reasonably be expected
in Mr Loomis' next book, and altogether more of an assault.
Old Crow, by Alice Brown (i2mo, 534 pages; Macmillan: $2) ends with
the sentence, "Kiss me, my Nan," which proves, as clearly as an affidavit
to that effect, that Miss Brown is unfamiliar with the "Kiss me, my fool"
of vaudeville. The rest of the novel proves her remoteness from life,
save as it is lived in the rarefied atmosphere of an artist whose powers of
observation have outrun her powers of assimilation. Old Crow touches
reality, but only as one touches in a game of "tag"; life is presented with
too arbitrary a stroke to win one's complete suffrage.
Rootabaoa Stories, by Carl Sandburg (illus., i2mo, 230 pages; Harcourt,
Brace: $2). Children may be interested, but adult admirers of Mr Sand-
burg will find with regret that his Rootabaga Stories lack his customary
pith and sting; they do not come off. Apparently they have been provided
with the tinder of imagination, which, however, has required much blowing
upon before it has taken fire. The plan is apparently to idealize into fairy
tales certain items already familiar to household life; there is the Village
of Liver-and-Onions, and characters like Gimme-the-Ax, Any Ice Today,
the Potato Faced Blind Man, Hot Dog the Tiger, the Rusty Rats, and
so on, who turn out, when all is over, not to mean a great deal. It ought to
work out well, no doubt, but the result has rather the effect of a sultry blast
from some forced draft theory of nursery education, than a book of ingenu-
ous cool tales for children.


BRIEFER MENTION
21i
Real Property, by Harold Monro (i2mo, 63 pages; Macmillan: $i.25).
Ia a note to his poems the author says; "Some of them are tainted with
slight Georgian affectations, which no amount of polishing could success-
fully remove." To read them confirms his judgement. He lacks the power
to transcend his period, but he is more intelligent than most of his con-
temporaries and bites deeper into his subject. Even when he treats the
same themes as Squire or Drinkwater (and he does it often) his poems
have more than a signature to distinguish them; they are his real property;
they do not belong entirely to a school.
Three Wonder Plays, by Lady Gregory (i2mo, 290 pages; Putnams: $2).
These plays have the lightness of touch of sunlight glittering on the waves,
and the ethereal and fantastic beauty of clouds driven before a swift wind.
They are characterized by an airy imagination, a delicious and whimsical
humour, and a fascinating and purposeful unreality; they bear us up from
the earth on the wings of fairies, yet are never quite out of sight of earth,
and never wholly out of touch with life.
Contemporary One-act Plays of i92i—American, edited by Frank Shay
(8vo, 630 pages; Stewart Kidd: $3.75). This anthology gives some-
what the impression of a crazy-quilt in which brilliant patches of silk and
satin are seen by the side of tawdry cotton rags. Together with several
masterly little dramas, clever satires, and skilful fantasies, there are a
number of plays that are either too trivial, too shallow, or too glaringly
pretentious to be accorded equal rank with the better work in the book.
On the whole, the collection maintains a good standard; but had several
of the selections been excluded, that standard might be appreciably higher.
Modern English Essays, i870 to i920, edited by Ernest Rhys (8vo, 5 vols.,
i220 pages; Dutton: $6). Mr Rhys's attempt to put in sequence the
changes that the English essay has undergone in the last fifty years in-
evitably tempts one to generalization. The essay, as this anthology exhibits
its evolution, has followed the trend of literary journalism in unmistakable
fashion. The "grand essay" of the old Tory reviews gives way after the
first volume to the rapid, concise, expert, and brief feuilleton of our con-
temporary weekly supplements and literary monthly magazines. There is,
too, a distinct revival of the traditional personal essay, "Tart de conferer"
reintroduced by Gosse, Stevenson, and Beerbohm, and carried on by Logan
Pearsall Smith, Chesterton, A. G. Gardiner, J. C. Squire, and A. A. Milne.
If it has less urbanity than the eighteenth-century causerie, it has a modern
brightness more acceptable to our taste.
Studies in Literature: Second Series, by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (8vo,
30i pages; Putnams: $2.50). There is much that is interesting and satis-
fying in Professor Quiller-Couch's evaluation of the poetic masters of the
past, for he views them under the rays of a searchlight that disperses many
of the shadows and illusions of the years, and reveals giants in proper per-
spective as giants, and dwarfs as dwarfs. The author writes with consider-
able analytical faculty, and with a warm appreciation of that which was
best in the Victorians and their predecessors.


212
BRIEFER MENTION
Mazzini's Letters to an English Family, translated by Emilie Ashurst
Venturi, edited, with an introduction, by E. F. Richards, (2 vols., illus.,
8vo, 6i6 pages; Lane: $5 each) is the sequel to those letters which the
Italian patriot and moralist addressed to the Ashursts between i844 and
i854, and which were first published in English in i920. The present
volumes, taking up the story where it was then left off, carry the cor-
respondence forward to i872, and so consistently end only with the writer's
death. As letters they leave something to be desired in the way of warm
and revealing intimacy; and for a unified portrait of this insurgent era of
Cavour and Garibaldi one will search sedulously, among many trivial
pages which were, for many illuminating pages which were never, writ-
ten. Considering the stormy circumstances surrounding their birth, and
the fact that they constituted a distinctly secondary outlet for Mazzini's
exuberant vitality, they nevertheless throw a moderately steady beam of
light on adjacent territory, and above all expose the permanence of Maz-
zini's human and humanistic affections which survived triumphs, defeats,
illness, and exile. Editorial interpolations and foot-notes add historical
value to the work which is documented with generosity and precision.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, by Aimee Dostoevsky (8vo, 294 pages; Yale Univer-
sity: $4). Except that it gives practically no dates, this study of Dostoev-
sky by his daughter is a fairly full and coherently written, though unem-
phatic, rendering of facts, the facts in the life of a distinguished man of
letters. It contains important matter and furnishes much historical and
personal data concerning Dostoevsky's life—his relations with the intellec-
tuals, the students, the church, the state, with Turgenev, with Tolstoy; it
also makes certain special contributions, such as the intimate circumstances
of his works, the uses he makes of his own experience, and so on, that a
daughter's biography of her father might be expected to make. But although
it recurrently italicizes his Lithuanian ancestry, a matter rather neglected by
other biographers, and attempts the delineation of its influence in his
thought and life, and on the whole is written with a certain careful literal-
ism, the book still presents none but a rather fluffy and powdered likeness,
and makes no definite attempt at any appreciation or realization of the rare
tremendous visionary who could write Crime and Punishment.
The Return of the Middle Class, by John Corbin (i2mo, 353 pages;
Scribner: $2.50). There is an uncommon propriety in the circumstance
that an eloquent champion of the great down-trodden middle class should
step forth from the editorial page of the New York Times. Mr Corbin is
articulate with the wrongs of the genteel folk who make up the respectable
"new poor." He is informed with a clear social purpose; nerved by the
great moral imperative of the Times, righteous indignation; and armed
cap-a-pie with statistics. Mr Corbin states the present needs and aspira-
tions of the middle class sympathetically and accurately, narrates its
wrongs feelingly, and exhibits it, after the manner of the cartoonist, lan-
guishing pitiably between the millstones of capital and labour. As it re-
gards the present the book is pessimistic in temper. As it regards the future
it is a lyrical exhortation urging the middle class, i. e., Americans of Nordic
stock, to rise up in their splendid strength and reclaim their birthright.


COMMENT
IT is no part of our plans concerning The Dial's award to quar-
rel with the criticism which the choice of the recipient annually
brings forth. Our experience in this regard is still limited and in
each case both the theory and practice of the award have been far
more welcomed than disapproved. What we were bound to note in
the case of our second award was that there was an occasional touch
of scepticism due to the fact that Mr Eliot's name had not been
widely canvassed nor his work widely read until a short time ago.
Our purpose in this connexion is neither to verify the popular or
critical opinion, nor to "put over" an unknown. Reputation or the
lack of it is irrelevant in this connexion; but publicity, oddly
enough, is not. The Dial's award looks forward to a specific pur-
pose: we have said frequently enough that it is a contribution to
freedom from the more pressing financial difficulties under which
most creative artists in our time, and in many other times, have been
compelled to labour. But The Dial itself is, to use a commercial
term, engaged in the business of making public some of the products
of the creative imagination, and we feel specifically that the pub-
licity which brings the work of art rather than the personality of the
artist to the attention of those who can appreciate it is wholly justi-
fiable. We find it a little bit difficult to sympathize with a clois-
tered and fugitive art when that is put forth as the one true art.
So far as art is a communication we see no reason to be silent about
it
The amount of publicity which our award receives is therefore
doubly pleasing to us. We have seen comparisons made between it
and certain prizes and "crowns" which have shown a lively appre-
ciation of the particular basis on which our award is made. It is not
another "delectable scheme for keeping the wolf from the door of
the literary artist"—with which phrase the New York Tribune
damns Mr Pound's account of Bel Esprit. The money does not
run into that. Nor is it—nor as far as we can see is Bel Esprit—
patronage. Bel Esprit, as Mr Pound has once written of it, is a
return to commercial justice in respect to the author. Just as a shirt
factory which underpays its workers really operates at a loss (hid-


2i4
COMMENT
den by the fact that workers are after all replaceable) and is "bad
business," so those who enjoy the arts and fail to pay adequately
for their enjoyment are working at a loss and are engaged in a busi-
ness particularly bad for the artist who is not indispensable, but cer-
tainly not replaceable. Bel Esprit at a distance of three thousand
miles suggests that those who care, pay.
"'Hardship,' " continues the Tribune, " 'is a good incentive,' says
Mr Pound, 'until it kills.' A good axiom, no doubt, and in the ab-
stract there is everything to be said for the support of your true
artist. The world owes him a living, but your true artist will per-
sist in wanting to work for it." More radical journals have fre-
quently informed us that the Tribune's economics are unsound.
Happily we are not concerned with them, but the very first te»
pages of the Republic will do more to confound the Tribune's
social ideas concerning "your true artist" than the first ten years of
The New Republic are likely to do. It is there that the Tribune wiH
find stated eternally the truth about labour and hire, and there to«
that the logic of the system which compels a man to hate his work
and cheerfully calls that process "working for a living" is exposed
without mercy. We surprise ourselves greatly by dragging in Plato
—but there are moments when no one less lofty will quite do.


THE THEATRE
ALTHOUGH it was not the only production of interest during
the past month, The Guild's Tidings Brought to Mary
provoked the most thinking. One doesn't care very much about
The Lady Cristilinda, except to wonder why Mr Milton has to
waste his talents upon such stuff; or about "Mr Warfield as Shy-
lock" which is the modern announcement of The Merchant of
Venice, except to be glad it is done—and so following. The The-
atre Guild remains the most interesting producing agency in New
York; I should name Mr Hopkins as its only competitor and his
limitations are more irritating to me than those of The Guild. So
that when a play is presented which indicates nearly all of The
Guild's faults, it is worth taking thought of.
The choice of the play was the first fault, and was a fault abso-
lutely, and not relative to the supposed greater desirability of pro-
ducing a play by an American. I see no reason why The Guild
should produce American plays unless it gets American plays it
wants to produce. If its limitations of intelligence are so great that
it continually passes over good American plays, it is not fulfilling
more than half of its duty—but I doubt very much if this is the
case. The American productions so far made have not impressed
one with the quality of the manuscripts submitted. It is difficult,
but until one has actually seen the plays which The Guild rejected,
one must absolve them of blame. About The Tidings one simply
felt that it might as well have been reserved for a special matinee
or two, and that the great beauty of the production emphasized the
secondary interest of the piece.
For the production was beautiful. Mr Komisarjevsky and Mr
Simonson combined to give it two things—picture and movement.
Yet it had the Guild fault of sweetening the play, a fault more
obvious in He and in Liliom, and more offensive there. Both of
these plays were perfectly produced, once you allowed an entire
misconception of mood. I do not, in all honesty, believe that a play
which gave everything of He to the audience would have lasted
half as long; Liliom would not have suffered in popularity and
would have been a better play if the process had been arrested,


2l6
THE THEATRE
if everything astringent had come out and everything "great" been
suppressed. In The Tidings it was almost impossible to realize the
confusion and the uncertainty of the drama, so overlaid was it with
interest and beauty in the production. Nun-like figures marching
not without mishaps to the stage from alcoves in the auditorium, or
holding branches before the plaster sky on which a vision was soon
to be projected; extraordinary life given to figures by shifting,
movement, and composition; changes of light so psychologically
accurate as to be almost miraculous; all these things betokened
something of the reverential attitude The Guild always has towards
a play. It made one wish that the directors would go outside their
own theatre and discover there its original name: Harrigan's.
What saves The Guild is that it is now wholly professional. It
is technically as good as its old building permits. It has intelli-
gence, and if it could get over the idea of "the art of the theatre"
and produce plays without a slight touch of patronage for its audi-
ence and a slight touch of reverence for its material, it would be
nearly perfect. The Guild and its more notable members have too
often been praised here for me to repeat the catalogue of its virtues.
To an outsider it needs not more daring in the choice of plays,
although more range would be a blessing; it needs to determine
what success means and then to produce plays for success. It
shouldn't, as it seems to now, adopt an attitude of pleased surprise
when a success moves up to the Frazee. The theatre is a business
as well as a bastard art, and The Guild should produce plays only
because that is good business—the only business not overcrowded at
the moment.
The Guild has not yet "developed" a dramatist; it has exploited
a fine stage-artist, but Mr Hopkins has done as much; it has helped
a number of actors and actresses, but has created no new school of
acting (the acting in The Tidings was of all sorts, inharmonious,
inappropriate, inspired—anything but a created acting unity); it
has done well by its producers. Its greatest triumph has been the
creation of a comparatively intelligent audience so numerous that
other producers can now count on the same audience for their more
intelligent plays. That is a great deal; it is enough, in fact, to give
The Guild courage to continue with the other things.
Ave atque vale.
G. S.


MODERN ART
HE passions were not excited by the art shows of December.
JL There seemed to be no occasion to send a telegram to Charlie
Demuth, at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, "Mustn't miss it. Come on
at once," except possibly in the case of his own show at Daniel's;
and that, of course, he had seen already. Twirling his thumbs in
Lancaster, Mr Demuth, in fact, was as up to date intellectually, as
we were who passed the holiday season in the trenches. The only
momentary advantage we had over him was that we knew this and
he didn't. Now he knows it and we are even.
But to the details! The entertainment provided for us featured
as many items as a Ziegfeld Follies programme and these were
about evenly divided between the standardized and the question-
able. Mr Demuth will not feel hurt to be included among the ques-
tionable when he learns who the standardized were. They were the
British best sellers of the Brooklyn Museum, Leon Bakst, Arthur
Rackham, the bronzes of Rodin, and the New Society of Artists.
All of them now invincibly fashionable and immune from debate!
Pitted against these were our Mr Demuth, Jacques Villon at the
Societe Anonyme, Arthur B. Carles, Henri Burkhard, and the carica-
tures of Frueh. Mr Demuth, himself, is dangerously near being
standardized since he has lately been introduced to the haut monde
by Mr Gallatin in his recent study of American Watercolourists
(E. P. Dutton and Company) and there honoured with three full-
page illustrations; but though he and Mr Marin do begin to com-
mand prices, they will never be reproached with too much success
so long as the general consternation at the sight of their pictures con-
tinues^—and it does, almost as amusingly as ever. Mr Demuth's
latest exhibition marked his venture in oils. The faithful little
band of admirers saw that the intensity of feeling did not lessen in
the new medium, nor the sly hints at mockery, nor the decorative-
ness; but one among them, whilst accepting the pictures joyfully,
suspected that this artist's mind is not wholly acclimated to oils as
yet. They had everything but unction. Now, unction may be a
mere habit. It may not go on into the future. It has gone distinctly
out in certain forms of expression—in sermons, for instance. But it


2i8
MODERN ART
is notable that even the innovator Picasso never wholly relinquished
it. He put perfectly flat tones on, but managed to keep them painty.
But unction or no unction, Mr Demuth is of this era—he is aware
of concrete, of immense, implacable walls of red brick, and of the
towering smokestacks which cut more of a figure now than church
steeples do—and somehow he doesn't seem to mind being of this
period. Fortunate artist. The moment in which the setting sun
throws the rubbishy heap of scrap-iron into a puzzlingly suggestive
mass of shadow and flicks strange designs upon the flat walls of
brick, seems sufficient for him. He makes of it a thing that seems
to glorify a subject that the rest of us have been taught to consider
ugly. But in doing so, after all, he only does what the sun does,
what God does—unction not having gone out of art criticism, you
see—and when we see how little God is flustered by these works of
man we may gradually arrive at the idea that this period is only
one of a long sequence of periods; and, always from the point of
view of God, of course, no more trying than the others.
The art of Jacques Villon may not present any new technical
aspect to Mr Demuth and the other American modernists, but it
must certainly give them pleasure. In view of the scare headlines
in the newspapers attending the recent pictures by Bracque and
Picasso, "Cubism is finished," et cetera, the new Villon pictures
come as a surprise. The headlines, it seems, contained an element of
exaggeration, since M Villon continues being cubistic and continues
being interesting. He has, it is said, been engaged upon these can-
vases for a space of two years or more and has posed for himself in
them certain problems, among others, colour perspective. In this
case the secrets of the laboratory may well be left in the laboratory,
since the paintings are lovely and comforting things in themselves
and suggest music rather than mathematics. To have laboured away
at these colour compositions for two years in complete indifference
to the fluttering banners of the advance-guard in Paris is in itself
peculiarly French. There always seems to be someone in that
country—like Redon, like Toulouse-Lautrec, like the philosopher
Joubert—who manages to hold on to a set of artistic principles and
refine them into expression in spite of the thunderous edicts of the
boulevards. Jacques Villon is a delightful colourist. His subjects
escape me or do not concern me, but I know I should not weary of
his colour arrangements any more than I should weary of fine old


HENRY McBRIDE
2i9
stained glass. He lacks the passionate attack of Picasso, but on the
other hand his coolness and limpidity are consoling. If there is the
violent unrest of the Spanish ballad somewhere in Picasso, some-
where in Villon there is much of Mozart.
Of the standardized artists mentioned, Bakst seems to have ex-
cited the most attention from the fashionable and Arthur Rackham
most from collectors. Mr Rackham appears to be as dear to the
heart of Americans as our own Maxfield Parrish and all of his new
drawings at Scott and Fowles' were straightway sold. There was
little said, however, on the street corners about these shows, nor
about the British paintings at the Brooklyn Museum, nor about the
Rodin exhibition at Brummers; though this last did interest me
somewhat because of its several Balzacs. All the preparations that
Rodin made for his great fiasco (according to official Parisians) or
his chef-d' oeuvre (as I think it myself) have their interest. The
present little group-show that Rodin was considering as one item in
the strange melange that was afterwards to be his Balzac, the note
of handsomeness, and even in those that represent the unwieldy
body of the latter days, the simple-minded Rodin was searching for
something gallant, the Balzac, I suppose of Mme Hanska. This, of
course, has to be searched for in the strange brew in which Rodin,
like Balzac himself in his own art, included everything. Rodin's
Balzac, in fact, becomes increasingly wonderful as time goes on,
but it also is more and more apparent that the fates that secretly
control the disposition of chefs-d'oeuvre are subtle, since the mere
argument that the statue was not architecture would not have car-
ried much weight in the heat of the original row, though most calm
spirits now agree that it is fitter for a museum than for a street
corner.
Henry McBride


MUSICAL CHRONICLE
SCHOENBERG'S orchestral transcriptions of Bach's choral
preludes Schmiicke Dich, O Liebe Seele and Komm, Gott,
Schopfer, Heiliger Geist, which were given for the first time at the
Philharmonic concert of December 7th, are re-creations indeed.
The two organ compositions have been genuinely refelt by the
Viennese with reference to the contemporary orchestra. In the
process of taking them into himself and reissuing them bathed in
his own instrumental magic, he has further opened for us Bach's
kingdom. Unlike certain other transcribers of Bach's pieces, he
has not found himself obliged to alter radically the detail of the
musical designs in translating the two poems into the idiom of a
modern instrument. We are quite ready to believe the scholarly
and imaginative analysis of Mr Lawrence Gilman when it assures
us that practically all that has been added to the musical matter
proper is "the three-note figure in contrary motion that occupies
half a bar just before the fourth entrance of the choral melody in
Schmiicke Dich; a similar one six measures further on; the filling
out of chords and the octave doubling of parts; and a pizzicato
violin figure, a flute trill, and a harp arpeggio that have no exact
equivalent in the musical fabric of the prelude, though each of these
slight elaborations is implied in Bach's music." Schoenberg has
preserved the delicate simplicity of the pieces, and has applied his
own hand only in the re-creation of the instrumental form. He
seems to have sought to represent to himself the manner in which
the tones sounded to the folk of the cantor's own time; and to have
searched out of the armory of the modern orchestra the timbres and
combinations capable of giving us sensations similar to those re-
ceived by the congregation of St Thomas' when its musician per-
formed upon his wheezing, short-winded organ. And the music has
been refelt with so much sympathy; Schoenberg has permitted
Bach to play almost in his own naive fashion with the textures of
our bands, with piccolos, English horns, bass clarinets, double-
bassoons, trombones, tubas, timpani, glockenspiel, cymbals, harps,
and celesta, that the spirit manifest in the two pieces has defined it-
self with freshness, and stood apart for us to see.


PAUL ROSENFELD
22i
The two transcriptions restore to us again a sense of the naivete,
the tenuosity, the seraphic lightness of Bach's manner of feeling.
The timbres of the modern instruments upon which his composi-
tions are usually performed, pianos, concert-organs, grand orches-
tras, manage in some fashion to deprive his art of its innocence, its
divine allegresse, its levity of true greatness. They have made use to
visualize him always as a figure like to some of Blake's ancient and
titanic emanations; a sort of Los or Urizen in a bagwig pedalling
an organ with all the austerity of a prophet and all the fury of an
element. The heaviness of the sound prevents us from recognizing
how often in his moods Bach was "Jesu's playtoy" no whit less
than the young disciple of Francis for whom the holy Claire first
found the name. To this youthful, rapt, enthusiastic state the in-
strumentation of Schoenberg restores him. The preludes are become
the frailest of orchestral fabrics; quiet candle flames lit here and
there in the orchestra; a shine of mystic lights flitting across the
ensemble of instruments. The colouring is rich and tender, but re-
served. Though the score requires nearly as many instruments as
that of Salome, the orchestra is treated somewhat in the style of a
concerto grosso, and the oppositions of the tutti and single instru-
mental timbres preserve an archaic flavour amid all the delicious
sweetness and variety of sound. In Schmiicke Dich, the choral
melody is lightly and warmly relieved by solo 'cello first upon
a background of muted and divided strings accompanied by wood-
wind, the celesta, and the harp; later against horns, bass clarinets,
violas, and double basses. So marvellously appropriate are the
timbres found by Schoenberg that Bach the young lyric poet comes
to be felt a personal presence. We seem to perceive him sitting at
his instrument lost in moods of joy so still and so deep they
threaten to burst his heart. The sweeping harp and violin arpeg-
gios which open Komm, Gott, perhaps the more genial and brilliant
of the two transcriptions, re-create so marvellously well the mood
which bore it that we seem to have a dazzlingly immediate access
to the experience Bach was rendering; to hear the brushing of the
wings of the divine visitor as he heard it when he gave from his
breast the summons to Genius. And at the close, when the cymbals
clashed and the triangle rang loud and bold above the resplendent
full orchestra, the childlike pomp of the baroque seemed for an in-
stant to invade Carnegie Hall; and the laughing faces of plaster


222
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
cherubs flashed out through the air; and behind the playing band
of musicians there seemed to spread a sunburst made of pieces of
gilt wood.
It must not be concealed that there were moments during the
performance when, despite its richness of texture, the music sounded
breathless and broken and small. Something was as it ought not
have been: what, we scarcely know. Nevertheless, our suspicions
will not fasten themselves to Schoenberg. Had the remainder of
the programme of the concert, the Unfinished Symphony of Schu-
bert, the Brahms violin concerto and the Meistersinger Prelude
been well handled, they might possibly have singled him out. He
is one of those persons doomed to be suspected. But the rest of the
music was handled badly. It is pitiful to see how little Mr Stransky
has changed since the dark day he came to succeed Mahler as con-
ductor of the Philharmonic. The pas seul which he executes before
his orchestra remains just as beautiful as it ever was. He dances,
he starts to fly, his coat-tails extend in the breeze. He has one
winged attitude which makes him resemble the Virgin in the As-
sumption by Titian. He has another which approximates the move-
ment of the Nike of Samothrace. Sculptors, where is your vortex'?
Here shall you find no enemy! Meanwhile, the orchestra before
which he postures remains as lifeless as it has ever remained when
he conducts. For this reason, we cannot bring ourselves to suspect
that it is Schoenberg who is the nigger in the woodpile. It seems
certain to us that, were his transcriptions to be performed by a
leader who occasionally makes something happen in his band, he
would stand, his craftsmanship perfectly vindicated.
New life appears to be circulating in the International Com-
posers' Guild. Last year, the organization to some degree retained
the air of being one of those groups formed for the purpose of
gilding the faces of grooms, that it may seem they're gilt. This
year, it commences to justify its existence. The programme of the
first of the three concerts promised for the season by the association
was the shapeliest it has yet given. The standard of performance
was raised. In the course of the evening, two introductions were
made which were interesting, and two others which were really
important.
The two interesting introductions were made by the playing of


PAUL ROSENFELD
Honegger's first sonata for violin and piano by Messrs Tinlot and
Salzedo, and the playing of a movement for six muted trumpets
from the symphonic suite Men and Angels of Carl Ruggles, by
Messrs Capodiferro, Buono, Glicken, Ricci, Rubinstein, and Gian-
aone. The Honegger sonata is interesting entirely because of its
third movement. The first two movements are abysmally weak, and
represent a past of which the composer can scarcely be vain. The
third movement is stronger. It is a sort of naturalistic speech, plain-
tive and bitter in character, revealing the composer's affinity for
Gustav Mahler in Mahler's truer moods; and although one cannot
call the composition either profoundly eloquent or bracingly fresh,
it attests again the sincerity and earnestness of this member of the
"Six." And the fragment of the Ruggles suite is distinguished by
the loveliness of the sound of the six close, dissonant, silver-snarling
trumpets; and by an inner homogeneity. It is named Angels by
the composer; one hears a few notes of Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht
toward the middle; and for some reason it reminds one of a paint-
ing of the heavenly host by a Jersey City primitive, if such a thing
exists. It seems very possible that the composition suffered from
being played unaccompanied by the two outer movements, and that
their presence might have relieved in it a greater rhythmic life and
emotional content than it appeared that evening to possess.
The first of the two more important introductions was the piano-
music of Dane Rudhyar. The two pieces, Luciferian Stanza and
Ravissement, which the composer himself played, go far to place
him in the company of those young musicians to whom we may
look with relative certainty for fine work. The young Frenchman
has not yet found his own idiom; the two pieces are as Scriabinesque
in general outline as they are in name. But they move; they have
architectural quality. The dense, fluent, passionate piano-tones are
merely the veil which separates two seas, the one in the composer,
the other in us. The music is the sincere expressions of a man who
is still in the state of apprenticeship, but who has become able to do
some conjuring for himself, and is rapidly mastering the old sor-
oerer's bagful of tricks.
The other important item was the performance by Messrs Tinlot
and Kefer of the Ravel sonata for violin and 'cello. The sonata
makes known to us a Ravel very different from the alexandrian
composer of the suave, tender, pellucid sonatine and string-quartet.


224
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
The new work is severe; harsh and acerb in many passages. The
independence of the voices of the two instruments is maintained
with a relentlessness which makes the Schoenberg of the quartet
Opus 7 appear conciliatory in mood. Flowrets do bloom in little
clumps amid these Alpine crags; Ravel were not Ravel did he not
from time to time make opalescent streams of music pour from the
strings; and so richly are the powers of the two instruments em-
ployed that at moments, particularly during the close of the Allegro,
the sonority seems as full as that of a quartet. But the work has in
general a Gothic austerity which makes the dedication of the piece
to the memory of Debussy less appropriate than would have been
the inscription to the memory of Magnard. The third movement,
apparently based upon mediaeval scales, transports us amid the
bland stonework and incorporeal beauty of Gothic portals; and
the composer seems less a Parisian of 1922 than a monk intoning
a hymn to the Virgin in the days when Mary was empress. Even
though its scope seems smaller than that of the quartet, the work
takes rank with the best of Ravel's adventures in sonata form.
Paul Rosenfeld






MAX REINHARDT. HY OSKAR KOKOSCHKA


DIAL
MARCH i923
THE KNEELING WOMAN
BY PAUL MORAND
Translated from the French by Florence Nelson Llona
THE Tavern had anchored at the corner of the boulevard. In a
chemically-pure twilight, the passengers summoned lazy liq-
uids, slow-descending syrups from the bottoms of glasses. It was
the hour when, forsaking their glass-roofed ceramic palaces, the
artists glide, rubber-heeled, towards the cafe. They feel loftier and
weary of being clever. Big splotches of sunlight butter the asphalt.
The boulevard makes laborious angles, glutted boa. One can take
pleasure or alarm at all the shops: art potteries, liberal arts, me-
chanical arts, poetic art, dental art, peasant art, art of pleasing.
At the terrace, they were already preparing the tables for din-
ner. A breeze manufactured in Montrouge lifted the paper table-
cloths and the aluminium forks and spoons. Within, there was a
permanent exposition of the Rue la Boetie and Boulevard Raspail
masters. Between canvases plastered with duplicity or violence,
placards proclaimed:
MOULES, ESCARGOTS,
CABINETS PARTICULARS.
"Everything that makes you sick," someone pointed out.
On the banquette, his back to the window, Thor Magnus sounded
like an emptying bath-tub as he drank. Plaited sandals, dove-
coloured homespun, maroon sweater, and sand-paper pate. i00,000
Kr. from an honourable Stockholm family for any one who will
THE


226
THE KNEELING WOMAN
return him to the Magnus domicile, Kardnausmakaregatan, No. 18.
He would gain by exchanging Boulevard Raspail, that Secession
artery, for streets that end in white yachts, the sea-gulls in umbrel-
las, the blue and silver sentries at the angles of brick residences, all
those voices so fresh from being borne by water, the equestrian
statues of Gustav Wasa charging the crazy clouds. But the magic
of Paris has no equal. This giant dissolves peacefully and sinks
into the hospitable Montparnasse bitumen. He left Upsala one
night, in evening clothes, loaded with aqua-vitae, leaving the mem-
ory of a marvellous being, frenzied in his cholers and mirth, among
the students.
Thor, to No. 428, is a fabulous babe. (Thor numbers each girl
who enlists for him. This broadens his views on the subject of hap-
piness.) She liked the craggy access of him, his pumps, his brace-
lets, his plucky painting, his blue shirt, and how he forbade her to
live the way she used to before she met him.
But he irritates her so with his vacant face like people who win
fat lottery prizes, that for the past two hours, she has been wishing
him dead.
"What are you thinking about?"
In one breath she answers, "Nothing, you, I love you."
Of course, there were the Sundays at Marika's, watching, from
the depths of a bed, the Seine flow by; the wrestling championship
matches at the Casino de Paris; the art nights at the house of the
Plaine Monceau lady-explorer, where they burn violet things; the
Sundays in Robinson riding a horse that every passer-by knows by
name; the accordion at the Plateau-Central dance-hall, place Mau-
bert; the Bourgeuil at Maniere's; the opium-den Rue Cortambert;
capital executions; and Fyscher's joint, shrimp-pink, perfumed
with cold cigar-smoke like an appointment-house chemise. But all
that no longer suffices No. 428. She feels like being alone, partak-
ing of calm as if with a spoon, entering the near-by cemetery where
granite cars pursue the silent voyage, going away. . . . Mel-
ancholy of nights that let themselves fall—old curtain tired of hav-
ing served so long—closed shutters, relaxation of obscurity when
humanity slackens and appears atrociously aged and stupid. No.
428 realizes that she will have to cut and run.
It is an art, old as women. They say that flight is the weapon of
the weak. On the contrary, the weak always stick. One should


PAUL MORAND
227
know when to decamp. When to do what, impulsive and auto-
matic, No. 428 is doing at this instant: get up slowly, with an air
of saying, "Wait for me—I'm going to the wash-room, don't ask
me any questions," cross the cafe, go out another door, make for the
street, the Gare de Lyon, the Marseilles express, and pass through
Dijon two hours later, with no other baggage than the Intran, on
account of the serial.
No. 428, or to be exact, Diana—since here she is restored to her-
self—has often decamped. She must bolt it when her heart "grabs
at her," as she tells the doctor. As insensible to catastrophes as
mystic feet to broken glass, she bolts headlong. Thus she has al-
ready thrown up her school, her family, the Legion of Honour, and
occasional good things—redoubtable strongholds to be evacuated
directly ennui lays siege. The returns differed: forgotten, pardoned,
recompensed, beaten. It is the irreparable suddenness of the exit
and the unknown quality of the return that she likes. Even as a
child, she had wished that there were not only prizes, but punish-
ments in the games of chance.
Beaune, Pommard, Clos-Vougeot, the inebriated coach now de-
scends the famous vintages, as with the roast, the finger descends
the wine-list. The tavern and its sour beer recede: emptied of emo-
tion, memories lighten, are expelled by a fragrance of grass and
parched earth. At last a night that doesn't reek of melted cheese
and the wild-cherrywood pipe that Thor has a habit of seasoning
in bed at night, while concocting landscapes with the assistance of
geometrical bits of pasteboard. What is he doing at twelve minutes
past twelve? He must have waited for his No. 428, grown as-
tonished, indignant, clamoured for her at the cloak-room, gotten
drunk, forgotten, been happy. He will liquor up for forty-eight
hours, performing on those silent trumpets, which, says he, make
music within. Next he will tackle the search for Diana, and the
situation will become serious.
All this on account of Sainte Colombe. She has suddenly recol-
lected that hamlet, caught on Mont Ventoux. Black firs, blue
mountains, and—she is for tricoloured landscapes—white houses,
peeled readily off a brutal sky. All of which seemly; the peaks
themselves clothed in modesty. The air, exhilarating, effervescent,
stinging the nostrils.
The church—a stable where the natives, gathered about God,


228
THE KNEELING WOMAN
ruminated. There, two years ago, on an excursion, she had felt
simultaneously so commendable and so detestable that she got a
stomach-ache. But one forgets and softens again. That evening,
above the Lion de Belfort, Sainte Colombe had loomed steadfast,
inevitable. Blackened pokers, the firs stirred up the sunset. All
that awaited her. . . . Prisoner intoxicated by liberation, she
rushes on in express No. 5, in her head a song, monotonous as the
busy signal.
Steps lead down into the church, for it was below the street level,
on the site of ancient Roman baths, and besides, it had gradually
sunk. The stones—still rusty from thermal water. A church with
fortified walls, slit high up with paneless windows. You thought
of the pungent and proximate caves of Roquefort. The altar—
dressed in a cotton cloth and topped by a green-tasselled ebony cre-
dence—souvenir style. Diana paid a courtesy visit to the Holy
Virgin. She lingered before the matron, who, with 1287 indul-
gences, looked down at the World, a home-made tart, under her
bare feet. Dusk began to exude from the soil.
"Here is a prayer-book, my child, in case you have forgotten
your Ave Maria."
It was a young priest, with beautiful, sugary hands, and a look of
suffering and sensitiveness.
"What a wonderful church you have, Father!"
He deemed Diana indulgent, was suborned.
"Your Holy Virgin is as good-looking as Grace Miles in For the
Sake of Her Race. But, alas, I'm such a wicked person that I don't
deserve to be here. Forgive me, Father, for talking about my-
self. . . ."
"I am here to listen to you."
"Which accounts for the success of religion. It's so nice, you see,
to give yourself a good overhauling, straighten up, drink out of the
faucet, hit the hay at nine o'clock, be far away from Rue de Rennes
with that depot at the end that it can't get rid of."
"You suffer?"
"Yes. It's always better."
"The meekness which graces your speech, my child, could not be
feigned. A life far from the world and its pleasures will put you
back on the right path. That path is arduous, as is a mountain trail,
but strewn with so many flowers! Then we shall unite in prayer
(I say 'we' for God leads you to me)."


PAUL MORAND
229
"I don't intend to pester you with my tales of woe, Father,"
answered Diana. "But when it comes to someone as daft as I am,
meditation is no good. 'Women weren't made to think,' my mother
used to say; 'It brings them bad luck.' When I'm with my pals,
leading such a life that you can't tell the difference between night
and day, I don't behave—and I don't think. Which, afterwards,
enables me to blame others preferably. Everybody around me lives
like that. Anyway, I've always had the impression of having water
on the brain."
The cure communed with himself. His lips moved. He said that
he was considering a series of uninterrupted pious exercises, to be
practised even without fervour.
"Eurythmics," said Diana.
The next day she sat on the rectory lawn. Her hair, already
bobbed, she had cut like a man's. This lengthened her neck and
dyed it blue. Touching, unsexed doll, she looked suddenly Catho-
lic, like a Jeanne d'Arc recovering from typhoid fever.
"Taste this excellent pear. It is owing to the mild autumn with
which our Lord has gratified us that it is already ripe. You will
also have a glass of Chateauneuf, Chateauneuf du Pape, will you
not?"
"Since it's a priestly wine," said Diana, placing a glass between
her and the sun.
"It's i908. It begins to ferment a little. It must be drunk."
"I'm happy for the first time in ages."
Diana was surrounded by a red cat, a plate of muscat, and three
pears, one of them bitten.
"Your soul, like a soft feather, is wafted on the Spirit of God,
Miss."
"Mrs."
She put the ribbon of her combination around the cat's neck.
"I'm animal myself. They tell me I look like a white mouse—
do I? Perhaps I'm going to become a saint?"
"Woman is naturally humble, and the Kingdom of God opens
often to her. Three times a day, say aloud, 'I hope.'"
"I could never screw myself up to confessing. But, like an old
toper, I'm going to tell you the story of my life—that is to say,
after all, of my sins. If you look incredulous, I'll invent a few
extra."


THE KNEELING WOMAN
Diana, however, stuck to a highly expurgated version.
"All you need to know, Father, is that I've done everything—"
When she had finished, the priest was praying.
"At least let your repentance be sincere. God wills the return of
your soul. Help Him. Not all sinners respond to His advances.
His infinite wisdom suffers Him to know which will help them-
selves and which, on the contrary, will not. God turns, in prefer-
ence, to the latter."
"Just like a woman."
Diana returned to the rectory twice, but the priest was absent.
As her coquetry went far, she pencilled to his address.
"You've dropped your white mouse. But won't you take her
picking daisies?"
She received no answer.
It rained. The mountains became a submarine landscape. Diana
felt lonesome. She did not, to be sure, pine for either the Elysee-
Montmartre where you slide down the banister; or the one-legged
lady on Boulevard des Capucines; or the Chinese dishes at the Pas-
cal; or the Cabaret du Neant where, one night, they laid Thor in
a coffin; or the Comedie Franchise, where they had been to see
La Fille de Roland, and it was like Aunt Emma's parlour. . . .
She had a mind to send Mad a card. She gave her address under
seal of secrecy. Then she regretted her weakness, and, to do pen-
ance, she climbed the stairs from the post-office to the church, stop-
ping at each step to recite an angelic salutation, in imitation of
Saint Catherine of Sienna.
The church was more than ever a bath. The walls oozed, water
squirted from the broken gargoyles—the altar, adorned with faded
paper flowers, rotted away in bitterness. Never would God, who
goes barefooted, choose such a place to appear as the sun or on a
golden throne. Back there, it would soon be the hour when Paris
blazes forth, rouses municipal stars—rose or white—streams of lu-
minous water, transforms the rain into an unbelievable revel,
doubles its lighting system free of charge. "Une nuit enflammee"
to talk like Berenice. Women, flitting along early winter evenings,
noses in furs taken out of pepper that morning, which makes them
sneeze. Diana was left alone with all this austerity. Solitude op-
pressed her eyelids.


PAUL MORAND
23i
"Tears add fuel to the flame of charity," said the priest. "Can
it be that you already feel flooded by an inner light'?"
"Oh, not at all! In this burg, I congeal where I'm soft, and when
I'm hard I liquefy."
She added, to make him feel bad:
"Something tells me to kill myself, that it's the Will of God."
"It is the work of the Demon," said the priest. "But I am con-
fident. The Lord appeared to me this night in the guise of a child."
"You have to be careful about what you dream nowadays, you
know."
She expatiated:
"When I'm asleep, I hear and even read music. And yet I don't
even know my scales."
"Saint Herman of Steinfeld composed his hymn to Saint Ursula
without knowing music," objected the priest.
"With a name like that and so talented, he must have been a
Jew."
But life was odious, no matter how you took it. She loathed the
sight of the priest, with his over-long hair, his stagy face, his unc-
tuousness—to dissimulate his fear of her. Why, instead of treat-
ing her harshly, was he always ready to shun her glance, to reel off
edifying twaddle? And the country—a thing absolutely useless
during ten months of the year. She was a member of that Parisian
tribe which takes wheat for rye. All that space gone to waste.
Never anything to do. Life is spent for leisure, and when one has
it, in regretting it.
Diana went back to the Hotel de la Poste and took to her bed.
There she spent thirty-six hours, stripping off the wall-paper and
weeping. Then, as beautiful weather had returned, she went out
and sat down in front of the so-to-speak townhall.
The plain, raked by the wintry wind, shook its still more beseech-
ing olive trees, wrinkled an already aged Rhone; far off, one de-
scried Fort Saint-Andre and its rose Tavel bottle turrets. Then the
Aries plain to the Cevennes. . . .
"So that's the way you go to the wash-room?"
In a rubber bag, beneath a crust of mud, it was Thor, come by
motor-bike.
He grabbed her by the hair.
"Don't touch me," Diana told him; "I've been introduced to
God."


THE LAST WORD
BY JAMES STEPHENS
The leaf will wrinkle to decay
And crumble into dust away:
The rose, the lily, grow to eld
And are, and are no more, beheld;
Naught can be stayed, for, as the eye
Rests upon an object nigh
It is not there to look upon;
It is mysteriously gone;
And, in its place, another thing
Apes its shape and fashioning.
Whate'er the sun can breath to-day
The moon can lip it all away
To-night, and all will rebegin
To-morrow as the dawn comes in:
Is no beginning, middle-trend,
Or argument to that, or end:
No cause and no effect, and no
Reason why it should be so;
Or why it might be otherwise
To other minds, or other eyes.
The soul can dream itself to be
Adrift upon an endless sea
Of day and night: the soul can seem
To be all things that it can dream;
And needs but look within to find
That which is steady in the wind;
That which the fire does not appal;
Which good and ill move not at all;
Which does not seek, or lack, or try,
And was not born, and cannot die.


JAMES STEPHENS
It has been writ in wisdom old—
This is the last word to be told:
There is no dissolution, no
Creation: there are none in woe:
There is no teacher, teaching, taught:
Are none who long for, lack for aught
Are none who pine for freedom, none
Are liberated under sun;
And this is absolutely true—
In Him who dreams in me and you.


A MONUMENT TO PROUST
BY MALCOLM COWLEY
CENTURIES never begin or end at the proper date: the seven-
teenth died in i7i5 and the eighteenth prematurely in 1789;
what we call the nineteenth century extends from i8i5 to i914 and
is the century of Marcel Proust. No other novelist has described
its latter years more faithfully. He makes no mention of battles,
political campaigns, world exhibitions, visits of crowned heads; but
in their place and with a better sense of relative values he records
those small and actual changes in private life to which the chang-
ing century gave birth. The invention, not of electricity, but elec-
tric parlour lamps, not of automobiles, but taximeters. Anti-Semit-
ism spreading after the Dreyfus affair. Fashion: skirts which ex-
pand or deflate, changing mannerisms of speech, palms in their
Chinese jardinieres carried from drawing-rooms to make place for
the severity of gilt and lacquer. Out of such details he builds a civi-
lization which differs minutely and essentially from that of 1920 or
that of i875, and which alters imperceptibly from year to year.
Remembrance of Things Past is, accurately, a historical novel.
At the same time it could be classed as autobiography: it is the
story of a hero who, in most respects, is Proust himself; who spends
his youth in a provincial city and his manhood in Paris; who is re-
ceived in society; who does little, in general, but observe a life in
which he is too sickly to participate. Remembrance of Things Past
has also been called "a laboratory of morals," "the story of the rise
of a family." It is a comedy of manners as elegant and artificial as
Congreve, and it is a Shakespearian tragedy expanded hugely: em-
bracing all of these categories it is limited by none. Incidentally it is
the longest novel of modern times.
Its every dimension, every member is brobdingnagian. Para-
graphs extend over several pages; a sentence contains three hundred
words and a single chapter eighty thousand; the completed whole,
with its million words at the least, is divided into eight books each
of which would make an exceptionally long novel in itself and yet
which retains the air of something as episodic, fragmentary as a


MALCOLM COWLEY
235
thousand years in face of eternity. Du Cote de Chez Swann
(Swann's Way) A l'Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleur, Le Cote des
Guermantes (I and II) Sodome et Gomorrhe (I, II, and III) Le
Temps Retrouve: from i880 till the war, from book to book and
decade to decade the novel marches on, endlessly.
Its publication in France, still uncompleted, has extended al-
ready through nine years, but the American version should appear
more rapidly. The task of the translator, although long and respon-
sible, is none too difficult. Proust writes a prose which is less French
than international; it can be rendered into English phrase by phrase,
almost word for word; approximately that is what Mr Moncrieff
has done. Except for a few pages of conversation translated uncol-
loquially, except for a dozen obscure phrases which he misunder-
stood, his version of Swann's Way gives the same effect as the origi-
nal. If he only does as well on the seven huge books which
follow. . . .
In spite of the hugeness of Remembrance of Things Past there is
something modest about the conception of it when compared with
many shorter novels. It is no attempt to anatomize genius, like
Jean-Christophe; no Odyssey of Modern Times. Neither is it
France, or Three Decades of the Nineteenth Century; in spite of
its historical value it does not even claim to be France During
Three Decades of the Nineteenth Century. Simply, it is what one
man remembers: the history of one man against a limited social
background. Everything is modest except the length, and the
length is responsible for its greatest imperfection.
Remembrance of Things Past lacks unity. Once I wrote: It is
not a work of art, but a gallery in which the separate portraits are
works of art. The judgement was true and unjust, for the gallery it-
self is savantly arranged.
Swann's Way is an introduction, a sort of catalogue to the por-
traits exhibited by Marcel Proust. In the first of its three immense
chapters he recalls his childhood, skipping from subject to subject
in a fashion as capricious as memory itself and thus, inconsequen-
tially, presenting situations which he will touch only lightly at first
and then leave hanging in suspense, like broken chords, till the
distant end of the novel. The second chapter approaches the story
from an entirely different angle. It is the history of a love-affair of


236
A MONUMENT TO PROUST
Charles Swann, an affair which began and ended before Proust or
Proust's hero was born, but which had unending consequences:
Swann is a sort of foreshadow of the hero, and his adventure a brief
parallel, a synopsis of the whole novel. The device is masterly. In
the third chapter Proust begins the orderly recital of his memories;
they will march through the seven books which follow, while, one
after another, the chords which he had sounded tentatively in
Swann's Way will be resolved. If the plan is excellent the author is
not always faithful to his plan; he forgets it, making excursions into
strange territory; the reader more fatally forgets and may even
write in his note-book: Remembrance of Things Past is not a work
of art, but a gallery in which . . .
The painter and his subjects change continually. Every seven or
ten years a man undergoes such complete alteration that he might
as well be a different person. This is at least true of men of excep-
tional intelligence, a quality which no one could deny either to the
purring social lion of Sodom and Gomorrha or to the little, little
boy of Swann's Way, the boy who lay awake all night when his
mother forgot to kiss him. They have intelligence and a name in
common, but nothing else: there is not a hair, not a molecule of the
finger-nail that is the same. And if Proust as hero has changed,
Proust as author has altered more dangerously; he becomes, in his .
later volumes, drier, wittier, more brittle than before; he describes
events which he saw accurately, heard brilliantly, but did not, as in
Swann's Way, touch, smell, taste. That first volume alone makes
an appeal to the senses which are inarticulate and fundamental; it
goes deeper than reason; it has magic.
It has the magic of things created: a brand-new world with
smells and tastes of its own and ditches where you can make authen-
tic mud pies. In that world is a city, newly created and aged as if
by some chemical process; a city with complete households of serv-
ants and masters, crooked definite streets, a church which over-
shadows them; and there is evil and pity and pain. You might al-
most take it for a city of the world you know already, but its ob-
jects are brighter and more definite, existing under the white sun
of logic.
Proust has created an aristocratic society which is vastly more
interesting than any which could exist. He has created a great
painter, an ambassador, a homosexual baron, actresses of two gen-


MALCOLM COWLEY
237
erations, a great philosopher. We believe in them as types because
they are individuals. But chiefly we believe in Swann, Charles
Swann, Jew and bourgeois, friend of the Duchesse de Guermantes
and the Prince of Wales, rejected lover of Odette. He, the arbiter
of elegances, followed her to gambling houses or questionable balls;
he waited outside till a friend appeared to carry her a note; he
waited; there was no answer; the gas-light flickered; guests passed
more and more rarely into the unapproachable and infernal hall.
He waited and expected nothing, consoling himself with the
thought that pity and love and knowledge had entered his life
again: with his knowledge and his pain and the new belief they gave
him in the importance of all life, his life, he bore some resemblance
to a first reader of Marcel Proust.
The "secret" of Proust is simply that he uses his five senses not
as mere recording instruments, but as servants to his intelligence.
It is hardly an illuminating secret. However, this directing intelli-
gence of his (one is forced to mention it so often) has its own modes
of operating which go a longer way towards explaining the quali-
ties of his work.
Proust is an analyst: not as Descartes or the Schoolmen were
analysts; not in any philosophical or mathematical sense, but in the
scientific; his novel is a sort of analytic organic chemistry. He de-
composes living things—a smile, a career, a reception—into their
constituent elements so as to define them more clearly.
When we speak of analysis in connexion with a novel we think
of something dead: "holding an autopsy over an idea," "analysing
the guts out of it." The effect of Proust's method is entirely differ-
ent; he makes things live. He describes, for example, a great ac-
tress in the role of Phedre, analysing not so much her manner of in-
terpretation as the effect which personally he received from it. He
decomposes his emotion into its most minute details, and at a cer-
tain point one of these minutiae, a detail which corresponds with
the reader's own experience, allows him to enter the procession of
Proust's ideas, to partake of them, to re-create the whole living emo-
tion in himself. Proust's method, described in two words, is a
creative analysis.
You cannot analyse a river, but you may analyse a bucket of
water drawn from the river. Proust extracts from his subject, which


238 A MONUMENT TO PROUST
is the stream of personal consciousness, a series of situations which
exist like separate bucketfuls of water; no two of them are quite
alike; he analyses each of them in turn and in this manner creates a
simulacrum of his stream of consciousness. This time it is not really
a stream. The situations do not move; it is only by the super-
position of one situation on another that he gives the illusion of
motion, as in a reel of films. He says, in conscious vindication of his
method:
"What we suppose to be our love, our jealousy are, neither of
them, single, continuous and indivisible passions. They are com-
posed of an infinity of successive loves, of different jealousies, each
of which is ephemeral, although by their uninterrupted multitude
they give us the impression of continuity, the illusion of unity."
Proust will decompose a love-affair into these little and succes-
sive loves, these ephemeral jealousies, and analyse each of them in
turn. Charles Swann loves a woman of the half-world: that is the
subject of the famous second chapter of Swann's Way. This main
situation is decomposed into ten. Thus, Swann meets a circle of new
friends—falls in love—attains his love—adjusts his life thereto—
visits the Verdurin circle a second time to meet a rival—becomes
jealous. . . . One situation follows another; each is brilliantly
analysed into a multitude of minor situations which are defined in
turn; however, between one situation and the next there is an hiatus
which, without being noticeable at first, becomes glaringly evident
on a second reading.
Situations do not really succeed each other for Marcel Proust;
there is a causal, but no temporal connexion between them. Past
and present, anterior and posterior, exist for him simultaneously as
in the omniscient mind of the Deity imagined by St Thomas
Aquinas.
This peculiar sort of vision which was Proust's; this decomposi-
tion of life into an infinity of situations which exist simultaneously,
is the commentary and explanation of his style. He sees everything
at once. Therefore he tries to pack as much as possible into every
single sentence: explaining, qualifying, expanding, piling adjective
on adjective and clause on clause till the receptacle overflows. His
sentences are paragraphs and his paragraphs chapters; however, it


MALCOLM COWLEY 239
is not the paragraph, not the chapter even, but the situation which
is the real unit of his work.
He is apt to define his situations at incredible length: he analyses
a kiss on the cheek in ten thousand words and spends most of a long
volume on a dinner party. Apparently he is prodigal of words, but
he wastes none of them. Two households with their miniature civili-
zations meet and mingle in the kiss, and the dinner is not so much
a page from the history of French society as that very history.
Sometimes a description by Proust reminds me of one of those
abnormally long stage directions in which Shaw analyses the ele-
ments which will create or influence his drama. Proust makes simi-
lar notations on the furniture, gives a brief history of the charac-
ters, catalogues their mannerisms; however, he extends these obser-
vations to limits beyond Shaw's ambition. At their conclusion the
stage is set for anything that may occur: murder, theft, bigamy, we
are prepared to taste the fine and particular flavour of any event.
There is none; at least our senses, blunted with melodrama, can
realize no event. But events are something else to Proust: a smile is
an event; so is a careless lie, a comprehension, a slight change in
attitude whose consequences develop indefinitely into new situations
which are analysed in turn, decomposed into others . . . and
so the book expands to seemingly all the breadth of life.
The nineteenth is Proust's century: all the congregation of
his friends and imitators cannot advance him into the twentieth,
nor can his personal admiration for Saint-Simon carry him back-
wards to a seventeenth century which he imagines, perhaps, to be
more congenial. He is not a contemporary of Racine, still less of
Apollinaire or Louis Aragon; his age is the one which produced
Symbolist poets, Henry James, Debussy. He has translated Ruskin
into French; he studied and imitated Meredith; he can be dated.
In France, where literary generations succeed each other almost de-
cennially, he belongs not even to the last generation, but to the one
which preceded it. He developed the ideals of that generation so
unexpectedly and to such depth that he became independent, in a
sense, of time; however, if any age can claim him it is certainly not
ours.
Observe the life of Proust, so different from the ideal of con-
temporary writers. He spent most of it in bed, in an interior room


240 A MONUMENT TO PROUST
hermetically sealed to prevent drafts; they say he could feel a
breath of air three rooms away, and it would set him coughing. He
rarely saw the daylight. His work-room was lined with cork to
deaden every noise. Flowers brought on his asthma and were pro-
hibited; women equally, whom he only saw of an evening when he
emerged, in correct evening clothes, to attend a reception in the
Faubourg Saint-Germain. Hatred for natural objects; fastidious
ill health; attraction for everything artificial: his life was the sort
which might have been imagined by Huysmans or in the Yellow
Book. At least it possessed the forgotten virtue of leisure, a leisure
which he used to develop his uncontemporary and unique sensibility.
He came to enter so completely into the minds of his friends that
before they visited the almost invariable sick-bed of his later years,
even before the visit was planned, he knew its hour and its day; to
him the tinkling bell which announced a caller was only a confirma-
tion of something he had projected a long time before. They say
he greeted death as a sort of importunate and expected guest. Some
months ago he was already saying: I have only so much or so much
time to live; can I finish it? A few days before he died his novel
was finished, as nearly finished as such a work can ever be; it lacked
a final adornment, but the great fleshed skeleton was complete. He
asked afterwards that all its eight books be brought to him. "Find
the passages where I have spoken about death. It seems to me that
I should know it better now. I want to rewrite the death of Ber-
gotte." His own death was only a process of externalization; he
had turned himself inside out like an orange and sucked it dry, or
inscribed himself on a monument; his observation, his sensibility,
his affectations, everything about him that was weak or strong had
passed into the created characters of his novel.



Courtesy of the Krausliaar Galleries
WOMAN'S HEAD. BY GASTON LACHAISE





CARCHESTER
BY B. M. G. ADAMS
« O HOULD advise you to lay in a stock of these hairpins whilst
we hold them, Madam? Our manufacturers are no longer
able to supply, as they are executing government barbed wire con-
tracts."—Richardson coming off duty in the V. A. D. hospital,
powdering her pallid face in front of the stained deal dressing-
table in the cloak-room, and after giving details of a heavy night
owing to Sergeant Dalton's final collapse from haemorrhage, ad-
mitting that the only thing about the prolongation of the fighting
really worrying her was a Daily Mail paragraph. Owing to rice
starch contained in it, further manufacture of face powder had
been forbidden. Going home the morning before she had bought
fourteen boxes of varying shades and qualities. "That and tea will
see me through the rest of the war. I never was a heavy eater,"
she remarked, examining a spot on her chin critically in front of the
mottled glass.
In the kitchens, voluntary workers with their rationing books
left in handbags in the cloak-room, obtained a comforting illusion
of plenty from the handling of hospital supplies. Slabs of bleeding
liver, rabbits, reddish purple, sacks of winter vegetables, blocks of
margarine. The special diet sheet presented difficulties. Also the
men would not touch "made-up" food. Four blue-suited con-
valescents came in after the doctor's round, and peeled potatoes
into buckets. At half-past ten the kitchen staff drank strong brewed
tea from enamel mugs, and ate hunches of bread spread with drip-
ping. In the mornings, there was no time to toast it. Girls, with
sleeves rolled above their floured forearms, giggled, pulled snap-
shots of the patients from their apron pockets, and showed them
to one another whilst Mrs Barton, the head cook, spoke at the
telephone. The most approachable ones had small woollen golli-
wogs, manufactured by men in the wards above, pinned to their
white starched bibs.
A loose-mouthed charwoman, with untidy hair and a soft un-
wieldy body, made excuses to enter the kitchen two or three times


242
CARCHESTER
^ whilst the men were there, chaffing and laughing loudly with them
each time she did so. The other workers who, whatever step in the
social scale they were drawn from, all considered themselves her
superior, resented this, but were frigidly civil, for fear she would
pretend that she had not the time to wash up kitchen implements
required in a hurry. She drank her tea and ate her bread and
dripping over the scullery sink, amid piles of dishes washed and un-
washed, while the two-year-old child she was still nursing played
with grimed potatoes and turnips on the floor. Her husband was
in France; in addition to the weekly grant from his pay, she got
good money for her work at the hospital, and was living with a
lance corporal from the infantry barracks. She was one of many
who would regret the end of the war.
Lodging-house keepers in Carchester got their share of loot from
the collapse of civilization. Every room, good, bad, and indifferent,
could have been let half a dozen times over to distracted temporary
officers, who trudged the city for hours, carrying their kit-bags, un-
able to find accommodation. They were over-charged, their gov-
ernment rations filched, hot water allowanced as though on active
service. Complaints were met by the reply that if not satisfied they
could go—the room could be let again before night—that the land-
lady herself objected to taking lodgers, but felt that she was "doing
her bit" by wearing out herself and her furniture, in making a home
for military gentlemen.
The "temps" in many cases brought wives who had provided
themselves with copies of Manners and Rules of Good Society so
as not to be at a disadvantage in the new social sphere in which
they hoped to find themselves. The lady of a quite efficient middle-
aged subaltern who had been a traveller for Warder's Whisky,
sat in her lodgings from two till six, every afternoon throughout
July and August, "in case any one called." When the major's wife
under orders from her husband eventually did so, she with diffi-
culty prevented herself from replying, "Damn'd damp," to her
hostess's remark, "Mr Kendal and myself consider the climate of
Carchester excessively humid. Do not you?" The social leavening
that the ferment of the war should have produced, failed as did
every other thing promised from it.
The monotony of the fourth year of war exhausted all emotions
capable of being played upon by government posters and news-


B. M. G. ADAMS
243
paper specials; preoccupation with the scarcity of necessities super-
vened. Lady Darley, in chinchilla wrap and suede gloves, stated
that she—was tired—she was going home to lie down until lunch.
She had been standing more than an hour in the sugar queue at Al-
den's. Farmer's demanded eight and six apiece for young rabbits
in the market, and took them home again to give to their dogs,
rather than sell them for less. Alden the grocer's was mobbed by a
dingy crowd of customers from the Co-operative Stores, whose re-
serve stocks had run low; and whose entire plate-glass front given
up to an exposition of tins of salmon and wreaths of immortelles
under glass cases, evinced either a morbid humour or unfortunate
association of ideas, on the part of the window dresser.
The seal-like red-faced proprietor at the Black Stag Hotel wel-
comed clients with an unpleasing familiarity heightened by whisky;
here good meals were still obtainable at heavy prices, often with-
out production of ration tickets. No other hotel keeper in the city
risked such a pre-war display of dressed meats on his side table.
Members of the local food-committee lunched there every day.
Hospitality in private houses became an ordeal for entertainer and
entertained when the poster "Eat less bread" was displayed in
every dining-room, and a request was made that the guest's cutlet
bone should be placed on a dish provided for that purpose, so that
it might be further utilized by the household.
A difference in popular spirit. White-bearded old gentlemen in
bath chairs no longer tore off their hats to wave them at khaki
platoons marching off to billet. The substitution of the word
"Windsor" for "Guelph" by the king, in the royal family tree, and
the conversion of certain of his less important relatives from Anglo-
German princelings to English aristocrats, awoke little national en-
thusiasm; though it was still possible to arouse irritation in an Eng-
lish railway carriage or drawing-room by remarking that George
and his sons were praiseworthy examples of what could be done
with full-blooded Germans after two or three generations of Brit-
ish training. To Carchester, war was no longer represented by
tattered banners hanging in the half lights of its cathedral, but by
emptying shop windows and over-flowing hospitals. Hysteria
amongst the women had reached its height when elderly Miss Jack-
son, a regular visitor at the Military Hospital, begged to be al-
lowed to enter the mortuary so that she might kiss the bodies of


244
CARCHESTER
three New Zealand soldiers she had never seen, "for their mothers'
sake."
In travelling theatrical companies, boys of fifteen played juve-
nile lead to flamboyant leading ladies, whilst elderly gentlemen,
scraggy and obese, some moving rheumatically and with cotton
wool in their ears, swung canes and raised top hats in a dandy
chorus. Something had to be done to liven up things for men on
leave. There were prostitutes in plenty, schoolgirls with painted
faces, middle-aged, respectable looking women whose husbands
were on active service hanging round the barrack gates all day, and
making the pavements of Church Walk impassable after dusk. In
the Maternity Hospital a ward had been set apart for unmarried
mothers. From time to time a child made its arrival there, whose
skin had the appearance of half melted pink wax. The nurses dis-
infected their hands before and after touching it. Meetings were
held in private houses at which rescue workers and clergy fought
as to the desirability of forming proper organizations for helping
young women to avoid the heaviest penalty of their sin. Command-
ing and medical officers raged against a pure-minded government
which refused to allow the military authorities to interfere with
women who were known to be contaminating batch after batch of
newly joined recruits. At Sergeant Thompson's funeral, the chap-
lain addressed the mourners with diffidence, in spite of military
lustre lent by the union jack wrapped round the coffin on the gun
carriage, and the firing party under command of a subaltern with
his tongue in his cheek.
Yet optimism existed. A halfpenny daily paper running a serial
love story and economical cookery recipes, stated that it was win-
ning the war for England. The feet of hundreds in Carchester
moved to one-steps and fox-trots night after night. As Reginald
Davis, rich elderly bachelor, owner of the steel works said, "One
must make the best of the show. There's old Lawson Green, who's
lost his two boys, down in the mouth, depressing other people, tak-
ing no interest in anything. As for me, I've never been in better
health in my life, have made many pleasant acquaintances I should
not have met except for the war, and we've extended the works—"


SAINT-EVREMOND
BY RICHARD ALDINGTON
SAINT-EVREMOND'S great gift is charm, the charm of an
exquisite and amiable and rather malin personality. The slight-
est as well as the most serious of his writings possesses this cordial
and fragrant charm. As we yield to this charm, smile at its pure and
ever-present wit, applaud the common sense kept so light by good
breeding, the antithesis of an elaborately simple prose, we under-
stand why Saint-Evremond was so welcome a guest at Whitehall,
why he delighted Buckingham and Waller with his conversation,
why he remained always an affectionate memory to Ninon. It is
to be apprehended that this charm is hardly appreciated by the
readers to-day as it was enjoyed by the best wits of the Court of
Charles II. Mr Whibley, of course, knows and appreciates Saint-
Evremond; Mr Frederic Manning has recently retold some of the
well-known passages of his life; but in that Caledonian Market of
literature, the Charing Cross-road, the works of Saint-Evremond
are a drug. We have moved singularly far from Saint-Evremond's
own conception of the intellectual life:
"Je ne trouve point de Sciences qui touchent particulierement les
honnetes gens, que la Morale, la Politique, et la connoissance des
Belles-Lettres.
La premiere regarde la Raison, la seconde la Societe, la troisieme
la Conversation. L'une vous apprend a gouverner vos passions; par
Fautre, vous vous instruisez des Affaires de I'Etat, et reglez votre
conduite dans la Fortune: la derniere polit l'Esprit, inspire la
delicatesse et l ' agrintent"
In life Saint-Evremond aimed at being the honnete homme; in
literature he was the accomplished "amateur," an amateur who had
the ability of the master, whose taste regulated the genius of
Racine, whose approval delighted and consoled Corneille in his old
age; a master of prose who shunned the promiscuity of publication
and only on his death-bed arranged his writings and indicated


246
SAINT-EVREMOND
which of the pirated pieces attributed to him were really his. If
there is a vanity of a coquettish kind here, the wilfully assumed in-
difference of the grand seigneur, there is none of the petty vanity of
authorship, no thrusting of his personality upon the world through
the refined medium of advertisement.
There are no Saint-Evremonds now; the examples are extinct,
the mould is broken; we have sold "cheap what was most dear." In
England only perhaps some remnant of the tradition of honnetes
gens still remains, but how precariously! It would be ignorant or
blind to deny that we still produce excellent books, that we still
possess a literary life and a literary "movement" of interest and
importance; but we have lost the tone, the temper, the charm which
were so eminently characteristic of Saint-Evremond and of the
society he represented. Our most conscientious authors write for
themselves and for other authors; if they venture beyond these
purely professional audiences, they find a huge, inchoate public, not
to be despised indeed, but lacking the authority of a society of
honnetes gens to correct gently their faults, to console them by just
appreciation. When Lord Clarendon tells us of the friends of his
youth, in that series of incomparable portraits which occupy the
early pages of The Life, he distinguishes between the profes-
sional authors like Ben Jonson and Selden, and the "Men of more
than ordinary Eminence" like Lord Falkland, Waller, and Chil-
lingworth. The distinction is perhaps a little arbitrary (Sir Kenelm
Digby is among the first) but it is sensible. And it is perhaps no
great straining of truth to say that Waller's influence on our poetry
(something of a puzzle, if one looks only at his mediocre work)
was due less to his practice as a poet than to his authority as a re-
fined judge.
This critical function of the honnetes gens, so important in the
history of the seventeenth-century literature, and so often over-
looked, is well appreciated by Mr Maurice Wilmotte in his intro-
duction to the selected critical writings of Saint-Evremond. One
may say that he pitched upon the criticism of Saint-Evremond—
not the most important or delightful of his writings—to form his
volume because he wished to bring out this aspect of society then.
Naturally his arguments and examples are drawn from France; but
the same thing happened in England. We all know how the Eliza-
bethan and Jacobean courtier worried and partly directed the stage


RICHARD ALDINGTON
by his importunate presence among the actors themselves. And so
in France:
"II avait des juges, cela va de soi, metis ils etaient ctilleurs que
dans ces stalles d'orchestre ou l'on prétend decider mctintenant du
sort d'une comedie. Ils etaient assis sur le 'plateau', et e'est la,
dans un contact infiniment plus proche (et parfois genant) avec les
acteurs, qu'ils ecoutaient et echangeaient a demi-voix les premieres
impressions. Ces impressions, ils les communiquaient aux gens de
leur monde, au sortir de la representation (ainsi fait le marquis
dans la Critique de l'Ecole des Femmes) et peu a peu une opinion
se formait, qui donnait le ton a la cour d'abord, a la ville ensuite."
Similarly the opinion of the two banished critics, Bussy Rabutin
and Saint-Evremond, was eagerly sought by correspondents, widely
spread and commented on, and had an effect we can scarcely realize
to-day.
All this may seem a rather solemn preamble to a few occasional
pieces from the pen of a minor author, but we have only to com-
pare the "humaner" criticisms of Saint-Evremond with the slightly
pedantic "rules" promulgated by Father Bouhours to recognize
that the former still belong to the category of universal literature,
while the latter concern only the literary student. Saint-Evre-
mond's criticism, so charmingly persuasive ("urbane" Arnold would
have called it) is purely the criticism of aristocratic good sense,
strictly limited, unimaginative, "correct." It makes no discoveries,
has no flair; it refines upon a few principles, restricts itself to a
few authors. Saint-Evremond's culture was purely Latin. He read
and re-read the Latin poets; but, so strong is his prejudice against
what is romantic, imaginative, fabulous, and "irregular," that
he preferred Lucan to Virgil. He delighted in Cicero's letters,
and had a tendre for Atticus, "the honnete homme of an-
tiquity," as he calls him somewhere. He knew Spanish and de-
lighted in "the Homer of comedy," Cervantes. His Italian was not
good enough for him to appreciate the niceties of its poetry (he
knows nothing of Dante) but he had a great admiration for Machia-
velli, whom he imitated. His preferences in French literature went
to Montaigne, Malherbe, Corneille, and Voiture. He read Bossuet
and Racine with admiration; he mentions Theophile and Saint-


248
SAINT-EVREMOND
Amant. He knew Epicurus through Gassendi and Bernier; Des-
cartes he knew and had conversed with. But he knew no Greek and
little English. The great literatures of the imagination were closed
to him.
His remarks on the English drama are omitted by M Wilmotte
as of "slight interest"; to us they are extremely interesting as show-
ing the taste of English society at the time, for Saint-Evremond
knew nothing of English literature except what he was told by his
English friends. He cites with approval Bacon, Ben Jonson,
Hobbes, Waller, and Shadwell. But he says nothing of Shake-
speare, nothing of Dryden. "There are," he says, "a few old Eng-
lish tragedies, which would be good if they were altered," "en
tous les autres de ces temps la, vous ne voyez qu'une matiere informe
et mal digeree." So that is what Mr Waller and my lords Montagu
and Buckingham, St Albans and Arlington, Crofts and d'Aubigny
thought of Macbeth and King Lear and Coriolanus! Did not Mr
Waller himself "improve" an old play called The Maid's Tragedy
in accordance with the dictates of reason and loyalty? Among our
comedies Saint-Evremond praised Bartholomew Fair and Epsom
Wells and he produced a sort of pastiche of The Fox under the title
of Sir Politic Would-be. Whereupon Dryden, smarting under the
slight to himself, even more than that to Shakespeare, wrote:
"His examination of the Grand Alexandre, in my opinion, is an
admirable piece of criticism; and I doubt not but that his observa-
tions on the English theatre had been as absolute in their kind, had
he seen with his own eyes and not with those of other men. But
conversing in a manner wholly with the Court, which is not always
the truest judge, he has unavoidably been led into mistakes, and
given to some of our coarsest poets ' a reputation abroad, which they
never had at home. Had his conversation in the town been more
general, he had certainly received other ideas on that subject; and
not transmitted those names into his own country, which will be
forgotten by Posterity in ours."
That is the other side of the question; but even these deficiencies in
taste do not invalidate the importance of the audience of honnetes
gens in forming and keeping a standard of good taste. Their in-
1 Meaning Shadwell, of course.


RICHARD ALDINGTON
249
fluence in France was generally good; in England, after the Restora-
tion, they were too Frenchified by their foreign education to be
sensible of the immense value of our imaginative literature. In their
criticism of English literature of intelligence they were doubtless
right—at least, we have Arnold's authority for so believing.
But criticism is only a part of Saint-Evremond's literary activity.
He wrote two comedies, some excellent "conversations" or dia-
logues, many delightful letters, numbers of essays, moral and philo-
sophical, and quantities of verse. He wrote a political study, the
discovery of which during the trial of Fouquet caused his exile.
Above all he excelled in "polite conversation." In his younger days
he had a knack of fine satire (witness the famous conversation of
the Marechal d'Hoquincourt and le Pere Canaye) which for deli-
cacy and point reminds one of no less a genius than M France. In-
deed, it makes us regret that Saint-Evremond wasted so much of
his time and verve on trifles. Had the novel been as respectable a
form then as two centuries later, had Saint-Evremond been a little
less indolent, what a novel he might have left us, with his fine gift
of style, his skill in dialogue, his penetration in reading character
and his ability to record it! He persisted in regarding himself
merely as a cultivated gentleman whose pleasure it was to appre-
ciate great writers and to "polish his wit" by contact with their
works; and we are forced to acquiesce, though with immense regret,
in his aristocratic prejudice. Was there ever a case of greater liter-
ary nonchalance than his refusal to re-write the chapters of his
most ambitious work, the Reflexions sur les Divers Genies du Peuple
Romain, after Waller had lost them in the confusion of the Plague
and the Fire? And how lacking in curiosity this bon esprit was!
There in the first years of his exile was the old London of the
Tudors and Stuarts, with its bridge of houses, its streets of tim-
bered shops, its extraordinary moving crowds, its multitudinous
sects and characters; and he says not a word of it. There later was
Shakespeare being played and widely read; Milton publishing Para-
dise Lost; and Dryden engaged in his combats with dullards; and
he missed it all. Certainly rather a high price to pay for an impec-
cability of tenue and an Epicurean tranquillity.
Among all the Epicureans of various shades of opinion produced
by Gassendi, Saint-Evremond is perhaps the most delicate, the most
genuine, and the most attractive in his character and philosophy.


250
ADMONITION IN AUTUMN
In one essay he divides men into "sensuels, voluptueux, et délicats";
he was himself a délicat, remote indeed from the gross orgies of
the goinfres, but equally repelled by what was austere, restricted,
and humble in Epicureanism. He is always protesting against the
ungodly habit of vegetarianism, and he points out with cogency
and wit that the austere habits attributed to Epicurus well be-
came an elderly invalid of small fortune, but are not to be desired
at another period of life or in good health. His Epicureanism was
a kind of prudent refinement, never allowing the pleasure of to-
day to spoil the pleasure to come to-morrow; the best of everything,
but too much of nothing.
ADMONITION IN AUTUMN
BY ANTHONY WRYNN
You tall hound hurrying across the floor of the forest,
To whom movement is stillness, whose heart
Shakes with the stir in the rocks, what fur of gold,
What dull glint of blood at the motionless mouth
Inspires your harsh call of pride and death
When the mystery lies curled in the nettles?
There is the answering horn through the wicker halls!
The horn of the twitching fur and the cry
And your quelling teeth. A piece of lightning may lie, then,
In your imperceptible iris from exaltation
Higher than the exaltation of stillness,
And, true, we see but impetuous sense, the blue gloss
And the paw, the flat ear, but November
Has gales of laughter when the sun stops.
You tall hound, watch the dark coverts when you wander,
Your jaw exhausted and cold, the hunters in bed.



LE CHEVAL DE BOIS. BY FRANS MASEREEL






LE VOYAGEUR. BY FRANS MASEREEL


1



L'lNGENIEUR. by frans masereel






LE BOXEUR. BY FRANS MASEREEL


I
(
I


TAOS
BY D. H. LAWRENCE
HE Indians say Taos is the heart of the world. Their world,
X maybe. Some places seem temporary on the face of the earth:
San Francisco for example. Some places seem final. They have a
true nodality. I never felt that so powerfully as, years ago, in Lon-
don. The intense powerful nodality of that great heart of the world.
And during the war that heart, for me, broke. So it is. Places can
lose their living nodality. Rome, to me, has lost hers. In Venice one
feels the magic of the glamorous old node that once united East and
West, but it is the beauty of an afterlife.
Taos pueblo still retains its old nodality. Not like a great city.
But, in its way, like one of the monasteries of Europe. You can-
not come upon the ruins of the old great monasteries of England,
beside their waters, in some lovely valley, now remote, without
feeling that here is one of the choice spots of the earth, where the
spirit dwelt. To me it is so important to remember that when Rome
collapsed, when the great Roman Empire fell into smoking ruins,
and bears roamed in the streets of Lyons, and wolves howled in the
deserted streets of Rome, and Europe really was a dark ruin, then,
it was not in castles or manors or cottages that life remained vivid.
Then those whose souls were still alive withdrew together and
gradually built monasteries, and these monasteries and convents,
little communities of quiet labour and courage, isolated, helpless,
and yet never overcome in a world flooded with devastation, these
alone kept the human spirit from disintegration, from going quite
dark, in the Dark Ages. These men made the Church, which again
made Europe, inspiring the martial faith of the Middle Ages.
Taos pueblo affects me rather like one of the old monasteries.
When you get there you feel something final. There is an arrival.
The nodality still holds good.
But this is the pueblo. And from the north side to the south side,
from the south side to the north side, the perpetual silent wander-
ing intentness of a full-skirted, black-shawled, long-fringed woman


252
TAOS
in her wide white deerskin boots, the running of children, the silent
sauntering of dark-faced men, bare-headed, the two plaits in front
of their thin shoulders, and a white sheet like a sash swathed round
their loins. They must have something to swathe themselves in.
And if it were sunset, the men swathing themselves in their sheets
like shrouds, leaving only the black place of the eyes visible. And
women, darker than ever, with shawls over their heads, busy at the
ovens. And cattle being driven to sheds. And men and boys trotting
in from the fields, on ponies. And as the night is dark, on one of the
roofs, or more often on the bridge, the inevitable drum-drum-drum
of the tom-tom, and young men in the dark lifting their voices to
the song, like wolves or coyotes crying in music.
There it is then, the pueblo, as it has been since heaven knows
when. And the slow dark weaving of the Indian life going on still,
though perhaps more waveringly. And oneself, sitting there on a
pony, a far-off stranger with gulfs of time between me and this.
And yet, the old nodality of the pueblo still holding, like a dark
ganglion spinning invisible threads of consciousness. A sense of
dryness, almost of weariness, about the pueblo. And a sense of the
inalterable. It brings a sick sort of feeling over me, always, to get
into the Indian vibration. Like breathing chlorine.
The next day in the morning we went to help erect the great
stripped may-pole. It was the straight, smoothed yellow trunk of a
big tree. Of course one of the white boys took the bossing of the
show. But the Indians were none too ready to obey, and their own
fat dark-faced boss gave counter-orders. It was the old, amusing
contradiction between the white and the dark races. As for me, I
just gave a hand steadying the pole as it went up, outsider at both
ends of the game.
An American girl came with a camera, and got a snap of us all
struggling in the morning light with the great yellow trunk. One
of the Indians went to her abruptly, in his quiet, insidious way.
"You give me that kodak. You ain't allowed take no snaps here.
You pay fine—one dollar."
She was frightened, but she clung to her camera.
"You're not going to take my kodak from me," she said.
"I'm going to take that film out. And you pay one dollar, fine,
see.
The girl relinquished the camera, the Indian took out the film.


D. H. LAWRENCE
253
"Now you pay me one dollar, or I don't give you back this
kodak."
Rather sullenly, she took out her purse and gave the two silver
half-dollars. The Indian returned the camera, pocketed the money,
and turned aside with a sort of triumph. Done it over one specimen
of the white race.
There were not very many Indians helping to put up the pole.
"I never see so few boys helping put up the pole," said Tony
Romero to me.
"Where are they all?" I asked. He shrugged his shoulders.
Dr West, a woman doctor from New York who has settled in
one of the villages, was with us. Mass was being said inside the
church, and she would have liked to go in. She is well enough
known too. Rut two Indians were at the church-door, and one put
his elbow in front of her.
"You Catholic?"
"No, I'm not."
"Then you can't come in."
The same almost jeering triumph in giving the white man—or
the white woman—a kick. It is the same the whole world over, be-
tween dark-skin and white. Dr West, of course, thinks everything
Indian wonderful. Rut she wasn't used to being rebuffed, and she
didn't like it. Rut she found excuses.
"Of course," she said, "they're quite right to exclude the white
people, if the white people can't behave themselves. It seems there
were some Americans, boys and girls, in the church yesterday, in-
sulting the images of the saints, shrieking, laughing, and saying they
looked like monkeys. So now no white people are allowed inside the
church."
I listened and said nothing. I had heard the same story at
Buddhist temples in Ceylon. For my own part, I have long since
passed the stage when I want to crowd up and stare at anybody's
spectacle, white man's or dark man's.
I stood on one of the first roofs of the north pueblo. The iron
bell of the church began to bang-bang-bang. The sun was down
beyond the far-off, thin clear line of the western mesa, the light
had ceased glowing on the pifion-dotted foot-hills beyond the south


254
TAOS
pueblo. The square beneath was thick with people. And the In-
dians began to come out of church.
Two Indian women brought a little dressed-up Madonna to her
platform in the green starting-bower. Then the men slowly
gathered round the drum. The bell clanged. The tom-tom beat.
The men slowly uplifted their voices. The wild music resounded
strangely against the banging of that iron bell, the silence of the
many faces, as the group of Indians in their sheets and their best
blankets, and in their ear-rings and brilliant scarlet trousers, or
emerald trousers, or purple trousers, trimmed with beads, trod the
slow bird-dance sideways, in feet of beaded moccasins, or yellow
doeskin moccasins, singing all the time like drumming coyotes,
slowly down and across the bridge to the south side, and up the in-
cline to the south kiva. One or two Apaches in their beaded waist-
coats.and big black hats were among the singers, distinguishable
by their thick build also. An old Navajo chief was among the
encouragers.
As dusk fell, the singers came back under a certain house by the
south kiva, and as they passed under the platform they broke and
dispersed, it was over. They seemed as if they were grinning subtly
as they went: grinning at being there in all that white crowd of
inquisitives. It must have been a sort of ordeal, to sing and tread
the slow dance between that solid wall of silent, impassive white
faces. But the Indians seemed to take no notice. And the crowd
only silently, impassively watched. Watched with that strange,
static American quality of laisser faire and of indomitable curiosity.


ETERNITY
BY YVOR WINTERS
THE small schoolroom was up stairs, and from the narrow win-
dow I could see the hills. The schoolyard was bare, with a few
cinderpiles, and the leaves had already fallen from the trees.
The days were grey and still, and the camp was silent. The
shacks were dull blue, grey, and brown, and most of them had been
there forty years. Back of the main street their arrangement was
indefinite. The sides of the valleys rose sharply, stiff lines of red
and yellow.
For days there was no change, and then the snow fell. Change
was an abstraction on the air. We were more than ever shut in.
I sat at my desk, barely conscious of the class. My knowing
dimmed their brains, and they watched the soundless air secretly.
Sometimes one whispered, and I slapped his hand with a ruler.
The hand of a certain negro boy was grey and wrinkled, and curled
slowly after the ruler left it; and his mouth widened and con-
tracted a little, slowly, like the hand.
I had seen this boy often, for nearly every night he hunched
close to the stove while the men were eating; and after supper he
gathered up what laundry he could, looked at the men with his
meaningless smile, and stepped carefully into the winter night.
Then I withdrew to an empty room I shared with an indeterminate
consciousness. There was no heat, and the soiled blankets were
thin.
I did not believe in the existence of precisions. It was no matter
whether I sat behind my desk or behind the window of my room.
Often I heard the pale Slavs stamping and shouting below me, and
one night a man wept with drunkenness.
The cinders in the moonlight were the same; I saw nothing but
perpetuity.


MANY MARRIAGES
BY SHERWOOD ANDERSON
VII (continued)
OW one was back in fancy on the hillside again. There was an
opening among the trees and through this one looked,seeing the
whole valley below. There was a large town down the river some-
where, not the town where he and his bride had got off the train, but
a much larger one with factories. Some people had come up river
in boats from the town and were preparing to have a picnic in a
grove of trees, up stream and across the river from her uncle's house.
There were both men and women in the party and the women
had on white dresses. It was charming to watch them moving in and
out among the green trees and one of them came down to the river's
edge and, putting one foot in a boat that was drawn up on the bank,
and with the other on the bank itself, she leaned over to fill a
pitcher with water. There was herself and her reflection in the
water, seen faintly, even from this distance. There was a going to-
gether and a coming apart. The two white figures opened and
closed like a delicately tinted shell.
Young Webster on the hill had not looked at his bride and they
were both silent, but he was becoming almost insanely excited.
Was she thinking the thoughts he was thinking? Had her nature
also opened itself, as had his?
It was becoming impossible to keep things straight in the mind.
What was he thinking and what was she thinking and feeling? Far
away in the wood across the river the white figures of women were
moving about among the trees. The men of the picnic party, with
their darker clothes could no longer be discerned. One no longer
thought of them. The white clad women's figures were being woven
in and out among the sturdy upstanding trunks of the trees.
There was a woman on the hill behind him and she was his bride.
Perhaps she was having just such thoughts as himself. That must
be true. She was a woman and young and she would be afraid, but
there came a time when fear must be put aside. One was a male


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
257
and at the proper time went towards the female and took her.
There was a kind of cruelty in nature and at the proper time that
cruelty became a part of one's manhood.
He closed his eyes and rolling over to his belly got to his hands
and knees. If one stayed longer lying quietly at her feet there would
be a kind of insanity. Already there was too much anarchy within.
"At the moment of death all of life passes before a man." What a
silly notion. "What about the moment of the coming of life?"
He was on his knees like an animal, looking at the ground, not
yet looking at her. With all the strength of his being he tried to tell
his daughter of the meaning of that moment in his life.
"How shall I say how I felt? Perhaps I should have been a
painter or a singer. My eyes were closed and within myself were all
the sights, sounds, smells, feeling of the world of the valley into
which I had been looking. Within myself I comprehended all
things, everything.
"Things came in flashes, in colours. First there were the yellows,
the golden shining yellow things, not yet born. The yellows were
little streaks of shining colour buried down with the dark blues and
blacks of the soil. The yellows were things not yet born, not yet
come into the light. They were yellow because they were not yet
green. Soon the yellows would combine with the dark colours in
the earth and spring forth into a world of colour. There would be
a sea of colour, running in waves, splashing over everything. Spring
would come, within the earth, within me too."
Birds were flying in the air over a river, and young Webster, with
his eyes closed, crouched before the woman, was himself the birds
in the air, the air itself, and the fishes in the river below. It seemed
to him now that if he were to open his eyes and look back, down into
the valley, he could see, even from that great distance, the move-
ments of the fins of fishes in the waters of the river far below.
Well he had better not open his eyes now. Once he had looked
into a woman's eyes and she had come to him like a swimmer com-
ing up out of the sea, but then something had happened to spoil
everything. He crept towards her. Now she had begun to protest.
"Don't," she said, "I'm afraid."
It would not do to stop now. There was a time came when one
must not stop. He threw his arms out, took her protesting and cry-
ing into his arms.


MANY MARRIAGES
VIII
"Why must one commit rape, rape of the conscious, rape of the
unconscious?"
John Webster sprang up from beside his daughter and then
whirled quickly about. A word had come up out of the body of his
wife sitting unobserved on the floor behind him. "Don't," she said
and then, after opening and closing her mouth twice, ineffectually,
repeated the word. "Don't, don't," she said again. The words
seemed to be forcing themselves through her lips. Her body lumped
down there on the floor had become just a strangely misshapen
bundle of flesh and bones.
She was pale, of a pasty paleness.
John Webster had jumped off the bed as a dog, lying asleep in
the dust of a roadway, might have leaped out of the path of a
rapidly moving vehicle.
The devil! His mind was jerked back into the present swiftly,
violently. A moment before he had been with a young woman on
a hillside above a wide sun-washed valley and had been making love
to her. The love-making had not been a success. It had turned out
badly. There had been a tall slender girl who had submitted her
body to a man, but who had been all the time terribly frightened
and beset by a sense of guilt and shame. After the love-making she
had cried, not with an excess of tenderness, but because she had felt
unclean. They had walked down the hillside later and she had
tried to tell him how she felt. Then he also had begun to feel mean
and unclean. Tears had come into his own eyes. He had thought
she must be right. What she said almost everyone said. After all
man was not an animal. Man was a conscious thing trying to strug-
gle upwards out of animalism. He had tried to think everything out
that same night as he, for the first time, lay in bed beside his wife,
and he had come to certain conclusions. She was no doubt right in
her belief that there were certain impulses in men that had better be
subjected to the power of the will. If one just let oneself go one
became no better than a beast.
He had tried hard to think everything out clearly. What she had
wanted was that there be no love-making between them except for
the purpose of breeding children. If one went about the business
of bringing children into the world, making new citizens for the
state and all that, then one could feel a certain dignity in love-


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
making. She had tried to explain how humiliated and mean she had
felt that day when he came into her naked presence. For the first
time they had talked of that. It had been made ten times, a thou-
sand times worse because he had come the second time and the
others had seen him. The clean moment of their relationship was
denied with determined insistence. After that had happened she
could not bear to remain in the company of her girl friend and, as
for her friend's brother—well, how could she ever look into his face
again? Whenever he looked at her he would be seeing her not prop-
erly clothed as she should be, but shamelessly naked and on a bed
with a naked man holding her in his arms. She had been compelled
to get out of the house, go home at once, and of course, when she got
home, everyone wondered what had happened that her visit had
come to such an abrupt end. The trouble was that when her mother
was questioning her, on the day after her arrival home, she suddenly
burst into tears.
What they thought after that she didn't know. The truth was
that she began to be afraid of everyone's thoughts. When she went
into her bedroom at night she was almost ashamed to look at her
own body and had got into the habit of undressing in the darkness.
Her mother was always dropping remarks. "Did your coming home
so suddenly have anything to do with the young man in that
house?"
After she had come home, and because she began to feel so
ashamed of herself in the presence of other people, she had decided
she would join a church, a decision that had pleased her father, who
was a devout church member. The whole incident had in fact drawn
her and her father closer together. Perhaps that was because, un-
like her mother, he never bothered her with embarrassing questions.
Anyway she had made up her mind that if she ever married she
would try to make her marriage a pure thing, based on comradeship,
and she had felt that after all she must marry John Webster if he
ever repeated his proposal of marriage. After what had happened
that was the only right thing for them both to do and now that
they were married it would be right also for them to try and make
up for the past by leading clean pure lives and trying never to give
way to the animal impulses that shocked and frightened people.
John Webster was standing facing his wife and daughter and his
mind had gone back to the first night in bed with his wife and to the


26o
MANY MARRIAGES
many other nights they had spent together. On that first night, long
ago, when she lay talking to him, the moonlight came in through a
window and fell on her face. She had been very beautiful at the
moment. Now that he no longer approached her, afire with passion,
but lay quietly beside her, with her body drawn a little away and
with his arm about her shoulders, she was not afraid of him and
occasionally put up her hand and touched his face.
The truth was that he had got the notion into his head that there
was in her a kind of spiritual power divorced altogether from the
flesh. Outside the house, along the river banks, frogs were calling
their throaty calls and once in the night some strange weird call
came out of the air. That must have been some night bird, perhaps
a loon. The sound wasn't a call, really. It was a kind of wild laugh.
From another part of the house, on the same floor there came the
sound of her uncle's snoring.
The two people had slept little. •There was so much to say. After
all they were hardly acquainted. What he thought at the time was
that she wasn't a woman after all. She was a child. Something
dreadful had happened to the child and he was to blame and now
that she was his wife he would try hard to make everything all right.
If passion frightened her he would subdue his passions. A thought
had got into his head that had stayed there for years. It was that
spiritual love was stronger and purer than physical love, that they
were two different and distinct things. He had felt quite exalted
when that notion came. He wondered now, as he stood looking
down at the figure of his wife, what had happened that the notion, at
one time so strong in him, had not enabled him or her to get happi-
ness together. One said the words and then, after all, they didn't
mean anything. They were trick words of the sort that were always
fooling people, forcing people into false positions. He had come to
hate such words. "Now I accept the flesh first, all flesh," he thought
vaguely, still looking down at her. He turned and stepped across
the room to look in a glass. The flame of the candles made light
enough so that he could see himself quite distinctly. It was a rather
puzzling notion, but the truth was, that every time he had looked at
his wife during the last few weeks he had wanted to run at once
and look at himself in a glass. He had wanted to assure himself
of something. The tall slender girl who had once lain beside him in
a bed, with the moonlight falling on her face, had become the heavy


SHERWOOD ANDERSON 26i
inert woman now in the room with him, the woman who was at this
moment crouched on the floor at the foot of the bed. How much had
he become like that?
One didn't escape animalism so easily. Now the woman on the
floor was so much more like an animal than himself. Perhaps the
very sins he had committed, his shamefaced running off sometimes
to other women in the cities, had saved him. "That would be a
pronouncement to throw into the teeth of the good pure people if it
were true," he thought with a quick inner throb of satisfaction.
The woman on the floor was like a heavy animal that had sud-
denly become very ill. He stepped back to the bed and looked at
her with a queer impersonal light in his eyes. She had difficulty
holding up her head. The light from the candles, cut off from her
submerged body by the bed itself, shone full on her face and shoul-
ders. The rest of her body was buried in a kind of darkness. His
mind remained the alert swift thing it had been ever since he had
found Natalie. In a moment now he could do more thinking than
he had done before in a year. If he ever became a writer, as he
sometimes thought maybe he would, after he had gone away with
Natalie, he would never want for things to write about. If one kept
the lid off the well of thinking within oneself, let the well empty
itself, let the mind consciously think any thoughts that came to it,
accepted all thinking, all imaginings, as one accepted the flesh of
people, animals, birds, trees, plants, one might live a hundred or a
thousand lives in one life. To be sure it was absurd to go stretching
things too much, but one could at least play with the notion that
one could become something more than just one individual man and
woman living one narrow circumscribed life. One could tear down
all walls and fences and walk in and out of many people, become
many people. One might in himself become a whole town full of
people, a city, a nation.
The thing to bear in mind, however, now, at this moment was
the woman on the floor, the woman whose voice had, but a moment
before, called out again the word her lips had always been saying to
him.
"Don't! Don't! Let's not, John! Not now, John!" What per-
sistent denial, of himself, perhaps of herself, too, there had been.
It was rather absurdly cruel how impersonal he felt towards her.
It was likely few people in the world ever realized what depths of


262
MANY MARRIAGES
cruelty lay sleeping within themselves. All the things that came out
of the well of thinking within oneself, when one jerked off the lid,
were not easy to accept as a part of oneself.
As for the woman on the floor, if one let one's fancy go, one could
stand as he was now doing, looking directly at the woman, and
could think the most absurdly inconsequential thoughts.
For one thing one could have the fancy that the darkness in which
her body was submerged, because of the accident that the light from
the candles did not fall on it, was the sea of silence into which she
had, all through these years, been sinking herself deeper and deeper.
And the sea of silence was just another and fancier name for
something else, for that deep well within all men and women, of
which he had been thinking so much during the past few weeks.
The woman who had been his wife, all people for that matter,
spent their entire lives sinking themselves deeper and deeper into
that sea. If one wanted to let oneself get more and more fancy about
the matter, indulge in a kind of drunken debauch of fancy, as it
were, one could in a half playful mood jump over some invisible
line and say that the sea of silence into which people were always
so intent on sinking themselves was in reality death. There was a
race towards the goal of death between the mind and body and
almost always the mind arrived first.
The race began in childhood and never stopped until either the
body or mind had worn itself out and stopped working. Everyone
carried about, all the time, within oneself life and death. There
were two gods sitting on two thrones. One could worship either, but
in general mankind had preferred kneeling before death.
The god of denial had won the victory. To reach his throne-room
one went through long hallways of evasion. That was the road to
his throne-room, the road of evasion. One twisted and turned, felt
his way in the darkness. There were no sudden and blinding flashes
of light.
John Webster had got a notion regarding his wife. It was sure
the heavy inert woman, now looking up into his face from the dark-
ness of the floor, unable to speak to him, had little or nothing to do
with a slender girl he had once married. For one thing how utterly
unlike they were physically. It wasn't the same woman at all. He
could see that. Any one who had looked at the two women could
see that they had really nothing physically in common. But did


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
263
she know that, had she ever thought of that, had she been, in any
but a very superficial way, aware of the changes that had taken
place in her? He decided she had not. There was a kind of blind-
ness common to almost all people. The thing called beauty, that
men sought in women, and that women, although they did not speak
of it so often, were also looking for in men wasn't a thing that re-
mained. When it existed at all it came to people only in flashes. One
came into the presence of another and the flash came. How confus-
ing that was. Strange things like marriages followed. "Until death
do us part." Well, that was all right too. One had to try to get
things straight if one could. When one clutched at the thing called
beauty in another death always came, bobbing its head up too.
How many marriages among people. John Webster's mind was
flying about. He stood looking at the woman who, although they
had separated long before—they had really and irrevocably sepa-
rated one day on a hill above a valley in the state of Kentucky—
was still in an odd way bound to him, and there was another woman
who was his daughter in the same room. The daughter stood beside
him. He could put out his hand and touch her. She was not looking
at himself or her mother, but at the floor. What was she thinking?
What thoughts had he stirred up in her? What would be the result
to her of the events of the night? There were things he couldn't
answer, that he had to leave on the knees of the gods.
His mind was racing, racing. There were certain men he had
always been seeing in the world. Usually they belonged to a class
known as fellows with shaky reputations. What had happened to
them? There were men who walked through life with a certain easy
grace of manner. In some way they were beyond good and evil,
stood outside the influences that made or unmade other men. John
Webster had seen a few such men and had never been able to forget
them. Now they passed, as in a procession, before his mind's eyes.
There was an old man with a white beard who carried a heavy
walking stick and was followed by a dog. He had broad shoulders
and walked with a certain stride. John Webster had encountered
the man once, as he drove on a dusty country road. Who was the
fellow? Where was he going? There was about him a certain air.
"Go to the devil then," his manner seemed to say. "I'm a man
walking here. Within me there is kingship. Go prattle of democ-
racy and equality if you will, worry your silly heads about a life


264
MANY MARRIAGES
after death, make up little lies to cheer your way in the darkness,
but get out of my way. I walk in the light."
It might be all just a silly notion, what John Webster was now
thinking about an old man he had once met walking on a country
road. It was certain he remembered the figure with extraordinary
sharpness. He had stopped his horse to gaze after the old man,
who had not even bothered to turn and look at him. Well the old
man had walked with a kingly stride. Perhaps that was the reason
he had attracted John Webster's attention.
Now he was thinking of him and a few other such men he had
seen during his life. There was one, a sailor who had come down to
a wharf in the city of Philadelphia. John Webster was in that city
on business and having nothing to do one afternoon had gone down
to where ships were loading and unloading. A sailing vessel, a
brigantine, lay at the wharf, and the man he had seen came down
to it. He had a bag over his shoulder, containing perhaps his sea
clothes. He was no doubt a sailor, about to sail before the mast on
the brigantine. What he did was simply to come to the vessel's
side, throw his bag aboard, call to another man who put his head out
at a cabin door, and turning walked away.
But who had taught him to walk like that? The old Harry!
Most men and women too, crept through life like sneaks. What
gave them the sense of being such underlings, such dogs? Were
they constantly besmearing themselves with accusations of guilt
and, if that was it, what made them do it?
The old man in the road, the sailor walking off along a street, a
negro prize fighter he had once seen driving an automobile, a gam-
bler at the horse races in a southern city, who walked wearing a
loud checkered vest before a grandstand filled with people, a woman
actress he had once seen coming out at the stage entrance of a thea-
tre, reprobates all perhaps and all walking with the stride of kings.
What had given such men and women this respect for them-
selves? It was apparent respect for self must be at the bottom of
the matter. Perhaps they hadn't at all the sense of guilt and shame
that had made of the slender girl he had once married the heavy
inarticulate woman now squatted so grotesquely on the floor at his
feet. One could imagine some such person as he had in mind saying
to himself, "Well, here I am, you see, in the world. I have this
long or short body, this brown or yellow hair. My eyes are of a


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
certain colour. I cat food, I sleep at night. I shall have to spend
the whole of my life going about among people in this body of mine.
Shall I crawl before them or shall I walk upright like a king? Shall
I hate and fear my own body, this house in which I must live, or shall
I respect and care for it? Well, the devil! The question is not
worth answering. I shall take life as it offers itself. For me the
birds shall sing, the green spread itself over the earth in the spring,
for me the cherry tree in the orchard shall blossom."
John Webster had a fanciful picture of the man of his fancy
going into a room. He closed the door. A row of candles stood on
a mantel above a fire-place. The man opened a box and took from
it a silver crown. Then he laughed softly and put the crown on his
own head. "I crown myself a man," he said.
It was amazing. One was in a room looking at a woman who had
been one's wife, and one was about to set out on a journey and
would not see her again. Of a sudden there was this blinding rush
of thoughts. One's fancy played far and wide. One seemed to have
been standing in one spot thinking thoughts for hours, but in reality
only a few seconds had passed since the voice of his wife, calling out
that word, "don't" had interrupted his own voice telling a tale of
an ordinary unsuccessful marriage.
The thing now was to keep his daughter in mind. He had better
get her out of the room now. She was moving towards the door to
her own room and in a moment would be gone. He turned away
from the white-faced woman on the floor and watched his daughter.
Now his own body was thrust between the bodies of the two women.
They could not see each other.
There was a story of a marriage he had not finished, would never
finish telling now, but in time his daughter would come to under-
stand what the end of the story must inevitably be.
There was something that should be thought of now. His daugh-
ter was going out of his presence. Perhaps he would never see her
again. One continually dramatized life, made a play of it. That
was inevitable. Every day of one's life consisted of a series of little
dramas for which one was always casting oneself for an important
part in the performance. It was annoying to forget one's lines, not
to walk out upon the stage when one had got one's cue. Nero fid-
dled when Rome was burning. He had forgotten what part he had
assigned to himself and so fiddled in order not to give himself away.


266
MANY MARRIAGES
Perhaps he had intended making an ordinary politician's speech
about a city rising again from the flames.
Blood of the saints! Would his daughter walk calmly out of the
room without turning at the door? What had he yet intended
saying to her? He was growing a little nervous and upset.
His daughter was standing in the doorway leading to her own
room, looking at him, and there was a kind of intense half-insane
mood in her as all evening there had been in him. He had infected
her with something out of himself. After all there had been what
he had wanted, a real marriage. After this evening the younger
woman could never be what she might have been, had this evening
not happened. Now he knew what he wanted for her. Those men,
whose figures had just visited his fancy, the race track man, the old
man in the road, the sailor on the docks, there was a thing they had
got hold of he had wanted her to have hold of too.
Now he was going away with Natalie, with his own woman, and
he would not see his daughter again. She was a young girl yet,
really. All of womanhood lay before her.
"I'm damned. I'm crazy as a loon," he thought. He had sud-
denly a ridiculous desire to begin singing a silly refrain that had
just come into his head.
Diddle de di do,
Diddle de di do,
Chinaberries grow on a chinaberry tree.
Diddle de di do.
And then his fingers, fumbling about in his pockets, came upon
the thing he had unconsciously been looking for. He clutched it,
half convulsively, and went toward his daughter, holding it between
his thumb and finger.
On the afternoon of the day, on which he had first found his way
in at the door of Natalie?s house, and when he had become almost
distracted from much thinking, he had found a bright little stone
on the railroad track near his factory.
When one tried to think his way along a too difficult road one was
likely, at any moment, to get lost. One went up some dark lonely
road and then, becoming frightened, one became at the same time


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
267
shrill and distracted. There were things to be done, but one could
do nothing. For example and at the most vital moment in life one
might spoil everything by beginning to sing a silly song. Others
would throw up their hands. "He's crazy," they would say, as
though such a saying ever meant anything at all.
Well, once before, he had been, as he was now, at just this mo-
ment. Too much thinking had upset him. The door of Natalie's
house had been opened and he had been afraid to enter. He had
planned to run away from her, go to the city and get drunk and
write her a letter telling her to go away to where he would not have
to see her again. He had thought he preferred to walk in loneliness
and darkness, to take the road of evasion to the throne-room of the
god Death.
And at the moment all this was going on his eye had caught the
glint of a little green stone lying among all the grey meaningless
stones in the gravel bed of a railroad track. That was in the late
afternoon and the sun's rays had been caught and reflected by the
little stone.
He had picked it up and the simple act of doing so had broken
a kind of absurd determination within him. His fancy, unable at
the moment to play over the facts of his life, had played over the
stone. A man's fancy, the creative thing within him, was in reality
intended to be a healing thing, a supplementary and healing in-
fluence to the working of the mind. Men sometimes did a thing
they called, "going it blind," and at such moments did the least
blind acts of their whole lives. The truth was that the mind work-
ing alone was but a one-sided, maimed thing.
"Hito, tito, there's no use my trying to become a philosopher."
John Webster was stepping towards his daughter who was waiting
for him to say or do something that had not yet been done. Now he
was quite all right again. Some minute readjustment had taken
place inside himself as it had on so many other occasions within the
last few weeks.
Something like a gay mood had come over him. "In one evening
I have managed to plunge pretty deeply down into the sea of life,"
he thought.
He became a little vain. There he was, a man of the middle class,
who had lived all his life in a Wisconsin industrial town. But a
few weeks before he had been but a colourless fellow in an almost


268
MANY MARRIAGES
altogether colourless world. For years he had been going along,
just so, day after day, week after week, year after year, going along
streets, passing people in the streets, picking his feet up and setting
them down, thump thump, eating food, sleeping, borrowing money
at banks, dictating letters in offices, going along thump thump, not
daring to think or feel much of anything at all.
Now he could think more thoughts, have more fancies, while he
took three or four steps across a room towards his daughter, than he
had sometimes dared do in a whole year of his former life. There
was a picture of himself in his fancy now that he liked.
In the fanciful picture he had climbed up to a high place above
the sea and had taken off his clothes. Then he had run to the end
of a cliff and had leaped off into space. His body, his own white
body, the same body in which he had been living all through these
dead years, was now making a long graceful arched curve
blue sky.
That was rather nice too. It made a picture for the mir
hold of and it was pleasant to think of one's body as making sharp
striking pictures. -
He had plunged far down into the sea of lives, into the clear
warm still sea of Natalie's life, into the heavy salt dead sea of his
wife's life, into the swiftly running young river of life that was in
his daughter Jane. A
"I'm a great little mixer-up of figures of speech, but at the same
time I'm a great little swimmer -in seas," he said aloud to his
daughter. ^
Well, he had better be a little careful too. Her eyes were becom-
ing puzzled again. It would take a long time for one, living with
another, to become used to the sight of things jerked suddenly up
out of the wells of thought within oneself and he and his daughter
would perhaps never live together again.
He looked at the little stone held so firmly between his thumb and
finger. It would be better to keep his mind fastened upon that now.
It was a small, a minute thing, but one could fancy it looming large
on the surface of a calm sea. His daughter's life was a river run-
ning down to the sea of life. She would want something to which
she could cling when she had been cast out into the sea. What an
absurd notion. A little green stone would not float in the sea. It
would sink. He smiled knowinglv.


SHERWOOD ANDERSON 4 269
There was the little stone held before him, in his extended hand.
He had picked it up on a railroad track one day and had indulged
in fancies concerning it and the fancies had healed him. By indulg-
ing in fancies concerning inanimate objects, one in a strange way
glorified them. For example a man might go to live in a room.
There was a picture in a frame on a wall, the walls of a room, an
old desk, two candles under a Virgin, and a man's fancy made the
place a sacred place. All the art of life perhaps consisted in just
letting the fancy wash over and colour the facts of life.
The light from the two candles under the Virgin fell on the stone
he held before him. It was about the size and shape of a small bean
and was dark green in colour. In certain lights its colour changed
swiftly. There was a flash of yellow green as of new-grown things
just coming out of the ground and then that faded away and the
stone became altogether a dark lusty green, as of the leaves of oak
trees in the late summer, one could fancy.
How clearly John Webster had remembered everything now. The
stone he had found on the railroad track had been lost by a woman
who was travelling west. The woman had worn it among other
stones in a brooch at her throat. He remembered how his imagina-
tion had created her at the moment.
Or had it been set in a ring and worn on her finger'?
Things were a bit mixed. Now he saw the woman quite clearly,
as he had seen her in fancy once before, but she was not on a train,
but was standing on a hill. It was winter and the hill was coated
with a light blanket of snow and below the hill, in a valley, was a
wide river covered with a shining sheet of ice. A man, a middle-
aged, rather heavy-looking man stood beside the woman and she
was pointing at something in the distance. The stone was set in a
ring worn on the extended finger.
Now everything became very clear to John Webster. He knew
now what he wanted. The woman on the hill was one of the strange
people, like the sailor who had come down to the ship, the old man
in the road, the actress coming out of the stage door of the theatre,
one of the people who had crowned themselves with the crown of
life. 3.;
He stepped to his daughter and taking her hand opened it and
laid therltttle stone on her palm. Then he carefully closed her
. fingers untfther hand was a fist.


270
MANY MARRIAGES
He smiled, a knowing little smile and looked into her eyes.
"Well, now Jane, it's pretty hard to tell you what I'm thinking,"
he said. "You see, there are a lot of thoughts in me I can't get out
without time and I'm going away. I want to give you something."
He hesitated. "This stone," he began again, "it's something for
you to cling to perhaps, yes, that's it. In moments of doubt cling to
it. When you become almost distracted and do not know what to
do hold it in your hand."
He turned his head and his eyes seemed to be taking in the room
slowly, carefully, as though not wanting to forget anything that
made a part of the picture in which he and his daughter were now
the central figures.
"As a matter of fact," he began again, "a woman, a beautiful
woman might, you see, hold many jewels in her hand. She might
have many loves you see and the jewels might be the jewels of ex-
perience, the challenges of life she had met, eh?"
John Webster seemed to be playing some fanciful game with his
daughter, but now she was no longer frightened, as when she had
first come into the room, or puzzled as she had been but a moment
before. She was absorbed in what he was saying. The woman
crouched on the floor behind her father was forgotten.
"There's one thing I shall have to do before I go away. I've got
to give you a name for this little stone," he said, still smiling.
Opening her hand again he took it out and went and stood for a
moment holding it before one of the candles. Then he returned to
her and again put it into her hand.
"It is from your father, but he is giving it to you at the moment
when he is no longer being your father and has begun to love you
as a woman. Well, I guess you'd better cling to it, Jane. You'll
need it, God knows. If you want a name for it call it the Jewel of
Life," he said and then, as though he had already forgotten the in-
cident he put his hand on her arm and pushing her gently through
the door closed it behind her.
IX
There still remained something for John Webster to do in the
room. When his daughter had gone he picked up his bag and went
out into the hallway as though about to leave without more words


SHERWOOD ANDERSON 27i
to the wife, who still sat on the floor with her head hanging down, as
though unaware of any life about her.
When he had got into the hallway and had closed the door
he set his bag down and came back. As he stood within the
room, with the knob still held in his hand, he heard a noise on the
floor below. "That's Katherine. What's she doing up at this time
of the night?" he thought. He took out his watch and went nearer
the burning candles. It was fifteen minutes to three. "We'll catch
the early morning train at four all right," he thought.
There was his wife, or rather the woman who for so long a time
had been his wife, on the floor at the foot of the bed. Now her eyes
were looking directly at him. Still the eyes had nothing to say.
They did not even plead with him. There was in them something
that was hopelessly puzzled. If the events that had transpired in
the room on that night had torn the lid off the well she carried about
within herself she had managed to clamp it back on again. Now
perhaps the lid would never again stir from its place. John Webster
felt peculiarly as he fancied an undertaker might feel on being
called at night into the presence of a dead body.
"The devil! Such fellows perhaps had no such feelings." Quite
unconscious of what he was doing he took out a cigarette and lit it.
He felt strangely impersonal; like one watching a rehearsal for
some play in which one is not particularly interested. "It's a time of
death all right," he thought. "The woman is dying. I can't say
whether or not her body is dying, but there's something within her
that has already died." He wondered if he had killed her, but had
no sense of guilt in the matter.
He went to stand at the foot of the bed and, putting his hand on
the railing, leaned over to look at her.
It was a time of darkness. A shiver ran through his body and
dark thoughts like flocks of blackbirds flew across the field of his
fancy.
"The devil! There's a hell too! There's such a thing as death, as
well as such a thing as life," he told himself. Here was however an
amazing and quite interesting fact too. It had taken a long time
and much grim determination for the woman on the floor before him
to find her way along the road to the throne-room of death. "Per-
haps no one, while there is life within him to lift the lid, ever be-
comes quite submerged in the swamp of decaying flesh," he thought.


272
MANY MARRIAGES
Thoughts stirred within John Webster that had not come to his
mind for years. As a young man in college he must really have been
more alive than he knew at the time. Things he had heard discussed
by other young men, fellows who had a taste for literature, and that
he had read in the books, the reading of which was a part of his
duties, had all through the last few weeks been coming back to his
mind. "One might almost think I had followed such things all my
life," he thought.
The poet Dante, Milton with his Paradise Lost, the Hebrew poets
of the older Testaments, all such fellows must at some time in their
lives have seen what he was seeing at just this moment.
There was a woman on the floor before him and her eyes were
looking directly into his. All evening there had been something
struggling within her, something that wanted to come out to him
and to her daughter. Now the struggle was at an end. There was
surrender. He kept looking down at her with a strange fixed stare
in his own eyes.
"It's too late. It didn't work," he said slowly. He did not say
the words aloud, but whispered them.
A new thought came. All through his life with this woman there
had been a notion to which he had clung. It had been a kind of
beacon that now he felt had from the first led him into a false
trail. He had in some way picked up the notion fronnothers about
him. It was peculiarly an American notion, always being indirectly
repeated in newspapers, magazines, and books. Back of it was an
insane, wishy-washy philosophy of life. "All things work together
for good. God's in his Heaven, all's right with the world. All men
are created free and equal."
"What an ungodly lot of noisy meaningless sayings drummed
into the ears of men and women trying to live their lives!"
A great disgust swept over him. "Well, there's no use my staying
here any longer. My life in this house has come to its end," he
thought.
He walked to the door and when he had opened it turned again.
"Good night and good-bye," he said as cheerfully as though he were
just leaving the house in the morning for a day at the factory.
And then the sound of the door closing made a sharp jarring
break in the silence of the house.
The End



Courtesy of the Galcrie Paul Rosenberg, Paris
WOMAN READING. BY PABLO PICASSO











PARIS LETTER
February, iQ23
CONSORTIUM (cinema) invitation card showing several peo-
ple being broken, roasted, rolled down hill on "the wheel,"
La Roue; also posters, nude figure on flaming ditto. Adaptation
Musicale d'Arthur Honegger; "everything possible" done to make
art a commercial proposition that must fundamentally remain a
commercial proposition and please the million. Thanks, we pre-
sume, to Blaise Cendrars, there are interesting moments, and effects
which belong, perhaps, only to the cinema. At least for the sake of
argument we can admit that they are essentially cinematographic,
and not a mere travesty and degradation of some other art. The
bits of machinery, the varying speeds, the tricks of the reproducing
machine are admirably exploited, according to pictorial concepts de-
rived from contemporary abstract painters. The thing takes place
on the railway, the driving wheels of the locomotive, et cetera, et
cetera, the composition of the photos of the actual machinery, are
interesting; and Mr Honegger's programmatic music accompanies
them. Thus far the high-brow urge has carried the matter. These
details are interpolated in a story (of sorts); and the rest of the
show remains the usual drivelling idiocy of the cinema sentiment
and St Vitus.
Any amount of careful thought has been spent on making the
good part good; I dare say we should laud the experiment; but am
not quite sure on what grounds. As experiment, yes; as publicity
for cubism, i. e., to lead the low-brow toward the art of abstract
composition, possibly; to settle the question (in the negative) i. e.,
to satisfy us once and for all that the cinema is no use as art, very
probably.
You test a picture by its powers of endurance. If you can have
it on your wall for six months without being bored, it is presumably
as good a picture as you, personally, are capable of enjoying. Even
if the individual photo, in cinema-photography is good, as those in
Cendrars' films presumably are, one is never given time to be sure
of it.


274
PARIS LETTER
Also there is the dilemma; the instant that slap-stick comedy, per-
sonal touch, tender infancy, puppy dogs, "humour," "drammer," et
cetera enter, the whole question of visual effects, composition, et
cetera is chucked overboard. Inevitablement. Yes, I think we may
as well say, inevitablement. Ineluctably.
With the progressive weakening of the popular mind, we may be
subjected to a club-sandwich, an alternation of visual effects, photo-
cinematographic effects, and the agile-flea melo-comic-sentimento-
kinesis. In passing, the French seem rather weak on continuous
action in their films; lack of plot, or lack of transitions; giving us.
not an action, but a poorly joined series of moving tableaux.
One must distinguish La Roue from Caligari. La Roue is honest,
and the "art" portions frankly in debt to contemporary art. Cali-
gari cribbed its visual effects, with craven impertinences, and then
flashed up a notice, "This film isn't cubism; it represents the rav-
ings et cetera." Precisely, ravings the inventors couldn't have
thought of without the anterior work of new artists.
I should like to stigmatize a parallel impertinence: a recently
pirated translation of Gourmont bears the legend "authorized
translation." The hypocrisy of Prof. can go no further. We
salute this triumph of parsimony.
Man Ray's album (published by Leonce Rosenberg, i9 rue de la
Baume) is interesting; although the reproductions do not carry the
full force of his experiments in "painting with light," nor have any
other reproductions yet succeeded in doing so. Ray's process is not
involved in any mystery, it is misleading to call it "photography
without a camera." Instead of placing a flat object on a piece of
sensitized paper, he places a solid object before the paper, and
shoots his light from various points, for various lengths of time, in
varying intensity. (This is quite different from vortography, where
the subject was selected and developed into a composition by the
vortex of mirrors, and then carried through the lens onto a sensitized
plate, from which any number of prints could be made.) Ray's
process produces only one picture, with effects he can not get by
taking a negative.
Coburn went out of photography into painting, via vortography;
Ray beginning as excellent painter, has eliminated his interest in
colour in his search for the immaterial (intermediate stage repre-


EZRA POUND
275
sented by his picture of fans). He stopped wanting to "bring every-
thing to the surface of the canvas." His work, to which he attaches
no label, may be termed expressionism, and it is a combination of
forms in varying light. His defence, or explanation, is that the
history of painting shows a series of swings from monochrome to
strong colour; that people no longer complain of the lack of colour
in etching; that white is all colours and black, the absorption of
colour; and that, in fine, he is not destroying anything, he is adding
something. He and Marcel Duchamp have carried their art to a
point where it demands constant invention, and where they can't
simply loll 'round basking in virtuosity. (That I get more pleasure
from Man Ray's painting in colour, than from his admirable
graduation of black and white, has nothing to do with the matter.
A determined series of experiments persisting through a number of
years deserves recognition, and one should do one's best to present
the artist's own view with the maximum clarity.) Man Ray wants
to express certain properties of light. He believes he can do so
more effectively by a control of chemical reactions than with a
brush; there is no divine ukase forbidding the artist to attempt em-
ploying one corner of chemistry as a fine art.
The Russians, the Rooshians (the reader will by now have ob-
served that I have been driven or lured out of my studio, and that
I, as a faithful and obedient chronicler, have been chasing around
Paris, raking in the news) the Russians, as presented by the Mos-
cow Art Theatre, and Chekhov's Cherry Orchard, confirm one's
deepest prejudices, and leave one wondering whether Lenin, or any
possible series of revolutions and cataclysms could possibly have
added any further disorder to the life of that unfortunate race.
The Cherry Orchard is realism, and I don't in the least doubt it
was well acted, and that Russians were, and are, like that, and
that Chekhov was a great writer, trying to remedy the chaos by
showing it its face in the mirror.
The Russian is the Caucasian with the top-layer of his head re-
moved; these people of Chekhov's rush about the stage, sentiment-
ing, and gibbering, or displaying a sympathetic bonhomie. The
whole show is included by the apologist-summarist in one sentence
concerning the second act: "Mme Ranevskaia s'em porte a propos de
tout"


276
PARIS LETTER
Doubtless it is laudable to educate the masses. Drama has al-
ways, or nearly always, been didactic. Only a wobbly aestheticized
age (recently) elevated the dogma that art shouldn't be didactic.
Most good literature has been. The real law in writing is that
literature shouldn't try to sell patent medicines. (Here included re-
ligion, taboos, et cetera.)
Greek drama was didactic, Omar is didactic. Homer is not didac-
tic (except in the treatise on etiquette—Telemachus's visit to Mene-
laus). The trouble with "all Russian literature" is that it contains
no didacticism on any points that can be of interest (oh, well, omit
some of Dostoevsky, and Turgenev, et cetera). Let us say not
ironically "all Russian literature," but the bulk of it, and the part
the cultists are continually shoving at one, contains no problems
that are of interest to any man with two grains of lucidity. They
say Gorky's mother was a good woman, an energetic woman, and
that she used to go among the peasants saying, "You should wash
more; if you would wash more you wouldn't have so many lice."
Excellent. Chekhov was a good man; he went among the suburban
bourgeoisie, et cetera.
But the Abbey Theatre presents plays with greater neatness,
greater economy in the introduction of characters, et cetera. In
short, we can't lie down and wait for the Russian theatre to evange-
lize us into drama.
Pirandello's La Volupte de PHonneur at the Atelier. At any rate
a play one can sit through. (This fact worthy of attention as such
plays have nearly ceased to exist. I had in fact supposed them ex-
tinct.) A vote of thanks due to Charles Dullin who has given us
a possible theatre (I mean good plays, in an uncomfortable shed on
the summit of the mount of martyrs).
Pirandello belongs in the post-Ibsen wave. He invents a false-
dilemma, or no, a situation caused by ignorance, or more probably
carelessness. The Marquis inadvertently stumbles on a Cartesian,
on a detached intelligence, and by this mechanism the dramatist is
able to revive the point-of-honour and the other tools of romanti-
cism. Even Stendhal had to postulate a non-extant type of heroine
in Le Rouge et le Noir.
Drama is probably bad (it nearly always is bad) because the
author is forced (he nearly always is forced) to invent some pal-
pable idiocy or falsity in order to "get things moving."


EZRA POUND 277
Pirandello however postulates his Cartesian, who continues to
postulate the effects of an absolute concept, thrust into a protoplas-
mic environment. The play at least states a real opposition. And
the best man wins the lady, so romance is satisfied; and the actors,
in the case of Dullin's company, allow one to believe in the
reality of the characters most of the time. I mean while the play
is in progress. The motif may also be classified as the "truth ver-
sus conventionality" motif of the contemporary romantic revolt.
The excellence of the Atelier presentation deserves emphasis, and
Dullin our solid thanks.
It is unfair for me to talk of these things without warning the
reader that I (personally) believe "the theatre" in general is no
good, that plays are no good. This conviction is bound to colour my
criticism, and the reader must discount my criticism to just the ex-
tent that he believes that the theatre can be good. Most plays are
bad, even Greek plays. The Greek dramatists were inferior to
Homer. The profoundest thing, perhaps the only really profound
thing I ever heard in Prof. Schelling's class-room was the suggestion
that Shakespeare became a playwright, because he couldn't make
his mark as a poet.
When I say that plays are no good, I mean they are no good for
any one who is capable of what I must call "poetic" or "literary"
satisfaction.
The Greek play is an ignis fatuus. Cocteau has made an heroic
attempt with the Antigone. I am not merely talking at random.
The Agamemnon drives one to admiration; it is a great work, it
probably knocks the spots off other Greek plays. The Prometheus
Bound has an opening situation and trails off into nothing, et cetera.
Years ago I took the Agamemnon to T. S. Eliot to see whether he
could do anything with it, he being, as we all know, keen on Web-
ster, English tragedy, et cetera. He kept my copy for a long time,
and I believe considered the matter; at the end of three or four
years nothing had happened, I grew impatient and thought I would
have a shot at it. I tried every possible dodge, making the watch-
man a negro, and giving him a fihn Geoogiah voyce; making the
chorus talk cockney, et cetera. This is a usual form of evasion in
modern drama. Ibsen makes his people provincial, Chekhov also,
the Irish theatre talks dialect, to get a "language." In the Agamem-
non there is simply too much stuff that doesn't function; you put it


PARIS LETTER
in and the thing goes dead, you start omitting it, and the remains are
insufficient.
Cocteau has made a desperate effort in his Antigone; he has got
a simple and direct speech, most of the time. He has not wholly
eliminated the "bloomin' syntax"; and the glued, glass ornament
phrasing of the official classic translation obtrudes at moments.
The virtues are probably shared about equally between Sophocles
and the adapter.
Poetry is immortal, drama isn't. The Antigone of Sophocles con-
tains great antitheses. It also contains stucco. The Greek sophistry
about the irreplaceability of the brother for example.
It contains some real didactism, re Individual versus State
(i. e., state concentrated in Creon); the motivation is dated. The
idea of a young lady acting as undertaker is almost as repellent to
the modern auditor as the idea of her not acting as undertaker. In
fact, the adapter has to carry a great lot of baggage: even when he
has had the courage, as Cocteau has, to throw over a great mass of
verbiage, to reduce the chorus to a megaphone, and a set of masks,
hung over a canvas temple.
The "modern equivalent," the modern presentation of the basic
struggle of Antigone? Oh, Lord, let us say it is the struggle of an
hereditarily hampered and conditioned individual against the state.
Lo state En passant, Lorenzo Medici's delightful sentence in his
memoir for his son, "It is difficult to live rich in Florence, senza
aver lo stato (without having the state)." Antigone will remain a
symbol, yes. But a modern Sophocles would have to show her
struggling, not with an individual Creon, but with the amorphous
mass of Lloyd Georges, Wilsons, pettifogging small-town minds,
the consummate blazing idiocy of bureaucracy. One merely be-
comes inarticulate at the sight of America naively blundering and
blubbering into the evils of paternalism, red tape, paper-forms,
regulations, short-time passports, et cetera, that Europe has already
discovered to be a foulness. The interference of government, the
excess of government!! et cetera. Government ought to be con-
cerned with the traffic and main drains. There it ought to stop.
One ought almost to say it is the job of great art to keep govern-
ment in its place, i. c., to kick it out of life, and reduce it to its
proper, and wholly mechanical functions: street cars, water-mains,
et cetera, a convenience, as your gas-range is a convenience.


EZRA POUND
279
This is not a cry for propagandist art, which means a touting one
form of government in opposition to some other. It means an exclu-
sion of politics, fads, crankisms from art; a driving them out of the
minds of the few individuals who can, in their excess of natural
energy, combine and form a civilization, in the midst of the un-
conscious and semi-conscious gehenna. This applies, naturally, only
to the minds which have arrived at a consciousness of these things,
there are the gazelles in the park and in the native forest, whose life
is unconcerned with problems of administration. It is only by in-
calculable intensity of life, an intensity amounting to genius, that
one can escape, even momentarily, from the pressure of this circum-
jacence, free oneself, or one's audience of six, from the bonds of
blatant actuality.
The value of these things to the individual is slight, as trifling as
his value to them: but their power to do him evil is almost infinite,
and extends to his complete extermination. His power to retaliate
is also slight; it does not in the least compare with their power to do
him evil; only by supreme genius, or more usually by luck, by the
million to one chance can he do anything against lo stato; the
"ante" required of him is usually immolation.
The present plague of democracy is that we have lost the sense
of demarcation between the Res Publica, the public business, and
the affairs of the individual.
(I had wanted to discuss the search for reality in Pierre Hamp,
and in the new prose, but have far overrun my space. Apropos of
Thomas Mann's discussion of Spengler and citation of Novalis in
the December Dial, there is a magnificent sentence of Leonardo's:
"Nature is full of causes which have never been put into
experiment.")
The emphasis five paragraphs above is on almost. Of course
the function of art, great or other, is to do nothing of the kind.
Its function is to portray; but the portrayal must be done by those
who are superlatively aware; and great art will be aware of the pas-
sion for rd Ka\6v, fighting against tyranny, against lo stato, if
that stato is corrupt. Tyranny is the concentration of power into
the hands of the ignorant, and the inept, the non-perceivers. The
awareness will detect the present form of this tyranny, and not be
limited by ancient symbols, even if it find it advisable to employ
them. Artistic formulas are bad that prescribe limits to awareness.


PARIS LETTER
If a man doesn't know that bureaucracy exists, that "social prob-
lems" (to use the most offensive and unliterary term possible) exist,
he is a minor artist; just as "minor" as the doctrinaire editorial
writer who doesn't know that anything else exists, and whose
knowledge of humanity is only one generation deep. Whether one
can get through this pasteboard and glue, into "the some more vital
equation," is a vastly other question.
And Creon (Lloyd George, Wilson, Harding, Curzon, the banks)
is, are, always complaining, in the words of Cocteau's Creon "Tu as
invente la justice": You have invented justice, or t6 ko.\6v, or
the belief in the dignity of the individual, or in liberty, or in non-
interference with the peripheries of others, or a disbelief in the need
for supervisors, or some other magnificence offensive to the control.
Sophocles having presented that equation, his play will continue
to attract adapter and translator, despite the "baggage." And (to
perorate) the classics will live as long as people can take their sym-
bols as equivalent of some current struggle which they are unable
to treat more directly, or with greater exactness of balance—de-
spite the baggage, the dead weight of archaism, aesthetic faults,
taboos.
Ezra Pound


VIENNA LETTER
February, i923
THIS year's Salzburg Festival took place in August and lasted
three weeks. At the Salzburg municipal theatre four works of
Mozart were played: Don Juan, II Seraglio, Le Nozze di Figaro,
and Cosi Fan Tutte. The cast was composed of members of the
Vienna Opera, supplemented by several male and female singers
from Germany. At the same time, for fourteen consecutive even-
ings in a church which the archbishop of Salzburg had set aside for
the occasion, they gave a sacred drama—or a miracle play, or what-
ever one chooses to call it—written by myself: Das Salzburger
Grosse Welttheater (The Grand World-Theatre of Salzburg). The
operas were conducted by Richard Strauss and Franz Schalk. The
stage-manager of the Grosse Welttheater was Max Reinhardt.
On this occasion I am forced by circumstances to speak of my
own personal work in my letter to the readers of The Dial. And
I shall do this with pleasure and with directness, especially as you
will probably, within a short time, see this piece, with its Reinhardt
settings, on one of the large stages of New York.
Everyone knows that among the seventy or eighty sacred dramas
{autos sagramentales) of Calderon there is one with the name of
The Grand World-Theatre. I read in an English paper that my
work was an "arrangement" of this work by Calderon. I do not find
this term quite accurate—and so far as I know it was used by this
one reporter only—but the question is not merely one of terminol-
ogy; it concerns the delicate and almost imponderable relationship
which works of art bear to one another. When The World-Theatre
was issued in book form I added by way of preface a few lines treat-
ing of this relationship. They follow:
"It is a matter of common knowledge that there exists a sacred
drama by Calderon, called The Grand World-Theatre. From this
the entire basic metaphor is borrowed: that the world forms a stage
on which people act out the play of life, each in the role that God
has assigned him. Further, this source provides the titles of the


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piece, and the names of the six characters by which mankind is repre-
sented. These elements do not belong to the great Spanish poet as
his own creation, but to the wealth of myths and allegories which
were formed in the Middle Ages and made over to later centuries."
The six characters by which mankind is represented are: the
king, the rich man, the peasant, the beggar, wisdom, and beauty.
Wisdom is a nun, beauty a court lady. As is evident, such naive
restraint as this goes back much farther than the seventeenth century
of Calderon. These figures, each in its own niche surrounded by in-
tricate Gothic tracery, belong to the world which we meet in the
Flemish and northern-French tapestries of the fifteenth century.
The World-Theatre is a miracle play, or a theatrical allegory. This
is a very old dramatic form which has had its great epoch in all
European literatures: in England of pre-Shakespearean times, and
also in France before she surrendered her literature to the imitating
of the Ancients . . . but with us, at least, this old form has
never quite died out. Up to the end of the eighteenth century, Cath-
olic South Germany and Austria possessed its folk-theatre, the sub-
jects for which were drawn indiscriminately from the Bible or from
the old treasures of allegory and the miracles. And Oberammergau
with its Passion Plays is simply a survival of this naive theatrical
world, the last protruding point, so to speak, of a sunken island-con-
tinent. With the spirit of rationalism which spread over Europe at
the time of the French Revolution these old art customs were finally
swept away. In my present work, and in an earlier one—a dramatic
reworking of the primitively and universally European Everyman
material—I have quite deliberately taken up the torch which with
us still lay glowing on the ground; and I believe that in this—as al-
ways happens to the seemingly quite instinctive processes of the
artist—my hand has been guided by a concealed plurality. The new
element which I have added to the traditional material is to be
found in the figure of the beggar. In my work he stands as the chief
character of the play, and is brought out as an individual against
all others. The beggar of the old miracle plays was passive and re-
signed, the poor man of the gospels who is chosen for blessedness by
the mere nature of his fate; while in this life, however, he is simply
an object whereby other people can be tested; but I have presented
the active beggar, the excluded, the disinherited eager for a place


HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL 283
among those who have inherited ... a figure, consequently,
such as could be seen in these proportions probably only at the pres-
ent moment: the threat of chaos to the world of order. Among the
many Americans of all classes whom I had the pleasure of meeting
in Salzburg, several mentioned to me the name of Eugene O'Neill in
reference to this character. Since then I have read The Hairy Ape,
and I do find a certain analogy between my beggar and that unhappy
stoker who is excluded from the ordered world and who yet displays
a nerve-wracking yearning to belong somewhere. In both dramas the
question which is posed is the same in its broad general outlines: it is
the ominous, or the leering, question which chaos addresses to "order."
And the answer which O'Neill gives to it is, so to speak, an opti-
mistic one—from the standpoint of society—with an admixture of
ugly irony in that he lets his poor beggar find in the cage of the
gorilla the peace of death and the ultimate place which he "belongs
to." The same question runs through the entire content of expression-
ism in all countries; or forms the impulse of ferment, if one objects
to the word "content." But in the stating of its question, expres-
sionism anticipates the answer, and this answer is the very opposite
one from that of O'Neill. That is to say, from the standpoint of
what we must call the world of society, the expressionist answer is
pessimistic. My answer was not optimistic, nor was it pessimistic,
but poetic, or religious. I have the disinherited beggar raise the ax
against everything that opposes him: king and rich man, peasant
(who corresponds with us to the smug, conservative, petty property
owner) beauty, and pious wisdom, against absolutely everything.
And from the situation and previous conversations it is evident
that when he strikes he will be stronger than all of them together,
and that the world structure of a thousand years—for indeed, the
synthesis between Christianity and the half-Roman, half-Germanic
system of justice in which we live is exactly that old—this structure
will collapse under the blows of his ax. But at the same moment
when he raises his arm with the ax, I have wisdom—under which
guise I have tried to symbolize everything lofty, unselfish, godlike
which we have in us, whether it is now of the sacred or the profane
tradition—raise her hands in prayer; not for her own salvation, for
she no longer believes in that, nor for the salvation of the world,
which she is not convinced is worth being saved, but for him, pre-
cisely for him . . . and this at the very moment when he is


284
VIENNA LETTER
brandishing the instrument of destruction over his head and is about
to bring it down with a crash. What next takes place in him is out-
side the province and the possibilities of the truly dramatic, and
could not be said in a regular play, but only in a miracle. Some-
thing comes over him like a sudden trance: a change, a complete re-
versal. While she prays for him he lets his ax sink down, and falls
on his knees. The trance which has taken hold of him was so com-
plete that he no longer knows whether he has struck with his ax or
not. Finally wisdom herself and the voices from angels above must
tell him that he has not committed the enormous deed—but they
sing it to him in such a way as to make him see that this very ab-
staining from action was the one great decisive act of his life; they
make him understand that once again, in a flash of lightning, a Saul
has become Paul. Indeed, he has been placed upon another plane,
a plane where the division of power and of worldly possessions
seems to him a matter of no moment. In one stroke he has become
what may be called a wise man, or a Christ, or one of the Enlight-
ened, or any other equivalent term. He turns his back on this whole
world and goes into the forest, into the eternal forest, home of the
wise man, and of the hermit. Next the passing of life is illustrated al-
legorically by a kind of ghostly dance of death in which all the char-
acters participate; and following this, when he finally returns to go
into his grave like all the others, he is a kind of holy hermit, with
a long white beard and penetrating eyes which are no longer of this
earth; the face is like that of Walt Whitman in his last photographs.
I hope that this summary sketch gives some idea of the play's
general outlines and goes to show how old and new elements are
here brought together. This method seems to me the natural pro-
cedure of the dramatist; and I do not see that the masters of the
drama have gone about their task very differently. Indeed, even
the ancient writers of tragedy, who might seem to us a beginning
out of nothing, have similarly utilized in their works the material
at hand. The truly magnificent thing about the present is that it
contains within itself, in a vitally and magically existing form, so
many things of the past. And the true destiny of the artist, it seems
to me, lies in his feeling himself as the expression of a plurality
which extends back into the remote past (along with that lateral
plurality, that planetary contemporaneity, of which Whitman is
so genial an expression) ; and he must create for himself the instru-
ment of his art by starting from those isolated impressions and hal-


HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL 285
lucinations of the individual and by linking up with these as much
of the traditional as he can encompass.
I cannot say that the public of these fourteen evenings had any
difficulty in reacting to this religious or allegorical play, or that the
play had any difficulty in carrying the minds of these people along
with it. Everything happened without any one having to think of
the process itself. Yet it was the most mixed public conceivable:
not only because we, for the first time since the war, had assembled
a completely international audience at a spot in Central Europe,
but also because those elements belonging to our own nation—I re-
fer to the Germans and the Austrians—were a very mixed audience
socially. Alongside of the nouveaux-riches there sat many plain
people, peasants with their wives and daughters, the petty bourgeois
of our little country towns in the Alps, priests and nuns, and among
them Americans, Scandinavians, Frenchmen, and residents of Ber-
lin. The credit for having amalgamated this extraordinary jumble
of incoherent individuals and viewpoints into an audience, yes, into
a completely unified and truly naive public which let itself "be
taken in" in an almost childlike fashion . . . the credit for
this lies entirely with Reinhardt's settings. His mise en scene was
the complete expression of the ripeness which this leading stage-
manager of Europe has arrived at in recent years. It laid few
stresses; but where it did stress, the result was extraordinarily
powerful. And by means of the great rhythmic art with which these
stresses were weighed against one another and distributed through-
out the length of the play, it knitted together the entire action last-
ing over two hours without pause; as a result, there was no suspicion
of drag, and the entire production was followed really breathlessly.
A strong rhythmic faculty forms the essential effectiveness in this
great stage-manager's poetics; his unusual sense of space is the natu-
ral correlate to this: for the rhythmic is the attempt to grasp and
organize time like space. In the twenty-five years that Reinhardt
has been working as a stage-manager the analysis of space has
formed the real centre of his activity. And in this tendency to con-
quer space as a new medium of expression, he is the appropriate
dramatic director, leader, and representative of his entire genera-
tion. For the modern European actors—and I am certain, the
Americans also, in so far as they are representative actors of our
epoch—are interpreters of our new spiritual relationship to space.
Consequently, what is essential to them, the mimic element—of


286
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which the spoken word is only an ingredient—manifests a mysteri-
ous affinity to the tendencies of modern painters. (The actor of the
earlier generation—I will name it, roughly, the Wagner generation
—stood in the same relationship to music.) If we observe a Euro-
pean painting of this generation, as a canvas of Kokoschka, the
figures stand out in space in such a manner as we never see them
arranged in any picture of an earlier generation. Heavy with hate,
or love; as though charged by electricity; in what one could call a
rarefied atmosphere; a man sinks like a phantom into the depths of
the picture; another, breathless, swollen with scorn, comes out at us
like a straw-coloured tongue of lightning. This is completely identi-
cal with the compressed and violent juxtaposition and opposition of
figures which Reinhardt conceives for an interior of Strindberg,
peopled with men who hate one another, fear one another, standing,
so to speak, with their faces in a dull reality, and their backs in a
dream.
But all this of which I am now speaking is one part of a
much broader and more complex spiritual movement. We are un-
doubtedly engaged in the difficult task of creating for ourselves a
new reality; and this creation is attained through the complete ques-
tioning of reality, and thus through the deepest of dreams. But no
one is more sensitive than the actor to these spiritual mysteries of
an epoch; no one is a more delicate instrument for registering such
changes in the spiritual climate, such vicissitudes of the contempo-
rary. With the actor of earlier periods the universal tendency was
first towards the grandly heroic, and later towards reality, or what
was taken for reality; with the actor of our period the universal
tendency is to make the created figure stand between reality and
dreams, always half-way between the two, in an ambiguous light
which throws the reflection of the dream upon reality, and some-
thing of reality upon the dream. And I feel quite certain that here
again, in a remarkable linking-up of the modern with the remote,
something in our imaginative life is in tune with the imaginative
life of primitive peoples. Nothing seems to me so identical with
the sinister quality which emanates from the great modern actor at
such moments as the following passage which a missionary has writ-
ten on the life of a primitive people:
"In the conception that men become animals by putting on their
hides: tigers, bears, wolves, and so forth—what an elementary ex-


HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL 287
ample of the transformation which the actor undergoes by changing
his costume, make-up, and so on!—in this conception, the Abiponas,
an Indian people in lower Paraguay, take everything mystically,
without regard for reason or logic. They are no longer concerned
whether the man, in order to become a tiger, must cease to be a man,
and then to become a man again must cease to be a tiger. What in-
terests them is the wonderful mystical property which permits these
individuals under certain conditions to share at once the nature of
the man and of the tiger, and consequently makes them much more
dreadful than men that are always men, and tigers that are always
tigers."
Just as the person in disguise, half-way between man and tiger,
fascinates the Abiponas, so that they cringe to him like helpless
children, though they are not afraid of a real man, and if they come
upon a real tiger boldly attack it with bow and battle-ax; in the
same way we are fascinated and overwhelmed by a modern actor
when he—and in this he is much more dreadful than the ghost of
Banquo or of Hamlet's father—belongs to two kinds of space at
once, that of dreams and that of reality, so that we cannot know
when he begins to be in the one and ceases to be in the other.
I hasten to add that I am indebted for the above quotation to an
interesting book, Les Fonctions Mentales Dans les Societes Infe^
rieures, by the Sorbonne professor, M Levy-Briihl; and I return from
this digression to the Salzburger Grosse Welttheater. Reinhardt's
mise en scene was extremely simple, consisting entirely in the fact
that the church was hung up to a certain height with a material of a
very beautiful scarlet red. But the unusual situation of being able to
play in a church, that is, in a place the height of which is more than
three times the height of a normal stage, gave him the opportunity
for several effects which seemed quite natural, but which those pres-
ent will not easily forget. I refer especially to those moments in
which the warning and consoling calls of the angels descended from
some unexpectedly high inner balcony of the dome; and the forms
of these angels really seemed to arrive here, not by flying up from
the earth, but by flying down from a much higher region. The
strongest and, if you will, most vehement moment of all came at
the beginning of the last third of the play, in that dance of death
which preceded the wasting away and dying of the six allegorical
figures. He did this to the accompaniment of a drum; but by its


288
VIENNA LETTER
rhythm it spread solemn horror through the assembly, and brought
forth from many people a subdued sigh which, I believe, was much
different from anything that could have been produced in a profane
theatre, and much more intense. Moissi played the beggar. He was
extraordinary, and his presentation had an internationality about it
which was remarkably suited to so mixed a public as this one;
whereas the part itself, being so international in its symbolic na-
ture, would probably have suffered had it been done in a more
definite manner, as something specifically German or Austrian. But
Moissi is an Albanian by birth, an Italian by education. In his
theatrical training he is half German, half Russian; there is nothing
he would rather play than Tolstoi, and in this emotional world, one
might say, he has taken root. So that his beggar had a Russian qual-
ity about it; and the spectre of Bolshevism stood very unmistakably
behind his extraordinarily sparing and unforgettable movements.
But at times his voice, with its Italian timbre, enabled him to
handle his lines in a remarkable manner which was incomparably
fitted to the marble church where so much of the Italian spirit of
past centuries had found its expression.
The public which had assembled at this theatrical festival was
composed of more discriminating and sensitive people of all coun-
tries than one has seen together for a number of years. In a certain
sense, this was the first resurrection of the old, earlier Europe, with
a very pronounced and very perceptible sprinkling of Americans.
Relatively few Englishmen had come; but it was a pleasure to see
our Mozart operas attended by so distinguished a Mozart-lover as
Mr Lowes Dickinson, who is the political philosopher of Cambridge
University. M Gemier, at the last moment, could not come from
Paris; while we were able to greet among our guests M Fabre, ad-
ministrator of the Comedie Francaise, and M Hebertot, the very
artistic director of the Theatre des Champs-Elysees. But Gemier
sent Reinhardt and me a very handsome telegram which he has since
reworked into an open letter, a genuine manifesto for the interna-
tionality of art. He announced here his definite decision to enter
into a relationship of mutual collaboration with the German thea-
tre. This letter, which was published in the Paris press, has become
the object of heated chauvinistic attacks; but also it has met with
very influential approval from those who hold to the other view-
point.
Hugo von Hofmannsthal


BOOK REVIEWS
A DEFINITIVE HEARN
The Writings of Lafcadio Hearn. i6 volumes.
Illustrated. 8vo. 635i pages. Houghton Mifflin Com-
pany. First collected edition.
FOR those who are interested in the ghostly, the exotic, in odd
bits of folk-lore, grotesque or poetic, Lafcadio Hearn's books
will always have more than a passing interest; for his intelligence,
stimulated in remote places of the world, is sensitive to every fleet-
ing incident, and he records the singular with an artistic prescience
alert to the most subtle implications. His admirers will be grate-
ful to Houghton Mifflin Company for at last bringing out in a uni-
form edition all his written works. The books are excellently edited
and the illustrations, numbering well over a hundred, have been
supplied by Mr Burton Holmes who was commissioned to go to
Japan for the purpose of securing these interesting plates.
When Prosper Merimee said to Theophile Gautier, "Your char-
acters have no muscles," the other replied, "And yours have no
^draperies." It was the articulated intention of Lafcadio Hearn to
clothe in textures of Latin luxuriance those bare structures of
thought, which, for him, represented a certain Teutonic or Anglo-
Saxon strength. A fusion not so very dissimilar had been accom-
plished for Italy in an earlier day by Giacomo Leopardi, and the
similarity in development of these two men was, indeed, striking.
Both suffered from deformities. Both knew poverty all their lives,
both were pathologically sensitive and incurably idealistic, both
were brought up Roman Catholics, and both turned their thwarted
idealism with irreconcilable scorn against Christianity. But whereas
the Italian, releasing his creative energy through an impregnable
pessimism, and returning for his inspiration to the earliest writers
of antiquity, achieved genius, Hearn, seeking to reconcile a mystical
faith in some cosmical scheme of the universe with a pagan delight
in the pure pleasure of the senses, never rose completely from the
ranks of the highly endowed.


290
A DEFINITIVE HEARN
Was it, one wonders, partly due to the fact that the Italian,
brought up in his ancestral home, was so firmly secured to the tradi-
tions of his country, while Hearn, born on an Ionian island of a
Greek mother and an Irish father, deserted by both, only to be
freshly deserted some years later by his fanatical guardian aunt
because of his suspected atheism at a Jesuit school, never knew, in
the entire world, a corner where he was not, in the deepest sense of
the world, an alien. His subconscious sense of belonging in neither
time nor space is illustrated by the fact that never once was he
known to date a letter.
How natural, then, that this boy, craving the experiences of
youth, and revolting against the cunning and asceticism of his
teachers should turn to the French romanticists where his frustra-
tions could be vicariously succoured, and where sophistication and
wit travelled hand in hand with delicate and daring amours. Pro-
foundly he wanted to belong, to take roots, and just as profoundly
he desired to lose himself in the macabre, the exquisite, to follow to
its ultimate conclusion that restless love of adventure that was
always forcing its way through to his reveries.
It was certainly not in New York, where at the age of nineteen
he found himself without shelter or work, nor in Cincinnati, where,
after sleeping in packing boxes, acting as pedlar, waiter, printer's
assistant, he was taken on as a reporter for the Cincinnati Enquirer,
that he found that sophisticated group he so craved, where his
curiosities could be stimulated without assaulting his sensitiveness.
Was it as extraordinary as some of his critics contend that he should
drift into a relationship with a mulatto girl at his cheap lodging
house—a girl who showed him an exuberant kindness unknown in
his wanderings? That he made every effort to marry her was
characteristic of one whose sympathies were almost pathologically
with the despised or oppressed, of one who could shoot four times
at a man in the street for maltreating a kitten, and regret that the
defective sight of his one eye allowed his victim to escape.
Disappearing from the provincial city whose reprobation had
caused him acute dismay he establishes himself in New Orleans.
His connexion with the Times Democrat in that city enabled him to
fix, to a certain degree, his literary tastes. A unique paper, indeed,
that would permit him in the course of five years to insert in its
columns no less than two hundred French translations of which
thirty-one were stories by de Maupassant. Here he studied with


ALYSE GREGORY
29i
diligent scrutiny the technique of his masters, Gautier, Flaubert
(not the Flaubert of Mme Bovary, but of The Temptation of Saint
Anthony) Anatole France, Loti, and de Maupassant. And although
his translations at that time were refused by the publishers, they
helped him enormously in developing his craft. It was in the old
Creole city that, after a visit to Grande Isle, Chita, still among the
most popular of his works, was written. It is a tour de force of
brilliant imagery, unparalleled of its sort in Anglo-Saxon litera-
ture. Yet how blurred by sentimentality.
In his Two Years in the West Indies his experiences in that
luxuriant country are recorded with sensitive verisimilitude. Tin-
kling, tropical cadences play musingly or vertiginously over the
scale of his senses. Yet slowly the vice of Spencerian mysticism
settles upon his work.
He pays a flying trip in Philadelphia to a certain pious fraud
called Gould (it is awful to think that he addressed him in letters
as "dear Gooley") who claims to have presented him with a soul,
and later, as his biographer, attacks him with a malicious fury sinu-
ously veiled, and, stopping for a few days in New York, is finally
en route for Japan. Here in this distant Oriental country his life
crystallizes into the pattern which it was to maintain until his
death. Here his two conflicting impulses, his love of the strange,
and his craving for a harbourage, are fused. In this static, artless
little world with its ancient rites and customs, its implications of
a soul too old and civilized to seek speech, he is at rest in the secure,
still "circle of himself," charmed and tranquillized, playing with
his reconnoitring intellect around the outskirts of those venerable
traditions which as yet had not been over-ridden or destroyed by
the pressure of Western civilization. Like the little figures in
Wells's Time Machine, almost too evolved for survival, these small
stoical people move in and out of his vision following their delicate
observances, according him perfect respect and courtesy, yet never
challenging him to real introspection. Disarmed, entranced, he,
Lafcadio Hearn, the ever suspicious, yet ever aspiring marries a
little Japanese wife of impeccable goodness and establishes himself
as the bread-winner of her large and ancient family. Yet how sig-
nificant that in a letter to his friend Basil Chamberlain, he could
recount a dream of a "gipsy dancing in the midst of a crowd;—
poising, hovering, balancing, tantalizing with eyes and gestures,—
and every click of the castanets went into my blood," and his in-


292
A DEFINITIVE HEARN
terest in dreams was acute, too—dreams, as he supposed, deposits
of race experience. The name Freud had not come upon his horizon.
When his first son is born he weaves about him his frustrated
hopes, his desire for tenderness, his vague terrors of the universe,
and with passionate concentration devotes himself to the child's
welfare. At last there is one who wholly depends on him, who is a
potential other self, a necessary anchor, and he can even replace his
old paeans to paganism for vague references to the value of a re-
ligious education for the young. He gives up his professorship at
the Japanese University so that he can become a Japanese citizen.
Through the whole range of Lafcadio Hearn's writings one finds
the same careful consideration of his craft, his feeling for words and
cadences, whether in his more rococo earlier works or in those later
ones where his exuberance has been hammered to an artful restraint.
He is always a serious artist of the small genre—an artist, however,
whose art is a little overbalanced by metaphysics and whose meta-
physics is poisoned by a mystical morality. In reading his letters
one wonders why he should have had such pious, or provincial, or
rationalizing friends. How they deplored his free pagan views and
welcomed as a sort of regeneration the diminishing fires of age!
And why did he acclaim Stevenson and Kipling as the intellectual
giants of the day?
Until his death this little modest, soft-voiced, propitiatory man,
with his acute nervous perceptions, reflective intelligence, exquisite
rectitude, unsatisfied libido, fierce pride, undeviating industry, and
his interest in the little ghostly, delicate by-ways of life—continues
the centre of a family of eleven who regard him with puzzled, unin-
quiring worship, and who remain to him always cryptic books sealed
in dainty bindings that charm his touch, but whose leaves he is un-
able to turn. And one likes him to the end, the strange little man
in his strange clothes in a world that remains always to the end pro-
foundly strange to his heart.
He died on September 26th, i904, at the age of fifty-four. Mrs
Hearn with that gentle economy of phrase characteristic of her race
writes thus of his death; "I advised him to lie quietly on his bed, and
he did so. Very soon after that he was no longer of this world. He
died without any pain having a little smile around his mouth. It
could not be helped if it was the order of heaven."
Alyse Gregory


THE IRISH POETIC TRADITION
Dramatic Legends and Other Poems. By Padraic
Colum. i2mo. i00 pages. The Macmillan Company.
$i.50.
THE Irish notion of poetry is different from that of the poets
of other nations. An English poem, for example, is "simple,
sensuous, passionate," one might almost add, logical: it is the con-
sistent embodiment of an idea emotionally realized: it fills and satis-
fies like music. Irish poetry, on the other hand, never attempts to
do what is only done for Ireland by its old national melodies: it is
neither simple nor sensuous, nor is it passionate, in the total sur-
render of the poet's nature to the necessity of utterance. Irish poets
are usually clever and versatile men, with talents for affairs and
public life, and when they write they do not wear their hearts upon
their sleeves, like the Keatses and Shelleys and Francis Thompsons;
nor is there much risk of an Irish Mrs Hemans. They cast forth
their reveries in riddles. When they write, they enter a symbolic
world to which they alone possess the clue, a world in which the
perennial themes of poets, love and war, doubt and faith, beauty
and pride, friendship, adventure, heroism, virtue, thought, and joy,
are present indeed, but as it were statically, and no longer as the
motive forces which perplex, reward, and redeem men. Ireland it-
self is seen, not as a place in which to "make a happy fireside hame
for weans and wife," but as a homeless and shifting figure; and
nature is regarded as an entity aloof from mankind, imparting its
secrets to the dead rather than to the living, and to mice and squir-
rels rather than to Plato and St Paul. The driving of Irish litera-
ture into a channel of its own, though it is in the English language,
is mostly due to the remarkable genius of Mr W. B. Yeats, who,
though he did not originate the spirit of modern Irish poetry—that
was rather the achievement of men like Mangan and Sir Samuel Fer-
guson—made it self-conscious and secured it recognition. The more
one looks into ancient and mediaeval Irish literature the more one
feels that Yeats has divined its character, or else is the natural rein-
carnation of its spirit. Can such poetry possibly have a great future?


THE IRISH POETIC TRADITION
Perhaps the absence of supereminent names from such a literature
will be recompensed by its continuity. English poetry shows from
the start a progressive development, but it has little spiritual con-
tinuity: after Milton comes Pope, after Pope comes Blake, after
Tennyson comes Kipling. A literary tradition persisting through
the ages, always preserving the same mood, always adopting the
same symbols, might ultimately have a weight in the spiritual coun-
cils of the world denied to prouder literatures, to which neverthe-
less the greatest names may belong.
Mr Colum writes in the full current of the Irish poetic tradition.
Superfically, he might seem to have yielded overmuch to the Yeats
influence, but a little knowledge of him shows that he is working
quite independently: there is a Colum-world, clear and distinct, and
interpreted by an eye far more directly conversant with the things
that make up the life of the Irish folk than is Mr Yeats'. As with
all poets, there are themes which are his special property, and pro-
voke him into being himself: such a theme is the broken magnifi-
cence of ancient imagery still gleaming in the speech of some old
vagrant of the roads—"as in wild earth some Grecian vase." This
phrase is a quotation from Mr Colum's first volume, Wild Earth,
and the theme holds him in one of his new poems:
"The lore she had
Was like a kingly robe, on which long rains
Have fallen and fallen, and parted
The finely woven web, and have washed away
The kingly colour, but have left some threads
Still golden, and some feathers still as shining
As the kingfisher's. While she sate there, not spinning,
Not weaving anything but her own fancies,
We ate potatoes out of the ash, and thought them
Like golden apples out of Tiprobane."
Personally, I have found tramps and vagrants a little disappointing
when I have ventured to engage them in discourse: possibly they re-
quire to be approached in the spirit of Mr Colum's world, in which
they are the true aristocrats, for in that world it is their poverty and
solitude which have ensured to them their inheritance.
It is no doubt due to the intimacy of Mr Colum with the life of


JOHN EGLINTON
295
the people that he is one of the few poets of the "Irish Renaissance"
who have achieved popularity in Ireland. It is easy to understand
how he has deserved it, for his poems are the breathings of an affec-
tionate nature. He loves the half-doors and yards of the Irish coun-
try-folk, the smell of the cows, the noise of a spade going into the
ground; he knows all the routine of the Irish day; he can say a word
to the children, and talk to the man of the house about his crops.
He knows all the neighbours, and the people who come into the
village, the old woman who keeps a toy-booth, the honey seller, the
man with the hounds, the "bird-alone" old woman of the roads. In
reading Colum I feel a regret that we seem to have just missed hav-
ing in him that long-wanted poet who, ploughing his native soil like
Robert Burns, might have put a new heart into the Irish country-
side; as it is, his exile, now apparently voluntary, has given an air
of wistfulness to all his moods, which keeps him within the limits
of the still unbroken Irish sadness. Like Burns, Mr Colum has two
manners, one, the intimate folk-manner in which he is really him-
self; the other, not I think so satisfactory, in which he writes much
like other English and American poets of the younger school. There
is another analogy in his work to that of Burns (though in pursu-
ing it I should acknowledge that no two poets could be more really
unlike than Burns and Colum): Mr Henley has shown in his
famous essay how Burns had so thoroughly absorbed the folk-poetry
of his country, that we can hardly distinguish between what is origi-
nal in his work and what is caught out of the common folk-memory.
Mr Colum's new book consists largely of adaptations from the
Gaelic, and unless he had been scrupulous enough to indicate the
fact in notes, we should have hardly known when the voice was not
entirely his own.
Mr Colum has gone far since I first knew him in Dublin, while
I was the editor of an impecunious and short-lived periodical of a
somewhat serious turn. I remember how he once scribbled out in
my presence a poem he had just composed, and left it with me: it
was the poem now familiar to those who know Irish literature, The
Old Woman of the Roads. "It's like a daisy!" exclaimed a friend
to whom I displayed it with becoming pride: and the phrase always
remains with me as the best description of a poem by Colum when
he is at his best. There is no poem in this new book of his quite like
a daisy. He has grown experimental and has developed some exotic


296 THE IRISH POETIC TRADITION
tastes; he is liable to occasional entanglements and obscurities; but
on the other hand he is more varied and more melodious. The Wild
Ass is a good example of his later manner:
"The wild ass lounges, legs struck out
In vagrom unconcern:
The tombs of Achaemenian kings
Are for those hooves to spurn.
And all of rugged Tartary
Lies with him on the ground,
The Tartary that knows no awe,
That has nor ban nor bound.
The wild horse from the herd is plucked
To bear a saddle's weight;
The boar is one keeps covert, and
The wolf runs with a mate;
But he's the solitary of space,
Curbless and unbeguiled;
The only being that bears a heart
Not recreant to the wild."
But I would rather have quoted a longer poem, in the series called
Reminiscence, "It would not be far for us to go back to the age of
bronze," a rare example of success with the unrhymed lyric.
If Mr Colum reads this notice I hope he will take to heart what I
have said about Robert Burns!
John Eglinton


THE HAMLET CONTROVERSY
Shakespeare's "Hamlet." By A. Clutton-Brock.
i6mo. i25 pages. E. P. Dutton and Company. $2.
MR CLUTTON-BROCK'S book on Hamlet is an attempt to
answer the theory recently put forth by Mr J. M. Robertson
in his book, The Problem of Hamlet, and further sponsored by Mr
T. S. Eliot in his collection of essays, The Sacred Wood. Mr Rob-
ertson believes, on the evidence of the i603 Quarto—an earlier and
much cruder text than the one we know—and of an even cruder
German version of Hamlet called Der Bestrafte Brudermord, that
our own Hamlet—a post-Shakespearean combination of two texts
which differ considerably from each other, the 1604 Quarto and the
i623 Folio—represents merely an unsuccessful attempt on Shake-
speare's part to refine and humanize an old play by someone else;
that, in fact, in the process of purging away the original barbarities
of the story, Shakespeare purged away the original motive of Ham-
let's delay in killing the King and has so left an unmotivated drama
—or, in other words, a piece of nonsense. Mr Eliot accepts this
critical foundation and rears upon it a portentous superstructure.
He believes that Shakespeare used Hamlet to express certain per-
sonal emotions which had nothing to do with the situation in Den-
mark; and that it is for this reason that Hamlet never tells us
clearly why he behaves as he does: his reactions—really Shake-
speare's own reactions—are irrelevant to the play in which he finds
himself; his emotion "is inexpressible because it is in excess of the
facts as they appear." He concludes that the play, "so far from
being Shakespeare's masterpiece, is most certainly an artistic
failure."
Now I cannot agree with Mr Eliot that the critics of the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries, to whose criticism he would wish
us to return, had a better instinct about Hamlet than we. With
their passion for the orderly and the reasonable they realized that
Shakespeare's performance had fallen short of perfection; but their
prosaic minds prevented them from understanding in the first place
what Shakespeare was trying to present. "To speak truth," wrote


298 THE HAMLET CONTROVERSY
Hanmer, "our poet, by keeping too close to the groundwork of his
plot, has fallen into an absurdity; there appears no reason at all in
nature why this young prince did not put the usurper to death as
soon as possible, especially as Hamlet is represented as a youth so
brave and so careless of his life." "The poet is accused," wrote Dr
Johnson, "of having shown little regard to poetical justice, and may
be charged with equal neglect of poetical probability. The appari-
tion left the regions of the dead to little purpose; the revenge which
he demands is not obtained but by the death of him that was re-
quired to take it; and the gratification which would arise from the
destruction of an usurper and a murderer is abated by the untimely
death of Ophelia, the young, the beautiful, the harmless, and the
pious." What then was Shakespeare trying to present that Dr
Johnson and Hanmer missed so completely? Was it not the tragedy
of the highly civilized man trying to deal with a situation to which
he is superior? Hamlet was what we should call nowadays an
"intellectual," with the strengths and weaknesses of the intellec-
tual—he is also what was once called a "Romantic." Or rather, he
is one of the most convincing representatives in fiction of the sort
of person who has supplied both these classes. He is the clever man,
the imaginative man, the idealist—the man who comes to grief in
the world because he is clever enough to see through it, yet neither
detached enough to stand aloof from it nor strong enough to master
it. The amazing thing is that in our own day there is any one to
misunderstand Hamlet. To the eighteenth century he was an
anachronism; he had appeared two hundred years too early. But
for the last hundred years at least we have had Hamlet night and
day. When we meet him in Moon Calf or Main Street, we have
no difficulty in understanding him; it is only his appearance in an
Elizabethan tragedy which throws us off. Yet from the Princess
Cassamassima to Three Soldiers he has become the stock hero of
our fiction.
It is so that Mr Clutton-Brock sees him and tries intelligently to
justify him. For Mr Clutton-Brock Hamlet is the man whose na-
ture is
"too rich to be narrowed into a vendetta. . . . This richness
is always rebelling against the narrow passion of revenge imposed
upon it. He hates but with a hatred that cannot be satisfied with


EDMUND WILSON, JR.
299
any act of revenge, since it is really not so much hatred even of the
King as of a beastliness in life itself which the King represents for
him. That is what is meant when Hamlet is called a philosopher.
It is not that he is incapable of action but that action cannot satisfy
a mind shocked by life itself."
My only complaint against Mr Clutton-Brock is that he does not
carry this line quite far enough. I believe that Hamlet pursued the
moral problems involved in his situation even further than Mr
Clutton-Brock makes him and that he was betrayed by the obverse
qualities of his sensitiveness even more profoundly than Mr Clut-
ton-Brock notes.
Hamlet's unfitness for the emergency which he has to deal with
wears the double aspect of all such temperaments—very often lit-
erary, like his. On the one hand, he is too intelligent; on the other,
he is too incompetent. On the one hand, his scepticism about the
moral assumption upon which his obligation rests makes it impos-
sible for him to take it quite seriously; and on the other, he is too
little accustomed to dealing with the values of the vulgar world
even to discharge it for the purpose of getting it over. In fact, on
the one hand, as Mr Masefield says, he is "too wise" for the situa-
tion; and, on the other, as Coleridge says, in a character of Hamlet
which Mr Eliot regards as a sheer irrelevant creation of Cole-
ridge's, "in Hamlet this balance (between the real and the imagi-
nary world) is disturbed; his thoughts and the images of his fancy
are far more vivid than his actual perceptions. . . . Hence we
see a great, an almost enormous, intellectual activity, and a propor-
tionate aversion to real action consequent upon it." Now we see a
man of this sort inextricably caught in a barbarous situation; he is
heir apparent to the throne of Denmark and it is more difficult for
him than for any other man in the country to avoid the responsibili-
ties imposed upon him by the tradition of the society in which he
lives. Mr Eliot will claim at once that this explanation is open to
the same objection as Coleridge's—that I have merely created a
character of my own for which no evidence is to be found in
Shakespeare. But is not this, after all, approximately what the ma-
jority of intelligent men have felt about Hamlet since the eighteenth
century1? Just as in Coriolanus, whom Mr Eliot recognizes and
applauds, we recognize the spirit of unreasonable pride which


3oo THE HAMLET CONTROVERSY
brings a man of action to grief by making loyalty to any group im-
possible, so in Hamlet we recognize the spirit of maladjusted ideal-
ism which, for example, made John Andrews such a failure as a
soldier in the late war.
To Hamlet—like the voice of the past itself, the voice of tradi-
tion and authority—comes the command of his father's ghost to
avenge the murder. The young man at first reacts violently and
conventionally into rage against his uncle, but he expresses this rage
less in imprecations than by intellectualizing it as fantastic irony.
And from the very first it is made quite clear that he will never turn
it directly into action. He swears that he will give up his old habit
of mind and henceforth devote himself to the world of realities—
"Remember thee!
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there;
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmix'd with baser matter . . ."
No more books then! No more "life of the mind"! But in the very
next breath he is as much an "intellectual" as ever. He has made a
phrase about his father's murderer's being a "smiling, damned vil-
lain" and he at once sets it down in his note-book—"So, uncle, there
you are." It is an exclamation of satisfaction and relief. We know
at once that Hamlet does not really want to kill his uncle; it has
been enough for his rage at the moment to have written down his
ideas about the villain. But "Now to my word ... I have
sworn't" he immediately adds, to remind himself of his obligation.
From this point, Hamlet becomes entangled in a whole net-work
of complex reactions. The necessity for behaving like the people
about him brings out his incurable difference from them. He finds
himself the only civilized man in a world of fools—a world whose
highest reaches of virtue and intelligence are to be found in the
prosaic fidelity of Horatio and in the ideals recommended by
Polonius to Laertes at the very beginning of the play. He is far
more shocked by what he regards as his mother's wantonness than
by the commonplace villainy of the King; and, in any case, he


EDMUND WILSON, JR.
30i
draws general conclusions from both phenomena which at once
advance him far beyond his neighbours as a moralist and make it
impossible for him to fulfil his obligation. But for the grace of
God, he reflects, he might have committed the same crimes himself!
"I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious. . . . We are arrant
knaves all; believe none of us." He himself has been ambitious like
the King—his prolonged moodiness after his father's death has
apparently been caused not only by grief for his father, but also by
disappointment at not having got the throne ( "He that hath kill'd
my king and whored my mother; Popp'd in between the election
and my hopes"). And, like the Queen, he has felt himself capable
of sins of lust—for when the new situation arises it is apparent that
he has had dishonourable designs upon Ophelia, whom as a Prince he
cannot marry. When he has recognized in himself the vices he is
supposed to punish in his fellows, his rage, as Mr Clutton-Brock
says, is directed against the beastliness of life itself.
He has, finally, however, succeeded in making himself take a step
toward discharging his obligation. He hits upon a literary device
for accusing the King: he writes his accusation into a play and
causes the play to be acted before him. Then, instead of following
up the King's admission of guilt with a swift and conclusive re-
venge, alleging a moral scruple he goes first to denounce his mother,
whose sins have touched him so much more deeply than the King's.
In the hysterical excitement of the interview, he kills Polonius by
mistake for the King. Then his violence flags again; he allows
himself to be shipped off. But now he has himself a crime to answer
for. When he returns, he is slain by Laertes, who, by a perfect
irony, has precisely Hamlet's motive. He, too, is avenging a father.
But, unlike Hamlet, he goes straight to his task; his enraged loyalty,
unlike Hamlet's, does not stop even at treachery (it is only at the
very end, when it is too late, that he feels a qualm). And Hamlet
only succeeds in slaying the King in the agony and outrage of his
own death. In the end, the stage is left to Fortinbras, who has no
doubt how to deal with realities and who has evidently never even
conceived the possibility of such a being as Hamlet.
What then is the matter with Hamlet? Why has it always caused
so much trouble? I believe that there is a little more justice to Mr
Eliot's case than Mr Clutton-Brock gives him credit for. There
certainly is something anomalous about the play: there is a real dis-
crepancy between Hamlet's emotions and the situation in which he


302 THE HAMLET CONTROVERSY
finds himself; though it is not the abysmal discrepancy which Mr
Eliot seems to see. I cannot agree that Hamlet is full of irrele-
vancies carried over from the original "intractable material"; Mr
Clutton-Brock seems to me very ably to have refuted the case
against the Polonius-Reynaldo and the Polonius-Laertes scenes,
which Mr Eliot regards as not only "unexplained," but also as not
even "beyond doubt in the style of Shakespeare" (though Mr Clut-
ton-Brock could add that, as I have said, the latter sets the whole
moral tone of the world in which Hamlet lives and would seem to
be authenticated as beyond doubt in the style of Shakespeare by the
fact that the speech of Polonius corresponds exactly with the advice
of the Countess of Rousillon to her son in the first act of All's Well
That Ends Well). But I do feel in the case of Hamlet, as I feel
also in a minor degree in the case of Macbeth, that the hero's reac-
tions are too sophisticated for so barbarous a situation. Shake-
speare's barbarian world has less logic than his Roman world or his
English world. It is much more obviously the world of a dream.
In Hamlet we have a Renaissance man like Hamlet himself, a man
who speaks the language and even the gossip of Shakespeare's own
time, side by side with the King and Queen, who at best behave like
primitive chieftains and at worst are scarcely distinguishable from
the wooden figures of the old chronicles themselves. Hamlet is in-
credible, absurd if you like—but it is one of the most convincing
things ever written. I should not dispute Mr Eliot's contention
that Coriolanus and Antony And Cleopatra are much more "assured
artistic successes": they stand on solid unmistakable bases and there
are no gaps or superfluities in their structure. They are rigorous and
sober studies of characters not enormously complex. They are un-
questionably more perfect; but that does not necessarily make them
greater. For one thing, in writing Hamlet, Shakespeare was at-
tempting something much more difficult; he was trying to present a
kind of man for which he could have got no models from the past.
He had scarcely even the vocabulary to express the thoughts of
such a man. But a sort of animus seems to have driven him to at-
tempt it. And the result, although less objective and less completely
satisfactory as fiction than the later Roman tragedies, is one of the
great poems of the modern soul. At first glance we may feel our-
selves put off by the antique barbarity of Denmark; but if we look
again, we see ourselves.
1 Edmund Wilson, Jr.


THE SNOWS OF YESTERYEAR
Against the Grain (A Rebours). By J-K. Huys-
mans. Translated by John Howard. With an Intro-
duction by Havelock Ellis. 8vo. jji pages. Lieber
and Lewis. $3.
1HAVE heard that this is considered a superior translation of a
celebrated book, but, as a matter of fact, it is impossible to
speak of it very highly. That it must have been a labour is unques-
tionable, that it was a labour of love is evident, but the liaison be-
tween the translator and his subject is not altogether happy regarded
as a work of art. The book is bound in black boards with sacerdotal
gold lettering, giving something of the air of an actual breviary to
a novel which has been called the Breviary of the Decadence. This
intention, comprehensible in itself, is marred by the vermilion deco-
rations on the title-page like those of a cheap children's classic, and
by the too many sins of omission and commission due to the trans-
lator, or to the timidity of the publishers, or to the ineptitude of the
proof-reader, or to a combination of the three. Two entire episodes,
one of them that of Des Esseintes and the gamin Auguste are, with-
out any real excuse, dropped from this version. Why the simple
word "duke" should appear feudally arrayed in italics as "due,"
while the word "sangfroid" is written as if it were English and split
in two halves by a hyphen, is not obvious. More serious than these
minor solecisms is the treatment accorded to whole passages such as
Huysmans' expressive paragraphs on the Satyricon of Petronius.
Surely Mr Howard knows that the bastard Greek names Ascyltos
and Eumolpos should not appear in any respectable English trans-
lation as Ascylte and Eumolpe. It is like designating the Serpent of
old Nile as Cleopatre or the Roman historian as Tite Live. In the
same sentence occurs a blunder which can be explained only by the
most fundamental ignorance of the subject treated or the language
translated. Everyone knows that the word "giton" owes its very
existence in the French vocabulary to the sprightliest of Petronius'
male creations. In default of any gamier expression it might be
rendered in English as "minion," or as some more colloquial locu-


304 THE SNOWS OF YESTERYEAR
tion, but a glance at the dictionary might have told Mr Howard
that it could not possibly be traduced as "depraved little girl"\
These are errors of detail, but an accumulation of such errors deep-
ens in the reader a mistaken conviction that this book, at once recon-
dite and a little demoded, should never have been translated at all.
Such an impression would be unfortunate. A Rebours is not only
a very precious and remarkable work of criticism, but it has had a
singular influence on the literary psychology of a whole generation,
not only in France, but in England. This influence was directed by
what might be called the second flight of French writers on a genera-
tion succeeding the Pre-Raphaelite and Swinburnian one which had
in turn submitted to the delirous magic of Raudelaire. That it was
caviar to the multitude and anathema to the cultured and "whole-
some" majority is, after all, beside the point. Volumes continue to
be written on the English Nineties, the aesthetic period which found
its most conspicuous exponent in the late Oscar Wilde, and the single
novel by that writer is nothing more than A Rebours diluted into
the literary idiom of Oxford University. Personally, we may think
The Picture of Dorian Gray very small beer, and its author one of
the most overrated of minor comedians, but no less a personage than
M Jean Cocteau has declared in cold print that this novel "poi-
soned" his youth. That the aesthetic arbiter of contemporary Paris
should have been poisoned by a book which is, substantially, the
Magdalen-cum-Mayfair version of another book now thirty years
old, throws an interesting light on a literary aspect of our own time.
It is certainly legitimate to revert to Huysmans as the original sin-
ner, and examine the fons et origo of a picturesque disease which is,
evidently, not yet extinct.
This malady, whether it be called aestheticism, or decadence, or
Tart pour Part, or the interior life, is the theme of A Rebours.
Lilceall its author's productions, it deals with a situation, expanded
to its last possibilities, not with the developments arising from a
situation,, and it has only one character.
The Due des Esseintes is the last representative of his race. At
the age of thirty he has simplified his philosophy into a complete
detestation of his fellow-men. In such a case there is, there can be,
no novel, for a novel implies action and conflict arising from desire,
and Des Esseintes is empty of desire since he is deprived of all vital-
ity save a febrile loathing for mankind. Nevertheless he is not in-


CUTHBERT WRIGHT
305
capable of loving. He loves art—that is, the art of other men and
other ages—but even this aesthetic passion is infected by his disease.
In the first chapter, he retires to an hermetical house in a desolate
suburb where he gives himself up to a kind of ghastly aestheticism,
amused by a mouth-orchestra composed of liquors, a concert con-
sisting of perfumes, a mechanical landscape, and a mock sea. He
buys a tortoise and incrusts its shell with a sheet of gold and jewels,
but the unfortunate animal, accustomed to a quiet life, succumbs
under its rutilant cope and dies overnight. The Duke's bedroom is
in white and violet like a monk's cell, and on the lectern of old
iron is a splendidly illuminated altar-canon containing Baudelaire's
prose poem: Anywhere Out of the World.
All this seems dangerously close to satire, conscious or uncon-
scious, and satire of a rather macabre sort is by no means lacking in
Huysmans. There are passages in the book which suggest the volup-
tuary in Punch: "To rise, to take a little opium, to sleep till lunch,
and after again to take a little opium, and sleep till dinner, that is
pleasure!" The deliberate extravagance with which it is inlaid
found immediate and perfervid admirers, particularly in England.
Compton Mackenzie has a story of an Oxford undergraduate, after-
wards a hard-working curate in a slum mission, who decided to go
Des Esseintes one better, and appeared on the High Street leading
a lobster on a silver chain. If the book had been merely an inspira-
tion for sophomoric fantasies of this sort (among which we should
certainly include Mr Wilde's novel) it need hardly have been resur-
rected in English after all these years. Its art, its philosophy, identi-
cal with those of its illustrious and unhappy writer, are so much
more important than any incidentally grotesque symbols of blue
china or gilded tortoises, that they are worth a moment's thought.
"Decadence," we are reminded by Mr Havelock Ellis in a won-
derfully penetrating study of Huysmans, "is simply an attitude
toward life and art. Technically speaking, a decadent style is only
such in relation to a classic style." In short, there can be no Act of
Uniformity applied to the dominion of art. A decadent art has only
the remotest relation to morality. The classic herring of Horace
cannot pretend any moral superiority to the decadent bloater of
Huysmans; and despite the enervating harmonies of Debussy, there
is nothing specifically immoral in employing the whole-tone scale.
Is there, however, a sense in which the decadence of Huysmans,


306 THE SNOWS OF YESTERYEAR
merging, as it ultimately did merge, into an extreme Christian indi-
vidualism, can be called immoral? Doubtless, if an aberration of
the nervous system, consciously willed and enjoyed, can be con-
sidered immoral. Pagan art, the art which can properly be called
classic, knew nothing of the morose delectation with which the
Huysmanses of this work regard beauty. It has always dealt with
candid, sunny tones and elemental things; it has not shrunk from or
despised what Mr Ellis finely calls "the adorable mystery of com-
mon life and the human love" which are commonplace only to the
anaemic. The extreme romanticist, everyone who wishes "to escape
from life," rejects these things because he is at once insufficient and
afraid. Artist and mystic, agnostic and believer, they are at one in
the common sentiment that they deny and hate the world. "Tu con-
nais cette maladie fievreuse qui s'empare de nous dans les froides
miseres, cette nostalgie du pays qu'on ignore. . . . There is a coun-
try made in your image, where all is beautiful, rich, quiet and hon-
est, where life is sweet to breathe, where happiness is wedded to
silence. It is there that we should live, it is there that we should
die." How perfect is the identity between people like Huysmans
and Baudelaire in the cold squalor of garnis, amid the wet detritus
of dead seasons, and the mediaeval mystic, super flumina Babylonis,
longing for "the happy city, the celestial vision of peace." All his
life, Huysmans was tortured by a longing (it is the reason and secret
of his art) for "a real country of Cockaigne, where all is beautiful,
clean and shining like a clear conscience ... a singular coun-
try excelling others as art excels nature." Tormented and unhappy,
he wandered through a world that was like an obscure wood, a forest
bristling with differences, and when he came to his senses he had, in
some unknown fashion, reached sanctuary, and found himself in a
church.
"In this atmosphere it was good to live; far off, where slower
hours contain more thoughts, where clocks strike happiness with a
deeper and more significant solemnity."
Cuthbert Wright


UTOPIA REVISITED
The Story of Utopias. By Lewis Mumford. 8vo.
3i5 pages. Boni and Liveright. $3.
HE Utopia of Lewis Mumford takes the form of a fresh ex-
X amination of the utopias of others, in much the same way that
philosophers launch themselves from re-examination of anterior
systems. By design it is a criticism of man's collective life in terms
of his inveterate dreaming about the good life. If this seem to
license the critic to roam the void for his values, "Nowhere," says
Mr Mumford, "may be an imaginary country, but News from No-
where is real news." So he takes the whole universe of utopia for
his province, and it proves not so vast after all.
That firmament of perfection rings him round as he stands on
the present as on the shoulder of a mountain, preparing to make
his own map about the major topography of the historic past spread
out below. Cities builded by no hand hover on the horizon that
confines both present and past, and he knows that each is no more,
and no less, than a mirage flung up from some quarter of the ter-
rain. With Professor Robinson, cartographer of Mind in the Mak-
ing, he recognizes that all such images of reality properly belong
on the map; that they are, indeed, the very legends without which
it would be next to unintelligible. Mr Mumford's name for these
legends is idola. Now, if we can ever decipher all of man's idola
and relate them to their generating and generated actualities, we
shall have the one really significant history of man. Professor
Robinson's map of the developing mind and Mr Mumford's map
of utopia are, of course, only two plates toward that atlas, but we
shall be luckier than we deserve if they are superseded in our
time.
Twenty-three hundred years of interaction between man's social
polity and his idola get reinterpreted and re-evaluated in Mr Mum-
ford's chart of selection and emphasis, until the void of Nowhere
through which we approached Plato has become, when we leave
Wells, a notably integrated cosmos of the heart's desire—a land
with a constitution, a history, and a future. We are as familiar
with its virtues and defects, liberties and compulsions, practicable


3o8
UTOPIA REVISITED
and impracticable institutions as with those of any foreign nation
in which we have travelled: the map of utopia works.
Thanks, primarily, to its scale. Man is the measure of this uto-
pian universe—man in his passionate, restricted, aspiring reality.
The guardian angels of Plato's sunlit Republic turn out to be
good Americans: their function is "to manufacture liberty"—and
censor art. If the fanatical utopianism of the Middle Age all but
fades from the map, it is because those cities are of God, not of
men; Mr Mumford will not have our common clay eclipsed by
pearly gates and walls of jasper. The farmers who cultivate More's
island of Utopia enslave their criminals, which permits them to
take their "natural pleasure" in an "uncommonly good club" in
Amaurat, a town as like every other town on the island as American
cities are alike. Across a narrow channel lies Andrew's Christian-
opolis, a city of fine workshops, comfortable apartment houses—
and compulsory chapel. When your eyes tire of these thrifty neigh-
bourhoods, look under the equator, where Fra Tomasso Campanella
compensated himself for the austerity of his vows by building a
blazing City of the Sun and nationalizing women, or where Fran-
cis Bacon established in the New Atlantis a glittering but useless
Salomon Foundation. Do your eyes dazzle? Turn them this way
on the Iron Age. Towns with the names of Pullman cars—Vic-
toria, Spensonia, Edendale, Icara (capital of Icaria, founded by
old man Icar)—celebrate the triumphs of the new freedom: uni-
versal service in overalls, large-scale production of human buttons
and iron buttonholes, the Australian ballot, Prohibition. The
future? How about our little old U. S. A. in the year 2000, with
its Great Trust, its Labor Army, its "alumni control" by a Gene-
ral Staff of ex-hazers, its universal broadcasting of news and ser-
mons. The place name of this perfect flower of propaganda is—
Looking Backward.
Must you go so soon? Here are three exits: W. H. Hudson
holds the door marked Crystal Age; you look over fresh fields to
a charming country house, wherein a matriarchal queen bee
monopolizes the reproduction of the human species, and rebellious
sex is "released" by euthanasia. William Morris swings open the
gate to Nowhere, the smiling Thames valley where no London
grins; and here men are men, women are women—but artists are
all craftsmen, craftsmen all artists. H. G. Wells pulls back the
grating to his express elevator Modern Utopia, which will whisk


CLARENCE BRITTEN
309
you to a metropolitan planet as tidy as a hospital—after you have
registered your thumb print that the International State may keep
track of you at every moment. Select the exit nearest your heart
and walk (do not run) to that exit.
The solid citizen, of course, has long since retreated into The
Here and The Now, those twin cities of refuge behind high tariff
walls against ideas. But Mr Mumford has put them on the map
too. I can only acknowledge, I cannot hope to convey, the glow-
ing virtuosity with which he represents the contemporary scene
under its dominant idola, criticizing them as if they already existed
in utopian literature, as now they do. His Country House, of
which the Abbey of Theleme is the blue print and Heartbreak
House the realization, is the castle out of work and living "the
goods life"—its liberty cloying leisure, its law passive taste, its
style derivative and capricious, its function to consume insatiably
and never produce. It created and now snubs a Frankenstein's golem
that produces interminably but cannot consume—Coketown, mon-
ster of stacks and dumps. Liaison between them is the function of
Megalopolis, a vertical filing case of a city, where "the religious
care of paper" is the chief end of man and where the policing myth
of the National State is "perpetually willed into existence." But
let no reformer or radical exult till he have examined another
corner of Mr Mumford's map (more loosely drawn, I confess)
where the partisan utopias of the ismist are labeled fetishes—
arbitrary segments of life masquerading as the human whole, each
laying claim to all the driving and lifting power generated by the
whole.
Indeed, every line of the map shouts that whether the utopia
be of "escape" or of "reconstruction," the one thing man cannot
escape is Man—the whole man, creator and consumer. The escapes
into creation are unanimously sumptuary, and the good life of con-
sumption invariably coerces or censors creation. As to what must
be reconstructed in utopia there is general agreement on only a few
essentials: common possession of the land and of natural resources,
work of some kind for all, some sort of eugenics. To these Mr
Mumford appends his conviction that any humane society will
drop such dogmas as the National State and the Proletariate—an
inconsiderable apostasy, by the way, beside the Renaissance seces-
sion from the City of God. For the rest, "in the Kingdom of Euto-
pia," he quotes Patrick Geddes, "there will be many mansions."


3io
UTOPIA REVISITED
Of the Mumford Mansion (when, as, and if it shall be built)
the site is indicated—an eminence with a wide view—and the
style is determined—the spacious, flowing humanism that sings a
perpetual duet with nature. Little of the exotic Country House
here, and nothing of the Coketown tenement; definitively a dwell-
ing, a home in which to live, work, and take your ease at sundown.
Though no exact plans have been drafted, some indispensable ma-
terials are specified.
The two most important, unhappily, have been more closely
studied in their historical developments than in their processes:
certain formula for science and art bear a suspicious resemblance
to vest-pocket recipes for home brew. Mr Mumford thirsts after
"synthesis," and it is nectar; but the merely synthetic, alas, is some-
thing else again. Science—so progressively departmentalized since
Aristotle that the common man embraces superstition "as a more
easily apprehended version of reality" (as he did before)—and
art—since the Renaissance so increasingly deprived of "social desti-
nation" that "art for the artist's sake" has left the common man
nothing but the "second best"—must not only undergo "reorienta-
tion"; they must somehow achieve a "synthesis of intellect and
emotion." Synthetic humanism! The scientist, who is doing his ut-
most to be lucid, knows that any "more easily apprehended version"
of science will probably be superstition, and the artist sees ample
destination accorded the third best of art-for-the-academy's-sake.
The good society must, of course, make the humanest possible use
of the findings of science and of works of art; but if it attempt
to use the scientists and artists themselves under any "definite
hierarchy of human values" other than disinterested inquiry and un-
concerned expression, it will realize pseudo-science, propagandist
art—and rebellion.
Finally, was it the "neurotic individualism" of artists that drove
them from the modern world? Or are they neurotic individualists
(when they are) because that world has banished them? The
miracle is that after all the slings and arrows of outrageous de-
mocracy the artist still rushes to meet any honestly appreciative
tender of an humane occasion. Give his human value free play,
and the stone that the builders of Coketown rejected can be the
cornerstone of utopia. Utopia—it is the land of his exile!
Clarence Britten


BRIEFER MENTION
Kanga Creek: An Australian Idyll, by Havelock Ellis (i2mo, 68 pages;
Golden Cockerel Press: $i.60) contains no taint of vicarious fulfilment
on the part of its author, the adventurous and seasoned humanist whose
steady intelligence now adds a brief conquest in fiction to its distinctions in
philosophy, political and social analysis, literary criticism, and science. His
exhaustive research in sexual psychology led to an idyllic innocence which
still takes account of all the facts—a unique attitude toward sex in our age.
And it is this grasp of sex as essentially idyllic which contributes so much
charm to this fictional study of the fluctuating adolescent battle between
shyness, pride, self-abasement, and the mental and sexual expansions of
manhood. The theme is developed by a man who knows how to create
structure: witness the mood of alertness induced by the protagonist's watch-
fulness for snakes just prior to meeting the major girl character.
The Reign of the Evil One, by C. F. Ramuz (i2mo, i95 pages; Harcourt,
Brace: $2) is a fantastic and somewhat mystical, i. e., not altogether
clear, tale of Swiss peasant life laid in a picturesque valley of the Alps.
Its theme, doubtlessly woven from some ancient legend into a modern
setting, can be briefly summarized as follows: a peaceful village—advent
of evil, symbolized by The Stranger—plague, strife and crime—moral re-
generation. Although its mise en scene is clear and its characters human,
one is apt to speculate after reading this book on the author's reason for
writing it. It seems to draw no conclusion and to have no central idea.
Tales of the Jazz Age, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (i2mo, 3i7 pages; Scribners:
$i.75) is an exhibit of cleverness in the technique of salesmanship rather
than in the technique of fiction. The two are sometimes confused by those
critics who speak of the perfect technique of the American short story.
Salesmanship begins with the art-to-conceal-art dictum and proceeds to
smother technical functions, emotion, and thought in those informal
draperies which sell so well to the public which takes its fiction as relaxa-
tion. In his fourth book, Mr Fitzgerald still sticks this side of paradise: far
from eliminating the dross in his first book, he is actually exploiting it as
though it were literary as well as gold specie.
A History of French Literature, by William A. Nitze and E. Preston
Dargan (illus., 8vo, 78i pages; Holt: $5) is a work which for general
breadth of design and minuteness of detail compares very favourably
with Lanson's architectural monument to Gallic letters. It is to be queried,
however, whether of the two courses open to literary historians Taine did
not once and for all choose the better path: if he permitted some smaller
English fry to slip through his historical net, he at any rate let no whales
escape him. And Messrs Nitze and Dargan, though hauling in every
French writer of note have, by fishing up so many minnows, diverted at-
tention from the real monsters of their sea.


BRIEFER MENTION
More Authors and I, by C. Lewis Hind (i2mo, 302 pages; Dodd, Mead:
$2.50) as might be expected from the title, contains more I than authors.
Mr Hind is a past master at the art of gossiping and can probably hold his
own at the most strenuous of teas. But he is altogether too garrulous, too
essentially uncritical, and what passes at first for kindly warmth and
geniality becomes extremely irritating before the reader has drifted through
many pages. He brings the same sweetness and light to bear upon such
diverse characters as Rabindranath Tagore and Alfred Noyes, George Eliot
and Clement Wood, with no differentiation of values.
William Dean Howells, by Delmar Gross Cooke (i2mo, 279 pages; Dut-
ton: $3). Any effort to rehabilitate Howells' reputation as a novelist de-
serves our gratitude. Hence Mr Cooke's determination is admirable. He is
no special pleader. His "critical study" is sympathetic but honest. He has
evidently closeted himself with Howells through hundreds of laborious
days and nights. But he has wandered too long in academic groves. Some-
how in the heat of the chase, the grace and charm and warm humanity of
Howells evaded him. His book is alive—almost.
The World in Falseface, by George Jean Nathan (i2mo, 326 pages;
Knopf: $2.50) is a motley collection of digressions on the theatre, art,
women, and other things, with a foreword in the best Nathan imitation of
George Moore, vintage at least a quarter century old. George Jean as an
Olympian with a mild stogie in his mouth is a trifle disconcerting. Never-
theless, he is nothing if not clever.
Sidelights on American Literature, by Fred Lewis Pattee (8vo, 342
pages; Century: $2). This book is hailed as one containing unlaboured
judgements. Professor Pattee's essay called The Modernness of Philip
Freneau is suggestive, but it is so ineptly presented that whatever value
it has is rendered thereby wholly nugatory. On Poe and Longfellow the
author is nearer his own native acre. Even here he disengages no novel or
stimulating point of view, but he is at least intelligible and one can go
along with him some distance. When he comes to treat of modern writers,
Professor Pattee is completely at sea, and with an unmanageable wheel to
boot. In The Age of O. Henry the author falls into an astonishing error,
namely that because the popular commercial short story writer is a servile
imitator of O. Henry, O. Henry is therefore influencing the sound creative
writers of the present. No one with any critical taste, it is necessary to point
out to Professor Pattee, really thinks of O. Henry as a great writer. What
others think, does not matter. His chapter on Mencken occasionally un-
masks the truth about our swashbuckling critic, but it is spoiled by quota-
tions from Mencken's adolescent volume, Ventures in Verse, which he calls
"good work" and "highly original." For him Bernard Shaw is "windy,
cocksure, iconoclastic"—nothing more; Nietzsche is merely the "devil's
Messiah, the prophet Nietzsche, of the German Empire that was." The
prose should really be looked into by a competent board of examiners. It
is honeycombed with absurdities like "The phosphorus of it [the "obses-
sion" of "contemporaneousness"] eats into the bones and turns all the sky
to mucus."


BRIEFER MENTION
3i3
Jean Jacques Rousseau, by Henri-Frederic Amiel, translated by Van Wyck
Brooks (i2mo, 94 pages; Huebsch: $i) is a welcome specimen of Amiel's
generally neglected literary criticism, the phase of Amiel that Matthew
Arnold regretted did not develop into his central vocation. Amiel ob-
serves that "clairvoyance and neutrality" are necessary virtues for a critic,
and he indeed exemplifies them in his brief account of Rousseau's life, char-
acter, works, and influence; while his sympathy for Rousseau warms his
record into a fitting centennial discourse. The thorough critic, however,
must work through neutrality to a decision, not a sympathy. The force
that is Rousseau has been mounting on a grandiose crescendo of romanti-
cism, volitionalism, and expressionism; an opposing cycle in which Arnold
is an important structure is rising to meet it; the impending conflict com-
pels decision. Consequently, Amiel's "enumeration of the positive claims
of the Genevese philosopher" has a very timely interest.
Waldo Frank: A Study, by Gorham B. Munson, photograph by Alfred
Stieglitz (i2mo, 95 pages; Liveright: $i) undertakes, in a form which
very nearly approaches that of a narrative, to trace the gradual merger
between a temperament and a medium. This method leads to a treatment
of Frank almost exclusively in his own terms: his matter and technique,
that is, are translated into their ideological parallel. As a consequence, the
work will serve mainly as a Baedecker to a more accurate understanding of
Frank's programme; and if, when it is all over, we discover that Mr Mun-
son has given us less of a criticism than a sales talk, we also discover
that in revenge he has succeeded quite convincingly in "putting across" his
commodity.
A Pushcart at the Curb, by John Dos Passos (i2mo, 2i6 pages; Doran:
$i.50). Exoticism. Romance. Decoration. The poet thirsts unquenchably
after beauty and local colour, pursuing them through Andalusia and
Castile, Manhattan Island, Asia Minor, and on the left bank of the Seine.
Sometimes he approaches . . . stretches out his arms vainly
is left clinging to a patch of the torn skirt of beauty; maybe also with a
taste in his mouth. He weaves his adventures into a sort of Persian car-
pet, boldly coloured with ochre, carmine, turquoise, emerald, and bearing
the conventional design of a poet in search of beauty ... If Dos
Passos is less of a poet than a novelist, it does not follow that he is a
negligible poet.
Chinese White, by Gladys Oaks, illustrated by William Gropper (4to, 24
pages; Melomime Publications: $i.50) contains eight lyrics by a hand not
unsuited to nursery rhymes, but inappropriately directed by a mind which
is unconsciously and not deliberately silly. The accompanying black-and-
whites by Gropper again demonstrate him to be an illustrator of pleasant
tricks. He understands simplification and the more obvious relationships:
often, however, he gets no movement when motion is needed. But after
air-sickness induced by a flight through "sounds, sounds, sounds" until the
singer's nerves "part, snap" and she feels her soul "twist and roll, swerve
and roll," it is stabilizing to land on Mr Gropper's immovable lady an-
chored by a heavy harp.


3H
BRIEFER MENTION
Eight More Harvard Poets, edited by S. Foster Damon and Robert Silli-
man Hillyer (i2mo, i30 pages; Brentano: $i.50) is a volume which, with
one brilliant exception, falls greatly below the earlier Harvard anthology.
It is Malcolm Cowley who will run ahead of his ticket. His poems are
the work of a man keen on the formal elements of writing; with the re-
sult that, in addition to their cautious line-for-line texture, they manifest a
functional relationship between the parts, a sense of the beauty in balanc-
ing movement with counter-movement. There is other solid work in the
volume (more notably that of John Brooks Wheelwright and Grant Code)
but on the whole one must bow before that unpleasant person who would
call the book Too Many More Harvard Poets.
Poems of the Soil and Sea, by Charles Wagner (i2mo, 62 pages; Knopf:
$i.50). These poems ring the changes on the eternal themes of love,
beauty, nature, and death. Though characterized by fluency and delicacy of
expression, they fail to hit a distinctive, individual note. Contrary to the
implication of the title, the verse is redolent of neither brown earth or salt
spray. Nor does he open new or strange vistas. Here is no new or com-
pelling voice to startle attention. Now and then, a thin vein of irony is
disclosed. Intensive mining might reveal richer ore.
In Memoriam, by Martin Feinstein (i2mo, 62 pages; Seltzer: $i.25) is an
unusual first book of verse for these ebb-tide days of the much-touted renais-
sance in American poetry. It would be unusual if it contained no piece of
writing other than the title poem, an elegy in easy American rhythms for
"Ike and the nigger and Jones" who were hurled into the stew civilization
brewed for them. That the editors of The Nation should have chosen this
poem for their annual prize is distinctly to their credit. Mr Feinstein's
other work more than justifies their confidence.
Finders, by John V. A. Weaver (i2mo, 83 pages; Knopf: $i.50). In this
collection of "more poems in American" Mr Weaver still relies on his one
divine invention: that of trying to compensate for his sentimentality by
couching said sentimentality in bad English. One stickles at the bad Eng-
lish until one turns to a "serious" poem, and then for the first time one
realizes what a godsend the bad English really is. Thus does the author
provide his own relief. Mr Weaver's strength is like that of a Robert W.
Service with the painted ladies left out.
Granite and Alabaster, by Raymond Holden (i2mo, i30 pages; Macmil-
lan: $i.25). All discussions of form land eventually in content, and all
discussions of content arrive finally at the writer's personality. In the case
of neutral work, one is compelled to start at the wrong end, and by con-
sidering the personality explain the vacuum. Mr Holden is serious and
sincere, but he achieves none of the clarities and surprises which occur
when an intellect operates at the tips of the senses. The majority of his
poems are "nature" poems: the absence of direct feeling and the substitu-
tion of received ideas deaden his many observations (not perceptions) of
country life. Inevitably, he commits cliches and packs his lines but loosely
with meaning.


BRIEFER MENTION
3i5
In A Book of Plays, by Witter Bynner (i2mo, 255 pages; Knopf: $2.50)
Mr Bynner submits himself to an intelligence test provided by Aristotle,
and quite convincingly shows that one may be a successful lyricist upon a
minimum of intelligence. For of Plot, Character, Thought—all the work
of the intellect—there is tiny evidence in his plays. Either the emotions
exceed the facts, or vice versa, thus locating Mr Bynner in sentimental
melodrama. It is this lack of a perceiving, defining and constructing power
which accounts for the inflexible diction—a smooth oily purr in spite of
vocabulary changes. In the version of Iphigenia in Tauris, prepared for
Isadora Duncan, Euripides supplies the intelligence and Mr Bynner evinces
a pleasing superiority to Gilbert Murray.
Three Plays : The Dover Road, The Truth About Blayds, The Great
Broxopp, by A. A. Milne (i2mo, 295 pages; Putnam: $2). The desperate
need of the theatre for new forms gets no alleviation from Mr Milne, deft
craftsman and super-suburbanite. He uses standard forms and standard
content, injecting inessential oddities into the latter as an excuse for writ-
ing. His plays are not absurd enough to create their own worlds, nor pro-
found enough to criticize life. He does not have an excellent understand-
ing of suburban risibilities—often indeed holding up his design to manipu-
late them, but suburban humour is a softening agent, a means to justify
mediocre living, an effort to blur distinctions. It is entertainment of low
vitality, and its grip on the proper theatre explains partly the vogue of
vaudeville and other entertainment of high vitality.
East of Suez, by W. Somerset Maugham (l2mo, i38 pages; Doran: $i.25).
The great dramatist invents or steals good situations in order to fill them
with great speeches. Mr Maugham contrives dramatic situations and then
flats them by crude or feeble dialogue, noting however in the stage direc-
tions that his character was "excessively distressed" or "feels helpless and
strangely weak." The framework is a string of seven scenes: the theme is
the reclamation by China of an Eurasian girl whose single violent passion
for a vacillating white man drives her to suicide. Both suggest a com-
parison with Emperor Jones, from which one gets a keener realization of
the organic defects in East of Suez.
What Prohibition Has Done to America, by Fabian Franklin (i2mo,
i29 pages; Harcourt, Brace: $i) is a sober legalistic argument against the
Eighteenth Amendment and its consequences. It begins with the undis-
puted fact that prohibition is a denial of personal liberty and maintains
that the Eighteenth Amendment perverted a Constitution hitherto existent
for the purpose of safeguarding liberty into a mechanism for safeguarding
the denial of liberty. This violation has created millions of lawbreakers,
invaded States' Rights, and may even be, Mr Franklin imagines, a breach
for his horrible cartoon of socialism as complete regimentation. It takes no
master, however, to contrive superior dialectics to the Prohibitionists, while
Mr Franklin's blindness to the Constitution as the document of an idealism
victimized by economic interest makes his reverence for it naive. The drink
question is not fundamentally legal, but psychological; what is needed is
an expert analysis of the ugly obsession-neurosis prohibition has created.


COMMENT
E have received the following illuminating communication:
"Suppose that one could discover America not by returning to it,
but by sailing away from it. I do not underestimate the discoveries
made by those who have had the good fortune to spend a year
abroad and to find, on their return, that it is as well for a man not
to be wholly uprooted and that whatever our background may be,
it is ours for better and for worse. One must be either a philosopher
or a genius to know that without learning it, and as it is a knowl-
edge particularly useful to young men, the journey away from
home is worth the price. It is difficult to appreciate one's own coun-
try during one of those periods of patriotism which come regularly
over the civilized world—those periods which make it superfluous
to say 'false patriotism' and make i00% the symbol of that perfect
whole which Plato held the end of a divine love.
"Separation without the pathos of distance and without home-
sickness is the priceless advantage you have ten minutes after the
ship casts away; it is the moment when you can love your country
without wishing to be immediately taken up again into its life. So
viewed, America repudiates the Emersonian epigram as wholly
as it withstands the curses of the emigres. If America merely meant
opportunity in the narrow sense now given to the words, it would
really mean the benighted barbarism which, one heard last year
from the Cafe de la Rotonde, marks the return of the Dark Ages.
Opportunity in that sense means chaos, and although chaos is still
possible in America, it is less dearly bought than the foreign product
of the same grade and quality. Where the arts are concerned it
has always been understood that America did not mean opportu-
nity because it failed to provide the social framework, the tradition,
the whole sense of life favourable to the creative activity; and
with this has always gone the second article of faith, that America
would not pay for whatever art work America produced.
"