��
�That the earth be made safer for men and more stable ..
Let us lay to its circle
Our fire bolts of thunder, around all the four regions,
Then smite with our arrows of lightning from under.


116
ZUNI FOLK TALES
Lo! the earth shall heave upward and downward with thunder!
Lo! fire shall belch outward and burn the world over!"
In rendering the speeches of the Beloved Gods, Cushing has done
what must have been the only possible thing in his time-given
them a regular, continuous movement, which though it clearly sets
them off from the matrix, does not, I suspect, reproduce the dance
measures which accompanied and controlled them. He managed
to keep the significant structure of Amerind dramatic recitative,
originating in, and out-carrying from, the centres of self-realization,
as in the following speech of the Ancient People of the Dew.
�For long, ere ye found us,
Ye afar sought for water
Drinking dew from our Father
Like deer on the mountain,
And for long, ere ye found us,
Ye wandered in hunger,
Seeking seeds of the grasses
Like birds on the mesa.�
Or again when Pautiwa, the Cloud Sender and Sun priest of
souls, addresses K'yák�lu.
G
�As a woman with children
Is loved for her power
Of keeping unbroken
The life line of kinsfolk,
So shalt thou, tireless hearer
Of all sounds with meaning,
Be cherished among us
And worshipped of mortals
For keeping unbroken
The tale of Creation."
We recognize the saga form as it came to be chanted to the harp
in Europe. But knowing the manner in which the sacred legends
of the Amerind are mingled with melody and dance, I suspect that
these might be more effectively rendered by means of some of the


MARY AUSTIN
117
thunde
18
has on
aleza
bedre
maria
XIZIK
lizados
ber
irregular verse forms in which we modernly express the relation be-
tween emotional and motor impulses. As they stand, the mixed
epic and dramaturgic forms represent an interesting phase of liter-
ary development of which we have no other examples.
There has never been any good reason offered why the episode
cycle of Trojan tales should have been finally consolidated in a
narrative and other Greek cycles have crystallized into drama.
So there is no saying whether epic or drama would have developed
out of the mixed Amerind form. There was however this distinc-
tion of great, if cloudy, significance. In the Greek it was the
speeches which were first freed of melody and slowed down to
conversational tempo, and the matrix which continued to be danced
and sung by the chorus. In Zuni the connective parts were recited
and the speech danced communally. The difference is perhaps the
distinction which marked the drift of social organization in Greece
towards aristocracy and autocracy, in Zuniland towards economic
and political communism.
Many minds must work on the native Amerind material which
Mr Cushing has furnished us before it yields all that it may have
to say to the American seeker after a competent medium for poetic
drama. As it stands it should have its place, a high and important
place, among the world's great tribal monuments.
MARY AUSTIN
IN


BRIEFER MENTION
THE MAN OF GOLD, by Rufino Blanco-Fombona (12mo, 319 pages; Bren-
tano: $2) is a sordid miser who rises for reasons quite unconnected with
merit to the position of Financial Minister of Venezuela. The hands that
thrust him forward are foul, and indeed with the exception of one tragic
and exquisite gentlewoman of the Agualonga family, there is no one in the
book whose motives rise even to the point of being merely under suspicion.
Venezuela, we infer, is a disease, and this book reads like a medical report
of its most virulent stage. There is a dogged, blind, but very real force
which moves the story along to inevitable conclusions, but the society
depicted is that of the last days of Rome, minus their splendour and lack-
ing a height to fall from.
The Norse OF THE WORLD, by Adriana Spadoni (12mo, 256 pages; Boni &
Liveright: $2) is a second novel by the author of The Swing of the Pen-
dulum. Against a background of capital-and-labour discords a modern
love story is trumpeted with a very vigorous horn. Without rising to sym-
phonic heights, it ends on a note of interrogation which is a plagal cadence
more consonant with life than with the artistic handling of it. It never-
theless remains a novel worth reading both for its sympathetic study of
industrial woes and for its analysis of some of the woes of the industrious
human heart.
PROMETHEUS: The FALL OF THE HOUSE OF LIMON: SUNDAY SUNLIGHT,
by Ramon Perez de Ayala, prose translated by Alice P. Hubbard, poems
donc into English by Grace Hazard Conkling (12mo, 224 pages ; Dutton:
$2.50). Gargoyles on a Greek temple! Subtle studies in degeneracy, these
three stories, for all their bitterly ironic endings, have an amazing beauty
about them. They are written with a classic purity of style which still is
modern, rich in colour, supple-phrased, and passionate. De Ayala moulds
his characters sympathetically and then with a fatalistic twist hurls them
to destruction. Pity and its kin, and a vivid horror, cling to the stories
and to the introductory poems which foreshadow the mood of each chapter.
JOHN SILENCE, by Algernon Blackwood (12mo, 345 pages ; Dutton : $2.50)
is a new American edition of five extraordinary tales. Blackwood has a
vast knowledge of psychic lore and uses it legitimately, producing fiction of
a strange and ingenious beauty-in happy contrast with Lodge and Doyle,
who make of kindred materials clumsy and stupid fiction which they solemn-
ly label truth.
THE THIRD WINDOW, by Anne Douglas Sedgwick (12mo, 154 pages;
Houghton Mifflin : $1.50) has genuine distinction, both in style and sub-
stance. The story unfolds with those delicate shadings, those sure flashes,
which betoken the artist in fiction. The ending, however, does not fasten
upon the imagination as does the earlier part of the book-possibly be-
cause one's sympathies refuse to travel the full course of the tragedy.


BRIEFER MENTION
119
THE BOY APPRENTICED TO AN ENCHANTER, by Padraic Colum (illus., 12mo,
168 pages; Macmillan: $1.75) is a re-told tale of the mediaeval legend of
Merlin. Legends, like folk-tunes, are legitimate ground-basses for poly-
phonic variations. But when the variations are largely sophisticated em-
bellishments the listener craves the sweet respite of an unadorned tune.
For this reason fairy stories are about as rare as fairies and Mr Colum's
story does at least a little to people the magic race.
DIARIES OF COURT LADIES OF OLD JAPAN, translated by Annie Shepley Omori
and Kochi Doi, with a preface by Amy Lowell (8vo, 201 pages; Houghton
Mifflin : $5). In this case �old Japan� is the Japan of the year 1000,
when society was fin-de-siècle without having discovered the modern name
for the complaint. Or perhaps the period most closely resembles the France
of the eighteenth century; except for a franker appreciation of romantic
beauty, the diaries of these three noble ladies are remarkably similar to the
letters of Madame de Graffigny or the Marquise du Deffand. Miss Lowell's
preface is, as always, highly intelligent and entertaining.
HIROSHIGE, by Yone Noguchi (4t0, 32 pages, 20 illustrations; Orientalia :
$7) strives to reveal the last of the great Japanese artists through the in-
fcxible medium of western criticism. The author is not equipped for
aesthetics of this sort-he is vague and pointless, and fails to understand
Hiroshige's curious assimilation of western naturalism. But when he looks
at his master through the �black eye of the Orient,� Yone Noguchi is in-
spiring, and with surprising oddities of diction he discloses the mood of the
castern artist in the presence of nature. The book is beautifully printed
and the reproductions are qualitatively as fine as the original prints.
ALL AND SUNDRY, by E. T. Raymond (12mo, 284 pages; Holt: $2.25) pre-
sents the author of Uncensored Celebrities in another omnibus excursion
amid personalities. Without attempting to drive completely around his
subject, Mr Raymond has the faculty for seizing upon a salient angle
capable of shrewd and entertaining treatment. Even where the sketch is but
a peg on which to hang a parable, the result is provocative and sprightly.
A MODERN Book of CRITICISMS, edited by Ludwig Lewisohn (16mo, 210
pages; Boni & Liveright: 95 cents) marshals a cosmopolitan army of
critical crusaders, all kindled with the wish to wrest their holyland from
the twin Turks of puritanism and formalism. The selections are admir-
ably representative, concise, and stimulating.
LITERATURE IN A CHANGING Age, by Ashley H. Thorndyke ( 12mo, 318 pages;
Macmillan: $3) is a scholarly analysis of nineteenth century literature
and the contributing influences which made it what it was. Dr Thorndike
finds the chief Victorian motives to have been religion and social reform,
with all they embraced of doubt, the growth of science, education, and the
position of women. The purpose of the book is not merely to examine the
recent past but to learn from it what to expect of the future. Dr Thorn-
dike expresses a conviction that �if criticism could accomplish this close
linking of the past with the present, it might hope to go farther and chart
the opportunities and invitations for future activity.�


120
BRIEFER MENTION
PASTORALES PARISIENNES, par Guy-Charles Cros (Francois Bernouard, 71
rue des Saints Péres, Paris). �The cold rain beats on the window�, and
perhaps only Cros can so place a line containing no more than this state-
ment, containing no greater novelty, and still give to it the eternal fresh-
ness which is the true gauge of "the classic.� Even to the title this book is
a book of the �just word� and a challenge to testy old gentlemen who
think that the breath of poetry ceased with Gautier, Verlaine, and Heine.
The secret of Cros' genius, for by this time there is no question about its
being genius and not talent or mere verbal aptitude, is perhaps in his
manner of following the perfectly simple presentation of things lying
daily under everybody's eye ... following it, that is, bang into the
immortal line imperturbable as Confucius.
.
ALCHEMY, by Robert Hillyer (8vo, 61 pages; Brentano: $2) is a long poem
divided into four movements, like a symphony. The musical structure
goes much deeper than this; there are main themes and secondary themes,
and skilful restatements in a different key. Hillyer has little to say, but
he says it richly and melodiously. As a result the poem intoxicates one
immediately, like a thin, heady wine; almost as soon, the ecstasy dies away,
leaving no trace, not even a headache.
Poems, by Wilfred Owen (8vo, 33 pages; Huebsch: $1.50) contains be-
tween its narrow covers the most interesting verse, technically and emotion-
ally, that has come out of the war. Technically the volume is important
on account of the experiments in assonance and dissonance. In The
Strange Meeting, Owen mates, quite successfully, words like "hair,"
"hour," and "here," or "tigress" and "progress.� Emotionally he goes a
step beyond Sassoon in his protest against the war. The latter poet, quite
fittingly, has been chosen to write an introduction; he handles his subject
cautiously, seeming to realize that he touches a greater work than his own.
MEDALLIONS IN Clay, by Richard Aldington (12mo, 99 pages; Knopf: $2).
We are told from time to time that the Greeks knew more about love than
we do. If, to-day, we sometimes involuntarily confuse epws with ayam,
,
the Greeks were not open to this confusion and one knows to look in them
for that in which they excelled-wit, the beauty of ritual, and the piercing
quality of imagined satisfactions. Anyte of Tegea appears in this volume,
less piercing, superlative, and �Homeric� than does Meleager, but we have
occasionally in Meleager's Garland, as we have in the Latin poems of the
Renaissance, supreme beauty-and, along with it, sensuality in excelsis.
Those whom the translator designates as the unenlightened, will perhaps
find Vitali's Rome, Meleager's Shipwrecked, and Anyte's To Eros, the
most beautiful poems in the book.
REMINISCENCES OF LEO NIKOLAEVICH Tolstoy, by Maxim Gorky, trans-
lated by S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf (12mo, 86 pages; Huebsch:
;
$1.50) cuts through the layers of incense-laden linen which were rapidly
making the great Russian into a mummy, and shows us the man. An artist
himself, Gorky is content to set down what he has discovered in terms of
reality. His reactions are genuine, and the sum of these intimate steno-
graphic notes is a full-length portrait-gnarled, brooding, and vivid.


BRIEFER MENTION
121
THEODORE ROOSEVELT AND His Time, by Joseph Bucklin Bishop (illus.,
2 vols., 8vo, 1021 pages; Scribner: $10) is a monument for which
Roosevelt left most of the bricks. Mr Bishop has co-ordinated hundreds
of letters and speeches and fashioned them into a running narrative wherein
the dead ex-President tells of his life and times in his own words. It is
a book that will prove of inestimable value to Roosevelt lovers, for the
man they adored is to be found here emphasizing those traits that made
him famous.
THE LIFE OF WHitelAw Reid, by Royal Cortissoz (illus., 2 vols., 8vo, 896
pages; Scribner: $10) involving, as it must, the national and international
affairs of sixty years, cannot fail to be interesting and important. As a
political record, this work is more than adequate, but as a biography it
fails somewhat. It does not leave a clear impression of the personality
which drew to Reid such friends as John Hay, Mark Twain, Theodore
Roosevelt, and Henry Adams. The few letters of these friends and the
quotations from Reid's own writings give but a tantalizing idea of what
the story might be. Moreover it is told in an unfortunate manner. There
are far too many sentences of spineless, even of careless structure, too many
roundabout colloquialisms, to make the reading of the book anything but a
discomfort.
RECREATIONS OF A PsycHOLOGIST, by G. Stanley Hall (12mo, 366 pages;
Appleton : $2.50). A volume revealing the mind of the distingushed
psychologist in its lighter moments�many of which are still heavy enough
to check undue frivolity in the reader. Pleasant fragments of autobiog-
raphy mingle with ventures into quasi-scientific fiction. The longest sketch,
The Fall of Atlantis, varies the Utopian theme by picturing the complete
débacle of an ideal commonwealth through "the nemesis of hyperdemocrati-
zation.� As a whole, the volume is vaguely but disappointingly reminis-
cent of the excellent work done by L. P. Jacks in Among the Idol Makers
and Mad Shepherds. Fortunately, its author's reputation is already
grounded on more substantial foundations.
NATURAL HISTORY STUDIES, by J. Arthur Thomson (illus., 12mo, 244 pages;
Holt: $2). The author felicitously calls this book �an anthology of his
own works.� He writes with Darwinian breadth of knowledge and with
poetic fervour, and presents the phenomena of the seasons, the miracle of
marine life, and the wonders of growth and decay with a human touch
rarely found in the biologist. The descriptions often read like odes, but
are safely governed by scientific truth. The studies are collected for the
elementary student, but the specialist will find them irresistible. The
illustrations are of no value.
TABOO AND GENETICS, by M. M. Knight, Iva L. Peters, and Phyllis
Blanchard (12mo, 301 pages; Moffat Yard: $3) is an examination of so-
ciological phenomena through biological spectacles. Lucidly presented, the
various physiological findings of the three authors form a scientific back-
ground for their study of ancient and modern fetishisms. It is Knowledge
That Every Human Being Should Have, and each provocative chapter is
further enhanced by the addition of a complete and authoritative bibliog-
raphy.


122
BRIEFER MENTION
а
The ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY, by R. H. Tawney (12mo, 188 pages; Harcourt,
Brace: $1.50). A typically solid English presentation of the facts and
arguments in favour of a better order of things, to which the author (�Fel.
low of Balliol College, Oxford, Late Member of the British Coal Industry
Committee�) gives the name of a Functional, as opposed to an Acquisitive,
Society. In the course of these pages it is irrefutably demonstrated that
this would be the best of all possible worlds if every man would labour
not to his own aggrandizement but to the greater glory of society: the
individualistic conception of economics and politics is here the scapegoat.
To sum up: The Acquisitive Society can offend no one but the obtuse con-
servative and the astute radical.
THE PEACE NEGOTIATIONS: A Personal Narrative, by Robert Lansing (illus.,
12mo, 328 pages; Houghton Mifflin : $3) is temperate, calm, and bitter; it
must be notably bitter for those who foresaw five years ago what the former
Secretary of State met and succumbed to in Paris. It is interesting to see
by what small things and by what small men the hopes of the world were
undone, and the book, by failing to give any cogent reason for Mr
Lansing's continuance in office when he saw that the Treaty was going
wrong, is the only explanation so far for Mr Wilson's failure to be dra-
matic when he saw the same thing. It gives the impression of being an
exceptionally honest book; it is certainly important.
BOLSHEVISM: PRACTICE AND THEORY, by Bertrand Russell (12mo, 192
pages; Harcourt, Brace: $3) is the reaction of a theoretical com-
munist when confronted with the practical communism of Soviet Russia.
Bertrand Russell has written the most courageous appraisal that has yet
been made of the accomplishments of the Bolsheviki. Bolshevist Practice
is a record of observations and contributes but little to the descriptions of
Wells, Brailsford, and other observers. In Bolshevist Theory an attempt
is made to interpret the philosophy and underlying tendencies of Bolshev-
ism. The result is a gloomy prophecy which affords but small satisfaction
to those who view Russia as the hope of the world. The conclusions of
this book may be summed up as follows: three issues seem possible from
the present situation. The first is the ultimate defeat of Bolshevism by the
forces of Capitalism. The second is the victory of the Bolsheviki, accom-
panied by the complete loss of their ideals and a régime of Napoleonic
imperialism. The third is a prolonged world war, in which civilization
will go under and all its manifestations (including communism) will be
forgotten.


COMMENT
�We seek only contact with the local conditions which confront
us.
W. C. WILLIAMS
M.
ISS ANNIE WINIFRED ELLERMAN,' aged twenty-six
and in person astringent-sixteen, has, like some other people,
a mind of her own. By way of presenting a slant on her age and
sex, I might mention that she finds the author of Ulysses quite soft
and démodé�"so hopelessly 1914.� Miss Ellerman, it will be re-
marked, is, in her conviction that the world moves, at one with the
Great Pisanese.
Mr Robert Menzies McAlmon is a poet, the singer of The Blue
Mandril. He also has helped out, on off days (�My make-up
emotionally and mentally is spasmodic") certain struggling artists.
(Old Masters like Mr Leftwich Dodge were, on the other hand,
dropped cold: "Get ye to Audrey" were Parsifal's words.) Poeti-
cally he flies too high for some of us to follow: but one recalls
he drove a plane through French horizon blue and that some people
could not even follow Icarus.
Miss Ellerman, chaperoned, quit Slains Castle (the Scotch seat
of Sir John, her able father) for a run about the States. The
Wild West, given the once over, lost caste; but Greenwich Village,
after hard dredging, gave up a valuable solitaire. At The Rabbit's
Conservatorium there was drinking of tea, and the poet-model
blend appealed. Those who know what studio-life is wagged their
noses: wealth remains, after all, so powerful a thing, and artist-
models are, after all, so often young and human. (It is not only
to young girls that studio-life is dangerous: boys also get snatched
away. One recalls, readily, the affair of Ganymede, a mere coun-
try-boy, and that awful Sir Jove.) Well, in this case, thank
heaven, there was nothing unsavoury. The young woman's inten-
tions were refreshingly honourable, and, in due course, marriage
ensued. So far from means assuming, in love's young equation,
any unconstitutional hand, we are told that, up to the last gun, this
,
1 Under the pen name of Winifred Bryher she recently published a volume
entitled Development. It was reviewed in the May number of The DIAL.
>
a


124
COMMENT
Ganymede had gone forward, as to the social and maritime (The
Ellerman Lines, like Elliman's Liniment, are, among sea-faring
people, one might almost say, a household word) aspect of the
powerful Miss, wholly in the dark. At the City Clerk's Office
(February the 14th, in that line a banner day) the cat-confess-
edly an immense one-got her whiskers out of the bag. But, hav-
ing set hand to the plough .
Now it so chanced that about this season Sir John had, with his
daughter's consent, purposed to slide across to Gotham. (The
fact is, The Ellerman Lines run all the way over.) At first blush,
to an outsider, this rings pat enough. What indeed more dégagé?
But Mrs McAlmon is not the one 1914-ly to lie down, even before
a father's blessing. It was her way to bolt on London. Having
packed her boxes, battened down her bonnet, grabbed up her hus-
band and her chaperone, she cleared out.
Thanks to Cavaliere
Marconi, Sir John Ellerman, large as life, was, as the little party
bundled and trundled down the gangway, pointedly on dock. A A
drawn sword (honest Injun: see Court News, The Morning Post,
Feb. 28th) furnished historical relief. The most intrepid of us
have moments
but so soon as the illuminated kid
had (with a 32 H. P. Freud drill) bored behind (in two jiffs, pre-
cisely) that nutty front, she knew-up and down and in and out-
that God was on her side, that Sir John was in the mood to gulp the
whole modern poet, even though that poet came, like Mr McAlmon,
with vers libres all squirming. The fact rolled out (it didn't catch
the croup waiting to) that the vigorous rooster was even then on
his way to Buckingham Palace, there to receive from a markedly
intelligent sovereign the Order of Companions of Honour. The
Ellerman Lines, it will be recalled, during Armageddon kept
plugging.
Now of course everybody knows that Robert Menzies McAlmon
and William Carlos Williams are the editors and owners of Con-
tact. (Contact, by the way, is a magazine.) The first number,
which bubbled out way back last winter, announced as follows:
�We seek only contact with the local conditions which confront
us.� However, those who kept shovelling as far as the front-cover
read too, �We want ... subsidy funds."
Now if anybody
guesses I am about to propose Robert McAlmon as a new hero (of
that authenticated variety which, in the boots of a silver-tail prin-
.
а


COMMENT
125
.
cess, swallows hard and a not-too-nice-to-think-about black bear,
thereby to subsidize centrally and to bolster up generally her old
Dad's kingly, if skewed, head) that body errs. But Contact�even
as The Saturday Evening Post-is printed�howsoever tempera-
mentally�on God's own common or garden paper. And they do
say the retired half-back had heard high talk of low prices in Lon-
don. Wherein, as The Dial has already pointed out, this retired
half-back barked up quite the wrong tree.
Yet every cloud possesses, as we are every one of us aware, a
sterling silver lining. This not yet abrogated natural law here
.
comes into action: Sir John himself here comes into play. Joint
owner (with the less-said-about-him-the-better Lord Northcliffe)
of the London Times and of one or two other unpleasant and
popular sheets, Sir John remains, maugre these impedimenta, a
man of ambition and of spirit. I here have to touch upon a rather
intimate feature of the big fellow's come-day-go-day home life: I
venture upon what is confessedly thin ice only because I see no
other way adequately to put before you the kidney of this magnate.
Are you aware that this genial controller of steamships, railways,
coal-mines, motor-lorries, and West India Docks takes in his own
shaving? While stopping next door (to Number One South
Audley Street; not to Slains Castle) I used, of a fine autumn morn-
ing, to catch, emerging from the freshly-lathered pipes of that
important financier, one noble and familiar verse descanted upon
again and again:
"Since the sails of Greece fell slack, no ships have sailed like
ours.�
So what could be more natural (to us who know the hearty fel-
low) than the abrupt turn things have now taken? Is it then
to be a subject for astonishment and for the feckless opening of
feckless mouths that there should one day have leapt into the
knight's face (as if from out that enchanted Dulcinea del Toboso
pink and blue shaving mug) a twin-six idea, an idea calculated to
raise considerable poetic dust? Why not enunciate, in wiping, the
rest of the trochees too? �Because red-lin'd accounts Are richer
than the songs of Grecian years ?� Die the thought! But Sir John
Ellerman is not the man to boast what he cannot make good: that


126
COMMENT
deep organ would sooner bust than swell�adown the bracken of
Old Scotland or athwart the chimney-pots of Golders Green-
�Since the songs of Greece fell silent, none like ours have risen�
1
before Lloyd's really has turned the trick. But when the master of
three hundred sea-going vessels with a combined tonnage of one
million five hundred thousand puts his hand to the wheel
And let us not forget that Robert McAlmon is as much at home
in the air as is Sir John in the sea.
And let us not overlook the political implication. There has
been of late a deal of light-headed talk about naval rivalry: stupid
fellows have even urged us�the better to obtain a supremacy-
to hock our grandmothers' ear-rings. But clever boys hit on shorter
cuts. If Mr McAlmon is really taking over Lloyd's, why doesn't
Mr Harding take over the British Admiralty? And why not?
There is always behind these great historic events, glorious and
golden as to the poet's dream (and to the layman's) they do ap-
pear, somewhere�howsoever buried beneath the oblivion of hum-
drum things�at least one seamed and tragic figure. But a little
time gone by and one could not anywhere happen on a copy of
Town Topics and remain ignorant of William Carlos Williams.
How often have we read of that engaging and debonair young
Jersey lady-doctor and his boyish pranks? The bouncing apple
of how many satined boudoirs ? But all that, you see, was four
months gone by. Robert McAlmon has gone to London; Contact
is going to London; �local conditions� have gone to pot; and there
is no joy in Jersey.
Reviewing, with a sympathetic young poetess, the whole rending
affair, Dr Williams is reported quite suddenly to have broken off
(and to have plunged into the night) with words which seem to
indicate better than any I could use what a cut-up man the Editor
of Contact now is: �There doesn't seem to be much honey left in
life, that's a fact.� We do not even know whether he caught the
last train.
1 Permit me to refer our Missouri subscribers to Admiral Mahan: The In-
fluence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783. After driving, nose down,
through 581 pages and 21 plates and 4 maps, they will find themselves
where the rest of us�more fortunately located�now are.



THE INDIAL
V
о�а: до
AUGUST 1921
THE TWO HOUSES
BY THOMAS HARDY
In the heart of night,
When farers were not near,
The left house said to the house on the right,
�I have marked your rise, O smart new-comer here!"
The other replied,
�New-comer here I am,
Hence stronger than you with your cracked old hide,
Loose casements, wormy beams, and doors that jam.
"Modern my wood,
My hangings fair of hue;
While my windows open as they should,
And water-pipes thread all my chambers through.
"Your gear is grey,
Your face wears furrows untold.�
"�Yours might,� said the other, "if you held, brother,
The Presences from aforetime that I hold.
"You have not known
Men's lives, deaths, toils, and teens;


128
THE TWO HOUSES
You are but a heap of stick and stone:
A new house has no sense of the have-beens.
�Void as a drum
You stand: I am packed with these,
Though, strangely, living dwellers who come
See not the phantoms all my substance sees.
�Visible in the morning
Stand they, when dawn crawls in;
Visible at night; yet hint or warning
Of these thin elbowers few of the inmates win.
"Babes new-brought forth
Obsess my rooms; straight-stretched
Lank corpses, ere outborne to earth;
Yea, throng they as when first from the void upfetched!
�Dancers and singers
Throb in me now as once;
Rich-noted throats and gossamered fingers
Of heels; the learned in love-lore and the dunce.
"Note here within
The bridegroom and the bride,
Who smile and greet their friends and kin,
And down my stairs depart for tracts untried.
"Where such inbe
A dwelling's character
Takes theirs, and a vague semblancy
To them in all its limbs and light and atmosphere.


THOMAS HARDY
129
�Yet the blind folk
My tenants, who come and go
In the flesh mid these, with souls unwoke,
Of such sylph-like surrounders do not know.�
�_Will the day come,�
Said the new-built, awestruck, faint,
"When I shall lodge shades dim and dumb�
And with such spectral guests become acquaint ?"
�_That will it, boy;
Such shades will people thee,
Each in his misery, irk, or joy,
And print on thee their presences as on me!"


T. FENNING DODWORTH
BY MAX BEERBOHM
-
HIS name is seldom, if ever, on the lips of the man in the
street. But it is a name highly esteemed by men whose good
opinion is most worth having. When the idols of our market-place
shall have been jerked from their pedestals by irreverent Time,
Fenning Dodworth will not be utterly forgotten. His name will
crop up passim, and honourably, in the pages of whatever Grevilles
and Creeveys we have had among us during the past thirty
years. ��Met Fenning Dodworth in Pall Mall this morning. He
told me he had it on the best authority that St John Brodrick
would not be put up to speak on the Second Reading." �"Heard
-
an amusing and characteristic mot of Fenning Dodworth's. He
was dining with some other men at E. Beckett's one night last week,
when the conversation turned on Winston's speech at Oldham.
Beckett said, 'Whatever Winston's faults may be, he has genius.'
That,' said Dodworth, in the silence that ensued, �is a proposition
on which I should like to meditate before endorsing it.' Collapse
of Beckett!" -"Sat next to Dodworth at the Cordwainers' din-
-
ner. He said that he did not at all like the look of things in the
Far East. Later in the evening I asked him point-blank whether
the phrase 'A Government of Pecksniffs, which has been going
the rounds, had been coined by him. 'It may have been,' he said
drily. Characteristic!"
Dodworth's wit is undeniable. It is not, certainly, of the kind
that I like best and rate highest�the kind that pierces without
leaving a wound. Dodworth's shafts are barbed, and, though it
were too much to say that they are poisoned, assuredly they have
been dipped in very caustic acids. And he has not humour. At
least, if he has, he uses it sparingly, and never at all in my pres-
ence. But humour, delightful though it is for current purposes,
lacks durability. There are fashions in humour, and they are
always changing. Wit, on the other hand, being a hard and clean-
cut thing, is always as good as new. Dodworth's gems, set in
the golden tissue of private journals given to the world, will have


MAX BEERBOHM
131
lost nothing of their flash. And among readers of those journals
there will be a great desire to know what Dodworth himself was
like. Keepers of journals are so apt to omit that sort of thing.
What faces, complexions, girths, heights, gaits, voices, gestures,
tricks of manner, shirt-studs, preferences in food and wine, had the
more or less eminent men who were forever pouring into the diar-
ist's ear their hopeful or fearful conjectures about to-morrow
night's Division? The diarist knew, and had therefore no need
to tell himself. But we don't know, and we want to know. That
Division was a turning-point in the world's history? No doubt.
Those more or less eminent men are dust? Alas, yes. But they
were flesh and blood to the diarist, and he could have made them
so to us, too. It may be that the diarists of our own day have held
in mind the omissions of their forerunners, and make a point of
telling themselves just the things that are a matter of course to
them. But it may be otherwise. So I insert here, for posterity,
a note or two on the surface of Fenning Dodworth-who, quite
apart from his wit, seems to me one of the most remarkable, the
strongest and, in a way, most successful men of our time.
Dignity, a Roman dignity, is the keynote of his appearance.
This is undoubtedly one of the causes of his success. Is it also, I
sometimes ask myself, partly a result of his success ? But no.
Twenty years ago (when first I made his acquaintance) he was as
impressive as he is, at the age of sixty, now. Moreover, had his
mind any knack to remould his body, surely he would be taller.
He remains very far below the middle heigh
far below the middle height. But he carries his
head high, thus envisaging the more easily the ruck of common
objects, and making on such of those objects as are animate the
kind of effect which his unaided stature might preclude. One of
his eyebrows is slightly raised; the other is slightly lowered, to
hold in position a black-rimmed single eyeglass. His nose is mag-
nificently Roman. His lips are small, firm, admirably chiselled,
and every word that falls from them is very precisely articulated.
His chin is very strong, and his chest (in proportion to his height)
deep. He has the neatest of hands and feet. Draped in a toga,
and without his monocle, he might pass for a statuette of Seneca.
But he prefers and affects a more recent style of costume�the style,
somewhat, of the Victorian statesmen who flourished in his youth:
a frock-coat and a rather large top-hat, a collar well-open at the


132
T. FENNING DODWORTH
throat and round it a riband of black silk tied in a loose bow. He
a
is a good judge (and, I take it, the sole survivor among judges) of
sherry. Nor is this the only way in which he imparts agreeably
the flavour of a past age. In Thackeray, in Trollope, in the old
volumes of Punch, you will have found a wealth of testimony to
the fact that persons of high importance, meeting persons of slight
importance, often did not shake hands, but offered a finger or two
to be shaken. Incredible, all the same? Then perhaps you will
not believe me when I say that I have been offered two fingers by
Dodworth. Indignantly you ask whether I shook them. I avoid
your eye, I evade your question, I do but say that I am very suscep-
tible to�well, to greatness.
The proof, for me, of Dodworth's greatness is in what he has
achieved. He has made so much out of so little. Many men have
been ten times more successful (in the coarse sense of that word)
without winning a tithe of what he has won. It is often said that
nothing succeeds like success. Dodworth's career offers a corrective
of such cynicism-or would do so if his case were a common one.
I admit that to have excelled in some undertaking is not always
needed for the making of a great prestige. Dukes and princes are
not without honour even if they shall have done nothing or even
if they shall have tried to do something and failed. Dodworth
was not born exempt from the advisability of doing something.
�b. 12. Feb. 1860, 0.s. of J. Dodworth and Rachel, e.d. of W. K.
Fenning, of Norwich.� Thus does he speak, in Who's Who, of his
'
origin; and as he is (albeit less a toady than any man I know) one
of the most finished snobs I have ever met, his reticence tells much.
Old Mr Dodworth was of some town so mean that it is not men-
tionable. And what did he do there? What, for that matter, did
old Mr Fenning do at Norwich? Something dreadful, you may be
sure, from the social standpoint. What school was the young
Dodworth sent to? Obviously to some school, else we should find
�Educ: privately.� There is no mention of any school. The boy
went to some school that is unmentionable. But it may be surmised
that he did well there, for we do find �Educ: Won open scholarship
at Queens Coll., Oxford, 1879.� A presage, this, of coarse suc-
cesses. But mark the sequel! "Second Class in Classical Mods.,
1881; Third Class, Lit. Hum., 1883. Treasurer of Union, 1882.�
He was thrice a candidate for the Presidency of the Union; and I


MAX BEERBOHM
133
happen to have met in later years two of his successful opponents,
both of them men rather prominent in public life to-day. One of
them told me that Dodworth's speeches were the wittiest ever heard
in the Union �or, I do believe, anywhere else;" the other described
them as the most closely reasoned. And neither of these men spoke
of Fenning Dodworth as one who had not lived up to his early
promise. They seemed to pride themselves, rather, on having
always foreseen his ascendency.
Men prominent in public life are mostly hard to converse with.
They lack small-talk, and at the same time one doesn't like to
confront them with their own great themes. I have found that
the best way to put them at their ease, to make them expand and
glow, is to mention Fenning Dodworth. They are all, from their
various standpoints, of one mind about him. Judges think he
would have been an ornament to the Bench, statesmen wish he were
in the Cabinet, diplomatists wish he were one of them, and wish he
could be at Tokyo or Pekin or wherever at the moment his grasp of
things in the Far East and his unfailing dislike of the look of them
would be most obviously invaluable. And all these gods console
themselves with anecdotes of his wit�some mordant thing he said
years ago, some equally mordant thing he said last week. �I remem-
ber,� a Judge will tell you, �one night at mess on the Northern
Circuit, somebody said 'I call Bosanquet a very strong man in Nisi
Prius cases.' Dodworth looked at him in that queer dry way of his,
and said 'Ah! I should hardly go so far as that.'� The judge will
�
then throw himself back in his chair and alarm you with symptoms
of choking. If you ask him why Dodworth did not remain at the
Bar, the answer will be that he got so few briefs: "He was the
best all-round Junior I ever heard, but he wasn't a man for the
jury: you can't saw a plank of wood with a razor. Pity he didn't
practise in Chancery! But I suppose he was right to devote himself
to politics. He's had more scope there."
He has not, certainly, been cramped. For him there has been
no durance within the four walls of the House of Commons. He
contested (I quote again his narrative in Who's Who) �East Grin-
stead, 1888; Dulwich, 1890; Skipton, 1891; Cannock, 1893; Hag-
gerston, 1897; Pontypool, 1898; Peebles, 1900.� He escaped,
every time, the evils of election. (And his good angel stood not
less close to him on the three occasions when he offered himself as


134
T. FENNING DODWORTH
candidate for the London County Council.) Voters, like jurors,
would not rise to him. At length it was borne in even on the
leaders of his party that they must after all be content to rely on
his pen rather than on his tongue. "Has been,� he says in Who's
Who, �for many years a contributor to the leading reviews.� That
is so. Those reviews are not edited by the vulgar. Dodworth's
MSS. have always been printed. I used to read articles by him
when I was yet a schoolboy, and to wonder whether the Liberal
Party would ever again hold up its hideous head. I remember one
entitled �The Franchise Bill And After,� and another entitled
�The Home Rule Peril�And After.� Both seemed to me splendid,
partly perhaps because of their titles. Dodworth was, I believe, the
first publicist to use that magical affix, that somehow statesman-
like, mysterious, intriguing formula, "-And After.� In later
years I began to think him narrow in his views. I became a prey
to that sentimentalism from which in one's schooldays one is
immune, and ceased to regard the ideas of the Liberal Party as
perverse. Dodworth as a political thinker seemed to me lacking
in generosity, lacking even (despite his invariable ��And After�)
in foresight. But the older I grew, and the less capable of his
doctrine, the more surely did I appreciate his command of literary
form. Losing the taste which undergraduates have for conceits and
florid graces, I rendered justice to the sombre astringency of Dod-
,
worth's prose. Whatever his theme, whatever the Liberal Party
was in office proposing, or in opposition opposing, his article was
substantially the same as every other article he had written; but,
like some masterpiece in music, it never palled. With perfect
sobriety and fairness he would state the arguments on which the
Liberal spokesmen had been basing their case; he would make these
seem quite unanswerable; but then, suddenly, like a panther crouch-
ing to spring, he would pause, he would begin a new paragraph:
What are the facts? The panther had sprung. It was always a
great moment. I usually skipped the forthcoming facts and went
on to the point where Dodworth worked back to first principles and
historic parallels and (best of all) quotations from the mighty
dead. He was always very adept in what may be called the sus-
pensive method of quotation. �It was written long ago, by one
who saw further and grasped more firmly than is given to most men
to see and to grasp, that 'the fate of nations is in the conscience of


MAX BEERBOHM
135
a
their rulers.' It is for us to ask ourselves whether, in saying this,
Mr Burke was right.� Or, �In a speech delivered in the Guildhall
at a time when Europe stood in the shadow of great events, a First
Minister of the Crown, as to whom not a few of us are agreed in
wishing that he were alive to-day, said that the art of government
lay in the construction of safeguards. Mr Disraeli never spoke a
truer word.� But presently, with a swoop from the past to the
present, and from the general to the particular, the scholar would
be merged in the panther, and the Liberal Party be mauled so
frightfully that at last even the panther seemed to recoil in pity for
"a Party once great� and to wonder if some excuse could not be
found for it. The excuse, the last sentence of Dodworth's article,
was usually Quos deus vult perdere prius dementat; but sometimes,
more simply and poignantly, Quos deus vult.
Fifteen years ago it seemed to the leaders of his party and to the
veiled prophets in their Central Office, that such a voice as his, if it
were heard daily by a vast public, would be proportionately more
potent than in its monthly addresses to the few. There was an
old-established daily newspaper whose proprietor had just died, and
his estate not yet been wound up. And there was, on one of the
back benches of the Party, a stout, silent man, middle-aged, very
affluent, a Mister. Some word in season, some word in the ear, was
spoken to this man, on a moonless night, by one of the veiled
prophets. That old-established newspaper was acquired. Dodworth
was installed in the editorial chair, gave the keynote to the staff,
and wrote every night a leading article with his own incisive
pen.
But "you cannot,� as the Judge said, �saw a plank of wood with a
razor." To uneducated readers the almost-daily-recurring phrase
Quos deus vult had no meaning. Half-educated readers thought it
meant "The Lord watch between you and me when we are parted
one from another.� The circulation fell by leaps and bounds.
Advertisers withdrew their advertisements. Within six months (for
the proprietor was now a Sir, and oafishly did not want to become
something better) that old-established newspaper ceased utterly to
be. �This,� I thought, "really is a set-back for Dodworth.� I was
far from right. The set-back was rather for myself. I received no
payment for three or four of the book-reviews that I had con-
tributed, and I paid two guineas for my share of the dinner offered
to Dodworth at the Savoy Hotel, and five guineas towards a por-


136
T. FENNING DODWORTH
trait of him "in oils� by one of the oldest and worst of Royal
Academicians. This portrait was presented to him after dinner by
our chairman (the Prime Minister of that time) in a speech that
would have been cloying if it had been more fluent. Dodworth
bandied no compliments. This was a private occasion, and he
lived up to his reputation of being privately as caustic about his
friends as he was publicly about his foes. He "twitted� his friend
the Prime Minister with one thing and another, reducing that
statesman and the whole company to paroxysms of appreciation
�Our chairman has said that he will continue to do what in
him lies to help the cause that we all have at heart (hear, hear).
Well, wherever there is a cause there is also an effect (laughter).
I hope that the effect in this instance will be of the kind that we all
desiderate (much laughter). I do not say that it will be, I only
say I hope that it will be (hysterics).� I wish I could recall more
of what Dodworth said. Every one agreed that he was in his best
vein and had never been more pungent.
Two or three years later I attended another banquet at which he
was the guest of the evening-a banquet at the Hotel Cecil, offered
by the Playgoers' Club. He had written a three-act comedy: �The
ANTAGONISTS�A Satire on Certain Aspects of Political Life.�
This had been instantly snapped up, and soon produced, with a very
strong cast, by Sir George Alexander. All the leaders of both parties
in both Houses were present on the first night, and many of them
(rashly, so weak were they with laughter) were present also on the
second, third and fourth nights, and would probably have been
present on other nights, too; but (such was the absenteeism of the
vulgar) there were no other nights. Dodworth had again not sawn
the plank. But it was clear to me, a week later, on the Sunday
evening fixed�some time previously�for the banquet, that the
edge of his razor was quite unblunted. In responding to the speech
of the President (who had said nothing to imply that the play was
not still running), Dodworth taunted us, very tartly, with our
failure to arrest the decay of dramatic art by elevating the taste of
the public. Had he been less witty, he might rather have spoilt our
evening, so deep did he plant in us a sense of our failure. His own
peculiar strength was never better attested than when, later in the
evening, Alexander rose and announced with pride that he had that


MAX BEERBOHM
137
morning secured from his friend Fenning Dodworth the promise to
write another comedy for the St James's Theatre.
As this was never performed, I am quite sure it was never written.
And I think the cause of the unfulfilment is to be found in the
history of our time. Politics had now become too tense and terrible
for the lighter use of Dodworth's pen. After the death of Sir Henry
Campbell-Bannerman "a Party once great� cast off what old rem-
nants of decency had clung to it. Mr Lloyd George composed a
Budget. The Lords rejected it. Mr Asquith introduced the Par-
liament Bill. Those were stirring times; and during them, as it
seemed to me, Dodworth was greater, aye! and happier, than he
had ever been. Constitutional points and precedents had always
lain very near to his heart. In them he had always both publicly
and privately abounded. His dislike of the look of things in the
Far East had never been more than skin-deep. Such themes as the
Reform Bill of 1832 had ever touched him to far finer issues. The
fiscal problems raised by Mr Chamberlain, strongly though he had
backed Mr Chamberlain's solution of them, had left in abeyance
what was best in him. The desirability of enriching some rich
merchants cannot be expressed in the grand manner. Mr Asquith's
desire to limit the Lords' veto was a worthy theme. Month followed
month. I soon lost count of Dodworth's articles. �The Assault on
the Constitution-And After,� �The Betrayal�And After," "The
End of All Things�And After,� are the only three that I recall.
Enough that he was at his best in all of them, and ended every one
of them with the inference that Mr Asquith (one of his staunchest
though most reluctant admirers) was mad.
I had the good fortune to meet him constantly in those days of
crisis. I hardly know how this was. I did not seek him out. It
seemed simply that he had become ubiquitous. Maybe his zest had
multiplied him by 100 or so, enabling him to be in as many places
at once. He looked younger. He talked more quickly than was
his wont, though with an elocution as impeccable as ever. He had
none of those austere, prim silences for which he was so feared. He
was a bard. His command of the nobler, the statesmanlike kind
of slang, and his unction in the use of it, had never been so mes-
meric. �If the Sovereign sent for the P. M. and said 'I shall do
nothing till the case arises', what could the P. M. say? Nothing.
>


138
T. FENNING DODWORTH
On the other hand, if the P. M. sought audience to-morrow with
a view to a contingent assurance, and the Sovereign said 'That's all
very well, but what d�you hypothecate?' and the P. M. simply
referred him back to what Mr G. said when The Buffalo was
threatening to throw out the Franchise of '85,�then what? The
Sovereign would be in a damned ticklish position. And the only
way out of it", etc. Little wonder that agéd ears played truant at
his tales, and younger hearings were quite ravished, so sweet and
voluble was his discourse.
Alas, the Sovereign did not slip through whatever loophole it
was that Dodworth descried. The P. M. did not climb down. The
Buffalo did not rise from the grave. Lord L. sold the pass. The
backwoodsmen went back to the backwoods. Dodworth was left
sitting among the ruins of the Constitution. But the position
suited him. He was still in his element, and great. It was at the
outbreak of the War that I feared there might be no more of him.
And there was, indeed, less. No longer young, he did not acquire
more than a smattering of the military idiom, nor any complete
grasp of strategy. But he was ever in close touch with the War
Office and with G.H.Q., and was still fairly oracular. Several
times in the last year of the conflict, he visited (with temporary
rank of Lieutenant-Colonel) certain sectors of the Western Front
and made speeches to the men in the trenches, declaring himself
well-satisfied with their morale, and being very caustic about the
enemy; but it may be doubted whether he, whose spell had never
worked on the man in the street, was fully relished by the men in the
trenches. Non omni omnia. Colonel Dodworth was formed for
successes of the more exquisite kind. I think the Ministry of
Information erred in supposing that his article, �Pax Britannica-
And After," would be of immense use all the world over. But the
error was a generous one. The article was translated into thirty-
seven foreign languages and fifty-eight foreign dialects. Twelve
million copies of it were printed on hand-woven paper, and these
were despatched in a series of special trains to a southern port.
The Admiralty, at the last moment, could not supply transport for
them, and the local authorities complained of them that they
blocked the dock. The matter was referred to the Ministry of
Reconstruction, which purchased a wheat-field twenty miles inland
and erected on it a large shed of concrete and steel for the reception


MAX BEERBOHM
139
of Dodworth's pamphlets, pending distribution. This shed was
nearly finished at the moment when the Armistice was signed, and it
was finished soon after. Whether the pamphlets are in it, or just
where they are, I do not know. Blame whom you will. I care not.
Dodworth had even in the War another of his exquisite successes.
Yet I am glad for him that we have Peace. At first I was afraid
it might be bad for him. We had been promised a new world; and
to that, though he had come so well through the War, I feared he
would not be able to adjust himself. The new world was to be, in
many respects, rather dreadful-a benign cataclysm, but still a
cataclysm, and Dodworth perhaps not to be found in any of his
favourite chairs when the crystal waters subsided and the smiling
land was revealed. We may have it yet. But the danger seems to
be less imminent. A few days ago I met Dodworth in Bird-Cage
Walk, and said to him something about it seeming likely that
moderate councils would prevail among the Labour men. "Ah,�
he said in that queer dry way of his, �it's their moderate intelligence
that's the danger.� He said it instantly (and it was obviously not
a thing he could have prepared). And the very fact that he was
able to jest once more was a heartening proof for me of his belief
that the worst was past. Another good sign was that he had resumed
his top-hat. During the last eighteen months of the War he had
worn a thing of soft black felt, which I took to be a symbol of
inward pessimism; and he had gone on wearing this long after the
treaty of Peace was signed�a retention which seemed to me equally
sinister, as a silent manifesto of unfaith in the future of our body
politic. But now he was crowned once more with a cylinder from
his old Victorian block. And a further good sign was that he was
on his way to the House. In the old days, he had been wont to
occupy, whenever an important debate was afoot, one or another
of those nice seats near the Serjeant-at-Arms. In the course of the
War he had ceased from such attendance. He had become very
bitter against "the politicians� and especially �the lawyer politi-
cians.� But I suspect that what revolted him even more was the
sight of the new, the �business� types on the Treasury Bench�the
bullet-headed men in reefer-jackets, rising to tell the House what
they were "out for� and what they were "up against,� and why
they had �pushed� this and �turned down� that, and forgetting to
address the Chair. Dodworth's return to St Stephen's implied


140
T. FENNING DODWORTH
for me the obsolescence of such men. I asked him what he thought,
from a tactical standpoint, of the line recently taken by the Inde-
pendent Liberals. �I am afraid,� he said, �there is not much hope
for these Adullamites without a Cave.� This phrase he may not
have coined on the spur of the moment. But, even so, how
extraordinarily good! It's wicked, it's unjust, it hurts, but�it
seems to me even more delicious than his description of Gladstone
in '86 as "a Moses without a Pisgah.� I think he was pleased, in
his queer dry way, by my delight, for he said he would send me a
copy of his forthcoming book�a selection from the political
articles written by him since his earliest days. He had not, he said
(quoting, I think, from his preface), intended to resuscitate th
ephemeræ. The idea was not his but 's (he named the head of
an historic firm of publishers). The book will be out next month,
and will include that most recent of his articles, "A Short Shrift
for Sinn Fein-And After.� It will be �remaindered,� of course,
in a year or so, but will meanwhile have taken an honoured place in
every eminent man's library. By the way, I had feared that Mr
Lloyd George, with his Celtic rather than classic mind, made a
break in the long line of Prime Ministers who have rated Dodworth
highly. I am glad to hear that at a dinner held somewhere the
night before last he impulsively rose and proposed Dodworth's
health, recalling that when he himself was a bare-legged, wild-
eyed, dreamy little lad on the Welsh mountains he read every word
of Fenning Dodworth's earlier articles as they came out, and had
never forgotten them (applause). Since those days he had met
Dodworth many a time in the valley and got some resounding
whacks (laughter). But he always felt, and more than ever he
felt to-night, that Dodworth and he were destined to walk hand in
hand on the heights, misty though those heights might be now, and
hail together the glory of the sunrise that, sooner or later, had got
to come (prolonged applause). My informant tells me that of all
the eyes around the table Dodworth�s alone were dry, and maintains
that in returning thanks he ought not to have been pungent. I
disagree. I want no signs of weakness in dear old Dodworth.
Dear old Dodworth? Well, no�and yet yes, too. I don't like
him, perhaps; but there is no man whom I so delight to see, to
watch, and to think of. I hope he will not predecease me. Of one
thing I am sure: he will die game, and his last words will be


MAX BEERBOHM
141
"�And After?� and will be spoken pungently. And of another
thing I am sure; the eminent men of all kinds will sign a hasty
petition about him to the Dean of Westminster. But there is, there
has been so often exemplified, a tradition of Philistinism in that
Deanery. The voices of the eminent fall on deaf ears there, and
only the roar of the man in the street is heard. Dodworth will,
characteristically, not have the coarse success of lying in our Abbey.
His monument will be found-piecemeal, indeed, but great, but
glittering in the diaries which I mentioned at the outset of this
little
essay
in his honour.


PERLUN
BY MINA LOY
the whipper snapper child of the sun
His pert blonde spirit
scoured by the Scandinavian Boreas
His head
an adolescent oval
ostrich egg
The victorious silly
beauty of his face
awakens to his instincts
A vivacious knick-knack tipped with gold
he puts the world
to the test of intuition
Smiling from ear to ear
Living from other hands to mouth
Holding in immaculate arms
the syphilitic sailor
on his avoided death bunk
or the movie vamp
among the muffled shadows of the shrubberies-
Picking lemons in Los Angeles
broke
The education of "Prince Fils à Papa�
How low men die
How women love-
The rituals of Dempsey and Carpentier
PERLUN
asks �Do these flappers of the millionaires
think i'm a doll for anyone to pat?�



m
sunt
21
HIS EXCELLENCY THE AMERICAN AMBASSADOR AT THE COURT OF ST JAMES'
BY BOARDMAN ROBINSON





DONS
BY G. SANTAYANA
DONS are picturesque figures.
Their fussy ways and their
oddities, personal and intellectual, are as becoming to them
as black feathers to the blackbird. Their minds are all gaunt
pinnacles, closed gates, and little hidden gardens. A mediaeval
tradition survives in their notion of learning and in their manner
of life; they are monks flown from the dovecot, scholastics carrying
their punctilious habits into the family circle. In the grander ones
there
may be some assimilation to a prelate, a country gentleman,
or a party leader; but the rank and file are modest industrious peda-
gogues, sticklers for routine, with a squinting knowledge of old
books and of young men.
Their politics are narrow and their
religion dubious. There was always something slippery in the
orthodoxy of scholastics, even in the middle ages; they are so
eager to define, to correct, and to trace back everything, that they
tend to cut the cloth on their own bias, and to make some crochet
of theirs the fulcrum of the universe. The thoughts of these men
are like the Sibylline leaves, profound but lost. I should not call
them pedants, because what they pursue and insist on in little
things is the shadow of something great; trifles, as Michael Angelo
said, make perfection, and perfection is no trifle. Yet dry learn-
ing and much chewing of the cud take the place amongst them of
the two ways men have of really understanding the world�science,
which explores it, and sound wit, which estimates humanly the
value of science and of everything else.
The function of dons is to expound a few classic documents, and
to hand down as large and as pleasant a store as possible of academic
habits, maxims, and anecdotes. They peruse with distrust the
new books published on the subject of their teaching: they refer to
them sometimes sarcastically, but their teaching remains the same.
Their conversation with outsiders is painfully amiable for a while;
lassitude soon puts the damper on it, unless they can lapse into the
academic question of the day, or take up the circle of their good
old stories. Their originality runs to interpreting some old text
a


144
DONS
afresh, wearing some odd garment, or frequenting in the holidays
some unfrequented spot. When they are bachelors, as properly
they should be, their pupils are their chief link with the world of
affection, with mischievous and merry things; and in exchange
for this whiff of life, which they receive with each yearly invasion
of flowering youth, like the fresh scent of hay every summer from
the meadows, they furnish those empty minds with some humor-
ous memories, and some shreds of knowledge. It does not matter
very much whether what a don says is right or wrong, provided it
is quotable; nobody considers his opinions for the matter they
convey; the point is that by hearing them the pupils and the public
may discover what opinions, and on what subjects, it is possible for
mortals to devise. Their maxims are like those of the early Greek
philosophers, a proper introduction to the good society of the in-
tellectual world. So are the general systems to which the dons
may be addicted, probably some revision of Christian theology,
of Platonic mysticism, or of German philosophy. Such foreign
doctrines do very well for the dons of successive epochs, native
British philosophy not being fitted to edify the minds of the young:
those vaster constructions appeal more to the imagination, and their
very artificiality and ticklish architecture, like that of a house of
cards, are part of their function, calling for paradoxical faith and
�what youth loves quite as much�for captious and sophistical
argument. They lie in the fourth dimension of human belief,
amongst the epicycles which ingenious error describes about the
unknown orbit of truth; for the truth is not itself luminous, as wit
the truth travels silently in the night and requires to be caught
by the search-light of wit to become visible. Meantime the mind
plays innocently with its own phosphorescence, which is what we
call culture and what dons are created to keep alive. Wit the
dons often have, of an oblique kind, in the midst of their much-
indulged prejudices and foibles; and what with glints of wit and
scraps of learning, the soul is not sent away empty from their door:
better fed and healthier, indeed, for these rich crumbs from the
banquet of antiquity, when thought was fresh, than if it had been
reared on a stuffy diet of useful knowledge, or on some single
dogmatic system, to which life-slavery is attached. Poor, brusque,
comic, venerable dons! You watched over us tenderly once, whilst
you blew your long noses at us and scolded; then we thought only of
is;


G. SANTAYANA
145
the roses in your garden, of your succulent dinners, or perhaps of
your daughters; but now we understand that you had hearts your-
selves, that you were song-birds grown old in your cages, having
preferred fidelity to adventure. We catch again the sweet in-
flection of your cracked notes, and we bless you. You have washed
your hands among the innocent; you have loved the beauty of the
Lord's house.


TWO POEMS
BY AMY LOWELL
FOOTING UP A TOTAL
I move to the sound of gold, and brass, and heavily-clashed silver.
From the towers, the watchers see the flags of my coming:
Tall magenta flags
Stinging against a pattern of light blue.
Trumpets and tubas
Exult for me before the walls of cities,
And I
pass
the gates entangled in a dance of lifted tambourines.
a
But you�you come only as a harebell comes;
One day there is nothing, and the next your steepled bells are all,
The rest is back ground.
You are neither blue, nor violet, nor red,
But all these colours blent and faded to a charming weariness of
tone.
I glare; you blossom.
Yes, alas! and when they have clanged me to my grave
Wrapped gaudily in pale blue and magenta;
When muted bugles and slacked drums
Have brayed a last quietus;
What then, my friend?
Why, someone coming from the funeral
Will see you standing, nodding underneath a hedge
(Picking or not is nothing).
Will that person remember bones and shouting do you think?
I fancy he will listen to the music
Shaken so lightly from your whispering bells
And think how very excellent a thing
A flower growing in a hedge most surely is.
And so, a fig for rotting carcasses.


AMY LOWELL
147
Waiter, bring me a bottle of Lachrima Christi,
And mind you don't break the seal. .
Your health, my highly unsuccessful confrère,
Rocking your seed-bells while I drift to ashes.
The future is the future, therefore-
Damn you!
THE SWANS
The swans float and float
Along the moat
Around the Bishop's garden,
And the white clouds push
Across a blue sky
With edges that seem to draw in and harden.
a
Two slim men of white bronze
Beat each with a hammer on the end of a rod
The hours of God.
Striking a bell,
They do it well.
And the echoes jump, and tinkle, and swell
In the Cathedral's carved stone polygons.
The swans Aoat
About the moat,
And another swan sits still in the air
Above the old inn.
He gazes into the street
And swims the cold and the heat,
He has always been there,
At least so say the cobbles in the street.
They listen to the beat
Of the hammered bell,
And think of the feet
Which beat upon
their
tops:
But what they think they do not tell.
And the swans who float


148
TWO POEMS
Up and down the moat
Gobble the bread the Bishop feeds them.
The slim bronze men beat the hour again,
But only the gargoyles up in the hard blue air heed them.
When the Bishop says a prayer,
And the choir sing �Amen,�
The hammers break in on them there:
Clang! Clang! Beware! Beware!
The carved swan looks down at the passing men,
And the cobbles wink: �An hour has gone again.
But the people kneeling before the Bishop's chair
Forget the passing over the cobbles in the square.
An hour of day and an hour of night,
And the clouds float away in a red-splashed light.
The sun, quotha ? or white, white
Smoke with fire all alight.
An old roof crashing on a Bishop's tomb,
Swarms of men with a thirst for room,
And the footsteps blur to a shower, shower, shower,
Of men passing�passing-every hour,
With arms of power, and legs of power, ,
And power in their strong, hard minds.
No need then
For the slim bronze men
Who beat God's hours: Prime, Tierce, None.
Who wants to hear? No one.
We will melt them, and mould them,
And make them a stem
For a banner gorged with blood,
For a blue-mouthed torch.
So the men rush like clouds,
They strike their iron edges on the Bishop's chair
And Aing down the lanterns by the tower stair.
They rip the Bishop out of his tomb
And break the mitre off of his head.
�See,� say they, "the man is dead;


AMY LOWELL
149
He cannot shiver or sing.
We'll toss for his ring.'
The cobbles see this all along the street
Coming-coming-on countless feet.
And the clockmen mark the hours as they go.
But slow-slow-
The swans float
In the Bishop's moat.
And the inn swan
Sits on and on,
Staring before him with cold glass eyes.
Only the Bishop walks serene,
Pleased with his church, pleased with his house,
Pleased with the sound of the hammered bell,
Beating his doom.
Saying �Boom! Boom! Room! Room!"
He is old, and kind, and deaf, and blind,
And very, very pleased with his charming moat
And the swans which float.


GIOVANNI VERGA AND THE SICILIAN NOVEL
BY CARLO LINATI
IE
F it were still the fashion to make literary comparisons as in
the time of the excellent Plutarch, it would be interesting to
draw one between the Sicilian writer, Giovanni Verga, and the
Irish dramatist, J. M. Synge. For these two writers, though so
widely separated geographically, are very similar, both as to the
origin of their inspiration and in the development of their literary
experience and style. Synge, after having searched an aesthetic
among French decadents and symbolists, at last finds his true
expression in the medium of his native Irish soil. Verga, having
passed his youth writing popular love stories, takes his high place
as a writer of tales when, returning to his own Sicilian soil, he por-
trays its soul and language in those colourful and passionate studies
which make him �the greatest writer of narrative since the time
of Manzoni.�
Yet even in America I believe he would have remained unknown
were it not that he is the author of Cavalleria Rusticana, on which
the facile muse of Signor Mascagni has conferred a popularity
unfortunately universal. As a thing apart from these verses and
music, however, Cavalleria Rusticana will always remain a fine
sketch of Sicilian life, written in semi-dialect�witty, spirited,
effective. Unfortunately the popularity of the opera has cheap-
ened the fresh charm of the original drama, a misfortune which
befell even Shakespeare when he had the bad luck to be chosen by
the librettist of Giuseppe Verdi, or to Goethe set to melody by
Gounod.
But the fame of Verga is due largely to his two Sicilian novels,
I Malavoglia and Mastro-Don Gesualdo, without doubt the
strongest peasant novels of contemporary Italy.
In these vast canvasses of his, Verga conjures up before us a
crowd of fishermen, of busy-bodies, a host of rascally landlords,
of usurers and village ruffians, of small avaricious and arrogant
proprietors, of hard working godmothers, of feudal duchesses and
prostitutes, all carved from life and dramatized in rough almost


CARLO LINATI
151
a
illiterate prose, vulgar and luminous. They speak in interrupted
dialogues and monologues rich with a provincial grace and ver-
nacular. He uses narrative very little, but when he does he puts
himself in the very skin of his characters, almost as if he were one
of "them� as sometimes happens in primitive sagas.
The power of Verga lies in the really startling truthfulness of
his pictures, a fact which unfortunately labels him as "realist� in
the minds of the great public. But his realism recalls rather the
exquisite subtlety of D. H. Lawrence or of Charles-Louis Philippe,
than the rhetorical magnificence of Zola.
I Malavoglia is the simple tale of the misfortunes which befell
a poor fishing family of Aci Trezza under a relentless weight of
destiny. About their vicissitudes swarm and mingle a prodigious
throng of secondary types and occurrences which lend the work the
aspect of a real comédie humaine, a luxurious vegetation of human-
ity. But, while in Malavoglia we have a world of poor peasants,
in Mastro�Don Gesualdo we participate in the life of the nou-
veaux riches which grows directly out of the very life-blood of the
hard-working Sicilian peasants.
It is the story of a peasant who, having amassed riches and prop-
erty through patient labour, avid to identify himself with the
aristocracy of the country, marries the daughter of a nobleman.
From this marriage result so many misfortunes that he at last loses
all his goods, falls ill with a tumour of the liver, and finally dies
amid the indifference of his superiors, his daughter, and his son-
in-law. The character is vividly portrayed, and his death in his
son-in-law's mansion, where he is surrounded with the
pomp
and
riches he himself has created, but which he can no longer com-
mand, resembles in sad and ironical magnificence the death of
Madame Bovary.
Verga borrowed the idea for this plot from a story which he had
written the previous year, and which formed part of a collection
called Novelle Rusticane; and here, as in his other collections,
Vita dei Campi and Don Candeloro e C., we find that his most bril-
liant narratives concern the Sicilian village, so colourful and rich
in myths. The primitive patriarchal characteristics of the com-
mon country people fuse with an aristocratic feudalism that is
almost mediaeval.
In these two books is portrayed marvelously the soul of the


152 GIOVANNI VERGA AND THE SICILIAN NOVEL
Southern peasant, superstitious, inconstant, weaver of fantastic
tales, with a half-humorous, half-mournful sense of his own mis-
eries, his speech, picturesque in his misuse of grammar, interspersed
with droll witticisms, and flavoured with melancholy sententious-
ness.
In his youth Verga had written among other things Una Storia
di una Capinera, passionate and tearful letters of a young girl
student about to enter a convent, written to a friend and telling
about an unhappy love affair because of which she dies in the end,
consumptive and insane, a plot so romantic as to be acceptable in
Italy at a time when the novels of Tosti were all the rage. To
some of us his appeal was slight, for Verga, the powerful creator
of peasant types, was then only dimly foreshadowed.
Fame was somewhat whimsical with him. At the time that his
great Sicilian novels appeared, Antonio Fogazzaro was already in
possession of the field, having seduced feminine hearts with the
narcotics of his vague and sensuous mysticism; De Amicis was
drenching thousands of pocket handkerchiefs for humanitarian and
patriotic Italy; D'Annunzio was beginning to ransack salon and
brothel with his nonchalant air of rich and gallant highwayman-
so that for poor Verga, modest and faithful bard of the common
Sicilian people, there remained but a small and obscure corner in
which peacefully to await the hour of his so justly deserved fame.
Even the �realism� which came after him, the realism of the
Novelle della Pescara of D'Annunzio, or the polite naturalism of
Trionfo della Morte and of Piacere cannot in any way be compared
with the sane and classic realism of Verga: they are but his bas-
tard offsprings. Verga still remains our greatest living writer
of prose.
And now after so many years of indifference towards his work,
our sensibilities and intelligence rendered more acute after the war,
the stories of Verga steal upon us unawares like forgotten gifts,
fresh and pleasing fruits of the season. What abundance of life,
what movement, and what sun! And at last Italy tries to repair
as best she can the injustice of her long neglect, for last year a splen-
did festival was made for the great artist on the occasion of his
eightieth birthday.



Property of John Quinn
FLORIDA
BY WYNDHAM LEWIS






Property of John Quinn
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY AMAZON. BY WYNDHAM LEWIS






Property of John Quinn
THE STARRY SKY. BY WYNDHAM LEWIS





OUT OF NOWHERE INTO NOTHING
BY SHERWOOD ANDERSON
II
T
HE story of Rosalind's six years in Chicago is the story of
thousands of unmarried women who work in offices in the
city. Necessity had not driven her to work nor kept her at her task
and she did not think of herself as a worker, one who would always
be a worker. For a time after she came out of the stenographic
school she drifted from office to office, acquiring always more skill,
but with no particular interest in what she was doing. It was a
way to put in the long days. Her father, who in addition to the
coal and lumber yards owned three farms, sent her a hundred
dollars a month. The money her work brought was spent for
clothes so that she dressed better than other women she met.
Of one thing she was quite sure. She did not want to return to
Willow Springs to live with her father and mother and after a
time she knew she could not continue living with her brother and
his wife. For the first time she began seeing the city that spread
itself out before her eyes. When she walked at the noon hour
along Michigan Boulevard or went into a restaurant or in the
evening went home in the street cars she saw men and women to-
gether. It was the same when on Sunday afternoons in the summer
she walked in the park or by the lake. On a street car she saw a
small round-faced woman put her hand into the hand of her male
companion. Before she did it she looked cautiously about. She
wanted to assure herself of something. To the other women in
the car, to Rosalind and the others, the act said something. It was
as though the woman's voice had said aloud, "He is mine. Do
not draw too close to him."
There was no doubt that Rosalind was awakening out of the
Willow Springs torpor in which she had lived out her young
womanhood. The city had at least done that for her. The city
was wide. It flung itself out.
It flung itself out. One had but to let one's feet go
thump thump upon the pavements to get into strange streets, see
always new faces.


154
OUT OF NOWHERE INTO NOTHING
On Saturday afternoon and all day on Sunday one did not work.
In the summer it was a time to go to places�to the park, to walk
among the strange foreign-looking crowds in South Halsted Street,
with a half dozen young people from the office to spend the day on
the sand dunes at the foot of Lake Michigan. One got excited and
was hungry, hungry, always hungry�for companionship. That
was it. One wanted to possess something�a man�to take him
along on jaunts, be sure of him, yes own him.
She read books�always written by men or by manlike women.
There was an essential mistake in the viewpoint of life set forth
in the books. The mistake was always being made. In Rosalind's
time it grew more pronounced. Someone had got hold of a key
with which the door to the secret chamber of life could be un-
locked. Others took the key and rushed in. The secret chamber
of life was filled with a noisy vulgar crowd. All the books that
dealt with life at all dealt with it through the lips of the crowd
that had newly come into the sacred place. The writer had hold
of the key. It was his time to be heard. "Sex,� he cried. �It is
"
by understanding sex I will untangle the mystery.�
It was all very well and sometimes interesting but one grew tired
of the subject.
She lay abed in her room at her brother's house on a Sunday
night in the summer. During the afternoon she had gone for a
walk and on a street on the Northwest Side had come upon a
religious procession. The Virgin was being carried through the
streets. The houses were decorated and women leaned out at the
windows of houses. Old priests dressed in white gowns waddled
along. Strong young men carried the platform on which the Virgin
rested. The procession stopped. Someone started a chant in a
loud, clear voice. Other voices took it up. Children ran about
gathering in money. All the time there was a loud hum of ordi-
nary conversation going on. Women shouted across the street to
other women. Young girls walked on the sidewalks and laughed
softly as the young men in white, clustered about the Virgin, turned
to stare at them. On every street corner merchants sold candies,
nuts, cool drinks-
In her bed at night Rosalind put down the book she had been
reading. "The worship of the Virgin is a form of sex expression,�
she read.


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
155
"Well, what of it? If it be true what does it matter?�
She got out of bed and took off her nightgown. She was herself
a virgin. What did that matter? She turned herself slowly about
looking at her strong young female body. It was a thing in which
sex lived. It was a thing upon which sex in others might express
itself. What did it matter?
There was her brother sleeping with his wife in another room
near at hand. In Willow Springs, Iowa, her father was at just
this moment pumping a pail of water at the well by the kitchen
door. In a moment he would carry it into the kitchen to set it on
the box by the kitchen sink-
Rosalind's cheeks were flushed. She made an odd and lovely
figure standing nude before the glass in her room there in Chicago.
She was so much alive and yet not alive. Her eyes shone with
excitement. She continued to turn slowly round and round twist-
ing her head to look at her naked back. "Perhaps I am learning
to think,� she decided. There was some sort of essential mistake
in people's conception of life. There was something she knew and
it was of as much importance as the things the wise men knew and
put into books. She also had found out something about life. Her
body was still the body of what was called a virgin. What of it?
�If the sex impulse within it had been gratified in what
way
would
my problem be solved? I am lonely now. It is evident that after
that had happened I would still be lonely.�
III
At just the time when her awakening became a half-realized
thing Rosalind went to work at a new place, a piano factory
on the Northwest Side facing a branch of the Chicago River. She
became secretary to a man who was treasurer of the company. He
was a slender, rather small man of thirty-eight with thin white
restless hands and with grey eyes that were clouded and troubled.
For the first time she became really interested in the work that ate
up her days. Her employer was charged with the responsibility
of passing upon the credit of the firm's customers and was unfitted
for the task. He was not shrewd and within a short time had made
two costly mistakes by which the company had lost money. �I
have too much to do. My time is too much taken up with details.
a


156
OUT OF NOWHERE INTO NOTHING
I need help here," he had explained, evidently irritated, and
Rosalind had been engaged to relieve him of details.
Her new employer, named Walter Sayers, was the only son of
a man who in his time had been well known in Chicago's social and
club life. Everyone had thought him wealthy and he had lived
on an expensive scale. His son Walter had wanted to be a singer
and had expected to inherit a comfortable fortune. At thirty he
had married and three years later when his father died he was
already the father of two children.
And then suddenly he had found himself quite penniless. He
could sing but his voice was not large. It wasn't an instrument
with which one could make money in any dignified way. Fortu-
nately his wife had some money of her own. It was her money,
invested in the piano manufacturing business, that had secured him
the position as treasurer of the company. With his wife he with-
drew from social life and they went to live in a comfortable house
in a suburb.
Walter Sayers gave up music, apparently surrendered even his
interest in it. Many men and women from his suburb went to
hear the Orchestra on Friday afternoons but he did not go. "What's
the use of torturing myself and thinking of a life I cannot lead?�
he said to himself. To his wife he pretended a growing interest
in his work at the factory. �It's really fascinating. It's a game,
like moving men back and forth on a chess-board. I shall grow
to love it,� he said.
He had tried to build up interest in his work but had not been
successful. Certain things would not get into his consciousness.
Although he tried hard he could not make the fact that profit or
loss to the company depended upon his judgement seem important
to himself. It was a matter of money lost or gained and money
meant nothing to him. �It's father's fault,� he thought. "While
he lived money never meant anything to me. I was brought up
wrong. I am ill prepared for the battle of life.� He became too
timid and lost business that should have come to the company quite
naturally. Then he became too bold in the extension of credit
and other losses followed.
His wife was quite happy and satisfied with her life. There
were four or five acres of land about the suburban house and she
became absorbed in the work of raising flowers and vegetables. For


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
157
9)
the sake of the children she kept a cow. With a young negro
gardener she puttered about all day, digging in the earth, spread-
ing manure about the roots of bushes and shrubs, planting and
transplanting. In the evening when he had come home from his
office in his car she took him by the arm and led him eagerly about.
The two children trotted at their heels. She talked glowingly.
They stood at a low spot at the foot of the garden and she spoke
of the necessity of putting in tile. The prospect seemed to excite
her. �It will be the best land on the place when it is drained,�
she said. She stooped and with a trowel turned over the soft
black soil. An odour arose. �See! Just see how rich and black
it is,� she exclaimed eagerly. �It is a little sour now because
water has stood on it.� She seemed to be apologizing as for a
wayward child. "When it is drained I shall use lime to sweeten
it,� she added. She was like a mother leaning over the cradle of
a sleeping babe. Her enthusiasm irritated him.
When Rosalind came to take the position in his office the slow
fires of hatred that had been burning beneath the surface of Walter
Sayers' life had already eaten away much of his vigour and energy.
His body sagged in the office chair and there were heavy sagging
lines at the corners of his mouth. Outwardly he remained always
kindly and cheerful, but back of the clouded, troubled eyes the
fires of hatred burned slowly, persistently. It was as though he
was trying to awaken from a troubled dream that gripped him, a
dream that frightened a little, that was unending. He had con-
tracted little physical habits. A sharp paper cutter lay on his
desk. As he read a letter from one of the firm's customers he took
it
up and jabbed little holes in the leather cover of his desk. When
he had several letters to sign he took up his pen and jabbed it
almost viciously into the inkwell. Then before signing he jabbed
it in again. Sometimes he did the thing a dozen times in succession.
Sometimes the things that went on beneath the surface of Walter
Sayers frightened him. In order to do what he called "putting
in his Saturday afternoons and Sundays� he had taken up photog-
raphy. The camera took him away from his own house and the
sight of the garden where his wife and the negro were busy digging,
and into the fields and into stretches of woodland at the edge of the
suburban village. Also it took him away from his wife's talk,
from her eternal planning for the garden's future. Here by the


158
OUT OF NOWHERE INTO NOTHING
house tulip bulbs were to be put in in the fall. Later there would
be a hedge of lilac bushes shutting off the house from the road.
The men who lived in the other houses along the suburban street
spent their Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings tinkering
with motor cars. On Sunday afternoons they took their families
driving, sitting up very straight and silent at the driving wheel.
They consumed the afternoon in a swift dash over country roads.
The car ate up the hours. Monday morning and the work in the
city was there, at the end of the road. They ran madly towards it.
For a time the use of the camera made Walter Sayers almost
happy. The study of light playing on the trunk of a tree or over
the grass in a field appealed to some instinct within. It was an
uncertain delicate business. He fixed himself a dark room up-
stairs in the house and spent his evenings there. One dipped the
films into the developing liquid, held them to the light, and then
dipped them again. The little nerves that controlled the eyes were
aroused. One felt oneself being enriched, a little-
One Sunday afternoon he went to walk in a strip of woodland
and came out upon the slope of a low hill. He had read some-
where that the low hill country south-west of Chicago, in which
his suburb lay, had once been the shore of Lake Michigan. The
low hills sprang out of the flat land and were covered with forests.
Beyond them the flat lands began again. The prairies went on
indefinitely, into infinity. People's lives went on so.
Life was
too long. It was to be spent in the endless doing over and over
of an unsatisfactory task. He sat on the slope and looked out
across the land.
He thought of his wife. She was back there, in the suburb in
the hills, in her garden making things grow. It was a noble sort of
thing to be doing. One shouldn't be irritated.
Well he had married her expecting to have money of his own.
Then he would have worked at something else. Money would not
have been involved in the matter and success would not have been
a thing one must seek. He had expected his own life would be
motivated. No matter how much or how hard he worked he would
not have been a great singer. What did that matter? There was
a way to live�a way of life in which such things did not matter.
The delicate shades of things might be sought after. Before his
eyes, there on the grass-covered fat lands, the afternoon light was


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
159
a
playing. It was like a breath, a vapour of colour blown suddenly
from between red lips out over the grey dead burned grass. Song
might be like that. The beauty might come out of himself, out
of his own body.
Again he thought of his wife and the sleeping light in his eyes
flared up, it became a flame. He felt himself being mean, unfair.
,
It didn't matter. Where did the truth lie? Was his wife, digging
in her garden, having always a succession of small triumphs, march-
ing forwards with the seasons�well was she becoming a little old,
lean, and sharp, a little vulgarized?
It seemed so to him. There was something smug in the way
in which she managed to fling green growing flowering things over
the black land. It was obvious the thing could be done and that
there was satisfaction in doing it. It was a little like running a
business and making money by it. There was a deep-seated vul-
garity involved in the whole matter. His wife put her hands into
the black ground. They felt about, caressed the roots of the grow-
ing things. She laid hold of the slender trunk of a young tree in
a certain way�as though she possessed it.
One could not deny that the destruction of beautiful things was
involved. Weeds grew in the garden, delicate shapely things. She
plucked them out without thought. He had seen her do it.
As for himself he also had been pulled out of something. Had
he not surrendered to the fact of a wife and growing children?
Did he not spend his days doing work he detested? The anger
within him burned bright. The fire came into his conscious self. .
Why should a weed that is to be destroyed pretend to a vegetable
existence? As for puttering with a camera�was it not a form
of cheating? He did not want to be a photographer. He had once
wanted to be a singer.
He arose and walked along the hillside, still watching the
shadows play over the plains below. At night-in bed with his
wife�well, was she not sometimes with him as she was in the
garden. Something was plucked out of him and another thing grew
in its place�something she wanted to have grow. Their love-
making was like his puttering about with a camera�to make the
week-ends pass. She came at him a little too determinedly�sure.
-
She was plucking delicate weeds in order that things she had de-
termined upon�"vegetables,� he exclaimed in disgust�in order


160
OUT OF NOWHERE INTO NOTHING
that vegetables might grow. Love was a fragrance, the shading
of a tone over the lips, out of the throat. It was like the after-
noon light on the burned grass. Keeping a garden and making
flowers grow had nothing to do with it.
Walter Sayers' fingers twitched. The camera hung by a strap
over his shoulder. He took hold of the strap and walked to a
tree. He swung the box above his head and brought it down with
a thump against the tree trunk. The sharp breaking sound�the
delicate parts of the machine being broken�was sweet to his ears.
It was as though a song had come suddenly from between his lips.
Again he swung the box and again brought it down against the
tree trunk.
IV
Rosalind at work in Walter Sayers' office was from the beginning
something different, apart from the young woman from Iowa who
had been drifting from office to office, moving from rooming house
to rooming house on Chicago's North Side, striving feebly to find
out something about life by reading books, going to the theatre, and
walking alone in the streets. In the new place her life at once
began to have point and purpose.
Walter Sayers' office was a rather large room on the third floor
of the factory whose walls went straight up from the river's edge.
In the morning Rosalind arrived at eight and went into the office
and closed the door. In a large room across a narrow hallway and
shut off from her retreat by two thick, clouded-glass partitions was
the company's general office. It contained the desks of salesmen,
several clerks, a bookkeeper, and two stenographers. Rosalind
avoided becoming acquainted with these people. She was in a
mood to be alone, to spend as many hours as possible alone with
her own thoughts.
She got to the office at eight and her employer did not arrive
until nine-thirty or ten. For an hour or two in the morning and
in the late afternoon she had the place to herself. Immediately
she shut the door into the hallway and was alone she felt at home.
Even in her father's house it had never been so. She took off her
wraps and walked about the room touching things, putting things
to rights. During the night a negro woman had scrubbed the floor


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
161
and wiped the dust off her employer's desk but she got a cloth and
wiped the desk again. Then she opened the letters that had come
in and after reading arranged them in little piles. She wanted to
spend a part of her wages for flowers and imagined clusters of
flowers arranged in small hanging baskets along the grey walls.
"I'll do that later, perhaps,� she thought.
The walls of the room enclosed her. �What makes me so happy
here ?� she asked herself. As for her employer�she felt she
scarcely knew him. He was a shy man, rather small-
She went to a window and stood looking out. Near the factory
a bridge crossed the river and over it went a stream of heavily
loaded wagons and motor trucks. The sky was grey with smoke.
In the afternoon, after her employer had gone for the day, she
would stand again by the window. As she stood thus she faced
westwards and in the afternoon saw the sun fall down the sky. It
was glorious to be there alone during the late hours of the after-
noon. What a tremendous thing this city in which she had come
to live! For some reason after she went to work for Walter Sayers,
the city seemed, like the room in which she worked, to have accepted
her, taken her into itself. In the late afternoon the rays of the
departing sun fell across great banks of clouds. The whole city
seemed to reach upwards. It left the ground and ascended into the
air. There was an illusion produced. Stark, grim factory chim-
neys, that all day were stiff cold formal things sticking up into the
air and belching forth black smoke, were now slender upreaching
pencils light and wavering colour. The tall chimneys detached
themselves from the buildings and sprang into the air. The factory
in which Rosalind stood had such a chimney. It also was leaping
upwards. She felt herself being lifted, an odd floating sensation
was achieved. With what a stately tread the day went away, over
the city! The city, like the factory chimneys, yearned after it,
hungered for it.
In the morning gulls came in from Lake Michigan to feed on
the sewage floating in the river below. The river was the colour
of chrysoprase. The gulls floated above it as sometimes in the
evening the whole city seemed to float before her eyes. They were
graceful, living, free things. They were triumphant. The getting
of food, even the eating of sewage as food was done thus grace-
fully, beautifully. The gulls turned and twisted in the air. They


162
OUT OF NOWHERE INTO NOTHING
wheeled and floated and then fell downwards to the river in a long
curve, just touching, caressing the surface of the water and then
rising again.
Rosalind raised herself on her toes. At her back beyond the
two glass partitions were other men and women, but there, in that
room, she was alone. She belonged there. What an odd feeling
she had. She also belonged to her employer Walter Sayers. She
scarcely knew the man and yet she belonged to him. She threw
her arms above her head, trying awkwardly to imitate some move-
ment of the birds.
Her awkwardness shamed her a little and she turned and walked
about the room. �I am twenty-five years old and it's a little late
to begin trying to be a bird, to be graceful,� she thought. She
resented the slow stupid heavy movements of her father and mother,
the movements she had imitated as a child. "Why was I not taught
to be graceful and beautiful in mind and body, why in the place
I came from did no one think it worth while to try to be graceful
and beautiful ?� she whispered to herself.
How conscious of her own body Rosalind was becoming. She
walked across the room, trying to go lightly and gracefully. In the
office beyond the glass partitions someone spoke suddenly and she
was startled. She laughed foolishly. For a long time after she
went to work in the office of Walter Sayers she thought the desire
in herself to be physically more graceful and beautiful and to rise
also out of the mental stupidity and sloth of her young womanhood
was due to the fact that the factory windows faced the river and
the western sky and that in the morning she saw the gulls feeding
and in the afternoon the sun going down through the smoke clouds
in a riot of colours.
V
On the August evening as Rosalind sat on the porch before her
father's house in Willow Springs, Walter Sayers came home from
the factory by the river and to his wife's suburban garden. When
the family had dined he came out to walk in the paths with the
two children, boys, but they soon tired of his silence and went to
join their mother. The young negro came along a path by the
kitchen door and joined the party. Walter went to sit on a garden


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
163
seat that was concealed behind bushes. He lighted a cigarette but
did not smoke. The smoke curled quietly up through his fingers
as it burned itself out.
Closing his eyes Walter sat perfectly still and tried not to think.
The soft evening shadows began presently to close down and
around him. For a long time he sat thus motionless, like a carved
figure placed on the garden bench. He rested. He lived and did
not live. The intense body, usually so active and alert, had become
a passive thing. It was thrown aside on the bench under the bush,
to sit there waiting to be reinhabited.
This hanging suspended between consciousness and unconscious-
ness was a thing that did not happen often. There was something
to be settled between himself and a woman but the woman had
gone away. The details of his life were forgotten. As for the
woman, he did not think of her, did not want to think of her. It
was ridiculous that he needed her so much. He wondered if he
had ever felt that way about Cora, his wife. Perhaps he had. Now
she was near him, but a few yards away. It was almost dark but
she with the negro remained at work, digging in the ground-
somewhere near-caressing the soil, making things grow.
"I want you as a lover-far away. Keep yourself far away.�
The words trailed through his mind as the smoke from the cigarette
trailed slowly upwards through his fingers. Did the words refer
to Rosalind Wescott? She had been gone from him three days.
Did he hope she would never come back or did the words refer to
his wife?
His wife's voice spoke sharply. One of the children in playing
about had stepped on a plant. "If you are not careful I shall have
to make you stay out of the garden altogether.� She raised her
voice and called, "Marian.� A maid came from the house and
took the children away. They went along the path towards the
house protesting. Then they ran back to kiss their mother. There
was a struggle and then acceptance. The kiss was acceptance of
their fate�to obey. "Oh, Walter,� the mother's voice called, but
the man on the bench did not answer. Tree toads began to cry.
�The kiss is acceptance. Any physical contact with another is
acceptance.'
The little voices within Walter Sayers were talking away at a
great rate. Suddenly he wanted to sing. He had been told that


164 OUT OF NOWHERE INTO NOTHING
a
his voice was small, not of much account, that he would never be
a singer. It was quite true no doubt, but here, in the garden on
the quiet summer night, was a place and a time for a small voice.
It would be like the voice within himself that whispered sometimes
when he was quiet, relaxed. One evening when he had been with
the woman, Rosalind, when he had taken her into the country in
his car, he had suddenly felt as he did now. They sat together in
the car that he had run into a field. For a long time they had
remained silent. Some cattle came and stood near by, their figures
soft in the night. Suddenly he had felt like a new man in a new
world and had begun to sing. He sang one song over and over,
then sat in silence for a time and after that drove out of the field
and through a gate into the road. He took the woman back to her
place in the city.
In the quiet of the garden on the summer evening he opened his
lips to sing the same song. He would sing with the tree toad hidden
away in the fork of a tree somewhere. He would lift his voice up
from the earth, up into the branches of trees, away from the ground
in which people were digging, his wife and the young negro.
The song did not come. His wife began speaking and the sound
of her voice took away the desire to sing. Why had she not, like
the other woman, remained silent?
He began playing a game. Sometimes, when he was alone the
thing happened to him that had now happened. His body became
like a tree or a plant. Life ran through it unobstructed. He had
dreamed of being a singer but at such a moment he wanted also
to be a dancer. That would have been sweetest of all things�to
sway
of young trees when a wind blew, to give himself
as grey weeds in a sunburned field gave themselves to the influence
of passing shadows, changing colour constantly, becoming every
moment something new, to live in life and in death too, always to
live, to be unafraid of life, to let it flow through his body, to let the
blood flow through his body, not to struggle, to offer no resistance,
to dance.
Walter Sayers' children had gone into the house with the nurse
girl Marian. It had become too dark for his wife to dig in the
garden. It was August and the fruitful time of the year for farms
and gardens had come, but his wife had forgotten fruitfulness. She
was making plans for another year. She came along the garden
like the tops
>


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
165
path followed by the negro. "We will set out strawberry plants
there,� she was saying. The soft voice of the young negro mur-
mured his assent. It was evident the young man lived in her con-
ception of the garden. His mind sought out her desire and gave
itself.
The children Walter Sayers had brought into life through the
body of his wife Cora had gone into the house and to bed. They
bound him to life, to his wife, to the garden where he sat, to the
office by the riverside in the city.
They were not his children. Suddenly he knew that quite
clearly. His own children were quite different things. "Men have
children just as women do. The children come out of their bodies.
They play about,� he thought. It seemed to him that children,
born of his fancy, were at that very moment playing about the
bench where he sat. Living things that dwelt within him and that
had at the same time the power to depart out of him were now
running along paths, swinging from the branches of trees, dancing
in the soft light.
His mind sought out the figure of Rosalind Wescott. She had
gone away, to her own people in Iowa. There had been a note at
the office saying she might be gone for several days. Between him-
self and Rosalind the conventional relationship of employer and
employee had long since been swept quite away. It needed some-
thing in a man he did not possess to maintain that relationship with
either men or women.
At the moment he wanted to forget Rosalind. In her there was
a struggle going on. The two people had wanted to be lovers and
he had fought against that. They had talked about it. "Well,�
he had said, �it will not work out. We will bring unnecessary
unhappiness upon ourselves.�
He had been honest enough in fighting off the intensification of
their relationship. "If she were here now, in this garden with me,
it wouldn't matter. We could be lovers and then forget about
being lovers,� he told himself.
His wife came along the path and stopped near by. She con-
tinued talking in a low voice, making plans for another year
of
gardening. The negro stood near her, his figure making a dark
wavering mass against the foliage of a low growing bush. His
wife wore a white dress. He could see her figure quite plainly. In


166
OUT OF NOWHERE INTO NOTHING
the uncertain light it looked girlish and young. She put her hand
up and took hold of the body of a young tree. The hand became
detached from her body. The pressure of her leaning body made
the young tree sway a little. The white hand moved slowly back
and forth in space.
Rosalind Wescott had gone home to tell her mother of her love.
In her note she had said nothing of that, but Walter Sayers knew
that was the object of her visit to the Iowa town. It was an odd
sort of thing to try to do. To tell people of love, to try to explain
it to others.
The night was a thing apart from Walter Sayers, the male being
sitting in silence in the garden. Only the children of his fancy
understood it. The night was a living thing. It advanced upon
him, enfolded him. �Night is the sweet little brother of Death,"
he thought.
His wife stood very near. Her voice was soft and low and the
voice of the negro when he answered her comments on the future
of the garden was soft and low. There was music in the negro's
voice, perhaps a dance in it. Walter remembered about him.
The young negro had been in trouble before he came to the
Sayers. He had been an ambitious young black and had listened to
the voices of people, to the voices that filled the air of America,
rang through the houses of America. He had wanted to get on in
life and had tried to educate himself. The black had wanted to
be a lawyer.
How far away he got from his own people, from the blacks of
the African forests! He had wanted to be a lawyer in a city in
America. What a notion!
Well, he had got into trouble. He had managed to get through
college and had opened a law office. Then one evening he went
out to walk and chance led him into a street where a woman, a
white woman, had been murdered an hour before. The body of
the woman was found and then he was found walking in the street.
Mrs Sayers' brother, a white lawyer, had saved him from being
punished as a murderer and after the trial and the young negro's
acquittal had induced his sister to take him as gardener. His
chances as a professional man in the city were no good. "He has
had a terrible experience and has just escaped by a fluke,� the
brother had said. Cora Sayers had taken the young man. She had
bound him to herself, to her garden.


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
167
It was evident the two people were bound together. One cannot
bind another without being himself bound. His wife had no more
to say to the negro who went away along the path that led to the
kitchen door. He had a room in a little house at the foot of the
garden. In the room he had books and a piano. Sometimes in the
evening he sang. He was going now to his place. By educating
himself he had cut himself off from his own people.
Cora Sayers went into the house and Walter sat alone. After a
time the young negro came silently down the path. He stopped by
the tree where a moment before the white woman had stood talking
to him. He put his hand on the trunk of the young tree where her
hand had been and then went softly away. His feet made no
sound on the garden path.
An hour passed. In his little house at the foot of the garden the
negro began to sing softly. He did that sometimes in the middle
of the night. What a life he had led too! He had come away
from his black people, from the warm brown girls with the golden
colours playing through the blue black of their skins and had
worked his way through a Northern college, had accepted the pat-
ronage of impertinent people who wanted to uplift the black race,
had listened to them, had bound himself to them, had tried to
follow the way of life they had suggested.
Now he was in the little house at the foot of the Sayers' garden.
Walter remembered little things his wife had told him about the
man. The experience in the court room had frightened him horribly
and he did not want to go off the Sayers' place. Education, books
had done something to him. He could not go back to his own
people. In Chicago, for the most part the blacks lived crowded
into a few streets on the South Side. "I want to be a slave," he
had said to Cora Sayers. �You may pay me money if it makes
you feel better, but I shall have no use for it. I want to be your
slave. I would be happy if I knew I would never have to go off
your place.�
The black sang a low-voiced song. It ran like a little wind on
the surface of a pond. It had no words. He had remembered the
song from his father who got it from his father. In the South, in
Alabama and Mississippi, the blacks sang it when they rolled cotton
bales on to the steamers in the rivers. They had got it from other
rollers of cotton bales long since dead. Long before there were any
cotton bales to roll, black men in boats on rivers in Africa had sung


168
OUT OF NOWHERE INTO NOTHING
it. Young blacks in boats floated down rivers and came to a town
they intended to attack at dawn. There was bravado in singing
the song then. It was addressed to the women in the town to be
attacked and contained both a caress and a threat. "In the morn-
ing your husbands and brothers and sweethearts we shall kill.
Then we shall come into your town to you. We shall hold you close.
We shall make you forget. With our hot love and our strength we
shall make you forget.� That was the significance of the song.
Walter Sayers remembered many things. On other nights, some-
times, when the negro sang and when he lay in his room upstairs in
the house, his wife came to him. There were two beds in the room.
She sat upright in her bed. �Do you hear, Walter ?� she asked.
She came to sit on his bed, sometimes she crept into his arms. In
the African villages long ago when the song floated up from the
river men arose and prepared for battle. The song was a defiance,
a taunt. That was all gone now. The young negro's house was at
the foot of the garden and Walter with his wife lay upstairs in the
larger house situated on high ground. It was a sad song, filled with
race sadness. There was something in the ground that wanted to
grow, buried deep in the ground. Cora Sayers understood that. It
touched something instinctive in her. Her hand went out and
touched, caressed her husband's face, his body. The song made her
want to hold him tight, possess him.
.
The night was advancing and it grew a little cold in the garden.
The negro stopped singing. Walter Sayers arose and went along
the path towards the house but did not enter. Instead he went
through a gate into the road and along the suburban streets until
he got into the open country. There was no moon but the stars
shone brightly. For a time he hurried along looking back as though
afraid of being followed, but when he got out into a broad flat
meadow he went more slowly. For an hour he walked and then
stopped and sat on a tuft of dry grass. For some reason he knew
he could not return to his house in the suburb that night. In the
morning he would go to the office and wait there until Rosalind
came. Then? He did not know what he would do then. "I shall
have to make up some story. In the morning I shall have to tele-
phone Cora and make up some silly story,� he thought. It was an
absurd thing that he, a grown man, could not spend a night abroad,


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
169
in the fields, without the necessity of explanations. The thought
irritated him and he arose and walked again. Under the stars in
the soft night and on the wide flat plains the irritation soon went
away and he began to sing softly, but the song he sang was not the
one he had repeated over and over on that other night when he sat
with Rosalind in the car and the cattle came. It was the song
the
negro sang, the river song of the young black warriors that slavery
had softened and coloured with sadness. On the lips of Walter
Sayers the song lost its sadness. He walked almost gaily along
and in the song that flowed from his lips there was a taunt, a kind
of challenge.
To be concluded


SUMMER EVENING:
NEW YORK SUBWAY STATION
BY MAXWELL BODENHEIM
Perspiring violence derides
The pathetic collapse of dirt.
An effervescence of noises
Depends upon cement for its madness.
Electric light is taut and dull,
Like a nauseated suspense.
This kind of heat is the recollection
Of an orgy in a swamp.
Soiled caskets joined together
Slide to rasping stand-stills.
People savagely tamper
With each others bodies,
Scampering in and out of doorways.
Weighted with apathetic bales of people
The soiled caskets rattle on...
The scene is made of mosaics
Moulded and blown apart by unseen breath.
A symbol of billowing torment,
This sturdy girl leans against an iron post.
Weariness has loosened her face
With its shining cruelties:
Round and poverty-stricken
Her face renounces life.
Her white cotton waist is a wet skin on her breast:
Her black hat, crisp and delicate,
Does not understand her head.
An old man stoops beside her,
Sweat and wrinkles erupting
Upon the blunt remnants of his face.
A little black pot of a hat
Corrupts his grey-haired head,


MAXWELL BODENHEIM
171
He watches dead men and women
Spin their miracles of motion
Upon the greyness of a subway-platform.
Two figures leaning against an iron post,
Pieced together by an old complaint.


CONTEMPORARY GERMAN DRAMATISTS
BY ALEC W. G. RANDALL
THI
HE position of supreme importance which the stage occupied
occupies to-day. In this respect, at least, there has been no change,
unless, indeed, it is that the theatre is now even more important
than ever. The encouragement given to dramatic art in Germany
years before 1914, the subsidies given to theatres, the numerous
funds which enabled the plays of the younger dramatists to be
produced when their chances of commercial success were doubt-
ful, the popularizing of the theatre by the provision of cheap seats
at performances of the highest merit, the foremost place given to
dramatic criticism, and the readiness of the Press to notice and
encourage all dramatic talent worth encouragement�all these were
factors in the diversion of imaginative self-expression in Germany
into dramatic channels. The play, the acted play, that is, became,
in fact, what the novel is in England�the most obvious, most
characteristic form of literary expression. And if to-day the sub-
sidies are less lavish, the habit of attending the theatre, and there-
fore the habit of writing plays�for the supply must attempt to
keep equal with the demand�is still deeply ingrained. The fre-
quent performance and long runs given in the Berlin theatres to
Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and other non-German dramatists
must not be allowed to obscure the really immense production of
new plays by present-day German dramatists. In this respect, as
in
many
others, the artistic decentralization of Germany must be
borne in mind. To-day at Frankfurt, at Munich, Darmstadt, Dus-
seldorff, Halle, Heidelberg, Stettin, Stuttgart, and a number of
other smaller centres, plays of the younger dramatists are being
given those first performances which may result in production in
the capital and hence greater publicity a year from now. This
immense, varied, and, so to speak, "hidden" dramatic production
in Germany to-day makes it impossible to do more in an essay of
this scope than trace the main tendencies and indicate the leading
writers.


ALEC W. G. RANDALL
173
The chief tendency in contemporary German drama, as in Ger-
man literature in general, is that against Naturalism and the mate-
rialistic philosophy which inspired it. For the beginnings of this
reaction we must go back some twenty years. The tremendous
success of the early Hauptmann led to an almost immediate pro-
test from several directions. The most important was that from
Vienna where the writers known as the Jung-Wiener (the Young
Vienna School) formed a kind of dramatic counterpart to the
school of lyric poetry inspired and directed by Stefan George. Sym-
bolism won its way on the German stage in the plays of Hugo von
Hofmannsthal. A little later the forces of anti-Naturalism were
increased by the arrival of the romantic drama, well represented
in 1907 by the very popular Tristan-drama Tantris der Narr
(Tantris the Fool) of Ernst Hardt, then by the so-called Neo-
Classic School, represented by Paul Ernst and Wilhelm von Scholz,
whose plays, particularly the former's Ariadne auf Naxos, spring
directly from a pronounced antipathy to that preoccupation with
the sordid side of modern life which the earlier Hauptmann dramas
so clearly and so powerfully manifested. Hauptmann himself,
too, was in the course of time not exempt. It is impossible in his
case to generalize with complete accuracy, for the imaginative
Hannele appeared early, in 1893, the year following the realis-
tic dialect-play Die Weber (The Weavers) and the typically
Naturalistic play Die Ratten (The Rats) comparatively late, in
1911. With this reservation, however, it may be said that Haupt-
mann himself, high priest of Naturalism, showed a clear develop-
ment away from his original cult from the year 1910 onwards,
until to-day he has come to occupy a position from which it would
appear that a return to the mood in which he wrote Vor Sonnen-
aufgang (Before Sunrise) may positively be stated to be out of
the question. Naturalism in the theatre was, of course, not at
once extinguished; it is not extinguished to-day. It persisted, side
by side with the forces which threatened it, in the work of the
pioneer Naturalistic lyric-poet, Arno Holz, whose admirable
Naturalistic drama Sonnenfinsternis (The Sun's Eclipse) on the
same theme as Shelley's Cenci, was written in 1902 and revived
with great success last year; in the powerful, but now nearly for-
gotten, plays in Low German dialect of Fritz Stavenhagen; and
in the realistic historical dramas of the Austrian dramatist Karl


174
CONTEMPORARY GERMAN DRAMATISTS
Schönherr, whose Glaube und Heimat (Faith and Home) an
intense drama of the Counter-Reformation in Tyrol, written in
1908, still holds its place in the repertoire of several Austrian and
South German theatres. The last writer, it may be noted, has
in the past few months produced another play, an exposition of
the sordid side of a doctor's life, entitled Der Kampf (The Strug-
gle) which, with the successful Flamme (Flame) of Hans Müller,
a melodramatic but on the whole sincere and moving play of the
rescue of a prostitute and her subsequent return to her old life, may
be taken as a proof of the fact that Naturalism, though in decay,
is not dead and sometimes, even at the present day, tends to revive
as by a kind of protest against the too recondite efforts of the
psychological school of drama.
With the foregoing reservation the thesis of the decline and
fall of Naturalism in twentieth-century German drama may be
considered as established. The next task is to pass in review the
chief dramatists whose works occupy the German stage to-day,
beginning with the older men, with those whose position was
secure before the war, whose names were in general familiar to
students of literature outside Germany, then turning to the younger
playwrights, to those who, although they may have begun to write
before 1914, were not at all well-known and have developed their
talent in the obscurity in which the great world-struggle caused
German literary activity to be enveloped. Among the first we
would name before all Gerhart Hauptmann, whose position of
pre-eminence has in no way been shaken. In 1917 Hauptmann
wrote a play entitled Winterballade (The Winter-Ballad) a
drama in beautiful blank verse founded on a tale of Selma Lager-
löf about the murder of a Swedish pastor by three Scottish officers
in Sweden in the service of the King, and the fate which dogged
their footsteps until the actual murderer fell dead. Hauptmann's
two post-armistice dramas are entitled Der weisse Heiland (The
White Redeemer) and Indipohdi. The first of these is a drama,
in the rather monotonous octosyllabic verse of Longfellow's Hia-
watha, on the subject of the Conquest of Mexico Montezuma
is the tragic hero, maintaining a dignified attitude in the face of
the invaders, until one day there is a more than usually horrible
murder of the Indians by the Spaniards and the old, pathetic, suf-
fering King is sacrificed to the fury of his subjects, who imagine


ALEC W. G. RANDALL
175
him to have encouraged the foreigner. Some critics, when this play
was first produced in Berlin�not on the whole very successfully-
thought they saw in it a symbolical representation of Germany's
plight under the heel of the triumphant Entente. But this is alto-
gether far-fetched. The play can be judged purely on its merits,
and as such declared to be remarkable more for the beauty of indi-
vidual passages than for construction and total effect. Indipohdi
is a mystical drama on a Prospero-theme, set in Indian surround-
ings which the poet-dramatist sometimes renders in blank verse of
a high quality. The exact meaning of the play it would, how-
ever, be difficult to discover; no critic has yet propounded a con-
sistent interpretation. From the hard but entirely comprehensible
realism of Vor Sonnenaufgang to the poetic but vague and obscure
imaginings of Indipohdi is a very wide span.
No such span has been crossed by the other dramatist whose
name occurs inevitably after that of Hauptmann, Hermann Suder-
mann. During the war Sudermann published a volume of three
plays under the general title of Die entgötterte Welt (The World
Without God) by which he meant decadent German society before
the war. Two plays from this series were produced last year in
Berlin and enjoyed a long and popular run-Die Freundin (The
Woman-friend) a character-sketch of a light-minded, intriguing
woman, who thoughtlessly ruins three lives, and Das höhere Leben
(The Higher Life) another play of amorous intrigue, satirizing
certain types of "fast" Berlin society. The success of these was
followed up by Die Raschoffs, in which father and son are pre-
sented struggling for the guilty love of a Berlin actress, until the
crisis is resolved by the suicide of the older man. In all these
plays the writing is essentially that of the Sudermann we know, with
the same �romantic-realist� conception of drama, the same talent
for situation, for light, swift dialogue, the same occasional lapse
into the merely melodramatic, but, above all, the same unrivalled
sense of the theatre. Sudermann's plays may not last except as
pictures of conditions; they are not profound enough for perma-
nence. But they still have, as ever, most of the essentials of imme-
diate success.
One of the stage sensations of the present year in Germany and
Austria was the production of Arthur Schnitzler's Reigen, a series
of dramatic sketches of such risqué character that public opinion


176 CONTEMPORARY GERMAN DRAMATISTS
was shocked and the representations in Vienna suspended. This
stage revival of writing never intended for production and the
hostility with which it was received should not be allowed to
obscure the facts that, since the armistice, this very talented writer
has produced, in the play Casanova in Spa, oder Die Schwestern
(Casanova in Spa, or The Sisters) a remarkable comedy which
will rank with his Anatol and Liebelei (Playing with Love).
The "sisters� are really friends, Anina and Flaminia, rivals for the
love of the arch-adventurer. The quarrels between them, the com-
plications with their respective husbands, and the unravelling of
the plot in which Casanova had unwittingly caused himself to
become involved are rendered with a brilliance of dialogue, a deli-
cacy of characterization, which may well compare with certain of
the masterpieces of the English school of Restoration drama. The
other leading Vienna dramatist who has produced work in the
past two years�Hermann Bahr�for Hofmannsthal has contented
himself with writing the libretto for Richard Strauss's latest opera,
Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman Without a Shadow)-has
given the large public he always commands two light comedies,
Ehelei and Der Unmensch. These were in distinct contrast to his
play, written during the war, Die Stimme (The Voice) a solemn,
rather dull drama of a man's miraculous conversion to the faith,
which is evidently based to a certain extent on that re-conversion
of Bahr himself which took place during the war, but not other-
wise of much account.
So much for the older men. Of their younger contemporaries,
men who were either not known at all in 1914 or were only just
beginning to get their plays produced, it is worth noting that one
of the most hopeful comes from that paradox of cities, Vienna, from
which not even complete political disaster, humiliation, and star-
vation have been able to take a certain leadership in the world
of literature and art. This is Anton Wildgans, in recent months
appointed to be director of the famous Vienna Burgtheater. Dur-
ing the war Wildgans distinguished himself by writing two plays,
Armut (Poverty) and Dies Irae, which might be said to be ex-
amples of the transfusion of Naturalism into imagination by the
attention given to spiritual values and motives. This writer's latest
achievement is the first play in a great trilogy on Biblical subjects.
It is entitled Kain (Cain) and its successors are intended to have


ALEC W. G. RANDALL
177
as heroes respectively Moses and Jesus Christ. There is still much
that is youthful and immature in Wildgans' writing, but his grasp
of character and situation, with the frequent beauty of his verse
in Kain, show him to be one of the most promising writers in pres-
ent-day German drama.
Two writers whose work is looked for with the greatest inter-
est on the German stage, where they have had produced in the past
five or six years several plays from their too prolific store, are
George Kaiser and Rolf Lauckner. Kaiser, who is in the forties,
is now in prison, having been found guilty of misappropriation
after a remarkable trial during which some of his adherents
attempted to represent him as a misunderstood, persecuted man.
But this fact and the obvious eccentricity which lies behind it need
not diminish our interest in his real dramatic talent. No one in
present-day German drama has come more clearly under the influ-
ence of Bernard Shaw, particularly in his Gerettete Alkibiades
(Alcibiades Saved) and Europa. The first of these is a skittish
dramatization of several episodes from the life of Socrates, the lat-
ter a dance-play based on the myth of Europa, in which there is
some excellent burlesque on the parts played by Zeus and Hermes.
In both we are carried into the atmosphere of Caesar and Cleopatra.
Kaiser, like Shaw, has attempted to strip off all romance from the
classical
story,
and clothe it in wit and fantasy. In another, more
bitter mood, during the war, Kaiser wrote Von Morgens bis Mit-
ternachts (From Morn to Midnight) which has been published in
English in both New York and London. This was greeted by
enthusiasts as a supreme example of expressionist dramatic art,
by the hostile critics as literary Bolshevism. The truth appears
to be that it, like Hölle, Weg, Erde, another later play by Kaiser,
is an attempt to apply the cinematographic method to art, giv-
ing by flashes, so to speak, a brief but profound and dazzling
insight into character and motive. George Kaiser, as a dramatic
experimenter, if as nothing more, holds a place in the history of
twentieth-century German drama.
Lauckner, possessed though he is of distinct originality of
method, seems to be, intellectually and philosophically, a follower
of Frank Wedekind, that writer of wayward but undoubted talent
whose offenses against taste have hitherto prevented a wholly
unbiassed judgement on his achievement. It
on his achievement. It may be mentioned


178 CONTEMPORARY GERMAN DRAMATISTS
here that Wedekind's last play, produced early in 1917, a little
before his death, was a series of dramatic scenes based on the life
of Hercules, entitled Herakles, a work of calm and dignity,
restrained action presented in often distinguished poetical lines,
which formed a singularly quiet climax to a literary career of such
violence and struggle. It is not this Wedekind, however, whom
Lauckner appears in some degree to have taken for his model, and
in his Predigt in Litauen (Sermon in Lithuania) a drama of a
rebellious son pitted against a pious but hypocritical parent, who
in the end commits suicide, he is almost as lurid as his mas-
ter. Other plays by him which have been received with favour are
the character-studies Wahnschaffe and Christa die Tante (Aunt
Christa) a kind of dramatized Coeur Simple with deliberately
"shocking' episodes which could very well have been omitted,
and Der Sturz des Apostels Paulus (The Fall of the Apostle Paul)
a drama of a man who rises from the common people to become a
sort of New Thought prophet but has to return, crushed and dis-
illusioned.
Promises have not been fulfilled by some of the younger German
dramatists whose work attracted great attention during the war.
There is, however, little sign at present that the production of works
of promise is likely to diminish. On the contrary an increase may
be expected and the task of selection from such profusion will be
labour even more onerous than it is to-day.


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GARGANTUA. BOOK III. CHAPTER 39. BY HERMANN-PAUL.





FOUR YEARS
1887�1891
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
XVI
I
a
HAD already met most of the poets of my generation. I had
said, soon after the publication of The Wanderings of Usheen,
to the editor of a series of shilling reprints, who had set me to
compile tales of the Irish fairies, �I am growing jealous of other
poets and we will all grow jealous of each other unless we know
each other and so feel a share in each other's triumph.� He was a
Welshman, lately a mining engineer, Ernest Rhys, a writer of
Welsh translations and original poems, that have often moved me
greatly though I can think of no one else who has read them. He
was seven or eight years older than myself and through his work as
editor knew everybody who would compile a book for seven or
eight pounds. Between us we founded The Rhymers' Club
which for some years was to meet every night in an upper room
with a sanded floor in an ancient eating house in the Strand called
The Cheshire Cheese. Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson, Victor
Plarr, Ernest Radford, John Davidson, Richard le Gallienne, T.
W. Rolleston, Selwyn Image, Edwin Ellis, and John Todhunter
came constantly for a time, Arthur Symons and Herbert Horne, less
constantly, while William Watson joined but never came and
Francis Thompson came once but never joined; and sometimes if
we met in a private house, which we did occasionally, Oscar Wilde
came. It had been useless to invite him to The Cheshire Cheese for
he hated Bohemia. "Olive Schreiner,� he said once to me, �is stay-
ing in the East End because that is the only place where people do
not wear masks upon their faces, but I have told her that I live in
the West End because nothing in life interests me but the mask.�
We read our poems to one another and talked criticism and
drank a little wine. I sometimes say when I speak of the club,


180
FOUR YEARS
�We had such and such ideas, such and such a quarrel with the
great Victorians, we set before us such and such aims," as though
we had many philosophical ideas. I say this because I am ashamed
to admit that I had these ideas and that whenever I began to talk of
them a gloomy silence fell upon the room. A young Irish poet,
who wrote excellently but had the worst manners, was to say a few
years later, "You do not talk like a poet, you talk like a man
of letters,� and if all the Rhymers had not been polite, if most of
them had not been to Oxford or Cambridge, the greater number
would have said the same thing. I was full of thought, often very
abstract thought, longing all the while to be full of images, because
I had gone to the art school instead of a university. Yet even if I
had gone to a university, and learned all the classical foundations
of English literature and English culture, all that great erudition
which once accepted frees the mind from restlessness, I should have
had to give up my Irish subject matter, or attempt to found a new
tradition, lacking sufficient recognized precedent. I must needs find
out some reason for all I did. I knew almost from the start that to
overflow with reasons was to be not quite well-born, and when I
could I hid them, as men hide a disagreeable ancestry; and that
there was no help for it seeing that my country was not born at all.
I was of those doomed to imperfect achievement, and under a
curse, as it were, like some race of birds compelled to spend the
time, needed for the making of the nest, in argument as to the
convenience of moss and twig and lichen. Le Gallienne and Dav-
idson, and even Symons, were provincial at their setting out, but
their provincialism was curable, mine incurable; while the one
conviction shared by all the younger men, but principally by John-
son and Horne, who imposed their personalities upon us, was an
opposition to all ideas, all generalizations that can be explained and
debated. E- fresh from Paris would sometimes say��We
are concerned with nothing but impressions,� but that itself was a
generalization and met but stony silence. Conversation constantly
dwindled into �Do you like so and so's last book ?� �No, I prefer
the book before it," and I think that but for its Irish members,
who said whatever came into their heads, the club would not have
survived its first difficult months. I saw-now ashamed that I
saw "like a man of letters,� now exasperated at their indifference
to the fashion of their own river-bed�that Swinburne in one way,


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
181
9)
Browning in another, and Tennyson in a third, had filled their
work with what I called �impurities,� curiosities about politics,
about science, about history, about religion; and that we must
create once more the
work.
Our clothes were for the most part unadventurous like our con-
versation, though I indeed wore a brown velveteen coat, a loose
tie, and a very old inverness cape, discarded by my father twenty
years before and preserved by my Sligo-born mother whose actions
were unreasoning and habitual like the seasons. But no other
member of the club, except Le Gallienne, who wore a loose tie,
and Symons, who had an inverness cape that was quite new and
almost fashionable, would have shown himself for the world in
any costume but "that of an English gentleman.� �One should
be quite unnoticeable,� Johnson explained to me. Those who
conformed most carefully to the fashion in their clothes, generally
departed furthest from it in their handwriting, which was small,
neat, and studied, one poet�which, I forget-having founded his
upon the handwriting of George Herbert. Dowson and Symons I
was to know better in later years when Symons became a very dear
friend, and I never got behind John Davidson's Scottish roughness
and exasperation, though I saw much of him, but from the first I
devoted myself to Lionel Johnson. He and Horne and Image and
one or two others, shared a man-servant and an old house in Char-
lotte Street, Fitzroy Square, typical figures of transition, doing as
an achievement of learning and of exquisite taste what their pre-
decessors did in careless abundance. All were Pre-Raphaelite, and
sometimes one might meet in the rooms of one or other a ragged
figure, as of some fallen dynasty, Simeon Solomon the Pre-Raphael-
ite painter, once the friend of Rossetti and of Swinburne, but fresh
now from some low public house. Condemned to a long term of
imprisonment for a criminal offence, he had sunk into drunkenness
and misery. Introduced one night, however, to some man who
mistook him, in the dim candle light, for another Solomon, a success-
ful academic painter and R.A., he started to his feet in a rage with,
�Sir, do you dare to mistake me for that mountebank?� Though
not one had hearkened to the feeblest caw, or been spattered by the
smallest dropping from any Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran,
Bastien-Lepage bundle of old twigs I began by suspecting them of
lukewarmness, and even backsliding, and I owe it to that suspicion
pure


182
FOUR YEARS
that I never became intimate with Horne, who lived to become the
greatest English authority upon Italian life in the fourteenth cen-
tury and to write the one standard work on Botticelli. Connoisseur
in several arts, he had designed a little church in the manner of
Inigo Jones for a burial ground near the Marble Arch. Though I
a
now think his little church a masterpiece, its style was more than a
century too late to hit my fancy, at two or three and twenty; and
I accused him of leaning towards that eighteenth century
"That taught a school
Of dolts to smooth, inlay, and clip, and fit
Till, like the certain wands of Jacob's wit,
Their verses tallied."
Another fanaticism delayed my friendship with two men, who
are now my friends and in certain matters my chief instructors.
Somebody, probably Lionel Johnson, brought me to the studio of
Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, certainly heirs of the great
generation, and the first thing I saw was a Shannon picture of a
lady and child, arrayed in lace silk and satin, suggesting that hated
century. My eyes were full of some more mythological mother
and child and I would have none of it and I told Shannon that
he had not painted a mother and child, but elegant people expecting
visitors and I thought that a great reproach. Somebody writing in
The Germ had said that a picture of a pheasant and an apple was
merely a picture of something to eat and I was so angry with the
indifference to subject, which was the commonplace of all art
criticism since Bastien-Lepage, that I could at times see nothing else
but subject. I thought that, though it might not matter to the
man himself whether he loved a white woman or a black, a female
pickpocket or a regular communicant of the Church of England,
if only he loved strongly, it certainly did matter to his relations and
even under some circumstances to his whole neighbourhood. Some-
times indeed, like some father in Molière, I ignored the lover's
feelings altogether and even refused to admit that a trace of the
devil, perhaps a trace of colour, may lend piquancy, especially if
the connection be not permanent.
Among these men, of whom so many of the greatest talents were
to live such passionate lives and die such tragic deaths, one serene


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
183
man, T. W. Rolleston, seemed always out of place; it was I brought
him there, intending to set him to some work in Ireland later on.
I have known young Dublin working men slip out of their work-
shop to see the second Thomas Davis passing by, and even remem-
ber a conspiracy, by some three or four, to make him �the leader
of the Irish race at home and abroad," and all because he had regu-
lar features; and when all is said Alexander the Great and Alci-
biades were personable men, and the Founder of the Christian
religion was the only man who was neither a little too tall nor a
little too short, but exactly six feet high. We in Ireland thought
as do the plays and ballads, not understanding that, from the first
moment wherein nature foresaw the birth of Bastien-Lepage, she
has only granted great creative power to men whose faces are con-
torted with extravagance or curiosity, or dulled with some pro-
tecting stupidity.
I had now met all those who were to make the nineties of the
last century tragic in the history of literature, but as yet we were
all seemingly equal, whether in talent or in luck, and scarce even
personalities to one another. I remember saying one night at the
Cheshire Cheese, when more poets than usual had come, �None of us
can say who will succeed, or even who has or has not talent. The
only thing certain about us is that we are too many."
XVII
I have described what image�always opposite to the natural
self or the natural world�Wilde, Henley, Morris, copied or tried
to copy, but I have not said if I found an image for myself. I know
very little about myself and much less of that anti-self: probably
the woman who cooks my dinner or the woman who sweeps out
my study knows more than I. It is perhaps because nature made
me a gregarious man, going hither and thither looking for conversa-
tion, and ready to deny from fear or favour his dearest conviction,
that I love proud and lonely things. When I was a child and went
daily to the sexton's daughter for writing lessons, I found one poem
in her School Reader that delighted me beyond all others: a frag-
ment of some metrical translation from Aristophanes wherein the
birds sing scorn upon mankind. In later years my mind
itself
to gregarious Shelley's dream of a young man, his hair blanched
gave


184
FOUR YEARS
with sorrow, studying philosophy in some lonely tower, or of his old
man, master of all human knowledge, hidden from human sight in
some shell-strewn cavern on the Mediterranean shore. One passage
above all ran perpetually in my ears�
"Some feign that he is Enoch: others dream
He was pre-Adamite, and has survived
Cycles of generation and of ruin.
The sage, in truth, by dreadful abstinence,
And conquering penance of the mutinous flesh,
Deep contemplation and unwearied study,
In years outstretched beyond the date of man,
May have attained to sovereignty and science
Over those strong and secret things and thoughts
Which others fear and know not.
Mahmud.
I would talk
With this old Jew.
Hassan.
Thy will is even now
Made known to him where he dwells in a sea-cavern
'Mid the Demonesi, less accessible
Than thou or God! He who would question him
Must sail alone at sunset where the stream
Of ocean sleeps around those foamless isles,
When the young moon is westering as now,
And evening airs wander upon the wave;
And, when the pines of that bee-pasturing isle,
Green Erebinthus, quench the fiery shadow
Of his gilt prow within the sapphire water,
Then must the lonely helmsman cry aloud
�Ahasuerus!' and the caverns round
Will answer �Ahasuerus! If his prayer
Be granted, a faint meteor will arise,
Lighting him over Marmora; and a wind
Will rush out of the sighing pine-forest,
And with the wind a storm of harmony
Unutterably sweet, and pilot him
Through the soft twilight to the Bosphorus:
Thence, at the hour and place and circumstance
Fit for the matter of their conference,


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
185
The Jew appears. Few dare, and few who dare
Win the desired communion.�
Already in Dublin, I had been attracted to the Theosophists be-
cause they had affirmed the real existence of the Jew, or of his
like, and, apart from whatever might have been imagined by Hux-
ley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran, and Bastien-Lepage, I saw nothing
against his reality. Presently having heard that Madame Blavat-
sky had arrived from France, or from India, I thought it time
to look the matter up. Certainly if wisdom existed anywhere in the
world it must be in some such lonely mind admitting no duty to
us, communing with God only, conceding nothing from fear or
favour. Have not all peoples, while bound together in a single
mind and taste, believed that such men existed and paid them
that honour, or paid it to their mere shadow, which they have
refused to philanthropists and to men of learning.
I found Madame Blavatsky in a little house at Norwood, with
but, as she said, three followers left�the Society of Psychical
Research had just reported on her Indian phenomena�and as one
of the three followers sat in an outer room to keep out undesirable
visitors, I was kept a long time kicking my heels. Presently I was
admitted and found an old woman in a plain loose dark dress: a
sort of old Irish peasant woman with an air of humour and au-
dacious power. I was still kept waiting, for she was deep in
conversation with a woman visitor. I strayed through folding
doors into the next room and stood, in sheer idleness of mind,
looking at a cuckoo clock. It was certainly stopped, for the
weights were off and lying upon the ground, and yet as I stood there
the cuckoo came out and cuckooed at me. I interrupted Madame
Blavatsky to say, �Your clock has hooted me.� �It often hoots
at a stranger,� she replied. �Is there a spirit in it?� I said. "I
"a
do not know,� she said, �I should have to be alone to know what is
in it.� I went back to the clock and began examining it and heard
her say: "Do not break my clock.� I wondered if there was
some hidden mechanism and I should have been put out, I suppose,
had I found any, though Henley had said to me, �Of course she
gets up fraudulent miracles, but a person of genius has to do some-
thing; Sarah Bernhardt sleeps in her coffin.� Presently the visitor
went away and Madame Blavatsky explained that she was a propa-


186
FOUR YEARS
a
gandist for women's rights who had called to find out "why men
were so bad.�
"What explanation did you give her?� I said.
"That men were born bad, but women made themselves so," and
then she explained that I had been kept waiting because she had
mistaken me for some man, whose name resembled mine and who
wanted to persuade her of the flatness of the earth.
When I next saw her she had moved into a house at Holland
Park, and some time must have passed-probably I had been in
Sligo where I returned constantly for long visits�for she was sur-
rounded by followers. She sat nightly before a little table covered
with green baize and on this green baize she scribbled constantly
with a piece of white chalk. She would scribble symbols, some-
times humorously applied, and sometimes unintelligible figures,
but the chalk was intended to mark down her score when she played
patience. One saw in the next room a large table where every
night her followers and guests, often a great number, sat down to
their vegetable meal, while she encouraged or mocked through the
folding doors. A great passionate nature, a sort of female Dr
Johnson, impressive I think to every man or woman who had them-
selves any richness, she seemed impatient of the formalism, of
the shrill abstract idealism of those about her and this impatience
broke out in railing and many nicknames: �O you are a flap-
doodle, but then you are a theosophist and a brother.� The most
devout and learned of all her followers said to me, �H.P.B. has
just told me that there is another globe stuck on to this at the
north pole, so that the earth has really a shape something like
a dumb-bell.� I said, for I knew that her imagination contained
all the folklore of the world, �That must be some piece of Eastern
mythology.� �O no it is not,� he said, "of that I am certain, and
there must be something in it or she would not have said it.� Her
mockery was not kept for her followers alone, and her voice would
become harsh, and her mockery lose fantasy and humour, when
she spoke of what seemed to her scientific materialism. Once I saw
this antagonism, guided by some kind of telepathic divination, take
a form of brutal fantasy. I brought a very able Dublin woman
to see her and this woman had a brother, a physiologist whose repu-
tation, though known to specialists alone, was European, and
because of this brother a family pride in everything scientific
and modern. The Dublin woman scarcely opened her mouth the
a


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
187
:
whole evening and her name was certainly unknown to Madame
Blavatsky, yet I saw at once in that wrinkled old face bent over the
cards, and the only time I ever saw it there, a personal hostility, the
dislike of one woman for another. Madame Blavatsky seemed to
bundle herself up, becoming all primeval peasant, and began com-
,
plaining of her ailments, more especially of her bad leg. But of
late her master-her "old Jew," her �Ahasuerus�-cured it, or set
it on the way to be cured. �I was sitting here in my chair,� said
she, "when the master came in and brought something with him
which he put over my knee, something warm which enclosed my
knee�it was a live dog which he had cut open.� I recognized a
cure used sometimes in mediaeval medicine. She had two masters
- and their portraits, ideal Indian heads, painted by some most in-
competent artist, stood upon either side of the folding doors. One
night, when talk was impersonal and general, I sat gazing through
the folding doors into the dimly lighted dining room beyond. I
noticed a curious red light shining upon a picture and got up to
see where the red light came from. It was the picture of an Indian
and as I came near it slowly vanished. When I returned to my
seat, Madame Blavatsky said, "What did you see?� �A picture,�
I said. �Tell it to go away.� �It is already gone. �So much
the better,� she said, �I was afraid it was mediumship but it is
only clairvoyance.� �What is the difference?" "If it had been
mediumship, it would have stayed in spite of you. Beware of
mediumship; it is a kind of madness; I know for I have been
through it.�
I found her almost always full of gaiety that, unlike the occa-
sional joking of those about her, was illogical and incalculable
and yet always kindly and tolerant. I had called one evening to
find her absent but expected every moment. She had been some-
where at the seaside for her health and arrived with a little suite of
followers. She sat down at once in her big chair, and began unfold-
ing a brown paper parcel while all looked on full of curiosity. It
contained a large family Bible. �This is a present for my maid,�
she said. "What a Bible and not even annotated!� said some
shocked voice. �Well my children,� was the answer, �what is the
good of siving lemons to those who want oranges?� When I first
frequent her house, as I soon did very constantly, I no-
began "nandsome clever woman of the world there, who seemed
9
a
ticed!


188
FOUR YEARS
a
certainly very much out of place, penitent though she thought her-
self. Presently there was much scandal and gossip for the peni-
tent was plainly entangled with two young men, who were ex-
pected to grow into ascetic sages. The scandal was so great that
Madame Blavatsky had to call the penitent before her and to speak
after this fashion, "We think that it is necessary to crush the ani-
mal nature; you should live in chastity in act and thought. Initia-
tion is granted only to those who are entirely chaste," and so it ran
on for some time. However after some minutes in that vehement
style, the penitent standing crushed and shamed before her, she
had wound up, �I cannot permit you more than one.� She was
quite sincere but thought that nothing mattered but what happened
in the mind, and that if we could not master the mind our actions
were of little importance. One young man filled her with exas-
peration for she thought that his settled gloom came from his
chastity. I had known him in Dublin where he had been accus-
tomed to interrupt long periods of asceticism, in which he would
eat vegetables and drink water, with brief outbreaks of what he
considered the devil. After an outbreak he would for a few hours
dazzle the imagination of the members of the local theosophical
society with poetical rhapsodies about harlots and street lamps,
and then sink into weeks of melancholy. A fellow-theosophist once
found him hanging from the window pole, but cut him down in the
nick of time. I said to the man who cut him down, �What did you
say to one another?� He said, �We spent the night telling comic
stories and laughing a great deal.� This man, torn between sen-
suality and visionary ambition, was now the most devout of all,
and told me that in the middle of the night he could often hear the
ringing of the little "astral bell� whereby Madame Blavatsky's
master called her attention, and that, although it was a silvery low
tone it made the whole house shake. Another night I found him
waiting in the hall, to show in those who had right of entrance,
on some night when the discussion was private, and as I passed he
whispered into my ear, �Madame Blavatsky is perhaps not a real
woman at all. They say that her dead body was found many years
ago upon some Russian battlefield.� She had two dominant moods.
both of extreme activity, one calm and philosophic, and this
was the mood always on that night in the week when she answered
questions upon her system and as I look back after thirty years I


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
189
often ask myself, "Was her speech automatic ? Was she a trance
medium, or in some similar state, one night in every week?"
In the other mood she was full of fantasy and inconsequent rail-
lery. "That is the Greek Church, a triangle like all true religion,�
I recall her saying, as she chalked out a triangle on the green baize,
,
and then as she made it disappear in meaningless scribbles, �it
spread out and became a bramble bush like the Church of Rome.�
Then rubbing it all out except one straight line, "Now they have
lopped off the branches and turned it into a broomstick and that is
protestantism.� And so it was night after night always varied
and unforeseen. I have observed a like sudden extreme change in
others, half whose thought was supernatural and Lawrence Oli-
phant records somewhere or other like observations. I can remem-
ber only once finding her in a mood of reverie, something had hap-
pened to damp her spirits, some attack upon her movement, or upon
herself. She spoke of Balzac, whom she had seen but once, of
Alfred de Musset, whom she had known well enough to dislike for
his morbidity, and George Sand, whom she had known so well that
they had dabbled in magic together of which �neither knew any-
thing at all� in those days; and she ran on, as if there was nobody
there to overhear her, �I used to wonder at and pity the people who
sell their souls to the devil, but now I only pity them. They do it
to have somebody on their side," and added to that, after some
words I have forgotten, �I write, write, write as the Wandering
Jew walks, walks, walks.�
Besides the devotees, who came to listen and to turn every doc-
trine into a new sanction for the puritanical convictions of their
Victorian childhood, cranks came from half Europe and from all
America, and they came that they might talk. One American said
to me, "She has become the most famous woman in the world by
sitting in a big chair and permitting us to talk.� They talked and
she played patience, and totted up her score on the green baize, and
generally seemed to listen, but sometimes she would listen no more.
There was a woman who talked perpetually of �the divine spark�
within her, until Madame Blavatsky stopped her with��Yes, my
have a divine spark within you and if you are not very
careful
you
will hear it snore.� A certain Salvation Army captain
probably pleased her, for if vociferous and loud of voice, he had
much animation. He had known hardship and spoke of his visions
dear, you


190
FOUR YEARS
while starving in the streets and he was still perhaps a little light
in the head. I wondered what he could preach to ignorant men, his
head ablaze with wild mysticism, till I met a man who had heard
him talking near Covent Garden to some crowd in the street. �My
friends,� he was saying, "you have the kingdom of heaven within
you and it would take a pretty big pill to get that out.�
XVIII
Meanwhile I had not got any nearer to proving that �Ahasuerus
dwells in a sea-cavern mid the Demonesi,� but one conclusion I
certainly did come to, which I find written out in an old diary and
dated 1887. Madame Blavatsky's "masters� were �trance per-
sonalities,� but by �trance personalities� I meant something almost
as exciting as �Ahasuerus� himself. Years before I had found, on
a table in the Royal Irish Academy, a pamphlet on Japanese art,
and read there of an animal painter so remarkable that horses he
had painted upon a temple wall had stepped down after dark and
trampled the neighbouring fields of rice. Somebody had come to
the temple in the early morning, been startled by a shower of water
drops, looked up and seen a painted horse, still wet from the dew-
covered fields, but now �trembling into stillness.� I thought that
her "masters" were imaginary forms created by suggestion, but
whether that suggestion came from Madame Blavatsky's own mind
or from some mind, perhaps at a great distance, I did not know;
and I believed that these forms could pass from Madame Blavat-
sky's mind to the minds of others, and even acquire external reality
and that these forms talked and perhaps wrote. They were born in
that imagination, where Blake had declared that all men live after
death, and where "every man is king or priest in his own house."
Certainly the house at Holland Park was a romantic place, where
one heard of constant apparitions and exchanged speculations like
those of the middle ages, and I did not separate myself from it by
my own will. The Secretary, an intelligent and friendly man,
asked me to come and see him, and when I did complained that I
was causing discussion and disturbance, a certain fanatical hungry
face had been noticed red and tearful, and it was quite plain that
I was not in full agreement with their method or their philosophy.
�I know,� he said, "that all these people become dogmatic and


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
191
fanatical because they believe what they can never prove, that their
withdrawal from family life is to them a great misfortune; but
what are we to do? We have been told that all spiritual influx
into the society will come to an end in 1897 for exactly one hun-
dred years. Before that date our fundamental ideas must be spread
.
through the world.� I knew the doctrine and it had made me won-
der why that old woman, or rather �the trance personalities� who
directed her and were her genius, insisted upon it, for influx of
some kind there must always be. Did they dread heresy, after the
death of Madame Blavatsky, or had they no purpose but the great-
est possible immediate effort?
XIX
At the British Museum reading room I often saw a man of
thirty-six, or thirty-seven, in a brown velveteen coat, with a gaunt
resolute face, and an athletic body, who seemed before I heard his
name, or knew the nature of his studies, a figure of romance. Pres-
ently I was introduced, where or by what man or woman I do not
remember. He was Macgregor, the author of the Kabbala
Unveiled and his studies were two only-magic and the theory
of war, for he believed himself a born commander and all but
equal in wisdom and in power to that old Jew. He had copied
many manuscripts on magic ceremonial and doctrine in the British
Museum, and was to copy many more in Continental libraries, and
it was through him mainly that I began certain studies and expe-
riences, that were to convince me that images well up before the
mind's eye from a deeper source than conscious or subconscious
memory. I believe that his mind in those early days did not belie
his face and body, though in later years it became unhinged, for he
kept a proud head amid great poverty. One that boxed with him
nightly has told me that for many weeks he could knock him down,
though Macgregor was the stronger man, and only knew long after
that during those weeks Macgregor starved. With him I met an
old white-haired Oxfordshire clergyman, the most panic-stricken
person I have ever known, though Macgregor's introduction had
been "he unites us to the great adepts of antiquity.� This old
man took me aside that he might say��I hope you never invoke
spirits�that is a very dangerous thing to do. I am told that even


192
FOUR YEARS
the planetary spirits turn upon us in the end." I said, "Have you
ever seen an apparition?" "O yes, once,� he said. �I have my
alchemical laboratory in a cellar under my house where the Bishop
cannot see it. One day I was walking up and down there when I
heard another footstep walking up and down beside me. I turned
and saw a girl I had been in love with when I was a young man, but
she died long ago. She wanted me to kiss her. O no, I would not
do that." "Why not?� I said. "O she might have got power over
me." "Has your alchemical research had any success ?� I said.
�Yes, I once made the elixir of life. A French alchemist said it
had the right smell and the right colour" (the alchemist may have
been Eliphas Levi, who visited England in the 'sixties, and would
have said anything) �but the first effect of the elixir is that your
nails fall out and your hair falls off. I was afraid that I might
have made a mistake and that nothing else might happen, so I put
it away on a shelf. I meant to drink it when I was an old man,
but when I got it down the other day it had all dried up."
XX
I generalized a great deal and was ashamed of it. I thought that
it was my business in life to be an artist and a poet, and that there
could be no business comparable to that. I refused to read books,
and even to meet people who excited me to generalization, but all
to no purpose. I said my prayers much as in childhood, though
without the old regularity of hour and place, and I began to pray
that my imagination might somehow be rescued from abstraction,
and become as preoccupied with life as had been the imagination
of Chaucer. For ten or twelve years more I suffered continual re-
morse, and only became content when my abstractions had com-
posed themselves into picture and dramatization. My very remorse
helped to spoil my early poetry, giving it an element of sentimen-
tality through my refusal to permit it any share of an intellect
which I considered impure. Even in practical life I only very
gradually began to use generalizations, that have since become the
foundation of all I have done, or shall do, in Ireland. For all I
know all men may have been so timid, for I am persuaded that our
intellects at twenty contain all the truths we shall ever find, but as
yet we do not know truths that belong to us from opinions, caught


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
193
up in casual irritation or momentary fantasy. As life goes on we
discover that certain thoughts sustain us in defeat, or give us vic-
tory, whether over ourselves or others, and it is these thoughts,
tested by passion, that we call convictions. Among subjective men
(in all those, that is, who must spin a web out of their own bowels)
the victory is an intellectual daily recreation of all that exterior
fate snatches away, and so that fate's antithesis; while what I have
called �the mask� is an emotional antithesis to all that comes out
of their internal nature. We begin to live when we have conceived
life as tragedy.
XXI
A conviction that the world was now but a bundle of fragments
possessed me without ceasing. I had tried this conviction on the
Rhymers, thereby plunging into greater silence an already too silent
evening. "Johnson,� I was accustomed to say, "you are the only
man I know whose silence has beak and claw.� I had lectured on it
to some London Irish society, and I was to lecture upon it later on in
Dublin, but I never found but one interested man, an official of
the Primrose League, who was also an active member of the Fenian
Brotherhood. �I am an extreme conservative apart from Ireland,"
I have heard him explain; and I have no doubt that personal expe-
rience made him share the sight of any eye that saw the world in
fragments. I had been put into a rage by the followers of Huxley,
Tyndall, Carolus Duran, and Bastien-Lepage, who not only as-
serted the unimportance of subject whether in art or literature, but
the independence of the arts from one another. Upon the other
hand I delighted in every age where poet and artist confined them-
selves gladly to some inherited subject matter known to the whole
people, for I thought that in man and race alike there is something
called "unity of being� using that term as Dante used it when he
compared beauty in the Convito to a perfectly proportioned human
body. My father, from whom I had learned the term, preferred
a comparison to a musical instrument so strung that if we touch a
string all the strings murmur faintly. There is not more desire, he
had said, in lust than in true love, but in true love desire awakens
pity, hope, affection, admiration, and, given appropriate circum-
stance, every emotion possible to man. When I began, however,


194
FOUR YEARS
to apply this thought to the state and to argue for a law-made
balance among trades and occupations my father displayed at once
the violent free trader and propagandist of liberty. I thought that
the enemy of this unity was abstraction, meaning by abstraction
not the distinction but the isolation of occupation, or class or
faculty�
�Call down the hawk from the air
Let him be hooded, or caged,
Till the yellow eye has grown mild,
For larder and spit are bare,
The old cook enraged,
The scullion gone wild.�
a
I knew no mediaeval cathedral, and Westminster, being a part
of abhorred London, did not interest me, but I thought constantly
of Homer and Dante and the tombs of Mausolus and Artemesia,
the great figures of King and Queen and the lesser figures of Greek
and Amazon, Centaur and Greek. I thought that all art should
be a Centaur finding in the popular lore its back and its strong legs.
I got great pleasure too from remembering that Homer was sung,
and from that tale of Dante hearing a common man sing some
stanza from The Divine Comedy, and from Don Quixote's meet-
ing with some common man that sang Ariosto. Morris had never
seemed to care greatly for any poet later than Chaucer and though I
preferred Shakespeare to Chaucer I begrudged my own preference.
Had not Europe shared one mind and heart, until both mind and
heart began to break into fragments a little before Shakespeare's
birth? Music and verse began to fall apart when Chaucer robbed
verse of its speed that he might give it greater meditation, though for
another generation or so minstrels were to sing his long elaborated
Troilus and Cressida; painting parted from religion in the later
Renaissance that it might study effects of tangibility undisturbed;
while, that it might characterize, where it had once personified, it
renounced, in our own age, all that inherited subject matter which
we have named poetry. Presently I was indeed to number charac-
ter itself among the abstractions, encouraged by Congreve's saying
that �passions are too powerful in the fair sex to let humour,� or as
we say character, "have its course." Nor have we fared better


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
195
under the common daylight, for pure reason has notoriously made
but light of practical reason, and has been made light of in its
turn from that morning when Descartes discovered that he could
think better in his bed than out of it; nor needed I original thought
to discover, being so late of the school of Morris, that machinery
had not separated from handicraft wholly for this world's good, nor
to notice that the distinction of classes had become their isolation.
If the London merchants of our day competed together in writing
lyrics they would not, like the Tudor merchants, dance in the open
street before the house of the victor; nor do the great ladies of
London finish their balls on the pavement before their doors as did
the great Venetian ladies, even in the eighteenth century, conscious
of an all enfolding sympathy. Doubtless because fragments broke
into ever smaller fragments we saw one another in a light of bitter
comedy, and in the arts, where now one technical element reigned
and now another, generation hated generation, and accomplished
beauty was snatched away when it had most engaged our affections.
One thing I did not foresee, not having the courage of my own
thought: the growing murderousness of the world.
�Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
More anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.�
XXII
The Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran, Bastien-Lepage coven
asserted that an artist or a poet must paint or write in the style of
his own day, and this with The Faerie Queen and The Lyrical Bal-
lads and Blake's early poems in its ears, and plain to the eyes, in
book or gallery, those great masterpieces of later Egypt, founded
upon that work of the Ancient Kingdom already further in time
from later Egypt than later Egypt is from us. I knew that I
could choose my style where I pleased, that no man can deny to the


196
FOUR YEARS
human mind any power, that power once achieved, and yet I did
not wish to recover the first simplicity. If I must be but a shep-
herd building his hut among the ruins of some fallen city, I might
take porphyry or shaped marble, if it lay ready to my hand, instead
of the baked clay of the first builders. If Chaucer's personages
had disengaged themselves from Chaucer's crowd, forgot their
common goal and shrine, and after sundry magnifications be-
come, each in his turn, the centre of some Elizabethan play, and
after split into their elements, and so given birth to romantic
poetry, I need not reverse the cinematograph. I could take those
separated elements, all that abstract love and melancholy, and
give them a symbolical or mythological coherence. Not Chaucer's
rough-tongued riders, some Procession of the Gods! a pilgrimage no
more but perhaps a shrine! Might I not, with health and good
luck to aid me, create some new Prometheus Unbound, Patrick or
Columbkil, Oisin or Fion, in Prometheus' stead, and, instead of
Caucasus, Cro-Patric or Ben Bulben? Have not all races had
their first unity from a polytheism, that marries them to rock and
hill? We had in Ireland imaginative stories, which the uneduca-
ted classes knew and even sang, and might we not make those
stories current among the educated classes, re-discovering for the
work's sake what I have called "the applied arts of literature,� the
association of literature, that is, with music, speech, and dance; and
at last, it might be, so deepen the political passion of the nation
that all, artist and poet, craftsman and day-labourer would accept
a common design? Perhaps even these images, once created and
associated with river and mountain, might move of themselves and
with some powerful, even turbulent life, like those painted horses
that trampled the rice fields of Japan.
XXIII
I used to tell the few friends to whom I could speak these secret
thoughts that I would make the attempt in Ireland but fail, for
our civilization, its elements multiplying by division like certain
low forms of life, was all-powerful; but in reality I had the wildest
hopes. To-day I add to that first conviction, to that first desire for
unity, this other conviction, long a mere opinion vaguely or inter-
mittently apprehended: Nations, races, and individual men are


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
197
unified by an image, or bundle of related images, symbolical or
evocative of the state of mind, which is of all states of mind not
impossible, the most difficult to that man, race, or nation; because
only the
greatest obstacle that can be contemplated without despair,
rouses the will to full intensity.
A powerful class by terror, rhetoric, and organized sentimental-
ity, may drive their people to war but the day draws near when
they cannot keep them there; and how shall they face the pure
nations of the East when the day comes to do it with but equal
arms? I had seen Ireland in my own time turn from the bragging
rhetoric and gregarious humour of O'Connell's generation and
school, and offer herself to the solitary and proud Parnell as to
her anti-self, buskin following hard on sock, and I had begun to
hope, or to half hope, that we might be the first in Europe to seek
unity as deliberately as it had been sought by theologian, poet,
sculptor, architect, from the eleventh to the thirteenth century.
Doubtless we must seek it differently, no longer considering it con-
venient to epitomize all human knowledge, but find it we well
might could we first find philosophy and a little passion.
XXIV
a
It was the death of Parnell that convinced me that the moment
had come for work in Ireland, for I knew that for a time the imagi-
nation of young men would turn from politics. There was a little
Irish patriotic society of young people, clerks, shop boys, shop
girls, and the like, called the Southwick Irish Literary Society. It
had ceased to meet because each member of the committee had
lectured so many times that the girls got the giggles whenever a
committee man stood up to speak. I invited the committee to my
father's house at Bedford Park and there proposed a new organiza-
tion. After a few months spent in founding, with the help of T. W.
Rolleston who came to that first meeting and had a knowledge of
committee work I lacked, the Irish Literary Society, which soon
included every London Irish author and journalist, I went to Dub-
lin and founded there a similar society.
a
The End


THREE CANTOS
BY EZRA POUND
THE FIFTH CANTO
Great bulk, huge mass, thesaurus;
Ecbatan, the clock ticks and fades out;
The bride awaiting the god's touch; Ecbatan,
City of patterned streets; again the vision:
Down in the viae stradae, toga'd the crowd, and arm�d,
Rushing on populous business, and from parapets
Looked down at North
Was Egypt, and the celestial Nile, blue-deep
cutting low barren land,
Old men and camels working the water-wheels;
Measureless seas and stars,
Iamblichus' light, the souls ascending,
Sparks like a partridge covey,
Like the "ciocco," brand struck in the game.
"Et omniformis�':
Air, fire, the pale soft light.
Topaz, I manage, and three sorts of blue;
but on the barb of time.
The fire? always, and the vision always,
Ear dull, perhaps, with the vision, flitting
And fading at will. Weaving with points of gold,
Gold-yellow, saffron . .
The roman shoe, Aurunculeia's,
And come shuffling feet, and cries �Da nuces!
"Nuces!" praise and Hymenaeus �brings the girl to her man.�
Titter of sound about me, always,
and from "Hesperus
Hush of the older song: �Fades light from seacrest,
�And in Lydia walks with pair'd women
" �Peerless among the pairs, and that once in Sardis
�In satieties
.


EZRA POUND
199
,
chill crests,
�Fades the light from the sea, and many things
�Are set abroad and brought to mind of thee,"
And the vinestocks lie untended, new leaves come to the shoots,
North wind nips on the bough, and seas in heart
Toss
up
And the vine stocks lie untended
And many things are set abroad and brought to mind
Of thee, Atthis, unfruitful.
The talks ran long in the night.
And from Mauleon, fresh with a new earned grade,
In maze of approaching rain-steps, Poicebot-
The air was full of women.
And Savairic Mauleon
Gave him his land and knight's fee, and he wed the woman.
Came lust of travel on him, of romerya;
And out of England a knight with slow-lifting eyelids
Lei fassar furar a del, put glamour upon her
And left her an eight months gone.
�Came lust of woman upon him,"
Poicebot, now on North road from Spain
(Sea-change, a grey in the water)
And in small house by town's edge
Found a woman, changed and familiar face;
Hard night, and parting at morning.
And Pieire won the singing, Pieire de Maensac,
Song or land on the throw, and was dreitz hom
And had De Tierci's wife and with the war they made:
Troy in Auvergnat
While Menelaus piled up the church at port
He kept Tyndarida. Dauphin stood with de Maensac.
.
John Borgia is bathed at last.
(Clock-tick pierces the vision)
Tiber, dark with the cloak, wet cat gleaming in patches.
Click of the hooves, through garbage,
: Clutching the greasy stone. "And the cloak floated�
Slander is up betimes.
But Varchi of Florence,


200
THREE CANTOS
9)
Steeped in a different year, and pondering Brutus,
Then
"SIGA MAL AUTHIS DEUTERON!
�Dog-eye!!� (to Alessandro)
"Whether for Love of Florence,� Varchi leaves it,
Saying, �I saw the man, came up with him at Venice,
�I, one wanting the facts,
�And no mean labour.
�Or for a privy spite ?"
Good Varchi leaves it,
But: "I saw the man. Se pia?
�O impia? For Lorenzaccio had thought of stroke in the open
�But uncertain (for the Duke went never unguarded)
�And would have thrown him from wall
�Yet feared this might not end him," or lest Alessandro
Know not by whom death came,
O si credesse
�If when the foot slipped, when death came upon him,
�Lest cousin Duke Alessandro think he'd fallen alone
�No friend to aid him in falling.�
Caina attende. .
As beneath my feet a lake, was ice in seeming.
And all of this, runs Varchi, dreamed out beforehand
In Perugia, caught in the star-maze by Del Carmine,
Cast on a natal paper, set with an exegesis, told,
All told to Alessandro, told thrice over,
Who held his death for a doom.
In abuleia.
But Don Lorenzino
"Whether for love of Florence .. but
"O si morisse, credesse caduto da se."
SIGA, SIGA!
The wet cloak floats on the surface,
Schiavoni, caught on the wood-barge,
Gives out the afterbirth, Giovanni Borgia,
Trails out no more at nights, where Barabello
Prods the Pope's elephant, and gets no crown, where Mozarello
Takes the Calabrian roadway, and for ending


EZRA POUND
201
>
Is smothered beneath a mule,
a poet's ending,
Down a stale well-hole, oh a poet's ending. "Sanazarro
"Alone out of all the court was faithful to him"
For the gossip of Naples' trouble drifts to North,
Fracastor (lightning was midwife) Cotta, and Ser D'Alviano,
Al poco giorno ed al gran cerchio d'ombra,
Talk the talks out with Navighero,
Burner of yearly Martials,
(The slavelet is mourned in vain)
And the next comer
says �were nine wounds,
�Four men, white horse with a double rider,�
The hooves clink and slick on the cobbles
Schiavoni ... the cloak floats on the water,
"Sink the thing," splash wakes Schiavoni;
Tiber catching the nap, the moonlit velvet,
A wet cat gleaming in patches.
�Se pia,� Varchi,
�O empia, ma risoluto
"E terribile deliberazione"
Both sayings run in the wind,
Ma si morisse!
.
THE SIXTH CANTO
"The tale of thy deeds, Odysseus!" and Tolosan
Ground rents, sold by Guillaume, ninth duke of Aquitaine;
Till Louis is wed with Eleanor; the wheel ...
(�Conrad, the wheel turns and in the end turns ill�)
And Acre and boy's love . . . for her uncle was
Commandant at Acre, she was pleased with him;
And Louis, French King, was jealous of days unshared
This pair had had together in years gone;
And he drives on for Zion, as �God wills�
To find, in six weeks time, the Queen's scarf is
Twisted atop the casque of Saladin.
�For Sandbrueil's ransom.� But the pouch-mouths add,
9)


202
THREE CANTOS
"She went out hunting, there, the tuft-top palms
�Give spot of shade, she rode back rather late,
�Late, latish, yet perhaps it was not too late.'
Then France again, and to be rid of her
And brush his antlers; Aquitaine, Poictiers !
Buckle off the lot! And Adelaide Castilla wears the crown.
Eleanor down water-butt, dethroned, debased, unqueen�d.
Unqueen�d for five rare months,
And frazzle-top, the sand-red face, the pitching gait,
Harry Plantagent, the sputter in place of speech,
But King about to be, King Louis, takes a queen.
"E quand lo reis Louis lo entendit
mout er faschée
And yet Gisors, in six years thence,
Was Marguerite's. And Harry joven
In pledge for all his life and life of all his heirs
Shall have Gisors and Vexis and Neauphal, Neufchastel;
But if no issue, Gisors shall revert
And Vexis and Neufchastel and Neauphal to the French crown.
A song: Si tuit li dol el plor el marrimen
Del mon were set together they would seem but light
Against the death of the young English King,
Harry the Young is dead and all men mourn,
Mourn all good courtiers, fighters, cantadors.
And still Old Harry keeps grip on Gisors
And Neufchastel and Neauphal and Vexis;
And two years war, and never two years go by
but come new forays, and "The wheel
"Turns, Conrad, turns, and in the end toward ill."
And Richard and Alix span the gap, Gisors,
And Eleanor and Richard face the King,
For the fourth family time Plantagenet
Faces his dam and whelps, .. and holds Gisors,
Now Alix' dowry, against Philippe-Auguste
(Louis' by Adelaide, wood-lost, then crowned at Etampe)
And never two years sans war.
And Zion still
Bleating away to Eastward, the lost lamb,
Damned city (was only Frederic knew
The true worth, and patched with Malek Kamel


EZRA POUND
203
The sane and sensible peace to bait the world
And set all camps disgruntled with all leaders.
"Damn'd atheists!" alike Mahomet growls,
And Christ grutches more sullen for Sicilian sense
Than does Mahound on Malek.)
The bright coat
Is more to the era, and in Messina's beach-way
Des Barres and Richard split the reed-lances
And the coat is torn.
(Moving in heavy air: Henry and Saladin.
The ser; ent coils in the crowd.)
The let rs run: Tancred to Richard:
That the French King is
More against thee, than is his will to me
Good and in faith; and moves against your safety.
Richard to Tancred:
That our pact stands firm,
And, for these slanders, that I think you lie.
Proofs, and in writing:
And if Bourgogne say they were not
Deliver'd by hand and his,
Let him move sword against me and
my word.
Richard to Philip: silence, with a tone.
Richard to Flanders: the subjoined and precedent.
Philip a silence; and then, "Lies and turned lies
"For that he will fail Alix
�Affianced, and Sister to Ourself.�
Richard: "My Father's bed-piece! A Plantagenet
�
"Mewls on the covers, with a nose like his already.�
Then:
In the Name
Of Father and of Son Triune and Indivisible
Philip of France by Goddes Grace


204
THREE CANTOS
To all men presents that our noble brother
Richard of England engaged by our mutual oath
(a sacred covenant applicable to both)
Need not wed Alix but whomso he choose
We cede him Gisors, Neauphal and Vexis
And to the heirs male of his house
Cahors and Querci Richard's The abbeys ours
Of Figeac and Souillac And St Gilles left still in peace
Alix returns to France.
Made in Messina in
The year 1190 of the Incarnation of the Word.
Reed lances broken, a cloak torn by Des Barres
Do turn King Richard from the holy wars.
And "God aid Conrad
�For man's aid comes slow,� Aye tarries upon the road,
En Bertrans cantat.
And before all this
By Correze, Malemort
� young man walks, at church with galleried porch
By river-marsh, a sad man, pacing
Come from Ventadorn; and Eleanor turning on thirty years,
Domna jauzionda, and then Bernart saying:
�My Lady of Ventadorn
�Is shut by Eblis in, and will not hawk nor hunt
"Nor get her free in the air,
nor watch fish rise to bait
"Nor the glare-wing�d flies alight in the creek's edge
�Save in my absence, Madame.
'Que la lauzeta mover,'
�Send word, I ask you, to Eblis,
you have seen that maker
�And finder of songs, so far afield as this
�That he may free her,
who sheds such light in the air.�
c


EZRA POUND
205
THE SEVENTH CANTO
Eleanor (she spoiled in a British climate)
��λανδ�ο� and ��λέ��ολι�, and poor old �omer blind,
blind as a bat,
Ear, ear for the sea-surge; rattle of old men's voices.
And then the phantom Rome, marble narrow for seats
�Si pulvis nullus erit"
The chatter above the circus, �Nullum tamen excute.�
Then file and candles, e li mestiers ecoutes;
Scene for the battle only, but still scene,
Pennons and standards y cavals armatz,
Not mere succession of strokes, sightless narration,
And Dante's "ciocco," brand struck in the game.
Un peu moisi, plancher plus bas que le jardin.
"Contre le lambris, fauteuil de paille,
�Un vieux piano, et sous le baromètre
.
.
The old men's voices, beneath the columns of false marble,
And the walls tinted discreet, the modish, darkish green-blue,
Discreeter gilding, and the pannelled wood
Not present, but suggested, for the leasehold is
Touched with an imprecision ..
about three squares;
The house a shade too solid, and the art
A shade off action, paintings a shade too thick.
а
And the great domed head, con gli occhi onesti e tardi
Moves before me, phantom with weighted motion,
Grave incessu, drinking the tone of things,
And the old voice lifts itself
weaving an endless sentence.
We also made ghostly visits, and the stair
That knew us, found us again on the turn of it,
Knocking at empty rooms, seeking for buried beauty;
And the sun-tanned, gracious and well-formed fingers
Lift no latch of bent bronze, no Empire handle
Twists for the knocker's fall; no voice to answer.
A strange concierge, in place of the gouty-footed.


206
THREE CANTOS
Skeptic against all this one seeks the living,
Stubborn against the fact. The wilted flowers
Brushed out a seven year since, of no effect.
Damn the partition! Paper, dark brown and stretched,
Flimsy and damned partition.
Ione, dead the long year,
My lintel, and Liu Ch'e's lintel.
Time blacked out with the rubber.
The Elysée carries a name on
And the bus behind me gives me a date for peg;
Low ceiling and the Erard and the silver,
These are in "time.� Four chairs, the bow-front dresser,
The pannier of the desk, cloth top sunk in.
�Beer-bottle on the statue's pediment!
�That, Fritz, is the era, to-day against the past,
�Contemporary.� And the passion endures.
Against their action, aromas. Rooms, against chronicles.
Smaragdos, chrysolitos; De Gama wore striped pants in Africa
And "Mountains of the sea gave birth to troops�;
Le vieux commode en acajou:
beer-bottles of various strata,
But is she as dead as Tyro? In seven years?
�λένα��, έλανδ�ο�, ελέ��ολι�
', ,
The sea runs in the beach-groove, shaking the floated pebbles,
Eleanor!
The scarlet curtain throws a less scarlet shadow;
Lamplight at Buovilla, e quel remir,
And all that day
Nicea moved before me
And the cold gray air troubled her not
For all her naked beauty, bit not the tropic skin,
And the long slender feet lit on the curb's marge
And her moving height went before me,
We alone having being.
And all that day, another day:
Thin husks I had known as men,
Dry casques of departed locusts
speaking a shell of speech .


EZRA POUND
207
Propped between chairs and table
Words like the locust-shells, moved by no inner being;
A dryness calling for death;
a
Another day, between walls of a sham Mycenian,
"Toc" sphinxes, sham-Memphis columns,
And beneath the jazz a cortex, a stiffness or stillness,
The older shell, varnished to lemon colour,
Brown-yellow wood, and the no colour plaster,
Dry professorial talk
now stilling the ill beat music,
House expulsed by this house, but not extinguished.
Square even shoulders and the satin skin,
Gone cheeks of the dancing woman,
Still the old dead dry talk, gassed out-
It is ten years gone, makes stiff about her a glass,
A petrifaction of air.
The old room of the tawdry class asserts itself;
The
young men, never!
Only the husk of talk.
O voi che siete in piccioletta barca,
Dido choked up with sobs for her Sicheus
Lies heavy in my arms, dead weight
Drowning, with tears, new Eros,
And the life goes on, mooning upon bare hills;
Flame leaps from the hand, the rain is listless,
Yet drinks the thirst from our lips,
solid as echo,
Passion to breed a form in shimmer of rain-blur;
But Eros drowned, drowned, heavy-half dead with tears
For dead Sicheus.
Life to make mock of motion:
For the husks, before me, move,
The words rattle: shells given out by shells.
The live man, out of lands and prisons,
shakes the dry pods.
Probes for old wills and friendships, and the big locust-casques
Bend to the tawdry table,
1


208
THREE CANTOS
Lift
up their spoons to mouths, put forks in cutlets,
And make sound like the sound of voices.
Lorenzaccio
Being more live than they, more full of flames and voices.
Ma si morisse!
Credesse caduto da se, ma si morisse.
And the tall indifference moves,
a more living shell,
Drift in the air of fate, dry phantom, but intact.
O Alessandro, chief and thrice warned, watcher,
Eternal watcher of things,
Of things, of men, of passions.
Eyes floating in dry, dark air,
E biondo, with glass-grey iris, with an even side-fall of hair
The stiff, still features.


PARIS LETTER
July, 1921
.
MONG the books which have appeared in France during the
last few months and which are absorbing the attention of the
cultivated public, I must mention four:
Le Côté de Guermantes: II.-Sodome et Gomorrhe: I, by Mar-
cel Proust (Editions de la Nouvelle Revue Française)
Tendres Stocks, by Paul Morand (the same)
Jesus Christ Rastaquouère, by Francis Picabia (Collection
Dada)
Carte Blanche, by Jean Cocteau (Editions de la Sirène).
To those who find a certain confusion in the currents of contem-
porary literature, the authors mentioned above present three quite
distinct tendencies; and I suggest that to consider them in detail
will be to clarify my readers' ideas on this subject.
Marcel Proust is the neo-classicist, at the opposite pole from
Francis Picabia, the extremist, the tumultuous innovator. Oscil-
lating between the two and linking them are Paul Morand on one
side and Jean Cocteau on the other, both trying to steer an intelli-
gent course between these two extremes.
Marcel Proust is engaged in �the pursuit of lost times��a tip
to contemporaries who have time to lose and are independent of
the accidents of a life never before so disturbing. It is years since
criticism proved that modern man hasn't time to read a long novel.
Even the novel which plods steadily through three hundred and
fifty pages bas been criticized in the same way. A few authors
have climbed out of this commercial mill of before the war;
M Proust has returned to it, has doubled its product, and presents
to the public volumes of not less than six hundred pages. The sec-
ond chapter of Sodome et Gomorrhe devotes nearly two hundred
pages of close type to a dinner, one only, at the Duchesse de Guer-
mantes', and the whole book is only the first part of several other
volumes to follow.
Nevertheless I must say that reading it is not a bore; for Proust
has all the qualities of the romantic novelist and knows how to keep


210
PARIS LETTER
his reader awake. He is a magician, a past master of phrase and
image, though for those only who enjoy being cradled on the mere
rhythm of words. An hour at dinner is rather empty for most
people, but M Proust has the gift of extracting from such an hour
a wealth of memories mingled with scraps of conversation and
punctilious description; and out of these again, he unravels a whole
series of delicate ideas, harmonious as the beads of a rosary, which
set the reader to soaring from one end of the book to the other,
sustained by its lyricism and its clear critical intelligence.
I do not believe that the description of detail-an old method
by this time�can satisfy all readers. In M Proust it is useless to
look for anything more than the story. Unconcernedly and without
any ulterior preoccupation he invites his reader to share in his pri-
vate amusements; that is all. When you have time to waste you
can reread this book, rather than be bored.
But we are equally right in demanding something else of a liter-
ary work, and notably that it should shake up our laziness, the
indolence of sensibility and imagination, and frighten us into the
evocation of whatever within us is personally and passionately
human.
That, without a doubt, is the pleasure afforded by the literature
of the opposite school, a pleasure much preferred by active spirits,
tossed in the torment of contemporary life, and rather bored by
this somewhat limited romantic sentimentality.
That is exactly what Francis Picabia gives us. Not here nor, I
think, in any country, is there a spirit more paradoxically curious.
Mme Marie de la Hire has just written a biography of this strange
artist; I venture she hasn't said one tenth part of all there is to
say about Picabia.
The very title of his book is there for its own sake and has noth-
ing in common with the book's contents but an association of
bizarre ideas; it is a downright and alarming wager, something to
frighten away the timid and to attract the lovers of verbosity-and
fooling them both.
All our ideas and the values we attach to them are brought in
for discussion; we find ourselves debating with the author. Almost
politely he treads on our tenderest notions, until we could insult
him with pleasure. We sneer and he laughs, amused; and then, a
moment later, we are no longer in harmony with ourselves; we are


CL�MENT PANSAERS
211
no longer sure; and the author continues to lead us, willy-nilly, from
the profoundest wisdom to the height of folly, keeping before our
eyes his laughing question mark.
We shut the book stupefied; still disconcerted we take it up
again; on second reading it exhibits another tragi-comic facet and
we discover in it the exact opposite of what we had discovered the
first time.
M Picabia could have written in six hundred pages what he has
condensed to seventy-five, but he surely would not have achieved the
same result by such a dilution. I would like to give quotations, to
make a summary of this disconcerting book, but a work which is all
synthesis and concentration does not permit summaries. Without
a doubt it is the best of this author's series.
In his Feuilles de Temperature' M Paul Morand seemed to place
himself very close to the extreme advance guard; he now gives us in
Tendres Stocks almost a return to the stable equilibrium, the man-
ner of Marcel Proust. In three studies he depicts three successive
states of his being, with assurance and by luminous images. He
confesses that he prefers the fanciful Aurore to inconsistent and
changeable Clarisse and to disquieting Delphine. His choice could
not be otherwise. Imagination, in fact, is the motive force of the
advanced literature with which Morand's work may be classed.
Thus in his book he accumulates a really tender stock of substan-
tial wealth, from which he complacently produces a fourth person
whose name is Paul Morand. All we can do is to wait for the next
volume which will undoubtedly assure us of the precise place to be
occupied in the young literary movement by this author.
And now, to bring this chronicle to an end, a word about Jean
Cocteau. I had almost said "the deoppilant Cocteau.� By prefer-
ence he entitles himself �the Parisian.� When he discusses Paris
and the rest of the world his apriorism, pushed to an extreme, makes
him almost provincial. Manager of The Six (as the young
musical
group is called) he edits a broadside-review, Le Coq. He has, in
truth, the head of a cock, of a fighting-cock, without the comb or
the nervous pride of the cock of the walk.
In his book, Carte Blanche, he spreads before you all the life of
Paris, a life as seductive as the Seine, with its many and complex
1 Selections from this volume, in both French and English, were published in
The Dial for September, 1920.
a


212
PARIS LETTER
facets, one a little smutty and vulgar, the other so courteously Gallic
in its clear cosmopolitanism. With an amused gesture Cocteau
takes you by the hand and guides you through the bals, the cinemas,
the cirques, the varnishing days, the literary salons, and sketches for
you with a gesture of fantasy, in two or three striking words, sil-
houettes and portraits and caricatures and everything in "his� Paris
that is remarkably typical : the current of artistic ideas which cross
there and are clarified, and established.
Jean Cocteau is to the nomadic extremist Picabia, what Paul
Morand is to the stable and classic Marcel Proust.
CL�MENT PANSAERS


zute la
che
LONDON LETTER
July, 1921
om
SEDE
THE
NA
HE vacant term of wit set in early this year with a fine hot
rainless spring; the crop of murders and divorces has been
poor compared with that of last autumn; Justice Darling (comic
magistrate) has been silent, and has only raised his voice to declare
that he does not know the difference between Epstein and Einstein
(laughter). Einstein the Great has visited England, and deliv-
ered lectures to uncomprehending audiences, and been photographed
for the newspapers smiling at Lord Haldane. We wonder how
much that smile implies; but Einstein has not confided its mean-
ing to the press. He has met Mr Bernard Shaw, but made no
public comment on that subject. Einstein has taken his place in
the newspapers with the comet, the sun-spots, the poisonous jelly-
fish and octopus at Margate, and other natural phenomena. Mr
Robert Lynd has announced that only two living men have given
their names to a school of poetry: King George V and Mr J. C.
Squire. A new form of influenza has been discovered, which leaves
extreme dryness and a bitter taste in the mouth.
The fine weather and the coal strike have turned a blazing glare
on London, discovering for the first time towers and steeples of
an uncontaminated white. The smile is without gaiety. What is
spring without the Opera? Drury Lane and Covent Garden
mourn; the singers have flocked, we are told, to New York, where
such luxuries can be maintained. They have forgotten thee, O
Sion. Opera was one of the last reminders of a former excellence
of life, a sustaining symbol even for those who seldom went.
England sits in her weeds: eleven theatres are on the point of
closing, as the public will no longer pay the prices required by the
cost. Considering the present state of the stage, there is little
direct cause for regret
. An optimist might even affirm that when
everything that is bad and expensive is removed, its place may be
supplied by something good and cheap; on the other hand it is
more likely to be supplied by what is called, in the language of
the day, the �super-cinema.� Yet the Everyman Theatre at
9


214
LONDON LETTER
a
Hampstead, formed on a similar ideal to that of the Theatre du
Vieux Colombier in Paris, has, I hear, done well with a season of
Shaw plays, though the performance has been criticized. And
M Diaghileff, who has lately arrived with his Ballet and
with Stravinsky, has crowded houses. Massine is not there, but
Lopokova in perfection. Not yet having had the opportunity
of going, I can say nothing about either of the new ballets, Chout
I
or Cuadro Flamenco. Two years ago M Diaghileff's ballet ar-
rived, the first Russian dancers since the war: we greeted the
Good-humoured Ladies, and the Boutique Fantasque, and the
Three-Cornered Hat, as the dawn of an art of the theatre. And
although there has been nothing since that could be called a further
development, the ballet will probably be one of the influences
forming a new drama, if a new drama ever comes. I mean of
course the later ballet which has just been mentioned; for the
earlier ballet, if it had greater dancers�Nijinsky or Pavlowa-
had far less significance or substantiality. The later ballet is more
sophisticated, but also more simplified, and simplifies more; and
what is needed of art is a simplification of current life into some-
thing rich and strange. This simplification neither Congreve nor
Mr Shaw attained; and however brilliant their comedies, they are
a divagation from art.
In this connection, it may be observed that Mr Gordon Craig
has incurred abuse by an essay which fills the February number
of the Chapbook, entitled Puppets and Poets. Mr Craig's style
of writing, from what one can judge of it in this essay or series of
notes, is certainly deplorable; but his essay contains a great deal
of interest and some sense. He was rebuked for pointing out that
the Puppet is not intended to deceive us into thinking that it is
human, and afterwards praising one of the Japanese figures illus-
trated by saying that �this ... hand almost seems prepared to
shake another hand.� Why, says the critic, this is a contradic-
tion: is the puppet intended to resemble a human being or not?
If it is, then it is merely a substitute for a human being, only
tolerable on account of the high price of actors; if it is not, why
should the proximity of the resemblance be a merit? But Mr
Craig has merely implied what is a necessary condition of all art:
the counter-thrust of strict limitations of form and the expression


T. S. ELIOT
215
of life. Ordinary social drama acknowledges no limitations, ex-
cept some tricks of the stage. A form, when it is merely tolerated,
becomes an abuse. Tolerate the stage aside and the soliloquy, and
they are intolerable; make them a strict rule of the game, and they
are a support. A new form, like that of the modern ballet, is as
strict as any old one, perhaps stricter. Artists are constantly im-
pelled to invent new difficulties for themselves; cubism is not
licence, but an attempt to establish order. These reflections pro-
voked by the ballet suggest at any rate a theory that might be main-
tained throughout an evening's conversation.
MR STRACHEY's Book
Mr Lytton Strachey's Queen Victoria has succeeded and far sur-
passed Mrs Asquith's book in popularity: it is found at every level;
it is discussed by everyone and is discharged into the suburbs by
every lending-library. It would be absurd to say that the vogue of
the book is not deserved; equally absurd to say that it is deserved,
since vogue and the merits of a book have nothing in common.
Its popularity is not due to faults, but rather to merits, though
partly to the qualities which are not the most important. The
notices which it has had, long and enthusiastic, from every paper,
have been of great interest as an index to the simple and unsuspect-
ing mind of the reviewer. What is of most interest in the book
is Mr Strachey's mind, in his motives for choosing his material,
in his method in dealing with it, in his style, in his peculiar com-
bination of biography and history. It was evident from Eminent
Victorians, and is equally evident from Queen Victoria, that Mr
Strachey has a romantic mind�that he deals, too, with his per-
sonages, not in a spirit of "detachment,� but by attaching himself
to them, tout entier à sa proie attaché. He has his favourites, and
these are chosen by his emotion rather than design, by his feeling
for what can be made of them with his great ability to turn the
commonplace into something immense and grotesque. But it must
be a peculiar commonplace, although Mr Strachey is limited only
by the degree of interest he takes in his personage. There must
be a touch of the fantastic, of a fantastic that lies hidden for
Mr Strachey to discover. Gladstone appears to be without it;


216
LONDON LETTER
Disraeli appears to be too consciously playing a rôle for Mr
Strachey to extract much fantasy from him. What is especially
charming is the fusion of irony with romance, of private with
public, of trivial and serious. The fusion is reflected in the style,
which, although Mr Strachey's, may be formulated as a mixture
of Gibbon with Macaulay-Gibbon in the irony, and Macaulay
in the romance. Mr Strachey, without your being aware of it,
places his sitter in just this light, and with a phrase��Lord Mel-
bourne, an autumn rose���Mr Creevey, grown old now,� imposes
his point of view. The innocent accept this under the impression
that they are acquiring information. If it were not under the
spell of Mr Strachey's mind, if we examined the letters of the
Queen, or Balmoral, or the Albert Memorial, or the Crystal Palace,
without Mr Strachey's directions, we might see them very dif-
ferently, and quite as justly. Mr Strachey never appears to impose
himself, he never drives a hint towards a theory, but he never
relaxes his influence.
Mr Strachey is a part of history rather than a critic of it; he
has invented new sensations from history, as Bergson has invented
new sensations from metaphysics. No other historian has so delib-
erately cultivated the feelings which the inspection of an historical
character can arouse. The strange, the surprising, is of course
essential to art; but art has to create a new world, and a new world
must have a new structure. Mr Joyce has succeeded, because he
has very great constructive ability; and it is the structure which
gives his later work its unique and solitary value. There are sev-
eral other writers�among the very best that we have�who can
explore feeling-even Mr Ronald Firbank, who has a sense of
beauty in a very degraded form. The craving for the fantastic,
for the strange, is legitimate and perpetual; everyone with a sense
of beauty has it. The strongest, like Mr Joyce, make their feeling
into an articulate external world; what might crudely be called a
more feminine type, when it is also a very sophisticated type, makes
its art by feeling and by contemplating the feeling, rather than
the object which has excited it or the object into which the feeling
might be made. Of this type of writing the recent book of sketches
by Mrs Woolf, Monday or Tuesday, is the most extreme example.
A good deal of the secret of the charm of Mrs Woolf's shorter


T. S. ELIOT
217
ya
pieces consists in the immense disparity between the object and
the train of feeling which it has set in motion. Mrs Woolf gives
you the minutest datum, and leads you on to explore, quite con-
sciously, the sequence of images and feelings which float away
from it. The result is something which makes Walter Pater appear
an unsophisticated rationalist, and the writing is often remarkable.
The book is one of the most curious and interesting examples of a
process of dissociation which in that direction, it would seem, can-
not be exceeded.
T. S. ELIOT
IN


BOOK REVIEWS
HIGH VISIBILITY
THE INVISIBLE CENSOR. By Francis Hackett. 12mo.
167 pages. B. W. Huebsch. $2.
THE
.
HE opening essay, which gives the title to this volume, is an
apology, in the original sense of the word, for freedom of
speech. The freedom for which Mr Hackett contends is not from
official restraint, but from the more subtle and dangerous censor
"who feels that social facts must be manicured and pedicured
before they are fit to be seen. He is not concerned with the facts
themselves but with their social currency. ... His object, as I
suppose, is to keep up the good old institutions, to set their example
before the world. . . . And to fulfil that object he continually
revises and blue-pencils the human legend.� It would be absurd
to see in the essays which follow any systematic development of this
theme, and yet they all may be regarded as illustrations of it.
Various as the essays are in subject matter�and they range from
literature to politics, and from personal experience to social criti-
cism�they are all distinguished by an attitude of independence,
a gesture of nonchalance, which is perhaps more a matter of uncon-
scious bearing and style than of deliberate thoughtful intention.
We know that Mr Hackett is not a conformist by the way he walks
down the page�and his speech is a challenge.
To some it will seem an affront. The comment that will be made
on this volume is that its unconcern is cocky, and its detachment
impudent. At least, this is what will be said of the essays in which
social criticism predominates. It offends our complacency to have
American religion handled realistically, or American society pre-
sented ironically, or American war hysteria reduced to reason. But
realism, irony, reason are inherent in Mr Hackett's personality;
he writes that way because he writes immediately out of his natural
gifts, and he seems to have put the Invisible Censor behind him
with his first essay.


ROBERT MORSS LOVETT
219
Mr Hackett's realistic perception of the world may be called
fundamental. It appears in the intensified experience of Whisky,
in the broad observation of Fifth Avenue and Forty-Second Street,
in the perfectly heard conversation of a Limb of the Law, and is
delicately modulated to atmospheric tones in The Clouds of Kerry.
These are noncontroversial topics, but the realism with which they
are treated becomes the substratum of irony in And the Earth Was
Dry and in Billy Sunday, Salesman. Of pure irony Okura Sees
Newport is the most sustained, A Personal Pantheon the most exu-
berant, and Youth and the Skeptic the most mordant example.
And for reason in politics there is The Irish Revolt, and in literary
criticism, Henry Adams. Altogether the book gives us a pretty
complete representation of Mr Hackett's vivid mind�what his
senses bring to it, its instinctive reaction towards these things, and
its more considered deliberate operation upon them.
Of Mr Hackett's variety of manner the book is likewise repre-
sentative. One can always say of a journalist that he writes badly
and never that he writes well; it is only when his work is brought
together in such mass that it becomes impressive by its unity that
one can risk a judgement. In Mr Hackett's case the unity of impres-
sion is accomplished largely by the ease and verve with which he
writes, the simplicity which is never palling, and the zest which
remains always good-natured.
Of the three types of essay of which I have spoken, the realistic
is best illustrated in The Clouds of Kerry, at once objective and
sympathetic.
"In the night-time a light or two may be seen dotted at great
intervals on those lonely hillsides, but for the most part the habita-
tions are in the cooms or hollows grooved by nature between the
parallel hills. The soil on the mountains is washed away. The
vestiture that remains is a watery sedge, and it is only by garnering
every handful of earth that the tenants can attain cultivation even
in the cooms. Their fields, often held in common, are so small as
to be laughable, and deep drainage trenches are dug every few
yards. Sometimes in the shifting sunlight between showers a light-
green patch will loom magically in the distance, witness to man's
indefatigable effort to achieve a holding amid the rocks. An awk-
ward boreen will climb to that holding, and if one goes there one


220
HIGH VISIBILITY
.
may find a typical tall spare countryman, bright of eye and sharp
of feature, housing in his impoverished cottage a large brood of
children. . . . A yellowish wife will perhaps be nursing the latest
baby in the gloomy one-roomed hovel, and as one talks to the man,
respectful but sensible, and admirable in more ways than he can
ever dream of, one elf after another will come out, bare-legged,
sharp-eyed, shy, inquisitive, to peer from far off at the stranger.�
Very different is the agile cleverness of this sketch of William
Marion Reedy.
�Mr. Reedy is the sort of human being who can combine Edgar
Lee Masters and Vachel Lindsay, single tax and spiritualism,
Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. He knows brewers and
minor poets and automobile salesmen and building contractors and
traffic cops and publishers, and he is genuinely himself with all of
them. He finds the common denominator in machine politicians
and hyperacid reformers, and without turning a hair he moves from
tropical to arctic conversation. He is at home with Celtic fairies
and the atomic theory, with frenzied finance and St. Francis. If he
has a Pantheon, and I believe he has, it must be a good deal like a
Union depot, with gods coming in and departing on every train and
he himself holding a glorious reception at the information booth.
I am sure he can still see the silver lining to W. J. Bryan and the
presidential timber in Leonard Wood. He does not make fun of
Chautauqua. He can drink Bevo. He has a good word for Freud.
He has nothing against Victorianism. And yet he is a man.�
Mr Hackett's main business in journalism is with literature.
Probably he regarded this volume as a vacation exercise, for there
is little in it of books and writers. Only two essays are devoted to
literary criticism, that in defence of Mr Lytton Strachey's uncen-
sored biographies with which the volume opens, and that on Henry
Adams. The latter is, however, one of the best criticisms which
Mr Hackett has written, and quite possibly the best that any
one has written on its fascinating and baffling subject. Here Mr
Hackett shows at its best his informal critical method, hovering
above his subject, flashing light upon it from this angle or that,
winding into it with patient penetration. For the number of deli-


ROBERT MORSS LOVETT
221
cate, interesting, illuminating things said by the way the essay is
a masterpiece, and through the various and discursive comment-
as Sterne remarks of his Uncle Toby�the character of Henry
Adams keeps emerging all the time-emerges triumphantly in the
last paragraph:
"Pallid and tepid as the result was, in politics, the autobiog-
raphy is a refutation of anaemia. There was, indeed, something
meagre about Henry Adams's soul, as there is something meagre
about a butterfly. But the lack of sanguine or exuberant feeling,
the lack of buoyancy and enthusiasm, is merely a hint that one must
classify, not a command that one condemn. For all this book's
parsimony, for all its psychological silences and timidities, it is an
original contribution, transcending caste and class, combining true
mind and matter. Compare its comment on education to the com-
ment of Joan and Peter-Henry Adams is to H. G. Wells as
triangulation to tape-measuring. That profundity of relations
which goes by the name of understanding was part of his very
nature. Unlike H. G. Wells, he was incapable of cant. He had no
demogoguery, no mob-oratory, no rhetoric. This enclosed him in
himself to a dangerous degree, bordered him on priggishness and on
egoism. But he had too much quality to succumb to these diseases
of the sedentary soul. He survives, and with greatness.�
ROBERT Morss Lovett


PROGRAMME MUSIC
12mo.
259 pages.
LEGENDS. By Amy Lowell.
Houghton Mifflin. $2.
S usual with her, Miss Lowell's title is exact. Legends is a
A volume consisting of eleven narrative poems, most of them on
themes selected from folk-lore. Their sources are various. A few
she has created herself. A Legend of Porcelain is obviously from
the Chinese; Dried Marjoram is English. Witch-Woman comes
from Yucatan; Memorandum Confided by a Yucca to a Passion-
Vine comes from Peru; Many Swans from North America, or, more
specifically, from a Kathlemet myth. The other legends are
European, Amerindian, or Down-Eastern. Evidently the volume
is a Mythology of All Peoples in brief. It is at least Miss Lowell's
reaction to universal mythology.
That reaction is anything but legendary. Her imagination may
in part be atavistic, as she says in the introduction, but the per-
sonality as a whole is quite at home in the contemporary world;
she observes it thoroughly and has assimilated it. Her private
library is one of the best in New England, and it is not idle. The
result of her reading and observation is that she can pack her
legends with a mass of brilliant detail, which distinguishes them
sharply from the stark narratives of the original. At her worst this
detail almost suffocates the theme; usually it gives life to the bare
bones of the story. Her own character, moreover, justifies this
handling; she is a pluralist, not a monist. And she is telling myths
that belong to her personally as well as to the races that originated
them. This is what she means when she says in the introduction:
"I have changed, added, subtracted, jumbled several together at
will, left out portions; in short, made them over to suit my particu-
lar vision.� Writing honestly she could do nothing else.
But retelling the legends is only part of her work. One could
say that she has written programme music around them; the legends
themselves form the programme. Or, since no analogy is exact, one
might say that she used the legends as themes, to which she added
harmony and counterpoint and variations.


MALCOLM COWLEY
223
In the case of Memorandum Confided by a Yucca to a Passion-
Vine, the original theme is very slight. It is a sentence out of
Garcilasso de Vega's account of the Incas:
"The spots in the Moone they fable to have come from a Foxe,
which being in love with the Moones beautie, went to heaven, and
touching her with his forefeete left those foule memorials.�
Miss Lowell builds this over into a long account of how a little
red fox from the mountains around Lake Titicaca journeyed to
meet the Moon in her high temple at Cuzco. There he met a Virgin
of the Sun, who because of her own guilty love sympathized with
him in his trouble. At night the Moon danced among the dead
mothers of the Incas (note how her detail transforms all this narra-
tive) and then rose to stand naked and immobile on the high altar.
The fox burst with a yelp from the grasp of the Virgin of the Sun:
�The clouds splinter, and a ruined moon wavers up into the heavens,
a
about her are three great rings, one of blood, one of black, and
the utmost all of stinging, glutinous, intorting coils of smoke.
Upon the disk of the moon are spots, black obscene spots, the print
of a fox's paws."
The end of the poem is a masterly tangent:
�Bake your cakes of sacred maize, Virgin,
Tend the flame the priest has gathered with his metal sun-glass,
Weave feathered mantles for the Coya,
Burn holy gums to deaden the scent of the daturas.
If you and the moon have a secret,
Let it rest there."
The story of the fox is accompanied with the metal music of the
Inca's gold-and-silver garden; with descriptions of the post-runner
carrying fish from the sea-coast for the Inca's table and of the
procession of the feather-coated Inca warriors; with pictures of the
flamingos that wade into the sunset waters of Lake Titicaca; with
all a prodigality of orchestral detail. I have chosen it for quota-
tion not so much because it is the best of the legends, but because


224
PROGRAMME MUSIC
it is the easiest to appreciate. Four Sides to a House requires at
least a second reading before one gives it complete approval. Its
theme is the superstition that a ghost cannot enter the house where
a horse's skull is nailed over the door. It resembles programme
music even more than does Memorandum; in fact I was embar-
rassed at first by the fact that the programme was omitted. A A
poem like this would at least be made more facile by the use of a
marginal gloss, like that of The Ancient Mariner. Such a gloss
would allow Miss Lowell even greater liberty of variation, at the
same time keeping before one's eyes the text from which she varies.
I offer the suggestion at its face value.
The myth from the Kathlemet reached her in a more complete
state than most of the others; it gave more material to work with.
It tells how Many Swans begged a great shining disk as a gift from
The-One-Who-Walks-All-Over-the-Sky. The disk burst into flame
and slew every human being that Many Swans encountered; he
was ready to put an end to his own life for grief, but at last the Sun
Mother compassionately took back her gift. The poem is especially
noteworthy for the fashion in which Miss Lowell introduces lyrical
interludes. Many Swans is narrative interspersed with choruses.
Sometimes the choruses have only a slight connection with the nar-
rative; they are used in such cases to lend it an extraneous signifi-
cance, for her tendency is to change the simple sun myth with which
she began into an epic of the whole Indian race. What is remark-
able, she approaches success in her attempt.
She shows in this poem, as elsewhere in the volume, remarkable
ability to handle large forms. At this point in the discussion, a
deficiency in critical vocabulary troubles me. If Miss Lowell were
a painter, one would certainly speak of her excellent composition,
but composition in painting and composition in writing are two
different things. One is safer in saying that her poems possess
balance and movement. The movement is diversified by certain
common devices, such as interludes (like the choruses in Many
Swans) and tangents (like the end of Memorandum). The num-
ber of these devices, whether for unification or diversification, is
limited, and yet they can be built into more combinations than a
bridge hand. The comparison is unfortunate, perhaps, for there
is nothing mechanical about poetical form; one can't just shuffle
and expect it to come out right. It is complex and organic like the


MALCOLM COWLEY
225
human body. All this is primer talk, but it is a quotation from an
unwritten primer. The point is that Miss Lowell builds�or com-
poses�her poems as well as a painter of the first rank, instead of
as badly as a British novelist.
Poetical form has, of course, another and smaller aspect. It is
the handling of the individual lines and stanzas, corresponding
somewhat to the brushwork in painting. Here, too, Legends shows
up excellently; her verse becomes increasingly supple. In former
volumes she was apt to use a single mode of verse. Thus, A Dome
of Many-Coloured Glass was written in rhymed stanzas; Sword
Blades and Poppy Seeds in unrhymed cadences; Can Grande's
Castle in polyphonic prose. She now uses all her former modes
in a single poem, and uses them all with greater freedom than
before. She varies from one to another in accordance with the
swiftness of the movement and the intensity of the mood (and
lyric poets will be shocked to discover that the most intense mood
does not usually call for rhyme and metre). This technique is
admirably suited to programme music.
In her brushwork, however, a serious weakness appears. It is to
her misfortune as a writer that she reads so well. Before an
audience she can make her worst lines sound convincing; for this
reason she is sometimes not so careful as a poet would be who
recited wretchedly. Only Miss Lowell's best oral manner can
carry over the line in The Ring and the Castle where Benjamin
Bailey says:
�He died, they say, at the sight of my present. I laughed when
I heard it-'Hee! Hee! Hee!'"
In print
�Hee� rhymes with "three.� Another bad line which she mends in
the reading occurs in Memorandum�"Blue dims rose.
the line is almost without meaning.
It is healthy that a poet should get the big things right and fail
only in the little; the trouble with poetry in the decade before us
was just the opposite. It is healthy also that a poet should go on
developing from year to year, instead of dying above the shoulders
at the age fixed by Mr Mencken. I cannot say pompously that this
latest volume contains Miss Lowell's best work, but it contains her
work that I like best.


226
PROGRAMME MUSIC
Her poetry has been variously rated. A few would still place it
outside the sphere of literature; Winifred Bryher, on the other
hand (Mrs Robert McAlmon) once wrote a critique which strove
to pedestal her beside Sophocles and Shakespeare. Personally I
have vacillated between the extremes. At times I was very unjust;
in a city of literary failures one mistrusts established reputations.
I have come to believe that one's estimate of Miss Lowell is bound
up with one's estimate of American poetry in general. The new
and excellent qualities of our literature are abundantly represented
in her work, as is also our national tendency to be ragged. We must
wait till the indefinite time when American literature has been
judged before judging her. She is, at any rate, one of the three
graces or nine muses upon whom our poetry stands or falls.
MALCOLM COWLEY


STRULDBRUGS AND SUPERMEN
BACK TO METHUSALEH. A Metabiological Penta-
teuch. By Bernard Shaw. 12m0. 300 pages. Bren-
tano's. $2.25.
THE
HE first thing to say of Mr Shaw's "beginning of a Bible for
Creative Evolution� is that it has little to do with that Bible
for Civilization which Mr Wells laudably aspires to edit in the
interest of a common religion for humanity. It is natural that
reviewers for whom the distinction between the creative and the
constructive faculties does not exist should have confounded the
two and murmured sweet nothings about the war having turned
men's thoughts to God; but it is not helpful. I do not mean that
the author of Tono Bungay lacks the creative faculty. I mean
only that in his later and more lucid writings about religion Mr
Wells has been searching for a new framework, or at best a new
discipline for the world; whereas in this book Mr Shaw looks
towards a new aspiration and a new Will. The two things are not
hostile, but we aren't likely to understand either so long as we pre-
tend that they are identical. Mr Shaw does not despise knowledge
and Mr Wells does not despise Will; but Mr Wells is prepared to
collect the wisdom and the best hopes of humanity in the reasonable
belief that if we know the same things we will probably want the
same thing, especially if that thing is the preservation of our civil-
ized existence; and Mr Shaw very earnestly is preaching the Gospel
of Creative Evolution and telling us to will to live three hundred
years or our civilization must perish because we haven't the time to
master its complexities. One is a guide to honest living; the other,
if it is anything, is the pathway to a New Life.
The novelties of this book are rather disappointing. That Mr
Shaw is something of a mystic and is essentially a religious man
has been clear to everybody but the Shavians for many years. That
a strong current of ideas passed into him from Friedrich Nietzsche
was equally clear to those who were not put off by the rubbish
Nietzsche talked about tropic swamps and Cesar Borgias and knew
precisely where in Beyond Good and Evil and in The Will to


228
STRULDBRUGS AND SUPERMEN
Power to find those teachings which consorted well with Shaw's
Protestant Puritan ideas of life. The Will to Power has become
the very instrument of Creative Evolution because it is based on
self-control, and that is no more astonishing than the fact that the
chief admirer of The Way of All Flesh should be a Lamarckian
and not a Darwinian. These and no others are the revelations of
Back to Methusaleh; their only effect is to obscure what seems to
me an essential relationship and to distract attention from the
serious business of Mr Shaw's work. The two things are happily
linked by the figure of Jonathan Swift.
I am fairly familiar with Mr Shaw's plays and prefaces, but I
recall no emphatic acknowledgement anywhere of his debt to Gulli-
ver's Travels, and if it mattered very much I should accuse Mr
Shaw of flinging Samuel Butler and the mysterious Captain Wilson
like pepper in our eyes for fear of our seeing the great Dean too
clearly. On a hundred topics, from doctors to diet, they have
similar ideas; note how the two minds run together:
In Back to Methusaleh:
60
.
(fancy a man of science talking of an unknown factor as
a sport instead of as x!)�
In the Voyage to Brobdingnag:
�After much debate, they concluded unanimously that I was only
relplum scalcatch, which is interpreted literally, lusus naturae; a
determination exactly agreeable to the modern philosophy of
Europe, whose professors, disdaining the old evasion of occult
causes, whereby the followers of Aristotle endeavoured in vain to
disguise their ignorance, have invented this wonderful solution of
all difficulties, to the unspeakable advancement of human knowl-
edge."
The passages have been chosen because there can be no comparison
of verbal style, since it is not a literary affinity but a distinct simi-
larity of mind which is in question. Those who care to verify
either connection will find that Gulliver's Travels is a book to be
read with profound intellectual satisfaction.
They will also find in the tenth chapter of the third voyage,


GILBERT SELDES
229
Swift's account of the Struldbrugs, �those excellent Struldbrugs,
who, born exempt from that universal calamity of human nature,
have their minds free and disengaged, without the weight and
depression of spirits caused by the continual apprehension of
death.� There follows close upon Gulliver's rhapsody the most
appalling description of the immortals; not even the Yahoos upon
whom Swift spat his "I hate and detest that animal called man�
are more loathsome. And these, with a significant change, are the
immortals of the fifth part of Shaw's play, the part which has been
called his Utopia.
In that Utopia the children of men are born full grown and for
four years live, intelligently and more or less intensely, the lives of
let us say the highest type of man known to us, the life in which
sense and spirit combine in joy and suffering and creation. There-
after they rapidly lose interest in sex, art, and dancing; begin to
speculate on the properties of numbers; they contemplate their
power and concentrate their will; they transform themselves by
their will; and they are able to say, �Infant, one moment of the
ecstasy of life as we live it would strike you dead.�
.
Now that is precisely the feeling of every saint, prophet, philoso-
pher, and poet who has ever known what it is to be drunk, who has
for so much as a moment held life in the hollow of his hand, or
been held by it. It is, if I mistake not, what Jesus meant when he
said, �Are ye able to drink the cup that I drink� and what
Nietzsche meant when he advised his good Europeans to live
dangerously. For the truth of this ecstasy is that those who are
possessed by it live in the tragic joy of knowing that another
moment and they themselves may be struck dead.
The Superman as an ecstatic Struldbrug is almost the end of
Mr Shaw's pentateuch, but not quite. For in a sort of epilogue
Lilith says,
"after passing a million goals they press on to the goal of redemp-
tion from the flesh, to the vortex freed from matter, to the
whirlpool in pure intelligence that, when the world began, was a
whirlpool in pure force"
�
and waits for the time when they shall have �disentangled their
life from the matter that has always mocked it.� With singular


230
STRULDBRUGS AND SUPERMEN
honesty Mr Shaw discovers this prospect; he might have tricked us
into living three hundred years, long enough to master political
economy and the physical sciences, without telling us what the end
must be. The pure intelligences in the vortex lack somehow the
attractiveness of disembodied spirits; they play no harps and one
cannot think of them dancing on a pin.
The criticism of this Utopia is obvious, whether you undertake
it humanely, as Montaigne does; or savagely as Swift; or in the
modern terms of psychoanalysis. I should only like to advise
critics that if they believe in a divine purpose without a divinity
this is exactly the sort of superman they are likely to create; that a
debauch of self-control is perhaps as dangerous as any other sort of
debauch; that if some of our clearest thinkers have been ascetics, so
have some of the maddest, and the profound truths of existence
have sometimes been vouchsafed us through dissipated philosophers
who hadn't the grace to reform before they became inspired; and
to warn them that if they are inclined to throw Mr Shaw out of
court because �he doesn't understand passion� they had better read
the chapter entitled The Artist Prophets before they submit their
case. Beyond these suggestions I do not think that the final scene
of Mr Shaw's drama can be discussed. It is the essential part of
the play; but it supplies its own illumination.
Mr Shaw advances to his ancients over the dead bodies of the
Darwinians and the Marxians (capitalists, priests, and politicians,
too, of course). His religion of creative evolution solves the prob-
lem of evil, for the world is full of unsuccessful experiments and,
as Blanco Posnet said:
�It was early days when He made the croup, I guess. It was the
best he could think of then; but when it turned out wrong on His
hands He made you and me to fight the croup for Him.�
Evolution, therefore, is Will in action, and our own share in it-
the first step must be voluntary longevity-is to be achieved by
willing. Death as a voluntary cessation of life having been estab-
lished in the first part, the case for longevity is stated by the
Brothers Barnabas in the second; the thing happens in the third
play; its middle course is shown in the fourth. And what one feels
after the first announcement of the theme is that it is diminishing


GILBERT SELDES
231
in a series of decorations; it begins vigorously and joyously and
ends in dreariness; it becomes unimportant. Life in the year 3000
A.D. is apparently dignified and decent but the only noble deed in
it is that of a modern man who dies rather than live among his
faithless and deluded contemporaries.
A blight is on Mr Shaw's conception and it is easy to see why.
Once he had saved civilization, his imagination went on, free for
the first time from its preoccupation with economics. But his life-
long struggle has left him crippled. He has seen body and soul
wasted by the greed of our time and the only way he saw of setting
us free from our evil masters was by setting us free from ourselves.
Man living freely, harmoniously, intensely, Mr Shaw cannot
imagine so long as man continues to be human. He has fought so
long against the industrial system that he has unconsciously
accepted its ideal: destruction for the body and limitation of the
soul. He took some of Nietzsche, but the poet escaped him; and
some of Goethe, but the humane philosopher escaped him; and
from Swift he failed to learn the essential lesson that the virtue
of the Houyhnhnms is in their humanity.
The sombre tone and the tragic earnestness with which the ideas
are presented suggest that this is Mr Shaw's last word, a testament
more than a pentateuch. That is why one passes in silence over
many inspiring things and goes direct to the root of Mr Shaw's
Tree in Eden. It seems for a time to be the Tree of Life�and
suddenly one discovers that it is like those magical trees of the
Hindu fakirs which grow before your eyes from sapling to full
height, and then vanish before they come to fruit. Or to put it in
words which Mr Shaw will despise, he has created-and in an age
which seldom rises above constructiveness that is much--but his
creation does not live because he is not an artist. I say that he will
despise these terms; but I am at least certain that he will under-
stand them.
GILBERT SELDES


THE EDITING OF ONESELF
The Mystic WARRIOR. By James Oppenheim. 8vo.
119 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $5.
W
ITH the advent of psychoanalysis the literature of confes-
sions enters upon
a new phase. Heretofore the confessor has
been subject to emotion in such a way that his need to express him-
self was greater than his discretion; he maintained a wavering bat-
tlefront between pride and humility, although above and beyo it
all the confessions continued. But now the confession has become
an invention, made possible only by the discoveries of modern
science and research. If the older confessions were written almost
in spite of oneself, the newer confessions burble along like brooks.
And when one has been properly "psyched,� he does not even suffer
a pudency before his secretly suspected virtues.
As a consequence, it is becoming the custom, when one has
reached a certain age, to lay out the stades and parasangs of one's
journey; and, having decided just where one is going, to tell exactly
how one got there. Further, it seems there is no longer any essen-
tial difference between making a work of literary art and writing
an essay on the causes of the Great War. Beginning with the
result, one works back into a set of teleological connections, and
then starting with the teleological connections, one works up to the
result ... a method which has produced a remarkably interesting
volume in Mr Oppenheim's The Mystic Warrior.
The Mystic Warrior, working along these lines, is born to find
that "the world was a dream of beauty, an ache of loveliness.�
But, on the other hand, "everything spoke of death, everything
whispered in my ears, "James, you will die.'� In the beginning,
�
therefore, Mr Oppenheim recalls the love of life and the fear of
death. �Then, after breakfast, grammar.� He could not concen-
trate on his studies, however. "Phantasy possessed me. . . And
everything was too beautiful ... Too beautiful the blue of the
sky, green of the earth, Too poignant the gleam of wonder in but-
terfly wings, Too aching lovely the summer fields, the glaze of the
morning . . . My throat was clutched with tears ..." Little
>
.


KENNETH BURKE
233
James watches the sun go down with terror, since then he will think
of death. By way of summing up here, the author passes two
judgements: �O, only one who has felt this terror knows what it is
to live!� and later on: �And nobody bothered his head about it!"
With the death of his father-told with an honest homeliness
of emotion which makes it one of the finest passages in the book,
the boy is thrown into less general preoccupations. �But now I
must take his place: I must hurry and be a man ... Strange task
for the dreamy little singer and artist!� Along with this, a period
of yearning sets in:
"... I wanted, not to be my father,
But to be the child encircled by my father's love . .
I wanted to go from the hard weary world, the torture of existence,
The clash and dust of my brain,
Into that cell of abnegation and quiet
Where the invisible Beloved hovers,
And I should give birth to the divine child,
My inspired song, my poem, born in love."
But instead:
"Sold my love for power, converted religion into livelihood,
And gave the artist in me to be a semi-harlot of the press.�
a
For the next years, life is a hodge-podge of Napoleon, Lincoln,
Shakespeare, Wagner, Jesus, and jobs. Above it all was a mixed
ambition to conquer or redeem the world, to throw off contempla-
tion for action. However:
.
�I essayed, and failed . . song lured me again
Again the storm-cloud, again the agony,
Again the triumph of music and vision.�
"Not that there was no counter-current.' He tried �To be
interested in others, to join good causes, to work among the poor,
And last, and greatest, to learn how to love." This love, although
containing much of the metaphysical�for "What did I love but
the God with whom I became one ..."-also extended to a


234
THE EDITING OF ONESELF
marriage, which was not successful and forced him into hack-writ-
ing. But finally �New knowledge came ... My marriage broke
open and showed itself for what it was
.
.
1
1
. I went off to a life of lonely poverty ...
And in that life, in anguish, listening, brooding,
I heard from far-off the murmur of the divine music coming like a
turning tide back to me ..
The story ends here, after the author has attained the haven of his
first book, Songs for the New Age.
In an appendix, Mr Oppenheim discusses the problem of form
as it applies to his present work. He finds that the tendency of the
realistic novel has gradually been leading closer to the material of
the author's life; in other words, gradually becoming a mere
"thinly disguised autobiography.� Mr Oppenheim claims that the
natural consequence is that we give over the thin disguise and write
frankly of ourselves. It is certainly gratifying to see an author
who can examine the basis of his work, although in the present
instance one might dispute the cogency of his conclusion on the
grounds that the increasing necessity which realism finds in thinly
disguising the life of the artist points simply to the imminent
bankruptcy of realism. In fact, looking beyond the novel to the
realistic movement as a whole, we find that even at the opening of
the century intense realism led not to autobiography, but to symbol-
ism. The reason for this is that realism, by putting man face to
face with facts per se, awakens over again his primitive need for
animism, or correspondences; since man is constitutionally averse
to the sterility of mere facts, and when they are placed before him
in all their barrenness he must immediately make something else
of them. (On the other hand, if realism has gone off into symbol-
ism, it could be claimed for Mr Oppenheim that he is leading it into
teleology, at least giving it the added significance of getting us
somewhere.)
The real objection to the frankly autobiographical �fiction� is
that the mere editing of one's accidental experiences offers so little
opportunity for an imaginative aggressiveness, a sense of line, mass,
organization, and the like. At the very start the emphasis is placed
on information rather than presentation, and as such belongs either


KENNETH BURKE
235
to journalism or Wednesday prayer meetings, but not to art. Auto-
biographical, certainly ... since the artist employs only that
which derives from his experiences; but the gods of Lord Dunsany
are as immediately connected with experience as any photograph
of an Eleventh Avenue beanery.
Since The Mystic Warrior is dedicated to Whitman, one finds
oneself almost automatically ranging the two poets alongside of
each other and comparing their methods of attack. Whitman began
with a more spontaneous gluttony, a will to devour which was
active even before meeting the object to be devoured. Thus, as
soon as he came upon it, he could cast it into his belly without so
much as a questioning glance. With Mr Oppenheim these processes
have been reversed. He begins by seeing things, examining them
very carefully, and all but throwing them away entirely. Then at
the last moment he remembers the obligation of gluttony which
is part of his ars poetica, and gobbles them down almost as raven-
ously as the master.
For the fact is that Whitman, the genial voice of an aggressive,
an expanding America�the earlier and less tarnished phase of our
imperialism, that is-slashed into his material so recklessly that he
has left his disciples with nothing but protest for a subject. The
elation of the broad axe is gone, although a group of epigons
remains which is bent on recovering this elation. While retaining
an unmistakably Whitman technique, they have gone over almost
as a body to Freud for material, since he seemed to offer some possi-
bilities of new territory, less physical than Whitman's, of course,
though satisfying the same yearning. But I doubt whether we have
as yet discovered the formula for making synthetic artist's-insight.
The psychoanalytic teachings, centring as they do about a set of
systematized inhibitions, chain the artist's attention almost exclu-
sively to the shedding of these inhibitions. In a great measure,
,
therefore, he begins with his interpretations of life prescribed for
him, and with a strict education as to what he must look for; it is
no wonder that his methods also are frequently adopted. Just how
much farther the intrusion of psychology into art will go it is hard
to say. There is at least one promising young poet and critic I
know of, however, who will no longer allow psychoanalysis to be
mentioned in his home.
Kenneth BURKE


PURITAN OR PLATONIST?
A NEW ENGLAND GROUP AND OTHERS. Shelburne
Essays, Eleventh Series. By Paul Elmer More. 12mo.
295 pages. Houghton Mifflin Company. $2.
Tigo
a
10 a remote English eye Mr Paul Elmer More appears an
isolated figure in the American landscape. He has a certain
likeness to Mr Babbitt; but the likeness is less important than the
difference. Mr Babbitt is an active, learned, and acute professor;
his ungainly and forceful books are primarily an attempt to com-
municate the potency of the classical ideal to minds which would
not ordinarily come into more than a superficial contact with it.
Mr Babbitt's effort is, in other words, largely, if not exclusively,
formative. He desires to shape the mind of a generation; he is
very little concerned with elucidating literature.
Mr More, on the other hand, is primarily a critic of literature;
or perhaps, considering what I am to urge against him, I had better
say primarily a man of letters. Not that he can be, or probably
desires to be, acquitted of a formative arrière pensée; but the prac-
tical emphasis is much less evident. At first sight he appears to be
a scholar gipsy, wandering in a strange and hardly hospitable land.
Hence his apparent isolation, which may be exaggerated by dis-
tance. He is a genuine scholar, and no mean Platonist; his language,
prim rather than precise, is nevertheless clear and flowing. More-
over�and this is not a small thing in a critic�the bulk of his work
begins to be impressive. The eleven volumes of Shelburne Essays
make a considerable monument in the American landscape.
To form an idea of Mr More's relative importance as a critic,
we should compare him with Mr Edmund Gosse. He belongs
roughly to the same generation. I think that he is in every sense
superior to Mr Gosse; he thinks more clearly, he is more serious, he
writes better; above all, he would never be guilty of the intolerable
shoddy which Mr Gosse puts out week by week in the English
Sunday Times. The journalistic phrase is that Mr Gosse is the
doyen of English criticism. Mr More, then, is the doyen of Ameri-
can criticism. I sincerely congratulate America.
But relative importance is not the same as intrinsic importance.


J. MIDDLETON MURRY
237
ence
Mr More writes better than Mr Gosse. Does he write well enough?
Mr More thinks more clearly than Mr Gosse. Does he think
clearly enough? I have read in all five volumes of the Shelburne
Essays. Each separate volume has interested me; but I have left
them with only a confused impression of the standards by which
Mr More judges. That is singular, for Mr More is a critic who
insists upon standards. Sometimes, it seems that Mr More is chiefly
a moralist; sometimes, a transcendentalist; sometimes even, a
politician, of a highly superior kind, of course. Somewhere, I have
felt, there is a great confusion in his thought.
This latest volume of Mr More is, I think, a fair sample of his
work. His positive gift is well displayed in the analysis of the
New England mind which runs through five consecutive essays, on
Early Poets of New England�that there are none makes no differ-
on Jonathan Edwards, on Emerson, on Charles Eliot Norton,
and on Henry Adams. With a firm hand Mr More traces the
idiosyncrasy of a spirit that is now forlornly remote from both
England and America, an emaciated and a transparent austerity,
the delicate writing of a bloodless hand. If Mr More had followed
a
the development of the spirit as it showed itself in Henry James,
whose tragedy was that he yearned after the fulness of European
life which he could not join again, and had to satisfy his impulse
of asceticism in the impassioned formalism of an art without con-
tent; and, after this, in the poetry of Mr Robert Frost, the New
Englander still uninhibited by the nostalgia that is awakened by
contact with European culture, Mr More's book would have been
complete and single. It would have displayed only his positive
qualities; but it would have been less characteristic. He would
have exhausted an episode in the history of the Anglo-Saxon mind.
Even so, the underlying contradiction would not have failed to
appear. Mr More reveres the New England mind. He is aware
that it is only a severed fragment of the European mind, essentially
even a protest against the European mind; what it lacked in com-
prehensiveness was, however, compensated by its discipline. But
there is Henry Adams. Was his mind disciplined? Was it not, on
the contrary, the least disciplined mind of the nineteenth century?
Mr More is forced to admit it.
�From one point of view he may appear to be the most honest
and typical mind of New England in its last condition; yet withal


238
PURITAN OR PLATONIST?
some manlier voice, some word of deeper insight that yet faces the
facts of life, we must still expect to hear from the people of Mather
and Edwards and Channing and Emerson.�
It follows then that the discipline which Mr More admires in
the New England mind is not in the least an inherent quality of
that mind. It is an accidental discipline. Yet, on the basis of an
accidental quality, Mr More ventures to uphold Emerson against
the European romantics.
�The spontaneity and individualism of the romantic movement
on the Continent went with a dissolution of character against which
the Puritan mind, so long as it held true to its origin, was impreg-
nably fortified. Emersonianism may be defined as romanticism
rooted in Puritan divinity.�
Behind all this lurk several confusions, but they have their
centre in Mr More's conception of character. Emerson had charac-
ter; the European romantics had not, and the implied conclusion is
that Emerson is to be preferred to them. Yet Emerson, with all his
character, does not satisfy Mr More. �He loses value for his
admirers in proportion to their maturity and experience,� because
he was blind to the reality of evil.
How are we to reconcile these conceptions? Emerson was blind
to the facts of life, yet he had character. Is character then inde-
, .
pendent of knowledge? Mr More did not find that in Plato. Still,
Emerson had character, and he is therefore to be preferred above
the European romantics who had none. Is it that Mr More con-
siders character merely a synonym for Puritan character? That in
itself would be a monstrous assumption; but the Puritan character
is by definition a character formed by a stern recognition of the fact
of evil, however arbitrarily evil may have been conceived. Emerson
had "transcended� that primitive distinction.
I fear it all reduces to the fact that Emerson was a man who had
no love affairs, stole no money, and was kind to his sister. I do not
suggest that Mr More never means anything more definite when he
applies the notion of "character� to literature; but I do suggest
that a conception which imperceptibly leads him to declare that
Emerson is superior to Stendhal and Baudelaire and Hugo because
he was more respectable is a double-edged tool for a critic.
a


J. MIDDLETON MURRY
239
To pit Emerson against the great European romantics on the
score of character is to assert, by implication, that the only charac-
ter worth troubling about is the Puritan character. This is surely
wrong in fact; it would be more nearly true to say that of all
varieties of moral integrity the Puritan is the least significant and
the least humane. It is a harmony not of comprehensiveness but of
exclusion. But the more immediately important point is that the
standard of Puritan integrity is irrelevant in judging the great
figures of European romanticism, or great writers of any epoch.
Many of the European romantics were genuinely heroic, as all
really great writers have to be. Stendhal, Baudelaire, Hugo him-
self, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche�to deny these men character, and
character in a very high sense of the word indeed, is to deprive the
conception of character of any valuable meaning. All these men
had, and had very positively, one necessary component
of
great
character, the sense of the problem of evil and pain. That very
thing, as Mr More acknowledges, Emerson totally lacked. The
effect he makes upon us, therefore, is of a man not grown up. The
Europeans are, at least, grown up. They may be extravagant, they
may be perverse; but they belong to the mature European mind.
The truth, as I see it, is that the conception of character is very
necessary indeed to the criticism of literature. But the character
of a great writer, lacking which he cannot be a great writer, has to
the character of ordinary social morality a relation not of identity,
not even of close similarity, but only of analogy. Mr More, like
Mr Babbitt, is continually forgetting this, and treating the analogy
as an identity. Too often they make it easy for the naïve exponents
of Art for Art's sake to point to a Verlaine or a Villon as an argu-
ment for the absence of character in a considerable writer. The
antithesis is a false one. The simple fact is that a great writer
must have character, because without it he cannot perfectly perform
one of the great natural functions of the human mind. To do this
demands first, the capacity to see life steadily and see it whole,
and, second, the resolution and devotion necessary to communicate
this vision through the written word. If true and comprehensive
vision and self-forgetful courage do not together make up character,
they make up something finer than character; and it is foolish and
unprofitable to turn upon a man in whom these elements visibly
co-exist and measure him with a foot-rule of the character that is a
purely social virtue.


240
PURITAN OR PLATONIST?
In other words, if the conception of character is to be employed
as a principle of order in estimating literature, it must be a concep-
tion derived from the examination of literature. You must discover
what in the finest works of literature is actually accomplished, and
further establish if you can what qualities of soul were necessary
in order to achieve these results. That there is a correspondence
between the high seriousness of the finest literature and a rare moral
quality in the writer admits, I believe, of no doubt; but to form
one's ideal character solely in accordance with social values and to
try literature by this standard is illegitimate and stultifying. To
follow Plato blindly to such conclusions is almost to forfeit one's
title to be concerned with literature at all.
The evidence is that Mr More is Plato-drunk. Plato is a heady
draught at all times and in all places, but above all in New
England. The primitive ascetic impulses of the Puritan have a
glamour reflected upon them by the imaginative austerity of the
Greek. But Plato must be read in the spirit and not in the letter
in an age when the sceptre of metaphysics has definitely and irrev-
ocably passed to literature and science. It is not literature now
but metaphysics which is the pastime and entertainment of society.
The consensus of experience is that literature exists in its own right
as one of the great natural functions of the human spirit, which
thereby attains to a truth which can be reached by no other road.
The truths of metaphysics are ephemeral; those of literature stand
fast for our human eternity.
A modern Platonist, therefore, must be prepared to place litera-
ture in the seat of honour where Plato put "divine philosophy,�
because it alone is the vehicle of humane wisdom. That is not to
enthrone anarchy, as Mr More seems to fear. Literature has its
laws, at least as exacting as those of scientific investigation; but it
must be judged by its own laws. Mr More does not trust literature.
He must have a policeman to keep it in order. Of course, it is a
Platonic policeman. When he (most romantically) regrets the
passing of pre-reform Oxford, he becomes almost dithyrambic.
�If the college as an institution is to retain any value above the
shop and the market-place, if the pursuit of scholarship as an end
in itself is to offer any satisfaction for the finer spirits of man, then,
in some way those studies must be restored to authority which give
zest and significance to the inner life of the soul; and at the centre


J. MIDDLETON MURRY
241
of that life, binding all its interests into one, lifting them above
the grosser forms of utility, irradiating them with joy, must be the
idea of God.�
a
This is not altogether clear; but it obviously has and is intended
to have an application far beyond university life. Therefore we
need not pause to ask why scholarship should be an end in itself.
The point of interest is that in Mr More's view zest and significance
can be given to the inner life of the soul only by the idea of God.
For a literary critic to hold such a belief is little short of fantastic,
unless we are to read into the phrase "the idea of God� a meaning
which it cannot ordinarily bear. Besides, there are other passages
in this volume which make it clear that Mr More means what he
says. Is it the New Englander, or is it the Platonist who speaks?
Are they any longer distinguishable?
This is not to deny that zest and significance are given to the
inner life by the idea of God. What is amazing is that Mr More
does not see they are also given, and more largely and humanely
given, by that pursuit of comprehensive truth to which literature
is devoted. Can it be that Mr More believes that there was no
zest and significance in the inner lives of the great Romantics that
have been named? Were Keats and Shelley spiritually stagnant?
One is left with a feeling of bewilderment, which is followed by
a slowly growing suspicion that Mr More has never been directly
touched by the inmost virtue of literature, its power of sheer
illumination cast on to human life. "Scholarship as an end in
itself��the phrase returns now in a sinister guise. I wonder
whether it is possible that Mr More's impulse as a critic comes first
from a belief in a scholarship as an end in itself, then from a desire
for a society in which the pursuit of this scholarship shall be duly
honoured; and the idea of God is invoked less to give zest to the
pursuit of scholarship than to keep in order a tumultuous democracy
which may disturb the scholar in his task.
Still, it is not for me to impute motives. I find a sufficient
explanation of Mr More in the combination of New England and
Platonism. The combination is, indeed, attractive, and I should
like it still better if he were more outspoken. But when I find this
ascetic weeping salt tears over the passing of unregenerate Oxford
-abhorrent to Puritan and Platonist alike�I begin to wonder
whether he is a critic at all, or merely a romantic conservative.
a
a
a
J. MIDDLETON MURRY


BRIEFER MENTION
The SchoolMISTRESS and Other Stories, by Anton Chekhov, translated by
Constance Garnett (12mo, 305 pages; Macmillan: $2.50) is another
volume in an admirable collection of stories by the great Russian master.
These are the usual carefully worked-out studies of men and women in all
possible circumstances and professions; from a provincial schoolmistress
without a future to a run-away girl who became an actress and was beaten
by her husband, the tragedian. They are as meticulous and unforgettable
as the details of a Memling, but there is no repose in them. Though there
is no movement of plot, one is constantly present at an intense, personal
drama, whose passion is stronger for being implicit.
FIGURES OF Earth, by James Branch Cabell (12mo, 356 pages; McBride:
$2.50) is quite as naughty as Jurgen but circumnavigates more skilfully
the rocks of the censorship. The book is very uneven. Usually it is
either overwritten or underwritten, but at times Cabell strikes such a high
level of satire that he makes the rest of the work, by comparison, seem
meretricious. Dom Manuel's struggle with Misery is excellent symbolism;
Dom Manuel's death would rank as a fine piece of writing in any age in
any country. Nevertheless Figures of Earth is profoundly irritating;
and the irritation is aggravated by one's failure to define the cause.
The GROWTH OF THE Soil, by Knut Hamsun (2 vols., 12mo, 580 pages;
Knopf: $5) is the epical presentation of the development of a community
seen through the eyes of a disillusioned analyst of the soul. From the
moment when that primitive creature, Isak, flings his axe down in the
wilderness, to the concluding chapters when as Margrave of a cultivated
territory he gazes about him and finds his labours good, the book moves
in a slow, leisurely tide, unimpassioned, simple, almost Biblical in its
directness of exposition. Hamsun, worn out with the febrilities of Hunger,
Victoria, and Pan, goes back to the good red soil and the terrible intensity
of the peasant. It is a book of first essentials, of man's difficult triumph
over the obdurate unconsciousness of Earth.
a
The Man Who DID THE RIGHT THING, by Sir Harry Johnston (12mo,
447 pages; Macmillan : $2.50) might have been an epic of imperialism
if it were not that imperialism omitted to supply the requisite epic quali-
ties. As it stands, a novel of extraordinary detail, a shrewd and illumi-
nating survey of empire building with Sir Harry carrying the mortar.
In a succession of letters, dialogues, and narrative chapters, East Africa
undergoes British vaccination, spanning a period from the 'eighties down
to the moment; and on this large canvas, where inevitably the political
scene overshadows the human values, one gets a bird's-eye view of the
factors which enter into the romance of a continent. There are all kinds
of empire builders, and Sir Harry leaves little doubt as to his preferences.
If only his people did not for ever talk in italics


BRIEFER MENTION
243
Avon's Harvest, by Edwin Arlington Robinson (12mo, 65 pages; Macmil-
lan: $1.50). Mr Robinson has wrought what looks at first glance like a
barren tale of hatred and corroding fear with melodramatic snatches of
ghostly demons and lurid obsession. But the melodrama, never obtrusive,
is tempered by unerring character analysis, by a searching portrayal
of the subtle interplay of two personalities whose clash is invisible and
persistent even though they are separated by endless miles of land or sea.
So corrosive, in fact, is this hatred that it survives even the death of one
of the participants, and finally causes the death of the other. The feud
starts between two boys at school and Avon cannot deny that the object
of his hatred was a dominating personality, subtle and lonely. Thus
begun, the hatred soon turns into a disastrous fear which dogs Avon
everywhere until he dies, as it were, in anticipation of his dead adversary's
revenge. Mr Robinson has written far better poems than Avon's Harvest
and this last product of his pen is marred by the defects of his peculiarly
intimate method. His effort to evade the cliché, one feels, has become,
like Avon's fear, something of an incubus and the result often is a series
of absurd locutions. Even so the style is high and few writers can make
such surprising transmutations of shopworn figures of speech, while retain-
ing an even colloquial temper throughout.
Poems, by Haniel Long (12mo, 70 pages; Moffatt Yard: $1.75) is compact
with delicate but tentative approaches towards poetic expression. His lyrics,
though slight, have a musical charm that should please the reader who is
not too critical. Their excellence is more potential than absolute, however.
Sun-Up, by Lola Ridge (12mo, 93 pages; Huebsch: $1.50) will inevitably
be judged by the pioneer work of James Joyce, who gave us a new method
in his two novels. It may be urged that in Sun-Up Miss Ridge is working
in a different medium, that of verse. And so she is, but the prose of
Joyce, sharp, staccato, and vividly beautiful in sudden flashes, more nearly
approaches poetry than many a volume that passes as verse. There are
portions of Miss Ridge's book that do but unequal justice to her fine earlier
work in The Ghetto. The section called Windows with its utterly medi-
ocre Time-Stone and Skyscrapers is somewhat disappointing in a poet so
cleavingly true to her vision. In Sun-Up, the first poem, however, she
renders with unusual beauty the impressions of a childhood spent in a
city slum. Memory and faded impulse have undergone a catalysis, and the
result is beauty and an acidly translated truth.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE: A Study, by Arthur Symons (illus., 12mo, 116
pages;
Dutton : $6). Nothing is added here either to Baudelaire or to the cus-
tomary interpretation of him. Baudelaire's penchant for Evil is seen nor-
mally enough as a highly moral attribute, and his dabbling in ugliness is
fought for as the manifestation of his love of beauty. The poet's writhings
are accepted at their face value, the critical vocabulary being composed of
such terms as diabolic, morbid, cynicism, mockery, abnormal. The method
employed is to give Baudelaire in terms of someone else, such as Gautier,
Maturin, de Nerval, Villiers, Meredith, Poe, Browning, Rossetti, Beards-
ley, frequently with interesting results.


244
BRIEFER MENTION
ARIOSTO, SHAKESPEARE, AND CORNEILLE, by Benedetto Croce, translated by
Douglas Ainslie (12mo, 440 pages; Holt: $2.50) contains three illumi-
nating examples of Senator Croce's application of his Theory of Aesthetic
.
To the decaying and crumbling standards of modern criticism he brings
a new vigour, surprisingly simple, in his direct search for the intuitional
expression. Croce believes in the independence and autonomy of the
aesthetic fact and carefully refrains from any critical exposition which
shall be even partially based on the personality and life of the author.
Ariosto, Shakespeare, and Corneille are considered from their works alone
as though the poets had never lived. All art is lyrical, according to Croce,
and the majority of great critics of the past have failed through lack of
philosophical knowledge. Croce lifts criticism into a new philosophy.
RHYTHM, MUSIC AND EDUCATION, by Emile Jacques-Dalcroze, translated
by Harold F. Rubinstein (illus., 8vo, 350 pages; Putnam: $3.50) is the
manifesto of the chief exponent of Eurythmics, the art of attuning one's
entire anatomy to rhythms and hence, according to M Dalcroze, the foun-
dation of all true musical education. The theory is not entirely new
since, like nearly everything else, it was practised somewhat by the Greeks,
but in its present pragmatic form it is a dignified and provocative solution
of an old problem. If it does nothing else it should confound bigots in
their belief that Sandow was the spiritual father of Nijinsky.
How to APPRECIATE Prints, by Frank Weitenkampf (12mo, 324 pages;
Scribner: $3) is a book which so signally justified the promise in its title
that the public has now demanded this third revised edition. Generously
illustrated, it is both a technical and practical treatise on the entire process
of making plates for etchings, line and wood engravings, mezzotints, and
photo-mechanical reproductions. Furnished with additional chapters on
the aesthetics of print collecting and sundry acquisitive matters, the work
is an authoritative guide whose statements bear the imprimatur of the
Chief of the Prints Division of the New York Public Library.
ALBERT PINKHAM RYDER, by Frederic Fairchild Sherman (illustrated 4to,
78 pages; Privately Printed) is an expensive monograph brought forth
to pay definitive tribute to a strange and distinguished figure in American
painting. The author writes in the mournful tone of one performing a
sacred obligation: Ryder's life is well told; the criticism is somewhat old-
fashioned, but always dignified and never quite inappropriate; and the
thirty-three reproductions much superior to the American average. A
bibliography and a complete list of paintings are included.
MODERN TENDENCIES IN SCULPTURE, by Lorado Taft (illus., 8vo, 152
pages; University of Chicago Press: $5). The dull, academic eye of Mr
Taft can see no farther than Rodin. His splenetic utterances on the truly
modern artists remind us of Kenyon Cox, only they are not half so well
written; and his sententious references to men like Matisse are crude and
insulting. The book, however, has one value�with patience the reader
may discover in the heterogeneous illustrations from various lands an
occasional sculpture of beauty. Mr Taft is old enough to know better.


BRIEFER MENTION
245
22 DRAWINGS IN BLACK AND White, by Donald Corley (4to, The Arts: $5).
Lacking the true draughtsman's talent for giving his shapes solidity and
poise, Mr Corley has covered his twenty-two pages with a floating, whim-
sical decoration, ranging in mood from the pleasantly wistful to the
pleasantly cute. He demonstrates that a good mood may be worth on
occasion considerable good drawing.
THE PROVINCETOWN Plays, edited and selected by George Cram Cook and
Frank Shay (12mo, 272 pages; Stewart & Kidd: $2.50) a collection of
the more successful of the Provincetown plays, including Suppressed
Desires, Aria da Capo, Cocaine, Bound East for Cardiff, and half a dozen
others, with a brief introduction by Hutchins Hapgood in the character of
an epitaph to those of the organization who have died since its beginning,
most conspicuously to John Reed. As for the plays, they are some of the
best of all the one-act plays of the last torrential decade.
SHACKLED Youth, by Edward Yeomans (12mo, 138 pages; Atlantic Month-
ly Press: $1.60) attempts to strike off a few of the chains with which each
coming generation of men is manacled by the pedagogic stupidities of the
school-room. The author cherishes no hope that he can emancipate these
slaves of tradition. He makes war on our schools with gusto however, and
succeeds at least in pointing out that the science of teaching the young
idea how to shoot has all but degenerated into the sport of shooting the
young idea.
The SALVAGING OF CivilizaTION, by H. G. Wells (12mo, 199 pages; Mac-
millan: $2). The Probable Future of Mankind is the subtitle of this
book, and sums up very definitely what it is about. In his early days Mr
Wells was very preoccupied with a possible future where the world was
overrun by monsters from Mars, and really those flights of fancy of his
are rather more intriguing than his present notions of the world over-run
by committees. However for those whose present allows them enough
leisure to toy with the potential Utopias the book is fluent and glib enough
of course, although it does lead to those terrible discussions of the Five-
Foot-Book-Shelf genre, which are apt to be fluent also, but illustrative of
how futile is the mere idea of Utopia.
The Russian PEASANT AND THE REVOLUTION, by Maurice Hindus (12mo,
323 pages; Holt: $2) is a valuable and not too dry account, couched
though it is in sociological English and buttressed with figures, percentages,
and tabular outlines, of the life of the peasant. It orchestrates the stark
tragedies of the figures we have known in the pages of Tolstoy, Turgenev,
and Gorky, and gives us a vivid perception of the difficulties with which
the Soviet Republic is faced. A regime which is striving to carry social
control and social co-operation to a pitch never before attained, must use
as its raw material the moujik who has a profound distrust of all govern-
ment, is ignorant of the inter-relationships of a modern industrial state,
and thinks solely of his own immediate welfare. He has, however, accord-
ing to Hindus, certain conceptions of land and labour which may serve to
bridge the chasm between him and the intellectual theorists in control of
Russia.
1


GLADIATORS, BROWN SKINS, ET CETERA
Teno
O the unphilosophical eye a prize-fight would appear a minute
enough spark. But to any observer whatever must the attend-
ant splutter attain significance. Not to broach any unnecessary
social or psychological hogsheads, let us anyhow be amused by so
world-compassing a show.
The fancy, embarked within an intensification of taxicabs, began
by blocking all roots to the Jersey station and ferries. Indeed the
tail of this huge fleet swished to and fro across the Avenue itself.
Cowcatcher faces, turtle necks, and personalities which appeared to
have been suckled upon port held grand sway. It was without
dispute their inning.
The blond saucer with the square-cornered ring in the centre
filled easily and early. The potent Tex Rickard himself, in manner
quite Harvard (or was it Yale?) shone brightly; even amongst an
assemblage which numbered John Ringling and Al Jolson. Our
brothers and sisters, black and brown, despite the unhappy eclipse
of their Great Eagle were generously sprinkled. Music, ensconced
upon the horizon seats, recalled that Life, like an overfatigued
hobo, was yet loping on. Perhaps it was better than an alarum-
clock could have been.
The bustling and leprechaunish Descamps followed by the not
extremely godlike but indubitably nice Carpentier, followed by
lots of other big and little French hustlers bored a way down the
main aisle. Arrived in the ring M Georges clasped hands above
his head in recognition of applause; he smiled and lightened as only
a French young man can. M Descamps took off his own jersey and
then put it right on again. He trotted about sniffing the corners of
the ring like a small intelligent wide-mouthed brown dog. He did
not essay the Napoleonic.
Our Jack meanwhile had also climbed into the ring. Some felt
he might have omitted the maroon sweater, but for my part
I
thought it sat well with the four days growth of stubble worn
upon his imposing jaw. The five dollar seats roared at their hero's
advent even as the fifty dollars had cried out at the imported article.
Thus was there set up the requisite social barrier.


TER:

2
dai
It hay
n.
TO
TU
HO
II
A DRAWING. BY E. E. CUMMINGS
de





1
247
SCOFIELD THAYER
And while two unhappy dragon-flies and Monsieur Descamps
buzzed, Destiny BULKED.
Georges Carpentier was handled and mothered and released for
the battle much as a favourite gamecock would be by a feeling
breeder. One questioned what he would do when left to stand on
his own feet.
He flew at the giant and it was very noble. Of course it was also
very foolish. His one chance lay in keeping his distance. After-
ward he is quoted to have said he wanted to prove to his American
friends that their faith in his courage was not misplaced. He was
a little like that other veteran of the world-war who, to prove his
manhood, the other day jumped off Brooklyn Bridge. One had
thought Carpentier required no such demonstration. Anyhow this
was for some of his American friends rather an expense. After a
fraction of a moment Carpentier clinched. Those who have seen
Dempsey's infighting know what that spelt. So the end began at
the beginning
In the second round, for a moment and a half, Carpentier seemed
to con