THE CARNEGIE LIBRARY OF The Pennsylvania State College CLASS NO. 051 1895 BOOK NO. D 54 R. ACCESSION 90273 2 308 THE DIAL V VU VI M 18 TO οΧΧΙΙΙΟ VOLUME LXXIII July to December, 1922 THE DIAL PUBLISHING COMPANY Index いっ​て ​ INDEX VOLUME LXXIII PAGE . ALDINGTON, RICHARD ANDERSON, SHERWOOD Brown, SLATER BUNIN, IVAN Burke, KENNETH BURKE, KENNETH, translator I 21 . 222 CauliFLOWER, SEBASTIEN CHAFEE, JR., ZECHARIAH COLUM, PADRAIC Cowley, MALCOLM CRAVEN, THOMAS CRAWFORD, Nelson ANTRIM Dos Passos, JOHN EGLINTON, JOHN Eliot, T. S. FAURE, ELIE FRANK, WALDO Fry, ROGER GILCHRIST, Helen Ives HESSE, HERMANN A Roman Letter (Fiction) 383 Many Marriages (Fiction) 361, 533, 623 Four and Twenty Blackbirds 675 Kasimir Stanislavovitch (Fiction) 41 The Consequences of Idealism 449 The Critic of Dostoevsky 671 Enlarging the Narrow House 346 Lucidor (Fiction) Arthur Schnitzler 241 Tristan (Fiction) 593 American Letter 555 The Common Law for Laymen Lady Gregory's Plays 572 The Author of Bliss 230 Euphues 446 Keats and Hearst 108 Two American Poets 563 The Freudian Incubus 103 Light from Italy 349 Democracy Diagnosed 219 Off the Shoals 97 Dublin Letter . 434 London Letter 94, 329, 659 Reflections on the Greek Genius . 525 John the Baptist . 312 M Jean Marchand 388 Balkan Balloons . 669 Thoughts on The Idiot of Dos- toevsky. Thoughts on The Idiot of Dostoevsky 199 Kasimir Stanislavovitch (Fiction) 41 The Fox (Fiction) 75, 184 German Letter 645 Tristan (Fiction) 593 Stick of a Rocket 453 A Portrait of George Moore . 664 Is the Real the Actual? 620 The Movement 215 Oedipus Tyrannus 441 Strachey's Past Paris Letter 332, 549 . 199 Hudson, Stephen, translator KOTELIANSKY, S. S., translator LAWRENCE, D. H. MANN, THOMAS . MITCHELL, STEWART MOORE, MARIANNE MORTIMER, RAYMOND 338 Pound, Ezra IV INDEX PAGE . 438 Powys, LLEWELYN Sir Thomas Urquhart, Knycht. 277 PURRMANN, HANS From the Workshop of Matisse . 32 Russell, BERTRAND The Aroma of Evanescence 559 What is Morality? 677 SANTAYANA, G. Penitent Art 25 SAPIR, EDWARD A Symposium of the Exotic . 568 SCHNITZLER, ARTHUR Doctor Graesler (Fiction) 1, 162, 246, 411, 509 Seldes, Gilbert The Altar of the Dead 343 Claude Bovary Nineties-Twenties-Thirties 574 A Trick of Memory 106 SERGEANT, ELIZABETH SHEPLEY Two Portraits 88 Shaw, Vivian Not Literary 228 Specht, RICHARD Arthur Schnitzler 241 SPINGARN, J. E.. Foreword to Tsang-Lang Discourse 271 THAYER, SCOFIELD, translator Tristan (Fiction) 593 von HOFMANNSTHAL, HUGO From the Book of Friends 23 Lucidor (Fiction) 121 Vienna Letter WADSWORTH, P. BEAUMONT Prague Letter 655 Wilson, Jr., EDMUND The Poetry of Drouth 611 Woolf, LEONARD, translator Kasimir Stanislavovitch (Fiction) 41 YEATS, William Butler More Memories 48, 133, 283, 395 The Player Queen 486 Yü, YEN Tsang-Lang Discourse on Poetry 274 Zeisler, Paul BLOOMFIELD, translator Doctor Graesler (Fiction) 1, 162, 246, 411, 509 206, 425 • INDEX V VERSE ALDINGTON, RICHARD BYNNER, WITTER, translator Coatsworth, ELIZABETH J. PAGE 181 644 276 387 . CRAPSEY, ADELAIDE DEUTSCH, BABETTE 31 Eliot, T. S.. KANG-HU, KIANG, translator Lowell, AMY . . Six Songs for Puritans . On a Gate Tower at Yu-Chou Evening Sails Blue Hyacinths Avatars Hibernal The Waste Land On a Gate Tower at Yu-Chou Easel Picture: Decoration Day Orientation The Red Knight Apology of Genius Brancusi's Golden Bird Two Poems Seven Poems Bantams in Pine Woods The Emperor of Ice-Cream Frogs Eat Butterflies. Snakes Eat Frogs. Hogs Eat Snakes. Men 205 328 473 644 393 392 393 73 507 159 303 89 93 Loy, MINA MITCHELL, STEWART Poore, Dudley STEVENS, WALLACE Eat Hogs 91 91 92 89 A High-Toned Old Christian Woman 0, Florida, Venereal Soil The Ordinary Women Revue On a Gate Tower at Yu-Chou When Fresh, It Was Sweet . TzU-ANG, CH’ẾN Williams, William Carlos 89 644 617 VI INDEX ART BIDDLE, GEORGE BRAGDON, CLAUDE BRANCUSI, CONSTANTIN Cano, MANOEL CHAGALL, MARC. . CUMMINGS, E. E. Davis, STUART DE FIORI, ERNESTO Dehn, ADOLPH DELAUNAY, ROBERT DICKINSON, PRESTON Faggi, ALFEO Gaul, AUGUST GONTCHAROVA, NATALIA GRANT, DUNCAN A Head December Two Drawings October The Golden Bird November A Drawing September Jew July On Dit October Peasant Eating July Violin Player July Young Girl July A Line Drawing August Strawinsky August Bather August Standing Figure August Walking Figure August Blind Beggar November Drinkers November St Severin November Garden in Winter · July Ka December The Llama December Mother and Child December The Tram December Sheep · July Espagnole August The Acrobats November Landscape: South of France November Nude November Hope September Tight Rope September Model for an Heroic Figure . December Esprit des Forêts . August Richard Strauss August Horses September La Belle Provençale October Coup de Mistral à Vence October Maternité October Les Capucines · July The Rape of Rebecca September Two Drawings October Two Drawings November The Woman of Samaria July Sholom Asch. September Fresco . October Two Heads December Rudolf Blümner September Herwarth Walden September Nell Walden. September GROPPER, William LACHAISE, GASTON LARIONOW, Michel . LIEBERMANN, MAX Marc, FRANZ MARCHAND, JEAN MATISSE, HENRI . PASCIN, JULES Picasso, Pablo Robinson, BOARDMAN RUBIN, Z.. SEVERINI, Gino von Huhn, Rudolf . Wauer, WILLIAM O INDEX VII BOOKS REVIEWED Authors and Titles PAGE . 236 456 a 680 . 580 236 453 AIKEN, CONRAD. Priapus and the Pool . 563 ALEXANDER, HARTLEY BURR. Odes and Lyrics ARMSTRONG, Harold H. For Richer, For Poorer AUMONIER, STACY. Heartbeat 579 AUSTEN, JANE. Love and Freindship 682 BABBITT, IRVING. Rousseau and Romanticism 555 BARRETS, J. L., translator. Very Woman, by Remy de GOURMONT 353 BELL, Clive. Since Cézanne. 215 BISHOP, John Peale, and EDMUND Wilson, Jr. The Undertaker's Garland 574 BJORKMAN, Edwin. The Soul of a Child 233 BODENHEIM, Maxwell. Introducing Irony 446 BOTTOME, Phyllis. The Kingfisher. 234 BOYD, Ernest, translator. Boule de Suife and Mademoiselle Fifi, by GUY DE MAUPAS- SANT.-Germinie Lacerteux, by EDMOND and JULES DE GONCOURT BRINK, Roscoe W. Down the River 682 Brooks, Van Wyck. Letters and Leadership 555 Brown, Alice. One Act Plays 114 BRUUN, LAURIDS. The Promised Isle 681 BUCHHOLTZ, JOHANNES. W. W. Worster, translator. Egholm and His God . 233 BUCHHOLTZ, Johannes. W. W. Worster, translator. The Miracles of Clara Van Haag Buschor, Ernst. G. C. RICHARDS, translator. Greek Vase-Painting Byron, LORD. John MURRAY, editor. Lord Byron's Correspondence CALDERON, GEORGE. See Tihoti. CANBY, H. S. Definitions . 555 CARR, GENE. Kid Kartoons 684 CARSWELL, CATHERINE. The Camomile 681 CATHER, Willa. My Antonia.-One of Ours CERVANTES, MIGUEL DE. Edwin Gile Rich, adapter. The Adventures of Don Quixote 582 CHESTERTON, G. K. What I Saw in America COBB, ANN. Kinfolks 113 COLCORD, LINCOLN. An Instrument of the Gods 682 Colum, Padraic. The Children Who Followed the Piper 582 COWARD, Noel. Terribly Intimate Portraits 457 Croce, BENEDETTO. The Poetry of Dante 114 Crown PRINCE OF GERMANY, Memoirs of the Crown Prince of Germany 355 CUMMINGS, E. E. The Enormous Room 97 DANA, Ethel NATHALIE, compiler. The Story of Jesus 582 Darío, Ruben. Charles B. McMichael, translator. Prosas Profanas 354 DARK, SIDNEY. An Outline of Wells . 457 DART, Edith, Sareel 580 Dawson-Scott, C. The Haunting 457 De Goncourt, EDMOND and Jules. Ernest Boyd, translator. Germinie Lacerteux 680 DE GOURMONT, REMY. John HOWARD, translator. Mr. Antiphilos, Satyr . 233 DE GOURMONT, Remy. J. L. Barrets, translator. Very Woman 353 De Kay, Charles, translator. Pierre and Luce, by Romain ROLLAND 353 DELAFIELD, E. M. Humbug 233 DE LA MARE, Walter. The Veil 114 DE LA Roche, Mazo. Explorers of the Dawn 113 DE MADARIAGA, SALVADOR, translator. Spanish Folk Songs DE MAUPASSANT, Guy. Ernest Boyd, translator. Boule de Suife.-Mademoiselle Fifi 680 438 683 684 VIII INDEX PAGE . 456 684 115 a 684 683 112 . 581 II2 458 572 DE NERVAL, GERARD. JAMES WHitall, translator. Daughters of Fire 234 Dennis, GEOFFREY. Mary Lee Deutsch, BABETTE, and AvrahM YARMOLINSKY, translators. Modern Russian Poetry 114 Doren, CARL VAN. See Van Doren. Downey, JUNE E., and Edwin E. Slosson. Plots and Personalities 459 Eliot, T. S. Poems 685 Eliot, T. S. The Sacred Wood 555,685 Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land 611,685 Farmer, John S., and W. E. HENLEY. A Dictionary of Slang and Colloquial English 459 FaY, SIDNEY BRADSHAW, translator. World History, 1815-1920, by EDUARD FUETER FERRERO, Guglielmo. The Hon. LadY WHITEHEAD, translator. The Ruin of Ancient Civilization and The Triumph of Christianity FICKE, Arthur Davison. Mr. Faust 235 Fisher, Henry W. Abroad With Mark Twain and Eugene Field 235 FRANK, Waldo. City Block.-Rahab 449 FREEMAN, John. Music: Lyrical and Narrative Poems 108 FREEMAN, John. A Portrait of George Moore in a Study of his Work . 664 FUETER, EDUARD. Sidney BRADSHAW Fay, translator. World History, 1815-1920 Furness, Horace Howard. Horace Furness Jayne, editor. The Letters of Horace Howard Furness FYFE, HAMILTON. The Widow's Cruse Garnett, EDWARD. Friday Nights GEROULD, KATHARINE Fullerton. Lost Valley Goncourt, EDMOND AND JULES DE. See de Goncourt. GOURMONT, REMY DE. See de Gourmont. GRAVES, CHARLES L. Mr. Punch's History of Modern England GREGORY, LADY AUGUSTA. The Image and Other Plays Grey, Zane. To the Last Man 113 Harrison, FREDERIC. Novissima Verba: Last Words 459 Hart, Francis Russell. Admirals of the Caribbean 580 Henley, W. E., and John S. FARMER. A Dictionary of Slang and Colloquial English 459 HergesHEIMER, Joseph. The Bright Shawl 579 HOWARD, John, translator. Mr. Antiphilos, Satyr, by Remy de GOURMONT Howe, M. A. DE WOLFE. Memories of a Hostess HRBKOVA, SARKA B., editor. Czechoslovak Stories 113 HUTCHINSON, A. S. M. This Freedom 460 HUTCHINSON, Vere. Sea Wrack . . 681 HYAMSON, Albert M. A Dictionary of English Phrases 459 Jackson, HOLBROOK. The Eighteen Nineties 574 Jayne, Horace Furness, editor. The Letters of Horace Howard Furness 683 JEFFERY, JEFFERY E. Escape 682 Johnson, Clifton. John Burroughs Talks JOHNSON, JAMES Weldon, editor. The Book of American Negro Poetry Joyce, James. Ulysses 434 KAY, CHARLES DE. See De Kay. LAGERLÖF, Selma. W. W. Worster, translator. The Outcast 354 LAING, B. M. A Study in Moral Problems 677 LEACOCK, Stephen. My Discovery of England 457 Lewis, SINCLAIR. Babbitt Lewis, WILMARTH, Tutors' Lane LIPPMANN, Walter. Liberty and the News.—Public Opinion 219 LOFTING, Hugh. The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle . 233 684 683 236 456 681 582 Longfellow, Ernest WADSWORTH. Random Memories 459 LONGSTRETH, T. Morris. The Laurentians 115 LYND, Robert. The Sporting Life and Other Trifles McCormick, Virginia Taylor. Star-Dust and Gardens McKenna, STEPHEN. The Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman 681 McMichael, Charles B., translator. Prosas Profanas, by Ruben Darío . 354 MADARIAGA, SALVADOR DE. See de Madariaga. 581 458 INDEX IX PAGE 664 581 580 MANSFIELD, KATHERINE. The Garden Party and Other Stories 230 MARE, WALTER DE LA. See De La Mare. MASTERS, EDGAR LEE. Children of the Market Place 457 MAUPASSANT, GUY DE. See de Maupassant. Moore, George. Astrolabe.—Avowals.—The Confessions of a Young Man.-Esther Waters.-Hail and Farewell.-Héloise and Abélard.—Lewis Seymour and Some Women MURRAY, Gilbert. Tradition and Progress 355 MURRAY, JOHN, editor. Lord Byron's Correspondence 453 MURRY, J. MIDDLETON. Still Life.—The Things We Are 671 NERVAL, GERARD DE. See de Nerval. NICHOLS, Robert. Guilty Souls Norris, KATHLEEN. Certain People of Importance Noyes, ALFRED. Watchers of the Sky 236 O'DONOVAN, GERALD. Vocations 354 ORAGE, A, E, Readers and Writer 228 OVERTON, Grant. The Answerer 234 PALMER, John. The Happy Fool 579 PAPINI, GIOVANNI. Ernest Hatch Wilkins, translator. Four and Twenty Minds 675 PARKER, H. T. Eighth Notes 683 Parsons, Elsie Crews, editor. American Indian Life 568 Paul, Elliot H. Indelible Pennell, E. R. & J. The Whistler Journal 354 PÉROCHON, Ernest. Nêne 235 PERROMAT, CHARLES. William Wycherley: sa Vie, son uvre 114 PICCOLI, RAFFAELLO. Benedetto Croce . 349 Poole, ERNEST. Millions . 680 POUND, Roscoe. The Spirit of the Common Law PRESCOTT, F. C. The Poetic Mind 103 Punch. Mr. Punch's History of England, by Charles L. Graves 458 Pyne, Zoe KENDRICK. The Life of Palestrina . 693 Quick, HERBERT. Vandemark's Folly 353 Rich, Edwin Gile, adapter. The Adventures of Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cer- II2 222 VANTES 582 236 . 353 458 580 235 563 559 669 346 RICHARDS, G. C., translator. Greek Vase-Painting, by Ernst BUSCHOR ROCHE, MAZO DE LA. See de la Roche. ROLLAND, Romain. Charles De Kay, translator. Pierre and Luce Roeden, A. MAUDE. Sex and Common Sense RUMSEY, Frances. Ascent SAINTSBURY, George. A Letter Book SANDBURG, Carl. Slabs of the Sunburnt West . SANTAYANA, GEORGE. Soliloquies in England, and Later Soliloquies SCHEVILL, FERDINAND. The Balkan Peninsula. SCOTT, C. Dawson-. See Dawson-Scott. Scott, Evelyn. Narcissus.—The Narrow House SEDGWICK, Anne Douglas. Adrienne Toner SEYMOUR, Beatrice Kean. Intrusion SHERIDAN, Clare. My American Diary SHERMAN, Stuart P. On Contemporary Literature SINGMASTER, Elsie. Bennett Malin Slosson, Edwin E., and June E. Downey. Plots and Personalities SPAETH, J. Duncan, translator. Old English Poetry SPEARE, DOROTHY. Dancers in the Dark SPENGLER, Oswald. Der Untergang des Abendlandes SQUIRE, J. C. Poems: Second Series STIRLING, A. M. W. William De Morgan and His Wife STRACHEY, Lytton. Books and Characters . STRACHEY, MARJORIE. David, Son of Jesse . TANNENBAUM, Frank. Wall Shadows 234 234 115 555 680 459 458 113 647 108 3 581 338 233 236 X INDEX PAGE 684 458 441 Ticknor, CAROLINE. Glimpses of Authors . Tihoti. (George Calderon) Tahiti . 115 Tooney, John Peter. Fresh Every Hour 113 TURNER, John Hastings. Where Your Treasure Is 681 Van Doren, Carl. Contemporary American Novelists 555 Van Vechten, Carl. Peter Whiffle: His Life and Works 353 WEEKLEY, ERNEST. An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English West, Rebecca. The Judge . Wharton, EDITH. The Glimpses of the Moon . 343 WhitALL, JAMES, translator. Daughters of Fire, by Gerard De Nerval 234 WHITEHEAD, The Hon. Lady, translator. The Ruin of Ancient Civilization and the Triumph of Christianity, by Guglielmo Ferrero 115 Whitton, Lt. Col. F. E. Moltke 355 Wilkins, Ernest Hatch, translator. Four and Twenty Minds, by Giovanni Papini 675 Wilson, Harry Leon. His Majesty Bunker Bean.-Merton of the Movies 106 Wilson, Jr., EDMUND, and John Peale Bishop. The Undertaker's Garland 574 Wood, Clement. Nigger . 680 Worster, W. W., translator. Egholm and His God, by JOHANNES BUCHHOLTZ 233 Worster, W. W., translator. The Miracles of Clara Van Haag, by Johannes Buch- 580 Worster, W. W., translator. The Outcast, by Selma Lagerlöf 35+ YARMOLINSKY, Avrahm, and Babette Deutsch, translators. Modern Russian Poetry HOLTZ II4 INDEX XI COMMENT PAGE 583 • 685 239 239 Children's Book Week Mr Eliot and the Dial Award Occam's Razor Secession Mr Spingarn's New Manifesto Statue of Bowdler, A Suggestion to the Censor Typographical Errors in Ulysses 118 358 460 240 THE THEATRE 463 117, 237 689 116 584 585 688 688 464 Ambush Chauve-Souris 49-ers, The From Morn to Midnight Greenwich Village Follies, The Hassan Loyalties. Music Box Revue Old Soak, The Plantation Rose Bernd R. U. R. Serpent's Tooth, A Six Characters in Search of an Author Springtime of Youth Strut Miss Lizzie Tempest, Marie La Tendresse. Tinney, Frank To Love Vaudeville The World We Live In Ziegfeld Follies 356 585 584 463 689 688 356 463 688 464 688 237 689 356 MODERN ART Art and the Masses Kent, Rockwell Passing of Dada Robinson, Boardman Salons of America 586 586 586 690 691 MUSICAL CHRONICLE Bach Festival, The Miriam, Alice International Composers' Guild Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da Szymanowski, Karol 465 589 695 693 . 589 XII INDEX MISCELLANEOUS MENTION PAGE A. E. . Avenue Theatre, The Babbitt, Irving Beardsley, Aubrey Bel Esprit Bridges, Robert Capek, Karel Castle on the Rock, The Cézanne, Paul Cocteau, Jean Cubism Czech Painters and Literary Groups D'Annunzio, Gabriele Davidson, John Descharmes, René Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Dowson, Ernest Faggi, Alfeo Flaubert, Gustave Freud, Sigmund Gonne, Maud Gregory, Lady Augusta Harvey, Alexander. The Most Romantic Episode in Literary History Henley, William Ernest Irish Agrarian Movement Irish Literary Society Johnson, Lionel Joyce, James Kassner, Rudolf Lawrence, D. H. Lloyd, Marie Mackenzie, Compton Marchand, Jean . Mathers, Macgregor Matisse, Henri Neumann, Karl Eugen Parnellites and Anti-Parnellites Professorship of Poetry at Oxford Proust, Marcel Psychology of the Crowd Reinhardt, Max Rhymers' Club, The Russell, George. See A. E. Saintsbury, George Edward Savoy Schnitzler, Arthur Sharp, William Sinclair, May Spengler, Oswald Stanislawski and the Moscow Art Theatre Stern, E. B. Strauss, Richard Symons, Arthur Synge, John Verlaine, Paul 51 72, 133 96 285 550 94 655 58 32 552 27 656 552 156 332 199, 330, 671 153, 288 620 332 430 395, 401 406 203 143 396 145 149, 283 434 428 331 659 329 388 294 32 426 396 94 552 430 211 145 95 286 206, 241 296 330 647 211 330 213 283 298 297 INDEX XIII PAGE Viennese Theatre Weston, Jesse L. Whibley, Charles Wilde, Oscar. 206 611 95 135, 288 DEPARTMENTS American Letter Briefer Mention Comment Dublin Letter German Letter London Letter Modern Art Musical Chronicle Paris Letter Prague Letter Theatre Vienna Letter 555 112, 233, 353, 456, 579, 680 118, 239, 358, 460, 583, 685 434 645 94, 329, 659 586, 690 465,589,693 332, 549 655 116, 237, 356, 463, 584, 688 206, 425 身 ​ 1 i Photograph: Druet LES CAPUCINES. BY HENRI MATISSE THE IV IX WI VI M DIAL VI OXXII JULY 1922 DOCTOR GRAESLER BY ARTHUR SCHNITZLER Translated from the German by Paul Bloomfield Zeisler TH a HE steamer was about to weigh anchor. Doctor Graesler, clad in a dark suit and an unbuttoned grey overcoat with a black arm-band on one sleeve, stood upon the deck. The hotel-director faced him bareheaded, his smooth-combed brown hair scarcely ruf- fled by the soft coast-breeze. "My dear Doctor,” the director remarked in that peculiar tone of condescension which had always affected Doctor Graesler so unpleasantly, “let me repeat that we are definitely counting on having you back again with us next season, in spite of the deplorable misfortune that has befallen you here." Doctor Graesler did not reply. Misty-eyed, he looked across towards the shore of the island where the big hotel with its white window-shutters, closed tight to keep out the heat, glared in the dazzling sun. Then his gaze swept farther, over the sleepy yellow- ish houses and the dust-baked gardens sloping indolently upward, in the mid-day vapour, until they reached the scant old remains of stone and mortar that festooned the hills. “Our guests,” the director continued, "of whom a number will probably return next year, have come to esteem you, my dear Doc- tor, and so we confidently hope that, in spite of the sad memories it holds for you, you will again occupy the little villa”—he motioned towards a modest, bright cottage in the vicinity of the hotel—"the more so as you realize, of course, that we could not possibly put Number 43 at your disposal during the height of the season.” And a 2 DOCTOR GRAESLER as Graesler gloomily shook his head and, taking off his stiff black hat, ran his fingers through a shock of coarse, slightly greying blond hair, the director added: "Oh, my dear Doctor, time works wonders. And if, by any chance, it's solitude you dread in that little white house, why, there's always a remedy for that. Why not bring along a nice little wife from Germany?” And as Graesler responded with a timid stare, the director continued in a lively, almost peremptory fashion: “Come, come, their name is legion. A nice little blond wife—or, for that matter, a brunette would do—that's very likely the one thing you need to make a complete man of you.” Doctor Graesler lifted his eyes reflectively, as though to seek vanishing pictures in a the past. "Well,” the director concluded affably, "whatever you decide, one way or the other, single or married, you will be welcome here in any case. And, if you please, by the twenty-seventh of October, as arranged. Otherwise, in view of the steamer-connexions, which, despite all our efforts, are regrettably still rather unsatisfactory, you might not arrive until the tenth of November; and as we open on the first"--and now he assumed the somewhat twangy accents of the army-lieutenant which the doctor found totally intolerable- "that really would hardly suit us.” He shook the doctor's hand with an excessive show of heartiness -a habit he had brought with him from the United States—ex- changed a hasty greeting with a passing ship’s-officer, hurried down the steps, and was shortly to be seen walking down the gang-plank, whence he again nodded a good-bye to the doctor who stood rather dejectedly, hat in hand, against the deck-rail. A few minutes later the steamer made clear of the shore. On the trip home, which was favoured by beautiful weather, Doctor Graesler often recalled the parting words of the director. And afternoons, when, with his Scotch plaid steamer-rug spread over his knees, he slumbered gently in his comfortable deck-chair on the promenade, there sometimes appeared to him, like a vision, a plump, attractive woman in white summer-clothes, gliding about through the house and in the garden-a pink-cheeked woman with a doll's face which he seemed somehow to know, not actually, but perhaps from some picture-album or some illustrated family-maga- zine. This creature of his dreams possessed, however, the mysterious - ARTHUR SCHNITZLER 3 power of banishing the apparition of his dead sister, so that she now seemed to have departed the world longer ago, and in a some- what more natural manner, than had in reality been the case. There were, to be sure, also other hours, wakeful and heavy with memories—hours in which the thought of that fearful event assailed him with almost intolerable distinctness and immediacy. The disaster had occurred a week before Doctor Graesler left the island. While in the garden after lunch, he had, as sometimes happened, fallen asleep over his medical journals; and when he woke he saw from the palm-tree's long shadow, which had run past his feet and across the entire breadth of the gravel walk, that he must have rested at least two hours—an accident which put him out of sorts because at his age-he was forty-eight-he was tempted to ascribe to it undue significance as an indication of the failing vigour of youth. He arose, pocketed his papers, and, with a deep , longing for the rejuvenating spring air of Germany in his heart, strolled slowly towards the little cottage which he inhabited with his slightly older sister. As he approached he saw her standing at a window, and this in a measure struck him, since at this sultry hour all the shutters were usually closed; when he came nearer he noticed that, though he had, while yet at a distance, thought to observe Friederike smiling at him, she was, on the contrary, standing absolutely motionless, her back turned to him. With a certain feel- ing of uneasiness for which he could not entirely account, he hurried into the house; and swiftly approaching his sister who seemed still to lean against the window without stirring, he was horrified to see her head sunk upon her breast, her eyes wide open, and twisted about her neck a rope which had been attached to the cross-bar of the window. He cried out her name, at the same time reaching for his pocket-knife and cutting the sling, whereupon the lifeless body sank heavily into his arms. He shouted for the servant, who pres- ently came from the kitchen and was utterly incapable of realizing what had happened. With her help he laid his sister upon the divan, and began immediately to apply, such means of resuscitation as were familiar to him from his professional experience. In the meantime the servant had rushed off to get the director; but just as the latter entered the room, Doctor Graesler, recognizing the fu- tility of all his efforts, sank exhausted and distraught upon his knees beside the corpse. 4 DOCTOR GRAESLER At first he was at a loss to find an explanation for the suicide. That this serious-minded spinster of mature years, with whom, as recently as their last luncheon, he had conversed on such a common- place topic as their imminent departure, should suddenly have gone insane, seemed to him improbable. He found it much more natural to assume that Friederike had brooded upon suicide for a long time, perhaps for years, and that for some reason she had deemed just this peaceful hour of the afternoon suitable to the execution of her slowly ripened plan. That she might be hiding a gentle sadness beneath her uniformly quiet disposition had at times fleetingly crossed his mind, although his professional duties had made such extraordinary claims upon his time that he had never concerned himself greatly with the thought. Indeed, there grew upon him only gradually the consciousness that since her childhood he had scarcely ever seen his sister really cheerful. Of her years of early womanhood he knew little, since, in his capacity as a ship’s-doctor, he had passed that period in almost constant travel. When, some fifteen years before, he had retired from service in the Lloyd, his parents had just died in rapid succes- sion; and it was shortly thereafter that she had left the town of her birth and the home of her childhood, and had joined him in order to attend him as his housekeeper in the various places of his sojourn. Though she was then considerably past the age of thirty, her figure had retained such youthful charm, her eyes such a dark and enig. matic glow, that she did not lack marked attentions; in fact, Emil sometimes had good reason to be apprehensive lest she might be carried off into a late marriage by some one of her admirers. When, with the years, the last prospect of this kind had vanished, she seemed to submit to her fate without complaint; and yet her brother now thought that he could remember many a mute look from her eyes, directed at him in silent reproach as though he, too, were some- how answerable for the haplessness of her existence. So, by and by, the consciousness of a wasted life had, perhaps, asserted itself, growing stronger as it was less outspoken, until she had finally pre- ferred a swift end to the gnawing torment of such a confession. She had, to be sure, reduced her unsuspecting brother—and this at a period of life generally unfriendly to the formation of new habits —to the necessity of concerning himself with affairs of domestic economy—a necessity which Friederike's ministrations had up to a ARTHUR SCHNITZLER 5 this time spared him. And though he mourned his sister none the less, there crept into his heart, during the last days of the steamer- trip, a somehow soothing and consolatory feeling of estrangement from the departed who, without so much as a farewell, had left him, wholly unprepared, alone in the world. II a After a short stay in Berlin, where he brought himself to the attention of a number of clinical professors who were in a position to favour him during the approaching season at the health-resorts, Doctor Graesler arrived on a beautiful May day in the little water- ing-place, surrounded by woods and hills, in which he had for the past six years been practising his profession during the summer months. He was greeted with cordial sympathy by his landlady, the elderly widow of a merchant, and was pleased at the modest wild-flowers with which she had decorated the dwelling in honour of his arrival. Not without trepidation did he set foot in the little room which his sister had occupied the previous year, but he found himself not so deeply affected as he had really feared. For the rest, life made itself tolerable from the very first. The sky was uni- formly clear and soft; the air had the mildness of Spring. And some- times, for instance when he was at the neatly set breakfast-table on his little balcony and saw there, glistening in the sun, the white, blue-flowered pot—from which, to be sure, he now had to pour his own coffee—there came over him a feeling of contentment such as, at least in latter years, he had not enjoyed in the company of his sister. His other meals he took in an imposing hotel, the best in the town, in the company of several estimable citizens whom he had known before and with whom he could chat without reserve, at times even very entertainingly. His practice, moreover, got under way quite promisingly, and this without unduly burdening his sense of professional responsibility with cases of especial seri- ousness. And so the early summer had passed without noteworthy event, when on an evening in July after a rather busy day a messenger, who withdrew as quickly as he had appeared, brought Doctor Graesler a call to The Range, which lay a good hour's drive from the town. The doctor rejoiced little in this turn of affairs; indeed, 6 DOCTOR GRAESLER he had no sort of predilection for resident patients because their treatment usually brought him neither much glory nor much gain. But as he rode up the valley in the mild evening air, smoking a good cigar, and along a lovely road dotted on either side with pretty country-houses, then on between yellow fields lying in the cool shadow of the hills, and finally through a grove of tall box-wood trees, he began to feel more contented; and when at last he caught sight of The Range, whose charming location he recollected well from many of his walks in bygone years, he almost regretted that the trip was so soon over. He bade the driver stop at the edge of the road, and took the narrow meadow-path winding up through the young pines towards the house, which seemed to give him friendly greeting with its blinking little windows, its huge pair of antlers hung above the narrow front door, and the glow of the evening sun on its reddish roof. Down the wooded steps leading to the comparatively spacious side-terrace there advanced to meet the doctor a young lady whose appearance seemed to him familiar from the very first glance. She shook hands with him, and then reported that her mother had been taken ill with indigestion. “She has been sleeping quietly now for an hour,” she went on. “The fever has evidently gone down. At four o'clock it was still up to a hundred and one and a tenth. And as she has been feeling miserable since yesterday evening, I took the liberty of asking you to come here, Doctor. I hope it will turn out to be nothing serious.” At the same time she cast at him a look of demure entreaty, as though the further development of the case depended entirely on his decision. He returned her gaze with becoming, but gentle, gravity. To be sure, he knew her. He had encountered her several times in town, but had always taken her for a summer guest. "Well, if your mother is now sleeping quietly,” he said, “it can hardly be anything serious. Perhaps you might give me some of the details, Fräulein, before the patient proves, after all, to have been awakened unnecessarily.” She invited him to walk up with her, went on ahead to the veranda, and offered him a chair while she remained leaning against the jamb of an open door leading into the interior of the house. In a strictly objective fashion she gave him an account of the course of the illness, and there soon remained no doubt in Doctor Graes- ler's mind that here there was no question of anything more than a ARTHUR SCHNITZLER 7 passing upset of the stomach. He felt himself, nevertheless, obliged to put all manner of medical questions to the young lady, and was surprised by the extraordinarily unembarrassed way in which she recounted and elucidated certain processes of nature with an ingenu- ousness he was quite unaccustomed to in young ladies; and while he listened, he asked himself casually whether she would have ex- pressed herself with as little hesitation in the presence of a younger physician. He would have taken her to be hardly less than twenty- five, had it not been for the calmness of the look in her large eyes, which somehow gave her an expression of greater maturity. In the braids of her blond hair, which she did up well towards the top of her head, she wore a plain silver comb. She was dressed simply, but in a thoroughly provincial style; her white girdle was fastened with a decorative gilt buckle. What impressed the doctor most, nay, even seemed to him somehow suspicious, were the very elegant light- brown buckskin half-shoes, which in colour exactly matched her stockings. But she had not yet completed her report, nor the doctor his observations, when from the interior of the house someone called “Sabine.” The doctor rose and the young woman showed the way through the ample, already half-dark dining-room and into the lighter apartment adjoining; here he saw the ailing parent, in a white bed-jacket and a white cap, sitting upright in one of the two beds. As he entered, she greeted him with a somewhat astonished, but rather alert and almost merry look. “Doctor Graesler,” Sabine introduced him, and then walked quickly to the head of the bed and felt tenderly of her mother's forehead. The latter, who appeared well-nourished, pleasant, and far from old, shook her head disapprovingly. “I'm very happy to make your acquaintance, Doctor,” she said, “but why, my dear child—” "It really seems to me,” remarked the doctor as he took the hand his patient held out to him and at the same time felt her pulse, "that I am by way of being rather superfluous here, the more so as your daughter”—and here he smiled politely—"would appear to have at her command a simply amazing knowledge of medicine. But as long as I have come all this way, you know—” And while the lady seemed with a shrug of her shoulders to be resigning herself to her fate, he undertook a more detailed examina- tion, followed attentively by Sabine's calm eyes. When he had a 8 DOCTOR GRAESLER a finished he was in a position to set at rest, so far as this was at all necessary, the minds of both the patient and her daughter. Certain difficulties were encountered, however, when Doctor Graesler wanted to put the former on a strict diet for the next few days, for against this she protested most vehemently. She maintained that in former years she had speedily cured just such attacks as these- which she designated as of nervous origin—by partaking of pork and sauerkraut, and of a particular kind of fried sausage which was unhappily not to be procured here; and only for this once had she permitted herself to be enjoined by Sabine from doing full justice to a hearty meal that very noon—an act of renunciation which, she averred, had very likely brought about the fever. The doctor, who had at first taken these remarks for jests, perceived during the fur- ther course of the conversation that, in contrast to her daughter, the lady held thoroughly unprofessional, not to say heretical, views on the science of medicine, and this the more so as, later on, she would not cease making contemptuous remarks about the efficacy of the mineral springs in the near-by watering-place. Thus she affirmed that, for purposes of export, the bottles were filled with ordinary spring-water to which were added salt, pepper, and probably also still other even more doubtfully salubrious spices; so that Doctor Graesler, who had always felt that he had an interest in the repu- tation of any spa in which he happened at any particular time to be practising and that he was in part responsible for its curative successes and failures, could not entirely repress some sign of having been offended. Yet he did not seriously contradict the mother, but rather contented himself with exchanging a smile of understand- ing with her daughter—a gesture with which he believed he had sufficiently, and with dignity, secured his position in the matter. Later, as he walked forth into the open accompanied by Sabine, he again emphasized the complete innocuousness of the case--a con- clusion with which Sabine declared herself in perfect agreement. And yet, she added, one had, in the case of persons of advanced age, to give some heed to attacks which in younger people were quite without significance; and it was for this reason, she declared, and more especially in view of the absence of her father, that she had felt in duty bound to send for a doctor. "Your father is, I presume, on a tour of inspection ?” the doctor suggested. “How do you mean, Doctor ?” -a a ARTHUR SCHNITZLER 9 "On a tour of inspection of the preserves?” Sabine smiled. "My father is not a ranger. It is a long time since this has really been 'The Range.' It is only called that because, up to six or seven years ago, the ranger of the county lived here. But just as, hereabouts, they still call the house The Range, so in town they always call my father The Ranger, although he has never in his whole life been anything remotely resembling that.” “You are the only child?” asked Doctor Graesler while, as though it were a matter of course, she accompanied him through the young pines, on the narrow path to the highway. "No," she replied, “I have a brother. He is much younger than I, though-only fifteen. When he is home on his vacation, of course he beats about in the woods all day long. Occasionally he even sleeps out in the open.” And as Doctor Graesler shook his head somewhat critically, she added, “Oh, that's nothing; I used to do that myself, sometimes. Not very often, to be sure.” “But only just near the house,” said the doctor, slightly worried, "and”—he added hesitantly—"only as a little girl ?” “Oh, no, I was already seventeen when we moved here. Before that, you see, we did not live in this vicinity, but in the city of- in different cities." As she expressed herself with so much reserve, the doctur thought it proper not to inquire further. They stood at the edge of the road. The driver was ready to start off. Sabine held out her hand to the doctor. Something prompted him to add another word. “If I am not mistaken, we have already run across one another several times in town.” “Certainly, Doctor. I have known you quite a while. Of course it is sometimes weeks before I get in. Last year, by the way, I had , the pleasure of meeting your sister, but only quite casually, at Schmidts—the merchant, you know. She is here with you again ?'' The doctor only stared at the ground. His eyes chanced to fall on Sabine's shoes, and he gazed past them. “My sister did not come with me,” he said. “She died three months ago in Lanzarote.” He felt an ache about his heart; yet that he had had occasion to utter the name of the distant island brought him some little indemnity for his pain. Sabine said “Oh,” and nothing more. And so they stood in silence for a while, until Doctor Graesler constrained his features to a somewhat formal smile and held out his hand to Sabine. 10 DOCTOR GRAESLER got under “Good night, Doctor,” she said gravely. “Good night, Fräulein," he replied, and climbed into the car- riage. Sabine stood there for a moment until the carriage had way; then she turned to go. Doctor Graesler looked back after her. Head slightly bowed and without turning around, she walked up through the pines and towards the house from which a beam of light shimmered along the path. A bend in the road, and the pic- ture had vanished. The doctor leaned back and gazed up at the sky, which hung above him in the cool dusk, sparsely studded with stars. He thought of distant times, of younger, happier days, when many a pretty creature had been bound to him by love. First there came to him the widow of the engineer from Rio de Janeiro; in Lis- bon she had left the steamer on which he was, in his capacity as ship’s-doctor, her fellow-traveller—had left it, ostensibly in order to make some purchases in the city, and, in spite of the fact that her ticket was good to Hamburg, had not returned on board. He saw her still before him, dressed in black—saw her as she nodded to him pleasantly from the carriage which was conveying her up to the city from the harbour-saw her as, at a street-corner, she vanished from his sight for ever. He further called to mind the lawyer's daughter from Nancy, to whom he had become engaged in St Blasien, the first watering-place in which he had ever practised, and who had then to make a sudden trip to France with her parents because of an important law-suit and had left him to that very day without advice of her safe arrival at home, without word of any kind. His mind also went back to Fräulein Lizzie and his student days in Berlin; she had gone so far as to shoot herself, somewhat, on his account, and he remembered how she had reluctantly shown him the smoke-blackened wound under her left breast, and how he had nevertheless been quite unmoved by this and had, indeed, been sensible rather of a certain vexation and of a feeling of ennui. Nice, domestic little Henriette he recalled, too; for many years, whenever he had returned to Hamburg from his ocean trips, he had found her in her tiny dwelling overlooking the Alster—found her as cheerful, as unruffled, as available, as when he had last left her, and this without his ever learning, or at all seriously bothering himself about, what in the interval she had been doing or feeling. Divers other affairs crossed his mind as well, among them several ARTHUR SCHNITZLER 11 which had not been so very pretty, and some which, in a different way, had been even downright dangerous and of which he could not rightly conceive to that very day how he had come to let himself in for them. It seemed to him sad, however, that youth had passed, and that with it he had forfeited the right still to expect something beautiful from life. The carriage travelled on through the fields; the hills rose darkly around him and seemed higher than by day; from the little villas lights glimmered across to him; against the railing of a balcony a man and a woman were leaning silently, pressed closer to one an- other than they would, very likely, have dared to be in daylight. From a veranda on which a small company sat at their evening meal, came the sound of loud speech and laughter. Doctor Graesler began to be aware of his appetite; he found no small joy in the prospect of the supper which he made it a habit to take at the Silver Lion, and urged the leisurely driver on to greater speed. At the table reserved for the regular guests he found his acquaintances already gathered. He drank one more glass of wine than usual, because, as he knew from past experience, life had a way of appear- ing to him, through the consequent, almost imperceptible numbing of his faculties, as somehow sweeter and more bearable. At first he had intended telling about his day's visit at The Range, but, for some reason which was not entirely clear to him, he let it be. The wine failed of its effect, however, on this occasion, and Doctor Graesler arose from the table even more melancholy than he had sat down, and took himself off, with a slight headache, to his home. III During the next few days, in the vague expectation of meeting Sabine, Doctor Graesler took more frequently than usual the oppor- tunity of wandering up and down the main street of the little town. Once during his office-hours, when the waiting-room happened by chance to be empty, he rushed down the steps as though seized by a sudden presentiment, and vainly took a hurried walk down as far as the pump-room and back again. That evening among his friends at the inn he mentioned, as though incidentally, that he had recently been called to The Range, and then listened tensely, even a trifle combatively, to hear whether someone would perhaps let fall a light word about Fräulein Sabine, such as is sometimes uttered, even a 12 DOCTOR GRAESLER without the slightest justification, by any one of a company of men in high spirits. But the feeble echo of his remark disclosed to the doctor that the Schleheim family aroused no interest whatsoever; and only quite cursorily did conversation touch upon some of the so-called ranger's relatives, with whom the daughter, -evidently no one in the gathering considered her remarkably pretty,—was sup- posed now and then to have spent the winter months. Late one afternoon, shortly thereafter, Doctor Graesler deter- mined upon a walk which took him gradually into the vicinity of The Range. From the road he saw it lying silent in the shadow of the woods, and even perceived on the veranda the form of a man whose features he could not at that distance distinguish. He stopped for a moment, violently tempted to walk up towards the house straight- way and inquire after Frau Schleheim's health, as though he had only just accidentally been passing by there; but he quickly re- flected that such a move was hardly compatible with his profes- sional dignity and might possibly be misconstrued. From this walk he came home more fatigued and out of temper than he would have thought possible after such a trivial disappointment; and when he did not meet Sabine in the spa even during the next few days, he began to hope that she was out of town or that she had perhaps even disappeared from there for good and all—a consummation which appeared to him, in the interest of his own equanimity, really desirable. As he sat one morning on his sunny balcony taking his breakfast, which he had long ceased to enjoy as he had the first few days, he was informed that a young man wished to see him. Directly there appeared on the balcony, clad in knickerbockers, a tall, handsome youth whose carriage and cast of countenance so unmistakably re- sembled those of Sabine that the doctor could not refrain from greeting him as an acquaintance. “Young Herr Schleheim ?” he said in a tone which carried more of conviction than of inquiry. “Yes, that's me,” the young fellow replied. “I recognized you immediately from your resemblance to your -eh-mother. Won't you sit down, young man? I am still at my breakfast, as you see. What's the trouble? Your mother ill again?” He felt somehow as though he were talking to Sabine. Young Schleheim remained standing, holding his cap politely in one hand. “Mother's all right, Doctor. Ever since you appealed ARTHUR SCHNITZLER 13 to her conscience in the matter, she has become somewhat more careful." The doctor smiled. It was immediately clear to him that, for the purpose of making a stronger impression, Sabine had ascribed to him, as the physician, an expression of her own apprehensions. Suddenly it occurred to him that it might this time be Sabine her- self who was sick, and he perceived from the unexpected quickening of his pulse how dearly he had the welfare of the young lady at heart. But before he could inquire further, the boy said: “This time it's my father.” Doctor Graesler drew a sigh of relief. “What is the matter with him? Nothing serious, I hope.” “Ah, if one only knew, Doctor. He has changed so, lately. Per- haps it isn't a case of sickness at all. You see, he's already fifty- two years old.” The doctor knit his brows involuntarily. He asked somewhat coolly: "Well, what symptoms give you occasion for anxiety?" “Latterly, Doctor, father has had attacks of vertigo, and yester- day evening, when he wanted to get up from his chair, he nearly fell over and only steadied himself with great difficulty by holding on to the edge of the table. And then, when he takes hold of his glass in order to drink—this we've been noticing for some time-his hands tremble.” “Hm.” The doctor looked up from his coffee-cup. “I suppose your father takes hold of his glass quite often, eh? And I presume there isn't always water in the glass either, is there?” The boy dropped his eyes. “Well, of course, Sabine thought that might have something to do with it. And then, besides, father smokes all day.” "Well, now, my dear young man, these don't necessarily seem to be symptoms of old age. However—your father wishes me to call?” he added courteously. “Unfortunately that isn't so simple, Doctor. Father mustn't on any account know that you are coming because of him. You see, he never wanted to have anything to do with doctors. And Sabine was wondering whether we couldn't manage to make your visit appear accidental.” “Accidental ?” "Well, for instance, if some time soon you were to pass by The Range again, just as you did the other afternoon, why then Sabine " 14 DOCTOR GRAESLER would nod to you or hail you from the veranda, and you would come up-and-and then we'd have to see what came after that." The doctor felt himself blushing to the roots of his hair. He stirred his spoon around in the empty cup and said: “Of course it is not very often that I have time to take a walk. The other day, to be sure, I—why, yes, come to think of it, I did pass rather near The Range.” At last he gathered courage to look up, and saw to his relief that the boy was gazing at him quite inno- cently. He continued in a businesslike tone: “If it can't be done in any other way, why then I shall accept your— Of course, a talk on the veranda will not do very much good. Without a thorough examination, you understand, nothing can really be determined.” “That goes without saying, Doctor. We hope, you know, that father will even make up his mind to that, too, after a while. But if you'd only just see him once, first! You've got so much experi- ence. Perhaps you could make it possible, Doctor, one of these days after your office-hours- Of course, we'd like it best if you could even do it to-day—” "To-day,” Graesler repeated to himself. “This very day I could see her again! How wonderful!” But he kept silence, turned the pages of his notebook, shook his head dubiously, seemed to be encountering insurmountable difficulties—until at last he picked up a pencil of a sudden, resolutely ran a line through something that was not there at all, and, as that word happened to be the first to occur to him, wrote down on the next page, “Sabine.” He an- nounced his decision pleasantly, but a little coolly. “Very well, then. Let us say, this evening between half past five and six. Is that all right?” "Oh, Doctor" Graesler rose, checked the boy's outburst of thanks, asked to be remembered kindly to his mother and sister, and at parting shook hands with him. Then he left the balcony and entered his room, and watched at the window as young Schleheim came out of the vesti- bule with his bicycle, pulled his cap well down on his head, swung himself nimbly and skilfully on, and had soon vanished around the next corner. “If I were only ten years younger,” the doctor thought to himself, "I might be justified in imagining that the whole thing is nothing but a pretext of Fräulein Sabine's to arrange to see me again.” And he sighed softly. a ARTHUR SCHNITZLER 15 Dressed in a light grey suit, which, however, preserved in the black band on its left sleeve some sign of his being in mourning, he drove off shortly after five o'clock. It had been his intention to let the carriage drop him near the range; but soon after he had left the villa district and long before he reached his destination, he was agreeably surprised to see Sabine and her brother coming to meet him on the narrow meadow-path that wound along beside the high- way on which he was slowly driving up the valley. He jumped out of the carriage and shook hands first with Sabine and then with the boy. “We have to beg you to forgive us,” Sabine began somewhat agi- tatedly. "You see, we didn't succeed in keeping father at home, and I'm afraid he will hardly be back until late in the evening. Please don't be angry with me, Doctor." The doctor would have liked to appear annoyed, and even tried; but he did not succeed and so said lightly, "Oh, that's all right.” He glanced at his watch with a frown, as though it were now neces- sary to arrange the rest of his day anew. Then he looked up and had to smile at Sabine and her brother, who stood at the edge of the road much like two school children waiting to be punished. Sabine wore a white dress; a broad-brimmed straw hat hung down from her left arm on a loose yellow ribbon, and she looked much younger than the other time. "And on such a hot afternoon,” said the doctor almost reproach- fully, "you came all this way on foot to meet me! That was really not at all necessary. “First of all, Doctor," she rejoined, in some confusion, "in order to avoid any misunderstanding, I want to state expressly that this unsuccessful visit must, of course, be considered as professional- The doctor hastily interrupted her. “Now, please, Fräulein. Even if our plot had succeeded to-day, there could not possibly be any question of a professional visit. What is more, I beg you to consider me, for the present, as an accomplice in your designs.” "If you take the matter in that way, Doctor,” Sabine responded, "you make it simply impossible for me” Doctor Graesler interrupted again. “It had been my intention to take a drive to-day, anyhow. And perhaps, as things have turned out this way, you will allow me to place the carriage at your dis- posal for the ride home, won't you? And if you are willing to take me along, I might perhaps take this opportunity of inquiring after 16 DOCTOR GRAESLER the health of your mother.” He felt himself a man of the world, and hastily resolved to try a larger watering-place in which to prac- tise his profession the following summer, although he had thereto- fore never had good luck in such places. “Mother is doing splendidly,” said Sabine. “But if you already count the evening lost, Doctor, what do you think, Karl—” and she turned to her brother of showing the Doctor our woods ?” "Your woods?” “That's what we call them,” said Karl. “They do really belong to us alone. None of the patients at the resort ever get out this far, you know. There are lots of beautiful walks—some just like in a virgin forest.” "Well, of course, we'll have to have a look at one of those. I accept with pleasure.” The carriage was ordered to proceed to The Range in any case, and under conduct of brother and sister Doctor Graesler started off along a lane so narrow that they had to walk single file, at first through corn-stalks as high as a man's head, then across meadow- land, and finally into the woods. The doctor mentioned that he had been coming here every sum- mer for six years and yet had no real acquaintance with the region. But then, that was his fate. Even when he was a ship’s-doctor he had seen only the coast, or, at best, the harbour-towns and their immediate environs; for his duties had nearly always prevented him from roaming farther inland. As Karl made known, through re- peated questions, his interest in sea-voyages and distant lands, the doctor named at random several maritime cities to or through which his profession had years before led him; and the thought that he might thus be accounted a much-travelled man lent to his speech a liveliness and a good humour that were otherwise not always at his command. Through a clearing they caught a delightful view of the little town, and saw the glass roof of the pump-room glisten- ing in the evening sun. They decided to rest a while. Karl stretched out at full length in the grass. Sabine sat down on a barked and chopped-off tree. But Doctor Graesler, who did not want to expose his light grey suit to any kind of peril, remained standing and con- tinued to tell of his travels; his voice, usually somewhat husky despite frequent clearings of the throat, seemed to him to have a new, or at least unfamiliar, soft ring, and he found himself listened to with an attention such as he had not for a long time enjoyed. He ARTHUR SCHNITZLER 17 finally offered to accompany brother and sister home, so that their father, should he be already returned, would without more ado credit the story of an accidental meeting; in this manner, also, their acquaintance would naturally occur. Sabine nodded shortly, in a way which was peculiar to her and which appeared to the doctor to imply a more definite approval than words could have conveyed. They went along the gently sloping and constantly widening wood- path and it was principally Karl who now led the conversation, developing plans of travel and of discovery; in his childish spirit of adventure there showed unmistakably the effects of juvenile books which he had recently read. Sooner than the doctor expected they had reached the garden hedge, and through the tall pines saw the back of the house, with its six narrow uniform windows shim- mering in the waning light. On the trampled lawn between the house and the hedge stood a long, rough-timbered table with a bench and chairs. As Karl had run ahead to reconnoitre, the doctor stood for a moment under the pines with Sabine. They looked at one another and the doctor smiled, a little embarrassed; but Sabine remained grave, and, after turning his gaze slowly about in all directions, the doctor remarked, "How peaceful it is here!” and cleared his throat softly. Karl appeared at an open window and beckoned vigorously. The doctor summoned professional gravity to his countenance and followed Sabine through the garden and on to the veranda, where the ranger and his wife were just listening to their son's report of the story of the afternoon's meeting. Graesler, still confused by the erroneous designation of the man as a ranger, had expected to see before him a rough, long-bearded man with a pipe in his mouth, and perhaps dressed in hunting costume, and was astonished to find him a slender, smooth-shaven gentleman with carefully combed hair only just turning from black to grey, who greeted him pleasantly, but with an air of distinction that affected him as somehow theatrical. Doctor Graesler began by extolling the beauty of the woods, with all whose glories Karl and Sabine had just been acquainting him; and while they carried on a conversation about the slowness with which, despite its charming surroundings, the watering-place nearby showed signs of growth, Doctor Graesler by no means neglected to set about his professional observations of the head of the house. He could at first discover nothing striking about him except a certain restlessness of eye as well as a recurring, half-contemptuous twitching of the corners of his mouth. When 18 DOCTOR GRAESLER Sabine announced dinner, Doctor Graesler wanted to take his leave; but the ranger, with an exaggerated show of courtesy, refused to allow this, and so the doctor was soon sitting with the parents and the children at the family board, over which a green-shaded lamp hung from the panelled ceiling. He mentioned the imminent gather- ing of the Saturday Club at the casino, and, turning to Sabine, asked her whether she sometimes took part in affairs of that sort. “Not in the last few years,” she replied. “Before, when I was younger” And in response to the doctor's deprecatory smile she added im- mediately and, as it seemed to him, not insignificantly, “You know, I'm already twenty-seven. Her father interposed a sarcastic remark about the petty pursuits of the little watering-place and began to speak animatedly of the magic of large cities and the stir of cosmopolitan life, and one gathered, as he continued, that he had been an opera-singer and had not relinquished that career until long after his marriage. While he was mentioning the names of many artists with whom he had appeared, of patrons who had esteemed him highly, and finally of doctors to whose faulty methods of treatment he claimed to owe the premature loss of his baritone voice, he emptied one glass after another until he suddenly seemed quite exhausted and looked, all at once, like an old and worn-out man. The doctor now thought it about time to take his leave. Karl and Sabine escorted him to his carriage, and inquired anxiously as to the impression he had got of their father's condition. Although Doctor Graesler already felt competent to pronounce any serious illness out of the question, he expressed the intention of finding an opportunity for further ob- servation and, even better, for a regular examination-without which, as a conscientious physician, he could make no definitive statement in the case. “Doesn't it seem to you,” Karl said to his sister, “that father was more talkative this evening than he has been for a long time ?” “Yes, I guess that's true,” she replied in confirmation. And then, turning towards Doctor Graesler with a look of gratitude, she added, “He took to you immediately; one could see that very clearly.” The doctor made a gesture of modest deprecation, promised upon their entreaty that he would repeat his visit in the near future, and ARTHUR SCHNITZLER 19 climbed into the carriage. Brother and sister both remained stand- ing at the edge of the road, gazing after him. In the cool dusk, be- neath a starry sky, the doctor rode homeward. Sabine's confidence in him filled him with contentment, all the sweeter as he allowed himself to think that her confidence was due not to his professional abilities alone. He knew very well that, particularly in recent years, he had become more tired and indifferent—had, indeed, often been positively deficient in the merest human sympathy with his patients and their ills. And for the first time in many a day there dawned upon him again the nobleness of a profession which he had chosen with enthusiasm in the years of his youth, but of which it was cer- tain that he had not at all times, and in a like manner, proved himself truly worthy. IV The next day when Doctor Graesler opened the door to his wait- ing-room, he saw to his amazement, sitting among the other patients, Herr Schleheim; who, being the first arrival, immediately followed the doctor into his consultation-room. First of all, the singer de- manded that his family never be informed of his visit, and on hav- ing exacted this promise he was prepared at once to recite his com- plaints and to submit to an examination. Doctor Graesler was unable to discover any serious physical ailment, but there was un- mistakably present a deep spiritual depression, not surprising in a man who, while still in the prime of life, had been forced to aban- don an outwardly brilliant profession for which he was incapable of finding sufficient compensation either in domestic concerns and love of family or in any inner wealth. It visibly benefited him to be able, for once, thoroughly to unbosom himself to someone. And so he took it very kindly of the doctor when the latter explained that he could really not at all consider him as a patient, and with humor- ous adroitness besought him for permission to drop in at The Range on his occasional strolls, to chat with him there. When, on the following Sunday morning, he was making use of this permission, he at first came upon the singer alone and was immediately informed by him that he had after all thought it wiser to apprise the "family”—as he always, thus collectively, referred to them—of the examination which had taken place and of its 20 DOCTOR GRAESLER favourable issue, if only so as not to have to see any longer their worried countenances, which were offensive to him, and to hear their tedious gossip, which had been driving him to despair. When, thereupon, the doctor was disposed to laud the solicitude of the children, exaggerated, to be sure, but nevertheless really touching, the father concurred in a measure and explained that he found nothing at all to criticize in them other than just that they were such good and exemplary persons. “That,” he added, “is why neither of them will get much out of life; very likely they will not even get to know it.” And in his eyes there shimmered a pale light of reminiscence of remote and iniqui- tous adventure. They had sat only a short while on the bench before the front door when the remaining members of the Schleheim family ap- proached, all dressed somewhat in Sunday-go-to-meeting fashion and looking for this very reason more countrified than usual. Sabine, who seemed to be aware of this, directly took off her beribboned hat and then, as though relieved, ran a hand over her simple coiffure. The doctor was persuaded to stay for dinner; conversation during the meal kept strictly to the surface of things, and when the talk chanced to turn to the fact that the director of a sanitarium in the neighbourhood of the spa entertained some thought of retiring, the mother incidentally asked her guest whether he was not tempted by such a position, in which he might, as she said, very possibly be offered the opportunity of turning his famous hunger-cures to sys- tematic account. After Graesler had smilingly parried the jest he remarked that he had never been able, theretofore, to reconcile him- self to the idea of a position of that sort. “I cannot forego the consciousness of my own freedom,” he said. “And even though I have already practised down there in town for half a dozen seasons in succession and in all probability shall con- tinue to return in coming years, yet constraint of any kind would be sure to disturb considerably my delight in this neighbourhood, nay, even in my profession.” Sabine seemed anxious to express through a barely noticeable nod her appreciation of this attitude. She showed herself, moreover, well instructed in the conditions at the sanitarium and declared them far more tolerable than they had been in a previous period under another director, an old man grown indolent. She also ex- a ARTHUR SCHNITZLER 21 a pressed the opinion that being active in a sanitarium was much to be desired by every doctor, if only because nowhere else were there offered conditions favourable to a really lasting relation between doctor and patients and, in addition, the opportunity of applying reliable, because constantly controllable, curative methods. “To be sure, there is a great deal in that,” said Doctor Graesler, in a tone of such reserve as he thought proper in an expert among laymen. Nor did this escape Sabine, who remarked quickly, with a slight blush: "I happen to have engaged in nursing for a while myself, in Berlin.” "You don't mean it!" the doctor cried, and did not at first know what attitude he ought to take towards this disclosure. He there- fore remarked somewhat indefinitely: “A splendid, a noble profession. But dismal and difficult. And I can readily understand that you were soon drawn home again to the fresh air and the woods.” Sabine did not reply, and the others kept silence also; but Doctor Graesler suspected that conversation had just passed hard by the spot where, perhaps, the modest riddle of Sabine's existence lay hidden. After dinner Karl insisted on his traditional right to a game of dominoes in the garden. The doctor was invited to join in; and soon—while the mother, reclining in a comfortable chair beneath the pines, gradually fell off into slumber over the needle-work which she had brought with her—the game was rattling cheerfully along. Doctor Graesler recalled certain gloomy hours spent with his dejected sister on Sunday afternoons in other years. He seemed to himself to have escaped miraculously from a melancholy and op- pressive period of his life; and when Sabine, becoming aware of his abstraction, reminded him with a smiling glance or even with a light touch upon his arm to make another move, these little intimacies encouraged him to a mild and indefinable hope. The dominoes were cleared away and a flower-embroidered cloth spread on the table; and as no carriage could that day be procured, the doctor had only time to drink a hasty cup of coffee with the others if he was to visit his patients (who could, of course, not dis- pense with him on Sundays) before late that evening. He took with him the memory of Sabine's smile and of a squeeze of her a 22 DOCTOR GRAESLER hand; and the afterglow of so much happiness would have left him indifferent to the tediousness and toil of tramping along an even dustier highway than that on which he took his way home. Nevertheless he thought it proper to let some time pass before again making his appearance at The Range. It was easier for him than he had expected, as his profession began, even inwardly, to occupy him again. He not only treated his patients with the most scrupulous care, but also took pains to fill in as far as possible, by the study of medical works and periodicals, the gaps which had gradually developed in his theoretical knowledge. But even if he was fully conscious that all this was to be traced to the effect upon him of Sabine's personality, he continued, notwithstanding, to defend himself against the rise of any serious hope of possessing the young girl. And even when he let his thoughts play gently over the possibility of a wooing and sought to picture in imagination the outcome of marriage to Sabine, there appeared to him unsummoned the figure-highly disagreeable in this connexion-of the hotel- director in Lanzarote, smiling impertinently as he received the elderly doctor and his young bride at the door of the hotel; and this apparition presented itself to him as regularly as though Lan- zarote were the only place in which Graesler could practise his pro- fession during the winter, and the director the only living being who could compromise his budding matrimonial fortunes. One morning towards the end of the week Graesler met Sabine in town, where she had been attending to some purchases. She asked him why he had not come to see them for such a long time. “So few people come to visit us,” she said, “and it is only to a few of them that you can talk sensibly. Next time you must tell us some more about your life. One likes to get a chance to hear about all that sort of thing." Her eyes shone with a gentle longing. “If you believe, Fräulein Sabine, that life out there in the world has so many more interesting things to offer, how does it happen that you stay here so quietly ?” "Perhaps it will not always be like this,” she replied simply. “And there was once a time when things were a little different. Besides, for the present I can hardly wish for anything better than I have.” And the light of longing died out in her eyes. To be continued FROM THE BOOK OF FRIENDS BY HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL Allegory is an important vehicle which must not be despised. To show what friends really are to one another we must turn to the magic horn and the magic ring, rather than to psychology. Of those whom destiny has really driven to play-acting, the heroic and tragic players are in flight from the ego, the comedians from the world. The significant Germans always seem to be swimming under water; Goethe alone whips across the flickering surface like a soli- tary dolphin. Balzac is the nearest approach of the French spirit to the German mode of thought and expression; in the second half of his life Goethe marks the corresponding reversal of this tendency. Nature executes her purposes in the haze of a non-understanding; this is also the relation of the poet to his spiritual product. Talent is not the deed; legs are not the dance. The historians of literature make a dreadful to-do of certain externals, but at the same time they overlook what applies to the single artist in his individual case. Racine lays all his stress on inner decisions; what value to him would there be in Shakespeare's continual change of setting? The four walls of a noble's chamber, almost barren in their dignity, are sufficient, to a symbolic degree, for his needs. a The usual writer tells how something might possibly come to pass. The good writer makes it occur before our eyes as though actually present. The master tells something as though it had hap- pened long ago and is happening again. 24 HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL Reality is the fable convenue of the Philistines. At the start of life we are most subjective and understand least the subjectivity of others. All women are French in their feeling for restraint and their hankering after the unrestrained. The stupidity of the wise, the bluntness of the sharp where is it rooted? In an unchecked desire for mimicry. Whoever in his intercourse with men guards his manners, is living on his revenues; but he who puts himself above such things draws on his principal. Children are entertaining because they are easy to entertain. Under certain conditions a woman will suffer a man to talk with her of his love for another: but all the emphasis must be laid on love, not on the object of love. Agreement without sympathy is repulsive. It is not the doer who is made impure by the deed, but the deed by the doer. By the giving and receiving of thoughts we communicate as with kisses and embraces; he who accepts a thought is not receiving something, but some one. There is a stillness of autumn which reaches even to its colours. The whole soul is never at one except when in rapture. When a man is gone he takes his secret with him: how he-pre- cisely he—found it possible, in the spiritual sense, to live. Where is thy self to be found ? Ever in the deepest enchantment which thou hast undergone. Courtesy of Der Sturin, Berlin JEW. BY MARC CHAGALL Courtesy of Der Sturm, Berlin YOUNG GIRL. BY MARC CHAGALL Courtesy of Der Sturm, Berlin PEASANT EATING. BY MARC CHAGALL | 佩 ​100, Courtesy of Der Sturm, B rrlin VIOLIN PLAYER. BY MARC CHAGALL | | 1 PENITENT ART BY G. SANTAYANA Ae a RT is like a charming woman who once had her age of inno- cence in the nursery, when she was beautiful without knowing it, being wholly intent on what she was making or telling or im- agining Then she has had a season of passion and vanity, when having discovered how beautiful she was, she decked herself out in all pos- sible pomp and finery, invented fashion after fashion to keep ad- miration alive, and finally began to put on rouge and false hair and too much scent, in the hope of still being a belle at seventy. But it sometimes happens, during her long decline, that she hears a call to repentance, and thinks of being converted. Naturally, such a fine lady cannot give up her carriage; she is obliged occasionally to entertain her old friends at dinner, and to be seen now and then at the opera. Habit and the commitments she has in the world, where no function is complete without her, are too strong for her to be converted suddenly, or altogether; but henceforth something in her, in her most sensitive and thoughtful hours, upbraids her for the hollowness of her old airs and graces. It is really a sorry busi- ness, this perpetual pretence of being important and charming and charmed and beautiful. Art seems to be passing at present through a lenten mood of this sort. Not all art, of course: somebody must still manufacture offi- cial statues and family portraits, somebody must design apartment- houses, clubs, churches, sky-scrapers, and stations. Visible through the academic framework of these inevitable objects, there is often much professional learning and judgement; there is even, some- times, a hint of poetic life, or a suggestion of exotic beauty. In Mr Sargent's painting, for instance, beneath the photographic stand- ards of the studio, we often catch a satirical intention, or a philo- sophic idea, or love of the sensuous qualities in the model and in the accessories; a technical echo of Velasquez and Goya, though without plastic vitality or dramatic ease; a sort of Van Dyck, as it were, for the days of Edward VII; the dreadful lapse in refinement 26 PENITENT ART 1 not being greater, perhaps, than is requisite for the documentary value of a true mirror of fashion in the later age. Taste of the old honest worldly sort is far from dead; it is found still in milliners and designers of fashionable garments, of furniture and ornaments. All this luxurious traditional art is as far as possible from re- pentance. Yet as the Magdalene was potentially a saint-perhaps always a saint really—so the most meretricious contrivances in the arts may sometimes include and betray the very principle of re- demption, which is love; in this case the love of beauty. For exam- ple, here is the Russian ballet, doubling the dose of luxurious stimu- lation in every direction, erotic, tragic, historical, and decorative; yet see how it glides at times into simplicity, and in spite of all the paraphernalia of expert aestheticism, issues in forms of unmistak- ably penitent art, like pure colour and caricature. I call pure colour and caricature penitent art, because it is only disappointment in other directions that drives artists back to these primary effects. By an austere and deliberate abstinence from every- thing that naturally tempts them, they achieve in this way a certain peace; but they would far rather have found it by genuinely recov- ering their naïveté. Sensuous splendour and caricature would then have seemed to them not the acme of abstract art, but the obvious truth of things; they would have doted on puppets and pantomime as a child dotes on dolls, without ever noticing how remote they are from reality. In the nineteenth century some romantic artists, poets, and philosophers actually tried being rebaptized, hoping that a fresh dip in the Jordan might rejuvenate them; but it was of no use. The notion of recovering innocence is a contradiction in terms; con- version can only initiate a non-natural life of grace; death must in- tervene before corruption can put on incorruption. That age was accordingly an age of revivals, of antiquaries, nothing in art and religion but retrospective; it was progressive only in things material and in the knowledge of them. Even its philosophical idealism and psychology were meant to be historical and descriptive of facts, literary and egotistical as the view of the facts might be. Roman- ticism thought it was exquisitely sensitive to the spirit of remote things, but in reality it was sensitive only to material perspectives, to costume and stage-setting; it grew sentimental over legends and ruins, and being moonstruck, thought it was imbibing the spirit of the past. But the past had not been consciously romantic; what the G. SANTAYANA 27 ancients actually thought and felt was understood much better be- fore the nineteenth century than since; for formerly they were regarded simply as men, essentially contemporary—which comes much nearer the truth. Of course, the passion that can drive people to such earnest affectations must be itself genuine. Keats or Rus- kin or Oscar Wilde had abundant vitality and expressed, each in his studied archaism, the profound helplessness that beset him; but what was vital in them was some sensuous or moral or revolutionary instinct of their own, such as in Shelley had existed pure; only in them it was contorted by their terrible preoccupation with being early, or rich, or choice. They were hypnotized by dead beauty; and not having invention nor influence enough to remodel their own age, they fled from it to exotic delights, sometimes primitive, sometimes luxurious, sometimes religious, and sometimes all these things at once. Similarly the revivals in architecture and in the minor crafts expressed a genuine love of colour, ornament, and beauty; they gave the snobbish middle classes a taste of cheap luxury; they could sip culture in a teacup. Yet the particular fashions revived were un- stable; each successive affectation had hardly ceased to seem ex- quisite when it began to look foolish. Art at best is subject to fash- ion, because there is a margin of arbitrary variation in its forms, even when their chief lines are determined by their function; but in revived art fashion is all; it is a fancy-dress, unsatisfying even in the glamour of the ball-room, which we are positively ashamed to be seen in in the morning. Fortunately revivals now seem to be over. Ruins and museums are interesting to the antiquary; they stir the historical imagination, and dazzle us here and there with some ray of living beauty, like that of a jewel; but they cannot supply inspiration. In art, in poetry, unless you become as a little child you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. Little children is what artists and poets are now striving hard to be; little children who instead of blowing a tin trumpet blow by chance through a whole orchestra, but with the same emotion as the child; or who, instead of daubing a geometrical skeleton with a piece of chalk, can daub a cross-eyed cross-section of the entire spectrum or a compound fracture of a nightmare. Such is Cubism: by no means an inexpert or meaningless thing. Before you can compose a chaos or paint the unnamable, you must train yourself to a severe abstention from all practical habits of percep- 28 PENITENT ART tion; you must heroically suppress the understanding. The result, when the penance is genuinely performed, has a very deep and re- condite charm; you revert to what the spinal column might feel if it had a separate consciousness, or to what the retina might see if it could be painlessly cut off from the brain; lights, patterns, dynamic suggestions, sights and memories fused together, hypnotic harmonies such as may visit a vegetative or even mineral sensibility; you be- come a thousand prisms and mirrors reflecting one another. This is one kind of aesthetic repentance. Vain, vain, it says to itself, was the attempt to depict or beautify external objects; let material things be what they will; what are they to the artist? Nature has the urgency of life, which art cannot rival; it has the lure, the cruel- ty, of actual existence, where all is sin and confusion and vanity, a hideous strife of forms devouring one another, in which all are mu- tilated and doomed. What is that to the spirit? Let it confess its own impotence in that field, and abandon all attempts to observe or preserve what are called things: let it devote itself instead to cleans- ing the inside of the cup, to purifying its sensibility, which is after all what nature plays upon when she seems to us to be beautiful. Perhaps in that way spirit may abstract the gold of beauty and cast the dross away—all that alloy of preoccupation with material forms and external events and moral sentiments and vain animal adven- tures which has so long distracted the misguided artist, when he could paint the whole world and had lost his own soul. It is always the play of sensibility, and nothing else, that lends interest to external themes; and it was an evil obsession with alien things that dragged sensibility into a slavery to things which stified and degraded it: salvation lies in emancipating the medium. To renounce representation, or be representative only by accident, is accordingly one sort of penitent art; but there is another sort, more humble and humourous. This second sort makes no attempt to resist the impulse to observe and to express external things. It does not proudly imagine that the medium, which is the human con- tribution to representation, can be sufficient unto itself. On the con- trary, in its sensuous orchestration it is content to be rudimentary, to work in clay or in wood, and to dress in homespun. It is all feel- ing, all childlike tenderness, all sense of life. Persons and animals fascinate it. At the same time, warned by the fate of explicit poets and realistic painters, it does not attempt, in its portraiture, to give G. SANTAYANA 29 more than a pregnant hint, some large graphic sign, some profound caricature. Don't be rhetorical, it says; don't try to be exhaustive; all that is worth saying can be said in words of one syllable. Look long, and be brief. It is not in their material entirety and detail that things penetrate to the soul, but in their simple large identity, as a child knows his mother, nurse, or dog. Fresh inchoate forms, voices draped in mantles, people the mind, and return to it in dreams. Monsters and dwarfs were the first gods; the half, said a Greek proverb, is better than the whole. The implicit is alone im- portant where life is concerned: nothing is more eloquent than an abstract posture, an immovable single gesture. Let art abandon reproduction and become indication. If it threatens thereby to be- come caricature, know that profound art can never be anything else. If men, when seen truly, take on the aspect of animals or pup- pets, it is because they are animals and puppets at bottom. But all caricature need not be unkind; it may be tender, or even sublime. The distortion, the single emphasis, the extreme simplification may reveal a soul which rhetoric and self-love had hidden in a false rationality. The absurd is the naked truth, the pathetic appeal of sheer fact, attempting to come into existence, like a featherless chick peeping out of its eggshell. All this pompous drapery of conven- tion was a disguise; strip it away. Do not make maps of your images; make companions of them, make idols. Be reticent, em- phatic, moody, bold; salvation lies in caricature. Accustomed as they are to revivals, some critics have called this form of aesthetic penance a revival of savage art; but the mood is reversed. Savages were never rudimentary on purpose; they were not experimenting in the distortion or simplification of forms; much less, of course, did they voluntarily eliminate all representa- tion of objects in order to deepen sensibility for the medium. They simply painted as well as they could. We have got far beyond that. Penitent art, childish as it may seem at times, is a refinement, per- haps an over-refinement; it is not so much crude or incompetent, as ascetic or morbid. It is also sometimes a little vulgar; because one of the forms of caricature and self-revelation is to be brutal, to flaunt what is out of place, what spoils the picture. Tragedy used to be noble; there is a new refinement in seeing how often it is ig- noble; there is a second tragedy in that. Perhaps what we regard at first sight as a terrible decline in art may be sometimes the awaken- 30 PENITENT ART ing of this sort of self-scorn. See how ugly I am, it cries, how brut- ish, common, and deformed! There are remains of sculpture and paintings of the late Roman Empire in some respects like our latest experiments. The decorative splendour (which was very marked) is lost; we miss the coloured marbles, the gold, the embroideries, the barbaric armour and jewels; but the stunted pathetic human figures remain in crowds. It seems that the spirit had no joy in man any more; it hid him in hieratic garments or pityingly recorded his gregarious misery. He was a corpse laid out in pontifical vestments. We too are dying; but in nature the death of one thing is commonly the birth of another. Instead of decorating a Byzantine sanctuary, our artists do penance in a psychological desert, studying their own sensations, the mysteries of sheer light and sound; and as music was long ago divorced from poetry and instrumental music from sing- ing, so a luxurious but strident art is detaching itself from every- thing but its own medium. This on the decorative side; in represen- tation the same retrenchment stops at another level. Representation too has a psychological medium; fancy must create the images which the observer or reproducer of things conceives to be their forms. These images are not the forms of things at all; not only is their per- spective created by the observer, but their character, when it is truly considered, is amazingly summary, variable, and fantastic-a mere wraith, a mere hint, a mere symbol. What we suppose we see, what we say things look like, is rather an inventory, collected in memory and language, of many successive observations; it is discursive study, registered perhaps in discursive painting. But as the total composi- tion never was nor ever could be a living image, so its parts are not images any longer; in being arrested they have acquired new bound- aries and lost half their primitive essence. We may paint the things we see, we cannot arrest the images by which we see them; all we can do—if the images and not the things are what interest us- is to paint something that, by some occult trick of optics, may revive the image in some particular; and then, although the picture when studied discursively may not resemble the thing at all, it may bring back to us, as it were by scent, the feeling which the thing originally gave us; and we may say that it has caught the spirit of the thing. It is the medium that in such a case animates the object, and seems to obscure it; and this medium which we call sense in so far as things affect us through it, we call spirit in so far as it modifies our view of ADELAIDE CRAPSEY 31 the things. The more we transform things in seeing them, the more we seem to spiritualize them and turn them into forms of our own sensibility, regarding the living image in us as the dramatic essence of the object. It is the business of science to correct this illusion; but the penitent artist—who has taken refuge in the spirit and is not striving to stretch his apprehension into literal truth, since the effort to depict things discursively has proved a vain and arid ambi- tion—the penitent artist is content with the rhythms, echoes, or rays which things awaken within him; and in proportion as these reverberations are actually renewed, the poem remains a cry, the story a dream, the building a glimpse, the portrait a caricature. BLUE HYACINTHS BY ADELAIDE CRAPSEY In your curled petals what ghosts Of blue headlands and seas, What profound immortal breath sighing Of Greece. FROM THE WORKSHOP OF HENRI MATISSE BY HANS PURRMANN Translated from the German by Kenneth Burke I a a a WAS lured to Paris in 1905 by an exhibit of Manets at the Autumn Salon. Also, I had heard the persistent call of Levy, Bondy, Weissgerber, and a few other painter friends already quite established in Paris. French to my ear was like any other noise; for a long time it was impossible for me to distinguish a single word. Weissgerber and Levy took me around their stamping grounds at the Café du Dôme, and then showed me the rest of Paris, took me to see the work of Simon and Blanche, painters well known to us Germans, also to a picture of a primitive forest by Henri Rousseau, a wall of Renoirs where the rose colouring started fierce discussions, and a wall of Cézannes. Finally they led me to the feature, in a small room, where I should surely laugh my head off. A place had been set aside here for the first time to that group of painters who later were dubbed les Fauves. In one corner there was a picture of a woman with a fan, and next to it a diminutive painting of a win- dow which was done in divided colours. The Lady With a Fan struck me by the energetic arrangement of its lines, although not so much by its colouring. Also, I took a strong liking to the Window. Instead of laughing, we argued. Our evenings at the Dôme were spent in powerful harangues. Weissgerber, for instance, who later got so much from Cézanne, directed tirades against this artist, tirades which were charged with anger and a crass misconception of his purposes. Soon I was able to get to the Salon by myself. And each visit was the occasion of a constant struggle. If I was inspired by Manet, then I could not find beauty in the Lady With a Fan. And on the other hand I might almost say that I did not like Manet. But the whole question was somewhat obscured, and it escaped me. Soon after that I met in a café an American painter, Sterne. Our views on painting were similar, with the result that he took me to the col- lection of a friend of his. Embarrassed and curious, I went with HANS PURRMANN 33 him to a studio where the walls were hung with pictures by Picasso —who was already known to me through Uhde—by Cézanne, Renoir, Valloton and there was also the Lady With a Fan. It was a blow to me; how could a man collect such pictures! And pay out good money for them! For the first time, I awoke. I spent so much time on the one picture that it attracted attention; as a result I was introduced to the painter: he was Matisse. He made a great impression on me, and there began a friendship of long standing At this time I was not doing much painting, but I visited the gal- leries often and drew night-pieces. What I saw nearly overwhelmed me, plunging me into discouragement rather than inciting my pro- ductivity. The collector whom I mentioned previously was named Stein. At that time his brother had begun collecting pictures by Matisse almost exclusively. His gifted wife was herself a painter, and in her Matisse found a really remarkable relief from the trials and humours of his art. I was frequently present at these conversa- tions, visited Matisse at his studio, solicited admirers for his work, but had never had the courage to appear with any of my own things. Consequently they tried a little coup d'état. Early one morning Stein knocked at the door of my studio, which likewise served as my residence. In my smock, fully disarmed, I had to admit Stein, and without wasting many words he took my drawings from the wall and showed them later to his wife and to Matisse. Matisse, I learned, examined them for a long while without being able to note a single element of beauty, but he did find a certain strength in them and numbered them in the order of his preference. He asked that I be told of his interest and observed that he found my work somewhat cramped, that he believed he could help me to a greater freedom and laisser-faire. Then Mme Stein invited me to work with her. This was the beginning of a plan to bring together several artists who had already taken their work to Matisse, and open a studio. Among the Germans, I found only Moll and his wife. At this period I was on quite distant terms with the Dôme, in fact I was even the subject of philippics. But when the studio had become well known the Dôme crowd renewed its alliances, and some of them even came to the classes. Students who visited the studio with the idea that they would learn to turn out Matisses or acquire a ferociously ultra-modern art a 34 FROM THE WORKSHOP OF HENRI MATISSE . were in for a disappointment. There was no programme. Of course, people came who had been affected by Matisse's pictures and who had lost their bearings, trying perhaps to renounce correct drawing and to paint with large masses and conflicts. But the majority at the school were not long lost in this direction, and Matisse helped them patiently to find their own way out. In fact, it was his cus- tomary procedure to attack any false aspects or mannerisms in a student; he would reduce a work to its ultimate nudity, examine the residuum for some trace of a personal art, and then devote himself to clarifying and strengthening this residuum. Matisse would ad- dress a student with words which to us were rare and remarkable: the artist must begin with the conventional—to have something interesting at the start is a mere hoax—the interest occurs as we move on from this conventional. “You are not committing suicide if you lean more on nature and strive for an exact reproduction. You must first subject yourself to nature, re- capture it, then motivate it and perhaps even heighten its beauty! But you must be able to walk well on the ground before you get on the tight-rope. True, I believe I could tell you whether you are on the tight-rope or are lying underneath, but I don't see how that would be of any use to you. You must learn to do your own criti- cizing.” Or Matisse stops before the work of another student: "Oh, don't think that you can frighten me; I am not afraid, al- though you may succeed with some one more naïve. But what sort of satisfaction do you get out of that ?" Matisse took every work in earnest, even that of the seemingly least gifted of his students. Just as if dealing with one of his own works, he would study out what was lacking, what method to pursue, and placing himself in the spiritual point of view of the student he would discuss only those matters germane to the work itself. Perhaps Matisse had but one weakness. If he found a work pleasant in its colouring, he fell a victim to its charm and could not leave off expressing his approval. The studio was open for only a few years. It became terribly overcrowded and began to tire Matisse. Still, it would be worth while checking up its successes by the number of people who came to it from all over the world and have since become noteworthy painters. Once while with Ma- tisse I met a Hungarian painter who was imitating Matisse heart- lessly, and whose exhibits were being quite successful. "Oh,” Ma- HANS PURRMANN 35 tisse said, “if he would only come to my studio how much pains I would take to help him find himself; perhaps he really has more than this nonsense to say!” Yet Matisse had nothing of the schoolmaster about him. He was nearly always like one of the students; and those showed poor insight who claimed that he looked like a German professor, and who saw more deliberation and brains in his work than a natural creative gift. Perhaps one could easily be betrayed into such a belief since Matisse was always attempting to analyse his pictures. But a closer examination into that mixture of agitation, care, pas- sion, transport, and sensitive restraint which marked his method of working would convince one that his talk was rather a shell for encasing the soul. Thanks to his work I saw more and more and as a German I was astounded—that it was possible to express so many of the problems of painting in words without falling into a sterile aestheticizing. I was impressed by the order which Matisse was bent on bringing out of this chaos, yet I always found that instinct was the determining element in his approach, which in itself remained mysterious enough: "I have forced myself to develop a personality in line with instinctive promptings, and when I could not progress in my work I would return to basic principle and say to myself, 'Here is canvas and paint, and I must express myself with the highest possible purity, quite summarily, by putting down four or five splotches of colour and drawing a few lines calculated to attain a plastic expression.”” Once when he was arranging a still life which he was going to paint he said that what disgusted him was his indecision: what sort of palette should he use, cadmium yellow or the much more moderate ochre? He said that he could paint this still life with three or even six colours, but that he must make his choice from the start; that previously he used to pick out colours which seemed ap- propriate to him with relation to the object he wished to represent, but now he determined his palette first and in this way got those equations which make the life of a picture. Here Matisse pointed to a house: "Notice the colour of the basement, the cornice, the wall, and the shutters: all that forms a unit, just such a unit as is needed in a picture. Earlier I used to return day after day to the same work with a new colour scheme. But that gave me many an hour of perplexity." a 36 FROM THE WORKSHOP OF HENRI MATISSE Matisse made a point of establishing a rigid formula and of working within these limits whenever possible. He would make this special effort to stick by his original conception in order to give a complete vision of the whole! “A picture is like a game of cards: you must figure from the very beginning on what you will have at the end; everything must be worked backwards and always be fin- ished before it is begun.” Once he was painting a large picture, La Musique. He kept re- arranging the limbs of the four figures represented, and manipulated the entire group as though it were one single figure with eight legs and eight arms. If he deranged only one line in an arm, the whole fell into disorder and the balance had to be restored at some other place. But Matisse complained to me at this, "Notice that large green mound the figures are sitting on; I should have loved to paint flowers in there but I can't manage them. They would have no organic meaning to me, they do not apply; and painful as it is, I must renounce them!” The painter Bonnard came into the studio and asked, “Why do you do all those figures in one colour; why don't you come nearer to reality ?” Matisse answered, “I know that the sky throws a blue reflection on an object, and that a meadow throws a green one, but why all these dreadful complications? It adds nothing to my picture and interferes with my expression.” I am a witness how difficult it was for him simply to make plein the three colours which constituted this picture. Yet once the picture was lying on the ground Matisse gave it one glance and retreated in distress: the primitive had frightened even him. Perhaps the art amateurs were repulsed most by the diversity of his pictures, which really do display radically different methods of approach in each of his phases. At one time he is tired of colour and paints only in tones; at another time he breaks up his colours; then again he paints with reflections, without light and shadow, or just the opposite. Nor did Cézanne remain the same all during his life; his early works are painted with large masses of light and dark, and his latest ones only in modulations of colour. Matisse thinks as an artist; when looking at a picture he forgets the matter of mere representation, and the interesting thing to him is the feel- ing which he is aiming at, the harmony of lines and colours in com- position. He sees the sport in a choice of means. For instance, I was standing with Matisse before the picture of Dürer's brother at а HANS PURRMANN 37 Munich. He saw in it a very fine reproduction of nature, but one which had not been arrived at from the standpoint of form. In that statement he caught Dürer's manner of seeing. But Cézanne also proceeds in this manner. He speaks of two plastic presenta- tions, the one sculptural and linear, the other decorative and colour- istic. The one could be designated roughly as the Venus de Milo type of art, the other is related to Michael Angelo and Rubens. The first is servile, and here contour has the upper hand; the latter is free, with the domination of colour, inspiration, and the sudden glimpse. Ingres belongs to the first, Delacroix to the second. As I have said before, Matisse lived in a continual concern for the fitness of his pictorial elements, and when he had made an in- complete picture he would question himself in this fashion: Perhaps the red is not full enough; it seems empty; what if I replaced it with yellow? As a rule, however, he would not replace it with another colour, but would try to remedy the error indirectly by changing some other part of the picture. In my view this is the reason for his most delicate qualities, his strength, simplicity, charm, and brilliance. And it is precisely here, I must say to obviate any misunderstand- — ing—that his painting stands definitely apart from literature. Matisse found that Cézanne, whom he loved immeasurably, had never neglected the broader equations of a picture. To-day that is readily forgotten; later artists give too much attention to the iso- lated composition of minor details. Matisse tried for a stronger ensemble; for instance, if he was bringing out the silhouette of a form, he would not supplement it with muscles; or if he wanted a strong yellow in a picture he recognized the need for an appropri- ate counteraction. The secret of his colour effects lies in a wise economy. Of course the matter of final importance, the appealing thing about a picture, cannot be explained, and here all science falls short. Still, it is not beside the issue that an art should make use of the sciences; scientific discovery has always brought progress into art. Nature is there to awaken an image and arouse the senses. With the aid of the sciences nature can be copied, but it cannot be represented in its spiritual equivalent. It remains for the painter to afford a mouthpiece for the genius of nature. Whether it be for a brief moment in passing through an exhibit, or in some room where the spectator must be brought into a state of harmony day after 38 FROM THE WORKSHOP OF HENRI MATISSE day and in all moods, a picture must call forth in the mind some half-memory of a disorder which has been rectified and made con- tenting. The spectator, perhaps even unknown to himself, is dis- turbed by disorder. In the disorder of the usual things about us Matisse has always hunted for a pure instrument; he has spoken directly and with freedom; and it is just this rectification of the con- ventional which gives him his unusual capacity for placing his spec- tator directly in touch with some freshness of expression. “The artist must make the elements of a picture large and clear, so as to get down three or four accurate contrasts; the further movement of colour plays to and fro among these points. Painting is nothing but the observance of the relation which one colour bears to another; you must see things as an ensemble. Nature appears to me in just that way. This is true even of Corot, although in his case it must be admitted that he paints each object in its local colour.” Matisse is said to have worked with gradations, in that he develops his colours in a definite and deliberate direction and in that he was associated with the scientific studies of Chevreul, according to which colours can strengthen or weaken one another reciprocally provided that they are close enough together to make their influence felt. Matisse also subjects his drawing to this principle. But his drawing is likewise linked up with the knowledge that a curved line seems more beau- tifully curved or oval if it is brought into contrast with a straight line or an angle. I recall that other artists have their working prin- ciples as well; it was Cézanne's theory that blue could be made richer with yellow, a thing which, owing to its subtlety, can be ac- complished only with great skill; while the Neo-Impressionists would surround a colour with its complement and join this with closely associated colours. Their pictures are full of such technical points. Matisse's work was always based on the greatest possible interval, acquired either through the opposition of black and white by which he got the effect of light, through juxtaposition instead of an actual application of light, or through the opposition of pure , colours. He said to me once when standing before one of my own works, "In handling light use neighbouring tones which cause no break in the continuity and by which fulness can be retained. If you wish you can paint the shadows with contrasts, but never put contrasting colours on a curved surface which you want to preserve as a unit. Forms can be brought out by the use of deeper colours, HANS PURRMANN 39 but positively never by the application of light!” He distinguished between cold and warm tones, but to get light from the opposition of colours was for him a thing apart. It was possible for him to paint a picture in black and white, thereby bringing it close to drawing, which is to say, to painting in tones. But one can also paint with colours only, like Turner, who went counter to all this by confining himself to the closer and farther contrasts, thus breaking the circuit of tones. Matisse, for instance, did not think much of the uniting of three harmonies which Seurat was working for, much to the surprise of this latter artist. Matisse's most frequent word of censure at the school was, “There is a hole here; this tone is not full.” He went so far in this respect that he once hunted with Marquet the places in all the pictures at the Louvre which were not full and which consequently left holes. They found these holes in many pictures. “If you put black on an object which is in the light and is yellow in colour, this makes a hole; a warm, somewhat brown colour should be used, which looks black but is at the same time full.” Matisse often spoke of Gustave Moreau's studio, a free studio in which he and almost all the younger French painters have worked. I shall name only Derain, Puy, Camoin, Manguin, Marquet, and the Norwegian, Munch. One day Matisse read Signac's book, and he hunted up the painter to work with him. A friend of his was laughing to me once about the fact that even Matisse had submitted to the somewhat ridiculous division of labour which was practised there, but Matisse said, “The breaking of colour gave me freedom and the knowledge of pure colour.” Matisse showed me a picture from a certain period; "Gauguin could have helped me with that.” His influence on Matisse was stronger than that of van Gogh. Also, one should not underestimate the influence which Odilon Redon had on him. At another time Matisse was in close personal relations with Pissarro. Then again, he tried to become a student of Rodin's. He submitted some drawings, and when Rodin rejected them he worked under Bourdelle, to get at least a second-hand acquaintanceship with Rodin's ideas. Also, for a long while Matisse made use of all sorts of mechanical appliances. a "I have never tried to avoid the influence of others. If I had, I should look upon it as cowardice and a disastrous lack of seriousness. a 40 FROM THE WORKSHOP OF HENRI MATISSE I believe that the artist's personality is formed and developed by the steady battle which he is forced to wage with other personali- ties. If this battle is fatal to the artist and his personality succumbs, that is nothing other than destiny." > Matisse's efforts were directed to the establishing of a rigid dis- cipline in his studio. He proclaimed the value of caution, he led painters back to the solid foundation of study, to a long and patient observation. He was surrounded by workers, a group which was really trying to understand him. Such attitudes were all the more wholesome in that painting had already dwindled out somewhat into facile impressions and casual-although charming, perhaps- colour schemes. It might be said that although Matisse may have honestly submitted to discipline he knew nothing of tradition. But this objection seems almost an advantage to me; the cry for tradi- tion is usually a mere subterfuge for mediocre artists whereby they can justify work which has no strength of its own. The true tradi- tion is simply a frame constructed about the spiritual strivings and methods common to an epoch and a people. The masters of the nineteenth century, Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, and Rodin, were also compelled to make their own tradition and mould it after their own requirements. I have often heard Matisse complain that every one must find an individual form for his own sensations. I and many another of his students praise Matisse because he has subjected us to a training, a critique of form, and the proper respect for colour, as well as teaching us how to judge and analyse our antecedents. Care ! THE WOMAN OF SAMARIA. BY BOARDMAN ROBINSON KASIMIR STANISLAVỌVITCH BY IVAN BUNIN Translated from the Russian by Leonard Woolf and S. S. Koteliansky N the yellow card with a nobleman's coronet the young porter O at a tian name and patronymic: Kasimir Stanislavovitch; there followed something still more complicated and still more difficult to pro- nounce. The porter turned the card this way and that in his hand, looked at the passport which the visitor had given him with it, shrugged his shoulders—none of those who stayed at the Versailles gave their cards—then he threw both on the table and began again to examine himself in the silvery, milky mirror which hung above the table, whipping up his thick hair with a comb. He wore an overcoat and shiny top-boots; the gold braid on his cap was greasy with age—the hotel was a bad one. Kasimir Stanislavovitch left Kiev for Moscow on April 8th, Good Friday, on receiving a telegram with the one word: "tenth.” Somehow or other he managed to get the money for his fare and took his seat in a second class compartment, grey and dim, but really giving him the sensation of comfort and luxury. The train was heated, and that railway-carriage heat and the smell of the heating apparatus and the sharp tapping of the little hammers in it re- minded Kasimir Stanislavovitch of other times. At times it seemed to him that winter had returned, that in the fields the white, very white drifts of snow had covered up the yellowish bristle of stubble and the large leaden pools where the wild duck swam. But often the snow-storm stopped suddenly and melted; the fields grew bright, and one felt that behind the clouds was much light, and the wet platforms of the railway-stations looked black, and the rooks called from the naked poplars . At each big station Kasimir Stanislavo- vitch went to the refreshment-room for a drink, and returned to his carriage with newspapers in his hands; but he did not read them; he only sat sunk into the thick smoke of his cigarettes which burned and a 42 KASIMIR STANISLAVOVITCH > głowed,: and to none of his neighbours—Odessa Jews who played - cards all the time–did he say a single word. He wore an autumn overcoat of which:the pockets were worn, a very old black top-hat, and new, but heavy, cheap boots. His hands, the typical hands of an habitual drunkard and an old inhabitant of basements, shook when he lit a match. Everything else about him spoke of poverty and drunkenness: no cuffs, a dirty linen collar, an ancient tie, an inflamed and ravaged face, bright blue watery eyes. His side-whisk- ers, dyed with a bad, brown dye, had an unnatural appearance. He looked tired and contemptuous. The train reached Moscow next day not at all on time; it was seven hours late. The weather was neither one thing nor the other, but better and drier than in Kiev, with something stirring in the air. Kasimir Stanislavovitch took a cab without bargaining with the driver, and told him to drive straight to the Versailles. “I have known that hotel, my good fellow,” he said, suddenly breaking his silence, "since my student days.” As soon as his little bag, tied with stout rope, had been taken up to his room, he immediately went out. It was nearly evening: the air was warm, the black trees on the boulevards were turning green; everywhere there were crowds of people, cars, carts. Moscow was trafficking and doing business, was returning to the usual, pressing work, was ending her holiday, and unconsciously welcomed the spring. A man who has lived his life and ruined it feels lonely on a spring evening in a strange, crowded city. Kasimir Stanislavovitch walked the whole length of the Tverskoy Boulevard; he saw once more the cast-iron figure of the musing Pushkin, the gold and lilac top of the Strasnoy Monastery. For about an hour he sat at the Café Filippov, drank chocolate, and read old comic papers. Then he went to a cinema, whose flaming signs shone from far away down the Tverskaya through the darkling twilight. From the cinema he drove to a res- taurant on the boulevard which he had also known in his student days. He was driven by an old man, bent in a bow, sad, gloomy, deeply absorbed in himself, in his old age, in his dark thoughts. All the way the man painfully and wearily helped on his lazy horse with his whole being, murmuring something to it all the time and occasionally bitterly reproaching it—and at last, when he reached the place, he allowed the load to slip from his shoulders for a mo- ment and gave a deep sigh, as he took the money. IVAN BUNIN 43 "I did not catch the name and thought you meant 'Prague,'” he muttered, turning his horse slowly; he seemed displeased, although the Prague was further away. “I remember the Prague too, old fellow," answered Kasimir Stanislavovitch. “You must have been driving for a long time in Moscow." “Driving ?” the old man said. "I have been driving now for fifty-one years.” “That means that you may have driven me before,” said Kasimir Stanislavovitch. "Perhaps I did,” answered the old man dryly. “There are lots of people in the world; one can't remember all of you.” Of the old restaurant, once known to Kasimir Stanislavovitch, there remained only the name. Now it was a large, first-class, though vulgar, restaurant. Over the entrance burnt an electric globe which with its unpleasant, heliotrope light, illuminated the smart, second-rate cabmen, impudent, and cruel to their lean, short-winded animals. In the damp hall stood pots of laurel and tropical plants of the kind which one sees carried on to the platforms from funerals to weddings and vice versa. From the porters' lodge several men rushed out together to Kasimir Stanislavovitch, and all of them had just the same thick curl of hair as the porter at the Versailles. In the large greenish room, decorated in rococo style, were a multitude of broad mirrors, and in the corner burnt a crimson ikon-lamp. The room was still empty and only a few of the electric lights were on. Kasimir Stanislavovitch sat for a long time alone, doing nothing. One felt that behind the windows with their white blinds the long, spring evening had not yet grown dark; one heard from the street the thudding of hoofs; in the middle of the room there was the monotonous splash-splash of the little fountain in an aquarium round which gold-fish, with their scales peeling off, lighted some- how from below, swam through the water. A waiter in white brought the dinner things, bread, and a decanter of cold vodka. Kasimir Stanislavovitch began drinking the vodka, held it in his mouth before swallowing it, and, having swallowed it, smelt the black bread as though with loathing. With a suddenness which gave even him a start a gramophone began to roar out through the room a mixture of Russian songs, now exaggeratedly boisterous and tur- bulent, now too tender, drawling, sentimental. And Kas- a 44 KASIMIR STANISLAVOVITCH a imir Stanislavovitch's eyes grew red and tears filmed them at that sweet and snuffling drone of the machine. Several times Kasimir Stanislavovitch went out of the hot hall into the cool corridors, into the cold lavatory, where was a strange smell of the sea; he walked as if on air and, on returning to his table, again ordered wine. After midnight, closing his eyes and drawing the fresh night air through his nostrils into his intoxicated head, he raced in a hansom-cab on rubber tires out of the town to a brothel; he saw in the distance infinite chains of light, running away somewhere down hill and then up hill again, but he saw it just as if it were not he, but someone else, seeing it. In the brothel he nearly had a fight with a stout gentleman who attacked him shouting that he was known to all thinking Russia. Then he lay dressed on a broad bed, covered with a satin quilt, in a little room half-lighted from the ceiling by a sky-blue lantern, with a sickly smell of scented soap and with dresses hanging from a hook on the door. Near the bed stood a dish of fruit, and the girl who had been hired to enter- tain Kasimir Stanislavovitch silently, greedily, with relish ate a pear, cutting off slices with a knife, and her friend, with fat bare arms, dressed only in a chemise which made her look like a little girl, was rapidly writing on the toilet-table, taking no notice of them. She wrote and wept—of what? There are lots of people in the world; one can't know everything. On the tenth of April Kasimir Stanislavovitch woke up early. He had got back after four in the morning. As soon as he lay down, everything began to turn round him, to rush into an abyss, and he fell asleep instantly. In his sleep all the time he was con- scious of the smell of the iron wash-stand which stood close to his face, and he dreamt of a spring day, trees in blossom, the hall of a a manor house, and a number of people waiting anxiously for the bishop to arrive at any moment; and all night long he was wearied and tormented with that waiting. Now in the corridors of the Versailles people rang, ran, called to one another. Behind the screen, through the double, dusty window-panes, the sun shone; it was almost hot. Kasimir Stanislavovitch took off his jacket, rang the bell, and began to wash. There came in a quick-eyed boy, with fox-coloured hair on his head, in a frock-coat and pink shirt. “A loaf, samovar, and lemon,” Kasimir Stanislavovitch said with- out looking at him. IVAN BUNIN 45 . “And tea and sugar ?” the boy asked with Moscow sharpness. And a minute later he rushed in with a boiling samovar in his hands held out level with his shoulders; on the round table in front of the sofa he quickly put a tray with a glass and a battered brass slop-basin, and thumped the samovar down on the tray. Kasimir Stanislavovitch, while the tea was drawing, mechanically opened the Moscow Daily which the page-boy had brought in with the samovar. His eye fell on a report that yesterday an unknown man had been picked up unconscious “The victim was taken to the hospital,” he read, and threw the paper away. He felt very low and unsteady. He got up and opened the window -it faced the yard—and a breath of freshness and of the city came to him; there came to him the melodious shouts of hawkers, the bells of horse-trams humming behind the house opposite, the blended rap-tap of the cars, the musical drone of church-bells. The city had long since started its huge, noisy life in that bright, jolly, almost spring day. Kasimir Stanislavovitch squeezed the lemon into a glass of tea and greedily drank the sour, muddy liquid; then he went again behind the screen. The Versailles was quiet. It was pleasant and peaceful; his eye wandered leisurely over the hotel notice on the wall: “A stay of three hours is counted as a full day.” A mouse scuttled in the chest of drawers, rolling about a piece of sugar left there by some visitor. Thus half-asleep Kasimir Stanislavovitch lay for a long time behind the screen, until the sun had gone from the room and another freshness was wafted in from the window, the freshness of evening. Then he carefully got himself in order: he undid his bag, changed his underclothing, took out a cheap, but clean handkerchief, brushed his shiny frock-coat, top-hat, and overcoat, took out of its torn pocket a crumpled Kiev newspaper of January 15th and threw it away into the corner. Having dressed and combed his whiskers with a dyeing comb, he counted his money-there re- mained in his purse four roubles, seventy copecks—and went out. Exactly at six o'clock he was outside a low, ancient little church in the Molchanovka. Behind the church fence a spreading tree was just breaking into green; children were playing there—the black stocking of one thin little girl, jumping over a rope, was continu- ally coming down—and he sat there on a bench among perambu- lators with sleeping babies and nurses in Russian costumes. Spar- a 46 KASIMIR STANISLAVOVITCH rows prattled all over the tree; the air was soft, all but summer- even the dust smelt of summer—the sunset sky behind the houses melted into a gentle gold, and one felt that once more there was somewhere in the world joy, youth, happiness. In the church the chandeliers were already burning, and there stood the pulpit, and in front of the pulpit was spread a little carpet. Kasimir Stanis- lavovitch cautiously took off his top-hat, trying not to untidy his hair, and entered the church nervously; he went into a corner, but a corner from which he could see the couple to be married. He looked at the painted vault, raised his eyes to the cupola, and his every movement and every gasp echoed loudly through the silence. The church shone with gold; the candles sputtered expectantly. An now the priests and choir began to enter, crossing themselves with the carelessness which comes of habit; then old women, children, smart wedding guests, and worried stewards. A noise was heard in the porch, the crunching wheels of the carriage; everyone turned their heads towards the entrance and the hymn burst out: “Come, my dove!” Kasimir Stanislavovitch became deathly pale, as his heart beat, and unconsciously he took a step forward. And close by him there passed—her veil touching him and a breath of lily-of- the-valley—she who did not know even of his existence in the world; she passed, bending her charming head, all flowers and trans- parent gauze, all snow-white and innocent, happy and timid, like a princess going to her first communion. Kasimir Stanis- lavovitch hardly saw the bridegroom who came to meet her, a rather small, broad-shouldered man with yellow, close-cropped hair. Dur- ing the whole ceremony only one thing was before his eyes: the bent head, in the flowers and the veil, and the little hand trembling as it held a burning candle tied with a white ribbon in a bow. a a About ten o'clock he was back again in the hotel. All his over- coat smelt of the spring air. After coming out of the church, he had seen near the porch the car lined with white satin, and its window reflecting the sunset, and behind the window there flashed on him for the last time the face of her who was being carried away from him for ever. After that he had wandered about in little streets and had come out on the Novensky Boulevard. Now slowly and with trembling hands he took off his overcoat, put on the table a paper bag containing two green cucumbers which for some reason he had bought at a hawker's stall. They too smelt of spring even . IVAN BUNIN 47 a a . through the paper, and spring-like through the upper pane of the window the April moon shone silvery, high up in the not yet dark- ened sky. Kasimir Stanislavovitch lit a candle, sadly illuminating his empty, casual home, and sat down on the sofa, feeling on his face the freshness of evening. Thus he sat for a long time. He did not ring the bell, gave no orders, locked himself in- all this seemed suspicious to the porter who had seen him enter his room with his shuffling feet and taking the key out of the door in order to lock himself in from the inside. Several times the porter stole up on tiptoe to the door and looked through the key-hole: Kas- imir Stanislavovitch was sitting on the sofa, trembling and wiping his face with a handkerchief, and weeping so bitterly, so copiously that the brown dye came off and was smeared over his face. At night he tore the cord off the blind, and, seeing nothing through his tears, began to fasten it to the hook of the clothes-peg. But the guttering candle flickered and terrible dark waves swam and flickered over the locked room: he was old, weak—and he him- self was well aware of it. No. It was not in his power to die by his own hand! In the morning he started for the railway station about three hours before the train left. At the station he quietly walked about among the passengers, with his tear-stained eyes on the ground; and he would stop unexpectedly before one and another, and in a low voice, evenly, but without expression, he would say rather quickly: "For God's sake I am in a desperate position My fare to Briansk If only a few copecks And some passengers, trying not to look at his top-hat, at the worn velvet collar of his overcoat, at the dreadful face with the faded violet whiskers, hurriedly and with confusion gave him something. And then, rushing out of the station on to the platform, he got mixed in the crowd and disappeared into it, while in the Versailles, in the room which for two days had, as it were, belonged to him, they carried out the slop-pail, opened the windows to the April sun and fresh air, noisily moved the furniture, swept up and threw out the dust—and with the dust there fell under the table, under the table-cloth which slid down to the floor, his torn note, which he had forgotten with the cucumbers: “I beg that no one be accused of my death. I was at the wedding of my only daughter, who а . . . MORE MEMORIES BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS I XII (continued) REMEMBER Taylor at some public debate, stiff of body and tense of voice; and the contrasting figure of Fitzgibbon, the Lord Chancellor of the moment, and his calm flowing sentences, sat- isfactory to hear and impossible to remember. I remember, too, and grow angry as it were yesterday, that somebody had shown me a let- ter from that Lord Chancellor, who had changed his politics for advancement's sake, recommending a correspondent to avoid us, because we ("suaded people from the study of “Shakespeare and Kingsley.” Taylor speaks of a little nation of antiquity, which he does not name, "set between the great Empire of Persia and the great Empire of Rome.” Into the mouths of those great Empires he puts the arguments of Fitzgibbon and such as he, “Join with our greatness! What in comparison to that is your little beggarly na- tionality ?” And then I recall the excitement, the shiver of the nerves, as his voice rose to an ecstatic cry, “Out of that nation came the salvation of the world.” Edward Dowden, my father's old friend, with his dark romantic face, the one man of letters Dublin Unionism possessed, was with- ering in that barren soil. Towards the end of his life he confessed to a near friend that he would have wished before all things to have been the lover of many women; and some careless lecture, upon the youthful Goethe, had in early life drawn down upon him the displeasure of the Protestant Archbishop. And yet he turned Shakespeare into a British Benthamite, flattered Shelley but to hide his own growing lack of sympathy, abandoned for like reason that study of Goethe that should have been his life-work, and at last cared but for Wordsworth, the one great poet who, after brief blos- som, was cut and sawn into planks of obvious utility. I called upon him from time to time out of gratitude for old encouragement, and because, among the Dublin houses open to me, his alone was pleas- ant to the eye, with its many books and its air of scholarship. But when O'Grady had declared, under substantial provocation, that he WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS 49 had "a bad head and a worse heart," I found my welcome troubled and called no more. The one house where nobody thought or talked politics was a house in Ely Place, where a number of young men lived together, and, for want of a better name, were called Theosophists. Beside the resident members, other members dropped in and out during the day, and the reading-room was a place of much discussion about philosophy and about the arts. The house had been taken in the name of the engineer to the Board of Works, a black-bearded young man, with a passion for Manichean philosophy, and all accepted him as host; and sometimes the conversation, especially when I was there, became too ghostly for the nerves of his young and delicate wife, and he would be made angry. I remember young men strug- gling, with inexact terminology and insufficient learning, for some new religious conception, on which they could base their lives; and some few strange or able men. At the top of the house lived a medical student who read Plato and took hashish, and a young Scotchman who owned a vegetarian restaurant, and had just returned from America, where he had gone as the disciple of the Prophet Harris, and where he would soon return in the train of some new prophet. When one asked what set him on his wanderings, he told of a young Highlander, his friend in boyhood, whose cap was always plucked off at a certain twist in the road, till the fathers of the village fastened it upon his head by recommending drink and women. When he had gone, his room was inherited by an American hypnotist, who had lived among the Zuni Indians with the explorer Cushing, and told of a Zuni Indian who, irritated by some white man's praise of telephone and telegraph, cried out “Can they do that?" and cast above his head two hand- fuls of sand that burst into flame, and flamed till his head seemed wrapped in fire. He professed to talk the philosophy of the Zuni Indians, but it seemed to me the vague Platonism that all there talked, except that he spoke much of men passing in sleep into the heart of mountains; a doctrine that was presently incorporated in the mythology of the house, to send young men and women hither and thither inquiring for sacred places. On a lower floor lived a strange red-haired girl, all whose thoughts were set upon paint- ing and poetry, conceived as abstract images like Love and Penury in the Symposium; and to these images she sacrificed herself with Asiatic fanaticism. The engineer had discovered her starving some- а 50 MORE MEMORIES a where in an unfurnished or half-furnished room, and that she had lived for many weeks upon bread and shell-cocoa, so that her food had never cost her more than a penny a day. Born into a county fam- ily, who were so haughty that their neighbours called them the Royal Family, she had quarrelled with a mad father, who had never, his tenants declared, "unscrewed the top of his flask with any man,' because she wished to study art; had run away from home, had lived for a time by selling her watch, and then by occasional stories in an Irish paper. For some weeks she had paid half-a-crown a week to some poor woman to see her to the art schools and back, for she considered it wrong for a woman to show herself in public places unattended; but of late she had been unable to afford the school fees. The engineer engaged her as a companion for his wife, and gave her money enough to begin her studies once more. She had talent and imagination, a gift for style; but, though ready to face death for painting and poetry, conceived as allegorical figures, she hated her own genius, and had not met praise and sympathy early enough to overcome the hatred. Face to face with paint and can- vas, pen and paper, she saw nothing of her genius but its cruelty, , and would have scarce arrived before she would find some excuse to leave the schools for the day, if indeed she had not invented over her breakfast some occupation so laborious that she could call it a duty, and so not go at all. Most watched her in mockery, but I watched in sympathy; composition strained my nerves and spoiled my sleep; and yet, as far back as I could trace—and in Ireland we have long memories—my paternal ancestors had worked at some intellectual pursuit, while hers had shot and hunted. She could at any time, had she given up her profession, which her father had raged against, not because it was art, but because it was a profes- sion, have returned to the common comfortable life of women. When, a little later, she had quarrelled with the engineer or his wife, and gone back to bread and shell-cocoa, I brought her an offer from some Dublin merchant of fairly well-paid advertisement work, which would have been less laborious than artistic creation; but she said that to draw advertisements was to degrade art, thanked me elaborately, and did not disguise her indignation. She had, I be- lieve, returned to starvation with joy, for constant anaemia would shortly give her an argument strong enough to silence her conscience when the allegorical figures glared upon her, and, apart from that, starvation and images had a large share in her ritual of worship. WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS 51 At the top of the house, and at the time I remember best, in the same room with the young Scotchman, lived Mr George Russell (A. E.) and the house and the society were divided into his ad- herents and those of the engineer; and I heard of some quarrelling between the factions. The rivalry was sub-conscious. Neither had willingly opposed the other in any matter of importance. The engi- neer had all financial responsibility, and George Russell was, in the eyes of the community, saint and genius. Had either seen that the question at issue was the leadership of mystical thought in Dub- lin, he would, I think, have given way, but the dispute seemed trivial. At the weekly meetings anything might be discussed; no chairman called a speaker to order; an atheistic workman could denounce religion, or a pious Catholic confound theosophy with atheism; and the engineer, precise and practical, disapproved. He had an object. He wished to make converts for a definite form of belief, and here an enemy, if a better speaker, might make all the converts. He wished to confine discussion to members of the society, and had proposed in committee, I was told, a resolution on the subject; while Russell, who had refused to join my National Lit- erary Society, because the party of the Harp and the Wolf-dog set limits to discussion, resisted, and at last defeated him. In a couple of years some new dispute arose; he resigned, and founded a society which drew doctrine and method from America or London; and Russell became, as he is to-day, the one masterful influence among young Dublin men and women who love religious speculation, but have no historical faith. When Russell and I had been at the Art School six or seven years before, he had been almost unintelligible. He had seemed incapable of coherent thought, and perhaps was so at certain moments. The idea came upon him, he has told me, that, if he spoke, he would reveal that he had lost coherence; and for the three days that the idea lasted spent the hours of daylight wandering upon the Dublin mountains, that he might escape the necessity for speech. I used to listen to him at that time, mostly walking through the streets at night, for the sake of some stray sentence, beautiful and profound, amid many words that seemed without meaning; and there were others, too, who walked and listened, for he had become to, I think, I all his fellow students, sacred, as the fool is sacred in the East. We copied the model laboriously, but he would draw without re- search into the natural form, and call his study “St John in the 52 MORE MEMORIES Wilderness”; but I can remember the almost scared look and the half-whisper of a student, now a successful sculptor, who said, pointing to the modelling of a shoulder, “That is too easy, a great deal too easy!” For with brush and pencil he was too coherent. We derided each other, told absurd tales to one another's dis- credit, but we never derided him, or told tales to his discredit. He stood outside the sense of comedy his friend John Eglinton has called “the social cement” of our civilization; and we would “gush when we spoke of him, as men do when they praise something incomprehensible. But when he painted there was no difficulty in comprehending. How could that ease and rapidity of composition, so far beyond anything that we could attain to, belong to a man whose words seemed often without meaning? A few months before I had come to Ireland, he had sent me some verses which I had liked till Edwin Ellis had laughed me from my liking by proving that no line had a rhythm that agreed with any other, and that, the moment one thought he had settled upon some scheme of rhyme, he would break from it without reason. But now his verse was clear in thought and delicate in form. He wrote without premeditation or labour. It had, as it were, organ- ized itself, and grown as nervous and living as if it had, as Dante said of his own work, paled his cheek. The Society he belonged to published a little magazine, and he had asked the readers to decide whether they preferred his prose or his verse, and it was because they so willed it that he wrote the little transcendental verses after- wards published in Homeward Songs by the Way. Life was not expensive in that house, where, I think, no meat was eaten; and I know that out of the sixty or seventy a year which he earned as accountant in a Dublin shop, he saved a considerable portion for private charity; and it was, I think, his benevolence that gave him his lucidity of speech, and, perhaps, of writing. If he convinced himself that any particular activity was desirable in the public interest or in that of his friends, he had at once the ardour that came to another from personal ambition. He was al- ways surrounded with a little group of infirm or unlucky persons, whom he explained to themselves and to others, turning cat to griffin, goose to swan. In later years he was to accept the position of organizer of a co-operative banking system, before he had even read a book upon economics or finance, and within a few months to give evidence before a Royal Commission upon the system, as an a WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS 53 acknowledged expert, though he had brought to it nothing but his impassioned versatility. At the time I write of him, he was the religious teacher, and that alone-his painting, his poetry, and his conversation all subservient to that one end. Men watched him with awe or with bewilderment; it was known that he saw visions continually, perhaps more con- tinually than any modern man since Swedenborg; and when he painted and drew in pastel what he had seen, some accepted the record without hesitation, others, like myself, noticing the academic Graeco-Roman forms, and remembering his early admiration for the works of Gustave Moreau, divined a subjective element, but no one doubted his word. One might not think him a good observer, but no one could doubt that he reported with the most scrupulous care what he believed himself to have seen; nor did he lack occa- sional objective corroboration. Walking with some man in the park -his demesne, as we say in Ireland he had seen a visionary church at a particular spot, and the man had dug and uncovered its founda- tions; then some woman had met him with “Oh, Mr Russell, I am so unhappy," and he had replied, “You will be perfectly happy this evening at seven o'clock,” and left her to her blushes. She had an appointment with a young man for seven o'clock. I had heard of this a day or so after the event, and I asked him about it, and was told it had suddenly come into his head to use those words; but why he did not know. He and I often quarrelled, because I wanted to examine and question his visions, and write them out as they occurred; and still more because I thought symbolic what he thought real, like the men and women that passed him on the road. Were they so much a part of his sub-conscious life that they would have vanished had he submitted them to question; were they like those voices that only speak, those strange sights that only show themselves for an instant, when the attention has been withdrawn; that phantasmagoria of which I had learnt something in London; and had his verse and his painting a like origin? And was that why the same hand that painted a certain dreamy, lovely sandy shore, now in the Dublin Municipal Gallery, could with great rapidity fill many canvases with poetical commonplace; and why, after writing Homeward Songs by the Way, where all is skilful and much exquisite, he would never again write a perfect book? Was it precisely because in Swedenborg alone the conscious and the sub- conscious became one, as in that marriage of the angels which he 54 MORE MEMORIES has described as a contact of the whole being, that Coleridge thought Swedenborg both man and woman? Russell's influence, which was already great, had more to sup- port it than his versatility, or the mystery that surrounded him, for his sense of justice, and the daring that came from his own con- fidence in it, had made him the general counsellor. He would give endless time to a case of conscience, and no situation was too diffi- cult for his clarity; and certainly some of the situations were diffi- cult. I remember his being summoned to decide between two ladies who had quarrelled about a vacillating admirer, and called each other, and to each other's faces, the worst names in our somewhat anaemic modern vocabulary; and I have heard of his success on an occasion when I think no other but Dostoevsky's idiot could have avoided offence. The Society was very young, and, as its members faced the world's moral complexities as though they were the first that ever faced them, they drew up very vigorous rules. One rule was that if any member saw a fault growing upon any other mem- ber, it was his duty to point it out to that member. A certain young man became convinced that a certain young woman had fallen in love with him; and, as an unwritten rule pronounced love and the spiritual life incompatible, that was a heavy fault. As the young man felt the delicacy of the situation, he asked for Russell's help, and side by side they braved the offender, who, I was told, received their admonishment with surprised humility, and promised amend- ment. His voice would often become high, and lose its self-posses- sion during intimate conversation, and I especially could often put him in a rage; but the moment the audience became too large for intimacy, or some exacting event had given formality to speech, he would be at the same moment impassioned and impersonal. He had, and has, the capacity, beyond that of any man I have known, to put with entire justice not only the thoughts, but the emotions, of the most opposite parties and personalities, as it were dissolving some public or private uproar into drama by Corneille or by Racine; and men who have hated each other must sometimes have been reconciled, because each heard his enemy's argument put into better words than he himself had found for his own; and this gift was in later years to give him political influence, and win him respect from Irish Nationalist and Unionist alike. It was, perhaps, because of it, joined to a too literal acceptance of those noble images of moral tradition which are so like late Graeco-Roman statues, that WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS 55 he has seen all human life as a mythological system, where, though all cats are griffins, the more dangerous griffins are only to be found among politicians he has not spoken to, or among authors he has but glanced at; while those men and women who bring him their confessions and listen to his advice carry but the snowiest of swan's plumage. Nor has it failed to make him, as I think, a bad literary critic; demanding plays and poems where the characters must attain a stature of seven feet, and resenting as something perverse and morbid all abatement from that measure. I sometimes wonder what he would have been had he not met in early life the poetry of Emerson and Walt Whitman, writers who have begun to seem superficial precisely because they lack the vision of evil; and those translations of the Upanishads, which it is so much harder to study by the sinking flame of Indian tradition than by the serviceable lamp of Emerson and Walt Whitman. We are never satisfied with the maturity of those whom we have admired in boyhood; and, because we have seen their whole circle -even the most successful life is but a segment—we remain to the end their harshest critic. One old schoolfellow of mine will never believe that I have fulfilled the promise of some rough unscannable verses that I wrote before I was eighteen. Does any imaginative man find in maturity the admiration that his first half-articulate years aroused in some little circle; and is not the first success the greatest ? Certainly I demanded of Russell some impossible things, and if I had any influence upon him—and I have little doubt that I had, for we were very intimate-it may not have been a good influence, for I thought there could be no aim for poet or artist except expression of a “Unity of Being" like that of a “perfectly proportioned human body”—though I would not at the time have used that phrase. I remember that I was ironic and indignant when he left the Art Schools, because his "will was weak, and must grow weaker if he followed any emotional pursuit”; as, later, when he let the readers of a magazine decide between his prose and his verse. I now know that there are men who cannot possess “unity of being,” who must not seek it or express it—and who, so far from seeking an anti-self, a mask that delineates a being in all things the opposite to their natural self, can but seek the suppres- sion of the anti-self, till the natural self alone remains. These are those who must seek no image of desire, but await that which lies beyond their mind, unities not of the mind, but unities of nature, 56 MORE MEMORIES unities of God; the man of science, the moralist, the humanitarian, the politician, St Simeon Stylites upon his pillar, St Antony in his cavern; all whose pre-occupation is to know themselves for frag- ments, and at last for nothing; to hollow their hearts out till they are void and without form, to summon a creator by revealing chaos, to become the lamp for another's wick and oil; and indeed it may be that it has been for their guidance in a very special sense that the “perfectly proportioned human body” suffered crucifixion. For them mask and image are of necessity morbid, turning their eyes upon themselves, as though they were of those who can be law unto themselves; of whom Chapman has written, “Neither is it lawful that they should stoop to any other law,” whereas they are indeed of those who can but ask "Have I behaved as well as So-and-So?” “Am I a good man according to the commandments ?” or, “Do I realize my own nothingness before God?” “Have my ex- periments and observations excluded the personal factor with suffi- cient rigour?” Such men do not assume wisdom or beauty as Shelley did, when he masked himself as Ahasuerus or as Prince Athanasius, nor do they pursue an image through a world that had else seemed an uninhabitable wilderness till, amid the privations of that pursuit, the image is no more named Pandemos, but Urania; for such men must cast all masks away and fly the image, till that image, transfigured because of their cruelties of self-abasement, be- comes itself some image or epitome of the whole natural or super- natural world, and itself pursues. The wholeness of the super- natural world can only express itself in personal form, because it has no epitome but man, nor can the "Hound of Heaven” fing itself into any but an empty heart. We may know the fugitives from other poets because, like George Herbert, like Francis Thomp- son, like George Russell, their imaginations grow more vivid in the expression of something which they have not themselves created, some historical religion or cause. But if the fugitive should live, as I think Russell does at times, as it is natural for a Morris or a Henley or a Shelley to live, hunters and pursuers all, his art sur- renders itself to moral or poetical commonplace, to a repetition of thoughts and images that have no relation to experience. I think that Russell would not have disappointed even my hopes had he, instead of meeting as an impressionable youth with our modern subjective romanticism, met with some form of traditional belief, which condemned all that romanticism admires and praises, WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS 57 indeed, all images of desire; for such condemnation would have turned his intellect towards the images of his vision. It might, doubtless, have embittered his life, for his strong intellect would have been driven out into the impersonal deeps where the man shudders; but it would have kept him a religious teacher, and set him, it may be, among the greatest of that species; politics, for a vision-seeking man, can be but half achievement, a choice of an almost easy kind of skill instead of that kind which is, of all those not impossible, the most difficult. Is it not certain that the Creator yawns in earthquake and thunder and other popular displays, but toils in rounding the delicate spiral of a shell? XIII I heard the other day of a Dublin man recognizing in London an elderly man who had lived in that house in Ely Place in his youth, and of that elderly man, at the sudden memory, bursting into tears. Though I have no such poignant memories, for I was never of it, never anything but a dissatisfied critic, yet certain vivid mo- ments come back to me as I write. Russell has just come in from a long walk on the Two Rock mountains, full of his conver- sation with an old religious beggar, who kept repeating, “God pos- sesses the heavens, but He covers the earth-He covets the earth.” a I get in talk with a young man who has taken the orthodox side in some debate. He is a stranger, but explains that he has inherited magical art from his father, and asks me to his rooms to see it in operation. He and a friend of his kill a black cock, and burn herbs in a big bowl, but nothing happens except that the friend repeats again and again, "Oh, my God!” and when I ask him why he has said that, does not know that he has spoken; and I feel that there is something very evil in the room. We are sitting round the fire one night, and a member, a woman, tells a dream that she has just had. She dreamed that she saw monks digging in a garden. They dug down till they found a coffin, and when they took off the lid she saw that in the coffin lay a beautiful young man in a dress of gold brocade. The young man railed against the glory of the world, and when he had finished, the monks closed the coffin reverently, and buried it once more. They smoothed the ground, and then went on with their gardening. a 58 MORE MEMORIES I have a young man with me, an official of the National Literary Society, and I leave him in the reading-room with Russell, while I go upstairs to see the young Scotchman. I return after some minutes to find that the young man has become a Theosophist, but a month later, after an interview with a friar, to whom he gives an incredible account of his new beliefs, he goes to Mass again. a XIV , When staying with Hyde in Roscommon, I had driven over to Lough Kay, hoping to find some local memory of the old story of Tumaus Costello, which I was turning into a story now called Proud Costello, Macdermot's Daughter, and the Bitter Tongue. I was rowed up the lake that I might find the island where he died; I had to find it from Hyde's account in The Love Songs of Con- naught, for when I asked the boatman, he told the story of Hero and Leander, putting Hero's house on one island, and Leander's on another. Presently we stopped to eat our sandwiches at the Castle Rock, an island all castle. It was not an old castle, being but the in- vention of some romantic man seventy or eighty years ago. The last man who had lived there had been Dr Hyde's father, and he had but stayed a fortnight. The Gaelic-speaking men in the district were accustomed, instead of calling some specially useless thing a "white elephant,” to call it "The Castle on the Rock.” The roof was, how- ever, still sound, and the windows unbroken. The situation in the centre of the lake, with little wood-grown islands, and surrounded by wood-grown hills, is romantic, and at one end, and perhaps at the other too, there is a stone platform where meditative persons might pace to and fro. I planned a mystical Order which should buy or hire the castle, and keep it as a place where its members could retire for a while for contemplation, and where we might establish mysteries like those of Eleusis and Samothrace; and for ten years to come my most impassioned thought was a vain attempt to find philosophy and to create ritual for that Order. I had an unshake- able conviction, arising how or whence I cannot tell, that invisible gates would open as they opened for Blake, as they opened for Swedenborg, as they opened for Boehme, and that this philosophy would find its manual of devotion in all imaginative literature, and set before Irishmen for special manual an Irish literature which, though made by many minds, 'would seem the work of a single WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS 59 mind, and turn our places of beauty or legendary association into holy symbols. I did not think this philosophy would be wholly pagan, for it was plain that its symbols must be selected from all those things that had moved men most during many, mainly Chris- tian, centuries. I thought that for a time I could rhyme of love, calling it The Rose, because of the Rose's double meaning; of an old fisherman with “never a crack in his heart”; of an old woman complaining of the idleness of the young, or of some cheerful fiddler, and all those things that "popular poets” write of, but that I must some day, on that day when the gates began to open, become difficult or obscure. With a rhythm that still echoed Morris I prayed to the Red Rose, to Intellectual Beauty: 6 “Come near, come near, come near-ah, leave me still A little space for the Rose-breath to fill, Lest I no more hear common things. But seek alone to hear the strange things said By God to the bright hearts of those long dead, And learn to chant a tongue men do not know.” a I do not remember what I meant by “the bright hearts,” but a little later I wrote of Spirits "with mirrors in their hearts.” My rituals were not to be made deliberately, like a poem, but all got by that method Macgregor had explained to me, and with this hope I plunged without a clue into a labyrinth of images, into that labyrinth that we are warned against in those "Oracles” which an- tiquity has attributed to Zoroaster, but modern scholarship to some Alexandrian poet. “Stoop not down to the darkly splendid world wherein lieth continually a faithless depth and Hades wrapped in cloud, delighting in unintelligible images." XV I found a supporter at Sligo in my elderly uncle, a man of fifty- three or fifty-four, with the habits of a much older man. He had never left the West of Ireland, except for a few days to London every year, and a single fortnight's voyage to Spain on board a trading schooner, in his boyhood. He was in politics a Unionist and Tory of the most obstinate kind, and knew nothing of Irish litera- 60 MORE MEMORIES ture or history. He was, however, strangely beset by the romance of Ireland, as he discovered it among the people who served him, sail- ing upon his ships or attending to his horses, and, though narrow and obstinate of opinion, and puritanical in his judgement of life, was perhaps the most tolerant man I have ever known. He never expected anybody to agree with him, and if you did not upset his habits by cheating him over a horse or by offending his taste, he would think as well of you as he did of other men, and that was not very well; and help you out of any scrape whatever. I was accustomed to people much better read than he, much more liberal- minded, but they had no life but the intellectual life, and if they and I differed, they could not take it lightly, and were often angry, and so for years now I had gone to Sligo, sometimes because I could not afford my Dublin lodging, but most often for freedom and peace. He would receive me with “I have learned that your friend So-and-So has been seen at the Gresham Hotel talking to Mr Wil- liam Redmond. What will not people do for notoriety?" He consid- ered all Irish Nationalist Members of Parliament as outside the social pale, but after dinner, when conversation grew intimate, would talk sympathetically of the Fenians in Ballina, where he spent his early manhood, or of the Fenian privateer that landed the wounded man at Sligo in the 'sixties. When Parnell was contesting an election at Sligo a little before his death, other Unionist magis- trates refused or made difficulties when asked for some assistance, what I do not remember, made necessary under election law; and so my uncle gave that assistance. He walked up and down some Town Hall assembly-room or some courtroom with Parnell, but would tell me nothing of that conversation, except that Parnell spoke of Gladstone with extravagant hatred. He would not repeat words spoken by a great man in his bitterness, yet Parnell at the moment was too angry to care who listened. I knew one other man who kept as firm a silence; he had attended Parnell's last public meeting, and after it sat alone beside him, and heard him speak of the followers that were falling away, or showing their faint hearts; but Parnell was the chief devotion of his life. When I first began my visits, he had lived in the town itself, and close to a disreputable neighbourhood called the Burrough, till one evening, when he sat over his dinner, he heard a man and woman quarrelling under his window. “I mind the time,” shouted the . ” man, "when I slept with you and your daughter in the one bed.” WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS 61 a My uncle was horrified, and moved into a little house about a quarter of a mile into the country, where he lived with an old sec- ond-sighted servant, and a man-servant to look after the racehorse that was browsing in the neighbouring field, with a donkey to keep it company. His furniture had not been changed since he set up house for himself as a very young man, and in a room opposite his dining-room were the saddles of his youth, and though he would soon give up riding, they would be oiled and the stirrups kept clean and bright till the day of his death. Some love-affair had gone wrong when he was a very young man; he had now no interest in women; certainly never sought favour of a woman, and yet he took great care of his appearance. He did not let his beard grow, though he had, or believed that he had, for he was hypochondriacal, a sen- sitiveness of the skin that forced him to spend an hour in shaving, and he would take to club and dumb-bell if his waist thickened by a hair's breadth, and twenty years after, when a very old man, he , had the erect shapely figure of his youth. I often wondered why he went through so much labour, for it was not pride, which had seemed histrionic in his eyes—and certainly he had no vanity; and now, looking back, I am convinced that it was from habit, mere habit, formed when he was a young man, the best rider of his district. Probably through long association with Mary Battle, the second- sighted servant, he had come to believe much in the supernatural world, and would tell how several times, arriving home with an unexpected guest, he had found the table set for three, and that he himself had dreamed of his brother's illness in Liverpool before he had other news of it. He saw me using images learned from Mac- gregor to start reverie, and, though I held out for a long time, think- ing him too old and habit-bound, he persuaded me to tell him their use, and from that on we experimented continually, and after a time I began to keep careful record. In summer he always had the same little house at Rosses Point, and it was there that he first be- came sensitive to the cabalistic symbols. There are some high sand- hills and low cliffs, and I adopted the practice of walking by the sea.. shore while he walked on cliff or sandhill; I, without speaking, would imagine the symbol, and he would notice what passed before his mind's eye, and in a short time he would practically never fail of the appropriate vision. In the symbols which are used yellow and red are classified as "actives," while purple, green, and white are "passives," and I had soon discovered that if I used yellow and a 62 MORE MEMORIES red George Pollexfen would see nothing. I therefore gave him exer- cises to make him sensitive to yellow and to red, and gradually we found ourselves well fitted for this work, and he began to take as active an interest as was possible, to a nature given over to habit, in my plans for the Castle on the Rock. I worked with others, sworn to the scheme for the most part, and I made many curious observations. It was the symbol itself, or, at any rate, not my con- scious intention that produced the effect, for if I made an error and told someone, let us say, to gaze at the wrong symbol—they were painted upon cards--the vision would be suggested by the symbol, not by my thought, or two visions would appear side by side, one from the symbol and one from my thought. When two people be- tween whose minds there was even a casual sympathy, worked to- gether under the same symbolic influence, the dream or reverie would divide itself between them, each half being the complement of the other; and now and again these complementary dreams, or reveries, would arise spontaneously. I find, for instance, in an old notebook, "I saw quite suddenly a tent with a wooden badly-carved idol, painted dull red; a man looking like a Red Indian was pros- trate before it. The idol was seated to the left. I asked G. what he saw. He saw a most august immense being, glowing with a ruddy opalescent colour, sitting on a throne to the left,” or, to summarize from a later notebook-I am meditating in one room, and a fellow- investigator in another, when I see a boat full of tumult and move- ment on a still sea, and my friend sees a boat with motionless sails upon a tumultuous sea. There was nothing in the originating sym- bol to suggest a boat. XVI We never began our work until George's old servant was in her bed; and yet, when we went upstairs to our beds, we constantly heard her crying out with nightmare, and in the morning we would find that her dream echoed our vision. One night, started by what symbol I forget, we had seen an allegorical marriage of Heaven and Earth. When Mary Battle brought in the breakfast next morning, I said, “Well, Mary, did you dream anything last night?” and she replied (I am quoting from an old notebook) "indeed she had,” and that it was a dream she would not have liked to have had twice in one night.” She had dreamed that her bishop, the Catholic bishop of WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS 63 a Sligo, had gone away "without telling anybody,” and had married "a very high-up lady and she not too young, either.” She had thought in her dream, “Now all the clergy will get mar- ried, and it will be no use going to confession.” There were “layers upon layers of flowers, many roses, all round the church.” Another time, when George Pollexfen had seen in answer to some evocation of mine a man with his head cut in two, she woke, to find that she "must have cut her face with a pin, as it was all over blood.” When three or four saw together, the dream or vision would divide itself into three or four parts, each seeming complete in it- self, and all fitting together, so that each part was an adaptation of a single meaning to a different personality. A visionary being would give, let us say, a lighted torch to one, an unlighted candle to an- other, an unripe fruit to a third, and to the fourth a ripe fruit. At times coherent stories were built up, as if a company of actors were to improvise, and play, not only without previous consultation, but without forseeing at any moment what would be said or done a moment after. Who made the story? Was it the mind of one of the visionaries? Perhaps, for I have endless proof that, where two worked together, the symbolic influence commonly took upon itself, though no word was spoken, the quality of the mind that had first fixed a symbol in the mind's eye. But, if so, what part of the mind? One friend, in whom the symbolic impulse produced actual trance, described an elaborate and very strange story while the trance was upon him, but upon waking told a story that after a certain point was quite different. “They gave me a cup of wine, and after that I remembered nothing." While speaking out of trance he had said nothing of the cup of wine, which must have been offered to a por- tion of his mind quite early in the dream. Then, too, from whence come the images of the dream? Not always, I was soon persuaded, from the memory, perhaps never in trance or sleep. One man, who certainly thought that Eve's apple was the sort that you got from the greengrocer, and as certainly never doubted its story's literal truth, said, when I used some symbol to send him to Eden, that he saw a walled garden on the top of a high mountain, and in the mid- dle a tree with great birds in the branches, and fruit out of which, if you held a fruit to your ear, came the sound of fighting. I had not at the time read Dante's Purgatorio, and it caused me some trouble to verify the mountain garden, and, from some passage in the Zohar, the great birds among the boughs; while a young girl, on being sent , 64 MORE MEMORIES to the same garden, heard the music of heaven from a tree, and on listening with her ear against the trunk, found that it was made by the "continual clashing of swords.” Whence came that fine thought of music-making swords, that image of the garden, and many like images and thoughts? I had as yet no answer, but knew myself to be face to face with the Anima Mundi described by Platonic phi- losophers, and more especially in modern times by Henry More, which has a memory independent of individual memories, though they constantly enrich it with their images and their thoughts. XVII At Sligo we walked twice every day, once after lunch and once after dinner, to the same gate on the road to Knocknarea; and at Rosses Point, to the same spot upon the shore; and as we walked we exchanged those thoughts that never rise before me now without bringing some sight of mountain or of shore. Considering that Mary Battle received our thoughts in sleep, though coarsened or turned to caricature, do not the thoughts of the scholar or the hermit, though they speak no word, or something of their shape and impulse, pass into the general mind? Does not the emotion of some woman of fashion, caught in the subtle torture of self-analysing passion, pass down, although she speak no word, to Joan with her Pot, Jill with her Pail, and, it may be, with one knows not what nightmare melan- choly, to Tom the Fool. Seeing that a vision could divide itself in divers complementary portions, might not the thought of philosopher or poet or mathe- matician depend at every moment of its progress upon the thought of others, perhaps at a great distance, and utterly unknown. Is there nation-wide multiform reverie, every mind passing from sug- gestion to suggestion, and all suggestions acting and reacting upon one another no matter how distant the minds, how dumb the lips? A man passed, as it were, casting a shadow, and yet one could never say which was man and which was shadow, or how many the shadows that he cast. Was not a nation, as distinguished from a crowd of chance comers, bound together by these parallel streams of thought, that unity of image, which I sought in national litera- ture, merely the originating symbol ? From the moment when these speculations grew vivid, I had created for myself an intellectual solitude, most arguments that WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS 65 could influence action had lost something of their meaning. How could I judge any scheme of education, or of social reform, when I could not measure what the different classes and occupations con- tributed to that invisible commerce of reverie and of sleep; and what is luxury and what necessity when a fragment of gold braid, or a flower in the wallpaper may be an originating impulse to revo- lution or to philosophy? I began to feel myself not only solitary but helpless. XVIII a I had not taken up these subjects wilfully, nor through love of strangeness nor love of excitement, nor because I found myself in some experimental circle, but because unaccountable things had happened even in my childhood, and because of an ungovernable craving. When supernatural events begin, a man first doubts his own testimony, but when they repeat themselves again and again, he doubts all human testimony. At least he knows his own bias, and may perhaps allow for it, but how trust historian and psychologist , that have for many hundred years ignored in writing of the history of the world, or of the human mind, so momentous a part of human experience? What else had they ignored and distorted? When Mesmerists first travelled about as public entertainers, a favourite trick was to tell a mesmerised man that some letter of the alphabet had ceased to exist, and after that to make him write his name upon the blackboard. Brown, or Jones, or Robinson would become without any surprise or hesitation, Rown, or Ones, or Obinson. Was modern civilization a conspiracy of the sub-conscious ? Did we turn away from certain thoughts and things because the Middle Ages lived in terror of the dark, or had some seminal illusion been imposed upon us by Beings greater than ourselves for an unknown purpose ? Even when no facts of experience were denied, might not what had seemed logical proof be but a mechanism of change, an automatic impulse? Once in London, at a dinner party, where all the guests were intimate friends, I had written upon a piece of paper, "In five minutes York Powell will talk of a burning house,” thrust the my neighbour's plate, and imagined my fire symbol, and waited in silence. Powell shifted conversation from topic to topic and within the five minutes was describing a fire he had seen as a young man. When Locke's French translator, Coste asked him paper under 66 MORE MEMORIES how, if there were no “innate ideas,” he would explain the skill shown by a bird in making its nest, Locke replied, "I did not write to explain the actions of dumb creatures,” and his translator thought the answer "very good," seeing that he had named his book “A Philosophical Essay upon Human Understanding.” Henry More, upon the other hand, considered that the bird's instinct proved the existence of the Anima Mundi, with its ideas and memories. Did modern enlightenment think with Coste that Locke had the better logic, because it was not free to think otherwise? XIX a I ceased to read modern books that were not books of pure litera- ture; when I met some current thought that interested me, I tried to trace it back to its earliest use, believing that there must be a tradi- tion of belief older than any European Church, and founded upon the experience of the world before the modern bias. It was this search for a tradition that urged George Pollexfen and myself to study the visions and thoughts of the country people, and some coun- try conversation repeated by one or the other often gave us a day's discussion. These visions, we soon discovered, were very like those we called up by symbol. Mary Battle, looking out of the window at Rosses Point, saw coming from Knocknarea, where Queen Maeve, according to local folk-lore, is buried under a great heap of stones, "the finest woman you ever saw travelling right across from the mountains and straight to here.”-I quote a record written at the time. “She looked very strong, but not wicked” (that is to say, not cruel). “I have seen the Irish Giant” (some big man shown at a fair). “And though he was a fine man he was nothing to her, for he was round and could not have stepped out so soldierly she had no stomach on her but was slight and broad in the shoul- ders, and was handsomer than any one you ever saw; she looked about thirty.” And when I asked if she had seen others like her, she said, "Some of them have their hair down, but they look quite dif- ferent, more like the sleepy-looking ladies one sees in the papers. Those with their hair up are like this one. The others have long white dresses, but those with their hair up have short dresses, so that you can see their legs right up to the calf.” And when I questioned her, I found that they wore what might well be some kind of buskin. “They are fine and dashing-looking, like the men one sees WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS 67 . . riding their horses in twos or threes on the slopes of the mountains with their swords swinging. There is no such race living now, none so finely proportioned. When I think of her and the ladies now they are like little children running about not knowing how to put their clothes on right why, I would not call them women at all.” Not at this time, but some three or four years later, when the visions came without any conscious use of symbol for a short time, and with much greater vividness, I saw two or three forms of this incredible beauty, one especially that must always haunt my mem- ory. Then, too, the Master Pilot told us of meeting at night close to the Pilot House a procession of women in what seemed the cos- tume of another age. Were they really people of the past, revisit- ing, perhaps, the places where they lived, or must I explain them, as I explained that vision of Eden as a mountain garden, by some memory of the race, as distinct from individual memory? Certainly these Spirits, as the country people called them, seemed full of per- sonality; were they not capricious, generous, spiteful, anxious, angry, and yet did that prove them more than images and symbols ? When I used a combined earth and fire and lunar symbol, my seer, a girl of twenty-five, saw an obvious Diana and her dogs about a fire in a cavern. Presently, judging from her closed eyes, and from a the tone of her voice, that she was in trance, not in reverie, I wished to lighten the trance a little, and made through carelessness or hasty thinking a symbol of dismissal, and at once she started and cried out, “She says you are driving her away too quickly. You have made her angry.” Then, too, if my visions had a subjective element, so had Mary Battle's, for her fairies had but one tune, The Distant Waterfall, and she never heard anything described in a sermon at the Cathedral that she did not "see it after,” and spoke of seeing in this way the gates of Purgatory. Furthermore, if my images could affect her dreams, the folk- images could affect mine in turn, for one night I saw between sleep- ing and waking a strange long-bodied pair of dogs, one black and one white, that I found presently in some country tale. How, too, could one separate the dogs of the country tale from those my uncle heard bay in his pillow? In order to keep myself from night- mare, I had formed the habit of imagining four watch-dogs, one at each corner of my room, and, though I had not told him or anybody, he said, “Here is a very curious thing; most nights now, when I 68 MORE MEMORIES lay my head upon the pillow, I hear a sound of dogs baying—the a sound seems to come up out of the pillow.” A friend of Strind- berg's, in delirium tremens, was haunted by mice, and a friend in the next room heard the squealing of the mice. XX To that multiplicity of interest and opinion, of arts and sciences, which had driven me to conceive a unity of culture defined and evoked by unity of image, I had but added a multiplicity of images, and I was the more troubled because, the first excitement over, I had done nothing to rouse George Pollexfen from the gloom and hypo- chondria always thickening about him. I asked no help of books, for I believed that the truth I sought would come to me like the subject of a poem, from some moment of passionate experience, and that if I filled my exposition with other men's thought, other men's investigation, I would sink with all that multiplicity of interest and opinion. That passionate experience could never come of that I was certain—until I had found the right image or right images. From what but the image of Apollo, fixed always in memory and passion, did his priesthood get that occasional power a classical his- torian has described, of lifting great stones and snapping great branches; and did not Gemma Galgani, like many others that had gone before, in 1889 cause deep wounds to appear in her body by contemplating her crucifix? In the essay that Wilde read to me one Christmas Day occurred these words-"What does not the world owe to the imitation of Christ, what to the imitation of Caesar?” and I had seen Macgregor Mathers paint little pictures combining the forms of men, animals, and birds according to a rule which pro- vided a form for every possible mental condition, and I had heard him describing, upon what authority I do not remember, how citi- zens of ancient Egypt assumed, when in contemplation, the images of their gods. But now image called up image in an endless procession, and I could not always choose among them with any confidence; and when I did choose, the image lost its intensity, or changed into some other image. I had but exchanged the Temptation of Flaubert's Bouvard et Pecuchet for that of his St Anthony, and I was lost in that re- gion a manuscript shown me by Macgregor Mathers had warned me of; astray upon the path of the Cameleon, upon Hodos Camelionis. WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS 69 XXI Now that I am old and settled and have many birds--the canaries have just hatched out four nestlings-I have before me the prob- lem that Locke waved aside. As I gave them an artificial nest, a hollow vessel like a saucer, they had no need of that skill the wild bird shows, each species having its own preference among lichen, or moss; but they could sort out wool and hair and a certain soft white down that I found under a big tree. They would twist a stem of grass till it was limber, and would wind all about the centre of the nest, and when the four grey eggs were laid, the mother bird knew how to turn them over from time to time, that they might be warmed evenly; and how long she must leave them uncovered, that the white might not be dried up, and when to return that the grow- ing bird might not take cold. Then the young birds, even when they had all their feathers, were very still as compared with the older birds, as though any habit of movement would disturb the nest or make them tumble out. One of them would now and again pass on the food that he had received from his mother's beak to some other nestling. The father had often pecked the mother bird before the eggs were laid, but now, until the last nestling was decently feath- ered, he took his share in the feeding, and was very peaceable, and it was only when the young could be left to feed themselves that he grew jealous, and had to be put into another cage. When I watch my child who is not yet three years old, I can see so many signs of knowledge from beyond her own mind; why else should she be so excited when a little boy passes outside the win- dow, and take so little interest in a girl; why should she put a cloak about her, and look over her shoulder to see it trailing upon the stairs, as she will some day trail a dress; and why, above all, as she lay against her mother's side, and felt the unborn child mov- ing within, did she murmur "Baby, baby”? When a man writes any work of genius, or invents some creative action, is it not because some knowledge or power has come into his mind from beyond his mind? It is called up by an image, as I think; all my birds' adventures started when I hung a little saucer at one side of the cage, and at the other a bundle of hair and grass; but our images must be given to us, we cannot choose them deliberately. 70 MORE MEMORIES XXII I know now that revelation is from the self, but from that age- long memoried self, that shapes the elaborate shell of the mollusc and the child in the womb, that teaches the birds to make their nest; and that genius is a crisis that joins that buried self for certain mo- ments to our trivial daily self. There are, indeed, personifying spirits that we had best call but gates and gate-keepers, because through their dramatic power they bring our souls to crisis, to Mask and Image, caring not a straw whether we be Juliet going to her wedding, or Cleopatra to her death; for in their eyes nothing has weight but passion. We have dreamed a foolish dream these many centuries in thinking that they value a life of contemplation, for they scorn that more than any possible life, unless it be but a name for the worst crisis of all. They have but one purpose, to bring their chosen man to the greatest obstacle he may confront without despair. They contrived Dante's banishment, and snatched away his Beatrice, and thrust Villon into the arms of harlots, and sent him to gather cronies at the foot of the gallows, that Dante and Vil- lon might through passion become conjoint to their buried selves, turn all to Mask and Image, and so be phantoms in their own eyes. In great lesser writers like Landor and like Keats we are shown that Image and that Mask as something set apart; Andromeda and her Perseus but not the sea-dragon; but in a few in whom we recognize supreme masters of tragedy, the whole contest is brought into the circle of their beauty. Such masters, Villon and Dante, let us say, would not, when they speak through their art, change their luck; yet they are mirrored in all the suffering of desire. The two halves of their nature are so completely joined that they seem to labour for their objects, and yet to desire whatever happens, being at the same instant predestinate and free, creation's very self. We gaze at such men in awe; because we gaze not at a work of art, but at the re-creation of the man through that art, the birth of a new species of man, and it may even seem that the hairs of our heads stand up; because that birth, that re-creation, is from terror. Had not Dante and Villon understood that their fate wrecked what life could not rebuild, had they lacked their vision of Evil, had they cherished any species of optimism, they could but have found a false beauty, or some momentary instinctive beauty, and suffered WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS 71 no change at all, or but changed as do the wild creatures, or from devil well to devil sick, and so go round the clock. They and their sort alone earn contemplation, for it is only when the intellect has wrought the whole of life to drama, to crisis, that we may live for contemplation, and yet keep our intensity. And these things are true also of nations, but the Gate-keepers who drive the nation to war or anarchy that it may find its Image are different from those who drive individual men, though I think at times they work together. And as I look backward upon my own writing, I take pleasure alone in those verses where it seems to me I have found something hard, cold, some articulation of the image, which is the opposite of all that I am in my daily life, and all that my country is; yet man or nation can no more make Mask or Image than the seed can be made by the soil into which it is cast. Ille What portion in the world can the artist have, Who has awakened from the common dream, But dissipation and despair ? Hic And yet No one denies to Keats, love of the world. Remember his deliberate happiness. a ILLE His art is happy, but who knows his mind? I see a schoolboy, when I think of him, With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window. For certainly he sank into his grave His senses and his heart unsatisfied, And made, being poor, ailing, and ignorant, Shut out from all the luxury of the world, Luxurious song. XXIII Two or three years after our return to Bedford Park The Doll's House had been played at the Royalty Theatre in Dean Street, the first Ibsen play to be played in England and somebody had given 72 MORE MEMORIES me a seat for the gallery. In the middle of the first act, while the heroine was asking for macaroons, a middle aged washerwoman who sat in front of me, stood up and said to the little boy at her side "Tommy, if you promise to go home straight, we will go now”; and at the end of the play, as I wandered through the entrance hall, I heard an elderly critic murmur “A series of conversations termi- nated by an accident.” I was divided in mind, I hated the play; what was it but Carolus Duran, Bastien-Lepage, Huxley, and Tyn- dall, all over again; I resented being invited to admire dialogue so close to modern educated speech that music and style were im- possible. “Art is art because it is not nature,” I kept repeating to myself, but how could I take the same side with critic and washerwoman? As time passed Ibsen became in my eyes the chosen author of very clever young journalists, who, condemned to their treadmill of ab- straction, hated music and style; and yet neither I nor my genera- tion could escape him because, though we and he had not the same friends, we had the same enemies. I bought his collected works in Mr Archer's translation out of my thirty shillings a week and car- ried them to and fro upon my journeys to Ireland and Sligo, and Florence Farr, who had but one great gift, the most perfect poetical elocution, became prominent as an Ibsen actress and had almost a success in Rosmersholm where there is symbolism and a stale odour of spilt poetry. She and I and half our friends found ourselves in- volved in a quarrel with the supporters of old fashioned melodrama and conventional romance, and in the support of the new drama- tists who wrote in what the Daily Press chose to consider the man- ner of Ibsen. In 1894 she became manageress of the Avenue Thea- tre with a play of Dr Todhunter's called The Comedy of Sighs, and Mr Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man. She asked me to write a one act play for her niece Miss Dorothy Paget, a girl of eight or nine, to make her first stage appearance in; and I with my Irish Theatre in mind wrote The Land of Heart's Desire, in some dis- comfort when the child was theme, as I knew nothing of children, but with an abundant mind when Mary Bruin was, for I knew an Irish woman whose unrest troubled me and lay beyond my com- prehension. To be continued i 1 Mild IL 1 1 Digniomb Courtesy of the Belmaison Gallery, Wanamaker's GARDEN IN WINTER. BY PRESTON DICKINSON 1 . 1 APOLOGY OF GENIUS BY MINA LOY Ostracized as we are with God- The watchers of the civilized wastes reverse their signals on our track Lepers of the moon all magically diseased we come among you innocent of our luminous sores unknowing how perturbing lights our spirit on the passion of Man until you turn on us your smooth fool's faces like buttocks bared in aboriginal mockeries We are the sacerdotal clowns who feed upon the wind and stars and pulverous pastures of poverty Our wills are formed by curious disciplines beyond your laws You may give birth to us or marry us the chances of your flesh are not our destiny- The cuirass of the soul still shines 74 APOLOGY OF GENIUS And we are unaware if you confuse such brief corrosion with possession In the raw caverns of the Increate we forge the dusk of Chaos to that imperious jewellery of the Universe -the Beautiful- While to your eyes A delicate crop of criminal mystic immortels stands to the censor's scythe. 1 THE FOX BY D. H. LAWRENCE III HINGS drew to a tension again towards evening. He and Banford had avoided each other all day. In fact Banford went in to the little town by the 11.20 train. It was market day. She ar- rived back on the 4.25. Just as the night was falling Henry saw her little figure in a dark-blue coat and a dark-blue tam-oʻ-shanter hat crossing the first meadow from the station. He stood under one of the wild pear trees, with the old dead leaves round his feet. And he watched the little blue figure advancing persistently over the rough winter-ragged meadow. She had her arms full of parcels, and advanced slowly, frail thing she was, but with that devilish little certainty which he so detested in her. He stood invisible under the pear tree, watching her every step. And if looks could have affected her, she would have felt a log of iron on each of her ankles as she made her way forward. “You're a nasty little thing, you are,” he was saying softly, across the distance. “You're a nasty little thing. I hope you'll be paid back for all the harm you've done me for nothing. I hope you will—you nasty little thing. I hope you'll have to pay for it. You will, if wishes are anything. You nasty little creature that you are.” ." She was toiling slowly up the slope. But if she had been slipping back at every step towards the Bottomless Pit, he would not have gone to help her with her parcels. Aha, there went March, striding with her long land stride in her breeches and her short tunic! Strid- ing down hill at a great pace, and even running a few steps now and then, in her great solicitude and desire to come to the rescue of the little Banford. The boy watched her with rage in his heart. See her leap a ditch, and run, run as if a house was on fire, just to get to that creeping dark little object down there! So, the Banford just stood still and waited. And March strode up and took all the par- cels except a bunch of yellow chrysanthemums. These the Banford still carried-yellow chrysanthemums! a a 76 THE FOX a "Yes, you look well, don't you," he said softly into the dusk air. "You look well, pottering up there with a bunch of flowers, you do. I'd make you eat them for your tea, if you hug them so tight. And I'd give them you for breakfast again, I would. I'd give you flowers. . Nothing but flowers.” He watched the progress of the two women. He could hear their voices: March always outspoken and rather scolding in her tender- ness, Banford murmuring rather vaguely. They were evidently good friends. He could not hear what they said till they came to the fence of the home meadow, which they must climb. Then he saw March manfully climbing over the bars with all her packages in her arms, and on the still air he heard Banford's fretful: "Why don't you let me help you with the parcels ?” She had a queer plaintive hitch in her voice.--Then came March's robust and reckless : “Oh, I can manage. Don't you bother about me. You've all you can do to get yourself over.” “Yes that's all very well,” said Banford fretfully. “You say ‘Don't you bother about me and then all the while you feel injured because nobody thinks of you." "When do I feel injured ?” said March. “Always. You always feel injured. Now you're feeling injured because I won't have that boy to come and live on the farm.” “I'm not feeling injured at all,” said March. “I know you are. When he's gone you'll sulk over it. I know you will." “Shall I ?!' said March. "We'll see.” “Yes, we shall see, unfortunately.--I can't think how you can make yourself so cheap. I can't imagine how you can lower your- self like it." “I haven't lowered myself,” said March. “I don't know what you call it, then. Letting a boy like that come so cheeky and impudent and make a mug of you. I don't know what you think of yourself. How much respect do you think he's going to have for you afterwards ?—My word, I wouldn't be in your shoes, if you married him." “Of course you wouldn't. My boots are a good bit too big for you, and not half dainty enough,” said March, with rather a miss- fire sarcasm. D. H. LAWRENCE 77 a "I thought you had too much pride, really I did. A woman's got to hold herself high, especially with a youth like that. Why he's impudent. Even the way he forced himself on us at the start.” “We asked him to stay,” said March. “Not till he'd almost forced us to.-And then he's so cocky and self-assured. My word, he puts my back up. I simply can't imagine - how you can let him treat you so cheaply." "I don't let him treat me cheaply,” said March. “Don't you worry yourself, nobody's going to treat me cheaply. And even you aren't, either.” She had a tender defiance, and a certain fire in her voice. “Yes, it's sure to come back to me,” said Banford bitterly. “That's always the end of it. I believe you only do it to spite me.” They went now in silence up the steep grassy slope and over the brow through the gorse bushes. On the other side the hedge the boy followed in the dusk, at some little distance. Now and then, through the huge ancient hedge of hawthorn, risen into trees, he saw the two dark figures creeping up the hill. As he came to the top of the slope he saw the homestead dark in the twilight, with a huge old pear tree leaning from the near gable, and a little yellow light twinkling in the small side windows of the kitchen. He heard the clink of the latch and saw the kitchen door open into light as the two women went indoors. So, they were at home. And so !--this was what they thought of him. It was rather in his nature to be a listener, so he was not at all surprised whatever he heard. The things people said about him always missed him personally. He was only rather surprised at the women's way with one another. And he disliked the Banford with an acid dislike. And he felt drawn to the March again. He felt again irresistibly drawn to her. He felt there was a secret bond, a secret thread be- tween him and her, something very exclusive, which shut out every- body else and made him and her possess each other in secret. He hoped again that she would have him. He hoped with his blood suddenly firing up that she would agree to marry him quite quickly: at Christmas, very likely. Christmas was not far off. He wanted, whatever else happened, to snatch her into a hasty mar- riage and a consummation with him. Then for the future, they could arrange later. But he hoped it would happen as he wanted it. He hoped that to-night she would stay a little while with him, after a 78 THE FOX Banford had gone upstairs. He hoped he could touch her soft, creamy cheek, her strange, frightened face. He hoped he could look into her dilated, frightened dark eyes, quite near. He hoped he might even put his hand on her bosom and feel her soft breasts under her tunic. His heart beat deep and powerful as he thought of that. He wanted very much to do so. He wanted to make sure of her soft woman's breasts under her tunic. She always kept the brown linen coat buttoned so close up to her throat. It seemed to him like some perilous secret, that her soft woman's breasts must be buttoned up in that uniform. It seemed to him moreover that they were so much softer, tenderer, more lovely and lovable, shut up in that tunic, than were the Banford's breasts, under her soft blouses and chiffon dresses. The Banford would have little iron breasts, he said to himself. For all her frailty and fretfulness and delicacy, she would have tiny iron breasts. But March under her crude, fast, workman's tunic, would have soft white breasts, white and unseen. So he told himself, and his blood burned. When he went in to tea, he had a surprise. He appeared at the inner door, his face very ruddy and vivid and his blue eyes shining, dropping his head forward as he came in, in his usual way, and hesitating in the doorway to watch the inside of the room, keenly and cautiously, before he entered. He was wearing a long-sleeved waistcoat. His face seemed extraordinarily a piece of the out-of- doors come indoors: as holly-berries do. In his second of pause in the doorway he took in the two women sitting at table, at opposite ends, saw them sharply. And to his amazement March was dressed in a dress of dull, green silk crêpe. His mouth came open in surprise. . If she had suddenly grown a moustache he could not have been more surprised. "Why,” he said, "do you wear a dress, then ?" She looked up, Aushing a deep rose colour, and twisting her mouth with a smile, said: “Of course I do. What else do you expect me to wear, but a dress?" “A land girl's uniform, of course,” said he. "Oh,” she cried nonchalant, “that's only for this dirty mucky work about here." “Isn't it your proper dress, then?” he said. “No, not indoors it isn't,” she said. But she was blushing all the a D. H. LAWRENCE 79 time as she poured out his tea. He sat down in his chair at table, unable to take his eyes off her. Her dress was a perfectly simple slip of bluey-green crêpe, with a line of gold stitching round the top and round the sleeves, which came to the elbow. It was cut just plain, and round at the top, and showed her white soft throat. Her arms he knew, strong and firm muscled, for he had seen her with her sleeves rolled up. But he looked her up and down, up and down. . Banford, at the other end of the table, said not a word, but piggled with the sardine on her plate. He had forgotten her exist. ence. He just simply stared at March, while he ate his bread and margarine in huge mouthfuls, forgetting even his tea. “Well I never knew anything make such a difference!” he mur- mured, across his mouthfuls. “Oh, goodness!” cried March, blushing still more. “I might be a pink monkey!” And she rose quickly to her feet and took the tea-pot to the fire, to the kettle. And as she crouched on the hearth with her green slip about her, the boy stared more wide-eyed than ever. Through the crêpe her woman's form seemed soft and womanly. And when she stood up and walked he saw her legs move soft within her modernly short skirt. She had on black silk stockings and small, patent shoes with little gold buckles. No, she was another being. She was something quite different. Seeing her always in the hard-cloth breeches, wide on the hips, but- toned on the knee, strong as armour, and in the brown puttees and thick boots, it had never occurred to him that she had a woman's legs and feet. Now it came upon him. She had a woman's soft, skirted legs, and she was accessible. He blushed to the roots of his hair, shoved his nose in his teacup and drank his tea with a little noise that made Banford simply squirm: and strangely, suddenly he felt a man, no longer a youth. He felt a man, with all a man's grave weight of responsibility. A curious quietness and gravity came over his soul. He felt a man, quiet, with a little of the heavi- ness of male destiny upon him. . She was soft and accessible in her dress. The thought went home in him like an everlasting responsibility. “Oh, for goodness sake say something somebody,” cried Banford fretfully. “It might be a funeral.” The boy looked at her, and she could not bear his face. a 80 THE FOX “A funeral !” said March, with a twisted smile. "Why, that breaks my dream.” Suddenly she had thought of Banford in the wood-box for a coffin. “What, have you been dreaming of a wedding?” said Banford sarcastically. “Must have been,” said March. “Whose wedding ?” asked the boy. "I can't remember,” said March. She was shy and rather awkward that evening, in spite of the fact that, wearing a dress, her bearing was much more subdued than in her uniform. She felt unpeeled and rather exposed. She felt almost improper. They talked desultorily about Henry's departure next morning, and made the trivial arrangement. But of the matter on their minds, none of them spoke. They were rather quiet and friendly this even- ing; Banford had practically nothing to say. But inside herself she seemed still, perhaps kindly. At nine o'clock March brought in the tray with the everlasting tea and a little cold meat which Banford had managed to procure. It was the last supper, so Banford did not want to be disagreeable. She felt a bit sorry for the boy, and felt she must be as nice as she could. He wanted her to go to bed. She was usually the first. But she sat on in her chair under the lamp, glancing at her book now and then, and staring into the fire. A deep silence had come into the room. It was broken by March asking, in a rather small tone: “What time is it, Jill ?'' “Five past ten,” said Banford, looking at her wrist. And then not a sound. The boy had looked up from the book he was holding between his knees. His rather wide, cat-shaped face had its obstinate look, his eyes were watchful. “What about bed?” said March at last. "I'm ready when you are,” said Banford. “Oh, very well,” said March. “I'll fill your bottle.” She was as good as her word. When the hot-water bottle was ready, she lit a candle and went upstairs with it. Banford remained in her chair, listening acutely. March came downstairs again. “There you are then,” she said. “Are you going up?" a D. H. LAWRENCE 81 “Yes, in a minute," said Banford. But the minute passed, and she sat on in her chair under the lamp. Henry, whose eyes were shining like a cat's as he watched from under his brows, and whose face seemed wider, more chubbed and cat-like with unalterable obstinacy, now rose to his feet to try his throw. “I think I'll go and look if I can see the she-fox,” he said. “She may be creeping round. Won't you come as well for a minute, Nel- lie, and see if we see anything ?” “Me!” cried March, looking up with her startled, wondering face. "Yes. Come on," he said. It was wonderful how soft and warm and coaxing his voice could be, how near. The very sound of it made Banford's blood boil. “Come on for a minute,” he said, looking down into her uplifted, unsure face. And she rose to her feet as if drawn up by his young, ruddy face that was looking down on her. “I should think you're never going out at this time of night, Nel- lie!" cried Banford. “Yes, just for a minute,” said the boy, looking round on her, and speaking with an odd sharp yelp in his voice. March looked from one to the other, as if confused, vague. Ban- ford rose to her feet for battle. "Why it's ridiculous. It's bitter cold. You'll catch your death in that thin frock. And in those slippers. You're not going to do any such thing." There was a moment's pause. Banford turtled up like a little fighting cock, facing March and the boy. “Oh, I don't think you need worry yourself,” he replied. “A mo- ment under the stars won't do anybody any damage. I'll get the rug off the sofa in the dining-room. You're coming, Nellie.” His voice had so much anger and contempt and fury in it as he spoke to Banford: and so much tenderness and proud authority as he spoke to March, that the latter answered: "Yes, I'm coming.” And she turned with him to the door. Banford, standing there in the middle of the room, suddenly burst into a long wail and a spasm of sobs. She covered her face a 82 THE FOX with her poor thin hands, and her thin shoulders shook in an agony of weeping. March looked back from the door. “Jill!” she cried in a frantic tone, like someone just coming awake. And she seemed to start towards her darling. But the boy had March's arm firm in his grip, and she could not move. She did not know why she could not move. It was as in a dream when the heart strains and the body cannot stir. “Never mind,” said the boy softly. “Let her cry. Let her cry. She will have to cry sooner or later. And the tears will relieve her feelings. They will do her good.” So he drew March slowly through the door-way. But her last look was back to the poor little figure which stood in the middle of the room with covered face and thin shoulders shaken with bitter weeping In the dining-room he picked up the rug and said: "Wrap yourself up in this.” She obeyed—and they reached the kitchen door, he holding her soft and firm by the arm, though she did not know it. When she saw the night outside she started back. "I must go back to Jill,” she said. “I must! Oh, yes, I must!" Her tone sounded final. The boy let go of her and she turned indoors. But he seized her again and arrested her. "Wait a minute,” he said. “Wait a minute. Even if you go you're not going yet.” “Leave go! Leave go!” she cried. “My place is at Jill's side. " Poor little thing, she's sobbing her heart out.” “Yes,” said the boy bitterly. “And your heart too, and mine as well.” "Your heart ?” said March. He still gripped her and detained her. “Isn't it as good as her heart?” he said. “Or do you think it's not ?" “Your heart?” she said again, incredulous. “Yes mine! Mine! Do you think I haven't got a heart ?”—And with his hot grasp he took her hand and pressed it under his left breast. “There's my heart,” he said, “if you don't believe in it." It was wonder which made her attend. And then she felt the deep, heavy, powerful stroke of his heart, terrible, like something from beyond. It was like something from beyond, something awful D. H. LAWRENCE 83 from outside, signalling to her. And the signal paralysed her. It beat upon her very soul, and made her helpless. She forgot Jill. She could not think of Jill any more. She could not think of her. That terrible signalling from outside! The boy put his arm round her waist. “Come with me,” he said gently. "Come and let us say what we've got to say.' And he drew her outside, closed the door. And she went with him darkly down the garden path. That he should have a beating heart! And that he should have his arm round her, outside the blanket! She was too confused to think who he was or what he was. He took her to a dark corner of the shed, where there was a tool- box with a lid, long and low. "We'll sit here a minute,” he said. And obediently she sat down by his side. “Give me your hand,” he said. She gave him both her hands, and he held them between his own. He was young, and it made him tremble. "You'll marry me. You'll marry me before I go back, won't you?” he pleaded. "Why, aren't we both a pair of fools ?” she said. He had put her in the corner, so that she should not look out and see the lighted window of the house, across the dark yard and gar- den. He tried to keep her all there inside the shed with him. "In what way a pair of fools?” he said. “If you go back to Can- ada with me, I've got a job and a good wage waiting for me, and it's a nice place, near the mountains. Why shouldn't you marry me? Why shouldn't we marry? I should like to have you there with me. I should like to feel I'd got somebody there, at the back of me, all my life.” ” "You'd easily find somebody else, who'd suit you better," she said. “Yes, I might easily find another girl. I know I could. But not one I really wanted. I've never met one I really wanted, for good. You see, I'm thinking of all my life. If I marry, I want to feel it's . for all my life. Other girls: well, they're just girls, nice enough to go a walk with now and then. Nice enough for a bit of play. But when I think of my life, then I should be very sorry to have to marry one of them, I should indeed." 84 THE FOX a a "You mean they wouldn't make you a good wife.” “Yes, I mean that. But I don't mean they wouldn't do their duty by me. I mean, I don't know what I mean. Only when I think of my life, and of you, then the two things go together.” “And what if they didn't?” she said, with her odd sardonic touch. “Well I think they would.” They sat for some time silent. He held her hands in his, but he did not make love to her. Since he had realized that she was a woman, and vulnerable, accessible, a certain heaviness had pos- sessed his soul. He did not want to make love to her. He shrank from any such performance, almost with fear. She was a woman, and vulnerable, accessible to him finally, and he held back from that which was ahead, almost with dread. It was a kind of darkness he knew he would enter finally, but of which he did not want as yet even to think. She was the woman, and he was responsible for the strange vulnerability he had suddenly realized in her. "No," she said at last, “I'm a fool. I know I'm a fool.” “What for?” he asked. "To go on with this business." “Do you mean me?” he asked. “No, I mean myself. I'm making a fool of myself, and a big one.” "Why, because you don't want to marry me, really ?” “Oh, I don't know whether I'm against it, as a matter of fact. That's just it. I don't know.” He looked at her in the darkness, puzzled. He did not in the least know what she meant. “And don't you know whether you like to sit here with me this minute, or not?” he asked. "No, I don't, really. I don't know whether I wish I was some- where else, or whether I like being here. I don't know, really.” “Do you wish you were with Miss Banford? Do you wish you'd gone to bed with her ?” he asked, as a challenge. She waited a long time before she answered: "No,” she said at last. "I don't wish that." “And do you think you would spend all your life with her—when your hair goes white, and you are old ?” he said. "No," she said, without much hesitation. “I don't see Jill and me two old women together.” D. H. LAWRENCE 85 “And don't you think, when I'm an old man, and you're an old woman, we might be together still, as we are now ?” he said. "Well, not as we are now,” she replied. “But I could imagine -no, I can't. I can't imagine you an old man. Besides, it's dreadful!" "What, to be an old man ?” “Yes, of course.” "Not when the time comes,” he said. "But it hasn't come. Only it will. And when it does, I should like to think you'd be there as well.” "Sort of old age pensions,” she said drily. Her kind of witless humour always startled him. He never knew what she meant. Probably she didn't quite know herself. "No," he said, hurt. “I don't know why you harp on old age,” she said. “I'm not ninety.” “Did anybody ever say you were ?” he asked, offended. They were silent for some time, pulling different ways in the silence. “I don't want you to make fun of me,” he said. “Don't you?” she replied, enigmatic. "No, because just this minute I'm serious. And when I'm serious, I believe in not making fun of it.” “You mean nobody else must make fun of you,” she replied. “Yes, I mean that. And I mean I don't believe in making fun of it myself. When it comes over me so that I'm serious, then- there it is, I don't want it to be laughed at. She was silent for some time. Then she said, in a vague, almos pained voice: “No, I'm not laughing at you.” A hot wave rose in his heart. "You believe me, do you ?” he asked. "Yes, I believe you,” she replied, with a twang of her old tired nonchalance, as if she gave in because she was tired.-But he didn't care. His heart was hot and clamorous. "So you agree to marry me before I go ?-perhaps at Christmas ?! “Yes, I agree.” “There!” he exclaimed. “That's settled it." And he sat silent, unconscious, with all the blood burning in all 86 THE FOX his veins, like fire in all the branches and twigs of him. He only pressed her two hands to his chest, without knowing. When the curious passion began to die down, he seemed to come awake to the world. “We'll go in, shall we?” he said: as if he realized it was cold. She rose without answering. “Kiss me before we go, now you've said it,” he said. And he kissed her gently on the mouth, with a young, frightened kiss. It made her feel so young, too, and frightened, and wonder- ing: and tired, tired, as if she were going to sleep. They went indoors. And in the sitting-room, there, crouched by the fire like a queer little witch, was Banford. She looked round with reddened eyes as they entered, but did not rise. He thought she looked frightening, unnatural, crouching there looking round at them. Evil he thought her look was, and he crossed his fingers. Banford saw the ruddy, elate face of the youth: he seemed strangely tall and bright and looming. And March had a delicate look on her face, she wanted to hide her face, to screen it, to let it not be seen. "You've come at last,” said Banford uglily. “Yes, we've come,” said he. “You've been long enough for anything,” she said. “Yes, we have. We've settled it. We shall marry as soon as possible,” he replied. "Oh, you've settled it, have you! Well, I hope you won't live to repent it,” said Banford. “I hope so too,” he replied. “Are you going to bed now, Nellie ?” said Banford. "Yes, I'm going now.” “Then for goodness sake come along." March looked at the boy. He was glancing with his very bright eyes at her and at Banford. March looked at him wistfully. She wished she could stay with him. She wished she had married him already, and it was all over. For oh, she felt suddenly so safe with him. She felt so strangely safe and peaceful in his presence. If only she could sleep in his shelter, and not with Jill. She felt afraid of Jill. In her dim, tender state, it was agony to have to go with Jill and sleep with her. She wanted the boy to save her. She looked again at him. D. H. LAWRENCE 87 a And he, watching with bright eyes, divined something of what she felt. It puzzled and distressed him that she must go with Jill. "I shan't forget what you've promised,” he said, looking clear into her eyes, right into her eyes, so that he seemed to occupy all her self with his queer, bright look. She smiled to him, faintly, gently. She felt safe again-safe with him. But in spite of all the boy's precautions, he had a set-back. The morning he was leaving the farm he got March to accompany him to the market-town, about six miles away, where they went to the registrar and had their names stuck up as two people who were going to marry. He was to come at Christmas, and the wedding was to take place then. He hoped in the spring to be able to take March back to Canada with him, now the war was really over. Though he was so young, he had saved some money. “You never have to be without some money at the back of you, if you can help it,” he said. So she saw him off in the train that was going West: his camp was on Salisbury plains. And with big dark eyes she watched him go, and it seemed as if everything real in life was retreating as the train retreated with his queer, chubby, ruddy face, that seemed so broad across the cheeks, and which never seemed to change its ex- pression, save when a cloud of sulky anger hung on the brow, or the bright eyes fixed themselves in their stare. This was what happened now. He leaned there out of the carriage window as the train drew off, saying good-bye and staring back at her, but his face quite un- changed. There was no emotion on his face. Only his eyes tight- ened and became fixed and intent in their watching as a cat when suddenly she sees something and stares. So the boy's eyes stared fixedly as the train drew away, and she was left feeling intensely forlorn. Failing his physical presence, she seemed to have nothing of him. And she had nothing of anything. Only his face was fixed in her mind : the full, ruddy, unchanging cheeks, and the straight snout of a nose, and the two eyes staring above. All she could remember was how he suddenly wrinkled his nose when he laughed, as a puppy does when he is playfully growling. But him, himself, and what he was—she knew nothing, she had nothing of him when he left her. To be concluded a TWO PORTRAITS BY ELIZABETH SHEPLEY SERGEANT THE IMAGIST You sit in pink kimono by a ninth floor hotel window smoking a cigar, and stare at the black open-work of a skyscraper in the making. This way and that, on rigid lines of steel, run little tinkering men. Mechanical contraptions. Black tinkers hung in open boxes of black metal, black automatic tinkers striking a hollow sound above a mammoth void. It might be a problem in geometry you ponder, with your look of pleased detachment. Decent of God to draw inhuman picture-pat- terns at your window under a bright blue sky, against a cool blue river. I like to see you smiling and smoking in your red arm-chair. Your eyes never cease their computing, and your ear detects the utmost polyphonics of New York. TWO ARTISTS One, made up as tradition wills, flowing black coat, curled mop of hair, benignant satisfaction, sits tall and bland upon a stool and darts aslant an audience two clever flitting eyes. The other, quiet, rotund soul is small and vexed and homeless to be viewed. He draws his bow and closes round, deep orbs upon these wraiths of New York streets, these rows of substance and content and devas- tation. Pale lids that feel, pale Spanish brooding lids, they float before pure mist, evoked from sterile air. It is you, scorner of crowds, with the grave, sportive voice of your instrument, who drag us from our velvet seats and twist and twine and wrap us in your dream. It is you, sage of the closed, dreaming eyes, who steal us from our urban ways and lose us near the pallid clash of mountain waterfalls. And all the while a pair of perfect hands plays rippling chords of black and white, pours out Victorian rivulets to charm a New York audience. us in 2 Courtesy of Paul Cassirer, Berlin SHEEP. BY AUGUST GAUL REVUE BY WALLACE STEVENS BANTAMS IN PINE-WOODS Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan Of tan with henna hackles, halt! Damned universal cock, as if the sun Was blackamoor to bear your blazing tail. Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat! I am the personal. Your world is you. I am my world. You ten-foot poet among inchlings. Fat! Begone! An inchling bristles in these pines, Bristles, and points their Appalachian tangs, And fears not portly Azcan nor his hoos. THE ORDINARY WOMEN Then from their poverty they rose, From dry catarrhs, and to guitars They flitted Through the palace walls. They fung monotony behind, Turned from their want, and, nonchalant, They crowded The nocturnal halls. The lacquered loges huddled there Mumbled and a-zay, a-zay. zay-zay and 90 REVUE The moonlight Fubbed the girandoles. And the cold dresses that they wore, In the vapid haze of the window-bays, Were tranquil As they leaned and looked From the window-sills at the alphabets, At beta b and gamma g, To study The canting curlicues Of heaven and of the heavenly script. And there they read of marriage-bed. Ti-lill-o! And they read right long. The gaunt guitarists on the strings Rumbled a-day and a-day, a-day. The moonlight Rose on the beachy floors. How explicit the coiffures became, The diamond point, the sapphire point, The sequins Of the civil fans! Insinuations of desire, Puissant speech, alike in each, Cried quittance To the wickless halls. Then from their poverty they rose, From dry guitars, and to catarrhs They fitted Through the palace walls. WALLACE STEVENS 91 FROGS EAT BUTTERFLIES. SNAKES EAT FROGS. HOGS EAT SNAKES. MEN EAT HOGS. It is true that the rivers went nosing like swine, Tugging at banks, until they seemed Bland belly-sounds in somnolent troughs, That the air was heavy with the breath of these swine, The breath of turgid summer, and Heavy with thunder's rattapallax, That the man who erected this cabin, planted This field, and tended it awhile, Knew not the quirks of imagery, That the hours of his indolent, arid days, Grotesque with this nosing in banks, This somnolence and rattapallax, Seemed to suckle themselves on his arid being, As the swine-like rivers suckled themselves While they went seaward to the sea-mouths. A HIGH-TONED OLD CHRISTIAN WOMAN We Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame. Take the moral law and make a nave of it And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus, The conscience is converted into palms, Like windy citherns hankering for hymns. agree in principle. That's clear. But take The opposing law and make a peristyle, And from the peristyle project a masque Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness, Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last, Is equally converted into palms, Squiggling like saxophones . And palm for palm, 92 REVUE Madame, we are where we began. Allow, Therefore, that in the planetary scene Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed, Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade, Proud of such novelties of the sublime, Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk, May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres. This will make widows wince. But fictive things Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince. O, FLORIDA, VENEREAL SOIL A few things for themselves, Convolvulus and coral, Buzzards and live-moss, Tiestas from the keys, A few things for themselves, Florida, venereal soil, Disclose to the lover. The dreadful sundry of this world, The Cuban, Polodowsky, The Mexican women, The negro undertaker Killing the time between corpses Fishing for crawfish Virgin of boorish births, Swiftly in the nights, In the porches of Key West, Behind the bougainvilleas, After the guitar is asleep, Lasciviously as the wind, You come tormenting, Insatiable, WALLACE STEVENS 93 When you might sit, A scholar of darkness, Sequestered over the sea, Wearing a clear tiara Of red and blue and red, Sparkling, solitary, still, In the high sea-shadow. Donna, donna, dark, Stooping in indigo gown And cloudy constellations, Conceal yourself or disclose Fewest things to the lover- A hand that bears a thick-leaved fruit, A pungent bloom against your shade. THE EMPEROR OF ICE-CREAM Call the roller of big cigars, The muscular one, and bid him whip In kitchen cups concupiscent curds. Let the wenches dawdle in such dress As they are used to wear, and let the boys Bring flowers in last month's newspapers. Let be be finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. - And Take from the dresser of deal, Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet On which she embroidered fantails once spread it so as to cover her face. If her horny feet protrude, they come To show how cold she is, and dumb. Let the lamp affix its beam. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. LONDON LETTER June, 1922 T 1 HE death of Sir Walter Raleigh removes a figure of some dig- nity from a post of some importance. I use both phrases with responsibility. I have never seen and heard the late Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and have never read a line of his writings. But he occupied the post of some importance, and though he may have left it no more important than he found it, he never, so far as I know, made it ridiculous. As for the post, I know well enough that such positions are not for the absolutely first-rate men, but their importance does not depend upon being held by the absolutely first- rate men; it is perhaps not even desirable that they should be held by the first-rate men. It is only a limited range of originality, like that of Anatole France, that is appropriate to be rewarded by the Académie Française. But the Académie stands for something valu- able; and so should the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford. It is not to the interest of English literature that the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford should pass to the servile, the indefinite, or the sluggish. And we may as easily get a less worthy Professor of Poetry than Sir Walter Raleigh, as a less worthy Laureate than Robert Bridges. Dr Bridges is a much more valuable personage, it must be said, than was Raleigh. He is the best living specimen in England of the good academic poet; and the word "academic” is not to be read in a pejorative sense. His Milton's Prosody is a piece of work well done. If I were to nominate his successor, the choice would be, I think, Mr Sturge Moore; also a conscientious, sensitive, and scholarly poet with a respect for the English language. But to find a successor for Sir Walter Raleigh I should be at a loss. The requirements are difficult: the good academic mind is as rare in England as the good revolutionary mind; there is an originality about the good academic mind, as essential to it as another original- ity is to the creative mind. The good critic of poetry cannot be merely an astute specialist, like Sir Sidney Lee, or an able biog- rapher, like Sir Sidney Colvin, or a polite essayist, like Mr Edmund Gosse, or a polite moralist, like Mr Clutton-Brock. All of these gentlemen may be accused of seriousness if one is seeking mirth: T. S. ELIOT 95 a but for a Professor of Poetry the choice of any one of them would be simply frivolous. The simplest way of dealing with the con- temporary writers of belles-lettres is to divide them into two classes: the Gentleman in a Library, and the earnest Liberal. Neither is quite what we want. The Gentleman in a Library is well read, and has a taste for books. In his highest form of development he is a genuine scholar, with considerable acuteness, and a vigorous gusto for literature. His highest manifestation in England is Professor Saintsbury. Mr Saintsbury is a scholar: and he knows a great deal about Port (his Notes for a Cellarbook are inadequate on the side of German wines). His services to literature have been great: had he done nothing but his edition of Caroline Poets in three volumes he would still have earned our perpetual gratitude. What is singular about his criticism is the range of his enjoyment: he enjoys not only the first, but the second, third, and tenth-rate, without confusion or illusions. If there is the smallest mustard seed of pleasure to be found in some forgotten poet or novelist, Mr Saintsbury will extract it. Consequently, Mr Saintsbury is often more entertaining when he writes about authors whom we do not want to read, than when he writes about authors whom we know. Things which we are in- capable of enjoying for ourselves we enjoy through Mr Saintsbury. The second Gentleman in a Library is Mr Charles Whibley. I also prize Mr Whibley because he has read so many things that I have not read, and because he is not a Whig. His great limitation, in contrast to Mr Saintsbury, is his affection for quaintness; he is a disciple of Henley and was a friend of George Wyndham. On the other hand, I do not know who else could write about Bolingbroke. I think that these are the two best specimens: there are many varieties. As the gentleman becomes the journalist, we get essays in the C. Lamb tradition; as he becomes the theologian, we get, with pomposity and pretence, Mr, or rather the late Mr A. J. and now Earl Balfour. Social ambitions, again, produce the literary chatter- box. The gentleman turned professor produces works of sometimes useful and sometimes useless scholarship. I recognize in Mr A. C. Bradley some of the acuteness of his greater brother, but whereas Appearance and Reality is a fine work of art, Four Plays of Shakes- peare strikes me as a needless luxury. Professor Mackail wrote a History of Latin Literature which was the first incentive to at least one boy to read Latin poetry; but Mr Mackail, a belated pre- 96 LONDON LETTER Raphaelite, shows a tendency towards Liberalism. (Nevertheless, his lecture on Pope is worth reading.) The Gentleman in a Library has dignity; he lacks, to put it in the crudest way, “punch.” This the Liberal endeavours to provide. For the former, Literature is a pleasure for the more cultivated upper classes; for the latter, it is Education for the Million. Mr Clutton-Brock really does, I think, try to improve the Million up to the pleasantness and peace of the William Morris way of life; I believe he is a Christian Socialist. The great weakness of our Lib- eral Practitioners is that they have abandoned a safe position with- out having the skill to prepare another. The Liberal is merely a drifting Conservative, and much more obstructive to genuine inno- vation in the Arts than the firm Conservative, because he persuades the public that he is himself modern, and that anything more origi- nal than himself is not modernity but madness. No. For a Professor of Poetry I believe that I should choose an American, Professor Irving Babbitt. Not that I agree with all of Mr Babbitt's opinions: but partly that there are few writers so well worth disagreeing with. There is no doubt that Mr Babbitt is a far more serious writer than any of the Englishmen I have men- tioned. He is more learned—or, to be more precise, better equipped; he has strong convictions; and he has just that valuable and rare academic originality which we seek. In Mr Babbitt's mind the classical culture is active; he is perfectly honest; and he does not forget that Homer, Virgil, and Dante have each certain qualities not so well represented in Shakespeare. Shakespeare has been a subject of attention lately, owing to two books, Mr Robertson's Shakespeare Canon, and Mr Clutton-Brock's Shakespeare's Hamlet. Both discussions are really due to Mr Rob- ertson; he wrote an essay on Hamlet several years ago which I re- viewed, and his essay and my review appear to have provided the impulse to Mr Brock. Mr Brock's argument I have not read; it may be a very good one. It is difficult to tell, from the reviews, what Mr Brock's argument is; for they have seized merely on one or two sentences, of my own or of Mr Robertson's, and neglected discus- sion of the issue: which is not whether other plays of Shakespeare are “greater” or “better” than Hamlet, but whether that play is a perfect artistic whole, and whether Shakespeare succeeded com- pletely in expressing the content of emotion. T. S. ELIOT BOOK REVIEWS OFF THE SHOALS The ENORMOUs Room. By E. E. Cummings. 12mo. 271 pages. Boni and Liveright. $2. W a HEN the American Chicle Company brings out gum of a new shape and unfamiliar flavour gumchewers are delighted and miss their subway trains in rush hour and step on each other's heels crowding round slot machines in their haste to submit to a new sensation. Frequenters of cabarets and jazzpalaces shimmy themselves into St Vitus dance with delight over a new noise in the band or a novel squirm in the rhythm. People mortgage their houses to be seen in the newest and most bizarre models of autos. Women hock their jewels and their husbands' insurance policies to acquire an unaccustomed shade in hair or crêpe de chine. Why then is it that when any one commits anything novel in the arts he should be always greeted by this same peevish howl of pain and surprise ? One is led to suspect that the interest people show in these much talked of commodities, painting, music, and writing, cannot be very deep or very genuine when they wince so under any unexpected impact. The man who invented Eskimo Pie made a million dollars, so one is told, but E. E. Cummings, whose verse has been appearing off and on for three years now, and whose experiments should not be more appalling to those interested in poetry than the experiment of surrounding ice-cream with a layer of chocolate was to those in- terested in soda fountains, has hardly made a dent in the doughy minds of our so-called poetry-lovers. Yet one might have thought a that the cadences of "Or with thy mind against my mind, to hear nearing our hearts' irrevocable play- through the mysterious high futile day 98 OFF THE SHOALS an enormous stride (and drawing thy mouth toward my mouth, steer our lost bodies carefully downward)” would have melted with as brittle freshness on the senses of the readers of The Dial as melted the brown-encrusted oblongs of ice- cream in the mouths of tired stenographers and their beaux. Can it be that people like ice-cream and only pretend to like poetry? Therefore it is very fortunate that this book of E. E. Cummings' has come out under the disguise of prose. The average reader is less self-conscious and more open to direct impressions when reading prose than verse; the idea that prose is Art will have closed the minds of only a few over-educated people. Here at last is an oppor- tunity to taste without overmuch prejudice a form, an individual's focus on existence, a gesture unforeseen in American writing. The attempt to obscure the issue, on the paper cover blurb and in the preface, will fool no one who reads beyond the first page. It's not as an account of a war atrocity or as an attack on France or the holy Allies timely to the Genoa Conference that The Enormous Room is important, but as a distinct conscious creation separate from anything else under heaven. Here's a book that has been conceived unashamedly and directly without a thought either of the columnists or the book trade or Mr Sumner, or of fitting into any one of the neatly labelled pigeon- holes of novel, play, essay, history, travel book, a book that exists because the author was so moved, excited, amused by a certain slice of his existence that things happened freely and cantankerously on paper. And he had the nerve to let things happen. In this pattern- cut generation, most writers are too afraid of losing their private reputations as red-blooded clear-eyed hundred-percenters, well- dressed, well-mannered and thoroughly disinfected fashion plates, to make any attempt to feel and express directly the life about them and in them. They walk in daily fear that someone will call them morbid, and insulate themselves from their work with the rubber raincoat of fiction. The Enormous Room seems to me to be the book that has nearest approached the mood of reckless adventure in which men will reach the white heat of imagination needed to fuse the soggy disjointed complexity of the industrial life about us into seething Auid of creation. There can be no more playing safe. JOHN DOS PASSOS 99 Like the old steamboat captains on the Mississippi we'll have to forget the hissing of the safety-valve and stoke like beavers if we are to get off the sticky shoals into the deeper reaches beyond. And many an old tub will blow sky high with all hands before someone makes the course. The Enormous Room for one seems to me at least to have cleared the shoals. Along with Sandburg and Sherwood Anderson, E. E. Cummings takes the rhythms of our American speech as the material of his prose as of his verse. It is writing created in the ear and lips and jotted down. For accuracy in noting the halting cadences of talk and making music of it, I don't know anything that comes up to these two passages. This is a poem that came out in The DIAL: “Buffalo Bill's defunct who used to ride a watersmooth-silver stallion and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat Jesus he was a handsome man and what i want to know is how do you like your blueeyed boy Mister Death” This from The Enormous Room: "Sunday: green murmurs in coldness. Surplice fiercely fearful, praying on his bony both knees, crossing himself. The Fake French Soldier, alias Garibaldi, beside him, a little face filled with terror the Bell cranks the sharp-nosed priest on his knees titter from bench of whores- “And that reminds me of a Sunday afternoon on our backs spent with the wholeness of a hill in Chevancourt, discovering a great apple pie, B. and Jean Stahl and Maurice le Menusier and my- self; and the sun falling roundly before us. "-And then one Dimanche a new high old man with a sharp violet face and green hair—'You are free my children, to achieve immortality-Songez, songez, donc-L'Eternité est une existence sans durée—Toujours le Paradis, toujours l'Enfer' (to the silently 100 OFF THE SHOALS roaring whores) 'Heaven is made for you'—and the Belgian ten- foot farmer spat three times and wiped them with his foot, his nose dripping; and the nigger shot a white oyster into a far-off scarlet handkerchief—and the priest's strings came untied and he sidled crablike down the steps—the two candles wiggle a strenuous soft- ness "In another chapter I will tell you about the nigger. “And another Sunday I saw three tiny old females stumble for- ward, three very formerly and even once bonnets perched upon three wizened skulls, and flop clumsily before the priest, and take the wafer hungrily into their leathery faces.” > a This sort of thing knocks literature into a cocked hat. It has the raucous directness of a song and dance act in cheap vaudeville, the willingness to go the limit in expression and emotion of a negro dancing. And in this mode, nearer the conventions of speech than those of books, in a style infinitely swift and crisply flexible, an in- dividual not ashamed of his loves and hates, great or trivial, has expressed a bit of the underside of History with indelible vividness. The material itself, of course, is superb. The Concentration Camp at La Ferté-Macé was one of those many fantastic crossroads of men's lives where one lingered for unforgetable moments, reach- ing them one hardly knew how, shoved away from them as mysteri- ously by some movement of the pawns on the chessboard, during the fearfully actual nightmare of war. A desperate recklessness in the air made every moment, every intonation snatched from the fates of absolute importance. In The Wanderer and Jean le Negre and Surplice and Mexique and Apollyon and the Machine Fixer and in those grotesque incidents of the fight with the stovepipes and Celina's defiance we have that intense momentary flare in which lifetimes, generations are made manifest. To have made those mo- ments permanent on a printed page is no common achievement. For some reason there is a crispness and accuracy about these transcripts of the smell and taste and shiver of that great room full of huddled prisoners that makes me think of Defoe. In The Journal of the Plague Year or in the description of a night spent among enormous bones and skeletons in the desert journey in Captain Singleton one finds passages of a dry definiteness that somehow give the sort of impression that gives this hotly imaged picture of a road- side crucifix: JOHN DOS PASSOS 101 “I banged forward with bigger and bigger feet. A bird, scared, swooped almost into my face. Occasionally some night-noise pricked a futile, minute hole in the enormous curtain of soggy dark- ness. Uphill now. Every muscle thoroughly aching, head spinning, I half-straightened my no longer obedient body; and jumped: face to face with a little wooden man hanging all by itself in a grove of a low trees. “—The wooden body, clumsy with pain, burst into fragile legs with absurdly large feet and funny writhing toes; its little stiff arms made abrupt cruel equal angles with the road. About its stunted loins clung a ponderous and jocular fragment of drapery. On one terribly brittle shoulder the droll lump of its neckless head ridiculously lived. There was in this complete silent doll a grue- some truth of instinct, a success of uncanny poignancy, an unearthly ferocity of rectangular emotion. "For perhaps a minute the almost obliterated face and mine eyed one another in the silence of intolerable autumn." Perhaps one thinks of Defoe because of the unashamed directness with which every twitch of the individual's fibres, stung or caressed by the world's flowing past outside, is noted down. There is no straining through the standard literary sieve. Of the English eighteenth century too is the fine tang of high adventure along roads among grotesque companions that comes to the surface in passages like this: "The highroad won, all of us relaxed considerably. The sac full of suspicious letters which I bore on my shoulder was not so light as I had thought, but the kick of the Briouse pinard thrust me forward at a good clip. The road was absolutely deserted; the night hung loosely around it, here and there tattered by attempting moonbeams. I was somewhat sorry to find the way hilly, and in places bad underfoot; yet the unknown adventure lying before me, and the delicious silence of the night (in which our words rattled queerly like tin soldiers in a plush-lined box) boosted me into a con- dition of mysterious happiness. We talked, the older and I, of strange subjects. As I suspected he had not always been a gen- darme. He had seen service among the Arabs.” and the first description of The Wanderer: 102 OFF THE SHOALS “B. called my attention to a figure squatting in the middle of the cour with his broad back against one of the more miserable trees. This figure was clothed in a remarkably picturesque manner; it wore a dark sombrero-like hat with a large drooping brim, a bright red gipsy shirt of some remarkably fine material with huge sleeves loosely falling, and baggy corduroy trousers whence escaped two brown, shapely, naked feet. On moving a little I discovered a face -perhaps the handsomest face that I have ever seen, of a gold brown color, framed in an amazingly large and beautiful black beard. The features were finely formed and almost fluent, the eyes soft and extraordinarily sensitive, the mouth delicate and firm be- neath a black moustache which fused with the silky and wonderful darkness falling upon the breast. The face contained a beauty and dignity which, as I first saw it, annihilated the surrounding tumult without an effort. Around the carefully formed nostrils there was something almost of contempt. The cheeks had known suns of which I might not think. The feet had travelled nakedly in coun- tries not easily imagined. Seated gravely in the mud and noise of the cour under the pitiful and scraggly pommier behind the eyes lived a world of complete strangeness and silence. The composure of the body was graceful and Jovelike. This being might have been a prophet come out of a country nearer to the sun. Per- haps a god who had lost his road and allowed himself to be taken prisoner by le gouvernement français. At least a prince of a dark and desirable country, a king over a gold-skinned people who would return when he wished to his fountains and his houris. I learned upon inquiry that he travelled in various countries with a horse and cart and his wife and children, selling bright colors to the women and men of these countries. As it turned out he was one of the Delectable Mountains; to discover which I had come a long and difficult way. Wherefore I shall tell you no more about him for the present, except that his name was Joseph Demestre. "We called him The Wanderer." a There is about this sort of writing a gusto, an intense sensitiveness to men and women and colours and stenches and anger and love that, like the face of Joseph Demestre, “annihilates the surround- ing tumult without an effort.” When a book like The Enormous Room manages to emerge from the morass of print that we flounder in, it is time to take off your new straw hat and jump on it. JOHN Dos Passos THE FREUDIAN INCUBUS ! The Poetic MIND. By F. C. Prescott. 8vo. 308 pages. The Macmillan Company. $2. Share OME years ago a huge and dismal book was written to prove that artists are degenerates. The manias of Max Nordau were bitterly resented and successfully demolished, and his book quickly passed into the realm of obsolete pathology, where it belonged. We have now to consider a treatise of converse nature, a work less temerarious than Degeneration and less bulky, but in many respects equally dangerous and misleading. Professor Prescott sets the thesis that the artist-he fastens on the poet as typical—is a divinity, a dreamer essentially akin to the inspired madman, a godlike agent deriving complete nourishment from the unconscious world. This idea, of course, is an historical commonplace, and owes its present revival to the fashionable influence of Doctor Freud. There seems to be no way to safeguard the arts against the invasion of the alien- ists and the dream-worshippers. They are incapable of regarding the artist as a human being: he must needs be an atavism or a god. The author's favourite victims of theopneusty are Shelley, Cole- ridge, and Poe. Less eccentric men, such as Milton, Chaucer, Browning, and Hardy, are not so amenable to his psychoanalytic method, and are tactfully avoided. I wonder if the Professor has read The Most Romantic Episode in Literary History, a fictional reconstruction of the "divine Shelley” carried to the very limit of logical idiocy? The Shelley of Alexander Harvey is the most egre- gious ass that ever penned a strophe; a sublime fairy; an anaemic, crumb-tossing deity who ate, occasionally, a raisin; a figure irrecon- cilable with the swift intelligence that produced Prometheus Un- bound and the preface thereto, the astonishing aesthetics of A De- fence of Poetry, and the most elaborate lyrics in the English lan- guage. By what right does the Professor remodel Coleridge, the penetrating analyst of Biographia Literaria, into a transcendental dopester? And on what authority does he transform Poe, a sober, extremely conscious, and painfully methodical workman, into a cataleptic visionary? The Poetic Mind is an honest and patient effort to explore the operations of the creative brain, but its premises 104 THE FREUDIAN INCUBUS are false. Works of this character help to spread the popular con- tagion which makes the artist a curious and distinct species. Professor Prescott's cardinal blunder arises from his misunder- standing of the intentions of scientific inquiry. He is continually asking why instead of how. Science is not called upon to explain anything; its purpose is the description and correlation of sense- impressions—no more and no less—and the validity of its investi- gations depends upon its close adherence to mental processes which are observable. The only excuse for the extension of psychology beyond the bounds of observation is to establish ideal concepts which will provide a progressive working basis for the classification of facts. In most cases when the scientist attempts to rationalize conscious phenomena by a pilgrimage into the uncharted hinter- land of dreams, he becomes a dreary metaphysician. The loose thinking of The Poetic Mind is the result of the author's departure from the solid ground of perceptual experience. The autogeny of art is destined, I fear, to remain enigmatical. But there is no reason to despair on this account: it is not necessary to explain why a man writes poetry. Here the psychologist throws up the sponge, and must be content to examine the processes of com- position. Many theories have been advanced: the peculiar brain- habit of the poet; the determining tendencies which sharpen his feelings and render him microscopically sensitive to visual impres- sions; Aristotle's catharsis; the unruly optative complex; the re- ligious urge; the social impetus; the crying demand for spiritual communication; and so on. These theories are valuable, but they belong to aesthetic criticism rather than to pure science. In the last analysis it is never really possible to find the sources of poetic in- spiration. Professor Prescott is always on the hunt for significant stimuli; he accepts without reservation the artist's word, and de- votes a considerable part of his book to the testimony of poets. Now poets have much to say that is vital and illuminating, but as scientific witnesses they are generally unreliable. They are inclined to attribute their powers to arcane sources, to indulge in incoherent symbols, to add colour and mystery to honest toil by insistence on the fantastic dream-motif. Professor Prescott believes in dreams; he has abundant evidence, but it is tenuous and unconvincing. Is there any legitimate reason why the author of a book on poetry should transcend the limits of perceptual experience? Very little. a THOMAS JEWELL CRAVEN 105 Dreams can be interpreted only in terms of the conscious; scientific description is therefore compelled to work by inference and not by observation; and inference is an unstable foundation for a poetic theory. If we adopt the view that the perceptive attitudes remain, for the most part, unchanged in dream-states—this opinion has received eminent confirmation—then it is foolish to attach great im- portance to the crumbling and spectacular manifestations of uncon- scious phenomena. On page 168 we find this statement: “The imaginative process in poetry is analagous to that in dreams.” This is the old-fashioned doctrine of the associationist, the outcome of the inspirational fallacy which would have us believe that the poem emerges full-blown from the mind of man. The making of a poem, as Shelley and Poe have so richly informed us, involves a vast amount of cold planning and deliberate prosaic energy: if the author construes process to denote the incubation and coalescence of sense- impressions, then art becomes a shallow and hypnotic affair. Con- sider the tissue of the dream, its ephemeral thinness and its habitual ineffectiveness, and then turn to the complex and ordered harmonies of the Ode to the West Wind or Atalanta in Calydon. The psychology of art has to do with form and composition—a big territory, but one that lends itself to definite treatment—the spiritual elements rest with the philosopher and the metaphysician. The psychology of Professor Prescott is inexact: he speaks of "the two modes of thought,” meaning the two forms of knowledge im- mortalized by Croce; he confuses images with stimuli, and proc- esses with meanings; he subscribes to the fetish of primitivism, and looks upon a poem as a preconceived expression executed spontane- ously. The evolution of a work of art—the slow, constructive growth from the diversified materials of experience to the unity of the finished poem-escapes him completely. He fails to grasp the relation of the laborious processes of selection to the chaotic store of images accumulated by the mind; to see how each immediate sense- impression is conditioned by all the physical impresses of the past. Let him read Shelley's famous utterance: “Poetical abstractions are beautiful and new, not because the portions of which they are com- posed had no previous existence in the mind of man, or in nature, but because the whole produced by their combination has some in- telligible and beautiful analogy with those sources of emotion and thought, and with the contemporary condition of them.” THOMAS JEWELL CRAVEN a A TRICK OF MEMORY MERTON OF THE Movies. By Harry Leon Wilson. 12m0. 335 pages. Doubleday, Page and Company. $1.75. THE a HE patient seeker after causes and effects in American fiction has a pleasant prospect in this novel by Harry Leon Wilson. If his memory goes back ten years he is in for a revelation. Merton of the Movies is a lightly conceived magazine serial, nearly always diverting, and never stupid; that is something. Brief- ly, it is the story of Merton Gill, a screen-struck grocer's clerk, who goes to Hollywood and, after starving there, makes a succès fou in slapstick in spite of himself. Here is a plot requiring some delicacy of handling and offering unlimited opportunities for two commodities not common in Ameri- can magazine fiction: satire and irony. Satire, that is, for the pic- tures; irony for Merton Gill. In spite of the fact that he has, for the purposes of comedy, made Merton as near to a half-wit as he dared, Mr Wilson has succeeded with him and, it seems to me, has failed with the pictures. The first film, through the mind of Merton, is a dime-novel, not a picture; Miss Tessie Kearns' passion-drama is better: so in a moment of weakness he gives himself to Corona Bartlett and then sees that he must break up his home and get a divorce and marry Corona to make an honest woman of her: but of course his wife is brought to her senses, so she sees that she has been in the wrong and has a big scene with Corona 99 Yet most of the parody is in the vein of "out there in the great open 'spaces where men are men" and the other obvious things of the seri- ous pictures—the things which Mack Sennett began burlesquing ten years ago and are no longer fair game. When Mr Wilson gets into his story he is highly diverting. But with a ten years' memory one looks a little closer. The best parts of Merton of the Movies are the first fifty pages presenting Merton's GILBERT SELDES 107 preparations for his career, and about one hundred pages after the resemblance is discovered by the Montague girl. Between them lies one third of the book describing, with no great ingenuity or inven- tion, Merton's descent to his last dollar. One whole blessed instal- ment as the story ran in The Saturday Evening Post revealed the fact that Merton slept in the sets on the lot. And here, fighting for space (and gasping for breath) Mr Wilson almost made one forget that he wrote His Majesty Bunker Bean. Bunker Bean is out of print. For the sake of our standing abroad it ought to be re-issued. It is an entirely trifling book, but it is beau- tifully trivial. It has actual American humour and presents, so that they have not needed to be humorously presented again, three American types: the business man, the flapper, and the young clerk. . It is written totally without smartness; it tells a sufficiently enter- taining story; some of its most casual utterances are immortal. It may be a trick of memory, but Bunker Bean seems a much more finely composed piece of work than Merton, and I cannot for the life of me see why a frivolous novel like this one should be shabbily done. In Bunker Bean the hero is also a bit of a fool, with his Ram- Tah and Napoleon for ancestors; there too an American habit (busi- ness) is satirized; the flapper is quite the trouper. But the essential difference, it seems to me, is that whereas in Bunker Bean Mr Wil- son has used business as an element in his story, in Merton of the Movies he has seen the possibilities of the moving picture as a comic subject. He has, in short, done what nearly every American novel- ist of any pretentions does sooner or later—accepted the magazine editor's idea that locale and subject are vastly important in a story, that you can make a story if you find a new setting. He has ex- ploited the moving picture, let us say, not used it. And it is fair to say that if he hadn't, he would have had to do more with his satire and more with his characters. Perforce he would have done better with the structure of his novel because he would have incorporated the hundred now superfluous pages instead of inserting them. I do not propose to send an evangelist out to Mr Wilson to recall him to the Better Way; nor do I want to suggest that he has done badly here. But if any one cares to remark that I am breaking a butterfly on a wheel, I will enquire if there is any good reason why this book should fatally be out of the class of Zuleika Dobson? GILBERT SELDES KEATS AND HEARST Poems: SECOND SERIES. By J. C. Squire. 8vo. 79 pages. George H. Doran Company. $2. Music: Lyrical and Narrative Poems. By John Free- man. 12mo. 190 pages. Harcourt, Brace and Com- pany. $2. ET us consider these volumes as if we knew nothing of the has his hands in lord knows how many magazines, and I believe his publishers call him the most influential literary man in England. To any one who followed the school of Ste Beuve these facts would be immensely important; so also would their pedigrees, their thumb- prints, and the exact figure of their income taxes. Here such data is unimportant; let us consider only their books. Both men belong, I believe, to the same group of poets, and Freeman is published in a magazine that Squire edits. These items are irrelevant also, except insomuch as they bear on the fact that both volumes have the same defects and very much the same quali- ties. Their qualities and defects apply equally to a score of other volumes, all written by friends of Squire or Freeman. When we were in high school our teachers would read us passages from the poets and ask us to identify the authors. The game would have been difficult indeed if we had played it with the Georgians; too many of their verses belong to no individual but to a school, or even to the whole romantic movement. It is an old sport to badger the Georgian poets, but the emphasis is laid usually and illogically on their lack of substance. They treat the old themes; so does almost everybody else, and to berate them for writing about Eyes, Moons, Birds, Trees, Rivers, and Muses Divine is a little unjust. Even it is not true that they never ap- proach fresher subjects. Squire in particular has the editor's copy, and boldly describes Airships over Suburb and Rugger Matches (than which nothing could be more advanced). More justly one can criticize the Georgians on the ground of their style. eye for MALCOLM COWLEY 109 Too often they are viewed from the standpoint of a contemptu- ous modernism. Evidently their verse is more nearly contemporary with Ronsard than with Jean Cocteau, but this need not be to their discredit; no one has the right to proclaim that after four o'clock on the morning of Monday, November 11, such and such stanzas may no longer be written. The Georgians cling to the old prosody; they should be criticized under the laws of the old prosody, and it is precisely this criticism which is entitled to be most harsh. Squire and Freeman take too many liberties. Keats allowed him- self extra syllables in his iambic pentameter; Squire writes in suc- cession two fourteen-syllable lines. Keats used an occasional hex- ameter; Freeman introduces them without discretion. He writes broken lines, stands false rhymes beside stale rhymes, and often counts the past tense of the verb as an extra syllable in cases where the familiar language of the passage does not justify this licence. In other words his verse (not all of it, of course, but the bulk) has the same relation to the great romanticists that the dramatic blank verse of 1640 had to that of 1603. Thus Freeman, from the stand- point of his style, is the deliquescence of Keats; his verse, like most of Squire's, is the opposite of good vers libre, which adheres strict- ly to another law. In poetry every variation from the norm must justify itself. Every syllable in a line beyond the prescribed eight or ten must be a introduced with a definite purpose. One could not read over a page of E. A. Robinson, for example, and strike out words indiscrimi- nately, but often with Squire or Freeman one can delete a score of the’s, of and's and but’s, of indiscriminate adjectives, and thereby clarify not only the metre but the expression. The redundancy of D. H. Lawrence often heightens his effects; he is like a man stut- tering with emotion. When Frost is jagged it is because he has tried to be simple and precise. But Squire and Freeman take liberties without paying for them. With no more to say than Tennyson they have no excuse for not writing with equal correctness. Poetry is an exact art; it is the art of expressing the infinite in a limited number of words. There is somewhat the same difference between poetry that there is between a letter and a cable- gram; in poetry every word must pay for itself. John Freeman prose and when he says: 110 KEATS AND HEARST “And long-parched as the fields for rain withheld Then first it was I saw you, once, twice, thrice, And not till yet again made means to speak,” is using his words carelessly; he is flinging monosyllables like hand- fuls of pebbles. Squire remarks at a rugger match: a “Each face is a story, a tragedy and a doubt; And the teams where they wait in the sacred place to the right, Are bewildered souls, who have heard of and brooded on death, And thought about God. But this is a football match; And anyhow I don't feel equal to thinking.” а And certainly he is not thinking. His words are birdshot; as they scatter he only hopes that one of them will be fatal. It is a prose method, and a method of bad prose. Certainly neither poet is negligible. Squire in his best verse threshes about like a mountain in travail; not always does he give birth to a mouse. Sometimes he lets slip avalanches to crack a nut, but not always. He has written poetry of a rare meta- physical intensity, but when he is most personal he is usually most awkward. He has written many verses which are correctly grandil- oquent, like those of The Birds and The Moon; unfortunately in these verses he has rarely anything to say, and correctness has little value if one cannot apply it to expressing one's own ideas. The same weaknesses are present in Freeman. He too is talented obviously; he has the uncommon gift of seeing the countryside with fresh eyes. He expresses himself negligently, however, and to find a good verse one reads a dozen which are insufficiently laboured. A lyric should attain nothing less than perfection, and this ideal seems to exist in his mind no more than in Squire's. If it did they would certainly never print lines like any one of a thousand I could quote: "Dims the wick's lambent dew." > “The beauty I knew not I knew there." “No choice was ours. We spoke and spoke not aught." MALCOLM COWLEY 111 “For two years you went Through all the worst of it." “Knowing my last would be surely my bravest breath, I am happy to-night; I have laughed to-night at death." "Exposed to shame and mockery when the dawn Unshutters the amused world.” 6 In some it is the metre which halts, in some it is the prose style. I cannot quote the worst lines (they are bad only in their context) but even at that infelicities are easy to find. “Not aught.” “Went through all the worst of it.” “Wick's lambent dew." "Shame and mockery.” “Laughed at death.” It is a terrifying mixture of Keats and Hearst; hardly is it the work of poets who respect their vo- cation. The poet who respects his vocation his lot is harder than theirs. He approaches his verse with the seriousness which Squire devotes to his excellent editorial work. He spends five or ten years perfecting a single brief volume, till the lines and stanzas give the effect of inevitable rightness, till no word could be omitted or even a comma without destroying something. And still he remains vul- nerable. Some capable critic arrives, fatally right and fatally from Oxford, to tell that his figures are strained; that he is neither Rabelais nor Ronsard... · A fate which Squire and Freeman need not fear; they have at least the shortcomings of Ronsard. MALCOLM COWLEY BRIEFER MENTION INDELIBLE, by Elliot H. Paul (12mo, 297 pages; Houghton Mifflin : $1.75) has already been given the accolade by the Academie Burton R