him.
Questions as to the workability of the proposed change are slurred over,
and the casual observation that the new masters will be “self-selected” is
thought sufficient for that hoary problem. Certain phrases like "the under-
lying population” and “Vested Interests” occur too often and too compla-
cently even for the purposes of irony. One feels that the thinker has been
swallowed alive by the propagandist.
Social DECAY AND REGENERATION, by R. Austin Freeman, with an Introduc-
tion by Havelock Ellis (8vo, 345 pages; Houghton Mifflin : $5) predicts
the probable collapse of Western civilization through the operation of four
“social anti-bodies": the domination of man by mechanism; collectivism, or
socialism; the progressive increase of the population; and the survival and
relative increase of the unfit. The chief emphasis is laid on the unhappy
effects of the power-machine on the human environment and on man him-
self. As a means of checking these tendencies the author advocates the vol.
untary segregation of the fit in self-supporting communities.


MUSICAL CHRONICLE
UT in Chicago, underneath a green and white marquee, there
O
Especially when we see, all over Europe, the black bole of the mu-
sical tree shrill again with young green: group of six tum-ti-tum-
ming it joyously upon the banks of Seine; young school in Poland,
very delicate, very elegant, and not too wishy-warshau; Spanish
music kicking out alive and tough and stiff underneath de Falla's
hand; disciples about Schoenberg opening dark sayings upon the
harp; especially then, when we hear all these new musics from over-
sea, does our thought strike suddenly in the direction of John Alden
Carpenter's.
A turn of the sort, a sudden conversion of the impulse received
from outre-mer into an examination of not merely Carpenter, but of
the local condition in general, is a process fairly normal, one would
say, to the minds of most of the younger American workers. The
members of the new generation do not, as a rule, go long without fur-
tively casting the eye inward. Every throb of life which debauched
old Europe even in her stews manages to communicate, impels them
to attack again, and worry the hoary problem of native incapacities.
In Paris, for instance, it is not at all uncommon for
Ameri-
cans who come from assisting at the performance of a Cocteau bal-
let or at a concert of the work of the Group of Six, to go sit at a café-
table half the night, discussing over the bocks the question why,
not Chartes and the Sainte-Chapelle, but things as irresponsible and
spontaneous and to-dayish as these Gallic entertainments, cannot be
produced t’other side the Atlantic. Evening after evening, over
the heads of a bunch of such, arguing and soliloquizing as though
they were Russians out of Turgenev, there quivers, like a humming
bird stationary on air, mute, rigid, ecstatic, a tiny winged Van
Wyck Brooks, and one perceives the sparkling of his keen grey eyes,
his grin like a pleased savage's, hears the agitation of his wings.
Wherever two or three of the musical persuasion are met together,
whether in Europe or over here at home, like as not they will fall
a-wondering why life doesn't turn itself into music in the New
World, where water contains as much the elixir of art as it does
young


616
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
in the Old, and where men stalk about on their hind legs, too.
There are instruments here, and people to play upon them, and
others who will go hear performances. There is the art of Europe
to serve as tradition. We'd like much to find a composer here who
furnishes us with solid matter into which we could bite with all the
jaw. We need composers; men to express themselves and us in
music; it's no longer a matter of decoration.
And then, your pondering music-lovers will turn in a sort of
frenzy, and search the native field once more. "I will not let thee go
unless thou bless me.” It must be some one real has been over-
looked. 'It must be an injustice has been done to an American com-
poser merely because he is an American. Jamesesque sentiment of
herd-inferiority has caused men to see Europe and her music-makers
through stained-glass spectacles. Why should not an American
composer be as able as a Frenchman or Pole or Viennese to seize
upon
the elements of existence and transmute them to music? There
must be, on these shores, at this very moment, two or three native-
born musicians of creative audition. It is then, however, that the
mind finds the man of the striped awnings in Chicago; and dissuad-
ed from further inquisitiveness, stands stunned.
Of the workers at play in the field of American music, none, we
are assured, were self-realization a possibility for the native-born
composer, would stand more directly in the way of success than
John Alden Carpenter. It is for that reason our thought goes direct
to him. Other personalities in the field are, it may be, inherently
finer, warmer, more thoroughly sympathetic. There are several one
respects more both as human beings and as potential fountains of
music. But the Chicagoan's resources are co-ordinated to a degree
approximated by no other young American composer. Neither En-
gel, Powell, Morris, nor any of our other hopefuls have themselves
as well in hand as has he. Without denying for an instant that a
course in composition under some great magister would help him
from the root up, one can still aver that among all the foetuses in
the arcana, he is the nearest birth. And at forty-five years of age
even an American artist is fullgrown. At moments, particularly in
the second movement of the concertino, with its five-eight beat, its
extended swing, its travelling-salesman sort of life, Carpenter's mu-
sic crosses the line that separates the unborn from the born and is
clothed in the colours of existence. The man has even attained a


PAUL ROSENFELD
617
certain liberation of fantasy. He toys engagingly with his orches-
tra. The piano is remarkably well treated as an instrument of
per-
cussion in the concertino. Indeed, the work exhibits a keen sensi-
bility to the qualities of the various pieces of the battery: kettle-
drums, bass drum, cymbals, tambourine, castanets and glockenspiel
- demonstrates the sensitivity of the composer's epidermis. Aqua-
tints wash charmingly across the orchestra of the Perambulator
suite; the scene of the mock bullfight in The Birthday of the In-
fanta is brilliant with its trumpet passages.
But with these gifts Carpenter has succeeded in producing chiefly
some comfortable music. His forms are not so much the very ob-
jects of emotion as means of suggesting emotion about something
not stated. The lento grazioso of the concertino is, after all, a very
exceptional passage in a body of work that scarcely ever permits one
to experience. The suite In a Perambulator, for example, is not so
much the world of the child felt directly as it is the adult com-
ment on the sensations of the baby carriage. You have but to com-
pare it with The Children's Corner of Debussy and Ma mère l’oye
of Ravel to perceive its pseudo-realism. The two Frenchmen man-
aged to coincide intuitively with the child. The American, with all
his charming talent for light orchestration, his wit and musical good
manners, causes us more to smile at a world made miniature and
playfully ironic than feel the terror, the buzz and glow of the uni-
verse of the nursery. Nor does Carpenter's ballet, The Birthday of
the Infanta, after the fairy story of Oscar Wilde, express the limbus
infantiorum in which the composer and so many of his co-workers
find themselves, and put us in touch with a reality. It was indu-
bitably the portal out of his own world of fantasy which the action
of the ballet opened to him, that drew the composer to the subject.
For to have realized indeed a musical atmosphere for the scene of
the dim Escorial, the monstrous etiquette hedging about the royal
child, the immense hoopskirts on the slim young body, the toy bull-
fight, the grotesque capers of the impassioned dwarf, the entire
strange little subterranean world, would have been, in a fashion, to
objectify himself. But, even here, Carpenter showed how almost
impossible it is for him to perform an act of imagination. The mu-
sic is not the expression of the composer's sensations and ideas. It
does not pierce out from some hidden centre. One feels it has been
“made” rather self-consciously. This is music as decoration. On


618
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
the whole, it is pleasant enough, but not exciting to the mind. One
rather likes the dreamy dances of the first scene and the burlesque
tauromachia; one rather dislikes the close of that scene, where the
dwarf decides to make his way into the palace, the interlude, and all
the rest of the business where Carpenter seeks to be dramatic and
passionate. That is all. It seems unfortunately as though the way
lay entirely clear for the qualification of Franz Schrecker as the
composer of the only Birthday of the Infanta. John Alden Carpen-
ter, after all, remains a musical embryon, man-sized, but neverthe-
less an embryon.
His very words re-enforce the impression given by his music.
When the work was produced in its original form in Chicago in
1916, he wrote:
“The Concertino is, in effect, a light-hearted conversation between
piano and orchestra—as between two friends who have travelled
different paths and become a little garrulous over their separate
experiences. The rules of polite talk, as always, between friends,
are not strictly observed—often, in animated moments they talk
both at once, each hearing only what he says himself. Presently the
moment comes, as always, between friends, when no conversation is
necessary—a relaxed moment, when Friendship itself takes them in
hand, and they have nothing to say.”
Is that not the tone by which Carpenter can be known among the
musicians ? Bach, one knows, loved music as though it were the
angel of deliverance and death. Beethoven loved it as though it
were the spirit of liberty, present, like Leonore in that Florestan,
in the dungeon of mankind. And Chopin loved music as though it
were a luxurious mistress riding him to death; and Schumann wor-
shipped it with a sort of sweet calf-love all his life, long after he had
gotten beyond the age of seventeen; and Brahms, as though it were
a woman whom he might never possess, for all his great adoration,
because she was the wife of another. But with John Alden Car-
penter, we are in the realm of friendship. The rules of politeness
are not strictly observed, and there is still so much that presses to
be said—on a pleasant night-between friends."
So on that day we read no further in the book. The case too
clearly throws into light the stone wall against which in the effort


PAUL ROSENFELD
619
to disentangle himself the American composer bruises his breast, to
permit further illusion. It makes us feel again something we all
know within us, knew all the while foreign enterprise made us re-
volt against it, and hope to prove it untrue. And we perceive again
that no native born musician can yet give us what dozens of Euro-
peans do. We perceive that no American composer can yet perform
a feat of imagination in music. For an act of imagination is the
process of perceiving an objective verity, and no one born this side
the Atlantic can stand looking long into the face of the truth. Why
it is so, why the truth, hard to envisage in the Old World, should
be a sort of head of Medusa in the New, it is not easy to say. Per-
haps it is for the reason that the verity concerning America itself,
the prime truth for the American, is so painful that sluggish life
prefers to maintain itself on a low plane by means of a moral
blindness rather than struggle desperately and perhaps perish on a
higher. Perhaps it is for the reason that no individual can see the
realities unsustained by the will of the group. One knows it one-
self, whatever one be, the pain of gazing long at the truth concern-
ing oneself; the glare of the fierce light, the constantly recurrent
impulse to glance away immediately after the vision into some con-
soling roseland, to cuddle oneself with the chocolate and movies and
newspaper patriotism of the eternal illusion. It's as if the breast
were sore, and couldn't long bear the embrace of life, and relaxing
the passionate clasp shrank away. The art of Arthur B. Davies,
after all, is the typically American.
No doubt, some are steeling themselves for the contact, thanks
largely to Brooks and his fellows, trying doggedly to bear the pain.
But it will be long before they become very strong at it. And of the
artists, the musicians will be the last to learn. Music is the funda-
mental art. In a renaissance that begins painfully à rebours, it must
of necessity be the last to live again.
PAUL ROSENFELD


THE THEATRE
M
RJOLSON has returned and those in foreign parts will envy
us and wonder whether he is as good as he ever was. He is.
In a show with all of the old tricks and some better new things to
the credit of Mr Watson Barratt, Mr Jolson sublimely lives. His
daemon attends. He is ageless and radiant and terrible. Having
heard all the technical and lay criticisms of Mr Jolson, I can only
say that I have found no other entertainer in America who can add
exaltation to enjoyment. He is all we have of the commedia dell
arte and something ought to be done to stop his silly curtain speech
about this being his last season.
For the first time in fifteen years I know what Gordon Craig
meant by printing in every issue of The Mask I ever saw the state-
ment that the theatre must be destroyed. Departing from The
Circle nothing seemed so obvious. Because this play, as produced
here, is really what our theatre is tending to; it is the "best" play
with the “best” cast. Ten days of meditation softens the decree. It
is necessary to destroy not the theatre but the audience. Mr Somer-
set Maugham, Heaven knows, was vulgar enough—in the sense that
beginning with fine comedy he steadily wrote it down and down,
so that the lowest intelligence could not fail to see every point.
(Trumping your partner's ace at bridge, swallowing false teeth,
and breathing down someone else's back, are a few of his tricks.
The obviousness and stupidity of his conversations, the total lack of
mental fineness, the broadening of every broad thing and the failure
to sharpen anything, are the methods.) But there is this to be said:
Mr Maugham, setting before us two saddened and disintegrated
outcasts of society made them bad enough and Mr John Drew and
Mrs Leslie Carter did nothing to soften his blows. Yet at every
moment when the tragedy of their lives was manifest, when their
very humours should have made strong men weep, the audience fast-
ened on the transparent hokum of the incidents and roared its de-
light. Miss Estelle Winwood, with an intelligence of our own time
struggling among the aborigines of the theatre—I refer not to ages
—
but to acting—was so right, so tidy, so instinctively a propriety,
that every movement and intonation remains alive in memory.


THE THEATRE
621
>
The Circle has been published for all to read by Doran. Lennox
Robinson's The WHITEHEADED Box has also appeared in print
(Putnam) and although we do not agree with Mr Ernest Boyd,
who wrote the introduction, that Mr Robinson's narrative com-
ments instead of stage directions are a success, we find the play good
reading. (Why, incidentally, should Geoghegan always appear as
“Geog." when there is a full line for the name?) Structurally the
play is remarkable, because as each act ends there seems no reason
for another act to follow. And as each act begins one sees the rea-
son in the rich humour and in the comedy scenes (after Moliere)
which fill the play. Miss Maire O'Neill played the clever aunt,
making her a grotesque and not a caricature; Mr Arthur Sinclair
is one of those rare actors who can be effectively silent on the stage,
who can not-listen; and Arthur Shields, we have it on the best au-
thority, was finely Irish. To me the best of the acting was that done
by the rest of the company, sitting about dejectedly while their
fates were being decided and establishing reality with a nod of the
head.
BLUEBEARD's Eighth Wife is, in one act, more than entertain-
ing and in the rest sufficient. Miss Ina Claire and Mr Barry Baxter
are both a bit better than in their last appearances here; Mr Ed-
mund Breese ought to be given his head and allowed to burlesque
his character entirely instead of only half-way.
The Silver Fox is bright but not brilliant; it is skilfully put to-
gether and Miss Violet Kemble Cooper looks lovely in yellow.
Lawrence Grossmith and William Faversham are the other prin-
cipals. In acting, therefore, and in playwriting, this piece scores
over The Circle. The box-office remains to be consulted.
>
The Theatre Guild's first production of the season was an Ameri-
can play, AMBUSH, by Arthur Richman. It is a thoroughly deriva-
tive play, and one wonders whether an American institution would
not be doing a greater service to American writers by producing orig-
inal European work than by wasting its unquestioned talents on the
morsels left half-warm on the plates of a score of dramatic Caesars.
G. S.


COMMENT
W
E have not seen the full list of seventy-nine names which
M Charles Cestre has chosen as representative of American
literature. Our interest in the affair is due to a notably bright letter
written by Mr Theodore Dreiser to The Daily News of St Paul,
Minnesota. From this we gather that M Сestre, in his function of
head of the department of American Literature and Civilization
(the name gives pause and has Mr Harold Stearns been consulted?)
at the Sorbonne, prepared such a list. The services of five Ameri-
cans increased the number of the culled and chosen to three hundred
and forty-two, and if Mr Dreiser isn't being romantic, the names of
Eleanor H. Porter and Harold Bell Wright are on it while “such
distinguished novelists” (says Mr Dreiser) as Henry B. Fuller,
Stephen French Whitman, Brand Whitlock, and Hervey White,
are omitted. To paraphrase: My dear Mr Dreiser!
Yet this is not the gravamen (no other word will do) of Mr Drei-
ser's letter. What he, personally, has to complain of, and that most
bitterly, comes out in the following:
.
O
"Where, for instance is the name] of Laura Jean Libby, the au-
thor of 872 separate and distinct American romances ? . And
Bertha M. Clay? . . . And the author of 'Thou Shalt Not' and
one hundred other thrilling American romances. ... And then
Mr George Barr McCutcheon of 'Graustark' fame. And that man
who wrote When Knighthood Was in Flower.' Am I to believe
‘'
that the French and Europe are not to hear of those as representa-
tive of us? For shame! Abas somebody. Rather than this should
be I will gladly resign my place on the list to make room. . . . The
French and every other nation should certainly know us as we are-
at our best, as it were."
This is really good and entertaining and as a journal which thinks
that bad work should always be called bad work and moderately good
work should never by any chance be called great, we ought to ap-
prove of it. But we fall out of sympathy on one point which is Mr
Dreiser's perverted jingoism. If Mr Dreiser really knew European


COMMENT
623
publications, instead of limiting himself to European literature, he
would not make the provincial mistake of thinking that America is
alone in producing Bertha Clays; nor would he think it necessary
to add them to a list of representative American writers. An Eng-
lishman aware of Nat Gould and Marie Corelli, of Ethel M. Dell
and Florence Barclay, would understand perfectly; it is so long since
we travelled in a wagon-lit that we have forgotten the names of the
French and German, the Swiss and Spanish counterparts. But they
exist—as surely as Americans exist who are too humiliated by their
own literature to realize that our badness differs in kind and not in
degree from the badness of others. Our vulgar literature is suitable
to our conditions and although we have cornered everything else we
share our human vulgarity with the world.
Still, as the typesetter made Mr Dreiser say, Abas somebody, or
as the magnificent Mr Dooley put it, Abase! Shall it be The Liber-
ator or The Saturday Evening Post? A mellow patriotism pervades
the offices of the former journal, a gentle hundred percentness, and
in a contributed article The Dial is given it over the knuckles for
printing the works of a number of French, English, and German
writers. The point has been made before but not by the organs
of
internationalism. We can only reassert our intention to publish the
best work we can find regardless of its country of origin; we are not
assessing custom duties but publishing a journal of art and letters.
As for The Saturday Evening Post, let us quote one of its most
cherished contributors:
"That fear, along with the behavior which became from that
night thenceforward part and parcel of him, made Dudley Stack-
pole as one set over and put apart from his fellows. Neither by day-
time nor by nighttime was he thereafter to know darkness. Never
again was he to see the twilight fall or face the blackness which
comes before the dawning or take his rest in the cloaking, kindly
void and nothingness of the midnight. Before the dusk of evening
came, in midafternoon sometimes, of stormy and briefened winter
days, or in the full radiance of the sun's sinking in the summertime,
he was within doors lighting the lights which would keep the dark-
ness beyond his portals and hold at bay a gathering gloom into
which from window or door he would not look and dared not look.”


624
COMMENT
a
These cadences we have heard before; they are the marks of "fine
writing,” no doubt, but the proof readers of the Post must have
wondered what the devil they were doing in that galley. We have
seen in the first paragraph of a cabled news story in the New York
Times a simile as complicated as that of the pagoda in The Golden
Bowl, and wondered. Is it possible that the common literature of
our day is forsaking the direct simplicity which made it if nothing
else intelligible and, with an instinct for these things, is beginning
to give us exactly the wrong thing in style and an initiation to bad
poems in prose? Or is this what the press considers its mission as
popularizer of the arts?
A year ago when we were moved to words by the imminence of
Children's Book Week we suggested that children might be allowed
to read anything their elders found interesting. In La Vie en Fleur
The Dial began last month a continuation of a story of childhood
which is certain to be immortal. In an earlier volume the author
has discussed the question of books for children and has decided
from his own experience that books written expressly for children
are not enough. “They perceive, as soon as they have read a page or
two, that the author has endeavoured to enter into their world in-
stead of transporting them into his own; and they realize in conse-
quence that they cannot, under his guidance, expect to find a means
of gratifying that passion for the novel and the unknown which ani-
mates mankind at every age.” Anatole France gave children selec-
tions from The Odyssey and himself began reading Don Quixote
as soon as he could read at all. Our own book was an illustrated
and no doubt expurgated Rabelais, the rediscovery of which, many
years later, as a classic was a shock of pure joy. Lemuel Gulliver
was, to our mind, a more entertaining companion than Little Lord
Fauntleroy. And it is probable enough that no book written to
edify, instruct, or annoy the young has ever done anything but
harm. Those which are honestly written because the authors love
to write them are good; and that there are quite a number of them
each year we are reasonably certain.
Twelve poems by Wallace Stevens in Poetry for October afford
one the best single chance one has had of estimating this farouche
author.






Courtesy of the Milch Galleries
LEDA.
BY GLEB DERUJINSKY



THE INDIAL
V
V
VI
W
IV
IX
OXXOITO
DECEMBER 1921
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
BY J. MIDDLETON MURRY
T
HERE are two Flauberts. One was born on the 12th of this
month a hundred years ago in the surgeon's house at Rouen
hospital; the other in enthusiastic minds in the last quarter of the
nineteenth century. One was a broad, big-boned, lovable, rather
simple-minded man, with the look and the laugh of a farmer, who
spent his life in agonies over the intensive culture of half-a-dozen
strangely assorted volumes; the other was an incorporeal giant, a
symbol, a war-cry, a banner under which a youthful army marched
and marches still to the rout of the bourgeois and the revolution of
literature.
To distinguish these beings from each other is not so difficult as
to understand how they came to be so completely interfused that the
separation of the legend and the man may appear an act of wanton
cruelty. So much has been derived from the legendary Flaubert, so
many advancing waves have borne his name on the crest of their at-
tack, that he has acquired the dignity of an institution. We have
Remy de Gourmont declaring that Flaubert was the very archetype
of the creative writer, for two reasons; because he devoted his life
and his personality to his work, suffering nothing to be wasted in the
exigences and delights of mere living, and because he was pre-emi-
nently gifted with visual imagination.
It is not easy to see why the value of a writer's work should de-
pend upon the completeness of his incineration on the altar of Art.
A good writer has to make sacrifices, of course, but he need not burn
himself to ashes. Better writers than Flaubert have not felt the
necessity. To one who is not a born Flaubertian the astonishing


626
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
tortures he inflicted upon himself would naturally suggest, not that
his genius was pre-eminent, but that his creative impulse was not
very strong. While the truth about his visual imagination is that it
was not of the finest quality. Flaubert adored images; he believed,
truly enough, that the highest poetic faculty is mastery of meta-
phor; he fancied that when he was wholly free to write what pleased
him—though when was he not?—he would triumphantly indulge
his passion. Yet, in fact, Flaubert's use of imagery is generally
strained or commonplace, and often both. Take the similes with
.
which L’Education Sentimentale begins and ends: neither is success-
ful. Here is the first:
“Enfin le navire partit; et les deux berges, peuplées de magasins.
de chantiers et d'usines, filèrent comme deux larges rubans qu'on
déroule.”
The image is forced, and it gives the wrong tempo to the opening
movement. A torpedo-boat destroyer could not steam fast enough
to justify it wholly, and this was a river-steamer on the Seine. The
second simile is used by Madame Arnoux when she revisits Frédéric
Moreau.
"Elle s'étonnait de sa mémoire. Cependant, elle lui dit:
-Quelquefois, vos paroles me reviennent comme un écho loin-
tain, comme le son d'un cloche apporté par le vent: et il me semble
que vous êtes là, quand je lis les passages d'amour dans les livres."
This is not a visual image; but its discrepancy is not less remark-
able for that. Had the words been given to the second-rate roman-
ticism of Emma Bovary they would have been in place. But Ma-
dame Arnoux was designed for Emma's opposite. For the sake of a
worn-out "poetical” metaphor Flaubert was willing to make his
heroine speak out of character. It would be hard to find an abso-
lutely convincing image in the whole of his work. Some of them are
really comic. “Frédéric, ayant monté l'escalier comme une flèche"
“Toutes ces images qu'elle se créait lui faisait comme au-
tant de fils qu'elle aurait perdus, l'excès de la douleur multipliant sa
maternité, .
The fact is that Flaubert did not possess the finest kind of lit-
.


J. MIDDLETON MURRY
627
erary discrimination. He had an unusual visual faculty which he
turned to good account, but the use he made of it was primitive.
Most of his descriptions are visual pageantry, sometimes impressive,
sometimes beautiful, sometimes as tedious as the tail-end of a Lord
Mayor's show. Of the faculty which employs visual imagery to
differentiate the subtler emotions of the soul, Flaubert had little or
nothing at all. The true faculty of metaphor was denied him.
Lacking this, a writer cannot be reckoned among the great mas-
ters of style. But Flaubert lacked something more fundamental
still. If we consider his works in the order they were written we are
chiefly struck by the strange absence of inward growth which they
reveal. The surface texture of L'Education Sentimentale is more
closely woven than that of Madame Bovary, but the scope of the
story itself is, if anything, less significant. Flaubert's vision of
,
life had not deepened in the long interval which separates the two
works. He saw a larger extent of life, perhaps, but he saw no fur-
ther into it; he had acquired more material, but no greater power of
handling it; he manipulated more characters, but he could not make
them more alive. Though the epicure of technical effects may
find
more to interest him in the later book, it is impossible not to endorse
the general verdict that Madame Bovary is Flaubert's masterpiece.
Undoubtedly the choice lies between those books, for La Tentation
de St Antoine and Salammbô are set-pieces which will not kindle,
and Bouvard et Pécuchet (which de Gourmont declared the equal
of Don Quixote!) cannot be redeemed from dulness by the mildly
amusing bubbles which float to the surface of its viscous narrative.
We may suspect that a writer who does not really develop, the vi-
tality and significance of whose latest work is less than that of his
first, has not the root of the matter in him. And Flaubert had not.
It may not be given to mortal men to understand life more deeply at
the end than at the beginning of their share of it; but they can more
keenly feel its complexity and its wonder; they can attain to an emi-
nence from which they contemplate it calmly and undismayed. The
great writers do this, and convey the issue of their contemplation to
us through the created world which they devise. But of this unmor-
tified detachment Flaubert was incapable. He lived and died in-
dignant at the stupidity of the human race. As he was at thirty, so
he was at sixty; in stature of soul he was a child.
“Récriminer,” Baudelaire asks in L'Art Romantique, “faire de
а


628
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
l'opposition, et même réclamer la justice, n'est-ce pas s'emphilistiner
quelque peu?”? In those three occupations Flaubert spent all his
time when he emerged from his gueuloir, and it is not too much to
say that he was a good deal of a Philistine. He had a bourgeois
horror of the bourgeois, and it was this repulsion rather than a nat-
ural attraction which kept him chained to his desk at Croisset. Lit-
erature was for him an ascetic revenge upon life, not a culmination
of it: he tore himself up by the roots and planted himself in the most
highly artificial atmosphere which a considerable writer has ever
breathed. Under this unhealthy stimulation he evolved for himself
the doctrine of the sovereign autonomy of art.
He could do no less. Having chosen the ivory tower, he had to
justify its existence. Hating life, he had to be convinced that lit-
erature was also indifferent to it. Accordingly he tried to persuade
himself that the subject-matter of a work of literature was of no ac-
count. A structure of beauty could be raised upon no matter what
foundation, and beauty was absolute and incommensurable.
Two things are remarkable about this aesthetic theory of Flau-
bert's: the theory itself, and his manner of holding it. Though it
seemed to resemble the doctrine held by other French romantics of
his generation, it was profoundly different. Baudelaire, for in-
stance, who claimed for the poet the right to deal with subjects gen-
erally held to be immoral, made his claim on behalf of what he con-
sidered to be the higher morality of art. He believed that the im-
portance of a subject was independent of the moral estimation in
which it was held, but he insisted that the subject should be impor-
tant. Flaubert, on the other hand, tried to believe that the signifi-
cance of a subject was an unessential quality. The writer actually
endowed it with importance by the beauty of the language in which
he treated it. Pressed to its logical conclusion, the theory is almost
meaningless, for the writer must choose a subject and must have
motives for his choice. So that it is not surprising that Flaubert
never wholly satisfied himself. He wavered. At one moment he
asserted that “tout découle de la conception,” at another that style
was "the soul beneath the words,” at yet another that everything in
literature depended on character. These beliefs do not necessarily
conflict with one another, but not one of them can really be recon-
ciled with the notion that the subject-matter is indifferent. For some
reason Flaubert was incapable of thinking the question out to a con-
a
9)


J. MIDDLETON MURRY
629
clusion. His formulated theory of writing went no further than the
injunction—valuable enough—to think clearly, express precisely,
and read aloud to test the rhythm.
All this he did, and did so well, that our feeling when we contem-
plate the years he spent upon works so inwardly hollow as Salammbo,
La Tentation, and Bouvard et Pécuchet, is one of utter dismay.
It seems that it was only by accident that he stumbled on a subject
of any significance at all; and indeed it was. It was not the fault of
his theory; that had little influence on his practice, and was rather
(as most literary theories are) a justification of an accomplished
fact. His choice of subjects was governed by his temperament and
his temperament was governed by his two predominant emotions,
indignation and aversion. Indignation drove him to Yonville and
Nogent and Paris; aversion gave him wings to fly to Carthage and
the Thebaid. His realism was of disgust, his romanticism of predi-
lection; the realism was in part triumphantly successful, the failure
of the romanticism complete. Never was a literary achievement
more deeply paradoxical. Flaubert's natural expression was satire,
but as we know from Bouvard et Pécuchet and as he himself also
recognized, his hand was as heavy in satire as his thought was cum-
bersome.
Indignation and aversion, unless they find their proper satisfac-
tion in satire, are treacherous emotions for a writer to build on; too
frequently they turn to petulance and superficiality. Flaubert was
saved from this by the qualities of his character. He had an im-
mense capacity for work, a passionate love of truth, and most im-
portant of all, he worshipped the great writers before him; as he
said, "he had the bump of veneration strongly developed.” Though
he recognized, with a clearness that should be disconcerting to his
own idolaters, that he was of another and a lower order than his
demi-gods, he saw that they had one quality which he too might aim
to possess. They were objectives; they did not intrude their per-
sonalities into their work; they were content to represent and to re-
cord. Long before he began Madame Bovary his determination to
emulate them in this was fixed; when he was only twenty-three he
declared that “dans la première période de la vie d'artiste il est
mieux de jeter du dehors tout ce qu'on a de vraiment intime, d'origi-
nal, d'individuel.” It sounds rather forbiddingly professional for
twenty-three, and in fact Flaubert had a fling on St Anthony be-


630
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
а
fore sitting down to Madame Bovary, his first real exercise in his
self-imposed discipline. It was much more than an exercise, of
course, for Flaubert had a passion of indignation that needed vent;
but without his resolve to be impersonal it would have wasted itself
in vain.
In sacrificing his personality Flaubert thought he sacrificed much.
He believed that he was "born lyrical.” Born romantic would have
been nearer the truth, for we have to qualify lyrical by his repeated
and truthful confession that his talent was not "primesautier.” His
natural bent was towards romantic dream and romantic tirade, and
his gift of lyrical expression very small. But the strength of a de-
sire cannot be measured by the capacity of satisfying it, and there is
no cause to doubt Flaubert's sincerity when he rebelled, as he re-
belled continually, against the "ugliness” of his work on Madame
Bovary. Ah, what he would do when he had a subject of his own!
He was tired, tired to death of the bourgeois. It was time to drop
them for ever. But the subject of his own never came. At first he
imagined that La Tentation and Salammbô were completely con-
genial, but the illusion was brief, and though he never went so far
as to declare that these subjects were ugly, his complaints and his
torments were the same. It was not surprising that in his last two
books he should return to the detested bourgeois. In one sense at
least all subjects were the same to him; he suffered equally from
them all.
Two demons stood always between Flaubert and his dreams, the
demon of style and the demon of truthfulness. Of the two it was
the demon of truthfulness that tormented him the more. It drove
him to fantastic efforts of documentation; his researches for Salamm-
bô were prodigious, and at the very commencement of Bouvard et
Pécuchet he confessed that he had read 1500 volumes for it. Yet
he seems never to have asked himself jesting Pilate's question. What
was this truth for which he laboured? Had he asked, he would
have been forced to reply: the truth of history, not of art. But he
was never able to disentangle them. His letters sometimes make
nightmare reading. He must find an actual piece of France for
Bouvard and Pécuchet to farm in. It was not enough to invent the
episode of their geological expedition to the coast; young de Mau-
passant must provide him with a stretch of real cliff where the com-
plicated event was possible: and he wrote again and again till he got
a


J. MIDDLETON MURRY
631
it. A passion for truth of this kind is a purely morbid condition in
a writer; he must be drunk with ink” to feel it. Such truth has no
value in itself, and the search for it is bound to prejudice the truth
which is proper to literature. The verisimilitude of art does not de-
pend on documents--neither indeed does the verisimilitude of his-
tory itself—but upon the creative imagination and the sensibility
-
from which the imagination is replenished. In both these Flaubert
was deficient; the range of his sensibility was small, and his creative
imagination feeble. He tried to eke them out with a reference li-
brary, with the result that in all his books save Madame Bovary and
Un Coeur Simple his tenuous characters dissolve away into their
own background.
With the demon of style, as he understood style, his struggle was
more successful. But in order to appraise his victory we must re-
member how he understood it. So many passages in his letters re-
veal his conception that the choice is embarrassing: one may suffice.
“Ce qui distingue les grands génies c'est la généralisation et la
création; ils résument en un type des personalités éparses et apportent
à la conscience du genre humain des personnages nouveaux; est-ce
qu'on ne croit pas à l'existence de Don Quichotte comme à celle de
César? Shakespeare est quelque chose de formidable sous ce rap-
port: ce n'était pas un homme, mais un continent; il y avait des
grands hommes en lui, des foules entières, des paysages; ils n'ont pas
besoin de faire du style, ceux-là, ils sont forts en dépit de toutes les
fautes et à cause d'elles; mais nous, les petits, nous ne valons que par
l'execution achevée. Hugo en ce siècle enfoncera tout le monde
quoiqu'il soit plein de mauvaises choses, mais quel souffle! Je ha-
sarde ici une proposition que je n'oserais dire nulle part: c'est que
les très grands hommes écrivent souvent fort mal et tant mieux pour
eux."
A style of which the greatest writers have no need, to the want of
which they owe their greatness, is a dubious light to follow. It was
less dangerous for Flaubert who saw his own limitations clearly than
for those who have blindly followed him. But probably Flaubert
also paid a price for his obsession; probably it distracted his atten-
tion from the content of his work and induced him to spend ener-
gies that might have gone to the expansion of his sensibility upon


632
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
a
the painful polishing of a hollow surface; the substance which could
have made it solid his starved sensibility could not provide. One
dare not dogmatize. Who knows for certain that a writer by taking
thought can add a cubit to the stature of his soul? Possibly Flau-
bert, being the man he was, made a right choice; possibly he perse-
vered where he could make some progress and abandoned the road
along which advance was barred. But the probability and the evi-
dence point the other way. The book whose style he laboured least
-a Flaubertian minimum is not as other men's—is the one by
which he is chiefly remembered. The youthful Madame Bovary has
a validity which he was to achieve only once again, in Un Coeur
Simple. Madame Bovary alone answers to his own definition of a
great work of literature; it gathers scattered personalities into a
type and brings new personalities to the consciousness of the human
race. Emma Bovary and Monsieur Homais are types of this kind;
they are the only ones in Flaubert's work.
Flaubert began his career with what is, take it all in all, a master-
piece; he was to write no other. L'Education Sentimentale is not
one. It may be life, but it is not living; it is a work of history rather
than literature. Flaubert had no certain hold of his characters, and
his handling of his theme at the crucial moment falls to the level of
melodrama. The most famous passage in the book is:
“Mais, sur les marches de Tortoni, un homme-Dussardier-re-
marquable de loin à sa haute taille, restait sans plus bouger qu'une
cariatide.
Un des agents qui marchait en tête, le tricorne sur les yeux, le me-
naça de son épée.
L'autre alors, s'avançant d'un pas, se mit à crier:
-Vive la République!
Il tomba sur le dos, les bras en croix.
Un hurlement d'horreur s'éleva de la foule. L'agent fit un cer-
cle autour de lui avec son regard; et Frédéric, béant, reconnut
Sénécal.
Il voyagea.
Il connut la melancolie des paquebots, les froids réveils sous la
tente, l'étourdissement des paysages et des ruines, l'amertume des
sympathies interrompues.
Il revint.”


J. MIDDLETON MURRY
633
"Et Frédéric, béant, reconnut Sénécal,” has been for years the
object of an esoteric admiration as a masterpiece of style. In a dif-
ferent book it might, indeed, have been overwhelming; in the grey
monotone of L'Education Sentimentale it is a splash of discordant
red. The dramatic artifice tears through the even texture of the
narrative: it belongs to another world of seeing and feeling, and the
measure of its discordance is our astonishment at Sénécal's surpris-
ing change. If a respectable solicitor were to slip behind a screen
and reappear in a cardboard nose and a pair of huge moustaches, it
could not be more disturbing than this coup de théâtre in the most
laboriously realistic story ever written.
Only if style could be separated from content, the surface from
the perceptions which make it solid, could Flaubert's style be
praised without reserve. The distinction, as he knew, cannot be
,
made. And Flaubert's style is sometimes perfect, sometimes bad,
more often indifferent than either. It is at its highest level in Un
Coeur Simple. There it follows the contour of his thought with a
perfect economy.
"Elle se levait dès l'aube, pour ne pas manquer la messe, et tra-
vaillait jusqu'au soir sans interruption; puis, le dîner étant fini, la
vaisselle en ordre et la porte bien close, elle enfouissait la bûche sous
les cendres et s'endormait devant l'âtre, son rosaire à la main. Per-
sonne, dans les marchandages, ne montrait plus d'entêtement. Quant
à la propreté, le poli de ses casseroles faisait le désespoir des autres
servantes. Économe, elle mangeait avec lenteur, et recueillait du
doigt sur la table les miettes de son pain,-un pain de douze livres,
cuit exprès pour elle, et qui durait vingt jours.
En toute saison elle portait un mouchoir d'indienne fixé dans le
dos par un épingle, un bonnet lui cachant ses cheveux, des bas gris,
un jupon rouge, et par-dessus sa camisole un tablier à bavette,
comme les infirmières d'hôpital.
Son visage était maigre et sa voix aigue. A vingt-cinq ans, on lui
en donnait quarante. Dès la cinquantaine, elle ne marqua plus
aucun âge, et, toujours silencieuse, la taille droite et les gestes
mesurés, semblait une femme de bois, fonctionnant d'une manière
automatique.
Elle avait eu, comme une autre, son histoire d'amour."


634
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
How exquisite—to descend to particulars—is the order of the
words in "recueillait du doigt ...les miettes de son pain”; it gives the
gesture its significance and yields to the rhythm of the paragraph.
And the final sentence, which opens the second chapter, is character.
istic of Flaubert at his best. He was a master of the short sentence
a
even more than the period. The effects he wrung from it are some-
times astonishing. Here the contrast between the movement which
ends "une femme de bois fonctionnant d'une manière automatique"
and the short sentence which follows, is carefully modulated by the
insertion of “comme une autre” where we should not expect it. It
not only gives us the very substance of Félicité, but saturates the nar-
rative with a sense of time.
This power of awakening in us a sense of the process of time was
Flaubert's most individual achievement as a writer. We might al-
most say that wherever we are struck with the beauty of a page or a
passage in his work we shall find the secret in this presentation of
time. Un Coeur Simple unrolls a life from beginning to end in nine-
ty short pages, and we feel every year of it drop slowly into the past.
In the passage from L’Education Sentimentale the significance of
“Il voyagea” is unmistakable, and there again Flaubert uses the
division of a chapter to achieve his effect. His devices are innumer-
able. In the last sentence of Hérodias it is the choice and placing of
an adverb. "Comme elle était très lourde, ils la portait alternative-
ment.” There it is too deliberate. But the first twenty pages of
Madame Bovary are a splendid example of Flaubert's resource. The
story is swift and unhesitating up to the eighteenth page. The
events of Charles Bovary's school-days and first marriage flow by in
a steady stream; it is one life among many. Suddenly the tempo is
changed in a paragraph.
“Elle le reconduisait toujours jusqu'à la première marche du per-
ron. Lorsqu'on n'avait pas encore amené son cheval, elle restait là.
On s'était dit adieu, on ne se parlait plus; le grand air l'entourait,
levant pêle-mêle les petits cheveux follettes de sa nuque, ou secouant
sur sa hanche les cordons de son tablier qui se tortillaient comme des
banderolles. Une fois, par un temps de dégel, l'écorce des arbres
suintait dans le cour, la neige sur les couvertures des bâtiments se
fondait. Elle était sur le seuil; elle alla chercher son ombrelle, elle
l'ouvrit. L'ombrelle, de soie gorge-de-pigeon, que traversait le so-


J. MIDDLETON MURRY
635
leil, eclairait de reflets mobiles la peau blanche de sa figure. Elle
souriait là-dessous à la chaleur tiède; et on entendait les gouttes
d'eau, une à une, tomber sur la moire tendue."
It is like a sudden oasis of calm in which everything can be seen,
everything heard. The languorous beauty of the last sentence
echoes on like the sound of the drops it registers. We feel that that
day was the first in his life for Charles Bovary.
If one were to press home the analysis of these characteristic ef-
fects of Flaubert, they would be found to depend generally on two
elements, an unusual use of the verb tenses which an English reader
can more easily feel than describe, and the manipulation of the
rhythm. A period like this from Madame Bovary has the compli-
cated rhythm of a fine piece of blank verse. Flaubert learnt some-
thing of this from Chateaubriand, and another part from Voltaire
and Montesquieu, from whom he quoted with delight: "Les vices
d'Alexandre étaient extrêmes comme ses vertus; il était terrible dans
sa colère; elle le rendait cruel.” A thousand sentences after that
pattern can be found in his work. The quality that fascinated him
in it was not so much the rhythm as the close texture on which the
larger effects of rhythm depend. Each one of those pronouns binds
the parts of the sentence into one whole. Flaubert, as always,
turned his admirations to account. He worked upon the hints they
gave him indefatigably, and he fashioned for himself an instrument
upon which no tones were impossible.
Because of this Flaubert is indeed a master; but he is a minor
master. In the years he spent on perfecting the instrument he for-
got, if he ever knew, what tunes are worth playing; and too often in
his work we hear him sounding idly for their own intrinsic beauty
notes which have no part in any larger plan. He was never passion-
ately possessed by a comprehensive theme, and he never clearly saw
that the rendering of such a theme was the final purpose of all the
explorations of language on which he lavished himself. His sacri-
fice was as pathetic as it was noble. When we read such a passage
as this—and there are many of them—we feel as sad as he:
—
“Néanmoins, il y a une chose triste, c'est de voir combien les
grands hommes arrivent aisément à l'effet en dehors de l'art même:
quoi de plus mal bâti que bien des choses de Rabelais, Cervantes,


636
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Molière et Hugo? Mais quels coups de poing subits? Quel puis-
sance dans un seul mot! Nous, il faut entasser l’un sur l'autre un
tas de petits cailloux pour faire nos pyramides qui ne vont pas à la
centième partie des leurs, lesquels sont d'un seul bloc."
a
What is this Art which the masters triumph by ignoring? If they
have no Art what is the value of Art at all? And why call it Art?
Flaubert never answered the question: the greatest writers remained
prodigies for him; there was no room for them in his philosophy.
But for Flaubert, though they existed on heights unapproachable,
they did exist, and he never forgot them. What are we to say of a
generation that has seen in Flaubert's “Art” the highest achieve-
ment of literature, and in Flaubert himself the type of the great
writer? Were it not the fact, the collective hallucination would
seem like a chapter in a fairy tale. We can see the cause of the
aberration. Flaubert's Art is an art which minor writers can under-
stand; in pretending to surrender themselves to it—for a real sur-
render is much too painful—they have the satisfaction of manipu-
lating a mystery. But the mystification has lasted too long. The
invention of Art has done no good to art, and it has interposed a veil
between Flaubert's work and the general judgement. To be critical
of Flaubert is to prejudice a vested interest, so large an edifice has
been built upon the insecure foundation.
Flaubert came as near to genius as a man can come by the taking
of pains. Just as his example will be a perpetual encouragement to
all honest artificers of literature, it will be a will-o'-the-wisp to those
who presume to measure the giants by it. Flaubert's work can never
cease to smell of the lamp, but by the writing of one fine book and
one perfect story and his devoted researches into the capacity of lan-
guage, he is one of the greatest minor heroes of letters; and his cor-
respondence shows him to us as one of the most lovable of all writ-
ers; we smile at him tearing his hair in the silence of his study, but
the smile is the smile of sympathy and admiration. Those who
claim more for him than this would lose all if it were possible, for
they can only exalt him by deposing greater men than he. Flaubert
stands in no need of such extravagant admiration, and we know him
well enough to be certain that he would have resented a worship
paid to himself at the cost of divinities he adored.


TWO POEMS
BY MARIANNE MOORE
NEW YORK
the savage's romance,
accreted where we need the space for commerce-
the centre of the wholesale fur trade,
starred with tepees of ermine and peopled with foxes,
the long guard-hairs waving two inches beyond the body of the pelt;
the ground dotted with deer-skins—white with white spots
"as satin needle-work in a single colour may carry a varied pattern,”
and blankets of eagles' down-
submarine forest upon submarine forest of tropical seaweed.
It is a far cry from the "queen full of jewels"
and the beau with the muff,
from the gilt coach shaped like a perfume bottle,
to the conjunction of the Monongahela and the Allegheny
and the scholastic philosophy of the wilderness,
to combat which one must stand outside and laugh
since to go in is to be lost.
.
It is not the dime-novel exterior,
Niagara Falls, the calico horses, and the war canoe;
it is not that "if the fur is not finer than such as one sees others wear,
one would rather be without it-
that estimated in raw meat and berries, we could feed the universe;
it is not the atmosphere of ingenuity,
the otter, the beaver, the puma skins
without shooting-irons or dogs;
it is not the plunder,
it is the “accessibility to experience.”


638
TWO POEMS
THE LABOURS OF HERCULES
a
a
To popularize the mule, its neat exterior
expressing the principle of accommodation reduced to a minimum:
to persuade one of austere taste, proud in the possession of home,
and a musician-
that the piano is a free field for etching and that his "charming tad-
pole notes"
belong to the past when one had time to play them:
to persuade those self-wrought Midases of brains
whose fourteen-carat ignorance aspires to rise in value
"till the sky is the limit,”
that excessive conduct augurs disappointment,
that one must not borrow a long white beard and tie it on
and threaten with the scythe of time, the casually curious:
to teach the bard with too elastic a selectiveness
that one detects creative power by its capacity to eliminate detach-
ment;
that while it may have more elasticity than logic,
it knows where it is going;
it flies along in a straight line like electricity
and devastates those areas that boast of their remoteness:
to prove to the high priests of caste
that snobbishness is a stupidity,
the best side out, of age-old toadyism-
kissing the feet of the man above,
kicking the face of the man below:
to teach the patron-saint-to-atheists, the Coliseum-
meet-me-alone-by-moonlight maudlin troubadour
that kickups for catstrings are not life
nor yet appropriate to death—that we are sick of the earth,
sick of the pig-stye, wild geese and wild men:
to convince snake-charming controversialists
that it is one thing to change one's mind,
another to eradicate it—that one keeps on knowing
“that the negro is not brutal,
that the Jew is not greedy,
that the Oriental is not immoral,
that the German is not a Hun.”


NAILED
BY ROWLAND KENNEY
IT
a
T was on a raw November night, in the year of the great railway
strike, that Nellie Leyton for the first time in her life left her
home to look after itself and went to meet her husband. It was
half
past
eleven and he should have been home an hour ago, but,
as was not unusual, something had detained him; he was probably
putting in a couple of hours overtime. She pushed on down Walk-
ers Way, to find the big gates of the goods yard closed.
The gateway, just wide enough for a couple of horse drays to
pass through abreast, was flanked by two massive pillars of built
stone, and on the top of one of them a dirty, broken gas-lamp
flickered intermittently. The whole street was deserted and, except
for this dull yellow patch of light round the gate, in darkness. Be-
yond the boundary wall of the yard, in the far background, she
could see the dim and softened outlines of a huge warehouse and,
nearer, the sheeted tops of a number of loaded wagons.
The silence impressed her with an unaccustomed sense of lone-
liness, and even the noise of moving men and the occasional clang
of a buffered wagon sounded far away, as if they were mere echoes
a
,
of day toil. As she had nothing to do but wait, she walked slowly
up and down before the closed gates. To an onlooker the scene
would have been inexpressibly dreary but for that strange romantic
atmosphere which clings to places where men work whilst the rest
of the world is sleeping, the feeling of disintegration, of melancholy
change, peculiar to November nights, and the presence of this
lonely, waiting woman.
Mrs Leyton was dressed in a black skirt, partly covered by a
clean white apron, patched and stitched, and a dark-coloured
blouse. A faded shawl drawn tightly over her ears emphasized the
pinched look on her face. Her eyes were bright and irritable,
though tired-looking. Her gait was clumsy, for the two black
patches, pushing alternately from beneath her skirt, were a pair of
men's heavy boots, down at heel and with hob-nailed toes. She
waited patiently, giving an occasional shiver and clutching at her
face with a thin, bony hand.
.


640
NAILED
Suddenly she stopped, arrested by the noise of shuffling feet ap-
proaching the gate from inside the yard. She recognized her hus-
band's footsteps, and her fingers twitched at the fringe of her shawl
as a small door in the big gate opened and the face of a man ap-
peared. Crouching a little, Tommy Leyton stepped through the
low, narrow doorway, gently closed the door behind him, and then
stared helplessly into the woman's face.
He was a shrunken little man of middle age, with stooping
shoulders. From below his watery eyes a large red nose poked its
way through an indeterminate brush of sandy moustache. A big
muffler, swathed round his neck, hid the worst of the stubble on
his lower jaw. He wore a pair of heavy boots, the counterpart of
his wife's; the sole of one of them was loose and flapped as he
walked. His clothes were caked with dirt, grease, and particles of
flour, cement, and the multitudinous commodities which he con-
stantly handled; but they were almost hidden by a big railway
overcoat. He looked a broken-spirited wretch. For a moment he
stared silently at his wife, then he spoke.
“Has t'Doctor been to-day?"
She made an unsuccessful attempt to stifle a sob. “Aye. He's
been. Has t’got any money?"
He shuffled his feet and mumbled into his muffler. "No.
Th’Inspector wouldn't gi'me a sub! .” He never attempted
to look into her eyes, but stared at his feet. "What does t'Doctor
а
.
.
say?"
The harsh lines of Mrs Leyton's face gradually softened and
sorrow drowned irritability in a wave of tears. “He thinks it's con-
sumption. Her only chance is fresh air and a proper diet. We
mun send her into t'country.”
"Into t’country?" He looked up, but his gaze failed to meet
her eyes. “How'll we manage it?"
“Manage it!” She almost bit on the words. “Manage it!” The
skin of her face tightened and her wet cheeks glistened as her weep-
ing ceased. His helpless look and limping brain angered her. "How
can we manage it? I'd like to know. There's us and t'three lads
and Elsie and all we have to live on is sixteen and tenpence a week;
and then-send Elsie into t’country when t'company won't sub thi
half a crown to buy her Doctor's food."
“Mebbe it'll be better soon,” he mumbled, with a ghastly effort
to look cheerful.


ROWLAND KENNEY
641
.
.
"Better? How better?"
"Well, now t'strike is o'er.”
"But
How better? T'strike is o'er, but it hasn't made
much difference as I can see.
What dost mean?"
“Well .” He evidently did not quite know what he
meant. “Some o' t'chaps say we won.”
“Aye, and t'papers say you 'won’; but what good has it done
.
.
you?”
.
a
“They say we've got,” he fumbled stupidly for the word, “Rec-
ognition. And there's some gentlemen sitting in London to
consider our grievances.'
"Sitting in London! To consider your grievances!” She
snapped with assumed amazement. "I guess when they've consid-
ered for a month or two they'll discover that working sixty hours a
week for sixteen and tenpence is a 'grievance. Seems to me they
don't need to consider'! It's plain to anybody but a born idiot-or
a railway director."
“But-see,” Leyton struggled to convince her, "when they've
decided about it things'll be better. They'll most likely give us a
shilling a week of a rise. Wilty said so.”
She flared up at this. Gestures were foreign to her, as to all
northerners, but now her arm flung out. “Shilling a week! Tup-
pence apiece for t’six of us! Things'll be all straightened out wi'
a shilling a week—when we're all half clemmed already, and
there's bread and butter, and coals and candles, and we owe two
months' rent, and t’landlord threatens t’turn us out next week, and
t'Doctor's bill is now seven pound, and Elsie
Good God!"
"Still • It mun help a bit.”
“Oh, aye. It'll help a bit,” she said sarcastically, “when our
Elsie's dead and buried.”
“But what can I do?” he cried appealingly. "What is there I
.
can do?"
“There's nothing to do,” she conceded wearily, "only get some
money, and God only knows how to do that. What we want is
money-pounds, not a shilling a week.
Come thi ways
home and have a bit of supper.'
Worn out, wrapped in silent and aching thought, they turned
slowly to the left, up Walkers Way; but before they had taken a
dozen steps they stopped, their attention drawn to the sound of firm
footsteps hurriedly crossing the yard to the gate. With a quick


642
NAILED
a
jerk and a violent bang the door fung to behind a young man
who shot into the street. In one hand he carried a shunting pole
and a hand lamp, the light of which he flashed up the street, rest-
ing it on Leyton. “There, Leyton!” he exclaimed. “You idiot!
.. Oh! Sorry!” he added, for Mrs Leyton had turned more
quickly than her husband. He waved his hand apologetically and
moved a few steps away, as if to suggest that he could wait.
Larry Yorke was of a type exactly opposite to Leyton. Over
his low brow hung a big grey wide-awake hat. He wore a soldier's
khaki tunic, much worn and frayed at the cuffs, buttoned up to
his throat, and a pair of tarpaulin leggings stretched from his heavy
bluchers to his hips. His clean-shaven face was of a healthy
colour; he had thick black hair and a firm but somewhat cynical
mouth, filled with good, sound teeth. Of low stature, he was solidly
built.
“It's all right, Mr Larry,” Mrs Leyton replied. “I'm just go-
ing. Tommy can come later if you want him.”
"Sorry to worry you, Mrs Leyton, but I've a message for Tommy.
How's the kiddie?”
Instead of replying Mrs
Leyton lowered her head into her shawl
and walked away. The two men watched her in silence until she
faded into the distance, then Larry turned a half-absent, half-con-
temptuous look on Leyton, laid a heavy hand on his shoulder and
shook him vigorously. “Leyton,” he growled, "if you'd a pennorth
of gumption you'd have been in bed now, and would have refused
to hear me when I knocked. As it is, you've got to be back on duty
in two hours to help the break-down gang. The London goods
jumped the metals at Lamton and the whole shebang-a raft of
twenty-four wagons and five cattle trucks-piled in a mess.
—a " This
was news, and for once Leyton showed a look of positive interest.
“Driver Jenkins got both legs broken and his fireman, Jones, was
cut in lumps. Jenkins jumped, but Jones funked and couldn't
jump.” Larry was silent for a moment and then continued medi-
tatively: "It's rotten to funk when you are up against things.
I helped gather Jones up in a sheet; my damned coat stinks yet
of his blood-smell it!" In avoiding the jerked coat Leyton nearly
fell on his back. Larry smiled grimly and resumed: “Wilson's act-
ing Chief Inspector to-night and somebody's in for a Hell of a
time.” Again Larry paused; then with a sneer: "He's a cheerful
sort of a swine is Wilson.”


ROWLAND KENNEY
643
.
Above the heads of the two men the single gas-jet battled piti-
fully with the cold night air, most of the time but dimly revealing
their strangely contrasted forms, occasionally shining down full
upon them, hardening their outlines, emphasizing the shrinking
passivity of Leyton and the almost aggressive strength of Larry
Yorke who with sneering lips strode up and down, meditating on
the peculiarities of the detested Wilson. He stopped abruptly and
again seized Leyton by the shoulder.
"Hold off, Larry," whined Leyton. “Don't
don't," he
appealed as he spiritlessly wriggled in the stronger grip.
Larry laughed shortly. “All right then... . And what were
you moping about here for?!?
Leyton did not reply. Larry looked at him fixedly, stretching
himself as a mute protest against Leyton's cowed look and bent
back. “You miserable skunk!” His voice was low but intense. He
bit out his words with a clearness not customary to the men of the
yard. “Why don't you do something? You mess and mope about
like a sick old hen instead of making a move for the kid.” At this
Leyton turned half round, surprised, but Larry forged ahead: "Oh,
no need to jump! I know. I saw your Missis yesterday and she
told me. I saw the kid too.” He paused and resumed his rapid
pacing up and down as Leyton wearily sank on to the corner curb-
stone of one of the pillars. Suddenly he bent over Leyton with
clenched fists, as if about to strike him. He was in a towering rage.
“I'm sick of the whole damned show! Do you hear? You numb-
headed fool, you! In two years I've seen seven men badly damaged.
I've helped kill two of the finest lads in the yard. There's a hos-
pital job nearly every week because the yard isn't half big enough
for the traffic, and they won't spend a penny on safe-guards. God!
I'd like to .” and he stretched out his muscular fingers as if
to grind the whole British railway system to powder. He paused,
re-settled his large hat on his tousled head, braced back his shoul-
ders, took Leyton by the arm and led him along under the shadow of
the wall, away from the gate. One moment, and a new, soft note,
almost of sadness, crept into his voice. “She'll go under, Leyton;
she'll sure go under if you don't move."
”
Leyton shrank back as if Larry had struck him. “She'll go
she'll go under, Larry? Yes
of course
Yes.
But
what can I do?”
“That's just what I'm worrying out. However much overtime
.
.
go under
.
.
.
.


644
NAILED
a
.
.
you put in you can't earn enough to save her. You can't borrow
money—anybody'd be a fool to lend it to you. You can't beg.
There's only one thing you can do
.” He looked quickly at
Leyton's face, hoping that he would not need to explain.
“I don't know anything I can do,” returned the uncomprehending
Leyton. “Is there anything, Larry ?”
“You know Wilty ?” asked Larry. Leyton nodded. “Of course
you know him. What a fool's question. Well, Wilty has heard
that the detectives have been cleared off to Lamton; so he's on the
job to-night. He's run a van of sundries down by the South Dock
wall and shaken it. His gang will have half emptied it by this
time, I guess; but there's still some stuff left-wine, eggs, cigars,
tinned goods of all sorts, and a case of jewellery.
Now
I've never pinched before, but I've never peached on the boys
and they trust me. You've never pinched, I believe, but the boys
are down on you. It'll do you good to join them. .. To-night
you're going to bring a sack of that stuff away, use what you can at
home and take the rest to old Cohen, the fence, to-morrow. I'll
get Wilty to put in a word and Cohen will give you a good price
for it.”
"I'll get copped, Larry.”
“My God, I believe you will! You're about as handy at any-
thing outside handling a truck as I should be at ballet dancing.”
"I can't help it, Larry.” Leyton spread his toil-worn, ugly hands
abroad. "I can't help it.
“You miserable devil .” interrupted Larry. “But you'll
have to see this thing through.”
"How-how if the stuff isn't worth much after I've got it?”
“You risk that. Why, Leyton man, there may be gold in the
jewellery case.”
"I daren't. Really, I daren't, Larry.”
"You have to!"
Leyton's timid spirit was in torture. He could not get away
from Larry's compelling eyes. “How can I . ?” he asked,
looking fearfully at the closed gates. "I can't!"
As he looked the yard seemed suddenly to awake. A raft of
wagons had been knocked in by the pilot engine, and the gang
had
come from the cabin, where they had been at supper, to handle it.
A capstan was whirring steadily; the capstan-man calling to his
.
.
.
.
.


ROWLAND KENNEY
645
nipper: "Fast hook back wheel of third wagon! Now then, you
bloody lunatic, brake up behind you, brake up! Up catch, up,
,
up ...” A volley of curses fouled the night air. The catch on
the turn-table had stuck and the wagon was off the road. More or-
ders rapidly given, a grinding of the flanges of the wagon wheels on
the paving sets of the road, a sudden clank as the wheels dropped
back on to the metals, a final order, and that particular wagon was
housed. The gang moved to a more distant part of the yard.
Larry became impatient. He dreaded to hear the men shouting
his own name. “Look here,” he said rapidly, "I've got to set the
meat train, so I can't do the whole job myself, but I'll go and get
the stuff, place it—there-under the arch and you'll come and
collect it later."
Leyton stared to the right as if hypnotized by Larry's pointing
finger, and his jaws worked creakily about his dry tongue. He
turned fearfully to Larry. “The police, Larry!"
“The copper doesn't come round here for an hour, and we can do
the job in ten minutes."
Leyton raised appealing eyes, but was promptly cowed by
Larry's look. "All right, Larry, I'll do it.”
“That's good. Now slip off and come back in a few minutes.
I'll go in by the passenger station. Poor, rotten devil!” murmured
Larry as he watched Leyton shuffle along. Then he turned and
marched briskly but quietly away.
No sooner had Larry disappeared than the small door in the gate
was cautiously opened and Detective Sergeant Simpson pushed
gently through, followed by Detective Lawton and Chief Inspector
Wilson. The Inspector wore a silver-buttoned uniform and "neb”
cap, and considered himself of tremendous importance. His eyes
were shifty, his face was covered by a scrubby beard, and he snarled
like a cur when speaking. The detectives were in no way remark-
able in appearance. Lawton was more bulky than his chief. They
both had dark, well-trimmed moustaches and beefy faces, and an
exaggerated air of mystery.
Wilson would have pressed forward after Larry, but Lawton
restrained him.
“So they thought we were in Lamton,” said Simpson. “You
know them, Wilson ?”
"Oh, yes! Don't I know them! That young chap is Larry


646
NAILED
Yorke,” he declared with surprising bitterness of tone. “I've sus-
pected him a while. I'll be glad to see him snapped."
“What's the other one called ?"
“Tommy Leyton. He's a fool.”
a
“That's good,” said Simpson. “If he's a fool we can bring some
pressure to bear.” And he pulled out a pair of hand-cuffs and
twisted an imaginary person's wrist. “Just jog his memory a bit
а
and get him to give the rest of his mob away.”
“Oh, I can deal with him, the fool! He'd have been sacked long
ago if I'd had a free hand. I've tried to make him chuck it, but
he'll stand anything. The other chaps give him socks, put live
mice in his dinner basket and drop handfuls of snow down his back,
but he never hits back. I remember?"
“Yes, yes,” Simpson gruffly checked him. “What does this Larry
do?”
"Oh, him, the pup! He does all sorts of things. The superin-
tendent imagines he's a clever chap and puts him on to anything
mostly. Last night he was working a hydraulic crane, and to-
night he's relief shunting.”
Simpson, under the weak gas-light, jotted down rough notes
whilst Wilson was speaking; and Lawton slipped back into the
yard. Suddenly Lawton hurried out. "He's got the stuff," he whis-
pered. "I saw him climb into the van and heard him groping about.
Shall we nail him here, or what?” he concluded, looking at
his chief.
“Yes, yes, what— ?” began Wilson, who was rubbing his hands
down his coat and nervously edging about.
"No," replied Simpson curtly. "Get back inside.”
They went; and for some moments there was no sound but that
made by a distant gang. The silence was broken by a slight rustle
on the yard side of the wall, and a second later a hand clutched the
top of the wall and Larry himself appeared, carrying a packed
sack. He dropped down into the street and glanced cautiously
about before depositing his burden at the foot of one of the iron
supports of the arch. Larry avoided the gate and, after a slight
pause of irresolution, as if he scented some danger, he placed one
foot on a projection of the wall and sprang up. But even as he
bent back for the leap, Wilson peered over the wall so that, when
Larry swung up, he found Wilson's head opposite to him. There
a


ROWLAND KENNEY
647
was no time for thought. Larry promptly hit out, knocked Wilson
backwards into the yard, dropped back into the street, and ran
towards the gate. Two pairs of arms shot out of the gloom as Larry
reached the gateway, and in spite of his struggles Lawton pinned
his arms to his side and Simpson gripped his throat and choked the
fight out of him. In less than a couple of minutes the detectives
had raised him from the ground, gagged, and his wrists bound.
“You'll not shout?” asked Simpson. Larry nodded and the gag
was removed. “You'll come along without any
bother?"
“Oh, yes, certainly! Game's up. Hello, Wilson!” said Larry
as Wilson appeared, holding his cheek, scowling at Larry and swear-
ing venomously. “Can't you give me my hands too ?”
“No fear! You're too handy with your fists, my lad,” said
Simpson with a quizzical smile in the direction of Wilson. “But
I'll give you one if you like and snap the other to Detective
Lawton.”
"All right. I know when I'm beaten.
And
my
first job
too!” concluded Larry bitterly.
Lawton raised a cynical eyebrow. “Yes? They all say that.
"
of
"Oh, only two,” declared Larry as he looked slyly at Wilson,
“Wilson and me.”
Wilson's face had swollen visibly and he was furious. “Look
here, Yorke; I'll smash your face in with this lamp if I have any
more cheek.”
Simpson glanced quickly up the street and emitted a long
“S-s-sh!” as Larry moved as if to shout. "Gag?” asked Simpson
S
as he gripped Larry's throat and Lawton held his hands—whilst
Wilson furtively kicked him from behind. Larry nodded. He was
beaten. He could but be silent and watch the game out to the
end. Simpson moved his hand from Larry's throat and pointed
to the door. They were barely through the doorway before Leyton
appeared, obviously nervous.
But there was a perceptible change in Leyton. Beyond a doubt
he was terrified, but there was also about him an air of potential
determination. He was trying to play his new part. His eyes
peered about, following the antics of the shadows disturbed and
distorted by the spasmodic gleams cast by the struggling gas-jet
above the gate-post. The pillar reached, he swung the sack over his
How many
.
you are there?”
C


648
NAILED
a
shoulder as a clock struck the hour. It was midnight. Scared, he
dropped the sack and staggered against the wall; but by the time
the twelfth stroke sounded he had recovered. He took a couple of
strides and paused, humping his shoulders, shaking the sack into
position. A look of hope and pride came into his face and
his step became firmer. His manhood was awakening.
The small door quietly opened before Leyton reached it, and
Simpson, Lawton, Wilson, and Larry stood silent in the shadow of
the gate. They moved out in front of Leyton, and Larry raised
a shackled wrist to his wondering gaze whilst Simpson laid a hand
on his shoulder and Wilson removed the sack.
“Are there any more of you?” demanded Simpson.
" .
“No, no ... I ...I..
I ..." Leyton was again the ab-
ject, pitiable wretch, helpless before the stronger will.
"We've got you,” snarled Wilson, shaking the sack; "both of
you, by God!"
“Wilson,” said Larry, stepping forward in front of Leyton, “I
gave you a rare smack there just now. I'm sorry.” Wilson snarled
and swore; Larry turned to the detectives. “You fellows, I know,
should do what you call your duty, but Leyton there has a kiddy
who's in a bad way, and she'll shut her knife soon if she don't get
decently treated.
That's why I made Leyton fetch that
stuff-mind you, I made him. Can't you look over his job and
-
,
leave the stuff with him? We'll spin a yarn about me being caught
in the van; that should be good enough. Are you on it?"
Wilson sneered. Lawton seemed moved by the appeal and
looked at his chief who gave no sign-he might not have heard one
of Larry's words. “You might bring the stuff along, Wilson,” he
said as he handcuffed Larry to Leyton. “Lawton, you hurry on
ahead and see if you can find a cab hanging about.”
Larry gave a gesture of submission and moved away, dragging
Leyton with him.
The street was deserted and silent, but from the yard came the
occasional sounds of labour. Wagons were moved about and the
distant voices of men could be heard. The gas-jet in its derelict
lamp fought on like a worn-out thing of life, sputtering and splut-
tering, with now and then a sustained hiss of annoyance as a breath
of wind attacked it through its broken rampart of glass.
.
9)
a
.
a


{"



Courtesy of the Montross Galleries
ALBERT PINKHAM RYDER.
BY KENNETH HAYES MILLER


AMERICAN PAINTING
BY PAUL ROSENFELD
THA
a
a
HE Ryders hang dark on the museum walls. They are pools
of very dusk, many of them so low in key that for a while they
resist the scrutiny. Their rigid and heavily enameled surfaces have
the colours of night when the moon is small and chill and hard,
of ancient tapestries sewn with tarnished gold, of sere leaves
in November and the smoke-blue of winter woodlands. Disks of
saddest silver burn coldly amid profound and undulant blacks;
rims of dreamy light glow palely as the greening skies of after-sun-
set; dullest gold of night-cloud edge is subtly and mystically har-
monized with sable and with the aureate browns of embossed
leather. The fanfares of romance breathe through the tender mys-
terious tones, the sensitive foaming forms. A white horse rears in
the sinister gloom; the sea creams away from a bark like an opened
flower; sails belly into the fathomless heaven and heave their craft
towards the indifferent sorcerer's moon; a skeleton rider with scythe
Aits round the track into the dun immeasurable distance. And yet,
these gorgeous and fissured things, these dreamy, old-world spells,
irrelevant as they may appear, in the eye of reason, to the allegedly
young, sanguine, garishly red white and blue life that streams out-
side, are indeed the first great expression of the American world in
the medium of paint. Here, for the first time, paintings speak to
the American of what lies between him and his native soil. In
them, for the first time since the pictural art began to be practised
among the European colonists of America, and tavern-sign deco-
rators were lured to portray, with their sour technique, sharp-faced
Puritan dames as shepherdesses of Versailles or in the "character”
of “sultanas,” a painter has succeeded in digging down through
sand to the sea. Three generations of sober craftsmen had sought
to spade their way through Reynolds and Constable, through Mun-
ich and Barbizon, had painted the valley of the Hudson and the
hill walls of Lake George, the Rockies and Niagara Falls, chintz
and girl graduates and candied Monets, quite vainly. Their little
ponds float nothing save paper boats. But, in the Ryders, the ocean
moves: we are set afloat beyond our depth, without intellectual com-


650
AMERICAN PAINTING
pass and chart, and challenged to find our way across the tide to the
unknown other shore.
For life, at length, had brought forth in the west a painter able
to work from what he perceived upon his eyelids when his eyes were
shut. Ryder was what the others were not, a poet. There was in
him a co-ordination which the others, even the sturdiest of them,
Martin, Homer, Fuller, wanted, or possessed in merely negligible
degree. So full was it, that it permeated his very clothes, made the
cloth coat and vest, the shirt and scarf he wore, curiously personal
and expressive; meet raiment, even in the days when he was only a
magnificent old derelict, for the bearded king in Ultima Thule he
was. It left it possible for him to live undisturbedly in his dingy
Sixth Avenue lodging, absorbed completely in his canvases, indiffer-
ent to what the world desired or did not desire, of him. And so,
while the others, weak in imagination, were dependent always on the
material facts which started their vision, and, once deprived of the
view of the objects on which they sought to base their painting,
were at completest loss, Ryder could study the image in his brain.
He could see with his closed eyes what it was that the night-clouds,
which he studied hours upon hours at a stretch, did to him; what the
greenwood and the wistful New England hills, the wracks of mists
chasing wildly through the illimitable icy areas of heaven, made to
occur in his blood; what the manner of his sensations were when the
high walls of the city rose ghostly and grey, and the night stood
high over New York. He came to know what it was that lay be.
tween the objective world and himself. And consequently, when
he gave forth again in sombre and argent mass the objects which he
had ached to seize and possess within himself, it was part of himself
that he issued on to the canvas. It was the world, or whatever
por-
tion of the world it was that he, the child of transcendental New
England, was able to perceive, that, arranged in conformity with
his own personality, his own physical order, was deposited in opaque
colour by his brush. The mystic hues of sundown were combined
in accordance with the desires of the artist; the flying mists moved
at the dictation of his spiritual rhythms; the old windmill in the
citron-coloured moonshine, the white horse in his stall, gave again
the beat of his blood, the tingle of his nerves. A world had come
into a man, and been recorded through him. The consciousness of
a man at a given moment of life in America; the thing real as any


PAUL ROSENFELD
651
object created before humanity or without it, had come to stand,
rich and sumptuous and dreamy, among the other natural things.
It is to the moment of the root-taking of an American culture that
these pictures hold the shadowy mirror. At last, the new world had
vanquished the old in the hearts of the inhabitants of the states.
For an hundred years or more, Americans had spoken of their sep-
arateness from the old world; now, after a century of resistance to
the separation, after all the intensification of colonialism which was
the aftermath of the Civil War, the sun of the western world had
melted the icy coats. Slowly, painfully, the minds began to turn
towards self-expression, towards acceptance of self, of the vague
and menacing American future. The new rhythm had been con-
sented in. Of that first, difficult, steep, contact with local condi-
tions, contact with what for want of a closer term one calls “the
soil,” the art of Ryder is the breath, the suspiration. In its very
essence, it is the sign of a reality that is only an edge, a fine rim, and
threatens at any moment to waver and disappear into non-being.
The pigment of these moony canvases vibrates; but there is no flu-
ency, no lightness, no mercuriality, in its application. It is curious-
ly cramped and uneasy. It lies thick in little waves and ridges of
enamel. Very Babylons and Ecbatanas of brush-strokes, cities un-
derneath whose streets the walls of five or six cities lie buried, offer
themselves to the eye within the frame of each Ryder. For all his
poethood, the man never learnt to master his medium. Fissures ap-
peared in the surfaces even before the works quit his room for the
dealer's shop, or the home of the rare patron. Ryder used to wave a
heated poker close to the cracks, believing that the red-hot iron
would close them. But the fissures remained, and multiply. Then,
colour in the modern sense there is scarcely any in his work. At
best, his painting has tone, merely; and the keys are always low and
gloomy. One knows well that the man fled from colour, or from all
colour that was not faded and tender and drenched with black; that
he was a blinded man in the noon; and that only as the fine rough-
ness of hues faded from the walls of the city, only as the world be-
came a few lines and areas of soft hue, and the moon shone wa-
tery and glamourous over the roof-lines did the waves of warm wet
flow against his skin again, to make the hour plastic.
Lastly, but perhaps most significantly of all, the limited convex-
ity of his works reveals the defective contact with life, the incapacity


652
AMERICAN PAINTING
of his genius. The canvases of Rubens and of Renoir, men born
fully contacting life, fully developed in body and ghost; the can-
vases of Cézanne, of Greco, of Rembrandt at his best, men born
Puritans, like Ryder, but born powerful enough to overcome their
limitation, are convex at the very base of the canvas, commence
swelling with forms of large amount in their foreground. Forms
tangle and increase and burst, launch themselves from the edge of
the frame into the middle and backgrounds of the paintings. And
the middle-ground and the background is no less full and exciting
than the immediate fore. For in these men, the animal nature was
fully spiritualized; the genitals were not excluded from the dream
of beauty, but contributed to it; and the portion of the canvas which
is most directly related to the abdominal centres of the human be-
ing, the foreground, was made as rich and expressive as any of the
painting. There was no necessity for these men to "flee" from the
foreground of life, and consequently from the present moment, into
the
past and the future. But, in the Ryders, which stem from the
undeveloped sensuality of the gilded age, the velvet-black and
brown canvases become convex with form only in the centre of the
canvases. Almost never do they commence their swell at the lower
edge of the picture. The lower edge of your Ryder, indeed, is almost
sure to be an evasion, a space hidden in darkness, passed over. Some-
times, as in the canvas known as The Forest of Arden, or in the lit-
tle purplish marine in the Brooklyn Museum, and in several other
examples of his dusky art, one finds testimony to the fact that
Ryder was aware of the evasion. For here, we find him trying to
right the matter and make living the foreground by filling it with
little human figures. But the figures remain stiff, extraneous, insig.
nificant, even damaging to the music of the tones and lights. And,
as in nearly all his work, the canvas remains curiously negative, em-
bryonic, until the foreground is passed, and the middle distance, the
area of the upper nerve centres, opens in all its sombre magic, its
shades of sundown and night, harmonies of argent and indigo,
breath of evening stillness.
And what the foregrounds manifest in their negative fashion,
that, the rest of the canvases, with their moments of ecstasy dark
and mystic as a fanfare of Pelleas, their blues of distant bays in au-
tumn windstillnesses, harmonies of palest rose and cobweb grey,
lights cast up from underworlds, manifest affirmatively. Here, one
perceives, what one is given to see in the portrait of Ryder by Ken-


PAUL ROSENFELD
653
neth Hayes Miller. One sees the presence of a man born to gigantic
power which he could direct; the presence of a man of the massive
corporeal forms, of the great bones and sinews of the fathers of the
races which have learned to do titanic labour, who could not quite
fulfil himself in the world of men. For the man who could paint
from such a palette, from such strange and fantastic conceptions,
one knows, only the blue distances sang, only the impalpable, the
unobtainable, the remote, was musical. The gentle regions of quiet
suspiration, the autumnal moods, the age-old oaks catching in their
ivy-loaded boughs the slow-drifting clouds, the ashen-hued nymphs,
proceed from a life that could not embrace the present moment and
fulfil itself therein; that never could fling itself out loose and re-
laxed on to the sod of the instant, but yearned away always into the
distance, into past and future; that in the arms of the beloved was
restless and unhappy, and only in solitude and deprivation felt the
whole of desire. They speak, these works, of great desire always un-
fulfilled. They speak the half of experience, never the whole. In
their laden glooms there records itself the pain and the annihilation
of the present object. New York was about this artist; but what
report of New York, with its frantic life, is here? Merely, by com-
plete omission, that the present world is unutterably painful and
cruel; the street a noisome cavern under an elevated railroad; the
place where men toiled only a jumble of misshapen buildings, of agi-
tated sinister beings, of curbs littered with packing-cases and lined
with yawning drays, of clatter of commerce and human calls shrill-
ing, cursing, and beraying the universe. The present is a round of
death; the painter, a derelict cast away beyond the sight of God.
His life is lonely cursed steering through trackless seas, drawn by an
unattainable lodestar wickedly gleaming afar; an unutterable soli-
tude and lost endeavour. There is always the refrain of a shadowy
and unreal life, of solitary wandering, of vain search, in Ryder's
art. He is Jonah, cast into the ravening black sea; calling in vain
for help, in the jaws of the monster, upon the faint legendary god
shining afar. He is the Flying Dutchman, a ghost peering over the
rail of a phantom ship that bears him over the wastes of ocean;
Macbeth, to whom the voices out of the dark speak of inevitable
guilt and unfathomable attendant evil; Siegfried, whom the weer-
women in the water and the leaves warn of impending doom. And
then, like a pendant to all this unsubstantial life, the brush paints
itself into the yearned-for world of the releasing, the resting, palp-
a


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AMERICAN PAINTING
able moment. The land east of the sun and west of the moon ap-
pears in Ryder's paint. He dreams himself in a world of soft col-
our, colour soft as the sky at evening over the Jersey bluffs, tenderer
than the winds of a spring night in the deserted city streets. He is
back again, in the land of his childhood, in a New England where
it is always golden fall, always apple-scented afternoon, and where
mountains stand sweet and soft and protecting, like huge mothers.
And which of us, in whom self-consciousness is awakening, can
fail to recognize, before these paintings, something woven tight into
his woof? For we of the new world, do we not all of us strain away
into some dim land? How many of us are there who can perceive
the wonder of the world of humdrum familiar things? Our being
steers away always into some pearly and mournful distance scarcely
visible to the naked eye. Like the Mélisande of Maeterlinck, the
spirit eye of the American sees always “otherwheres.” It is always
the otherwhere, the far unseen, that is lovely to the American. The
sun, which thrusts towards us a convexed full-blown world, and
presses immediate and sharp the spearheads of things, annihilates
us quite. It is only the night, that blunts the spearheads and re-
moves and makes indistinct the pitching buildings, that shows us
beauty in the town. Or, it is the past, the future, Europe and Asia,
the wild West and the opium-tainted East, that excite the imagina-
tion. No American is happy in a room, happy over a tiny hill,
happy over what little he has, contented to sit and watch three trees
growing in the yard before his house. The demon always whispers
that colour is to be found far off, away, in the distance, in someone
else's house, in someone else's shoes, in someone else's bank-vault.
So everyone lives beyond his means; none can get the fulness of life
out of the present. The wishing stone is always being rubbed. The
fancy is always busy with the perfections that are certain of arriv-
ing with the sun of the day after the day after the day after to-mor-
row. And meanwhile, life slips by; the demonaic moon draws the
craft across the icy sterile ocean.
Ryder's career, in such an environment, could scarcely differ ra-
dically from the feat of balancing oneself a lifetime upon a razor-
sharp rim. To be part of a community so disturbed, and yet to be
without it sufficiently to see it objectively, came very near constitu-
ting a condition in defiance of the laws of gravitation. For very
long, therefore, he could not maintain himself; it became autumn
and evening very quickly in him. As long as his physical strength
a


PAUL ROSENFELD
655
a
lasted, his somatic co-ordination kept him feeling the charm of the
far hills, the music of night and fall. But as soon as the body began
to slacken, that, too, collapsed, and left him, during the last years of
his life, a man whose contact with reality had departed, and made
him merely a survival of his very self. If he did not paint safely
and prosily, as did his plodding and limited fellows, he nevertheless
was impotent to produce his own poetic work. He sat there, owl-
like, in his dusty-paned lodging, unable to complete his paintings,
unable to let anything go, unable to discover his own proper inten-
tions. He removed pigment, put it back again, painted out a silver
rain, painted in a stiff scarlet-coated little figurine, unable to satisfy
himself; delivered his work to patrons and dealers, then rushed back
again to demand it of them. It was as though nature, after having
permitted one man to resist her awhile, had repented her of her gen-
erosity, and taken back again the indulgence she had consented to
give the first American painter. Fear of life, sentiment ineradicable
of sin, inhibited voluptuousness, an almost diseased daintiness, she
had capriciously permitted to be expressed affirmatively in his art.
Now, as if to further point the moral of the tale, she let the last
years of the magnificent tramp who once was Albert Pinkham
Ryder demonstrate upon what cliffs inhospitable to life American
art would have to learn to grow.
II
Another generation has come to occupy the scene once occupied
by Ryder, Chase, Homer, and the others of the fin de siècle. Again
there are paintings on the walls that speak secretly and importunate-
ly to us of what we as Americans have lived. The newer group
contains craftsmen of a sort better than ever was Ryder. The mod-
erns brush more lightly and freely and thinly; their work is more
“in” the medium of colour than ever was his; they seem able to ap-
proach objects at times other than that of their lowest visibility; the
blows dealt the old academic tradition by Cézanne and Picasso,
transmitted to them via 291 Fifth Avenue, have shaken them vio-
lently into life. And yet, for all the development shown by the
artists of the newer group, the same unfulfilment that breathes so
poignantly from the dusky splendours of Ryder, re-echoes again and
again from their canvases. With but a very few exceptions, the
American painters of the present time are men not quite wholly un-


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AMERICAN PAINTING
folded. Birth has not yet expelled them fully from their limbo
into the roaring world. The "great individual,” demanded by
Whitman, is as yet far from complete in them. Power and doubt
of self, energy and fear of life, courage and want of faith in their
own craft, in their own vocation, are strangely balanced in so many
of them. Whatever the colour that the American of to-day paints
may nominally be, the feeling that his pigment communicates is
oftentimes curiously grey. Neither the high bright noon, nor the
nadir of night, reigns absolutely over these artists. It is in the ante-
chamber, in a sort of purgatory of twilight, in a zone of hesitation
and rigidity, that so many are to be found hesitating. Over them
there flames the sign of the new birth of things in the new country.
But, as yet, the procession that is to follow the star, the procession
for which we are waiting, has set forth no more vigorously in paint-
ing than in any of the other arts.
Painters as dissimilar in temper, style, and vision, as are Arthur
B. Davies, Marsden Hartley, and Kenneth Hayes Miller, artists
generously endowed, exhibit, nevertheless, each in his
proper
fash-
ion, the want of perfect muscular freedom. Davies, for example,
shows, in classic form, the thinness of the vital substance left at the
disposal of the American artist. If Ryder is the sundown, then
Arthur B. Davies is pale green moonlight. This painter has ex-
quisite taste, poetical feeling, daintiness. He has, it would seem,
as sensitive a response to the work of the artists of his own and other
times, as any American painter, Max Weber alone, perhaps, ex-
cepted. But there is no virility in the man's own art. Davies'
paintings seem like pages out of the life of a dreamy and wealthy
spinster. One feels that a young girl, or an old young girl might
have composed his charming fantasies, his tender and wan har-
monies, but not a man. It is all so virginal, so charming and dec-
orative, so safely guarded against virile passion and virile procrea-
tiveness. Davies appears to paint nude women; but there is no
woman in his paint. The flesh of his superhuman figures has the
quality of candy. One knows that, were one to touch these breasts
,
with the lips, they would taste sickishly of pink taffy. It is for this
reason that Davies is the painter preferred of the American women.
For the woman who fears her own sexuality, and hates the male who
appeals directly to it, finds in the art of Arthur B. Davies the man
she wants men to be. Here, all is tender, dreamy, poeticized, steril-
ized, sentimentalized. There are innumerable promenades on sun-


PAUL ROSENFELD
657
а
set terraces amid the spreading tails of peacocks; walks in West-
chester County on autumnal afternoons; lawns outside music-room
windows in the pale moonshine of New England summers; reveries
at the piano before the lighting of the lamps at tea-time; a song by
Charles Martin Loeffler; Sunday afternoon promenades by still
duck-ponds; white roses. But nothing ever happens. Everything
has remained safely remote, controlled, refined. No hot fecund
powerful surge of life has asserted itself. And the pair depart, each
to find another partner with whom to sentimentalize and toy. All
that is left is delicious regret, memories of an evening sky or two,
and the sense of having had a pleasant time without having in-
fringed on the law of the land.
Hartley, in a different key, speaks, as do Ryder and Davies, the
grey. The tone of this painter, however, is more tragic; sometimes
sinister, sometimes morbidly oversweet. For it carries the expres-
sion of a gigantic power, an intense and mordant sensuality, which
has never quite succeeded in freeing itself from the personality of
the artist. Prometheus fits himself to the rôle of Beau Brummel
out of sheer boredom; promenades his new muffler, swagger-stick,
and gardenia on Fifth Avenue, and invents the name of the Iride-
scent Ball. (Of course, it is something to be a grand old character
at forty.) Van Wyck Brooks it was who compared America to the
Hans Christian Andersen hero who bore in his heart a splinter of
ice; and the comparison appears never so apt as it does at the times
one thinks of the distinguished, luxurious, and frozen art of the
Maine-born Marsden Hartley. For here is passionate colour
drowned in black. Here are flames at play about a mountain of
ice; circus reds, banging of bass drums, paper frills, and all sorts
of tricks that cannot banish the spectre within; a gigantic power and
daring and voluptuousness that never remain tumescent sufficiently
long to accomplish quite a work of art, and inevitably break off and
lose direction before the material has been entirely penetrated and
vivified. The stone in the heart will not shatter, and let loose the
passion out of its cavern into the world of folk. Hartley is often-
times likest a cadaver covered with a profusion, a hill, of the most
tropic and devilish bloom, and bedded on gorgeous embroideries. So
overwhelmingly sumptuous and colourful and odorous is the floral
sheath, so handsome and noble the cloths and candles and music,
that the spectators find a voluptuous satisfaction in the funeral cere-
mony, which even an occasional glimpse of the waxy protagonist
a


658
AMERICAN PAINTING
a
does not dispel. For the corpse is in a state of preservation nothing
short of the marvellous. The flesh is conserved so perfectly that in
some respects it is preferable to living tissue. It's still, and doesn't
think. It has a distinct and impressive, even though slightly chill-
ing beauty of its own. The meat of the mastodon which was so
well kept for fifty centuries in a Siberian glacier that the dogs of the
geologists who discovered it a few years since could scarcely be pre-
vented from tearing and devouring it, is not to be compared as an
example of successfully embalmed Aesh with that of Hartley. The
art in which he has recorded, despite a certain absence of complete
concentration, his own starvation and imprisonment, vain writh-
ings and death-in-life, is among the most vital and moving which
the Americans who commenced maturing with the twentieth cen-
tury have succeeded in producing. There is the flight of true genius
in these dark and mournful and coldly sumptuous canvases with
their strong underlying rhythms. The black mountain pieces of
Hartley's early "Maine” period, are powerful and memorable ex-
pressions of the starvation of a generation, the suffering and aband-
onment by the world which every sensitive spirit in the states feels
for long stretches of time. The bare gloomy mountain sides, the
shattered and dying evergreens, the rocks like piles of bones, the
clouds that float high and insanely free and distant above the de-
serted valley, are woven into patterns almost Wagnerian in their
grandiosity. Or, a cold and ferocious sensuality seeks to satisfy it-
self in the still-lives, with their heavy stiff golden bananas, their
dark luscious figs, their erectile pears and enormous and breast-like
peaches. A sensuality become almost morbid writhes in the terrible
landscapes of the New Mexican period, tries to utter itself in one
last world-consuming spasm and die under the weight of moun-
tains. And in Hartley's most recent works, those of the "rubber-
plant” period, with their magnificent painting of white, their hand-
some colour and strong organization, we seem to hear funeral dirges
keened over an open grave, behold the lowering of a coffin into the
womb of mothering earth, feel the tides of death wash the tired and
unslaked body.
In a third, perhaps less obvious, but no less real fashion, the art of
Kenneth Hayes Miller betrays the American incompleteness. The
manner in which his solidly and oftentimes even massively painted
forms attest it is less straightforward, for the reason that Miller ap-
pears to have, to a certain degree, come to be able to fix what Ryder


PAUL ROSENFELD
659
us.
and Davies and Hartley never quite vividly apprehended: the im-
mediate. The close foregrounds of his canvases are generally dy-
namic and swelled. The figures of his bathers surge directly from
the lower edge with sculpturesque mass, press their arms and breasts
and flanks directly towards the spectator. The women Miller por-
trays have flesh of a quality different from the roseate taffy of
Davies. These great instinctive dryads, if they have nothing else,
at least have organs. One senses the solidity and temperature of
their flesh. Were one to take them in one's arms, they would not
melt, but resist the clasp with their muscular and Swedish bulks.
They could bear children, these bathers. And when Miller shows
us them clothed, shopping, promenading the Avenue, or at Piping
Rock, their heads fit roundly and snugly into their pretty hats. Be-
neath the clothes, the capes and furs and silken blouses, one senses
the palpitancy of the bosom. Indeed, Miller even makes one con-
scious of the portions of his bathers and shoppers turned away from
And still, despite solidity and temperature and weight, his
forms do not swiftly, largely, or passionately release the spectator.
The flight does not occur with sufficient wildness in his art. Too sel-
dom, the aeroplane leaves the earth. To be sure, the artist oftentimes
makes important communications. The stout woman in grey sing-
ing at the piano, opening her mouth in half-intense and flaccid fash-
ion, brings one the feeling of the monotony and eternal second-rate
quality of existence, the languorous fashion in which nature takes
and gives the lives of her creatures, pours it out carelessly, wastes
it; floods of energy poured forth, nothing very noble, very tragical,
or very exciting happening withal. But such very vivid communi-
cation is not the rule with Miller; more often, his nudes and his
promenaders leave one a trifle dissatisfied. There is a hitch here and
there in the rhythm of a nude, an arm turns suddenly wooden; a
hand is boneless as a hunk of meat. The opalescence, swiftness,
and breath of Renoir are missing. The ascending rhythm that leads
to the heads of the shoppers oftentimes fails to come to a conclu-
sion; clothing and haunches are generally more fully created than
are the visages.
It would seem therefore, as though the artist were one who, like
Davies and Hartley, had the transcendental strain in his blood, al-
ways felt the distance more beautiful than the near; and that, in or-
der to overcome the yearning tendency left in him by puritan and
pioneer forebears, had sacrificed much of his fantasy, his dream, in
a


660
AMERICAN PAINTING
the hope of first achieving the immediate contact with life, and then,
later, of re-uniting dream and reality. Miller was a friend of Ry-
der's. His profoundly sympathetic portrait of the old man reveals
how deeply akin he must have felt himself to the lone dreamer.
The turn into Renoir-land, which creates a sort of distinctive second
period in Miller's painting, different from his grey, Ryderish first,
suggests a profound desire to escape the maladjustment of the
American in art, and to approximate the happy Frenchman's free,
full, easy relation to the present. If, however, Miller's bathers
reveal the split caused by the departure, his landscape painting, on
the other hand, suggests the near future will see the desired co-ordi-
nation of his very powerful personality. These last elaborate com-
positions, with their pink and green and orange tones at once acidu-
lous and warm, bitter and sweet, salt and rich, their lushness of
form and fluidity of movement, have distinction and vigour and
satisfactoriness. They have more colour than have the somewhat
undistinguishedly coloured nudes; their gauntness and melancholy
of character, their visionary radiance, give the feel of the New
England-New York State earth germane to their author. They seem
the beginning of a painting that will have all the earthiness, the salt
and homeliness of Robert Frost's poetry, and perhaps something of
majesty and power that the New Hampshire singer has not.
Perhaps even less apparently than Miller's, but nevertheless no
less really, does painting as superficially other in spirit from Ry-
der's as is that of Max Weber, Macdonald-Wright, and Thomas
Benton, discover the family likeness. These young men, three of
the most ultramodern in tendency among modern American
painters, stemming from Cézanne and Matisse and Picasso, never-
theless show some of the selfsame disability that characterized the
art of the elder man. They, too, cannot breast the moment quite
nakedly. They have not entirely the courage of their intuitions.
Their form of withdrawal is intellectualism. All three of them,
for all their daring, their science, born of research into colour and
form, their attitude so kindred in spirit to modern scientific explo-
ration, seem unable to approach their work without the shield of a
protecting theory. The impulse that moves Weber, for instance, to
paint, seems to come to him too exclusively from without himself.
Painting is to him too much Rousseau, Matisse, Picasso; too little
Max Weber. What one would like to see expressed in his work, the
mystical metaphysical Jew, evidences itself only furtively. Rather-


PAUL ROSENFELD
661
more it is the assimilative power of the Jew that, encouraged to
assert itself by the shortcomings of the civilization of the land of his
adoption, is present here. To be sure, Weber's ability, his tasteful-
ness, his power to analyze the work of his masters, remain always
profoundly impressive. There is delicious dryness and surety in his
handling of pigment, in his greens and greys. He is even able to do,
.
at times, a better Rousseau than Rousseau himself could do, a better
Picasso than many which the unique disciple of Ingres has produced.
One lingers with pleasure over the delicately brushed details in his
pictures. He is finicky without end. It is a pity he has never quite
developed a personal style.
Wright and Benton, perhaps more original in manner, are never-
theless quite as intellectualized as is Weber. Wright has sought
to continue experimenting with the formative might of colour where
Cézanne left off; both he and Benton have sought to add orange,
green, and violet to the triad of yellow, red, and blue upon which
the Provençal master based his harmonies. Wright's fugues of
prismatic colour hammer out a sort of steely, icy music, a music of
girders and metal plates and anvils; his aeroplanes whirr, his land-
scapes build up solidly and majestically. But a certain coldness
and hardness and even disagreeableness of touch mark the brilliant
painting as work of the head more than of the passions. So, too,
with Benton. This young painter, who has gone for authority quite
as much to the Renaissance as he has to his co-worker Wright, and
follows the Italian masters in painting goodly areas of colour, has
of late attained a great dignity and fulness of form. Yet, his work,
also, shows a want in the painter's personality of co-ordination, a
like sluggishness of the feelings. It is questionable whether Ben-
ton's painting is always colour. His powerful designs with their
quick contours appear oftentimes conceived in terms of black and
white. At any rate, his colour is mealy at times, never quite pas-
sionate. A recently completed work, Bathers, shows both Benton's
high talent and his shortcoming. Certain portions of the picture,
the row-boat and the curve of the distant shore, are powerfully
felt, rhythmical, full of bull-dog vigour. But the bodies of the
bathers themselves want the powerful grip and handling; have
something unleavened in them. At first, all Benton's figures seem
Michael Angelesque. Later, one is not sure what it is they have
under their clothes. They do protest too much. It is as though the
artist himself were not using his body properly.


662
AMERICAN PAINTING
From every side, in an hundred different tonalities, one hears re-
echoed the same theme. One hears it again out of the canvases of
Man Ray, at once sensitive and sheerly limited. Ray possesses a
sensitive epidermis, of a kind. He seems particularly attuned to
the modern world; gets sensations from the products of modern in-
dustry, the sights and sounds of the modern great town. One can
perceive the starting points of much of Ray's work in the window-
displays of phonograph-record shops and drug-stores. The novel
textures of articles of pressed rubber, of delicate Japanese silks, of
pasteboard, the shine of polished metal surfaces, the shapes of dress-
makers' figurines, the quality of aniline dyes, interest and stimulate
him. He is tireless in his attempts to communicate new colour-sen-
sations, to make new combinations of textures; to increase the range
of his art; to invent new harmonies and fix new tones. Of late, he
has found pigment outworn; has found paint worthy only the re-
mark of Cambronne; taken to experimenting with the air-brush;
used bronze hair pins in decorating his surfaces. Picasso stuck
pieces of Le Journal to his canvases; Ray has applied bits of the
oily chocolate-coloured illustrated Sunday supplements of the
American newspapers, to his. However, as a dada, he wants the cer-
tain, unwavering taste of his friend Marcel Duchamp, the dada of
genius; his inventions seem never sufficiently dexterously and dar-
ingly carried out. Morover, it is probable that in attempting to rid
his work of all literature and render it completely abstract, he has
erred into making it too much a matter of the nerves and the epi-
dermis, and never quite approfundized it. At one moment, at the
time he was painting canvases in the manner of his large War
piece, his work with its solid masses and fine painting did promise
to have veritable expressiveness. One is still awaiting the redemp-
tion of the pledge.
An exquisite and equally limited talent, too, is that of Charles
Demuth. Demuth is indubitably one of those artists of whom it may
be said that, “while the cup out of which they drink is small, the
wine they quaff is entirely their own." His washes and tempera-
paintings show him a very delicate lyric poet, gifted with almost in-
fallible taste, daintiness of touch, distinction of conception. His
flower pieces in water-colour are tender and pungent. His illustra-
tions for The Turn of the Screw and The Beast in the Jungle of
Henry James, for Nana by Zola, and Wedekind's double tragedy
Lulu, are veritable recreations in the water-colour medium. The


PAUL ROSENFELD
663
James illustrations give mordantly the atmosphere of Puritan re-
finement; the Wedekind are full of adolescent concupiscence. De-
muth has caught, very beautifully, the spirit of Sir Christopher
Wren in certain of his geometricized representations of New Eng-
land belfries. Always, his work has airiness, daintiness, charm.
Only, the artist appears to be a trifle too much the Gentlemanly
Johnny of his profession. The polite demeanour of his craft, the
preciousness, the parnassian jewellery, are they not a little the cowl
of fear? Demuth seems obliged to candy and beribbon everything
a little before he can quite bring himself to the point of facing it.
There is always the suspicion of an almost feminine refinement in
his wash. The factory chimneys on which he bases some of his
painting, instead of "biting the skyline with stub teeth,” are soft-
ened and romanticized by use of a sort of una corda pedal. Masts
of Gloucester schooners, red ventilators with gaping maws out of
which the sound comes back, warehouses mirroring themselves in
canals still as Vermeers, they are all pared of their nails, and made
Sunday-afternoonish, lest Lancaster, Pa., be filled with swarthy
devils.
III
a
a
Louis Bouché with his irrepressible and touching desire to stick
his head through his canvases and grin at the public; Walt Kuhn
who appears unable to cast forth work save in moods of self-ridi-
cule and out of a need of burlesquing infantile grandiosity and il-
lusions; Joseph Stella, pervaded by a morbid sweetness; Abraham
Walkowitz, the dwarf-Beethoven; Charles Duncan, Oscar Bluem-
ner, William McFee, Charles Sheeler, a dozen other artists equally
gifted, continue to plot the curve begun in Ryder. But, as there are
no rules that have not exceptions, it is not strange that one should
find in the company of the modern Americans certain painters who
have achieved, or are upon the point of achieving, the unification of
their personalities, and bringing the entire man, dream interpene-
trated with reality, and reality with dream, to the composition of
their works. There are amongst us workmen with feet planted
firmly upon the ground. There are, among others, John Marin,
.
Arthur Dove, Georgia O'Keeffe.
It is quite impossible, for example, to see the water-colours of
Marin without instantaneously becoming cognizant in them of the


664
AMERICAN PAINTING
signs of a complete harmonious release. One forgets the medium
when Marin paints. One receives only the communication of a
delicate and whole nature: perceives only the play of a deep sanity
in his fresh, youthful, and eternally sweet wash. At first, to be
sure, it seemed merely Puck of Pook's Hill who was disporting him-
self on Marin's sheets of Wattman paper. There was a capricious
tripping in his touch. As in the photograph of Stieglitz, one felt
Marin peeping timidly and teasingly through a silver mist. It was
uncertain whether Marin was wholly serious; whether he was not a
school-boy out on a water-colour lark. The rose and silver and
green of his landscapes, so sober and yet so casual, the purplish
peaks of his Dolomite series, so patently the work of one with the
temperate and light blood of the French in him, struck one as al-
ways a little wayward and playful. But they haunted, persisted in
the memory, drew back to them again time after time, gave more
,
subtle pleasure. Marin's development has been profound. He is one
of those whom the life at 291 Fifth Avenue benefitted hugely. The
Puckishness has never left him. But, beside the boy, there has come
to be a very self-conscious and robust adult. The wash has become
freer, deeper, more biting and powerful. Fused with the French
delicacy, there has come to exist a granite American crudeness. So
strong and rough has Marin's water-colour become, that the elders
complain he has transcended the natural limits of his medium.
What he has done indeed, is to liberate the medium, and express
through the liberation the nature-poetry he feels. The old Chinese
delight is still there. Lyric blue still chants above Marin's hill-
crests. Warm, roseate grey still drifts in his Maine waterscapes.
There is always a spot in the Marin water-colour, a little crease, a
tender little depression, where the colours become secret and prick-
ing and warm. It is such a childishly wistful little place, a sort of
Charles-Louis Philippe bit of art. But beside the old delight, there
is a sort of great grey monotony come to express itself in Marin's
art. Nature is felt in her endlessness, her indifference, her vast mel-
ancholy fecundity. The conscious and the unconscious mind inter-
play in this expression. Flashes of red lightning, pure ecstatic in-
vasions of the conscious field, tear through the subdued and reticent
American colour of the wash. The deep blues and browns become
strangely mystic. The realism turns very suddenly, inexplicably,
into unrealistic, ghostly expressionistic art. Little complexes of
colour, gold and red and yellow, little nucleii of painted jewels, ap-



7
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15
1:
I
1
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BLACK SPOT.
BY GEORGIA O'KEEFFE


1
1
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PAUL ROSENFELD
665
a
pear, poured out of the unknown regions of the mind. One is re-
minded again and again of Blake, a Blake unliterary and master of
his prophetic medium. Nature has given her lover back again to
himself, and permitted him to develop in the strength of his spirit.
Even greater of avoirdupois, if as yet far less lubricated than that
of Marin, is the virile and profound talent of Arthur Dove. And
Dove, too, together with his great delicacy and tenderness, exhibits
a grasp of the whole of life, takes in the animal with the spiritual,
the gross teeming earth with a translucent sky. A tremendous mus-
cular tension is revealed in the fullest of the man's pastels. Great
rhythmic forms suffuse the canvases; are one and swelled out to the
borders; knock against the frames for egress. A male vitality is be-
ing released. One stands always, with Dove, one's feet "tenon'd
and mortised” in the ground; is made aware always of materials, of
the life of the senses. In the work of this artist, who is so delicate
that before commencing a work he manufactures anew his pastels
that the colour-harmony he dreams may pre-exist in the material he
uses, and so obtain the better in the picture, one senses always the
strength and ruggedness of the earth. Dove can make one feel wood
and iron, weight and solidity. His planes cross each other with the
inflexibility of girders. Reds and blues have the strength of the
rocks. One of Dove's earlier abstracts, with its blood reds and
mouse greys and straw-colour, its jagged cogs, is tense as though
heavy inert masses were being lifted in it, slowly gotten under way.
And in everything he does, there is the nether trunk, the gross
and
vital organs, the human being as the indelicate processes of nature
have shaped him. After having seen so much art made exclusively
by man and for man as bourgeois society has chosen to view him, it
is good to see work that, like this, is made with the full consent of
the portions of the human frame which middle-class society is eager
to ignore and forget. No vulgar laughter is here; no shamefulness
and guilt, no titillation. Only the great udders and hairy flanks of
nature; animals at their business of feeding; cows, calves, goats.
The mustard browns, the dull rich greens, the fawns and tans and
soft warm whites, call to mind the smell of hay, the breath of kine,
the taste of warm-squirted milk. One hears perforce the grunting
of piglets, the lowing of oxen, the swishing of great slow tails. But-
ter and cheese and all dairy products have a sort of apotheosis here.
Dove's Cows, his New Born Calf, his Goat, with their synthetiza-
tions of natural forms, are very poems of earthfastness. After cen-


666
AMERICAN PAINTING
a
turies of puritan unwillingness to perceive man in his relation with
the rest of creation, here, as in Whitman, with all the sadness and
tenderness and milky human kindness of Arthur Dove, there is the
fearless and clean acceptance of the grossly animal processes. Like
a healing contact it comes to men at once too luxurious and too
fearful. It is a great pity that this painter finds so little time for
his art. For it is easily within his power to give us the pageant of
the soil, and do Whitman-work in Whitman fashion indeed.
If these two artists instance in their work the unification of the
male, the oils, water-colours, and black and whites of Georgia
O'Keeffe instance the complement. The pure, now flaming, now icy
colours of this painter, reveal the woman polarizing herself, accept-
ing fully the nature long denied, spiritualizing her sex. Her art is
gloriously female. Her great painful and ecstatic climaxes make us
at last to know something the man has always wanted to know. For
here, in this painting, there is registered the manner of perception
anchored in the constitution of the woman. The organs that dif-
ferentiate the sex speak. Women, one would judge, always feel,
when they feel strongly, through the womb. The external world
is a series of red and green signals, like the signals along a railway
bed. In the womb lies the race. But it is not the feminity that
agrees with the virility of the business man that O'Keeffe's painting
demonstrates. Beside her art, that of Marie Laurencin stands as
Manon Lescaut might stand beside Pompilia Comparini. The Amer-
ican woman's work has something leonine, maternal, at once pas-
sionate and chaste in its essence. All is ecstasy here, ecstasy of pain
as well as ecstasy of fulfilment. There is no mean for this woman.
In her, the ice of polar regions and the heat of tropical springtides
meet and mingle. Greenland's icy mountain abuts on India's coral
strand. A white radiance is in all the bright paint felt by this girl.
Her colours sworl and flame and explode. Everything rushes down
in fiery cascade. The autumn hillside is a torrent. Her masses are
like pistils, like whirlpools, like great concentric waves that spread
outward and outward until they seem to embrace some sea. The
sun and moon are placed in her hair. The night is a swathing gar-
ment.
It is a sort of new language her paint speaks. We do not know
precisely what it is we are experiencing. She leaves us breast to
breast with the Auent unformed electric nature of things. Here, if
ever, one sees with Novalis "the eyes of chaos shining through the


PAUL ROSENFELD
667
veil of order.” Others make one to feel grey whenever they paint
red. O'Keeffe makes us feel dazzling white in her shrillest scarlet
and heavenliest blue. She takes us far indeed from Ryder, with his
faint tinges. But, whatever it is that her flooding liquid pigment
does, one thing it always seems to be bringing about in the beholder.
It seems to be leading him always further and further into the truth
of a woman's life. We have had, in our paint, no such simple and
direct articulateness as records itself here. For this is the new inno-
cency that is exhibited. The old innocency is long since dead. What
in the woman dares not face itself, what has cringing hearing and
enfeebled eyesight, is it not sick, or perverse, or unborn? But this
girl is indeed the innocent one. For here there appears to be nothing
that cannot be transfused utterly with spirit, with high feeling,
with fierce clean passion. The entire body is seen noble and divine
through love. There is no flesh that cannot become the seat of a
god. There is no appetite that cannot burst forth in flowers and
electric colour. Here speaks what women have dimly felt and un-
certainly expressed. Pain treads upon the recumbent figure. Pain
tears the body with knives. Pain sets the universe with shark's
teeth. Then again, the span of heaven is an arch of bloom. A little
red flower with pistil of flame is in paradise. A climax of many
seraphic tints holds as though the final great burst of the Liebestod
were sustained many minutes. Veils of ineffable purity rise as the
mists of a summer morning from lakewater. And, through makes
itself felt the agony of a struggle to preserve intact and pure the
vessel within. This art is, a little, a prayer that the indifferent and
envious world, always prepared to regard self-respect as an insult
to its own frustrate and crushed emotions, may be kept from defiling
and wrecking the white glowing place. It is no little sadness,
no little knowledge of waiting evil, that utters itself in O'Keeffe's
later, dark, purely painted flower and fruit pieces. The artist goes
through the world like one carrying aloft in her thin sensitive hands,
above the shoulders of the brushing, brutal crowd of women and of
men, a bubble of a bowl that is her all.
And so, confronted with the work of these three artists, one finds
oneself turning to gaze a little more steadily, and with "wild sur-
mise” at the phenomenon which was called 291 Fifth Avenue. For
if the common trait which first suggests itself to our attention is their
healthiness, the second which comes to our cognizance is the fact
that all of them were intimately associated with the Photo-Secces-
a


668
AMERICAN PAINTING
sion gallery, were championed by it, exhibited, and furthered in the
many ways in which that institution furthered those who came in
contact with it. One had, of course, long felt the great beauty of
the adventure that was the tiny place. The spirit that reigned in the
two little burlap-hung rooms up under the skylight was one of the
very few wholly clean and lovely things in New York. A banner
was planted amid the shifting sands and moving waters of the new
world. The protest made was not so much against the materialism
of America. For, after all, America is not “materialistic”; for
pure
“materialism” one must go to Europe; Americans do not love
money; they squander it madly. The protest of 291 was made
against the fierce disregard of the value of human life, of the value
of materials, forests, sky, against the ruthlessness of destructive
children that is so terribly the Western malady. To the hate and
fear of nature that cloaks itself under the vaulting ambitions of the
business world, there was opposed, always with the accent on their
quality, their humaneness, their personal reference, the revolution-
ary works of contemporary Europe and America. The inhumane
world had intrenched itself in the field of art by means of the belief
that all good work had been done in past time, that this was the age
of the machine, and that there was something fresh, young, and ath-
letic in the disregard for the irresponsibly beautiful. 291 showed
for the very first time in this land, the washes of Rodin, the oils and
water-colours of Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso both as painters and
sculptors, the douanier Rousseau, Picabia, Brancusi, Nadelman, de
Zayas, Hartley, Marin, Weber, Bluemner, Dove, Walkowitz, Stei-
chen, negro and african sculpture, children's work, Strand photo-
graphs, all in the effort to exorcise the American devil with the
truth of present-day life, the call to the inner room, the impulse to
self-knowledge. The small picture-buying public, so it was hoped,
would learn to purchase works of art out of love for the thing itself,
in recognition of the fineness of feeling in which good work is done,
and not in a spirit of personal vanity. The artist, in turn, freed
from the commercial game of the galleries, was to be set free to live
out his life and develop his art. Quality was to be loved.
Well, 291 closed in 1917. The world was to be saved through
"getting” the Kaiser; art might wait until the millennium had been
brought about by the business-men, scientists, armament manufac-
turers, and all the rest of the "mental” workers. Apparently, the
skyscrapers of lower New York had vanquished. What could one in-


PAUL ROSENFELD
669
dividual, assisted by a few dreamers, do against a civilization ?
America was unready for the orientation. And still, to-day it does
not seem so sure that the endeavour of 291 was lost. It seems as
though 291 was but a light carried along by a stream in the night
that showed in which direction the stream was moving. For here
are Hartley, Ray, Demuth, to show that something has been chang-
ing in the character of the American painter since the days when he
first showed himself at the close of the last century. Here are Dove
and Marin and O'Keeffe, moved by something of the same impulse
that moved 291; reflecting something of the same human maturity.
All these people, no doubt, were affected by what was going on in
the gallery. But none of them was actually created by the place.
There must have been in them something of 291 before ever they
heard of it. Otherwise how could they have come into touch with
it? No, to-day it appears much more as though all these manifesta-
tions were but lights afloat a darkling tide. It appears as though
something had changed in life in America itself, that a counter-tide
almost imperceptibly was commencing to move through the country.
A second corner in the history of American culture may have been
turned; the present has the look of a time of transition; we may all
;
see during the next decades, the period commenced by Ryder draw
to a close, transform itself into one of fullest life, change from grey
to white.
Of course, there are moments when such a belief convinces the
holder of his own insanity. What, America produce a great native
expression, America, at this hour! And, indeed, it seems unreason-
able to expect it before an hundred years are over. For if, in times
of prosperity, the life of the true creator is difficult, what will it be
during the next terrible years that are swagging black overhead?
The human race is still busy at its little games; it is still pleased
with its rôle of irresponsible little patient in psychopathic ward.
Not even heaven and the psychoanalysts know what to expect next
of it, whether a poem or a smiling murder. The artists themselves
are still somewhat prone to sell out to their enemies; the dealers are
still prone to knife the artists; the artists to knife one another. The
newspapers are entrusting their criticisms to the younger variety of
sob-sister before dispensing with it altogether. Radical journals
sport critics who write “Ryder is one of the most beautiful things of
the nineteenth century, and to-day we have Maurice Prendergast.”
It is not simple for a country born old to become youthful again.


670
MOUNTAIN VALLEY
The palmer must wander long before his dry staff leafs. It will
be long before American life, in any of its forms, will cease being
predominantly grey.
And yet, again, the dry staff has once before broken into green.
Why should it not once more?
All swans are fledged grey. In maturity, they become white. Are
not people developed by the workings of a similar law? And to-day
so many little water-fowl have been hatched and are swimming
about, marvellously automatically, in the American mill-stream!
a
MOUNTAIN VALLEY
BY MALCOLM COWLEY
Lost in this mountain valley, we have struggled
Too long for bread. Here corn grows sparse and yellow.
The valley is too narrow, and we have driven
Our ploughs vainly against the flanks of the hill.
There is no more use in struggling, O my brothers;
Let us lie down together here and rest.
Some day when the crust of the earth has grown as cold
As the dead craters of the moon, these hills will wrinkle
Like the wrinkles on a forehead; they will draw
Together like a finger and a wrinkled thumb,
Squeezing the valley between them, and there will be
For us magnificent sepulture, O my kin.
.
Already the cold hills lie
Staring down at our cornfields covetously.



g & Clinic
JAN
Courtesy of the Belmaison Gallery
LA MATINÉE ANGOISSANTE. BY GIORGIO DE CHIRICO.


1
i
1


INSANITY
BY MAXWELL BODENHEIM
GEUR
EROID LATOUR was a lean, grandiose Frenchman whose
curly beard resembled a cluster of ripe raspberries. His lips
were maroon-coloured and slightly distended, as though for ever
slyly inviting some stubbornly inarticulate thought—as though sly-
ly inviting Geroid Latour. A man's lips and beard are two-thirds of
his being, unless he is an anchorite, and even in that case they can
become impressively stunted. Geroid Latour was an angel rolling in
red mud. From much rolling he had acquired the pert, raspberry
beard, struggling lips, and the surreptitious grandeur of a nose, but
the plastic grin of a singed angel sometimes listened to his face.
His wife, having futilely tried to wrench his beard off, sought
to reach his eyes with a hat-pin.
“This is unnecessary,” he expostulated. “Another woman once
did it much better with a word.”
A plum-coloured parrot in the room shrieked: “I am dumb! I
am dumb!” Geroid Latour had painted it once, in a sober moment.
Geroid and his wife wept over the parrot; slapped each other
regretfully; and sat down to eat a pear. A little girl ran into the
Her face was like a candied moon.
“My mother has died and my father wants a coffin,” she said.
Geroid Latour rubbed his hands into a perpendicular lustre—he
was a facetiously candid undertaker. He took the hand of the
little girl whose face was like a candied moon and they ambled
down the street.
“I have lost my friendship with gutters,” mused Geroid, looking
down as he walked. “They quarrel with bits of orange peel and
pins. Patiently they wait for the red rain that men give them
every two hundred years. Brown and red always sweep towards
each other. Men are often unknowingly killed by these two huge
colours treading the insects upon a path and walking to an ultimate
trysting-place."
The little girl whose face was like a molasses crescent cut off
one of her yellow curls and hung it from her closed mouth.
"Why are you acting in this way?” asked Geroid.
room.
a


672
INSANITY
a
“It's something I've never done before,” she answered placidly.
Geroid stroked his raspberry beard with menacing longing but
could not quite induce himself to pull it off. It would have been
like cutting the throat of his mistress.
They passed an insincerely littered courtyard, tame beneath its
grey tatters, and saw a black cat chasing a yellow cat.
“A cat never eats a cat-goldfish and dead lions are more to his
taste,” said Geroid. “Indulgently he fees from other cats or pur-
sues them in turn."
“I see that you dislike melodrama," observed a bulbous woman
in penitent lavender, who was beating a carpet in the courtyard.
“You're mistaken. Melodrama is a weirdly drunken plausibility
and cannot sincerely be disliked,” said Geroid. “But I must not
leave without complimenting your lavender wrapper. Few people
.
have mastered the art of being profoundly ridiculous.”
“'I can see that you're trying to be ridiculously profound,” said
the woman as she threw a bucket of stale water at Geroid. He fled
down the street, dragging the child with him. They left the cumber-
some sterility of the city behind them and passed into the suburbs.
“Here we have a tragedy in shades of naked inertness,” said
Geroid to the little girl.
"I don't quite understand you,” answered the little girl. “I see
nothing but scowls and brownness.
A tree stood out like the black veins on an unseen fist. A square
house raised its toothless snarl and all the other houses were jealous
imitators. Wooden fences crossed each other with dejected, math-
ematical precision. A rat underneath a verandah scuffled with an
A
empty candy box. The green of dried grasses spread out like poi-
sonous impotence.
“Here is the house where my mother lies dead,” said the little
girl.
Her father-peace germinating into greasy overalls—came down
His blue eyes were parodies on the sky—discs of sinis-
terly humorous blue; his face reminded one of a pear that had been
stepped on-resiliently flattened.
"I have come to measure your wife for her coffin," said Geroid.
“You'll find her at the bottom of the well in the back-yard,"
answered the man.
“Trying to cheat a poor old undertaker out of his business!” said
Latour, waggishly.
the steps.
9


MAXWELL BODENHEIM
673
a
“No, I'll leave that to death,” said the man. "Come inside and
warm your candour.”
“No, thank you, shrieks travel faster through the open air,” said
Geroid, squinting at the man's sportively cerulean eyes.
“Come out to the well and we'll haul her up,” said the man.
The little girl darted into the house, like a disappointed hobgob-
lin, and Geroid Latour followed the man to the well at the rear of
the house. Suddenly he saw a mountainous washerwoman dancing
on her toes over the black loam. Her sparse greyish black hair
flapped behind her like a dish-rag and her naked body had the colour
of trampled snow. An empty beer-bottle was balanced on her head.
She had the face of an old Columbine who still thought herself
beautiful.
“A neighbour of mine," said the man in an awed voice. “She
was a ballet-dancer in her youth and every midnight she makes my
back-yard a theatre. In the morning she scrubs my floors. Here,
in my back-yard, she chases the phantoms of her former triumphs.
Moonlight turns her knee-joints into miracles!
“Ah, from enormous wildness and pretence, squeezed together,
comes the little drop of happiness,” said Geroid Latour, senti-
mentally.
“My wife objected to my joining this woman's midnight dance,”
said the man. “To prevent her from informing the police, I killed
her. I could not see a miracle ruined."
"Only the insane are entertaining," answered Geroid. “The
egoism of sane people is gruesome-a modulated scale of com-
placent gaieties—but insane people often display an artificial ego
which is divine. The artist, gracefully gesticulating about himself,
on his divan, is hideous, but if he danced on a boulder and waved
a lilac bough in one hand and a broom in the other, one could re-
spect him.”
As Geroid finished talking the mountainous washerwoman drew
nearer and stopped in front of the man. Blossoming glints of water
dropped from her greyish white skin.
"You haven't killed me yet, my dear husband,” she shouted to
the man. Then snatching the beer-bottle balanced on her head she
struck at him. Geroid fled to the front-gate and sped down the
road. Looking back, from a safe distance, he saw the mountainous
woman, the man, and the little child earnestly gesticulating in the
moonlight.
a


NATIVES OF ROCK
BY GLENWAY WESCOTT
The fire cut away
The soft forest
Down to the rose-pink rock
Harder than light.
Movement is not easy
In the mountain clearing
Where all that is not stone
Imitates and is above stone.
We ride so high
That we are embedded
In the air, O crystal,
And cry for love among aspens,
Ferns that uncoil beneath,
Cry discontent. At night
We lie down
On red granite
Ledges, throat on throat,
Mid polished berry rods,
Eyes wide open
For the early rays' stir:
Illusion of antelope
Who make the horizon
Quiver upon their lifted
Spikes, and lap the dew.



Property of John Quinn
JOYEUSE. BY WYNDHAM LEWIS


1
1


LA VIE EN FLEUR
BY ANATOLE FRANCE
III
LE THÉÂTRE DES MUSES
AT
a
a
T Madame Airiau's I met Victor Pellerin, a rich manufactur-
er's son, who was passionately fond of the drama. He was an
enormously fat young man, always perspiring and blown, his eyes
popping out of his head, choleric and affable. Having obtained
from a big gas company, on I know not what terms, the use of a vast
hall at Bercy, he had made it into a theatre where he gave perform-
ances. This theatre had a stage, decorations, wings, and dressing-
rooms for the artists. It was called the Théâtre des Muses, and if
the arts of Euterpe and Terpsichore were seldom practised there,
the teachings of Thalia and Melpomene at least were studied atten-
tively. From this point of view its name was justified, although it
was too classical for a period still dominated by romanticism and
would not have drawn the multitude. That, however, was only a
mild inconvenience for a theatre where admissions were free and by
invitation. I myself found it a very pretty name. The actors were
society people, young amateurs, friends of Victor Pellerin. The ac-
tresses were professionals from the Odéon and other Parisian thea-
tres, and among them were two pensionnaires of the Comédie Fran-
çaise. At a very low rate Pellerin got actresses who were not unskil-
ful, and who worked hard for him. This big fellow, who had all
the qualities of a good theatrical manager, had to an eminent degree
the most important-parsimony. It must be said he needed it; for
his theatre brought him in nothing and cost him a great deal. And
the money he got from his family barely sufficed. I wonder if there
is another art in which he would have had such precious assistance
for so little.
One thing, especially, led me to be present at the rehearsals at the
Théâtre des Muses. I have said that Victor Pellerin was an excel-
lent manager. He chose his plays very well. As each play was put
a


676
LA VIE EN FLEUR
a
on only three times, there was no need of appealing to the larger
public; he cared only about pleasing connoisseurs, and he succeeded
tolerably. When I first met him, he had already staged, among
other plays which had not been seen elsewhere, Ben Jonson's Alche-
mist, the first part of Goethe's Faust, Marivaux’s Les Sincères. Then
.
he thought of playing the Lysistrata, which was at that time an en-
tirely new idea. Remember that I am speaking of a very ancient
period. Knowing that I was fond of Greek art and literature he
thought my advice could help him in transporting Aristophanes to
Paris, and he invited me to come to the rehearsals which took place
in the evenings. I went regularly, not because I imagined that I
should be the least use in the world, but because I enjoyed going.
Goethe who was in love with the theatre used to say that even a bad
a
play poorly played was still a marvellous spectacle. I agreed with
that godlike man. And my enjoyment began at the rehearsals,
where a chaos of movements and words is seen transforming itself
little by little into an orderly sequence of interesting actions. It is
good that men and women, who are at bottom like all men and
women, no worse certainly, but egotistical, greedy, envious, jealous,
wishing one another all possible misfortune, should yet work earn-
estly in the interest of all and create, by stubborn effort, that happy
ensemble for which some must inevitably be subordinate to others.
Lysistrata was Marie Neveux of the Odéon, our best actress and
prettiest, artificially blond with velvet black eyes. She made it rain
or shine at the Théâtre des Muses.
"I don't show any preference among these women," said Victor
Pellerin. "If I did I shouldn't be able to manage them.”
Remark unworthy of such a good manager. The truth is he
showed his preference for Marie Neveux and had no end of trouble
managing his little company. Hence his choleric and discontented
air, the continual scowl, the eyes popping out of his head. But even
had he shown no preferences, he would still have run into innumer-
able troubles in a profession which affords all sorts at all moments,
a profession which he loved for that very reason, and because it en-
abled him to show preferences. His comrades, the actors, had also
their likes and dislikes. The preferences of some interfered with
those of others; but in the end everything was adjusted. I too had
a preference from the start. It was for Lampito, the Lacedemonian
woman, played by Jeanne Lefuel of the Odéon. This rôle is unim-


ANATOLE FRANCE
677
a
portant. Jeanne Lefuel asked me to add a few lines and did not ask
in vain. Fatal consequence of a failing of the heart: I interpolated
the text of Aristophanes! I may say in my defence that the Lysis-
trata suffered such alterations at the Théâtre des Muses that Aris-
tophanes, had he managed by some miracle to be present, would not
have recognized it. But why look for an excuse beyond the eyes of
Jeanne Lefuel? They were of a grey which was not grey, of a grey
which had never before been seen and which will not be seen again,
light, liquid, subtle, aerial, ethereal, with barely perceptible, lu-
minous points of light suspended in them, coming to the surface, div-
ing and appearing again. Jeanne Lefuel was neither as fresh nor as
brilliant nor as insolent as Marie Neveux; but she was better made,
though this, in the eyes of the general run of men, gave her no great
advantage. For it is the face that attracts them first of all, and
makes them indulgent to the rest. Who said that? A master in the
matter: Casanova. He might have added that few know how to ap-
praise the beauty of a figure. As for me, I was very grateful to
Jeanne Lefuel for being made the way she was.
In spite of my additions the rôle of Lampito was still a short one.
Thus Jeanne Lefuel had time to spend and she spent it with me.
We talked. For this we had to get a long way off from the stage.
At the least noise in the auditorium Victor Pellerin would blaze
with wrath and utter furious roars. Jeanne Lefuel had only to
say two words to put me in a state of delight. She had natural wit
and perhaps a little more reading than our other actresses; but that
a
was not what I liked in her. Ordinarily in conversation the subject
matters very little to me; a small subject or a big one finds me well
disposed, but I want it treated to my taste, which is not very ele-
vated; the humblest minds can satisfy it; the most considerable are
likely to wound it horribly. Women for the most part do not fall in
with it. I seldom like their talk, but when I do I like it to distrac-
tion. Let us be frank, correctness in details annoys me. That
had best be left to lecturers. A lecture if you like is a picture, a
painting, well-planned and finished. A conversation is a series of
sketches. Well, my taste in conversation is like my taste in draw-
ing. I demand of a sketch that it be free, swift, incisive, biting, em-
phatic. I demand that it be excessive, that it outrage truth in order
to make it more apparent. I demand as much of a conversation:
what pleases me is a series of rapid studies. The conversation of so-
a


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ciety women doesn't ordinarily give this. The conversation of
Jeanne Lefuel did so continuously, with natural grace. Each time
it was like running through an album of Daumier, and this at a pe-
riod when the talk of ladies in a salon consisted of endless pages
from the Revue des Deux Mondes. The subjects touched by Jeanne
Lefuel were slight, it is true; but the strokes with which she drew
them made them immeasurably larger. Generally she talked of
backstage adventures, rivalries in art and love, the transports of
jealous women, friendships between actresses broken, repaired, and
broken anew in one evening; and still more insignificant stories
of some buffoonery of strolling players—an egg slipped furtively by
Pyrrhus into the hand of Andromache, and Hector's widow, holding
the egg now in her right hand, now in her left, stretching towards
the king of Epirus her suppliant arms: Et vous prononcerez un arrêt
si cruel!...
This delicious art of illustrating her slightest talk, she owed to
nature; and after that she owed it to her profession which teaches
one to see and feel, accustoms one to the form and character of
things. What pleasant moments I passed thanks to her in the great,
bare, ill-lighted hall of the Théâtre des Muses.
The rehearsals ended about midnight and the sensible people
went home. After that we summoned spirits. All of these women
were spiritists. I am not sure whether Jeanne Lefuel, who made the
table turn outrageously with her own hands, did not herself believe
in spirits. The table was sometimes slow in warming up, but it
tipped in the end. How could it have resisted indefinitely the pres-
sure of so many impatient hands? The spirits were questioned by
typtology, that is, by agreeing with them either on an alphabetical
code, or on the conventional meanings of table tapping. One tap
meant a, two b, three c, and so on. Or one tap for yes, two taps for
no. In this way the spirits gave their answers, some of which had no
sense, and they were not the worst. When I showed surprise at
their stupidity our duenna, whose name was Thérèse Duflon, said
not unreasonably:
“They are the spirits of the dead, and because one is dead it does
not follow that one is clever."
Thus we vainly questioned as to her present condition a carder of
mattresses, recently deceased at Amiens. The poor soul who had
never known much about life, knew even less about death. And
this was the case with the majority of souls who talked through the


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679
table. It had its familiars, among whom one, Charlie, was very foul-
mouthed, and a certain Gonzalve whom Mademoiselle Berger rec-
ognized as a lover she had loved and unfortunately lost. We be-
came sentimental over these touching meetings between the dead
man and the living woman. But taps struck by a table leg did not
afford passion a very rich language, and Gonzalve bored us. One of
our prettiest actresses, Rosemonde by name, threw herself into the
practice of necromancy with more ardour and curiosity than the oth-
ers, even than Mademoiselle Berger herself; she believed that she
had called up the soul of a little girl named Luce, who died at the
age of seven after appearing in a play at the Odéon, thus repeating
the experience of little Septentrion, the child who danced twice on
the stage at Antipolis and was a success. Biduo saltavit et placuit.
Rosemonde besieged Luce with questions about her so brief life on
earth and about her present state. It was pointed out that she
answered with much lighter taps than the other spirits, and that her
sudden materializations were in keeping with her childish nature.
Rosemonde after several trials was able to get in touch by typtology
with an aunt of Luce's. And among other things which she asked
this dead lady, she wanted to know whose daughter Luce was. Ill-
satisfied by the aunt's replies, the inquisitive Rosemonde, who had
finally made the acquaintance of several deceased members of little
Luce's family, conducted a long and confused inquiry, without suc-
ceeding in distinguishing between the child's mother and grand-
mother. And her curiosity was no better satisfied than that of the
scholars who wanted to know the parentage of Menou, the little
girl in Molière's company.
In spite of the most obvious jokes, the most manifest frauds, and
the least mysterious mystifications, which never ceased during the
dance of the tables, these women, some of whom were intelligent,
believed that the dead were present in person in that great hall,
lighted with three candles, where like Ulysses in Cimmeria we per-
formed the rites of the Nekuia, while on all sides hung vast curtains
of shade. Sometimes, suddenly terrified, for no reason, the women
would rush away from the table, would scream and circle like great
birds; would seize and repulse one another, becoming entangled in
their skirts, fall, cry for their mothers, cross themselves. And five
minutes afterwards, they were round the jumping table again, with
exclamations of joy, cries of astonishment, and great bursts of laugh-
ter. And this until two or half past two in the morning.


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a
After that it remained for me to take Jeanne Lefuel to her home,
rue Vaneau. This was not done in a moment. First of all one had
to find a cab, a difficult and hazardous feat, particularly when it was
raining. If one was lucky, one would after fifteen or twenty
minutes stop a hack with red curtains, surmounted by an old coach-
man in a box coat driving a decrepit nag, or to speak more accurately,
a horrible old plug. In this rig it took all of an hour to reach the
Luxembourg. I did not complain at this. We were alone, and con-
versation more intimate. I talked with entire confidence, with com-
plete abandon, and with that irresistible need for surrender which I
felt when I was with her. She, on her part, talked of what she was
interested in without embarrassment or hesitation. But she was far
from telling everything and I felt that even in her most reckless con-
fidences she kept a great part of her life, her feelings and actions, to
herself. No doubt this was out of prudence; it was also, I think be-
.
cause she was detached, to a degree which is hard to imagine, from
past and future, and few women could have lived in the moment as
she did. To this practice she owed her peace of mind. She was ig.
norant of regrets and did not know anxiety. A soul as serene as a
calm sea.
The cab would stop at 18 rue Vaneau. When we still had some-
thing to say, I used to send away the coachman and climb to the
third floor where Jeanne's little apartment was. To get in one rang
a bell, but to have the porte-cochère opened for one, that was the
job, that was the task, as Virgil says. After stubborn efforts, shak-
ing the bell and hammering the door with your fist or kicking it, you
succeeded in waking the doorman. Sesame opened: and you were
rewarded for your trouble. The actress's room was not rich; the
furniture consisted of an iron bed, a walnut bureau, and a wardrobe
with a looking glass; but it was remarkably clean and neat. Jeanne
decorated the doors in odd fashion with verses of her own making in
a frame of flowers painted in water-colour. These verses were not
without grace but contained errors in prosody which shocked me.
Nobody would notice the errors to-day. I am writing of another
time.
One morning I went to see her and found her sewing. Big, round
spectacles with tortoise shell rims sat strangely across her nose. She
was surrounded by a quantity of little old boxes and sewing cases,
like the careful housekeeper she was. And it is thus that I most love
to remember her.
a


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681
Three months after our meeting at the Muses' Theatre, we ceased
for ever to see each other, for no reason, simply because life no
longer brought us together.
DIGRESSION
One day, in my room, I was reading Virgil. I had loved him since
college but once the professors had stopped explaining him to me, I
got to know him better and nothing now spoiled his charın for me.
I was reading the sixth Eclogue with enchantment. My ugly
little room vanished; I was in the cave where Silenus went to sleep
Ι
and let fall his garland. With young Chromis, Mnasyllus, and
Aegle, the loveliest of the naiads, I listened to the old man, stained
with the blood of mulberries, whose songs made fauns and wild ani-
mals leap in cadence and taught the oaks to wave their lofty tops.
He told how, through the great void, the seeds of earth, air, and sea
were gathered together, how the liquid ball of the world began to
harden, shutting Nereus in his deeps, and began itself little by little
to take substantial shapes; he told how already the earth saw with
wonder the glow of the new sun and how the rains fell from the
highest clouds. Then for the first time forests began to grow and a
few animals wandered on unknown mountains. Then he told of the
stones thrown by Pyrrha, of the reign of Saturn, of the birds of the
Caucasus, and Prometheus' theft.
That day I followed Silenus no farther. Beneath the iridescent
veil of poetry I admired his solid philosophy of nature. After hav-
ing studied these profound views of the origin of the earth, how put
up with oriental cosmogonies and their barbarous fables? Virgil
lends his Silenus the language of Lucretius and the thoughts of the
Greeks. And he thus formed an idea of the origin of the earth which
agrees amazingly with modern science. It is generally believed to-
day that the sun at a very high temperature spread out its immense
sphere beyond the present orbit of Neptune and contracting as it
cooled left from time to time, in the space it no longer occupied, rings
of matter, which, splitting and contracting in their turn, formed the
planets of the solar system. Thus it is believed the earth was made,
at first diffuse and Auid and cooling gradually. After the heavy
rains of fused metal which charged its burning atmosphere, there fell
from high clouds the water of the fertile rain. This is precisely


682
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what old Silenus says. The globe was first covered with a hot shal-
a
low sea. Continents heaved up. Air at length fresh and pure let
through the sun. Grasses and giant ferns crowned the hills. Ani-
mals were born and last of all man. Thus in these immemorial
times the destiny was accomplished by which the earth became the
perpetual home of crime. Plants sucking with their roots the juices
of the earth, were fed; innocent alone among all creatures, they
formed their living substance by distilling with marvellous instinct
lifeless or at least unorganized substances, for it cannot be said of
anything in the world: that is lifeless. The plants had arisen, ani-
mals could arise. Rara per ignotos errant animalia montes.
The first animals, wretched, without spines or brain, lived on the
forest grasses. Thus animal life began by murder. Oh! I know
well enough we never say that a tree is put to death: but that is what
ought to be said, for it was alive. Did it feel? We deny that; we
say that it had no sense organs, that it was not an individual, that it
could not know itself. Yet this bearer of flowers celebrates nuptials
the splendour and fecundity of which are unsurpassed by anything
we know. And if, as I do not believe, it be insensible, it is no less a
living thing and to cause its death is as much an insult to life as to
kill an animal.
Meanwhile the animal species, one springing from another, were
gaining in strength and intelligence. They acquired a brain and
nerves which made them conscious of themselves and put them in
communication with the external world. Some lived on grass; but
the majority devoured the flesh of animals of weaker and less agile
species. Wretched inhabitants of forests and mountains, it was not
enough that their miserable existence be threatened by hunger and
sickness, and pledged to death; it must be spent from beginning to
end in fear of the enemy, and among horrors which, brutes though
they were, terrorized them. Man came as the last of the animals,
related to them all and to some closely. The terms by which he
is still known to-day point to his origin: he is called human and
mortal. What names would better fit the wild animals who like
him inhabit the earth and are subject to death? Man is incompar-
ably more intelligent than his brothers; but his intelligence is not of
a different order. And what makes him the equal of them all is the
obligation he is under of eating to live that which has been alive, the
law of carnage which weighs upon him as upon them, and has made
him ferocious. He is carnivorous; in order not to be ashamed of


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683
killing his brothers he denies them and boasts of his superior origin;
but everything about him shows his kinship with the animals; like
them he is born, like them he feeds himself, like them he reproduces
himself, like them he dies. Like them he is subject to the law of
carnage imposed on all inhabitants of the earth. He makes use of
his incomparable intelligence in order to enslave the animals he
needs. And, although he has well-stocked stables, the hunt is his
favourite occupation. That was the greatest pleasure of kings; it
is so still. He abandons himself to slaughter with an intoxication
which is not felt by other animals. Like the wild beasts which do
not eat one another, he refrains from devouring the flesh of men;
but, and this is what other animals rarely do, he kills his own kind,
if not to eat them, at any rate to take from them some coveted pos-
session, to prevent them from enjoying what belongs to them, or just
for fun. This is what is called war, and men make war with volup-
tuous pleasure. Doubtless they would not think of committing this
extravagant crime if the necessity of killing animals for food had
not prepared their minds for it. The fates have willed it: from the
beginning of life until to-day, the earth has been vowed to carnage,
and will follow her vocation until life withdraws from her. Kill to
live will be the eternal law.
I was thinking of this obligation from which none of us may es-
cape. The sun had set, I opened my window, I watched the first stars
.
come out and thought with horror that the destiny of this world, far
from being unique in its atrocity, is perhaps the destiny of myriads
and myriads of worlds, and that in the infinite spaces, wherever liv-
ing beings are found, they are perhaps subject to the same law as we.
Are the worlds inhabited? The only planets we have seen, that we
shall ever see, are those of our system. They are our sisters, and like
us, daughters of the sun. But they were not born at the same time,
nor situated at an equal distance from the life-giving star. Some are
perhaps still too young to give birth, others too old. Some are en-
veloped in thick atmospheres which seem stifling; the rarefied atmos-
phere of others would be unbreathable for beings like us; those which
we see at the opposite side of the sun occupy regions of cold and
shade. We cannot say, however, that these stars have not ever car-
ried, do not or will not ever carry beings upon their surfaces; we
know too little of the conditions in which life can exist. May these
sisters of the earth give being to beings less unhappy than we. But
is not each sun which we see, like a point of fire in the distances of


684
LA VIE EN FLEUR
ether, accompanied by its train of planets, and may not these planets
be inhabited? We believe so, for we know the suns are all composed
of almost the same materials, and we judge these distant stars by the
one which gives us light.
If we guess rightly, if, like ours, all the worlds are inhabited or
were or will be, if these inhabitants are subject to the same laws
which govern our world, the evil brims over, it embraces the infinite,
and the wise man has nothing left but to fly from life or laugh at so
pleasing a circumstance. Rara per ignotos errant animalia montes.
Old Silenus, stained by the most lovely of naiads with the blood
of mulberries, whither has it led me, this verse you sang to Mnasyl-
lus, to beautiful Aegle, to the fauns, to the forest oaks. Sing again,
divine drunkard, sing Pasiphaë, and make me forget my sombre
reveries.
DO NOT WRITE
For nearly two years M Dubois had been coming only at long in-
tervals to our house which he once frequented so steadily; he seemed
not to enjoy it any more. During his brief visits he did not tease my
mother on points of morality or belief. Now that I could appreci-
ate them more he was sparing of the severe and lofty phrases, the
rich meaty discourse which he once squandered on a child. Was he
tired of thinking and of speaking? Were his many years beginning
to weigh on him? It was not evident; he had not changed and
seemed immutable. Perhaps now that he no longer found in me the
soft wax on which he used to impress his thoughts, he was not flat-
tered by communicating his ideas to a great oaf who opposed them
with his own, and sometimes with little measure and not enough
deference. However, one morning in autumn we heard his sharp
imperious ring. Large dark-blue spectacles hid his eyes. He sat
down in an armchair, gathered the tails of his bottle-green frock coat
over his legs, and talked as magnificently as ever; in his mouth
abounded “divine words, as the snow on the hill-tops in winter.”
“I think,” he said among other noteworthy things, "I think, my
friend, that the idea of progress must be familiar to you. To-day it
circulates universally, and one might be surprised that this idea
should prevail in a generation which, owing to its inferiority, is
further from substantiating it than any other. But religious feeling
has weakened of late, and has allowed the idea of stability imposed


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685
a
by dogma to be gradually supplemented by the notion of unlimited
free progress in liberty. This idea flatters people and that is enough
to make them believe it. All unanimously accepted ideas are those
which please their vanity or fall in with their hopes—agreeable
ideas; and it matters little whether they are well founded or not.
Let us look a little at that progress which is always on the lips of
your contemporaries. What are we to understand by the word? If
we define it like good grammarians, it means an increase in good or
in evil, in so far as we can distinguish good from evil; and in this
way it represents the very march of humanity. But if we say, as
people do nowadays when they no longer know how to think and
how to speak, that it is the never-ending movement of humanity
towards perfection, we say something which does not correspond to
the facts. Such a movement cannot be observed in history, which
traces for us only a series of catastrophes and of progressions always
followed by retrogressions. The first men were without arts and
.
miserable, no doubt, but the progress of their posterity in industry
brought as many ills as benefits and multiplied the suffering and the
misery of our species quite as much as its power and comfort. Let
us observe the most ancient races which left monuments of their
genius and compare them to ourselves. Do we build better than the
Egyptians? In what are we superior to the Greeks? I do not deny
their vices and defects. They were often unjust and cruel. They
.
exhausted themselves in fratricidal wars. And we? . . . Are our
philosophers wiser than theirs and is there in France or Germany a
more profound thinker than Heraclitus of Ephesus? Do we make
statues more beautiful or temples more serene than theirs ? Who
would dare to pretend that there has appeared, in modern times, a
poem more beautiful than the Iliad? We are keen on spectacles; do
ours equal in beauty a trilogy of Sophocles played in the theatre at
Athens? Shall we talk of moral ideas? We must go back to the
Eleusinian mysteries to find the highest conception of death known
to our race. Come to organization and the maintenance of order
among nations. A powerful effort was once made in this direction.
It was when Augustus closed the temple of Janus and erected an al-
tar to peace in Rome, and when the immense majesty of the pax
romana enveloped the world. But Rome perished. The world,
since its fall, has been given into the hands of barbarians who, even
to-day, far from taking up the task of Caesar and Augustus, con-
demn the idea for fear of finding it an obstacle to their mad lust for


686
LA VIE EN FLEUR
murder and pillage. And, among all these hostile peoples, no man
thinks of the institution which might assure universal tranquillity,
of the establishment of powerful Amphictyonies which should domi-
nate the states and constrain them in the right; and if a citizen were
found to express his desire for this new thing, the salvation of hu-
manity, he would be scoffed at by the good citizens of his own coun-
try and of every other for trying to deprive patriots of their dearest
privilege—that of murdering for spoil. And this unanimity of peo-
ples in hatred and jealousy shows well enough towards what sort of
progress they are hastening.
“In science, I am not unwilling to admit that we are far ahead of
the ancients. The sciences are built up of the successive deposits of
generations. It took more genius to found them as the Greeks did
than to bring them to the degree of astonishing perfection to which
we have brought them. We know of epochs when all culture perished
from wide areas of the world. But even in the happy times when
generation after generation added its portion to the achievement of
science, it does not seem that the advancement of learning and the
multiplication of inventions did much to ameliorate our morals.
And-most discouraging of all in my opinion—when a science is
perfected and brings a new and certain piece of knowledge, when
astronomy, for example, reveals to us the structure of the universe,
men of culture cannot find the high intelligence to deny whatever
beliefs do not agree with their new idea of the universe. No. They
preserve the ancient errors, after their falsity is demonstrated, and
so give proof of a desolating stupidity. Boast of progress, gentle-
men, take pride in your growing aptitude for perfection, march on
singing your own praises until you come a cropper.”
M Dubois, having abandoned this topic, took from his pocket a
little volume in-18, one of the fine series of Greek poets published
at the beginning of the nineteenth century by Boissonade. It was a
volume of Euripides. He opened to the place in the Hippolytus
and read the nurse's speech. He read it in French, whether out of
consideration for my mother who was present, or because of his vast
contempt for the teaching of Greek as it was practised at the Uni-
versity in the Second Empire.
“The life of man is all sorrow and there is no truce to his sufferings.
But if anything more precious than this life exists, a dark cloud en-
velopes it and hides it from our eyes, and we are desperately enam-


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oured of this life which flourishes upon the earth because we know
of no other, know nothing of what passes in Hell, and are deceived
by fables.”
>
M Dubois repeated this passage:
"We are desperately enamoured of this life which flourishes upon
the earth because we know of no other, know nothing of what passes
in Hell, and are deceived by fables.”
"Euripides,” he said afterwards, "was a profound philosopher
and he lent his wisdom—a little too generously perhaps to the old
nurse of the Queen. He is right in saying that men are attached to
this life, however bad it is, and he is not wrong in saying that the
stories told of the other world are terrifying. But I, who am not
afraid of Hell and do not allow myself to be deceived by fables—I
wonder if I haven't still some attachment to the life which glitters
here on the earth, where, in more than three-quarters of a century, I
have not enjoyed a single day of happiness. Understand this, my
friend: although Fate has spared me the great evils of which it is
prodigal to so many others; although I have not suffered cruel sick-
ness, nor afflictions which confound nature, I should not care to re-
peat one single day of my life. And yet, I tell you, I wonder wheth-
er, contrary to all common sense, I am not awaiting some gift, some
favour from this life, the natural term of which I have exceeded. In
that I am human. We love life. And I must admit—if not by ex-
perience at least by logic, that this dog of a life' (as Mme de
Sévigné called it) may hold some good thing which I never was
aware of. It has some excellence, for we know no other life, yet we
get an idea of good from it as well as an idea of evil. But the apti-
tude for happiness is not the same in all men. It seems to me to be
greater in mediocrities than in superior men or in imbeciles. We
ought to wish those we love to possess mediocrity of mind and of
heart, mediocrity of condition—all the mediocrities."
Having let fly this shaft with his usual impassive air, M Dubois
drew out his large red silk snuff-taker's handkerchief and lifted it to
his lips; then, holding one corner in his teeth, twisted it into a cord
with both hands. In his history of Madame Récamier, M Herriot
bears witness that Chateaubriand made almost the same gesture at
L'Abbaye-au-Bois when an attempt was made to associate him with


688
LA VIE EN FLEUR
praise bestowed on a young poet. M Dubois remained a long time
in this attitude, then put his handkerchief back in his pocket and
asked me what had become of that Lives of the Painters on which he
understood I was collaborating and of which nothing had been heard
for some time.
I answered truthfully that our general history of the painters had
not met with the good reception which had been expected and that
we had been obliged to stop work at the very beginning. I added
that I had lost an agreeable and singularly useful occupation and
that now I was collaborating on a large dictionary of antiquities-
but that the task was harder and paid less.
“It is all right,” he replied, "to write notes on artists of the past
and articles on archaeological subjects. That sort of work doesn't
feed you, but otherwise it is without drawbacks for the man who
does it, if he has the knack. A good compilation does not compromise
the man who brings it to a successful completion and may even bring
him some honour without exposing him to many dangers. It is not the
same, my friend, with any literary work where the author sets the
imprint of his personality, defines, reveals, and expresses himself,
or seeks to distinguish himself in poetry, fiction, history, or philoso-
phy. That is an adventure you must not undertake if you care for
peace and independence. To publish an original book is to run a
terrible danger. Believe me, my friend: hide your mind. Do not
write. If you publish a book which is too weak to attract attention
and lift you out of obscurity, which is most likely, for talent is very
rare, give thanks to the gods: you will have escaped your ill-fortune,
and at most you will have run the risk of being ridiculous in private.
That is not terrible. But if, by some impossible chance, you have
enough talent to be noticed, to gain some reputation (I do not speak
of glory) if you are renowned, farewell tranquillity, quiet, peace!
farewell repose, the most precious of blessings! The envious pack
,
will never stop barking at your heels; the innumerable army of the
talentless which fills the theatres and the editorial rooms will spy
upon your actions and make them into crimes, they will overwhelm
you with outrage. They will publish thousands and thousands of
slanders about you. And people will believe them. We do not al-
ways believe disparaging things because we do not always believe
the truth; but we always believe slander which is prettier. Journal-
ists bound to inform public opinion will say that you violated your
mother and assassinated your father; they will say that you have no
a


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689
talent; your books will bring you friends, no doubt, but they will be
far from you, scattered, silent; they will do nothing, they will say
nothing. They too will make you suffer much. They will prefer
your most mediocre books. And when you write bold and profound
pages which pass by the run of readers, they will not follow you.
And the envious will always be on hand to finish you.
"Do not write."
It was the M Dubois of the old days. It was M Dubois himself
again. He even teased my mother and explained to her the uses and
advantages of the prayer-wheel.
When he had left, my mother, who was watching him as he passed
through the courtyard, said that he walked with a firmer
step
and
finer carriage than the young men of to-day. She kissed me on the
neck and whispered in my ear, “Write, my son, you will have talent,
and you will silence the envious.”
a
a
The next morning we learned through a messenger sent by his old
housekeeper, Clorinde, that M Dubois was dead. Twenty minutes
after receiving this news I entered the apartment on the rue de
Sainte-Anne which I had seen but once, but which had left a remark-
able impression with me. In the antechamber Clorinde was telling
visitors that Monsieur had not awakened when she brought him his
breakfast, she had called him and touched his shoulder and he had
given no sign of life; then she had run to find the doctor, who when
he returned with her to the house declared that death had come sev-
eral hours before.
She wept copiously and smelled strongly of wine.
I saw him on his deathbed. His face, a dull reddish colour when
he was alive, now seemed cut in white marble, it seemed to belong to
a robust man in the prime of life. Above his head I saw the beauti-
ful nudes of the Italian school which he had loved so much and the
Céline by Gérard which had troubled my adolescence.
My eyes returned to the terrible beauty of the dead. He was in-
tellectually the greatest man I had known or was to know through-
out my long life, and yet I have known people who have made them-
selves famous by their writings. But the example of M Dubois and
of some others who, like him, left no works, has made me suspect
that the greatest human worth may have perished without leaving a
trace. And need we be so astonished that those who despise glory
should be superior to those who conquer it with flattering words?


690
LA VIE EN FLEUR
EPILOGUE
These memories, which are a continuation of the book of Petit
Pierre, are true in their principal facts, in characters and manners.
When I began to jot them down, without continuity or order (in Le
Livre de mon Ami and in Pierre Nozière) many witnesses of my
childhood were still alive and I was turning them over to the public;
I was bound to change their names and their circumstances in order
not to offend their pride or their modesty. These are feelings of ex-
treme sensitiveness among people happy enough to live in obscurity.
The mere sight of their names in a newspaper excites them; praise
and blame trouble them equally when they are made public. My
father and mother were still with me. With nothing but praise to
give them, nothing but gracious acts to repay, I still had to offer
my gifts disguised if they were to give pleasure.
It is a long time they have rested, side by side, under a mossy
stone, at the edge of the wood which sheltered their peaceful old age.
And now that the devastating years have swept torrentially over my
childhood and carried all things away, I am still afraid of injuring
by mischance some one of those fibres of my filial piety which plunge
so deeply into the
past.
So I had to do as I have done or not publish these little stories dur-
ing my lifetime, according to the custom of those who write their
own biographies or parts of them. I venture to say, with one of the
splendid improprieties of language, that almost all memoirs are me-
moirs from beyond the grave. But I have not dedicated “My Child-
hood” to posterity, nor supposed for a moment that the people of the
future could be interested in these trifles. I think now that all of
us, just as we are, big and little, will have no more of a poster-
ity than did the last writers of Latin antiquity, and that the new Eu-
rope will be too different from the Europe which is foundering at
this moment before our eyes to care about our art and our thought.
Not being a prophet I did not foresee the approaching terrible ruin
of our civilization when at the age of 37, midway in the path of life,
I changed little Anatole into Little Pierre.
For my own sake I was not sorry to change name and station. I
found it easier to speak of myself, to accuse and praise and pity and
laugh at and scold myself at will. At Venice, in the old days,
passersby who did not wish to be spoken to would attach a little
mask to a button on their cloaks, thus warning others not to address


ANATOLE FRANCE
691
а
a
them. Likewise this fictitious name while it did not disguise me
indicated my wish to be invisible.
This disguise was also very advantageous to me because it allowed
me to dissimulate the faults of my memory which is very bad and to
confuse the wrongs of memory with the rights of the imagination.
I could invent circumstances to replace those which had escaped me.
But these inventions never had any purpose other than the desire to
show the truth about a character; indeed, I think no one ever lied in
a more truthful fashion. Jean-Jacques, somewhere in his Confes-
sions, made a similar declaration, it seems to me. I say that my
memory is very bad. I must explain: the greater part of the im-
pressions it has received are totally lost, but the few that remain are
very clear and make a brilliant collection.
This manner of writing about my childhood offers one more ad-
vantage which is, in my opinion, the most precious of all: that of
associating, in however slight a way, fiction with reality. I repeat:
I have lied very little in these pages and never in essentials; but per-
haps I have lied enough to instruct and to please. The naked truth
is never seen. Fiction, fable, story, myth—these are the disguises
under which men have always known and loved the truth. I should
be tempted to believe that without a bit of fiction Petit Pierre would
not have pleased any one; and that would have been a pity, not for
me, who am without desire, but for those to whom it has brought
sweet thoughts and taught the quiet virtues which give happiness.
Without a bit of fiction it would not have smiled.
However I do not mean that this disguise is without its disadvan-
tages. Whatever decision we take we must expect to find some of
the consequences disagreeable. My confrère Lucien Descaves, with
his delicate perception and his strong sense of the real, showed, one
day when he was analysing Le Petit Pierre, all that my father lost
when my imagination made him into a doctor. I admit that he lost
his book-shop, which is not a small thing in the eyes
of a bibliophile
like Lucien Descaves. But what I know better than any one else is
that my father had no attachment for that book-shop of which I de-
prived him. Shorn of all commercial spirit he was more fit to read
than to sell his books. His mind, purely metaphysical, never con-
sidered the outsides of things; he did not care for the appearance of
books and had an aversion to bibliophiles. I will say, without para-
dox, that Doctor Nozière in his office resembles my father more pro-
foundly than my father himself in his book-shop. What I took


692
LA VIE EN FLEUR
away from him was an accident of fortune and I gave him in ex-
change what accorded with his nature. None the less I did indeed
suppress a book-shop. Let Lucien Descaves forgive me, remember-
ing that I opened one in another place for Jacques Tournebroche.
Descaves has noted, I believe, my gravest fault. I hope that no one
will blame me very much for having transferred the home of my
godfather to within a hundred paces of the rue des Grands-Augus-
tins, in the rue Saint-André-des-Arts, where Pierre de l'Estoile lived.
There are many contemporaries of my childhood whose habits I
have not changed at all; there are many like M Dubois whose name
I kept, merely striking off a title of nobility, which, moreover, he
never used.
I said just now that Petit Pierre was lovable. Like Jean-Jacques
I am tempted to defy any man to say he is better than I am. But I
hasten to add that I do not on that account think highly of myself.
I think that men in general are worse than they seem. They do not
show themselves as they are; they hide when they commit deeds
which will cause them to be hated or despised and show themselves
when they act in a manner which will be approved or admired. I
have rarely opened a door inadvertently without finding something
that made me look with pity on humanity, with disgust or horror.
What can I do? It is not pleasant telling, but I cannot help myself.
Have I always been faithful to that truth I love so passionately?
I flattered myself just now on that score. After ripe reflection I
would not swear to it. There is little art in these stories; but per-
haps a little has crept in; and when you have said art you have said
arrangement, dissimulation, falsehood.
It is questionable whether the language of humanity lends itself
perfectly to the expression of the truth; it derives from the cries of
animals and has kept some of their characteristics; it expresses emo-
tion, passions, needs, joy and sorrow, hate and love. It was not made
to tell the truth. There is no truth in the souls of savage beasts;
there is none in ours, and the metaphysicians who have described it
are lunatics.
All I can say is that what I have done I have done in good faith.
I repeat: I love truth. I believe that humanity has need of it; but
surely it has a much greater need of falsehood which flatters and
consoles and gives infinite hopes. Without falsehood humanity
would perish of despair and ennui.
The End


HIGHER EDUCATION IN CHINA
BY BERTRAND RUSSELL
Con
HINA, like Italy and Greece, is frequently misjudged by per-
sons of culture because they regard it as a museum. The pre-
servation of ancient beauty is very important, but no vigorous for-
ward-looking man is content to be a mere curator. The result is that
the best people in China tend to be Philistines as regards all that is
pleasing to the European tourist. The European in China, quite
apart from interested motives, is apt to be ultra-conservative, be-
cause he likes everything distinctive and non-European. But this is
the attitude of an outsider, of one who regards China as a country to
be looked at rather than lived in, as a country with a past rather
than a future. Patriotic Chinese naturally do not view their coun-
try in this way; they wish their country to acquire what is best in the
modern world, not merely to remain an interesting survival of a by-
gone age, like Oxford or the Yellowstone Park. As the first step to
this end, they do all they can to promote higher education, and to
increase the number of Chinese who can use and appreciate Western
knowledge without being the slaves of Western follies. What is
being done in this direction is very interesting, and one of the most
hopeful things happening in our not very cheerful epoch.
There is first the old traditional curriculum, the learning by rote
of the classics without explanation in early youth, followed by a
more intelligent study in later years. This is exactly like the tradi-
.
tional study of the classics in this country, as it existed, for example,
in the eighteenth century. Men over thirty, even if, in the end, they
have secured a thoroughly modern education, have almost all begun
by learning reading and writing in old-fashioned schools. Such
schools still form the immense majority, and give almost all the ele-
mentary education that is given. Every child has to learn by heart
every day some portion of the classical text, and repeat it out loud
in class. As they all repeat at the same time, the din is deafening.
.
(In Peking I lived next to one of these schools, so I can speak from
experience.) The number of people who are taught to read by these
methods is considerable; in the large towns one finds that even


694 HIGHER EDUCATION IN CHINA
coolies can read as often as not. But writing (which is very diffi-
cult in Chinese) is a much rarer accomplishment. Probably those
who can both read and write form about five per cent of the total
population.
The traditional classical education was, of course, not intended to
be only elementary. The amount of Chinese literature is enormous,
and the older texts are extremely difficult to understand. There is
scope, within the tradition, for all the industry and erudition of the
finest renaissance scholars. Learning of this sort has been respected
in China for many ages. One meets old scholars of this type, to
whose opinions, even in politics, it is customary to defer, although
they have the innocence and unworldliness of the old-fashioned don.
They remind one almost of the men whom Lamb describes in his es-
say on Oxford in the Vacation-learned, lovable, and sincere, but
utterly lost in the modern world, basing their opinions of socialism,
for example, on what some tenth-century philosopher said about it.
The arguments for and against the type of higher education that
they represent are exactly the same as those for and against a classi-
cal education in Europe, and one is driven to the same conclusion in
both cases: that the existence of specialists having this type of
knowledge is highly desirable, but that the ordinary curriculum for
the average educated person should take more account of modern
needs, and give more instruction in science, modern languages, and
contemporary international relations. This is the view, so far as I
could discover, of all reforming educationists in China.
The second kind of higher education in China is that initiated by
the missionaries, and now almost entirely in the hands of the Ameri-
cans. As every one knows, America's position in Chinese education
was acquired through the Boxer indemnity. Most of the Powers, at
that time, if their own account is to be believed, demanded a sum
representing only actual loss and damage, but the Americans de-
manded (and obtained) a vastly larger sum, of which they gener-
ously devoted the surplus to educating Chinese students, both in
China and at American universities. This course of action has abun-
dantly justified itself both politically and commercially; a larger
and larger number of posts in China go to men who have come under
American influence, and who have been taught to believe that Amer-
ica is the one true friend of China among the Great Powers.
One may take as typical of American work three institutions of
which I saw a certain amount: Tsing-Hua College (about ten miles


BERTRAND RUSSELL
695
a
from Peking) the Peking Union Medical College (connected with the
Rockefeller Rospital) and the so-called Peking University.
Tsing-Hua College, delightfully situated at the foot of the West-
ern hills, with a number of fine solid buildings in a good American
style, owes its existence entirely to the Boxer indemnity money. It
has an atmosphere exactly like that of a small American university,
and a (Chinese) President who is an almost perfect reproduction of
the American College President. The teachers are partly American,
partly Chinese educated in America, and there tend to be more and
more of the latter. As one enters the gates, one becomes aware of the
presence of every virtue usually absent in China: cleanliness, punc-
tuality, exactitude, efficiency. I had not much opportunity to judge
of the teaching, but whatever I saw made me think that the institu-
tion was thorough and good. One great merit, which belongs to
American institutions generally, is that the students are made to
learn English. Chinese differs so profoundly from European lan-
guages that even with the most skilful translations a student who
knows only Chinese cannot understand European ideas; therefore
the learning of some European language is essential, and English is
far the most familiar and useful throughout the Far East.
The students at Tsing-Hua College learn mathematics and sci-
ence and philosophy, and broadly speaking almost everything that
is taught commonly in universities. Many of the best of them go
afterwards to America, where they take a Doctor's degree. On re-
turning to China they become teachers or civil servants. Undoubt-
edly they contribute greatly to the improvement of their country in
efficiency and honesty and technical intelligence.
The Rockefeller Hospital is a large conspicuous building, repre-
senting an interesting attempt to combine something of Chinese
beauty with European utilitarian requirements. The green roofs
are quite Chinese, but the walls and windows are European. The
attempt is praiseworthy, though perhaps not wholly successful. The
hospital has all the most modern scientific apparatus, but, with the
monopolistic tendency of the Standard Oil Company, it refuses to
let its apparatus be of use to any one not connected with the hospi-
tal. The Peking Union Medical College teaches many things be-
sides medicine-English literature, for example—and apparently
teaches them well. They are necessary in order to produce Chinese
physicians and surgeons who will reach the European level, because
a good knowledge of some European language is necessary for medic


696
HIGHER EDUCATION IN CHINA
a
a
cine as for other kinds of European learning. And a sound knowledge
of scientific medicine is of course of immense importance to China,
where there is no sort of sanitation and epidemics are frequent.
The so-called Peking University is an example of what the Chi-
nese have to suffer on account of extra-territoriality. The Chinese
Government (so at least I was told) had already established a uni-
versity in Peking, fully equipped and staffed, and known as the
Peking University. But the Methodist Missionaries decided to give
the name “Peking University” to their schools, so the already exist-
ing university had to alter its name to “Government University.”
The case is exactly as if a collection of old-fashioned Chinamen had
established themselves in London to teach the doctrines of Confu-
cius, and had been able to force London University to abandon its
name to them. However, I do not wish to raise the question of ex-
tra-territoriality, the more so as I do not think it can be abandoned
at present, in spite of the abuses to which it sometimes gives rise.
Returned Students (i. e., students who have been at foreign uni-
versities) form a definite set in China. There is in Peking a “Re-
turned Students Club” a charming place. It is customary among
Europeans to speak ill of returned students, but for no good reason.
There are occasionally disagreements between different sections; in
particular, those who have been only to Japan are not regarded quite
as equals by those who have been to Europe or America. My im-
pression was that America puts a more definite stamp upon a student
than
any
other country;
country; certainly those returning from England are
less Anglicized than those returning from the United States are
Americanized. To the Chinaman who wishes to be modern and up-
to-date, skyscrapers and hustle seem romantic, because they are so
unlike his home. The old traditions which conservative Europeans
value are such a mushroom growth compared to those of China
(where authentic descendants of Confucius abound) that it is use-
less to attempt that way of impressing the Chinese. One is reminded
of the conversation in Fothen between the English country gentle-
man and the Pasha, in which the Pasha praises England to the re-
frain: “Buzz, buzz, all by steam; whir, whir, all on wheels," while
the Englishman keeps saying: “Tell the Pasha that the British yeo-
man is still, thank God, the British yeoman.'
Although the educational work of the Americans in China is on
the whole admirable, nothing directed by foreigners can adequately
satisfy the needs of the country. The Chinese have a civilization
a


BERTRAND RUSSELL
697
a
and a national temperament in many ways superior to those of white
men. A few Europeans ultimately discover this, but Americans
never do. They remain always missionaries—not of Christianity,
though they often think that is what they are preaching, but of
Americanism. What is Americanism? “Clean living, clean think-
ing, and pep,” I think an American would reply. This means in
practice the substitution of tidiness for art, cleanliness for beauty,
moralizing for philosophy, prostitutes for concubines (as being
easier to conceal) and a general air of being fearfully busy for the
leisurely calm of the traditional Chinese. Voltaire —that hardened
old cynic—laid it down that the true ends of life are "aimer et pen-
ser.” Both are common in China, but neither is compatible with
“pep.” The American influence, therefore, inevitably tends to elim-
inate both. If it prevailed, it would no doubt, by means of hygiene,
save the lives of many Chinamen, but would at the same time make
them not worth saving. It cannot therefore be regarded as wholly
and altogether satisfactory.
The best Chinese educationists are aware of this, and have es-
tablished schools and universities which are modern but under Chi-
nese direction. In these, a certain proportion of the teachers are
European or American, but the spirit of the teaching is not that of
the Y. M. C. A. One can never rid oneself of the feeling that the
education controlled by white men is not disinterested; it seems al-
ways designed to produce convenient tools for the capitalist pene-
tration of China by the merchants and manufacturers of the nation
concerned. Modern Chinese schools and universities are singularly
different: they are not hotbeds of rabid nationalism as they would
be in any other country, but institutions where the student is taught
to think freely, and his thoughts are judged by their intelligence, not
by their utility to exploiters. The outcome, among the best young
men, is a really beautiful intellectual disinterestedness. The dis-
cussions which I used to have in my seminar (consisting of students
belonging to the Peking Government University) could not have
been surpassed anywhere for keenness, candour, and fearlessness. I
had the same impression of the Science Society of Nanking, and of
all similar bodies wherever I came across them. There is among the
young a passionate desire to acquire Western knowledge, together
with a vivid realization of Western vices. They wish to be scien-
tific but not mechanical, industrial but not capitalistic. To a man
a
they are socialists, as are most of the best among their Chinese teach-


698 HIGHER EDUCATION IN CHINA
ers. They respect the knowledge of Europeans, but quietly put aside
their arrogance. For the present, the purely Chinese modern educa-
tional institutions, such as the Peking Government University, leave
much to be desired from the point of view of instruction; there are
no adequate libraries, the teaching of English is not sufficiently
thorough, and there is not enough mental discipline. But these are
the faults of youth, and are unimportant compared to the profound-
ly humanistic attitude to life which is formed in the students. Most
of the faults may be traced to the lack of funds, because the Gov-
ernment-loved by the Powers on account of its weakness—has to
part with all its funds to the military chieftains who fight each other
and plunder the country, as in Europe—for China must be com-
pared with Europe, not with any one of the petty States into which
Europe is unhappily divided.
While I was in Peking, the Government teachers struck, not for
higher pay, but for pay, because their salaries had not been paid for
many months. Accompanied by some of the students, they went on
a deputation to the Government, but were repulsed by soldiers and
policemen, who clubbed them so severely that many had to be taken
to hospital. The incident produced such universal fury that there
was nearly a revolution, and the Government hastened to come to
terms with the teachers with all possible speed. The modern teach-
ers have behind them all that is virile, energetic, and public-spirited
in China; the gang of bandits which controls the Government has
behind it Japanese money and European intrigue. America occupies
an intermediate position. One may say broadly that the old tradi-
tional education, with the military governors and the British and
Japanese influence, stands for conservatism; America and its com-
merce and its educational institutions stand for liberalism; while
the native modern education, practically though not theoretically,
stands for socialism. Incidentally, it alone stands for intellectual
freedom.
The Chinese are a great nation, incapable of permanent suppres-
sion by foreigners. They will not consent to adopt our vices in or-
der to acquire military strength; but they are willing to adopt our
virtues in order to advance in wisdom. I think they are the only
people in the world who quite genuinely believe that wisdom is more
precious than rubies. That is why the West regards them as un-
civilized.


Courtesy of the Belmaison Gallery
ARLEQUIN. BY PABLO PICASSO


1



pray
BE
A DRAWING. BY PABLO PICASSO


1
1
1


BOOK REVIEWS
MISS SINCLAIR'S LATER WORK
MR WADDINGTON OF Wyck. By May Sinclair. 12mo.
315 pages. $2. The Romantic. By May Sinclair.
12mo. 203 pages. $2. The Macmillan Company.
M.
ISS SINCLAIR’S work has approached such dimensions that
it is appropriate and convenient to speak of it by periods.
The Divine Fire has the characteristics of an early novel of extraor-
dinary promise. The Three Sisters is the work of a mature and
practiced hand, a genuine fulfilment, a classic in its balance and
symmetry, its understanding and authority. In this novel, as in
The Tree of Heaven, the author works in the frame of family life,
and develops a pattern of considerable breadth and variety through
the interaction of her characters. In Mary Olivier the tendency is
perceptible to limit her theme to the interests of a single personality,
to replace width of application by depth of implication, and to seek
compensation for the narrower outlook by more intense penetration.
This tendency becomes more marked in her last two novels, The Ro-
mantic and Mr Waddington of Wyck, but instead of pursuing an
autobiographic method of self-analysis, Miss Sinclair presents her
heroes objectively, as seen by other characters and tested by them.
The Romantic is a study of a single character. John Roden Con-
way manifests himself to Charlotte Redhead, the woman who loves
him. She meets him in the moment of her recoil from another rela-
tion in which a man funks and lies and repents and crawls. She sees
his "spare oval face with the straight-jutting pointed chin,” with
"its look of being winged, lifted up, ready to start off on an ad-
venture. Hair brushed back in two sleek dark wings. The straight
slender nose, with the close upward wings of its nostrils. Under it
the winged futter of his mouth when he smiled.” She knows that
this winged Mercury is “miles beyond . . . the rotten things people
do, the rotten things they think.” She is confirmed in this opinion
by his wanting her to live with him on his farm "without-that,”
.


700
MISS SINCLAIR'S LATER WORK
.
by his assertion: "If I know a woman wants me, it makes me loathe
her ... I should hate her then if she made me go to her.”
They do not try to live in innocence on John's farm. Instead, the
war intervenes and John takes out to the Belgian front two ambu-
lances contributed by his father, with Charlotte, her friend Gwenny
Denning, and Dr Sutton as his command. They are thrown with
another ambulance corps headed by Dr McClane, and having as its
most aggressive member a Mrs Rankin. All these are added to the
gallery before which John plays his part. They bear testimony un-
willingly, bit by bit, to Charlotte's disillusionment. For John Con-
way is a congenital coward. He loves the bright face of danger as
he loves Charlotte, abstractly. Contact with either is impossible to
him. Inspired by these remote, ideal loves he sets forth like a hero,
day after day, with Charlotte by his side, to bring away the wounded
from behind the firing line, and time after time he funks, and lies,
and funks again. Episode after episode unfolds to Charlotte's
horror-stricken gaze the depths of John's character and the illusions
in which he seeks protection, to which he sacrifices his colleagues,
Charlotte herself, and the wounded men entrusted to his care. The
circumstances of each event are defined with the exhaustive skill of
the realist, every fact corroborated by witnesses whose testimony
dovetails perfectly. To add the final touch of authority Dr McClane
is a noted psychiatrist who has seen through John at a glance, and
only awaits his death to announce the theorem of which the narra-
tive is a demonstration—that John was a degenerate, that his whole
life was a struggle to get compensation. “His platonics were a
glorifying of his disability. All that romancing was a gorgeous trans-
formation of his funk. So that his very lying was a sort of truth.
I mean it was part of the whole desperate effort after completion."
Thus Dr McClane. He even explains in Freudian terms certain
anticipatory dreams which Charlotte had had before the war was
thought of.
Mr Waddington of Wyck is curiously like The Romantic in
theme and structure. It also is a study of a single character. Ho-
ratio Bysshe Waddington is seen chiefly through the eyes of his
secretary, Barbara Madden, who checks up on him with his former
assistant, Ralph Bevan. He is allowed independent appearance,
however, and the witnesses who encompass him are more numerous
and varied than in The Romantic. Among them are his wife, Fanny


ROBERT MORSS LOVETT
701
Waddington, whose personality is a wonderfully delicate study, his
son, Horry, and the whole provincial society of Wyck headed by Sir
John Corbett. Barbara sees him first at tea with his wife.
“His eyes bulged with the startled innocence of a creature taken
unaware. He had just lifted his face, with its dripping moustache,
from his teacup, and though he carried off this awkwardness with an
unabashed sweep of his pocket-handkerchief, you could see that he
was sensitive; he hated you to catch him in any gesture that was less
than noble. All his gestures were noble and his attitudes. He was
noble as he got up, slowly, unfolding his great height, tightening
by a movement of his shoulders his great breadth. He looked down
at her superbly and held out his hand.”
a
Nr Waddington of Wyck is post-war fiction. The subject of the
discussion upon which Barbara enters is the starting of a branch of
the National League of Liberty at Wyck in order that England may
be united against Bolshevism and continue to be a free country.
66
Well, dear,' said Fanny placably, “it'll keep you busy for the
next six months, and that'll be nice. You won't miss the war then
so much, will you?'
1
'Miss the war?'
‘Yes, you do miss it, darling. He was a special constable, Bar-
bara; and he sat on tribunals; and he drove his motor-car like mad
on government service. He had no end of a time. It's no use your
saying you didn't enjoy it, Horatio, for you did.''
,
>
But Mr Waddington does not find his chief compensation in the
field of politics, though his speech at the inauguration of the Na-
tional Liberty League of Wyck is a masterpiece of patriotic bunk.
Nor is his time fully occupied with the Ramblings about Cotswold,
the book on which Barbara is engaged to assist him and to which his
own chief contribution comes to be photographs of the author on his
Tudor porch, sitting in his garden, mounted on his mare, Speedwell,
in his motor-car, sitting at his writing-table, or fishing a stream in
wading-boots. No. As John Conway finds it necessary to extend
his personality in pursuit of danger, so Mr Waddington must seek
passion and ensue it. His object is at first a Mrs Levitt, a predatory
a


702
MISS SINCLAIR’S LATER WORK
а
widow from whose clutches he is rescued by Barbara's adroitness,
and then Barbara herself. She and Fanny discover four pairs of silk
pyjamas, remarkable pyjamas of a fierce magenta with forked light-
ning in orange running all over them.“ 'It's a mercy he didn't get
them eighteen years ago,' said Barbara, ‘or Horry might have been
born an idiot.'” He equips himself with a canary yellow waistcoat
"
for the grand scene.
“Mr Waddington tossed his cigarette into the fire with a passion-
ate gesture of abandonment. He came to her. She saw him com-
ing. She saw it chiefly as the approach of a canary yellow waist-
coat. She fixed her attention on the waistcoat as if it were the
centre of her own mental equilibrium.
“This state lasted for one instant. The next she was in his arms.
His mouth, thrust out under the big, rough moustache, was running
over her face, like-like—while she pressed her hands hard against
the canary yellow waistcoat, pushing him off, her mind disengaged
itself from the struggle and reported—like a vacuum cleaner. That
was it. Vacuum cleaner.”
Both The Romantic and Mr Waddington of Wyck are studies in
egoism. In the former Miss Sinclair works through tragedy; in the
latter through comedy. Both John Conway and Mr Waddington
are seeking compensation, the former for a congenital defect, the
latter for a weakness enforced by years and environment. One is
therefore a case of abnormal psychology; the other of what we call
normal. One is revealed through the intervention of the war; the
other against the background of an English provincial town. Both
are studies in individual character, but both are types with a
more general application. In John Conway we see reflected, in a
distorted and exaggerated form, the psychology which in one way
or another played so large a part in the war. Not only the vain-
glorious soldier who skulked and came home to boast, but the patriot
who stayed at home and defended his country through the courts,
and the clergy and ladies who imagined crimes and atrocities and
relieved their souls in hate and vengeance, were seeking compensa-
tion for qualities of which they suddenly felt the lack, and for deeds
which they dared not do. Even the vagaries and tergiversations of
some of the chief figures at the peace table can be understood in the


ROBERT MORSS LOVETT
703
light of this principle of compensation, and the Treaty of Versailles
may be regarded as a document in morbid psychology. But if John
Conway is of wide application as a war type, Mr Waddington is
universal. Here is a genuine humour in Ben Jonson's sense, an
exhibition of the vast inferiority complex under which the male has
always laboured. Miss Sinclair's malicious feminism has scored a
triumph for her sex.
In The Romantic Miss Sinclair works through tragedy; in Mr
Waddington of Wyck through comedy. The former remains a mas-
culine, the latter a feminine book. It satisfies George Meredith's
definition of comedy, and presents a world which, for all the titular
di: ction of man, is really dominated by shrewd, witty, clear-eyed
women. Miss Sinclair succeeds better with comedy than with trag-
edy. There is over-emphasis in The Romantic, an insistence on the
detail of every occurrence, as well as a certain apparent striving for
unity and strain to preserve the point of view by having everything
seen by Charlotte. The fact that she loves John Conway and that
she pays with her love for every episode in his revelation makes the
story quiver with pain. Mr Waddington of Wyck is exact in design
and perfect in texture without a moment of self-consciousness on the
part of the author. It has an atmosphere of good-nature about it.
So deft is Miss Sinclair's hand that she performs the operation upon
Mr Waddington without allowing him to suspect that he has lost
anything. And though that hero is completely destroyed in the eyes
of his beholders, it is by their kindness and pity that he remains in-
tact to himself. Among the minor artifices of the story the skilful
use of properties with their Freudian connotation should not be for-
gotten. Mr Waddington's canary yellow waistcoat, and his py-
jamas flaming in orange, are like Malvolio's cross-gartered stock-
ings, the symbol of the self-love with which he is sick.
Robert Morss Lovett


AN ADVENTURER IN THE ARTS
ADVENTURES IN THE ARts. By Marsden Hartley.
12mo. 254 pages. Boni and Liveright. $3.
I
T is not at all unlikely that Marsden Hartley's Adventures in
a
sounds like cautious commendation, but the truth is that books of
art criticism in America have been not only very dreadful but few in
number. I can recall only one or two that have been of use. Mars-
den Hartley's will be of use, and in reading it, I found myself think-
ing of the now only dimly remembered Studio Talks of the late
William M. Hunt-a book that served for a term, many years ago.
Hunt got to Paris long before Hartley, long before any of us, and
by a piece of Yankee good luck, got to know the martyr, Millet, who
was to prove to Hunt's generation what Cézanne was for Hartley's.
Hunt's ebullient methods of instruction soon surrounded that earlier
Mercury with worshipful pupils and the sayings he dropped to them
when collected later on much impressed the general public which
was pining then as now for an attitude and it obtained several
from Hunt upon that early occasion.
But it is a long time since any one has desired a safe thing to say
upon the subject of Millet. The timid long ago mastered that sub-
ject and the attitudes acquired by the Henry Adamses and their con-
temporaries are one by one being folded up and laid away with their
owners in their graves. A multitude of the intellectually newly rich
have taken their places—more timid even than were their predeces-
sors when brought face to face with a work of art—and they year
for a guide. Marsden Hartley can and may be that guide. He is so
uncannily up-to-date that sceptics may accuse him of making that
his profession. While never being actually number one upon the
scene he may confidently be counted among the first six to arrive. In
saying that it seems to me that I recommend him to the local pride
in the highest of current valuations, for Americans love speed more
dearly than anything. All the way through the Adventures are as
smart as possible and we also yearn for smartness. Only the nicest
people are mentioned. Among the Americans there are Walt Whit-
a


HENRY MCBRIDE
705
man and Emily Dickinson, Albert Ryder and Arthur B. Davies;
among the French, Odilon Redon, Henri Rousseau, Cézanne, and
Matisse; among the English, Francis Thompson, Ernest Dowson,
Henry James, Lionel Johnson. One can, one must like them all.
No space nor steam is wasted upon such vieux jeux as Whistler
and Sargent. In fact, where history begins for Mr Hartley, with
his appraisals of Winslow Homer, Homer Martin, George Fuller,
et cetera, he is at his least useful, and he only reluctantly admires
the most undoubted candidate for world fame that we have yet pro-
duced. "Winslow Homer,” he says, "will not stimulate for all time
only because his mind was too local. There is nothing of universal
appeal in him. His realism will never reach the height even of the
sea-pieces of Courbet. .
Mr Hartley really emerges as a guide only when he begins going
up and down in the world of his contemporaries. Here where all
has been dark and disconcerting to inquiring Americans he waves a
reassuring torch. It is not so much that he supplies dogma or alge-
braic proof but merely that he shows himself enjoying himself fear-
lessly. Being nine-tenths poet it is to the poets among the painters
he flies first. Just as Ryder fares better at his hands among the
older men so does Arthur B. Davies among the newer. He has evi-
dently wished to be a Pater for Davies. This, for instance, is the
sort of interpretation to the outer world that all imaginative paint-
ers long for but so seldom get:
“It contains the history of all the hushed horizons that can be
found over the edges of a world of materiality. It holds in it always
the warm soul of every digit of the moon. Human passion is for
once removed, unless it be that the mere humanism of motion excites
the sense of passion. You are made to feel the non-essentiality of
the stress of the flesh in the true places of spiritual existence. The
life of moments is carried over and made permanent in fancy, and
they endure by the purity of their presence alone.”
I don't quite like the idea of every digit of the moon having a soul
of its own but there can be no question but that Davies must have
been comforted by the general tone of this "adventure.” Mr Hart-
ley enjoys sans peur et sans reproche the amateur quality of the
works of Mrs Jennie Vanvleet Cowdery whom we owe to the Soci-


706
AN ADVENTURER IN THE ARTS
a
ety of Independents. It is absurd that it is an indication of courage
to admire such lovely things as hers, but so it is. It will require less
courage now that our writer has allotted her an entire chapter to her-
self. Better service still is rendered in essays devoted to the artists
who delve into the abstract and from whom the public has been
frightened by the disrepute of the term "Cubistic.” He writes of
John Marin in a way to compel Mr Arnold Bennett to make a sec-
ond trip across the ocean, and of Charles Demuth, Max Weber,
Man Ray, Thomas H. Benton, Charles Sheeler, Abram Walkowitz,
and William McFee, he says: “There may be no least questioning as
to how much success all of these artists would have in their respec-
tive ways in the various groupings that prevail in Europe at this
time. They would be recognized at once for the authenticity of
their experience and for their integrity as artists gifted with inter-
national intelligence.”
As a writer Mr Hartley is uneven. In every essay there are ten-
der and lyrical sentences, sometimes tender and lyrical passages; but
this of Dowson, "He is so like someone one knows, whom one wants
to talk to tenderly, touch in a friendly way, and say as little as pos-
sible," or this of Odilon Redon, “It would seem as if Redon had
surely walked amid gardens, so much of the morning is in each of his
fragile works,” lead one to expect more in the way of naturalness
than one gets. Hartley is himself as he says of Emily Dickinson a
"magician in sensibility” and when he writes of that poetess thinks
unconsciously in her style; when he quotes Walt Whitman, Walt
stays visibly with him for a page or two; and Pater coloured the Da-
vies essay as has been seen. In the essay on Vaudeville there is the
most personal writing in the book. Here the author's muse mounts
a galloping steed indeed. There is a total lack of concern for form
or for niceties of speech and a breeziness results that has our true
racial flavour. There are no beatings about the bush nor hesitancies.
“Burlington Bertie is nothing less than a chef d'oeuvre," and "Fay,
Ella, Cissie, Vesta" are not only "superb girls” but recognized as ge-
niuses of the first water the instant they walk out upon the stage.
This is as it should be. Oh, for a like certainty in the world of art
criticism. But alas, in all the modern world there are very few paint-
ers about whom any of us may be as certain as Hartley is of his su-
perb girls in vaudeville. What is the explanation? Is this, perhaps,
the age of vaudeville?
HENRY MCBRIDE
a


MODIFYING THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Casanova's HOMECOMING. By Arthur Schnitzler.
Translated by Eden and Cedar Paul. 8vo. 199 pages.
Privately printed for subscribers only.
possess such
THE
HERE is one species of poet who, if he quarrels with his mis-
tress in the morning—supposing that poets
still
lovely baggage—writes a poem that day on quarrelling with his
mistress; whereas, if he had been awakened by a piano playing next
door, he would have composed some Variations on Being Awakened
by a Piano. In a much broader way, Schnitzler's procedure has
about it something analogous to this. Since as a much younger
man, that is, Schnitzler wrote Anatol and Reigen, as an older man
he writes Casanova's Homecoming. If this method succeeds, which
it seems to have done in Schnitzler's case, the artist must have one
highly consoling thought as he looks back over the range of his pro-
ductions: he has made the world observe with interest the milestones
of his own personal journey.
Casanova himself, belonging to a rather more glorious century,
and one which could not go sour on the scientific dethronement of
man, found the meditation of his earlier fougues an occupation of
such a delightful nature that he simply could not help retailing them
for everyone. For, as he explains in his capacity as a somewhat
facile philosopher, the joys of his past are still with him because he
can live them again in his memory, whereas the pains are no longer
operative since he is so conscious of their being gone. But then,
Casanova was not particularly interested in the Orphic, that pecu-
liar pudency which was to capture the following century and which
manifested itself in the tendency to qualify to the point of disinte-
gration, to behold with a divided attitude, thus feeling ashamed.
He was content with his facile philosophy.
The comparison is inevitable, since in Casanova's Homecoming
Schnitzler sees so markedly nineteenth century an ending for so
eighteenth century a celebrity. Where Casanova himself—if we
take him at his word—found a perfect satisfaction in recalling an
adventurous past which he could no longer duplicate—Schnitzler


708 MODIFYING THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
sees the chevalier broken and hideous, stripped of human dignity,
and at fifty-three maneuvring to prolong those pleasures which he
had accepted with confidence fifteen years earlier. He reduces the
adventurer by a series of final qualifications, when he has lost the
very essence of his glory; he imagines Casanova as an old man try-
ing to carry off an existence which sits well with a much younger
man.
.
Casanova is decidedly moth-eaten. What money he gets comes
for the most part from petty gambling. He has two suits, one for
every-day and one "for occasions.” At this point he meets an old
school friend, Olivo, who insists that Casanova come stay with him
for a few days on his estate. There is a young woman here, Marco-
lina; Casanova forthwith becomes pre-occupied with this Marcolina
exclusively. She, however, is completely neglectful of his prestige;
she treats him with a mixture of politeness and indifference which
turns to something like revulsion when he makes a few tentative
moves. Also, there is Lorenzi, a young lieutenant whom Casanova
suspects of being in love with her, perhaps successfully.
Sneaking out at dawn, to see if he can catch sight of Marcolina in
her room, he finds the shutters closed and barred. But after a time
,
there is a noise; dropping behind a bench, Casanova spies Lorenzi
taking leave of her. His desire for Marcolina becomes intense, al-
most a necessity. Schnitzler next centres his attention on
getting Lorenzi into a gambling debt, which in a moment of beau
geste, of the old feudal honour, Lorenzi claims he will redeem the
following morning. But he has no money, and is leaving for war
the next day. Casanova, who has won the thousand ducats that
Lorenzi needs, in what is perhaps the most skilfully executed por-
tion of the story, makes Lorenzi a strictly business proposition: he
will give Lorenzi the money if Lorenzi pledges his word that he will
arrange to have Casanova enter Marcolina's room that night, posing
as her lover. Lorenzi agrees; the plan succeeds; Casanova is accept-
ed in the darkness as the lieutenant.
It is from this point that Schnitzler begins pursuing the wretch in
earnest. After describing in a highly romantic vocabulary what hap-
pened in that pitch-black room, Schnitzler begins tracing a set of
wild images in Casanova's brain-a mixture of day-dreams and
nightmare-Casanova awakes, stifling . dawn is penetrating
the thick curtain, and Marcolina is looking at him in horror, at his


KENNETH BURKE
709
yellow, wrinkled face. He sees, by her mute agony, the monstros-
ity of his age. Then Marcolina turns her face to the wall, while
this lean, worn frame pulls itself out of the bed, clasps on its sword,
throws on Lorenzi's robe, and leaps through the window.
Lorenzi is waiting, with his sword. Casanova, a bit cynically,
pulls back his robe and shows that he is naked; whereupon, Lorenzi
undresses as well. Scene: the two men facing each other, stark
naked, the one young, fresh, full-muscled, the other slightly spav-
ined with age and usage; the cool, moist lawn; the dawn still pale
in the east; fencing. Lorenzi is stabbed through the heart; Casa-
nova kisses his dead face; after which the flight to Venice begins.
We end with him established as a spy, in mean quarters, preparing
to give information against people who trust him implicitly.
In Casanova's Homecoming Schnitzler has produced both the tri-
umph and the reduction to absurdity of his method. The story has
been so simplified, so thoroughly focussed on the one subject of Casa-
nova's decay, that every element of it shows up as an accessory.
Certain parts plainly exist, for instance, to establish in the reader's
mind just how splendid a figure Casanova used to be, so that we get
the full force of his going to seed. As the most aggressive instance
of this might be cited the staging of a sight-seeing trip to a convent,
so that, as Casanova is leaving, one of the nuns can break her vow
of silence by whispering his name, the name which belongs not to
him as he is now, but to his former reputation. Other parts exist
for the machinery of the plot, as for instance the first evening of
gambling, which leads imperceptibly into the second evening of
gambling, which leads to a gambling debt, by which Schnitzler can
get Casanova into Marcolina's room; Schnitzler gives us one eve-
ning of gambling so that we accept the second. Or again, we have
Casanova see himself in the mirror, and for no other reason than
that the next morning, when he awakes with Marcolina looking at
him in horror, Schnitzler can give us a cut-back to the face in the
mirror, thus making the point more forceful than if he had tried to
get the full significance of Casanova's wrinkles across at the last
moment. So thoroughly has Schnitzler been permeated by stage
technique—the painless method of insinuation, that is—that we
find it again in such things as this: the story begins with our being
told twice that Casanova has not seen Amalia—whom he had se-
duced just before her marriage—for over fifteen years, while her


710
MODIFYING THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
eldest child is only thirteen; at which point, gentlemen, we have a
perfect right to await the seduction of this eldest daughter, which
comes in time.
I do not recall ever having seen before a structure so elaborately
propped and counter-propped. Nor a piece of prose fiction which
was so much like a play with the he-saids and the she-saids written
in. Schnitzler has become so thoroughly accustomed to objectivi-
zation that even when Casanova thinks, he thinks visually. Still, it
should be pointed out that the plot is thoroughly in keeping with
the theme, for this is the sequence to eight volumes of more or less
elaborate intrigue; a plea which Schnitzler himself makes as skil-
fully as anything in the story, by bringing up here and there various
high points out of the Memoires.
Significantly enough, a somewhat analogous theme has been han-
dled by Schnitzler's one superior as a craftsman of German prose; I
refer to Thomas Mann's Der Tod in Venedig. Here, however, the
raisonneur has been complicated and diseased by years of devotion
to literature; and quite in keeping with the intricacy of von Aschen-
bach's brain-over against the flat “dramatic conflict” of Casanova
with an eyetooth missing—the plot centres on, not a beautiful
young woman, but a beautiful young Polish boy, the entire story
working among half-stified and purely cerebral transgressions.
Mann's treatment is that of a musician, rather than a playwright,
which, I think, will always be the case of a subjective writer who
has gone to the bottom of his methods. Whereas Schnitzler has
produced something as objective as a movie scenario, Mann turns
rather to orchestration, to harmonization, putting out elements not
as "plants,” but as themes to be picked up and developed later, and
assembling his material until he has brought the very air and water
of Venice to bear upon his story. Mann goes for an almost austere
dignity; Schnitzler gets a clarity of evidence which might be found
in the reviewer's vade mecum, I believe, under “Depiction, relent-
I
less.” But if Mallarmé's claim is just and the artist should accept
first of all those properties which are fundamental to his medium,
Mann is more in his province than Schnitzler, for prose fiction is as
inherently subjective as the stage is inherently objective.
KENNETH BURKE


HALF ENCHANTMENT
GHITZA AND OTHER ROMANCES OF Gypsy Blood. By
Konrad Bercovici. 12mo. 227 pages. Boni and Live-
right. $2.
TEL
IELLING as they do of passionate gipsy maidens and of lovely
and remote Tartar wives, of gipsy chiefs and Tartar magnates,
of forest and waste and flood and mountain, how could these stories
fail to intrigue us dwellers in apartment houses? We are all for
these horse-stealing, bear-catching men, and these girls who are
bought and sold, who ride horses and who wield the whip that
tames. We are all for them, and it is only when we turn resolutely
to the best we know in the way of short stories about an untamed
people—to Neil Munro's Lost Pibroch—that we know that we are
not really being enchanted.
Ghitza and Other Romances of Gypsy Blood is an entertaining
book although there is little art in the telling of the stories and little
distinction in the writing of them, and although the men and women
who appear are figures and not lives. One gipsy chief is exactly like
another gipsy chief, and whether the gipsy girls are called Lina, or
Anica, or Tinka there is not the difference of a drop of blood be-
tween them. The story-teller gets more character into his Tartars,
and the tales in which Yahde, the Tartar girl, and Mehmet, the Tar-
tar ferryman, figure are the best in the collection.
But there is always a zest in the way that Konrad Bercovici writes
about the Danubian country—a zest and a romantic detail, and his
zest and his detail carry us along. He writes about his gipsies as a
youth who could express himself and who did have some knowledge
might write about pirates and sloops-of-war and pieces-of-eight.
“For thirty years he had been their ruler. His father and grand-
father, the mighty Lupu, had each ruled the same tribe. Ruled and
ruler knew each other. There was strict discipline on some matters.
No harshness. Murdo was too strong to be harsh. He was too much
of a born ruler to squander his authority on matters not of the first
importance. Tall, broad, straight, with a long white beard and a


712
HALF ENCHANTMENT
grey mane of hair that reached over his shoulders, Murdo was every-
where a distinguished man. At sixty Murdo's black eyes
had lost none of their brilliancy, his strong mouth none of its firm-
ness; his arms, long, brown, and long-muscled, still retained their
steel; and he moved with a litheness unexcelled by the fleetest
youngsters of the tribe.”
It is not a subtle way of making a description. But it registers an
earnestness in the story-teller that is impressive.
The best stories in the book are the two in which there is just a
single, simple situation—Yahde the Proud One, and Fanutza.
There is human nature in Yahde, the Tartar wife, in Fanutza the
gipsy girl, and in Mehmet the Tartar boatman who wants to buy
Fanutza from her father-human nature on the possessive side and
on the side of a fear of being undervalued. When Kurguz Mehmet,
the Tartar magnate, comes to the village where the wife who ran
away from him is in hiding and asks, not for his wife, but for the
horse she rode away on, and when his wife runs out and catches the
bridle of the horse and begs to be taken back with him we have one
of the good situations in literature and Konrad Bercovici does not
spoil it. When Fanutza in the drifting boat recognizes the differ-
ence between the gipsy sentiment as voiced by her father: “All
women are alike,” and the Tartar feeling that prompts the ferry-
man to offer his life's savings for her and to prepare to let the boat
drift over the rapids if he cannot get her, we have another real situa-
tion. Often, in the less simple stories, the situation and even the in-
cident that is being dealt with become unconvincing. For instance,
we are told that Tinka, the gipsy violinist, is regarded as a Madonna
by all her tribe. But Tinka has a love affair and every night she
goes out to the young boyar who is her lover. Is there no watch kept
by the cat-eyed gipsies? Do all of them sleep all through the night?
Apparently this part of the story is not realized by the story-teller.
And in Vlad's Son a great deal is made depend upon the stealing of a
mare. An especial watch is kept by the villagers. Then the mare is
stolen. We are just told she is stolen and we are not shown how.
All this is to say that Ghitza and Other Stories of Gypsy Blood
has nothing that ranks with Carmen. But there is a half enchant-
ment about the stories. They have details that read as if they were
given by someone who actually saw the alien people who figure in


PADRAIC COLUM
713
the stories. These details are often charming. Particularly do I
like the description of the Tartar woman who was to meet so tragic
a fate, Hazi, Sender Surtock's wife:
“Hazi only lifted the lower part of her veil, up to her nose, as she
sat down to eat, and she was as much embarrassed as she was amused
by forks and
spoons and their use. She had never seen such tools be-
fore. She clapped her hands noisily when she saw how skillfully her
husband used a fork and spoon. She had never known Sender to be
such a learned man. Why! he used these tools almost as well as
Effendi. They should buy a few of them before they returned home
across the Danube.
Sender thought it well to excuse his wife's exuberance.
'She is young. She has never been outside her home.
‘But she is good and healthy. She stands me two hundred ducats
in gold! She is the daughter of an Osmanli with the blood of Chi-
ans in her veins.' But mother kissed Hazi and said she would be
very happy to have her near her every winter.”
PADRAIC COLUM


BRIEFER MENTION
LIZA OF LAMBETH, by W. Somerset Maugham (8vo, 221 pages; Doran:
$1.75) was written when Maugham was in his twenties, has been out of
print for several years, and is now published for the first time in America.
It tells the love story of a girl of eighteen, creating the illusion of atmo-
sphere by the spirited repetition of some half dozen colloquialisms which
we feel that Mr Maugham must have conscientiously memorized. Like
Thomas Burke's Limehouse Nights the story bases its claim to originality
upon its selection of material foreign to the average reader. It lacks the
vulgarity of Burke's stories, which rely for their effect upon the titillations
of horror they produce, but it is equally written from outside its subject.
Mr Maugham does not inspire confidence in his knowledge of the girl; he
apes the manners of realism, but writes romance. Although the story is
allowed to act itself out objectively, the feeling persists that the whole per-
formance was arranged by a stranger who was more struck with the oddi-
ties in garb and speech of his characters, and with their delightfully slummy
background, than with the essence of their story. The book is a sincere
and talented attempt to produce literature. It falls short apparently be-
cause of an unconscious tendency in the author either towards mental lazi-
ness or mediocrity. As a result the book bears about the same relation to
real literature that Moon Calf bears to The Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man. No single situation is fully realized, and the characters are
as clearly defined as the figures one passes in the street on a foggy night.
Messer Marco Polo, by Donn Byrne (16mo, 148 pages; Century: $1.25)
shows how well the author can look through the wrong end of a telescope
and dwarf an epic into an attractive bit of bric-a-brac. This love story of
Marco Polo and Golden Bells, daughter to Kubla Khan (who will be re-
membered as the architect of the “stately pleasure dome") furnishes an
opportunity for a deal of colourful writing; ivory, apes, and peacocks is
the motif. Putting the tale in the mouth of the old Ulster-Scotch Irishman,
Malachi of the Glens, permits Mr Byrne to insist on the fact that he is
Irish. It hardly helps the story.
A CITY IN THE FOREGROUND, by Gerard Hopkins (16mo, 318 pages; Dutton:
$2) being a first novel by an intelligent young Englishman, possesses a
sophisticated naïveté that fits admirably the chief protagonist. He is a
forty-year old Don at Oxford who deludes himself into the idea that he
is still “one of the boys.” Along comes the war, kicking respectable Oxford
ideals into a cocked hat, and the Don suddenly feels a cold wind blowing.
When the undergraduates march away in khaki he understands, wretchedly
enough, that his false allegiance to the banner of youth is self-distortion.
The framework of the book allows Mr Hopkins a certain freedom in the
delineation of Oxford life which, of course, includes talks and rows and
drinks. An occasional subtlety will surprise the reader into considering the
book better than it really turns out to be.


BRIEFER MENTION
715
REVIEWS AND CRITICAL PAPERS, by Lionel Johnson, edited, with an introduc-
tion, by Robert Shafer (16mo, 109 pages; Dutton : $2) unlike the first col-
lection of this author's prose, Post Liminium, presents its twelve articles
just as they were written and first published. It is surprising to observe
how well Johnson's dicta hold up in the passing of time. There are re-
views of three of Rudyard Kipling's books, and critical papers treating the
work of R. L. Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne, John Davidson, William
Morris, Mrs Humphry Ward, George Meredith, Austin Dobson, Nico-
las Caussin, Cardinal Manning, and Richard Le Gallienne. Strange bed-
fellows, these; but all possessed points of contact with Lionel Johnson. He
drained a book dry and based his judgements on the aesthetic residue. The
epicurean qualities of Walter Pater adjusted themselves neatly in him to
a determinedly Roman-Catholic scale of values. In spite of this he was a
critic of the first rank.
THUS TO REVISIT
by Ford Madox Hueffer (8vo, 231 pages;
Dutton : $6) resolves itself into a picaresque narrative, with numerous
anecdotal side-journeys, of the search for that phoenix of letters we some-
times call le mot juste. Naturally such an explorative expedition, beset
by the deep waters of strained style and the black rocks of excessive elabo-
ration, led towards certain hardier adventurers, chief among them being
the late Henry James. In Hueffer James assuredly neared the kindred
soul, a co-partner in the great good place, although it is always wise to em-
phasize that disturbing little word "neared.” Hueffer was not so sure of
himself as to cease from combat, but his individualism (described on the
jacket of the book as “brisk”) made him a nomad of letters. When Mr
Hueffer is not concerned with literary theories he proves a delectable jug-
gler with reminiscences, whirling up such provocative figures as James,
Conrad, W. H. Hudson, Stephen Crane, Mr Pound, and Mr Flint, in a
manner that causes them to slip back quite neatly into his scheme of liter-
ary things. We may guess (and a reading of several of Mr Hueffer's
books, including his Collected Poems, appears to verify this assumption)
that Mr Hueffer has been too greatly involved in possibilities, theories, and
propaganda to concentrate much on authentic creation. The brave search
for the perfect word, so stressed by Mr Hueffer, brings to mind a sen-
tence by James: "Now to see deep difficulty braved is at any time, for the
really addicted artist, to feel almost even as a pang the beautiful incentive,
and to feel it verily in such sort as to wish the danger intensified.” Mr
Hueffer may have felt this once; at present, we gather, he rests on his oars.
ESSAYS ON Books, by A. Clutton-Brock (16mo, 181 pages; Dutton : $2) are
reprinted from the London Times Literary Supplement, and are decidedly
worth the bringing together. Although they deal chiefly with literary fig-
ures concerning whom it is generally accepted that the last word has been
said, Mr Clutton-Brock's critical perceptions are not clouded over by other
men's pronouncements. In what he has to say of Shakespeare he disposes
refreshingly of considerable buncombe; writing of Swinburne, he takes issue
with the accepted belief that the poet rewrote himself in his later days. He
displays biographical insight in the essays on Samuel Butler, Keats, and the
Brontës.


716
BRIEFER MENTION
The CONTEMPLATIVE QUARRY AND THE MAN WITH THE HAMMER, by Anna
Wickham (16mo, 136 pages; Harcourt, Brace: $1.75) offers in a single
volume two small books of verse by an English poet who hardly deserves
the laudation that Louis Untermeyer has prefixed to this American edition.
Miss Wickham's work would resolve itself into entertainingly argumenta-
tive essays on feminism if it were not chopped up into rather bad verse.
Her ideas reveal an indubitable personality, pugnaciously modern in its
conceptions, a personality torn between the struggle of equal individuality
in a world of men and the old idea of "the weaker sex.” At times she dom-
inates the reader by adroit argument and revealment but her lines rise infre.
quently to that perilously beautiful plane that is authentic poetry.
WAMPUM AND Old Gold (12mo, 69 pages; Yale University Press : $1.25)
is Hervey Allen's first challenge to fame. He Alings it in the face of the
fickle goddess with the vehement introduction : "I think, by God! It is no
lie; I shall go dreaming till I die!" The inevitable fumbling towards a
definite self-expression fails to conceal certain virtues that are more the
accidents and unexpected illuminations of an authentic individuality than
the poet, it may be surmised, quite intended. Most of the work appears to
have been written before and during the war and this being the case it is
hardly fair to estimate Mr Allen by this book. Rather is it the function of
the critic to accept the last statement in the book which posits that the men
who broke the line of the Hun claim the time by “right divine" and that they
"have a rendezvous with life.” The results of that assignation will make
manifest Mr Allen's importance.
nas-
The Captive Lion, by William Henry Davies (12mo, 99 pages; Yale Uni-
versity Press : $1.50). Although occasionally distinguished by a striking
phrase or an arresting thought, these poems are for the most part marked
by a consistent mediocrity, not poor enough for definite censure, not good
enough for especial praise. They are written with considerable ease and
technical facility, but even at their best they abound in echoes of the
ters; and even when they strive for the original, they are too threadbare
and uninspired to be noteworthy.
Paul Verlaine, by Harold Nicolson (8vo, 271 pages; Houghton Mifflin
Company: $5) describes in an admirably detached manner the career of
that French poet who has done so much to colour the Bohemianism of our
day. Verlaine, the perverse, dirty, out-at-elbows, drunken, heavenly-in-
spired creature of the '8os and '90s, who led so delightfully shocking a life
а
and varied it with occasional interludes of religious hysteria, has been pre-
sented so often and so finely in a critical sense that the reader should be
grateful for a volume that is content to confine itself to the poet's physical
existence. Such books may be found in French, notably those by Lepelle-
tier and Delahaye, but they are not to be found in English. Mr Nicholson
is therefore to be congratulated. The whole career of the man is set forth
here in a dispassionate manner although the sympathy of the biographer is
never in doubt. The unfortunate marriage, the affair with Arthur Rim-
baud, the brief years of fame and the longer years of squalor in cheap bras-
series with their necessary and humiliating posing make up a tale that sug-
gests the times when wolves howled through the streets of Paris.
a


BRIEFER MENTION
717
MY BROTHER THEODORE Roosevelt, by Corinne Roosevelt Robinson (illus.,
12mo, 365 pages ; Scribner: $3) contains rather less of the revelations of a
sister than it does of the reverberations of the astutely fostered Roosevelt
tradition. Under its sway, Mrs Robinson seems impelled to cast the late
President's smallest gesture in the heroic mould, with overtones of Ameri-
canism. The doorbell always rang in a “rapid, incisive way” to “mark his
advent”; he “bounded” upstairs; he "jumped” to his feet; Mrs Robinson
“can still hear the sound of the President's pen,” as he “with one strong
stroke effaced” a name. One longs for a little more discernment and a lit-
tle less superficial strenuousness in the portrait. Notwithstanding, an en-
tertaining and in many respects valuable addition to the Roosevelt book-
shelf, which grows apace. The most recent volume to find lodgement there
is QUENTIN ROOSEVELT, a memorial edited by Kermit Roosevelt (12mo, 281
pages; Scribner: $2.50) which unfolds the brief career of the President's
son who died in the war. It is largely composed of the boy's letters, which
reflect a youthful enthusiasm and sincerity.
a
William Lloyd GARRISON, by John Jay Chapman (12mo, 289 pages; Atlan-
tic Monthly Press : $1.50). This book leaves unfilled the need for a biog-
raphy of the man who supplied the electricity for great movements. The
results of his fervour have been laid before the people often, but the man
himself is not made more real to us in discussions of slavery and the Civil
War. He is worth a Boswell. He does not need a eulogist. Here, one
reads through too many spirited judgements upon the "miscreants” who
failed to support Abolitionism, too many sounding similes in praise of the
righteous few who did. After all, history demands perspective, and surely
a question answered sixty years ago in the Civil War may be dealt with
impartially now.
Four Pilgrims, by William Boulting (8vo, 256 pages ; Dutton : $4) is a new
volume in Trubner's Oriental Series. It describes four ancient pilgrimages,
one to Buddha's birthplace, one to Palestine, and two towards Mecca and
the East. Most interesting of the pilgrims themselves is Ludovico Var-
thema, the first Christian to visit the tomb of Mohammed; his journey
makes Richard Burton's seem uneventful. There is more observation of
manners than of morals in the book, and more adventure than theology.
THE APPLE (Of Beauty and Discord) (4to, unnumbered; Stokes : $12.50).
On the right hand, drawings, etchings, woodcuts—one hundred and sixty of
them; on the left, as many poems, essays and stories; a volume of sumptu-
ous uselessness, essentially English in its conception, gracefully printed,
harmoniously sentimental and stupid. The explanatory essay sheds no
light on the symbolical title; instead of beauty we have a wan and accom-
plished prettiness—the discord turns out to be an occasional decent work in
line by H. Gaudier-Brzeska, Augustus John, or Wyndham Lewis. The
modern note is further emphasized by Ezra Pound, who writes with his
usual acrid brilliancy, and by W. L. George, who has, for him, a surprising
piece of common sense on Labor and the Arts. There are a host of academic
celebrities from Shannon to Conder, a number of second-rate Japanese, an
artistic cat by Steinlen, a poor Dürer, and a dozen clever, uninteresting
lithographs. Only those who can afford to buy the book will enjoy it.


MODERN ART
NO
OT because I was there but because everybody else was there
does it seem necessary to make of the Paris scene a little
pre-
lude for the history of the New York winter.
Apparently Greenwich Village had emigrated en masse to the
Latin Quarter and like a flock of birds in process of migration was
agitatedly fluttering about the Café de la Rotonde as though fully
convinced that that was to be the final resting place but finding it
nervously impossible after the long flight from the land of dollars
to settle into position at once. Some of the hardier birds such as
Marsden Hartley and Edna St Vincent Millay rooted themselves
instantly and with decision to the wicker chairs of the terrasse.
Marsden told me himself that most of his first week in Paris was de-
voted exclusively to the Café de la Rotonde. He went early in the
afternoon that he might certainly have a chair for the evening. The
method did appear to be the swiftest one for getting in touch with
all Paris. If there were any new heroes bulking large they weighed in
at the Rotonde. If they weren't there in person then the news of
them was. Scouts from the various camps were continually arriv-
ing. John Storrs there for a night on his way back from Rome where
he had been arrested for speaking awkwardly the Italian to an offi-
cial; Marcel Duchamp, pale ascetic, with the tolerant faint grin
upon his face of the elderly man who has been through it all before
but relishes the smell of the sawdust quand même; Man Ray just
landing and being whisked off instanter to the secret little café in a
passage from the great boulevard where Tzara and the other Dada-
ists meet every night at six o'clock; and Lipchitz the sculptor who
had just finished a remarkable bust of Gertrude Stein; and Braque
who had just punched Leonce Rosenberg the dealer upon the jaw at
the sale of the Kahnweiller Collection, all, All were there, and all
bore the look of exaltation and solid satisfaction that had seemed so
significant upon the faces of Hartley and Miss Millay.
The mob that made seats difficult and generally impossible to ob-
tain was composed of the usual picturesque pre-war elements. On
the night of quatorze juillet Waldo Pierce pointed out a young man
at one of the neighbouring tables and explained that it was a young
woman. I asked with much virtuous indignation how on earth he


HENRY McBRIDE
719
а
knew but Pierce had turned indifferently away and some one else
gave the answer, "Why, don't we see her here every night in skirts !"
The young lady certainly was an excellent imitation of a young
man, and my informant went on to say that she was very well
known in the quarter due to a proclivity she had for appearing on
her balcony in a state of nature at odd moments during the middle
of the night-a proclivity, it must be said for the vindication of the
French, that had brought out loud protests from the neighbours.
And there was the tall young fellow in evening dress and a monocle,
a Chilian, who never took a seat but moved about chatting from
group to group, and who, Charley Demuth told me, had established
a record of staying thirty-six consecutive hours at the Rotonde, eve-
ning dress, monocle, and all. And there were the two identical col-
oured lady models who used to flaunt so haughtily in and out of the
Rotonde in 1914 and who survived the great war unscathed. And
there were, of course, innumerable young things, here, there, and
everywhere. It was, in fact, very like the vie de bohème of ten years
,
ago, twenty years ago, of the memoirs of Benvenuto Cellini.
Of actual news there was little. The gossip centred for a while
upon the Braque-Rosenberg encounter which was the first little af-
fair of the kind since the war and had the effect of making everyone
feel that real life had begun again. Part of its success was due to
the known good-nature and quietness of Braque which made it the
more surprising that he of all those who were disgruntled with
Leonce Rosenberg should lead the attack. Braque and his friends
not only accused the dealer of having been the reverse of generous
during the difficult period of the war, but of being actually against
Braque's interests, in his quality as expert, in the Kahnweiller sale.
The Henry Kahnweiller Collection, the property of a Viennese, had
been confiscated by the French Government and was now to be sold
for the public benefit, and as it was rich in productions by the mod-
ernists, the entire group were intensely interested in an outcome that
it was felt would go a great way towards definitely placing these
much debated men. Whatever the rights and wrongs of Braque and
his circle may have been—and it is unbecoming for a foreigner to
take sides in family disputes—there can be no doubt but that the
blow that was struck in the presence of Miss Stein, Matisse, and the
assembled multitude, let loose a great wave of sympathy for the
artist, a sympathy no doubt that helped the subsequent prices. The
Braque prices compared favourably with the Picasso prices, his top
a


720
MODERN ART
price being thirty-two hundred francs, a respectable enough auction
figure considering the despicable leanness of everyone's pocketbook.
Two Picassos fetched thirty-one hundred francs each, but prices
having been mentioned, it is only fair to add that Derain eclipsed
all, selling several for over ten thousand francs and selling one for
eighteen thousand. Derain, it seems, has a vogue in England, which
is clever of England; hence his prices.
No great new giants have appeared. The advanced guard still
considers Braque, Derain, Picasso, Lipchitz, Gris, and Matisse suf-
ficiently in advance of the public taste for its purposes although Ma-
tisse is dangerously near to becoming fashionable. He is in every
show and usually dominates it, painting joyously in the now fa-
miliar manner. Lipchitz and Braque, with whom I dined at Miss
Stein's, are still deploring the passing of Guillaume Apollinaire, and
insist that what the new movement chiefly lacks is an adequate
spokesman. It may be, however, that Jean Cocteau, whose Nou-
veaux Mariées sur le Tour Eiffel at the Ballet Suédois was an im-
mense success, is he whom Providence designs for this rôle. It should
be added, too, that Miss Stein takes the new café exhibitions in the
Boulevard Montparnasse and in Montmarte seriously, believing
they will replace the Independents whose spirit has been crushed by
the deadly atmosphere of the Grand Palais.
So, on the whole, it may be seen that Paris is again Paris,
the city of light, but this wholesale sweeping towards it of the Amer-
ican moths is something I regard with misgiving. Our Greenwich
Village which had assumed respectable proportions during the war
will drift again, with its chief characters gone, into a mere way-
station on the route to the Latin Quarter. I never obtained much
soul food myself in Greenwich Village—the place meant almost
nothing to me—but I am loth to lose a shred of such atmosphere as
we had managed to accumulate. I hate, in fact, to see my country-
men accept provincialism as their portion. I cheer myself with the
reflection that we are very rich, that we have all the gold that there
is, and that where the gold is there comes that ease of living that
flowers into artistic expression, but apparently we are in for a dull
year or two until all our pig-headed geniuses realize that New York
is, after all, the centre of the universe and return to it. I like Paris,
too, you understand . . . but I think the time has come when it
is no longer necessary for a first-rate American to go there.
a
Henry MCBRIDE


MUSICAL CHRONICLE
AT
a
T first, what impressed in the matter of the American Academy
and its Prize of Rome in Musical Composition, was the snob-
bishness. The academy in the eternal city was itself palpably an
imitation of the Villa Medici. The establishment of a musical prize
destining the recipient to three years' residence in the Italian capital,
of all galleys one of those in which any composer has least affair,
savoured overmuch of that brainless aping of French customs at
present the approved manner of demonstrating one's hundred per
cent red-blooded Americanism. Moreover, there were certain other
factors clouding the not too unblemished heaven of the competition.
There was the social element. Besides being closed to all individu-
als married and over thirty years in age, the competition was open
only to such as could demonstrate, besides Exceptional Creative
Ability and Adequate Theoretical Training (and how many musi-
cians in the entire world have exceptional creative ability and ade-
quate theoretical training, one asks?) Character, Education, and
Personal Fitness. What was really understood by these last three
terms was known only, so it appears, to a certain English organist
for some unknown reason exercising control in the matter. At any
rate, candidates, it seemed, had to go lunch with the person and de-
monstrate something or other qualifying them more fully than ex-
ceptional creative ability and adequate theoretical training could do,
for the reception of the prize. You perceive in what magnificently
patriotic surroundings we are suddenly plunged. French academies;
English organists; personal flavours. But, for a time, one chose to
believe the competition, for all the snobbery, one sincerely proposed.
And it seemed very possible that the American Academy, in spite of
its bogus Villa Medici and Roman stuff and nonsense, might do
good work in the musical field. After all, three years' liberty, even
in as insignificant a musical capital as the Italian city, might be a
boon to many a young composer. If it did nothing else, it would re-
lieve him of the necessity of toiling in the banks, advertising agen-
cies, and insurance companies in which most young American com-
posers earn their bread. That in itself would be enormous.
To-day, however, we are not at all convinced that the American


722
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
Academy and its Prize of Rome in Musical Composition will bear
fruit for the cause of American culture. To this terrible pass are
we come in observing the capricious and mysterious fashion in
which the institution has conducted the competition proposed by it.
The term of the competition, it will be remembered, was, at first, Oc-
tober first. The date was announced in the literature issued by the
Executive Secretary of the Academy resident in New York City.
Eight manuscripts appeared in answer to the announcement. Several
of them were four hundred pages in length. One was an operatic
score. A jury, upon which sat, among others, Messrs Walter Dam-
rosch, Walter Spalding, Carpenter, and Henderson, rejected, after a
very brief session of less than twenty-four hours, all eight scores.
None, it was alleged, showed the exceptional creative ability and ad-
equate theoretical training demanded of the competing boys. A brief
time later, it was announced that an award had been made, outside
the competition, to Mr Leo Sowerby, who had submitted no work at
all. Meanwhile, a new competition was announced by the resident
secretary. A typewritten circular issued to certain young musicians
fixed the term on October thirty-first. Mr Sowerby, so it afterwards
appeared, had been granted, not the three-year prize, but a supple-
mentary prize which consisted of a two-year stipend. Had Mr Sow-
erby been offered the three-year prize, and had he refused it because
three years seemed too long a banishment? That we do not know,
though the sudden creation of a supplementary award would seem
to point to such a conclusion.
In response to the new announcement of the secretary, one candi-
date, who had not competed in the first race, telephoned the office of
the academy to make sure the competition would not close before the
date set, October thirty-first. He was assured he would run no risk
in working up to the very close. But when the last day came, and
the manuscript was carried to the office of the secretary, the competi-
tor was surprised with the announcement that the competition had
been closed over a week since, and the award made to a gentleman
from Pasadena, a Mr Hanson, former pupil of Mr Damrosch's, for
a symphonic poem entitled "Before Dawn” or “Before Damrosch”
or something of the sort. The committee, it seems, had become very
nervous; had felt positive, inwardly warned, that the compositions
submitted in the new competition would differ in no wise in quality
from those submitted in the old, and had, like the drowning camel,
a


PAUL ROSENFELD
723
clutched at what they considered, with or without luncheon, to be
the last straw.
Now, it was perfectly within the rights of the responsible parties
to declare off the competition because of the disappointing quality
of the manuscripts entered, as was done upon the close of the first,
and award a two, three, or four-year stipend to Mr Leo Sowerby,
who had not competed. (One hesitates to think what must have
been the quality of the rejected manuscripts, if by their side those of
Mr Sowerby hitherto published appeared to betoken in their author
exceptional creative ability and adequate theoretical training. Still,
among the members of the jury there were several who but a brief
while previously had awarded one thousand dollars of Mr Flagler's
money to Mr Louis Gruenberg for a symphonic poem; and to be re-
jected and despised of such judges may be a sign of worth.) What,
however, was not at all within the rights of the authorities was the
power to surreptitiously terminate a competition publiclyannounced,
and make an award in an arbitrary fashion. In doing so, they have
not at all cast positive light upon the meaning of the words Char-
acter, Education, and Personal Fitness, so pompously used by them.
It is because of this manner of conduct that the impression left by
the American Academy and its Prize of Rome in Musical Composi-
tion is scarcely longer merely one of snobbishness. The impression
left is one of something far more disagreeable. A beginning of this
sort promises nothing green for American culture. The Prize of
Rome in music is already a dubious honour. It seems doubtful
whether the recipients can really profit by awards made in this curi-
ous fashion.
PAUL ROSENFELD


THE THEATRE
D
ESTROY the audience! Everything else will follow. This
proposal was made in all moderation a month ago but, I regret
to report, has had no effect. I am afraid that I am helpless. But I
return to the charge and if I go down another will grasp the sword
from my hand. For nothing short of annihilation will do.
The text this month is Mr Eugene O'Neill's Anna CHRISTIE. But
before going into that let us look at the latest picture made by Mr
Chaplin. The Idle Class was not, presumably, released in all its so-
cial pungency, but whatever was shown was Mr Chaplin's own
work; every foot of it had a definite intent and all our piety and all
our wit cannot retrace or blot out a gesture or a look. The moving
picture, one is told, is made for the lowest intelligence; but at least
when it is made it is incorruptible. The theatre audience, however,
is tyrannical; it re-creates the play. I pass such flagrant examples
as Miss Lulu Bett of last year and Daddy's Gone A-HUNTING
this season. Miss Maire O'Neill's Aunt Ellen in THE WHITE-
HEADED Boy was a much criticized characterization; quarrel with it
as you please, but admit that she is artistically intelligent and incor-
ruptible. Her chief difficulty was not in making the audiences laugh
but in preventing them from laughing; and to most actors and ac-
tresses the knowledge that they can get an extra laugh is a heady
wine and irresistible.
In Anna Christie Mr O'Neill sets before you a young girl whose
father believes her to be incomparably virginal and innocent. Actu-
ally she has been a prostitute. I find nothing laughable in this situa-
tion. Yet every time Anna Christie spoke the vicious racy ugly slang
of her past, every word of which should have fallen like sleet upon
our stricken hearts, the audience of which I was a part gathered it-
self with refreshment and laughed. It was a second night audience,
at least part of it came by invitation; I do not dare to think of the
nights that followed. In The Circle the blame was shared by the
author and the two actors who made the scene at the bridge table
meanly humorous; in this case I absolve Mr O'Neill and his pro-
ducer, both. The audience must go.


THE THEATRE
725
a
Mr O'Neill has gratified some of his critics and has escaped from
his formula. I regret to report that he has escaped only as far as the
theatre. Add to the situation indicated above a young man who
falls in love with Anna Christie; the father and the lover struggle
for the girl's devotion and, outraged by their assumption that it is
for them to decide, she turns them both out with a drastic history of
her past. Up to this point Mr O'Neill has charged his play with
emotion and has let the interaction of character upon character de-
termine his plot. That is where good plays end. This one goes on
to a so-called happy conclusion; before that arrives we have the
strange spectacle of the young lover accusing the girl of having lied
to him, whereas it is clear enough that she has done nothing but
speak the truth, and we find Mr O'Neill modulating from real emo-
tion into a strange and complicated key of purely theatrical feeling.
I do not mean that the theme calls inevitably for tragedy; but I felt
that Mr O'Neill needed three acts more to work to any other con-
clusion.
The madness of Mr Hopkins' method is unusually interesting
this time. The play is in the mood and time of Daddy's Gone A-
Hunting. That is, sub-realism. Everything a little less interesting
and less exciting than natural. I do not ask Mr Hopkins for con-
trast or for a sense of the actual or for anything except sustained in-
terest in his production and sustained acceptance of his illusion. And
when he directs Miss Pauline Lord and Messrs George Marion
and Frank Shannon to participate in the rescue of a castaway row-
boat, involving starving men and the sinister power of “the devil
sea,” as if they were engaged in nothing more palpitant than a scan-
dalous divorce case (after his own manner) I fall back. The fog in
which this scene is played is the work of Robert Edmond Jones; it
is perfect and I have no curiosity—I would rather not know how it
was done. In Mr Hopkins' case I am afraid I know.
There were, of course, other plays, too.
G. S.


COMMENT
AN
NATOLE FRANCE has, on the day we write, been named for
the Nobel Prize in literature by the Swedish Academy, and al-
though it may seem a trivial thing for us to say we confess to an espe-
cial feeling of happiness. We are publishing in this issue the end
of M France's memories of his childhood and, as far as we know, this
is the first time that any work of M France has appeared simultane-
ously in English and in French. That the work of an acknowledged
master in the ordinary course of events waits many years before its
introduction to America confirms in us our belief that The Dial, by
bringing European work immediately to America, fulfils a highly
necessary function.
The Nobel Prize to M France affects us in another way. Within
a few weeks we shall announce through the newspapers the name of
the recipient of The Dial's award. According to the original state-
ment the award will go to a young American writer, one of our con-
tributors, in recognition of his service to American letters. These
are, to be sure, limitations forced upon us by lack of those millions
which enable the Swedish Academy to range the world for their
prizemen. But the distinction of The Dial's award, in our own
eyes, is that it is to be given annually to one who has already accom-
plished a service, yet has not completed his work. The money we
pay to the recipient will give him leisure for a year, if leisure is what
he wants most; it will in any case afford him an opportunity to do
what he wishes to do and out of that to enrich and develop his work.
The Nobel Prize (particularly in literature) is the bestowal of an
honour, and with that we cannot quarrel ; our own small award is in-
tended for encouragement and opportunity.
The present number of The Dial completes our second year as a
journal of art and letters. The Dean of the College of Liberal Arts
at the University of North Dakota makes the occasion felicitous by
the following letter:
.
.
I have been following The Dial for some time with con-
siderable curiosity. I can remember when The Dial was a distinct


COMMENT
727
credit to American letters, but that day has certainly gone by. In-
deed, I am at a loss to know its reason for existence. Perhaps it is to
be regarded as a humorous publication. If so, its humor is too dull
and gross to merit any attention. It is equally a failure if one at-
tempts to take it seriously. Its ethics are rotten, its style is often
loose and inartistic, its illustrations are disgusting. It represents
nothing but degeneracy.' I shall certainly not recommend it to any
of my students. In fact, I have given orders to have it stopped at
the library as soon as our present subscription expires.
Yours, with scant respect,
VERNON P. Squires"
Tros, runs a line in Virgil, the motto of The North American Re-
view, Tros Tyriusve mihi nullo discrimine agetur. Our modernist
Trojan, our classic Tyrian, are treated thus; but for the first time we
understand nullo discrimine,
Dean Squires cannot know. Even the most degenerate of us have
our moments, our moments of longing for "ancient beauty and au-
stere control.” At times it has seemed to us that we have foundered
out of the morass, have published one picture, one poem, one line
of prose, which represented something not degenerate. We had
thought that with the spread of culture, which means the capacity to
make distinctions, our readers had recognized our tragic efforts. We
have been mistaken. We represent nothing but.
even
eminent English critic has written us that alone among maga-
zines we stand without respect of persons for the honour of letters
and we have tried to believe him. Now we cannot. But faithful
always to our duty we make the following report to our readers:
Their number is increasing. More important, the rate of increase
is going up, so that each month shows a gain over the preceding.
The comparatively profitless sales at newsstands has improved for
us, since we have been able to distribute more copies to the stands
and have virtually no returns. What we want is subscriptions.
Shortly it will become necessary to print more copies; and if our
casual readers will subscribe the business department assuring us
that subscriptions are now offered on most favourable terms) they
will help us to decide how much larger to make our coming editions.
1 The italics are ours.


728
COMMENT
To those who subscribe we can promise a few things. We have so
far not been persuaded to abandon the greatest of our projects, to
serve American letters by publishing the best work of known and
unknown Americans, expressed in new or traditional forms, together
with the best work of the same type produced in Europe. We have
been called to account for not excluding established writers and for
admitting Europeans; we have undoubtedly lost readers because of
our refusal to omit work unsanctified by time. But nothing has yet
been said to convince us that legitimate change in the form of artistic
expression came to an end in the reign of the good Queen Anne; nor
have we any reason to believe that the perfection of a traditional
form is an effort unworthy of the encouragement of publication.
We are aware (and think it natural) that some of the work we pub-
lish should seem eccentric to some of our readers and we appreciate
their criticism; what makes us understand the rack and the wheel is
the assurance from our friends that if we dropped everything mod-
ern we should have a great magazine. Possibly they are right. We
a
will not say that in that case we should have a great dead magazine;
but we are certain that we should be doing exactly half-our job and
no more.
We want more and better work from American artists. We have
no closed list of regular contributors. One thing only we cannot
see: the advisability of publishing second-rate work in order to en-
courage other Americans. We have noted at the Metropolitan and
at the Theatre Guild that the supposed necessity of producing an
American work (pour encourager les autres) has often resulted in
the production of a bad American work; and we have always felt
that the real encouragement (to the others, of course) came from
the hard-hearted and totally unpatriotic critics who damned the ven-
ture out of hand. Fortunately there are in the fields we cultivate
Americans who refuse to do the cheap and scamped and meretricious
thing; if they are not Titans they are artistically honest men and
women. On them our case, and our success, stands.


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ID:000020203252
051054 v.71 July-Dec. 1921
The Dial
Browne, Francis F. (F
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