THE CARNEGIE LIBRARY
OF
The Pennsylvania State College
CLASS No. 051
NO
1895
BOOK No. 154
RSSION
ACCESSION NO. 93.119
2 308














THE
DIAL
Prear

M
VI
VII
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IX
ΟΧΧΙΙΙο
VOLUME LXXV
July to December, 1923
See index in the back
THE DIAL PUBLISHING COMPANY





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Courtesy of the Staatsvalerie, Munich
BY JANS VON MARÉES
GAVYMEDE.


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THE INDIAL
OXX ITO
JULY 1923
GERMAN ART AFTER THE WAR
BY JULIUS MEIER-GRAEFE
Translated from the German by Kenneth Burke
S
UPERFICIAL examination fails to reveal with us the influ-
ence of the war on the artists. And not only with us. Neither
have the victors gained any jubilating fresco by their triumph.
Painting goes on, and sculpture, it seems, as though nothing had
happened. This phenomenon is taken for granted, and is ex-
plained in accordance with the individual temperament and man-
ner of thinking. Sceptics fall back on a precarious Platonism:
according to them, art spends its shadowy life so far from all reality
that even the decay of the world could not disturb it. The socialist
finds a confirmation for his legend of the time-wasting of a privi-
leged class, and he compares the Muse to an all-night restaurant in
Berlin which is never empty even in the worst periods of destitu-
tion. Idealists harp on the nonsense of the catastrophe. For them
the war is simply the hypertrophy of a dirty fait divers which pure
art has nothing to do with.
In reality, nothing stands out so prominently in the art of the
present as the world war; and unfortunately the impossibility of
determining the duration of the catastrophe makes it more difficult
to uncover the correlated facts. No one knows yet when the war is
over, even if he does imagine himself capable of fixing its start. For
art, it did not begin on the day when some potentate or other gave
the order to mobilize and the first grenade shook the air, but long
before. It was not the military incidents which affected the cre-
ative faculties, nor the verdict of victory or defeat; but it was the


2
GERMAN ART AFTER THE WAR
a
root of the evil, the spiritual and moral confusion of Europe.
In art there was nothing but the defeated; and the overthrow
can be read in all its phases by the falling curve of the European
graph. Even the first shocks, which escaped the notice of the un-
suspecting victims or possibly looked like the accomplishments of
the precious individual personality, were recorded on the graph,
with the precision of a seismograph, as symptoms of disease. Every
development after the mighty rise of the nineteenth century, indeed
,
this rise itself with its wealth of heroism, pointed to the coming
catastrophe. In 1912 I foretold it in a little book, Wohin Treiben
Wir, and I do not think it required great wisdom. Every work of
the times, the successful as well as the unsuccessful, indicates the
decay. The successful, because it lifts itself above the masses, and
becomes an illegible logarithm to them; the unsuccessful because
it sinks in the masses. At times the successful, and the imposing
array of successful works, is a picture of decay. If art is to be the
pictorial edifice of mankind, then the continued deformation of the
pictorial, even the most genial deformation, can only signify the
disruption of mankind. In the house which should be there for all,
there is a place finally for only one individual. The rest look upon
it as a curiosity, as art, and move on.
The role of German art corresponds to the role of Germany.
There culture had already been for a long time the matter of a few
personalities: peaks with slight connexion to one another. They
rise out of the desolate soil, and they seem to benefit by loneliness.
In loneliness the insatiable wish grows on them to assemble man-
kind about them. It is the Germans who have felt the tragedy of
a dehumanized art and have fought passionately against it. Either
they were able to bring such an enormous clarity into the latent
German mysticism that suddenly our whole forest of legend shone
magically; and then the mysticism became a monument which no
one can pass without being deeply affected, although its phe-
nomenal character precludes every notion of active participation
by the masses. Or the grasp of a genius usurps what is denied the
masses through lack of tradition, and then a gifted man seems
capable of recovering in a work the advantages of happier peoples
and improving upon them. Then the threatening aberrations of
the rest of the world show up through this one German. This one
becomes a haven for all the efforts of the others who are dismember-
ing the cosmos, and he offers the world the perfect order of a new


JULIUS MEIER-GRAEFE
3
cosmos. And if it were possible to make his realization, his one
work, generally accessible, the virtues from such vulgarization
would be forthcoming. But such accessibility can be obtained only
after the overcoming of countless difficulties which, while relatively
superficial, are in their totality unsurmountable. Among the thous-
and texts which are offered to mankind, surely one must contain the
remedy. How shall they grasp the one, which came from some re-
mote place, removed from the daily rounds of life? One could
just as well turn a Central African negro into a follower of Christ.
Darkness lies over the Hesperides of our Hans von Marées.
This envelops him, makes judgement difficult. The tragic is a mat-
ter of will; this darkness is inevitable. It does not simply envelop
him, but is at the same time rooted in his work, a protest against the
zealous conquest of light which a generation of painters in France
undertook at just that moment when Europe was beginning to
darken. Was this bewitching conquest only the fruits of victorious
instincts; was it not also a recourse to light in order to escape the
demands of a permissible past (for instance, Delacroix) which
Hans von Marées rated more highly? The stride into Impression-
ism occasioned brilliant enthusiasm. The enthusiasm of a day
when war is declared against dark enemies. This enemy must
perish, to make room, to make a new structure possible. It was a
very legitimate and generous enthusiasm. But the persistency of
this movement, the consequence of its programme, was an admission
of the weakness of the times. Rationalism took the place of en-
thusiasm. Even the taste and the tact of the French did not suc-
ceed in covering the gaps in this degeneration of the pictorial.
There was no more mention of composition. The picture, which
was to be made more brilliant, lost its reality. The world was dis-
integrated into a coloured film. A recipe was left. Thanks to it,
Rembrandt became a dirty spot on the wall of fashion, and the
plastic of the primitives became arbitrary and barbaric.
German Impressionism is a sorry chapter. People painted away
at it, substituting an obvious temperamentalism for the tact and
taste of the French. At times it was wildly obvious, but sufficed,
considering relative merits, to draw out some possibilities from the
system which was being completely exploited in Paris, the imita-
tion of the Dix-huitième without rococo. The world of the Ger-
mans remained outside. Not one of these facile temperaments sus-
pected that a few generations previously the enthusiasm for light
a


4
GERMAN ART AFTER THE WAR
and colour had belonged also to Germany, that long before Monet,
quiet landscape painters in Hamburg, Dresden, Berlin had found
an Impressionism which did not, to be sure, respond to all the con-
ditions of spectral analysis, but in revenge was free of all rational-
ism. Runge, Wasmann, C. D. Friedrich, Blechen, even Menzel
(I mean the lyric Menzel) have remained without followers. In
art we have never learned how to economize. Somewhere, in some
remote place, an artist will suddenly arise for no external reason.
A bare stone on a cliff covers itself with ravishing little flowers.
Wasmann's landscapes from the 'thirties are tiny in size and evince
no bold temperament, but they are fragrant. Germany's tenderest
spirit is in them. Young Dürer, who painted landscapes in water-
colour, belongs here. Suddenly the stone is bare again, and there
are no more blossoms. Some corporation puts up a building there,
and the flowers are recalled only by some stupid signboard. All of
our predecessors, even when they had the significance of young
Menzel, remained alone. There are traditions in the German
graphic arts—as the development from Chodowiecki through Men-
zel to Liebermann and Slevogt. A line very much alive, which,
since Slevogt, has divided into so many branches and twigs that it
is hard to recognize the stem. On a western branch hangs the
genial dandy of German graphic artists, Rudolf Grossmann. One
aim holds this thriving vegetation together: illustration. For a
hundred talented illustrators we have hardly one painter. Things
were the same four hundred years ago. Painting without an exte-
rior motive grows up with us accidentally and in isolated instances.
Perhaps we think too highly of art; perhaps metaphysics is too
much in our way for us to be capable of fashioning traditions.
The generation after Liebermann has a living artist of high
calibre, Lovis Corinth. In superficial details he corresponds to the
idea which unfriendly foreigners have of Germans. A man from
the German wilderness. One can imagine him covered with hair.
A cave man who was at the Academy in Munich. He has made
many pictures of a useless brutality, of a brutality which is coars-
ened as much by the academic as by the nature of the subject; and
he had made astonishing masterpieces. Beneath the clumsiness of
the calibre there is greatness. He cannot choose, but this weakness
goes with a victorious power. More important considerations than
those of taste are met with surprising accuracy, so that the lacunae


JULIUS MEIER-GRAEFE
5
in the customary requirements are less noticeable. Corinth takes
objects which otherwise exist only in name, religious stuffs, ancient
legends, episodes from history. And in such pictures the brush
stroke on the palette is by no means the important thing which
enlivens the object; but it is the pictorial, and this has the power
of safeguarding the object. Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism,
Futurism-as different as all these movements may be, they have
one thing in common: the fear of the object. Flatteringly or with
vehemence, the motif is removed. The opposing tendency does not
make Corinth a narrator of things which are to be looked at. Rather,
the object is naturalized. A crucifixion of Corinth's is no picture
puzzle; but so very much a crucifixion that the observer can feel a
shudder. At times the observer is crucified also. This primitive
has kept the faculty for such experiences; he experiences them with
the intensity of Grünewald. At times his experiences are from the
immediate vicinity; then details occur which are of unbearable
crudity. At times he sees from a distance; and then gripping
legends are produced. The same primitive has painted the most
beautiful modern landscapes outside of France They have an Im-.
pressionism of his own invention which does not admit of any
formulas. They are the landscapes of an outsider. The almost
scientific apparatus of our contemporary specialists breaks down
before this concentrated reality.
For some years Corinth's pedestal has been growing noticeably,
and even in his lifetime his position in history is foreshadowed. A
German who has none, or hardly any, of the usual ready-to-hand
national attributes: no simpleness nor joviality, no depth of
thought-a crude maker of representations, such as Grünewald
The epithet "metaphysical” must be brought in, since Cor-
inth, like Grünewald, represents without any noticeably specific
background. If Cézanne had the notion of repeating Poussin in
nature, one could call the German a Grünewald "refait sur nature.”
None of the younger men even approaches him in scope. Nearly
all of them need anchoring in the deep foundations of the race;
the lack of tradition makes painting restless. The influence of
Maillol has made for a certain tradition in the plastic arts. It had
been deepened by Lehmbruck, the only German sculptor of rank
since Gottfried Schadow. He was not content with the mild static
of graceful roundness which is so seldom adapted to the German
was.
а


6
GERMAN ART AFTER THE WAR
genius; but he has brought in oppositional elements of Gothic
origin. He had set himself a high task, worthy of a German; he
was to bring these two counter elements together—an aim which
Hans von Marées alone has reached so far, and which hardly any
one ever thought of before in the German plastic arts. Lehmbruck
seemed to be the man. His premature death took him off halfway.
The other Germans, like Haller, de Fiori, Renée Sintenis, and Gaul
and Kolbe of the older men, all artists of respectable level, incline
towards a tasteful decoration which is quite in keeping with the
properties of the spatial, but possesses no essential metaphysical
possibilities. Barlach, the German George Minne, one of the few
Nordic-minded sculptors, possesses such possibilities, but he carries
them out too restrictedly. To approach our old masters one must,
like Corinth, be laden with the present.
Most Germans believe that this necessity for the contemporary
can be met by an unrestrained devotion to the current issues. The
experiments of the Parisian doctrinaires were more welcome to them
than any great French master. In Germany to-day Delacroix is
still a vague great name; and besides Slevogt, Leo von König, and
Klosowski I know of scarcely a painter who has tried to reconcile
himself with him and his world. On the other hand you will find
a Cubist in every German nest. Because they could not follow up
the traditional, this young generation among us and everywhere
else exulted that tradition had been shattered. They could only
gain by such a collapse. It is no accident that Cubism in Paris was
decreed by foreigners. They played here the rôle of the Jews in
Bolshevism.
A special task fell to the Germans. Whenever there is something
in art to write about, to think about, or to theorize on, Germany
applies. Berlin became the cook-house for the formulas of the new
doctrines. The unprejudiced modernism of the metropolis was
easily convinced, and many an amateur who had been too late for
Manet bought the new pictures before they were dry. The revolu-
tion increased still more the calories of enthusiasm. The bourgeois
would not let this comfortable opportunity slip to display his pro-
gressive-mindedness. The Impressionists hatched out as formidable
supporters of capital.
This attitude has done much mischief. Hundreds of little Picas-
sos arose. Kandinsky and Archipenko became schools. Every new


JULIUS MEIER-GRAEFE
7
notion of the Russian Dadaists with which the Russian invasion
presented us was turned into German by hook or crook; and the day
came when the dutiful exhibit at the Lehrter Bahnhof approached
the rooms of the Paris Independents. But this tolerance also aided
daring people of real ability. In any other country a Klee or a
Grosz could hardly have lived out his spleen so successfully. Ber-
lin has the right atmosphere for the art of the present. Not only
for a gold-brick, but also if one may say it, for a super-gold-brick,
an exaggeration, a stylization, an objectivization of the gold-brick.
They take the improvised Berlin as though it were a necessary fact
in nature; and they build upon this as though they were dealing
with the church of God. They really build, although their material
is nothing but the starting point for unhindered activity. They
come to Berlin because it is large, and they live here in the hotels.
The mechanism of the hotel contains springs of energy. These lead
to derailings, to enormities, but they favour a rhythm of speed
which modern art can now make use of. One can search in vain for
the like of this in other, much more favoured cities. The wealth of
the traditional art cities is a restrictive antiquity. Berlin with its
energy belongs to America, but lies in the middle of Europe. As a
consequence the mechanization which is taken for granted in
America and is not at all an incentive there, has an enchanting and
a grating effect here, and is always a stimulus. There is no mechan-
ized hinterland, rich in its particular kind of health and power, ,
lying right beyond the gates of Berlin. These people stream into
the hotels; here they do not drop their crudenesses like the provin-
cials in Paris, but they make themselves as motley as possible in the
mosaic of the metropolis. Berlin's sensation-hunger is never ap-
peased. Coarse food is preferred. Van Gogh was not recognized
elsewhere so soon and so spontaneously, and has not had so endur-
ing an effect in any other country. Manet and his fellows were
taken up by the collectors and received all public honours; Van
Gogh belonged to the family. There is hardly a contemporary
painter between Liebermann and Kokoschka in North Germany
who does not owe something to the Hollander. Liebermann freed
himself with his help from the remains of Israel; and Kokoschka
overcame by the same aid the feebleness of his early work in
Vienna, and aimed at the remarkable concentration of his roman-
ticism. What they prized in Van Gogh—it is another matter


8
GERMAN ART AFTER THE WAR
whether this got at the depths of the artist—was his bold decisive-
ness in making the quickest impression. They have a feeling for
that in Berlin. They don't have much to say. They have tremen-
dously little to say. But they don't linger long over this little.
Brevity has activity. This is good Berlin. As it trimmed and
sharpened the prose of Alfred Kerr and Sternheim, so the tempo
shortened the expression of Heckel, Kirchner, Pechstein, and sev-
eral others, and held them down to a strict circumstantiality. The
war emphasized this tendency, and added cynical accents to the
stenographic style. Of course this tendency does not belong solely
to Berlin. The destructive tempo of the machine is felt in the art
of all modern countries, but in Berlin the movement has found its
typical home. It belongs here, as the lyricism of Renoir and Bon-
nard belongs to Paris.
Consequently, since it was here that Cubism took root, it was
here alone that it could be overcome. In Paris the Cubists laid down
a purely abstract programme and afterwards gave it up again. In
the morning Picasso paints cubes, in the afternoon fountain nymphs
in the style of Fontainebleau. Yet in the long run the Parisian
orchestra triumphs over all the dissonances of the up-to-date. Ber-
lin is grateful for any style which consecrates its weaknesses. Here
it doesn't seem at all so addle-brained to alter painted surfaces by
pasting on bits of paper or cloth. The streets and squares of Berlin
are not made any differently, and the culture of most hotel guests
is in much the same state. Already, naked people are dressed with
one stocking. The mildest sobriety can become a starting point.
Thus none of these new styles is taken in a very orthodox fashion.
The most gifted German Cubist, Franz Marc, was not hindered
by an early death from indicating a way out of this tendency. His
large animal pictures are experiments which are prodigal of space;
but just as Signac in his water-colours kept intact a reservation
against Neo-Impressionism and thereby laid the safest guaranty of
his future reputation, so Marc has left coloured animal drawings
of limited size, unforgettable things. These animals are not only
formulas for this and that mathematic, but through some accident
are also droll, animal-like, instinctively-functioning living things.
And the accident which brought them to life lends them charm,
gives a tastefulness to their rigidity which one could without dis-
paragement call elegant. The elegance of a new-style Pisanello, of



DANCERS.
BY LOVIS CORINTH





JULIUS MEIER-GRAEFE
9
a
a Chinese stone-cutter, who knew how to handle rock-crystal and
amethyst—as becoming as a Charvet cravat. There is a difference
between the audacity of such searches and the patented processes
of the professional stylists. In the web of a Klee a spiritual impetus
spins for itself its curious cocoons, not to invent an architecture, but
to shelter the spirit somehow. The housing problem is great. A
puppet can become articulate, a cipher puppet from Borneo, or
some scrawled junk of negro origin. And any one of the hun-
dreds and thousands of forms which impress themselves upon
the retina of the musically sensitive can join in fashioning the co-
coons; also the wish to avoid making a bourgeois gold-brick; also
the exaggerated hatred for all patents and repetitions; also the fac-
ile smile at the nonsense which is shattering Europe; also the cari-
cature from the children's primer. In his book on Klee, Hausenstein
describes the psyche of his hero thus: “How good that nothing
exists, for now everything can be invented.” This is genuine Ber-
lin. Nowhere so much as in Germany does art have the right to
hunt for beginnings. It is only as an end that Cubism is a shameless
imposition. Its memento mori cannot be overlooked. It is the
second or third invasion of exact speculation into art. In Germany
we have experienced in our midst the invasion of the engineer into
architecture, and the fear was not far off that the same locality
might favour an operation on painting and the plastic arts. If the
amputation leaves the sound parts intact, if it confines itself to
organs which to-day, at least with us, can no longer be nourished,
the invasion can be of use. We do not lack artists who are defend-
ing themselves against too extensive amputations. First of all they
want to do their own cutting, and not allow themselves to undergo
vivisection by some academic postulate. These voluntary surgeons
-Karl Hofer and Max Beckmann, besides Kokoschka-are stand-
ing to-day in the foreground. Beckmann has gone through his Ber-
lin. Here before the war, at the time of Berlin's most vigorous
flourishing, he made sensational hits with large ingeniously painted
pictures, evidences of the little chastened requirements of that
Germanicism. The war turned him into a bitter singer. He had
already made use of the social motifs of the demagogue. Now the
rhetoric vanished, and the question of mechanization was gone into.
Tormented mankind found its symbol. Nothing which painted
with hand-me-down gestures the monumental sorrow of defeat: no
1


10
GERMAN ART AFTER THE WAR
a
fallen warriors, no lions riddled with bullets. Humbled mankind
had no time for edification. Berlin maintained its tempo and lost
its substance. The senseless idiocy of mechanization, the human
absurdity of humans, animals, things which are nothing but instru-
ments of commerce—all this formed itself, deformed itself, into
pictures. The narrowness made faces crooked and legs twisted;
tragi-comedies of things jammed together arose. Beckmann went
straight through Berlin. Perhaps he is coming out beyond Berlin.
Perhaps a Breughel. The metropolis of to-day discloses to him its
barbaric mediaevalism. The horrors of the apocalypse are trans-
formed into bursting corsets, into the horns of graphaphones, into
the mugs of pimps grimacing under caps on sideways. They are
brayed in a mortar.
The psychological significance of the episodes removes the ques-
tion as to their aesthetic value. One doesn't ask a man being led to
the scaffold what sort of hair tonic he uses. Therefore the suspicion
can arise that Beckmann's pictures are purely phenomena of con-
tent. Let us recall that our northern primitive knew no other
phenomena. They stood under the spell of a necessity which
left room for sensory considerations only after the consummation
of very unequivocal creeds. And, as is well known, the sensory
was confined to the absolutely necessary. Form arose only from
the depth of the emotion. Could it not be the same with Beck-
mann? Courbet, when asked what was the impetus for his pic-
tures, was not embarrassed in declaring, Je suis ému.” Beck-
mann could say the same of himself with less fear of making
himself ridiculous. To be sure, the dangers of such emotion
are close at hand. One can entangle himself in barbarism, in
idées fixes; and many pictures of Beckmann's show signs of en-
tanglement. Relentlessly, he says what is there, and he adds
nothing, not even the baroque twist which permitted a Rubens to
tear his Saint's tongue from his throat with the tongs in such a
manner that our mouth waters with raptures over the texture.
Also graphaphones, wooden legs, signboards, would be adapted to
still lifes. He opposes himself to such adaptation. Occasionally
he devotes himself to a fair. It is the only concession he allows him-
self. So we can imagine that things go that way only at a fair.
Pious people who happen to stumble in on it. A bitter singer.
If we had only Beckmann, it would be enough to indicate the
a


JULIUS MEIER-GRAEFE
11
blow which the European explosion dealt to art; but it would not
be fair to refer to him in this way. The facts which he summons
do not contain the discipline with which they are placed crudely
before us, the fanaticism of this circus-director, as he has named
himself in one of his graphic series. After an art which devoted it-
self to conquering the object, in our days a method of presentation
must be used which lets us be conquered through an insight into the
frightful meaning of our objects.
Karl Hofer's good disposition and easy manners are more Euro-
pean. He is not for this reason less German, but of the other sort.
We have always had Grünewalds and Maréeses. Beckmann is
helped and endangered by his one-sidedness, Hofer by the Ger-
man humanists' ideal of assembling every beautiful element in
other cultures and adorning the northern content of our ideas with
southern vegetation. In harsh words: the ideal of an artist, at-
tempted hundreds of times before Marées and almost always with-
out success; a very significant ideal to-day when every Tom, Dick,
and Harry is puffed up with individualism and every notion is
right if it has never been held before. Nothing is less eclectic than
the art of this humanist. In spite of its many evident relationships
to many tendencies of the times. None of these tendencies weakens
him. After every fecundation he is left richer or more collected
than before. Whoever surveys Hofer's already extensive develop-
ment cannot fail to recognize its logical organism, and will marvel
most of all at the discipline of his searches. In general effective-
ness Hofer's discipline stands higher than that of Beckmann. Richer
possibilities hold him back from all impasses. It remains for the
future to show whether he can summon Beckmann's intensity in
dealing with a definite content. Up to a certain degree he has
moved the other way from Beckmann, beginning in specifically
German channels, in the vicinity of Böcklin, and arriving with the
help of Marées from the narrow into the open. Beckmann was in
Paris a few months and was able to get very little from this outer
sphere; and I believe he would have fared badly had he not sealed
himself up so thoroughly. There are such people; there must be.
Hofer was in Rome and Paris for several years, led an industrious
hermit's life throughout, but kept his eyes open. From his post as
lonely observer he joined in all the attempts to extend Impression-
ism, and made the most highly personal contributions to the turn
a


12
GERMAN ART AFTER THE WAR
a
towards the decorative. It was the direction between Cézanne
tapestries and El Greco flowing figures, rich in grace, spontaneity,
taste, and borne by a passionate baroque. In this fertile period
also he was still restlessly searching. Two trips to India enriched
his material, but did not bring him to any objective variations.
Every experience has been utilized to attain a shorter method of
expression. The surface of his paintings was simplified. This idyll
was broken into by the war. Hofer sat for several years in a Ger-
man prison camp. Here there was no incentive to luxurious pic-
tures, but rather to puzzlings over the problems of form. He went
off into the bleak world of abstraction. Form lost its flesh, the
stroke was sharp and angular, the colour ornamental. Strangely
enough, the result was not devoid of a certain hyper-modern ele-
gance. After his release he remained for a time in Switzerland and
then settled in Berlin. His ornamental surfaces brought him close
to the fresco, which had already tempted him in Rome along the
line of Marées' reconstructions. Perhaps it was his good fortune
that the times were unfavourable to such commissions. They com-
pelled him to exert more effort. His skill placed itself at the service
of vision. In this way the artist in him was outdone by the human
with its struggle for symbols, and a contemporary tactics which
can only be named German was the result. Nor has Berlin left this
painter with an attitude free of bitterness, but this turn does not
leave the rest of Europe out of account and allows the up-to-date-
ness of the object to operate only to a very limited degree. The
forced lyricism of earlier years has given way to the sustained and
sharply concentrated rhythm of the epic. If Hofer had to paint
frescos to-day, the problems of form would not be the only thing to
interest him.
At least, the earnestness of these days has not done harm to
German art. After the parroting of the last generation, it is trying
to get into its own sphere. The road there leads through labyrinths.
Discipline-a too facile concept with us Germans—is not an abso-
lute protection. Success depends upon more elementary conditions.
We shall gain an art if we succeed in rescuing our humanity from
the ruins of Europe.



A DRAWING. BY WILLIAM SOMMER





A DRAWING. BY WILLIAM SOMMER





A BIOGRAPHICAL FRAGMENT
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
HEN lecturing in England the other day, I met a man
learned in Cretan and other East Mediterranean antiquities.
He spoke of some passage where I had suggested a memory of the
race, as distinct from individual memory, and we went on from
one thing to another until I had told of the dreams and visions
described in the following pages. I said I had intended to put
them into The Trembling of the Veil, but had been afraid of mak-
ing that book seem fantastic, of losing human interest; but he
said: “Oh, no, you must write it all out, it may be important,” and
he began to tell me things about ancient tree worship that seemed
to interpret my experiences. I said: “I will write a new chapter
for The Trembling of the Veil and you will read it and tell me
where I can find all those things about tree worship.”
NEW OPENING TO CHAPTER SIX OF LAST SECTION OF
THE TREMBLING OF THE VEIL
When in my twenty-second year I had finished The Wanderings
of Usheen my style seemed too elaborate, too ornamental and I
thought for some weeks of sleeping upon a board. Had I been
anywhere but at Sligo where I was afraid of my grandfather and
grandmother, I would have made the attempt. When I had finished
Rosa Alchemika for the Savoy, I had a return of the old trouble
and went to consult a friend who under the influence of my cab-
balistic symbols could pass into a condition between meditation and
trance. A certain symbolic personality who called herself, if I
remember rightly, Megarithma, said that I must live near water
and avoid woods "because they concentrate the solar ray.” I be-
lieved that this enigmatic sentence came from my own demon, my
own buried self, speaking through my friend's mind. “Solar” ac-
cording to all that I learnt from Macgregor meant elaborate, full
of artifice, rich, all that resembles the work of a goldsmith, whereas
a


14
A BIOGRAPHICAL FRAGMENT
"water" meant "lunar" and "lunar" all that is simple, popular,
traditional, emotional. But why should woods concentrate the
solar ray? I did not understand why, nor do I now, and I decided
to reject that part of the message as an error. I accepted the rest
without difficulty for after The Wanderings of Usheen, I had sim-
plified my style by filling my imagination with country stories.' My
friends believed that the dark portion of the mind-the subcon-
scious—had an incalculable power even over events. To influence
events or one's own mind, one had to draw the attention of that
dark portion, to turn it, as it were, into a new direction. Mac-
gregor described how as a boy he had drawn over and over some
event that he longed for; and called those drawings an instinctive
magic. But for the most part one repeated certain names and drew
or imagined certain symbolic forms which had acquired a precise
meaning and not only to the dark portion of one's own mind, but
to the mind of the race. I decided to repeat the names associated
with the moon in the cabbalistic tree of life. The divine name, the
name of the angelic order, the name of the planetary sphere, and
so on, and probably, though my memory is not clear upon the point,
to draw certain geometrical forms. As Arthur Symons and I were
about to stay with Mr Edward Martyn at Tullyra Castle, in Gal-
way, I decided that it was there I must make my invocation of the
moon. I made it night after night just before I went to bed and
after many nights—eight or nine perhaps—I saw between sleeping
and waking as in a kinematograph, a galloping centaur and a mo-
ment later a naked woman of incredible beauty, standing upon a
pedestal and shooting an arrow at a star. I still remember the tint
of that marvellous flesh which makes all human flesh seem un-
healthy, and remember that others who have seen such forms have
remembered the same characteristic. Next morning before break-
fast, Arthur Symons took me out on to the lawn to recite a scrap of
verse, the only verse he had ever written to a dream. He had dreamt
the night before of a woman of great beauty, but she was clothed
and had not a bow and arrow. When he got back to London, he
found awaiting him a story sent to the Savoy by Fiona MacLeod
and called, I think, The Archer. Someone in the story had a vision
of a woman shooting an arrow into the sky and later of an arrow
shot at a faun that pierced the faun's body and remained, the faun's
· The stories of my Celtic Twilight. The learned man wishes me to point out
that nothing there could have suggested the visions or dreams described in
the chapter.-W. B. Y.
a


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
15
a
heart torn out and clinging to it, embedded in a tree. Some weeks
later I too was in London and found among Macgregor's pupils a
woman whose little child had come running in from the garden,
perhaps at the time of my vision, perhaps a little later, calling out
"Oh, mother, I have seen a woman shooting an arrow into the sky
and I am afraid that she has killed God.” I have somewhere
among my papers a letter · from a very old friend describing how
her little cousin-perhaps a few months later—dreamed of a man
who shot at a star with a gun and that the star fell down, but “I do
not” the child said “think it minded dying because it was so very
old,” and that presently she saw the star lying in a cradle. Had
some great event taken place in some world where myth is reality
and had we seen some portion of it? One of my fellow-students
quoted a Greek saying “Myths are the activities of the demons” or
had we but seen in the memory of the race something believed
thousands of years ago, or had somebody—I myself perhaps—but
dreamed a fantastic dream which had come to those others by trans-
ference of thought? I came to no conclusion, but I was sure there
was some symbolic meaning could I but find it. I went to my
friend who had spoken to Megarithma and she went once more
into her trance-like meditation and heard but a single unexplained
sentence: “There were three that saw, three will attain a wisdom
older than the serpent, but the child will die.” Did this refer to
myself, to Arthur Symons, to Fiona MacLeod, to the child who
feared that the archer had killed God? I thought not, for Symons
had no deep interest in the subject and there was the second child
to account for. It was probably some new detail of the myth or an
interpretation of its meaning. There was a London coroner in
those days, learned in the Cabbala, whom I had once known though
we had not met for some years. I called upon him and told all that
I had set down here. He opened a drawer and took out of it two
water-coloured paintings by a clumsy painter who had no object
but a symbolical record, one was of a centaur, the other of a woman
standing upon a stone pedestal and shooting her arrow at what
seemed a star. He asked me to look carefully at the star and I saw
that it was a little golden heart. He said: “You have hit upon
things that you can never have read of in any book, these symbols
belong to a part of the Christian Cabbala”—perhaps this was not
'This letter is not now within my reach, for my papers are stored till our
Irish civil war is finished.-W. B. Y.


16
A BIOGRAPHICAL FRAGMENT
A
his exact term—“it has never been published. The centaur is the
elemental spirit and the woman the divine spirit of the path Samec
and the golden heart is the central point upon the cabbalistic tree of
life and corresponds to the Sephiroth Tipereth.” I was full of
excitement for now at last I began to understand. The "tree of
life” is a geometrical figure made up of ten circles or spheres called
Sephiroth joined by straight lines. Once men must have thought
of it as like some great tree covered maybe with fruit and foliage,
but at some period, in the thirteenth century perhaps, touched by
the mathematical genius of Arabia in all likelihood, it had lost its
natural form. The Sephiroth Tipereth, attributed to the sun, is
joined to the Sephiroth Yesod, attributed to the moon, by a straight
line called the path Samec, and this line is attributed to the con-
stellation Sagittarius. He would not or could not tell me more,
but when I repeated what I had heard to one of my
fellow-students,
yachtsman, yacht-designer, and Cabbalist, he said: “Now you know
what was meant by a wisdom older than the serpent.” He reminded
me that the cabbalistic tree has a green serpent winding through
it which represents the winding path of nature or of instinct and
that the path Samec is part of the long straight line that goes up
through the centre of the tree and that it was interpreted as the path
of "deliberate effort.” The three who saw must, he said, be those
who could attain to wisdom by the study of magic for that was “de-
liberate effort.” I remember that I quoted Balzac's description of
the straight line as the line of man, but he could not throw light on
the other symbols except that the shot arrow must symbolize effort,
nor did I get any further light.
a
A couple of weeks after my vision, Lady Gregory whom I had
met once in London for a few minutes, drove over to Tullyra and
after Symons' return to London, I stayed at her house. When I
saw her great woods on the edge of a lake, I remembered the saying
about avoiding woods and living near the water. Had this new
friend come because of my invocation, or had the saying been but
prevision and my invocation no act of will, but prevision also ?
Were those unintelligible words—"avoid woods because they con-
centrate the solar ray”—but a dream confusion, an attempt to ex-
plain symbolically an actual juxtaposition of wood and water? I
could not say nor can I now. I was in poor health.
.


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
17
NOTE
I sent the foregoing chapter to my learned man, and he has sent
me several pages of notes. I will not give his name for I do not
think it right to compromise his scholarship by joining it to such
an outlawed doctrine as that of the Race Memory.
(1) The Child and the Tree.
.
On a certain night in Devonshire, farmers and farm-labourers
and their wives and children perform a ceremony at the finest apple-
tree in the orchard. Punch is poured out at the roots and bread
put among the branches and a boy set among the branches "who is
either the tree in boy form or the tree in bird form,” and the men
fire blank charges at him. All dance round the tree singing some
such rhyme as this:
"Here's to thee good apple-tree
To bear and blow apples enow,” et cetera.
This boy is clearly Balder “who is shot to death by means of a
sprig or arrow of mistletoe.”
In
my
vision the star is shot by an arrow from a bow, and in one
of the child's dreams which I have described, God is shot with an
arrow, while in another child's dream a star is shot with a gun.
“Balder is the tree embodied. His name tells us that. Recent
philology has said that the name means or is related to apple-tree,
abbal; apfal, et cetera. But that is not true enough. When the
first decipherment of Cretan pictographs is published, it will be
seen that his name goes back to the Cretan Apollo, who in old Cre-
tan belief was a tree god.” It is plain, too, that he is that “child
hidden on the scented Dikton near Mount Ida” (Phaen: 32 ff.) of
Aratus' lines “When those lines are read in the light of the de-
ciphered old Cretan inscriptions” and that part of his significance
is solar. He was believed to be born and grown up in a year (Ara-
tus; Callimachus: Zeus 55 ff., et cetera) and to die once more.
Orpheus made much use of these facts. (Lobeck: Aglaophamas, I,
552 ff.)
I had used Hebrew names connected with the symbolic Tree
1
Transactions of the Devonshire Association 1876, Whitcombe: Bygone
Days in Cornwall.


18
A BIOGRAPHICAL FRAGMENT
and the star at which the arrow was shot seems to have symbolized
a Sephirah attributed to the Sun, and my invocation had for its
object the killing or overcoming in some way of a “solar influence.”
(2) The Woman who shot the Arrow.
She was, it seems, the Mother-Goddess whose representative
priestess shot the arrow at the Child, whose sacrificial death symbol-
ized the death and resurrection of the Tree-spirit or Apollo. She is
pictured upon certain Cretan coins of the fifth century B. C. as a
slightly draped beautiful woman sitting in the heart of a branch-
ing tree. (G. F. Hill: A Handbook of Greek and Roman Coins,
page 163.) She goes back to the very earliest form of the religion
of Crete, and is, it seems probable, the Tree as Mother killing the
Tree as Son. But she is also Artemis, and there is a beautiful vase
at Naples (Reinach: Repertoire des Vases Peints Grecs, I, 379, 1)
which shows her archaic image upon a tall pillar, with a strung bow
in her left hand and some object too small for my eyes to decipher
in her right.
.
(3) The Heart torn out.
A Father of the Church, Firmicus Maternus, in his book “On the
errors of the Profane Religion” turns the Myth of the Child slain
and reborn into a story of murder and adultery. The Cretan
Jupiter "made an image of his son in gypsum and placed the Boy's
heart
in that part of the figure where the curve of the
chest was to be seen.” It had been kept by his sister, Minerva-
and a Temple was made to contain the image. There were festi-
vals and noisy processions that followed "a basket in which the
sister had hidden the heart.” “It may be conjectured perhaps,
writes
my learned man, “that images were made with a chest cavity
to contain the heart of the sacrificed.”
a
(4) The Star.
“The Star goes right back to the Cretan Mother-Goddess. The
latter Greek form of it was Asterios or Asterion. The latter, for
example, is said to be Jupiter's son by Idaia” (Pausanias, II, 31, 1).
“This star name did not mean in its primary use any particular
star. It appears to have meant the Starry Heavens.
Zeus-
Asterios is a late Gortynian (Cretan) collocation (Johannes Ma-
lala: Chronicle Five). In the earlier thought of Crete her deified


ALFRED KREYMBORG
19
kings bore the same name Asterion or Asterios (e. g. Bacchylides;
frag. 47 and Diodorus IV, 60).
(5) The Centaur.
There is a fragment of a very early Greek pot showing two
roughly drawn centaurs with long thin legs, one of the centaurs
touching with his hand a tree which has long leaves and what seems
to be a round fruit. Above the centaurs, but apparently separate
from the tree, a bird perches on a twig. (Salzmann Necropole de
Camires, Plate XXXIX.)
a
a
(6) Sagitta.
“About the third century B. C., we find Apollo is closely linked
with Sagitta.” I find in a book upon Astrology published this year
"Sagittarius. The symbol is an arrow shot into the unknown. It
is a Sign of Initiation and Re-birth.” (A Student's Text-book of
Astrology by Vivian E. Robson, page 178.)
a
THE LINES OF HER WARY BODY
BY ALFRED KREYMBORG
The lines of her wary body lure the eye
Out of his head, insinuate the way
From breast to rounder breast and hip to thigh,
A symmetry of curve and wisdom gay
With melody of movement improvised
To make occasion seem a mystery
And mystery a night to be surprised,
Annihilated, white with history:
His thoughts with rain begin to swell, and they
Gather momentum in loins which fiercely ply
The brooding storms that rage to burst and slay
The covert of the labyrinth, the cry
Of each proud curve pierced silently and straight,
Till love clear cool of passion and of hate!


MRS DALLOWAY IN BOND STREET
BY VIRGINIA WOOLF
MRS
RS DALLOWAY said she would buy the gloves herself.
Big Ben was striking as she stepped out into the street. It
was eleven o'clock and the unused hour was fresh as if issued to
children on a beach. But there was something solemn in the delib-
erate swing of the repeated strokes; something stirring in the mur-
mur of wheels and the shuffle of footsteps.
No doubt they were not all bound on errands of happiness.
There is much more to be said about us than that we walk the streets
of Westminster. Big Ben too is nothing but steel rods consumed by
rust were it not for the care of H. M.'s Office of Works. Only for
Mrs Dalloway the moment was complete; for Mrs Dalloway June
was fresh. A happy childhood—and it was not to his daughters
only that Justin Parry had seemed a fine fellow (weak of course
on the Bench); flowers at evening, smoke rising; the caw of rooks
falling from ever so high, down down through the October air-
there is nothing to take the place of childhood. A leaf of mint
brings it back; or a cup with a blue ring.
Poor little wretches, she sighed, and pressed forward. Oh, right
under the horses' noses, you little demon! and there she was left
on the kerb stretching her hand out, while Jimmy Dawes grinned
on the further side.
A charming woman, poised, eager, strangely white-haired for her
pink cheeks, so Scope Purvis, C. B., saw her as he hurried to his
office. She stiffened a little, waiting for Durtnall’s van to pass.
Big Ben struck the tenth; struck the eleventh stroke. The leaden
circles dissolved in the air. Pride held her erect, inheriting, handing
on, acquainted with discipline and with suffering. How people
suffered, how they suffered, she thought, thinking of Mrs Foxcroft
at the Embassy last night decked with jewels, eating her heart out,
because that nice boy was dead, and now the old Manor House
(Durtnall's van passed) must go to a cousin.
“Good morning to you!” said Hugh Whitbread raising his hat
rather extravagantly by the china shop, for they had known each
other as children. “Where are you off to ?”
1


VIRGINIA WOOLF
21
9)
?!),
“I love walking in London” said Mrs Dalloway. "Really it's
better than walking in the country!
"We've just come up” said Hugh Whitbread. “Unfortunately
to see doctors.”
“Milly?" said Mrs Dalloway, instantly compassionate.
“Out of sorts," said Hugh Whitbread. “That sort of thing.
Dick all right?"
"First rate!” said Clarissa.
Of course, she thought, walking on, Milly is about my age-
fifty-fifty-two. So it is probably that, Hugh's manner had said
so, said it perfectly—dear old Hugh, thought Mrs Dalloway, re-
membering with amusement, with gratitude, with emotion, how
shy, like a brother-one would rather die than speak to one's
brother-Hugh had always been, when he was at Oxford, and came
over, and perhaps one of them (drat the thing!) couldn't ride.
How then could women sit in Parliament? How could they do
things with men? For there is this extraordinarily deep instinct,
something inside one; you can't get over it; it's no use trying; and
men like Hugh respect it without our saying it, which is what one
loves, thought Clarissa, in dear old Hugh.
She had passed through the Admiralty Arch and saw at the end of
the empty road with its thin trees Victoria's white mound, Vic-
toria's billowing motherliness, amplitude and homeliness, always
ridiculous, yet how sublime, thought Mrs Dalloway, remembering
Kensington Gardens and the old lady in horn spectacles and being
told by Nanny to stop dead still and bow to the Queen. The flag
flew above the Palace. The King and Queen were back then. Dick
had met her at lunch the other day—a thoroughly nice woman. It
matters so much to the poor, thought Clarissa, and to the soldiers.
A man in bronze stood heroically on a pedestal with a gun on her
left hand side the South African war. It matters, thought Mrs
Dalloway walking towards Buckingham Palace. There it stood
four-square, in the broad sunshine, uncompromising, plain. But it
was character she thought; something inborn in the race; what In-
dians respected. The Queen went to hospitals, opened bazaars—the
Queen of England, thought Clarissa, looking at the Palace. Al-
ready at this hour a motor car passed out at the gates; soldiers
saluted; the gates were shut. And Clarissa, crossing the road,
entered the Park, holding herself upright.
June had drawn out every leaf on the trees. The mothers of
!


22
MRS DALLOWAY IN BOND STREET
Westminster with mottled breasts gave suck to their young. Quite
respectable girls lay stretched on the grass. An elderly man, stoop-
ing very stiffly, picked up a crumpled paper, spread it out flat and
Aung it away. How horrible! Last night at the Embassy Sir Digh-
ton had said "If I want a fellow to hold my horse, I have only to
put up my hand.” But the religious question is far more serious
than the economic, Sir Dighton had said, which she thought extraor-
dinarily interesting, from a man like Sir Dighton. "Oh, the coun-
try will never know what it has lost” he had said, talking, of his
own accord, about dear Jack Stewart.
She mounted the little hill lightly. The air stirred with energy.
Messages were passing from the Fleet to the Admiralty. Picca-
dilly and Arlington Street and the Mall seemed to chafe the very
air in the Park and lift its leaves hotly, brilliantly, upon waves of
that divine vitality which Clarissa loved. To ride; to dance; she
had adored all that. Or going long walks in the country, talking,
about books, what to do with one's life, for young people were
amazingly priggish-oh, the things one had said! But one had con-
viction. Middle age is the devil. People like Jack'll never know
that, she thought; for he never once thought of death, never, they
said, knew he was dying. And now can never mourn—how did
it go?—a head grown grey.
From the contagion of the
world's slow stain
have drunk their cup a round or two
before.
From the contagion of the world's slow stain!
She held herself upright.
But how Jack would have shouted! Quoting Shelley, in Picca-
dilly! “You want a pin,” he would have said. He hated frumps.
“My God Clarissa! My God Clarissa !”—she could hear him now
at the Devonshire House party, about poor Sylvia Hunt in her
amber necklace and that dowdy old silk. Clarissa held herself up-
right for she had spoken aloud and now she was in Piccadilly, pass-
ing the house with the slender green columns, and the balconies;
passing club windows full of newspapers; passing old Lady Bur-
dett Coutts' house where the glazed white parrot used to hang; and
Devonshire House, without its gilt leopards; and Claridge's, where
she must remember Dick wanted her to leave a card on Mrs Jepson
or she would be gone. Rich Americans can be very charming. There
was St James palace; like a child's game with bricks; and now-
she had passed Bond Street-she was by Hatchard's book shop. The
.
.


VIRGINIA WOOLF
23
stream was endless—endless—endless. Lords, Ascot, Hurlingham
—what was it? What a duck, she thought, looking at the frontis-
piece of some book of memoirs spread wide in the bow window, Sir
Joshua perhaps or Romney; arch, bright, demure; the sort of girl-
like her own Elizabeth—the only real sort of girl. And there was
that absurd book, Soapy Sponge, which Jim used to quote by the
yard; and Shakespeare's Sonnets. She knew them by heart. Phil
and she had argued all day about the Dark Lady, and Dick had
said straight out at dinner that night that he had never heard of
her. Really, she had married him for that! He had never read
Shakespeare! There must be some little cheap book she could buy
for Milly-Cranford of course! Was there ever anything so en-
chanting as the cow in petticoats? If only people had that sort
of humour, that sort of self-respect now, thought Clarissa, for she
remembered the broad pages; the sentences ending; the characters
-how one talked about them as if they were real. For all the great
things one must go to the past, she thought. From the contagion of
the world's slow stain.
Fear no more the heat o' the sun.
And now can never mourn, can never mourn, she repeated,
her eyes straying over the window; for it ran in her head; the test of
great poetry; the moderns had never written anything one wanted
to read about death, she thought; and turned.
Omnibuses joined motor cars; motor cars vans; vans taxicabs;
taxicabs motor cars—here was an open motor car with a girl, alone.
Up till four, her feet tingling, I know, thought Clarissa, for the
girl looked washed out, half asleep, in the corner of the car after
the dance. And another car came; and another. No! No! No!
Clarissa smiled good-naturedly. The fat lady had taken every sort
of trouble, but diamonds! orchids! at this hour of the morning!
No! No! No! The excellent policeman would, when the time came,
hold up his hand. Another motor car passed. How utterly unattrac-
tive! Why should a girl of that age paint black round her eyes?
And a young man, with a girl, at this hour, when the country—
The admirable policeman raised his hand and Clarissa acknowledg-
ing his sway, taking her time, crossed, walked towards Bond Street;
saw the narrow crooked street, the yellow banners; the thick
notched telegraph wires stretched across the sky.
A hundred years ago her great-great-grandfather, Seymour Parry,
-,
who ran away with Conway's daughter, had walked down Bond
93119


24
MRS DALLOWAY IN BOND STREET
Street. Down Bond Street the Parrys had walked for a hundred
years, and might have met the Dalloways (Leighs on the mother's
side) going up. Her father got his clothes from Hill's. There was
a roll of cloth in the window, and here just one jar on a black
table, incredibly expensive; like the thick pink salmon on the ice
block at the fishmonger's. The jewels were exquisite-pink and
orange stars, paste, Spanish, she thought, and chains of old gold;
starry buckles, little brooches which had been worn on sea green
satin by ladies with high head-dresses. But no good looking! One
must economize. She must go on past the picture dealer's where one
of the odd French pictures hung, as if people had thrown confetti-
pink and blue—for a joke. If you had lived with pictures (and it's
the same with books and music) thought Clarissa, passing the
Aeolian Hall, you can't be taken in by a joke.
The river of Bond Street was clogged. There, like a Queen at a
tournament, raised, regal, was Lady Bexborough. She sat in her
carriage, upright, alone, looking through her glasses. The white
glove was loose at her wrist. She was in black, quite shabby, yet,
thought Clarissa, how extraordinarily it tells, breeding, self-respect,
never saying a word too much or letting people gossip; an astonish-
ing friend; no one can pick a hole in her after all these years, and
now, there she is, thought Clarissa, passing the Countess who waited
powdered, perfectly still, and Clarissa would have given anything
to be like that, the mistress of Clarefield, talking politics, like a
man. But she never goes anywhere, thought Clarissa, and it's quite
useless to ask her, and the carriage went on and Lady Bexborough
was borne past like a Queen at a tournament, though she had noth-
ing to live for and the old man is failing and they say she is sick of
it all, thought Clarissa and the tears actually rose to her eyes as she
entered the shop.
“Good morning” said Clarissa in her charming voice. “Gloves”
she said with her exquisite friendliness and putting her bag on the
counter began, very slowly, to undo the buttons. “White gloves”
she said. “Above the elbow” and she looked straight into the shop-
woman's face—but this was not the girl she remembered? She
looked quite old. “These really don't fit” said Clarissa. The shop
girl looked at them. “Madame wears bracelets ?” Clarissa spread
out her fingers. "Perhaps it's my rings.” And the girl took the
grey
gloves with her to the end of the counter.
Yes, thought Clarissa, if it's the girl I remember she's twenty


VIRGINIA WOOLF
25
years older.
There was only one other customer, sitting
sideways at the counter, her elbow poised, her bare hand drooping,
vacant; like a figure on a Japanese fan, thought Clarissa, too vacant
perhaps, yet some men would adore her. The lady shook her head
sadly. Again the gloves were too large. She turned round the glass.
“Above the wrist” she reproached the grey-headed woman; who
looked and agreed.
They waited; a clock ticked; Bond Street hummed, dulled, dis-
tant; the woman went away holding gloves. “Above the wrist” said
the lady, mournfully, raising her voice. And she would have to
order chairs, ices, flowers, and cloak-room tickets, thought Clarissa.
The people she didn't want would come; the others wouldn't. She
would stand by the door. They sold stockings—silk stockings. A
lady is known by her gloves and her shoes, old Uncle William used
to say. And through the hanging silk stockings quivering silver she
looked at the lady, sloping shouldered, her hand drooping, her bag
slipping, her eyes vacantly on the floor. It would be intolerable
if dowdy women came to her party! Would one have liked Keats
if he had worn red socks? Oh, at last—she drew into the counter
and it flashed into her mind :
“Do you remember before the war you had gloves with pearl
buttons ?”
“French gloves, Madame ?”
“Yes, they were French” said Clarissa. The other lady rose very
sadly and took her bag, and looked at the gloves on the counter.
But they were all too large—always too large at the wrist.
“With pearl buttons” said the shop-girl, who looked ever so much
older. She split the lengths of tissue paper apart on the counter.
With pearl buttons, thought Clarissa, perfectly simple—how
French!
“Madame's hands are so slender” said the shop girl, drawing the
glove firmly, smoothly, down over her rings. And Clarissa looked
at her arm in the looking glass. The glove hardly came to the
elbow. Were there others half an inch longer? Still it seemed
tiresome to bother her—perhaps the one day in the month, thought
Clarissa, when it's an agony to stand. “Oh, don't bother” she said.
But the gloves were brought.
“Don't you get fearfully tired” she said in her charming voice,
"standing? When d’you get your holiday ?"
“In September, Madame, when we're not so busy.”


26
MRS DALLOWAY IN BOND STREET
When we're in the country thought Clarissa. Or shooting. She
has a fortnight at Brighton. In some stuffy lodging. The landlady
takes the sugar. Nothing would be easier than to send her to Mrs
Lumley's right in the country (and it was on the tip of her tongue).
But then she remembered how on their honeymoon Dick had shown
her the folly of giving impulsively. It was much more important,
he said, to get trade with China. Of course he was right. And she
could feel the girl wouldn't like to be given things. There she was
in her place. So was Dick. Selling gloves was her job. She had
her own sorrows quite separate, “and now can never mourn, can
never mourn” the words ran in her head, “From the contagion of
the world's slow stain” thought Clarissa holding her arm stiff, for
there are moments when it seems utterly futile (the glove was
drawn off leaving her arm flecked with powder) —simply one
doesn't believe, thought Clarissa, any more in God.
The traffic suddenly roared; the silk stockings brightened. A
customer came in.
"White gloves,” she said, with some ring in her voice that
Clarissa remembered.
It used, thought Clarissa, to be so simple. Down down through
the air came the caw of the rooks. When Sylvia died, hundreds of
years ago, the yew hedges looked so lovely with the diamond webs
in the mist before early church. But if Dick were to die to-morrow
as for believing in God—no, she would let the children choose, but
for herself, like Lady Bexborough, who opened the bazaar, they say,
with the telegram in her hand-Roden, her favourite, killed-she
would go on. But why, if one doesn't believe? For the sake of
others, she thought, taking the glove in her hand. This girl would
be much more unhappy if she didn't believe.
“Thirty shillings" said the shopwoman. “No, pardon me Ma-
dame, thirty-five. The French gloves are more.”
For one doesn't live for oneself, thought Clarissa.
And then the other customer took a glove, tugged it, and it split.
“There!” she exclaimed.
“A fault of the skin,” said the grey-headed woman hurriedly.
“Sometimes a drop of acid in tanning. Try this pair, Madame.”
“But it's an awful swindle to ask two pound ten!"
Clarissa looked at the lady; the lady looked at Clarissa.
“Gloves have never been quite so reliable since the war” said the
shop-girl, apologizing, to Clarissa.


VIRGINIA WOOLF
27
a
a
But where had she seen the other lady ?-elderly, with a frill
under her chin; wearing a black ribbon for gold eyeglasses; sen-
sual, clever, like a Sargent drawing. How one can tell from a voice
when people are in the habit, thought Clarissa, of making other
people—“It's a shade too tight” she said-obey. The shopwoman
—
went off again. Clarissa was left waiting. Fear no more she re-
peated, playing her finger on the counter. Fear no more the heat o'
the sun. Fear no more she repeated. There were little brown spots
on her arm. And the girl crawled like a snail. Thou thy wordly
task hast done. Thousands of young men had died that things
might go on. At last! Half an inch above the elbow; pearl but-
tons; five and a quarter. My dear slow coach, thought Clarissa, do
you think I can sit here the whole morning? Now you'll take
twenty-five minutes to bring me my change!
There was a violent explosion in the street outside. The shop-
women cowered behind the counters. But Clarissa, sitting very up-
right, smiled at the other lady. “Miss Anstruther!” she exclaimed.


POEM
BY DUDLEY POORE
Hot earth sucks the roses' spattered blood.
Thunder trembles over hazy sycamores,
seed pods fatten, grapes grow round.
In the weed-grown border flowers have stopped.
And all the sultry day, rose jar in hand,
up and down the garden walks
I have played June's busy undertaker,
with cloves from the pantry shelf
embalming dead rapture,
ordering black gloves for Eros,
hiring the mourners.
Now disgust curdles my blood. .
I will empty these rotton petals
where the rain's hobnailed boot,
and the cricket's delicate heel
shall grind them back into earth,
to learn of languid caresses
in the angleworm's naked bed.
Let these empty jars gather dust
beyond the groping hand of spinsterish years
on the highest shelf of my thought.
On the mellowed year lies fulfilment
like the down on a peach.
Do the months look backward?
Do the ripe pods regret their fulness?
Does the squirrel weep
when hazels grow sweet in frilled jackets?
I will turn my face with joy
toward the swallows' going
and the month of vintage.



Courtesy of Prof. Julius Meier-Graefe
BY CARL HOFER
WOMEN BY THE SEA,





1
HENRY JAMES: THE AMERICAN SCENE
BY VAN WYCK BROOKS
I
.
1
N the last story that he published, The Jolly Corner, James
presents an expatriate like himself, Spencer Brydon, who, re-
turning to New York after an absence of a quarter of a century,
finds himself obsessed with thoughts of what his destiny might have
been if he had remained in America. He still owns the old house
on lower Fifth Avenue, the "jolly corner" in which he had passed
his childhood: it is empty and deserted and full of dusty memories,
and Brydon falls into the habit of passing his nights there, roaming
through the great blank chambers and evoking the past. “It's only
a question,” he says to a friend, "of what fantastic, yet perfectly
possible, development of my own nature I may not have missed. It
comes over me that I had then a strange alter ego deep down some-
where within me as the full-blown flower is in the small tight bud,
and that I just took the course, just transferred him to the climate,
that blighted him at once and forever.” And thereupon he becomes
convinced that the old house is still haunted by the self who stayed
at home. Who is he, what is he, what has he become, that
abandoned, that American self? Brydon, invaded by the illusion,
stalks the ghost; and at last, one night, in the first glimmering
of the dawn, he becomes aware that it has actually taken form.
Prowling about the house, he has himself opened a certain door;
he returns to the room and finds it closed. Shall he open it? It
comes over him that the other Brydon does not wish to be seen. He
hesitates; he masters his curiosity; he turns away; he has decided
not to pursue the reluctant spirit. He descends the stairs; then he
perceives that the street door stands open. The figure is before him,
against the wall, with its hands over its face. Brydon starts for-
ward; the hands drop; it is a face of horror. And Brydon faints
and falls upon the floor.
It is impossible to mistake the personal bearing of this story, im-
possible to question the implication of that face of horror which
presents itself to Brydon. Who can doubt that it expresses a con-
viction which James himself had never outlived, a conviction that,


30
HENRY JAMES: THE AMERICAN SCENE
>
but for the grace of Europe, his life too would have ended in some
monstrous fiasco? His return to America at seventeen, after his
first long visit to the Old World, had signified, to his aching fancy,
as he tells us, "premature abdication, sacrifice and, in one dreadful
word, failure.” How did he feel in his old age? “When I think,”
he wrote to Mrs William James in 1913, “when I think of how
little Boston and Cambridge were of old ever my affair, or anything
but an accident, for me, of the parental life there to which I occa-
sionally and painfully and losingly sacrificed, I have a super-
stitious terror of seeing them at the end of time again stretch out
strange inevitable tentacles to draw me back and destroy me.” A
superstitious terror! Strange inevitable tentacles! James was a
man of seventy when he wrote that.
To the end of his life, then, and however disenchanting his ex-
perience of Europe may have been, America, to James, signified
failure and destruction. It was the dark country, the sinister coun-
try, where the earth was a quicksand, where amiable uncles ended
in disaster, where men were turned into machines, where genius
was subject to all sorts of inscrutable catastrophes. He had taken
to heart numberless examples that seemed to have been placed, as
if to warn him, directly in his path. There was his father, whose
mind he had never understood, but whose brilliant capacity was
no more obvious than the fact that somehow he had mysteriously
failed to effectuate himself. There was William Page, the painter,
the friend of the family, whose extraordinary pictures were already
turning black and vanishing from their canvases owing to "some
fallacy as to pigments, some perversity as to basis, too fondly, too
blindly entertained,” as James was to remark later, a tragic story
of waste, of "unlighted freedom of experiment possible only (for it
comes back to that) in provincial conditions.” There was Wash-
ington Allston, whose talent had grown thinner and vaguer every
day in the bleak atmosphere of Cambridgeport: long and long
James had looked at that last unfinished, laboured canvas of his in
the Boston Athenaeum, drinking in the lesson that he was con-
strained to draw from it. The American artist in the American air
was a doomed man: pitfalls surrounded him on every side. Was
not even Hawthorne a case in point, Hawthorne who had himself
attributed the paucity of his productions to a “total lack of sym-
pathy at the age when his mind would naturally have been most


VAN WYCK BROOKS
31
.
effervescent”? What might not Hawthorne have become if he had
sprung from another soil!
Thus Henry James read his
own fears into the world that surrounded him. Was there any
occasion for these fears, any justification in the facts of the case
itself? It suffices to say that he felt them: the instances to which
I have referred, and which are all to be found in his writings, show
us how constantly his mind was occupied with this question. We
remember how the narrator in The Aspern Papers marvels that
Jeffrey Aspern, that American Shelley of the previous age, had
"found means to live and write like one of the first; to be free and
general and not at all afraid; to feel, understand and express every-
thing." We remember the moral that James tells us he had drawn
from Hawthorne's case before his first naïve opinion of Hawthorne
had been subjected to the test of his friend H. B. Brewster's
"cosmopolitan culture," the moral “that an American could be an
artist, one of the finest, without ‘going outside' about it.” Clearly,
Hawthorne to James' mind was the exception that proved the
rule, the rule that, without "going outside,” an American could not
be an artist at all, and even Hawthorne ceased to be an entirely
convincing exception. As for Poe, Thoreau, Whitman, whose
poems he was so soon to read, they could never have dispelled his
apprehensions. Of Poe he said, that “to take him with more than a
certain degree of seriousness is to lack seriousness oneself”; and of
'
Thoreau, that “he is worse than provincial, he is parochial.” And
he accused Whitman of “discharging the undigested contents of
his blotting-book into the lap of the public.” It might be said of
these estimates that they reveal simply a series of legitimate per-
sonal antipathies, though I think they suggest more than a little of
that provincial humility, that inability to believe that any good
thing could come out of the American Nazareth, which he exhibited
when he found his opinion of Hawthorne so sadly reduced at the
approach of a Europeanized friend. My present point, however, is
that, feeling as he did about the greatest of his predecessors, he
could find neither in the world about him nor in the history and
traditions of that world anything to reassure him, anything to
counterbalance the fears, the dread, with which from the first he
had looked out upon it. The "striking evidence” of his childhood
that “scarce aught but disaster could, in that so unformed and un-
seasoned society, overtake young men who were in the least ex-
a


32
HENRY JAMES: THE AMERICAN SCENE
9)
posed” was confirmed for him now in the artistic as well as in the
general human sphere: “exposure,” he was evidently convinced,
signified disaster as much for the American artist as for the Ameri-
can young man. He could not, in the phrase of one of his con-
temporaries, keep himself too carefully in cotton.
Such were the prepossessions with which, at the outset of his
career, Henry James appears to have regarded the American scene.
Was he not, for comprehensible reasons, the prey of that "fear of
,
life" to which Flaubert also confessed himself a victim? Un-
doubtedly; and to this may be traced perhaps the deep longing for
security, privacy, ceremony that was to mark his later years. But
to return from the ultimate to the immediate, what a light this fact
seems to throw upon the great “renunciation” with which his career
opened! In the Notes of a Son and Brother he describes a certain
moment when, as he was sailing back to Newport one evening after
a visit to a camp of wounded soldiers at Portsmouth Grove, a
sudden “realization” had come to him, a “strange rapture” of
realization, that one might be “no less exaltedly than wastefully
engaged in the common fact of endurance.” He means that the
passive rôle, the role of the spectator of life, had suddenly been
endowed in his eyes with a certain high legitimacy: he who had
been prevented by an accident from taking part in the Civil War
had “worked out," as Miss Rebecca West puts it, “a scheme of ex-
istence
in which the one who stood aside and felt rather
than acted acquired thereby a mystic value, a spiritual supremacy,
which—but this was perhaps a later development of the theory-
would be rubbed off by participation in action.” In this faith, as
we know, James was to live ever after. But would he have em-
braced it with such a "strange rapture” if, for him, life, action,
passion had not been invested with singular terrors?
It is with some such question as this in our minds that we see
him emerging from the New England of the 'sixties. His family
had left Newport; they had settled in Cambridge. Not till he was
twenty-seven was Henry James to return to Europe for a second
visit. Meanwhile, upon what sort of scene was he destined to look
out? In what light does he himself appear to us? What thoughts
filled his mind? We seem to see a grave and somewhat priestlike
figure, sedate and watchful, guarded in his movements, slow and
hesitating in speech. He has not yet acquired that look of an


VAN WYCK BROOKS
33
a
66
Elizabethan sea-captain that is to accompany the black, silky
beard of his early London days; he suggests rather some Hellenized
Roman of the third century, though there are times when his per-
sonality is enveloped in a kind of shadow. He is reserved and yet,
one would say, eager for experience, affectionate and suspicious,
precise and slightly prosaic, but full of the keenest sort of aesthetic
subtleties. His talk, enchanting in the presence of a single com-
panion, bristles with intense little preferences and sharp little ex-
clusions. His personal pride appears to be almost morbidly over-
developed. Of what is he thinking? He has not been able to forget
the humiliation of those first hours of the war, his accident, his in-
validism. He remembers his childhood, the failure that he had
been in the eyes of his tutors, his inability either to grasp the rudi-
ments of his studies or to play with other boys. He had scarcely
known a time in those days when he would not have been willing
to exchange his lot for that of somebody else, with the assured cer-
tainty of gaining by the bargain! He is determined to vindicate his
existence, to write as man has never written before: had he not con-
vinced himself, in the face of Mr Lincoln's call for volunteers, that
this might be at least a negative of combat, an organized, not a
loose and empty one, something definitely and firmly parallel to
action in the tented field”? He is infinitely curious about life; his
sensibilities are clear and fresh. For the rest, he is circumspect and
somewhat prim. Should an artist have passions? He believes that
an examination of this question is always premature. Like Long-
mere, in Madame de Mauves, he has in his composition a lurking
principle of asceticism to whose authority he has ever paid an un-
questioning respect. Like Longueville, in Confidence, he is annoyed
when he discovers that he has obeyed a force which he was unable
to measure at the time; he has little taste for giving himself
never does so without very soon wishing to take himself back. Like
Roderick Hudson, in the latter's first phase, he has a tendency to
regard all things in the light of his art, to hand over his impulses
to his genius to be dealt with, to invest every gain of soul or sense
in the enterprise of planned production.
Does he strike
us as somewhat dry, cold, and frugal, this young man who yet
nourishes in his heart an inordinate appetite for colour and form,
for the picturesque and the romantic?
One thing may
be said of him: if he has been estranged from life, his lot has been
up and


34
HENRY JAMES: THE AMERICAN SCENE
cast amid conditions that are the least calculated to win him back
again.
“The generation between 1865 and 1895,” as
Henry Adams remarks, “was already mortgaged, and no one knew
it better than the generation itself.”
Henry James knows
it, knows it in advance: has he failed to catch the signs of the times,
to foresee the chaos of the new age, the decline of the social life of
his countrymen, the drop of the American barometer? Far from re-
assuring is the spectacle that lies before him. The age of faith has
come to an end; the age of business has begun.
One pictures Henry James, then, peering anxiously into the
future, terrified by countless omens of a wrath to come.
He saw himself confronted with a population given over compre-
hensively to what Mr Rockefeller was to describe as sawing wood;
for such as himself, he must have felt, there was as little room in his
own country as there was for Alice at the Mad Hatter's table. “She
found her chief happiness,” our author says of the repatriated
,
American baroness in The Europeans, “in the sense of exerting a
certain power and making a certain impression; and now she felt
the annoyance of a rather wearied swimmer who, on nearing shore,
to land, finds a smooth straight wall of rock where she had counted
upon a clean firm beach. Her power, in the American air, seemed
to have lost its prehensile attributes; the smooth wall of rock was
insurmountable.” So it seemed to James, no doubt; he had no
single point of contact with what a contemporary was to describe
as this new “bankers' Olympus.” Nor was Boston capable of arous-
ing his affection. Those years in the New England capital were
marked, to quote Henry Adams again, by “a steady decline of
literary and artistic intensity.
Society no longer seemed
sincerely to believe in itself or anything else.” We have it all, or
much of it, in The Bostonians, that admirable novel which deserves
its generic title; we have there a most memorable image of the
aftermath of the heroic age, the ebb-tide of all those humanitarian
impulses which, at an exceptional hour and at the hands of ex-
ceptional men, had assumed such elevated if rather fantastic forms,
and had now lost themselves in fatuity and petrifaction. To James,
who had no hereditary associations with it, whose mind reverber-
ated with the echoes of the great world, and who saw it now in its
hour of Götterdämmerung, Boston was nothing if not repellent: he
expressed the feeling of a lifetime when he placed in the mouth of
a
a


VAN WYCK BROOKS
35
Christopher Newman the opinion that those who spoke ill of the
United States should be carried home in irons and compelled to live
in the neighbourhood of the Back Bay. "What it all came to say-
ing,” as he remarks in his life of W. W. Story, apropos of the
latter's attempt to adjust himself to an earlier Boston, "was that,
with an alienated mind, he found himself again steeped in a society
both fundamentally and superficially bourgeois, the very type and
model of such a society, presenting it in the most favourable, in the
most admirable light; so that its very virtues irritated him, so that
its ability to be strenuous without passion, its cultivation of its
serenity, its presentation of a surface on which it would appear to
him that the only ruffle was an occasionally acuter spasm of the
moral sense, must have acted as a tacit reproach.” And Story had
“belonged”; and that had been Boston at its best!
Boston! And, beyond Boston, that great unendowed, unfur-
nished, unentertained, and unentertaining continent where one
sniffed as it were the very earth of one's foundations! "I shall freeze
after this sun,” said Albrecht Dürer, as he turned homeward across
the Alps from Italy. And where was James to turn for warmth, he
whose every fibre longed for that other gracious world, that soft,
harmonious, picturesque “Europe” of his imagination, that paradise
of form, colour, style from which he had been ravished away and
which had captured and retained, as in some delirious, some alas,
too soon interrupted embrace, the virtue, the very principle of his
desire, his fancy, his every instinct? Ah, that secret passionate
ache, that rebellious craving of the unsatisfied senses! One felt like a
traveller in the desert, deprived of water and subject to the terrible
mirage, the torment of illusion, of the thirst-fever. One heard the
plash of fountains, one saw the green gardens, the orchards, hun-
dreds of miles away. Europe. And then this emptiness, this implac-
able emptiness: not a shadow, nothing but the glare of a common-
place prosperity.
There were moments, to be sure, when
Boston seemed almost European. How one rejoiced in those quiet
squares, in the ruddy glow of the old brick walls in the late October
sunlight! And there was Norton's great brown study at Shady
Hill.
But one seemed somehow to lose the feeling of
one's identity, one seemed to breathe in a vacuum. There was so
little spontaneity in the air; it was all so earnest, or so cold and
restrained, or so complacent-wit itself in Boston seemed to be a


36
HENRY JAMES: THE AMERICAN SCENE
function of complacency. And outside, in the streets, how shrill
were the voices, how angular were the gestures, how deficient some-
,
how in weight, volume, and resonance were the souls one discerned
in these hurrying passers-by!
And there was the Cam-
bridge horse-car, clattering along through the dust on its lazy ever-
lasting way: one could sit there on a summer noon, utterly alone,
jogging home to one's work-table, with a sense of being on the
periphery of the universe, twenty thousand leagues from the nearest
centre of energy. One stared through the dingy pane of the window
at the bald, bare, bleak panorama that seemed to shuffle past: an
unkempt field, and then a wooden cottage, and then another
wooden cottage, a rough front yard, a little naked piazza, a foot-
way overlaid with a strip of planks.
Was it all like this, was it all a void or a terror? He had re-
ceived every encouragement, certainly; and yet he had never been
really drawn out, as young men were drawn out--or weren't they?
-in England, in France. People seemed somehow never to expect
one to become, or even to want one to become, what one was de-
termined to become. A portent, a veritable genius—that would
have been so disconcerting in Boston! There was something a little
indecent in the mere thought of such a thing: it appeared to be
taken for granted that a bright young American ought not to make
himself too conspicuous, ought not even to desire a destiny that
deviated too far from the common lot. And then there were those
prescriptions, those impalpable moulds that one was supposed to
have accepted. There was Howells' repeated warning, for in-
stance, against not “ending happily”: one laboured always under
the conviction that to terminate a fond aesthetic effort in felicity
had to be as much one's obeyed law as to begin it and carry it on
in the same rosy mood. And in any case-granting that one didn't,
for one's life, for the very life of one's imagination, dare to pene-
trate too far beyond one's own circle—how could one ever create
a comédie humaine out of the world at one's disposal? It was
utterly, fantastically impossible!
Years later, in London, Henry James told his friend E. S. Nadal
that before deciding to live in Europe he had given his own country
a “good trial.” It was true; for the greater part of a decade he
kept his eyes fixed upon the American scene, and even then for a
number of years he seems not to have relinquished the idea of re-
a


VAN WYCK BROOKS
37
turning to it. "I know what I am about,” he writes at thirty-five
to William James, “and I have always my eyes on my native land."
But there was something that came between him and the picture,
something that is revealed in the fact that he endeavoured to find
America in such places as Newport and Saratoga: a certain pattern
that he had drawn from his reading had taken shape in his imagina-
tion, and he could look in the world about him only for the traces
of that alien literary world. He could scarcely conceive indeed of
an art of fiction that dispensed with the mise-en-scène of the writers
he admired. Was this merely, was it purely, a matter of spontane-
ous taste? Is it not more accurate to say that a certain preconcep-
tion had taken root at the very base of his literary consciousness?
By whatever name we are to call the vision that filled his mind, he
expressed it, in any case, in the following passage in his life of
Hawthorne-a passage that explains better than anything else the
inevitable rift between himself and his own country:
1
.
“It takes so many things, as Hawthorne must have felt later in
life, when he made the acquaintance of the denser, richer, warmer
European spectacle—it takes such an accumulation of history and
custom, such a complexity of manners and types, to form a fund of
suggestion for a novelist.
The negative side of the
spectacle on which Hawthorne looked out, in his contemplative
saunterings and reveries, might, indeed, with a little ingenuity, be
made almost ludicrous; one might enumerate the items of high
civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from
the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to
know what was left. No State, in the European sense of the word,
and indeed barely a specific national name. No sovereign, no court,
no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army,
no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles,
nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched
cottages, nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little
Norman churches, nor great universities, nor public schools--no
Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no
museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class--nor
Epsom nor Ascot! Some such list as that might be drawn up of the
absent things of American life—especially in the American life of
forty years ago, the effect of which, upon an English or a French


38
HENRY JAMES: THE AMERICAN SCENE
imagination, would probably, as a general thing, be appalling. The
natural remark, in the almost lurid light of such an indictment,
would be that if these things are left out, everything is left out.
The American knows that a good deal remains; what it is that re-
mains—that is his secret, his joke, as one may say."
a
a
It could not have occurred to James in the 'seventies that most of
the items he enumerates here are absent as much from the texture of
Russian and Scandinavian as from that of American life, and that
this was not to prevent the emergence in Russia and Scandinavia
of a fiction entirely comparable with that of England and France.
The evidence for such a deduction was still to come, at least for an
American reader; but so much for the general law involved in this
bill of the novelist's rights. Was Howells mistaken when, in his
review of James' book, he remarked that after one had omitted
all these paraphernalia one had “simply the whole of human life
left”? Was there anything, anything but the limitations—the
mental configuration, rather-of the individual himself, to make
it impossible for an artist to shape in prose the material that
Whitman, for example, had found so abundantly at hand? Or is
there some truth in the theory that a given society must have
arrived at a certain equilibrium and crystallized in certain more
or less permanent forms before the novelist can effectively handle
it? "Looking about for myself,” James wrote in 1871, “I conclude
that the face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a
certain point a very sufficient literary field. But,” he adds, “it
will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination.
To write well and worthily of American things one needs even more
than elsewhere to be a master.” And that, at least, was un-
doubtedly true: would it not have required a Tolstoy, a Balzac,
one of those veritable creators of societies, really to present the
America of the generation that followed the Civil War—to present
it with anything like the adequacy with which novelists of the
second or the third rank had been able to present the organized
societies of Europe? However this may be, James had taken his
world and his scale of values from the fiction with which his mind
was saturated. He was thus destined to make certain exactions of
America which America could not fulfil.
For if it was a question of palaces, castles, thatched cottages, and


VAN WYCK BROOKS
39
ivied ruins, if it was a question of the “luxuries and splendours of
life," of "ambassadors, ambassadorial compliments, Old World
drawing-rooms, with duskily moulded ceilings,” if it was a ques-
tion of such things as these, of which, like the hero of Watch and
Ward, James himself “liked to be reminded,” then America was
unprofitable indeed. There was the New York of the dancing-
masters—a world of echoes. There was Boston society, but that
was a “boy and girl institution,” a “Sammy and Billy, a Sallie and
Millie affair," as another caustic observer had just remarked,
"very pleasant and jolly for young people, but, so far as the world
and its ways were concerned, little more than a big village develop-
ment.” And between the two there was Mrs Howe, propounding,
alas, apropos of the new-born son of her Newport neighbour, the
Turkish minister Blaque Bey, the riddle, Can a baby a Bey be?
"Mrs Howe was very gay," writes Colonel Higginson in his diary,
"and sang her saucy song of 'O So-ci-e-ty,' which is so irreverent to
Beacon Street that I wondered how the A's could remain in the
field.” Henry James, with his inner eye fixed upon the denser,
richer, warmer European spectacle that filled his imagination, upon
the palaces, the castles, et cetera, that had formed such a fund of
suggestion for the novelists he revered-Henry James might easily
have listened to that saucy song, and with what a sinking of the
heart. Clearly, as he was to put it later, the apple of America was
not to be negotiated by any such teeth as his.
Later on, after he had settled in London and could look back
upon these years of indecision, he was to find that certain aspects of
American life had left upon his mind indelible impressions. He was
then to produce, in Washington Square and The Bostonians, the
most brilliant pictures of the two cities in which he had lived: the
New York that he had absorbed as a child and the Boston that he
had observed in the heightened light of the war. He had known
his America, he had understood it, far more deeply than he had ever
supposed. But as long as he was in that world he could see it, as
Don Quixote saw Spain, only in terms of the novels that possessed
his imagination. As a boy, he had written a letter to an actress in
Boston who had sent him in return a printed copy of her play,
"addressed,” as he says, “in a hand which assumed a romantic cast
as soon as I had bethought myself of finding for it a happy prec-
edent in Pendennis's Miss Fotheringay.” He had never ceased to
1


40
HENRY JAMES: THE AMERICAN SCENE
9)
read into the incidents of his life, into the scenes that confronted
him, associations with the novelized Europe from which he had
drawn such "mystic strength": he had caught in the legend of his
father's friendship with Edwin Forrest echoes of the diaries and
memoirs of "the giftedly idle and the fashionably great, the Byrons,
the Bulwers, the Pelhams, the Coningsbys”; he had seen in Miss
Upham's boarding-house in Cambridge a translation in American
terms of Balzac's Maison Vauquer; he had found in his cousin
Robert Temple, newly returned from Europe, a character "in the
sense,” as he puts it, “in which ‘people in books' were characters,
and other people, roundabout us, were somehow not.
We
owed him to Dickens or Thackeray, the creators of superior life to
whom we were at that time always owing most.” And as the years
had gone by and the American scene had failed to stimulate his
interest on its own account, he had continued to romanticize it in
this way, re-creating it in the image of the pattern within his brain.
Glance at his stories of this period. In Crawford's Consistency,
Elizabeth is brought up "in the manner of an Italian princess of
the Middle Ages,” in a “high-hedged old garden” at Orange, New
Jersey. In De Grey: A Romance, Mrs De Grey keeps a priest in
her house to serve as her confessor. In Poor Richard, the young
New England farmer is represented as kissing Gertrude's hand
whenever he meets her, while she, a homespun Yankee by every
implication of her being, maintains in her rustic parlour the ritual
of an English country-house. In Eugene Pickering, the story turns
upon the fact that a marriage had been arranged when Eugene was
a boy between himself and the daughter of one of his father's
friends. “I have an especial fondness for going into churches on
week-days,” says Miss Guest, in Guest's Confession. “One does it
in Europe, you know; and it reminds me of Europe.” Virtually all
these early stories of James' are the fruit of a similar nostalgia, a
similar effort to discover in the American world the traces of a
Europe either of memory or of fantasy: their creator was as much
out of key with the scene upon which his eyes rested as Roger
Lawrence, in Watch and Ward, standing on the piazza of his
house and surveying the bursting spring through an opera-glass. As
for the American spectacle in and of itself, he could make nothing
of it. "I believe I should be a good patriot,” says Miss Condit, in
The Impressions of a Cousin, “if I could sketch my native town.


1
41
VAN WYCK BROOKS
.
But I can't make a picture of the brown-stone stoops in the Fifth
Avenue, or the platform of the elevated railway in the Sixth.
I can sketch the palazzo and can do nothing with the up-
town residence.” And this was precisely the situation of Henry
James.
In his old age, when he returned to America, he commented on
"the thinness, making too much for transparency, for the effect of
paucity, still inherent in American groupings; a law under which
the attempt to subject them to portraiture, to see them as 'com-
posing,' resembles the attempt to play whist with an imperfect pack
of cards.” Well he remembered that sensation of helplessness, of im-
potence, as of those creatures of the deep sea who change colour and
shrink when they are astray in fresh water. He had felt so baffled,
so powerless in this environment that refused to conform to the
shapes within his brain; he had not been able to conquer his world,
and every day it had seemed to him more menacing. “Long would
it take,” he says in his reminiscences, "to tell why [New England]
figured as a danger, and why that impression was during the several
following years much more to gain than to lose intensity.” But we
can restore perhaps a few filaments of the mood that possessed him.
He would lose, if he remained, the wondrous web of images that
shimmered in his mind! He would forget the thoughts that he had
laid away, like nuts or winter apples, in the dim: chambers of his
consciousness! He would sink into a duil conformity with the cau-
tious, conventional, commonplace: routine of literary Boston. At
fifty, at sixty
he could see himself, rather stout, a little
shabby, his arm laden with parcels, waiting at the corner of
Boylston Street for the Cambridge horse-car, his mind running on
a new serial, another "old New England story" for the Atlantic.
Shades of Balzac and the world forgone! The world,
alas, the great, the dangerous, the delightful world!
The recurring theme of James' first period as a novelist was to
be that “hatred of tyranny" of which Mr Ezra Pound speaks, that
defence of “human liberty, personal liberty, the rights of the in-
dividual against all sorts of intangible bondage.” His novels, Miss
Bosanquet observes, are "a sustained and passionate plea for the
fullest freedom of the individual development that he saw con-
tinually imperilled by barbarian stupidity.” Who that recalls The
Bostonians, that picture of a world which seems to consist of noth-
a


42
HENRY JAMES: THE AMERICAN SCENE
ing but hands, manipulating, repressing, reproving, pushing, pull-
ing, exploiting hands, can doubt that, in all this, James was in-
spired by the sacred terror of his own individuality? The charac-
ters in his early novels are not as a rule quite sure of what they
want in Europe, though they all exist for the sake of getting there.
What they are sure of is that they want to escape from America -
and they never do quite escape: the "strange inevitable tentacles”
that James himself still felt as a man of seventy are always trying
to drag them back. Hands reach for them over the sea; their
friends pursue them; peremptory letters follow them, imploring
them to return. Who can forget Isabel Archer's efforts to shake off
those importunate well-wishers, Henrietta Stackpole and Casper
Goodwood, who are always reminding her of her “old ideals” and
of her proper destiny as a "bright American girl”? Or the letters
that follow the young painter Singleton, appealing to him as "son,
brother, fellow-citizen"? Or Roderick Hudson's family, watching
him from across the ocean, ever ready to intervene if he makes what
they consider a false step? Or, to go forward to The Ambassadors,
Strether's attempt to get Chad back from Paris, and Mrs New-
some's attempt: to..get Strether? From the first page of The
Ambassadors to the last, one seems to feel that ship, waiting, under
full steam, in Boston Harbour; to speed away at a moment's notice
and fetch Strėéhér hame.::And what does America signify to these
characters? The destiny of: Jini Pocock, to put it in a phrase,
vulgarization; that is to say, :brutalization, the eclipse of all their
finest possibilities: Strether, we recall, has hoped that Jim Pocock
would come to Paris—it would so clearly reveal to Chad the sort
of life to which they are all trying to induce him to return.
Can one doubt that in these fables James was expressing his
own fears?
But let me make one further observation.
Jim Pocock's face is the same face of horror that Spencer Brydon
encountered when the ghost of his American self dropped its
hands.
a
.
.



1
A DRAWING. BY NORMAN-BEL GEDDES






A DRAWING. BY NORMAN-BEL GEDDES
17
LLEGE
RAR





THE APOSTLE
BY GEORGE MOORE
ACT II
Interior of the cenoby of the Essenes on a shelf of rock in the
gorge of the brook Kerith. Sunrise. When the curtain rises a shep-
herd's pipe is heard from afar. A slight interval, and the shep-
herd's pipe is heard again, this time much nearer. Paul and Jesus
are asleep on benches on either side of the balcony; neither awakes.
Jacob appears at the end of the gallery. He advances cautiously. .
He is about to play his pipe again with a view to awakening the
sleepers, he hesitates, decides not to do so, and advances towards
them. Touching Jesus with his pipe, he awakens him. Jesus rises
to his feet and signs to Jacob that he is not to speak. Jesus and
Jacob come down the stage.
JACOB: So the preacher found his way into the cenoby!
JESUS: A great knocking came at our door, and I gave him the bed
that Manahem and Saddoc were making for me.
JACOB: But his fellow-where is he?
JESUS (pointing to Paul): He asked for his fellow, and we know-
ing nought of him, he got himself to his feet saying he must seek
Timothy; but he fell into our arms whilst talking, and has lain
all night in sleep deep as the sea yonder.
JACOB: I wonder if his dreams are of Jordan, for the twain made
escape through a yellow swirl of water that no man would have
dared his life into but to save it. But he told
you
all?
JESUS: No more than that they hid themselves in a cave.
JACOB: And seeing them carried down to the sea, the people
laughed and clapped their hands, saying: They will drink of
bitterness before they drown, and if they drown not, we shall
take them in Moab. A crafty device it may have been to keep
to the bank they plunged from, or belike a sudden Aux in the
current carried them out of sight and up a shelving strand,
whence they escaped into the hills, for they did not cross
Jordan.


44
THE APOSTLE
JESUS: We can get this man to Caesarea by ways known only to us.
JACOB: We can indeed, and be sure I'll lead him to safety.
JESUS: An evil blow might befall thee, or many stripes, or a
stoning.
JACOB: No matter, master, if thy life be spared, thy life being
worth twenty such lives as mine.
JESUS: I am but a shepherd on the hills of Kerith like thyself.
JACOB: Thou’rt up on high, Master, and we're down here. But
thou’rt always in our thoughts, whether we be speaking of sheep
or the sick. Of what art thou thinking? I said yesterday to a
man whose thoughts had wandered from me, and he told me
the story of a ram gotten by thee hard-by Caesarea—the origi-
nal Adam of the flock; and when he heard from me that thou
wast about to bid the hills farewell, he sighed and began the
story of his wife, who was bedrid for three years, and would be
still if thou hadst not called to her from the door: Woman,
rise and dress thyself.
No, thou’rt only one of us
outwardly. The sick ask for something thou hast touched, the
laces of thy shoon, a strip from a veil thou hast worn. We
cannot spare thee, Master, and I would not have thee go to
Caesarea with that man.
JESUS: But it is with this man I would go, for I know the secret
ways better than thou. (Approaching Paul.) So speak no more,
Jacob, of being this man's guide, I am his guide. But come with
me to the hills and we will warn the shepherds hard-by that if
a stranger comes to them for bread or drink, they must give it
to him and put him on his way. .
(Jesus and Jacob go up the stage, and Saddoc, Manahem,
and Caleb enter.)
Our guest still sleeps. Do not awaken him, and when his
eyes open tell him that I return in an hour to guide him to
Caesarea.
(Exit Jesus and Jacob. The Essenes come down to Paul.)
SADDOC: He sleeps like one that naught could awaken but the trum-
pets of Judgement, and I would it were so, for I am not forget-
ful of the great danger it is for us to hide a man who is alike an
enemy of both Jews and Romans.
CALEB: But we must allow an hour for his discourse, Saddoc, for
we, too, would hear of the Lord Jesus who was raised from the
dead by the power of his Father.


GEORGE MOORE
45
(Paul awakes, and seeing the three figures, looks round with
staring eyes, like one who believes himself to be the victim
of an hallucination.)
PAUL (springing to his feet): Who are ye? Is this cave the habita-
tion of evil spirits? I must escape.
Yonder is day-
light.
MANAHEM: Hast forgotten knocking at our door last night?
PAUL: The Essenes, the Essenes, only the Essenes! I was over-
come with sleep and the dream was so heavy upon me that I
knew not where I was. Thank God, it was but a dream! But
my fellow, Timothy, where is he? And he who slept by me on
this balcony?
CALEB: Jesus, our shepherd-
PAUL: Jesus! Jesus!
MANAHEM: Jesus, our shepherd, has gone in search of thy fellow.
Hast forgotten Timothy?
PAUL: Forgotten Timothy? No. But ye startled me out of a
dream, or were ye three standing round me whilst I dreamt ?
It must be so, for I was dreaming of myself on a spar amid
foaming seas when my eyes opened upon you in your white
garments.
CALEB: And mistook us, belike, for angels. I bring thee bread and
a jug of milk freshly drawn.
PAUL: Having travelled far I am weary still, and footsore, despite
the shepherd's bathing of my feet. Where is he?
MANAHEM: Have we not said that he has gone in search of
Timothy?
(Exit Caleb. Whilst Paul is eating Mathias enters, fol-
lowed by Bartholomew, Benjamin, Shallum, Eleazor,
Eliakim.)
MATHIAS (to Paul): Our President has charged me to bid thee
welcome and to tell thee that he hopes thou'lt stay with us till
thou'rt rested.
(Enter Caleb with a plate of lentils, which he hands to
Paul.)
PAUL: Salute thy President for me and tell him that I slept well,
but the ache of travel has not yet left my bones and I would
tarry here till midday, if I may without hindrance to anybody.
MATHIAS: Hazael will be with thee soon and doubtless thy request
will be granted, for we would hear thee tell of the Lord Jesus,


46
THE APOSTLE
a
of whom Manahem has not ceased to talk since the day broke.
PAUL: I thank thee, Sir, for thy invitation to me to preach the joy-
ful tidings, and I thank God for having led me hither, for by
whom should they be more joyfully received than by the
Essenes and by whom more easily understood, your learning
being famous throughout Judea?
MATHIAS: Our minds are always open to new interpretations of
Scripture; we would debate thine with thee, but before enter-
ing into debate we would have thee finish thy lentils.
PAUL: I would spend some days with you, but am under bond to
the noble Festus to return to Caesarea before the ship sails.
MANAHEM (to Mathias): Our guest has appealed to Caesar.
MATHIAS (to Paul): Thou art then a rich man that paid a great
sum of money for thy citizenship?
PAUL: My citizenship was not purchased. I was born free.
MATHIAS: Stranger still, for why then shouldst thou be at the
same time an enemy of the Jews and of the Romans?
PAUL: I am an enemy of neither, but a prisoner of the Romans for
a riot that began two years ago in Jerusalem, whither a great
pressing of the spirit urged me, for I would not leave Asia be-
fore preaching once more in Jerusalem to the Jews, a stiff-
necked, gainsaying race, but dear to me despite its stubborn-
ness, for I am a Jew like yourselves. But the people were stirred
up against me and would have stoned me had not the Roman
guard come out to quell the uproar and borne me on their
shoulders
up the steps of the castle, whither the people thronged
after me, rending their garments, throwing dust into the air,
crying: Away with him for scourging. As I was being bound
I turned to the centurion and asked him if it were .lawful to
scourge a Roman citizen and he untried; whereupon they de-
sisted, and I was sent to Caesarea to be judged. And there I
have remained for the last two years, the Jews still thirsting for
my blood; and to get it they sent elders from the Temple to
Festus, saying: We would question this man in Jerusalem on
some points of the law; give him over to us. But I said to the
noble Festus: These men are planning to kill me in an ambush;
I appeal to Caesar. He answered me: Thou hast appealed to
Caesar, and to Caesar thou shalt go.
MANAHEM: Paul travels the whole world over, founding churches.


GEORGE MOORE
47
(Looking round.) And the Lord has led him hither to make
known to us certain joyous tidings.
PAUL: That there is salvation for all, Jews and Gentiles alike.
MANAHEM (to Mathias): And this wonderful passing of the old
world was wrought by the coming of the Messiah promised be-
foretime, a child born of a virgin's womb.
MATHIAS: I know of no such prediction; the word in Isaiah is not
virgin, but girl, who shall conceive and bear a son and shall
call his name Immanuel. In thine eagerness to accept Paul's
Gospel, thou hast forgotten the Scriptures, Manahem.
SHALLUM: The prophecy in Deuteronomy is fulfilled in the Lord
Jesus.
MATHIAS: I would answer thee, Shallum, out of Deuteronomy:
The prophet that shall presume to speak a word in my name
which I have not commanded him to speak, or that shall speak
in the name of other Gods, even that prophet shall die.
SHALLUM (to Eliakim): It was an act of God that separated Paul
from his companion, Timothy.
ELIAKIM: And it was the hand of God that upheld him in the
path now for evermore sacred to us. Come, let us look upon it,
and take instruction from him, how since the coming of the
Messiah all things have changed.
PAUL: And that the Lord Jesus has raised the curse of the law
from you.
a
SADDOC: The curse of the law! (Aside to Mathias.) When he says
such things it's like running a knife into me.
MATHIAS: Hush!
PAUL: Once we were as children lost in a desert, and the law was
our guide, and it led us to the Lord Jesus. But now we are
under a guide no longer; the love of the Lord Jesus is enough.
(The Essenes crowd round Paul and lead him on to the bal-
cony, leaving Saddoc and Mathias alone in the middle of
the stage.)
MATHIAS: Art thou with Paul, Saddoc, or against him?
SADDOC: With a man who has said that the law has passed away?
Thou mockest me, Mathias, as is thy wont. But methinks the
moment is one rather for dust and ashes and the rending of
garments.
MATHIAS: Seeing all the brethren in cluster about this wandering


48
THE APOSTLE
preacher, I forgot thy fealty. Forgive me, Saddoc. We are
enemies no longer; common misfortunes make friends of former
disputants.
SADDOC: I am an Essene and will hold myself faithful to my vows.
(He goes up the stage and listens, returning after a moment to
Mathias.) Hear him now. He is saying that circumcision is in
the heart! (Mathias goes up the stage and listens and returns to
Saddoc.)
MATHIAS: I will set a noose for him, and thou shalt see him run
into it.
SADDOC: Like a foolish rabbit. I shall pray that thy noose prevail
against him, and though he never comes to kick in it I shall
abide in Kerith with the few that remain with us till God calls
me, going to him as he made me, the same in the end as in the
beginning.
MATHIAS: I have offered thee friendship, Saddoc, and shall not
desert Kerith though the brethren leave us.
SADDOC: But thou'lt weary in Kerith without brethren to instruct
in the Scriptures, and thou mightest do worse than join the
brethren upon the thither side of Jordan who have taken wives
lest the order of the Essenes should perish utterly.
MATHIAS: My first business is to overcome Paul in disputation,
and, as I have said, I shall impose arguments that he will not
be able to answer.
SADDOC: But the brethren will turn a deaf ear. May it not be that
thy interpretation of the Scriptures is the cause of the dis-
sidence-
MATHIAS: Of the dissidence, Saddoc!
SADDOC: Thy discourses dispose the mind to restlessness-
(Enter Hazael. Mathias goes up the stage to meet him.)
HAZAEL: Why are the brethren gathered on the balcony?
MATHIAS: To view the path that Paul came by, already a sacred
way!
HAZAEL: Thy meaning is not plain, Mathias.
MATHIAS: Will my meaning be plain if I tell thee that our guest
is the bearer of a new Gospel and that the brethren are receiving
instruction in it?
HAZAEL: Mathias, thy words alarm me, and I am too old and
feeble in mind to seek hidden meanings; so speak plainly.


GEORGE MOORE
49
MATHIAS: The Gospel he preaches is that the coming of the Mes-
siah has freed the Jews from the bondage of the law. More
than that I cannot tell. But I hope to entangle him in argu-
ment when he returns from the balcony with his converts, and
his defeat will remind the brethren of their oaths.
HAZAEL: Who is this who stands on my left hand ? Saddoc! Is
there but one Essene left true to his oath?
MATHIAS: There is thyself—
HAZAEL: Count me not, for I am already among the gone.
MATHIAS (going up the stage and returning a moment after):
Manahem, Shallum, Eliakim, relinquish themselves like women.
Paul persuades them, but I will crouch and cast a net. Hearken
to me. Paul, why lingerest thou on the balcony?
(Paul and the Essenes come down the stage.)
Hazael our President, comes to meet thee.
HAZAEL: I beg thy forgiveness for my delay; my great age compels
me to rest long after the brethren are about. But tidings have
reached me of thy escape from the Jews and of thy Gospel,
which since thou camest among us thou hast not ceased to
preach.
PAUL: God forbid that I should withhold the truth from any who
are eager to hear it. God led me hither; I knew not the cavern,
nor the path.
MATHIAS: But if it was God that led thee, why did he bring thee
round by Jericho instead of straight to us?
PAUL: The ways of God are unsearchable. He led me round by
Jericho and through the waters of Jordan to the brook Kerith
as he has led me always since my vision on the road to Damas-
cus, through many countries that ye know of, Thessalonica,
Macedonia, Bithynia, Phrygia, Greece, through a hundred
cities, founding churches everywhere I went and everywhere
persecuted by the Jews. On my first mission I was stoned and
left for dead at Lystra by certain Jews from Antioch and
Iconium, and fled into Derbe, and at Philippi I was beaten and
cast into prison. But my life has never been my concern but
God's, a thing upheld by God for so many years that I shun
danger no longer, and now it has even come to me that I am
lonely in security, withdrawn from God in houses, and safe in
his arms when clinging to a spar in the dark sea. God and our


50
THE APOSTLE
Lord Jesus Christ, his beloved son, have walked on either side
of me in mountain passes where robbers lie in wait. We are
nearer to God in hunger and thirst than when the mouth is full,
in fatigue rather than in rest, and to know oneself to be God's
servant is good cheer for the traveller, better than the lights of
the inn showing over the horizon, for false brethren may await
him in the inn, some that will hale him before rulers, but if he
knows that he is God's servant he will be secure in his own
heart, where alone security abides.
MANAHEM: From this day I am pledged to the Lord Jesus.
SHALLUM: God is not an unjust God, and the world will not be
destroyed before all have heard of the Lord Jesus.
CALEB: We will carry tidings of him to Italy and to Spain.
ELIAKIM: Teach us, Paul, teach us. We would learn the new Gos-
pel; we're weary of the old.
OTHER ESSENES: Teach us! Teach us!
MANAHEM: So that we in our turn may teach. (To Mathias.) We
are weary of thy interpretations of the Scriptures.
MATHIAS: So because ye are weary of the Scriptures ye would
accept a Gospel that a misadventure on the hills has cast among
you. And ye would go out and preach it before ye know it,
confident that the peoples ye go among will accept it as easily
as ye have done. Questions will be put to you; they will ask for
proof of the resurrection from the dead.
SADDOC: Be not hasty, brethren. Paul has not told you whence the
Redeemer came, nor of the witnesses of his resurrection.
PAUL: Witnesses are not lacking. He has many times returned to
his disciples, and clothed in the light of the spirit he has walked
with them and talked with them, yea, and eaten and drunk
with them, and the greater part of the city of Jerusalem saw
him hanging on the cross.
MATHIAS: It is strange that the story thou tellest should not have
reached us, for Kerith is but ten leagues from Jerusalem.
PAUL: Ye live among the rocks out of reach of tidings; but God
sent me hither, for he wished the Essenes to hear the Gospel of
the Lord Jesus, and from his Apostle.
MATHIAS: We would hear thee debate out of the Scriptures, Paul,
that the promised Messiah has come and died and been raised
from the dead.
.


GEORGE MOORE
51
9
a
MANAHEM: It was not in the Scriptures that Paul discovered that
faith in the Lord Jesus is enough, but on the road to Damascus.
MATHIAS: On the road to Damascus !
PAUL: Whither I went twenty years ago, bringing letters from the
High Priest, Hanan, which would give me right to arrest the
Saints and lead them back in chains to Jerusalem.
MATHIAS: The Saints !
ELIAKIM: The Saints are those who follow the new doctrine that
faith in Christ is enough.
SHALLUM (to Paul): And thou didst go with chains to bind them,
but wast stricken with a vision of the Lord Jesus.
MANAHEM (to Mathias): The Jews of Damascus laid plans to
kill him.
PAUL: But their plans were made known to me and to my disciples
in Damascus, who let me down from the wall at night in a
basket.
SHALLUM: From a window?
PAUL: Yes, from a window, in a drenching rain and in darkness,
and many times the wind carried me against the walls. But
why dost thou put these questions to me?
CALEB: We have in mind the cliffs above us and the caves in them,
and those we let down in baskets for repentance.
PAUL: For repentance!
MATHIAS: Should an Essene leave us and return, he must first re-
pent his sins in one of the caverns above, receiving food daily
from us, enough to sustain life, and if we are convinced that he
is truly repentant he becomes one of us again.
CALEB: It was thirty years ago that Brother Shalmaneser withdrew
from us to a small cave thirty feet above the ledge on which
we live, and for ten years his wont was to come down to us on
feast-days; but now he comes down no more, we know not
whether from too great piety or that he dare not trust himself
to the ladder, for it sways not a little if there be any wind
about.
HAZAEL: Nay, brethren, is it for us to relate the ways our brother
took to seek favour with God? Let Paul speak his Gospel, for
the sake of which it would seem that some of our brethren
would forgo their oaths.
PAUL (looking round): My Gospel, Essenes, was not taught to me


52
THE APOSTLE
nor born of the imagination of my heart, but given to me by
the Lord Jesus Christ himself in Arabia, and it being fully dis-
closed, I went up to Jerusalem and abode with Peter, the Lord's
head servant whilst he lived in the flesh; and having learnt from
him the story of the Resurrection I fared for fourteen years up
and down Asia preaching it, to return with Barnabas to Jerusa-
lem, taking Titus with me, for dissensions divided us and we
were at strife in the conference.
MATHIAS: So dissension has begun among you already!
PAUL: Dissension there must be always, since men do not see and
think alike, but if the rudiments of our faith be the same, we
should yield a little. And Peter, James, and John, seeing
that the spirit of the Lord had descended into me, held out their
hands in good fellowship, and again I fared from city to city
till I was called to Antioch to settle whether circumcision should
be imposed upon the Gentiles; and coming upon Peter eating
with Gentiles in a tavern, I said to him and to his company,
which comprised Barnabas and other Jews: Ye are neither
Jews nor Christians.
MANAHEM: Christians!
PAUL: We who are of Christ have come to be called Christians.
And that day in Antioch I said to Peter, James, and John: If
circumcision be imposed upon the Gentiles, and if they be
forced to live as Jews whilst ye live as Gentiles, then indeed the
Lord Jesus has died in vain and the world will continue in the
idolatries which have shamed it since Moses came out of Egypt
and smote the golden calf, saying: There is no God but one.
I listened to them with patience, till, seeing that Barnabas was
siding with Peter, I said: Ye are but waverers from whom no
good will come; and so I shook the dust of Antioch from my
shoon and went forth.
MATHIAS: We would hear how thou didst fare among the Gen-
tiles, but before hearing it we would have some instruction from
thee as to what manner of man was Peter. Whence came he?
PAUL: From Galilee, a fisher in the lake, one of the disciples to
whom Jesus said: Henceforth ye shall be fishers of men.
MATHIAS: So the Christians began among the poor, uninstructed
fishers of Galilee!
PAUL: Thou wouldst not have had them begin among the wise and
the learned?


GEORGE MOORE
53
a
.
MATHIAS: Truly not. But a Jew of Alexandria would have put to
thee some simple questions which thou wouldst be troubled to
answer plainly. He would have asked thee why the resurrection
of the Lord Jesus Christ should deliver the Jews from the law
of Moses. But it seems to me that I begin to understand thee,
Paul, and thy company; for whereas thy disciples believe that
signs and observances summon and strengthen the love that is
in the heart, thou holdest that all such are of Pagan kinship,
and that the name of the Lord Jesus, his death and resurrec-
tion, is enough for the true Christian.
We are not so
far apart, Paul, as thou thinkest for, but I would warn thee that
there is a dangerous doctrine implicit in thy Gospel : that who-
soever have faith may sin and sin again, but may come into
salvation despite his sins. (Paul begins to interrupt.) Bear
with me a little while, Paul. The promise made to Moses counts
for nothing?
PAUL: It counted for much till the Lord Jesus was born of woman
and died on the cross for our sins.
MATHIAS: The promise made to Moses was then a duplicity.
(Again Paul begins to interrupt.) Do not trouble to explain,
for I will refrain from this aspect of the question and will ask
thee instead how we may come into the faith; philosophy, it
appears, may not lead us into it.
PAUL: Through grace.
MATHIAS: But how comes grace? Whence comes it?
PAUL: Grace is a gift from God, which he gives or withholds.
MATHIAS: At his pleasure.
PAUL: God's words to Moses were: I will have mercy on whom I
will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will
have compassion.
MATHIAS: So the law of Moses is not ended! Thou leanest upon it
when it suits thy purpose and it is put aside when it pleases thee
to reprove us as laggards in tradition; and it was lest some mood
of injustice might be imputed to God that we were invited to
become thy disciples and carry thy Gospel into Italy and Spain.
PAUL: Does the vase ask the potter: Why hast thou made me thus?
Has not the potter power over the clay to make from the same
lump two vases for noble and ignoble use?
(A murmur of approval is heard among the Essenes.)
MATHIAS: Has it then come to pass that I discern a heed in the


54
THE APOSTLE
countenances around me for a potter God, a maker of things
according to a pattern? (Turning to Paul.) The Christ that
possesses thee, Paul, is but the Logos, the principle that medi-
ates between the supreme God and the world formed out of
matter, which has no being of its own, for being is not in that
mere potency of all things alike, which thou callest Power, but
in Divine Reason.
PAUL: Thou’rt nearer to Christ than thou knowest, yet among the
Greeks that I heard in Athens.
MATHIAS: I gather from thy Greek that thy stay in Athens was not
long, and from thence I would have had thee go to Alexandria,
my city, to learn philosophy from the masters. Essenes are
among them; Philo would have persuaded thee into a purer
conception of God than a mere potter.
PAUL: Neither life, nor death, nor angels can separate me from the
love of our Lord Jesus Christ.
(Rising from his seat Mathias leaves the table and passes
on to the balcony like one offended, and leaning his arms
on the rail looks into the abyss.)
MANAHEM (whispering to Paul): A Jew of Alexandria, but he
holds fast by the law in his own sense.
SHALLUM (to Paul): We would hear from thee a tale of Peter,
the Lord's head servant.
MANAHEM: We care not for Peter, but would hear of the Lord
Jesus Christ.
SADDOC: But who was this Christ when he lived
upon
earth?
PAUL: Born of a virgin's womb and crucified and raised by the
power of his father from the dead.
HAZAEL: Our brother Jesus was born in Nazareth.
PAUL: Which among you is that Jesus of Nazareth? (He scans
the ten or a dozen faces.)
SADDOC: Jesus is away on the hills with Jacob, our new shepherd.
(Enter Jesus.)
But here he is, returned to lead thee to Caesarea.
(Jesus hangs a wallet over Pauls shoulders.)
JESUS: Herein is food for three days. The journey before us is as
long, and it is time that we started.
MATHIAS: We thought our guest would remain with us till even-
ing, and that under cover of darkness-


GEORGE MOORE
55
JESUS: Darkness is not needed, for there are secret ways known to
us alone. (To Paul.) Have no fear for Timothy; a shepherd
put him on the way to Caesarea soon after he missed thee.
PAUL (turning from Jesus): For the safety of my beloved son,
Timothy, I give thanks to thee, Lord. (Turning to Jesus.)
Thou’rt sure of what thou sayest, so let us away, for there is a
great burning in me to see my son's face again. (Turning to
the Essenes.) Farewell, brethren, to whom I was led unwit-
tingly. Let the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, of whom you
have heard this day for the first time, thrive in your spirit, and
let those among you who would preach the Gospel of his death
and resurrection from the dead take up my work where I have
left it in Asia.
(He turns and looks into Jesus'
face.)
JESUS: Why dost thou look into my face so steadfastly?
PAUL: So thou'rt from Nazareth ?
SADDOC: Yea, the one of us that preached in Galilee and after-
wards went up to Jerusalem and was crucified by Pilate. The
very Lord Jesus whom thou preachest.
PAUL (to Jesus): Saddoc is making a mock of thee.
JESUS: I know naught of the Lord Jesus, but I was baptized in
Jordan by John and left the brethren to preach the kingdom of
heaven in Galilee, and afterwards came to Jerusalem with fol-
lowers. The people strewed palms before me, and at hearing
myself called the Son of David, I said to those who would have
reproved the people: If they did not call it forth the stones
themselves would. And pride having lifted me above myself,
I turned to my followers, saying: Who am I? Am I Moses,
Elijah, or the Messiah promised to the Jews?
(Paul stares at Jesus in bewilderment, and then as if to
break a spell cries out.)
PAUL: A madman! A madman! Or possessed by an evil spirit!
(Paul rushes out of the cenoby, and the Essenes flock on to
the balcony.)
CALEB (speaking from the balcony): He runs quickly; he is nigh
the bridge already.
SADDOC: A man of paunch and short legs runs quickly, like a stoat
but he runs not for long.
MANAHEM: With him goes our last hope of escape.


56
THE APOSTLE
MATHIAS: Thou'lt escape my discourses, Manahem, whilst repent-
ing in the caves above us. (Turning to Saddoc.) But thou,
good Saddoc, saw him truly from the beginning, an outcast Jew
that brawls in bad Greek.
SADDOC: A great victory it was, surely. Our ancient order is saved,
and that is enough. (He goes up the stage.)
MATHIAS (coming down the stage): I would know if it be in the
purpose of your desires that Jacob should lead our guest to
Caesarea.
(Receiving no answer from Jesus or Hazael, Mathias with-
draws. He signs to the Essenes to follow him. Exeunt all
but Jesus and Hazael.)
jesus: I must go to Jerusalem to testify.
HAZAEL: A day later, and thou and Paul would not have met, and
our order have perished and Paul gone his way to preach a lie.
But God put forth his hand, and again thou’rt chosen. Where-
fore go to testify in Jerusalem.
JESUS: It cannot be that I should stand aloof and let the world
take comfort in a lie, making it into the sign and symbol of
the living God.
(Hazael rises and brings a staff and scrip to Jesus. They
embrace. Exit Jesus. Hazael returns to his chair.)
HAZAEL: The priests will laugh in their beards, saying: A poor,
insane shepherd from the hills, but they know how to turn all
things to their profit; emissaries will be sent to Rome, where
Paul will be confounded as he was here.
And then
Jesus will return to Kerith and we shall live the end of our
lives together, the brethren about us.
.
.
CURTAIN
ACT III
A room in a house in Caesarea. Four days later. Evening. When
the curtain rises Eunice is alone on the stage.
EUNICE (rising from her chair): A footstep in the street! It may
be Paul's. It may be Timothy's. (Listens.) Neither. The
footstep dies in the distance like the hope it awakened, and so


GEORGE MOORE
57
door opens.
1
it is from dusk to dusk, hearkening to footsteps that come and
go. (Crosses and returns.) Mayhap the passenger was a friend
of Paul's in search of news, but I couldn't have given him any;
we should have stood looking into each other's faces and he'd
have gone, leaving me in a worse disquiet than before.
(Listens.) Other footsteps! They stop.
The street
The feet of several on the stairs !
(Enter Priscilla, Aquila, and Apollos.)
PRISCILLA: Pardon us, Lady, but the door was not latched.
AQUILA: We are friends of whom thou mayest have heard Paul
speak. We are Aquila and Priscilla, who arrived yesterday
from Rome. We are not mistaken? This house is Paul's?
EUNICE: You are in Paul's house; and you have come to get tid-
ings of him, but I can give you none.
AQUILA: May we ask when he will return?
EUNICE: You may ask, but the only answer I can give you is that
he may return to-night, if not to-night, to-morrow or the day
after. More than that I cannot tell you.
APOLLOS: We can see that our questions are troublesome, but we
have come long distances to see Paul.
EUNICE: Well then, Paul was not here when I arrived from Lystra;
he had gone two days before to Jericho with my son, and my son
returned three days ago without Paul. On their way back they
missed each other in the darkness.
Timothy could
say no more, but threw himself on that couch, and after a sleep
of twelve hours he returned to the hills to make a search for his
father in the faith.
You would know who I am
Eunice, Paul's first convert.
APOLLOS: I am Apollos, from Alexandria, Paul's latest convert.
EUNICE: Hearken! Did you hear no sound of footsteps in the
street ?
APOLLOS: I heard nothing.
PRISCILLA and AQUILA: We heard nothing.
EUNICE: My ears are quicker than yours. (She goes to the door.)
Timothy, of a certainty; the step is his.
(Enter Timothy.)
Thou bringest tidings of Paul?
TIMOTHY: That he has not been captured by the Jews, Mother,
but no more than that.
1
.
a


58
THE APOSTLE
.
.
EUNICE: Thy news is enough, if it be true. But from whom did
the news come? From the shepherds?
TIMOTHY: Who tell that Paul could not have been taken in an
ambush without the news being passed from hill to hill.
EUNICE: Shepherds think their hills overlook the world!
TIMOTHY: I bring a story.
But I am in doubt-
EUNICE: Then speak it, for we are among friends: Priscilla and
Aquila, from Rome-
APOLLOS: And Apollos, from Alexandria, who will dispense with
the usual salutations that he may get news of Paul more
quickly.
TIMOTHY: Well, Mother, yesterday was spent seeking Paul in
every coombe and clough, and hallooing to the shepherds; but
getting no answer from them of any avail I started at dawn
to-day for Kerith, and half of the journey had been accom-
plished when I met a shepherd who told me that he had seen
the man I was seeking travelling with one Jesus of Nazareth, a
shepherd with a great eye for a yoe or a ram, and a wonderful
cure for scab.
EUNICE: Timothy, I pray thee not to linger in shepherd's prate,
but tell us if Paul be far from Caesarea.
TIMOTHY: He was ten leagues from Caesarea when the shepherd
saw the twain on their way hither, one lagging like a sick man
or a very weary one, he said.
EUNICE: And the laggard was Paul?
TIMOTHY: Escaping from the Jews and at the end of his strength,
so said the shepherd.
APOLLOS: Thine ear was caught by the linking of the name Jesus
with the village of Galilee?
AQUILA: Jesus is a common name in Judea, and there are many of
that name in Nazareth.
TIMOTHY: The finding of a Galilean shepherd among the Kerith
hills is not strange in itself-men wander like the winds; nor is
it wonderful that he should bear the name of Jesus. The won-
der begins when we learn that he came from the cavern of the
Essenes above the brook Kerith, and that he escaped from the
cross.
EUNICE: Thou art not speaking of a robber, but of a shepherd.
Why then was he put upon the cross? And how did he escape
from it?


GEORGE MOORE
59
TIMOTHY: The question that I asked the shepherd, who answered
me: Belike an angel came down from heaven and carried him
back to Kerith, whence he had come.
PRISCILLA: To follow his flock, as herebefore.
TIMOTHY: And to work miracles, as herebefore. A great wonder-
worker is this shepherd from Nazareth, having power to heal
and to prophesy.
PRISCILLA: Has he cast out devils? And do the bedridden rise up
at his bidding?
TIMOTHY: He comes into a room, and the crazy become peaceful;
his look is a balm. And the shepherd told me how his wife had
not left her bed for three years, but had risen out of it when
Jesus told her she must clothe herself and follow her husband
into Arabia.
APOLLOS: We do not know whence his power comes, whether from
heaven or hell.
TIMOTHY: I asked the shepherd if he had heard of the Lord Jesus;
he said he hadn't, nor had he heard of Paul.
APOLLOS: Thou hast brought back a strange story from the hills,
Timothy.
EUNICE: But the story of the cross, whence came it? Does Jesus
of Nazareth babble it as he leads his flock?
TIMOTHY: Jesus of Nazareth, who is now guiding Paul to Cae-
sarea, speaks seldom.
PRISCILLA: He may be one who, after long brooding on the story
of the cross, has sloughed his own pitiful story to drape himself
in the Lord's legend.
EUNICE: And should this shepherd have been on the cross and bear
the scars of the nails on his hands and feet, he may have easily
borrowed the rest of the story.
TIMOTHY: Mother, I brought back the story for its own sake, and
I see all your faces in gloom.
APOLLOS: What thinkest thou, Eunice?
EUNICE: It may be that the shepherd has come to believe himself
to be the Lord Jesus, or it may be that the shepherds have
confused this shepherd with God's messenger.
AQUILA: Or it may be that the Lord Jesus has appeared to Paul
on the road to Caesarea.
APOLLOS: Hast forgotten, Aquila, that Paul's guide is an Essene
well known to the shepherds for many years?
1


60
THE APOSTLE
AQUILA: Kerith is over against Jordan, and the shepherd mayhap
a disciple of the Baptist.
APOLLOS (turning to Eunice): Aquila would have thee know that
till I came to Ephesus the Baptist's doctrine of repentance
alone was known to me, and that it was they who instructed
me-
PRISCILLA: In Paul's doctrine of grace. He came to Ephesus after
thy departure for Achaia, and when he asked thy followers if
they had received the Holy Ghost, they answered him: We
have not so much as heard whether there be any Holy Ghost.
AQUILA: Paul imposed his hands; they prophesied, and many
miracles were wrought.
EUNICE: The Lord upholds him and speaks through his mouth,
and all he says cometh to pass. But though ye know these
things, ye are here debating the truth of a shepherd's tale,
which, if it be true, derides our labour and mocks Paul, making
him a liar to us, his familiars for twenty years. Yet we know
he has never withheld anything from us, nor taken any man's
gold or silver, nor coveted any of this world's glories, but turned
his back upon them, it being enough for him to work for the
salvation of us all in sickness as in health.
PRISCILLA: Gaining his living at his loom as we do, Aquila and my-
self, for like him we are tent-makers.
(A knocking is heard.)
EUNICE: Somebody knocking at our door.
I would not
have this story made known till Paul returns to refute it;
so not a word, nor any hint of it.
TIMOTHY: Paul is away on the hills-
EUNICE: Why do ye stand here guessing who it may be?
(The knocking is heard again. Exit Timothy. A pollos and
Aquila talk in dumb show. Priscilla comes down to Eunice.)
PRISCILLA: May I look into the street ?
EUNICE: There is a moon to-night.
Look.
(Priscilla draws the curtains.)
PRISCILLA: And so bright is the moon that the rigging of the ships
alongside the wharf can be counted. Ah! Timothy comes to
help a man unload a cart. He is lifting a hamper on to the
man's shoulders.
(Apollos and Aquila come down the stage.)
.


GEORGE MOORE
61
1
1
APOLLOS: If there be scars on the hands and feet of the shepherd,
he will find believers.
EUNICE: It would seem that a shepherd's tale has power over much
learning, Apollos.
(Enter Timothy.)
TIMOTHY: Probus has come, laden with hampers, and asks for leave
to lay the table.
EUNICE: For whom?
TIMOTHY: His orders, he said, were taken from Julius, the cen-
turion, who would mark Paul's return with a feast.
EUNICE: Grief makes me forgetful of my housekeeping; and may-
hap Julius has news of Paul's return. (Enter Probus, a hamper
on his shoulder. Exit Timothy. Eunice turns to Probus.) If
)
Julius has no news of Paul, his feast will be wasted.
PROBUS: Not if I may open this hamper, Lady, so full is it of deli-
cacies, the very show of which, I'll warrant, will awaken thy
appetite. (Eunice signifies dissent.) The hamper is heavy, ,
Lady, and the stairs are steep. I would not have the charge of
carrying it back again unlightened. (Eunice again signifies dis-
sent.) But, Lady, I did not say that Julius was without news
of Paul. In an hour or less-
EUNICE: Then why have we been kept waiting for thy news?
PROBUS: I have only just come, Lady.
EUNICE: Ah! torment me not, but tell me quickly—where is Paul,
and how knowest thou that he is on his way to us? Didst say
he
would be here in an hour?
PROBUS: I said in less than an hour, Lady; and as I lay the feast
to bid him welcome I'll tell thee how-
EUNICE: The opening of hampers delays the news I would hear
quickly
PROBUS: A letter was brought in this morning by a shepherd to
Julius the centurion, my master; whereupon we went to Festus,
and the twain read the letter together.
EUNICE: Whose letter?
PROBUS: Why, Paul's letter. Of whom else should I speak?
EUNICE: And what was said in the letter?
PROBUS: The letter was mumbled over between them, and all I
heard was that Paul was lying footsore on the hills and asked
for a litter to bring him hither.
now.
.


62
THE APOSTLE
.
EUNICE: Has the litter been sent?
PROBUS: Yes, Lady; I saw the litter-men go. And in an hour or
less—
EUNICE: A letter mumbled over together was a long letter, more
than a mere request for a litter. So speak; what else didst thou
a
hear?
PROBUS: Well, Lady, if I heard more it's gone out of my head.
But there was something more. Let me unpack my
hamper, for whilst unpacking it I shall remember.
Something about a postponement of his journey to Rome till
the springtime, when favourable winds will fill the sails and the
ship be carried joyously over a blue, kindly sea.
EUNICE (to Apollos): Paul spoke naught of that. The man in-
vents. As well might he tell us that Paul spoke of perfumed
gales!
APOLLOS: Now, what reason, good Probus, did Paul give for ask-
ing that his journey to Rome might be deferred till the spring?
PROBUS: The lady is so anxious to hear all in a minute that I have
no thought for anything. Give me time.
No, I can
think of no reason except that he is tired, as well he might be.
A journey of sixty leagues in a weck is no small journey for a
a
man-
AQUILA: Forget the length of the journey, Probus, and tell us if
Paul met with an angel.
PROBUS: We Romans know naught of angels. But if you like
wings I can show you a few. I have brought some quails—
PRISCILLA: Did Paul say he was alone, or with a guide? Think,
Probus, think.
PROBUS (returning to his hamper): I may remember whilst un-
packing this hamper, Lady, a hamper that was packed with due
regard to Christian license: lampreys, swine's flesh, wild and
tame.
PRISCILLA: We eat of lampreys only in the taverns frequented by
Jews.
PROBUS: I do not know how the Lord Jesus may be pleased by the
eating of lampreys or refraining from eating them--a vile food,
to my thinking, though deemed a delicacy by many.
PRISCILLA: We command our bellies and proclaim our faith by
eating of loathly meats.


GEORGE MOORE
63
PROBUS (aside): A strange people, surely, on whichever side they
range themselves, Christians crying: Freedom for the belly!
and Jews replying: A stint on the belly! (Aloud.) Wherefore,
knowing you to be Christians, I have brought a sucking-pig that
was taken from the dug in such good time that Elijah would
have sniffed and mayhap eaten; and do you sniff him, but be-
fore eating mark his crackling lined with—do not call it fat,
for ambrosia is the word for it. And for those who will not
break with the old faith by eating this little innocent that never
laid his snout in the trough, here is a kid.
(Enter Timothy with a basket.)
And in this basket-
EUNICE: Thou meanest well, Probus, and hast no thought to offend
a
us, but-
PROBUS: Offend thee, Lady? May not a showman take pride in
his show? I durst not add that these quails have prepared them-
selves for this feast by refraining from flight so that they may
gather a flesh so tender- (Eunice turns away.) Pardon my
babble, Lady; I will stay my tongue and leave the viands to
prove their excellence by being devoured. Of the wine I will
only say that it is Chian, and Paul being a Christian, thou'lt
not fail to offer him a goblet, for after his long travel he will
need it. And here are cakes of white wheaten flour fresh from
the kneading-tray, which he'll be glad to nibble, however tired
he may be, whilst he drinks.
APOLLOS: Hearken! The tramp of litter-men.
PROBUS (to Eunice): What did I tell thee, Lady—that he would
return in an hour or less.
AQUILA: So he did reject the guide's story as a lie!
PRISCILLA: He could have only heard it, Aquila, by a fire on the
hills amid a drift of shepherds.
EUNICE: And whilst their journey they kept away from all en-
campments for fear of betrayal.
(A pollos, Eunice, and Timothy go to the window.)
TIMOTHY: Mother, Paul has come back.
EUNICE: Then why do we not run to meet him?
(Eunice and Timothy start forward.)
APOLLOS: His feet are already on the stairs.
EUNICE (listening): He coughs as he ascends the steep stairs, and
a


64
THE APOSTLE
I'd know his cough amid a thousand. Timothy, draw forward
the couch for him to rest on. (Enter Paul.) So, Paul, it's
thou, and so weary. I would have chosen to remember thee
otherwise; but choice is not given to us.
PAUL: From weariness to weariness, so I have lived.
EUNICE: But why didst thou not wait for me?
PAUL: I thought to return sooner.
EUNICE: Here is Timothy, thy son in the faith, who arrived safely
after missing thee on the hills.
TIMOTHY: And who has been for the last two days striving to get
tidings of thee from the shepherds.
PAUL: Will none loose my sandals for me? (Eunice loosens his
sandals. Paul turns to Probus.) Of the strength that the jour-
ney
back from Jericho has robbed me, thou'lt tell Festus; long
marches, hunger, thirst.
But whom do I see? Aquila
and Priscilla, returned from Rome! What tidings do ye bring?
AQUILA: Evil tidings enough, dear Master, of stirs and quarrels
that have broken out between Jews and Christians.
PRISCILLA: News of Nero must have reached Caesarea.
AQUILA: An Emperor once so gentle that he could not sign an
order for an execution without tears that he had learnt to write,
now signs away the lives of half his Senators.
PRISCILLA: A madman he is said to be. Before we left Rome a
rumour was going hither and thither that what remained of the
Senate, about two-thirds, had been summoned at midnight to
attend upon the Emperor. Only a few minutes were given to
them to clothe themselves, and when they arrived at the Em-
peror's golden house they were ushered into a long gallery
draped in black with seats on either side; and when all these
were filled, the Emperor, dressed in black, fiddled whilst he
danced past the quaking Senators. He disappeared through a
distant door, not a word having been spoken, and then, after
an interval, the Senators were informed by an officer of the Im-
perial household that they might return to their beds.
PAUL: But ye would not have me forgo the journey because a mad
Emperor wears the purple?
AQUILA: We thought it might be deferred till the spring.
PAUL: Who told thee that my letter to Julius begged for a post-
ponement? (Looking round.)


GEORGE MOORE
65
!
APOLLOS: Probus.
AQUILA: Julius' servant.
TIMOTHY: Is the news false?
PAUL: It is true inasmuch as I am waiting for the voice of God
bidding me to Rome.
APOLLOS: But he has bidden thee to Rome.
PAUL: From the beginning of my life I foresaw this journey, and
I foresee it still—whether this year or the next, I am not sure.
But two years hence I shall be far from Rome, in Spain, for
whosoever foresees his life beyond the day he lives in, foresees
his death; as the arm ends in the hand, life ends in death; and
my death will come to pass in a rocky plain, with these words
upon my lips: Jesus, whom on earth I knew always in the
spiritual body, I come to thee, to thy kingdom, to my salvation,
to life everlasting in thy love that I have earned in many
tribu-
lations; and forget not these, dear Lord, but take thy faithful
servant in thine arms and bear him into thy house, made not
with hands, but in the eternity of the heavens.
(Paul stands lost in the vision, and those around watch him
in wonderment. He staggers, and Timothy supports him.)
TIMOTHY: Fill a goblet, Probus.
(Probus pours out a goblet of wine and hands it to Paul,
who drinks.)
PROBUS (sniffing the wine): The wine is Chian, and all the Gods
are in Chian—a heavenly wine! I drink to their health. (He
drinks.)
PRISCILLA: If thy Gods be immortal, why drink to their health?
PROBUS: New Gods replace the old at the will of men. Men cast
their eyes heavenward and cried: Let there be Gods! and there
!
were Gods, beautiful Gods, living on ambrosia and nectar,
though what nectar can they have that surpasses Chian?
PRISCILLA: But Gods are not men.
PROBUS: Has not a God been born of woman—But thou must
excuse me, Lady, till I get this hamper on my shoulders. (Tim-
othy comes to his help. To Timothy.) Give me the basket.
(Timothy hands him the basket. He turns to Paul.) Hast any
message for Julius, who will come to the feast that I've laid if
he can spare time from the prisoners now going on board ?
PAUL: Tell him I need rest, for that is all that is certain.


66
THE APOSTLE
(Exit Probus. A pause. Paul starts to his feet.)
I must speak with him.
(Exit Paul hurriedly.)
EUNICE: Who now believes the shepherd's story?
APOLLOS: None was pledged to belief or unbelief. Paul will tell
us-
EUNICE: Ye have seen how weary he is.
AQUILA: But he cannot go on to Rome leaving us in doubt.
EUNICE: In doubt! In doubt! Ye have heard him foretell his
death in Spain, and still ye doubt! Hearken! He returns.
Not a word!
APOLLOS: But we must hear the truth from him.
(Enter Paul. He goes to Timothy.)
PAUL: So, my beloved son, after losing each other in the rocks
thou wert able to find thy way through twenty leagues of
hills. How long did the journey take thee?
TIMOTHY: Two days.
PAUL (to Eunice): Thou couldst hardly have known thy son after
so hard a journey.
EUNICE: After a few hours' rest I sent him forth to the hills again
to seek thee.
PAUL: Timothy outwalks me, great traveller though I be; yet to
send him forth again after a long journey seems— But I'll not
reprove anybody to-night. We are here united belike for the last
time, mayhap never to see each other's faces again. (To dis-
guise his emotion.) So, Timothy, after a few hours' sleep thou
wert sent out on the hills to search for me?
TIMOTHY: To get no news of thee from the shepherds till I met
one coming from Kerith who said he had seen thee, or one like
thee, with Jesus of Nazareth.
PAUL: And what said he of him?
TIMOTHY: That he was a man of abrupt speech and seldom, yet
with a kindly smile when he was met on the hills.
PAUL: We seem to have spoken but once whilst on our journey.
APOLLOS: After losing Timothy thou camest upon a shepherd?
PAUL: No. But it is a long story, and I know not how to tell it all.
AQUILA: A few words—when and where?
PAUL: One moment Timothy was by me, the next he was gone,
and I wandered calling in the darkness, finding myself suddenly
a


GEORGE MOORE
67
in a narrow path bordering an abyss which led me to a cavern,
the dwelling of some Essenes, to whom I preached next day;
but when they were about to accept my Gospel one of them
said: But our brother Jesus, of Nazareth, was put on the cross
by Pilate. He had barely spoken these words when the shepherd
that guided me hither came with a wallet, which he hung over
my shoulders, saying: It is a three days' journey from Kerith
to Caesarea.
APOLLOS: Did he tell how he was saved from the cross?
PAUL: More I did not hear, but cried out: A madman! a madman!
and fled into the desert.
APOLLOS: Where he found thee?
PAUL: By a well-head, where I had fallen in my sickness. After
a long sleep, I said, I shall be able to follow thee, but he an-
swered: To thy feet, to thy feet, for the hills are watched. He
knew all the caves and we slept in them, journeying mostly at
night.
TIMOTHY: And for food?
PAUL: We had food in our wallets.
APOLLOS: And ye ate without speaking?
PAUL: To argue with a madman awakens the mad idea in him that
a
often sleeps so soundly that we know not he is mad.
TIMOTHY: But if he were not a ghost or a phantom born of thy
sickness
PAUL: Neither ghost nor fetch, but the brother that slept one night
on the bench beside me and went to search the hills for thee,
Timothy; and having gotten news of thee from the shepherds,
returned to guide me hither.
TIMOTHY: Yet you could not have parted without breaking silence.
PAUL: It was yesterday on the hills above Caesarea, as the winds
were dropping and the sea-fowl hung on their long wings, each
making in turn for the roosts by the sea, that he said: I have
brought thee within a league of Caesarea and now must leave
thee, Paul. Whither goest thou? I asked, and he answered:
Back to Kerith, to the brethren that thy arrival did much dis-
quiet. For they were divided, I said, some against, some for,
my Gospel. And thou? To me, he answered, thou wert even a
greater disquiet than to the other brethren, for my first thought
was to go to Jerusalem to testify against thee; and Hazael, who


68
THE APOSTLE
had seen the brethren ready to forgo their oaths, thought well
of my journey thither, and gave me staff and scrip.
APOLLOS: Thy story gets stranger and stranger.
PAUL: It does, indeed, Apollos, so strange that I can hardly believe
it myself. My shepherd guide did not lead me into Jerusalem.
For to testify against thee, he said, after leaving thee safe in
Caesarea, would embroil men's minds still further. Although
we preach naught but the kingdom of heaven, Paul, preaching
is vain and mischievous. And these words bringing a thought of
my journey to Rome to me, I asked him if we must not strive
against evil. Whilst waiting for his answer I heard the evening
sigh gently about the hilltop where we rested, and his answer
came almost as gently as the dropping wind: It is better to love
the good than to hate the wicked. Many other things he said,
all of which were beautiful, and whilst I listened to him it often
seemed to me that long brooding on the story of the crucifixion
had awakened something of the Lord Jesus in him, for are not
all things akin, all things participating in God's will, even the
Lord Jesus himself? Once during the night he stood over me,
but whether I waked or dreamed I know not, for sleep closed
about me again, and in the morning I looked for him in vain.
TIMOTHY: But in four days, travelling together thou must have
seen scars of the nails on his hands and feet, if indeed he were
crucified.
EUNICE (coming forward): What hast thou asked, Timothy?
TIMOTHY: I have but asked if there were scars on the hands and
feet, for they would testify that the shepherd was at least put
on the cross. Paul did not understand my question.
PAUL: Only too well do I understand thee, Timothy. But are you
all thinking of the man Jesus? And is there not one among you
who understands? Thou, Eunice?
EUNICE: Life was not life, but death, till Jesus came. Can I mis-
trust his Apostle?
PAUL (turning from Eunice and addressing the others): So it is by
the signs of the cross that ye know him, ye being no better than
Peter, James, and John, who preach naught but the Galilean.
And of all, Timothy, thou’rt without knowledge of the ever-
lasting Jesus!


GEORGE MOORE
69
TIMOTHY: But many times we have preached the man Jesus, in
Jericho and in many other towns and cities.
PAUL: We preach the man Jesus and also the everlasting Jesus that
:
has abided in man since the beginning.
TIMOTHY: Then thou deniest not the Galilean, Paul ?
PAUL: God forbid that I should deny Jesus of Nazareth was pos-
sessed of the Lord Jesus when he preached the kingdom of
heaven in Galilee and the worthlessness of this world, for who-
soever speaks God's wisdom is possessed of the Lord Jesus,
God's messenger, his beloved son, who died for me on the cross
and for whom I, too, was crucified, he in me and I in him.
(Turning from Timothy to the others.) Brethren, who has
come among you to pervert my doctrine, stinting it to a single
revelation in Galilee? Is there one among you who doubts that
Moses was possessed of the Lord Jesus when he led the Israelites
out of Egypt, or Elijah when a fiery chariot carried him heaven-
ward? We are Jews no longer, but Christians, and may
believe
that Jesus was revealed in Pythagoras, in Socrates, in Plato,
and will be revealed again and again in many different mani-
festations till the end of time, till the last man has perished,
and death himself, the last enemy, is subdued. Then, and not
till then, will the Lord Jesus be converted nigh to his Father.
My brethren, is not this understood among you, or are ye still
like John and James and Peter? And thou Timothy ? but, alas!
no longer in the faith.
TIMOTHY: Forgive me for not knowing, Father, that the truth lies
beyond the scars.
APOLLOS: Priscilla and Aquila instructed me so far as they knew,
but as themselves will admit after hearing thee to-day, Paul, it
was no more than the blind striving to lead the blind.
AQUILA: We are comforted by thy words, Paul, for they awaken
the truth that slept in our hearts.
PRISCILLA: We knew without knowing that we knew. Thou hast
made us clear to ourselves, Paul.
PAUL: What question shall I put to thee, Eunice?
EUNICE: Thou hast my answer in thy heart already: Go to Rome
and fetch the world to Christ, and glorify thyself, if glory be
>
on earth.


70
THE APOSTLE
a
PAUL: As body and soul are Rome and my doctrine, for I go
thither to reconcile the factious, but preach a religion that will
make the empire the world. Aquila and Priscilla, I bid you to
Corinth to combat vices that are not so much as named among
Pagans, and Apollos, I confide to thee the writing of an Epistle
addressed to the Hebrews—thine excellent Greek will obtain
for it a fair hearing in Alexandria; and I will only bid thee not
to show Jesus too much in time and too little in eternity. And
thou, Eunice, wilt return to Lystra to defend my Gospel against
false teachers; and thou, Timothy, shalt return with thy mother
and await my letters from Rome. There are many others, whose
faces rise up dimly, for I am weary beyond any weariness I have
known before. There is Phoebe, servant of the Church at
Cenchrea, who has laboured much for us, Onesimus and Phile-
mon, Lucius, Jason, Gaius, Erastus, Stephanus, Fortunatus, and
many others whose names I cannot speak. But ye know them
all, and when ye meet on the roads stop a little while to tell
them that I went commending them all unto God's grace, and
though your ways may not be the same, go a little way together
talking of me. (The company crowd round him, but he puts
them aside.) I go alone. (As he reaches the door, sailors are
heard singing. He turns.) I would speak alone with Eunice,
and do ye others go to tell them on board that I will be with
them anon.
(Exeunt Priscilla, Aquila, A pollos, and Timothy.)
Not with the words of parting friends can I part with thee,
Eunice, nor with the words that I would address to my son,
Timothy. Our bonds are different and the stronger for that we
ourselves have willed them and accepted our lives as fated and
dedicate to the Lord Jesus from the first day in Lystra.
But I see tears on thine eyelids; one has dropped from thy chin
into thy bosom; tears of thankfulness I would believe them to
be for the fulfilment of things. My heart breaks.
Make not this parting harder for me, but try to remember that
each has his work, thou in Lystra, I in Rome, and that each will
be rewarded according to his doing of it. We are always alone
in this world and should not seek a oneness that life has not
for giving. Now it's I who am weeping. I know not whence
these tears come nor whether their source is joy or grief.


GEORGE MOORE
71
EUNICE: I cannot bear to see thee weep; a man's tears overcome
me. But the minutes are running out; there is no time for weak-
ness. Paul, I would that my son went with thee to care for
thee. But thou knowest best. Whether Timothy goes or stays,
there is no parting. Hast thou not written it? Neither death,
nor life, nor angels, nor height, nor depth, nor any other crea-
ture, shall separate us from the love of God which is in Christ
Jesus our Lord.
I can bear it no longer. Thou'lt
need food for the voyage. (She gathers food from the table and
places it in a basket, which she hangs on Paul's arm.) Hence-
forth in Lystra I shall live in recollection of the work we have
done, and in our love of the Lord Jesus Christ. The synagogue
to which I went to hear thee preach is still there, and the road
by which we returned, leading Timothy by the hand; the street
and the angle to which the Jews dragged thee and cast stones
upon thee; the house to which Lois, my mother, and I carried
thee wounded; the bed on which we laid thee, and the table at
which we sat at meat together; the seat at the end of the garden
walk where thou hast often sat rejoicing in the sun. And there
I shall sit in eventide, saying: He is now in Italy or mayhap
far away in Spain, and listening, I shall hear thee in my
thoughts preaching, calling all the world to Christ. We part in
mutual love. All days are henceforth thy days, but to-day is
my day, for I live to-day in the lesson that I learnt from thee
long ago in Lystra: that there is no happiness on this earth ex-
cept in the Lord Jesus Christ. His name brings strength; I am
strong again, and I'll show thee how strong when Timothy
returns.
(Enter Timothy.)
TIMOTHY: All are on board. The anchor is weighed and the ship
swings on the hawsers. Julius waits at the gangway for thee,
Paul.
EUNICE (drawing aside the curtains): The sails go up. Never shall
we see his face again; we part for eternity. But no matter if I
die of grief, go, Paul, and fetch the world to Christ.
(Paul embraces Eunice and then Timothy.)
PAUL: I go alone! I am led! (Exit Paul.)
EUNICE (going to the window): He crosses the gangway, and now
he descends into the ship. Priscilla, Aquila, and Apollos are


72
THE PRECINCTS OF FEBRUARY
on the wharf bidding him farewell. Why are we not waving
scarves with them and singing songs? for Jesus goes this day to
Rome, and the city of Caesar shall be henceforth the city of
Christ.
TIMOTHY: The ship has not yet loosed. There is time still to see
the face that we shall look upon no more. Come, Mother, let
us go to join with the others in a song of triumph, a last
Hosanna.
(Exeunt Eunice and Timothy.)
CURTAIN
THE PRECINCTS OF FEBRUARY
BY YVOR WINTERS
Junipers,
Steely shadows
Floating the jay.
A man,
Heavy and iron-black,
Alone in sun,
Threading the grass.
The cold
Coming again
As spring
the valley,
But to stay
Came up
Rooted deep in the land;
The stone-pierced shadows
Trod by the bird
For day on day.


LONDON LETTER
June, 1923
IS
T is about a year, as far as I can remember, since any play by
Shakespeare has been put on the stage for a “run” in any of the
"
forty-odd theatres in the West End of London. It sometimes seems
that the War has reduced England to barbarism: not only by the
astonishing, rapid, and almost complete departure of all moral
decency and tolerance during the fighting (that was perhaps less
marked here than in most of the countries compromised) but by
the withering of all public pretence of respect for Art. Before the
War it was considered elevating, genteel, even chic, to patronize in
moderation the serious theatre. The Middle Classes took their
children to see Tree in Shakespeare, the Upper Classes made a
vogue of the Russian Opera and Ballet. For a moment it looked as
if an artistic revival incubated in snobbery might grow to flourish
naturally upon an improved public taste. Then came War; the
war was against Kultur; Culture herself, for all her togas, had
alarming resemblances to her panoplied German cousin; look at
Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, the Prince Consort himself; the Royal
Family set an unfortunate but much followed example by chang-
ing its name; and everything modern was declared decadent. The
young demanded amusements that drugged and did not stimulate
the brain—it was a bad time for brains that worked properly—and
their parents were able to be honest with themselves and prefer
Revue to Shakespeare and Rimsky-Korsakov. So a new generation
arose which did not believe in Victorian shams and voted art as
well as faith and morals a convention and a bore. Meanwhile of
course artists just pursued their way; but every form of art has
become more difficult to understand and more apparently esoteric.
The distance of the great mass of the semi-educated public (that is
the class which goes, and sends its children, to the Universities)
from all knowledge of the best art being produced is greater than
it has probably ever been. Enjoyment of the arts has become
specialized, and it sometimes seems that soon only writers will read
books, only painters look at pictures, and only musicians listen to
music.


74
LONDON LETTER
Now this version I believe to be a more specious than complete
explanation of the recent history of taste. It is true that while the
most popular contemporary writers were in their lifetimes Dickens
and Tennyson, they are now people like Miss Dell and Mrs Wilcox.
And such a dégringolade is more than an accident. But Dickens and
Tennyson were not pioneers: their works were largely emasculated
varieties of their predecessors, especially and respectively of
Smollett and Keats. The formal innovators, like Browning, Henry
James, Ford Madox Brown, and Whistler, for years appealed only
to a public as restricted as that which at present interests itself in
new forms in art. For it is unreasonable to expect a rapid general
understanding of formal novelty. The important and feasible thing
is first to obtain some general knowledge of what is old: the creative
genius may occasionally be ignorant of his predecessors, but if an
audience for new things is to be found which is discriminating as
well as appreciative, it will need some scholarship in the highest
achievements of the past. No one, I venture to say, is so much to
be distrusted as the admirer of Picasso who has not studied Giotto
and Poussin, the advocate of Eliot and Joyce who has not studied
Milton and Sterne, the enthusiast for the Expressionist Theatre
who has not studied Webster and Dryden. And I suggest that there
is no better rule for everyone to follow than that of reading, for
every new book, at least one old one.
As far as the theatre in England is concerned, it is not certain
that if good things were offered to the public, they would not be
lapped up. But the public is not given a chance: we are on the cruel
knees of the theatrical financiers. But despite the power of these
remorseless deities, we have in London one institution which did
not exist before the war, which grows yearly more robust, and
which, I believe, has no counterpart in the States. That is the
Phoenix, a Society which exists to produce performances of old
English plays; in each of the three or four seasons since its begin-
ning, it has given four plays of great interest and importance.
The very genius of Shakespeare has in some respects had calami-
tous results—for his successors and contemporaries have been dis-
astrously eclipsed by it from the public view, and several of them
were only not so great as he. I do not suppose that people are any
more generally aware in America than they are here of the greatness
of English dramatic literature. Do many of them know that there
is a greater Webster than Noah, and a more important Ford than


RAYMOND MORTIMER
75
1
Henry? Here Shakespeare, Sheridan, and Goldsmith are the only
three old dramatists who have continually been played, and many
of those readers who consider themselves well-educated have
neglected the existence of any besides these, and perhaps Marlowe,
Ben Jonson, and Congreve. Several of the plays recently produced
by the Phoenix have not been acted in England for over a century.
Thus those who have a little knowledge of this tremendous litera-
ture have been given the exciting opportunity of seeing acted some
of its masterpieces, and others—a remarkable number indeed—have
made at these performances their first acquaintance with some of
the greatest plays ever written by man. Last summer two plays by
Dryden were given, All for Love and Amphitryon: the greatness of
Dryden as dramatist, critic, and poet can hardly be exaggerated.
During this season we have had The Jew of Malta, 'Tis Pity She's
a Whore, and The Alchemist. (If there is any reader of The DIAL
who does not know these five plays, I beg him or her to put down
this Letter without finishing it, and immediately read them.) To
my infinite disappointment I missed the Marlowe, but in spite of
serious inequalities in the acting and production Ford's tragedy
and Jonson's comedy made two of the most impressive per-
formances any one could see. As a warning to any American who
may be inspired to produce such plays, I can state that a highly un-
suitable taste for "cuts” seems to be taking hold of those responsible
for these productions. If it is easy to exaggerate the damage that
"cuts” do, it is grotesque to want them.
At Cambridge an amateur society of undergraduates, the Mar-
lowe, has been formed for doing similar work, so that it should soon
be possible to see acted all the masterpieces of sixteenth and seven-
teenth century drama, and also to discover which of the less obvi-
ously magnificent plays stand best the test of stage performance.
“I never go to the theatre except when I'm drunk," said one of
the most intelligent and rightly eminent men in England the other
day. “Drunk” is of course a façon de parler—but the fact remains
that there is no theatre in England to interest educated people ex-
cept the Phoenix and the Stage Society. “To instruct delightfully,"
says Dryden, “is the general end of all poetry.” I suggest to the
Citizens of the United States that in no way could they gain at
once more instruction and delight than by forming a society like
our Phoenix for the performance of the masterpieces of old
dramatic art.
1


76
LONDON LETTER
The most remarkable, and the most devastating, event in this
winter's history of the Fine Arts in England has been the bequest to
the Nation and the prompt exhibition in the National Gallery, of
the nine portraits of the Wertheimer family by Mr Sargent. I am
told that every public picture-gallery in the States wants to procure
an example of Mr Sargent's painting. I know he is an American,
but I should have thought there were limits even to patriotism; and
it seems anyhow a mistake to buy at the top of the market. But
perhaps this story like so many that reach us from abroad is untrue,
and it is only here, in a country not his own, that this prophet has
an honour that no other living painter, native or foreign, is given.
Mr Roger Fry in an admirably balanced article has assized the ex-
act aesthetic value of these portraits, but without attempting to de-
scribe their immeasurable vulgarity. Most men of aesthetically good
will would agree that they are blasphemously out of place in the
National Gallery, and that in allowing them to crowd real pictures
off the walls and into the cellars, our officials have committed an
extravagant and unpardonable error. But is it irretrievable? No
one has, I think, yet suggested what seems to me the obvious solu-
tion of the difficulty. The Musée des Arts Décoratifs at Paris con-
tains a number of rooms illustrating the styles of art at every period
from early times right up to the present. Last before the room con-
taining contemporary work is one of fascinating fearfulness. It is
devoted to Art Nouveau. The most enthusiastic aberrations of late
Victorian taste never attained such a height as this. But what a
noble nucleus for an Edwardian room the Wertheimer portraits
would make, and what a perpetual lesson in social and aesthetic
history they would teach. It would have to be the carefullest re-
construction of a drawing- or dining-room of the period, the furni-
ture either carved oak of the best Boer War period, or painstaking
but “improved” imitations of the florider sorts of Boulle; the piano-
cover or table-centre a choice piece of ribbon-work; about the
room a little beaten metal from India; an octagonal table en-
crusted with mother-of-pearl from Morocco; a great many photo-
graphs in silver frames; and above a dado of lincrusta, upon the
most expensive satin-finished wall-paper, the nine portraits from
the National Gallery. They would rehearse unendingly the bank-
ruptcy (the commercial metaphor is appropriate)—the catastrophic
bankruptcy in taste of the age which hailed Kipling as its prophet,
a


RAYMOND MORTIMER
77
a
Puccini as its musician, Pinero as its playwright, and Sargent as its
painter.
I want to take advantage for the second time in this Letter of the
license given me by the epistolary form, change the subject
abruptly, and point out that the almost simultaneous publication of
two books on Tennyson provides a suitable occasion for everyone to
make up his or her mind about that poet, remembering of course
that no aesthetic decision about so recent an artist is likely to be
other than temporary and incomplete. Like Victor Hugo, Tennyson
is a poet to whom it is at present extraordinarily difficult to be just.
He has ceased to be fashionable, but is not far enough away to be
romantic. His work has not yet been given patina by the indulgent
hand of the merciful faker, Time. Seventeenth and eighteenth
century verses, for instance, often engage our amused affection by
their characteristic absurdity, by the extravagance to which minor
writers especially carried the fashions of their age. Similarly Early
and even Middle Victorian decoration have their charms for us:
they are already "period,” but it is only the most delicate dilletanti
who can yet extract much enjoyment froin the quaintness and
typical Victorianism of such poems as The Lord of Burleigh, The
Princess, In the Children's Hospital, and Locksley Hall Sixty
Years After. The moral ideas also are too near, if not to our own,
at least to our parents', for us to be able to regard them with the
tolerant interest and sympathy which those of the old writers in-
spire. Tennyson has only been dead for thirty years.
Tennyson and his family contrived to cover his tracks with re-
markable success, and neither Mr Nicolson (whose book is pub-
lished by Constable) nor Mr Fausset (whose book is published by
Selwyn and Blount) bring any new material worth mention. But
they apply a new method to the old material, and the method is
inevitably Mr Lytton Strachey's. It seems impossible to touch
biography now without trying this instrument, but it is dangerous
to use. No one has quite such delicate taste as Mr Strachey. Both
Mr Nicolson and Mr Fausset consider that most of Tennyson's
poetry is best forgotten, and I do not see how it is possible to dis-
agree with them. The Old Guard of Tennysonians has come out
with surprising energy to cry "Sacrilege” at these impudent young
men, but its protests have relied more upon passion than upon
argument.


78
LONDON LETTER
Mr Nicolson's Tennyson is incomparably better than his
Verlaine, which he ruined by what must have been an assumed con-
ventionality. He judges Tennyson from the point of view of an
aesthete and man of the world: Mr Fausset criticizes him from the
moral and intellectual standpoint. Mr Nicolson writes urbanely,
but sometimes flippantly: Mr Fausset earnestly, but with a sort of
post-war bitterness. Mr Nicolson's Tennyson is a sensitive, melan- ,
cholic, almost neurotic poet driven by ironic circumstances most
unsuitably to play the Bard of the Victorian Age: Mr Fausset on
the other hand maintains that he was the victim of his too sheltered
life, and seems to think that if once he had come into the open, he
might have become a great poet of moral ideas. I doubt if either of
these explanations is satisfactory. Certainly he was some sort of
a poet manqué; but what sort ?
Even in his most depressing poems, in Enoch Arden, in The
Idylls, in Tiresias, he keeps surprising you by some technical effect
of quite sublime ingenuity. On occasion he could attain real
magnificence of image: "Now lies the earth all Danae to the stars”
seems to me one of the great lines of English poetry. But it is rare
for his felicities to rise to the height where they can be called in-
spirations. A few lyrics are perfect, but how few! Hardly more
than fifty different poets have brought off, whom no one has ever
thought of making equal with Tennyson. But his occasional verse
is astonishingly good, and on this Mr Nicolson rightly lays great
emphasis. Though hardly, I think, enough; for I suggest very
tentatively that Tennyson should have been a greater Prior instead
of a worse Wordsworth. Which means of course that I agree with
both Mr Nicolson and Mr Fausset in thinking that he was the
victim of his milieu, but that I doubt if he had the genius appro-
priate to either of the destinies they respectively suggest for him.
Passion is wanting. A great lyric poet would indeed have piped be-
cause he must; a great moral poet would have thrown off the bonds
of time and place and confining circumstance. But Horace might
conceivably have mistaken himself for a Catullus or a Lucretius.
RAYMOND MORTIMER


PRAGUE LETTER
June, 1923
,
a
IVING here, right at the centre of Europe, is to feel as
though one were lying on the ground, ear pressed to the earth,
listening to the slow rumbling which announces the crash of the
social structure, and feeling the heavy waves of disintegration
which threaten European culture, a disintegration which began in
the nineteenth century with Nietzsche, Ibsen, and Strindberg,
reaching its highest point during the World War.
But while such writers as Oswald Spengler have made a scientific
analysis of this decadence, others have firmly believed that the
European soul-sickness is only a transitional phase, an inevitable
phase between war and peace. They refuse to read the writing on
the wall; unwilling to believe in a passing of our slowly-gathered
culture. They resolutely affirm their belief in the spiritual good-
ness in man, attempting, where possible, to salvage what remains
of that traditional culture.
On the other hand there are writers who seem to follow no tra-
ditional path; writers who do not wish to conserve the past. They
step out into the future with nothing more to guide them than a
simple faith in life. This faith, clear-running as a brook, is the
secret of the success of the dramas by the two brothers, Karel and
Joseph Capek.
Karel Capek is the author of The Robber, R. U. R., The Ma-
cropolus Affair; Joseph Capek collaborated with his brother in
The World We Live In, and is also the author of The Land of
Many Names, a new play produced this month.
The “Expressionist” drama is a product of post-war conditions
in Germany. It grew out of the common mood that accompanied
the various revolutions and revolts that took place in the Teutonic
countries, bringing the masses and the barricades on to the stage.
It deals almost exclusively with man as a social and a political
animal, although at times the individual soul stalks nakedly
through the general disorder. But in the main it concerns itself
with the social organism, while the "Collective-Expressionist"


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PRAGUE LETTER
drama which is supposed to be flourishing in Russia takes on the
task of making the theatre acceptable to the proletarian masses.
The Land of Many Names is pure Expressionism. A new con-
tinent has arisen out of the sea and a capitalist, Dollarson, taking
advantage of the general desire to escape from this crumbling
Europe, starts a company to colonize it. There is a war to decide
the ownership of the new land, and after allowing itself to be
conquered, it very inconsiderately sinks under the sea again. The
moral of the play is contained in a speech by one of the characters,
Pieris, a poet, who cries out that here, beneath our feet, is the new
Land of Hopes.
This type of play acts far better than it reads. It is written for
the stage and certainly not for the study. The looseness of its struc-
ture gives an incredible amount of freedom to the dramatist who
can throw in any characters he likes, they may be as real as the
people we meet in the street, or as fantastic as his imagination may
wish them to be. Coarse everyday slang follows poetical speech;
passages that are reminiscent of the best parts of the Bible merge
into the obscenities that accompany a street-brawl. Crowds of
people rush in and out; armies of soldiers are heard marching be-
hind the scene; filmed aeroplanes come rushing towards one; while
raucous voices yell through megaphones.
It seems as if the dramatist would catch the whole movement of
life to imprison it within his short play; as if he would hold up the
mirror to our disintegrating existence; as though by doing so he
could give a new direction to our actions, a meaning or purpose to
our meaningless lives. Especially is the fact of the unity of man-
kind underlined, and doubly emphasized whenever disaster over-
takes him. Man is like a wayward child crying for the moon, for
all that it sees: Wealth, Land, Gold, Liberty, Peace of the Soul,
Escape, Forgetfulness, Health, Sleep, and God! He gives strange
names to the new land: Land of Hopes, New Paradise, Land of
Plenty, New Utopia, New Zion, Land of the Strong, Land of
Marx, Land of Lenin, and a dozen others. But man is not to find
his soul in the search for desired possessions or pilgrimages to new
lands with new names.
Joseph Capek is Joseph the Dreamer. He dreams of a life, puri-
fied and clear, free from subtleties and modern sophistication. It is
to be a life in which we shall all be human, all divine, finding our
happiness in the service of our fellow-man, finding beauty in the
a
a
a


P. BEAUMONT WADSWORTH
81
a
a
simple things of our daily life; not because we believe in any spe-
cial social theory, but because it is our only salvation.
This naïve simple faith, shining through the bitter corroding sa-
tire of the Capek plays, gives them a freshness, a wood-fragrance,
that makes them doubly welcome in the post-war theatre, full of
the musty past.
We have had one other play of this type this season: The Up-
heaval, an extraordinarily ambitious attempt on the part of a Czech
dramatist, Stanislav Lom, to make a convincing play out of the
events which led up to the bloodless Revolution which brought
Czecho-Slovakia into being at the end of the War.
The opening scene, which takes place in Eternity, reveals two
figures: one, flame-lit, proud and magnificent, the other, rising out
of the shadows, ragged and sinister. In this scene the author has
tried to symbolize the conflict between the abstract conception of
our desires and the concrete realization of them. Then follow five
acts, scene after scene of satire, symbolism, and caricature. Czech
public and political life, both during the War and after the Revo-
lution, is boldly photographed and put upon the stage; while the
prologue, which takes place in the future, shows the Czech nation,
having come to grief through the wickedness of her politicians,
appealing to its patron saint, St Vaclav.
In spite of a certain amount of verbosity and intellectual snob-
bishness the play was an interesting proof of what can be done
with such a large theme.
These two plays, The Land of Many Names and The Up-
heaval, are the only significant Czech plays that have emerged from
a season flooded with foreign classics. The fact that they both be-
long to the Expressionist school may mean that the renascent
Czech drama will tend to follow that direction. In that case the
Czech dramatist will not be at a loss for good material near at
hand. The problems are many. Czecho-Slovakia is a small nation
that has gained its national freedom through the force of exterior
circumstances; a small nation attempting to build a political struc-
ture that will consolidate that freedom. It is a small nation eager
to take its place in the sun and perhaps almost losing its soul in
the process. Its people seem condemned by some compelling exter-
nal force to ape the despised vulgarity of the greater nations. They
contain within themselves the seed of a new bourgeoisie that may
take the place of the old aristocratic Austria of which they were
a


82
PRAGUE LETTER
part. All these questions, and many more, are lying ready to hand
for the Czech dramatist as subjects for large treatment and courage-
ous handling, and we may therefore expect to find a special form
of the Expressionist drama growing and flourishing side by side
with the advance of the new republic.
In our producers and theatrical designers we are fairly fortunate
in Prague. At the National Theatre there is Dr K. H. Hilar,
Jaroslav Kvapil and Karel Capek at the Vinohrady Theatre, and
Jan Bor at the Svandova Intime Theatre.
Dr Hilar is an ambitious producer with one eye on Reinhardt
and the other on the limited possibilities of the National Theatre
stage. He produced The World We Live In; and I hear he is to
produce either Emperor Jones or The Hairy Ape by Eugene O'Neill
very soon.
Jaroslav Kvapil, on the other hand, is a Shakespeare specialist.
He has been producing Shakespeare for almost a quarter of a cen-
tury. This season he has given three beautiful productions:
Twelfth Night, Cymbeline, and A Midsummer-Night's Dream.
Jan Bor has the credit of introducing Franz Werfel's mysterious
play, Bocksgesang, to the Czech stage. This play will be seen in
New York next season.
We have half-a-dozen competent scenic designers who are kept
well occupied owing to the extremely large number of plays which
are produced every year, Joseph Capek, Vlastislav Hofman, Bed-
rich Feurstein, Joseph Wenig, J. M. Gottlieb, and C. O. Jandl.
The first three design for all the modern plays, and the latter
three for the ordinary type of stage play.
Joseph Capek's finest achievement this season was his setting for
Shelley's tragedy, The Cenci, which was produced by his brother,
Karel Capek. Dark sombre curtains and three blood-red cubed pil-
lars which were used in all the scenes, the Cenci Palace, the Vatican,
and the Castle of Petrella, becoming the symbols of the bloody
tragedy. The setting for Calderon's romantic tragedy, Life Is a
Dream, designed by Joseph Wenig, was a series of painted arches
stretching back into the distance like a tunnel in an underground
railway. If I had space I would describe some of the beautiful de-
signs which Hofman is exhibiting at the moment at one of the
exhibitions. Hofman is perhaps the most interesting and live artist
in this sphere.
P. BEAUMONT WADSWORTH


BOOK REVIEWS
JACOB'S ROOM
Jacob's Room. By Virginia Woolf. 12m0. 303 pages.
Harcourt, Brace and Company. $2.
VIE
IRGINIA WOOLF seems to me the most interesting of the
younger writers now living as well as the best of them, but
her work is so individual that another writer can learn little from
it, and I very much doubt if she will have a direct influence on her
contemporaries. In that respect she may be compared with Matisse
among the painters. In each case the art is perfect, but the gifts
are personal and defy imitation. Mrs Woolf's writing is character-
ized by remarkable beauty of phrasing, and the merit of her work
lies in the fact that the beauty of each line runs into the next one
and forms part of the whole work.
"Long past sunset an old blind woman sat on a campstool with
her back to the stone wall of the Union of London and Smith's
Bank, clasping a brown mongrel tight in her arms and singing out
loud, not for coppers, no, from the depths of her gay wild heart-
her sinful tanned heart, for the child who fetches her is the fruit
of sin, and should have been in bed, curtained, asleep, instead of
hearing in the lamplight her mother's wild song, where she sits
against the Bank, singing not for coppers, with the dog against her
breast.”
In Jacob's Room the task that Virginia Woolf has set herself is
to create Jacob's environment, to approach him on this side and on
that, so that the surroundings evoke Jacob about whom she does
not tell us very much directly.
"Listless is the air in an empty room, just swelling the curtain,
the flowers in the jars shift. One fibre in the wicker armchair
creaks though no one sits there. Bonamy crossed to the window.


84
JACOB'S ROOM
Pickford's van swung down the street. The omnibuses were locked
together at Mudie's corner. Engines throbbed, and carters jamming
the brakes down, pulled their horses up sharp. A harsh and un-
happy voice cried something unintelligible. And then suddenly all
the leaves seemed to raise themselves up. “Jacob, Jacob,' cried Bon-
amy standing by the window. The leaves sank down again.”
By the end of the book we know Jacob as one knows one's brother,
but we never identify ourselves with him.
To do this Mrs Woolf employs a particular method which she
has employed before, but never so completely to the exclusion of
other methods. Just as in Conrad's The Heart of Darkness we hear
everything as a story from the lips of Marlow, so here we learn
everything as a fragment of memory passing through Virginia
Woolf's mind. One thing calls up another, and we skip on to some-
thing very different, yet queerly linked with what went before. The
story is tangled and inconsequent as are our digressions into the
past. To use Mr Strachey's metaphor she drops a little bucket now
here, now there, and fishes up—What is it? Ah, the sheep's jaw so
treasured at eight years old, the door slamming all night in the pass-
age.
Things so recalled have a peculiar beauty, an added value, yes,
and an odd reality, which the things we are passing have not got
as we flash by in the 16-40 automobile of life. Every moment in
life we are carried beyond the possibility of turning our heads to
take a second look, and we are haunted by whatever it is—an old
woman stooping to gather a dry stick, a child by the red currant
bushes, the sun sweeping down between the clouds so that the valley
is barred and chequered with light, like waking, years ago in the
night nursery with the sun pouring in through the Venetian blinds.
That is the impression Mrs Woolf gives, that the illusion got by
art. Our own memories are pale trodden-away things like the pat-
tern of the linoleum in the parlour, her words fresh like childhood,
or first love, and real—as poetry is. And we actually have to re-
mind ourselves that Mrs Woolf is not drawing upon her memories,
but her imagination, and that somehow she gilds everything she
writes with the beauty of something remembered.
If she were not so individual she would almost certainly be a


DAVID GARNETT
85
a
sentimentalist, as it is no doubt there are some people who would
accuse her of being one.
Jacob's Room and Ulysses! Turn from one to the other and
compare them, for both are new departures in literary method.
Both could only have been written in the last few years, but they
are utterly different.
M Valéry Larbaud has told us that Ulysses is written exactly
on the pattern of the Odyssey, and that Mr Joyce wrote it in dif-
ferent coloured chalks in order to make quite clear to what part
each sentence belonged. But in spite of the coloured chalks it is
impossible to find out why one part leads to the next.
It is an
agglomeration, not a unity. But the real failure of Ulysses is not
that it lacks unity, but that the author has a different set of values
from the rest of us. It is the things from which mankind instinct-
ively turns away that Mr Joyce delights to write about.
In the art of painting subject is probably of no importance: but
the aesthetic of writing is different. Not only must a poem or story
have some sort of subject, but, even though they cannot be graded
like apples, some subjects are more important than others. And the
failure of Ulysses is that it is full of subjects of practically no
aesthetic value, not that it is full of obscene words. This is all
very relevant to Jacob's Room, for Mrs Woolf is incapable of
Mr Joyce's offence. She can touch only what will move us aestheti-
cally. She is the kind of butterfly that stoops only at the flowers,
Mr Joyce “a painted lady or peacock that feasts upon bloody en-
trails dropped by a hawk,” or even on less interesting droppings.
And Jacob's Room has form. Tangled and twisted as is the
story, discursive, full of alleys (but not blind alleys) yet the
whole has unity.
“Oh yes, human life is very tolerable on the top of an omnibus in
Holborn, when the policeman holds up his arm and the sun beats on
your back, and if there is such a thing as a shell secreted by man to
fit man himself here we find it, on the banks of the Thames, where
the great streets join and St. Paul's Cathedral, like the volute upon
the top of the snail shell, finishes it off.”
Yes, the same thing can be said of Jacob's Room, though it has
more form than London has. But the book would be better if not


86
JACOB'S ROOM
quite so many pictures were called up; with all its beauty it is a
little bit too much like fire, or like a very amusing person's memories
of life. Here and there in it one finds something a little haphazard.
In a work of Art as in St Paul's Cathedral: "if a boot creaks it's
awful; then the order; the discipline. The verger with his rod has
life ironed out beneath him.” So should the artist. One thing calls
up another, it is endless, and the images are introduced again and
again, we never forget the surroundings, the setting.
No book so completely gives the feeling of London since Henry
James wrote, but it is the London of to-day. “A homeless people,
circling beneath the sky, whose blue or white is held off by a ceiling
cloth of steel filings and horsedung shredded to dust.”
In Jacob's Room Mrs Woolf has broken the conventional mould
of the novel into which she poured The Voyage Out and Night And
Day. For four or five years she wrote a number of short sketches,
experiments to enable her to find the style which suits her. These
sketches were published together under the title Monday or Tues-
day, and it is by using the style she developed in them, that she
was able to write Jacob's Room. She is now free to do anything
she likes.
DAVID GARNETT
)


AN AESTHETIC PROPHECY
The FUTURE OF PAINTING. By Willard Huntington
Wright. 12mo. 65 pages. B. W. Huebsch. $1.
MR
R WRIGHT, in his periodic excursions into the science of
aesthetics, has committed himself to many ill-considered
,
prophecies. His book, Modern Painting, written in defence of a
certain school of contemporary artists called Synchromists, an-
nounced in unequivocal language the supremacy of abstract com-
position. With extraordinary cleverness and ingenuity he at-
tempted to prove that the trend of art since Delacroix had been
a sustained and inevitable progression toward the overthrow of
representative form, and that the Synchromists, through an intel-
lectual fusion of form and colour, partaking of architecture on the
one hand and symphonic music on the other, had at last relieved art
of its traditional illustrative integuments, and had achieved final
plastic perfection. Painting could go no farther—its future was
to be a new tradition of abstract harmonics in colour. This fore-
cast was made in 1915, but since then much has happened. Mr
Wright has made a discovery: he has realized that the underlying
principle of all the art of the past is not colour, but drawing, and
this fact has instigated new speculations.
His latest book is less dogmatic and challenging, but not less
pretentious in its assertions: painting is dead; it was exhausted
in the omniscient genius of Rubens; it was an experiment even with
the Synchromists; and it survives to-day only in the hands of
academic practitioners. But Mr Wright pronounces the requiem
with a vision of hope out of the ashes of the dead past he heralds
the phoenix of a splendid dawn—the new art of colour. His
lamentations on the obsolete art remind us of George Moore, who
wept bitterly because English was a worn-out expressive vehicle,
apparently unaware of a Polish expatriate named Conrad.
Mr Wright clings to the empathic hypotheses of a decade past,
to such limited reasoners as Grant Allen, Lipps, Lee, and Thomp-
son, who made a futile effort to reduce aesthetic expression and
appreciation to physical reactions. He attributes all art values
1


88
AN AESTHETIC PROPHECY
to materiality, confuses processes with meanings, and considers
form as the simple result of psychophysical responses to objective
stimuli. The “aesthetic emotion”-in truth, only a popular hack,
no psychologist having succeeded in separating it from other
emotions—serves as the basis of a treatise which presents the his-
tory of art as nothing more or less than mechanical expansion.
Never philosophical, his conception of the beautiful is much too
meagre to permit of any penetration into the intimate connexion
between pigment and the subjective antecedents of human experi-
ence, and to recognize how deeply and inextricably bound to one's
whole nature are those impulses which take form in the conven-
tions of poetry, painting, sculpture, and the rest of the arts. To
believe that a mechanical evolution in the technique of art is of
any great aesthetic importance is an illusion arising from a pro-
found misunderstanding of the history of the subject.
Aesthetics is a study of the relationship between the theoretic
spirit and form, both of the building of form and the responses
to it; the means by which form is delineated are of small consider-
ation compared with the psychological states involved in construc-
tion and appreciation. All questions of drawing, colour, line,
mass, et cetera, apart from the meaning they convey when combined
into expressive symbols, are essentially mechanical; indeed they
are as remote from true aesthetics as would be a knowledge of
geology and botany in the analysis of the emotional appeal of a
beautiful landscape. Technical manipulation, even among artists,
has been at all times of far less concern than Mr Wright concedes.
Except for the noisy mechanical flurry succeeding Cézanne, paint-
ers have from the beginning insisted on the pre-eminence of their
spiritual message; they have been composers, not of lines and
planes, but of ideas—and of ideas having but one inevitable med-
ium of externalization. The visible world with its enormous
array of suggestive material, and the memory with its accumula-
tion of historical, practical, and emotional experiences, are the
true motives of plastic expression.
While the artist is of necessity interested in procedure, that
interest is always subordinate, in genuine creative activity, to con-
ception. We find to-day among radical painters a growing pre-
occupation with ideas; and even from the first appearance of Mod-
ernism the main quarrel with the academy has been one of content,


THOMAS CRAVEN
89
of meaning, and not one of processes. The academy in turn objects
to the new movements on the ground that they exploit a brutalized
and false conception of life.
Though we accepted Mr Wright's contention—the supremacy
of what he calls “aesthetic procedure,” his statement that Rubens
closed once and for all the path of formal composition is erroneous.
Rubens, despite his gifts, seldom succeeded in establishing an ab-
solutely clear form. The intention of his compositions must be
studied—it is never, as in the work of Masaccio and Giotto, emo-
tionally effective. Masaccio, Giotto, and El Greco, more limited
in the number and the extension of their forms, arrived much
closer to emotionally complete design, that is, to forms which ex-
pressed the whole content of their pictures. Rubens, a painter of
mythological histories demanding an intricacy of forms and elabo-
rate spatial projections, conceived his pictures in depth and com-
plicated them according to the needs of his subject which was
visualized in the flamboyant manner of his age; and while his de-
signs are mechanically the most perfect in existence, they fail to
arouse complete emotional responses. The reason is that the se-
quences of form from plane to plane are encumbered with exhibit-
ions of virtuosity in textures and illumination-he was, for all
his power, unable to restrain himself, and while technically he
affords the student more than Giotto, El Greco, and Michael
Angelo, he gives less in aesthetic pleasure. Practically speaking,
his work is a vast stimulus to new ideas rather than a structure in
which all plastic ideas have culminated.
As long as there are conceptions sufficiently moving to provoke
expressional volition, new forms will be found to embody them.
If it were true, as Mr Wright holds, that all compositional rhythms
have been utilized, there would be no need for the new art of mo-
bile colour; for this innovation at best could only restate in a new
medium things which have already been fixed in the theoretic
mind. Whether sequences of colour and form operate sensation-
ally in time, or in the calmer intellectual world of pure contempla-
tion, is of no moment—a change of vehicle implies no more than
a surface alteration. I do not believe, however, that Mr Wright's
opinions will have much weight in the new art which he sponsors.
If such an art is feasible, it will introduce new designs compatible
with its content, as in the case of the new movements in painting.


90
AN AESTHETIC PROPHECY
Whether it is possible for colour, when intensified to the glaring
transparency of light, to stimulate us aesthetically by a mere indi-
cation of sequential action, I cannot say. The science of optics
would be against the assumption; for the eye, unlike the ear, can-
not accommodate itself to intense and prolonged sensations. This,
however, belongs to the future, and Mr Wright only prophesies—
he makes no definite explanations. He argues that the human or-
ganism in the exciting stress of modern life can no longer react to
so tepid an art as painting. It would be well for him to consult
the high-school texts in biology in order to learn how man under
necessity can adjust himself to the exigencies of any environment.
Besides, as I have affirmed again and again, it is not a question of
aesthetics: the study of the beautiful is not a science of substance,
but of meanings, and any research dealing exclusively with pro-
cedure is a technical matter..
It is to be hoped that the experiments of Mr S. MacDonald.
Wright, the Synchromist, will prove successful; for they will open
a field for those modern artists—happily decreasing in number-
who are endeavouring to make a specious formula take the place
of the philosophic content in painting. Mr S. MacDonald-Wright
as a colourist is distinguished; he is artistic in everything he
touches; and he is better equipped than any one I can think of to
direct an enterprise devoted to the ordering of light sensations.
THOMAS CRAVEN


THE CASE OF THE FAIRY PHOTOGRAPHS
THE COMING OF THE FAIRIES. By Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle. 8vo. 196 pages. George H. Doran and Com-
pany. $2.50.
Tstec
THE Great Detective and I had just finished breakfast in his
study, when the maid announced Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I
rose at once to go, but Holmes stopped me.
“Don't go,” he said. “I was expecting Sir Arthur. He has
come to consult me about the mystery of the Fairy Photographs.”
A moment later Sir Arthur was ushered in, and Holmes greeted
him warmly.
“I will come to the point at once,” said Sir Arthur. "The fairy
photographs, which I have presented to the public as genuine, have
been attacked on all sides as fraudulent. I want you to make a
complete investigation of the case and present a report. If there
were any possibility of fraud, you of all men in the world would
discover it. So if you report them genuine, as I am sure you will,
the scoffers will be silenced."
“You flatter me," said Holmes, “but tell me the story.”
Sir Arthur in answer presented a group of photographs. I looked
at them in amazement. For the first time in human history, fairies
had actually been photographed! There they were, exactly as we
have pictured them in our imagination, with gossamer wings, tights,
and ballet skirts. They were shown fitting about the head of the
young girl in the photographs, sitting on little twigs before her,
and one of them was even offering her a tiny flower.
“They were taken,” said Sir Arthur, "by two young girls in the
North of England. These children had often seen the fairies in
the wood near their home, and one day they took a camera along,
with the results you see. How the photographs came into my
hands is a long story, and you will find it in detail in my book.
When I first saw the photographs, I was sceptical, so I took them
to the Kodak Company and asked their opinion. They replied that
the photographs could have been produced by fraud. This seemed
inconclusive to me, so I took them to another prominent photo-
I


92
THE CASE OF THE FAIRY PHOTOGRAPHS
grapher, who gave the same irrelevant report. I had the identical
experience with a third photographer. Desirous of learning the
truth at all costs, I searched the United Kingdom, and my scientific
spirit was finally rewarded. I discovered an out-of-the-way pho-
tographer named Snelling who pronounced the photos genuine!
The evidence was thus irrefutable.”
Holmes nodded, and then said, “One of these girls, I believe,
worked in a Christmas card factory. And the other was assistant
to a photographer. Am I correct in my deductions ?”
“Yes,” said Sir Arthur, astonished. “You are perfectly right.
I included those facts in my book to prove that the girls had no
training which would fit them for making fraudulent photographs.”
“If you will leave the pictures with me till to-morrow,” said
Holmes, "I will then have a complete report ready for you."
As soon as Sir Arthur had gone, Holmes turned to me and said,
“Watson, go to the Sharpe Christmas Card Company and get one
sample of every card they manufacture." I did as he ordered, and
soon returned with a hundred or more cards. Holmes spread them
on the table and began examining them feverishly. After ten
minutes he had pulled four or five from the group.
“Look!” said he. “There are your fairies!” I looked at them,
and great was my amazement to see that the little figures on the
cards were exact facsimiles of the fairies on the photographs!
“But—!” I cried. “But-!”
“I could tell from the photographs,” said Holmes, "that the
fairies had been pasted onto ordinary prints, which were then re-
photographed. You will see that in comparison with the human
figure in the pictures, the fairies are flat. Furthermore, the fairies
are anatomically incorrect. I could tell at once that they were
drawings, and were drawn by an artist without much knowledge
of anatomy. So I knew they had been cut from Christmas cards.
Evidently the girls made them for their own amusement, or for a
joke on their friends, and when they obtained so much publicity,
they were afraid to tell the truth. It's perfectly simple.”
"Marvellous !” said I. “But what will you tell Sir Arthur? His
heart will be broken."
In answer Holmes took all the cards and threw them into the
fire. “I will tell him nothing,” he said. “After all, I owe him a
great deal.”
PATRICK KEARNEY


THE ANATOMY OF WAR
Through THE WHEAT. By Thomas Boyd. 12mo.
pages. Charles Scribner's Sons. $1.75.
266
M
R THOMAS BOYD'S Through the Wheat is much less
brilliant than Three Soldiers, but I believe that it is nearly
as important. Mr Dos Passos rendered one thing admirably: the
nightmare oppression of the army, the ruin by war of certain char-
acters which might under normal conditions have proved decent and
useful. But Mr Boyd's theme is something different: the adventures
of the man who does not break down. His Sergeant Hicks is a
hero: he endures, he accepts authority, he fights boldly. But he is
a hero tout autrement intéressant than that other hero Sergeant
Empey. His endurance is half helpless exhaustion, his obedience is
deeply tinctured with bitterness, and his bravery becomes finally an
utter numbness beyond horror and beyond pain. This is probably
the only candid account on record of what it meant to be a hero
in the Marines, and a valuable document on the ordinary human
virtues in reaction to the conditions of modern warfare.
Yet in tone Through the Wheat resembles Three Soldiers and
most other sincere pictures of modern war. It is a tone which, I
should think, if persisted in, should ultimately discourage humanity
with war altogether. One finds it first in its characteristic coolness
after the Napoleonic wars. Not that there had ever been lacking in
European literature a realistic attitude toward war: Homer de-
scribes its ignominies as well as its glories; Aristophanes never tired
of making fun of it, and Pindar writes, “TXuxù åteipolol rólemos,"
(war is sweet to those who have never tried it); The Roman Em-
pire, to be sure, dignified its conquests with a noble ideal (parcere
subjectis et debellare superbos); but by the chaos of the Middle
Ages common sense was revolted again and great men from Dante
to Kant devoted much thought to European peace: the religious
wars provoked the satire of Erasmus and Grotius' foundations of
international law, and as comment on the War of the Spanish Suc-
cession you had Swift's pamphlet on The Conduct of the Allies
and Southey's poem about little Peterkin finding the skull from the


94
THE ANATOMY OF WAR
a
Battle of Blenheim; then where Swift had applied irony to the
economics of war Voltaire turned the same livid light on its cruelty
and the whole civilized Europe of the Enlightenment was in gen-
eral agreement against it. At last the tremendous boom in war
under Napoleon brought the formula of our present detachment.
For the stagy and hectic glories of Napoleon had their counter-
balance in a scientific dryness. Goya in his engravings gave frank
expression to the scorn which had apparently been implicit in Cal-
lot's Misères de la Guerre of two hundred years before, and even
the noble stoicism of de Vigny could not cloak the littleness of the
military life; but it was Stendhal, who had ridden the tidal wave of
the Napoleonic romance, who, outliving the romantic age, put war-
fare to its cruellest scrutiny. Not that he held any brief against war
in general: he had merely a passion for ironic analysis. For him
the Battle of Waterloo becomes a chaos of trivial or ridiculous in-
cidents; as we go through it with young Fabrice del Dongo in La
Chartreuse de Parme there is nothing glorious or romantic about it:
first a vivandière, then a corpse, then a general swearing at getting
splashed. And when Stendhal had described the first great battle
of the century the foundation of modern war fiction had been laid.
Tolstoy and Hugo acknowledged their debt to him and most of
their successors have debts to acknowledge. Flaubert adds venom to
Stendhal's coldness in his steel engraving of the shootings of '48
in L'Education Sentimentale; and in Michelet the attitude of
mockery has invaded even military history so that the heroisms of
Agincourt or Pavia wear a new and disconcerting aspect. Then the
Franco-Prussian War drenched dryness in despair with Zola and
his disciples: you find the same formula applied with more or less
bitterness in any number of books—in the Soirées de Médan, in
Maupassant, in the early novels of Mirbeau. In the United States
Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage, which, whether
or not inspired by Stendhal, represents precisely the same approach
to the subject.
With the World War Barbusse burst his bombshell of natural-
ism compounded with humanitarianism and Dos Passos drew on
Barbusse and Stendhal for a more local bombshell of his own.
Finally Mr Boyd has rewritten The Red Badge of Courage, which
I am told he had never read, as Crane had rewritten La Chartreuse
de Parme, which I dare say he had never read either. It is not


EDMUND WILSON
95
merely a literary trick which they have all learnt, but a common
way of thinking which they have arrived at. And it is a way of
thinking which in the future may make the melodramatization of
war more and more difficult. What books on war are likely to be
read by the educated young people of the next generation ? Not
the movie-poster propaganda of the press bureaus, but the books I
have mentioned above. There are scarcely any other literary works
which can be conceived as having a chance of survival; the well-
written books of the war, if they are not detached and prosaic like
Mr Boyd's, are in general either the saddened reflections of non-
combatant older writers—like Masefield's history of Gallipoli or
Kipling's epitaphs for dead soldiers; or, like the poems of Siegfried
Sassoon, they are the expression of madness and despair.
EDMUND WILSON


BRIEFER MENTION
LOVE AND OTHER Stories, by Anton Chekhov, translated by Constance Gar-
nett (12mo, 306 pages; Macmillan: $2). This, the thirteenth and final
volume in Mrs Garnett's invaluable series of translations of Chekhov's
work, contains twenty-four stories of far from even merit. As a part of
Chekhov's output, they claim attention, but most of them are several cuts
below his best work. They are, as Mrs Garnett says, “mainly pot-boilers”
-vivid fragments, sardonic pictures, and somewhat sketchy stories.
The ENCHANTED APRIL, by the author of Elizabeth and Her German Gar-
den (12mo, 313 pages; Doubleday, Page: $1.90) creates its own enchant-
ment, to which Italy and the calendar are but supplementary. It is com-
pounded of deft psychology, gentle irony, and sheer joyousness—all welded
in a narrative which twinkles with wit and poetry. The novelist sees her
men eye to eye with Jane Austen, and her women eye to eye with Barrie;
they emerge into the radiant Italian sunlight with just enough of the
reality rubbed off them to make it highly probable that they would act
and react precisely as they do. At any rate, one's scepticism is charmed
into silence—and that, in itself, is achievement.
a
PRINCE HEMPSEED, by Stephen Hudson (12mo, 250 pages; Knopf: $2)
sheds a definite antecedent illumination upon Richard Kurt, the dominant
figure of Mr Hudson's two earlier novels. Here is a sympathetic and
essentially poetic narrative of boyhood-a story of mingled aspiration and
frustration, projected without sentimentality and without recourse to the
befogging machinery of Freud. The author discloses an unerring sense
of adolescent psychology, a fine grasp of values, and artistic economy in
the use of mere plot. Altogether, an arresting novel in which form and
content have been welded into a complete harmony.
ISLAND OF THE INNOCENT, by Grant Overton (12mo, 332 pages; Doran : $2)
is one of those successful novels that lead us to believe the novel must be
destroyed. It possesses no single distinguishing characteristic that might
lift it above the general run of pretty popular books unless, perhaps, it be
a not too happy ending. It is all a dreary level of mediocrity smacking of
the uninspired, if sincere, literary tradesman.
To Tell You THE TRUTH, by Leonard Merrick (12mo, 311 pages; Dut-
ton : $1.90) is uniform with the collected works which have gone before,
save that "it contains no Introduction by a distinguished professional col-
league of Mr Merrick”-an omission which is not exactly unbearable
when one recalls the frail nature of some of those introductions. These
short stories will neither add to nor detract from their author's standing,
being competent and readable, but not distinguished, except in their uni-
form absence of distinction.


BRIEFER MENTION
97
Gates of Life, by Edwin Björkman (12mo, 384 pages ; Knopf: $2.50) re-
veals once more the fine perception, the artistic restraint, and the narrative
skill which distinguished The Soul of a Child. This sequel carries the life
story of Keith Wellander forward another decade, and becomes—as was
almost inevitable—more emphatically a document of autobiographical
fidelity, a circumstance which detracts in some measure from its charm,
although it still remains a work of positive values. Mr Björkman sustains
his theme without racing up bypaths in search of climax; he writes with
a refreshing freedom from either sentimentality or swagger.
THE ORISSERS, by L. H. Myers (12mo, 555 pages; Scribner: $2) is over-
burdened by ramifications of psychology and philosophy. The author
has set himself a weighty task and defeated his accomplishment of it by
too great thoroughness. He is insatiably explicit. Every detail of the
story is heavily underscored, with the result that the interest of the whole
is deadened. The book is one of slow maturation, gathering into itself the
ideas and observations of many years. It has unusual scope, intermittent
power, and sagacious penetration into human motives. But it does not
quite conquer the reader; the remorselessness of its elaboration is too un-
remitting to permit his absorption.
The Middle OF THE ROAD, by Philip Gibbs (12mo, 428 pages; Doran: $2).
Sir Philip Gibbs' new novel tells us nothing we do not know. The dissolu-
tion of European society as the aftermath of the war has been well estab-
lished. We note some new phase of disintegration in the papers of each
succeeding day. The strength of the book lies in the undoubted truth of
the picture it paints. Its stark gloom is unrelieved by futile conventional
optimisms. But its convincing description of the shipwreck of nations,
faiths, and ideals will not appeal to those who wish to be amused. In that
sense it is not a novel. As a record of ruin presented in fictional form, even
with characters serving as pegs on which to hang opposing ideas and
theories, it should hold the attention. In Janet's words: “Things happen
like that. Perhaps they can't be helped. It's good if one gets a chance to
patch things up. Life's mostly patchwork.”
PLAYS: THIRD SERIES, by Jacinto Benavente, translated with an introduction
by John Garrett Underhill (12mo, 219 pages; Scribner: $2.50) contains,
to use the phrase of jh, nothing for adult education. Benavente has a
fluent pen and a shallow intelligence; he can write a play in any genre
without enriching it. Thus, in the present series, The Prince Who Learned
Everything Out of Books is far inferior in freshness and invention to the
dramatized versions of Wilde's fairy tales; In the Clouds is simply an-
other realistic study of the middle class far less intense than those of
Strindberg; while The Truth is a clever skit of the type Schnitzler per-
fected. The fourth play, Saturday Night, is an elaborate cheat. We puzzle
through a slack labyrinth of noise, colour, epigram, and violence to
arrive at the sub-structure—which turns out to be a stale allegory of Am-
bition, Youth, and Imagination. Indubitably, a very properly gilded brick
for Drama Leaguers.


98
BRIEFER MENTION
a
Maine Coast, by Wilbert Snow (16mo, 114 pages; Harcourt, Brace $1.75).
The poetry inherent in the sea and the dwellers next to it saturates this
book, the author's first. Verse forms are sometimes rather crudely handled,
and occasionally the poetry remains a little outside the net cast for it, but
there is vision in this verse and some fine interpretation of character. It
has much the quality of Sarah Orne Jewett's tales, though it gives a more
intimate presentation of the foibles and philosophy of an isolated com-
munity of fishermen and sailors.
SKEETERS Kirby, by Edgar Lee Masters (12mo, 394 pages; Macmillan:
$2). In this sequel to Mitch Miller, Mr Masters tries his hand at the
portrait of an artist as young man. It is a garrulous, uneven piece of
work giving evidence, however, of unusual sensitiveness to the material
on hand and, in portions, of able execution.
SULAMITH, by Alexandre Kuprin, translated by B. Guilbert Guerney (12mo,
159 pages; Brown: $2) is a far departure from Russian themes and Rus-
sian literary manners. It attempts to create a prose poem out of the splen-
dours of Solomon's court, the frenzies of Isis-worship, and the passion of
Solomon and the Shulamite. The chief aesthetic difficulty is one of
texture: to harmonize one's own prose with the frequent magnificent in-
serts from the Song of Songs. This requires a sensitive limitation of vo-
cabulary and a gift for rhythm and unstrained but fresh imagery, for
both of which either Kuprin or his translator fail to qualify in the measure
that Edgar Saltus and Oscar Wilde did in similar situations.
The GENIUS OF AMERICA, by Stuart P. Sherman (8vo, 269 pages, Scribner:
$2). The spirit and content of the book are delightful. There is great
wisdom--not merely knowledge-tolerance without sentimentalism, and
keen satire where satire is due. Snobbery and arrogance come in for their
share of it in no ambiguous terms. Stuart Sherman is always alert to fend
off scintillating and artificially-heated attacks on the genuine achievements
of American writers he is quite as ready to slash at sand-built, and un-
warranted American pretensions and reputations. His demands are
sincerity, sense, and ideals, qualities which he himself possesses in high
degree. He is good reading whether you are on his side or at the other end
of his lance.
CREATIVE SPIRITS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, by Georg Brandes, trans-
lated by Rasmus B. Anderson (12mo, 478 pages; Crowell: $3). "Criticism
is an art" is the sound postulate planted in the author's preface and equally
sound and taken for granted are most of his conclusions. The thorough-
ness of Brandes is extraordinary: he marches around and around his sub-
ject, viewing it from all angles—technical, biographical, historical, and
philosophical. One is wearied, however, by the slowness of his step and
the lack of style in his gait, both accentuated by his clumsy translator.
Granted that criticism is an art, it should be shaped, energized, and crystall-
ized as one, so that structure and style satisfy as completely as do its penc-
trations, information, and judgements.
.


BRIEFER MENTION
99
The Old DRAMA AND THE New, by William Archer (12mo, 396 pages;
Small, Maynard: $3) is a bold championship of modern English drama
at the expense of Elizabethan and Restoration drama. The approach is
patently anaesthetic. It does not recognize a great difference between
literature, including drama, as a representative art, and literature as an
exercise merely in verisimilitude. Judged solely by the criteria of surface
verisimilitude, Webster is unreal and improbable, but that begs the
aesthetic question. What Mr Archer is really an apostle of is art-to-con-
ceal art-a clever persuasion of an audience that a play is not a play.
The Elizabethans, however, knew that a play was a play, and permitted
a framework which offered a maximum of opportunities to display in-
ternal functional relationships. From that standpoint, it may be asserted
that modern drama has laboured to obscure the elements of drama, and
Mr Eliot's Sacred Wood stands untouched by Mr Archer's opposing
theories as well as unapproached in style by the flat and pale language of
his lectures.
AN ATTIC DREAMER, by Michael Monahan (12mo, 333 pages; Kennerley:
$2.50) carries the memory back a dozen years to the era of tiny maga-
zines giving unbridled self-expression to literary tasters, the day of Elbert
Hubbard and hammered copper, of 0. S. Marden and hand-tooled ethics.
Inevitably, here is a paper on Robert Ingersoll and a monograph on Poe.
Inevitably, also, a rhapsody on Love and a handful of aphorisms. A
book in which everything appears slightly dated except the title page.
BARNUM, by M. R. Werner (illus; 8vo, 381 pages, Harcourt, Brace: $3.50).
Eighty years old, Barnum tripped one day over a rope in Madison Square
Garden, and was slightly scratched. “Where's the press agent ?” he yelled,
as he got to his feet. “Tell him I've been injured in an accident." Truly
says his biographer, "Barnum still retained the use of all his faculties.”
This voluminous and incredibly fascinating account of a life which was
itself voluminous and incredible is one of the most entertaining books of
the year; a detailed and colourful reflection of an amusing life amid an en-
vironment which can never be duplicated. The circus man was an apostle
of publicity; his life is a veritable source book in hokum, and Mr Werner
has given it an impartial, intelligent projection. Gamaliel Bradford has
included Barnum in his recently published Damaged Souls, but there is
little in this biography to indicate that this jovial old faker possessed any-
thing so tragic.
LIFE OF CHRIST, by Giovanni Papini, translated by Dorothy Canfield Fisher
(8vo, 416 pages; Harcourt, Brace: $3.50) is a bombastic, sententious, in-
flated restatement of the New Testament stories. Signor Papini is obvious-
ly more interested in turning out well rounded periods than in shedding
any new light on his Master. Not without significance, either, is the fact
that the author found it necessary to introduce himself in characteristic
fashion in a long introductory dissertation before coming to the Saviour.
Signor Papini is no true prodigal son. He has merely turned from the
dogmatism of atheism to the still greater dogmatism of theology.


THE THEATRE
B
a
ERNARD SHAW'S THE Devil's Disciple has been not
very interestingly done by the Theatre Guild. But then the
play itself is not very interesting—as Shaw goes. I always feel
about Mr Basil Sidney—the Dick Dudgeon of the production-
that he might conceivably be good in some other rôle than the one I
am seeing him in—in this case, perhaps, that of the Minister. It
seems to me a great mistake to cast him for these sprightly and
dashing parts. For one thing, his delivery is too slow. Earlier in
the season, in the Hopkins' ROMEO AND Juliet, he was the least
mercurial Mercutio I have ever seen. He delivered Mercutio's
witty jibes in a drawl suggestive of Josh Billings and unloaded the
Queen Mab speech painfully like a wagonful of bricks, staggering
with one phrase at a time and then heaving up his back for
another. And to The Devil's DISCIPLE he brings neither the fire
nor the nimble wits of the part. His mind seems actually to move
more slowly than that of the stupid people he is supposed to con-
found.
For the rest, the role of the younger brother, whom the text
makes nothing worse than thick-witted, is not only perverted into
a village idiot part, but is doubly ruined by an actor who has obvi-
ously no gift for idiocy, but looks as if he would be far more at
home as a brilliant young Member of Parliament in an English
drawing-room drama. Mr Roland Young, as General Burgoyne,
is intelligent, as always, but seemed to me to be hampered a little
by the habitual constraint of his stage presence from representing
a character whose easy manners are supposed to contrast with the
stiff ones of the army.
YOU AND I by Philip Barry is a partially interesting attempt to
deal with an authentic theme and to study an authentic milieu.
But it is badly spoiled before the end and I believe for the follow-
ing reasons. In the first place, Mr Barry takes the inhabitants of
his country house for very smart and cultivated people when they
are actually half-baked in the extreme. You think he is going to
study them seriously, then you discover that he shares their view of


THE THEATRE
101
themselves—that he is impressed by their suburban luxuries and
ravished by their silly-clever wit—a wit which is only one of the
means such people employ to make agreeable the banality of their
lives—like curtains of flowered chintz and little electric wall-
lamps. Furthermore, Mr Barry, having set out with a real prob-
lem, proceeds to develop it with theatrical situations. The young
girl who loves the boy so much that she is willing to give him up
entirely so that instead of being obliged to support her he may fol-
low his architectural dreams, but never offers to share his struggles
or to assist him with her $2000 a year! The father who having
smothered his own artistic ambitions by a money-making career
allows his son to do the same thing just at the moment when he is
himself most keenly feeling his own futility, and who after becom-
ing at the end of years one of the mainstays of a large soap com-
pany is unable to take a year's vacation without being in danger of
losing his job! I don't know whether it was the presence in the cast
of Mr Ferdinand Gottschalk, but the whole thing reminded me a
little of the late Clyde Fitch. Clyde Fitch was par excellence the
virtuoso of the external: like the America of the time, his true gift
lay in playing with it. When I think of his plays, I think of people
being kept awake by banging radiators, trying to eat wax oranges,
turning on the wrong electric lights, of men diving under the table
after dinner to retrieve the things the ladies have dropped. I think
of beings who speak on ordinary occasions in the very accents of
life, but who as soon as they are moved by any strong emotion begin
to talk like the theatre of fifty years ago. When Fitch was on the
surface he was excellent: he was a master of the property and the
“line," but when he was serious he was almost always awful: his
situations were wholly for and from the stage.--Mr Barry has a
gift not unlike Clyde Fitch's; let him beware, as he hopes to be an
artist, how he falls back on the same tricks.
At the Circus you saw beautiful horses and beautiful human be-
ings—which is much. For the rest, I don't mind having dogs and
seals and even elephants trained to do tricks, but I do object to
sulky lions and tigers badgered into jumping over each other. Lions
and tigers, like domestic cats, have no feeling for human games;
they cannot enter into the spirit of the thing. Where a seal will
dance about on a spring-board and bark eagerly for fish, a tiger


102
THE THEATRE
has to be driven with a whip and a revolver fired off in its face;
they never look anything but bored and morose and anxious to eat
the tamer.—I saw also a red-eyed hippopotamus in a cage only
twice its length and in which I suppose he had been hauled from
Bridgeport to New York and was to be hauled from New York to
Cincinnati. He gazed wildly from his meagre bath with the fright-
ened innocence of cows in cattle-trains, and when one of the hands
slammed a trunk behind him he started like a nervous woman. I
pity this hippopotamus and wish he were back in his native swamp.
a
a
Amateurs of the slapstick arts who go in for Joe Cook and Char-
lie Chaplin, should not fail to see the vaudeville act known as
Williams and Wolfus. Herbert Williams is a clown of a high order
with a curious fantasy of his own. Obviously a serious and respec-
table character, he seems doomed to failure and disappointment.
When he first comes on there is no spotlight and he has to shout
to the electrician; he desires to sing a song, but his voice is not
quite strong enough, and when he does get under way his silk hat
begins slipping off. Then the orchestra leader turns out to be a
malignant demon who, instead of keeping time with the baton, be-
gins twirling it like a drum-major and otherwise behaving like a
fiend. Williams finally snatches the stick away from him and
bashes him with it over the head, but the baton only bends in two
and the demon remains unscathed. There is nothing for the poor
gentleman to do but to hand it back politely. As he touchingly con-
fides to the audience in his low inadequate voice: “This is very
embarrassing for me!" His adventures have the quality of a bad
dream-or of a French Dadaist drama. I suppose it will only be a
question of time before someone puts him in a review.
a
a
EDMUND WILSON


COMMENT
BY
Y repeating over and over again some set lines from a poet,
we find that they cease to be an illumination and become
simply sheep jumping over the fence. A great deal of aesthetic
rebellion has been based upon this simple principle. The brain had
been lulled; the lines repeated themselves mechanically; when lo!
some “colossal genius” came along to discover what had been going
on, and a new generation set in.
Not only the message, but also the method, can lose its kick in
this manner. Subjects become more recherché with the passing of
time, and the antics of execution more strained. Until finally each
artist must discover some remote virgin territory much as the engi-
neer discovers another oil pocket. All sorts of inventions are
brought in, the field is exploited, the vein is exhausted-art passes
elsewhere. Huysmans is an especially poignant instance of this
procedure which, waiving all connotations aside for the moment,
we recognize as decadence. Les Soeurs Vâtard, A Vau l'Eau, A
Rebours, Là-Bas, En Route, La Cathédrale—each one of these
books is the discovery and the sucking dry of a territory. Like
modern business, Huysmans' energy had to find new channels con-
tinually, or perish. This, then, is the distinguishing mark of a
decadence: that each man has his own little corner; each man is his
own John Jones and Company; each man hunts out his own spir-
itual markets.
Decadence is that stage in the history of art wherein nothing
can be built upon anything preceding. There is nothing beyond
A Rebours—there can only be something different. Similarly,
Joyce's Ulysses marks the snapping of a contact. A second Joyce
could merely prospect for the meagre watery oil which is left.
Decadence, then, leaves us with a choice between Ersatz and
retour. Ersatz demands ingenuity, and there is much ingenious
work being done. Retour means classicism. It is not unlikely that
the next phase of European thought will be a classical era, a turn
away from the recent religion of "pure creation.” A classical era,
roughly, is one which strives to organize what resources are at
hand, rather than find new resources. And returning to the matter


104
COMMENT
of the kick, perhaps we have been specializing in the recherché for
so long that our kick can be gotten only by a deeper examination
into those facts which are immediately before our eyes—we having
o'erleapt ourselves and fallen on t'other.
Are we not already beginning to find that the intelligence re-
quired in inventing something is much lower than the intelligence
required in using the invention properly? Similarly, a truly classi-
cal age, devoted to dropping everything into its just place, must
begin by attacking the national religion of creative "energy' and
putting in its place a religion of minimal productiveness. In litera-
ture this involves the simple heresy against Bergsonism that it is
more blessed to read a book than to write one.
The peculiarly disheartening paradox, however, is this: classical
eras heretofore have always glorified the powers that be. Yet in
these gnarled times, the classical spirit would be so inimical to the
spirit of modern business that when all its ramifications have been
followed through we learn that classicism would be nothing other
than howling rebellion. A religion of minimal productiveness and
maximal order would, in the present state of society, be much more
radical than Bolshevism. Whereat we begin to suspect that the
world to-day, in its commercial code, is so thoroughly anti-classical
that a truly classical movement in art and letters would have to be
pursued in the catacombs.


.
1
于
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1



Courtesy of the Galerie Alfred Fiechtheim, Berlin
BY ANDRÉ DERAIN
LA COUR.



M
THE INDIAL
OXXIIO
AUGUST 1923
LEISURE AND MECHANISM
BY BERTRAND RUSSELL
Tere
10 any one who reflects upon industrialism it is clear that it
requires, for its successful practice, somewhat different vir-
tues from those that were required in a pre-industrial community.
But there is, to my mind, wide-spread misapprehension as to the
nature of those virtues, owing to the fact that moralists confine
their survey to a short period of time, and are more interested in
the success of the individual than in that of the race. There is
also, in all conventional moralists, a gross ignorance of psychology,
making them unable to realize that certain virtues imply certain
correlated vices, so that in recommending a virtue the considera-
tion which ought to weigh is: Does this virtue, with its correla-
tive vice, outweigh the opposite virtue with its correlative vice?
The fact that a virtue is good in itself is not enough; it is neces-
sary to take account of the vices that it entails and the virtues that
it excludes.
I shall define as virtues those mental and physical habits which
tend to produce a good community, and as vices those that tend
to produce a bad one. Different people have different conceptions
of what makes a community good or bad, and it is difficult to find
arguments by which to establish the preferability of one's own con-
ception. I cannot hope, therefore, to appeal to those whose tastes
are very different from my own, but I hope and believe that there
is nothing very singular in my own tastes.
For my part, I should judge a community to be in a good state
a
if I found a great deal of instinctive happiness, a prevalence of
feelings of friendship and affection rather than hatred and envy, a


106
LEISURE AND MECHANISM
capacity for creating and enjoying beauty, and the intellectual curi-
osity which leads to the advancement and diffusion of knowledge.
I should judge a community to be in a bad state if I found much
unhappiness from thwarted instinct, much hatred a