oughts and quarter thoughts are commanded by the
always yawning space to be filled, and in the glare and exposure of
shop-window thinking the best he can do generally is to indicate
the direction of his thought and not the full force of it. The re-
search necessary for the establishment of exact values in a scattered
world being impossible, it follows that justification for a pro-
nounced feeling, when it arrives at all, arrives by accident.
Having changed one of my half thoughts recently into a whole
thought, with true goldfish candour I must write it down. It con-
cerns the position of Thomas Eakins. At the time of the memorial
exhibition of the work of this artist at the Metropolitan Museum
of Art in i917 I proclaimed in all the publications to which
I had access that the hitherto reviled, ignored Thomas Eakins
was one of our greatest painters, worthy of a place in our history
with Sargent, Whistler, and George Fuller. This seemed suffi-
ciently daring at the time, but now it makes me smile. It was
decidedly a half statement. Subconsciously I knew better; but it
seemed one way to lead our public, which must be led gently, if it
is to be led at all. Now I place Eakins unhesitatingly at the top
of our figure painters and my only surprise in the rating of our older
men is that Sargent seems so paltry beside him. Just lately the
Eakins paintings have been shown again at the Joseph Brummer
Galleries in New York, and the agitation in London over the ad-
mission of the Wertheimer portraits by Sargent into the National
Gallery naturally sent fresh photographs of these works to our
newspapers; and the looking at them after all these years and fresh
from a contact with the serious art of Eakins, was a distinct shock.
They seemed incredibly shallow and frivolous. I knew, of course,
even in infancy that Sargent was largely a matter of an agile wrist,
but to infants dexterity has its attractions, and I suppose that ever


53°
MODERN ART
since I had been seeing the Asher Wertheimer through the rose-col-
oured glasses of youth and putting things into it it did not possess.
It still seems clever to my adult eyes, but gracious heavens, master-
piece of Sargent though it be, it could never be placed next to the
John Laurie Wallace or the Cardinal Falconio of Eakins except
to its shame. The Cardinal Falconio is undoubtedly one of the
great portraits of the world, and even the Young Man that Eakins,
who was remorseless in his demand for sittings, must have con-
sidered unfinished, is a profoundly human document. Profound is
the word for Eakins. He was a pupil of Bonnat and there are
traces of the Bonnat teaching in his style, but technique with him
was never anything more than a stepping stone to the things of the
soul. The innermost depths of the sitter were sounded before he
let go, but at the same time, as there was absolutely no trace of side
in the work, the essential result had a quiet reasonableness that
passes, naturally enough, above the heads of the thoughtless. Look-
ing again at these pictures in the Brummer Gallery it occurred to
me amusedly that after all it is no wonder that we know nothing
of the real life of Shakespeare. Work intensely true to its period
must seem too natural to be astonishing, and without the sense of
shock what can put a personality before the public distinctly'? It
is silly to blame the critics of the 'eighties and 'nineties, therefore,
or even the wealthy collectors who preferred Bouguereau and
Cabanel to Eakins. We may be quite sure, as Samuel Butler ex-
asperatingly points out, that though we have at last caught up
with Eakins we are just as heartily crushing some living "Flower
beneath the Foot" (Marin, Weber, Man Ray, perhaps?) as ever
our predecessors did.
It is however permissible to laugh gently at our museum direc-
tors in this regard. It always seems possible to laugh at museum
directors though, to do the poor dears justice, everyone knows that
the real trouble comes from the stupid committee-men who stand
behind the director and hamper his every turn. These men are
supposedly "conservative," but that is only one way of saying they
are incapable of ideas. By the time these conservative ignora-
muses are educated, bullied, or swayed by fashion into a receptive
mood, the real opportunity for constructive work has always passed.
In the case of Eakins, all of these directors knew ten years age
that any of his pictures could be obtained for almost nothing, but it


HENRY McBRIDE
never occurred to them then that the things had merit. The me-
morial show of i9i7 startled them into a degree of activity, but
already someone had raised the Eakins prices above the former
bargain rates. It produced a hesitation in official circles that later
resolved into complete inaction, when the pictures were hidden
away from public view and quietude descended upon them. The
Brummer resurrection has of course brought the matter forward,
and as always happens with the real thing, the impetus towards jus-
tice is stronger with each recurring discussion. Again the directors
seem accused by fate. But what happens? The Eakins prices rise
again. One must now pay eight thousand dollars for some of
them. Is it not amusing? And as pretty an argument as any one
need wish for the establishment of a local Luxembourg which shall
have an interest in contemporary art?
Henry McBride


MUSICAL CHRONICLE
CYRIL SCOTT is a Parnassian when he is most strong. His
sonata for piano and his piano concerto are, both, opulent and
marmoreal. Their beauty is a beauty of pomp and slow proud
gesture and oratund period taken musical shape. Fire and sheet-ice
combine in them; surface fire of enthusiastic sweep and crashing
ecstatic summit and Handelian state overlying the profound im-
personality and chill of the poet turned away from the existing fact
into regions of grandiose and indifferent and solitary dreaming.
They are Ubermenschenmusik, like some of Szymanowski's and
Scriabine's orchestral compositions; arrogant and voluptuous and
flauntful; rhythms of runners stepping through the skies far over
human heads; visions of the glory of the creative life; visions pro-
foundly uninformed of the depths of the heart and of suffering and
brotherliness and man. A marble being made them, too, and what
they utter is eloquent of some cold and sumptuous palace of art
where rags and sores and muddied feet never penetrate, and the
heaped treasures of the world are used to procure in life's despite a
perpetual dalliance. They have their kin in the actions and dreams
of a generation of gods and impotents: Louis II building Versailles
on the Chiemsee and Neuschwanstein in the lonely heart of the
mountains; d'Annunzio cradling himself with visions of a Penteli-
can temple on the shores of Como dedicate everlastingly to his own
dramatic art; Stefan George upholding in solemn verse before a
yellow curtain an hieratic and glorified image of himself. A trifle
belated, these English scores arrive and assume their place by the
side of much old-fashioned grandeur.
And they have beauty, even though it is a beauty circumscribed
and shut off from the electric reaches of to-day. The stuff of them
is rich and good. The treatment is .somewhat too stiff and too or-
nate to satisfy us quite; too much velvet and too much gold have
been applied; and we prefer barer and simpler rooms, and Mous-
sorgsky and his courage to stand pain. And still, the material
excites us with its native amplitude and density. Scott is one of
the creatures born to musicianship; he has it in his blood. Many
living musicians are more respectable and vital artists than he.


PAUL ROSENFELD
533
Nevertheless, his Sunday-childhood sets him among the rare few.
What he has in his fingers cannot be obtained with will. It falls
from the gods; and, despite his languor and poor-heartedness, re-
mains in the touch of its host as felicity and glamour and magic.
Music comes from this man, wan and languid, it is true, but molten
and relaxed in its flow. It is born out of the cool stony beauty of the
piano-sound. The ideas are just fallen right, right in the register,
right in their harmonic vesture. Song begins tender and magical in
him; auditory sensations are caught. Delicate washes of beauty,
glintings of rich novel harmonies, brilliant orchestral hues, appear
as though shaken out of a sorcerer's bag. Scott's harmonic progres-
sions thrill mid the flamboyant forms; fill with their power and
subtlety. He is among the original modern harmonists; sometimes
acrid and pricking and sadistic; oftener, juicy and gorgeous. The
colour is always rich, whether colour of harmony or of instrument.
There is a fine cloudy sonority in the middle movement of the
concerto, with its noble bell-tones; and the last movement rings
bright with the well-disposed sounds of celesta, campanella, harp,
and piano. At moments, power cries out of these works. Page upon
page of the piano sonata, the opening theme, and passage precedent
to its return, the staccato triplet passage toward the close of the
second movement, proves him capable of not only the dreamful,
tender lyrical movements, but of the large aggressive exuberant
ones as well. The final fugue is masterly, almost; piles rock on rock
in its racing ascent.
Unfortunately, it is a dishevelled beauty that comes to us in
Scott; in the very best of his compositions. It does not even fill out
the sphere to which it is limited. Between the magnificent stuffs
there are holes. The satins and velvets and gilding are strewn
about disorderly, and do not play properly against each other.
Scott's thematic invention is unequal; his critical sense uncertain.
The sonata for piano, the very best of his works, shows how weak
they are. The themes of the first movement are satisfactory and
well contrasted; the heroic first motif plays against the languorous
second, grandiloquence and fire against the dreamful and wayward
flute. But in the second movement, the composer becomes the senti-
mental Englishman, pompous and episcopal; and the Englishman
never becomes sentimental, but he empties the suddy-pail entire, to
the last soapy drop. Later, Scott simpers, "vesperal," with Mac-


534
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
Dowell; and the fugue has to erect its ladder to hardier regions
midmost a pool of melted sundaes.
More responsible for the disarray is the absence of the formal
sense. Both sonata and concerto are without genuine organization.
Clangorous and opulent and sensitive as the music is, crammed
with rich lyrical substance, with pearly and opalescent colour, it
wants base. It has no situation in space; no points of departure
and rest and conclusion. It is like an array of large unanchored
fragments; pieces and progressions of sound which start out bravely
enough, but complete no curve. Little that Scott touches and that
quivers a minute in his hand, is maintained. The pulsing lyrical
fragments rarely build out, continue and engender each other. The
earth, presses a brief instant, fades; and we float limp in space.
Each fresh idea is always something of a new commencement. The
middle movement of the concerto is curiously indeterminate, ends
up in air. The finale is somewhat like a railroad train which starts
to circle the globe, but being too rigid to conform to the curvature
of the earth's surface, quits the ground and loses* itself in the chill
regions of interstellar space. The concluding measures of the work,
the recapitulation of the opening Handelian chords, taste arbi-
trary and not satisfying. While the first movement of the sonata
hangs together, the second goes quite to pieces. The pages which
precede the fugue are both lone wandering and being lost; an im-
passe of sound; endless repetitions of indeterminate phrases. And,
as in the concerto, the rapid, acrid, brilliant finale does not really
come to a result. The peroration, noble and exciting as it is, seems,
here too, an arbitrarily harnessed coda.
And these are the strongest of Scott's work! About them, levia-
thans of the lake, there swims a school of smaller pieces, lesser
in form and life. There are effective works among these, too: The
Jungle, Dance of the Elephants, for instance. But the greater
number of them are wan and near vapid, leaving us with a sense
of malaise and restlessness and unsatisfaction. Many of Scott's
songs deserve to go by the name of the Irish tune which he has used
as theme in one of his passacaglias—Famine Song. In most of
these almost tediously yearnful and dreamy and effeminate pieces,
the Parnassian, proud and clangorous, writes as though he were a
sbcteen-year-old schoolboy enduring his first attack of Weltschmerz.
There are three poems of Stefan George dedicated to Cyril Scott,


PAUL ROSENFELD
535
and entitled Der Knabe, Der Mir von Herbst und Abend Sang;
and to-day, years since the composition of the poem, Scott seems
still the lad in the voluptuous glooms of puberty yearning beneath
painted windows. He pours himself out in banal sentiments and
pallid rhetoric; is weak and loose at once. Sometimes he rocks his
own cradle in Lotus Land. In less sensual moods, he wanders
plucking posies in the Garden of Soul Sympathy. He is still a good
year this side Children of Adam and Song of Myself.
Imagination is wanting Scott; for that reason his very major
works retain the general character of brilliant improvisations. His
gift has remained an almost purely physical thing. He is a slave,
it appears, of his two hands. What they, wandering over the key-
board, find for him, and not what his mind shadows forth, is deter-
minate for his work. He cannot project a rhythm away from him-
self, outside his body; cannot conceive a work in such a fashion
that it has a shape its own, iron and immutable. Form, after all, is
the product of the marriage of a rhythm projected by the brain well
before the process of incarnation is begun, and of a steady and un-
flagging improvisation lying in the curve projected by the brain.
And Scott, incapable of imagination, of objectification, has, it
seems, to permit one phrase to suggest another, and to construct his
works in fairly haphazard fashion. Magnificent flights do appear.
But the inner form is vague. And sentimentality, child of unimagi-
nativeness, beacons ever.
And, when once a figure manages to establish itself in his work,
it has the tendency instead of flowing and generating complemen-
tary figures, to become obsessive. The two passacaglias for orchestra
seem born of such rigidity. They have the "hammering monotony"
of a single figure repeated over and over with exasperating un-
variedness. In them, the basso ostinato of The Jungle, effective
enough in the piano composition, has a counterpart almost madden-
ingly regular. The form of the passacaglia, one supposes, demanded
something other; demanded a steady variation of theme and de-
formation of rhythm. Now, Scott has indeed varied the orchestral
dress of the tunes, the Irish Famine Song and the Poor Irish Boy
upon which he has based the passacaglias. He has lavished the
colours of the grand orchestra upon them, particularly those of the
instruments of percussion. The pianoforte is brilliantly introduced
in the second. But the monotony persists, despite the steady aug-


536
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
mentations of volume which brings both compositions to resonant
conclusions. And at the end, they remind one unpleasantly of the
rigid repetitions of catatonic gestures.
In the effort to correct this imaginative poverty and invertebracy,
Scott has had recourse to mechanical expedients. He has attempted
to create a great irregularity of beat in his work; to contrast five
fourths with four fourths and seven eighths with five eighths and
eleven sixteenths with nine sixteenths, and so forth. But the result,
as in all instances of mental protestations against imaginative im-
potence, is thoroughly unhappy. There is no real justification for
the continual changes of time in which Scott indulges. The
shifts are not invariably justified by the musical phrases. Often,
the irregular bars reveal themselves as perfectly arbitrary; purely
wilful extensions of regular ones. Hence, they defeat their own
purpose. Intended to lift the music out of the rhythmical ruts into
which it has the tendency to fall, they create a Sort of monotony of
their own. For they are not necessary. But, so it seems, Scott har-
bours a theory to the effect that there is a need for these changes;
and finds a sort of occupation for his unrooted mind by acting upon
it. And, as usual, the over-determined act is quite as truly expres-
sive of the inner condition as the one it is calculated to correct.
(After the second Ornstein recital; the New Gallery; March 6th.)
Paul Rosenfeld








THE
DIAL

JUNE i923
THE APOSTLE
BY GEORGE MOORE
CHARACTERS IN THE PLAY
Joseph of Arimathea
Esora—his housekeeper
Jesus of Nazareth
A Servant
Jedaiah—a camel-herd
Jacob—a young shepherd
Hazael—President of the Essenes
Mathias
Saddoc
Manahem
Caleb
Eleazor
Eliakim
Shallum
Paul of Tarsus
Probus—a Roman soldier
Priscilla
Aquila
Apollos
Eunice
Timothy
> Essene monks
Prelude: June, a.d. 33. Two months after the Crucifixion. The
garden of Joseph of Arimathea's home on the Mount of
Olives.


538
THE APOSTLE
Act I: Twenty years later. Interior of the cenoby of the Essenes
on a shelf of rock in the gorge of the brook Kerith. Evening.
Act II: The same. Sunrise.
Act III: A room in the house in Caesarea. Four days later.
Evening.
PRELUDE
Two months after the Crucifixion. The garden of the house of
Joseph of Arimathea on the Mount of Olives. When the curtain
rises Joseph is discovered sitting on a bench near the trees with J
letter in his hand.
joseph {rising): So the robbers have broken out on the hills
again—more wheat and camels captured. {He stops and looks
through the olive trees as if he were expecting somebody.) Esora
will be able to tell me how many when she returns from
Jerusalem. {Crosses and returns.) She has been delayed
. . . I wonder . . . Ah! here she comes, and overladen
with her basket. I must go to her help.
{Joseph goes out and returns immediately after, carrying a
basket on his right arm and helping Esora with his left.)
esora: I am late, Master, I know it, but the way is hot and weary
down into the valley, and the climb up to Jerusalem—
Joseph: With a heavy basket on thine arm, not less wearisome.
esora: It wouldn't have been felt ten years ago. My troth on
it, the sun is fierce on these hillsides! I can't talk; my tongue is
thick. A cup of water, Joseph, if thou wouldst hear me. {Joseph
goes out. Esora walks to the bench from which Joseph has risen,
and sits. Joseph returns with a cup of water. Esora drinks and
hands him back the cup.) Thou hast lost a convoy.
Joseph: I know it, and bread will be dearer next week in
Jerusalem.
esora: It will indeed. And if another caravan be pillaged—
joseph: Bread will be still dearer. . . . What hast thou
brought back, Esora?
esora: A quarter of a lamb, enough for all of us and something
over. A fine beast was this lamb, so plump that I could not part
with the rest of him, and the three-quarters will be sent on to-
night, the butcher's word on it; and if he change him for another


GEORGE MOORE
539
I shall know it, and will never stop to cheapen with him again,
but go on to another stall.
joseph: The lamb has overburdened thee, Esora.
esora: If I had nothing but the lamb in the basket. . . .
{She takes out two chickens.) Good chickens; feel their breasts.
I have no fault to find with them. But put a guess upon the
price, Joseph. Nor wilt thou ever guess it, nor half of it.
joseph: Half a shekel?
esora: We have not come to that yet, but soon we shall. The
prices are going up and up, putting gloom into the faces, setting
the people asking how they are to live through the winter, for
prices will be higher then than now. But I have not told thee all.
joseph: Not all! {Rising.) What art thou withholding from me,
Esora? {He stands looking for a moment through the olive trees
and then turns to her.) Tell me, do the people speak against me?
And what reason do they urge? What would the people have me
do?
esora {rising): Listen to me, Joseph. The people are crying out
that thou shouldst have asked for soldiers.
joseph: But I command no soldiers. {He stands thinking.)
esora: Thou shouldst have asked for soldiers since thou hast the
ear of Pilate; so they are saying.
joseph: And blaming me for the fine string of camels I have lost?
esora: They are indeed; and the talk of the market is that Pilate
will have to bestir himself and put the robbers on crosses if the
poor are to live.
joseph: So Pilate and I are the culprits! Yet before our coming
there was not a league of road safe between Jerusalem and Moab.
esora: I durst not tell thee all I have heard against thee and Pilate
—hard words everywhere, betokening stirs, quarrels, riots, later.
joseph: So I am bedded with Pilate and rated with him.
esora: It is as thou sayest; but blame me not for bringing thee all
tidings that befall.
joseph: And in a city for which I have done so much.
esora: Pilate is not well reckoned of by the Zealots. And there is
much else I would tell thee, Joseph. {Pause.)
joseph: Tell me all thou hast heard. But beware, Esora, that
thou dost not seem to side with thy master, lest the hand go to
the mouth at sight of thee.
esora: I greet all they say with smiles and nods, and never fail


54©
THE APOSTLE
to scowl when, to test me, they say: Ever since Pilate rid the hills
of robbers, bread is cheap in Jerusalem.
Joseph: Pilate is cursed for being here; he is cursed for not send-
ing soldiers to rid the hills of robbers; and he is cursed if he puts
them upon crosses. The people are hard to understand, Esora.
esora: Troth and faith! they are; for going among them as I do
with an ear for everybody's say, all I get from some is that the
Romans should leave the city, whilst others would have them
remain, else prophecy begin again and prophets head the people
against the priests. {Nudging him.) Art dreaming, Joseph?
Joseph: But it is with my father's money that I fetch wheat from
Moab. Were it with Roman money the people would have cause
of complaint against me.
esora: It is said that Pilate shares with thee.
Joseph: My father asked for my promise that the enterprise
should bring no profit to Pilate, and my answer to Pilate is
known in Jerusalem. The fish Salter of Galilee gives the money
and Pilate the soldiers to make safe the roads for the caravans.
We work together for good, Esora.
esora: The people know the truth well enough.
Joseph: But the people believe according to their passions rather
than their reason. What wouldst thou have me do, Esora?
esora: I would have thee withdraw thyself from the counsels of
Pilate for a time at least.
Joseph: It would seem that I am always being asked to withdraw
from somebody's company. The corn trade will bring thee great
profit, Joseph, my father said, and when I am gone and the fish
salting comes to thee, thou'lt be the richest man in Syria. In
saying these words he foresaw in me the happiest man in Syria,
and to make my happiness doubly sure he exacted another
promise—that I should withdraw myself from Jesus of Nazareth
and his company.
esora: Thy father is a Jew of old time, and he was told that Jesus
had said he could destroy the Temple and build it again in three
days; and ever since, his face darkens when the name of Jesus of
Nazareth is spoken.
Joseph: But the Temple Jesus had in mind is in the soul. My
father should have understood.
esora: Traditions and observances are part of him, and it is re-
ported that Jesus said: The law is of no account.


GEORGE MOORE
54i
Joseph: Nor is it if the love of God be in our hearts. As thou say-
est, Dan is a Jew of old time and his understanding is closed to
the new. I would not think ill of him, but I cannot forget that
a prophet who tells fishermen to lay aside their nets finds but
little favour with a fish salter.
{Sounds as of the felling of trees are heard from the olive
grove.)
esora: Hearken! Somebody is felling trees; and there is a smell
of burning in the air.
Joseph: Jesus is burning last year's leaves and gathering decayed
branches for fuel. He came to me asking for an adze—
esora: And thou gavest it to him?
Joseph: Why not, Esora? There are many trees about that have
almost ceased to bear fruit, and in their places young trees will
be planted.
esora: But it is of his hands I am thinking, not yet hard for the
wielding of an adze.
joseph: Have no fear; he is too weak for much work. Hearken!
he has stopped already, and were the trees fewer between us we
should see him leaning on his adze, lost in a dream of Galilee.
We are three Galileans, and the lake is never far from our
thoughts.
esora: Did he speak to thee of Galilee, of returning thither?
joseph: No. Why dost thou ask?
esora: Thou tellest what it pleases thee to tell and withholdest
what thou pleasest, for we are master and servant. {Pause.)
joseph: Say on, Esora.
esora: The people are talking in Jerusalem of Jesus of Nazareth
and Joseph of Arimathea—
joseph: Who received the body of the Nazarene for burial.
esora: And every time thy name is spoken my heart stands still,
and I wait for somebody to step forward, saying: I spied him
on the night of the crucifixion bringing home a dead man on his
shoulders.
joseph: My servant truly thou art, but the word sounds harsh;
mother would sound better, for I lay upon thy breast, Esora,
and thy hand led my first steps.
esora: My hands rocked thy cradle, washed and dressed thee.
joseph: And thou'rt trusted as none other.
esora: Why then was I not told that the man yonder is Pilate's


542
THE APOSTLE
crucified? Hearken! he is at work again. I must forbid him lest
the half-healed wounds should open.
Joseph: Stay, Esora. I would tell thee that my wits were not with
me the night I brought Jesus of Nazareth home upon my should-
ers; and afterwards remembrance of the promise to my father
kept the words back whenever I sought to speak them, for
thou'rt his servant as much as mine.
esora: And coming from Galilee to abide thy orders, cured his
wounds without putting questions to thee. ... I must go.
Joseph: There is no need; the garth is silent again. ... I
left Galilee to keep the promise to my father; and when the dis-
ciples prepared a triumphant entry into Jerusalem for Jesus, I
rode away lest a sudden movement of the heart should compel
me to join in their welcome, to cry: Hosanna, Son of David!
esora: For many weeks a moodiness was upon thee; but it was on
the night of thy return from Jericho—
Joseph: The masons coming from my tomb cried: Thy tomb is
finished, Master. I reined in, for Jesus was in my thoughts; I
needed news of him. And they answered me: Jesus of Nazareth
was condemned by Pilate, and is hanging on a cross between two
robbers. And when I rode up the mount the robbers were strain-
ing their heads high in the air above the cross-bar. But Jesus's
head was sunk upon his chest. I rode on to Pilate, returning with
a centurion and an order that the body was to be delivered to
me. Mary and Martha were at the foot of the cross and they
followed to the tomb, and when the women had gone their way
to prepare the oils and spices for embalmment, I entered to bid
him farewell. The sheet that covered his face had fallen, and as
I was about to replace it he stirred under the winding-sheet. I
walked out of the tomb, frightened by this resurrection, but hear-
ing no sound of footsteps or voices, I began to ask myself if my
strength was enough to carry him up the steep, narrow way. So
frail a body cannot be of great weight even up this hillside, I
said, lifting him, but the words of the promise I had given to my
father returning to me suddenly, I laid him back, though only
for a moment did I hesitate. My father would not have had me
roll back the stone and leave Jesus to die; and ashamed of my
thoughts—
esora: As thou mightest well be! If Dan had been with thee, he'd
have helped thee, hoisting the frail body on to thy fine broad


GEORGE MOORE
543
shoulders, given thee for the burden. A frail body, but all bur-
dens are heavy up that hillside, as this basket has often learnt me.
Joseph: It took all my strength to get him hither.
esora: And my balsam to cure him.
Joseph: Thou knowest the rest of the story, and it would have
remained between us two if Mary and Martha had not gone to
the tomb on Sunday morning.
esora: Martha and Mary have been talking ever since; and now
the say of Jerusalem is: Joseph of Arimathea is a Nazarene, else
he would not have gone to Pilate to ask for the body; he is hid-
ing the body so that the people may believe in the resurrection
of Jesus. The say of others is that Jesus is not dead, and the
Zealots speak of a search, which will not be a long one; their
first pounce will be upon this house. Master, we love him and
would save him from his enemies, and to save him we can do no
more than send him to some Greek city.
Joseph: What thinkest thou of Caesarea?
esora: Caesarea or any other city, so long as he goes hence; and
the sooner he goes the better, for we know not when the search
will begin.
Joseph: Go to him, Esora; bring him to me. We will talk to him
together.
esora: He will come to our wishes if our words reach his mind, but
his memory comes and goes, rustles like a wind among the olive
trees and is off again. {Jesus comes up the stage carrying a
large bundle of faggots on his back. Esora goes to meet him.)
Thy bundle is too heavy for thee, good Jesus. Lay it aside, for
thy master would speak with thee. {She tries to take the bundle
from Jesus, but he resists her.)
joseph: Esora is afraid that thy strength is not enough for the
carrying of large bundles.
jesus: The sticks are light, and with the adze I can make up many
bundles.
esora: Chopping wood is hard upon the hands. Show me thy
hands, Jesus. {She looks at his hands.) The wounds are nearly
cured. {She shows Jesus's hands to Joseph.)
joseph: Yes, thy hands are well cured; but chopping wood with
an adze is not work for thee, Jesus, not yet, and we have much
to say that concerns thee. . . . Art tired?
jesus: No; but I cannot talk as I did in old time.


544
THE APOSTLE
Joseph: But soon thou wilt: sea breezes will restore thee to health
and strength, and having business in Caesarea, methinks we
might journey thither. {Jesus turns to go. Joseph detains him.)
We are thy friends and would consult thy wishes, but we have
reasons for wishing thee in some Greek city.
jesus: In some Greek city?
Joseph: Thy wounds are cured, and Esora thinks—
jesus: My wounds!
Joseph: Only in a Greek city wilt thou be free.
jesus: Much work is still to be done in the garden.
Joseph: But faggoting in an olive garden is not thy work.
jesus: What wouldst thou have me do?
Joseph: On any day I may be called to Galilee; my father is an
old man; and I would not leave thee here alone.
jesus: Why not leave me here, since God has called me hither?
Joseph: Thou'lt weary alone.
jesus: Enough for me is my work, and when it is done I rest
hearkening to the summer in the branches.
Joseph: We would have thee go to some Greek city, for there
thou'lt find disciples—
jesus: What should I be among them? First a gazing and then a
jeering-stock. Let me stay here.
Joseph: But thou hast raked all the dead leaves into heaps.
jesus: And they are burning now; the smoke smells sweet on the
air. I have gathered many faggots, but not enough for Esora's
winter fires. Come and see the work I've done with the adze thou
gavest me.
joseph {turning to Esora and taking her aside): It is like speak-
ing into an empty room; only a faint echo answers me; words
drift across his mind, no sooner heard than forgotten. But his
mind is coming back slowly and we must have patience with him,
putting our trust in God, who will not forsake him.
esora: But God did forsake him.
Joseph: He believed that Pilate had no power over him and that
God would send angels to release him from the cross, and so he is
like one in a smother of dream.
esora: God must have foreseen all, for all things are in God.
joseph: I have often asked myself why God did not send angels.
esora: It may be that his Father has withdrawn his favour from
him.


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joseph: Mayhap his ears still retain the murmur of the people
acclaiming him the Son of David.
esora: And that he feels his place is here till God calls him into
his counsels again.
joseph: We must not awaken him from his dreams, come what
may.
esora: But speak we must, else we perish together.
{As Esora moves towards Jesus a Servant enters.)
servant: Jedaiah, thy camel-driver, is at the gate asking for thee,
Master.
joseph: Jedaiah, my camel-herd from Moab! Let him come in.
{Exit Servant.) Come with tidings of a further loss of camels!
esora: Were the trouble but the loss of a caravan we could bear it.
{Enter Jedaiah, followed by a dog.) At sight of thee, my good
Jedaiah, I guess evil tidings.
jedaiah: We had crossed the plain and reached the ascent from
the sea; we were by the Kerith hills when the gangrel rogues
ran out from the rocks where they were hiding.
joseph: How many camels?
jedaiah: Seven, Master; and half the corn still at Moab.
joseph: Which we shall lose if we try to bring it to Jerusalem.
Let not a camel stir out of Moab till thou hast word from me
that the roads are safe.
jedaiah: So like are my thoughts to thine, Master, that before
coming to thee I went to Pilate and said that soldiers should
guard the caravans, and he answered: The hills must be made
safe for caravans.
esora: Before the hills are freed of robbers bread will be a penny
a loaf in Jerusalem.
joseph {to Jedaiah): What else did Pilate say to thee?
jedaiah: That an expedition would be sent into the hills. He
spoke of lowering the soldiers in baskets down the cliff sides to
the robbers' caves, but I told him that the burning of a few
trusses of wet straw would compel the robbers to choose be-
tween choking within or being cut down as they pass out; and
Pilate answered: We will not cut them down as they rush out,
but will take them prisoners, and they'll serve to fill all the crosses
between Jerusalem and Jericho. ... I bring a letter to
thee from Pilate. {He hands Joseph a letter.) If thou wouldst
replace the camels thou hast lost, Master, at little cost—


546
THE APOSTLE
Joseph: Stolen camels are cheap to-day in Moab, and the stealing
of another convoy will cheapen them still further. . . .
{Reading his letter.) I must write to Pilate at once.
{Joseph goes out hurriedly, and Jesus approaches Jedaiah.
Esora takes one of the fowls out of her basket and begins to
pluck it.)
jesus {to Jedaiah): The smeh of camels hangs around thee and
of sheep, and thou comest from the hills over against the Jordan,
maybe?
jedaiah: We come up from Moab with camels and sheep.
jesus: What is thy dog's name?
jedaiah: Take thine eyes off my dog, for the Thracian breed
recks little of the stranger's eye or hand. Take thine eyes from
that dog, and I'll tell thee how one night I lay in sleep so deep
that the rain could not stir me out of it, though it flowed about
me. But the dog, taking pity on my plight, licked my face till
I awoke, and when I had wrung out my cloak he led me to a
dry cave.
jesus: He must have gone in search of a cave as soon as it began
to rain, and when he found a dry one came back to fetch thee.
A faithful friend is the Thracian; he loves but once.
jedaiah: Thou hast worked with the Thracian breed?
jesus: Aye, and with the Syrian.
jedaiah: Timorous curs, that turn shrieking from a wolf.
jesus: Anos and Torbitt and Boreth were Thracians. Anos and
Torbitt were at home, one with a lame paw, the other with pup-
pies, and I was sleeping in a cave, the flock about me; Boreth
was away upon his rounds. It was then that two robbers crept
up through the flock, one with a dagger to plunge into me, but
I had time to catch his wrist and to whistle, and in a few seconds
Boreth was at his throat, biting his neck and shoulders; and
then leaving the robber disabled, he crept round and round in
the darkness, biting the robber's mate all the time. And then
pursuing the two he worried them up the valley till his heart
misgave him and he returned to me, thinking it would not be
safe to leave me alone any longer.
jedaiah: Over what hills didst thou lead thy flock?
jesus: The hills over against Jericho, sometimes taking the flock
into the valley of the Jordan and sometimes leading it round by


GEORGE MOORE
547
the source where the brook Kerith rises out of the earth and
tumbles over the rocks.
jedaiah: And who was thy master?
jesus: I belonged to the Essenes.
jedaiah: To those that live in a cavern above the brook Kerith,
hard by Elijah's cave?
jesus: Having charge of the flock I lived on the hills, going but
seldom to the cavern where the Essenes assemble. My flock was
my single thought until ... I remember no more.
jedaiah: Brother Amos leads the flock, and him I have seen on
the hills for a couple of years.
jesus: Does he do well with the flock?
jedaiah: None too well. He has fallen in with wolves, and scab.
jesus: The tidings sorrow me, for the yoes I gave over had good
teeth, the rams speeded well, there was little scab.
jedaiah: The day that I lost my camels I had talk with him, and
he told me that he would be well pleased to give up his flock to
another, for he is doing no good with it. And it would please
Hazael, the President, to give over the flock to another, for it
wastes month by month. Being an Essene, thou canst not have
forgotten Hazael?
jesus: I have not forgotten him.
jedaiah: As we turn aside and pass the sundered rocks that mark
the shoulder of the hill, we often come into view of Hazael sit-
ting on his balcony overhanging the gorge. It is said that he sits
waiting always the coming of a brother lost to him long ago.
{Jesus turns suddenly from Jedaiah.)
jesus: Oh, my God, hide the past from me, and whatever it may
have been, let it be past. {He comes down to Esora, as if seek-
ing her help to save him from further revelation, and then like
one belated he returns to Jedaiah.) I would hear how my poor
sheep fare, poor starvelings that Brother Amos leads any whither,
no whither.
esora {to Jedaiah): Lead him away, and under the olive trees
talk to him of Kerith and the Essenes.
{Enter Joseph. Jesus and Jedaiah go up the stage. Joseph
goes to Esora.)
joseph: This letter bids me to the Praetorium. Pilate would
speak with me about the rise of the price of bread in Jerusalem,


548
THE APOSTLE
and perchance about the loss of my camels. Or he may say to
me: I gave thee a body thinking it was dead, but it was a
living man; now, where is he? He will ask me kindly, for he
trusts me, but what answer shall I make to him?
esora: There is but one answer—that Jesus is not in Jerusalem.
Joseph: Should I lie to Pilate and Zealots come here by night and
seek Jesus, he will not trust me again.
esora: I would not have thee lie to Pilate. No. Then indeed we
should perish, all of us. I would have thee tell the truth to
Pilate, that Jesus is not in Jerusalem. He must go hence at
once, and methinks that God has sent Jedaiah to take him away
from us.
joseph: Jedaiah is to be trusted, but not with this secret.
esora: He need know nothing. They babble together of sheep and
Thracian dogs, and Jesus has begun to remember the Essenes of
the brook Kerith.
{Jesus and Jedaiah come down the stage.)
joseph: Of what are ye talking together so eagerly?
jedaiah: Of flocks and pastures and the Essenes.
jesus: Joseph, I would return to my brethren.
joseph {to Jedaiah): Thou'lt return to Moab to keep watch over
the camels that remain to us, taking Jesus with thee, who would
return to his brethren.
jedaiah: If we start now we shall be at the brook before daybreak.
joseph: See that thy asses are ready.
{Exit Jedaiah.)
jesus: I shall see thee again, Joseph, at the brook Kerith. The
brethren show little favour to a truant brother, but Hazael will
plead for me.
joseph: In a week, Jesus, I shall be at the brook Kerith. My
greetings to Hazael and the brethren, for I knew them before the
Essenes divided, when all were collected in the cenoby on the
thither side of Jordan.
{Jesus takes farewell of Joseph and Esora and goes out.)
I would have ridden with Jesus to the brook Kerith, but I dare
not leave Jedaiah here to babble of one Jesus whom he met in
Joseph of Arimathea's garden. A Zealot would cry: From
Nazareth? and he would answer: No, from the brook Kerith;
and then a search would begin. Jedaiah will be safe in Moab,


GEORGE MOORE
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and I'll take care that he remains in Moab till Jesus of Naza-
reth is forgotten.
esora: Thou'st saved his life, Master, and our own lives are safe
from the moment he reaches Kerith. {Joseph and Esora stand
looking at each other for a moment.) I must be thinking now
of the lamb in my basket.
joseph: We shall sit down to meat without him, and to-morrow
will be empty of his dear presence.
esora: But in a week's time thou'lt see him, Master.
joseph: Mayhap, mayhap, if he reaches Kerith in safety, and
suspicion is diverted from me for having carried him hither
from the tomb. {The servant enters to carry away the bundle of
faggots that Jesus has collected, but Joseph repels him.) I will
carry the faggots myself. {Joseph picks up the bundle and goes
out, followed by Esora with her basket.)
Curtain
ACT I
Twenty years later. Evening. The main hall of the cenoby of
the Essenes, a rude, barn-like structure opening on to a balcony,
which is visible; doors lead from the hall to the lecture-room and
the cells. Enter Jesus with Jacob, a young shepherd. As they
advance down the cave voices are heard.
jesus: Speak in hushed voice, Jacob; Mathias is discoursing.
jacob: He is the brother who interprets the Scriptures, showing
the meaning hidden in the stories, they being certainly but para-
bles, for Adam and Eve could not have been so foolish as to hide
from God in a garden; nobody can hide from God.
jesus: But whence came this knowledge of Mathias's science,
Jacob? Who has been talking?
jacob: Saddoc, whom I met the day I came with a message to
thee from Hazael. He was sitting on the cliff's edge looking
into the gulf, muttering: Heresies! heresies! heresies!
jesus: Saddoc and Mathias are of different minds about the gar-
den of Eden, our first parents, and many other things. Mathias
is hard to understand and a great trouble to Saddoc.


55°
THE APOSTLE
jacob: And will be to thee, Master, in this cavern, for it will
breed a great longing in thee for the sky and the hills and all
that belong to these: the flock running merrily, following after
the sound of the pipe, the sunny mornings on the hillsides, and
the oak wood where we sat so often resting through the heats of
midday. And to escape, Master, the drone coming from under
yon door thou'lt be thinking of Eliab, who often soothed thee
with sweet airs on the double flute, of Bozrah, who ran his
fingers over the strings of his harp to recall thee to us from the
depths of the wood. But it was in answer, methinks, to Havi-
lah's pipe that thou wouldst come to the rugged oak; he had a
lonely ditty that fetched thee. Ah, Master, thou canst not forget,
so why leave us?
jesus: Thou'rt right, Jacob; I have lived too long on the hills to
forget them. I shall not seek to forget, and not many days will
pass without my coming to the hills to hearken to the sound of
thy pipe. Mine I make over to thee.
jacob: Thou must keep thy pipe, Master, to warn me of thy
coming, and when I hear it I shall leap to my feet as the goat
leaps at the sight of a quickening bough.
jesus: I have taught thee much of my craft.
jacob: But Hazael will put questions to me that I cannot answer.
jesus: Hazael is without wit for sheep and goats.
jacob: Hazael will say to thee: Jesus, thou must remain our
shepherd till next lambing season is over; and if he says that he
will say well.
jesus: It is not long since he said to me: Jesus, there is grey in
thy beard; how old art thou? And when I answered: Fifty-
three, his head sank on his breast and he muttered: And I heard
thee always spoken of as the boy Jesus. And now he often
speaks to me of my return from the hills.
jacob: He would like to have thee with him, but he must think
of the flock, and he will ask if the dogs will follow me.
jesus: Thema takes meat from thee and after two days' fast Gor-
botha will come, and when they have run down a wolf or a
jackal for thee, they'll know thee as their master. Take heed of
thy flock; do well the work that God has given thee to do, re-
membering always that though the distance be great from bad
pasture to good, the journey from the bad to the good will profit
thee, though the flock be weary before they attain it; but how-


GEORGE MOORE
55i
ever weary, if the grass be good they will fall to nibbling. And
now, Jacob, before we part, remember that when the lambs are
folded with the yoes thou'lt put into their jaws a stick to keep
them from sucking; and keep thine eye upon the lamb I pointed
out to thee, for he will come into a fine, broad-shouldered ram,
strong across the loins and straight on his legs, the sort to get
lambs that will do well on these hills; and thou'lt be wise to
leave him for another hundred days on his dam. Shear him, for
it will give him strength to take some wool from him, but take
it not from his back, for he'll want the wool there to protect him
from the sun. All the first year he will skip about the yoes and
jump upon them, but it will be only play, for his time is not yet
come. In two more years he will be at his height, serving ten
yoes a day; but keep him not overlong, for thou must always
have some new rams preparing, else the flock will decline. The
ram that I chose for thy lesson to-night is old and must soon be
replaced; he was a good ram in his time; but the white ram that
came at my call is the best that I have seen this many a year.
The white ram is stronger than the black, though the black yoe
will turn from him and seek a ram of her own colour. I have
known a white ram so ardent for a black yoe that he fought the
black ram till their skulls cracked.
jacob: But Master—
{The door of the lecture-room opens and Brothers Manahem
and Saddoc bear out Hazael, their President, who has fainted.
The Essenes are clad in long white garments.)
manahem {as they cross the stage to the balcony): As soon as we
get him into the air he will return to himself.
saddoc: A little water!
{Exit Jesus. He returns with water; he motions the others
aside and bathes Hazael's temples.)
hazael: The heat overcame me. But I shall soon be well, and
then I'll bid you bear me back to hear—
jesus: Thou'lt do better to rest in the air of this balcony, hearken-
ing to the brook that never wearies.
hazael: It was not the length of Mathias's discourse, nor his
eloquence, that caused my senses to swoon away, but my age,
which will not permit me to listen long. I would be with Jesus,
and I would that ye, Saddoc and Manahem, return to the lec-
ture-room at once, else our brother will think his discourse has


552
THE APOSTLE
failed. Hasten, lest ye miss any of his arguments. Jesus is here
to give the attendance I require. {The Essenes are about to raise
a protest, but at a sign from Hazael they obey.)
hazael: Who is this standing by thee, Jesus? My eyes are not
so good as they were. Not one of the brethren, for if he wore a
white robe I should see it.
jesus: Jacob: one surer of eye and fleeter of foot than I am. I
have brought him this evening to thee to receive thy commands,
for to-night I remain with you here.
hazael: So thou biddest the hills farewell to-night?
jesus: Why not to-night, since I am bringing thee a shepherd
that will serve thee as well as I have? Another may claim him
whilst winter wears, for his fame is spreading.
hazael: Jacob, thy master speaks well of thee.
jacob: He speaks too well of me, sir, overlooking my ill luck on
the hills over against Caesarea.
jesus: Whither he went in search of pasture, tidings having
reached Kerith that rain had fallen in the west.
jacob: Without dogs. Let Hazael know that my dogs were
taken the night before by panthers.
jesus: There is nothing so palatable to a panther as a dog; he
will risk his life fearlessly for one. And how many wolves were
there in the pack that trailed thee from cavern to cavern?
jacob: Ten or a dozen, and what defence would my poor dogs
have been against such a number? It was on the fourth night
that I found no cavern where I expected to find one, and lay
down in the open with my flock. . . . After the loss of the
flock I wandered, an outcast, living on the scraps which the
shepherds threw me. But they wearied of charity, and I'd be
sitting with the lepers by the wayside above Jericho if Jesus had
not given his lambs into my charge.
jesus: Jacob lost faith in himself.
jacob: I am young, said I to myself, and can wait. Jesus, who
knows more than all the other shepherds together, holds me to
be no fool. I am young and can wait, and, who knows, Jesus
may tell me his cure for the scab, and by serving him I may get
a puppy when Thema has a litter.
hazael: Jacob, it is for thee to listen rather than to speak, and
since Jesus believes that thou canst replace him, the flock from
henceforth is in thy charge. {Jesus goes up the stage with Jacob.)


GEORGE MOORE 553

jesus: Thou'lt come to fetch me in the morning and we'll go to
count the sheep together; and take heart, Jacob, for I shall
always be by in case of need.
jacob: Am I to feed the dogs, Master?
jesus: It will be better for thee to pass them by to-night without
notice and to-morrow they'll take food from thee at my bidding,
as before. {Exit Jacob.)
hazael: I gave Caleb a letter this morning for thee, charging him
to search the hills. He found thee quickly.
jesus: He met Jacob, for whom I was waiting at the source of
the brook. After reading thy letter I held my peace to Jacob,
and it was not till the last yoe was made clean for the winter
that I said to him: I have come to the end of my life on the hills.
He was frightened at the thought of leaving me before the
lambing time—
hazael: And I, too, am frightened at the thought of leaving thee
before the springtime. I shall be sorry to leave thee, Jesus, for
our lives have been twisted together, strands of the same rope.
But it must be plain to thee that I am growing weaker; month
by month, week by week, my strength is ebbing. I am going out;
but for what reason should I lament that God has not chosen to
retain me for a few months longer, since my life cannot be pro-
longed for more than a few months? My eighty and odd years
have left me with barely strength enough to sit in the doorway
looking back on the way I have come. Every day the things of
this world grow fainter, and life becomes to me an unreal thing,
and myself becomes unreal to those around me; only for thee do
I retain anything of my vanished self. So why should I remain?
For thy sake, lest thou be lonely here? Well, that is reason
enough, and I will bear the burden of life as well as I can for
thy sake. A burden it is, and for a reason that thou mayest not
divine, for thou art still a young man in my eyes, and, moreover,
hast not lived under a roof year after year listening to learned
interpretations of the Scriptures. Thou hast not guessed, nor
wilt thou ever guess, till age reveals it to thee, that as we grow
old we no longer concern ourselves to love God as we used to
love him. No one would have thought, not even thou, whose
mind is always occupied with God, and who art more conscious
of him, perhaps, than any one I have known, no one, I say, not
even thou, would have thought that as we approach death our


554
THE APOSTLE
love of God would grow weaker, but this is so. In great age
nothing seems to matter, and it is this indifference that I wish
to escape from. Thou goest forth in the morning to lead thy
flock in search of pasture, and God is nearer to us in the wilder-
ness than he is among men.
jesus: Dost thou mean that under this roof I, too, may cease to
love God?
hazael: Not cease to love God.
jesus: Thou wouldst warn me that God is only loved on the hills
under the sky.
hazael: I am too weak to choose my thoughts or words, and
many things pass out of my mind. Had I remembered I
shouldn't have spoken.
jesus: But why not speak, Father, so that I may be prepared in a
measure for what may befall me?
hazael: Life never comes twice in the same way and I know not
what may befall thee; but the sky, Jesus, will always be before
thine eyes and the green fields under thy feet, even whilst lis-
tening to Mathias.
jesus: But thou didst live once under the sky.
hazael: Not long enough. But the love of God was ardent in me
when I walked by day and night, sleeping under the stars, seek-
ing young men who could give up their lives to the love of God
and bringing them back hither into the fold of the Essenes. But,
Jesus, why this grief? Because I am going from thee? But,
dear friend, to come and go is the law of life, and it may be
that I shall be with thee longer than thou thinkest for; eighty
and odd years may be lengthened into ninety; the patriarchs
lived till a hundred and more years, and we believe that the soul
outlives the body. Out of the chrysalis we escape from our cor-
ruptible bodies, and the beautiful butterfly flutters Godward.
Grieve for me a little when I am gone, but grieve not before I
go, for I would see thy face always happy, as I remember it
those years long ago in Nazareth. Jesus, Jesus, thou shouldst
not weep like this! None should weep but for sin, and thy life
is known to me from the day in Nazareth when we sat in the
street together to the day that thou wentest to the Jordan to get
baptism from John.
jesus: But a year of my life is unknown to thee, Hazael.
hazael: We will not speak of it, nor of thy transgression of our


GEORGE MOORE
555
rules, atoned for on the hills. Since God has forgiven thee, why
should we be laggards in forgiveness? Thy voice calms the
possessed.
jesus: I pray thee, say not another word, Hazael, for none is less
worthy than I. The greatest sinner amongst us is sitting by thee,
one that has not dared to tell his secret to thee. . . . The
memory of my sin has fed upon me and grown stronger, becom-
ing a devil within me, but till now I have lacked courage to come
to thee and ask thee to cast it out; to none may I tell it but thee,
for none else would understand it.
hazael: I am listening, Jesus.
{The door of the lecture-room opens and the Essenes come
out singing:)
In the Lord put I my trust:
How say ye to my soul, Flee
As a bird to your mountain?
For, lo, the wicked bend their
Bow, they make ready their arrow
Upon the string, that they may privily
Shoot at the upright in heart.
If the foundations be destroyed, what
Can the righteous do?
For the righteous Lord loveth
Righteousness; his countenance
Doth behold the upright.
jesus: These words of the Psalmist were meant for me, and now
that the brethren are here I may not speak. But to-morrow—
hazael: There may be no to-morrow for us.
jesus: Even so, I cannot speak to-night. It is as though I were
bidden to withhold my secret till to-morrow. We know not why
we speak or why we are silent, but silence has been put upon me.
hazael: Be it so. {To the Essenes.) Our brother Jesus has given
over the charge of our flocks to a young shepherd in whom he
trusts, and Jesus sleeps under a roof to-night, the first for many
years, for, like us, he is getting older, and the rains and the blasts
of last winter have gone into his bones.
saddoc: All the cells, Father, are filled.
hazael: I know that well, Saddoc. Jesus can sleep here on these


556
THE APOSTLE
benches; a mattress and a cloak will be enough for him who has
slept in caverns or in valleys on stones piled high to keep him
above the floods. Manahem will get thee a mattress, Jesus; he
knows where to find one. {Exit Manahem.) I am strong enough
to walk alone, Saddoc. {Hazael disengages himself from Sad-
doc's arm and walks with the Essenes towards his cell, joining
them in the psalm:)
All the powers of the Lord
Bless ye the Lord; praise and
Exalt him above all for ever.
{Exit Hazael and the Essenes. Saddoc remains with Jesus.)
saddoc: The brethren are weary of hearing Mathias prove that the
Scriptures are but allegories, and for a long time have been talk-
ing of thee, saying: He'll come back with stories of the robbers
he has met and the wolves and the bears that he has escaped
from. True enough, there are some that would have thee stay
on the hills, for Jacob, not being one of us, will claim one lamb
out of every twenty. High wages, high wages! And these he
may send to the Temple for burnt offerings, the which, as thou
knowest, is forbidden by our laws. I have much more to tell,
but Manahem comes with a mattress for thee.
{Enter Manahem carrying a mattress.)
manahem: Wilt thou sleep, Jesus, within the cavern or on the
balcony under the sky?
jesus: On the balcony, dear brethren.
saddoc {helping Manahem to lay the mattress on the balcony):
On this bench he will lie comfortably under a covering, for
though the evenings are still warm, the nights are chilly. Fetch
a warm covering, Manahem. {Exit Manahem. Saddoc ap-
proaches Jesus.) Since Mathias came we have never had an easy
day with our own thoughts. What dost thou think he was saying
when we returned to the lecture-room?
jesus: I cannot guess the mind of Mathias, Saddoc.
saddoc: That there are two beings in man, one that has prudence
and the other that exerts it, and he likens these two principles to
a carbuncle and an emerald. I said to myself: Jesus shall decide
between us—
{Enter Manahem with a quilt.)


GEORGE MOORE
557
manahem: The warmest I could find, perhaps too warm.
jesus {feeling the quilt): My thanks, brethren, my thanks. {He
passes to the further end of the balcony and leans over the balus-
trade.) How still the night is, not a sound in it but the murmur
of the brook flowing down the gorge to Jordan. ... Ye
have voices of wayfarers sometimes at your door asking for
shelter and bread?
saddoc: The dangers of the path save us from wayfarers, and we
sleep from dusk to dusk.
manahem: Only once did a wayfarer attempt to follow the path
by night, and he lost his life over the cliffs in the brook. Thyself
would miss the path, shepherd though thou art.
jesus: We shall have one to-night, vagrant or prophet. Come,
Manahem, and tell me if thine eyes discern not a man in the
path yonder. He comes out of the shadow of the overhanging
rock.
manahem: I see none.
jesus: Look again, Manahem.
saddoc: Our shepherd's eyes are better than ours. A man is on the
path, trying to follow it; but if he be a man of flesh and blood
like ourselves, he will topple.
manahem: He has not yet gone over into the brook, but keeps
the path as if he knew it. He is maybe one of our dissident
brothers come up from Jordan.
saddoc: Now he is crossing the bridge, and now he begins the
ascent. Let us pray that he may miss the path through the
terraces.
jesus: But thou wouldst not have him miss it, Saddoc? He shall
have my mattress.
saddoc: If not an evil spirit, of a certainty he is coming to ask for
shelter for the night; and if not a demon, he may be a prophet
or a robber; for once more the hills are filled with robbers.
jesus: Or it may be the preacher of whom Jacob spoke to me this
evening; he came up from Jordan with a story of a preacher that
the multitude would not listen to and sought to drown in the
river; and he told me how the rabble had followed the man over
the hills with the intent to kill him.
manahem: Some great and terrible heresy he must be preaching
to stir them like that. Did Jacob bring news of his escape or
death?


558
THE APOSTLE
jesus: Jacob thought the prophet escaped into a cave, for he saw
the crowd dispersing, going home like dogs from a hunt when
they have lost their quarry.
saddoc: A robber is at our door, for sure. He escaped the crowd
and has been lying in hiding in a cave. Only a robber who knew
the hills could have kept the path. . . . Now he sees us.
He is no shepherd, but a robber. (They wait a few moments, and
the knocking they expect comes at the door.) Open not the door.
Jesus! They are Sicarii who kill men in the daytime, mingling
themselves among the multitude with daggers hidden in their
garments, their mission being to stab those that disobey the law
in any fraction. We're Essenes, and may not send blood offer-
ings to the Temple. Open not the door. Sicarii or Zealots travel
in search of heretics through the cities of Samaria and Judea.
Open not the door! Men are for ever fooled, and will never
cease to open their doors to those who stand in need of meat and
drink. It will be safer, Jesus, to bid him away. Tell him rather
that we'll let down a basket of meat and drink from the balcony
to him.
jesus: Art thou, Manahem, for turning this man from the door or
letting him in?
manahem: There is no need to be frightened; he is but a wan-
derer, Saddoc.
saddoc: A wanderer he cannot be, for he has followed the path
through the darkness, a thing we could not do. Open not the
door, I tell thee, or else we all hang on crosses above the hills to-
morrow. {He goes to the door and listens.)
manahem: But, Saddoc, by our law we may not refuse bed and
board to the poor.
jesus: If we do not open, he will leave our door, and that will be
a greater misfortune than any that he may bring us. Hearken,
Saddoc!
saddoc {to Manahem): He speaks fair enough; but we may plead
that after sunset in the times we live in—
jesus: But, Manahem, art thou with me or with Saddoc? We
know that there is but one man, and we are more than a match
for one. Put a sword in Saddoc's hand.
saddoc: No, Manahem! for I should feel like a fool with a sword
in my hand. Since thou sayest there is but one man and we are
three, it might be unlucky to turn him from our doors.


GEORGE MOORE
559
jesus: May I then open to him?
{Jesus unbars the door and Paul staggers in, bald-headed, his
turban having fallen in his flight. He is a powerful man of
medium height, "with broad shoulders, piercing black eyes,
shaggy eyebrows, and a hooked nose; a black beard covers the
lower part of his face. He stands like a hunted animal, breath-
ing hard, looking from one to the other.)
paul: May I rest a little while? If so, give me a drink before I
sleep. No food, but drink. Why do ye not answer? Do ye fear
me, mistaking me for a robber? Or have I wandered among rob-
bers? Where am I? {To Jesus.) Hearken! I am but a way-
farer, and thou'rt a shepherd of the hills, I know thee by thy
garb; thou'lt not refuse me shelter.
jesus {to Saddoc and Manahem): He shall have the mattress I
was to sleep upon. {To Paul.) Thou shalt have food and a
coverlet.
paul: No food, but a drink of water.
saddoc: There is some yoes' milk on the shelf, Manahem.
{Manahem fetches the milk, which Paul drinks greedily.)
jesus: Thou must be footsore. I'll get thee a linen garment so
that thou mayest sleep more comfortable; sleep will come easier
in a fresh garment, and I'll bathe thy feet before sleep.
{Exit Jesus.)
paul: But to whose dwelling have I come? A shepherd told me
the Essenes lived among the rocks. Am I among them? He told
me to keep close to the cliff's edge or I should topple over.
manahem: We watched thee.
saddoc {whispering to Manahem): It will be well to ask him his
name and whence he comes.
manahem {to Paul): The shepherd told thee that we were
Essenes, and it remains for thee to tell us whom we entertain.
paul: I am Paul of Tarsus, a prisoner of the Romans—
saddoc: A prisoner of the Romans! Then indeed we are lost; a
prisoner of the Romans with soldiers perhaps at thy heels! A
prisoner fled from Roman justice may not lodge here. . . .
Let us put him beyond our doors. Manahem, aid me.
{Saddoc tries to drag Paul to his feet. Jesus enters with a
basin of water and a garment.)
jesus: Have a care, Saddoc, and give thy thought to our law that
no traveller shall be turned away from our doors.


560
THE APOSTLE
saddoc: But he tells us he is a prisoner of the Romans!
jesus: Even so we cannot turn him away to fall into the gorge.
saddoc: He kept to the path once; why should he not keep to it
again?
paul {to Jesus): These men have small understanding. I am not
a criminal fleeing from the Romans, but a Roman citizen escaped
from Jewish persecution.
saddoc: Why then didst thou say that thou'rt a prisoner of the
Romans?
paul: I am a prisoner of the Romans to escape the Jews of
Jerusalem—but of all this I will tell you to-morrow, and do you
tell me now of him who followed me along the cliff.
jesus: We saw no one following thee; thou wast alone.
paul: He may have missed me before I turned down the path
coming from Jericho. I speak of Timothy, my beloved son in the
faith.
saddoc {whispering to Manahem): What strange man is this that
we entertain for the night?
paul: The Jews will never set free any disciple of mine. Should
Timothy have fallen into their hands he is lost to us for ever.
jesus: We know not of what thou'rt speaking.
paul {rising): I must make search for Timothy.
jesus: The moon is setting, and there is no strength in thy legs to
keep to the path. Thy friend is on his way to Caesarea, and in
the darkness of the hills—
paul: I should seek him in vain.
{Jesus unties Paul's sandals and bathes his feet.)
We came from Caesarea to Jericho and by leave of the noble
Festus, to whom we must return quickly, for he sends us to Rome
in four days from now.
saddoc: Thou hast nothing to fear from us. We would not keep
thee over thy time, but would hear willingly on what errand ye
came hither.
paul: We came to preach the Lord Jesus who was raised from the
dead, but the people would not listen.
manahem: Why would they not listen? 'Tis not every day one
hears tales like that.
paul: And, stirred up by the Jews, they sought to capture us, but
we escaped into the hills and hid in a cave to which the spirit of
the Lord directed us.


GEORGE MOORE
56i
manahem {whispering to Saddoc): Hark! an angel pointed out a
cave to him!
saddoc: Then he must be a good man; but we know not if he
speaks the truth. We have had too many prophets; he is another
of the same tribe, setting men by the ears. {Jesus relieves Paul
of his garment and passes a white robe over his shoulders.)
jesus: Thou'lt sleep easier in it.
paul: They would have done well to hearken to me, for have I
not testified in many synagogues to the truth of the vision on the
road to Damascus, witnessed by many, and the need of re-
pentance and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, and founded
churches in a hundred cities. {Consciousness passes from Paul.
He falls asleep in the arms of Jesus and Saddoc.)
saddoc: Of what is he telling us?
jesus: He has fallen asleep. Help me to lift him on to the bed
on the balcony.
{Jesus and Saddoc carry Paul to the balcony and lay him on
one of the wide benches. They cover him with the quilt. Jesus
lies down beside him. Saddoc returns to Manahem.)
manahem: He speaks of the Lord Jesus as if all the world knew
him.
saddoc: And all the world should know him if he were raised from
the dead. {They move a little nearer to Paul and Jesus.) One
would hardly know him from stone.
manahem: He'll sleep long after we are about, and Mathias will
grimace and sneer, and scorn us, for we shall not be able to
answer the hard questions that he'll put to us.
saddoc: He has a grudge against me, and I will not abide his ques-
tions. But it would be shameful to awaken our guest: and if we
did, he is too weary to answer me. {They go up the stage.)
manahem: Jesus, too, is asleep. We must leave them. But why
did he speak of the Gentiles?
saddoc: Has it not been said that all the world will be united
under one God—Iaveh?
manahem: Mathias will explain.
saddoc: Mathias! Mathias! Mathias! {Exit Manahem and
Saddoc.)
Curtain
To be concluded


POEM
BY WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast—cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen
patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees
All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines—
Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches—
They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind—
Now the grass, to-morrow
the stiff curl of wild-carrot leaf
One by one objects are defined—
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf
But now the stark dignity of
entrance—Still, the profound change
has come upon them; rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken



A DRAWING. BY EDWARD NAGLE











THE HERETIC OF SOANA
BY GERHART HAUPTMANN
Translated from the German by Bayard Quincy Morgan
III
THE descent to Soana brought to Francesco a meditative disen-
chantment, as to one who has drunk the final dregs from the
cup of intoxication. The Scarabota family had gone away after the
mass: brother, sister, and daughter had gratefully kissed the young
priest's hand in parting.
Now, as he descended farther and farther into the depths, he
likewise grew more and more suspicious of the state of mind in
which he had celebrated the mass up yonder. The peak of St
Agatha too had surely been in former times a place of pagan wor-
ship; and what had taken hold of him up there, seemingly with the
rushing sound of the Holy Ghost, was perhaps the demoniacal
work of that dethroned theocracy which Jesus Christ had deposed,
but whose pernicious power was still tolerated by the creator and
ruler of the world. Arriving at Soana and his parsonage, the priest
had been wholly possessed by the consciousness of having commit-
ted a grievous sin; and his anxieties on this account became so
severe that even before his noon meal he entered the church, which
stood wall to wall with his dwelling, in order to commit himself in
ardent prayers to the highest Mediator, and perhaps be cleansed by
His grace. In a feeling of pure helplessness he begged God not to
deliver him over to the assaults of the demons.
Francesco's prayers had no longer their former clearness and
conciseness. He prayed for things which were mutually exclusive.
At times he himself fell into doubt as to whether the stream of
passion which carried his prayers derived from Heaven or from
some other source. That is, he did not exactly know whether he
was not actually beseeching Heaven for a hellish benefit. The fact
that he included the two Scarabotas in his prayer might have its
source in Christian compassion and his pastoral responsibility,


564
THE HERETIC OF SOANA
but was it just the same thing when he prayed to Heaven, with a
fervour that brought scalding tears, for the deliverance of Agata?
At present he could give an affirmative answer to this question;
for the clear stirring of his most powerful instinct, which he had
felt on seeing the girl again, had passed over into a dreamy enthu-
siasm for something infinitely pure. This transformation was the
reason why Francesco did not perceive that that fruit of a mortal
sin was coming to take the place of Mary, the Mother of God, and
was becoming for his prayers and thoughts, one might say, the in-
carnation of the Madonna. On the first of May there began in the
church of Soana, as everywhere, a special worship of Mary, whose
observance put to sleep still more notably the watchfulness of the
young priest. Always, day in, day out, at about the time of the
evening twilight, he delivered a little discourse, principally to the
women and daughters of Soana, which had for its subject the vir-
tues of the Blessed Virgin. Before and afterward the nave of the
church resounded with songs of praise in the honour of Mary,
which rang out through the open door into the springtime. And
with the delicious old airs, so beautiful in both text and music,
there mingled from without the cheerful chirping of sparrows, and
from the near-by, humid gorges the sweetest plaint of the nightin-
gale. At such moments Francesco, while apparently serving Mary,
was wholly given over to the service of his idol.
Had the mothers and daughters of Soana dreamed that in the
eyes of the priest they formed a congregation which he was inviting
to the church day after day to the glorification of that hated child
of sin, or in order to have himself wafted on the devout strains of
the songs of Mary-worship up to the tiny pasture clinging far and
high up on the crags, he would surely have been stoned; but as it
was, it seemed as if the young pastor's piety increased with each
day before the wondering eyes of the entire parish. Little by little,
old and young, rich and poor, in short everybody from sindaco to
beggar, from the most faithful to the most indifferent churchgoer,
was drawn into the sacred May-madness of Francesco Vela.
Even the long solitary walks which he now frequently took were
construed in the young saint's favour. And yet they were only
undertaken in the hope that on such an occasion chance might lead
Agata across his path. For fearing to betray himself, he had set a
week's interval before the next special service for the Scarabota
family; and this now seemed unbearable to him.


GERHART HAUPTMANN
565
Nature was still speaking to him in that unconcealed manner
which he had first become aware of on the road to St Agatha, on the
height of the little sanctuary. Every grass-blade, every flower,
every tree, every vine and ivy-leaf were merely single words of a
speech which issued forth from the primeval source of all being,
and which even in the deepest silence spoke with a titanic roar.
Never had any music so permeated his entire being, and, as he
thought, so filled it with the Holy Ghost.
The day of the divine service for the poor outlawed mountain-
herders had finally arrived again. Even in the morning, when
Francesco got up, it resembled no other among all those he had
ever experienced. Thus in the life of every privileged man, days
spring up unexpected and unbidden, like a blinding revelation. On
this morning the youth had no desire to be either a saint or an
archangel or even a god. Nay, he was rather seized with a faint
fear that saints, archangels, and gods might be made his foes by
envy: for on this morning he felt himself exalted above saints,
angels, and gods. But on the summit of St Agatha a disappoint-
ment was awaiting him. His idol that bore the name of the saint
had not come to the church with the others. When questioned by
the blanching priest, the rude animal father only produced rude
animal sounds; whereas his wife, who was at the same time his
sister, excused her daughter on the grounds of household work.
Hereupon the holy office was performed by Francesco in so listless
a manner that at the end of the mass he hardly knew whether it
had already begun. Inwardly he experienced the torments of Hell;
indeed such states of mind as, comparable to a real fall from
Heaven to Hell, made of him a poor damned soul.
After he had dismissed at once both the ministrants and the two
Scarabotas, he descended at random one side of the steep peak,
still utterly disconcerted, without being conscious of any goal, still
less of any danger. Again he heard the cries of nuptially circling
ospreys. But they sounded to him like mockery poured out upon
him from the deceptively gleaming ether. In the rubble of a dry
water-course he slipped, panting and leaping, while he whimpered
confused prayers and curses. He felt torments of jealousy. Al-
though nothing had happened save that the sinner Agata had been
detained by something or other on the alp of Soana, it seemed a
settled thing to the priest that she had a lover, and was spending
the time stolen from church in his villainous arms. While her ab-


566
THE HERETIC OF SOANA
sence brought home to his consciousness all of a sudden the immen-
sity of his dependence, he felt by turns fear, consternation, and
rage, the impulse to punish her and to beg her for deliverance from
his distress—that is, for the return of his love.
With torn and dusty cassock, flayed hands, and scratched face,
Francesco arrived after some hours of wild and aimless clambering
up and down gorges, through thickets of broom, across rushing
mountain-waters, at a part of Generoso where herd-bells greeted his
ear. He was not in doubt for a moment as to the place he had thus
reached. He looked down upon abandoned Soana, upon his church,
which was clearly to be seen in the bright sun, and recognized the
throng that was now streaming in vain toward the sanctuary.
Something like a restoration of consciousness was just about to
come over the young pastor, when a fragrant smoke, carried by the
fresh mountain air, ascended into his nostrils. Involuntarily look-
ing about him with searching glance, he beheld not very far from
him the seated figure of a man who seemed to be tending a little
fire, beside which a tin vessel, probably filled with minestra was
steaming. The seated person did not see the priest, for he had his
back turned to him.
Francesco's heart beat violently. It was not because he had
climbed so furiously up and down the gorges, but for reasons which
derived partly from the strangeness of his situation, partly from
the peculiar impression which the proximity of the man by the
fire produced on him. This brown neck, this curly, yellowish-white
hair, the youthfully vigorous physique which one divined beneath
the shabby covering, the noticeably free and self-sufficient be-
haviour of the mountaineer—all this had an immediate deeper
meaning to Francesco: his vague morbid jealousy flared up still
more torturingly than before.
Francesco walked up to the fire. He could not have hidden suc-
cessfully anyway; and he was attracted moreover by irresistible
forces. The mountaineer turned around, revealing a strong youth-
ful face the like of which the priest had never seen before. Spring-
ing up, he stared at Francesco as he approached.
Since the object he was carving was a sling, it was now clear
to Francesco that he had to do with a young herdsman. He was
tending the brown-and-black spotted cattle which were visible here
and there, but for the most part were far off and hidden, climbing
about among boulders and brush, and betrayed only by the tinkle


GERHART HAUPTMANN
567
of the bells which the bull and some of the cows wore on their
necks. He was a Christian: and what else should he have been
among all the mountain-chapels and the images of the Madonna in
this region? But he also seemed to be a very particularly devoted
son of the Holy Church; for, recognizing the garb of the priest at
once, he kissed Francesco's hand with timid fervour and humility.
To begin a conversation with this child of nature involved con-
siderable difficulties. To be alone with the man of the church
seemed to embarrass him. Resting on his knees, he would blow
into the fire for a time. Then he would throw on twigs, and lift
the lid of the kettle, speaking occasionally in an incomprehensible
dialect. Then suddenly he uttered a mighty shout, which echoed
and re-echoed from the rock-bastions of Generoso.
Scarcely had this echo died away when something was heard
approaching with loud shrieks and laughter. There were various
voices, the voices of children, among which the voice of a woman
could be distinguished, alternately laughing and calling for help.
At the sound of this voice Francesco felt his arms and feet grow
numb; and at the same time it seemed to him as if a power were
making itself known, which, like the one that had caused his birth,
contained the true and veritable secret of life. Francesco was flam-
ing like the burning bush of the Lord, but outwardly he gave no
sign. He felt an unfamiliar freedom and at the same time a cap-
tivity as sweet as it was hopeless.
In the meantime the laughter-choked cries for help had been
coming nearer, until at the turn of a precipitous path a bucolic pic-
ture became visible. Snorting and rebellious, the same spotted goat
that had pestered the priest Francesco on his first visit to the moun-
tain pasture was leading a little bacchantic procession, and, pur-
sued by shouting children, was bearing astride his back the only
bacchante of the troop, a beautiful girl whom Francesco thought
he was seeing for the first time. She had fast hold of the twisted
horns of the goat, but however strongly she leaned backwards,
drawing the neck of the animal with her, she was still unable either
to force it to stand still or to slide off its back. Some bit of fun,
which she might perhaps have undertaken to please the children,
had got the girl into this helpless situation; she was not really sit-
ting, but touched the ground with her bare feet on either side, and
yet could not get free of the unruly, fiery buck without taking a
fall. Her hair had come down, and the straps of her coarse shirt


568 THE HERETIC OF SOANA
had slipped from her shoulders so that one breast was visible; and
the short skirts of the shepherdess, which at all times hardly reached
to her calf, were now less than adequate to cover her rounded knees.
It took some little time before the priest became aware who the
bacchante really was. The shrieks of the girl, her laughter, her
involuntarily wild gestures, her loosened and flying hair, the open
mouth, the spasmodically heaving and panting breast, had
changed her appearance entirely. A rosy glow overspread her face;
pleasure and fear were mingled with a bashfulness which found
droll and pretty expression when one of her hands would dart like
a flash from the horn of her mount to the dangerously disarranged
hem of her dress.
Francesco was held spellbound by the picture. It seemed to him
beautiful in a way which did not suggest the remotest resemblance
to a witches' ride. On the other hand, his impressions of the an-
cients were revived. He thought of the marble sarcophagus which
stood on the village square of Soana, continually pouring out clear
mountain-water; he recalled how he had recently studied the sculp-
ture on this. Was it not as if that living marble world of the
wreath-crowned wine-god, the dancing satyrs, the panther-drawn
triumphal chariot, the female flutists and bacchantes, had hidden
itself in the stony wastes of Generoso, and as if suddenly one of
the god-inspired women, cut off from the frenzied mountain-wor-
ship of the maenads, had surprised them by appearing in present-
day life?
If Francesco had not recognized Agata at once, the goat had
immediately recognized the priest: he dragged his vainly shrieking
and resisting burden straight up to him, and by setting his two
cleft fore-hoofs without any ceremony in the lap of the priest he
brought about the final release of his rider. She slid slowly down
from his back.
After the girl had realized that a stranger was present, and when
she actually recognized this stranger as Francesco, her laughter and
her gaiety came to a very sudden end; and her face, which had
till that moment been beaming with pleasure, took on a half-defiant
pallor.
"Why did you not come to church to-day?" Francesco asked
this question, rising to his feet, in a tone and with an expression on
his pale face which one must have interpreted as anger, although it


GERHART HAUPTMANN
569
had for its cause a very different commotion in his soul. Either
because he wished to conceal this agitation, or out of embarrass-
ment, even helplessness, or because the shepherd of souls in him
really burst into indignation, his anger increased and was displayed
in a manner that made the herder look up in disapproval, but that
sent the alternate flush and pallor of consternation and shame into
the face of the girl.
Every one of his angry words taught Francesco that he was no
longer master of himself, but was being forced to seek and to exer-
cise power over Agata at any price. He took possession of her with
words. The more he humiliated her, the more loudly resounded
within him the harps of bliss. Every pain which his censure in-
flicted on her aroused a delirium in him: a little more—if only the
herder had not been present—and Francesco would have lost in
such delirium the last vestige of his self-control, and falling at the
girl's feet would have betrayed the true beating of his heart.
Agata had preserved, although she had grown up in that ill-
famed home, the innocent mind of a flower. Her blue eyes that
resembled the mountain-gentian had never been seen in the valley
or down by the lake, any more than the gentian itself. The circle of
her experience was limited in the extreme. Yet although the priest
was for her not really a man at all, but rather a thing between
God and man, a kind of strange sorcerer, yet she suddenly divined,
and manifested it by an astonished look, what Francesco wished
to conceal.
The children had led the billy-goat up over rubble and away.
The woodcutter had not felt comfortable in the presence of the
priest. He took his pot from the fire and climbed with it very
laboriously up to a comrade who was lowering bundles of brush-
wood on an interminable wire over a precipice into the depths
below. At intervals such a dark bundle would crawl with a scrap-
ing sound along the rocky bastions, looking much like a brown bear
or the shadow of a giant bird. Moreover, it seemed to fly, as the
wire was not visible. Finally the herdsman had disappeared from
sight with a yodel of such great power that it re-echoed from the
battlements and bastions of Monte Generoso; Agata, as if crushed
with penitence, kissed the hem of the priest's garment and then his
hand.
Francesco had mechanically made the sign of the cross over the


570 THE HERETIC OF SOANA
girl's head, so that his fingers had touched her hair. But now a
convulsive trembling went through his arm, as if one element were
trying with its utmost strength to keep another element in its
power. But the straining, resisting element could not prevent the
hand from opening slowly after making the sign of the cross; the
palm was brought nearer and nearer to the head of the penitent
sinner, and suddenly rested firmly and fully against it.
Francesco cast a cowardly glance about him. He was far from
wishing to lie to himself at this stage of affairs, or to use the duties
of his holy office to justify him. Yet he was speaking all sorts of
words about confession and confirmation. And in his very nearly
uncontrolled, straining passion, he feared so greatly the possibility
of arousing horror and detestation in case of discovery, that he
once more took cowardly refuge behind the mask of the ministry.
"You will come down to my school in Soana, Agata," he said.
"There you will learn to read and write. I will teach you a morn-
ing and an evening prayer, also God's commandments, and how you
can recognize and avoid the seven cardinal sins. Then you will
confess to me every week."
But Francesco, who had torn himself free after these words, and
had gone down the mountain without looking around, resolved the
next morning, after a painfully wakeful night, to go to confession
himself. When he revealed, not without disingenuousness, his
qualms of conscience to a snuff-taking arch-priest of the neighbour-
ing mountain town, Arogno by name, he was most readily absolved.
It was obvious that the Devil was opposing the attempt of the
young priest to lead straying souls back into the bosom of the
church; especially since for a man, woman was always the most
immediate occasion for sinning. Francesco had then breakfasted
with the arciprete in the parsonage, and many a frank word had
been uttered concerning the frequent conflict between secular and
churchly interests. Then, while the open window let in soft
breezes, sunlight, and birdsongs, Francesco yielded to the delusion
that he was carrying away an unburdened heart.
But Francesco had scarcely said farewell to his father-confessor,
he had scarcely stridden vigorously away around a turn in the road
and put sufficient hilly country, with tree and thicket, between
himself and the other . . . and he was already feeling an
inexplicable repugnance to the consolation of his colleague and to
the entire time that he had spent with him.


GERHART HAUPTMANN
57i
That dirty peasant, whose worn cassock and sweaty underwear
disseminated a repulsive odour, whose scurvy head and rude hands,
covered with ingrained dirt, proved that soap was an alien thing
to him, now seemed to be rather an animal, or an imbecile, than a
priest of God. The church teaches that the clergy are consecrated
persons, he told himself, who have been endowed through the tak-
ing of vows with supernatural dignity and power, so that even
angels bow down before them. This man could only be designated
as a travesty on all that. What a disgrace to see the priestly su-
premacy laid into such clownish hands! since even God is actually
subject to such supremacy, and is irresistibly forced by the words
"hoc est enim meum corpus" to descend upon the altar in the Mass.
The day had come on which Francesco was expecting in his par-
sonage for the first time the sinner from the alp of Soana.
Shortly before the peal of the noon bell a murmur of voices arose
on the village square, which had till now lain quietly in the sun-
light, its chestnut-tops covered with the shoots of Maytime. A
crowd of people was approaching. One heard the sound of calmer
male voices which seemed to be protesting. But an irresistible
stream of women's words, cries, curses, and protests all at once far
out-swelled them. Then an ominous stillness followed. Suddenly
there came to the ear of the priest dull sounds, the cause of which
was incomprehensible for the first moment. It was Maytime, and
yet it sounded as when in the fall a chestnut-tree, feeling the force
of a gust of wind, shakes down tons of fruit at a time. The hard
chestnuts burst like drum-beats as they fall on the ground.
Francesco leaned out of the window.
He saw with horror what was taking place on the piazza. He
was so frightened, indeed so filled with consternation, that he was
first brought to his senses by the shrill, piercing peal of the con-
fessional bell, which was being pulled at with desperate persistence.
And already he had run into the church and out in front of the
door, and had snatched the confessant—it was Agata—away from
the bell-pull and into the church. Then he stepped out before the
portal.
So much was clear: the entrance of the outlawed girl into the
village had been noticed, and the people had done what they
usually did in that case. They had tried to drive her away from
the haunts of men with stones, as one would have done with any


572
THE HERETIC OF SOANA
mangy cur or a wolf. Soon children and mothers of children had
assembled and chased the ostracized, curse-laden being, undisturbed
by the beautiful girlish figure; they felt that their stones were
aimed at a dangerous animal, a monster that was spreading pesti-
lence and destruction. At the same time Agata, certain of die
priest's protection, had not let herself be swerved from her pur-
pose. So the resolute girl, pursued and hunted, had arrived before
the door of the church, which was even now struck by some stones
thrown by childish hands.
The priest had no need of reproving words to bring his excited
parishioners to their senses: they scattered and fled as soon as they
saw him.
In the church Francesco had motioned to the panting, silent
fugitive to follow him into the parsonage. He too was excited, and
so the two heard each other breathing fitfully. The housekeeper
was standing upon a narrow little staircase of the parsonage, be-
tween whitewashed walls; she was horrified, but already somewhat
reassured, and was ready to receive the hunted creature. One could
see that she was willing to help in any way that might be needed.
When she saw the old woman Agata seemed for the first time to
become aware of the humiliating character of her present state.
Going from laughter to anger and back from anger to laughter, she
uttered violent imprecations; this gave the priest his first opportu-
nity to hear her voice, which seemed to him to ring out full, sono-
rous, and heroic. She did not know why she was persecuted. She
regarded the little town of Soana about as she would a nest of
mud-wasps or an ant-hill. Furious and indignant as she was, it did
not enter her mind to reflect upon the cause of such dangerous
malignance; for after all she had been familiar with this condition
from childhood, and took it for a natural one. But one fights off
wasps and ants, too. Though it be animals that attack us, we are
brought by them to hatred, to fury, to despair, as the case may be,
and unburden our hearts, again as the case may be, by threats,
tears, or by evidences of the deepest contempt. Agata did the same,
and while the housekeeper was twitching her miserable rags into
place, she herself was putting up the astonishing profusion of her
rust or ochre-coloured hair, which had come down during her
swift run.
At this moment young Francesco suffered as never before under
the strain of his passion. The nearness of the woman who had


GERHART HAUPTMANN
573
ripened to maturity in the mountains like a delicious wild fruit, the
intoxicating glow which radiated from her heated body, the cir-
cumstance that the confines of his own dwelling now embraced the
hitherto distant and unattainable girl—all this brought him to
such a pass that he had to clench his fists and set his teeth, merely
to bear up under a condition that at moments would completely
darken his brain. When it lightened, there was a monstrous
tumult of pictures, thoughts, and feelings in him: landscapes,
people, remotest recollections, vivid moments in the past of his
family and his profession, united with images of the present. Flee-
ing from these, as it were, an inescapable future rose up sweet and
terrible, to which he knew he was completely subject. Thoughts
quivered across this picture-chaos of the soul, innumerable, restless,
but powerless. The conscious will, Francesco realized, was de-
throned in his soul, and another was reigning which was not to be
resisted. With a shudder the youth confessed to himself that he
had unconditionally surrendered to it.
Francesco did not know at first what to do. He felt an admoni-
tion now to get away from the girl. All sorts of reasons, not all
equally pure, moved him to seek out the Sindaco at once and to
acquaint him with the incident before others could do so. The
Sindaco listened to him quietly—Francesco had fortunately found
him at home—and took the priest's point of view in the matter.
It was but Christian and the part of a good Catholic not simply to
overlook the deplorable conditions on the Alp, but to take an in-
terest in the ill-famed tribe, ensnared in sin and shame. But as to
the villagers and their conduct, he promised to take stern measures
against them.
When the young priest had gone, the pretty wife of the Sindaco,
who had a quiet, silent way of observing things, said:
"This young priest might easily get to be a cardinal, yes even
Pope. I think he wears himself out with fasting, prayers, and
night-watches. But it is the saints most of all whom the Devil is
always pursuing with his hellish arts and with the most deceptive
tricks and scheming. May the young man, with God's aid, ever
be preserved from them."
Many desirous and many malignant feminine eyes followed
Francesco as he walked back to the parsonage at a pace as little ac-
celerated as possible. They knew where he had been, and were re-
solved to use every effort to keep this pestilence of Soana from being


574
THE HERETIC OF SOANA
forced upon them. Girls walking along erect with loads of wood on
their heads had met him on the square near the marble sarcophagus,
and had, to be sure, saluted him with submissive smiles; but subse-
quently they looked contemptuously at each other. Francesco strode
along as in a fever. He heard the confused warbling of the birds,
the swelling and diminishing roar of the eternal waterfall: but it
seemed to him as if he did not have his feet on the ground, but were
being dragged forward without a rudder into a maelstrom of sounds
and images. Suddenly he found himself in the sacristy of his church,
then in the nave before the high altar, as he prayed to the Virgin
Mary on his knees for help in the tempest of his soul.
But his prayers were not meant to have the effect of freeing him
from Agata. Such a wish would have found no nourishment in his
heart. They were rather a plea for mercy. The Mother of God
should understand, forgive, perhaps approve. Abruptly Francesco
interrupted his prayer and tore himself away from the altar as the
thought happened to flit into his consciousness that Agata might
have gone away. However, he found the girl still there, and
Petronilla was keeping her company.
"I have settled everything," said Francesco. "The road to the
church and the priest is free to all. Trust in me. What happened
to-day will not be repeated." He became resolute and assured, as if
he were once more standing on the right path and on good ground.
Petronilla was sent to the neighbouring parsonage with an impor-
tant church document. Unfortunately the errand could not be post-
poned. And incidentally, the housekeeper might inform the priest
of this incident. "If you meet anybody, then tell them," he also
said with emphasis, "that Agata has come from the high Alp and
is here with me in the parsonage, being instructed by me in the
doctrines of our religion, our hallowed faith. Just let them come
and prevent it, and draw down upon their heads the punishment of
eternal damnation. Just let them cause an uprising before the
church to maltreat their fellow-Christian. The stones will not
strike her, but me. I shall escort her myself as soon as it grows dark,
all the way up to the Alp, if necessary."
When the housekeeper had gone, a lengthy silence ensued. The
girl had laid her hands in her lap and was still sitting on the same
rickety chair which Petronilla had moved for her up against the
whitewashed wall. There was still a quiver in Agata's eyes, and the


GERHART HAUPTMANN
575
injury she had suffered was reflected in flashes of indignation and
suppressed rage; but her full-cheeked Madonna-like face had more
and more taken on an expression of helplessness, until at last a
silent, copious stream bathed her cheeks. Meanwhile Francesco had
been looking out of the open window with his back to her. As he let
his eyes rove over the gigantic mountain-walls of the valley of
Soana, from the calamitous Alp down to the lake-shore; with the
eternal murmur of the waterfall the singing of a single melting
boyish voice came to him from the luxuriant vine-clad terraces; he
hardly dared to think that he now really had in his hands the ful-
filment of his desires. Would Agata still be present when he
turned around? And if she were present, what would happen when
he turned? Must not this turning be decisive for his entire earthly
existence, yes and even beyond it? These questions and doubts led
the priest to keep the position he had taken as long as possible, in
order to judge or at least take counsel once more before the decision
was made. It was a matter of seconds, not of minutes: yet in these
seconds not only the entire history of his entanglement, from the
first visit of Luchino Scarabota on, but his entire conscious life, be-
came immediately present to him. In these seconds a whole tre-
mendous vision of the Last Judgement, with Father, Son, and Holy
Ghost in the sky, spread out above the topmost ridge of Generoso
and terrified with the blare of trumpets. One foot upon Generoso,
the other upon a summit across the lake, the scale in his left hand,
the naked sword in his right, the Archangel Michael stood terrible
and threatening, while the abominable Satan had descended with
horns and claws behind the alp of Soana. But wherever the glance
of the young priest strayed, there, wringing her hands, stood a
black-robed, black-veiled woman, who was no other than his de-
spairing mother.
Francesco shut his eyes and then pressed his two hands against
his temples. Then as he slowly turned around he looked for a long
time with an expression of horror at the tear-bathed girl, whose
purple lips were quivering with pain. Agata was startled. His face
was distorted, as if the finger of death had touched it. Speechless,
he staggered over to her. And with a rattling sound in his throat,
like a man conquered by some inevitable force, with a wild, life-
hungry moaning and groaning for mercy, he collapsed upon his
knees before her, wringing his hands.
Francesco would perhaps not have succumbed to his passion in


576
THE HERETIC OF SOANA
such a degree for a long time, if the villagers' crime against Agata
had not mingled with it a nameless, burning, humane compassion.
He realized what this creature, endowed by God with the beauty
of Aphrodite, must look forward to without a protector. He had
been made her protector by circumstance, had perhaps saved her
from being stoned to death. He had thereby gained a certain per-
sonal claim to her—a thought which was not clear to him, but
which influenced his actions: operating unconsciously, it cleared
away all sorts of inhibitions. And he saw no possibility of ever
again withdrawing his hand from the outcast. He would stand by
her side, even if the world and God stood on the other. Such reflec-
tions, such emotional currents were unexpectedly united with the
stream of passion, and so the latter overflowed its banks.
For the moment, however, his behaviour was not a betrayal of
the right, the consequence of a resolve to sin: it was only a state
of weakness, of helplessness. Why he did what he was doing he
could not have told. In truth he was really doing nothing. Only
something was happening to him. And Agata, who really should
have been frightened now, was not frightened, but seemed to have
forgotten that Francesco was a stranger to her and a priest. He
seemed all at once to have become her brother. And while her
weeping increased to sobbing, she not only permitted him, now
likewise shaken by dry sobs, to embrace her as if to comfort her,
but she lowered her tear-streaming face and hid it on his breast.
Now she had become a child and he her father, by virtue of his
seeking to comfort her in her sorrow. But he had never felt the
body of a woman so close to him, and his caresses and his tender-
ness were soon more than fatherly. To be sure, he felt clearly that
there was something like a confession in the girl's sobbing and
misery. He realized that she knew to what a hateful love she owed
her existence, and was weeping over it with him in equal sorrow.
He was bearing her distress, her pain with her. Thus their souls
were united. But he soon lifted her sweet Madonna-face to his own,
clasping her around the neck and drawing her to him, and when
he had long feasted greedily on what he held imprisoned, with the
fire of madness in his eye he suddenly dropped like a hawk upon
her hot, tear-salted mouth and remained indissolubly fused with it.
—After a few moments of earthly time, but eternities of ecstasy,
Francesco suddenly tore himself away and stood firmly on both
feet, with the taste of blood on his lips. "Come," he said, "you


GERHART HAUPTMANN
577
cannot go home alone without protection, and so I shall accom-
pany you."
A changeable sky hung over the Alpine world as Francesco and
Agata stole out of the parsonage. They turned into a field-path on
which they climbed down unseen from terrace to terrace between
mulberry-trees and through garlands of grape-vines. Francesco
knew very well what lay behind him and what Rubicon he had
now crossed, but he could feel no regret. The night was sultry. In
the plain of Lombardy, it seemed, thunder-storms were moving
about; distant flashes shot up in fan-shaped rays behind the giant
silhouettes of the mountains. Odours of the immense lilac-tree
under the windows of the parsonage floated down with the pass-
ing, seeping water of the branching brooks, mingled with warm and
cold currents of air. The two inebriates did not speak. He sup-
ported her as often as they climbed down the wall in the darkness
to a lower terrace, and would perhaps catch her in his arms, so that
her heart beat on his, his thirsty mouth clung to hers. They did
not really know where they were going, for from the depths of
the Savaglia's gorge no path led up the Alp. They were agreed on
this, however, that they must avoid the ascent to it through the
village. Still the aim was not to attain any external, any distant
goal, but to enjoy fully their immediate attainment.
Francesco celebrated early mass punctually the next morning.
His absence had been noted by nobody, his return not even by Pe-
tronilla. The haste with which he had to cleanse himself, join the
waiting ministrants in the sacristy, and go to the altar before the
expectant little congregation, prevented him from coming to his
senses. This took place when he was once more in the parsonage,
once more in his little room, where the housekeeper had set the cus-
tomary breakfast before him. But his recovery did not at once
bring the clearness of sobriety. Rather, the old environment, the
rising day gave to his past experience the guise of something unreal,
which faded like a dream of yesterday. But here was reality, after
all. And although it outdid in fantastic incredibility any dream
that Francesco had ever dreamed, yet he could not disavow it. He
had taken a fearful fall, there could be no quibbling about that:
the question was whether any recovery at all from this fall into sin
was still possible. The plunge was so deep and from such a height


578
THE HERETIC OF SOANA
that the priest could not help despairing of it. Not only from a
churchly, but also from a worldly point of view, this terrible fall
was unexampled. Francesco thought of the Sindaco, and how he
had talked with him on the possibility of saving the outcasts of the
Alp. Only now, in secret and in his deep humiliation, did he recog-
nize the whole priestly arrogance, the whole overweening conceit
that had puffed him up at that time. He gritted his teeth for
shame, he writhed with degradation, vain, unmasked, in naked
helplessness. Had he not just been a saint? Had not women and
virgins of Soana looked up to him almost with idolatry?
The youth started up from the chair and the breviary on the
table, in which he had pretended to be absorbed. It had seemed to
him as if a hail of stones were rattling against the house: not in
the manner of the previous day, when they were trying to stone
Agata, but with hundredfold, thousandfold strength; as if the par-
sonage were to be razed or at least turned into a rubbish-heap, and
he buried under it like the flattened corpse of a poisonous toad. He
had heard strange sounds, terrible shrieks, frenzied shouts, and
knew that among the frenzied ones who were throwing stones there
were not only all Soana, the Sindaco, and his wife, but also Scara-
bota and his family, and in the very foreground his own mother.
But after a few hours very different fantasies and very different
emotions had come to dislodge the others. Everything that had
been born of his heart-searching, his horror at the deed, his contri-
tion, now seemed never to have existed. A wholly unfamiliar dis-
tress, a burning thirst, was drying him up. His spirit cried out,
as one who rolls with parched throat on the burning desert sand
and cries for water. The air seemed to be without those substances
which are required for breathing. The parsonage became a cage to
the priest. He strode between its walls with aching knees, as rest-
less as a beast of prey, resolved if he were not freed, to rush against
the wall and shatter his skull rather than continue in such an
existence. How is it possible to live as a dead man, he asked him-
self, as he observed the villagers through the window. How are
they willing or able to breathe? How do they endure their miser-
able existence, since they do not know that which I have enjoyed
and am now deprived of? And Francesco grew within himself.
He looked down upon popes, emperors, princes, bishops, in short
upon all men, as men do upon ants. Even in his thirst, his misery,
his deprivation, he did so. To be sure, he was no longer master of


GERHART HAUPTMANN
579
his life. A supreme enchantment had made him a victim of Eros,
of the god who is older and mightier than Zeus and the other
gods; he was will-less, and without Agata would have been com-
pletely lifeless. He had read in the writings of the ancients about
such sorcery and about Eros, and despised both with a smile. Now
he felt clearly that one must actually think of an arrow-shot and
a deep wound, with which, according to the ancients, the god poi-
soned the blood of his victims. This wound burned, bored, flamed,
rankled, gnawed within him. He felt terribly piercing pains—
until at nightfall, inwardly almost screaming with happiness, he
set out for that same little island-universe which had united him
yesterday with his beloved, and where he had agreed upon a new
meeting with her.
THE mountain-herdsman Ludovico, known to the inhabitants
of the district as The Heretic of Soana, fell into silence when
he had come to the place where his manuscript breaks off. The
visitor would have liked to hear the end of the narrative. How-
ever, when he had the candour to express this desire, his host in-
formed him that his manuscript went no further. And he was of
the opinion that the story could end here, indeed must do so. The
visitor was not of this opinion.
What became of Agata and Francesco, of Francesco and Agata?
Did the story remain a secret or was it discovered? Did the lovers
find lasting or temporary pleasure in each other? Did Francesco's
mother learn of the affair? And finally, the listener wished to know
whether a real incident formed the basis of the story, or whether it
was an out-and-out fiction.
"I have already said," replied Ludovico, paling slightly, "that
a real incident set me to scribbling." Thereupon he was silent for
a long time. "About six years ago," he continued, "a priest was
driven with sticks and stones—literally—from the altar and the
church. At any rate, it was told to me by so many people, when
I returned from Argentina to Europe and came to this region, that
I do not doubt the incident itself. Also, the incestuous Scarabotas,
though not under that name, lived here on Monte Generoso. The
name Agata is invented: I simply took it from the little chapel of
St Agatha, over which you see the brown ospreys are still circling.
But the Scarabotas, among other children of sin, did really have a


580
FESTOONS OF FISHES
grown daughter, and the priest was accused of illicit intercourse
with her. They say he did not disavow the fact, nor evince the
slightest remorse, and they claim that the Pope excommunicated
him for it. The Scarabotas had to leave the region. They are said
—the parents, not the children—to have died of yellow fever in
Rio."
The wine and the excitement which had been produced in the
listener by place, hour, and company, and especially by the reading
of the composition, combined with all sorts of mystic circum-
stances, made him still more importunate. He asked again as to
the fate of Francesco and Agata. As to this the herder could make
no statement. "They are merely said to have been for a long time
the scandal of the district, in that they desecrated and profaned the
scattered solitary shrines, and misused them as asylums for their
infamous pleasures." At these words the recluse burst into loud
laughter which continued for some time unchecked.
The End
FESTOONS OF FISHES
BY ALFRED KREYMBORG
Incognitos of masquerading moons
Refute the theories philosophers
Propound who blow their cheeks to fill balloons
And call their windy whims interpreters;
The swimming islands of the naked sun
Confound a telescope to ignorance
By dancing like oases on the run
Or delicate mirages in a trance;
The torrents of the sky reduce the earth,
A brittle stone, to powdered, liquid sand;
Amuse themselves with slanting, silver mirth
If hermits claim they've found the hidden hand;
Among the coral crypts that hold the sea,
Festoons of fishes weave insanity.








THE PROGRESS OF PAINTING
BY THOMAS CRAVEN
INDIVIDUAL TENDENCIES
MODERNISM made its first public appearance as a revolt
against the formless productions of the Impressionists. From
the armour of Bronzino and the silks of Titian, through Dutch and
Spanish schools of tone to Manet and the painters of atmosphere,
the history of art, as I have outlined it, is the gradual dissolution of
form. With Impressionism this became an accomplished fact; and
it is worth noting that the champions of Monet, Pissarro, and
other passive disciples of sunlight, noisily announced the "final
purity of painting." Great stress was laid on the "innocence of the
eye," the eye that could see and do nothing else; that registered
nature impartially like the lens of a camera, and was not hampered
by the action of a critical and inquiring mind. This philosophy was
doomed to sudden destruction.
The new movement is already old and complicated. It was not
born into the world overnight by spontaneous generation, nor was
it conceived by madmen and merchants. It is a continuation of the
art of the far past, a readjustment rather than a revolution. Art like
philosophy has its constant recurrences. All periods overlap; and
during that long barren interval preceding Impressionism there
was no organized denial of form: Ingres, Delacroix, Courbet,
Daumier, Constable, and even David, by their intellectual con-
templation of structural harmonics, kept art from perishing from
the earth. But the trend was toward the unreflective worship of
nature, and Impressionism was the inevitable result of such a course.
The new movement destroyed Impressionism by assimilating it, and
through Cezanne, a painter with a vision, turned art back to the
fundamental consideration of form and design.
Cezanne, influenced by Delacroix, whom he ardently admired,
studied classic painting in the Louvre. For a while he emulated the
realism of Courbet and Daumier, and his canvases done in the old
manner of handling light and shade were intrinsically stronger than


582 THE PROGRESS OF PAINTING
those of Manet, though by no means so excellent in technical finish.
Swayed by Pissarro, whose command over natural light has never
been equalled, he adopted the Impressionistic palette; but after dis-
covering the thinness and want of purpose in the tone-painters,
returned again to the Louvre, made notes and small copies of the
great masters, and eventually began to penetrate the secrets of
Renaissance composition. It was owing to his exhaustive investiga-
tion of classic art that Cezanne gained insight into the tri-dimen-
sional form and design which had its beginning in Masaccio, and
which, because of a highly involved and extraneous interest in
surfaces—textures and values—had been lost. He was conscious of
the compelling nature of clearly conceived and clearly presented
form, and of the imperative need for a sequence between forms.
Convinced of the "natural" truth of the Impressionistic palette,
with its nervous atmosphere of glowing pigment, and realizing at
the same time that a formless art was worse than none at all,
Cezanne entered into the complicated process of revealing and com-
posing form in its material and rhythmical aspects by the juxtaposi-
tion of colours. His first experiments are definitely referable to the
method of Pissarro. In painting objects he not only changed their
actual positions in space to harmonize with his ideas of design, but
also subjected them to a series of colour divisions set down with the
determination to achieve, if possible, the functional use of the
medium. By introducing spectral tints from yellow to violet in
modelling his forms from light to dark, he did, in a material sense,
succeed in uniting form and colour—sometimes, I must confess, at
the sacrifice of the clarity of his design. This colour-form procedure
called for rigid attention to the planes of objects: to retain solidity
and deep space in a scheme where darks vibrated and were as
colourful as lights, he was instigated to a profound study of the
geometrical formation of cubic structure; and his method, often
minute and very technical, was at once analytical, and as concerns
design, creative. He made form with the implements of naturalism;
and any one with the slightest notion of what plastic form really is,
can appreciate the unswerving fierceness of his struggles. This was
the first logical move toward increasing the reality, the freedom,
and the force of art since the Renaissance.
Cezanne replaced the pale tonal suggestions of the literalists with
a rich atmosphere of colour, and what was much more important,


THOMAS CRAVEN
583
awakened the modern mind to the significance of the far past, to a
conception of real form, solid, thick, material, and plastic. His
influence on the art of to-day has been incalculable. At first scorned,
then accepted, he has latterly been awarded the Olympian crown.
There is no occasion in the present paper to argue his definitive
rank. We might with reason proclaim him the most interesting
figure in painting since Rembrandt, but this judgement does not
absolve us from pointing out his limitations. A large part of his
groping labour went into technical processes. He asseverated the
necessity for form and design, and created unmistakably a high
order of both, but he never arrived at the breadth of the Renais-
sance masters. His canvases are more intense, but the struggle and
strain are obvious, and his work lacks the stately completion of the
old art. His colour divisions, too small and broken to function as
distinct parts of design, exhibit the planes of objects instead of their
mass—design is more often suggested than achieved. But it is pre-
cisely the primitive and incomplete nature of his genius that has so
powerfully actuated painters, and I can say without hesitation that
practically the whole of modern art had its origin in this man.
Cezanne accepted occidental tradition. He yearned to make with
his Impressionistic colour something as strong and robust as the
masterpieces of the Renaissance—the "museum paintings" in his
own naive speech. His goal was reality, a full, rich, tri-dimensional
world in whose mass and depth we might encounter subjective ex-
periences comparable in force with the experiences of practical life.
He held all flat art in contempt—philosophically an unjustifiable
contempt, for most of the world's fine painting is flat, those artists
who have truly disengaged objects from a background being rare
indeed. To him Gauguin was intolerable. The frank decorations
of this barbarian bore no signs of the struggles of formal creation.
His opinion in this case has been substantiated. Gauguin's exotic
magnetism is waning; his pictures carry no stimulation for the stu-
dent, and attract only lazy minds who are tired of life and turn to
art for soothing relief.
After the death of Cezanne new movements followed apace, the
most important of which was Cubism. I shall not undertake to
name the discoverer of this school—the question has been debated
at great length and to no profit in the cafes of Paris—but over its
source there can be no dispute. Cezanne's form was composed of


584 THE PROGRESS OF PAINTING
coloured planes, one denned against the other; the Cubists enlarged
upon these planes, and converted the contrasting colours into simple
masses of light and dark. This process, if sufficiently pursued,
abstracts a natural object into its closest geometrical equivalent.
But it would be a grave error to suppose the movement only a modi-
fication of Cezanne's technique. Intellectually it was in line with
classic ideals, in some respects a rebirth of those ideals, and the art
of Cezanne provided both an inspiration and a means. Cubism
advocated form. It became immediately popular for two reasons:
it attacked conventional painting and current superstition in the
most combative terms; its radicalism was non-representative, and
therefore a tonic to young minds surfeited with the academy. There
are few modern painters who have not profited in one way or
another by its teachings. Cubism implies the diametrical opposite
of imitation, and though it is not difficult to detect the inadequate
scope of its geometrical expression, we cannot afford to overlook its
beneficial influences.
Cubism disintegrates design. It is impossible to translate objects
into a congeries of forms, and to give these forms sequential con-
nexion. Such a method is not conducive to composition on a large
scale. The activity of the artist is circumscribed: he may, like
Picasso and Leger, present segments of true form, but these seg-
ments are devoid of integral unity. A Cubistic picture is a solid
assemblage of irrelative details. Its exponents have failed to see
the necessity for the clean contour, to grasp the fact that decisive
linear variations capable of being followed without strained atten-
tion are indispensable to rhythm. The movement has about run its
course. Picasso, if not the originator, at least the outstanding figure,
has abandoned it and gone forward into higher and harder fields.
But his recent sculpturesque nudes would never have been possible
without his preliminary training in the cubic anatomy of form.
And without a thorough understanding of planal structure, Jean
Marchand would not have developed the sharp massiveness and
straightforward solidity of his compositions.
Cubism has proved to be a transitional measure, a bridge, I might
say, leading from the unfinished painting of Cezanne to the art of
to-morrow, an art which will be, I hope, as lofty and complete as
the masterpieces of the Renaissance, and much more intense in
reality. Of the eccentricities I need say little: the movement has


THOMAS CRAVEN
585
been vulgarized, as noted in the first part of the article, by a few
charlatans, a number of dilettantes, and a good many hot-headed
youths avid of notoriety. Fortunately the public can no longer be
shocked, and work must stand or fall according to its merits.
Shortly after Cubism had stirred the curiosity of a jaded public,
and kindled the wrath of the old-fashioned critics, there came out
of Italy a noisy band of heretics known as Futurists. The message
exploited by the leaders of this band was derived from Expression-
ism, a theory unallied with the classic doctrine of Cezanne and
Picasso, but fully as radical in its antipathy to the conventions of
salon painting. The movement was skilfully concerted, well adver-
tised, and adroitly managed; it had a propaganda to offer, and it
was bent on driving it home in the most effectual modern style. In
plain words its manifesto was this: "The language of the old art
is dead. We have a new idiom, an exciting vehicle, a set of personal
symbols compounded of anything and everything; we will put
into graphic form live states of the soul; we will jerk your sensi-
bilities into the most acute responses; with our arresting emblems of
brilliant colour and free line we will make you feel art against your
will." Briefly, it insisted that art is a matter of emotive suscepti-
bility, that true feeling creates true and worthy expression.
The influence of Futurism, despite its challenging publicity, has
been of a cryptic nature. As a school it is virtually dead; and I am
not sure that such contemplative workmen as Kandinsky and
Severini would relish the original label. But it promulgated an idea
shared by a long list of modern artists. The Expressionistic slogan,
"True feeling makes true art," has become the painter's panacea,
and in addition, an unanswerable reply to the inquisitive layman.
This idea disguises every imaginable sort of stupidity, lack of
knowledge, and deficiency of vision; it raises the puerile scratches
of the incompetent crank into the realm of the masters. Hence its
popularity. But like many of the ideas of faith-healers and reli-
gious mystics, it is based upon a fundamental truth. It states con-
clusively that the artist must have a natural and not a forced
interest in the things he engages to present. In its highest philo-
sophical form, as evolved by Croce, it postulates intuitive knowl-
edge as an artistic necessity. Viewed in this light, Expressionism is
a cardinal factor in aesthetics, for it brands as inartistic all virtu-
osity, exhibitionism, opportunism, and academic cultivation. Few


586 THE PROGRESS OF PAINTING
of its adherents, however, are alive to its true meaning, and many
painters guilty of everything it condemns unwittingly flourish its
banner. America's leading water-colourist, John Marin, has some
of the "true feeling that makes true art," but Marin is too deeply
versed in the work of Cezanne and the old masters to mistake design
for the unguided flow of the sentiment. Marin is the happy medium
between feeling and imagination, and his work in his chosen field is
unapproachable.
The repudiation of imitative art, as formulated by the above
schools, promoted a lively interest in original sources. Painters
went beyond the Renaissance to the earliest records—to the archaic
carvings of the East, Congo sculpture, and the caves of Altamira.
Matisse, with an instinctive love for the Persians, was first in the
field. Before the rise of Cubism he had abandoned Cezanne's classic
leanings, and casting about for inspiration of a less exacting char-
acter, decided on the Asiatics. Forthwith he set himself to the hope-
less task of expressing modern ideas in primitive terms. He has had
innumerable followers, for nothing is quite so easy as the simple
trick of pulling a primitive mask over incapacity. But Matisse is
an eminent artist. His Persian inclinations are legitimate, and in
a measure, helpful. As a linear draughtsman he has few equals and
no superiors among the moderns; and a study of the early art has
crystallized his ability. He has learned from the ancients many of
the secrets of simplification and undiluted form, and when he has
adapted these to modern ideas, his expression has been successful;
but his attempts to throw himself into a primitive state of mind
have brought forth distortions. Most of his sculpture is too im-
itative of the negros to be of value. No sophisticated mind can
acquire a naive vision by an act of will.
The interest in primitive forms has received a pronounced stim-
ulus from another quarter—from the work of Rousseau, a man who
may be classified as the exact opposite of Matisse. Rousseau in
many ways is a true primitive, a modern without modern equip-
ment either in technique or intellect; and his charming pictures
recalling the naive fancy of the old manuscript makers have un-
balanced many a painter of talent. He is a curious exception in art,
a sort of delightful idiosyncrasy; his work has neither technical
nor philosophical merit, and painters who have read these qualities
into it have ended in the most servile imitation. Rousseau, contrary


THOMAS CRAVEN
587
to his many admirers, has nothing to offer the mind. His art as a
source of knowledge is sterile. He has the charm of a blind fiddler
playing sweetly by ear; or the untutored old man lisping a fairy-
tale in the musical numbers of a child. Notwithstanding the mea-
greness of his gifts, he is a spiritual force. Because of his "true
feeling," and his unguided, rambling integrity, the Expressionists
point to him as living proof of the value of uncultivated intuition.
Of all the issues of modern art, the one which has remained the
most bewildering to the layman is abstraction. While we can single
out no authentic school of abstractionists, the majority of the
younger painters have clung to the belief that if you destroy repre-
sentation, you have purified form, and accordingly have produced
a higher art. Now Roger Fry has shown beyond question that non-
representative form is an impossibility—the instant planes are
opposed to one another, the effect is representation of something;
otherwise there would be neither meaning nor form to contrasting
areas. In a larger sense, of course, all art is founded upon abstrac-
tion, the groundwork, or the design, being a graphic weaving of
lines to indicate action and counter-action; but design is only the
accompaniment of art, and not art itself, the instrument which
enables man to articulate his experiences. Unfortunately most of
the pure abstractionists have made design an end in itself.
The development of this propensity has not been unnatural.
Cubism, which arose from the enlargement of Cezanne's geometrical
planes, and which was, by its very name and reason for existence,
an art of three dimensions, by a continual process of extension has
ended in a flat pattern. This may seem paradoxical, but the result
is inescapable. The three visible planes of a cube when projected
beyond the limits of vision, that is, to the frame of the canvas,
cease to function as indications of solidity and become simply three
flat tones. Matisse has been another spur to the tendency, but his
work has been more forthright, and entirely at variance with the
mechanics of Cubism. He has aimed at oriental decoration, at
clean flat design in which every superfluous patch has been elimi-
nated; and though his successful efforts may strike us at first
glance as only spontaneous sketches, they are actually the fruit of
the utmost deliberation. His most recent pictures are somewhat
disappointing. Matisse has succumbed to the apocryphal lure of
naturalism. Probably the most original of living colourists, he has


588 THE PROGRESS OF PAINTING
begun to use tones in the almost uncanny duplication of natural
light and shade. This makeshift lends a false realism to his paint-
ing. Upon a carefully studied and lucid framework he has imposed
flat colour-areas, beautiful in themselves, but of such positive pho-
tographic accuracy as to wreck design, and to give the illusion of the
diffuse world of the camera.
With reservations, the modern interest in abstraction has been sal-
utary. It has drawn the attention of painters and public to the
importance of design, and has made clear even to the dullest work-
man the fact that art, at bottom, is built upon a rational plan. But
its interest is mainly technical, and painters have committed the
unpardonable blunder of hanging experiments and inviting the
public to accept them as finished works of art. In France the zest
for psychological investigation has plunged the abstractionists into
the depths of materiality. It goes without saying that a painter
must have a command over his materials, but to make art an affair
of textures is frankly preposterous. An artist should use his
medium as unconsciously as the pedestrian uses his bones. There
is no hope in aesthetics for those misguided souls who plant upon a
background all sorts of matter—cement, cigar boxes, linoleum,
newspapers, and door-bells—their contrivances are ingenious, but
too eccentric to be taken seriously. The primacy given to materials
has begotten some of the most astonishing technicians in the history
of painting, but these men should be in the crafts where their highly
specialized talents and their mechanical competence in all depart-
ments of art could be applied to serviceable ends.
The pure abstractionist sees, feels, and realizes little in the
world. Instead of life, reality, and structure, he gives us textures,
arbitrary linear combinations, and decorative prettiness.
In recapitulation we can say that the strongest testimony to the
vitality of Modernism is the diversity of its forms—which is only
another way of emphasizing its value as a reflection of a complex
social structure. We are, perhaps, too close to its puzzling vigour,
too much a part of its impatient growth, to render judgement upon
its variegated achievements; but underlying all its manifestations
—its reckless claims, its abnormal devotions, and its sober dili-
gence—we find one consolidating purpose. Modernism gives preced-
ence to ideas; it stands specifically for creative thought as opposed
to imitation of nature, and in this respect it is the most significant
movement in art since the Renaissance.


THOMAS CRAVEN
589
The tendencies which enable us to pierce the spirit of the artist,
to get at the compelling force beneath individual endeavour, and
to determine the approximate position of painters as imaginative
agents, have been definitely examined: the classicism of Cezanne
and the Cubists (a revival of the occidental tradition); the primi-
tivism of Gauguin, Matisse, and Rousseau; Expressionism, which
refuses to sanction the aesthetic value of formal knowledge; and
the stark abstractionism of those who have pushed the freedom of
art into an absorption in technical processes. All of these tendencies
intermingle—art becomes positive only when it is narrow and puri-
tanical—and I cannot point to a single modern painter whose work
is limited to a precise category. Consequently the divisions must be
regarded as analytic tools and not as absolute niches; as means to
separate the various influences which have been in operation.
All of this is purely critical. Appreciation, in the aesthetic sense,
is a different matter, simple in some of its phases, abstruse in others.
Response to the qualities of a given work of art means the discovery
of those qualities in one's self; the concrete object makes precise,
and gives form to latent feelings or ideas. Critically the explana-
tion of the appeal of pictures is an elementary task, but when the
aesthetic response is treated psychologically and co-ordinated with
the nervous system, immense difficulties arise. In truth the whole
problem of social contact hinges on the question of individual
differences and agreements. Such a study is beyond the province of
a paper devoted to art alone; but it is well to remind the reader
that one cannot respond equally and sympathetically to a number
of artists, even though these artists be on a parity of excellence.
One can react only to the art which coincides with one's own feel-
ings and opinions. Art is great in proportion to its power to attract
the largest audiences throughout the longest period of time, and
the greatest art, because of its humanity and its philosophy, is in-
exhaustible. The numerous sides, emotional and intellectual, of
profound aesthetic thought, when put into plastic expression, offer
the student so many points of approach that his sympathy is en-
listed in spite of his temperamental objections. Thus it happens that
a painter like Rubens, on account of his flamboyant sensuality, may
repel the modern feelings—it is fashionable just now to condemn
Rubens—but as we look more deeply into the nature of art and
grow more familiar with its syntax, we go to him with increasing
interest. His gifts were so vast, the range of his craft so far-reach-


59o THE PROGRESS OF PAINTING
ing, his form so luxurious and succulent, that whoever studies art
conquers his original prejudices and comes to a place where he must
respond, must find a contact with the Rubens genius. So it is with
Cezanne. Many a young man who has at first scoffed at this gro-
tesque personality, and ridiculed him as a clumsy abortionist, has,
with a little more knowledge to his credit, subscribed to even'
article in the Cezanne creed. Indeed it is a pleasant sight to watch
the various types of artists rally about this uncouth figure. He
stands pre-eminent among moderns, a man whose comprehensive
vision has inspired the creative energies of every species of honest
temperament.
All the special tendencies of the new movement are corollaries
from Cezanne's determination to restore artistic reality to the field
of vision where it truly belongs. That his ambition was a full, tri-
dimensional form in no wise detracts from the interest of painters
who naturally prefer a decorative style. Like all well-composed
art, his canvases contain a wealth of provocative surface shapes and
lateral rhythms, elements which have won the allegiance of paint-
ers opposed to released form.
A study of modern sculpture offers even greater difficulties than
painting, though its passage from the unity of the block-form to
Impressionism has been analagous. The art of Rodin was the climax
of a textural progression which began as far back as the monu-
mental compositions of Michael Angelo. The great Florentine, per-
ceiving to the last degree the formal sequences of the hewn figure,
created in marble a reality as convincing as the life of nature and
many times more powerful. His successors, particularly of the
French schools, confusing effect with cause, attributed his realism
to anatomical replicas, and in their pursuit of this false premise
reduced sculptural expression to the model.
The evolution of modelling in the round, as I have noted in an
essay on The Artistic Vision (The Dial, July i92i) is an elabora-
tion of purely frontal conceptions. The reality of primitive sculp-
ture was augmented by the quadruple relationship of its fronts: the
early workman drew his design on the four surfaces of the block,
and then carved toward a common centre. But the material re-
tained its inherent stiffness, and what was accomplished in dignity
and grandeur was neutralized by static lifelessness—the primitive
mind could find no method of fixing a sequence between the planes


THOMAS CRAVEN
59i
of the different faces. No matter how expertly the edges were
rounded, the divisions remained. The Greeks, by uniting and in-
creasing the sides of the shaft, conceived a sculptural anatomy
which broke down the barrier between expression and experience,
and converted the block into living form. Michael Angelo enlarged
the range of planes and added to their number, and so thoroughly
eliminated the frontal divisions that his work, technically speaking,
is a perfect expression of our tactual and motor experiences.
Primitive art forms are unimaginative constructions. Nature
was interpreted and not imitated, but the rendition of objects from
memory-pictures quickly led to standardization. Drawing, as in
the work of children, was limited to the front view and the profile,
and statues were bilaterally symmetrical. Sculpture, like painting,
grew plastic as the imagination entered into the reconstruction of
experiences. It was only in the late Greek and Roman art that the
process of modelling from direct observation interrupted the rise of
creative power. The sculptors and painters who discovered that
imitation served the popular taste quite as well as the realism of
the great epochs, did far more harm to art than any public indiffer-
ence. Fortunately the broken Roman tradition recalled the neces-
sity for study and contemplation, and we have in the High
Renaissance a truly organic sculptural expression, an art born of
stored impressions and ordered by the imagination. Let it be under-
stood that Michael Angelo's realism is a product of mind; it is
knowledge transformed by imaginative vision, a human conception
completely realized and as convincing as phenomenal experience.
But the Roman short-cut to realism was revived, and from
Michael Angelo to Rodin the history of the art is a futile preoccu-
pation with the imitation of appearances—Goujon and his bastard
Greek huntresses; Canova with his smooth death-masks; Thor-
waldsen's pedantic draperies. Salon sculpture, like salon painting,
became a soulless, brainless mummery. The creative will had
ceased to function—only the eyes and fingers were employed. If the
imagination was used at all, it was to inject into marble some senti-
mental legend or half-felt poetic idea. Art is not expository—it
springs from ideas, but is productive of emotions. The sombre
humanity of the great age disappeared in the gestures of imitative
trickery.
Rodin revolted against banality, but resembling the Impression-


592 THE PROGRESS OF PAINTING
ists in painting, failed to get at the sources of the curse. He exag-
gerated and intensified appearances, but seldom attempted the
conception of ordered form. His celebrated anatomical studies are
only deceptive polished surfaces. True sculptural anatomy con-
sists in the development of sequential planes running up and down
and round the block of a figure. Inasmuch as nature presents no
such sequences to the eye alone, it follows that an art dependent on
observation must be fragmentary—must carry no conviction of the
unity of its parts. Rodin was conscious of this fact and tried to
provide for it by leaving his figures attached to a roughly chiselled
background. But this stratagem only made heavy what was already
formless. Michael Angelo's unfinished pieces are invariably pro-
jected to the limits of the block. The modern academic formula
which designates hollows as "darks," and resorts to modelling by
light effects instead of by tactual feeling, has had its foremost
example in Rodin. In no other sculptor can one find such perfect
representation of atmosphere. Light seems not only to flow over
Rodin's marble, but to be caught within it and to radiate from it.
This, however, has no sculptural significance. It may be remarkable
as an optical phenomenon; but it breaks up form, and renders im-
possible the realization of any sort of formal connexions.
Since Rodin, modern radical sculpture has turned against surface
naturalism and advocated form. It also sets great store by tactual
processes, and emphasizes the value of mind in its presentations. It
is primitive simply because it is not yet capable of capturing reality
by wholly imaginative methods. There is to-day no perfected
rhythmical expression in modern sculpture. Brancusi, a master of
delicately balanced blocks, would have us behold the world as a
frozen silence, immobile and calm as death. His polished planes,
rounded into imperceptibility, impel no thoughts of movement.
Maillol and Epstein in Europe, and Faggi and Lachaise in Amer-
ica, are steadily moving from a primitive frontalism to a veritable
plastic expression. Faggi's art adheres to the block-form, but at
times is complicated by a Gothic fervour that runs into unintel-
ligible symbolism. With Lachaise the field is opening swiftly. He
rises to an intense realism, and it must be apparent, even to the
novice, that such a realism, with its long, linear rhythms and its
clear, harmonized masses, is no surface imitation. Lachaise so
orders the grooves of his form that potential movement is inevitably


THOMAS CRAVEN
593
felt. And this is a rare achievement in modern or any other
sculpture.
For the development of a complete rhythm extending through
large masses of sculptural form, modern art has uncovered no gift
like that of Thomas H. Benton, a painter who seems to belong
neither to his own department nor to the domain of sculpture.
Benton's work is still crude, and he has no respect for the laws
and limitations of painting; but he has built up an art of form that
is unique in the history of the subject. He has a sculptor's gifts
and a painter's vision; and while it is too early to assert his final
place as an artist, I am certain that the aestheticians of the future
will have to deal at length with his curious and profoundly original
form of expression.
In concluding the review I wish to make clear that the term prog-
ress has been used for convenience only. There has been no evolu-
tion in the sense of superior aesthetic achievement—only cycles of
growth, culmination, and decadence. Art struggles toward a com-
plete reality which, at certain favourable moments, is approached.
But since perfection is unattainable, the quest in all its forms is
eternal. In addition, the context of art is peculiar to its time, and
this, in itself, makes any duplication of import an impossibility.
The warfare between abstraction and experience is perpetually
waging, and within this field there are periods of progress and de-
cline. Occasionally a mean is reached, and however simple it may
be, if it strikes man with a force equivalent to his experience, it is
art.


MAGNOLIAS AND THE INTANGIBLE HORSE
BY GLENWAY WESCOTT
"But no beast comes"—Y.W.
The magnolia bud
stained with plum,
not built to open
but to remain tubular.
The watering place
full of white tubes
piled in pyramids,
where I bend
through pear-yellow air,
dream of my red horse—
his nose a spike
of chestnut flowers,
his tail and mane
silver-centred
curls, his shell-hoofs
pounding hollow
against mountains . . .
In sorrow
the sun breaks the bud
to a flower
like a fallen bird,
feathers bent up
and out, star-shaped.



A SILHOUETTE. BY ADI BEILER






A SILHOUETTE. BY ADI BEILER





THE SAMOVAR
(A Little Tale, in the Russian Manner, without Psychology)
BY JOHN COURNOS
IVAN PETROFF'S custom, since becoming a widower, was to
leave the lumber-yard, of which he was the owner, precisely at
four o'clock each day and to wend his way home, where a hot
samovar awaited him with a punctuality not less exact. A samovar,
as every good Russian knows, is, if a comfort, not the same thing
as a wife, even though it take turns at being hot and cold, at hum-
ming a song and keeping silent, at shining brightly on gala days—
reflecting gladness—and being dully irresponsive on others. Never-
theless, since his wife's death, Petroff—or Ivan Stepanitch, as he
was familiarly called—resisted the importunities of matchmakers:
one might as well have asked him to have another samovar in the
place of the one he had. Petroff had* chosen that samovar with great
care, just as he had chosen his lamented wife with great care. The
one he saw in a shop window—the samovar, of course—the other
behind a shop counter: nothing strange, to be sure, in either fact.
How often he had passed that window and paused to look at the
samovar. There was something about it that struck his fancy, just
as later there was something about the woman he had married
struck his fancy. It was not shaped quite like other samovars; or
rather, this particular samovar had a shape, others hadn't. Other
samovars had a straight up and down effect, without any curves
or deviations in the body to make the thing interesting and piquant
to the eye; this samovar curved in at the middle like a Greek urn
or a finely shaped woman's waist. Though Petroff was far from
being a barin (a noble) he somehow had an eye for these things: a
fact which imparted a measure of confirmation to the report of his
grandmother having been the illegitimate daughter of a barin in
the neighbourhood. One day, after a long wooing of that samovar,
unable any longer to resist the ever urging possessive instinct, he
walked into the shop and at his request the young woman behind
the counter went to the window and, lifting the desired object high


596
THE SAMOVAR
with her both hands—a manoeuvre which set off the young woman's
shapeliness—put it tenderly on the counter. The whole effect was
of a woman lifting a baby under the arms; at least so it seemed to
Ivan Petroff. She smilingly looked down on the samovar and
waited for Petroff to speak.
"How much?" muttered Petroff.
The young woman named the price.
"Rather high, isnt it?" said Petroff.
"I've got some at half the price," replied the young woman, still
smiling. "But, of course, they are not the same thing. Look at the
shape . . . the sparkle too! One in a thousand . . ."
"Y-yes . . . I see . . ." murmured Petroff, not look-
ing at all at the samovar. He was actually, in a half-dazed way,
realizing the background. He somehow, as yet vaguely, grasped
that she, in her tight-fitting black frock, set off the samovar; the
thought that they were like two pieces of a set stunned him. Yes,
one in a thousand!
"I'll t-take it," he said at last hesitatingly, and slowly pulled out
his wallet.
"Name and address, please!"
"Oh! . . . Ivan . . ."
"Ivan . . ." repeated the young woman after him, writing
at the same time.
"Deuce take it! How prettily she says it!" thought Petroff,
while she, pencil in hand, patiently waited.
"Ivan . . ." she repeated, noting his absent look and wish-
ing to give him his cue.
"That's right," he said, "Ivan . . . Ivan Ste-pa-nitch
. . . I mean Stepanovitch . . ."
"Ivan Stepanovitch," she repeated, and waited again.
"Pet-roff . . ."
"Ivan Stepanovitch Petroff . . ." she pronounced, gathering
up all the fragments of his name, and added: "And what is your
address?"
"Never mind!" he exclaimed suddenly. "I'll come back for it
myself. But please give me a receipt."
Once in the street, Petroff drew out the receipt and read under
the firm's name: "per Anna Svetloff." That was what he wanted
the receipt for; he was afraid she would sign only her initials.


JOHN COURNOS
597
That was the worst about taking a fancy to a thing: in the end
you wanted it. He now had his samovar. But how could he tell
when he unwarily entered the shop that day that his small innocent
fancy would breed a greater, an infinitely more difficult one of sat-
isfaction, since merely to admire there was need of something more
than the stopping before the shop-window; one had to go into the
shop itself; moreover, one must go in to buy something. So Petroff
began to frequent that shop on one pretext or another. The second
time he went to the shop he bought a mouse-trap, though he already
had three lying idle on the rummage-heap in the attic. On his third
visit he bought a fishing-rod: goodness alone knew what he was go-
ing to fish for: all the fishing he's ever done has been in dreams. His
next venture was a tin-opener. He went on buying these things, and
as a result of his otherwise useless purchases had achieved the
privilege of calling her familiarly, "Anna Pavlovna."
One day a strong impulse urged Petroff towards Anna Pavlovna.
It was the same impulse, only ten thousand times stronger, that
finally drove him to possess the samovar. Had it been one of those
devilishly clever Frenchmen we hear of who had been thus in love,
he would have asked the object of his affections out for a walk and
deftly manoeuvred her towards a fashionable dressmaking estab-
lishment, where, pausing and allowing her eyes to fall on the nice
feminine things in the shop-window, until her mouth had begun to
water, he would have remarked with discreet casualness: "What
do you say, dear, to going in and ordering a trousseau?" Then
there is the case of the Spaniard, who put the question with equal
effectiveness: "Shall you and I put our clothes in the same trunk
and go on a long journey together?" Unforunately our Ivan
Petroff was not up to these clever French and Spanish tricks. He
was a simple Russian, with honest if sometimes uncouth ways;
nevertheless, with an eye, as it has already been observed, for the
little niceties of life. He had not forgotten how nice she had looked
behind the samovar, how one had set the other off, how much they
seemed like two companion pieces of a set. Such was the picture
she evoked, a picture which with the passing of days had grown
tense and luminous, almost too large for the frame of his mind,
which it threatened to split. So, having decided to speak to her, he
approached her thus:
"Anna Pavlovna, you remember the samovar I bought of you?"


598
THE SAMOVAR
"Why shouldn't I remember it? It was such a nice one. I was
quite sorry to part with it."
"That's just what I came to talk to you about. You needn't be
parted from it. I came to ask you if you wouldn't come and pour
tea for me? . . . I mean for always. . . ."
There was a silence. Petroff was afraid that she would say that
she had already promised to pour tea for someone else. She looked
serious for a while, then burst out laughing.
"What an original way you have of putting it, Ivan Stepanitch!
Who could resist it? Of course, I'll come and pour tea for you.
But tell me, Ivan Stepanitch, what did you buy a mouse-trap for
and a fishing-rod . . . and a bird-cage . . and
a monkey-wrench . . . and a tin-opener . . . and a
. . . You didn't really want any of those things, did you?"
Petroff smiled assent shyly.
"Remember the day you bought the bird cage?" asked Anna
Pavlovna, and he nodding in the affirmative, she went on: "You
were going to say something to me that day, weren't you?" He
again nodding in the affirmative, she continued: "Yes, I watched
you, Ivan Stepanitch. I watched you, as you looked through the
wires of the cage. You were looking at me. You said nothing. But
your eyes gave you away. . . . You've got fine eyes, Ivan
Stepanitch. . . . Come nearer, Ivan Stepanitch. . . ."
And Ivan Stepanovitch drawing nearer, she impulsively seized his
head between her hands, and kissed his eyes. "Don't you try," she
said, laughing, "to fool a woman so long as you have those eyes.
Of course, I'll come and pour tea for you!"
And so Ivan Stepanovitch took her home to pour tea for him.
For a full year Anna Pavlovna poured tea for her Ivan. Then, one
day she fell ill, and for days lay in a delirium, with intervals of
calm. During one of these the nurse, all in white, poured out a cup
of tea for her patient: for the samovar, on the insistent demands of
the patient, was now in the sick-room. Anna Pavlovna watched the
nurse pouring out tea, and imagined that the white figure was
Death.
"No, no!" she cried, as the white figure approached her with a
cup of tea. "Take it away! Don't make me drink it! I don't want
to die! No, no—not just yet!"


JOHN COURNOS
599
II
Ivan Petroff's custom since becoming a widower—so our story
began, you will remember—was to leave the lumber-yard, of which
he was the owner, precisely at four o'clock each day, when he
would wend his way home, where a hot samovar awaited him.
Neighbours, on seeing him pass by, regulated their clocks by him
(as the saying goes) so punctual were his goings and comings.
Punctuality is not natural to a Russian, but Petroff was punctual.
It is not to be wondered at, then, that he was regarded as a queer
sort. Not that Petroff was business-like. Far from it. His punc-
tuality was rather the result of apathy, become mechanical. He had
been like that since his wife died. That had happened a year ago.
A samovar has much to answer for in Russian life. If it were not
for samovars there might not be any Russian novels. This par-
ticular samovar had much to answer for in Petroff's life. The first
day that he was unfaithful to it was the day that began Petroff's
second adventure.
On leaving the lumber-yard that day, Ivan Petroff walked as
usual as far as the church, where the road forked into two. As usual,
he took off his hat and crossed himself. Then he did something
unusual. Instead of taking the road to the right, as was his habit
of over a year, he turned into the road to the left. An instant before
he had no idea of turning to the left. He had no idea why he had
turned into the road to the left. It was as if a magnet which had
formerly drawn him to the right had now changed its position in
the road to the left. Petroff himself had hardly realized what he
had done until he felt a slap on his back and heard a familiar voice
say:
"And what brings you this way, Ivan Stepanitch?"
Ivan Petroff looked at his questioner in a confused way and
stammered:
"... I? ... I? I'm just taking a walk. . . ."
Petroff blushed. He could not lie gracefully. All the same, if
he had wished to tell the truth, he could not have said just what
took him that way and not the other way. But he felt a strong con-
sciousness of unfaithfulness, a desire to get away from his own
beloved samovar, which never ceased to remind him of the dear one,
who daily, for a whole year, had poured him tea out of it.


600 THE SAMOVAR
At the next turn of the road was the inn, and thither he guiltily
directed his footsteps, as in the old days, before he had married
Anna Pavlovna.
He paid but slight attention to the sleigh at the door, and to the
woman getting out of it, all wrapped in furs.
"Well, well, you haven't honoured us with your company for a
long while," said the proprietor, greeting his former patron heartily.
"A samovarchik (a little samovar) please!" said Petroff with an
embarrassed air, "and how are you, Pavel Timofeyevitch?"
A little samovar was brought, containing a mere fifteen tumblers,
a small matter for a Russian, and our Ivan Petroff, removing his
fur overcoat and his high fur cap, and undoing his caftan, sat down
before the tea urn. Before pouring out the tea he gulped down a
small vodka as a kind of appetizer.
In the Russian manner he put a small lump of sugar in his
mouth and sipped the tea through it. He was drinking his third
tumbler, when a woman, the same he had casually noted getting out
of the sleigh, entered the inn. She surveyed the room, for an instant
fixed Petroff with her eyes, and sat down at a table across the room,
facing him. Apparently, she was staying there, for she did not have
her furs with her. She also ordered a small samovar.
All of a sudden Petroff felt strongly conscious of the woman's
presence, and on raising his eyes found hers fixed on his. And
helplessly he felt his soul wrenched from his body with a kind of
violence, drawn by the unfathomable power of those eyes. Then,
she relinquished his soul and allowed it to drift back, now hers.
There was something about that woman which reminded him,
indefinably at first, of his lamented wife. There was, indeed, some
similarity in their features, but the stranger's eyes were larger, more
widely parted, and had a sense of knowledge and worldliness which
the other's did not possess, and this was an added attraction. At
all events, the superficial resemblance was in itself sufficiently
startling to cause a flutter, and more than a flutter, in Ivan's heart,
as his eyes, involuntarily, continued to drift in her direction, always
to find her eyes responding with an intimate wonderment, as if to
say: "I surely have seen you somewhere before? But whether I
have seen you or not does not matter. I know you!"
In short, they were all-knowing eyes, and he felt them sounding
him to the innermost depths of his being. Intent as that look was,


JOHN COURNOS
60i
it was not a stare, for there was no hardness in it; indeed, it had all
the tremulous modulation of pliant violin music stealing into one's
heart without one knowing how. An inner fluid warmth, such as
he had not remembered since his first courting of Anna, and surely
not to be ascribed to tea, was stealing through Petroff and flooding
him. It began to radiate from his moistened eyes and to wander in
vapoury, lit-up clouds, which seemed to interpose themselves be-
tween him and the woman, so that he saw her as through a filmy
mist. Such havoc can a woman play with a man's soul!
Stranger still, Petroff felt that the woman was undergoing a not
unsimilar emotion. More than once, prodded by an inexplicable
impulse, he was on the point of rising and asking her to join him at
his samovar, but Petroff was a very shy man, and he could not
screw up his courage to commit a possible effrontery to the unknown
woman for whom, at first sight, he had contracted so tender a
regard.
After two hours, poor Petroff paid the waiter and reluctantly
took his departure. He felt the woman's eyes follow him until he
had passed through the door, and immediately formed a mental
resolution:
"I shall be here to-morrow at the same time . . . Deuce
take it, I wish I had spoken to her!"
It would be as hard to say why Petroff made this sudden resolu-
tion as it would be to say what drew him here in the first place.
Such was Petroff, such things happened to Petroff. Why inquire
further?
At all events, on arriving home, he astonished the already won-
dering maid, Marusya, by instructing her not to prepare the
samovar the next day, so that poor Marusya crossed herself and
muttered:
"What's come over master? I hope nothing ill. The Saints pre-
serve him!"
Petroff lay wide awake that night, and a woman's eyes, grey as a
sunless sea, long eyelashes flickering, looked at him and beckoned
out of the darkness, it was hard to tell whether to paradise or per-
dition.
Willingly, it is true, yet helplessly, Petroff at the same hour the
next day wended his way towards the inn. He felt sure she would
be there, yet feared that she might not. There was no one in the


6o2
THE SAMOVAR
room. He took the seat he had occupied the previous day, ordered
a samovar, and waited, waited. ... At last he heard the
sound of a woman's voice, and knew at once it was hers. Palpitat-
ing instants became transformed in his heart into hammer-beats.
That voice, indeed, though he had not heard it before, matched
those eyes well. She was ordering a samovar. She glided into the
room with a feline motion, and the brown fur of her long overcoat
undulated to the rhythm of her body, and might have been in-
tegrally a part of her. She sat down in her former seat, and Petroff
sat still and rigid in his, a serpent charmed. It was the same as
yesterday, and Petroff could not screw up his courage to rise and
speak. This time, having consulted her watch, she was the first to
rise from the table, and departing, left Petroff a prey to the most
agitated emotions.
For three days this little comedy was enacted, and on the fourth
Petroff made up his mind to speak, come what will. After the sixth
tumbler of tea, Petroff began to curse himself. The charming un-
known did not come.
"I've missed my chance, the deuce take it!" he muttered to him-
self. "That's what comes of being a ninny and putting things off!"
At six o'clock he rose, and with a crest-fallen air walked out of
the room, feeling like a whipped hungry dog, his tail between his
legs.
"Perhaps to-morrow!" he murmured half-hopefully. Listlessly
he arrived at his own door. Having deposited his hat and coat in
the ante-room, he entered the dining-room. He found it lit up and
the table set for dinner. He flung himself down on the sofa and
gazed towards the table. A singular fact, which had at first escaped
his notice, now, quite suddenly, impressed itself upon his conscious-
ness, as he scratched his head in astonishment. The table was set
for two! He sat up and looked again. There was no mistake. The
table was set for two! He had not remembered having asked any
one to dinner. Indeed, he had not asked any one to dinner since
his wife had died.
What was the meaning of this? Petroff sat up and rubbed his
eyes. A mood of enchantment held him and prevented him from
calling Marusya. There was a temptation to discover the meaning
of the illusion, if illusion it was, for himself. A thought slowly
struggled in his simple brain, a sluggish, yet a wild thought.


JOHN COURNOS
603
. . . But that was impossible. . . . simply impossible.
He was a fool and a simpleton to entertain such a thought.
. . . His blood began to tingle through his veins hotly; after-
wards, from head to foot, he trembled with the ague. He won-
dered: was he ill, was a fever setting in, or had the woman cast an
evil spell upon him? And he remembered that he hadn't slept three
nights. He had better have Marusya call a doctor. What was the
good of a doctor? They were no remedy against a woman's eyes.
There they were, even at that instant, between the half-parted
draperies in the doorway, looking at him, penetrating him to the
bottom of his soul.
She was real as life, and it was the first time that he had seen
her hatless, showing a wealth of brown hair, rich with gold-tinged
high lights. It was wound round her head in large, tight, snaky coils
and under her broad high-arched brows her grave, long-lashed eyes
were lapsing into a smile. She appeared to hold the draperies to-
gether with an invisible hand, and only her head showed through
the opening.
Petroff sat transfixed, unable to move or say a word. He feared
that if he stirred the vision would vanish.
The smile between the draperies broadened. Then the invisible
hand flung aside the draperies, and the figure ran forward and
dropped on its knees before Petroff.
"Here am I, Ivan Stepanitch. You wanted me, and I have come!"
Petroff said nothing. He was dazed and under a spell.
"You did want me, did you not?" she went on, as her hand
sought his knee and rested quietly there.
"Yes ..." replied Petroff, galvanized into life by that
touch. "But how do you know my name? Who are you, and where
do you come from?"
"Don't ask questions, Ivan Stepanitch. But if you'd like to
know, a little bird told me. As for my name, call me Maria
Feodorovna. Aren't you glad I have come?" Petroff shyly put his
hands on her shoulders.
"I'm real enough," laughed Maria Feodorovna.
"I am not dreaming? . . ."
"You may kiss me when you wake up. . . . Then we'll
have some dinner. I am frightfully hungry. I've asked Marusya
to cook something especially nice."


604
THE SAMOVAR
"I have not slept three nights because of you," said Petroff,
stroking her hair.
"And you are not going to sleep a fourth," laughed Maria
Feodorovna. "Poor Ivan!"
"You don't mean that you are going to leave me," exclaimed
Petroff, alarm in his voice.
"No, of course not, you stupid! What I meant was that I have
come to stay. You do want me?"
In answer, he seized one of her hands and covered it with kisses.
Ill
Who was she? Where had she come from? What had been her
past? Ivan never knew. Every time he questioned her, during their
lovings, she simply laughed and replied:
"What does it matter, darling? You are happy, aren't you?
People who are happy shouldn't ask questions. Just imagine I've
dropped down from heaven, and take your happiness. Did I ask
questions when I first saw you? I didn't even ask you whether I
might come or not. I liked you at first sight, and I knew that you
liked me. That was enough. And so I just came. . . ."
But the male in him, jealous of her past history, was not satisfied,
and he importuned her:
"But did you ... I mean are you a widow? . . .
Are you . . ."
She always stopped a question with a kiss and the remonstrance:
"Don't ask questions. Questions bring unhappiness . . .
they are always the beginning of all trouble."
Three months they lived as man and wife, and were happy to-
gether. She turned a deaf ear to his repeated proposals of marriage.
She placed all such proposals in the category of unnecessary ques-
tions.
"There you go again with your questions! Aren't we happy as
we are? What do you want to marry me for? Besides . . ."
She always paused there, just as he felt he was on the eve of a
revelation, which might furnish the key to the mystery of her. But
having said, "Besides . . ." she would scrutinize the eager,
questioning face of her lover, and, after a pause, break into a tan-
talizing laugh.


JOHN COURNOS
605
"Never mind, Ivan. It doesn't matter so long as we are happy.
. . It doesn't really matter."
Under her caresses, Petroff would forget everything, to return
afterwards to an intense preoccupation with that portentous
"Besides." He felt sure that there was much behind that enigmatic
word, and his mind was troubled. Had she run away from a hus-
band? Was she not free to marry him? He was fiercely in love
with Maria Feodorovna, and he thought that if she would only con-
sent to marry him, he would secure her for ever. But there was al-
ways that "Besides"!
One evening a strange thing happened. It was winter. There
was snow on the ground, but no frost, and the windows were clear.
Maria Feodorovna had not drawn the curtains. She and Ivan sat
before the samovar, and Maria was pouring out tea. The red-
shaded lamp-light cast rich glints on the old curved copper of the
samovar and found responsive echoes in the now coppery surfaces
of Maria's face.
Maria sat with a preoccupied air, and her eyes were full of a
mysterious apprehension, which communicated itself to Ivan. He
noticed that her hand trembled when she handed him his glass of
tea. He knew her to be subject to occult perceptions, which usually
proved to be uncannily accurate. But never before had he seen her
in such an intense state of repressed agitation.
It was then that the fearful thing happened. It happened so
quickly, so suddenly, and so unaccountably. First there was the
report of a revolver, instantaneously followed by a crash of window
panes; something hard and sharp struck the samovar; a tiny jet of
water and steam came pouring out of the wounded urn. Maria
gave a scream. With quiet presence of mind, Ivan blew out the
lamp and forced Maria down to the floor. He felt his way to the
cupboard and extracted a revolver, which he kept loaded for any
emergency. He then flung himself out of doors and caught sight
of a moving shadow faint against the snow, which crunched under
the prowler's furtive footfalls.
Petroff fired. The figure began to run. Once or twice it paused
to aim a revolver. They kept up a running fire in the half dark.
Once the unknown uttered an oath, as of pain, then ran out of the
gate. Ivan gave up the pursuit.
He put up the shutters before re-entering the house. On lighting


6o6
THE SAMOVAR
the lamp he found Maria Feodorovna sitting on the floor where he
had left her. Her face was ashen pale, and fear had not left her
eyes.
He told her what had happened. She quickly recovered her
spirits, and restored Ivan's as well. That night she loved Ivan with
redoubled ardour.
In the morning there was no sign of her. Only a strange note on
her pillow to say that it was better that they should part on a high
note of passion than that their love should degenerate into habitual
caresses and grey domesticity. How could she say that when he
loved her so!
In his garden, now covered with snow, he discovered a trail of
blood, leading to the gateway and beyond. It was left by the
prowler of the previous night's encounter.
Later in the day, in the village, men talked of a stranger who
came to the district hospital, dripping with blood, wounded, and
died there, and before death raved about a woman who had loved
him for a space and left him.
Petroff listened, but said nothing. He went home, and locking
the doors, went forth with a knapsack. In the inside pocket of his
caftan was a revolver.


PETITE CHANSON DISCRETE POUR CELLES
QUI ONT PLEURE LES MECHANTS GARS
BY LEGARE GEORGE
Les vierges,
bienveillantes
mats modes-
tes, embras-
sent les gars
pourleslaisser
partir mieux
pour la guerre.
"Elise: Mats, au moins, Us ne
dédaignent pas la bouche dont
la salive les a enivres? Moi:
lis en oublient jusqu'au gout.
Elise: Eux aussi? J'ai envie de
pleurer!"
—Nuit au Luxembourg.
Troubled by furious winds in March that blew
At twilight, blowing a small scared moon through
clouds,
Or by midsummer evenings confiding
Dew to your hair and coolness to your hands,
They made you meek avowals, whispering
Intimations of their disquietude.
They were like tuned instruments
Played on by fugitives.
For that war coming to them vouchsafed
This curious excellence to novices
For a tenderness, a thing to be conferred
As roses would be pinned by clumsy hands,
Therefore, maidens, did you receive them
Mysteriously among trees, and with kind mouths
Discreetly woo their phrases, remembering
Others once loved by other women,
Who went away.
Grieving for those, you whimpered after these:
"And shall we see them go, see others purge
The wounds like roses burning in their flesh,
Who die upon the verge, a day from home,
And never will return?"


6o8
PETITE CHANSON
Mais les gars,
en suivant les
parf urns des
femmes, ou-
blient la bien-
veillance des
vierges.
Et apres, les
honteux par-
lent tout has,
comme il faut
aux pleurea-
ses ;et Von en-
tend de petite s
complaintes.
And they survived your pity, having found
(After the days and nights, the mud in camps,
Silence intent on earth, sky, men, and trenches)
Wet evenings mingling on the boulevards
Laughter and talk, tobacco smoke and scents
Of perfumes and cosmetics warm from wraps:
Anonymous seductions, casual
And effortless to stroke the anxious pride
Stirring boys who shrink or smile,
Appraise, deliberate, confirm, among the songs
And voices in cafes.
From cinemas and porches you return
To reaffirm the gesture of romance,
So much the same to you until your fears,
Roused by a mood or quickened by a glance,
Appraise, deliberate, confirm, among the words
And pauses and replies:
"We gave you . . . something. You have
lost
Something!" (Like a flower dropped from a
coat)
And if they trembled when you cried
Against their shoulders, if their eyes
Met the disorder of your pride
With some confusion, some surprise,
The taste of such simplicities of grief
Upon your lips was mixed upon their kisses
Like bitterness in honey; whence they whimpered:
"We died upon the verge, a day from home,
And were born again; and how shall we forget?"








GERMAN LETTER
Munich May, i923
FOR several weeks before and after the Christmas holidays the
chaise longue next to my writing-desk was withdrawn from its
natural purpose, since it was piled high with fresh printed matter,
the evidence of our Christmas book mart. Our postman kept bring-
ing in the packages day by day, so that I tried to recompense the man
for his trouble by giving him a goodly selection of our surplus con-
signment. But since a proper place simply could not be found for all
these books, they hindered me from taking that horizontal position
which is frequently so salubrious. In Goethe's words: "Hiess ich
mir das doch eine Messe!" Really, I was quite willing to renounce
my comfort, through my delight with an abundance which, while it
does bring with it much that is useless, testifies at any rate that
there can be no talk of our hanging our heads here in Germany, in
spite of the unfavourable conditions.
Novels, books of verse, year books, anthologies, monographs,
critical essays, philosophic investigations of time and the universe,
collections of historic letters, illustrated editions of classical authors
—nothing was lacking. The masters were there, and the young men
who imitate them, or who imitate one another, or who stand com-
pletely, absolutely, and absurdly alone—all of which also is amus-
ing. The get-up of these books was often of high quality. I am
not speaking of de luxe editions, artistically decorated bibelots
which appear in limited issues, numbered and signed, and which ex-
perience has shown to be good business. These are soon in tight
hands. But also the book intended for a large public displays as a
rule an agreeable binding. Our impoverishment has not changed
things much in this respect, even though the practice to-day usually
is to get the effect by methods more modest than at the time of our
economic flourishing. Since I was young (and was receiving the
strongest literary impressions of my life through the little twenty-
pfennig booklet) the taste of the German public's requirements in
matters of bookbinding has been extraordinarily improved. And
such cultural habits of a people will not easily deteriorate; they
persist somehow, even under reduced economic circumstances. The


6io
GERMAN LETTER
prices—now they are raised to take in the investment of the pub-
lisher and the middleman's need of a profit—the prices are colossal;
during the last weeks, in fact, they have reached such a height that
the consumers' strike has finally set in, and the sale of books, still
in full swing around Christmas, is now at a standstill. It will right
itself, in some way or another; after all, in a country like Germany
the book is as much a necessity as anything else. It is not a luxury;
a people with such an extensive educated class cannot dispense with
it. But perhaps we still have to say good-bye to the "fine" book,
return to the primitive forms of this industry, and bring to market
our poets and thinkers, the old and the new, printed on wood-paper,
like cheap pamphlets whose pages one never hesitates to dog-ear
and to cut with a match. But books will always be turned out, and
will always be bought. Legere necesse est; vivere non est necesse.
To be sure, certain vast and ambitious projects in the field of
books are endangered for the present. The monumental edition of
Nietzsche's complete works is indeed threatening to give way under
economic difficulties. It was being undertaken by an enterprising
institution in Munich, the Musarion-Verlag, in collaboration with
the Weimarer Nietzsche-Archiv; it is appearing under the imprint
of a publishing firm which was founded in Munich during the war
and which carries the name of the great philosopher-lyricist on its
letterheads. The work is splendidly gotten up, philologically ac-
curate, and entirely complete; it is to comprise twenty-two volumes,
and just now is halted at the sixth, while even this came to light
with a certain painful slowness. It is to be feared that the stagna-
tion which has begun will be permanent: the frightful drop in the
exchange, the fabulously swollen costs of production, have made all
calculations in advance impossible. Frankly, it is impossible to raise
the sums which would be necessary to continue the enterprise.
Nietzsche's importance as a prophet and a guide for the future
of mankind cannot be overestimated. And yet unfortunately—
notably in Anglo-Saxon quarters—the most astounding misunder-
standings of his value arose on the part of the vast public. The
usual thing was to link together Nietzsche, Treitschke, and Bern-
hardi—a grotesque cacophony for the ear of all intellectual Ger-
mans, and not of the Germans alone. One might conceivably name
Treitschke and General von Bernhardi in one breath, although
there was a great injustice to Treitschke in this. But it was ridicu-
lous that Nietzsche should be brought in to complete the symbol of


THOMAS MANN
6i1
German wickedness; and it remains ridiculous, even after one
comes to understand how it was possible. The things responsible
for this were his philosophy of power, his anti-Christianity (which
he shared with Goethe, but which was less thoroughly grounded
personally in his case) his enthusiastic glorification of aesthetic
greatness, of the strong and the beautiful life. But to take this
lyricism as a prophecy of militaristic industrialism means simply to
understand neither the lyricism nor the industrialism. Are people
not aware that he, above all others, hated and cursed the "Empire"
for its poverty of philosophy and ideas? That he was the one
who formed the concept of "good Europeanism," and fought
against the obdurate notion of Pan-Germanism as the highest na-
tional tradition? Nietzsche stands at that point where the spirit of
Greece meets the spirit of democracy as it reaches its expression in
hymns through the medium of Walt Whitman; Walt Whitman
when he exclaims "And if the body does not do so much as the
Soul? And if the body were not the Soul, what is the Soul?"
That is the third realm of religious humanity, a new idea of man
which is more than idea, is pathos and love: a true educational love
which assures its standard-bearers—and Nietzsche also was one of
these—the suffrage of an entire young generation. At the En-
tretiens d'Ete in Pontigny, French and Germans have agreed on
the three minds which should be named as the awakeners and the
builders, in both countries, of the present-day sense of values in
living: Whitman, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky. This was un-
doubtedly a more modest assembly than that other one, which was
nothing but a testimony of the general stupidity caused by the war;
and it will be a highly difficult task to point out any connexion be-
tween the Nietzsche-Gesellschaft and General von Bernhardi. (I
am not certain whether he is still alive, the doughty old gentleman.)
This company sees, as the prospectus states, "its principal task in
the fostering of a completely unpolitical, but genuinely European
spirit." The purpose is to assemble "under the name of Friedrich
Nietzsche, the good Europeans of the present, this type of persons
which are readily suspected in their own countries, but nevertheless
embody in their present form the ideas of their nations." They live
in all parts of the world. And we are soliciting members from all
parts of the world—also for our committee, in which, if things go
as we plan, in time each country outside of Germany will be repre-
sented by a member.


6l2
GERMAN LETTER
I mentioned Hugo von Hofmannsthal, a name well known to the
readers of The Dial. Recently this spirited intellect has been mak-
ing the world of thought further extraordinarily handsome and
valuable contributions. Unfortunately I was prevented last sum-
mer from attending the splendid production in Salzburg of his re-
working of Calderon's The Grand World Theatre. But I have
read the poetry with positive astonishment in Hofmannsthal's
magazine, Neue Deutsche Beitrage. The first number of this maga-
zine appeared a short time ago. Its significance and emphasis are
announced programmatically in a few sentences of the editor's fore-
word to the issue, sentences truly addressed to the nation. He says:
"But it amounts quite plainly and simply to this: that in a dark
and adverse situation the intellectuals, through whom the general
public finds its expression, should conduct themselves exactly as
would befit the individual in such a situation. They should retain
a modest deference to the European spiritual world, present and
past in one, and a sturdy self-respect, without haughtiness, regard-
less of how fate may have placed them."
Very good! Very good! But as to The Grand World Theatre,
this allegory of the inner life, this pious play with its brightness and
its sternness—the thing which I marvel at most of all is the mixture
of elements, some of them sublimely poetic, and some crude, lusty,
folk-qualities. This mixture is unmannered and legitimate, but is
natural only to that Catholic, Austrian, South-German sphere in
which this poet is rooted. It is closed to us Protestants—closed, not
in that we cannot enjoy such things, but in that we cannot produce
them. Speaking in broad terms the "cultured" novel remains our
province, even while it is no longer abreast of fashion and the
times as a literary genre. The union of the folk elements with the
sublime is a matter of a more southerly sky and a more socially-
minded culture. It can hardly succeed with the pietistic introspec-
tion of the individualist, which is something to be envied. For what
one cannot do, yes? that is art?
A further contribution of the Austrian poet which I absolutely
must point out is his Deutsches Lesebuch (German Reader) which
is issued by the Bremer Presse in Munich and is complete in two
volumes. The first presents a selection of German prose master-
pieces and extracts of the century from i750 to i850. This book


THOMAS MANN
6i3
cannot be warmly enough recommended to foreigners who wish to
read good German and at the same time lift themselves above the
turmoils and arid misunderstandings of the day, to seek some con-
tact with the higher, the eternal Germany. We too had our "great
century": it was precisely that in which this prose is situated, from
the advent of Lessing up to the bourgeois revolution. And if, as
Hofmannsthal says, we are still not without friends in the world,
it is because we are still living off the high opinion which was
formed of the German intellectual calibre of those days. He says
this in an introduction which, by its grace and dignity of expression,
is on a par with the other contents of the volume. There are, for
instance, such things as: the description of the actor Garrick by
Lichtenberg and that of the torso in the Belvedere at Rome by
Winckelmann; further, Goethe's essay on German architecture; a
portion of Jung-Stilling's Jugendgeschichte; Der Rheinfall Bei
SchafFhausen, by Heinse; the incomparable study by Kleist on the
puppet-show; fragments of Novalis, and much else besides. No
political propaganda could be so effective abroad in defence of an
excessively ill-treated people as this book; and I should be happy
if these lines helped somewhat to smoothe its path through the
world.
Shall I be permitted, on the other side of the ocean, to seek sym-
pathy for the cosmopolitan outlook of a nation which, notwith-
standing so strong a pressure from without, or even with the enemy
inside its borders, still suffers no hardening or narrowing in things
of the mind, but expresses its world-hunger in a varied offering of
literature translated from all languages? Ah! At Christmas the
evidences of this weighted down my ottoman to such an extent,
that I was worried for the elasticity of its springs! There was
the elegant five-volume edition of Diderot, from the Georg
Miillersche Verlag in Munich; further, there were the highly pre-
sentable German versions of a whole row of works by Anatole
France, gotten out by a firm I have mentioned above, the Mu-
sarion-Verlag; and there was no end of translations from the older
and the modern Russian authors, which, as can be learned from
the booksellers, are quite characteristically in especially great de-
mand by our public.
A friend told me that on visiting Andre Gide in Paris recently, he
found the French writer buried in the large German edition of


6i4
GERMAN LETTER
Dostoevsky's complete works—for there is no edition in French.
But while France has discovered Dostoevsky in German, we have
brought out Nikolai Lyesskov, a contemporary to the creator of
The Brothers Karamazov, but overshadowed by him for a long
time. But to-day he is recognized as a story-teller by God's grace,
provided with a rare artistic power, and, in expressing the soul of
the Russian people, quite the equal of the man who found his story,
The Sealed Angel, worthy of an extensive discussion in The
Journal of an Author. We are devouring Lyesskov. There is noth-
ing in Europe to-day like his tremendous talent for story-telling.
But the tradition lives on in the young generation of Russian
writers, more than one member of which is now living in Germany.
To my delight I recently had the opportunity in Berlin of meeting
one and another representative of this poetic offshoot, Remizov for
instance, and Count Alexei Tolstoy. They live there, refugees from
the tyranny of the Reds, but homesick for the Little Mother,
Russia. Meanwhile, they might well feel at home here, since their
works, in the German versions of Alexander Eliasberg, have been
received with the most eager sympathy.
Young Tolstoy, it is said, has obtained his great family name
only through adoption, but as an artist he does it full honour.
His novel, The Road to Calvary, is planned as the first part of a
trilogy which is to lead epically through war and revolution to a
brighter future; it is an unusually healthy and amiable work in
which the plastic strength really does recall at times the old man of
Yasnaya Poliana.
As to Alexei Remizov, he is an artist in folk-lore, loving the old-
fashioned and the primitive to the point of eccentricity; as a result,
even his handwriting, his signature, displays a crisp, old-Slavic
turn. A new book by him is lying before me; it appeared in the
Russian Library of the Munich Drei-Masken Verlag. It is called
Russian Women and contains easily half a hundred short tales,
stories, legendary anecdotes, mostly of a wild, ghostly character—
things which the people like to tell in the evening around the stove;
he has listened to them and heightened them with the license of love
to the most expressive poetry.
I break off for the present. I must save up for a subsequent letter
what I hope to be able to say about modern German fiction and the
state of our theatre.
Thomas Mann


BOOK REVIEWS
A SYNTHETIC MIND
The Life of Reason, or The Phases of Human Pro-
gress. By George Santayana. Volume I: Introduc-
tion and Reason in Common Sense. Volume II:
Reason in Society. Volume III: Reason in Re-
ligion. Volume IV: Reason in Art. Volume V:
Reason in Science. i2mo. i325 pages. Charles
Scribner's Sons. Each volume, $2.
AFTER twenty years, Mr Santayana's magnum opus, The Life
of Reason, has reached a second edition, differing from the
first only by the addition of a characteristic preface. This new
preface tells us that there is hardly a page which perfectly expresses
the author's present feelings, but that he has not attempted a re-
vision because "some readers would perhaps prefer the original to
my revised version, and if I lived another twenty years I might
myself prefer it." There has been, he says, "no change in my delib-
erate doctrine; only some changes of mental habit." The chief of
these is that "Nature has come forward, and the life of reason,
which then held the centre of the stage, has receded." One may
surmise that this change is due to the war, which has certainly in-
clined most reflective minds to minimize the part of reason in
human life, and has made human life itself appear more intimately
a part of Nature than it did when we defined homo as animal ra-
tionale. This, however, is not said by Mr Santayana, and may be
a false interpretation of his change of mood.
Mr Santayana is a philosopher whose importance has not been
adequately recognized. Professors pass him by because he is not
pedantic, and the general public because he does not flatter the
prejudices of our age. It may be suspected, however, that his books
will outlive those of many men who have had a greater contempo-
rary vogue; this is probable just because his writing is not topical.
He is not a "modern," in the sense in which the pragmatists are
modern in university philosophy, or Mr H. G. Wells in popular
thought. The intellectual background of our time is composed of


6i6
A SYNTHETIC MIND
conflicting tendencies. First, there is the heritage of the romantic
movement and the French Revolution; this leads to an extreme
individualism, exemplified in contemporary art and in the philos-
ophy of Nietzsche, as well as in much of German idealism. Sec-
ondly, there is the idea of evolution, originally in conflict with
religion, but now reconciled to it; this idea leads to a disbelief in
finality, whether in thought or in social systems, and to a mystical
faith in "progress." Thirdly, there is physics and industrialism—
the mind and body of the new world that is growing up independ-
ently of our conscious desires, creating a new organization and a
new rigidity to replace those of the Middle Ages. The chaotic
character of our world—in art, in thought, and in politics—is
largely attributable to the conflict of industrialism (which has been
in the main an instinctive growth) with the beliefs and ideals that
we inherit from Rousseau and the romanticists.
Mr Santayana is aware of these modern forces, but as an ob-
server, not as one who is subject to their operation. So far as his
own tastes and interests are concerned, there are other periods in
which he might have lived—seventeenth-century France, for ex-
ample, or the age of Tacitus. His knowledge of the present is like
other men's knowledge of the past, an external affair, lacking in-
stinctive sympathy. I do not say this by way of criticism, since our
age is destitute of some of the most important elements of human
excellence. What these are, Mr Santayana endeavours to make
us know in his urbane, uncontroversial manner. He loves, first and
foremost, the Greeks, and among the Greeks especially Democritus
and Plato. He admires the Roman Empire, and he cherishes an af-
fection for the Catholic Church—without, of course, accepting its
dogmas. He holds that the Latin races alone understand civiliza-
tion, and that the best of the English and Germans are hardly more
than inspired barbarians. I cannot recall any mention of Russian
literature in his works, but I am convinced that if he were com-
pelled to read Dostoevsky he would treat him even more scathingly
than he has treated Browning and Walt Whitman; while what he
would say of Tolstoy as a prophet may be inferred from what he
says of Kant:
"The 'categorical imperative' was a shadow of the ten command-
ments; the postulates of practical reason were the minimal tenets of


BERTRAND RUSSELL
6i7
the most abstract Protestantism. These fossils, found unaccount-
ably embedded in the old man's mind, he regarded as the evidences
of an inward but supernatural revelation."
Mr Santayana is a believer in physical science, and in a sense a
materialist. But he holds these doctrines, not as moderns do, but as
Lucretius did. If I had not read what he says about Epicurus, I
should be tempted to call him an Epicurean; certainly he would
have felt at home with those aristocratic Ghibelline Epicureans of
whom Dante found such attractive specimens in Hell. He would
not feel at home with Einstein, because relativity disintegrates
matter into a flux of events, and seems to destroy its solidity and
power. He loves solidity perhaps more than any other quality; he
would like our beliefs, our social systems, and the external world
to have as far as possible the character of Roman architecture. In
our age, such things as railways, sky-scrapers, and the Assouan dam
have something of this Roman quality, but our thought, as yet, has
none of it. It may be suspected that if, in time, our ideas become
again as rigid as an iron building, they will not take a form which
would please Mr Santayana, because they will not be mellow with
age. He likes the rock to be overgrown with moss, concealing its
alarming immovability beneath a veil of softness. He loves the
pieties and myths that gather about ancient tradition, and it is
doubtful whether he could ever like anything radically new. But it
is time to turn from his tastes to his beliefs—which, however, like
those of most good writers, are an embodiment of temperament, and
can hardly be appreciated without some understanding of his likes
and dislikes.
Mr Santayana's philosophy is at once ethical and naturalistic.
He views man as an animal plunged into a given environment, and
endowed with a variety of tastes and impulses. "Reason" consists
in taking account of our whole nature, and also of our environment
as revealed by science, and endeavouring to produce the greatest
attainable harmony, both inwardly and outwardly. This involves
a certain humility, and also a certain capacity of renunciation. He
hates those who, like Fichte, essentially deny that we have any en-
vironment, and think that our own ego is all that we have to con-
sider. He hates also those who, like the romantics, admire an im-
pulse for its strength and passion, and not for its power of con-


6i8
A SYNTHETIC MIND
tributing to life as a whole. He takes pleasure in the limitations to
individual power, and even to collective human power, because they
are indications of a wider order, a possibility of a more enlarged
cosmos. Every impulse is in itself good, but it becomes contrary to
the life of reason when it is allowed to defeat the satisfaction of
other impulses which have equal rights. In his Life of Reason he
traces out the harmonious development of human nature in the
successive fields of common sense, society, religion, art, and science.
On all of these, he says many illuminating things, but most readers
will derive the greatest pleasure from his occasional trenchant
criticisms of current forms of unreason.
There is in all his writing an extraordinary aptitude for produc-
ing le mot juste about whatever topic he is discussing. For this
reason, as well as on account of his admirable style, he lends him-
self to the method of selection, employed by Mr Pearsall Smith in
Little Essays, Drawn from the Writings of George Santayana. In
some ways, his merits are more apparent in this form than in his
complete works; for, while all his writing is good in detail, one
cannot but feel something lacking in the whole. What it is that is
lacking, it is not easy to say. His mind is synthetic rather than
analytic, and synthesis, nowadays, is only possible by a certain
wilful blindness. Whatever synthesis is suggested, something is
known which contradicts it. Moreover, every synthesis, once ac-
cepted, becomes a mental prison; the pleasure of synthesis is so
great that its votaries fight against everything that would destroy
it. Reason has its place in life, but that place is, perhaps, not para-
mount. If our reason were divine, we could worship it and let it
rule us; but it is human, and liable to err. To respect it unduly is
to retard progress, even intellectual progress. Perhaps it is on this
account that the reader feels no very ardent desire to live Mr
Santayana's reasonable life; perhaps it is for reasons that have more
to do with the old Adam. Which it is, I cannot tell; but the feeling
persists in spite of all his admonitions that it is well to become what
he would call a "humble animal."
Bertrand Russell


GERMAN SYMBOLISM
Demian. By Hermann Hesse. Translated from the
German by N. H. Friday. i2mo. 2i3 pages. Boni
and Liveright. $2.
DEMIAN is a disorderly and unconvincing piece of fiction. It
is a symbolical attempt to reconcile the imaginative aggres-
siveness of the Nietzschean will with the sacrificial tolerance of
Christianity—in other words, the conflict of two moralities. The
book is compounded of strange things: apocalyptic visions, remote
philosophies from the cabbala, and dreams interpreted in the
modern method of Freud. This is dangerous stuff for the making
of novels, and particularly dangerous here, since the author uses
his materials to exemplify psychological truth and not as accessories
to dramatic emphasis. Despite the carefully selected incidents and
a background drawn with unusual honesty and considerable skill,
the characters remain abstractions. One and all are bloodless
creatures, empty of all reality, and suggestive of the studio-con-
ceptions of Poe. But Poe was a thoroughly consistent workman; his
characters are devoid of human warmth and corporeality, but they
are, to the last degree, appropriate to their limited world; Hesse
endeavours to enliven a realistic skeleton by imposing mystic ideas
upon it; he gives us moods and incredible episodes; and unable to
devise a satisfactory conclusion, brings in the great war as an in-
strument of divine light, and then suddenly stops.
In one sense, of course, all art is symbolical. In reading Don
Quixote we are sharply conscious of our own extravagances, of our
reckless efforts to escape the oppressions of life by plunging head-
long into romantic folly. Hence the universal appeal of the book.
But within recent years the robust sanity of great art has been cast
aside for a symbolism of a very narrow order. Painting has been
scourged by vapid abstractions, and by expressionists seeking to
portray obscure and incommunicable states of the soul; literature
has been invaded by neurotics, and by precocious intellectuals who
would rather be damned with James Joyce than write anything so
banal as to stir the sensibilities into a decent human emotion. Hesse


620
GERMAN SYMBOLISM
is a penetrating critic; he is evidently familiar with the psychology
of the unconscious mind; he yearns religiously to escape the bonds
of materiality; but his novel is little more than a record of the be-
haviour of a few emblems of abnormality.
Let us examine briefly the character of the symbols. Demian, the
principal adumbration, bears the mark of Cain, a sign of intel-
lectual superiority—this super-youth knows all the secrets of
heaven and earth by magical intuition, and is subject to catalepsy;
his mother, or mistress—the author is not clear on this point—is a
sort of Rosicrucian goddess; Sinclair, friend to Demian and narra-
tor of the story, is a blundering student who drifts from bad to
worse, falls in with Pistorius, a musical necromancer beaten at his
own game, rises again to a shadowy communion with the occult
powers, and at length meets his affinity in Demian's mother, or mis-
tress. I doubt if Mr Yeats himself would accept the account of
Sinclair's artistry: unconsciously and with practically no training
the student paints a beautiful water-colour, an androgynous crea-
tion resembling at first his beneficent genius Demian, and later on
Demian's consort. There is no end of dreams, and the dreams are
subtle and elaborate; there are fire demons and sacred hawks,
mysteries and desires—and then, happily, the war.
The elements just enumerated are enough to kill the book for
readers who demand intelligible human experience as the basis of
a novel; who admit the author's right to mould his characters as he
pleases, to strengthen their fibre and magnify their actions to a ter-
rifying limit, provided these departures from the normal are
directly referable to the fundamental operations of the spirit. But
to the neurotics, spiritualists, and cosmic wiseacres, Demian will
have a large and, I dare say, perspicuous appeal.
In justice to Hesse it must be said that Demian contains isolated
passages of genuine beauty, and that notwithstanding its cryptic
allusions and vagaries, it is a relief to Americans who are tired of
mechanical ingenuity and the meanness of small towns. The fault
is mainly one of medium—the book has simply no vitality as fiction.
Hesse has contributed psychologically to the revolt against the
curse of materialism; occasionally his novel lifts us above the curse,
and that, in itself, is something of an achievement.
Thomas Craven


RECONSTRUCTING MISS AUSTEN
The Watsons. By Jane Austen. Concluded by L.
Oulton. i2mo. 211 pages. D. Appleton and Co. $1.75.
JANE AUSTEN'S fragment, The Watsons, first published some
time ago in her collected works, has now been brought out sepa-
rately with a conclusion by somebody else. As it has been com-
plained that there is no indication of where Miss Austen leaves off
and Miss Oulton begins, it may be worth while to put on record
that Miss Austen's last words are the three lines at the top of
page i04.
Not that the change wouldn't soon be noticeable in any case.
Miss Oulton does not delay to sink. It would be absurd to blame
her seriously for not succeeding, as not even a great artist could
complete a great artist's work; but it does seem to me that she has
left the suture a little more glaring than it need have been by aban-
doning not perhaps the style of her author, but the characteristic
features of her technique. Her continuation is interesting because it
heightens our sense of what Miss Austen's method actually was.
In the first place, Miss Austen was in the habit of developing her
action in a series of elaborate episodes and scenes—rather in the
manner of Henry James.. It is not surprising that Miss Oulton
cannot keep this up—for it would require an extraordinary dra-
matic genius to do so—the genius which Miss Austen possessed to
such an amazing degree. The Watsons itself supplies an example
of this of a kind to bring despair not only to Miss Oulton, but also,
I should think, to almost any other writer. Miss Austen brings her
heroine, a by no means dazzling girl, to a small dance in a provin-
cial town; before she arrives she has been told a little of some of
the people whom she is to meet there. Yet by the time the reader
has arrived at the door of that prosaic "assembly room" he is almost
as much excited about the ball as the young lady is supposed to be
herself. No adventure in a tale of mystery could be more thrill-
ingly prepared. We watch the coming and goings of the dancers
like the auguries of Some tremendous drama. In their gestures we
half read the signs of a complete world just beyond our ken.


622 RECONSTRUCTING MISS AUSTEN
But, what is less venial, Miss Oulton has altogether disregarded
Miss Austen's manner of focussing her material. In general, Miss
Austen—like James again—ordinarily soaked her story in a single
temperament: the central character in the complex of relations sup-
plies the eyes through which all the others are seen. The kind of
personality possessed by the heroine determines the kind of interest
to be derived from the events. Now Miss Oulton abandons the lim-
ited point of view which makes the "assembly," for example, excit-
ing. The circumstances which surround Emma Watson are interest-
ing because we do not know too much about them; but Miss Oulton,
as soon as she has launched forth, will be telling us at once what
everybody is up to. She even begins switching back and forth, as
Miss Austen would surely never do, between different groups of
characters—some in England, some in Italy!
Incidentally, it is in this question of the central personality that
I believe the real reason is probably to be found for Jane Austen's
never finishing The Watsons—not, as Mr Austen. Leigh suggests
in the preface, like one of his great-aunt's own pompous snobs, be-
cause "the author became aware of the evil of having placed her
heroine too low, in such a position of poverty and obscurity as,
though not necessarily connected with vulgarity, has a sad tendency
to degenerate into it." I cannot believe it was her obscure situation
which discouraged Miss Austen with Emma Watson. Fanny Price,
in Mansfield Park, reaches a milieu far more ignoble than anything
possible for Emma Watson. It must rather have been her paleness
and tameness which allowed Jane Austen to drop her fortunes. In
Pride and Prejudice we have a finely sensible heroine who sets the
tune of the story by her tact; in Mansfield Park we have a girl so
submissive that her very humility gives the book a positive colour;
in Northanger Abbey the whole action takes its point from the
delusions of a young romantic. But it is a little difficult, in The
Watsons, to see what value Emma Watson could have had. She
seems to come nearer to the conventional modest heroine than it
was Miss Austen's habit to invent. She seems built for no more
interesting fate than to triumph through virtue over the pretentious
and the proud; and it is no doubt the somewhat narrowly correct
quality of this virtue which persuaded her creator to extinguish her.
Yet though Miss Austen's indications plainly point to the happy
ending which Miss Oulton fills in, I cannot believe that Miss Aus-


EDMUND WILSON, JR. 623
ten would have arrived at it with quite the ease which Miss Oulton
permits herself. Though Miss Austen brought her novels to a close
with the conventional happy ending of the time, it is a happy end-
ing which we never feel is anything more than a convention. Miss
Oulton's good characters are completely good and the characters
which Miss Austen has made disagreeable become suddenly rather
amiable people as soon as Miss Austen has left the room. But in
Miss Austen life is not so easy as this; moral values are not so sim-
ple. No other novelist has ever been more ruthless than was Miss
Austen, within her convention. Not Shakespeare; not Racine. As
we read we are sometimes abashed as by the sight of life itself; we
smile, but we are troubled as we smile. The narrow stage proves
yet as deep as the inexplicable laws of human fate; and the prim
figures of the county, as we watch them, take on the seriousness
which arrests us in any intense and clear-headed vision of human
life.
Edmund Wilson, Jr.


THE OWL AND THE NIGHTINGALE
Black Armour. By Elinor Wylie. i2mo. 77 pages.
George H. Doran Company. $1.50.
IANTASY is the quality of an agile mind working freely, as if
A in a vacuum. It consists in the unexpected combination of
ideas and images so as to create a world apart from the world,
governed by a more arbitrary logic. The poems of Elinor Wylie, at
any rate the best of them, have fantasy. They share the quality
with T. S. Eliot, and reading Black Armour for the first time one is
reminded of him forcibly.
But of which Eliot . . . the question is legitimate; he is
never quite the same; he changes his style to keep pace with the
continued development of his ideas. An author who depends on
the sole resources of his own temperament (take Sherwood Ander-
son for example) is perfectly consistent with his own temperament;
he changes rarely. There is an opposite type, that of Apollinaire or
Picasso: intellectual artists, perfectly conscious, who gather in-
formation wherever they can find it and imitate anybody except
themselves. They move from one theory to another, emitting dis-
ciples like sparks as they pass through each stage: the disciples have
separate relations to the master and are usually one another's
enemies. Eliot is an artist, a master, of this type.
As in the case of Picasso, where Pink and Blue and Classical eras
are distinguished, one can name the eras of Eliot: for example the
period of the early realistic poems, the Prufrock stage, the quatrains
about Sweeney, Gerontion, The Waste Land. Each era has a sepa-
rate influence whose history can be traced; Black Armour belongs in
great part to the history of the quatrains. Remembering Burbank
in Venice one reads:

'Castilian facing Lucifer,
Juan does not remove his cap;
Unswaddled infantile to her
His soul lies kicking in her lap.


MALCOLM COWLEY 625
While she, transported by the wind
! Mercutio has clasped and kissed . . .
Like quicksilver, her absent mind
Evades them both, and is not missed."
In these two stanzas her qualities are evident. A poem by-
Elinor Wylie is the quick notation of a guess, a situation, a
metaphor; it contains a bit of drama, rarely a narrative, often a
character drawn briefly, but not hastily. Her metre is like Eliot's;
her images have a similar air of being jumbled together, with de-
liberation; her vocabulary, though not the same, is parallel and
includes strange words, words out of history and science, words
used for their own sake, but exactly, with a parade of erudition
which is justified in the fact. Alarums rhymes with bar-rooms and
sentient with bent; Apeneck Sweeney nods his maculate head in
approval.
But the resemblance to Eliot is more on the surface than beneath,
and when Miss Wylie uses the same dictionary and the same
metrics she uses them to her own purpose. She has a personality
which is in many ways his opposite. He is afraid of intimate emo-
tions, hides them politely, holds them at arm's length when he
wishes to describe them; she is both emotional and intimate, as if
her subject were a penny world to eat with Pippit behind the screen.
She writes in a medium which Eliot never attempted: magazine
verse. Literature takes curious forms and magazine verse is one of
them. It is bound by conventions as rigid, perhaps, as those of
Racinian tragedy or the Noh drama; the perspective of a century
will be needed to appreciate how they are narrow. Magazine verse
must fill the bottom of a page, agreeably. It is limited to certain
subjects treated with a certain degree of lyricism; to emotions
neither too personal nor impersonal and to a few stanzas in a minor
tradition. Apparently these conventions should prevent the writing
of even passable verse, but talent thrives on conventions. Miss
Wylie is talented.
She writes genuine poetry while observing even the minor con-
ventions of her medium. For example it is the general consent that
human bodies are composed of breast, hands, head. Black Armour
is in five sections to cover them: breastplate, gauntlet, helmet,
beaver (Beaver Up!) and plumes. Jhe legs are left unprotected


626
THE OWL AND THE NIGHTINGALE
through delicacy, or they are lacking. And nevertheless Black
Armour gives no sense of being incomplete; within limitations it is
unexcelled. The verse is hard and bright as a piece of machinery;
there are no loose screws about it; metres are varied with astonish-
ing skill. Miss Wylie is a craftsman who cannot be praised too
highly, but her real achievement is to write magazine verse which is
not repulsive to the intelligence. I doubt whether any one else has
done as much.
Only, you form such a high opinion of her talents that you expect
too much of them, saying to yourself: The last poem was agreeable,
but the next will be a masterpiece ... or surely the one
after. At the end of the book you are left still unsatisfied, still ex-
pecting another something which will come, perhaps, in a future
volume. The feeling is not disagreeable. Sometimes you wish she
would write in other conventions, more ambitious, complete an-
atomically, giving more scope to her notations of character and her
dramatic power. As it is, she never lacks charm and only at her
worst is she cute.
Apparently her greatest virtue should be the fact that she com-
bines, in wise proportions, intellect with emotion. It is a defect in-
stead, perhaps her gravest, for although she combines them in a
book she has fused them perfectly in no single poem. She has emo-
tion and fantasy by turns. She thinks in one poem and thinks well;
feels in one poem and feels strongly; allows thought and feeling to
be separate. She is the Owl and the lyric Nightingale at sea in a
beautiful pea-green boat; during the honeymoon they write verses
dedicated to each other, but obviously by two authors.
It is the Owl who is more modern. . . . There is a group
of phenomena in contemporary letters, which, if taken together, are
the elements of a movement perhaps important enough to be com-
pared with the classicism of the seventeenth century or the roman-
ticism of the nineteenth. Different aspects of the movement have
been referred to as cubist, neo-classical, abstract, fantastic, but the
one term which includes all its tendencies is Intellectual ism. The
decade, perhaps the century will be intellectualist. . . . Miss
Wylie, with her double personality, is half in the movement and
half outside of it. In a way this is a judgement, for although it is no
virtue to be modern, none to be conservative, there is a difficult
virtue in extremes.
Malcolm Cowley


MACHEN IN RETROSPECT
Things Near and Far. i2mo. 250 pages. $2. The
House of Souls. The Secret Glory. Far Off
Things. The Hill of Dreams. Hieroglyphics.
By Arthur Machen. Published by Alfred A. Knopf.
PAN—the Pan of what, in one's innocence, one used to call the
fin-de-siecle—died hard. But he did die: and was securely
buried, very deep beneath a headstone embellished with a design of
a somewhat post-Beardsley school. Since when, as examination of
the Georgian poets will demonstrate, he never stirred; and in the
very woodlands where, in the not so very distant 'nineties, his
shadow had evoked a nameless terror, finches, thrushes, and even
nightingales warbled sweetly again. . . . Pursue these wist-
ful thoughts a little, and then reflect how sharp a surprise it must
have been for Arthur Machen, of late years, to find himself be-
coming slowly but surely the object of a cult. Minor, if you like,
but still a cult.
Machen seemed so definitely to have faded away. For since
i902, when Hieroglyphics appeared, the chief public recognition of
his literary powers had been shewn by the late Viscount Northcliffe,
who used him until i92i, with the almost uncanny perspicacity of
a captain of industry, as a reporter on the London Evening News.
For several years Machen, a man who had certainly ventured into
some very curious hinterlands of the human soul and probably
come very near to meeting Pan face to face, was thus enabled to
run around the town accumulating fragments of insane information
for those quite touchingly ephemeral columns, interviewing Person-
ages in theatres and West-end hotels, writing up the usual stories
to order—a specialist, I conjecture, in the warm little gusts of
religious emotion stirred in the readers of the "late finals" by a cele-
brated death or a really military funeral. It was a murky disap-
pearance. He only emerged as a visible character again on that
memorable occasion in i9i5 when, having invented in a short story
the highly popular Angels of Mons, he found to his alarm that his
creatures were rapidly becoming an accepted piece of the history


628
MACHEN IN RETROSPECT
of British strategy, and that no right-thinking clergyman would be-
lieve that they were only the angels of a Mr Arthur Machen. In
1907, it is true, The Hill of Dreams, written ten years before, had
appeared: but the mode was aging and no one had paid very much
attention. And with the passing of a few more years a good many
people, even among the erudite in such things, must have thought
that the author of The Great God Pan, like most of the "Keynotes"
celebrities, was either dead or stricken vengefully dumb. And then,
somehow or other, perhaps by the intervention of those angels, signs
of a resurrection began to multiply. Mr Vincent Starrett, for in-
stance, arose and proclaimed him to be the "Novelist of Ecstasy
and Sin." Before long, collectors would find his name, in their
catalogues of "modern firsts," appearing just before that of Mase-
field. A sixty-page bibliography, with introduction and notes (these
last extremely amusing, by the way) and costing fifteen shillings,
was published. The late Peter Whiffle, nothing if not a litmus to
test the elegances of the 'twenties, sat in Stuyvesant Square and
talked Machen continuously through five of Mr Van Vechten's
pages, in such an ecstasy of dreadful delight as even his subject has
never quite attained. And 1923 brings a uniform and collected edi-
tion of his work in England.
Things Near And Far really contains the core of most of
Machen's creative writing. This second volume of his autobiog-
raphy (if the term is not too strict for an agreeably mazy mono-
logue) covers the years between i884 and 190i, during which he ac-
complished most of that imaginative work. And I incline to think
that this meditation and self-portraiture is in many ways an indis-
pensable gloss on his novels and tales of the occult. Machen set out
to depict certain recondite states of the soul which are probably im-
possible to define, certainly intensely difficult even to indicate: the
symbols are wavering and uncertain, now too vague, now too
esoteric. But manifestly his stories (the best of them) were born of
his own experience of the Hidden Country. They had been written
out of so long a travail, and with such painstaking valuation of
words, that they were obviously not just the glorified "shockers"
they were often mistaken for. Yet the fact remains that when
Machen writes (as here) directly of himself, of the actual houses
he has lived in, of the actual adventures of his own youth, of the


HAMISH MILES
629
actual horrors of his own solitude, he writes with far more ease, and
he carries a correspondingly greater conviction, than when he trans-
posed these experiences, whether in the seen or the unseeable
worlds, into fiction.
Look, for instance, at a highly characteristic work, The Hill of
Dreams. Here he set out to write, as he says himself, "a Robinson
Crusoe of the mind ... to represent loneliness not of the
body on a desert island, but loneliness of the soul and mind and
spirit in the midst of myriads and myriads of men." The story, in
effect, is Machen's imaginative summing-up of the years which he
now returns to describe more or less objectively in Things Near And
Far. The woods and valleys of Gwent and the ghosts of Isca
Silurum, the torture of a barren endeavour in letters, poverty and
the abominable wilderness of the London of dim boarding-houses,
the Ars Magna of the city and the exploration of obscure streets in
search of the unutterable Mystery which he knows they hold, the
loneliness of crowds tightening about him—the two books are
fashioned from the same material. But the Lucian Taylor of the
novel is a tediously laboured manipulation of character in compari-
son with this mature, coolly reticent narrative of the same (or
similar) happenings. Lucian never emerges altogether solid and
three-dimensioned from the page: he has something of the remote
and disembodied quality of a "case" in the Proceedings of the
Society for Psychical Research. That adolescent misanthropy of
his is irksome. The girding at stupid schoolboys, frumpish rela-
tives, "impossible people" in general, grows tiresome. The satiric
touch is often strangely amateurish. And all this weakens the tre-
mendous force of Lucian's story. But take this volume and its pre-
decessor, Far Off Things, and turn back to The Hill of Dreams
with the living Machen in your mind to sharpen the outlines of
Lucian. The whole story is somehow quickened with a new vitality
that transcends the irritating flaws in the telling. The smouldering
glow burns suddenly up. It is as if an actor of genius had taken
over a part from a stiff and puzzled beginner.
Sentimentality? It was all true, then? Here is Mr Machen
himself telling us so ... If only we had known . . .
No, admittedly the artist has no earthly right to count on a ret-
rospective aid like this. And Machen, of course, has nowhere asked


630 MACHEN IN RETROSPECT
for it. But the measure of Machen's success in these self-explana-
tory books is in a way a measure of his failure in earlier ones. The
pity is that it is only in these late works that he has found an ex-
pression so free and adequate. His first matrix was fashioned after
a pattern of Rabelais, Marguerite of Navarre, Beroalde de
Verville; later came a congenial fluency in a Stevensonian manner;
from this he deliberately broke away after i895 in search of an
authentic style. But only now does he seem to have found his way
into an easy, unshackled, uninhibited speech. It may be, perhaps,
that only now has he come into a settled tranquillity of the soul.
Such things come late: and this is the book of a man who knows it.
Hamish Miles


BRIEFER MENTION
Earlham, by Percy Lubbock (l2mo, 254 pages; Scribner: $3) is a reflec-
tion of precisely the type of intellect which, in the same author's The Craft
of Fiction, laid its choicest gifts on the shrine of Henry James. Here is
probably the most searching, as it is certainly one of the most artistic, repre-
sentations of the life of an English country house which has found its way
between book covers. Nothing is wasted in this delicate recital; one gets the
colour and the feel of an exquisite civilization, where tradition is lifted
to a poetic significance and where the influence of environment, instead of
being a force of dwindling importance, becomes the mainspring of inspira-
tion. Mr Lubbock is a master of portraiture, and he has conjured out of
the past a miniature—deft and sympathetic, and in the full sense of the
word, beautiful.
Lady into Fox, by David Garnett (i2mo, 97 pages; Knopf: $i.50) presents
a supernatural event, the sudden metamorphosis of a lady into a fox, in
nineteenth century England, under the eyes of her husband. The illusion
of reality is perfectly maintained, the details of the effect of the change
upon a correct English country household, the gradual change in the lady's-
character to fit her new form, are admirably worked out. And quite apart
from the lady's side of it, the sympathetic handling of the unfortunate hus-
band's dilemma is excellent.
Impromptu, by Elliot Paul (i2mo, 356 pages; Knopf: $2.50) is a ghastly
book on a Dostoevsky model, vivid, bitter, and foredoomed to swift ob-
scurity on several counts. It is written in impressionist fashion with con-
siderable technical power. There are some facets of reality about it, and
as a study of certain pathological cases and types it ought to be valuable.
It is the story of a boy with a yellow streak which widens with the sordid
and terrible experiences he undergoes, until murder for an end he has not
the nerve to carry through, closes his active career. The heroine is a
moron who gravitates into the profession best fitted for her. And there
Impromptu ends, as a nightmare fades. Elliot Paul ought to write some-
thing really fine when he finds his own manner, and learns to interpret the
details which he can so vividly select.
The Seven Ages of Woman, by Compton Mackenzie (i2mo, 3i5 pages;
Stokes: $2). Mr Mackenzie shows us a child born of a romantic love
to young, normal, healthy parents going through life without passion,
without friendship, too bloodless for tragedy, without intellectual en-
thusiasms, gossip, malice, or generosity, and calls it Woman. The book
seems to derive from a drowsy after-dinner remembrance of The Old
Wives' Tale. But it does not confine itself to an emaciated imitation of
Bennett. When the lower middle class is in question Dickens is liberally
drawn upon. In short it is a thoroughly literary production, a pale
shadow of a shadow. Its veins run printer's ink.


632
BRIEFER MENTION
Blackguard, by Maxwell Bodenheim (i2mo, 2i5 pages; Covici-McGee:
$2) is a book that loses by contrast with another recent novel with the
same theme and something of the same bias, to wit, Craven's Paint. Both
books assume that, as the latter author aptly phrases it, the artist in the
modern world is, like the prostitute, a parasite upon society. The difference
is that whereas Craven's hero accepts his destiny with a kind of simple
hardihood, Bodenheim's blackguard is a weakling who derives a sense of
achievement as much from a clever sneer as from a well-made poem. The
novel is rich in excellent epigram and has a few entertaining portraits, but
is chiefly important as something for Maxwell Bodenheim to put behind
him.
Secret Drama, by Isabel Beaumont (i2mo, 3i6 pages; Harcourt, Brace: $2)
is really an exceptional novel in spite of the fact that it was awarded the
Melrose £250 first-novel prize in London. Miss Beaumont has an able pen
and a still abler intuition which permits her to get under the skin of her
sisters. Her portrait of the contemporary femme savante is lucid and
merciless, her attitude cool and detached, her emotion restrained, but not
sterile. She is fully aware of the inevitable tragic strain in the truly comic
situation. May Sinclair will have to look to her laurels.
The substitution of unremarkable snobbisms for thought in Black Oxen, by
Gertrude Atherton (i2mo, 346 pages; Boni & Liveright: $2) produces a
triple breakdown. First, the wires of the suspense-pattern are left un-
tightened and ungilt, and the crude secret of the loose mystery peeks
beyond the frame at every moment. Second, the portrait of fashionable and
literary New York is fatally crippled by the provincial assumptions of a
social climber and the equally provincial assumption that the "Algonquins"
constitute the bright centre of American intelligence. Third, one can accept
the bodily rejuvenation of Madame Zattiany, but it is hard to discover an
old cagey mind in her—"the most subtle, complex, and fascinating woman
in Europe . . . abominably disillusioned." Mrs Atherton, however, gives
her favourite no opportunity to display her reputed genius for politics, but
•does exhibit her admiring the mind of a newspaper columnist and admitting
that the novel Main Street is Greek to her. Like those of Main Street,
the imperfections of Black Oxen are of that golden sort that insures a
.democratic -success.
American Ballads and Songs, collected and edited by Louise Pound (i6mo,
266 pages; Scribner: $i). It is a mistake to believe that American folk-
songs are disappearing; the only sort to die is that type of imported
European ballad which students have been taught to record. If Sweet
William is forgotten with his Lady Margaret, Frankie and Johnnie sur-
vive. Most of our interesting folk-songs of the present are sea chanties,
or obscene, or just blues. Miss Pound's anthology includes none of these
types. She would be the first to admit that it smells more of the library
than the forecastle or the barber shop, but it loses the best of its material
£herehy. She ;has done well with what remains.


BRIEFER MENTION 633
Samphire, by John Cowper Powys (i6mo, 53 pages; Seltzer: $i) is a
book of twenty poems in a jargon worthy of Ossian or Monk Lewis, with
mysterious castles, haunted woods, trolls, and a personal Devil. A bit of
cosmos is thrown in for good measure, while the metre limps and staggers
as if drunken with Immensities. . . . Samphire is also an aromatic
cliff plant used in making pickles.
Orioles and Blackbirds, by Hi Simons (i2mo, 7i pages; Will Ransom)
is a first volume of verse, in rhythms hardly more than the rhythms
of prose. The virtue of its best poems is to be outspoken; the vice of the
others is decoration in old patterns. It promises well and that is its main
achievement.
Roast Leviathan, by Louis Untermeyer (i2mo, i43 pages; Harcourt Brace:
$i.75) is not, as its author seems to think, compact of "that strange blend of
irony and imagery" which constitutes for him the literary heritage of the
Jews. It is rather a stranger blend of authenticity and pose, of naive self-
glorification and essential fire. Even in the foreword the old distressing
.note of puerile braggadocio recurs. Such poems as He Goads Himself and
Lenox Avenue Express are merely a facile restatement of a theme which
Louis Untermeyer should never have attempted. Another false note is
struck when the poet claims that such a piece as Boy and Tadpoles reflects
the "ironism and Semitic fantasy" peculiar to his race. There is nothing
obviously Semitic about Stephen Benet's analagous Portrait of a Boy.
Putting these irritations aside, what one finds in this volume is a greater
strength, a finer sensitivity, a richer content than was discoverable in the
author's previous books. There is a good deal of obvious influence, per-
haps inevitable to so inveterate a parodist, but on the whole a firmer grasp
on his material and more interesting stuff between his fingers.
The Thinker, by Stanton A. Coblentz (i6mo, ii2 pages; White: $i.50) is
commonplace and honest. "In seeking," Mr Coblentz says, "to subject the
truth to the vivid light of poetry, I have striven to avoid the cold rays of
didacticism; in most cases I have essayed to temper my thoughts with the
solvent of imagination or of a transforming emotion; and in every instance
I have endeavoured to present ideas only as moulded and given effect and
direction through the channels of art."
The Life of William Hazlitt, by P. P. Howe (illus., 8vo, 476 pages;
Doran: $6). Despite—rather than because of—a vast and painstakingly
collected mass of evidence, the character of William Hazlitt, critic, painter,
essayist, lifts magnetically from the pages of this book—irritable, morose,
sometimes washed with the "waters of bitterness," yet always splendidly
and craggily significant. The author has made untiring search through this
period and has collected every slight documentary straw which indicates the
wind of the times and Hazlitt's relation to them. As a research student he
has made this book a faithful and exhaustive repository rather than a
constructive living portrait.


634
BRIEFER MENTION
Letters and Papers of John Addington Symonds, collected and edited by
Horatio F. Brown (i2mo, 280 pages; Scribner: $3.50) are alone suffi-
cient to establish their author as one of the few reliable coeval touchstones
for the literary production of Victorian England. Symonds's reservations
on Tennyson, Browning, and Stevenson are the starting-points for the
adverse judgements of these one-time heroes by a later generation. Pain-
fully cognizant of the destruction by science of the old stabilities of con-
sciousness, he foresaw our contemporary task, the creation of a new
synthesis of consciousness, and therefore he responded promptly and
warmly to Walt Whitman. He was, however, impotent to construct his
life upon Whitman; his sighing is excessive; three years before his death
he wrote: "I am reconciled to literature and study as palliatives. I do not
believe in them as substantial factors in life. Only when I am in fairly
good spirits do they amuse me and help me to pass the time."
A Book About Myself, by Theodore Dreiser (8vo, 502 pages; Boni &
Liveright: $3-5o) recounts the throes of the author's early twenties in
humourless apostrophes, with a redundancy that reveals his childish be-
lief in their importance. One grows impatient, but remains indulgent
For the sluggish movement of the book, like that of his novels, is a
motion powerful with life-force: Dreiser never writes from second-hand
knowledge, but only of what he himself has seen and heard, and as a
consequence felt. He feels deeply; too deeply to seem quite mature in-
tellectually. This may be just as well when he is purely the creative
artist; when, however, he is reviewing his own life in the capacity of in-
terpreter and, ideally at least, of critic, it is decidedly detrimental.
Joseph Conrad: His Romantic-Realism, by Ruth M. Stauffer (i2mo, i22
pages; Four Seas: $2.50) is a conscientious attempt to encompass the
technic of Conrad, which fails, as most criticism fails, by mistaking prop
erties for essences. The author's definitions of romanticism and realism
are pre-Eliot, and the hypothetical romantic-realistic genre she declares
Conrad has created is invalidated by her superficial distinctions. Con-
fronted by technical functions, she sees only "symbols," or a representation
of life's post facto unravellings for the sake of verisimilitude. The method
is strictly classroom: comments on plots, characters, and settings in a
vague, trade-marked prose of zero candle power. The bibliography is
thorough.
Fifty-One Years of Victorian Life, by the Dowager Countess of Jersey
(8vo, 392 pages; Dutton: $7) might well be used, by one so minded, to
prove the high standard of morals and manners of half a century ago and
its subsequent deterioration. For the author possesses just those qualities
glaringly lacking in the lady-writers of the following generation: an un-
ruffled acceptance of events in her life; a moulding of her emotions to
conform with an ideal; reserve, loyalty, and an unobtrusive sense of
humour. The book is well fortified with these admirable traits; literary
interest it has none, nor does it pretend to have: it is an attempt at
communication, not at art.


THE THEATRE
THE American version of Le Comedien—produced by Mr
Belasco—is another proof that the Guitry plays without the
Guitrys never quite come off. This seems to be especially true of
the plays written for the elder Guitry: they contain a larger ad-
mixture of seriousness, and straight drama is not Sacha's best vein.
Lucien Guitry—who is a great actor—can make any role extraor-
dinary, but when one of these plays is presented without him, it
is seen to be a flimsy scaffolding from which the chief reality has
been removed. Yet it is the vehicle built for the more powerful of
the Guitrys—and to which he is in the habit of supplying the
power himself—that we seem usually to get. And even the plays
which are still mainly ironic tend on our stage to become straight
romantic comedies. The Grand Duke I know, and The Comedian
I suspect, to have been written largely in a spirit of high farce
verging almost on the Gilbert and Sullivan. But where Sacha has
written and Lucien played an objective comic figure of an actor or
a Grand Duke, Lionel Atwill gives us an old-fashioned leading
man who would be more at home in the drawing-rooms of Pinero
than in the sophisticated comedy of the French. It is irony which
makes Guitry amusing. Robbed of irony, he usually becomes banal.
It is in the plays which Sacha writes primarily for himself that
this irony appears in its purest form and in which his genius finds
its happiest expression. They have at worst a kind of decorous silli-
ness reminiscent of William Collier, whom the younger Guitry in
some ways suggests. (He has the same slight habitual air of embar-
rassment in situations which are always just a little too much for
him—or in which it is become more and more difficult for him to
conceal that he is a flagrant impostor. I remember a play in which,
when someone asks him what he got out of going to Aix-les-Bains,
he replies, "Beaucoup de ben" and then adds hastily in his earnest
worried way, "heu . . je veux dire, beaucoup de bien"—
which is pure Collier.) But beyond this vein of polite gagging, he
is capable of a rather high comedy. The scenes which he writes for
himself and his wife are masterpieces of their kind. Though he
lacks the profound point of view at the centre of his work which


636
THE THEATRE
would make him another Moliere (someone once compared him to
Moliere) though his comedies have no real point, do not even pre-
tend to be going anywhere in particular, he manages to strike off
passages by the way which are quite in the tradition of Moliere and
by no means unworthy of him. He has done a number of scenes
between lovers which have a real comic truth; and there hangs
always over his silliest dialogue a wing of philosophic wit which
brushes everything he writes with distinction. Furthermore, there
are his wonderful Parisiennes, drawn with a genuine gusto and
affection: the flapper in The Grand Duke, the little music-hall
singer in LTllusioniste, the unfaithful and wide-eyed wife in
Le Mari, la Femme et l'Amant. They are gauche, naive, witty,
and adorable, like Printemps, who plays them, herself. They are
the facets of Printemps, who is herself the gamin spirit of Paris.
I do not blame American audiences for being sceptical about the
legendary brilliance of the Guitrys: they have never had a chance
to see much of it. First, the semi-serious—and inferior—pieces are
chosen; then they are reduced to wholesomeness by Mr Belasco;
then the roles are played by romantic actors who insist upon taking
them more seriously still. But even if someone put on L'Illusion-
iste, for example, I wonder if it would ever really reach us. Even
if the wit did not evaporate in translation, who could be found to
play the principal roles—to supply the intellectualized farce of
Sacha and the innocent sophistication of his wife? Not, at any
rate, I am afraid, Mr Atwill and Miss Elsie Mackay.
Mr Pinero's Enchanted Cottage is a fantasy without any
fancy. Instead, you have soft music, red fire, and old-fashioned
masquerade costumes. When the gauze curtain of enchantment has
descended you are startled by blinding violet flashes which you
take at first for short circuits in the scenery; but it is only Mr
Brady's idea of a star-dust of fairy fire. In the end, there is a
phantom child which suggests the old illustrated songs.—Miss
Katharine Cornell is quite good in her inhibited first act, but in the
later more lively ones her vivacity seems to cost an effort.
Edmund Wilson, Jr.


COMMENT
IT was precisely in Paris (where we had gone to see a man about
a painting) that we read an editorial in The Literary Review
which flattered us to the point of bedazzlement and then struck
home. Magazines travel more slowly than ideas, so we will reprint
the blow (assuming that the bouquets remain fresh in the ever-
grateful memories of our readers):
"The Dial apparently would have us make the same mistake
over again [the mistake of Longfellow]. Here, its editors say—
by implication and sometimes directly—here is the way to write;
these are the subjects, these the methods of modern European lit-
erature; go you and do likewise and we shall have an American
literature! . . .
"But we do not want another age of Longfellow. Bring Europe
to us by all means and in every measure. Encourage us to experi-
ment, break down the prejudices that withhold us from novelty,
fertilize the American soil with ideas from abroad; but don't tell
us to write like Schnitzler, D. H. Lawrence, or Paul Fort, or any
one else whose environment and tradition are utterly different from
our own. Ever since the mid-eighteenth century, when Americans
began to feel that they were not Europeans, some worthy mission-
ary or another has been bringing in Europe to civilize us, saying:
'Drink this; then act like little Europeans, and your souls will be
saved.' And those who like Hawthorne refused to act, or who, like
Walt Whitman and Mark Twain, rejected the cup, have best
pleased both the Europeans and ourselves. We thank The Dial
and Broom and the rest for giving us more of Europe, but will
not join them in acting Longfellow over again. That play is out of
date."
The Literary Review owes a debt to The Dial which it proposes
to acknowledge later. (We know this from the same article, which
uses those words and specifies the indebtedness.) May we suggest
that a revision of the statements quoted above would be a fair way
to pay off? For they are, as far as they apply to us, sheer nonsense-


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COMMENT
and if some stupidity of idea or carelessness of phrase has given
any one the impression that we want Americans to write like
Europeans or like Hindus, we are ready to go into sackcloth and
Hergesheimer for six months. Have we really given American
writers to believe that we are publishing the work of European
writers as an object lesson? The discourtesy to the Europeans
would be a little too great, and the insult to Americans too smart.
And precisely like what Europeans do we want our Americans to
write? Will Cabell be better for imitating Lawrence, or Anderson
clear up his style by reading Morand, or Willa Cather gain an in-
tensity by a study of Bunin? And will the result be worth a hang
if there is a result? It has been our fear, precisely, that too many
young Americans would begin writing like James Joyce; and the
manuscripts we have rejected prove that our fear was well-
grounded. Writing like anything or anybody is as good a way as
any for a writer to get his manuscript back by return mail; and if
what we have published in any case bears a resemblance to the
work of some vast European genius, it will be found that the
resemblance is due to an identity, a necessary and justifiable
dence, in character or expression.
If we have already history behind us, if American' letfers
something, it is simply because we have never published anything
or anybody for any reason but the one natural reason: because the
work was good. We have published European work not as exotics
and not as exemplars; only because we feel that Americans are at
work in the same milieu and in the same tradition of letters as the
Europeans—that we are all in the Western-civilized-Christian-
European-American tradition, and that American letters have their
independent existence and their separate, precious character, within
that circle, just as German and Italian letters have. It is true that
an Italian can say, I shall write in the manner of Petrarch (and
as like as not miss the excellence of the tradition he aspires to) and
an American, casting about for definite models will find few names
to buoy him on. But the American who feels that he has not in-
herited Dean Swift as surely as he has inherited Mr Dooley, is
simply missing half of his heritage and, unless he be a startling in-
dividual genius, will not write half so well. We have pointed out,
perhaps too often, that the whole sighing for a background in
America is due to the false, political feeling that we are cut off from


COMMENT
639
the main stream of European art and letters. There is no evidence
of the fact—except for the wailing. Mr Sinclair Lewis has written
two American books which owe more to Flaubert than anything
Jean Cocteau or Paul Morand has created. And Huck Finn is
accepted in Germany exactly as Tom Jones is accepted. Nor were
we aware when we published Mr Anderson's I'm a Fool that it
was written in the image—of whom? Perhaps The London Mer-
cury which published the same story later thought it an imitation
of something, or published it for young English writers to imitate.
Perhaps—we offer the suggestion in a spirit of editorial confrater-
nity—they thought it a good story.
But when we consider "implications"—does The Literary Re-
view mean that a number of American writers, accustomed to praise
elsewhere, are here treated with scant respect, while a number of
European writers are praised in our pages? It has been The Dial's
habit to find intelligent reviewers and then to let them have as
free a hand as any creative artist can have; no one has been in-
structed to praise or dispraise and delicate hints have generally had
results the opposite of what we hoped; and if our reviewers have not
been clubby about American books it is because that is how they
feel, and it is our fault only because we've chosen the wrong men. A
careful reading of our review pages will indicate that European
writers have not got off easily; and if in the past two or three years
a majority of the books we have praised have come from Europe—
we do not know whether this is so or not—it has been their quality
and not their provenance which has influenced us. The truth is that
a few great Europeans are producing work of exceptional merit;
that these books arrive in translation or in American editions; and
as long as we believe that the love of letters knows no frontiers we
are going to praise them—we, including our reviewers. And the
equal truth is that for a long time American writers have not been
subjected to serious and severe criticism, that they have lived on
"notices" and puffs; and The Dial adds itself to the small num-
ber of journals which see no reason for praising a book except that
the book deserves praise when viewed with the same unsentimental
eye as looks out upon the literary scene abroad. It is no use saying
that one ought to be more tender to Gertrude Atherton than to May
Sinclair, because May Sinclair lives in a literary milieu; or that it
will not help Anderson to be as severely handled as Schnitzler. We


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COMMENT
fancy that not a few of the authors who have been mercilessly
attacked in these pages prefer that attack to any suggestion that
they are only in primary school and are not to be marked on the
same scale as the bigger boys abroad. We aren't to be sure mark-
ing anybody or setting up prize-boys. We are discussing creative
work.
If the work of European artists continues to be nobler in con-
ception and more honest in execution than the work of Americans,
we shall undoubtedly print the former in preference to the latter.
But we ask The Literary Review to continue to watch what hap-
pens. It is barely possible that our greatest service to American
letters will turn out to be our refusal to praise or to publish silly
and slovenly and nearly-good-enough work. The Americans we
publish have at least the certainty that we publish them not be
cause they are Americans, but because they are artists.


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