tradict Nature. He flew at Goliath with eyes that really did
flash cold fire. And he hit too. Altogether he behaved in a fashion
we have rightly been taught to consider honourable and French.
And watching him step one had the impression there had come loose
in the ring some links of chain-lightning. But such things do not
feaze Jack Dempsey. For all the effect blows had on that boiler-
like person, it might have been the Golem itself. Dempsey did,
however, appear interested—much as a fond father might be at
blows of a child. And one sensed that the parental mind was made
up and that in a little while the boy would be quiet.
The rest of the fight was one long grizzly-like shuffling forward
by Dempsey and one long series of futile attacks and pell-mell
retreats by Carpentier. The Frenchman was forever backing up
against one rope or another. It seemed almost as though the ropes
came to him. It was like a very insistent nightmare. Usually in
a prize-fight it is of course the weaker fighter who to save himself
clinches. But here it was always Dempsey who, chin on chest, eyes
intent on his man, pushed forward into a clinch. For each clinch
was the opening for more than one blow to his helpless opponent's
body and was another step toward the knockout. In the fourth
round came the bolt of iron to the jaw. Carpentier went down flat,
а
a
a


248 GLADIATORS, BROWN SKINS, ET CETERA
sprang up on nine, and went down for good after a couple more
short unspectacular jabs.
Would then the philosopher find aught here to hold his atten-
tion? The legs of M Carpentier and the paws of Mr Dempsey do
not appear to signify much. Theirs is not the valid form of beauty.
But have we not here, expressed in blow and counterblow, that old
struggle of opposing wills which remains the life of drama? It is
the iron Indian will which inhabits the stiff straight almost archaic
neck of Jack Dempsey, it is the rich verve and bright courage which
live in the springing legs of Georges Carpentier, which can hold
alike the humanist and the hundred thousand. Why do spectators
always applaud the smaller man? Surely because their emotions
are roused by this demonstration of the power of a man's will to
take on all comers. In the prize-ring the essential protagonist is
not the sweating body, in Greek tragedy the essential protagonist
is not the purfled king: in either case it is the spirit of man.
The more pity that commercialization here as everywhere else
should murder.
SHUFFLE ALONG, at the Sixty-third Street Music Hall, is an all-
African show: by which is not meant that giraffes trouble the flies,
but merely that our darker brothers and sisters here show their
mettle. All costumes are passionately home-stirred; pearl-grey
derbies, corn-cob pipes, and rather extreme feather-dusters eke out.
Those black faces which (not fearing to gild the lily) own black
paint stand up best; those which (led on by a false mulattoism to
try to jump the Great Gap) powder their noses taste like hot black
coffee gone cold. In a climactic scene the gentler dusky bevy exud-
ing stretched alligator laughter, jungle brown-swan undulations,
and the wet whites of rolled eyes, exhibit crinolines. Their Afri-
canità, like a python discoagulating from the chastity of a harpsi-
chord, knocks dead.
"If You Haven't Been Vamped by a Brown Skin, You Haven't
Been Vamped at All” supplies food for thought. Uncle Tom and
Old Black Joe in a clog achieve an aesthetical intensification of
movement which approaches the cinematographic. The gent who
pours the great black heart and mouthfuls more into a centrally
illuminated detachable telephone possesses lungs.
The buckwheat-cake orchestra hoisted high up heavy clods of


SCOFIELD THAYER
249
lop-sided emotion and left them turning over there like dead
engines glum and loose in the middle snioke. Whereabove swam
Nigger Heaven.
At Mr Ziegfeld's Follies the lid stays partially off.
The chorus-lads are chorus-girls: in their slick top-hats, in their
white soft faces, in their stiff bent shirt-fronts, in their smooth
unbent legs, these demonstrate once more that dress-suits are not for
males. The Statue of Liberty is there too, albeit, as from of old
time has been her wont and pleasure, a bit uncorseted. There are
also rabbits, ducks, and birds of Peace and Paradise. O'Denishawn
en Cyclamen Tree is argently divine, but when she stops posing and
starts dancing, all distinction flies away. If a horse could be comic,
he could not be so comic as that imaginative leaper, Charles O'Don-
nell. Fannie Brice as always persuades there is hope in America
while her mouth stays loose. She and Ray Dooley and Ray Hitch-
cock and W. C. Fields together pull off every night every wallop as
good a fight as that more press-agented one which several million
people failed to see. Germaine Mitti, in person and in step, proves
again to how fine a temper Gallic girlhood can on occasion be fash-
ioned. Several young American ladies illustrate with pomp and
circumstance of breast and leg flesh regnant.
SCOFIELD THAYER


COMMENT
a
E have had a surprisingly good press for the announcement
W of our annual payment of two thousand dollars to a young
American writer who has contributed to The Dial. The three hun-
dred
newspaper
editors to whom we explained the project gave it
space, headlines, preferred position, and comment to a gratifying
degree. We thank them and the editors of the other journals who
understood our purpose and wrote of it with critical approval.
Some misconceptions have arisen. The word "prize” which we
specifically barred in the connection, crept into the headlines; we
have had so many letters asking for the conditions of the contest.
Let us repeat that we are not holding a competition, and that we
are not giving a prize. The basis of the award will be the general
character of a writer's work; the service to letters which the award
will acknowledge will be measured by his work as a whole, and not
merely by his contributions to The Dial. (His or her, of course.
The terms of the payment indicate a young American writer among
those who have contributed to The Dial in the twelvemonth pre-
ceding the award. We may add that since the fund for this
pay.
ment was not in existence in The Dial's first year as a magazine of
art and letters, the contributors to the magazine since January,
1920, will be considered for the award made January 1, 1922.)
Among the gratifying things was the criticism of The Dial itself
which many editors added to our brief announcement. Many
delectable adjectives have been associated with our name and we
have discovered to how great an extent the policy of the magazine
is approved. Another cheerful thing was the way in which the
newspapers drove home our suggestion that someone else follow us
to the tune of two hundred thousand. (Our two thousand is the
interest on the sum of fifty thousand.) Few of our critics are as
apprehensive as the Christian Science Monitor and the Washington
Herald, both fearing a return of the bad old system of literary
patronage. To them we reply that ourselves are without fear.
First, because many American writers have had patrons; second,
because others who have not had the fortune to find a patron of
wealth and taste have subjected themselves to the indulgence of a


***
COMMENT
251
semi-literate mob, the present day patrons of the arts; and finally,
because whatever was bad in the old system was in its limitation of
the client's liberty, in his moral obligation to please the patron.
Whereas liberty is exactly what we are after—and we make our
award not to keep a writer doing what we want him to do, but to
set him free to do what he wants to do. We thank the Chicago
Tribune for summing it up in a phrase: Friend, not Patron.
The Duluth Herald suggests that "the first few beneficiaries of
this gift will have heavy responsibilities upon them”; The Nation
expresses the hope, and The New Republic the belief that they will
use this "opportunity to become the kind of young American writer
The Dial so wisely and generously seeks to encourage.” Mr Ben
Macomber, of the San Francisco Chronicle, admits that a thousand
men, each making a similar offer, might miss fire occasionally, yet
considers that chance worth taking: “Think what a gift like this
would have meant to Edgar Allan Poe.” The most skeptical of our
critics is Mr John V. A. Weaver who abhors those of our contribu-
tors who experiment in verse forms and assumes (from our state-
ment that the award will go to a young American writer) that one
of these experimenters will waste two thousand dollars “in the same
old frantic efforts to be original” which stain our pages.
Mr Weaver, himself a writer who has developed a verse-lan-
guage from American slang, should know better. He should know
that the contrast between our "originals” and our "established
folk” is not dismal, at least not dismal to the writers of our "beauti-
ful stuff” who willingly send their work to appear in our pages.
As for the award, Mr Weaver confuses his own terms with ours.
He says it “is not to go to a contributor who is already established
-and why should it?” Why shouldn't it? We can name not a
few American writers whose reputation is established and whose
chances of a year of leisure are considerably less than those of an
average newspaper column conductor.
Had we known any way other than the gift of money by which
to give leisure we should have chosen it, for money in our time has
a strange effect upon men's minds; it is not provocative of clear
thinking. We should like our readers, and our contributors, and
those who by our help will have the leisure they prize, to think of
our award as part of our normal life as a magazine. The first, and
by far the most important, acknowledgement of genius which we


252
COMMENT
can make is by publication of work in our pages. We have broken
through most of the limitations imposed upon journals like our
own in order to make the appearance of a writer's name in The
Dial mean something. We have freed ourselves from commercialism
and manifestos, from schoolmen and little schools, from a little
nationalism and a snobbish cosmopolitanism. We are publishing
the work of young American writers in such fashion that it is sub-
mitted to the great test of comparison with other first-rate work.
Those who feel that our award is too encouraging, that writers need
hardships, should note that we feel, and we know many of our
younger writers feel, that publication is more significant than pay-
ment. And our award is simply an additional payment. We are
fairly confident that we shall not have to answer the charge of
spoiling half so many artists as are spoiled by the neglect of the
few or the patronage of the many.
In re The Fight, qua fight, the Editor doubtless peddles, as al-
ways, the exact dope. He had a better seat than we did. Only!
from back there on the horizon of the ringside reduced, some forty
Bacardi yards from the referee, the dance did seem to us to be there
with the aesthetic (as well as the lion-hearted) goods.
The scenery eloquently geometrical, the dancers trained as nicely
to hit and dodge to the rhythm of necessity as Mordkin ever was in
skipping to music; the attitudes of their exhaustion as comely as
those of his trimness. Nijinsky, of course, was an artist. But
among the other wise tumblers of the purfled ballet, Dempsey and
Carpentier, the perfect dramatic couple of the day, would have
looked anything but silly.
.






Courtesy of the Belmaison Gallery
BY HUNT DIEDERICH
HORSE.



THE
IT
VI
TV
DIAL
OXXIUO
SEPTEMBER 1921
THE GREEK DANCER
BY ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
Translated from the German by Pierre Loving
.
a
EOPLE may say what they will. I, for one, am by no means
persuaded that Frau Mathilde Samodeski died of heart fail-
ure. I know better. I have no intention of visiting the house from
which she was, to-day, borne to her everlasting rest. Nor do I feel
in the slightest bound to go up to her husband and clasp his hand
in a pulsing, articulate silence. So I turn aside and take another
path. This path is, to be sure, circuitously zigzag, but the fine-
spun autumnal day is steeped in ineffable beauty and stillness; and
somehow somehow it lifts the burden from my heart to be
alone. In a little while I will be brought up sharp by the garden
gate behind which, last spring, I laid my eyes on Mathilde for the
last time. The shutters of the villa will, no doubt, be closed
tightly; on the smooth gravel path the crisp magenta leaves will be
scattered broadly, many shelvings deep. And from almost any
position I choose to take, I shall be able, once again, to command a
view of the shimmering white-carven marble of the Greek Dancer.
To-day I find it hard to shake off a magic web of thought about
that far-off evening. In retrospect it seems indeed like a divine
intercession that I made up my mind, at the very last moment
almost, to accept the invitation extended by the Wartenheimers.
You see, I had for a good part of the year lost the zest for going
about. Perhaps the warmish caress of the breeze was to blame,
wavering, just about evening, down from the green-clad hill-slopes
into the city and luring one persuasively out into the country. By


254
THE GREEK DANCER
way of a house-warming for the villa, the Wartenheimers had
planned a garden fête, and I had no reason to anticipate formality
on the occasion. Certainly I did not expect to meet Mathilde there,
even though I knew that Wartenheimer had bought the Greek
Dancer from Samodeski-and that Frau von Wartenheimer was
desperately in love with the sculptor as, to speak truth, were all
women. I cherished a sort of admiration for Mathilde. Just
before her marriage we had a wonderful time together. Not quickly
shall I erase from memory one glorious summer at Lake Leman, ex-
actly a year before her betrothal was announced.
My hair is swiftly greying here and there. In spite of that, when
Mathilde became the wife of Samodeski the following year, I was
not above believing that she had unconsciously let herself in for
the bankruptcy of her illusions. I was utterly convincedor
merely hoped, if you like—that she would not be happy living
with him. I met her again, the first occasion after her marriage, at
a studio party given by Gregor Samodeski shortly after their return
from the honeymoon, at which all the guests had to appear (inanely
enough) in Japanese or Chinese costumes. She came up to me and
greeted me warmly, utterly without a trace of self-consciousness.
Her whole being was candidly stamped with a redolent peace and
serenity. Later in the evening, however, when she was engaged in
conversation with other guests, she flashed an extraordinary look
in my direction.
Some moments elapsed before I understood,
beyond peradventure, what it was meant to convey. It aimed to
assuage my doubts with the following reassurance: "My dear, you
think he married me for money. You think he doesn't love me.
You believe I'm unhappy. You're altogether wrong. See how
cheerful I am and how my eyes glisten.”
After that I ran into her several times. On each of these occa-
sions it happened that we were both, as it were, on the wing. Our
paths joined, once, on a holiday. I dined with Mathilde and her
husband in a railway restaurant. He must have put himself out
trying to regale me with his stock of alleged witty stories. Really,
he was quite boring. I spoke to her once again at the theatre. She
had in tow her mother, who is, I sometimes think, more beautiful
than she.
The deuce alone knows where Samodeski was
that evening! Last winter I caught a brief glimpse of her on
the Prater. The day was enfolded in a crystalline wintry translu-


ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
255
.
cence. Holding her little girl by the hand, she made her way over
the crisp snow, while overhead the black chestnut boughs, stripped
and bare, were etched against the pale sky. Her carriage prowled
leisurely in the rear. I was walking on the opposite side of the
driveway. It didn't once occur to me to cross over. Perhaps I
was too deeply preoccupied with matters of my own. .
So, very likely, I should not to-day have given her more than a
moment's thought, if that final encounter at the Wartenheimers'
had not intervened. That evening comes back to me with astonish-
ing, I had almost said poignant clearness, as though it were a
delicious transparent day quivering over Lake Leman. Twilight
was sifting over the purplish hills when I arrived. Guests, in knots
or couples, sauntered idly along the bordered garden paths. I paid
my respects to the host and chatted with several acquaintances.
Somewhere out of sight, apparently screened by a quickset row of
bushes, welled the strains of a small salon orchestra.
Presently I found myself on the margin of the tiny pool, rimmed
by a half-moon of tall trees. In the middle, set upon a darkly
obscure pediment, so that it gave the illusion of swaying over the
green water-mirror, glimmered the Greek Dancer. The statue was
rather theatrically illumined by the broad sweep of the electric
blaze from the house. I remember well the stir it evoked the year
before at the Secessionist show. To be quite frank, it made a pro-
found impression on me too, although I've taken a deep dislike to
Samodeski although I am of the opinion, amazing as it
may sound, that it is not he who wakes that penetrating beauty
which one sometimes surprises in his work, but something other
within him, something inexpressible and inviolate, passionately
glowing:
something daemonic, if you will. But it will fade
in an instant when he stops being young, when he stops being loved.
I am satisfied that there are artists of this ilk and, knowing
this, I am filled with immitigable delight.
In the vicinage of the pool, I came face to face with Mathilde.
She was leaning on the arm of a youngish man who looked the very
picture of a corps student and who represented himself to me as a
relative of our host. The three of us, then, strolled about the garden,
a flow of bright spirits, chattering aimlessly. The
lanterns, perched amid the foliage, bloomed with light. Our hostess
and Samodeski drifted towards us. For a fleeting instant we all
.
.
.
animated by
а


256
THE GREEK DANCER
.
.
remained stock-still and, to my own amazement, I murmured to
the sculptor a word of admiration for the Greek Dancer.
I was quite irresponsible a mild transporting emana-
tion, working havoc with one's highest resolutions, possessed
the very air and gathered us up into its magic mesh. There is noth-
ing supernatural about all this on a warm spring night. People
who, on most occasions, have no earthly use for each other, on such
a night pay each other spontaneous courtesies; while others, who
feel the least bit attuned, are tempted to all manner of effervescing
confidences. To take but a single instance: As I sat on a bench some
minutes later enjoying a cigarette alone, a man strolled up to me
whom I knew only superficially. Suddenly he launched into an
.
encomium of people like our host, who turned their wealth to such
praiseworthy uses as this. I acquiesced at once, even though nor-
mally I looked upon Wartenheimer as a downright, insupportable
snob. Subsequently, for no ascertainable reason, I volunteered my
views on modern sculpture—a subject, I assure you, upon which I
am but meagrely informed—views which were incapable of any.
thing but boring him. Yet under the seductive and pervasive
sorcery of the spring night, he said he held the same views
agreed with me heartily.
Later on I ran into the nieces of our host, who found the fête
“awfully romantic.” The lanterns swaying amid the foliage and
the music mysteriously far-off! True, the orchestra was only a
few
paces away.. still I did not find the outburst gushingly
silly, as I might have ordinarily.
Refreshments were served on small tables placed on the broad
terrace. The overflow was accommodated in the adjoining salon.
The three huge French windows stood folded wide open. I sat at
an outdoor table. On my right I had one of the nieces, on my left
Mathilde and the man I could have sworn was a corps student but
who was, in reality, a bank official and an officer of the reserve.
Vis-à-vis, but in the salon proper, sat Samodeski wedged in between
the hostess and another woman, disturbingly beautiful, whom I
hadn't met. He flung his wife a kiss, flirtatious and not wanting in
a touch of gaiety. She merely nodded and smiled back.
I don't know why, but I studied his face pretty narrowly. He
was, to be sure, handsome with his challenging steel-blue
long dark Vandyke beard, which he stroked nattily, at intervals,
.
eyes and


ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
257
with two fingers of his left hand. I don't recollect ever seeing a
man before so hedged about with inviting words, glances, and ges-
tures, as he was on this particular evening. At the outset, it seemed,
he merely put up with it, with an air of patient endurance. But
soon I noted how insinuatingly he bent over to whisper in the ears
of the women. Did I alone detect the vanquisher's air of triumph
and the kindled vivaciousness he inspired in his fair neighbours,
as though they were being subconsciously held in thrall by a secret,
irresistible core of fire? Mathilde must have perceived all this as
well as I. But she wandered on in pointless conversation, out-
wardly unmoved. The man on her other side listened piously.
Gradually, however, she turned the spate of talk full upon me,
evinced a decided interest in my affairs and let me entertain her
with a running account of my trip to Athens, taken the year before.
Then she galloped on about her children who (most promising,
don't you think?) had already mastered Schumann's songs by car;
about her parents who had lately purchased a small house in
Hietzing where they planned to spend their declining days; about
the old church relics she had managed to buy in Salzburg last year
and
well, hundreds of other things. Nevertheless under
the placid surface flow of this banal conversation something else
wavered back and forth between us
a voiceless and bitter
undercurrent of conflict. She sought to drive home with a dignified
implacableness of manner that she was serenely happy ... and
I fought against it ruthlessly.
Inevitably, again, the Japanese-Chinese evening comes to mind,
that evening at Samodeski's studio, when she essayed the same sort
of thing. Now she sensed with unerring accuracy that she could
make but little headway against the harsh tide of my thoughts and
that, if she was to rout them, she must outdo herself in the way of
dissimulation. And so she hit upon the idea of calling my attention
to the seductive blandishments of the two ravishing women on
either side of her husband. Then she told me about his attraction
for women as though she, too, could dispassionately admire the
fascination of his personality and his genius, without the slightest
cause for fear or distrust. But the more she bent her emotional
being to simulate an appearance of non-committal calmness, the
deeper proved the shadows that gathered on her brow. As she
lifted her glass to drink to Samodeski, her hand trembled visibly.
.


258
THE GREEK DANCER
.
.
.
a
.
.
.
.
She fought wildly to conceal it, to suppress her vehement emotion.
And so not only her hand, but her arm her whole body fell
into such a fierce rigidity that I grew deeply concerned for her.
She touched my arm faintly again, shot a swift, meaningful glance
at me sidewise, at last aware that her game was up. She said
abruptly, as though this was her last doubtful effort:
“I'll wager you think I'm jealous.” Before I had a chance to
answer, she added hastily: "Oh, many people think so. I suspect
Gregor believes it himself.” She spoke with what appeared to be
a premeditated loudness. Every word must have been distinctly
audible across the table.
"Oh, yes,” she resumed, fixing her gaze opposite, “when a woman
has that kind of a husband, handsome and famous
and she
herself isn't much of a beauty . Oh, don't feel duty-bound
to reply. I'll grant you, that since my two girls were born, I've
grown prettier.” Perhaps she was right. But for her husband (of
this I was firmly convinced) the high-born, chiselled lines of her
face held absolutely no attraction. And as to her figure, what with
the vanishing of her girlish slimness and grace
that, too,
no longer possessed any charm for him. With exaggerated empha-
sis, however, I assented to every word she uttered. She seemed
overjoyed at this, and ran on with increasing verve:
“I've no aptitude at all for jealousy. I didn't realize that at
first. Gradually it came over me especially several years
ago in Paris. You know, of course, that we lived in Paris.”
I assured her that I remembered it.
“Gregor had a commission to do busts of the Duchess La Hire
and Minister Chocquet . . and several others. We lived like
a pair of young love-birds in Paris. . Of course, we're still
quite young. It was like a honeymoon, even when we went about.
We visited the La Hire's and other people in the same
set. We were present at a party given by the Austrian ambassador.
On the whole, though, we didn't mix much. As a matter of fact,
we lived in a pretty ramshackle house in Montmartre, which served,
partially, as Gregor's studio. Several of the younger artists who
,
lived in the neighbourhood didn't even know we were married. I
was seen everywhere with him. Often, in the evening, we would
sit in the Cafe Athènes with Leandre, Carabin, and others. All
sorts of questionable women would, on frequent occasions, join our
.
.


ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
259
.
group. In Vienna, I daresay, it would ruin me to be seen in their
company, although
She flung a quick glance at Frau
Wartenheimer and pattered on: “Many of them were ravishing.
I remember distinctly the last mistress of Henri Chabran who, after
his death, wore only black and changed her lovers weekly
but they all had to wear mourning for . . . she demanded it.
One meets with odd characters sometimes. The Parisian
women, of course, ran after my husband the same as they do here.
It was highly amusing. But since I was always with him, almost
always at any rate, they didn't dare make open advances to him.
You see, they were under the impression I was his mistress.
If they had known that I was only his wife! One day I had a
perfectly stunning idea. You wouldn't have thought me capable
of it. And, to be quite frank, I myself marvelled at the courage I
displayed.” Her abstracted gaze ranged straight in front of her,
then she went on, more gently:
“Circumstances had something to do with it .. . . I needn't go
into that. For several weeks I knew that I was going to have a
baby. That made me insanely happy. At the start I was not only
more cheerful but more flexible and responsive than ever before in
my life. Do you know what I did? One lovely evening I put on
masculine clothes and ventured out, with Gregor, on a lark. I
made him promise right away that he would not hold himself back
on my account, or the whole adventure would have been meaning-
less. I looked stunning · · you wouldn't have recognized me.
A friend of Gregor’s, Léonce Albert by name, a young painter-
hunch-backed-called for us. The weather was adorable. May.
A mild breeze blew through the streets. I grew bold beyond belief.
Just fancy: I took my overcoat off . . . a very swanky fawn-
coloured overcoat, and carried it folded over my arm, as men have
a habit of doing. It was growing dark. We dined in a small
restaurant on the outer Boulevard; then we went to the Roulotte
where Legay sang, also Montoyo. ... 'Tu t'en iras les pieds de-
vant. Haven't you heard it here at the Wiedener Theatre ?”
Mathilde looked avidly across at her husband, who was entirely
oblivious of her glance, which was like an outcry of leave-taking;
it seemed that she was about to go away for a long time. But she
resumed her narrative, while a faint flush mounted her cheeks and,
almost beside herself, she plunged ahead:
.
.
.


260
THE GREEK DANCER
“In the Roulotte a very becomingly gowned woman sat near us.
She Airted with Gregor in a way ... well, candidly, it is hard to
imagine anything more indecent. I shall never understand why
I
her husband didn't throttle her on the spot. I am sure, if I were
he, I should have done it. I believe she was a duchess or something.
.. Oh, don't laugh. It was easy to see that she was one of those
women whose place in society is secure, no matter what her behav-
iour. I wanted Gregor to go on with the flirtation. I was curious
to see how it's done. I wanted him to hand her a note.
.. or do
something anything like in his bachelor days. I
egged him on, although the affair was not entirely harmless. Don't
you think women have an outrageous curiosity? But Gregor,
thank Heaven, showed not the least desire. In fact, we left almost
at once. The May evening enveloped us. Léonce dragged himself
along at my side. That evening he fell in love with me and, con-
trary to his usual custom, showed that he was capable of gallantry.
Apart from that he was, as you may imagine, a very timorous
creature, owing to his physical defect. I said to him in jest:
'Léonce, it takes a fawn-coloured overcoat to fetch you at a
woman's feet.'
“Gaily we strolled along like three carefree students. The most
intriguing adventure of the evening was yet to follow. We went
into the Moulin Rouge. This was part of our programme. More-
over, we had set our hearts on something happening. Up to that
moment the escapade had been uneventful except that ...
woman had addressed me on the street. By one o'clock we were
in the Moulin Rouge. I needn't go into details as to what you may
expect to find there. Really, I had a notion it was far worse. Noth-
ing at all happened in the beginning, and for a moment it seemed
that our whole lark was doomed to turn out a fiasco. I
grew peev-
ish. Gregor scolded: 'You're a mere child. Do you suppose that
all we have to do is to come here and the women will fall prostrate
at our feet?
“He said 'we' in deference to Léonce. Poor Léonce! It was
inconceivable that any one would fall at the feet of Léonce. But
just as we were contemplating going home, the prospect took a
turn for the better. A woman who had passed us a number of times
fascinated me.
actually fascinated me. She was rather
serious-faced and carried herself with a hauteur that was foreign
. a
.
a
.
.


ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
261
to the place. She was not what you would call well-dressed. But
simply, and becomingly, in white—all in white. I had noticed
that she had spurned the advances of two or three men and passed
austerely on, without so much as acknowledging their ogling
glances. She appeared to all intents and purposes quite content
to watch the dancing with a subdued interest that was highly im-
personal. Léonce, at my bidding, inquired of several acquaint-
ances who the beautiful creature was. One of them, fortunately,
called to mind that he had seen her, the foregoing winter, at the
Thursday parties of the Latin Quarter. Léonce then spoke to her
from a distance on our behalf. She acknowledged his invitation
and swept slowly up to us.
"We all sat round a small table and ordered champagne. Gregor
did not put himself out the least bit on her account. Obviously
he was not interested. It was as though she did not exist for him.
He gave me all his attention, talking all the time without pause.
This did not appear to annoy the girl at all. A genial placidity
spread over her face; she grew more affable, more intimately
relaxed and, gradually overcoming the barriers of remoteness, un-
folded the chequered history of her life. How much misery such
persons go through. or are forced by circumstances to go
through! One often hears or reads of such things, but when they
are told by a human being who has been through it all
well, it's a different matter altogether. I still remember a good
deal of what she divulged.
"At the age of fifteen she was seduced and deserted. Then she
became a model, with a job on the side as a super in a small thea-
tre. What tales she had to tell about the director! I should
have fled right off, but I was slightly tipsy from the champagne.
Later she fell in love with a medical student who was specializing
in anatomy. She used to wait for him outside the morgue or, as
happened more frequently perhaps, stayed on with him.
No, it's impossible to repeat all that she blurted out! Of course,
after a while the medical student left her in the lurch, too. And life
became insupportable after that that last blow was hard
to survive! And so she committed suicide, which is to say, she
attempted to. She grew spiritedly jocose about it and her raillery
was provokingly funny. I can still hear her voice, falling with a
soft ingratiating accent, coarse-grained though it undoubtedly was.
.
a


262
THE GREEK DANCER
.
.
.
.
"She undid her dress at the bosom and pointed out a tiny crim-
son scar printed over her left breast. And as we gazed, stupefied
and speechless, at the puny blemish, suddenly, with startling fury
and abruptness, she said . ... no, shrieked to my husband:
'Kiss it!
“As I have already said, Gregor was bored. During the whole
time that she was pouring out her blotched irregular story I doubt
whether he so much as listened. He fixed his gaze, for the most
part, on the ball-room and smoked cigarette after cigarette, flicking
the ashes dully. And now at her unforeseen outcry his face
remained unchanged, with not the minutest suggestion of a smile
to mar its grim stolidity. However, I nudged him. pinched
him under the table. I was a bit fuddled and in the best of moods.
Whether he was willing or not, I was bent on his kissing the
that is, I insisted that he should make as if he touched
the spot with his lips. We all grew hilarious and gay; never have
I laughed so much in my life, without knowing why. But I never
dreamed that a woman
and one of that calibre, too.
could in the course of one hour fall desperately in love with a man,
as this woman did with Gregor. Her name was Madeleine.”
Could it be that Mathilde uttered the name out loud from sheer
design? Or did I only fancy it? I don't know. At all events, her
husband clearly heard it for he lifted his eyes towards us. His
gaze did not converge on his wife, but met my own and lingered
in a prolonged exchange bordering closely on hate. Suddenly,
however, he smiled blandly at his wife and she nodded docilely in
return. He then resumed the dropped thread of his conversation
with his neighbour, and Mathilde turned towards me again.
"I can't recall everything Madeleine said,” she continued. "It
was all so confusing. I don't want to hide anything from you.
For an instant, I'll admit, I was a bit out of humour. That was
when Madeleine impulsively seized my husband's hand and kissed
it hotly. But it passed quickly enough. The submerged thought
of my child flashed vividly across my mind at the moment, and
that opened my eyes to the truth that Gregor and I were indis-
solubly bound together. Everything else.
.
..., everything else
was pale shadow, emptiness, or merely extravagant buffoonery,
after the fashion of that evening. Thus, in every way, the eve-
ning turned out a perfect treat.


ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
263
>
a
.
"After that we stayed until the bluish grey of dawn crept into
the wan café. I caught Madeleine in the act of begging my hus-
band to take her home. He laughed mockingly at her. But to
carry the joke to a climax (you know what vain fops artists are
when it comes to their art) ... in short, he informed her that
he was a sculptor, and would she not come to his studio and pose
for him. She replied incredulously:
"You a sculptor! I'd like to believe that! All right, I'll come
just the same."
Mathilde's voice, pausing, seemed to drop sheer into a deep pool
of silence. Never have I surprised in the eyes of a woman so piti-
less an anguish as I saw mirrored . or veiled. . in Ma-
thilde's. When she had composed herself, she continued her story.
“Gregor was insistent that I should be present next day in the
studio. He suggested that I hide behind the portières, should the
girl keep her promise. Well, I daresay there are women, many
women, no doubt, who would have jumped at the opportunity. I
believe, however, that either one has confidence or one has not con-
fidence . and I have made up my mind to have implicit
faith. Isn't that the best way?
Mathilde turned large questioning eyes upon me. I merely
nodded my head indicating assent, and she went on speaking. “Yes,
Madeleine came as she had promised. And not only the next day
but many days after that. When I look back, I think she is one
of the most beautiful girls who has ever posed for Gregor. Didn't
you admire her to-day by the pond?"
"The Dancer ?”
“Yes. Madeleine was the model. Don't get the notion that I
.
was jealous in this or in any other case. Why should I make his
life and mine miserable? I am glad it isn't in me to play the
jealous wife.”
Somebody stood framed in the wide-flung centre door and had
launched what was, judging from the hilarious laughter that at-
tended it, an immensely witty toast in honour of our host. But I
simply could not remove my eyes from Mathilde's face, and neither
of us heard a word of it. Again I spied her yearning gaze across the
space interval, a gaze that was pathetic with ineffable love, breath-
ing implicit trust, as if it were her holiest office in life to avoid at
all costs shattering his joy of living. And he ... what about
.
.
??!!


264
THE GREEK DANCER
a
him? He harvested this sacrificial poignancy to himself, smiling
complacently, cool and unruffled. And yet he knew only too well
that every moment of her life throbbed with indescribable agony,
and that she bore it mutely, stricken though she was.
That's why I am inclined to scout the old wives' tale of heart
failure. That evening I learned to know Mathilde too well. I am
convinced that, even as she played the part of a happy contented
wife from start to finish · while he betrayed her and goaded
her to insanity so at the last, to save him from remorse, she
went through the magnificent gesture of a natural death. She died
because she couldn't bear it any longer. And he accepted this ulti-
mate sacrifice as though it, too, were owing to him.
Ah, here's the iron grille at last. The shutters, as I surmised,
are locked fast. White and magical, the little villa snuggles in
the silver sheen of twilight, and yonder the marble statue shim-
mers between interlacing fiery boughs.
Am I unjust to Samodeski? I daresay he is fatuous enough
not to divine the truth. It is inexpressibly sad to conceive that
death held no more vivid bliss for Mathilde than the barren
knowledge that her last sublime feint came off so splendidly. Or
do I imagine things? Was it a perfectly natural death? No! I
will not lightly yield up the privilege of hating the man Mathilde
loved so pitiably. For many years that, and that alone, will per-
haps constitute my sole joy in living.


THOUGHTS UPON THE PRESENT STATE
OF THE WORLD
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Many ingenuous lovely things are gone
That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude;
Above the murderous treachery of the moon,
Or all that wayward ebb and flow. There stood
Amid the ornamental bronze and stone
An ancient image made of olive wood;
And gone are Phidias' carven ivories
And all his golden grasshoppers and bees.
We too had many pretty toys when young;
A law indifferent to blame or praise,
To bribe, or threat; habits that made old wrong
Melt down, as it were wax in the sun's rays;
Public opinion ripening for so long
We thought it would outlive all future days.
O what fine thoughts we had because we thought
That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.
All teeth were drawn, all ancient tricks unlearned,
And a great army but a showy thing;
What matter that no cannon had been turned
Into a ploughshare; parliament and king
Thought that unless a little powder burned
The trumpeters might burst with trumpeting
And yet it lack all glory; and perchance
The guardsmen's drowsy chargers would not prance.
Now days are dragon ridden, the nightmare
Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery
Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,
To crawl in her own blood and go scot-free;
;
The night can sweat with terror as before
We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,


266 THOUGHTS UPON THE STATE OF THE WORLD
And planned to bring the world under a rule
Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.
He who can read the signs, nor sink unmanned
Into the half-deceit of some intoxicant
From shallow wits, who knows no work can stand,
Whether health, wealth or peace of mind were spent
On master work of intellect or hand,
No honour leave its mighty monument,
Has but one comfort left: all triumph would
But break upon his ghostly solitude.
And other comfort were a bitter wound:
To be in love and love what vanishes.
Greeks were but lovers; all that country round
None dared admit, if such a thought were his,
Incendiary, or bigot, could be found
To burn that stump on the Acropolis,
Or break in bits the famous ivories
Or traffic in the grasshoppers and bees?
II
When Loie Fuller's Chinese dancers enwound
A shining web, a floating ribbon of cloth,
It seemed that a dragon of air
Had fallen among dancers, had whirled them round
Or hurried them off on its own furious path;
So the platonic year
Whirls out new right and wrong,
Whirls in the old instead;
All men are dancers and their tread
Goes to the barbarous clangour of a gong.
III
Some moralist or mythological poet
Compares the solitary soul to a swan;
I am content with that,


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
267
a
Contented that a troubled mirror show it
Before that brief gleam of its life be gone
An image of its state;
The wings half spread for Aight,
The breast thrust out in pride,
Whether to play, or to ride
Those winds that clamour of approaching night.
A man in his own secret meditation
Is lost amid the labyrinth that he has made
In art or politics;
Some platonist affirms that in the station
Where we should cast off body and trade
The ancient habit sticks,
And that if our works could
But vanish with our breath
That were a lucky death
For triumph can but mar our solitude.
.
The swan has leaped into the desolate heaven:
That image can bring wildness, bring a rage
To end all things, to end
What my laborious life imagined, even
The half imagined, the half written page.
O but we dreamed to mend
What ever mischief seemed
To afflict mankind, but now
That winds of winter blow
Learn that we were crack-pated when we dreamed.
IV
We, who seven years ago
Talked of honour and of truth,
Shriek with pleasure if we show
The weasel's twist, the weasel's tooth.


268 THOUGHTS UPON THE STATE OF THE WORLD
V
Come let us mock at the great
That had such burdens on the mind
And toiled so hard and late
To leave some monument behind,
Nor thought of the levelling wind.
Come let us mock at the wise;
With all those calendars, whereon
They fixed old aching eyes,
They never saw how seasons run,
And now but gape at the sun.
Come let us mock at the good
That fancied goodness might be gay,
Grown tired of their solitude,
Upon some bran-new happy day;
Wind shrieked and where are they.
Mock mockers after that,
That would not lift a hand may be
a
To help good, wise or great
To bar that foul storm out, for we
Traffic in mockery.
VI
Violence upon the roads, violence of horses,
Some few have handsome riders, are garlanded
On delicate sensitive ear or tossing mane;
But, weary running round and round in their courses,
All break and vanish, and evil gathers head.
Herodias' daughters have returned again:
A sudden blast of dusty wind and after
Thunder of feet, tumult of images,
Their purpose
in the labyrinth of the wind;
And should some crazy hand dare touch a daughter
All turn with amorous cries, or angry cries,
a


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
269
According to the wind for all are blind.
But now wind drops, dust settles; thereupon
There lurches past, his great eyes without thought
Under the shadow of stupid straw-pale locks,
That insolent fiend Robert Artisson
To whom the love-lorn Lady Kyteler brought
Bronzed peacock feathers, red combs of her cocks.
9)
Note: The country-people see at times certain apparitions whom they name
now "fallen angels,
now "ancient inhabitants of the country,” and
describe as riding at whiles "with flowers upon the heads of the horses."
I have assumed in the sixth poem that these horsemen, now that the times
worsen, give way to worse. My last symbol, Robert Artisson, was an evil
spirit much run after in Kilkenny at the start of the fourteenth century.
Are not those who travel in the whirling dust also in the Platonic Year?
May, 1921
W.B.Y.


BALZAC
BY BENEDETTO CROCE
F:
IRENCH criticism is notably weak whenever the fundamentals
of art are concerned; since the theory of art, philosophically
considered, has never been so thoroughly studied in France as it
has in Italy and Germany. Nevertheless I regard the French psy-
chological or impressionistic critics as superior to those who have
ventured on system and doctrine: I prefer the Sainte-Beuves and
the Lemaîtres to the Taines and the Brunetières. French critics
of the latter type have indeed approached the theory of their trade,
but always in an intellectualistic, a dogmatic spirit that raises an
insuperable barrier against artistic comprehension.
Read, if you will, the volume that Brunetière devoted to Balzac
-it is now available in a so-called “popular” reprint-and you
will see to what extent Brunetière's philosophy of literature suc-
ceeds only in obscuring truths that are patent even to the layman,
truths too so adequately and diligently set forth in Le Breton's
modest study on the author of the Comédie Humaine. I am not
thinking of the theory of the "literary genre” only. The genre
was not invented by Brunetière, though, in his hands, it became
something absurdly rigid and mechanical; so that, in approaching
Balzac, the problem before his mind was the problem of "the
novel”—as a genre—and his solution of the problem was that
Balzac had declared the independence of the new "genre," created
“the true novel,” and established the impassible boundaries thereof!
What light, I would ask rather, did Brunetière succeed in throw-
ing on the nature of the novel,” or, keeping more particularly to
the matter at hand, on the nature of the "historical" or "social
novel”? And how far did he succeed in grasping the essential
attitude of Balzac towards the "social novel" and towards art
itself?
Had Brunetière not been deficient in aesthetic training and in
philosophic aptitude he might easily have seen that the "social
novel” is to be isolated as an independent genre” from other forms
of art, not because it is a form of art (in which case the distinction


BENEDETTO CROCE
271
I
3
would be wholly empirical and arbitrary) but because, in its origin
and in its nature, it is not a form of art at all, but simply an in-
strument of didacticism.
In ancient Greece, when religious, mythical, poetic inspiration
began to fail, making way for scholarship and criticism, the Greek
comedy, which had been so fanciful, so imaginative, so capricious,
in the hands of Aristophanes became the critical, and—as Vico
first discovered and as Nietzsche first made widely known-the
“Socratic,” comedy of Menander. Comedy writers and moralists
worked hand in hand. The comedy took over the ethical categories
of the philosophers; and the philosophers adopted and rationalized
the "types" created on the stage. It is well known that the frame-
work of the Menandrian comedy did good service for centuries.
It satisfied the Romans; and it satisfied the Italians of the Renais-
sance, as well as the French of the grand siècle. It was the comedy
of the fixed, the conventional, the “stock” character—the old man,
the lover, the astute servant, the miser, the braggart, and so on.
Even if the framework was occasionally embellished with this local
detail or that, its general purpose was never changed—to study, to
"reflect" mankind in general, making sport of human vices and
human weaknesses.
But, towards the end of the eighteenth century and early in the
nineteenth, a period of spectacular overturns in the social order,
there was a sudden growth of interest in history. On the one hand,
the comedy began to present characters and environments belonging
to specific historical moments and derived from specific aspects
of society; on the other hand, the prose tale was transformed to
the "historical,” the “social” novel.
The preface which Balzac wrote for his Comédie Humaine is an
exposition of his programme, no less, for a new Menander, a new
Theophrastus: a Menander who has the French Revolution behind
him and a bourgeois régime of democracy to look forward to—
a Menander, who, in his way, is a revolutionary and a bourgeois
(or an anti-revolutionary and an anti-bourgeois) and a Theo-
phrastus, who has imbibed something of modern philosophy and
something of modern materialistic science. Balzac, significantly,
appeals in the last instance to the aesthetic doctrine of Geoffroy
Saint-Hilaire; and he cites Buffon, if you please, as his literary
model. Since, he asks, there are, as there have always been, "social
a


272
BALZAC
as well as zoological species” (il y a des espèces sociales comme il
y a des espèces zoologiques) why not do for human society what
Buffon did for the world of animals—include the whole panorama
of life in one magnificent work? The subject he had in mind fell
naturally into three divisions: "men, women, and things: people,
in other words, and the material demonstration they make of their
inner selves—mankind and ihe life of mankind, in short.” Nor
would he be content with the mere observation, the mere recording,
of facts. From these he would pass on to their underlying prin-
ciples—the laws of sociology—thence arriving ultimately at the
ideals of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True! Note especially
Balzac's reference to Walter Scott, in his demand that history be
not something generically human, as the individualism of the Eigh-
teenth Century had made it, but something pre-eminently "social.”
The intention of Balzac and of the other writers who before,
with, or after him, designed the historical and social novel as the
successor to the waning Graeco-Roman comedy, is an intention re-
lating not directly to art but to history, sociology, and philosophy;
and since their idea was to utilize the imagination as well as science,
the better to condense and expound their notions and theories, they
endeavoured to set up, as I previously intimated, a category, a
formula, of didactic character. But in the framework of the social
novel resulting, where the blend of science and imagination proved
unworkable, two situations alternately arose: either the poetic ele-
ment gained the upper hand, becoming the real centre of the pro-
duction, subjugating the scientific elements, and using them as sub-
tones and colouring (pure poetry in other words; the Sacred Hymns
of Manzoni furnish a classic example) or the scientific elements
came to predominate, the poetic elements falling into the back-
ground till they became mere embellishments of discourse. This
second fate has befallen the work mainly of mediocre writers, popu-
larizers and authors of educational books; for people with original
minds and an aptitude for thought do not stoop to fables and
apologues to express their visions of truth but go straight to the
point in the direct prose of science, history, and argument. But
artists, who have some of the gifts of the thinker and the critic and
a certain tendency towards observation and meditation, do not,
as a rule, go beyond a certain point in their philosophical pursuits.
They create living embodiments of their scattered thoughts and


BENEDETTO CROCE
273
>
inductions (stripping these of their truly scientific character) or
they jot them down in notes, diaries, short paragraphs, without at-
tempting any systematic elaboration of them.
To all these varied relations that exist between the social novel —
a didactic formula—and art, or poetry; and to the various corol-
laries that depend on those relations, Brunetière paid no attention;
nor is that surprising, since, as is well known, he had a purely in-
tellectual attitude towards poetry and art. But one effect of his
fallacious aesthetics, to my mind quite astonishing, was his dogged
persistence in regarding Balzac as the incarnation of the very idea
of the novel (“Balzac is the novel itself,” he says) the creator of a
type of literature fraught with objective observation of society,
a type whose essential function it is "to copy life,” “subjecting
the observer to the matter observed,” and “following that em-
pirical method which has given new life to science”; in such guise
'
that the “work cannot be judged as a thing apart,” but “only by
comparing it with life” (testing the observations it contains, in
other words, with new experiments and new observations).
Now any one who has—I will not say read thoroughly—but
merely dipped into the work of Balzac, 'must have seen—as in-
deed it is difficult not to see that Balzac's mental attitude is not
that of the scientific observer. The scientist, for one thing, is
hesitant, cautious, loath to risk categorical assertion. And there
is Balzac, sure of himself, proud of himself even, and taking your
with the cocksureness of his affirmations! Nor yet
is he the literary pedagogue, who chooses to dress his sociological
notions and his interpretations of history in symbolic and illus-
trative tales in usum Delphini. No one, to be sure, can fail in
admiration for the acute psychological aphorisms that occur here
and there in Balzac's romances; but his incompetence as a sys-
tematic aphorist is no less obtrusive; as witness, again, the preface
already referred to his most serious venture into theory-where
his rather lumbering philosophy is finally and hastily crowned
"with two eternal truths”: religion and monarchy, two institutions
"the necessity of which is proclaimed from the housetops by every-
thing that has happened in our day!”
Let us add, also, that some of his reflections on social history
illuminating power that is brilliant to say the least;
but it is the radiance of the rocket, rather than the sustained, the
breath
away
flash with an


274
BALZAC
a
enduring light of day: for they suggest questions, without supply-
ing answers. Turn, for instance, to Balzac's intuition of the rôle
that high finance was to play in modern society. He makes Gos-
beck, his famous Jew, exclaim: “I am rich enough to buy a hundred
men who can twist Ministers around their fingers. I can buy a
Premier's butler, and I can buy a Premier's mistress! Well, isn't
that Power? I can purchase women, and have their tenderest
caresses for myself—and isn't that Pleasure? And Power and
Pleasure—what else is there to this new social order of yours?
There are ten or more of us fellows here in Paris who are kings,
kings unknown and kings uncrowned, maybe, but none the less in
control of our own destinies. Life is a machine, and money is its
motive power. Gold is the breath of life to this modern Utopia
of yours.”
Now all this, true as it may be, is not science; for science begins
with research–I dare not say with doubt and scepticism. The
scientific objective would have been to discover to what extent and
in what manner finance lies at the bottom of the present order,
to what social purposes money is destined and therefore chained.
But this critical problem does not dawn on Balzac's mind. He
fills the void with an exclamation of amazement and terror: “I
went home dumbfounded,” he says. "That little wizened miser had
grown to huge proportions in my eyes. He had become an unreal,
a fantastic being, the personification of Money and Power. And
life and mankind were suddenly horrible to me!"
Balzac, to common knowledge, was brought up, as a boy, on the
wildest romantic dime-novels of England and France—books of
travel and adventure, conquest, treasure-hunting, crime, dreams,
ghosts, and double personalities. Of such, later on, he even be-
came an author himself; and never did he wholly master this
hankering after the wonderful and the strange. That element he in-
troduced in greater or lesser—at times in very great-proportions
into the books of his maturest years. In those novels, precisely,
and in that series of novels, which Brunetière considers most "ob-
jective” and “naturalistic," Balzac really does nothing but make
events and episodes that are as ordinary, as humdrum, as "bour-
geois” as may be, seem wonderful and extraordinary. Not one of his
portraits, not one of his environments, but is hyperbolized to look
like something marvellous and fantastic—you may take your choice


BENEDETTO CROCE
275
-a former subaltern of Napoleon like Philippe Brideau, or a lov-
ing father like le père Goriot, or a typical Balzacian household
like that of "Daddy' Grandet, or a shop like that of the chat qui
pelotte. Balzac takes a few fragments of reality from here and
there, and works himself into a trance over them, till he finds
himself in an immense world of fantasy through which he can
move tingling with terror or with wonderment, as though an Apoc-
alyptic vision had opened before his eyes.
To mistake this procedure for the "method of natural science"
is indeed surprising; and the error is forgivable only in that un-
critical public which gets its history of France out of the stories
of Dumas père. With Dumas, indeed, Balzac has much in common,
so far as method is concerned; and I would even risk asserting that
Balzac did little but transfer The Three Musketeers into the poli-
tics, the commerce, the finance, the manufacturing, of his day; for
his works show many a D'Artagnan in business, many an Athos in
industry, not to mention the Aramis who becomes a statesman, and
the Porthos who becomes a millionaire by sheer violence and crime.
This banal confusion had in truth been placarded by many
critics of real perceptiveness. Baudelaire, in one of the essays as-
sembled under the title L'art romantique, acutely remarks:
9
"I have been often and not a little surprised that Balzac's chief
renown should rest on his skill as an observer. To me his excellence
appears rather to lie in his visionary, his passionately visionary,
turn of mind. All his characters palpitate with that vital eager-
ness with which he himself was thrilled. All his imaginings have
the sombre colouring of dreams. From the apex of the aristocracy
to the lowest levels of the underworld, all the personages who
figure in the Comédie Humaine are more intense in pursuit of life,
more shrewd and tenacious in struggle, more long-suffering in mis-
fortune, more swinish in indulgence, more angelic in devotion, than
the individuals whom the social drama actually presents to us.
Everybody in Balzac, not excluding his janitresses, is a person of
genius. Every soul he bares in his work is a soul charged with
energy and will--so many Balzacs, in other words..
The over-exhilaration of Balzac's imagination not only pre-
cluded that capacity for scientific observation which Brunetière


276
BALZAC
praises him for, but was at times so violent, so incursive, as to dis-
turb his artistry. This point must be made more clear, since it is a
capital one in the critical enjoyment of Balzac's novels. In this
matter also Brunetière finds himself embarrassed to a degree. “The
depiction of life,” he says, “not the realization of beauty, was
Balzac's prime concern. He seems to have understood, however
vaguely, that in art beauty is attainable only at the expense of
fidelity to the actual.”
If this were so, it is evident that neither criticism nor art would
be possible; but the dictum, for all its falsity, is interesting as
showing Brunetière comfortably propped on two bits of flotsam
from the old rhetoric—the concept of art as an imitation of life,
and the concept of beauty as something transcending reality; where-
as, in art, beauty and the representation of reality are one and the
same thing, so truly that where beauty seems to fail we must always
seek the failure in imperfect representation.
But how was it, we are constrained to ask, that this passionate
fancifulness, which would seem such a precious asset to an artistic
mind, proved to be harmful to Balzac? The fact is that in the
delicate processes of art we must carefully distinguish between the
imagination which reshapes the impressions and sensations it has
of life, holding these latter constantly in hand, and the imagina-
tion which utilizes the fancy for its own amusement or satisfac-
tion. What, indeed, has been described as Balzac's "ardorous
imagination” was really two things under a single name, two things,
moreover, that worked in different ways, in the one case impelling
him to real artistic creation, in the other, tending to inhibit and
deform the artistic effort already under way. That Balzac was a
poet, in the best sense of the word, is apparent in the vigour with
which he presents character, situation, environment; and in the
frank spontaneity with which the motifs burst from his excited
fancy. Even at his worst moments he has nothing in the manner
of Victor Hugo, who, whether in the novel or in the drama, pro-
ceeds not from “poetic frenzy” but from intellectual plan, and,
accordingly, in the maze of imagery which accretes around the
latter, always preserves clarity of design to the sacrifice of poetic
inspiration and genuine imaginativeness. Balzac inevitably begins
with energetic demonstration of what the Latins call génialité-
the creative exultation of the real artist. But as he goes on, in-


BENEDETTO CROCE
277
stead of giving free rein to his creatures to follow the laws of their
own inner being; instead of allowing them to choose their own com-
panions, their own station in life, their own objectives—own in
the sense that they are implicit in the fundamental cast of the
characters-Balzac ruthlessly subjugates them, whips them into line
with his own rapacious temperament (the temperament and out-
look of life of M Honoré de Balzac, who likes passions that are
extreme, and contrasts that are uncompromising and overwhelm-
ing) involves them in all sorts of colossal enterprises, endows them
with most diabolical cunning, brings them to hair-raising successes
and desperate failures; while he, personally, enjoys their antics,
and when they faint from sheer exhaustion, drugs them to go on
for his still greater enjoyment!
It has been repeatedly observed—by Sainte-Beuve, among others,
if I am not mistaken—that, in Balzac, characterizations are ex-
cellent, plot is less successful, while style is execrable. Another
superficiality of criticism this, refutable by reference to exact
theory; which holds that those three things—character, action,
style—make up but a single unit, no one of them free from the
defects of the other, and these defects, in turn, all referable to a
common origin. And this origin, as I have suggested, is the mental
attitude of Balzac towards his work. His people he launches forth
on wild capricious careers, twisting them this way and that, lift-
ing them above or sinking them below their natural spheres, till
they are drunk with their own madness, and at times, on reaching
the climax of their adventurous lives, are either changed into the
opposites of what they were, or else suddenly develop traits dis-
cordant with their original outlines. Plot, in consequence, forced
to assume responsibility for character, is caught up in the same
dizzy whirl, loses contact with logic, at its best is bludgeoned into
affecting the manner and the movement of the sensational serial,
and at its worst rushes panting to an abrupt conclusion or lan-
guishes to an insipid end. And "style,” which is but an aspect of
character and action, loses its simple robust suppleness, becomes
weak and banal, and fluctuates between bathos and surface narra-
tive. In Balzac, the man of the "ardorous imagination,” character
fails to attain the unity of "discordant concord,” plot fails of nat-
ural cementing, and style, necessarily, is devoid of rhythm.
Any of Balzac's better novels would furnish ample documenta-


278
BALZAC
tion of such defects; but I will refer to the one which is regarded
as the most perfect, or one of the most perfect, of his efforts—to
Eugénie Grandet. There, after a magnificent picture of a French
country home—the intimate and delightful environment where the
tender affection of Eugénie comes into being—it is apparent that
M Grandet, Mme Grandet, and even Eugénie herself, are pro-
gressively rhetoricized into types. The miserliness of the father
soon loses all trace of humanity, of individuality, and takes on the
mechanical movement of the automaton. An automaton literally
le père Grandet becomes in the scene where he discovers the jewel
case which Charles has given as a love pledge to the old man's
daughter:
“Mme Grandet saw how her husband's eyes darted upon the
gold. Oh! God have pity upon us!' she cried.
The vinegrower seized upon the dressing-case as a tiger might
spring upon a sleeping child.
What may this be?' he said, carrying off the treasure to the win-
dow, where he ensconced himself with it. 'Gold! solid gold!' he
cried, “and plenty of it too; there is a couple of pounds' weight here.
Aha! so this was what Charles gave you in exchange for your pretty
gold pieces! Why did you not tell me? It was a good stroke of
business, little girl. You are your father's own daughter, I see.
(Eugénie trembled from head to foot.) This belongs to Charles,
doesn't it?' the goodman went on.
Yes, father; it is not mine. That case is a sacred trust.'
‘Tut, tut, tut! he has gone off with your money; you ought to
make good the loss of your little treasure.'
‘Oh, father!
The old man had taken out his pocket-knife, with a view to
wrenching away a plate of the precious metal, and for the moment
had been obliged to lay the case on a chair beside him. Eugénie
sprang forward to secure her treasure; but the cooper, who had kept
an eye upon his daughter as well as upon the casket, put out his
arm to prevent this, and thrust her back so roughly that she fell
onto the bed.
Sir! sir! cried the mother, rising and sitting upright.
Grandet had drawn out his knife, and was about to insert the
blade beneath the plate."
>
.


BENEDETTO CROCE
279
Could a miser of the old Menandrian farce do better?
And so, with that maniac of a father, coupled with a character-
less fiancé such as Charles, the story of Eugénie, which promised to
be so deeply and so movingly fraught with poetry, dwindles off
into insignificance. And it would seem as if the author, after
exerting all his strength in attaining such extremes of contrast, has
no reserves to fall back on when he arrives at the dramatic climax.
He hurries through to a hasty conclusion; and what should have
been the great moment of the story he records merely as having
duly passed: “Five years went by
or else: "While these
things were taking place at Saumur, Charles was making money in
the Indies..
With his inspiration thus attenuated, how could Balzac's style
have any remnant of tension or vibrancy? In places he actually
writes like a school-boy:
.
"By the time she was thirty, Eugénie was still unfamiliar with
any of the joys of life! Her pale insipid childhood had Aitted
away in the company of a mother whose own heart, bruised and
misunderstood, had constantly been filled with pain. Eager her-
self to be rid of living, the mother lamented that her daughter
must still be condemned to live; and on dying she left in the young
girl's soul the twinge of remorse and the ache of lasting sorrow.
Eugénie's first and only love was a principle of gloom in her ex-
istence. She had known the man whom she adored for a few days
only. She had given him her entire heart in the panting exchange
of two furtive kisses. Then he had gone away, throwing a whole
world between himself and her ...
a
9
Often, indeed, one feels a touch of irritation at Balzac, as though
his slovenliness were the desecration of a great artistic vision; and
the mind reverts to one of his titles, The Unknown Masterpiece, the
story of a painting where bits of genius, magnificently expressed,
peer through a general daub of colour. Great, in just this sense,
Balzac unquestionably is. In spite of the carelessness, the exag-
geration, the distortion, which are his frequent and capital sins,
his art has a mighty sweepdispersed by a mischance of tempera-
ment into random thoughts and observations of great penetration
and charm.


280
AND AGAIN TO PO CHU-I
Balzac's failure, in short, is the failure to attain artistic serenity,
save at moments exceedingly rare. And that is why I am sur-
prised that people, especially in Italy, should ever have ventured
comparing him with Manzoni—to the now trite conclusion that the
author of The Betrothed is sterile and lacking in self-confidence,
while Balzac is remarkable for fertility and boldness. Comparison
of Balzac and Manzoni seems to me to have point for one purpose
only: the Olympian equanimity of the great Italian serves to em-
phasize more emphatically than almost anything else the tormented
hesitancy of vision which is the fundamental artistic shortcoming
of Honoré de Balzac.
AND AGAIN TO PO CHU-I
BY BABETTE DEUTSCH
In exile, forlorn,
Plucking the solitary lute,
Drinking alone,
Feeding on the remembrance
Of festivals at the Court:
The crimson pagodas
Ringing with song, the feasts,
the dancing-girls;
The prizes
From august imperial hands;
And friends of rich autumns.
Now earth is shaken
With war and civil wars.
Men lie in exile
Gnawing the crust of hunger
Till they die.
Yet in this wilderness of gaping graves
We open our hearts
To the knock
of a thousand-year-old sorrow.
a


uda

Courtesy of the Belmaison Gallery
STREET SWEEPERS.
BY JULES PASCIN





TURKISH NIGHT
(To The Princess Lucien Murat)
BY PAUL MORAND
Translated From the French by Ezra Pound
THE Simplon-Orient dragged its tri-fortnightly public through
elderly, modistes were returning to Constantinople with a new lot
of models; at Laroche the perfume of Paris began to fade and the
tenacious oriental odours, rose and peppery bergamotte, reasserted
themselves. Officials' wives Aitted in the corridor with six infant
children who wouldn't be properly put to bed this side of Bombay.
Officers of the French État-major, in police caps, strode up the
station platforms, during the stops, stretching their short, authori-
tative legs. The English slept late, whistled in the conveniences,
where they stayed in relays until the water and towels ran out.
Israelite-Spanish families from Salonika and to Salonika returning
after clarifying their complexions at Vichy, kept to their bunks all
day with their clothes on, stretched on the unmade bedding, be-
neath swaying flasks of Chianti hung from the electric light fixtures.
Then after a tedium they and the rest of us slept to the rattle of
the iron castanet springs. Snores. We beat on the mahogany
panels to drive back the bed bugs. The conductor snoozed at
the end of the corridor, on a cushion stuffed with contraband lire,
dinars, drachmas, Roumanian leis, and £T, his alpaca tunic stuffed
also with little folded papers full of jewels.
The train shook the loose glass of Gothic Swiss railway stations.
The peculiar noise of the Simplon engulfed us for twenty-nine
minutes. Then the banked roads and rice fields of Piedmonte.
Then a station leading off into nothing, a great cistern of silence
and shadows, that was Venice. In the morning a zinc-coloured
north wind overbent the Croatian corn in the plains. Pigs, striped
black and white as with racing colours, betrayed the presence of
Serbia; they were apparently devouring the corpse, or rather the


282
TURKISH NIGHT
wheels and an alarm signal, of a car which lay still derailed in
a ditch. After rivers came yet other rivers that we crossed on
rickety trestles, beside the ruined piers of older bridges which had
been destroyed in retreats. At Vinkopje we got rid of the velvet
Roumanians, velvet eyes, velvet moustaches, daughters in under-
shirts plaiting their hair in the gelid darkness by the glimmer of
half-frozen candles. After Sofia, pimentos hung drying across the
house-fronts. Oriental sun beat upon the Bulgar plains, ox-
ploughs obtruded a symbolic prosperity, as depicted upon the Bul-
gars' postage stamps and their money. At last, after the desert of
Thrace, under a sky full of constellations lacking a Pole star, with
the disfigured Bear no longer recognizable at the low edge of the
horizon, the Sea of Marmora stretched before us through a breach
in the Byzantine wall.
The boat wouldn't go till to-morrow morning. I had the evening
before me. The hotel was unbearable: sneaky faces, loose mouths,
fat noses, receding chins, sharp Pera eyes. A shrill pistol-shooting
orchestra played to smoking-room seats covered with false bokaras,
lit by mosque lamps made from soda bottles; to the Greek major
staff; to spurred anglomaniac palikares, with black hair showing
at their cuffs' edges. Half a dozen Russian restaurants to choose
from-preferably Restaurant Feodor at the end of the passage in
the Grand rue de Pera. On the second floor a low room curdled
with smoke, noise, alcohol, into which soupiness the draught from
a new arrival cut curious caverns, whereafter the obfuscation again
settled at the level of heads, which showed like a pattern in
cloissonné.
Under this impalpable vault, society was amusing itself—a few
English, a few Perotes, but especially Russians. Waitresses sat
about at the tables. They fetched the food, gave orders, took them
with a gentle distinction; here and there the ease, the fine word, the
elegance of some gesture ordinarily servile, betrayed their former
condition. A bottle of Greek champagne, which had been shaken
en route, drove its cork to the ceiling with a frightful detonation.
The chief dish at the next table was an iron box a foot deep, cov-
ered with red paper and full of caviar. An officer smothered in
ten days' beard wore a Commander's insignia pinned to his day coat.
He was being entertained by some worn-out, sordid, boresome men,
who looked like notaries in flight.


PAUL MORAND
283
A very pretty green Jewess with frizzled head, gold acorns in
her ears reaching to her shoulders, put salt into the ice-bucket. A
woman with her décolletée back to me, said in good French:
"What'll you have?” She spoke with such authority that I took
her for the owner. After I had made up my mind she pulled a
tablet from her pocket and scribbled the order herself. She got
up, pushed back her chair and turned:
"Anna Valentinovna: You? Here!"
“Hello. 'Mm. How long’ve you been in Constantinople ?"
"Two hours.”
There was no use in her raising her voice on the last two words,
she could not sound surprised. She seemed, as usual, to be standing
on the steps on the hotel, waiting for me to take her out walking,
a cane under her arm, putting on her gloves, kicking the dog out
of the way.
.
“I am a refugee,” she said, holding out both hands with a
poverty-stricken gesture, "eighteen months on the road, here since
last spring. You seem to know your way about. I say, you've
got on a good pair of boots. Mine have been re-soled in tin and
fastened with goose leather. Is Theotocopeuli still in business? I
owe him for one hundred and thirty-two pairs.”
“But ...?"
"No. One doesn't—as Tuchev says—'explain.' You can't
understand Russia with the intellect. You can only believe in
Russia.
“Still . . . if you want me to talk you'll have to change tables,
this one isn't mine. It belongs to the Countess Strakof.
“Marika,” this to a young brunette covered with rouge, her
neck in a black shirtwaist, “let me steal him. I used to know him
in Biarritz, let me present you."
The countess wiped her hand on her apron and extended it.
I kissed her hand. She wore a large diamond on her thumb.
We sat. I told Anna how glad I was to see her, that I still loved
her, as usual. She accused me of mocking her misfortunes.
“Previous-politely so—sensual, serious, like any other French-
Passion and safety: Motto for La Ville de Paris at the
hour set for adultery. Amiable and annoying, and witty, oh, yes,
always witty. I haven't been having any for five years, not that
sort of fodder,” she slapped her arm with a knife-handle.
a
man.


284
TURKISH NIGHT
An English officer wanted his bill. She went over to him, gave
it, returned.
“One would think you'd been doing it all your life.”
“I am Russian. We are lunatics, we get used to anything, any.
where, and, in the end, we beat the bad magicians. We don't
clench our fists and stick out our jaws and box with the gods, like
the English; we don't accept, as you do, any old destiny, with
grumpy intelligence. It is a bore to wait on a table, but it is
just as much a bore to be waited on, and to dance every evening
at the Palace Hotel.”
“Touching scene, April, 1914. Storm on the Virgin's Rock,
waves mounting right up to the corner where your and your
mother's room was. How is she?''
“Died of typhus a year ago, in a Turkish hospital, on l'Île des
Princes. Thirty-five of my relatives gone. I've lost everything,
even my independence, and the simple life. I have no fun but my
troubles, I reckon they keep me going. Here with the rest,
I mean, it's a noise, sad and mad enough possibly, but it lets
me empty the days. At the mobilization we went back to Per-
menikof, our place in Toula government, chalk house under a green
roof. Agriculture, huntin', chicken raising, pullets, bandages, read-
ing, nights out on the snow, in the birches, big fires, noise of horses.
The revolution changed nothing. The soldiers came back from
the front in bunches, on the roofs of the trains; they divided the
land. It was only in 1918 that things went to pieces. The cloud-
burst of the revolution, capricious, no system. Although my
brother was a Guards officer, we weren't badly treated, mother
and I; five versts off Count Samarine (I live with them here) saw
his niece buried alive and his nephew torn to pieces with forks,
table forks. One morning some deserters and an adjutant wanted
to 'enter' Permenikof. I jumped out of bed, hid my pearl necklace
in the ashes under the stove, put our rings in the powder-puff.
“ 'Anna Valentinovna, give me all the silver and money, all
,
,
you've got.' I obeyed. “Swear by the icons that that is all of it.'
I swore. Now give me your jewels.' I put the small stuff into
his fur cap, bracelets, paste diadems. 'Swear by the icons that
that's all there is of it. I was going to swear, but the adjutant
looked at me. I dropped my eyes. “They're at the pawn shop.'
He smiled and let it pass.


PAUL MORAND
285
rear
.
.
"What I wanted was my baby mug, a red one with the Kremlin
enamelled on it in white over blue, and my little French spoons. I
said: 'Leave me my baby mug and my little French spoons. He
'
gave them back to me and kissed my hand-after taking off my
—
cabochon emerald—and went out politely.
"A month later the place was overrun by stragglers dodging the
Czecho-Slovaks. Wrecked everything. We had to clear in two
hours. After that one couldn't get anywhere, everyone was an
enemy. There was only one decent half-hour and that was when
Denikin entered Kiev. Cossacks in parade order, groomed horses
shining, distribution of flour, city draped with flags, even the Polish
refugees sang; sailors playing accordions, we all thought Russia
was delivered. Discipline broke down, disorder, cheating at the
what the deuce do you expect? That's the way it is
in Russia, always.”
"And Wrangel ?"
"Got no money. My brother is in his army, gets ten thousand
roubles a day. You can't live on it. He has no boots and nothing
to eat but raw onions. Stefan Bazarof, the officer at that table
where I was sitting when you came in, was Colonel at Preobrajen-
sky. He's been dish-washing in Yalta. Carved silver cartridge
box and topaz-headed dagger, yes, but hasn't a shirt to his name,
nothing on under his uniform. We stayed at Odessa until the
Bolsheviki arrived. English tramp took us to l'Île des Princes.
I nearly died of typhoid. Nothing left. I have this old silver
rouble strung round my neck on a ribbon. Anastasia speaks twelve
languages, diploma from the Moscow Institute of Philology, is sell-
ing American matches. I haven't slept between sheets for two years.”
She said all this in a tone plaintive, but conventional, no painful
memory seemed to be attached to the words. At times she seemed
rather to exult in having paid off some sort of mystical debt to
Providence.
The orchestra played Phi-phi. Half submerged, half drown-
ing in the harmony, the first violin rose now and then from the
other sounds.
“You got a royal flush, and won’t bet on it.”
The toothless gamblers slammed down their cards like hatchets.
Anna brought a basket of fruit and stood before me. Eating the
grapes, she continued:


286
TURKISH NIGHT
O
a
1
“It all sounds like pitching a tale, romantic, yes, Russia is ro-
mantic or whatever pleasure, boredom. All of it magnetism.
The women add to it, they have mixed up in everything, war,
politics, espionage, business. They ride on the Generals private
trains, they walk into the Government offices, they are in forests,
in the prisons, on the rivers, and they don't come in like the French
women to bring more common sense and economy. Wherever we
are, things always go to extremes. Look at Constantinople, pov-
erty is incredible, squandering, worse than ever, crazy, drink, cheat-
ing, priggishness, people die and they do business with a cleverness
and a dishonesty that make even Pera sit up.”
I tried to divert her by prophesying a change.
"Yes,” she said, without alteration of tone, "we may go back
to Russia, some day, per-haps ...'
This last word took on an intonation, silky, distant. It laid
no burden on the future, it merely underlined it, as if by a stroke
light as the blue pines and the horizon, a mirage which made no
one its dupe.
Even concrete statements undergo this curious transformation
upon the lips of the Russians, they become like a shadow of verity,
they lose all their motive and force. One began to think that
all she had just been saying had come out of the non-existent;
annulling the speech and the grammar; instead of bringing words
to the actual, it seemed merely to set them free of their meaning,
to let them drift further and still further from the real. They
alluded to the past, then to a past more distant, till even yesterday
assumed the odour of legend. “Per—haps.
“
As she had said it on the Adour, her hair flying in the wind,
driving her hundred H. P. Fiat, breakneck (à tombeau ouvert)
like a troika.
She had been engaged to Vladimir Yermoloff; she didn't care
for him much, but he sent her poems written in blood, really his
I asked her to marry me. She said, “We shall see. All
things are possible, since they carry in themselves the seeds of their
contraries."
I found her just as she had been, attended by a charm which
entoiled one, but which ended a few paces from her. One looked
into her eyes as into a bath; they were the colour of water, in
which the swimmer can see the river bottom at a hundred yards
а
.
own.


PAUL MORAND
287
from the bank. I would have left everything to follow her, and
then the War came between us.
“I'm married, you know, got children .
I saw a slight cloud in her eyes, for a moment, like the shift
of light on submarine foliage, or against the flaw of an emerald.
She turned her head away, as Orientals will when you look at
them. “You don't look like a père de famille. You'll have that
baby face all your life. . . . You see I was right
need me after all.”
"What can I do for you, Anna ?”
"Nothing. I am making enough to get my opera cloak out of
“
hock. Then I shall have enough to get to Paris on the cheap,
on the train, that's cheaper than the boat fare. We all want to
.
you didn't
get to Paris.”
Anna got per
“Let me, for God's sake, get you the ticket.”
“I've got the money for the ticket. Old Samarine pawned it
on the quiet, wanted the money for drink. I've got three one
thousand franc City of Paris Bonds sewn up in the lining; natu-
rally I don't want to talk about it with the police.”
"I think we'd better go get it out."
I looked at my watch. The shop was open till twelve-open,
that is, until the last boat ... People wanted to hock something
to get a bed for the night, one hundred francs.
The High Commissioner's curfew was at one.
mission to leave the restaurant. The orchestra was playing tunes
grad ally more plaintive and delicate, like a troop of singers going
off into the distance. Everyone joined in the chorus. The tables
were in disorder, cigarette ashes, the long cardboard cigarette butts,
angora cats prowling from table to table, electric fans stirring the
fetid air, piano out of key, all this mess obliterated by the
grave
singing voices of the Russians, going up to the low ceiling like a
prayer of exile.
“Russia can never die." Anna said this as we passed out.
"Misery makes a new soul. Our youth is gone, ruined, but the
next lot, Russians in Constantinople, in Baku, in Vladivostock, in
Sakaline, all with a love of Russia, intenser. To-day it needs little
time to make a great empire, even less to destroy one. The bottom
of the wheel is up to-morrow. Don't forget that in Paris.”
We had to go to her lodgings for the pawn ticket and her pass-


288
TURKISH NIGHT
.
.
.
a
port. She lived in a slum by the docks. The wind from the Black
Sea swept in over the Bosphorus. Along the Petits Champs, Ital-
ian carabinieri, French gendarmes, military police in red caps, were
apparently on the lookout for an international criminal; each cor-
ner his death trap. The smell of rouge, pomades, greasy hair roots,
invited one into the Bar de la Belle Crète. Tram-cars like great
red and gold lacquer boxes rushed creaking by one. British Ad-
miralty wireless crackled over the station by the old Genoese tower.
"Who'd have thought before dinner we should be here together?”!
I said. “I have thought of you .
often . .. I knew we'd meet
again sometime.”
"I didn't.”
We went on over ill-paved streets clogged with litter, past Greek
cabarets with the Allied flags painted on the window-panes, with
portraits of Venizelos, in farm costume and black-rimmed specta-
cles, over the doors. Turks were taking their coffee on the side-
walks in spite of the wind, under old, torn, fringeless awnings.
Under the frozen light of a cinema a poster showed an auto at full
tilt with a woman tied into it, changing the gear with her teeth.
There were signs: “This street closed to French troops”; an or-
chestrophone sputtered; a dromedary loaded with carrots and cab-
bages, like a hairy bridge, blocked the path with spread legs. Turk-
ish houses of satin-grey sycamore wood stuck their broken roofs
into the reddish sky. We went down a slope into a cellar where
three people were having supper. They had been the three largest
proprietors in Toula Government, Prince Samarine and his two
sisters, Georgina and Anika, Anna's cousins. The place smelt of
alcohol, and phosphorus, mixed with that staleish Russian odour
of faded cashmere and leather. The old women, dames d'honneur
to the Empress Mother, wore the yellow ribbons of the Order
of Catherine pinned to their shirtwaists. They were breeding rab-
bits under the bed, they prayed to their icons bobbing their old
pates, which the English had shaved at Lemnos to get rid of the
lice: they were eating from broken crockery with old family silver
saved from the wreckage, their pale faces lit by the one candle
that guttered in a bottle neck; faces brutalized by their adven-
tures.
One of them kept saying: "I want to go back to Russia.”


PAUL MORAND
289
a
And the other, “You can't go back, they'll cut your throat,” and
with the antiphony, she stretched her crossed wrists in front of her
and moved her hands inward like scissor blades, grinning.
Prince Samarine offered me a chair with an elaborate politeness.
He looked like a St Nicholas mobilized in a long English artillery
coat, with a full-size Legion d'Honneur in his button-hole. “Thank
you, sir. You will take tea with us? I am sorry I have no real
brandy to offer you, Napoleon the First."
On the death of Emperor Alexander he had left court; and
married a rich religious crank. A little later he had pretended
to get religion, proposed that they should both abandon the world,
each leaving their fortune to the other. She bit. When the doors
of her nunnery had firmly closed behind her he emerged from the
monastery where he had been very careful not to take vows. He
got the Courts to turn over the property to him and then went to
Paris, where he had passed twenty-eight years amusing himself,
after which he returned to Toula dead broke, and lived in ville-
giature, on his sisters.
“And Paris is still as, as 'pschutt,' as, as ‘vlan' as it ever was?
Do they still use the expression? I hear the Jews set the fashion.
Look what they've brought us to. By God, I resigned from the
Jockey Club the day they elected Baron Gustav. O Lord! what
days we do live in!”
The Louis Philippe samovar with the Samarine blazon bubbled.
"'Days we do liv' in. Decorative Arts lottery, Molier's Circus.
Fifine winning at Auteuil, June 5th, 1886. Princesse de Sagan's
animal ball. I went as the white rat, and M de Germiny was price-
less as an ourang. He was priceless. He exhibited me as 'Half
beaver, a bad hat, fur de luxe.' I tell you, he was awfully clever.”
Anna started to go. The old boy held me by my coat button,
puffing his rummy breath into my face.
“Thank you, sir, it mustn't be said that the Samarines let you
go off like this. You must come see us at Kolovskaia, our own
place. We'll be getting back there before long now.
bit of Tokay; Franz Joseph, the Emperor, gave it me, and part-
ridge shooting. Chinese partridges, Soemarung pheasants, and deer
brought up on the bottle.'
“I want to go back to Russia.” The old woman, excited by
I've got a


290
TURKISH NIGHT
this reminiscence, began again. "You can't, Georgina, they'll cut
your throat.” The other again made the scissor gesture. “I want
to go back to Russia ..." It continued.
We went back towards Pera, Anna holding my arm, her face
showing pale under every lamp-post, under her oil-cloth hat, with
her reddish hair sticking out in bunches about it; thin in her
knitted jumper hidden beneath a dust-coat.
Indifference—I don't know-or a wish not to appeal for pity,
kept in her distress. Or perhaps this tonelessness, this lack of
response or resonance came from the abuse of nerves, the long
drawn out series of horrors she had seen about her. I wanted to
give myself to her, to put off my departure, to reconcile her with
her destiny. I don't know. She seemed not to want it. She
seemed not to want to soften her destiny. Anything I could say
only came up against a sort of secret urge, always firmer.
Street hawkers passed, carrying lighted baskets full of grapes
with a candle in the middle, showing through them. As we came
to Le Tunnel people were streaming in from the street. "Russian
Press Bureau . . . there's Wrangel's map."
A row of tin electrics showed a map of Russia, cut by a thread
which passed through Elisabetgrad, Lozolavia, Slaviansk, outlin-
ing Crimea, the wheat ports, the beginnings of the Black Country,
the mines.
“We must keep a stiff lip. All these people, all living on hope.”
"You say 'hope' and you aren't 'having any' yourself.” An
imperceptible sigh. “Done with it.”
The Russians, in clumps, gossiping over the telegrams, announce-
ments of boat arrivals from Crimea. All leaning over the edge of
that abyss, Red Russia, out of which comes nothing but cries, gun-
shots, whip-cracks, never any news of one's relatives, shut in there,
hopeless. In the slow-coming darkness they loitered, nothing to
do, gregarious and nocturnal, odd costumes and disguises, unbe-
lievable. Intelligentsia, their hair plastered down with bear's
grease, in Turkish coats, talking bad logic, glowering through black
iron-rimmed spectacles. Ambiguous Slavic rabble, sexless, ageless,
,
one in high heels, grey suit patched at the knees, followed by a
priceless King Charles spaniel, jabbering with the voices of coach-
Uniforms (by courtesy) lancers in duck-hunting blouses,
infantry with regimental badges sewed on to the velvet collars of
men.


PAUL MORAND
291
a
evening suits. A quartermaster-general in a bicycle suit, with the
Cross and full collar of St Anne, giving his arm to his poor old
mother; a colonel of service-trains in a silk muffler, selling the
Gazette de Sebastopol. And nearly all with that oriental expres-
sion which shows nothing, neither boredom nor impatience, nor
sadness—nothing but immense fatigue.
Near the Press Bureau we stopped by a side alley under the sign
"Polak's Oriental Stores, Salon de Mode, Great choice of objects
de luxe exported from Russia." We slid under the half-closed
iron blind. Behind a counter red-eyed, towheaded Polak and his
sons were taking an inventory by the light of a kerosene lamp. One
checking the day's loans on silver, pictures, lace, carpets, under-
wear, evening frocks; flimsy pink satins, hanging rumpled in the
shadows. Furs at the further end, hanging from pegs, a sort of
gigantic "Return from the Hunt”; ermines gone yellow, sables
worn and rusty, and the men's coats especially, heavy beyond any-
thing we know in the West.
Anna finally got her beaver fur. The lining intact. The Paris
Bonds were still there. A mist came over her eyes.
“
but I can't bear owing it to you.”
“Come, buck up, Anna. After all I have friends in Paris; you
might even call on my wife, and discuss me, as they usually do in
Russian novels, à la Sologub or Chekhov.”
"I will go to Paris, for me, me. That will be the coda of the
concerto. Mind you I'm not going back there, not ever.” She
pointed over the golden horn, over past the Bosphorus, and the
sea, the route she had come by.
“I will not see the old place, not again. I wouldn't, not if I
could. The old life is gone, gone. There is nothing left of it. I
am young, not really, I know what I'm saying. You are going
on further East, you are my friend, so I can tell you frankly; it's
finished. At Paris I shall go to the Hotel Voltaire, because the
Louvre is royal at five in the afternoon, in October; I shall put
the family affairs in order, I shall look into the church in the Rue
Pierre le Grand, where I was baptized. I shall be about broke in
two weeks. Then I shall finish it, I know too much. I hope you
will think of me. as I think of you."
She said good-bye to me gently. And I saw nothing but a
vague form moving from me indistinctly in the darkness.
"Thank you,
.
.


THREE CANTICLES FOR MADAME
SAINTE GÉNEVIÈVE
BY DUDLEY POORE
Kind Saint, within your burnished casket lying,
where wasting tapers weep
tear after pompous trickling tear,
take of your goodness I pray you
this candle I offer,
golden as honey that the bees distil
into their dark close cells
through drowsy afternoons of summer
in droning thickets fragrant with raspberries,
or golden as the tawny grape bunches
that hang among warm leaves,
each full globe swollen to bursting
with juices of untold sweetness,
so clear that the translucent sunlight
shows in each shining heart
the tiny core of seeds;
a candle fragrant as the October mist
that flows, smoky blue,
in your chilly evening city,
when twilight shades with rose and marigold
the end of long streets;
and with my offering take also
all my homage.
Hear me and be propitious.
Hide me in the close dark folds
of
your trailing sleeves
that sweep the ground as you go,
softly, so softly,
with the whisper of autumnal leaves
blown by the glittering wind
along the moist pavement


DUDLEY POORE
293
down to the quay's edge
where under the bronzing plane-trees
in a haze of sweet-scented smoke
the autumn bonfires are burning.
Shake out the folds of your mantle over me
so I shall not feel the cold winds that are blowing
out of the tortured lands,
so I shall not hear the jackal voices that rise
against the shrunken sky,
for I am tired, tired,
of the snarling tongues
that urge on me night and day
their tedious hatreds.
II
1
If ever, kind Saint,
your ghost, its old habit resuming,
takes human form to walk
in these thronging streets,
how shall your face be known?
By what sign shall we tell you?
By garments of
snowy wool
from seraphic looms,
stitched by the inspired needles
of sempstresses in glory
whose glimmering fingers float
languidly over the hem,
as float and veer
chestnut petals on the jade green river?
Or by your gleaming nimbus
that twirls and sparkles
through the warm, close pressing dark,
revolving in tempests of fire
with lights blue and green
like the Catherine-wheels of our childhood,
while the ebony water,


294
THREE CANTICLES
aglitter with burnished reflections,
trembles in the black shadow of the bridges?
Or by your green palm branch
a little tattered and worn
by the wind, by the rain,
by the angry thwacks you deal
at the swarming imps from hell
that rise in the semblance of urchins
to surround you and mock
when hasty dawn,
interrupting your diligent rounds
and dimming your nimbus,
sends
you, with scuttling heels
and a flutter of snowy robes,
up an obscure stair
to your garret room on the Montagne
where, in the placid sunshine
under the weed grown eaves,
the plump young cherubs,
seated like obese pigeons
on the sill by the potted geranium,
drone their sleepy canticles ?
а
Or rather shall we not know you
by the dress, by the tufted mole,
of a marchande des quatre saisons
who with eyes that glitter
like an autumnal morning,
trundles a cart of ripe figs
down the sparkling street
where in heaps of amber and topaz
the tattered rags of the summer,
spilled last night from the rain-wet, shivering branches,
lie along brilliant pools
in whose glass
the revolving wheels of her cart
flash and are gone as she passes
over the grey, shining pavement?


DUDLEY POORE
295
III
Cold blue mist is flowing
in the long street
where the first pale blossoms
of the orange street lamps
shower their wealth of gleaming petals
on hurried forms that pass
like ghosts over the darkening pavement.
1
The cold blue mist is full of stirring scents.
Tingling odours of autumn
wander frostily on the air,
mixed with the winey fragrance
of October fruits.
1
Like heavy petals spilled
by the crisp evening wind
from roses overblown,
the orange light of the street lamps
falls on the flushed bright rinds
in their heaping trays,
on the grapes, golden green,
that crack at a touch,
overflowing with sharp sweet juices
cold to the warm lips and throat;
on shining nuts freshly stripped
of their enamelled green casings; ;
on pumpkins of orange vermilion,
seated in the pride of swollen majesty
like Chinese emperors,
or glimmering like October moons
of tarnished, ruddy gold,
that rise, languorous and heavy,
through the russet mist
beyond the yellow, thinning boughs.
On the sharp air
creeps a spicy odour
of delicate puckering wines.


296
THREE CANTICLES
distilled from the dark sunburnt earth
on vine-terraced hillsides
and packed to bursting
in crisp mottled skins
that the cold lips of the summer rain
and lusty fingers of the autumnal sun
have embrowned and reddened.
And from the street corner
where the chestnut-vender, shivering with the cold,
warms his gnarled hands over the glowing vents,
spirals of pale blue smoke
scented of roasting chestnuts
rise as from an altar,
rise through the darkening plane-tree
whose leaves are of burnished copper,
rise through the bronzed branches
in twisting, grey blue spirals
toward the watchful chimney-pots that stand
craning with bent heads,
black against the cold yellow sunset.
In the autumn twilight
all things seem dying
only through excess of life
and the ripened year,
perfectly rounded and mellow,
is ready to fall like the ripe fruit that drops
in the long grass
of a forgotten orchard.
Oh the fervour that wakes
in the smouldering blood,
more potent than the wistful fervour of spring,
when, with the lights and the cries,
comes, in the patch of sky
far down the darkening street,
the smoky flush of orange and apricot,
and the frosty air is atingle
with life fulfilled and golden!
Oh the ardour of evening in the autumnal city!


1

i
INS
Courtesy of the Belmaison Gallery
BY MAX WEBER
STILL LIFE.





THE WHEEL TURNS
BY EDNA CLARE BRYNER
H
N a warm June morning in the early nineteen-hundreds a
train drew up at a little half-obscured way station a score of
miles out from a large prosperous city and pausing just long enough
to let two persons, a young girl under the charge of an officer,
alight, veered off to the right over its sharply curving track as
though deliberately trying to get its curious-eyed passengers out of
sight of the two before they turned towards the walled-in grounds
back of the station.
The
young girl, with her guard, entered through the high iron
gates and, hardly knowing how it was that she moved along
through the June sunshine, went up the asphalt walk curving be-
side the well-kept driveway through green stretches of rolling
smooth-shaven lawn, past the enormous bed of tall fancy grass,
past the massive red rose-bush climbing bunchily on its invisible
support, up to the great avenue of horse-chestnut trees under whose
wide-spreading branches the driveway turned to the left. Here
she, too, would have turned to go past the row of cottages to the
building showing its red bulk through the trees, but her guide
pulled her sharply by the sleeve straight on ahead, saying gruffly,
"Not there. That's the Boys' Department.”
Rebuked, she stumbled forwards, with a cloudy feeling of going
from a beautiful front yard into an unsightly back yard as she
passed the long ugly brick building sending up puffs of steam to
her right, crossed over a little bridge that spanned a deep narrow
ravine, and went up a brick walk leading to a stern square struc-
ture. In a moment she was standing in the entrance of the Girls'
Department before the office of the matron.
Josephine. A slender Polish girl, with long, soft, corn-coloured
hair in a broad plait, a pale nunlike face with transparent skin
faintly flushed. She stood with drooping grace like the delicate
mayflower that sends out its soft leaves and pale flowers in the
depths of spring woods, her slim hands clasped before her, their
long pale fingers like interlocking petals, her delicate ankles and


298
THE WHEEL TURNS
.
.
Her aunt
.
.
.
shapely feet showing under her shoe-top length dress. Her eyes
were lowered under her heavy blonde eyelashes as if to shut out her
surroundings. When she raised them to regard the matron, their
grey depths, wistful, haunting, besought help, the eyes of a Meli-
sande lost in the wood.
Josephine Krushka. Charge, immorality. Committed by court
order at the instigation of her aunt, her nearest living relative, to
an institution for correcting her vicious tendencies. The officer
handed over her papers. Through a haze Josephine saw the pink
cheeks and deep blue compelling eyes of the matron, heard far
away the hypnotic questioning voice, and answered in gentle low
tones which seemed not to belong to her but to some other person
standing at a great distance and answering for her.
Fifteen in May Catholic ... Until she was fourteen
. In the sixth grade. A nurse girl
wished her to .. Yes, she liked little children. She always
took care of the neighbours' . She was out in the park with
the baby and a man came up to her... She was shaking the
baby's rattle and did not see him until he was right there
He took the rattle out of her hand and shook it for the baby
He said it was a cute baby .. To get ice cream
She took the baby home and then she came back . . . He was
waiting He took her to the drug-store and then she went
home with him... Yes, ma'am, she knew she had done wrong.
Her aunt told her so, and the judge, too.
She listened to a long explanation about some system by which
she could get out, if she were good, in less than two years. No,
ma'am, two years was not long. Then she would be placed in a
family somewhere.
The matron pushed a bell and a thin, dark, bright-eyed girl
appeared, smiling, walking with hopping steps like a little bird.
“Martine, this is Josephine Krushka. Take her to bathe and then
to the Younger Family Room."
“Yes, ma'am.” Martine took her by the hand, squeezing it in
friendly fashion, and led her down to the basement, told her to
undress, took her clothes away from her, showed her how to take
a shower bath, and helped her into the regular Institution dress,
underwear of unbleached muslin, a tight muslin waist instead of
a corset, round garters, coarse stockings and shoes, a dark blue
.
.
.
•
.
.
•


EDNA CLARE BRYNER
299
gingham school dress. “Every Saturday you get clean underclothes
and stockings at bathing time. Every two weeks a clean night-
gown, work dress, and school dress. On one Saturday you get a
,
school dress and on the next a work dress so's not to have too much
laundry all in one week. Sunday dresses we wear about a year
before they get washed. The worst is nightgowns and work dresses.
But you'll get used to it. The girls have too much laundry
anyway.”
She soaked Josephine's corn-coloured hair in kerosene and bound
it
up
in a towel. "It's a shame. Your hair's so nice and clean.
But it's the rule. Can't take any chances of catching things in
here. Do you want to see a picture of my little girl? Here it is.
Isn't she cute? My mother has her. Just six months more and I'll
see her. Now I'll take you up to Miss Cecil. She's new and she's
real nice. She's only here for the summer. She reads awful inter-
esting stories to the girls.”
Feeling strange and awkward in her new clothes, top-heavy
under the towel around her head, Josephine followed up to the
Assembly Room.
"Miss Cecil, this is Josephine Krushka.” An avalanche of curi-
ous glances swept her from head to foot, denuding her of the flimsy
covering that she tried to hold fast over the quick of her soul.
"How do you do, Josephine ?” From the young woman in the
white linen dress sitting on the raised platform before her desk
something warm and comforting came. “K-s-u-s-h-k-a? Is that
the way you spell it? All the girls after Mollie King please move
along one seat.”
Like a forlorn soul condemned to a season of expiation for some
unwitting sin, the young girl managed to reach the place made
vacant for her and sank into it, trembling, her face feverishly
flushed, her eyes swimming.
The fingers of the young woman in the white linen dress tight-
ened on the book that she held in her hand. "Shall I go on with
the reading, girls, until the bell rings ?”
Immediately the wave of interest that had inundated the shrink-
ing newcomer swept from her to Miss Cecil. "Yes,” from all parts
of the room. A single voice, “The part where old Gruffy turns
her out."
Miss Cecil began to read: “The Countess went to the glass box
9)


300
THE WHEEL TURNS
.
in which she kept Betsinda's old cloak and shoe this ever so long,
and said, 'Take those rags, you little beggar creature, and strip off
everything belonging to honest people, and go about your busi-
ness.' And she actually tore off the poor little delicate thing's back
almost all her things, and told her to be off out of the house.
"Poor Betsinda huddled the cloak round her back, on which
were embroidered the letters PRIN ... ROSAL . . and
then came a great rent.”
In the peace that had fallen upon her with the distraction of the
girls' attention towards Miss Cecil, Josephine relaxed and was
taken up into the story with the others, no longer, to the discern-
ing eye, girls in faded blue gingham dresses sitting close together
on long hard benches, but an array of young ladies with torn cloaks
printed in mysterious capitals that would some day establish their
true name and lineage.
They started in telling her everything the moment they were
on the playground at the evening hour. A new girl, a new audi-
ence for old things. A new audience, that was the essence of living.
They gathered about her cautiously for fear the officer-in-charge
would disperse them.
“What are you in for ?'' they asked her.
Josephine could not raise her eyes.
“Oh, she ate peanuts in the kitchen,” said Blanche, whose high
cheek bones, straight coarse black hair, and piercing eyes bore out
her boast that her grandmother was a full-blooded Indian.
"She went to church too often," commented Florence, the red-
cheeked girl, who could faint whenever she wanted to.
Josephine kept silent, trembling.
"Well, we'll tell you what we're in for,” announced Blanche in
a conciliatory tone, pushing herself up close to Josephine, “and
"
then you can tell us. That tall girl over there is the worst one
here. She killed her kid the day it was born. You otto seen her
hair when she come in. Whew! Etta knows!”
Chunky pouting Etta pushed her way in front of Blanche. “I
know! I helped cut it off. Six months in jail and she never put
a comb through it once. She needed the kerosene! We hadda
cut it off in one piece. You otto seen the diamond rings she had!
Six! She's got two brothers over in the Boys' Department. One
of 'em killed a man. Now you tell us what you
did."


EDNA CLARE BRYNER
301
Josephine shrank back. "I ...1.. she stammered,
"I didn't do anything. I was a nurse girl.”
Loud guffaws of laughter. An officer walked quickly up to the
group. “Less noise, girls. Let the new girl alone. Give her time
to get used to being here."
Sullenly the girls backed away. “She'll have time, all right, all
right, to get used to being here,” said Etta under her breath.
The day was over. Josephine lay in her cot in the dormitory
up under the sloping roof. It was still quite light. If she turned
on her side, she could see the girl in the cot next to her; but she lay
on her back, staring out of the window whose low sill she could
touch with her foot. She felt sore, as though someone had beaten
her all over thoroughly with a wooden stick, like thick pulp before
heavy presses flatten it into thin sheets of paper. Happenings,
dreadful and meaningless, floated through her helpless mind.
Slowly she dissolved into great tears that arose like waters from
tiny springs and flowed out of the corners of her eyes over her pale
temples, dropping one by one on the unbleached muslin pillow case.
About her, the girls turned restlessly in their cots. There were
low whispers. As twilight filled the room, the whispers increased,
a scuffling arose. Josephine, lying in the half-stupor that precedes
troubled sleep, felt someone at her bedside and started in terror. A
hand was laid on her. "Hush!” said a voice. "It's Blanche. Listen,
I'll tell you something if you swear you'll never tell. Nobody
knows it but the girls that sleep down on the corridor.” She crept
into Josephine's cot and, as darkness closed in, unfolded the tale
of how Mamie and Jennie, two of the biggest girls who roomed
together in one of the narrow corridor cells had plotted with four
other girls to run away. Words and phrases out of this new strange
life piled up in confusion in Josephine's tired mind: “Their
mothers 'rich women' in the City, chloroform in the rat in her hair,
money in her shoe, they don't search the girls since Miss Kirkshaw's
here, Old Fogarty, the nightwatchwoman, keys to the washroom,
unlock the doors, through the washroom window, automobile out-
side the wall. Don't you tell any one, not even Etta. She's such
a nosey. Now you tell me what you did. Honest, I won't tell.
It must be awful or you'd a told right away.”
Josephine got used to it. In a week, ten days, two weeks, she had


302
THE WHEEL TURNS
got quite used to it. Rise at six, breakfast at six-thirty, school sev-
en-thirty to eleven-thirty, dinner at twelve, work one-thirty to five-
thirty, supper at six, play six-thirty to seven-thirty, bed at eight.
Yes, she had got used to it. Did she not live in a line that formed
itself in the morning and crawled about like a serpent from one
activity to another under the command of masters, folded its length
at stated times into stated spaces, unfolded itself to crawl some-
where, and finally at bedtime disintegrated entirely to form itself
anew the next morning. Wherever the serpent went, she had to go
as though carried in its belly.
She became accustomed to the rattle of the key as the officer un-
locked the grating of the dormitory, the tinkling sound of the rising
bell, the scuffling of the coloured girls across the way. She be-
came accustomed to getting out of bed under the eye of an officer,
slipping off her coarse nightgown, turning back the covers of her
bed, braiding her long fair hair, waiting her turn at the wash basins.
Toilet completed, she slipped into line, the line filed down the
stairs to the dining-room and placed her and the others about the
oilcloth-covered table before their breakfast of bread and syrup and
coffee, which they ate under the eye of an officer standing in the
doorway. “Be careful not to spill the syrup or you will get demerits.”
When the motions of eating had ceased, the line pulled her out
of her seat and carried her along with it to hear the assignment of
work for the day and then took her over the ravine to the musty
old-time chapel used for school classes. Deposited there for four
hours in the strict space of a desk, a part of her crept out of her
cabined body and timidly tried the various new dim and difficult
paths that Miss Cecil encouraged them to enter, with gestures of
pulling aside the dark curtains that hid the way.
At the end of the morning the inexorable line folded her in,
carried her back to tidy herself and then to the dining-room to eat
thick stew and the inevitable bread and syrup, returning her shortly
to the Assembly Room for an hour's respite. Josephine used this
hour for making drawn work. She had learned the second day she
came in and had been working at it every day since. There was
something peculiarly fitting about it, not like anything else, the
pulling out of fine threads and filling in spaces with spiderlike de-
signs. While you were working at it, you forgot where you were
until the bell rang for the next thing.
a


EDNA CLARE BRYNER
303
At one-thirty the line took her, reluctant, from this fascinating
work and carried her to the room where the Institution sewing was
done, dresses and underwear for the girls, shirts and caps for the
Boys, and socks knitted on hand machines, curtains, table and bed
linen. Josephine was helping to make Margot's going-out clothes.
Margot would be twenty-one shortly and then she would leave the
School where she had been since she was thirteen, never able to earn
her merits, staying eight years where she might have spent only two.
Josephine sewed with pleasure, thinking of Margot out in the world,
maybe taking care of little children.
After her four hours of work, the line took her again to the tidy-
ing place and again to the dining-room, to eat bread and syrup,
milk and gingerbread. From supper it carried her out to the lawn
that sloped down into the ravine and, gracious at last, turned her
out to her own motions.
The officers affected nonchalance, sitting in rocking chairs on the
porch, while the girls played games and exchanged secrets. The
present there was the warmed-over past. Conversations were like
tea, made from leaves "boiled” many times before. Conversations
were seldom new, but sometimes girls were. That was the saving
thing. Josephine learned from many of the girls what they were
in for. They all liked to joke about it. “Too many husbands” or
“his other girl was jealous of the clothes he gave me” illumined the
text of their recital. Josephine, hugging her own meagre secret,
felt herself inextricably mixed up in their stories, partaking of their
acts. She herself spoke little. She had little to say compared with
the others.
She liked to toss ball or talk with Martine, feeling envy of the
little messenger girl who “did the hair and nails” of the officers in
the Girls' Department and who had a baby to think about and care
for. Martine was her friend, her refuge from the advances of
Goldie, the bold-faced negro girl. Martine warned her: "Be care-
ful, Josephine. It's not allowed to have anything to do with the
coloured girls. You'll get a lot of demerits.” Josephine did not
understand, but she was careful. She hung about Martine who did
understand.
When Martine was gone on some errand during the evening hour,
Josephine wandered about unhappily, trying to attach herself to
someone who would keep her safe. So she drifted in with Hattie's


304
THE WHEEL TURNS
"bunch.” Hattie had "been to high school” a fact which gave her
unquestioned prestige. She retailed with gusto, again and again,
what happened to her for refusing to come in from the playground.
“They put me ker-plunk in the dark hole.” This was a cell in the
basement where the baths were, with straw on the floor and a
blanket. “They paddled me good when they let me out. They
sent Miss Baxter for the paddle. She looked as scared as if she
was gonno get it instead of me. It looked about six feet long. I I
was lying across the table where Miss Kirkshaw writes her letters.
They took her pen and ink and green blotter off. It was funny.
I was gonno say, Write your sweet letter, Miss Kirkshaw,' but
when I saw that paddle, I had another think a-coming. I thought
it would break my bones.”
Hattie was different from the six girls who had been paddled for
trying to run away. They were surly, would not speak to any one.
.
That was because someone told on them and they suspected every-
one. Josephine knew who told. It was Martine. “They'd get
caught anyway,” she confided to Josephine. She had overheard
them in the washroom and they talked so rough she was afraid they
would kill Miss Cecil.
Josephine had a guilty feeling every time she saw the six plotters.
One of them was Ella Conger, a brooding girl with sombre, hating,
grey-green eyes. The girls said Ella was a married woman. The
day after her marriage, she ran away from her husband and took
to the streets. Josephine felt drawn to her from the first and had
tried to make friends with her. Ella looked at her grimly, and said,
“I could give you something. Better stay away from me.” She
was one of the half dozen girls who "took treatment" and had her
own cup and spoon. When Miss Cecil got the girls to tell what
.
they would do when they got out, Ella said, "What am I going to
do? I'm going to do exactly what I did before I came in, and let
everyone look out for himself!"
At seven-thirty the line always gathered her and the others in
with difficulty. “Aw, it's too light to go to bed!”
“Please let us stay up till eight to-night!”
Some pert girl invariably ended with, “How can you expect any
one to go to sleep in Pig Alley ?” That was what they called the
stifling dormitory up under the roof, for its windows opened on
an immense field in the rear of the building where roamed and


EDNA CLARE BRYNER
305
rooted three or four hundred pigs. Stench from them, when the
wind blew towards the building, filled nostrils with loathing, pre-
vented sleep.
The line took them at last, in spite of their protests, into its
length up to the dormitory. At eight everyone was in bed and
apparently settled for the night. The officer locked the grating
and said, "Good-night, girls,” the girls answered good-night in a
loud chorus, and the officer went downstairs to stroll about with
other officers in the soft summer night, leaving her charges safe
under lock and key.
Then life really began for the girls. At last they were out from
under the eye of an officer, fifty of them together. If there had
been a bed large enough, they would all have got into it in order
to talk, to be as unlike they were in the daytime as possible. As it
was, they crept into each other's cots, two or even three crowding
into the narrow space, and told everything they knew to each other,
secrets about girls, secrets about themselves, and other still more
secret things whose names cannot be mentioned.
The girls were thrifty. They never spoke at night of what they
could talk during the day. In a couple of weeks of nights, what a
mass of inner things, what nerves and organs and fibres of this tre-
mendous life, had been revealed! Josephine would lie and listen
as night came more and more darkly down, dimming the stage for
that chaos whose dark countenance could hardly show itself by
day. Like lodestones drawn together by some occult power, the
girls crept from bed to other beds. Whispers and giggles, scuff-
lings, sharpened the ears of those who remained decorously in their
own beds, brought whole new trains of thought into the spaces of
their minds.
Girls crept into Josephine's bed, girls to whom she said very lit-
tle during the day. Everyone wanted some confidante. They
always hoped for a better one than they had had before. There
were things that Josephine heard lying there in the darkness that
made her grow hot with shame. Little by little the whole dark,
opulent, steaming world opened itself up to her and she saw a dull-
red-lined maw into which she was slowly sliding and of which she
was horribly afraid. She fought against things, put the girls out
of her bed and out of her mind, but then, afterwards, there were
dreams.


306
THE WHEEL TURNS
There were three that came often and often, mixed up with a
thousand conflicting and gasping complexities. A horrible dark
shapeless object sat on her chest, pressed it down, out of the press-
ing came hands that tore at her, from the hands rose up the grin-
ning face of Goldie the negro girl, with malignant expression. A
veiled white figure came up out of mists and advanced towards
her, stretching out veiled hands in a beseeching manner, circled
lightly around her, and receded. Little children, chubby and rosy,
came up out of pools of clear water, running to her, smiles on their
dear faces, chubby hands held out. After the dreams, a little clear
sleep, and emergence once again into the outer life of the day.
Yes, she was used to it. She questioned nothing. She obeyed
silently, went docilely in the line that carried her through the daily
activities. She wound herself into the routine that marked its relent.
less line about the inner chaos, and with her moved Miss Cecil and
all the other officers, figures of authority, pegs of women, checking
off the rhythm of the moves.
>
On her third Sunday in the Institution, Josephine sat in the
Assembly Room of the Younger Family with her face bent over a
catechism card, her lips moving silently over the answers to the
questions printed there as though absorbed in getting them word
perfect for the Monthly Review.
"Q. What is the first thing a man should know?
A. The first thing a man should know is that there is a God
who rewards the good and punishes the wicked.”
Every time she read the words, she had a stab of pain, a guilty
fear. She was wicked. Everyone there was wicked, except Miss
Cecil who sat up at her desk in the front of the room.
from the outside; they were inside. She could go away whenever
she wanted to; they had to stay until someone let them go.
Outside. She lifted her face from the catechism card and looked
out through the windows to the left across the little vegetable gar-
den to the great stretch of pasture beyond. Three weeks ago, she
too had been outside, in a green park, wheeling a baby in a carriage.
Then something happened, and she was inside. Outside, inside
as though a revolving wheel with long bent-over teeth had caught
her up out of the level green and cast her into this whirling mass
life that threw out sparks, dripped blood, thrust out slimy tenta-
She was


EDNA CLARE BRYNER
307
a
cles from antediluvian seas, like some amorphous piece of chaos
following outwardly a rhythm but inwardly still a chaos.
She felt Miss Cecil's reminding gaze upon her and bent once
more over her catechism card. Already she knew the answers per-
fectly, but she kept going over them again and again in instinctive
accordance with some vaguely comprehended rule requiring atten-
tion to the task assigned in the time set aside for it. Her mind,
less obedient, released itself automatically from a task already
accomplished and caught at every floating end to weave into its
activity.
Clean and neat she felt in her best dress, a white percale printed
in tiny dark flowers, clean from yesterday's bath and hair-wash-
ing, from fresh underwear and stockings. Cleanness came to her
from the washed bodies of the girls, from their clean clothes and
hair, their white percale dresses. Her hair was soft and light. Her
finger nails were polished.
Looking upon her shining nails as she moved her hand down
the catechism card, she felt warmth well up in her towards Mar-
tine who had taught her how to polish her nails, towards Gene-
vieve who had loaned her the little sticks and pink powder and
buffer. With their help she had got rid of the marks of Friday's
cleaning of the brick walk. Was it true, she wondered, what the
girls declared among themselves, that the brick walk had been
made on purpose to keep their hands ugly? Hateful walk! With
its smirking diamond pattern that grass tried to break up by push-
ing between the bricks. Deceitful tender grass! whose little tufts
showed so much strength against their uprooting that the blunt
pieces of iron used against them turned into weapons against their
users, bruising flesh, breaking nails. The girls said, "It ruins your
hands! Why can't we have an asphalt walk like the Boys have?”
The officers laughed at them. Why did the officers always laugh
when the girls tried to have their hands nice?
Josephine had never polished her nails before. Here everyone
had polished nails, even the coloured girls, even Pearl Green, the
youngest member of the Younger Family, very black and straight
up and down like a board. Josephine thought of yesterday's furore
of polishing, of Pearl stubbornly rubbing away at her black hands
amid the jibes of the other girls, of Pearl later in her ugly ill-fitting
bloomers, playing ball, her legs wide apart, her eyes rolling, clutch-


308
THE WHEEL TURNS
ing the dirty ball, pitching it in a frenzy that baffled the best bat-
ter, shouting, "Watch my manicure!" There was something defiant
about a manicure, a triumph over ruinous work. Looking at the
shining rosiness at the ends of her long slim fingers, Josephine felt
there the culmination of her cleanliness, its accent.
Her hand reached the bottom of the card and involuntarily
moved itself back to the first question. “God who rewards the
good and punishes the wicked.” Again she was pulled up sharply
for a moment out of the confusion of mass life, like a dreamer who
suddenly awakes still in the confusion of his dreams, feeling in
terror, “Where am I?” and her mind, as though trying to answer
the unformed question, brought once more to her consciousness
remembrance of her first sharp impact with this whirling life.
Three weeks ago. One day a person is bending over a baby
shaking a rattle in front of its eager eyes. On a day three weeks
later, one sits in a room full of girls, bars on the window, going
over catechism, waiting for a tardy bell to ring.
Sitting there in her pigeon-hole between King and Lowman,
Josephine let her gaze wander again and again out over the vege-
table garden to the stretch of pasture with its fringe of thick trees
effectually obscuring any view of the Boys' quarters. Forbidden
quarters those, so terribly forbidden that they held undeservingly
mysterious invitation, were the subject of endless speculation. Was
it true that the trees had been planted there so that the girls could
not see the Boys at work in the fields ? But what harm in that? ?
Did they not go over every Sunday where the Boys were in Chapel ?
In just a few minutes they would be going over, first the Older
Family, then the Younger. At the laundry they would find the
girls from the Honour Cottage waiting for them.
The Honour Cottage. That was a matter for speculation, too.
Hattie had been sent over there but had been returned shortly for
bad conduct. The girls said she misbehaved on purpose. Why?
When any one asked Hattie, she stuck her tongue in her cheek and
said, “Too high-toned for me. Table cloths and silver. As long
as I am in this place, I wanta stay right where the bunch stays."
Just the same, Josephine reflected, the Honour girls looked as
though they liked being where they were. They always marched
at the head of the line. To-day they would lead the way, in white
lawn dresses that set them apart from the rest, past the Boys' cot-


EDNA CLARE BRYNER
309
tages into the great mouth of the Chapel and up the stairs into the
gallery. All the rest would follow, trying to steal glances into the
floor of the Chapel where the Boys sat in rows and rows of dark
blue backs and close-cropped heads.
To-day was Review Sunday. That came only once a month.
Instead of listening to some minister who proffered his services for
the day, as was customary on other Sundays of the month, the boys
and girls took part in catechism. Each division of boys and each
family of girls learned the answers to different sets of questions.
The Superintendent stood up on the platform and read the ques-
tions and each division or family answered in chorus.
Etta was going to try to drop a note down to the Boys while
catechism was going on. She said she had dropped one every single
Review Sunday since she had been in the School and she had never
been detected. “If I have to wash their old clothes, I guess I can
write and tell them what a pleasure it is,” she said.
Was it true that the girls were kept there to do the laundry work
for the Boys ? Etta said so. She worked in the laundry and was
always getting into trouble, always complaining.
Some day Josephine would have to work in the laundry. The
thought haunted her. Fifty girls worked there every day, twenty-
five in the morning and another twenty-five in the afternoon. They
marched over to work looking surly and came back with the fronts
of their dresses slopping wet, their shoulders sagging. Some girls
worked there all day when there was extra washing. They washed
the dirty clothes for the whole Institution, dresses and underwear
and stockings for a hundred and thirty girls, shirts, socks, and
nightclothes for four hundred boys, the trim white uniforms for
seventy officers, the clothes for the Superintendent's family.
The Superintendent entertained a great deal. That was why the
girls washed twenty table cloths some weeks and dozens of heavy
linen table napkins and dozens of little blouses and dresses for his
children. Sometimes they twisted the napkins into the machines on
purpose. Then six-foot Mrs Granger applied the piece of garden
hose that she kept hanging conveniently near.
Josephine hoped she would get out before she had to work in
the laundry. She did not want to leave the sewing room. But
she would have to take her turn at other work. In a few months
she would be doing housework, and after that she would go to the
a


310
THE WHEEL TURNS
you could
laundry. Rotation, the matron called it. A girl must learn every-
thing there is to do about a house and when she was discharged,
she got a good place in a family. Josephine was sure she would
a
get demerits when she went to work in the laundry.
Demerits! She had only begun to understand the elaborate
system by which one could get out. You had to get six thousand
merits. You got eight merits every day that you went a whole
day without being corrected for a single thing. If you went four
months perfect, you got a hundred and sixty extra credits; but you
weren't to think much about that because you hardly ever went
perfect so long. The best girls rarely got out in less than two years.
There were demerits for everything wrong you did, spilling the
syrup, getting out of line, talking back, whispering in silence hour.
The most were for running away, fighting officers, and “carrying
on” with the coloured girls. For trying to run away you got two
thousand demerits. That set you back the best part of a year. It
wasn't worth trying to run away for you were always caught.
There was something puzzling about demerits. If
get
only eight merits in a day, how could you get two thousand demerits
in one day? If you could get two thousand demerits in a lump,
there ought to be some way in which you could get two thousand
merits all at once. Josephine had been in the School just twenty
days and she had one hundred and sixty merits. Six thousand!
What a lot to get! They added up so slowly.
There were other punishments besides demerits. Demerits kept
you in longer, other punishments hurt you while you were there.
Well, Miss Kirkshaw was good. She only paddled the worst girls.
She would never paddle Martine. Would Ella Conger be paddled?
A weight settled down upon her at the thought. Why didn't the
bell ring for Chapel ?
She kept going over again and again the questions and answers
of Lesson Number One, Easy Lessons in Christian Doctrine. The
first question never failed to stab its accusation into her, to take her
back again and again to the time in the park, the man approach-
ing . and then she was being brought here. She thought of
her drawn work. She wanted to go and get it out of her gingham
"treasure bag” where she kept it with her picture of the Virgin
which the matron had not taken away from her when she came in.
But it was wicked to do drawn work on Sunday.
a


EDNA CLARE BRYNER
311
She went down the list of questions trying to fasten her mind
securely on them.
"Q. What is witchcraft?
A. Witchcraft is to try, with the help of the devil, to injure
others in their person and property. Witchcraft and all
dealings with the evil one, such as charms, spells, fortune-
telling, and the like are practices strictly forbidden."
There was no witchcraft now. The teacher in the fifth grade had
said that. They burned persons as witches once, but to-day there
was no such thing. But there were persons who could tell fortunes.
She wondered what the next set of questions would be like.
They would be entirely different, and the next after still different,
until she had learned all the questions and answers of Easy Les-
sons in Christian Doctrine. The hymns rotated that way, too.
They were printed on cards, ten cards altogether, three hymns to
each card. Josephine was about to sing her third card. In seven
more Sundays she would have sung them all up and then what
would she do? That was the thought that suddenly came to her
as she sat in her white percale dress waiting for the belated Chapel
bell to ring. Then what would she do? Why, to be sure, begin
all over again. And then all over again. And—all over again.
—
-
Her brain began to turn round as though it were quite loose
inside her head. Her mouth drew up dryly. At six every morn-
ing, at eight every evening, and on Sundays—all over again.
Goldie on the playground—all over again. The sewing room,
housework, the laundry-all over again. The dormitory at night,
dreams—all over again. Josephine was used to everything, every-
thing, in three weeks, everything except-all over again.
She gave a quick glance at Miss Cecil, sitting quiet at her desk
with her hands clasped before her, her eyes staring out of the win-
dow far away into illimitable space. Josephine leaned over in her
seat and put her handkerchief to her face. In a minute she straight-
ened up and took away her handkerchief. There was a tiny spot
of blood upon it. She raised her hand. "Please, Miss Cecil, may
I go to the wash room? My nose's bleeding.”
"Yes, but hurry. The bell will ring in a minute. ”
“Yes, ma'am.” She walked quickly into the corridor. No one
was there. The front door was wide open, letting in a flood of sun-
shine, ready to let the line out for Chapel. She stole softly towards


312
THE WHEEL TURNS
it. When she got to the stairway that led up to Miss Kirkshaw's
room, an officer suddenly appeared. “What are you doing here?”
“Miss Cecil sent me up to Miss Kirkshaw."
“All right.” Josephine started up the steps. The officer disap-
peared. Josephine turned on the third step and came down
precipitately, darted out of the door, flew over the sloping lawn
into the ravine, down to its bottom, scrambled up the scraggly other
side, bolted through between the school and the laundry, and struck
the curving driveway that she had come up three weeks before.
Running, panting, blindly she struck out in the direction of the
gates, left open for Sunday visitors, got through them up on the
railroad track, and ran straight down the track towards the City.
From somewhere a figure sprang out and began pursuing her.
She felt the figure coming, turned about, saw a man running
swiftly, and turning round again redoubled her efforts. The man
gained, caught up with her. Just as he was about to take hold of
her, she fell down on the track as if fainting. The man picked her
up gently. At his touch, something demoniac stirred within her.
She fastened her teeth into his wrist taking out a piece of it, mak-
ing the blood gush out. He dropped her and stood swearing, nurs-
ing his wrist. She lay still with her eyes closed.
He picked her up again, cautiously. Another man approached
and took her from him. She made no resistance. Rigid in the
man's arms, she let herself be carried back again through the iron
gates. Her first pursuer walked along, swearing at intervals. “The
witch! That little thing! To bite a person! She's possessed!"
The siren, death knell to runaways, began to blow, two long
shrieks, three short ones, signal for the chase. Josephine heard it
and shook in her rigidity, her teeth chattering, her eyes rolling.
Other officers and guards hurried up. They carried her back to
the Girls' Department past the window of the Assembly Room
where the Younger Family were waiting for the Chapel bell to
ring. The girls stood up in their seats and craned their necks to
see what the commotion was. When they saw the slender body
of their companion lying with closed eyes across the man's arms,
her long fair hair streaming down in disarray from her white face,
they screamed, "She's dead, Miss Cecil!”
“They killed her!" some hysterical girl added.


EDNA CLARE BRYNER
313
a
“Take your seats, girls! She's not dead. Take your seats! Do
you hear me? A hundred demerits for every girl that doesn't sit
down immediately!" Miss Cecil's knees were trembling so that
she could hardly stand, her eyes could not distinguish the girls'
faces, she gritted her teeth to keep back sobs. The girls sat down.
“Poor Josephine,” they whispered.
"Miss Cecil, will they put her in the dark hole?”
“Miss Cecil, I hear them. They're going to put her down there.
She's awful afraid of ghosts.”
"She sees ghosts at night up in the dormitory.”
"She'll die in the dark hole."
“They'll paddle her.”
"Miss Kirkshaw won't do it hard.”
“She'll get two thousand demerits! And she's only been here
three weeks. She'll be eighteen hundred in the hole.” This
from Etta.
The officers talked together out in the corridor. “Josephine!
Of all the girls! She hadn't a single demerit!”
“And she was so quiet and sweet.”
“You can't tell about the quiet ones. I say they're always the
worst."
"If she's begun like this, she'll be here until she's twenty-one."
The Chapel bell began to ring, like a funeral bell. The girls
filed out in orderly lines to the Chapel and took their places in the
gallery. After they had settled in their seats, the Boys filed in in
orderly lines and took their places downstairs. “The girls got in
first to-day,” Etta whispered triumphantly.
The opening hymn was sung. The Superintendent walked slowly
and impressively to his place on the platform. Review began.
The Boys answered their sets of questions. The second hymn was
sung. The Superintendent cleared his throat for the dozenth time
and turning his eyes up to the corner of the gallery where the
Younger Family of girls sat, rolled his pompous voice out in heavy
enunciation: "What is the first thing a man should know?"
Like a chant, the chorus of voices responded: “The first thing
a man should know is that there is a God who rewards the good
and punishes the wicked.”
Over in the dark hole, a slender form grovelled on the straw,


314
LOSS
twisting the blanket around her. “Take me out, Miss Kirkshaw!
I'll be good. Take me out! I don't know what made me do it.
I'm afraid! Take me out!” And then a despairing cry. “Miss
Cecil! Oh, Miss Cecil!"
In the Chapel, questions and answers went on. Etta dropped
her note, undiscovered, down to the boy who sat just below her
under the edge of the gallery. The last hymn was sung on card
number three. The Boys began filing out. The girls sat, restless,
disturbed by the thud, thud, thud, of heavy marching feet. When
the disquieting sound of the last division's tread had quite died
away, they too began filing out. Review was over. Another month
had begun.
LOSS
BY PIERRE LOVING
Shall your lips no more surprise my cheek?
Nor your grace like scent exalt this room.
And your voice steal to annul its silences?
Shall your touch forget the door that made
Sudden surrender of your great ways
Till the room was clouded with rose legend?
Lo, these children
peer
for
you
in vain
Beside listening doorways, thinking 'tis
The flower whisper of your gown they heard. . . .
Ah, the stars were faultless in their places.
Spaded gravel purled into a grave. ...
But pain crashed worlds together in my heart!


!
1
1
.
1
A.

al
A WOODCUT. BY JOHN J. A. MURPHY


1



A WOODCUT. BY JOHN J. A. MURPHY


.
{


PETRONIUS
BY CUTHBERT WRIGHT
W
HY is it necessary that I choose between Paul and Petro-
nius? demanded Mr Havelock Ellis in an early book,
Affirmations, which had the distinction of containing the best
essay on Nietzsche and the best essay on Huysmans in the English
language. Perhaps Mr Ellis had been thinking of Quo Vadis, in
which Sienkiewicz allows himself the considerable liberty of in-
troducing an interview between the Arbiter of Elegance and the
Apostle to the Gentiles. Almost everyone, at some time in their
lives, has read Quo Vadis, or seen it at the cinema, unless they
have read Chateaubriand's Martyrs first, in which case they are
saved the trouble. At all events, the rapprochement invented by
M Sienkiewicz was anything but a bad idea. Supposing for a
moment that the author of Trimalchio's Feast and the courtier of
Nero were the same individual, there could be no more fascinating
subject for the imaginative or philosophic artist than their meeting.
The most graceful, the most daring, the most complete exponent
of the dying Paganism and the small ugly courageous epileptic,
driven through all the coasts of Asia as if by a whipping flame,
an interior wound, the real founder, it may be, of Occidental
Christianity. The writer of the Satyricon and the writer of the
Epistle to the Romans! The creator of a book the most disconcert-
ing in literature, a book "seemingly ignorant of the difference be-
tween good and evil,” and the feverish apostle who more than
any one has invested these relative terms with an air of terribly
real significance.
Nor is it intrinsically improbable that they should have met.
There is a well-established tradition that Acté, the enchanting
mistress of Nero, saw and conversed with St Paul, and herself died,
fortified with the sacraments of the infant Church. An academic
painter, an Italian, has presented his conception of this event to
the late Pope, and the picture now hangs in the room of modern
painting at the Vatican, the golden-haired favourite reclining in
peroxidized splendour, looking a little like Miss Theda Bara re-
ceiving a reporter from the New York Call.


316
PETRONIUS
a
a
It is certain that Petronius, whoever he may have been, was a
man "for whom nothing pertaining to mankind was uninteresting,”
and in his character of connoisseur to the more gorgeous human
follies, it is improbable that Christianity could have escaped him.
A religion which considers perpetual virginity as a highest good
and unchastity as a crime must have afforded moments of exquisite
amusement to the creator of Giton and Quartilla. Unfortunately
for the human comedy of history, however, it is by no means sure
that the author of the Satyricon and the Arbiter of Elegance are
the same. All that we know of the latter is that Nero had a favour-
ite named Gaius Petronius, a man of very dissolute life and fabu-
lous luxury who “knew how to preserve a certain aesthetic measure
even in his vices.” For a time he had been proconsul in Bithynia,
where he astonished all who knew him by the temperate firmness
of his rule. He was indispensable to Nero, as long as the latter
chose to be the imperial aesthete, the protagonist of the fine arts
on the throne, but as the emperor sank into more and more porcine
and miry courses, he became jealous of his favourite, and finally
sent him word to open his veins. Thereupon Petronius commanded
that they read him some of Nero's verses as a cathartic, shattered
his favourite vases lest they fall into the hands of his gluttonous
lord, and taking a beautiful slave in his arms, perished, his eyes
misty with love and death, surrounded by flowers, music, and the
acclamations of his friends.
Such is the pretty legend, a little too pretty perhaps, this apothe-
osis of the perfect aesthete, and a trifle more redolent of West
Kensington than of the Mons Palatinus. A man capable of having
written the Satyricon would have been exceptionally bored, I think,
at Oxford or London, in the society of the late Mr Oscar Wilde.
For one who knows at all certain aspects of Paris, it is all the differ-
ence, let us say, between the Rue Notre Dame de Lorette and the
Porte Montmartre. What is still worse for the theory of the
Roman favourite as the author of the Satyricon is that nowhere in
the legend of the former is there a real indication that he himself
wrote a line. Nor is the Satyricon, on the whole, the work of a
“lover of beauty” or an arbiter of elegance. Of course, there is
nothing improbable in the case of a man who, having exhausted
all the capacities afforded by the merely beautiful in art and life,
weary of the facile perfections of the time, fed up with the whipped
a


CUTHBERT WRIGHT
317
cream shepherds and porcelain nymphs of Latin poets, should have
felt “the hunger for the gutter,” the attraction of low hostelries
and the open road, in a word, should have achieved the honour of
writing the first naturalistic romance and the first picaresque novel.
It adds the crowning touch to the complex and troubling charm of
Nero's courtier that, less than fifty years after the death of Virgil,
he should have written this book. But alas, it is all of the stuff
that dreams are made of. He may have been an imperial favourite,
and he may equally well have lived in Provence a century later, or
died a canonized bishop of Bologna. (Sancte Petronius ora pro
nobis!) In these discussions, it is usually best to beat the profes-
sors at their own game and side with the less obvious probabilities,
and we may suppose that, to the consummation of time, it will
never be proved that the author of the Satyricon was the Arbiter
of Elegance.
Forgetting the author then, and taking this original yet oddly
impersonal book on its own merits, what do we find? First a
style, a manner of thinking and writing, perhaps the first inter-
esting prose in Latin literature.
Setting aside the poets, of whom, after all, there is not a great
deal more to be said, what have we got before the probable advent
of Petronius, in that epoch which literary historians still persist in
calling the great century? We have Cicero, Caesar, Titus Livius,
Seneca, Tacitus, the Plinys, and Terence and Plautus who were
dramatists. Let us be frank and admit, without more ado, that, in
the great bulk, all these worthies are of a tediousness beyond words,
and that it is, naturally, the two most tedious, the two most aston-
ishing bores that ever afflicted unhappy humanity, Cicero and
Caesar, that we force American school-boys to endure year after
year, thanks to that enlightened instrument of modern education,
the College Entrance Board. Occasionally a little Horace is read,
sometimes the chaster portions of Ovid, and that is all. It is
precisely as if the gentlemen of the universities had deliberately
set out to do their worst, had said: “Here is a writer who habitually
writes long sentences, here is one who habitually writes short ones;
the whole essence of classic literature can be absorbed by this con-
venient process of selection.” As a result, for the past seventy-five
years, the Fourth Form has read Caesar, the Fifth Form Cicero, and
there you are.
I have not the space to dilate on the inflated ab-
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PETRONIUS
surdity of the latter, or the unthinkable dryness of the former,
constipated as an official bulletin. Nor will I go so far as to say
that it would be better for school-boys to read Petronius, rather
than Virgil, though a perusal of the man who begins his novel with
the words: “What makes our boys grow into stupid men is that all
they see and learn in their schools offers no real image of living
society,” might be immensely more educational. It is enough to
say that Petronius is the first bright light of a literary epoch which
for sheer dulness and stupefying conventionality is second to none,
not even to the great century of Addison, dead even as Queen
Anne, or to that other great century, of Louis the Fourteenth, which
is also dead, but which the French have not, as yet, had the taste
to inter.
It will be argued that, setting considerations of literature aside,
it would be very immoral for school-boys to read Petronius. It is
a dissolute novel, without marked literary form and certainly with-
out moral purpose. It has to do with a large number of people of
the lowest ethical type, principally with three adventurers who
rigoler through unnamed ports and midnight lanes and along many
a moral seacoast of Bohemia, in which the interesting towns of
Sodom and Gomorrah are by no means left unvisited. It is true
that the novel ends abruptly with one of the worst offenders being
precipitated into the sea, but this is regarded rather in the light
of a diverting and unexpected occurrence than as a moral judge-
ment. In short, it would be hard to name a book more amusingly
devoid of what might be called in America “the higher things of
life.”
An acquaintance of mine once amused himself by lending a copy
of the Satyricon to a fifteen-year boy, not so monstrous an act as
it might seem, since the boy belonged to the profession of Giton,
and not even Petronius had anything new to teach him. I suppose
my acquaintance thought that the merry and slightly macabre ex-
istence depicted in its pages might well remind the child of the life
which he himself was forced to lead, but the only word of
appre-
ciation he could elicit from the gamin was that it was "très bien
écrit.” In spite of the originality of this expression, excusable in
one who may have led an infamous life, but was not at least a critic
of literature, I am inclined to think that he had uttered the last
word on the Satyricon, in a manner to confound all those who ap-
a


CUTHBERT WRIGHT
319
a
a
proach it from the standpoint of moral pretension. Really, it is
"très bien écrit." It is "well written' to an extent that makes one
disregard its sordid background, the low vice of its episodes, that
makes one even forget it was consciously well written, consciously
composed in a manner supremely acute and more than often a little
precious. It belongs to a rare class of great books, of "master-
pieces written in an ecstasy,” the less spontaneous but valiant com-
panion of Pantagruel and Moll Flanders and the Golden Ass.
However realistic in episode and setting, it is part of that matchless
picaresque literature, indulgence in which seems to open perilous
doors of escape to “a life beyond life," as the brilliant author of
Jurgen would say. As for its alleged immorality, I don't see that
there is anything to do but to accept and make the best of it. It
was Charles Lamb, I believe, who made the point, virtuously com-
batted by Macaulay, that there is a certain class of books, the
comedy of the Restoration for instance, which it is absurd to handle
from the standpoint of Christian morality, for the reason that they
deal with a milieu fantastically removed from the realm of official
and domestic ethics, and with persons as unsubstantial and super-
lunary as the Fata Morgana or the Lady of the Lake. To criticize
the characters of Love in a Wood as though they were Mr Walter
Lippmann or the Bishop of New York, would be as unreasonable
as to appoint a commission to investigate the rate of unmarried
motherhood among the fairies of North Wales.
I am not prepared to make so elaborate an apology for the Saty-
ricon because I believe with the virtuous Macaulay, that however
pleasant the theory, it is highly sophistic. Lamb's apology came
from the romantic habit of heightening the colours of persons and
things in literature at the expense of those in actual life. I am
"realistic” enough to believe that the less serious aspect of London
life in 1660 was very like a comedy of Wycherly played to music
on the moon-shaven, star-tangled stretches of Hyde Park; for one
thing the quotidian diary of Pepys is quite as comically fascinating
in its atmosphere as anything by R. B. Sheridan.
There are two very familiar forms of literary Romanticism be-
sides Lamb's; one is to idealize the past at the expense of the
present, the other is to idealize the present. The first may be rep-
resented by Lord Tennyson, as he appears in a recent book by Mr
Edmund Gosse: Some Diversions of a Man of Letters. Mr Gosse


320
PETRONIUS
was formerly a curator in the British Museum, and one of these
diversions was an unexpected visit from the Poet Laureate. Lord
Tennyson was then one of the most imposing figures in the United
Kingdom, possessing that mighty, almost commercial prestige which
is attached to no merely "literary” man at present except per-
haps Lord Northcliffe or Mr Gilbert Chesterton. Mr Gosse, with
his charming, old-world courtesy, escorted the noble visitor up
and down those chilling corridors, till they finally reached a
copy of the bust of Antinous in the Louvre. The poet stopped in
front of it, and remained some moments, leaning on his tasseled
cane, contemplating that stupid and tragic profile without speak-
ing. Finally he sighed and said: “Ah the inscrutable Bithynian.
If we knew all that he knew, we would understand the secret of the
ancient world.” No better example could be found of the sermons
in stones beloved by the British poet. No better example could be
found, equally, of that incorrigible disposition on the part of the
romantic mind to read metaphysical secrets into the past, secrets
which, to believe them, have utterly vanished from the present.
Mr Gosse was not the man to suggest that Lord Tennyson try
Piccadilly that evening about 10:30, if he were inclined to find out
more of the Bithynian's secret, but had he done so, he would have
been far nearer the truth than the author of Enoch Arden. It is
true that circus-boys do not, in our time, become more than kings
and have statues and cities raised in their dishonour, but that is
only because the world has been made safe for democracy and we
have no more Caesars. For the most part, the past was always as
good as it is painted, but the present is as good as the past. There
.
is no madness, no passion, no fantastic bestiality or touching hero-
ism depicted in literature which has not been surpassed in life, and
life itself never changes.
The second great form of romanticism is to idealize the present.
An unknown writer of genius, Mr Arthur Machen, has written a
remarkable story (or rather several, for it is a favourite idea with
him) about a little London clerk, who leads the usual daily life of
millions of such people, the life of buses and cigars and week-
end trips to Hampstead or Hampton Court; and then gradually,
through a rich accumulation of quite ordinary experiences, learns
that he is no commonplace loiterer at life's spectacle, but "like a
man of the Middle Age, stands with sacraments about his ways, in
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CUTHBERT WRIGHT
321
a world of mysteries and adorations and wonder, attended perhaps
by strange Companions.” Mr Machen will perhaps forgive this
villainous quotation from memory of his prose, since I write on an
all but inaccessible mountain of southermost France, several thou-
sand miles away from one of his beautiful books.
The great objection to the sacramental attitude of people like
Mr Machen towards the world is again its excessively metaphysical
character. The natural sensual life of streets and highways is not
enough for them; they depend, all too consciously, on the opiate
afforded by their own spacious imaginations, and with them all
roads lead to Catholic Rome, even when they pass by Shepherd's
Bush. It was quite otherwise with the author of Trimalchio's
Feast. However fantastic his material, however dreamlike appears
the atmosphere of his pages, it was nothing but the daily life of low
taverns, gay baths, the temples of shady divinities, a whole world
of entremetteurs, sodomites, errant priestesses, debauched children,
seedy Roman knights and their mistresses, profiteers, sailors, and
slaves, that he described in those alert and marvelous chapters,
with no intention of satire or reform (whatever pedants may say)
and with a complete absence of parti pris, of moral disapprobation,
that has never in its way been surpassed. It was the unexpurgated,
but quite unexaggerated life of Italy at the beginning of its deca-
dence, of its rich October, and those who say that its moral at-
mosphere is, from the standpoint of the modern world, impossible
or unreal, simply do not know the modern world.
It is this cool amorality, if I may use the term, which has caused
one of our best-selling novelists, a Roman Catholic, Mr Compton
Mackenzie, to say of the Satyricon that it appears to be ignorant
of the difference between good and evil. That is what peculiarly
irritates people with absolute standards, not that one should say
"Evil be thou my Good,” but that one should seem to ignore the
distinction. This indifference to “higher issues” may very properly
be called Pagan, since it is an authentic aspect of Paganism, itself
so many-sided, and its existence in the so-called Pagan world has
necessitated a number of amusing disfigurements and explanations,
a kind of perennial costume play, on the part of Christian and
romantic commentators, ever since the Renaissance. First came
the poets and painters with their dewy inspirations and exquisite
ignorance of historical correctitude, of celestial local colour, who


322
PETRONIUS
painted the ancient world in the wistful hues of the Quattrocento,
so that Virgil became the gentle Mage of Mantua, and Venus and
Mars were transformed respectively into a Medicean lady and a
beautiful young condottiere. The English pre-Raphaelites, espe-
,
cially of literature, revived this tradition, but much more meretri-
ciously, and we have Pater's Marius the Epicurean, supposedly a
study of the same civilization as that of the Satyricon, filtered
through the temperament of a neurotic man of letters with a ten-
dency to romantic Christianity and weak digestion, the Paganism
of an aesthetic theologian, of a high-church curate. After the
artists, it was the turn of the professors, who, being usually clergy-
men, added confusion to confusion. Even the most rational among
them were hard put to it to explain, historically, why a race so
happily constituted as the Latin should have been willing to ex-
change, for a religion as uncomfortable as Christianity, their own
easy-going, pleasure-loving gods. It would have been too shrewd
a blow to the dogma of divine inspiration to have admitted that
Christianity was imposed on the population, by force or by mode,
as inexorably as the law of military service. Their solution may
be found in a stanza of Arnold's poem Obermann, which must have
been a godsend to historians with a taste for metaphysical specula-
tion à la Quinet.
“On that hard Roman world disgust
And secret loathing fell,
Deep weariness and sated lust
Made human life a hell.”
Very ingenious, is it not? But it is not clear that the hard Roman
world understood anything of secret loathing and sated lust until
Christianity taught it how to indulge these somewhat Byronic
emotions. But let us pass on. As for the clergymen, who were
Christians in all but their theology, the national adoration of the
classics involved an immense amount of Bowdlerizing and expur-
gating to the moral benefit of the younger forms. Naturally, it was
no small thing to have to edit an attitude towards life in the school-
room which was condemned every Sunday in the chapel. But a
system of education which for generations has shut its eyes to the
existence of Giton and Encolpos in the class-rooms had no difficulty


CUTHBERT WRIGHT
323
in expelling them from the class-books. At all events and in
various ways, they have gotten around the problem, and the result
is that in the course of the nineteenth century in England, a whole
new and complete version of classic life and morals has been
evolved virginibus puerisque. In this tradition, Venus loses her
dear husband who has been spiked while hunting the fox, and the
relation of Achilles and Patroclus is very similar to the saintly
affection of Mr Alfred Tennyson and Mr Arthur Hallam. There
is really nothing in this parody more exaggerated than a study by
any Greek-loving person, Mr Pater for example, of the ancient
world. It was not always so, even in England. Some of the
Elizabethans, Heywood, Marlowe, Shakespeare himself, in writing
of these things, have expressed themselves, like the Botticelli Venus
and Mars, with a candour, which, however mannered, is almost
Petronian. But in general the Anglo-Saxon reaction to Paganism
has been, throughout the history of the race, a very curious one,
resulting in some beautiful literature and a complete and perverse
misconception of its essential immoralism and self-sufficiency. It
comes from an obstinate misunderstanding of the past, and a blind-
ness to the present, or rather it comes from the old failure to recog.
nize that life is unchangeable. The professor and the poet alike
read Plato with one eye, while they shut both to their own world,
preferring to examine “the secret of the Bithynian” through the
microscope of two thousand years. The elimination of the sexual
factor, which is the keynote of Latin life and art, if it is not the
keynote of all life and of all art, is very like the little girl playing
at being married, who being asked the whereabouts of the bride-
groom, replied that it was a very quiet wedding. The ancient
world adored the body more candidly, and consequently more
cleanly than we; otherwise, I do not think that it possessed a
"secret,” any more than we possess one.
It is the merit of books like this novel of Petronius that they
recall us to life, to the existence of the visible and physical world.
They are sane and hard and singularly complete in themselves.
Naked of metaphysics and innocent of idealism, they serve to re-
mind us that, while life may be a nightmare, like the Satyricon
itself, it is a nightmare from which we would be curiously loath to
awaken.


PITY
BY VIOLA I. PARADISE
Pitiable sea!
Only with the white edges of your heaving passion
Can you embrace
The dead cold edges of the living land.
Always you are driven back
And in upon yourself,
To hurl yourself again upon the unyielding shore,
Booming your tragedy
In a hoarse raucous sibilance,
Starved, ungratified, driven
To suck yourself in, and churn yourself,
Chew your great monstrous depths,
And spew them forth
A white and sterile foam.
Poor mighty sea,
Toiling so fruitlessly,
So helplessly, so endlessly,
I pity you.
As for me,
I live, and breathe,
Suck in the sun;
After a while
Grow old and cold
And die.
But you,
You hunger on.



THE GARDEN.
BY WILLIAM E. SCHUMACHER





OUT OF NOWHERE INTO NOTHING
BY SHERWOOD ANDERSON
VI
AT
T the end of the short street on which the Wescotts lived there
T
was a corn field. When Rosalind was a child it was a
meadow and beyond was an orchard. On summer afternoons the
child often went there to sit alone on the banks of a tiny stream
that wandered away eastward towards Willow Creek, draining the
farmer's fields on the way. The creek had made a slight depression
in the level contour of the land and she sat with her back against
an old apple tree and with her bare feet almost touching the water.
Her mother did not permit her to run barefooted through the streets,
but when she got into the orchard she took her shoes off. It gave
her a delightful naked feeling.
Overhead and through the branches she could see the great sky.
Masses of white clouds broke into fragments and then the fragments
came together again. The sun ran in behind one of the cloud
masses and
grey shadows slid silently over the face of distant fields.
The world of her child life, the Wescott household, Melville Stoner
sitting in his house, the cries of other children who lived in her
street, all the life she knew went far away. To be there in that
silent place was like lying awake in bed at night only in some way
sweeter and better. There were no dull household sounds and the
air she breathed was sweeter, cleaner. She played a little game.
All the apple trees in the orchard were old and gnarled and she
had given all the trees names. There was one fancy that frightened
her a little but was delicious too. She fancied that at night when
she had gone to bed and was asleep and when all the town of
Willow Springs had gone to sleep the trees came out of the ground
and walked about. The grasses beneath the trees, the bushes that
grew beside the fence—all came out of the ground and ran madly
here and there. They danced wildly. The old trees, like stately
old
men, put their heads together and talked. As they talked their
bodies swayed slightly—back and forth, back and forth. The
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326
OUT OF NOWHERE INTO NOTHING
bushes and flowering weeds ran in great circles among the little
grasses. The grasses hopped straight up and down.
Sometimes when she sat with her back against the tree on warm
bright afternoons Rosalind played the game of dancing life until
she grew afraid and had to give it up. Near by in the fields men
were at work, cultivating corn. The breasts of the horses and their
wide strong shoulders pushed the young corn aside and made a low
rustling sound. Now and then a man's voice was raised in a shout.
"Hi, there, you Joe! Get in there, Frank!” The widow of the
hens owned a little woolly dog that occasionally broke into a spasm
of barking, apparently without cause, senseless, eager barking.
Rosalind shut all the sounds out. She closed her eyes and struggled,
trying to get into the place beyond human sounds. After a time
her desire was accomplished. There was a low sweet sound, like
the murmuring of voices far away. Now the thing was happening.
With a kind of tearing sound the trees came up to stand on top
of the ground. They moved with stately tread towards each other.
Now the mad bushes and the flowering weeds came running, danc-
ing madly, now the joyful grasses hopped. Rosalind could not
stay long in her world of fancy. It was too mad, too joyful. She
opened her eyes and jumped to her feet. Everything was all right.
The trees stood solidly rooted in the ground, the weeds and bushes
had
gone back to their places by the fence, the grasses lay asleep
on the ground. She felt that her father and mother, her brother,
everyone she knew would not approve of her being there among
them. The world of dancing life was a lovely but a wicked world.
She knew. Sometimes she was a little mad herself and then she
was whipped or scolded. The mad world of her fancy had to be
put away. It frightened her a little. Once after the thing hap-
pened she cried, went down to the fence crying. A man who was
cultivating corn came along and stopped his horses. “What's the
matter?” he asked sharply. She couldn't tell him so she told a lie.
"A bee stung me,” she said. The man laughed. “It'll get
well.
Better put on your shoes,” he advised.
The time of the marching trees and the dancing grasses was in
Rosalind's childhood. Later when she had graduated from the
Willow Springs High School and had the three years of waiting
about the Wescott house before she went to the city she had other
experiences in the orchard. Then she had been reading novels and
a
>


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
327
had talked with other young women. She knew many things that
after all she did not know. In the attic of her mother's house there
was a cradle in which she and her brother had slept when they were
babies. One day she went up there and found it. Bedding for the
cradle was packed away in a trunk and she took it out. She
arranged the cradle for the reception of a child. Then after she
did it she was ashamed. Her mother might come up the attic stairs
and see it. She put the bedding quickly back into the trunk and
went down stairs, her cheeks burning with shame.
What a confusion. One day she went to the house of a school-
girl friend who was about to be married. Several other girls came
and they were all taken into a bedroom where the bride's trousseau
was laid out on a bed. What soft lovely things! All the girls
went forward and stood over them, Rosalind among them. Some
of the girls were shy, others bold. There was one, a thin girl who
had no breasts. Her body was flat like a door and she had a thin
sharp voice and a thin sharp face. She began to cry out strangely.
“How sweet, how sweet, how sweet,” she cried over and over. The
voice was not like a human voice. It was like something being
hurt, an animal in the forest, far away somewhere by itself, being
hurt. Then the girl dropped to her knees beside the bed and began
to weep bitterly. She declared she could not bear the thought of
her schoolgirl friend being married. “Don't do it! Oh, Mary,
don't do it!" she pleaded. The other girls laughed but Rosalind
couldn't stand it. She hurried out of the house.
That was one thing that had happened to Rosalind and there
were other things. Once she saw a young man on the street. He
clerked in a store and Rosalind did not know him. However, her
fancy played with the thought that she had married him. Her own
thoughts made her ashamed.
Everything shamed her. When she went into the orchard on
summer afternoons she sat with her back against the apple tree
and took off her shoes and stockings just as she had when she was
a child, but the world of her childhood fancy was gone, nothing
could bring it back.
Rosalind's body was soft but all her flesh was firm and strong.
She moved away from the tree and lay on the ground. She pressed
her body down into the grass, into the firm hard ground. It seemed


328
OUT OF NOWHERE INTO NOTHING
to her that her mind, her fancy, all the life within her, except just
her physical life, went away. The earth pressed upwards against
her body. Her body was pressed against the earth. There was
darkness. She was imprisoned. She pushed against the walls of
her prison. Everything was dark and there was in all the earth
silence. Her fingers clutched a handful of the grasses, played in
the grasses.
Then she grew very still but did not sleep. There was something
that had nothing to do with the ground beneath her or the trees or
the clouds in the sky, that seemed to want to come to her, come
into her, a kind of white wonder of life.
The thing couldn't happen. She opened her eyes and there was
the sky overhead and the trees standing silently about. She went
again to sit with her back against one of the trees. She thought
with dread of the evening coming on and the necessity of going out
of the orchard and to the Wescott house. She was weary. It was
the weariness that made her appear to others a rather dull stupid
young woman. Where was the wonder of life? It was not within
herself, not in the ground. It must be in the sky overhead. Pres-
ently it would be night and the stars would come out. Perhaps the
wonder did not really exist in life. It had something to do with
God. She wanted to ascend upwards, to go at once up into God's
house, to be there among the light strong men and women who had
died and left dulness and heaviness behind them on the earth.
Thinking of them took some of her weariness away and sometimes
she went out of the orchard in the late afternoon walking almost
lightly, something like grace seemed to have come into her tall
strong body.
Rosalind had gone away from the Wescott house and from
Willow Springs, Iowa, feeling that life was essentially ugly. In a
way she hated life and people. In Chicago sometimes it was un-
believable how ugly the world had become. She tried to shake off
the feeling but it clung to her. She walked through the crowded
streets and the buildings were ugly. A sea of faces floated up to
her. They were the faces of dead people. The dull death that was
in them was in her also. They also could not break through the
walls of themselves to the white wonder of life. After all perhaps
there was no such thing as the white wonder of life—it might be


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
329
just a thing of the mind. There was something essentially dirty
about life. The dirt was on her and in her. Once as she walked
at evening over the Rush Street bridge to her room on the North
Side she looked up suddenly and saw the chrysoprase river running
inland from the lake. Near at hand stood a soap factory. The
men of the city had turned the river about, made it flow inland
from the lake. Someone had erected a great soap factory there,
near the river's entrance to the city, to the land of men. Rosalind
stopped and stood looking along the river towards the lake. Men
and women, wagons, automobiles rushed past her. They were
dirty. She was dirty. “The water of an entire sea and millions
of cakes of soap will not wash me clean,” she thought. The dirti-
ness of life seemed a part of her very being and an almost over-
whelming desire to climb upon the railing of the bridge and leap
down into the chrysoprase river swept over her. Her body trembled
violently and putting down her head and staring at the flooring of
the bridge she hurried away.
Rosalind was in the Wescott house at the supper table with her
father and mother. None of the three people ate. They fussed
about with the food Ma Wescott had prepared. Rosalind looked
at her mother and thought of what Melville Stoner had said:
"If I wanted to write I'd do something. I'd tell what everyone
thought. It would startle people, frighten them a little, eh? I
would tell what you have been thinking this afternoon while you
walked here on this railroad track with me. I would tell what
your
mother has been thinking at the same time and what she would like
to say to you.
What had Rosalind's mother been thinking all through the three
days since her daughter had so unexpectedly come home from Chi-
cago? What did mothers think in regard to the lives led by their
daughters? Had mothers something of importance to say to
daughters and if they did when did the time come when they were
ready to say it?
She looked at her mother sharply. The older woman's face was
heavy and sagging. She had grey eyes like Rosalind's but they
were dull like the eyes of a fish lying on a slab of ice in the window
of a city meat market. The daughter was a little frightened by
what she saw in her mother's face and something caught in her
a


330
OUT OF NOWHERE INTO NOTHING
throat. There was an embarrassing moment. A strange sort of
tenseness came into the air of the room and all three people sud-
denly got up from the table.
Rosalind went to help her mother with the dishes and her father
sat in a chair by a window and read a paper. The daughter avoided
looking again into the mother's face. “I must gather myself to-
gether if I am to do what I want to do,” she thought. It was
strange-in fancy she saw the lean bird-like face of Melville Stoner
and the eager tired face of Walter Sayers floating above the head
of her mother who leaned over the kitchen sink, washing the dishes.
Both of the men's faces sneered at her. “You think you can but
you can't. You are a young fool,” the men's lips seemed to be
saying.
Rosalind's father wondered how long his daughter's visit was
to last. After the evening meal he wanted to clear out of the
house, go up-town, and he had a guilty feeling that in doing so he
was being discourteous to his daughter. While the two women
washed the dishes he put on his hat and going into the back yard
began chopping wood. Rosalind went to sit on the front porch.
The dishes were all washed and dried but for a half hour her mother
would putter about in the kitchen. She always did that. She
would arrange and rearrange, pick up dishes and put them down
again. She clung to the kitchen. It was as though she dreaded
the hours that must pass before she could go upstairs and to bed
and to sleep, to fall into the oblivion of sleep.
When Henry Wescott came around the corner of the house and
confronted his daughter he was a little startled. He did not know
what was the matter but he felt uncomfortable. For a moment he
stopped and looked at her. Life radiated from her figure. A fire
burned in her eyes, in her grey intense eyes. Her hair was yellow
like cornsilk. She was, at the moment, a complete, a lovely daugh-
ter of the cornlands, a being to be loved passionately, completely
by some son of the cornlands—had there been in the land a son as
alive as this daughter it had thrown aside. The father had hoped
to escape from the house unnoticed. “I'm going up-town a little
while,” he said hesitatingly. Still he lingered a moment. Some
old sleeping thing awoke in him, was awakened in him by the
startling beauty of his daughter. A little fire flared up among the
charred rafters of the old house that was his body. "You look
a


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pretty, girlie,” he said sheepishly and then turned his back to her
and went along the path to the gate and the street.
Rosalind followed her father to the gate and stood looking as
he went slowly along the short street and around a corner. The
mood induced in her by her talk with Melville Stoner had returned.
Was it possible that her father also felt as Melville Stoner some-
times did? Did loneliness drive him to the door of insanity and
did he also run through the night seeking some lost, some hidden
and half forgotten loveliness?
When her father had disappeared around the corner she went
through the gate and into the street. “I'll go sit by the tree in the
orchard until mother has finished puttering about the kitchen,” she
thought.
Henry Wescott went along the streets until he came to the square
about the court house and then went into Emanuel Wilson's Hard-
ware Store. Two or three other men presently joined him there.
Every evening he sat among these men of his town saying nothing.
It was an escape from his own house and his wife. The other men
came for the same reason. A faint perverted kind of male fellow-
ship was achieved. One of the men of the party, a little old man
who followed the house painter's trade, was unmarried and lived
with his mother. He was himself nearing the age of sixty but his
mother was still alive. It was a thing to be wondered about.
When in the evening the house painter was a trifle late at the ren-
dezvous a mild flurry of speculation arose, floated in the air for a
moment, and then settled like dust in an empty house. Did the
old house painter do the housework in his own house, did he wash
the dishes, cook the food, sweep, and make the beds, or did his
feeble old mother do these things? Emanuel Wilson told a story
he had often told before. In a town in Ohio where he had lived
as a young man he had once heard a tale. There was an old man
like the house painter whose mother was also still alive and lived
with him. They were very poor and in the winter had not enough
bedclothes to keep them both warm. They crawled into a bed
together. It was an innocent enough matter, just like a mother
taking her child into her bed.
Henry Wescott sat in the store listening to the tale Emanuel
Wilson told for the twentieth time and thought about his daughter.
Her beauty made him feel a little proud, a little above the men


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who were his companions. He had never before thought of his
daughter as a beautiful woman. Why had he never before noticed
her beauty? Why had she come from Chicago, there by the lake,
to Willow Springs, in the hot month of August? Had she come
home from Chicago because she really wanted to see her father and
mother? For a moment he was ashamed of his own heavy body,
of his shabby clothes and his unshaven face and then the tiny
flame that had flared up within him burned itself out. The house
painter came in and the faint flavour of male companionship to
which he clung so tenaciously was reëstablished.
In the orchard Rosalind sat with her back against the tree in the
same spot where her fancy had created the dancing life of her child-
hood and where as a young woman graduate of the Willow Springs
High School she had come to try to break through the wall
that separated her from life. The sun had disappeared and the
grey shadows of night were creeping over the grass, lengthening the
shadows cast by the trees. The orchard had long been neglected
and
many of the trees were dead and without foliage. The shadows
of the dead branches were like long lean arms that reached out, felt
their way forwards over the grey grass. Long lean fingers reached
and clutched. There was no wind and the night would be dark
and without a moon, a hot dark starlit night of the plains. Through
what an age of thought and emotions Rosalind had lived since she
went to walk on the railroad track in the early afternoon!
In a moment more it would be black night. Already the creeping
shadows on the grass were barely discernible. Rosalind felt death
all about her, in the orchard, in the town. Something Walter
Sayers had once said to her came sharply back into her mind.
“When you are in the country alone at night some time try giving
yourself to the night, to the darkness, to the shadows cast by trees.
The experience, if you really give yourself to it, will tell you a
startling story. You will find that, although the white men have
owned the land for several generations now and although they
have built towns everywhere, dug coal out of the ground, covered
the land with railroads, towns, and cities, they do not own an inch
of the land in the whole continent. It still belongs to a race who
in their physical life are now dead. The red men, although they
are practically all gone, still own the American continent. Their


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333
fancy has peopled it with ghosts, with gods and devils. It is be-
cause in their time they loved the land. The proof of what I say
is to be seen everywhere. We have given our towns no beautiful
names of our own because we have not built the towns beautifully.
When an American town has a beautiful name it was stolen from
another race, a race that still owns the land in which we live. We
are all strangers here. When you are alone at night in the country,
anywhere in America, try giving yourself to the night. You will
find that death only resides in the conquering whites and that life
remains in the red men who are gone.
.."
The spirits of the two men, Walter Sayers and Melville Stoner,
dominated the mind of the woman. She felt that. It was as though
they were beside her, sitting beside her on the grass in the orchard.
She was quite certain that Melville Stoner had come back to his
house and was now sitting within sound of her voice, did she raise
her voice to call. What did they want of her? Had she suddenly
begun to love two men, both older than herself? The shadows of
the branches of trees made a carpet on the floor of the orchard, a
soft carpet spun of some delicate material on which the footsteps
of men could make no sound. The two men were coming towards
her, advancing over the carpet. Melville Stoner was near at hand
and Walter Sayers was coming from far away, out of the distance.
The spirit of him was creeping towards her. The two men were
in accord. They came bearing some male knowledge of life, some-
thing they wanted to give her.
She arose and stood by the tree, trembling Into what a state
she had got herself. How long would it endure? Into what knowl-
edge of life and death was she being led? She had come home on
a simple mission. She loved Walter Sayers, wanted to offer her-
self to him, but before doing so had felt the call to come home to
her mother. She had thought she would be bold and would tell
her mother the story of her love. She would tell her and then take
what the older woman offered. If her mother understood and
sym-
pathized, well that would be a beautiful thing. If her mother
did not understand—at any rate she would have paid some old
debt, would have been true to some old, unexpressed obligation.
The two men—what did they want of her? What had Melville
Stoner to do with the matter? She put the figure of him out of her


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a
mind. In the figure of the other man, Walter Sayers, there was
something less aggressive, less assertive. She clung to that.
She put her arm about the trunk of a tree and laid her cheek
against its rough bark. Within herself she was so intense, so ex-
cited that she wanted to rub her cheeks against the bark of the tree
until the blood came, until physical pain came to counteract the
tenseness within that had become pain.
Since the meadow, between the orchard and the street end, had
been planted to corn she would have to reach the street by going
along a lane, crawling under a wire fence, and crossing the yard of
the widowed chicken-raiser. A profound silence reigned over the
orchard and when she had crawled under the fence and reached the
widow's back yard she had to feel her way through a narrow open-
ing between a chicken house and a barn by running her fingers
forwards over the rough boards.
Her mother sat on the porch waiting and on the narrow porch
before his house next door sat Melville Stoner. She saw him as
she hurried past and shivered slightly. “What a dark vulture-like
thing he is! He lives off the dead, off dead glimpses of beauty,
off dead old sounds heard at night,” she thought. When she got
to the Wescott house she threw herself down on the porch and lay
on her back with her arms stretched above her head. Her mother
sat on a rocking chair beside her. There was a street lamp at the
corner at the end of the street and a little light came through the
branches of trees and lighted her mother's face. How white and
still and deathlike it was. When she had looked Rosalind closed
her eyes. “I mustn't. I shall lose courage," she thought.
There was no hurry about delivering the message she had come
to deliver. It would be two hours before her father came home.
The silence of the village street was broken by a hubbub that arose
in the house across the street. Two boys playing some game ran
from room to room through the house, slamming doors, shouting.
A baby began to cry and then a woman's voice protested. "Quit it!
Quit it!" the voice called. “Don't you see you have wakened the
baby? Now I shall have a time getting him to sleep again.”
Rosalind's fingers closed and her hands remained clenched. "I
came home to tell you something. I have fallen in love with a
man and can't marry him. He is a good many years older than


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
335
myself and is already married. He has two children. I love him
and I think he loves me. I know he does. I want him to have me
too. I wanted to come home and tell you before it happened,” she
said, speaking in a low clear voice. She wondered if Melville
Stoner could hear her declaration.
Nothing happened. The chair in which Rosalind's mother sat
had been rocking slowly back and forth and making a slight creak-
ing sound. The sound continued. In the house across the street
the baby stopped crying. The words Rosalind had come from
Chicago to say to her mother were said and she felt relieved and
almost happy. The silence between the two women went on and
on. Rosalind's mind wandered away. Presently there would be
some sort of reaction from her mother. She would be condemned.
Perhaps her mother would say nothing until her father came home
and would then tell him. She would be condemned as a wicked
woman, ordered to leave the house. It did not matter.
One evening, on just such another quiet summer evening as this
one, she had gone into the country with Walter Sayers. Before
that he had talked to her, at her, on many other evenings and during
long hours in the office. He had found in her someone to whom
he could talk, to whom he wanted to talk. What doors of life he
had opened for her. The talk had gone on and on. In her presence
the man was relieved, he relaxed out of the tenseness that had
become the habit of his body. He had told her of how he had
wanted to be a singer and had given up the notion. “It isn't my
wife's fault nor the children's fault,” he said. “They could have
lived without me. The trouble is I couldn't have lived without
them. I am a defeated man, was intended from the first to be a
defeated man and I needed something to cling to, something with
which to justify my defeat. I realize that now. I am a dependent.
I shall never try to sing now because I am one who has at least
one merit-I know defeat. I can accept defeat.”
That is what Walter Sayers had said and then on the summer
evening in the country as she sat beside him in his car he had sud-
denly begun to sing. He had opened a farm gate and had driven
the car silently along a grass-covered lane and into a meadow. The
lights had been put out and the car crept along. When it stopped
some cattle came and stood near by.
a


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Then he began to sing, softly at first and with increasing bold-
ness as he repeated the song over and over. Rosalind was so happy
she wanted to cry out. “It is because of myself he can sing now,"
she thought proudly. How intensely, at the moment, she had loved
the man—and yet, perhaps the thing she felt was not love after all.
There was pride in it. It was for her a moment of triumph. He
had crept up to her out of a dark place, out of the dark cave of
defeat. It had been her hand reached down that had given him
courage.
She lay on her back, at her mother's feet, on the porch of the
Wescott house trying to think, striving to get her own impulses
clear in her mind. She had just told her mother that she wanted
to give herself to the man, Walter Sayers. Having made the
statement she already wondered if it could be quite true. She was
a woman and her mother was a woman. What would her mother
have to say to her? What did mothers say to daughters? The
male element in life—what did it want? Her own desires and
impulses were not clearly realized within herself. Perhaps what
she wanted in life could be got in some sort of communion with
another woman, with her mother. What a strange beautiful thing it
would be if mothers could suddenly begin to sing to their daughters,
if out of the darkness and silence of old women song could come.
Men confused Rosalind, they had always confused her. On that
very evening her father, for the first time in years had really looked
at her. He had stopped before her as she sat on the porch and
there had been something in his eyes. A fire had burned in his
old eyes as it sometimes burned in the eyes of Walter. Was the
fire intended to consume her quite? Was it the fate of women to
be consumed by men and of men to be consumed by women?
In the orchard, an hour before, she had distinctly felt the two
men, Melville Stoner and Walter Sayers, coming towards her, walk-
ing silently on the soft carpet made of the dark shadows of trees.
They were again coming towards her.
In their thought they
approached nearer and nearer to her, to the inner truth of her.
The street and the town of Willow Springs were covered with a
mantle of silence. Was it the silence of death? Had her mother
died? Did her mother sit there now, a dead thing in the chair
beside her?


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337
The soft creaking of the rocking chair went on and on. Of the
two men whose spirits seemed hovering about, Melville Stoner
was bold and cunning. He knew much. He was unafraid. The
spirit of Walter Sayers was merciful. He was gentle, a man of
understanding. She grew afraid of Melville Stoner. He was too
close to her, knew too much of the dark stupid side of her life.
She turned on her side and stared into the darkness towards the
Stoner house, remembering her girlhood.
The faint light from the distant street lamp that had lighted
her mother's face crept between branches of trees and over the
tops of bushes and she could see dimly the figure of Melville Stoner
sitting before his house. She wished it were possible with a thought
to destroy him, wipe him out, cause him to cease to exist. He was
waiting When her mother had gone to bed and when she had
gone upstairs to her own room to lie awake he would invade her
privacy. Her father would come home, walking with dragging
footsteps along the sidewalk. He would come into the Wescott
house and through to the back door. He would pump the pail of
water at the pump and bring it into the house to put it on the box
by the kitchen sink. Then he would wind the clock. He would-
Rosalind stirred uneasily. Life in the figure of Melville Stoner
had her, it gripped her tightly. She could not escape. He would
come into her bedrom and invade her secret thoughts. There was
no escape for her. She imagined his mocking laughter ringing
through the silent house, the sound rising above the dreadful com-
monplace sounds of everyday life there. She did not want that
to happen. The sudden death of Melville Stoner would bring sweet
silence. She wished it possible with a thought to destroy him, to
destroy all men. She wanted her mother. Surely, before the
evening had passed her mother would have something to say, some-
thing living and true.
Rosalind forced the figure of Melville Stoner out of her mind.
It was as though she had got out of her bed in the room upstairs
and had taken the man by the arm to lead him to the door. She
had put him out of the room and had closed the door.
Her mind played her a trick. Melville Stoner had no sooner
gone out of her mind than Walter Sayers came in. In imagination
she was with Walter in the car on the summer evening in the


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pasture and he was singing. The cattle with their soft broad
noses and the sweet grass-flavoured breaths were crowding in close.
There was sweetness in Rosalind's thoughts now. She rested
and waited, waited for her mother to speak. In her presence
Walter Sayers had broken his long silence and soon the old silence
between mother and daughter would also be broken.
The singer who would not sing had begun to sing because of
her presence. Song was the true note of life, it was the triumph
of life over death.
What sweet solace had come to her that time when Walter
Sayers sang! How life had coursed through her body! How alive
she had suddenly become! It was at that moment she had decided
definitely, finally, that she wanted to come closer to the man, that
she wanted with him the ultimate physical closeness—to find in
physical expression through him what in his song he was finding
through her.
It was in expressing physically her love of the man she would
find the white wonder of life, the wonder of which, as a clumsy
and crude girl, she had dreamed as she lay on the grass in the
orchard. Through the body of the singer she would approach,
touch the white wonder of life. “I shall willingly sacrifice every:
thing else on the chance that may happen,” she thought.
How peaceful and quiet the summer night had become! How
clearly now she understood life! The song Walter had sung in
the field and in the presence of the cattle was in a tongue she had
not understood but now she understood everything, even the mean-
ing of the strange foreign words.
The song was about life and death. What else was there to sing
about? The sudden knowledge of the content of the song had
not come out of her own mind. The spirit of Walter was coming
towards her. It had pushed the mocking spirit of Melville Stoner
aside. What things had not the mind of Walter already done
to her mind, to the awakening woman within. Now it was telling
her the story of the song. The words of the song itself seemed to
float down the silent street of the Iowa town. They described the
sun going down in the smoke clouds of a city and the gulls coming
in from a lake to float over the city.
Now the gulls floated over a river. The river was the colour


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
339
of chrysoprase. She, Rosalind Wescott, stood on a bridge in the
heart of the city and she had become entirely convinced of the filth
and ugliness of life. She was about to throw herself into the river,
to destroy herself in an effort to make herself clean.
It did not matter. Strange sharp cries came from the birds.
The cries of the birds were like the voice of Melville Stoner. They
whirled and turned in the air overhead. In a moment more she
would throw herself into the river and then the birds would fall
straight down in a long graceful line. The body of her would
be gone, swept away by the stream, carried away to decay, but
what was really alive in herself would arise with the birds, in the
long graceful upward line of the flight of the birds.
Rosalind lay tense and still on the porch at her mother's feet.
In the air above the hot sleeping town, buried deep in the ground
beneath all towns and cities, life went on singing; it persistently
sang. The song of life was in the humming of bees, in the calling
of tree toads, in the throats of negroes rolling cotton bales on a
boat in a river.
The song was a command. It told over and over the story of
life and of death, life for ever defeated by death, death for ever
defeated by life.
The long silence of Rosalind's mother was broken and Rosalind
cried to tear herself away from the spirit of the song that had
begun to sing itself within her-
The sun sank down into the western sky over a city--
Life defeated by death,
Death defeated by life.
The factory chimneys had become pencils of light-
Life defeated by death,
Death defeated by life.
The rocking chair in which Rosalind's mother sat kept creaking.
Words came haltingly from between her white lips. The test of Ma
Wescott's life had come. Always she had been defeated. Now


340
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she must triumph in the person of Rosalind, the daughter who
had come out of her body. To her she must make clear the fate of
all women. Young girls grew up dreaming, hoping, believing.
There was a conspiracy. Men made words, they wrote books and
sang songs about a thing called love. Young girls believed. They
married or entered into close relationship with men without mar-
riage. On the marriage night there was a brutal assault and after
that the woman had to try to save herself as best she could. She
withdrew within herself, further and further within herself. Ma
Wescott had stayed all her life hidden away within her own house,
in the kitchen of her house. As the years passed and after the
children came her man had demanded less and less of her. Now
this new trouble had come. Her daughter was to have the same
experience, to go through the experience that had spoiled life for
her.
How proud she had been of Rosalind, going out into the world,
making her own way. Her daughter dressed with a certain air,
walked with a certain air. She was a proud, upstanding, tri-
umphant thing. She did not need a man.
“God, Rosalind, don't do it, don't do it,” she muttered over and
over.
How much she had wanted Rosalind to keep clear and clean!
Once she also had been a young woman, proud, upstanding. Could
any one think she had ever wanted to become Ma Wescott, fat,
heavy, and old? All through her married life she had stayed in
her own house, in the kitchen of her own house, but in her own
way she had watched, she had seen how things went with women.
Her man had known how to make money, he had always housed
her comfortably. He was a slow, silent man, but in his own way
he was as good as any of the men of Willow Springs. Men worked
for money, they ate heavily, and then at night they came home
to the women they had married.
Before she married, Ma Wescott had been a farmer's daughter.
She had seen things among the beasts, how the male pursued the
female. There was a certain hard insistent cruelty. Life per-
petuated itself that way. The time of her own marriage was a dim,
terrible time. Why had she wanted to marry? She tried to tell
Rosalind about it. "I saw him on the Main Street of town here,


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
341
one Saturday evening when I had come to town with father, and
two weeks after that I met him again at a dance out in the country,"
she said. She spoke like one who has been running a long distance
and who has some important, some immediate message to deliver.
"He wanted me to marry him and I did it. He wanted me to
marry him and I did it.”
She could not get beyond the fact of her marriage. Did her
daughter think she had no vital thing to say concerning the rela-
tionship of men and women? All through her married life she
had stayed in her husband's house, working as a beast might work,
washing dirty clothes, dirty dishes, cooking food.
She had been thinking, all through the years she had been think-
ing. There was a dreadful lie in life, the whole fact of life was
a lie.
She had thought it all out. There was a world somewhere unlike
the world in which she lived. It was a heavenly place in which
there was no marrying or giving in marriage, a sexless quiet wind-
less place where mankind lived in a state of bliss. For some
unknown reason mankind had been thrown out of that place, had
been thrown down upon the earth. It was a punishment for an
unforgivable sin, the sin of sex.
The sin had been in her as well as in the man she had married.
She had wanted to marry. Why else did she do it? Men and
women were condemned to commit the sin that destroyed them.
Except for a few rare sacred beings no man or woman escaped.
What thinking she had done! When she had just married and
after her man had taken what he wanted of her he slept heavily
but she did not sleep. She crept out of bed and going to a window
looked at the stars. The stars were quiet. With what a slow
stately tread the moon moved across the sky. The stars did not
sin. They did not touch one another. Each star was a thing apart
from all other stars, a sacred inviolate thing. On the earth, under
the stars everything was corrupt, the trees, flowers, grasses, the
beasts of the field, men and women. They were all corrupt. They
lived for a moment and then fell into decay. She herself was
falling into decay. Life was a lie. Life perpetuated itself by the
lie called love. The truth was that life itself came out of sin,
perpetuated itself only by sin.


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a
"There is no such thing as love. The word is a lie. The man
you are telling me about wants you for the purpose of sin," she
said, and getting heavily up went into the house.
Rosalind heard her moving about in the darkness. She came to
the screen door and stood looking at her daughter lying tense and
waiting on the porch. The passion of denial was so strong in her
that she felt choked. To the daughter it seemed that her mother
standing in the darkness behind her had become a great spider,
striving to lead her down into some web of darkness. “Men only
hurt women,” she said, "they can't help wanting to hurt women.
They are made that way. The thing they call love doesn't exist.
It's a lie.
“Life is dirty. Letting a man touch her dirties a woman.” Ma
Wescott fairly screamed forth the words. They seemed torn from
her, from some deep inner part of her being. Having said them
she moved off into the darkness and Rosalind heard her going
slowly towards the stairway that led to the bedrooms above. She
was weeping in the peculiar half choked way in which old fat
women weep. The heavy feet that had begun to mount the stairs
stopped and there was silence. Ma Wescott had said nothing of
what was in her mind. She had thought it all out, what she wanted
to say to her daughter. Why would the words not come? The
passion for denial within her was not satisfied. “There is no love.
Life is a lie. It leads to sin, to death and decay,” she called into
the darkness.
A strange, almost uncanny thing happened to Rosalind. The
figure of her mother went out of her mind and she was in fancy
again a young girl and had gone with other young girls to visit a
friend about to be married. With the others she stood in a room
where white dresses lay on a bed. One of her companions, a thin,
flat-breasted girl fell on her knees beside the bed. A cry arose. Did
it come from the girl or from the old tired defeated woman within
the Wescott house? "Don't do it. Oh, Rosalind, don't do it,
“
”
pleaded a voice, broken with sobs.
The Wescott house had become silent like the street outside
and like the sky sprinkled with stars into which Rosalind gazed.
The tenseness within her relaxed and she tried again to think.
There was a thing that balanced, that swung backwards and for-
wards. Was it merely her heart beating? Her mind cleared.


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
343
The song that had come from the lips of Walter Sayers was
still singing within her-
Life the conqueror over death,
Death the conqueror over life.
She sat up and put her head into her hands. “I came here to
Willow Springs to put myself to a test. Is it the test of life and
death ?” she asked herself. Her mother had gone up the stairway,
into the darkness of the bedroom above.
The song singing within Rosalind went on-
Life the conqueror over death,
Death the conqueror over life.
Was the song a male thing, the call of the male to the female,
a lie, as her mother had said? It did not sound like a lie. The
song had come from the lips of the man Walter and she had left
him and had come to her mother. Then Melville Stoner, another
male, had come to her. In him also was singing the song of life
and death. When the song stopped singing within one did death
come? Was death but denial ? The song was singing within
herself. What a confusion!
After her last outcry Ma Wescott had gone weeping up the stairs
and to her own room and to bed. After a time Rosalind followed.
She threw herself on to her own bed without undressing. Both
women lay waiting. Outside, in the darkness before his house sat
Melville Stoner, the male, the man who knew of all that had
passed between mother and daughter. Rosalind thought of the
bridge over the river near the factory in the city and of the gulls
floating in the air high above the river. She wished herself there,
standing on the bridge. “It would be sweet now to throw my body
down into the river,” she thought. She imagined herself falling
swiftly and the swifter fall of the birds down out of the sky. They
were swooping down to pick up the life she was ready to drop,
swooping swiftly and beautifully down. That was what the song
Walter had sung was about.
Henry Wescott came home from his evening at Emanuel


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Wilson's store. He went heavily through the house to the back
door and the pump. There was the slow creaking sound of the
pump working and then he came into the house and put the pail
of water on the box by the kitchen sink. A little of the water
spilled. There was a soft little slap—like a child's bare foot strik-
ing the floor-
Rosalind arose. The dead cold weariness that had settled down
upon her went away. Cold dead hands had been gripping her.
Now they were swept aside. Her bag was in a closet but she had
forgotten it. Quickly she took off her shoes and holding them in
her hands went out into a hallway in her stocking feet. Her father
came heavily up the stairs past her as she stood breathless with her
body pressed against the wall in the hallway.
How quick and alert her mind had become! There was a train
eastward bound towards Chicago that passed through Willow
Springs at two in the morning. She would not wait for it. She
would walk the eight miles to the next town to the east. That
would get her out of town. It would give her something to do.
“I need to be moving now," she thought as she ran down the stairs
and went silently out of the house.
She walked on the grass along the sidewalk to the gate before
Melville Stoner's house and he came down to the gate to meet
her. He laughed mockingly. “I fancied I might have another
chance to walk with you before the night was gone,” he said
bowing. Rosalind did not know how much of the conversation
between herself and her mother he had heard. It did not matter.
He knew all Ma Wescott had said, all she could say and all Rosa-
lind could say or understand. The thought was infinitely sweet
to Rosalind. It was Melville Stoner who lifted the town of
Willow Springs up out of the shadow of death. Words were un-
necessary. With him she had established the thing beyond words,
beyond passion, the fellowship in living, the fellowship in life.
They walked in silence to the town's edge and then Melville
Stoner put out his hand. “You'll come with me?” she asked, but
he shook his head and laughed. "No," he said, “I'll stay here.
My time for going passed long ago. I'll stay here until I die. I'll
stay here with my thoughts.”


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
345
He turned and walked away into the darkness beyond the round
circle of light cast by the last street lamp on the street that now
became a country road leading to the next town to the east. Rosa-
lind stood to watch him go and something in his long loping gait
again suggested to her mind the figure of a gigantic bird. "He is
like the gulls that float above the river in Chicago,” she thought.
"His spirit floats above the town of Willow Springs. When the
death in life comes to the people here he swoops down, with his
mind, plucking out the beauty of them.”
She walked at first slowly along the road between corn fields.
The night was a vast quiet place into which she could walk in
peace. A little breeze rustled the corn blades but there were no
dreadful significant human sounds, the sounds made by those who
lived physically but who in spirit were dead, had accepted death,
believed only in death. The corn blades rubbed against each
other and there was a low sweet sound as though something was
being born, old dead physical life was being torn away, cast aside.
Perhaps new life was coming into the land.
Rosalind began to run. She had thrown off the town and her
father and mother as a runner might throw off a heavy and un-
necessary garment. She wished also to throw off the garments
that stood between her body and nudity. She wanted to be naked,
new born. Two miles out of town a bridge crossed Willow Creek.
It was empty and dry, but in the darkness she imagined it filled
with water, swift running water, water the colour of chrysoprase.
She had been running, but now stopped and stood on the bridge,
her breath coming in quick little gasps.
After a time she went on again, walking until she had regained
her breath and then running again. Her body tingled with life.
She did not ask herself what she was going to do, how she was to
meet the problem she had come to Willow Springs half hoping to
have solved by a word from her mother. She ran. Before her eyes
the dusty road kept coming up to her out of the darkness. She
ran forwards, always forwards into a faint streak of light. The
darkness unfolded before her. There was joy in the running and
with every step she took she achieved a new sense of escape. A
delicious notion came into her mind. As she ran she thought the
grey road under her feet became more distinct. It was as though


346
THE MIRACLE
the darkness had grown afraid in her presence and now sprang
aside, out of her path. There was a sensation of boldness. She
had herself become something that within itself contained light.
She was a creator of light. At her approach darkness grew afraid
and fled away into the distance. When that thought came she
found herself able to run without stopping to rest and half wished
she might run on forever, through towns and cities, all through the
land, driving darkness away with her presence.
The End
THE MIRACLE
BY J. DONALD ADAMS
I walked the lake shore late to-day.
Spring was a distant promise,
Whispered from a spray
Of budding alder on the hill.
I saw the Mountain, chiselled, cold,
A painted back-drop, a dead mould
Of majesty. I saw the sky
A leaden roof-top to the world.
But there will come a day,
The golden banners of the spring unfurled,
When I shall see again
The ancient miracle made plain;
Earth shot with splendour,
Stained marvellous with light,
And that dull mountain, which was clay,
A high blue altar at the throne of Day.


AE
SEATED DANCER.
BY C. BERTRAM HARTMAN





AE
SEATED DANCER.
BY C. BERTRAM HARTMAN





AMERICAN LETTER
August, 1921
TAI
T o
a
AKEN by themselves, perhaps, the movies may not appear to
add up aesthetically to much, but when compared with the
legitimate drama they are seen to have some rather blessed advan-
tages. Virtue is negative and the movies have virtue. Let us say
that every so often, from desperation and the inability to learn bet-
ter, or to please a friend, you go to a play. You have ceased expect-
ing any very intense pleasure, but you do hope that you are not go-
ing to be humiliated. And yet if you see a "legitimate drama,” that
is precisely what is most likely to happen. There is something pecul-
iarly humiliating about the combined voice and facial expression of
a good actor saying stupid lines or of a bad actor saying good lines ;
and there are mighty few plays where one of these nefarious combi-
nations is not kept before you most of the evening. The movie gives
us the facial expression and eliminates the voice (just as the puppet-
show gives us the voice and eliminates the expression) and we are
grateful.
This limitation is regarded as unfortunate; people argue that a
good play, perfectly acted, is more satisfying than a good movie or
a good puppet-show, because you are getting twice as much for your
money. They may be right, but the legitimate drama is so pre-
carious, so at the mercy of the almost invariable idiots in the cast,
that the more limited forms have all the odds in their favour.
The movies, of course, do not escape all snares. One of the most
trying experiences imaginable is that of attending a movie which
you cannot see. The movie is nothing if not visual, and when from
the start the proceedings are obscured by an impenetrable fog of
sentiment it is best to go home early. Mr Griffith managed to let
us catch occasional glimpses of The Birth of a Nation by casting
emotional nonentities in nearly all the principal parts. The play
called for mush, and while they did their best, they had the luck to
be short on that commodity. Even this expedient, however, failed
to save Way Down East.
The movies we have been able to see most clearly were either


348
AMERICAN LETTER
serial thrillers in which the sentiment was conventionalized and
perfunctory, in which the dime novel gestures had formal dignity
and were often in keeping with the scenery (The Perils of a Girl
Reporter for example) or tragi-comedies in which the tragic parts
had all been given to comic actors and vice versa. I do not remem-
ber the names of any of these plays, but I do remember a scene in
one of them where many faces appear at windows in a courtyard,
and where the very satisfying arrangement of the faces is not inter-
fered with by laughter or tears. They at least suggested the possi-
bility of a movie which should have more formal interest than the
average street accident.
As for the question of the movies being a new art or anything
like it, the answer for the present seems plain enough. To call in
the "cut back” and the "close up” in support of such a notion, to re-
fer to them as part of a "technique,” is absurd. There are at present
some important differences between the movies and the legitimate
drama. Actors and actresses who are graceful on the stage are often
graceless on the screen, but this is probably a simple matter of me-
chanics and will be corrected. Charlie Chaplin's quick, right-angled
gestures, his salient shoes, fit the jerky movement of the film better
than Mary Garden. However, if producers spend more money on
film and speed up their cameras, the movies will indubitably quit
hopping and start becoming. M Bergson's philosophy will tri-
umph; with colour added, with a phonograph geared to the roller,
with stereoscopic lenses attached to the seats, we shall soon be back
on the stage we started from. We shall have brought home only
the Rocky Mountains and the Monongahela.
The attempts at giving the movies a reasoned critical foundation
which I have so far seen, have not been very indispensable. Most
highbrow writers on the subject write about anything but the mov-
ies. They are interested in psychoanalysis or in the fourth dimen-
sion. They have a cosmic, an almost German yearning for the
realms of infinite space and of the unconscious. But why hurry the
producers who have only begun to succeed at home into these tick-
lish regions? A critic recently observed that The Golem was as per-
fect in the plastic form as Caligari in the flat. If this is true, let us
by all means return to pancakes.
Mr Willard Huntington Wright in a recent number of Photo-
play discusses Caligari as the first three-dimensional film. Why,


W. C. BLUM
349
one asks, should the movies be three-dimensional ? Because, says
Mr Wright, painters have always done their best to paint in three
dimensions. He does not explain what painting has to do with
the movies; from which one gathers either that the movies are not
a new art, or that Mr Wright, like all good critics when the sub-
ject in hand gives them nothing to talk about, talks about some-
thing else. His article is called The Romance of the Third Dimen-
sion.
Another new art which we are threatened with is the art of mobile
colour. The earliest sponsors of mobile colour were ridden by the
musical analogy. Every note in the musical scale was supposed to
have a counterpart in colour, and musical scores were supposed to be
playable in music or colours or both. The musical analogy was in-
genious as far as it went, but it stopped short of the fact. There is
no spatial problem in music, whereas in mobile colour the spatial
problem and its solution or evasion differentiate the various colour
organs far more radically than musical instruments were ever dif-
ferentiated.
You may have, for instance, a square or oval of flat colour, or a
background and a changing figure, or many lozenges, triangles, or
circles. You may have whatever you want, and you are lucky if
you know what it is.
The only colour organ which I have seen in operation more than
once is Mr Wilfred's at Huntington, L. I., and it is said to be the
most highly perfected of its type. The colours are thrown on a
screen; the field is square. He begins by gradually reducing his
theatre to complete darkness, the square field next appears in some
neutral tint and deepens in intensity; a three-dimensional figure (say
a spool or horse shoe) generally asymmetrical, is introduced from
the top, turns, blurs or sharpens, throws out rays or coils of smoke,
draws them in and retreats upwards. All the elements change colour
rhythmically; the figure descends, advances, retreats, ascends again
several times, and the show ends as it began.
Mr Wilfred's machine can apparently do anything. What he
makes it do is nearly always interesting and impressive. The slow
fading of an intense purple square through mauve and pale tan to
blackness is particularly so. It is the shapes, the figures, which
seem arbitrary, which raise the old questions.
It appears to me that Mr Wilfred has bitten off more than he can


350
AMERICAN LETTER
chew. These moving shapes of his can be charming, marvellous
even, like the whirling draperies of the lady who used to dance,
illuminated by coloured spotlights, among twenty big looking-
glasses. He can imitate, if he likes, a pulsating heart, but does a
pulsating heart bring us any nearer to the intensity of a new syn-
thesis? How introduce artistic order into what is at present no
more than a very vivid spectacle? So far (and here I apologize to
I
Mr Wright) the only method of arranging shapes beautifully on a
flat surface has been the method of the painter and Mr Wilfred
is apparently not a painter. Furthermore one wonders whether a
first-rate painter would want his picture to become fluid. Having
spent much effort to make something which though stationary shall
express movement, he might very well feel that to set all the deli-
cate relations in flux would be (other more serious damages aside)
to make the movement less rather than more real. He might be
made to see the advantage of a series of pictures nicely reproduced
and following one another as in the animated cartoon, just as a
dancer might see the advantage in a perfect reproduction on the
screen of his dance, but this would bring us back to the movie, not
forwards to a new art of mobile colour.
The truth is that "mobile colour” as a name for the work of any
colour organ, is not exact enough. You cannot have mobile colour
without mobile shape, and this, after all, is the problem of the
movie. You can, however, have changing colours with shapes
which do not move or which move only in stiff and regular patterns.
This would be the art of the electric sign, and a very important one.
It is to be the principle of Mr Claude Bragdon's "luxorgn,” when
that instrument is completed.
W. C. BLUM
a


1
BOOK REVIEWS
HÉLOÏSE AND ABÉLARD
Héloïse AND ABÉLARD. By George Moore. Two
volumes. 8vo. 440 pages. Privately printed for sub-
scribers only by Boni and Liveright.
ATURE laboured infinitely, some tell us, to raise man from
N ,
a
but it seems to me that Mr Moore in his later work is labouring
with a minuteness equal to Nature's to depress us to the quad-
ruped again. Remembering the minute industry of The Brook
Kerith and how by a patient nosing in the backyards of Palestine
Mr Moore piled up for us a heap of tarnished stuff and asked
us to recognize in it the Figure that was a world's magnet, I did
not hope that one of the most touching tales of human affection
would fare any better under his pawing than the Divine Love
Story. What do I remember of The Brook Kerith? Slow to anger
as I read it, because Mr Moore's monotonous recitation of the story
narcotized me, my anger awakened when I ceased to read, and
breaks into a flame now whenever I recall the rheumatic shepherd,
mumbling farmers' proverbs, shuffling about the pastures with
simples for his ewes, the form Mr Moore has substituted for Him
of whom a poet sang: "How beautiful upon the mountains are the
feet of Him that bringeth good tidings.” No art of writing in The
Brook Kerith, if Mr Moore has an art, can compensate for this
overthrow of his readers.
Reading Héloïse and Abélard I fall indeed, but not from so
great a height as in The Brook Kerith. I am less hurt, and my anger
has more of ferocity in it than grief. Being on all fours I am
reminded of my teeth, and would bite as well as bark. Mr Moore
cannot complain, he has put his readers in a position favourable for
biting and he has never denied himself the use of his teeth. The
story of Abélard and Héloïse as we know it in the Letters comes
to us as a thing warm and young and passionately alive out of a


352
HELOISE AND ABELARD
past so remote from our habit of thought to-day that we believed
we had no use for it and had folded it up and laid it aside in lawn
and lavender. Mr Moore recognizes the life and youth but is
obtuse to the lavender in the lawn. Those muddied eyes of his
show him only dirty linen, which, in accordance with his usual
ill-directed industry, he proceeds to wash in public by a process
warranted, for us who know his ways, to turn white black.
There are perhaps a dozen beautiful stories that are the patri-
mony of humanity and it would be absurd for any one to say that
these stories may not be reworked by the poets or the writers. Is
it not to the poets we owe them, for even Helen, as contemporary
history knew her, may have been one of those women who, as A.E.
says: "never lifted up a single heart in their day,” and only as the
a
poets gave her to us we see her? Among the moderns, Shaw has
dared greatly in his re-creation of the old tales. He brings intel-
lect to bear on them and if he does not burnish them for us with
the soft radiance of romance, he can give them an intellectual glit-
ter. The old tales were narrated with the old naturalism, unself-
conscious and frank; I do not think you can impose on this the
modern naturalistic methods, a record of sensations, intensely self-
conscious, and hope to achieve a work of art. It may
be possible
to do it, but Mr Moore has not done it in Héloïse and Abélard.
He has brought no fresh beauty to the story, the only excuse for
retelling it. He has muddied the colours that glowed so freshly
in the Letters, as he had not the intellect to recreate Jesus, so he
has not the passion to recreate Abélard and Héloïse. Moore never
rises to any intellectual conception of Jesus. The whole pother
of his hundreds of pages in The Brook Kerith, is about one whose
speeches as recorded by Moore, never show even a glimmer of intel-
lect. The personal interrogation of Moore: “How would I feel
if I were he?" runs like a little yapping dog beside the reader and
arouses in him the desire to kick. Pretty language is not the mir-
acle worker Moore believes it to be. It can do a great deal I admit,
and I can be drawn aside from my anger even in Kerith by the
pleasantness of his use of words, but it cannot fill up the voids in
Moore's mind when he tries to supply a perfectly natural motive,
from the Moore standpoint, for the action in the Gospels.
Let me get away, if I can, from The Brook Kerith, Moore's
attempt to rationalize a divine story, to Héloïse and Abélard, his
a


SUSAN L. MITCHELL
353
effort to capture and cage for modern readers the wild thing that
Auttered in the Letters. I appreciate his amazing industry as a
restorer of the picture of the times the lovers lived in, his descrip-
tions of furniture and clothes, the subdued, detached tone of the
narration, the selection of incident, of scenery. All those factors
have their full weight with me, for I have in others of his books
followed with interest and I think understood Moore's processes
in writing, but nothing in the two volumes, if one excepts the bind-
ing, which is delightful in colour and, in the backs at least, in
material, seems to me as artistic as the dedication to Madame
X.. Not even written in English, the language Moore
has worked hardest at, I love it, its grace, its sophistry, its little
wink. For I find Moore in it-Moore who is himself the best work
of art he ever created. He does not really get a fling in the text.
What is the use of his spancelling himself with the love story of
Abélard and Héloïse, a thing he cannot remotely understand, for
Moore has had too many love adventures in the imagination to
have had any in the flesh, and a man with whom any pretty girl
might walk in safety through the desert of Sahara, knowing that
he and not she would be the one who was afraid, has no business
to be meddling with a passionate human story like Abélard's.
Moore brings to love affairs the noxious mind of a prude and is
curious where he should be reverent. In Héloïse and Abélard
he is re-writing in afternoon tea what has been written in heart's
blood. He cannot wholly wash out the beauty of the story, indeed
towards the close its strong and noble features are discerned even
through Moore's palimpsest. The understanding of affection with
which I have always credited Moore gives him some notion of the
heart of Héloïse in her later period, and he makes her far more
attractive then than when, as a robust schoolgirl, curiously reminis-
cent of one hoyden in his Memoirs of My Dead Life, she throws
herself at Abélard's head.
But the writing. The critics of Mr Moore's later work have a
great deal to say about his art as a writer. Perhaps these highly
strung and nervous beings are afraid of coming suddenly round
a corner and finding themselves face to face with Mr Moore, whose
tongue is mightier than his pen. The simple fact is that if we
applied to any page of Héloïse and Abélard the test that Mr
Moore applied to the Apologia of Newman, dismissing him as a


354
HELOISE AND ABELARD
>
>
stylist, we would discover more mechanical construction of sen.
tences in a half page than Mr Moore was able to find after search-
ing a whole volume of Newman. We open at random on page
eight and find within the measure of thirty lines all these old forms:
"painful to contemplate," "judging harshly," "a letter acquaint-
ing her of the fact," "he relied upon her to break the news,” “never
sought to discover," "fond of good living," "springing out of his
chair," "giving a solemn order," "paying a silent respect to grief,"
all pure journalism, without a sign of research or fastidiousness
in choice.
Mr Moore has failed in his attempt to recreate the story of Abél-
ard and Héloïse, because he was unable to bring to it any new
beauty. In his hundreds of pages there is nothing to move us as
the passion of one of the Letters moves us. He was unequal to the
restoration he undertook, and the effect it has upon one is as dis-
tressing as would be that of the Venus of Milo “restored” by the
addition of a Paris hat. Even as a historical novelist Mr Moore
has failed, for his narrative style is too ponderous. After the
Dedication I like nothing so well as the last sentence.
Susan L. MITCHELL


CRITICISM OR PSYCHOLOGY?
The AMERICAN Novel. By Carl Van Doren. 12mo.
295 pages. The Macmillan Company. $2.
MEN
R VAN DOREN'S adeptness in this history of the Ameri-
can novel comes agreeably after the too much flat information
and the witlessness that deface the average treatise of this sort.
The book is a contribution to a newer and rather extra-academic
criticism, a criticism best characterized as expert. The bland and
entertaining ease of its ways is not evidence of superficiality, but of
careful skill and undoubtedly much arid labor and many dusty
hours in digesting a mass of more or less discrete matter. The thor-
oughness of this preparation is evident from the completeness of
discourse, the strong attention, the quick and full awareness dis-
played by the text. The book covers the period from 1744 to the
present, necessarily touching upon tedious writers and dull writing,
but its manner is alert and active and its presentation never fails
in fresh changefulness or the skill of discussion which says much
in little without congestion. It is well-bodied and competently
thought. Its facts are considered and not merely accumulated; its
guiding principle of consideration is intelligence, not pedantry.
History and criticism meet and alternate; chapters absorbed in the
consideration of a single artist, as those on Cooper, Hawthorne,
Howells, Henry James, surround chapters which follow the
fortunes of tendencies, periods, and schools, but the author's feeling
for the whole keeps him and his reader well aware of direction and
progress. The book is almost wholly critical in intent.
Expertness and competence are, in this account, the chief quali-
ties displayed by Mr Van Doren. His writing has that mark of
being well considered that he nowhere complains of lack of space.
The readability, the reasonableness of thinking, the steadiness of
rendered opinion, the watchful proportioning, the scrupulous care
for the reader's attention are pleasantly and constantly effective to
the end. His criticism is distinguished in information, in mobility
of consideration, and conscientiousness in perceiving and assem-
bling the grounds of judgement. He not merely shows an intent to


356
CRITICISM OR PSYCHOLOGY?
see the thing from all angles possible to the seer, but states his find-
ings with an agreeable moderation of utterance. His opinions, it
would seem, are happily somewhat experimental still, his tastes
forming, his critical culture and background somewhat still in the
finding. He has a share of the grand relish which makes criticism
readable, though less of the reverse relish of bellicosity and denun-
ciation which makes it even more readable; only occasionally is
there a glint of teeth through his blandness, to fetch the reader
hasting along vainly in hope of affray. He professes non-par-
tisanship, but one suspects from his paean to Howells that he
is of the cult; nor does he escape the select enthusiasm of those who
read in and write of Henry James. It must be said, however, that
the chapters on Howells and James are the best in the book, both in
effectiveness of execution and care and depth of thinking.
Every page is testimony of well-felt prose and considered opinion.
The discussion is freed of the old dull baggage of platitude and
overworn expression, and couched in newer locutions fresher of
thought. Of especial effect are his characterizations of individual
achievement, as, for instance, his comment on the art of The Scarlet
Letter:
“Hawthorne gives every evidence of having moved through his
first and greatest long romance with an unfaltering stride, never
obliged to consider how he should construct because the story grew
almost of itself, and never at a loss for substance because his mind
was perfectly stored-neither too much nor too little—with the
finest materials of observation gathered during a lifetime. For
three years he had written almost nothing; now all the power he
had unconsciously hoarded freed itself and flowed into his book;
now all the quarter century of discipline in form and texture effort-
lessly shaped an abundant flood.”
Such readably fluent deliverances are representative of the general
felicity, the organic and knowing soundness of his writing. He
chooses his vocabulary for intelligibility and sense, and operates
his discussion with variety and taste. His book should be under-
standable even to American undergraduates; its clarity could not
be much enhanced were it clothed in monosyllables.
When this is said, however, we appear to be about done. Though


CHARLES K. TRUEBLOOD
357
this book is neither shallow nor thin of substance, there still does
not occur very frequently in it, any great depth of criticism, either
of art or life, such as this from the chapter on Henry James:
“Praise can hardly exaggerate the skill with which James at first
warily investigates as from without the spirit of the fresh young
girl (Isabel Archer in The Portrait of A Lady) gradually transfers
the action to her consciousness, and thenceforth with almost no
appearance of art reduces his story to the terms of her realization
of her fate. In something of this delaying fashion life dawns upon
its victims.”
This sort of comprehension if extended lends to the business and
the results of criticism an importance independent of its subject.
But there is here not a great deal of such philosophic going deep
or far; nor much broad or synthetic generalization. The main con-
cern of the book is with proficient characterizing and description.
It is a coherently arranged series of careful individual analyses held
together more by skill of arrangement than by any reasoning from
assembled concrete entities to a general rationale. The superior
chapters of the book are those in individual consideration of par-
ticular artists; and the competence of the sections on periods,
schools, movements depends principally on the same individual
studies made brief, adroitly grouped, and the groups neatly joined.
As a history of the American novel, a flexible and particularizing
consideration of American novelists and their efforts, it is an evi-
dent success—clever, smooth, careful, expert. But its author has
unfortunately led us to expect of it somewhat more.
"This book”, he writes modestly but romantically, “is meant to
serve as a chapter in the history of the American imagination”-
from which it might not unreasonably be inferred that we are to
have something more in the way of construction, theory-frame,
historical interpretation of American psychology than we get.
Moderate as his statement of intent is, the realization is more mod-
erate still. Indeed we scarcely learn from his discussion what man-
ner of manifestation the American imagination is. Except in the
first chapter and random brief passages elsewhere devoted to the
movements of public taste in fiction, the American imagination, as
imagination, is but desultorily mentioned. From the evidence of


358
CRITICISM OR PSYCHOLOGY?
the book it would appear that the author is by talent first an ex-
cellent critic of particular writers of fiction, second a deft historian
of periods and groups, and last—if seriously at all—a psychologist
of the general mind. His notion of his work as a chapter in the his-
tory of the American imagination has doubtless done the book good,
helped inform the difficultly managed matter, illuminated the ex-
tensive labours of preparation that must have gone into its bland
competence. But it evidently did not light his thinking to the
final extremity of discovering and answering any really central
question. His resting in description, his omission to drive his think-
ing to the indicated summit, may have been from excess of con-
science, distrust of his constructions, fear that interpretation at-
tempted too far would end in distortion. It may have been simply
from exhaustion of his energies in the monumental task of assem-
bling and presenting the material ; to go farther and make the chap-
ter a portrayal of any general mental faculty or trait may have
needed more voltage than was left. Having stated his intention,
however, he could justifiably have taken the risk, one feels, of
pushing more beyond and through his individual characterizations,
to the making of his group studies more deductions than amalgams
of description, as they tend to be. Greater effort in this direction
would have enhanced the force of his work and justified his preface,
which, as it stands, is little more than a romance, a statement of
inoperative second intention, a pretty conceit, only slightly indi-
cating the actual character of the book.
Charles K. TRUEBLOOD


A BRILLIANT FAILURE
The PORTRAIT OF Mr W. H. By Oscar Wilde. 8vo.
133 pages. Mitchell Kennerley. $15.
O
SCAR WILDE'S essay entitled The Portrait of Mr W. H.,
dealing with the mystery of Shakespeare's Sonnets, was pub-
lished in Blackwood's Magazine for July, 1889, and caused much
discussion. It was Wilde's métier to cause discussion. Shortly
afterwards it became known that he was working on a larger study
of the same subject, and in 1893 this was announced for publica-
tion. But there was some delay, for reasons now obscure; the new
work, though completed, did not appear; and on the day of Wilde's
arrest, April 5, 1895, his books were withdrawn from the pub-
lisher's shelves, and the manuscript of The Portrait was supposed
to have been returned to the author's house in Tite Street, Chelsea.
Since those troubled days, no trace of the lost essay had been
discovered, and no one, however optimistic, expected to hear more
about it. Suddenly, in July, 1920, it came into the hands of
Mitchell Kennerley, who of course at once recognized it, and made
arrangements for its publication. The present writer has since seen
and read the manuscript. A portion of it consists of pasted sheets
from the magazine essay, revised by Wilde and carrying his neat
marginal alterations; but the rest is new matter, in his beautifully
formed script, which seemed to vary so slightly in the years between
Oxford and Reading. Some one—I think Richard Le Gallienne
wrote or spoke of it years ago as the "... poet's wonderful hand-
writing, each letter delicately moulded as a petal.” That does not
quite convey the effect; the petal is not so conspicuous as the per-
sonality. After all, handwriting should be more expressive than
boutonnières. Still, Wilde's boutonnières were expressive.
There have been many theories, interesting and otherwise, on the
subject of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Wilde's theory is not one of the
most striking, nor did he invent it; nor, perhaps, would he have
used it if he had appreciated the Sonnets at their full value. Much
as he found in them, there is surely something that he missed-
a sense of bigger personalities and larger issues than he has painted


360
A BRILLIANT FAILURE
in The Portrait. But these, in degree, were the things that he
habitually missed. W. B. Yeats has quoted his phrase, “Nothing
in life interests me but the mask,” and Frank Harris says in his
biography, “Life was not his study nor the world-drama his field.
His talk was all of literature and art and the vanities.
When the enterprising Thomas Thorpe took it upon himself to
issue the original (Quarto) edition of the Sonnets, and prefixed
his brief dedication to the "onlie begetter" of the poems, it was by
a happy stroke of fatuity or thoughtfulness that he gave merely
the initials—the famous W. H.—by which this mysterious person
was to be known (or not known). Many men have no doubt been
saved from more useful pursuits by thus having a problem to
play with.
Wilde, in The Portrait, develops the theory of Thomas Tyrwhitt,
the accomplished Shakespearean who also gave the world the first
edition of Rowley (it seems hard to believe that Chatterton was not
eighteen when he solved so abruptly his problem of how long genius
could feed on itself). As a philological expert Tyrwhitt paused at
the line (Sonnet 20)-
-
"A man in hew, all Hews in his controwling.”
Did not this play allusively upon the name of the beloved friend
-Hughes? There were other passages, he thought, tending to con-
firm the conjecture, and the Christian name, Will, might be derived
from the much-discussed "Will” sonnets (135, 136, 143). Plau-
sible or not, the theory had sufficiently distinguished parentage in
Tyrwhitt; it was adopted by Samuel Butler when he tried to do for
the Sonnets what he had done for the Odyssey; and it was adapted
by Wilde for the purposes of his story-essay, not because he really
believed in it, but because he was interested in the openings it pre-
sented. He knew that in the final analysis it was only a sort of
moonbeam theory, very lovely, very fascinating, but intangible.”
The Portrait, as already implied, is in the form of a story—a
skeleton story, clothed with the flesh and blood of the Sonnets and
animated by Wilde's own spirit. Starting with the Hughes theory,
and “proving” it on the lines that seemed convincing to Tyrwhitt
and Butler, he proceeds to fill in the shadowy vacancies. Touch
by touch, phrase by phrase, a personality is built up and the ab-


CHARLES VALE
361
a
>
straction William Hughes becomes the young actor Willie Hughes
—the boy-actor who played Viola and Imogen, Juliet and Rosa-
lind, Portia and Desdemona, and Cleopatra herself; the boy whose
extraordinary beauty and genius had stirred the deepest feelings of
the poet's nature. But they do not stir ours. It is a shadowy por-
trait, after all, that Wilde has sketched so carefully; he could not
make it vital. It is Wilde himself who draws our interest—Wilde
and the Sonnets, artist and art. So far as Hughes himself is con-
cerned, we are indifferent. Our neo-Platonism is altogether too
academic, perhaps; we are not responsive to the light that dazzled
Michael Angelo and so many shining spirits.
And here, of course, comes in the debated question of the "moral-
ity” of the Sonnets and their author.
Slander had no doubt been slyly at work, according to its habit,
both before and after Thorpe had contrived to procure some or all
of the "sugred sonnets” circulating amongst the poet's private
friends, and offer them to a public for whom they were not in-
tended—at the time, at least. John Benson, in his rearrangement
of 1640, takes pains to convey the assurance that the poems are
"of the same purity the Authour himselfe then living avouched.”
The Sonnets, then, had presumably been attacked, and Shakespeare
had defended them. A few of the initiate, with a clue, like Jonson,
to the true story, had perhaps made pointed remarks. But after
their time, when contemporary gossip, such as it was, had died out,
the general vague impression seems to have been that the verses
had been composed for a mistress, the "dark lady” of the later series
tending to confuse the casual reader. Steevens was the first to
attack them intemperately. "What,” he sneers, in his note to
.
Sonnet 54, "has truth or nature to do with sonnets ?” Wordsworth,
who knew somewhat more about nature and about poetry, saw the
beauties and understood the human note of the poems. Coleridge
felt that the spirit was essentially feminine all through, whatever
the outward figure might be; there were “subtle shining secrecies”
of meaning that only a woman could have evoked. That is a feel-
ing which many have shared. But the majority of the poems, none
the less, are addressed to a man; Sonnet 20 is explicit; no theory of
disguise can explain it away. Why anybody should desire to do
so, is not clear. We are dealing with history.
Wilde was under no misapprehensions as to the personal note of
a
9


362
A BRILLIANT FAILURE
these "written embassages” of emotion, but he understood the spirit
of the times, and the timeless spirit of the artist. To those critics,
he says, who, like Hallam, had regretted that the Sonnets had ever
been written, who had seen in them something dangerous, some-
thing unlawful even, it would have been sufficient to answer in
Chapman's words:
“There is no danger to a man that knows
What life and death is: there's not any law
Exceeds his knowledge, neither is it lawful
That he should stoop to any other law."
>
But it was evident that the Sonnets needed no such defence, and
that “those who had talked of 'the folly of excessive and misplaced
affection' had not been able to interpret either the language or the
spirit of these great poems, so intimately connected with the philos-
ophy and the art of their time.” And in another place he quotes
the “sonnet of noble scorn"-
“No, I am that I am, and they that level
At my abuses reckon up their own:
I may be straight though they themselves be bevel;
By their rank thoughts my deeds must not be shown.”
(Sonnet 121)
It is, then, with a very human but not ostracizable Shakespeare
that Wilde's study is concerned. The poems, and the life of their
creator, are analyzed and presented in due order of drama:
“My whole scheme of the Sonnets was now complete, and by
placing those that refer to the 'dark lady' in their proper order and
position, I saw the perfect unity and completeness of the whole.
The drama—for indeed they formed a drama and a soul's tragedy
of fiery passion and noble thought—is divided into four scenes or
acts. In the first of these Shakespeare invites Willie Hughes to
go upon the stage as an actor, and to put to the service of art his
wonderful physical beauty, and his exquisite grace of youth, be-
fore passion has robbed him of the one, and time taken from him the
other. Willie Hughes, after a time, consents to be a player in


CHARLES VALE
363
Shakespeare's company, and soon becomes the very centre and key-
note of his inspiration. Suddenly, in one red-rose July there comes
to the Globe Theatre a dark woman with wonderful eyes, who
falls passionately in love with Willie Hughes. Shakespeare, sick
with the malady of jealousy and made mad by many doubts and
fears, tries to fascinate the woman who had come between him and
his friend. The love that is at first feigned becomes real, and he
finds himself enthralled and dominated by a woman whom he
knows to be evil and unworthy.
.
But who was she, this Delilah, “this black-browed, olive-skinned
woman, with her amorous mouth that Love's own hand did make,'
her 'cruel eye' and her 'foul pride,' her strange skill on the virginals
and her false, fascinating nature”? Wilde will have nothing to
do with Mary Fitton or Lady Rich, the "fair woman with a black
soul.” It is another woman that he is looking for, though her name
does not interest him; he is content to hold with Professor Dowden
that “to the eyes of no diver among the wrecks of time will that
talisman gleam”—always a rather unsatisfactory point of view, for
the unexpected does happen, or The Portrait would not now have
been published. However, “Two things were certain: she was
much older than the poet, and the fascination that she exercised
over him was at first purely intellectual. He began by feeling no
physical passion for her. He did not even think her beautiful. He
had his moments of loathing for her.
.
“But who was she? It seems to me that although better edu-
cated than most of the women of her time, she was not nobly born,
but was probably the profligate wife of some old and wealthy
citizen. We know that women of this class, which was then first
rising into social prominence, were strangely fascinated by the new
art of stage playing. and The Actors' Remonstrance is elo-
quent on the subject of their amours with young actors."
.
Naturally, after Willie Hughes we must have a woman of a
type suitable for him. Yet Wilde's Hughes has more glamour than
Samuel Butler's; for Butler contentedly accepts the supposition
that Shakespeare's idol became a steward on various ships of the
royal navy, and afterwards applied for a position as cook. All


364
A BRILLIANT FAILURE
a
a
things are possible, no doubt, and cooks are estimable people; but
did Butler really think that the wealth of the Sonnets was poured
out for precisely such a type? The author of Erewhon contrives
to make the whole of his interpretation more sordid than romantic:
amongst other things, he believes that the future cook sold the
manuscript of the Sonnets to Thorpe for a few guineas to relieve
his immediate wants. Even Thorpe would scarcely have invoked
immortality for such a fallen idol.
At the best, there does not seem to be a great deal in the Hughes
theory—as expounded either by Wilde or Butler—to attract
Shakespeareans; yet there is a great deal in The Portrait of Mr
W. H. to attract all students of history and human nature. The
enlarged work stands as a sort of intermediate mark in Wilde's
career. It was completed at the beginning of the times of abun-
dant success, or possibly just before. At any rate, money soon
began to flow in from the plays; life widened and grew rich for
fortune's spoilt child. London was his, or the London world of
drawing-rooms; he was both a celebrity and a curiosity, brilliantly
witty, charming in disposition, talked about, and talking inimi-
tably, everywhere. But the clouds were gathering. The security
of success, and the reactions of new friendships, were lending him
aggressive self-confidence and he had never been precisely a
shrinking violet. He seemed more arrogant, harder perhaps, cer-
tainly more careless of public surveillance and public opinion.
That part of his personal history (or anybody else's) is not diffi-
cult to understand; the path has been trodden before. In the very
process of expansion, there was manifest decadence. Lord Al-
fred Douglas had come into the situation, a decisive, fatal factor.
Queensberry, morbid and unhappy man, was ominously in the back-
ground. And Wilde, with the pagan in him coming more clearly
and coarsely to the surface, drifted to his doom. It was only intel-
lectually that he was ever a Hellene; physically, he always pam-
pered himself, and discipline was a mere name to him.
At what periods in the earlier of these years he worked at The
Portrait it is impossible to say; the manuscript supplies no dating
clues. But whether the result of quick strokes or leisurely, it is
not a masterpiece, though there are masterly touches in it, many
rememberable things, for it would have taken Wilde more than
he was capable of to make himself negligible.
CHARLES VALE


PAGE DR BLUM!
280 pages.
Bliss. By Katherine Mansfield. 12mo.
.
Alfred A. Knopf. $2.50.
LISS is one of those books which it is very hard to forget.
B : is
impressed too much by people she dislikes and is more apt to write
about them than about people she finds agreeable to her. Such at
least is the evidence of these stories. In them the disagreeable peo-
ple far outnumber the sympathetic; her likable characters, indeed,
are usually introduced as a foil. Most of them are men and only
two or three of them receive full-length portraits. Those figures
which she draws in most carefully are women; they are selfish,
weak, cultured, irritable, and conceited. Bliss in one sense is a
book of neurotics; a literary corridor of the psychopathic ward.
But with what a vigour does she depict these neurotics. Typical
of them is Monica Tyrrell, who suffered from nerves every morning
from eight o'clock till about half-past eleven, "suffered so terribly
that these hours were-agonizing, simply.” There is Monica's
male counterpart, Mr Reginald Peacock; fourteen pages are de-
voted to venomously meticulous account of a day from his life.
There are Linda Burnell and her sister Beryl from the first story.
Most horrible of all is the woman in The Escape, with her refrain
of:
“Oh, why am I made to bear these things? ... Oh, to care as
I care—to feel as I feel, and never to be saved anything-never to
know for one moment what it was to ... to ..
.
From this treatment of Katherine Mansfield one might think
that she was no more than a literary specialist in nervous disorders.
The idea is mistaken; only about a third of the stories in her vol-
ume deal specifically with neurotics. It is simply that her handling
of them is so vivid that they overshadow most of the other charac-
ters.
Yet these other characters are by no means lifeless. Her ob-


366
PAGE DR BLUM!
servation of people is extensive and accurate, and wherever her
sympathy does not lead her to understanding, her hate does. Her
style fits accurately to her matter. She has borrowed just enough
from the new experiments in prose without trying to swallow them
whole. In her punctuation she shows a positive genius. The result
of all this is that her best descriptions are final and perfect; one
must fight back the temptation to quote whole pages of them.
The form of her stories shows usually a certain amount of ex-
periment; this carries her, in most of her work, to about the same
stage as Chekhov. I do not mean to make any comparison of ex-
cellence with Chekhov; I mean simply that, like him, she has come
to a point where she writes most of her stories around a situation
instead of around a plot. Sometimes she goes farther. She has
written one story around two themes instead of around a situation;
she approaches here to the construction of music.
If you analyze Je Ne Parle Pas Français conventionally for its
plot, you will find very little. It is the story of how an English-
man ran off to Paris with a girl and left her there alone on account
of his greater love for his mother. Implication of Freud. It covers
some forty-four pages but the plot as stated is disposed of in less
than twenty; the rest of the space is taken up with the divagations
of Raoul Duquette, the narrator. According to the standards of
.
the Committee of Award of the O. Henry Memorial Prize Stories,
it is badly and extravagantly constructed.
But abandoning all idea of plot, let us analyse the story for its
themes. The little English girl, Mouse, is one of them, with her
helpless refrain of Je ne parle pas français. Dick, the big English-
man, is the second theme. “He gets drunk slowly,” says the nar-
rator, "and at a certain moment begins to sing very low, very low,
about a man who walks up and down trying to find a place where
he can get some dinner. . . How extraordinarily English that
is . . . I remember that it ended where he did at last 'find a place
and ordered a little cake of fish, but when he asked for bread, the
waiter cried contemptuously in a loud voice: We don't serve bread
with one fish ball.?” That ridiculous song is repeated almost every
time Dick enters the story; it serves as his motif.
With these two themes in mind, the construction of the story
becomes clearer. The first theme is introduced; that takes eight
pages, and not a word is wasted. Then an interlude on Raoul
.
.


MALCOLM COWLEY
367
Duquette. Second theme: Dick. Waiter, a whiskey ... We
don't serve bread, et cetera. Re-entry of first theme in counterpoint
with the second: twenty pages. And in these pages only is there any
suggestion of a plot. Finally, the Coda, in which the Mouse theme
is universalized:
Evenings when I sit in some gloomy café and an auto-
matic piano starts playing a "Mouse” tune (there are dozens of
tunes that evoke just her) I begin to dream things like
“A little house on the edge of the sea, somewhere far, far away.
A girl outside in a frock rather like Red Indian women wear, hailing
a light, barefoot boy who runs up from the beach.
"... The same girl, the same boy, different costumes—sitting
at an open window, eating fruit and leaning out and laughing.
“All the wild strawberries are for you, Mouse. I won't touch
a
one.
A wet night. They are going home together under an um-
brella. They stop at the door to press their wet cheeks together.
"And so on and so on
.
Analysed in this fashion, the story appears as handled with a
sense of form both strong and delicate. Merely because I have
used certain musical terms in my discussion, it should not be con-
fused with music. Je Ne Parle Pas Français is not an imitation of
a sonata. Its form is purely literary, but it has the suppleness and
some of the abstractness of music.
In one part of the story Raoul Duquette speaks of discussing the
modern novel. For him this discussion was equivalent to stating
“the need of a new form, or the reason why our young men appeared
to be just missing it.” Katherine Mansfield has got hold of that
new and necessary form. So far she has used it only in a short
story, but there is no reason why she should not meet with the same
success if she applied it to a full-length novel.
MALCOLM COWLEY


LETTRES PROVINCIALES
The EDUCATION OF Eric LANE. By Stephen McKenna.
12mo. 287 pages. George H. Doran Company. $1.90.
COQUETTE. By Frank Swinnerton. 12mo. 306 pages.
George H. Doran Company. $1.90.
THE JOURNAL OF HENRY BULVER. By C. Veheyne.
12mo. 287 pages. G. P. Putnam's Sons. $2.
REVOLUTION. By J. D. Beresford. 12m0. 357 pages.
G. P. Putnam's Sons. $2.
12mo.
THE DEATH OF Society. By Romer Wilson.
303 pages. George H. Doran Company. $2.
S
OME of these books were written expressly for us by English
writers and in spite of a growing school of critics who believe
that Englishmen ought not to write novels in English, I feel that
we ought to be grateful for them. I am not one of those who would
be continually reminding Englishmen that since we have all the
money in the world we have all the art, too, and that it is absurd for
them to keep on thinking of Shakespeare as an English poet when
we have all the First Folios in our hands. These things are vulgarly
true and it is good to note that many English writers are at last
trying to write down to our taste; but such efforts apart I do not feel
that we should do anything to stop the production of English
novels. A second rate English novelist is usually more entertaining
than a third or fourth rate American, and his work has an histori-
cal value not to be despised.
How, for example, could a highly sophisticated society like ours
learn to know the simple pleasures of London-in-wartime without
such a guide as Mr Stephen McKenna? His book should be called
after Balzac: la vie de province. Eric Lane, his hero, made a
fortune out of one play and "gave himself a fortnight's holiday to
order the furnishing and decoration of the six tiny rooms.” Sacred
simplicity! when we other Americans often spend an entire winter
a


VIVIAN SHAW
369
in decorating a hallway. Eric Lane had a glass horse-shoe paper-
weight and when Lady Barbara Neave made him take her up to his
flat-it was a flat-long after midnight, such being the more daring
manners of their set, she broke it. Eric wrote a line or two in his
journal about it before he went to bed. In London it is still possible
to take the telephone from one room to another, and when you leave
it in the smoking room—Barbara smokes nearly everywhere, by the
way—you are free from the temptation of using it again. The tele-
phone is the machina ex deo in this book, and we are inclined to
believe that when he read the papers Mr McKenna was so busy
getting material for his novel out of the stage and society columns
that he forgot to read the protests against the postoffice which in
England quaintly controls and rations telephone calls.
Everything else in this book can be checked back by consulting
the files of The Bystander. Except the passages about the port
which we read somewhere else.
Each chapter of The Education of Eric Lane has a quotation
from a famous author at the top and an excerpt from Eric Lane's
journal at the end. For the whole book we have Shane Leslie's
"Because lust was not good enough, the Celt invented Romance.”
Mr McKenna lags behind the Celt in invention. His achievement
is a phrase about "erotic battledore-and-shuttlecock” which we
think rather good and hope to see in not a few American novels of
the next season but one; and Eric calls himself a "sex amateur"
which has its points. Eric always was such an emotional one! For
the rest we find the construction of the case of conscience-Bar-
bara's divided allegiance between a duty she considers real and a
love no reader can do nearly so well by—not half so cute as the
description of manners. Barbara sings Un bel di from Butterfly
twice and Mr McKenna translates the song in full both times. No
man who has wondered how it feels—and who has not?-to be a
successful playwright and to have the most famous woman of Mr
McKenna's set in love with him, will want to miss this novel.
Miss C. Veheyne's Journal of Henry Bulver will not be half so
useful to Americans travelling in the back areas because it was, it
seems, written for an English prize and not for American sales.
(Unlike many others, it won the prize.) Northcliffe having been
preëmpted by so many novelists, Miss Veheyne made her hero a
playwright. He, too, was successful, but he married and carried on
1


370
LETTRES PROVINCIALES
with a leading lady. Also, he was one of your strong noisy English-
men and trampled roughshod over the conventions. Unfortunately,
he sailed on the Titanic and went mad. He will not do as a model
for Americans who want to tone down. The book is notable for a
caricature of Mr Bernard Shaw which hits off exactly those charac-
teristics known to all readers of the less intelligent London Sunday
papers. I append a conversation between Bulver and the critic:
“ 'You seem to have a habit of running off with other men's
wives,' remarked Vebeen. 'That,' I rejoined, 'is a habit nobody
could suspect you of-beast.”
'
а
For all I know this is considered a great book.
Coquette is Mr Frank Swinnerton's contribution to this exceed-
ingly instructive group. It deals with the lower orders-sympa-
thetically; we have generally preferred a frank snobbery in this
connection, but it is barred; snobs are not realistic. Mr Swinner-
ton is a serious writer and in Nocturne wrote a popular work in the
present romantic manner which persuades us that a beautiful sunset
over a London slum is more beautiful than the same sunset over
Painswick Hill. I confess myself unable to resist any novel of
English life if there is sufficient conversation. The echoes of Charles
Dickens ring in my ears and when the heroine of Coquette, who is
never half so attractive in the book as she is on the jacket-illustra-
tion by Thelma Cudlipp, calls her mother "an old image” I adore
Sam Weller above all men. Mr Swinnerton hasn't succeeded so
well with his males. Toby is a lay figure, Gaga is still-born, because
the author has put no intensity into their creation; they do for Sally,
and no more.
When Henry James wrote his famous account of the younger
novelists of England he made much use of the metaphor of the
orange and how the younger ones squeezed it. Mr McKenna has
no orange; he is soaking a sponge in smelling-salts and squeezing it
spasmodically; it squirts in every direction. Mr Swinnerton's
saturation is in a more decent Auid—though it is by no means the
stream of life—and he is much less haphazard in his use of his
material. No one can quarrel with the logic of his scheme, to wit:
Sally falls in love with Toby, marries Gaga, becomes Toby's mis-
tress, and Toby and Gaga are killed in a struggle. (I cannot bring


VIVIAN SHAW
371
myself to care whether herself regains consciousness.) That has the
directness of a squirt gun; unfortunately the book lacks the tender
care of a gardener in distributing his spray.
Two novels of the future are not likely to aid the inquiring
American, unless his interest be political and literary. Mr Beres-
ford stopped being a minor novelist in order to become a minor
prophet. His picture of England ever so soon is hopeful and in
spots is a good yarn. The aristocrats are as good as Mr Chester-
ton's Lord Ivywood and the labour leader is princely. But the book
which is brief and will, in the classic phrase, hold the reader should
not, in an equally classic phrase, detain the critic. Especially when
he has such a puzzling work as Miss Romer Wilson's Death of
Society before him. Miss Wilson's ability to make her critics wait
for her next book to prove they were right in proclaiming her prom-
ise has already twice been proved. Her failures are enormous and
magnificent. In this book she has invented a technical difficulty in
order to overcome it and by her triumph seems to conceal her failure
to express herself. The book is an effort to say something profound
about the nature of love. The protagonists of the book, an English-
man and the wife of a Norwegian critic, have no language in com-
mon; they speak to each other at great length and the reader believes
—that is the tour de force that they understand each other. The
trickor, as newspapers call it, the art-of these conversations is
beautiful. But the profound thing itself is not expressed in the
book and one would become quite impatient with the author's bal-
butient utterance were it not for the real power of her creation.
That is something. We are inclined to think that Miss Romer
Wilson is an expatriate.'
VIVIAN SHAW
1 Editorial Note: Cf. page 376.
a
a


BRIEFER MENTION
THE CORDS OF VANITY, by James Branch Cabell (12mo, 330 pages;
McBride: $2) is not the usual compound of intrigue, wit, and legend
which the Society for the Suppression of Vice is so anxious to send into
several editions. It is a second edition of a straightforward and fre-
quently dull novel, concerned with the amours and immoralities of Robert
Etheridge Townsend. One may not agree with Wilson Follett, writing
in the introduction, that Townsend "may the better consummate in his art
the auctorial virtues of distinction and clarity, beauty and symmetry, ten-
derness and truth and urbanity, precisely because his personal life is bereft
of these virtues.” But one must agree that, on the whole, this "comedy of
shirking" is put on with much veracity and some sardonic humour.
The Wall, by John Cournos (12mo, 286 pages; Doran: $2). A novel,
sequel to The Mask, and dealing with John Gombarov's sentimental edu-
cation in Philadelphia. The young intellectuals, their ideals, conversation,
parenti-phobia, et cetera, are gone into at great length, while John, who
was once the most harmless lad on earth, develops some bitterness and
more cunning. The book closes as the hero sails for London, not knowing
"that his life was just beginning" an infallible promise of at least
one more deck. If one is looking for the "representative” modern novel
he can find it in The Wall, especially in its assiduous deference to the
tenets of arrivism.
.
a
MODERN GREEK STORIES, translated by Demetra Vaka and Aristides Phou-
trides (12mo, 270 pages; Duffield: $1.90) nine and an impassioned fore-
word apparently go on not far from where ancient Greek life left off.
The accumulated unrest of a long sufferance of foreign influence is added,
but the underlying spirit is strangely familiar. There is much tragedy in
the nine tales, but a buoyancy of spirit keeps the tone from becoming too
sombre. The best of the stories are remarkable for unusual turns of
thought, a wistful feeling for beauty, a worship of freedom, and, curiously
enough, for a naïve submission to forms of superstition in the matter of
ghosts, cures by witchcraft, and sins quaintly expiated, that cling closely
as barnacles of obscurantism on a race otherwise aloof and sceptical.
ZELL, by Henry G. Aikman (12mo, 326 pages; Knopf: $2.50) is a book
of some exceedingly keen observation of American life. This observation
eventually gets in the way of the book which intends to create a young
man's life in the shadow of his parents' disgraceful divorce. Finally the
loose ends are tied, but they dangle through the middle portions of the
book hopelessly. Mr Aikman is removed from the other American realists
by several things : he never gives the effect of writing a dull autobiography
and his intrigue is worked out with a number of fresh and vividly pre-
sented incidents. The detestable children, the attractive father, and the
pathetic sister in the book are better made than any of the principal
characters.
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BRIEFER MENTION
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A Few Figs From Thistles (8vo, 18 pages; Shay: $1) THE LAMP AND
THE BELL (12mo, 71 pages; Shay: $1.25) and Second APRIL (12mo,
110 pages; Kennerley: $2) by Edna St Vincent Millay. The sauciness
of the thin orange-coloured salvo, the immediate imagery and the poignant
passages in her Elizabethan drama, and the fine casualness of Second April
show Miss Millay for a young woman of rare gifts and real achievement.
She has a genuine humour—the charm which no woman, perhaps, since
Emily Dickinson has scattered like salt on her verses. She has, too, a
youthful preoccupation with death and “savage Beauty.” And her obvious
indebtedness to poets as distant from her generation as Goethe and John
Donne does not mitigate her intensity and originality.
IN AMERICAN, by John V. A. Weaver (12mo, 80 pages; Knopf: $1.50) is a
collection of some twenty-five poems in American slang. The accuracy of
the author's ear and his skill in adapting his words to rather simple verse
rhythms are equal to the achievements of Ring Lardner in prose. Mr
Weaver uses slang as his medium just as an electrician might satisfy him-
self with a fibre filament because the current he uses is of a low emotional
voltage; high voltage through this medium might burn it out and it looks
very much as if the same themes, subjected to any high intensity, would
yield only ashes of sentiment. The dramatic monologues are more success-
ful than the narrative and eharacter is much more deftly done than action.
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POEMS NEW AND OLD, by John Freeman (12mo, 317 pages; Harcourt,
Brace: $3) won the Hawthornden prize as the best book of poetry published
in England in 1920. It is most interesting in its differences from current
American verse, much of which seems self-conscious beside this simply-
worded, deeply passionate, and sincere expression of the feelings life stirs
in a poet. Mr Freeman is especially a lover of trees, of the music in all
natural sounds, and of the effects of light. His poems of people ring true
in their psychology though they are almost uniformly melancholy in tone.
There is a restlessness about them that is lacking in the nature interpreta-
tions. These have taken their writer into a realm where, with his "nerve
of being bared," he finds "unimaginable joyance" of vision and sound.
The Poems of CORINNE ROOSEVELT ROBINSON (12mo, 280 pages; Scrib-
ner: $2.25) contains the work of her previous volumes along with several
new poems. If this country were a monarchy Mrs Robinson would
deserve to be its laureate, for she is almost the only American who devotes
her talents seriously to occasional verse. She is not the only American
humorous poet, but she is one of the more amusing.
The Old Soak, by Don Marquis (illus., 12mo, 141 pages; Doubleday,
Page: $1.50) steers an appropriately zigzag course between columnar
humour and a more enduring satire. The bar-room habitué is the hero of
this epic, an