e of any
uncertainty of my feeling in regard to the work—that was clear
and profound—but because of an apprehension that the term might
be misunderstood. There was a danger that others might not re-
gard it as the triumph that I insist it is, and there was the possi-
bility (not important to my theory, however) that Weber himself
might not be a Jew. The new quality is not based upon the
lugubriousness of Weber's themes, nor the long beards of the Jews
who wail upon the housetops after the manner of the prophets, but
rather it comes to me in an abstract way and from the colour
chiefly. It is the richest, most distinguished, most eloquent use of
colour I have seen this winter. In a way I scarcely know how to
define, it seems to have come straight from the Old Testament to
Weber. It is sombre and with something in each tone that seems
to crystallize a human experience. The faded reds are the stains
dripping from the wine press, the blues are dull turquoise; and
onyx and lapis and alabaster and such terms spring to the mind
in recalling them, in preference to the prosaic qualifications of the
palette. The pictures may be said to reek with melancholy, but it
is a melancholy more than made supportable by this colour. Even
such a work as Meditation in which all the personae including
the dog beneath the table seem steeped in woe, the general author-
ity of the composition combined with the lovely colour make a
noble, and, upon the whole, exhilarating appeal. It would be a
fortifying possession for a Christian collector, and for a Jewish,
wonderful. But I have a horrid scepticism as to all the collectors
of the present, both Jew and Gentile, and fear the worst in regard
to Weber's selling possibilities. . . . To be sure, there are
the museums!!
Henry McBride


MUSICAL CHRONICLE
THE music of Schoenberg is concentrated as something
squeezed with relentless might in a fist. It is seized; held;
compressed. The water has been forced out. The softness and
the non-essential have been forced out. What remains is skele-
ton-bone. Into a few small tins an enormous blasting-might has
been stuffed.
All steps have been abbreviated. This mind has the tempo of
the modern world. It recognizes approaching situations from a
long ways off. It comes quickly to consciousness; becomes aware
with flashing quickness from the first low preliminary rustle and
quiver in the nerves. It has the power of exceedingly rapid ex-
perience. It goes into things; and gets done with them again
speedily. This is the great-surgeon technique. Schoenberg over-
leaps processes of relationship which to minds of slower tempi
seem irreducible and fundamental. In what appear succession
of dissonances, he hears a common pitch. Elements which seem
to have no common basis he approaches to one another as though
they were blood-brothers. The voices of his music have almost
anarchistic independence. They seem to lie far out from the com-
mon centre, on the edge of things. They are always like over-
tones of an implicit and unmentioned tone. But the links which
connect, though they are fine almost to the point of invisibility,
are formed of coldest durable steel. Great bales of substance,
far-lying, have been condensed.
As this mind hears closenesses between far-lying things, so, too,
it hears widths between close-lying chords. This music is com-
pressed and almost painfully distended, too. Between two chords
that lie so close the duller ear has difficulties in distinguishing
them, it perceives iron resistances. So intense is the denseness of
the harmony; so intense the density of the colour, that the paint-
ings of Georgia O'Keeffe, with their terrific concentrations, their
acid-sweet opposition of warms to warms, of scarlet to the violet-
red of burning alcohol, seem the one form of expression to which
this music can properly be compared. Schoenberg, too, seems to
hear oftentimes in single planes of colour. For that reason, he


PAUL ROSENFELD
has been obliged to increase the size of the families of certain in-
struments in his band, the clarinets, for example. He has to be
at liberty to realize whole full chords within the medium of a
single unmixed timbre.
Schoenberg's music moves with such spiritual rapidity; jumps
so many intermediary processes as it goes, that at first encounter
it seems almost grotesque. These rapid progressions, rapid chan-
ges of mood, abrupt sudden flights, sudden trilling of brasses in
their lower registers, fluttering of woodwind, sudden roaring cli-
maxes of sound followed upon by equally sudden silences, seem
the starts and twitches and twinges of an over-nervous man. But
the transitions are present. They may be indicated with epigram-
matic terseness. The form is preserved. In narrow spaces of time
he achieves searing, fiery summits of tone. The ecstatically heav-
ing violin-music of the few measures of Heimweh in Pierrot which
set the words
"Durch den bleichen Feuerschein des Mondes,
Durch des Lichtmeers Fluten—schweift die Sehnsucht
Kiihn hinauf, em for zum Heimathimmel—"
are like an oceanic Tristan-climax concentrated in tabloid form.
The concentration is in the economical instrumentation. Schoen-
berg's sear, ghostly scores are full of novel effects of a wonder-
ful sweetness and faery; grasshopper fiddlings; puffing of flutes
that sound like the chugging of exhausts; oriental subtlety ot
the human voice; fiuttertongues in the brass; delicate aerial
sotto-voce music for celesta, for piano, for harp. They are full
also of simple marvels of expressivity wrought with single instru-
mental voices. The melodrama in particular contains passages
comparable quite to the solo clarinet in the first movement of the
C-minor symphony of Beethoven; to the solo English horn in the
third act of Tristan; to the solo violin that opens the last scene of
Siegfried. The piccolo that slowly climbs at the close of O Alter
Duft opens windows and finds its way into pearly distances. In
Nacht, the tones of the bass-clarinet and 'cello are charged with
the fathomless depths of night. They are macabre and mysterious
and black. Der Kranke Mond, with its duo between voice and
flute, is like some painting out of China which records in a few


428
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
strokes a landscape, a history, a mood. Throughout the work,
brief phrases for single instruments descend like burning flakes
of snow, spark like the silver-green of glow-worms in and out of
the night, hold and stir like faint horncalls from afar.
The concentration of these forms is equivalent to the concen-
tration of intense pains and pleasures. Schoenberg is driven by
desire of a sharpness that sets him almost apart from the other
living composers. The refined burning sensuousness of Wagner,
of Debussy, and of Scriabine seems lodged in this man; tearing
at his flesh for egress. It achieves intensities that must be new
in life; of the nervous modern time. Swooning sensuousness suf-
fused his expressions from the first, even when his idiom was not
yet personal. It gives the sextette its penetrating tenderness, its
soprano-like violin colouring, its texture of moonfire. One hears
the ecstatic voluptuousness grown graver, more biting, in the final
sections of the quartette Op. 7. And in the Five Pieces, it utters
itsef with a poignancy become almost insupportable. A terrific
tension expresses itself in the third piece, Der Wechselnde Ac-
cord; in the slow, overlapping phrases, in the almost impercep-
tible changes of honey-sweet harmonies.
But it is a smothered desire that breaks loose in this music.
Schoenberg is the man without a machine. He is the creature of
a time of dislocation. The machinery of life no longer co-operates
with the human soul. It moves to a rhythm its own; and the
mechanical things laugh down the poor human. We have no tools
to work with. Tools, organizations, states, current ideas, social-
isms, anarchisms, capitalisms, they no longer express the human
being. They clutter the landscape. They fill the world with
their noise and smoke and bulk. They make people do their will
and misrepresent themselves. But they are of no use. The human
soul cannot work with them. But it has not forged implements ac-
cording to its needs. So the two things that ought to be harnessed
run wild of each other. Strawinsky is more the thing that has
run wild of man; the world in which no man exists; the mechani-
cal rhythm that shouts its triumph over the microscopic human
bug. He has tried to capture it for the imagination. The human
torso of this time is in the music of Schoenberg. He is the thing
without arms, without legs, without organs of communication,
without a phallus. He is the helpless quivering pulp; blindly stir-


PAUL ROSENFELD
429
ring, groping, stretching. An almost immovable weight seems to
lie upon his voice. And when it speaks, it seems to tear itself
through shrouds; to come out as agony, as hysteria even. The
ecstatic voluptuousness of Debussy, by the side of this of Schoen-
berg, is like a thing safely delivered, safely carried across to its
goal. It buds like flowers in the grass. Wagner's will, undercut
as it was, seems free and direct by the side of this mortally
wounded will. In these works, the cry of Amfortas and of the
sick Tristan is become shrill, piping, broken. The tones are full
of anguish; of anguish almost suffocated; but drumming and roar-
ing underneath the blanket of silence.
Anguish speaks out of the sweetest dreams. Eine Blasse Wa-
scherin is like a cool hand upon a pain-rent head; like the cool
linens that release the body after states of exhaustion. It is out
of some starvation-pit that the Pierrot yearns for Columbine.
She is the drink of water to a black and leathern mouth. Moments
of health are only moments of lessened sickness; moments when
desire twists and takes a happier way, and suffuses the dried heart
with dew; shivers of beauty that fall from the sky into his soli-
tude at some street-corner and for a fraction of a second thrill the
heart with unknown irretrievable bliss. For an instant, the past
sings in the blood, and scatters some delicious old perfume, some
pale gold light, into the grey air. More often, the pain speaks
direct. Sometimes, as in the first of the Five Pieces, it is merely
the image of the states of sick presentiment the music brings up
before us. Again, the fourth of the Five brings before us more
of the silent and atrocious music that goes on in the body during
bad quarter hours. Savage tearing arpeggios of the brass and
woodwind in contrary motion. In the interstices of the grinding
storm, the muted horns sing voiceless, broken song; a flight of
clarinets; and the world topples in. And at other, the music
cries with the pain of someone held down on an operating-table
and only half anaesthetized; and out of the unendurable tension
of overtaxed and shattered nerves. The piccolo shrieks in alarm.
The voice gasps under the pressure.
A score of tortured and bizarre moods are expressed by this
strange man. The melodrama is full of them; and they follow
upon each other with capricious inconsequentiality. Some of them
are poisonous; express themselves through the caricature and de-


43°
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
gradation of the image of some person in the brain. Some are
vexed and divided against themselves; lyric flight in the heart
and on the 'cello, self-mockery in the mind. There are moods of
boredom and enervation, moods of blasphemy and fear. There
are states that are almost hallucinatory; images that start in the
brain and begin to frighten the beholder, images of the rape of
forbidden things. Rhythms commence that will not let be and
pursue with their insistent patter. Panics start; over imaginary
things. Then crystal dreams interpose; momentary feelings of
union with the All; kisses of the moon and the unseen world;
moods of reconciliation and return to the dreams of youth.
It is not by chance that Pierrot Lunaire contains the daintiest
and most capricious of Schoenberg's ideas. The figure of the
languid clown of the unconscious gave Schoenberg a post about
which he could sling the most delicate of his tendrils. In itself,
it is a symbol of his helpless state. To be sure, the twenty-one
poems upon which this melodrama is erected, even in the original
French of Albert Giraud, are romantic decoration; stuff of i840.
Black masses, drops of blood on the lips of sick women, wounds
like red and open eyes, moons like Turkish scimitars on satin
swarthy pillows; were they ever anything but bad taste? And
Otto Erich Hartleben, the translator, has not improved upon his
original. With his faithful stein in one hand, he sat and put
heavy words for light. It is a pity Schoenberg could not have
done something with Laforgue. Nevertheless, even the bad poetry
had been useful to him. He could scarce, it seems, have gotten as
full an expression without the instrumentality of the voice. For
the singer, neither actually speaking, nor singing, save very oc-
casionally, and adumbrating tones in a speaking voice, achieves
the effect of something languorous, pallid, epicene even. The voice,
so tender and weak, is the shadow of the rose. It is curiously in-
between. And the music carries Giraud's poor stuff where it had
no wings to go. Schoenberg, at least, has made a vital form of
the mysterious stirrings and rumblings of the subconscious. He
gives sick apprehension and panicky states; not amateurish carica-
tures of them. This music is indeed the creature shaken by moods
that come upon him strange and ineluctable as hailstones on sum-
mer fields, and fill him with almost incommunicable dread and
bliss. It touches like a rose-petal; and there is a spark of drunk-


PAUL ROSENFELD
43i
enness in the blood; and a quick extinction. A feeling comes from
somewhere; and for an instant the world is afloat on moonbeams
down to the safe still place of home. The sun sinks slow; and the
painful splendour of election, of coronation, overwhelms; then
flits away swifter than the swallow. The witchery of a Chopin
waltz intoxicates; a phrase haunts and beckons mysteriously; but
its magic remains incomprehensible: and the summons it insist-
ently reiterates signals to something we have perhaps always un-
consciously desired, but never seen more than faintly in our minds
or known or understood. All the wine and hurt of vagrant
evanescent unreasonable moods pour over us. But it is only the
wine one drinks with eyes; and the hurt of shadow-swords that
leave no fleshly wound. Where the quiver and panic and exalta-
tion come from, is unknown. And they hardly connect at all with
the forces of the world, and substantiate themselves; but disap-
pear again into the arcana whence they came. All the election
and crucifixion of a saviour goes on in the imagination of Pierrot,
sick subject of the wandering moon. He too is apart from men
and knows the sorrowing mother and the piercing nails. But the
elevation and crucifixion go on only inside himself; and he remains
indeed a white and dreamy half-man, part poet, part dandy, and
part buffoon.
For the picture of Schoenberg we have lately gotten, we are
obliged to the International Composers' Guild; to Greta Torpadie,
Louis Gruenberg, and to the six musicians who played the instru-
ments in the production of Dreimal Sieben Gedichte aus Albert
Giraud's Pierrot Lunaire. Stokowski's presentation of the Five
Orchestral Pieces last winter commenced the portrait. But the
melodrama rounded it vigorously; for it was presented with far
deeper musicianship and greater reverence. Certain of the in-
struments never came in correctly during the Philadelphia's per-
formance; one could not hear the flight of clarinets which ended
Peripetie. But no holes gaped during Pierrot Lunaire. Conduc-
tor Mengelberg, who heard the work under the direction of the
composer himself, Darius Milhaud, who directed it in Paris,
agreed on that point. The performance was almost perfect.
In Louis Gruenberg, who prepared the performance under im-
mense difficulties, and conducted it in a spirit of complete self-


432 MUSICAL CHRONICLE
effacement, New York has found a musicianly head on which it can
congratulate itself. His achievement was, almost primarily, a
conquest of his musicians. There was the vastest difference be-
tween the fashion in which the instrumentalists played this music
and the fashion in which those who accompanied other modern
songs in times gone, acquitted themselves. When Eva Gauthier
gave the three Japanese melodies of Strawinsky; when Vera Jana-
copoulos presented the Pribaoutki of the same composer, the musi-
cians came on the stage grinning, to let the audience know they
at least were not balmy. And their playing was without earnest-
ness and incisiveness. But, during the Schoenberg, the playing
was rich and smooth and telling. One does not know which to
praise the more: the violin of Jacob Metechkin, the clarinet of
Robert Lindeman, the flute and piccolo of George Possell, or the
'cello of Willem Durieux. What the score demands in faery-
like delicacy and precision of tone, came out under the baton of
the young conductor.
Greta Torpadie has long been known to us as a very charming
and sympathetic young artist. On the night of February 4th, she
began to assume in our eyes the stature of a genuinely great one.
Her comprehension of Schoenberg's rapid and multicoloured
moods; the sureness and freshness and beauty with which she de-
livered the exquisite music assigned to the speaker, was an ex-
pression of the sort one does not easily forget. Diction, tone-col-
our, appearance; they were appropriate all. Here at last is a
lieder-singer leaving little to be desired.
The Guild deserves heartiest thanks for the thrilling event.
Without it, the season, one of the dullest we have ever experi-
enced, would have been almost lifeless. It is upon organizations of
its kind that we are coming more and more to depend for nourish-
ment. The musical institutions of New York are dead. If the Guild
continues in the path it seems to be cutting for itself; and moves
ever nearer the most daring and hourly of expressions, never again
letting a revolutionary work come to us ten years late, it will in a
very brief time become the most important instrumentality in the
entire field.
Paul Rosenfeld






Courtesy of the Museum of Mannheim
FEMALE FIGl'RE. BY ALEXANDER ARCHIPENKO


DIAL
MAY i923
HENRY JAMES: THE FIRST PHASE
BY VAN WYCK BROOKS
ON a certain morning in the year i849, the philosopher
Emerson received from a peripatetic friend a letter contain-
ing these oddly heretical words: "Considering with much pity our
four stout boys, who have no playroom within doors and import
shocking bad manners from the street, we gravely ponder whether
it wouldn't be better to go abroad for a few years with them, al-
lowing them to absorb French and German, and get such a sen-
suous education as they cannot get here." Heretical I say these
words were, more truly heretical in a sense than any of Emerson's
own, for they seemed to contradict the assumptions of the Ameri-
can religion of democracy. One asks oneself what Emerson must
have thought as he read them. Perhaps it crossed his mind that
if, to a fellow-American, a fellow-philosopher, the out-of-door
world had ceased to be a school of manners and a "sensuous educa-
tion" had become the chief desideratum for one's offspring, it must
mean that the first phase of the great American experiment was
approaching its end.
The letter could not have been written by a New Englander—
its savour was too worldly. Besides, the New England out-of-
doors had still its old bucolic innocence: even in Boston, the Bos-
ton of i849, the "street" could have given the fond parent little
cause for alarm. And what New Englander of the heroic age
would have desired for his sons an education primarily sensuous?
In fact, the writer, philosopher that he was notwithstanding, lived,
or rather lodged, in New York: he had in his veins no drop of
New England blood and had never set foot in New England till
THE


434
HENRY JAMES: THE FIRST PHASE
he was nearly thirty-five years old. This singular heretic—it was
Henry James the Elder—was of Irish descent on both sides.
Moreover, and as if to seal the disparity between himself and
the illuminati of Boston, the comrades of his youth had included
at least one actor, and there was a family legend that he had been
for a period "quite definitely wild."
This letter, or rather the purpose which it expressed, was to
have its consequences in American history, for the William as
well as the Henry James of the succeeding generation was largely
a product of that sensuous education in the Old World. On the
other hand, both were largely products of their father. If the
elder James had not possessed the peculiar temperament and in-
terests that set him apart from his contemporaries, if he had not
inherited a considerable fortune, if, finally, he had not been the
victim of an accident in his youth that had resulted in the ampu-
tation of one of his legs, the philosophy of his elder and the art of
his second son would certainly have been quite different. Having
lost this leg, he could live conveniently, as his grandson says,
"only in towns where smooth footways and ample facilities for
transportation were to be had." It was thus predestined that, in
an age when the rustic life was the characteristic American life,
his children should pass their infancy on the high roads of the
great world.
He was, this man, this witty and devoted, this inveterately ur-
ban sage, a figure to the highest degree paradoxical. The son of
a Presbyterian merchant in Albany, whose wealth is said to have
been greater than that of any other citizen of the State save John
Jacob Astor, he had studied for the ministry and remained, though
he never took orders, a theologian by vocation. In his youth,
while travelling in England—he was suffering at the time from a
nervous disorder—he had become acquainted with the writings
of Swedenborg. It was a mystical experience, and it had fixed
in him the belief, which his elder son seems to have inherited,
that a true enlargement of the spirit is possible only to those who
have known sickness, to which he added ostracism and opposition.
It was then that he dedicated himself to the formulation of a
theology that should express his profound and multiple intuitions.
"He applied himself," wrote one of his sons, "with a regularity
and a piety as little subject to sighing abatements or betrayed


VAN WYCK BROOKS
435
fears as if he had been working under pressure for his bread and
ours and the question were too urgent for his daring to doubt."
And this although his books, published at his own expense, were
received from first to last in "blank silence."
No one but his elder son, who edited his Literary Remains, has
attempted to elucidate what in his own family were known as
"Father's Ideas." To us, at least, they must remain flights of the
alone to the alone; yet William James expressed what all must
feel when he said that his father's style, "to its great dignity of
cadence and full and homely vocabulary, united a sort of inward
palpitating human quality, gracious and tender, precise, fierce,
scornful, humorous by turns, recalling the rich vascular tempera-
ment of the old English masters, rather than that of an American
of today." The style, in fact, suggests the complexity of the man.
Theologian that he was, he had no more sympathy with the mor-
alistic than with the commercial preoccupations of the majority
of his countrymen: he had never been able to forget the rigours
of his Albany childhood. He delighted in giving the Sabbath a
"black eye"; his greatest horror was what he called "flagrant
morality," and he said that he would rather have a son of his
"corroded with all the sins of the Decalogue than have him per-
fect." From which we can see that he was in full rebellion
against the idols of the tribe.
This singular man was, therefore, in a somewhat trying posi-
tion. Had he been born a New Englander, had he been shaped
by the influences of New England, he might well have become a
sort of supplementary Emerson or Thoreau; he might have been
able to participate, that is, in the intellectual movement of his
age. In this case he would undoubtedly have been reconciled to
an American destiny. "An expansive expanding companion," as
Emerson called him, who "would remove to Boston to attend a
good club a single night," he was framed for society as others are
framed for solitude and would certainly have been a happier
man if his social and his intellectual interests had been able to
run side by side. In the end he retired to Boston, he settled in
Cambridge, he became an ornament of the Saturday Club; and
New York knew him no more. As a mystical democrat, a consti-
tutional optimist, a Fourierist of a sort—overflowing, as one of
his sons remarks, with a "brave contradiction or opposition be-


436 HENRY JAMES: THE FIRST PHASE
twecn all his parts, a thing which made for perfect variety"—he
had indeed much in common with the Transcendentalist brother-
hood. Much, but not enough. He could observe that "once we
get rid of slavery the new heavens and new earth will swim into
reality"; but there he stopped. The truth is that his material
resources, his knowledge of the world, his metropolitan view of
life had bred in him, along with his theological preoccupations, a
sceptical and mundane habit of mind. He had been "wild" and
had not repented; he had been the friend of an actor and had not
regretted it. New York, in a word, for all its flimsiness and its
commerciality, had spoiled him for a more provincial atmosphere:
New York was not intellectual, but it was, after all, an outpost
of the great world. His elder son speaks of the reckless humour
of his conversation and of his "abasing mood" as having "often
startled the good people of Boston." He could not take New-
England seriously.
It was unfortunate. Had anything so irregular, indeed, ever
been seen before? This eccentric American was at once too Bos-
tonian for New York and too much of a New Yorker for Boston:
he was, moreover, a born controversialist, he loved an argument,
he battened on opposition—and where had he been able to find
an adversary? In a day of rampant isms, not a soul had listened
to his particular gospel; he had toiled away in the most awkward
of solitudes, and it was not sympathy that he longed for, it was
resistance. Resistance! If only the blank wall had returned an
echo! If only the blank wall had been firm! He had gifts, pow-
ers, potentialities: how could he ever discover what he had'?
But America had spoken no word, and he had pushed at the blank
wall and found that it was soft; and the bewildered sage, wonder-
ing and aggrieved, asked himself whether in Europe his case might
not have been different. For Europe he had, on other accounts,
a sufficient affection: he loved the colour and the romance of life,
music, pictures, the past, the ways of the world. Who could tell?
Perhaps Europe, which contained everything, might even pro-
vide him with a forum. England, for instance. It was in Eng-
land that he had received the revelation of Swedenborg; he had
even formed there in his youth an acquaintance with Carlyle.
Possibly, if he returned, he might, in that livelier air, find himself
not only welcomed, but embraced, not only embraced, but called


VAN WYCK BROOKS
437
out: there were antagonists in England who were worthy of his
wit. . . . Such were the fond hopes that possessed him.
The pathos of it was that our anxious philosopher could not,
for all his longings, rejoin the European procession. If, in the
New World, he dreamed of the Old, he no sooner set foot in
Europe than all his American predilections rose up in him. He
was the victim of a species of atavism that is common in the
younger countries when men, relieved from material pressure, be-
come aware of ancestral instincts that have retained the stamp
of their original environment. But the intervening generations
had stamped him also: he was American, incorrigibly American,
American for good and all. From England he writes home that
all the men he meets are "despoiled of their rich individual manli-
ness by the necessity of providing for these imbecile old inheri-
tances of Church and State." "I shouldn't wonder," he observes,
"if Barnum grew regenerate in some far-off day by mere force of
his democracy." And as for the intellectual life which he had so
idealized—alas, how could he have so befooled himself! There
was Carlyle, for instance, "Mother Eve's own darling cantanker-
ous Thomas," the greatest man of them all, Carlyle, with his
"rococo airs and affectations, his antiquated strut and heroics":
Carlyle was simply a "literary desperado." ... In short,
our wistful pilgrim was utterly disabused, disabused and piqued;
for it is also true that as a seeker of the English felicity he had
experienced, as the younger Henry James remarks, nothing but
"the sense of playing his mature and ardent thought over great
dense constituted presences and opaque surfaces that could by
their very nature scarce give back so much as a shudder." . .
It was all impossible. . . . And yet, and yet . . . He could
not surrender the beloved vision. He would walk up and down
in his room at the hotel, "talking," as William James describes
him, "of the superiority of America to these countries after all,
and how much better it is we should have done with them." But
the moment he stepped off the ship the illusion seized him once
more. The Old World, was it not a paradise, of which, in the
end, by some miracle, the gates might open to receive him1?
. . . Thus he lived with his eye ever turned across the sea.
Such is the figure who drifts in and out of his second son's
reminiscences; such was the man whose temperament, impulses,


43«
HENRY JAMES: THE FIRST PHASE
and preoccupations determined so largely the character and con-
dition of the James family. No doubt Henry James had his
father's example in mind when, as he remarks in his life of
W. W. Story, he "contrasted the luxury of the European 'career'
with the mere snatched dignity of the American." A high talent
wasting itself upon the desert air: this was the most poignant
spectacle that hung before his eyes during the whole of his
adolescence. It would all have been so different beyond the At-
lantic! Europe was the land where great men came into their
own; Europe was indeed the Jerusalem of all delights. Could
anything have been more obvious to a little boy? It was an ax-
iom, an axiom by the nature of the case. "Had all their talk,"
the novelist says of his parents, "had all their talk for its subject,
in my infant ears, that happy time?"—the time of their first visit
to England. "Did it deal only with London and Piccadilly and
the Green Park?" And again: "I saw my parents homesick, as I
conceived, for the ancient order and distressed and inconvenienced
by many of the more immediate features of the modern, as the
modern pressed about us, and since their theory of our better liv-
ing was from an early time that we should renew the quest of the
ancient on the very first possibility I simply grew greater in the
faith that somehow to manage that would constitute success in
life. I never found myself deterred from this fond view, which
was implied in every question I asked, every answer I got, and
every plan I formed."
Europe! It was as if Henry James had been born with a nos-
talgia for that far-away paradise. Was it not a legend in the fam-
ily that he had recalled, from a visit to Paris in his second year,
the wondrous aspect of the Place Vendome? He was a preter-
naturally impressionable little creature, and something had ex-
cited him: his retina had retained the image, at once so harmo-
nious and so imposing, of the beautiful Parisian square, the great
mansions, the soft line of the roofs, the surprising column, so erect
in the bright air. . . . And then there had been New York,
the cozy back-parlour in Fourteenth Street, the hearth-rug, the
glowing fire. . . . Could he remember a time when he had
not been lying there, in the fading light of the winter dusk,
drinking in the enchantment of those English picture-books?
. . . It was so warm, so intimate, there was nothing to break


VAN WYCK BROOKS
439
the spell. . . . Europe was all about him: in the Italian
landscape just over his head, in the marble bust of the Bacchante
between the windows, in the golden haze of the vast Prospect of
Florence in the front room—he could see it through the gap in the
red curtains. . . . The picture-books: they were European
too. . . . The stiff glossy covers, the thick smooth pages, the
colours, deep and rich, chocolate-brown, plum-colour, claret, and
that funny chalky black. They were not colours, they were tones.
. . And the scenes, English scenes! . . . The stable-
yard, the sleek fat horses, the blustering master, the coachman
with his cockade. Master Jacky, home from Eton for his Christ-
mas holidays, the charred stick in his hand, the footman's immacu-
late calves, the banisters and the chandelier, the charming young
sisters with their golden ringlets, their blooming cheeks, the pretty
blue sashes over their fresh muslin gowns. The breakfast-room,
the rosy fire in the grate, the toast and the eggs on the table, the
comfortable old grandfather unfolding his Times. And then the
holly and the mistletoe, and the foaming ale, and the obsequious
grooms, and the buxom nursemaids, and the gallant fox-hunting
gentlemen, their crimson coat-tails on the wind, taking a fence,
taking a hedge, taking that little green cottage perhaps. Was
there anything one couldn't take—in England, in Europe?
Came Punch, and the wonder grew; came Dickens, and he had
learned to read; came Thackeray, and Europe was more real to
him now than his own three brothers. Europe, or was it only
England? He had lived, in a way, so long in England. Those
drawings of Leech's! And then Mrs. Perkins's Ball, and Pen-
dennis, and David Copperfield—when had he begun to read them,
when had he ceased to hear them read? But there was the Conti-
nent too: France and Italy. There was Gavarni's Paris and
Toepffer's droll Geneva. And Florence, where the artists lived,
and Rome. ... It was all a world of colours and forms.
. . . Was it wrapped in a sort of iridescent mist? . . .
But that was the celestial atmosphere. . . . And every
spring his parents had been going back: he was to see it face to
face! And every spring they had suddenly changed their minds.
Frustration, hope, frustration again—it only fanned his desire.
Thus, for the little boy, the very names of places and things
in the other world had become "values and secrets and shibbo-


44© HENRY JAMES: THE FIRST PHASE
leths." He had lived in England, lived in Europe, in Thackeray's
England, in Toepffer's Europe. . . . What other life, in-
deed, had he ever known?
America? New York? O yes, he had taken all that in! He
had absorbed it; he had found it delightful, too. There had been
Albany, for holidays and the long summer afternoons, Albany
and the old garden sloping down to the stable, and the peach
trees: Albany somehow had a flavour of peaches. There were the
aunts and the uncles, a bewildering company, all so different, and
each with a different legend. And the cousins, the pretty, happy,
dancing cousins—they were always dancing: vague airs of the
perennial German seemed ever to attend their steps. Had he not
himself been taken, a mere mite of observation, to one of Kitty
Emmet's "grown-up" assemblies? And there were always the
other boys, and school. The Wards, for instance, who were so
tough and brown and whose pockets bulged with apples and nuts:
any one would have known that the Wards were New Englanders.
And Simpson, who boasted that his father was a "stevedore"—
mysterious eminence! And the theatre—what a world that had
been! And Barnum's Museum. And the summer hotels: the wide
verandahs, the ladies with their curls and crinolines and their
little parasols, and the gentlemen, bewhiskered and grim-lipped
or young and rakish and dressed in blazers and white pantaloons.
And there were the artists and authors who were always drifting
in and out of the house, Mr Cole, the "American Turner," and Mr
Powers of the "busts," and "Howadji" Curtis, and Mr Emerson,
whose silvery voice he had heard in the dusk of the back-parlour.
And there were the other great men whom he had "met," outside,
in the street, as he walked about with his hand in his father's: Mr
Sumner, the Senator from Massachusetts, who had stopped and
spoken to them, and General Winfield Scott, prodigious with the
triumphs of the Mexican war, and Mr Irving, who had told them
how Margaret Fuller—Margaret Fuller of the "Boston connec-
tion"—had been drowned the day before on the Jersey coast.
Had he missed so much as a breath, a vibration of it all?
He had taken it in, he had listened and looked and marvelled.
Ana yet, it was strange, the whole panorama had simply inflamed
his desire. New York, America, his America had spoken of
Europe with a single voice. There was a confused rumble and
rumour in the background that referred to something else, to "busi-


VAN WYCK BROOKS
44i
ness," to politics, to the West, to the mountains and the woods, to
strange vague villages and towns with Indian names and names
out of history books. But of all these things he had heard so little
at home; and there had been no Punch, no Gavarni, no Thackeray
to make them picturesque and comprehensible. . . . There
were the other boys, of course, but he had found the other boys
so difficult to play with; and besides, he had never been allowed
to remain long enough in any one school to make friends with
them. . . . And as for the rest, it had been just like
"Europe," a Europe plain instead of a Europe coloured! There
was the castellated villa on Staten Island, where they had spent
the summer: had it not been set up there just in order to remind
one of what a real castle might be? And those country-houses on
the Hudson—how pale they were beside the lithographs in Nash's
Mansions of England in the Olden Time! But everything in New
York had been like that; everything had sent him back to his
dreams and his picture-books. The theatre: the plays he had seen,
London Assurance and Nicholas Nickleby, were all so many evo-
cations of Drury Lane. And there were the French acrobats at
Barnum's, and the "Bavarian Beauties," and the opera, and Patti
—Italian to the last echo. And there were his teachers, Count
Adam Gurowski, for instance, the Polish refugee, and the "rank"
Russian lady, and Mile Delavigne, who had given him lessons at
home and who had been simply a Gavarni caricature come to life.
And the ladies in the summer hotels had always just been going
to Paris, and the gentlemen had always just come back. . . .
And then the artists and the authors. An American Turner im-
plied the existence of a European one, and Mr Powers's busts
had all been made in Italy, and "Howadji" Curtis's very name sa-
voured of everything foreign. Mr Irving had been so much like
an Englishman, and Mr Emerson's silvery voice had never been the
voice of Fourteenth Street. The others? Alas, for the others,
alas, for art in New York! Had they haunted the family fireside
for any other purpose than to show a little boy how much more
illustrious the artists of the Old World could not fail to be?
"I was somehow in Europe, since everything about me had been
'brought over.'" Thus James himself, in later years, summed up
the atmosphere of his childhood. He had seen, he had heard, he
had touched, he had all but literally tasted, in the land of his
birth, nothing that was not a reflection, a reminder of that roman-


442 HENRY JAMES: THE FIRST PHASE
tic other land across the ocean. Had America no identity of its
own? Was it all simply a noisy chaos, all that lay outside the
sphere of the cousinage? Was it all just a rain of atoms, a storm
of wind and dust? Something lay outside, beyond, behind, some-
thing; but why had he always been deterred—oh, so gently de-
terred—from investigating it? He had not been particularly curi-
ous about it. Those outside things, the things that were not
"somehow" European—the streets were full of them—had struck
him as rather ugly. They repelled him, they were difficult, like
the boys at school. . . . Still, why had his parents discour-
aged him from making friends with the other boys? ... Or
had they discouraged him? It was only a breath, a hint. . . .
Not that he greatly cared. . . . But then why were they
always changing his schools? . . . Were they afraid of
America, afraid of New York?
"I read into the whole connection," Henry James continues,
"the chill, or at least the indifference, of a foreseen and fore-
doomed detachment." Why was it? How had it come about?
What was at the bottom of it all? Was it only that the bewil-
dered father, perpetually in search of a happier environment,
could not submit to giving hostages to that little New York
world in which he had ever been so profoundly ill at ease? For
that father himself, adrift as he was, New York was only a half-
way house. He was a prophet without honour in his own country,
a nomad by the nature of things: how could he permit his children
to take root in the city of the Philistines? If London was imprac-
ticable, New York was impossible—that was sufficiently clear.
But another thought weighed upon his paternal imagination: New
York was also dangerous. He had before him the example of
his own brothers who, liberated as they were from the life of
business, the only life for which that primitive society seemed to
afford any provision, had, as we gather, generally come to grief.
"He regaled us with no scandals," Henry James remarks, "yet it
somehow rarely failed to come out that each contemporary on his
younger scene, each hero of each thrilling adventure, had, in spite
of brilliant promise and romantic charm, ended badly, as badly as
possible." This, in fact, became for his sons a "grim little general-
ization," so striking was the evidence that "scarce aught but dis-
aster could, in that so unformed and unseasoned society, overtake
young men who were in the least exposed. Not to have been im-


VAN WYCK BROOKS
443
mediately launched in business of a rigorous sort," Henry James
continues, "was to be exposed, in the absence I mean of some fair-
ly abnormal predisposition to virtue; since it was a world so
simply constituted that whatever wasn't business, or exactly an
office or a 'store,' places in which people sat close and made money,
was just simply pleasure, sought and sought only in places in
which people got tipsy." And moreover, "it was just the ready,
even when the moderate, possession of gold that determined, that
hurried on, disaster." . . . Such were the fears the benevo-
lent father nursed in his heart. His own brothers, with gold in
their pockets, had gone to perdition; and here were his four little
boys, eager, imaginative, impressionable—heaven be thanked!—
but not cut out for business, and destined in their turn to inherit
a share of the Albany gold. How could one be too careful?
It was a little tragicomedy of the New York of the 'fifties.
The elder James could have no continuing city; he did not wish
to anchor himself—that was perfectly true; but he was even more
a parent than a philosopher; he had pondered the case, according
to his lights, and he was filled with trepidation over the future of
that little brood for whose "spiritual decency" he cared, as Henry
James remarks, "unspeakably more than for anything else."
Thrown in as he was upon himself, he had so few other active
concerns. New York was dangerous, he had no doubt of that; and
was it not inevitable that, as he saw only New York, he should
have looked askance upon American life in general? . . .
What did any one really know about this extraordinary national
"experiment," this America into which destiny had cast them all
and which they had taken as it were on faith, a country without
a precedent and almost without a history, which, after the first
great epoch of the Revolution, had fallen more and more into the
hands of mountebank politicians and rascally business men, a
country that certainly provided one with opportunities for making
money, but in which it remained to be seen whether the higher
human faculties would be able to survive at all? America was
the dark continent! Who had understood it, who had explained it?
Could one trust it? Could one go on, like the poets and the states-
men, protesting even the stoutest optimism? . . . How natural
it was, in those last dispiriting years before the Civil War, that
such thoughts should have invaded the mind of a sensitive fellow-
citizen of Mr Astor the fur merchant and Commodore Vander-


444
HENRY JAMES: THE FIRST PHASE
bilt of the Erie! In the South men had their soil, and they lived
by the faith of the soil. There was the West: for millions the
West was a religion. The New England air still vibrated with
the memories of the Revolution; and besides, if New England and
the South had retained their colonial sentiment, they were im-
pregnated with the traditions of American statesmanship. New
York, on the other hand, was the metropolis, and those who loved
the world foregathered there; but its own traditions had been lost
and forgotten, trampled away by the ravenous feet of trade. It
was the last quarter in which to seek either for the traces of the
American past or for the omens of the American future. Natural
it was, therefore, that the elder James, reflecting upon his family
history, should have asked himself, in his gloomier moments, how
far America itself was not responsible for "such a chronicle," as
one of his sons describes it, "of early deaths, arrested careers,
broken promises, orphaned children." Our sage, in short, our
theologian, the father of those four impressionable boys, had be-
come the victim of an obsession. American life was a quicksand
in which everything one held most dear was in peril of being en-
gulfed and lost. At all hazards one's own children must be pre-
vented from getting their feet entangled in it.
Thus at the outset Henry James was shielded from any touch
of the pTofanum vulgus. "It meanwhile fairly overtakes and
arrests me," he writes in his reminiscences, "that our general me-
dium of life in the circumstances I speak of was such as to make
a large defensive verandah, which seems to have very stoutly
and completely surrounded us, play more or less the part of a
raft of rescue in too high a tide, too high a tide there about us of
the ugly and the graceless." The ugly and the graceless were, to
be sure, nine-tenths of human life; but that was the point, it was
life itself this father feared on behalf of his children—since life,
for them, presented itself in American terms alone. Endless were
to be the consequences of all this in the career of Henry James.
Even his brother William was to find it difficult to overcome that
inherited fear: he might never have overcome it, in fact, if he had
not found in Agassiz a great master to reassure him, to convince
him not only that America was "all right," but that it offered him
an adequate scope for his particular genius. Indeed, how far
was not that final "plunge" of William James's, that philosophic,
that pragmatic plunge into what he called "the muddy stream of


VAN WYCK BROOKS
445
things," an almost conscious reaction against the "tender-minded-
ness" of the circle of his childhood? For Henry James America
was to afford no Agassiz; he was to encounter no parallel case of
an artist, a man of letters, eminent, equipped, magnetic, and at
the same time at home in the new chaotic generation as Emerson,
Prescott, Hawthorne had been at home in the simpler world of
the past. In short, he was to find no Virgil for the dark path;
and besides, he was more passive than his brother; he could not
so easily react; he received impressions and he retained them.
. . . Europe was a paradise. . . . America was a wil-
derness. It signified nothing but calamity, destruction, oblivion.
In time, in the far future, the life and writings of Henry James
were to manifest the effects of all these early—shall we call them?
—illusions. They grew, they flourished: "brooding monster" that
he was, or was to call himself, "born to discriminate a tout pro-
pos," how many preconceptions were to embed themselves in the
depths of his mind, gradually, silently, how much of a sort of
preliminary discrimination was to be imposed upon him, as it
were, determining the field and the conditions of his fastidious
thought! He accepted these idols of the provincial cave that had
been bred so naturally by the character, the circumstances, the
solicitude of his father, by the situation of his family, and all the
influences of his childhood contributed to foster them.
For if he was protected from the common life, to what was he
exposed? To the life of that little New York society which, if
it was "open wide," as he says, "to the east and comparatively
to the south," the east and the south that signified Europe and
the lingering European order, was yet "screened in somehow con-
veniently from north and west." So far as the world of "busi-
ness" was concerned, "the word had been passed, all round," he
remarks, "that we didn't, that we couldn't and shouldn't, under-
stand these things." But when, from that little screened society,
the element of business was subtracted, what was left? What
was left for a child to absorb, a child so impressionable that "fig-
ures, faces, furniture, sounds, smells and colours" had become for
him "a positive little orgy of the senses and riot of the mind"?
Nothing, virtually, but echoes of the beau monde across the ocean.
Along with business the men had vanished from the scene: there
remained only, as our author remarks in one of his prefaces, "the
music-masters and French pastry-cooks, the ladies and children—


446 HENRY JAMES: THE FIRST PHASE
immensely present and immensely numerous these, but testifying
with a collective voice to the extraordinary absence ... of
a single male interest." What remained, in short, was "the won-
drous fact that ladies might live for pleasure, pleasure always,
pleasure alone." Ah, that New York society of the Age of In-
nocence, of N. P. Willis and Nothing to Wear! Ah, those
dreams of the Tuileries, of Paris gowns and English lords! Ask
the freshets in the spring why they run to the deep sea!
Henry James looked and listened. What did he hear? What
ingenuous and charming discourses on the conduct of life? What
hymns to the Graces? What notes of a perpetual song in which
the artless and the elegant, the virginal and the voluptuous were
blended in equal measure? This little society, so intensely femi-
nine, was it not an unregarded, but ever so keenly regarding pro-
tectorate, as it were, of the fashionable world of England and
France? How natural it was then that, in the midst of his ro-
mantic dream of the Old World, a second romantic dream should
have begun to take form in Henry James's mind. Countesses,
duchesses, great ladies, noble gentlemen were so obviously the
heroes and the heroines of the wondrous European fairy-tale!
That was the New York idea, and all the stories he had read, all
the pictures he had absorbed, had prepared him to believe it: the
great world was a world beyond good and evil. . . . Was it
another illusion, this fruit of a sequestered adolescence? But
what "reality" of his own had he ever experienced? He had been
removed from the discipline of the streets: had he been subjected
to any other discipline? . . . He had "read too many
novels." . . . And his father's "Ideas" had been so impal-
pable: how could he have derived from that source any "interpre-
tation of the universe"? The elder James had been so irrepres-
sibly optimistic; he had had such a cloudless faith in human na-
ture; he had heard so much about discipline in his own bitter
Presbyterian youth; he had trusted his children to find the right
pasturage for their souls. . . . But admitting that problem
about the other boys (who were "so difficult to play with") ad-
mitting that they had "no companions," would a little history,
not to say a little more Latin and Greek, not to add a little more
continuity, have come amiss?
At twelve, Henry James had at last been taken to Europe; at
sixteen he had been brought home again. His family had aban-


VAN WYCK BROOKS
447
doned New York; henceforward, until he was twenty-one, New-
port was to remain his home. But for four years, the years of
awakening, he had experienced in the Old World a riot of "recog-
nitions"; he had been so "pierced," as he put it later, "by the
sharp outland dart, as to be able ever afterwards but to move
about, vaguely and helplessly" with the shaft still in his side.
Ah, that Europe of "the complex order and the coloured air"!
There had been the first night in London . . . the thick,
heavy smell of the atmosphere that had given him such a sense of
possession. There had been the soft summer evening when they
had arrived in Paris and he had hung over the balcony, drinking
in the shadowy mystery of the Rue de la Paix. There had been
the old inn at Lyons, so redolent of the true vie de province and
of all the voices and graces of the past. And the first castle, the
first ruin, the first peasant in sabots! There had been the old
thick-walled, green-shuttered pension-school at Geneva; and
Boulogne, where Thackeray's world had come to life under his
eyes; and the legendary woods at Bonn. And London again, Ho-
garth's London, and Paris, the old and the new. He had seen the
Empress, young and fair and shining; he had seen the baby Prince
Imperial borne amid glittering swords on his progress to Saint-
Cloud. And there had been the Luxembourg and the great still
rooms of the Louvre, the left bank, the quays, the old bookshops,
the long black Rue de Seine. Above all, he had had his taste—
such a tantalizing taste!—of the beau monde itself. Was he ever
to forget that English family at Geneva to whom, in the first
flush of their own admiration for Adam Bede, his parents had
confidingly lent the book? "I catch again," he writes in his rem-
iniscences, "the echo of their consternation on receiving it back
with the remark that all attempt at an interest in such people,
village carpenters and Methodists, had proved vain—for that
style of Anglo-Saxon; together with that of my own excited won-
der about such other people, those of the style in question, those
somehow prodigiously presented by so rare a delicacy, so proud
a taste, and made thus to irradiate a strange historic light." And
there had been the pretty young Marquise, "unmistakably 'great,'
exhaling from afar," as he had encouraged himself to imagine,
"the scented air of the Tuileries," who had looked into their com-
partment, where her own servants were travelling, on that memo-
rable journey from Cologne to Paris, and smiled, and even pouted,


448 HENRY JAMES: THE FIRST PHASE
through her elegant patience. She had "caused to swim before
me somehow," he says, "such a view of happy privilege at the high-
est pitch as made me sigh the more sharply, even if the less pro-
fessedly, for our turning our backs on the complex order, the
European." . . . He had, in short, absorbed the "European
virus"; he had come home with an aching prevision of "the com-
parative, not to say the absolute, absence of tonic accent in the
appearances complacently awaiting" him.
He had come home, home to Newport. His affections had been
fixed irretrievably upon the Old World. Picturesque Europe, so-
cial Europe: ah, that "sublime synthesis" of his early reveries!
Who could question it? Was it not for ever the Great Good Place,
the abode of honour, order, beauty, of all the elegances? That
was the faith of Newport, at least, "old Newport," the Newport
of the "mildly and reminiscentially desperate," the Newport of
those who were always "going back," again, and again, and yet
again, "with a charming, smiling, pleading inconsequence," the
Newport of the "inverted romantics," of the wanderers between
two worlds, the America for which Europe had unfitted them, and
the Europe which, Americans as they were, they had never been
able to call their own. Newport was not New York, the New York
of the music-masters and the French pastry-cooks. The bright,
the brisk, the fresh, the artless had, in a measure, given place there
to the mellow, the crepuscular, the retrospective. There was a
difference, a difference of note, a difference of tone. . . . Morn-
ing and evening. . . . But were they not a morning and an
evening of the same day'? ... In the one society as in the
other the great world across the sea was the dream of every heart.
Criticism only began "after that."
It was here, encircled by his family and John La Farge, in that
"wondrous esoteric quarter," as he describes it, "peopled just by
us and our friend and our common references," that Henry James
set to work to learn the craft of a writer. He was already a
"novelist en herbe"; and he had himself perceived that his im-
pressions "were naught without a backing, a stout stiff hard-
grained underside that would hold them together and of which
the terrible name was simply science, otherwise learning, and
learning exclusively by books." He was to become a novelist, in
short, by studying other novelists: such was the design with which
he assumed the obligations of an apprenticeship that was to have,


VAN WYCK BROOKS
449
in its own way, so marvellous a flowering. The circumstances of
his life and character were to intensify, as the years passed, this
self-dedication of the craftsman; meanwhile, we observe that his
reading confirmed the romantic prepossessions with which he
looked out upon the world. "Who that has turned the pages of the
Notes of a Son and Brother can forget the ardour of those refer-
ences to the Revue des Deux Mondes? It took its place, the great
review, it took its place, for James at Newport, "as the very head-
spring of culture, a mainstay in exile, and"—let us note his words
—"as opening wide in especial the doors of that fictive portrayal
of a society which put a price, for the brooding young reader, on
cases, on cadres, in the Revue parlance, already constituted and
propitiously lighted. Then it was," our author continues, "that
the special tension of the dragged-out day from Cologne to Paris
proved, on the absurdest scale, a preparation, justified itself as a
vivid point of reference: I was to know what the high periodical
meant when I encountered in its etudes de moeurs the blue-chinned
corruptible, not to say corrupt, larbin and the smart soubrette; it
was, above all, a blessing to feel myself, in the perusal of M Octave
Feuillet, an education, as I supposed, of the taste, not at a marked
disadvantage; since who but the Petite Comtesse herself had swung
her crinoline in and out of my prospect, or, to put it better, of my
preserved past, on one of my occasions of acutest receptivity?" I
have said that James's reading confirmed the romantic preposses-
sions with which he looked out upon life; and, in fact, what do
we discern between the lines that I have just quoted? Had it
escaped him that the novelists whom he most admired had con-
cerned themselves almost exclusively with the world of fashion?
That they had, indeed, as the children of Balzac, written of that
world with all of Balzac's own admiring astonishment? The
great world was the great theme of the great novelists: we cannot
doubt that in the depths of James's mind some such principle as
this had already begun to take form. He who had never been able
to question a European precedent and who seemed, as one of his
friends remarks, "to have read all Balzac in the cradle," had ac-
cepted as axiomatic a doctrine that everything in his life had pre-
pared him to believe. ... If one meant to be a great novel-
ist—one must—somehow—the great world—But how?—Where?
—In America?—That was a little perplexing.—But one could
leave so much to the future.


45©
BE A SPORT
He had passed into a silent ecstasy of dreams, thoughts, plans.
"The above-mentioned H.," his brother William writes in a letter
of the time, "could in no wise satisfy my craving for knowledge
of family and friends—he didn't seem to have been on speaking
terms with anyone for some time past, and could tell me nothing
of what they did, said or thought, about any given subject." He
was immersed in his own fantasies—"not a little mildly—though
oh so mildly—morose or anxiously mute," as he remembered later;
he felt within himself the stir of a prodigious talent. And thus,
confined within that warm little coterie, circumfused with the air
of his father's household, an air "stimulating," as a visitor de-
scribes it, "like that of a high mountain near the tropics," he be-
gan to premeditate the creation of a world of his own. He had
reached, let us add in his own words, the age of twenty "in well-
nigh grotesque unawareness of the properties of the atmosphere
in which he but wanted to claim that he had been nourished."
BE A SPORT
BY BAKER BROWNELL
They have tipped Minnie with quarters: the week has clattered
round on French heels to Thursday afternoon, and the rustle
of eaters in Henrici's is a thick wind in the corn.
She has served up this Thursday noon on numerous white dishes,
and the man who sits thickly at the fourth table behind a pros-
perous waistcoat will have a steak and onions, no doubt, with
coffee on the side and a piece of pie.
He will tip Minnie with quarters, and his smile waits for her under
the shuffling of luncheons as a retriever waits when a duck
stumbles in the air and falls. For years ago he learned his
smile in a sales campaign at a good price.
It is past rush hour, and three o'clock slips from her slim body like a
little white apron. And to-night a man with a prosperous
waistcoat and a car will carry her no doubt somewhere deep
into the lemon-coloured moonlight.



ITOW. BY RUDOLF VON HUHN





A MARRIED MAN'S STORY
BY KATHERINE MANSFIELD
IT is evening. Supper is over. We have left the small, cold din-
ing-room, we have come back to the sitting-room where there is
a fire. All is as usual. I am sitting at my writing-table which is
placed across a corner so that I am behind it, as it were, and facing
the room. The lamp with the green shade is alight. I have before
me two large books of reference, both open, a pile of papers. . . .
All the paraphernalia, in fact, of an extremely occupied man. My
wife, with our little boy on her lap, is in a low chair before the
fire. She is about to put him to bed before she clears away the
dishes and piles them up in the kitchen for the servant-girl to-mor-
row morning. But the warmth, the quiet, and the sleepy baby have
made her dreamy. One of his red woollen boots is off, one is on.
She sits, bent forward, clasping the little bare foot, staring into the
glow, and as the fire quickens, falls, flares again, her shadow—an
immense Mother and Child—is here and gone again upon the
wall. . . .
Outside it is raining. I like to think of that cold drenched win-
dow behind the blind, and beyond, the dark bushes in the garden,
their broad leaves bright with rain, and beyond the fence, the
gleaming road with the two hoarse little gutters singing against
each other, and the wavering reflections of the lamps, like fishes'
tails. While I am here, I am there, lifting my face to the dim sky,
and it seems to me it must be raining all over the world—that the
whole earth is drenched, is sounding with a soft quick patter or hard
steady drumming, or gurgling and something that is like sobbing
and laughing mingled together, and that light playful splashing
that is of water falling into still lakes and flowing rivers. And all
at once and the same moment I am arriving in a strange city, slip-
ping under the hood of the cab while the driver whips the cover off
the breathing horse, running from shelter to shelter, dodging some-
one, swerving by someone else. I am conscious of tall houses, their
doors and shutters sealed against the night, of dripping balconies
and sodden flower-pots, I am brushing through deserted gardens


452
A MARRIED MAN'S STORY
and falling into moist-smelling summer-houses (you know how
soft and almost crumbling the wood of a summer-house is in the
rain); I am standing on the dark quayside, giving my ticket into
the wet red hand of the old sailor in an oilskin. How strong the
sea smells! How loudly the tied-up boats knock against one an-
other! I am crossing the wet stackyard, hooded in an old sack,
carrying a lantern, while the house-dog, like a soaking doormat,
springs, shakes himself over me. And now I am walking along a
deserted road—it is impossible to miss the puddles and the trees
are stirring—stirring. . . .
But one could go on with such a catalogue for ever—on and on
—until one lifted the single arum lily leaf and discovered the tiny
snails clinging, until one counted . . . and what then? Aren't
those just the signs, the traces of my feeling? The bright green
streaks made by someone who walks over the dewy grass? Not the
feeling itself. And as I think that, a mournful glorious voice be-
gins to sing in my bosom. Yes, perhaps that is nearer what I mean.
What a voice! What power! What velvety softness! Marvellous!
Suddenly my wife turns round quickly. She knows—how long
has she known?—that I am not "working." It is strange that with
her full, open gaze, she should smile so timidly—and that she
should say in such a hesitating voice, "What are you thinking?"
I smile and draw two fingers across my forehead in the way I
have. "Nothing," I answer softly.
At that she stirs, and still trying not to make it sound important,
she says: "Oh, but you must have been thinking of something!"
Then I really meet her gaze, meet it fully, and I fancy her face
quivers. Will she never grow accustomed to these simple—one
might say—everyday little lies? Will she never learn not to ex-
pose herself—or to build up defences?
"Truly, I was thinking of nothing."
There! I seem to see it dart at her. She turns away, pulls the
other red sock off the baby—sits him up, and begins to unbutton
him behind. I wonder if that little soft rolling bundle sees any-
thing, feels anything? Now she turns him over on her knee, and
in this light, his soft arms and legs waving, he is extraordinarily
like a young crab. A queer thing is I can't connect him with my
wife and myself; I've never accepted him as ours. Each time when
I come into the hall and see the perambulator, I catch myself think-
ing: "H'm, someone has brought a baby!" Or, when his crying


KATHERINE MANSFIELD 453
wakes me at night, I feel inclined to blame my wife for having
brought the baby in from outside. The truth is, that though one
might suspect her of strong maternal feelings, my wife doesn't seem
to me the type of woman who bears children in her own body.
There's an immense difference! Where is that . . . animal
ease and playfulness, that quick kissing and cuddling one has been
taught to expect of young mothers'? She hasn't a sign of it. I be-
lieve that when she ties its bonnet she feels like an aunt and not a
mother. But of course I may be wrong; she may be passionately
devoted ... I don't think so. At any rate, isn't it a trifle
indecent to feel like this about one's own wife? Indecent or not,
one has these feelings. And one other thing. How can I reasonably
expect my wife, a broken-hearted woman, to spend her time tossing
the baby? But that is beside the mark. She never even began to
toss when her heart was whole.
And now she has carried the baby to bed. I hear her soft, delib-
erate steps moving between the dining-room and the kitchen, there
and back again, to the tune of the clattering dishes. And now all
is quiet. What is happening now? Oh, I know just as surely as
if I'd gone to see—she is standing in the middle of the kitchen fac-
ing the rainy window. Her head is bent, with one finger she is
tracing something—nothing—on the table. It is cold in the kitchen;
the gas jumps; the tap drips; it's a forlorn picture. And nobody is
going to come behind her, to take her in his arms, to kiss her soft
hair, to lead her to the fire and to rub her hands warm again. No-
body is going to call her or to wonder what she is doing out there.
And she knows it. And yet, being a woman, deep down, deep down,
she really does expect the miracle to happen; she really could em-
brace that dark, dark deceit, rather than live—like this.
To live like this ... I write those words, very carefully,
very beautifully. For some reason I feel inclined to sign them, or
to write underneath—Trying a New Pen. But seriously, isn't it
staggering to think what may be contained in one innocent-looking
little phrase? It tempts me—it tempts me terribly. Scene. The
supper-table. My wife has just handed me my tea. I stir it, I lift
the spoon, idly chase and then carefully capture a speck of tea-leaf,
and having brought it ashore, I murmur, quite gently, "How long
shall we continue to live—like—this?" And immediately there is
that famous "blinding flash and deafening roar. Huge pieces of
debris (I must say I like debris) are flung into the air . . .


454 A MARRIED MAN'S STORY
and when the dark clouds of smoke have drifted away . . ."
But this will never happen; I shall never know it. It will be found
upon me "intact" as they say. "Open my heart and you will
see . . ."
Why? Ah, there you have me! There is the most difficult ques-
tion of all to answer. Why do people stay together? Putting aside
"for the sake of the children," and "the habit of years" and "eco-
nomic reasons" as lawyers' nonsense—it's not much more—if one
really does try to rind out why it is that people don't leave each
other, one discovers a mystery. It is because they can't; they are
bound. And nobody on earth knows what are the bonds that bind
them except those two. Am I being obscure? Well, the thing itself
isn't so frightfully crystal clear, is it? Let me put it like this.
Supposing you are taken, absolutely, first into his confidence and
then into hers. Supposing you know all there is to know about the
situation. And having given it not only your deepest sympathy,
but your most honest impartial criticism, you declare, very calmly
(but not without the slightest suggestion of relish—for there is—I
swear there is—in the very best of us—something that leaps up
and cries "A-ahh!" for joy at the thought of destroying) "Well,
my opinion is that you two people ought to part. You'll do no
earthly good together. Indeed, it seems to me, it's the duty of
either to set the other free." What happens then? He—and she—
agree. It is their conviction too. You are only saying what they
have been thinking all last night. And away they go to act on
your advice, immediately . . . And the next time you hear
of them they are still together. You see—you've reckoned without
the unknown quantity—which is their secret relation to each other
—and what they can't disclose even if they want to. Thus far you
may tell and no further. Oh, don't misunderstand me! It need not
necessarily have anything to do with their sleeping together. . . .
But this brings me to a thought I've often half entertained. Which
is that human beings, as we know them, don't choose each other at
all. It is the owner, the second self inhabiting them, who makes
the choice for his own particular purposes, and—this may sound
absurdly far-fetched—it's the second self in the other which re-
sponds. Dimly—dimly—or so it has seemed to me—we realize
this, at any rate to the extent that we realize the hopelessness of try-
ing to escape. So that, what it all amounts to is—if the imper-
manent selves of my wife and me are happy—tant mieux pour nous


KATHERINE MANSFIELD
455
—if miserable—tant pis. . . . But I don't know, I don't
know. And it may be that it's something entirely individual in me
—this sensation (yes, it is even a sensation) of how extraordinarily
shell-like we are as we are—little creatures, peering out of the
sentry-box at the gate, ogling through our glass case at the entry,
wan little servants, who never can say for certain, even, if the
master is out or in. . . .
The door opens . . . my wife. She says, "I am going to
bed."
And I look up vaguely, and vaguely say, "You are going to
bed." ,
"Yes." A tiny pause. "Don't forget—will you?—to turn out
the gas in the hall."
And again I repeat, "The gas in the hall."
There was a time—the time before—when this habit of mine—
it really has become a habit now—it wasn't one then—was one of
our sweetest jokes together. It began, of course, when, on several
occasions, I really was deeply engaged and I didn't hear. I emerged
only to see her shaking her head and laughing at me, "You haven't
heard a word!"
"No. What did you say?"
Why should she think that so funny and charming? She did; it.
delighted her. "Oh, my darling, it's so like you! It's so—so—"
And I knew she loved me for it. I knew she positively looked for-
ward to coming in and disturbing me, and so—as one does—I
played up. I was guaranteed to be wrapped away every even-
ing at ten-thirty p. m. But now? For some reason I feel it
would be crude to stop my performance. It's simplest to play on.
But what is she waiting for to-night? Why doesn't she go? Why
prolong this? She is going. No, her hand on the door-knob, she
turns round again, and she says in the most curious, small, breath-
less voice, "You're not cold?"
Oh, it's not fair to be as pathetic as that! That was simply
damnable. I shuddered all over before I managed to bring out a
slow "No-o!" while my left hand ruffles the reference pages.
She is gone; she will not come back again to-night. It is not
only I who recognize that; the room changes too. It relaxes, like
an old actor. Slowly the mask is rubbed off; the look of strained
attention changes to an air of heavy, sullen brooding. Every line,
every fold breathes fatigue. The mirror is quenched; the ash


456
A MARRIED MAN'S STORY
whitens; only my sly lamp burns on. . . . But what a cynical
indifference to me it all shows! Or should I perhaps be flattered?
No, we understand each other. You know those stories of litde
children who are suckled by wolves and accepted by the tribe, and
how for ever after they move freely among their fleet, grey
brothers? Something like that has happened to me. But wait!
That about the wolves won't do. Curious! Before I wrote it down,
while it was still in my head, I was delighted with it. It seemed to
express, and more, to suggest, just what I wanted to say. But
written, I can smell the falseness immediately and the . . .
source of the smell is in that word "fleet." Don't you agree? Fleet,
grey brothers! "Fleet." A word I never use. When I wrote
"wolves" it skimmed across my mind like a shadow and I couldn't
resist it. Tell me! Tell me! Why is it so difficult to write simply
—and not only simply but sotto voce, if you know what I mean'?
That is how I long to write. No fine effects—no bravura. But just
the plain truth, as only a liar can tell it.
I light a cigarette, lean back, inhale deeply—and find myself
wondering if my wife is asleep. Or is she lying in her cold bed.
staring into the dark, with those trustful, bewildered eyes? Her
eyes are like the eyes of a cow that is being driven along a road.
"Why am I being driven—what harm have I done?" But I really
am not responsible for that look; it's her natural expression. One
day, when she was turning out a cupboard, she found a little old
photograph of herself, taken when she was a girl at school. In her
confirmation dress, she explained. And there were the eyes, even
then. I remember saying to her, "Did you always look so sad?"
Leaning over my shoulder, she laughed lightly, "Do I look sad? I
think it's just . . . me." And she waited for me to say some-
thing about it. But I was marvelling at her courage at having
shown it to me at all. It was a hideous photograph! And I won-
dered again if she realized how plain she was, and comforted her-
self with the idea that people who loved each other didn't criticize,
but accepted everything, or if she really rather liked her appearance
and expected me to say something complimentary. Oh, that was
base of me! How could I have forgotten all the numberless times
when I have known her turn away to avoid the light, press her
face into my shoulders. And above all, how could I have forgotten
the afternoon of our wedding day, when we sat on the green bench
in the Botanical Gardens and listened to the band—how, in an


KATHERINE MANSFIELD
457
interval between two pieces, she suddenly turned to me and said
in the voice in which one says, "Do you think the grass is damp1?"
or "Do you think it's time for tea?" . . . "Tell me, do you
think physical beauty is so very important?" I don't like to think
how often she had rehearsed that question. And do you know what
I answered? At that moment, as if at my command, there came a
great gush of hard, bright sound from the band, and I managed to
shout above it cheerfully, "I didn't hear what you said." Devilish!
Wasn't it? Perhaps not wholly. She looked like the poor patient
who hears the surgeon say, "It will certainly be necessary to per-
form the operation—but not now!"
But all this conveys the impression that my wife and I were
never really happy together. Not true! Not true! We were mar-
vellously, radiantly happy. We were a model couple. If you had
seen us together, any time, any place, if you had followed us,
tracked us down, spied, taken us off our guard, you still would
have been forced to confess, "I have never seen a more ideally
suited pair." Until last autumn.
But really to explain what happened then I should have to go
back and back, I should have to dwindle until my two hands
clutched the banisters, the stair-rail was higher than my head, and
I peered through to watch my father padding swiftly up and down.
There were coloured windows on the landings. As he came up,
first his bald head was scarlet; then it was yellow. How frightened
I was! And when they put me to bed, it was to dream that we were
living inside one of my father's big coloured bottles. For he was
a chemist. I was born nine years after my parents were married.
I was an only child, and the effort to produce even me—small,
withered bud I must have been—sapped all my mother's strength.
She never left her room again. Bed, sofa, window, she moved be-
tween the three. Well I can see her, on the window days, sitting,
her cheek in her hand, staring out. Her room looked over the street.
Opposite there was a wall plastered with advertisements for travel-
ling shows and circuses and so on. I stand beside her, and we gaze
at the slim lady in a red dress hitting a dark gentleman over the
head with her parasol, or at the tiger peering through the jungle
while the clown, close by, balances a bottle on his nose, or at a
little golden-haired girl sitting on the knee of an old black man in
a broad cotton hat . . . She says nothing. On sofa days there
is a flannel dressing-gown that I loathe, and a cushion that keeps


458 A MARRIED MAN'S STORY
on slipping off the hard sofa. I pick it up. It has flowers and writ-
ing sewn on. I ask what the writing says, and she whispers, "Sweet
Repose!" In bed her fingers plait, in tight little plaits, the fringe
of the quilt, and her lips are thin. And that is all there is of my
mother, except the last queer "episode" that comes later.
My father . . . Curled up in the corner on the lid of a
round box that held sponges, I stared at my father so long, it's as
though his image, cut off at the waist by the counter, had remained
solid in my memory. Perfectly bald, polished head, shaped like a
thin egg, creased, creamy cheeks, little bags under the eyes, large
pale ears like handles. His manner was discreet, sly, faintly amused,
and tinged with impudence. Long before I could appreciate it, I
knew the mixture. ... I even used to copy him in my corner,
bending forward, with a small reproduction of his faint sneer. In
the evening his customers were, chiefly, young women; some of
them came in every day for his famous fivepenny pick-me-up. Their
gaudy looks, their voices, their free ways, fascinated me. I longed
to be my father, handing them across the counter the little glass
of bluish stuff they tossed off so greedily. God knows what it was
made of. Years after I drank some, just to see what it tasted like,
and I felt as though someone had given me a terrific blow on the
head; I felt stunned. One of those evenings I remember vividly.
It was cold; it must have been autumn, for the flaring gas was
lighted after my tea. I sat in my corner and my father was mixing
something; the shop was empty. Suddenly the bell jangled and a
young woman rushed in, crying so loud, sobbing so hard, that it
didn't sound real. She wore a green cape trimmed with fur and a
hat with cherries dangling. My father came from behind the
screen. But she couldn't stop herself at first. She stood in the mid-
dle of the shop and wrung her hands and moaned. I've never heard
such crying since. Presently she managed to gasp out, "Give me a
pick-me-up." Then she drew a long breath, trembled away from
him and quavered, "I've had bad news!" And in the flaring gas-
light I saw the whole side of her face was puffed up and purple;
her lip was cut, and her eyelid looked as though it was gummed
fast over the wet eye. My father pushed the glass across the coun-
ter, and she took the purse out of her stocking and paid him. But
she couldn't drink; clutching the glass, she stared in front of her
as if she could not believe what she saw. Each time she put her
head back the tears spurted out again. Finally she put the glass


KATHERINE MANSFIELD
459
down. It was no use. Holding the cape with one hand, she ran in
the same way out of the shop again. My father gave no sign. But
long after she had gone I crouched in my corner, and when I think
back it's as though I felt my whole body vibrating—"So that's
what it is outside," I thought. "That's what it's like out there."
Do you remember your childhood? I am always coming across
these marvellous accounts by writers who declare that they remem-
ber "everything, everything." I certainly don't. The dark stretches,
the blanks, are much bigger than the bright glimpses. I seem to
have spent most of my time like a plant in a cupboard. Now and
again, when the sun shone, a careless hand thrust me out on to the
window-sill, and a careless hand whipped me in again—and that
was all. But what happened in the darkness—I wonder? Did one
grow? Pale stem . . . timid leaves . . . white, reluc-
tant bud. No wonder I was hated at school. Even the masters
shrank from me. I somehow knew that my soft hesitating voice
disgusted them. I knew, too, how they turned away from my
shocked, staring eyes. I was small and thin, and I smelled of the
shop; my nickname was Gregory Powder. School was a tin build-
ing, stuck on the raw hillside. There were dark red streaks like
blood in the oozing clay banks of the playground. I hide in the
dark passage, where the coats hang, and am discovered there by
one of the masters. "What are you doing there in the dark?" His
terrible voice kills me; I die before his eyes. I am standing in a
ring of thrust out heads; some are grinning, some look greedy,
some are spitting. And it is always cold. Big crushed up clouds
press across the sky; the rusty water in the school tank is frozen;
the bell sounds numb. One day they put a dead bird in my over-
coat pocket. I found it just when I reached home. Oh, what a
strange flutter there was at my heart, when I drew out that terribly
soft, cold little body, with the legs thin as pins and the claws
wrung. I sat on the back door step in the yard and put the bird
in my cap. The feathers round the neck looked wet, and there was
/ a tiny tuft just above the closed eyes that stood up too.—The smoke
from our chimney poured downwards, and flakes of soot floated—
soft, light in the air. Through a big crack in the cement yard a
poor-looking plant with dull, reddish flowers had pushed its way.
But what has all this to do with my married happiness? How
can all this affect my wife and me? Why—to tell what happened
last autumn—do I run all this way back into the past? The past—


4&o
A MARRIED MAN'S STORY
what is the past? I might say the star-shaped flake of soot on a leaf
of the poor-looking plant, and the bird lying on the quilted lining
of my cap, and my father's pestle and my mother's cushion, belong
to it. But that is not to say they are any less mine than they were
when I looked upon them with my very eyes, and touched them
with these fingers. No, they are more; they are a living part of me.
Who am I, in fact, as I sit here at this table, but my own past? If I
deny that, I am nothing. And if I were to try to divide my life into
childhood, youth, early manhood, and so on, it would be a kind of
affectation; I should know I was doing it just because of the pleas-
antly important sensation it gives one to rule lines, and to use
green ink for childhood, red for the next stage, and purple for the
period of adolescence. For, one thing I have learnt, one thing I do
believe is, Nothing Happens Suddenly. Yes, that is my religion,
I suppose. . . .
My mother's death, for instance. Is it more distant from me
to-day than it was then? It is just as close, as strange, as puzzling,
and in spite of all the countless times I have recalled the circum-
stances, I know no more now than I did then, whether I dreamed
them, or whether they really occurred. It happened when I was
thirteen and I slept in a little strip of a room on what was called
the half-landing. One night I woke up with a start to see my
Mother, in her night-gown, without even the hated flannel dressing-
gown, sitting on my bed. But the strange thing which frightened
me was, she wasn't looking at me. Her head was bent; the short,
thin tail of hair lay between her shoulders; her hands were pressed
between her knees, and my bed shook; she was shivering. It was
the first time I had ever seen her out of her own room. I said, or I
think I said, "Is that you, Mother?" And as she turned round, I
saw in the moonlight how queer she looked. Her face looked small
—quite different. She looked like one of the boys at the school
baths, who sits on a step, shivering just like that, and wants to go
in and yet is frightened.
"Are you awake?" she said. Her eyes opened; I think she
smiled. She leaned towards me. "I've been poisoned," she whis-
pered. "Your father's poisoned me." And she nodded. Then, be-
fore I could say a word, she was gone, and I thought I heard the
door shut. I sat quite still, I couldn't move, I think I expected
something else to happen. For a long time I listened for something;
there wasn't a sound. The candle was by my bed, but I was too


KATHERINE MANSFIELD
46i
frightened to stretch out my hand for the matches. But even while
I wondered what I ought to do, even while my heart thumped—
everything became confused. I lay down and pulled the blankets
round me. I fell asleep, and the next morning my Mother was
found dead of failure of the heart.
Did that visit happen? Was it a dream? Why did she come to
tell me? Or why, if she came, did she go away so quickly? And
her expression—so joyous under the frightened look—was that
real? I believed it fully the afternoon of the funeral, when I saw
my Father dressed up for his part, hat and all. That tall hat so
gleaming black and round was like a cork covered with black seal-
ing-wax, and the rest of my Father was awfully like a bottle, with
his face for the label—Deadly Poison. It flashed into my mind as
I stood opposite him in the hall. And Deadly Poison, or old D. P.,
was my private name for him from that day.
Late, it grows late. I love the night. I love to feel the tide of
darkness rising slowly and slowly washing, turning over and over,
lifting, floating, all that lies strewn upon the dark beach, all that
lies hid in rocky hollows. I love, I love this strange feeling of
drifting—whither? After my Mother's death I hated to go to bed.
I used to sit on the window-sill, folded up, and watch the sky. It
seemed to me the moon moved much faster than the sun. And one
big, bright green star I chose for my own. My star! But I never
thought of it beckoning to me, or twinkling merrily for my sake.
Cruel, indifferent, splendid—it burned in the airy night. No mat-
ter—it was mine! But, growing close up against the window, there
was a creeper with small, bunched-up pink and purple flowers.
These did know me. These, when I touched them at night, wel-
comed my fingers; the little tendrils, so weak, so delicate, knew I
would not hurt them. When the wind moved the leaves, I felt I
understood their shaking. When I came to the window, it seemed
to me the flowers said among themselves, "The boy is here."
As the months passed, there was often a light in my Father's
room below. And I heard voices and laughter. "He's got some
woman with him," I thought. But it meant nothing to me. Then
the gay voice, the sound of the laughter, gave me the idea it was
one of the girls who used to come to the shop in the evenings—and
gradually I began to imagine which girl it was. It was the dark
one in the red coat and skirt, who once had given me a penny. A
merry face stooped over me—warm breath tickled my neck—


462 A MARRIED MAN'S STORY
there were little beads of black on her long lashes, and when she
opened her arms to kiss me, there came a marvellous wave of scent!
Yes, that was the one. Time passed, and I forgot the moon and
my green star and my shy creeper—I came to the window to wait
for the light in my Father's window, to listen for the laughing
voice, until one night I dozed and I dreamed she came again—
again she drew me to her, something soft, scented, warm, and merry
hung over me like a cloud. But when I tried to see, her eyes only
mocked me, her red lips opened and she hissed, "Little sneak!
Little sneak!" But not as if she were angry, as if she understood,
and her smile somehow was like a rat . . . hateful!
The night after, I lighted the candle and sat down at the table
instead. By and by, as the flame steadied, there was a small lake
of liquid wax, surrounded by a white, smooth wall. I took a pin
and made little holes in this wall and then sealed them up faster
than the wax could escape. After a time I fancied the candle flame
joined in the game; it leapt up, quivered, wagged; it even seemed
to laugh. But while I played with the candle and smiled and
broke off the tiny white peaks of wax that rose above the wall and
floated them on my lake, a feeling of awful dreariness fastened on
me—yes, that's the word. It crept up from my knees to my thighs,
into my arms; I ached all over with misery. And I felt so strangely
that I couldn't move. Something bound me there by the table—I
couldn't even let the pin drop that I held between my finger and
thumb. For a moment I came to a stop, as it were.
Then the shrivelled case of the bud split and fell, the plant in
the cupboard came into flower. "Who am If I thought. "What
is all this?" And I looked at my room, at the broken bust of the
man called Hahnemann on top of the cupboard, at my little bed
with the pillow like an envelope. I saw it all, but not as I had seen
before . . . Everything lived, everything. But that was not
all. I was equally alive and—it's the only way I can express it—
the barriers were down between us—I had come into my own
world!
The barriers were down. I had been all my life a little outcast;
but until that moment no one had "accepted" me; I had lain in the
cupboard—or the cave forlorn.! But now I was taken, I was ac-
cepted, claimed. I did not consciously turn away from the world
of human beings; I had never known it; but I from that night did
beyond words consciously turn towards my silent brothers . . .









A BAS-RELIEF. BY ARNOLD ROENNEBECK






A BAS RELIEF. BY ARNOLD ROENNEBECK





MARCEL PROUST: THE PROPHET
OF DESPAIR
BY FRANCIS BIRRELL
IT is the privilege of those known as the world's greatest artists
to create the illusion of dragging the reader through the whole
mechanism of life. Such was pre-eminently the gift of Shakespeare,
whose tragedies appear to be microcosms of the universe. Such a
gift was that of Balzac, for all his vulgarities and absurdities, if we
may treat the whole Comedie Humaine as a single novel. Such, in
his rare moments of prodigal creation, was the power of Tolstoy,
whom Proust in some ways so much resembles. Such is the gift of
Proust in his astonishing pseudo-autobiography—A la Recherche
du Temps Perdu. For it is the sense of imaginative wealth and
creative facility that is the hall-mark of the first-rate genius, who
must never appear to be reaching the end of his tether, but must
always on the contrary leave the impression of there being better
fish in his sea than have ever come out of it.
The outpouring of the romantic school of authors, their neglect
of form, their absence of critical faculty, their devastating facility,
have made this truth disagreeable and even doubtful to many
minds, who feel more in sympathy with the costive author of
Adolphe than with the continual flux of Victor Hugo. Yet if Victor
Hugo be a great author at all, as he evidently is, it is because of this
very fertility that we so much dislike, and if Benjamin Constant be
not a really great artist, as he evidently is not, the reason must be
sought in the absence of fertility, though we may find its absence
sympathetic; while this same fertility, which is the whole essence
of Balzac, is rendering him formidable and unattractive to a gen-
eration of readers. Now Proust was eminently fertile, and, within
the limits imposed by his own delicate health, he could go on indefi-
nitely, so profound and so all-embracing was his interest in human
beings and human emotions. But he was fertile in a new way. Not
for him was the uncritical spate of nineteenth century verbiage.
His intellectual integrity, of which M. C. Dubos has written so
well in his Approximations, always compelled him to check and


464
MARCEL PROUST
ponder every move upon the chess-board of life, every comment on
human feelings. For Proust is the latest great prophet of sensibility,
and it is bearing this in mind, that we can trace the intellectual
stock of which he comes.
One of the great landmarks in French literature is pegged out
for us by the Abbe Prevost's translation of Clarissa Harlowe, which
burst on the new sentimental generation, starved on the superficial
brilliance of the Regnards and their successors, with all the energy
of a gospel. The adoration with which this great novel was received
by the most brilliant intellects of eighteenth century France, seems
to-day somewhat excessive, however deep be our sympathy with the
mind and art of Richardson. Remember how Diderot speaks of
him, Diderot the most complete embodiment of the eighteenth cen-
tury with its sentimental idealism and fiery common sense—the
man in whom reason and spirit were perfectly blended, the enthusi-
astic preacher of atheism and humanity.
"O Richardson, Richardson! homme unique a mes yeux. Tu
seras ma lecture dans tous les temps. Force par les besoins pressants
si mon ami tombe dans l'indigence, si la mediocrite de ma fortune
ne suffit pas pour donner a mes enfants les soins necessaires a leur
education je vendrai mes livres, mais tu me resteras; tu me resteras
sur le meme rayon avec Virgile, Homere, Euripide, et Sophocle.
Je vous lirai tour a tour. Plus on a I'dme belle, plus on aime la
verite, plus on a le gout exquis et pur, plus on connatt la nature*
plus on estime les ouvrages de Richardson."
The new sentimental movement, developed to such a pitch of
perfection by the author of Clarissa Harlowe, was one of enormous
value to life and art. But inevitably it was pushed much too far,
and the novels of the ecole larmoyante are now well-nigh intoler-
able, even when written by men of genius like Rousseau whose
characters seem to spend their lives in one continual jet of tears in
a country where the floodgates of ill-controlled emotion are never
for an instant shut.
Rousseau had one great pupil, a great name in the history of the
French novel, Stendhal. But he wore his Rousseau with a differ-
ence. For Rousseau represented, in his novels, but one side of the
eighteenth century, the sentimental; but there was another, the
scientific—and the life work of Stendhal consisted in an untiring


FRANCIS BIRRELL
465
effort to combine the two. For what was the avowed ambition of
the self-conscious sentimentalist that was Stendhal? Soaked in the
writings of Lavater, de Tracy, and the Scotch metaphysicians,
crossed with a romantic passion for Rousseau and the Elizabethan
drama, he wished to be as sec as possible and boasted that he read
a portion of the Code Civil every day—a document Remy de Gon-
court may be right in calling diffuse, but which is certainly not
romantic. Nourished on Shakespeare, Rousseau, and de Tracy,
Stendhal became one of the first completely modern men, who study
the working of their minds with the imaginative enthusiasm, but
also with the cold objectivity of a scientist dissecting a tadpole.
Like the young scientist in Hans Andersen, his first instinct was to
catch the toad and put it in spirits; but in this case the toad was
his own soul. Stendhal was too much of a revolutionary in writing
ever to have been completely successful, but the immensity of his
achievement may be gauged by the fact that parts of l'Amour, and
still more of Le Rouge et le Noir are really of practical value to
lovers who might profit considerably in the conduct of their affairs
by a careful study of Stendhal's advice, if only they were ever in a
position to listen to reason. Now this is something quite new in
fiction and would have astonished his grandfather Richardson.
Proust is in turn the intellectual child of Stendhal, and has bespat-
tered A la Recherche du Temps Perdu with expressions of admi-
ration for his master. In truth he has taken over not only the meth-
ods, but the philosophy of his teacher. It will be remembered that
Stendhal insists in his analysis of L'Amour-Passion that crystalliza-
tion can only be effected after doubt has been experienced. So, for
Proust, love, the mal sacre, as he calls it, can only be called into
being by jealousy, le plus affreux des supplices. We can want noth-
ing, till we have been cheated out of getting it; whence it follows
that we can get nothing till we have ceased to want it, and in any
case, once obtained, it would ipso facto cease to be desirable. Hence
Man "how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty, in form and
moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel! in
apprehension how like a god!" is doomed by the nature of his being
to unsatisfied desire and restless misery, till Proust becomes, as I
have called him above, the prophet of despair. He is a master of
the agonizing moments spent hanging in vain round the telephone,
the weeks passed waiting for letters that never come, and the terri-
ble reactions after one's own fatal letter has been irrevocably posted


466
MARCEL PROUST
and not all the jewels of Golconda can extract it from the pillar-
box. For how does the hero of his novels finally pass under the
sway of Albertine 1 Through agony caused by the cutting of an
appointment.
"Comme chaque fois que la porte-cochère s'ouvrait, la concierge
appuyait sur un bouton électrique, qui éclairait l'escalier et comme
il n'y avait pas de locataires, qui ne fussent rentrés, je quittai immé-
diatement la cuisine, et revins m'asseoir dans l'antichambre, épiant
là où la tenture un peu trop étroite, qui ne couvrait pas la porte
vitrée de notre appartement, laissait passer la sombre raie verticale
faite par la demi-obscurité de l'escalier. Si tout d'un coup cette raie
devenait d'un blond doré c'est qu'Albertine viendrait d'entrer en
bas et serait dans deux minutes près de moi: personne d'autre ne
pourrait plus venir à cette heure-là. Et je restai, ne pouvant plus
détacher mes yeux de la raie, qui s'obstinait à demeurer sombre; je
me penchais tout entier pour être sûr de bien voir; mais j'avais beau
regarder, le noir trait vertical, malgré mon désir passionné, ne me
donnait pas l'enivrante allégresse que j'aurais eue, si je l'avais vu
changé par enchantement soudain et significatif en un lumineux
barreau d'or. C'était bien de l'inquiétude pour cette Albertine à
laquelle je n'avais pas pensé trois minutes pendant toute la soirée
Guermantes! Mais réveillant les sentiments d'attente jadis
éprouvés à propos d'autres jeunes filles, surtout de Gilberte, quand
elle tardait à venir, la privation possible d'un simple plaisir phy-
sique me causait une cruelle souffrance morale."
Indeed happiness in love is by nature impossible, as it demands
an impossible spiritual relationship.
"Si nous pensions que les yeux d'une telle fille ne sont qu'une
brillante rondelle de mica, nous ne serions pas avides de connaître
et d'unir à nous sa vie. Mais nous sentons que ce qui luit dans ce
disque réfléchissant n'était pas dû uniquement à sa composition
matérielle, que ce sont, inconnues de nous, les noires ombres des
idées, que cet être se fait, relativement aux gens et aux lieux qu'il
connaît, pelouses des hippodromes, sable des chemins, ou, pédalant
à travers champs et bois, m'eut entraîné cette petite péri, plus
séduisante pour moi que celle du paradis persan—les ombres aussi
de la maison, où elle va rentrer, des projets qu'elle a formés, ou


FRANCIS BIRRELL
467
qu'on a formés pour elle, avec ses désirs, ses sympathies, ses
répulsions, son obscure et incessante volonté. Je savais que je ne
posséderais pas cette jeune cycliste, si je ne possédais aussi ce qu'il
y avait dans ses yeux. Et c'était par conséquent toute sa vie, qui
m'inspirait du désir—désir douloureux parce que je le sentais
irréalisable, mais enivrant, parce que ce qui avait été jusque-là
ma vie ayant cessé brusquement d'être ma vie totale, n'étant plus
qu'une petite partie de l'espace étendu devant moi, que je brûlais
de couvrir et qui était fait de la vie de ces jeunes filles, m'offrait
ce prolongement, cette multiplication de soi-même qui est le bon-
heur. Et sans doute qu'il n'y eût entre nous aucune habitude—
comme aucune idée—communes devait le rendre plus difficile de me
lier avec elles et leur plaire. Mais peut-être aussi c'était grâce à ces
différences, à la conscience qu'il n'entrait pas dans la composition de
la nature et des actions de ces filles un seul élément, que je connusse,
ou possédasse, que venait en moi de succéder à la satiété la soif—
pareille à celle dont brûle une terre altérée—d'une vie que mon âme,
parce qu'elle n'en avait jamais reçu jusqu'ici une seule goutte absor-
berait d'autant plus avidement, à longs traits, dans une plus
parfaite imbibition."
Proust, having thus reduced all human society to misery builds
upon the ruins his philosophy of salvation: Only by much suffering
shall we enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, that is to say, shall we
be enabled to see ourselves solely and simply as members of the
human race, to perceive what is essential and fundamental in every-
body beneath the trappings of manners, birth, or fortune, learn to
be really intelligent. Love and jealousy alone can open to us the
portals of intelligence. Thus in the opening pages of Du Côté de
Chez Swann, the poor little boy, who, because M Swann is dining
with his parents, cannot receive in bed his mother's kiss, starts on
the long spiritual journey which is to run parallel to that of the
brilliant unhappy mondain guest. Miserable at being left alone he
desperately sends down to his mother an agonized note by his nurse,
and in his agitation he hates Swann whom he regards as the cause
of his misery and continues to reflect:
"L'angoisse que je venais d'éprouver, je pensais que Swann s'en
serait bien moqué, s'il avait lu ma lettre et en avait deviné mon but
—or, au contraire, comme je l'avais appris plus tard, une angoisse


468
MARCEL PROUST
semblable fut le tourment de longues années de sa vie et personne
aussi bien que lui peut-être n'aurait pu me comprendres: lui, cette
angoisse qu'il y a à sentir l'être qu'on aime, dans un lieu de plaisir
où l'on n'est pas, où on ne peut pas le rejoindre, c'est l'amour qui
la lui a fait connaître, l'amour auquel elle est en quelque sorte pré-
destinée, par laquelle elle sera accaparée, spécialisée; mais quand,
comme pour moi, elle est entrée en nous avant qu'il ait encore fait
son apparition dans notre vie, elle flotte, en l'attendant vague et
libre, sans affectation déterminée, au service un jour d'un sentiment,
le lendemain d'un autre, tantôt de la tendresse filiale ou de l'amitié
pour un camarade. Et la joie avec laquelle je fis mon premier ap-
prentissage quand Françoise vint me dire que ma lettre serait
remise. Swann l'avait bien connue aussi, cette joie trompeuse, que
nous donne quelque ami, quelque parent de la femme que nous
aimons, quand arrivant à l'hôtel ou au théâtre où elle se trouve,
pour quelque mal, redoute, ou première, où il va la retrouver, cet
ami nous aperçoit errant dehors, attendant désespérément quelque
occasion de communiquer avec elle."
"We brought nothing into the world," remarked the first Chris-
tian stoic, "and it is certain we shall take nothing out of it." He
might have made an exception for our personality, that enormous
anonymity, unmalleable as granite, and unchanging as the ocean,
which we brought along with us from a thousand ancestors and
shall carry unaltered into the grave. Swann and little Proust both
endowed with sensibility could shake hands with each other across
the generations: all the experiences of one, all the innocence of the
other were as nothing beside that similarity of temperament, which
calls to us irrevocably, as Christ called to Matthew at the receipt
of custom, and bids us share with our friend the miseries of the
past and the terrors of the future.
Proust's youth was spent in Paris during that period when France
was spiritually and politically severed by the Affaire Dreyfus and
for him the Affaire becomes the touchstone of sensibility and intel-
ligence. To be a Dreyfusard means to pass beyond the sheltered
harbour of one's own clique and interest into the uncharted seas
of human solidarity. Hard indeed is the way of the rich man, the
aristocrat, the snob, or the gentleman, who wishes to find salvation
during the Affaire. He must leave behind him taste, beauty, com-
fort, and education, consort, in spirit at least, with intolerable Jews,


FRANCIS BIRRELL
469
fifth-rate politicians, and insufferable arrivistes, before worthily
taking up the burden of human misery, and routing the forces of
superstition and stupidity. And there is only one school for this
lesson, the school of romantic love, that is to say of carking
jealousy, in the throes of which all men are equal. Little Proust
himself, his bold and beautiful friend the Marquis de Saint Loup,
the eccentric and arrogant M de Charlus, even the stupid high-
minded Prince de Guermantes, who all know the meaning of
romantic love, as opposed to the facile pleasure of successive mis-
tresses, will eventually, be it only for a short moment, triumphantly
stand the test. But Saint Loup's saintly mother, Mme de Mar-
santes, the rakish Due de Guermantes and his brilliant, charming,
but limited wife, will never put out to sea on the ship of misery,
bound for the ever-receding shores of romantic love and universal
comprehension. They will never risk their lives for one great mo-
ment, for the satisfaction of unbounded passion. Swann, tortured
and fascinated by his flashy cocotte, little Proust lacerated by the
suspected infidelities of the niece of a Civil Servant, Saint Loup in
the clutches of an obscure and ill-conditioned actress of budding
genius, M de Charlus broken by the sheer brutality of his young
musician, such are the people who have their souls and such are
the painful schools in which Salvation is learned—the Salvation
that comes from forgetting social prejudice and from not mistaking
the "plumage for the dying bird," from judging people by their
intrinsic merit, from making no distinction between servants and
masters, between Prince and Peasant. For, as the author insists
with almost maddening iteration, good brains and good breeding
never go together: all ultimate talent and perception is with the
cads. The price to pay is heavy and incessant. A little easy happi-
ness, a little recovery from hopeless love, a passing indifference to
ill-requited affection can undo all the good acquired by endless
misery in the long course of years.
Such I take to be the fundamental thought underlying A la
Recherche du Temps Perdu in its present unfinished state, though
we cannot tell what surprises the succeeding volumes (happily com-
pleted) may have in store for us. I have insisted, at perhaps ex-
cessive length, on the general mental background to this vast epic
of jealousy, because it is not very easy to determine. The enormous
wealth of the author's gifts tends for the superficial ornament. For


470
MARCEL PROUST
Proust combines to a degree never before realized in literature, the
qualities of the aesthete and the scientist. It is the quality which
first strikes the reader who does not notice in the aesthetic rapture
communicated by perfect style, that all pleasures are made pegs
for disillusion. Human beauty, the beauty of buildings, of the
sea, of the sky, the beauty of transmitted qualities in families and
in the country-side, the beauty of history, of good breeding, of self-
assurance, few people have felt these things as Proust. For him
the soft place-names of France are implicit with memories too deep
for tears. Let us take one passage among many where the aesthete
Proust is feeling intensely a thousand faint suggestions:
"Quand je rentrai, le concierge de l'hôtel me remit une lettre de
deuil, où faisait part le Marquis et la Marquise de Gonneville, le
Vicomte et la Vicomtesse d'Am)'reville, le Comte et la Comtesse de
Berneville, le Marquis et la Marquise de Graincourt, le Comte
d'Amenoncourt, la Comtesse de Mainville, le Comte et la Comtesse
de Franquetot, la Comtesse de Chaverny, née d1 Aigleville, et de
laquelle je compris enfin pourquoi elle m'était envoyée, quand je
reconnus les noms de la Marquise de Cambrcmer, née du Mesnil la
Guichard, du Marquis et de la Marquise de Cambremer, et que
je vis que la morte, une cousine des Cambremer, s'appelait Eléo-
nore-Euphrasie-Humbertine de Cambremer, Comtesse de Criquetot.
Dans toute l'étendue de cette famille provinciale, dont le dénom-
brement remplissait des lignes fières et serrées, pas un bourgeois et
d'ailleurs pas un titre connu, mais tout le ban et l'arrière-ban des
nobles de la région, qui faisaient chanter leurs noms,—ceux de tous
les lieux intéressants du pays,—aux joyeuses finales en ville, en
court, parfois plus sourdes {en tot). Habillés des tuiles de leur
château ou du crépi de leur église, la tête branlante dépassant à
peine la voûte ou le corps-de-logis et seulement pour se coiffer du
lanternon ou des colombages du toit en poivrière, ils avaient l'an
d'avoir sonné le rassemblement de tous les jolis villages échelonnés
ou dispersés à cinquante lieues à la ronde et de les avoir disposés en
formation serrée, sans une lacune, sans un intrus dans le damier
compact et rectangulaire de F aristocratique lettre bordée de noir."
Such a passage contains in little the whole history of a nation
reflected in the magic mirror of a nation's country-side, equally de-
sirable for its human suggestiveness and for its pure aesthetic worth.


FRANCIS BIRRELL
47i
And here we may pause a moment to consider one of the most
important aspects of Proust's aesthetic impulse, which is expressed
in the title A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, The Remembrance of
Things Past. This is more than the expression of a desire to write
an autobiography, to recapitulate one's own vanishing experience.
It is an endeavour to reconstruct the whole of the past, on which
the present is merely a not particularly valuable comment. Royal-
ties are interesting because they have retired from business, aristo-
crats because they have nothing left but their manners; the bour-
geoisie still carry with them the relics of their old servility, the
people have not yet realized their power; and a social flux results
therefrom, the study of which can never grow boring to the on-
looker, as long as superficially the old order continues, though it
represent nothing but an historic emotion. The hero, as he winds
along the path of his emotional experience from childhood to
adolescence, is pictured as avid for all these historic sensibilities,
which find their expression in his early passion for the Guermantes
group, the most aristocratic combination of families in France.
From his earliest childhood he has dreamed about them, picturing
them as their ancestors, whom he has seen in the stained-glass win-
dows of his village church at Combray; till he has woven round
them all the warm romance of the Middle Ages, the austere splen-
dours of Le Grand Steele, the brilliant decay of Eighteenth Century
France. But when he meets them, the courage has gone, the in-
telligence has gone, and only the breeding remains. It was the
greatest historical disillusion in the boy's life. Yet there still hangs
about them the perfume of a vanished social order, and Proust
makes splendid use of his hero's spiritual adventure. As he wanders
through the salons, fast degenerating into drawing-rooms, he be-
comes the Saint-Simon of the décadence. For Proust can describe,
with a mastery only second to that of Saint-Simon himself, the
sense of social life, the reaction of an individual to a number of
persons, and the interplay of a number of members of the same
group upon each other. His capacity for describing the manifold
pleasures of a party would have stirred the envy of the great author
of Rome, Naples et Florence. Many people can only see snobbery
in this heroic effort to project the past upon the screen of the
present. Yet the author is too intelligent and honest not in the end
to throw away his romantic spectacles. Le Cote de Guermantes
cannot be permanently satisfying. Again bursts in the philosophy


472
MARCEL PROUST
of disillusion. When he has obtained with immense labour the key
to the forbidden chamber, he finds nothing but stage properties
inside.
But this poet of political, economic, and social institutions is also
the pure poet of nature in another mood:
"Là, où je n'avais vu avec ma grand'mère au mois d'août que
les feuilles et comme l'emplacement des pommiers, à perte de vue
ils étaient en pleine floraison, d'un luxe inouï, les pieds dans la
boue et en toilette de bal, ne prenant pas de précautions pour ne pas
gâter le plus merveilleux satin rose qu'on eût jamais vu, et que
faisait briller le soleil: l'horizon lotntain de la mer fournissait aux
pommiers comme un arrière-plan d'estampe japonaise; si je levais
la tete pour regarder le ciel, entre les fleurs qui faisaient paraître
son bleu rasséréné, presque violent, elles semblaient s'écarter pour
montrer la profondeur de ce paradis. Sous cet azur, une brise
légère, mais froide, faisait trembler légèrement les bouquets rougis-
sants. Des mésanges bleues venaient se poser sur les branches et
sautaient entre les fleurs indulgentes, comme si c'eût été un amateur
d'exotisme et de couleurs, qui avait artificiellement créé cette
beauté vivante. Mais elle touchait jusqu'aux larmes, parce que,
si loin qu'on allât dans effets d'art raffiné, on sentait qu'elle
était naturelle, que ces pommiers étaient là en pleine campagne
comme les paysans, sur une grande route de France. Puis aux rayons
du soleil succédèrent subitement ceux de la pluie; ils zébrèrent
tout l'horizon, enserrèrent la file des pommiers dans leur réseau
gris. Mais ceux-ci continuaient à dresser leur beauté, fleurie et
rose, dans le vent devenu glacial sous l'averse qui tombait: c'était
une journée de printemps''
But so wide-minded is this lyric poet who can speak with the
voice of Claudel and of Fustel de Coulanges, that he is also perhaps
the coldest analyst who has ever devoted his attention to fiction.
His knife cuts down into the very souls of his patients, as he calls
into play all the resources of his wit, animosities, sympathy, and
intelligence. He is a master of all the smaller nuances of social re-
lations, of all the half-whispered subterranean emotions, that bind
Society together while Society barely dreams of their existence.
It is also worth remark that Proust is the first author to treat
sexual inversion as a current and ordinary phenomenon, which he


FRANCIS BIRRELL
473
describes neither in the vein of tedious panegyric, adopted by cer-
tain decadent writers, nor yet with the air of a showman display-
ing to an agitated tourist abysses of unfathomable horror. Treat-
ing this important social phenomenon as neither more nor less
important than it is, he has derived from it new material for his
study of social relations and has greatly enriched and complicated
the texture of his plot. His extreme honesty meets nowhere with
more triumphant reward. It is by the splendid use of so much
unusual knowledge, that Proust gains his greatest victories as a
pure novelist. Royalty, actresses, bourgeois, servants, peasants,
men, women, and children—they all have the genuine third dimen-
sion and seem to the reader more real than their friends. The story
is told of an English naval officer that he once knocked down a
Frenchman for casting doubt on the chastity of Ophelia. It is
to the credit of Shakespeare's supreme genius that our sympathies
are with the naval officer, for Shakespeare's characters, too, are as
real to us as our parents and friends and more real than our rela-
tions and our acquaintances. But to how few artists can this praise
be given, save to Shakespeare and to Tolstoy! But to Proust it can
be given in full measure. To read A La Recherche du Temps Perdu
is to live in the world, at any rate in Proust's world, a world more
sensitive, variegated, and interesting than our own. It is difficult
to analyse the ultimate quality of an artist's triumph; yet such is
the function of criticism, the sole justification of writing books
about books.
Proust, it seems to me, had the extremely rare faculty of seeing
his characters objectively and subjectively at the same moment.
He can project himself so far into the mind of the persons he is
describing, that he seems to know more about them than they can
ever know themselves and the reader feels, in the process, that he
never even dimly knew himself before. At the same time he never
takes sides. The warm palpitating flesh he is creating is also and
always a decorative figure on the huge design of his tapestry, just
as in Petroushka the puppets are human beings and the human be-
ings puppets. For Proust, though the most objective, is also the
most personal of writers. As we get accustomed to the long, tor-
tuous sentences, the huge elaboration of conscientious metaphor,
the continual refining on what cannot be further refined, we insen-
sibly become listeners to a long and brilliant conversation by the


474
MARCEL PROUST
wisest and wittiest of men. For Proust, as much as any man, has
grafted the mellowness and also the exacerbation of experience on
to the untiring inquisitiveness of youth. In a page of amazing
prophecy, written as long ago as 1896, M Anatole France summed
up the achievement of Proust at a moment when his life work had
barely begun:
"Sans doute il est jeune. II est jeune de la jeunesse de l'auteur.
Mais il est vieux de la vieillesse du monde. C'est le printemps des
feuilles sur les rameaux antiques, dans la foret seculaire. On dirait
que les pousses nouvelles sont attristees du passe profond des bois
et portent le deuil de tant de printemps morts. . . . II y a
en lui du Bernardin de Saint Pierre déprave et du Petrone ingenu."
This is not the moment to pretend to estimate impartially his
exact place and achievement in letters. For the present we can only
feel his death, almost personally, so much has he woven himself
into the hearts of his readers, and apply to him in all sincerity the
words Diderot used of his predecessor in time:
"Plus on a Fame belle, plus on a le gout exquis et pur, plus on
connatt la nature, plus on aime la verite, plus on estime les ouvrages
de Proust."
PLENIPOTENTIARY
BY TINA MODOTTI DE RICHEY
I like to swing from the sky
And drop down on Europe,
Bounce up again like a rubber ball,
Reach a hand down on the roof of the Kremlin,
Steal a tile
And throw it to the kaiser.
Be good;
I will divide the moon in three parts,
The biggest will be yours.
Don't eat it too fast.








THE HERETIC OF SOANA
BY GERHART HAUPTMANN
Translated from the German by Bayard Quincy Morgan
HE uncouth mountain herder was breathing hard, not only
A because he had traversed in a short time the distance from a
remote, more elevated alp, after he had observed from there the
priest's arrival, but because this visit was an event for the out-
lawed man.
The greeting was short. Francesco was compelled by his host to
sit down, after the latter had, with his rough hands, cleared
the soapstone bench of the stones and cowslips which served his
accursed brood as playthings.
The mountain herder stirred the fire and blew upon it with puffed
cheeks, so that his feverish eyes gleamed still more wildly in the
reflected light. He nursed the flame with logs and dry brushwood,
until the pungent smoke was enough to drive out the priest. The
herdsman was obsequious and submissive; he acted with a nervous
eagerness, much as if everything now depended on not losing by
some wrong move the favour of the higher being that had entered
his poor dwelling. He brought out a great pail full of milk, which
was covered with a thick layer of cream, but was unfortunately
fouled in such an incredible fashion that for this reason alone, Fran-
cesco was unable to touch it. But although he had become hungry,
he also declined to taste any fresh cheese and clean bread, because
he had a superstitious fear of committing a sin by eating it. Finally,
when the mountaineer had somewhat composed himself, and was
standing facing him with fearful, expectant eyes and limp arms, the
priest began speaking:
"Luchino Scarabota, you are not to be deprived of the consola-
tion of our holy Church, and your children shall hereafter not be
cast out of the community of Catholic Christians, if it turns out, on
the one hand, that the evil rumours touching you are untrue, or if
II


476
THE HERETIC OF SOANA
you honestly confess, show penitence and contrition, and are pre-
pared with God's aid to remove the stumbling block. Therefore,
first open your heart to me, Scarabota; confess freely in what re-
spect you are calumniated, and confess with honest truth the guilt
which is burdening you."
After this speech the herdsman was silent. Only a brief wild
sound was suddenly wrung from his throat; it betrayed no feeling,
however, but had rather a gurgling, bird-like quality. With the
fluency of familiarity, Francesco at once proceeded to hold up
before the sinner the terrible consequences of impenitence, and the
propitiatory goodness and love of God the Father, which he had
proved through the sacrifice of his only Son, the sacrifice of the'
Lamb which took the sins of the world upon itself. Through Jesus
Christ, he concluded, any sin can be forgiven, provided that an un-
reserved confession, combined with remorse and prayer, has proved
to our Heavenly Father the contrition of the miserable sinner.
The priest had waited a long time and with a shrug of the shoul-
ders was rising as though he intended to leave; then finally the
herder began to choke out an incomprehensible tangle of words: a
sort of guzzling like that of a disgorging hawk. And with straining
attention the priest attempted to seize upon as much as was compre-
hensible in the chaos. But what he could understand seemed to him
quite as strange and remarkable as what was obscure. Only this
much became clear from the alarming and oppressive quantity of
imaginary things: that Luchino Scarabota wished to secure his aid
against all kinds of devils which lived in the mountains and
harassed him.
It would ill have become the credulous young priest to doubt the
existence and activity of evil spirits. Was not the creation filled
with all manner and degree of angels fallen from the train of Luci-
fer, the rebel whom God had cast out? Yet here he shuddered,
although he did not know whether it was at the unheard-of spiritual
darkness and superstition he met with, or at the hopeless blindness
caused by ignorance. He resolved to ask some questions, in order to
form a judgement as to his parishioner's range of ideas, and the
power of his understanding.
Then it soon became evident that this wild, neglected man knew
nothing of God, still less of Jesus Christ the Saviour, and least of
all about the existence of a Holy Ghost. On the other hand, it


GERHART HAUPTMANN
477
began to seem as if he felt himself surrounded by demons and were
possessed by a gloomy persecution mania. And in the priest he did
not see the chosen servant of God at all, but much rather a mighty
sorcerer, or God himself. What could Francesco do but cross him-
self, while the herder humbly threw himself on the ground, and
with moist, protuberant lips began to lick his shoes like an idolater,
and to cover them with kisses.
The young priest had never found himself in a similar situation.
The rarefied mountain air, the spring, the separation from the usual
level of civilization, all this had the effect of befogging his con-
sciousness somewhat. Something like a visionary spell entered the
sphere of his soul, where reality was dissolving into unstable, airy
forms. This alteration was combined with a faint fearfulness,
which suggested to him more than once a precipitate flight down
into the realm of consecrated churches and chimes. The Devil was
powerful: who could know how many ways and means he had of
luring onward the most unsuspecting, most faithful Christian, and
hurling him down from the brink of a giddy height into the abyss.
Francesco had not been taught that the idols of the heathen were
nothing but empty creations of the imagination. The Church ex-
pressly recognized their power, only that it represented it as one
hostile to God. They were still fighting with almighty God, though
hopelessly, for the world. Hence the pale young priest was not a
little startled when his host fetched a wooden article out of some
nook in his dwelling, a horrible carving which probably was a
fetish. Despite his priestly terror of the lascivious object, Francesco
could not refrain from taking a closer look at it. With abhorrence
and astonishment he confessed to himself that the most revolting
heathenish abominations, namely the rural worship of Priapus, were
still active here. Nothing but Priapus, it was clearly evident, could
be represented by this primitive religious emblem.
Scarcely had Francesco seized the harmless little god of procrea-
tion, the god of rural fertility, who was so openly accorded high
honour by the ancients, when the strange constriction of his soul
turned into holy wrath. Without stopping to think, he flung the
obscene little alruna into the fire; but rushing forward as swiftly as
a dog, the herder drew it out again in the same instant. It was glow-
ing in spots, and in other spots it was flaming; but the rough hands
of the pagan immediately restored it to its previous harmless con-


478 THE HERETIC OF SOANA
dition. But now, along with its deliverer, it had to undergo a tor-
rent of castigating words.
Luchino Scarabota did not seem to know which of the two gods
he should regard as the stronger: the wooden one or the one of flesh
and blood. However, he kept his eyes, in which horror and terror
were mingled with spiteful rage, fixed on the new deity, whose
atrocious daring did not, at any rate, point to any sense of weak-
ness. Once started, the emissary of the one and only God did not
allow himself to be intimidated in his sacred zeal by the glances,
threatening as they were, of the benighted idolater. And without
any ceremony he now came to speak of the heinous sin from which,
as everyone said, the numerous progeny of the mountaineer had
sprung.
Into the young priest's loud words burst, as it were, the sister of
Scarabota; but without saying anything, and merely eyeing the
zealot in secret, she busied herself here and there in the cavern. She
was a pale and repulsive woman, to whom washing seemed to be a
thing unknown. One had disagreeable glimpses of her naked body
through the rents of her neglected clothing.
When the priest had finished and had temporarily exhausted his
store of stinging accusations, the woman sent her brother out into
the open with a short, barely audible word. Without objecting, the
savage disappeared, like an obedient hound. Then the filth-crusted
sinner, whose matted black hair hung down over her broad hips,
kissed the priest's hand, and said, "Praised be Jesus Christ!"
Immediately afterwards she burst into tears.
She said the priest was quite right to condemn her with harsh
words. She had indeed sinned against the word of God, though
not at all in the way indicated by the calumnies told about her.
She alone was the sinner; her brother, however, was wholly inno-
cent. She swore, and by all the saints, that she had never been
guilty of that frightful iniquity she was accused of: incest. To be
sure she had lived unchastely, and as she was now confessing, she
was ready to describe the fathers of her children, if not to call them
all by name. For she knew very few of the names, since need had
often caused her to sell her favours, she said, to passing strangers.
For the rest, she had brought her children into the world pain-
fully and without any help, and she had had to bury some of them
shortly after their birth, here and there in the debris of Monte


GERHART HAUPTMANN
479
Generoso. Whether he could give her absolution or not, she knew
nevertheless that God had forgiven her, for she had done penance
enough through privations, cares, and suffering.
Francesco could not but regard the tearful confession of the
woman as a tissue of lies, at least so far as the incest was con-
cerned. To be sure, he felt that there were actions which it is abso-
lutely repugnant to confess before men, and which God alone learns
in the solitary stillness of prayer. He respected this reserve in the
degenerate woman, and could not conceal from himself that in
many respects she was of a higher type than her brother. It was she,
as it turned out, who had sent the man to Francesco. She had seen
the pale young priest when she went to market one day at Lugano,
where she sold the products of her mountain farm; and at sight of
him she had taken courage, and had conceived the idea of recom-
mending her outlawed children to his mercy. She alone was the
head of the family, and cared for her brother and her children.
"I will not discuss," said Francesco, "how far you are guilty or
innocent. One thing is certain: if you do not wish your children
to grow up like beasts, you must separate from your brother. As
long as you live with him, the frightful reputation you have can
never be lived down. People will always assume that you have
committed that terrible sin."
After these words, obstinacy and defiance seemed to become dom-
inant in the woman. At any rate, she made no answer; and for a
long while, as if no stranger were present, she devoted herself to
her household duties. Meanwhile a girl of about fifteen came in,
drove some goats into the opening of the stable, and then partici-
pated in the woman's activities, also as if Francesco were not there.
The young priest knew at once, as soon as he merely glimpsed the
girl's shadow gliding through the depths of the cave, that she must
be of uncommon beauty. He crossed himself, for he felt in his body
a faint dread of an inexplicable kind. He did not know whether
he should resume his admonitions in the presence of the youthful
shepherdess. To be sure, there could be no doubt that she was de-
praved to the core, since Satan had called her to life by way of the
blackest sin; but still there might be a remnant of purity left in her,
and who could know whether she had any idea of her black origin?
Her movements, at any rate, displayed a great calmness, from
which one could certainly not conclude that she had an uneasy mind


480
THE HERETIC OF SOANA
or a load on her conscience. On the contrary, everything about her
was of a modest self-assurance, which was not affected by the pres-
ence of the pastor. She had so far not cast a glance at Francesco, at
least not so that he had met her eye or otherwise caught her looking
at him. Indeed, while he himself was secretly watching her through
his glasses, he had to cast more and more doubt on the supposition
that a child of sin, a child of such parents, could really be so
formed. At last she vanished up a ladder into a sort of attic, so
that Francesco could now continue his laborious pastoral work.
"I cannot leave my brother," said the woman, "and for the very
simple reason that he is helpless without me. He can write his name
after a fashion, and I taught him that only with the greatest diffi-
culty. He does not know coins, and he is afraid of the railroad, the
city, and people. If I go away, he will pursue me as a wretched dog
pursues his lost master. He will either find me or perish miserably;
and then what is to become of the children and our property? If
I stay here with the children, then I'd like to see the man who
could succeed in getting my brother away: unless they should put
him in chains and lock him up in Milan behind iron bars."
The priest said, "That may yet come to pass, if you will not take
my good advice."
Then the woman's fears turned into rage. She had sent her
brother to Francesco so that he might take pity on them, but not to
have him make them unhappy. In that case she had certainly rather
go on living as hitherto, hated and cast out by the people down be-
low. She was a good Catholic, but if the Church cast out a man, he
had a right to sell himself to the Devil. And what she had not yet
done, the great sin with which she was charged, she might then
actually commit.
Intermingled with the smothered words of the woman, and her
sudden outcries, Francesco kept hearing from above, from the direc-
tion in which the girl had disappeared, a sweet singing, at times like
the softest breathing, at times increasing in power; so that his soul
was more under the spell of this melody than intent upon the
furious outbursts of the woman. And a hot wave rose up in him,
combined with a kind of anxiety which he had never felt before.
The smoky hole of this animal-human dwelling-stable seemed to be
transformed, as by enchantment, into the loveliest of all the crystal-
line grottoes of Dante's Paradise—full of angel-voices and the
flutter of pinions that sounded like those of the laughing-dove.


GERHART HAUPTMANN
48i
He went. It was impossible for him to withstand any longer,
without trembling visibly, such confusing influences. Outside, com-
ing out in front of the excavated stone-pile, he inhaled the fresh-
ness of the mountain air and was immediately filled, like an empty
vessel, with the titanic impression of the mountain-world. His soul
became transferred, as it were, into the farthest ranges of his eye-
sight, and consisted of the colossal masses of the earth's crust, from
distant, snowy peaks to near-by, terrible abysses, under the royal
brightness of the spring day. Still he saw the brown ospreys
describing their unconscious circles above the sugar-loaf of St
Agatha. Then he hit upon the idea of holding a secret service for
the outlawed family up there; and he laid this plan before the
woman, as she stepped dejectedly upon the threshold of the cave,
where the dandelions were clustered. "You can't dare come to
Soana, as you yourself know," he said; "and if I should invite you
there, it would be a grave mistake for both of us."
Again the woman was moved to tears, and promised to appear
before the chapel of St Agatha on a certain day, with her brother
and the older children.
When the young priest had gone far enough away from the
vicinity of the dwelling-place of Luchino Scarabota and his curse-
laden family so that he could no longer be seen from there, he chose
a sun-warmed boulder to rest on, while he thought over what he
had just experienced. He told himself that he had ascended there
with a thrill of interest, to be sure, but yet with a dutifully sober
mind and without any foretaste of what was now disquieting him
in such an ominous manner. What was it? He smoothed, brushed,
and picked at his cassock for a long time, as if that would enable
him to extract the secret.
When some time had elapsed and he had not yet felt the
desired enlightenment, he took his breviary from his pocket as
usual; but even though he began immediately reading aloud, it
did not free him from a peculiar kind of irresoluteness. He felt as
if he had forgotten to do something, some important part of his
mission. From behind his glasses he turned his eyes again and again
toward the road with a certain expectancy, and could not summon
up courage to continue the descent he had begun.
So he fell into a strange reverie from which he was wakened by
two small incidents, which, to his overwrought imagination, took on


482
THE HERETIC OF SOANA
an exaggerated importance. First, his right-hand lens cracked under
the influence of the cold mountain air; and almost immediately
afterward he heard a fearful sneeze above his head, and felt a
heavy pressure on his shoulders.
The young priest sprang up. He laughed loudly when he recog-
nized as the cause of his panic a spotted he-goat, which had given
him a proof of its unlimited confidence by resting its fore-hoofs on
his shoulders, without any regard for his clerical garb.
But this was only the beginning of its most obtrusive familiarity.
The shaggy buck with his strong, finely curved horns and his flash-
ing eyes was accustomed, it seemed, to beg of passing mountain-
climbers; and he did this in such a droll, resolute, and irresistible
fashion that one could not get rid of him except by running away.
Again and again, rearing in the air, he set his hoofs on Francesco's
breast, and seemed determined, after the harassed priest had sub-
mitted to having his pockets sniffed at, and after some bread-
crumbs had been consumed with ravenous greed, to nibble at the
priest's hair, nose, and fingers.
An old bearded she-goat, with bell and udder touching the
ground, had followed the highwayman; and, encouraged by him,
she also began to worry the priest. The breviary with its gilt-edges
and cross had made a particular impression upon her; and she suc-
ceeded, while Francesco was occupied with repelling a curving
buck's horn, in getting possession of the little book. Taking its
black-printed leaves for green ones, she followed the prescription
of the prophet and feasted literally and greedily upon the sacred
verities.
The annoyances were increased by the arrival of other animals
which had been scattered about, grazing; then of a sudden the
shepherdess appeared as his rescuer. It was the very same girl that
Francesco had first caught a glimpse of in Luchino's hut. After she
had driven off the goats, the strong, slender girl stood before him
with freshly reddened cheeks and laughing eyes; he said, "You have
saved me, my good child." And he added with a laugh of his own,
as he received his breviary from the hands of young Eve, "It is
really queer that in spite of my pastoral office I am so helpless
against your flock."
A priest may not converse with a young girl or woman longer
than his ecclesiastical duties require; and the parish remarks on it
at once if he is seen in such a tete-a-tete outside the church. So,


GERHART HAUPTMANN
483
mindful of his stern calling, Francesco continued his journey home
without much delay; and yet he had the feeling that he had de-
tected himself in a sin, and must purify himself at the next oppor-
tunity by remorse and penance.
What Francesco had experienced on this official errand, as a
whole and in detail, was not worth talking about if one does not
take into consideration the abominations that had their breeding-
place in the hut of the miserable Scarabotas. But the young priest
felt at once that this mountain trip had become an event of great
significance in his life, even though he was for the moment far from
realizing the entire scope of that significance. He could trace a
transformation that, working from within him, had taken place in
his being. He found himself in a new state which seemed queerer
to him every minute, and somewhat suspicious, but yet nowhere
nearly so suspicious that he would have scented Satan as being back
of it, or perhaps have thrown an ink-pot at him even if he had had
one in his pocket. The mountain world lay below him like a para-
dise. For the very first time, with involuntarily folded hands, he
congratulated himself on having been entrusted by his superiors
with the administration of just this parish. Compared with this
delicious height and depth, what was Peter's vessel which came
down from Heaven with three angels holding the corners? Where
was there a greater majesty, from man's point of view, than these
inaccessible crags of Monte Generoso, on which ever and again
the dull springtime thunder of melting snow was audible in an
avalanche?
From the day of his visit to the outlaws, Francesco to his own
astonishment could no longer find his way back to the thoughtless
peace of his former existence. The new aspect which nature had
assumed for him did not fade away again; and she would not per-
mit herself to be driven back in any way into her former inanimate
state. The manner of her influences, by which the priest was
oppressed not only day by day, but also in his dreams, he called and
recognized at first as temptations. And as the faith of the church
has been fused with pagan superstition, just by the fact of having
struggled against it, hence Francesco attributed his transformation
in all seriousness to the touching of that wooden object, that little
alruna which the shaggy herdsman had rescued from the fire. Un-
doubtedly, there had still remained active a remnant of those


484 THE HERETIC OF SOANNA
abominations which the ancients revered under the name of phallic
worship, that shameful cult which had been laid low in the world
by the holy war of the cross of Jesus. . . . Up to the time when
he had set eyes on the disgusting object, the cross alone had been
burned into Francesco's soul. They had branded him, just exacdy
as they brand the sheep of a flock with a red-hot die, with the stigma
of the cross; and this stigma had become, present alike in waking
and in dreaming, the symbol of his own essence. Now the accursed
and embodied Devil was looking down over the cross-piece of the
cross, and that most unclean, horrible satyr-symbol was usurping
more and more, in constant conflict, the place of the cross.
Francesco had reported to his bishop, as well as to the burgo-
master, on the success of his pastoral visit; and the answer which
he received from him was an approval of his procedure. "Above
all," wrote the bishop, "let us avoid any open scandal." He found
it extremely shrewd that Francesco had appointed a special and
secret service for the poor sinners at St Agatha, in the chapel of the
Holy Mother Mary. But the approval of his superior could not
restore the peace of Francesco's soul; he could not get rid of the idea
that he had come back from up there with a kind of enchantment
fastened upon him.
In Ligornetto, where Francesco was born, and where his uncle the
famous sculptor had spent the last ten years of his life, there still
lived the same old pastor who had initiated him as a boy into the
saving truths of the Catholic faith, and had pointed out to him the
paths of grace. This old priest he sought out one day, after he had
walked the road from Soana to Ligornetto in about three hours.
The old priest bade him welcome, and was visibly touched as he
consented to hear the confession which the young man wished to
make to him. Of course he absolved him.
Francesco's pangs of conscience are substantially expressed in the
revelation which he made to the old man. He said, "Since I was in
the home of the wretched sinners on the alp of Soana, I find my-
self in a kind of obsession. I shudder. I feel as if I had not only
put on another coat, but actually another skin. When I hear the
waterfall of Soana roaring, then I should like best to climb down
into the deep gorge and place myself under the falling masses of
water, for hours at a time, so as to become pure and healthy, as it
were, inside and out. When I see the cross in the church, the cross


GERHART HAUPTMANN 485
over my bed, I laugh. I cannot weep as I used to when picturing to
myself the agony of the Saviour. Instead my eyes are attracted by
all sorts of objects like the alruna of Luchino Scarabota. Some-
times they are quite unlike it, too, and I see a resemblance just the
same. In order to study, in order to bury myself deep in the study
of the Church Fathers, I had curtains put up over the windows of
my little room. Now I have had them taken away. The singing of
the birds, the roaring of the many brooks through the meadows past
my house after the melting of the snow, yes, even the scent of the
narcissus used to disturb me. Now I open my double windows wide,
and enjoy it all with veritable greediness.
"All this alarms me," Francesco had continued, "but there is
worse yet. As if by black magic, I have got into the power of un-
clean devils. Their tickling and prickling, their impudent prodding
and provocation to sin, at every hour of the day and night, is terri-
ble. I open the window, and through their sorcery the song of the
birds in the blossoming cherry-tree under my window seems to me
to teem with unchastity. Certain shapes in the bark of trees, and
even certain lines of the mountains, remind me of the parts of the
corpus femininum. All nature—I tell you with horror—sometimes
thunders in my frightened ears one monstrous phallic song, where-
by, as I am forced to believe despite all my reluctance, it worships
the miserable little wooden idol of the herder.
"All this of course increases my unrest," Francesco had pro-
ceeded; "the more so because I recognize it as my duty to march
to battle against that pestilential herd up there on the alp. Worse
still, even in the duties most inseparable from my calling there is
mingled, with an almost devilish sweetness, an all-perplexing, inex-
tinguishable poison. Once I was moved to pure and holy zeal by
the words of Jesus, where he tells of the lost sheep and the shepherd
who forsakes his flock in order to bring it back from the inaccessible
cliffs. But now I doubt whether this zeal of mine is as pure as I
once thought it. I awake at night, my face bathed in tears, and
everything within me is dissolved into sobbing compassion for the
lost souls, up yonder. But when I say 'lost souls'—and here I
must be honest—the sinful souls of Scarabota and his sister are
represented in my mind's eye plainly and simply by the fruit of
their sin: their daughter.
"Now I wonder whether unlawful desire for her is not the cause -


486
THE HERETIC OF SOANA
of my eagerness, and whether I am doing aright and not running the
risk of eternal death, in continuing my apparently pious work."
Serious, but smiling at times, the old, experienced priest had
listened to the pedantic confession of the youth. This was the Fran-
cesco he knew, with his conscientious love of rectitude, and his
craving for scrupulous accuracy. He said, "Francesco, be not
afraid. Keep to the path you have always trodden. It must not
surprise you if the machinations of the evil enemy seem most power-
ful and dangerous just at the time when you are proceeding to rob
him of victims that he already thought were safe, so to speak."
In a mood of relief Francesco stepped out of the parsonage into
the street of the village of Ligornetto, in which he had spent his
early youth. It is a little place, situated on a rather flat and broad
valley-floor and surrounded by fruitful fields, upon which, over
the heads of vegetables and grain-stalks, the grape-vines are en-
twined back and forth from mulberry to mulberry like firmly
twisted dark ropes. This locality is also dominated by the mighty
crags of Monte Generoso, the west side of which here rises majes-
tically from its base.
It was about midday, and Ligornetto was drowsy. Francesco was
barely greeted on his way by a few cackling chickens, some chil-
dren at play, and at the end of the village by a yelping dog.
Here, at the end of the village, the residence of his uncle closed the
street like a door. It had been erected by a man of considerable
means, and was once the Buen Retire of Vincenzo the sculptor. It
was now uninhabited, and in the possession of the canton of Ticino
as a sort of memorial endowment. Francesco walked up the steps
of the forsaken garden, where he yielded to a sudden desire to re-
visit for once the interior of the house. A neighbouring farmer, who
was an old acquaintance, handed the key over to him.
The young priest's relations with the fine arts were the tradi-
tional ones of his rank. His famous uncle had been dead for about
ten years, and since the day of his burial Francesco had not been
inside the celebrated artist's home. He could not have said what
suddenly moved him to visit the empty house, which he had hither-
to regarded only in passing and with fleeting interest. His uncle
had never been more to him than a dignitary, whose sphere of
activity was an alien, meaningless thing.
When Francesco had turned the key in the lock and stepped


GERHART HAUPTMANN
487
into the vestibule through the door that creaked on its rusty hinges,
a faint shudder passed through him at the dust-laden stillness
wafted toward him down the stairs from all sides out of open doors.
Just to the right of the hall was a domed rotunda, several stories
high, and lighted from above. Vincenzo had worked here with
modelling tool and chisel, and the plaster casts of his best works
filled this almost churchly room, a crowded and mute assemblage.
Oppressed, even alarmed, and starting at the echo of his own
footsteps, with a bad conscience as it were, Francesco had got this
far and now proceeded, really for the first time, to study this or that
work of his uncle's. There was Ghiberti to be seen beside Michael
Angelo. Dante was there too. They were covered with systems of
dots, the models having been executed on a larger scale in marble.
But these world-famed figures could not hold the attention of the
young priest for long. Near them were the statues of three young
girls, the daughters of a marquis, who had been sufficiently open-
minded to let the master portray them in the nude. From all ap-
pearances, the youngest of the young ladies was not over twelve,
the second not over fifteen, the third not over seventeen years old.
Francesco came to himself only after he had surveyed the slender
bodies for a long time in utter self-forgetfulness. These works did
not display their nudity, like those of the Greeks, as a natural
nobility and image of the deity, but one felt it as an indiscretion of
the bedroom. In the first place, the copy of the originals had not
been dissociated from them as persons, and had remained fully
recognizable as such; and these originals seemed to say: we have
been indecently exposed and disrobed by brutal decree, contrary to
our will and our sense of shame. When Francesco awoke from his
absorption, his heart was pounding, and he looked fearfully in all
directions. He was doing nothing wrong, but he felt it was a sin
even to be alone with such creations.
He resolved to depart as quickly as possible, lest he be actually
caught there. Yet when he had again reached the house-door, he
dropped the latch into the lock from the inside, instead of going
away, and turned the key, so that he was now locked into the ghostly
house of the dead man and could no longer be surprised by anybody.
This done, he resumed his station before that scandal in plaster, the
three graces.
His heart began to beat more violently, and a pale and fearful


488
THE HERETIC OF SOANA
madness came over him. He felt impelled to stroke the hair of the
oldest marchioness, as if she were living. Although this action
plainly, and in his own judgement, bordered on madness, yet it was
still a priestly one to a certain extent. But the second marchioness
had to suffer more: a stroking of shoulder and arm—a round shoul-
der and a round arm, which ended in a soft and delicate hand. Soon
Francesco had become a disconcerted, perplexed, and penitent sin-
ner, who was in no better frame of mind than Adam when he heard
the voice of the Lord after he had eaten of the apple of knowledge.
He fled. He ran away as if hunted.
The following days Francesco spent partly in the church praying,
partly in his parsonage chastising himself. His penitence and his
remorse were deep. By a fervour of worship such as he had not
known hitherto, he might hope to be victor in the end over the
temptations of the flesh. Yet the struggle between the good and
evil principle had burst out in his breast with undreamed-of fright-
fulness, so that it seemed to him that God and the Devil had for the
first time transferred their battle-ground to his breast. Even the
strictly irresponsible part of his existence, sleep, no longer offered
the young cleric any peace: for just that unguarded season of
human repose seemed especially favourable to Satan for setting up
seductive and pernicious delusions in the innocent soul of the young
man. One night, toward morning, he knew not whether it had hap-
pened while sleeping or waking, he saw in the white light of the
moon the three white figures, lovely daughters of the marquis, enter
his room and approach his bed; and on looking closer he perceived
that each one coalesced in magic fashion with the image of the
young shepherdess on the alp of Santa Croce.
There was no doubt that from the little toy dwelling of Scara-
bota down into the room of the priest, into which the alp could look
through the window, a connexion had been established whose
thread was not spun by angels. Francesco knew enough of the
heavenly hierarchy, as of the hellish one, to recognize at once where
this work took its origin. Experienced in many a branch of scholas-
tic science, he assumed that evil demons, in order to exert certain
pernicious influences, make use of the stars. He had learned that
with respect to his body man belonged among the celestial spheres,
that his reason made him the equal of the angels, that his will was


GERHART HAUPTMANN
489
subordinated to God, but that God permitted fallen angels to direct
his will away from God, and that the realm of the demons was
increased by alliance with such already perverted beings. More-
over, a temporary physical emotion, when exploited by the hellish
spirits, could often be the cause of a man's eternal damnation. In
short, the young priest quivered to the marrow of his bones in fear
of the poisonous sting of the diaboli, the demons that reek of blood,
of the bestial Behemoth, and most especially of Asmodeus, the well-
known demon of whoring.
He could not at first decide to presuppose in the accursed inces-
tuous couple the sin of witchcraft and sorcery. To be sure, he had
one experience which seemed to him gravely suspicious. Every
day he undertook with holy zeal and all the resources of religion a
purification of his soul, in order to cleanse it of the image of the
shepherd-girl; and again and again she stood there more clearly,
firmly, and plainly than before. What sort of a painting, what
sort of an indestructible panel of wood or canvas could it be on
which one could not make the slightest impression either by water
or fire?
The continual intrusion of this image became the object of his
quiet and astounded observation. He would read a book, and
when he saw on a page the soft countenance, framed in its pecu-
liarly reddish earth-brown hair and gazing with wide dark eyes,
he would cover it with a leaf previously inserted. But it passed
through every leaf as if none were there, just as it made its way
through curtains, doors, and walls, both in the house and in church.
Amid such anxieties the young priest almost died of impatience,
for the appointed date of the special service on the peak of St
Agatha would not come soon enough. He wished to do the duty
he had undertaken as quickly as possible, because he might perhaps
in that way wrest the girl from the talons of the prince of hell. He
wished still more to see the girl again, but what he desired most
was his liberation, which he confidently expected, from his tortur-
ing enchantment. Francesco ate little, spent the greater part of his
nights in wakefulness, and, becoming daily more haggard and pale,
was more than ever invested by his parish with the odour of an ex-
emplary piety.
The morning had come at last on which the pastor had his
appointment with the poor sinners in the chapel that stood high up


49°
THE HERETIC OF SOANA
on the sugar-loaf of St Agatha. The extremely arduous path to
the chapel could not be traversed in less than two hours. At nine
o'clock Francesco stepped out into the square of Soana, ready for
the trip, with his heart cheered and refreshed, and surveying the
world with new-born eyes. It was nearing the first of May; nothing
more delicious could be imagined than this day which was just be-
ginning. But the young man had often lived through days of
equal beauty before this, yet without feeling, as he did to-day, as if
nature were the very Garden of Eden. To-day he was in the midst
of Paradise.
Women and girls were standing as usual about the sarcophagus,
with its flow of clear mountain-water; they greeted the priest with
loud cries. Something in his bearing and his mien, as well as the
holiday freshness of the young day, had given the laundresses cour-
age. With skirts wedged between their legs, so that in some cases
their brown calves and knees were visible, they stood bending over,
working stoutly with their equally brown, powerful bare arms.
Francesco stepped up to the group. He felt induced to say all
kinds of friendly things that in no case bore any relation to his
pastoral office, and that dealt with good weather, good spirits, and
the hope of a good wine-crop. For the first time, probably stimu-
lated by his visit to the house of his uncle the sculptor, the young
priest condescended to inspect the ornamental frieze on the sarcoph-
agus; it consisted of a bacchanalian procession, and showed pranc-
ing satyrs, dancing female flutists, and the tiger-drawn chariot of
Dionysus, the grape-crowned god of wine. At this moment it did
not seem strange to him that the ancients had covered the stone
vestment of death with the figures of effervescing life. The women
and girls, among whom there were some of unusual beauty, chat-
tered and laughed into the sarcophagus during this inspection, and
at times it seemed to him that he himself was surrounded by shout-
ing, intoxicated maenads.
His first ascent into the mountain-world was like that of a man
with open eyes, and his second like that of one who had been blind
from the womb. Francesco felt with compelling clearness that he
had suddenly had his eyes opened. In this respect the inspection of
the sarcophagus seemed to him not an accident at all, but deeply
significant. Where was the dead man? Living water of life
filled the open stone and coffin, and the eternal resurrection was


GERHART HAUPTMANN 49i
portrayed in the language of the ancients on the surface of the
marble. Thus was the gospel to be understood.
To be sure, this was a gospel which had little in common with
that which he had previously learned and taught. It derived by
no means from a book, but rather came welling up out of the earth,
through grass, plants, and flowers, or floating down with the light
from the centre of the sun. All nature seemed to be animated and
eloquent. Formerly dead and mute, she became active, confiding,
frank, and communicative. Suddenly she seemed to be telling the
young priest everything that she had hitherto concealed. He seemed
to be her favourite, her chosen one, her son, whom she was initiat-
ing, like a mother, into the holy secrets of her love and motherhood.
All the abysses of terror, all the anxieties of his startled soul, were
no more. Nothing remained of all the thick darkness, all the fears,
of the supposed assaults of hell. All nature radiated goodness and
love, and Francesco, overflowing with goodness and love, was able
to requite her.
Strange: as he laboriously clambered upwards through broom,
dwarf beech, and blackberry-vines, often slipping on sharp-edged
stones, the spring morning invested him like a symphony of nature,
as mighty as it was blissful, which spoke more of creating than of
the creation. He saw revealed the mystery of a creative labour
that was for ever exempt from death. Whoso did not hear that
symphony, so it seemed to the priest, deceived himself when he pre-
sumed to join the Psalmist in his songs of praise: "jubilate Deo
omnis terra" or "benedicite coeli domino."
Without weariness the priest had arrived at the summit of the
conical mountain, which was scarcely broader than the tiny house
©f God that stood there. It also supplied space for a narrow ledge
and a cramped little fore-court, the middle of which was occupied
by a young, still leafless chestnut-tree. A fragment of the sky or of
Mary's blue robe seemed to be strewn about the little chapel in the
wilds, the blue gentians had spread so thickly about the sanctuary.
Or one might even have imagined that the tip of the mountain had
simply been immersed in the blue of the sky.
The choir-boy and the two Scarabotas were already there and had
made themselves comfortable under the chestnut-tree. Francesco
grew pale, for his eyes had searched in vain, though but hastily, for
the young shepherdess. But he put on a stern countenance and


492
THE HERETIC OF SOANA
opened the door of the chapel with a large rusty key, without giv-
ing any sign of the disappointment and the struggle of his dismayed
soul. He entered the diminutive church, in which the choir-boy
then made some preparations behind the altar for the celebration
of the mass. From a bottle he had brought, some holy water was
poured into the dried-up font, into which the two Scarabotas could
dip their hard and sinful fingers. They sprinkled and crossed them-
selves, and dropped on their knees in timid awe close by the
threshold.
Meanwhile Francesco, driven by agitation, went out once more
into the open. With a sudden profound and silent emotion, after
walking about a little, he found the girl he sought; she was some-
what below the topmost platform, resting upon a starry sky of bril-
liant blue gentians. "Come in, I am waiting for you," called the
priest. She arose with seeming indolence, and lookd at him with
quiet glance from under lowered lashes. At the same time she
seemed to be smiling in lovely gentleness; this, however, was merely
caused by the natural formation of her sweet mouth, the lovely
light of her blue eyes, and the delicate dimples of the rounded
cheeks.
At this moment the devastating image which Francesco had
cherished in his soul was completely reconstructed. He saw an
innocent childlike Madonna-face, whose distracting charm involved
a very slight, painful acerbity. The rather striking redness of the
cheeks rested upon a white skin, from which the moist redness of
the lips shone out with the glow of a pomegranate. Every strain in
the music of this childlike head was at once sweetness and bitter-
ness, melancholy and gaiety. There was a shyness, a reticence in her
glance, and at the same time a tender challenge: with none of the
violence of animal passions, but unconscious, flower-like. If the
eyes seemed to hold within them the riddle and the fairy-tale of the
flower, the whole appearance of the girl resembled rather a beauti-
ful ripe fruit. This face, as Francesco's inner eye saw with aston-
ishment, still belonged to an utter child as far as the soul found
expression in it; only a certain swelling roundness, like that of the
grape, pointed to the overstepped boundary of childhood and
to the attainment of woman's destiny. Her hair, partly earth-
coloured, partly crossed by lighter strands, was wound into a heavy
coil about temples and brow. Some trace of a heavy, inwardly


GERHART HAUPTMANN
493
fermenting, choice and ripe slumberousness seemed to pull the girl's
lashes downward, and gave to her eyes a certain moist, over-urgent
tenderness. But the music in her face changed below her ivory
neck; external notes expressed a different meaning. With her
shoulders the woman in her began: a woman of a youthful, yet
mature stature that almost inclined to overweight, and did not
seem to belong to the childlike head. The naked feet and strong
tanned legs bore a fruitful plumpness which the priest thought was
almost too heavy for them. The head possessed the sensuously
ardent mystery of its Isis-like body unconsciously, or at most
faintly suspected. But for that very reason Francesco realized that
he was irretrievably and for ever at the mercy of that head and that
irresistible body.
But whatever the youth perceived, realized, and felt at the mo-
ment he once more looked upon that creature of God, so heavily
burdened with a heritage of sin, one could detect nothing of it in his
looks, except that his lips quivered a little. "What is your name?"
he merely asked of the sin-laden innocent. The shepherdess called
herself Agata, and did so with a voice that seemed to Francesco like
the cooing of a heavenly laughing-dove. "Can you read and write?"
he asked. She answered, "No." "Do you know anything about the
significance of the holy office of the Mass?" She looked at him
and made no reply. Then he bade her enter the little church, and
he himself entered ahead of her. Behind the altar the choir-boy
helped him into his vestments; Francesco placed the cap on his
head, and the holy service could begin: never had the young man
felt himself so full of a solemn fervour as on this occasion.
And while he stood there with the elevated sacrament, an eternity
in his estimation, in reality two or three seconds, it seemed to him
as if the sugar-loaf of St Agatha were covered from top to bottom
with listening angels, saints, and apostles. But almost more glo-
rious seemed to him a hollow drum-beat and a line of beautifully
dressed women, who, linked together with garlands of flowers and
clearly visible through the walls, danced around the little chapel.
Behind them were whirling in ecstatic frenzy the maenads of the
sarcophagus, the goat-footed Satyrs danced and pranced while
some were carrying in merry procession Luchino Scarabota's
wooden symbol of fruitfulness.
To be concluded


TWO POEMS
BY MALCOLM COWLEY
THE FISHES
From the bulk of it
from summer fields pegged flat beneath the sky
from enormous sunlight beating down on them
I hid myself away
under the water, under green water
where silver fishes nibbled at my thighs
saying
—We swam upstream for three days and three nights
we drifted three days southward with the current
and nowhere found a limit to the world.
It is shaped like a willow branch. No one can swim
to its tip.
The fishes hid away beneath a stone.
STARLINGS
Starlings wheel and descend at nightfall, choosing maybe a bamboo
copse or a cedar of Lebanon. They cross the face of the winter
sun like a smoke.
A cloud of descending starlings: it takes the successive postures of
a ball, a cane, a mandolin (or rather a guitar) a string of
frankfurters, a candy-poke, finally a balloon which collapses
with a rush of escaping gases.
Out of the centre of a cloud is heard the twittering of birds.



A WOODCUT. BY ROGER FRY






A WOODCUT. BY ROGER FEY





ITALIAN LETTER
Naples April, ig23
SINCE my visit to La Verna and to Papini, Italy has gone
through a clamorous political upheaval, and many things
which at the time were still affecting a semblance of solidity, have
now quietly dissolved into thin air. Other shapes, other images,
other idols, after a violent incubation, have taken their place, and
are bent on sucking the blood of reality with concentrated eager-
ness. I thank my private, personal God, who has not assigned the
lot of a political correspondent to me: I am not thereby forced to
cut the Gordian knot of my perplexities, and to anticipate the
judgement of posterity on the swift shadows weaving their intricate
webs against the walls of my cavern.
But certain aspects of the visible drama, certain words and
gestures of the protagonists, seem to point insistently to an inner
meaning, to a spiritual design, to a soul within the body. There
is a passionate desire to recapture the obsolete forms of religion, to
fix one's ideals as permanent values, to crown these forms and these
values with a mystical halo, and to employ them in curbing a reluc-
tant history to the will of men. The war, and this stormy peace
even more (since the war might still have appeared as a kind of
common work) have narrowed the horizon of these men to the
nation; a revulsion against the shallow official idealism of the war,
and the fear of social dissolution, have made of democracy and
humanitarianism the most execrable of taboos. The nation be-
comes, consciously, a myth, in the pragmatic sense given by Sorel
to the word, to be worshipped in thought and action by its adepts,
with firm faith, severe discipline, and blind obedience. The "im-
mortal principles" are made fun of, and the Nineteenth Century
is dismissed, with Daudet, as a huge and stupid mistake.
Moscow and Rome, Communism and Fascism, are often com-
pared to each other; their striking resemblance (hatred of democ-
racy, and of the bourgeois ideology; belief in the power of violence
and of myths; voluntarism) and their not less striking opposition
(hierarchy against equality; individual against collective economy;


496
ITALIAN LETTER
the nation against the world) are emphasized and commented upon.
And indeed, within Italy herself the struggle has had some of the
bitterness and fierceness of a war of religion; and in continental
Europe, the two formae mentis are undoubtedly the essential spirit-
ual outcome of the war until now. The nations which have not
yet reached either the one or the other, are still involved in the
meshes of an irrevocable past; but they will come to one of them
soon: they will have to go through one of them.
There is not a third horn of the dilemma: these curves will have
to be fully described before the dawn of a different day. Of these
curves, the immediate and common origin is in that Messianic
spirit which filled the European atmosphere at the end of the war
so thickly that you could then almost breathe it in the air. Millen-
nium was the name of the only land to which it seemed possible and
reasonable to travel, if you were just emerging from the blood-
stained mud of a trench. For a short, charmed interval Europe
lived in that magic climate out of which great religions are born;
but the Procession of the Apocalypse ended in the Pageant at Ver-
sailles, and for peace we were given the confusion of tongues, for
one beaten enemy, the sword turning against itself and the nations
divided.
Yet that Messianic spirit had posited an exigency which can be
eluded, but not overcome. Whatever Fascism and Communism
may become for the future historian, they must appear to their
adepts as religions, that is, as collections of universal principles
sufficient to the whole spirit of man. They must affirm themselves
as complete answers to that undeniable spiritual need, and deny the
validity of that need in relation to those questions which they leave
too clearly unanswered. Therefore both their positive and their
negative aspects, their fanaticism and their cynicism, must be
studied as elements of a coherent faith, as parts of one body of
passionate beliefs.
This study would probably be easier for Communism than for
Fascism: the former has had more time and greater opportunity,
and its failure, in spirit much more than in practice, is apparent.
As for Fascism, though the forms and the acts are manifest, the
soul which they intend to reveal, the inner meaning, the spiritual
design, are still dubious and involved. Within Fascism itself, a
strong though not numerous group is now making a valiant effort


RAFFAELLO PICCOLI
497
to interpret these forms and these acts in terms of Gentile's philos-
ophy, or "actual Idealism." If the attempt should succeed, it
would result not in a mere interpretation, but in a conquest. A
philosophy cannot become a religion unless it has "thought itself
out," and is therefore ready to stabilize itself as the substance of
faith, and to be told in spontaneous and intelligible mythical terms:
has "actual Idealism" reached this stage of maturity, and supposing
it had reached it, how is it to be explained that it did not appear
as a faith or as a collection of myths before the advent of Fascism,
and independently? And again, supposing this philosophy to be
truly endowed with the power of blossoming out into a religion,
will it succeed in conquering those elements of Fascism which are
obviously repugnant to it? Will it produce a schism? Will it end
by fighting against that which it is now willing to support? Or,
being defeated, will it content itself with becoming the cold, servile
theology of a discordant truth?
For the present, "actual Idealism" is not an actual, but only a
potential factor of the religion of Fascism, towards which an in-
finitely more powerful and more substantial body of myths and
beliefs is now also spreading its tentacles: the Church of Rome.
Fascism will be the new Faust in this secular tragedy, the struggle
between Catholicism and modern thought, the choice being between
a form whose spirit is dead, and a spirit which may not yet be able
to fashion its own form. The defeat of "actual Idealism" would
only mean that modern thought is still unripe for the function to
which it aspires, and that it will have to go back again, for a few
years or for a few centuries, to the catacombs of individual experi-
ence and culture, before finding its place in the sun. In any case,
the outcome of the struggle, in this particular episode, will not seal
the fate of either of the antagonists, but of Fascism itself. The
saint and the devil fought for the soul of Guido da Montefeltro,
as some of Dante's readers may remember; and the devil won it
with his logic. In human affairs, it is only after the event that we
can tell whether logic was on the saint's or on the devil's side.
It may happen, after all, that both the priests and the philoso-
phers will come out of this struggle empty-handed, the black-
shirted Faust deciding to keep his soul as it is, without any infusion
of either new or ancient sanctity. This would make things much


498
ITALIAN LETTER
easier for the spiritual investigator, since it would then be sufficient
for him to take those words, those gestures, of which we were
speaking before, at their face value, that is, as words, as gestures
having a definite and sufficient meaning in themselves, dramatic,
political. The philosopher of history and the historian of religions
would then be able to point to a continuous process of involution,
from the universality of the Mediaeval Mind (and even of the
Roman Empire) to the particularity of modern European nations;.
Europe would have found its several religions, of the nations,
of the "gentes" of the tribes, instead of discovering the religion for
which it seemed to be thirsting, of man, human. And for the re-
ligion of Italy, of Fascism in its concrete Italian revelation, habe-
mus prophetam: all its elements, and even a few more which have
not yet passed into the heart of the multitude, can be found in the
work of Gabriele d'Annunzio, and especially in this last book of his,
Per l'ltalia degli Italiani.
No present-day writer, in any country, holds a position approach-
ing d'Annunzio's position in Italy. Rudyard Kipling came very
near to being England's d'Annunzio, but the Boer War blasted his
chance, and the Great War found him too old, irreparably out of
touch with the new temper of his countrymen; and besides, d'An-
nunzio, though lacking some of Kipling's raciness, of his imme-
diacy, of his popular quality, possesses undoubtedly a much vaster
personality. Though not yet over sixty, he has behind himself
forty-five years of an immensely varied literary experience and
activity: each of his thirty odd volumes, incursions, experiments,
accomplishments in all the fields of fiction, poetry, and drama, has
been the sensation of its day and, together with the events and ad-
ventures of his private, practical life (his loves, his finances, his
houses, horses, and dogs) a passionate object of wonder, and scorn,
of admiration, of scandal, for two generations of Italians.
All fashions and schools of aesthetic and semi-philosophical
thought in Europe, from the pre-Raphaelite Poets to the Russian
novelists, from Ibsen to Nietzsche, from Wagner to Scriabine, are
reflected in his work: through him, Italian literature (in the narrow
meaning of the word, as contrasted to living, original thought)
entered once more into the circle of European literature, though
more passively perhaps than at any other time in the course of its


RAFFAELLO PICCOLI
499
history. But the high-water mark of his fortune as a writer falls
between i890 and i905: his surviving disciples date all from those
years. And his place in the general history of literature remains with
the French Parnassians and Decadents, and with their cognate and
derived writers abroad, the Wildes, the Yeatses, the Hofmanns-
thals: that is, with the last brood of irreparably "stupid Nineteenth
Century" writers. After 1905, though he has never given up the
pretence of being and of looking "up to date," yet the novel fash-
ions began to be introduced by younger (and often much lesser)
men; and at the same time the temper of Italian culture swerved
decidedly from the literary to the philosophical.
But the Wars were far more generous to him than to Kipling:
they gave him, in exchange for his lost literary leadership, an indis-
putable national laureateship. In a time of rapidly deepening and
widening patriotic emotions, his truly amazing knowledge and his
exclusive love of things Italian—words, works, landscapes, deeds,
tempers, traditions—present in every page of his books, marked him
out as the true depositary of the nation's spirit. His "moral" ideal,
in which Nietzschean phrases and attitudes, literally understood,
were adapted as a modern disguise to the Renaissance principe and
condottiero, seemed sufficient to supply with a standard of heroism
an age which had lost every perception of the tragic. But it would
be unfair to regard either of these aspects of d'Annunzio's person-
ality as superficial and false: they are both true and native, and
deep, with all the depth of which he is capable. And their popu-
larity is also deep and genuine: not on account of any aesthetic
sympathy (d'Annunzio has never learnt to speak or to write so as
to be intelligible to the non-literati) but because of a practical,
emotional, temperamental affinity with the moods and needs of a
new generation.
The Canzoni della Gesta d'Oltremare were the epics of our war
with Turkey. Having been sent forth from what d'Annunzio calls
his exile in France, their effect was considerably enhanced by a
space-perspective, not less favourable than time-perspectives are
to the transformation of a man's image in the group's mind: the
transformation, in this case, of the Egotist and the Aesthete into
the Patriot and the Soldier. And in the Canzoni, written during
a crisis of mysticism to which we owe one of d'Annunzio's most
subtle prose works, the Considerazione della Morte, as well as the


5<x>
ITALIAN LETTER
ultradecadent Mystere de Saint Sebastien, the Catholic myths and
rites appear as an indispensable element of the national tradition:
if not as a religion, at least as a superstition essential to the heroic
behaviour of the group.
The Great War put its final seal on the transfiguration. The
campaign for the intervention of Italy, four years of strenuous war
life (d'Annunzio revealing himself as a born soldier, a true lover
of danger and scorner of death, a principe and a condottiero) and
lastly the Fiume expedition, fixed his new image as an incarnate
model of his own ideal of Italian virtu. To the more precise delin-
eation and fuller adornment of this image, d'Annunzio himself,
after having furnished the raw material of action, has also attempt-
ed to contribute the poetical and legendary elaboration in a book
written during a forced pause in the war, II Notturno, and in the
one which has just been published.
There is a short paragraph in the Notturno in which d'Annunzio
defines the nature and the limits of his own personality with a more
cruel lucidity than any of his critics ever did: "Life is not an
abstraction of aspects and events, but a kind of diffuse sensuous-
ness, a knowledge offered to every sense, a substance good to smell,
to feel, to eat." It was with this elementary form of consciousness,
with all his animal spirits, as they would have been called in the
Middle Ages, wide awake, alert, ready to enjoy and to suffer, and
to make of every danger and of every suffering the source of a
deeper, intenser joy, that d'Annunzio went so youthfully, so gal-
lantly through the war. Every healthy young soldier has known
this exhilaration of the dangerous life: courage is often but the sac-
rifice of all practical and moral motives to the taste of this depth
and intensity of primitive feeling. A beautiful thing in itself,
accompanied by an incomparable sense of spiritual freedom, since
the spirit, reduced to its simplest functions, is all here, in this body,
in this instant, and the body accepts and enjoys the conditions of
its instantaneous existence; and a wonderful thing, a prodigy, in a
man of d'Annunzio's age.
Even the infirmity which keeps him in his bed, blind and help-
less, while he writes, line after line, on narrow strips of paper, this
long succession of visions of the war and of his past life, adds new
visions, new sensations, to the immense store from which he is


RAFFAELLO PICCOLI
501
drawing. The intention to build up his own legend is unconcealed:
in all his novels he always made himself the protagonist, under a
mask; here, at last, he drops the mask, and is the hero of his own
song. And yet of this book it can be repeated what a brilliant critic
said of his novels in general: it is but a collection of lyrical motives
and residua. Admirable, in this respect, and the exquisite tex-
ture of the phrase, the delicious richness of the language are a con-
tinuous joy to the connoisseur. But no human image becomes
visible through these fragments; and this is as it should be, since
no true humanity can exist in a world of pure sensuousness, in
which the aesthetic dimension may counterfeit at times, but never
actually generates out of itself, the essential human dimensions, in-
tellectual and moral.
The book has an even, hard, shiny surface, only occasionally and
very slightly troubled by the legendary intention. The war de-
composes itself into a multitude of intense sensations of which the
poet is the subject and the centre. Events materially tragic, being
constantly referred to this centre only, are represented as vivid
appearances, in their mere materiality; but more than any of them
the reader is likely to remember the episode of the death of the
horse Aquilino—a recollection from childhood—since a horse's
tragedy can hardly make him feel the absence of the human sub-
stance of tragedy.
The new book, Per l'ltalia degli Italiani, is much more uneven
and fragmentary than the Notturno, since the deliberate aim of
presenting the ideal image of himself as the model of Italian hu-
manity more frequently interferes with the poet's genuine inspira-
tion. Apart from the pages in which d'Annunzio is still, even here,
the naively egocentric poet delighting in rare and sometimes fierce,
dolorous sensations, the book has no other reality than that which
belongs to beautiful words and highly decorative gestures. It is,
on the whole, a strange, a pathetic piece of work, in which the
author, in his vain attempt to evade the bounds of his purely
sensuous and aesthetic world, reminds the reader of a white bear
pacing rhythmically the narrow artificial rock which is its prison.
The word Spirit, in its Italian and Latin forms (since this Italian
prose is frequently interspersed with Latin mottos and fragments
like a sacred oration: one symptom, among many others, of senes-


502
ITALIAN LETTER
cence and rhetoric involution)—the word Spirit is everywhere in
the book. But the thing is absent: from the first to the last page we
are constantly kept in the same tense, oratorical, and oracular at-
mosphere, looking at a succession of symbols, which not even the
amazing mimetic powers of the writer can persuade us to accept as
truly significant. There is no movement, no development, no
progress; that is, no evidence of a real dialectic, spiritual, moral
drama.
But these static symbols which we find here clothed in the most
gorgeous verbal forms, are substantially those of which we
spoke at the beginning of this letter as the popular symbols of a
national, political religion. In d'Annunzio, however, strangely
coupled with his innate love of violence, we may discover also a
yearning towards something more human and higher: a Franciscan
ideal of peace and meekness, which resolves itself, like every other
element of the d'Annunzian ideal, in a mere attitude. We can
therefore easily disregard the difference, and having dismissed this
book as a work of art capable of adding but one leaf to the poet's
crown, yet treasure it among the documents of these troubled times,
not less important because essentially negative.
Raffaello Piccoli


BOOK REVIEWS
MODEL AMERICANS
Americans. By Stuart P. Sherman. i2mo. 336
pages. Charles Scribner's Sons. $2.

'ROFESSOR SHERMAN once more coaxing American criti-
cism the way it should go.
Like Benjamin Franklin, one of his heroes, he attempts the in-
vention of a creed that shall "satisfy the professors of all religions,
and offend none."
He smites the marauding Mr Mencken with a velvet glove, and
pierces the obstinate Mr More with a reproachful look. Both
gentlemen, of course, will purr and feel flattered.
That's how Professor Sherman treates his enemies: buns to his
grizzlies.
Well, Professor Sherman, being a professor, has got to be nice to
everybody about everybody. What else does a professor sit in a
chair of English for, except to dole out sweets.
Awfully nice, rather cloying. But there, men are but children
of a later growth.
So much for the professor's attitude. As for his "message." He
steers his little ship of Criticism most obviously between the Scylla
of Mr Mencken and the Charybdis of Mr P. E. More. I'm sorry I
never heard before of either gentleman: except that I dimly re-
member having read, in the lounge of a Naples hotel, a bit of an
article by a Mr Mencken, in German, in some German periodical:
all amounting to nothing.
But Mr Mencken is the Scylla of American Criticism, and hence,
of American Democracy. There is a verb "to menckenise," and a
noun "menckenism." Apparently to menckenise is to manufacture
jeering little gas-bomb phrases against everything deep and earnest,
or high and noble, and to paint the face of corruption with phos-
phorus, so it shall glow. And a menckenism is one of the little
stink-gas phrases.


MODEL AMERICANS
Now the nouveau riche jeune fille of the bourgeoisie, as Professor
Sherman puts it; in other words, the profiteers' flappers, all read
Mr Mencken and swear by him: swear that they don't give a nickel
for any Great Man that ever was or will be. Great Men are all
a bombastical swindle. So asserts the nouveau riche jeune fille,
on whom, apparently, American democracy rests. And Mr Mencken
"learnt it her." And Mr Mencken got it in Germany, where all
stink-gas comes and came from, according to Professor Sherman.
And Mr Mencken does it to poison the noble and great old spirit
of American Democracy, which is grandly Anglo-Saxon in origin,
but absolutely American in fact.
So much for the Scylla of Mr Mencken. It is the first essay in the
book. The Charybdis of Mr P. E. More is the last essay: to this
monster the professor warbles another tune. Mr More, author of
the Shelbourne Essays, is learned, and steeped in tradition, the very
antithesis of the nihilistic stink-gassing Mr Mencken. But alas, Mr
More is remote: somewhat haughty and supercilious at his study
table. And even, alasser! with all his learning and remoteness, he
hunts out the risky Restoration wits to hob-nob with on high Par-
nassus; Wycherley, for example; he likes his wits smutty. He even
goes and fetches out Aphra Behn from her disreputable oblivion,
to entertain her in public.
And there you have the Charybdis of Mr More: snobbish, dis-
tant, exclusive, disdaining even the hero from the Marne who
mends the gas bracket: and at the same time absolutely preferring
the doubtful odour of Wycherley because it is—well, malodorous,
says the professor.
Mr Mencken: Great Men and the Great Past are an addled egg
full of stink-gas.
Mr P. E. More: Great Men of the Great Past are utterly beyond
the mobile vulgus. Let the mobile vulgus (in other words, the
democratic millions of America) be cynically scoffed at by the gen-
tlemen of the Great Past, especially the naughty ones.
To the Menckenites, Professor Sherman says: Jeer not at the
Great Past and at the Great Dead. Heroes are heroes still, they do
not go addled, as you would try to make out, nor turn into stink-
bombs. Tradition is honourable still, and will be honourable for
ever, though it may be splashed like a futurist picture with the
rotten eggs of menckenism.
To the smaller and more select company of Moreites: Scorn not


D. H. LAWRENCE 505
the horny hand of noble toil; "—the average man is, like (Mr
More) himself, at heart a mystic, vaguely hungering for a peace
that diplomats cannot give, obscurely seeking the permanent amid
the transitory; a poor swimmer struggling for a rock amid the flux
of waters, a lonely pilgrim longing for the shadow of a mighty rock
in a weary land. And if 'P. E. M.' had a bit more of that natural
sympathy of which he is so distrustful, he would have perceived
that what more than anything else to-day keeps the average man
from lapsing into Yahooism is the religion of democracy, consisting
of a little bundle of general principles which make him respect him-
self and his neighbour; a bundle of principles kindled in crucial
times by an intense emotion, in which his self-interest, his petty
vices, and his envy are consumed as with fire; and he sees the com-
mon weal as the mighty rock in the shadow of which his little life
and personality are to be surrendered, if need be, as things negligi-
ble and transitory."
All right, Professor Sherman. All the profiteers, and shovers, and
place-grabbers, and bullies, especially bullies, male and female, all
that sort of gentry of the late war were, of course, outside the aver-
age. The supermen of the occasion.
The Babbitts, while they were on the make.
And as for the mighty rocks in weary lands, as far as my ex-
perience goes, they have served the pilgrims chiefly as sanitary of-
fices and places in whose shadows men shall leave their offal and
tin cans.
But there you have a specimen of Professor Sherman's "style."
And the thin ends of his parabola.
The great arch is of course the Religion of Democracy, which
the professor italicizes. If you want to trace the curve you must fol-
low the course of the essays.
After Mr Mencken and Tradition comes Franklin. Now Benja-
min Franklin is one of the founders of the Religion of Democracy.
It was he who invented the creed that should satisfy the professors
of all religions, not of universities only, and offend none. With a
deity called Providence. Who turns out to be a sort of superlative
Mr Wanamaker, running the globe as a revolving dry-goods store,
according to a profit-and-loss system; the profit counted in plump
citizens whose every want is satisfied: like chickens in an absolutely
coyote-proof chicken-run.
In spite of this new attempt to make us like Dr Franklin, the


$o6
MODEL AMERICANS
flesh wearies on our bones at the thought of him. The professor
hints that the good old gentleman on Quaker Oats was really an
old sinner. If it had been proved to us, we might have liked him.
As it is, he just wearies the flesh on our bones. Religion civile,
indeed.
Emerson. The next essay is called The Emersonian Liberation.
Well, Emerson is a great man still: or a great individual. And
heroes are heroes still, though their banners may decay, and stink.
It is true that lilies may fester. And virtues likewise. The great
Virtue of one age has a trick of smelling far worse than weeds in the
next.
It is a sad but undeniable fact.
Yet why so sad, fond lover, prithee why so sad? Why should
Virtue remain incorruptible, any more than anything else? If stars
wax and wane, why should Goodness shine for ever unchanged?
That too makes one tired. Goodness sweals and gutters, the light
of the Good goes out with a stink, and lo, somewhere else a new
light, a new Good. Afterwards, it may be shown that it is eternally
the same Good. But to us poor mortals at the moment, it emphatic-
ally isn't.
And that is the point about Emerson and the Emersonian Libera-
tion—save the word! Heroes are heroes still: safely dead. Hero-
ism is always heroism. But the hero who was heroic one century,
uplifting the banner of a creed, is followed the next century by a
hero heroically ripping that banner to rags. Sic transit Veritas
mundi.
Emerson was an idealist: a believer in "continuous revelation,"
continuous inrushes of inspirational energy from the Over-soul.
Professor Sherman says: "His message when he leaves us is not,
'Henceforth be masterless,' but, 'Bear thou henceforth the sceptre
of thine own control through life and the passion of life.'"
When Emerson says: "I am surrounded by messengers of God
who send me credentials day by day," then all right for him. But
he cozily forgot that there are many messengers. He knew only a
sort of smooth-shaven Gabriel. But as far as we remember, there
is Michael too: and a terrible discrepancy between the credentials
of the pair of 'em. Then there are other cherubim with outlandish
names, bringing very different messages than those Ralph Waldo
got: Israfel, and even Mormon. And a whole bunch of others. But


D. H. LAWRENCE
507
Emerson had a stone-deaf ear for all except a nicely aureoled
Gabriel qui riavait pas de quoi.
Emerson listened to one sort of message, and only one. To all
the rest he was blank. Ashtaroth and Ammon are gods as well, and
hand out their own credentials. But Ralph Waldo wasn't having
any. They could never ring him up. He was only connected on the
Ideal 'phone. "We are all aiming to be idealists," says Emerson,
"and covet the society of those who make us so, as the sweet singer,
the orator, the ideal painter."
Well, we're pretty sick of the ideal painters and the uplifting
singers. As a matter of fact we have worked the ideal bit of our
nature to death, and we shall go crazy if we can't start working
from some other bit. Idealism now is a sick nerve, and the more
you rub on it the worse you feel afterwards. Your later reactions
aren't pretty at all. Like Dostoevsky's Idiot, and President Wil-
son sometimes.
Emerson believes in having the courage to treat all men as equals.
It takes some courage not to treat them so now.
"Shall I not treat all men as gods?" he cries.
If you like, Waldo, but we've got to pay for it, when you've
made them feel that they're gods. A hundred million American
godlets is rather much for the world to deal with.
The fact of the matter is, all those gorgeous inrushes of exalta-
tion and spiritual energy which made Emerson a great man, now
make us sick. They are with us a drug habit. So when Professor
Sherman urges us in Ralph Waldo's footsteps, he is really driving
us nauseously astray. Which perhaps is hard lines on the Pro-
fessor, and us, and Emerson. But it wasn't I who started the mills
of God a-grinding.
I like the essay on Emerson. I like Emerson's real courage. I like
his wild and genuine belief in the Over-soul and the inrushes he got
from it. But it is a museum-interest. Or else it is a taste of the
old drug to the old spiritual drug-fiend in me.
We've got to have a different sort of sardonic courage. And the
sort of credentials we are due to receive from the god in the shadow
would have been real bones out of hell-broth to Ralph Waldo. Sic
transeunt Dei hominorum.
So no wonder Professor Sherman sounds a little wistful, and
somewhat pathetic, as he begs us to follow Ralph Waldo's trail.


508
MODEL AMERICANS
Hawthorne: A Puritan Critic of Puritanism. This essay is con-
cerned chiefly with an analysis and a praise of The Scarlet Letter.
Well, it is a wonderful book. But why does nobody give little
Nathaniel a kick for his duplicity. Professor Sherman says there is
nothing erotic about The Scarlet Letter. Only neurotic. It wasn't
the sensual act itself had any meaning for Hawthorne. Only the
Sin. He knows there's nothing deadly in the act itself. But if it
is Forbidden, immediately it looms lurid with interest. He is not
concerned for a moment with what Hester and Dimmesdale really
felt. Only with their situations as Sinners. And Sin looms lurid
and thrilling, when after all it is only just a normal sexual passion.
This luridness about the book makes one feel like spitting. It is
something worked up: invented in the head and grafted on to the
lower body, like some serpent of supposition under the fig-leaf. It
depends so much on coverings. Suppose you took off the fig-leaf,
the serpent isn't there. And so the relish is all two-faced and tire-
some. The Scarlet Letter is a masterpiece, but in duplicity and
half-false excitement.
And when one remembers The Marble Faun, all the parochial
priggishness and poor-bloodedness of Hawthorne in Italy, one of
the most bloodless books ever written, one feels like giving Na-
thaniel a kick in the seat of his poor little pants and landing him
back in New England again. For the rolling, many-godded mediae-
val and pagan world was too big a prey for such a ferret.
Walt Whitman. Walt is the high priest of the Religion of
Democracy. Yet "at the first bewildering contact one wonders
whether his urgent touch is of lewdness or divinity," says Professor
Sherman.
"All I have said concerns you."—But it doesn't. One ceases to
care about so many things. One ceases to respond or to react. And
at length other things come up, which Walt and Professor Sherman
never knew.
"Whatever else it involves, democracy involves at least one grand
salutary elementary admission, namely, that the world exists for
the benefit and for the improvement of all the decent individuals
in it."—O Lord, how long will you submit to this Insurance
Policy interpretation of the Universe! How "decent"? Decent in
what way? Benefit! Think of the world's existing for people's
"benefit and improvement."


D. H. LAWRENCE
509
So wonderful, says Professor Sherman, the way Whitman identi-
fies himself with everything and everybody: Runaway Slaves and
all the rest. But we no longer want to take the whole hullabaloo
to our bosom. We no longer want to "identify ourselves" with a lot
of other things and other people. It is a sort of lewdness. Noli me
tangere, "you." I don't want "you."
Whitman's "you" doesn't get me.
We don't want to be embracing everything any more. Or to be
embraced in one of Waldo's vast promiscuous armfuls. Merci,
monsieur!
We've had enough democracy.
Professor Sherman says that if Whitman had lived "at the right
place in these years of Proletarian Millenium, he would have been
hanged as a reactionary member of the bourgeoise." ('Tisn't my
spelling.)
And he gives Whitman's own words in proof: "The true gravita-
tion hold of liberalism in the United States will be a more univer-
sal ownership of property, general homesteads, general comforts—
a vast intertwining reticulation of wealth. . . . She (De-
mocracy) asks for men and women with occupations, well-off,
owners of houses and acres, and with cash in the bank and with
some craving for literature too"—so that they can buy certain
books. Oh, Walt!
Allons! The road is before us.
Joaquin Miller: Poetical Conquistador of the West. A long es-
say with not much spirit in it, showing that Miller was a true son of
the Wild and Woolly West, in so far as he was a very good imita-
tor of other people's poetry (note the Swinburnian bit) and a rather
poor assumer of other people's played-out poses. A self-conscious
little "wild" man, like the rest of the "wild" men. The Wild West
is a pose that pays Zane Grey to-day, as it once paid Miller and
Bret Harte and Buffalo Bill.
A Note on Carl Sandburg. That Carl is a super-self-conscious
literary gent stampeding around with red-ochre blood on his hands
and smeared-on soot darkening his craggy would-be-criminal brow:
but that his heart is as tender as an old tomato.
Andrew Carnegie. That Andy was the most perfect American
citizen Scotland ever produced, and the sweetest example of how
beautifully the Religion Civile pays, in cold cash.


5io
MODEL AMERICANS
Roosevelt and the National Psychology. Theodore didn't have
a spark of magnanimity in his great personality, says Professor
Sherman, what a pity! And you see where it lands you, when you
play at being pro-German. You go quite out of fashion.
Evolution of the Adams Family. Perfect Pedigree of the most
aristocratic Democratic family. Your aristocracy is played out, my
dear fellows, but don't cry about it, you've always got your De-
mocracy to fall back on. If you don't like falling back on it of
your own free will, you'll be shoved back on it by the Will of the
People.
"Man is the animal that destiny cannot break."
But the Will of the People can break Man, and the animal man,
and the destined man, all the lot, and grind 'em to democratic
powder, Professor Sherman warns us.
Allons! en-masse is before us.
But when Germany is thoroughly broken, Democracy finally col-
lapses. (My own prophecy.)
An Imaginary Conversation With Mr P. E. More: You've had
the gist of that already.
Well, there is Professor Sherman's dish of cookies which he bids
you eat and have. An awfully sweet book, all about having your
cookies and eating 'em. The cookies are Tradition, and Heroes,
and Great Men, and $350,000,000 in your pocket. And eating 'em
is Democracy, Serving Mankind, piously giving most of the $350,-
000,000 back again. "Oh, nobly and heroically get $350,00x5,000
together," chants Professor Sherman in this litany of having your
cookies and eating 'em, "and then piously and munificently give
away $349,000,000 again."
D. H. Lawrence
P. S. You can't get past Arithmetic.


A NOVEL OF THE ARTIST
Paint. By Thomas Craven. j2mo. 229 pages. Har-
court, Brace and Company. $2.
O those who have followed with interest Mr Thomas Craven's
X lucid and discriminating articles on the tendencies in modern
art his first novel, Paint, will come somewhat as a shock. That Mr
Craven has chosen one of the most case-hardened themes in exist-
ence on which to secure his spanking indignation—that of the
genius in opposition to society—is in itself audacious. But when
this genius turns out to be a veritable charging ram of barbaric ob-
tuseness, who flings lighted cigarette stubs on velvet carpets, puts
his feet up on anything that is handy, makes "soughing" noises
after eating, "loosens his belt" when it "restricts him," appears
habitually in dirty linen, and lies awake at night devising a
scheme of society in which members with good manners shall be
hanged, Mr Craven will have to be a most persuasive artist indeed
in order to arouse in us those sympathies for his hero which his
present book so clearly petitions.
With the author's most obvious thesis we are wholly in sym-
pathy. It is all very true and all very sad. America is as a whole
profoundly antipathetic to art, and even more profoundly ignorant
of the derivation and significance of modern art. Only one indi-
vidual in a thousand, probably, consents to step outside the wall
of his traditional acceptance and face new disturbing values that
challenge him to honest and original consideration. But Carlock,
we maintain, was as purblind and bourgeois, as limited in his view
of the world, as the most complacent and somnambulant of stock
brokers.
As art Mr Craven's book cannot be considered. It is too obviously
a treatise where intellect has been harnessed hurriedly to anger
and the guiding rein of a really imaginative conception is entirely
lacking. It is an attack on the lethargic art world of America—
academicians, critics, dealers, public—with as protagonist the
rumpled, scarecrow figure of Carlock. The minor parts are mere
signposts bearing various recorded accusations. The quality of Mr


5i2 A NOVEL OF THE ARTIST
Craven's so-called realism may be judged by the following chance
fragments of writing: "the streets squirmed"—"life bumped along"
—"Carlock's enthusiasm wouldn't bubble"—"he talked nice to
her"—"in the Village, where greasy poets read free verse." Ex-
amples equally banal or vulgar abound on every page.
It is almost with a feeling of deliverance that we turn from
Carlock to Nettie, the bouncing street trollop who performs the
dubious service of saving him from starvation. We would like to
defend her, however, against the young man's indomitable egoism.
If she dozes while he is reading aloud some obscure passages from
an abstruse book on aesthetics, he prods her awake with epithets.
When he returns unexpectedly to find her entertaining in their
rooms (for which she incidentally is paying) a feeble and defense-
less young man, he flings him out hatless and coatless, and comes
near to breaking every bone in Nettie's body, while refusing con-
sistently to satisfy her craving for affection. When the money
gives out he tells her to "doll up" and bring in more.
The story reaches its climax of ludicrous unreality when Car-
lock, rising like a demented Golem from his death-bed, insists on
adding great fevered strokes to his most important masterpiece.
One is deeply relieved when it is all over and Nettie, tearful and
triumphant, in the one pleasant and satisfactorily humorous epi-
sode in the whole book, refuses to part with Carlock's paintings
which he has left her in his will, and, surrounded by crestfallen and
suppliant dealers, has them carted off in a great van to her rooms.
Thus the hoarse and grating homily arrives at its logical con-
clusion. One suspects, however, that her sorrow soon assuaged
Nettie will sell the astounding canvases for fabulous sums. One
also suspects that the sums paid will in the end prove a little too
fabulous for the real worth of the pictures.
Alyse Gregory


MR HERRICK'S NEW NOVEL
Homely Lilla. By Robert Herrick. i2mo. 293
pages. Harcourt, Brace and Company. $i.90.
THE reception of Homely Lilla shows how seriously Mr Her-
rick is taken by American readers and critics, how significant
an event is his return to the novel after a long absence. Neverthe-
less, to hail this book as the product of seven years' observation
and contemplation is to over-estimate it. It is rather a practice
flight, a preliminary warming-up for a more important enterprise,
which will appear later. It is of happy augury, since it shows that
Mr Herrick has gained rather than lost in mastery of his vehicle,
and that he has his public with him.
Homely Lilla follows the model most characteristic of the Eng-
lish novel, biography—the form in which Mr Herrick has usually
cast his fiction. Only once, so far as I remember, in Together, has
he adopted a more complicated procedure, involving the drawing
of several lines of advance into a single pattern. Lilla is the de-
veloping principle of this story; other characters appear and dis-
appear as the light of her presence plays on them and passes on.
By this process the story gains complete unity, but I have a feel-
ing that Mr Herrick has carried it too far. His treatment of his
subordinate characters is too casual. Except for Lilla's mother, we
do not fully believe in them, and they do not support the illusion
of a peopled world. Lilla looms too large among them—she is too
far in the foreground—a bit out of the picture, which tends in con-
sequence to lose the perspective of life.
Undoubtedly this failing is the result of Mr Herrick's preoccu-
pation with his theme. That theme is one with which he has dealt
consciously and conscientiously since his beginning as a novelist,
the problem of separating reality from unreality in life. It
formed the motive of his earliest novels, The Gospel of Freedom,
The Web of Life, and was recognized in the title of his third,
originally called The Real World, now Jock o' Dreams. In book
after book he brought some set of conventional or social values to
the test of individual experience, and found it wanting—The


514 MR HERRICK'S NEW NOVEL
Common Lot, A Life for a Life, One Woman's Life, The Healer.
In Clark's Field, the last of the series resumed by Lilla, he iron-
ically considered as a source of life values that ultimate social
reality which is called par excellence real estate. Now Mr Her-
rick's indifferent treatment of his other characters in contrast with
Lilla has a symbolic quality. She is a real person. When she learns
how real she is she can do without the poor copies of life which
surround her. With her large, free stride she walks away from
them. To Lilla the ultimate reality is maternity. She is the fruit-
ful, full-breasted mother; and the unpardonable sin of her hus-
band is to defraud her womb. Her power of blessing goes forth
in healing, impartially to the girl with whom her husband de-
ceives her and the boy who pities her until he desires her. Her
ultimate fulfilment she finds through her son and her mature lover;
but even they chiefly serve negatively to define the unreality of
the legal bond which binds her to her husband. The positive rela-
tion which exists between her and them we must take for granted.
They are too far away from us for intimate knowledge—we sus-
pect that Lilla herself is nearer to us than to them. She is cer-
tainly nearer to Mr Herrick.
But though the reader may find certain inconsistencies in the
scale of Mr Herrick's design, due very possibly to the exigencies
of serial publications to which Homely Lilla was originally sub-
jected, he will note few in the detail of the drawing. The story
is told with a simplicity, economy, and directness which assures
us that Mr Herrick's craftmanship has not suffered from disuse—
rather, it has gained. He has avoided the over-emphasis which
marred certain earlier works, and has achieved an easy uniformity
of texture. Always sparing of condiment, ornament, sentiment,
and other adventitious forms of the novel-reader's satisfaction, he
produced in Homely Lilla a truly Lenten offering. Yet there
is something impressive about its literal homely style, a mirror
for the reflection of Lilla herself.
Robert Morss Lovett


MR ROBINSON'S MOONLIGHT
Roman Bartholow. By Edwin Arlington Robin-
son. i2mo. igi pages. The Macmillan Company.
The Poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson. By
Lloyd Morris. i2mo. i16 pages. George H. Doran
and Company. $i.50.
MR LLOYD MORRIS'S monograph on Mr E. A. Robin-
son was written to commemorate an award and "attempts to
express the appreciative attitude of the Authors' Club toward Mr
Robinson's work." It is, therefore, rather like a speech at a birth-
day dinner: except for an interesting and valuable chapter on Mr
Robinson's philosophic sources, it has little importance as criticism
and it would perhaps be a mistake to expect it to have. Still I can-
not but boggle at the wholesale way in which Mr Morris has
swallowed Mr Robinson. There is no word of his limitations; no
candid attempt to gauge his stature. To read him you would think
that all Mr Robinson's poems had achieved an equally consummate
success.
That this is very far from being true it seems to me that Mr
Robinson's latest poem shows. It is one of the most arid products
of a mind which has always run much into the sands. I will admit,
a la rigueur, that the novel in verse is a practicable literary form
(since, I suppose, The Ring and the Book has still some claims).
And I will grant that Mr Robinson's shadowy world is an authentic
replica of the real one: with the examples of Hawthorne and Henry
James we should do ill to refuse credence to shadows. It seems to
be characteristic of the New England genius to combine shyness
with its extreme shrewdness—to be more occupied with casuistry
than with action and to prefer ghosts to carnal men. To under-
stand the fiction of New England it is necessary to accept this
world of phantoms. But what I cannot forgive Mr Robinson the
poet is the absence of poetry in his poem. Surely a poem should
be beautiful as well as interesting; it is beauty which constitutes it


5i6 MR ROBINSON'S MOONLIGHT
a poem. And Roman Bartholow, though it is sometimes interest-
ing, can almost never be said to be beautiful.
Yet Mr Robinson began as a real poet—and a poet of a very rare
sort. He was the last, and probably the greatest, of the authentic
poets of New England. To the country of Longfellow and
Whittier—the lone houses and sea-scoured coast-towns, the cold
thin air of the northern hills and the blackness of the northern
nights—he brought a more sophisticated point of view and a far
greater artistic seriousness. Luke Havergal and Aaron Stark are
even better than Floyd Ireson. And the moral ideas of The Man
Against the Sky are a marked advance on The Psalm of Life.
But Mr Robinson, even in youth, was a poet of failure and re-
gret. He was preoccupied with New England in decay. In the
moonlight of an eternal autumn he sat brooding on the poor ghosts
of men—brooding sadly rather than in grief: time has calmed
this passion like the others. Through his long contemplation he has
learned that things are doomed to this tragic end; one can only
keep one's eye on "the gleam," which drifts faintly on the weedy
dunes—pale green like an ignis fatuus—surely the most spectral
and unluminous beacon which ever kept a poet from despair. His
hope can never warm us with its rays; it is only his sad moonlight
which enchants us. When the red western gates have been locked,
the moonlight strips the world to white bones, where the phantoms
of men move faintly in eternal unfinished gestures.
And since Mr Robinson began with autumn he has never had his
rightful spring. He was old from the very first. When the time
came for him to be really old his trees were left doubly bare.
Coming on the scene to find the flutes of Arcady "broken" and
Amaryllis "grown old," his best efforts have done little ever since
to repair these important casualties. A sterility has blighted his
work; its glamour is fading paler and paler. Always poignant
rather than intense, its very poignancy has been slowly eroded. I
will not say that such things as Avon's Harvest and Avenel Gray
have not still sometimes poignancy and beauty; but I cannot, with
Mr Morris, accept his Arthurian poems as crowning glories. Save
for a lovely line here and there, they are among the flattest of
blank-verse deserts. His old blank-verse idylls of New England
had more beauty and more life.
And when it comes to Roman Bartholow and his later historical


EDMUND WILSON, JR.
5i7
monologues, we are even further from the old charm. In Roman
Bartholow, for example, we hear much, as usual, of moonlight; the
culmination of the poem is enveloped in it. But it is not the moon-
light we used to know. It is a moonlight which no longer sheds
radiance. It brings no beauty to the unpleasing situation which it
is supposed to bathe. That situation, subtly understood and skil-
fully presented as it is, never undergoes the complete transmutation
which makes an idea into a work of art.
Yet Mr Robinson, for all his later aridity, is one of the few
first-rate artists we have. It would be ungrateful to complain too
much of his dreariness; he has already charmed us enough. His
very failures are marked as no one else's are with a high originality
and distinction. Only a distinguished and original mind could ever
have conceived or produced them. And their example has more
literary importance than other people's blazing successes.
Edmund Wilson, Jr.


OMITTING SCOTLAND YARD
The Man Who Knew Too Much. By Gilbert K.
Chesterton. i2mo. 365 pages. Harper and Brothers.
$2.
IT has escaped the attention of no one interested in such things
that Mr Chesterton is a writer of superior detective stories. The
reason for his superiority may be that he writes them as he writes
everything else, with all his powers and with all his amazing con-
victions. He condescends no more here than he did in his fine
History of England, and the History had no more careless pages
than this book has. None of the stories in The Man Who Knew
Too Much are better than the earliest of the Father Brown series;
and the go and gusto of the magnificent Man Who Was Thurs-
day are perceptibly weakened. Yet they are good—better by far
than the mystery stories based on the opposite conviction.
For it is a conviction more than a theory with Mr Chesterton
that the elements of a mystery are commonplace. He escapes the
fallacy of believing that all common life is full of that kind of
mystery which requires a detective from Scotland Yard for its
solution; but he knows that human beings are far more astonished
and impressed by a slight variation in the things they know inti-
mately than by the arrival of the unheard-of and the unexpected.
Thus in The Fad of the Fisherman we are presented with a man
who sits fishing all day, leaving his post only at sunset. And one
day two men go to him with urgent information and return saying
that he refuses to budge. It is only when, at sunset, his figure is
still seen motionless that the truth arrives—the man is dead.
One or two of these stories are rather high-life; for the most part
the wild romance and the thrill of mystery and terror are irruptions
in everyday existence. The Vanishing Prince makes use of a
scarecrow and "it was a manifest if melancholy truth that the
architect was an artist." In each one the complication is deft and
the false scents are managed with a grave honesty. If one man is
killed and six are suspected it is because, in Mr Chesterton's philos-
ophy, each of the six probably has a good reason for committing


GILBERT SELDES
5i9
the murder. These are reasonably intelligible and reasonably real
people—made so by the infusion into them of their author's vital
loves and hates. They are all here—Jews and Little England and
sceptics and red-haired girls and monomaniacs. For their moment
they are intensely alive. It is enough; and the prose style which
Mr Chesterton developed out of Swinburne and which he occasion-
ally debauches is used with a new sort of restraint—the restraint
which comes from tiredness.
I do not mean that Mr Chesterton is physically or mentally tired;
I mean that the battle in a sense goes against him and that every
once in a while he suspects the people in whose behalf he daily
lays down his life. It is possible after all, that the great majority
of Englishmen do not care for drunkenness and do care for divorce;
and whenever Mr Chesterton regards them in that possible light,
his own light goes out. That is why in this book the protagonist
of his ideas is a man poles apart from the immortal Syme with his
abounding energy and his neat convictions and his violence. Horne
Fisher knows too much to do anything after a certain point has
been reached; he solves mysteries, confronts criminals, and reports
nobody to Headquarters. It is as well that this one was killed;
it would be far from well if that other one should be hanged. At
the end he acts, to be sure; he kills a minister of the crown, his own
uncle; and he gives up his life for England. That, too, is an "ap-
palling allegory."
On Mr Chesterton's head be it if he makes us think of such
things. Essentially and most significantly he is a story-teller; and
he knows that an idea or an emotion is a good thing to give a story
point. Whenever he uses these elements he gets them deeply into
his story and leaves it to the reader to get them out again. The
story itself, the swift entertaining fiction is always there.
Gilbert Seldes


BRIEFER MENTION
Suzanne and the Pacific, by Jean Giraudouz, translated by Ben Raj
Redman (i2mo, 286 pages; Putnam: $2) is replete with technical victoria.
The elements of the plot are introduced with thrills, and the functions of
the narrative are operated smoothly, though in an unaccustomed manner.
In particular, M Giraudoux piles up those contradictions, absurdities, and
irrationalities so esteemed by the Dadaists until one is certain that some-
thing surprising must happen, and the decisive statement is always com-
mensurate with the preparation. Psychology is utilized to carry loneliness
up to a pitch of despair at the climax, and this plus the shipwrecked
Suzanne's attachment to a civilization of slot machines, railway switches,
electric bulbs, and perfumes from Guerlain's furnishes the solid overtones
to a subject-matter of fancy and fantasy. The book gives a sense of diffi-
culties happily overcome rather than a sense of inevitability produced by
the harmonies of the imagination.
Druida, by John T. Frederick (illus., l2mo, 286 pages; Knopf: $2.50)
is a story of commonplace Middle-Western folk in contact with a central
character, Druida, who seems to represent the elemental earth spirit of
the region. It would take a certain magic to make this union perfect and
hence wholly convincing, and the author is no Celt in his artistic ap-
proach. Nevertheless he has honesty, calmness, and understanding.
These give his novel a stark, detached beauty, promising much for the
author's future. A departure from the usual in novel-publishing is found
in seven woodcuts by Wilfred Jones, all of which, except the first, inter-
pret discerningly the quality of the story.
Flaming Youth, by Warner Fabian (i2mo, 336 pages; Boni Sc Liveright:
$2) emerges, in the author's phrase, "out of the vatic incense-cloud of
pseudonymity" as the truth about the twentieth-century woman of the
luxury-class. It is written by a family physician—possibly one whose pre-
scriptions are mostly pint ones. Not counting the incense, it is a thoroughly
entertaining piece of fiction—half Scott Fitzgerald and half "Should a
woman tell?" It tears no veils from modern society, although it does
demonstrate that members of the smart set do not get that way by listening
to one another's conversation.
The Invisible Gods, by Edith Franklin Wyatt (i2mo, 433 pages; Harper:
$2). Most of us find satisfaction in watching the fortunes—or better
still, the misfortunes—of our neighbours. The Invisible Gods arouses at
least, and at most, this common interest. A large and loyal family is
shattered by the responsibilities its ideals incur; a sterling theme, but the
treatment is not equally sound. The development is burdened by
lachrymose pronouncements and redundant descriptions. The book is a
loosely constructed, vague-minded body moving heavy of foot in the
narrow circle of the author's sentimentality.


BRIEFER MENTION
521
Futility: A Novel on Russian Themes, by William Gerhardi, preface by
Edith Wharton (l2mo, 256 pages; Duffield: $i.75) attempts to jazz the
themes of the great Russian novelists. But the creation of jazz demands a
high vitality, whereas Mr Gerhardi's process is simply to devitalize his
facts. The result is Chekhov in terms of Christopher Morley, Dostoevsky
in terms of F. P. A., Tolstoy in terms of Stephen Leacock. This extends
comfort to those who are bewildered by Russian fiction, but to those who
have outgrown laughing at repeated orders for soup and the repeated reply
that it will be ready in three-quarters of an hour such a substitution of an
inferior sense of life for profound visions of living must seem dull.
The Red Redmaynes, by Eden Phillpotts (i2mo, 377 pages; Macmillan:
$2). Mr Phillpotts returns to his Dartmoor country, and—the plot thick-
ens. Evidently the author's knitting days are over, and he has dedicated
himself to unravelling. Instead of character studies against a background
of industry, he gives us crime against a background of mystery—with
chapters labelled A Clue, The Compact, Revolver and Pickaxe, and Death
in the Cave. E. Phillipps Oppenheim had better look to his bloodstains!
Rube, by G. A. Borgese, translated from the Italian by Isaac Goldberg
(i2mo, 394 pages; Harcourt, Brace: $2.50) is an Italian version of the
war psychology novel, picturing a bankrupt world with the pockets of its
soul turned inside out, and arid with despair. The hero, one Fillipo Rube,
suffers from the present-day mania for annihilation, and the story of his
pilgrimage is a furious pursuit of chaos. Child of the old world, having
thrown all inherited standards overboard, and too sterile to give birth to
his own, he plunges headlong into the abyss. Rube approximates the pro-
portions of an epic of these last barren years.
Fashions for Men and The Swan, by Franz Molnar (i2mo, 309 pages;
Boni & Liveright: $2) are two satirical comedies dealing with love, busi-
ness, and deposed royalty. The first, which ran with no great success in
New York, is not a very effective attempt to criticize ironically current
business and problem plays. The other has been widely played in Europe.
It is classical in plot, but peopled with characters of a modern cut with
contemporary psychology. Molnar creates problems for his characters,
makes them do unthinkable things, and at the end introduces a situation no
different than in the beginning.
Pender Among the Residents, by Forrest Reid (i2mo, 278 pages;
Houghton Mifflin: $2) is an expert pattern of suspense unfolded by a
series of amusing situations in polite society. The author has a good
ear, a sophisticated brain, alert perceptions of the comic, and a skill
wholly equal to the subtle task of stitching an interior ghost plot to the
external material one. A slick craftsman, he wastes no fraction of the
pulling power of undisclosed secrets. But the distinction between this
method arid the method by which an artist creates a sense of inevitability
in his structure is ultimate. The difference is between something which
can charm but once and something which can be read many times, the
difference, in short, between entertainment and experience.


522
BRIEFER MENTION
On, by Hilaire Belloc (i2mo, 253 pages; Doran: $2) is a collection of thirty-
one short essays that possess less individuality than diversity, and rather
more suavity than the urbanity of actual charm. The subjects range from
footnotes to the hatred of numbers, from titles to educational reform. A
mildly acid eye is turned on these topics just long enough to transform
the milk they contain into something that is not so much sweet or bitter as
something pallid and tepid and sour.
The chapters of The Development of the American Short Story, by
Fred Lewis Pattee (i2mo, 388 pages; Harper: $2.50) are constructed in
the manner of currently popular textbooks: biographical facts about the
writer under consideration, with dates; literary influences; works, again
with dates; appreciation, in many instances quoted. This method in-
sists on details as necessary to comprehensiveness; but it does not regard
clarity as a requisite of equal importance. Professor Pattee's book b
adumbrated by the prudent fallacy that a literary historian—self-im-
posed model for his literary students—must chronicle without judging.
The author's opinions, a few of them staunchly independent, are unobtru-
sively inserted. The book is thorough, but not concise; informative, but
not formative.
Things That Have Interested Me, by Arnold Bennett (i2mo, 264 pages;
Doran: $2.50). Two dozen novels, a dozen plays, and a handful of mis-
cellaneous works and pocket philosophies have in no wise diminished the
eager outlook and racing curiosity of their author, who writes "The truth
is, nature still exists"—and takes an unbounded pleasure in the fact Mr
Bennett has little patience with James Joyce because the latter has a
colossal "down" on humanity, and he withers A. B. Walkley as a critic
who "surveys the modern stage as a spiritual exercise to test his powers of
repudiation." The rest of the world Mr Bennett finds very much to hi.'
liking; he embraces it in the same mood as Kipling's fellow "went into a
public-house to get a pint of beer"—which is not precisely a crusading
spirit, but probably just as pleasing to the gods.
Lyric Forms From France, by Helen Louise Cohen (i2mo, 527 pages;
Harcourt, Brace: $i.75). Inclusive rather than exclusive, the editor has
gathered into her net singers of varying gifts ranging from the exquisitely
dainty Austin Dobson to the uninspired Brander Matthews. The princes ot
persiflage, the spinners of airy, wistful sentiment, the elegant triflers art
here assembled. As if determined to keep personal taste and bias strictly out
of it, the compiler has chosen to be undiscriminately catholic. Hence an
array of the exquisite with the banal, high grade with low.
American Poetry, i922, A Miscellany (i2mo, 200 pages; Harcourt,
Brace: $i.75). This collection of poems is well characterized as "AM*
cellany," for the chaff is mixed indiscriminately with the grains of wheat,
and a little good poetry is to be found in company with much doggerel. W
would hesitate to call this anthology representative of the best in contem-
porary American poetry, for to make such a statement would be to imply
that much of the best is worthless.


BRIEFER MENTION
523
Pietro Aretino, by Edward Hutton (8vo, 268 pages; Houghton Mifflin:
$4). This is a biography of the Renaissance "Monster" who, while he lived,
was so feared and mistrusted that even after his death chroniclers of the
period have been unwilling to mention his name. And so, especially in
English-speaking countries, he is practically unknown. Yet here was a
man who wielded tremendous influence on sixteenth-century Venice. It is a
pity that his work and letters, the best commentaries we have on his period,
have been published in English only in private editions; a man who was
the greatest critic both of politics and of art of that time, a friend of
Michael Angelo, a "gossip" of Titian would certainly be interesting to
read. And this is why Mr Hutton has performed a valuable service in
writing this authoritative and competent biography.
Richard Middleton, the Man and His Work, by Henry Savage (illus.,
8vo, 2i0 pages; Small, Maynard: $3) is rather a pot-pourri of quotations
from a "minor" poet interspersed with fervid and banal comments than a
portrait of the artist. There is entirely too much of Henry Savage and too
little of Richard Middleton in this biography. After all, and especially in
the case of Middleton, the man is first, the poet only secondary. Mr Sav-
age's volume is a sincere tribute, but a tribute only to that part of the man
we already know from his literary work.
Edgar A. Poe: A Psychopathic Study, by John W. Robertson, M.D.
(illus., 8vo, 33i pages; Putnam: $3.50) is yet another endeavour to
visit the terminology of Matteawan on the Muses. Dr Robertson exhibits
fairly conclusive if fairly stale evidence that Poe's aberrations were not
wholly crapulous; but his findings are more in the nature of an epitaph
than a strict autopsy, for the post-mortem is constantly interrupted by
literary eulogies, the nature of which may be summed up by revealing
the secret that he considers For Annie one of the most remarkable of his
victim's effusions.
The Biology of Death, by Raymond Pearl (i2mo, 275 pages; Lippincott:
$2.50) is a partially technical, but otherwise extremely readable monograph
on the causes and chances of our somatic decline and fall. No actually new
data are presented on the etiology of senescence and dissolution; but the
statistical field of human mortality is well reviewed, and some very signifi-
cant tables of probabilities are gathered together, setting forth the apparent
influence of environment and heredity on longevity. The work is gener-
ously illustrated with photographs and graphs, and is further amplified
with an exceptionally replete bibliography.
The Goose Step, by Upton Sinclair (i2mo, 488 pages; Upton Sinclair: $2)
is a study in American educational factories, written in the most trenchant
manner of our irrepressible present-day St George. Rumour has it that
Mr Upton Sinclair is a monomaniac for ever sallying forth to give battle
to imaginary dragons. Nevertheless, if half of what he records in his
latest book be true, and it is impossible to deny the facts Mr Sinclair has
arranged so formidably, The Goose Step is a terrific indictment of our
so-called institutions of learning.


COMMENT
E are glad to publish herewith the letter which Dr Schnitz-
V V ler has addressed to us and through us to American pro-
ducers and publishers, but it is impossible for us to take any
pleasure in the circumstances which have made such a letter neces-
sary. It is not only on his own behalf that Dr Schnitzler makes his
protest, and our own communication with European authors veri-
fies every painful detail of what he says. The isolation of Central
Europe—no longer existing as a political or commercial fact—is
continued in one sense by some of those who deal (the word is
accurate) in art and letters.
We appeal directly to such organizations as the P. E. N. Club
and the Authors League to act promptly and decisively in the mat-
ter. And we do so all the more freely because the injustice is not
one-sided and the American publisher has everything to gain by
destroying the pestilential literary freebooter who now makes a
moderately good living off him. For the honest American publisher
is continually being taken in by unauthorized agents, pays reason-
able royalties, acts legally and honourably, and discovers two years
later that his respected author considers him a scoundrel and a thief.
Meanwhile the less scrupulous publisher can take what he likes,
troubling himself not at all about agents and authorizations. These
conditions are well enough known in Central Europe and suspected
here. The degree of freedom and of thievery may be measured by
the attitude of a popular European dramatist who expressed to us
his surprise that American producers troubled to buy his work when
they could as easily steal it!
The protection of literary property lags behind the protection of
other things more directly usable by the multitude. The complete
re-establishment of copyright treaties is a first step—and one which
American authors can urge upon Congress; after the matter is le-
gally arranged and something like decency in international literary
affairs is arrived at, we suggest a careful consideration of the final
proposal in Dr Schnitzler's letter:
"I am continually receiving word from America that certain
people there claim the right to dispose of my works or even to act


COMMENT 525
as my general agents, although I have never given them any author-
ity of this sort. Publishers, editors, theatrical managers, but espe-
cially I myself have incurred many annoyances and damages from
this. And in order that such things may be avoided in the future,
I am sending to all people in America who are interested the urgent
request that they demand from any one who wants to negotiate
with them about any of my works that he exhibit my written
authorization bearing specifically on the work in queston.
"Such an admonition seems to me all the more pressing, in that
the respect for spiritual property, or even merely the right attitude
towards it, is as a rule not much developed, either in the public at
large or in circles where the interest in art and letters is professional.
And further, the existing copyright laws in various countries, not
only in America, are by no means adequate for the avoidance of
misunderstandings, or even misuse, in this matter. Let us hope the
time will come when special laws will no longer be necessary for
works of art and literature, and the property of the mind will enjoy
the same protection on the part of the state as any other possession.
I myself, and many fair-minded people along with me, have
reached the point of considering as improper all transactions and
oversights which are calculated to limit or cheat one in the profits
of his labours; even in those cases which from the legal standpoint
are not responsible before the courts and not liable to punishment.
"The problem of copyright laws, which is here touched on in
passing, is far too complicated for me to be able, and to dare, to
take it up at length in what is intended merely as a personal state-
ment. For the present I shall simply point out that in my opinion
this problem could be treated and solved only through international
channels; and probably the only hope of interesting parliaments,
governments, and the general populace in this subject would be an
arrangement whereby a certain fixed percentage of the proceeds
arising from the publication of the translated work (whereas up
to now the original authors have figured either slightly or not at all
in these proceeds) would be managed by some state bureau of con-
trol and be turned over to the purposes of charity. The propagan-
dizing of this idea must be left to someone with a gift for organiza-
tion. I shall be content if my statement is taken up by other pub-
lications in your country.
"Faithfully yours,
Arthur Schnitzler."


THE THEATRE
HE ADDING MACHINE, written by Elmer L. Rice and
X presented by the Theatre Guild, is, in its first half anyway,
absolutely first rate. Though it is in a vein which has already be-
come rather familiar, it brings to its tragic satire of our commercial
civilization an energy, an intensity, and a sureness of stroke which
we do not often find in this sort of thing. I am not sure that Bai-
bitt, The Hairy Ape, or From Morn to Midnight, all of which
it touches at some point, achieve the vigour or the accuracy of aim
of the first scenes of this play. They are the accuracy and vigour—
as well as the cruelty and hardness—of the adding machine itself—
of the society of which the adding machine is master. Even the ex-
pressionism is used sparely and efficiently for the purpose of driving
home the right effects.
And behind the heavy ax-blade of the author Mr Digges puts a
force and precision equal to it. He gives his poor henpecked over-
worked boob a relentlessly tragic dignity. The difficult scene in the
office in which he has to render not only the smarting backfire of his
bicker with his fellow clerk, but at the same time the undercurrent
of desire and fear which is running in his weary brain; his doglike
servility to the boss who has come to lay him off for an adding
machine; his dazed return home after the murder and his gentle sur-
render to the police; and finally the agonizing spectacle of his at-
tempt to justify himself to the jury; were like so many blows stiffly
dealt in a war for human dignity and freedom.
But having once made us believe in Mr Zero's dignity, the author
proceeds to take it all away from him. Mr Zero ascends to tht
Elysian Fields only to discover that he is incapable of enjoying
them and to learn that he must return to earth and resume his serf-
dom to eternity. Once a drudge, for ever a drudge. No act of
courage can save him.—Now it is obvious that, even apart from the
sociological question, there is a strong dramatic objection to such as
ending. It seems a mistake to begin a play with revolt and to end it
with a dreary subsidence. And in The Adding Machine the cli-
max comes at the beginning. Mr Zero is made to burst from the
living coffin of his life with an eclat which commands our sympathy


THE THEATRE 527
and then, during the latter half of the evening, we are obliged to
see him slowly nailed back into it.
And is this not something more than a dramatic weakness? Is it
not a psychological mistake as well? Would even a slave object to
Mr Rice's Paradise on the ground that it was not respectable'(
Surely this is a caricature even of a man like Mr Zero. It is a mis-
take to suppose that the standardized mechanical lives of our com-
mercial-industrial human beings really represent all the native im-
pulses of the more primitive grades of humanity. They are not
strong enough to free themselves, it is true; if they were strong
enough, they would do so; they do not even, if you like, want to
strongly enough. But it does not follow that, if you substituted for
their present state something easier and more agreeable, they would
not much prefer it to the other. Respectability is more easily shed
than Mr Rice would have us believe. Other instincts lie deeper and
stronger. I used to see Mr Zero very often with the American army
in France and I know that, confronted with feebler temptations
than Mr Rice has supplied him in Paradise and given freedom of
stranger codes, he seldom resigned.
I unfortunately missed the first act of Sandro Botticelli,
but from the programme and what I saw afterwards I know it must
have been like this:
Leonardo da Vinci: What ails our friend Botticelli? He seems
silent and distracted to-day—this day of all days, the birthday of
Lorenzo the Magnificent, when the people are dancing in the streets
like cicadas after rain.
Fra Lippo Lippi: They say he is enamoured of Giuliano's mis-
tress, the beautiful Simonetta. But look, here comes Lorenzo him-
self with Poliziano!
Lorenzo de' Medici: Ha, our incomparable Leonardo! How
goes the Mona Lisa and what are your latest experiments in engi-
neering?
Poliziano: Gentlemen, I must confess it. I have turned another
little canzone to Simonetta. Per bacco, I cannot find it in my heart
to keep away from the subject. (All laugh.)
Fra Lippo Lippi: No more can our friend Botticelli! (All
laugh.)
Botticelli (joining them): Greeting, good Master Leonardo,


THE THEATRE
and Your Most Excellent Highness Lord Lorenzo. Is it not a day
for men and for angels, for music, for flowers—
Leonardo: And for lovers? (All laugh.)
Poliziano: All Florence is laughing to the sun. Come, let us
taste some of our host's wine. (Exeunt omnes—except Botticelli,
who hides behind a potted rose-bush to watch Eva Le Gallienne
make her entrance.)
Mr John Murray Anderson's Jack and Jill has been produced
with infinitely pretty costumes and with a tolerably successful at-
tempt to make it exquisite and well-bred. But in spite of all this—
and Ann Pennington—it is the old grind of musical comedy. You
recognize The Prince of Pilsen and cannot help being bored.
With the publication of his volume of essays, The Flower in
Drama,1 Mr Stark Young establishes himself as one of the few
American minds of any distinction who have devoted themselves
to dramatic criticism seriously. His book is full of fine taste and
sound judgements, and the only possible objection to it would be
that it takes the theatre a little too seriously. I feel that Mr Young
is often writing about the stage in a style which is not proper to it
—the style of the aesthetic criticism of the last century and particu-
larly of Walter Pater. Pater was already sufficiently, himself, an
offender in this respect. He had a tendency to write about the set-
ting-up exercises of Sparta as if they were the Duncan dancers, and
to translate the even prose of Plato into the literary filigree of the
time. But Mr Young has sometimes been known to lavish on the
commonplaces of current acting language which Ruskin would
surely have thought excessive for the glories of the Renaissance.
He has a way of describing even things he thinks indifferent in a
sort of mood of antique rapture, and he is in the habit of surround-
ing his nouns with such prismatic clouds of modifiers that we can
scarcely catch a glimpse of them at all. I would warn him—in all
admiration—to vent his lyric strain on Tintoretto and to leave us
for Ben Ami and Charlie Chaplin his native intelligence and taste.
Edmund Wilson, Jr.
1 The Flower in Drama, by Stark Young (i2mo, i62 pages; Scribner:
$i.50).


MODERN ART
JOURNALISTIC criticism, as practised in America at least,
obliges a critic to live in a glass house, and none of his processes
of arriving at an opinion may be kept secret. A goldfish's lot, to
use a simile made popular by one of our wits, is infinitely happier,
since the goldfish's thoughts are his own. Not so your daily critic.
His half th