d he is deftly permitted to score his talking-points with just
that insistence and reiteration, that flow of emotion and appeal to reason,
which his departed prototype approached at the crest of his jag. Don
Marquis has contrived a burlesque which will enlist sympathy and evoke
reminiscence.


374
BRIEFER MENTION
NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS, by Joseph Conrad (12mo, 262 pages; Double-
day, Page: $1.90) collects "a thin array . . . of really innocent atti-
...
tudes : Conrad literary, Conrad political, Conrad reminiscent, Conrad con-
troversial.” Since it is always Conrad and therefore always distinguished,
the book needs no further advertisement, but it should be noted that Mr
Conrad's superb little essay on Henry James is at last rescued from the
inaccessibility of the bound volumes of the North American Review. The
earnestness of the political papers and the invective of the papers on the
loss of the Titanic are significant examples of the relative unimportance of
the subject-matter in the hands of a great writer.
a
THINGS THAT Have INTERESTED ME, by Arnold Bennett (12mo, 332 pages;
Doran : $2.50) judging from the present volume of sketches, are matters
of deep concern to the modern man of letters, but the studied journalism
of their style, their self-conscious dégagé air, their breezy self-complacency
overpower one with a sense of the gloating triumph of a lower order of
commonsense over delicacy, imagination, and art. Bennett, for example,
finds that Henry James lacked "guts." The single fact that Bennett can
dash off such a play as Body and Soul in a day and a night, is ample tes-
timony that he differs from James. Comparison of the Bennett notebook
with the Journal of Amiel or with the table-talk of such men as Johnson,
Coleridge, or Hazlitt indicates further differences. In point of fact il ne
donne pas des entrailles à tous les mots.
MODERN DRAMA IN EUROPE, by Storm Jameson (12mo, 280 pages; Har.
court, Brace: $3) gives every indication of being the one book about the
structure and content of modern plays which will be the starting point, for
agreement or difference, of many others. The separate judgements are
not necessarily final, but they are clearly the effects of a mind able and
willing to think hard. How noteworthy that is can be determined by
any one with the slightest acquaintance with modern dramatic criticism.
LOAFING Down Long Island, by Charles Hanson Towne (illus., 8vo, 212
pages; Century: $2.50) testifies to the consummation of that which every.
one dreams of and no one undertakes—a walking journey. Probably
Long Island has never been approached with a more unshakable will to
poetry, for Mr Towne breaks into lyric measure at the end of almost
every chapter. Discounting the rhapsodical tangents, one finds a narrative
pleasantly informative, supplemented by Thomas Fogarty's drawings.
Paul BUNYAN COMES West, by Ida Virginia Turney (illus., 8vo, 34 pages;
University of Oregon Press) comprises Pacific Coast legends of Paul
Bunyan, mythical lumberjack and one of the few folk-lore heroes of mod-
ern American origin. He has the qualities common to such characters.
The Colorado Canyon was formed by his pick as he dragged it behind
him. His ox was “a 'normous critter-forty axhandles an'a plug o' Star
terbacker between the eyes.” The book, which is beautifully executed, is
exclusively a university product. Pupils of Miss Turney's collected the
stories, while pupils of Miss Helen N. Rhodes' made the many linoleum
cuts.


BRIEFER MENTION
375
a
JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS, with a Note on Confucius, by Paul-Louis Couchoud,
translated by Frances Rumsey, with a preface by Anatole France (8vo,
155 pages; Lane: $2.50) is a collection of four pleasant but meaty essays.
The first is a French interpretation of the Japanese character: an attempt
to present logically and humanly what Okakura and Nitobé tried to do
in two volumes. The second considers the seventeen-syllabled haikai (or
hokku) and is really a cento of free translations. The third is the tran-
script of M Couchoud's diary for the first two months of the Russo-Japa-
nese war. The last is simultaneously a description of a visit to the tomb
of Confucius and a resumé of his moralistic philosophy. M Couchoud is
a sincere admirer of Japanese culture which, he claims, can be compared
favourably at any historical moment with modern European culture.
9
The LARGER SOCIALISM, by Bertram Benedict (12mo, 243 pages; Macmil-
lan: $2.50) has value chiefly as a stimulating criticism, by an American
Socialist, of current Socialist propaganda in the United States, though it
presents also much strong argument for "the cause.” The author attri-
butes the slow growth of his party in this country to too dogmatic follow-
ing of Marxian theory and failure to realize, pragmatically, American
conditions, particularly as related to government. He urges recognition of
a psychological as well as an economic interpretation of history, of a social
more than an economic class-consciousness, and of an ethical basis in
human action. The "larger Socialism" which Mr Benedict describes is
not to deal exclusively with economic matters, but is to carry to fruition
eugenics, feminism, and other modern movements—in short, to develop
"a completely new orientation in every field of human endeavour."
COMMERCIAL ENGRAVING AND PRINTING, by Charles W. Hackleman (8vo,
790 pages; Commercial Engraving Publishing Company, Indianapolis) is
a copiously illustrated and well documented text book of all the methods
of reproducing pictorial designs for commercial purposes. It is largely
non-technical and includes virtually everything suggested in the title plus
chapters on auxiliary subjects. Although it deals with printing and en-
graving as accessories to trade it suggests that they are still capable of
being fine arts.
MEMOIRES DE Russie, par Jules Legras (8vo, 449 pages; Payot et Cie,
Paris). Un curieux mirage qui fait voir à travers l'esprit et la sensibilité
d'un professeur d’université français, officier d'état major, la personna-
lité étrange et rude de moujiks russes. Un livre à la fois plat et dur mais
qui frappe. Après tout n'est pas la plus haute valeur de l'Europe que ces
contrastes accentués par lesquels civilisations et types humains brillent en
relief? M Legras n'a peut-être pas compris grand'chose à la revolution
russe, mais il est des cas ou il est plus intelligent de ne pas trop compren-
dre. Le musée de bavardages que M Legras présente a plus d'intérêt pour
un lecteur aventureux qu'une explication philosophique du cas russe. M
Legras a subi le moujik, mais au moins l'a-t-il subi avec enthousiasme.
Quelquechose de la pésanteur géniale du russe a passé dans ces pages. Il
a la naiveté d'un bon chroniqueur, et bien qu'il soit professeur d'université,
son livre a une forme française correcte, claire, et simple.


COMMENT
M
R VIVIAN SHAW'S totally unnecessary review of some
English novels, published in this issue, was received by us and
read with some mystification until a few scribbled lines on the back
of one of the sheets supplied the clue. The lines read: "To be an
Englishman reviewing an American book is to experience one of the
great natural pleasures of life, the pleasure of committing a socially
encouraged vulgarity.” It is obvious that the writer, with suitable
material, began an example of this notorious style of criticism, lost
heart, and abandoned it. Even at the beginning his imitative fac-
ulty seems to us weak, but his project deserves encouragement.
Broadening down from vulgar precedent to modern instances more
vulgar still, the tradition of reviewing American books now gives
an English critic every liberty and absolves him from all responsi-
bility. He begins with a faint resentment against the idea that an
American has written a book and with all the languages of his own
country at his disposal has chosen the language which was, after all,
inherited by Ethel M. Dell, Compton Mackenzie, Edmund Gosse,
Hugh Walpole, and Sir Hall Caine, from William Shakespeare and
the translators of the Authorized Version. If the book be well writ-
ten he indicates the debt to Swift or Conrad or some other English-
man. He implies that the more pompous works of Rupert Hughes
and Booth Tarkington are true pictures of American life, and that
every American has a middle name, not linked to his family name
by a hyphen, and usually represented by the initial Q or some
equally gauche letter of the English alphabet.
We have sent the author of The Vanishing Men to be our Am-
bassador at the Quirinal, and presumably we deserve this sort of
thing. And it is natural, not vulgar, to dislike bad American novels.
What is vulgar is to dislike any book for any reason except that it
is a bad book, and to make its badness a pretext for literary chau-
vinism. We have often read bad American books and it has not
consoled us to be sure that we should read worse importations from
Spain a week later. Nor can we understand the proud possessive
attitude in respect to (or of) dead authors. We find ourselves tak-
ing an immense pride in Voltaire and Heine, to the disadvantage of


COMMENT
377
a
Robert Ingersoll and Bayard Taylor, and we cannot allow a French-
man with no feeling for the grand manner a greater share in Racine
than our own. Patriotism in literary criticism is intolerable; and
in all fairness it may be said that quite recently a few English re-
viewers have treated American books as if our work, however good
or bad, were a part of the body of literature in English, and not the
accidents or perversities of wayward children. On the other hand
American reviewers are notoriously incapable of sneering; they are
afraid to violate some canon of taste wholly foreign to their society,
and bad English novels get off all too easily. It is a pity because
that, too, is not literature, but politics.
a
We cheerfully make our readers party to a controversy which has
already employed the postal services of three nations.
In The Dial for June we published a review of Mr John Gould
Fletcher's Breakers and Granite and of Mr Conrad Aiken's Punch:
The Immortal Liar. The writer of this review, Mr Malcolm Cow-
ley, made the point, which seemed to us well taken, that “the whole
question of authorship and originality has been ridiculously over-
emphasized during the last century” and suggested that “the poet
is a workman to whom a certain task has been set, and it is no dis-
honour if he calls on his fellows to aid him.” Controversy, omit-
ting this significant idea, centres upon a specific instance-alleged
instance, we should say. Mr Cowley wrote that the two poets, Mr
Fletcher and Mr Aiken, “at one time reacted strongly on each other.
There was a great deal of visiting back and forth
certain interchange of ideas... One poem of Aiken's
shows his debt to Fletcher especially. ... Meanwhile Fletcher
was playing the borrower as well as the lender.” Mr Cowley quoted.
On June 23, Mr Fletcher wrote us from Holme Lea, Crystal Pal-
ace Park Road, Sydenham, S. E., which is London, that his atten-
tion had been called to an amusing article in our June number. “In
this article," wrote Mr Fletcher, “Mr Cowley attempts a compari-
son of the poetry of Mr Aiken and myself and makes use of two
quotations from my work to prove that Mr Aiken influenced me.
May I add, for Mr Cowley's as well as for your readers' benefit, that
one of the passages quoted was written nine months, and the other
seven months before I had either met Mr Aiken personally or read
anything by him.” Mr Fletcher remained ours obediently.
a
.
.


378
COMMENT
In a later letter, which reached the Editor in Paris, Mr Fletcher
felt obliged to ask that this matter be set right, "as I cannot permit
quotations from my work to be made which convey a false impres-
sion.” We trust that, by full quotation of every pertinent word of
the original letter, the false impression has been corrected.
It so happens that the penitent Mr Cowley is also in foreign
parts and that without loss of time it was possible to involve him in
the correspondence. Through his courtesy we are able to quote a
paragraph from a letter addressed by him, one month and five days
after the date of the first letter in the series, from 1, rue de Fleurus,
Paris, Vle, to Mr Fletcher, in London:
"I met Mr Aiken the year you left Boston; I talked with him
a great deal. In the course of these conversations he mentioned his
discussions with
you
the
year
before. He said, if I remember cor-
rectly, that your opinions had been very divergent; that by the time
you left many of these divergences had been ironed out; that his
ideas of poetic form had been influenced by what you said and that
he believed you in turn to have been influenced by his ideas.
“After a lapse of several years this summary can only be approxi-
mate, but that is the way his remarks stuck in my head. And as a
result I incorporated them into my criticism when I came to review
your book and his at the same time. I went further; I searched
through your book and Aiken's to find places where this supposed
influence was shown. My guesses, in your case at least, proved to
be wrong, but they were made in good faith, and nothing I said
gave reason for taking them otherwise."
a
We offer these letters to our readers primarily to do the right
thing by Mr Fletcher; a careful reading will indicate that both Mr
Fletcher and Mr Cowley are masters of implication.
The editors regret the ascription to Anyte of the poem To Eros.
This occurred in a review of Mr Richard Aldington's Medallions in
Clay and both the author and the reviewer have called our attention
to the error. The poem should have been attributed to Meleager.






Courtesy of the American Museum of Natural Histor
HEAD IN DIORITE



THE
IV
V
VI
VH
IX
OXXIII
DIAL
OCTOBER 192 I
LA VIE EN FLEUR
BY ANATOLE FRANCE
TO MY READERS
THESE pages are a sequel to Le Petit Pierre, published two
.
Fleur brings friend as far as
early manhood and his entrance into the world. These volumes,
together with Le Livre de mon Ami and Pierre Nozière, contain,
under borrowed names and with a few imaginary circumstances,
the memories of my earliest years. I shall tell later how I came to
employ concealment in publishing these faithful memories. I found
pleasure in setting them down at a time when the child I had been
was becoming quite a stranger to me and I could find in his com-
pany distraction from my own.
my own. I remember without order or se-
quence; my memory is capricious. Madame de Caylus, when she
was old and overwhelmed with worries, complained one day that
her mind was not free enough to dictate her Mémoires: “Well,
then,” said her son, who was ready to write at her dictation, "we
shall call them Souvenirs and you will not be bound to any order of
dates or to any continuity.” Alas, in the memories of Petit Pierre
there will be neither Racine, Saint-Cyr and the court of Louis XIV,
nor the perfect style of Mme de Maintenon's niece. In her time
the language existed in all its purity; it has since been thoroughly
spoilt. But I have had to write in the language of my time. These
pages are full of little things set down with great precision. And
I have been assured that these trifles, coming from an honest heart,
can give pleasure.
A. F.


380
LA VIE EN FLEUR
THE BIFURCATION
That year, eight days before school opened, I saw Fontanet, just
returned from Étretat, his face tanned by the spray and his voice
deeper than it had been. He was still small of body and made
up
for the shortness of his stature by the loftiness of his thoughts.
When he had told me about his games, his swimming, his sailing,
his narrow escapes, he began to frown and said severely:
“Nozière, we are about to become upper-classmen; this is the year
of our bifurcation. You've got an important decision to make;
have you thought about it?”
I said no, but that I should certainly choose the classical course.
“And you ?" I asked.
At this he let the clouds gather round his forehead and replied
that it was a serious matter which could not be decided lightly.
He left me alarmed, humiliated, and envious of his sagacity.
To understand our conversation one must realize that at this
time the pupils of the Université de France were obliged, after fin-
ishing their preparatory work, to choose, on the threshold of the
upper classes, between the scientific and classical courses and at
thirteen or fourteen had to "bifurcate,” as it was called. In ac-
cordance with their own and their parents' lights they decided on
one branch or the other of the pedagogical fork without worrying
excessively over the necessity in which they were placed of choosing
between rhetoric and algebra and of no longer following the whole
chorus of the Muses which M Fourtoul had divided.
Nevertheless, no matter which choice we made, our minds were
bound to suffer serious injury; for science isolated from letters re-
mains mechanical and brutal, and letters without science are empty,
since science is the substance of literature. These considerations, I
must admit, did not enter my little mind. What may be surprising
is that my parents never touched upon this point in talking with
me. If reasons for their silence must be found I can distinguish
several: such as the timidity of my father who never dared put
forward his ideas, and my mother's nervousness which never al-
lowed her own to form. But their principal reason for letting me
alone was that my mother had no doubt that whatever path I chose
I should display my ever-smouldering if sometimes hidden genius,
while my father considered that in letters as in science I should


ANATOLE FRANCE
381
a
never amount to anything. And my father had another, special
reason for keeping silent in my presence about this rule which
originated after the coup d'État in a decree of M Hippolyte Four-
toul, principal of the University in 1852, and was bound up with
the most burning political questions. As an ardent Catholic my
father approved a reform which seemed to favour the Church at
the expense of the University, but as an opponent of the Empire he
looked with suspicion upon the gifts of an enemy and no longer
knew what to think. His reserve prevented me from forming my
opinion in the usual way which was to take the contrary of his
own. But I was all for the classics which seemed to me easy, ele-
gant, and friendly, and I pretended to have a great problem to solve
only in order to make myself important and to appear not less
serious than Fontanet. I slept quite peacefully. The next morn-
ing, finding Justine sweeping the dining-room, I put on a severe ex-
pression and said solemnly:
"Justine, this year I become an upper-classman. It is the year
of the bifurcation. I have an important decision to make which
will affect my whole existence. Think of it, Justine: bifurcation!”
When she heard these words the daughter of the Troglodytes
leaned on her broom, like Minerva in council leaning on her lance,
remained thoughtful, and looking at me with consternation, cried
out:
“Gracious! Is it really ?”
It was the first time she had heard the word bifurcation, and
she did not understand it; yet she did not ask what it meant for
she had already given it a meaning of her own, a disastrous one, I
am sure. I fancy she identified bifurcation as one of those scourges
sent by the government, like conscription, taxes, fines, and though
generally unemotional, she condoled with me for having been
marked for it.
The morning sun illuminated the blue eyes and pink cheeks of
the daughter of the Troglodytes; she had her sleeves rolled up and
her white arms, crossed with crimson scratches, seemed beautiful
to me for the first time. Remembering the poetry I had read I
made her a priestess of Apollo, radiant with youth and majesty,
and transformed myself into a young Orchomenean shepherd com-
ing to Delphi to ask the God which road to Knowledge he should
choose. The doctor's dining-room did not do very well as the sacred


382
LA VIE EN FLEUR
Pytho; but the porcelain stove surmounted by a bust of Jupiter
Trophonius was enough of a holy altar for me, and my imagina-
tion, which at that time was good for anything, supplied a land-
scape by Poussin.
“It is necessary to bifurcate,” I said gravely, “and choose be-
tween art and science."
The Priestess of Apollo shook her head thrice and said:
“My brother Symphorien is good in science; he got prizes in
arithmetic and catechism."
Then leaving me and beginning to sweep:
“I must get on with my work.”
I urged her to tell me if I ought to choose science.
“Surely not, little master,” she replied in all the goodness of her
heart, "you aren't intelligent enough.”
And she added by way of consoling me:
"Not everybody has intelligence. It's a gift from God.”
I did not consider it entirely incredible that I was as stupid as
the daughter of the Troglodytes thought, but I was not sure, and on
this point as on so many others, I remained in doubt. I had no
idea at all of building up my mind or disciplining my intellect. In
this matter of bifurcating I sought only my ease and comfort and
chose, as I have already said, to take the arts because they seemed
to float along more easily. The sight of a geometrical outline, far
from arousing my curiosity, transfixed me with sadness and offended
my youthful senses. A circle perhaps; but an angle! but a cone!
To frequent this sad, dry, angular, bristling world while art and
letters gave you at least form and colour and one could catch sight
at times of fauns and nymphs and shepherds, and glimpses of trees
beloved by the poets and of the shadows which fall at night from
the mountains—how muster so truculent a courage ?
To-day I recant this stupid contempt for geometry, humbly at
your feet, ancient Thales, Pythagoras mythical king of numbers,
Hipparcus who first attempted to measure the universe, Vietus-
before you, Galileo who too wise to love suffering suffered none
the less for truth, Fermat, Huyghens, inquisitive Leibnitz, Euler,
Monge, and you Henri Poincaré, whose silent face, heavy with
genius, I have looked upon—0 greatest of men, heroes, demigods,
before your altars I offer my unworthy thanks to the Uranian
Venus who crowned you with her most precious gifts.


ANATOLE FRANCE
383
But in those far-off hours, poor little fool that I was, I was quick
to cry without judgement or knowledge: “I choose letters." I think
that I was braying blasphemies against geometry and algebra at
the very moment when my godfather Danquin appeared before me,
pink and blooming. He had come to share with me one of his
favourite diversions.
“Pierrot,” he said, "you must be bored after dragging through six
weeks of vacation; come with me and hear M Vernier lecture on
ballooning."
Though he was still in the flower of youth, M Joseph Vernier
had distinguished himself by a number of bold ascents. His zeal
and his courage fired the heart of my godfather who was passion-
ately interested in the progress of aeronautics. Atop the omnibus
my worthy godfather enthusiastically explained to me the future
of aerial navigation. He did not doubt that the problem of the
dirigible would presently be solved and predicted that I should see
the day when the ways of the air would be populous with countless
travellers.
“And then," he said, "there will be no more frontiers. All peo-
ples will become one people. Peace will reign on earth.”
M Joseph Vernier was giving his lecture in one of the rooms
of an enormous factory at Grenelle. We came to it by way
hangar where we saw the balloon in which the young aeronaut had
recently made a frightful voyage. It lay there collapsed like the
carcass of a mythical monster, and the great wound where the en-
velope had been torn drew people's eyes. Near the balloon lay the
propeller which was said to have driven it for several minutes.
The audience was already seated in many rows of chairs when we
reached the next room; we saw the bright hats of the women and
heard the hum of voices. At one end of the room was a platform
with a table and some empty armchairs facing the audience. I
looked about excitedly. After ten minutes or so we saw the young
aeronaut, surrounded by an illustrious reception committee, climb
the three steps to the platform amid great applause. Dull in com-
plexion, beardless, thin, pale, serious as Bonaparte, his face affected
the immobility of an historic mask. Two aged members of the
Institute took their places on either side of him, both supernaturally
ugly and looking like those cynocephaloi which the ancient Egyp-
tians in their rituals used to set at the right and at the left of the
>
of a


384
LA VIE EN FLEUR
corpse during its judgement. Behind the orator several important
personages seated themselves; among them one distinguished a
large, very handsome woman in a green dress, who looked like the
figure of Christian Art in Paul Delaroche's fresco on the hemicycle
at the Beaux-Arts. My heart beat faster. Joseph Vernier began
to speak in a dull, monotonous voice which went well with the im-
mobility of his face. He announced his proposition at once:
“To navigate the air,” he said, “we must have a propeller driven
by a steam engine and constructed on the same mathematical prin-
ciples which enabled us to make the vanes of the turbine and the
blades of the ship's screw.”
He then talked for a long time about the shape of the balloon
which was to be elongated as much as possible in the axis of its
direction.
One of the cynocephaloi approved and signalled for applause;
the other remained immobile.
The orator then told the story of his perilous ascent and described
a landing during which the anchor broke and the balloon with ex-
traordinary rapidity shaved the ground of trees, hedges, and fences,
and trailed the basket with the crew bouncing through the ruins.
He made us shudder by the simple tale of how, on another occasion,
when the valve failed to work, the balloon climbed to altitudes
where it was impossible to breathe and swelled so that it would
have burst had not Vernier slashed the envelope. The tear spread
to the top and after a frightful fall the aeronauts were saved from
being mashed on the ground only by the basket falling into a pond.
In conclusion, he announced that he was starting a subscription for
the manufacture of the apparatus necessary for aerial navigation.
He was heartily applauded. The two cynocephaloi shook his
hand. The green lady offered him a bunch of flowers. And I, with
beating heart, my eyes round with generous tears, cried to myself:
“I too will be an aeronaut!"
I could not sleep that night for excitement at the exploits of
Joseph Vernier and pride in anticipation of the aerial voyages I
planned for myself. It became clear to me that to build, manage,
and steer balloons one would have to acquire no end of technical
knowledge. I resolved to go in for science.
In the morning I informed Justine of my decision and of the rea-


ANATOLE FRANCE
385
sons which inspired it. She told me that her brother Symphorien
used to make balloons out of paper and send them up in the air by
holding them above a fire. But this was only a game. She did not
approve of going up alive to heaven and frowned on trips to the
moon because Cain was a prisoner there. Somebody had pointed
him out to her one clear night carrying a bundle of thorns on his
back.
Three days I held to my decision. But on the fourth the Vir-
gilian myrtles and the secret paths of the shadowy forest tempted
me afresh. I gave up the glory of conquering the air and non-
chalantly followed the branch of the road which led to the class of
M Triaire. I became rather proud of this and looked down on
my comrades who had chosen the other route. Such was the com-
mon effect of the bifurcation. It was bound to happen, it was re-
quired by the spirit of solidarity, the spirit of those who have no
spirit. The students of the classics and the students of science
despised each other reciprocally. As a classical student I married
the prejudices of my class and took pleasure in making fun of the
heavy, undecorative spirit of the scientifically-minded. Perhaps
they did lack elegance and the humanities. But what fools we must
have seemed, we literary fellows.
I cannot judge from my own experience the effects of the bifur-
cation because I have always been naturally incapable of getting
anything from class teaching. To scientific as to literary classes I
should have brought a closed mind and a rebellious spirit. The
little I have learned, I learned alone.
I believe that bifurcation hastened the decline of classical studies
which no longer met the requirements of a bourgeois society com-
pletely bent on industry and finance. It has been said that the
minister of public instruction in 1852 made it his business to crip-
ple university education which was considered in high places to be
a public danger. He cut off its noblest parts and had the effrontery
to say that: "historical and philosophical discussions are not proper
for children and such untimely questionings can result only in van-
ity and doubt.” Certainly that is not the way an educator talks
who is anxious to awaken the young intelligence. Fourtoul flat-
tered himself that he was forming a peaceful generation and pro-
posed to give the bourgeois children who grew up under the liberal


386
LA VIE EN FLEUR
monarchy an education suitable to the business life for which they
were intended. At that time a university professor who had re-
mained faithful to the July Monarchy expressed himself plainly
enough as follows:
“Our sons are not destined to be professors. We do not desire
to make them poets and men of letters; poetry and literature are
too precarious trades; we do not want them to be lawyers, there
are enough already; we want them to be good business men, good
farmers. Now for the purposes of these estates which form the
body of society, of what use are the Latin and Greek we teach our
sons and they so quickly forget? Not everybody can write, plead
cases, or teach. The majority are outside the circle of the learned
professions. What do your colleges do for this majority? Noth-
ing or nothing worth while."
No stomach with a little pride could fail to rise with disgust at
these low and vulgar words. I recall them because the state of
mind which inspired them still exists. Secondary education has
gone down and down for half a century. It is condemned. It is
a
no longer acceptable to our society that the children of the people
should go to the primary school and that the child of the rich alone
should go to the higher schools where he learns nothing anyway.
After this monstrous war which in five years has made all institu-
tions out of date, the edifice of public instruction must be rebuilt
on a new plan of majestic simplicity. The same instruction for
rich children and poor, all going to the primary school. Those
who show the greatest aptitude for study will be admitted to sec-
ondary education which, given free, will bring together the best of
the bourgeois and the best of the proletariat. And this best will
turn its best into the great schools of science and art. In this way
democracy will be administered by the best.
To return to the fabulous age of my childhood, let me admit that
the instinct which drew me to literary studies did not altogether de-
ceive me. In these sordid rooms Greece and Rome appeared to me,
Greece which taught men science and beauty, Rome which gave
peace to the world.


ANATOLE FRANCE
387
AN APOLOGY FOR WAR BY M DUBOIS
“My parents,” said M Danquin, "lived in Lyons where I was
born. I was still quite a child when bright and early one morning
my father took me down to a quay where an enormous crowd of la-
bourers, bourgeois, and women where gathering, and hoisted me on
his shoulder so that I could get a glimpse of the Emperor who was
coming from Grenoble. He crossed the bridge over the Rhone on
foot, by himself. A squadron of cavalry preceded him by more than
a hundred paces; his staff marched a long distance behind; I saw
his great head, his pale face. His grey greatcoat was buttoned across
his large chest, he wore no insignia, carried no arms, and he held in
his hand a hazel branch still covered with leaves. At his approach,
millions of shouts grew into one shout on the quay. The spectacle
will never grow dim before my eyes.
M Dubois, older than M Danquin, also had a memory of Na-
poleon. He recalled it at once:
"I saw and heard that extraordinary man at the setting of his
fortunes, in 1812, on the day after the tragic victory of the Moscow
river. Accompanied by many staff officers he was visiting the battle-
field, which was covered with dead and wounded, and he seemed
still affected by the torpor which had paralyzed him during the
battle the night before. I was slightly wounded and was looking for
my missing canteen when his visit caught me. At the same moment
a colonel of the Guard said to him:
“ 'Sire, there are more enemies behind that ravine.'
“At these words his countenance expressed an unrestrained indig.
nation and he cried out in a terrible voice:
What's that you say, sir? There are no enemies on a battle-
field; there are only men.'”
I have thought deeply over these words and the tone in which
they were uttered. I do not believe they betray an outburst of hu-
manity in Napoleon but a desire to discipline the emotions and sub-
а
ject them to the military régime.
In 1855 the Italian war set France and Austria at each other.
The battles which made Lombardy run with blood alarmed my
mother who from my birth was frightened of wars which might
take away her son.


388
LA VIE EN FLEUR
Here are the words addressed to her one day of that year by
M Dubois, set down as I recall them:
“In my youth one man, Napoleon, alone decided between peace
and war. Unfortunately for Europe he preferred war to adminis-
tration for which, however, he showed great talent. But war gave
him glory. Before him in all ages Kings have loved it. Like them
the men of the Revolution went in for it furiously. I fear very
much that the financiers and captains of industry who are little by
little becoming the masters of Europe will show themselves as
bellicose as the Kings and Napoleon. To be so is to their interest,
partly on account of the profits to be had from supplying the
materials of war, partly on account of the increase which victory
will bring their business. And one always believes in victory;
patriotism makes it criminal to doubt. Wars are decided on, most of
the time, by a very small number of men. The ease with which
these men carry the people is surprising. The means they employ
have been known for a long time, and always succeed. First they
advertise outrages on the national honour which can only be
washed away in blood; when in all good morality, the cruelties and
perfidies inherent in war, far from honouring the nation which
commits them, cover it with eternal shame. They make it seem
credible that it is to the interest of the nation to take arms, whereas
nations always are ruined by wars, which enrich only a small num-
ber of individuals. It is even unnecessary to say so much; it suffices
to beat a drum, to wave a flag, and the enthusiastic mob rushes to
carnage and to death. To sign a payroll, to see the world, to be
covered with glory—these things make men brave all perils. Let
us rather say that men adore warfare. It gives them the greatest
satisfaction they can ever experience on earth, that of killing. Un-
doubtedly they run the risk of being killed themselves, but when
one is young, one never believes that one will die and the intoxica-
tion of murdering makes one forget the risk. I have fought in war
and you can believe me when I say that to strike, to beat down an
enemy is, for nine men out of ten, an ecstacy beside which the
tenderest embraces seem insipid. Compare war and peace. The
labours of peace are long, monotonous, often harsh, and without
glory for most of those who undertake them. War work is prompt,
easy, and within the scope of the most obtuse intellect. Even of
the leaders it does not demand much intelligence, of the soldier


ANATOLE FRANCE
389
it demands none. Everyone can go to war. It is the property of
mankind.”
It was said that my mother never once agreed with M Dubois.
War, which mothers detest, she feared as the worst of plagues.
Nevertheless she did not like to hear it spoken of in this way. She
almost preferred the manner of M Danquin who liked the French to
carry liberty to the world at the point of the bayonet and held that
to die for one's country is the most beautiful and the most enviable
fate.
She remained dreaming a moment. Then, recalling the song
which long ago, she used to sing at my cradle, she hummed imper-
ceptibly:
Le voilà général.
Il court, il vole, il devient maréchal...
En attendant, sur mes genoux,
Beau général, endormez-vous.'
.
HOW I BECAME AN ACADEMICIAN
The scholastic year was drawing to an end. It was the last
year in college for the students in philosophy and the joy of being
free at last was mingled, for the sensitive ones, with melancholy
at the loss of our old habits. Under the acacias Maxime Denis,
who excelled in Latin verse and was of an affectionate nature, said
to us one day at the noon recess:
"We are soon going to go into the great world and separate, each
to follow his career. In college we have formed friendships which
ought not to be lost. The friendships of youth ought to last a life-
time. To drop them at the college gate when we leave never to
return would be to give up our most precious possession. We will
not make that mistake. Immediately on leaving college we are go-
ing to create a centre where we can meet. Shall that centre be a
club, a circle, a society, or an academy? Comrades, you shall de-
cide!”
This proposal was well received. We discussed it at once and
quickly discovered that founding a society, a circle, or a club re-
quired considerable funds, an enormous work of organization, and
a knowledge of the law-none of which orators and philosophers


390
LA VIE EN FLEUR
a
could provide. It is true that Fontanet undertook to organize, in
three months, a first-rate club, but his seductive offers were rejected.
By a great majority we declared for an academy. We were none
too sure what an academy might be; but the word flattered us.
After a long and confused discussion Isambart, a philosophy stu-
dent, invited us to draw up a constitution. We approved; but the
task seemed ungrateful and no one volunteered. We believed we
had done enough when we decided that the Academicians should
be chosen from the students in rhetoric and philosophy and that
the meetings, to be held at irregular intervals, be devoted to read-
ings and addresses of an agreeable but serious nature.
We elected twenty Academicians, reserving to ourselves the right
to increase the number if necessary. It would be hard for me to
recall the names of those twenty. Do not be surprised; for out in
the world, they say, there is a famous academy the forty members
of which no one can name.
We were pressed to give our Academy a title. In turn we sug-
gested:
“The Academy of Friends.
“Academy Molière. And we will produce comedies.
“Academy Fénelon.
“Academy of Rhetoric and Philosophy.
“Academy Chateaubriand.”
Fontanet addressed us with conviction:
"Comrades, a man endowed with a genius for oratory served,
during his long lifetime, the cause of the under dog. Let us honour
this noble example and invoke the name of Berryer for our
Academy."
This idea was received with groans and hisses; not that the name
of a great advocate seemed unworthy of our tribute, but because
we remembered that Fontanet, who was preparing for the bar, pre-
sumptuously intended to take the place of Berryer. Maxime Denis
shouted:
“Let's call it the Academy Fontanet right off!”
The voice of Laboriette came out like a rifle shot:
“I
propose
The Académie Française.”
He was answered by a great burst of laughter. He did not
understand and grew angry, for he was of a violent temper.
La Berthelière, our authority, said firmly:


ANATOLE FRANCE
391
"If you take my advice you will put yourselves under the patron-
age of Blaise Pascal.”
This proposal was unanimously and enthusiastically adopted.
Our Academy had a name. We discovered that it had no home.
Chazal, the country boy, offered us a feed-and-hay dealer's loft
in the rue du Regard for a clubroom. "We'll be very comfortable
“
there,” he said, “but we can't light any lamps for fear of fire.”
This habitation, more suitable for rats than for Academicians,
did not satisfy. Fontanet thought we could meet in my rooms,
which he declared were spacious, airy, and situated on the most
beautiful quai in Paris. Terrified at the thought of housing an
Academy I swore that what he called my rooms was only a mean
little dressing-room where you couldn't turn around.
Mouron offered a lace-shop, Isambart a back room at a book-
seller's, Sauvigny his uncle Maurice’s apartment.
All that re-
mained was to make sure whether these various places were at
their disposal. The next day uncle Maurice's apartment, the back
room at the book-seller's, and the lace-shop had disappeared by
magic. They had vanished like Aladdin's palace before the wand
of the wicked magician. We despaired of finding a home when
Sauvigny undertook to get Tristan Desrais' room for us. Tristan
Desrais was the friend I had loved passionately for three months
for his smartness and with whom I had broken because he hadn't
chosen me on his side one day when they were playing balloons.
His room, on the second floor of an old house in the rue Saint-
Dominique, was separated by a long corridor from the rest of the
apartment in which his family lived. Sauvigny, who had seen this
room, pronounced it superb. Desrais was at that moment busy
with the parallel bars and seemed unapproachable, but Sauvigny
ventured to speak to him. If Desrais was as good as admitted to
Saint-Cyr, Sauvigny was almost one of the crew of the Borda.
The words exchanged on this occasion by the young army and navy
have not been preserved. But Sauvigny, tall as a boot and proud
as Artaban, returned to tell us that Desrais didn't give a hang for
the Academy Blaise Pascal but would gladly lend his room to the
Academicians. As soon as this reply was made known to us Sau-
vigny was commissioned to express the Academy's thanks to Des-
rais. I refused to add my own; I could not forgive Desrais; I had
loved him too well. I had the bad taste to demand that he be


392
LA VIE EN FLEUR
kept out of our Academy. My confrères answered with one accord
that you couldn't bar from the Academy the man who gave it its
home. I prophesied that our installation in the rue Saint-Domi-
nique would bring ruin upon our noble project, and I was inspired
to this prophecy by a profound knowledge of the character of Des-
rais. The list of members of the Academy was drawn up and at the
head stood the name of Tristan Desrais.
Noufflard and Fontanet were appointed to purchase, on the first
free day, a bust of Blaise Pascal to adorn our meeting-room.
Mouron was chosen President. It was decided that I was to
make the opening address. This flattering choice was a sweet caress
.
to the vanity of my heart and glory afforded me such delight as it
was never to make me feel again. I walked on air. I began that
very day to compose my discourse, in a serious tone but full of
felicity. I filled it with pretty turns of speech; later I added others;
I was to add still more until the last minute. Never was a piece so
full of beauties; I left nothing to inspiration, nothing to cleverness
or ease, nothing to simple nature; it was all elaboration.
On the appointed day the two delegates found in a statuary shop
in the rue Racine a plaster bust of Blaise Pascal and ordered it sent
to M Tristan Desrais in the rue Saint-Dominique. It was more
than life-size, with a thoughtful expression and a funereal effect.
The tone of our Academy was to be sober, austere, and even a little
sombre.
The night of our inauguration it rained in torrents; the gutters
overflowed the kerbs and the pavements, the drains regurgitated
into the street; under a furious wind umbrellas turned inside out.
It was so dark you could not see where to walk. With both hands
I pressed my speech close to my breast to save it from the deluge.
At last I came to the rue Saint-Dominique. On the second floor an
old servant opened the door for me and silently directed me down
a long sombre corridor at the end of which I found the seat of the
Academy. Only two Academicians had yet arrived. But had there
been more, where would they have sat? There were in the room
only two chairs, and a bed on which Sauvigny and Chazal had
taken their places next to Desrais, our host. On top of a tall ward-
robe with a mirror stood the bust of Pascal, the only decoration
which spoke to the soul in this room, on every wall of which hung
foils, swords, and shotguns. Desrais pointed to the bust and said
a


ANATOLE FRANCE
393
in a nasty voice, "I suppose you think it's great to have that dumb
face hanging over you when you go to bed.”
In three-quarters of an hour two members arrived, then a third:
Isambart, Denis, and Fontanet. It was the consensus of opinion
that no more would come.
“And Mouron, our President?” I cried with the agony of an
orator seeing his audience dwindle to nothing.
“Are you crazy ?” answered Isambart. “You want Mouron with
his weak chest to come out in this wind and rain? It would kill
him!”
Having no President to call upon me I decided to do it myself
and began reading my speech which I knew was beautiful but-
I did not conceal the fact from myself—was perhaps not entirely
in the tone most appropriate to the circumstances. I read:
“Gentlemen of the Academy and dear Comrades:
"It is a great honour for me to be called upon to indicate the pur-
poses which have guided you in founding this Academy of litera-
ture and philosophy under the patronage of the great Pascal, whose
image smiles down upon us. Two purposes, rising like two fruitful
.
streams from your hearts and your minds, have sprung
.
.
>
At this moment Desrais, who had greeted the opening of my
speech with ironic applause, said to me frankly:
“Oh, look here, Nozière, you're not going to bore us long with
that stuff.”
A few protesting voices were raised in my favour. But how
feeble I found them! They made little impression upon Desrais,
who continued to address me:
"Turn off the spout and shut your trap. Anyway, here comes the
tea.”
And so it was. An old housekeeper came in with a tray which
she put down on the table. When she had gone Desrais said with
a disdainful smile:
“The family sent that tea.” Then he laughed maliciously.
“I've got better.”
And bringing out a bottle of rum from the cupboard he an-
nounced that he was going to make a punch and, as he had no bowl,
he would make it in the washbasin. He did what he said, putting


394
LA VIE EN FLEUR
а
a
a
a
the rum and sugar into the basin, and after he had put out the light
,
he set the punch on fire.
I decided then that I would have to give up reading my speech;
it hurt me cruelly that no one insisted upon hearing it.
Round the punch the Academicians danced, holding hands, and
in the circle Fontanet and Sauvigny, like two diabolic dwarfs, were
terrifying in their frenzy. All of a sudden a voice cried:
“The bust! The bust!"
On its perch, lit up by the livid flame, the Bust was green, it was
frightening and terrible. It looked like a dead man rising from the
grave. We lit the lamp again and drank large cups of punch.
Desrais, calm and cool, took the foils from the wall and wanted
to know who would have a bout with him.
“Me,” cried Chazal.
Never having had a foil in his hand he attacked furiously, utter-
ing loud cries, and rudely “touched” Desrais, who called him a
brute, a savage, a wild beast. But the lad pleased him. He chal-
lenged him to pick up a chair
chair by the back and hold it horizontal
at arm's length for a minute. Chazal took the bet and won. Des-
rais began to think highly of him. Both of them wanted to show
off their strength.
“Let's have a fight,” said Desrais.
“Suits me," answered Chazal.
They stripped to the waist and took body-holds. Chazal, bony
and black and stooping, was a perfect contrast to Desrais with his
body like an athlete by Myrrho or a student at Cambridge or Eton.
Correct and unflustered, he maintained perfect form while the good
Chazal, ignorant of the rules, fell unsuspectingly into the traps set
by his adversary and, in all innocence, struck blows which are gen-
erally considered foul. Finally he grabbed Desrais by the head
with both hands and swung him round and round.
"You're disqualified,” cried Desrais. "The head-hold is for-
bidden."
"Perhaps,” answered the rustic Chazal with an ingenuous smile.
“But you're licked.”
Desrais poured punch immoderately. He took a pack of cards
and began to play écarté with Sauvigny. And then, seized with
a sudden madness, the Academicians outraged that same Pascal
whom a short time ago they had chosen as their patron saint. They


ANATOLE FRANCE
395
insulted his bust. Fontanet found some shoes in a drawer and be-
gan flinging them at it. Desrais, losing heavily at his cards, saw
him and asked Fontanet to let his shoes alone, adding, "As for that
bust, you'll do me a favour if you take it off my hands.”
Fontanet, with the devil in him, didn't wait for another invita-
tion. He got up on a chair and dragging Blaise Pascal by the base,
which was all he could reach, let him fall to the floor, where he
broke into bits with a horrible noise. The Academy shouted hur-
rahs in honour of the iconoclast. The tumult and the disorder were
at their height when the housekeeper who had brought the tray
reappeared in the room and said to the young master:
“Your father orders you to send your guests home this minute
making an intolerable noise after midnight.”
In spite of his impudence Desrais did not protest against this
command and his silence made us tremble. We stood not on the
order of our going and gained the street where we found the wind
and the rain again.
The Academy Blaise Pascal met no more.
THE LAST DAY AT COLLEGE
a
My last day at college arrived.
My parents thought they were doing the right thing and had not
spared me the course in philosophy by which I profited in a fashion
quite contrary to their intentions. Without being very intelligent
I found the philosophy taught me so stupid, so inept, so absurd, so
silly, that I believed none of the verities which it established and
which you must profess and practise if you want to pass for an
honest man and a good citizen.
It was the last day of the scholastic year. Most of the pupils
were going away for two months; some, the happier ones like my-
self, were going away for ever. They all made up packages of
their books to take away; I left mine at the place.
Our professor did not lecture. He read us the Distribution of
the Eagles in M Thiers’ Consulate and Empire. So the University,
to crown my studies, made me acquainted with the worst writer in
the French language.
I felt a great sorrow at the thought that I should no longer be


396
LA VIE EN FLEUR
seeing Mouron every day. I clasped his warm little hand with
I
hidden emotion, for I was at that age when the most noble tender-
ness seemed a weakness unworthy of a man. We took an oath to
meet again.
I was very unhappy at college almost all the time and I prom-
ised myself great joy in leaving. When I had left for good I was
disappointed. My joy was neither so great nor so honest as I had
promised myself. That was due to a feeble and timid nature; it
was also the effect of that odious discipline which is imposed upon
every thought and every movement of school boys from birth to
young manhood, making them incapable of enjoying liberty and
unfit to live in the world. I, who escaped every evening from the
constraint of the overseers, felt it. What of the boarders who
never left their prison? Education in common as it is given now-
adays not only fails to prepare the pupil for the life he is des-
tined to lead but actually makes him unfit for it if he has the
least obedience or docility. The discipline imposed on little pri-
mary school children becomes harsh and humiliating when youths
of seventeen and eighteen are subjected to it. The uniformity of
the exercises makes them insipid. It stultifies the mind which gets
false values from a system of rewards and punishments correspond-
ing to nothing we find in life where our actions bear within them-
selves their good or evil consequences. So when we leave college
we are shy of action and afraid of liberty. All of that I vaguely
felt and my happiness was troubled.
M DUBOIS TEASES
M Dubois took pleasure in scandalizing my mother. One day
he found her with a book in her hand; it was a work by Nicole
which she always kept by her, seemed to be always reading and
never read; believing it very good she hoped to absorb some of it
by keeping her hands on it, like the prayer of Saint Catherine which
relieves the colic when placed on the stomach. The book led the
conversation to morality, which M Dubois defined as the science
of natural laws or of the things which are good or bad in human
society.
"It is always the same," he added, “because nature does not


ANATOLE FRANCE
397
9)
change. There is a morality for animals and even for vegetables,
because for each there is conformity or non-conformity with nature
and, consequently, a good and an evil. The morality of wolves is to
eat sheep, just as the morality of sheep is to eat grass.
My mother, who wanted morality for human beings only, grew
angry.
M Dubois reproached her because her pride would not allow that
animals and plants were as capable of good and evil as herself.
She sent him away to compose a moral discourse for wolves and
maxims for nettles.
Seeing that she was pious and attached to her religion, M Dubois
was pleased to recite to her the speech of gentle Zaire to her confi-
dante, Fatima, in the seraglio at Jerusalem:
“Je le vois trop; les soins qu'on prend de notre enfance
Forment nos sentiments, nos meurs, notre créance.
J'eusse été près du Gange esclave des faux dieux,
Chrétienne dans Paris, musulmane en ces lieux."
a
Only he blamed Zaïre for calling the gods of India false at the
very moment when she seemed to believe them as true as the
others.
During a cholera epidemic which took off several of our ac-
quaintances my mother, my father, and M Danquin came naturally
to talk about death. My parents' sentiments were orthodox; that
is all I can say of them. Those of my father indicated his hope
of being received by the God of decent people whom he had learned
to know from Béranger and in whom he had a friendly and trusting
faith.
M Dubois, who was present, remained silent and seemed indif-
ferent to the conversation. But when it was over he came to my
mother and said:
“Listen to the most profound of Latin poets on this subject. Un-
happily I cannot give you the accent and the harmonies of his verse:
What to us were the troubles of Rome in the centuries which
pre-
ceded our birth when all Africa fell upon the Empire, when the
shattered air bore from afar the noise of war? Even so when we
have ceased to live will we be sheltered from the accidents of life.'”


398
REFLECTION
One day M Dubois asked Mme Nozière to name the most tragic
day in history. Mme Nozière did not know.
“It is,” M Dubois told her, “the day of the battle of Poitiers
when in 732, the science, the art, and the civilization of Arabia fell
back before the barbarism of the Franks."
M Dubois was by no means a fanatic. He did not dream of im-
posing his ideas on any one. He was much more likely to be
tempted to keep them to himself as an honourable distinction. But
he was a tease. It was because he liked my mother that he pre-
a
ferred to let his contrary humour loose upon her. We tease only
those we love. I was surprised that a man so old should have such
amusements. I did not know that the spirit of a man does not
change with the years.
To be continued
REFLECTION
BY ELIZABETH J. COATSWORTH
Geraniums
Vho ever heard that Sappho put
eraniums in her hair?
Or thought that Cleopatra brushed
Her long Greek face against their petals?
Did Beatrice carry them?
Or any bird sigh out his wild-fire heart
In passion for them?
Yet sparrows, far outnumbering nightingales,
Have gossiped under their tomato cans,
And lonely spinsters loved them more than cats,
And living girls have felt quite festive, going
Down vulgar streets
With such unsubtle gaiety at their belts.


SPEED THE PLOUGH
BY MARY BUTTS
H
E lay in bed, lax and staring, and obscure images rose and
hung before him, dissolved, reshaped. His great illness
passed from him. It left him too faint for any sequence of thought.
He lay still, without memory, without hope. Such concrete impres-
sions as came to him were sensuous and centred round the women
of the hospital. They distressed him. They were not like the
Kirchner girls in the worn Sketch he fingered all day. La Coquet-
terie d'une Ange. One need not know French to understand
Coquetterie, and Ange was an easy guess. He stared at the neat
counterpane. A tall freckled girl with dragged red hair banged
down
a
a cup
of cocoa and strode away.
Coquetterie, mannequin, lingerie, and all one could say in Eng-
lish was underwear. He flicked over the pages of the battered
Sketch, and then looked at the little nurse touching her lips with
carmine. "Georgette,” he murmured sleepily, "crêpe georgette."
He would always be lame. For years his nerves would rise and
quiver and knot themselves, and project loathsome images. But he
had a fine body, and his soldiering had set his shoulders and hard-
ened his hands and arms.
"Get him back onto the land," the doctors said.
The smells in the ward began to assail him, interlacing spirals of
odour, subtle but distinct. Disinfectant and distemper, the home-
ly smell of blankets, the faint tang of blood, and then a sour draught
from the third bed where a man had been sick.
He crept down under the clothes. Their associations rather
than their textures were abhorrent to him, they reminded him of
evil noises ... the crackle of starched aprons, clashing plates,
unmodulated sounds. Georgette would never wear harsh things
like that. She would wear ... beautiful things with names
velours and organdie, and that faint windy stuff aerophane.
He drowsed back to France, and saw in the sky great aeroplanes
dipping and swerving, or holding on that line of steady flight like
a travelling eye of God. The wisps of cloud that trailed a moment
behind them were not more delicate than her dress.
a
.
.


400
SPEED THE PLOUGH
а
a
.
"What he wants, doctor, to my mind, is rousing. There he lies
all day in a dream. He must have been a strong man once. No,
we don't know what he was. Something out of doors I should
think. He lies there with that precious Kirchner album, never a
word to say.'
The doctor nodded.
He lay very still. The presence of the matron made him writhe
like the remembered scream of metal upon metal. Her large hands
concealed bones that would snap. He lay like a rabbit in its form,
and fright shewed his dull gums between his drawn-back lips.
Weeks passed. Then one day he got up and saw himself in a
glass. He was not surprised. It was all as he had known it must
be. He could not go back to the old life. It seemed to him that
he would soil its loveliness. Its exotics would shrivel and tarnish
as he limped by. “Light things, and winged, and holy" they flut-
tered past him, crêpe velours, crêpe de chine, organdie, aerophane,
georgette. He had dropped his stick
there was no
one to wash his dirty hands. ... The red-haired nurse found him
crying, and took him back to bed.
For two months longer he laboured under their kindness and
wasted under their placidity. He brooded, realizing with pitiful
want of clarity that there were unstable delicate things by which
he might be cured. He found a ritual and a litany. Dressed in
vertical black, he bore on his outstretched arms, huge bales of
wound stuffs. With a turn of the wrist he would unwrap them,
and they would fall from him rayed like some terrestrial star. The
Kirchner album supplied the rest. He named the girls, Suzanne
and Verveine, Ambre and Desti, and ranged them about him. Then
he would undress them, and dress them again in immaculate fabrics.
While he did that he could not speak to them because his mouth
would be barred with pins.
The doctors found him weaker.
Several of the nurses were pretty. That was not what he
wanted. Their fresh skins irritated him. Somewhere there must
still be women whose skins were lustrous with powder, and whose
eyes were shadowed with violet from an ivory box. The brisk
provincial women passed through his ward visiting from bed to bed.
In their homely clothes there was an echo of the lovely fashions of
mondaines, buttons on a skirt where a slit should have been, a shirt
a


MARY BUTTS
401
.
.
cut to the collar bone whose opening should have sprung from the
hollow between the breasts.
Months passed. The fabric of his dream hardened into a shell
for his spirit. He remained passive under the hospital care.
They sent him down to a farm on a brilliant March day.
His starved nerves devoured the air and sunlight. If the winds
parched, they braced him, and when the snow fell it buried his
memories clean. Because she had worn a real musquash coat, and
carried a brocade satchel he had half believed the expensive woman
who had sat by his bed, and talked about the worth and the beauty
of a life at the plough's tail. Of course he might not be able to
plough because of his poor leg ... but there was always the milk-
ing ... or pigs . ... or he might thatch.
Unfamiliarity gave his world a certain interest. He fluttered
the farmer's wife. Nothing came to trouble the continuity of his
dream. The sheen on the new grass, the expanse of sky, now heavy
as marble, now luminous; the embroidery that a bare tree makes
against the sky, the iridescent scum on a village pond, these were
his remembrancers, the assurance of his realities. Beside them a
cow was an obscene vision of the night.
Too lame to plough or to go far afield, it seemed as though his
fate must overtake him among the horned beasts. So far he had
ignored them. At the afternoon milking he had been an onlooker,
then a tentative operator. Unfortunately the farmer recognized a
born milkman. At five o'clock next morning they would go out to-
gether to the byres.
At dawn the air was like a sheet of glass; behind it one great star
glittered. Dimmed by a transparent shutter, the hard new light
poured into the world. A stillness so keen that it seemed the
crystallization of speed hung over the farm. From the kitchen
chimney rose a feather of smoke, vertical, delicate, light as a plume
on Gaby's head. As he stamped out into the yard in his gaiters
and corduroys he thought of the similitude and his mouth twisted.
In the yard the straw rose in yellow bales out of the brown
dung pools. Each straw was brocaded with frost, and the thin ice
crackled under his boots. He paused. “Diamanté,” he said at
last, "that's it."
On a high shoulder of down above the house, a flock of sheep
were gathered like a puffy mat of irregular design. The continual


402
SPEED THE PLOUGH
رو
.
.
> >
bleating, the tang of the iron bell, gave coherence to the tranquillity
of that Artemisian dawn. A hound let loose from the manor by
some early groom passed menacing over the soundless grass. A cock
upon the pigsty wall tore the air with his screams. He stopped
outside the byre now moaning with restless life. The cock brought
memories. “Chanticleer, they called him, like that play
once.
He remembered how he had once stood outside the window of a
famous shop and thrilled at a placard. . . . "In twenty-four hours
M Lewis arrives from Paris with the Chanticleer toque.” It had
been a stage hit, of course, one hadn't done business with it, but, O
God! the London women whose wide skirts rose with the wind till
they bore them down the street like ships. He remembered a phrase
he had heard once, a "scented gale.” They were like that. The
open door of the cow shed steamed with the rankness that had driven
out from life.
Inside were twenty female animals waiting
to be milked.
He went in to the warm reeking dark.
He squatted on the greasy milking stool, spoke softly to his beast,
and tugged away. The hot milk spurted out into the pail, an amaz-
ing substance, pure, and thick with bubbles. Its contact with
caked hides and steaming straw sickened him. The gentle beast
rubbed her head against her back and stared. He left the stall and
her warm breath. The light was gaining. He could see rows of
huge buttocks shifting uneasily. From two places he heard the
milk squirting in the pails. He turned to it again, and milked one
beast and another, stripping each clean.
The warm milk whose beauty had pleased began to nauseate him.
There was a difference in nature between that winking pearling flow
and the pale decency of a Lyons' tea jug. So this was where it all
started. Dimly he realized that this was where most of life started,
indifferent of any later phases. “Little bits of Auff,” Rosalba and
all the Kirchner tribe
was Polaire only a cow
Delysia? . . The light had now the full measure of day. A
wind that tasted delicately of shingle and the turf flew to meet
him. The mat on the down shoulder was now a dissolving view of
ambulating mushrooms.
or
.
“Yes, my son,” the farmer was saying, "you just stay here where
you're well off, and go on milking for me. I know a born milkman


MARY BUTTS
403
.
cost
G
>
when I see one, and I don't mind telling you you're it. I believe
you could milk a bull if you were so inclined. . .
He sat silent, overwhelmed by the disarming kindness.
“See how the beasts take to you,” the voice went on.
"That old
cow she's a terror, and I heard you soothing her down till she was
pleasant as yon cat. It's dairy work you were cut out for. ...
There's a bull coming round this forenoon ... pedigree
me a bit. You come along.”
As yet they did not work him very hard, he would have time to
think. He dodged his obligations towards the bull, and walked
over to an upland field. He swept away the snow from under a
thorn bush, folded his coat beneath him, and lit a cigarette.
“And I stopped, and I looked, and I listened.” Yes, that was
it, and about time too. For a while he whistled slowly Robey's
masterpiece.
He had to settle with his sense of decency. It was all very
well. These things might have to happen. The prospect of a
milkless, meatless London impressed him as inconvenient. Still
most of that stuff came from abroad, by sea. That was what
the blockade was for. “I've got to get away from this. I never
thought of this before, and I don't like it. I've been jockeyed
into it somehow, and I don't like it. It's dirty, yes dirty, like a
man being sick. In London we're civilized. ...
A gull floated in from the sea, and up the valley where the
horses steamed at the spring ploughing.
"A bit of it may be all right, it's getting near that does one
in. There aren't any women here. They're animals. Even those
girls they call the squire's daughters. I never saw such boots. ...
They'd say that things were for use, and in London they're for
show.... Give me the good old show....” He stopped to dream.
He was in a vast circular gallery so precipitous that standing one
felt impelled to reel over and sprawl down into the stalls half
a mile below. Some comedian had left the stage. Two gold-laced
men were changing the numbers on either side. The orchestra
played again, something that had no common tune. Then there
swung on to the stage a woman plumed and violent, wrapped in
leopard skins and cloth-of-gold. Sometimes she stepped like a
young horse, sometimes she moved with the easy trailing of a
snake. She did nothing that was not trivial, yet she invested
every moment with a significance whose memory was rapture.


404
SPEED THE PLOUGH
Quintessence was the word he wanted. He said ... “There's
a lot of use in shows."
Then he got up stiffly, and walked down the steep track to the
farm, still whistling.
When the work was over he went out again. Before the pub,
at the door marked "hotel" a car was standing, a green car with
glossy panels and a monogram, cushioned inside with grey and
starred with silver. A chauffeur, symphonic also in green and
bright buttons, was cranking her up. Perched upon the radiator
was a naked silver girl. A woman came out of the inn. She wore
white furs swathed over deep blue. Her feet flashed in their glossy
boots. She wore a god in green jade and rose. Her gloves were
rich and thick, like moulded ivory.
"Joy riding,” said a shepherd, and trudged on, but he stood
ravished. It was not all dead then, the fine delicate life that had
been the substance of his dream. Rare it might be, and decried,
but it endured. The car's low humming died away, phantom-like
he saw it in the darkling lane, a shell enclosing a pearl, the quin-
tessence of cities, the perfection of the world.
He had heard her deep voice. “I think we'll be getting back
now.” She was going back to London. He went into the bar and
asked the landlady who she was.
"Sort of actress,” the landlord said. And then. "The war
ought to have stopped that sort of thing.”
“Why, what's the harm?"
“Spending the money that ought to go to beating those bloody
Germans.”
“All the same her sort brings custom,” the wife had said.
He drank his beer and went out into the pure cold evening.
It was six o'clock by the old time, and the radiance was unnatural.
He walked down the damp lane, pale between the hedgerows.
It widened and skirted a pond covered with vivid slime.
"And that was all they had to say about her. ...'
He hated them. A cart came storming up the hill, a compelling
noise, grinding wheels and creaking shafts and jingling harness;
hard breathing, and the rough voice of the carter to his beast.
At the pond the horse pulled up to breathe, his coat steamed,
the carter leaned on the shaft.
"Some pull that.”
a


MARY BUTTS
405
"Aye, so it be.” He noticed for the first time the essential
difference in their speech.
Carter and horse went up the hill. He lit another cigarette.
Something had happened to him, resolving his mind of all
doubts. He saw the tail lights of a car drawing through the
vast outskirts of a city. An infinite fine line went out from it
and drew him also. That tail lamp was his star. Within the car
a girl lay rapt, insolent, a cigarette at her lips.
He dreamed. Dark gathered. Then he noticed that something
luminous was coming towards him. Down the hollow lane white
patches were moving, irregular, but in sequence, patches that
seemed to his dulled ears to move silently, and to eyes trained
to traffic extraordinarily slow. The sun had passed. The shadow
of the hill overhung the valley. The pale light above intensified
its menace. The straggling patches, like the cups of snow the
downs still held in every hollow, made down the lane to the pond's
edge. It was very cold. From there no lighted windows showed.
Only the tip of his cigarette was crimson as in Piccadilly.
With the sound of a charging beast, a song burst from him, as,
soundless, each snowy patch slid from the land on to the mirrored
back of the pond. He began to shout out loud.
"Some lame, some tame, some game for anything, some like a stand-
up fight,
Some stay abed in the morning, and some stay out all night.
Have you seen the ducks go by, go a rolling home?
Feeling very glad and spry, have you seen them roam?
There's mamma duck, papa duck, the grand old drake,
Leading away, what a noise they make.
Have you heard them quack, have you heard them quack, have
you seen those ducks go by?
Have you seen the ducks go by, go a rolling home?
.
The way back to the farm his voice answered Lee White's, and
the Vaudeville chorus sustained them. At the farm door they for-
sook him. He had to be coherent to the farmer. He sought inspira-
tion. It came. He played with the latch, and then walked into
the kitchen, lyrical. ...
"And I stopped, and I looked, and I left.”


406
POE
A month later found him on his knees, vertical in black cloth,
and grey trousers, and exquisite bow tie. A roll of Lyons brocade,
silver, and peach, was pliant between his fingers as the teats of a
cow. Inside it a girl stood frowning down upon him.
Despair was on her face, and on the faces of the attendant
women.
"But if
you
can't
get me the lace to go with it, what am I to
wear?"
“I am sorry, madame. ... Indeed we have done all that is pos-
sible. It seems that it is not to be had. I can assure madame that
we have done our best.” He rose and appealed to the women. His
conviction touched them all.
“Madame, anything that we can do . .
The lovely girl frowned on them, and kicked at her half-pinned
draperies.
“When the war starts interfering with my clothes,” she said,
"the war goes under. . .
His eyes kindled.
POE
BY MINA LOY
a lyric elixir of death
embalms
the spindle spirits of your hour glass loves
on moon spun nights
sets
icicled canopy
for corpses of poesy
with roses and northern lights
Where frozen nightingales in ilix aisles
sing burial rites


Courtesy of the Belmaison Gallery
A DRAWING.
BY BEN BENY





THE IRONY OF LIBERALISM
BY G. SANTAYANA
To
O the mind of the ancients, who knew something of such
matters, liberty and prosperity seemed hardly compatible,
yet modern liberalism wants them together. Liberals believe that
free inquiry, free invention, free association, and free trade are
sure to produce prosperity. I have no doubt they are right in this;
the nineteenth century, that golden age of liberalism, certainly saw
a great increase in wealth, in science, and in comforts. What the
ancients had before them was a different side of the question: they
had no experience of liberalism; they expected to be state-ridden
in their religion, their customs, and their military service; even in
their personal and family morals they did not begrudge the strictest
discipline; their states needed to be intensely unified, being small
and in constant danger of total destruction. Under these circum-
stances it seemed clear to them that prosperity, however it might
have been produced, was dangerous to liberty. Prosperity brought
power; and when a people exercises control over other peoples its
government becomes ponderous even at home; its elaborate machin-
ery cannot be stopped, and can hardly be mended; the imperial
people becomes the slave of its commitments. Moreover, prosper-
ity requires inequalities of function and creates inequalities of for-
tune; and both too much work and too much wealth kill liberty
in the individual. They involve subjection to things; and this is
contrary to what the ancients, who had the pride of noble animals,
called freedom. Prosperity, both for individuals and for states,
means possessions; and possessions mean burdens and harness and
slavery: and slavery for the mind too, because it is not only the
rich man's time that is pre-empted, but his affections, his judgement,
and the range of his thoughts.
I often wonder, looking at my rich friends, how far their pos-
sessions are facilities and how far they are impediments. The tele-
phone, for instance, is a facility if you wish to be in many places
at once and to attend to anything that may turn up; it is an im-
pediment if you are happy where you are and in what you are doing.


408
THE IRONY OF LIBERALISM
Public motor-vehicles, public libraries, and public attendants (such
as waiters in hotels, when they wait) are a convenience, which even
the impecunious may enjoy; but private automobiles, private col-
lections of books or pictures, and private servants are, to my think-
ing, an encumbrance: but then I am an old fogey and almost an
ancient philosopher, and I don't count. I prize civilization, being
bred in towns and liking to hear and to see what new things people
are up to: I like to walk about amongst the beautiful things that
adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort
of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty.
Perhaps what liberalism aspires to marry with liberty is not so
much prosperity as progress. Progress means continued change for
the better; and it is obvious that liberty will conduce to progress in
all those things, such as writing poetry, which a man can pursue
without aid or interference from others: where aid is requisite and
interference probable, as in politics, liberty conduces to progress
only in so far as people are unanimous, and spontaneously wish to
move in the same direction. Now what is the direction of change
which seems progress to liberals? A pure liberal might reply,
The direction of liberty itself: the ideal is that every man should
move in whatever direction he likes, with the aid of such as agree
with him, and without interfering with those who disagree. Lib-
erty so conceived would be identical with happiness, with spon-
taneous life, blamelessly and safely lived; and the impulse of lib-
eralism, to give everybody what he wants, in so far as that is pos-
sible, would be identical with simple kindness. Benevolence was
one of the chief motives in liberalism in the beginning, and many a
liberal is still full of kindness in his private capacity; but polit-
ically, as a liberal, he is something more than kind. The direction
in which many, or even most, people would like to move fills him
with disgust and indignation; he does not at all wish them to be
happy, unless they can be happy on his own diet; and being a re-
former and a philanthropist, he exerts himself to turn all men into
the sort of men he likes, so as to be able to like them. It would be
selfish, he thinks, to let people alone. They must be helped, and not
merely helped to what they desire—that might really be very bad
for them—but helped onwards, upwards, in the right direction. Prog-
ress could not be rightly placed in a smaller population, a simpler
economy, more moral diversity between nations, and stricter moral


G. SANTAYANA
409
a
discipline in each of them. That would be progress backwards,
and if it made people happier, it would not make the liberal so.
Progress, if it is to please him, must continue in the direction in
which the nineteenth century progressed, towards vast numbers, ma-
terial complexity, moral uniformity, and economic interdepend-
ence. The best little boy, for instance, according to the liberal
ideal, desires to be washed, to go to school, to do Swedish exercises,
and to learn everything out of books. But perhaps the individual
little boy (and according to the liberal philosophy his individuality
is sacred, and the only judge of what is good or true for him is
his own consciousness) desires to go dirty, to make mud-pies in the
street, and to learn everything by experience or by report from older
boys. When the philanthropist runs up to the rescue, this little
ingrate sniffles at him the very principle of liberal liberty, “Let me
alone.” To inform such an urchin that he does not know what is
good for him, that he is a slave to bad habits and devilish instincts,
that true freedom for him can only come of correcting himself, until
he has learned to find happiness in virtue-plainly that would be
to abandon liberalism, and to preach the classical doctrine that the
good is not liberty but wisdom. Liberalism was a protest against
just such assumptions of authority. It emphatically refused to
pursue an eventual stoical freedom, absurdly so called, which was
to come when we had given up everything we really wanted—the
mock freedom of service. In the presence of the little boy, liberal
philosophy takes a middle course. It is convinced—though it
would not do to tell him so prematurely—that he must be allowed
to go dirty for a time, until sufficient experience of filth teaches
him how much more comfortable it is to be clean; also that he will
go to school of his own accord if the books have pictures enough
in them, and if the teacher begins by showing him how to make
superior mud-pies. As to morals and religion, the boy and his com-
panions will evolve the appropriate ones in time out of their own
experience, and no others would be genuine.
Liberal philosophy, at this point, ceases to be empirical and
British in order to become German and transcendental. Moral life,
it now believes, is not the pursuit of liberty, and happiness of all
sorts by all sorts of different creatures; it is the development of a
single spirit in all life through a series of necessary phases, each
higher than the preceding one. No man, accordingly, can really or


410
THE IRONY OF LIBERALISM
if
ultimately desire anything but what the best people desire. This is
the principle of the higher snobbery; and in fact, all earnest lib-
erals are higher snobs. If you refuse to move in the prescribed
direction, you are not simply different, you are arrested and per-
verse. The savage must not remain a savage, nor the nun a nun,
and China must not keep its wall. If the animals remain animals
it is somehow through a failure of the will in them, and very sad.
Classic liberty, though only a name for stubborn independence, and
obedience to one's own nature, was too free, in one way, for the
modern liberal. It accepted all sorts of perfections, animal, human,
and divine, as final after their kind, each the seat of a sufficient vir-
tue and happiness. It was polytheistic. Between master and slave,
between man and woman, it admitted no moral advance or devel-
opment; they were, or might be, equally perfect. Inequality was
honourable; amongst the humblest there could be dignity and
sweetness; the higher snobbery would have been absurd, because
you were not content to be what you were now, how could
you
ever be content with anything? But the transcendental principle
of progress is pantheistic. It requires everything to be ill at ease
in its own house; no one can be really free or happy but all must
be tossed, like herded emigrants, on the same compulsory voyage,
to the same unhomely destination. The world came from a nebula,
and to a nebula it returns. In the interval, happiness is not to be
found in being a fixed star, as bright and pure as possible, even if
only for a season; happiness is to flow and dissolve in sympathy
with one's higher destiny.
The notion of progress is thus merged with that of universal evo-
lution, dropping the element of liberty and even of improvement.
Nevertheless, in the political expression of liberalism, liberty took
the first innings. Protestants began by asserting the right of private
judgement in interpreting Scripture; transcendentalists ended by
asserting the divine right of the individual to impose his own spirit
on everything he touched. His duty to himself, which was also his
deepest instinct, was to suck in from the widest possible field all
that was congenial to him, and to reject, down to his very centre,
whatever might thwart or offend. Sometimes he carried his con-
sistency in Egotism to the length of denying that anything he
could not digest could possibly exist, or that the material world
and foreign nations were more than ideal pawns in the game he
a


G. SANTAYANA
411
played with himself for his self-development. Even when not
initiated into these transcendental mysteries, he was filled with
practical self-trust, the desire to give himself freedom, and the be-
lief that he deserved it. There was no need of exploring anything
he was not tempted to explore; he had an equal right to his opinion,
whatever the limits of his knowledge; and he should be coerced as
little as possible in his action. In specific matters, for the sake of
expediency, he might be willing to yield to the majority; but only
when his vote had been counted, and as a sort of insurance against
being disturbed in his residual liberty.
There was a general conviction behind all these maxims, that
tradition corrupts experience. All sensation—which is the test of
matters of fact—is somebody's sensation; all reasoning is some-
body's reasoning, and vitally persuasive as it first comes; but when
transmitted the evidence loses its edge, words drop their full mean-
ing, and inert conventions falsify the insights of those who had
instituted them. Therefore reform, revision, restatement are per-
petually required: any individual, according to this view, who hon-
estly corrected tradition was sure to improve upon it., Whatsoever
was not the fresh handiwork of the soul and true to its present de-
mand was bad for that soul. A man without traditions, if he could
only be materially well equipped, would be purer, more rational,
more virtuous than if he had been an heir to anything. Weh dir,
dass du ein Enkel bist! Blessed are the orphans, for they shall de-
,
serve to have children; blessed the American! Philosophy should
be transcendental, history romantic and focussed in one's own coun-
try, politics democratic, and art individual and above convention.
Variety in religious dogma would only prove the truth—that is, the
inwardness of inspiration.
Yet if this transcendental freedom had been the whole of liber-
alism, would not the animals, such of them at least as are not gre-
garious, have been the most perfect liberals? Are they not ruled
wholly from within? Do they not enjoy complete freedom of
conscience and of expression? Does Mrs Grundy interfere with
their spontaneous actions? Are they ever compelled to fight except
by their own impulse and in their private interest? Yet it was not
the ideal of liberalism to return to nature; far from it. It admon-
ished the dogs not to bark and bite, even if, in the words of the
sacred poet, “it is their nature to.” Dogs, according to transcen-


412
THE IRONY OF LIBERALISM
dental philosophy, ought to improve their nature, and to behave
better. A chief part of the liberal inspiration was the love of peace,
safety, comfort, and general information; it aimed at stable wealth,
it insisted on education, it venerated culture. It was wholly out of
sympathy with the wilder instincts of man, with the love of forag-
ing, of hunting, of fighting, of plotting, of carousing, or of doing
penance. It had an acute, a sickening horror of suffering; to be
cruel was devilish and to be hardened to pain was brutal. I am
afraid liberalism was hopelessly pre-Nietzschean; it was Victorian;
it was tame. In inviting every man to be free and autonomous,
it assumed that, once free, he would wish to be rich, to be educated,
and to be demure. How could he possibly fail to covet a way of
life which, in the eyes of liberals, was so obviously the best? It
must have been a painful surprise to them, and most inexplicable,
that hardly anybody who had had a taste of the liberal system has
ever liked it.
What about liberty in love? If there is one ingenuous and
winged creature among the immortals, it is Eros; the freer and
more innocent love is, the more it will futter, the farther it will
range, and the higher it will soar. But at the touch of matter, of
conditions, of consequences, how all its freedom shrivels, or turns
into tragedy! What prohibitions, what hypocrisies, what respon-
sibilities, what sorrows! The progress of civilization compels love
to respect the limits set to it by earlier vows, by age, sex, class, race,
religion, blood relationship, and even fictitious relationship; bounds
of which the impertinent Eros himself knows nothing. Society
smothers the imp altogether in the long christening-clothes of do-
mestic affection and religious duty. What was once a sensuous in-
toxication, a mystic rapture, an enchanted friendship, becomes all
a question of money, of habit, of children. British liberalism has
been particularly cruel to love; in the Victorian era all its amiable
impulses were reputed indecent, until a marriage certificate sud-
denly rendered them godly, though still unmentionable. And what
liberty does even the latest radicalism offer to the heart? Liberty
to be divorced; divorced at great expense, with shabby perjuries and
public scandal, probably in order to be at once married again, until
the next divorce. Was it not franker and nobler to leave love,
as in Spain, to the poets; to let the stripling play the guitar as much
as he liked in the moonlight, exchange passionate glances, whisper


G. SANTAYANA
413
daily at the lattice, and then, dressing the bride in black, to dismiss
free fancy at the church door, saying: Henceforth let thy names be
charity and fidelity and obedience?
It is not politics that can bring true liberty to the soul; that
must be achieved, if at all, by philosophy; but liberalism may
bring large opportunities for achievement in a man's outward life.
It intensifies—because it renders attainable—the lure of public
distinction, of luxury, of love surrounded by refined pleasures.
The liberal state stimulates the imagination of an ambitious man
to the highest degree. Those who have a good start in the uni-
versal competition, or sharp wits, or audacity, will find plenty
of prizes awaiting them. With the pride of wealth, when it is
great, there comes the pride of munificence; in the suburbs of
wealth there is culture, and in its service there is science. When
science can minister to wealth and intelligence to dominion, both
can be carried on the shoulders of the plutocracy which dominates
the liberal state; and they can fill it with innumerable comforts
and marvellous inventions. At the same time, nothing will hinder
the weaker members of rich families from becoming clergymen
or even scholars or artists; or they may range over the five conti-
nents, hunt whatever wild beasts remain in the jungle, and write
books about savages.
Whether these prizes offered by liberal society are worth win-
ning, I cannot say from experience, never having desired them;
but the aspects of modern life which any one may observe, and
the analytic picture of it which the novelists supply, are not very
attractive. Wealth is always, even when most secure, full of itch
and fear; worry about health, children, religion, marriage, ser-
vants; and the awful questions of where to live, when one may
live anywhere, and yet all seems to depend on the choice. For the
politician, politics are less important than his private affairs, and
less interesting than bridge; and he has always a party, or a wicked
opposition, on which to throw the blame if his careless measures
turn out badly. No one in office can be a true statesman, because
a true statesman is consistent, and public opinion will never long
support any consistent course. What the successful man in mod-
ern society really most cares about is love: love for him is a curious
mixture of sensuality, vanity, and friendship; it lights up all the
world of his thought and action with its secret and unsteady flame.


414
THE IRONY OF LIBERALISM
Even when happy and legal, it seems to be three quarters anxiety
and sorrow; for if nothing worse happens to lovers, they grow
old.
I hear no laughter among the rich which is not forced and nervous.
I find no sense of moral security amongst them, no happy freedom,
no mastery over anything. Yet this is the very cream of liberal
life, the brilliant success for the sake of which Christendom was
overturned, and the dull peasantry elevated into factory-hands,
shop-keepers, and chauffeurs.
When the lists are open to all, and the one aim of life is to live as
much as possible like the rich, the majority must needs be dis-
couraged. The same task is proposed to unequal strengths, and
the competition emphasizes the inequality. There was more en-
couragement for mediocre people when happiness was set before
them in mediocrity, or in excellence in some special craft. Now
the mass, hopelessly out of the running in the race for wealth, falls
out and drifts into squalor. Since there is liberty, the listless man
will work as little and drink as much as he an; he will crawl into
whatever tenement he can get cheapest, seek the society in which
least effort is demanded and the least shame is felt, have as many
children as improvidence sends him, let himself out, at a pinch, for
whatever service and whatever wages he can obtain, drift into some
syndicated servitude or some great migration, or sink in solitude
into the deepest misery. He then becomes a denizen of those slimy
quarters, under the shadow of railway bridges, breweries, and gas-
works, where the blear lights of a public-house peer through the
rain at every corner, and offer him the one joy remaining in life;
for joy is not to be mentioned in the same breath as the female
prowling by the door, hardly less befuddled and bedraggled than the
lurching idlers whom she endeavours to entice; but perhaps God
does not see all this, because a pall hangs over it perpetually of im-
penetrable smoke. The liberal system, which sought to raise the
individual, has degraded the masses; and this on so vast a scale and
to so pitiable a degree, that the other element in liberalism, philan-
thropic zeal, has come again to the fore. Liberty go hang, say
the new radicals; let us save the people. Liberal legislation, which
was to have reduced government to the minimum of police con-
trol, now has undertaken public education, social reform, and even
the management of industry.
This happy people can read. It supports a press conforming to


G. SANTAYANA
415
the tastes of the common man, or rather to such tastes as common
men can have in common; for the best in each is not diffused
enough to be catered for in public. Moreover, this press is auda-
ciously managed by some adventitious power, which guides it for
its own purposes, commercial or sectarian. Superstitions old and
new thrive in this infected atmosphere; they are now all treated
with a curious respect, as if nobody could have anything to object
to them. It is all a scramble of prejudices and rumours; what-
ever first catches the ear becomes a nucleus for all further presump-
tions and sympathies. Advertising is the modern substitute for
argument, its function is to make the worse appear the better article.
A confused competition of all propagandas—those insults to human
nature—is carried on by the most expert psychological methods,
which the art of advertising has discovered; for instance, by always
repeating a lie, when it has been exposed, instead of retracting it.
The world at large is deafened; but each propaganda makes its
little knot of proselytes, and inspires them with a new readiness
to persecute and to suffer in the sacred cause. The only question
is, which propaganda can first materially reach the greatest num-
ber of persons, and can most efficaciously quench all the others.
At present, it looks as if the German, the Catholic, and the Com-
munist propagandas had the best chances; but these three are di-
vergent essentially (though against a common enemy they may
work for a while together, as they did during this war) and they
appeal to different weaknesses of human nature; they are alike,
however, in being equally illiberal, equally “rücksichtlos" and
"böse,” equally regardless of the harm they may do, and account-
ing it all an added glory, like baiting the devil. By giving a free
rein to such propagandas, and by disgusting the people with too
much optimism, toleration, and neutrality, liberalism has intro-
duced a new reign of unqualified ill-will. Hatred and wilfulness
are everywhere; nations and classes are called to life on purpose to
embody them; they are summoned by their leaders to shake off
the lethargy of contentment and to become conscious of their
existence and of their terrible wrongs. These propagandas have
taken shape in the blue sky of liberalism, like so many summer
clouds; they seem airships sailing under a flag of truce; but they
are engines of war, and on the first occasion they will hoist their
true colours, and break the peace which allowed them to cruise


416
THE IRONY OF LIBERALISM
over us so leisurely. Each will try to establish its universal as-
cendancy by force, in contempt of personal freedom, or the voice
of majorities. It will rely, against the apathy and vagueness of
the million, on concentrated zeal in its adepts. Minorities every-
where have their way; and majorities, grown familiar with projects
that at first shocked them, decide one fine morning that there may
be no harm in them after all, and follow like sheep. Every trade,
sect, private company, and aspiring nation, finding someone to lead
it, asserts itself "ruthlessly” against every other. Incipient forma-
tions in the body politic, cutting across and subverting its old
constitution, eat one another up, like different species of animals;
and the combat can never cease except some day, perhaps, for lack
of combatants. Liberalism has merely cleared a field in which
every soul and every corporate interest may fight with every other
for domination. Whoever is victorious in this struggle will make
an end of liberalism; and the new order, which will deem itself
sacred, will have to defend itself in the following age against a
new crop of rebels.
For myself, even if I could live to see it, I should not be afraid
of the future domination, whatever it may be. One has to live in
some age, under some fashion; I have found, in different times and
places, the liberal, the Catholic, and the German air quite possible
to breathe; nor, I am sure, would communism be without its ad-
vantages to a free mind, and its splendid emotions. Fanatics, as
Tacitus said of the Jews or Christians, are consumed with hatred
of the human race, which offends them; yet they are themselves
human; and nature in them takes its revenge, and something rea-
sonable and sweet bubbles up out of the very fountain of their
madness. Once established in the world the new dispensation
forms a ruling caste, a conventional morality, a standard of honour;
safety and happiness soften the heart of the tyrant. Aristocracy
knows how to kiss the ruddy cheeks of its tenants' children; and
before mounting its thoroughbred horse at the park gates, it pats
him with a gloved hand, and gives him a lump of sugar; nor does
it forget to ask the groom, with a kindly interest, when he is set-
ting out for the war. Poor flunkey! The demagogues will tell
him he is a fool, to let himself be dragooned into a regiment, and
marched off to endure untold privations, death, or ghastly wounds,
all for some fantastic reason which is nothing to him. It is a hard
a


G. SANTAYANA
417
fate; but can this world promise anybody anything better? For
the moment he will have a smart uniform; beers and lasses will be
obtainable; many comrades will march by his side; and he may re-
turn, if he is lucky, to work again in his master's stables, lounge
at the public house, and bounce his children on his knee amongst the
hollyhocks before his cottage. Would the demagogues give him
better prospects, or prove better masters? Would he be happier
with no masters at all? Consider the demagogues themselves, and
their history. They found themselves in the extreme of misery;
but even this is a sort of distinction, and marks off a new species,
seizing new weapons in the struggle for existence. The scum of
the earth gathers itself together, becomes a criminal or a revolu-
tionary society, finds some visionary or some cosmopolitan agitator
to lead it, establishes its own code of ethics, imposes the desperate
discipline of outlaws upon its members, and prepares to rend the
free society that allowed it to exist. It is astonishing with what
docility masses of Englishmen, supposed to be jealous of their per-
sonal liberty, will obey such a revolutionary junta, that taxes and
commands them, and decrees when they shall starve and when they
shall fight. I suspect that the working-people of the towns no
longer have what was called the British character. Their forced
unanimity in action and passion is like that of the ages of faith;
its inspiration, like that of early Christianity, comes from a few
apostles, perhaps foreign Jews, men who in the beginning had
visions of some millennium; and the cohesion of the faithful is
maintained afterwards by preaching, by custom, by persecution,
and by murder. Yet it is intelligible that the most earnest liberals,
who in so far as they were advocates of liberty fostered these con-
spiracies, in so far as they are philanthropists should applaud them,
and feel the néed of this new tyranny. They save liberal principles
by saying that they applaud it only provisionally as a necessary
means of freeing the people. But of freeing the people from what?
From the consequences of freedom.


THE PORCH
BY CONSTANCE MAYFIELD ROURKE
THI
THE porch was fully if somewhat shabbily furnished. Two
tall stiff plants, unequal in height, were posted at the top
of the steps, and hanging baskets swung at each end. A cushion-
covered settee and a pair of rocking chairs were placed at fixed
intervals. A thick reddish-grey carpet was spread along the narrow
floor.
Neither the occupants of the house nor the visitors who at vari-
ous times of the day drove up before it in motor cars accepted the
obvious invitation of the porch. Of the occupants, a family
named Fassett, little was to be seen. In the late spring or early
fall Mr Fassett, a slender, puffy, pink-skinned man with a receding
baldness would sometimes stroll up and down the strip of carpet,
usually about the middle of the morning, in heelless leather slip-
pers and without a coat, if the weather permitted. Those were
the days of Mr Fassett's brief vacations. For the rest of the year
he was gone-on the road. His son was on the road perennially.
Sometimes a small, slight figure in a cap would emerge from the
shadowy darkness of the hall and stand for a moment at the half-
open door, glancing down the street. The cap which drooped over
the sallow fine-featured little face was not a badge of servitude;
it had lace ruffles. This was Mrs Fassett. Except on brief excur-
.
sions quite outside the house, into the streets, she rarely appeared
without the cap, mornings or afternoons. Evenings she never ap-
peared at all. She was seldom obliged even to answer the door, for
Maude's friends knew their way about, in and out of the house, and
other visitors were rare.
Maude and her friends used the porch only as a passageway.
Maude was a tall blonde girl with a high colour, who wore large
pearl disks in her ears, showed a flashing smile when she chose,
and trod the earth, or as much of it as lay between the porch steps
and a waiting motor car, with a firm elastic stride.
"Maude has such spirits !” Mrs Fassett would often confide to
the stocky cleaning woman, as Maude made her exit with more
than her usual effect of climax. The cleaning woman listened to


CONSTANCE MAYFIELD ROURKE
419
Mrs Fassett with an impenetrable stare in her small, hard, blue
eyes and a little twist along the line of her mouth which suggested
that she kept her tongue in her cheek.
Maude's visitors also had high spirits. They would wait for
Maude in a long car, the women dressed in vivid colours, the men
conspicuously tailored, and they would call up noisily to an upper
window and honk their motor horns in a short ragged rhythm.
“Say, what you think you goin' do this evenin'!” shouted one
of the men as Maude came down the steps flashing her smile and
her pearl disks, radiant in a purple cloak.
"Say, Maude! What you keep your porch all dressed up like
that for?" shouted another. "You never stay there!"
“No, I never stay there,” responded Maude with a laugh.
"No, she never stays there," echoed one of the women with a
laugh which was also an echo. "Never knew Maude to really stay
anywheres."
“Oh, I dunno,” said Maude, and flashed another smile, as she
climbed into the car. "Mother's idea. Say, what are we goin' do
to-night! Start her up, anyhow, Peters, and let's find out. Start
her up and let her go!"
Maude's brief public interludes of conversation with her friends
were not lost upon the neighbourhood. There were more porches
up and down the small side street. A few of these were unadorned
and seldom used; they belonged to transients, renters who rarely
stayed long and seemed not to value the arts of domesticity. The
other porches showed the same effect of decorative hospitality as
did the Fassett's. Miss Stemmlen, who sometimes went out to
sew, had old-fashioned rockers fitted out with linen towels, which
were tied to the posts of the chairs with red tapes; and a neat strip
of matting lay on her porch floor. Mrs Wheatley's rockers were
covered with cretonne. Mrs Clarke, across the street, had a cre-
tonne-covered swing. These porches were frequently occupied.
“Maude's going round with another one now, I believe,” said
Miss Stemmlen to Mrs Clarke as they rocked in Miss Stemmlen's
linen-covered chairs. Miss Stemmlen had a long, thin face with
a white, finely wrinkled skin and a mouth which slowly and gently
became circular as she talked and peered over her glasses. “Do you
suppose Mrs Fassett really knows?”'
“Knows!” shouted Mrs Clarke. “Of course she knows, unless
the woman's a born fool!"


420
THE PORCH
9)
"Sh-h-h,” breathed Miss Stemmlen. She glanced over the railing
of the porch and motioned with a sidewise gesture of her hand as
Mrs Clarke lifted her voice.
Mrs Fassett had been out on one of her occasional errands. She
came quickly along with a tripping, rather pretty step, and as she
passed Miss Stemmlen's porch she smiled up at the pair and nodded.
“How's Maude?” asked Mrs Clarke boldly, grasping the railing
with her hand.
“Oh, Maude . . . Maude,” Mrs Fassett drifted into a slight
pause. "Maude's just left for a trip—with some friends!” She
smiled up at her two interlocutors.
“She takes a good many trips, don't she?” remarked Mrs Clarke
with a fixed glance. Miss Stemmlen adjusted her glasses and nerv-
ously laid down her sewing.
"Well, yes, she does,” answered Mrs Fassett. “Maude's so
popular. And we're all great ones to travel_all, that is, except
me! I like to stay at home. I never like to go. But it does run
in the blood sometimes, I think-to travel. George never could
stay in one place," asserted Mrs Fassett.
Neither Miss Stemmlen nor Mrs Clarke was able to meet this ex-
planation. They stared at Mrs Fassett, and Mrs Fasset candidly
smiled back.
“It's been a lovely day, hasn't it?" she appealed in her thin,
musical voice and slipped away.
Maude travelled a considerable distance on the trip which Mrs
Fassett mentioned to her neighbours. She travelled more than half
way across the continent, to California; and after her absence had
prolonged itself to three or four weeks Mrs Fassett received a note.
“Dear Mother," it ran. "Well, here I am in California, but noth-
ing doing with the bunch I came with. They all lit out to the hills,
but it looked better to me here. Awful skates. Got the trip any-
how, and I guess I'll stay. I wrote to Ethel. Let you know if I
want any more of my things. Love. Maude.”
“Of course I do miss Maudc,” said Mrs Fassett to Miss Stemm-
len a few days later as she paused again before Miss Stemmlen's
porch railing. Miss Stemmlen was alone.
“Sh—shouldn't think you'd miss her much," began Miss Stemm-
len bravely, but her voice hoarsened to a whisper. She finally got
)


CONSTANCE MAYFIELD ROURKE
421
.
it out, however. "She was always away so much when she was
here."
"Well, Maude was always so lively—such high spirits,” said
Mrs Fassett with a reminiscent little smile and half a sigh. "I'm
all alone now, with Mr Fassett gone so much. . . . Still, Maude's
done well, and I don't complain. Maude's married, you know!"
!
She spoke blithely, and she sent back an invitation over her shoulder
as she tripped off. “Come over some time, Miss Stemmlen!"
Mrs Clarke went first to see Mrs Fassett and stayed an hour,
but for Mrs Clarke the visit was not wholly satisfactory. Mrs
Fassett hardly talked about Maude at all, except to say that she
had taken a trip to Alaska and that Maude's husband was doing
fine. She said his name was Joe Greene and that he was a promoter.
They sat on the porch. "She would sit on that porch,” declared
Mrs Clarke, “though I told her I'd really prefer to sit in the house
I've never seen the inside of her house, and you know how hot and
glary it was.” Mrs Clarke was speaking to a joint audience com-
posed of Miss Stemmlen and Mrs Wheatley. “She's got her porch
fixed up more than ever, I expect you've noticed. It's a regular
bower! She's getting new things for inside too, I guess. Svelten-
heim's van's been driving up there. I told her to come over some
afternoon and bring her sewing. She seems so kind of lonesome
and innocent-like. After all, what do we know about Maude !"
"Don't you think,” said Mr Fassett one morning early in the
fall, when he was taking one of his brief biennial vacations, “that
we'd better sell the house and you take a flat?”
He was walking up and down the porch, according to his custom,
but he found this exercise more difficult than formerly, because of
the more ample furnishings. Mrs Fassett sat in one corner of the
cushion-covered settee, now gaily bright with coloured patterns.
She had a tiny bit of sewing in her hand. She still wore the lace-
ruffled cap. “Make you less work, you know, now that Maude's
.
gone. She won't be back. Oh, no! Not Maude! Even if she
comes back for a visit, you'd have room,” continued Mr Fassett.
"Maude isn't coming back for a visit,” replied Mrs Fassett, with
a trembling accent in her thin, futing voice. “I had to write her
that it really wouldn't do. There'd be talk. She's all right there
and it's a long trip.” She looked up at her husband with a smile


422
PASTORALE
which for an instant threatened to become whimpering. A coaxing
look came into her faded pretty eyes. “I've got my neighbours
here, Henry. I like it here. And I'm getting things for inside.
You'll see—it's going to be pretty. You couldn't expect me to
give up my home now, Henry,” exclaimed Mrs Fassett almost tear-
fully. “I've got money, too.
Maude sends me money.”
Henry Fassett stared, said nothing, and turned to continue his
impeded exercise.
1
PASTORALE
BY HART CRANE
1
1
No more violets,
and the year
broken into smoky panels.
What woods remember now
her calls, her enthusiasms.
That ritual of sap and leaves
the sun drew out,
ends in this latter muffled
bronze and brass. The wind
takes rein.
If, dusty, I bear
an image beyond this
already fallen harvest,
I can only query, "Fool-
have you remembered too long;
or was there too little said
for ease or resolution-
summer scarcely begun
and violets,
a few picked, the rest dead?”



JOB. BY OSIP ZADKINE






THE HOLY FAMILY. BY OSIP ZADKINE


1


THOMAS MOORE
BY RAYMOND MORTIMER
A"
LL that is now generally known of Moore is that he was an
Irishman, a friend of Byron, and the favourite poet of our
grandparents; and all that is generally remembered of his poetry is
a considerable number of quotations, chiefly the first lines of songs:
“I never nursed a dear gazelle”
“The minstrel-boy to the war is gone”
“The Harp that once through Tara's Halls”
'Tis the last rose of summer.”
But the contrast between the oblivion to which his works have
now been relegated and the reputation which they originally at-
tained is in itself liable to excite a certain curiosity about their
author. For both as man and poet, his position was prodigious.
Everywhere he went he was fêted, he was crowned with laurel at
dinner-parties, and in Ireland he was treated like a King making a
triumphal progress. His poems rapturously received in England,
were soon translated into all European and several Oriental lan-
guages.
“I'm told, dear Moore, your lays are sung
(Can it be true, you lucky man?)
By moonlight, in the Persian tongue,
Along the streets of Ispahan.”
Lalla Rookh, translated into German by Fouqué, the author of
Undine, was made into a play and acted at a Berlin fête by Roy-
alty: "the most splendid and tasteful thing that I have ever seen,”
said Chateaubriand. The Prince Royal of Prussia always slept
with a copy of the poem under his pillow, the Grand Duchess of
Russia, wherever she went, always carried two copies of it with
her, magnificently bound and studded with precious stones. Nor
was his fame based only on the doubtful excellence of Royal taste.


424
THOMAS MOORE
Macaulay considered his prose among the best of the time; Madame
de Staël, the Begum of literature, as Moore calls her, was always
proclaiming her passion for his poetry; Stendhal, who never met
him, wrote to him that he had read Lalla Rookh five times, and
sent him copies of his own works; Landor thought he had written a
greater number of beautiful lyric poems than any one man that
ever existed; Shelley seems genuinely to have thought him a
greater poet than himself, and Byron besides writing the famous
dedication to The Corsair, in which he calls him the Poet of all
circles, and the Idol of his own, protested that "some of Moore's
last Erin sparkles were worth all the epics ever composed.” Byron
did not care for Epic, perhaps.
Moore was obviously and inevitably affected by the high view
of his poetry which was generally taken. He was not a more per-
ceptive critic than those who gave him his reputation, but just a
man of good sense, one of Dickens' earliest admirers, and apparently
unaware of the existence of a poet named Keats. "Wordsworth's
excessive praise of Christabel,” he notes, “far beyond my compre-
hension.” In this age criticism was more active than honest. The
great Reviews were edited and written by political partisans, and it
was less the literary quality of the work criticized than the political
opinions of its author which decided whether it should receive the
most alarming condemnation, or be loaded with even more ponder-
ous praise. The success therefore of Moore, who was a pronounced
Whig, could not be universal, and while Lady Holland seems the
only friend who ever criticized him adversely, Scott was one of the
few Tories who condescended to praise him. The Lake School took
little notice of Moore, but Coleridge complained after reading Lalla
Rookh that there were not three lines together without some adulter-
ation of English, and Lamb, with less hostile intentions, perhaps,
but more deadly aim, compared his verse to “very rich plum cake;
very nice, but too much of it at a time makes one sick.'
It is not easy to obtain a sharp idea of Moore's personality. Con-
temporaries took him for granted, his letters are dull, and his Mem-
oirs and Diaries which Lord John Russell published with a few
lamentably inadequate notes of his own, are singularly arid. Who-
ever makes his way through the eight volumes of them finds end-
less accounts of social doings, comical anecdotes, and elegant rep-
This was a simple and mediocre soul, one concludes, in
artees.


RAYMOND MORTIMER
425
which there were none of the hidden and mysterious depths which
made Byron, for instance, a problem to his contemporaries and a
legend to posterity. And yet, once or twice, there are surprising
glimpses.
II
The son of John Moore, a grocer in a small way in the city of
Dublin, and of his wife (née Anastasia Codd) Thomas Moore was
born in 1779, in a room over the shop, "with a rose in his mouth and
a nightingale warbling at his bed-side.” He was brought up as a
patriot and a Catholic, received a good education, and attended the
University of Dublin, where he was a friend of Emmet, and was
nearly involved in the political troubles of '98. In 1799 he came
to London with a letter to Lord Moira and a verse translation of
Anacreon. He made an instant social success, and won the patron-
age
of the Prince of Wales, whom he was afterwards so bitterly to
attack. A year later The Poetical Works of the late Thomas Little
Esq appeared and won an immediate and great success, partly de
scandale. They were considered excessively licentious; they hardly
seem so now. These lines may be taken as typical:
"Who now will court thy wild delights,
Thy honey kiss, and turtle bites ?''
The book had a great influence on the young Byron; it was one of
the first fruits of the Romantic Movement in England, and written
avowedly in imitation of seventeenth century poets. The author
however was no Sedley or Rochester; it soon became known that he
was Moore. It is a lack of taste rather than of morals which afflicts
the young poet.
In 1803 he went to Bermuda to occupy a Government post
obtained for him by Lord Moira, but it proved unprofitable, and
after only three months in the island he came back to England with
no prospects but those afforded by his literary gifts. Soon after his
return he provoked a duel with Jeffrey of the Edinburgh Review,
who had attacked him as the licentious author of Little's Poems.
The meeting which took place at Chalk Farm, was cut short by the
opportune arrival of the Bow Street Runners, one of the pistols was


426
THOMAS MOORE
found to be unloaded, and the poet and the editor became friends
for life. A few years later Byron lampooned the rather ridiculous
circumstances of this duel in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers,
and Moore challenged him in turn. But an arrangement was made
to satisfy both parties and Moore showed his talent for turning
everything to profit by converting Byron, as he had converted
Jeffrey, into one of his most valued friends.
At first Moore satirized both political parties, but a patriotic
Irishman could hardly be a Tory, and he soon joined the Whigs and
for the rest of his life he remained a familiar of the great Whig
Houses, counting Lord Lansdowne and Lord Holland among his
intimates, and leaving Lord John Russell as his literary executor
and biographer. In 1811 he married a sensible woman of origin at
least as modest as his own, who bore him four children and to whom
he always remained sincerely attached. The fashionable world made
her uncomfortable while it kept him happy. She was content there-
fore only occasionally to accompany him into it, and he, for her
sake, took a cottage in the country at Sloperton, and worked there
for many months which he would otherwise have spent idly in
London. His marriage was followed by an uneventful life, broken
only by a long visit to Italy and a stay of three years in France, and
punctuated by the appearance of his various works, the Irish
Melodies, Lalla Rookh (in 1817), The Loves of the Angels, The
Twopenny Postbag and other satires, and a crowd of miscellaneous
poems. In the latter part of his life he wrote chiefly prose, begin-
ning with reviews for the Edinburgh, and continuing with the Lives
of Sheridan and Byron, and a series of controversial books relating
to Ireland. At last his mind began to fail, and he died, “not quite
as imbecile as Southey,” in 1852. “Even the day before he died he
warbled.”
This was the report made upon him by Delille the Phrenologist
who had no suspicion who he was. “Found no poetry in my head,
but a great love of facts and clearness in argument; humour, love of
music, strong feelings of friendship, a facility in parting with
money, and the organs of combativeness and destructiveness as
strong as he had ever witnessed in anyone.”
Moore quotes this, one of the justest of contemporary estimates,


RAYMOND MORTIMER
427
with evident amusement at its absurdity. The paintings that were
made of him contribute little to the understanding of his character.
"Little” was his first pseudonym, and as “little Moore” he was
always known, for he was a small man, a very small man. His
pert round face was distinguished only by remarkable mobility of
expression. But when we remember that he almost always stood
up when he was talking, that his nose was retroussé, and that his
wife's pet name for him was Bird, we can conjure up a tolerably
good portrait of him. His singing voice, though not strong, was so
sweet that it brought tears to all eyes including the singer's. (He
was ever a man of feeling, and avoided such painful spectacles as
deathbeds with precaution.) "Sung in the evening and made Lady
Louisa's governess (as I afterwards heard) cry most profusely,” is
a typical extract from his diary. This drawing-room accomplish-
ment was a contributory cause to his social success, but while it
helped him to achieve it, it could not have enabled him to retain it,
had he not been considered to combine successfully extraordinary
amiability and pliability of character with notable integrity and
independence. "He is gentlemanlike and gentle and altogether
more pleasing than any individual with whom I am acquainted,”
was Byron's testimony, and Moore was one of the very few men
for whom Byron had any affection.'
His life was admittedly a happy one, his only complaint being of
a lack of money, though he received nearly five thousand pounds
for his life of Byron, and over twenty thousand pounds for his
verse, three thousand guineas for Lalla Rookh alone, and he was
always receiving handsome offers from editors of Annuals, which
he always refused as beneath his dignity. He had however to keep,
besides his wife and children, his father, his mother, his sister, and
his mother-in-law; moreover he was naturally generous, and even
extravagant. A devoted father and an affectionate husband, he
liked women to be beautiful and foolish, nothing more; but he was
a persevering frequenter of feminine society. He wept with con-
trition for the "Little” volume, afterwards; but even in these and
1 It is a common belief that Moore was responsible for the burning of the
Memoirs of Byron, given him by the poet. This is not the case. Alone
of those concerned Moore protested against the destruction of the Memoirs,
which by a kind of pawning transaction with Murray, had ceased to be his
property


428
THOMAS MOORE
his other erotic and Anacreontic verses, there is a certain candour
to show that this was not so much a goat-legged Satyr as a playful
and ingenuous Cupid. He seems eminently suited to an agreeably
trivial World, where ringleted young ladies, fair toxophilists by
day, romantically performed in the evening upon the harp and the
guitar; a world in which the newly founded Athenaeum Club and
Fops' Alley at the Opera were the places of recreation, and of which
to travel in a Railway Train and to be photogenized with the won-
der-invention of Monsieur Daguerre were the sensational adven-
tures. A happy, careless, comical fellow, as he calls himself, he
might, it seems, be left contentedly singing in a trio, as on one
occasion he did, “Go where Glory waits thee!" with the Duchess
of Kent and the Princess Victoria, his future Sovereign.
III
Of his literary quality it is less easy to speak sympathetically.
He was a musician before he was a poet, “Music issuing out of
Light is as good an idea as we can have of Heaven," he
says, and
again, "My passion for music was in reality the source of my poetic
talent, since it was merely the effort to translate into words the
different feelings and passions which melody seemed to me to
express.” It is hardly fair to judge the words of his songs apart
from their music; they were not intended for such a test. Moore
was a composer as well as a poet, and his ear was keener for the
melody of music than for that of verse, though he would have been
surprised, no doubt, if he had been told that his liquid or tripping
anapaests are lacking in subtlety or harmony. He had of fluency
and erudition too much, of taste and ear too little.
At the time his light satiric verse was effective, but little of it has
retained any life. It suffers like so much similar work from the
depressing discretion of many asterisks, from the oblivion which has
swallowed most of those against whom it was directed, and from
a lack of that wide applicability which characterizes all satire that
lasts. Occasionally however a few lines still emerge, like these on
the engaging subject of the Regent:
“Methought the Prince, in whisker'd state,
Before me at his breakfast sate;


RAYMOND MORTIMER
429
On one side lay unread petitions,
On t'other, hints from five physicians
Here tradesmen's bills, official papers,
Notes from my lady, drams for vapours-
There plans of saddles, tea and toast,
Death-warrants and the Morning Post.”
a
The general impression given by Lalla Rookh is of triviality
and of a fashionable and merely exterior romanticism. Moore had
a true grocer's eye for the public taste, and the packets he kept hand-
ing over the counter were well stuffed with literary sugar-plums
and poetic sultanas:
“There's a bower of roses by Bendemcer's stream,
And the nightingale sings round it all the year long,"
for instance, and again, with the true warbling note,
“Oh! am I not happy? I am, I am,
To thee, sweet Eden! how dark and sad
Are the diamond turrets of SHADUKIAM,
And the fragrant bowers of AMBERABAD!"
Moore's method of producing poetry was beautifully businesslike.
He scoured libraries for historical works and books of travel, read
them industriously through, and so amassed a rich supply of inter-
esting facts; with their help he proceeded to write his verses. But
if business-like, he was honest; and he gave at the foot of each page
his authority for every epithet and the source of every detail of
local colour. Perhaps this was advisable, because his phrases did
not without elucidation always afford a vivid or intelligible picture.
At any rate the back-shop is thus open to us, and we can watch the
process by which his dainties are concocted. Here are six notes
from the foot of a page of Lalla Rookh:
“1. "C'est d'où vient le bois d'aloès, que les Arabes appellent
Oud Comari, et celui du sandal, qui s'y trouve en grande quantité.'
-D'Herbelot.


430
THOMAS MOORE
2. 'Thousands of variegated loories visit the coral-trees.'
Barrow.
3. 'In Mecca there are quantities of blue pigeons, which none
will affright or abuse, much less kill.'— Pitt's Account of the Mo-
hametans.
4. “The Pagoda Thrush is esteemed among the first choristers
4
of India. It sits perched upon the sacred Pagodas, and from thence
delivers its melodious song.'-Pennant's Hindostan.
5. Birds of Paradise, which at the nutmeg-season come in flight
from the Southern isles to India, and 'the strength of the Nutmeg,'
says Tavernier, ‘so intoxicates them that they fall dead drunk to the
earth.'
6. "That Bird which liveth in Arabia and buildeth its nest with
cinnamon.'—Brown's Vulgar Errors."
Here are the lines based upon these notes:
lightly latticed in
With odoriferous woods of COMORIN
Each brilliant bird that wings the air is seen;-
Gay sparkling loories, such as gleam between
The crimson blossoms of the coral tree
In the warm isles of India's sunny sea:
Mecca's blue sacred pigeon, and the thrush
Of Hindostan, whose sacred warblings gush,
At evening from the tall pagoda's top;
Those golden birds that, in the spice-time drop
About the gardens, drunk with that sweet food
Whose scent hath lur'd them o'er the summer flood,
And those that under ARABY's soft sun
Build their high nests of budding cinnamon.”
This is better than most of Moore, and "very rich plum cake” to be
sure, but not much is left if you remove the borrowed plums. On
the whole he is preferable when he is being "horrid.” In this vein
he has passages that have a certain power, like the famous descrip-
tion of the coming of the Demon of the Plague, when “The very
vultures turn away, And sicken at so foul a prey,” and the picture
of a besieged city attacked by incendiary arrows:


RAYMOND MORTIMER
431
“All night, the groans of wretches who expire,
In agony, beneath these darts of fire,
Ring through the city—while, descending o'er
Its shrines and domes and streets of sycamore;
Its lone bazars, with their bright cloth of gold,
Since the last peaceful pageant left unroll’d-
Its beauteous marble baths, whose idle jets
Now gush with blood;—and its tall minarets,
That late have stood up in the evening glare
Of the red sun, unhallow'd by a prayer;
O’er each, in turn, the dreadful Flame-bolts fall,
And death and conflagration throughout all
The desolate city hold high festival!"
It is rare in Moore to find a passage so free from glaring faults of
taste.
Lalla Rookh was actually his most satisfactory achievement, but
his reputation now depends more upon his performance as a lyric
poet. He was alone among his greater contemporaries in devoting
his talent principally to the writing of songs, and at the present
time, when Lyric is given almost too much importance, his songs
are more likely than the rest of his work to attract attention. But a
lyric is too short to admit even of inequalities, and in Moore's
lyrics there is much that is positively bad; so much so that apart
from their music and associations—they still recall to those who
then were young winsome memories of Mid-Victorian days—they
are now mostly unreadable. We are immediately antagonized by
his use of galloping anapaests when indulging in the luxury of
woe.” His songs always give the impression of having been written
in a hurry-improvised at a soirée, perhaps, for a lady's album, or,
more probably, scribbled while the publisher's messenger stood
waiting at the door. Anyhow the copy must be quickly completed,
and the poet was never at a loss for a fanciful metaphor or an easy
rhyme. The whole sham romantic vocabulary lay at his elbow,
Charms and Chains, Bards and Billows. If a word was not expres-
sive enough, it could always be italicized; if the natural order of
words was not convenient, it could always be reversed; if a syllable
was metrically superfluous, it could always be elided, and down on
his paper went slav'ry and vi'lets. Worst of all, he continually
a
a
>


432
THOMAS MOORE
fails in precision. And yet, with a little more polishing, and a little
less facility, had the lady been less pressing, or the publisher more
patient, Moore might have made admirable lyrics. Often he starts
well, only to fall to unplumbed depths; a less obvious metaphor,
an honester rhyme, and the whole poem would stand. The imagin-
.
ative figures he uses in Oft in the Stilly Night do not follow each
other as smoothly as they should—"the light of other days," for
example, is not happily obscured by "slumber's chain,” but in this
instance the poetic feeling is realized with sufficient intensity for
the poem to survive a slight jerkiness of thought. Another example
of Moore at his best is Echoes.
"How sweet the answer Echo makes
To Music at night
When, roused by lute or horn, she wakes
And far away o'er lawns and lakes
Goes answering light!
“Yet Love hath echoes truer far
And far more sweet
Than e'er, beneath the moonlight's star,
Of horn or lute or soft guitar
The songs repeat.
'Tis when the sigh-in youth sincere
And only then,
The sigh that's breathed for one to hear-
Is by that one, that only Dear
Breathed back again.”
It is rare for him to come so near to perfection of expression as he
does in this poem, and as one reads the celebrated Irish Melodies,
one begins to wonder was there even anything particularly Irish
about his work beyond an occasional use of local legend.
Irish poetry does possess a distinctive quality.' The Irish when
speaking English do not make the great difference which the Eng.
lish do between stressed and unstressed syllables; in fact they dwell
almost equally upon each syllable. Their poetry in consequence
1 See Thomas MacDonagh's Literature in Ireland (Fisher Unwin, 1916).


RAYMOND MORTIMER
433
like French poetry is syllabic, whereas English verse is gov-
erned by stress. The characteristic rhythm which results and which
distinguishes Irish poetry in English from ordinary English verse,
is noticeable in the poems and translations of Mangan, Callanan,
and Sir Samuel Ferguson, still more remarkable in the young con-
temporary poets like Padraic Pearse and Thomas MacDonagh, and
best known to English readers in the poems of Yeats and of Edward
Thomas, who though a Welshman, wrote in this Irish rhythm.
These poems (such as The Lake Isle of Innisfree and Had I the
Heavens Embroidered Cloths) must be spoken almost as if they
were prose, with no hurrying over some syllables and no pausing
upon others to reduce the lines to the ordinary movements of Eng.
lish metre. A few of Moore's Irish Melodies, it is interesting to
discover, are written in this distinctive Irish rhythm. The best
example is the poem of which this is the first stanza-
“At the mid hour of night, when stars are weeping, I fly
To the lone vale we lov’d, when life shone warm in thine eye
And I think that, if spirits can steal from the regions of air
To revisit past scenes of delight, thou wilt come to me there,
And tell me our love is remember'd ev'n in the sky.”
Another is The Irish Peasant to his Mistress (the Church) —
“Thy rival was honour'd, whilst thou wert wrong’d and scorn'd,
Thy crown was of briers, while gold her brows adorn'd;
She woo'd me to temples, while thou layest hid in caves,
Her friends were all masters, while thine, alas! were slaves;
Yet cold in the earth, at thy feet, I would rather be,
Than wed what I love not, or turn one thought from thee.”
The prosody of these poems immediately commands attention, and
even lends a certain charm to the phrasing, which in itself is no
richer or less conventional than that of his other
and
apart
from anonymous street songs and country ballads, these poems seem
the first in English to possess this peculiar movement. That they
do possess it cannot be attributed to the delicacy and originality of
Moore's taste, or they would not be isolated, as they are, in a mass
of commonplace work; it is rather due to the care with which he
poems;


434
THOMAS MOORE
followed the exigencies of the music to which he was writing, tra-
ditional Irish music which moved in a rhythm natural to Irish
speech. Though taste is always changing, each age thinks that its
own taste is best and that it can, by following it, produce definitive
criticism. In the case of Moore the qualities which made him the
idol of his age seem now utterly valueless, and, ironically, the only
thing that he did originate, and that we can find in his verse to
admire, escaped the notice of his contemporaries.
IV
Moore was aware that his poetry was not in the first flight of
sublimity; he maintained that he fell short of his own possibilities,
and gave an excuse hardly creditable to his character:
"Oh! blame not the bard, if he fly to the bowers,
Where Pleasure lies, carelessly smiling at Fame,
He was born for much more, and in happier hours
His soul might have burn'd with a holier flame. ...
But alas for his country!-her pride has gone by,
And that spirit is broken, which never would bend;
O’er the ruin her children in secret must sigh,
For 'tis treason to love her, and death to defend.”
Of this treason he was always guilty; but it is necessary to discover
how far he undertook this dangerous defence, and whether he was
fair to himself in making this excuse; in fact whether the faults of
his poetry can be attributed to a flaw in his character. Moore had
come to England in 1800, a member of a despised and brutally
oppressed people, whose last liberties had just been destroyed, and
the sufferings of his countrymen in the atrocious happenings of '98
were fresh in his memory. His struggle for a livelihood, and his
voyage to Bermuda no doubt blunted these recollections and drove
them from their commanding place in his brain. When he returned
to England, there was an obvious opening for a poet to harp upon
the sorrows of Ireland. A literary sympathy with the aspirations
of small nations was a characteristic of the contemporary Romantic
Movement. Moore with typical flair perceived this opening and
took it. But he had unconsciously to make a choice. Was he to
a


RAYMOND MORTIMER
435
be the fearless and passionate champion which Ireland needed, who
should excite all Irishmen to action, or was he to be a boudoir
patriot, moving English Whig ladies to ineffective tears?
It may now seem that he only allowed his patriotic feelings to
escape in a sentimental form, which rendered them not only inof-
fensive, but popular and lucrative. His book of Irish Melodies,
for all its sadness, was, in his own words, "not meant to appeal to
the passions of angry and ignorant multitudes: it looks much higher
for its readers: it is found upon the pianofortes of the rich and edu-
cated.” The strange thing however is that he was actually con-
sidered the champion of oppressed nationalities throughout Europe.
The Irish worshipped him, and Shelley, who scorned all compro-
mise, was able to speak of him coming from Ireland as
“The sweetest lyrist of her saddest wrong,
And Love taught Grief to fall like music from his tongue.”
a
The national aspirations of the Melodies found a world-wide
audience, and while Russian and Prussian Princes were innocently
delighting in the Oriental picturesqueness of Lalla Rookh, their
Polish subjects brought a rebellious ardour to the detection of its
political allusions. Still, Moore's frequentation of a world so much
above his breeding exposed him to easy criticism. He took a naif
and almost engaging pleasure in the brilliance of his reputation and
the grandeur of his friends. He saw himself as “an Irishman and
Catholic prospering among the grandees of England without the
surrender of one honest or Irish principle," and this picture of a
patriotism that managed to be both pure and prosperous always
enchanted him. He certainly lived on terms of close intimacy with
Englishmen of great power and position; which might argue a
suspicious pliancy of character. But it must be remembered that
the Holland House circle, informed as it still was with the generous
spirit of Charles James Fox, was not easily offended, and could
understand that Englishmen were not the only people who had a
right to be patriotic. Again he refused the patronage of a Govern-
ment opposed to Catholic Emancipation in an age when it was
unfashionable to refuse anything; but he accepted as favours from
the Whigs (besides the unlucky Bermuda place) a barrack-master-
ship for his father and later a pension of three hundred pounds a
year for himself. No one thought him grasping; in fact he was
.


436
THOMAS MOORE
a
always being complimented upon his manly independence. But the
frequency with which Moore and his friends apply the word "man-
ly" to his conduct is such in itself as to rouse our suspicions.
In any case as he grew older, increasing signs of uneasiness are
perceptible in him. He began to take up a more decided line in the
defence of his country, partly, perhaps, because he became better
acquainted with her case. His knowledge of Ireland had been
confined to Dublin, but in 1823 he made a tour of the South of
Ireland, and this year marked a turning-point in his attitude and
work. He admitted publicly his desire to see the Repeal of the
Union “even with separation as its too certain consequence, so hopea
less appears the fate of Ireland under English government.” In
1824 he published The Memoirs of Captain Rock, an attack upon
various abuses of the English dominion. This was brave, and
(what was braver) he wrote a laudatory memoir of Lord Edward
Fitzgerald, who in his zeal for Irish liberty had tried to induce a
Continental Power then at war with England to make a landing in
Ireland, who was in fact a sort of Casement who only escaped a like
end by dying in prison. This book appeared in 1831; in 1833 he
brought out The Travels of an Irish Gentleman in search of a
Religion, which he wrote to show that Catholicism was the original
and only logical form of Christianity. Moore was a Liberal first
and a Catholic afterwards, or rather a Catholic because a Liberal,
his religion being a part of his patriotism. Though always a
Theist, he had given up the practice of his religion from his Uni-
versity days, had sometimes spoken of it with great bitterness, and
had brought up his children as Protestants. This work of religious
polemic therefore must be considered as one more expression of his
increasing sympathy with Irish national aspirations, and yet an-
other was a rashly undertaken History of Ireland which occupied
and depressed the last years of his life. But in spite of this assertion
of his principles in the later part of his life, he was not altogether
satisfied. At those depressing moments which bring to all men the
bitter consciousness of wasted lives and betrayed ideals, he appar-
ently admitted to himself that Emmet had taken the better part.
“A wet, gloomy day,” he writes in his diary, "my spirits of the
same hue. Often do I wish I had a good cause to die in."
A man can only be fairly judged by his fidelity to his own beliefs,
and had Moore accepted English rule in Ireland, it would be unrea-


RAYMOND MORTIMER
437
sonable to blame him. But he never accepted it. In all things he
followed the world too much. He had always retained, half uncon-
sciously perhaps and almost in spite of himself, the patriotic senti-
ments of his youth. But for years his deference to public opinion
weakened his public allegiance to them. It seems psychologically
.
certain that the same pliability and over-sensitiveness to public
feeling also injured any taste or talent he naturally had for the
writing of poetry. When his original political principles began to
reassert themselves, he ceased to write poetry. He may have
been conscious that it was too late to start a better manner. At
least these words appear in his Life of Byron:
“However delightful therefore may be the spectacle of a man of
genius tamed and domesticated in society taking docilely upon him-
self the yoke of social ties, and enlightening without disturbing the
sphere in which he moves, we must nevertheless in the midst of our
admiration admit that it is not thus smoothly and amiably immor-
tality has ever been struggled for or won.”
Moore had by instinct the gift of gauging the literary market
with the shrewdness of an Irish tradesman: to this he added a quite
English capacity for not letting his left hand know what his right
hand was doing. Such a combination must always bring success
and popularity, but can never ensure their permanence. Moore was,
with Scott, the most successful expounder of the literary fashions
of the day, but a pliable talent like his which would have adapted
itself to any age would have been better able in the preceding age
to carry gracefully its natural mediocrity. Like Byron (though for
different reasons) in spite of his romantisme échevelé, he would
have been more at home in the Eighteenth Century, and his posi-
tion would have been more secure as a rival of Shenstone than as a
contemporary of Shelley. The picture imposes itself of the jaunty
little Irishman, an Abbé perhaps, and domiciled in France under
the patronage of noble friends (they would always be noble as
well as friendly) delighting the Marquis with his sentimental
chansons, the Marquise with his pointed pasquinades, the Cardinal
with his eloquent defence of a Church in which he did not believe,
and posterity with a career completely characteristic of the time.
In the Age of good taste, his taste would have been better.


CHINESE POEMS
Translated by Florence Ayscough
English Versions by Amy Lowell
THE CITY OF STONES (NANKING)
Hills surround the ancient kingdom; they never change.
The tide beats against the empty city, and silently,
silently, returns.
To the East, over the Huai River—the ancient moon.
Through the long, quiet night it moves, crossing the
battlemented wall.
LIU YÜ-HSI
THE RETREAT OF HSIEH KUNG
The sun is setting—has set on the Spring-green Mountain.
Hsieh Kung's retreat is solitary and still.
No sound of man in the bamboo grove.
The white moon shines in the centre of the unused garden pool.
All round the ruined Summer house is decaying grass,
Grey mosses choke the abandoned well.
There is only the free, clear wind
Again—again—passing over the stones of the spring.
LI T'AI-PO



To
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CONCENTRATION. BY WILLIAM GROPPER






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HONOURABLE GENTLEMEN. BY WILLIAM GROPPER






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Gropeles

SIX MONTHS. BY WILLIAM GROPPER


1
1
1
1


POEM
BY E. E. CUMMINGS
Always before your voice my soul
half-beautiful and wholly droll
is as some smooth and awkward foal,
whereof young moons begin
the newness of his skin,
so of my stupid sincere youth
the exquisite failure uncouth
discovers a trembling and smooth
Unstrength, against the strong
silences of your song;
or as a single lamb whose sheen
of full unsheared fleece is mean
beside its lovelier friends, between
your thoughts more white than wool
My thought is sorrowful:
but my heart smote in painful thirds
of anguish quivers to your words,
As to a flight of thirty birds
shakes with a thickening fright
the sudden fooled light.
it is the autumn of a year:
When through the thin air stooped with fear,
across the harvest whitely peer
empty of surprise
death's faultless eyes
(whose hand my folded soul shall know
while on faint hills do frailly go
The peaceful terrors of the snow,


440
POEM
and before your dead face
which sleeps, a dream shall pass)
and these my days their sounds and flowers
Fall in a pride of petalled hours,
like flowers at the feet of mowers
whose bodies strong with love
through meadows hugely move.
yet what am i that such and such
mysteries very simply touch
me, whose heart-wholeness overmuch
Expects of your hair pale,
a terror musical ?
while in an earthless hour my fond
soul seriously yearns beyond
this fern of sunset frond on frond
opening in a rare
Slowness of gloried air
The flute of morning stilled in noon-
noon the implacable bassoon-
now Twilight seeks the thrill of moon,
washed with a wild and thin
despair of violin


SEA AND SARDINIA
BY D. H. LAWRENCE
AS FAR AS PALERMO
W
HERE does one go? There is Girgenti by the south. There
is Tunis at hand. Girgenti, and the sulphur spirit and the
Greek guarding temples, to make one madder? Never. Neither
Syracuse and the madness of its great quarries. Tunis? Africa?
Not yet. Not yet. Not the Arabs, not yet. Naples, Rome, Flor-
.
.
ence? No good at all. Where then?
Where then? Spain or Sardinia. Spain or Sardinia. Sardinia,
which is like nowhere. Sardinia, which has no history, no date,
no race, no offering. Let it be Sardinia. They say neither Romans
nor Phoenicians, Greeks nor Arabs ever subdued Sardinia. It lies
outside; outside the circuit of civilization. Like the Basque lands.
Sure enough, it is Italian now, with its railways and its motor-
omnibuses. But there is an uncaptured Sardinia still. It lies
within the net of this European civilization, but it isn't landed yet.
And the net is getting old and tattered. A good many fish are
slipping through the net of the old European civilization. Like
that great whale of Russia. And probably even Sardinia. Sardinia
then. Let it be Sardinia.
a
There is a fortnightly boat sailing from Palermo-next Wednes-
day, three days ahead. Let us go, then. Away from abhorred
Ftna, and the Ionian sea, and these great stars in the water, and
the almond trees in bud, and the orange trees heavy with red fruit,
and these maddening, exasperating, impossible Sicilians, who never
knew what truth was and have long lost all notion of what a hu-
a
man being is. A sort of sulphureous demons. Andiamo!
Under the lid of the half-cloudy night sky, far away at the rim
of the Ionian sea, the first light, like metal fusing. So swallow
the cup of tea and the bit of toast. Hastily wash up, so that we
can find the house decent when we come back. Shut the door-


442
SEA AND SARDINIA
windows of the upper terrace, and go down. Lock the door: the
upper half of the house made fast. .
The sky and sea are parting like an oyster shell, with a low red
gape. Looking across from the verandah at it, one shivers. Not
that it is cold. The morning is not at all cold. But the ominous-
ness of it: that long red slit between a dark sky and a dark Ionian
sea, terrible old bivalve which has held life between its lips so
long. And here, at this house, we are ledged so awfully above the
dawn, naked to it.
Fasten the door-windows of the lower verandah. One won't
fasten at all. The summer heat warped it one way, the masses of
autumn rain warped it another. Put a chair against it. Lock the
last door, and hide the key. Sling the knapsack on one's back, take
the kitchenino in one's hand, and look round. The dawn-red
widening, between the purpling sea and the troubled sky. A light
in the Capucin convent across there. Cocks crowing, and the long,
howling, hiccuping, melancholy bray of an ass. "All females are
dead, all females-och! och! och!
Shoooo! Ahaa !-there's one
left.” So he ends on a moaning grunt of consolation.—This is what
the Arabs tell us an ass is howling when he brays.
Very dark under the great carob tree as we go down the steps.
Dark still the garden. Scent of mimosa, and then of jasmine.
The lovely mimosa tree invisible. Dark the stony path. The goat
whinnies out of her shed. The broken Roman tomb which lolls
right over the garden track does not fall on me as I slip under its
massive tilt. Ah dark garden, dark garden, with your olives and
your wine, your medlars and mulberries and many almond trees,
your steep terraces ledged high up above the sea, I am leaving
you, slinking out. Out between the rosemary hedges, out of the
tall gate, on to the cruel steep stony road. So under the dark, big
eucalyptus trees, over the stream, and up towards the village.
There, I have got so far.
Humanity is, externally, too much alike. Internally there are
insuperable differences. So one sits and thinks, watching the peo-
ple on the station; like a line of caricatures between oneself and
the naked sea and the uneasy, clouding dawn.
You would look in vain this morning for the swarthy feline


D. H. LAWRENCE
443
a
a
southerner of romance. It might, as far as features are concerned,
be an early morning crowd waiting for the train on a north Lon-
don suburb station. As far as features go. For some are fair and
some colourless and none racially typical. The only one that is ab-
solutely like a race caricature is a tall stout elderly fellow with
spectacles and a short nose and a bristling moustache, and he is the
German of the comic papers of twenty years ago. But he is pure
Sicilian.
They are mostly young fellows going up the line to Messina to
their jobs: not artizans, lower middle class. And externally, so
like any other clerks and shop-men, only rather more shabby, much
less socially self-conscious. They are lively, they throw their arms
round one another's necks, they all but kiss. One poor chap has
had ear-ache, so a black kerchief is tied round his face, and his black
hat is perched above, and a comic sight he looks. No one seems
to think so, however. Yet they view my arrival with a knapsack
on my back with cold disapprobation, as unseemly as if I had ar-
rived riding on a pig. I ought to be in a carriage, and the knap-
sack ought to be a new suit-case. I know it, but am inflexible.
That is how they are. Each one thinks he is as handsome as
Adonis, and as "fetching” as Don Juan. Extraordinary! At the
same time, all flesh is grass, and if a few trouser-buttons are missing
or if a black hat perches above a thick black face-muffle and a
long excruciated face, it is all in the course of nature. They seize
the black-edged one by the arm, and in profound commiseration:
“Do you suffer? Are you suffering ?” they ask.
And that also is how they are. So terribly physically all over
one another. They pour themselves one over the other like so much
melted butter over parsnips. They catch each other under the
chin, with a tender caress of the hand, and they smile with sunny
melting tenderness into each other's face. Never in the world have
I seen such melting gay tenderness as between casual Sicilians on
railway platforms, whether they be young lean-cheeked Sicilians
or huge stout Sicilians.
There must be something curious about the proximity of a vol-
cano. Naples and Catania alike, the men are hugely fat, with
great macaroni paunches, they are expansive and in a perfect drip
of casual affection and love. But the Sicilians are even more wildly
exuberant and fat and all over one another than the Neapolitans.


444
SEA AND SARDINIA
They never leave off being amorously friendly with almost every-
body, emitting a relentless physical familiarity that is quite be-
wildering to one not brought up near a volcano.
This is more true of the middle classes than of the lower. The
working men are perforce thinner and less exuberant. But they
hang together in clusters, and can never be physically near enough.
THE SEA
The fat old porter knocks. Ah me, once more it is dark. Get
up again before dawn. A dark sky outside, cloudy. The thrilling
tinkle of innumerable goat-bells as the first blocks enter the city,
such a rippling sound. Well, it must be morning, even if one shive
ers at it. And at least it does not rain.
а
а
That pale, bluish, theatrical light outside, of the first dawn.
And a cold wind. We come on to the wide, desolate quay, the curve
of the harbour Panormus. That horrible dawn-pallor of a cold sea
out there. And here, port mud, greasy: and fish: and refuse. The
American girl is with us, wrapped in her sweater. A coarse, cold,
black-slimy world, she seems as if she would melt away before it.
But these frail creatures, what a lot they can go through!
Across the great, wide, badly paved, mud-greasy, despairing road
of the quay side, and to the sea. There lies our steamer, over there
in the dawn-dusk of the basin, half visible. "That one who is
smoking her cigarette,” says the porter. She looks little, beside the
huge City of Trieste who is lying up next her.
Our row-boat is hemmed in by many empty boats, huddled to the
side of the quay. She works her way out like a sheep-dog working
his way out of a flock of sheep, or as a boat through pack-ice. We
are on the open basin. The rower stands up and pushes the oars
from him. He gives a long, melancholy cry to someone on the
quay. The water goes chock-chock against the urging bows. The
wind is chill. The fantastic peaks behind Palermo show half-
ghostly in a half-dark sky. The dawn seems reluctant to come.
Our steamer still smokes his cigarette-meaning the funnel-smoke
-across there. So, one sits still, and crosses the level space of half-
dark water. Masts of sailing ships, and spars, cluster on the left,
on the undarkening sky.
a


D. H. LAWRENCE
445
a
I felt very dim, and only a bit of myself. And I dozed blankly.
The afternoon grew more sunny. The ship turned southwards,
and with the wind and waves behind, it became much warmer, much
smoother. The sun had the lovely strong winey warmth, golden
over the dark-blue sea. The old oak-wood looked almost white,
the afternoon was sweet upon the sea. And in the sunshine and
the swishing of the sea, the speedier running of the empty ship, I
slept a warm, sweet hour away, and awoke new. To see ahead
pale, uplooming islands upon the right: the windy Egades: and
on the right a mountain or high conical hill, with buildings on the
summit: and in front against the sea, still rather far away, build-
ings rising upon a quay, within a harbour: and a mole, and a castle
forward to sea, all small and far away like a view. The buildings
were square and fine. There was something impressive-magical
under the far sunshine and the keen wind, the square and well-
proportioned buildings waiting far off, waiting like a lost city in a
story, a Rip Van Winkle city. I knew it was Trapani, the west-
ern port of Sicily, under the western sun.
And the hill near us was Mount Eryx. I had never seen it before.
So I had imagined a mountain in the sky. But it was only a hill,
with undistinguishable cluster of a village on the summit, where
even now cold wisps of vapour caught. They say it is two thousand
five hundred feet high. Still it looks only a hill.
But why in the name of heaven should my heart stand still as
I watch that hill which rises above the sea? It is the Etna of
the west: but only a town-crowned hill. To men it must have had
a magic almost greater than Etna's. Watching Africa! Africa,
showing her coast on clear days. Africa the dreaded. And the
great watch-temple of the summit, world-sacred, world-mystic in
the world that was. Venus of the aborigines, older than Greek
Aphrodite. Venus of the aborigines, from her watch-temple look-
ing at Africa, beyond the Egatian isles. The world-mystery, the
smiling Astarte. This, one of the world centres, older than old!
and the woman-goddess watching Africa! Erycina ridens. Laugh-
ing, the woman-goddess, at this centre of an ancient, quite-lost
world.
I confess my heart stood still. But is mere historical fact so
strong, that what one learns in bits from books can move one so?
Or does the very word call an echo out of the dark blood? It seems


446
SEA AND SARDINIA
a
so to me. It seems to me from the darkest recesses of my blood
comes a terrible echo at the name of Mount Eryx: something quite
unaccountable. The name of Athens hardly moves me. But Eryx
-my darkness quivers. Eryx, looking west into Africa's sunset.
Erycina ridens.
There is a tick-tocking in the little cabin against which I lean.
The wireless operator is busy communicating with Trapani, no
doubt. He is a fat young man with fairish curly hair and an im-
portant bearing. Give a man control of some machine, and at
once his air of importance and more-than-human dignity develops.
One of the unaccountable members of the crew lounges in the little
doorway, like a chicken on one foot, having nothing to do. The
girl from Cagliari comes up with two young men—also Sardinians
by their thick-set, independent look, and the touch of pride in their
dark eyes. She has no wraps at all: just her elegant fine-cloth
dress, her bare head from which the wisps of hair blow across her
brow, and the transparent “nigger” silk stockings. Yet she does
not seem cold. She talks with great animation, sitting between the
two young men.
And she holds the hand of the one in the over-
coat affectionately. She is always holding the hand of one or
other of the two young men: and wiping wisps of wind-blown hair
from her brow: and talking in her strong, nonchalant voice, rap-
idly, ceaselessly, with massive energy. Heaven knows if the two
young men—they are third-class passengers—were previous ac-
quaintances. But they hold her hand like brothers—quite simply
and nicely, not at all sticky and libidinous. It all has an air of
"Why not?''
She shouts at me as I pass, in her powerful, extraordinary
French:
“Madame votre femme, elle est au lit?”
I
say she is lying down.
“Ah!!” she nods. "Elle a le mal de mer?”
No, she is not sea-sick, just lying down.
The two young men, between whom she is sitting as between
two pillows, watch with the curious Sardinian dark eyes that seem
alert and show the white all round. They are pleasant-a bit like
seals. And they have a numb look for the moment, impressed by
this strange language. She proceeds energetically to translate into
Sardinian, as I pass on.


D. H. LAWRENCE
447
We do not seem to be going to Trapani. There lies the town on
the left, under the hill, the square buildings that suggest to me the
factories of the East India Company shining in the sun along the
curious, closed-in harbour, beyond the running, dark blue sea. We
seem to be making for the island bulk of Levanzo. Perhaps we
shall steer away to Sardinia without putting in to Trapani.
On and on we run-and always as if we were going to steer
between the pale blue, heaped-up islands, leaving Trapani behind
us on our left. The town has been in sight for an hour or more:
and still we run out to sea towards Levanzo. And the wireless-
operator busily tick-tocks and throbs in his little cabin on this upper
deck. Peeping in, one sees his bed and chair behind a curtain,
screened off from his little office. And all so tidy and pleased-
looking
From the islands one of the Mediterranean sailing ships is beat-
ing her way, across our track, to Trapani. I don't know the names
of ships but the carpenter says she is a schooner: he says it with
that Italian misgiving which doesn't really know but which can't
bear not to know. Anyhow on she comes, with her tall ladder of
square sails white in the afternoon light, and her lovely prow,
curved in with a perfect hollow, running like a wild animal on a
scent across the waters. There—the scent leads her north again.
She changes her tack from the harbour mouth, and goes coursing
away, passing behind us. Lovely she is, nimble and quick and
palpitating, with all her sails white and bright and eager.
We are changing our course. We have all the time been head-
ing for the south of Levanzo. Now I see the island slowly edging
back, as if clearing out of the way for us, like a man in the street.
The island edges and turns aside: and walks away. And clearly
we are making for the harbour mouth. We have all this time been
running, out at sea, round the back of the harbour. Now I see the
fortress-castle, an old thing, out forward to sea: and a little light-
house and the way in. And beyond, the town-front with great
palm trees and other curious dark trees, and behind these the large
square buildings of the south rising imposingly, as if severe, big
palaces upon the promenade. It all has a stately, southern, im-
posing appearance, withal remote from our modern centuries:
standing back from the tides of our industrial life.
I remember the Crusaders, how they called here so often on their


448
SEA AND SARDINIA
way to the East. And Trapani seems waiting for them still, with
its palm trees and its silence, full in the afternoon sun. It has not
much to do but wait, apparently.
The queen bee emerges into the sun, crying out how lovely!
And the sea is quieter: we are already in the lea of the harbour-
curve. From the north the many-sailed ship from the islands is run-
ning down towards us, with the wind. And away on the south, on
the sea-level, numerous short windmills are turning their sails
briskly, windmill after windmill, rather stumpy, spinning gaily in
the blue, silent afternoon, among the salt-lagoons stretching away
towards Marsala. But there is a whole legion of windmills, and
Don Quixote would have gone off his head. There they spin,
hither and thither, upon the pale-blue sea-levels. And perhaps one
catches a glitter of white salt-heaps. For these are the great salt-
lagoons which make Trapani rich.
We are entering the harbour-basin, however, past the old castle
out on the spit, past the little light-house, then through the en-
trance, slipping quietly on the now tranquil water. Oh, and how
pleasant the fulness of the afternoon sun flooding this round, fast-
sleeping harbour, along whose side the tall palms drowse, and
whose waters are fast asleep. It seems quite a small, cosy harbour,
with the great buildings warm-coloured in the sun behind the dark
tree-avenue of the marina. The same silent, sleeping, endlessly
sun-warmed stateliness.
In the midst of this tranquillity we slowly turn round upon the
shining water, and in a few moments are moored. There are other
ships moored away to the right: all asleep, apparently, in the flood-
ing of the afternoon sun. Beyond the harbour entrance runs the
great sea and the wind. Here all is still and hot and forgotten.
“Vous descendez en terre?" shouts the young woman, in her
energetic French-she leaves off holding the young men's hands
for the moment. We are not quite sure; and we don't want her to
come with us, anyhow, for her French is not our French.
The land sleeps on: nobody takes any notice of us: but just one
boat paddles out the dozen yards to our side. We decide to set
foot on shore.
One should not, and we knew it. One should never enter into


D. H. LAWRENCE
449
those southern towns that look so nice, so lovely, from the outside.
However, we thought we would buy some cakes. So we crossed
the avenue which looks so beautiful from the sea, and which, when
you get into it, is a cross between an outside place where you
throw rubbish and a humpy unmade road in a raw suburb, with
a few iron seats, and litter of old straw and rag. Indescribably
dreary in itself; yet with noble trees, and lovely sunshine, and the
sea and the islands gleaming magic beyond the harbour mouth, and
the sun, the eternal sun full focussed. A few mangy, nothing-to-do
people stand disconsolately about, in southern fashion, as if they
had been left there, waterlogged, by the last flood, and were wait-
ing for the next flood to wash them further. Round the corner
along the quay a Norwegian steamer dreams that she is being
loaded, in the muddle of the small port.
We looked at the cakes-heavy and wan they appeared to our
sea-rolled stomachs. So we strolled into a main street, dark and
dank like a sewer. A tram bumped to a standstill, as if now at last
was the end of the world. Children coming from school ecstatically
ran at our heels, with bated breath, to hear the vocal horrors of our
foreign speech. We turned down a dark side alley, about forty
paces deep and were on the northern bay, and on a black stench that
seemed like the perpetual sewer, a bank of mud.
So we got to the end of the black main street, and turned in
haste to the sun. Ah-in a moment we were in it. There rose the
palms, there lay our ship in the shining, curving basin—and there
focussed the sun, so that in a moment we were drunk or dazed by it.
Dazed. We sat on an iron seat in the rubbish-desolate, sun-stricken
avenue.
A ragged and dirty girl was nursing a fat and moist and im-
niovable baby and tending to a grimy fat infant boy. She stood
a yard away and gazed at us as one would gaze at a pig one was go-
ing to buy. She came nearer, and examined the q-b. I had my big
hat down over my eyes. But no, she had taken her seat at my side,
and poked her face right under my hat brim, so that her tousled
hair touched me, and I thought she would kiss me. But again no.
With her breath on my cheek she only gazed on my face as if it
were a wax mystery. I got up hastily.
"Too much for me,” said I to the q-b,


450
SEA AND SARDINIA
She laughed, and asked what the baby was called. The baby
was called Beppina, as most babies are.
We strolled for ten more minutes in this narrow, tortuous, un-
real town that seemed to have plenty of flourishing inhabitants,
and a fair number of Socialists, if one was to judge by the great
scrawlings on the walls:
W LENIN and ABASSO LA BORGHESIA. Don't imagine,
by the way, that Lenin is another Willie on the list. The apparent
initial stands for Evviva, the double V.
a
Cakes one dared not buy, after looking at them. But we found
macaroon biscuits, and a sort of flat plaster-casts of the Infant Jesus
under a dove, of which we bought two. The q-b ate her macaroon
biscuits all through the streets, and we went towards the ship. The
fat boatman hailed us to take us back. It was just about eight
yards of water to row, the ship being moored on the quay: one could
have jumped it. I gave the fat boatman two Liras, two francs.
He immediately put on the socialist-workman indignation, and
thrust the note back at me. Sixty centimes more! The fee was
thirteen sous each way! In Venice or Syracuse it would be two
sous. I looked at him and gave him the money and said: “Per Dio,
we are in Trapani !” He muttered back something about foreigners.
But the hateful, unmanly insolence of these lordly labourers, now
they have their various “unions” behind them and their "rights”
as working men sends my blood black. They are ordinary men no
more: the human, happy Italian is most marvellously vanished.
New honours come upon them, et cetera. The dignity of human
labour is on its hind legs, busy giving every poor innocent who isn't
ready for it a kick in the mouth.
But, in parenthesis, let me remind myself that it is our own
fault. We have slobbered so much about the nobility of toil, so
now no wonder if the nobles insist on eating the cake. Moreover,
we have set forth, we being lofty Britain, on such a high and Gala-
had quest of sacred liberty, and have been caught so shamelessly
trying to fill our bottomless pockets, that no wonder if the naive
and idealistic south turns us down with a bang.
a
Slowly, slowly we creep along the formless shore.
An hour


D. H. LAWRENCE
451
passes. We see a little fort ahead, done in enormous black-and-
white checks, like a fragment of gigantic chess-board. It stands
at the end of a long spit of land-a long, barish peninsula that has
no houses and looks as if it might be golf-links. But it is not golf-
links.
And suddenly there is Cagliari: a naked town rising steep, steep,
golden-looking, piled naked to the sky from the plain at the head
of the formless dreary bay. It is strange and rather wonderful,
not a bit like Italy. The city piles up lofty and almost miniature,
and makes me think of Jerusalem: without trees, without cover,
rising rather bare and proud, remote as if back in history, like a
town in a monkish, illuminated missal. One wonders how it ever
got there. And it seems like Spain-or Malta: not Italy. It is a
steep and lonely city, treeless, as in some old illumination. Yet
withal rather jewel-like: like a sudden rose-cut amber jewel naked
at the depth of the vast indenture. The air is cold, blowing bleak
and bitter, the sky is all curd. And that is Cagliari. It has that
curious look, as if it could be seen, but not entered. It is like some
vision, some memory, something that has passed away. Impossible
that one can actually walk in that city: set foot there and eat and
laugh there. Ah no! Yet the ship drifts nearer, nearer, and we
are looking for the actual harbour.
a
The usual sea-front with dark trees for a promenade and pala-
tial buildings behind, but here not so pink and gay, more reticent,
more sombre of yellow stone. The harbour itself a little basin of
water, into which we are slipping carefully, while three salt-barges
laden with salt as white as snow creep round from the left, drawn
by an infinitesimal tug. There are only two other forlorn ships
in the basin. It is cold on deck. The ship turns slowly round,
and is being hauled to the quay side. I go down for the knapsack,
and a fat blue-bottle pounces at me.
"You pay nine francs fifty.”
I pay them, and we get off that ship.
To be concluded


LONDON LETTER
September, 1921
Loe
OOKING back upon the past season in London—for no new
our two months' lion. He has been the greatest success since
Picasso. In London all the stars obey their seasons, though these
seasons no more conform to the almanac than those which concern
the weather. A mysterious law of appearance and disappearance
governs everybody—or at least everybody who is wise enough to
obey it. Who is Mr Rubenstein? The brilliant pianist. This
summer he was everywhere; at every dinner, every party, every
week-end; in the evening crisp and curled in a box; sometimes ap-
parently in several boxes at once. He was prominent enough to
have several doubles; numbers of men vaguely resembled him.
Why this should have happened this year rather than last year,
perhaps rather than next year, I for one cannot tell. Even very
insignificant people feel the occult influence; one knows, oneself,
that there are times when it is desirable to be seen and times when
it is felicitous to vanish.
But Strawinsky, Lucifer of the season, brightest in the firmament,
took the call many times, small and correctly neat in pince-nez.
His advent was well prepared by Mr Eugene Goossens—also rather
conspicuous this year—who conducted two Sacre du Printemps
concerts, and other Strawinsky concerts were given before his ar-
rival. The music was certainly too new and strange to please
very many people; it is true that on the first night it was received
with wild applause, and it is to be regretted that only three per-
formances were given. If the ballet was not perfect, the fault does
not lie either in the music, or in the choreography—which was
admirable, or in the dancing—where Madame Sokolova distin-
guished herself. To me the music seemed very remarkable—but
at all events struck me as possessing a quality of modernity which
I missed from the ballet which accompanied it. The effect was
like Ulysses with illustrations by the best contemporary illustrator.
Strawinsky, that is to say, had done his job in the music. But


T. S. ELIOT
453
music that is to be taken like operatic music, music accompanying
and explained by an action, must have a drama which has been put
through the same process of development as the music itself. The
spirit of the music was modern, and the spirit of the ballet was
primitive ceremony. The Vegetation Rite upon which the ballet
is founded remained, in spite of the music, a pageant of primitive
culture. It was interesting to any one who had read The Golden
Bough and similar works, but hardly more than interesting. In
art there should be interpenetration and metamorphosis. Even The
Golden Bough can be read in two ways: as a collection of enter-
taining myths, or as a revelation of that vanished mind of which
our mind is a continuation. In everything in the Sacre du Prin-
temps, except in the music, one missed the sense of the present.
Whether Strawinsky's music be permanent or ephemeral I do not
know; but it did seem to transform the rhythm of the steppes into
the scream of the motor horn, the rattle of machinery, the grind
of wheels, the beating of iron and steel, the roar of the underground
railway, and the other barbaric cries of modern life; and to trans-
form these despairing noises into music.
MR BERNARD SHAW
It is not within my province to discuss Back to Methuselah, but
the appearance of the book may make some observations on Mr
Shaw not impertinent, and it is an advantage for my purpose that
the book is as well known in America as it is here. A valedictory
tone in this book (already noticed by Mr Seldes) is not inapposite
to a successful season of his plays by Mr Macdermott's company.
Blanco Posnet is now running at the Court Theatre. The recog-
nition indicated by this success implies perhaps that Mr Shaw has
attained, in the most eulogistic sense of his own term, the position
of an Ancient.
Seven years ago, in 1914, when Mr Shaw came out with his
thoughts about the War, the situation was very different. It might
have been predicted that what he said then would not seem sub-
versive or blasphemous now. The public has accepted Mr Shaw,
not by recognizing the intelligence of what he said then, but by
forgetting it; but we must not forget that at one time Mr Shaw
was a very unpopular man. He is no longer the gadily of the com-


454
LONDON LETTER
monwealth; but even if he has never been appreciated, it is some
thing that he should be respected. To-day he is perhaps an im-
portant elder man of letters in a sense in which Mr Hardy is not.
Hardy represents to us a still earlier generation not by his date of
birth but by his type of mind. He is of the day before yesterday,
whilst Shaw is of a to-day that is only this evening. Hardy is
Victorian, Shaw is Edwardian. Shaw is therefore more interest-
ing to us, for by reflecting on his mind we may form some plausible
conjecture about the mind of the next age—about what, in retro-
spect, the “present” generation will be found to have been. Shaw
belongs to a fluid world, he is an insular Diderot, but more serious.
I should say—for it is amusing, if unsafe, to prophesy—that we
shall demand from our next leaders a purer intellect, more scien-
tific, more logical, more rigorous. Shaw's mind is a free and easy
mind: every idea, no matter how irrelevant, is welcome. Twenty
years ago, even ten years ago, the Preface to Methuselah would
have seemed a cogent synthesis of thought instead of a delightful
farrago of Mr Shaw's conversation about economics, politics,
biology, dramatic and art criticism. It is not merely that Mr Shaw
is wilful; it is also that he lacks the interest in, and capacity for,
continuous reasoning.
Mr Shaw has never cajoled the public; it is no fault of his that
he has been taken for a joker, a cleverer Oscar Wilde, when his in-
tention was always austerely serious. It is his seriousness which
has made him unpopular, which made Oscar Wilde appear, ,
in com-
parison, dull enough to be a safe and respectable playwright. But
Shaw has perhaps suffered in a more vital way from the public
denseness; a more appreciative audience might have prevented
him from being satisfied with an epigram instead of a demonstra-
tion. On the other hand Mr Shaw himself has hardly understood
his own seriousness, or known where it might lead him: he is some-
how amazingly innocent. The explanation is that Mr Shaw never
was really interested in life. Had he been more curious about the
actual and abiding human being, he might have been less clever
and less surprising. He was interested in the comparatively tran-
sient things, in anything that can or should be changed; but he was
not interested in, was rather impatient of, the things which always
have been and always will be the same. Now the fact which makes
Methuselah impressive is that the nature of the subject, the attempt


T. S. ELIOT
455
to expose a panorama of human history "as far as thought can
reach” almost compels Mr Shaw to face ultimate questions. His
creative evolution proceeds so far that the process ceases to be
progress, and progress ceases to have any meaning. Even the
author appears to be conscious of the question whether the begin-
ning and the end are not the same, and whether, as Mr Bradley
says, "whatever you know, it is all one.” (Certainly, the way of
"
life of the younger generation, in his glimpse of life in the most
remote future, is unpleasantly like a Raymond Duncan or Mar-
garet-Morris school of dancing in the present.)
There is evidence that Mr Shaw has many thoughts by the way;
as a rule he welcomes them and seldom dismisses them as irrele-
vant. The pessimism of the conclusion of his last book is a thought
which he has neither welcomed nor dismissed; and it is pessimism
only because he has not realized that at the end he has only ap-
proached a beginning, that his end is only the starting point towards
the knowledge of life.
The book may for a moment be taken as the last word of a
century, perhaps of two centuries. The eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries were the ages of logical science: not in the sense that this
science actually made more progress than the others, but in the
sense that it was biology that influenced the imagination of non-
scientific people. Darwin is the representative of those years, as
Newton of the seventeenth, and Einstein perhaps of ours. Creative
evolution is a phrase that has lost both its stimulant and sedative
virtues. It is possible that an exasperated generation may find com-
fort in admiring, even if without understanding, mathematics, may
suspect that precision and profundity are not incompatible, may
find maturity as interesting as adolescence, and permanence more in-
teresting than change. It must at all events be either much inore
demoralized intellectually than the last age, or very much more
disciplined.
T. S. ELIOT


PARIS LETTER
September, 1921.
T
a
HE secret of English literary criticism is, in our time, so simple
that, blinded by the naïve idealism of an American University,
one can live for years in England without suspecting it. The atti-
tude of the weekly and monthly press appears to be so dark a mys-
tery; obviously no educated or intelligent person could believe the
things printed, or hold the opinions approved, or support them by
definite mis-statement with so great a consistency. A fair statement
of facts, one supposes, a fair proving of a case will gain the process:
one searches for intellectual reasons, one finds in this only that the
official taste is still that which appears in anthologies printed be-
tween 1775 and 1830, and then in the end, by accident, one falls
on the so uncomplicated explanation. Publishing firms have vast
sums of money invested in the electro-plates of Palgrave's Golden
Treasury and works of a kindred spirit, and the least, the very least
change in the public taste would greatly depreciate the value of
these electros. One is hitting John Bull on his pocket, upon his one
sensitive spot, and he resists with all the weapons of his arsenal.
His army of pressmen is subsidized and maintained. Young ladies
are sought for docility, elderly gentlemen for the faculty of never
grasping an idea, and the result is what we all know: Spectator,
Times Lit. Sup., Nation-aeum, London Mercury, all there with
their publishers' ads. And really the country is not, on those terms,
worth invading. In painting, I can but take the recent visit of a
distinguished English artist as symptomatic. He had come to
Paris to see if he could find a market for the part of his work in
which he himself takes most interest.
England seems to have amassed all the debris of the war; France,
if desolated, has at any rate a clear space and, to my mind at least,
already a clearly marked if very divergent group of writers under
or about forty years of age, writing without humbug, without jeal-
ousy, and without an eye on any market whatsoever. The printing
press has piled up such mountains of pseudo-books, for every real
book there are a hundred or so thousand in stucco. The spirit of


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9
stucco is attacked, in I think a late dadaist publication, thus:
“G— said ‘painting is a farce,' but since — has sold 20,000
francs worth of pictures in Switzerland, painting is no longer a
farce."
And of England one has heard said, “It is the only country where
a man will lie without being paid for it”; and of France “Yes, I
know, the English keep quiet, they know it pays, and here, oh, yes
they know they ought to keep quiet, mais le français est trop ba-
vard.” It is possibly this saving vice which makes the difference;
and the lack of it which has made it possible for England to de-
velop, since the war, a Franz-Josef-Austrian atmosphere. You
have the London Mercury on one side of the channel, and on the
sunnier bank you have the phrase which Cocteau puts into the
mouth of a red Indian dining at the White House; being reproved
for his appetite, the chief replies “Un peu trop c'est juste assez pour
moi.” A little too much is just enough for me.
And therein is the freshness of the classic, the freshness of the
classic being the essential quality of the classic which the British
press and the academics continually omit from their definitions.
Cocteau's La Noce Massacrée is the most savage work I have read
since the days when one read obscure pamphlets about Mr Alex-
ander Pope. Barrès is flayed alive but with the grace of a Chinese
execution. The sound criticism included as postscript is in the
same vein as that of Carte Blanche: “Gabriele d'Annunzio looking
at a locomotive thinks of the Victory of Samothrace, Marinetti
looking at the Victory of Samothrace thinks of a locomotive.
There is not much to choose between them." There is an attempt
to clear off the Debussy mist.
There is also what I might call an ideographic tendency in the
actual writing of some of the younger men, but I do not think
this is conscious. What must be conscious, even when not pro-
claimed, is the nettoyage, the clearing; whether it be in Guy-
Charles Cros' almost old-fashioned verse or in Picabia's more ob-
vious and hyper-Socratic destructivity. Picabia having gradually
effaced all colour, all representation, nearly all design in his love
for the absolute, gives up painting and after a few years produces
"Pensées sans langage.” It is very annoying to people who want
literature to bulk up, and who believe that every time one has an
idea one should embody it in a polite essay. Picabia has found a
.
a


458
PARIS LETTER
new way of leaving his card. “Dieu etait juif mais les catholiques
l'ont roulé.”
"I dreamt that my great great grandfather discovered America,
but not being an Italian he said nothing about it to any one."
“Those who have given the dimension of the infinite as one metre
are in error, the dimension of the infinite is exactly two metres
cinquante.” The photo of an autograph letter of Ingres. Neither
the squibs nor the photo can be considered as literature”; any more
of course than could the Xenia, the little two line tags which Mar-
tial made for saturnalia presents, be “considered as literature,” not
at least, as long as there are only a few dozen, but an accumulation
of such wild shots ends by expressing a personality, just as the
Maxims of Rochefoucauld, or the Livre de Diane expressed the
personalities of their authors.
This dispensing with literary mechanisms is perhaps the mark
of extreme civilization. As an American one has the more intimate
contrast between two female expatriates: Mrs Wharton, who in
conserving the Salem-to-New York attitude beneath her formal
novels has ended by becoming less readable, and Natalie Barney
who has published with complete mental laziness a book of unfin-
ished sentences and broken paragraphs, which is, on the whole,
readable and is interesting as documentary evidence of a specimen
liberation. The Pensées d'une Amazone contain possibly several
things not to be found in the famous Lettres addressed to that alle-
gory, and at least one sublime sentence running I think "Having
got out of life, oh having got out of it perhaps more than it
contained.”
And in it all, in all the gentle drift of Paris, the non-appearance
of criteria; I don't mean necessarily the non-existence, but merely
that nobody seems to feel responsible for any one else's taste. Even
I have not tried to improve any one's mind since I got here.
There is perhaps a sort of outer court engaged in that business.
Jean Epstein has written La poésie d'aujourd'hui un nouvel
état d'intelligence, it seems to be a rather intelligent collection of
various things that one knows about the modern movement.
The new Proust, or the new lump of Proust, being the tail end
of one book and the beginning of another, is good, that is by the
supreme test: one picks it up intending to read only enough to do a
book-review and one continues the perusal for one's pleasure. The


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ideal criticism of it would be written in one paragraph seven pages
long and punctuated only by semicolons; the paste is more uni-
form, the heterogeneous elements tend to disappear, leaving only
the "James” part; and we must perhaps put our national pride in
our pockets and admit that Proust has out-Henried the late H. J.
in this dinner-party, pages of a master, and of a petit-maître, some
almost of a dancing master, but with a patience and grace, a
descriptivity rather than a presentation, yet with interminable
essays interlarded at rarer intervals than in precedent segments of
the Guermantes: “ 'Comment, vous ne connaissez pas cet excellent
Gri-gri,' s'écria M de Guermantes, "and he gave my name to the
M d'Agrigente, whose name so often pronounced by François had
always been to me like a transparent glass box top under which I
perceived the roseate cubes of an ancient city bathed, at the edge
of its violet sea, in the slanting rays of the golden sunlight, and
whereof doubtless to my mind the prince, miraculously in Paris
for the instant, was himself a no less luminously Sicilian and glo-
riously patined de facto sovereign. And alas, the common grass-
hopper to whom one presented me, and who danced about in the
processes saying his bon jour with a heavy off-handedness which he
thought, perhaps, elegant, was as independent of his label as he
might have been of a work of art in his possession, whereof no
glamour descended upon him, and at which he might not even have
looked. The Prince of Agrigentum was indeed so deprived of the
least princely attribute or of anything that might have carried the
mind to that city that one might have imagined that the name,
distinct wholly from him, had sucked into itself all that there might
have been of vague poetry inherent in this as in any other human
being, and had hermetically shut it within the enchanted syllables
themselves; which operation if it had taken place had successfully
done so, for from this relative of the Guermantes one could extract
no atom of charm whatsoever; he remaining the sole man in the
world who was Prince of Agrigentum and yet the one man who
was so less than any man other; happy to be the Prince, but enjoy-
ing it as a banker enjoys having numerous mine shares without
caring whether the mineral source bears the ornate name of Ivanhoe
or Primrose or is called merely the Premier. ... Thus the Prince
de Guermantes, who years later would be considerably less choosy
in his own case, used to say of his nieces What a pity poor Mme


460
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a
a
a
de Guermantes (the vicomtesse de G., mother of Mme de Grouchy)
could never get her daughters married off.' 'But uncle, the oldest,
married M de Grouchy.' 'I don't call that a husband. Still they
say uncle Francis has proposed to the youngest, that'll keep from
all dying old maids.' And with multiple and giratory clic-clack
the signal for dinner is obeyed and the dining room doors open, and
the butler 's'inclina' before the Princesse de Parma, saying Madame
is served in the same tone that would have said 'Madame is
dying.'”
And this is perhaps all that can be expected of a Europe, as
Picabia calls it, "exhausted by the conquest of Alsace-Lorraine.”
But the pages of Proust's beautiful boredom roll on, readable, very
readable, and for once at least the precise nuance of the idiocy of
top-crusts is recorded, and a future age will know, if it cares, very
much what a dinner is like in the upper societies of the world, and
will know as even the dear late H. J. never quite told them, the
degree of vagueness of these people with regard to literature and
art. And at the same time that "it is all there izz, there isn't any
more.” That there is society, and that one needn't sigh, and that
the Balzac duchess has passed. I mean a change in the ignis
fatuus is to be registered. The wicked duke remains for melodrama.
The young litterateur may return to his friends and his typewriter.
The complex is discharged. The fable of polite conversation has
FINIs written beneath it. ‘But is she really the eldest,' Madame
de Gallardon had demanded, not positively as if this sort of person
had no age, but rather as if, probably denuded of civil and religious
status and of definite traditions, they were more or less young like
kittens of the same litter between whom only a veterinary could
distinguish.” More and more it is the Jamesian touch, more and
more the reading of Balzac and Dostoevsky and the less nourishing
symbolistes ceases to affect him, and James or the element in Proust
kindred to our great author pervades the narration. But James
has never been so exhaustive, perhaps indignation would have
stopped him. In one's growing enthusiasm one wonders if the
exact degrees of stupidity of the Princess of Parma, of Oriane, the
Courvoisier, of Mme d'Arpajon, and their replicas, their corre-
spondents existing under the faint veil of a different nationality,
have ever been so precisely recorded. At least Proust has "created"
his world, that is to say put it on paper. Stylistically Jamesian,


EZRA POUND
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temperamentally perhaps nearer to Trollope—at least one keeps
thinking of Trollope as one goes on with the dinner, perhaps be-
cause both Proust and Trollope have the knack of getting so inside
the sphere of the world they portray, of seeing its peripheries as
the bounds, skies, horizons of an existence; while James is always
at the other end of the studio painting with a long-handled brush.
The duchess quotes Victor Hugo, the duchess admires Halévy,
but no, I exaggerate, Proust is really a portraitist, the duchess ad-
mires "Mérimée, Meilhac et Halévy."
There is work for a master stylist in turning Proust into English,
a subtle uncreative temperament might make a career of this trans-
lation. We are perhaps less receptive than the French, and less
modest.
Valery Larbaud with no inconsiderable prestige, author of Bar-
nabooth, is translating Samuel Butler into French. La Sirène has
just issued Blaise Cendrars' Anthologie Nègre, three hundred pages
of African stories, proverbs, and poems.
Suzanne et le Pacifique, Jean Giraudoux' romance of the young
lady from the suburbs marooned on a South Sea island (the book
of which Wreck is a part) has appeared. Proust in his preface to
Morand's Tendres Stocks has greeted Morand and Giraudoux as
the standard bearers, or something of that sort, of the new prose.
They are different enough, Giraudoux piling up objective detail in
a welter of words, trying to construct, and succeeding, along lines
which Laforgue had used in satirizing the overloading of Salammbo;
Giraudoux writing almost obviously for his own pleasure and out
of his own subjectivity; Morand with buddhic eye contemplating
the somewhat hysterical war and post-war world and rendering it
with somewhat hasty justness. His somewhat unusual title may
perhaps be translated Fancy Goods; one has met his ladies “de par
le monde,” and technically Aurora must be exceedingly good, for
one can hear the English woman's voice and speech throughout
the story, and it cannot be easy to convey these tones of voice
and idiom in a foreign speech. Aurora is English, just as Delphine
is not English, and in the later stories I think he has sustained his
differentiation of nationalities exceedingly well. And he has surely
the first clear eye that has been able to wander about both ends
of Europe looking at wreckage, and his present news value need
not fail ultimately of historic validity. His people are as definitely


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real, of the exterior world, as Giraudoux’are subjective mechanisms.
There follow the events of the end of the season: Mock trial of
Barrès by the dadas, resulting in condemnation both of the accused
and of the court. Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel, ballet by Cocteau,
Jean Hugo, and music by Les Six, successful and amusing; the
theatre brought up or down to the style of Le Douanier, and the
Swedish ballet dominated by the sole possible means, that is to
say, by putting them into masks and into stiff costumes which con-
cealed the real nature of their human movements and left the eye
pleasurably affected by the resultant gyrations of the puppets. The
ballet was the finished product in a manner of which Parade had
been but the sketch.
The grotesques held up
the mirror to nature, one came out of the
Théâtre Montaigne and found two duplicates of the sailor on a
bench in the Champs Elysées, supporting Cocteau's claim that the
Douanier had been the sole painter to reflect contemporary France.
The awful rubbish of Claudel's ballet, L'homme et son desir,
might be with advantage cut away from Milhaud's interesting
music for the same. The art exhibits have included Ingres, the
Dutch Masters, and Picasso's last fat woman phase.
All of which is rather disjointed, for a metropolis is for the
recipient, necessarily, a disjointed series of impressions, pleasurable
or other, with the succeeding amalgams of conclusion. Yet in this
Paris full of personal vendettas and “potins," spiteful anecdotes,
replies discourteous, et cetera I seem to discern a difference from
London, in that the French do not seem to attack a man merely be-
cause he has made an innovation or achieved a creditable piece of
work, the attack remains a personal attack, the attacker does not
attempt to justify his malice as a crusade in favour of better morals
or literary uplift. And the city with all its well-known and adver-
cised clap-trap, and all the galleries full of pictures made obviously
for the market, remains nevertheless the place in which more than
in any other there are the greatest number of men and things not
for sale.
This throws one for the thousandth time upon the economic fac-
tor. For the arts to exist the attic must be cheap, and the daily
salt bread must be cheap. A man must be independent at small
cost, and he must have with his indigent independence the entrée


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to the best intellectual company. The French must have some
instinct against the vested interest, for symptom you have Proust,
the most respected writer in France, established, accused of snob-
bery, yet he writes Morand's preface, and champions the young
anti-academics, and gives a well deserved coup dans l'épigastre
to Sainte-Beuve in whose work some great maison d'édition must
have a commercial interest. This shows a greatly blessed indisci-
pline. Indiscipline is perhaps in this aspect the only basis of
culture.
Ezra Pound.


BOOK REVIEWS
MR YEATS' SELECTED POEMS
12mo.
Selected POEMS. By William Butler Yeats.
308 pages. The Macmillan Company. $2.50.
TH.
THERE is an interest in checking off some of the poems that
Mr Yeats has excluded from the volume that contains, as one
cannot but believe, his own selection. Those early poems of his
that he once harshly described as “Arcadian rubbish”-the poems
in which shepherds figured and Indian priestesses—are not to be
found; the only vestige of this period that has been left is The
Indian upon God.
This, of course, was to be expected. But one did not expect
that The Wanderings of Oisin would be excluded from the Selected
Poems. The Wanderings of Oisin contains not only the early,
but a great deal of the essential Yeats. One can see how an author-
editor might be forced to leave it out: each of the three sections
has a different metrical scheme, and this destroys the impression
of unity; the first part, however, is a magical telling of a magical
tale, and it has its own completeness. One wants to have this first
part in a selection of Mr Yeats' poems. The splendid Death of
Cuchulain has not been included either; the mature plays that are
included are On Baile's Strand and Deirdre; The King's Thresh-
old, which I think is Mr Yeats' most characteristic play, and The
Green Helmet, which I think is his most effective one, are left out.
As one goes through this collection of beautiful poems and im-
pressive plays one is struck, first of all, by the poet's capacity for
renewing his poetic life. There are poets who have strung a poetic
period out through a whole life-time. Not this poet. After writ-
ing poems and a play that are full of the feeling of Irish country
life, and after writing a long poem that had in it the elemental
things of Celtic romance, he produced the deliberately esoteric
poems of The Wind Among the Reeds. The liquidescence of the
Symbolist movement showed him that there could be no advance


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in that direction. He sought for "a more manful energy” in the
direct statements of dramatic poetry. The new effort brought him
a great renewal; out of it came The King's Threshold, On Baile's
Strand, Deirdre, The Green Helmet. Then his interest in the
theatre he created lapsed: he made no new plays, but he brought
back to the lyric the direct and living utterance of the drama-
“words with a spit on them,” as they used to say in Dublin when
discussing his insistence upon "living speech.” The directness of
'
speech that he learnt in the theatre and through the range of in-
terests that the theatre opened for him, makes his later lyrics stir-
ring in a way that few lyrics since the XVII century are stirring.
Mr Yeats, then, is not only a first-rate poet, but he is an abundant
poet. And no poet writing in English in our time has given out so
many fruitful influences. Thomas Hardy is a first-rate poet also.
.
But Thomas Hardy has few sons in Apollo. Mr Yeats has fathered
most of the Irish poets of to-day. And by his insistence upon the
.
importance of local life, local speech, and local tradition, he created
in English-speaking countries the movement to which is due John
Masefield in England, and Edgar Lee Masters and Vachel Lindsay
in America.
He is a court poet in a country that had no court, and in a world
in which courts are vanishing. His sense of the office and his
detachment from the office have both been a gain to him. His sense
of the office has kept him out of both the Market Place and the
Ivory Tower; his detachment from it permitted him to use his
abundant secular energy in a way that meant the widening of his
interests. But for all that he remains a poet of the court, respond-
ing to forms and courtesies, to rank, and to all authentic traditions.
Above all, his sense of the office has given style to his poetry.
Swinburne had substituted sound for style, and the next poet would
have to return to plainer verse. William Morris made his verse
plain and freed it from inversions. The youthful Yeats learnt to
do with verse all that Morris could do with it, and he made it more
intrinsically poetic.
And he was to do something else to this straight verse—some-
thing that was to give it a distinction that Morris had never at-
tained. Did Mr Yeats come to this new distinction through his
knowledge of the rare achievements of Anglo-Irish poetry—achieve-
ments that brought into English verse the unemphatic rhythms of
a


466
MR YEATS' SELECTED POEMS
the Irish folk song? To the straightness that William Morris had
brought into verse he added a stillness:
"Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet. ..."
..
Here was verse as near as could be in English to the verse that the
French symbolists dreamed of—a verse that would be, not a hymn
to beauty, nor a description of beauty, but an evocation of beauty.
From what region do these poems come? From a region beyond
the world, certainly, but not from any irresponsible Fairyland.
These are the poems of an ascetic-of a man who has taken to him-
self “a secret discipline."
His vision of the world made perfect is in the race course where
“delight makes all of the one mind.” Those who shared in that
delight had to have one discipline—the discipline of horsemanship.
Mr Yeats is an ascetic for the sake of ecstasy—of an ecstasy that
awakens body and spirit. All the things that bring ecstasy in Mr
Yeats' poetry come through labour—"Beauty that we have wrought
from bitterest hours.” The men he celebrates are:
“Bred to a harder thing
Than triumph."
Labour and discipline have not always an end in ecstasy, and in
some moods the poet is ready to cry out against them—
“I would be—for no knowledge is worth a straw-
Ignorant and wanton as the dawn.”
He has that queer mood, too, in which he makes the hero of On
Baile's Strand “live like a bird's flight from tree to tree.” But the
very texture of his verse shows how much labour and discipline are
a part of his being. The child dancing in the wind brings to him,
not images of freedom, but thoughts of a discipline to be imposed
and a work to be accomplished.
He has called The Land of Heart's Desire the most feminine of


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467
his plays in deprecating its popularity. And yet The Land of
Heart's Desire is a play that has a firm texture; in it character is
really projected, the people in it live and move, and the verses that
they speak have relation to their character. It is one of the few
plays that have a real poetry—the poetry of the hearthside and of
the hill-top are matched in it.
This little play will have a place in literary history. It is remark-
able that a young man, writing out of the tradition of an Irish
countryside should have succeeded in doing what Tennyson and
Browning and Swinburne failed in doing—in writing dramatic
verse that an audience could not only listen to, but be stirred by.
With The Land of Heart's Desire dramatic verse comes back to the
English-speaking stage for the first time after its flickering out in
Jacobean days.
Mr Yeats places The Land of Heart's Desire before The Coun-
tess Cathleen. But he dates The Land of Heart's Desire 1894, and
The Countess Cathleen 1893. In his notes, however, he speaks of
the production of The Land of Heart's Desire as in 1891. I have
always regarded The Land of Heart's Desire as being prior to The
Countess Cathleen and for that reason I have spoken of it and not
of The Countess Cathleen as being the innovating play. The
Countess Cathleen is in conception a great play. The idea—that
of a great soul sacrificing itself for the sake of lesser souls, and in
sacrificing itself attaining to fulfilment—is one of the great dra-
matic ideas of literature—it is an idea comparable to the idea in
Antigone. But this great idea is not given adequate illustration.
It is spoiled by what seems mere fantasy. And the fantasy that
dissipates all the clearness and the fineness of the idea is all gath-
ered around the poet Aleel. Aleel, the antagonist to Countess
Cathleen's other-worldliness, should represent some part of common
life; he should be firmly made and have a firm enunciation. But
we are made to know Aleel only as a mutterer.
Both these plays were written before Mr Yeats got his hand
upon a theatre; both, however, were re-written in 1911 when the
poet was in the extremely fortunate situation of having a malleable
theatre to his hand and a growing dramatic movement behind him.
The other two plays included in the Selected Poems, On Baile's
Strand and Deirdre, were written in the course of the dramatic
movement that he headed, and one has to speak of them as his
mature plays.
-


468
MR YEATS' SELECTED POEMS
Both have passages of verse that, to speak of work since Jacobean
days, are unequalled except in The Cenci; this verse is informed,
nioreover, as the verse of The Cenci is not informed, with the spirit
of the theatre.
The verse is triumphant. But the plays representing his mature
dramatic work that Mr Yeats has selected are both, even more
seriously than The Countess Cathleen, marred by fantasies. Cuchu-
lain, in On Baile's Strand goes out to fight the young man who had
won his liking just because somebody talks of "a witch of the air”
and suggests that the young soldier had bewitched him. And
Deirdre, for all its fine verse and for all its excellent invention, has
an over-emphasized fantastic element—Libyan dragon-stones and
outlandish soldiers. It seems to me that the real dramatic poetry of
this play is in the two pages that follow on Deirdre's movement to
kill herself on Naisi's body.
After the plays come the great lyrics written between 1904 and
1919. Truly men improve with years, and one has to say of A
Woman Homer Sung, The Cold Heaven, The Wild Swans at
Coole, that they are even more remarkable than The Folly of Being
Comforted. They are thrilling in their austerity, in their renuncia-
tion of what is merely emotional. And these particular poems are
only the outstanding ones in a group of extraordinary poems--
poems in which speech seems to flow into verse simply through its
own energy
Every poem in this latter group gives one the impression of some-
thing dimensional—a poem that one might handle like a blade-
a
That the Night Come, Friends, Against Unworthy Praise, These
are the Clouds, At Galway Races, The Mountain Tomb, To a
Friend whose Work has come to Nothing, When Helen Lived, The
Player Queen, The Mask, An Irish Airman faces Death, Men Im-
prove with Years. These poems must make for us all a rare, an
austere standard of perfection.
Towards the end there comes another change in this poetry. In
The Collar Bone of a Hare, Under the Round Tower, The Cat and
the Moon, he gets the waywardness of the folk-rhymer. With these
poems the circle is made complete, the singer of the countryside
goes back to the countryside, to its roads and its ditches; the court-
poet goes from where the wax candles are lighted, and comes to sit
by the kitchen fire-side.
PADRAIC COLUM


NON EXPEDIT
CLERAMBAULT. By Romain Rolland. Translated by
Katherine Miller. 12mo. 286 pages. Henry Holt and
Company. $2.
A
of
a
SAD, chaotic, heart-breaking book. Romain Rolland was
during the war one of the few great pacifists, the greatest
those whom pity rather than scorn led to the heights above the
battle. The least intelligent member of the least effective secret
service can testify to the stupidities and intrigues of pacifist circles,
to a fanaticism almost as shocking as patriotic devotions, to muddle
and mischief. Very little of this is told in Clerambault, a book
which the author declares is neither a novel nor an autobiography;
but what is told is enough. Nietzsche once declared that if he
could forget everything else he would never forgive Christianity for
corrupting the mind of Pascal; and those who care for the one
against the multitude may say that if they can forget the whole
disaster of the war and the peace they cannot forgive what was done
to Romain Rolland.
Clerambault is not in the line of Jean-Christophe; it is another in
M Rolland's series of the Lives of Illustrious Men. Beethoven,
Michael Angelo, and Tolstoy are its predecessors, and in the first of
these I find the purpose of the last:
"Life is hard. It is a daily struggle for those who do not resign
themselves to mediocrity of spirit, a bitter struggle most often,
without grandeur, without happiness, and fought out in solitude
and silence.. They can count only on themselves; and there
are moments when the strongest of them winces with pain. They
call for help, for a friend. ... It is to help them that I have
I
undertaken to surround them with heroic Friends, with the great
souls who have suffered for the good. These Lives of Illustrious
Men are not addressed to the ambitious; they are dedicated to the
unhappy.”
.
Clerambault is dedicated to the unhappiest, to those who cannot


470
NON EXPEDIT
associate themselves with the passions of their fellows, to the one
against all. The single step taken by M Rolland is in his departure
from the war itself to the theme: "that the individual soul has been
swallowed up and submerged in the soul of the multitude.” That
is in the preface. It is not in the book.
It is not superfluous to indicate that towards the end of Cleram-
bault we are confronted with a long and confused apostrophe to
Liberty which begins to be clear with the final prophecy: “The One
against All is the One for All, and soon will be The One With All."
Clerambault's opposition to his world interests M Rolland because
Clerambault opposes only to cure and save; Clerambault, in effect,
is miserable because he cannot identify himself with the momentary
passions of his time; but he is supported by his faith, he is associated
with the deep desires of humanity; soon, all too soon, the craving to
merge with the multitude will be satisfied. This is not independ-
ence, but prophecy. The predicament of the one who finds himself
at odds with the ultimate concerns of humanity M Rolland has not
even approached.
I consider this an evasion because that is the theme which the
book implies and because nihilism is the immediate portion of free
spirits unless they escape from the present dilemma of being for or
against the multitude. Accidents will happen and the world will
become a better place for everybody; but the most which we can do
at present is to make it possible for independent minds to survive;
ten million slaves are shoring up the monuments of the past and a
thousand are hewing stone for the monuments of the future; the
proportion is normal and the slavery is equal. And those who stand
between the grossness of to-day and the grossness of to-morrow
crying out “A plague on both your houses” are accused of frivolity!
Nothing is more frivolous than the refusal to think.
M Rolland has always been willing to sacrifice lucidity to
strength; Jean-Christophe is a masterpiece out of chaos; "informe,
ingens ...” He is the single exception among the great to the
rule that you cannot write French without being clear. In Cleram-
bault everything is sacrificed to an altar without a God, just as the
hero is assassinated to no purpose. "Hatred makes no mistakes,”
.
says a friend after the assassination and as one thinks back to the
tumultuous pages of The Market Place one wonders whether
M Rolland hasn't failed in this book because he has forgotten how
a
a


SGANARELLE
471
to hate. The failure of the book is terrible; it turns the heart to
stone; it defeats its own cause. Its passions and outcries and rhet-
oric create nothing; there is no magnificence in its tragedy and the
tragedy of ten million wasted lives should have its magnificence.
We have been told at times that a great secret organization is plot-
ting the downfall of nationalism and is using pacifist propaganda
as an insidious weapon; we rather doubt it; the heads of such
societies are no fools and they would have suppressed this book.
Because it is not expedient to tell things in this way. It is often
better not to confess, and this book is a confession.
a
In the preface to his Beethoven, M Rolland wrote:
“L'air est lourd autour de nous. La vieille. Europe s'engourdit
dans une atmosphère pesante et viciée. Un matérialisme sans
grandeur pèse sur la pensée, et entrave l'action des gouvernements
et des individus. Le monde meurt d'asphyxie dans son égoïsme
prudent et vil. Le monde étouffe.—Rouvrons les fenêtres. Faisons
rentrer l'air libre. Respirons le soufle des héros."
.
SGANARELLE


DAGUERREOTYPES AND WATER-COLOURS
NOTES AND Reviews. By Henry James. With a pre-
face by Pierre de Chaignon la Rose. 8vo. 227 pages.
Dunster House. $5.00.
Master EUSTACE. By Henry James. 12mo. 280
pages. Thomas Seltzer. $2.
A
BOOK must have a preface and the editors of these two col-
lections of early work by Henry James have kept up the old
tradition without having anything important to say. Mr Albert
Mordell's foreword to Master Eustace is brief but he has found
room for:
“From an autobiographical point of view, the most interesting
tale in this volume is 'Benvolio.' The poet Benvolio is evidently
a bit of self-portraiture. Not that Henry James had the identical
experience of his character. But the reader will scarcely fail to
recognize in Benvolio the restless type divided between love and
literature, for which James was his own model. Henry James
himself tells us that he drew on autobiographical material in writ-
ing his early tales. ... It is safe to assume that the type of char-
acter he draws most frequently is that one that approximates most
closely to himself.”
I wonder did Mr Mordell find that in Freud? I wonder if it is
important, or true. With this ill-formed, ill-fitting key James un-
locked his heart? The less Shakespeare he—and have done!
Mr Pierre de Chaignon la Rose has contemplated his navel and
evolved a strange beast from his inner consciousness. He is more
original than Mr Mordell, as sin may be more original than virtue:
"James, despite his present posthumous eminence, was never a
‘popular' author; and even the most devout Jacobite must admit,
albeit with serene tranquillity, that he was not a 'great' one.”


GILBERT SELDES
473
“This is not quite the place to enter upon a discussion of funda-
mentals,” says Mr la Rose after making this shocking statement
with its fantastic despite and its knowing albeit, and adds that
James "was decidedly what he himself would have called a 'special
case.'
It has not occurred to Mr la Rose that what makes Henry
James a special case is precisely the fact that he is great—I do not
pretend to know what Mr la Rose's inverted commas round the
word may mean. I lack serene tranquillity before such a bêtise. As
for Mr la Rose's animadversions on book-reviewing in the 'sixties
and now, I think the present editors of The Nation and The North
American Review ought to have something to say.
The books are distinctly better. It is my feeling that the Notes
and Reviews are not criticism and those who wish to know James
in the quality of critic can satisfy themselves by reading his essay
on Guy de Maupassant which has been called the best of American
critical essays and the one on Baudelaire which has often impressed
me as the worst. The prefaces to the New York edition are full
of other things, but no critic of fiction can escape them. In his
youth James was reviewing books and doing his best to prevent
bad work from passing as good; he wrote in a strangely pompous
and unhappy manner; he was at times savage, his judgement was
good; he was agreeably independent. Certain qualities of his ma-
ture mind appear in these reviews, but if the author of them had
become a romantic poet or a writer of problem plays the same thing
would still be true. It might, in fact, have been a pleasant literary
exercise for Mr la Rose to trace the other possible Jameses in these
reviews and to list those interests and qualities which later dropped
out of James' mind.
The admirer of James (excluding the most devout Jacobite) will
find in the reviews something even more interesting: the literary
depths out of which James rose. Nothing in Mr Carl Van Doren's
account of the American novel had prepared me for the stink and
stagnation which these essays describe. The journal of which Mr
Van Doren is now literary editor felt justified (1866) in publish-
ing a serious review of Winifred Bertram and The World She Lived
In, a work seemingly of the intellectual level of Oliver Optic, and
the reviewer says that it "is, in our judgment, much better than the
author's preceding work.” To review Miss Braddon as one reviews
Hall Caine to-day is one thing; to be compelled to guard fairly


474
DAGUERREOTYPES AND WATER-COLOURS
enlightened taste against the Schönberg-Cotta family and the works
of T. Adolphus Trollope or Henry Kingsley is another. These,
with Harriet Prescott's Azarian were no doubt the best-sellers of
their time and Henry James may have helped them to die quickly.
But the faith of our fathers must have been a strange thing if they
had to be driven with whips and scorpions from the beastly tem-
ples of such false gods. And, if these things are important, it may
be noted that the greater number of bad novels reviewed here were
English, while for sheer badness the native product led all the rest.
I believe that we are better now. Bad work is still popular and
is forced upon the semi-literate by great engines of publicity. But
I do not think that the readers of The North American Review
seriously need to be warned against the insidious badness of Harold
Bell Wright or those of The Nation against the superficial seduc-
tions of Robert W. Chambers. I fancy that the readers of this
magazine are not wholly taken in by the new American realists.
It is true that some of the shrewdest criticism in this book is ap-
plicable to-day; the reason is not that it was ineffective, but that
the temptation not to be vulgar is feeble and most artists have the
moral courage to resist it. Bad work is recurrent, but, as James
wrote apropos of Walter Scott in 1864, "the public taste has been
educated to a spirit of the finest discernment, the sternest exaction.”
The public is damned in this connection by the publishers; the level
of taste is higher because more individuals are insisting upon good
work.
The reviews are daguerreotypes. They leave us thinking that
not only the process but the subjects differed from our slick snap-
shotted and art-photographed humanity. Master Eustace is a series
of water-colours; the technique changed when the brush was
touched in oils, but the object remained the same; there was al-
ways design to take the colour, always the effort to render a given
circumstance, character, event—sometimes a subject of remarkable
unimportance. Out of impatience one might say that the one fully
developed passion in these stories is that of a collector of objets-
d'art for a wax model. The magniloquence of James' manner-
which became the perfect utterance of his later writing--is bore-
some and irritating; his timidity, his propriety, his spinster preoc-
cupation with trivial things make one despair of his ever arriving


GILBERT SELDES
475
at The Portrait of a Lady; one loses contact with The Ambassadors
a
entirely.
What happened to James is a pretty problem. Perhaps he pub-
lished too early. Possibly—and here the reviews throw a faint
light upon the stories—possibly he was so ironic and bitter about
the fiction of his time because he was aware of the impulse in him-
self to do mediocre work. These stories lack even the freshness of
A Landscape Painter. They approach nearer in time but not in
power to James' first important work; for all I know he
may
have
been writing rather good novels while he still struggled with these
shorter pieces. He had here neither freedom of spirit nor the sense
of exact proportions which the novel gave him.
The one thing he had was a sort of fidelity to his art. He pressed
his
grape hard and managed a wine with more bouquet than body.
It is craftily and faithfully made. But it is just the sort of wine
which should not be broached in its forgotten barrel after all these
fifty years.
GILBERT SELDES


THE COMMEMORATION OF JOHN KEATS
John Keats MEMORIAL VOLUME. Issued by the Keats
House Committee. 4to. 276 pages. John Lane Com-
pany. $7.50.
IN
N the February of this year fell the hundredth anniversary of the
death of John Keats. The English newspapers, and I suppose
the American also, pullulated into centenary articles. It is scarcely
to be believed that the American eruption was so unsightly the
English. If Keats is read in England it is not by the writers of
centenary articles.
Possibly newspapers have no business with poets, just as poets
(if only they could afford to) would have no business with news-
papers; and we ought to be optimists and regard the appearance of
these articles merely as a sign that it was generally thought by
interested persons that the public would expect a centenary ref-
erence to Keats. The real anniversary celebration of Keats was con-
tained in the Memorial Volume.
As far as I know no protest against this remarkable volume has
appeared. The critics have reviewed it with the utmost politeness.
It can hardly be that they know nothing of Keats, unless of course
they, and not the sporting editors, were the authors of the centenary
articles. The more generous hypothesis is that they treated the
volume as a charity performance. For it was compiled with the
laudable object of securing for the nation at the usual exorbitant
price the house in Hampstead where Keats and Charles Brown
lodged together.
Let us admit, in spite of old experience, that the publication of
a memorial volume was a hopeful method of raising the wind; let
us admit that it is improbable that the percentage of buyers of the
volume who will read it is not likely to be higher than the per-
centage of those who go to charity concerts when they have paid
for tickets. Nevertheless, the honour of English poetry is intimately
concerned. If no protest is made against this volume, ten years
hence, or a hundred years hence, or whenever the millennium may
be when the poetry of the Anglo-Saxon race is consciously recog-


J. MIDDLETON MURRY
477
nized by its members as one of its chief titles to true civilization,
it will be thought that in 1921 Keats was regarded with such indif-
ference that a desecration of his memory passed utterly unregarded.
For the Memorial Volume is nothing less than this.
Let it be accepted without question that there are valuable and
worthy contributions contained in it: the unpublished letter of
Keats to Whitehouse enclosing the Ode to Autumn, Mr Thomas
Hardy's unassuming poem, Sir Sidney Colvin's reproduction of
the original draft of the Ode to the Nightingale. Perhaps Pro-
fessor de Selincourt's undistinguished lecture on the poet may be
admitted, by an ex officio courtesy, into this class; if not, it would
find a safe harbour in the next, where a number of unobjectionable
items are gathered together: notes by Mr Clutton-Brock and Pro-
fessor Bradley, a translation of Sappho by the Poet Laureate-
would that he had reprinted his famous and hardly procurable
essay instead a pleasant paper on Haydon by Mr Hugh Walpole,
and some charmingly unpretentious contributions by the son of
Joseph Severn, Dr Morrison of Glasgow, Sir Ian Hamilton, and
others. But these together compose barely one-third of the book.
Into the remaining portion a brief examination must be con-
ducted. The contributors to it are distinguished chiefly by their
ignorance of the poet whom they presume to celebrate. It would
be hard, for instance, to conceive a more colossal infelicity than this
complacent sentence of Mr Frederic Harrison. “John Keats pre-
sents a remarkable problem. at the age of twenty-five he
had written sonnets that would not disgrace Milton, lyrics that
Shelley might have owned, letters that Byron could hardly have
surpassed.” Possibly Mr Harrison was too busy compiling his
calendar of great men to have heard Matthew Arnold declare that
Keats was with Shakespeare. But Mr Harrison is, if anything,
surpassed by Mr Oscar Browning's peculiar blend of personality,
platitude, and ignorance. "I went to Eton as a boy in January,
1851. . . . It is a misfortune to the world that Keats had not the
courage to finish what would have been the noblest epic in our lan-
guage. . . . If he could have met Byron and Shelley, his course
would have been different and perhaps he would not have died.
Art has too often suffered and must continue to suffer by remorse-
less death.” Perhaps Byron and Shelley would have given the
poor boy a little Etonian polish. Unfortunately it happens that
O
.


478
THE COMMEMORATION OF JOHN KEATS
.
)
he did meet Shelley; while Byron, whom he did not meet, used
such brutally foul language about him that no one has ever
dared to print it. Nor is it yet finally established that acquaint-
ance with Etonians is truly prophylactic against remorseless death.
Mr Browning is not the only one, however, who is anxious to
suggest that, if Keats was an underbred Cockney, he himself went
to a public school. A large portion of the world already knows
that Mr Horace Annesley Vachell went to Harrow, but in case they
have forgotten, or it may be in the reasonable belief that this por-
tion of the world does not contain many readers of Keats, Mr
Vachell repeats the fact: “I am not a critic. . When I
was a boy at Harrow. . . . In California, I remember, during
the early 'eighties, flappers helped to receive at Browning teas—and
dismal entertainers they were !—but Keats was never acclaimed by
the pig-tailed highbrows. .. I do not presume to write more
of this 'Immortal.' ” We presume Mr Vachell uses the word of
himself in the French sense; he would probably be one of the Eng-
lish Forty.
The Master of the Temple is only superbly commonplace. After
all it is not easy to say anything new about Keats; nor is it desir-
able unless you know him fairly well, so that he was perhaps well
advised merely to quote a verse of the Nightingale and remark that
"the verse, for all its expressiveness, suggests more than it ex-
presses.
that impression is the one true hall-mark of the
poet's genius.” The emptiness of that statement does not try to con-
ceal itself and is therefore less positively irritating than Professor
Boas' double-barrelled observation (of which the right and left are
fired off ad nauseam by other contributors, that "Keats was an
Elizabethan born out of due time and a Greek who had never known
his spiritual home." Each of these statements separately is almost
meaningless; in conjunction they are pure nonsense. At least one
needs a strong effort of imagination to grapple with a Greek Eliza-
bethan, an effort, if anything a little stronger than that demanded
of us by Mr T. Fairman Ordish, who invites us to contemplate
“perchance Shakespeare, in the year 1615, sitting with the seven
year old boy, John Milton, on his knee (at the Mermaid) and we
‘on this bank and shoal of time' not knowing.” That is a generous
and supererogatory evocation, seeing that the book is about Keats;
but Mr Ordish has imagination to spare. It costs him nothing to
.


J. MIDDLETON MURRY
479
swer.
describe Keats's first visit to Leigh Hunt in these lyrical terms:
"To Hampstead he came, not on the wings of a dove, but on those
of the spirit.” This is the authentic cadence of Pecksniff's oratory
and, as such, pleasanter than the grim salvationism of Mr Arthur
Lynch. “Do you know John Keats? I ask and wait for an an-
In the worst and best of his poems—I have named
Endymion—I am sure that I find the soul of Keats. What guides
me in this appreciation? The words of John Keats; yes, but some-
thing nearer, quicker, more intuitive, more alive to the meaning
of this. I know. . . . I will rescue Keats and say, Behold the
Man!” Poor Keats is thus rigorously rescued by what seems a
very formidable process; but the means is justified by the end,
which is celestial. It is no half-hearted apotheosis that Mr Lynch
finally awards: “He sitteth on the right hand of God.” We have
a dim recollection of someone who said that to sit on his right
hand and his left hand was not his to give. He was evidently
waiting for Mr Lynch.
Miss Marie Corelli is on a similar mission of redemption; only
she does it in poetry. She, like another lady poet, knows what
Keats meant far better than he did himself.
.
.
“Lift me up friend
Higher, still higher
Lift me to Him! Lift me as high as Heaven!"
.
This kindly perversion of Keats's dying words probably comes
of knowing so much about the sorrows of Satan. The origin of
Mr Drinkwater's motives is not so patent; perhaps he feels that
his Abraham Lincoln has given him a position of responsibility as a
moral leader; it certainly has given him a pulpit intonation.
“There he found the peace of understanding
And thus alone the world shall find salvation."
It would be hard to believe that Mr Drinkwater is commemo-
rating a poet with a sense of verbal music and a sense of humour.
Anyhow, we may be sure that if Keats is where Mr Lynch and Miss
Corelli have put him, he is enjoying it all vastly; he is surely im-
mensely tickled by Lord Dunsany's poem in his honour. The sec-


480 THE COMMEMORATION OF JOHN KEATS
ond of its two verses is this. (To the tune of Jack and Jill, as the
old ballad books say.)
"Now he is dumb with no more to say,
Now he is dead and taken away,
Silent and still and leading the way,
And the world comes tumbling after."
Two poems are reproduced in facsimile in this Memorial Vol-
ume; one is the Ode to a Nightingale, the other this inspiration
of Lord Dunsany's. Keats's handwriting is much the neater, and
his manuscript shows signs of correction. Of Lord Dunsany's not
a letter is blotted.
Still Keats, good fellow though he was, was averse to being
patronized and even more reluctant to have his intimacy presumed
upon. He might have resented Miss Amy Lowell's claim to knowl-
edge even more than Mr Lynch's.
"Well, John Keats,
I know how you felt when you swung out of the inn
And started up Box Hill after the moon
.
Miss Lowell possesses one of Keats's important letters; she has
evidently come to believe that it was addressed to her. Mr God-
frey Elton also intrudes his ego unduly; we cannot see why Keats
should be required to answer questions which concern Mr Elton
alone.
"What is it I have followed, never found? ..
And why,
I cannot tell,
Not I.”
But this problem is as nothing beside the more general one.
Why, why should the centenary of a great poet be officially com-
memorated by outbursts from a host of bad ones? Even the re-
spectable versifier would be out of place in such a volume, if it
were rightly conceived; incompetent rhetoricians should be abso-
lutely forbidden. But there they are in every variety! Which


J. MIDDLETON MURRY
481
is the worst is a question of taste; but we find in ourselves a peculiar
detestation for those who call Keats "a lad.” “The lonely English
lad who came With heart athirst for love and fame” (Mr G. M.
Whicher). "An English lad had he sat down to read, But he rose
up and knew himself a Greek” (Miss Lizette Woodworth Reese).
The latter is a subtle combination with the Greek gambit, which
appears in all its naked splendour in Mr Walter Sichel's sonnet.
a
.
“The gods and goddesses when Hellas fell
Fled shivering to our northern woods and streams
Men in lanes and streets
Drank youth divine and called the singer Keats.”
.
Evidently Mr Sichel is of opinion that they might have called
him something else—Orpheus perhaps. But rhymes for him would
have been scarcer still. Then there is the lady who refers to Keats
as “him who snared in print's prosaic expanse Half Nature's se-
crets”; the gentleman who informs us that "I am enamoured of
the nightingale”; the lady who is very angry with Fanny Brawne
“Those silly slender hands that murdered him”; the facetious gen-
tleman who begins his poem: “Keats! What are Keats? The dear
old lady said.” They are past name and number. If this is the
way we celebrate a great poet it becomes doubtful whether we de-
serve to have one.
If we care to give the execution of them into the right hands
we can do these things as well as any nation in the world. The two
great volumes of Shakespeare's England which celebrated his ter-
centenary are a monument of scholarship and good taste; they will
give delight and instruction to the reader of Shakespeare for many
years to come. But no one who cares for the poetry of Keats will
be able to look at his Memorial Volume without an acute sense of
shame. Many of the contributors will, we hope, live to feel this
more acutely still. Possibly Lord Dunsany will one day have mis-
givings at the sight of his stupid rhymes sprawling in facsimile.
We are certain that Mr Shane Leslie will be embarrassed at seeing
this contribution of his own in the middle of a page with an inch
of white space above and below. "I owe you an apology. I have
been too ill with 'Au to write about Keats, and am off for a fort-
night to the sea.”
J. MIDDLETON MURRY


BRIEFER MENTION
Jake, by Eunice Tietjens (12mo, 221 pages; Boni & Liveright: $2) is
pivoted upon the essential beauty of a life which-by all external stand-
ards—is a bundle of failures. Jake, seen through sympathetic feminine
eyes, glows with the enduring hues of romance, not in a positive realization
of life, but in acceptance of a wistful frailty. The mood is evoked without
fumbling; it is developed in significant harmony, and played in a minor
key-tender without being plaintive. The style is limpid and disarmingly
unstudied, and the result is a novel of directness and compression, in which
people live.
a
а
>
THE ENEMIES OF WOMEN, by Vicente Blasco Ibañez, translated by Irving
Brown (12mo, 547 pages; Dutton : $2.15). The book begins with the
Prince repeating his statement: “Man's greatest wisdom consists in getting
along without women.” Then he is interrupted by the passing of a train
full of soldiers. A few pages farther on we have some one described as
a gambler, but a gentleman.. . . Ergo: a novel of high life, centred
around Monte Carlo in war time, and proving that woman remains, in
spite of all, the greatest fact in the life of man. After the intricacies of
personal tragedy, the novel ends with the war finished and everyone danc-
ing above the ruins, but “The earth and the sky know nothing of our
sorrows. And neither does life.”
>
THE ROMANCE OF THE RABBIT, by Francis Jammes, translated by Gladys
Edgerton (16nio, 147 pages; Nicholas L. Brown: $1.50). Perhaps not
above the battle, Jammes at least remains to one side of it. With God in
the pleasantest of heavens, Jammes can turn with assurance to the fixing
of specific observations. The present volume is a collection of tales of
varying lengths, nearly all of which have an allegorical twist and exem-
plify his characteristic simplism. On his way to paradise with the asses,
Jammes nods familiarly to all the lesser roadside saints who cure eye-sore
and the itch; he has also borrowed tobacco of the Bon Dieu.
THE SEVENTH ANGEL, by Alexander Black (12mo, 360 pages; Harpers :
$2) has clipped wings. The novel unfolds itself in the guise of a De
Morganatic marriage of H. G. Wells and Henry Van Dyke, in which
sociology is delegated as handmaiden to uplift. Mr Black realizes that
the world is changed since the war—and his novel is to that effect. But
one wishes that his awareness had not been communicated so evenly to all
his characters, transfiguring them into puppets to hang preachments on.
INVISIBLE TIDEs, by Beatrice Kean Seymour (12mo, 357 pages; Seltzer:
$2) is a story of adultery during wartime, and a study of the effects of
the war on an artistic set in London. Miss Seymour works honestly and
capably, but with more attention to her subject than to her drawing, with
the result that her book is utterly lacking in composition. The fault is
not individual; Invisible Tides is a typical Georgian novel.


BRIEFER MENTION
483
a
No DEFENCE, by Sir Gilbert Parker (12mo, 347 pages; Lippincott: $2) is an
awkward polemic against Sinn Fein in the shape of an historical novel.
The hero, Dyck Calhoun, is a wild, gallant Irishman, but loyal, withal, to
his King; this loyalty carries him, pure in heart, through duels, mutinies,
battles against Napoleon's fleet, and the finding of Spanish gold. Events
tumble pell mell on one another, but the style in which they are related is
as bald as a motion picture continuity.
HOWARDS END, by E. M. Forster (12mo, 393 pages; Knopf: $2.50) is a
reprint which is new to the United States and should be welcomed here.
The author has a keenness of perception of small encounters which is one
of the essentials of fine narrative. His people are nervous, sensitive,
alive. It is in his effort at symbolism that he fails, and spiritual values
blur in the too sharp light of melodrama. Life may be like the end of
this book, but the end of the book is not lifelike. It is well worth reading
for its beginning.
Books ON THE TABLE, by Edmund Gosse (12mo, 348 pages; Scribners : $3)
reveals once more that gentle mode and nature that have made the author
the most successful friend of famous writers in England. The book is
pieced together from what Mr Gosse terms his “ten minute sermons,”
written every week for the Sunday Times. Pleasantly and calmly the
writer discusses all manner of books from Margot Asquith's saucy memoirs
to Heywood's The Hierarchie of Angels. One can but behold with amaze-
ment the display of so much erudition and the extreme care with which its
owner abstains from any personal criticism. Mr Gosse being so much an
anomaly (imagine such a well-bred cautious wanderer in belles lettres dis-
covering Ibsen for England when the Norwegian was a young iconoclast!)
it is impossible to do more than point out that the struggle between the
author's Good and Bad Angels has resulted in complete victory for the
Good Angel. Otherwise Mr Gosse would explain more about Swinburne's
privately printed Cannibal Catechism, which he dangles before us in a
brief essay that tells us nothing.
a
Tales From A Rolltop Desk, by Christopher Morley (12mo, 262 pages;
Doubleday, Page: $1.75) have a sunny, summery, rambling, hammocky
flavour. Mr Morley takes such a genial, boyish delight in being an author
that one is tempted to overlook his amiable defects, and to forgive him for
not occasionally holding his inspiration against an emery wheel to give
it edge and start the sparks flying. A mild blend of fiction and philoso-
phy, set down by one whose skin is impervious to the sleet of realism.
STREETS, by Douglas Goldring (12mo, 106 pages; Seltzer: $1.50) is a col-
lection of the easy Sunday-afternoon lucubrations—sentimental, humor-
ous, or rollicking-of a likeable personality which is equipped with the
latest mental apparatus for evaluating its delicate perceptions and with ac-
tive humorous tentacles. Measurably superior to the poetic efforts which
used to hide their heads in obscure country papers, these poems are never-
theless of the same genre. They contain no truly imaginative word, no
sudden piercing of the fog of wontedness which hides reality from us. The
occasional ballades are as pithy as Mother Goose, and quite as familiar.


484
BRIEFER MENTION
A TANKARD OF Ale, by Theodore Maynard (12mo, 205 pages; McBride:
$2). The obsessions of religiosity are not lacking, but "the boozer's thoughts
ought to be on his pot-not on the Pope,” remarks the anthologist, and
thereupon proceeds to set forth as bracing and conclusive a collection of
drinking-songs as this age of anthologies has ever dreamed of. As poet,
Mr Maynard is freshly and favourably known—there are citations from
his ballades in this book; as anthologist he fares even more happily, since
in this task his oddly-assorted theological and alcoholic convictions do not
come to so abrupt a clash. He has "ransacked the ages, despoiled the
climes” for his Tankard with luscious garnerings of Herrick, the dear,
mellow Bishop of Bath, Elizabethan Dekker, Victorian Thackeray, Geor-
gian Noyes. His pungent and crisp preface explains why American drink-
ing-songs are omitted; but it was a faulty editorial faculty that could, for
the sake of disdaining a "country of prohibitionists,” overlook Mr Hovey's
Give A Rouse, or certain famous ribaldries of the land of Volstead.
DIANTHA GOES THE PRIMROSE Way, by Adelaide Manola Hughes (12mo,
78 pages; Harper : $1.35) reveals a personality more intent upon narrative
a
than upon poetic expression and rhythmic values. The surface of emotion
is churned as by a paddle wheel, but there is little of depth or driving power
in the performance.
MODERN AMERICAN Plays, collected with an introduction by George P.
Baker (12mo, 544 pages; Harcourt, Brace: $2.50) prints the complete
text of the following plays: Thomas' As a Man Thinks, Belasco's The
Return of Peter Grimm, Sheldon's Romance, Anspacher's The Unchast-
ened Woman, and Massey's Plots and Playwrights. An interesting choice
of plays interesting in themselves and for the compromises they did or did
not make to win success.
SEEN ON THE STAGE, by Clayton Hamilton (12mo, 270 pages ; Holt: $1.75).
Among records of dramatic thrills experienced by a critic, is some worth-
while analysis of good acting, and some good criticism. Significant details
of the lives and work of several actors and playwrights are pleasantly
recorded, and here the value of the book ends. The authoritative way in
which the writer has set down some questionable dictums lessens the weight
of all he has to say, and where he would be humorous, his light goes out.
MODERN MOVEMENTS in Painting, by Charles Marriott (illus., 8vo, 268
pages; Scribner : $7.50) receives its essential value through a large number
of excellent reproductions, several of them in colour. Mr Marriott's view
of art, as expressed in the letterpress of the book, is that the artist is much
more of an ordinary man than he is commonly considered and that many
of the emotional characteristics supposedly peculiar to him are shared in
a high degree by thousands of people. Mr Marriott starts his modern
movements with Turner and Constable and gallops through English and
French art to the Vorticists and Group X. His brief comment on various
figures serves to place them in proper relation to one another with some
degree of discernment.


BRIEFER MENTION
485
:
a
a
Ernest Renan, by Lewis Freeman Mott (12mo, 462 pages; Appleton : $4)
is a voluminous if not plethoric biography of the author of the Life of
Jesus. The Frenchman's youthful predilection for the church, his growing
scepticism of it, and his final departure from the orthodox faith under
which he once received his tonsure, form the groundwork for an exposition
of his really vast labours in philology and comparative religions. Chiefly
known in the English speaking world as the author of the Life of Jesus,
Renan deserves more extensive if not more intensive recognition. This
Professor Mott's work should obtain for him; for to the copious remarks
of the author are added many of the subject's own utterances.
The Life of GENERAL William Booth, by Harold Begbie (illus., 2 vols.,
8vo, 911 pages; Macmillan : $10.50) is the record of a tremendous person-
ality, shaping a great religious and social movement by means of a simple
and terrible theology and a genius for organization. He believed and
preached that "the best man that ever lived” would go to everlasting pun-
ishment if he did not receive forgiveness for original and acquired sin
through the salvation of Christ's love. This salvation was a definite thing
which came upon the truly repentant giving them a conviction that they
were saved. With this teaching he combated evil actively for sixty-six
years, so intent upon his work as to be almost unaware of the storm of
criticism that attended his progress. He was a Titan of personality. His let-
ters, impatient, hasty notes to his many children, long love letters to his
wife, jubilant reports of souls saved and material reforms instituted, and
autocratic mandates to his officers, are among the most interesting features
of the book. He has found in Mr Begbie an ideal biographer, thorough,
sympathetic, and with due appreciation of the naïve, shrewd, tempestuous,
buoyant nature of this general of the most amazing army in the world.
THE MIRRORS OF DOWNING STREET, Anonymous (illus., 8mo, 171 pages;
Putnam: $2.50) is a collection of journalistic portraits of England's
political figure-heads. Lloyd George, Asquith, Northcliffe are snapped
in unflattering poses. The author hides his identity behind the camera,
and also most traces of style.
PEEPS AT PEOPLE, by Robert Cortes Holliday (illus., 12mo, 118 pages;
Doran: $1.25) reveals symptoms of literary housemaid's knee, the result of
too continued kneeling at the shrine of the consciously quaint. There is
little sustenance in slices of life cut thin and buttered on both sides.
)
FATHER ALLAN'S ISLAND, by Amy Murray, with a foreword by Padraic
Colum (12mo, 240 pages; Harcourt, Brace: $2.50) is the story of her
visit to the island of Eriskay in the Outer Hebrides, where she went to
collect folk melodies and stayed "from a Lady Day to a St Michael's.” In
some ways the volume is reminiscent of The Aran Islands of J. M. Synge,
but Miss Murray's journey was more of an adventure and less of an
introspection. Her style is a mixture of Elizabethan and Hebridean collo-
quialisms which at first seems mannered and almost unintelligible, but
which grows in vigour and effectiveness as the volume progresses.
a


486
BRIEFER MENTION
AN OCEAN TRAMP, by William McFee (12mo, 189 pages; Doubleday, Page:
$1.75) a reissue of the author's first book augmented by a reminiscent
preface, has-aside from an occasional flair for the studiously archaic-
vivid prose qualities which give it tang and buoyancy. With its alternate
passages of actuality and speculation, of sea experience and bookish obser-
vation, it combines a youthful candour and freshness with a mature and
pliant style. The narrative episodes are particularly interesting, as guide-
posts pointing towards subsequent achievements.
a
THE LAND OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN, by William Somerset Maugham (8vo,
228 pages; Knopf: $3) is a collection of colour-prints made from emotional
snap-shots taken during a siesta in Spain. Heavy with perpetual sun-
shine, the pictures are reflections of the indolent midsummer-day-dreams
of Andalusia. They are the dead life of Spain—and as remarkable a
resurrection as George Moore's more personal miracle in prose. A second
edition of this work has now been issued under the title of ANDALUSIA.
PROBLEMS OF TO-DAY, by Moorfield Storey (12mo, 258 pages; Houghton
Mifflin : $1.50). Mr Storey's arguments in support of the liberalism of
the good citizen are most piquant. For instance, he "comes out” for free
speech, because he thinks that some day it might be of use in the defence
of capitalism. But on the other hand he does not consider that capitalism
is in need of any defence because its extravagances offer employment to
the poor. Nevertheless, the rich must not be oppressive, if they wish to
preserve their luxuries and privileges. Mr Storey considers that the com-
mand, “Render unto Caesar the things which are God's” is imperative
for the good citizen, but shows that he finds the command impossible to
The breach with the omnipotent state is bound to occur shortly
after one begins to ponder the problems of government. In this book
issue is taken with the state over prohibition and the public control of
railways—not the most vital of the issues, but still distinct breaches. The
legal fiction that the majority equals the whole almost encircles the world,
but somewhere it is bound to snap; if only, as in this book, in Ulster alone.
Mr Storey is one of those liberals who proclaim Roosevelt a prophet of the
political religion. He is also the head of the anti-imperialistic league.
execute.
BERGSON AND His Philosophy, by Alexander Gunn (12mo, 190 pages;
Dutton : $2.50) is another addition to the already overwhelming Bergson-
Archiv. The volume is admittedly a handy Baedeker for uninitiates who
would do Bergson. And although criticism by the unassuming Mr Gunn is
limited to only minor phases of his master's philosophy, the exposition is
clear, precise, and terrifyingly complete. For the volume not only treats all
Bergsonian concepts from Memory to la durée, but includes an extensive
bibliography, a biography, and a photograph of Bergson.
THE ABC OF Evolution, by Joseph McCabe (12mo, 124 pages; Putnam:
$1.50) is a Q. E. D. of natural science presented for the delectation of non-
mathematical minds. A lucid and beguilingly simple history of terrestrial
life, it prints nature's alphabet in capital letters—and makes an excellent
preparatory course for the study of her etymology.


MUSICAL CHRONICLE
S
CARCE is midsummer past when the unwelcome pestiferous
hunger waxes once again. Well before the commencement
of September, it's germinating in you, the durned appetite for hear-
ing musical performances; mounting to the skull; glazing the eye
and making it to perceive on the concert horizon, where dusty
stretches, mostly, lie, the rosiest mirages. You are being well pre-
pared for another round of disappointments. And only recently
you had congratulated yourself on being rid of it for ever. The
last season of music had apparently most thoroughly slain it.
Towards springtime, it was but rarely that you had found your-
self inside concertrooms. So many mediocre and stale performances
endured had reconciled beautifully with doing without recitals.
Since there was so little opportunity of satisfying lust for sweet
sounds, philosophic resignation entered in, and dulled desire. One
or two evenings of music a year, so wisdom whispered, would, in
the future, quite suffice. A great deal of income once diverted
to the pockets of managers would now be free to roll into those of
tobacco merchants. For while a concert appeared to prove, almost
invariably, a concert, a cigar had been found quite oftentimes a
smoke. The music lover would have to learn to read orchestral
scores. That was the only alternative left him. What he could
not play for himself upon his own piano, he'd have to teach him-
self to hear with the mental ear up in the library on Forty-second
Street among the readers of Musical America. There was nothing
else he could do.
But every summer, the ninth-month, arriving, finds the self-
same music lover in the boots of the wretch without the price of a
dinner who purchases himself a cake of cheap chocolate in the
hope of deceiving his belly, and but a few hours after he has con-
gratulated himself on the extinction of his hunger, finds it gnaw-
ing furiously. Despite the accumulated unhappy experiences of
many musical seasons, despite disgust with the whole poor business
of music-making, one surprises oneself dreaming forward blandly
towards the coming winter of multiple concerts, the cool weather
time when one can go hear people play. Symphonies to come draw


488
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
stately through the imagination. The horns of elfland, Philadel-
phia, and Boston are heard faintly blowing. Forgotten entirely
is the last bad performance of the Jupiter of Mozart or the Fourth
of Brahms; the first of the conductors to announce either for per-
formance will surely have one at his heels. There is no time one
glides upon the autobus down Fifty-seventh Street that the red
and black placards on the walls of Carnegie Hall do not thrill
with the promise of auricularly blissful autumn months. The
prospectuses of the various organizations transmitted through the
mails excite with their dazzling announcements of premières, re-
vivals, soloists, historical series, guest-conductorships; in trembling
and in haste the cheque is prepared that will forfend subscription-
seats becoming forfeit, prevent hopeless exclusion the evening the
bridegroom comes. One even finds oneself turning to the exclama-
tory irregular blocks in the daily press where, during the season,
managers announce, present, and have the honour of offering fore-
most American pianists, greatest Russian violinists, Jewish Carusi,
boy-prodigies from Austria, girl-prodigies from Brazil, pupils of
Auer and protegés of Lambert, Griffes groups, Beethoven associa-
tions, Damrosch festivals, and all-Tchaikowsky programmes. It is
not even in the hope of finding that some major artist is announcing
an out-of-season concert, that one does so. One peeps, oh, shame,
in the mere hope of finding that some of the daffodils that come
before the swallow dares, and are a trifle prone to take the
applause of October with too many encores, are advertised for
appearance.
It is no latter-day degeneracy of individuals who cannot con-
tact the world immediately; no nervous falling-off of an over-ripe
society to whom luxuries are become organically necessary, that
brings back the hunger each falltide. The country Englishman,
able to live redfacedly out of doors amid stock, innyards, and tank-
ards of ale without at all feeling the need of having a culture of
ideas, of seeing Cézannes and hearing string-quartets, does not
after all, embody the perfection of the natural man. On the con-
trary, if the appetite for hearing musical performances, and with
it the illusion that there exist hundreds of performers able to
gratify it, returns upon us each year, it comes chiefly because of
the gorgeously animal life so many of us live during the warm
season, the satisfaction of the senses, the association with woods,


PAUL ROSENFELD
489
beasts, waters, hillocks, skies. All time, man is seeking to syn-
chronize with a great rhythm that pulses inside him, outside him,
in the earth, in the air. All time, he is seeking to give himself to
that rhythm, to inhale and exhale with the breathing of the earth,
to leap into the dance and let the dance be the inner movement of
him. The inner split must be healed. He must be one as the
kingfisher skimming grey and white over the face of the pond; one
as the clowning porpoise of the sea. Life must go swinging and
balanced and dancing as it goes where blue and white acrobats flit
from trapeze to trapeze under the canvas circus vault, he knows.
And, from time to time, men do coincide with the great cosmic
rhythm. Philosophies, poems, symphonies, bulging rich canvases,
are there to attest the attainment, to arrest the moment of co-in-
cidence. For what happens to us at only certain moments, say
when we run naked in the forest, or swim naked in stream and
ocean, that pacification, release, and cleansing, takes place regu-
larly from time to time in the artist. His work offers us a path,
offers us a bridge to inanimate nature, offers us a place from which
to leap off into the universal river.
And we, physically whole, strapping from tramps, swims, games;
healed with the blackness of nights that no city-lights powder with
rose; with stars hanging large as sunbursts in the sky, with drenched
grass and the purplish flush of dawn, and all that gives one back
to one's animal being, we are ready for the ministry of art. We
are ready for the Seventh Symphony of Beethoven, and the sev-
enth of all the musicians. The dionysiac fiddler must play up for
dance. The completion of experience which only great rhythmed
cosmic art can give, that, every straining fibre demands. And,
indeed, as one who has never read a poem out of doors cannot quite
know what a poem may be, so one who has never heard music
played in the open, and not only in parks or gardens, but among
the lush and homely things of nature, cannot quite know how deep
an hunger it stills. Never to have heard a Brahms quartet, for
instance, out of doors in the evening when the hillsides flow softly
as vineyards winding away into distance, and the village standpipe
appears a donjon; ever to have heard the faery scherzo die down
with the familiar rims and contours, among grey bushes and misted
meadows, while the last greenish light follows the long since sunken
sun, is never entirely to have felt the shy life, the subdued passion,


490
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
a
the grave sweet reconciliation of the music. Who indeed can quite
understand ultra-modern music who has not had a piano far away
from houses, in a hut in the sun-warmed woods, by rocks and bal-
sam and sumach; and there turned from the endless concertizing,
the eternal rhythm of tree-toads, crickets, and rustling leaves, to the
wild free numbers of the new composers; and again, after playing,
returned once more to the soughing of the wind, the creaking of the
laden branches, the moments of brooding fecund silence, the smell
of cones, needles, and fallen leaves, the flicker of the light on the
ground? But, since we have no Flonzaley Quartets of our own,
no music in our own chamber, no forest studio with an Ornstein to
play the piano for us, we are left groping about us. Then, forget-
ting what the concert-hall in America is, we remember only the few
memorable performances which, despite the titanic wastage, each
season brings. Forgetting the innumerable times when perform-
ances took away rathermore than gave, debauched rathermore than
fulfilled, we remember only the moments, scattered over many
years, when compositions suddenly reared enormous over us, when
the moon-worship of the thing was felt, and the great winds and
tides laid hold on us, and Aung us aloft into some universe of spin-
ning suns. Of last season, we recollect only the hours when Mr
Bauer, for example, sat and played Sebastian, stately at the clavi-
cord; or when Mr Mengelberg, like the Hals among conductors he
is, splashed Flemish sunlight about Carnegie Hall, and made trom-
bones blare with kirmess carousal; or when Mr Stokowski let go; or
when the Society of the Friends of Music befriended music indeed.
The dry dusty banks get the semblance of saturation; the grey air
under the smoky clouds is veiled with roseate mists; we are about
to be launched into joy.
To be sure, this midsummer music-madness doesn't last so very
long. No sooner does one become aware of it, catch it at work,
than one begins to right oneself automatically. No one has to
possess even the least vestige of the prophetic strain to be able to
envisage realistically the coming pabulum of music-making, and
know what satisfactions are offered the giant appetite. Without
any thaumaturgical practices at all, it is revealed to any one, if only
he be gifted with common sense, just what sort of folk the virtuosi
are, anyway, and just what is to be expected of such heads this
coming winter, the next, and perhaps all coming winters. It will


PAUL ROSENFELD
491
easily be recognized that, since we have to do with the stupidest
species of artist, that of actor perhaps alone excluded, we must
expect to have happen this coming season much what happened
last: which is, next to nothing. The profession of conductors will
do heroic work, as usual, in preventing much save Brahms and
Tchaikowsky from being heard. A neglected overture of Bee-
thoven's, the Leonore No. III, will be dragged twelve or fourteen
times from an unjust oblivion. A little known poem of Rimsky's,
named Scheherazade, will be presented several times to an aston-
ished public. When President Masaryk, the republic of Czecho-
Slovakia, the Philharmonic Society, or Conductor Stransky has a
birthday, there will take place the première of a brilliant and revo-
lutionary work, by one Dvorak, the New World Symphony. Several
apprentice-works by modern composers will be presented; if by
chance a really representative modern work should be performed,
it will be performed so badly that its worst denigrators will find
themselves justified. When Mr Coates arrives from London to
take the wand from the hand of Mr Damrosch, he will surely do
An Episode in the Life of a Very Old Gentleman, vulgarly known
as Le poéme de l'extase. As for the pianists, there's not a one of
them won't be found playing the b-minor Chopin sonata and all
its usual attendants. Of course, a few surprises are sure to reward
the weary pilgrim. A few concerts will issue him forth delighted
and refreshed. But he knows that, all in all, the best of music will
come to him not in the public places, but at some one of the mo-
ments that find him at his piano, or in the room of a composer or of
some other true musician who has just stepped to his instrument
to share a thing that he has written or rediscovered. Long before
the last weeks that precede the commencement of the season have
lapsed, it has become quite plain to him that he who makes so bold
as to venture into a concert-hall without carrying with him an
interesting book with which, as soon as it becomes necessary, he
can while away the time, is nothing but a ninny. And by the time
the first trump has sounded he is speculating how many years of
this sort of adventure must elapse before his fool will shall renounce
entirely the channel of recitals and all music-making, and develop
for him some other spillway not so hopelessly choked with "matter
in the wrong place.”
PAUL ROSENFELD
a


THE THEATRE
T
HE business of catching up with the theatrical season, which
began about August 1, is complicated by an effort to get right
with the critics. I feel in no mood for pinking the shows with
bright shafts of wit or summing up the season in an epigram.
I have spent agreeable hours at the theatre wondering what the
playwrights and producers were up to, and irritating moments out-
side them wondering where the devil the critics got their stuff. One
play which I found delightfully mad and frivolous, MARCH
Hares, met with a disaster in an evening paper; it was called
scabrous. Another, Dulcy, moderately diverting in spite of lu-
dicrous mechanics and an intolerably knowing air, was three times
hailed as something or other wonderful at last on the Broadway
stage; and the most irritatingly pompous and clap-trap piece of
several seasons was made the theme of an almost lyric outburst
about the flame of the American theatre flaring triumphantly
higher.
Most of the critics were not so taken in by the Tosca-cum-Fran-
cesca da Rimini niminy piminy animated wax-works of Mr Sidney
Howard in spite of the putative intelligence of the producer and
the unquestioned magnificence of Mr Robert Edmond Jones's
single setting. Miss Clare Eames, by accident out of Mrs Jarley,
or is it Mme Tussaud ? carried on the illusion so long as she walked,
stood still, or prayed; after that she joined Mr José Ruben in
taking us into the torture chamber. The lines were almost as good
as those of “Savonarola” Brown. A singularly inept piece on busi-
ness, distressing in its vulgar moments and never funny. It is
called SWORDS.
ONE of the simple pieces of the early days, The NightCAP, was
perfectly good entertainment of the kind The Bat sold over the
counter last year. The serious play came in with The Detour, of
which one hears good report and at the moment of writing has
a revival of The Easiest Way to back it up. Between these two
came Back Pay, in which the participants indicated that the author
was not alone in her mastery of the cleaver as an instrument of


THE THEATRE
493
precision, and Daddy's Gone A-Hunting. Looking over the list
of productions I find nothing except this last play to justify the
least expenditure of thought; Liliom is of last season. In Miss
Zoe Akins' play there was the advantage of sympathetic and ap-
propriate direction; Miss Marjorie Rambeau and Mr Frank Conroy
presented really puzzling complications of character and were so
good that they showed up the one weakness of the play. When
Miss Akins set out to take melodrama and triangle situations and
treat them untheatrically she pledged herself to carry the thing
through; for the greater part of the play the people in it act upon
each other a hundred times more forcefully through their emotions
and thoughts than through the brief words they speak. Yet in
the crux of her situation Miss Akins makes a wife leave her hus-
band for something he says when it is quite obvious that he means
the contrary and is giving her a thousand reasons for staying while
he says "You are free to go.” Miss Akins, in fact, fell back upon
the dismal cleverness of Déclassée; but the important thing is
that she was so far in advance of it that the fall was notable.
MR JOHN MURRAY ANDERSON's new edition of The GREEN-
WICH Village Follies is not a great success except for pictorial
moments now and then and clever bits in one or two scenes. Mr
Anderson
puts his faith in cloth-of-gold nowadays instead of in his
chiffons and gauzes of a few years ago. His marionettes and his
masks, the latter used with distinctly dramatic effect in a wild
beheading scene, are successful; his chorus is for pictures only;
and his comedians, except for James Watts, are not entertaining.
Everywhere I feel that this is high-class revue; and everywhere
my vulgar soul craves amusement. So far Mr Robert Locher has
not provided anything so ineffably lovely as to make me forget
that I need entertainment.
I suggest that entertainment may be justifiably demanded and
that if all the dramatic critics were involved each early eve-
ning in something as exciting as a poker game, as entertaining as
an intelligent conversation, or as absorbing as the Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire—and if they compared the plays with
what they had to give up in order to sit through them, we might
learn something from dramatic criticism.
G. S.


COMMENT
a
Na world where one can be so many things it is a little trying to
be perpetually in one attitude, especially if that be so fatuous as
"being gratified to learn." Yet once more we confess our pleasure.
The Guild of Free Lance Artists, the graphic arts section of The
Authors League of America, has resolved and voted thus:
“The recent announcement made by The Dial that every year it
would give $2000.00 to a contributor that it might provide for at
least one year the necessary leisure in which the artist could work
unhampered by financial worries is an announcement that com-
mends The Dial and this most generous action to all those who are
interested in the Arts and Artists.
“As artists we are particularly gratified by this announcement
and although the gift is for 'the artist in literature' our appreciation
is none the less hearty—as the growth of one particular art gives
strength to the others.
"It is for this direct encouragement to the production of the best
in Art by financial assistance that we feel The Dial is entitled to
the commendation and the heartiest appreciation of The Guild of
Free Lance Artists."
To this we can only add that, obviously, The DIAL's award was
a beginning and that we should like nothing better than to announce
a further award for workers in the field of the Guild.
The general question of the award still agitates editorial minds.
Few more incisive comments have been made than this, from the
Chicago Post, which requires nothing beyond quotation:
“The Dial's policy has provoked some very interesting com-
ment. As usual, the comment is largely on the great dangers of
the idea. With our habitual optimism, we can face the prospect of
poets not having enough to eat because American ingenuity has pro-
duced belts with buckles which can be pulled in any desired length
and are guaranteed not to slip. But our optimism is offset by a
great timidity: Suppose the poet is given the wherewithal to avoid


COMMENT
495
a
starvation and eats so much that he is no longer spurred on to work,
or works with less sincerity. O dreadful thought-and how strange
that this thought is always uppermost in the minds of those people
who never read the man's work, whether it was good or bad.
“And this attitude is seen in the discussion of The DIAL's offer.
One or two editors think it a bad thing because it revives the old
institution of the patron. The obvious answer to that is that The
Dial would be a much better patron than the public.
But it
is absurd to imagine the editors of The Dial being patrons of the
bad type-limiting the moral liberty of the writer.
“No, the fact of the matter is that The Dial has done a very fine
thing. American letters will benefit materially by it. As against the
Pulitzer prizes with their silly reservations about moral influences
—which the judges seem to ignore occasionally, however—this
straight, honest offer quite without any strings is a fine piece of
straightforward and far-seeing policy. And The Dial does not
wish to copyright the idea, either. It suggests that some one else, an
individual acting for himself or an editor of a magazine that has
money, do the same thing on a larger scale.
"We wonder if the suggestion will be taken up? And if it is,
whether it will be done with the same moral courage which dictates
the freedom from all qualifications of The Dial's offer ?”
On September 7th Mr Edward Robinson of the Metropolitan
Museum, having let The New York Herald know that he was in
Europe, told The World that the anonymous circular objecting to
the present loan exhibition of impressionist and post impressionist
painting was the first hint of protest which the museum had re-
ceived. Four months of the finest exhibition of painting this coun-
.
try has seen and only one protest! The American crank must have
run himself out of breath.
This anonymous circular is not without subtlety. Its authors are
aware that nothing can be proved in aesthetics, and except for the
occasional use of the word "ugly,” they do not try. They employ
the scientific jargon, so effective in editorials and the pulpit-its
passwords: (“neurotic egomaniacs,” “taints of hereditary and ac-
"
quired insanity”) its dreadful metaphors, its errors in grammar.
One would like to wager that the circular had been written by a
committee of medical experts.


496
COMMENT
>
Three "stimuli” are announced as responsible for modern paint-
ing, and as these stimuli are bad ones the reader is expected to know
what to think.
The first stimulus (a medical expert would be likely to say “the
first stimuli”) is, of course, "the world-wide Bolshevist propa-
ganda.” As the majority of the paintings condemned were done in
the nineteenth century and recognized as masterpieces before 1910
our friends would seem to have got the cart before the horse.
The second stimulus is “human greed,” and to imply that this is a
bad stimulus is not especially 100% ingenuous. It is hard for an
American not to admire a painting which sells for five or ten thou-
sand. This is success, this is proof of excellence, in fact it is almost
the only proof of excellence, and in order to explain it away accusa-
tions of fraud must be resorted to. "A coterie of European art deal-
ers” is charged with having used "every crafty device known to the
picture trade” to put across the new art and discredit the old. As
if anybody in America expected to sell anything without advertis-
ing it; as if advertising, publicity, and crafty devices were not the
basis of our civilization.
The third stimulus is a "well-known form of insanity,” a combi-
nation of deteriorated vision with deteriorated emotion, bad per-
spective, and an "uncontrollable desire to mutilate the human body"
(the stimulus also, one imagines, of modern surgery). The learned
opinions of psychiatrists who admit they can see no difference be-
tween any drawing done in their asylums and a Renoir, are quoted
at length in support of this theory. One grants Van Gogh's lunacy;
and one recalls that modern medicine owes discoveries to dipso-
maniacs and that the inventor of 606 had the bad taste to belong to
a nation which our psychiatrists used to characterize, when they
could think of nothing worse, as victims, en masse, of paranoia.
But we are perhaps taking the circular too lightly in attributing
it to a group of ordinary imbeciles. “Printed on good paper,” it
may be one of those "classy" commodities which the great adver-
tising firms love to edit for their $500,000 clients. In a week or so
a "follow-up” may expose the anonymous circular as part of a
“world-wide" campaign for soft soap.
a
We recommend a review in Contact of William Carlos Williams'
Kora in Hell. It is infinitely the finest of the three or four (we
wrote one) notices of these vigorously imagined improvisations.



THE INDIAL
IV
V
V
OXXII
NOVEMBER 192 I
PERONNIK THE FOOL
BY GEOR