res, the hour of dusk when the lamps on the boulevards be-
gin to parade in even rows, and a city of bricks of light comes to be
on both banks of the river, make him to hear. The popular life,
the life of the sentimental citizens, again came into opera. But
Charpentier did more than give orchestral, operatic music some of
the impress of the midinette and her world. He caught into his score
a little of the glamour which the capital on the Seine has for every:
one, for Parisians, provincials, and outlanders alike. The fanfares
of mystic trumpets, brutal and brilliant, which the American hears
when the name of Lutetia Parisiorum enters his consciousness; the
waltz of the blood, the sharp tattoos, the laughter of pleasure-
drunken crowds, which are Paris to him whether he be desolate in
Syracuse, New York, or in Peoria, Illinois, or standing pensive be-
side the pensive gargoyle of Notre Dame, are in Louise. The
music speaks pleasure, a curious blend of pleasure and luxury, of
love and dinners at intimate chic restaurants, of passion and fire-
works. The flesh sings cunningly, softly; a little dream, a little
sensuality, a little longing, a little gourmandise, wake, and honey
the blood. We see the flank of the Louvre and hear the band at the
bal Bullier, remember the moonlit Bois and the liqueurs on the
café tables, the melancholy of the water-works at Versailles, and
the crispness of the pommes soufflées at the restaurant Laperouse.
Suddenly, we recollect that liners sail almost daily for Cherbourg.
Within ten days, one might be on the rue de Rivoli! What price
transportation?
And since Louise has demonstrated its power to resist not only
Metropolitan Opera House singers and Metropolitan Opera man-
agers, but the Metropolitan Opera House audience which encour- •


PAUL ROSENFELD
485
ages singers and managers in their odious habits, and which is
responsible chiefly for the morgue-like chill that has settled, per-
manently, it appears, upon the noble old theatre in Thirty-Ninth
street, who can doubt the durability of the work? Since it has
resisted that terrible audience wanting imagination, wanting sym-
pathy for the composer, and awaiting, with greatest eagerness, the
moments when the lights flare up for the entr'acte, and the per-
formance which it came to see will indeed commence and the old
ladies shrouded in ermine capes leave their seats to walk up one
aisle and down the other; resisted those people without respect
for their neighbours, willing to mar the whole of the first act of
every opera by trailing in tardily all through it and slamming down
seats, willing to mar the last by trailing out again in order not to
have to wait too long for automobiles, ready to disturb their en-
tire entourage by conversations in stage whispers carried on during
the performance (oh, these inevitable conversations that commence
just as the prelude to, say, Tristan begins its anguished confession,
oh, those ubiquitous dames who manage, just as the orchestra be-
gins speaking to remember something of flaming importance that
must be said immediately, and cannot bear postponement, that must
be said immediately lest worlds go under); since, then, Louise has
demonstrated itself a match for neurotic America and its thousand
coughs, who shall dare affirm that generations will not know it
much as we know it now? The work has endured the ordeal by
cold water. And so, it appears probable that when men come to
speak of the poets who, during the nineteenth century, expressed
the excitement of the great cities, they will remember Balzac, they
will remember Walt Whitman, they will remember d'Annunzio
and his descriptions of modern Rome in Il Piacere; and they will
not, before the roster is completed, forget entirely the name of
Charpentier and his Louise.
And, in so doing, will they not be performing the "couronne-
ment de la muse,” that coronation of the little burghess muse, of
which the composer dreamt so fervently, so many years?
Paul ROSENFELD
а
1


THE THEATRE
THE
HE THEATRE GUILD'S invitation to Miss Laura Hope
Crews was an inspiration, for Mr Pim Passes By demanded
her presence rather than that of any other actress on the American
stage. It is a tidy little play with pleasant lines and good humour,
but it is still far from being the masterpiece of light comedy Miss
Crews, so full of wit and understanding, so intelligent and deft,
deserves to have. But Mr Milne is neither Wilde nor Schnitzler;
he is only the most amusing writer in England. In that capacity
he has a distinction which American writers neither desire nor
achieve. The lines in The Bad Man, for example, are funny
with a sort of comic-strip violence. It is a play built for action.
To correct a current impression it should be said that this is not a
parody of melodrama, and, if repetition can assist to confirm an-
other impression, Mr Holbrook Blinn is doing a fine piece of im-
personation in it. The moments of delicacy allowed him by the
broad lines of the play are not wasted, but in the main he is im-
mensely and agreeably rich and Rabelaisian.
G. S.
Macbeth, the newspaper critics notwithstanding, really was a
whopper; not since Birnam Wood removed to Dunsinane have I
been in at such goings on. Lionel Barrymore took the cake: it
is indeed great pity that those ill-advised gestures of one most
distressingly overfilled with lager and that most unfortunate in-
ability to comprehend the lines he was chewing should somewhat
have marred the insistent charm we might otherwise have relished in
a Thane of Cawdor who more than once brought to mind the astute
Miss Severn's Dance of the Silly Doll. He was good only when
exhibiting physical fear; this Macbeth had no soul anyhow. Mr
Barrymore's Neri was indeed a great bore, yet there for his roaring
and wallowing some hint of a case could be made out. Shake;
speare's Macbeth was a human being. Julia Arthur, got up as an
Algerian motorist, exhibited in her voice and person far too much
of the milk of human kindness to be either dominant or tragic.
With such a pair before them it is no wonder Messrs Hopkins and
Jones conceived this tragedy as “impersonal.” But for Fate to


THE THEATRE
487
be impressive (and that is what they sought) there must be a vic-
tim worthy of the steel: Oedipus was King.
In the reading of Shakespeare's lines the perversity was such as
only ignorance can achieve. One example must suffice: in Act I,
Scene II, the wounded sergeant recounts the battle's progress. Any
one with a particle of feeling for rhythm must from the superb
energy of these Elizabethan periods know the sergeant, despite
his wounds, to be, howsoever tottering, yet on two feet. Lawrence
Cecil speaks them from all fours. While at it I might as well
mention the multitudinous rat-squeakings of the orchestra. Why
leave out the music of Shakespeare and put in that of Robert
Russell Bennett? Home talent?
Robert Edmond Jones is an artist. Any one who has seen him,
heard him talk, or followed his work knows that. Some of the
sets in this Macbeth were corking; the suggestion of a tilted and
unstable throne quite came off; so did lots of other things. But
Shakespeare is not Mr Jones' man. Ultimately I believe that all
the arts and all their manifestations aim at very similar, if not
quite identical, effects. But each artist has his own way of going,
and if ever poet was realist that poet was Shakespeare. His Weird
Sisters do not talk of green and blue and God and Devil: they talk
of chestnuts "and munch'd, and munch’d, and munch’d.” Mr
Jones sees in Macbeth "a puppet.” Call him so if you will, but
,
then, lest the wooden connotation of that word carry you forever-
more astray, make sure you think of this puppet as with corns.
If
you
invest realism with abstract settings you arrive nowhere:
you do but cancel the chestnuts and make ridiculous your in them-
selves pointed designs. Dunsany, Stucken, Maeterlinck itch after
.
infinite hangings; somebody sometime somewhere shall ache for
Wyndham Lewis masks; Shakespeare asks to be let be. Seeing
this production one remembered certain bolts of fateful taffeta
Aung across a settee in the otherwise highly realistic interior of
Ibsen's Wild Duck. If Mr Jones is not willing to play the game,
he should not sit at table with either of these in their piquantly
different ways realists.
The public was led on by The Tower of London and John
Barrymore's legs to swallow Richard III. But to an attuned ear
the gulp was audible. Mr Jones and Mr Hopkins lack respectively
piety and horse-sense.
S. T.


COMMENT
OY
UR readers will be interested to know that Erich Mendelsohn,
the
young German architect four of whose architectural de-
signs were reproduced in the March Dial, is shortly to visit this
country. He has commissions from an important syndicate. Just
now, however, he is engaged in building an underground laboratory
for Professor Einstein in Berlin.
There exist, unhappily, a great many people, otherwise un-
inhibited, who never see the inside of a music-hall. They even
think they don't want to—haul up from the obscure waters of their
past some cold occasion on which they went and were not con-
quered. Their case (I speak not of Presbyterians) arouses inter-
est.
We may not agree with St John Ervine that John Galsworthy is
worse than Winston Churchill ("Mr Winston Churchill, in my
judgement, is a greater novelist than Mr John Galsworthy” was
Mr Ervine's balanced way of putting it) yet we do know pretty
certainly what not to expect from that gentleman. And among
those sufficiently soft to submit to the indignities of the contem-
porary stage, is there anybody better? One James Barrie got
knighted: but a relative of mine saw Mary Rose. Shaw does not
submit; innocence shields him; Parsifal is permitted his improprie-
ties. One's friends have seen (at the Cavendish) Sir Arthur and
oneself has seen (at the Brevoort) Henry Arthur. These dis-
tingués beacons are, rated in candle-power, no great shakes; and to
illuminate a Pinero or a Jones drama they would have to be very
great shakes indeed.
Yet these otherwise uninhibited people bundle out through hail
and tramcar to regret they have come to just such vanity. Granted
our musical-comedies are chiefly twaddle, granted our vaudeville is
nine-tenths sawdust, there yet does by God's bounty pretty com-
monly remain, and in the dismallest of shows, at least one come-
dian, one girl, one costume, one leg, one canvas of aesthetic sheen.
While the conventions of the regular theatre have driven out every-
body who is alive, those of the variety-stage do permit variety, and
that means, now and then, howsoever wedged, an artist.


COMMENT
489
Sapient folk are indeed odd fish. Because Kit Marlowe didn't
wear unities they patronized Latin plays. Because Al Jolson
doesn't wear them either, or “good taste," or intelligible plots (and
this lets in brindle dogs and molasses women) they patronize house-
broken drama. But that very convention of disorder which at the
wrong moment emits the wrong elephant also emits genius. Wherę
from I don't know.
In an art like that of the theatre, which is financially dependent
upon the people at large, tight conventions are invariably bad.
For these exact purity. The conventional drama cannot cultivate
the purely aesthetic, for that the unaesthetic public will not buy.
Hence the pure breed of Jones. Our friends if they would ex-
perience aesthetic pleasure must not take amiss mongrels: nowhere
in the world of art and least of all in the popular theatre is discre-
tion the better part of valour.
“Driven out and compelled to be chaste."
PROFESSOR STUART Pratt SHERMAN, well-known wiseacre of
Urbana, Ilinois, now and then says a lot. He opened the New
a
Year and the January Atlantic with a rather smashing thing en-
titled The National Genius. Some of us, of course, do not have
time to take in either the Professor or his vehicle, but it is surely a
good sign as to the soundness of our communal life that somebody
else does. Mr John Farrar, the new Yale editor of The Bookman,
is such an one. And taking rather seriously to heart (as a young
man should) those rather thick black marks which were in this re-
port The Young Intellectuals portion, he with a sure instinct
sought comfort and counsel at the residence of Mr Harold Stearns,
Editor Emeritus of THE DIAL. At first blush The Grand Old
Man (so the tale runs) faltered: his high regard for the academic
profession and his warm feeling for his friend, Mr Ellery Sedgwick,
deterred. But Mr Farrar was altogether too much on the spot so
to be put off, and having, after some gentlemanlike beating about
the bush (loose talk about The Late Queen) pretty shrewdly sized
up
his man, he spoke gravely, and of justice. Now where there is
talk of justice Mr Stearns is a lion: so jacked up, he wrote.
The better to drive home his wholesome points, our ancient col-
league recalled the honourable practices of the great. Aristotle,
Pericles, Shakespeare, Rabelais, God and Mr Nock—they are all


490
COMMENT
trotted out. I was particularly gratified to learn that at this
juncture "one thinks of Pericles,” also to read the following right-
minded words “I myself think affectionately of my New England
forefathers who kept their blunderbuss well polished and hung in
a conspicuous place.” Those are the sort of thoughts that are
worth while having. Alan Seeger once admonished me "Woo
beautiful moods”: Mr Stearns doesn't have to: they throw them-
selves in his arms.
In the course of a sustained peroration our friend elected (after
sleeping on the matter) to drop into, quite naturally, what scholars
have long recognized as the Noble, or the Roman, or, more pre-
cisely, the Propontic manner: "While we of the younger genera-
tion-of course in point of view, not necessarily in age—make
our plans for leaving the country of our birth and early affec-
tions ... Many of us shall probably starve when we go to
some alien country.”
Mr Stearns announces he has already booked passage. Disciples
will, however, to some extent be reassured at learning that the
Master purposes to embark not before June, a month in which
(we are permitted to hope) the high-seas may acquit themselves
with decency; they will, I am sure, not omit to remark in this
prudent handling of a desperate and noble resolve one more evi-
dence of the accustomed owopooúv. This just man bears with
σωφροσύνη.
him, I am further informed, his numerous household Penates,
among them, in a special box, that gilded Palladium, that highly-
coloured New Bedford whaling-ship figure-head, that ancestral
heirloom which he has so long piously cherished. Recalling both
the privileged vessel (the Kaiserin Augusta Victoria) and her
excellent cuisine and cellar, I trust the starving at any rate will
not be undertaken en route.






an
Antonion 13
Courtesy of the Weyhe Galleries
BROOKLYN BRIDGE. BY JOHN MARIN



V
V
THE EN DIAL
OXXII
MAY 1921
THE PRISONER WHO SANG
BY JOHAN BOJER
I
Hisinamer wand well-patched breeches
.
)
IS name was Andreas, and he was a fat, pink little boy with
His mother was a
hunch-back and unmarried; her brother was an old bachelor who
chewed tobacco and expectorated profusely. The three of them
lived together far away in the middle of the forest by a winding
road that creeps uphill crossing from one valley to the next.
"Poor kiddy! How lonely he must be,” people said, for
Andreas had no playmates, and nobody suspected the amount of
fun he found for himself. When the grown-ups were having
their afternoon nap, a handful of pebbles thrown among the
chickens was sufficient to set things going. His mother would run
out, her eyes still heavy with sleep. "A hawk,” yelled the boy.
"You don't say so! Did you see it?" "I should think I did!
He was as big as that,” and Andreas stretched out both stubby
Then his mother would bless both herself and him, and
praise him up to the sky, the hens stretching their necks as if they
wanted to tell quite another story. Afterwards the boy would go
where he could not be seen, lie down flat on his stomach, and laugh.
Learning to read a book was fun but reading people's faces was
even better. When his mother lay on her bed writhing with colic,
her face was exactly like a wooden shoe and Andreas had to hide
his face in some corner. "You poor mite, don't cry,” said his
mother, “I'll be better in a little while.” But when her mis-
shapen figure came from the cow-shed carrying the pails full of
arms.


492
THE PRISONER WHO SANG
>
milk, and she happened to stumble and fall, spilling it all in the
dust, then things were too much for him, and he tumbled in a heap
shrieking with laughter. “You fool,” said his mother, threatening
him with an angry fist.
What was Andreas to do when the laughter came? It sprang
upon him from behind, and sent no warning beforehand. One
winter's day he went with his uncle to fetch wood from the forest.
They let the loaded sledge slide down a steep hill, and they hung
on to it, one on each side, in order to brake as best they could.
Then one of the old man's snow-shoes caught in a juniper bush.
He dare not let go of the sledge and between the hard pull of one
and the firm hold of the other he was stretched till you could fairly
see him getting thin in the middle. Andreas could not help him-
self. He fell in a heap, shrieking with laughter. His uncle
turned an angry face towards him and swore. "You just wait till
I can get out of this,” he threatened. But Andreas ran away and
when the old man reached home at last, the boy was in bed, ill.
“Tread softly, Iver,” warned the mother.
In the light summer nights Andreas often tiptoed upstairs to
have a look at the grown-ups sleeping in their beds. Surely it
could be no sin to tickle uncle under his nose with a straw until he
tried to chase the flies away, or to pinch mother until she scratched
herself as if bitten by a flea. If only he could keep back the
laughter which would take hold of him when nobody expected it,
even when it was all wrong to laugh! But it was surely no fault
of his that the grown up people made such funny faces when he
said grace at meals. His mother's nose grew as long as long with
.
sheer earnestness and Uncle Iver could not keep his lips still.
Ha-ha-it was awful to laugh when praying, and he was duly and
properly cuffed for his crime but they might have lifted an ax
against him for all he could do to stop himself.
His home was called Berget (The Rock) and lay on the shoulder
of a hill. Andreas studied the two grey buildings, a tiny cottage
and a cow-shed. He made them out to be husband and wife who
had grown ugly and warped through sitting out in the open in all
sorts of weather. In the alder thicket and down below by the
brook all their children could be seen. They were the big grey
boulders; who never got any farther and never grew to be any-
thing because their parents had no money with which to help them.
a


JOHAN BOJER
493
One day he was at the window upstairs while the others were
outside staring after a townsman who was driving by. It is not
given to everybody to control impulses. Suddenly the idea struck
Andreas that the two might just as well stare in another direction,
so he unhooked the window and let it fall. Panes twinkled and
glass tinkled. The two down below turned in a flash and stared as
if the boy in himself were a house on fire. And then things hap-
pened. Andres, hearing his uncle's steps on the stairs, swung out
on the bare wall and caught hold under the caves. "Where is
he?”' the old man bawled within. "God bless us,” screamed the
mother, “if the brat isn't sitting on the roof.” In a little while
both were in the yard yelling threats at him. “If you don't come
down this minute you'll get a hiding—” His uncle brought a
a
ladder. “I'll jump down,” the boy yelled stretching one foot
over the gutter. His mother nearly fainted. “Andreas, Andreas,”
she moaned, catching hold of her brother on the ladder and hauling
him down. "Be quiet, Iver, don't frighten him.” And she began
coaxing her boy, who did not however deign to come down till she
promised him clotted cream and sugar.
He was sincerely sorry to hear the two grown-ups quarrel on his
account, but every once in a while the fancy took him, and murder
was out.
With his blue cap pushed well back from his forehead he went
to church with them one fine Sunday. From the crest of the last
hill he could see the wide wide world, where other people lived.
It spread out down there on the plain with patches of dark forest
between painted houses and bright green fields. Then there was
the fiord with ships upon it, and finally the church with ringing
bells that dominated all and everything. They met a crowd of
people and Andreas was struck by the fact that not every woman
wears a hump on her back. He suddenly saw that his mother
looked like a tiny church and the hump was the chancel. Sup-
posing there was a wee parson chanting in there, too? Once
?
inside God's house he had to sit quite still, though no one could
see his fancies. What would happen if somebody rose up in the
middle of the sermon and said, “Hallo, Ola Nybakken will have
a drink,” or if someone stole up the steps behind the parson and
pricked him with an awl? "Mind you don't misbehave and giggle
in church,” his mother hissed in his ear.
>


494
THE PRISONER WHO SANG
On three days every second week he trotted down to the nearest
school armed with a well-filled bag of provisions. The winter
morning was dark, the forest road long, and sometimes he heard
the foxes howling. Not till he was as far down the hillside as at
Rynningen did he find company. Jonetta Rynningen was his own
age. She borrowed her mother's new skirt to go to school in, and
as a consequence she often stumbled.
It was fine fun when you got to school, however, especially when
there were maps to look at, or Bible stories to listen to. Norway
looked just like a tabby cat waiting for fish, Sweden became a sack
of flour, Great Britain was his own mother with Ireland on her
back. And scripture lessons offered such a variety of parts to be
acted when he was alone in field and forest. He went up in the
air like Elijah, bade the storm be still, drove Satan out of the
swine, and preached the Sermon on the Mount to such trees and
shrubs as were willing to listen.
The two little figures like balls of grey wool would roll up hill,
home again in the pale winter twilight, as often as not dragging a
toboggan after them. Andreas dreaded the moment when Jonetta
would say good-night and leave him to face the long uphill road
alone. When she was in a good temper, however, she would see
him off part of the way. They had so much to discuss, those two,
especially all their plans for the time when they would be
grown up.
"America is the best place after all,” Jonetta remarked one day
in her best grown-woman manner.
But Andreas pulled his cap over his frost-bitten ears and hinted
that his dream was Persia, where men rode on white horses and
saluted with curved sabres.
"My goodness! That is where you are killed before you know
where you are!” cried the little girl.
“O no, not when you know how to handle a pistol,” he observed.
The next day she earnestly advised him to think twice before
going so far away. She for one had given up America lately.
“Good-bye,” she said at the Rynningen gate and trudged in
through the snow. "Good-bye,” he said and went on alone up the
long dreary hills.
Then followed a whole week, with no school, and the little
farmstead in the heart of the forest was lonelier than ever. The


JOHAN BOJER
495
tinkling of a bell on a passing horse seemed something wonderful.
What was one to do? Cutting wood and carrying it into the
kitchen were things one knew by heart and could do blindfolded.
But while roaming about on skis he thought of many queer things.
Behind the mountains the north wind rose from the sea driving a
grey pall of clouds over the sky, and once in a while a yellow face
with a mad grin came riding on a woollen fish. Heigh-ho for a
ride! Far away down below there was the valley where people
meet. It seemed an eternity since he had met any of them. He
tried to talk to a boulder, helping it with the answer. He tried
to conjure up people and make them live around him. “Are you
quite mad, Ola Nybakken, having a drink in church ?” After-
wards he would sneeze like Begging Biddy, cough like the sallow-
cheeked student, and finally limp home like Olsen, the old cobbler.
“What has happened,” his mother cried in alarm. "Oh, oh, I have
hurt my foot.” Then uttering loud cries of pity, she bathed his
foot with camphorated oil and allowed him treacle with his por-
ridge.
A wonderful thing happened one day, when some parcel wrap-
pings were found to be a newspaper. Andreas read and read again.
There had been a fire at one place and a boy was suspected. A
murder had been committed in another place, and the murderer
was still at liberty. "Mother, what does defrauding mean?” She
had to explain and the explanation gave food for much thought.
All those things were evil, and he for one would never dream
of committing such crimes. Only it was amusing to imagine the
face Uncle Iver would pull if he, Andreas, pointed a knife at his
throat, or the look of his mother if the cow-stable were on fire,
with the chickens clucking and screeching to be helped out of the
flames.
The next time when they were snow-balling at school during the
recess, he managed to put a stone inside his ball. The boy who
was hit did not know who threw it, but his nose bled and he
howled! The teacher came out to investigate and Andreas most
zealously explained his own position when the mishap took place.
The culprit was not discovered and Andreas hummed a hymn to
himself on his way home.
“I must have a newspaper,” he thought, and there was no peace
for his mother until they subscribed for one.


496
THE PRISONER WHO SANG
II
a
No one would have thought that he was barely fifteen, that
broad-shouldered muscular lad walking beside a hunch-back woman
down the hills towards the valley. His blue cap did not conceal
his magnificent crop of brown hair, his complexion was a clear
pink and white, his eyes had a twinkle in them as if he saw some-
thing amusing far away. A handsome lad indeed, and goodness
knows where the mis-shapen heap of skin and bones beside him
could have found energy enough to bear him.
Andreas understood perfectly well that people giggled about
them behind their backs, and it was an evil thing to do. He was
fond of his mother. Only when she walked too near the ditch he
unfortunately pushed her in. Before God he had no intention of
hurting her, but it was great fun pulling her out again.
Who else could have comforted him in those days when bad
people tried to make his life a burden? They came up through
the forests and complained of petty thefts, making him out to be
the thief! A young girl was attacked in the dark one evening
and had her clothes torn off, and the easiest explanation was to
accuse Andreas of the dark deed—he, Andreas, who worked hard
for his mother and uncle and studied the newspaper as his sole
recreation.
“You have a fine voice, my lad,” his teacher remarked one day
on their way from church.
Andreas protested, laughing.
“Yes, even Parson has noticed it, and he says that if only you
had money to pay for lessons you might gain fame and riches.”
True enough, whenever his mind was full Andreas felt like sing-
ing loudly and clearly, but his mother said it was rude to sing
above the rest of the congregation.
At last the time came for him to join the fishermen going to
Lofoten (a group of islands in the far north of Norway). His
mother sold a heifer and the money procured sea boots that reached
right up to his hips, jerseys, blouses, oilskins, and huge woollen
gloves with two thumbs and no fingers.
Didn't he feel a full-grown man! When he tramped off in a
fisherman's full rig-out carrying his chest of provisions on his back
his mother gazed after him smiling between her tears!


JOHAN BOJER
497
The next day she climbed up where she could see the fleet sailing
out of the fiord to disappear in the fog out at sea.
"I shall never
see him again,” she sobbed and went slowly home.
A week afterwards Andreas was back. The old people stared
unable to believe their eyes. He had run away from the others
on their way north, sold his sea outfit, and was now the proud
possessor of a watch and a splendid walking stick. “Good morn-
ing, mother.”
The old people still stared in silence. At last Iver stammered,
“No! Is that you, Andreas ?”
Andreas explained. The idea had taken hold of him that if he
went fishing this winter he would have to go fishing all his life,
with no prospect of becoming either shoemaker or parson. Surely
then it was better to return home to work for a while, and think
things out? His mother sighed, Uncle Iver was angry and uttered
not a syllable, it was no concern of his. Andreas knew that now
people would have something to talk about and when he went to
church everyone would stare at him.
“Look, there goes the Lofoten man-he-he!” Well, let them
!" ,
scoff. He had a great mind to become a teetotal missioner, because
then one was allowed to have breakfast in bed wherever one visited.
Or perhaps he would decide to be a tailor, so as to keep his hands
soft and be indoors in bad weather. What he really wanted was
to be many persons in many places all at once.
many places all at once. This could only
be encompassed in one way—by reading newspapers and stories.
Oh, those quiet evenings spent with a book, his mother's spinning
wheel humming, and the fire in the stove crackling and murmuring!
He tried as it were to people the room with all the characters he
had met in books so that he himself could have a share in the events
recorded. He went with St Paul on his missionary journeys all
over Asia Minor and made a trip to Egypt in the company of Julius
Caesar, and when his mother one day bemoaned his laziness de-
claring he would soon be the laughing stock of all the valley, he
answered that such an adversity would be as nothing compared
with the battle of Waterloo.
“What?” She stopped her spinning wheel, staring blankly.
What was he talking of? “The battle of Wat-Wat-
“It was a very big mission meeting,” Andreas explained, turning
over a new leaf in his book.
a


498
THE PRISONER WHO SANG
In the spring he happened to attend a funeral, and while the
whole family and a number of relatives were weeping round the
open grave, and the deacon was reading aloud out of the prayer-
book, somebody rapped out a fearful oath.
A pause ensued. The deacon lost his spectacles and on every
face there was a look as if the dead man might be expected to rise
up at any moment. It could not have been Andreas who swore for
he was the only one who kept on weeping. Neither could it have
been anybody else. They all looked at him. And then he chose
the worst possible course. He slipped his prayer-book into his
pocket, and crept away.
There was an icy feeling all down his spine. He felt as if the
whole parish pursued him with stones. He took to his bed beg.
ging leave of his mother that he might never get up again.
He could not explain why he had done that awful thing. He
had been suddenly seized with a desire to present all the mournful
faces with a new expression, no matter how.
Was it not bad luck that such a thing should happen to him just
now, when he had decided to become a first-class joiner and when
he longed for the esteem of everybody for the sake of a girl? The
thought of her drove him out of bed to write her a letter of ex-
planation.
“Dear Jonetta. You are the only one before whom I wish to
clear myself. Evil people blacken me from behind and in front,
but Satan has many ways, and punishment is waiting for sinners.”
And he went on thus, page after page, about his own guilelessness,
the malice of other people, and his desire to meet her alone some
day. He signed the letter “Yours truly, Andreas Pedersen Berget,
leading chorister.”
A few days afterwards he was cutting wood in the dazzling sun-
shine when a tiny bare-footed imp of a boy came up and danced
around him, almost bursting with something he wanted to tell.
“What do you want, you rascal?” “Oh-he-he-haw.” The boy
"
held his sides with laughter, but finally he gasped out that Jonetta
had shown a letter to half the people in the valley and it was now
circulating among the other half. “Good-bye.” The boy had
delivered his message and ran away like lightning. Andreas stared
after him.
For a few days he could eat nothing. For a few nights he lay


JOHAN BOJER
499
a
tossing in bed, waiting for the sleep that would not come. Then
he was filled with a resolve to do the very worst, and he had Jonetta
summoned before the local Conciliation Board, for libel.
On the next Sunday a group of young people at the Lychgate
put their heads together as he drew near. They laughed and
slapped their thighs. At last one of them caught sight of him,
and pointed, "There he is.”
All faces were turned towards him. They tried to keep decently
serious until he had passed, but then a rain of laughter and jeers
followed him. "Hello, champion of the girls! Hello Mr A.
Pedersen Lawyer. Come this way, Fudge Berget. Here are more
,
girls to be attended to, Mr Solicitor. But Andreas pulled his cap
over one eye and entered God's house, and was soon singing louder
than any one else in the whole church.
He had run the gauntlet, and after all it was not so bad. He
was an important person, stared at by everybody. He had in-
,
vented such a brand-new way of treating girls that half the parish
could do nothing but gape at it.
From that day a new life began for Andreas. People were some-
thing apart from him, and he was something else apart from them.
He had to stay away from the young people's gatherings. Wher-
ever he appeared he saw pointing forefingers “There he goes.'
From up above the whole valley took the likeness of one big face
grinning sourly at him where he stood on the shoulder of the high
hill. However badly it might turn out, he had to tickle that big
sour face once in a while, until it would turn towards him gaping
and staring.
The little grey house in the forest was as lonely as ever. The
week was long, and mad ideas had time to soak into his brain. A
new parson came to the parish and he passed that way every Sun-
day. People lamented his greed. Weddings cost twice as much as
they used to cost, and he demanded payment for going across to
the chapel-of-ease to instruct the children for their confirmation.
"If I were St Paul now," Andreas thought, “I should know how
to convert him and teach him generosity.”
One Sunday morning he sat by the roadside, waiting for the
parson. At last the tawny horse appeared lazily pulling the
carriole. The parson's head was bent, his fair, bearded face was
shadowed by the brim of his hat.


500
THE PRISONER WHO SANG
a
Andreas rose up touching his cap, startling the horse so that it
began to shy. The parson was busy with the reins and when
Andreas caught at the bridle, the startled man lifted his whip as
if to strike him. “What do you want, my man?” he inquired.
Heaven knows where the idea sprang from. . Andreas' sole
desire was suddenly to soften the angry face, to see it smile—and
even to make it look pious. He began to talk of his poor mother
who was in bed hungry. He himself seemed to be transformed
and looked needy, poverty-stricken. The fishing was bad, he said,
and no one would lend them any more.
His uncle was a cripple
and their only cow had just died. Twenty kroner would buy a
barrel of salt herring, a sack of barley flour, and medicine for his
mother. He would pay the money back as soon as God might be
pleased to send better times.
The parson listened. He blew his big red nose once or twice,
eyeing the tiny grey box of a house beyond the potato patch. “Is
that where you live?” “Yes, that is my home, God save the
'
mark.”—“Hm.”—Andreas thought, "If he takes it into his head
to drive up to the door and see the old people there will be the
Devil to pay.” The parson, however, pulled out a brown leather
,
wallet which was not by any means as fat as Andreas expected
it to be.
“There you are.
Give
my kind regards to the old people. Let
us hope things will take a turn for the better. Good-bye.” The
carriole rattled away. Andreas, two ten crown notes in his hand,
stared after it. Never in his life had he seen such a foolish looking
back as the one in the carriole.
He wanted to look on this Sunday as a Red Letter Day. He
had experienced an excitement, warming his heart like wine, only
in a more subtle manner. The only disturbing thought was the
meagreness of the parson's purse. The two notes made Andreas
ashamed of himself. On Monday he sent the money back, as a
present from the parish. After that he could enjoy the thought
that he had it in him to transform even the parson's face. He
would like to try again some day. In the meantime he sauntered
about, his hands in his pockets, humming a hymn.
Jonetta did not appear before the Conciliation Board, and when
Andreas asked for the case to be brought before the local court the
lensmand started to say exceedingly rude things. Andreas returned


JOHAN BOJER
501
home defeated and bad days followed. His mother's eyes were
permanently red, his uncle never said a single word to him, food
began to be distasteful. He spent hours staring down into the
valley. He felt himself an outlaw, not daring to go down and
mix with his fellow men. The Lofoten fishing fleet returned.
Columns of smoke rose from the beach where cod-liver was being
boiled for oil in huge pans.
The smell reached him even up there
on the hill. People moving in the valley looked like ants crawling
on a half-dead ant-hill. Supposing he were to drive a stick into
that ant-hill, stirring it into life!
One day he did so. He sent a complaint to the magistrate
alleging that the midwife's youngest daughter was very suspiciously
like the lensmand although somebody else was registered as the
child's father. He read the document aloud to several persons
before sending it off.
It was foolhardiness, as wild as that of his book-heroes storming
fortresses. Well, he was not afraid, anyhow. He enjoyed his
thoughts now of an evening. With his eyes closed he could pic-
ture the valley. Something was creeping from house to house.
It was the rumour. Tiny figures were running along a short cut.
They were running to talk about him. Old people, whose feet
were swollen with rheumatism, put on their boots to go out be-
cause of the rumour.
“Thank God," sighed his mother, when she heard him humming
a hymn.
Very soon Andreas was summoned for libel, and he ran all over
the parish to find witnesses. The lawsuit became a scandal that
stirred up the whole parish. People hardly knew whether to weep
or laugh, but anyhow they did not scoff at Andreas any more, they
simply stared. He felt the difference and was uplifted thereby.
About that time he was reading about a great man named Voltaire
who fearlessly arraigned judges, princes, and kings. Andreas
worked himself into a state of intoxication by calling up in his
mind the picture of this man, by following him, imitating him, and
even boldly becoming like him. You wait and see, my good peo-
ple. There are wrongs to be righted even in our time, and he
wrote a complaint to the County Council concerning the district
doctor who had killed a woman in childbirth; a copy of the docu-
ment was posted up in the local shop. The old doctor was fat


502
THE PRISONER WHO SANG
and choleric and used to drive fast on all roads, but after this
he drove like one possessed. Andreas even wrote to the Bishop
accusing the deacon of blasphemy in church, and when the chair-
man of the Local Board stopped the lad one day to give him a
piece of his mind, Andreas had him summoned before the Concilia-
tion Board for assault on the King's highway.
Many were kept busy, especially the lensmand who wore out
his horse and gig serving writs and fresh writs. People began to
sleep badly. No one knew what might happen the next day.
“There he is,” they said, withdrawing and staring.
A man who is so much in the public eye cannot for decency's
sake walk about in patched trousers and Andreas took to wearing
his Sunday best on week days. In the picture, Voltaire wore a
curious sort of coat, and Andreas wanted one to match it. He
therefore bought an ancient blue coat at an auction after the old
deacon's death, and in this wonderful garb he stalked to church
twirling his stick and generally behaving as if he were an inspector
supervising the conduct of the whole parish.
“There he is”—and all eyes followed him.
Such an important man as himself ought not to be without a
title, Andreas thought, and soon he was known as The Agent.
"For whom are you an agent ?” he was asked, and the answer
came promptly enough: "For four American steamship lines.”
Could any one give him the lie? Did he not cover his walls with
gorgeous posters sent by the emigrant agencies? Had not the
latter promised him a commission as soon as he secured a real
emigrant? Undoubtedly he was an agent right enough.
But his mother returned from the shop one day, empty-handed
and weeping. She could not get half a pound of coffee on credit.
Abuse and jeers were all she received. “Surely her son, the agent,
could pay,” was the burden of it. Andreas lay awake a whole
night pondering. The next day he left for town. He was going
to show the parish a real live man for once.
>
,


JOHAN BOJER
503
III
He had been to town before this but at that time he was a mere
boy carrying his mother's egg basket, and grinned at by the town-
bred urchins. Now he saw the place in perspective—like the valley
from above. There was the town and he was here. The grand
gentlemen there did not know him from the dust under their feet,
but all the same he was going to measure himself against one of
them, if only for the fun of it.
He took his time sauntering to and fro outside the big shops, in
the glare of the glittering windows. No use to enter with a story
of a bedridden mother, still less to play Voltaire and preach uni-
versal justice. Moreover the old deacon's broadcloth coat was left
at home. He was now dressed in honest plain homespun; he had
better be a well-to-do farmer demanding respect for his own dig-
nity.
He could feel his heart beating, though, when he set his foot on
the broad steps that led up to Romer & Son's extensive premises.
A moment later he was in the store. Goodness! it contained every-
thing from coffee and cobbling pegs to self-binders. Hundreds of
stories were told of old Romer. He would stand on his steps keep-
ing an eye on the fishermen coming from their boats. And if some
poor culprit passed by with an empty sack the excitable old fellow
would cry out, "Hello, my man, you want four in that sack. Come
here, come here, I have flour for you." And somehow the fisher-
men found themselves obeying that commanding voice. He used
to boast that his shop contained everything needed by man or
woman, and when one day a young rascal tried to be funny and
asked for a dozen buttonholes, he did not lose countenance for a
moment, but called out to an assistant: "Mr Ass, please, where do
we keep our buttonholes ?”
Such was the man Andreas had chosen as a worthy foe in his
battle of wits.
Could he speak to the chief? he asked an assistant.
The
young
dude behind the counter gave him a searching glance.
“This way,” he said.
A door was opened, and in the badly-lit room beyond two men
were seated, one on each side of an office desk, an old man with a
big white wig over a ruddy face, and a young stripling with eye-


504
THE PRISONER WHO SANG
glasses. From the moment when the older man lifted his head to
look at him, Andreas felt like a new being. He suddenly had at
his command the face, the pose, and even the voice of a mature
man.
"What do you want ?”
The great man Romer spoke with a sharp nasal twang.
Andreas explained. His name was Andreas Pedersen Berget,
and he would like to have a look at the stores. Times were bad
for the farmer, what with increasing taxes and rising wages, and the
weather always uncertain. He thought of opening a store in a
small way to help out his farming.
“Have you a big farm ?”
Oh no, nothing much to boast of. He could barely feed some
twenty to thirty cows and five or six horses as yet, but in time he
hoped work would show even on a farm.
"Where do you hail from ?”
?
Andreas told him. For some minutes he felt as if he were being
stripped, weighed, and measured. The merchant did not lay down
his pen, searching him with keen eyes from the crown of his head
to the soles of his boots. Well, what of it? The great man was
a seller and Andreas was a purchaser. Wasn't that an honest deal ?
He felt at that moment that he had never been anything else in all
his life but a well-to-do farmer.
Old Romer had a peculiar way of treating beginners. He abused
them and crushed them to the ground, but they made a great mis-
take if they thought they were free to leave his office. And hav-
ing once been in that murky room no one dared to stay away
for
ever.
“Really? So you want to start a store ?” The rotund little
man slipped from his stool and began tripping about. "How old
are you?"
This question gave Andreas his chance, and his back stiffened.
He was sorry, he said, but he did not generally carry his birth certi-
ficate in his wallet.
A pause ensued. The all-powerful town merchant stared at the
young peasant and Andreas met his gaze steadily. A well-to-do
farmer is as good as a store-keeper any day.
"You seem to think a lot of yourself, my young gentleman. So
you want to start business! What? Do you think you can com-


JOHAN BOJER
505
a
.
>
pete with the peddlers who already infest your valley? They open
a shop in a hen-coop, buy for cash at Smith's of Fox Hill, obtain
credit at respectable stores, and go bankrupt twice a year. What?
And when we summon them they turn pious and conduct prayer
meetings. What? Why, drat them! they deserve years of im-
prisonment with hard labour every mother's son of them. Well--
and if you fail and lose your farm through store-keeping, you will
pay cash I suppose? What?” He stopped short before the young
man, searching his face.
Andreas shivered delightedly. He felt a perfectly new person
highly enough esteemed by the great Romer to be abused by him.
It was his turn to be touchy and using town speech he said: “I
generally give everybody his due. Anyhow I know where the door
is. Good morning!"
“Oh, no, wait a little.-Surely you are not so touchy about a
word or two? You who are going to be a store-keeper!"
"I have paid cash up to now,” said Andreas.
"Up to now? What does that mean? What have you been
paying cash for?”
“Oh, crockery and that sort of thing."
“But nobody can stock you with those things more cheaply than I.
If you want to establish your credit in the world of business your
only reliable plan is to buy everything from the same firm. D’ye
hear me ? Everything! Because then there might be a deal both
for yourself and us.”
“And when I have sold the herrings?” Andreas continued, giddy
with the crowd of ideas in his brain.
“Herrings? D'ye mean to say you have herrings? Where the
Devil did
you find herrings so early in the season ?"
The well-to-do farmer was evidently tired of having every state-
ment challenged. Opening the door he said as if in parting, "I've
not stolen them. There's been some net fishing out our way lately.
Not much to speak of-half a hundred barrels or so."
"Stop you madman! Are you off again! Come in and have a
cigar."
Thanks, but Andreas was a non-smoker.
"A glass of port then? We must come to an understanding.
Sit down, man, take a chair. You drink port ?”
It seemed to Andreas that the sharp eyes took a glint of foxiness.
a


506
THE PRISONER WHO SANG
customer.
as if the question were a test of his character. Therefore he re-
fused with thanks, saying that he was a teetotaller.
Another pause followed. The great little man looked at him in
a different way; he even stepped back a pace or two to have a better
view. Evidently Andreas was rising in his esteem, becoming more
reliable by his declaration of total abstinence.
“So you buy herrings? Does your place lie handy for trading
with the fishermen ?"
Andreas would not deny it. By this time he was sitting in the
big arm-chair, the old gentleman fairly dancing round him. It
was no longer Andreas but Romer himself who felt that he was
being tested. There are rascals in the world, but they are rarely
teetotallers. Nor are they as a rule sensitive about their honour.
If this young man were honest he might become an important
If he were dismissed from them without obtaining any-
thing he would go to another, and be lost to Romer & Son. Any
talk of guarantees and letters of introduction would send him away,
huffy. Romer knew those proud old peasant families. Was that
stripling in the arm-chair honest? Of course he was. Romer
understood men.
“Hansen,” he said to the boy with eyeglasses. “Follow this man
to the main stores and tell Dahl to let him have what he needs.-
Then it is agreed that you come to me with your herrings when you
bring them to town? Will you sign an agreement to that effect ?”
In the evening Andreas met an acquaintance from home, who
offered him beer. Andreas refused with thanks. He thought beer
.
and spirits common stuff now. He had discovered an intoxication
as refined as sunshine. The fact of having made old Romer dance
about, swearing and abusing him, on his guard, and still giving ad-
vice, deceived all the time-holy mother of Moses how deeply de-
ceived—and by him. Andreas thought of the golden clouds chased
over the mountain tops at home, by the north wind. Surely he was
riding on one of them. He had better find a place to sleep in. He
was giddy and could not stand.
A few days later, as the steamer from town approached his home
valley, it was met at the pier by a number of wagons and shortly
afterwards by a gig. They had been ordered by telegram from
town, and men stood around, hands in pockets, discussing the pos-
sible meaning of it all.


JOHAN BOJER
507
>
"Have you heard anything about the next trial ?" Old Per
Naust asked of his friend the Gorseth farmer.
“There won't be anything but drivel and spite, as at all the other
trials,” jeered the farmer. “But that madman from the forest can't
escape prison this time, I should say."
The loaded ferry-boat left the steamer and the first to jump
ashore was no other than Andreas.
The men stared at him. He had a new suit on, and was as grand
as a solicitor. The ferry-boat unloaded slowly, there were sacks
of flour, and cases and sacks of other things, and then more cases,
and boxes, and farming implements, and machines, and so on
without end, and every single item bore the address: Andreas
Berget, Store-keeper. They opened their eyes somewhat when he
ordered them to start loading the wagons.
"What about the carriole ?” asked the post-boy.
“Oh, I'll drive that myself,” said Andreas speaking like a grand
man from town, taking the reins from him. What a procession
there was along the main road through the valley. Andreas came
first in a gig, with a string of loaded wagons after him. People
first stared, and then ran across to their next-door neighbours. The
excitement spread like wild-fire. Urchins threw away their shoes
in order to run faster. Windows along the road were filled with
faces. Andreas looked extremely sedate, but inwardly he was rid-
ing on a golden cloud. Get out of the way there, all those who
have looked down on Andreas Berget. Here he comes. At the
entrance to the pass across the hills the country folk usually stepped
off their vehicles to walk. Only big landowners and the like were
grand enough to remain seated. Andreas did not dismount on that
day. He kept his seat in the gig-humming a tune loud enough
for every one to hear.
In the tiny forest cottage his mother kept up a murmuring com-
plaint, because she ran out of real coffee days ago and had to grind
roast potato-cakes to make the brown fluid she called coffee.
The old man swore all day long, because he had no tobacco and
was driven to the extremity of chewing tarred rope, for the sake
of having something between his teeth. Both calamities were due
to none other than that cursed Andreas.
"Oh, look," said the old woman pointing at the window, "what
in all the world?"


508
THE PRISONER WHO SANG
Both stared. Never before had so many cartloads been seen
at once on the forest road. And behind the carts came a swarm of
children apparently determined to follow the procession even to
the end of the world.
“The man in the gig must be a powerful grand one," opined the
old woman, “I suppose it's he who owns the whole lot.”
“Most of it is flour, I guess,” her brother answered, spitting,
"but where on earth are they going to ?”
What? Did they really stop at their very own gate? The
gig drove in first and all the carts followed—into their very own
yard. The two old people had to take a firm hold of the furni-
ture for sheer excitement.
“Well, I'm darned, if it ben't Andreas,” exclaimed his uncle.
That set tongues awagging. How that young devil of a lad
could get hold of such a powerful heap of good stuff was a problem
in itself. But the novelty lay in the fact that he started a store
in the heart of the wild woods miles away from all traffic, whilst
the well peopled valley was thick with shops.
The small holding grew to be a busy place. The two tiny build-
ings were not designed to hold the ample stores of a great trader.
Luckily it was summer. The cow was placed in a temporary shed.
The pig was killed, the chickens beheaded one by one, every nook
and corner was filled with sacks and cases. The pigsty was
crowded with barrels and casks, the barn bursting with sacks,
whilst up aloft the old man's bedroom was turned into a paradise
of well-filled cases and boxes, where he slept the sleep of the just.
The living room was turned into a shop.
Andreas placed one empty barrel on each side of the floor, laid
a couple of planks on top of them, and there was a counter. Better
go slowly to start with.
The old people lived in a fairy land. The whole thing happen-
ed so suddenly that they lost their hold on reality. They awoke
every morning to rub their eyes and find that they had not been
dreaming. It was real life. Fancy for one thing, setting the
coffee mill going at all hours of the day, and for the other, imagine
Uncle Iver with a plug of tobacco in each pocket, and the joyful
fingering of silks and stuffs and reels of cotton for the poor old
mother who had never dreamt of handling ribbons and buttons
and needles as she was doing now, to her heart's content. God


JOHAN BOJER
509
She was
bless everybody, and God be praised who had let her live to see
such days. Andreas was a good son to her. He presented his
mother with a wonderful sewing machine, which kept her busy
half a day at a time, pricking her fingers till they bled in her efforts
to master its intricacies. On Sundays he ordered a cart to take
them to church and she was allowed to choose the most gorgeous
shawl from the shop stores to make herself look nice in.
not above giving the glad eye to the bachelors she passed on her
way.
People actually came up there to buy. Andreas had a way with
him that attracted people. And there was always an extra cup
of coffee for a customer. It had to be served in the kitchen as yet,
but the storekeeper hinted at new buildings. Nor did the old man
stint the horses. "You just let them loose in the meadow," he
would say. Grand people have grand manners as everybody
knows. The old people started dressing up as if they were cele-
brating a wedding every day. The mother put on her best skirt
and even washed her face every morning, while as for Uncle
Iver he wore his Sunday best trousers "so as to look decent.” When
he signed papers as a witness he assumed a title and styled himself
Warden of the Roads although years had gone since he filled that
post. At church he made a brave show with his clean-shaven face
under a top hat holding one hand on his back on account of rheu-
matics and leaning on his stick with the other whilst he boasted
he would have to go down south to some spa to try and cure “this
'ere back-ache.”
“But that is expensive,” people said. “Of course it is expen-
sive,” Gaffer Iver would admit, shaking his head like a man who
has plenty of money and does not like parting with it. "Of course
it will cost a darned lot of money."
Then-in order to show that he was no longer a miserable cot-
ter, he went up to the biggest farmer in the valley, the man from
Bergheim himself, shook hands with him, and thanked him for
“their last meeting.
As a shop-keeper Andreas was great and generous. If anybody
wanted a sack of flour or a pound of coffee to be paid for later on
when more convenient, he did not write names and dates in a book.
He simply made a cross in the ceiling with a piece of chalk. That
was plain enough for anybody to see. In a week the ceiling was
a


510
THE PRISONER WHO SANG
white with chalk marks and Andreas mixed up what meant flour,
and what sugar and coffee, and who was to pay. But it would all
come right in the end.
One person did not come to his shop, though he waited for her
-Jonetta. And Andreas was sorry.
One day at dinner time at Rynningen when Jonetta was just get-
ting up from table for more soup, Andreas entered and placed a
brand-new sewing machine on a chair.
"There you are, Jonetta,” he said, "that is a little memento of
our school-days.” The faces round the table were stiff with won-
derment and Jonetta forgot the soup tureen. The thing was so
absolutely incredible and happened so swiftly that they were dumb-
founded and Andreas left as grand as a duke.
One hearing was not sufficient for the lensmand's lawsuit, and
at the next Assizes the district doctor and the deacon sued him for
libel. On that occasion Andreas was really an important person.
He was a store-keeper, and for a while things looked black enough
for his opponents. His witnesses had now sufficient courage to
side with him. Many clearly remembered having seen the lens-
mand and the midwife going for a walk together in the lower
forest. The bereft widower dared openly to accuse the doctor of
killing his poor deceased wife. Pious people now quite agreed
with Mr Andreas Berget that the deacon often made mistakes
when reading prayers thus turning God's word into a mockery.
All cases were adjourned until the Autumn Assizes so that more
witnesses might be called in. In the meantime Andreas was a
great man in the eyes of the people because he was daring enough
to attack the high and mighty gentility, and when at this time he
stalked along the road boys lifted their caps to him as they did to
Squire Brandt of Lindgaard.
His shopkeeping lasted two months, to the joy and comfort of
many. And neither the barn, nor the pigsty, nor the lofts were
quite empty, when a trap containing two gentlemen drove up to
the door, followed by four empty carts. Evidently the owners of
horses had once more a chance of making some money.
“Oh, this means big doings," the old woman exclaimed and had
the coffee kettle over the fire in the twinkling of an eye. Andreas
also looked out through the window. The two-wheeled carriage
went on one wheel for a moment threatening to upset, so that the


JOHAN BOJER
511
as one stares at a star.
two men made wry faces holding on for dear life. But when he
discovered one to be the lensmand and the other an old red face
with a white wig, he understood that wicked people had used in-
trigue and slander against him.
“Where is Andreas Berget,” roared a nasal voice, before the
horse had stopped.
“In the shop," answered the old man stepping forward to let the
horse loose in the meadow. There were a few tufts of grass left
somewhere, even then.
“Oh, there he is," Romer said, when Andreas came out touching
his cap. “Good-morning Mr Squire with thirty cows and five
horses. Good-morning Mr Wholesale Herringdealer. Eh ?” And
he began a difficult descent from the high cart. Andreas assumed
an innocent air and seemed rather glad to see callers. His mother
did not know whether she dared offer a cup of plain coffee to such
grand people.
At last the great man Romer reached the ground and stood be-
fore Andreas, his hands on his back, chewing silently, staring up
His face was crimson, but he found no
words at first. Then he began.
The two old people understood nothing, but soon sought and
found the support of a wall. The irate old merchant screamed
and yelled, threatened Andreas with his fist, promising him hand-
cuffs and prison for life. Several times he took God's name in
vain, and he mentioned Andreas and the Evil One in the
same breath. He did not seem to like being fooled by a clod of a
peasant. Then the drivers, strong, well-built men, all of them,
were called in to pack the shop stores into the empty wagons. They
stripped the shop bare, emptied the pigsty, plundering every nook
and corner, supervised by the enraged Mr Romer who danced
about, his white mane flowing.
Then he wanted to know where the remainder was. Where in
thunder were the other stores, since the cash drawer contained only
three crowns? Andreas took him indoors and pointed to the chalk-
marked ceiling: the great man Romer strained his neck and looked
“What? What is that?" "That's credit,” Andreas said.
The older man seemed to have a fit. He foamed at the mouth,
swung his arms about saying several things. He was very nearly
downright rude, and Andreas found it rather unpleasant listening
up. “What?


512
THE PRISONER WHO SANG
And once
to him. Gaffer Iver followed at their heels axe in hand, the lens-
mand was sitting on a boulder out of doors smoking a pipe. An-
dreas had enough of it. He too sat down on a boulder and lit a
cigar. “What sort of weather do you think we shall have to-
morrow?” he politely asked of the lensmand. But that worthy was
looking straight before him half smiling, and did not reply.
The woman was frightened out of her wits, but Romer finally
succeeded in making her give the names of a few of those who had
received coffee and flour on credit. He was going to have it out
of them, even if they had both cooked and eaten it, he said.
One cart only was filled. The others returned empty. The
ever-present swarm of children who accompanied Romer up, went
in front down hill again to warn people that "it" was coming.
The shop in the forest was on its way back to town.
more all windows were filled with faces, old people, bedridden for
years, stumbled out to see it pass. The whole store in one wagon.
Soon they might expect to see the criminal. Perhaps he would
be hand-cuffed! "Oh, Andreas !"
The lensmand did nothing till the wagons had left. He had
no cause beforehand to love Andreas and he behaved as might be
expected. On behalf of the County Judge he declared Andreas
Berget, shop-keeper, to be bankrupt, and started legal bankruptcy
proceedings. He read a lot out of a ledger and found witnesses
to sign. He sealed up “the shop,” although it contained no earth-
ly thing but waste paper and the old man's slippers. He even lock-
ed and sealed the barn although the only thing in it was an old
hoe. He was rude enough to ask Andreas to report at his office
every day at twelve o'clock, otherwise he would have to arrest
him on the spot. Andreas declared the whole thing to be illegal,
and said he would start a lawsuit.
“Good-day then," said the lensmand, joining Mr Romer who
sat in the cart already fuming with impatience to start hunting for
his flour and his coffee, and all the other things.
“Good-day,” said Andreas. “Good-day,” echoed his mother
wiping her eyes with her apron.
The three stared at each other. The houses were empty. The
grass in the meadow, which otherwise would have given winter fod-
der for their cow, had been eaten by strange horses. The wedding
party was over and they felt ashamed of their finery.


JOHAN BOJER
513
True enough, Andreas was nearly weeping, but what an expe-
rience it was to study the two old people while the storm lasted. To
see his mother looking from the furious townsman up to the sky as
if she expected heavenly aid. And Gaffer Iver with his axe! And
the two faces. They had had their trip to heaven, and were sud-
denly brought down again on earth to a day of reckoning. It was
rather unexpected and they did not yet feel quite sure where they
were.
The old man chewed, and spat, and finally going up to the win-
dow for a peep he enquired, “Can't we even enter the living room?"
a
“No, the living room is bankrupt.”
“What about the kitchen?” his mother asked.
“We may use the kitchen and the bedroom,” Andreas stated.
“The kitchen is not bankrupt.” The old man grumbled about his
.
old slippers, all the time peeping through the window. "Your
slippers and the hoe in the barn are now bankrupt estate,” Andreas
declared, starting to hum a hymn tune. The old man stopped
grumbling. He never dreamt that his old slippers would become
anything so grand as those words.
At the Autumn Assizes Andreas was the head figure in four cases.
His was no easy position, for his witnesses against the doctor, the
deacon, and the lensmand, withdrew one by one, misremembering
everything. Romer's case on the other hand was simple enough,
and no one would listen to Andreas' plea of illegal bankruptcy pro-
ceedings. When at last his reckoning with the authorities was
settled, he had a free journey to town and stayed away for several
months.
IV
He returned but for a little while. He did not himself know
why, but the desire was there to turn up at church and see
people's faces, when they saw him, the convict, the storekeeper,
the agent. He twirled his stick and feeling a delightful shiver at
people's stares, he said—“How do you do?” to the greatest men
of the valley, chatting easily and asking about their children.
During the service his voice was heard above all the others.
Then he disappeared, and the old people in the tiny house in
the forest had a bad time of it. The old woman took to her bed


514
THE PRISONER WHO SANG
for days, and Gaffer Iver was barely able to keep the home sup-
plied with wood for fuel. Once more they brewed coffee from
roast potato cakes and people in the valley began to speak of the
parish looking after the old people and keeping them from stary-
ing to death.
Then one day Gaffer Iver appeared at the village shop paying
cash both for coffee and treacle. This fact was food for much talk,
and people found important business to be done in the forest.
There they saw the two old people eating porridge with butter,
which in itself is no trifle on a week day. The following Sunday
they hired a horse and buggy once more to go to church, the old
woman in a brand new shawl! Later on Iver actually painted the
walls red and the window frames white, so that the place shone
with sinful pride. Ay, and the old dame took to having flowering
plants in the windows and she bought huckleberries according to
weight and paid cash like a shopkeeper. “Where is Andreas ?”
people would ask. Andreas was somewhere in the north.
The old mother died one day, and Andreas attended her funeral.
He looked flourishing enough, with a fair full beard and a gold
watch chain, as grand as that of a big farmer. A thick gold ring
on his right hand gave rise to much speculation.
At the funeral party he was telling them all about his vessel and
his fish trade in the North, when the lensmand and a policeman
from the town entered and interrupted the narrative.
Andreas went with them meekly enough. But he turned at the
door to take in the scene. What faces! Mercy upon us, the
amazement on those staring faces !
“So long then," he cried.
“Good-bye, Andreas,” several of the party came up and offered
to shake hands with him, but then he hurried out slamming the
door.
Six months later he returned—back to the small holding in the
forest.
In the meantime Gaffer Iver also died. The tiny holding was
absorbed into the main farm, the horses were sold and taken away.
Ruin and confusion reigned. Andreas sat down on the broad
stone shelf that was once the door-step, and brooded.
Time and again he rose to go but turned and sat down again.
A few nights later the buildings of the main farm were burnt down,
a


JOHAN BOJER
515
1
and once more Andreas was fetched by his friend the lensmand.
At the trial, however, he could plainly prove that he spent
the night
in question in the upper room at Per's house in the Pass, and so
nothing came of it.
Then followed a period of difficulties. No one wanted him to
work for them, and something seemed to have snapped inside him,
so that he could not at once tear himself away from the ruin in the
forest. In the long run it proved impossible to go to people's
tables, uninvited, and he had nothing in his pocket, nothing to sell,
not even a gold ring on his right hand.
Something had to be done and one day he sat with his old school-
master, who was also chairman of the guardians of the poor. An-
dreas coughed incessantly, complaining of giddiness and haemor-
rhage. The old schoolmaster was kind and tried to arrange for
parish relief in the form of board and lodging for the strapping
young man.
People however refused. Andreas was by now a bogey for the
whole valley, and the children ran away whenever he appeared.
At last Anders Kaalseth agreed to house him. He was a white-
haired deliberate man, whose farm lay apart near the fiord, and
who had acquired the habit of thinking independently.
"Guess you want to have your farm burnt down over your
head,” people said to him.
"Guess I want to raise him up,” was the old man's answer.
Andreas moved into the farm, in spite of the mortally fright-
ened young Mrs Kaalseth, who watched his arrival from the
window.
"You are welcome,” said Mr Kaalseth, shaking his hand.
Then he tried to awaken the fallen man's self-respect by calling
him his servant.
The beginning was satisfactory enough. Andreas wanted to
learn ploughing, and was soon stamping behind two brown horses,
crying "whoa” every once in a while. The plough cut one fur-
row like another and the face of the field came out.
great relief to know that he was now engaged in honest work and
had nothing to fear from the Great Watchman above. Steady
there! One might just as well stop and breathe a little. Andreas
turned round between the handles of the plough, pushed his cap
back, and looked around him.
It was a


516
THE PRISONER WHO SANG
a
a
The autumn day was perfect. The yellow leafage of the hill-
side vied in brilliancy with the red clouds above, mirrored in the
dead calm fiord. The air was so clear and dry that he could hear
the sound of planks falling down miles away.
Andreas stood immovable under the immovable clouds. He
fell to wondering how people can endure being the very same per-
sons year after year. They sail to Lofoten and back again, one
winter after the other, or they work hard on the same farm, or
quarrel with the same wife this year as they will do ten years hence,
and they remain for ever Knut and Ola, and nothing else, before
God and man. And it does not kill them either.
He for one could not get rid of the obsession of trying to trans-
form himself. Supposing somebody came and offered him the
life of a parson? Yes, for a year—but for life?—No thanks.
Or the life of a bishop, say? Yes, great fun for a while conse-
crating churches and inspecting the diocese, but a whole long life
of it? How dreadful. Or to be a king now? For a coronation
or two, or for the pleasure of bestowing the king's free pardon on
a few poor devils, oh, yes, certainly, it would be a great pleasure
indeed. But to go on till the end of his life, with no possibility
of becoming a missionary to-morrow or a petty officer next year?
No thanks, it was not good enough. When he was a child he merely
imitated, now he wanted to put on another's very skin, to be
Peter to-day and Paul to-morrow. He had been a beggar to the
parson, a farmer to the great man Romer, a Voltaire to the district,
and was at present a parish pauper and a pariah. Perhaps some
poor people had to remain in such misery all their lives. To him it
represented but a brief stage of transition. He would enjoy the
sensation of entering a sacred meeting, like a leper to them all,
and offer his hand for a shake, asking whether he had kept them
waiting. Was he the only man in all the world who could afford
inward laughter?—The clouds were up above, he was here below.
The horses pulled, and the days wore on. Every Sunday it
was a delight for him to don his blue coat and stalk to church with
a merry face. People withdrew and stared. They did nothing
but look at him. He felt as if he walked straight towards the
sallow, sour face of the valley throwing his merriest laughter at it.
“Good morning,” he said with a friendly nod in all directions,
although no one responded.


JOHAN BOJER
517
At last there came a change. One or the other of the mission
people came to him with sweet words of loving-kindness. It
promised re-establishment, as if they saw the glimmer of salvation
for him, who had behaved so very well lately. Mr Kaalseth
cultivated a tiny smile in one corner of his mouth. Had he not
told them so? It was possible to raise up Andreas. There now.
Andreas kept humming a hymn tune for several days at a
stretch. Then one Sunday morning the young housewife had no
clean shirt ready for him to wear, and the next day he had her
summoned before the Conciliation Board.
Mr Kaalseth stood stock still at this event.
Andreas was already far away, carrying his box on his shoulder.
Luckily for him, Mr Kaalseth and Mr Bergheim were just then
greatly at variance with each other concerning the questions of
the King versus the People, and the Norwegians versus their breth-
ren the Swedes. It was election year. Mr Bergheim had already
contrived to get Mr Kaalseth's name struck off the list of the
Conservatives, and now he opened his house to Andreas in order
to spite Mr Kaalseth.
Andreas liked the change. He lived at the largest farm in the
valley and did little else besides drive the great man to election
meetings. There were newspapers in abundance and Andreas be-
haved as if he were the boss of everything. Until one day it oc-
curred to him that in reality it was the life at Kaalseth's over
again, and then Mr Bergheim's smug confidence in the security
of his own election began to irritate him.
At the last meeting before the election everybody felt sure that
Mr Bergheim's party would obtain an overwhelming majority,
when suddenly the lensmand entered and elbowed his way to the
platform. It was evident to all that something had happened.
Now the lensmand was a Radical and a bitter adversary of
Mr Bergheim. What then did he want there?
“It is my duty,” the lensmand declared, "to inform you of the
fact that one of the candidates has just been accused of theft.”
A pause ensued. Mr Bergheim who occupied the chair stroked
his beard and felt like kicking the lensmand off the premises.
"Who is it?" he asked at last.
“Mr Bergheim himself,” came the reply.
Another pause.
This indeed was an event. Mr Bergheim,


518
THE PRISONER WHO SANG
some news.
the richest man in the valley, a teetotaller, president of the Lay
Mission, and a great politician-Mr Bergheim a thief—that was
All faces went stony and the old man arose.
“What have I stolen?”
"You had better ask at home," the lensmand answered—“Mr
Berget, the store-keeper, has just lodged information against you
for having taken ten kronen from his cash box. Possibly the
whole thing is a mistake, but it is my plain duty to enlighten this
assembly concerning the facts, as we do not want our election to
make us ashamed before the whole nation."
The lensmand left.
When Mr Bergheim's foaming horse drove into the home yard,
his master yelling for Andreas, the latter had left already, a box
under his arm.
Andreas disappeared from the valley, and although no one
took his last trick seriously, Mr Bergheim was not elected to Par-
liament that year.
To be continued



I
Bosschere
OÙ IRAI.JE? BY JEAN DE BOSSCHÈRE


3
1
1



OÙ IRAI.JE? BY JEAN DE BOSSCHÈRE





THE PROBLEM OF POPULATION
BY HAROLD COX
Raigh
ATHER more than a hundred and twenty years ago an Eng.
vlish clergyman published an essay which enunciated a new
doctrine and in subsequent years gave a new word to all civilized
languages. The Reverend T. R. Malthus was professor of His-
tory and Political Economy in the East India College in Hert-
fordshire, and it was as an economist and as an historian that he
approached the problem of population. But he was also, as his
Essay and the record of his life both clearly show, a thoroughly
human individual with a kindly temperament and a well balanced
mind. His main purpose, in his own words, was "the improvement
of society," and his Essay on Population was written to show
that the permanent improvement of society is impossible without
a conscious limitation of the rate at which children are born. His
Essay immediately it appeared was attacked from two quarters,
by theologians who argued that children were sent by God and that
it was impious to interfere with God's decree; by semi-socialists
like Godwin, who assumed that the proposal that population should
be limited was a device of the rich to stave off a revolt of the poor.
Both sets of opponents are heard to-day. With regard to the
theological argument, it is sufficient to say that the same line of
reasoning would forbid any precautions against illness, or the
employment of any remedies for disease. The attitude of some
of the socialists is more plausible. Their movement depends very
largely for its driving power upon the existence of an immense
mass of human misery; reduce that misery and their arguments
grow weaker. That is indisputable, and it explains why some
socialists oppose the birth control movement.
But those among
the socialists who adopt this attitude are condemning their own
creed more scathingly than any opponent could condemn it. In
effect they are saying that they wish to keep the world in misery
in order to be able to impose their views upon people who other-
wise would not accept them. All socialists are not so cynical.
There are many who see clearly that under any kind of socialist


520
THE PROBLEM OF POPULATION
a
organization it would be absolutely necessary to limit the birth-
rate, for otherwise the standard of comfort of the whole community
would be lowered. They also see that if socialism is to have any
chance of success its appeal must be directed, not to the envy of a
squalid multitude of under-fed, under-sized, and under-brained
beings, but to the enterprise of a body of self-respecting and public-
spirited citizens.
The question of birth control has in fact no necessary connection
with the partisan interests either of socialists or of anti-socialists.
Whatever form the future organization of industry and society
make take the problem of population will remain. To the Rever-
end T. R. Malthus belongs the credit of having first given a con-
sidered enunciation of that problem. He begins by stating that
there is a constant tendency in all animated life to increase beyond
the nourishment prepared for it, and he effectively quotes Franklin,
who says: “Were the face of the earth vacant of other plants, it
might be gradually sowed and overspread with one kind only, as
for instance with fennel, and were it empty of other inhabitants
it might in a few ages be replenished from one nation only, as for
instance with Englishmen.” From this starting-point he goes
on to lay down three propositions, which he repeats more than
once in his book: (1) population is necessarily limited by the
means of subsistence; (2) population invariably increases where
the means of subsistence increase, unless prevented by powerful
and obvious checks; (3) these checks are all resolvable into moral
restraint, vice, and misery.
The greater part of his famous Essay is occupied with a detailed
examination of the different countries of the world and the differ-
ent checks to population therein existing. Everywhere he finds
races warring against races, and he notes that in some parts of the
world the conqueror completes a successful battle by making a good
meal off the defeated enemy. He finds that in addition to peren-
nial warfare the practices of infanticide and abortion are widely
used to check the growth of population, and he shows that these
practices are not confined to savage tribes. He quotes Plato and
Aristotle, who both insist on the absolute necessity for limiting the
population of the State and who advocated either abortion or in-
fanticide as a means for securing the necessary limitation.
This appeal to the teaching of Plato and Aristotle is specially


HAROLD COX
521
interesting because these great philosophers were compelled by the
circumstances in which they lived to view the problem of popula-
tion on a small scale. It was forced upon their attention, and
upon the attention of their contemporaries, that the City State
could not possibly permit its population to expand indefinitely be-
cause the available means of subsistence were so obviously limited.
As City States grew to great nations, and as great nations organized
world-wide commerce, the final limitation of the means of sub-
sistence became less obvious. Especially was this the case in the
decades immediately succeeding the publication of Malthus' Essay.
When Malthus wrote, England was just beginning to emerge
from the agricultural into the industrial stage. The wonderful
machines which were to revolutionize manufacturing industry had
only just been invented; the overwhelming majority of the popu-
lation was still agricultural; and it was mainly the agricultural
problem with which Malthus dealt, so far as England was con-
cerned. But during the succeeding decades the power of ma-
chinery rapidly extended and enabled Great Britain to utilize for
industrial purposes her rich endowment of coal, with the result
that her dependence for food upon her own agriculture ceased, and
she was able to call upon the whole world to feed her.
Thus what was a local problem became a world problem; but the
problem remains not for England only but for all countries. It
still remains a truism that population cannot increase beyond the
means of subsistence. But instead of each country looking mainly
to its own soil for its own food supply, all the commercial nations
of the world compete for a share of the world's common stock of
food. The question as to the date at which the total means of sub-
sistence throughout the world will only just suffice for the num-
ber of stomachs craving for food, is a matter of speculation. But
all the available evidence shows that population everywhere tends
to increase pari passu with an increase in the means of subsistence.
Each fresh development of the food-producing areas of the world
has in the main been followed by an increase of population either
in those areas or in other areas dependent upon them. The case of
the United States is perhaps the most striking. Fifty years ago the
United States was a large exporter of food. She still exports some
foodstuffs, but she is now compelled to import others.
The case of India, in a different stage of civilization, is equally


522
THE PROBLEM OF POPULATION
impressive. British engineers in the past fifty years have added
enormously to the food-producing areas of India by constructing
irrigation canals and by developing railways, but as fast as new
food areas have been opened up, so fast has the population ex-
panded to eat up the new food produced. Yet in India those posi-
tive checks to population from which Malthus strove to save the
world are in cruel operation. A very large part of the population
of India never knows what it is to have even one square meal a
day. The mortality, especially the infantile mortality, is terrific.
Exactly the same phenomena are in operation in China, where an
even larger population is perpetually struggling to obtain a bare
living. The infantile mortality is said to be something like seven
hundred per thousand births. In addition to natural causes of
mortality, in many parts of China infanticide is a common practice.
Recently a new famine has broken out in China and the
newspapers
are reporting the widespread sale of children to buy food.
These facts with regard to India and China are horrible enough
in themselves, but their horror to Western minds is, or ought to
be, aggravated when we reflect that it is only because of the ex-
treme poverty of these millions that the prosperous nations are able
to enjoy a fairly substantial supply of food for their own require-
ments. If the three hundred million inhabitants of India and the
five hundred million inhabitants of China consumed food at even
half the scale that Englishmen and Americans think necessary, there
would be little, or indeed none, left for the rest of the world.
This consideration brings us to what may be regarded as the
crucial point in the Malthusian argument, namely that the races
and nations of the world are in the ultimate resort compelled to
struggle with one another to get a maximum share of a limited food
supply. That it is still possible in certain regions of the world to
increase the existing food supply no one denies, but equally is it
true that there is an ultimate limit to that increase. Moreover as
the limit of possible food production in any area is approached, so
the cost of each unit of food produced is increased. This is the
well-known “law of diminishing returns” in agriculture. The
operation of this law can be temporarily suspended by commercial
or industrial developments, such as the importation of relatively
cheap artificial manures or the use of efficient machinery in place
of hand-labour. But these improvements do not abrogate, they
a


HAROLD COX
523
only postpone, the operation of the law. As we ask more of nature
from each acre of land, so after a certain point has been reached,
does she make us pay more dearly for what she yields.
Meanwhile different nationalities are competing for the avail-
able supplies of food which must be ultimately limited by the capac-
ity of the globe. The competition in its mildest form is repre-
sented by bidding against one another in the Chicago wheat market;
in its ultimate form it is represented by killing one another on the
battle-field. As the world gets filled, so inevitably will different
races or nations fight with one another for a share of the available
means of subsistence, unless they otherwise keep down their re-
spective population. Men will always prefer to kill one another,
rather than to starve themselves.
That a continuous high birth-rate must lead to the overfilling
of the world is an arithmetical proposition which needs little
demonstration. Take England. A good many people, observing
that before the war the birth rate in England was declining, as-
sumed that the English population was on the highroad to extinc-
tion. Apart from the fact that a decreased birth-rate is almost
invariably accompanied by a decreased infantile death-rate so that
a lower birth-rate may actually mean a higher rate of net increase,
there remains the arithmetically even more important consideration
that a low rate of increase taken over a large basis may yield a
greater volume of increase than a high rate on a small basis. One
per cent on ten thousand dollars gives a larger annual income than
nine
per cent on one thousand.
The importance of this arithmeti-
cal fact is crucial. As a population grows larger the annual increase
automatically grows greater unless the birth-rate is correspondingly
reduced. In a small population a high birth-rate is often beneficial,
as in the case of the early settlers in New England. In a large
population a high birth-rate involves overcrowding, under-feeding,
social unrest, and the danger of war.
The English census shows that in spite of the decline in the
birth-rate, the population of England and Wales increased by a
larger volume in the ten years ending 1911 than in any previous
decade of England's long history. The increase in those first ten
years of the twentieth century was greater than the increase during
the whole of the eighteenth century.
Further to press home the significance of these figures it is worth


524
THE PROBLEM OF POPULATION
.
while to add that the population of England and Wales just
doubled between 1851 and 1911. If that rate of increase were to
continue for three hundred and sixty years the figure reached would
be two billion, three hundred and four million, or five hundred
millions more than the present population of the whole globe.
Franklin was fully justified in saying that the world might in a
few ages be filled with Englishmen only.
It is equally true that any other race could in a few ages, if left
to itself, replenish the earth. It is further and finally true that no
race will be left to itself to seize for its own accommodation the
whole surface of the globe and all its buried wealth. Either the
different races must limit their own numbers or they must destroy
one another by high explosive shells and poison gas.
There are two ways by which a race can limit its numbers: the
first is by encouraging deaths, the second is by discouraging births.
The first method is mankind's historic method, still maintained by
the lower races and by the lower classes among the higher races.
In the slums of London and New York, as in the villages of India
and China, unwanted babies are encouraged to die. Often no
specific encouragement is needed. The poverty of the household
and the weakness of the mother give the child no chance of life.
Thousands of children are born every year only to die within a few
days or a few weeks or a few months. The call for cradles only
precedes by a brief interval the call for coffins.
That is the tragedy of the married woman's life in the poorer
classes throughout the world. It is a cruel wrong imposed upon
women by the decrees of Nature and by man's lack of imagination.
Had Nature decreed that men should share with women the anxie-
ties of gestation and the pains of parturition, husbands and wives
in all races would long ago have learnt how to avoid bringing into
the world unwanted children. In the proverbial phrase-if the
husband had to bear the second child, there would never be a
fourth. As matters stand a married woman's life in the less pru-
dent classes is one long disease. The race gains nothing by this
protracted suffering.
Therefore for the sake of the race, as well as for the sake of the
mother, it is important that parents should learn how to regulate
the size of their families. No intelligent gardener plants trees so
close to one another that they have no room to grow, and for ex-


HAROLD COX
525
>
actly similar reasons intelligent and patriotic parents ought to
leave adequate intervals of time between their successive infants,
and ought to refrain from producing more than they can afford to
bring up to healthy maturity.
In England, as in many other countries, this is now being done by
,
a very large proportion of the population. Not only have the
middle and upper classes reduced the size of their families but the
same practice is being followed by well-to-do artisans and by
agricultural labourers. In English villages where thirty years ago
families of ten or twelye were common, the rule to-day is two or
*three children at most, and often only one. Meanwhile the reck-
less production of children in the slum population still continues,
and the government of the United Kingdom, instead of discourag-
ing this output of infants, few of whom will add any real strength
to the race, is encouraging their multiplication by the payment of
maternity benefits and by other devices for relieving slum parents
of the cost of rearing their own children. But if the better edu-
cated and physically stronger classes reduce their numbers, while
the more ignorant, more reckless, and more unhealthy classes con-
tinue to multiply, the average character of the race must decline.
A similar problem faces the world as a whole. If the lower
races continue to multiply, while the higher races restrict their num-
bers, the time will come when the mastery of the world will pass
to the inferior but more prolific types of mankind, just as in a
garden the weeds will choke the flowers if left unchecked. The
danger cannot be met by any appeal to the higher types to breed
more children. They will not do it, and even if they did it they
would only intensify the racial rivalry for the limited resources of
the earth. The only possibility of avoiding an endless succession
of world-wide wars lies in the reduction of the numbers of the more
prolific races. To kill out these races is impossible, even if we
could bring our minds to the deliberate contemplation of such a
hideous massacre. But it is possible for them to learn what the
upper classes among white men already have learnt, and con-
sciously to limit their output of children. It is the duty of the
higher races to impart this knowledge and if necessary to enforce
the importance of it by combined measures against those races which
by recklessly increasing their numbers threaten the peace of the
world.


526
TWO POEMS
BY CHARLES VILDRAC
Translated by Witter Bynner
A FRIENDSHIP
Among your good qualities of mind and heart
And
among
those which belong to me,
Some are a little alike
And others hardly alike at all.
But they go well together,
All your good qualities and mine,
And we are friends because of them.
They complete and enrich one another,
They touch and control one another,
Like different leaves
Mingling in a clump of trees,
Or like two heads,
One fair, one dark, drawn close.
There are also in you and in me,
As in everyone else, things lacking;
Some flowers
Not in my garden,
Some weapon
Not by your hand;
But it happens always, luckily for us,
That I can lay hold of that weapon,
That your garden is full of those flowers,
And that we go, without asking, the one to the other
For the things that we need.


CHARLES VILDRAC
527
You are well aware of my wants
And of my weaknesses;
They turn to you unabashed,
You receive them and love them,
And equally I love yours
Which are a part
of
your
worth
And the price of your strength.
And so each of us, O my friend,
Goes and can go with assurance,
Because of a hand which is ready,
At the least peril, to turn and take hold
Of the wandering arm of the blind man
Which you become or which I become,
Like everyone else, from time to time.
THE ONE SONG
To-night in the lumbering cavern of his cart,
A wagoner hides, to find peace.
A hundred leagues away, a great lord
In his great park is wandering alone.
And I know a shopkeeper in town
Who huddles by himself in the shadowy depth of his shop.
This is the time when they take advantage, all three,
Of being alone and of the evening
Which lets them cringe with twisted lips
And feel the tears roll down their faces,
Each of them thinking of his dead child.
From lights on the way
And from other vehicles and passers-by,
The wagoner is hidden by his hat
And by the hubbub
.
.


528
TWO POEMS
The great lord, turning aside from the lawns
Where what is left of light
Gathers and stares and startles him,
Chooses the blackest paths.
And the shopkeeper puts off just a little longer
The moment for lighting his window and his eyes.
Now if they were all here this evening, these three men
Who do not wear the same clothes,
Nor eat the same food,
Nor talk in the same fashion,
Who do not know the same houses
Nor the same women,
If they were here, all three, this evening,
Seated on a bench behind you in the darkness,
And
you
should sing to them
That song, say, of the man who walks slowly,
Who goes with his feet in the water and his shoulders bare,
Through the bitter-blowing night-air,
But who blessedly shelters the eyes
Of his little child,
Whom he carries cradled from the storm,
Rolled in his great big coat,
Asleep and warm,
If you sang that song for these three men,
O you who know the language
Which finds and reaches in their nakedness
The men and the women with whom you are
Upon the earth,
If
you sang that song without turning your head
- Because of their eyes and their shyness-
Might you not hear
The stifled sound of but one sob?


MONALDI AT THE ALFIERI
BY RITA WELLMAN
T is a little alley full of soldiers, very gay in their wide capes
and their hats with the luxuriant cocque feathers. It is very
dark, and the only sound is that of my cab rolling over the stone
street, and the sound of the horse's hoofs, and the tinkle of the little
bell he wears.
The light of the theatre seems a very important and
exciting thing.
To get to our seats in the orchestra we go around a corridor be-
hind the boxes, an arrangement much like that in the ancient arenas,
but this corridor has no exits into the open air, and it is stuffy and
crowded. Painted on the doors of the boxes are the crests of the
aristocracy, graceful ghosts of a time that is past, for now the mob
sits in the boxes. I am with a family of the aristocracy, and as we
slip meekly into our orchestra seats they make an apology for the
crowd, and notice in disgust that even the royal box is filled with
rowdies. Probably royalty is glad to be out of it; it is so ugly.
Monaldi is both author and actor. They tell me he comes from
a good family, but that the slums are his passion. This play is
about the slums of Rome. He is an enormous man built in a mould
dear to Michelangelo, and he plays the part of the executioner as if
he were eating delicious roast beef, or more, the tender flesh of lit-
tle children not too well done. He must have gone to great pains
to learn the difficult Roman dialect, the language of the poor, and
his audience is at great pains to understand him. But the plot is
easy.
Give us a dive with a great Harpy in charge whose pink satin
gown is longer in back than in front, an old man, her husband and
victim, a daughter who wears an expensive Spanish shawl, and we
know exactly what kind of a play we are to see. We are not mis-
taken, when several men come in and speak mysteriously, and drink
very hard, and act like thieves, in believing that someone is soon
to be murdered. We get a little lost when a particularly black
looking character enters and all in the dive display their contempt
and hatred for him. We do not know if he is murderer or to-be-


530
MONALDI AT THE ALFIERI
murdered, but murder is in the air, and we are on seat's edge wait-
ing for it. The black man is a coachman. He gives himself airs.
Our daughter in the Spanish shawl loves him. Her black eyes
tell us that, but he loves, for the moment, a pretty little creature
who seems like a dainty wise little cat who has found herself in a
stable of beasts.
The room is full now of men who wear handkerchiefs for collars,
who are very pale, and who talk continually of prison with the
courageous irony of hardened criminals. Several little cocottes
come in, and soon we have a song, and then a dance. The song
is a song of hate. Although we know it is of blood, it has the
charm and sweetness of a Neapolitan love-song. This is the death
.
song of the executioner. It is he who must die. He has killed
many of their kind. Now it is his turn. While they sing and
dance the song of death, the door opens and the executioner him-
self appears. Everyone in the room shudders, and so do I. He is
very terrible. If you met him to-morrow at the Piazza Vittorio
Emmanuele you would know him at once as an executioner. He
wears a light brown coat bound in brown braid. His gloves are a
a
bright yellow, and so is his heavy walking stick. About his neck
is a bright red silk tie. When he opens his coat to hang his finger
in his suspender, he reveals his watch chain which is a thing of
great glory, with a charm on it of bright gold, as large as a cooky.
He enters the room with a great stride, his legs far apart. He
lowers his head and shows the whites of his eyes, like a bull about to
charge, and in great respect the crowd makes way for him. Al-
though his eyes are closed in passion he has not failed to find out
where she is, and before any one in the audience can see him do it,
he has whipped out his folding dagger and has gashed his girl
across the cheek to brand her for unfaithfulness. It is the pretty
girl whom the coachman loves.
While she is carried off screaming with pain, and fear for her
beauty, the executioner carefully wipes the blood from the dagger
on the coat of the coachman. I thought this a very good touch.
It draws a murmur of horror from the characters in the dive, and
makes them respect him. Even after it is clean of blood, the exe-
cutioner examines his knife to see if it is quite dry before he puts
it away. He cares for this knife, you can see that. It is his real
mistress. The act ends, as it should, with the arrival of the police.


RITA WELLMAN
531
a
a
The coachman has murdered someone before the beginning of the
next act. The executioner is to have another chance of killing one
of them. The daughter in the Spanish shawl comes to warn the
coachman that he is to be killed. She is all in black, with a black
Spanish shawl, and looks exactly like a picture of Antigone I have
seen painted by some mediocre artist. At least before he dies will he
not marry her and make their child legitimate? For answer he
threatens to kill her. She is very unhappy. Monaldi appears and
the murderer flees from the executioner. The executioner is more
terrible than ever in a black satin shirt with wide white stripes, and
a touch of real imagination pure white suspenders. His hat
is a snowy, wide-brimmed felt. It is the garb of true tragedy.
It develops that Antigone has been very badly ruined, first by
the executioner himself, and then by the coachman. Antigone
loves the cad of a coachman with all the passion women lavish on
weaklings, and begs the executioner to free him. What will hap-
pen to his art then if he fails to kill the coachman at the appointed
time? But with the persistence of women she continues to plead
for the coachman. For her child at home, if for nothing else. He
must! He loved her once. Yes, he did love her once. He loves
her now. And, like all great brutes, when his heart is touched he
becomes a child in her hands. But, what is that? It is the call
to duty. It is the whistle that blows for the execution. And
true artist again he thinks only of his duty, and tries to get rid of
her soft arms. Then there follows a scene of such hair-falling-
down, such rolling of great black eyes, such sighs and such groans,
such "no, no, no's," and such "si, si, si's," that you sit in your seat
as unmoved and annoyed as if a great express engine had stopped
by your side and was filling the air with continuous roar.
Do not think from this that Monaldi is not a good actor. He is.
He gives you the naivete and exaggeration of this great brute of
an executioner, who, in his way, has the soul of an artist. He
began as a bully, but, like all bullies, he discovered that he had to
make good, and he became an executioner in earnest, and now has
reason to be proud of his calling. Through it all he has preserved
his simple, child-like heart-in blood, you might say. He has
humour and pathos in his acting, and his exaggeration is full of
wisdom. Only small people are afraid to exaggerate.
Beside Monaldi, Antigone is clumsy, and her continual eye-


532
MONALDI AT THE ALFIERI
9
rolling monotonous. This is her fête night, and the good-natured
Monaldi bounces her on and off the stage where she gives a sweet
smile and receives many bunches of flowers. She throws a bunch
of red carnations out to the audience, and I see one man very
proudly catch several, as red as blood, and hold them to his lips.
In the next act we see what we have been waiting a whole act
for—the scar! We were afraid that he had disfigured the pretty
kitten very badly, but, now that
badly, but, now that it is done, it is not so bad. . It is
even becoming, and gives her an air of reckless sin which is
very
provocative. This is her last appearance and the author gives her
a chance, as real cocottes have occasionally in life, to tell her story.
This she does with a great deal of humour and courageous philos-
ophy. “Ma madre” a sigh. “Mio padre—” a shrug.
“We do
not see her again.
The coachman is worse than we thought. He has been making
love to Antigone's mother in order to get the old husband's money.
His appearance as a man who is condemned and desperate, is very
good. He is pale with a yellow pallor the Anglo-Saxon actor can-
not imitate, and his sleeves rolled up from very heavy, dark brown
flannel underwear, is a good touch too. It shows that he has lost
his vanity, now, at the hour of crisis, otherwise he would never
display that underwear. He has a cigarette behind his ear. He
has been disturbed in a scheme, and has forgotten where he put
it. He smokes another nervously. It is plain that he is going to
kill the old man. Just as the knife flashes, there is a knock at the
door, and the old man runs away to safety. Of course the visitor
is the executioner. He has knocked with his cane, which he holds
jauntily in his hand. But for all his jauntiness his head lowers
and he charges into the room, the whites of his eyes showing, his
lips curling. He is very terrible.
As they draw near to each other we feel the hatred of these two
men, their silence creating a terrific vacuum; then comes the thunder
of their impact. But their fight is subtle. Each knows the other's
strength-and the sharpness of the other's knife. After their first
lunge at each other, they draw off and face each other like Fabre's
bee and spider in a bottle. The executioner tells the coachman
that he has saved his life at the expense of his, the executioner's,
reputation, and that the coachman must marry Antigone and go
with her to America. Here I stopped to think of the ways of


RITA WELLMAN
533
playwrights. In American plays when characters are very desper-
ate and must go far, far away to some land of barbarians, the play-
wright always chooses Italy to be that land. Here, in this Italian
play, the criminal is urged to go to America to begin life anew.
The criminal, however, bad as he is, has no desire to leave Italy for
America. The executioner insists, and the criminal finally con-
sents. They shake hands at the agreement, the executioner hesi-
tantly. His hands are clean! Shall he take the hand of a mur-
derer! But he does, like a reluctant school-boy, rolling his eyes
and twisting his mouth. The coachman is treacherous and once
the executioner's back is turned, out steals the wicked knife! But
the executioner is more quick, and his dagger is ready to strike
first. The criminal sneaks out, doomed to marry Antigone.
Down below in the court they begin to sing the song of derision
and death for the executioner. It drives the honest man mad.
He breathes like a dying fish. He hears the crowd of thieves
ascending the stairs. They are coming for him. He puts his
mother's gift, a very ugly silk handkerchief about his neck, so that
when he dies he will wear her last gift to him. Then he turns and
faces the mob with truly moving heroism which has much of the
boy in it, and a great deal of the bully, and not a little of the
coward, but the strong animal, nevertheless, who is not going to
die without a fight.
The coachman enters the first, ready to strike the blow. Anti-
gone rushes in and begs the executioner to kill the coachman. Like
a woman she has forgotten that in the last act she made him risk
his honour in order to save the coachman. The executioner does
as she asks, with all the finesse of his difficult art. At once An-
tigone regrets, and goes into hysterics. Judging by the docility of
the mob the executioner is now a hero; leaving him so the play ends.
As we go out, I see the man who caught the red carnations
holding them to his nose, and he, too, rolls his
eyes.
My Italian friends are disgusted with the play, and continue
their apologies to me.
“Of course they don't give things here so well as you do in
America."
“But we don't give them well, at all,” I say.
"Perhaps not the acting, but the scenery. You have such won-
derful scenery in America."
)


534
MONALDI AT THE ALFIERI
"Not at all. The man all the artists in America imitate most,
although they may not know it, is an Italian.”
“Really, who is that?”
“Adolph Appia. And hasn't Gordon Craig lived in Florence
for years ?”
They do not know. They are cultured Florentines. They can
tell you anything you wish to know of music or of painting, but
the theatre—one goes up dark alleys to the theatre and sees rowdies
in the royal box.
The Renaissance is dead. There is no enchanted ground of art.
Here, there, all over the world in isolated brains, like
pure, vital
drops of water, are the ideas and dreams of beauty. When will
they gather together? When will a great torrent of fresh young
genius flow through this sad earth again?
But we ask too much. Here in Florence, Giotto, Brunelleschi,
Donatello, Leonardo still live. Be content!


Courtesy of the Kingore Galleries
A LITHOGRAPH. BY GEORGE BIDDLE





ART AND RELATIVITY
BY THOMAS JEWELL CRAVEN
Pe
ROFESSOR EINSTEIN'S revolutionary theory is the latest
example of the eternal kinship between art and science. His
principle of relativity, essentially valid in the unbounded realm of
mechanics, leads portentously to an aesthetic analogue which has
hitherto received no critical attention. It has long been recognized
in the plastic arts that the potentialities of linear alteration are
governed by the design, a fact as familiar to the psychologist as
to the painter; the relativity of colour values is equally well known,
but this interdependence, because of its endless range, has never
been fully catalogued. While the celebrated physicist has been
evolving his shocking theories of the courses of natural phenomena,
the world of art has suffered an equivalent heterodoxy with respect
to its expressive media. This revolt has sprung from the convic-
tion that the old art is not necessarily infallible, and that equally
significant achievements may be reached by new processes and by
fresh sources of inspiration.
The term organization, applied universally by the modernists—
and sometimes, it must be confessed, quite absurdly—to the dis-
position of the forms selected for pictorial treatment, is one in-
stance of the radical change in the artist's attitude toward his
work. Originally the term connoted the idea of the relationship
of the constituent elements; with the men of the recent schools this
idea has developed into an end in itself, as distinguished from a
means, as it was employed in the art of the past. With this con-
cept in mind it is readily seen why so much of the diligence and
experimental activity of the younger painters results in merely
technical combinations, and it also helps to explain why so much
of their work is fragmentary and often apparently superficial.
When organization is regarded as an end, the business of relating
the material chosen for presentation becomes of supreme import-
ance, and points the way to a new set of co-ordinates without
which no new forms can be created.
In his special theory of relativity Professor Einstein has demon-


536
ART AND RELATIVITY
strated with brilliant finality that Newton's laws of inertia are
true only for a Newtonian system of co-ordinates; that is, when
the gravitational field is disregarded, and when the description of
motions is definitely referable to a point on a rigid body of speci-
fication; he has shown that these laws are adequate for practical
measurements but incompatible with the law of the propagation of
light unless the Lorentz transformation be substituted. In his
general theory he has defined the limited validity of the special
principle, and has made clear that the laws of natural phenomena
cannot be formulated with absolute accuracy unless the old co-
ordinates are abolished and a new system devised wherein the refer-
ence-bodies are no longer fixed but in relative motion. In connect-
ing the equations of an abstract science like mathematics with
philosophy the symbolical method must be followed; in the case
of art the same plan is retained, and with even more striking re-
sults. When one considers the reflective aspect of art and its close
affinity with the general thought of its time, this connection will
not seem strange. The plastic world is, of course, compounded of
manifold details gathered from the forms of perceptional experi-
ence, but the processes involved in harmonizing these details are
purely psychic and inseparably bound to all other psychic factors
of the age. It is hardly necessary to add that neither scientific nor
mathematical formulae are directly concerned with this reaction to
life, and that the quest for new relations in art-forms is guided
almost entirely by feeling after the first intellectual step has been
taken.
The fixed co-ordinates upon which the Newtonian measure-
ments were erected have their parallel in more than one aesthetic
manifestation. It is of no consequence that these manifestations
have differed in tendency—there has always existed a common
bond of interest, a rigid system of judgements corresponding to an
immovable reference-body, and it is this abstract quality which
establishes the analogy between the old art and classical mechanics.
Professor Einstein's general theory of relativity has shaken the
whole physical structure; similarly has the modern painter broken
the classical traditions.
Although the artists of the past, in striving for enduring beauty,
never regarded organization as an end, nevertheless they were con-
scious of its importance; and in every period the creative will has


THOMAS JEWELL CRAVEN
537
received its impetus from specific and rigid tenets. Most of these
principles since the days of Giotto have been founded upon
verisimilitude, architectural proportion, and the like; they have
been born of the belief that truth could not be attained except by
strict adherence to the dictates of experience. Co-ordinates from
which further relations were constructed have varied from time to
time, but in every movement to the present they have had incep-
tion in inflexible ideas, such as the logic of light and shade, correct
anatomical structure, and perspective. Even in rhythm the bal-
ancing actions and counter-actions have become standardized, and
composition has deteriorated into mechanical pattern-making. The
artist of to-day is not seeking the impossible, the overthrow of the
past;
he asks that the relativity of individual truths be acknowl-
edged; he is convinced that the real meaning of art lies beyond
precise lines of definition, and is searching for a new point of de-
parture, a system of co-ordinates which allows him to achieve
coherence without falling back on the laws of visual experience,
knowing that these laws invariably become static and conventional-
ized when severed from the field of personal action where they
originate. It is undeniable that the great man of former periods
has broken the laws of his age, has revolted against the aesthetic
dogma handed down to him; but what has signalized his genius
has not been the construction of a new and moving reference-
body, but a change in direction from a fixed basis.
It is at last recognized that the truth of art from a constructive
point of view is a matter of coherence, of inevitable relationships,
and that to intensify its value as a reflection of life, art can no longer
proceed from the traditional loci. Instead of clinging to the rigid
laws of photographic vision for a logic of creative activity, the
modernist is ever mindful of his psychic responses to experience.
For example: a painter has chosen for a theme a specific landscape
consisting, say, of two houses, a prominent tree, a brook, and a
bridge, items which may be delineated in several ways, and which
may be held together pictorially by following a precise scheme of
light and shade, by obedience to correct perspective, or by certain
recurrent accents of lines. Each of these methods is compatible
with the old doctrine of art, and each is adequate for graphic ren-
dition; but it is not to be inferred that the primary inspiration of
the painter was the simple idea of representation. What made


538
ART AND RELATIVITY
a
it his own theme was the fact that the landscape aroused his per-
ceptive powers and stirred his emotions—it had characteristics
peculiar to him alone. It is here that a factor enters the old sys-
tem of co-ordinates which is quite as disturbing as Professor Ein-
stein's introduction of the time element into the Euclidean laws
of spatial calculation. The personal feeling of the artist must
be injected to arrive at greater truth, a truth far beyond that of
mere vision, for the latter quality, while it serves all purposes
of
illustration, reveals nothing psychologically.
In the landscape mentioned above, the painter feels the pre-
dominance of certain forms; some objects attract him and stimulate
his imagination profoundly—others are instinctively allotted a
secondary position; the forms which excite him are contemplated,
one might say, out of perspective, out of the pure logic of vision-
they assume a magnitude that transcends all reality. Obviously
the artist's conception of the real and living truth cannot be por-
trayed by conformity to any laws of actual appearance—it is
compassed in a different fashion. Nor can the goal be reached by
the simple device of accentuations, for here he is confronted with
the fundamental requisite of coherence which insists on the
relativity of the constituent parts in spite of all emphasis. He
must, therefore, discover some point of reference that will provide
for the desired accentuations and at the same time preserve unity
and sequence without which art is inconceivable.
It is here that organization becomes a decidedly conscious pro-
cess, and proclaims the necessity for a new and mobile basis identi-
fied with the personal element. We must not conclude that such
an element has been absent in the old art; but not until modern
times has painting been regarded as a vehicle for psychological
truth, has it been made the reflection of the artist's mental states
in the presence of simple objects of experience. The message of
the former periods, notably in the great ages of productivity, has
been spiritual in the collective sense-pervaded with religious
thought; to-day it testifies to individual psychology and mirrors
scientific experiment. Seizing the old system of visual co-
ordinates, the modern painter has infused into it the personal
element with a high degree of premeditation, and in place of the
static pivot, correct in architectural symmetry, sound in aerial per-
spective, and logical in light and shade, he has given us a moving


EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON
539
body of specification, independent of naturalism of any sort, and by
which the integral forms are bound together by flowing sequences
of line and colour.
Recognizable objects find their way as often as not into the
new works of art, but they are never servile to realistic appearance,
and it is unlikely that the painter will ever again attempt the
ancient efforts to reproduce nature literally. Endowed with the
system of co-ordinates gradually evolved since the death of
Cézanne he has at his command the most plastic medium of expres-
sion that the world has ever known.
MODERNITIES
BY EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON
Small knowledge have we that by knowledge met
Some day may not be quaint as any told
In almagest or chronicle of old,
At which we smile because we are as yet
The last—though not the last who may forget
What cleavings and abrasions manifold
Have marked an armour that was never scrolled
Before for human glory and regret.
With infinite unseen enemies in the way
We have encountered the intangible,
To vanquish where our fathers, who fought well,
Scarce had assumed endurance for a day;
Yet we shall have our darkness, even as they,
And there shall be another tale to tell.


AVANEL BOONE, AND THE YOUNG
AMERICAN POETS OF RUSSIAN BLOOD
Inscribed to Marya Zaturensky
BY VACHEL LINDSAY
THE
WHERE is a favourite walk of mine in Springfield, east from
the High School, and past Barker's Art Store, past the new
white sunset tower there on the corner across from Herndon's old
store, past the public square, and east to the old city gate. It is on
that walk that the sun shines brightest and it seems noon for ever,
and a day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as a day.
The Joan of Arc of Springfield in one hundred years will be the
lovely Lady Avanel Boone, but on this walk, sometimes the vision
of her, already alive, goes by on her horse of fire, already spreading
his dazzling wings. Sometimes I watch her, as she is starting at
the High School, and going east, all the way to New York Harbour
and the Statue of Liberty to meet the incoming Russians. I am the
little cloud that follows to dream and understand.
When I look through history, if I am sincere with myself, my
visions first go back through that archway called Kentucky, through
which my fathers passed to this my home town. And so it is with
.
most of my neighbours who have lived very long in Springfield,
Illinois. And our fancy goes back along what we may well call
the Elizabethan Highway, first to Old Virginia, and then to Eliza-
bethan England. It begins, no doubt, in Greece, or wherever it
may
be that the Athenian Violet blooms perpetually.
It comes toward us, this highway, from the England of Marlowe
and the Sweet Swan of Avon. It is from there we retrace Daniel
Boone's old route round the curve of the globe through Cumberland
Gap, westward for ever. I myself, walking his very trail, through
woods and wild rocks, have found what was literally the Eliza-
bethan speech, among "folks” who could neither read nor write,
but who welcomed the poor singer with ancient and eternal hospi-
tality. Those gentlemen, those courtiers, spoke the Elizabethan
tongue after the manner of the spelling in the first folio. So I here


VACHEL LINDSAY
541
doubly certify that the Elizabethan Trail comes westward through
their land. Then it turns north into Indiana out of the archway,
Kentucky, by that jog in the road which Abraham Lincoln's own
immediate people followed in his earliest days. Then it sweeps
westward through Springfield, a shrine, and Hannibal, Missouri, a
shrine, to the glory that shall be revealed, in the land north of and
around Santa Fe, to that American Splendour I call New Arabia,
and to the land of the Pacific Coast I call New Italy, where will
be fulfilled the dreams of all west-going hearts, and all Gipsies that
have wound and wandered from India.
How, in one moment of time, without warning or preparation
or discipline, can the sons and daughters of Muscovy become Ameri-
cans? How can they go with Daniel Boone along that old Eliza-
bethan Trail, how can they catch that first folio accent of English
tradition of law and adventure and song and freedom, from the
days of Marlowe's Helen, to the days of Lincoln's Gettysburg Ad-
dress, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye?
They have come this very morning to confront Avanel and the
Statue of Liberty, from a land that outdoes the domains of Panta-
gruel and Gargantua. Their kind have shown us over and over in
the third grade, ward school, that in that little time they can forget
the language of Muscovy, but alas, the vast soul of Muscovy is still
beneath all their souls.
What is the meaning of the word Muscovy? Muscovy means
fields of grain in the height of summer, over which fly squalling
birds who have come all the way from Borneo, fields where dragons
may be seen peeping over the edge of the horizon, blowing smoke
our way.
But the dragons are nothing. For to the north, over the frozen
seas, march marauding mammoths, seventy times the size of polar
bears, and with whiter fur that hangs upon them in frost-bitten
cataracts.
And these marauders march to the south and tear the green-tiled
roofs from the palaces.
Muscovy! I know little of Muscovy, except that there once
lived Peter the Great, who was Jack the Giant Killer and the
Giant in one. He had a tremendous black moustache, like the villain
in a Laura Jean Libby novel. Yet he ruled like King Alfred of
England. I know that he fought all the tribes of India, China, and


542
AVANEL BOONE
a
Japan to a standstill, and that, personally, he could whip his weight
a
in wildcats after sitting up all night reading the Bible, and eating
boiled elephant's foot, and drinking like a hole in the sink.
Peter the Great had a church full of the bones of all the saints
I never heard of, and mass was said there so often that incense
poured out of the front door and made the trees on that street
bloom in winter, and the central pinnacles of that church stretched
up in the form of a great hand that would grab the sun at noonday
and squeeze flaming heart's blood from it for the snow to drink.
And wherever that cataract touched the snow, there sprang up
Cossacks, Cossacks, Cossacks, riding hell-bent, with their loves on
their saddle-bows or beside them, Cossack Amazons.
And they are springing from the snow like thunder till this day.
All this I have seen as I have watched the Russian Dancers. And
some of them are poets, and therefore want to be Americans. Rosy
precocious children, springing up from this same baptism, riding
across the sea and land to where Lady Avanel, with a heart as hot as
the sun, has gone forth on her winged horse to meet them, and has
placed herself at their head, on the cloud road just by the Statue
of Liberty.
And she is now on solid pavement, leading them up panicky
Fifth Avenue towards the famous Bronx.
She might have said to them, “You cannot join me in an hour.
You cannot meet me in New York Harbour. The only way to
find me is to begin centuries back, and join Sir Walter Raleigh,
and sail to far-off traditional Virginia.” She might have said to
them: “Fight the Indians with our great grandfathers, and great
grandmothers, or be yourself a Red Indian, as was many an an-
cestor of mine. And come west with the Kentons and the Boones
and the Crocketts through the centuries, bearing bound to the
saddles of your ponies the books that have in them the fancies of
Marlowe, and of Chaucer.” She might have said, “Come west with
Andrew Jackson, when Tennessee was the West."
But in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, Avanel leads them
through all the trembling Main Streets of the North, to that latest
part of the Elizabethan Trail that goes through the Topeka Kansas
State House.
As their first act of citizenship, they look thoughtfully as she
shows them there the honorific portraits of the lords of Kansas


VACHEL LINDSAY
543
Events. Here they are, in oil, watercolour, photograph, daguerreo-
type, and tintype. There is more in these tintypes than in all
statute books. They are the pioneers of Kansas, with shirts open
almost to the waist, and not one necktie to be seen. And what
matters it? They all have whiskers like sheaves of wheat, like
those worn by Uncle Sam. And they have set eyes, and set jaws,
like Old John Brown. Reading their countenances, we know in
its essence every hero tale. These are the men with barb-wire for
backbone, whose breath is the Kansas whirlwind. These are the
men who resisted the grasshopper, the hail, the snowstorm, the
sunstroke, bankruptcy, locust, and plague. They resisted the Indian
raid, the squatter raid, the rebel raid. They have founded on the
eastern edge of New Arabia this commonwealth of Kansas, that is
wheat and thistles and cottonwoods on top, and granite for a
million miles all the rest of the way down to the roof of Hell.
These are the gentlemen who will allow themselves one more chew
of tobacco, take down the ancient sawed-off shotgun, and shoot the
very daylights out of any horsemen who come riding from Muscovy
or any other such parts, if they are not vouched for by the Lady
Avanel Boone, or her sérvants and ministers. She it is who can
say that Muscovites have a right upon this Elizabethan Daniel
Boone Trail, she and no other.
The beginning of Coffeeville, Kansas, was this: long ago there
was a boiling geyser here of purest water. Sometimes it would leap
and disappear into the high sky, after the manner of geysers, and
then it would come dashing down and subside completely, leaving
a steaming pit in the ground, which is also after the manner of
geysers. A hearty young adventurer from Springfield, Illinois, came
by, leading a wagon-train of green coffee towards ancient Santa Fe.
And the desert sun roasted the coffee, and swept over the then
barren plain. And the prairie dog by the Arkansas River sat on his
hill, and sniffed with delight.
One evening the adventurer, wanting his coffee instantly, poured
the whole wagon-train of roasted coffee into the hole where the
geyser
had subsided for meditation. As soon as the avalanche of
loose coffee struck the inwards of the natural phenomenon, there
was a whistling such as one hears from the coffee pot when it is


544
AVANEL BOONE
beginning to boil over, deliciously, on the stove, and provoke our
wild appetites the more after we have had a day in the harvest field,
and we are washing our faces in the tin pan on the back porch,
preparatory to supper. After this whistling came a more wonderful
fragrance that drove the prairie dogs pifflicated with delight and
made the tired horses whinny and chatter their old teeth and wobble
their ears. Then there was a great grumbling, Kansas shook.
The coffee shot up, pierced the clouds. It came down and made
a great amber lake.
Thus the custom began. Now the citizens pour in a carload of
coffee every time the geyser subsides, that is, about once a day.
All down Main Street are the tables with ironware porcelain
dishes, and red table-cloths, laid under blue and white awnings.
There relays of Kansas harvest hands eat Kansas harvest meals,
morning and evening. And when the harvest is over, three times
a day. Of course when the harvest is on, they eat the noon meal
in the field. All these meals are cooked by the Kansas school-
marms, in the palaces of Coffeeville. And together all sing the
Kansas state song, and give the yell, "rock-chalk, jay-hawk, rock-
chalk, jay-hawk, rock-chalk, jay-hawk, rock-chalk, jay-hawk, rock-
chalk, jay-hawk, et cetera."
It will be merry in Coffeeville to-night, and the Cossack boys and
girls will dance with the Kansas harvest hands and school-marms,
and visions of the inspired winged Books of New Muscovy and
New Arabia and New Italy will come flaming to all these, as the
dance goes round and round.
And as I look into the maelstrom of my coffee-cup, the coffee
goes round and round, faster and faster, and I am beholding a
golden dance pavilion, with the giant fairy Avanel spreading her
wings over all. A dance floor wide as the whole West! And the
dancers go round! But not one footstep is heard. Not one foot
touches the desert sand, or the water of Salt Lake, or the mountain
tops of Wyoming. They dance through all those states, and above
all those states and their national parks, as above a golden map,
to one whisper, a tune simple and old. Is it a tom-tom? No. Is it
a Jazz? No. Only one instrument in all the world has that tone.
The hand is steady and immortal. Some call it a poor music, but
it is sufficient: the violin of Thomas Jefferson.



A DRAWING.
BY ELIZABETH NAGEL





A DRAWING.
BY ELIZABETH NAGEL






A DRAWING.
BY ELIZABETH NAGEL





FANUTZA
BY KONRAD BERCOVICI
LICH
IGHT and soft, as though the wind were blowing the dust off
the silver clouds that floated overhead, the first snow was fall-
ing over the barren lands stretching between the Danube and the
Black Sea. A lowland wind, which had already hardened and
tightened the marshes, was blowing the snow skywards. The fine
silvery dust, caught between the two air currents, danced lustily,
blown hither and thither until it took hold of folds and rifts in the
frozen land and began to form rugged white ridges that stretched
in soft silvery curves to meet other growing mountains of snow.
The lowland wind, at first a mere breeze playfully teasing the
north wind, like a child that kicks the bed-sheets before falling
asleep, increased its force and swiftness, and scattered huge moun-
tains of snow, but the steadily rising drone of the north wind soon
mastered the situation. Like silver grain strewn by an unseen hand
the snow fell obliquely in steady streams over the land. A great
calm followed. The long Dobrudgean winter had started. In the
dim steady light, in the wake of the great calm, travelling towards
the Danube from the Black Sea, the "marea Neagra,” four gipsy
wagons, each drawn by four small horses, appeared on the frozen
plains. The caravan was brought to a standstill within sight of
the slowly moving river. The canvas-covered wagons ranged them-
selves, broadwise, in a straight line with the wind. Between the
wagons enough space was allowed to stable the horses. Then, when
that part of the business had been done, a dozen men, in furs from
head to toe, quickly threw a canvas that roofed the temporary quar-
ters of the animals and gave an additional overhead protection from
the snow and wind to the dwellers of the wheeled homes.
While the unharnessing and quartering of the horses and the
stretching of the canvas roof proceeded, a number of youngsters
jumped down from the wagons, yelling and screaming with all the
power of their lusty lungs. They threw snowballs at one another
as they ran, some in search of firewood and others, with wooden
pails dangling from ends of curved sticks over the left shoulder,


546
FANUTZA
in search of water for the horses and for the cooking pots of their
mothers.
Soon afterwards, from little crooked black chimneys that pointed
downwards over the roofs of the wagons, thick black smoke told
that the fires were already started. The youngsters came back;
those with the full water pails marching erectly with legs well
apart; the ones with bundles of firewood strapped to their shoulders
leaning forward on knotted sticks so as not to fall under the heavy
burden.
When everything had been done, Marcu, the tall grey-bearded
chief, inspected the work. A few of the ropes needed tightening.
He did it himself, shaking his head in disapproval of the way in
which it had been done. Then he listened carefully to the blowing
of the wind and measured its velocity and intensity. He called to
his men. When they had surrounded him, he spoke a few words.
With shovels and axes they set energetically to work at his direc-
tion, packing a wall of snow and wood from the ground up over
the axles of the wheels all around the wagons so as to give greater
solidity to the whole and to prevent the cold wind from blowing
underneath.
By the time the early night settled over the marshes, the camp
was quiet and dark. Even the dogs had curled up near the tired
horses and had gone to sleep.
Early the following morning the whole thing could not be dis-
tinguished from one of the hundreds of mountains of snow that had
formed overnight. After the horses had been fed and watered,
Marcu, accompanied by his daughter, Fanutza, left the camp and
went riverward, in search of the hut of the Tartar whose flat-
bottomed boat was moored on the shore. Marcu knew every inch
of the ground. He had camped there with his tribe twenty winters
in succession. He sometimes arrived before, and at other times
after, the first snow of the year. But every time he had gone to
Mehmet Ali's hut and asked the Tartar to row him across the
Danube, on the old Roumanian side, to buy there fodder for the
horses and the men; enough to last until after the river was frozen
tight and could be crossed securely with horses and wagon. He had
always come alone to Mehmet's hut, therefore, the Tartar, after
greeting Marcu and offering to do what his friend desired, inquired
why the girl was beside the old chief.


KONRAD BERCOVICI
547
a
“But this is my daughter, Fanutza, Mehmet Ali,” Marcu in-
formed.
"Who, Fanutza? She who was born here fourteen winters ago
on the plains here?”
“The same, the same, my friend,” Marcu answered as he smil-
ingly appraised his daughter.
Mehmet Ali looked at the girl in frank astonishment at her size
and full development; then he said as he took the oars from the
corner of the hut: "And I, who thought that my friend had taken
a new wife to himself! Allah, Allah! How fast these youngsters
grow! And why do you take her along to the Giaour side, to the
heathen side, of the river, friend?” he continued talking as he put
heavy boots on his feet and measured Fanutza with his eyes as
he spoke.
“For everything there is only one right time, say I, Marcu,” the
chief explained in measured solemn voice. "And so now is the time
for my daughter to get married. I have chosen her a husband from
amongst the sons of my men, a husband who will become the chief
when I am no longer here to come to your hut at the beginning of
every winter. She shall marry him in the spring. I now go with
her to the bazaars to buy silks and linens which the women of my
tribe will fashion into new clothes for both. And may Allah be
good to them.”
“Allah il Allah," Mehmet assured Marcu. “And who is he whom
you have chosen from amongst your men ?"
“I am old, Mehmet, I would otherwise have chosen a younger
man for my daughter; but because I fear that this or the following
winter will be the last one, I have chosen Stan, whose orphaned
daughter is Fanutza's own age. He is good and true and strong.
Young men never make careful chiefs."
“That be right and wise,” remarked Mehmet, who was by that
time ready for the trip. During the whole conversation the young
gipsy girl had been looking to her father when he spoke and sidewise
when Mehmet answered.
At fourteen Fanutza was a full-grown woman. Her hair, braided
in tresses, was hanging from underneath a black fur cap she wore
well over her forehead. Her eyes were large and brown, the long
eyebrows were coal black. Her nose was straight and thin and the
mouth full and red. Withal she was of a somewhat lighter hue


548
FANUTZA
gone
9
than her father or the rest of the gipsy tribe. Yet there was some-
thing of a darker grain than the grain in her people that lurked
beneath her skin. And she was light on her feet. Even trudging
in the deep snow, she seemed more to float, to skim on top, than
to walk.
Unconcerned she had listened to the conversation that had
on between her father and the Tartar in the hut of the boatman.
She had hardly been interested in the whole affair, yet, when
Mehmet Ali mentioned casually as soon as he was outdoors that
he knew a man who would pay twenty pieces of gold for such a
wife as Fanutza was, she became interested in the conversation.
“I sell horses only,” Marcu answered quietly.
“ “Yet my friend and others from his tribe have bought wives.
Remember that beautiful Circassian girl ?” the Tartar continued
without raising or lowering his voice.
“Yes, Mehmet, we buy wives but we don't sell them.”
"Which is not fair," Mehmet reflected aloud still in the same
voice.
By that time they had reached the river shore. Mehmet, after
rolling together the oil cloth that had covered the boat, helped the
gipsy chief and his daughter to the stern. With one strong push
of the oar on the shore rock, the Tartar slid his boat a hundred
feet towards the middle of the stream. Then he seated himself,
face towards his passengers, and rowed steadily without saying
a single word. The gipsy chief lit his short pipe and looked over
his friend's head, trying to distinguish the other shore from behind
the curtain of falling snow. The boat glided slowly over the
thickening waters of the Danube. A heavy snowstorm, the heaviest
of the year, lashed the river. When Mehmet had finally moored
his boat to the Roumanian side of the Danube, he turned around
to the gipsy chief and said:
“Be back before sundown. It shall be my last crossing of the
year. For when the sun rises the waters will be frozen still. The
gale blows from the land of the Russians."
"As you tell me, friend,” answered Marcu while helping his
daughter out of the boat.
When the two had gone a short distance Fanutza turned her
head. Mehmet Ali was leaning on an oar and looking after them.
A little later, a hundred paces further, she caught fragments of a


KONRAD BERCOVICI
549
Tartar song that reached her ears in spite of the shrill noises of
the wind.
Marcu and his daughter entered the inn that stood a few hundred
feet from the shore. The innkeeper, an old fat greasy Greek, Chiria
Anastasidis, welcomed the gipsy chief. Not knowing the relation-
ship between the old man and the girl, he feared to antagonize
his customer by talking to the young woman. He pushed a white
pine table near the big stove in the middle of the room and after
putting two empty glasses on the table he inquired "White or red?”
“Red wine, Chiria. It warms quicker. I am getting old.”
“Old!” exclaimed the Greek as he brought a small pitcher of
wine. "Old! Why, Marcu, you are as young as you were twenty
years ago."
“This is my daughter, Fanutza, Chiria, and not my wife.”
“A fine daughter you have. Your daughter, eh?”
“Yes, and she is about to marry, too."
After they had clinked glasses and wished one another health
and long years the innkeeper inquired:
"All your men healthy ?”
“All. Only one-eyed Jancu died. You remember him. He was
well along in years.
"Bogdaproste. Let not a younger man than he was die,”
answered Anastasidis as he crossed himself.
After Marcu had declared himself warmed back to life by the
fine wine he inquired of Anastasidis the price of oats and straw
and hay. The innkeeper's store and his warehouse contained
everything from a needle to an oxcart. The shelves were full of
dry goods, socks, shirts, silks, belts, fur caps, coats, and trousers.
Overhead, hanging from the ceiling, were heavy leather boots,
shoes, saddles, harness of all kinds, fishers' nets, and even a red
painted sleigh that swung on heavy chains. In one corner of the
store blankets were piled high, while all over the floor were bags
of dry beans and peas and corn and oats. At the door were bales
of straw and hay, and outside, already half covered with snow,
iron ploughs hobnobbed with small anchors, harrows, and bundles
of scythes that leaned on the wall.
“Oats you wanted? Oats are very high this year, Marcu.”
And the bargaining began. Fanutza sat listlessly on her chair
and looked through the window. A few minutes later, the two


550
FANUTZA
men called one another thief and swindler and a hundred other
names. Yet each time the bargain was concluded on a certain
article they shook hands and repeated that they were the best
friends on earth.
"Now that we have finished with the oats, Chiria, let's hear your
price for corn? What? Three francs a hundred kilo? No. I call
off the bargain on the oats. You are the biggest thief this side
of the Danube.”
“And you, you lowborn Tzigane, are the cheapest swindler on
earth.”
Quarrelling and shaking hands alternately and drinking wine
Marcu and the Greek went on for hours. The gipsy chief had
already bought all the food for his men and horses and a few extra
a
blankets and had ordered it all carted to the moored boat where
Mehmet Ali was waiting, when Fanutza reminded her father of
the silks and linen he wanted to buy.
"I have not forgotten, daughter, I have not forgotten.” Fanutza
approached the counter behind which the Greek stood ready to
serve his customers.
“Show us some silks,” she asked.
He emptied a whole shelf on the counter.
The old gipsy stood aside watching his daughter as she fingered
the different pieces of coloured silk, which the shopkeeper praised
as he himself touched the goods with thumb and forefinger in keen
appreciation of the quality he offered. After she had selected all
the colours she wanted and picked out the linen and neckerchiefs
and ear-rings and tried on a pair of beautiful patent leather boots
that reached over the knees and had stripes of red leather sewed
on with yellow silk on the soft vamps, Fanutza declared that she
had chosen everything she wanted. The bargaining between the
Greek and the gipsy was about to start anew when Marcu looked
outdoors thoughtfully, stroked his beard and said to the innkeeper:
“Put away the things my daughter has selected. I shall come
again, alone, to bargain for them.”
“If my friend fears he has not enough money suavely
intervened Anastasidis, as he placed a friendly hand on the gipsy's
arm.
“When Marcu has no money he does not ask his women to select
silk," haughtily interrupted the gipsy. “It will be as I said it


KONRAD BERCOVICI
551
.
will be. I come alone in a day if the river has frozen. In a day
or a week. I come alone.”
"Shall I, then, not take all these beautiful things along with
me, now?” asked Fanutza in a plaintive yet reproachful tone.
“There is Marcia who waits to see them. I have selected the same
silk basma for her. Have you not promised me, even this morn-
ing
"A woman must learn to keep her mouth shut,” shouted Marcu
as he angrily stamped his right foot on the floor. He looked at his
daughter as he had never looked at her before. Only a few hours
ago she was his little girl, a child! He was marrying her off so
soon to Stan, although it was the customary age for gipsies, against
his desire, but because of his will to see her in good hands and to
give to Stan the succession to the leadership of his tribe.
Only a few hours ago! What had brought about the change?
Was it in him or in her? That cursed Tartar, Mehmet Ali, with
his silly offer of twenty gold pieces! He, he had done it. Marcu
looked again at his daughter. Her eyelids trembled nervously and
there was a little repressed twitch about her mouth. She returned
his glance at first, but lowered her eyes under her father's steady
gaze. “Already a shameless creature,” thought the old gipsy. But
he could not bear to think that way about his little daughter, about
his Fanutza. He also feared that she could feel his thoughts. He
was ashamed of what passed through his mind. Rapidly enough
in self defense he turned against her the sharp edge of the argu-
ment. Why had she given him all those ugly thoughts ?
“It will be as I said, Anastasidis. In a day or a week. When
the river has frozen, I come alone. And now, Fanutza, we go.
Night is coming close behind us. Come, you shall have all your
silks.”
The Greek accompanied them to the door. The cart that had
brought the merchandise to the boat of the waiting Mehmet was
returning
"The water is thickening,” the driver greeted the gipsy and his
daughter.
They found Mehmet Ali seated in the boat expecting his pas-
sengers.
“Have you bought everything you intended ?” the Tartar in-
quired as he slid the oars into the hoops.


552
FANUTZA
“Everything,” Marcu answered as he watched his daughter from
the corner of an eye.
Vigorously Mehmet Ali rowed till well out into the wide river
without saying another word. His manner was so detached that
the gipsy chief thought the Tartar had already forgotten what had
passed between them in the morning. Sure enough. Why! He
was an old man, Mehmet Ali. It was possible he had been com-
missioned by some Dobrudgean Tartar chief to buy him a wife.
He had been refused and now he was no longer thinking about her.
He will look somewhere else, where his offer might not be scorned.
That offer of Mehmet had upset him. He had never thought of
Fanutza other than as a child. Of course he was marrying her to
Stan ... but it was more like giving her a second father!
Suddenly the old gipsy looked at the Tartar who had lifted his
oars from the water and brought the boat to an abrupt standstill.
Mehmet Ali laid the paddles across the width of the boat and
looking steadily into the eyes of Marcu, he said:
“As I said this morning, Marcu, it is not fair that you should
buy wives from us when you like our women and not sell us yours
when we like them."
"It is as it is,” countered the gipsy savagely.
“But it is not fair,” argued Mehmet, slyly watching every move-
ment of his old friend.
"If Mehmet is tired my arms are strong enough to help if he
wishes,” remarked Marcu.
“No, I am not tired, but I should like my friend to know that
I think it is not fair."
There was a long silence during which the boat was carried
downstream although it was kept in the middle of the river by
skilful little movements of the boatman.
Fanutza looked at the Tartar. He was about the same age as
Stan was. Only he was stronger, taller, broader, swifter. When
he chanced to look at her his small bead-like eyes bored through
her like gimlets. No man had ever looked at her that way. Stan's
.
eyes were much like her own father's eyes. The Tartar's face
.
was much darker than her own. His nose was flat and his upper
lip curled too much noseward and the lower one chinward, and
his bulletlike head rose from between the shoulders. There was
no neck. No, he was not beautiful to look at. But he was so


KONRAD BERCOVICI
553
.
different from Stan! So different from any of the other men she
had seen every day since she was born. Why! Stan . . . Stan
was like her father. They were all like him in her tribe!
“And, as I said," Mehmet continued after a while, "as I said,
it is not fair. My friend must see that. It is not fair. So I offer
you twenty gold pieces for the girl. Is it a bargain ?”
“She is not for sale,” yelled Marcu, understanding too well the
meaning of the oars out of the water.
“No?” wondered Mehmet, "not for twenty pieces of gold?
Well, then I shall offer five more. Sure twenty-five is more than
any of your people ever paid to us for a wife. It would shame
my ancestors were I to offer more for a gipsy girl than they ever
received for one of our women.'
“She is not for sale,” roared the gipsy at the top of his voice.
By that time the Tartar knew that Marcu was not armed. He
knew the chief too well not to know that a knife or a pistol would
have been the answer to his second offer and the implied insult
to the race of gipsies.
Twenty-five gold pieces! thought Fanutza. Twenty-five gold
pieces offered for her by a Tartar at a second bid. She knew
what that meant. She had been raised in the noise of continual
bargaining between Tartars and gipsies and Greeks. It meant
much less than a quarter of the ultimate sum the Tartar was
willing to pay. Would Stan ever have offered that for her? No,
surely not. She looked at the Tartar and felt the passion that
radiated from him. How lukewarm Stan was! And here was a
man. Stopped the boat midstream and bargained for her, fought
to possess her. Endangered his life for her. For it was a danger-
ous thing to do what he did and facing her father. Yet . . . she
...
will have to marry Stan because her father bids it.
“I don't mean to offend you,” the boatman spoke again, “but
you are very slow in deciding whether you accept my bargain or
not. Night is closing upon us.
Marcu did not answer immediately. The boat was carried down-
stream very rapidly. They were at least two miles too far down
by now. Mehmet looked at Fanutza and found such lively interest
in her eyes that he was encouraged to offer another five gold pieces
for her.
It was a proud moment for the girl. So men were willing to


554
FANUTZA
9
man.
pay so much for her! But her heart almost sank when her father
pulled out his purse from his pocket and said:
“Mehmet Ali, who is my best friend, has been so good to me
these twenty years that I have thought to give him twenty gold
pieces that he might buy himself a wife to keep his hut warm
during the long winter. What say he to my friendship?"
“That is wonderful! Only now, he is not concerned about that,
but about the fairness of his friend who does not want to sell wives
to the men whose women he buys. I offer five more gold pieces
which makes thirty-five in all. And I do that not for Marcu but
for his daughter that she may know that I will not harm her and
will for ever keep her well fed and buy her silks and jewels.”
“Silks!" It occurred to the gipsy chief to look at his daughter
at that moment. She turned her head away from his and looked
at the Tartar, from under her brows. How had he known?
"A bargain is a bargain only when two men agree on some-
thing, says the Koran,” the gipsy chief reminded the Tartar boat-
"I don't want to sell her."
“So we will travel downstream for a while,” answered Mehmet
Ali and crossed his arms.
After a while the gipsy chief who had reckoned that they must
be fully five miles away from his home across the water made a
new offer.
"A woman, Mehmet Ali, is a woman. They are all alike after
you have known them. So I offer you thirty-five pieces of gold with
which you can buy for yourself any other woman you please when-
ever you want.”
Fanutza looked at the Tartar. Though it was getting dark
she could see the play of every muscle of his face. Hardly had
her father finished making his offer, when Mehmet, after one look
at the girl, said:
“I offer fifty gold pieces for the girl. Is it a bargain ?”
Fanutza's eyes met the eyes of her father. She looked at him
entreatingly, “Don't give in to the Tartar,” her eyes spoke clearly,
and Marcu refused the offer.
“I offer you fifty instead that you buy yourself another woman
than my daughter."
"No," answered the Tartar, “but I offer sixty for this one, here.”
Quick as a flash Fanutza changed the encouraging glance she


KONRAD BERCOVICI
555
sum
had thrown to the passionate man to a pleading look towards her
father. “Poor, poor girl!” thought Marcu. "How she fears to
.
lose me! How she fears I might accept the money and sell her to
the Tartar!”
"A hundred gold pieces to row us across,” he yelled, for the
night was closing in upon them and the boat was being carried
swiftly downstream. There was danger ahead of them. Marcu
knew it.
"A hundred gold pieces is a great sum,” mused Mehmet, “a
great sum! It has taken twenty years of my life to save such a
yet, instead of accepting your offer, I will give you the
same sum for the woman I want."
“Fool, a woman is only a woman. They are all alike,” roared
the gipsy.
“Not to me!" answered Mehmet Ali quietly. “I shall not say
another word.”
"Fool, fool, fool,” roared the gipsy as he still tried to catch
Fanutza's eye. It was already too dark.
“Not to me.” The Tartar's words echoed in the girl's heart.
"Not to me.” Twenty years he had worked to save such a great
sum. And now he refused an equal amount and was willing to pay
it all for her. Would Stan have done that? Would anybody else
have done that? Why should she be compelled to marry whom
her father chose when men were willing to pay a hundred gold
pieces for her? The old women of the camp had taught her to
cook and to mend and to wash and to weave. She must know all
that to be worthy of Stan, they had told her. And here was a man
who did not know whether she knew any of these things who staked
his life for her and offered a hundred gold pieces in the bargain!
Twenty years of savings. Twenty years of work. It was not every
day one met such a man. Surely, with one strong push of his arms
he could throw her father overboard. He did not do it because
he did not want to hurt her feelings. And as the silence continued
Fanutza thought her father, too, was a fine man. It was fine of
him to offer a hundred gold pieces for her liberty. That was in
itself a great thing. But did he do it only for her sake or wasn't
it because of Stan, because of himself? And as she thought again
of Mehmet's "Not to me," she remembered the fierce bitterness in
her father's voice when he had yelled, "All women are alike.” That


556
FANUTZA
was not true. If it were true why would Mehmet Ali want her
and her only after having seen her only once? Then, too, all men
must be alike! It was not so at all! Why! Mehmet Ali was not
at all like Stan. And he offered a hundred pieces of gold. No.
Stan was of the kind who think all women are alike. That was it.
All her people were thinking all women were alike. That was it.
Surely all the men in the tribe were alike in that. All her father
had ever been to her, his kindness, his love was wiped away when
he said those few words. The last few words of Mehmet Ali, "Not
to me,” were the sweetest music she had ever heard.
Marcu waited until it was dark enough for the Tartar not to see,
when pressing significantly his daughter's foot, he said:
"So be it as you said. Row us across.
"It is not one minute too soon,” Mehmet answered. “Only a
short distance from here, where the river splits in three forks, is a
great rock. Shake hands. Here. Now here is one oar. Pull as
I count, Bir, icki, outch, dort. Again, Bir, icki, outch, dort. Lift
your oar. Pull again. Two counts only. Bir, icki. So, now we
row nearer to the shore. See that light there? Row towards it.
Good. Marcu, your arm is still strong and steady and you can
drive a good bargain.”
Again and again the gipsy pressed the foot of his daughter as
he bent over the car. She should know of course that he never
intended to keep his end of the bargain. He gave in only when
he saw that the Tartar meant to wreck them all on the rocks ahead
of them. Why had he, old and experienced as he was, having
dealt with those devils of Tartars for so many years, not known
better than to return to the boat after he had heard Mehmet say,
"It is not fair!” And after he had reflected on the Tartar's words,
why, after he had refused to buy all the silks and linen on that
reflection, not a very clear one at first, why had he not told Mehmet
to row across alone and deliver the fodder and food. He could
have passed the night in Anastasidis' inn and hired another boat
the following morning if the river had not frozen meanwhile! He
should have known, he who knew these passionate beasts so well.
It was all the same with them; whether they set their eyes on a
horse that captured their fancy or a woman. They were willing to
kill or be killed in the fight for what they wanted. A hundred
gold pieces for a woman! Twenty years' work for a woman!


KONRAD BERCOVICI
557
The two men rowed in silence, each one planning how to outwit
the other and each one knowing that the other was planning like-
wise. According to Tartar ethics the bargain was a bargain. When
the boat had been pulled out of danger Mehmet hastened to fulfil
his end. With one jerk he loosened a heavy belt underneath his
coat and pulled out a leather purse which he threw to Marcu. As
he did so he met Fanutza's proud eye.
"Here. Count it. Just one hundred.”
“That's good enough,” the gipsy chief answered as he put the
purse in his pocket without even looking at it. “Row, I am cold.
I am anxious to be home.”
“It will not be before daylight, chief,” remarked Mehmet Ali
as he bent again over his oars and counted aloud, “Bir, icki, Bir,
icki.” An hour later, Fanutza had fallen asleep on the bags of
fodder and was covered by the heavy fur coat of the Tartar. The
two men rowed the whole night up-stream against the current in
the slushy heavy waters of the Danube. A hundred times floating
pieces of ice had bent back the flat of the oar Marcu was handling,
and every time Mehmet had saved it from breaking by a deft
stroke of his own oar or by some other similar movement. He was a
waterman and knew the ways of the water as well as Marcu him-
self knew the murky roads of the marshes. The gipsy could not
help but admire the powerful quick movements of the Tartar .
yet ... to be forced into selling his daughter—that was another
thing.
At daylight they were within sight of Mehmet's hut on the
shore. The storm had abated. Standing up on the bags of fodder
Marcu saw the black smoke that rose from his camp. His people
must be waiting on the shore. They were a dozen men. Mehmet
was one alone. He will unload the goods first; then, when his
men will be near enough, he will tell Fanutza to run towards them.
Let Mehmet come to take her if he dare!
A violent jerk woke the gipsy girl from her sleep. She looked
at the two men but said nothing. When the boat was moored,
the whole tribe of gipsies, who had already mourned their chief
yet hoped against hope and watched the length of the shore, sur-
rounded the two men and the woman. There was a noisy welcome.
While some of the men helped unload the boat a boy came running
with a sleigh cart.


558
FANUTZA
When all the bags were loaded on the sleigh Marcu threw the
heavy purse Mehmet had given him to the Tartar's feet and grabbed
the arm of his Fanutza.
"Here is your money, Mehmet. I take my daughter."
But before he knew what had happened, Fanutza shook off his
grip and picking up the purse she threw it at her father, saying:
“Take it. Give it to Stan that he should buy with the gold
another woman. To him all women are alike. But not to Mehmet
Ali. So I shall stay with him. A bargain is a bargain. He staked
his life for me.”
Marcu knew it was the end. "All women are alike," he whined
to Stan as he handed him the purse. “Take it. All women are
alike,” he repeated with bitterness as he made a savage move-
ment towards his daughter.
"All, save the ones with blood of Chans in their veins," said
Mehmet Ali who had put himself between the girl and the whole
of her tribe. And the Tartar's words served as a reminder to
Marcu that Fanutza's own mother had been the daughter of a
Tartar chief and a white woman.



A DRAWING. BY JOHN B. FLANNAGAN





DUST FOR SPARROWS
BY REMY DE GOURMONT
Translated by Ezra Pound
211
The chief obstacle against which débutants in letters have to
struggle is that they do not know that it is the essential that one
must put into a story and that the accessory should be put aside.
For this reason their first pages, even when they denote a great
talent, are puerile and heavy.
212
The deficiency in lay instruction is that it does not teach men
how to die.
213
Art and science are at bottom the same, since without geometry
there is no architecture, and since geometry has been engendered
by experience, man creating the space which geometry studies.
What we call art is the scientifically ruled translation of the agree-
able sensations which we get from the appearances and qualities
of things; and science is the perception of the harmonious beauty
of the universe and a practical means of economizing thought in
the practical applications of this.
214
The less talent and competence a man has in the science he
prac-
tises, the more downright and imperative he is.
Thank God that in order to free the human mind from this
tyranny, Henri Poincare has demonstrated with mathematic evi-
dence that without chance there would have been no science, and
that it is chance alone which corrects the inevitable errors which
defective senses and defective instruments cause in all scientific
work.


560
DUST FOR SPARROWS
215
The first time one sees a realist play in a theatre, the care for the
staging and the interpretation makes all the details effective with
meticulous patience; one has the sensation of watching a painting
which moves and speaks. Then the eye gets promptly used to the
trick and it becomes boring because one notices that it isn't life but
a simple copy of its superficial elements.
216
Renaissance princes received great artists in their palaces and
loaded them with favours. Among us, people in high society, when
there appears a man of extraordinary intellectual gifts but in mod-
est circumstances, treat him as a poor relation whom they receive
in négligé, and do not invite to their parties. Talent ill-dressed is
become something ridiculous. Better an imbecile with cash.
217
One is a Jew when one lends two or three thousand pesos at ten
per cent per month; one is an Hebrew when one hypothecates at
fourteen per cent per annum; one is an Israelite when, in partner-
ship with a Christian, one carries on business with the government
yielding one hundred and fifty per cent in utilities. (Apropos of
which one can still see in Verona a mediaeval lion's mouth for the
denunciation of usurers and unjust, usurious contracts. E. P.]
218
Given two husbands with similar temperaments, which will feel
most outraged, the one whose wife confesses that she loves another
man chastely; or the one whose wife says that in a moment of
enthusiasm she has given herself to a man whom she did not love
and whom she now detests?
219
There are psychologists who mock at Shakespeare because in
several of his plays he gives a decisive rôle to sorcerers. They do
not know that to-day among the people most dramas of passion are
managed and exploited by somnambules (fortune tellers, trance
mediums, et ceteri) according to their fancy.


REMY DE GOURMONT
561
220
A very curious investigation (family papers hitherto kept secret)
has revealed that Ernest Renan was descended from a son whom
Abelard had by Heloise after the famous surgical intervention
of Canon Fulbert.
221
Verlaine, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, and Wagner . . . The first
and second lived amid the tables of night cafés and ended in hos-
pital. Wagner realized his prodigious dream because a lunatic was
king of Bavaria.
Oh! marvelous influence of criticism!
a
222
The day when the irremediable instability of every scientific
verity is proclaimed we shall see the fall of the last Bastile.
223
The sensations of love, like the vibrations of music, move all the
nervous system at once; because of this the voice of the beloved has,
during youth, such prestige, the most chaste and fugitive contact
electrifies us and leaves a prolonged sensation of gentleness upon
the brushed nerve tip; it is as if we felt the musical waves of a
'cello divinely stroking the skin, having reached us through the air
and through objects in contact with us.
224
It is as absurd to nourish and to exercise one's soul with the aim
of attaining possession of Truth as to nourish and exercise one's
body with the aim of making it immortal.
225
The dream is a cupful of death which gives us—without the
ennui of disenchantment, without the ravages of alcohol, and with-
out the chagrin of leaving the world before having solved its
enigma—the most entire of pleasures, the unmixed sweetness of
not existing
The End


AMERICAN LETTER
TW
Traverse City, Mich., April, 1921
HE idea of making a survey or inventory of recent American
writing has occurred to several persons this winter, and be-
cause I found their attempts so very unsatisfactory from the point
of view not only of the serious fellow who worries over the United
States but of the reader as well, who wants something really new
and bang-up to read, I decided to write things down as they appear
to one in Traverse City.
Up north here, in this thin air and beside this purified Michigan,
one is in a more fortunate position for surveying the country, I
believe, than in New York or San Francisco, or Urbana, Ill. Much
tiresome nonsense fails to carry over these protecting sand hills.
As one would not care to imitate Prof. Sherman and his extraor-
dinarily awful catalogue of ships, it is to be a question only of
the most serious young writers, critics who are serious about ideas
or pleasure, and poets who are serious about both. They have all
probably detested one another, or will do so when the occasion
offers, but to us each one appears as a blessing. It is to their inter-
actions with one another and with a small audience, that we shall
look for something in America even more interesting.
First I should like to discuss what seems to me very significant,
and what nearly everyone else has minimized or overlooked: we
have, or had quite recently, a group of writers, more or less able,
whose intentions were sufficiently circumscribed to make them
what in France would be called a "school” of literary criticism.
I realize that many people consider schools superfluous; tell you
that England got on without them, that great men are accidents.
But the dispersion or absence of taste and thought here is surely
more fatiguing than any concentration of intelligences could pos-
sibly be. Besides, this is no longer an Anglo-Saxon country; per-
haps the French method would just suit us. At least the momen-
tary association of Van Wyck Brooks, Randolph Bourne, Waldo
Frank, James Oppenheim, Paul Rosenfeld, and the rest in the
Seven Arts was more stimulating for them and for us than to have


W. C. BLUM
563
а
had them all over the lot. Their combination produced a "move-
ment” and furnished the "resistance” (so plaintively asked for by
The Little Review) which is necessary to a healthy opposition.
Only Mencken has the Quixotism to react against nothing at all
backed by the police and the professions.
Who first applied psychoanalysis to America I do not know,
though I suspect Randolph Bourne. People had been growling
about the puritans for centuries, when here in a moment the whole
disease and machinery of puritanism was shown up. Psycho-
analysis fitted beautifully, more beautifully than ever before or
since. America was plainly suppressed, infantile, imitative, in-
verted; Whitman the only free voice we ever found. Bourne, the
genius of the group, outlined the campaign in a few masterly essays,
and The Ordeal of Mark Twain and Our America remain to show
how admirably an idea can be run into the ground by a patient
and an impatient mind.
Apart from Paul Rosenfeld, who has always seen or heard what
he criticized as well as dreamed about it, the Seven Arts group was
interested too exclusively in the soul. Charlie Chaplin appeared
to them not as a series of precise, rectangular gestures, but as the
frustrated clown that exists in the heart of every American. This
sort of observation is considered by people like Francis Hackett
very
valuable, and is easy to do and, when slickly done, per-
haps, easy to read. But it has no more direct bearing on art than
any other bi-product of psychoanalysis.
Of course when one wishes to be a literary critic in one's own
country, and when that country offers no literature for discussion,
one naturally takes to psychology in self-defense; but the Seven
Arts group was too ready to disregard and despise as un-American
very admirable and very American poets like Ezra Pound, Marianne
Moore, and William Carlos Williams for one to have much faith
in their affection for art.
I remember a place in A Reviewer's Note Book (The Freeman)
where Brooks says that Margaret Fuller was a more significant
critic than Poe because she was "less interested in the technical
aspect of literature and more in its spirit.” The distinction is sus-
picious; the word "spirit” more so. And Brooks has gone Margaret
Fuller one better by criticizing modern literature without naming
work or author. It is all spirit for him.
to be


564
AMERICAN LETTER
As a contrast to the school which prefers psychology to aesthetics,
and which when it becomes lyrical, as it has an unfortunate habit
of doing, combines Freud and Whitman less profitably than Whit-
man combined the Bhagavad Gita and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle,
we have had the anthologists of Des Imagistes. This book is still
a pleasure to read, and seems older than the Golden Treasury.
Here the Americans divided honours equally with the English and
Irish. Des Imagistes was followed by The Egoist in England and
The Little Review and Others in this country.
Only a little farther west Poetry turned up Sandburg; Amy
Lowell and Vachel Lindsay gave readings. Of other poets to
whom the public has paid out from time to time a little rope Edgar
Lee Masters has hanged himself thoroughly and often (we have
not read the Domesday Book) and Robert Frost has continued
meritoriously.
Sandburg has recently been praised by Stuart P. Sherman. It
looks like it were time to get off. Only the dead can be admired
in America with impunity.
Somewhere in all this the public has missed several first rate
poets; but before talking about them I shall try to clear the atmos-
phere a little with some borrowed theory.
The most significant thing about the modern aesthetic move-
ment, I believe, aside from its having enlisted practically all of
the really able men, is its insistence on definition. Abstract paint-
ing, for example, pretends to eliminate likeness and all the
“impure” pleasures which likeness implies. Even the professors
admit that Rembrandt was a great painter, not because he painted
beds and women that resembled actual beds and women, nor
because his paintings excite religious or sensual ecstasies, but be-
cause his paintings were well constructed. In this case why bother
with likeness and the emotions at all; why not give the valuable
skeleton, the pure shapes, on which likeness and sentiment are
imposed only as dangerous superfluities? Of course, as Wyndham
Lewis has pointed out, true abstract painting is impossible; it
always looks like something. While the abstract use of words is
1
i "Sandburg is not sickened by the savour of things fresh and clean. Blue
sky, sunlight shattering on peach blossoms, children, comradeship, the folk-
feeling ... these things are safe with him.” (Yale Review, April 1921.)


W. C. BLUM
565
even farther off. It is very hard to say, even, just what the ele-
ments of literature may be. But one can at least move in the right
direction.
Modern writers have chosen, quite properly I think, to return
from hazier emotions and sentiments to those clear, energetic, and
pure sensations which lie immediately under the skin; just as
modern painters have returned to geometrical conflicts. The dif-
ference for the spectator is obvious. Suppose I see a wedge-shaped
block of some heavy material flying in my direction or in the direc-
tion of some shape in which I am interested; my response will be
prompt and unsentimental; whereas if I see a photographic lady
waving a scarf, I may begin to dream. The erotic elements em-
ployed by modern artists are not more lascivious, they are simply
more direct. Everything is to be, not more brutal, necessarily, but
crisper, sharper, more slippery. By combining such vigorous ele-
ments, a work of art is produced which is quite subtle enough (the
subtlety is in the arrangement) and which is less likely to lead the
spectator astray from the primary aesthetic intention.
After so tiresome an introduction, which recent articles on the
subject unfortunately screamed for, and which Thomas Jewell
Craven would have done much better, one is in a position to men-
tion some of the best writers.
William Carlos Williams has been writing for ten years or more
and is by all odds the hardiest specimen in these parts. His poetry
actually gets better every year. He was in Des Imagistes in 1914,
and has been appearing since in The Egoist, The Little Review,
Poetry, The Dial, and Contact. Several books of his were pub-
lished in England by Elkin Mathews, and The Four Seas has
published Al Que Quiere and this year Kora in Hell.
At one time passages like this pointed to a wind off London:
"for granite is not harder than
my love is open, runs loose among you!"
but since 1914 the wind has blown only from Jersey.
If Dr Williams wrote a book on surgery there would be a descrip-
tion of an ulcer in it, margin, base, discharge, and people would
stop saying with such emphasis “Osler and Colles could write."
His phrases have a simplicity, a solid justice:
a
a


566
AMERICAN LETTER
"Hairy looking trees stand out
in long alleys
over a wild solitude.
the great oaks
lying with roots
ripped from the ground.”
This modest quality of realness, which he attributes to "contact”
with the good Jersey dirt, sometimes reminds one of Chekhov. Like
Chekhov he knows animals and babies as well as trees. And to
people who are looking for the story his poems must often seem as
disconnected and centrifugal as Chekhov's later plays; they are
very nearly as intense. I offer this comparison as a poor handle
to his work, not to his personality.
Williams is one of the people who think they know what the
U. S. needs in order to ripen a literature. Pound's remedy was
for us to parse all the classics, ancient and modern; Brooks, the most
gingerly of critics, wanted to improve our morals and let art come
as an inconsiderable afterthought. Williams' first suggestion was
that someone give Alfred Kreymborg one hundred thousand dollars.
Recently, becoming impatient, he started a magazine of his own,
in which he advises us to pay no attention to Europe and be thor-
oughly local. This may be excellent advice, and, in finding the
metaphysics to back it up with, Williams appears to be learning a
great deal that he never knew before. One is even sorry that
entangling alliances have made Contact swallow so many of its
propositions. But to use a theory of this sort as a test for art is
stupid. Who is there, I don't care how illiterate, who can say
whether a given piece of writing shows contact with the writer's
environment? Not Robert McAlmon.
E. E. Cummings' poetry is appearing in the magazines. At its
best it is a verbal dance, a dance of words in the pure state, almost
of vowels and consonants. Impacts and recoils are felt vertically
and horizontally over several lines of type, the words being erect
on the page with a clean violence. The effect is largely visual,
visual and auditory mixed inextricably as they now are. Cummings
has gone farther toward heightening this effect by the unconven-
tional use of type (capitals, punctuation, spacing) and has annoyed


W. C. BLUM
567
more people thereby, than any other poet in America. Why the
gentlemen who pay big prices for a Caxton and employ all sorts
of typographical barbarities in their advertising should object to a
poet's free use of his own medium is hard to say.
"the leaneyed
Caesars borne neatly through enormous
twilight"
There is something here more remote, more emotional too per-
haps, than in Williams' poetry; the adjectives are freshened with
more alarming juxtapositions. One has a little the sensation of
a suave, well-lubricated roller-coaster—without scenery. But the
phrasing is quite as sure, the adjectives in key, essential as well
as ingenious.
“i say that sometimes
on these long talkative animals
are laid fists of huger silence."
Which proves again that what is called good drawing has nothing
to do with kodaks or with popular reality.
When Marianne Moore rhymes she reminds us that the eigh-
teenth century, too, desired lucidity.
“Despising sham, you used
your
sword
To riddle the conventions of excess;
Nor did the king love you the less.”
Separate lines of hers often read like the classical prose to which
we are supposed to have become accustomed in school. She borrows
or invents long quotations (“interpreting life through the medium
of the emotions," "deluded him with loitering formality, doing its
duty as if it did it not”) which she works into her poems without
the slightest inappropriateness. Like Rimbaud she uses the most
matter-of-fact constructions, critical rather than poetic phrases,
so that extraordinary expansions of mood are uncovered without
warning:


568
AMERICAN LETTER
.
your dress, a
magnificent square
cathedral of uniform
and at the same time, diverse appearance—a species of
vertical vineyard rustling in the storm
of conventional opinion.”
Gordon
Craig with his “this is l' and 'this is mine,' with his three
wise men, his 'sad French greens' and his Chinese cherries-
Gordon Craig so
inclinational and unashamed-has carried
the precept of being a good critic, to the last extreme. And
Burke is a
psychologist-of acute, raccoon-
like curiosity.”
These penetrating or sensible remarks, spoken so distinctly and
as though with the back turned, following one another with such
shattering politeness and efficiency, have a broken rhythm-pile up
and resolve.
There is no end of other tricks besides.
W. C. BLUM


BOOK REVIEWS
EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON
THE THREE TAVERNS. By Edwin Arlington Robinson.
16 mo. 120 pages. The Macmillan Company. New York.
SENE
EVERAL centuries of misplaced enthusiasms having made of
English poetry an Appian Way of sepulchres, the present-day
critic, with an excess of caution, always begins by setting up his
own particular pretension to foresight and discrimination. Depre-
ciation, naturally enough, ministering, as it does, to the critic's
self-esteem, has always been the easiest short-cut to criticism. And
somewhat for the same reason, praise is difficult—sometimes only
slightly less so than actual performance.
Mr Robinson, and I believe intentionally, forgoes much ap-
plause that meaner men might covet. Less than that of almost any
of his contemporaries has his poetry depended on the accidents of
time and manner; not because he wears fashions of the past with
the awkward carriage of the present-doing so, he would achieve
only the whimsical but cheap singularity of the isolated instance.
The verse of Mr Robinson is distinguished, primarily, because it
has been created under the austere mastery of character; as with
the sonnets of Milton: no single one suffices; each is a minute por-
tion of one and the same portrait of the man himself. We need
not necessarily impute the major virtue to this method merely in
order to understand it. But verse so written, though it be seldom,
if ever, the vogue, dies hard.
For one thing, popularity is scarcely apt to lure Mr Robinson on
to his own destruction, the claret of The Three Taverns being
rather too cool for most palates. Poems that must, and shall, be
read for the honour and glory of each word will never own a vast
apostledom. Consequently, a poem in blank verse on the subject
of Saint Paul's advent to Rome is almost incredible in these days
of peep-show poetry. It remains only for some critic to liken it
to Browning's Cleon to corroborate the philosopher who writes that
a


570
EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON
they who compare two things have never felt the heart of either.
In a fashion, all the volumes of the verse of Mr Robinson have
been books of silhouettes. The outline of the idea seems to be his
passion. To the casual eye of them who read poetry at a glance
all these poems will look alike in their neat black and white; in
the absence of high colour, only examination can distinguish one
from another by means of the peculiar feature or characteristic
posture that is the appropriate merit of each. In such books there
is no best poem, and scarcely a worst. But it is in the sonnets that
Mr Robinson speaks in his most intimate, even wayward and at
times disdainful mood. The direction of the thought is oblique,
seldom, if ever, direct in its splendour, the inevitable artistic habit,
possibly, of an age generally thought to be heavy with the accumu-
lated learning of books. One dare not be too open and above-
board these days. As in the sonnets of Shakespeare, here speaks
the gracious, measured voice of thought looking on nearly all, if
not all things, with a mind at peace—but something too subdued
at moments as if the lips themselves betrayed their conscious dread
of folly or exaggeration. Just here Mr Robinson is in and of his
own times, more genuinely than the superficial tricks and manners
of expression (which he neglects) would ever indicate: in all his
poems
fall the shadows of men who are brave in their dislikes and
timid in their admiration.
The vessels of this verse: its form, its metre, its rhythm, are not
unfamiliar; we have seen the like for many days; as for some men
clothing is a part of character, for others it remains a trivial, incon-
siderable item. One would wish only that Mr Robinson had chosen
to abstain from combat in such matters, taking as his text the very
words he has put into the mouth of his own character:
“myriads will be done
To death because a farthing has two sides,
And is at last a farthing.'
>
Expert as men have often been at boring themselves with disputes
about methods of literature, their unhappy faculty of being miser-
able over the question of categories has never yer made them
interesting. Mr Robinson should have remembered that of all
things there is nothing more ponderously transient in its futility


STEWART MITCHELL
571
a
than earnest discussion of the forms of art; possibly he did remem-
ber, and for having done so, is the wiser and the greater poet. The
age that asks questions about poetry may learn anatomy, in time,
but it will never reproduce itself.
What is commonly called a vital objection might be offered
against the work of Mr Robinson: austere and conventional—many
poets have been so—his failure is his neglect to express the spirit
of his time; whatever that may mean. But a glib certainty as to
that spirit has cost more than one poet dear these last seven hundred
years; were Mr Robinson to exercise a conscious choice—and he, of
course, would not—the hollow accusation that he lacks contempora-
neousness would leave him cold in the face of the obvious fact that
the spirit of an age is only a fiction built up heavily on the surface
of that particular portion of history under which lie the actual
remains. So, especially, are the tombs and epitaphs of poets.
In all his volumes Mr Robinson has chiselled with a deft and
gracious hand; if there be no "fair vast head," as yet, along his
galleries, there are, nevertheless, fascinating faces, and companion-
able ones.
As with fine work he has come slowly into fame, one
suspects his tenure of it will be at least correspondingly long, such
being the caprices of events. Cynically though Mr Robinson might
reflect, in view of the havoc literary legends play with the memory
of men—legends that make a Puritan of Milton and an Irishman
of Swift-fame is of small moment.
Stewart MITCHELL
-


THE MODERN ENGLISH NOVEL PLUS
Night and Day. By Virginia Woolf. 12mo. 508
pages. George H. Doran Company. New York. .
The Voyage Out. By Virginia Woolf. 12mo. 379
pages. George H. Doran Company. New York.
I
a
F symbolism was carried off by a collection of Greeks, Jews,
Spaniards, Germans, Americans, and Belgians writing French,
France is no worse off than England, where letters since the Nine-
ties seem to have been maintained by one Pole, two Americans,
and a horde of Irishmen. Germany at least had the vitality left to
produce a philosophical historian as late as 1917, but Spengler
according to his own testimony is the dying gasp, while all of occi-
dental Europe enters upon the winter of its civilization.
In any case, the Spenglerian doctrine is not endangered any by
Virginia Woolf's Night and Day, where we learn in five hundred
pages, against a background of afternoon teas and the names of
philosophers, that Katharine loves Ralph but is engaged to William
who is also chafing under the bondage since he has come to care
more for Cassandra, while Ralph has concealed his love from
Katharine, and Mary loves Ralph in vain so that in the end she
must strive to forget, but Katharine and Ralph are united by her
mother-concealing a tear of happiness—and Cassandra and
William ditto.
The appearance of Night and Day is all the more astonishing in
that it was preceded by The Voyage Out, a first novel in which
Mrs Woolf had made a distinct advance upon the representative
modern English novel. The book was marked at times by a peculiar
loneliness of vision. Or perhaps better, a readjustment of the
angle of approach. This quality is to be found, for instance, in the
passage where the ship on which the action of the novel is taking
place is suddenly treated as it is seen by the passengers of other
vessels, so that it becomes simply “a ship passing in the night.” It
is present when the heroine's first serious moonings are shattered
by the rousing appearance of an English battleship, or when the
illness which is to cause her death is introduced in this wise:


KENNETH BURKE
573
"Owing to the heat and the dancing air the garden too looked
strange-the trees were either too near or too far, and her head
almost certainly ached. She was not quite certain, and therefore
she did not know, whether to tell Terence now, or to let him go on
reading. She decided that she would wait until he came to the
end of a stanza, and if by that time she had turned her head this
way and that, and it ached in every position undoubtedly, she
would say very calmly that her head ached.”
a
It is to be found in the self-serious conversation of two friends
while one of them is cutting his toe nails. Or the description of a
hotel attained by giving a two-or-three-line glimpse at each separate
and unrelated entity. Or the sudden memory of a drizzly day in
London when the book has us baking in the steady heat of the
Amazon.
In its weakest exemplification, the tendency shows up in the
following kind of attack, a method which has been squeezed and
sucked dry by our neo-Whitmanites, and which the earnest editors
of Contact would probably dispose of very rightly as “modern
traditionalism":
“It was as though the room were instantly flooded with water.
After a moment's hesitation, first one couple, then another, leapt
into mid-stream, and went round and round in the eddies. The
rhythmic swish of the dancers sounded like a swirling pool. By
degrees the room grew perceptibly hotter. The smell of kid gloves
mingled with the strong scent of flowers. The eddies seemed to
circle faster and faster, until the music wrought itself into a crash,
ceased, and the circles were smashed into little separate bits.”
.
Without this shift of attitude, her material is composed of the
characteristic English-novel accessories. Mr Pepper is a vegetarian
pedant who complains of his ailments; St John is the eunuch
second-lead friend who worships the heroine awkwardly and always
says the wrong thing, for which you love him; Mrs Somebody is
partially deaf, so that tragic news gains a hysterical relief by being
shouted at her four times. Indeed, a great many of her characters
are stock types which could be patched together from one season on
Broadway.
Too often, the general mentality behind the books displays a


574
THE MODERN ENGLISH NOVEL PLUS
hankering after the secrets of life, the sacred experience, the beauti-
ful truths which are sensed—not realized in crude clarity-one
more bow, in short, to the inarticulate muqueuses. The more im-
portant—and therefore sensitive characters—spend a large portion
of their time living as in a dream, frequently floating in so disturb-
ingly indefinite a thing as a cloud of thought. Indeed, Mrs Woolf's
vocabulary for fixing brain states does not depart radically from
that of Oliver Optic; we learn, for instance, that her hero's "mind
was scaling the highest pinnacles of its alps, where there was only
starlight and the untrodden snow.” She also accepts with unques-
tioning seriousness what Benda would call the “aesthetic of love”:
which is to say that the Bronte throb is restored with neither addi-
tions nor subtractions. (And while on this subject it might be well
to add that Mrs Woolf's romantic men are more than a vengeance
for our male authors' romantic women.)
These tendencies, however, show to much less disadvantage in
The Voyage Out, since in this book the technical manipulation has
been so thorough. It is a splendid stroke, for instance, when the
heroine is dead, to dismiss her and her lover entirely, return to the
hotel and summon a raging storm. For a few pages this little
colony of Britishers, who have come all the way to South America
and transplanted every single feature of their life in England, chat
nervously while the tropical storm rips by and Rachel is known to
be dead. It passes; we see it lighting far out on the ocean; the
Britishers go to their rooms. One gets the smell of fresh damp
vegetation . . . and the death of the heroine has been magnificently
orchestrated. In fact, The Voyage Out is full of such careful
juxtaposition of elements; Mrs Woolf reaches the highest points
in her book by just this method.
If Night and Day had been followed by The Voyage Out, one
could explain very glibly that the first book was a mere blind tenta-
tive. But as the books were written in the reverse order, it seems
that Mrs Woolf did not realize her own distinctions. The same
calamity happened to Louis Wilkinson, who wrote The Buffoon,
and then went scurrying back to the usual society novel of his
countrymen. As a matter of fact, the ideal development of a writer
would probably be in exactly the opposite direction. Before he
had attained a complete consciousness of his intentions and a
mediumistic equipment with which to embody those intentions, he
.


KENNETH BURKE
575
a
would be much nearer the general level of writing than after he had
gotten himself really in hand. To take the example of music, it is
only in their earlier compositions that Scriabine and Debussy ap-
proach the Grade 3 A splendour of the Minute Waltz.
3
But for some reason or other, literature seems to fight shy of this
Zug nach Innen. There is the case of Sherwood Anderson in
America, for instance, who is evolving on the principle that the
stages of a literary artist should be, first to express one's self, then
to express an Illinois butcher, and finally to express all the read-
while-runners in seven continents. (Those, that is, for whom a
book is the moral equivalent of a newspaper or a box of chocolates.
The work of art is received as a vague lump; the acme of critical
acumen is attained in the characteristic "Have you read the latest
book by -?" To become "great," a book must naturally be
”
composed of elements which do not go beyond this preponderant
public.) In America, this process of vulgarization is caused by
our neo-Whitmanite hoax, which strives to make art explode like
a blunderbuss. In England, perhaps, it all derives from the deadly
combination of literature and the drawing room.
KENNETH BURKE


CHARACTER AND OPINION IN THE
UNITED STATES
CHARACTER AND OPINION IN THE UNITED STATES.
With Reminiscences of William James and Josiah
Royce and Academic Life in America. By George
Santayana. 12mo. 233 pages. Charles Scribner's
Sons. New York.
I
a time when most books are written by correspondents, travel-
lers, and men of affairs, and it is thought a sufficient qualifica-
tion for authorship that one should have been physically present
when the thing took place, it is refreshing to read a book whose
author has the power to observe with the eye of the mind. This
is not a "six-weeks-in-Russia” scrap-book of casual jottings, but an
interpretation, with an exceptionally high ratio of thought to fact.
It consists of "reflections on” rather than "impressions of.” Mr
Santayana forestalls the objection that such a book will reveal the
author rather than his subject-matter, by admitting without shame
that such is the case, and by encouraging the reader to look for
expressions of the author's own feelings and hints of his opinions.
These will be recognized promptly and unmistakably by readers
of Mr Santayana's other books. His feelings are two, pro-
Paganism and anti-Protestantism. Judged by the former, William
James and those about him had no notion of the "good life.” “As
to what might render human existence good, excellent, beautiful,
happy, and worth having as a whole, their notions were utterly
thin and barbarous. They had forgotten the Greeks, or never
known them.” The anti-Protestantism is divisible into two parts,
a dislike of liberal Christianity as having assumed the name while
rejecting the substance of Christianity; and a dislike of moral
strenuousness as being intolerant, chilling, and impoverishing.
As to hints of the author's opinions, these also are unmistakable
and well-known. Physical causes being the only causes, and con-
sciousness being an impotent bystander, the intellect should retreat
from affairs and devote itself to contemplation. But "in academic
America the Platonic and Catholic traditions had never been
planted”; while American philosophers have been peculiarly dis-


RALPH BARTON PERRY
577
posed to drag the intellect into the world of affairs, and to discuss
the problems to which its presence there gives rise.
Such being his feelings and opinions, it was impossible that
Mr Santayana should have written of American philosophy with
approval or conviction. The most that could reasonably have been
expected was an attitude of detachment and indulgence; and this
he has achieved.
Mr Santayana is correct in saying that the deepest motive in
both James and Royce was their moral earnestness.
Both were
acutely conscious of the evil in the world and could never for a
moment have tolerated in themselves any other attitude than that
of hating and combating it. This led James to a “pluralism” or
"meliorism,” in which the evil was recognized as something alien
to God, and wholly irreconcilable to good; while it led Royce to
emphasize moral struggle, and to justify evil as existing only to
be overcome. Mr Santayana's own repugnance to moralism of
this sort appears in paragraphs like the following, in which he is
describing "the academic environment” at Harvard in the ’nineties:
“But this official freedom was not true freedom, there was no
happiness in it. A slight smell of brimstone lingered in the air.
You might think what you liked, but you must consecrate your
belief or your unbelief to the common task of encouraging every-
body and helping everything on. You might be an atheist, if you
were troubled enough about it. The atmosphere was not that of
intelligence nor of science, it was that of duty.”
Feeling as he does, the author is tempted to find excuses, ulterior
motives, or alternative solutions that may free James and Royce
from the reproach of being merely victims of the sense of duty.
Thus he suggests that James did not believe or feel enthusiasm
for the tenets which he professed, but "merely believed in the
right of believing that you might be right if you believed.” Now
this is clever, and, were the word "merely” omitted, would have
a grain of truth in it. With that word included, however, it mis-
represents James utterly. He was typically a man of convictions,
who found it necessary to believe, and lived what he believed;
who felt that he had the truth, and endeavoured to propagate it;
and who, because he was candid enough to recognize how far his


578
CHARACTER AND OPINION
own belief was founded on feeling and will, could not but respect
the earnest beliefs of others. And what he found it most necessary
to have a belief about, was the status of evil in the world, so that as
a moral being he might know his friends and his enemies. His
intellectual crises were all at the same time spiritual crises, when
some new illumination was found by which he and others could
wage the moral fight more hopefully.
As for Royce, who in the judgement of his American friends was
most heroic and most himself in his denunciations of evil and in
his tenderness for mankind, Mr Santayana thinks “the sanest ele-
ment in his natural piety” to have been his "joy in the hard truth,
with a touch of humour and scorn in respect to mortal illusions.”
Thinking this of him, the author naturally suggests that Royce
should have accepted as his solution of the problem of evil that
Spinozistic intellectualism in which, having become a pure phi-
losopher and taking his pleasure only in the exercise of reason, a
man no longer suffers himself to be troubled by the woes of the
world. But the very essence of Royce was that while he knew all
about this alternative, he could not justify it to himself because
he felt it to be simply evasion. A smooth and cynical Royce, or
even a consistent Royce, is unthinkable, because while he affirmed
the unity of the world he could neither ignore evil, nor palliate it,
nor excuse himself from attacking it.
The issue between James and Royce on the one hand, and Mr
Santayana on the other, is not as the latter would have it, the
issue between "barbarous virtue” and the ultimate perfection.
James and Royce and others of the lingering brimstone age in
American philosophy, did not regard duty as a state of angelic
perfection, but as being a relatively tolerable state of mind in a
world in which evil abounds. Moralism is, it is true, unbeautiful;
it is strained, harsh, distraught. But what, the state of the world
being such as it is, shall we say of the philosophers whom Mr San-
tayana describes as concentrating their lives as much as possible
in pure intelligence in order that they may be led by it into the
way of peace? There is a point of view from which a peace so
purchased is hard, complacent, inhumane, and frivolous. And
if it can be said of the qualities of moralism, certainly it can be
said with equal force of these qualities, that they are not among
the attributes of perfection.


RALPH BARTON PERRY
579
When Mr Santayana turns from the philosophers to American
character and life his generalizations are not novel, but they are
probably as accurate as such generalizations ever can be. America
is optimistic, amiable, youthful, energetic, and governed by a prac-
tical and efficacious idealism. Its institutions are an adaptation
of English institutions, and rest fundamentally upon the Anglo-
American genius for adaptation, mutual concession, and co-opera-
tion, much of which Mr Santayana unqualifiedly admires.
The book is good-tempered throughout; distinguished, and at
times brilliant, in style. If there is any fault of style it is due to
the difficulty of being an essayist and a dialectician at the same time.
For even though Mr Santayana not infrequently argues, his style
at its best is essentially that of the essayist. And an essayist, how-
ever much thought his opinions may have cost him, must not either
pay or betray that cost in the finished product. There truth must
seem to have been received in moments of careless insight, and
must be given out with easy and generous assurance to those more
unfortunate ones who have been making an unnecessary difficulty
of it.
RALPH BARTON PERRY
a


THEY WENT
They Went. By Norman Douglas. 12mo. 274
pages. Dodd, Mead and Company. New York.
IT.
T is a comment upon our book vendors that at present it appears
impossible to find that earlier novel of Norman Douglas, South
Wind, in their shops—that this book should have been allowed to
sink into the oblivion of store-rooms so easily. They Went, having
some way secured a general distribution on the counters, has met
already with such favourable reviews as are allotted the charming,
the graceful, the fantastic, and thus it may serve to rediscover the
earlier and more important work.'
In They Went, Mr Douglas has left even the most exotic phases
of our modern civilization, and gone into those regions, vaguely
dated, vaguely placed, where his fancy can pick and choose what
it will of the historic and the legendary. It is a story of a city and
its king and queen and their daughter, and other occasional persons
who distract the princess at odd times away from her parents, as a
young girl is apt to be distracted. For though only nineteen she is
a precocious girl with ideas of her own. Her putative father's king-
dom, one gathers, is rather far north, where are dim rainbows and
mists and resentful seas, as well as druids, dwarfs, and a missionary
or two sent from Ireland to inquire into certain carryings-on whic
have been talked about in Christian countries. His majesty, well
along now in years, is content with the ways of peace and to allow
his daughter to use his capital as her plaything, which she does
with a zest to be commended, if somewhat startling to the suburban
student of mankind with only his neighbours for his own labora-
torial experimentation. This city was, we are told,
"a democratic mart, an emporium and outpost of civilization; a
gaudy place inhabited by folks of the same kind-exiled rulers and
generals, high-class reprobates, merchants, enriched slaves, artizans
of uncommon capacity who, for some reason or other, had to leave
their homes. Folks who had money to spend! They flocked hither
Appreciated and reviewed, if all in vain, by the present Editor of The
DIAL, August 15, 1918.
1


JOHN MOSHER
581
from every part of the world, assured of the protection and encour-
agement of the princess. No questions were asked how he or she
lived. No one was discouraged from settling in this town, whose
reputation for vice was such that lovers of pleasure had been known
to desert even their Mediterranean capitals for the sake of the
peculiar attractions they found here. An air of good humour per-
vaded those thronged streets.”
Such a city, even as more reputable towns, has an ever-threaten-
ing peril. In this case it is a very definite doom. A key hanging
on the king's girdle can unlock a sluice and admit the pressing sea
and bring about the total destruction of the place. Thus as one by
one the persons in the story, the lovers of the precocious princess,
the king's minstrels, the Christians had come and gone—so the city
vanishes at the end. They pleased, they grew wearisome, they went.
“They went” is the book's refrain.
Mr Douglas possesses that sophistication, disillusionment, cyni-
cism-call it what you will from your back porches—which comes
-
from such intimate and varied contact-one feels it can come only
thus—with the human performance as to allow the ease of familiar-
ity with its distortions. We come. We go. And in the meantime
we are not all we should be. Mr Douglas can face the idea with
equanimity. He can be facetious about it. It starches his wit
nobly. He shrugs shoulders at the aspirations of the senile, sodden
king who "like all sensible men had no objection to becoming, as it
were, immortal.” Of the Roman missionary's God he remarks that
“he not only had a reputation to preserve, but unlike many others,
a knack of invariably preserving it.”
A number of remarkable persons are involved in the story of
the last days of the city. No one can pass through without the
intaglio mark of definite individuality. One gets a hint of the
most casual lover the princess has had occasion to drop down the
Great Drain, and in spite of her ballet-princess disposition this
young lady herself has a strange humanity in her restlessness, her
resentment that this plaything city is never quite the beautiful
affair she wills to make it.
But the most seriously treated, the least bizarre characters, are the
arch-druidess Manthis and the Greek artist Theophilus. Manthis
was “the repository of the lore and learning of her time, and men
were sometimes disposed to call her conservative, or even reaction-


582
THEY WENT
ary”—yet Manthis was not quite so convinced about things as she
professed to be.
“ 'One gropes,' she would often admit to herself; sometimes even
adding: 'perhaps one gropes in a groove.' ... Manthis loved
not beauty, but betterment. ‘Woman need only want was
a favourite axiom of hers. She called it a 'pleasant discovery.'
.
.
Theophilus can realize for the princess with his skill her concept
of the beautiful city—or rather it is his concept, as his vision takes
hold of her. The price he asks for his services is the life of the
Christian missionary, because, he says, ‘Between goodness and
beauty there yawns a gulf which none can bridge over. Uphill
work, princess, trying to make men strive after beauty and rise
aloft. It is so much easier to make them good, to keep them
grovelling earthwards, that sometimes I think that I, too, will
grow into a preacher in my
old
age. . We have enemies enough
without him (this Christian)—the All-Highest, I mean, and that
red-haired papa
of yours. They are leagued together like all good
folks for the destruction of beauty. Envy makes strange bed-
fellows.'"
And at last—“'A portico is worth a preacher,' ” agrees
the princess. But it is this same Theophilus who exclaims as the
seas overwhelm the unfinished city: “ 'It breaks me, to watch the
agony of fair things.'”
The Princess however and the Greek flee the catastrophe to
begin again their building elsewhere. And Manthis looking from
her island tower . “it dawned upon her that she would now
be free from many kinds of annoyances, free to develop her own
ideas of betterment, free to introduce or abolish as she saw fit.”—
In fact such a calm acceptance of the disaster gives to the book that
note of the happy ending the editorial people talk about so much.
John Mosher
>


A MAN OF FOUR WORDS
Ulysses S. GRANT. By Hamlin Garland. Illustrated.
8vo. 524 pages. The Macmillan Company. New York.
NCE a national hero's period is past, he and his biographer
take to the upper shelves a while, until some proverb trick of
history recalls the hero's acts as precedent or warning. Thus Grant
had an airing in 1898 when the Spanish War recalled to us that
he had wished to annex San Domingo for the freed slaves, and to
recognize the independence of Cuba. Now, while the returned
veteran of the Great War is reading the story of his mighty cam-
paigning of sixty years ago, and the reconstructionists are thumbing
over his national policies, he returns, and with still another subtle
timeliness that is not all political.
For one thing, Henry Adams has revived him to lament over his
inaction and its effect upon a young man's education. For another
matter, our American novels of the past two years are full of his
habitat and his type of mind. Ulysses Grant was born on Main
Street; he knew the Poor Whites intimately; the Moon Calf's
father was one of his men, and after his Presidency, he came to
New York to take up his residence among the people of the Age
of Innocence. All this Mr Garland has revealed minutely and
with a simplicity that has not been easy to attain in convincing
form. For a hero who will not speak there must be many inter-
pretations, and at the crises of his life, Grant said nothing at all,
becoming thereby Jekyll or Hyde according to the various theories
and geographical locations of his critics. Even when he said, “Let
us have peace,” he meant, Henry Adams assures us, that he wished
to be let alone in a policy of drift. In fact, no one seems to have
known just what to do with the remark until a place was found
for it on his tomb. Mr Garland has interpreted it sympathetically,
but he does not insist upon his translation. He has, rather, effaced
himself in this biography, leaving it an accurate and fairly complete
source-book for the facts of Grant's life.
The account begins traditionally enough with a two-room cabin
in southern Ohio, and for sixteen years it runs true to form in


584
A MAN OF FOUR WORDS
sturdy poverty. Ulysses Grant was the equal and opposite reaction
to an over-talkative father, a likable unambitious lad who went
presently to West Point because the academy offered education and
offered it free. A letter written from there when he was seventeen,
expresses a conclusion significantly recurrent during all his later
life. "On the whole,” he wrote, “I like the place very much. The
fact is, if a man graduates here, he is safe for life.”
Out of this thought grew his first ambition. He wanted to be-
come a teacher of mathematics, first at the academy and then,
permanently, in “some respectable college.” The dream died
young. Those were parlous times, and West Point demanded in
the Mexican War a swift return for the education given.
So far, Grant gave his biographer little trouble, but there was
a time after the border war when he made but an unsatisfactory
hero. We find him presently, outside the army, discouraged,
clouded, and more silent than ever. Here, of course, he becomes
novelists' meat. He might have had a neat epitaph in Spoon River
with all his torpid greatness unfulfilled if he had not been matched
with an opportunity. Just at present, with the Great War imme-
diately behind us, we seem to have been thrown upon our national
holdings with a vehemence that suggests nostalgia. We have a
weakness for fights and failures that are our own whether they be
north of Boston or along the Ohio. And Grant, found out by his
weakness, losing the safety which was his world, and fighting a
dogged, silent way back to second-best is typically, even sentiment-
ally, ours of the moment. Here, under Mr Garland's unmeddlin
sympathy of treatment, Grant emerges so unmistakably the man
America knows best and has so often hurled against a crisis, that
we never again doubt his epic significance.
Grant took into the War of the Secession a tarnished record,
military and civil. He emerged four years later the unbeaten
general, the man whose every thought meant a stride towards vic-
tory. Here his biographer has no need to tread warily, although
he does inherit the task of writing a history of the Civil War. We
want it all, the lack of words, the mass of achievements, the tin
soldiering at Washington, the stupid opposition of superiors. And
we recall an earlier war and a clever traitor in it, who, before he
betrayed us, sputtered out his view of the Continental Congress-
“a stable of stupid cattle, stumbling at every step.” Grant said
nothing, not even, after many opportunities, "I told you so."
>
>


HELEN IVES GILCHRIST
585
Historians conceded long ago that Grant "won the war,” though
they word it variously. "There was no one to replace him,” Rhodes
says, “the North had developed a great general in Grant.” Rossiter
Johnson, that master of colour and epic incident, ends his comment:
"At the close of the war, Grant was the foremost soldier in the
world.” Mr Garland cannot equal Johnson's charm of narrative.
He falls something short of reproducing the immensity of that
long fight by day and fire-reddened night down the length of the
Mississippi, but he has given us Grant himself, muddy, silent, and
desperately sure he was right. When Grant came before the mas-
sive resistance of Vicksburg, the North was one impatient howl for
an end-any end-to the nigger war. And then,
“The army began to stretch and stream away along the narrow,
slippery roads on the levee-top. The men did not need to be told
that this was no parade soldier who led them. He was spattered
with mud, grizzled of beard, and wherever he went, the 'boys' felt
a twinge of singular emotion. They had admired him before. Now
he became 'the old man' to them.”
When we have followed Mr Garland through his engineering
feat of elucidating Grant's carefully interlocked plans, and his
human generalship over the two hundred thousand men of his
command, we are the more ready to read again the climax of all
Grant's work, the closing of the war. This scene has been made
the apex of a successful drama by an Englishman, and a still
greater Englishman, George Meredith, wrote of Appomattox,
twenty years after the Rebellion had died, “Since their (the Ameri-
cans') most noble closing of the Civil War, I have looked to them
as the hope of our civilization.”
It was Grant who made an Iliad of the war, not less effective
for the fact that Achilles was kind, that Hector was not slain, and
that the last incident revealed the conqueror feeding his foe's starv-
ing men and bidding them take home their horses for the spring
ploughing
Lacking another war, the rest of Grant's life, and of his biog-
rapher's task, must be an anticlimax. In Grant's day, reconstruc-
tion was everybody's business, because nearly everyone had fought
in the war, and the man who undertook to settle the problem had
worse than a Peace Conference on his hands. He had the reblock-


586
A MAN OF FOUR WORDS
ing of the country to insist upon, and meanwhile, the country re-
blocked him.
Mr Garland has given us all the data there is, northern and
southern newspaper comment, congressional tirades, Sumner's at-
tack, and in the midst of it, Grant himself with his never-finished
cigar. Time has settled once for all the wisdom of his reconstruc-
tion policy; and of his other work, Nicolay says, “The acts of his
two administrations have not had to be undone.” Where he failed
was in personal leadership. That required speech and Grant was
inarticulate. He kept to matters of the South, of the West Indies,
foreign policy, and the Indian question. The people had Moses and
plentiful prophets—let them hear them.
Here it is that Henry Adams becomes exasperated. Where
Grant is concerned, Adams is largely "porcupinus” and very little
"angelicus.” He has material for his tirade. He knew, if any one
did, conditions of the treasury, and Grant could not handle finance.
He could not handle the Erie, the Union Pacific, the Whiskey Ring,
nor Charles Sumner. When things had happened, Grant acted,
but not before. It is easy to understand the disgust of Henry
Adams whose training and traditions were those of diplomacy. An
Adams did not upset his basket and then make as thorough a job as
possible of picking up the muddy contents. On the other hand,
the most critical Adams carried no basket at all.
But Grant, Adams asserted, upset more than baskets. He over-
turned the very theory of evolution in coming into power two thou-
sand years after Alexander and Pompey, or in coming at all after
Washington. The indictment is tremendous, but one is inclined to
be grateful to the accuser in that he here so casually sets at nought
his great-grandfather's occasional bitter flings at Washington, his
suspicions and attempts at limiting his power until Washington
wrote the Continental Congress, “It will be impossible for me to
be of further service if such insuperable difficulties are thrown in
my way.” After all, the beauty of quoting Henry Adams is that
presently one comes upon the peculiar, contrite, contrary generosity
of that subtle non-conclusionist. Moreover, along the way, he has
thrown out some few shrewd truths about Grant. “A great soldier
"
might be a baby politician,” he concedes, and out of another hand-
ful of comment, you select his sage observation that Grant was
awed by money.


HELEN IVES GILCHRIST
587
He was; and it makes his scrupulous honesty stand out the more
sharply. Over and over again since that letter of the seventeen-
year-old boy at West Point, Grant had revealed the desire to be
financially safe. He could face mathematics in the abstract and do
such sums as a quartermaster must, but money on any looser basis
baffled him. After his two terms as President, he repeated the
tragedy of trusting his money to a friendly scoundrel in the hope
of laying up a competency for his family, and then, ill and har-
assed, he set about breaking his life's silence, because, as he explains
in the preface to his Memoirs, he has been living on borrowed
money and hopes to remedy the matter thus.
The rest of the book is only for the reader to whom Grant is
personally a hero, the collector of Grantiana, the man interested in
the dark picture of the old general proffering in payment of debts
the swords and jewelled caskets presented to him at the close of the
Civil War. It is a very human record, less to the credit perhaps
of the American populace than to Grant's, but such as it is, Mr
Garland has presented it faithfully, as he has all the other bits of
matter that go to make this biography an accurate source-book. The
volume has finally a lighter note to end on, and it has, too, among
its good qualities this pleasantest of all, that it gives you armfuls
of facts about Grant and his period, in the order in which they
happened. The book does not crystallize; that pleasure is left for
the reader, a privilege delightful in histories at least. Reading it,
you find presently that you have new light upon America and
Americans, their work and their limitations, and the loosely held,
immensely strong cable that holds them together.
HELEN IVES GILCHRIST


DEVELOPMENT
Development. By W. Bryher. Preface by Amy Lowell.
12mo. 187 pages. The Macmillan Company. New York.
Derecho
EVELOPMENT is the study of a mind in the formative
process—perhaps one should say of a scholarly mind. The
interacting of intellectual interests as the heroine combats imposed
restraints and herself, takes the place of what might be required
as plot and the recital will please those who, with a recent con-
tributor to The Spectator, like the "novel neat” and “regret that
delightful descriptions of Swiss mountains and Italian plains should
be subordinated to an amatory plot.” Juxtaposed, we have im-
petuosity and philosophic endurance of what cannot be helped.
Miss Bryher says of her heroine that “she could never remember a
time when she had not wanted to go to sea. True, when she was
fourteen she would run away and be a sailor, but that was ten
years distant; it was so long to wait that sailing ships might be
then, as she heard them say, 'extinct.'” Of Nancy at school she
says, “The glare of many faces, weary and uniform in expression,
was about her. Surely this was the feeling out of which was born
the many-headed dragon of myth. ... As the class ended, she
rose like the Athenian follower of Nikias, his body compelled to
obedience, his soul freer than ever."
Nancy's aloofness was not the apathy of a captive enslaved but
of a busy man kept from work. She was impelled to write a his-
a
tory
9)
“which would become almost the history of the Mediterranean,
from the beginnings of Egypt, through Phoenicia, Greece and
Carthage, to the end of Saracen and Norman, the gradual dying
of the Middle Age. It was not alone to be a history. All the
life of the time, the customs, the armour, especially the trade, would
be depicted, the tiny details she missed in the longest histories, all
she wanted to know and was told she was 'too young to under-
stand.' She would labour to make it perfect ... till it became
the very epic of the South, till all could read in one volume the


MARIANNE MOORE
589
knowledge she was seeking in books, in fragments, in pictures, in
stones, in the whole of the land itself."
“The roots of things interested her. Middleton, Lyly and
Marston gave her the inside of an age . It was indeed a mad
world, curious mingling of a very ferocity of strength with the
'light-colour summer stuff out of which Euphues, Campaspe and
Rosalynde were fashioned.”
Naturally enough the modern opus was to her but a
"lump of unwrought material, a long preparation for something
which never happened, heavy, blunted, barren of definite aim.
The 'romantic' volumes set out to be wicked, and drowned them-
selves in a mire of untrue psychology and false emotion. The
realists photographed the time, but somehow managed to omit the
spirit. There was no mingling of irony with loveliness; the un-
pleasant truths of existence were blurred with a false perspective
or were never faced at all. Discouragement marched in the train
of this futility, and from these pages of degenerate weakness,
Nancy turned with relief to Tom Jones.”
9
One might easily expect to find conclusions arrived at by the
small heroine, immature; and possibly in her protest against
woman's rôle as a wearer of skirts—in her envying a boy his free-
dom and his clothes her view is somewhat curtailed. One's dress
is more a matter of one's choice than appears; if there be any
ad-
vantage, it is on the side of woman; woman is more nearly at
liberty to assume man's dress than man is able to avail himself of
the opportunities for self expression afforded by the variations
in colour and fabric which a woman may use.
Moreover, women
are no longer debarred from professions that are open to men, and
if one cares to be femininely lazy, traditions of the past still afford
shelter. There is nothing unripe, however, in Nancy's comment
upon her schoolmates, who on the last day of school "besought mis-
tresses to write to them, whom, a week before, they had hoped never
to see again,” or in her simple answer, “They are the South,” when
a flock of goats occasioned shivering on the part of a fellow travel-
ler, who "loved” little green shutters and said, “Nancy, you don't
“
realize how wonderfully romantic it all is. I don't believe you


590
DEVELOPMENT
appreciate travelling at all.” There is something dramatic in
winning by force of intention; and in every case in which a lack
of comprehension is recorded such as the foregoing, one feels that
Nancy's silence under fire is a victory. Her oppressive companion
might feel-should she read the following description, that sight-
seeing included more than green shutters:
“The sea was a wide mass of luminous metal, faint silver here and
there where a flickering light caught it, or a grey hollow revealing
the tumult underneath. A parting of the waves, a vivid shout,
and the lifeboat slid into the water, vanishing in the hollows, or
flung, a struggling fish, upright against a roll of wave.”
This book is a flower cluster mounted on a tall spike—a raceme
of lilies; and for the lily the flower level of development is suffi-
cient, but in human development the flowering stage is many times
this side of maturity. One awaits eagerly the higher stages of
maturing, which, in Development, Miss Bryher leads one to
anticipate.
MARIANNE MOORE


BRIEFER MENTION
a
THE NARRow House, by Evelyn Scott (12mo, 221 pages; Boni & Live-
right) is a microscopic anatomy of unpleasant family-life. With vigorous
perceptions and definite psychology, this new-world novelist leads us,
champingly, from parlour unto bedroom and from bedroom unto toilet.
Childbearing, potato peeling, underwear soiling, and heaps of other im-
portant and accepted processes for some time included in the Canon of
Nature here find a celebrant at once capable and initiate; one feels they
have come into their own. Patches of moonlight and other bits of colour
are, at discreet intervals, competently stitched on.
This young needle-worker boasts, at either elbow, James Joyce and
D. H. Lawrence; each helps.
“Christ died on a cross. She felt sick as with disgust. Good to others.
Hate. Winnie.
"Alice could not bear to think of the children born of Winnie. Bobby
born of Winnie. She could not think of him. Virgin Mary. There
seemed something secret and awful in maternity-some desecration. She
felt the child helplessly intimate with the mother's body. He did not want
her. Other religions. No time to read up. Buddha. Sex. Marriage.
Laurie was an atheist. He wanted her to be perverse.
"Must be something. Nice pictures. Art. Beauty.
"When she said beauty to herself her heart was hard with resentment.
Long-haired men. Rot.”
Before allowing the patient out of his hands good Dr Liveright is said
to have exhibited considerable of a purgative: perhaps that is why the
story may now be observed to fall between so many stools.
After reading this book one is aware what psychology and imagination
compounded can do: one is also painfully in a hurry to get to The New
Amsterdam Dispensary,' there to submit oneself to the ministrations of a
less drastic and probing school of medicine. Those outside the forty-mile
radius can, with propriety, seek relief in Colgate's Peppermint Toothpaste.
KOBIETY (Woman), by Sofja Rygier-Nalkowska, translated by Michael
Henry Dziewicki (12mo, 324 pages; Putnam). It is difficult to wax
enthusiastic over this latest attempt to give American readers an inside
view of “the soul of woman.” Three hundred odd pages, made up in-
discriminately of metaphysics, sentimentality, and an excessive self-
consciousness produce more bewilderment than pleasure, m ore amusement
than respect. The heroine, Janina, is a kind of blue-stockinged Marie
Bashkirtseff, and the record of her adventures can be summed up
in the
single word: futility. Which would be well enough if the book itself did
not partake of that quality. There are, of course, flashes of brilliance,
pages testifying to its author's desire to produce a work of more than
transient value. But the translation does not encourage a belief either in
its significance as literature or its genuineness as psychology.
1 At 214 West 42nd Street.


592
BRIEFER MENTION
Blind Mice, by C. Kay Scott (12mo, 321 pages; Doran) a novel of definite
merits, develops its theme without parade or ballyhoo, and reveals character
in shrewd cumulative touches, rather than in cynical labels. Out of ma-
terials drawn from human experience, the author discloses how inextricably
blended are the commonplace and the crucial threads of existence, and how
futile the task of separating them, once the shuttle has moved on. In his
narrative method, effects are built up by a succession of minute strokes,
analogous to the stippling process in the graphic arts. Thus each incident
is rendered increasingly significant in retrospect, and Mr Scott emerges
with a competent achievement to his credit.
THE SISTERS-IN-LAW, by Gertrude Atherton (12mo, 341 pages; Stokes)
starts with the San Francisco earthquake and ends with the armistice.
Mrs Atherton, often crude in style but with a certain dynamic earnestness,
sets up the old Californian aristocracy as a protagonist and observes how
the rapidly swirling environment of modern democratic days affects it.
The love affair of the two sisters-in-law which centres about one man
affords Mrs Atherton opportunities for a deal of melodramatic writing.
War-torn France becomes the spiritual battle-ground of the two women.
The book is an excellent marginal note upon the shifting pages of great
days.
THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS, by Storm Jameson (12mo, 306 pages; Century).
A young man blinded by the war looks back upon his boyhood and his life
at the University of London, and with a certain poignant force, recalls it
all in this novel. This is the story written by a woman able to embody
her hero-certainly more vividly than she does her heroine. There is a
good deal of bitter contemplation of the social system, eloquent and angry,
even in more trivial matters, where satire would have been sufficient. One
gets the point of view of the excited and shocked intelligentsia of under-
graduate life who know how Utopia could be arranged if people weren't
such villainous fools.
ORIGINAL SINNERS, by Henry W. Nevinson (12mo, 204 pages; Huebsch)
is a collection of eight short stories ranging in style from that of Strind-
berg's Historical Miniatures to that of Beatrice Fairfax's handling of a
sexual drama. Astonishingly uneven as they are in merit the best of them
betray a steel pen which has been skilfully dipped into the author's pro-
vocative thesis: “There is nothing to astonish us in Original Sin. What
overwhelms us with incredulous amazement is the fleeting apparition of
virtue.”
Satan's Diary, by Leonid Andreyev (12mo, 263 pages; Boni & Liveright).
This posthumous novel of Andreyev's but betrays the exhaustion of the
big mind toward the end-an exhaustion not visible in his final work for
the theatre. With the method, obvious enough to be crude, of bringing
Satan to earth disguised as an American millionaire he launches bitter
invective against humanity in general, and such convenient factors of it
as the Church and the American temperament in particular. Passages
testify in truth to the quality of the intelligence behind the book.


BRIEFER MENTION
593
CAPTAIN MACEDOine's DAUGHTER, by William McFee (12mo, 326 pages ;
Doubleday, Page) is a tale which will lift out of his chair, after keeping
him there for two hours, any one capable of being moved by the narrative
power of the English language. For this reason it is peculiarly unfor-
tunate that the author, a man of distinctive talents, should openly elect
to ape the manner of Joseph Conrad. Comparisons are always odious.
THE GATHERING OF THE FORCES, by Walt Whitman, edited by Cleveland
Rodgers and John Black (illus., 2 vols., 8vo, 666 pages; Putnam) a selec-
tion from Walt Whitman's writings as editor of the Brooklyn Eagle in
1846-8, is apparently designed for collectors and students of the poet.
The collector, while deploring the too obvious fallibility of proof-readers,
will be gratified by a format done in the best Putnam style-perhaps also
by the nine illustrations, though few of these are new. As for the student,
he is likely to feel that he stands upon a peak in Darien, amazed that there
is so much water as yet practically untraversed by biographical barks since
Charles M. Skinner called attention to it in the Atlantic Monthly in 1903;
but (to drop the figure) he will be constantly irritated by the journalistic
and unscholarly manner in which the material is presented. An editorial
craftsmanship which groups a leader on The Poor of Scotland under
England's Oppression of Ireland and which confuses Whitman's 1872
Preface with that of his First Edition betrays, quite as plainly as do
Mr John Black's fulsome Foreword and Mr Cleveland Rodgers's enthusi-
astic sketch of Whitman's Life and Work, the fact that these collaborators
are journalists and Whitman-lovers and not editors in any strict sense of
the term. Nothing in the volumes indicates any research, beyond an
examination of the Eagle files, in the field invaded. And yet the Whitman
text presented, material which hitherto could be seen only in Brooklyn,
will be welcomed not only by students of the poet, seeking to understand
his mental growth, but also by students of American history, manners,
journalism, literature, drama, music, and art.
The Book of JOB: Its Origin, Growth and Interpretation, by Morris Jas-
trow, Jr. (illus., 8vo, 369 pages; Lippincott) is a literal English transla-
tion of the much-mouthed Hebraic text which has served moralists as a
scaffold on which to twine their creeds and poets a tree on which to hang
their harps. Following the policy of an earlier work, The Gentle Cynic, on
The Book of Ecclesiastes, the author has shown with a wealth of scholarship
how history has been suborned by pietistic historians. It is an illuminating
exposé of Job's recusant scepticism, and brilliantly demonstrates that this
man who dwelt in the land of Uz was as impatient with God when alive
as he has been patient with his biographers since his death.
a
Caius GRACCHUS, by Odin Gregory (12mo, 172 pages; Boni & Liveright)
is the widely-hymned blank-verse tragedy of the fall of the Roman tribune.
Though it heroically attempts to revive Roman customs and Elizabethan
diction, the drama, for all its heroism, succeeds chiefly in resurrecting the
iambic pentameter. Were the play less grandiloquently fashioned we
should be less painfully aware that the nobility of antiquity has fallen
amid the ashes of the archaic.


594
BRIEFER MENTION
PRECIPITATIONS, by Evelyn Scott (12mo, 103 pages; Nicholas Brown).
Mrs Scott is at her best in some of the individual poems. To be specific,
those which deal with her Brazilian experiences achieve a vague and sur-
prising loveliness. The volume loses when taken as a whole; it seems to
borrow its colour from the bad poems rather than from the good. The
forms in which her verse is cast are interesting but not especially original;
she appears to have made good use of the unwritten textbooks of the New
Poetry. Her own volume, indeed, might very well be used as a textbook.
The Song of ROLAND, done into English by Charles Scott Moncrieff (12mo,
131 pages; Dutton). Here, line for line and almost word for word, the
Old French epic poem has been made into English. So far as the English
language will allow, the original verse form has been kept with its endings
of assonance and its short, sharp iambic stresses. As verse, the result is
ragged, but the story emerges entire, with its mediaeval spirit unbroken,
a fit song for Normans going into battle. The book is also worthy of note
for its introduction by Mr G. K. Chesterton, its preface by Mr Saintsbury,
and for the three fine, sombre-spirited poems dedicated by Mr Moncrieff
to warrior friends of his own whose death has put him in the mood for
Charlemagne's grief over Roland and Oliver.
a
Red Earth, by Alice Corbin (12mo, 58 pages; Seymour, Chicago), is a
volume of brief poems which deal with the life of the mesa, and which
include several translations from New Mexican folk-songs, both Spanish
and Indian. The author handles blank verse, rhyming lyrics, and ballad
measures with equal skill, and seems to draw on even a greater technical
proficiency in the writing of vers libre. Despite this the book is very
uneven; it is stale and flat at times but may rise to sombre elevations, as
in Una Anciana Mexicana and in the title poem.
The FORERUNNER, His PARABLES AND Poems, by Kahlil Gibran (12mo,
64 pages, with five drawings; Knopf). This wisdom-of-the-East type
of literature should be taken with reserve. It will always border on the
manufactured mysticism of a Tagore. Often there is nothing so signifi-
cant, so fraught with echoes and overtones, as a pointless parable which
withers and dies softly; such things are apt to edify. ... On the other
hand, the five drawings have honestly attained the dreamy. The com-
position of large and small figures—a trick of Rops—gives us a perfect
misrepresentation of life. Occasionally, out of an anguish of nudes,
some detail, like a hand or a mouth, exists with an almost startling clarity.
Gibran's unique invention, the cosmic cloud, often appears to advantage in
these drawings.
WOMAN AND THE New RACE, by Margaret Sanger (12mo, 234 pages;
Brentano) summarizes the arguments for, and disposes of the arguments
against, birth control in a sane and logical manner. A successful attempt
to meet the problem with facts, instead of hysteria and spurious emo-
tionalism.
1
Mrs. Scott has informed the Editor of The Dial that when in Brazil she was not conversant
with the vers libre movement.


MODERN ART
T seems to me that there has been less in the public prints this
and also less private discussion. I myself certainly wrote less and
talked less about it and possibly because of my defections I exag-
gerate the muteness of others. I talked less because circumstances
not within my control—including an influenza that descended
upon me the night of the opening reception—prevented me from
getting sufficiently acquainted with the exhibition to talk of it.
The exhibition as now alphabetically arranged is not a thing
any one can get hold of easily. Even Mr Walter Pach, who had
better and more opportunities of seeing what the collection was
made up of than most of us, begins his review of it with the usual
apology: “Let me now record some notes of a first glance at the
exhibition, saying, even before I begin to transcribe them, that
they are of the most fragmentary incompleteness.” Mr Pach sets
the example for all Independent reviewers and his phrases will
doubtless be the stock phrases as long as the Independents provide
their present chaotic entertainment.
Now I have vented my private grievances as a critic against the
alphabetical system of hanging pictures, before this, and do it
again only because my especial difficulties with the show this
year
have emphasized my fear that the institution is in for a diminish-
ing vogue or a diminished power unless its policy be changed or
adapted. I don't pretend that my lack of support
this
was entirely accidental, was a menace, but it is obvious that pub-
licity is a necessity to modern movements and that justice is not
being done to contributors when they are curtailed in their share
of it. Justice, of course, is the reason in the first place for the
alphabetical system, but perfect justice, some thinkers hold, is im-
possible on earth, and the best that humanity can do in that line
is to strike for practicality. The artist who exhibits, exhibits that
his work may be seen and bring him honour. At the Independents
it is an hundred to one chance that an artist's effort will be killed
by something next door and this rampant injustice is far worse
than the possible danger of favouritism in hanging that would
year, which


596
MODERN ART
occur were groups allowed. It is unfair to enlarge upon the addi-
tional injustice that is meted out to the unfortunates whose works
happen to hang in the particular rooms that have no daylight, for
of course the society secured the best rooms it could—but the
drawback must be mentioned, at least, as a contributing illustration
of the difficulties in administering perfect justice.
The Independents, I rejoice to say, continues to be as pleasant
an exhibition to visit as ever, particularly if one be accompanied
by friends, and if one has dined comfortably. There are so many
droll pictures supplied by rural candidates for fame that the blasé
find it the easiest thing in the world to be agreeably facetious over
them. But the entertainment strikes no higher note, and I grow
more and more convinced that it cannot with the present accursed
system of hanging. A foolish picture is still more foolish in
absurd surroundings, but a subtle or rare thing is simply negatived
out of sight. Light entertainment in the arts is quite all right and
the institution that provides it is entitled to a certain degree of
blessedness, but light entertainment ought not to be the exclusive
mission of the Society of Independents. It could be, if it chose,
a theatre of ideas, as well.
At the first exhibition, now four years ago, by dint of going
many times to the galleries at odd half-hours and by the extraordi-
nary luck of having an entire afternoon free upon the last day of
the show, I was enabled to compile a list of fifty works I considered
promising or significant by artists whose names were unfamiliar.
At the second exhibition I had something of the same luck in regard
to time and again compiled such a list, but it was again published
after the show had run its course and too late to profit much the
artists I had hoped to assist. I don't intend my complete fluke of
this year to discourage me in regard to these new people who grab
for the Independent exhibitions apparently as drowning men grasp
for straws and shall continue my custom of looking into all the
nooks and crannies of the Waldorf Roof Garden no matter how
badly lit in search of likely new people, but I begin to feel that
with the best intentions in the world critics are powerless to save
these drowning talents. Painters exhibit, as I said before, in order
to be known, and it is conceivable to me that after trying for four
or five years and finding that only the foolish are acclaimed by the
hectic first night reception mob and in the first journalistic accounts


HENRY MCBRIDE
597
of the show, the unnoticed serious strugglers might relinquish their
grasp upon the straw and sink resignedly beneath the waters.
There are some stern moralists, I believe, who hold that geniuses
who drown are not geniuses, but I am not so stern. In fact I orig-
inally conceived of the Society of Independents as a life-saver.
Mr ARNOLD BENNETT once said, I believe, that the principal
reason for his visit to America was his desire to see Winslow
Homer's water-colours. If Mr Bennett still maintains his interest
in the use of this medium he should pay a second visit to this coun-
try. We are beating the world in water-colours, just now, and
English journalists who, like Mr Bennett, care to introduce deft
allusions to genuine celebrities into their sketches, should know the
name of Mr John Marin and all that it represents. Mr Marin
carries the art to a new high level. He looks down upon the sea
from the cliffs and paints the turbulent waters and the shifting skies
with a breadth and smashing feeling for harmony that matches the
achievements of a Beethoven, really. Like certain other gifted
stylists, however, he is perpetually out-distancing all but the most
agile of his admirers, and the latest exhibition of his work, just
open in the Daniel Galleries, will cause gasps of anguish to the
collectors who are just beginning to appreciate Mr Marin's work
of ten years ago. It is rude, strong, primal, and American. Come
along over, Mr Bennett—or you, Mr Somerset Maugham, I believe
you like art—and see it.
HENRY MCBRIDE


MUSICAL CHRONICLE
TW
THE orchestra was placed, during the free concerts conducted
by David Mannes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Satur-
day evenings in January and March, at one end of the gallery that
overhangs the great stone entrance hall. To the audience was
assigned the remainder of the gallery, the floor of the hall, the
broad staircase at the foot of which erects itself in its dream of
green bronze L'age d'arain, the entire edifice, if it chose to wander
from the music to the tranquil illumined rooms hung with the
canvasses and set with the statuary. It was permitted to comport
itself much as it would. A restraining hand had been laid, it
appeared, on the officious guards. Stentorian commands did not
shatter the spell of art. Detective-like glances did not pursue
visitors who stepped close to works to examine them in detail.
Babylon the Great, in the guise of blue-tunic'd attendants, was
fallen, and reduced to gently making aisles for promenaders. Folk
were permitted to stand, to lean, to sit, to wander about at will.
Folk sat at the bases of sarcophagi; rested their backs and necks
against granite Egyptian deities. Crowds stood, heads lifted or
depressed, while from the gallery tones broadened and fell; crowds
circulated slowly, stilly, or sat on grass-mats in the staircase. One
saw families standing grouped; a pair of lovers sitting close and
lost on the steps. One saw women with babies in their arms. An
invalid or two was pushed about in a wheel-chair. A child sucked
a bottle. Against a fish-shaped Egyptian sculpture there crouched,
her bobbed head upturned ecstatically, a girl with powerful, pro-
truding modern features. Another, trim in a dolman, dreamily
leaned her arm at the foot of the Rodin boy, and listened to the
sounds of the Siegfried Idyll that filled the hall.
There was a pleasant ease, a respectful quiet pervading the place.
And, as scarcely ever, the music came fresh and direct. It came
with naturalness and inevitableness; it was become again a simple
and nourishing thing; an integral part of life. Music was again
a thing like nutrition, or love, or sickness and age, a form of the
natural process. Not even the fact that the performances were
mediocre, the programmes routine, the brasses uncertain, detracted


PAUL ROSENFELD
599
vitally from its realness. Music was for a moment again what
the concert-hall prevents it from remaining always. For here, no
admission fee was demanded. There was no exhibition of an
audience by means of music. There were no boxes and no galleries,
no preening of bedizened gargoyles, no airs of painful distinction,
no ermine capes, no self-consciousness of the attendance. Music
alone had the road. And there was no virtuosity. The orchestra
was hidden from the greater part of the audience. Music was given
in a spirit of self-effacement. No performer trod before the gather-
ing and bade it, silently, watch him perform. No virtuoso used
music to glorify himself. Mannes, it was evident, wished only to
make music for those who wanted to hear it, and forget themselves
and him. And so, as far as it is within his power to do so, he let
music live.
And then, the museum that night did not interrupt, as does the
concert-hall, the style of life. The concert-room, after all, is an
artificial place. It requires a certain fixed attitude; a “musical”
attitude. Our civilization has made art useless; it has taught us
to cast from us our quotidian habits as we enter the houses of art,
and cast from us our spiritual selves as we leave them again. The
concert-room is become a sort of bayou of life, in which the inces-
sant coursing of the elements is arrested, a manner of dark sack
into which folk crawl for a few hours, in order to forget their prob-
lems. The uncomfortable positions into which one is crowded in
the stalls, the lowered lamps, the nabisco decorations, augment the
artificiality of the place. But in the museum, the sick cast which
the concert-hall has given music, the guilty feeling, the sense of
futility, which it manages to infuse even into the pleasure it gives,
were absent. But they were in abeyance not because the place was
a museum. The museum was only a makeshift; any place of ordi-
nary concourse would have better served, had such a one been
available for David Mannes' purpose. It was the fact that the mu-
seum during those hours in January and March when his band
performed there, was permitted to take on the character of a place
of ordinary concourse, in which folk might behave much as they
do in familiar places of concourse, in which folk might come direct
from their toil, with their families or their friends, that let music
again appear in her person. The style of life remained intact.
Life as it is commonly lived, life as it exists for the general, con-
а


600
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
tinued unbroken. And, amid all these forms of natural existence,
amid the babies and the invalids, the lovers and the family men, the
unconstrained attitudes and the sculptures, the rough modern coats
and the antique basalts, the nursing-bottles and wheel-chairs, the
bobbed hair and the modern faces of the city-dwellers, music, too,
floated on the great current of reality, became modern, became a
functioning organic thing.
But chiefest among the causes for the genuineness of the expe-
rience, there was the fact that one felt oneself, these evenings, one
in
purpose with men and women; not, as one does in the concert-
hall, even when it is most crowded, separate from them. Here,
there was no property distinction; one felt oneself part of human-
ity, part of the crowd not removed from the fundamentals of exist-
ence; a member of the great community. It is to men as members
of the great community that music addresses itself; it is of music,
as well as of joy, that Schiller might have sung: “Deine Zauber
binden wieder, Was die Mode streng geteilt.” So, one found one-
self prepared to permit it to do its gracious work of sympathy.
One knew the will of art. And, in a sudden illumination, one
saw what music, what art, might again come to be to all the
world, might it only be brought out from its stuffy cavern, wrested
from the hands of those who use it to exhibit themselves, and
made to speak directly to folk in places where life is lived.
Hubert Trench it was who fabled an Apollo "in furred
raiment” entering an English tavern and sitting at meat with
mariners; Karol Szymanowski has written music that, unintention-
ally enough, makes one picture a transmogrification equally charm-
ing. When the young Polish composer arrived here in February,
.
one of a joyous trio of comets about to shoot through the musical
system of New York, and disappear again eastward, he brought
with him several recently completed works, a new pianoforte sonata,
three Masques for the same instrument, and three Myths for violin
and piano, La fontaine d'Arethuse, Narcisse, and Pan et Dryade;
it is these classical fantasies that call to mind demigods become
septentrional and quaintly transformed. Szymanowski's talent is
a pre-eminently cool and elegant one; elegant not with the banal
and fatigued grace of the Russian salon school, that
of
mournful vulgar banqueters on “lucent syrups tinct with cinna-
group


PAUL ROSENFELD
601
mon," but with an instinctive taste and refinement and politeness
that go far to make good a lack of strength and fire and avoirdupois.
He is the elegist among the ultramoderns. The piercing harmonies
and acidulous colours and rugged masses of the newest music be-
come, under his light and sensitive touch, a little wan and noble
and melancholy. Ravel is recalled by this work; and yet, beside
it, Ravel's music appears curiously warm and Hebraic. One feels,
in these pleasantly metallic and pale-silver tones, the person of the
Polish gentleman, the slavonic aristocrat with his racial daintiness
and anaemia and mournfulness, his pastel-like colouration.
In consequence, Szymanowski's Arethusa and Narcissus and
Pan appear in one's imagination in fantastic guise. The world
which violin and piano summon up is not the world of flooding
dayshine and dry warmth in which the animal deities of Greece are
usually imagined disporting themselves. On the contrary, the
capricious cascades of the music make one to feel himself far from
the light and heat of Mediterranean lands, make one to feel him-
self in a northern clime of short days and long winters. It is the
atmosphere of the salon of a Polish château, a château, say, some-
where outside the gates of Warsaw, with which perhaps involun-
tarily enough, Szymanowski has succeeded in suffusing his com-
positions. The writhing of the dryad in the arms of the god, the
passionate maladif efforts made by Narcissus in the attempt to
embrace the unsubstantial image mirrored before him, appear to
transpire in a room with a huge chimney-piece, before windows
without which a snowy landscape stretches away in the twilight.
Arethusa, without a doubt, is a Comtesse, lovely, perhaps, as the
perennial Potocka; Narcissus is certainly a high-born young com-
poser, of the race of Chopin, and pupil of Moritz Moskowski; Pan
is a pan, the dryad has yellow braids, and he clutches her by the
light of candles sconced in a scintillating chandelier.
The direct stimulus to the composition of these tenuous, chlorotic,
and yet novel and shimmering poems appears to have been the
violin technique of another one of the musicians in whose company
Karol Szymanowski arrived in America, Paul Kochanski. This
latter, who is not so much a violinist as an artist, and whose pro-
digious talent was manifested by the powerful grasp with which
he took hold of the Bloch sonata for violin and piano at the
première of that work, has invented, it appears, a novel fashion of


602
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
playing his instrument. He can play harmonics with utmost facil-
ity; he has subtilized the colours of the instrument so much that
one gets veritable pleasure from listening to that usually most
boring of musical tools. Szymanowski has used Kochanski's
virtuosity constructively. His Myths, a little like Bloch's sonata,
make one forget the old odious habits of the violin. The strings
tinkle and shine; cascades of silvery bubbles foam from them in
Narcisse; all three poems are full of capricious, mandolin-like
music; cool, melancholy, and yet pricking.
Nevertheless, the fact of a mere rediscovery of the violin does
not alone explain the genesis of these pieces. For Szymanowski's
recent compositions for the piano, the third sonata, and the three
Masques—Scheherazade, Tantris der Narr, and Eine Don Juan-
Serenade, like the violin-poems, begin to mark out a distinct route
in music. They, too, have the individual character which has
hitherto been wanting in the music of the young Pole. Even the
second piano sonata, played here last year for the Society of the
Friends of Music by Arthur Rubenstein, was, it will be remembered,
somewhat amorphous in style. Here, as in some of his songs, Bünte
Lieder and the setting of six lyrics of Hafiz, one felt Szymanowski
in quest of a style; not by any means possessed of one. But in the
third sonata, with its capricious fugue on a theme that recalls the
shrilling of some fantastic dream-bird, and in the Masques, with
their ironic undertone, a new procession into musical terra incognita
appears to be beginning in earnest. The sonata would seem to
promise a new creative series of piano-sonatas, outrageously diffi-
cult, cool, acidulous, and firm. The three Masques, certainly, are
among the most amusing and hard of recent works for the piano.
The interplay of the two moods which each of them expresses, for
each of these pieces contrasts two emotions, a secret one, and
another, ostentatious and protective, is worked through with con-
summate cleverness. Scheherazade, full of the fear of death,
forces herself to make brilliant and intriguing gestures, to whip
her emotions into dazzling play, to charm her tyrant into forgetful-
ness; but under the apparent animation and passion and enchant-
ment, there lurks the old, gnawing terror, and returns upon her
constantly. Tantris der Narr, which follows the motif of the
drama of Ernst Hardt, interweaves in like fashion the loud
laughter of the pretended zany, the rattling of his bells, the hair-


PAUL ROSENFELD
603
brained port, and the terrible emotion of love which threatens at
every moment to surge up and tear from his face the mask. And
Don Juan, the man who fares distractedly through the world in
vain search of the woman able to make him experience really, and
turns disappointed and untouched from each new conquest, twangs
his mandolin in pretended passion, tries to augment his cleverly
donned frenzy, proffers fiery theatrical declaration upon declara-
tion; and, the immediate object attained, slinks away again dis-
gruntled and wearied and bored.
What it is that has permitted Szymanowski to take hold of the
opportunity which the violin-playing of his friend proffered him,
and compose his charming Myths, is nothing other than the ability
to contact which seems to have developed in him since the war.
It was lack of vital contact that made his earlier work brainspun
and precious. But something appears latterly to have happened
to him, and touched his work into geniality. Perhaps too, modern
French music has helped stir in his being, and urged him forward
in his proper paths. Whatever it is that has freed him, and much
it does not matter, henceforth we may look for the steady gush of
a new rivulet of music in the north. How much of a flood we may
permit ourselves to expect of this urbane and delightful talent, it is,
of course, as yet a little too early to ascertain. The benevolent
Prunières, ready to declare that the mantle of Chopin promises
speedily to fall on the shoulders of Szymanowski, seems to us some-
what reckless in his auguries. Chopin was, after all, part French-
man, and our good friends the Poles on the whole have not yet
learnt to labour, to give themselves in work. There are indubitably
whole regions in the personality of Karol Szymanowski that have
not yet been mobilized, and set aglow, and it seems possible they
will have to wait long for incandescence. But that there is inflam-
mable matter there, of that we can be well assured. We know
that, should it ever be spontaneously combusted entire, there might
come to birth a new Poland, a Poland different from the Poland of
Paderewski, a Poland which we shall be able to love. Not the least
of the reasons for which we must be grateful to Szymanowski, is
that he makes that hope of a speedy Polish contribution to Euro-
pean culture appear not entirely chimerical.
PAUL ROSENFELD
a
a


THE THEATRE
BETWE
ETWEEN The Kid and The CABINET OF DR CALIGARI, the
films have provided all the necessary thrills for a month. Mr
Chaplin's delicacy and general dearness, young Mr Coogan's in-
genuous talents, and a touch of fantastic imagination throughout
the piece make it priceless. It is humanity triumphant; and the
German film about Caligari is something else. It hardly matters
whether this film is great art. For the first time the arts of design
have been applied, in their most radical form, to the film, and the
Expressionists of the German group known as Der Sturm have,
as if by accident, solved the problem of the three-dimensional
moving picture. I wonder whether the Société Anonyme could
do what Der Sturm has done; and equally whether an American
producer would give them half a chance.
G.S.
THE MIDNIGHT ROUNDERS of 1921 is a phenomenon of socio-
logical rather than aesthetic interest. Before prohibition this kind
of thing used to be rather well done; now it isn't. Why? Not
all of us were drunk all of the time and yet things used to look
“good”; their beauty cannot have dwelt wholly in the head of the
beholder. One has a hunch the management used to make their
drinks pay and used to put on the stage some of the accruing iron
They certainly don't now. But does taste cost such a lot,
too?
Tot Qualters sports a figure as cute as her name.
men.
In Mary Rose the astute knight has turned out "a good thing."
Ruth Chatterton, as the touched young party of nubile years and
proportions, has, in modelling her sumptuously organed exit upon
the unorganed and unorgandied Après Midi d'un Faune, bestowed
that exotic (or is it erotic?) hint without which even Mary Roses
had not smelled so sweet.
In Blue Eyes a tag-end and bob-tail company sucks under the
ebullient-to-the-last Lew Fields. And they seem to be not wholly
unaware of the universal dreadfulness of the show, themselves, and


THE THEATRE
605
their costumes; at least that is how I interpret their constant jig-
gling around the stage. They appear to hope that by moving in a
sufficiently rapid and confused manner the immense fact that they
are doing nothing at all may be obscured. In this laudable so to
speak rear-guard diversion they completely fail. Mollie King
insinuates a great deal ; Lew Fields, that benignant boy which is
middle-age, beams more.
Lady Billy, despite the minute presence of Mitzi and the mag-
nitudinous presence of Sydney Greenstreet, strikes twelve not so
much in their apposite persons as in the skilful lettings in of oil-
paintings as transom-windows. A turn worth seeing.
The Bat again demonstrates what good sport melodrama can
give. In the first act one starts whole squadrons of hares, but in the
last the large rabbit is at length duly unsleeved.
FRANCINE LARRIMORE almost justifies Nice People, though
not, I confess, her own all too Nice regeneration. However, it is
well to know that Mr Randolph Hearst is not the only one who
can so season a sermon as to persuade the worst of us to eat it up.
Frederick Perry, when he makes a noise like a papa, is dear.
THE ROSE GIRL includes a ballet “conceived and staged by
Michel Fokine” wherein Lopokova performs. Apparently she for-
got to tell The Learned Russian that The Good Lord had, for better
or for worse, turned her out a toe-dancer. But anyhow he might
have refrained from those ladies of the chorus, thick as North
River ferry-boats at 5:30 p. m. amongst which he has ordained that
our Lydia shall chug her complicated and perilous way. Under
the disintegrating atmosphere of America and Morris Gest a clever
man has come to "conceive” as wearisomely as he dances. As to
Lydia Lopokova, my heart refuses to accept that the birdlike and
quintessential and agitated steps of her whom Petroushka so right-
fully adored shall lead but to rose-water for keeps. Somebody give
the girl a show!
Shep Camp and Louis Simon suggest, agreeably, billiard balls.
Their kellies round them off.
S.T.


COMMENT
"Williams' first suggestion was that someone give Alfred Kreym-
borg one hundred thousand dollars.”
W. C. BLUM
WHA
HAT do you know? Somebody's gone and done it. Alfred
Kreymborg and Harold Loeb announce An International
Magazine of the Arts to be printed in Italy and sold all round
the block. And how much is $100,000 in lire, just now?
66
'Tirra lirra,' by the river
Sang Sir Alfred Kreymborg.”
Money always did breed like a rabbit, but Alfred's pocket is some
hutch. All of which goes to support dear Dr Blum's opinion that
Dr Williams knows what he is talking about. [And if this almost
too obvious coup de génie, this modern transmutation of metals,
this Poggism' in literature, exhibits Mr Kreymborg, and so his
advocate, in a white blaze, may not this Rutherford Aesculapian
be right about his flying boy, too? May not Robert McAlmon’
also be capable of great decisions?] Before all this blew out, I
had, I confess, been so blind as to see in Friend Blum's mash but
another case of professional esprit de morgue. Hang together or
hang apart: Dr Franklin, Dr Chekhov, Dr Williams, Dr Blum.
[In re Blum on Williams, certain low fellows have tried to
piece out a sort of family-relationship. Just because both these
gentlemen happen to sport the same pair of initials, the genealogi-
cally inclined have made as if to smell nepotism. There has been
talk of an obscure person by the name of Trott,' said to be
Hippocrates-in-Ordinary to the Princess Hotel, Hamilton, Ber-
muda. The burnished names of Henry Huttlestone Rogers and
of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, veteran habitués of that resort,
have, quite unnecessarily, been dragged in. That there does (or
1 Secretary-Treasurer's Query: Ponzistry?
? Cf. note 1, page 608.
Apparently Dudley Cox Trott, member of the Bermuda Medical Service,
is the physician alluded to.
3
8


COMMENT
607
e time did) and upon a vexed Bermoothe and in conjunction
The Princess Hotel flourish a medical man by the name of
Trott too many people already know. But as to his forming a
further pharmaceutical link between these two writing doctors—
Scammony, say I, Scammony! And though The Dial, it is true,
be indeed edited urbi et orbi, yet 13th Street carries on, thank
,
Ingersoll, with no subvention from Popery and with no vile knowl-
edge of nepotism.]
There has been considerable speculation as to the significance of
Mr Kreymborg's excellent tag, The Broom. Some, taking off from
the poet's vigorous biceps and verses, have erroneously concluded
that The Broom is to be another Scourge of God. The Kaiser's affair
having proved, so far as cleaning up the pantry goes, a bit of a
fizzle. But these folk either forget or wilfully ignore The Sun-
wise Turn Bookshop. The Sieges-Allée in orange phosphate. No,
Messrs Loeb and Kreymborg are not that kind. Their talents are
cast in sunnier ways.
Alfred and Harold, kings, were exemplary and Saxon: their
have long been (among those capable of appreciating good
things) conjured with. But Messrs Alfred Kreymborg and Harold
Loeb, contrarily enough, plump, in temperament and in taste, for
the Norman. I hope no one will overshoot my meaning: I never
saw, I never expect to see, Alfred Kreymborg (a real pepper-and-
salt American, a live lecture-platform poet) toying with or trying
on any Tooting coronet. He is, simply, not that kind of a boy.
But to show in his cap, as did Geoffrey the Handsome, a sprig of
that popular and golden plant known as Broom, to put on (I speak
vulgarly) golden dog—this has continued through several days the
acute ambition of a heart at tassel arrantly, nay, flauntingly Norman.
And shall we learn to speak of Alfred Yea and Nay? And
shall Sherman, Hackett, Phelps, and Untermeyer (Maumeters
all) be from Holy Land to once ousted? And shall there be
massacres in Acre? And gross insults too? And shall the mothers
of bad poets, having endured since time began all, dumbly, possess
at last one talisman wherewith to hush their dreadful offspring-
the threat that Alfred of the Lion Heart will get them? And
shall our roarer, too, shake his mane amongst lit-up minstrels?
1 "Kind hearts are more than coronets,
And simple faith than Norman blood.”


608
COMMENT
And shall the gutters leap with Malmsey and the heavens flop
with song? And shall there be sweet largesse, buckets and bon-
fires of largesse? I'd give my eyes to see 'em.
And (dropping down several centuries to brass tacks) shall the
Colosseum be saved for the spoken drama? Shall deedy Alfred
hustle out those bastard movies? By
“Le droit qu'un esprit vaste, et ferme en ses desseins
A sur l'esprit grossier des vulgaires humains"?
.
Shall august Lima Beans, toga'd or no, rightfully inherit the Colos-
seum boards? Shall Indiana family life, after Jesus-knows-how-
many grape-juice-nearest-thing-to-purple years, climb into its im-
perial own, and cluck up? Shall beans rather than Christians be
there now podded? And where of old the sands,
red from the print of thy paces,
Made smooth fo