en days in the little Pennsylvanian hill-city unsealed. I heard
glorious music roundly presented; I found this purest beauty rearing
itself like a Gothic dome in a sad American town; and the knowl-
edge that for the hour in American land there has established itself
a yearly music festival as noble in plan and in execution as was the
Salzburg Mozart festival in the years before the war, has hovered
like a benediction in grey and oppressive weather. Formerly, I
thought that there existed nowhere in the States a place to which
folk fared pilgrim-wise for the purpose of assisting at reverent and
accomplished presentations of the work of an almighty composer; a
spot wherein an artist has been permitted to create for himself the
air most necessary to the life of his thought, and wherein for a day
or two performers and audience live as do the lilies of the field
merely for the sake of lifting into fullest light an immortal thing.
I knew by name the Bach Festival of the Bethlehem Choir. But
memories of certain end-season orchestral debauches in mid-western
cities, had foolishly deterred me from testing it. To assist at the
temple-service of music; to see fall the fruity evening sun as it fell
across the Mirabellengarten after Dr Muck within the Mozarteum
had sent into farthest space the fugal close of the Jupiter sym-
phony; to feel the night as it lay grand and ruddy and prolonged
over the Isar when the fire-music of Die Walküre had dwindled into
opal mist, and the doors of the Prinz-Regententheatre were fung
open, one had, it seemed to me, to cross sea-water and forfeit the
American fact, and to lose oneself in the alien circumstances of a
foreign society.
So sadly ignorant I might a good many years longer have re-
mained, had not last springtime a certain orient star led me and
several equally unwise persons to Bethlehem, and there let us drink
draughts of Bach no whit less full and lucid than those of Mozart


466
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
a
and of Wagner once offered by Salzburg and Munich and Bay-
reuth. Indeed, it was from a larger cup one quaffed in the Pennsyl-
vanian than in the German festival towns. For here it was Bach's
gorgeous-sounding music that was performed. This year two su-
preme examples of the eternal goodman's many masterpieces were
presented. On the two successive days of the festival the St Mat-
thew Passion and the B-minor Mass were attacked, and for all the
indifference of portions of the medium, marvellously well realized.
One was not generally oppressed by the divine tragedy as one was
when the Oratorio Society of New York under the baton of a Dam-
rosch proceeded through it. One was not permitted to become a
little drowsy during certain movements of the stupendous vocal
symphony as one was last winter when Mr Schindler and the Schola
essayed it. The two sounding worlds dug deeply in. Bach was enor-
mous over one as a firmament; for the two gigantic works, emanat-
ing from about the same years of the cantor's life, are dissimilar in
feeling, and well-nigh as opposed to each other as two hemispheres.
The one is situate in earth. The tender tones are saturated with the
knowledge of inevitable grief and pain. Moussorgsky-like the plan-
gent chords and melancholy flutes paint sorrow of flesh and sorrow
of spirit. Heaven is far from the earth-bound soul condemned to
drink its hemlock. High over it looms the gate of death; and yet,
death the friend and releasing earth-burial, cannot wipe away the
sadness of life. In sorrow the work begins, and even after the full
major turn of the burial chorus, resolves into high, simple woe.
There is no self-commiseration in the work; Bach is wrapped in the
thought of the suffering of the innocent Jesus caused by man's griev-
ous sin; he sees the crucified and the tears pour from his eyes and the
moans from his mouth, and with his hands he tries to comfort the
expiring body. Yet, while he strives to paint the agony of the just
man, from what abysses of grief does he not draw his vocal imagery!
How well he knows the horrid yell of the crowd demanding Bar-
abbas in place of the one who has healed the sick and done good to
all! How raucous the throats of mankind shouting “Crucify him!”;
and above the sound-mass, how terrible the shrieking women-brutes.
Through endless avenues of pain the little organist of the St
Thomas Church had had to go, that he might pen this piteous score!
But if the St Matthew Passion brought forward poignantly a
Bach deeply tragical in mood, the mass, its twin-born, produced a


PAUL ROSENFELD
467
Bach wrapped in the fire of passionate affirmation. If the former
remains in grimmest earth, the latter, for all the vehement clutch-
ing at the divine garment-hem in the Kyrie, for all the deathly
rigour of the Crucifixus, is completely within the inmost circle of
heaven. The pang of mortal life is present in the Mass only as it
appears in the moments of intensest fulfilment when night is ac-
cepted in deepest gratitude with day for the sake of the inestimable
boon of existence. On the wings of the great-arched, ecstatic fugal
choruses we are carried out beyond pain and pleasure and set naked
breast to breast with the labouring divinity. The proud brass and
grandiose drums, the great sky-floating edifices of sound that are
like great golden-mosaicked San Marcos rising high in the air, seem
shaped out of stuff dragged from the very depths of the human
heart, and offered in great lordly clusters to the light. Gorgeous
masterly movements, each the amazing and powerful development
of simple material, are set with a sort of quenchless liberality one
beside the other. Other musicians, some of the greatest, might have
sunk back exhausted after composing two or three such; Bach con-
tinues, and sets soaring climax upon climax. At intervals, between
some of the great choral movements, like flowering bushes between
granite crags, a solo air with exquisitely intricate accompaniment of
reed or strings, is set; and the two grandeurs seem to increase for the
opposition of character. If ever work brought man close to the burn-
ing source of creation, it is this mass.
It was no baroque or rococo town that lay about the church in
which these wondrous works were performed. It was an American
city, a place not really distinguished from a score of others. It might
have been Scranton or Wilkes-Barre, Easton or some Hudson River
town, that lay about the memorial church, so little did the environ-
ment do to make particularly free the recipient mind. For all the
bits of Moravian old-worldliness in ancient schools and walls that
makes one feel something almost more Canadian than American, at
certain turnings amid the smoky air of Bethlehem, the place does
not depart essentially from the type of second-class city in the
United States. If it has its mountainy walls, its pretty hillside
campus, and its bits of blazer-colour supplied by Lehigh students
lounging feet up on the porches of fraternity houses, it has also its
river-front grim with the brutal bulks and chimneys of mills, its
trolley lines running past numberless blocks of genteel dreary houses


468
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
of the last century into the more modern Arcadia of the Ladies'
Home Journal, and its corner drug-stores in whose windows repose
majestically enormous brass-crowned glass vases apparently filled
with liquids of chemical violet and blue. It contains one plaster-
fresh hotel wherein a senatorial coloured head-waiter addresses
guests Bossuet-like with “We beg you sincerely to bear with us”
when the restaurant service breaks down beneath the matutinal de-
mands of famished Bach enthusiasts, and it takes the eggs an hour
and a quarter to fry. It contains also several smaller older hotels
where leather arm-chairs and attendant cuspidors stand before the
long plate window giving on the thoroughfare, and where wait-
resses of virginal demeanour recruited from the ranks of the lower
middle classes serve vegetables in birds' bath-tubs. Much of the
character of what is outside the walls of the Packard Memorial
Church is within it, too. The apse contains six painted win-
dows which, while pretending to represent three Old Testa-
mentary and three New Testamentary worthies, are really exquis-
itely expressive of the feeble and sour representations of the spir-
itual forces made by the latter generations who have inhabited the
environs. One could easily perceive the sons in that picture of pa-
ternal authority. Moses and Elias, if these indeed are they, look
exactly like doddering old fatherly gentlemen whom the young am-
bitious could perfectly afford to neglect; while King David smiting
his harp looks like a sporty banker with whiskers, turned a bit aes-
thetic; a sort of Victorian Anthology Stedman in oriental silks; and
wears his light-coloured biretta at a raffish angle. The New Testa-
mentary personages, on the other hand, look like nobody at all.
No, it is an individual has made flourish this great grave beauty
a few hundreds of yards away from the mills of the Bethlehem Steel
Company! In a little nervy man, half schoolmasterish, half poeti-
cal; in two lengthy hands like violins that seem to reason and to coax
music from out the throats of an hundred odd work-people of a
Pennsylvania industrial town; in the spectacled face which registers
every nuance of a most subtle and complex and severe art; in a small
slender body suffused entirely with the excitement of Bach's music,
there resides the lever which has brought Bach and Bethlehem to-
gether, and made a temple-service of musical art for the United
States. It is said that twenty years ago Dr Wolle went to Germany
and heard Bach, and returned full of the will to organize the com-


PAUL ROSENFELD
469
positions of this composer into the life of his native city. And out
of that feeling of a single individual for a work, a kunstkörper has
grown. Support has been found in the pocket of a man who prob-
ably ignores nothing more than he does the spirit that expressed it-
self in a "Passion according to St Matthew.” A medium has been
created out of folk who in their pristine state probably most heartily
preferred the tunes of Harry von Tilzer to the chorales of the Leip-
zic cantor. Among the tenors and bassos who sat high up in the
tribune in the Memorial Church, there were doubtless some of the
selfsame valiant steel-puddlers who, it used to be rumoured, hastily
recruited, assured the strength of the Lehigh eleven in its yearly
fray with the team of Lafayette. One had feared the dragon of
conventionality how many times behind faces little different from
those of the serried rows of girls in white. And yet, what sincerity
and intelligence in the voices of the huskies to whom small solo parts
had been assigned! What veritably ecstatic poses of the head, what
ecstatic suffusion of the neck-chords, among the women as the per-
formance progressed! One saw bodies that had summoned them-
selves complete and gave themselves complete in the spirit of Bach
into the long outstretched persuasive hand of the conductor crouched
luminous and self-forgetful in his chair.
There was the intermission of an hour between the performance
of the Gloria and the Credo the second day of the festival; and dur-
ing that time I climbed up the green campus of the university and
stood on the ivy-randed terrace of one of the buildings. From that
parapet one sees far away over Bethlehem to the north. On the
horizon, the grey sky of coldish May was slashed with lights of
white and whitey-blue. Below, in the belfry of the Memorial
Church, the brass choir was intoning on solemn trombones and trum-
pets chorales of Bach. As I stood gazing out over the fuming town
towards the cloud-confines, there was in me the exaltation that
comes whenever something perfect has taken place for me in Ameri-
can land. The light sang over the harsh scene as then it always sings.
A beauty somewhat like that in certain of Sandburg's rich pieces
seemed to inform all the drab and humdrum objects spread over the
landscape before me. An event of great importance was taking
place in this city, I knew. It had begun when first Dr Wolle re-
turned from Europe with the intent of performing the great Mass
each year, and it was, surely, to remain for many years to come, in


470
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
process of accomplishment. It was an event such as takes place when
directly next a certain colour its complement is set. Such an har-
monic opposition was created by the beautiful presentation in this
place of the sublime works of Johann Sebastian Bach. For in the
music of Bach there lies in one of its most powerful expressions the
principle completely complementary to the principle of our civiliza-
tion. No man, it seems, has been more replete with the giving virtue
than was the cantor of the Thomas-schule. For Bach, there was no
life of man outside the state in which men give to each other; and,
in taking from one another, give each other the power to donate
themselves ever more copiously. Man was a fallen thing outside
that state he knew; alone in that community which exists when two
or more touch, does man achieve the stature of man.
That principle was not adapted from without. It was the manner
of being of the man; the orientation of his spirit. It may even have
been never more than half-conscious in him. Perhaps he reflected
very little in the philosophic sense, and never formulated his re-
ligion. Certainly, it is known that when he wanted to state the
theory of the fugue, he could do no more (nor less) than write the
twenty-four preludes and fugues of the first book of the Well-Tem-
pered Clavicord; and other abstract thought was probably as diffi-
cult for him. But that such was his understanding of life, his work
seems readily to prove. Such an attitude seems to condition the
“form” of the St Matthew Passion. Here, there is but one actor,
and it is man. It is not man alone at the time of the Crucifixion. It
is man at all time, Adam and Bach and Charles M. Schwab. It is
the corpus all men together form, and which lives and dies as they
touch or as they separate. There is no fixed division between the
presenters and the public; the public rises and joins in the chorales.
In
part this “form” was inherited by Bach from the Protestant ser-
vice; but Bach was not the man to accept anything out of conven-
tionality; when he, Evangelical of the dark days before Illumi-
nation wanted, he wrote Catholic Latin masses, and made the art
of music, the art of Couperin as well as of Buxtehude, over to accord
with his ideas. No, Bach had something to say about life. The as-
semblage of singers and auditors are together the crucified and the
crucifiers. It is they yell the hateful words, and hear them as they
fall on the ears of Jesus. It is they who suffer, and take the body


PAUL ROSENFELD
471
down and lay it to rest, and through the sight of their own crime
are turned to God, and offer themselves in contrition wholly to him.
Moreover, is not precisely such an attitude towards life implied
by the very polyphonic nature of Bach's art? Are not his prodigious
counterpoints the results in a musical mind of the vision in nature of
opposing objects combining and giving life to each other; and its
attendant hearing of a polyphonic universe ? Certainly, polyphony
is the art which achieves unity and power through the simultaneous
combination of two or more individual voice-parts which never for-
feit their independent interest, and still create a harmony. Certain-
ly, although Bach may not have made a more perfect music than
did the madrigalists, he created one no less wonderful than theirs
and increased the physical apparatus of music by including the
sounds of instruments in his immense contrapuntal edifices. So, it
seems not too overweening to presume that this peculiar feeling
about man grew together with his technique; and that the two inter-
played and increased each other until the gigantic soul that was
Bach's had fleshed itself in notes.
But down in Bethlehem; in every American town, how many are
there who know what Bach knew? Is not well-nigh the whole of
American civilization builded on the completest ignorance of that
truth; established on the principle that the welfare of man lies in
each one taking what he can and in giving as little as possible;
vowed to the great game of getting the other fellow's money? What
else, pray, is going on in our competitive, uselessly over-productive
society? Of those who really believe that it is not in what each
holds, but in what all share, in what lies between man and man,
that the wealth of the world consists, there are very few. And yet,
of all those millions engaged in supplying themselves with material
goods, there is not one who truly believes in what he is doing one
half as much as Bach believed in the usefulness of making music.
Not any of the steel-workers down in the iron sheds of the Bethle-
hem steel plant where the great iron cranes go down the ceilings like
sunset down the sky. There may be a sense of power flowing from
the enormity of the physical apparatus they handle. But faith
there is none; for men who have faith look not so sad and grey even
in hellish labour. Nor does the millionaire who heads the company
believe in his job as Bach believed. Bach gave no power into the
;


472
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
hands of his antichrist. But this man helps support what is indeed
the very devil to his god. For he, no more than the last of his
workmen, finds satisfaction in his devotions paid his deity.
And what I had seen, then, was a sort of momentary turning of
the tide of life. I had seen a vast churchful of hands grasping
blindly for the unknown thing without which a material-rich civil-
ization cannot commence to live. I had seen under the direction of
one American a little more advanced than the rest, beauty issue
forth from common American bodies. I had seen a thousand people
unwittingly confess themselves to the distant power. And as I went
again towards the church it seemed to me that something had hap-
pened not alone to me and to an odd thousand of singers and lis-
teners. It seemed that through the far, subtle complex interrelations
of folk something had happened to the whole of the land; and that
in some mysterious fashion all of America for an hour was stand-
ing, hands groping upward, merged in that religious ceremony.
PAUL ROSENFELD





Made in Germany
Courtesy of Der Sturm, Berlin
ST SEVERIN. BY ROBERT DELAUNAY



THE DIAL
vi
VI
V
VI
VI
UV
IX IT
OXX SITO
NOVEMBER 1922
THE WASTE LAND
BY T. S. ELIOT
Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis
vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent:
Σίβυλλα τι θέλεις ; respondebat illa: άπο θανείν θέλω.
THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke's,
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
Copyright 1922 by T. S. Eliot. An edition of The Waste Land with annota-
tions by Mr Eliot will presently be issued by Boni & Liveright.-The
Editors.


474
THE WASTE LAND
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock)
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you,
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu,
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
"You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
They called me the hyacinth girl.”
-Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Öd und leer das Meer.
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.


T. S. ELIOT
475
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself;
One must be so careful these days.
a
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: "Stetson!
You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men,
Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!
You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,-mon frère!"
a
-
A GAME OF CHESS
a
The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne
Glowed on the marble, where the glass
Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines
From which a golden Cupidon peeped out
(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)
Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra
Reflecting light upon the table as
The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,
From satin cases poured in rich profusion;
In vials of ivory and coloured glass
Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes
Unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled, confused
And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air
That freshened from the window, these ascended
In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,


476
THE WASTE LAND
Burned green
Flung their smoke into the laquearia,
Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.
Huge sea-wood fed with copper
and orange, framed by the coloured stone,
In which sad light a carved dolphin swam.
Above the antique mantel was displayed
As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene
The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king
So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale
Filled all the desert with inviolable voice
And still she cried, and still the world pursues,
“Jug Jug” to dirty ears.
And other withered stumps of time
Were told upon the walls; staring forms
Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed.
Footsteps shuffled on the stair,
Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair
Spread out in fiery points
Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.
C
"My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.
What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
I never know what you are thinking. Think.”
I think we are in rats' alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.
“What is that noise ?"
The wind under the door.
“What is that noise now? What is the wind doing ?”
Nothing again nothing.
"Do
You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you re-
member
Nothing?"
I remember
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
“Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?”.
But


T. S. ELIOT
477
0000 that Shakespeherian Rag-
It's so elegant
So intelligent
"What shall I do now? What shall I do?
I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street
With my hair down, so. What shall we do to-morrow?
What shall we ever do ?”
The hot water at ten.
And if it rains, a closed car at four.
And we shall play a game of chess,
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the
door.
a
When Lil's husband got demobbed, I said,
I didn't mince my words, I said to her myself,
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
Now Albert's coming back, make yourself a bit smart.
He'll want to know what you done with that money he
gave you
To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.
You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set,
He said, I swear, I can't bear to look at you.
And no more can't I, I said, and think of poor Albert,
,
,
He's been in the army four years, he wants a good time,
And if you don't give it him, there's others will, I said.
Oh is there, she said. Something o' that, I said.
Then I'll know who to thank, she said, and give me a
straight look.
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
If you don't like it you can get on with it, I said,
Others can pick and choose if you can't.
But if Albert makes off, it won't be for lack of telling.
You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique.
(And her only thirty-one.)
I can't help it, she said, pulling a long face,
It's them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.
(She's had five already, and nearly died of young George.)
The chemist said it would be all right, but I've never been
the same.


478
THE WASTE LAND
You are a proper fool, I said.
Well if Albert won't leave you alone, there it is, I said,
What you get married for if you don't want children?
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
Well that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot
gammon,
And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it
hot-
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight.
Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.
Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night,
good night.
THE FIRE SERMON
The river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are de-
parted.
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are
departed.
And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors;
Departed, have left no addresses.
By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept
Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.
But at my back in a cold blast I hear
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.
A rat crept softly through the vegetation
Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening round behind the gashouse
Musing upon the king my brother's wreck
a


T. S. ELIOT
479
a
And on the king my father's death before him.
White bodies naked on the low damp ground
And bones cast in a little low dry garret,
Rattled by the rat's foot only, year to year.
But at my back from time to time I hear
The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring
Sweeney to Mrs Porter in the spring.
O the moon shone bright on Mrs Porter
And on her daughter
They wash their feet in soda water
Et O ces voix d'enfants, chantant dans la cou pole!
Twit twit twit
Jug jug jug jug jug jug
So rudely forc'd.
Tereu
a
Unreal City
Under the brown fog of a winter noon
Mr Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant
Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants
C. i. f. London: documents at sight,
Asked me in demotic French
To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel
Followed by a week-end at the Metropole.
At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
,
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
The typist home at tea-time, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
Out of the window perilously spread
Her drying combinations touched by the sun's last rays,
On the divan are piled (at night her bed)
Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.
I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs


480
THE WASTE LAND
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest-
I too awaited the expected guest.
He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,
A small house-agent's clerk, with one bold stare,
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.
The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
Endeavours to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defence;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.
(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.)
Bestows one final patronizing kiss,
And gropes
his way, finding the stairs unlit
.
She turns and looks a moment in the glass,
Hardly aware of her departed lover;
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass :
"Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over.”
When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone.
"This music crept by me upon the waters”
And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street.
O City City, I can sometimes hear
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,
The pleasant whining of a mandoline
And a clatter and a chatter from within
Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls
Of Magnus Martyr hold
Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.
a


T. S. ELIOT
481
The river sweats
Oil and tar
The barges drift
With the turning tide
Red sails
Wide
To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.
The barges wash,
Drifting logs
Down Greenwich reach
Past the Isle of Dogs.
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala
Elizabeth and Leicester
Beating oars
The stern was formed
A gilded shell
Red and gold
The brisk swell
Rippled both shores
South-west wind
Carried down stream
The peal of bells
White towers
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala
“Trams and dusty trees.
Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew
Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees
Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.”
>
“My feet are at Moorgate, and my
heart
Under my feet. After the event
He wept. He promised a new start.
I made no comment. What should I resent ?”
"On Margate Sands.
I can connect


482
THE WASTE LAND
Nothing with nothing.
The broken finger-nails of dirty hands.
My people humble people who expect
Nothing."
la la
To Carthage then I came
Burning burning burning burning
O Lord Thou pluckest me out
O Lord Thou pluckest
burning
DEATH BY WATER
Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
0 you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
WHAT THE THUNDER SAID
After the torch-light red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience


T. S. ELIOT
483
Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were only water amongst the rock
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain
There is not even solitude in the mountains
But red sullen faces sneer and snarl
From doors of mud-cracked houses
If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
-But who is that on the other side of you?
What is that sound high in the air


484
THE WASTE LAND
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal
A woman drew her long black hair out tight
And fiddled whisper music on those strings
And bats with baby faces in the violet light
Whistled, and beat their wings
And crawled head downward down a blackened wall
And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted
wells.
In this decayed hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home,
It has no windows, and the door swings,
Dry bones can harm no one.
Only a cock stood on the roof-tree
Co co rico co co rico
In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust
Bringing rain
а
Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves
Waited for rain, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Himavant.
The jungle crouched, humped in silence.
Then spoke the thunder
DA
Datta: what have we given?


T. S. ELIOT
485
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms
DA
Dayad hvam: I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison
Only at nightfall, aetherial rumours
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus
Da
Damyata: The boat responded
Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar
The sea was calm, your heart would have responded
Gaily, when invited, beating obedient
To controlling hands
I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling
down
Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam ceu chelidon–O swallow swallow
Le Prince d'Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Dam yata.
Shantih
shantih
shantih


THE PLAYER QUEEN
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
CAST OF CHARACTERS
DECIMA.
SEPTIMUS.
ΝοΝΑ.
THE QUEEN.
THE PRIME MINISTER.
THE BISHOP.
THE STAGE MANAGER.
THE TAPSTER.
AN OLD BEGGAR.
Old Men, Old WOMEN, CITIZENS, COUNTRYMEN, PLAYERS, ET CETERA.
SCENE I
An open space at the meeting of three streets. One can see for some
way down one of these streets and at some little distance it turns, showing
a bare piece of wall lighted by a hanging lamp. Against this lighted wall
are silhouetted the heads and shoulders of two old men. They are leaning
from the upper windows, one on either side of the street. They wear grotesque
masks. A little to one side of the stage is a great stone for mounting a horse
from. The houses have knockers.
FIRST OLD MAN: Can you see the Queen's Castle? You have better sight
than I.
SECOND OLD MAN: I can just see it rising over the tops of the houses yonder
on its great rocky hill.
FIRST OLD MAN : Is the dawn breaking? Is it touching the tower ?
SECOND OLD MAN: It is beginning to break upon the tower, but these nar-
row streets will be dark for a long while. (A pause.) Do you hear any-
thing? You have better hearing than I.
FIRST OLD MAN: No, all is quiet.
SECOND OLD MAN : At least fifty passed by an hour since, a crowd of fifty
men walking rapidly.
FIRST OLD MAN : Last night was very quiet, not a sound, not a breath.
SECOND OLD MAN : And not a thing to be seen till the tapster's old dog came
down the street upon this very hour from Cooper Malachi's ash-pit.
FIRST OLD MAN: Hush, I hear feet, many feet. Perhaps they are coming
this way. (Pause.) No, they are going the other way, they are gone now.
SECOND OLD MAN : The young are at some mischief, the young and the mid-
dle-aged.
FIRST OLD MAN: Why can't they stay in their beds, and they can sleep too
seven hours, eight hours. I mind the time when I could sleep ten hours.


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
487
a
SEPTIMUS:
THIRD OLD MAN:
SEPTIMUS:
They will know the value of sleep when they are near upon ninety years.
SECOND OLD MAN: They will never live so long. They have not the health
and strength that we had. They wear themselves out. They are always
in a passion about something or other.
FIRST OLD MAN : Hush! I hear a step now, and it is coming this way. We
had best pull in our heads. The world has grown very wicked and there
is no knowing what they might do to us, or say to us.
SECOND OLD MAN: Yes, better shut the windows and pretend to be asleep.
(They pull in their heads. One hears a knocker being struck in the
distance, then a pause and a knocker is struck close at hand. Another
pause and Septimus a handsome man of thirty-five staggers on to the
stage. He is very drunk.)
An uncharitable place, an unchristian place. (He begins bang-
ing at a knocker.) Open there, open there. I want to come in and sleep.
(A Third Old Man puts his head from an upper window.)
Who are you? What do you want?
SEPTIMUS: I am Septimus. I have a bad wife. I want to come in and sleep.
THIRD OLD MAN: You are drunk.
Drunk! So would
you
be if
you
had as bad a wife.
THIRD OLD MAN : Go away. (He shuts the window.)
SEPTIMUS: Is there not one Christian in this town? (He begins hammering
the knocker of the First Old Man, but there is no answer.) No one there?
All dead or drunk maybe—bad wives. There must be one Christian man.
(He hammers a knocker at the other side of the stage. An Old Woman
puts her head out of the window above.)
OLD WOMAN (in a shrill voice): Who's there? What do you want? Has
something happened?
SEPTIMUS: Yes, that's it. Something has happened. My wife has hid her-
self, has run away, or has drowned herself.
What do I care about your wife! You are drunk.
Not care about my wife! But I tell you that my wife has to
play by order of the Prime Minister before all the people in the great hall
of the Castle precisely at noon and she cannot be found.
Go away, go away! I tell you, go away. (She shuts the win-
dow.)
SEPTIMUS: Treat Septimus, who has played before Kubla Kahn, like this.
Septimus, dramatist and poet! (The Old Woman opens the window
again and empties a jug of water over him.) Water! drenched to the
skin—must sleep in the street. (Lies down.) Bad wife-others have had
bad wives, but others were not left to lie down in the open street under the
stars, drenched with cold water, a whole jug of cold water, shivering in
the pale light of the dawn, to be run over, to be trampled upon, to be
eaten by dogs, and all because their wives have hidden themselves.
(Enter Two Men a little older than Septimus. They stand still and
gaze into the sky.)
Ah my friend, the little fair-haired one is a minx.
Never trust fair hair-I will have nothing but brown hair.
FIRST MAN: They have kept us too long-brown or fair.
SECOND MAN: What are you staring at?
At the first streak of the dawn on the Castle tower.
OLD WOMAN:
SEPTIMUS:
OLD WOMAN:
FIRST MAN:
SECOND MAN:
FIRST MAN :


488
THE PLAYER QUEEN
FIRST MAN:
SECOND MAN : I would not have my wife find out for the world.
SEPTIMUS (sitting up): Carry me, support me, drag me, roll me, pull me
or sidle me along, but bring me where I may sleep in comfort. Bring me
to a stablemy Saviour was content with a stable.
Who are you? I don't know your face.
SEPTIMUS: I am Septimus, a player, a playwright, and the most famous poet
in the world.
SECOND MAN: That name, sir, is unknown to me.
SEPTIMUS: Unknown?
SECOND MAN : But my name will not be unknown to you. I am called Peter
of the Purple Pelican, after the best-known of my poems, and my friend
is called Happy Tom. He also is a poet.
SEPTIMUS: Bad, popular poets.
SECOND MAN : You would be a popular poet if you could.
SEPTIMUS: Bad, popular poets.
FIRST MAN : Lie where you are if you can't be civil.
SEPTIMUS: What do I care for any one now except Venus and Adonis and
the other planets of heaven!
SECOND MAN: You can enjoy their company by yourself.
(The Two Men go out.)
SEPTIMUS: Robbed, so to speak; naked, so to speak—bleeding, so to speak-
and they pass by on the other side of the street.
(A crowd of citizens and countrymen enter. At first only a few and
then more and more till the stage is filled by an excited crowd.)
FIRST CITIZEN: There is a man lying here.
SECOND CITIZEN: Roll him over.
FIRST CITIZEN: He is one of those players who are housed at the Castle.
They arrived yesterday.
SECOND CITIZEN: Drunk, I suppose. He'll be killed or maimed by the first
milk-cart.
THIRD CITIZEN: Better roll him into the corner. If we are in for a bloody
day's business, there is no need for him to be killed-an unnecessary death
might bring a curse upon us.
FIRST CITIZEN: Give me a hand here. (They begin rolling Septimus.)
SEPTIMUS (muttering): Not allowed to sleep! Rolled off the street!
Shoved into a stony place! Unchristian town!
(Septimus is left lying at the foot of the wall to one side of the stage.)
THIRD CITIZEN: Are we all friends here, are we all agreed ?
FIRST CITIZEN: These men are from the country. They came in last night.
They know little of the business. They won't be against the people, but
they want to know more.
FIRST COUNTRYMAN: Yes, that is it. We are with the people, but we want
to know more.
SECOND COUNTRYMAN : We want to know all, but we are with the people.
(Other voices take up the words: “We want to know all, but we are
with the people" et cetera. There is a murmur of voices together.)
THIRD CITIZEN: Have you ever seen the Queen, countryman ?
FIRST COUNTRYMAN: No.
THIRD CITIZEN: Our Queen is a witch, a bad evil-living witch, and we will
have her no longer for Queen.


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
489
THIRD CITIZEN:
THIRD COUNTRYMAN : I would be slow to believe her father's daughter a
witch.
Have you ever seen the Queen, countryman?
THIRD COUNTRYMAN: No.
THIRD CITIZEN: Nor has any one else. Not a man here has set eyes on her.
For seven years she has been shut up in that great black house on the great
rocky hill. From the day her father died she has been there with the doors
shut on her, but we know now why she has hidden herself. She has no
good companions in the dark night.
THIRD COUNTRYMAN: In my district they say that she is a holy woman and
prays for us all.
THIRD CITIZEN: That story has been spread about by the Prime Minister.
He has spies everywhere spreading stories. He is a crafty man.
FIRST COUNTRYMAN: It is true, they always deceive us country people. We
are not educated like the people of the town.
A BIG COUNTRYMAN : The Bible says, suffer not a witch to live. Last Can-
dlemas twelvemonth I strangled a witch with my own hands.
THIRD CITIZEN: When she is dead we will make the Prime Minister King.
SECOND CITIZEN: No, no, he is not a king's son.
SECOND COUNTRYMAN : I'd send a bellman through the world. There are
many kings in Arabia, they say.
THIRD COUNTRYMAN: The people must be talking. If you and I were to
hide ourselves, or to be someway hard to understand, maybe they would
put some bad name on us. I am not against the people, but I want testi-
mony.
THIRD CITIZEN: Come, Tapster, stand up there on the stone and tell what
(The Tapster climbs up on the mounting-stone.) )
TAPSTER: I live in the quarter where her Castle is. The garden of my house
and the gardens of all the houses in my row run right up to the rocky hill
that has her Castle on the top. There is a lad in my quarter that has a
goat in his garden.
FIRST CITIZEN: That's Strolling Michael—I know him.
TAPSTER: That goat is always going astray. Strolling Michael got out of his
bed early one morning to go snaring birds, and nowhere could he see that
goat. So he began climbing up the rock, and up and up he went, till he
was close under the wall, and there he found the goat and it shaking and
sweating as though something had scared it. Presently he heard a thing
neigh like a horse, and after that a something like a white horse ran by,
but it was no horse, but a unicorn. He had his pistol, for he had thought
to bring, down a rabbit, and seeing it rushing at him as he imagined, he
fired at the unicorn. It vanished all in a moment, but there was blood on
a great stone.
THIRD CITIZEN: Seeing what company she keeps in the small hours, what
wonder that she never sets foot out of doors.
THIRD COUNTRYMAN: I wouldn't believe all that night rambler says—boys
are liars. All that we have against her for certain is that she won't put
her foot out of doors. I knew a man once that when he was five and
twenty refused to get out of his bed. He wasn't ill-no, not he, but he
said life was a vale of tears, and for forty and four years till they carried
you know.
a
a


490
THE PLAYER QUEEN
а
ever
him out to the churchyard he never left that bed. All tried him-parson
tried him, priest tried him, doctor tried him, and all he'd say was, “Life is
a vale of tears.” It's too snug he was in his bed, and believe me,
that
since she has had no father to rout her out of a morning she has been in
her bed and small blame to her maybe.
THE BIG COUNTRYMAN: But that's the very sort that are witches. They
know where to find their own friends in the lonely hours of the night.
There was a witch in my own district that I strangled last Candlemas
twelvemonth. She had an imp in the shape of a red cat that sucked three
drops of blood from her poll every night a little before the cock crew. It's
with their blood they feed them; until they have been fed with the blood
they are images and shadows; but when they have it drunk they can be
for a while stronger than you or me.
THIRD COUNTRYMAN: The man I knew was no witch, he was no way active.
“Life is a vale of tears,” he said. Parson tried him, doctor tried him,
priest tried him—but that was all he'd say.
FIRST CITIZEN: We'd have no man go beyond evidence and reason, but hear
the Tapster out, and when you have you'll say that we cannot leave her
alive this day-no, not for one day longer.
TAPSTER: It's not a story that I like to be telling, but you are all married
men. Another night that boy climbed up after his goat and it was an hour
earlier by his clock and no light in the sky, and when he came to the Castle
wall he clambered along the wall among the rocks and bushes till he saw
a light from a little window over his head. It was an old wall full of
holes, where mortar had fallen out, and he climbed up putting his toes in-
to the holes, till he could look in through the window; and when he looked
in, what did he see but the Queen.
FIRST COUNTRYMAN: And did he say what she was like ?
TAPSTER: He saw more than that. He saw her coupling with a great white
unicorn. (Murmurs among the crowd.)
SECOND COUNTRYMAN: I will not have the son of the unicorn to reign over us,
although you will tell me he would be no more than half a unicorn.
FIRST COUNTRYMAN: I'll not go against the people, but I'd let her live if the
Prime Minister promised to rout her out of bed in the morning and to set
a guard to drive off the unicorn.
THE BIG COUNTRYMAN: I have strangled an old witch with these two hands,
and to-day I will strangle a young witch.
SEPTIMUS (who has slowly got up and climbed up on to the mounting-stone
which the Tapster has left): Did I hear somebody say that the unicorn is
not chaste? It is a most noble beast, a most religious beast. It has a
milk-white skin and a milk-white horn, and milk-white hooves, but a mild
blue eye, and it dances in the sun. I will have no one speak against it,
not while I am still upon the earth. It is written in the great beastery of
Paris that it is chaste, that it is the most chaste of all beasts in the world.
THE BIG COUNTRYMAN: Pull him out of that, he's drunk.
SEPTIMUS: Yes, I am drunk, I am very drunk, but that is no reason why I
should permit any one to speak against the unicorn.
SECOND CITIZEN: Let's hear him out. We can do nothing till the sun's up.
SEPTIMUS: Nobody shall speak against the unicorn. No, my friends and
poets, nobody. I will hunt it if you will, though it is a dangerous and


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
491
Let me pass.
cross-grained beast. Much virtue has made it cross-grained. I will go
with you to the high table-lands of Africa where it lives, and we will there
shoot it through the head, but I will not speak against its character, and
if any man declares it is not chaste I will fight him, for I affirm that its
chastity is equal to its beauty.
THE BIG COUNTRYMAN : He is most monstrously drunk.
SEPTIMUS: No longer drunk, but inspired.
SECOND CITIZEN: Go on, go on, we'll never hear the like again.
THE BIG COUNTRYMAN : Come away. I've enough of this—we have work to
do.
SEPTIMUS: Go
away,
did
you say,
and
my
breast feathers thrust out and my
white wings buoyed up with divinity? Ah! but I can see it now-you are
bent upon going to some lonely place where uninterrupted you can speak
against the character of the unicorn, but you shall not, I tell you that you
shall not. (Septimus comes down off the stone and squares up at the crowd
which tries to pass him.) In the midst of this uncharitable town I will
protect that noble, milk-white, flighty beast.
THE BIG COUNTRYMAN:
SEPTIMUS: No, I will not let you pass.
FIRST COUNTRYMAN : Leave him alone.
SECOND COUNTRYMAN: No violence—it might bring ill-luck upon us. (They
try to hold back the Big Countryman.)
SEPTIMUS: I will oppose your passing to the death. For I will not have it
said that there is a smirch or a blot upon the most milky whiteness of an
heroic brute that bathes by the sound of tabors at the rising of the sun and
the rising of the moon and the rising of the Great Bear, and above all, it
shall not be said, whispered, or in any wise published abroad by you that
stand there, so to speak, between two washings; for you were doubtless
washed when you were born, and it may be, shall be washed again after
you are dead. (The Big Countryman knocks him down.)
You have killed him.
THE BIG COUNTRYMAN: Maybe I have, maybe I have not—let him lie there.
A witch I strangled last Candlemas twelvemonth, a witch I will strangle
to-day. What do I care for the likes of him?
THIRD CITIZEN: Come round to the east quarter of the town. The basket-
makers and the sieve-makers will be out by this.
FOURTH CITIZEN: It is a short march from there to the Castle gate.
(They go up one of the side streets, but return quickly in confusion and
fear.)
FIRST CITIZEN:
Are you sure that you saw him?
Who could mistake that horrible old man ?
THIRD CITIZEN: I was standing by him when the ghosts spoke out of him
seven years ago.
FIRST COUNTRYMAN : I never saw him before. He has never been in my
district. I don't rightly know what sort he is, but I have heard of him,
many a time I have heard of him.
FIRST CITIZEN: His eyes become glassy, and that is the trance growing upon
him, and when he is in the trance his soul slips away and a ghost takes its
place and speaks out of him-a strange ghost.
THIRD CITIZEN : I was standing by him the last time. “Get me straw," said
FIRST CITIZEN:
SECOND CITIZEN:


+92
THE PLAYER QUEEN
that old man, “my back itches.” Then all of a sudden he lay down, with
his eyes wide open and glassy, and he brayed like a donkey. At that mo-
ment the King died and the King's daughter was Queen.
FIRST COUNTRYMAN: They say it is the donkey that carried Christ into
Jerusalem and that is why it knows its rightful sovereign. He goes beg-
ging about the country and there is no man dare refuse him what he asks.
THE BIG COUNTRYMAN : Then it is certain nobody will take my hand off her
throat. I will make my grip tighter. He will be lying down on the straw
and he will bray, and when he brays she will be dead.
FIRST COUNTRYMAN: Look!
Look! There he is coming over the top of the hill,
and the mad look upon him.
SECOND COUNTRYMAN : I wouldn't face him for the world this night. Come
round to the market-place, we'll be less afraid in a big place.
THE BIG COUNTRYMAN: I'm not afraid, but I'll go with you till I get my
hand on her throat.
(They all go out but Septimus. Presently Septimus sits up, his head
is bleeding. He rubs his fingers on his broken head and looks at the
blood on his fingers.)
SEPTIMUS: Unchristian town! First I am, so to speak, thrown out into the
street, and then I am all but murdered; and I drunk, and therefore in
need of protection. All creatures are in need of protection at some time or
other. Even my wife was once a frail child in need of milk, of smiles, of
love, as if in the midst of a flood, in danger of drowning, so to speak.
(An old beggar with long matted hair and beard and in ragged clothes
comes in.)
OLD BEGGAR: I want straw.
SEPTIMUS: Happy Tom and Peter of the Purple Pelican have done it all.
They are bad, popular poets, and being jealous of my fame, they have
stirred the people. (He catches sight of the old beggar.) There is a
certain medicine which is made by distilling camphor, Peruvian bark,
spurge and mandrake, and mixing all with twelve ounces of dissolved
pearls and four ounces of the oil of gold; and this medicine is infallible
to stop the flow of blood. Have you any of it, old man ?
OLD BEGGAR: I want straw.
SEPTIMUS: I can see that you have not got it, but no matter, we shall be
friends.
OLD BEGGAR: I want straw to lie down on.
SEPTIMUS: It is no doubt better that I should bleed to death. For that way,
my friend, I shall disgrace Happy Tom and Peter of the Purple Pelican,
but it is necessary that I shall die somewhere where my last words can be
taken down. I am therefore in need of your support. (Having got up he
now staggers over to the old man and leans upon him.)
OLD BEGGAR: Don't
you know who I am, aren't you afraid? When some-
thing comes inside me, my back itches. Then I must lie down and roll,
and then I bray and the crown changes.
Ah! you are inspired. Then we are indeed brothers. Come, I
will rest upon your shoulder and we will mount the hill side by side. I
will sleep in the Castle of the Queen.
OLD BEGGAR: You will give me straw to lie upon
?
up
SEPTIMUS:


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
493
SEPTIMUS: Asphodels! Yet indeed the asphodel is a flower much overrated
by the classic authors. Still, if a man has a preference, a preference, I say
for the asphodel-
(They go out and one hears the voice of Septimus murmuring in the
distance about asphodels. The First Old Man opens his window and
taps with his crutch at the opposite window. The Second Old Man
opens his window.)
FIRST OLD MAN: It is all right now. They are all gone. We can have our
talk out.
SECOND OLD MAN : The whole Castle is lit by the dawn now, and it will soon
begin to grow brighter in the street.
It's time for the Tapster's old dog to come down the street.
Yesterday he had a bone in his mouth.
FIRST OLD MAN :
SECOND OLD MAN :
a
CURTAIN
SCENE II
The throne-room in the Castle. Between pillars are gilded open-work doors,
except at one side, where there is a large window. The morning light is slant-
ing through the window making shadows among the pillars. As the scene
goes on, the light at first feeble becomes strong and suffused, and the shadows
disappear. Through the open-work doors one can see down long passages, and
one of these passages plainly leads into the open air. One can see daylight at
the end of it. There is a throne in the centre of the room and a flight of steps
that leads to it. The Prime Minister, an elderly man with an impatient man-
ner and voice, is talking to a group of players, among whom is Nona, a fair,
comely, comfortable-looking young woman of perhaps thirty-five; she seems
to take the lead.
PRIME MINISTER: I will not be trifled with. I chose the play myself; I chose
the tragical history of Noah's deluge because when Noah beats his wife
to make her go into the Ark everybody understands, everybody is pleased,
everybody recognizes the mulish obstinacy of their own wives, sweethearts,
sisters. And now, when it is of the greatest importance to the State that
everybody should be pleased, the play cannot be given. The leading lady
is lost, you say, and there is some unintelligible reason why nobody can
take her place; but I know what you are all driving at—you object to the
play I have chosen. You want some dull, poetical thing, full of long
speeches. I will have that play and no other. The rehearsal must begin
at once and the performance take place at noon punctually.
NONA: We have searched all night, sir, and we cannot find her anywhere.
She was heard to say that she would drown rather than play a woman
older than thirty. Seeing that Noah's wife is a very old woman, we are
afraid that she has drowned herself indeed.
(Decima, a very pretty young woman, puts her head out from under
the throne where she has been lying hidden.)
Nonsense! It is all a conspiracy. Your manager should
PRIME MINISTER:


494
THE PLAYER QUEEN
NONA:
be here. He is responsible. You can tell him when he does come that if
the play is not performed, I will clap him into jail for a year and pitch
the rest of you over the border.
Oh, sir, he couldn't help it. She does whatever she likes.
PRIME MINISTER: Does whatever she likes—I know her sort; would pull the
world to pieces to spite her husband or her lover. I know her—a bladder
full of dried peas for a brain, a brazen, bragging baggage. Of course he
couldn't help it, but what do I care. (Decima pulls in her head.) To jail
he goes—somebody has got to go to jail. Go and cry her name every-
where. Away with you! Let me hear you cry it out. Call the baggage.
Louder. Louder. (The Players go out crying, "Where are you De-
cima ?”). Oh, Adam! why did you fall asleep in the garden? You might
have known that while you were lying there helpless, the Old Man in the
Sky would play some prank upon you. (The Queen, who is young, with
an ascetic timid face, enters in a badly fitting state dress.) Ah!
QUEEN: I will show myself to the angry people as you have bidden me. I
am almost certain that I am ready for martyrdom. I have prayed all
night. Yes, I am almost certain.
PRIME MINISTER: Ah!
QUEEN: I have now attained to the age of my patroness, Holy Saint Oetema
when she was martyred at Antioch. You will remember that her unicorn
was so pleased at the spectacle of her austerity that he caracoled in his ex-
citement. Thereupon she dropped out of the saddle and was trampled to
death under the feet of the mob. But indeed for the unicorn, the mob
would have killed her long before.
PRIME MINISTER: No, you will not be martyred. I have a plan to settle that.
I will stop their anger with a word. Who made that dress?
QUEEN: It was my mother's dress. She wore it at her coronation. I would
not have a new one made. I do not deserve new clothes, I am always com-
mitting sin.
PRIME MINISTER: Is there sin in an egg that has never been hatched, that
has never been warmed, in a chalk egg?
QUEEN: I wish I could resemble Holy Saint Octema in everything.
PRIME MINISTER: What a dress! It is too late now. Nothing can be done.
It may appear right to those on the edge of the crowd. The others must
be conquered by charm, dignity, royal manner. As for the dress, I must
think of some excuse, some explanation. Remember that they have never
seen your face, and you will put them in a bad humour if you hang your
head in that dumbfounded way.
QUEEN: I wish I could return to my prayers.
PRIME MINISTER: Walk! Permit me to see Your Majesty walk. No, no,
no. Be more majestic. Ah! If you had known the Queens I have known
—they had a way with them. Morals of a dragoon, but a way, a way.
Give the people some plain image or they will invent one. Put on a kind
of eagle look, a vulture look.
QUEEN: There are cobble-stones—if I might go barefoot it would be a
blessed penance. It was especially the bleeding feet of Saint Octema that
gave pleasure to the unicorn.
PRIME MINISTER: Sleep of Adam! Barefoot-barefoot did you say? (A
pause.) There is not time to take off your shoes and stockings. If you
a
а


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
495
were to look out of the window there, you would see the crowd becoming
wickeder every minute. Come! (He gives his arm to the Queen.)
QUEEN: You have a plan to stop their anger so that I shall not be martyred ?
PRIME MINISTER: My plan will be disclosed before the face of the people
and there alone.
(They go out. Nona comes in with a bottle of wine and a boiled lobster
and lays them on the middle of the floor. She puts her finger on her lip
and stands in the doorway towards the back of the stage.)
DECIMA (comes cautiously out of her hiding place singing):
a
a
“He went away,” my mother sang,
"When I was brought to bed."
And all the while her needle pulled
The gold and silver thread.
She pulled the thread and bit the thread
And made a golden gown,
She wept because she had dreamt that I
Was born to wear a crown.
NONA:
(She is just reaching her hand for the lobster when Nona comes for-
ward holding out towards her the dress and mask of Noah's wife which
she had been carrying over her left arm.)
Thank God you are found. (Getting between her and the lobster.)
No, not until you have put on this dress and mask. I have caught you
now and you are not going to hide again.
DECIMA: Very well, when I have had my breakfast.
Not a mouthful till you are dressed ready for the rehearsal.
DECIMA: Do
you
know what
song I was singing just now?
It is that song you're always singing. Septimus made it up.
It is the song of the mad singing daughter of a harlot. The only
song she had. Her father was a drunken sailor waiting for the full tide
and yet she thought her mother had foretold that she would marry a
prince and become a great queen. (Singing):
NONA:
NONA:
DECIMA:
a
“When she was got,” my mother sang,
“I heard a sea-mew cry,
I saw a flake of yellow foam
That dropped upon my thigh.”
How therefore could she help but braid
The gold upon my hair,
And dream that I should carry
The golden top of care.
The moment ago as I lay here I thought I could play a Queen's part, a
great Queen's part; the only part in the world I can play is a great Queen's
part.
You play a Queen's part? You that were born in a ditch between
two towns and wrapped in a sheet that was stolen from a hedge.
NONA:


496
THE PLAYER QUEEN
NONA:
NONA:
DECIMA:
NONA:
DECIMA:
NONA:
DECIMA:
DECIMA: The Queen cannot play at all, but I could play so well. I could
bow with my whole body down to my ankles and could be stern when hard
looks were in season. Oh, I would know how to put all summer in a look
and after that all winter in a voice.
NONA: Low comedy is what you are fit for.
DECIMA: I understood all this in a wink of the eye, and then just when I am
saying to myself that I was born to siť up there with soldiers and courtiers,
you come shaking in front of me that mask and that dress. I am not to
eat my breakfast unless I play an old peaky-chinned, drop-nosed harridan
that a foul husband beats with a stick because she won't clamber among
the other brutes into his cattle-boat. (She makes a dart at the lobster.)
NONA: No, no, not a drop, not a mouthful till you have put these on. Re-
member that if there is no play Septimus must go to prison.
DECIMA: Would they give him dry bread to eat ?
They would.
DECIMA: And water to drink and nothing in the water ?
They would.
And a straw bed?
NONA: They would, and only a little straw maybe.
DECIMA: And iron chains that clanked ?
They would.
And keep him there for a whole week?
A month maybe.
And he would say to the turnkey, “I am here because of my beauti-
ful cruel wife, my beautiful flighty wife.”
NONA: He might not, he'd be sober.
DECIMA: But he'd think it, and every time he was hungry, every time he was
thirsty, every time he felt the hardness of the stone floor, every time he
heard the chains clank, he would think it, and every time he thought it I
would become more beautiful in his eyes.
NONA: No, he would hate you.
DECIMA: Little do you know what the love of man is. If that Holy Image
of the Church where you put all those candles at Easter was pleasant and
affable, why did you come home with the skin worn off your two knees ?
NONA (in tears): I understand—you cruel bad woman—you won't play the
part at all, and all that Septimus may go to prison and he a great genius
that can't take care of himself. (Seeing Nona distracted with tears,
Decima makes a dart and almost gets the lobster.) No, no! Not a
mouthful, not a drop. I will break the bottle if you go near it. There is
not another woman in the world would treat a man like that and you were
sworn to him in Church-yes, you were, there is no good denying it.
(Decima makes another dart, but Nona, who is still in tears, puts the lob-
ster in her pocket.) Leave the food alone, not one mouthful will you get.
I have never sworn to a man in Church, but if I did swear I would not
treat him like a tinker's donkey-before God I would not-I was properly
brought up, my mother always told me it was no light thing to take a man
in Church.
DECIMA: You are in love with my husband.
NONA: Because I don't want to see him jailed you say I am in love with him.
Only a woman with no heart would think one can't be sorry for a man
without being in love with him. A woman who has never been sorry for
a


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
497
DECIMA:
NONA:
anybody, but I won't have him jailed, if you won't play the part, I'll play
it myself.
DECIMA: When I married him, I made him swear never to play with anybody
but me, and well you know it.
NONA: Only this once, and in a part nobody can do anything with.
That is the way it begins and all the time you would be saying
things the audience couldn't hear.
Septimus will break his oath and I have learnt the part. . . every line
of it.
DECIMA: Septimus would not break his oath for anybody in the world.
There is one person in the world for whom he will break his oath.
What have you in your head now?
He will break it for me.
ou are crazy.
Maybe I have my secrets.
What are you keeping back? Have you been sitting in corners
with Septimus, giving him sympathy because of the bad wife he has and all
the while he has sat there to have the pleasure of talking about me?
You think that you have his every thought because you are a devil.
Because I am a devil I have his every thought. You know how his
own song runs. The man speaks first (singing):
NONA:
DECIMA:
NONA:
DECIMA:
NONA:
DECIMA:
NONA:
DECIMA:
"Put off that mask of burning gold
With emerald eyes.”
and the woman answers :
“Oh no, my
SO
dear, you make bold
To find if hearts be wild and wise
And yet not cold.”
DECIMA:
NONA: His every thought—that is a lie. He forgets all about you the mo-
ment you're out of his sight.
Then look what I
carry
under
my
bodice. This is a poem praising
me, all my beauties one after another-eyes, hair, complexion, shape, dis-
,
position, mind-everything. And there are a great many verses to it. And
here is a little one he gave me yesterday morning. I had turned him out
of bed and he had to lie alone by himself.
NONA: Alone by himself!
DECIMA: And as he lay there alone, unable to sleep, he made it up, wishing
that he were blind so as not to be troubled by looking at my beauty. Hear
how it goes! (sings again):
O would that I were an old beggar
Without a friend on this earth
But a thieving rascally cur
A beggar blind from his birth;
Or anything else but a man
Lying alone on a bed
Remembering a woman's beauty,
Alone with a crazy head.


498
THE PLAYER QUEEN
a
NONA: Alone in his bed indeed. I know that long poem, that one with all the
verses; I know it to my hurt, though I haven't read a word of it. Four
lines in every verse, four beats in every line, and fourteen verses—my
curse upon it!
DECIMA (taking out a manuscript from her bodice): Yes, fourteen verses.
There are numbers to them.
NONA: You have another there—ten verses all in fours and threes.
DECIMA (looking at another manuscript): Yes, the verses are in fours and
threes. But how do you know all this? I carry them here. They are a
secret between him and me, and nobody can see them till they have lain a
long while upon my heart.
NONA: They have lain upon your heart, but they were made upon my shoul-
der. Ay, and down along my spine in the small hours of the morning; so
many beats a line, and for every beat a tap of the fingers.
DECIMA: My God!
NONA: That one with the fourteen verses kept me from my sleep two hours,
and when the lines were finished he lay upon his back another hour waving
one arm in the air, making up the music. I liked him well enough to seem
to be asleep through it all, and many another poem too—but when he made
up that short one you sang he was so pleased that he muttered the words
all about his lying alone in his bed thinking of you, and that made me mad.
So I said to him, am I not beautiful? Turn round and look. Oh, I cut
it short, for even I can please a man when there is but one candle. (She
takes a pair of scissors that are hanging round her neck and begins snipping
at the dress for Noah's wife.) And now you know why I can play the part
in spite of you and not be driven out. Work upon Septimus if you have a
mind for it. Little need I care. I will slip this a trifle and restitch it again
- I have a needle and thread ready. (The Stage Manager comes in ring-
ing a bell. He is followed by various Players all dressed up in the likeness
of various beasts.)
STAGE MANAGER: Put on that mask-get into your clothes. Why are you
standing there as if in a trance ?
NONA: Decima and I have talked the matter over and we have settled that I
am to play the part.
STAGE MANAGER: Do as you please. Thank God it's a part that anybody can
play. All you have got to do is to copy an old woman's squeaky voice.
We are all here now but Septimus and we cannot wait for him. I will read
the part of Noah. He will be here before we are finished, I dare say. We
will
suppose that the audience is upon this side, and that the Ark is over
there with a gangway for the beasts to climb. All you beasts are to crowd
up on the prompt side. Lay down Noah's hat and cloak there till Septimus
As the first scene is between Noah and the beasts you can go on
with your sewing.
DECIMA: No, I must be heard. My husband has been spending his nights
with Nona, and that is why she sits clipping and stitching with that vain-
glorious air.
NONA: She made him miserable, she knows every trick of breaking a man's
heart—he came to me with his troubles—I seemed to be a comfort to him,
and now-why should I deny it?—he is my lover.
I will take the vainglory out of her. I have been a plague to him.
comes.
DECIMA:


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
499
a
a
Oh, I have been a badger and a weasel and a hedgehog and polecat, and all
because I was dead sick of him. And, thank God! she has got him and I
am free. I threw away a part and I threw away a man-she has picked
both up.
DECIMA:
NONA:
STAGE MANAGER: It seems to me that it all concerns you two.
It's your busi-
ness and not ours. I don't see why we should delay the rehearsal.
I will have no rehearsal yet. I'm too happy now that I am free.
I must find somebody who will dance with me for a while. Come, we must
have music. (She picks up a lute which has been laid down amongst some
properties.) You can't all be claws and hoofs.
STAGE MANAGER: We've only an hour and the whole play to go through.
Oh, she has taken my scissors, she is only pretending not to care.
Look at her! she is mad! Take them away from her! Hold her hand!
She is going to kill me or to kill herself. (To Stage Manager.) Why
don't you interfere? My God! she is going to kill me.
DÉCIMA: Here, Peter. Play the lute. (She begins cutting through the breast-
feathers of the Swan.)
She is doing it all to stop the rehearsal, out of
vengeance; and
you
stand there and do nothing.
STAGE MANAGER: If you have taken her husband, why didn't you keep the
news till the play was over ? She is going to make them all mad now. I
can see that much in her eyes.
Now that I have thrown Septimus into her lap, I will choose a new
man. Shall it be you, Turkey-cock, or you, Bull-head?
There is nothing to be done. It is all your fault. If Septi-
mus can't manage his wife, it's certain that I can't. (He sits down help-
lessly.)
FIRST PLAYER (who is in the fore legs of the Bull): Come live with me
and be
my
love.
Dance, Bull-head, dance. (The Bull dances.) You're too slow on
NONA:
DECIMA:
.
STAGE MANAGER:
:
DECIMA:
your feet.
FIRST PLAYER: Although I am slow I am twice as good as any other, for I
am double, one in the fore legs and one behind.
DECIMA: You are heavy of build and that means jealousy and there is a sort
of melancholy in your voice, and what a folly now that I have found out
love to stretch and yawn as if I loved.
SECOND PLAYER (who is in the form of a Turkey-cock): Come live with me
and be my love, for as everybody can see from my ruff and my red wattle
and my way of strutting and my chuckling speech, I have a cheerful ap-
petite.
DECIMA: Dance, dance. (The Turkey-cock dances.) Ah, Turkey-cock, you
are lively on your feet and I would find it hard to hide if
you
followed.
Would you expect me to be faithful?
SECOND PLAYER: No, neither I nor you. I have a score of wives.
You are a disgrace.
SECOND PLAYER: Be content now that
you
have a man of your own.
You are quick of mind, Turkey-cock, I see that by your bright eyes,
but I want to let my mind go asleep. All dance, all, all, and I will choose
NONA:
the best dancer amongst you.
FIRST PLAYER: No, let us toss for it. I understand that better.
DECIMA:


500
THE PLAYER QUEEN
DECIMA: Quick, quick, begin to dance. (All dance round Decima.)
DECIMA (singing):
a
Shall I fancy beast or fowl,
Queen Pasiphae chose a bull,
While a passion for a swan
Made Queen Leda stretch and yawn,
Wherefore spin ye, whirl ye, dance ye,
Till Queen Decima's found her fancy.
,
CHORUS:
Wherefore spin ye, whirl ye, dance ye,
Till Queen Decima's found her fancy.
DECIMA:
Spring and straddle, stride and strut,
Shall I choose a bird or brute ?
Name the feather or the fur
For my single comforter.
CHORUS:
Wherefore spin ye, whirl ye, dance ye,
Till Queen Decima's found her fancy.
DECIMA:
None has found, that found out love,
Single bird or brute enough;
Any bird or brute may rest
An empty
head
upon my
breast.
CHORUS:
Wherefore spin ye, whirl ye, dance ye,
,
,
,
Till Queen Decima's found her fancy.
STAGE MANAGER: Stop, stop, here is Septimus.
SEPTIMUS (the blood upon his face still, but little soberer): Prepare to die.
Consider whether you will speak as Cato, as Demosthenes, as Cicero tri-
umphing over death in sonorous eloquence, or like Petronius Arbiter telling
witty, scandalous tales.
STAGE MANAGER: Come, Septimus, this is not a time for making up speeches
for the new play. Let us get on with the rehearsal.
SEPTIMUS: Look at my wounds and know that the mob is climbing up the
hill with pitchforks to stick into our vitals and burning wisps to set the
roof on fire.
FIRST PLAYER (who has gone to the window): My God, it's true. There
is a great crowd at the bottom of the hill.
SECOND PLAYER: But why should they attack us?
SEPTIMUS: Happy Tom and Peter of the Purple Pelican have stirred up the
mob.
THIRD PLAYER (at window): My God, they have dung-forks and scythes
set on poles and they are coming this way. Many Players gather round
(
the window.)
SEPTIMUS (who has found the bottle and is drinking): I will die railing
upon the unicorn because he will not trample mankind to death, and upon
some women beget a new race, but I will rail sweetly. We must not allow


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
501
our murderers to discompose us. For after all even if they blow up the
floor with gunpowder they are merely the mob. I will even put my railing
into rhyme.
Upon the round blue eye I rail,
Damnation on the milk-white horn.
FIRST PLAYER:
а
all to
A telling sound, a sound to linger in the ear-hale, tale, bale, gale—my
a
God, I am even too sober to find a rhyme—(he drinks and then picks up a
lute) a tune that even my murderers may remember my last words and
croon them to their grandchildren. (For the next few speeches Septimus
is busy making his tune.)
The players of this town are jealous. Have we not been
chosen before them all, because we are the most famous players in the
world? It is they who have stirred up the mob.
THIRD PLAYER : When we played at Kzanadu, my performance was so in-
comparable that the men who pulled the strings of the puppet-show left
all the puppets lying on their backs and came to have a look at me.
FOURTH PLAYER: Listen to him! His performance indeed! I ask you
speak the truth. If you are honest men you will say that it was my pero
formance that drew the town. Why, Kubla Khan himself gave me the
name of the “Talking Nightingale.”
FIFTH PLAYER: My God, listen to him! Is it not always the comedian who
draws the people? Am I dreaming, and was it not I who was called six
?
times before the curtain ? Answer me that.
SIXTH PLAYER (at window): There is somebody making a speech. I cannot
see who it is.
SECOND PLAYER: Depend upon it, he is telling them to put burning wisps
upon dung-forks and put them into the rafters. That is what they did in
the old play of the Burning of Troy. Depend upon it, they will burn the
whole house.
FIFTH PLAYER (coming from window): I will stay here no longer. (Exit.)
Nor I, nor I.
FIRST PLAYER: Must we go dressed like this?
There is no time to change, and besides should the hill be
surrounded, we can gather in some cleft of the rocks where we can be seen
only from a distance. They will suppose we are a drove of cattle or a
flock of birds.
(All go out except Septimus, Decima, and Nona. Nona is making a
bundle of Noah's hat and cloak and other properties. Decima is watch-
ing Septimus.
SEPTIMUS (while the players are going out): Leave me to die alone ? I do
not blame
OTHER PLAYERS:
SECOND PLAYER:
you.
There is
courage
in red wine, in white wine, in beer, even
in thin beer sold by a blear-eyed pot-boy in a bankrupt tavern, but there
is none in the human heart. Oh, I will journey to a cavern in Africa and
sing into the ear of the unicorn epithalamiums until, unable to endure any
longer his desirous heart, he becomes the new Adam.
I'll pile these upon your back. I shall carry the rest myself and so
we shall save all. (She begins tying a great bundle of properties on Sep-
timus' back.)
NONA:


502
THE PLAYER QUEEN
SEPTIMUS: You are right. I accept the reproach. It is necessary that we
who are the last artists—all the rest have gone over to the mob—shall save
the images and implements of our art. We must carry into safety the
cloak of Noah, the high-crowned hat of Noah, and the golden face of the
Almighty, and the horns of Satan.
NONA: Thank God you can still stand upright on your legs.
SEPTIMUS: Tie all upon my back and I will tell you the great secret that
came to me at the second mouthful of the bottle. Man is nothing till he
is united to an image. Now the unicorn is both an image and beast, that
is why he alone can be the new Adam. When we have put all in safety we
will go to the high table-lands of Africa to find where the unicorn is
stabled. I will stand before the terrible blue eye.
NONA: There now I have tied them on. (She begins making another bundle
for herself.)
SEPTIMUS: You will make Ionian music-music with its eyes upon that
voluptuous Asia—the Dorian scale would but confirm him in his chastity.
One Dorian note might undo us and above all we must be careful not to
speak of Delphi. The oracle is chaste.
NONA: Come, let us go.
SEPTIMUS: If we cannot fill him with desire he will deserve death. Even
unicorns can be killed. What they dread most in the world is a blow from
а
a knife that has been dipped in the blood of a serpent that died gazing up-
on an emerald. (Nona and Septimus are about to go out, Nona leading
Septimus.)
Stand back, do not dare to move a step.
SEPTIMUS: Beautiful as the unicorn, but fierce.
I have locked the gates that we may have a talk.
(Nona lets the hat of Noah fall in her alarm.)
SEPTIMUS: That is well, very well. You would talk with me because to-day
DECIMA:
DECIMA:
I am extraordinarily wise.
DECIMA: I will not unlock the gate till I have a promise that you will drive
her from the company.
NONA: Do not listen to her, take the key from her.
SEPTIMUS: If I were not her husband I would take the key, but because I am
her husband she is terrible. The unicorn will be terrible when it loves.
NONA: You are afraid.
SEPTIMUS: Could not you yourself take it? She does not love you, there-
fore she will not be terrible.
NONA: If you are a man at all you will take it.
SEPTIMUS: I am more than a man, I am extraordinarily wise. I will take
the key.
DECIMA: If you come a step nearer I will shove the key through the grating
of the door.
NONA (pulling him back): Don't go near her, if she shoves it through the
door we shall not be able to escape. The crowd will find us and murder
us.
DECIMA: I will unlock this gate when you have taken an oath to drive her
from the company, an oath never to speak with her or look at her again, a
terrible oath.
SEPTIMUS: You are jealous; it is very wrong to be jealous. An ordinary


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
503
man would be lost-even I am not yet wise enough. (Drinks again.)
Now all is plain.
DECIMA: You have been unfaithful to me.
SEPTIMUS: I am only unfaithful when I am sober. Never trust a sober man.
All the world over they are unfaithful. I warn you against all sober men
from the bottom of my heart. I am extraordinarily wise.
NONA: Promise, if it is only an oath she wants. Take whatever oath she bids
you. If you delay we shall all be murdered.
SEPTIMUS: I can see your meaning. You would explain to me that an oath
can be broken, more especially an oath under compulsion, but no, I say to
you, no, I say to you, certainly not. Am I a rascally sober man, such a
,
.
man as I have warned you against ? Shall I be foresworn before the very
eyes of Delphi so to speak, before the very eyes of that cold rocky oracle?
What I promise I perform, therefore, my little darling, I will not promise
anything at all.
DECIMA: Then we shall wait here. They will come in there and there, they
will carry dung-forks with burning wisps. They will put the burning
wisps into the roof and we shall be burnt.
SEPTIMUS: I shall die railing upon that beast because owing to a pedantic
scruple or some congenital chill of the blood or because of the machina-
tions of Delphi he will not become the new Adam.
I shall be avenged. She starved me, but I shall have killed her.
NONA (who has crept behind Decima and snatched the key): I have it, I
have it! (Decima tries to take the key again, but Septimus holds her.)
Because I am an unforsworn man I am strong.
Go then. I shall stay here and die.
Let us go. A half hour since, she offered herself to every man in the
company.
DECIMA: If you would be faithful to me, Septimus, I would not let a man
of them touch me.
SEPTIMUS: Flighty, but beautiful.
She is a bad woman. (Nona runs out.)
A beautiful, bad, flighty woman. I will follow, but follow slow-
ly. I will take with me this noble hat. (He picks up Noah's hat with
difficulty.) I will save the noble, high-crowned hat of Noah. I will carry
it thus with dignity. I will go slowly that they may see I am not afraid.
(Singing):
DECIMA:
SEPTIMUS:
DECIMA:
NONA:
NONA:
a
SEPTIMUS:
Upon the round blue eye I rail
Damnation on the milk-white horn
But not one word of Delphi. I am extraordinarily wise. (Septimus goes.)
DECIMA: Betrayed, betrayed, and for a nobody. For a woman that a man
can shake and twist like so much tallow. A woman that till now never
looked higher than a prompter or a property man. (The Old Beggar
comes in.) Have you come to kill me,
old ?
I am looking for straw. I must soon lie down and roll, and
where will I get straw to roll on? I went round to the kitchen and “Go
away,” they said. They made the sign of the cross as if it were a devil
that puts me rolling.
man
OLD BEGGAR:


504
THE PLAYER QUEEN
DECIMA:
DECIMA: When will the mob come to kill me ?
OLD BEGGAR: Kill you? It is not you they are going to kill. It's the itching
in my back that drags them hither, for when I bray like a donkey, the
crown changes.
The crown? So it is the Queen they are going to kill.
OLD BEGGAR: But, my dear, she can't die till I roll and bray, and I will whis-
per to you what it is that rolls. It is the donkey that carried Christ into
Jerusalem, and that is why he is so proud; and that is why he knows the
hour when there is to be a new King or a new Queen.
DECIMA:
Are you weary
of the world, old man?
OLD BEGGAR: Yes, yes, because when I roll and bray I am asleep. I know
nothing about it, and that is a great pity. I remember nothing but the
itching in
my
back. But I must stop talking and find some straw.
DECIMA (picking up the scissors): Old man, I am going to drive this into
my heart.
OLD BEGGAR: No, no, don't do that. You don't know what you will be put
to when you are dead, into whose gullet you will be put to sing or to bray.
You have a look of a foretelling sort. Who knows but you might be put
to foretell the death of kings; and bear in mind I will have no rivals, I
could not endure a rival.
I have been betrayed by a man, I have been made a mockery of. Do
those who are dead, old man, make love and do they find good lovers?
OLD BEGGAR: I will whisper you another secret. People talk, but I have never
known of anything to come from there but an old jackass. Maybe there
is nothing else. Who knows but he has the whole place to himself. But
there, my back is beginning to itch, and I have not yet found any straw.
(He goes out. Decima leans the scissors upon the arm of the throne and is
about to press herself upon them when the Queen enters.)
QUEEN (stopping her): No, no—that would be a great sin.
DECIMA: Your Majesty!
QUEEN: I thought I would like to die a martyr, but that would be different,
that would be to die for God's glory. The Holy Saint Octema was a
martyr.
DECIMA: I am very unhappy.
QUEEN: I, too, am very unhappy. When I saw the great angry crowd and
knew that they wished to kill me, though I had wanted to be a martyr, I
was afraid and ran away.
DECIMA: I would not have run away. Oh no, but it is hard to drive a knife
a
into one's own flesh.
QUEEN: In a moment they will have come and they will beat in the door, and
how shall I escape them?
If they could mistake me for you, you would escape.
QUEEN: I could not let another die instead of me.
That would be very
wrong.
DECIMA: Oh, your Majesty, I shall die whatever you do and if only I could
wear that gold brocade and those gold slippers for one moment, it would
not be so hard to die.
QUEEN: They say that those who die to save a rightful Sovereign show great
virtue.
DECIMA: Quick! the dress.
DECIMA:


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
505
QUEEN: If you killed yourself your soul would be lost, and now you will be
sure of heaven.
DECIMA: Quick, I hear them coming.
(Decima puts on the Queen's robe of state and her slippers. Under-
neath her robe of state the Queen wears some kind of nun-like dress.
The following speech is spoken by the Queen while she is helping
Decima to fasten the dress and the slippers.)
QUEEN: Was it love? (Decima nods.) Oh, that is a great sin. I have
:
never known love. Of all things, that is what I have had most fear of.
Saint Octema shut herself up in a tower on a mountain because she was
loved by a beautiful prince. I was afraid it would come in at the
eye
and
seize upon me in a moment. I am not naturally good, and they say people
will do anything for love, there is so much sweetness in it. Even Saint
Octema was afraid of it. But you will escape all that and go up to God
as a pure virgin. (The change is now complete.) Good-bye, I know
how I can slip away. There is a convent that will take me in. It is not
a tower, it is only a convent, but I have long wanted to go there to lose my
name and disappear. Sit down upon the throne and turn your face
away.
If you do not turn your face away you will be afraid. (The Queen goes
out. Decima is seated upon the throne. A great crowd gathers outside the
gates. A Bishop enters.)
BISHOP: Your loyal people, Your Majesty, offer you their homage. I bow
before you in their name. Your royal will has spoken by the mouth of the
Prime Minister-has filled them with gratitude. All misunderstandings
are at an end, all has been settled by your condescension in bestowing
your royal hand upon the Prime Minister. (To crowd) Her Majesty,
who has hitherto shut herself away from all men's eyes that she might
pray for this Kingdom undisturbed, will henceforth show herself to her
people. (To Player Queen) So beautiful a Queen need never fear the
disobedience of her people. (Shouts from crowd of “Never!")
PRIME MINISTER (entering hurriedly): I will explain all, your Majesty,
there was nothing else to be done. This Bishop has been summoned to
unite us. (Seeing the Queen) But sleep of Adam—this—who is this?
Your emotion is too great for words, do not try to speak.
PRIME MINISTER: This-this-
DECIMA (standing up): I am Queen. I know what it is to be Queen. If I
were to say to you I had an enemy you would kill him—you would tear
him in pieces. (Shouts “We would kill him.” “We would tear him in
pieces" et cetera.) But I do not bid you kill any one-I bid you obey my
husband when I have raised him to the throne. He is not of royal blood,
but I choose to raise him to the throne. That is my will. Show me that
you will obey him so long as I bid you to obey. (Great cheering. Septimus
who has been standing among the crowd comes forward and takes the
Prime Minister by the sleeve. Various persons kiss the hand of the sup-
posed Queen.
SEPTIMUS: My Lord, that is not the Queen, that is my bad wife. (Decima
looks at them.)
Did you see that? Did you see the devil in her eye. They
are mad after her pretty face and she knows it. They would not believe a
word I say, there is nothing to be done till they cool.
:
DECIMA:
PRIME MINISTER:


506
THE PLAYER QUEEN
DECIMA:
Are all here my faithful servants ?
All, Your Majesty.
All?
PRIME MINISTER (bowing low): All, Your Majesty.
DECIMA (singing):
BISHOP:
DECIMA:
She pulled the thread, and bit the thread
And made the golden gown.
Hand me that plate of lobster and that bottle of wine. While I am eating
I will have a good look at my new man.
(The plate and bottle of wine are handed to her. The bray of a donkey
is heard and the Old Beggar is dragged in amid the hoots of the mob.)
BISHOP: At last we have found this impostor out. He has been accepted by
the whole nation as if he were the Voice of God. As if the crown could
not be settled firmly on any head without his help. It's plain that he has
been in league with the conspirators, and believed that Your Majesty had
been killed. He is keeping it up still. Look at his glassy eye. But his
madman airs won't help him now.
PRIME MINISTER (shaking Septimus): Do you understand that there has
been a miracle, that God or the Fiend has spoken, and that the Crown is
on her head for good, that fate has brayed on that man's lips. (Aloud)
We will hang him in the morning.
SEPTIMUS: She is my wife.
PRIME MINISTER: The Crown has changed and there is no help for it.
Sleep of Adam, I must have that woman for wife. The Oracle has settled
that. (Takes Septimus away to prison.)
She is my wife, she is my bad, flighty wife.
PRIME MINISTER: Seize this man. He has been whispering slanders against
Her Majesty. Cast him beyond the borders of the Kingdom and find the
company of players he belongs to. They also are banished and must not
return on pain of death. Now, my Lord Bishop, I am ready.
DECIMA (singing):
SEPTIMUS:
She wept because she had dreamt that I
Was born to wear a crown.
(She flings the lobster's claw at the Prime Minister.) Come-crack that
claw,
CURTAIN


BRANCUSI’S GOLDEN BIRD
BY MINA LOY
The toy
become the aesthetic archetype
As if
some patient peasant God
had rubbed and rubbed
the Alpha and Omega
of Form
into a lump of metal
A naked orientation
unwinged unplumed
—the ultimate rhythm
has lopped the extremities
of crest and claw
from
the nucleus of flight
The absolute act
of art
conformed
to continent sculpture
-bare as the brow of Osiris-
this breast of revelation
-
an incandescent curve
licked by chromatic flames
in labyrinths of reflections
This gong
of polished hyperaesthesia
shrills with brass
het


508
BRANCUSI'S GOLDEN BIRD
as the agressive light
strikes
its significance
The immaculate
conception
of the inaudible bird
Occurs
in
gorgeous reticence



Courtesy of John Quinn
THE GOLDEN BIRD. BY CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI


.


DOCTOR GRAESLER
BY ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
Translated from the German by Paul Bloomfield Zeisler
XII (continued)
I ,
a
a
T occurred to Graesler that, with poor steamer connexions, he
could not reach the island before the middle of November, and,
that, in view of his having neither accepted nor rejected the direc-
tor's offer, he might find his position filled by that time. Well, fortu-
nately he was no longer dependent upon it. He could permit himself
a vacation of a half year or more, if he so desired; why, if he only
economized a little, he could give up practising altogether. But the
thought frightened him. Why, he was not capable of living without
a profession. He had to work on, make people well, lead the life
of a noble, active man; and he was, after all, still destined to pur-
sue that earthly career at the side of this pure and wonderful crea-
ture, who wished perhaps only to punish him a little for his hesita-
tion or perhaps to test him once again. And so he explained to Sa-
bine that he had not as yet made any kind of binding arrangement;
he was still awaiting the arrival from Lanzarote of a letter contain-
a
ing the acceptance of new and advantageous conditions which he
had made the management there; and he had determined, if these
were not granted him, to spend the coming winter in study at dif-
ferent German universities. Oh, he had not by any means been idle
in his native city either; he had not only been diligent in his visits
to the hospital, but had even practised privately. Quite by accident,
of course. A child it had been, a darling little girl of seven, the
daughter of a widow who lived in his house. He could not shirk
his duty. It had been a case of some seriousness—scarlet fever. But
the child was now quite out of danger. Otherwise he could scarcely
have left. While he was talking on in this manner he tried to evoke
the picture of Frau Sommer in his memory; but there always ap-
peared, instead, the lady with the doll's face from the family maga-
zine, she who had filled his dreams during the ocean trip. Obviously
there existed a certain resemblance between the two. Why, of
,


510
DOCTOR GRAESLER
course; had it not impressed him at the very first? To his latest
communications Sabine had been listening with growing interest,
but—as he feared, perhaps only because of his heavy conscience-
with some distrust; and almost immediately she began to speak of
her two friends, whom Graesler would probably still remember, the
younger of whom had become engaged to a late arrival at the spa
from Berlin. She expected to go there for the wedding and on that
occasion, as her mother remarked, to plunge into the metropolitan
whirl for a change. Graesler turned his eyes upon Sabine again, im-
patiently, almost imploringly, as though to ask, "Well, what about
us two, anyhow?” But her gaze remained impenetrable; and al-
though she seemed to have become more friendly, even more gentle,
during the course of the evening, he felt that he had as good as lost
the game. Yet his pride rebelled against his acceptance of such a
mute leave-taking as seemed to be intended for him, and he re-
solved to ask Sabine for a moment's private conversation before de-
parting. As he rose and alluded with affected lightness to the possi-
bility of their meeting in Berlin around Christmas, Sabine also got
up
from the table, so that her intention of escorting the guest was
unmistakable. Side by side, as in the happy bygone days, but in
silence, they walked along beneath the pines and towards the high-
way where the carriage was waiting. Graesler stopped, however,
almost involuntarily, and asked: “Are you angry at me, Sabine?”
“Angry?” she repeated in a whisper. “Why should I be ?”
"Oh, that letter of mine; don't I know it? That miserable letter
of mine!” And when, in the darkness, he saw her quiver convul-
sively, painfully, with but a deprecating gesture of her hand, he
hastily attempted an explanation, feeling nevertheless that he was
involving himself more irretrievably at every step. She had misun-
derstood his letter, misunderstood it altogether. His conscientious-
ness, his sense of duty, had prompted him to write that letter. Oh,
if he had only obeyed the dictates of his heart, of his passion! Why,
he had loved her, had adored her, from the very first moment he had
stood opposite her at the bed-side of her mother. But he had not had
the courage to believe in his happiness. After such a sombre, lonely,
restless life as his! He had no longer dared to hope, to dream. An
old man like him! Almost an old man-for, to be sure, he did feel
that it was not the number of one's years that constituted youth.
In those endless weeks of their separation he had learned to realize
that.
But her letter, that marvelous, heavenly letter-


ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
511
9
oh, he had not been worthy of such words.
And thus his
words were headlong and confused, and he knew that he was not
finding the right words, could not find them—because the path be-
tween his lips and her heart had been blocked up. And when at last,
quite hopelessly, he concluded with an almost stifled cry, “Forgive
me, Sabine!” he heard her answering, as though from a distance.
“There is nothing to forgive. But it would have been nicer of
you
not to have spoken. That was what I hoped you would do. Other-
wise I should have asked you not to come.”
Her voice sounded so hard now that Graesler suddenly took new
hope. Was it not outraged love that rendered her so implacable?
Outraged love—but love, nevertheless; it still existed although she
was ashamed of it? And he began again with fresh courage:
“ “Sabine—I beg nothing of you but this one thing—that you will
let me come back again next spring, ask you once more next spring.”
She interrupted him. “It has turned quite cool out here. Good-
bye, Doctor Graesler.” And in spite of the darkness he thought that
he could make out a contemptuous smile as she added, “I wish you
good luck for the future.”
“Sabine!”
He seized her hand and tried to hold it. She withdrew it gently.
“I wish you a pleasant trip,” she said, and in her voice there was
again all the kindness that was now lost to him for all time. She
turned, and without hastening her step—though none the less irrev-
ocably—she walked to the house and disappeared through the door.
Only for a moment did Graesler stand staring fixedly after her;
then he hurried to the carriage, climbed in, wrapped himself in his
coat and a blanket, and rode homeward through the night. Defiance
a
awoke in his heart. “Very well, then,” he said to himself. “You
wish it so. You yourself drive me into the arms of another. You
shall have your wish. And more besides. You shall learn of it.
Before I travel south, I shall come here with her. I shall
live here with her for a few days. I shall go driving with her and
come by The Range. You shall see her. You shall meet her. You
shall talk with her. 'Allow me to introduce my wife, Fräulein Sa-
bine! Not such a pure soul as you, my dear Fräulein, but not such
a cold one either! Not so proud, but kinder! Not so chaste, but
sweeter! Katharina is her name—Katharina.
Contemplatively he spoke the name aloud. And the farther the
carriage drew away from The Range, the more intense became his
a
ܕܙ ܙܙ


512
DOCTOR GRAESLER
longing for Katharina. It quickly turned into exultation at the
wonderful certainty that soon-to-morrow, to-morrow evening -
he would hold his beloved in his arms again. What eyes she would
make when she suddenly caught sight of him in the Wilhelmstrasse
at seven in the evening! That would be a surprise! And another, a
greater one, awaited her. For he was not a Puritan. He had no
other desire than to be happy, and he would take his happiness
where he found it—where it was proffered him so heartily, so unre-
servedly, with such true womanliness, as by Katharina
Katharina
How fortunate it was, after all, that he had
seen Sabine once again. Not until now had he known that Katha-
rina and no other was the right woman for him.
XVI
The next evening, an hour after his arrival, he stood on the
street corner from which he could not fail to see Katharina imme-
diately she left the glove-store. The two other sales-ladies employed
by the shop walked out of the door one after the other and disap-
peared. The shutters were rolled down, the porter withdrew, the
arc-light within went out—and Katharina had not appeared.
Strange. Very strange. Why, her vacation had expired. What,
then, could have kept her from coming to the store? A sudden jeal-
ousy flamed up in Graesler; no doubt of it—she was with someone
else. Presumably with an old acquaintance, for whom she again had
plenty of time, now that the old doctor from Portugal, with his
Indian shawls and amber chains, had gone away. Perhaps it was
even a brand new acquaintance. Why not? That kind of thing
doesn't take so very long for our sort to arrange, does it, Fräulein
Katharina ? Where could they possibly be hiding? At the theatre,
very likely. That was probably the established order of procedure,
what? The first evening, theatre; the second-all the rest! Most
likely she had already been through all that several times before.
But that the affair should start all over again on the very next day!
By Jove, that was carrying things a bit too far! The miserable crea-
ture! on whose account he had lost a woman like Sabine. Trots off
with shawls and hats and clothes and other finery, and in the end
makes merry with some young fellow or other about that old fool
from Portugal.
Such thoughts succeeded one another
rapidly, and with intentional self-torment he inwardly set aside the


ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
513
.
.
possibility of any harmless reasons for Katharina's non-appearance.
Well, what was to be done? Trudge home quietly, and let the mat-
ter go at that, so far as he was concerned; that would certainly have
been the most sensible move. But he could not muster that much
self-restraint. Finally he decided to make his way into the suburbs,
stand near her house, and wait for her. It would soon appear with
whom she had picked up, unless by any chance she had already
established herself in the household of her new lover.
But
that was hardly to be feared. It was not so easy to find another fool
like himself, who would take such a creature into his own home as a
fellow-lodger—such a crafty, gossipy, uncultivated, mendacious
little thing. He despised her utterly, and abandoned himself with
even a kind of voluptuousness to this emotion. “Do you find that
somewhat puritanical, my dear Fräulein ?” he suddenly turned to
ask of the distant Sabine, towards whom he now also perceived a
violent resentment rising within him. "Well, that can't be helped.
No one can jump out of his skin, you know, neither man nor woman.
One is born to be a whore, another is cut out to become an old maid,
and a third, in spite of the very best upbringing in a good, German
middle-class family, leads the life of a cocotte, imposes on her
parents and her brother—and finally kills herself when she can no
longer find any male of the species to please her. And it happens
that God made me squeamish and puritanical
But, by
the Lord, there are worse things than being a Puritan!”
And he dreamt that he was in houses of ill-fame, dreamt of wild
dances by naked women, and planned monstrous orgies as a sort of
demoniacal revenge upon the pitiful sex which had behaved so
treacherously, so faithlessly, towards him-revenge on Katharina,
on Sabine, and on Friederike.
In the meantime he had arrived before Katharina's home un-
awares. A disagreeable wind had risen and was sweeping the dust
down the wretched alley. Here and there windows were hurriedly
closed. Graesler looked at his watch. It was not nearly eight yet.
How many, and what trying, hours might now still be in store for
him? Perhaps it would be ten, eleven, even twelve o'clock, or to-
morrow morning, before the little miss got home.
The thought of running up and down here, in uncertainty, in
wind and rain—for the first drops were already falling was
rather distressing. And now at last he began to give ear to an inner
voice that had for some time been shyly addressing him. What if
.


514
DOCTOR GRAESLER
Katharina were at home after all? Perhaps she had left the store
earlier than usual-even though, on the very first day after her va-
cation, there was not much likelihood of that. Or her vacation had
not yet come to an end at all, and she was spending her last free
days in the circle of her family. He himself did not really believe
any of this, but such considerations did him good, the more so as he
reflected that it was not unduly difficult to bring light upon the
matter. One had only to walk up three flights, and ask up-stairs, at
the apartment of Herr Rebner, the postal clerk, whether Fräulein
Katharina was at home. That would hardly impress anybody as
strange. One would scarcely be so very particular in a family in
which the Fräulein daughter returned from the country with twice
as much baggage as when she had left. And if she were not at home,
one might at least take this opportunity of finding out, perhaps, on
what pretext she was spending the evening away from her house.
And if she were at home, why, so much the better; then everything
would be well and good, and he would immediately have her back
again, and would make all the necessary arrangements with her, for
the following day, and the one after, and all the succeeding ones.
For in that case, of course, everything that had been going through
his head would be absurd. There would then be nothing left to do
but beg her pardon inwardly for what he had thought her capable
of, while he was in that miserable humour for which another was
much more responsible than she. And so, with the very best dis-
position towards her, he stood before the door of the house and rang
the bell. A small, elderly woman in a wrapper, with a kitchen-
apron tied about her waist, opened the door and looked at him in
astonishment.
“I beg your pardon,” said Graesler, “but is this the residence of
Herr Rebner, of the post office ?"
“Certainly. I am his wife.”
“Ah, quite so. Yes. I should like--I wished to inquire, you
know, whether I might perhaps have a word with Fräulein Katha-
rina. You see, I had the pleasure of—”
“Ah,” Frau Rebner interrupted him with evident delight. “I
take it you are the doctor whose acquaintance Katharina made in.
the country at Ludmilla's, and from whom she got that beautiful
shawl?”
“Yes, that's who I am. Doctor Graesler is my name”
"Of course-Doctor Graesler. Oh, she has been telling us a lot
>


ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
515
about you—yes
>
а
6
if you'll wait a moment, I want to go
and see whether it is possible for her to— You see, she is in bed.
She only got back yesterday. She has probably caught a cold.”
Graesler started violently. “In bed? Since when ?”
“She has not gotten up at all to-day. I suppose she has got a
little fever, too.”
"Have
you had a doctor here yet, Frau Rebner ?”
"Oh, no. She enjoyed her breakfast so much; that will pass.
“But perhaps you would allow me, as long as chance has led me
here, to— I don't think Fräulein Katharina will object.”
“Why, yes, so long as you are a doctor, perhaps it is really quite
lucky you came."
And she led him through a fairly large, unlighted room into a
smaller one where Katharina lay in bed. On the little bed-chest
stood a candle from which a ray of light flickered across the damp,
white cloth which lay in many folds upon Katharina's forehead, so
that her eyes were at first quite invisible.
“Katharina,” Graesler cried. With apparent difficulty she pulled
the cloth away from her eyes, which shone dimly.
“Good evening,” she said with a weak smile, a bit absently.
“Katharina!” He stood at her bed-side, hastily jerked back the
cover from her throat, pushed her night-gown back from her shoul-
ders, and saw a dark flush there. The fever seemed to have climbed
very high, her apathy was considerable, and so it was unnecessary
for Graesler to make any more detailed examination to recognize
Katharina's disease as scarlet fever. And holding her hand in his,
deeply distressed, feeling like a guilty man, he sank into a chair
beside her bed. At that moment her father came in and cried out
from the doorway:
“But, children, what a fuss you are making about the business!
Why, then you have really got a doctor—?”
His wife went to meet him. “Not so loud,” she said. “She has a
headache. It is only the doctor she met at Ludmilla's.”
“Oh, I see,” said the father, coming nearer. “It is certainly a
pleasure to make your acquaintance. There, now, you have it; you
send the girl into the country, spend money on her trip, and she
only comes back all the more miserable. Well, I don't suppose it
will amount to anything, eh, Doctor? She must have been sitting
out in the open, evenings, at this advanced season of the year. Isn't
that right, Katharina? That is what you did, isn't it?”


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DOCTOR GRAESLER
a
>
Katharina did not answer and pushed the cloth over her eyes
again. Doctor Graesler turned to the father; he was a fairly small,
stout man, nearly bald; he had lustreless eyes and a turned-up, grey
moustache.
“It is not a cold,” said Graesler. “It is scarlet fever.”
“But, Doctor, there can surely be no question of that. Why, that
is a children's sickness, isn't it? Her sister had it when she was five
years old. She would have caught it then, wouldn't she?”
Katharina seemed to have been brought into fuller consciousness
by the excessively noisy behaviour of her father. “The Doctor ought
to know more about it than you, Father,” she said. “But he will also
surely make me well again, won't he ?”
“Yes, that I will, Katharina, that I will,” Graesler replied, and
in that moment he loved her more than he had ever yet loved any
human being. While he was making arrangements the sister ap-
peared with her husband, who at first greeted the doctor with an
amused wink, but soon escaped the gravity of the situation by with-
drawing into the next room with his wife. To the parents, however,
Graesler explained softly that he would in any event stay there over
night, as the first night was of great significance in such cases; and
if he watched at her bed-side uninterruptedly, he might perhaps be
able to prevent certain dangers which, in their earliest symptoms,
might escape untrained eyes.
"Well, Katharina,” said her father, stepping up to her bed again,
"you are certainly in luck. Not everybody has got such a doctor.
But, Doctor”—he dragged Graesler along with him to the door-
“this much I want to tell you right away: we are not rich people.
Even if she did live out in the country, she was there as a guest of
Ludmilla’s, as you may have noticed. Except for the railroad ticket
there and return; that, of course, we paid for.”
His wife reproved him for talking like this, and drew him along
into the living-room; she felt, perhaps, that it was time to leave
Katharina alone with her doctor. Graesler bent over the patient,
stroked her cheeks and her hair, kissed her on the forehead, assured
her that in a few days she would be well again and that then she
would have to come back to him immediately—that he could, in
fact, never again let her leave him, and would take her along with
him everywhere his fate might lead him—that he had felt the most
powerful urge to return to her again, and that she was his darling
and his beloved and his wife, and that he loved her, loved her as no


ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
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being had been loved since the world's beginning. But even as he
saw her smiling still with gratification, he perceived that his words
no longer found their way into the depths of her soul, that she could
now but clutch at what moved about her as at some wavering
shadow; he was standing on the threshold of days in which every
hour would be filled for him with a horrible fear for something be-
loved that was forfeit to an invisible and approaching enemy. He
must prepare for a desperate struggle—a struggle which even in
that very moment he recognized as hopeless.
XVII
After three days and nights in which Graesler watched almost
without interruption at the bed-side of the stricken girl, without her
ever regaining full consciousness, her feverish soul took flight upon
a dull November evening; and after another two days, during which
the settlement of all the sad affairs attaching to the misfortune
completely occupied Graesler's time and attention, she was buried.
Graesler followed the coffin without speaking more than was neces-
sary to her relatives; in spite of their common sorrow, Graesler felt
himself quite isolated. He stood rigidly beside the grave as the
coffin was lowered, and then, without so much as taking leave of the
others, he left the cemetery and drove back to his lodgings. Until
evening he lay in heavy sleep on the divan in his study. It was dark
when he arose. He was alone, more alone than he had ever been be-
fore, even after the death of his parents, or after that of his sister.
Suddenly his life had become void of all content. He went forth
into the street without knowing what to do with himself, without
knowing where to turn. He hated the people, the city, the world,
his profession; this profession, after all, had served no other end
than that of killing the one creature who had seemed destined to
bring some last little measure of happiness into the declining years
of his life. What was there now left for him on earth? He was in
a position to cast off his profession and, if it pleased him, never
exchange another word with mortal being; this seemed to him the
only consolation, the only gain, of his existence. The streets were
damp; upon the grassy carpet of the municipal gardens, in which he
found himself as though by accident, lay a whitish fog. He gazed
up at the sky and saw ragged clouds drifting across it. He felt him-
self growing tired, not only of his aimless wandering, but also of his


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DOCTOR GRAESLER
own company, which all at once became unendurable to him. He
found it quite impossible to go back home and pass a hopeless, lone-
ly night in the very rooms where he had been so happy with Katha-
rina. He could not bear the thought of repeating his fate over and
over again to himself in the selfsame paltry words, without receiv-
ing from somewhere a reply, a consolation, a little sympathy; and
he was aware that, if he did not want to break out sobbing, shriek-
ing, and cursing in the open street, it was imperative that he find
someone immediately to whom he could unbosom himself. As his
old friend Boehlinger was the only person answering to such re-
quirements, Graesler set out for Boehlinger's house. He feared that
he would not find his friend at home, but luck favoured him, and
when he arrived there he found the attorney seated at his docu-
ment-covered writing-desk, dressed in a Turkish lounging-robe and
enveloped in a thick cloud of smoke.
"What, you are here again ?” Boehlinger greeted him. “What's
the matter? Rather unusual time of day for calls.” He glanced at
the clock on the wall; it was ten.
"Please forgive me,” Graesler said hoarsely. “I hope I am not
disturbing you.”
“Why, of course not. Sit down, won't you? Will you have a
cigar?”
“Thanks,” said Graesler, “but I can't smoke now. You see, I
have not yet eaten anything this evening.”
Boehlinger regarded him through narrowed eyelids. "Oh, I see,"
he said. “I suppose it is something important. Well, what about
the sanitarium?”
"Nothing has come of it."
“Ah, so you have broken off negotiations ? That could not have
hit you so hard, could it? Speak up, man! You would hardly have
come here without having some – Of course, I am awfully glad you
came, but— Come, tell me the whole story. Or would you rather
I guessed? Something about a woman?” He smiled. “Unfaithful ?”
Graesler checked him with a gesture of his hand. “She is dead,”
he said harshly; he rose and paced up and down the room.
"Oh,” Boehlinger said and then stopped; and as Graesler chanced
to be passing him again, he seized his hand and pressed it several
times sympathetically. Graesler sank into a chair; with his head in
his hands, cried bitterly, as he had not cried since his boyhood.
Boehlinger smoked and waited patiently. Now and then he threw


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>
a glance at the document that lay spread out before him on the
writing-table and made a few notes on its margin. After a time,
when Graesler seemed gradually to be quieting down, he asked
gently, “How did it happen? Why, she was so young."
Graesler looked up. He drew his mouth into a sarcastic smile.
“She did not die of old age, you may be sure. Scarlet fever. And it
is my fault. My own fault.”
"Your fault? Bring it from the hospital ?”
Graesler shook his head, rose again, raced up and down the room,
,
clutched about in the air as though in desperation, and breathed
hard. Boehlinger leaned back and followed him with his eyes.
"Well, now, suppose you tell me all about it,” he said. “Perhaps
that will quiet you a little.”
And Doctor Graesler began, at first falteringly, then more and
more Auently, although without complete coherence, to recount the
story of his last few months. He would walk up and down, then
stand still-in a corner, at the window, or leaning against the writ-
ing-table. He did not only tell about Katharina; he spoke also of
Sabine, of his hopes, his fears, his rejuvenation-here and there
even of his dreams—and how in the end they had all turned to
naught. Sometimes he had a feeling as though they were both dead,
Katharina and Sabine, and as though it had been he that had
brought them both to their death. Occasionally Boehlinger inter-
posed a curious or a sympathetic question. And when these events
from his friend's life had been made clear to him in their continu-
ity, he turned to the Doctor with the words, “Did you, then, honest-
ly come back here to town with the intention of-marrying her?”
“Of course I did. Do you by any chance think that her past
would have prevented me?”
“By no means. For I know that those with a future are generally
not to be preferred.” And he gazed contemplatively ahead.
“Yes, you are probably right,” said Graesler and, looking at him
somewhat narrowly, added, “By the way, I also wanted to tell you
that-” and he broke off.
Something in his voice had astonished Boehlinger. “What were
you saying?”
“I have read your letters to Friederike, yours and others.”
-
“Oh,” said Boehlinger imperturbably, and smiled a little sadly.
“That was a long time ago, my friend.”
"Yes, a long time ago,” Graesler repeated; and as he felt the ne-


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DOCTOR GRAESLER
a
a
cessity of expressing his attitude towards the matter in brief and
conclusive terms, he added, "It was naturally clear to me, after read-
ing the letters, why you did not marry each other.”
At first Boehlinger looked at him as though he did not under-
stand. Then he said, with a twitching at the corners of his mouth:
"Ah, I see. You think it was because she-deceived me. I
—
suppose that is what you call it. Good Lord, what a lot of fuss one
makes about that kind of thing when one is young! The fact is,
she deceived only herself, and I-deceived myself! Yes, that latter
especially. Well, and now I guess it is too late.” And they both
remained silent for a while.
“A long time ago,” Graesler said once more, but as though in
his sleep. A great weariness had suddenly come over him, and his
eyelids fell shut. But he started up again immediately, as Boeh-
linger took him by the hands and exhorted him earnestly to spend
the rest of the night—which was already far advanced—at his
house. He even declared himself ready to place his own bed at
Graesler's disposal. But Graesler preferred to lie down, fully
dressed as he was, on the divan in the smoke-filled room, and imme-
diately lapsed into a deep slumber. Boehlinger spread a cover over
him; then he opened both the windows for a while, set his docu-
ments in order, closed the windows again, and left his sleeping
friend alone.
When Graesler awoke, Boehlinger stood over him, smiling sym-
pathetically.
“Good morning,” he said with a kind look-like a doctor, so it
seemed to Graesler, watching a sick child wake from its sleep of
convalescence. A cool, autumn sun was shining into the room.
Graesler perceived that he must have been sleeping a very long time,
and asked, “How late is it, anyhow?''
Just then the noon bells began to ring. Graesler rose and held
out his hand to his friend. "Thank
you
for your hospitality. It is
time, now, I were getting home.”
“I shall go along with you,” Boehlinger said. “It is Sunday, and
I haven't a thing to do at the office. First, though, you must have a
little breakfast, and there is a bath ready for you, too."
Graesler accepted everything gratefully. After the bath, which
considerably refreshed him, he betook himself to the dining-room
where breakfast was waiting. Boehlinger sat beside him, helped him
to food, and, with the evident intention of diverting his friend's


ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
521
a
mind from melancholy thoughts, chatted along about all kinds of
unimportant political and local news. “What are the world, the
state, the people, to me?” thought Graesler. "Ah, if one could but
resurrect Sabine into life”-he at once corrected himself inwardly,
"-Katharina!" The other one was alive-to a certain extent. He
smiled and did not himself know just why.
The friends left the house; the streets bustled with pedestrians
attired in Sunday habit, and Boehlinger had to tip his hat to a good
many people. They chanced to pass the glove-store in the Wilhelm-
strasse; Graesler regarded the lowered shutters with hostility and
horror. At last they stood before the house in which Graesler lived.
“If you don't mind, I shall come in with you,” said Boehlinger.
At that instant there came out through the door a rather pretty
plump woman dressed in respectable mourning, whose gravity
seemed to be a little modified by her attractively and jauntily tilted
hat; she was leading a little girl by the hand. As she caught sight
of the doctor, her eyes shone with surprise. “Look who is coming
there,” she said loudly and delightedly to her child.
Graesler's eyes, however, went wide with horror as he recognized
Frau Sommer, and he turned upon the child a quick but altogether
ungoverned look of hatred; forgetful of every greeting, he hurried
past mother and child and entered the door-way. But Boehlinger
noticed that the woman, holding the child by the hand, had stood
stock still and was gazing after his friend in bewilderment, or even
in despair. Shaking his head discontentedly, he followed Graesler
the steps, determined to question him; but hardly had the door
of the apartment closed behind them when Graesler burst out, “That
was the child. That was the mother and her child. It is that child's
fault! Katharina had to die, and that child I made well!"
“I don't see that there can be any question of fault here,” Boeh-
linger replied. “Deplorable as the whole affair may be, the little
girl cannot help it—nor, certainly, the mother. Your behaviour
could scarcely have seemed altogether intelligible to her.”
“But she doesn't know what has happened in the meantime,”
Graesler said.
“You stared at her as though you were seeing a ghost. And espe-
cially at the child. You should have seen the mother's face. She
was frightened to death.”
“I am really sorry. But she will compose herself soon enough.
When the opportunity offers, I shall explain to her.”


522
DOCTOR GRAESLER
“You ought to do that without fail,” Boehlinger said, and added
in an appropriately cheerful tone, “the more so as she happens to be
a very pretty and attractive little woman.”
Graesler frowned and made a deprecating gesture of the hand.
Then he asked Boehlinger to excuse him a moment; he just wanted
to look quickly over his last few days' mail, which he had not yet
taken the trouble to read. He could not entirely suppress a faint
hope that Sabine might have called him to her, though he fully
realized the folly of such an idea. There was not a line from her,
nor had anything else of importance arrived.
He and Boehlinger went to a restaurant, and during dinner, in
the half-light of a warm, cozy niche and over a bottle of good Rhine
wine, his friend advised him not to abandon himself to unfruitful
grief, but to busy himself with his profession as soon as possible.
Graesler promised to send word to-day that he would arrive in
Lanzarote by the end of the month. He was convinced that he
would be welcome. Later, over coffee and cigars, they spoke of
Friederike. While Boehlinger, his eyes half closed, blew smoke-
rings slowly before him and listened, Graesler spoke with earnest
praise of his sister; he lauded her thoughtfulness and her loyalty,
and even regarded it as possible that, in having her old room re-
decorated, she had been thinking no longer of herself, but rather-
self-sacrificingly and with kindly prevision of someone else who
might be destined as companion and sweetheart to her brother.
Boehlinger only nodded; sometimes he gazed at his old friend,
whom he had never seen so talkative, with an astonishment not alto-
gether void of pity. Finally he seemed to be getting absent-minded
and somewhat impatient; he rose suddenly, and took his leave in
unexpected haste with the excuse that unfortunately he had already
disposed of his evening.
Graesler strolled home alone. He walked restlessly up and down
in his room, and perceived that his sorrow was beginning gradually
to turn into boredom. He sat down at his writing-table and advised
the hotel-management in Lanzarote that his arrival there would be
delayed by a few weeks, but he hoped this would not occasion the
management any inconvenience as the island was not usually much
frequented before the middle or the end of November. After finish-
ing this letter he was done with his day's work. He took his hat
and coat and left his lodgings again; as he was passing the door of
Frau Sommer's apartment in the hall, he hesitated a moment, but


ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
523
then rang the bell. The widow herself came to the door. She re-
ceived him much more pleasantly than he might have expected, even
with some signs of pleasure. He had come, so he immediately re-
marked, to explain his more than strange behaviour of the forenoon.
But Frau Sommer had perhaps heard what a great misfortune had
befallen him, and so he hoped she would forgive him. She had heard
nothing, positively nothing, she said; and she begged him first of
all please to come in and sit down with her in the living-room.
There he told her that his dear little friend, the very one she had
only a few weeks ago seen at the balustrade—in the Chinese wrap-
per with the gold-embroidered dragons—had died after an illness
of only a few days. Not until Frau Sommer inquired sympatheti-
cally, did he supply the information that a treacherous case of scar-
let fever had carried the young girl off. There were many cases
cropping up in the city just then; one could almost call it an epi-
demic. And it was all the less likely that there was any connexion
between the illness of his little friend and the case of little Fanny as
the child's symptoms had subsided so quickly that he began almost
to doubt the correctness of his diagnosis. And as the child came run-
ning in just then, he took her upon his knee, stroked her hair, and
kissed her on the forehead. Then he cried softly to himself, and
when he looked up again he saw tears in the young woman's eyes.
Next day he visited Katharina's grave, where several modest
wreaths were still lying. Frau Sommer had accompanied him to
the cemetery with her child; and while Graesler stood there mute
and with bent head and Frau Sommer contemplated the inscriptions
on the wreaths, the little one held her hands folded together in
silent prayer. On their way home they stopped for a while at a con-
fectioner's, and Fanny arrived home with a big bag of bonbons.
From that time on Frau Sommer took an unobtrusive but kindly
interest in the lonely bachelor. He spent many hours—more espe-
cially, every evening—in her apartment, and brought the little one,
for whom he was coming to cherish an increasing affection, all man-
ner of playthings; among them were wild animals of wood and
pasteboard, about which he had to tell her stories, quite as though
they were real, but enchanted beasts. Frau Sommer, moreover,
showed herself in word and look more grateful from day to day for
all the kindness which the doctor rendered her fatherless child.
It was not a month after Katharina's death that Doctor Graesler
disembarked in the island of Lanzarote, accompanied by Frau Som-


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DOCTOR GRAESLER
>
mer—who had, as a matter of fact, been Frau Graesler since the day
of her departure from Germany—and little Fanny. The director
stood on the gangplank, bare-headed as usual; and despite the coast
wind his smooth-combed brown hair was scarcely ruffled.
“Welcome, my dear Doctor,” he greeted the arrival, speaking
with the American accent that had, even during the previous year,
affected Graesler so unpleasantly. "Welcome! We have had to
wait for you a bit, to be sure, but we are all the more happy to have
you back with us again. The villa is, of course, all ready for you,
and I hope that Madam will also find it pleasant here with us.”
He kissed her hand and patted the child on the cheek.
The air was delightfully warm, and the sun shone brightly, as
though it were still summer. They all walked towards the hotel,
which glistened white in the dazzling sun; the director and the
young woman went on ahead, engaged in lively conversation, fol-
lowed by Doctor Graesler and little Fanny, who was clad in a some-
what crumpled, white linen dress, with a white silk ribbon tied
around her black curls. Graesler was holding the child's soft hand.
“Do
you see that little white house up there,” he said, “where all
the windows are open? That is where you are going to live. And
right behind it—you can't see that just this minute, of course-
there is a garden with wonderful trees such as you have never seen
in all your life, and under those trees you are going to play. And
when it is snowing somewhere else and the people are freezing, the
sun will be shining here just as it is to-day.” And so he talked on,
still holding that soft hand whose pressure made him more happy
than any other contact had ever made him. The little one looked
up at him inquisitively and listened.
In the meantime the director was continuing his conversation with
Graesler's young wife. “The season has really started out quite
well,” he remarked. “Your husband is going to be very busy. On
the fourth of next month we are expecting His Highness the Duke
of Sigmaringen, his wife and children, and their suite
It
is a blessed plot of earth we have here. A little paradise. And in the
words of the writer Ruedenau-Hansen—who has been visiting the
island regularly for the last twelve years—’
The wind, which blows there on the coast even on the calmest
days, blew the next few words away—and many others also.
The End


1
REFLECTIONS ON THE GREEK GENIUS
BY ELIE FAURE
I
HAVE written elsewhere on Greek art. I have written on Greek
art, the least mystical in the world, with a mystic passion. As
a result, through love of Greek art, I have passed beside it. It is
treason to speak without poise and restraint of a poised and bal-
anced work. One wants it to be loved; and one makes it ridiculous.
However, I had read The Birth of Tragedy. But one reads even
the most profound books—perhaps the most profound more than
others—with the fixed intention of learning nothing from them-
before the age of thirty, in any case, when one thinks one knows
everything. Perhaps at that moment I had seized Nietzsche's pur-
pose: to bring into harmony, in an immortal moment of the oscilla-
tion of the spirit, the Dionysian faculty of rejoicing and suffering
in the exaltation of the instincts and the Apollonian faculty of
mastery and understanding in the light of the intelligence. But the
essential elements of the problem escaped me. Education and ac-
quired habit are so strong that when I wished to acquit Greek art
of the old accusation of “serenity” which has for such a long time
prevented us from being touched by its ardent life, I succeeded, irre-
sistibly and in spite of myself, in exaggerating its insipidity. The
poison of morality worked in me as it works in nearly everyone, to
obscure judgement without purifying the heart. I did not expressly
say, but I continually suggested, that the Greeks were greater in
proportion as they were less immoral. Unceasingly I spoke of effort
I
and struggle for the aggrandisement of man, invoking the myth of
Hercules to symbolize the Greek genius. But I neither said nor
wanted to say what conditioned this effort, against what the strug-
gle was carried, nor from what abyss of horror the Hercules myth
had issued. For me, a good European of before the war, despite
demonstrations to the contrary, despite my own knowledge of the
contrary, Greek art was an absolute in the aesthetic order in which
the moral order was somehow intermingled. This perfection ob-
scured from me the great world, its poignant expression, and its
uncertain possibilities. I was even angry at Christianity for having


526
REFLECTIONS ON THE GREEK GENIUS
a
supplanted all this. And I anxiously pressed the dried fruit of Greek
genius in its decline to squeeze out of it a juice it never contained.
I mean those new spiritual realities which, because I hated Chris-
tianity, I refused to admit Christianity had brought.
Since then-later than others, it is true, I have undergone the
assault of the world and the infiltration of the Auctuating. If twenty
years ago we scarcely knew Egyptian art, were we prepared to as-
similate its immense spirituality? Did it not require music, the war,
and a universal anguish to prepare us? At that time, moreover, we
did not know the great Chinese sculpture, the tides of the Hindu
sculpture had not touched our hearts. The negro fetiches, the
Aztec idols, are the childlike and ominous forms which our instincts,
when they wish to define themselves, take on in their most limpid
purity; they seemed to us hardly acceptable, horrible as a rule, and
often comic. It is so painful for us to accept ourselves in the whole
course of human history and to rediscover a sometimes thoroughly
essential aspect of ourselves in each of its pages, that rather than
make the effort we almost always prefer spiritual death on the spot.
The symphonic grandeur of humanity in its vastest aspects appears
only to those who agree to this effort. It is undoubtedly to the Greek
genius that we owe twenty centuries of continued aspiration towards
the realization of a European spirit which has produced marvellous
fruits, but is now decaying. It is from all that is not Greek as well
as from the Greek genius that we can hope for the birth of a spirit
which will be perhaps not exclusively, perhaps not at all, European,
but will lead mankind, in a corner of the world or everywhere,
towards a new and living method of exploring, exploiting, and de-
veloping its means.
I am well aware that a terrible danger rises at precisely this mo-
ment. Though it be broken, the raft is in spite of everything a bar-
rier between us and the abyss. Wanting it, there is nothing but the
illimitable sea, full of monsters; and no one knows, when he plunges
in, whether he will reach the shore or the vessel. We do not know
where we will be led by this seduction which alien civilizations cast
over us. Our tastes and our ways of thinking may come, and almost
always do come, from passing needs which at our peril we take for
profound needs. And these profound needs themselves tend, if we
lean too heavily upon them, to draw us in their madness into for-
getting what we are, and to death. We are not Chinese, nor Hindus,
nor Egyptians, nor Negros, nor Aztecs. To be sure; and that is the


ELIE FAURE
527
argument, or rather the sentiment, which created Western Acad-
emicism long before the Renaissance, even in the time of Phidias—
because Phidias, in his direction, could not be surpassed. Disgust
with this academicism—or, to extend our point of departure from
the plastic to the whole activity of the spirit, disgust with the dis-
couraged and routine methods of the West-ought it to jeopardize
us in the opposite sense and, dragging us in the wake of Africa and
the Orient, annihilate the power of Europe? Yes, if we do not
know that there is also an academicism for the Egyptian, Chinese,
Hindu, Aztec, and Negro. No, if we can assimilate like food the
spiritual endowment which Africa and the Orient are now bringing
us, and if we can incorporate it in western thought. Nor if this
thought is aware that, for the last two or three thousand years, it
has existed only by force of having assimilated like food the spir-
itual endowment offered to the mariners of the Aegean and the Pin-
darean shepherds by the three symbolic missionaries who came from
Asia, Phoenicia, and Egypt: Pelops, Cadmus, and Danaos.
II
However that may be, there is the fact, redoubtable certainly, but
impossible to deny or to destroy. Greek art has no more than a
relative value for us, a very high value certainly and powerfully
stimulating; and its absolute value for the man of to-day who is
determined to rejoice and suffer fully in the world, does not surpass
the absolute value of the art of China, Egypt, or India. This idea,
and this idea alone, has allowed us to explore the sources, just as
only the idea that Jesus is not a God has made it possible for us to
take the origins of Christianity from its legendary theology and to
humanize it, perhaps by so doing to make it greater.
We do not count the explication of actual causes which can be
taken all the way from geology to ethnology and history and which
show us that Greek civilization, while it exploited its creative power,
did not lose its original qualities—its unquiet but fecund turbu-
lence; its boundless but inconsequent idealism; its incorrigible illu-
sionism, necessary but insupportable; its spiritual nationalism which
ruined the City-State and was none the less cherished by the Greeks'
unavailing desire to stabilize the moral unity of the race; its aspira-
tion towards justice which proscribed the just man and massacred
the innocent; its pretension to wisdom which condemned to per-


528
REFLECTIONS ON THE GREEK GENIUS
petual agitation the native indolence of a people incapable of know-
ing itself while it pursued indefatigably the phantom of its Reason.
In every period of Greek history, from the Trojan war to the
adventure of Alexander-passing by the struggles between Sparta
and her neighbours, and the Peloponnesian and Sicilian wars—in
all the scattered cities it is easy to discover the spirit of warfare and
chicanery which gives Greek history, clothed in all the splendour
of plastic and poetic fiction, a tone of terrifying ferocity. A race
of tradesmen, pillagers, comedians, orators, slaves, panders, politi-
cians. The tragedy of Troy and of the house of Atreus may be
nothing more than a symbolic résumé of the unbridled passions
which characterize its way of life. By the gods the race creates, it
confesses its terrible impulses. They are not, like the gods of India,
elementary fatalities, instinctive, irresistible entities, like death and
birth, tides, seasons, the movements of the stars. They are psy-
chological entities, entirely conscious monsters, made in the image
and measure of man, Zeus and Ares, Athene and Aphrodite, Hermes
and Hera, admirable in courage and authority when they are grati-
fying their passions; they are genuine debauchees, treacherous and
cruel in turn; they are liars; they are vindictive, lecherous, sadistic
-often stupid in addition. I see no discrepancy-since they are
human beings. But why, then, have they so long passed as Gods?
a
Because, such as they are, in fury or valour or cruelty or dissimu-
lation, they carry their impulses to the very utmost of their capacity,
to the most uncompromising and definitive perfection. The Greek
genius as a whole may be but a relative thing for humanity; it is a
Hellenic and, momentarily, European absolute. Out of it Chris-
tianity has only disengaged the idea of perfection to carry it over
entire, in one piece, and in a single direction, and to erect on this
illusion a too rigid, but entirely logical, system. The saint succeeds
the hero, that is all, and in all domains—moral, aesthetic, social,
simultaneously or in turn-one or the other rules and imposes on
man a single idea-force which culminates here in asceticism, there
in academicism, elsewhere in communism. I do not despise the his-
torical advantages of this. But there are other idea-forces equally
propitious, and a deep study of the non-Hellenic world of the spirit
reveals them to us, especially by the striking evidence of their mul-


ELIE FAURE
529
tiform plastic beauty. Knowledge of this puts Greek art, for ever,
in the place defined by the discipline which was accepted by a small
nation first and later by part of the smallest of the continents in
order to utilize their means.
III
However, I repeat, the Greek genius went as far, if not as pro-
foundly, as possible in its chosen direction. If to-day we find the
Egyptian more noble, the Indian more lyric, the Chinese more pro-
found, the Gothic more human, and the Negro more accentuated, it
is very likely because we have a more pressing need of the forces
set free by these new-comers than of the forces revealed by the Greek
genius which was so long the animator of our own. But we have
still to explain how such a perfection rose from such baseness-
and that is precisely what we have learned from the study of civil-
izations which developed anterior or exterior to that of Greece.
Baseness is everywhere the same (or at least among artistic peoples,
for there are moral, or relatively moral peoples) but elsewhere it
may
be less in evidence, less resistant, less generalized, less aggres-
sive and irremediable than in Greece, and often relieved by some
mystic or aristocratic virtues the Greeks did not know. And that is
what gave to Greek art its orderly character.
The Greeks pursued an absolute, but as it is rather limited, they
believed candidly in the possibility of its immediate realization.
Their imagination has terrible desires, but whatever they say or even
think, these desires are not beyond possible attainment, and if they
clothe their pretexts in an ingenuous idealism, it crumbles like a
stage-set when the prey escapes. They leap in one bound upon their
prey, by no matter what road, most often without reflection. Reflec-
tion comes when perils or obstacles appear. The Greek fears two
things: responsibility and death. He never follows to the bitter end
a leader who seeks the one or accepts the other, and after suddenly
idolizing such a one because his desire has been flattered and his
imagination fired, he treats him brusquely, with calumny and mar-
tyrdom. As his desires lead him beyond his capacities, he accuses
the capacities of his leader if his desire be not fully gratified. The
great man is the enemy because his gestures provoke reflection, ac-


530
REFLECTIONS ON THE GREEK GENIUS
tion, war. Perpetual warfare is only passion carried into the field
of politics; it is sustained by instability, disorder, the renascence of
desire, the impossibility of yielding before the visible victim, the
impossibility of carrying it on to its conclusion because of the mis-
eries and sacrifices it involves. Apollonianism is its fruit—all the
more splendid, it must be said, because the more terrible drama
forms certain superior men to master it. It is the ideal order estab-
lished by the spirit in the chaos of hostile interests and opinions;
the savage rivalry of parties; the fanatic need, checked at every
moment, of seizing a material good which unbridled covetousness
gives the appearance of a will-o'-the-wisp; the continued irruption in
the over-excited imagination of an intelligent, turbulent, insatiable
multitude of precise, clear images all of which seem capable of real-
ization. The social expression of this spirit is the great gymnastic
which maintains in the tumult the imperious desire to impose on
all a discipline which will assure the very continuity of intellectual
effort. The great man, artist or warrior, is like a nerve stretched be-
tween the points of an always vibrant arc, sullied by blood and
mire. Thanks to such a spirit, and to such great men, this vile race,
impassioned and ravaged by the thirst for power, is nevertheless a
great race—which proves once more that civilization and morality
do not always coincide. The Greek was morally no more worthy
in the age of Pericles or even of Peisistratus than in the less heroic
time of Philip or Sulla. But he had not lost, under Pericles or
Peisistratus, the terrible vital energy which made it possible for him
to traverse the stage from end to end and to bequeath to some men
the task of giving form to the play. Immortality begins only when
power dwindles.
So we see why there is not, even in the highest manifestations of
Greek genius, any higher illusion. It is simply a question of attain-
ing absolute form. It is the pure, perfect, but limited intelligence.
Mystic intoxication is forbidden to the too subtle philosopher who
sees naked before him the motives always consciously self-interested,
of every action-as to a too clairvoyant sculptor a too orderly and
harmonious nature might present no striking contrast with the sub-
ject, no abyss to explore, no plastic contradiction to resolve. Their
energy working within limits prescribes simple solutions because the
gestures of man and the aspects of nature are simple. The universal
mystery escapes the spirit of the Greeks because they tried to con-
fine it within the limitations of Reason.


ELIE FAURE
531
IV
But precisely for that reason Greek art—the least mysterious we
know—is the mystery of art. It is in radical contradiction to the
profound principle of art itself, which is to imagine for us a living
interior world, exalting itself with an all-powerful illusion and
giving us an image which will not be the exact representation of our
exterior world. To Greek art all symbolism is foreign. It is natu-
ralistic. And if in its desire for a realizable absolute it makes nature
more beautiful, it is always in the narrow sense taught by nature
herself. Greek art neither transposes, nor stylizes, nor schematizes;
it does not even summarize. It expresses perfectly. It carries the
splendour of physical (and of none but physical) life to the limit of
the formal indications which life has revealed. It says everything
-in such a way that it will never be said better or even as well-
but it suggests hardly anything. It is this which makes it incom-
parable—and arrested. It is anthropomorphic, to be sure, since it
sees nothing beyond the human form carried to the point of most
rigorous harmony and of adaptation to its function. It is not an-
thropocentric. Limiting its expression of the world to representa-
tion of the object perfected by attentive study, it gives over the
search in man himself of the means to enlarge the world and to
spiritualize its aspects infinitely and inexhaustibly.
Greek art seems moreover to have turned sharply at the moment
when it reached the incomparable height of its naturalist idealism
which the genius of Phidias imposed on his followers as a rational
and impassable barrier. Apollo, having vanquished Dionysos, was
to die of his victory. A vaster rhythm, a musical atmosphere, an
appeal to cosmic forces which might have revealed the universal
analogy were foreshadowed in the vague doctrines of philosophers
and in the equivocal but intoxicating creations of sculptors before
the Medic wars and the classic realizations of the Greek genius.
Morality and reason brought it in the fifth century, perhaps to the
benefit of multitudes, to explore the single road which modern poli-
tics and science have at last taken up. But this was at the price of
that great intoxication which gives the humblest figure made by an
Egyptian, Chinese, or Indian sculptor the privilege of appearing to
belong to an invisible ensemble which surpasses and surrounds us.
The elements of sensuality and will, of sensibility and intelligence,
which give our universe a familiar human character we often re-


532
REFLECTIONS ON THE GREEK GENIUS
pudiate when we are not in its presence and are always moved by
when we find it again—these elements cannot be united in a more
stable equilibrium than that of the art of Phidias. On the other
hand it is impossible more completely to forbid our supersensual
imagination, presented with the image of such a perfection, to pene-
trate further into the interior of the spirit and so permit it to create
a form-less true in detail, more radiant in the whole-as a sym-
bol and résumé of its most hidden aspirations.
This splendid art, the most rational of all, appears to us for that
very reason, to be somehow monstrous-and the only one which is
monstrous. We can transport the art of India, China, or even Egypt
-all so alive in spirit—into an imaginary world where they would
still retain their vitality by their structural rigour. We can trans-
port Dutch or Spanish art into our own world and see, living among
us, their realizations which excepting Rembrandt here, and El
Greco and Goya there--limit themselves to achieving the extreme
of character and the extreme of verisimilitude. The Greek form,
ideally perfect, is impossible anywhere outside of itself and cannot
fit in. Involuntarily it exiles itself. Animated and placed in the
midst of men, it appears neither familiar nor strange: true, we see
there a possible or desirable aspect of ourselves. But our shortcom-
ings, our inadequacies, our almosts and our half-measures are not to
be found in it. In an ideal world it would seem immobile, crystal-
lized, too limited and not resolute enough in its strangeness to give
us glimpses of the abysses within us. On the contrary, it does its
best to conceal them from us. But the eternal man is more complex
than that, if not more ambitious. He wants to hold all his possi-
bilities in unremitting readiness. If Christ was what his disciples
imagined him to be, then Phidias, if one may say so, is the Christ of
the aesthetic order. His kingdom is not of this world, for he refuses
to accept man as he is; nor will he transpose him into an arbitrary,
but logically conceived, universe, a universe which would renounce
objective exactitude to acquire the unlimited, mobile, polyrhythmic
form of the spirit itself. But this subjective world is not his prov-
ince. In the moment of attaining perfection, man would feel effort
die in his heart. And from this point of view one may say that
Greek art, which never created a monster, is more false than that of
Egypt or China, which never ceased to make monsters. It is because
the Greek believed in the reality of his falsehood that his perfect
humanity takes on this accent of monstrosity.


.

1
1
I
I
5
Property of Lytton Strachey
THE ACROBATS. BY DUNCAN GRANT


1



Property of Bernard Adeney
NUDE. BY DUNCAN GRANT
|






ILU
Courtesy of the Artist
LANDSCAPE: SOUTH OF FRANCE. BY DUNCAN GRANT


1
1


MANY MARRIAGES
BY SHERWOOD ANDERSON
IV
"Well, hello you, Mr Webster. This is a fine place for you to be
day-dreaming. I've been standing here and looking at you for sev-
eral minutes and you haven't even seen me.”
John Webster jumped to his feet. The afternoon was passing and
already there was a kind of greyness falling over the trees and the
grass in the little park. The late afternoon sun was shining on the
figure of the man who stood before him and, although the man was
short of stature and slight, his shadow on the stone walk was gro-
tesquely long. The man was evidently amused at the thought of
the prosperous manufacturer day-dreaming there in the park and
laughed softly, his body swaying a little back and forth. The
shadow also swayed. It was like a thing hung on a pendulum, swing-
ing back and forth, and even as John Webster sprang to his feet a
sentence went through his mind. “He takes life with a long slow
easy swing. How does that happen? He takes life with a long slow
easy swing,” his mind said. It seemed like a fragment of a thought
snatched out of nowhere, a fragmentary dancing little thought.
The man who stood before him owned a small second-hand book
store on a side street along which John Webster was in the habit of
walking as he went back and forth to his factory. On summer even-
ings the man sat in a chair before his shop and made comments on
the weather and on passing events to the people going up and down
the sidewalk. Once when John Webster was with his banker, a
grey dignified-looking man, he had been somewhat embarrassed be-
cause the bookseller called out his name. He had never done it
until that day and never did it afterward. He had explained the
matter to the banker. “I really don't know the man. I was never in
his shop,” he said.
In the park John Webster stood before the little man deeply
embarrassed. He told a harmless lie. “I've had a headache all day
and sat down here for a moment,” he said sheepishly. It was annoy-
ing that he felt like apologizing. The little man smiled knowingly.
a


534
MANY MARRIAGES
a
"You ought to take something for that. It might get a man like you
into a hell of a mess,” he said and walked away, his long shadow
dancing behind him.
With a shrug of his shoulders John Webster went rapidly through
a crowded business street. He was quite sure now that he knew
what he wanted to do. He did not loiter and give way to vague
thoughts, but walked briskly along the street. “I'll keep my mind
occupied,” he decided, “I'll think about my business and how to
develop it.” During the week before, an advertising man from
Chicago had come into his office and had talked to him about adver-
tising his washing machine in the big national magazines. It would
cost a good deal of money, but the advertising man had said that
he could raise his selling price and sell many more machines. That
sounded possible. It would make the business a big one, an institu-
tion of national prominence, and himself a big figure in the indus-
trial world. Other men had got into a position like that through
the power of advertising. Why shouldn't he do the same?
He tried to think about the matter, but his mind didn't work very
well. It was a blank. What happened was that he walked along
with his shoulders thrown back and felt childishly important about
nothing. He had to be careful or he would begin laughing at him-
self. There was within him a lurking fear that in a few minutes he
would begin laughing at the figure of John Webster as a man of na-
tional importance in the industrial world and the fear made him
hurry faster than ever. When he got to the railroad tracks that ran
down to his factory he was almost running. It was amazing. The
advertising man from Chicago could use big words, apparently with-
out being in any danger of suddenly beginning to laugh. When John
Webster was a young fellow and had just come out of college, that
was when he read a great many books and sometimes thought he
would like to become a writer of books, at that time he had often
thought he wasn't cut out to be a business man at all. Perhaps he
was right. A man who hadn't any more sense than to laugh at him-
self had better not try to become a figure of national importance in
the industrial world, that was sure. It wanted serious fellows to
carry off such positions successfully.
Well now he had begun to be a little sorry for himself, that he
was not cut out to be a big figure in the industrial world. What a
childish fellow he was.
Would he never grow up?
Hearing the rumble of a train, far away somewhere in the dis-
a


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
535
tince John Webster got off the tracks. There was, at just that place,
a high embankment beside the river along which he could walk.
“I don't intend to come near being killed by a train as I was this
morning when that young negro saved me,” he thought. He looked
away to the west and to the evening sun and then down at the bed
of the stream. Now the river was low and only a narrow channel
of water ran through wide banks of caked mud.
“I know what I am going to do,” he told himself resolutely.
Quickly a plan formed itself in his mind. He would go to his office
and hurry through any letters that had come in. Then, without
looking at Natalie Swartz, he would get up and go away. There
was a train for Chicago at eight o'clock and he would tell his wife
he had business in the city and would take the train. What a man
had to do in life was to face facts and then act. He would go to
Chicago and find himself a woman. When it came right down to
the truth he would go on a regular bat. He would find himself a
woman and he would get drunk and if he felt like doing it would
stay drunk for several days.
There were times when it was perhaps necessary to be a down-
right rotter. He would do that too. While he was in Chicago and
with the woman he had found he would write a letter to his book-
keeper at the factory and tell him to discharge Natalie Swartz.
Then he would write Natalie a letter and send her a large check.
He would send her six months' pay. The whole thing might cost
him a pretty sum, but anything was better than this going on as he
was, a regular crazy kind of man.
As for the woman in Chicago, he would find her all right. One
got bold after a few drinks and when one had the money to spend
women were always to be had. He felt very resolute and strong.
V
When he had opened the door that led into the little room where
he had been sitting and working beside Natalie for three years, he
quickly closed it behind him and stood with his back to the door
and with his hand on the doorknob, as though for support. Natalie's
desk was beside a window at a corner of the room and beyond his
own desk and through the window one could see into an empty space
beside the spur of tracks that belonged to the railroad company, but
in which he had been given the privilege of piling a reserve supply of


536
MANY MARRIAGES
lumber. The lumber was so piled that, in the soft evening light, the
yellow boards made a kind of background for Natalie's figure.
The sun was shining on the lumber pile, the last soft rays of the
evening sun. Above the lumber pile there was a space of clear light
and into this Natalie's head was thrust.
An amazing thing had happened. When the fact of it came into
his consciousness something within John Webster was torn open.
What a simple thing Natalie had done and yet how significant. He
stood with the doorknob grasped in his hand, clinging to the door-
knob, and within himself the thing happened he had been trying to
avoid. Tears came into his eyes. In all his after life he never lost
the sense of that moment. In one instant all within himself was
muddy and dirty with the thoughts he had been having about the
proposed trip to Chicago and then the mud and dirt was all, as by a
quick miracle, swept away.
“At any other time what Natalie had done might have passed
unnoticed,” he told himself later, but that fact did not in any way
destroy its significance. All of the women who worked in his office
as well as the book-keeper and the men in the factory were in the
habit of carrying their lunches and Natalie had brought her lunch
on that morning as always. He remembered to have seen her come
in with it wrapped in a paper package.
Her home was a long distance away, at the edge of the town.
None of the other of his employees came from so great a distance.
And on that noon she had not eaten her lunch. There it was done
up in its package and lying on a shelf back of her head.
What had happened was this—at the noon time she had hurried
out of the office and had run all the way home to her mother's house.
There was no bathtub there, but she had drawn water from a well
and
put
it in a common washtub in a shed back of the house. Then
she plunged into the water and washed her body from head to foot.
After she had done that she had gone up stairs and arrayed herself
in a special dress, the best one she owned, the one she had always
kept for Sunday afternoons and for special occasions. As she dressed
her old mother, who had been following her about, swearing at her
and demanding an explanation, stood at the foot of the stairway
leading to her room and called her vile names. "You little whore,
you are planning to go out with some man to-night so you are fixing
yourself up as though you were about to be married. A swell chance
either of my two daughters have got to ever get themselves hus-
a


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
537
bands. If you've got any money in your pocket you give it to me. I
wouldn't care so much about your traipsing around if you ever got
any money,” she declared in a loud voice. On the evening before she
had got money from one of the daughters and during the morning
had provided herself with a bottle of whiskey. Now she was enjoy-
ing herself.
Natalie had paid no attention to her. When she was fully dressed
she hurried down the stairs, brushing the old woman aside, and half
ran back to the factory. The other women employed there had
laughed when they saw her coming. "What is Natalie up to,” they
had asked each other.
John Webster stood looking at her and thinking. He knew all
about what she had done and why she had done it although he had
seen nothing. Now she did not look at him, but, turning her head
slightly, looked out over the lumber piles.
Well then she had known all day what had been going on within
himself. She had understood his sudden desire to come within her-
self so she had run home to bathe and array herself. “It was like
washing the doorsills of her house and hanging newly laundered
curtains at the windows,” he thought whimsically.
"You have changed your dress, Natalie,” he said aloud. It was
the first time he had ever called her by that name. Tears were in his
eyes and his knees suddenly felt weak. He walked, a little unstead-
ily, across the room, and knelt beside her. Then he put his head in
her lap and felt her broad strong hand in his hair and on his cheek.
For a long time he knelt thus breathing deeply. The thoughts of
the morning came back. After all though he wasn't thinking. The
things going on within him were not so definite as thoughts. If his
body was a house it was now the cleansing time for that house. A
thousand little creatures were running through the house, going
swiftly up and down stairs, opening windows, laughing, crying to
each other. The rooms of his house echoed with new sounds, with
joyous sounds. His body trembled. Now, after this had happened,
a new life would begin for him. His body would be more alive. He
would see things, smell things, taste things, as never before.
He looked up into Natalie's face. How much did she know of
all this? Well, she would no doubt be unable to say it in words, but
there was a way in which she did understand. She had run home to
bathe and array herself. That was the reason he knew she knew.
“How long have you been ready for this to happen ?” he asked.
a


538
MANY MARRIAGES
“For a year,” she said. She had grown a little pale. In the room
it was beginning to grow dark.
She got up and putting him gently aside went to the door leading
into the outer office and slipped a bolt that would prevent the door
being opened.
Now she was standing with her back to the door and with her
hand on the knob as he had been standing some time before. He
got up and went to his own desk, near a window that faced the spur
of the railroad track, and sat in his office chair. Leaning forward he
buried his face in his two arms. The trembling, shaking thing con-
tinued to go on within him. Still the little joyous voices called. The
cleansing thing was going on and on.
Natalie spoke of the affairs of the office. “There were some let-
ters, but I answered them and even dared to sign your name. I did
not want you to be bothered to-day.”
She came to where he sat, leaning forward on the desk, trembling,
and knelt beside him. After a time he put an arm about her shoulder.
a
The outside noises of the office went steadily on. In the outer
office someone was running a typewriting machine. It was quite
dark in the inner office now, but above the railroad track, some two
or three hundred yards away, there was a lamp suspended in the air
and when it was lighted a faint light came into the dark room and
fell upon the two crouched figures. Presently a whistle blew and the
workers from the factory went off up the spur of track. In the outer
office the four people were getting ready to go home.
In a few minutes they came out, closing a door behind them, and
walked also along the spur of the tracks. Unlike the workers from
the factory they knew the two people were still in the inner office
and were curious. One of the three women came boldly up to the
window and looked in. She went back to the others and they stood
for a few minutes, making a small intense group in the half dark-
ness. Then they went slowly away.
a
When the group broke up, on the embankment above the river,
the book-keeper, a man of thirty-five, and the older of the three
women went to the right along the tracks while the other two women
went to the left. The book-keeper and the older of the women did
not speak of what they had all seen. They walked for several hun-
dred yards together and then parted, turning from the tracks into


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
539
>
a
separate streets. When the book-keeper was alone he began to worry
about the future. “You'll see. Within a few months I'll have to be
looking for a new place. When that sort of thing begins business
goes to pieces.” He was worried about the fact that, as he had a wife
and two children and did not get a very large salary, he had no
money saved. “Damn that Natalie Swartz. I'll bet she's a whore,
that's what I'll bet,” he muttered as he went along.
As for the two remaining women, one of them wanted to speak
of the thing seen while the other did not. There were several in-
effectual attempts at talk of the matter on the part of the older of
the two and then they also parted. The youngest of the three
women, the one who had smiled at John Webster that morning
when he had just come out of Natalie's presence and when he had
for the first time realized that the doors of her being were open for
him, went along the street past the door of the bookseller's shop
and up a climbing street into the lighted business section of the
town. She kept smiling as she went along and it was because of
something she herself did not understand.
It was because she was herself one in whom the little voices talked
and now they were going busily. Some phrase, picked up some-
where, from the Bible perhaps when she was a young girl and went
to Sunday school, or from some book, kept saying itself over and
over in her mind. What a charming combination of plain words in
everyday use among people. She kept saying them in her mind and
after a time, when she came to a place in the street where there was
no one near, she said them aloud. “And as it turned out there was
a marriage in our house,” were the words she said.
a
u
BOOK TWO
As
you will remember, the room in which John Webster slept was
at a corner of the house, upstairs. From one of his two windows he
a
looked out into the garden of a German who owned a store in his
town, but whose real interest in life was the garden. All through
the year he worked at it and had John Webster been more alive,
during the years he lived in the room, he might have got keen
pleasure out of looking down upon his neighbour at work. In the
early morning and late afternoon he was always to be seen, smoking
his pipe and digging, and a great variety of smells came floating up
and in at the window of the room above, the sour acid smell of


540
MANY MARRIAGES
vegetables decaying, the rich heady smell of stable manure and then,
all through the summer and late into the fall, the fragrant smell of
roses and the marching procession of the flowers of the seasons.
John Webster had lived in his room for many years without
much thought of what a room, within which a man lives and the
walls of which enclose him like a garment when he sleeps, might be
like. It was a square room with one window looking down into the
German's garden and another window that faced the blank walls
of the German's house. There were three doors, one leading into
a hallway, one into the room where his wife slept, and a third that
a
led into his daughter's room.
One came into the place at night and closed the doors and pre-
pared oneself for sleep. Behind the two walls were the two other
people, also preparing for sleep, and behind the walls of the Ger-
man's house no doubt the same thing was going on. The German
had two daughters and a son. They would be going to bed or were
already in bed. There was, at that street end, something like a little
village of people going to bed or already in bed.
For a good many years John Webster and his wife had not been
very intimate. Long ago, when he had found himself married to her
he had found also that she had a theory of life, picked up some-
where, perhaps from her parents, perhaps just absorbed out of the
general atmosphere of fear in which so many modern women live
and breathe, clutched at, as it were, and used as a weapon against
too close contact with another. She thought, or believed she thought,
that even in marriage a man and woman should not cohabit excep
for the purpose of bringing children into the world. The belief
threw a sort of heavy air of responsibility about the matter of love-
making. One does not go very freely in and out of the body of an-
other when the going in and out involves such heavy responsibilities.
The doors of the body become rusty and creak. “Well, you see,
John Webster, in later years, sometimes explained, “one is quite
seriously at the business of bringing another human into the world.
Here is the Puritan in full flower. The night has come. From the
gardens back of men's houses comes the scent of flowers. Little
hushed noises arise followed by silences. The flowers in their gar-
dens have known an ecstasy unfettered by any awareness of respon-
sibility, but man is something else. For ages he has been taking
himself with extraordinary seriousness. The race, you see, must be
perpetuated. It must be improved. There is in this affair something


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
541
of responsibility to God and to one's fellow men. Even when, after
long preparation, talk, prayer, and the acquiring of a little wisdom,
a kind of abandon is acquired, as one would acquire a new language,
one has still achieved something quite foreign to the flowers, the
trees, and the life and the carrying on of life among what are called
the lower animals.”
As for the earnest God-fearing people, among whom John Web-
ster and his wife then lived and as one of whom they had for so
many years counted themselves, the chances are no such thing as
ecstasy is ever acquired at all. There is instead, for the most part,
a kind of cold sensuality tempered by an itching conscience. That
life can perpetuate itself at all in such an atmosphere is one of the
wonders of the world and proves, as nothing else could, the cold
determination of nature not to be defeated.
And so for years the man had been in the habit of coming into
his bedroom at night, taking off his clothes, and hanging them on a
chair or in a closet and then crawling into bed to sleep heavily.
Sleeping was a part of the necessary business of living and if, before
he slept, he thought at all, he thought of his washing machine busi-
ness. There was a note due and payable at the bank on the next day
and he had no money with which to pay it. He thought of that and
of what he could and would say to the banker to induce him to re-
new the note. Then he thought about the trouble he was having
with the foreman at his factory. The man wanted a larger wage
and he was trying to think whether or not, if he did not give it to
him, the man would quit and put him to the trouble of finding an-
other foreman.
When he slept he did not sleep lightly and no fancies visited his
dreams. What should have been a sweet time of renewal became a
heavy time filled with distorted dreams.
And then, after the doors of Natalie's body had been swung open
for him, he became aware. After that evening when they had knelt
together in the darkness it was hard for him to go home in the
evening and sit at table with his wife and daughter. "Well, I can't
do it,” he told himself and ate his evening meal at a restaurant
down-town. He stayed about, walking in unfrequented streets,
talking or in silence beside Natalie and then went with her to her
own house, far out at the edge of town. People saw them walking
thus together and, as there was no effort at concealment, there was
a blaze of talk in the town.


542
MANY MARRIAGES
a
When John Webster went home to his own house his wife and
daughter had already gone to bed. “I am very busy at the shop.
Do not expect to see much of me for a time,” he had said to his wife
on the morning after he had told Natalie of his love.
He did not intend to stay on in the washing machine business or
to continue his married life. What he would do he didn't quite
know. He would live with Natalie for one thing. The time had
come to do that.
He had spoken of it to Natalie on that first evening of their
intimacy. On that evening, after the others were all gone they went
to walk together. As they went through the streets people in the
houses were sitting down to the evening meal, but they did not
think of eating.
John Webster's tongue had become loosened and he did a great
deal of talking to which Natalie listened in silence. Of the people
of the town those he did not know all became romantic figures to
him. His fancy wanted to play about them and he let it. They went
along a residence street towards the open country beyond and he
kept speaking of the people in the houses. “Now Natalie, my
woman, you see all these houses here,” he said waving his arms to
right and left, “well, what do you and I know about what goes on
back of these walls?” He kept taking deep breaths as he went along,
just as he had done back there at the office when he had run across
the room to kneel at Natalie's feet. The little voices within him
were still talking. He had been something like this sometimes when
he was a boy, but no one had ever understood the riotous play of his
fancy and in time he had come to think that letting his fancy go was
all foolishness. Then when he was a young man and had married
there had come a sharp new flare-up of the fanciful life, but then it
had been frozen in him by the fear and the vulgarity that is born of
fears. Now it was playing madly. “Now you see Natalie,” he cried,
stopping on the sidewalk to take hold of her two hands and swinging
them madly back and forth, “now you see, here's how it is. These
houses along here look like just ordinary houses, such as you and I
live in, but they aren't like that at all. The outer walls are, you see,
just things stuck up, like scenery on a stage. A breath can blow the
walls down or an outburst of fames can consume them all in an hour.
I'll bet you what—I'll bet that what you think is that the people
back of the walls of these houses are just ordinary people. They
aren't at all. You're all wrong about that Natalie, my love. The


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
543
9
women in the rooms back of these walls are all fair sweet women
and you should just go into the rooms. They are hung with beauti-
ful pictures and tapestry and the women have jewels on their hands
and in their hair.
“For every woman there is a lover and when there are not enough
lovers to go around two or three of the women sometimes have the
same lover or its the other way about. It all depends, you see, on
how much love the man or woman is capable of feeling. That's all
that counts in this street.
“And so the men and women live together in their houses and
there are no good people, only beautiful ones, and children are born
and their fancies are allowed to riot all over the place, and no one
takes himself too seriously and thinks the whole outcome of human
life depends upon himself, and people go out of these houses to work
in the morning and come back at night and where they get all the
rich comforts of life they have I can't make out. It's because there
is really such a rich abundance of everything in the world some-
where and they have found out about it, I suppose.
On their first evening together he and Natalie had walked beyond
the town and had got into a country road. They went along this for
a mile and then turned into a little side road. There was a great
tree growing beside the road and they went to stand leaning against
it, standing side by side in silence.
It was after they had kissed that he told Natalie of his plans.
“There are three or four thousand dollars in the bank and the fac-
tory is worth thirty or forty thousand more. I don't know how much
it is worth, perhaps nothing at all.
“At any rate I'll take a thousand dollars and go away with you.
I
suppose I'll leave some kind of papers making over the ownership
of the place to my wife and daughter. That would, I suppose, be
the thing to do.
“Then I'll have to talk to my daughter, make her understand
what I am doing and why. Well, I hardly know whether it is possi-
ble to make her understand, but I'll have to try. I'll have to try to
say something that will stay in her mind so that she in her turn may
learn to live and not close and lock the doors of her being as my
own doors have been locked. It may take, you see, two or three
weeks to think out what I have to say and how to say it. My daugh-
ter Jane knows nothing. She is an American middle-class girl and I
have helped to make her that. She is a virgin and that, I am afraid,
a


544
MANY MARRIAGES
Natalie, you do not understand. The gods have robbed you of your
virginity or perhaps it was your old mother, drunk and calling you
names, eh? That might have been a help to you. You wanted so
much to have some sweet clean thing happen to you, to something
deep down in you, that you went about with the doors of your being
opened, eh? They did not have to be torn open. Virginity and re-
spectability had not fastened them with bolts and locks. Your
mother must quite have killed all notion of respectability in your
family, eh Natalie? It is the most wonderful thing in the world to
love you and to know that there is something in you that would
make the notion of being cheap and second-class impossible to your
lover. O, my Natalie, you are a woman strong to be loved.”
Natalie did not answer, perhaps did not understand this outpour-
ing of words from him and John Webster stopped talking and
moved about so that he stood directly facing her. They were of
about the same height and when he had come close they looked
directly into each other's faces. He put up his hands so that they lay
on her cheeks and for a long time they stood thus, without words,
looking at each other as though they could neither of them get
enough of the sight of the face of the other. A late moon came up
presently and they moved instinctively out from under the shadow
of the tree and went into a field. They kept moving slowly along,
stopping constantly and standing thus, with his hands on her cheeks.
Her body began to tremble and the tears ran from her eyes. Then
he laid her down upon the grass. It was an experience with a woman
new in his life. After their first love-making and when their pas-
sions were spent she seemed more beautiful to him than before.
He stood within the door of his own house and it was late at
night. One did not breathe any too well within those walls. He had
a desire to creep through the house, to be unheard, and was thank-
ful when he had got to his own room and had undressed and got
into bed without being spoken to.
In bed he lay with eyes open, listening to the night noises from
without the house. They were not very plain. He had forgotten
to open the window. When he had done that a low humming
sound arose. The first frost had not come yet and the night was
warm. In the garden owned by the German, in the grass in his own
back-yard, in the branches of the trees along the streets and far off
in the country there was life abundant.


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
545
Perhaps Natalie would have a child. It did not matter. They
would go away together, live together in some distant place. Now
Natalie must be at home in her mother's house and she would also
be lying awake. She would be taking deep breaths of the night air.
He did that himself.
One could think of her and could also think of the people closer
about. There was the German who lived next door. By turning his
head he could see faintly the walls of the German's house. His
neighbour had a wife, a son and two daughters. Perhaps now they
a
were all asleep. In fancy he went into his neighbour's house, went
softly from room to room through the house. There was the old
man sleeping beside his wife and in another room the son who had
drawn up his legs so that he lay in a little ball. He was a pale slen-
der young man. "Perhaps he has indigestion,” whispered John
Webster's fancy. In another room the two daughters lay in two beds
set closely together. One could just pass between them. They had
been whispering to each other before they slept, perhaps of the lover
they hoped would come, some time in the future. He stood so close
to them that he could have touched their cheeks with his out-
stretched fingers. He wondered why it had happened that he had
become Natalie's lover instead of the lover of one of these girls.
“That could have happened. I could have loved either of them had
she opened the doors of herself as Natalie has done."
Loving Natalie did not preclude the possibility of his loving an-
other, perhaps many others. "A rich man might have many mar-
riages,” he thought. It was certain that the possibility of human re-
lationship had not even been tapped yet. Something had stood in
of a sufficiently broad acceptance of life. One had to accept
oneself and the others before one could love. ㄴ
​As for himself he had to accept now his wife and daughter, draw
close to them for a little before he went away with Natalie. It was
a difficult thing to think about. He lay with wide open eyes in his
bed and tried to send his fancy into his wife's room. He could not
do it. His fancy could go into his daughter's room and look at her
lying asleep in her bed, but with his wife it was different. Some-
thing within him drew back. “Not now. Do not try it. It is not
permitted. If she is ever to have a lover now it must be another,” a
voice within him said.
“Did she do something that has destroyed the possibility of that
or did I ?” he asked himself sitting up in bed. There was no doubt
the way
a


546
MANY MARRIAGES
a human relationship had been spoiled-messed. “It is not per-
mitted. It is not permitted to make a mess on the floor of the tem-
ple,” the answering voice within said sternly.
To John Webster it seemed that the voices in the room spoke so
loudly that as he lay down again and tried to sleep he was a little
surprised that they had not awakened the others in the house.
II
Into the air of the Webster house and into the air also of John
Webster's office and factory a new element had come. On all sides
of him there was a straining at something within. When he was not
alone or in the company of Natalie he no longer breathed freely.
“You have done us an injury. You are doing us an injury,” every-
one else seemed to be saying.
He wondered about that, tried to think about it. The
presence
of
Natalie gave him each day a breathing time. When he sat beside her
in the office he breathed freely, the tight thing within him relaxed.
It was because she was simple and straightforward. She said little,
but her eyes spoke often. “It's all right. I love you. I am not
afraid to love you,” her eyes said.
However he thought constantly of the others. The book-keeper
refused to look into his eyes or spoke with a new and elaborate
politeness. He had already got into the habit of discussing the mat-
ter of John Webster and Natalie's affair every evening with his
wife. In the presence of his employer he now felt self-conscious and
it was the same with the two older women in the office. As he
passed through the office the younger of the three still sometimes
looked up and smiled at him.
It was no doubt a fact that no man could do a quite isolated
thing in the modern world of men. Sometimes when John Web-
ster was walking homeward late at night, after having spent some
hours with Natalie, he stopped and looked about him. The street
was deserted and the lights had been put out in many of the houses.
He raised his two arms and looked at them. They had recently held
a woman, tightly, tightly and the woman was not the one with
whom he had lived for so many years, but a new woman he had
found. His arms had held her tightly and her arms had held him.
There had been joy in that. Joy had run through their two bodies


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
547
during the long embrace. They had breathed deeply. Had the
breath blown out of their lungs poisoned the air others had to
breathe? As to the woman, who was called his wife-she had
wanted no such embraces, or, had she wanted them, had been unable
to take or give. A notion came to him. “If you love in a loveless
world you face others with the sin of not loving,” he thought.
The streets lined with houses in which people lived were dark.
It was past eleven o'clock, but there was no need to hurry home.
When he got into bed he could not sleep. “It would be better just
to walk about for an hour yet,” he decided and when he came to the
corner that led into his own street did not turn, but kept on, going
far out to the edge of town and back. His feet made a sharp
sound on the stone sidewalks. Sometimes he met a man homeward-
bound and as they passed the man looked at him with surprise and
something like distrust in his eyes. He walked past and then turned
to look back. “What are you doing abroad? Why aren't you at
home and in bed with your wife?” the man seemed to be asking.
What was the man really thinking? Was there much thinking
going on in all the dark houses along the street or did people simply
go into them to eat and sleep as he had always gone into his own
house? In fancy he got a quick vision of many people lying in beds
stuck high in the air. The walls of the houses had receded.
Once, during the year before, there had been a fire in a house on
his own street and the walls of the house had fallen down. When
the fire was put out one walked past in the street and there, laid
bare to the public gaze, were two upstairs rooms in which people had
lived for many years. Everything was a little burned and charred,
but quite intact. In each room there was a bed, one or two chairs, a
square piece of furniture with drawers in which shirts or dresses
could be kept, and at the side of the room a closet for other clothes.
The house had quite burned out below and the stairway had been
destroyed. When the fire broke out the people must have fled from
the room like frightened and disturbed insects. One of the rooms
had been occupied by a man and woman. There was a dress lying on
the floor and a pair of half burned trousers Alung over the back of a
chair, while in the second room, evidently occupied by a woman,
there were no signs of male attire. The place had made John Web-
ster think of his own married life. "It is as it might have been with
us had my wife and I not quit sleeping together. That might have


548
MANY MARRIAGES
been our room with the room of our daughter Jane beside it,” he
had thought on the morning after the fire as he walked past and
stopped with other curious idlers to gaze up at the scene above.
And now, as he walked alone in the sleeping streets of his town
his imagination succeeded in stripping all the walls from all the
houses and he walked as in some strange city of the dead. That his
imagination could so flame up, running along whole streets of
houses and wiping out walls as a wind shakes the branches of the
trees, was a new and living wonder to himself. “A life-giving thing
has been given to me. For many years I have been dead and now I
am alive," he thought. To give the fuller play to his fancy he got
off the sidewalk and walked in the centre of the street. The houses
lay before him all silent and the late moon had appeared and made
black pools under the trees.
In the houses the people were sleeping in their beds. How many
bodies lying and sleeping close together, babes asleep in cribs,
young boys sleeping sometimes two or three in a single bed, young
women asleep with their hair fallen down about their faces.
As they slept they dreamed. Of what did they dream? He had
a great desire that what had happened to himself and Natalie should
happen to all of them. The love-making in the field had after all
been but a symbol of something more filled with meaning than the
mere act of two bodies embracing, the passage of the seeds of life
from one body to another.
A great hope flared up in him. “A time will come when love like
a sheet of fire will run through the towns and cities. It will tear
walls away. It will destroy ugly houses. It will tear ugly clothes off
the bodies of men and women. They will build anew and build
beautifully,” he declared aloud. As he walked and talked thus he
felt suddenly like a young prophet come out of some far strange
clean land to visit with the blessing of his presence the people of the
street. He stopped and putting his hands to his head laughed loudly
at the picture he had made of himself. “You would think I was
another John the Baptist who has been living in a wilderness on
locusts and wild honey instead of a washing machine manufacturer
in a Wisconsin town,” he thought. A window to one of the houses
was opened and he heard low voices talking. "Well, I'd better be
going home before they lock me up for a crazy man,” he thought.
To be continued



win
BLIND BEGGAR. BY ADOLPH DEHN






હd
TYP
લો.
DRINKERS. BY ADOLPH DEHN





PARIS LETTER
October, 1922
IF
F people like to eat an advertising medium, it is their own affair;
no advertising medium has yet been proved to be nutritive. “We
may” (as the editorial writers put it) distinguish between English
and American habit, by saying that literature is regarded in America
as an advertising medium; it is considered good or bad "stuff" in
proportion as it will carry a certain number of ad. columns to a
vast or still vaster aggregate. Any criteria contrary to this manner
of judgement, are a minority report. They are "high-brow.”
In England, respect for the value of electro-plates now possessed
by older publishing firms still in some measure impedes the pure
concept of "advertising medium,” and still further obfuscates the
critic intelligence.
(You understand that I am continuing the attempt to disentangle
our national qualities, an attempt begun by the late Henry James,
and one which our brilliant contemporary Mr T. S. Eliot constantly
assures us that he is about to pursue. This attempt leads to general-
ities, which are dangerous.)
The producers of “advertising medium” apparently make no
effort to protect themselves. They arrive as live beef at the doors
of their respective Armours, they leave canned, and are in a few
years anonymous, after having “reached millions.” They are uni-
form and they approach obliviscence, as the best-sellers of 1898.
Can any one now of the day and year
?
This is all very well for zoologists; it has nothing to do with the
talk “de litteris, de armis, de praestantibus ingeniis” which Platina
considered natural between intelligent men.
The problem (O gawd, how one falls into clichés) facing (O
gawd, O Montreal). . . Is it possible to establish some spot of
civilization, or some geographically scattered association of civilized
creatures? One is up against this problem in a decadent wallow like
London, in an enervated centre like Paris, in a reawakening Italy,
in an inchoate America.
a


550
PARIS LETTER
a
You can't base it on illiterate millionaires, nor on an illiterate
multitude. It has never come out of slaves, though every state has
had slaves or “the employed.” It, the vortex, has, historically, come
from free groups, or from groups formed about men who had
reached a condition of more than freedom; and these men or groups
have acted as consumers. Whatever they have constructed, they
have also consumed. Before their time the artist had crawled as
far as possible into his Dordogne, or other cavern, and scratched in
quiet. He was there moderately safe from interruption. He would
probably have been bashed on the head had he been caught drawing
in public.
Recently, and due partly to my connexion with Bel Esprit, my
grave has been desecrated, I have been dragged down from the quiet
of my mountain tomb, have been entoiled in three months of pri-
vate controversy, and have come to the following conclusions:
1. Quality in the arts is a luxury. 2. Only a few people can
taste it. 3. It is infinitely more costly to produce art (literature)
having quality, than to produce art (literature) that hasn't it. 4.
Only those who can taste it, can be expected to pay. Question:
Will they? Or will they continue to sponge on the artist (writer)?
It is perfectly obvious that there is enough loose credit to pay for
all the art (literature) of quality now being produced. It is per-
fectly obvious that enough money to support it, is actually spent
with the intention of paying for it. The problem is that of finding
an efficient way of applying the funds. It is not, it is emphatically
not a problem of finding enough goodwill. It is not a question of
desert. No one denies that Anatole France deserved the Nobel prize,
and no one claims that his receipt of it in the hundred and tenth
year of his age in any way contributes to the production of literature.
Similar wastage occurs in all, or in nearly all “prizes.” It has
been repeated often enough in these pages that "the only thing you
can give an artist is leisure,” (i. e., food, shelter, et cetera, plus
leisure to work in.
Bel Esprit contains a definitely radical idea as to the modus of
doing this; or, if you wish a more general formula, “of releasing
energy for invention and design” (in the field of literature and the
arts). We want not more writing, but better writing. And that can
be got, if there is any way of getting it, only by freeing the very
limited number of talents most capable of producing it.


EZRA POUND
551
Questions of whether they, the writers, will go on producing
when "freed” are almost irrelevant. The way to get oil is to dig
oil wells; they sometimes gush and they sometimes give out. You
take risks in dealing with any very subtle and powerful energy.
The alternative is to do without your fun altogether.
There was once a man in a small town who had Pisanello, Pier
Francesco, and Mino da Fiesole all working for him at one time or
another. They might have turned out bad jobs, but they didn't.
They might have smashed up their work when they had finished,
and he would have been out of pocket several months' board. The
actual cost of the upkeep of the few dozen artists and writers now
capable of producing anything of interest, is a mere flea-bite. And
a certain number of them are already free—they are the grands
seigneurs, offering and not receiving largesse.
The modus of Bel Esprit is a simple annual subscription of fifty
dollars yearly; the society has no running expenses (or at least none
chargeable to members) and the aim is to free, one at a time, as
many writers and artists as possible; this by giving them the deficit
difference between a reasonable cost of living and the amount they
can make by the sale of their best work and nothing but their best
work under current conditions. This means that they are not ex-
pected to interrupt serious work by doing the vendible trivial; and
that they will not be penalized (on the pocket) for destroying their
inferior stuff. Each member of Bel Esprit knows where his par-
ticular subscription is used. And as talent exists only in the indi-
vidual case, each case will be treated according to its requirements,
as seen first-hand by a certain number of the beaux esprits subscrib-
ing for the particular artist or writer.
This appears fairly simple to me. I am somewhat submerged in
the number of minor objections and misunderstandings presented
to me since the inception of the scheme. Market as applied to the
arts has NOT worked. Nobody with any knowledge of poetry or
the fine arts has ever, I think, claimed that it did work. Hardship
is a good incentive, until it kills Laforgue or Corbière, or commits
some other natural folly.
The individual patron is nearly extinct. Few of us can afford to
keep up a dozen or even one artist. There is no aristocracy, there
is no active Este in Ferrara. Business recognizes the limited lia-
bility company as a convenient means of action for a number of
a


552
PARIS LETTER
individuals each too poor to act for himself. Perhaps the moral in-
dignation aroused by Bel Esprit springs from that fury natural to
man when asked to pay for something he has been accustomed to
get, and for a long time, at someone else's expense.
a
So much for the movement of thought-omitting Einstein, Berg-
son's elucubrations on Einstein, glands, et cetera. In the “realm
of books” M Cocteau has produced a volume of poems which leaves
one nothing to say that one had not already said about his preced-
ing volume. He has produced a pamphlet in prose which begins
with a promising attack on Flaubert, descends into an unconvincing
laudation of Balzac, and then trails a metaphor over five pages,
wherein the general vagueness of analogy ultimately deprives the
discourse of strict critical value; the number of parallels between
the shooting-booth and the pursuit of letters having a presumable
limit.
Monsieur Proust has produced the volume promised so amiably
at the end of his last: “Certes ils forment dans tous les pays une
colonie orientale, cultivée, musicienne, médisante, qui a des qualités
charmantes et d'insupportables défauts. On les verra d'une façon
plus approfondie au cours des pages qui suivront; mais on a voulu
provisoirement prévenir l'erreur funeste qui consisterait, de même
qu'on a encouragé un mouvement sioniste, à créer un mouve-
ment
.” The reader hardly needs my admonishment that
there are now a number of volumes of Proust, charmingly written.
M Proust is like a very correct little gentleman in black kid gloves
who, having lifted a rather ancient haddock from the fish stall (this
metaphorical haddock being the high bourgeoisie and the relics of
anterior aristocracy) discourses elaborately upon the effects of de-
composition and shimmer. There is no reason why he should stop
M Martin du Gard presents also a family
group, endlessly. Criticism is, shall we say, a preliminary excite-
ment, useless unless it culminates in the creative act of the writer or
artist. It furnishes merely imaginary axes useful, I think, only for
the given work; or at any rate powerless against any organic crea-
tion. One turns from the indisputable enervation of Paris to D'An-
nunzio's Notturno, I think with relief. At any rate one finds the
Italian readable. In the fury of Fiume, in the general bewilderment
.
ever.
a


EZRA POUND
553
of manifestos, aeroplanes, bombs, fascisti, et cetera, together with
memories of vast verbal emprise, one had forgotten—if one ever had
a critical estimate of the “poet hero” as a writer.
It seems that he writes very clearly, very "lyricly”; what are the
impressionists going to do about it? Presumably, nothing.
.
.
"I am stretched by the window. The moon is full. There is no
wind-froth about her.
“In Kore's house there are now only white peacocks. I see only
the great stone base, and the trees of the hidden garden, and a strip
of luminous water.
“Mystic and solitary greatness as in a dead Persian or Indian
city.
“The canal like an holy river where the ashes of pyres are scat-
tered at sunset.
"There is no voice heard, no fall of oars, no rumour at all. Life,
seems to have breathed itself out ages before.
“And the insensible moon contemplates a beauty as exanimate
as that of Angkor or Anuradhapura.”
a
And so on. When any one else tries to do it, it is impossible. Ac-
cording to the critical measuring rods now in fashion, one can hardly
speak well of the book without, by implication, speaking well of a
great deal of rubbish.
Gabriele is a male, civilized, he writes of Dolmetsch, Wm. Lawes,
Scriabine, Venice, of the things that make life bearable. He does
this instead of presenting a meticulous record of minor annoyances.
This is a false dilemma, presumably. I mean in the strict terms
of the old logic. But in the intolerable mush of vagueness which
contemporary criticism “has become,” we are in considerable need
of disentanglement, of dissociation of this and of a number of other
false or real dilemmas. So far as I know, no one has ever taken up
a challenge of mine made five or six years ago: “Most good prose
arises from an instinct of negation”; the best prose writers choose
the only means left them of eliminating (by exact diagnosis) some-
thing (the typical mediocrity of contemporary existence) too hide-
ous to be tolerated.
D'Annunzio does not fall into this category; he lies with a ban-


554
PARIS LETTER
a
daged eye in a bombarded Venice, foaming with his own sensations,
memories, speculations as to what Dante might or might not have
done had he been acquainted with Aeschylus.
“Non so più cosa son cosa faccio”; Donna, resta con me, perchè si
fa serà. Vers libre about Scriabine; Amors me fait commencer; but
after all some sort of vigour, some sort of assertion, some sort of
courage, or at least of ebullience that throws a certain amount of
remembered beauty into an unconquered consciousness. All of
which the Times Reviewer, leaning from sociological heights, may
consider "dangerous for the republic of letters.” But
it
is perhaps time we stopped considering books from the angle of the
possible effect they would have on something if they had it. D’An-
nunzio presents, shall we say, no sentence more than six lines long,
Proust no sentence under
lines in length. Yet I cannot
see that either of these writers should be made an excuse for the
Kate Douglas Wiggin touch in American fiction.
EZRA POUND


AMERICAN LETTER
Dante, Va., October, 1922
TH
were
a
HE citizens of this place pronounce it Dant' tout court and the
recent celebrations of the birthday of the great Florentine
here chiefly private. There are times when we think longingly of
Italy and wish that we had a tradition that the man who had been
in Hell had been here also; but like the rest of America, we have no
traditions and we do what we can without them. Yet it seems to me
that the separate distant view we get of letters is not without com-
pensations; we approach a simplicity, we are a direct people. Things
come slowly up this way, but they stay long and we examine them
closely.
And like all small communities we are tremendously interested in
abstract problems. It is a mistake to think that sophisticated people
are the only ones concerned with abstractions. The bitterest argu-
ments I have ever heard were between farmers here concerning the
comparative merits of Corbett and Fitzsimmons or the actual dis-
tance of the sun from the earth. I am sure that the really simple-
minded are the ones who will eventually understand Einstein. Our
present abstraction is almost as complicated. We have been think-
ing about criticism and, if I may use the rustic phrase, we have come
to believe that like the giraffe at the fair it doesn't exist.
I do not mean that we are disappointed in the literary criticism
which we read in the press. Some of it is illuminating, but we find
that it illuminates nearly everything except letters. The economic
system under which we live was highly thought of until a literary
critic, Mr Van Wyck Brooks, took it into camp and, as far as we are
concerned, forced it into unconditional surrender by showing that
it brought forth an acquisitive society in which the creative life was
stifled. I do not believe that there were any pacifists here until Pro-
fessor Irving Babbitt so eloquently showed us how “the crowning
stupidity of the ages” came from tampering with the moral law and
overriding the veto power in man. Dr Canby gave us much in-
formation about America, letting us understand what could and
what could not be called Anglo-Saxon, what liberal, what popular;


556
AMERICAN LETTER
а
he is full of ideas. Dr Van Doren has taken us through the subjects
of all the contemporary novels and impressed us with their impor-
tance, pointing out the higher significance of Alice Adams in com-
parison with Mr Tarkington's earlier work and giving us to feel
that there are countless subjects about which the American novelist
can write. Professor Sherman is, we think, a spiritual collaborator
of Professor Babbitt and we do not think of him as he is thought of
in the outside world. He discusses philosophy for us and we under-
stand his dualism; he finds philosophy in everyone, nearly, and ex-
poses it brilliantly. We are inclined to believe with him that most
of the philosophy is bad. Dr Canby is something of a dualist, too;
at least he believes in discipline, both in life and art, and like Pro-
fessor Sherman he prefers the books in which the undisciplined are
not made heroic.
If I have left out any of our major critics it is due to our own
obscurity, with one exception: Dr Paul Elmer More. I have left
him out because he illustrates my point. The Shelburne Essays com-
plete none of us have read, but we found from time to time that he
stood with Babbitt and Sherman, and his great departure was not
in his thinking, but in his form of expression. He is now writing
philosophy, or the criticism of philosophy, as we think of such
things. He is expressing his ideas in the form which, it seems to us,
they fit best, and his example has made things clear to us. We sud-
denly realize that all the rest of them are critics not of literature,
but of economics, sociology, psychoanalysis, morality—and so on.
And we wonder whether Aristotle, who had a point of view and
was certainly a moralist, is still considered a great critic, or do
readers nowadays feel that his work is fairly thin since it tells us
nothing of the economic life of Periclean Athens and seems to erect
into laws his perceptions of aesthetic fact without telling us any-
thing at all about his philosophy.
Perhaps we are unnecessarily confused. We are sure that some-
where, on occasions, must appear a technical criticism of a book of
poetry or of a novel, but it is not exactly technical criticism we want.
It is, I suppose, aesthetic criticism. We read Clive Bell and Roger
Fry and find that they do not bother to tell us the story of the pic-
ture they describe-perhaps because pictures no longer have stories,
but we do not mind. Our music criticism seems to deal with the
ways and means used by the composer to call up emotion, and with
a


SEBASTIEN CAULIFLOWER
557
a
the kinds of emotion; sometimes the standing of the emotion, in an
orderly or beautiful life, is suggested. But when it comes to any-
thing printed it seems that everything is relevant except the art of
the thing itself. We heard the other day, and were not surprised to
hear, that Joyce isn't so important because he isn't nearly so good a
psychoanalyst as Freud. Ulysses we shall probably never see in
these parts, but our local librarian is making quite a search for
Freud's novels, so that we can have the best. Or are we confused?
Professor Sherman has helped us a great deal in this confusion
by presenting in that book of his which has lately been reissued, a
literary criticism which is almost exactly what we have been look-
ing for—the essay on Henry James. Is there a better one? And on
comparing it with the others in the book, which are almost as exactly
what we are not looking for, we find the reason. In the one on
Wells, for example, we find “The difference widens as soon as one
considers the uses to which Wells and Arnold propose to put the
enlarged powers of the state.” It is a criticism of Wells' Utopia.
Or again it is the vulgar barbarism of Dreiser, much more than his
naturalistic method. Or George Moore's animalism. And when he
arrives at James Mr Sherman, still looking for the ruling passion in
an idea, hits upon exactly the right idea, that James "adored
beauty and absolutely nothing else in the world” and he proceeds
from that to show how this exclusive consecration to beauty made
James' work, the style and the structure and everything, what it was.
That is to say that in James there is no absorption in politics and
economics; there is an idealism sympathetic to Mr Sherman, and
this happy accident makes his essay a work of aesthetic criticism.
To make it clearer, compare the usual run of essays about James,
dealing with the fact that he wrote up the international situation.
Don't those who write about him bother to read what he himself
said on the subject?
For many of us the use of literature as a means to an economic
end has become tiresome. We do want to know the relevance of a
book to life, of course; but we want our critics to tell us just how
well the “criticism of life" is managed in a novel, for instance, and
then to go on and make our enjoyment greater by referring us to the
artistic harmonies which the novel may possess, to let us share a lit-
tle the rapture of the creator. We would like our critics to thin out
a little, if necessary. Let them tell us how Chekhov apprehends life,
a


558
AMERICAN LETTER
and not that his characters are all doleful or half-witted. If our
modern novelists are creating beautiful things, let our critics define
for us their beauty or at least make it possible for us to see it, in-
stead of trying to make us believe that the chief interest in a man
like Lawrence is in his "sexology”—a word we do not use here. We
.
are, as foreigners have observed, eager for culture, but we are a
little afraid that our critics are giving us something else. Mr Eliot
says that the important critic is absorbed in the present problems of
art and wishes to bring the forces of the past to bear upon the so-
lution of these problems. Perhaps that is the kind of importance
we are looking for.'
SEBASTIEN CAULIFLOWER
1
The recent books alluded to in the American Letter are Contemporary
American Novelists, by Carl Van Doren (Macmillan) On Contemporary
Literature, by Stuart P. Sherman (Holt) and Definitions, by H. S. Canby
(Harcourt, Brace). Letters and Leadership, by Van Wyck Brooks
(Heubsch) The Sacred Wood, by T. S. Eliot (Knopf) and Rousseau and
Romanticism, by Irving Babbitt (Houghton Mifflin) are the other, some-
what older volumes.


BOOK REVIEWS
THE AROMA OF EVANESCENCE
SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND, AND LATER SOLILOQUIES.
By George Santayana. 12mo. 254 pages. Charles
Scribner's Sons. $3.50.
MK
R SANTAYANA'S Soliloquies are somewhat melancholy
reading, although he is too philosophic to be melancholy
himself. The things he loves in England are all rapidly disappear-
ing, and being replaced by things which no contemplative spirit can
admire. The England of Mr Santayana's affections centres about
the well-to-do unintellectual undergraduate, and includes the coun-
try-house from which he comes, the sports which are his most serious
pursuit, even—with some reserves—the dons by whom he is taught,
provided they are sufficiently mellow and remote from modern re-
search. This is the England which was fashioned in the time of
Queen Anne-a land of leisure and beauty, of aristocratic culture,
of tolerance and good humour. But Queen Anne is dead, and the
civilization inherited from her time is dying. Its destruction was
begun by the industrial revolution, and greatly hastened by the late
war. Very soon the little that survives must perish.
Mr Santayana is a true philosopher, in that he views everything
sub specie aeternitatis. "In so far as the mind conceives a thing
according to the dictate of reason, it will be equally affected whether
the idea is that of a future, past, or present thing." So says Spinoza;
and accordingly these soliloquies are not unduly disturbed by the
fact that the things which their author values are past or passing. It
would be unfair to call Mr Santayana a conservative, since he does
not wish, like a conservative, to preserve the things he admires, but
is content with the thought that their essence is eternal though their
existence is fleeting. Their existence in the past has enabled us to
contemplate their essence, and that is what really matters. His
philosophic detachment, however, has its limits. Modern liberal-
ism is abhorrent to his soul, and some of the best writing in the book


560
THE AROMA OF EVANESCENCE
is directed against it. The two essays on Liberalism versus Culture
and The Irony of Liberalism ought to be digested by all those who
still fancy that this creed is of use in the modern world.
“If liberalism had been a primitive system, with no positive insti-
tutions behind it, it would have left human genius in the most de-
pressed and forlorn condition. The organized part of life would
have been a choice among little servitudes, and the free personal
part would have been a blank. Fortunately, liberal ages have been
secondary ages, inheriting the movements, the feelings, and the so-
cial hierarchy of previous times, when men had lived in compul-
sory unison, having only one unquestioned religion, one style of art,
one political order, one common spring of laughter and tears."
a
There is more truth in this than most apostles of liberalism are
willing to concede. Since the Renaissance, Europe has been like a
clock running down; its positive institutions have come to it from
the Middle Ages, and the changes effected have all been negative.
To this process there must come an end; if the clock is not to stop,
it must be wound up again sooner or later. The essay on The Irony
of Liberalism shows, by an almost Hegelian dialectic, how freedom
breeds opposite propagandas, each stimulating "hatred and wilful-
ness,” and generating a strict tyranny by which the beneficent in-
tentions of liberalism are defeated. The war, even, affords Mr
.
,
Santayana a certain grim satisfaction as a refutation of the glib
hopes of liberals. Addressing the liberal intellectuals on armistice
day, he says:
“Ah, my delicate friends, if the soul of a philosopher may ven-
cure to address you, let me whisper this counsel in your ears: Re-
serve a part of your wrath; you have not seen the worst yet. You
suppose that this war has been a criminal blunder and an excep-
tional horror; you imagine that before long reason will prevail, and
all these inferior people that govern the world will be swept aside,
and your own party will reform everything and remain always in
office. You are mistaken. This war has given you your first glimpse
of the ancient, fundamental, normal state of the world, your first
taste of reality. It should teach you to dismiss all your philosophies
of progress or of a governing reason as the babble of dreamers who
walk through one world mentally beholding another.”


BERTRAND RUSSELL
561
I share entirely Mr Santayana's view as to the nature of this
planet and as to its probable future, but I had not realized before
that there was pleasure to be extracted from such a prognostic. In
the world in which we find ourselves, the only reliable joys are
those derived from hatred, since it is more likely that our enemies
will suffer than that our friends will be happy. Therefore the true
philosopher, if he cannot banish the passions altogether, will select
hatred as the most comfortable.
There is one surprising passage, however, which suggests that
Mr Santayana has not quite realized the effects of social cataclysms.
It occurs at the beginning of his essays on Dickens:
“If Christianity should lose everything that is now in the melt-
ing-pot, human life would still remain amiable and quite adequate-
ly human. I draw this comforting assurance from the pages of
Dickens. Who could not be happy in his world? Yet there is noth-
ing essential to it which the most destructive revolution would be
able to destroy.”
Any one who will imagine Pickwick and his friends transported to
modern Russia can see the falsehood of this optimistic belief. There
are no comfortable inns, no fires blazing on the hearth, no plentiful
suppers and no punch-bowls; there is no freedom to travel about
the country, no leisure for enjoyment. The only character in Pick-
wick who could be happy in modern Russia is Mr Alfred Jingle,
who would be in the Food Commissariat. One is compelled to con-
clude that Mr Santayana does not quite realize how profound is
the effect of a really serious revolution.
The greater part of the Soliloquies has no direct bearing upon
modern social questions. A great deal is concerned with the English
character-always kindly, too kindly perhaps. The English charac-
ter which Mr Santayana likes and chiefly considers is that of the
"gentleman” who is mildly conservative and not too much in
earnest. Intellectual England, Puritan England, the England of
the various tribes of cranks and faddists, is recognized as existing,
but regarded as a regrettable aberration. Mr Santayana's view of
the world is a product of peculiar circumstances: Spanish tempera-
ment and American experience. What Spain has stood for in the
world seems to him in the main good; what America and progres-
sive England have stood for he dislikes. This outlook has in him a


562
THE AROMA OF EVANESCENCE
a
peculiar value, because it is combined with an intimate knowledge
of things that a Spaniard in Spain would not know. The standard
of values prevalent throughout the modern world, but worst of all
in America, is challenged from two sides: by the revolutionaries,
who wish to introduce a new constructive era by means of a new
discipline, and by the mediaevalists, who wish to revive the dis-
cipline of the Catholic Church. It is singular how much these two
parties have in common. Much of Mr Santayana's indictment of
liberalism might have been written by a Russian Bolshevik-per-
haps because in Russia the influence of the church is still as strong
as in Spain, even over those who reject its dogmas and rebel against
its political domination.
It is superfluous to praise the style of Mr Santayana, which
must delight every lover of good English; or the genuinely philo-
sophic outlook of the soliloquies, which will be familiar to all his
admirers. Most English-speaking readers, even when they admire
most, will feel something which they cannot share in this outlook-
something which is probably attributable to the difference between
a Protestant and a Catholic civilization, for even Catholics in
England and America are always Protestant in their mentality.
This is a barrier to sympathy rather than to understanding; but it
enhances the value of the book, by making it more distinctive and
challenging. Indeed, few people were better employed during the
years 1914-1918 than Mr Santayana, who built this memorial of the
beauties that were perishing while he wrote.
BERTRAND RUSSELL


TWO AMERICAN POETS
PRIAPUS AND THE Pool. By Conrad Aiken. 8vo. 59
pages. Dunster House. $2.50.
SLABS OF THE SUNBURNT West. By Carl Sandburg.
12mo. 76 pages. Harcourt, Brace and Company.
$1.75.
WH
HERE are the grand old days of American poetry? Re-
member how it was born; or rather, since this passive mood
suits badly, how it bore itself back in 1914, the first of war babies.
Before the Lusitania affair, if you remember, American poetry was
built hastily like a skyscraper. Crowds gathered to comment on the
thoroughly modern installation: open plumbing, critics running hot
and cold like water, printing presses, magazines, two complete an-
thologists, even poets. Above the entrance arch was lettered in com-
mercially-pure gold: THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE. To-
day this lettering remains, slightly tarnished. Anthologies still
appear, each in its season, and critics function still, but those old
and grand days of American poetry are over.
At least their contagious excitement has subsided. The poets of
those days continue to write and usually write well, but they are
making only literature now; they make history no longer. That
perhaps is the reason no younger writers join their group (or has
talent ceased utterly to develop?) Masters dies slowly after the
childbirth of Spoon River. Robinson embalms himself in a collected
edition. No one appears to close the gaping ranks. There are no
new American poets.
For the adjective American belongs to a definite poetic genera-
tion. One rarely applies it to Poe, nor is Estlin Cummings, as a
poet, American. An American poet is one whose first book, or whose
first successful book, coincided roughly with the first year of the war.
.
An American poet is Frost, Masters, Lindsay, Fletcher, Amy Low-
ell; by extension the term has even been applied to Walt Whitman.
The adjective American is less national than temporal; a certain
generation wear it like a rosette in the buttonhole; their work was
brave enough to deserve a more definite decoration.


564
TWO AMERICAN POETS
They are the generation which corresponds in time to the Georg-
ian poets. They form a definite group, but nothing more; unlike
their English contemporaries they cannot be treated as a school.
Their aims, their methods are different and conflicting; their only
mutual property is the adjective American, and even this must be
stretched thin to cover all of them. At the two extremities of the
group and typical of its internal dissensions stand Conrad Aiken and
Carl Sandburg, who write from opposite traditions in a different
technique, even in different languages.
They appear together in the anthologies of the group, and to-
gether are dissected by its critics. Beyond this Sandburg and Aiken
hold absolutely nothing in common.
Sandburg in his poems uses neither metre nor rhyme, but if he
gives an impression of ragged ease it is not much more than a sur-
face impression. His verse as a matter of fact is highly organized;
it is not free verse at all, in the common acceptance of the word.
Rather it is repetitive verse. He uses parallel constructions; he re-
peats words and phrases with great skill; thereby he produces effects
as complex and difficult sometimes as those of Swinburne's most in-
tricate ballades. He never writes, “The overland passenger train
drives westward into the night”; he says instead:
“Into the night, into the blanket of night,
Into the night rain gods, the night luck gods,
Overland goes the overland passenger train." ”
Repetition, to use a fatigued metaphor, is the tool with which
Sandburg fashions his verse. Aiken works with iambs, trochees, and
anapaests. He works with rhymes (male and female like the joints
of a pipe); with all the capable machinery of English poetry. As
opposed to Sandburg he might be called traditional, and the term
applies to him equally in other ways.
Apparently he believes in poetry as a craft, a sport, a profession-
like boxing or magic—which must be thoroughly studied before it
can be improved. He examines other poets accordingly, not to imi-
tate them, but to learn their tricks. He never echoes. Sometimes
he uses the devices of other poets as a vehicle for his own expression,
but in any case he mingles them with devices of his own discovery
so that he does not merely live in a tradition; he aids with his proper
hands in building it.


MALCOLM COWLEY
565
His last volume is typical more of his attitude than of his former
work. It is briefer, more lyric, more varied; the philosophy remains
the same, but the style has changed vastly. Priapus and the Pool is
better and worse than anything Aiken wrote before it. Usually it is
better, and it lies even more certainly within the traditions of great
English poetry. Sandburg is alien to those traditions.
Sandburg is alien to most of the Anglo-Saxon elements in Ameri-
can life. Its aspects which he chooses to describe are those precisely
which distinguish it from life in England. He talks about stock-
yards, wide-sweeping prairies, the growth of mushroom cities, Hell
on the Wabash, Watch your Step. He talks about booze runners,
hankey panks, humpties (whatever they are) bulls, and Charlie
Chaplin. He never mentions tea, gentlemen, golf, or any other of
our briticisms. He is an American; not an Amayrican with the r
trilled lightly against the upper teeth as in Back Bay, but a ril
Amurricn.
He avoids the language along with everything else that is Eng-
lish. He never wrote an American dictionary, but he does some-
thing more hazardous and exciting: he writes American. With ear-
lier authors American was a dialect; it was the speech of the co-
median and the soubrette; the hero, when serious, declaimed his
Sunday-best Oxford. The case is opposite with Sandburg. He
writes American when he is pompous, philosophic, sentimental; in a
word, when he is most upstage:
“If any fool, babbler, gabby mouth, stand up and say:
Let us make a civilization where the sacred and beau-
tiful things of toil and genius shall last-
a
If any such noisy gazook stands up and makes himself
heard-put him out—tie a can on him-lock him up
-
in Leavenworth-shackle him in the Atlanta hoose-
—
gow—let him eat from the tin dishes at Sing Sing-
slew him in as a lifer at San Quentin.”
His vocabulary in such passages is inchoate and immense, whereas
the vocabulary of Aiken (in his verse, at least) is small, accurate,
limited by choice to a couple of thousand words. It is free from
Americanisms, for Aiken writes English as if it were his mother
tongue. Sandburg writes American like a foreign language, like a


566
TWO AMERICAN POETS
language freshly acquired in which each word has a new and fasci-
nating meaning. It is a language, in fact, which never existed be-
fore; the separate words existed, but in the speech of no one man;
Sandburg was the first to thesaurize them. More than H. L. Menck-
en or John V. A. Weaver or any one else he can claim the discredit
of bringing a new language into a world whose tongues are too con-
fused already
A poet may write in American and still not be an American poet.
But Sandburg advances other claims. He has washed dishes in Den-
ver; shovelled coal in Omaha; swung a Kansas pitchfork; served
;
through the Spanish (but typically Yankee) war as a member of the
6th Ill. Vol. Inf. In some ways his nationality seems pretty well
established. And in some ways he is no more American than the tile
stoves and featherbeds of his ancestral Sweden.
Consider his worship of strength, bigness, and danger: the viking
virtues. Consider his berserk rages, his unintelligible rhapsodies on
old themes. Sometimes he is merely a racy translation from one of
the Scandinavian tongues. Consider also his shakiness on war, the
American Constitution, and the negro problem; his socialism; his
hatred of the genteelly English tradition. It is clear that by the
standards of Sulgrave Manor and the Union League he will never
be quite one hundred per cent.
By the same standards Aiken would perhaps be highly rated. Of
course his political opinions were not always above reproach, but
politics play little part in his poems. They are the work of a man
who is more at home in London than New York; who contributes to
the English reviews in the English tradition. No snobbery; no kow-
towing; he stands on his own feet, but has an honest liking for the
British. A hard guy from the West Side of Chicago, one of those
fabulous humpties who step from the pages of Sandburg's latest : not
:
an undertaker's stiff, but a real live-wire would say, “He ain't no
Amurricn, he's a bloody limey.”
Mr Aiken would justly punch his jaw.
Thereupon would ensue a polygonal battle of the poets: New
England poets, Illinois poets, Jewish and Anglo-Saxon poets, jazz-
banders, hard-boiled eggs and two-minute lyricists, all the poets of a
generation, each defending an Americanism which quite agrees with
no other. A battle rages with fists, articles, anthologies, and a brace


MALCOLM COWLEY
567
of pistol shots by the author of That's Where the West Begins—and
all of it over a purely academic question. Except as a party label
there is no American poetry.
There is no American poetry in the sense that there is French or
Chinese poetry. In other words there is no poetry so deeply rooted
in our soil and tradition that a foreigner can never fully understand
it, and I doubt whether such a poetry is to be desired. In spite of all
efforts America remains a thing seen and not a manner of seeing.
America is not a point of view, a style, or a mode of thought, but a
subject merely; a subject that has been most brilliantly developed
in Paris or by Scandinavians. American poets do not exist, but (to
witness Sandburg and Aiken) there are capable poets in America.
MALCOLM COWLEY


A SYMPOSIUM OF THE EXOTIC
AMERICAN INDIAN Life. By Several of its Students.
Edited by Elsie Clews Parsons. 4to. 419 pages. B.W.
Huebsch. $10.
T.
O the making of this sumptuous volume have gone twenty-
three tribes of North America, twenty-three American an-
thropologists, an Indian, and an illustrator. Its appearance may
mean one of two things. These anthropologists may have become
a little wearied of their admirable devotion to technical problems
and of their zeal in composing valuable but little read monographs;
they may have suddenly come to see how intensely alive and human
is the core of their subject-matter after all, have taken their courage
in their hands, and determined that the great public outside, good-
natured and unaware, be given some idea of the strange yet always
intelligible life of our natives. Or it may be that just such a volume
as this has long been in silent demand and that the editor has but
read on the lips of the public its desire for guidance into an exotic
field. It would not be strange if both of these motives had found
each other and made the book.
American Indian Life is not devoid of the usual defects of a
symposium. The sketches differ widely in merit and there is a
greater monotony than the varied styles of treatment would have led
one to expect. A little pruning here and there would have helped
the volume; two or three of the sketches might have been omitted
by a less kindly editor. And yet, all in all, the editor and her col-
laborators have succeeded in accomplishing their difficult task.
While the book is something less than a brilliant achievement, it is
a great deal more than a merely creditable one. The reader does get
a sense of the reality of native life, the universally human shines
through in hundreds of passages, and even the strangest of beliefs
and customs are so presented as to arouse a wondering sympathy
rather than incredulity or derision. If there are a few dull or flip-
pant or self-conscious pages, many more are fascinating with their
revelation of the turns of human sentiment and the beauty of human
conduct. Above all, the scientific competence of the writers has
automatically weeded out the sentimentality that clings to the In-


EDWARD SAPIR
569
dian of the literary shop. It is well to submit to a little boredom of
sobriety for the sake of escaping from the far more terrible boredom
of unction and bombast.
Each writer has set himself the task of telling an Indian story,
not, as a rule, for the sake of the intrinsic interest of the narrative,
but to thread, pleasantly, a number of significant facts about the old
tribal life. Most of these narratives are biographical in form. A
warrior, a hunter, a medicine-man, a singer, a trader, a maiden-
each is born, grows up, and ages. The reader is not asked to work
his way systematically through the cultural patterns of the tribe,
but by the time he is through with a biographical sketch he has ob-
tained some insight into the material background, the social cus-
toms, the religious ideas, and the general cultural tone of the tribe.
Some of the stories are rather generalized in content, being hardly
more than sugar-coated ethnological summaries. Such are Mr Swan-
ton's account of the Creek Indians, Mrs Parsons' sketch of Zuñi
Pueblo, the reviewer's study of the Nootka, and Mr Boas' Eskimo
Winter. They are confessedly didactic rather than literary. It is
possible that their very timidity, or scientific bonhommie, will give
them safe conduct through the gauntlet of literary critics.
In another group the episodes are more tightly woven into a per-
sonal narrative, though the writer's eye is still fixed on the essentials
of tribal custom. A notably successful instance is Mr Wissler's
biography of a Blackfoot medicine-man. This has in it much of the
dignity and measured sentiment of the Indians of the Plains. Mr
Lowie's sketches of Crow life are somewhat more skilfully com-
posed, but suffer a little, it seems to me, from a straining for cli-
mactic effect. In Earth-Tongue, a Mohave, Mr Kroeber has suc-
ceeded, somewhat elusively, in giving the reader an intimate par-
ticipation in the nuances of native feeling. This story reveals a
markedly aesthetic sensibility. With such a flair for the curve and
tempo of Indian life and with a surer literary technique one could
do much to make the exotic glow. Most adventures into the exotic
capture the mere glitter.
The more self-consciously literary narratives are somewhat dis-
appointing, with one or at most two exceptions. Mr Lowie's Chipe-
wyan tale of the dispossessed husband and his gradual transforma-
tion into a terrifying "Windigo” is excellently told. Mr Speck's
Montagnais episode is interesting for its evocation of the stark back-
ground of Indian life in northern Quebec, but is marred in spots by
a


570
A SYMPOSIUM OF THE EXOTIC
a faulty sense of words. As for the rest, Mr Spinden essays a mag-
niloquent mysticism, Mr Spier a jotty impressionism, Mr Waterman
a devilish humour. All in vain.
From the strictly literary standpoint, the volume would probably
have to be rated a succès d'estime, but the volume neither desires nor
demands a strictly literary rating. It poses an interesting question.
To what extent can we penetrate into the vitals of primitive life
and fashion for ourselves satisfying pictures on its own level of
reality? Can the conscious knowledge of the ethnologist be fused
with the intuitions of the artist? It is difficult to think oneself into
the tacit assumptions of so alien a mode of life as was that of an
American Indian tribe. It is not that its patterns are elusive or un-
intelligible, for they are not, but that the attempt to sink these vis-
ible patterns into an atmosphere which is as unobtrusive as it is
colourful demands an imagination of a peculiarly tolerant kind.
Few artists possess so impassioned an indifference to the external
forms of conduct as to absorb an exotic milieu only to dim its
high visibility and to make room for those tracks of the individual
consciousness which are the only true concern of literary art.
It
is precisely because the exotic is easily mistaken for subject, where
it should be worked as texture, that much agreeable writing on
glamorous quarters of the globe so readily surfeits a reader who
possesses not merely an eye, but what used to be called a soul.
There is always something sentimental and unelemental about a
tapestry. Many literary travellers have taken their eyes with them
and stitched their impressions into skilful embroideries; few have
had the intensity to penetrate to those currents of life which make
all backgrounds commonplace and acceptable. A favourite method
of approach is to leave one's domestic morality behind. This is help-
ful so far as it goes, but perhaps the truest understanding would
come from the donning of new and more tyrannous moralities.
From such a volume as American Indian Life, disarming in its
modesty, we cannot fairly expect samples of the perfection that I
have counseled and to which not even the exotic elements in Lord
Jim and The Heart of Darkness have attained. And yet out of its
pages there comes more than a hint of how compelling an imagina-
tive treatment of primitive life might be. It would almost seem
that the bare recital of the details of any mode of life that human
beings have actually lived has a hidden power that transcends the
skill or the awkwardness of the teller. There are passages in the
a


EDWARD SAPIR
571
book that suggest that a great deal might be done to capture the
spirit of the primitive by adhering, so far as possible, to its letter-
in other words, by transcribing, either literally or in simple para-
phrase, personal experiences and other texts that have been written
down or dictated by natives. In any event, the accent of authentic
documents always reveals a significant, if intangible, something
about native mentality that is over and above their content.
I should like to quote a couple of unpretentious passages to illus-
trate what I mean. How Meskwaki Children Should be Brought
Up is Mr Michelson's rendition of a Fox text. There is little in its
morality that is other than the white man's commonplace, but vari-
ous turns of phrase and odd kinks of motivation keep it fresh
throughout. Take its opening sentences:
“When a boy becomes old enough to be intelligent, his parents
begin to teach him how to take care of himself and act righteously.
They usually tell him not to do a good many things. Children are
taught not to be naughty. They are told that if they are naughty,
people will have nothing to do with them. They are told that if they
are naughty, people will talk about them. And children are told
not to steal anything from their neighbors. Moreover, children are
taught not to talk to people. If they see any one going by their
place, they should hold their tongues, nor should they laugh. And
they also tell children not to visit other people too often. Every
time they see you going anywhere they would say that you are look-
ing for something good to eat, if you go visiting too often,' is what
children are told.”
The illustrations are a disappointment. They seem to be a cross
of divers purposes. They illustrate the narratives, they are decked
out with strangely meaningless borders, and they aim to do with
ethnological specimens what museums are more successfully in the
habit of doing. In other words, they lack unity. Worst of all, they
seldom capture more than the barest hint of the native style of the
decorative material that they vainly refashion. The pleasing colour
work does not reconcile us to their insensitive construction.
EDWARD SAPIR


LADY GREGORY’S PLAYS
THE IMAGE AND OTHER PLAYS. By Lady Gregory.
12mo. 253 pages. G. P. Putnam's Sons. $2.
LA
ADY Gregory is the only playwright of to-day who writes
comedies that have poetry in them. Her people talk lyrics
and ballads. Most of her plays have a weakness—they are not
firmly articulated, and too often they give the impression that a
subject has been talked out rather than that an action has been
brought to an end. Of the plays in the present collection this might
be said of three out of the four-The Image, Hanrahan’s Oath,
The Wrens. The fourth play, Shanwalla, is different; it is com-
pact, and there is something hushed about it.
Shanwalla is a three-act play about a horse and a ghost, and the
Connacht woman in Lady Gregory can rise with power in what
has to do with these entities. The atmosphere is different from the
usual Kiltartan play—it is not of the cross-roads nor the market-
place, but of a gentleman's house in Ireland at the Stable-side. In
Shanwalla there is nothing loquacious, nothing rhetorically tragi-
cal; everything is compact and hushed; the characters are all simple
and all well-marked, and there is dramatic tension and power in it.
It is one of Lady Gregory's best plays.
The others are typically Kiltartan; they are comedies of lan-
guage, and they put us into contact with a rich and warm and quaint-
ly cultivated humanity. There is a theme in each of the plays, a
theme, rather than a plot, along which the people talk, and what
we remember of them is the picturesque talk of the people who have
had leisure enough to acquire a vocabulary and a wonderful stock
of metaphor, not to speak of a rhythm that constantly rises into
hexameters. Lady Gregory has kept note-books of this country-
side talk, and her comedies make an anthology of phrases, partly
traditional, partly improvised, of the Irish countryside. But no
phrase is left sticking out. All are used as if they had never been
on a collector's pages. The speeches are delightfully entertaining,
but the Irish voice is needed to give the proper flow, intonation, and
rhythm. Sometimes one detects speeches that have been made for
particular voices:
a


PADRAIC COLUM
573
"A man to be a herd now, and to be sent back out of the fair with
beasts, the very time the sport would begin, or to be landing fish
from a hooker and to be made take the tide at the very minute
maybe the crowds would be gathering for a race, or an assizes, or a
thing of the kind, it is down-hearted you would be coming into your
own little place, and all the stir left after you.”
>
Only Arthur Sinclair could properly “sound out” that speech.
And this one could come with the right nuances only from the
mouth of Joseph O'Rourke:
“The towns do be in an uproar and do be crowded, and the roads
do be wet and wide; and as to the villages, there is spies in them,
and traitors, and people you wouldn't like to be talking with. Too
venomous they are and too corrupted with drink. I'd like to keep
my own company, and I have no way of living but the berries of
the bush.”
PADRAIC COLUM


NINETIES-TWENTIES—THIRTIES
THE EIGHTEEN NINETIES. By Holbrook Jackson.
Illustrated. 8vo. 304 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $5.
The UNDERTAKER'S GARLAND. By John Peale
Bishop and Edmund Wilson, Jr. 12m0. 192 pages.
Alfred A. Knopf. $2.
"HE
:
E was,” says Mr Lytton Strachey of the hero of The
Rousseau Affair, “modern. Among those quick, strong,
fiery people of the eighteenth century, he belonged to another
world—to the new world of self-consciousness, and doubt, and
hesitation, of mysterious melancholy and quiet intimate delights,
of long reflexions amid the solitudes of Nature, of infinite intro-
spections amid the solitudes of the heart.”
This was written fifteen years ago, and I wonder whether Mr
Strachey, rewriting it to-day, would not stop over one word, to
qualify it or to give it a date. I wonder whether any man who so
profoundly influenced the spirit of the nineteenth century and was
contemporary with every year of it, can be modern in the third
decade of the twentieth. It does not seriously matter in what terms
we conceive the war; we may think of it as an incident or as a cul-
mination, as a divine act of justice or as an error in the divine
calculations. We know that it marks decisively the break between
us and our immediate past; there was a black moment just after
the Peace when one fancied that the nineteen-twenties had been
dissevered from the whole course of civilization, that isolated and
unhappy as we were we could console ourselves only with the hope
that we had no future, as we had no past. That is gone; yet it is
likely that we shall continue for long to look upon the nineteenth
century with that same mingling of hatred and irritation and con-
tempt which the Yellow Nineties had for the early Victorian era,
and probably with neither more nor less of justice. And if we are
to find contemporaries in the past they will be those who had least
to do with the form and character of that rejected time; among the
rebels they will be those who were not too violently in revolt,


GILBERT SELDES
575
.
Stendhal rather than Nietzsche; or they will be those whom the
nineteenth century repudiated, like Swift and Voltaire. Fifty
years hence, perhaps, Rousseau will again be contemporaneous;
for the moment, his melancholies and his mysteries affect us alike
with a vast irrelevance.
Rousseau in this connexion is, of course, something more than
the prophet; it is the great Romantic movement which may revive
and, changing its form to suit the circumstances, become as creative
(or according to Pierre Lasserre as destructive) in the 'seventies of
this century as it was in the Nineties of the last.' And it is obvious-
ly something more than a man and his direct influence, it is the
whole system of ideas and the whole way of feeling which clustered
round the name of Rousseau that are incapable of affecting us
just now. A notion is being carefully fostered (will it be a con-
spiracy?) that the most intelligent and the most striking works of
the present decade merely repeat the attitudes of the Nineties;
that Huxley is Beardsley, Joyce Huysmans, and Eliot, presumably,
James Thomson. This attitude makes it easy to dismiss the pre-
sent work of the creative spirit as an echo, but in addition to this
injustice it is uncritical of the Nineties themselves which did not
spring from the head of Jove nor descend hissing like Meteor into
the sea. They are, in fact, as much and as valid an influence as any
other period and to say that a thing is Nineties is as criticism no
more valid than to say that it is biblical.
Yet the Nineties have a special relation to us because ours is the
first creative period to be affected by them at a remove, and I think
of no discrimination more necessary than that between the two
times. The critic who sees the difference will be more just to the
present and be able to distinguish those elements which are reason-
ably certain to carry over into the fourth (and intellectually de-
cisive) period of this century. Roughly I propose Rousseau as a
test. Let him be dipped as a little rod into the cloudy precipitate
of the Nineties; whatever crystallizes around him is foreign to all
that is specifically of the Twenties. It is possible that they are the
very things for which the Nineties will in the long run be remem-
indeed if I am right in thinking that Rousseau as a spiritual
leader is only temporarily discredited that is very likely to be the
case. It happens that the other things—those which are not Rous-
seau—are at the moment significant.
bered;


576
NINETIES-TWENTIES—THIRTIES
The new world of Rousseau was more complex even than Mr
Strachey's description indicates and the Nineties, wilfully compli-
cating many things, cannot be confined in a definition. Industry
and the great personified Science both cut transversely across the
path of pure Romanticism, and it was as Old Believers, the last of
Rousseau's faithful in an age corrupted from the pure faith, that
the Nineties first appear. With them his melancholy turned at
times to pessimism, his doubts to a sceptical languor; one swooned
with love of Nature only while walking along the Strand and knew
the purity of love only in Leicester Square; and the hysteria which
a kindly Providence bestowed on Rousseau the last disciples found
could be safely and artificially induced. They fled him down the
labyrinthine ways, but they embraced him at the gate. For in
essence their faith was the same, and the same and most significant
in this: that they had faith, and believed in the possibility of having
faith, and believed in the triumph of whatever faith they held.
They believed in the past and in the future, and they did not be-
lieve in the Fall of Man.
Mr Holbrook Jackson's history of this period is specifically, but
not generally, critical; its valuations are of men and movements in
relation to their time, and not to ours-intentionally and success-
fully so. The spiritual history of the time is contained in Mr
Yeats' Memories and it is regrettable that Mr Jackson should have
consulted neither these documents nor the one other, Enoch Soames,
which is in its way as important, when he prepared this new edition
of his book. The book is almost all surface, but the surface is
agreeably rich, and I run through a summarizing page, jotting down
phrases, to indicate how far the Nineties are from the twenties:
.
"Glorification of the fine arts
virtuosity. “Fine shades'
the 'unique word'
peacock phrases. Expres-
sion in the average national life
saner and more balanced
social consciousness
There were demands for culture and
social redemption
transcendentalism
Social
evils
vitality
New Hedonism
cheerfully
endeavouring to solve the question How to Live'
feeling
of expectancy
taste new sensation
life-tasting
new
new
Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!
.
New .
.
.
They are the slogans of a battle in which we never fought.
a


GILBERT SELDES
577
The darker side of the Nineties and all that was self-divided
and thoughtful and poetic come to us with none of this pathos, but
untarnished. We have substituted analysis for introspection, irony
for satire, and a spirit of huge, bitter, passionless mockery seems
so exclusively appropriate to us that we sometimes overstrain to
achieve it. The great men of the Nineties (Mr Hardy and Mr
Yeats are living proof of it) were in the world and in life and had
great concerns far more than they were, in their time. And when-
ever, even in the less great, the experience of being held in the hand
of fate (rather than in the fell clutch of circumstance) asserted it-
self, they presented to us an outlook upon life which was the first
suggestion of our own despair and disillusion. The difference is
that for the most part their disillusion hurt them, and ours does not.
Until I had read The Waste Land by Mr Eliot I believed that
Ulysses was the only complete expression of the spirit which will
be "modern” for the next generation. (Complete, I say, because
I
in part Mr Eliot and Mr Joyce had already expressed it in their
earlier work; and others also.) The analysis and tagging of that
spirit is a necessary work, to be accomplished when the distrust of
classifications has somewhat abated. I have indicated how it
differs from the Nineties, in its attitude towards its own disillusion;
it differs more, I venture, in having no faith and in believing, more
or less consciously, that no faith is possible, in wanting very much
not to be called upon to make the effort to have faith. It is as
sceptical of ideals (directions, "ends,”) as Spinoza ; it may recover
from its détraquement sufficiently to understand the competition
between its own interests and passions and by recognizing their
relations arrive at what Mr Santayana terms the life of Reason.
That infinite intellectual love which God has for himself, according
to Spinoza, is perhaps the last remaining contact of this age with
what is divine.
What is interesting about The Undertaker's Garland is that the
authors apparently despaired of finding any unity in our lives and
were compelled to find it in Death. It is, to be sure, of life that
they are writing; yet for them life seems insupportable unless,
until, it is regarded from the impregnable fortress of the grave. In
this, in their preoccupation with Lucifer, in their extraordinary
seriousness about secondary things, in a certain heaviness and a
certain loftiness, they are close to the Nineties; if I may borrow a
phrase which M Bergson used and Mr Santayana demolished, ils


578
NINETIES-TWENTIES—THIRTIES
a
retardent sur Joyce. Yet to lag behind Joyce is in itself not con-
temptible, and the significance of The Undertaker's Garland is that
it is the first recent native work to pass beyond the Nineties and
to the threshold of our own time. Both of the authors do this in
their unlaboured association with ancient literature and modern art;
Mr Wilson, after writing a preface which virtually lays down his
life for his friend since after reading it one would be justified in
omitting everything else of his own in the book, passes from a suc-
cessful, but not significant satire (in The Death of an Efficiency
Expert) to a piece of dignified and very nearly noble irony in the
story of Emily in Hades. The grey is a little too black; but it has
the tone of our time. Mr Bishop's two successes are The Death of
a Dandy, successful for its hard, specific, certain pictures of things
in themselves sentimental and soft; and The Death of God in which
a number of sculptural images (The Thinker and The Hand of
God, notably) are the conveyors of a profound emotion. It is
necessary to mention also The Death of a Soldier because the greater
part of it is built out of the spoken word, recorded with an excep-
tionally accurate sense of the stress and cadence of vulgar speech.
The whole book is far more noteworthy for its intelligence (for its
ideas) than for any outstanding method or technique of presenta-
tion. Structurally the prose pieces are better because their propor-
tions are suitable to their content and the disposition of the parts
is well arranged; those in verse are almost without exception too
long, the procession of ideas and the procession of images fail often
to coincide, and lengths turn into longueurs. But nothing in the
book gives evidence of haste or indolence or contempt for the prac-
tised art, and nearly everything in it has something of an alert, a
sophisticated and watchful intelligence. It has gone far, but not
,
far enough; for in writing about death it has failed to express the
deep and calm and unhurried desire of an age which like the
Cumaean Sibyl wants only to die.
GILBERT SELDES
а


BRIEFER MENTION
In The BRIGHT SHAWL (12mo., 220 pages; Knopf: $2) Joseph Hergesheimer
has written, and written remarkably well, a straightforward, unpretentious
and beautiful romance. It is interesting in relation to his other work, for
in other and lovelier skies there reappears the lay Anthony, with all the at-
tractiveness of that character and with the author's greatly increased sophis-
tication of technique to carry him forward. There reappears also the skill in
evocation which made the early chapters of Java Head notable. The story
is excellent and Mr Hergesheimer's exceptional talents may be judged from
the fact that it comes out as his story in spite of everything. It is as in Con-
rad a question of courage; it is as in Meredith a question of brilliance; but
when a writer is doing simply and honestly what he wants to do, the influen-
ces do not matter. The one flaw in the book is that Mr Hergesheimer does
not induce the young hero's sudden determination to die for the liberty of
Cuba and for a long time takes no pains to make it creditable; he over-
comes this by the extraordinary neatness of his narrative, by flashes of
talent, by a certain solid belief in it on his own part. The Bright Shawl is
good enough to rescue Mr Hergesheimer even from the compromising
position in which Cytherea left him.
an in-
Heartbeat, by Stacy Aumonier (12mo, 282 pages; Boni & Liveright: $2)
while it does not stand as the highest achievement of its author's pen,
is
head and shoulders above most of the season's outpour of fiction
cisive, swiftly-told, and consistent novel, written with grace and vitality.
One never remains in any doubt as to what sort of people Mr Aumonier
moves across his pages; with crisp and sympathetic strokes he sketches
them, and there is not a blurred or wavering line from cover to cover.
Character, in the intricate pattern of some of his work, is here subordinated
to action, but the narrative is entirely creditable, and squares with life.
The Happy Fool, by John Palmer (12mo, 304 pages; Harcourt, Brace:
$2). It is a pity that the verbal teeth in the critical wheel are worn so
smooth that they no longer bite in the minds of review readers, for this
novel is really "penetrating" and "illuminating," and these now ineffectual
adjectives are the only ones to describe it properly. Mr Palmer frequently
startles one by his perception and understanding of the subtler motives of
human conduct: in his unheralded novel there is a deeper knowledge of
life, a more precise comprehension of psychological and emotional forces,
than can be found in many touted works by the psychological and psy-
choanalytic brahmins of the day. And the method is so deceptively easy:
there are no torturing, long-drawn operations, no clumsy worrying of
helpless characters. Mr Palmer has written a novel which records the
complex relationship of a young couple, ideally unsuited to each other
temperamentally and socially, who love, marry, and make tragedy and
beauty of their lives because their characters, in propinquity, demanded
those actions; not because a scheming author willed it.


580
BRIEFER MENTION
SAREEL, by Edith Dart (12mo, 318 pages; Boni & Liveright: $2) steps from
the workhouse on the first page of this novel, and with few words and
even a Devonshire dialect, manages to arrest attention and hold the reader's
interest undeviatingly through the entire record of her adventures as
maid-of-all-work in a farm-house, wife of a gentleman, runaway, and
mistress of her own fate at last. The plot is not new. The beauty of the
book lies in its clear-cut character drawing, and in its alluring reticence.
Ascent, by Frances Rumsey (12mo, 379 pages; Boni & Liveright: $2) is
too carefully swaddled in the thick wool of its embroidered verbal quilt,
for anything more lusty than an occasional kicking out of the story. And
whenever that happens, Mrs Rumsey hastily tucks it in again, and con-
tinues to rock the cradle of fine writing. Despite her vigilance, the novel
emerges now and then with sufficient authority to suggest that—if she
were only a little less solicitous—it would stand on its own legs most satis-
factorily.
THE MIRACLES OF CLARA Van Haag, by Johannes Buchholtz (12mo, 303
pages; Knopf: $2.50) will have a wider appeal as a translation than did
Egholm and his God, largely because it is peopled with characters of more
universal aspect than those which clustered around Egholm in the previous
volume. Here is a lively romance, indigenous and racy, the flavour of
which has been well caught in Mr W. W. Worster's translation. Aside
from its narrative interest, the novel has considerable value as a picture of
Danish life, seen with an informal and sympathetic eye.
CERTAIN PEOPLE OF IMPORTANCE, by Kathleen Norris (12mo, 486 pages;
Doubleday, Page: $2) has—despite the defects of its ambitions-an in-
contestable solidity and worth. If Mrs Norris had been willing to sacri-
fice a measure of the solidity for a greater momentum, the achievement
would have been more successful. The wish to play the hostess to too
many generations has transformed a finely conceived work into a sort of
buffet tea, where--although there is food in profusion-one has to elbow
one's way towards it. Certain figures stand out with all the author's power
of delineation; the rest suffer from a Malthusian impatience.
ADMIRALS OF THE CARIBBEAN, by Francis Russell Hart (Illust., 8vo, 203
pages; Houghton Mifflin : $3) is a placid and authentic account of those
reckless spirits who carried Europe's wars to the shores of the new world
and sometimes decided them there. Drake, Morgan, Rodney, Verne, and
the Frenchmen Du Pointis and Du Casse are treated with curt thorough-
ness. There is no mention of Cavendish or Dampier or of those ferocious
fellows, Lollonois and Montbar the Exterminator, whose exploits have
been the source of so many pirate yarns. One dare not quarrel with this
omission since the title excludes mention of these uncommissioned marau-
ders, but it is a disappointment. The book will serve well those who are
looking for a comprehensive account of the early history of the Spanish
Main and its principal figures. The excerpts from old manuscripts are
interesting and the book is beautifully printed and contains some excel-
lent prints and maps.


BRIEFER MENTION
581
FRIDAY Nights, by Edward Garnett (12mo, 377 pages; Knopf: $2.50). Mr
Garnett is a man who has long displayed a gift for perceiving, in advance
of his fellows, literary clouds no larger than a man's hand. From his
position as publisher's reader he has enjoyed a wide view of the horizon,
and it is history that his eye was the first to spy Conrad, Hudson, and
numerous others. But this collection of appreciations, containing papers
bearing widely separated dates, proves that his intuition is not matched by
critical analysis. He is keenly aware in the presence of genius or talent,
his depths are stirred, but he cannot quite communicate the causes of his
condition. His emotional justifications consist too often of a fine mélange
of the genres, in which the terms of literary art are translated into the
terms of every other art without Mr Garnett troubling to discover their
meaning in the dictionary of any one language. The sympathetic re-
actions here presented are not now valuable as criticism-more thoroughly
analytical intelligences have worked the mines that are Mr Garnett's dis-
coveries—but they do tell us what, for example, their writer felt about
Joseph Conrad in 1898. The sentiments do Mr Garnett credit, but they
contribute nothing to our understanding of Conrad. Where are Mr Gar-
nett's anecdotes? They should prove valuable.
a
William De MORGAN AND HIS WIFE, by A. M. W. Stirling (8vo, 403 pages;
Holt: $6). Mrs Stirling displays an admirable talent for research, together
with an almost unrelieved ineptitude as biographer. The result of her
labour is a book which has charm in spite of the complete absence of tact in
the arrangement of the material. The charm of the work radiates from the
rare personalities of William and Evelyn De Morgan, which will not be
submerged in the mass of letters and anecdotes with which the book is salted.
This volume is in reality the authoritative De Morgan source-book. Any
one of a dozen competent hands could turn out a first-rate biography of the
novelist and his wife using as a basis only the materials which Mrs Stirling
has furnished here in such profusion.
THE SPORTING LIFE AND OTHER Trifles, by Robert Lynd (12mo, 251
pages ; Scribner : $2.25) eludes most of the labels in the light essay cata-
logue. Mr Lynd's humour is too robust to be whimsical, and not quite
disciplined enough to be ironic; it lodges gracefully in a niche between
Milne on that side of the water and Clarence Day, jr., on this. Aside from
the cricket chapters, which are merely excellent reporting, the range of
subjects is from money-lenders to milk, from boxing to a small boy's ap-
petite. The collection is gay, observant, happily expressed-in the