tivity into the impression, the transforming imagina-
tion, and the expression is, in itself, incontrovertible, but for some
reason or other—possibly because of his distaste for psychology-he
has left the second process undeveloped. The concrete art-object is
a long and cumulative growth; it is not the extrinsication of an
original idea already executed in the brain; nor is it constructed from
a sequence of images stored away in perfect form and demanding
only colour and canvas for objective realization. A powerful gov-
a
a


352
LIGHT FROM ITALY
erning intelligence; the ability to select and reject; to determine the
congruity of material; to accept or modify the image which, upon
representation, turns out to be harmonious or inadequate; the feel-
ing for unity and the recognition of it when achieved—these are the
constituents of the process of transformation, and the qualities
which distinguish the true artist from the naïve rhapsodist who
merely expresses himself. But Croce has made clearer than any other
writer the identity of form and content. The abolition of this time-
honoured dualism will, alone, assure him of immortality. The chief
characteristic of art is that it has no ideas separable from its form,
and in this respect it is unlike philosophy where thought may adopt
any one of a number of forms and still preserve its essential mean-
ing. In art the material drawn from the vast reservoir of experience
retains its meaning only in the form given it: change one detail and
a different meaning instantly appears.
In his definition of the concept, I am not sure that Croce has sur-
mounted Berkeley's old contention that "we have no idea of sub-
stance distinct from that of a collection of particular qualities.”
But it is one of the blessings of philosophy that it is never absolute;
and it is one of the liberties of philosophy that its concepts, whether
impregnable or not, provide us with instruments for probing into the
meaning of art and life. And when Croce places art among the
lower grades of the theoretic spirit, that is, inferior to logic, I am not
hurt. Lower it may be, but certainly not less important. In his
latest writings he has at last connected art, by means of its lyric
aspect, with the universal. "In every accent of a poet, in every crea-
a
ture of his fantasy, there is the whole of human destiny, all the
hopes, the illusions, the sorrows and the joys, all human greatness
and all human misery, the entire drama of reality, which perpetually
becomes and grows upon itself, suffering and rejoicing." Philos-
ophy, parasitic on art, dies in its unattainable desire for eternal
truth. The beauty of art is complete and unchangeable. Art lives
through the perfection of its forms. Therein lie its glory and its
immortality.
THOMAS CRAVEN


BRIEFER MENTION
Very Woman, by Remy de Gourmont, translated by J. L. Barrets (12mo,
317 pages; Brown: $2.50). In three great works de Gourmont struck the
balance between the life of the mind and the compulsion of reality: Sixtine,
Les Chevaux de Diomède, and Une Nuit au Luxembourg. In the last, the
dualism is welded beautifully into one; in the second it exists most har-
moniously as a duality; in the first, the present volume, it is applied with
the most vigour. What Schnitzler tackled in The Green Cockatoo, de Gour-
mont tackles here with a wholly different set of mechanisms. His keen love
of ideology appears on every page. If Sixtine begins where A Rebours left
off, it is to show us the charm of erudition where Huysmans showed us its
atrocity, and to give us grace where Huysmans gave us precipitancy. Very
Woman—the English title is blasphemous and unfair—is a literary novel,
dealing with literary people and literary currents of thought, and written
by an author who possessed an acute sense of literary values. While rooted
in symbolism, the virtues of the book are absolute.
a
VANDEMARK's Folly, by Herbert Quick (12mo, 420 pages ; Bobbs-Merrill:
$2) turns over the rich and inexplicably neglected soil of the plains in those
significant years when the rich Mississippi valley was a battleground of
pioneer conquest. Mr Quick turns from the fashioning of rapid romances,
skilful and swift-moving and evanescent, and proves himself qualified for
a more serious work by one of the best pictures of that period which Ameri-
can fiction affords. The book represents a considerable absorption in the
life and lore of the time, which has been sufficiently mulled over to lose its
mustiness, and the novel which emerges is well-constructed, picturesque in
detail, and intelligently related to the era with which it is concerned.
Peter WHIFFLE: His LIFE AND Works, by Carl Van Vechten (12mo, 247
pages; Knopf: $2.50). Although this is Mr Van Vechten's first excursion
into the field of fiction, yet it is such a sure-footed and airy-heeled prome-
nade of the imagination that apologies for him on the basis of inexperience
are rendered pointless by the sureness of his stride. Whiffle as a character
is an errant whimsy whose factitious identity lends an authentic air to the
most beguiling criticism Van Vechten has so far contrived.
PIERRE AND Luce, by Romain Rolland, translated by Charles De Kay (12mo,
136 pages; Holt: $1.50) is Rolland's version of the Paul-and-Virginia
motif : young love is pressed for time by the ubiquitous threats of the war;
it strives to affirm spring above campaigns and communiqués; and at the
moment when the lovers are absorbed with the greatest intensity in their
love, the potentialities of the war become kinetic, and both Pierre and Luce
are annihilated. The thesis, thus, is ingeniously and violently presented,
and much more succintly than is usual with Rolland. But one will find few
additional documents on young love beyond the element of the intruding
war, as noted above.


354
BRIEFER MENTION
The OUTCAST, by Selma Lagerlöf, translated by W. Worster (12mo, 297
pages; Doubleday, Page: $1.90) is another example of the somewhat dis-
jointed, episodic novel which is so peculiar to the genius of this Swedish
story-teller. There are passages in it which recall the homely strength and
simplicity of the old Icelandic sagas. Its atmosphere, as in so much of
Selma Lagerlöf's work, is a curious blend of the archaic mood of the folk
and the soil and the all-suffering, all-forgiving Christ idea. The characters,
though they speak with a Swedish accent, are members of an elemental and
timeless commonwealth ; their bodies are but vessels for devouring ideas and
feelings, they move towards the borderland of insanity. The Outcast lacks
the firmness of Jerusalem and suffers, possibly, from a not completely con-
vincing germinal idea. It is doubtful if the cannibalism of the hero and his
Arctic companions, under the direst extremes of hunger and delirium, can be
rightly assumed to evoke quite that passion of loathing which Miss Lagerlöf
demands. There is an unfortunate strain here; too much is made of our
instincts. Nor was it necessary to disprove the charge, so far as the hero was
concerned, at a sentimental last moment.
a
VOCATIONS, by Gerald O'Donovan (12mo, 334 pages; Boni and Liveright:
$2) is a novel offered under the aegis of George Moore, quite obviously the
George Moore who wrote Esther Waters and The Lake. The book treats,
with a convincing circumstantiality, of the Catholic priesthood and of con-
vent life in Ireland. Contrary to the usual study of the religious life, the
author examines the results of too little religion rather than of too much ; his
characters are all involved in a comprehensive system of religious gestures,
but they have drifted into their vocations instead of arriving at them per
aspera, and herein lies the message. Mr O'Donovan writes with a certain
neutral impeccability, conceiving his story in the block, and evidently not
distressed by page upon page of "he murmured, with a suppressed sneer,”
or "he absentmindedly replied," or "and said effusively."
Prosas Profanas, by Ruben Darío, translated by Charles B. McMichael
(12mo, 60 pages ; Brown: $1.20). The author addresses his soul, “And
deeper than any vulgar consciousness may know, Thou explorest the dark-
est and most terrible labyrinths.” The results, however, are much less
drastic, and if the poet is distorted it is the distortion of a marble satyr on a
green lawn. For Darío is first of all a lover of ornament; his emotions are
always rhetorized, and retain something of the old Spanish gesture.
THE WHISTLER JOURNAL, by E. R. & J. Pennell (illus., 8vo, 339 pages; Lip-
pincott : $8.50) can be made the subject of any number of essays—except
one attacking the Pennells for neglecting Whistler. This work is freely com-
posed of the memories and journals kept by them; and their immense good
fortune is that Whistler's everydays were not dull. The whole book is in-
teresting, and even those who dislike or affect to dislike Whistler's particular
humours will confess that they are more entertaining than the total lack of
humour in others to whom journals have been dedicated. The work is well
done, the documentation full and not excessive, the illustrations intelligent-
ly selected. An ideal book in its kind, the kind being indispensable to wor-
shippers and interesting to nearly everyone besides.


BRIEFER MENTION
355
TRADITION AND PROGRESS, by Gilbert Murray (12mo, 221 pages; Houghton
Mifflin : $3) is a somewhat curiously assorted group of ten essays, all re-
prints of papers and lectures previously published. The first five of these
pleasingly written essays deal with some of the larger aspects of classical
scholarship, the sixth with Literature as Revelation, the remainder of the
volume consists of thoughts on social and international ethics. The trans-
lator of Euripides is at his best in the earlier papers. He does succeed
in setting such topics as the war-satire of Aristophanes, the bitterness of
Euripides, the Stoic philosophy, and the poetic definitions of Aristotle in
some relation to our interests of to-day. The paper on Poesis and Mimesis
is particularly penetrating in its insistence on the necessity of taking due
account, in literary criticism, of the formal genius of the language in which
the artist does his work. Not a great deal is to be said of the latter half of
the book. Professor Murray oscillates rather comfortably between optimism
and despair, makes the usual high-souled march along the smooth ridge of
English liberalism, animadverts feelingly on the elements of wickedness
and goodness in contemporary politics, and is careful to put in the parenthe-
ses needed to prevent a charge of excessive radicalism.
Moltke, by Lt.-Col. F. E. Whitton (8vo, 326 pages, Holt: $3.50). This
book is less a biography than an exhaustive study of the formation of
the German army after the Napoleonic wars and the using of that per-
fected instrument in effecting the union of the German empire. The
after-effects of having a huge and successful army on a nation's hands are
ably brought out, and as an inferential study of the psychological back-
ground of the Great War, its value is great. As a life of a German
citizen it amounts to very little, because Moltke scarcely existed aside
from his statesmanship. In his youth he was an excellent student at the
War Academy. In his old age, he planted trees, played whist, and
refused to own more than two suits. The one time when enthusiasm is
recorded of him is the occasion of Bismarck's historic altering of the
French telegram into an insult which made war inevitable. The one bit
of humour he indulged in belongs to the same occasion. The devil, he
said, might come for his old carcass as soon after the war as he liked,
provided only Bismarck might lead the German armies into it. He was a
Spartan, a thinker, and a strategist second to none in the history of
nineteenth century warfare.
MEMOIRS OF The Crown PRINCE OF GERMANY, written by himself (illus.,
8vo, 375 pages; Scribners: $5) traces a wavering line, as though the
author-wise after the event—were still undecided whether to present him-
self as having been, so to speak, on the inside looking out or on the outside
looking in. Basking in this confusion, the Kaiser's heir dextrously draws a
red herring across the path of his own share in military and political exploits
which did not precisely pan out in harmony with imperial aspirations, yet
with no subtraction from the consciousness of his high rank and prestige.
Thus he contrives to come out of it all looking rather more infallible than
father. With this reservation, however, the book is as illuminating as it is
diversified—a panorama of opinion, conjecture, narrative, and high-flown
sentiment-a restless record, curiously without stamina.


THE THEATRE
TH
HE restoration of mid-winter's title to these pages is a conces-
sion to the calendar. By August "the theatre” is again in ac-
tion; and in effect to call the summer shows by any other name
would be flying in the face of fact. For most people when they go to
the theatre (“conceived,” as a recent writer on the subject has in-
formed us, “in godhead, born beside altars, slain in the brothel and
born again in the soul of man”) think of their excursion as pure en-
tertainment. The reason for it, quite apart from the natural lust of
man to be amused, is that pure entertainment has been steadily
growing more entertaining while the theatre, serious style, has stead-
ily grown more serious.
All of this has to be mere prologue to Mr Ziegfeld's offering:
“the sixteenth of the series of / the national institution glorifying
the American girl / ZIEGFELD Follies. Elsewhere in town flourish
successors to SHUFFLE ALONG: STRUT Miss Lizzie and the PLANTA-
tion notable among them. Mr Ziegfeld concedes much to the rage
for blackness, persuading the sombre-brooding, impassioned Gilda
Grey to stop worrying over the chances of complete disarticulation
and to strut freely and magnificently in a more than nigger black-
ness picked out by radiolite. Messrs Buck and Stamper have not
equalled the ecstatic energy and excitement of Mr Shelton Brooks'
Darktown Strutters' Ball, a piece which Mr Brooks' presence at
the PLANTATION ought to bring into long-deserved repute. The
wild cries Mr Ned Wayburn has not attempted, the melodic curve
of his production is an interesting undulation, the gesture is gentle
and smooth. But what smoothness!
Will Rogers grows more and more simple, more and more subtle,
each year, and in this production simply walks away with virtually
,
all the honours not taken by Miss Grey. One has to report the par-
ticular humour he was in at a specific performance, and the quality
of the jests on that day: both excellent; he was in significant form.
His permanent piece is that written by Ring Lardner, The Bull
Pen, in which he does virtually nothing but sit still and shift his
chew of tobacco, and does it beautifully. The advantages of being
Will Rogers have been fairly well exposed in recent years, never


THE THEATRE
357
more so than in comparison with a quite good act, that of Gallagher
and Shean, which is enormously popular without having a single
moment of that unobtrusive and absolute rightness which informs
all of Mr Rogers' doings.
All of these matters take us far from the American girl whom
Mr Ziegfeld in his quaint way thinks he is glorifying. In effect he
does well by the number he gathers on the stage, giving them a first-
act curtain all to themselves and a grand finale in which all the prin-
cipals are actually secondary. Some of the girls seen from just the
right distance (H) seem little in need of glorification.
What Mr Ziegfeld glorifies is the American habit of doing things
slickly and smoothly and as well as possible: a habit largely ex-
tended to motor cars, transcontinental travel, Statler hotels, news
reels, fountain pens, and other tertiary things, and excessively lack-
ing in human relations and in the arts. The FOLLIES comes, I think,
chiefly under human relations. It pleases many tastes, and its suc-
cess, if I am to judge by my own experience, is due to one thing:
that the portions which do not please do not disgust. The set pieces
almost always bore me by pretending to add something to the mere
display (mere, indeed!) of what Mr Ziegfeld probably calls Amer-
ican girlhood; the intrusion of classic or aesthetic dancing always
chills me. I pass them as not my affair, because from year to year I
have found that you can look at them without pain.
It is given out that Mr Augustus Thomas has been made the
"dictator” of the American stage; in fact he heads the Producing
Managers' Association. The rage for dictatorship will unquestion-
ably be set down by pacifists as the introversion of the German virus
which our war supposedly destroyed. Baseball and the moving pic-
tures have their dictators; in the popular mind, at least, no public
institution can be complete without one. Day by day, in every way,
we're getting dummer and dummer.
G. S.


COMMENT
SOB
UBSCRIPTIONS (cash and carry) will be received in this
office for the erection in Vesey Street, New York, of a statue
to Dr Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825). Our own artist has already
submitted to us a small model of that noted physician and editor,
showing him not too erect and holding by the hand a little girl.
Both of the characters are fully clothed.
The Family Shakespeare (“in which nothing is added to the orig-
inal; but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with
propriety be read aloud in a family”) was issued in 1818. From the
prefaces to the first and fourth editions we learn that Dr Bowdler
held Shakespeare his favourite poet, but that he felt that of the five
greatest plays "there is not one that can be read aloud by a gentle-
man to a lady, without undergoing some correction.” Of the in-
decencies “the greater part were evidently introduced to gratify the
bad taste of the age and the rest may perhaps be ascribed
to his own unbridled fancy. But neither the vicious taste of the age,
nor the most brilliant effusions of wit, can afford an excuse for
pro-
faneness or obscenity.” An edition was therefore prepared “un-
sullied . by any word that can give pain to the most chaste.”
It was well received. Those only protested who "condemn every
attempt at removing indecency from Shakespeare.” It was a good
job; and six years later the editor found only a few objectionable
expressions remaining; he does not name them, for obvious reasons,
poor man, as he says.
It is interesting to note that although Dr Bowdler got the idea of
his vast enterprise from hearing his father read The Bard—the older
gentleman had to make his expurgations impromptu—he did not
offer his edition exclusively as one which could be read to children.
The very young person is mentioned, but the main thing is the rescue
of delicacy. In those days, apparently, gentlemen read Shakespeare
to ladies, and the works which could be read by gentlemen to gentle-
men, could not be read across the abyss of sex. In our time this has
changed. The Editor of The Literary Review makes public no dis-
crimination of sex. He says, flatly, that
.


COMMENT
359
.
'Ulysses' is not fit for public distribution. When a little
time has passed it will be possible to salvage by excerpt a briefer
volume, which, if too strong for all but the most sophisticated tastes,
will yet, in its brilliance and originality, be a credit to Irish litera-
ture.”
a
Sophistication is so obviously no longer the exclusive prerogative of
the male,
The little girl whose hand is held by Dr Bowdler in the statue
which we propose to place where Dr Canby can see it every working
day has been in our mind lately owing to her prominence in con-
nexion with the action taken by the Society for the Suppression of
Vice against Mr Thomas Seltzer, as publisher of A Young Girl's
Diary, Women in Love, and Casanova's Homecoming. The pre-
cocious child who would begin to understand and, understanding,
might continue to read the last-named two of these books we have
not met. But that she exists we are assured. And it is quite certain
that unless a hundred or a thousand judicial decisions are handed
down to undermine our laws and precedents it will shortly become
impossible to publish anything which could offend her taste or cor-
rupt her morals. This is no new thing we are saying, but it does no
harm to say it again. That child is dragged into every case of sup-
pression and her triumphs (Mr Sumner saying nothing about her
except that she is young) are many. Between hearings on bootleg-
ging and wife-beating the great artists of our time are called upon to
prove themselves not indecent, and to defend themselves from the
priggish reproaches of this abominably susceptible little half-wit. A
description in court of the austere work of Dr Schnitzler makes it
sound like the Satyricon; there is no defence except in the common
sense of the magistrate who hears.
By the time this is published the decision will have been rendered.
We can only note that in the present position of the law it is vir-
tually impossible to attack, through isolated hearings, the idea of
the censorship itself. One defends this book or that from the charge
of indecency; one cannot defend anything or anybody from the
harsh arrogance of the attack upon the liberty of the press.
Yet we wonder whether a recent reverse suffered by the Society
does not encourage the publishers of America to attack the covering
law itself. It is preposterous to assume that a small body of fanatics


360
COMMENT
can carry everything before them in America; the whole organization
of publicity is in the hands of men ready to attack; the cost of the
matter must be slight in comparison with the cost in fees and labour
and time involved in these endless proceedings. One hopes only that
the thing will be intelligently done, without appointments of dic-
tators and installations of self-censorships. The thing to do is to
propose a substitute law which will cover what apparently at this
time must be considered criminal—the smutty postcard effects in
general—and which will require proof of the power (not merely the
tendency) to degrade in works of art. We are aware that quibbles
are possible; but we are certain that the Society for the Suppression
of Vice needs suppression, by due process of law, and that only the
publishers can accomplish it.
The mild hope expressed above that the attack would be carried
on without resorting to self-censorships and dictators was almost
dashed when, two days after it was written, exactly these things sat
in the wind. Actually what Mr Sumner proposed to the publishers
was a conference to discuss censorship and the possibilities of censor-
ship in advance of publication. A "dictator” was invoked, we be-
lieve, more by the press than by any individual. It is useless for us
to comment further
upon
this matter.


१
३
.


Made in Germany
Courtesy of Der Sturm, Berlin
ON DIT. BY MARC CILAGALL



THE
VI
VI
VII
DIAL
TV
OXX II
OCTOBER 1922
MANY MARRIAGES
BY SHERWOOD ANDERSON
A FOREWORD
I
F one seek love and go towards it directly, or as directly as one
may in the midst of the perplexities of modern life, one is per-
haps insane.
Have you not known a moment when to do what would seem at
other times and under somewhat different circumstances the most
trivial of acts becomes suddenly a gigantic undertaking.
You are in the hallway of a house. Before you is a closed door
and beyond the door, sitting in a chair by a window, is a man or
a
woman.
It is late in the afternoon of a summer day and your purpose is to
step to the door, open it, and say, “It is not my intention to continue
living in this house. My trunk is packed and in an hour a man, to
whom I have already spoken, will come for it. I have only come
to say that I will not be able to live near you any longer.”
There you are, you see, standing in the hallway, and you are to
go into the room and say these few words. The house is silent and
you stand for a long time in the hallway, afraid, hesitant, silent. In
a dim way you realize that when you came down into the hallway
from the floor above you came a-tiptoe.
For and the one beyond the door it is perhaps better that you
do not continue living in the house. On that you
would
agree
if
you
could but talk sanely of the matter. Why are you unable to talk
sanely?
Why has it become so difficult for you to take the three steps
you


362
MANY MARRIAGES
towards the door? You have no disease of the legs. Why are your
feet so heavy?
You are a young man. Why do your hands tremble like the
hands of an old man?
You have always thought of yourself as a man of courage. Why
are you suddenly so lacking in courage ?
Is it amusing or tragic that you know you will be unable to step
to the door, open it, and going inside say the few words, without
your voice trembling?
Are you sane or are you insane? Why this whirlpool of thoughts
within your brain, a whirlpool of thoughts that, as you now stand
hesitant, seem to be sucking you down and down into a bottomless
pit?
MANY MARRIAGES
There was a man named Webster lived in a town of twenty-five
thousand people in the state of Wisconsin. He had a wife named
Mary and a daughter named Jane and he was himself a fairly pros-
perous manufacturer of washing machines. When the thing hap-
pened of which I am about to write he was about thirty-seven or
eight years old and his one child, the daughter, was seventeen. Of
the details of his life up to the time a certain revolution happened
within him it will be unnecessary to speak. He was however a
rather quiet man inclined to have dreams which he tried to crush
out of himself in order that he function as a washing machine manu-
facturer; and no doubt, at odd moments, when he was on a train
going some place or perhaps on Sunday afternoons in the summer
when he went alone to the deserted office of the factory and sat
several hours looking out at a window and along a railroad track,
he gave way to dreams.
However for many years he went quietly along his way doing his
work like any other small manufacturer. Now and then he had a
prosperous year when money seemed plentiful and then he had bad
years when the local banks threatened to close him up, but as a
manufacturer he did manage to survive.
And so there was this Webster, drawing near to his fortieth year,
and his daughter had just graduated from the town high school. It
was early fall and he seemed to be going along and living his life
about as usual and then this thing happened to him.


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
363
a
Down within his body something began to affect him like an ill-
ness. It is a little hard to describe the feeling he had. It was as
though something were being born. Had he been a woman he might
have suspected he had suddenly become pregnant. There he sat in
his office at work or walked about in the streets of his town and he
had the most amazing feeling of not being himself, but something
new and quite strange. Sometimes the feeling of not being himself
became so strong in him that he stopped suddenly in the streets and
stood looking and listening. He was, let us say, standing before a
small store on a side street. Beyond there was a vacant lot in which
a tree grew and under the tree stood an old work horse.
Had the horse come down to the fence and talked to him, had the
tree raised one of its heavier lower branches and thrown him a kiss
or had a sign that hung over the store suddenly shouted saying-
"John Webster, go prepare thyself for the day of the coming of
God”-his life at that time would not have seemed more strange
than it did. Nothing that could have happened in the exterior
world, in the world of such hard facts as sidewalks under his
feet, clothes on his body, engines pulling trains along the railroad
tracks beside his factory, and street cars rumbling through the
streets where he stood, none of these could possibly have done any-
thing more amazing than the things that were at that moment going
on within him.
There he was, you see, a man of the medium height, with slightly
greying black hair, broad shoulders, large hands, and a full, some-
what sad and perhaps sensual face, and he was much given to the
habit of smoking cigarettes. At the time of which I am speaking he
found it very hard to sit still in one spot and to do his work and so he
continually moved about. Getting quickly up from his chair in the
factory office he went out into the shops. To do so he had to pass
through a large outer office where there was a book-keeper, a desk for
his factory superintendent and other desks for three girls who also
did some kind of office work, sent out circulars regarding the wash-
ing machine to possible buyers, and attended to other details.
In his own office there was a broad-faced woman of twenty-four
who was his secretary. She had a strong, well-made body, but was
not very handsome. Nature had given her a broad flat face and thick
lips, but her skin was very clear and she had very clear fine eyes.
.
A thousand times, since he had become a manufacturer, John
Webster had walked thus out of his own office into the general office
a
a
a


364
MANY MARRIAGES
а
of the factory and out through a door and along a board walk to
the factory itself, but not as he now walked.
Well he had suddenly begun walking in a new world, that was a
fact that could not be denied. An idea came to him. “Perhaps I
am becoming for some reason a little insane," he thought. The
thought did not alarm him. It was almost pleasing. “I like myself
better as I am now," he concluded.
He was about to pass out of his small inner office into the larger
office and then on into the factory, but stopped by the door. The
woman who worked there in the room with him was named Natalie
Swartz. She was the daughter of a German saloon-keeper of the
town who had married an Irishwoman and then had died leaving no
money. He remembered what he had heard of her and her life.
There were two daughters and the mother had an ugly temper and
was given to drink. An older daughter had become a teacher in the
town schools and Natalie had learned stenography and had come
to work in the office of the factory. They lived in a small frame
house at the edge of town and sometimes the old mother got drunk
and abused the two girls. They were good girls and worked hard,
but in her cups the old mother accused them of all sorts of immoral-
ity. All the neighbours felt sorry for them.
John Webster stood at the door with the doorknob in his hand.
He was looking hard at Natalie, but did not feel in the least em-
barrassed nor strangely enough did she. She was arranging some
papers, but stopped working and looked directly at him. It was an
odd sensation to be able to look thus, directly into another person's
eyes. It was as though Natalie were a house and he were looking in
through a window. Natalie herself lived within the house that was
her body. What a quiet strong dear person she was and how
strange it was that he had been able to sit near her every day for
two or three years without ever before thinking of looking into her
house. “How many houses there are within which I have not
looked,” he thought.
A strange rapid little circle of thought welled up within him as
he stood thus, without embarrassment, looking into Natalie's eyes.
How clean she had kept her house. The old Irish mother in her cups
might shout and rave calling her daughter a whore, as she some-
times did, but the words did not penetrate into the house of Natalie
The little thoughts within John Webster became words, not ex-
pressed aloud, but words that ran like voices shouting softly within


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
365
9
himself. “She is my beloved,” one of the voices said. “You shall
go into the house of Natalie,” said another. A slow blush spread
over Natalie's face and she smiled. “You are not very well lately.
Are you worried about something?" she said. She had never spoken
to him before in just that way. There was a suggestion of intimacy
about it. As a matter of fact the washing machine business was at
that time doing very well. Orders were coming in rapidly and the
factory was humming with life. There were no notes to be paid
at the bank. “Why I am very well,” he said, “very happy and very
well, at just this moment."
He went on into the outer office and the three women employed
there and the book-keeper too stopped working to look at him.
Their looking up from their desks was just a kind of gesture. They
meant nothing by it. The book-keeper came and asked a question
regarding some account. “Why, I would like it if you would use
“
your own judgement about that,” John Webster said. He was
vaguely conscious the question had been concerned with some man's
credit. Some man, in a far away place had written to order twenty-
four washing machines. He would sell them in a store. The ques-
tion was, when the time came, would he pay the manufacturer?
The whole structure of business, the thing in which all the men
and women in America were, like himself, in some way involved,
was an odd affair. Really he had not thought much about it. His
father had owned this factory and had died. He had not wanted to
be a manufacturer. What had he wanted to be? His father had
certain things called patents. Then the son, that was himself, was
grown and had begun to manage the factory. He got married and
after a time his mother died. Then the factory belonged to him.
He made the washing machines that were intended to take the dirt
out of people's clothes and employed men to make them and other
men to go forth and sell them. He stood in the outer office seeing,
for the first time, all life of modern men as a strange involved thing.
"It wants understanding and a lot of thinking about,” he said
aloud. The book-keeper had turned to go back to his desk, but
stopped and turned, thinking he had been spoken to. Near where
John Webster stood a woman was addressing circulars. She looked
up and smiled suddenly and he liked her smiling so. “There is a
way—something happens—people suddenly and unexpectedly come
close to each other,” he thought and went out through the door and
along the board walk towards the factory.


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MANY MARRIAGES
In the factory there was a kind of singing noise going on and
there was a sweet smell. Great piles of cut boards lay about and
the singing noise was made by saws cutting the boards into proper
lengths and shapes to make up the parts of the washing machines.
Outside the factory doors were three cars loaded with lumber and
workmen were unloading boards and sliding them along a kind of
runway into the building.
John Webster stood with blinking eyes watching the men unload
boards at his factory door. The little voices within him were saying
strange joyous things. One could not be just a manufacturer of
washing machines in a Wisconsin town. In spite of oneself one be-
came, at odd moments, something else too. One became a part of
something as broad as the land in which one lived. One went about
in a little shop in a town. The shop was in an obscure place, by a
railroad track and beside a shallow stream, but it was also a part of
some vast thing no one had as yet begun to understand. He himself
was a man standing, clad in ordinary clothes, but within his clothes,
and within his body too there was something, well perhaps not vast
in itself, but vaguely indefinitely connected with some vast thing.
It was odd he had never thought of that before. Had he thought of
it? There were the men before him unloading the timbers. They
touched the timbers with their hands. A kind of union was made
between them and black men who had cut the timbers and floated
them down a stream to a sawmill in some far away southern place.
One went about all day and every day touching things other men
had touched. There was something wanted, a consciousness of the
thing touched. A consciousness of the significance of things and
people.
“And before I'd be a slave,
I'd be buried in my grave,
And go home to my father and be saved.”
He went through the door into his shop. Near by, at a machine, a
man was sawing boards. There was no doubt the pieces selected for
the making of his washing machine were not always of the best.
Some of the pieces would soon enough break. They were put into a
part of the machine where it didn't so much matter, where they
wouldn't be seen. The machines had to be sold at a low price. He


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
367
felt a little ashamed and then laughed. One might easily become
a
involved in small things when there were big rich things to be
thought about. One was a child and had to learn to walk. What
was it, one had to learn? To walk about smelling things, tasting
things, feeling things perhaps. One had to learn who else was in the
world besides oneself, for one thing. One had to look about a little.
It was all very well to be thinking that better boards should be put
into washing machines which poor women bought, but one might
easily become corrupted by giving himself over to such thoughts.
There was danger of a kind of smug self-righteousness got from
thinking about putting only good boards in washing machines. He
had known men like that and had always had a kind of contempt
for them.
He went on through the factory, past rows of men and boys stand-
ing at machines at work, forming the various parts of the washing
machines, putting the parts together, painting and packing the ma-
chines for shipment. The upper part of the building was given over
to the storage of materials. He walked through piles of cut boards
to a window that looked down upon the shallow and now half dry
stream on the banks of which the factory stood. There were signs
all about forbidding smoking in the factory, but he had forgotten
and now took a cigarette out of his pocket and lighted it.
A rhythm of thought went on within him. “There must be more
than one of me," he thought vaguely and when his mind had formed
the thought something seemed to have happened within himself. A
few moments before, as he stood in the presence of Natalie Swartz
down in the office, he had thought of her body as a house within
which she lived. That was an illuminating thought too. Why could
not more than one person live within such a house?
It would clear a good many things up if such an idea got abroad.
No doubt it was an idea that had come to a great many other men,
but perhaps they had not put it forth in a simple enough way. He
had himself gone to school in his town and later to the University
at Madison. For a time he had read a good many books. At one
time he had thought he might like to be a writer of books.
And no doubt a great many of the writers of books had been
visited by just such thoughts as he was having now. Within the
pages of some books one found a kind of refuge from the tangle of
things in daily life. Perhaps as they wrote, these men felt as he felt
now, exhilarated, carried out of himself.
a


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MANY MARRIAGES
He puffed at his cigarette and looked beyond the river. His fac-
tory was at the edge of town and beyond the river fields began. All
men and women were like himself standing on a common ground.
All over America, all over the world for that matter, men and
women did outward things much as he did. They ate food, slept,
worked, made love.
He was growing a little weary of thinking and rubbed his hand
across his forehead. His cigarette had burned out and he dropped it
on the floor and lighted another. Men and women tried to go with-
in one another's bodies, were at times almost insanely anxious to do
it. That was called making love. He wondered if a time might
come when men and women did that quite freely. It was difficult to
try to think one's way through such a tangle of thoughts.
There was one thing sure, he had never before been in this state.
Well that was not true. There was a time once. It was when he mar-
ried. Then he had felt as he did now, but something had happened.
He began to think of Natalie Swartz. There was something clear
and innocent about her. Perhaps, without knowing, he had fallen
in love with her, the daughter of a saloon-keeper and the drunken
old Irish woman. That would explain much if it had happened.
He became aware of a man standing near him and turned. A
workman in overalls stood a few feet away. He smiled. “I guess
you have forgotten something,” he said. John Webster smiled also.
"Well yes,” he said, “a good many things. I'm nearly forty years
old and I guess I have forgotten to live. What about you?”
The workman smiled again. “I mean the cigarettes,” he said and
pointed to the burning and smoking end of the cigarette that lay on
the foor. John Webster put his foot on it and then dropping the
other cigarette to the floor put his foot on that. He and the work-
man stood looking at each other as but a little while before he had
looked at Natalie Swartz. “I wonder if I might go within his house
also,” he thought. “Well, I thank you. I had forgotten. My mind
was far away,” he said aloud. The workman nodded. “I am some-
times like that myself,” he explained.
a
a
II
John Webster rode to his house on a street car. It was half past
twelve o'clock when he arrived and, as he had anticipated, he was
not expected. Behind his house, a rather commonplace looking


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
369
frame affair, there was a little garden and two apple trees. He
walked around the house and saw his daughter, Jane Webster, lying
in a hammock hung between the trees. There was an old rocking
chair under one of the trees near the hammock and he went and sat
in it. His daughter was surprised at his coming upon her so, at the
noon hour when he so seldom appeared. “Well, hello dad,” she said
listlessly, sitting up and dropping a book she had been reading on
the grass at his feet. "Is there anything wrong?" she asked. He
shook his head.
Picking up the book he began to read and her head dropped again
to the cushion in the hammock. The book was a modern novel of
the period. It concerned life in the old city of New Orleans. He
read a few pages. It was no doubt the sort of thing that might take
one out of oneself, take one away from the dulness of life. A young
man was stealing along a street in the darkness and had a cloak
wrapped about his shoulders. Overhead the moon shone. The mag-
nolia trees were in blossom filling the air with perfume. The young
man was very handsome. The scene of the novel was laid in the time
before the Civil War and he owned a great many slaves.
John Webster closed the book. There was no need of reading.
When he was still a young man he had sometimes read such books
himself. They took one out of oneself, made the dulness of every-
day existence seem less terrible.
That was an odd thought, that everyday existence need be dull.
There was no doubt the last twenty years of his own life had been
dull, but during that morning life had not been so. It seemed to him
he had never before had such a morning.
It was a strange and terrible fact, but the truth was he had never
thought much about his daughter, and here she was almost a woman.
There was no doubt she already had the body of a woman. The
functions of womanhood went on in her body. He sat, looking
directly at her. A moment before he had been very weary, now the
weariness was quite gone. “She might already have had a child,” he
thought. Her body was prepared for child-bearing, it had grown
and developed to that estate. What an immature face she had. Her
mouth was pretty but there was something, a kind of blankness.
Her face was like a fair sheet of paper on which nothing had been
written. Her eyes in wandering about met his eyes. It was odd.
.
Something like fright came into them. She sat quickly up. “What's
the matter with you, Dad?” she asked sharply. He smiled. “There


370
MANY MARRIAGES
>
isn't anything the matter,” he said, looking away. “I thought I'd
come home to lunch. Is there anything wrong about that?”
a
His wife, Mary Webster, came to the back door of the house and
called her daughter. When she saw her husband her eyebrows went
up. “This is unexpected. What brought you home at this time of
the day ?” she asked.
They went into the house and along a hallway to the dining-room,
but there was no place set for him. He had the feeling they both
thought there was something wrong, almost immoral, about his be-
ing home at that time of the day. It was unexpected and the unex-
pected had a doubtful air. He concluded he had better explain. “I
had a headache and thought I would come home and lie down for
an hour,” he said. He felt they looked relieved, as though he had
taken a load off their minds, and smiled at the thought. “May I
have a cup of tea? Will it be too much trouble?” he asked.
While the tea was being brought he pretended to look out at a
window, but in secret studied his wife's face. She was like her
daughter. There was nothing written on her face. Her body was
getting heavy.
She had been a tall slender girl with yellow hair when he married
her. Now the impression she gave off was of one who had grown
large without purpose, “somewhat as cattle are fattened for slaugh-
ter," he thought. One did not feel the bone and muscle back of her
bulk. Her yellow hair that, when she was younger, had a way of
glistening strangely in the sunlight was now rather colourless. It
had the air of being dead at the roots and there were folds of quite
meaningless flesh on the face among which little streams of wrinkles
wandered.
“Her face is a blank thing, untouched by the finger of life," he
thought. “She is a tall flower, without a foundation, that will soon
fall down.” There was something very lovely and at the same time
rather terrible to himself in the state he was now in. Things he said
or thought to himself had a kind of poetic power in them. A group
of words formed in his mind and the words had power and meaning.
He sat playing with the handle of the teacup. Suddenly a great de-
sire to see his own body came over him. He arose and with an apol-
ogy went out of the room and up a stairway. His wife called to him.
"Jane and I are going to drive out into the country. Is there any-
thing I can do for you before we go ?”
a


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
371
He stopped on the stairs, but did not answer at once. Her voice
was like her face, a little fleshy and heavy. How odd it was for him,
a commonplace washing machine manufacturer in a Wisconsin
town to be thinking in this way, to be noting all these little details
of life. He resorted to a trick, wanting to hear his daughter's voice.
"Did
you call to me, Jane ?” he asked. The daughter answered, ex-
plaining that it was her mother who had spoken and repeating what
had been said. He answered that he wanted nothing but to lie down
for an hour and went on up the stairs and into his own room. The
daughter's voice, like the mother's, seemed to represent her exactly.
It was young and clear, but had no resonance. He closed the door to
his room and bolted it. Then he began taking off his clothes.
Now he was not in the least weary. "I'm sure I must be a little
insane. A sane person would not note every little thing that goes on
I do to-day,” he thought. He sang softly, wanting to hear his own
voice, to in a way test it against the voices of his wife and daughter.
He hummed over the words of a negro song that had been in his
mind earlier in the day,
as
“And before I'd be a slave,
I'd be buried in my grave,
And go home to my father and be saved.”
He thought his own voice all right. The words came out of his
throat clearly and there was a kind of resonance too. “Had I tried
to sing yesterday it would not have sounded like that,” he con-
cluded. The voices of his mind were playing about busily. There
was a kind of gaiety in him. The thought that had come that morn-
ing when he looked into the eyes of Natalie Swartz came running
back. His own body, that was now naked, was a house. He went
and stood before a mirror and looked at himself. His body was still
slend and healthy looking, outside. “I think I know what all this
business is I am going through,” he concluded. “A kind of house
cleaning is going on. My house has been vacant now for twenty
years. Dust has settled on the walls and furniture. Now, for some
reason I do not understand, the doors and windows have been
thrown open. I shall have to scrub the walls and the floors, make
everything sweet and clean as it is in Natalie's house. Then I shall
invite people in to visit me.” He ran his hands over his naked body,
over his breast, arms, and legs. Something within him was laughing.


372
MANY MARRIAGES
a
He went and threw himself, thus naked on the bed. There were
four sleeping rooms in the upper floor of the house. His own was at
a corner and there were doors opening into his wife's and his daugh-
ter's rooms. When he had first married his wife they had slept to-
gether, but when the baby came they gave that up and never did it
afterward. Once in a long while now he went into his wife at night.
She wanted him, let him know in some woman's way that she wanted
him, and he went, not happily or eagerly, but because he was a man
and she a woman and it was done. The thought wearied him a little.
"Well it hasn't happened for some weeks.” He did not want to
think about it.
He owned a horse and carriage that was kept at a livery stable
and now it was being driven up to the door of the house. He heard
the front door close. His wife and daughter were driving out into
the country. The window of his room was open and a breeze blew
in and across his body.
>
a
III
When he awoke an hour later he was at first frightened. He
looked about the room wondering if he had been ill.
Then his eyes began an inventory of the furniture of the room.
He did not like anything there. Had he lived for twenty years of his
life
among
such things? They were no doubt all right. He knew lit-
tle of such things. Few men did. A thought came. How few men in
America ever really thought of the houses they lived in, of the
clothes they wore. Men were willing to go through a long life with-
out any effort to decorate their bodies, to make lovely and full of
meaning the dwellings in which they lived. His own clothes were
hanging on a chair where he had thrown them when he came into the
room. In a moment he would get up and put them on. Thousands
of times, since he had come to manhood, he had gone through the
performance of clothing his body without thought. The clothes had
been bought casually at some store. Who had made them? What
thought had been given to the making of them or to the wearing of
them either? He looked at his body lying on the bed. The clothes
would enclose his body, wrap it about.
A thought came into his mind, rang across the spaces of his mind
like a bell heard across fields. "Nothing can be beautiful that is not
loved.”
1


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
373
Getting off the bed he dressed quickly and hurrying out of the
room ran down a flight of stairs to the floor below. At the foot of
the stairs he stopped. He felt suddenly old and weary and thought
perhaps he had better not try to go back to the factory that after-
noon. There was no need of his presence there. Everything was go-
ing all right. Natalie would attend to anything that came up.
"A fine business if I, a respectable business man with a wife and
a grown daughter get myself involved in an affair with Natalie
Swartz, the daughter of a man who when he was alive ran a low
saloon and of that terrible old Irish woman who is the scandal of the
town and who when she is drunk talks and yells so that the neigh-
bours threaten to have her arrested and are only held back because
they have sympathy for the daughters.
“The fact is that a man may work and work to make a decent
place for himself and then by a foolish act all may be destroyed.
I'll have to watch myself a little. I've been working too steadily.
Perhaps I'd better take a vacation. I don't want to get into a mess,"
he thought. How glad he was that, although he had been in a state
all day long, he had said nothing to any one that would betray his
condition.
He stood with his hand on the railing of the stairs. At any rate
he had been doing a lot of thinking for the last two or three hours.
“I haven't been wasting my time.”
A notion came. After he married and when he had found out his
wife was frightened and driven within herself by every outburst of
passion and that as a result there was not much joy in making love
to her he had formed a habit of going off on secret expeditions.
a
It
had been easy enough to get away. He told his wife he was going
on a business trip. Then he went somewhere, to the city of Chicago
usually. He did not go to one of the big hotels, but to some obscure
place on a side street.
Night came and he set out to find himself a woman. Always he
went through the same kind of rather silly performance. He was
not given to drinking, but he now took several drinks. One might
go at once to some house where women were to be had, but he really
wanted something else. He spent hours wandering in the streets.
There was a dream. One vainly hoped to find, wandering about
somewhere, a woman who by some miracle would love with freedom
and abandon. Along through the streets one went usually in dark
badly lighted places where there were factories and warehouses and


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MANY MARRIAGES
poor little dwellings. One wanted a golden woman to step up
out of the filth of the place in which he walked. It was insane
and silly and one knew these things, but one persisted insanely.
Amazing conversations were imagined. Out from the shadow of one
of the dark buildings the woman was to step. She was also lonely,
hungry, defeated. One went boldly up to her and began at once a
conversation filled with strange and beautiful words. Love came
flooding their two bodies.
Well perhaps that was exaggerated a little. No doubt one was
never quite fool enough to expect anything so wonderful as all that.
At any rate what one did was to wander about in the dark streets
thus for hours and in the end take up with some prostitute. The
two hurried silently off into a little room. Uh. There was always
the feeling, "perhaps other men have been in here with her already
to-night.” There was a halting attempt at conversation. Could
they get to know each other, this woman and this man? The woman
had a businesslike air. The night was not over and her work was
done at night. Too much time must not be wasted. From her point
of view a great deal of time had to be wasted in any event. Often
one walked half the night without making any money at all.
a
After such an adventure John Webster came home the next day
feeling very mean and unclean. Still he did work better at the office
and at night for a long time he slept better. For one thing he kept
his mind on affairs and did not give way to dreams and to vague
thoughts. When one was running a factory that was an advantage.
Now he stood at the foot of the stairs, thinking perhaps he had
better go off on such an adventure again. If he stayed at home and
sat all day and every day in the presence of Natalie Swartz there
was no telling what would happen. One might as well face facts.
After his experience of that morning, his looking into her eyes in
just the way he had, the life of the two people in the office would
be changed. A new thing would have come into the very air they
breathed together. It would be better if he did not go back to the
office, but went off at once and took a train to Chicago or Milwau-
kee. As for his wife—he had got that notion into his head of a kind
of death of the flesh. He closed his eyes and leaned against the stair
railing. His mind became a blank.
A door leading into the dining-room of the house opened and a
woman stepped forth. She was the Webster's one servant and had
a


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
375
been in the house for many years. Now she was past fifty and as she
stood before John Webster he looked at her as he hadn't for a long
time. A multitude of thoughts came quickly, like a handful of shot
a
thrown against a window pane.
The woman standing before him was tall and lean and her face
was marked by deep lines. It was an odd thing, the notions men had
got into their heads about the beauty of women. Perhaps Natalie
Swartz, when she was fifty, would look much like this woman.
Her name was Katherine and her coming to work for the Web-
sters long ago had brought on a quarrel between John Webster and
his wife. A young man of Indianapolis, who worked in a bank, had
stolen a large sum of money and had run away with a woman who
was a servant in his father's house. He had been killed in the wreck
as he sat with the woman and all trace of him had been lost until
someone from Indianapolis, quite by chance, saw and recognized
Katherine on the streets of her adopted town. The question asked
was, what had become of the stolen money, and Katherine had been
accused of knowing and of concealing it.
Mrs Webster had wanted to discharge her at once and there had
been a quarrel in which the husband had in the end come out vic-
torious. For some reason the whole strength of his being had been
put into the matter and one night as he stood in the common bed-
room with his wife he had made a pronouncement so strong that he
himself was surprised by the words that came from his lips. "If this
woman goes out of this house without going voluntarily then I go
also," he had said.
Now John Webster stood in the hallway of his house looking at
the woman who had been the cause of the quarrel long ago. Well,
he had seen her going silently about the house almost every day dur-
ing the long years since that thing happened, but he had not looked
at her as he did now. When she grew older Natalie Swartz might
look as this woman now looked. If he were to be a fool and run
away with Natalie, as that young fellow from Indianapolis had
once run away with this woman, and if it fell out there was no rail-
road wreck he might some day be living with a woman who looked
somewhat as Katherine now looked.
The thought did not alarm him. It was on the whole rather a
sweet thought. “She has lived and sinned and suffered,” he thought.
There was about the woman's person a kind of strong quiet dignity
and it was reflected in her physical being. There was no doubt a


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MANY MARRIAGES
kind of dignity coming into his own thoughts too. The notion of
going off to Chicago or Milwaukee to walk through dirty streets
hungering for the golden woman to come up to him out of the filth
of life was quite gone now.
He sat at the table eating the food Katherine had prepared. Out-
side the house the sun was shining. It was only a little after two
o'clock and the afternoon and evening were before him. It was
strange how the Bible, the older Testaments, kept asserting them-
selves in his mind. He had never been much of a Bible reader.
There was perhaps a kind of massive splendour to the prose of the
book that now fell into step with his own thoughts. In that time,
when men lived on the hills and on the plains with their flocks, life
lasted in the body of a man or woman a long time. Men were spoken
of who had lived for several hundred years. Perhaps there was more
than one way to reckon the length of life. In his own case—if he
could live every day as fully as he had been living this day life
would be for him lengthened indefinitely.
Katherine came into the room bringing more food and a pot of
tea and he looked up and smiled at her. Another thought came. “It
would be an amazingly beautiful thing to have happen in the world
if everyone, every living man, woman, and child, should suddenly,
by a common impulse, come out of their houses, out of the factories
and stores, come let us say into a great plain, where everyone could
see everyone else, and if they should there and then, all of them, in
the light of day, with everyone in the world knowing fully what
everyone else in the world was doing, if they should all by one
common impulse commit the most unforgivable sin of which they
were conscious, what a great cleansing time that would be.”
His mind made a kind of riot of pictures and he ate the food
Katherine had set before him without thought of the physical act
of eating. Katherine started to go out of the room and then, noting
that he was unaware of her presence, stopped by the door leading
into the kitchen and stood looking at him. He had never known
that she had been aware of the struggle he had gone through for her
many years before. Had he not made that struggle she would not
have stayed on in the house. As a matter of fact, on that evening
when he had declared that if she were to be made to leave he would
leave also, the door to the bedroom up stairs was a little ajar and she
was in the hallway down stairs. She had packed her few belongings
and had them in a bundle and had intended to steal away some-


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
377
where. There was no point to her staying. The man she loved was
dead and now she was being hounded by the newspapers and there
was a threat that if she did not tell where the money was hidden
she would be sent to prison. As for the stolen money—she did not
believe the man who had been killed knew any more about it than
she did. No doubt there was money stolen and then, because he had
run away with her, the crime was put upon him. The affair was very
simple. The young man worked in that bank and was engaged to
be married to a woman of his own class. And then one night he and
Katherine were alone in his father's house and something happened
between them.
a
a
As John Webster walked along the street the sun was shining and
as there was a light breeze a few leaves were falling from the maple
shade trees with which the streets were lined. Soon there would be
frost and the trees would be all afire with colour. If one could only
be aware glorious days were ahead.
Now he was thinking of things he decided had better be left out
of the thoughts of a business man. However, for this one day, he
would give himself over to the thinking of any thought that came
into his head. To-morrow perhaps things would be different. He
would become again what he had always been (with the exception
of a few slips, times when he had been rather as he was now) a
quiet orderly man going about his business and not given to foolish-
ness. He would run his washing machine business and try to keep
his mind on that. In the evenings he would read the newspapers and
keep abreast of the events of the day.
“I don't go on a bat very often. I deserve a little vacation,” he
thought rather sadly.
a
Ahead of him in the street, almost two blocks ahead, a man
walked. John Webster had met the man once. He was some kind
of a professor in a small college of the town, and once, two or three
years before, there had been an effort made, on the part of the col-
lege president, to raise money among local business men to help the
school through a financial crisis. A dinner was given and attended
by a number of the college faculty and by an organization called
the Chamber of Commerce to which John Webster belonged. The
man who now walked before him had been at the dinner and he
and the washing machine manufacturer had been seated together.


378
MANY MARRIAGES
He wondered if he might now presume on that brief acquaintance-
ship to go and talk with the man. He had been thinking rather un-
usual thoughts to come into a man's head and perhaps, if he could
talk with some other man and in particular with a man whose busi-
ness in life it was to have thoughts and to understand thought some-
thing might be gained.
There was a narrow strip of grass between the sidewalk and the
roadway and along this John Webster began to run. He just
grabbed his hat in his hand and ran bareheaded for perhaps two
hundred yards and then stopped and looked quietly up and down
the street.
It was all right, after all. Apparently no one had seen his strange
performance. There were no people sitting on the porches of the
houses along the street. He thanked God for that.
Ahead of him the college professor went soberly along with a
book under his arm, unaware that he was followed. When he saw
that his absurd performance had escaped notice John Webster
laughed. “Well, I went to college myself once. I've heard enough
college professors talk. I don't know why I should expect anything
from one of that stripe."
Perhaps to speak of the things that had been in his mind that day
something almost like a new language would be required.
There was that thought about Natalie being a house kept clean
and sweet for living, a house into which one might go gladly and
joyfully. Could he, a washing machine manufacturer of a Wiscon-
sin town, stop on the street a college professor and say—“I want to
know, Mr College Professor, if your house is clean and sweet for
living so that people may come into it and, if it is so, I want you to
tell me how you went about it to clean your house."
Weary tired moments had been coming to him all day long and
now another came. He was like a train running through a moun-
tainous country and occasionally passing through tunnels. In one
moment the world about him was all alive and then it was just a
dull dreary place that frightened one. The thought that came to him
was something like this—"Well, here I am. There is no use deny-
ing it, something unusual has happened to me. Yesterday I was one
thing. Now I am something else. About me everywhere are these
people I have always known, here in this town. Down that street
there before me, at the corner there, in that stone building, is the
bank where I do the banking business for my factory. It happens
>


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
379
that just at this particular time I do not owe them any money, but
a year from now I may be in debt to that institution up to my eye-
a
brows. There have been times, in the years I have lived and worked
as a manufacturer, when I was altogether in the power of the men
who now sit at desks behind those stone walls. Why they didn't
close me up and take my business away from me I don't know. Per-
haps they did not think it worth while and then, perhaps, they felt,
if they left me on there I would be working for them anyway. At
any rate now, it doesn't seem to matter much what such an institu-
tion as a bank may decide to do.
“One can't quite make out what other men think. Perhaps they
do not think at all.
“If I come right down to it I suppose I've never done much think-
ing myself. Perhaps the whole business of life, here in this town
and everywhere else, is just a kind of accidental affair. Things hap-
pen. People are swept along, eh? That's the way it must be."
It was incomprehensible to him and his mind soon grew weary of
trying to think further along that road.
It went back to the matter of people and houses. Perhaps one
could speak of that matter to Natalie. There was something simple
and clear about her. "She has been working for me for three years
now and it is strange I've never thought much about her before.
She has a way of keeping things clear and straight. Everything has
gone better since she has been with me."
It would be a thing to think about if all the time, since she had
been with him, Natalie had understood the things that were just
now becoming a little plain to him. Suppose, from the very begin-
ning, she had been ready to have him go within herself. One could
get quite romantic about the matter if one allowed oneself to think
about it.
There she would be, you see, that Natalie. She got out of bed in
the morning and while she was there, in her own room, in the little
frame house out at the edge of town, she said a little prayer of some
kind. Then she walked along the streets and down along the rail-
road tracks to her work and to sit all day in the presence of a man.
It was an interesting thought, just to suppose, as a kind of play-
ful diversion let us say, that she, that Natalie, was pure and clean.
In that case she wouldn't be thinking much of herself. She loved,
that is to say she had opened the doors of herself.
One had a picture of her standing with the doors of her body
a


380
MANY MARRIAGES
open. Something constantly went out of her and into the man in
whose presence she spent the day. He was unaware, was in fact too
much absorbed in his affairs to be aware.
Her own self also began to be absorbed with his affairs, to take
the load of small and unimportant details of business off his mind
in order that he in turn become aware of her, standing thus, with
the doors of her body opened. How clean, sweet, and fragrant the
house within which she lived. Before one went within such a house
one would have to cleanse oneself too. That was clear. Natalie had
done it with prayers and devotion, single-minded devotion to the
interests of another. Could one cleanse one's own house that way?
Could one be as much the man as Natalie was the woman? It was a
test.
a
As for the matter of houses—if one got thinking of his own body
in that way where would it all end. One might go further and think
of his own body as a town, a city, as the world.
It was a road to madness too. One might think of people con-
stantly passing in and out of each other. In all the world there
would be no more secrecy. Something like a great wind would
sweep through the world.
"One had better go a little slow and not get himself out of hand,”
he told himself.
He went and sat on a bench in a little park in the very centre of
his town and began trying to think along another road. Across a
little stretch of grass and a roadway before him there was a store
with trays of fruit, oranges, apples, grapefruits, and pears arranged
on the sidewalk and now a wagon stopped at the store door and
began to unload other things. He looked long and hard at the
wagon and at the store front.
His mind slipped off at a new tangent. There he was, himself,
John Webster, sitting on that bench in a park in the very heart of a
town in the state of Wisconsin. It was fall and nearly time for frost
to come, but there was still new life in the grass. How green the
.
grass was in the little park! The trees were alive too. Soon now
they would fame with colour and then sleep for a period. To all
the world of living green things there would come the flame of even-
ing and then the night of winter.
Out before the world of animal life the fruits of the earth would
be poured. Out of the ground they would come, off trees and bushes,
out of the seas, lakes, and rivers, the things that were to maintain
a


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
381
animal life during the period when the world of vegetable life slept
the sweet sleep of winter.
It was a thing to think about too. Everywhere, all about him
must be men and women who lived altogether unaware of such
things. To tell the truth he had himself been, all his life, unaware.
He had just eaten food, stuffed it into his body through his mouth.
There had been no joy. He had not really tasted things, smelled
things. How filled with fragrant suggestive smells life might be.
It must have come about that as men and women went out of the
fields and hills to live their lives in cities, as factories grew and as
the railroads and steamboats came to pass the fruits of the earth
back and forth a kind of dreadful unawareness must have grown in
people. Not touching things with their hands people lost the sense
of them. That was it, perhaps.
John Webster remembered that, when he was a boy, such matters
were differently arranged. He lived in the town and knew nothing
much of country life, but at that time town and country were more
closely wed.
In the fall, at just this time of the year, for one thing, farmers
used to drive into town and deliver things at his father's house. At
that time everyone had great cellars under their houses and in the
cellars were bins that were to be filled with potatoes, apples, turnips,
and such things. There was a thing man had learned to do. Straw
was brought in from fields near the town and many things, pump-
kins, squashes, heads of cabbage, and other solid vegetables were
wrapped in straw and put into a cool part of the cellar. He remem-
bered that his mother wrapped pears in bits of paper and kept them
sweet and fresh for months.
As for himself, although he did not live in the country he was, at
that time, aware of something quite tremendous going on. Wagons
arrived bringing things to his father's house. On Saturdays a farm
woman, who drove an old grey horse, came to the front door and
knocked. She was bringing the Websters their weekly supply of
butter and eggs and often a chicken for the Sunday dinner. John
Webster's mother went to the door to meet her and the child ran
along, clinging to his mother's skirts.
The farm woman came into the house and sat up stiffly in a chair
in the parlour while her basket was being emptied and while the
butter was being taken out of its stone jar. The boy stood with his
back to the wall in a corner and studied her. Nothing was said.
a


382
MANY MARRIAGES
What strange hands she had, so unlike his mother's hands, that were
soft and white. The farm woman's hands were brown and the
knuckles were like the bark-covered knobs that sometimes grew on
the trunks of trees. They were hands to take hold of things, to take
hold of things firmly.
After the men from the country had come and had put the things
in the bins in the cellar it was fine to go down there in the afternoon
when one had come home from school. Outside the leaves were all
coming off the trees and everything looked bare. One felt a little
sad and almost frightened at times and the visits to the cellar were
reassuring. The rich smell of things, fragrant and strong smells!
One got an apple out of one of the bins and stood eating it. In a far
corner there were the dark bins where the pumpkins and squashes
were buried in straw and everywhere, along the walls, were the glass
jars of fruit his mother had put up. How many of them, what a
plentitude of everything. One could eat and eat and still there
would be plenty.
At night sometimes, when one had gone up stairs and got into
bed, one thought of the cellar and of the farm woman and the farm
men who had brought the things. Outside the house it was dark and
a wind was blowing. Soon there would be winter and snow and
skating. The farm woman with the strange, strong-looking hands
had driven the grey horse along the street on which the Webster
house stood, and around a corner. One had stood at a window down
stairs and had watched her out of sight. She had gone off into
some mysterious place, spoken of as the country. How big was the
country and how far away was it? Had she got there yet? It was
night now and very dark. The wind was blowing. Was she still
driving the grey horse on and on, the reins held in her strong brown
hands?
The boy had got into bed and had pulled the covers up about him.
His mother came into the room and after kissing him went away
taking his lamp. He was safe in the house. Near him, in another
room, his father and mother slept. Only the country woman, with
the strong hands, was now out there alone in the night. She was
driving the grey horse on and on into the darkness, into the strange
place from which came all of the good, rich-smelling things, now
tucked away in the cellar under the house.
To be continued


K
((
P
t
SES
11
w
w
A DRAWING. BY JULES PASCIN





A DRAWING. BY JULES PASCIN





A ROMAN LETTER
BY RICHARD ALDINGTON
M. TRANQUILLUS TO HIS RUFINUS GREETING:
I despair, my Rufinus, of ever attaining that truly Ciceronian
elegance and urbanity which distinguish your letters; I should recog-
nize them as yours were they unsigned and deprived of all personal
allusions. Nor can I hope to play even the inferior part of an Atti-
cus to your Marcus Tullius; all my ambition is that contact with
your virtues may insensibly incline me to follow the same path so
far as my imperfections allow. You must therefore not pretermit,
as you threaten, but rather increase, as I implore, your letters to me;
believe me, they are essential to my happiness. That you are to be
proconsul of Achaea must not be a reason for depriving your old
friend of a necessary pleasure; unless indeed this dignity should
lead you to despise so inglorious and so obscure a man. But even in
jest such a thought wrongs us both. Shall I congratulate or condole
with you on your heavy honour? You will have a year's residence
in that Hellas whose culture you so greatly delight in and so per-
fectly understand. I shall imagine you at Corinth; either walking
in silent meditation along the ilex walks of your villa, pausing be-
fore some marble, the tutelary deity of the place, leaning in thought
above some wide fountain untroubled as that great stone pool in the
gardens of Sallust; or speaking of wisdom and beauty with poets
and learned men. For I cannot think that even the proconsulship
will cause you to forget the greater good. What memories will
greet you at Corinth! not only of that Hellenic perfection the world
will never see again, but of our lamented countryman Gallio, whose
urbanity and fastidious good taste astonished even the cultivated
Hellenes. By one of those coincidences old superstition pretended
significant, your letter reached me while I was reading the letter On
Anger addressed to Gallio by his illustrious brother, Lucius An-
naeus. May you share their virtues and fame, but not their fate!
You ask me again whether I am not weary of solitude and you
bid me ask myself: Would it be well for the world if all men acted
as I? And you add tha
add that this is a sovereign rule of conduct. Did I


384
A ROMAN LETTER
not believe you are jesting I should reproach you for accepting so
wretched a sophism, worthy only of the most paltry barbarian. As
if in this complexity of life we could govern ourselves by such fool-
ishly over-simple and rigid rules! As if the great variety of the
world did not call for as great a variety of men! Must the emperor
conduct himself as the freedman, the senator as the slave, the matron
as the courtesan? Shall the fisherman ask himself: Did all men
fish would it be well for the world? Shall the philosopher leave to
speculate because if all men imitated him human life would cease?
This question of yours cannot but be some foolish trope brought to
Rome by a glib uneducated Pict. The Empire needs men of many
kinds; some to give it wealth; some military strength; some justice;
some dignity; some wisdom; some tranquillity and sweetness. It
may be necessary for the Empire at times to make use of the wicked-
ness of evil men whose company we ourselves would avoid; and
indeed were Rome filled with none but good men the imperium
romanum would vanish in a decade. No, let us not ask ourselves so
foolish and useless a question ; let us rather seek to discover the true
nature of our own minds and fit them to that manner of life which
is most harmonious; for if we try to serve the Empire in a manner
for which we are conspicuously unfit we may bring contempt upon
the majesty of Rome, whereas if we do those things consonant with
our nature we may serve it even though we appear to do nothing.
We cannot all be proconsuls; we cannot all be excellent. I am sure
innocence cannot harm the Empire; I even think vice may serve it;
when I am convinced my manner of life injures the Empire-dearer
to me than life-I shall change it. You tell me that the venality
and incapacity of administrators make it urgent for every honest
man to seek the utmost power he can obtain in order that justice
may be done; and you regret the purer morals of the Republic. I
cannot think you are right; a vast number of men is continually
pressing to obtain these posts and surely none who was unfit either
morally or intellectually would offer to take upon himself such a
responsibility? You know I did not refuse to serve the Empire,
even in a post for which I was grotesquely incapable, when it was
forced upon me; I should not refuse if I were commanded to a dig-
nity so imposing even as that of proconsul of Achaea, but I should
lament it as a difficult and burdensome duty that had perforce to be
undertaken, not as an honour to be enjoyed. I prefer an easy ob-
scurity and tranquillity to distracting and arduous dignities.


RICHARD ALDINGTON
385
company of
a
You laugh at me for my rusticity and pretend to find unpolished
locutions in my letters and a country heaviness in my wits. These
are fearful accusations! But I do not fear them. Whatever the
wealthy freedmen may pretend to believe, you will not confuse a
philosophic frugality with avarice or ill breeding, nor will you look
with contempt upon lettered idleness. Some day I must tell you of
the gardens I have laid out here, the embellishments I have given
them, the statues, friezes, and other decorations I have procured to
render my rusticity a little less rustical. As to my solitude it is less
absolute than you imagine. I have not only the
many
excellent and charming men always near me in their writings
(which my agents procure for me from Athens and Rome) but I
have close at hand an agreeable companion to my studies who is
also a man of urbane conversation and philosophic morals. He is a
teacher of rhetoric, the son of a Greek woman and a certain legatus
legionis whose name I shall conceal; his mother, an inhabitant of a
small township in Attica, bestowed on him the austere name of
Diogenes. Whether she hoped to make her son honest by giving
him the name of one who so vehemently claimed honesty as his pe-
culiar virtue; or whether she attempted thus to excuse herself by
insinuating the paternity of Jove; I am unable to tell you. But few
men could less resemble the great cynic than this Diogenes. He is a
large, not unhandsome man, with long, carefully trimmed beard and
hair; his address is smiling and frank; his air quiet and self-con-
tained; his learning not inconsiderable; his speech eloquent; his
manner attractive and winning; as unlike that of the usual rhetor
as it is dissimilar from that of his growling namesake. He was con-
demned by poverty to the misery of a wandering life, displaying to
the gaping provincials his ware of Milesian tales and philosophical
discourses, more glittering and sharp than sound and wise. He asked
my hospitality one spring evening when he had missed his way; we
had some conversation which so pleased me I begged him to stay
several days. The days became months and finally I gave him a
house and small estate, vacated by one of my freedmen, about three
thousand yards from here. He visits me frequently, advises me in
the pursuit of my studies, debates points of philosophy or literary
subtlety with great ability and learning, assists and stimulates my
appreciation of what is beautiful and excellent. His gratitude has
caused him to take the cognomen of Tranquillanus, but indeed I
look upon him as a friend, not as a client. I have made him quite
a


386
A ROMAN LETTER
independent of me and he is not included in my testament; so that
he has no reason to love me save his pleasure in the gift of a few
acres I did not need and the sympathy of our minds. His friendship
seems to me the more serious and tenacious because he is a convinced
though not fanatical Epicurean—if a quality so opposed to Epi-
cureanism can ever afflict any member of that enlightened sect.
No doubt you will exclaim against me, both for admitting to my
familiarity a man who is a kind of cultivated vagabond, perhaps an
escaped slave, and for allowing him to bring the morals of Epicurus
into my house. Believe me, dear Rufinus, not even Cicero has been
just to Epicurus; and the Stoics have maligned him bitterly. When
I had read the works of Epicurus, Philodemus, and other exponents
of the doctrine, comparing them with the poem of our own nobly
inspired Lucretius, I was delighted with the purity and wisdom of
their philosophy. It secures my assent the more readily because
practice of its teaching actually creates the spiritual effect promised;
because it does not seek to persuade by rewards or to terrify by
punishments; because it appears to be in harmony with reason and
nature. You know my fancy that philosophical sects are mere
classifications of temperaments. In my opinion the various phi-
losophies are not to be looked upon as mutually destructive enemies,
but as convenient methods of living for many sorts of men; thus the
;
sensual man becomes a Cyrenaic, the proud man a Stoic, the morose
man a Cynic, the sceptic a disciple of Pyrrho. My nature is most
suited by the philosophy of Epicurus, though I add to its gentleness
and tolerance and temperance, to its “indolence of body and tran-
quillity of mind,” something more robust in physical health, more
ardently Platonic in the love of beauty, less supercilious in my rela-
tions with other men. Of course it is the morals of Epicurus I
chiefly study; the physics, even of Aristotle, I read rather because
I am curious than because I perceive any final truth in them, while
I have a natural aversion from metaphysics which I find hard to
overcome. The purpose of my inexpert philosophy is simply to pass
through this too brief life as agreeably, honourably, and harmlessly
as possible. I am not anxious that Rome should eke out its scanty
intellectual fare with chatter about me; and I am not ambitious that
a fraction of an indifferent posterity should know that such a man
once existed. You will exclaim against this contempt for glory; it
is sincere though perhaps ignoble and certainly un-Roman. Had I


ELIZABETH J. COATSWORTH
387
a son to whom I might leave a glorious name, I should consider the
matter differently, for, as you know, I love to make no absolute rules
of conduct, giving all things that relative importance they seem to
deserve and being always willing to change my mind when it ap-
pears reasonable so to do.
How much I have to write you which the exiguity of a letter ex-
cludes and how glad I am that this renewal of our correspondence
gives me not only the benefit of your wisdom and incomparable
politeness, but provides me with so sensible a pleasure as talking of
myself! By Hercules! you shall hear from me more often than you
expect and doubtless more often than you desire.
Vale.
SAILS
BY ELIZABETH J. COATSWORTH
The river with its sails is a strip of blue
silk
On which moths have alighted
And cling tilting.


M JEAN MARCHAND
BY ROGER FRY
T is now many years since M Marchand became known to the
I
movement he is the one who has found most acceptance in England.
The gravity and sobriety of his colour schemes, the tenderness and
simplicity of his feeling, the absence from his work of anything that
could be mistaken for caprice or insolence combine to make him a
persuasive apostle of the new doctrines in painting.
No wonder that the recent exhibition of his works at the Inde-
pendent Gallery in London was an important event in artistic cen-
tres. M Marchand's numerous English friends and admirers
crowded to it with expectant curiosity. They wanted to see what
answer he would give in his maturity to the high promise of his
early work. M Marchand has arrived at a stage which is often a
somewhat difficult one in an artist's career, both for himself and his
admirers. Something of the zest and élan which the first discovery
of his own temperament gives to an artist has begun to subside, his
efforts are quite rightly directed to consolidating his position—he
must dig himself in before beginning a fresh attack. And conversely
his admirers have become accustomed to his method of approach;
they are familiar with his angle of vision: the delighted surprise
with which they greeted a new discovery has worn off and can no
longer be counted on. At the best they must be content with the
calmer though more solid satisfaction of seeing that personal vision
ever more clearly and more fully expressed. Some such considera-
tions may explain the diverse feelings which, speaking for myself, I
experienced in the present exhibition. I felt that, as compared with
earlier exhibitions of M Marchand held in London, there was both
gain and loss. I found, moreover, to my great satisfaction that the
gains were more solid and of greater consequence than the losses;
and that where I felt a sense of disappointment it was possible to
assign it to some temporary or accidental cause.
Particularly in the landscapes I find a greater diversity of motive
than there used to be. It is possible to divide them almost into two
parts. In one M Marchand expresses his feeling for plastic se-



LA BELLE PROVENÇALE. BY JEAN MARCHAND


1



MATERNITÉ BY JEAN MARCHAND






COUP DE MISTRAL A VENCE. BY JEAN MARCHAND


1
1
1


ROGER FRY
389
quences, his ideas of composition in depth, with an increased force
and precision. In the other group he seems to me to have been led
away by some other aspect of nature which, by the fascination of
some unexpected opposition, has made him mistake it for the object
of his search. I will take instances: St Paul-One is standing on a
terrace bounded on the left by a high wall; one looks over a wide,
undulating country with a little hill town occupying the middle
distance and a vast expanse of sky. Now here the choice of quanti-
ties, the recessions and the modelling have to me but little plastic
significance. I find myself dwelling at once on the scenic qualities of
the vision. I recall, no doubt, something of the surprise which I
might have in travelling, on coming suddenly on this splendid ex-
panse. And here I must guard against misapprehension: what I have
said might give rise to the supposition that this was a vulgarly poet-
ical picture. It is nothing of the kind. M Marchand is much too
serious and too genuine a painter for that. There is no romantic
emphasis, no underlining of the scenic effect; he does not make the
hill town appear more isolated, more inaccessibly perched than it is.
He does not dig round it more precipitous ravines—in fact, he is
utterly innocent of any of the well known appeals to romantic feel-
ing. Only since the motive contains in itself scenic rather than plas-
tic values it fails, I think, of any particular conviction or intensity.
I put against this Jardins en Terrasses. One is looking down a
sloping olive yard to a hill-side opposite terraced with stone walls
from the bottom to the top, which is crowned by a row of houses
with a tiny strip of sky above; all is seen in bright, flat, hard sun-
light. In the foreground on either hand are the dark trunks and
branches of olive trees, with a figure in shadow at the foot of one of
them. It is what from a picturesque point of view one might call a
thoroughly ungrateful subject. A description in paint of this suc-
cession of stone walls going perfectly straight across the field of
vision would be intolerably dull; but this is no mere description.
M Marchand's intimate feeling for his matière, his subtle percep-
tion of delicate variations of tone, his power to express recessions,
to create the visual hollow, his vigorous workmanlike touch, the
feeling for form which enables him to realize the thrust of the tree
trunks, and his austere simplicity of colour which yet gives all the
purity and brilliance of the effect: all these things taken with the
fine architectural simplicity and solidity of the design make this a
triumphant success.
a


390
M JEAN MARCHAND
a
a
Another picture of the same quality is the Coup de Mistral, where
the steely blue of sea and sky and the leaden tone which the cold,
dry wind lays on the land, have inspired him to a new and fine
colour harmony, dry and unprepossessing perhaps, but worked out
with a fine consistency and limpid purity. Here, too, the harsh, rec-
tangular forms of the buildings and the sharp, upright of the cypress
have their exact significance, and the choice of proportions shows a
master of design. And, fortunately, there are many more such
works in the exhibition.
The two elements which I have tried to distinguish in M Mar-
chand's landscapes both come together in the big Maternity. This
looks far better than it did in the autumn Salon, and I am glad to
have the opportunity to revive the impression it then made on me.
I think M Marchand has never done anything better than the cen-
tral and most crucial part of this picture. The plastic rhythm of
the nude breast and arms of the mother and the body of the child
is extremely beautiful. He has woven these complex movements
into a single whole of almost sculptural completeness and coherence.
The drawing is everywhere large, simple, and firm. And this is the
essential part of the picture. It is a splendid piece of direct and
solid painter's workmanship controlled by a fine sensibility. But
was M Marchand wise to turn this solid piece of objective vision,
this complete study from the model, into a "Maternity”? I cannot
help thinking that when the idea of doing this occurred to him it
exercised an unfortunate influence on the rest of the picture. It led,
I think, to certain accents in the head of the mother which were not
dictated by purely plastic considerations, and it led to his intro-
ducing a landscape background, a reminiscence of a Paris banlieue,
which has to my feeling no intimate connection with the figure. The
mother and child are quite evidently painted in a studio light. Had
M Marchand kept the actual background before which they sat, his
infallible sense of relations would have made him follow through
an unbroken sequence of reliefs and spaces into the rest of the de-
sign. As it is, I am brought up by a sudden break in the texture
whenever my eyes stray from the figure to its surroundings.
I turn now to the other figure pieces, and here I find nothing but
solid achievement and steady progress. The portrait of M Raverat
is admirable. The placing is just, and the vigorous relief is obtained
by means of surprising simplicity. The drawing and modelling of


ROGER FRY
391
a
the head are particularly fine. The large synthetic treatment of the
forms has enabled M Marchand to find an easy and flowing rhythm
which expresses at once the form and the character. It is at once a
portrait in the literal sense of the word and an impressive formal
design. He has avoided altogether the descriptive and accidental,
and within a severely restricted scheme of browns and greys he has
managed to attain luminosity and brilliance. There is much in
these paintings that reminds one of Courbet. M Marchand has
something of his "fist” in the downright straightforwardness and
uncompromising assertion of his statements. This extreme sim-
plicity and directness of vision enable him to give a surprising value
and purity to his colour. This is especially noticeable in the richness
and transparency of his shadows. Without losing anything of the
intensity of their contrasts with the light, they yet have nothing of
the muddiness and neutrality which a more anxious and timid
handling would give. M Marchand never takes refuge in a non-
committal statement. There is a portrait called La Belle Proven-
çale which shows us a red-faced, weather-beaten peasant girl in a
blue dress seen against a dark red chair-back. At first sight this does
not strike one as being of particular interest, but a closer scrutiny
discovers in this perhaps as much as in anything here M Marchand's
great qualities as a painter. The larger aspects of the form are
held with uncompromising sureness and are expressed in handling
of the utmost simplicity and directness. The matière is dense, rich
and transparent, and the colour, for all its unflattering dryness, has
a deep resonance. This is the painter's art at its best. There is no
confectionery, no fabrications of agreeable pigment; the quality
comes directly out of the necessities of expression. If our Profes-
sors are alive to their opportunities they will send all their pupils
here to see and study this; since one can learn more easily from one's
own contemporaries than from any old master, and no better exam-
ple could be found of sheer downright good painting than this.
Some of the drawings—particularly the figure drawings--are very
good. Here, too, there is nothing brilliant or clever-all is purpose-
ful and exact. The artist's feeling for the essentials of direction and
volume enables him to realize his figures with something of the syn-
thetic power that we see in primitive sculpture, and this without any
hint of archaism, with no imposition of a ready-made style.


THREE POEMS
BY AMY LOWELL
ORIENTATION
When the young ladies of the boarding-school take the air,
They walk in pairs, each holding a blush-red parasol against the sun.
From my window they look like an ambulating parterre
Of roses, I cannot tell one from one.
There is a certain young person I dream of by night,
And paint by day on little two-by-three inch squares
Of ivory. Which is she? Which of all the parasols in sight
Covers the blithe, mocking face which stares
At me from twenty miniatures, confusing the singleness of my de-
light?
You know my window well enough—the fourth from the corner.
Oh, you know.
Slant your parasol a bit this way, if you please,
And take for yourself the very correct bow
I make toward the line of demure young ladies
Perambulating the street in a neat row.
It is true I have never seen beneath your parasol,
Therefore
iny
miniatures resemble one another not at all.
You must pick yourself like a buttonhole bouquet,
And lift the parasol to my face one day,
And let me see you laughing at the sun-
Or at me. Then I will choose the one
Of my twenty miniatures most like you
And destroy the others, with which I shall have nothing more to do.


AMY LOWELL
393
THE RED KNIGHT
I saw him,
Standing in red armour before an altar
Under the fish-scale roof of a church
In a river valley in mid-France.
The organ was crying an anthem along the great nave
And the eddy of it tickled the noses of the impish stone manikins
with foxes' tails curled beneath the architraves.
When the organ ceased crying, he lifted his head
And gazed through the clerestory windows at the white-blue of an
after-rain sky.
Suddenly a thin scatter of sunlight smote upon his armour
And it flamed like a bonfire, and he in the midst, unnoticing.
White wood of poplar beneath green bark,
A man, the height and spread of a tall man,
Beneath a burning armour.
I would have flung my kerchief to him to bind upon his helmet,
But kerchiefs fall obliquely through backward centuries,
And already the light was growing too dim to see a silken nothing
upon a shadowed floor.
Steel footsteps on stone make a strange sound;
I never heard the like before, and I think I never shall again.
For which unreasonable reason
I am determined to remain a virgin.
a
EASEL PICTURE: DECORATION DAY
a
She is a washer-woman most of the time,
But to-day she is a widow.
Important distinction, which warrants a plaintive manner
And her best black bombasine.
To be sure, she is only a plain widow,
And her husband was a drunkard who ill-treated her,
But she never forgets that it is owing to him that she ranks third
in the cemetery,
Next to the war-widows and gold-starred mothers.
She regrets that he did not enlist
Instead of lying about his age and dying coldly of pneumonia,


394
THREE POEMS
Until she reflects that he might have returned from overseas and
beaten her according to custom.
The thought purges her of envy, and she sprinkles woebegone, con-
tented tears
On the bell-glass of artificial flowers she lays on his grave;
It is a beautiful offering and has been much admired.
With a blissful sense of bereavement, she bows her head over the
bell-glass,
Then rises to totter to the gate on the arm of a friend who has of-
fered to give her a lift home.
In her attic room, she carefully folds the bombasine,
Whispering to herself: "It was a beautiful Decoration Day."
а


MORE MEMORIES
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
XLIV
It may have been the spring of 1897 that Maud Gonne, who was
passing through London, told me that for some reason unknown to
her, she had failed to get a Dublin authorization for an American
lecturing tour. The young Dublin nationalists planned a Monu-
ment to Wolfe Tone which, it was hoped, might exceed in bulk and
in height that of the too compromised and compromising Daniel
O'Connell, and she proposed to raise money for it by these lectures.
I had left the Temple and taken two rooms in Bloomsbury, and in
Bloomsbury lived important London nationalists, elderly doctors,
who had been medical students during the Fenian movement. So I
was able to gather a sufficient committee to pass the necessary reso-
lution. She had no sooner sailed than I found out why the Dublin
Committee had refused it, or rather put it off by delay and vague
promises. A prominent Irish American had been murdered for po-
litical reasons, and another Irish American had been tried and
acquitted, but was still accused by his political opponents, and the
dispute had spread to London and to Ireland, and had there inter-
mixed itself with current politics and gathered new bitterness. My
Committee and the majority of the Nationalist Irish Societies
throughout England were upon one side, and the Dublin Commit-
tee and the majority of the Nationalist Societies in Ireland upon
the other, and feeling ran high. Maud Gonne had the same friends
that I had, and the Dublin Committee could not be made to under-
stand that whatever money she collected would go to the move-
ment, and not to their opponents. It seemed to me that if I accepted
the Presidency of the '98 Commemoration Association of Great
Britain, I might be able to prevent a public quarrel, and so make a
great central council possible; and a public quarrel I did prevent,
though with little gain perhaps to anybody, for at least one active
man assured me that I had taken the heart out of his work, and no
gain at all perhaps to the movement, for our central council had


396
MORE MEMORIES
commonly to send two organizers or to print two pamphlets that
both parties might be represented, when one pamphlet or one organ-
izer had served.
XLV
It was no business of mine, and that was precisely why I could not
keep out of it. Every enterprise that offered, allured just in so far
as it was not my business. I still think that in a species of man,
wherein I count myself, nothing so much matters as Unity of Being,
but if I seek it as Goethe sought, who was not of that species, I but
combine in myself, and perhaps, as it now seems looking backward,
in others also, incompatibles. Goethe, in whom objectivity and
subjectivity were intermixed I hold, as the dark is mixed with the
light at the eighteenth lunar phase, could but seek it as Wilhelm
Meister seeks it intellectually, critically, and through a multitude
of deliberately chosen experiences; events and forms of skill gath-
ered as if for a collector's cabinet; whereas true unity of being,
where all the nature murmurs in response if but a single note be
touched, is found emotionally, instinctively, by the rejection of all
experience not of the right quality, and by the limitation of its
quantity. Of all this I knew nothing, for I saw the world by the
light of what my father had said, speaking about some Frenchman
who frequented the dissecting rooms to overcome his dread in the
interest of that unity. My father had mocked, but had not ex-
plained why he had mocked, and I, for my unhappiness, had felt a
shuddering fascination. Nor did I understand as yet how little that
Unity, however wisely sought, is possible without a Unity of Cul-
ture in class or people that is no longer possible at all.
“The fascination of what's difficult
Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent
Spontaneous joy and natural content
Out of
my
heart."
XLVI
I went hither and thither speaking at meetings in England and
Scotland and occasionally at tumultuous Dublin Conventions, and
endured some of the worst months of my life. I had felt years
I
be-


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
397
fore that I had made a great achievement when the man who trained
my uncle's horses invited me to share his Christmas dinner which
we roasted in front of his harness-room fire; and now I took an
almost equal pride in an evening spent with some small organizer
into whose spittoon I secretly poured my third glass of whiskey. I
constantly hoped for some gain, in self-possession, in rapidity of de-
cision, in capacity for disguise, and am at this moment I dare say no
different for it all, having but burgeoned and withered like a tree.
When Maud Gonne returned she became our directing mind both
in England and in Ireland, and it was mainly at her bidding that
our movement became a protest against the dissensions, the lack of
dignity, of the Parnellite and Anti-Parnellite parties, who had
fought one another for seven or eight years, till busy men passed
them by as they did those performing cats that in my childhood I
used to see boxing one another on a table outside Charing Cross
station. Both parliamentary parties seeing that all young Ireland,
and a good part of old, were in the movement, tried to join us, the
Anti-Parnellite without abandoning its separate identity. They
were admitted I think, but upon what terms I do not remember. I
and two or three others had to meet Michael Davitt, and a member
of Parliament called F. X. O'Brien to talk out the question of sepa-
rate identity, and I remember nothing of what passed but the man-
ner and image of Michael Davitt. He seemed hardly more unfitted
for such negotiation, perhaps even for any possible present politics,
than I myself, and I watched him with sympathy. One knows by
the way a man sits in his chair if he have enotional intensity, and
Davitt's suggested to me a writer, a painter, and artist of some kind,
rather than a man of action. Then too, F. X. O'Brien did not care
whether he used a good or a bad argument, whether he seemed a
fool or a clever man, so that he carried his point, but if he used a
bad argument Davitt would bring our thought back to it though he
had to wait several minutes and restate it. One felt that he had
lived always with small, unimaginative men whom he despised; and
that, perhaps through some lack of early education, perhaps because
nine years' imprisonment at the most plastic period of his life had
jarred or broken his contact with reality, he had failed, except dur-
ing the first months of the Land League, to dominate those men.
He told me that if the split in the Irish Party had not come he
would have carried the Land League in the Highlands, and recov-
ered for Ireland as much of Scotland as was still Gaelic in blood or


398
MORE MEMORIES
in language. Our negotiations, which interested so much F. X.
O'Brien and my two negotiators, a barrister and a doctor, bored
him I thought, even more than they did me, to whom they were a
novelty; but the Highland plan with its historical foundation and
its vague possibilities excited him, and it seemed to me that what
we said or did stirred him at other moments also to some similar
remote thought and emotion. I think he returned my sympathy,
for a little before his death he replied to some word of congratula-
tion I sent him after the speech in which he resigned his seat in the
House of Commons, with an account of some project of his for im.
proving the quality of the Irish Representation there.
a
XLVII
I think that he shared with poet and philosopher the necessity of
speaking the whole mind or remaining silent or ineffective, and he
had been for years in a movement, where, to adapt certain words of
a friend of mine, the heart upon the sleeve was as essential as the
tongue in the cheek. The founders of the Irish Agrarian Movement
had acted upon the doctrine, contradicted by religious history, that
ignorant men will not work for an idea, or feel a political passion
for its own sake, and that you must find a lever as it was called,
some practical grievance, and I do not think that I am fantastic in
believing that this faith in levers, universal among revolutionaries,
is but a result of that mechanical philosophy of the Eighteenth
Century, which has, as Coleridge said, turned the human mind into
the quicksilver at the back of a mirror, though it still permitted a
work of art to seem "a mirror dawdling along a road."
O’Leary had told me the story, not I think hitherto published.
A prominent Irish American not long released from the prison
where Fenianism had sent him, cabled to Parnell, “Take up Land
Reform side by side with the National Question and we will sup-
port you. See Kickham.” What had Parnell, a landowner and a
haughty man, to do with the peasant or the peasant's grievance?
And he was indeed so ignorant of both that he asked Kickham,
novelist and Fenian leader, if he thought the people would take up
a land agitation, and Kickham answered, “I am only afraid they
would go to the Gates of Hell for it” and O'Leary's comment was
"and so they have.”
And so was founded an agitation where some men pretended to


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
399
national passion for the land's sake; some men to agrarian passion
for the nation's sake; some men to both for their own advancement's
sake and this agitation at the time I write of had but old men to
serve it who found themselves after years of labour, some after
years of imprisonment, derided for unscrupulous rascals. Unscru-
pulous they certainly were, for they had grown up amid make-be-
lieve, and now that their practical grievance was too near settle-
ment not to blind and to excite, that make-believe was visible to
all. They were as eloquent as ever, they had never indeed shared
anything in common but the sentimental imagery, the poetical al-
lusions inherited from a still earlier generation, but were faced by
a generation that had turned against all oratory. I recall to my
memory a member of Parliament who had fought for Parnell's pol-
icy after Parnell's death, and much against his own interest, who
refused to attend a meeting my friends had summoned at the
declaration of the Boer War, because he thought “England was in
the right” and a week later, when the Dublin mob had taken the
matter up, advised the Irish soldiers to shoot their officers and join
President Kruger. I recall another and more distinguished poli-
tician who supported the Anti-Parnellite Party in his declining
years, and in his vigorous years had raked up some scandal about
some Colonial Governor. A friend of mine, after advising that Gov-
ernor's son to write his father's life, had remembered the scandal
and called in her alarm upon the politician; "I do beseech you” he
had said and with the greatest earnestness “to pay no attention
whatever to anything I may have said during an election.”
Certain of these men, all public prepossessions laid aside, were
excellent talkers, genial and friendly men, with memories enriched
by country humour, and much half sentimental, half practical phi-
losophy, and at moments by poetical feeling that was not all an af-
fectation, found very moving by English sympathizers, of the tear
and the smile in Erin's eye. They may even have had more sincerity
than their sort elsewhere, but they had inherited a cause that men
had died for, that they themselves had gone to jail for, and had
worn their hereditary martyrdom so that they had seemed for a
time no common men, and now must pay the penalty. "I have just
told Mahaffy” Wilde had said to me “that it is a party of men of
genius” and now John O'Leary, Taylor, and many obscure sincere
men had pulled them down, and yet, should what followed, judged
by an eye that thinks most of the individual soul, be counted as
>


400
MORE MEMORIES
more clearly out of the common? A movement first of poetry,
then
of sentimentality, and land-hunger, had struggled with, and as the
nation passed into the second period of all revolutions, had given
way before a movement of abstraction and hatred; and now after
twenty years of the second period though abstraction and hatred
have won their victory, there is as yet no clear sign of a third, a
tertium quid and a reasonable frame of mind. Seeing that only the
individual soul can attain to its spiritual opposite, a nation in
tumult must needs pass to and fro between mechanical opposites,
but one hopes always that those opposites may acquire sex and
engender. At moments when I have thought of the results of politi-
cal subjection upon Ireland I have remembered a story told me by
Oscar Wilde who professed to have found it in a book of magic: "If
a
you carve a Cerberus upon an emerald” he said “and put it in the
oil of a lamp and carry it into a room where your enemy is, two
heads will come upon his shoulders and devour one another.”
Instead of sharing our traditional sentimental rhetoric with every
man who had found a practical grievance, whether we cared a but-
ton for the grievance or not, most of us were prosecuting heretics.
Nationality was like religion, few could be saved, and meditation
had but one theme—the perfect nation and its perfect service.
“Public opinion” said an anonymous postcard sent to a friend of
mine "will compel you to learn Irish” and it certainly did compel
many persons of settled habits to change tailor and cloth. I be-
lieved myself dressed according to public opinion, until a letter of
apology from my tailor informed me that "It took such a long time
getting Connemara cloth” as it had to come "all the way from
Scotland.”
The Ireland of men's affections must be, as it were, self-moving,
self-creating, though as yet but few added, avoiding a conclusion
that seemed hopeless, altogether separate from England politically.
Men for the moment were less concerned with the final achievement
than with independence during the struggle for it of English parties
and influence. We had no longer any leaders, abstractions were in
their place; and our conventions where O'Leary presided interrupt-
ing discussion without the least consideration for rules of procedure
when the moment came for his cup of coffee, were dominated by
little groups, the Gaelic propagandists, though still very few, being
the most impassioned, which had the intensity and narrowness of
theological sects.


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
401
I had in my head a project to reconcile old and new that gave
Maud Gonne and myself many stirring conversations upon journeys
by rail to meetings in Scotland, in Dublin, or in the Midlands;
should we not persuade the organizations in Dublin and in London,
when the time drew near for the unveiling of our statue, or even
perhaps for the laying of its foundation-stone, to invite the leaders
of Parnellite or Anti-Parnellite, of the new group of Unionists who
had almost changed sides in their indignation at the over-taxation
of Ireland, to lay their policy before our Convention—could we not
then propose and carry that the Convention sit permanently, or
,
appoint some Executive Committee to direct Irish policy and report
from time to time. The total withdrawal from Westminster had
been proposed in the Seventies, before the two devouring heads
were of equal strength, and now that the abstract head seemed the
strongest, would be proposed again, but the Convention could send
them thither, not as an independent power, but as its delegation,
and only when, and for what purpose the government might decide.
I dreaded some wild Fenian movement, and with literature perhaps
more in my mind than politics dreamed of that unity of culture
which might begin with some few men controlling some form of
administration. I began to talk my project over with various organ-
izers, who often interrupted their attention which was perhaps only
politeness, with some new jibe at Mr Dillon or Mr Redmond. I
thought I had Maud Gonne's support, but when I overheard her
conversation she commonly urged the entire withdrawal of the
Irish Members, or if she did refer to my scheme, it was to suggest
the sending to England of eighty ragged and drunken Dublin beg-
gars, or eighty pugilists “to be paid by results."
She was the first who spoke publicly or semi-publicly of the with-
drawal of the Irish Members as a practical policy for our time, so
far as I know, but others may have been considering it. A nation in
crisis becomes almost like a single mind, or rather like those minds
I have described, that become channels for parallel streams of
thought, each stream taking the colour of the mind it flows through.
These streams are not set moving, as I think, through conversation
or publication, but through "telepathic contact” at some depth be-
low that of normal consciousness, and it is only years afterwards as
a rule when future events have shown its importance, that we dis-
cover that they are different expressions of a common theme. That
self-moving, self-creating nation necessitated an Irish centre of pol-


402
MORE MEMORIES
icy, and I planned a premature impossible peace between those two
devouring heads because I was sedentary and thoughtful, but Maud
Gonne was not sedentary and I noticed that before some great event
she did not think, but became exceedingly superstitious. Are not
such as she aware, at moments of great crisis, of some power beyond
their own minds; or are they like some good portrait painters of
my father's generation and only think when the model is under
their eye? Once upon the eve of some demonstration, I found her
with many caged larks and finches which she was about to set free
for the luck's sake.
I abandoned my plans on discovering that our young men, not
yet educated by Mr Birrell's university, would certainly shout down
everyone they disagreed with, and that their finance was so extrava-
gant that we must content ourselves with a foundation-stone and an
iron rail to protect it, for there could never be a statue; while she
carried out every plan she made.
Her power over crowds was at its height, and some portion of the
power came because she could still, even when pushing some ab-
stract principle to what seemed to me an absurdity, keep her own
mind free, and so when man and woman did her bidding they did
it not only because she was beautiful, but because that beauty sug-
gested joy and freedom. There was some element in her beauty also
that moved minds full of old Gaelic stories and poems, for she
looked as though she lived in an ancient civilization where all su-
periorities whether of mind or of body were a part of public cere-
monial, were in some way the crowd's creation, as the Pope's enter-
ing the Vatican is the crowd's creation. Her beauty backed by her
great stature could instantly affect an assembly, and not as often
with our stage beauties because obvious and florid, for it was in-
credibly distinguished, and if her face like the face of some Greek
statue showed little thought—as must be that it might seem that
assembly's very self, fused, unified, and solitary—her whole body
seemed a master-work of long labouring thought, as though a Scopas
had measured and calculated, consorted with Egyptian sages, and
mathematicians out of Babylon, that he might outface even Arte-
mesia’s sepulchral image with a living norm.
But in that ancient civilization abstract thought scarce existed,
while she but rose partially and for a moment out of raging abstrac-
tion; and for that reason, as I have known another woman so, she
hated her own beauty, not its effect upon others, but its image in the
a


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
403
mirror. Beauty is from the antithetical self, and a woman can scarce
but hate it, for not.only does it demand a painful daily service, but
it calls for the denial or the dissolution of the self.
"How many centuries
spent
The sedentary soul,
In toil of measurement
Beyond eagle or mole
Beyond hearing and seeing
Or Archimedes' guess
To raise into being
That loveliness?"
:
XLVIII
On the morning of the great procession, the greatest in living
memory, the Parnellite and Anti-Parnellite members of Parliament
huddled together like cows in a storm, walk behind our carriage, and
I hear John Redmond say to one of his late enemies “I went up
nearer the head of the Procession, but one of the Marshals said
*This is not your place Mr Redmond; your place is further back.'
'No' I said 'I will stay here.' 'In that case,' he said, “I will lead
you back.'” Later on I can see by the pushing and shouldering of a
delegate for South Africa how important place and procedure is;
and noticing that Maud Gonne is cheered everywhere and that the
Irish Members march through street after street without welcome,
I wonder if their enemies have not intended their humiliation.
We are at the Mansion House Banquet, and John Dillon is mak-
ing the first speech he has made before a popular Dublin audience
since the death of Parnell; and I have several times to keep my
London delegates from interrupting. Dillon is very nervous, and
as I watch him the abstract passion begins to rise within me, and I
am almost overpowered by an instinct of cruelty; I long to cry out;
"Had Zimri peace who slew his master ?”
Is our foundation-stone still unlaid when the more important
streets are decorated for Queen Victoria's Jubilee?
I find Maud Gonne at her hotel talking to a young working-man
who looks very melancholy. She had offered to speak at one of the


404
MORE MEMORIES
regular meetings of his socialist society about Queen Victoria, and
he has summoned what will be a great meeting in the open air. She
has refused to speak, and he says that her refusal means his ruin, as
nobody will ever believe that he had any promise at all. When he
has left without complaint or anger, she gives me very cogent rea-
sons against an open air meeting, but I can think of nothing but the
young man and his look of melancholy. He has left his address, and
presently at my persuasion, she drives to his tenement where she
finds him and his wife and children crowded into a very space
-perhaps there was only one room—and moved by the sight, prom-
ises to speak. The young man is James Connolly who with Padraic
Pearse is to make the Insurrection of 1916 and to be executed.
very small
The meeting is held in College Green and is very crowded, and
Maud Gonne speaks, I think, standing upon a chair. In front of her
is an old woman with a miniature of Lord Edward Fitzgerald
which she waves in her excitement, crying out, “I was in it before
she was born.” Maud Gonne tells how that morning she had gone
to lay a wreath upon a political martyr's tomb at St Michael's
Church, for it is the one day in the year when such wreaths are laid,
but has been refused admission because it is the Jubilee. Then she
pauses, and after that her voice rises to a cry "Must the graves of
“
our dead go undecorated because Victoria has her Jubilee?”
It is eight or nine at night, and she and I have come from the
City Hall, where the Convention has been sitting, that we may walk
to the National Club in Rutland Square, and find a great crowd in
the street who surround us and accompany us. Presently I hear a
sound of breaking glass, the crowd has begun to stone the windows
of decorated houses, and when I try to speak that I may restore
order I discover that I have lost my voice through much speaking at
the Convention. I can only whisper and gesticulate, and as I am
thus freed from responsibility, I share the emotion of the crowd, and
perhaps even feel as they feel when the glass crashes. Maud Gonne
has a look of exultation as she walks with her laughing head thrown
back.
Later that night Connolly carries in procession a coffin with the
words "British Empire” upon it, and police and mob fight for its
possession, and at last it is thrown into the Liffey that the police
may not capture it. And there are fights between police and win-
a


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
405
dow-breakers, and I read in the morning papers that many have been
wounded; some two hundred heads have been dressed at the hospi-
tals; an old woman has been killed by baton blows, and that two
thousand pounds' worth of decorated plate-glass windows have been
broken. I count the links in the chain of responsibility, run them
across my fingers, and wonder if any link there is from my work-
shop.
a
Queen Victoria visits the city, and Dublin Unionists have gath-
ered together from all Ireland some twelve thousand children and
built for them a grandstand, and bought them sweets and buns that
they may cheer. A week later Maud Gonne marches forty thousand
children through the streets of Dublin, and in a field beyond Drum-
condra, and in the presence of a Priest of their Church, they swear
to cherish towards England until the freedom of Ireland has been
won, an undying enmity. How many of these children will carry
bomb or rifle when a little under or a little over thirty?
a
a
a
a
Feeling is still running high between the Dublin and London
organizations, for a London Doctor, my fellow-delegate, has called
a little after breakfast to say he was condemned to death by a cer-
tain secret society the night before. He is very angry, though it
does not seem that his life is in danger, for the insult is beyond
endurance.
We arrive at Chancery Lane for our committee meeting, but it
is Derby Day, and certain men who have arranged a boxing match
are in possession of our rooms. We adjourn to a neighbouring pub-
lic-house where there are little panelled cubicles as in an old-fash-
ioned eating-house, that we may direct the secretary how to answer
that week's letters. We are much interrupted by a Committee-man
who has been to the Derby, and now half lying on the table keeps
repeating “I know what you all think. Let us hand on the torch, you
think, let us hand it on to our children, but I say no! I say, let us
I
order an immediate rising."
Presently one of the boxers arrives, sent up to apologize it seems,
and to explain that we had not been recognized. He begins his
apology, but stops, and for a moment fixes upon us an eye full of
our demerits. “No I will not,” he cries "What do I care for any
one now but Venus and Adonis and the other Planets of Heaven."


406
MORE MEMORIES
a
French sympathizers have been brought to see the old buildings
in Galway, and with the towns of Southern France in their mind's
eye, are not in the least moved. The greater number are in a rather
crowded hotel. Presently an acquaintance of mine peeping while it
is still broad day from his bedroom window, sees the proprietress of
the hotel near the hall door, and in the road a serious-minded, quix-
otic Dublin barrister with a little boy who carries from a stick over
his shoulder twelve chamber-pots. He hears one angry, and one
soft pleading explanatory voice “But Madam, I feel certain that at
the unexpected arrival of so many guests, so many guests of the
Nation I may say, you must have found yourself unprepared.”
"Never have I been so insulted.” “Madam, I am thinking of the
honour of my country.”
a
I am at Maud Gonne's hotel, and an Italian sympathizer Cip-
riani, the friend of Garibaldi, is there, and though an old man now,
he is the handsomest man I have ever seen. I am telling a ghost
story in English at one end of the room, and he is talking politics in
French at the other. Somebody says "Yeats believes in ghosts,” and
Cipriani interrupts for a moment his impassioned conversation to
say in English, and with a magnificent movement and intonation
“As for me, I believe in nothing but cannon.”
I call at the office of the Dublin organization in Westmoreland
Street, and find the front door open, and the office door open, and
though the office is empty the cupboard door open and eighteen
pounds in gold upon the shelf.
At a London Committee meeting I notice a middle-aged man who
slips into the room for a moment, whispers something to the secre-
tary, lays three or four shillings on a table and slips out. I am told
that he is an Irish board-school teacher who in early life took an
oath neither to drink nor smoke, but to contribute the amount so
saved weekly to the Irish Cause.
a
XLIX
A few months before I was drawn into politics, I made a friend-
ship that was to make possible that old project of an Irish Theatre.
Arthur Symons and I were staying at Tillyra Castle in County Gal-
way with Mr Edward Martyn, when Lady Gregory, whom I had
met once in London for a few minutes drove over, and after Symons'
a


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
407
return to London I stayed at her house which is some four miles
from Tillyra. I was in poor health, the strain of youth had been
greater than it commonly is, even with imaginative men, who must
always I think find youth bitter, and I had lost myself besides as I
had done periodically for years, upon Hodos Camelionis. The first
time was in my eighteenth or nineteenth year, when I tried to create
a more multitudinous dramatic form, and now I had got there
through a novel that I could neither write nor cease to write which
had Hodos Camelionis for its theme. My chief person was to see
all the modern visionary sects pass before his bewildered eyes, as
Flaubert's St Anthony saw the Christian sects, and I was as helpless
to create artistic, as my chief person to create philosophic order. It
was not that I do not love order, or that I lack capacity for it, but
that, and not in the arts and the thought only, I outrun my strength.
It is not so much that I choose too many elements, as that the pos-
sible unities themselves seem without number, like those angels,
that in Henry More's paraphrase of the Schoolman's problem, dance
spurred and booted upon the point of a needle. Perhaps fifty years
ago
I had been in less trouble, but what can one do when the age
itself has come to Hodos Camelionis?
Lady Gregory seeing that I was ill brought me from cottage to
cottage to gather folk-belief tales of the fairies and the like and
wrote down herself what we had gathered, considering that this
work, in which one let others talk, and walked about the fields so
much, would lie, to use a country phrase “Very light upon the
mind.” She asked me to return there the next year, and for years
to come I was to spend my summers at her house. When I was in
good health again, I found myself indolent, partly because I was
affrighted by that impossible novel, and asked her to send me to my
work every day at eleven, and at some other hour to my letters,
rating me with idleness if need be, and I doubt if I should have
done much with my life but for her firmness and her care. After a
time though not very quickly, I recovered industry, though it has
only been of late years that I have found it possible to face an
hour's verse-writing without a preliminary struggle and much put-
ting off.
Certain woods at Sligo, the woods above Dooney Rock, and those
above the waterfall at Ben Bulben, though I shall never perhaps
walk there again, are so deep in my affections that I dream about
them at night; and yet the woods at Coole, though they do not come


408
MORE MEMORIES
into
my dream are so much more knitted to my thought, that when
I am dead they will have I am persuaded, my longest visit. When
we are dead according to my belief, we live our lives backward for
a certain number of years, treading the paths that we have trodden,
growing young again, even childish again, till some attain an inno-
cence that is no longer a mere accident of nature, but the human in-
tellect's crowning achievement. It was at Coole that the first few
simple thoughts that now, grown complex, through their contact
with other thoughts, explain the world, came from beyond my own
mind. I practised meditations, and these as I think so affected my
sleep that I began to have dreams that differed from ordinary
dreams in seeming to take place amid brilliant light, and by their
invariable coherence, and certain half-dreams, if I can call them so,
between sleep and waking. I have noticed that such experiences
come to me most often amid distraction, at some time that seems of
all times the least fitting, as though it were necessary for the exterior
mind to be engaged elsewhere, and it was during 1897 and 1898,
when I was always just arriving from or just setting out to some
political meeting that the first dreams came. I was crossing a little
stream near Inchy wood and actually in the middle of a stride from
a
bank to bank, when an emotion never experienced before swept
down upon me. I said “That is what the devout Christian feels,
that is how he surrenders his will to the will of God.” I felt an
extreme surprise, for my whole imagination was preoccupied with
the Pagan Mythology of Ancient Ireland; I was marking in red ink
upon a large map every sacred mountain. The next morning I
awoke near dawn, to hear a voice saying “The love of God is in-
finite for every human soul, because every human soul is unique,
no other can satisfy the same need in God.”
Lady Gregory and I had heard many tales of changelings, grown
men and women as well as children, who as the people believe are
taken by the Fairies, some spirit or inanimate object bewitched into
their likeness remaining in their stead, and I constantly asked my-
self what reality there could be in these tales, often supported by
so much testimony. I woke one night to find myself lying upon my
back with all my limbs rigid, and to hear a voice which did not seem
to be mine speaking through my lips. "We make an image of him
who sleeps" it said "and it is not him who sleeps but it is like him
who sleeps, and we call it Emmanuel.” After many years that
thought others often found as strangely being added to it, became


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
409
the thought of the Mask, which I have used in these memoirs to
explain men's characters. A few months ago at Oxford I was ask-
ing myself why it should be “An image of one who sleeps" and took
down from the shelf not knowing why I was doing so, a book which
I had never read, Burkitt's Early Eastern Christianity, and opened
it at random. My eyes lit upon a passage from a Gnostic Hymn
telling how a certain King's son being exiled, slept in Egypt, a
symbol of the natural state, and while he slept an Angel brought
him a royal mantle; and at the bottom of the page I found a foot-
note saying that the word mantle did not represent the meaning
properly for that which the Angel gave had the exile's own form
and likeness. I did not however find in the Gnostic Hymn, my other
thought, that Egypt and that which the Mask represents are anti-
thetical. That I think became clear, though I had had some pre-
monitions when a countryman told Lady Gregory and myself that
he had heard the crying of new-dropped lambs in November-
spring in the world of Fairy being November with us.
а
L
a
On the sea-coast at Duras a few miles from Coole an old French
count Florimond de Bastero lived for certain months in every year;
Lady Gregory and I talked over my project of an Irish Theatre
looking out upon the lawn of his house, watching a large flock of
ducks that was always gathered for his arrival from Paris, and that
would be a very small flock if indeed it were a flock at all when he
set out for Rome in the autumn. I told her that I had given up my
project because it was impossible to get the few pounds necessary
for a start in little halls, and she promised to collect or give the
money necessary. That was her first great service to the Irish intel-
lectual movement. She reminded me the other day that when she
first asked me what she could do to help our movement I suggested
nothing, and certainly I no more foresaw her genius than I foresaw
that of John Synge, nor had she herself foreseen it. Our theatre
had been established before she wrote or had any ambition to write,
and yet her little comedies have merriment and beauty, an un-
usual combination, and those two volumes where the Heroic Tales
are arranged and translated in an English so simple and so noble,
may do more than other books to deepen Irish imagination. They
contain our ancient literature, are something better than our Mabi-


410
MORE MEMORIES
nogion, are almost our Morte d'Arthur. It is more fitting however
that in a book of memoirs I should speak of her personal influence,
a
and especially as no witness to it is likely to arise better qualified to
speak. If that influence were lacking Ireland would be greatly im-
poverished, so much has been planned out in the library or among
the woods at Coole, for it was there that John Shawe-Taylor found
the independence from class and family that made him summon the
conference between landlord and tenant that brought land purchase,
and it was there that Hugh Lane formed those Irish ambitions that
led to his spending many thousands and gathering much ingratitude;
and where, but for that conversation at Florimond de Bastero's, had
been the genius of Synge?
I have written these words instead of leaving all to posterity, and
though my friend's ear seems indifferent to praise or blame, that
young men to whom recent events are often more obscure than those
long past, may learn what debts they owe and to what creditor.
The End



i
A DRAWING. BY CLAUDE BRAGDON






A DRAWING. BY CLAUDE BRAGDON





DOCTOR GRAESLER
BY ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
Translated from the German by Paul Bloomfield Zeisler
XII
Doctor Graesler visited his little patient every morning; after-
wards, with due regard to the possibility of endangering Katha-
rina's health, he usually took a half hour's walk before returning
home. The case, which had started off rather threateningly, took a
surprisingly light course, and after the anxiety and excitement of
the first few days had passed, Frau Sommer appeared a very affable,
cheerful, nay, even talkative lady; moreover—be this construed as
accident or design-by no chance did she pay any attention to
whether the kimono in which she received her child's physician was
wrapped about her throat and breast as carefully as the strictest
decorum might have demanded. She never neglected to inquire after
the health of Graesler's "little friend,” as she liked to call Katha-
rina; she asked him whether he intended to take his sweetheart to
Africa with him—for she had determined upon this to indicate
Graesler's winter destination or whether there was already some
other beauty, perhaps a black one, longingly awaiting him there;
and finally she insisted on pressing a bag of chocolate-drops upon
him as a present for Katharina. He thought it best to decline them,
however, in view of the danger of contagion. On the other hand,
Katharina never tired of referring to the young widow in terms
which, even allowing for an element of jealousy in her scorn, did not
seem entirely unjustified according to Graesler's own impression.
Even during the life of her husband, who had been a travelling
man and had seldom spent much time at home, Frau Sommer's repu-
tation had not been of the very best; she already had her little girl
when she was married, and it was regarded as doubtful whether
her husband was also the father of the child. All this was imparted
to Katharina by the printer's wife, with whom, during the few


412
DOCTOR GRAESLER
hours Doctor Graesler was absent from his house, she was fond of
conversing more frequently, and at all events more intimately, than
the doctor found agreeable.
He tried, once, to call the attention of his sweetheart to the im-
propriety of such intercourse; but as Katharina seemed hardly to
understand his scruples, he did not return to the matter, as he did
not want the short period of happiness allotted him to be clouded
by any kind of disagreement, and was, moreover, firmly resolved to
regard this experience as nothing more than a pretty adventure
which should not be prolonged by anything in the nature of a se-
quel. Therefore, whenever she began to ask him inquisitively, mod-
estly, and apparently without special design, about his plans for the
winter and to inquire after the climatic and social conditions of the
island of Lanzarote, he would carry on the conversation as casually
as possible and soon steer it into some other channel, so as, above all,
not to allow her to nourish any kind of hopes which he was very
definitely disinclined to fulfil. In the constant wish that no shadow
might cross his enjoyment of this interlude, he also refrained from
inquiring much about her past; he let the present suffice him, and
was pleased not only at the happiness he was enjoying but even
more at that which it was in his power to give.
And gradually, as the days and nights advanced, and especially in
the morning hours when Katharina lay sleeping by his side, the
longing for Sabine began to stir within him more potently. He re-
flected how much happier he would be, how much more worthily his
life would now be shaping itself, if instead of this pretty little shop-
girl, who had certainly had several other lovers besides the book-
keeper to whom she had been engaged, and who was deceiving her
good parents and gossiping with that neighbour of his—if instead
of this rather insignificant creature, whose charm and goodhearted-
ness he did not by any means underestimate, there were resting here,
with her blond head on the pillow beside him, that remarkable
creature who, so pure of soul, had offered herself to him as a life
companion, and whom he had disdained because of an altogether
unreasonable lack of self-confidence. For he could not deceive him-
self into denying that she had construed his foolishly timid letter as
a definite rejection—which in the last analysis had really been his
intention at that time. But could he, in his awkwardness and pre-
cipitancy, have done something which he could not undo? Was it


ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
413
.
really possible that the feelings which Sabine had cherished for him,
and expressed in a manner so well considered, might simply have
been extinguished, or were never again to be kindled? Had he not
in his own letter set her and himself a period of silence; and now, in
not letting him hear from her, was she not simply holding herself to
the agreement which he had demanded of her, and did not her very
silence, her very patience, give expression to what was noblest and
truest in her soul? After having observed the period which he him-
self had set, if he were to come into her presence now and lay at
her feet a definitive “Yes” which had been enhanced in value by
his deliberation
was it possible that he might not find her
the same as he had left her ? Certainly, no one else had approached
her in the peaceful stillness of The Range. In her purity of soul,
she could not have fallen into confusion either through his foolish
though well meant letter or through the sudden intrusion of another
passion; indeed, this anxious thought was nothing but the last diffi-
dent trembling of a lonely and intimidated spirit, which had now
been vouchsafed confidence and assurance by a miraculous decree of
fate. It seemed to him more and more that it had been Katharina's
mission to lead him back to Sabine, that the true meaning of his
existence was implicated in his love for her; and the more confident-
ly Katharina, without considering the future, offered up her youth-
fulness and her cheerful, young heart to him, the more impatiently
and hopefully his deepest yearnings went out to Sabine.
His external affairs, moreover, began to press upon him for early
decision as October approached its end.
its end. First of all, the doctor
deemed it prudent to inform the proprietor of the sanitarium that
he would arrive at the spa in a few days, and intended clearing up
the entire matter at that time. As no answer came, he followed his
letter with a telegram in which he asked whether he could count on
finding Director Frank at home on such and such a day. That he
also received no reply to his telegram annoyed him, though it did
not really cause him worry, for the man's ill-tempered, impolite
manner had left a disagreeably clear impression upon his memory.
After his previous experience he found himself quite incapable of
writing a letter to apprise Sabine herself of his coming; he would
simply take a train, arrive there, stand in her presence, take her two
hands in his—and the look upon her face should, would, clearly
give him a redeeming answer.
a
а
a


414
DOCTOR GRAESLER
XIII
The day on which Katharina's vacation came to an end, and on
which she had to leave Graesler's house to resume living with her
parents, had of course been definitely set from the very beginning.
But, as though by common agreement, neither of them spoke a single
word of the parting which now approached nearer and nearer, and
Katharina's whole behaviour was so little calculated to let one sus-
pect her of thinking at all about the separation that Graesler began
to be apprehensive lest, just as one evening she had come to him
unasked with her little grip, the affectionate creature might now
perhaps be planning to attach herself to him, without further cere-
mony, as his travelling companion for life. Consequently there
ripened in him the scheme of taking his flight from the house and
from the city some morning while she was still asleep; and he began
surreptitiously to make preparations for his departure.
Besides the Indian shawl, he had given his sweetheart several
other things left by his sister; here and there even a modest bit of a
trinket had been among his gifts, while he intended to save several
more valuable pieces of jewellery for Sabine. But on a dark and
rainy afternoon two days before his contemplated departure, when
-as sometimes happened at that hour of the day—Katharina had
withdrawn to the room allotted her, Graesler was possessed with a
desire once more to visit the attic, as though in hope of finding there
some last memento for Katharina which would serve not only to ap-
pease his own conscience, but also to console her to some extent for
his approaching disappearance. While he was searching and rum-
maging around up there, unlocking one trunk after another, contem-
plating and examining silks, linens, picture-maps, veils, handker-
chiefs, ribbons, and laces, again he came upon the packet of letters
which, according to the instructions of the deceased, were to have
been burned unread. As though he foresaw that he would not set foot
again in this darkening room for a long while, or perhaps never, he
was now for the first time conscious of a stirring of curiosity within
a
him. He laid the little packet aside, deluding himself for the pres-
ent with the thought of preserving it in a safe place and bequeathing
it to some distant heir who would be able to open it without thereby
violating any confidences on the part of one whom he had never
known and who had long been dead. And so, together with a few
pretty trifles which he had found for Katharina, above all a fragile


ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
415
a
chain of amber beads and a yellowed piece of oriental embroidery-
and this, like some other articles, he could not remember having
ever in his life seen on Friederike—he also brought down with him
this time the fairly heavy packet of letters, and laid it on the writ-
ing-table with the other things before going to Katharina's room.
When he entered, she was sitting in the arm-chair, in a reddish
brown Chinese wrapper interwoven with a gold-embroidered dragon,
-a recent gift from him-on her lap an illustrated serial novel of
the kind she was fond of reading; she had fallen asleep. Graesler
gazed at her with emotion, avoided waking her, went back into his
study, sat down at the writing-table, and played absently with the
loose threads which were twisted around the packet until the seals
cracked and broke. He shrugged his shoulders. “Why not?” he
said to himself. "I don't believe in a personal immortality. And if,
contrary to my expectations, there should be one, why, Friederike's
spirit which is now hovering in such lofty spaces will not be offended
at me. Such secrets as the packet may contain will, I presume, hard-
I
ly be so very dark.” The wrapper was soon unfolded, and what he
now saw lying before him was a great number of letters which had
been classified, each group being separated from the next by a white
sheet of paper; he soon observed that everything had been carefully
arranged. The first letter Graesler picked up was over thirty years
old and written by a young man who bore the Christian name of
Robert and had apparently had the right to address Friederike in
very tender terms. The contents showed that this Robert had fre-
quented the Graesler home; but Graesler could not recall in the
faintest who it might have been. There were probably about a
dozen letters from him: affectionate, and yet on the whole quite
innocent, scribblings that did not particularly arrest the reader's
attention. Other letters following from the period during which, in
his capacity as a ship's doctor, Graesler had been sailing around the
world and had made only short visits home every other year. But
here the handwriting fluctuated, and Graesler was at first unable
to make out just what was behind all these passionate assurances,
oaths of faithfulness, allusions to beautiful hours, waves of jealousy,
warnings, veiled threats, and monstrous aspersions; what connexion
could this dissolute affair possibly have with his sister? And he
was almost ready to believe that these letters had been addressed
to someone else, to a friend of Friederike's perhaps, and had only
been committed to her care to be stored away, when it suddenly ap-


416
DOCTOR GRAESLER
peared to him that certain characteristics of the handwriting were
familiar; and soon there remained, even according to other signs,
not the slightest doubt that the letters emanated from Boehlinger.
The interwoven threads of this strange romance were now quickly
disentangled, and it became clear to Graesler that, more than twenty
years before-at a time when she was already a fairly mature
woman-his sister had been secretly engaged to Boehlinger; he,
owing to some previous affair of Friederike's, had repeatedly de-
ferred their marriage; Friederike had then deceived him with some-
one or other, out of impatience, caprice, or revenge; and she had
finally made conciliatory overtures to which Boehlinger had replied
with outbreaks of mockery and of contempt. The tone of his last
letters was so completely devoid of all moderation, or even of de-
cency, that Graesler could not entirely comprehend how tolerable
relations, and in the end a sort of actual friendship, had gradually
been established again between the two. Graesler had experienced
suspense rather than astonishment during the reading, and it was
simply with an increased curiosity, and without any deep shock to
his ideals of her, that he set out to discover what secrets from her
life succeeding pages would divulge. There were not many left, but
as the handwritings now began to change very frequently, Graesler
supposed that Friederike had selected only single specimens to be
preserved. There were, to begin with, a few notes which contained
nothing but alphabetic letters and numerals, evidently the symbols
of a secret code. Then there was an interval of years, the next letters
dating from the time when Friederike had joined her brother; a
number of these were in French and in English, and two in a pre-
sumably Slavic tongue with which he had not known that his sister
was acquainted. There were letters that courted, others that
thanked; there were respectfully cautious letters and unequivocally
affectionate ones; now and then Graesler recalled vaguely some one
of his patients for whom—himself an unsuspecting pander—he had
very likely arranged a meeting with Friederike. But the last letter,
glowing, chaotic, and full of the presentiment of death, left not
the slightest doubt of having been written by the nineteen-year-old
consumptive whom, ten years before, Graesler had to send home
from the South in an almost dying condition; and involuntarily he
asked himself whether that pathetic young fellow had been sent to
an early grave by the widely experienced and love-thirsty woman
which his apparently virtuous sister revealed herself to have been.


ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
417
a
As her brother he was ashamed that she had considered him so little
worthy of her confidence and had probably-like another-consid-
ered him a Puritan; his memory of her was distorted by a belated
resentment that he could have appeared ridiculous to other people,
in somewhat the position of a cuckolded husband; but in the end all
this was outweighed by his feeling of gratification at the fact that
Friederike had not wasted her life. Now he could regard himself as
freed of any obligation to her; it was clear that she had taken her
life when there was no longer the possibility of pleasures which she
had once enjoyed so abundantly. And as he pondered over the let-
ters once more, picked up one or the other, and read over several
lines here and there, it suddenly dawned on him that everything
he had just learned had not really been so new and mysterious to
him as it seemed at first. He recalled, for instance, having watched
the inception of one little affair-between Friederike and a French
captain—which was touched on in these letters; it had taken place
many years ago on the Lake of Geneva; but he had not suspected its
full significance, nor desired to interfere in the liberties of a woman
more than thirty years old. And even though its further develop-
ment had necessarily escaped him, it had been just as little concealed
from him that, even as early as their long-vanished childhood, there
had declared itself in Friederike and in Boehlinger a serious inclina-
tion towards each other. And so he thought it quite possible that
the strange glances which Friederike had in latter years sometimes
let rest upon him had not signified any complaint or reproach, as he
had formerly feared; but rather, they were a plea for forgiveness
because, shutting away all her feelings and experiences from him,
she had walked through life a stranger by his side. But he, on his
part, had told her only the most innocent parts of what he had lived
and experienced in all that time; and if all this were set down in
letters that were meant to be destroyed unread it would very prob-
ably have made as questionable an appearance as Friederike's ad-
ventures of the heart. For this reason he did not believe himself
justified in resenting her reserve towards him when he had been just
as careful in his reserve towards her.
Katharina was standing behind his chair and had laid her hands
upon his forehead.
“You ?” he asked, as though awaking.
“I was in here twice before,” she said, “but you were so engrossed
that I did not want to disturb you."


418
DOCTOR GRAESLER
He looked at his watch. It was half past eight. For four hours he
had been entangled in the skeins of a played-out destiny.
“I have been reading some old letters of my poor sister's,” he
said, drawing Katharina down upon his lap. "She was a remark-
able woman.'
For an instant he even thought of telling Katharina certain facts
from the letters, but he felt immediately that he would only be vio-
lating the memory of the dead if he decided to display the details
of her life before a creature who would necessarily be wanting in
any deeper comprehension of them, and who might, in fine, take it
into her head to trace out certain similarities which were, in a higher
sense, completely non-existent. He intimated, by a gesture of the
hand which served at the same time to brush aside the letters, that
they ought to let the past lie; and in the tone of a person who has
just emerged from dark dreams into bright actuality, he asked Kath-
arina how she had been passing the time. She reported that she had
read on in her novel, carefully polished the silver and the glass-
ware on her toilet-table for a change, and moved a few buttons on
her ample Chinese wrapper. Finally she also had to confess, how-
ever, that she had gossiped in the hall for half an hour with the
printer's wife, who was really a good, diligent woman, even though
the gracious Herr Doktor could not stand her. Of course he did not
like to find that she took pleasure in conversing with such an inferior
person, or that she had stood in the hall dressed in her Chinese wrap-
per; but that would not be lasting much longer. In a few days he
would be far away, in worthier and purer surroundings, would never
again see Katharina, nor, except for a few hours or days now and
then, even his native city—since, of course, it was to be hoped that
the sanitarium would demand his presence and his energies the
whole year round. And so his thoughts ran on, while he still held
Katharina on his lap, one hand mechanically stroking her cheeks
and her throat. Suddenly, however, he noticed that she was regard-
ing him attentively and sadly.
"What is the matter ?” he asked. She only shook her head and
tried to smile. He was moved and astonished to see a few small
tears roll down her cheeks. “You are crying,” he said softly, and in
that moment he was more sure of Sabine than he had ever been
before.
"What an idea!” Katharina replied; she jumped up, made a
cheerful face, opened the door to the dining-room, and motioned
a


ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
419
a
towards the attractively set table. "And will the Doctor also allow
me to stay in my wrapper ?”
Then it occurred to him that he had again brought her down
something from the garret; he looked around for the amber chain,
which had slipped in among the letters on the writing-table, and
when he found it he put it around her throat. "Again?" she said.
“There, and now that is the very last,” he replied, and immedi-
ately regretted the remark, which sounded more severe than it had
been meant. He tried to correct it. "What I mean is”
She raised her hand slightly, as though to bid him say no more.
They sat down at the table. After a few bites she suddenly asked;
“And will you sometimes think of me down there?”
It was the first time she had alluded to their imminent separation,
so that Graesler was somewhat taken aback; she noticed the effect
of her words on him, and added quickly, “Just say 'Yes' or 'No.'”
“Yes,” he replied, smiling painfully.
She nodded as though completely satisfied, poured out wine for
both of them, and then chattered along in her own way, innocently,
merrily, as though there were no parting in prospect, or at least as
though it would concern her little when the time for it had come.
Later she wrapped herself tight in her Chinese garment, then let it
float again freely about her limbs (for it was far too wide for her)
drew it up over her head and let it sink again; then she danced up
and down the room, the kimono with the embroidered dragon gath-
ered in one hand, in the other a wine-glass, and laughed brightly, her
eyes sweet and melting. At last Graesler took her in his arms and
carried more than led her into Friederike's half-dark room; there
he embraced her with a passion which made the dull resentment
against the departed, the liar, his sister, Aicker and at last die out.
XIV
On the following morning, while Katharina was still asleep,
Graesler arose from her side in order to pay a last visit to his little
patient, who had long since been feeling very well, but was not yet
allowed to leave her bed. But to prevent the possibility that news
of his imminent departure should reach Katharina by way of the
printer's wife, he assured the friendly mother of the little sick girl
that he would very probably stay in the city for another week.
Frau Sommer smiled. “I can understand how hard it will be for


420
DOCTOR GRAESLER
a
you to leave your little friend! What a perfectly charming crea-
ture! And how lovely she looks in that Chinese wrapper you gave
her!”
Doctor Graesler frowned. Then he busied himself with little
Fanny, who was combing her doll's blond hair with childish earnest-
ness. A few days before he had begun to tell the child about some
wild animals, intended for a circus, with which he had once trav-
elled on the same ship coming from Australia to Europe; since
that time the little girl had never let him go without making him
repeat the story and give her an exact description of the lions, tigers,
panthers, and leopards, at whose feeding in the hold of the steamer
he had occasionally been present. That day he was more brief than
usual, for he still had to make all kinds of preparations for his de-
parture the following morning. To the great dissatisfaction of the
little child he suddenly rose to leave, but Frau Sommer stopped him
at the door with a dozen questions—which he had already answered
a hundred times—regarding the further treatment of the child. His
impatience did not escape her, but she tried to make the parting
hard for him by edging up to him almost to the point of actual con-
tact, and looking up at him with grateful and tender eyes. At last
he succeeded in tearing himself away, and quickly hurried down the
steps.
He had told Katharina nothing more than that he had all sorts
of things to attend to down town and also after all this time wanted
to show up again at the hospital, so that she would not become im-
patient and he would have enough time to get ready for his trip.
He drove to the infirmary, said good-bye to the doctor in charge,
made several purchases down town, made arrangements for having
his baggage called for and expressed, and finally stopped in to see
Boehlinger, whom he still had to consult about various business
matters. The latter seemed scarcely to notice his uneasiness, and
gave him several bits of sensible advice, as well as his very best
wishes for the favourable settlement of the sanitarium purchase.
Boehlinger refrained, evidently on purpose, from any intimate allu-
sions, and it did not occur to Graesler until he was on his way down
stairs that he had just been talking to one of his dead sister's lovers.
He was, however, now impelled to rush home for his last meal with
Katharina. He wanted to pass these last few hours undisturbed
with her, without letting her notice the slightest thing unusual; and
early the next morning while she was still asleep, he would take his


ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
421
a
silent departure, leaving behind him a letter which would also con-
tain a small sum of money.
When he entered the dining-room he found the table set for only
one. The printer's wife put in an appearance and remarked, with
an expression of malicious and silly regret, that on the instructions
of the Fräulein, who had begged to be excused, she herself had at-
tended to the luncheon. Graesler's glance seemed to frighten her so
much that she left the room immediately; he, however, quickly went
into his study where he found a sealed letter from Katharina. He
opened it and read:
“My dear, my very dearest Doctor! It was so beautiful being
here with you. I shall be thinking of you a great deal. Of course I
know that you are going away to-morrow, and so I guess it will be
better that I don't disturb you any more to-day. Take good care of
yourself, and if you come back next year—but by that time, of
course, you will have forgotten about me long ago. I also wish you
a pleasant trip across the ocean. And I thank you many, many times
for everything. Your faithful Katharina.”
Graesler was deeply affected by these honest lines and by the awk-
ward, childish hand in which they were written. "Dear, good crea-
ture,” he said to himself contemplatively. But he was afraid of
weakening. He went back into the dining-room, and had his lunch
brought in to him; intermittently, but diligently, he entered re-
marks and instructions in his note-book, so as to obviate the need
of speaking to the printer's wife--whom, moreover, he dismissed
immediately after the meal. He himself went from one room into
the next. Everywhere was the most absolute order: everything
that belonged to Katharina had been removed; nothing remained
except a peculiar fragrance, especially in the room which had been
hers during the three weeks. Indeed the whole place seemed to
Graesler ineffably cool and desolate, although there was not a single
thing wrong with it. All at once he felt so lonely that there rushed
into his head the question whether he ought not cast all other hopes
and possibilities to the winds and bring Katharina back here again
from her parental home; but he realized immediately that such a
notion was unwise, or even absurd; if he were to carry it out it
would involve his whole future and would end all possibilities of
the happiness which now seemed so near him. Sabine's picture was


422
DOCTOR GRAESLER
suddenly illuminated with amazing clearness in his soul. It occurred
to him that there was no longer anything to restrain him from rush-
ing off with the evening train that very day and seeing Sabine again
as early as the following morning. But he abandoned this idea, be-
cause he shrank from having to face the woman he longed for in a
condition of listlessness and exhaustion, after perhaps a sleepless
night on the train; he decided to employ this extra time in writing
a letter which should announce his arrival and prepare Sabine fa-
vourably for it. But as he sat at the writing-table, pen in hand, he
could not form a single sentence which could have expressed even an
approximate idea of his inner state; he let a few words suffice, writ-
ten boldly and with passion;
“To-morrow evening I shall be with you. I hope for a kind re-
ception. Longingly, E. G.”
Then he dashed off a telegram to Doctor Frank, stating that he
would arrive the following morning and would like to have word
left at his home as to whether the construction work might be com-
menced on the fifteenth of November. He personally deposited both
the letter and the telegram at the post office, went back home again,
put things in order, locked up anything of value, and packed his
grip, placing on the very top a little antique cameo, set in gold and
representing the head of a goddess. During the night he started up
at least half a dozen times in a confused, phantasmal fear that all
would be lost to him for ever-Sabine, and Katharina, and the sani-
tarium, and his means, and his youth, and the beautiful sun of the
South, and the ivory cameo—if on the morrow he overslept the hour
of departure.
a
ху
It was a mild and sunny afternoon late in autumn when Doctor
Graesler arrived in the little watering-place. Before the station
stood some half-dozen hotel-coaches and two cabs; the hotel-drivers
called out the names of their respective hotels, but without real con-
viction, as visitors were not in the habit of coming for the cure at
that advanced season of the year. Doctor Graesler rode to his lodg-
ing-house and instructed the driver to wait. First of all he asked
for his mail, was vexed that no reply had arrived from Doctor
Frank and bitterly disappointed that there was not even a line of
greeting from Sabine; he inquired of the obliging landlady whether


ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
423
anything noteworthy had taken place in the town or its surround-
ings, but he learned no news, and, as he had apprehended, found out
nothing about The Range. At last he drove up the familiar valley-
road in the deep, evening twilight; there were no stars; the villas
were for the most part deserted; the hills stood out darkly. Of a
sudden he realized with inexorable clearness something which he
had been stupidly trying to conceal from himself for days and up
to the very last: he was facing a desperate—and probably hopeless
-attempt to recapture the goodwill of the most glorious of beings
—the goodwill which he had half carelessly, half faint-heartedly,
trified away.
While he was searching incessantly, but vainly for irrefutable
words of vindication and for phrases of irresistible tenderness, the
wagon suddenly halted—in the middle of the road, it seemed to
Doctor Graesler. And all at once, as though the house had only
just been illuminated, a reddish gleam of light fell along the foot-
path and across to him. He climbed out; slowly, in order to calm
his violently beating heart, he strode up to the door-way. His ring
brought an immediate response; just as he was about to enter, he
saw the door of the living-room open and Frau Schleheim step
forth, while Sabine, after raising her eyes from a book, had remained
a
quietly sitting at the table.
"Why, how lovely that you should have taken notice of us poor,
forsaken women,” said the mother, holding out her hand to him in
hearty welcome.
“I took the liberty of dropping Fräulein Sabine a line to say I
was coming."
Sabine had now also risen and, stretching out her hand pleasantly
to the doctor, who had approached the table, she said:
"Welcome, Doctor."
He tried to read her look, which rested upon him serenely, alto-
gether too serenely. Then he inquired after the head of the house.
“He is away on a trip,” Frau Schleheim replied.
I ask where he happens to be at present ?” Doctor
Graesler went on to ask, taking a chair at Sabine's invitation.
Frau Schleheim shrugged her shoulders. "We don't know that
ourselves. This happens now and then. He will be coming back
again in a few weeks. We have had the experience before," she
concluded, and exchanged a glance of mutual understanding with
her daughter.
“And may


424
DOCTOR GRAESLER
"You are staying here for some time, Doctor?” the latter asked.
He looked at her, but the expression of her face was quite non-
committal.
“That depends,” he said. “Probably not very long-just until
I have disposed of my affairs."
Sabine nodded absently. The servant came in to set the table.
"You will stay and have supper with us, won't you?” the
mother asked. He hesitated before replying; again his gaze sought
an answer in Sabine's eyes.
“Of course you will stay and eat with us, Doctor. We have been
counting definitely on you."
Graesler felt that it was not kindness she was showing him-
mercy, perhaps. He nodded his head mutely. As everyone was si-
lent and this was especially painful to him, he began in a lively
fashion:
“First of all I must look up Doctor Frank to-morrow. For only
think of it, ladies, he did not even let me have an answer to my
last
letter. But I am still in hopes that we can come to an agreement."
“Too late,” Sabine coolly interposed, and Graesler felt imme-
diately that she was not referring only to the business opportunity
he had missed. "Doctor Frank,” Sabine then explained, "has made
up his mind to continue managing the establishment himself. For
the last few days they have been busily at work renovating the
place. Your friend Adelmann, the architect, has undertaken the
job.”
"No friend of mine," said Graesler, “or he would have found
some way of letting me know.” And he shook his head gravely and
slowly, as though he had experienced a bitter disappointment at the
hands of the architect.
“Under those circumstances,” Sabine remarked politely, “I sup-
pose you will be going south again.”
“Yes, of course,” Graesler responded quickly. “Back to my good
little island of Lanzarote. Yes
In fact this climate!
Who knows whether I am still equal to one of these mid-European
winters.”
To be concluded



AN
a
GOVER
MICO
Courtesy of the artist
FRESCO. BY GINO SEVERINI





VIENNA LETTER
September, 1922
E
VERY large city has its double aspect: one can consider it
either as a unit of society or as a unit of isolation. Indeed, the
background of isolation for the modern man is just as wholly the
large city as the virgin forests were the background of isolation for
men of the Middle Ages.
Vienna-and like Paris it has a marked social character-has
always, again like Paris, possessed great and noteworthy recluses.
The social character was never more emphasized than around 1815,
when the sovereigns and diplomats of Europe, the loveliest women,
and the best singers and virtuosos assembled for a general rejoicing
over Europe's emancipation from the oppressive genius who had
been transferred recently to the inhospitable island of Elba. But to
us a hundred years later, the busy Vienna of those days is first of all
the background of a morose and titanic seclusion; aside from all this
turmoil Beethoven moved with a heavy tread, living in some suburb
like a grey old lion in his den, changing his quarters twenty-nine
times in twenty years, and finally, when he had been hunted
up
and
found, remaining as distant and as unattainable as ever.
But, also in the later part of the nineteenth century and in our
own times we have known such recluses; they will never cease to
exist or, in a certain sense, to be the true connoisseurs of this city;
they live on the outskirts—a short walk from a district of vine-
yards and meadows—but never in the villas or cottages which have
made certain spots of the beautiful city to the west and south into
something trivial and generally European; but they live in quiet,
unpretentious lanes on the periphery, where the houses date mostly
from the middle of the nineteenth century and are inhabited by
petty officials, professors, manual labourers of the better class, and
owners of small manufacturing establishments: inconspicuous exist-
ences in inconspicuous houses. Among these inconspicuous exist-
ences there has always been a sprinkling of remarkable individuals,
intellectuals of very distinguished rank; but they have no points of
contact with the transient intellectuals of the press, the theatre,' and


426
VIENNA LETTER
the coffee-house. (In Austria, as in Italy, the coffee-house performs
very much the same function as the club.) Nor do they have much
to do with the circles of the university or of other higher schools
and academies. I speak of those mental labourers of whom Vol-
taire has said beautifully:
“Les gens de lettres, qui ont rendu le plus de services au petit
nombre d’êtres pensants, répandus dans le monde, sont les lettres
isolés, les vrais savants, renfermés dans leur cabinet, qui n'ont ni
argumenté sur les bancs de l'université ni dit les choses à moitié dans
les académies: et ceux-là ont presque toujours été persécutés.”
The persecution of such individuals, which in Voltaire's time was
carried on by the church authorities or the minister of the absolute
sovereign, has taken a new form in our democratic age: a disastrous
disinterest extending over decades or even over an entire lifetime.
Remarkably enough, this punishment is seldom passed on mediocre,
doubtful, or half-way artists and thinkers, but is aimed with all its
vigour at the exceptional individuals only, and at the purest and
the highest accomplishments.
Seven years ago, in October, 1915, there died in one of these in-
conspicuous houses a very inconspicuous individual, Karl Eugen
Neumann. He died exactly at fifty, although the fact that it was
his birthday was overlooked by himself as by everyone else. He
was unquestionably the greatest German Orientalist of his times.
His translations of all the canonical writings of Buddhism, and
especially of the discourses of Buddha according to the Prakrit
text, are complete both as to rhythm and significance; and beyond
all doubt they have formed one of the richest cultural acquisitions
of our generation. German culture had no equivalent for England
and America's Sacred Books of the East, which are an inexhaustible
thesaurus of Oriental wisdom. Yet in this one matter of the Buddha
discourses--and considering the linguistic significance which this
translation, by its fidelity to the spirit and movement of the origi-
nal, had for the German nation—I feel bound to assert that none of
the translations in the imposing array of the Sacred Books has any-
thing near the corresponding significance, mutatis mutandis, for
England and America. K. E. Neumann published the individual
volumes of his translations over a period of twenty years. He
worked constantly, both as a scholar and a poet (or craftsman of


HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL
427
a
language) with but two interruptions for the purpose of trips to
)
Ceylon. He visited the remotest monasteries to compare texts of
the sacred books and to converse with Sinhalese monks on the inter-
pretation of obscure or equivocal passages. Often a journey of sev-
eral days was repaid by the clearing up of one single word. And it
frequently happened that the conversation between him and the
Indian ended with Neumann more finally established in his own
interpretation, while the autochthonous interpreter received instruc-
tion instead of giving it. The public remained indifferent to these
translations, and the specialists at the universities treated them with
jealous disfavour; these were the works of some private scholar who
belonged to no university, no academy, no learned coterie. The
publisher finally became cool towards a writer whose publications
for the most part had not gone into a second edition even after
twenty-five years. (Last year, four years after the death of the
author, a publishing firm issued in a pocket edition a Shorter
Collection of Buddha's discourses; this collection, which was
under the careful supervision of the deceased's dearest friend, went
through forty thousand copies within a few weeks.) Neumann often
had to wait for years before the publisher was disposed to issue an-
other volume of the invaluable works; he utilized this time in in-
creasing and reworking the annotations which accompanied each
volume of text. He wove these annotations into a thick cocoon which,
if its single thread were stretched in a line, would extend thousands
a
of miles. Countless parallels to the passage in question are skilfully
selected and incorporated. There are quotations from the neo-Pla-
tonists, the mystics of the Middle Ages and the seventeenth century,
acute side-references to products of architecture and folk-lore. The
whole is like a lecture by a Protagoras or a Pico della Mirandola.
And his style is perhaps the best of any German savant since
Schopenhauer; for he belongs to this type, the type of the eruditus,
and not, like Nietzsche, to the informal thinkers and the brilliant
subjective stylists. As I have said, his death was as little noticed by
the public as his life had been. After he had already been lying in
his grave for six months, letters kept filtering in from foreign corre-
spondents. Among them was one from a large German paper; the
editor was requesting Herr K. E. Neumann to give them as soon as
possible an obituary for a famous Scandinavian Orientalist who had
just died. The friend who had taken over the arranging of his post-
humous works and who was receiving his letters was compelled to
a
a


428
VIENNA LETTER
a
answer with somewhat bitter humour in that he requested the editor
to hold off the obituary of the Dane until the long-delayed obituary
of his collaborator of many years, K. E. Neumann, had been pub-
lished.
Such an enormous degree of neglect as K. E. Neumann received
during his lifetime is more than a match for Rudolf Kassner's ob-
scurity. This acute and unusual philosopher—the word is taken here
in its broader sense, as the eighteenth century and the ancients used
it-can always count on a very faithful, although somewhat lim-
ited, group of readers who would not let a single one of his books
pass unread. His books are permeated with an elegance which is in
a way reminiscent of the ancients: they are small, succinct volumes,
apparently written in a facile, mundane style; but if one knows how
to read them fully, or down to their depths, they will be found to
offer an extraordinary substance out of which a highly significant
and important work is constructed.
Nearly twenty-five years ago Kassner began with a book of essays
on the English poets and artists of the nineteenth century. Blake,
Shelley, Keats, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Swinburne, and Browning
were each allotted a chapter. One chapter took up William Morris
and Edward Burne-Jones, and in another chapter the author had
assembled everything which fell in with his formulation of the
“Dream of the Middle Ages.” This book was a thorough and in-
genious monograph; but it was also more than that. It was the
sketching of an entirely new universal aesthetic, a powerful link in
that chain of European understanding and mutual attraction—I
am discussing the life of the spirit, and not politics—which charac-
terizes the last ten years of the nineteenth century. The book was
also the first harbinger of a new literary personality. It was evident
from the start that this personality would be hard to classify and
pigeon-hole; and perhaps it was this very difficulty among others
which has kept Kassner a writer of extraordinary unpopularity in
spite of his quite extensive reputation.
The book was unusually spirited, just such a book as a young
and promising man should write. At that time Kassner was
not much over twenty-five. The influence of several great Eng.
lishmen, Irishmen, and Americans is plainly felt: one can note the
effect of Walter Pater as well as of Oscar Wilde; Emerson's con-
tribution is unmistakable, also De Quincey's and Landor's; but
above all, and almost inevitably, Plato predominates. Neverthe-


HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL
429
less, it remains a very personal book. With the keenness of youth
the author saw perfectly just how peculiar and how isolated his
spiritual position in Central Europe was at that time. He recog-
nized that he could not move in complete harmony with any group
or spiritual type of our times. But he also knew that the Platonists
of the ancient world, the sceptics at the close of the Renaissance,
and the moralists of the eighteenth century were his spiritual for-
bears; and in a preface which has remained as brilliant to this day
as it seemed then, he circumscribes his function—that of the critic"
—and his spiritual position with an incomparable keenness:
“He [the critic] is the philosopher without a system, the poet
without rhyme, the society man in seclusion, the aristocrat without
an escutcheon, the Bohemian without an adventure. He possesses
.
much love and little power, great pride and no servants. He has the
most delicate ear, but cannot strike a note. His knowledge is un-
limited, but his sway is usually nil. He is without talent and re-
mains essentially without response. He is defined by that which he
does not possess, and he always finds the extent of himself in others.
He is a Hamlet whose father was never murdered. Others can make
nothing of his happiness; his misery seems to them lacking in utility
-but he loves life in the art of others, and he loves their art in his
own life. Their thoughts and their themes are of no moment; he
has eyes only for the play and the movement of it all. To him the
world is one great form for which he in his own thoughts supplies
the substance. In his most felicitous moments it seems to him as
though the life-forms of others were tossing on his thoughts, like
boats on the waves of the sea.”
This was both a self-portrait and a programme, the announce-
ment of a personality and the prospectus of a life work. To-day
this work lies before us; perhaps it is not completely rounded off,
yet it is organic and significant. Kassner has remained indubitably
in the highest field of criticism; he announced himself as a "Pla-
tonic” critic, and such he has remained. He always aimed at dis-
covering the identity or co-ordination of every productive agent; he
sought the absolute unity between the innermost essence of the artist
and the technical methods employed in its expression, or the unity
between the artist's proclivities and his place in history—a unity
which might also be called the style, or the spiritual physiognomy,


430
VIENNA LETTER
or the cipher of a man. But his stimulating curiosity went much
further. It was not merely concerned with the poems, novels, and
revelations of important individuals; it also took into account their
features and build, going still beyond this to the spiritual physiog-
nomics of countries and whole races, to considerations of what might
be called the spirit of an age or the spirit of a people. The centre
of his interests moved from the West to the East; and the little
book which he calls Der Indische Gedanke is certainly the subtlest
and most succinct work written on the Indian character in Central
Europe or perhaps in all Europe. Kassner's power lies in his re-
fusal to pass anything by as a mere insignificant detail. He can
speedily discover some relationship connecting the most heterogene-
ous elements. In this, as is true of all original thinkers, his mind-
which in spite of its subjectivity is guarded and rigorous—follows
the procedure of nature itself: it makes no division into the impor-
tant and the subsidiary, and rejects any distinction between exterior
and interior. It seems almost self-evident that a man like Kassner
should begin his career by translating Plato and that in maturity
he should arrive at physiognomics. The subject of his latest books
is entirely physiognomics; not, however, in the restricted and pedan-
tic manner of the eighteenth century. His method is peculiarly his
own, and holds a half-way position between the systematic and the
fragmentary or aphoristic. The most recent of his books, Die
Grundlagen der Physiognomik, contains many sharp and profound
observations concerning mouth and eye, ear and chin, the contrast
between the face and the nape of the neck, between the front and
back views of the human frame; and from this—without the slight-
est break in his treatment—he goes into the deeper subject of repose
-
and mobility as it shows on the human face, contrasts the ancient
type with the modern-utilizing the opposites: seeming and being,
art and reality. In short, morphology becomes for him the channel
whereby one enters into the realm of a truly universal or philosophic
manner of considering the world.
My American readers will be surprised if I follow the names of
these two isolated spirits with that of Dr Freud, who has been fa-
mous for some years in both hemispheres and whose psychoanalytic
theories have been adopted by hundreds of students and, in a partly
elaborated form, have become a kind of world-power. But in mat-
ters of the mind fame is an unrelated incidental feature, very often
the result of sheer accident. In any case it leaves no imprint upon


HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL
431
the spiritual profile, and does no more, at the most, than set off that
profile with greater clarity. Twenty years ago Dr Freud was the
same kind of interesting and inconspicuous private citizen as Ru-
dolf Kassner or Karl Eugen Neumann—and all three men, by the
way, are of similar age. He was essentially the same then as now;
there was living in him an intuition which gave him the key to a
great maze of the most secret and silenced processes operating not
only in the individual but in the community as well. No one had
ever before held this key in his hand with such awareness—with the
exception of the poets. But the poets—who have held this key firm-
ly and at all times—were prevented from using it except as some-
thing priestly, veiled, and esoteric. As to Dr Freud, with the bold-
ness and the fanatical zeal of an inventor and a discoverer he has
made a far-reaching exoteric use of the key in his hands. Twenty
years ago a friend of his, Dr Brewer, a practising physician of
Vienna, made an acute and penetrating observation to him. Dr
Freud supplemented it with astounding and highly consequential
propositions of his own. And this marked the first decisive step in
the formulation of that viewpoint which he has since fixed in such
an acutely chosen terminology, as though it were made into a high-
power search-light with its strong lenses turned upon one field of
existence after another. Among other things, this procedure has
produced those remarkable books on the meaning of dreams, the psy-
chological phenomena of daily life, and his widely known and
stimulating theory of sex; nor must we overlook certain other works
in which this same search-light is trained upon the phenomena of
prehistoric times, upon tales and myths, or other forms of the primi-
tive community as in his treatment of the concepts totem and taboo.
His new book, which lies before me, has as its subject crowd-
psychology. The book The Crowd, which was written by Le Bon,
has been famous for a number of years. Recently a group of English
savants has been occupied with the same theme, and it is evident that
this activity comes as a result of the war. For in war the idea of the
organized mass so obviously triumphs over the idea of the indi-
vidual which we had been accustomed since the Renaissance to hold
as the fulcrum of European thought, or to take silently for granted.
It is quite natural that, as a reflex to the new poignancy which these
problems have acquired, there should arise such inquiries as Mc-
Dougall's The Group Mind, or Trotter's Instincts of the Herd in
Peace and War which made its appearance in London during the
a


432
VIENNA LETTER
second or third year of the war. Freud begins his new book by ana-
lysing the works of these predecessors. He gives each one of them
due credit, only laying especial stress on the descriptive qualities of
Le Bon's book, which he characterizes as unparalleled in this par-
ticular. Then with his customary sharpness and concision, Dr
Freud extracts the universal core from these theories and finds that,
in spite of a varying terminology, it all falls under the general head
of suggestion. And as to McDougall's formula for explaining that
sheer snatching up and carrying away of the individual which is the
chief aspect of mass movements—his “principle of the primitive
sympathetic response”—even this formula cannot escape the conno-
tation of imitation and contagion, or in other words, of suggestion.
Consequently, all these interpretations of the crowd lead to the idea
of suggestion as an elementary phenomenon which is incapable of
further reduction and must be treated as a basic fact concerning the
activities of the mind. At this point Dr Freud raises one of his
favourite objections: for more than thirty years he has been averse
to the use of suggestion to explain things while suggestion itself
undergoes no explanation. Was the search-light which had pierced
so many phenomena to find its beams too weak for the thick fog of
this concept? And now, after having held off for thirty years from
the puzzle of suggestion, "after so long an abstention from inquiry
into the conditions under which influences can operate
without an
adequate logical foundation,” Freud decides to employ in the inter-
pretation of these phenomena that same idea of the libido which
plays such an important part in his study of psycho-neuroses.
As Freud's work teaches us, the expression libido serves to indi-
cate the "energy (quantitatively considered, although incommen-
surable) of all those impulses having to do with whatever can be
included under the term love." The idea which is contained in the
word love is enormously extensive, and is limited neither above nor
below. It is at once the love which the Apostle speaks of in Corinth-
ians, and the pws of Plato. Everything is united here; and
nothing is excluded, whether it be self-love, the love between
parents and children, or friendship, or the general love of mankind,
or even the devotion to concrete objects and abstract ideas.
It is quite evident from the discoveries of Dr Freud and the use
he makes of them, that his entire spiritual slant and that of his
students is peculiarly the property of our times. Although we could


HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL
433
not pass judgement now as to their absolute significance, we must
discern in them something highly up-to-date, the word as used here
having no pejorative connotations. It seems more difficult to de-
termine whether the Freudian theories could have originated in any
other spot in the cultural world of Europe and America, or whether
Vienna was the one predestined point. For my part I am not in-
clined to consider any factor in such phenomena as accidental; I
take it that every modification of time and place has its effect on the
spiritual product. I see it as more than a mere accident that K. E.
Neumann should have lived and ended his obscure life here; for
Vienna is the old Porta Orientis of Europe. Likewise I find it very
fitting and consistent that Dr Freud's theories should have started
on their career from this city, like those facile and somewhat trivial,
yet pliable and seductive opera melodies with which they have so
few points of actual contact. Vienna is the city of European music;
she is the Porta Orientis also for that mysterious inner Orient, the
realm of the unconscious. Dr Freud's interpretations and hypoth-
eses are the excursions of the conscious time-spirit along the shores
of this realm. In my first letter I tried to explain how closely the
basic element of Austrian music seems to coincide with local condi-
tions, with that which the French language designates as sociable,
and which differentiates the Austrian nature from the German na-
ture as a whole. But nothing is so closely related to the social and
the sociable as psychology, which is nothing other than the system-
atic application of social faculties. In both cases the demand is to
appreciate the feelings of others, to note their more subtle excita-
tions, and in a degree to identify oneself with them—all of which
goes to make up something which is unlearnable: tact. This seems
to me the most natural explanation for the fact that German scien-
tificism is occasionally accused of lacking psychological fineness,
while on the other hand it is in this very field of psychology that
there is such a pronounced contact between Viennese researches and
those of Western Europe in general, especially the Parisian school.
The internal force, which we might call the genius loci, is active
in many ways, and there is a great attraction in noting the relation-
ship among its various facets of expression.
HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL


DUBLIN LETTER
September, 1922
A
LTHOUGH Dublin has never inspired in any of its poets
quite the feelings with which Sir Walter Scott apostrophized
Edinburgh—"piled close and high, mine own romantic town!”—
it has not lacked honour in literature. Without reckoning two con-
spicuous works produced within the last dozen years, enormous in
volume and unique in form and design, one might make a consid-
erable list of novels and social studies of life in Dublin, historic or
domestic; and of recent years there has been evident in our poets a
desire to see Dublin in the light of romance, to name its streets in
verse (with something of the defiant spirit of Walt Whitman) in
a word, by means of art, to create a spiritual Dublin, not built with
hands. The Anglo-Irish, however, it must be owned, have never
evolved a local sentiment for “dear dirty Dublin” comparable with
that of the Lowland Scotch for "Auld Reekie.” Its squares and
streets, named hitherto mostly after members of the English nobil-
ity, are paced by its citizens with little glow of communal feeling.
“Sydney Parade!” I once exclaimed to A. E., “Could Villon himself
have brought that name into a poem ?" His reply was that there was
no locality in Dublin which he would shrink from naming proudly
in verse; and when next I met him he had, in fact, produced some re-
sounding verses in which he had not hesitated to mention Rathgar
Road in the same breath with Nineveh and Babylon. His poem was
a noble one; but I had been thinking less of such daring poetic coups
as Francis Thompson's stanza about Charing Cross, or Walt Whit-
man's occidental orientalism in Broadway, than of such simple
things as "Within a mile of Edinboro' town,” or “The boat rocks at
the pier o' Leith,” or even, “The Lord in his mercy be kind to Bel-
fast!” A folk-spirit flowering spontaneously and cordially into local
references of this kind, the poets of Dublin do not inherit. And the
reason is that Dublin, for all its antiquity and romance (it is men-
tioned, as is well known, on Ptolemy's map of about 150 A. D.)
and its beauty of hills and waters, possesses only a vague historic
individuality. It wears its metropolitan crown with a rakish and


JOHN EGLINTON
435
seedy air. There exists in Dublin no corporate sentiment such as be-
longs, I fancy, only to places which retain the memory of some good
cause which has triumphed there, or of some phase of moral en-
thusiasm which has been the sanction of subsequent well-being and
prosperity. If any place in Dublin was sacrosanct it should have
been, one would have thought, the chamber in which its ancient
archives were stored. And yet, not many weeks ago, about noon, ,
when we Dublin citizens were at our work, we were shaken by a
monstrous explosion, and rushing out of doors soon perceived, under
black volumes of smoke rolling seaward, gleaming objects which we
rightly surmised to be the shreds of the intimate records of Dublin's
life for many hundreds of years, the documents over which Sir Sam-
uel Ferguson had laboured. And this was the deed of no Caliph
Omar, but of a patriot who bore the name of Ireland's last monarch,
Mr Roderick O'Connor.
Thus it will be understood by the reader who may wish to learn
what kind of reception Mr Joyce's Ulysses has found in Dublin,
that there is here, as I say, no corporate sentiment likely to take
offence at his cruel realism. The book has, in fact, been received
with enthusiasm by those who provisionally determine literary fame.
in Ireland. “A marvellous book—it has broken up English litera-
-
ture!”—“It puts Ireland at the head of European literature!”-
these are some of the phrases in circulation; chiefly among the newly
emancipated youth of the National University colleges, who dis-
parage the Protestant-minded Shaw with a whole-heartedness which
would satisfy even Mr Ezra Pound, and turn to the pure diabolism
of Mr Joyce as to the living waters of a new art. The first was the
phrase of a Dublin bookseller who was pleased by the number of
orders he had booked. I have heard a highly intelligent Catholic
admirer of Mr Joyce express a doubt as to whether any one but a
Catholic could really understand the book, and perhaps to savour it
perfectly the reader should be a Catholic born and bred in Dublin.
Mr Pound however makes light of its difficulties, and several non-
Catholics of my acquaintance recognize it as an epoch-making
achievement-being chiefly, I must own, of a somewhat malicious
turn of mind. For Dublin, I must repeat, is not a nurse of moral
enthusiasms. Dublin produces the scholar and the mocker: the
scholar, chiefly I think among the descendants of the old Protestant
ascendancy, who in these changed times bury themselves in their


436
DUBLIN LETTER
a
books; the mocker, chiefly among those Catholic youths whom Mr
Joyce presents to us in this work and in his Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man.
Mr Joyce is both a scholar and a mocker. But his standing as a
philosophical humorist must be determined by the answer to the
question, whether he universalizes the objects of his mockery, or is in
the main merely a local satirist. It has been maintained by a recent
critic of Swift that the caricature of humanity in Gulliver was sug-
gested by Swift's observation of the "Wild Irish.” Swift however
bore the Teagues of his time no ill will; but Mr Joyce is so minutely
personal in his mockery that the doubt arises whether his original
intention—to catch in a work of art the whole phantasmagoria of a
day of life in Dublin-has not been prejudiced by something short
of good humour. Thus A. E. passes by, and Mr Joyce sets us all
cachinnating. It is extremely well done, and we cannot help joining
in, but it is not—shall I say, very high class. I except all that relates
to Bloom in this epic work. In the philosophic Bloom Mr Joyce has
added a new character to that company of real-imaginary personali-
ties whom we know better than our nearest acquaintances, perhaps
better than ourselves.
I see that it is in debate among those who have received Ulysses
as a great event in literature, whether the work has artistic unity.
Of unity in one sense Mr Joyce is always sure; for though, Heaven
knows! there is enough variety in his book, everything in it is
atoned to one mood, the only mood, in fact, which he appears to have
at his command. In a normal work of art (if one may use the ex-
pression) certain incidents would be discordant and would shake
our faith in the moral and intelligent governor of the little world
to which we are admitted, to wit, the artist; but in the world of
mockery which Mr Joyce has brought into being, anything may drop
into its place as easily as a paragraph in a newspaper. In a normal
work of art I will say it, in a true work of art, this faith in a moral
a
and intelligent creator is stirred in proportion to its manifestation
of the author's artistic power. I do not say this in order to accuse
Mr Joyce of atheism, or of not being a god himself, but to explain
what I mean by saying that his work, with its infinite variety, is
monotonous, as only the cinema or the hippodrome entertainment
is monotonous, and that monotony is not unity. Also, is it not a
mistake in construction that this memorable Day has two begin-
a


JOHN EGLINTON
437
a
nings: we are well on towards noon with Dedalus when we have to
return to the waking-up of Mr Leopold Bloom. I have managed to
read one way or the other nearly the whole of this work, but I con-
fess that after a hundred pages or so I read on with an admiration
chiefly of the heroic persistence of the author; of the number of
things he knows, notices, remembers; of the unfailing vitality and
purity of his phrase; of his superb powers of mimicry and literary
impersonation; of the half-kindly and painstaking exactness which
mitigates his cruelty. Such a display of erudition is only possible
where a man has subordinated all his reading and research for a
long period to a single purpose. This alone is admirable; and it
condones the use (which one suspects) of encyclopaedias and above
all of Thom's Dublin Directory.
All the same, I doubt whether this massive work is of good
augury for Irish literature. Just as it was a disappointment that
Sweden—a land, one fancied, with bones of iron and breath fra-
grant with the pine-should produce as her literary representative a
mere bundle of nerves like Strindberg, such as the exhausted Medi-
terranean races could so well understand; so it is a little disconcert-
a
ing to find Ireland—the country where, as the world fancied, Faith
still lingered in all its bookless artlessness—breathing out no heal-
ing airs from its boglands into European literature, but rather-in
this its most important contribution to literature for some time—a
particularly strong and composite odour from mean streets and
brothels. Mr Joyce's masterpiece is a violent interruption of the
movement known as the Irish Literary Renascence, and I shall look
forward to the new edition of Mr Ernest Boyd's history of that
movement, in which he will study its significance.
JOHN EGLINTON


BOOK REVIEWS
CLAUDE BOVARY
One of Ours. By Willa Cather. 12mo. 459 pages.
Alfred A. Knopf. $2.50.
WE
E have been lately advised to confine ourselves, in dealing
with our contemporaries, to book-reviewing and to leave
criticism alone. It may do for criticism to be concerned with the
past; and for the future to deal with our present. But for the pres-
ent to react effectively on the present is, for some reason, considered
superfluous and perhaps ill-bred.
Miss Cather's new work is an exceptionally good example of the
kind of work to which mere reviewing is inadequate, the kind which
must be criticized or let alone. The reviewer can guide the reader
and buyer of books; but the critic, having his centre of interest in
the art which is being practised, and the centre of influence in the
public taste, with more than a slight concern for the creative process,
looks to something a little more serious than the sign-post for his
symbol. He has to think, when he considers a novel, of what the
novel has been and can be; he has to remember how books are read
as well as what books; he has to want, however presumptuously, to
assist the creative power by giving it a wider appreciation as well as
by indicating its present lapses and its possible achievements. No
less than all of these things Miss Cather calls for, even by such a
novel as One of Ours which has the fatal defect of dulness. Be-
cause she is a serious writer, and a meritorious one. Her merit lies
in her exceptional honesty; she has not, in the novels of Nebraska,
written a meretricious line. It lies in her having an intelligence
above that of most practitioners of her art. It lies in a certain
dignity.
Honesty, intelligence, and dignity are no mean equipment when
they are joined to a special faculty which is the power to commu-
nicate (it is his personal vision of the world that the novelist seeks
to communicate to us by reproducing it, according to Guy de Mau-


GILBERT SELDES
439
passant) what has been intensely apprehended (the novel, accord-
ing to Henry James, is a personal, a direct impression of life; "that
constitutes its value, which is greater or less according to
the intensity of its impression”). Let modern aesthetics persuade
us that the two things coincide, that the impression conditions the
expression (or communication); the reader of Miss Cather's novels
cannot help feeling a small abyss between them; he cannot help
feeling that the impression must have been a little more intense
than it seems; that the lines of communication have somewhere
broken down.
This is more remarkable in One of Ours than in My Antonia and
it coincides with Miss Cather's increase of impersonality. She may
well have become weary of those who treat rustic life with irony or
contempt; in My Antonia she herself treated it with a remarkable
degree of impartial sympathy. In One of Ours it seems that she has
ceased to treat it, or anything, at all. Despairing, possibly, of the
novel afflicted with too protrusive a point of view, she has managed
to write one with none at all; she has recorded without creating; she
has described without evocation. The second half of the book is a
real tour de faiblesse: the war built up out of any number of immu-
table facts and probable incidents, brightly and brilliantly ineffec-
tive. It is in this portion of the book that Miss Cather has entirely
given up the effort to communicate; she has almost stopped writing
fiction altogether. For after noting the Doctor's report that “a
scourge of influenza had broken out on board, of a peculiarly
bloody and malignant type,” she adds a foot-note "the actual out-
break of influenza on transports carrying United States troops is
here anticipated by several months.”
It semes to me that such a foot-note, so thoroughly giving away
Miss Cather's fictional case, could only have been added to prevent
unfavourable criticism on the ground of historical inaccuracy; and
this apprehension, dismal as it is for the author, illuminates by its
justness the equally sad plight of the critics. It at once abdicates
the sovereign throne of the creative artist and reproaches the pre-
tenders. But it concedes everything, which is too much; and it gains
nothing. The whole matter has been discussed in The Poetics.
But if our novelists will not study Aristotle, they surely will not
object to reading Flaubert. The first half of One of Ours freely
suggests Madame Bovary. Claude Wheeler ought to be even more


440
CLAUDE BOVARY
interesting than Emma, since he is both emotionally and intellec-
tually at odds with his circumstance. The narrowing of his radius,
the cruel stoppage to his freedom, the trap which fate springs for
him, are, fact for fact and movement for movement, as capable of
interesting us as the sad events of the Bovarys. The influenza epi-
demic ought to be as good as the horrible amputation; the war, as
background, offers more than Flaubert chose to use. And that this
book fails to come to life is not to be set down to a lack of genius, for
a fair talent can make a book live. It is due, I think, to the cal-
culated pursuit of a purpose alien to fiction, the purpose to record,
rather than to create.
When this purpose is forgotten Miss Cather's deliberate care in
statement, her occasional utterance neither shrill nor weak of pas-
sion, lead her to veritable creation. Claude's mother emerges; bet-
ter still a fine emotion is conveyed in a brief chapter in which
Claude's prospective father-in-law tries to tell him what life is like,
and knows that he cannot express it. In one
In one half page the misery of
the inarticulate is set down as in the whole book the emotions of
Claude never are. The small successes are fine indeed and from
them one gathers certainty that Miss Cather can do pretty nearly
whatever she wants to do; one feels from them that the fields of
ripe corn and the tides of human joy and suffering have with in-
tensity been present in her mind's eye, that she has checked the
buoyant power, the humour, the vitality which tried to get into her
book. Possibly she found no place for them in a record of small and
dispirited things and people. It is an error in conception, and the
error in design (common in her work: the book breaks in half) illu-
minates. For the trouble is not that the war cuts off the solution of
Claude's problem in marriage; it is that the second half of the book
is about the war, and cuts off the solution of the aesthetic problem
a
as well.
GILBERT SELDES


OEDIPUS TYRANNUS
THE JUDGE. By Rebecca West. 8vo. 492 pages.
George H. Doran and Company. $2.50.
W
HEN Rebecca West goes out at the end of the first act of
Rosmersholm, the curtain falls on Madame Helseth mutter-
ing, “Lord-Lord! That Miss West! The things she says!” and
I can imagine the writer who takes her pseudonym (if such it is)
from Ibsen's alarming heroine provoking similar protests. For she
too has no inhibitions and says the things she wants to say, in the
way she wants to say them, equally careless of those she shocks by
a morally painful subject, and those she annoys by an unfashion-
ably romantic style.
Her literary reputation has till now been resting upon a high-
spirited little book on Henry James; the best psychoanalytical
novel yet published; and the best regular reviews now appearing of
current fiction. Admirers of her Return of the Soldier, and her criti-
cal articles in the English New Statesman are at last given the work
which they have so long been promised, a long and important novel,
entitled The Judge.
Before the reader has finished three pages of it, he will settle him-
self more comfortably in his chair, and surrender himself to the
powerful and lamentably rare pleasure of reading a writer who can
write. Miss West does not use the staccato style As Now Worn by
Leading Literary Ladies; her writing is rich, closely packed, highly
coloured, and individual. It seems impossible for her to be careless,
to take the easy, faded word, or to fall short of precision. Her im-
agination is primarily visual, and her landscapes stand out with
mineral hardness and brilliance. Her style reflects her subjects, like
a metal mirror, varying with their colours, but burnishing them all
to an ardent, almost truculent, loveliness. Hardly one page of the
four hundred but would provide an example, like this description of
the Pentland Hills:
“Two grassy tracks went forward, both marked by bare, unin-
scribed posts, as if they led to destinations too unvisited to need a


442
OEDIPUS TYRANNUS
name. The one they did not take climbed over the grey shoulder of
the range, and the other brought them into an eastward valley,
where there was for the moment no wind and a serenity that was
surely perpetual. The cries of the hill-birds did but drill little holes
in the clear hemisphere of silence that lay over this place. The
slopes on either side, thickly covered with mats of heather and bris-
tling mountain herbage, and yet lean and rocky, were like the furry
sides of emaciated animals, and up above, bare black summits con-
fronted the sky.”
This is not a purple patch; everywhere the texture is close and of
the same weight. But it is a little too thick, not fluid and easy
enough. Reading it is like walking through breast-high corn: a de-
light at first, it inclines to become fatiguing.
The technique is particularly ingenious by which the events are
presented through the consciousness of the different characters. We
are shown them as they appear in turn to each other, so that they
emerge in full, round relief; but they are not subjected to that de-
tached, omniscient author's gaze which places too great a distance
between the characters on the one side, and the author and reader
on the other.
The next thing to say about the book is that it is in two parts.
We are introduced at once to Ellen Melville, a very Scotch, delight-
ful, earnest, funny, shrewd, simple, contemptuous, bright-haired,
boyish, suffragette girl, who applies a strong sense of humour to
herself, but lets none touch her political ideas. In the first part we
are given her life with her mother in her penurious Edinburgh
home, and in the office, where she works, with two disgusting law-
yers, both very respectable, but with the makings, in the one, of a
,
sadist, in the other, of a voyeur. (Miss West's opinion of the male
sex is not high.) Then, with a d'Artagnanesque gesture, enter (from
Rio) Richard Yaverland, tall, handsome, dark, rich, vital, with the
masterful nature of an Ethel M. Dell hero, and a typically South
American past, in which the torrid name of Mariquita de Rojas
represents only one episode. He "doesn't care a damn for anybody
or anything” but Ellen—and his mother. Soft music, and a dear,
old, white-haired lady in the background? You little know your
authoress, and if that is what you want, put the book down at the
end of the first part, before learning more of the Mother and the


RAYMOND MORTIMER
443
Old Home to which he takes Ellen (for they get engaged at once,
of course, and her mother dies).
Miss West shows her great gift for comedy in the early part of
this book, but she is determined to make a tragedy, and having read
Freud, she knows that where there is tragedy, there must be a neu-
rosis. She remembers her Greek Tragedies, her Lear, and her
Phèdre, finds the complex she wants, but falls, I think, too com-
pletely under its domination, allowing it to tyrannize over the sec-
ond
part of her book. The first part was getting on so nicely with-
out it. Still, whereas her former novel introduced a practitioner of
the new psychotherapy and all its terminology, now she uses the ma-
terial without the jargon-a better method for fiction.
The Judge, Part II; the big skies of Essex; the mud-flats of the
Thames Estuary, and Richard's mother, Marion, "a dark, silent,
sledge-hammer of a woman,” living too intensely, in a too personal
house. Ellen suffers from it; so do we. For Marion is possessed by
the horrors of her past life, and keeps not only herself, but all who
come near her, including ourselves, living over again in imagination
her tragical experiences. All night she lies awake suffering from old
wounds that have never healed, remembering how she was seduced
by the Young Squire, and stoned (improbably enough) by the vil-
lage boys, when about to become an Unmarried Mother, and how
then she accepted as a protection the name of the Young Squire's
butler, on the understanding that the marriage should remain nomi-
nal. The old story, you think? The butler wins her love, no doubt,
and proves that kind hearts are more than coronets, and pantry skill
than Norman blood? Wrong again! Mr Peacey (that is his name)
violates his contract and his wife; the Squire's son is given a con-
temptible little brother, and we are in the middle of a home as un-
comfortable as Wuthering Heights or the House of Atreus. The
brothers hate each other; the mother hates her Peacey child, and
hates herself for hating him; while for Richard, her son by the
Squire, her love is violent and extreme; in fact
a
“C'est Vénus toute entière à sa proie attachée.”
This is the pivot of the tragedy. Ellen is faced with this frantic
woman as a prospective mother-in-law, and noble and well-inten-
tioned as they both are, they naturally cannot hit it off. Disaster fol-


444
OEDIPUS TYRANNUS
lows disaster; we sup full of suffering. The Peacey child, after fail-
ing in everything, turns up as an incredibly nauseous Salvation
Army Officer, and brings with him his fiancée, a lady who calls her-
self Miss Poppy Alicante, but is now more or less "converted.” The
house seethes with hatred, envy, and contempt.
Richard's filial love for Marion is so absorbing that he cannot
give Ellen all the conjugal love she deserves and needs. Marion
realizes this, and with a superb gesture, drowns herself, as if by
accident, to get out of Ellen's way. But her subconscious self be-
trays her, and Richard learns the truth. He falls into the lethargy
of desperate grief, and in an attempt to rouse him from it Ellen re-
peats to him the hysterical remarks of his Peacey half-brother, who
says Marion was driven to suicide because Richard and Ellen had
anticipated the marriage ceremony (this is untrue and an uncon-
vincing reason anyhow, but like all Miss West's men, he has a
nasty mind). Richard is roused only too successfully, for he puts
a bread-knife in his brother's heart; and then goes off with Ellen to
wait for the police on an island in the estuary. The book ends with
Ellen wondering whether a son or a daughter is waiting for her
there, and with us wondering what is going to happen to Richard
after the sordid horrors of a sensational trial, and why poor Ellen
should have to continue this fatal tradition of unmarried mother-
hood.
In synopsis the story may seem comic in the way that melodramas
are. Actually it is almost unendurably painful. For Miss West
writes quite extraordinarily well. There is here all the intensity of
Mr D. H. Lawrence and all the remorselessness of Emily Brontë.
The book leaves us with a grudge against the author. We can
bear the disasters that happen to Desdemona and Cordelia, because
tragedy fits them. But it does not fit Ellen (it would not fit Rosa-
lind) and it seems wanton to build up such an attractive character,
only to throw her away into an infernal pit of family life, in which
her wretched part could be played by an understudy. For in the lat-
ter part of the book she is the plaything of circumstance and wraith
of her real self. We console ourselves with the belief that any one
so humorous and capable as Ellen would have swept the poisonous
accumulations of the past out of the house, the moment she entered
it, and would never have allowed any further such disasters to occur
there.


RAYMOND MORTIMER
445
Apart from the suspicion that the two parts of the novel do not
unite, I think the only reproach that can be made concerns the tempo
of the book; it does not move quite quickly enough. It is true that
the action takes place in a short while, but there seems a lot of
“marking time.” The pasts of the characters have to be tacked on
to them, and the action held up thereby. It is as if they were being
stuffed out or blown up to make them big enough to match their
tragic destinies.
It is an exhausting book. In it, as in a room it describes, “there is
present an excess of beauty and an excess of being.” Miss West has
every quality a novelist needs: startling descriptive powers, a never-
failing felicity of phrase, subtle and individual humour, most acute
insight into character, and, above all, convictions. Her smile at
Ellen's feminist enthusiasms is the smile of one who shares them,
and it is by her own feminism that she brings the invaluable gift of
passion to her work. The title of the book is explained by a sentence
on the title-page: “Every mother is a judge who sentences her chil-
dren for the sins of the father.” This may serve for this particular
book, but as a generalization seems to me rather meaningless. One
might, I should have thought, say with equal justice: "Every
father is a judge who sentences his children for the sins of the
mother.” But then criticism is eventually a personal business, and
the critic now writing is not a woman.
Having taken refuge in sex distinctions, I will end by suggest-
ing that if for this year's fiction, a man deserves the first prize—I
mean of course Mr James Joyce, a woman deserves the second—I
mean Miss Rebecca West.
RAYMOND MORTIMER


EUPHUES
INTRODUCING Irony. By Maxwell Bodenheim. 8vo.
101 pages. Boni and Liveright. $2.
ten
EATS said, I believe, that English to be elegant must be writ-
as if it were a foreign language. That is the fashion of
Maxwell Bodenheim; his English verse has the accent of another
civilization; the words lisp slightly and thereby acquire a charm
which greater writers before him had worked savantly to create.
One remembers the majestic Latinity of Milton; the overtones of
Italian in Rossetti, of Gaelic in Synge, of French in Macaulay and
George Moore. Bodenheim follows none of their precedents, but
still remains foreign; he writes English as if remembering some
learned book of Confucian precepts.
His verse is Chinese. It does not resemble Chinese poetry; it is
not a direct and unfigured commentary on nature; quite the con-
trary. It is Chinese in etiquette rather, being stilted, conventional
to its own conventions, and formally bandaged in red tape. It is a
social gathering of words; they have ancestries and are over-bred;
they know the precepts of the Law and take delight in breaking
them. Meeting together they bow too deeply, make stiff patterns on
paper or silk, relate their adventures in twisted metaphor and under
an alias, sometimes jest pompously behind a fan. They discovered
irony late in life.
Bodenheim is master of their ceremony and arranges it with an
agile fantasy which takes the place of imagination.
a
Poetry has been based on rhythm, rhyme, syllable-counting, al-
literation, repetition, and some fifty other linguistic devices. Boden-
heim makes it depend almost wholly on figures of speech. His poems
are a dictionary of metaphor, arranged in unalphabetical order. If
he had chosen to write, "When she played too loudly a man in the
next room knocked on the wall,” he would be writing prose. He
says instead, “An acrimonious man in the next room often remon-
strated with the wall when her piano conversed too impulsively.”


MALCOLM COWLEY
447
He says, “When swung to him the voices were insolent enigmas,
, "
tripping him as he stood midway between fright and indifference.
His rages were false and sprang from aloof thoughts chant-
ing over their chains.” Sometimes a pentameter line which is the
accidental essence of the eighteenth century. "The stunted messen-
gers of trembling thought.” Oftener his accumulation of images re-
sembles Shakespeare, and still more often that early and underesti-
mated model of Shakespeare's, John Lyly. Only, Bodenheim is if
possible more euphuistic.
Maxwell Bodenheim
Euphues
not “a sec-
ond Euphues”—for he is no imitator—but Euphues simply; Ameri-
can prophet of the new preciosity (and with many disciples). If I
were Max Beerbohm and making his caricature, I should draw him
in mandarin robes, posing on a torn dictionary and somehow leading
a cotillion of empty champagne bottles and tomato cans. It would
not be a very consistent portrait.
.
In his latter volume Bodenheim has included, in addition to the
poems, a number of “poetic short stories.” The word poetic, as usual
with him, means "full of metaphor," but here it carries another
meaning also; it means that these stories are fantastic, improbable,
ironic. Furthermore they are remarkable for containing no real
characters and for distilling no emotions except wonder and (I
borrow the word) a sort of windy sadness. They are not an attempt
at creating or reproducing life, but a literary criticism with faint
unimitative memories of Jules Laforgue. They are an impromptu
banquet of words, a verbal pyrotechnic: pin-wheels, Roman candles,
sky-rockets, giant firecrackers that hiss and sometimes explode; af-
terwards the memory of a boy's Fourth of July with green apple
colic and the smell of burned powder. They are by no means negli-
gible stories.
Another innovation in this latter book is rhyme, which Boden-
heim once utterly despised. He rhymes awkwardly sometimes, as if
he were the captain of the P. H. S. eleven making his first tentative
verses. He puts "boy” at the end of one line and "toy” at the end
of the next; he peppers half a dozen words before each of them
without much regard for rhythm or metre, and calls the result a
couplet:


448
EUPHUES
“Of undesired love, to quiet a boy
Who wept inanely for his favorite toy.”
Sometimes the facture of his verses is impeccable, as if he were
T. S. Eliot. One would allow ten years between the two quotations,
and yet they may have been written on the same day:
"Above the sprightly insolence of plates
Men sit and feign industrious respect,
With eye-brows often slightly ill at ease-
Cats in an argument are more erect."
No poem attains a lyrical perfection (he has a contempt for
lyricists) and no poem is without its excellences:
"Take your cocaine. It leaves a blistering stain,
But phantom diamonds are immune from greed.
You pluck them from the buttons of your vest,
Wildly apologizing for your need.”
“Two figures on a subway platform
Pieced together by an old complaint.”
“If one mutters, 'I shall go to Euston Road,
Imagination is relieved of all errands
And, decently ticketed, enters the omnibus.”
Evidently there is no consistency to his work; it cannot be cata-
logued under any of the epithets which he so abuses; there is no
place for him in the files. He is good and bad at once; brilliant and
boring; awkward and skilful. He has all the insufferability of
genius, and a very little of the genius which alone can justify it.
He will be known some day wherever an adjective meets a strange
adverb and where they bow distantly to each other; that is, he will
be known in the literary circles where such introductions are made.
Elsewhere he will never need to be forgotten.
MALCOLM COWLEY.


THE CONSEQUENCES OF IDEALISM
RAHAB. By Waldo Frank. 12mo. 250 pages. Boni
and Liveright. $2.
City Block. By Waldo Frank. 8vo. 320 pages. Pri-
vately printed for subscribers only.
LI
.
ET us imagine a room painted in this wise: there are the walls,
a window, chairs, table, food on table, and two humans. These
walls are aligned as inexorably as armies; one feels their seclusion
and their leaden mass. Light, however, pours through the flood-
gates of the window, tumbles and seethes into the room, rolling
with sheer commensurable bulk. The chairs fulfil their functions as
chairs earnestly, even avidly; in a sense one might say that they are
crying out to be chairs; they are more than chairs, by God, they
are staunch havens of palliation, they are strong, tender arms to
which our failing corporeal fibres may surrender with confidence.
As to the table, note how it offers up its contents, as profusely, as
unstintingly, one might say, as the calyx of a lily. And that man
and that woman, leaning, gravitating towards each other
they are waterspouts growing up out of the floor. Their arms hang
limp, but countless phantom arms interlock in the air. While these
two humans stand "silent upon each other, heavily."
The closing quote is from Waldo Frank, as is fitting. For our
painted room is in the truest manner of Rahab, or City Block. I
wish mainly to bring out the element of volition behind the author's
eye. He has written elsewhere that when "feet clamber up and over
a hill” the hill is already there; “the feet do not create the hill, al-
though they have a tendency to think so." Yet his own writings are
a testimony of feet which, if they do not create the hill, at least
re-create it, transforming it from a mere hill, qua hill, to a spiritual
problem, an obstacle proclaiming its identity over against the yearn-
ings and necessities of human atoms.
In 1893 Stéphane Mallarmé gave the first definite formulation of
the poetics which encompasses this attitude in writing. Building
on Hegel, he found in idealism the artist's right to his own universe,


450 THE CONSEQUENCES OF IDEALISM
a
a right which extended even to the development of a personal idiom.
Mallarmé's expert mal-writing reached a rare flowering—in such a
hothouse product, for instance, as "heureuses deux tétines.” And
the peculiar glory of these pursuits is that the artist attains thereby
"au-dessus d'autre bien, l'élément de félicités, une doctrine en
même temps qu'une contrée.”
Waldo Frank's idiom is no less personal. But instead of Mal-
larmé's special-case fauns and nymphs with their icy emotions, Mr
Frank gives us the eager, pulsing universe noted above. Still, it
cannot be denied that Waldo Frank's idealism emphasizes a some-
what different aspect. If Mallarmé was striving simply for beauti-
ful possibilities, for intriguing enormities, for likely distortions
which would appeal to the connoisseur acquainted with all the rules,
Mr Frank falls in rather with the German expressionists who strive
to give us a version of life which shall be alas! only too true. For
the last fifty years the world has been pressionistic (read, volitional)
first im and then ex. If Mallarmé, looking at a man, goes beyond
that man with the direct purpose of distortion, the expressionists
take their man, rip off his clothing, observe the sorry nipples of his
breasts, look into his viscera, and maintain that here is the real man,
the essential man. The subtle difference is that Mallarmé has said,
“Here is a distortion,” and has given us one, while the expressionists
have said, “Here is the very pulse of truth,” and their distortion has
been no less marked.
One goes into a park and sits down, and immediately, if one is an
artist, the park becomes a problem. It lies there. The individual
feels his edges knocking improperly against it. He is sitting in
somebody else's park. Then, if he is Waldo Frank, he starts re-
making that park. Exorbitant characters appear, the skyline begins
to churn, mad speeches are ground out. And we have John the
Baptist, one of the most interesting stories of City Block. But such
a park is a personal creation, and is statistically false; it is true as
a reflection of Waldo Frank's temperament, true in a sense that
Mallarmé's fauns are true, but completely erroneous as a gauge of
our environment.
My reason for pointing this out is a somewhat complicated one.
But first of all, I feel that it provides us with a criterion for ap-
proaching Mr Frank. Thus, we have the two possibilities: a book
must be statistically true, a whole and proper valuation of life; or


KENNETH BURKE
451
.
it must be true in the sense that Mallarmé’s fauns are true, must be
a beautiful possibility created in the mind of the artist. I have con-
sistently objected that Mr Frank does not qualify on condition one;
life as he presents it is assiduously culled, the volitional element of
the artist is over-emphasized. Or, to borrow from a colleague,
M. Cowley, I should say that he has stacked the cards. However, if
we admit this cheating, take it as a basis of our calculations, we
must next inquire as to whether Mr Frank cheats dextrously; we
shall not ask if he is false, but if he is superbly false. On the whole,
I think he is not, for the two books under consideration are not
finally beautiful. They lack just that element of cold carving, that
bloodless autopsy of the emotions, which allows Mallarmé so near
an approach to perfection.
True, these books have many passages of thick beauty such as
Mallarmé probably never dreamed of. When Mr Frank, for in-
stance, undresses one of his women, and opens his throat and sings
thereat, the song is full and lovely. Or when, as in Rahab
but the situation must be explained more fully: Mrs Luve is a
procuress, but a procuress with her Bible and her refinements, a pro-
,
curess who needs a great deal of explanation. Mr Frank takes us
through a book to explain her, and at the end we do accept his atti-
tude—we believe that she is a delicate woman whose denigration has
an almost Christlike significance. We see her, then, in the midst of
her set, politicians, gamblers, crooks, whores. We hear their vul-
garly minute conversation, note their unenlightened envelopment
in the immediate moment; whereupon, of a sudden, the author gives
a projection of each character, or, technically speaking, draws out
the song of each character, the lyric surrender to a grand commu-
nion of passions. That is, they sit in the room, each aware of his
apartness from the others; but each has a purer attitude within him
somewhere, a naïve burst of confidence which is suppressed: it is
this naïve burst which Mr Frank gives in his lyrical projections of
the characters present. Here passion has justified itself by the dis-
covery of an excellent subterfuge; it is Waldo Frank at his best.
On the whole, however, I must confess that the author's intensity
is too direct, lies too far beyond the subterfuge. Mr Frank is as se-
rious as Buddha, which is a dangerous thing to be in an age which
could produce Ulysses. If we have to choose between an artist who
is passionless and clever, and an artist who is tumultuous and non-
a


452 THE CONSEQUENCES OF IDEALISM
clever, it is a sad pair to choose from, but the former would be nearer
to art. Mr Frank, as I have noted above, can be clever, but as a rule
he is too precipitant. As a result, his works lack edges; one catches
an abundance of rich overtones, but they obscure the note itself.
What, for instance, is the structural significance of the City Block
cycle? What is the inevitable centre about which it revolves? It
should force itself upon us from the complexion of the work. Struc-
ture is not so priestly a thing that only the elect can glimpse it.
Structure is the first principle of a work, not the last.
As to Rahab, the case is simpler. One does, on finishing it, get a
definite retrospect. The author starts with Mrs Luve, a procuress;
then he goes back to the beginning, and gives us Mrs Luve's career;
ending upon Mrs Luve, exactly where the book began, we now have
this procuress with all the qualifications and subtilizations of 250
pages. She emerges, somehow, stationary, like a fireplug on a busy
street, like a boat anchored in a fog. There is nothing priestly about
this; it is, in fact, startlingly simple. The book is undoubtedly Mr
Frank's best piece of work up to date. It is the logical culmination
of The Dark Mother, representing directly that type of writing
which the former book was feeling for. That is, Mr Frank has
found the manner which best carries his burden.
The
same is true of certain stories in City Block taken as isolated units.
In stories like Under the Dome and John the Baptist Mr Frank has
made just as accurate a junction between the burden and the ex-
pression thereof. That is, so far as the untrammeled, direct giving
of himself is concerned, the author has attained it. These works go
the whole extent of Croceanism: the expression is immediate and
full.
But expression is not all of art; the rest is elegance. Mr Frank
has done a valiant task in his fight against the inhibitory baggage
which American art has had to lug. His work on this score is as sig-
nificant as that of Van Wyck Brooks. But both men, under the urge
of their evangelism, tend to make the emphasis on expression too ex-
clusive. It is an excellent corrective which becomes in turn a defect
if carried too far.
KENNETH BURKE


STICK OF A ROCKET
LORD Byron's CORRESPONDENCE. Edited by John
Murray. 2 volumes. Illustrated. 8vo. 334 pages.
Charles Scribner's Sons. $8.50.
THE
HESE two volumes of letters, obviously designed to supple-
ment the great Prothero and Coleridge edition of Byron pub-
lished by John Murray from 1898 to 1904, complete, presumably,
all the world's available records of that poet. Already, in 1914,
death had released these documents from the curious claims of
per-
sonal reticence; a further delay of eight years carries us over the
war and, conveniently enough, almost to the gates of those centen-
ary stirrings of 1924, when Byron, as Keats and Shelley, will be-
come the property of those proud fools who inherit the ages.
Interlarded with letters from various correspondents, by far the
most interesting of whom is Shelley, these long and jealously
guarded manuscripts Autter down to earth as the last tattered shreds
of tinsel from some gay-starred rocket. For many the main ques-
tion always is the fate of the stick. These persons will be disap-
pointed. Byronites who hoped for some counterblast adequate to
the excavations of our own Mrs Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1869, and
Ralph Lovelace's Astarte in 1905, will be cruelly vexed at finding
almost nothing. More particularly Americans, if ever they be led
so far afield as the hate and scandal following Byron's marriage,
may happen on a curious parallel to the moral activities of Mrs
Stowe in Mark Twain's vitriolic outpourings in praise of Harriet
Westbrook. But even in clean Yankee hands these spades rarely
turn up anything to excuse the stench of tombs. If Murray found
evidence, he chose to suppress it. For his house these books are a last
séance with the ghost of Byron.
But there remains a second and more genuine disappointment.
Actually, few of these letters seem to justify the long-lived mystery
with which Lady Dorchester enveloped them. Readers will inev-
itably compare them with those already published years ago. One
wonders what has been gained to offset the inconvenience of having
the correspondence printed out of its natural order. From five hun-
dred letters written chiefly to Hobhouse, Kinnaird, and Lady Mel-


454
STICK OF A ROCKET
>
bourne over a period of sixteen years, Murray has combed two vol-
umes which are supplemental, but not invaluable. By far the best
are those addressed to Lady Melbourne, who was, it will be remem-
bered, at once the mother-in-law of Lady Caroline Lamb and the
aunt of the future Lady Byron, a strategic, if delicate position. To
her the bard sent a running commentary on the courtship, the wed-
ding, and the "treacle moon,” his one definite objection to the actual
ceremony being cushions "stuffed with peach stones.” Incidentally,
whoever is sufficiently curious to consult in Appendix C two letters
containing Miss Milbanke's opinion of Byron's poetry, will require
no sexual details for explanation of why Lord and Lady Byron
failed to get on.
Yet lovers of Byron may relish all the chatter and cross references
of these books. With them, possibly, his memory lies in trust, for
among latter-day poets the tendency of Byron is decidedly bearish.
Our own damp-handed priggishness of art and intellect recoils not
only from the huge grasp of this vulgarly self-conscious man, but
also from the indolent grand manner of his verse. Poets out for a
Sunday swim, cool-tongued critics, cautious despite the bigotry of
youth, artists-in-general, all shudder before this shouting, splashing
nakedness, this salt-water splutter. Our own heroes go down to the
sea, circumspectly. Indecent Byron was—personally and mentally:
he snatched at fame as he snatched at Newstead Abbey, eagerly and
without poise. Aesthetically, mentally, and morally, he is thought
a bit of a joke.
Tragically enough, for us, our fathers thought so too. Carlyle, for
instance, devoted a considerable portion of his career to writing
down this man he dubbed a “surly dandy.” “Close”-he concludes
in his imposing pulpit manner—"close thy Byron, open thy
Goethe.” Whoever does so will be a trifle confused as to what to
do next, once confronted with Goethe's opinion of Byron:
(6
“A character of such eminence has never existed, and probably
will never come again. The beauty of Cain is such as we shall not
see a second time in the world.”
“Byron is the burning
bush.”
Trailing Byron throughout Europe, one can pick up flowers like
these almost anywhere, for critics and brides throw their bouquets
backward.


STEWART MITCHELL
455
a
Yet to forget Byron of Cain and Don Juan for the mummer of
Childe Harold and The Giaour is merely to be almost incompre-
hensibly stupid. All this romantic verse was scarcely more than
patched hand-me-downs from Walter Scott. Byron the satirist and
scoffer, the reader of the gospels, makes good food, even nowadays.
What matter if a somewhat boisterous ghost did haunt Howells in
Venice? Without being unnecessarily irreverent towards the whirl-
igig of time, wise men should credit most of its revenges to the en-
tirely conventional hatred of the young for the old. Then, too, in
our great school of comparative criticism, the aptest praise of
Rabelais, for instance, has always been a sneer at Milton.
Human emotion, however, is something more intricate. With
Byron himself the most poignant of all experiences seems to have
been his constantly recurring sensation of the impersonal passing of
time. This consciousness makes for three things: history, egotism,
and one kind of poetry. Those of us who lack it may have com-
pensations, but have missed one part of life. For us Byron is
the stick of a spent rocket primarily, perhaps, because no lusty, live
age can properly appreciate any methods but its own. Instinctively,
we divide our poetic grandfathers into two groups: those who died
in British beds, and those who did not. This, it might be argued,
is the only sensitive discrimination. Of the latter, Byron still has
much to answer for: although he seriously looked to England as “the
star of the future,” as did Shelley, for recompense he pleased his
vanity scribbling Don Juan and armed his body-servants with gilt
helmets. As evidence of the persistence of this person after a cen-
tury, we are offered two fat volumes.
STEWART MITCHELL


BRIEFER MENTION
BABBITT, by Sinclair Lewis (12mo, 401 pages; Harcourt, Brace: $2) is an
encouraging phenomenon for it starts dully and disastrously with the de-
scription of a good Rotarian, a heavy-footed seriously-conceived portrait
doing in the manner of Bouvard et Pécuchet what should be done and has
been done (Mr Benchley's Nine to Five; To the Ladies; various columnar
conversations) with a hard and brittle brightness. Form letters, advertise-
ments, six-page conversations about prohibition, evangelical sermons by
Mike Monday, all are put in, head first. And out of this, about two-thirds
way through the book, Mr Lewis gets down to the business of writing a
novel with created characters and very nearly pulls it off. Babbitt ceases to
be a transcript of what the young intellectual portrays as the tired bourgeois
and for better or worse, as far as realism is concerned, becomes a person. It
is by that time too late for the reader to shake off the consuming effect of Mr
Sinclair's documentation and observation and intellectualism; he can only
wonder what the author's emotion must have been when he discovered that
his principal character had a soul. It is a much better book than Main
Street. Mr Sinclair's way of presenting surfaces is exceedingly persuasive
and his capacity for avoiding the underlying truth held out long enough.
He ought to re-write Babbitt as a novel all the way through, for the root
of the matter may be in him.
Mary Lee, by Geoffrey Dennis (12mo, 442 pages; Knopf:$2.50) is, like Crime
and Punishment and Sons and Lovers, an almost unbearable book. Not that
it has anything in common with these two-except its unusual capacity
to communicate intensity of feeling to the reader. It is the story of a little
girl brought up by "Saints"--one of the most fanatical of English Protes-
tant sects, flourishing in the middle of the last century. Outwardly, her
history is often so ghastly, and yet felt as so unescapably true, that it almost
breaks the reader's nerve. The inside Mary is the more real. The inside
Mary-who fostered two selves within her for the sake of company, who had
only herself with whom to act magnificent dramas of hate and revenge and
love and adoration, who was unceasingly haunted by fear of her torturers,
of her own human impulses, and, worst of all, by the terror of living for-
ever-a terror that forced her again and again "to think eternity out” to the
verge of madness. It seems incredible that the story of this Mary, drab,
ecstatical, odd, entirely human, should not be autobiographical—incredible
until one remembers that autobiographical novels are not written with the
economy and the self-control of this book.
For Richer, For Poorer, by Harold H. Armstrong (8vo, 308 pages; Knopf:
$2) is "entirely free from the ramifications of sex.” It is just the story of
the marriage of two people, good normal Americans, without any sex. Not
sexless, of course, because that would sound too Freudian, or continental.
Mr Armstrong displays the same intention of keeping close to the flesh of
his subject, but the skeleton he has hastily articulated is a meagre affair.


BRIEFER MENTION
457
THE HAUNTING, by C. Dawson-Scott (12mo, 310 pages; Knopf: $2). Out of
a chunky foreshortened Van Gogh painting of Cornish village life, where
each thick sensitive dab of colour brings up the rich solidity of background;
out of a peculiarly English substantiality of cottage and garden and homely
character, emerges the ghost of this story—a "new" ghost, spun of the
psychological texture of a man's mind and moored to actuality by thistle-
down threads, yet triumphantly simulating the real by a protective colour-
ing of natural life. An excellent study of immobile matter interpenetrated
by the eternally mobile.
CHILDREN OF THE MARKET PLACE, by Edgar Lee Masters (12mo, 469 pages;
Macmillan: $2) is not so much a historical novel as an attempt to be a
history and novel at one and the same time. The history centres in the per-
sonality of Stephen Douglas, the great northern Democrat of the decades
before the Civil War. The rapid development of Illinois, the slavery ques-
tion, the advent of Lincoln, come in for a treatment that is neither informa-
tive nor distinguished. The novel that elbows its way through Mr Masters'
historical lumber is curiously devoid of human interest. The characters are
as placidly dead as those found in any rural album of family photographs,
and a number of them are the excuse for a bit of harmless philosophizing
to boot. The deadness of the book is in contrast to its galvanic and not
always grammatical style. Closing this volume one blinks with incredulity.
One remembers the prophets who concluded their reviews of Spoon River
Anthology with the remarks that Mr Masters had the instinct of portraiture,
that he had strayed into verse under a slight misunderstanding, and that he
ought and probably would turn to prose narrative. These prophets were
not wholly wrong.
My Discovery OF ENGLAND, by Stephen Leacock (12mo, 264 pages; Dodd,
Mead: $1.50) has so many good passages in it, most of them humorous,
that the reader regrets more than ever Mr Leacock's having become a pro-
fessional humorist at times. A Lost Satirist is suggested, after reading the
best of these sketches, is a not too irrevocable epitaph.
TerriblY INTIMATE PORTRAITS, compiled by Noel Coward, illustrations by
Lorn Macnaughtan (8vo, 212 pages ; Boni & Liveright: $2) suggest, with
a difference, Belloc's The Aftermath, down to the press-clippings. That is
the manner; but it isn't done. It is thin and dull and well-intentioned and
generally awful.
AN OUTLINE OF Wells, by Sidney Dark (8vo, 200 pages; Putnam : $2.50).
A defence of Wells, the artist, from the thrusts of adverse criticism. Mr
Dark has written the book with an evident chip on his shoulder. He begins
by resenting the idiosyncrasies of genius, from which H. G. Wells as the
short, stocky, and democratic Britisher has apparently escaped. He objects
to the intellectual who "stands at the street corners and thanks God that he
is not as other men.” Wells does not. But Mr Dark's chief quarrel is with
H. L. Mencken whom he quotes not infrequently. These quotations, inci-
dentally, form the only vital bits of critical analysis in the entire work. The
author is not spiteful, however, and his comparisons are interesting.


458
BRIEFER MENTION
Old English Poetry, by J. Duncan Spaeth (8vo, 268 pages; Princeton Uni-
versity Press: $2) surveys the field of metric literature between the time of
the Anglo-Saxon invasion and the Norman conquest, not merely skimming
it, but reproducing in alliterative verse complete poems, and the greater
part of Beowulf and the Biblical Epic. They make cool reading, these ad-
ventures by sea, these "ale-spilling frays" when the banqueting halls of the
king were suddenly invaded by the pirate Danes. Even religion takes on a
seafaring aspect, when faith, after the "ceaseless surges of life" "holds
with hawsers our horses of the deep.” The translator has been more than
commonly successful in transfusing the life blood of the vigorous old poems
in translation.
STAR-DUST AND GARDENS, by Virginia Taylor McCormick (8vo, 77 pages;
privately printed). These verses make no experiments in rhythm, and, for
the most part, the thought they express is conventional enough. Here and
there the feeling for nature detaches itself into a pleasurable image, and a
fine fancy impresses its idea delicately through the rather monotonous tread
of iambics, but the general level is that of newspaper verse, pastime, not
poetry.
SEX AND COMMON SENSE, by A. Maude Royden (12mo, 211 pages; Putnam:
$2). The author, assistant preacher at the City Temple, London, and
worker in the Victoria Women's Settlement at Liverpool, has been lecturing
,
for several years on the questions arising from women's position in England
since the war left them so greatly in the majority. It is rather a relief to
find a woman analyzing her own sex. There is less theorizing here than one
finds in the many treatises by men on the same subject. Miss Royden begins
where Freud leaves off. She grants desires, and the consequences of repres-
sion, but unlike Freud, she makes no god of the individual nor of his mo-
ment of existence. Civilization, and that other individual who is to come
as the expression of the conduct of to-day's people, seem to her sufficient
reason for distinguishing between desire and need.
AN ETYMOLOGICAL DICTIONARY OF MODERN ENGLISH, by Ernest Weekley
(8vo, 1659 pages; Dutton : $15) has all the quality of a biography. In
controversy Mr Weekley has proved that some of the errors reported in his
work are imaginary; errors and omissions there may be. The concision and
wit of the work, the general atmosphere of being interested in words and the
general effect of making them interesting are equally admirable.
MR. Punch's HISTORY OF MODERN ENGLAND, by Charles L. Graves (illus.,
vols. III and IV, 8vo, 770 pages; Stokes : $10) concludes as brilliantly as
it began. Retrospectively one sees again the change in the social attitudes of
Punch, as with the earlier volumes in hand one saw what was coming. Re-
actionary or radical, Punch's humour seems to have been about the same in
quality, with if anything a shade in favour of its present conservative
course. “Thunder is cheap to-day” on the announcement that The Times
would go down to one penny is outside political lines, and the criticism of
manners throughout is of the same quality. The History ends just before
the war began.


BRIEFER MENTION
459
PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES, by Edwin E. Slosson and June E. Downey (12mo,
238 pages ; Century: $1.75) is described as a new method of testing and
training the creative imagination. It actually is an exceedingly interesting
compendium of the tricks of the trade of writing, the tricks being on parade
in the new garments of psychoanalytic terms, the whole being addressed to
the fantasy which combines and not to the imagination which creates. Apart
from this error in description the book is interesting because it stresses what
the American short-story writer already has in abundance: ingenuity. It
should be popular with those European writers who envy the proceeds of the
American short story.
RANDOM MEMORIES, by Ernest Wadsworth Longfellow (illus., 8vo, 263
pages; Houghton Mifflin : $4) does not pretend to be other than literature
in a dressing-gown and slippers. Yet even a dishabille, to be successful,
must suggest a certain firmness of line and modelling beneath the loose folds
of its exterior. Ernest Longfellow, artist, and son of the New England
poet, has at hand rich stores of reminiscence gleaned from a most prolific
period of American art and letters, yet in his zeal to be intimate, gossipy,
entre nous, he has shredded his material too fine, becoming petty rather than
personal, prosy instead of pungent, and patronizing rather than hospitable
towards the finenesses of the period.
NovissiMA VERBA: LAST WORDS, by Frederic Harrison (8vo, 203 pages;
Holt: $3). Not the least of the problems which oppress us in this age of
sabotage and reparations, is what to do with the elderly, distinguished
littérateurs. We have ours. England has Frederic Harrison, who has been
publishing books and magazines on literature, politics, mountain climbing,
the younger generation, the Victorians, and Auguste Comte, ever since the
publication in 1860 of the epochal Essays and Reviews of Jowett, Pattison,
Maurice, and their heterodox associates. These latest words embody the
running comment which Harrison passed upon the political and literary
events of the year 1920, published originally in The Fortnightly Review.
The conservatism of advanced age has crept upon Harrison's sturdy liberal-
ism, so that it wabbles badly at times. Age, too, accounts for the alarm with
which Harrison views the march of events.
A DICTIONARY OF ENGLISH PHRASES, by Albert M. Hyamson (12mo, 365
pages; Dutton : $5) is the first issue of a book for the completion of which
the author calls upon his readers. It includes phrases, slang words, nick-
names, stereotyped expressions, with their history and their meanings. The
omission of Poker-face will be a fair indication that the American phrases
have not been fully canvassed.
A DICTIONARY OF SLANG AND COLLOQUIAL ENGLISH, by John S. Farmer and
W. E. Henley (8vo, 534 pages; Dutton : $5) is a reissue of the abridg-
ment of the Farmer-Henley masterpiece on Slang and its Analogues. It is
if anything too much condensed, because once the habit is formed of tracing
words the lack of a complete genealogy becomes irritating. But in the ma-
jority of cases nearly everything essential is put in. Like Farmer's Ameri-
canisms, Old and New, the book needs a supplement or a revision to date.
a


COMMENT
W
E conceive it not part of our duty to the republic (U. S. A.)
to publish a reasoned review of the new novel by Mr A. S.
M. Hutchinson, author of If Winter Comes. So far no one except
Professor William Lyon Phelps has pretended that This Freedom
is a great book and our experience of that authority in the republic
(of letters) is unconvincing. To us its aesthetic claims seem of the
slightest; its aesthetic interest being chiefly in its violations of a cer-
tain decorum which even second-rate books have recently possessed.
The moral issue involved does however interest us. We should like
to suggest the book as in a sense a proper subject for the activities
of Mr Sumner.
To avoid misapprehensions let us say that we are not writing
ironically and that we do not withdraw from our position that all
the movements of Mr Sumner's society are touched with fatuity.
We suggest that Mr Sumner prosecute those who publish, sell, ex-
pose, or give away this book because it is at least as liable to prose-
cution as any other book recently attacked and because such a prose-
cution would illuminate more than any defence the singular im-
propriety of the law under which Mr Sumner operates. Let us also
say that while we consider This Freedom an exceptionally ill-writ-
ten book and one in which a moral thesis is violently rammed home
at the expense of decent verisimilitude, our feelings towards it are of
the mildest. We wish its publishers luck with it and congratulate
England on its newest success.
The thesis of the book is, however, one which offends against the
current moral sense of the United States, and as far as we can see
that is precisely what Casanova's Homecoming is supposed to do.
It is in accordance with the moral sense of this country that women
should go into industry—they are often forced to by sheer economic
necessity-and into the professions. It is also in accordance with
that moral sense that they should continue in their professions after
marriage and should bring up children as best they may. In fact the
ingenuity of American life is so slick that it will soon be possible for
a woman to do a full day's work at her office and still devote as
much time to her children as her domestic grandmother, with her


COMMENT
461
countless discomforts, was ever able to give to hers. Certainly no
American morality declares that the fine flower of American woman-
hood will allow its children to grow up agnostics and unbelievers
because the fine flower works in a bank.
Now the thesis of This Freedom is simply that a woman who con-
tinues her work in a bank perforce neglects her children, allows
them to become little disbelievers, leads them to or lets them become
forgers, victims of abortion, and suicides, and generally smashes up
the home. Lacking the slightest respect for Mr Hutchinson as a
creative artist, we are compelled to go directly to this thesis, and to
state it in these terms. Inasmuch as his characters simply do not
live, he cannot pretend that he is describing their particular case;
he is, and his somewhat sanctimonious air makes it obvious, de-
scribing the general case: Everywoman in Everybank. And in effect
Mr Hutchinson knows it, is well aware that he is making a Bold
Stand against current morals and a Grave Plea for the morality of a
Better Day.
We ourselves confess that we do not know whether he is right or
wrong in this matter; we know that many fine minds are absorbed
in the question and we do not care to anticipate their decisions nor
the perhaps more cogent decisions of experience. But we know that
America fairly definitely has declared that woman can do her job
and raise her children, that the American morality at this moment
holds it counter to public decency to suggest that the economic sys-
tem which compels or allows a married woman to work is wrong.
Mr Hutchinson's book therefore offends and should be cast out.
There is, moreover, an element of sexual indecency in the book.
It is part of the American morality to believe that women are human
beings. In the franker circles and among married men and women
it is even admitted that women bear children. Towards the close of
This Freedom the errant banker-mother is summoned to the bed-
side of her daughter and the doctor refuses (on the grounds that it
is too terrible and requires a man) to tell her the simple fact that
her daughter, who has been seduced, is the victim of an operation for
abortion. The idea that abortion cannot be discussed by a physi-
cian and a grown-up (although errant) female person is abhorrent
to our idealism and suggestive and indecent. The immediate
drenching of the scene in bathos is merely a veil for that indecency;
we are convinced that this scene would corrupt the minds of the


462
COMMENT
young, that they would suffer in their moral fibre from reading it.
And, alas! This Freedom is a book which any child could read-
without suspecting for a moment that it has any ideas behind it.
We do not believe that Mr Sumner will prosecute because it is
patent from his movements that he has taken the morality of fifty
years ago as the basis of the eternal verities. Yet the indictment is
grave: the book gives a false idea of the relations of the sexes, in-
stils immoral precepts, degrades, and corrupts. And for once Mr
Sumner and his attorneys would have no difficulties with the so-
called expert opinion which drags in the irrelevant matter of art.
Should that matter come up at all we fancy that the shade of Charles
Dickens would arise and have something to say. The eloquent
M Taine himself was so carried away by Dickens' eloquence as to
quote two full pages of description of a stage-coach in action; to
which he adds, “All this to tell us that Tom Pinch is come to Lon-
don.” There is in This Freedom a paragraph describing the exer-
tions of a family of women to get a boy off to school. It is the
Dickens touch vulgarized beyond belief. And one says at the end,
All this to create a lie! There are moments, indeed, when the flat
waste areas of American fiction are a cool refuge and a relief.


THE THEATRE
HINESE metaphysics, no less, are a counterpart for Miss
Marie Tempest in A SERPENT'S Tooth. Explaining the
genesis of an article on this subject:
CMAN
He read, sir,' rejoined Pott, laying his hand on Mr Pickwick's
knee, and looking round with a smile of intellectual superiority-
‘he read for metaphysics under the letter M, and for China under
the letter C, and combined his information, sir!'”
a
So the producers who knew that there was Miss Tempest and who
had, for less observable reasons, a play by Mr Arthur Richman, and
who combined their information, quite regardless of the fact that
whatever the merits of the play they were not such as Miss Tem-
pest needed to waste her talents upon. If ever in our time there were
voice and gesture to point frivolity and insouciance, if ever on our
stage an intelligence which could be sophisticated and dazzling, they
are hers; and it is a hideous mistake to put these talents to the ser-
vice of a play in which even the old sentimentalities are not freshly
observed and taken to heart, but are taken on trust.
Mr Richman's play is much better than Ambush was; his actual
feeling for comedy is great and the light passages are frequently
pleasant; but like Mr Somerset Maugham whom he resembles in
other ways, he seems to feel it a duty to be serious at moments, and
his seriousness is not high. The evening, therefore, rested on Miss
Tempest who impresses us—she has always done so—as the most
gifted of actresses. She has such energy, such vitality, and such
abounding, amazing, adorable carelessness. She crosses a room as
one going to be crowned or crucified, and it matters not at all that
she points her speeches and holds her final consonants and is, in
effect, of the older, sharper, and more theatrical generation. Mr
Richman's sense of milieu (the best thing in AMBUSH) quite de-
serted him, and with Mr Leslie Howard assisting Miss Tempest,
and with the old-hat idea of the rotter going out into the open spaces
to reform, one didn't know whether one was in England or America.
It didn't matter much, since one remained positively embraced in the
warmth of Miss Tempest's humour and intelligence.
а


464
THE THEATRE
In an ode to hard liquor Mr Don Marquis has interpolated lyric
passages of extraordinary power. The ode being a play, The Old
SOAK, the lyrics are comic, and the best of them, concerning the
death of the parrot, is simple, passionate, and sensuous. Two char-
acters and a good caricature (the old soak, the bootlegger, and the
maid) are a fair contribution to one play, and it is only unfortunate
that just one of them is relevant to the plot. They are done with
loving-kindness and with Mr Marquis' exceeding sense of person-
ality. The play is fresh and pure and sweet of breath; it has, like
all simplicity, its moments of dulness, but little of its mechanism is
superimposed and it uses up all of its available material. I mean
that the implication of the pious banker in the business of bootleg-
ging is implicit in the action and that the turns and tricks come
chiefly out of the whisky bottle. The acting, too, seemed so inspired,
for the best work was done by Harry Beresford, Robert E. O'Con-
nor, and Eva Williams, in the characters noted above. All of the
staleness of plot and weakness of characterization and dulness of
lines was given to the others, and they seemed to eat it up.
An error of judgement brings Mr Tinney to New York in the
worst musical comedy which might be one of the best revues in
years. He does a definite piece of impersonation as an old coach-
man, and is as funny as ever, but there is no reason in the world
why he should appear only in the intervals of an exceptionally
sickly and banal love-story. Perhaps Mr Tinney never saw the
show until the first night.
Quite a number of the early openings have already gone to the
storehouse. One anticipates a lively season.
G. S.


MUSICAL CHRONICLE
A
LL summer long, the Bach Festival at Bethlehem has had me
under its broad pinion. In the sky it has spread its delicate
protective sail; if the season has seemed less long and less crude than
it has been so many other years, it is not a little because of the high
,
experience had in May. It was a double source of joy those cool
gre