
can see.
up like a lioness threatened; breasts hang tired and sensitive, sore
from too much pain. A tiny phallic statuette weeps; is bowed over
itself in weeping; while behind, like watered silk, there waves the
sunlight of creation. A naked body, white cloths draping the
arms, stands ecstatic in the window-light, greeting the light no man
Is it the call to death the releaser? Is it the piercing cry
of the human being for the life of its soul? We cannot tell.
And in ourselves, too, confronted by these noble monuments,
there surges a great yea-saying to life. We, too, before the works
of this man who has included things great and small in his sym-
pathy, who has accepted so freely his own moment, his own life, the
pain as well as the beauty, of the world; we, too, find the will to
accept to the utmost the present, even though it be the present of
a turmoiled world, a raw America, to see what there is directly in
front of us, to express ourselves in terms of our own time, to live
in our own careers. It is not alone the fact that he has expressed
us, and so communicated the impulse to create, that moves us so.
The deep sense of inevitable inferiority that is entrenched so
strongly in us all cannot remain where these things are. The con-
viction that the world is old, that man will remain always the
slave of the machine, that America is foredoomed a blasted heath, a
barren soil out of which no straight and robust and lofty form of
life can grow; the conviction which appears to have been born in us
all and which helps hold all of us back from building ourselves out,
is seen, through these photographs, a stratagem of the sluggish hu-
man blood. Were there no other proof, these cool prints unaided
would bear witness that the world is young; that the world is ever
able to permit life to cease being mediocre, and to erect itself
upon
its surface in grand and high and tragic form. Were there no other,
here would be proof abounding that America, or, for that matter,
Kamchatka or Patagonia, can nourish the high and sober and
serene arts of life richly, if only there are men present with a will
to develop them. These photographs are the justification of to-
day. It appears indeed as though Alfred Stieglitz, in setting him-
self free from the restless flux of mediocrity and chaos, and lifting
himself to tragic heights, had provided a perennial means by which
all others of his time, who so desire, can help free themselves for
the life of the spirit, the life of art.


.
1
THE APOSTOLIC BEASTS
BY D. H. LAWRENCE
SAINT MARK
There was a lion in Judah
Which whelped, and was Mark.
But winged-
A lion with wings-
At least at Venice,
Even as late as Daniele Manin.
Why should he have wings?
Is he to be a bird also?
Or a spirit?
Or a winged thought?
Or a soaring consciousness?
а
Evidently he is all that,
The lion of the spirit.
Ah, Lamb of God,
Would a wingless lion lie down before Thee, as this winged lion
lies?
The lion of the spirit.
Once he lay in the mouth of a cave
And sunned his whiskers,
And lashed his tail slowly, slowly,
Thinking of voluptuousness,
Even of blood.
But later, in the sun of the afternoon,
Having tasted all there was to taste, and having slept his fill,


D. H. LAWRENCE
411
а
He fell to frowning, as he lay with his head on his paws
And the sun coming in through the narrowest fibril of a slit in his
eyes.
So, nine-tenths asleep, motionless, bored and statically angry,
He saw in a shaft of light a lamb on a pinnacle, balancing a flag
on its foot,
And he was thoroughly startled.
Going out to investigate,
He found the lamb beyond him, on the inaccessible pinnacle of
light.
So he put his paw to his nose and pondered.
"Guard my sheep,” came the silvery voice from the pinnacle,
“And I will give thee the wings of the morning.'
So the lion of the senses thought it was worth it.
Hence he became a curly sheep-dog with dangerous propensities,
As Carpaccio will tell you:
Ramping round, guarding the flock of mankind,
Sharpening his teeth on the wolves,
Ramping up through the air like a kestrel
And lashing his tail above the world
And enjoying the sensation of heaven and righteousness and
voluptuous wrath.
a
There is a new sweetness in his voluptuously licking his paw
Now that it is a weapon of heaven.
There is a new ecstasy in his roar of desirous love
Now that it sounds self-conscious through the unlimited sky.
He is well aware of himself,
And he cherishes voluptuous delights, and thinks about them,
And ceases to be a blood-thirsty king of beasts,
And becomes the faithful sheep-dog of the Shepherd, thinking of
his voluptuous pleasures of chasing the sheep to the fold,
And increasing the flock, and perhaps giving a real nip here and
there, a real pinch, but always well meant.
And somewhere there is a lioness,



412
THE APOSTOLIC BEASTS
The she-mate.
Whelps play between the paws of the lion,
The she-mate purrs;
Their castle is impregnable, their cave,
The sun comes in their lair, they are well-off,
A well-to-do family.
Then the proud lion stalks abroad, alone,
And roars to announce himself to the wolves
And also to encourage the red-cross Lamb
And also to ensure a goodly increase in the world.
Look at him, with his paw on the world,
At Venice and elsewhere.
Going blind at last.
SAINT LUKE
A wall, a bastion.
A living forehead with its slow whorl of hair
And a bull's large, sombre, glancing eye
And glistening, adhesive muzzle
With cavernous nostrils, where the winds run hot,
Snorting defiance
Or greedily snuffling behind the cows.
Horns,
The golden horns of power,
Power to kill, power to create,
Such as Moses had, and God.
Shall great wings flame from his shoulder sockets,
Assyrian-wise?
It would be no wonder.
Knowing the thunder of his heart,
The massive thunder of his dew-lapped chest,


D. H. LAWRENCE
413
Deep and reverberating,
It would be no wonder if great wings, like flame, fanned out from
the furnace-cracks of his shoulder-sockets.
Thud! Thud! Thud!
And the roar of black bulls' blood in the mighty passages of his
chest.
Ah, the dewlap swings pendulous with excess,
The great, roaring weight above
Like a furnace dripping a molten drip.
a
The urge, the massive, burning ache
Of the bull's breast;
The
open
furnace-doors of his nostrils.
For what does he ache and groan?
Is his breast a wall ?
Nay, once it was also a fortress wall, and the weight of a vast
battery;
But now it is a burning hearthstone only,
Massive old altar of his own burnt offering:
a
It was always an altar of burnt offering;
His own black blood poured out like a sheet of flame over his
fecundating herd
As he gave himself forth.
But also it was a fiery fortress frowning shaggily on the world
And announcing battle ready.
Since the Lamb bewitched him with that red-struck flag
His fortress is dismantled,
His fires of wrath are banked down,
His horns turn away from the enemy.
He serves the Son of Man.


414
THE APOSTOLIC BEASTS
And hear him bellow, after many years, the bull that serves the
Son of Man.
Moaning, booing, roaring hollow,
Constrained to pour forth all his fire down the narrow sluice of
procreation
Through such narrow loins, too narrow.
Is he not overcharged by the dammed-up pressure of his own
massive black blood,
Luke, the Bull, the father of substance, after two thousand years?
Is he not overfull of offering, a vast, vast offer of himself
Which must be poured through so small a vent?
Too small a vent.
Let him remember his horns, then.
Seal up his forehead once more to a bastion,
Let it know nothing.
Let him charge like a mighty catapult on the red-cross flag, let him
roar out challenge on the world,
And throwing himself upon it, throw off the madness of his blood;
Let it be war.
a
And so it is war.
SAINT JOHN
John, oh John,
Thou honorable bird,
Sun-peering eagle.
Taking a bird's-eye view
Even of Calvary and Resurrection,
Not to speak of Babylon's whoredom.
High over the mild effulgence of the dove,
Hung all the time, did we but know it, the all-knowing shadow


D. H. LAWRENCE
415
Of John's great gold-barred eagle.
John knew all about it,
Even the very beginning.
“In the beginning was the Word,
And the Word was God,
And the Word was with God."
Having been to school,
John knew the whole proposition.
As for innocent Jesus,
He was one of Nature's phenomena, no doubt.
Oh that mind-soaring eagle of an Evangelist,
Staring creation out of countenance
And telling it off
As an eagle staring down on the Sun!
The Logos, the Logos !
“In the beginning was the Word.”
Is there not a great Mind preordaining?
Does not a supreme Intellect ideally procreate the Universe?
Is not each soul a vivid thought in the great consciousness-stream
of God?
Put salt on his tail,
The sly bird of John.
Proud intellect, high-soaring Mind
Like a king eagle, bird of the most High, sweeping the ro
heaven
And casting the cycles of creation
On two wings, like a pair of compasses ;
Jesus' pale and lambent dove, cooing in the lower boughs
On sufferance.
In the beginning was the Word, of course;


416
THE APOSTOLIC BEASTS
And the Word was the first offspring of the almighty Johannine
mind,
Chick of the intellectual eagle.
Yet put salt on the tail of the Johannine bird,
Put salt on its tail,
John's eagle.
Shoo it down out of the empyrean
Of the all-seeing, all fore-ordaining ideal;
Make it roost on bird-spattered, rocky Patmos,
And let it moult there, among the stones of the bitter sea.
For the almighty eagle of the fore-ordaining Mind
Is looking rather shabby and island-bound these days;
Moulting, and rather nak'd about the rump, and down in the beak,
Rather dirty, on dung-whitened Patmos.
From which we are led to assume
That the old bird is weary and almost willing
That a new chick should chip the extensive shell
Of the mundane egg.
The poor old golden eagle of the creative spirit
Moulting and moping and waiting, willing at last
For the fire to burn it up, feathers and all,
So that a new conception of the beginning and end
Can rise from the ashes.
Ah Phoenix, Phoenix,
John's Eagle!
Phoenix, Phoenix,
The nest is in flames,
Feathers are singeing,
Ashes flutter flocculent, like down on a blue, wan fledgeling.


NING
MITT
THE CIRCUS RIDER.
BY SIDNEY D. CARLYLE





DUST FOR SPARROWS
BY REMY DE GOURMONT
Translated by Ezra Pound
185
I have often observed that men most attached to their political
leaders complain in private that these latter shower rewards and
honours more freely upon far less devoted co-religionists. They
do not understand, firstly, that private intercourse has in it a touch
of servitude, and, secondly, that one must always give more to those
whose defection one fears than to those whose fidelity is assured.
a
186
The day when the riches of this world are divided, not absurdly
into equal parts, but equitably divided, one will no longer see
houses fit for birds of paradise next to hovels fit only for rats, cities
will be clean, and full of honest people; crime and contagious di-
sease will be almost unknown; vice will no longer gnaw the viscera
of the rich, nor of the poor; suburbs will no longer be nests of
apaches, and streets where the wild conditions are eternally domi-
nant, where it rains, snows, and where one receives the wind as in
a forest, will become galleries sheltered from disagreeable extremes,
when the state of the weather demands it.
187
The brutal militarism of William First, the thief of giants;
joined to the idealism of the old universities; beer swillings plus
the music of Beethoven; schlager duels, contempt for ladies of in-
determinate reputation plus the adoration of inaccessible Marguer-
ites, have given birth to the most savant, the strongest, the most
idealistic, the most law-respecting, and the most barbarous people
in Europe.
188
Journalism, in normal epochs, when it is not an impartial censor
of public life, nor a truthful vehicle of daily information, is


418
DUST FOR SPARROWS
changed, as one has often seen it, into a violent apostle of morality
plus the art of blackmail. Which is, after all, to end as it began
in the person of its creator, Pietro Aretino. (Whose apocryphal
writings are published plus the soubriquets il veritabile, il divino.
E. P.)
189
Why should one, of necessity, consider the criminal as an un-
balanced person utterly lacking in sensibility? Are not the ac-
cidents of the milieu in which he is born enough to account for the
conjunction of the savage's rudimentary sensitization with the
sharpened wit of civilized man?
190
The next paragraph will pass as a joke, yet I am convinced that
when feminism triumphs, yes on that day and without further pro-
crastination, the origin of humanity's profound evils will be dis-
covered to rest in the mute war between thin women and fat women.
191
An intelligence examining the earth from above without know-
ing civilization, nor formulating an idea of countries and frontiers,
would end by saying in face of the various activities of agglomera-
tions of humans, that they lived according to their density and its
relation to the land which feeds them, sometimes resisting, some-
times penetrating them peacefully—and that this latter condition
tended to predominate.
192
When socialists become owners and find themselves at the head
of a business in difficulties, instead of convoking their employees
and forming a coöperative affair, they behave like other bourgeois,
and lower the wages. They then excuse themselves and blame it
on force majeure and when the danger is over, those who have
helped them surmount it find themselves where they were before.
193
Perhaps the English are the greatest people on earth, for their
acts in general bear the stamp of freedom (franchise) and are al-
ways modeled on life's realities,


REMY DE GOURMONT
419
194
To speak evil of the French would be a useless, ridiculous task,
for one would never attain the severity of mind which they them-
selves employ in self-criticism.
195
In Paris, the centre of a very ancient civilization, the apache is
the product of certain districts only; in South America, in the midst
of new heterogeneous civilization, the indian appears in all classes
of society. The phenomenon is the same: Rudimentary sensibility
plus intelligence over-sharpened by necessity and the "hot house”
(serre chaude) of the milieu.
196
The Church, marvellous weapon of the social order, has had the
profound wisdom to permit mystic monomanias to perfect them-
selves and at the same time to limit propagation; establishing
celibacy for priests, cloistration for ecstatics, and the active exercise
of charity for souls given to abnegation and incurably wounded
by the world.
197
It is the duty of superior men definitely to take the first place
and to make people who base their social eminence on wealth alone
feel their inferiority. One should notice the intimate petulance
with which these little gentlemen obey the request when one states
it clearly.
198
Under the race's total drive, the return blow (la revanche) has
taken during half a century's effort the form of submarine, auto,
and aeroplane. The Frenchman, seeing himself smaller and less
numerous than the German, has sought to make up the difference
by a reckless bravery which gives him the deciding advantages in
time and in space.
199
Men born in contradiction to the social pact make a breach in
the conventions which close unjustly before them. A life con-
sciously and uniquely martyrized is worth just that much more.


420
DUST FOR SPARROWS
200
Only the political ballet-dancers (coryphées) can understand all
the sorts of bitterness; all the concealed hatreds which are concen-
trated in the soul of a servant.
201
Public opinion brands governments as thieves when their depre-
dations injure the general welfare; when the times are prosperous,
when the official purses are not filled too full, opinion grumbles a
little, but in the main shrugs its shoulders.
[Here end the numbered paragraphs of the manuscript.)
202
Art is the means of giving plastic, perceivable (sensible) life to
things, ideas, sensations, feelings, and passions. By use of forms,
precarious, and poetically magnified, it eternalizes all the interior
and exterior manifestations of l'attimo fugente. It gives to all
sensations, and to the prolongations of them, the seal of its general-
izing synthesis. In indefinitely enlarging the field of thought and
the dimensions of life, it manages to give us the best of all con-
solations: the illusion of immortality.
203
Let one attribute what importance one will to the fact, it is
nevertheless certain that all men of genius and all those who have
had the most extraordinary influence over the destinies of humanity
or of their country, have had blue eyes. Christ was a blue-eyed
Jew.
204
Men with black eyes are too violent and too nervous to command
well. The chief ought to be a man calm, reflective, energetic,
equitable, capable of pardoning a negligence, but never a breach
of discipline. These qualities are most often found in blue-eyed
men. This is the secret, or at any rate the symptom of the secret,
which enabled the Barbarians to dominate and regenerate the Latin
world.


REMY DE GOURMONT
421
205
The right sort, the man who judges himself with sincerity and
takes count of that fragile and shadowy thing, the human soul, is
the only sort of man who has the right to kill another man in self-
defence.
206
Two great and apparently paradoxical merits: to exaggerate
without exaggeration in a story; and to declaim without declama-
tion in the tribune.
207
The greater part of the "enlightened public” admires parlia-
mentary speeches and political editorials as if they were fine works
This shows that the artistic criteria of the crowds is su-
perior to that of cultivated people, even though they do not con-
fuse Trefoil and masonry.
of art.
208
Musical interpretations, copies of works of plastic art, need only
in order to be good, stick closely to the text, as is also the case with
translations; but neither one nor the other is worth anything unless
the copyist or translator possesses something more than technical
competence and mechanical cleverness.
209
The fundamental condition of good prose is that it should be
natural and rhythmic as the movements of breathing. (Vide also
the Essay on Style.)
210
I confess that when I first looked at Leonardo's Mona Lisa, I
was astonished. I had never seen any woman with such a silly
expression.
To be continued


MAIN CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY
GERMAN LITERATURE
ALEC W. G. RANDALL
I
T may be questioned whether political events—even events of
tremendous magnitude-have the important influence on art and
literature which is commonly ascribed to them. As regards that
literature whose primary aim it is to reflect the age, there is, of
course, much to be said for the argument that political changes can
seriously affect its development. But as regards literature of more
than mere historical importance it may be compared with the great
undercurrents of the sea, flowing on almost undisturbed by the
waves on the surface, changed or slightly diverted, no doubt, in the
course of time by the material alterations which make up the
sequence of history, but not to any great extent and in any case
with extraordinary slowness.
The application of this simile to the literature of Germany since
the beginning of the war and the Armistice and Revolution of
November, 1918, appears to us almost exact. The overthrow of
the Monarchy no doubt had an immediate effect of some descrip-
tion. Such an unlooked-for event as the overturning of a régime
unique, so it seemed, in its autocratic power and sternly-wielded
authority, was bound to strike the imagination of men, affect their
mode of thought, introduce differences into their lives--all factors
in the development of a different type of literature. But that
different type was not at once apparent, even to-day cannot be said
to have definitely emerged. The most important immediate effect
of the German Revolution was that it released certain rebellious
poets and novelists from the restraint the war had laid upon them, ,
and a number of poems, plays, and novels which, but for the
Armistice, might not have been published, were enabled to be is-
sued. But this was a mere mechanical effect; it indicated no per-
manent influence. And the best proof of this may be discovered
by a consideration of certain of the novels and plays in question.
We will take one play and one novel, both widely discussed, as
illustrating the point.


ALEC W. G. RANDALL
423
a
sermon.
Of the first, the play Antigone of the promising young dramatist
Walter Hasenclever, it should be noted that this, although not re-
leased for general performance until after the breakdown of the
Hohenzollern dynasty, was actually written during the war and,
despite the Censor, was staged for a short time at Frankfort during
1917. The choice of a classical theme was clearly not determined
by any of that predilection for the form and subjects of the Greek
drama which has been such a marked feature of German literature
from Wieland to Nietzsche; it had little or nothing to do with the
particular, so-called, "neo-classic” school of German drama which,
inspired, both in theory and practice, by the dramatist and critic,
Paul Ernst, flourished from about 1916 onwards and has not lost
its influence to the present day. No, it was merely an example of
that device, common enough throughout literary and social history
—the choice of an old-world theme to conceal a present satirical
intention, give the writer a safe platform from which to preach his
In this play Antigone is the type of the high-minded hu-
manitarian and pacificist, Kreon represents the futile old ruler,
despotic, bombastic in speech and manner, uttering the stale com-
monplaces of ultra-patriotic rhetoric-almost as if the writer of
the play had intended a deliberate satire on the All-Highest War-
Lord himself. Whatever beauty there was in Hasenclever's play
--and there were situations and lines of particular power and
intensity-would probably have been put into his work in any
All that was done by the war and the revolutionary fer-
ment which distinguished its closing stages was to influence Hasen-
clever in the choice of that least essential element-or one of the
least essential elements of a work of art, the subject.
The post-Revolution novel of which we wish to speak, Heinrich
Mann's Der Untertan (The Subject), is an even more convincing
This is a very thoroughgoing attack on William of Hohen-
zollern, not veiled and indirect, like Hasenclever's drama, but di-
rect and specific. It is the story of a boy's development from
childhood, on through school-days and life at the University, to
manhood, in the atmosphere and under the illusion of the infallible
and sacrosanct character of his august sovereign. And what a
prig it makes of him; what bombast fills his boyhood, his student's
days, what patriotic hypocrisy settles down upon him when he is
finally established as a successful man of business in a small pro-
a
event.
case.


424
CONTEMPORARY GERMAN LITERATURE
1
vincial town, duly decorated by the Kaiser, a terror to Social Dem-
ocrats and all who question the absolute authority and wisdom of
the Emperor. The book cannot be called great, but it at least is
not dull and the enormous popularity it enjoyed in Germany after
the Armistice is certainly interesting from the historical-psychologi-
cal point of view. But that the Armistice and the events which
accompanied it had anything—beyond the most superficial influ-
ence on its date of issue—to do with its production is discounted by
the fact that the novel was written and ready for printing in July,
1914 All that the fall of the Hohenzollerns did was to set it free
for publication.
This, then, can be said in general, that the flood of literature
produced in Germany after the Armistice of a kind which could
not have been produced before does not indicate in the least a
change of imagination, a transformation of intellect on the part
of German writers. Everything existed before—the revolutionary
spirit, hatred of the bourgeoisie, even Bolshevism, which is, after
all, only the logical development of certain of the Marxist doc-
trines. The thoughts and motives behind the revolutionary poems,
plays, and novels of German writers of the past two and a half
years—the plays of the Bavarian revolutionary, Ernst Toller, the
poems of the late Ludwig Rubiner, of Max Barthel, Iwan Goll,
the critic Gustav Landauer-these are not at all new. They were
present to the mind in 1914 and would have found expression
sooner or later in any event—whether to the gain of German liter-
ature may for the present be seriously doubted, for there is little in
contemporary German literature directly ascribable to the war and
its consequences—the former Uhlan officer Fritz von Unruh's
trilogy, of which the first two parts, Ein Geschlecht and Platz have
been published, apart—of which one could prophesy permanence
other than as an historical document, with which literature has
very
little to do.
A general verdict of “no change" seems to be even more justified
as we contemplate the principal literary achievements of the older
German writers since the war. Several of the most prominent
writers display a welcome sameness. The art of Arthur Schnitzler,
for example, has survived the war and all its disturbance with al-
most cynical ease. His very amusing farce of Viennese newspaper
life, Flink und Fliederbusch, his successful short story, Casanovas


ALEC W. G. RANDALL
425
a
Heimfahrt, his brilliant comedy of manners, Die Schwestern, also
based on a gallant episode in Casanova's career-all these will be
greeted with relief by his admirers. Sudermann, who early in the
war succumbed to the wave of super-patriotism and turned aside
from drama to write one or two of the million odd patriotic poems
said to have been written in Germany in the first twelve months of
the warSudermann, too, has returned to his former fashion, with
complete success, in the box-office sense of the word at all events.
He is a writer whose chief value may be called historical; that is
to say, he faithfully reflects his age and however old-fashioned his
plays may become—and how out of date does not such a drama as
Die Ehre appear even now—it can at least be said that a certain
type of German society is accurately mirrored in them. All this
is true of Die Raschoffs, Sudermann's post-Armistice tragedy, of
Das höhere Leben, his chief war-time comedy, first published in
1917 but recently staged at Berlin amid rapturous applause. The
talent for situation, for crisp dialogue, the incomparable sense of
the theatre—these remain unaltered. And if, finally, we take the
novel, it is again to discover little apparent change. The most
distinguished of the newer novelists, Jakob Wassermann, has con-
tinued along the same path he was treading so hopefully before the
war and some of his latest works, above all Christian Wahnschaffe,
have become deservedly famous outside Germany. But of a new
"main current" there is nothing.
Gerhart Hauptmann must be singled out--and not alone on
account of that pre-eminence of his, still undisputed to-day as be-
fore the war. He also, it is true, has not changed, but he seems to
have reached the culmination of that development of his imagina-
tion which was already in progress before the war—the develop-
ment away from Naturalism towards Symbolism and Mysticism
(Emmanuel Quint, Der Narr in Christo, known to vast numbers of
readers under its English title of The Fool in Christ) was one of
the first signs. Then, during the war, Hauptmann published a
very beautiful tragedy in verse, based on a story of Selma Lager-
löf, Die Winterballade; there succeeded a little masterpiece in
prose, Der Ketzer von Soana, full of wonderful description and
constituting a psychological study of the greatest interest. Of his
two latest plays, Indipohdi and Der weisse Heiland (The White
Redeemer) it can be said that the first is a kind of Tempest drama,


426
CONTEMPORARY GERMAN LITERATURE
but mystical and symbolical to the point of obscurity, the second
a poetical tragedy of the contest between enlightened savage, Mon-
tezuma, and unenlightened Christian, Cortes. In any case all are
very far from the Hauptmann of Vor Sonnenaufgang, and it
seems likely that he will never look back to the period of material-
istic philosophy, naturalistic technique, and social preoccupation
summed up in that play.
Hauptmann is not the only example of the full swing of the
pendulum against Naturalism which appears to have reached its ex-
treme limit in Germany during the past
four or five years—exactly
—
to what degree under the influence of the war it would be a very
complicated matter to determine, although it may be said that
the state of mind produced by the struggle hastened the reaction.
For, whatever the cause, Romance has come into its own again,
above all in the immense three-volume novel—its subject, by a
curious coincidence, that of Hauptmann's Weisse Heiland—by
Eduard Stucken, Die weissen Götter, certainly one of the best Ger-
man novels of the present century. Wedekind's last work, pub-
lished before his death in March, 1918, was a poetical drama en-
titled Herakles a kind of classical symbolization of himself. In
poetry we should note firstly, a new issue of Stefan George's Blät-
ter für die Kunst, with Friedrich Gunfolf's great critical work on
the poet himself, urging his claim to be put in the front rank of
German classic writers, not merely labelled as a kind of German
Mallarmé; second, the appearance of a new volume of poems by
Hugo Salus, one of the chief of the German-Bohemian poets-
romanticist and symbolist by turns. Finally, on all hands the ex-
pressionists--summing up all hatred of impressionism and realism,
for are not both inspired by the same motives?-on all hands the
voice of the Expressionists has made and is making itself heard.
The strange plays of the Blake-like painter and lithographer,
Oskar Kokoschka, may represent the movement in drama; in poetry
we may select as typical the poems of Franz Werfel, a poet of much
promise in 1914 who bids fair completely to fulfil expectation; in
the novel, Carl Sternheim, with a truly remarkable novel of Europe
during the past fifty years, entitled Europa. It is from this move-
ment-before-the-war in its origins, let us be careful to point out
in this case, too_that the greatest changes may come. For the
young German writers are very active and almost all are confessing



Ta
STEFAN GEORGE
BY REINHOLD LEPSIUS





ALEC W. G. RANDALL
427
the Expressionist creed, intelligently and for reasons they are pre-
pared to give. A few naturalistic plays or novels of protest may
appear and be greeted—as recently was Hans Müller's play,
Flamme, and Der Kampf of Karl Schönherr, the author of the well-
known Glaube und Heimat-as affording some diversion from the
too recondite paths into which certain expressionist and fashionable
psychoanalytical writers may have been inclined to lead their read-
ers or audiences. But the future of German literature-of, that is
to say, that abiding literature, not the mere documentary, histori-
,
cal, reflective-this would appear to rest for some years to come
with those numerous German poets, novelists, and dramatists who
have—whether proceeding along the paths of romance, of "neo-
classicism,” of a not yet outworn Symbolism, of Expressionism--
turned their back on the Naturalism and Realism of the 'nineties
of the previous century. If the main current of German literature
to-day may be summed up negatively we could do it in a sentence:
a
It is all that Naturalism is not.


LOULOU
BY THOMAS MANN
Translated from the German by Kenneth Burke
I
THE
WHERE are some marriages, and not even an imagination fed up
on novels can explain how they came about. They must
simply be accepted, the way we accept a juxtaposition of opposing
qualities on the stage, such as old-and-stupid over against beautiful-
and-full-of-life—which are presupposed, taken for granted as the
basis for erecting a farce with the proper mathematics.
As to the wife of Herr Jacoby, attorney at law, she was young
and lovely, an unusually prepossessing woman. Let us say about
thirty years ago, she had been baptized Anna Margaret Rose
Amelia, but since then she was called nothing but Amra, from her
four initials. This had an exotic twang which was peculiarly suited
to her character. For although the darkness of her strong soft hair,
which she wore parted in the middle and brushed on either side away
from her low forehead, was only the brownness of a chestnut kernel,
still her skin was southern in its subdued flat olive. And this skin
was stretched over curves which likewise seemed ripened by a south-
ern sun, recalling a sultana with their indolent and vegetative
luxuriance. This impression, which was heightened by every one
of her covetously sluggish motions, corresponded with the fact that
in all probability her head was less master than her heart. To know
that, you had only to be looked at out of her stupid brown eyes,
while she wrinkled her almost astonishingly low forehead in a way
of her own. But she was not too simple to realize this herself.
She avoided exposing herself by the mere contrivance of speaking
seldom, and making that seldom brief. And no one can object to
a woman who is lovely and says nothing. No, “simple” was not
the best word to describe her. Her expression was not merely
stupid, but also had a certain eager shrewdness about it. And it
was easy to see how this woman was not too restricted to create
trouble. ... Beyond that, perhaps her nose in profile was a little


THOMAS MANN
429
too full and aggressive; but her rich wide mouth was completely
beautiful, even though it had no other expression than that of plain
sensuality.
This disquieting woman, then, was the wife of a man about forty,
Herr Jacoby, attorney at law—and whoever saw him was aston-
ished. The attorney was corpulent; no, he was more than corpu-
lent, he was the very colossus of a man! His legs, which stuck in
ash-grey trousers, reminded one of an elephant's in their pillar-like
formlessness; vaulted with bolsters of fat, his back was that of a
bear; and over the vast bulge of his stomach was the queer jacket of
greenish grey which he usually wore, and which was so painfully
fastened with one button that it would snap back around his shoul-
ders if ever the button was unloosened. But on this massive trunk,
almost without the transition of a neck, sat a comparatively little
head, with small watery eyes, a short compressed nose, and cheeks
that hung down under their own weight. A tiny mouth with miser-
ably drooping corners was lost in the cheeks. His round pate, as
well as his upper lip, was sprinkled with hard little bristles, a light
blond, which allowed the bare skin to shine through the way it does
with an over-fed dog. .. Ah! it must have been evident to any
one that the attorney's corpulence was not of a healthy nature. His
latitudinally and longitudinally prodigious body was all muscleless
fat. And often a sudden excess of blood would pump up into his
swollen face, to give place almost immediately to a sallow paleness,
while his mouth was distorted with a sour expression.
The attorney's practice was quite limited; but since he and his
wife together had a reasonable amount of money, this childless pair
kept up a comfortable apartment in the Kaiserstrasse and quite a
lively bit of social doings. This, of course, was due more to Amra
than to him, since it is hardly possible that the attorney, who
seemed at best to be only half-hearted in the matter, would be happy
in such a state of things. This corpulent gentleman's character
was of the strangest. Nobody could have been more polite, more
considerate or compliant; but without realizing it clearly, perhaps,
a person would be unpleasantly touched by the feeling that his flat-
tering over-friendly manner was forced for some reason or other,
that it rested on self-belittlement and some inner uncertainty.
There is no eye so unpleasant as that of a man who despises him-
self, but who is nevertheless trying out of cowardice and vanity to
.
a


430
LOULOU
be amiable with people. In my opinion, this is exactly the way
things stood with the attorney; he went too far with his almost
grovelling self-belittlement to retain the necessary personal dignity.
It was not beyond him to say to a woman he was about to escort
to the table, "Pardon me, I am hardly an alluring sort, but would
you be so kind ..." And he would say this without any talent
for self-despisal, with a sorry show of good humour, repugnant in
its torment. The following anecdote about him is also
founded on fact. One day while out walking, a gruff chap with
a pushcart ran one of the wheels over his foot. The man stopped
his wagon too late, turned around—whereupon the attorney, quite
beside himself, with his cheeks gone pale and trembling, raised his
hat and stammered, “I beg your pardon.” Things of that sort are
disgusting. This peculiar colossus seemed continually to be tor-
tured by a bad conscience. If he appeared with his wife on the
Lerchenberg, the main promenade of the city, he would keep cast-
ing tremulous side-glances at Amra as she sprang forward with her
remarkable elasticity, and he would greet everyone with too much
eagerness, with an air of anxious diligence. It was as though he
felt called upon to bow humbly before every lieutenant, and apolo-
gize that he, he of all people, should be in possession of this beauti-
ful woman. And the beseechingly friendly expression about his
mouth seemed to be begging everyone not to laugh at him.
II
As has already been pointed out, there is no way of telling just
why Amra married Herr Jacoby the attorney. But for his part,
he loved her, and with a love indeed that was too fervent to be met
with often in people of his build. He loved her with all the anxiety
and humility corresponding to the rest of him. Late in the even-
ing, when Amra had gone to bed in her large bedroom with its high,
thickly curtained windows, the attorney would often come in so
softly that his footsteps were inaudible, that she could hear nothing
but the steady shaking of the floor and the furniture. He would
kneel beside her heavy bed, and take her hand with infinite caution.
At such times Amra would draw her eyebrows until there were little
perpendicular wrinkles in her forehead. Silently, with an expres-


THOMAS MANN
431
O
.
sion of sensual malice, she would observe her prodigious husband
lying there in the pale light of the night-lamp. He would stroke
the cover back carefully from her arm with his plump, quivering
hands, and place his miserably wide face against this full brown
arm—there, where the tiny blue veins showed against the darker
tint. Then he would begin speaking, the way a man of good com-
mon sense would never speak of ordinary matters. “Amra!” he
would whisper; “my dear Amra! Am I disturbing you? Are you
asleep yet? O God, I have been thinking all day long how beauti-
ful you are and how much I love you! . Listen, what I have
to say to you—it is so hard to express. I love you so much that
often my heart seems to get tight and I don't know what to do; I
love you more than I can bear! You can't understand all this,
but
you will believe me, and you must say just once that you will
be a little bit grateful to me, for don't you know that such a love
as mine for you is worth something in this world and that
you will never betray me or do anything underhanded, even if you
cannot love me, but out of gratitude, simply out of gratitude.
I came here to beg that of you, as hard, as earnestly as I can.
Such speeches usually ended by the attorney's finding everything
unchanged, and breaking into a soft, bitter weeping. But then
Amra would be moved somewhat, would run her hand over her
husband's bristles, and talk to him in the drawled, encouraging, and
teasing tone one uses to a dog that is licking his shoes, “Yes, yes,
you're a nice fellow. .
Amra's conduct was certainly not that of a respectable woman.
Further, it is time enough that I unburdened myself of the truth
which I have been holding back, the truth namely that she was not
honest with her husband; yes, I will say it, that she actually de-
ceived him—in the company of a young man called Alfred Läutner.
He was a gifted young musician whose clever little pieces had al-
ready acquired him a reputation at twenty-seven. Slender, with
a distinct snap to him, careless blond hair, and a sunny smile in his
eyes that was quite aware of itself. He belonged to that cut of
present-day lesser artists who don't ask too much of themselves, wish
first of all to be happy and amiable, utilize their comfortably small
talent to enhance their personal appeal, and play the naïve genius
in society. Intentionally childlike, unscrupulous, beyond morality,
enjoying everything, and contented with themselves as they are,
.


432
LOULOU
own.
they are healthy enough to enjoy their little illnesses; and their
vanity is in reality quite delightful so long as it is not wounded.
But woe to these lesser mimes and their amusements, if they meet
with some serious misfortune, some sorrow that can't be toyed with
and in which they can find no self-contentment! They will fail at
being properly miserable; they will not know how to approach their
sorrow; they will go all to pieces . . . but that is a story of its
Herr Läutner composed pleasant trifles, waltzes and
mazurkas for the most part. But their appeal, so far as I am a
judge of such things, was a bit too popular for them to be counted
as Music. Still, every one of these compositions had its little spot
of originality, a modulation, a bit of accompaniment, an harmonic
twist, some slight nervous effect which betrayed cleverness and in-
genuity. All his pieces seemed to have been made for this one ele-
ment, whatever it was, and became interesting to the more earnest
connoisseur. Often these two simple rhythms had something re-
markably far-off and melancholy about them which would rise out
of the piece for an instant, and then vanish again in the general
enthusiasm of the dance.
Amra, then, had burned with a guilty interest in this young man,
and he for his part was not troubled enough with matters of moral-
ity to resist her advances. They met in one place, met again some-
where else, until by now they had been bound for some time in their
unpleasant relationship. A relationship, by the way, which the
whole city knew of, and which the whole city discussed behind the
attorney's back. And as to him? Amra was too dull to betray
herself with a bad conscience. It must be definitely established
that the attorney could harbour no distinct suspicion against his
wife, however much he might be disturbed with his vague anxieties. .
III
At present, spring had swept over the land to make everyone
happy, and Amra had hit upon an excellent idea.
“Christian,” she said—the attorney's name was Christian; "why
not have a party, a big party, to celebrate the spring brewing? It
could be quite simple, of course, just cold roast veal, but with a
good many people.”


THOMAS MANN
433
“Certainly,” the attorney answered; "but couldn't we put it off
a while longer ?”
Amra made no answer to this, but plunged on into the details
immediately. “There will be so many people, you see, that this
place will be too small; we'll have to hire some sort of affair, a
garden or a dance-hall, in order to have enough room and enough
air. The first place I can think of is that big hall of Wendelin's,
at the foot of the Lerchenberg. It is off by itself; only a little
passage-way connects it with the café and the brewery. It could
be decorated up, provided with long tables, and we could serve the
new beer. We could have music and dancing, and perhaps some
sort of play, for I know there is a small stage there; in fact, that's
one of the best things in its favour. Very well then, we'll give
something that's quite original, and have a marvelous time.”
During all this, the attorney's face had turned a pale yellow and
the corners of his mouth began to droop. “It all appeals to me
tremendously, Amra dear. But of course, I can leave everything
to your management. By all means, go ahead with your prep-
arations.
.
IV
And Amra went ahead with her preparations. She held several
consultations, saw personally to the hiring of Wendelin's big hall,
and organized a kind of committee of the people who either were
asked or had offered of their own accord, to help get up the accessory
entertainments. This committee was composed exclusively of men,
with the exception of one opera singer, the wife of Hildebrandt the
actor at the Hoftheater. Among the others were Herr Hildebrandt
himself, an Assessor Witznagel, a young painter, and also Herr
Alfred Läutner, besides a few students who were proposed by the
Assessor and were to give an exhibition of negro dancing.
Within eight days of the time when Amra had made her decision,
this committee was assembled for discussion in the Kaiserstrasse, in
Amra's library. It was a warm little room, with a good many
a
things in it, furnished with a heavy carpet, a divan covered with
cushions, a large palm, English leather-back chairs, and a mahogany
table with carved legs on which there was a plush throw and a num-
ber of ornaments. There was also a fireplace, with a small fire


434
LOULOU
a
a
ness.
still burning; a few plates were lying on the black hearth, with
some lightly buttered toast, glasses, and two decanters of
sherry. ... Her knees crossed easily, Amra was leaning back
among the cushions of the divan, half in the shadow of the palm,
and as lovely as a mild night. She had on a waist of a bright, soft
silk, although her coat was of a heavy material, dark, and with
large embroidered flowers. Now and then she would raise one
hand to brush her chestnut hair away from her low forehead. Frau
Hildebrandt, the singer, was sitting on the divan beside her. She
had red hair, and was in her riding habit. In front of the two
women the men had arranged themselves in a restricted half-circle.
In their midst was the attorney; he had a very low chair, and seemed
unutterably miserable. Occasionally he would draw a deep breath
and swallow, as though he were fighting against some growing ill-
Herr Alfred Läutner, in a tennis outfit, had renounced a
chair altogether and was leaning contentedly and decoratively
against the mantlepiece, claiming that he could not sit still so long.
Herr Hildebrandt was discussing English songs in a voice that
rang pleasantly. He was a powerfully built man, dressed in black,
with an assertive step and the head of a lion-an actor of culture,
good taste, and knowledge well digested. He loved to pass serious
judgements against Ibsen, Zola, and Tolstoy, who were all going
in the same destructive direction; but to-day he was confining him-
self quite amiably to this minor matter.
“Do you perhaps all of you know that corking song, That's
Maria!” he was saying; “it is a bit' daring, but quite surprisingly
effective. Then perhaps the famous .” and he proposed other
songs which were finally agreed on, and which Frau Hildebrandt
was willing to sing. The young painter, a gentleman with pro-
nouncedly drooping shoulders and a blond imperial, was to give a
magician act, while Herr Hildebrandt intended to imitate some
celebrities ... in short, everything was going along excellently
and the programme seemed to be already complete, when Assessor
Witznagel, who had the advantage of a flowing gesture and a good
many fencing scars, suddenly renewed the discussion.
“Very good. All that certainly promises to be entertaining.
Still, I might add one more word. It seems to me there is still
something lacking, and that something is the big number, the draw-
ing card, the feature, the climax . . . something quite unique,
quite startling, something funny enough to bring the amusement
.


THOMAS MANN
435
.
a
.
to a point ... but to be brief, I confess I have no definite idea;
;
yet, to my way of thinking .
“That is radically true!” Herr Läutner let his tenor be heard
from the mantelpiece; “Witznagel is right. An opening and a
closing number would be just the thing. Let's see if we can't ..."
And pulling his red belt into place with a few quick tugs, he look-
ed about him searchingly. The expression on his face was indeed
lovely.
"Well,” said Herr Hildebrandt; “if you don't think the celeb-
rities could be taken as a climax
Everyone agreed with the Assessor. An exceptionally amus-
ing number was needed. Even the attorney nodded and ventured
mildly, “Quite right . . . something overpoweringly funny.
They all set to thinking.
And at the close of this pause, which had lasted about a minute,
and was interrupted only by little cries of deliberation, a peculiar
thing occurred. Amra was lying back among the cushions of the
divan, chewing as busily as a mouse at the pointed nail of her
little finger, while her face took on an unusual expression.
A smile lay about the corners of her mouth, an absent, almost in-
sane smile, which bespoke a lasciviousness that was at once pained
and cruel. Her eyes, now glazed and wide open, traveled slowly
to the mantelpiece, where they rested for a moment on the young
musician. Then with a jerk, she turned the whole upper part of
her body toward her husband, the attorney; her hands resting in
her lap, she stared clinchingly and suckingly into his face, while
she herself became visibly whiter. Then she spoke in a voice that
was full and measured, "Christian, I suggest that for the final act
you appear as a little girl dressed up in baby-clothes, and sing and
dance for us.”
The effect of these few words was enormous. Only the young
painter attempted a good-natured laugh. Herr Hilderbrandt
brushed something from his sleeve with a face as cold as stone. The
students coughed, and used their handkerchiefs with unnecessary
loudness. Frau Hildebrandt blushed painfully, a thing which
didn't often happen. And Assessor Witznagel simply moved away,
to get himself some toast. The attorney sat in a pained heap on
his low chair; he looked about him with an anxious smile and a
yellow face, stammering, “But my God ...1... hardly capable
not as if . . . but I beg pardon.
.


436
LOULOU
.
Alfred Läutner had lost his carefree expression. He looked as
though he might have blushed a bit; with his head stretched for-
ward, he was staring uncomfortably into Amra's eyes. He was
bewildered, and questioning.
But as for Amra, without changing her point of attack in the
least, she went on speaking in the same heavy accent, “Herr Läut-
ner could compose a song for you to sing, Christian, and he will
accompany you on the piano. That would certainly be the feature
of the evening."
A pause arose, an oppressive pause. But then, quite suddenly
and unexpectedly, Herr Läutner became infected likewise, excited
and carried along with Amra. He took a step forward and began
speaking hastily, while he trembled with some sort of violent in-
spiration, “By God, Herr Jacoby, I am willing, I declare myself
willing, to compose something for you. . . . You must sing it and
dance to it. . . . It is the only conceivable climax. . . . You will
see, really-it will be the best thing I have ever done and ever shall
do. ... In red silk baby-clothes! Ah, your wife is an artist, a true
artist, I insist! Otherwise she could not have hit upon such an
idea! I beg of you, just say that you are willing! I'll do some-
thing worth while, you'll see if I don't. ..."
Now everything was unloosened, everything broke into motion.
Out of either malice or politeness, they began storming the attor-
ney with coaxing. Frau Hildebrandt even went so far as to say
quite loudly in her Brünnhilde-voice, “But Herr Jacoby, you are
such a funny man, and so amusing!” But now the attorney found
words, and began speaking, still somewhat yellow, but with a
strong front of determination, "Kindly hear me a moment, ladies
and gentlemen—what should I say to you? Believe me, I am not
fitting. I have no gift for being funny at all, and besides ...
no, unfortunately that is impossible.”
He insisted obstinately on this refusal. Since Amra had dropped
out of the conversation and was lying back with quite a far-off look,
and since Herr Läutner began staring at a design in the carpet
without another word, Herr Hildebrandt contrived to give a new
turn to the conversation. Soon after this the company broke up
without having reached a decision on this last question.
In the evening of the same day, however, when Amra had gone
to bed and was lying with her eyes open, her husband entered heav-
ily. He drew a little stool over to the bed and sat down. Then
>
.
6


THOMAS MANN
437
>
he spoke softly and with hesitation, “Listen, Amra. To be open
with you, I have been very much disturbed. If I was too curt with
those ladies and gentlemen to-day, if I insulted them to their face,
God knows it was not what I intended! But tell me, do you really
think ...
Amra was silent a moment, lifting her eyebrows slowly. Then
she shrugged her shoulders and said, "I don't know what to tell
you, my dear. You acted in a manner I never expected of you.
You refused flatly to do your part in making the plays a success,
even though they all felt that you were needed, which ought to
have been downright flattering to you. To put the thing mildly,
you have greatly disillusioned everyone, and you have put a crimp
in the whole party with your crude unpleasantness, while it should
have been your duty as a host ..."
The attorney had let his head sink; he was breathing with diffi-
culty. “No, Amra, believe me, I didn't want to be unpleasant.
I shouldn't like to hurt any one's feelings or be thought poorly of.
And if I have acted ugly, I am ready to make everything right
again. The whole affair is simply a joke, a bit of buffoonery, an
innocent amusement—why shouldn't I? I don't want to spoil the
evening. I am willing. ...'
The next afternoon Amra drove out once more "to tend to some
matters.” She stopped in the Holzstrasse, Number 78, and went
up to the second floor, where someone was waiting for her. Tight-
ened and relaxed with love, she pressed his head against her breast,
and whispered a passionate, “Do you hear me, make it for two
pianos! You and I both will accompany him, while he sings and
dances. I'll see to the costume.
And a queer shudder, a suppressed, cramped laughter, went
through their two bodies.
.
V
To any one who wishes to give any sort of festivity, especially
an open-air entertainment in the grand style, Herr Wendelin's es-
tablishment near the Lerchenberg is to be most highly recommend-
ed. From the street with its agreeable suburban element, the en-
trance to the parklike garden is through a latticed door. In the
middle of this garden runs the extensive hall. This hall is con-


438
LOULOU
nected only by a small passage with the restaurant, the kitchen, and
the brewery. It is built of a gaily coloured wood in a clever mix-
ture of the Chinese and Renaissance. It has large folding doors,
which can be opened in good weather to admit the wind as it blows
from the trees.
And it offers accommodations for a great many
people.
This evening the approaching carriages were greeted even at a
distance by the shimmer of coloured light, since all the lattice, the
trees of the garden, and the hall itself were decorated with variegat-
ed lanterns; and as to the interior of the hall, it was a really ap-
pealing spectacle. Thick streamers were fastened along underneath
the ceiling with numerous paper lanterns fastened to them. In ad-
dition, the room was brilliantly illuminated with electric lights,
scattered in among the decorations on the walls, the flags, shrubs,
and artificial flowers. At one end was the stage, with ferns on
either side of it, and a red curtain on which a guardian-angel was
painted with outspread wings. But from the other end of the
room, the long tables extended almost to the stage. They were
trimmed with Aowers; and here Attorney Jacoby's guests were
gathered to enjoy the spring beer and the roast veal. Jurists, of-
ficers, merchants, artists, prominent officials with their wives and
daughters-easily more than a hundred and fifty ladies and gentle-
men in all. Everyone was dressed quite simply, dark coats with
some element of a brighter spring outfit, since ease and enjoyment
was to be the law. The men carried their pitchers themselves to
the large kegs lined along the side-walls. Throughout the wide,
cheerful, and well-lighted room with its thickly sweet smell of
pines, flowers, people, beer, and food, the noise buzzed and mum-
bled. An over-loud conversation without pretension was kept up,
and the laughter of all these people was shrill-polite, lively, and
unconcerned. ... The attorney was sitting in a helpless heap at
the end of a table near the stage. He was not drinking much, and
directed a laborious word now and then at his neighbour, the wife
of the minister Havermann. He was breathing painfully, the
corners of his mouth drooping, while he looked steadfastly out of
swollen, watery eyes at all this brilliant commotion. He observed
it with a sort of unhappy estrangement, as if this festivity, this
noisy amusement, contained something unspeakably sad and in-
comprehensible. ...
a


THOMAS MANN
439
.
.
Soon the large tarts were handed around, whereupon everybody
began drinking sweet wine and the speech-making commenced.
Herr Hildebrandt, the actor from the Hoftheater, commemorated
the spring beer in an address which consisted almost entirely of
classical quotations, yes, even from the Greek; Assessor Witznagel
employed his most flowing gestures and his most delicate manner
in toasting the women, taking a handful of flowers from the nearest
vase and comparing some woman with each of them. But Amra
Jacoby, who sat opposite him dressed in a thin, yellow silk, was
named “the more beautiful sister of the tea rose.”
She immediately brushed a hand over her soft hair, raised her
eyebrows, and nodded earnestly to her husband-whereupon the
heavy man arose and nearly spoiled the whole flavour of the thing
by stammering painfully a few meager words with his ugly smile.
Only a few artificial bravos followed, and for a moment there was
an oppressive silence. Then the general good cheer regained the
upper hand. Smoking, and reasonably unsteady, everybody began
shoving the tables noisily out of the hall, since it was time to
dance.
By eleven o'clock the carefree spirit was at its height. Part of
the guests had streamed out for fresh air into the gaily lighted
garden, while others remained in the hall, standing about in groups,
smoking, chatting, drawing beer and drinking it where they stood.
Suddenly a trumpet-blast rang out from the stage to assemble every
one in the hall. Musicians—violins and brasses—had already
appeared, and were arranging themselves in front of the curtain.
Rows of chairs had been brought in, each with a red programme
lying on it. The women took seats, while the men ranged behind
them all along the walls. There was an expectant silence.
The little orchestra played a rousing overture, the curtain opened
... and lo! there was a number of hideous negroes, in shrieking
costumes and blood-red lips; they began grinning and setting up
a barbaric howl. ... These plays were certainly the biggest suc-
cess of Amra's entertainment. Enthusiastic applause broke loose
as the cleverly arranged programme progressed number after num-
ber. Frau Hildebrandt appeared in a powdered wig, knocked on
the floor with a long cane, and sang overly loud, That's Maria! A
magician came on in a dress-coat covered with medals, and managed
to do wonders. Herr Hildebrandt impersonated Goethe, Bis-
a


440
LOULOU
marck, and Napoleon frightfully well, and the editor, Dr Wiesen-
sprung, undertook at the last moment a humorous essay on the
theme Spring Beer and its Social Significance. But towards the
end, expectancy ran at its highest, since the last number was now
due, this mysterious number which was framed on the programme
with a wreath of laurel and read simply: Loulou. Song and
Dance. Music by Alfred Läutner.
A movement went through the hall and a number of glances met
as the musicians put their instruments aside and Herr Läutner, who
had been leaning in silence against a door with a cigarette hanging
carelessly from his lips, took his place alongside of Amra Jacoby in
the middle of the stage before the curtain. His face was flushed,
and he kept turning the sheets of his score nervously. Amra, who
on the contrary had become a bit pale, supported one arm on the
back of her chair and was looking critically out at the audience.
Then the sharp little signal rang out, and everyone stretched his
neck to see. Herr Läutner and Amra played a few bars of intro-
duction, the curtain slid back ... Loulou appeared ..
A start of astonishment and fascination went through the crowd
of onlookers, as this miserable, hideously dressed up mass danced
across the stage with the painful effort of a bear. It was the at-
torney. His formless body was covered with a broad, smooth dress
of crimson silk which reached to his feet. This dress had been cut
to expose his unpleasant neck with its coating of powder. Also,
his sleeves were pulled back in a puff around his shoulders, although
he had long, light yellow gloves over his fat and muscleless arms.
There were light curls the colour of wheat rolls standing out from
his head, with a green feather waving back and forth. But from
underneath this wig a yellow, swollen face looked out.
plainly miserable, but was smiling desperately. Its cheeks were
shaking up and down pitifully, and its small, red-rimmed eyes were
staring steadfastly at the floor without seeing a thing. The heavy
man was shifting himself laboriously from one foot to the other,
while he either held his dress with both hands or held up two index
fingers with his helpless arms—he knew no other gestures. In a
strained, wheezing voice he sang his stupid song to the tones of
the piano.
Could it be true that some cold breath of misery flowed out of
this wretched figure and killed all spontaneous enjoyment, came
It was


THOMAS MANN
441
inevitably down over the whole audience like some disquieting and
oppressive discord? The same horror lay at the bottom of all
these countless eyes; as though a spell were on them, they kept
looking at this picture .. the two here at the piano and the hus-
band up there. The silent, unheard scandal continued for fully
five minutes.
Then the moment occurred which no one who was present will
forget as long as he lives. . .. But let us get everything straight,
just as it happened in that frightful, complicated little space
of
time.
The trifling quatrains that pass under the name of Loulou are
quite well known, and no doubt the lines can be recalled which run:
"Den Walzertanz und auch die Polke
Hat keine noch, wie ich, vollführt;
Ich bin Luischen aus dem Volke,
Die manches Männerherz gerührt ...
these rather bald and facile lines which form the refrain to the three
reasonably long stanzas. In the re-setting of these words to music,
Alfred Läutner had attained his master-work. Here he had
brought to the highest perfection his method of illuminating a
vulgar and amusing bit of hack by a sudden trick of the best music.
The melody, in C sharp major, had remained reasonably pretty and
thoroughly banal all through the first stanza. At the beginning of
the refrain quoted above, the tempo became swifter, and there oc-
curred a sequence of dissonances in which the continually growing
emphasis on B led on to expect a change of key to F sharp major.
These disharmonies became more involved up to the word voll-
führt; and after the Ich bin, which brought the development and
suspense to a finish, there should have followed the resolution to
F sharp major. Instead of that, there was a great surprise. With
a vicious twist, a freakish abruptness that was almost a bit of
genius, the key changed here to F major; this new element, which
developed out of the use of both pedals for the long drawn out
second syllable of the word Luischen, had an indescribable, an un-
heard of effectiveness! It was a complete astonishment, a rough
shaking of the nerves that made chills go down the spine. It was
a marvelous piece of work, a discovery, a denudation that was al-
most terrible in its suddenness, a curtain that is snatched away. ...


442
LOULOU
And with this chord in F sharp, the attorney stopped dancing.
He stood still, stood in the middle of the stage as though he were
rooted there, both index fingers still held up, with one a little lower
than the other. The į of Luischen died in his mouth; he was
silent. Almost at the same time the accompaniment broke off
sharply, and this picturesque, detestably ridiculous apparition stood
up there with its head shoved forward like an animal, and staring
with blazing eyes. He stared out into the lively, brilliant hall
with its mass of people; scandal seemed to float on the air almost,
like some emanation from the audience. He stared into all these
lifted faces, saw them distorted and strongly illuminated; he
looked into these hundreds of eyes that were all turned with the
same knowing expression on the two down there in front of him
and on himself. While an unbroken silence rested over everyone,
he let his widened eyes wander slowly and inhumanly from them
to the audience, and from the audience back to the two of them.
Suddenly a look of understanding seemed to come over his
face; the rush of blood made it as red as his silk dress; then he
was left a waxen yellow—and the big man fell, so that the floor
groaned.
For a moment the silence continued. Then cries were heard,
an uproar started, a few courageous men sprang from the
orchestra up to the stage, among them a young physician; the
curtain was drawn.
Amra Jacoby and Alfred Läutner were still sitting at the piano,
each turned away somewhat from the other. With his head down,
he seemed to be still listening to his transition into F major. She,
incapable of grasping with her sparrow-brain what was happening
in front of her, sat gazing around emptily.
Soon after this the young physician appeared in the hall again,
a slight Jewish gentleman with a serious face and a black pointed
beard. With a shrug of his shoulders, he answered the men and
women that had gathered about the door: “Done for.”



1
SPANISH BULL FIGHT.
BY HUNT DIEDERICH






SPANISH BULL FIGHT.
BY HUNT DIEDERICH


1


TRANSLATIONS FROM THE ANACREONTIC
POEMS
BY E. ALLEN ASHWIN
THE DREAM
1
I lay down to sleep
On my bed of sea-purple,
Exulting after wine.
I seemed lightly to be running
Swift races for sport with young girls.
Boys with skin fresh as a ripe grape
Mocked upon me,
Teasing me about those fair young girls.
I was to be awarded a kiss,
But they vanished a moment too soon.
Alone and miserable,
I longed for more sleep.
TO THE SPRING
See how, with the coming of the Spring,
The Graces burgeon out the roses.
See how the waves of the sea
Are stroked to a calm.
See the diving of ducks,
And the journeys of the cranes,
And the Sun smiles openly,
And the cloud shadows race about,
And man's work puts on a radiance.
The green of the olive peeps out,
The vine is crowned with the wine flower;
Swelling with leaves and
young shoots
The fruit trees have burst into flower.





TRANSLATIONS FROM THE ANACREONTIC
POEMS
BY E. ALLEN ASHWIN
THE DREAM
I lay down to sleep
On my bed of sea-purple,
Exulting after wine.
I seemed lightly to be running
Swift races for
sport with young girls.
Boys with skin fresh as a ripe grape
Mocked upon me,
Teasing me about those fair young girls.
I was to be awarded a kiss,
But they vanished a moment too soon.
Alone and miserable,
I longed for more sleep.
TO THE SPRING
See how, with the coming of the Spring,
The Graces burgeon out the roses.
See how the waves of the sea
Are stroked to a calm.
See the diving of ducks,
And the journeys of the cranes,
And the Sun smiles openly,
And the cloud shadows race about,
And man's work puts on a radiance.
The green of the olive peeps out,
The vine is crowned with the wine flower;
Swelling with leaves and young shoots
The fruit trees have burst into flower.


444
FROM THE ANACREONTIC POEMS
A FRAGMENT
I will speak to this one;
For she has the face of one who would listen,
However foolishly a man might speak.
TO A SWALLOW
You noisy swallow,
What shall I do to you?
Shall I take your airy wings
And cut them off ?
Or shall I be another Tereus,
And tear out your tongue?
With your early morning songs
You have raped away Bathyllus
From my dreams.
TO ANACREON
Anacreon the Teian singer
Came to me in a dream, calling me;
And I ran up to him,
Embracing him and kissing him.
He was old but beautiful,
Beautiful, and a lover of wine;
His lips smelled of wine.
And, as he was growing feeble,
Love led him by the hand.
He took the garland from his head
And offered it to me,
And it smelled of Anacreon.
Like a fool I put it on my brow;
And from that time till now
I have not ceased to love.


E. ALLEN ASHWIN
445
TO A CICADA
یا اسے اتنا
Happy Cicada, I envy you.
On the intoxication of a little dew,
You are throned like a king on the shrub-tops,
And can sing.
All things that you see in the country-side
Belong to you;
For you do the woodlands nurse their greenlings.
The farmers make a friend of you,
For you harm nothing of theirs;
And men revere you
As the sweet proclaimer of Summer.
The Muses love you,
Phoebus himself loves you
And gave you a clear silvery voice.
Age has no weariness for you,
Wise, earth-born lover of song;
You are serene from passion,
Free of the torment of blood,
Very like the Gods, Cicada.
|
TO A PIGEON
Dear pigeon,
Where do you fly from,
Breathing and distilling
Such perfume on the air?
What business is yours?
Anacreon sent me
To his boy Bathyllus,
The first, the prince of all his loves.
Cythere sold me to him
For a tiny love poem;
And I do such service
To Anacreon.


446
FROM THE ANACREONTIC POEMS
See, I am carrying his letters now.
He says that presently
He will set me free;
But even if he sets me free,
I shall remain his slave.
Why should I fly
Over mountains and fields,
Resting in trees,
And eat wild food?
I take bread from the very hands
Of Anacreon;
And he gives me to drink
Of the wine that he drinks.
And drinking I dance,
And comfort my Lord with my wings;
And I lie down to sleep on his harp.
Away! I have told you all. .
Man, you have made me
More talkative than a crow.
A PORTRAIT OF BATHYLLUS
You are a master of portrait making;
Now I will teach you how to paint
My companion Bathyllus.
Hair that plays with the light,
Black at the roots,
Shading to gold of the sun at the tips;
And the tresses of his hair
Freely and unordered
Lying as they will.
Soft as the dew
Let his snake black eyebrows
Encircle his brow.
Dark eyes
At once fierce and voluptuous,
Part Ares and part Aphrodite;


E. ALLEN ASHWIN
447
So that one may be afraid,
And yet hang on hope.
Cheeks apple-red with a down of silk,
a
And a blush that will try your skill.
Indeed, I cannot tell you
How to paint his lips,
Tender, fulfilled with Persuasion;
If the canvas do not speak, you have failed.
His
young
face should be
Not without a touch of chubbiness;
And I must tell you his ivory neck
Should be like the neck of Adonis.
Give him the breast and the hands of Hermes,
The thighs of Polydeuces,
And the belly of Dionysus.
Make him as one that is fit to love,
And fit to be loved.
But yours is a beggarly art,
That will not let you paint his back,
Which is even more beautiful.
His feet-
But name your own price,
And I will take this Apollo;
It is exactly my Bathyllus.
When you come to Samos,
You
may finish my Bathyllus for Apollo.


LONDON LETTER
March, 1921
The Two STUPIDITIES
I take up this task of writing a London letter with an over-
whelming sense of difficulty. As I first proposed it to myself,
there was no difficulty at all: it was to mention any work, or any
momentary appearance of intellect or feeling, which seemed to de-
serve mention, to use any opportunity to consider the writing of
living authors whom I respect, and to construct such a portrait of
the time as might be in my power. Then I reflected that there
is in contemporary English literature a very great deal which I
cordially detest; and that I could not make an honest portrait
without calling attention to these things. Yet I recognized that
by so doing I might arouse the glee, and draw upon myself the
approval, of exactly that part of American opinion which I
abominate. One must face the fact that the imbeciles on either
side of the water are very glad and quite able to perceive, by that
sort of hostile sympathy which exists only among members of the
same family, the imbecilities of the great fraternity on the other
side; and that this perception only confirms them in their own
variety of stupidity. I can claim no great originality in diagnosing
either of the two stupidities; the only possible originality is in their
collocation. There is Mr Mencken, a brilliant specialist in Ameri-
can depravity, whose last book I have read with strong admiration.
And only recently, when I mentioned, rather gently as I thought, a
very conspicuous feature of English stupidity, I was gaped at by
one of the smaller English reviewers, for my words of “elegant
anguish.” It pleased me to reflect that a critic of the same stripe
had once referred to Matthew Arnold as an "elegant Jeremiah”;
although this coincidence merely proved the immortality of the
English reviewer, and not any similarity between Matthew Arnold
and myself. However, if these letters succeed in being written
with any competence, I am almost certain to become an object of
international execration; a disaster in which I pray very vigor-
ously that The Dial may not share.
a


T. S. ELIOT
449
PROLEGOMENA TO POETRY
Mr Harold Monro has just produced a book entitled Some Con-
temporary Poets: 1920, which is a particularly useful book for my
horrid purpose. It is, I hope, no injustice to Mr Monro to say that
his book has every appearance of having been written to order.
We have all written books to order, or we have conceived the de-
sire, at times of penury, of being asked to write a book to order,
and some moralists tell us that desire is as sinful as commission.
But the peculiar effect of Mr Monro's labours appears to be, that
everything in contemporary poetry (1920) is reduced to a precise
level of flatness. Our judgement is thus left free, if unguided.
It is to be wondered what the “general reading public,” to whom
its publishers say it should appeal, and who can hardly be other
than a small section of what Arnold called the Philistines, will
make of it. Some of the poets whom Mr Monro chats about are
dull, some are immature, some are slight, some are downright bad:
Mr. Monro's effect is to make them all seem dull, immature, slight,
and bad. And some are good, but we do not get that impression
from the book.
The first suggestion which this book gives me is that what I may
call the centre of gravity of dulness lies, in America and England,
at different points. Nearly the whole body of the Established
Church of contemporary literature in America must appear a little
ridiculous, if no worse, to even the most latitudinarian littérateurs
of Established contemporary literature in England. I cannot con-
ceive Mr Edmund Gosse, for example, really being taken in by the
effusions of Miss Repplier or the Reverend Mr Crothers, although
I can conceive of his commending them with a kindly Olympian
patronage which might take in the recipients. The Polite Essay
is, in fact, done rather better in England, and this truth is not re-
served for a few profound minds. Nevertheless the Established
Church of Literature does occasionally patronize, with the sem-
blance of enthusiasm, American literature which happens to amuse
it. It is creditable that Spoon River should for a time have
aroused interest here; unfortunately, its success has been more
lately duplicated by the poetry of Mr Vachel Lindsay. His ap-
parent "Americanism” and vigorous freedom from shame about his
simple tastes amuse the orthodox, while his Y. M. C. A. morality
represents something more remote than a massacre in Armenia.


450
LONDON LETTER
His verses have appeared in an English periodical. But I cannot
believe that he is treated with more respect than that with which
Clemenceau and Lloyd George bonified President Wilson.
One must therefore reject the belief that there is any near
equivalent in England for the Reverend Mr Crothers, or Lindsay, or
Mr Mabie, or that there is any exact parallel anywhere between
English life and American life (though there are constant curious
resemblances when one has ceased to expect them). And the
standards by which one disposes of American bad writing and Eng-
lish bad writing will not be the same. The conventional literature
of America is either wretchedly imitative of European culture,
or ignorant of it, or both; and by this standard one easily expels
either the Reverend Mr Crothers, with his parish tea-party wit,
his dreadful Nonconformity, or Mr David Graham Phillips, with
his exploitation of the Noble Fallen Woman who, in England, has
vanished into the underworld of romance. But there is no simple
international comparison of cultures by which to deal so easily
with, let us say, Mr John Drinkwater. I cannot point to any ex-
isting society which produces finer average specimens than Mr
Drinkwater; I can only point to a few individuals in England; and
it is always open to Mr Drinkwater's admirers to protest that my
few individuals are impostors. The most obvious thing to say,
the thing which makes it difficult for the critic to say more, is that
the work of Mr Drinkwater is dull, supremely dull. But when one
turns to view the work of a numerous host of Drinkwaters, incipient
Drinkwaters, decayed Drinkwaters, cross-bred Drinkwaters, this
adjective ceases to satisfy the intelligence. Any social phenomenon
of such dimensions must present more interest than that.
I do not make the mistake of supposing that Keats, or Shelley, or
Wordsworth, or Tennyson can be incriminated in the production
of the Georgian Anthology. Good poets may usually have a bad
influence, but their influence is usually much more restricted. I
cannot see in the Georgian Anthology any such influence as Words-
worth, Keats, and Shelley had upon Arnold, Tennyson, and Brown-
ing. The dulness of the Georgian Anthology is original, unique;
we shall find its cause in something much more profound than the
influence of a few predecessors. The subtle spirit inspiring the
ouija-board of Mr J. C. Squire's patient prestidigitators is not the
shattered Keats but the solid and eternal Podsnap himself. This


T. S. ELIOT
451
party represents, in fact, the insurgent middle class, Mr Monro's
General Reading Public. At the very moment when the middle
class appears to be on the point of perdition—beleaguered by a
Coalition Government, the Three Trades-Unions, and the Income
Tax-at this very moment it enjoys the triumph, in intellectual
matters, of being able to respect no other standards than its own.
And indeed, while its citadels appear to topple, it is busy strength-
ening its foundations. Year by year, royal birth-day by royal
birth-day, it gains more seats in the House of Lords; and on the
other hand, if it rejects with contumely the independent man, the
free man, all the individuals who do not conform to a world of
mass-production, the Middle Class finds itself on one side more
and more approaching identity with what used to be called the
Lower Class. Both middle class and lower class are finding safety
in Regular Hours, Regular Wages, Regular Pensions, and Regular
Ideas. In other words, there will soon be only one class, and the
second Flood is here.
This social evolution is not, of course, peculiarly British, and I
am ready to admit that it may have more revolting forms else-
where. I have no wish to dwell upon the subject; I only intro-
duced it as a background to the Georgian Anthology. I do not
wish either to dwell upon the dulness of this book; that the writers
cannot help. What I wish to comment on is the extreme lack of
culture on the part of a number of writers in prose and verse; and
when I say this I hear already the repeated epithets of "elegant
anguish,” and “dusty face,” and “précieux ridicule" with which
my efficient clipping-bureau has lately refreshed me.
pared to be accused, so unconscious is the humour of the multitude,
of self-advertisement. But it is certain that culture does not reside
solely in a university education, or in extensive reading; and it is
doubtful whether culture is perceptibly developed by a busy life
of journalism. A literature without any critical sense; a poetry
which takes not the faintest notice of the development of French
verse from Baudelaire to the present day, and which has perused
English literature with only a wandering antiquarian passion, a
taste for which everything is either too hot or too cold; there is no
culture here. Culture is traditional, and loves novelty; the Gen-
eral Reading Public knows no tradition, and loves staleness. And
it must not be supposed that this great middle class public which
I am pre-


452
LONDON LETTER
consumes Georgian poetry corresponds to the public of Mrs Ella
Wheeler Wilcox. I intend no disrespect to that lady, whose verse I
have read with ease and some pleasure. The Georgian public is a
smallish but important public, it is that offensive part of the mid-
dle class which believes itself superior to the rest of the middle
class; and superior for precisely this reason that it believes itself
to possess culture.
Returning to Mr Monro's book, we find a number of poets, a
very small number, who cannot simply be described as purveyors
to the General Reading Public. There is Mr Nichols, who is too
nimble to be dull, and who is very immature; if he could free him-
self from the circumambient vulgarity and in several ways forget
himself, he might rise to a superior place. Then there is the curi-
ous spectacle of Mr Huxley, one of the very few who have experi-
enced the influence of Laforgue, and who writes (I believe it is no
secret) one of the brightest pages in the Athenaeum; before he has
thoroughly worked out Laforgue into a perfect language of his own,
skews off into Leda, which, although the work of a much more
sophisticated temperament than Mr Squire's, is really a concession
to the creamy top of the General Reading Public. There is Miss
Sitwell. She is tediously given to repeating herself, but this repeti-
tion is perhaps her consciousness of the fact that she has a genuine
little vision of the age, quite her own. This peculiar way of see-
ing things, which is not capable of much development, is what is
interesting; not her technique, which is insufficient. And individu-
ally, there are poems by Mr Herbert Read and Mr Aldington
which endure. But what is good (on looking over for the last
time Mr Monro's list of names) is very scattered, and the bad
poetry is very compact. I have avoided mentioning the Elder
Poets, such as Mr Bridges, or Mr Yeats, or Mr Pound. One be-
comes old very quickly in these days.
What I propose to myself, in continuation of this tentative es-
say, is to compare the use of the English language in contemporary
English and American verse, a comparison which will probably
show a balance in favour of London (or Dublin); and further to
institute a comparison of English and American verse with French.
There are pitfalls too in the question of the Revival of Criticism
in England; I should rightly have discussed the revival of criticism
in this letter, as it may be dead before I write again. Again, the


T. S. ELIOT
453
Palladium has at this moment an excellent bill, including Marie
Lloyd, Little Tich, George Mozart, and Ernie Lotinga; and that
provokes an important chapter on the Extinction of the Music
Hall, the corruption of the Theatre Public, and the incapacity of
the British public to appreciate Miss Ethel Levey. Next week
the admirable Phoenix Society will perform Volpone or the Fox
and this requires a word on Shakesperian acting in England. All of
these problems are integral to my plan, and I hope can be included
before the next visit of M Diaghileff's Ballet. A small but varied
exhibition by Picasso is the most interesting event of London at this
moment—but that lies outside of my province.
T. S. Eliot


BOOK REVIEWS
RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY. By John Dewey.
12mo. 224 pages. Henry Holt and Company. New York.
T!
THIS little book serves two distinct purposes, and should be
judged accordingly. On the one hand, it is a sketch of the
development of European philosophy, intended to afford a broad
view of general tendencies to the Japanese audiences to which it
was addressed in February and March, 1920. On the other hand,
it is a recapitulation and defence of Professor Dewey's own par-
ticular brand of the new philosophy.
Judged in relation to the first of these purposes the book has
great merits. Although the author undertakes to trace the out-
lines of European philosophy from antiquity to the present era of
reconstruction, a fine sense of proportion enables him to present a
true picture on the scale which he has chosen; and although such
a sketch must necessarily limit itself to what is familiar, Professor
Dewey's distinguished simplicity of style enables him to say many
things better than they have been said before. It is his general
thesis that the classic philosophy of the ancient, mediaeval, and
early modern periods was a philosophy which "aimed at a rational
justification of things that had been previously accepted because of
their emotional congeniality and social prestige.” In other words,
it was an “apologetic” philosophy. But although this was its real
purpose, it could not admit it. Seeking to invest a particular
historical set of ideals with absoluteness and finality, it claimed the
infallibility of reason, set up a feudal system in nature, and dis-
paraged the world of experience in behalf of a “real” world in
which its ideals were eternally embodied. The new philosophy is
to do consciously what the classic philosophy did from hidden and
falsified motives. It is to clarify moral and social ideals and re-
solve their conflicts. Since it will acknowledge the traditional
ideals as its subject matter it will satisfy those who respect the past;


RALPH BARTON PERRY
455
and since it will re-fashion these ideals, it will also satisfy “those
who are interested in establishing a freer and happier future.”
When we turn to Professor Dewey's own philosophy we find a
sort of distant clearness which does not bear close and attentive
scrutiny. The footing is good if one keeps moving, but it is quick-
sand if one stands too long in one spot. Suppose, for example,
one pauses to ask oneself about the author's metaphysics. He al-
lies himself with the scientific movement, and proposes that man
should reap all the practical applications of the mechanical method.
But does he accept the physical account of nature as defining the
origin, status, environment, and destiny of man? There is no
clear answer to this question. As intelligence man is to devote him-
self to the "intentional reconstruction of experience”: and “the
true 'stuff of experience is recognized to be adaptive courses of
action, habits, active functions, connections of doing and under-
going; sensori-motor co-ordinations." But we are left in doubt
as to whether these "adaptive courses of action" are to be
construed as activities of the physical organism, and hence as
portions of the general system of physical nature, or are to
be taken as the primitive and original elements from which
this system is derived. In one case man's "intentional reconstruc-
tion” would consist of such changes as he is enabled to make in
physical nature through his body and the physical forces by which
its agency is extended; in the other case it would consist of some
sort of direct creative activity on the part of a non-physical mind.
Santayana somewhere remarks that all Anglo-American naturalism
has a taint of subjectivism, by which despite its scientific profes-
sions it is enabled to preserve something of the anthropo-centric
bias of the old apologetic philosophies. Owing to his use of that
philosophical weasel-word "experience,” Professor Dewey is per-
haps a case in point.
As regards the question of truth, the author is satisfied to restate
the pragmatist or instrumentalist position in that loose form which
has hitherto prevented its acceptance by rigorous thinkers. "If
ideas, meanings, conceptions, notions, theories, systems are instru-
mental to an active reorganization of the given environment, to a
removal of some specific trouble and perplexity, then the test of
their validity and value lies in accomplishing this work. If they
succeed in their office, they are reliable, sound, valid, good, true.”


456
RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
This would justify the application, that if my specific perplexity
is the need of livelihood, and this leads me to form the idea of a
new planet, and if, as a result I obtain appointment to a professor-
ship of astronomy, then my idea is proved true by the fact that I
got a job by it. Professor Dewey does not mean this, but he vir-
tually says it. The point is that through his anxiety to establish
the view that thought is useful, he has failed to insist that it has a
special use; and that its success is to be defined relatively to this
and to this only, regardless of such ulterior successes as may event-
ually accrue from it. One may fairly paraphrase Professor
Dewey's own words used in another connection, and ask, “How
far would the biologist and the physician progress if when the sub-
ject of respiration is under consideration, discussion confined itself
to bandying back and forth the concepts of ‘reorganization,' 'suc-
cess,' and 'consequences' ?” Respiration has its own work to do,
and has to be judged accordingly, not by the general standard of
health; and similarly thinking has an extremely specialized and
delicate function, which normally conduces to the general "suc-
cess” of the organism, but which has to be judged true or false in
its own terms.
As regards the status of logic, Professor Dewey rightly insists
that the art of thinking should be based on a psychology of the
thought-process. But he fails to provide any proper definition of
the role of formal logic. Despite its admixture of psychology,
this traditional branch of knowledge undoubtedly contains a body
of facts that are not psychological. Since our author apparently
admits mathematics as a special science, it would have been possible
for him to concede a place for logistics as an extension of mathe-
matics. This however he unaccountably fails to do.
And what, finally, of ethics? After having condemned the
traditional ethics for insisting upon formulating "some final end
or good or some ultimate and supreme law,” and after having
abolished morality altogether as a separate domain of life, he then
proceeds to say that "growth itself is the only moral ‘end,” and
“growing, or the continuous reconstruction of experience, is the
only end.” He also alludes to "directions of change in the quality
of experience,” to the inquiry as to "what is done to release specific
capacities and co-ordinate them into working powers,” and recom-
mends association as a means by which "goods” may "exist and


RALPH BARTON PERRY
457
endure.” The effect is to justify the traditional ethics in its search
after a final end or supreme law, while leaving the reader in the
profoundest doubt as to what Professor Dewey means by his con-
ception of the matter.
The four problems indicated above, concerning the reality of
physical nature, the meaning of truth, the status of logic, and the
general principle of moral value, are perhaps the most important
of the distinctively philosophical problems of the day. Despite
his lucidity of style Professor Dewey's solution of these problems
receives no clarification in this book.
RALPH BARTON PERRY


A PHILOSOPHER OF THE EROTIC
WOMEN IN Love. By D. H. Lawrence. 8vo. 536
pages. Privately printed.
12mo. 378
The Lost GIRL. By D. H. Lawrence.
pages. Thomas Seltzer. New York.
Mim
ICHELANGELO, El Greco, Cézanne, D. H. Lawrence; so
I might begin a classification which would include those who
could be called the substitutionists among artists-men who have
an individual affirmative to substitute for the interrogation of
existence. This would not be a classification according to perfec-
tion. D. H. Lawrence has done things which are incredibly bad.
However, I do not doubt that the others, when among their con-
temporaries, have been equally guilty. Waldo Frank, in present-
day America, though he is as yet incompletely articulate, belongs
to the same artistic type.
The apex of all recorded human experience—the ecstasy of love,
art, religious passion is in its immediate essence the same, a re-
lease from the limitation of individuality in a sense of identity
with other life. What passes for new in art is merely a readjust-
ment, through technical means, of the pressure which asserts this
identity. In the beginning art was confessedly a religious expres-
sion. But religion in a group inevitably tends to establish a social
rather than an individual interpretation of deity, and so reduce
aesthetics to the functional conception called morality. Art dis-
tinguished itself from religion that each man might make his own
god, individual and unmoral. Hence the purest art is an expres-
sion of the most individual experience.
But there is something negative, deathly in this pure art. Be-
ing the purest intensive expression of what is, it renounces the
extensive expression of a desire to be otherwise. It requires a
receptive, negative will. In a facile nature it is a voluptuous veri-
fication of sense. In a man like Dostoevsky the will to receive and
register human agonies becomes a kind of spiritual masochism.
There is in all artists of a certain emotional vigour, the intoxication
a


EVELYN SCOTT
459
of self-annihilation balanced against the intoxication of self-asser-
tion: the deathly, intensive expression of pure art, always being
tempted to become extensive and romantic.
If an individual is small, his romanticism is merely a short cut
to self-assertion. Never having acutely experienced particular
values, he grasps the generality of the mob and tries to come into
deductive being through it. However, there are persons in whom
the particular experience of life is so intense that it grows, through
the wholeness of emotion, into the justifiable conviction of an ab-
solute. D. H. Lawrence is one of these. In him the extensive
will to live asserts itself from the depths of his sensuous and emo-
tional resolutions.
“Parturiunt montes, nascetur ridiculus mus." So the romantic
individual brings forth his realized self. But if the great roman-
tic's creed, finally articulate, is disappointing, the spectacle of the
travail in which he gives birth to it is, in cases like that of Law-
rence, a magnificently revealing thing.
Women In Love is not pure as an art form, but it is because art
is too limited for Lawrence's conviction of reality. Lawrence's
poetry seemed out of place in the Imagist Anthology. A number
of his contemporaries express finely the delicate nostalgic emotions
of neo-classicism, the emotions of nuns. The Parnassian muse,
though she speaks of orgies, is a virgin. Lawrence is aesthetically
unchaste. His genius has consorted with life and has acquired
mystical imperfections, nail-prints in the palms.
Women In Love purports to be a novel. In unfolding the love
life of Ursula Brangwen and of her sister, Gudrun, Mr Lawrence
has made concessions to the novel form. There are characters in
the book-Mrs Crich, the elder, and Hermione Roddice, particu-
larly—as subtly authentic as any in fiction. There are moments,
such as those when Mrs Crich breaks through her sinister quiescence
to speak to her dead husband and when Gerald Crich takes Gudrun,
that are intense dramatic revelations. Yet Women In Love lacks
that quality of the arrested ephemeral which is in the pure art form.
Lawrence's moods are taken deep down in an irrevocable substance.
There is in him no capacity for the play of relations, for adding
notes to an established chord. His resolutions are all absolute.
The souls of his characters are unrolled like scrolls.
And so this book falls, as if outside itself, into the category of


460 A PHILOSOPHER OF THE EROTIC
confessions. Having written it, Lawrence might turn philosopher
or priest. It is the last word of his living truth. Anything fur-
ther in this nature, would necessarily be mere exposition. The
book might as well be the last word of an age in revolt against the
intellectualism to which it has been betrayed; an after-war world,
hectically clutching at immediacy; a world in which Parnassianism
has brought forth the dadaists.
To such an age, sex, the most immediate experience of the in-
dividual, presents the greatest revelation. The intellectual evalu-
ator is to the first hand revealer of actuality as the anatomist to
the observer of physiological processes. Sense and emotion are
known in a state of becoming. Intellectual understanding is ex-
traneous to the thing understood, a process, of analysis and classi-
fication, of the annihilation of intimate knowledge. Art has car-
ried Bergson to the conclusion from which he was withheld by the
timidities of logic. And now Woman, because of her immediate
part in the intimate mystery of creation, is revived for worship.
It is an old rôle for her, that of the sacred prostitute. But she
accepts it now with the ache of a new awareness. Freedom is hers,
if she wills it, but at the price of her own dark importance.
Lawrence rebels half-heartedly against the conclusion of his
intuitions. The polarized relations of Ursula Brangwen and
Rupert Birkin-less convincing than anything in the book-are
obviously tendered as a solution of the erotic problem. Something
like this was possibly in Lawrence's mind when he gave to a volume
of his poems the title, Look, We Have Come Through. But the
love of Ursula and Rupert is presented to us with a conjectural un-
certainty that makes it pale against the vivid, nameless actuality
of the instinctive relationship of Gudrun and Gerald Crich.
Yet even Gudrun rebels at last against "the stupidity of the
phallus,” and Hermione Roddice remains for ever withheld in her
bitter intellectuality because she dare not understand her own
nature too well.
If Mr Lawrence were a Russian he would take the answer to life
as his art gives it, in terms of other-worldliness. The experience
of God is an initiation into the soul of chaos. But belonging to
the English race of moralists, Mr Lawrence persists in a search for
a
temporal solutions. In The Lost Girl, he doubles on himself, as it


EVELYN SCOTT
461
a
were, and begins his quest anew; this time submitting to an ob-
jective sequence of whích Women In Love took little account.
The first half of this story of Alvina Houghton is the cerebral
registration of a series of rather boring incidents. Mr Lawrence,
even less French than Russian, has no pure passion of creation.
The book means next to nothing until that point where the middle-
class English girl eludes her spinsterish fate by eloping with the
Italian player. From here on there is a kind of radiance of con-
viction in the pages. After having threaded a futilely round-about
way, we are returned to Mr Lawrence's old revealed, almost re-
ligious certainty. Lawrence, the Englishman, accomplishes a sort
of mystical identity with the sense-enwrapped Italian, Francesco
Marasco.
Alvina goes to Italy with her husband—to an old, oblivious,
father terrible Italy. The final chapters of this book parallel
those of Women In Love. In the latter volume, Gudrun, in the
rigid ecstasy of the Alps, becomes an unwilling initiate in Nature's
impersonal being. Alvina Houghton, lost from her kind in her
warmer coloured wilderness, with aching acquiescence, experiences
the same intoxication.
Religions are immediate philosophies. Mr Lawrence, by acci-
dent a novelist, actually is the priest of an age almost intolerably
self-aware. Evocative, rather than delineative, he consciously de-
sires what all ritual infers, the release of individuality in the con-
fusion of sense.
EVELYN Scott


THE MYSTIC FINGER-POST
MIND ENERGY. Lectures and Essays. By Henri Berg-
son. Translated by H. Wildon Carr. 1210. 262 pages.
Henry Holt and Company. New York.
I
N this mixture of expositions for the general and dialectics for
the particular, Bergson reiterates under the very modern title
of Mind Energy, his popular thesis of Vitalism and Free Will. To
those acquainted with his more ponderous productions this volume
will contain little that is patently new. But as it is a hand-book
for the uninitiate (excepting of course the last two chapters of di-
alectics) it will probably fill an awaited place among the number-
less other primers of the Bergsonian gospel.
The translation by Professor Carr is vivid, even more persuasive
than the original. Bergson can be more artfully expressed in any
language less incisive than that of France. For he has a natural
a
hatred of perspicuity, insisting at most times that if he be "com-
plete, precise, and mathematical” he will "get nothing.” So like
poets and preachers, he prefers the deeper suggestion of nimble
metaphors to all the accuracy of strict and beefy prose.
His prodigiously modern epic of creative evolution is naturally
popular. For this (must we say pudgy?) age still hankers after
the attitudes and oracles of a mystic side-show. With its "sacri-
legeous backward grasp” it still hangs to its infantile hunger for
some paternal god to reveal Direction. But unfortunately the age
flourishes under the tyranny of scientific method. And since the
dolls of the ancient magicians can only articulate their answers in
a forbidden language (poor cracked spent dolls gesticulating a fad-
ed poetry), the age must only pity their display.
For religion, abandoning its existence as the symbol of super-
natural purpose, dissolves forthwith to mere optimism in the flim-
flam of Mediaeval morals. And even eternal truth (still spelled
with capitals, it is true, by the sentimental) has been dragged to
the work-shop by a few tough-minded philosophers who will give
her only a pay envelope for memory of her ancient splendour. So
with religion and rationalism gone by the board, science alone re-


SLATER BROWN
463
mains to reveal life's final Direction. But science is a terrible
mother, and labouring with the gloomy law of the conservation of
energy, it can prove nothing but that life has no direction at all.
The outlook is tragic.
Like a gentleman, Bergson meets the dilemma with a compro-
mise.
“In man alone, especially among the best of mankind, the vital
movement pursues its way without hindrance, thrusting through
that work of art, the human body, which it has created on its way,
the creative current of moral life. Man, called at every moment to
lean on the totality of the past in order to bring his weight to bear
more effectively on the future, is the great success of life ... The
men of moral grandeur, particularly those whose inventive and sim-
ple heroism has opened new paths of virtue, are revealers of meta-
physical truth. Although they are the culminating point of evo-
lution, yet they are nearest the source and they enable us to perceive
the impulsion which comes from the deep. It is in studying these
great lives, in striving to experience sympathetically what they
experience, that we may penetrate by an act of intuition to the life
principle itself. To pierce the mystery of the deep, it is sometimes
necessary to regard the heights. It is earth's hidden fire which
appears at the summit of the volcano."
This eloquent expansion perhaps displays the compromise. For
though the "vital impulse” can only be revealed to experience "by
an act of intuition,” it is only through its acceptance as an empiri-
cally determined truth that evolution, according to Bergson, can be
explained. The élan thus gains its necessary pragmatic sanction;
the technique of science gives validity to the mystic content. Berg-
son turns a microscopic eye inward for telescopic revelation. Ploti-
nus transfigures Darwin.
The attitude is auspicious. For not only does Bergson answer
the demand for cosmic direction, but he brushes aside the dis-
turbing logic of supernatural purpose. The Bergsonian élan
vital differs from an omniscient deity in the same way that a blind
push differs from a deterministic pull. God then becomes the cross
section of an ever changing, ever progressing present. But like a
blind man on a bicycle He knows only that He is on his way.


464
THE MYSTIC FINGER-POST
>
a
Mind energy is this vitalistic activity seeking expression. It is
a force exhibiting among other things an absolute freedom of will.
It bends the implacable necessity of matter to its own purpose, and
gives direction to an otherwise improvident world. "Matter is in-
ertia, geometry, necessity. But with life there appears free, un-
predictable movement. The living being chooses, or tends to
choose. Its rôle is to create."
This dashing theory necessarily ravishes the law of the conserva-
tion of energy. For if an efficient will can perform free actions,
heaven alone knows what other forces cannot do the same! Why
must free action be limited to mind? But to these questions Berg-
son replies testily in a long sentence, the bearing of which is that as
consciousness "feels itself to be in the possession of a free activity"
(which cannot be doubted) "on those who hold the feeling is
illusory, then, falls the onus of proof.” Or, as Dr Johnson blunt-
ly said, “We know our will is free, and there's an end on't.”
Psychology may some day be able to show that there is no such
"end on't.” For already there is a tendency among certain psy.
chologists to ascribe to the unconscious the whole determination of
mind, and what is more, a determination over which conscious exist-
ence has no control. Thus consciousness acting under the fatal
hypnotism of its virtual master, can possess only the illusion and
not the reality of free will.
But this is hardly more than a theory, and it may take years yet
to force Bergson to lower his gay banners. It required many cen-
turies to disabuse man's mind of the animistic phantasy that light-
ning and thunder moved capriciously, and perhaps it will take even
longer to destroy the vitalistic gospel.
However let us abandon disputation and condescend to an ami-
cable agreement with Bergson that "that which counts, that which
lasts is the positive truth we bring out, the true idea pushes out the
false one by its mere weight and thus proves to be, without refuting
anybody, the best of refutation.” So let us accept the positive
truth of the élan vital, since Bergson has at least attempted to de-
termine empirically the values and direction of life. For philoso-
phers, usually too busy playing solitaire, seldom find time to an-
swer those very problems which give to their profession its only
semblance of utility or purpose.
Yet before we abandon our souls to the gentle and esoteric gospel


SLATER BROWN
465
a
of Bergson, let us observe disinterestedly the élan vital. For per-
haps we may perceive in its mystic twilight some hidden, disquiet-
ing vista. There may be hell within the City of God.
So it is possible that the cosmic urge may imply despair as well
as hope. And since in the course of evolution it has produced its
greatest succces, Man; it may at a leap conceive a greater, far more
terrible success. A super-Bolshevik perhaps, with a fourth dimen-
,
sional eye; who, in the tyranny of his vitalistically-given strength
may enslave man as man has enslaved the animals.
Or again, intelligence may itself carry the poison of destruction
in its own loins. For the vital impulse produced instinct in the
same manner that it produced intelligence. And yet so soon as in-
stinct developed a technique of living in which racial desire could
find an expression compatible with the demands of environment;
so soon did instinct cease to evolve and change.
Even this tragedy may overwhelm man, for intelligence may also
come to the stopping place where it will drift into inertia. Though
it is commonly believed that the lusts of the human species are in-
satiable, there is no passion like that of indolence. And should
man surround himself with a wilderness of thought-saving ma-
chines, with an efficient social order to limit his desires and enlarge
contentment, then even intelligence, lacking the stimulus of a strug-
gle, may atrophy. Man, with all the futility of an ant, may come
to revolve in endless and ridiculous circles.
But this suggestion, equal in probability to the Bergsonian hope,
is exceptionally disspiriting.
Slater Brown


THE ACADEMIC JAMES
The LETTERS OF William JAMES. Edited by his son
Henry James. Two volumes. Illustrated. 8vo. 730
pages. The Atlantic Monthly Press. Boston.
WILLIAM
a
ILLIAM JAMES, in turn artist, naturalist, physiologist,
psychologist, philosopher, was so much more than a profes-
sor, so much other than a professor, that it seems partial and in-
vidious to project his life as reflected in his letters, from the
academic angle. Yet (with interruptions of ill health) he taught
for thirty-five years, and was seen and heard and looked upon the
world professorially. The profession is quite unwilling to relin-
quish his memory as that of one of their kind; departments of
psychology and philosophy cherish him as their own. Individualist
to the core, stimulated and guided to the expression of thought
through personality by the brilliant example of his father, no title
or occupation or career could be other than a medium for his pre-
dilection for the broadly human and deeply spiritual problems of
life.
As a youth, relieved from immediate economic stress, he found
himself slowly; more truly, to give them a fair chance, he tested
the depth of his several interests. A year with William Hunt as
master and La Farge as a fellow-pupil convinced him that the
artist in him was not his predominant métier; the expedition to
Brazil with Agassiz demonstrated to his satisfaction that natural
science would not hold him singly, forsaking all other pursuits. He
persevered with his medical studies in Germany and at home long
enough to take his degree, and then to teach ad interim in anatomy
and physiology. His primary spontaneous inclination was for
philosophy; psychology was but the approach from a hill-top to
the promised land. When safely ensconced in the philosophic
chair, he could refer to it with a playful retrospective tribute, as
"a nasty little subject.” The manuscript of the great Psychology,
the work of a dozen years, was dispatched with this description:
“a loathsome, tumefied, bloated, dropsical mass, testifying to noth-
ing but two facts: ist, there is no such thing as a science of psy-


JOSEPH JASTROW
467
chology, and 2nd, that W. J. is an incapable.” This monumental
work established James as the American psychologist to the larger
non-professional clientele, and notably so in Europe already claim-
ing him as a cosmopolitan product. There followed the Briefer
Course—known colloquially as "Jimmy”—which went to the pub-
lisher thus labelled and libelled:
“By adding some twaddle about the senses, by leaving out all
polemics and history, all bibliography and experimental details,
all metaphysical subtleties and digressions, all quotations, all hu-
mor and pathos, all interest in short, and by blackening the tops of
all the paragraphs, I think I have produced a tome of pedagogic
classic which will enrich both you and me, if not the student's
mind.”
Through this text thousands upon thousands of students were in-
troduced to the world of mind and to a master mind as interpreter.
Its popularity it owed in no small measure to the vivid style, allow-
ing the personality to speak through and between the prismatic
paragraphs. Yet of his style he says:
“If there is aught of good in the style, it is the result of cease-
less toil in rewriting. Everything comes out wrong with me at
first; but when once objectified in a crude shape, I can torture
and poke and scrape and pet it till it offends me no more.”
William James was an artist to the tips of his fingers and the
point of his pen. He was a naturalist exploring the varieties of
human experience; he had a clinical interest in irregular and out-
lying types of mentality; he had a humanitarian prejudice in
favour of the under-dog and the unrecognized product; he had a
passion for the fluid and formative and youthful in ideas and a
deep antipathy to the settled and complete and final conventional
solutions that seemed to him so much ingenious erudition elaborate-
ly embalmed. He was violently anti-scholastic, yet in his maturity
found himself recognized as a pre-eminent academician. By the
zeal of his stimulation and the charm of his person, he had in-
jected into the academic temper a new flavour.
To his surprise
he made informality respectable.


408
THE ACADEMIC JAMES
James' life as a professor was filled with more than the usual
relief and compensations, though heavily handicapped by ill
health. Europe as an educative influence he knew in his youth;
it became his refuge from the fatigue of teaching and a stimulus
for professional contacts; later, and to the last, in many a Kurort,
a hope of recovery. It remained these compositely, quickening his
reactions to men and peoples. In sharp contrast to his brother,
Henry, whose Anglicisms and mannerisms he constantly though
sympathetically opposed, he felt his Americanism proudly and
responsibly.
“England is ungracious, unamiable and heavy; whilst the Con-
tinent is everywhere light and amiably quaint, even where it is
ugly, as in many elements it is in Germany. To tell the truth I
long to steep myself in America again and let the broken rootlets
make new adhesions to the active soil. A man coquetting with
too many countries is as bad as a bigamist and loses his soul alto-
gether."
The shortcomings of American life, both in manners and ideals
he felt keenly, and feared that they might obstruct the imaginative
vision of his brother when he urged upon him a fraternal visit and
a mature American impression after twenty years abroad. Yet
both sons understood when their father spoke of the writings of
Swedenborg (which affected him deeply) as “insipid with veracity.”
The Henry Jamesian and the William Jamesian recoils from in-
sipidity were poles apart; yet both would have agreed to the
William Jamesian sentiment: "Man wants to be stretched to his
utmost, if not one way, then in another.” It was the violent re-
action from the temper of Chatauqua, which as experience he en-
joyed, that called out this epigram, and the desire to get away from
that sort of thing to "something less blameless and admiration-
worthy."
“The flash of a pistol, a dagger, or a devilish eye, anything to
break the unlovely level of 10,000 good people—a crime, murder,
rape, elopement, anything would do.”
The incentive of contacts with other institutions and with the


JOSEPH JASTROW
469
larger public came to James as a popular tribute to the vigour of
his thought and the inspiration of his personality. The pupils
whom he helped to professional maturity and the colleagues who
came under his encouraging spell, rejoiced in the opportunity of
the master's presence among them. Such invitations—at Columbia
University and Stanford University in this country and at Edin-
burgh abroad-served as the “summation of stimuli” to complete
a long projected book, or in due course to issue in book-form a
group of addresses through which he approached, saw, and con-
quered those who heard or read—the American public most direct-
ly. Of this phase of academic extension (for apart from a few oc-
casions, that of the dedication of Shaw Memorial the most notable
one, the themes were of the grove, though suitable to the forum)
James writes:
a
“But though I learn a good deal and become a better American
for having all the travel and social experience, it has ended by
being too tiresome.”
What James felt keenly as a lack in the academic régime was the
neglect of foriginality in sacrifice to scholastic traditions accepted
and exalted and intensified with imperfect consideration of losses
and gains. A meeting with a small group of Italian philosophers
inspired these words in a letter home:
they “show an enthusiasm and also a literary swing and activity
that we know nothing of in our own land, and that probably our
damned academic technic and Ph. D. machinery and university
organization prevents from ever coming to birth ... What is
most needed is new ideas. For every man who has one of them,
one may find a hundred who are willing to drudge patiently at
some unimportant problem.” And of the experience at Stanford
University—a promising venture in a virgin soil: “The whole
thing might be Utopian; it is only half-Utopian. A characteristic
American affair!"
What to James became the keenest compensation of his academic
career was his intercourse with choice minds bent upon living sig.
nificantly after the individual pattern of their temperaments and


470
THE ACADEMIC JAMES
their intellectual convictions. Josiah Royce, “a perfect little
Socrates,” was to him, first and last, intimate companion and
constant inspiration:
"Beloved Royce,- Great was my, was our pleasure in receiving
your long and delightful letter last night. Like the lioness in
Aesop's fable, you give birth to one young one only in the year, but
that one is a lion. I give birth mainly to guinea-pigs in the shape
of post-cards; but despite such diversities of epistolary expression,
the heart of each of us is in the right place. I need not say, my
dear old boy, how touched I am at your expressions of affection, or
how it pleases me to hear that you have missed me.
I too miss you
profoundly. I do not find in the hotel waiters, chambermaids, and
bath-attendants with whom my lot is chiefly cast, that unique mix-
ture of erudition, originality, profundity and vastness, and human
wit and leisureliness, by accustoming me to which during all these
years you have spoilt me for inferior kinds of intercourse. You
are still the centre of my gaze, the pole of my mental magnet.
When I write, 'tis with one eye on the page and one on you. When
I compose my Gifford lectures mentally, 'tis with the design ex-
clusively of overthrowing your system, and ruining your peace.
I lead a parasitic life upon you, for my highest flight of ambitious
ideality is to become your conqueror, and go down in history as
such, you and I rolled in one another's arms and silent (or rather
loquacious still) in one last death-grapple of an embrace. How
then, O my dear Royce, can I forget you, or be contented out of
your close neighborhood? Different as our minds are, yours has
?
nourished mine, as no other social influence ever has, and in con-
verse with you I have always felt that my life was being lived
importantly. Our minds, too, are not different in the Object
which they envisage. It is the whole paradoxical physico-moral-
spiritual Fatness, of which most people single out some skinny
fragment, which we both cover with our eye. We ‘aim at him
generally—and most others don't. I don't believe that we shall
dwell apart forever, though our formulas may."
And of Santayana:
“What a perfection of rottenness in a philosophy! I don't


JOSEPH JASTROW
471
.
think I ever knew the anti-realistic view to be propounded with so
impudently superior an air. ...
.. Bah! Give me Walt Whitman
and Browning ten times over, much as the perverse ugliness of the
latter at times irritates me, and intensely as I have enjoyed San-
tayana's attack. (Squealed and grunted with delight at the thick-
ening of the Harvard atmosphere.] The barbarians are in
the real line of mental growth, and those who do insist that the
ideal and the real are dynamically continuous are those by whom
the world is to be saved. But I'm nevertheless delighted that the
other view, always existing in the world, should at last have found
so splendidly impertinent an expression among ourselves.”
The reaction of men like William James to the trials and re-
wards of the academic life as lived in America, is a matter of con-
sequence. Large allowance must be made for his temperament;
though if Bergson—a congenial friend of later years—is right
in urging that much of the creative work of the world is to be done
by neurasthenics, that handicap must be accepted as conferring
qualities as well as limitations. As early as 1892 he writes from
Florence:
“I believe that last year in Cambridge I counted one single night
in which I could sit and read passively till bedtime; and now that
the days have begun to lengthen and that the small end of winter
appears looking through the future, I begin to count them here as
something unspeakably precious that may ne'er return.”
And in 1906:
.
"The first thing to do is to get out of the treadmill of teaching
which I hate and shall resign from next year. . Simplifi-
cation of the field of duties I find more and more to be the sum-
mum bonum for me. It's the harness and the hours that are
so galling.”
It is in the nature of things given to few men to live important-
ly; it might well be within the reach of a much larger selection to
live significantly, and within the reach of the great majority of


472
THE ACADEMIC JAMES
healthy-minded intellectuals to live adjustedly to an inspiring, at
the least, a sympathetic and helpful environment.
James' conclusion that “Life here in the University consists
altogether of interruptions” sets a sober theme. What James
called the harness, Lowell in the same environment and with
slighter responsibilities, dubbed “the ball and chain.” The situ-
ation with all its implications deserves a hearing. Are the Wil-
liam Jameses, of high and low degree, out of place in the academic
profession? Or is there something out of joint in the official
atmosphere of our great universities which dampens and harasses
when it should cheer and inspire? Surely the Jamesian type of
men belong, if anywhere in this groping civilization of ours, in the
formative centres of opinion, where the select youth congregate for
the intellectual fertilization of their lives.
To make the academic career for the Jamesian type of professor
something of an obstacle-race seems the climax of studied un-
wisdom; particularly so as the provisions-concessions if you like
-needed to remove the chafing and to fit the harness to a freer
movement, are so nearly within attainment. “The whole thing
might be Utopian; it is only half-Utopian. A characteristic
American affair!" It is indeed characteristic of a peculiarly ir-
ritating brand of folly that provides so many of the requirements
for a desired end and skimps upon the completing essentials. It
is the fatal passion for external control of intellectual interests,
that blights; it is the utterly irrelevant standards derived from a
harsh competitive business-life that hobbles the academic career,
and all for the insignificant reason that professors, among other
things, need salaries. It acts subtly and plausibly withal: setting
not quite the right men, not quite the first-rate men in positions of
influence, denying to those who most need the protection of security
and recognition just that final measure of esteem which, unsupplied,
turns to acid the sweeter juices of the fruits of learning. By such
slight failings in the disposition of stimulation and compensation
is the academic type cheated of its possibilities; and yet more dis-
astrously do the prizes go so largely to those who need them least.
The successful professor is too commonly the supporter of the
régime that continues in places of influence men not mediocre,
not without ability, but lacking that rarer and finer quality of
which Jameses are made. The working majority of academic men


JOSEPH JASTROW
473
must ever be of the safe and sane type to whom successful business-
men-equally honouring and suspecting the “highbrow” mind-
will prefer to send their sons, in the hope that the academic at-
mosphere will not too seriously divert practically minded youth
from worshipping the gods of things as they are. So may it be!
All this is right and proper! What is wrong and improper is the
insistence that other types of men, with different capacities for
service in other directions shall feel themselves out of the tradition,
and out of the line of such preferment and freedom essential to
produce the summum bonum.
It won't do barely to tolerate the individualistic qualities upon
which William James laid emphasis and which live so emphatical-
ly in his own career: it requires wisdom and a fine sense of val-
ues to let each man ripen to fullest maturity. Yet for many
an institution, toleration would be a great advance upon the
actual attitude. It is indeed a feather in Harvard's cap that
William James was able to live his career as one of the Cambridge
it confirms the conviction that the Harvard tradition is more
generous and appreciative of the academic qualities than are many
of her sister-institutions. What might have become of James in
a less congenial environment it is sad to consider. What number
of lesser Jameses-of little “Jimmies”—well worth the freedom
of unconfined development, there may be chafing in less emanci-
pated institutions against untoward circumstances, is also a sober-
ing reflection. It is not a case of mute and inglorious Miltons,
but of those feebly where they might be richly, inconsequently
where they might be significantly, articulate, whose glories, mild
and tempered, are none the less well worthy of the world's be-
stowal. The academic James is a choice heritage, destined to in-
fluence for generations those that cherish the traditions of the
career that he served with such distinction.
JOSEPH JASTROW


BRIEFER MENTION
THE COMEDIENNE, by Wladyslaw S. Reymont, translated from the Polish
by Edmund Obecny (illus., 12mo, 499 pages; Putnam). A novel of
the third-rate stage by a first-rate Rupert Hughes, although by a grave
oversight of the translator Janina stumbles on page 381 amidst an over-
hasty oschestration of “burning kisses,” “passionate glances,” and “vol-
canic outbursts.” Her lover done her wrong, and Janina, starving, a
bitter failure in her career, with disgrace growing under her heart, takes
essence of vinegar, this time amidst an overhasty orchestration of "awak-
ings from a torpor," "eyes lit up with a strange fire,” and “pressing the
bottle to her breast.”... The minor accuracies of the stage life are in-
teresting, however, although the book jumps in spots, probably as the
result of cutting by the translator.
AN IMPERFECT Mother, by J. D. Beresford (12mo, 311 pgaes; Macmillan),
is the story of a boy who loved his mother. Twenty years ago one would
have dismissed it on this statement as a tract; to-day one thinks of Freud
and wonders whether Mr Beresford is growing unhealthy. This accusation
he soon disproves; his hero becomes a contractor and builder whose mono-
tonous successes lead one to suspect him of Pelmanism, deciding that it is
really Mr. Beresford who writes those full-page advertisements for Pel-
man, the ones that put a million British clerks on the New Path to Three
Thousand Pounds a Year.
The Tour, by Louis Couperus (12mo, 321 pages; Dodd, Mead), shows
this author creating in the Egypt of the reign of Tiberius the same situation
which he likes to play with in his Dutch novels. The atmosphere is that
of a velvet luxury, redolent of sweet wines and thrilling to hidden lutes.
The characters are the same sensitive, nervous, capricious creatures who
made Small Souls. It is interesting to see how so foreign a setting leaves
the author free to produce such similar effects.
IN THE MOUNTAINS, Anonymous (12mo, 288 pages; Doubleday, Page).
Rather than affix her name to the cover of this book, Lady Russell, once
the Countess Von Arnim, has written it unmistakably on every page. The
story is a sequel in spirit to that sprightly and lovable romance of Fräulein
Schmidt and Mr Anstruther which appeared more than twenty years ago.
The widowed heroine of forty charms more than the abrupt little Eng.
lish dean, with her demure flicker of a smile and her softly voiced heresies.
Mrs. Warren's DAUGHTER, by Sir Harry Johnson (12mo, 396 pages; Mac-
millan). The author of The Gay-Dombeys singles out Shaw for the
same honours he has already shown Dickens. But it is a stunt repeated
once too often. Vivie Warren is grown trite with suffragette haranguings
and more so with the early war excitement. It is all a dishevelled ghost
of the Shaw fancy, maudlin with a du Maurier sentiment.


BRIEFER MENTION
475
BEAUTY-AND MARY Blair, by Ethel M. Kelley (12mo, 282 pages,
Houghton Mifflin), is a novel full of secret beauty and an extraordinary
instance of the possibility of writing a profound study of adolescence
without forsaking for a moment the delicacy and humour of an entertain-
ing story. Mary Blair's search for beauty is as far removed from the
sub-deb's major interests as her delicious manner of telling her story is
from the preposterous mis-spellings which have heretofor constituted
realism in writing about young people. The impact of sordid unhappiness
upon a virginal faith in loveliness is recounted with a deceptive simplicity,
the author's impersonation being so thoroughly successful that its extreme
niceness and accuracy of imagination almost escape notice. A quiet
sensation this book should be in American fiction.
Our Women, by Arnold Bennett (8vo, 264 pages; Doran), is sane, dis-
cerning, and cheerful withal. If it fails to blast into the bedrock of the
subject, it nevertheless achieves a considerable surface havoc, and that in
itself-in conjunction with Mr Bennett's verbal skill—is exhilarating
enough to cause one to overlook what he may have ignored. Obviously,
it is a topic upon which the last word will never be said; the English
novelist has simply voiced his reactions.
ADVENTURES AND ENTHUSIASMS, by E. V. Lucas (Illus., 12mo, 329 pages;
Doran), rarely fulfils the challenge of its title. These sketches are guided
by a slack rein, but occasionally disturbed by the whip of fancy. Mr
Lucas winds in and out among his themes, sowing parentheses which hard-
ly reward one's patience to reap. Here are placid subjects, tranquil
thoughts, and a cheerful, slippered style.
The Gentle Art of COLUMNING, by C. L. Edson 12mo, 177 pages; Bren-
tano), has four introductions, by Don Marquis, Christopher Morley,
Franklin P. Adams, and George Horace Lorimer. It is one of the happy
occasions when the book deserves but needs them not. The author's Aip
is at least engaging, his technique good, and except that he praises and
helps to perpetuate a notorious lapse in taste on the part of one column-
ist, the choice of illustrations is excellent. The column is no butterfly
and Mr Edson's book is no wheel. Only sometimes he explains the joke.
PointS OF FRICTION, by Agnes Repplier (12mo, 276 pages; Houghton
Mifflin), are those made by the impact of any humourless or sentimental
view of life upon Miss Repplier's temperament. She draws again that
flashing rapier with which she has pinked the follies of many periods and
men these last thirty years. Her wit, her prejudices, and her fund of
.
illustration make this series something approaching literature.
THE DAME SCHOOL OF EXPERIENCE, by Samuel McChord Crothers (12mo,
279 pages; Houghton Mifflin), gambols gently with the essay form, as
becomes one of the Lambkins of American letters. The mood is one of
fleecy scholarliness-an urbane detachment, now and then condescending
to what Mencken has termed “an elephantine whimsicality, by the chau-
tauqua out of the Atlantic Monthly.'


476
BRIEFER MENTION
Fiddler's Luck, by Robert Haven Schauffler (12mo, 276 pages; Houghton
Mifflin), will contribute more delight to the Musical Amateurs of America
than distinction as narrator or critic to Mr Schauffler. The volume-a
string of fragile musical adventures hung on a flimsy cotton thread of
romance—should be laid away among the million jejune relics of the war.
Mr Schauffler has been roaming while his fiddle burned.
FRENCH LITERATURE IN THE GREAT WAR, by Albert Schinz (12mo, 433
pages; Appleton), offers unnecessary and belated praise to the wartime
inanities of men like Barrès and Peladan, while its only reference to the
real literature of the war is a chapter of fish-wife's gossip about Barbusse.
It might be called a collection of obituaries on dead books; as a volume of
literary criticism it is still-born.
a
STUDIES IN SPANISH-AMERICAN LITERATURE, by Isaac Goldberg (8vo, 377
pages; Brentano), is irrefutable as a symposium of fact. Beginning with
what he terms the “Modernista Renovation," he takes us in brief biography
and summarization through the works of some dozen writers of poetry and
prose, with the purpose, so he tells us, of introducing to English readers a
continental culture they have too long neglected. Dr Goldberg's inter-
pretations are platitudinous and indiscriminate, but his prose resolutions
are eagle-like when compared in distinctiveness with Miss Alice Stone
Blackwell's accompanying translations of verse.
The Birds, and Other Poems, by J. C. Squire (12mo, 61 pages; Doran),
is a sort of appendix to Poems; First Series. At its worst, Mr Squire's
poetry is a pompous inventory of nature, and it is usually at its worst
in this volume. At its best it hovers on the metaphysical boundary line
between the real and the unreal, building with the material of the five
senses into something that is beyond the senses. Only the last poem in
The Birds answers to this description.
FLAME AND SHADOW, by Sara Teasdale (12mo, 144 pages; Macmillan), is
a collection of innocuously beautiful verse, most of which has appeared
in our magazines “of the better sort.” It is well written, but belongs to
an unimportant genre; the same impulse produced it that drives most
women to needlework. The logical outcome of Sara Teasdale is to reduce
poetry to a sort of emotional Battenberg; her imitators have already
accomplished much towards this end.
The Elfin Artist, by Alfred Noyes (12mo, 187 pages; Stokes), seeks to
to record “The things that matter, The tints that we all pass by.” But
the tints stand out more clearly than the forms beneath. Strongly marked
rhythm and luscious diction hover above the ideas, too often merely dis-
tracting attention to themselves. Mr Noyes was at his best in some of
his earlier long poems when he reproduced old atmospheres of romance.
Here the slight rift between word and thought, the feeling that now and
then a mood is barely sustained, is more insistent. Only in some of the
very lovely, homesick poems of England has a sincere harmony been
reached.


BRIEFER MENTION
477
COLLECTED POEMS OF ALFRED Noyes, Volume III (12mo, 315 pages;
Stokes). In this volume Alfred Noyes gives renewed proof that he is
a lineal poetic descendant of Swinburne. Like Swinburne, he not only
bewitches the reader with his haunitng rhythmic effects, but revels in
"linked sweetness” that often is too “long drawn out,” and that at times
lacks vitality because of the absence of a significant subject-matter.
NEIGHBOURS, by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson (12mo, 169 pages; Macmillan),
is a volume of homely sentiment, cast in the simple meters of folksong.
Gibson has always been a sort of rhyming journalist; where another man
would write an article for The Times, he could be counted on for a sonnet
sequence.
There was a time when he had a surprising grip on events,
but he never possessed more than a surface understanding of character.
Especially does that weakness appear in the present volume, which is a
sort of romantic relapse; it places him definitely as a Georgian poet
among the other Georgians.
WILDERNESS Songs, by Grace Hazard Conkling (12mo, 102 pages;
Holt). A wide range of subjects skilfully handled and a sincerity of
nature feeling distinguish Mrs Conkling's second book of verse. It asserts
more individuality than did Afternoons in April. Several poems recall
.
the war, but except for The Return of Jeanne d'Arc, those that tell the
whole duty of Berkshire brooks and the beauty of tropic seaports are more
alluring.
CHIPS OF JADE, by Arthur Guiterman (16mo, 86 pages; Dutton), is felici-
tous proof that there are sermons to be found in stones if only you can
find a poet to quarry them. How much of the grace of these Asiatic
proverbs is attributable to the lands from which they come, and how much
to Mr Guiterman, is a recondite question for sinologists. It is sufficient
for the moment that in their English rhythms the platitudes of the slaves
of forgotten emperors still can make music in the ears of democratic kings.
The Lynching Bee, by William Ellery Leonard (12mo, 84 pages;
Huebsch), is the description of a Negro burned at a stake. The moral
purpose is unescapable; the style is sometimes obvious and jingly, but
the vigour and reality of the poem redeems its faults; without reference
to its merits as a sermon, it is a work of art.
$1200 A Year, by Edna Ferber and Newman Levy (12mo, 173 pages;
Doubleday, Page). This satire on the lot of the College Professor loses
in effect because of its obvious exaggeration. It is more amusing than
critical, more entertaining than convincing. But the play is well con-
structed, and in places distinctly clever, the dialogue flows smoothly, and
the characters are clearly drawn.
THE AMERICANIZATION OF EDWARD Bok: The Autobiography of a Dutch
Boy Fifty Years After (8vo, 461 pages; Scribner's) has been called the
most significant or the greatest autobiography of our time—by the Vis-
count Northcliffe. It is rumoured that the Viscount Northcliffe is writing
his autobiography.


478
BRIEFER MENTION
BUFFALO BILL, AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY, by Colonel William F. Cody (illus.,
12mo, 328 pages; Cosmopolitan), has four-fifths of our western novels
lashed to the stake when it comes to action, gun-play, narrow escapes, and
all the concomitant incidents of frontier life. A straight-forward nar-
rative, with the showman happily subordinated to the fighter.
LINCOLN: the World Emancipator, by John Drinkwater (12mo, 118 pages;
Houghton Mifflin), is a plea for Lincoln as a symbol of Anglo-American
likenesses and reconciler of their differences. An exhortation inclined to
be tedious is redeemed by a poetic epilogue, which says more in a few
lines than all the foregoing oratory.
CHARLES E. CHAPIN'S STORY, written in Sing Sing Prison (8vo, 334 pages;
Putnam), is the unembellished life history of a newspaperman, told with
unerring "news sense" and that knack for turning up incidents of wide
human appeal without which Mr Chapin could not have remained city
editor of the New York Evening World for twenty minutes, let alone
twenty years. It is impossible to write a single paragraph about this book
without calling it a "human document,” and that, we imagine, is exactly
what its author intended.
а
>
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ANDREW CARNEGIE. (Illus., 8vo, 385 pages;
Houghton Mifflin). Matthew Arnold once remarked to Mr Carnegie that
he did not shoot, but that he could not give up fishing—“the accessories
are so delightful.” The ironmaster's history of himself is not a great
book, but it is thoroughly fascinating-the accessories are so delightful.
It is not merely the recital of a fortune amassed and disbursed, but a full-
length mirror of the times, in which one glimpses many personalities and
the fragments of a philosophy—canny, shrewd, naïve, and unshakable.
As a story of business, it has romance; as a record of world-wide philan-
throphy, one sees the ledger in the background.
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND BEHAVIOUR, by André Tridon (12mo, 354 pages;
Knopf). To André Tridon the questing lay reader may well be thank-
ful for presenting in a lucid, superficial, and buoyant though precise
form, the complex influence of the psyche on everyday behaviour. By
isolating the outstanding theories of the disparate schools and indicat-
ing their point of departure, he has done much to make psychoanalysis
less cryptic and less confusing to the searching catechumen. It is grati-
fying to note that in Tridon's work Dr Edward J. Kempf, the American
psychiatrist, for the first time receives due recognition for his "dynamic
mechanism," a theory which psychoanalysts, on the whole, are rather
prone to overlook in their experiments.
Psycho-ANALYSIS, A Brief Account of the Freudian Theory, by Barbara
Low (12mo, 199 pages; Harcourt, Brace & Howe). This is an excel-
lent and readable introduction to the subject of psychoanalysis, written by
a devout follower of the great Vienna innovator. It leaves a treatment
of the work of Freud's pupils to others, while offering an insight into the
master's technique. The brevity of treatment is something of a fault;
yet each phase is covered with some satisfaction to the reader.


BRIEFER MENTION
479
FREE-THINKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, by Janet E. Courtney
(illus., 8vo, 260 pages; Dutton). The title of this book promises a great
deal more than is actually accomplished. The word "Free-thinkers” is
one of those elastic phrases that can be made to cover a multitude of
mediocrities, so that with the best will in the world a sophisticated modern
reader is tempted to smile at the serious accounts here given of such men
as Charles Kingsley and Charles Bradlaugh; both at heart sentimentalists
with “ideas” on the perfectibility of the species. However, Miss Court-
ney, if neither profound nor thorough, is at least chatty, and one can
glean from her volume a few tid-bits of gossip on these and other Vic-
torian titans like Matthew Arnold, Frederick Denison Maurice, T. H.
Huxley, Leslie Stephen, and that queen of English blue-stockings, Harriet
Martineau. But, since the brilliant and mordant work of Lytton Strachey,
it is hard to take such books as this seriously.
RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS, by H. G. Wells (12mo, 179 pages; Doran), is
the record of a tragedy, which is not, as has been suggested, the tragedy
of Mr Wells' mind. It restores Russia and the Russians to their proper
places, as fanatics, victims, idealists, tyrants-perhaps, but essentially
as human beings, the most pitiful, the most perilous in a thousand years.
Mr Wells' book may be both wrongheaded and soft-hearted (probably
neither) but it sets things down with such an intensity of utterance that
it is likely to accomplish more than the most moral of judgements or
the most precise of descriptions. It is absurd to hope that this book will
not be neglected, while the world neglects Russia. But the author is one
of the few people who have a passion for civilization and want it saved,
even to have the chance of spoiling it afterward. The official attitude
seems to be that it is sufficiently spoiled now.
LETTERS OF Travel, by Rudyard Kipling (12mo, 302 pages; Doubleday,
Page), form a collection of swift sketches of people and places. Kipling
is too rapid an impressionist to be really fair, but his observation is amaz-
ingly acute whatever his conclusions, and here as always, the English
language performs every feat he requires of it.
WANDERINGS: A Book of Travel and Reminiscence, by Richard Curle (8vo,
350 pages; Dutton). A heavy chronicle of trenchant observations and
independent judgements; the diary of an unsatisfied man to whom travel
is romantic and indispensable, but, after all, a painful duty. Curle has
been called an inveterate wanderer; his book will be enjoyed by inveterate
readers of travel.
VAGABONDING THROUGH CHANGING GERMANY, by Harry A. Frank (illus.,
8vo, 358 pages; Harper), sends a glimmer of sane observation through
the fogs of hearsay, and throws a welcome light upon certain ugly, but
long-surviving prejudices. Without holding a brief for the Germans,
Mr Franck brings them back into focus as human beings.


MODERN ART
,
a
A.
LFRED STIEGLITZ, with his photographs, provided the
nearest approach to an excitement that we have had in
month. People did stop you on the street to tell you that you
ought to see them and people did dispute about them. Alfred's
former disciples from the old Gallery of the Photo-Secession clung
to him loyally. To a man they vowed that every one of the photos
was great—the greatest ever. Professional photographers whom
I chanced to meet told me that they didn't like them-didn't like
them at all in fact. One professional photographer told me that
he actually felt physical pain when he beheld them and he clapped
his hands to his side as though the agonies were to begin all over
again at the mere thought. And then, all at once, someone ran
down Fifth Avenue crying that Alfred Stieglitz had put a price
of $5,000 on one of the photographs, a nude, one that was a unique
impression with the plate destroyed. Gracious Heavens! $5,000
for a mere photograph! And then everyone had to go see the
exhibition over again, the crowd about the nude being particularly
dense.
But that's Alfred for you.
He's a dear, delightful duck, and I verily believe that if he were
to assemble into an exhibition an hundred pairs of old shoes all his
followers would find lovely qualities in them and the dealers in
new shoes would suddenly discover that they had acute pains in the
side like the photographers.
But however that may be, Alfred succeeded in making people
think once more about photography, a subject that did indeed
need thinking about. It has twisted itself so insidiously into
every ramification of modern life that now a considerable pro-
portion of the population owes about three-quarters of its education
to one use or another of photography. But the manipulation of
this immense power has been given for the most part into the
hands of hoi polloi. It is yet another case of the blind leading
the blind. Stieglitz announces that henceforth he repudiates the
word "art" and will live or die by photography pure and simple.
It was that announcement, I think, more than the photographs


HENRY MCBRIDE
481
a
themselves, that caused his rivals anguish. In spite of Alfred's
care not to rob the product of a machine of any of its machinelike
attributes, a number of the photographs have painterlike aspects.
One or two of the large heads look like things by Rossetti or Cour-
bet; and one-save the mark-bears a suggestion of the lamented
Bouguereau. But my instinct exonerates this photographer of
the painterlike intention. If the machine itself does such things
why should the purist object? It is only when the tricksters mani-
pulate the plates and spread fond fogs over everything that painter-
like photography becomes silly. Of that last foolishness Stieglitz
certainly cannot be accused.
The portraits of Waldo Frank and Abram Walkowitz are ad-
mirable. All the portraits have admirable points though I am
afraid of the portraits of Marsden Hartley and George Of. In
these two there is a flash from the eyes that verges into another
division of photography—that of the movies—and I cannot look
at them for more than a second. To say that the Stieglitz por-
traits go beyond or even come up to the wonderful daguerreotype
portraits taken by Lewis Carroll .(the Alice-in-Wonderland Car-
roll) in the early days of the art, would be perhaps to say too much
(I myself have not given up the use of the word "art") but to
recall photographers to the essential powers of the camera as he
has done is a great deal.
In the little "credo” of the catalogue, Stieglitz says this:
“My ideal is to achieve the ability to produce numberless prints
from each negative, prints all significantly alive, yet indistinguish-
ably alike, and to be able to circulate them at a price not higher
than that of a popular magazine, or even a daily newspaper. To
gain that ability there has been no choice but to follow the road
I have chosen."
In that statement, Alfred, I believe, touches the significant clou
to the modern photographic situation. He, himself, however, I
fear will not realize it. His photography is essentially aristocratic
and expensive. He spends an immense amount of time making
love to the subject before taking it. His impressions are printed
luxuriously upon the rarest papers to secure a richness of effect
that must always lie beyond the appreciation of the multitude.


482
MODERN ART
Whereas, obviously this is the age of snap-shotting. It's a time
of many sales and small profits. The most typical big enterprises
multiply their products appallingly. Such a thing as a $5,000
photograph with the plate destroyed harks back to the standards
of other eras.
This age is casual and hasty. The machines re-
produce perfectly but the artists are flippant. Coming away from
Stieglitz' exhibition I saw at least three photographs in one supple-
ment to a Sunday newspaper that might with justice claim the
attention of serious students in future ages as giving them an
excellent line on the things of to-day. Yet they were only snap-
shots by a camera-man who had not had to repudiate the word
"art" because he had never even pretended to it. In the long
series of photographs that unroll from Mr Charles Chaplin's new
film, The Kid, which I regard as one of the wonders of the age,
it happens that my most vivid recollection is of the startled look
of surprise upon the face of the motor-truck driver who looks back
to see that the health-agents have disappeared from the car and
that the redoubtable Charlie is there instead with his Kid. This
is only one of the minor incidents of the story but it registers with
a force than can only be paralleled in the frescoes of Lorenzetti,
or some other of the vehement mediaeval Italians.
The reverse of the medal—and I admit it is a crushing reverse
is the blow, not to say knock-out, that is given to individualism.
This is a blow, however, that is being administered all along the
line, in all of our arts. Pessimists really have considerable scare-
material at their disposal with which to prove that fame is one of
the things the future will dispense with. For instance, which one
of the army of photographers took the photo of the truck driver
in the Charlie Chaplin film? Who cares to inquire or to remember
who took any of the photographs in any of the films or Sunday
supplements? Fame, possibly, will be reserved exclusively for
the English, for, for a long time to come, characters like Samuel
Butler will persist in that country, who will be so confident in the
possession of character, that they will be content to labour away
in obscurity for the pleasure of posterity. But character isn't a
firm enough plant in America to grow in the shade. I doubt very
much if even democratic Alfred Stieglitz would lend his skill to
the anonymous duplicatory system that we seem to be drifting into.
Though to be sure, there is always the money consolation!
Henry McBRIDE


MUSICAL CHRONICLE
IT
T is as long gone as are the days when they gave opera in New
York City, that the Louise of Charpentier was first present-
ed here, and the intervening years have not warred quite lightly
against the score. At the time when Oscar Hammerstein first
mounted the musical romance it was heady as champagne. To-
day, even though it still tastes sweet of the grape, the music wants
the sparkle and potency it had, or seemed to have. The score is
fairly thin, thinner far than one remembered it to be. Although
the work is what most operas are not, the embodiment of an idea,
the musical inventions that fix Charpentier's conception are neither
very strong, very distinguished, nor very abundant. The fine bits,
the music that accompanies the drinking of the soup in Act I, the
street cries and sewing-machine music in Act II, arrest momentarily
a flow always a little too easy. The valse movement is repeated
.
so often that already in the third act one is irritated at its re-appear-
ance; the Paris music of the final scene veritably requires the melo-
dramatic stage-business to save its effectiveness, so over-familiar
does it become through the constant service to which the composer
puts it. And still, despite the sheerness, the music remains suffi-
ciently stout to bear incontrovertible witness to one fact, the one
fact to which it has hitherto always testified. Even in the form
of a revival by the Metropolitan Opera House, even in the form of
revival typical of the Metropolitan Opera House, with Geraldine
obscuring the title rôle, the stage set as though Gordon Craig had
never lived, and sincerity quite wanting to the performance, the
score of Louise still attests that its author loved Paris, loved it
passionately. Whether it was love of the city that made him love
.
its little shop-girls, or whether it was the love for a midinette that
made him love her crowded land, we cannot say. All Charpentier
tells us, in the words of Julien to his sweetheart, is that "Hors
Paris, Louise ne serait Louise! Paris, sans toi, ne serait pas Paris”;
that it was the woman in the city, that he adored; and that, in its
pleasure-mad child, he had found again the city. But that it was
á sort of love he felt, that, the score is here to demonstrate.
For Charpentier did more than dress his actor-singers in blouses
a


484
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
and shirt-waists, and show, on the very operatic stage, where most
usually only gods and diademed kings and folk in exotic and
mediaeval costume stalk, three work-people eating cabbage soup
about a kerosene lamp. What it was that he did accomplish, what
it is that gives his score its weight, was the discovery of musical
phrases and movements that express a little the poetry of the gens
du peuple. The moment when the family of Parisian labourers
sits down at the close of day to eat stew and bread, and drink their
vin ordinaire, started a sweet music within him; music, too, did the
little sewing-machine girls sitting in their workshop dreaming of
lovers and silks and satiety, the voices of street-hawkers advertising
their wa