nd envy, little
sense of beauty, and little intellectual curiosity. As between these
different elements of excellence or the reverse, I do not pretend to
judge. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that intellectual curi-
osity and artistic capacity were found to be in some degree incom-
patible, I should find it difficult to say which ought to be preferred.
But I should certainly think better of a community which con-
tained something of both than of one which contained more of
the one and none of the other. I do not, however, believe that
there is any incompatibility among the four ingredients I have
mentioned as constituting a good community, namely: happiness,
friendship, enjoyment of beauty, and love of knowledge.
It is to be observed that we do not define as a virtue merely
what leads to these good things for its possessor, but what leads to
them for the community to which he belongs. For different pur-
poses, the community that has to be considered is different. In the
case of acts which have little effect outside the family, the family
will be the community concerned. In the official actions of a
mayor, the community concerned will be the municipality; in inter-
nal politics it will be the nation, and in foreign politics the world.
Theoretically, it is always the whole world that is concerned; prac-
tically, the effects outside some limited circle are often negligible.
However moralists may recommend altruism, all the moral ex-
hortations that have had wide-spread effects have appealed to
purely selfish desires. Buddhism urged virtue on the ground that
it led to nirvana; Christianity, on the ground that it led to heaven.
In each of these great religions, virtue was that line of conduct
which would be pursued by a prudent egoist. Neither of these,
however, has much influence on the practical morality of our own
time. For energetic people, the moral code of our time is that of
"success"—the code which my generation learnt in childhood from
Smiles' Self-help and which modern young men learn from effi-
ciency experts. In this code, “success” is defined as the acquisition
of a large income. According to this code, it is wicked for a young
man to be late at the office, even if what has delayed him is fetch-
ing the doctor for a sudden illness of his child; but it is not wicked
to oust a competitor by well-timed tale-bearing. Competition,


BERTRAND RUSSELL
107
hard work, and rigid self-control are demanded by this code; its
rewards are dyspepsia and unutterable boredom, in all who have
not a quite exceptional physique. By comparison with its votaries,
St Simeon Stylites was a voluptuary; nevertheless they, like him,
are pure egoists.
In sociology, we are concerned with men in the mass, not with
rare and exceptional individuals. It is possible for a few saints
to live a life which is in part unselfish, but it does not appear to
be possible for the vast majority of mankind. The study of psy-
chology, and more particularly of psychoanalysis, has torn aside
the cloaks that our egoism wears, and has shown that when we think
we are being unselfish, this is hardly ever in fact the case. It would
therefore be useless to preach a morality which required unselfish-
ness on the part of any large number of men. I do not think my-
self that there is any need to do so. Our natural impulses, prop-
,
erly directed and trained, are, I believe, capable of producing a good
community, provided praise and blame are wisely apportioned.
It is through the operation of praise and blame that the positive
morality of a community becomes socially effective. We all like
praise and dislike blame; moreover, rewards and punishments often
accompany them. “Positive morality"_i. e. the habit of attach-
ing praise to certain types of behaviour and blame to certain other
types—has enormous influence on conduct. In Somaliland, and
formerly among the aborigines of Formosa, a man was not thought
sufficiently manly to deserve a wife until he had killed someone;
in fact, he was expected to bring the head of his victim to the
wedding ceremony. The result was that even the mildest and
gentlest of men, in obedience to the moral sense of the community,
felt obliged to practise homicide. This custom is rapidly dying
out among savages, but among the white races the same feeling
persists as regards military service in wartime. Thus in spite of
the egoism of human nature, the positive morality of neighbours
forces men into conduct quite different from that which they would
pursue if positive morality were different; they even often sacrifice
their lives for fear of being blamed. Positive morality is there-
fore a very tremendous power. I believe that at present it is quite
unadapted to industrialism, and that it will have to be radically
changed if industrialism is to survive.
There is one point in which the definition of virtue and vice
given above departs from tradition and from common practice,


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LEISURE AND MECHANISM
We defined a virtue as a habit which tends to produce a good com-
munity, and a vice as one which tends to produce a bad community.
In thus judging by results, we agreed in one important respect with
the utilitarian school of moralists, among whom Bentham and the
two Mills were the most eminent. The traditional view is differ-
ent; it holds that certain specified classes of actions are vicious, and
that abstinence from all these is virtue. It is wicked to murder or
steal (except on a large scale); it is wicked to speak ill of those in
power, from the Deity to the policeman; above all, it is wicked
to have sexual intercourse outside marriage. These prohibitions
may, in our degenerate age, be defended by utilitarian arguments,
but in some cases-e. g. refusal of divorce for insanity—the utili-
tarian arguments are very far-fetched, and are obviously not what
is really influencing the minds of those who use them. What is in-
fluencing their minds is the view that certain classes of acts are
"wicked,” quite independently of their consequences. I regard
this view as superstitious, but it would take us too far from our
theme to argue the question here. I shall therefore assume, with-
out more ado, that actions are to be judged by the results to be ex-
pected from actions of that kind, and not by some supposed a priori
moral code. I do not mean—what would be obviously impractic-
able—that we should habitually calculate the effects of our actions.
What I mean is that, in deciding what sort of moral instruction
should be given to the young, or what sort of actions should be
ished by the criminal law, we should do our best to consider what
sort of actions will promote or hinder the general well-being. It
might also seem as if this were a platitude. Yet a tremendous
change would be effected if this platitude were acted upon. Our
education, our criminal law, and our standards of praise and blame,
would become completely different from what they are at present.
How they would be altered, I shall now try to show.
Let us consider one by one the four kinds of excellence which
we mentioned, beginning with instinctive happiness.
pun-
a
Instinctive HAPPINESS. I mean by this the sort of thing that
is diminished by ill-health and destroyed by a bad liver, the kind of
delight in life which one finds always more strongly developed in
the
young
of any mammalian species than in the old. I doubt
whether there is anything else that makes as much difference to
the value of life from the point of view of the person who has to


BERTRAND RUSSELL
109
live it. Those who have instinctive delight in life are happy ex-
cept when they have positive causes of unhappiness; those who do
not have it are unhappy except when they have positive causes of
happiness. Moreover outward causes of happiness have more
effect upon those who delight in life, while those who do not are
more affected by outward causes of unhappiness. Of all personal
goods, delight in life is therefore the greatest; and it is a condition
for many others. I do not deny that it can be too dearly pur-
chased, if it is obtained at the cost of injustice and stupidity. In
the advanced industrial nations, apart from the agricultural popu-
lation, I can think of only one small class that lives so as to pre-
serve it, namely, the male portion of the British upper class. The
public schools develop a boy's physique at the expense of his intel-
ligence and sympathy; in this way, by the help of a good income,
he often succeeds in preserving instinctive happiness. But the
system is essentially aristocratic, so that it cannot be regarded as
in any degree a contribution to the solution of our problem. Our
problem is to preserve instinctive happiness for the many, not only
for a privileged few.
The causes of instinctive happiness could best be set forth by a
medical man, but without medical knowledge observation makes it
easy to see broadly what they are. Physical health and vigour
come first, but are obviously not alone sufficient. It is necessary to
have scope for instinctive desires, and also for instinctive needs
which often exist without corresponding explicit desires. Very
few adults, whether men or women, can preserve instinctive hap-
piness in a state of celibacy; this applies even to those women who
have no conscious desire for sexual satisfaction. On this point,
the evidence of psychoanalysis may be taken as conclusive. Many
women and some men need also to have children sooner or later.
To most men, some kind of progressive career is important; both
to men and women, a certain amount of occupation imposed by
necessity, not chosen for its pleasurable quality, is necessary for
the avoidance of boredom. But too much work and too little
leisure are more destructive of instinctive happiness than too little
work and too much leisure. Another essential is the right amount
of human companionship, neither too much nor too little; but as
to what is the right amount, people vary greatly. Our instinctive
nature seems to be fairly adapted to the hunting stage, as may be
seen from the passion of rich men for shooting big game, killing


110
LEISURE AND MECHANISM
a
birds, and careering after foxes. In the hunting stage, men had
periods of violent exertion alternating with complete quiescence,
while women had activities which were more continuous, but less
strenuous and less exciting. This probably accounts for the fact
that men are more prone to gambling than women. One result of
adaptation to the hunting stage is that most people like loud noise
at times of excitement, alternating with silence at other times. In
modern industrial life the noise is continuous, and this certainly
has a debilitating nervous effect. I believe that almost everyone
has a need (though often not a desire) for the sights and smells of
the country. The delight of slum children on a country holidav
is of a kind that points to the satisfaction of an instinctive need
which urban life cannot supply. In recovering from a dangerous
illness, the pleasure of being still alive consists mainly in joy in
sunshine and the smell of rain and other such sensations familiar
to primitive man.
The difference between needs and desires is important in the
consideration of instinctive happiness. Our desires are mainly for
things which primitive man did not get without difficulty: food
and drink (especially the latter) leadership of the tribe, improve-
ments in the methods of hunting and fighting. But we have many
needs which are not associated with desires, because under primi-
tive conditions these needs were always satisfied. Such are the
needs of country sensations, of occasional silence and occasional
solitude, of alternations of excitement and quiescence. To some
extent, sex and maternity in women come under this head, because
in a primitive community men see to the satisfaction of these
feminine needs without any necessity for female co-operation.
Per contra, there are desires which do not correspond to instinctive
needs. The most important of these are the desires for drugs,
including alcohol and tobacco. The fact that these desires are so
readily stimulated by habit is an example of natural maladjust-
ment from a Darwinian point of view. They differ from instinc-
tive needs in two ways. First, from the point of view of survival,
their satisfaction is not biologically useful; drugs do not help a
man either to survive, himself, or to have a numerous progeny.
Secondly, from the psychological point of view, the craving that
they satisfy depends upon the habit of taking them, not upon a
pre-existent need. The instinctive dissatisfaction which leads a
man to take to drink is usually something wholly unconnected


BERTRAND RUSSELL
111
1
with alcohol, such as business worries or disappointment in love.
Drugs are a substitute for the thing instinctively needed, but an
unsatisfactory substitute, because they never bring full instinctive
satisfaction.
With the advance of what is called civilization, our social and
material environment has changed faster than our instincts, so that
there has been an increasing discrepancy between the acts to which
we are impelled by instinct and those to which we are constrained
by prudence. Up to a point, this is quite unavoidable. Murder,
robbery, and rape are actions which may be prompted by instinct,
but an orderly society must repress them. Work, especially when
many are employed in one undertaking, requires regularity, which
is utterly contrary to our untrained nature. And although a man
who followed his impulses in a state of nature would (at least in a
cold climate) do a good deal of work in the course of an average
day, yet it is very rare indeed that a man has any spontaneous im-
pulse to the work which he has to do in a modern industrial com-
munity. He works for the sake of the pay, not because he likes
the work. There are of course exceptions: artists, inventors, men
of learning, healthy mothers who have few children and strong
maternal instincts, people in positions of authority, a small per-
centage of sailors and peasants. But the exceptions are not suffi-
ciently numerous to be an important section of the whole. The
irksomeness of work has no doubt always existed since men took
to agriculture; it is mentioned in Genesis as a curse, and heaven
has always been imagined as a place where no one does any work.
But industrial methods have certainly made work more remote
from instinct, and have destroyed the joy in craftsmanship which
gave handicraftsmen something of the satisfaction of the artist. I
do not think that, if industrial methods survive, we can hope to
make the bulk of necessary work pleasant. The best we can hope
is to diminish its amount, but there is no doubt that its amount
could be diminished very greatly. It is chiefly in this direction
that we must look for a lessening of the instinctive dissatisfaction
involved in work.
A "return to nature,” such as Rousseau's disciples dreamt of, is
not possible without a complete break-up of our civilization. Reg-
imentation, especially, is of the very essence of industrialism, which
1
! I do not wish this to be regarded as an argument for prohibition, to which
on the whole I am opposed.


112
LEISURE AND MECHANISM
would necessarily perish without it. If this is an evil, and is un-
avoidable, our aim must be to have as little of it as is possible.
This aim will be realized by making the hours of industrial labour
as short as is compatible with the production of necessaries, and
leaving the remaining hours of the day entirely untrammelled.
Four hours' boredom a day is a thing which most people could en-
dure; and this is probably about what would be required.
In many other respects, the restraints upon instinct which now
exist could be greatly diminished. Production at present has two
correlative defects: that it is competitive, and that it is thought
important to produce as much as possible. A great deal less work
is required now to produce a given amount of goods than was
required before the industrial revolution, and yet people live at
higher pressure than they did then. This is chiefly due to com-
petition. An immense amount of labour is wasted in getting or-
ders and securing markets. At times when there is a great deal
of unemployment, those who are not unemployed are overworked,
because otherwise employers could not make a profit. The com-
petitive management of industry for profit is the source of the
trouble. For the same reason there is a desire to maximize pro-
duction, because, with industrial methods, the production of im-
mense quantities of a commodity is more capable of yielding a
profit than the production of moderate quantities. The whole
urgency of the modern business world is towards speeding up,
greater efficiency, more intense international competition, when it
ought to be towards more ease, less hurry, and combination to
produce goods for use rather than profit. Competition, since the
industrial revolution, is an anachronism, leading inevitably to all
the evils of the modern world.
The sense of strain, which is characteristic of all grades in an
industrial community from the highest to the lowest, is due to in-
stinctive maladjustment. Every kind of failure to satisfy deep
instinctive needs produces strain, but the manifestations are some-
what different according to the instinct which is thwarted. The
chief needs thwarted by industrialism, as at present conducted,
are: the need of spontaneous and variable activities, the need of
occasional quiet and solitude, and the need of contact with the
earth. This applies to the working classes, but in the middle
.
1
Cf. R. Austin Freeman, Social Decay and Regeneration (Constable 1921)
especially pages 105-127.


BERTRAND RUSSELL
113
classes the thwarting of instinct is much more serious. A man who
has any ambition cannot marry young, must be very careful how
he has children, must if possible marry a girl whose father will
help him professionally rather than a girl he likes, and when mar-
ried must avoid infidelity, except so furtively as not to be found
out. Our society is so imbued with the belief that happiness con-
sists in financial success that men do not realize how much they
are losing, and how much richer their lives might be if they cared
less for money. But the results of their instinctive dissatisfac-
tion are all the worse for being unconscious. Middle-class men,
when they are no longer quite young, are generally filled with
envy: envy of their more successful colleagues, envy of the young,
and (strange as it may seem) envy of working-men. The result
of the first kind of envy is to make them hostile to all intellectual
or artistic eminence until it is so well-established that they dare
not challenge it; of the second, to make them rejoice in war be-
cause it gives them a chance to thwart the young who have to do
the fighting; of the third, to make them politically opposed to
everything calculated to benefit wage-earners, such as education,
sánitation, maintenance during unemployment, knowledge of birth
control (which the middle class practise as a matter of course)
housing reform, and so on. They believe that their opposition to
these measures is based on economy and a desire to keep down the
taxes, but in this they deceive themselves, because they do not ob-
ject to the spending of vastly greater sums on armaments and wars.
The same man, often, will object to the education rate on the
ground that the poor have larger families than the well-to-do, and
to birth control on the ground that it is immoral and unnatural
except for those whose income is fairly comfortable. Men are
strangely unconscious of their passions, and the envy which dom-
inates most middle-aged professional men is a thing of which they
know nothing, though the methods of psychoanalysis reveal it un-
erringly.
The failure of instinctive satisfaction in the wage-earning classes
is less profound than in the professional classes, because, whatever
Marxians may say, they have more freedom in the really impor-
tant matters, such as marriage. Of course this greater freedom is
being rapidly diminished by improvement in police methods, and
by the continual tightening up of the "moral” standard through
the activities of thwarted middle-class busy-bodies. This has gone


114
LEISURE AND MECHANISM
so far that at present, in English law, the penalty for deserting
a vindictive wife, if you are a wage-earner, is imprisonment for
life. In spite of this tendency, wage-earners, as yet, in good
times, suffer less instinctive repression than professionals, because
they are less dominated by respectability and snobbery. Never-
theless, the failure to satisfy instinctive needs is serious, particu-
larly as regards spontaneity. The effect shows itself in love of ex-
citement, thoughtless sentimentalism, and (in the more intelligent)
hatred of richer people or of foreign nations.
It is evident that the first steps towards a cure for these evils are
being taken by the trade unions, in those parts of their policy
which are most criticized, such as restriction of output, refusal to
believe that the only necessity is more production, shortening of
hours, and so on. It is only by these methods that industrialism
can be humanized and can realize the possibilities of good which
are latent in it. It could be used to lighten physical labour, and to
set men free for more agreeable activities. Hitherto, the competi-
tive system has prevented its being so used. It should have made
life more leisurely, but it has made it more hustling. Increase of
leisure, diminution of hustle, are the ends to be sought, not mere
quantitative increase of production. The trade unions have clearly
perceived this, and have persisted in spite of lectures from every
kind of middle- or upper-class pundit. This is one reason why
there is more hope from self-government in industry than from
State Socialism. The Bolsheviks, when they had established State
Socialism, ranged themselves on the side of the worst capitalists
on all the matters we have been considering. It is obvious that this
must always be the case when conditions of work are determined
bureaucratically by officials, instead of by the workers themselves.
1
FRIENDLY FEELING. It is impossible to find any single phrase to
describe adequately the whole of what I wish to include under this
head. I can, I think, best explain by avoiding hackneyed words
This fact is not generally known. The mechanism is as follows: The
Court makes an order for maintenance, the wife makes a scandal where
the man is employed, he is dismissed, cannot pay the maintenance, and is
imprisoned for contempt of Court. He is legally liable for maintenance
even while in prison ; therefore on the very day he comes out his wife can
have him put back for not paying maintenance during the period of his
first imprisonment. And so it goes on until he dies or she is glutted with
vengeance. This is not a fancy picture, as any one who knows prisoners
can testify.


BERTRAND RUSSELL
115
which seem to convey the correct meaning, but in fact fail to do so.
An average human being is indifferent to the good or evil fortune
of most other human beings, but has an emotional interest in a
certain number of his fellow-creatures. This interest may involve
pleasure in their good fortune and pain in their evil fortune; or it
may involve pain in their good fortune and pleasure in their evil
fortune; or it may involve one of these attitudes in certain respects
and the other in certain other respects. I shall call these three atti-
tudes, friendly, hostile, and mixed, respectively. Broadly speak-
ing, the second of the four goods which we wished to see realized
in a community is the friendly attitude combined with as little as
possible of the hostile attitude. But this is only a rough prelim-
inary characterization of what I mean.
Biologically speaking, the purpose of life is to leave a large
number of descendants. Our instincts, in the main, are such as
would be likely to achieve this result in a rather uncivilized com-
munity. Biological success, in such a community, is achieved
partly by co-operation, partly by competition. The former is pro-
moted by friendly feeling, the latter by hostile feeling. Thus on
the whole, we feel friendly towards those with whom it would be
biologically advantageous to co-operate if we lived in uncivilized
conditions, and hostile towards those with whom, in like condi-
tions, it would pay us to compete. In all genuine friendship and
hostility there is an instinctive basis connected with biological
egoism (which includes the survival of descendants). Some re-
ligious teachers and moralists preach friendly feeling as a duty,
but this only leads to hypocrisy. A great deal of morality is a
cloak for hostility posing as “true kindness,” and enabling the vir-
tuous to think that in persecuting others out of their “vices” they
are conferring a benefit. When I speak of friendly feeling I do
not mean the sort that can be produced by preaching; I mean the
sort which is instinctive and spontaneous. There are two methods
of increasing the amount of this kind of feeling. One is physiolog-
ical, by regulating the action of the glands and the liver; everyone
knows that regular exercise makes one think better of other people.
The other is economic and political, by producing a community in
which the interests of different people harmonize as much as pos-
sible and as obviously as possible. Moral and religious teaching
is supposed to be a third method, but this view seems to rest on a
faulty psychology.


116
LEISURE AND MECHANISM
The stock instance of the friendly attitude is the feeling of a
maternal mother for a young child. As the most obvious example
of the unfriendly attitude we may take jealousy. Sex-love is, of
course, a good example of instinctive co-operation, since no one can
have descendants without another person's help. But in practice
it is so hedged about by jealousy that, as a rule, it affords a less
adequate example of friendly feeling than maternal affection.
Paternal affection involves, as a rule, a mixed attitude. There is
usually some genuine affection, but also much love of power, and
much desire that children should reflect credit on their parents. A
man will be pleased if his boy wins a prize at school, but displeased
if he inherits money from his grandfather, so as to become inde-
pendent of the paternal authority as soon as he is twenty-one.
There is a melancholy satisfaction when one's boy dies for his coun-
try, of a sort not calculated to increase filial affection in those
young men who witness it:
"Snug at the club two fathers sat,
Cross, goggle-eyed, and full of chat.
One of them said: 'My eldest lad
Writes cheery letters from Bagdad.
But Arthur's getting all the fun
At Arras with his nine-inch gun.'
“Yes,' wheezed the other, 'that's the luck!
My boy's quite broken-hearted, stuck
In England training all this year.
Still, if there's truth in what we hear,
The Huns intend to ask for more
Before they bolt across the Rhine.'
I watched them toddle through the door-
These impotent old friends of mine."
Of course war affords the supreme example of instinctive co-op-
eration and hostility. In war, the instinctive prime mover is hos-
tility; the friendly feeling towards our own side is derivative from
hatred of the enemy. If we hear that some compatriot with whom
we are unacquainted has been captured by the enemy and brutally
ill-used, we shall be full of sympathy, whereas if his brother dies
a lingering death from cancer we shall take it as a mere statistical


BERTRAND RUSSELL
117
а
fact. If we hear that the enemy underfeed their prisoners, we shall
feel genuine indignation, even if we are ourselves large employers
paying wages which compel underfeeding. The formula is: sym-
pathy with compatriots in all that they suffer through the common
enemy, but indifference to all that they suffer from other causes.
This shows that, as we asserted, the friendly feelings arising during
war are derivative from the hostile ones, and could not exist in the
same form or with the same wide-spread intensity if hatred did not
exist to stimulate them. Those who see in national co-operation
during war an instinctive mechanism which could be applied to
international co-operation during peace have failed to understand
the nature of the mechanism which war brings into play, or the
fact that without enmity there is no stimulus to set it in motion.
There is, it is true, in addition to sex and parenthood, a form of
instinctive co-operation which involves no enemy, and looks at first
sight very hopeful as a social incentive. I mean that kind of co-
operation in work which, so far as human beings are concerned, one
finds most developed among uncivilized peoples, and which is car-
ried to its highest perfection by ants and bees. Rivers, in his book
on Instinct and the Unconscious (page 94 ff.) describes how the
Melanesians carry out collective work apparently without any need
of previous arrangements, by the help of the gregarious instinct. I
do not believe, however, that much use can be made of this mech-
anism by civilized communities. The instinct involved appears to
be very much weakened by civilization, and is probably incompat-
ible with even the average degree of intellectual development that
exists where school education is common. Moreover, even when it
exists most strongly, it is not such as to make complicated large
organizations possible. It seems also that with the progress of in-
telligence the individual grows more self-contained, less receptive
to immediate impressions from other personalities, which survive
chiefly in fragmentary and sporadic forms such as hypnotism.
The primitive instinct for collective work is certainly one to be
borne in mind, but I do not think it has any very important con-
tribution to make to the solution of industrial problems.
In order to stimulate friendly feeling and diminish hostile feel-
ing, the things that seem most important are: physical well-being,
instinctive satisfaction, and absence of obvious conflict between the
interests of different individuals or groups. On the first two heads,
we have already said enough in considering instinctive happiness.


118
LEISURE AND MECHANISM
The last head, however, raises some interesting points. Our pres-
ent society, under the influence of Liberal ideals, has become one
which, while it retains immense social inequalities, leaves it open to
any man to rise or sink in the social scale. This has resulted from
combining capitalism with a measure of "equality of opportunity.”
In mediaeval society the inequalities were as great as they are now,
but they were stereotyped, and accepted by almost everybody as
ordained by God. They did not therefore cause much envy, or
much conflict between different classes. In the society that social-
ists aim at, there will not be inequality in material goods, and
therefore economic competition and economic envy will be non-
existent. But at present we have the evils of the mediaeval system
without its advantages: we have retained the injustices, while de-
stroying the conception of life which made men tolerate them. It
is evident that, if the prevalence of competition and envy is to be
overcome, an economically stereotyped society is essential. It is
also evident that, in the absence of the mediaeval belief that
hereditary social grades are of divine ordinance, the only stereo-
typed society in which people can acquiesce is one which secures
economic justice in an obvious form—that is to say, economic
equality for all who are willing to work. Until that is secured,
our economic system will continue to grind out hatred and ill-will.
What is called "equality of opportunity” is of course not real
equality, even of opportunity, so long as we retain inheritance of
private property and better education for the children of the well-
to-do
Inequality must breed strife unless it is supported by a
philosophy or religion which even the unfortunate accept. At
present, no such doctrine is conceivable. Therefore equality in
material goods is an essential condition for the prevalence of
friendly feelings between different classes, and even between the
more fortunate and the less fortunate members of the same class, or
between rivals who hope in time to outdistance each other. A
society will not produce much in the way of mental goods unless it
is materially stereotyped. This applies to all kinds of mental
goods, but for the present it is only friendliness that concerns us.
In preaching the advantages of a materially stereotyped society,
I am conscious of running counter to the real religion of our age
the religion of material progress. We think that it would be a
great misfortune if the rate at which new mechanical inventions are
made were to slacken, or if people were to grow lazy and easy-


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119
going. For my part, since I came to know China, I have come to
regard "progress” and “efficiency" as the great misfortunes of the
Western world. I do not think it is worth while to preach difficult
virtues or extremes of self-denial, because the response is not likely
to be great. But I have hopes of laziness as a gospel. I think that
if our education were strenuously directed to that end, by men with
all the fierce energy produced by our present creed and way of life,
it might be possible to induce people to be lazy. I do not mean
that no one should work at all, but that few people should work
more than is necessary for getting a living. At present, the leisure
hours of a man's life are on the whole innocent, but his working
hours, those for which he is paid (especially if he is highly paid)
are as a rule harmful. If we were all lazy, and only worked under
the spur of hunger, our whole society would be much happier.
Think of a man like the late Lord Northcliffe, working like a
galley-slave to produce bloodshed and misery on a scale hitherto
unknown in human history. How admirable it would have been
if he could have been persuaded to lie in the sun, or play bridge, or
study chess-problems, or even take to drink. But, alas, such men
have no vices.
ENJOYMENT OF Beauty. On this subject it is not necessary to
say much, as the defects of industrial civilization in this respect
are generally recognized. It may, I think, be taken as agreed that
industrialism, as it exists now, destroys beauty, creates ugliness,
and tends to destroy artistic capacity. None of these are essential
characteristics of industrialism. They spring from two sources:
first, that industrialism is new and revolutionary; second, that it
is competitive and commercial. The result of the first is that peo-
ple do not aim at permanence in industrial products, and are loath
to lavish much care on something that may be superseded by to-
morrow. The result of the second is that manufacturers value their
wares, not for their intrinsic excellence, but for the profit to be
made out of them, which is (roughly) the excess of their apparent
value above what they are really worth, so that every defect not
evident at first sight is advantageous to the producer. It is obvious
that both these causes of ugliness might be expected to be absent
from an industrialism which was stereotyped and socialistic, since it
would be neither revolutionary nor worked for profit. It therefore
remains only to consider the third point, namely, artistic capacity.


120
LEISURE AND MECHANISM
It would seem, from the history of art, that nine-tenths of artis-
tic capacity, at least, depends upon tradition, and one-tenth, at
most, upon individual merit. All the great flowering periods of art
have come at the end of a slowly maturing tradition. There has,
of course, been no time for industrialism to generate a tradition,
and perhaps, if the absence of tradition were the only thing at
fault, we could wait calmly for the operation of time. But I fear
that the other element, individual artistic merit, without which no
good tradition can be created, can hardly exist in an atmosphere
of industrialized commercialism. Commerce which is not indus-
trial is often extraordinarily favourable to art; Athens, Venice,
Florence are noteworthy examples. But commerce which is indus-
trial seems to have quite different artistic results. This comes
probably from the utilitarian attitude which it generates. An
artist is by temperament a person who sees things as they are in
themselves, not in those rough convenient categories which serve
for the business of life. To the ordinary man, grass is always
green, but to the artist it is all sorts of different colours according
to circumstances. This sort of thing, in anybody who is not already
a famous artist, strikes the practical business man as a waste of
time—it interferes with standardizing and cataloguing. The re-
sult is that, although eminent artists are fêted and paid highly, the
artistic attitude of mind is not tolerated in the young. A modern
industrial community, when it wants an artist, has to import him
from abroad; it then pays him such vast sums that his head is
turned and he begins to like money better than art. When the
whole world has adopted commercial industrialism, the artistic
habit of mind will everywhere be stamped out in youth, by people
who cannot see any value in it unless its possessor is already
labelled as a celebrity. This points to the same requirements as
we found before: a society which is stable as regards the material
side of life and the methods of production, where industrialism has
ceased to be competitive and is used to make life more leisurely
instead of more strenuous. And the first step towards this end is
the general diffusion of a less energetic conception of the good life.
a
KNOWLEDGE. The strongest case for commercial industrialism
can be made out under the head of scientific knowledge. Since
the industrial revolution there has been an enormous increase both
in the general level of education and in the number of men devoted


BERTRAND RUSSELL
121
to learning and research. The importance of science for industrial
progress
is very evident, and all industrial States encourage scien-
tific research. But even in this sphere the utilitarian habit of mind
inseparable from our present system has deleterious effects, which
are only beginning to be evident. Unless some people love knowl-
edge for its own sake, quite independently of its possible uses, the
new discoveries will only concern the working out of ideas inherited
from disinterested investigators. Mendelism is now studied by
hosts of agriculturists and stock-breeders, but Mendel was a monk
who spent his leisure enjoying his peas-blossoms. A million years
of practical agriculturists would never have discovered Mendelism.
Wireless is of great practical importance: it facilitates slaughter in
war, the dissemination of journalistic falsehood in time of peace, ,
and the broadcasting of trivialities to relieve the tedium of even-
ing hours not devoted to success. But the men who made it pos-
sible—Faraday, Maxwell, and Hertz—were none of them the
least interested in furthering this remarkable enrichment of human
life; they were men solely interested in trying to understand physi-
cal processes, and it can hardly be said that the existence of indus-
trialism helped them even indirectly. The modern study of the
structure of the atom may have a profound effect upon industrial
processes, but those who are engaged upon it are very little inter-
ested in this possible future effect of their work. It seems likely
that the utilitarianism of commercial industry must ultimately kill
the pure desire for knowledge, just as it kills the very analogous
artistic impulse. In America, where the more utilitarian aspects of
science are keenly appreciated, no great advance in pure theory has
been made. None of the fundamental discoveries upon which prac-
tical applications depend have been made in America. It seems
probable that, as the point of view appropriate to commercial in-
dustry spreads, utilitarianism will make such fundamental discov-
eries more and more rare, until at last those who love knowledge
for its own sake come to be classified in youth as "morons” and
kept in institutions for harmless lunatics.
This, however, is not one of the main points I wish to make.
There are, in fact, two such points: first, that pure science is infin-
,
itely more valuable than its applications; second, that its appli-
cations, so far, have been in the main harmful, and will only cease
to be so when men have a less strenuous outlook on life.
To take the second point first: Science, hitherto, has been used
a


122
LEISURE AND MECHANISM
a
for three purposes: to increase the total production of commodities;
to make wars more destructive; and to substitute trivial amuse-
ments for those that had some artistic or hygienic value. Increase
in total production, though it had its importance a hundred years
ago, has now become far less important than increase of leisure
and the wise direction of production. On this point it is not neces-
sary to enlarge further. The increasing destructiveness of wars
also needs no comment. As for trivial amusements: think of the
substitution of the cinema for the theatre; think of the difference
between the gramophone and the really beautiful songs of Russian
peasants; think of the difference between watching a great football
match and playing in a small one. Owing to our belief that work
is what matters, we have become unable to make our amusements
anything but trivial. This is part of the price we had to pay for
Puritanism; it is no accident that the only great industrial countries
are Protestant. People whose outlook on life is more leisurely
have a higher standard for their amusements: they like good plays,
good music, and so on, not merely something that enables them to
pass the time vacuously. So far, however, science has only in-
truded into the world of amusement in ways that have made it
more trivial and less artistic. Nor can this be prevented so long
as men think that only work is important.
As for the greater value of pure rather than applied science,
that is a matter which goes deeper, but which it is difficult to argue.
Applied science, while men retain their present ideals, has the sort
of effects we have been considering, which I for my part find it
very difficult to admire. Pure science—the understanding of nat-
ural processes, and the discovery of how the universe is constructed
-seems to me the most god-like thing that men do. When I am
tempted (as I often am) to wish the human race wiped out by
some passing comet, I think of scientific knowledge and of art;
these two things seem to make our existence not wholly futile.
But the uses of science, even at the best, are on a lower plane. A
philosophy which values them more than science itself is gross,
and
cannot in the long run be otherwise than destructive of science.
On all four heads, therefore, we are led to the conclusion that
our social system, our prevailing habits of mind, and our so-called
moral ideals, are destructive of what is excellent. If excellence is
to survive, we must become more leisurely, more just, less utili-
tarian, and less "progressive.”
a



A DRAWING.
BY STUART DAVIS





THE GOLD COAST
BY JOHN FREEMAN
A
MORE beautiful dragon-fly had never been seen: he must
follow it, catch it, release it unharmed and lovelier than
before. Hovering at the edge of Crispin's Pool it seemed like a
shining arrow of gold, shot from the sun and pausing before it fell.
If it fell it would fall into the green water. Richard-Richard
Corbet Clyne—had not been to the Pool since last winter, when it
was frozen over and he tried to skate on the rimy surface, and
skimmed pebbles upon it, and smiled to hear the noise. It was won-
derful that he had walked and slid helplessly, where now, if this
fine arrow of gold fell, it would be spoiled and drowned.
The dragon flashed suddenly past him and Richard plunged
through the green bracken after it, wishing he had a cap instead of
a flimsy handkerchief that would be so long in falling if he flung it.
He scrambled up the sandy path, not stopping to notice how many
rabbits must haunt the copses, and followed the dragon until it
stayed and flashed its shaking light again. Richard, too, paused,
for he was out of breath and knew he was too far off to attempt to
catch the dragon-fly by tossing a handkerchief, and feared to fold a
stone in it. How lucky were the boys who went out with nets.
Next term he would sell all his stamps and buy a net-oh, but his
mother would be sure to forbid it. His mother, he obscurely felt,
was proud of him, and encouraged him in every serious pursuit- ,
stamp collecting was one—but butterfly-hunting was merely hunt-
ing, a violent exercise and no more. If he needed play, there was
chess; and he sighed to think that though he sold every stamp he
possessed he would be no nearer getting a net. The Martins had
nets, but he couldn't bring himself to borrow things he wanted for
his own, especially since his mother disapproved. He might per-
suade her by showing her he really could play chess now, but he
hated chess—and look, the sheeny wings were gone!
Richard sprang up and followed again, but a single glimpse of
the brilliant being was all: the dragon-fly had vanished and the sky
was empty. A hundred nets would make no difference now.
1
a


124
THE GOLD COAST
a
A man working at the hedge watched him as he turned away dis-
appointed, and Richard tried to look as though he didn't care or
was unconscious of dragon-flies burning swiftly through the air.
The labourer saw the pretence and smiled, and Richard, not quite
understanding the smile, was still lightly teased by it. The man
was laughing at him! The man, truly, was not laughing at the
boy, but at his own half-shaped thoughts on seeing the boy chasing
and losing a fly; for he thought of himself as a boy and was con-
scious of looking a long way backwards—forty years away when
lovely things tormented his eyes with their freedom and light. Had
he spoken he could have said no more than “That minds me now.”
Richard's shadow was but a shadow falling upon a hidden nerve
and waking it to brief sensitiveness.
Richard's shadow followed him through the thin wood, back to-
wards Crispin's Pool, and before he reached it he stopped, and slid
down at the foot of a beech. It was so pleasant to loll there, for in
the softness of this early summer warmth he felt a kind of physi-
cal languor creeping over his frame, so that for a while it was bet-
ter to be idle than active. But though he lay still, his head rubbing
now and then against the stained trunk, his thoughts were busy
enough; at first turning after the lost fly and then, as he looked up
at the blue, following the limbs of the beech tree into the sky. How
could a tree hold its arms so firm and still, when his own-stretched
out level from his shoulders—became in a moment so heavy and
tremulous? He dropped them and looked up again, and saw a sun-
beam through the leaves gilding the pale green of a great member
that sprang high into the blue-gold on the pale green. The un-
spoken word made him think of the Gold Coast and his father. The
Gold Coast-sparkling gold on dull gold sands, gold sparkling un-
der shallow waves, gold flowing down in almost imperceptible mor-
sels with the river to the sea; the Gold Coast-muddy forests, and
figures black as mud, shining like mud after rain, staggering down
through forests under small heavy bales of gold. An alligator
moving slowly made a swell in the river, and slowly heaved his
bulk out of the river water-a score of tiny streams falling from his
corrugated back, and gold dust sliding in them or caught between
the horny channels, sparkling like golden frost in the sun. Golden
frost-the gold of the tropics where the heat made everything faint,
except these minute, hard particles of golden frost.


JOHN FREEMAN
125
The Gold Coast! Once he had thought his father was King
there—had conquered it, perhaps, and stayed to rule. But that
early fancy had faded, for his father had not returned. Nor had he
died, for his mother had not worn black nor talked of him as Aunt
Marian had talked and wept when Uncle had died. His father
couldn't be dead, yet could he still be on the Gold Coast? Surely
letters at least would come, and gifts, and they would be rich. He
couldn't
say how long it was since his father had kissed him good-
bye and promised him—"all sorts of things, Richard.”
"A gun, father?”
“All sorts of things at any rate, Richard.” But his mother inter-
rupting said quietly, “Don't promise the boy.”
Richard wondered why his father was not to promise, and why
his father, hearing the interdict, merely looked at him with smiling
eyes that still promised, and said no more, but turned towards the
trunks, tied the straps, sprang into the seat, and with a splendid
flourish of the whip drove off—to a ship, to the Gold Coast. How
long ago was that? Three Christmases had gone—no, four, and no
gun had come, no arrows, no African marvels, no letter even, no
promise even. Nothing! His mother had simply silenced
him when he asked questions—silenced him with a look, a quiet, “I
don't know, Richard," or "You must wait, Richard”—words said in
that familiar way of hers which always expressed, Don't ask ques-
tions. But questions persisted though unasked, and he questioned
himself; indeed of late he had questioned constantly the absence
and the silence of his father. No letter had come, nor had he ever
surprised his mother writing. How could she live so quietly with-
out a word, when he himself, a child, hungered for a word? Why
was his mother so quiet as to make him afraid to disturb her with
his play? Why was he still a day-scholar, when he had so long
been promised a boarding school? The Gold Coast—that was
where his father had gone, and although he was no longer so stupid
as to think of him as King of the Gold Coast, he couldn't under-
stand why, since his father was there, they should be growing
poorer at home. Everything had grown quieter; people no longer
called at the house as they used to do when he was a small boy and
his father was commonly at home; and his mother seldom met peo-
ple outside now. Nobody spoke to him of his father, and although
he was glad, yet he still wondered why nobody spoke. There was a
a
a


126
THE GOLD COAST
fairy story he'd been told once, of a tower of silence, with the moon
rising up one side and setting on the other, and in it was a silver
Prince who had everything he wished for except the sound of a
voice. He forgot what had happened to the Prince, but he saw the
tower, its rising and falling moon, and the unmoving hands of the
clock, with the Prince looking over the tower. If only his mother
would say to him, “Richard, I'll tell
you
about your father now, ”
he could bear anything she might tell him; for it must be something
to bear. One day he would know, of course, he would insist upon
knowing; but as yet he could not face his mother's steady look.
And so thinking, he caught again the glimpse of the gliding beam
and, feeling miserable now, stretched himself, rose, and walked on.
-But why walk so quickly, since he had the whole day? His
mother had given him leave to roam as he would, with a packet of
egg sandwiches and a stick of American chocolate; soon he would
find a spot from which he could see things passing, and eat his
lunch. Devil's Wood, that would be the place, for at the top of the
wood were cross-roads and carts went by, farm wagons, sometimes
fast motors; he could time them over the exact quarter-mile from
the post-office to the cross-roads, proud of his silver watch that
ticked off the seconds so loudly.
Half way to the wood he heard a voice and saw a school fellow
approaching. “Hullo, Alexander”—“Hullo, Clyne!" for a mo-
ment exhausted the intelligence of the twain; and then Richard
said, “You haven't gone away yet, then?”
"No, hang it, we can't go for a day or two. They've got measles
down in Cornwall and we've got to find a fresh place. When are
you going?”
Richard was resentfully evasive. “I don't quite know yet
my mother—where are you going now?”
“Anywhere," and the two moved on together. They had never
been great friends, for Richard didn't quite like young Boney, as
Alexander was called. Young Boney was an awkward-looking,
pallid, fat boy, suspected of Jewishness mainly on account of a nose
which was thought conclusive evidence in spite of voluble denials
and protests. His nose, thick lips, dark eyes, and pallid fleshiness
,
gave the lie to his assertions; even his unvarying good nature argued
against him.
“I'm going to leave after next term,” said Boney; "my father


JOHN FREEMAN
127
a
will be home then and we're going to move. When I'm older I'm
to have a pony. You haven't got a pony, have you?"
'
Richard shook his head, and the other pursued, “Rabbits ?”
Again Richard shook his head and said no and then Boney cried,
“I say, come and see mine. It isn't far.” At first Richard hesi-
tated, and then allowed himself to be led across the road to a path
by the river side, over the hanging bridge that swayed, stooped, and
recovered as they passed it, and then up between steep hot banks of
dustless herbs. Twenty minutes brought them to a white gate, a
short avenue of ragged elms, a barn with a gilded vane, another
gate, and a courtyard which seemed to Richard a wonderful place
for roller skates—large smooth flags with smaller flags for border,
and grass growing at the edges. He had never been to the house
before and looked round with a little envy at the spacious yard and
the stone casements deep in the thick wall.
“Look at the date,” said Boney, pointing to the 1617 cut over the
doorway, with a faint A. M. traced in the greening stone. "Year
“
after Shakespeare's death—always remember that now," he added.
“Nobody at home, I expect, unless it's Myra.”
Boney looked round before opening a heavy door: there wasn't
a maid in sight; then with a furtive "Wait!” he entered and in a
moment joined Richard with a canister of grain. “They won't let
me feed them before feeding time,” he explained, and laughed as
they went under an arch and along a tiled path, soft with tarnish-
ing mosses, into an orchard. The sun seemed cool under the trees,
and as the wind shook the small pears and apples overhead, and
bent the raspberry canes, Richard shivered as though the wind
touched his branches also.
In a corner of the orchard the rabbit hutches hung, just beneath
the glossy ivy. Boney thrust the canister into Richard's hands,
squeezed his head and shoulders into a door, and dragged out one
by one the quivering white bodies. The sleek coats glistened in the
sun as Boney held the quick-breathing startled creatures by the ears
and felt the fatness of their bellies. "No, no one ever touches them,
Clyne,” said Boney, and refused to let Richard do more than stroke
them and feel the silk of their ears. Suddenly a voice surprised the
boys—"What on earth are you doing, Cassy ?"
Richard was the first to turn and saw a girl of fifteen coming
near over the grassy path, dressed in something richly red. He


128
THE GOLD COAST
stared at the bright-hued figure, full and soft under the long face,
and was confused as she stared back. "It's all right, Myra, I'm
only showing Clyne my rabbits.”
“But you know you're not allowed to feed them, Cassy. You
make them so horribly fat—it's loathsome.” She took no notice of
Richard save to smile at him when she ended; but as she turned her
face away she added, half to Richard and half to the sky, “Cassy's
such a donkey with rabbits.”
Her brother smiled. “Well, you're afraid of them—you're
afraid of everything, silly."
Myra moved off. "You'd get into trouble, only mother's out.”
Richard looked after her diminishing figure, as it sway under
the apple boughs. The sun and dappling shadow made her dress
bright as a bird's plumage--peacock-like for richness; and as she
passed from sight he heard her voice ambling an air, no, he couldn't
be quite sure of the air, and only felt that the voice was rich and
full. Boney was still feeding and fondling his rabbits, and after a
moment's silence Richard asked him, “Is that your sister—Myra ?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Why did she call you Cassy ?" And as Boney didn't answer at
once, Richard pursued teasingly, “It might be short for so many
names—Cassius, the envious Casca; why it might be Casabianca.'
“I say,” protested the other.
"What is it short for, then ?" He was seized with a desire to
drag his name from Boney, not because he was interested in names,
but because real names were hidden and between the boys at school
there was a rigid secrecy upon this most intimate and sacred subject.
He wanted Boney's name because he shared the school's attitude of
slightly despising Boney, Boney being clever, of rich parents, and
with showy habits, and a generally mysterious origin. “What is
Cassy short for?”
Boney was afraid to tell, but since Richard knew now that he
was called Cassy he was afraid the name might be used at school.
After a cunning moment he looked up and said, “Well, I'll tell you,
on conditions of course.”
"Well-what conditions ?”
"You tell me yours, and we'll both swear a solemn oath—a really
dreadful solemn oath—not to tell any one else.”
“All right-I'll swear.”


JOHN FREEMAN
129
“A solemn oath, mind ?”
“Yes, yes, anything you like.”
“And
you
will tell me yours ?”
"Well-yes, if you like.”
“Then say after me, “I swear by Almighty God—”
Richard repeated the words, though now he regretted the oath,
but when Boney began, “And by the —” Richard stopped him.
"You can't swear any more after that, you know.” He felt uncom-
fortable.
"All right then,” said Boney, a little dubiously; and stepping
nearer and lowering his voice said, “Caspar David.” The syllables
pleased him as he uttered them and he repeated proudly, "Caspar
David Alexander. But you're not to tell, and you're never to call
me Cassy."
"I didn't promise that," began Richard, but seeing the alarm on
Boney's face he added, "But I won't tell.”
"Now tell me yours," said Boney, with a hint of contempt for
anything he might hear.
Richard was suddenly dismayed. How could he do what no
other boy would do except of course Boney, who wasn't like the
others? The oath seemed now a snare, but the keeping of it a
crime; he couldn't tell. He ought not to have sworn—and who
was Boney, anyhow, to make him swear and tell?
"You won't repeat it, Boney, mind,” he cried warningly.
"Of course I won't.”
Looking at the other's eyes Richard became utterly mistrustful.
It would be wrong to tell—but how to get out of telling?
In a swift moment he had decided.
"John Thomas John Thomas Clyne.” He was conscious of
staring firmly at the other while he spoke the virtuous lie. Why
should he tell him?
“Pah!” cried Boney contemptuously. “That's not much of a
name to make a fuss about."
“But you've sworn."
“Of course.
I say, it's stupid here. Come on and I'll show
you things.” Standing up he yawned and led the way back to the
house. As they returned by the same mossy path Richard was
teased by a regret. He'd deceived Boney and didn't mind that very
much; he'd deceive him again, come to that. But he wanted to
9)
.


130
THE GOLD COAST
.
ask about Myra—what her name was; and he wanted to get Boney
to talk about Myra and now he couldn't. His ears were stretched
for the sound of her voice, as the boys went past the kitchen door
and into the pantry, beyond which was a huge dark cupboard.
That cupboard, Boney said, was his; and lighting a safety lantern
he began to show his treasurers-earlier toys, a pair of roller skates,
cards with butterfly's wings carelessly fixed on and now damaged.
In a corner stood some nets. “These are mine, too,” said Boney,
gloatingly; and conscious of his wealth he grew suddenly expan-
sive and taking one of the nets in his hand and testing the fabric,
thrust it carelessly upon Richard. “You take it, Clyne. I've got a
lot."
Richard was angry
the very thing, and he was angry. “I
don't want it. I don't care about butterfly hunting. It's a silly
game—all right for kids.”
Boney took it back, seeming glad to keep it. The next moment
Richard said, “I'm going on now," and moved to the door.
Boney put out the light and the two stepped away. Boney
opened another door and Richard caught a glimpse of a high
kitchen with heavy beams and a fire blazing behind a huge cook,
who at once looked aggressive. Boney promptly shut the door,
muttering, “Ugly old thing!” and led Richard towards the white
gate. There he swung idly, and Richard said, “Next term is your
last, then ?"
“Yes. And I shall be jolly glad. I don't know where I'm going;
my father hasn't settled it. He is in Russia, and he's coming back
before Christmas. I've asked him for a Russian wolf-hound. Per-
haps he'll take me with him next time he goes—me or Myra.
Myra's going to Cheltenham when we move, so most likely it will
be me. Just think, Clyne! Sledges in the snow, snow everywhere,
and you wear everything fur. Wolves, lots of wolves, and you can
hunt them—ugh! Frozen rivers, and big prairies in the summer-
,
must be bigger than America."
“Does Myra want to go?” Richard was conscious of sadness at
the thought that she might be leaving England.
"Myra ? I don't know, I don't suppose so.
—
. Girls--well.
But even if I don't go next time I shall go soon, if mother will let
me.” Boney licked his lips at the prospect of Russian snows, and
then said sharply, “Don't you wish you could go ?”
.
"


JOHN FREEMAN
131
.
9
"Rather-or somewhere else."
Boney's curiosity was pricked again—"Where ?"
"Well, Africa.”
“Why—what part ?”
“The Gold Coast. It must be wonderful. Why it sounds won-
derful.
Dangerous, too. You get fevers there; they use
poisoned arrows. And there are snakes and—” He checked him-
self sharply, and wished he had held his tongue when the other
asked, “But what could you do there? It sounds as if it isn't a
place for a boy.
Got any people there ?"
Richard shook his head, and anxious as he felt to change the sub-
ject, could think of nothing to divert it. Boney went on promptly.
"I thought you said once that your father was there—you know,
when we had to write an essay about countries. I thought you said
it was Africa, somewhere."
“No-South America,” answered Richard steadily. He couldn't
bear that Boney should be trying thus to force him into talking of
his secret thoughts.
"O well! Who wants to go to South America ?” And as Boney
ended Richard told him quickly, “I saw such a fine dragon-fly this
morning-over by Crispin's Pool. I expect there'll be a lot there.
Why don't
you
take
“It's too far to-day. I'm not supposed to go much away from
the house while mother isn't at home. I might to-morrow."
“With Myra ?"
"What an ass! She won't go and I shouldn't want to take her.
She'd only be a nuisance if I did.”
Richard looked angrily at Boney as he spoke, but the latter said,
"I can't come any further, I shall have to run to get home for
lunch.”
The next minute Richard was watching Boney's awkward thick
figure lurching hastily off. He murmured to himself in extremest
disdain and envy, “Caspar David-Caspar David Alexander”; and
then, “Myra Alexander, Myra.
Miserable enough, he
sat down at last to eat the lunch that had oozed its greasy patch
against the lining of his old coat.
A dishevelled tramp shuffled by just as Richard finished his
lunch. He scarcely saw the boy, but Richard watched him closely
as he shambled on. He wondered how a man could like going
your net ?”
a
.


132
THE GOLD COAST
a
a
about so dirty, so unwholesome, so avoided, through the fresh green
country; or, perhaps, he couldn't help it, and would rather be clean
and brisk if he could. But this man certainly looked as though he
didn't care, and the boy dismissed him from his mind almost as
soon as he passed from sight.
And so it was all the afternoon-one thing after another falling
upon his mind like a cloud, and then moving off again and leaving
him idle as sunny water in a shallow bed. All the time he was dis-
satisfied. It wasn't that he was solitary, for he liked being alone to
watch things and wonder how they came; but something flawed his
mind or memory, and the day became uneasy. It was nearly tea-
time when he reached the village, and he quickened his steps be-
cause his home was at the other end. The village slept perfectly;
everybody was asleep, or shut within the blind walls and drinking
tea; it seemed the quietest place in the world—the dullest. Noth-
ing could happen there. And nothing happened when he
reached home, except that his mother remarked that he was a little
late, and asked how he had spent the day. She frowned, he fancied,
when he spoke of Boney and Myra, but she was still sedate as ever
when she asked if Mrs Alexander had been at home. After tea his
mother reminded him of his promise to read French every day dur-
ing the holidays, and with this and idler matters the evening began
to slip softly away.
But his quiet mind was shaken by the casual sight of a book he
had often meant to read-Captain Singleton, a recent gift from
someone who knew nothing of it but that it was by the author of
Robinson Crusoe. It was a sheer misadventure that led Richard to
open it now, and read of-Africa, dark forests, cruelties done upon
the black people of the mysterious land; everywhere echoes of the
magical, dark, bright Gold Coast. Richard read, then dipped, his
head confused by the tangle of suggestion and picture, a tangle
thick and clinging as the creepers of the forests and the fever-creep-
ers hanging there. The book dropped from his hand and he sat
perfectly still, thinking not of the Captain nor of the subtle Quaker
and the men, but of his father. His father was even yet, maybe,
even this aching evening, lonely and unsupported on the Gold
Coast. Why wouldn't his mother speak? He looked at her, as she
sat upright, knitting. There was no noise in the room but that of
the clicking needles, and the moth wings against the lamp-shade;


JOHN FREEMAN
133
a
she knitted so quickly that the clicking of her needles was like the
quick plucking of strings from which all sweetness had gone;
but
her face was impassive—still and fine and reserved like a yellowing
old ivory god brought from Bengal to stare unmoved upon the fret-
ting of the West.
Richard looked at his mother and her eyes, lifting a second as at
a summons, caught his. He tried to look boldly and challenge her
with a glance; but it was his eyes that fell beneath quivering lids,
and his courage that died. His mother still knitted steadily on and
then, as if nothing had passed between them even while this mute
challenge had sprung and quailed, she said:
“It's bedtime, Richard.” His heart murmured, but his will was
sunken into weakness.
It took him some time to get to sleep and he was restless, it
seemed, all through restless centuries. The sound of a river soothed
a
him and then excited him, for it was a shallow rapid river, with in-
finitesimal reflections beneath the water-gold, gold dust, gold par-
ticles clinging to the yellow pebbles. Huge black natives came
stumbling towards him, sinister presences brandishing their arms
and threatening, not him, but some other. They were threatening
his father, but he could nowhere see him. “Father, father!” he
cried, and rose from the bed; “Father, come away, come away
from
the Gold Coast."
It seemed that Myra Alexander was holding his arms firmly and
leading him from the huge natives. "Father—Myra!” he mut-
"
tered. The shining candle woke him, and the face that was Myra's
became his mother's. “I thought I heard—” and then, remember-
ing the rebuke of his mother's presence earlier in the evening, he
said no more.


TWO POEMS
BY MARGARET NAUMBURG
COUNTRY SUNDAY
Sedately muffled feet
click across village asphalt
into black mouth
of steepled church
as impious cocks
cut the clean sabbath silence.
IN CENTRAL PARK
Along unkempt paths
puffy sparrows
fiddle with peanut shells.
Over endless asphalt
roller skates grind
cheerful.
On pond of puddly green
cardboard swans and quackleducks
parade,
as lozenge-like apartments
jostle flatfaced office fronts
from the rim of the sky.
ما



Mene Laurent cu
Courtesy of the Galerie Alfred Flechtheim, Berlin
LE CITRON. BY MARIE LAURENCIN





GEORGE MOORE AND GRANVILLE BARKER
BY GEORGE MOORE
MOORE (handing Barker a cigar): A cigar is welcome after
reading; the spell of the Corona enjoins silence, but we may
listen without losing any of the fragrance if the comment be fa-
vourable. Mine will provoke certainly no argument in you; you
may even be glad to hear that the thought that returned to me
again and again was: a dramatist's play, without trace of the
novel, the poem, or the sonnet in it. Few are faithful to one lit-
erary form chosen from the beginning. Even Ibsen was a trans-
gressor; he wrote some poems. Pater! Of course, there is Pater-
like you, an exemplar of literary fidelity, his genius saving Marius
again and again from drifting into the novel; and in Imaginary
Portraits he was not less true to his genius, suave and punctilious—
BARKER: Then you like the play you have just heard better
than
MOORE: Yes, better than The Voyse's Inheritance, better than
The Madras House, and better than-
BARKER: I shall not take it as a compliment if you like my new
play better than Waste, which you did not like at all. I gave it to
you to read when I was lying stricken with typhoid fever in a Dub-
lin lodging
MOORE: And every evening I read an act and every morning I
came to tell you how much I admired the construction, the dialogue,
and the characters.
BARKER: But you found faults.
MOORE: About one incident in the play my feelings cannot
change.
BARKER: And the incident to which you take exception is the
very one from which the action of the play springs.
MOORE: No, Barker, I do not take exception to the incident
from which the action of the play springs, but to the shrubbery in
which it occurs. I can understand a pursuit through a garden, a ter-
race, or a park, but not through laurels, a shrub so gloomy that if
there had been any in the vale of Menalus, Pan's hooves would


136 GEORGE MOORE AND GRANVILLE BARKER
have lagged or turned aside and the reed not been cut to which he
owes his redemption from the beast. Your shrubbery, I admit, is
but a trivial objection; a more serious criticism of Waste is your
politician's lack of courtesy.
BARKER: Courtesy was not a characteristic of the politician I
had in mind. But if you admit the chase-
Moore: Admit the chase, Barker! But who could deny the right
of chase ?—so long as it is conducted with courtesy.
BARKER: I am afraid your meaning escapes me. I'll ask you to
speak more plainly.
Moore: In writing an elaborate work something is overlooked,
and not seldom something essential. In writing Waste you do not
seem to have remembered that to kiss a lady once is most impolite.
BARKER: My politician's transgression was barely possible, but
it was possible once. A second kiss would have been a vulgarity.
Moore: A thing so deeply implanted in human nature as a kiss,
Barker, cannot, I think, be considered vulgar. And being a man of
the eighteenth century (the eighteenth century continued in Ireland
till 1870) I expected you to make amends for the shrubbery by in-
troducing your characters to us in an arbour, on a terrace, or a bal-
cony.
BARKER: William took Esther Waters on the Downs once and
then abandoned her, so will you tell me how my politician differs
from your footman?
Moore: If Esther and William did not walk out again on the
Downs the fault lay not with William, but with Esther. Her vio-
lent temper-
BARKER: A quick parry
of
Moore: For a moment I was embarrassed, so quick was your
thrust, and remembered only just in time-
BARKER: We will forget this passage of wits in which neither is
worsted, and you'll tell me what you think of the new play.
Moore: My impression is, after a first hearing, that the new
play is the best you have written. The qualities of craftsmanship,
of course, are the same as in your other plays—a very subtle and
yet apparently easy construction, pointed dialogue, never a word
wasted.
BARKER: But I thought you preferred abundance to reticence,
Shakespeare's method to Ibsen's?
yours, Moore.


GEORGE MOORE
· 137
MOORE: I never think about methods, and when I read in the
newspapers that a play is not technically a play I lay the paper
I
aside.
BARKER: And you are right. There are plays of all kinds, and
all we ask is that the writer shall produce a play good of its kind.
MOORE: You condemn monologues
BARKER: Not always. I wrote to you that the three or four lines
of monologue with which you begin The Apostle were unnecessary,
admitting, however, that they might annoy our friend Archer.
Moore: I have dedicated the play to you.
BARKER: I am honoured.
Moore: And hope that one or two monologues and perhaps an
aside will not blind you to other merits, should any be discoverable.
BARKER: And you are pleased with The Apostle, now that you
have finished it to the last revision of the last comma?
Moore: No correspondence with managers, no rehearsals, no
withdrawing the play from rehearsals—an admirable play!
BARKER: But from what you told me and from what I saw in
your first draft the play seemed to me designed for the stage.
Moore: The stage was in my mind as fourteen lines are in the
mind of him who sits down to write a sonnet.
BARKER: The characters of Jesus and His Apostle are treated
with much reverence; the Archbishops could hardly have treated
them with more, and, the Censor being no longer adamantine, it
might be worth while asking a management to send the play to the
Censor's office.
Moore: There is not an irreverent word in the play, but I doubt
if the Censor could pass it even if he wished to do so.
Barker: You may be right, in that a Jesus who does not die on
BARKER
the cross conflicts too flagrantly with current theology.
Moore: The play may be acted in America; America is full of
Unitarians. It may be acted in Germany, or in Paris, even in Eng-
land privately; if I have succeeded in representing St Paul in all his
instincts and attributions, he will not escape the ambition of a great
actor.
BARKER: Who will know little ease till he has been seen in the
part, which he will, mayhap, illuminate by his genius. You are
content to wait?
MOORE: I do not attach overmuch importance to a performance.


138 GEORGE MOORE AND GRANVILLE BARKER
BARKER: And you throw the book on the waters, hoping that the
bait will be swallowed by some greedy fish.
Moore: It occurred to me that it would be as well to give The
Coming of Gabrielle to the Tauchnitz Library, and the manager of
the National Theatre, Prague, picked the play up from a bookstall
and decided to produce it.
BARKER: I shall print my play.
Moore: I hope you will, for the publication will attract and
prepare the public for literary drama.
BARKER: You live in London (I in Devon and Italy) and may
be able to tell me if people are beginning to weary of trash.
Moore: The public accept what the managers give them, and if
an author has written books, especially well-written books, if his
name, I mean, be connected with literature, the manager begins to
sniff danger, for we have no record of a successful "literary” play.
Of course we haven't; literature is never literary. And the man-
ager is duped by the high-brow, and the high-brow in turn is duped
by the disagreeable, else I should drop, he says, into the common-
place. The literary papers shriek “Literature at Stake!" but the
public heed them not. The manager puts on Cocoanut Ice and gets
a run of three hundred nights. The Two-Seater follows and gets a
run of four hundred nights. And once more literature is discredited
by the “literary.”
BARKER: As the theatre cannot be suppressed, a Bill will be in-
troduced into Parliament for its reformation sooner or later. There
will be hitches and delays-
Moore: There will indeed; for the roots of Puritanism are so
deep in England that at the first hint of a National Theatre theol-
ogy and morals will be massed against us, and the question will be
asked in both Houses of Parliament if it be just that the taxpayer
should put his hand into his pocket to pay for what he does not
want, indeed, for what he actively dislikes.
BARKER: You talk like one who is opposed to a National Thea-
tre.
Moore: No, not opposed, but in doubt whether art can be beck-
oned. Art comes to a country and flourishes in it for a while, and
then leaves it, never to return.
BARKER: It may be so; so far as you know, it is so. But to-mor-
row may prove your theory to be wrong. Why furnish the opposi-
tion with arguments?
a


GEORGE MOORE
139
MOORE: Our logic will not bring us any nearer to a National
Theatre. We shall get it—if we get it–because it is desired, and I
do not think the opposition will borrow my metaphysics to confute
us. The argument that will be produced against us will be such as
the plain man in the street can understand. He will ask, and his
spokesman in Parliament, who duplicates him, will ask: For what
purpose are plays written? He will answer his question himself:
To please. And for whom does the playwright cater? The answer
comes pat: The public. Who, therefore, are more capable of judg.
ing plays than the general public? And if the general public be
admitted as competent judges, why set up another standard? The
general public have always supported Shakespeare; Shakespeare is
good. Answer me that if you can. And he sits down confident in
the triumph of common sense over the sophistries of the crank.
BARKER: The voice of the politician whose mouthpiece you are
for the moment will be heard certainly in Parliament, but I would
have you remember that many voices will be heard, and that it is
not to the voice of the rook or the jay the mob listen.
MOORE: The mob will listen to the nightingale, I know, because
the nightingale sings for nothing.
BARKER: It surprises me to find you on the side of the mob.
MOORE: Not on the side of the mob, but their spokesman for the
nonce, as you have said. I read in your book that the cost of a
National Theatre would be a million. I always calculated that the
sum required would be about five hundred thousand pounds.
BARKER: That was before the War. The cost would now be a
million.
MOORE: Half of which, I understand, would go to the building
of the theatre. And when the Bill comes before Parliament the
question will be put: Why build a new theatre? Why not buy one
of the theatres already in existence and save five hundred thousand
pounds? I am not expressing my opinion, Barker, but anticipating
an argument.
BARKER: My answer to the heckler is simple: Sir, you lack the
civic sense. The business of the National Theatre is not the exclu-
sive production of modern plays. I would not ban modern plays-
who would, if we get a good play? And by a good play I do not
mean a play that will run as long as a public house, but one that
will encourage and enrapture those who seek pleasure in thought.
In my little speech to the caviller whom you are representing at this
a


140 GEORGE MOORE AND GRANVILLE BARKER
moment I would say that the business of a National Theatre is the
a
glorification of London. I said just now that you lacked the civic
sense, sir. Perhaps I should have worded my reproof differently,
and said: You are forgetful for the moment of the civic sense,
which is your possession as much as mine. And to recall the civic
sense to your consciousness I would remind you that we might de-
stroy a great deal of London without destroying London; leave us
our buildings, and London would still be London. But think, sir,
if you can, of London without Westminster Abbey and St Paul's.
These and the many beautiful churches that throng our streets may
not be as useful as garages, and for this reason there are many
among us who would pull down our churches, pleading that they
are without sufficient congregations, and that the thoroughfares
need widening for a freer circulation of traffic and a more rapid
passage
of motor cars. The abolition of the National Gallery
would long ago have been advocated if our utilitarians did not feel
that they might find themselves in the minority—an unpardonable
sin—and for the moment they prefer to justify the National Gal-
lery as a place where young women and young men go to study the
art of painting
Moore: As well might they study Chaucer with a view to quali-
fying for the post of sub-editor on one of our dailies. Only the
great artist can study the past with impunity; he understands at a
glance, and passes on. We must live in our own time; a modern
theatre will serve us better than an archaic. Let us consider the
sites that have occurred to you, Barker, as suitable for a National
Theatre.
Barker: It has often been in my mind to petition the King to
concede a corner of St James' Park-
MOORE: A theatre in St James' Park! How wonderful! Go on
talking, Barker. I like listening to you; go on talking.
BARKER: But for the King to concede two or three acres of St
James' Park would be the thin end of the wedge. I'm sorry I can't
think of a newer simile.
Moore: Nobody has ever thought of a better one. The thin end
goes on for ever, like the roseate fingers of the dawn. But you were
saying?
BARKER: I was saying that if the King were to grant us a site in
St James' Park for a National Theatre, other requests would come
to him for a college
a
a


GEORGE MOORE
141
a
a
MOORE: Or for a school of art, or for a museum where stuffed
birds would be shown to gaping children. You did well, Barker,
to put St James' Park out of your mind as a convenient site for the
National Theatre.
BARKER: Westminster has been long in my mind as the site we
require. Westminster Hall was built in the reign of William
Rufus.
You say you like listening to me, but I can see
your thoughts are away.
Moore: I admit that my thoughts strayed from you to your
book, The Exemplary Theatre, for I suddenly remembered that in
your long conversation with the Minister of Education you based
your claim for a National Theatre on the educational advantages
thereof.
BARKER: There was much else in my book besides the long talk
with the Minister of Education, which I admit was a mistake.
MOORE: That is what is so winning in you, Barker. You are
ready always to confess a mistake, and thereby you weaken your
opponent's defence. The day your book arrived from the Times
office I was writing an article pointing out that the twentieth cen-
tury had come to believe that by the aid of a curriculum an almost
perfect uniformity of intelligence can be obtained, and on opening
your book the first thing that met my eye was the long conversation
between you and Mr Fisher. "How can I review this book ?" I
"
asked myself. “Barker places his demand for a National Theatre
on an altogether false basis."
BARKER: You would not say that listening to a play by Shake-
speare, nobly interpreted, is of no avail ?
Moore: In one instance it may meet with a response. But I
have little belief in the boy who reads Shakespeare; much more in
the literary future of the boy who likes swinging on a gate in May.
time in front of a meadow flooded with sun and shadow, his soul
elated by the songs of the willow-wrens flitting in the sprouting
larches.
BARKER: You have always been averse from education. I re-
member a phrase in a little book you wrote many years ago, Confes-
sions of a Young Man: "We never learn anything that we did not
know before."
Moore: Meaning thereby that a man cannot be taught. But
though he cannot be taught, he can learn, meaning thereby that he
may
discover a self within himself. I am thinking of the gift a man
a
a


142 GEORGE MOORE AND GRANVILLE BARKER
a
a
brings into the world, for that is a man's true self, and the gift, if
he be possessed of a real gift, can only be discovered by himself; it
may even be argued that this gift awakes in him suddenly, and to
his own great surprise.
Barker: But how is a man to learn a trade-a carpenter, for
instance? Nor is it likely that he will invent dovetailing by himself
or out of his imagination. Do you know what dovetailing is?
MOORE: Indeed I do, and have practised it. It is in the work-
shop that a man learns a trade, not in the school. I was told this
morning of a boy who had been taught metal-work and had passed
all the London County Council tests, but when he made application
to a silversmith for a place in his shop as an improver—a grade
higher than an apprentice—the silversmith found he could do noth-
ing with him. He tried all the boys the County Council sent him,
but preferred in the end to take an ignorant boy and teach him
from the beginning. And this is not the only story which I can cite
in support of my belief that we never learn anything that we did
not know before. I heard this morning of a boy who was crushed
between a wall and a wagon when he was five, and the question was
debated between parents and doctors whether the leg was to be
taken off from the hip-joint. The parents decided that it would be
better for the boy to die than to lose his leg, and he was allowed to
crawl about the floor for five years, teaching himself a little reading
and writing. At ten he began to recover the use of his limb; then
the doctors took him in hand, and their treatment was so successful
that at fourteen he was able to choose a trade. He said: "I'll be a
blacksmith.” Nobody ever could tell why he said that; he didn't
know himself; probably a horseshoe nailed to the wall captured his
imagination. Be that as it may, he lived to eighty-two and left a
fortune of four thousand pounds to be distributed among his rela-
tives. Martyrs are beginning to appear; not long ago a mother said
she would prefer to go to prison rather than send her son to school
after he was fourteen, urging on the magistrate that the time to
learn a trade was between fourteen and sixteen. Whilst admitting
her contention to be reasonable, the magistrate could not avoid
sending her to prison, for such is the law. She accepted prison,
heroic woman, and it is heroism such as hers that may in the end re-
deem us from a system that comes between man and his instincts.
But education is being found out; the other day an architect pub-
lished an admirable letter telling how time is wasted in examina-
a


GEORGE MOORE
143
tions, and the new demand of the teachers for higher salaries is
making plain that education is of no help to anybody except teach-
ers and that section of the Labour Party which needs wastrels.
But we are wasting time, Barker.
BARKER: If preaching to the converted be wasting time, you are
:
wasting it certainly, for I am willing, more than willing, eager to
admit that my attempt to couple the National Theatre with Mr
Fisher's curriculum was indeed a mistake.
Moore: You found Mr Fisher a little obtuse?
BARKER: Absent-minded, rather—his mind bent on a new cur•
riculum.
MOORE: We will leave him meditating it, and discuss instead
the play that should open the National Theatre.
BARKER: I have nothing to say against Hamlet.
Moore: Nor have I. Better to begin with a masterpiece than to
strive to appeal to sentimentality, announcing that the National
Theatre will open with the story of England as told by Shakespeare
in the chronicle plays.
BARKER: You are weary of the story of England ?
Moore: I would like Shakespeare better if people would leave
off writing about him. Your advertisement will be applauded until
the balance sheet is published, and then your praisers will begin to
talk economics. The National Theatre need not make both ends
meet, but the hiatus must not run into tens of thousands. If we get
a National Theatre you will need all your courage and determina-
tion. The pedagogues will ask for nothing but Shakespeare, and
for the whole of Shakespeare, forgetful of the fact that the human
mind cannot assimilate more than three hours of text. I once heard
the whole of Hamlet-five hours and a half. The first act lasted
two hours, and was very wonderful, as wonderful as The Ring; but
when we came to the fourth and the fifth acts I found it impossible
to keep my mind on the stage, and so brain-weary was I that I
couldn't have told blank verse from prose, nor could I have sworn
that some passages from the Daily Mail were not being introduced.
It takes five hours and a half to play The Meistersinger, without
cuts, and when we arrive at the glories of Nuremberg we don't
know what we are listening to; our minds are away, and it is not
until we of wisdom propense cut an act and a half that we can ap-
preciate the end of Wagner's opera. Another difficulty will be to
decide what is Shakespeare. You will take advantage, I suppose,
a


144 GEORGE MOORE AND GRANVILLE BARKER
of the fact that Titus Andronicus is not generally believed to be
written by him, and omit that play from your repertory. Pericles,
too, is certainly not by Shakespeare, and that you will probably
omit. Another thing: The National Theatre will not be confined
entirely to the acting of Shakespeare. You will seek among his
contemporaries, if the pedagogues will allow you to, and find a
pleasant change of diet in Jonson, whose plots, unfortunately, are
not always very explicit, and there's nothing more wearisome than
a play one cannot follow. I doubt very much if there are many
people who can follow the story of Every Man in His Humour, but
the first three acts of Volpone are admirable. You'll have to decide
if the last two might not be shortened. Ford's play, 'Tis Pity She's
a Whore, was received with enthusiasm when the Phoenix Society
produced it. Your productions will be finer than anything the
Phoenix, with little time and money at its disposal, can do. I am
sorry that you are not to be the first to show the Elizabethans on
the modern stage-Marlowe, Jonson, Fletcher-for he who has
tasted of the Elizabethans eschews modern drama, and it would
have been a fine sport to astonish London, weary of small adul-
teries, with Elizabethan stories of murder and incest, written when
the language was sappy. But no man gets all that he asks for, and
you would not cherish jealousy of a gallant little society whose am-
bition it is to serve as a stopgap till some Conservative or Liberal
Government grants a site and a subvention. If you had been able
to hold out any hope to us of a National Theatre, Lady Cunard
would not have hesitated to propose a dissolution of the Society.
BARKER: Lady Cunard takes an important part in your delibera-
tions.
MOORE: She is our President. The Phoenix owed three hundred
pounds, but at one of the last performances the announcement was
made that a benefactor or a benefactress, who did not wish his or
her name to be known, had paid the debt. I hasten to say that I do
not attribute the paying of the debt to Lady Cunard; I know no
more than any other member of the Phoenix Society. I am not of
.
the inner circle; only this I can say, that there are few of the Phoe-
nix who have not heard it reported that her influence counted for
much in getting the money that saved the Old Vic. Among much
that is uncertain it seems certain that without Lady Cunard we
should not have had a London opera season in 1921. Does our last
opera season go back to 1920? I do not know. My admiration for


GEORGE MOORE
145
this warm-hearted, courageous woman compels me to praise her
whenever her name is mentioned, and to recall to the remembrance
of everybody that she is the one woman in London society whose
thought for art extends beyond the narrow range of ordering a por-
trait to be painted and setting on foot an intrigue for the hanging
of it in the National Gallery. I stop without having said all,
Barker, for I would tell you that the performance given by the
Phoenix of Love for Love revealed to a select London audience the
unsuspected fact that we have once more amongst us a great com-
edy actress-Athene Seyler.
BARKER: A very remarkable actress-
MOORE: No more than remarkable in the trashy comedies you
have seen her in, but in a masterpiece she is easily the greatest com-
edy actress I have ever seen, and I have seen many great comedy
actresses.
BARKER: I regret that you did not write about her and Congreve.
Moore: All, but you, who could appreciate one and the other
were in the theatre.
BARKER: It is true that I have ceased to be a Londoner. All the
more reason why you should write about the Phoenix.
Moore: My article need not go to Devon for you to read it.
You can hear it in this room, if you like. Your cigar is not yet fin-
ished?
BARKER: I am only half way through the excellent cigar you
have given me, and have little hope that its excellence can be en-
hanced by silence. All the same, read. I am listening.
MOORE: I have poured my memories into the ear of an imagin-
ary journalist.
BARKER: Read. My cigar is burning excellently well.
Moore (reading):
MAID: A gentleman from the Observer has called, sir. Will you
see him?
Moore: Yes, I'll see him.
MAID: Mr Deacon.
MOORE: No, I'm not busy, Mr Deacon. I am never too busy to
talk about art. Let me give you a chair, and when you are seated
you'll put questions to me. But before you put the first will you al-
low me to talk to you a little while about the mysterious disappear-
a
ance of the nine Muses from England; indeed, I might say from the


146 GEORGE MOORE AND GRANVILLE BARKER
planet we inhabit, for search it from sea to sea and neither Calliope,
Melpomene, nor Erato-
MR DEACON: It is true that we have lost many of the Muses,
but Terpsichore
Moore: You have mentioned the Muse, Mr Deacon, in whom I
am least interested. Terpsichore, I admit, is not easily avoided in
London, and we cannot get the music she demands out of our ears;
it leaves us little peace. But her great sisters are nowhere to be dis-
covered, and many think they have followed the Gods, who, Heine
tells us, went into exile in the third century; whilst others think
that they have hidden themselves in the laboratories of scientists to
whom they whisper secrets of poisonous gases, having become dia-
bolic, like Wagner's Venus. I have borrowed the thought from
Baudelaire, who suggests that the Erecine became diabolic among
ages that would no longer accept her as divine, and what more nat-
ural than that the eight (Terpsichore is admittedly with us still)
should conspire to destroy a world that no longer follows beauty?
I hope you will take note, Mr Deacon, of the valuable hint I have
just thrown out to account for the disappearance of the eight, and
that your Editor will reserve some columns of his newspaper for a
correspondence on the subject of the present occupation of the
Muses, whether they have really left the planet, or are engaged in
planning the destruction of a civilization concerned only with truth
and knowledge. ... I know what you are going to say, my dear
sir: that want of space will prevent your Editor from considering in
detail the very interesting question I have raised. I have had much
to do with Editors, and know that their point of view is with affirm-
ations rather than with negations. Now, if the correspondence I
suggest were concerned with the return of the Muses, the matter
would be different and he would be glad to publish a letter on the
subject. You will tell him that although I cannot anticipate the
return of the missing eight, I would like to point out in his valuable
newspaper that the tenth Muse arrived some five years ago and at
once devoted herself to the revival of the ancient art of music in
England, and, when her project for English opera went into bank-
ruptcy descended at once into the Phoenix Society and found her
reward in an unbroken series of successes. I know what you are
going to say: you are going to tell me that the Phoenix rises out of
her own ashes. My remembrance is that art always rises out of its
own ashes. Why, therefore, should not the revival of the Eliza-
a


GEORGE MOORE
147
a
bethans give birth to a new form of drama, unless, indeed, you cling
to the belief that to have culture we must have long periods with-
out culture, a theory which is difficult to rebut, for the fact that the
world was without art from the sixth to the thirteenth century is
the thought of everybody who thinks about art seriously. Your
face, Mr Deacon, is very readable. I gather from it that you were
about to ask me if I had attended all the performances, and to my
great regret I answer that I have missed two or three; and of the
performances I missed the one I regret the least is a certain play by
John Dryden, though I am told that Athene Seyler's genius was
even brighter in Marriage à la Mode than it was in Love for Love,
an appreciation that betrays a certain insensibility of eye and ear to
the shades which divide good verse from bad. For in reading the
Elizabethans we are in salt water always; the verse is buoyant.
Dryden's verse may be compared to a brackish lake, languid and
muddy, and the rough words that rise to our lips express the change;
the kick has gone out of it.
Mr DEACON: Dryden, then, in your opinion, was the last of the
Elizabethans ?
Moore: Rather the beginning of Grub Street, and that is why I
cannot believe that Athene Seyler showed to greater advantage in
Dryden than in Congreve. Whilst trying to collect my thoughts for
this interview which you have been kind enough to come to report,
I rose suddenly from my chair, saying: An actress' charm in a play
cannot be put into words, at least not by me. And then stopping, I
added : It's all clear enough till I try to write it to-morrow the
commonplace awaits me; and I went up-stairs to dress myself for
dinner. I was dining with Mr Arnold Bennett, and after dinner a
lady played Mozart's Sonata in D-Major, and the gaiety and the
instinctive elegance of the music recalling my memories of Athene
in Congreve's comedy, I said to myself: She was to the play what
Mozart's music is to his librettist, incessant, always at it. She
alights and breaks into song abruptly, like a bird. She listens, and
we sit amused, enchanted by the sallies of her witty eyes, by the
beat of her feet. Her very clothes catch inspiration, and she adapts
her gait to the character and every gesture, each adding an accent.
Any omission would be a loss, any addition an excess.
MR Deacon: If Athene be in reality what she is in your mem-
ory, she is an actress comparable to Sarah or Aimée Desclée (I
think her name was Aimée).
a


148 GEORGE MOORE AND GRANVILLE BARKER
а
Moore: I am glad to hear you speak of her as Athene. Rachel
is known to us only as Rachel, and Sarah Bernhardt was Sarah for
the greater part of her life. And her death having made her an
actuality, I will tell you that Halévy, who saw the three French
actresses, looked upon Sarah as the least, a long way behind Rachel
in tragedy and as far behind Desclée in comedy.
MR Deacon: Did he give reasons for his preference?
Moore: I did not press him to give reasons; his reasons seemed
obvious to me, for I was thinking of Sarah's usual indifference to
the play she was acting in, putting herself always in front of it,
using it as a means for a cunning display of her tricks and manner-
isms, and certain moments of it for an exhibition of theatrical pas-
sion in which the play and some handkerchiefs were torn into rags.
Halévy could not approve of such an interpretation; no author
could, I no more than Halévy, and I felt with Halévy and for
Halévy when I saw Sarah walk through two acts of Frou-Frou and
part of the third act, conveying no impression of the play, nor even
of herself, seeming as commonplace an actress as her sister in the
play; a shameful trick, ruining two acts so that in the third, when
her moment came, she might bound about the stage like an enraged
tigress till the house seemed about to come down. Of course, it
came down in the figurative sense and everybody was delighted;
but I, who had seen her at the Français in the 'seventies, found
excuses for her, saying to myself as I returned through the jostling
Strand: This is the fruit of her travels in countries in which the
French language is unknown.
MR DEACON: If I understand you rightly, Mr Moore, your ap-
preciations of Sarah's acting were certain magical moments for
which much was sacrificed ?
Moore: Much was sacrificed, but the moments did not delight
me, nor could they have delighted Halévy, who had seen the origi-
nal Frou-Frou, Aimée Desclée. She was in London just before or
during the war of 'seventy, and I saw her in one of Dumas fils' mo-
rality plays, Les Idées de Madame Aubray; but I did not know
French then and was too young to appreciate shades. I am sure,
however, that she acted from the beginning of the play to the end.
She died during the war, and in the early 'seventies all Paris was
talking about her in studio and in drawing-room. In the studio in
the Passage des Panoramas Julian used to delight my young ears
with a description of Desclée as Diane de Lys searching among


GEORGE MOORE
149
a
books in a library for a letter that some woman had written to her
lover or that her lover had written to some woman; and in the
drawing-rooms in which I danced there used to come a great, heavy,
unwieldy man, who spoke little and was considered to be very stu-
pid, but before whom everybody gave way; even the dancers, as he
passed down the room, drew into groups to whisper to each other
that the man who had just gone by was Desclée's lover.
BARKER: Has the gentleman's name come down to us?
Moore: It is well known in France, and if you like I can-
I
BARKER: I would not put you to the trouble. It would interest
me more to hear if the help you received from a piece of music was
a literary invention, or if it really fell out that after having de-
spaired of bringing Athene Seyler before us as she appeared in Con-
greve's play, you did really-
Moore: Yes, Barker, I did really hear the D-Major Sonata in
Arnold Bennett's drawing-room and was reminded by it of Athene
Seyler in Love for Love. But you haven't told me what you think
of the interview I have just read to you.
BARKER: I think that if Athene is lucky and gets great parts to
play, and her name is carried down to posterity, your description
will help posterity to realize her charm. I don't know that we
have got any adequate description of Rachel's acting, though pens
have been busy with the three great actresses. Gautier was a past-
master of descriptive writing, and the abundant Théo would have
found no difficulty in telling the actress' dress from the neck to the
hem.
MOORE: The fame of the actress is transitory.
BARKER: Not so transitory as the fame of the authors she repre-
sents; their works remain to decry them. The actress is more for-
tunate; she leaves only a name and a legend.
Moore: You are right, Barker. The mummer is more fortunate
than the poet, musician, painter, or sculptor, and Athene is fortu-
nate among her sisters, for I have always refrained from seeing her
in those parts in which she earns her bread.
BARKER: And you live in your memory of a unique performance,
:
given, you tell me, by the Phoenix Society; but in what theatre?
MOORE: In the Lyric, Hammersmith.
BARKER: Now I am beginning to understand why you doubted
the wisdom of spending five hundred thousand pounds in building
a


150
DESERT MOON
a National Theatre at Westminster. The exaltation with which
the old masters are received in a theatre situated in a slum caused
a
you to forget Wagner and the wooded hillside overlooking a plain.
Moore: You are right, Barker. I have forgotten that the wooded
hillside was chosen so that the ecstasy created in the theatre might
be prolonged from act to act in the steep woods and afterwards till
midnight and long after midnight in a restaurant. If we cannot
have a wooded hillside overlooking an amphitheatrical landscape,
let us have a river site where the ecstasy may be prolonged. Mean
streets and a tangle of tramways from which we have to run for our
lives like cats before pavement skaters, shatter our dreams. Whilst
fleeing before them, many a time I regretted a restaurant, and many
a time wondered how it was that groups of impassioned young men,
inspired by a memory of the bust in the museum, did not gather
about our President's motor, crying: Ave Faustina plena gratia
immortalis ago tibi gratias!
Now I know; the mean streets stayed the words on their lips.
Within the theatre we were as in Wagner's theatre, but the sights
and sounds without the theatre killed the ecstasy and the value of
the play as “an educational influence."
DESERT MOON
BY ELIZABETH J. COATSWORTH
When the desert lies
Pulsating with heat
And even the rattlesnakes
Coil among the roots of the mesquite,
And the coyotes pant by the waterholes-
Far above,
Against the sky,
Shines the summit of San Jacinto,
Blue-white and cool as a hyacinth
With snow.



MARIE LAURENCIN.
BY HERMANN HALLER





TOUJOURS JAZZ
BY GILBERT SELDES
THU
a
HE word jazz is already so complicated that it ought not to be
subjected to any new definitions, and the thing itself so famil-
iar that it is useless to read new meanings into it. Jazz is a type of
music grown out of ragtime and still ragtime in essence; it is also a
method of production and as such an orchestral development; and
finally it is the symbol, or the byword, for a great many elements in
the spirit of the time—as far as America is concerned it is actually
our characteristic expression. This is recognized by Europeans;
with a shudder by the English and with real joy by the French, who
cannot however play it.
The fact that jazz is our current mode of expression, has refer-
ence to our time and the way we think and talk, is interesting; but
if jazz music weren't itself good the subject would be more suitable
for a sociologist than for an admirer of the gay arts. Fortunately
the music and the way it is played are both of great interest, both
have qualities which cannot be despised; and the cry that jazz is
the enthusiastic disorganization of music is as extravagant as the
prophecy that if we do not stop "jazzing” we will go down, as a
nation, into ruin. I am quite ready to uphold the contrary. If-
before we have produced something better—we give up jazz we
shall be sacrificing nearly all there is of gaiety and liveliness and
rhythmic power in our lives. Jazz, for us, isn't a last feverish ex-
citement, a spasm of energy before death. It is the normal devel-
opment of our resources, the expected, and wonderful, arrival of
America at a point of creative intensity.
Jazz is good—at least good jazz is good—and I propose to sum-
marize some of the known reasons for holding it so. The summary
will take me far from the thing one hears and dances to, from the
thing itself. The analysis of jazz, musically or emotionally, is not
likely to be done in the spirit of jazz itself. There isn't room on
the printed page for a glissando on the trombone, for the sweet sen-
timental wail of the saxophone, or the sudden irruptions of the bat-
tery. Nor is there need for these-intellectually below the belt-
a


152
TOUJOURS JAZZ
attacks. The reason jazz is worth writing about is that it is worth
listening to. I have heard it said by those who have suffered much
that it is about the only native music worth listening to in America.
I
Strictly speaking jazz music is a new development—something
of the last two years, arriving long after jazz had begun to be
played. I mean that ragtime is now so specifically written for the
jazz band that it is acquiring new characteristics. Zez Confrey,
Irving Berlin, Fred Fisher, and Walter Donaldson among others
are creating their work as jazz; the accent in each bar, for example,
is marked in the text—the classic idea of the slight accent on the
first note of each bar went out when ragtime came in; then ragtime
created its own classic notion—the propulsion of the accent from
the first (strong) note to the second (weak). In jazz-ragtime the
accent can occur anywhere in the bar and is attractively unpredict-
able. Rhythmically-essentially-jazz is ragtime since it is based
on syncopation and even without jazz orchestration we should have
had the full employment of precise and continuous syncopation
which we find in jazz now, in Pack Up Your Sins, for example. It
is syncopation, too, which has so liberated jazz from normal poly-
phony, from perfect chords, that M Darius Milhaud is led to expect
from jazz a full use of polytonic and atonic harmonies; he notes
that in Kitten on the Keys there exists already a chord of the per-
fect major and the perfect minor. The reason why syncopation lies
behind all this is that it is fundamentally an anticipation or a sus-
pension in one instrument (or in the bass) of what is going to hap-
pen in another (the treble); and the moment in which a note occurs
prematurely or in retard is, frequently, a moment of discord on the
strong beat. A dissonance sets in which may or may not be resolved
later. The regular use of syncopation therefore destroyed the fal-
lacy (as I hold it) of the perfect ear; and this is one reason why
Americans are often readier to listen to modern music than peoples
who haven't got used to dissonance in their folk and popular music.
It is not only syncopation that makes us indebted to negro music.
Another element is the typical chord structure found there, the
characteristic variations from the accustomed. Technically de-
scribed one of the most familiar is the subdominant seventh chord
a


GILBERT SELDES
153
1
with the interval of a minor instead of a major seventh-a method
of lowering the leading tone which affects so distant a piece as A
Stairway to Paradise where the accented syllable of Par'-adise is
skilfully lowered. (By extension ragtime also uses the minor
third.) The succession of dominant sevenths and of ninths is an-
other characteristic, and the intrusion of tones which lie outside of
our normal piano scale is common. Still another attack on the per-
fect chord comes from the use of the instruments of the jazz band,
one for which ragtime had well prepared us. The notorious slide of
the trombone, now repeated in the slide of the voice, means inevi-
tably that in its progress to the note which will make an harmonious
chord, the instrument passes through discords. “Smears," as they
,
are refreshingly called, are the deadliest enemy of the classic tradi-
tion, for the ear becomes so accustomed to discords in transition that
it ceases to mind them. (We hear them, of course; the pedants are
wrong to say that we will cease to appreciate the "real value” of a
discord if we aren't pained by it and don't leave the hall when one
is played without resolution.) In contemporary ragtime, it should
be noted, the syncopation of the tonality—playing your b-flat in
the bass just before it occurs in the voice, let us say—is often purely
a method of warning, an indication of the direction the melody is
to take.
I put the strange harmonies of jazz first, not because they are its
chief characteristic, but because of the prejudice against them. The
suggestion is current that they are sounds which ought never to be
uttered; and with this goes an attack on the trick instruments, the
motor-horns, of the battery-man. The two things have nothing in
common. The instruments of the jazz band are wholly legitimate
and its characteristic instrument was invented by a German, after
whom it is named, in the middle of the last century, and has been
used in serious music by (and since) Meyerbeer-I refer to the sax-
ophone. There is no more legal objection to the muted trombone
than to the violin con sordini. And the opponents of jazz bands
.
will do well to remember that the pure and lovely D-Minor Sym-
phony of César Franck was thrown out as a symphony because it
used the English horn. The actual sounds produced by the jazz
My indebtedness, and, I suppose, the indebtedness of everyone who cares
at all for negro music, is apparent-to Afro-American Folksongs, by
Henry Edward Krehbiel (Schirmer).
1


154
TOUJOURS JAZZ
band are entirely legitimate. We have yet to see what use they
make of them.
In Krehbiel's book the whole question of rhythm is compara-
tively taken for granted, as it should be. Syncopation discovered
in classic music, in the Scot's snap of the Strathspey reel, in Hun-
garian folk music, is characteristic of three-fifths of the negro songs
which Krehbiel analysed (exactly the same proportion, by the way,
as are in the interval of the ordinary major). But it is such a nor-
mal phenomenon that I have never found a composer to be inter-
ested in it. Krehbiel, to be sure, does refer to the “degenerate
form" of syncopation which is the basis of our ragtime, and that is
hopeful because it indicates that ragtime is a development–inten-
sification, sophistication of something normal in musical expres-
sion. The free use of syncopation has led our good composers of
ragtime and jazz to discoveries in rhythm and to a mastery of com-
plications which one finds only in the great masters of serious music.
In describing the Dahoman war dances at the Chicago World's
Fair, Krehbiel says:
“Berlioz in his supremest effort with his army of drummers pro-
duced nothing to compare in artistic interest with the harmonious
drumming of these savages. The fundamental effect was a combi-
nation of double and triple time, the former kept by the singers, the
latter by the drummers, but it is impossible to convey the idea of
the wealth of detail achieved by the drummers by means of ex-
change of the rhythms, syncopation of both simultaneously, and
dynamic devices.”
The italics are mine. I am fully aware of the difference between
savage and sophisticated, between folk music and popular music;
yet I cannot help believing that this entire statement, including
Berlioz whom I greatly admire, could be applied to Paul White-
man playing Pack Up Your Sins or his incredible mingling of A
Stairway to Paradise with the Beale Street Blues.
Freedom with rhythm is audible—should I say palpable ?-
everywhere. Stumbling (Zez Confrey) is in effect a waltz played
against a more rapid counter-rhythm, and is interesting also for its
fixed groups of uneven notes—they are really triplets with the first
note held or omitted for a time, then with the third note omitted


GILBERT SELDES
155
and so on. A similar effect with other means occurs in the treat-
ment of three notes in Ingenue Baby, by George Gershwin, where
the same note falls under a different beat with a delightful sense of
surprise and uncertainty. Mr Hooker's words are equally tricky
for it isn't “Beautiful-Ingenue-Baby" at all; it is Beautiful Ingenue
(baby). In By and By, Gershwin has shifted an accent from the
first to the second simply by giving the second the time-value usual-
ly given to the first, producing a fresh and delightful treatment of
a sentimental expression. The variety of method is vastly inter-
esting. Louis Hirsch, whom I rank fairly low as a composer
for
jazz, has done perfectly one obvious, necessary thing: stopped syn-
copating in the middle of a piece of ragtime. In the phrase "shake
and shimmy everywhere” in It's Getting Very Dark on Old Broad-
way, he presents the whole-tone scale descending in two bars of full
unsyncopated quarter-notes. In the works of Zez Confrey (they
are issued with a snobbish tasty cover, rather like the works of
Claude Debussy) the syncopation and the exploitation of concur-
rent, apparently irreconcilable rhythms is first exasperating and
eventually exciting. They are specifically piano pieces and require
a brilliant proficiency to render them.
It is a little difficult, unless one has the piano score, to determine
what
part is the work of the composer, what of the jazz orchestra.
You can only be fairly certain that whatever melody occurs is the
composer's and that rhythmically he is followed with some fidelity.
All
you need to do is to listen to the violin, piano, or whatever in-
strument it is which holds the beat, to realize what the composer
has given. Harmonization is often and orchestration nearly always
left to other hands. Mr Berlin makes a habit now of giving credit
to his chief collaborator; and he deserves it.
a
II
Mr Berlin's masterpieces (June, 1923, but who shall say?) in
jazz are Everybody Step and Pack Up Your Sins. I see no letting
down of his energy, none in his inventiveness. He is, oddly, one of
It has been clairvoyantly pointed out to me by another composer that Ber-
lin's pre-eminence in ragtime and jazz may be traced to his solitary devo-
tion to melody and rhythm; in the jazz sense there remains something
always pure in his work. This supports the suggestion made in the next
paragraph.


156
TOUJOURS JAZZ
the simplest of our composers. A good way to estimate his capacity
is to play the more sentimental songs (I'm Gonna Pin My Medal
on the Girl I Left Behind; Someone Else May Be There While I'm
Gone; All by Myself) in slow time and then in fast. The amazing
way they hold together in each tempo, the way in which the senti-
ment, the flow of the melody, disengages itself in the slow, and then
the rhythm, the beat, takes first place in the fast time, is excep-
tional. You cannot do the same with his own Some Sunny Day,
nor with Chicago, or Carolina in the Morning. Berlin's work is
musically interesting, and that means it has a chance to survive. I
have no such confidence in Dardanella or Chicago. The famous
unmelodic four notes occur in the latter as in Pack Up Your Sins
(the source is the same, but we need not go into that); the working
out is vastly inferior. Fred Fisher's work is sledge-hammer in com-
parison with Berlin's, and lacks Berlin's humour. Of that quality
Walter Donaldson has some, and Gershwin much. Donaldson
wrote Al Jolson's Mammy (I can't remember it, but I'm afraid I
didn't like it) and a song I count heavily on: Carolina in the Morn-
ing. This song is, incidentally, a startling example of how jazz is
improving the lyrics, for the majority of jazz songs are not meant
primarily for singing, so the balladists take liberties, and not being
held to definite end-rhyme give us "strolling with your girlie when
the dew is pearly early in the morning. The music is clean, rapid,
and audacious. It carries the introduction (of the chorus) almost
to the point of exhaustion, suspending the resolution of its phrases
until the last possible moment, and then lets go, with a vast relief
on the long, somewhat yodelly note. Confrey has done the same
thing in Kitten on the Keys where one bar is repeated five times
with successive tightening of interest.
Two composers are possible as successors to Berlin if he ever
chooses to stop. I am sure of Gershwin and would be more sure of
Cole Porter if his astonishing lyrics did not so dazzle me as to make
me distrust my estimate of his music. Gershwin is in Berlin's tradi-
tion, he has almost all the older man's qualities as a composer (not
as a lyric writer; nor has he Berlin's sense of a song on the stage).
Internal, off-beat rhyme occurred as long ago as Waiting for the Robert
E. Lee. Bud de Sylva has used it intelligently, but not expertly enough
in Where is the Man of My Dreams ? and Brian Hooker and William Le
Baron make it a great factor in their highly sophisticated lyrics. So also
Cole Porter and Anne Caldwell.
1رو
>
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GILBERT SELDES
157
That is to say, Gershwin is capable of everything, from Swanee to
A Stairway to Paradise. His sentiment is gentler than Berlin's, his
"attack” more delicate. Delicacy, even dreaminess, is a quality he
alone brings into jazz music. And his sense of variation in rhythm,
of an oddly placed accent, of emphasis and colour, is impeccable.
He isn't of the stage, yet, so he lacks Berlin's occasional bright
hardness; he never has Berlin's smartness; and he seems possessed
of an insatiable interest and curiosity. I feel I can bank on him.
Banking on Porter is dangerous because essentially he is much more
sophisticated in general attitude of mind than any of the others,
and although he has written ragtime and patter-songs and jazz of
exceptional goodness, he has one quality which may bar him for
ever from the highest place-I mean that he is essentially a paro-
dist. I know of no one else with such a sense of musical styles. A
blues, a 1910 rag, a Savoy operetta serio-comic love song, a Mother
song—he writes them all with a perfect feeling for their musical
nature, and almost always with satiric intention, with a touch of
parody. It is only the most sophisticated form which is germane to
him; in highly complex jazzing he is so much at home, his curiosity
is so engaged, he feels the problem so much, that the element of
parody diminishes. Yet The Blue Boy Blues, almost as intricate a
thing as Berlin ever wrote, with a melody overlaid on a running
syncopated comment, has a slight touch of parody in the very ex-
cess of its skill. Jazz has always mocked itself a little; it is possi-
ble that it will divide and follow two strains—the negro and the
intellectual. In the second case Porter will be one of its leaders
and Whiteman will be his orchestra. The song Soon, for example,
is a deliberate annihilation of the southern negro sentiment care-
fully done by playing Harlem jazz, with a Harlem theme, merci-
lessly burlesquing the clichés of the Southern song—the Swanee-
Mammy element-in favour of a Harlem alley. Porter's parody is
almost too facile; Soon is an exasperatingly good piece of jazz in
itself. He is a tireless experimenter, and the fact that in 1923
others are doing things he tried in 1919, makes me wonder whether
his excessive intelligence and sophistication may not be pointing a
way which steadier and essentially more native jazz writers will
presently follow. Native, I mean, to jazz; taking it more seriously.
The other way is still open—the way of Sissle and Blake, of
Creamer and Layton, of A. Harrington Gibbs. The last is a name
a


158
TOUJOURS JAZZ
a
unknown to me ten days before the moment of writing; I do not
know if it represents a Southern negro or a Welshman. But—if he
has composed anything, if Runnin' Wild isn't a direct transcript of
a negro devil-tune-he is in the school of the negro composers and
he has accomplished wonders already. For Runnin' Wild is a mas-
terpiece in its genre. Note the cleverness of the execution: the mel-
ody is virtually without accompaniment; it consists of groups of
three notes, the interval of time being simple and the interval of
pitch in the group or between two successive groups, is quite con-
ventional. Once three groups of three notes are played in succes-
sion; toward the end the group is twice lengthened to four notes; the
orchestra is heard after each group has been sung, giving an unnerv-
ing effect of alternating sound and silence. But there is something
more! There is the complete evocation of the two negro spirits-
the darky (South, slave) and the buck (Harlem); the negro and
the nigger. It ends with a shout which is lyrical and ecstatic at
once, wild and free. It is an enchantingly gay piece, it expresses
its title—one sees our own Gilda Grey stepping out in it bravely; it
is, in a way, a summary of the feeling of negro music which Shuffle
Along and its followers restored to prominence.
More must be said of the negro side of jazz than I can say here.
Its technical interest hasn't yet been discussed by any one sufficient-
ly expert and sufficiently enthusiastic at the same time. In words
and music the negro side expresses something which underlies a
great deal of America-our independence, our carelessness, our
frankness, and gaiety. In each of these the negro is more intense
than we are, and we surpass him when we combine a more varied
and more intelligent life with his instinctive qualities. Aggravatin'
Papa (don't you try to two-time me) isn't exactly the American re-
sponse to a suspected infidelity, yet it is humanly sound, and is only
a little more simple and savage than we are. The superb I'm Just
Wild About Harry is, actually, closer to the American feeling of
1922 than I Always Dream of Bill, as expression it is more honest
than, say, Beautiful Garden of Roses; and He May Be Your Man
is simply a letting down of our reticences, a frankness beyond us.
I shift between the two teams, Sissle and Blake, Creamer and
Layton, uncertain which has most to give. Sissle and Blake wrote
Shuffle Along; the others accomplished the intricate, puzzling
rhythm of Sweet Angelina, one or two other songs in Strut Miss


GILBERT SELDES
159
a
Lizzie, and Come Along, I'm Through With Worrying. Of this
song a special word can be said. It is based on Swing Low, Sweet
Chariot and imposes on that melody a negro theme (the shiftless-
ness and assurance of “gonna live until I die”) and a musical struc-
ture similar to that applied to the same original by Anton Dvorak
in the New World Symphony. I am only a moderate admirer of
this work; I am not trying to put Come Along into the same cate-
gory, for its value is wholly independent of its comparative merits;
nor am I claiming that jazz is equal to or greater or less than sym-
phonic music. But I do feel that the treatment of a negro melody,
by negros, to make a popular and beautiful song for Americans
ought not to be always neglected, always despised. I say also that
our serious composers have missed so much in not seeing what the
ragtime composers have done, that (like Lady Bracknell) they
ought to be exposed to comment on the platform.
If they cannot hear the almost unearthly cry of the Beale Street
Blues I can only be sorry for them; the whole of Handy's work is
melodically of the greatest interest and is to me so versatile, so
changing in quality, that I am incapable of suggesting its elements.
Observed in the works of others the blues retain some of this elusive
nature—they are equivocal between simplicity, sadness, irony, and
something approaching frenzy. The original negro spiritual has
had more respect, but the elements have been sparsely used, and one
fancies that even in looking at these our serious composers have felt
the presence of a regrettable vulgarity in syncopation and in melo-
dic line. Jesus Heal' de Sick is negro from the Bahamas; its synco-
pation, its cry, Bow low! are repeated in any number of others; the
spirituals themselves were often made out of the common songs in
which common feeling rose to intense and poetic expression-as in
Round About de Mountain, a funeral song with the Resurrection in
a magnificent phrase: "an' she'll rise in His arms.” The only place
“
we have these things left, whether you call the present version de-
based or sophisticated, gain or loss, is in ragtime, in jazz. I do not
think that the negro (in African plastic or in American rag) is our
salvation. But he has kept alive things without which our lives
would be perceptibly meaner, paler, and nearer to atrophy and de-
cay.
I say the negro is not our salvation because with all my feeling
for what he instinctively offers, for his desirable indifference to our


160
TOUJOURS JAZZ
a
set of conventions about emotional decency, I am on the side of
civilization. To any one who inherits several thousand centuries
of civilization, none of the things the negro offers can matter un-
less they are apprehended by the mind as well as by the body and
the spirit. The beat of the tom-tom affects the feet and the pulse,
I am sure; in Emperor Jones the throbbing of the drum affected our
minds and our sensibilities at once. There will always be way-
ward, instinctive, and primitive geniuses who will affect us directly,
without the interposition of the intellect; but if the process of civ-
ilization continues (will it? I am not so sure, nor entirely con-
vinced that it should) the greatest art is likely to be that in which
uncorrupted sensibility is worked by a creative intelligence So
far in their music the negros have given their response to the world
with an exceptional naïveté, a directness of expression which has
interested our minds as well as touched our emotions; they have
shown comparatively little evidence of the functioning of their in-
telligence. Runnin' Wild, whether it be transposed or transcribed
is singularly instinctive, and instinctively one recognizes it and
makes it the musical motif of a gay night. But one falls back on
Pack Up Your Sins and Soon as more interesting pieces of music
even if one can whistle only the first two bars. (I pass the question
of falling farther back, to the music of high seriousness, which is
another matter; it is quite possible, however, that the Sacre du
Printemps of Strawinsky, to choose an example not unaffected by
the jazz age, will outlive the marble monument of the Music Box.
III
Nowhere is the failure of the negro to exploit his gifts more ob-
vious than in the use he has made of the jazz orchestra; for al-
though nearly every negro jazz band is better than nearly every
white band, no negro band has yet come up to the level of the best
white ones, and the leader of the best of all, by a little joke, is
called Whiteman. The negro's instinctive feeling for colourful in-
struments in the band, is marked; he was probably the one to see
what could be done with the equivocal voice of the saxophone—a
reed in brass, partaking of the qualities of two choirs in the orches-
tra at once. He saw that it could imitate the voice, and in the per-
son of Miss Florence Mills saw that the voice could equally imitate


GILBERT SELDES
161
the saxophone. The shakes, trills, vibratos, smears, and slides come
natural to him, although they produce tones outside the scale, be-
cause he has never been tutored into a feeling for perfect tones, as
white men have; and he uses these with a great joy in the surprise
they give, in the way they adorn or destroy a melody; he is given
also to letting instruments follow their own bent, because he has a
faultless sense of rhythm and he always comes out right in the end.
But this is only the beginning of the jazz band—for its perfection
we go afield.
We go farther than Ted Lewis. M Darius Milhaud has told me
that the jazz band at the Hotel Brunswick in Boston is one of the
best he heard in America, and stranger things have happened. The
best of the negro bands (although he is dead I make exception for
that superb 369th Hell-fighters U. S. Infantry Band as it was con-
ducted by the lamented Jim Europe) are probably in the neigh-
bourhood of 140th Street and Lenox Avenue in New York and in
the negro district of Chicago. Many hotels and night clubs in New
York have good jazz bands; I limit myself to three which are rep-
resentative, and, by their frequent appearances in vaudeville, are
familiar. Ted Lewis is one of the three; Vincent Lopez and Paul
Whiteman are the others. Lewis does with notorious success some-
thing that had as well not be done at all. He is totally, but bril-
liantly, wrong in the use of his materials, for he is trying to do
what he cannot do, i. e., make a negro jazz orchestra. It is a good
band; like Europe's it omits strings; it is quite the noisiest of the
orchestras, as that of Lopez is the quietest, and Lewis uses its (and
his) talents for the perpetration of a series of musical travesties,
jokes, puns,
and
games which are extraordinarily tedious and would
be hissed off the stage if it were not for the actual skill Lewis has in
effecting amusing orchestral combinations. His own violence, his
exaggeration of the temperamental conductor, his nasal voice and
lean figure in excessively odd black clothes, his pontificating over
the orchestra, his announcement that he is going to murder music
all indicate a lack of appreciation of the medium. He may be a
good vaudeville stunt, but he is not a great jazz leader.
Lewis
may have a perfectly trained orchestra, but the sense of
control which one absolutely requires, he does not give. He has
violence, not energy, and he cannot interpret those qualities which
Mr Haviland so justly discovers as being of our contemporary life


162
TOUJOURS JAZZ
because he isn't hard and scornful and sophisticated himself-he is
merely callous to some beauties and afraid of others and by dint of
being in revolt against a serene and classic beauty pays it uncon-
scious tribute.
The orchestra of Vincent Lopez I take as an example of the good,
workmanlike, competent, inventive, adequate band. It plays at the
Hotel Pennsylvania and in vaudeville and although Lopez lacks
the ingenuity of Lewis in sound, he has a greater sense of the capa-
cities of jazz and instead of doing a jazz wedding he takes the en-
tire score of “that infernal nonsense Pinafore,” cuts it to five char-
acteristic fragments, and jazzes it—shall I say mercilessly or rev-
erently? Because he likes Sullivan and he likes jazz. And the in-
evitable occurs; Pinafore is good and stands the treatment; jazz is
good and loses nothing by this odd application. The orchestra has
verve and, not being dominated by an excessive personality, has
humour and character of its own.
Jim Europe seemed to have a constructive intelligence and had
he lived I am sure he would have been an even greater conductor
than Whiteman. To-day I know of no second to Whiteman in the
complete exploitation of jazz. It is a real perfection of the instru-
a
ment, a mechanically perfect organization which pays for its per-
fection by losing much of the element of surprise; little is left to
hazard and there are no accidents. Whiteman has been clever
enough to preserve the sense of impromptu and his principal band
—that of the Palais Royal in New York—is so much under control
(his and its own) that it can make the slightest variation count for
more than all the running away from the beat which is common
chez Lewis. Like Karl Muck and Jim Europe, Whiteman is a bit
of a Kapellmeister; his beat is regular or entirely absent; he never
plays the music with his hand, or designs the contours of a melody,
or otherwise acts. I know that people miss these things; I would
miss them gladly a thousand times for what Whiteman gives in re-
I mean that a sudden bellow or a groan or an improvised
cluck is all very well; but the real surprise is constructive, the real
thrill is in such a moment as the middle of Whiteman's perform-
ance of A Stairway to Paradise when the Beale Street Blues occur.
That is real intelligence—and the rest-is nowhere. The sleek,
dull, rather portly figure stands before his orchestra, sidewise, al-
turn.


GILBERT SELDES
163
most somnolent, and listens. A look of the eye, a twitch of the
knee, are his semaphoric signals. Occasionally he picks up a violin
and plays a few bars; but the work has been done before and he is
there only to know that the results are perfect. And all the time
the band is producing music with fervour and accuracy, hard and
sensitive at once. All the free, the instinctive, the wild in negro
jazz which could be integrated into his music, he has kept; he has
added to it, has worked his material, until it runs sweetly in his
dynamo, without grinding or scraping. It becomes the machine
which conceals machinery. He has arrived at one high point of
jazz—the highest until new material in the music is provided for
him.
IV
The title of this essay is provoked by that of the best and bitter-
est attack launched against the ragtime age-Clive Bell's Plus de
Jazz (in Since Cézanne). “No more jazz,” said Mr Bell in 1921,
and, “Jazz is dying.” Recalling that Mr Bell is at some pains
'
to dissociate from the movement the greatest of living painters,
Picasso; that he concedes to it a great composer, Strawinsky, T. S.
Eliot whom he calls "about the best of our living poets," James
Joyce whom he woefully underestimates, Virginia Woolf, Cendrars,
Picabia, Cocteau, and the musicians of Les Six-remembering the
degree of discrimination and justice which these concessions re-
quire, I quote some of the more bitter things about jazz because it
would be shirking not to indicate where the answer may lie:
.
“Appropriately it [the jazz movement) took its name from mu-
sic—the art that is always behind the times.
Impudence
is its essence—impudence in quite natural and legitimate revolt
against nobility and beauty: impudence which finds its technical
equivalent in syncopation: impudence which rags.
After
impudence comes the determination to surprise: you shall not be
gradually moved to the depths, you shall be given such a start as
makes you jigger all over.
"... Its fears and dislikes—for instance, its horror of the no-
ble and the beautiful are childish; and so is its way of expressing
-


164
TOUJOURS JAZZ
.
.
<<
.
.
them. Not by irony and sarcasm, but by jeers and grimaces does
Jazz mark its antipathies. Irony and wit are for the grown-ups.
Jazz dislikes them as much as it dislikes nobility and beauty. They
are the products of the cultivated intellect and Jazz cannot away
with intellect or culture.
Nobility, beauty, and intellectual
subtlety are alike ruled out.
And, of course, it was delightful for those who sat drink-
ing their cocktails and listening to nigger-bands, to be told that, be-
sides being the jolliest people on earth, they were the most sensitive
and critically gifted. They were the possessors of
natural, uncorrupted taste. Their instinct might be trusted:
so, no more classical concerts and music lessons.
“The encouragement given to fatuous ignorance to swell with
admiration of its own incompetence is perhaps what has turned
most violently so many intelligent and sensitive people against
Jazz. They see that it encourages thousands of the stupid and vul-
gar to fancy that they can understand art, and hundreds of the con-
ceited to imagine that they can create it.
.
It is understood that Mr Bell is discussing the whole of the jazz
movement, not ragtime music alone. I do not wish to go into the
other arts, except to say that if he is jazz, then Mr Joyce's sense of
form, his tremendous intellectual grasp of his aesthetic problem,
and his solution of that problem, are far more proof than is required
of the case for jazz. Similarly for Mr Eliot. It is not exactly hor-
ror of the noble that underlies Mr Joyce's travesty of English prose
style, nor is it to Mr Eliot that the reproach about irony and wit is
to be made. In music it is of course not impudence, but emphasis
(distortion or transposition of emphasis) which finds its technical
equivalent in syncopation, for syncopation is a method of rendering
an emotion, not an emotion in itself. (Listen to Strawinsky.)
,
Surprise, yes; but in the jazz of Lewis and not in that of Whiteman
which does not jeer or grimace, which has wit, and structure, i. e.,
employs the intellect. Nobility—no. But under what compulsion
are we always to be noble? The cocktail drinkers may have been
told a lot of nonsense about their position as arbiters of the arts;
precisely the same nonsense is taught in our schools and preached
by belated aesthetes to people whose claims are not a whit better-


GILBERT SELDES
165
since it doesn't matter what their admirers think of themselves-
it is what jazz and Rostand and Michael Angelo are in themselves
that matters. I have always used the word art in connexion with
jazz and jazzy things; if any one imagines that the word is belittled
thereby and can no longer be adequate to the dignity of Leonardo
or Shakespeare, I am sorry. I do not think one has given encour-
agement to "fatuous ignorance” by praising simple and unpreten-
tious things at the expense of the fake and the faux bon. I suggest
that people do what they please about the gay arts, about jazz; that
they do it with discrimination and without worrying whether it is
noble or not, or good form, or intellectually right. I am fairly cer-
tain that if they are ever actually to see Picasso it will be because
they have acquired the habit of seeing without arrière-pensée, be-
cause they will know what the pleasure is that a work of art can
give, even if it be jazz art. Here is Mr Bell's conclusion, with
most of which I agree:
“Even to understand art a man must make a great intellectual
effort. One thing is not as good as another; so artists and amateurs
must learn to choose. No easy matter, that: discrimination of this
sort being something altogether different from telling a Manhattan
from a Martini. To select as an artist or discriminate as a critic
are needed feeling and intellect and-most distressing of all-
study. However, unless I mistake, the effort will be made. The
age of easy acceptance of the first thing that comes is closing.
Thought rather than spirits is required, quality rather than colour,
knowledge rather than irreticence, intellect rather than singular-
ity, wit rather than romps, precision rather than surprise, dignity
rather than impudence, and lucidity above all thing: plus de Jazz.”
It is not so written, but it sounds like "Above all things, no more
jazz!” A critic who would have hated jazz as bitterly as Mr Bell
does, wrote once, alluding to a painter of the second rank:
a
“But, beside those great men, there is a certain number of artists
a
who have a distinct faculty of their own by which they convey to
us a peculiar quality of pleasure which we cannot get elsewhere;
and these, too, have their place in general culture, and must be in-


166
FIRST COMMUNION
terpreted to it by those who have felt their charm strongly, and are
often the objects of a special diligence and a consideration wholly
affectionate, just because there is not about them the stress of a
great name and authority.”
—and beside the great arts there is a certain number of lesser arts
which have also a pleasure to give; and if we savour it strongly and
honestly we shall lose none of our delight in the others. But if we
fear and hate them, how shall we go into the Presence?
FIRST COMMUNION
BY DJUNA BARNES
The mortal fruit upon the bough
Hangs above the nuptial bed.
The cat-bird in the tree returns
The forfeit of his mutual vow.
The hard, untimely apple of
The branch that feeds on watered rain,
Takes the place upon her lips
Of her late lamented love.
а
Many hands together press,
Shaped within a static prayer
Recall to one the chorister
Docile in his sexless dress.
The temperate winds reclaim the iced
Remorseless vapours of the snow.
The only pattern in the mind
Is the cross behind the Christ.



PAYSAGE.
BY CLÉMENT PANSAERS





SIR JAMES BARRIE: CONFECTIONER
AND PARLOUR-MAGICIAN
BY LOUIS WILKINSON
S
IR JAMES BARRIE is related, with peculiar intimacy, to the
mind and the emotions, to the naïveties and idealisms of the
American and British public. He loves easy pretty illusions, and
so does the average Anglo-Saxon. As an anodyne for those mod-
ern discontents that are the besetting virtues of our introspective
serious writers and readers he has been found invaluable. From
the "unpleasant truths” of Shaw and Galsworthy and Wells the
patron of the circulating library turns in relief to warm and cheer
his heart with the agreeable fantasies, the dainty make-believes, the
harmless friendly humour of this Scotch sentimentalist.
Barrie is never disquieting, he is never bitter. Though he may
indulge us and himself in sarcasm, the sarcasm is always genial. To
most readers he is seldom anything but charming and companion-
able. He is the most “taking” of playwrights or novelists, and he
never offends the normal proprieties. Like Mr A. S. M. Hutchin-
son, whom he praises so highly and so significantly, Barrie can be
read aloud in any drawing-room to any lady. His humour is very
like the humour of Punch; middle-class drawing-room humour, re-
assuringly undistinguished, always wholesome, always safe. When
we think of the husband who declared that “his first two wives
were angels; and so is the third, in many respects”—of the other
husband who “clapped his hands when his wife died, and ex-
claimed: Hip, hip, hurrah!' adding only as an afterthought: 'The
Lord's will be done!'”—of the dour Auld Lichts who “always
looked as though they were returning from burying a near rela-
tive”-of the minister who believed that "no other denomination
could be saved, and not so many of his own”—we realize at once
how well and how shrewdly such jests avoid the danger of giving
any real offence. They are just daring enough; they are on the
right side of the line: there is not implicit in them, as there is in the
jests of Hardy or Shaw, any vital discontent with or any serious
attack upon either orthodoxy or marriage. You may laugh and yet


168
SIR JAMES BARRIE
moult no feather of your respectability. But when we remember,
in contrast, the individual and revealing, the philosophic humour
of writers of genius—such as Sterne or Ben Jonson—we may react
somewhat from our enjoyment of Barrie's little jokes.
A writer may be judged by his humour: he may also be judged by
his view of women and by his feeling for romance. Now to many
there is no doubt something very attractive in Barrie's chivalry;
something very charming in his tender self-deceptions about maids
and wives and mothers and domestic felicities. He appears, in this
regard, as a susceptible and high-minded adolescent to whom the
more advanced volumes of feminine psychology are fast sealed.
But many women enjoy adolescent devotion, many women like
being idealized. They accept with ironical enjoyment-most pro-
foundly concealed !-the tributes of the sentimental male; and they
read Barrie novels or witness Barrie plays with an enjoyment of
precisely the same kind. None the less most of them know well
enough in their hearts that Barrie and his kin are not really their
best friends. "How like you in the plan is woman, Knew you her
as we!” wrote that true feminist, George Meredith. Barrie does
not agree. “Oh, man!” he cries, in an orgy of abasement before
the glimpses of those vistas of spiritual beauty which the name
Woman discloses to him: "Oh, man! selfish, indelicate, coarse-
grained at the best!” He would cherish, at all costs, in women,
that “purity infinite, spotless bloom,” in the male demand for which
Meredith detected an "infinite grossness."
Is there, perhaps—the disconcerting reflection must sometimes
have occurred to some of his admirers—is there not perhaps, after
all, a certain element of grossness, of vulgarity, even, in Barrie's
treatment of sex-a sort of obscene decency, one might call it?
Though he never offends “nice” susceptibilities, does he not offend
other susceptibilities which are characterized by a delicacy of a dif-
ferent kind? Witness the emphasis——the particular sort of empha-
sis—that he gives to certain passages in the conversation of the chil-
dred in Peter Pan; witness the particular quality of his comments
on certain innocent observations that occur in The Young Visiters.
There is, in relation to sex, a special sort of respectable and dis-
creet facetiousness that is altogether alien to great writers. It is, to
finer taste, infinitely more offensive than sheer ribaldry, of which,
indeed, numerous men of the highest literary genius, including


LOUIS WILKINSON
169
а
notably Shakespeare himself, are abundantly capable. When Barrie
refers to the beating of a lover's heart as a “palp,” or when he talks
with a smirk of "Little Mary,” he is perhaps not more coarse in the
usual sense than is Mercutio when telling Juliet's nurse the time of
day, but he is certainly more coarse-grained. It is this same coarse-
ness of grain that makes Barrie incapable of depicting true passion.
The poetic intensities of love are outside his scope, and he therefore
takes refuge in sentimentalism, though somewhat more subtly, no
doubt, than his own Sentimental Tommy. The lover whose romance
has poetic quality transmutes by a sovereign alchemy the baser
metal of fleshly desire to pure gold; but the desire is not destroyed:
it never can be. The sentimentalist, with his thinner and weaker
emotions, is ashamed of that element of desire which his lesser love
lacks strength to interfuse. So he tries hard to pretend it is not
there; he lies to himself about it, and the whole tissue of his feeling
is tainted by the morbid blight of this pretence. Lack of poetic
strength is the original cause.
Nor is this lack, in Barrie, any the less evident when we turn
from the "love-interest" in his work to those more fantastic and
whimsical excursions which some regard as providing his chief claim
to recognition. How little of the glamour of Celtic fairyland has
the sugar-sweet magic of this Lowland Scot! Peter Pan is no Ariel:
he can wake not even the most distant echo of that fairy music that
sounds from the yellow sands of an island veritably enchanted.
“Pretty touches," it is true, abound in Peter Pan, and children will
probably always like the play because of the pirates, but of beauty
it has no single touch, no single thrill. Poetry and prettiness—a
gulf lies in between; and think of Mary Rose-Mary Rose, not for
remembrance! Only the poet can be fantastic without being ab-
surd. Contrast, with Barrie, Walter de la Mare.
But the author of Mary Rose and Peter Pan is not a negligible
figure. He serves a purpose. In a rather curious and quite illumin-
ating way he shows what comes of that kind of fancy that does not
strike deep roots in heart or head. He shows us make-believe and
whimsy falling just short of imagination, sentiment just missing
romance, humour ranging just outside the arena of laughing philos-
ophy. He has never felt passion, nor poetry's "wand-like touch,”
and so, for all his success, he fails; fails, in all his pleasantness and
prettiness, in all his sterile charm.
a
>


THREE POEMS
BY WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
I
The farmer in deep thought
is pacing through the rain
among his blank fields, with
hands in pockets,
in his head
the harvest already planted.
A cold wind ruffles the water
among the browned weeds.
On all sides
the world rolls coldly away:
black orchards
darkened by the March clouds-
leaving room for thought.
Down past the brushwood
bristling by
the rainsluiced wagon-road
looms the artist figure of
the farmer-composing
—antagonist.
II
Our orchestra
is the cat's meow
Banjo jazz
with a nickle-plated
а
amplifier to
soothe


WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
171
the savage beast-
Get the rhythm
That sheet stuff
's a lot a cheese
Man
gimme the key
and lemme loose
I make 'em crazy
with
my
harmonies
Shoot it Jimmy
Nobody
Nobody else
but me
They can't
copy
it
III
The crowd at the ball game
is moved uniformly
by a spirit of uselessness
which delights them-
all the exciting detail
of the chase
and the escape, the error
the flash of genius-
all to no end save beauty
the eternal-


172
THREE POEMS
So in detail they, the crowd,
are beautiful
for this
to be warned against
saluted and defied
It is alive, venomous
it smiles grimly
its words cut-
The flashy female with her
mother, gets it,
The Jew gets it straight-it
is deadly, terrifying-
It is the Inquisition, the
Revolution
It is beauty itself
that lives
day by day in them
idly-
This is
the power of their faces
It is summer, it is the solstice
the crowd is
cheering, the crowd is laughing
in detail
permanently, seriously
without thought


C
A DRAWING.
BY CARL SPRINCHORN






NEO
STA
À DRAWING.
BY CARL SPRINCHORN






いいいいいいいい
​Winni
Turn
ιιι
Maula
M
tha
wer
Kro
A DRAWING.
BY CARL SPRINCHORN
1
i





PARIS LETTER
July, 1923
THEO
THIS is my first letter to the readers of The DIAL: in a way my
credential letter. I have composed it myself so I can have no
assurance in presenting it, certainly not the assurance, common in
such cases, of knowing that though the letter be sealed it speaks
well of the bearer.
It is a real effort for me because I write only to indifferent people
a
and almost never to my friends (friends being those with whom
you do not have to keep up relations because you know you can
count on them). And to-day, when autographs fetch such high
prices at auction, a writer owes it to himself to write still less, so as
not to lower the rate.
In other days it took a Parisian to speak competently of Paris.
But we are no longer in the Paris of the past; undoubtedly that is
why the task is now confided to one who has lived so much abroad
that the description of his birthplace is exoticism. However, Paris
has itself become so much a stranger to its proper genius that I find
myself more at home than I should after long absences. Where is
the labyrinth of the old streets of the Latin Quarter? Where are
the great gardens destroyed by the Boulevard Raspail ? Where is
the gentle slope of the Champs-Elysées without palaces, without
dressmakers with Russian names, where the first modern shop, an
automobile agency, installed itself, to the scandal of the quarter, at
the corner of the rue Marbeuf where I was born? A Paris so deli-
cate, so unaudacious, gay in the evening with its shops open late
and its cafés regretfully closing at two in the morning-Paris of
1895, of Sarah Bernhardt and of Robert de Montesquiou. I see
myself again in the rented coupé (de l’Epatant) which took me as
a child down the Boulevard Pereire to the hôtel of “Madame Sa-
rah.” In a salon which smelled of lilacs I see again that fine profile
painted by Bastien-Lepage, the body already heavy with its fifty
years, lying on the skin of some wild animal, surrounded with
flowers. As I came in, dressed in a black velvet suit, and frightened
because of the lions which, they told me, roamed the house, Sarah
a


174
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a
sat up and in the voice which was then still a caress, the luminous,
ardent voice, trembling like a violin (in the last fifteen years it
was spoiled and seemed to be emitted by a tragic phonograph) she
cried out, "There's Morand's boy! How like his father he looks!”
She had the trick of pronouncing my name nasally—it was theat-
rical and at the same time expressed the deep friendship she had for
my father—which gave me a physical pleasure I shall not forget.
It was the time of MacNab, of the songs of the Chat Noir. I had
been taught the Pendu de la Forêt de St Germain and the Fiacre
the fiacre with the coachman in yellow and in black—that song
which, says Tzara, is like a print by Toulouse-Lautrec. I got up on
a gilt chair and sang and Sarah kissed me and stuffed me with bon-
bons which I ate with one eye squinting at the door where the lion
would come in.
But I see that I am writing my memoirs, which is quite ridicu-
lous. It is only out of superstition that I set at the head of this
first letter the name of her who was always good to me and who,
under a beautiful sun, a short time ago, left us, surrounded by the
tired, intelligent faces which are the ornaments of the streets of
Paris and preceded by five carriages of the most beautiful flowers.
Sarah is dead and her throne remains vacant. Montesquiou is dead
—this poet who would have gone down to posterity even if he had
issued only one book—and his title dies with him. Nothing re-
places what is dying to-day. After their death they leave us their
outline, the hollow mould which no one fills; and this is necessary
to make us feel that there is nothing in common between their time
and ours. It requires the genius of Marcel Proust to pass over the
chasms which divide the generations and master the years. (He
should be called “The Master of Time.”) Proust, however, was
)
fully of their time; his letters to Montesquiou which, with a pang
at the heart, all Paris saw the other day before they were put on
sale and gathered up by the pious hands of his brother—these let-
ters were of that period and of no other. Those of Proust are full
of kindness and submissive respect (too submissive say those who
do not understand that it was this excess of humility which, by
reaction, gave the character of de Charlus all its virulence); those
of Montesquiou are full of vain and arrogant writing, and are sus-
tained only by the extreme culture of his malice and the very excess
of his artifice. In this connexion I want to repeat a little known
anecdote which Proust told me less than a year ago and which is


PAUL MORAND
175
pretty because it marks the malice of Montesquiou as worthy of
Saint-Simon. Montesquiou was related to the Marquise de B. who
for years surrounded him with admiration and solicitude. Every
day she wrote to him, opening her heart and seeking for affection
and spiritual aid. The day after the death of the poet his secretary
presented himself before the marquise and told her that in accord-
ance with the last wishes of the deceased, he was handing over a
package to Madame la Marquise.
And this packet con-
tained, carefully filed, all the letters written in many years by her
to Montesquiou, and not a single one of them had ever been opened
by him. I can still see my poor Marcel Proust in the depths of his
copper bed, transported with admiration for this posthumous ma-
lice.
We must quit these Parisians for, even in Paris, Europe is the
fashion. Those of us who have been "good Europeans” since their
youth, can only rejoice at this. Later we will leave behind “ľ Eu-
rope aux anciens parapets" as Rimbaud said, and become cosmo-
politan-it will happen sooner than we think-and after that it
will only remain for us to become human, which will not be the
easiest thing in the world. Today the fortifications of Paris are
razed and Paris is justly called a free city. “A Frenchman really
has no need to put his nose out of doors” Kipling said to me once-
he who never had to regret having put his nose, with the golden
spectacles, out of doors. Not even Cocteau—Cocteau the Parisian,
as Picabia calls him—who declares that he has taken root in the
asphalt, comparing himself to a chestnut tree on the boulevards,
fails to regard the far horizon with his restless and piercing eye.
Europe is in the headlines. After L'Europe Nouvelle, we have La
Revue Européenne, edited by Valéry Larbaud, Jaloux, Germain,
Soupault-names inspiring confidence; there is Europe where we
find Vildrac, Arcos, Duhamel, and others. In Patrie Européenne
Arcos is tracing, in the style of Whitman, a programme to which
one is bound to subscribe. The apostle of nationalism, Maurice
Barrès himself, presided recently at a banquet and scrutinizing the
horizon announced "a literature having the feeling of a greater
world and of countries spread over the face of the globe.” It must
rejoice us to see a kind of union sacrée forming in France on these
questions—a thing which appeared distant enough on the morrow
of the Peace.
In its forms the modern spirit still gives offence. Publicity, cer-


176
PARIS LETTER
.
tainly, has never been a French science (but it is a science all the
same). No doubt this is due to the existence of a well-informed
public opinion, at least in literature, and to the abuses we practise
with words. In the face of literary réclame our critics feel injured,
as do our readers, too, who with each book they buy, purchase also
the precious right to exercise their private criticism—which the
French, a jealous people, prefer to all other sports. Symposia are
being held on the question "whether it is legitimate to exploit works
of the mind exactly like commercial products”—which will cause a
smile in the United States. There is room for pleasure in seeing
how the taste for letters has spread in France in three years.
Everywhere publishers are opening book shops, and newspapers de-
voted exclusively to literature (like Les Nouvelles Littéraires) are
established; new literary salons are opening every day (we must re-
turn to that interesting topic another time) manuals of the history
of literature and anthologies come from every press; Hachette has
a Histoire de la Littérature, and Larousse another; Crès publishes
a manual by Lalou; there is the Vingt-cinq Ans de Littérature, by
Montfort, published by Saint Andréa. Gus Bofa, in a pamphlet
sold out the moment it appeared, has synthesized in satiric phrases
the impressions left on him by the authors he has read. Finally the
number of literary prizes has reached unheard of heights. They
grow in number and in importance. The season 1922-23 will have
seen ten great prizes and some forty minor ones awarded. Tired of
being judged by literary men, the painters have decided to judge
them in turn and to give a prize. This morning, lunching with
some friends, we thought of founding a prize by novelists for the
best critic, not to mention another prize to be given by all those
who have received prizes in the preceding twelvemonth—all lead-
ing to the happy day when there will be more prizes than books.
In the end the rage will pass and the only prizes left will be
those awarded by juries which have not deceived their publics. We
hope that the New World Prize (Prix du Nouveau Monde) estab-
lished by Mrs Keep of New York, and intended to reveal a young
writer of the French language to the United States, will be one of
those which will remain. Larbaud, Giraudoux, Cocteau, Max Ja-
cob, Lacretelle, Bernard Fay, and myself will award it some time
this month. Giraudoux recently said that “the one who wins a
prize captures the interest of people; but sympathy goes to those
who don't.” We hope for one and the other for our candidate.


PAUL MORAND
177
An exposition of Belgian art has just opened at the Tuileries.
We can revisit the Van Eycks from Ghent, Adam and Eve returned
from farther away than Paradise, the Angelic Music, the Memlings
from Bruges, and that prodigious Pietà of Van der Weyden which
is one of the great masterpieces of Flemish art, lent by the King of
Spain; it seemed to me less effective than in the sombre granite hall
of the Escorial. The Vienna Breughels were also expected, but it
seems that the curator of the museum who is—if I may use the
word in connexion with crowns—paid to know whether it is best to
let pictures travel or not, opposed their coming to a country where
the currency is less depreciated. The only subject of conversation
at the exhibition was the quarrel preferred by a young novelist,
Henri Béraud, laureate of the Goncourt Prize, against André Gide,
Jules Romains, and certain other writers for the Nouvelle Revue
Française whom he accuses of being tiresome.
The reaction marked by the creation of the N. R. F. about 1908
is well known. Rimbaud, Claudel, Gide, Romains—all the authors
whom the old Mercure de France had made known to the public
without imposing them or making them absolutely the masters for
the younger generation, found a medium there in which they could
exercise in full function an influence which now-years later—is
showing its effects. The thing was not accomplished without ex-
cesses on the other side, a dogmatism whose intensity was perilously
near intolerance, and a calvinist spirit even in paganism which was
not made to please everybody. For us who came late to the Nou-
velle Revue Française, when the influence of Gide was diminish-
ing and yielding to the more human and less literary influence of
Proust, such a quarrel has no meaning; it is full of personal rancour
and seems destined to a short hold on our attention.
With the permission of those who have declared this little war
against the "white covers” (as the authors of the N. R. F. are
called) I am going to finish this letter by mentioning several recent
volumes, among which there are three from the N. R. F. First,
Filibuth ou la Montre en Or, an exquisite novel by Max Jacob. I
know that the talent of Max Jacob is rather inaccessible and that
his humour is not of a kind to be spontaneously relished by foreign-
ers. But mount the steps of the little middle-class houses in Mont-
martre, look into the small shops where through the windows paned
with tissue-paper you can see the rue Ravignan, listen to the rich
speech rendered with incredible precision, a veritable science of the
-
a


178
PARIS LETTER
a
conversation of concierges which is philological on one side and
lyric on the other—and you may be sure of being well rewarded. So
many Americans risk a stroke in mid-July by climbing up the steeps
of the Basilica and—what is more serious—run the risk of a bad
dinner on the Place du Tertre in order to see Paris in her grey and
violet mists; why not traverse the charming pages of Max Jacob
and find it there, without trouble?
M Abel Hermant has just issued the first two volumes of a series
entitled Le Cycle de Lord Chelsea. It is not, be assured, a Wag-
nerian Ring. Le Suborneur, le Loyal Serviteur are charming and
easy narrations, pursued with the impertinent grace of a master and
held together by the personality of Lord Chelsea. Here we find
again the type-perverse, ironic, cultivated, and in a literary way
demoniac—which tradition has perpetuated with us since the eight-
eenth century, coming through the Goncourts. Is it necessary for
me to note the novel of a beginning writer of twenty-Le Diable
au Corps, by Raymond Radiguer'? His publisher, I should fancy,
has taken good care that this author should become known to the
American public. But I would like to say how much-once your
attention is attracted to the book—it is worth while. This story
of the love of a boy and a woman whose husband is at the front is
done with a definite grace, a solid writing, without external effects,
a
and the difficult and hardly pleasing subject hides its harshness in
the most redoubtable and charming ingenuities.
Louis Aragon, whose talent is known to the readers of The
Dial, has published Les Aventures de Télémaque in which the
gods frequently take on strange appearances to come and visit us.
In Malice, MacOrlan, an alert Latin, master of his nerves and of
his talent, isn't abashed to seize his phantoms by their feet; he plays
them a thcusand tricks, takes off their shrouds, and in the morning
we remain alone, with a beautiful book in our hands.
Joseph Delteil, a new name, gives us his first novel, Sur la Fleuve
Amour, which presages an endowed and powerful novelist afraid of
none of our recent liberties.
You must not believe that my stopping here means that the bas-
ket is empty. But I think that with these books your diversion is
assured for a few weeks; and I hope that this letter with its news
will arrive where it should in the bosom of faithful friends.
PAUL MORAND
1 Awarded the Nouveau Monde prize for this year.


DUBLIN LETTER
July, 1923
I
SOMETIMES think that it is very nice of American readers to
be interested in Irish literature. The volume of that literature
is not great, especially when we do not reckon some big-selling Irish
authors as contributors to it. If mingled with a group of the writ-
ers of other nations, Irish writers would not at once be recognized
by their towering stature and noble appearance. Nevertheless, Mr
Yeats, A. E., Mr James Stephens, Mr Colum, even Mr Joyce, and
some others, if their countenances be closely scrutinized, betray a
certain proud consciousness of belonging to a secret order, with in-
communicable beliefs and traditions. A general air of distinction
may be claimed for Irish literature, so consciously maintained that
when any of its writers, however fresh and vigorous, shows signs of
popularity on railway book-stalls, he begins to lose caste and ceases
to be spoken of in that inner circle from which proceeds his true re-
ward of recognition. An Irish R. L. Stevenson, for example, or Sir
James Barrie, would have been of little account in Ireland. And
the strong point of Irish literature has hitherto been that this dis-
tinction was not due to the jealousy of a small clique, such as is
found in other literary centres, but to the exacting requirement of
the Irish public itself that Irish authors should be true and disin-
terested interpreters of Irish nationality. But this was perhaps
only while literature was the outlet to which Irish nationality was
restricted for its manifestation. O fortunati nimium, sua si bona
norint! What would the poets and artists of other lands not give
to belong to a country in which literature and art are the instru-
ment of national expression? It is true that this privileged status
of the poet in Ireland rested on the supposition of a grievous politi-
cal wrong, namely the subordination of the political interests of
Ireland to those of Great Britain; just as the awful dignity of the
Hebrew prophets and poets rested on the fact of expatriation and
oppression. But this was in itself a powerful advantage, inasmuch
as the very squalors of Irish politics were redeemed under the
strong light—one might almost say the lime-light-of idealism


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DUBLIN LETTER
which irradiated them, and attracted the sympathetic attention of
all the world. What the future held for a literature so circum-
stanced it would now be idle to speculate. History presents one
illustrous instance of a sacred symbolism founded on the historical
fact of expatriation and oppression. Would Irish literature thus
have become symbolic and in a manner sacred? Such a develop-
ment was certainly not uncongenial to the literary speculations of
A. E. and Mr W. B. Yeats, who have more than once dwelt on the
saying that it is the problem of literature to produce a sacred book.
As it turned out, however, Mr Yeats and A. E. had not yet more
than reached middle age when minatory murmurs began to be heard
in that new Ireland which had begun to tread their generation
down. The disturbances in the Abbey Theatre during the first per-
formances of Synge's Playboy of the Western World were a warn-
ing of the arrival of a new generation which rejected symbolism,
both in politics and poetry; and in the Easter week of 1916, a little
band of poets, armed with guns, inaugurated that movement for
the immediate realization of all ideals which has since been
crowned with a success almost disconcerting to those who have in-
herited responsibility for it.
Irish literature, then, appears to have forfeited the enjoyment of
those conditions in which it might have dreamed of producing a
sacred book-unless, indeed, it has inadvertently produced one in
Mr Joyce's Ulysses. The ironic mood in which that work is con-
ceived might seem a little unholy, but for the matter of that, irony
is now the very accent of prophecy. Mr Joyce's irony, however-
unlike that of the humorous hot-gospellers Shaw and Chesterton-
conveys no prophetic burthen: the coin of his wit has the same
stamp on both sides. Even his master Rabelais ranks among the
"pioneers of education,” but Mr Joyce has achieved a work so
purged of all philanthropic intention and so purely Mephistophe-
lean, that one may almost say of it that it has every characteristic
of a masterpiece except a raison d' être. Conflagration is the order
of the day in Ireland; and perhaps Mr Joyce, after all, has some
spiritual kinship with the late destroyer of our archives, Roderic
O'Connor; for Ulysses is a bonfire, glorious while it lasts, of all the
pious illusions of provincial and Catholic Ireland.
But I
am by no means sure that it is the function of literature to produce
a sacred book, or that any nation need envy the Hebrews those cir-


JOHN EGLINTON
181
cumstances which gave to all their history a unique symbolic value.
Ireland, at all events, is not the nation to make a martyr of itself.
Quite independently of its experiences as an oppressed national-
ity, however, mediaeval Ireland, or more correctly Gaeldom, did
conceive one fruitful idea which might have led, if not to a sacred
book, at least to the formulation in imaginative literature of a per-
manent human problem. This was the idea—which arose appar-
ently by accident in the popular mind-of impersonating the spirit
of paganism and the spirit of Christianity in the figures of Oisin
and Saint Patrick, and of engaging them in dramatic dialogue. If
Ireland, later on, had admitted the spirit of the Renaissance, we
can hardly doubt that some literary or dramatic elaboration of this
theme would have been attempted: it is one which might have at-
tracted Marlowe or Calderon if they had heard of it. Or dare we
compare the setting of this dialogue—which contains the rudiments
of a profound philosophical inquiry—amid the wild adventures of
the Fenians, with that of the sacred episode of the Mahabharata, in
which Arjuna and Krishna hold converse in the space between the
hosts drawn
up for battle? A. E. always insists that there is a like-
a
ness between the Hindu and the Irish mythologies, but I am afraid
the Irish temperament was always "out for fun,” and one shrinks
from trying to conceive what would have become of the theme of
the Bhagavad Gita in the world of Gaelic imagination. What
could Krishna himself have thought of by way of reply to the old
Gaelic hero?-
"O Patrick of the crooked crozier, who makest me that imper-
tinent answer, thy crozier would be in atoms were Oscar present.
"Were my son Oscar and God hand to hand on Knock na-veen,
if I saw my son down, it is then I would say that God was a strong
man.
"How could it be that God and his clerics could be better men
than Finn, the chief king of the Fenians, the generous one who was
without blemish ?”
In these dramatic dialogues it was clearly Oisin who had the
good will of the Irish auditors, and the poets of the Celtic Renais-
sance are now even disposed to make Saint Patrick the burlesque
figure. Probably the most notable attempt to treat the subject in


182
DUBLIN LETTER
terms of modern art and thought is a book which has just broken
the silence of Irish literature, The Return of the Hero, by “Michael
Ireland.” The name of the author somehow sets one thinking of
"Anatole France,” and one is in fact reminded of Anatole France
by certain characteristics of the book, as well as of Algernon Black-
wood, Mark Twain, and the Bhagavad Gita: finally, however, one
settles down to thinking of no one else but Mr James Stephens. A
writer of the modern Irish school was bound to reverse the inten-
tion of the legend-in which it was understood that the future,
both in this world and the next, belonged to Saint Patrick—and to
make Oisin even dialectically the conqueror; and this was permissi-
ble, so long as the issue lay in dialectic. But one begins at last to
find it a little unfair that while the Saint is restricted to the theo-
logical formulae of his own period, his antagonist is free to range
far into the future, and to confound Saint Patrick with the oracles
of Blake and Nietzsche. If the book is by Mr Stephens-I must
not assume this-it seems almost regrettable that this debate was
not left as an inconclusive episode in his rendering of the whole
cycle of Irish mythology, and that he was tempted to convert it into
a story, with an appropriate ending secured by magical transforma-
tions akin to those practised by Mr Algernon Blackwood.
When Irish literature, in Miltonic language, "reassembles its
afflicted powers," it will find a good many gaps in its ranks: not
so much that our poets, in any considerable number, have been exe-
cuted, assassinated, or banished, as that a fell disillusionment has
seized upon many Irishmen with respect to the realization of long-
cherished ideals, and in particular the ideal of a Gaelic-speaking
Ireland. Ireland being no longer a country in which it is permitted
to dream dreams, but one in which it is pre-eminently necessary to
circumvent British trade-competition by hard work, the Gaelic
idealists, who really flourished best under provincial conditions, are
looking for a way of escape, and some of them, if they are allowed
to emigrate, may even nurse the old ideals in other lands. The
legitimate outlet of this dissatisfaction will no doubt be in the
formation of a constitutional party representing these ideals, and it
remains to be seen whether this party will represent an Ireland
which is still the main source of literature. Meanwhile that man-
ner of life which seemed threatened with extinction by Sinn Fein
appears likely enough to reassert itself and to continue under trans-


JOHN EGLINTON
183
formed conditions: the life of the "gentry,” represented by a series
of conscientious novelists from Miss Edgeworth to Miss Somerville.
In certain districts of the West of England, in France, Italy, Ger-
many, are gathered little groups of Anglo-Irish émigrés, most of
them longing to come back, and already indeed beginning to do so.
They are attracted back to Ireland, partly by patriotism, partly by
a belief prevalent amongst them that Ireland is socially a conserva-
tive community.
We await a portent—the transformation of Irish literature. In
1913 Mr Yeats wrote a poem with the burden “Romantic Ireland's
dead and gone,” in which he was generally understood to take leave
of Irish nationalism; but in 1916 Romantic Ireland had reasserted
itself with a vengeance, and Mr Yeats published a kind of palinode
with the refrain, “A terrible beauty is born!” Mr Yeats has not
taken anything like A. E.'s share in bringing into being the Free
State, but he has done what he could for it—and that is a good deal
-by coming over to live in it and by serving in the Senate; and the
other day he made a speech in which he urged the need of building
up, in place of the old idealism, the “idealism of labour and of
thought.” Can we conceive Mr Yeats, like an Irish d'Annunzio,
casting away his dreamer's cloak and chanting the songs of labour?
Does a loftier destiny await Ireland than to be the dreamer amongst
the nations? The intense Italian temperament, which reduces so-
cial and spiritual problems to clear alternatives, is certainly not
ours. There is a dimness and indistinctness of outline in all our
prospects, and we have perhaps secured the form of nationality be-
fore we have made quite sure of the reality.
a
a
John EGLINTON


BOOK REVIEWS
SHORTER AND BETTER STORIES
O. HENRY MEMORIAL AWARD PRIZE STORIES OF
1922. Chosen by the Society of Arts and Sciences.
Introduction by Blanche Colton Williams.
260 pages. Doubleday, Page and Company. $1.90.
12mo.
The Best SHORT STORIES OF 1922. Edited by Ed-
ward J. O'Brien. 12mo. 389 pages. Small, Maynard
and Company. $2.
THE ADVANCE OF THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY. By
Edward J. O'Brien. 12mo. 302 pages. Dodd, Mead
and Company. $2.
As WE ARE. Stories of Here and Now. Collected by
Walter B. Pitkin. 12mo. 312 pages. Harcourt, Brace
and Company. $2.
THE
HE fatuity of The Society of Arts and Sciences must be
purely occasional, like an annual dinner, for one never hears
of it except in connexion with the most ridiculous volume of short
stories issued in association with the name of O. Henry. If it is ac-
tually a society which concerns itself in any way with arts and sci-
ences, it ought promptly to separate itself, in the minds of intelli-
gent people, from this yearly exhibition of commercialism and stu-
pidity; if it exists only for the purpose of issuing this book, and
awarding the prizes which go with it, the name is a contravention
of commercial honesty. I leave the solution of the dilemma to the
Society, whichever it is.
The more prizes it has, the more fatuous the Committee becomes.
This year they had a special prize for the best story under three
thousand words. (I must not be unjust, for “at first the Commit-
tee set the outside limit for the very brief story at 2,500 words.
Later they rescinded their action in establishing that limit and


GILBERT SELDES
185
made it 3,000.” O magnanimous Committee! O Committee which
is aware that aesthetically 2,500 is as naught, whereas 3,000 is as
3,000! O God, as I wrote in reviewing their previous volume,
O Montreal! O Committee which prefers "those narratives re-
“
flective of life”!) I have taken the quite unnecessary pains to
read the stories in their volume—unnecessary because the introduc-
tion is quite enough, and more interesting. Some are not bad
stories; most are. I suppose Mr Cobb’s being the worst of even
their lot, naturally won the prize. Most of the stories are dull,
spiritually banal, intellectually vulgar, uninteresting in plot, weak
in characterization, shabbily written—and not good interesting
narratives. I cannot go on in decent language about the product
before me, and I do not think it is required of me to make the ex-
ceptions specific. The O. Henry Memorial Award has been going
on long enough for any self-respecting author to know better than
to allow his work to appear in the annual volume. As for the in-
troduction, I urge everyone to read it, for everything that is wrong
and depressing in the American story is explained there-generally
as everything that's right and entertaining. In addition to a Credo,
.
the introduction provides a reasoned catalogue of the stories con-
tained in the volume, and critical reasons for the rejection of oth-
You will learn that “only one dog story was considered for
inclusion” and that Mr Beer has "successfully fictionized the Yan-
kee family at home,” that "a story otherwise excellent may fail to
“
convince” (which it happens is written in connexion with one of the
worst stories published during the year, not, however, included in
this series) and that another story seemed “deftly to incorporate an
episode in the life of Mark Twain. But the specialist in slang
wrote roundly
‘Nope' ” and so damned it. Here are
'
specimen fragments of the Credo:
ers.
“I believe that every good story is based upon a struggle, not
upon a tableau or picture. I admit (sic) that a complication en-
larges and enriches the primary struggle.
“I believe in the aids of suspense, of clues, of dramatic forecast,
of surprise and all the other arts at the story teller's command.
“I believe that an underlying truth, which is not propaganda or
didacticism, exists at the basis of every good story.
“I believe that every story which lives, even momentarily, exists


186
SHORTER AND BETTER STORIES
through a triangle of forces: the author's afflatus conveyed through
the characters and firing the reader. [The lady believes in mixing
them up, too, one gathers.]
“I believe that if a story lives beyond three score hours and ten
it must be possessed of the intangible quality known as style.”
In all honour, what can you expect after these so deeply medi-
tated, so profoundly silly observations?
I follow Mr O'Brien at a rather long distance, for if I under-
stand him at all, he is interested chiefly in ideas, with which the
art of fiction has little enough to do. Both his selection and his
book on the progress of the short story indicate his deep concern
with ideas, or as he puts it with "realizing a new form of life.”'
Unlike the editors of the O. Henry volume, Mr O'Brien has no
faculty for always missing good stories, and he publishes fewer bad
ones. I dislike some of his selections intensely and it seems to me
that some of his best choices do little to strengthen his argument.
Above all I congratulate him on taking a tip from me—in choosing
Ring Lardner's beautiful story, The Golden Honeymoon. To con-
gratulate him on not missing the stories he has chosen from The
Dial would be as superfluous as to condemn him for including one
of the trickiest and cheapest of F. Scott Fitzgerald's “output.”
Mr O'Brien has authority; he knows whom to encourage. But
there are moments when he seems not to know what in them needs
encouragement most.
The fourth of these books is the beginning of mass-production.
It represents "A first attempt of the writers to combine informally
in drawing scenes from one field of American life.” That is to say,
Professor Pitkin set a theme, and a dozen writers used it. The
theme seems to be the class-struggle, not narrowly conceived as be-
tween capital and labour, but as between any two classes. Almost
all the stories are dull. “They are life drawings, some done in the
rough, others subtly refined, a few rather minutely elaborated with
interpretation. At least one principal character in each story is
real
several of the stories are not fiction but biography
and one of them is pure history.” Professor Pitkin con-
tributes quite a discussion, a defence of realism, of the disagreeable,
conceived wholly as an answer to the hypothetical complaint about
there being so much tragedy in real life. In such a connexion one
a


GILBERT SELDES
187
doesn't expect and one doesn't get a glimmer. That there obvi-
ously isn't enough tragedy in real life to make it noble, that people
have begun to lose all sense of the tragic, and that the argument he
produces has nothing to do with fiction—these things the reader
will be aware of the moment he begins to read the stories them-
selves. A low conception of art is a fairly certain sign of a low
understanding of life. It is not surprising to read the confused
and commonplace remarks which Professor Pitkin makes about sci-
ence, about the creative mind, about the college graduate of to-day
who “knows more” than Aristotle did—as if any one ever cared for
how much Aristotle knew. But on the whole the intrusion of that
great name is apt. For most of the plays he knew and wrote about
were also on "given themes”—exactly in the sense of “donnée"-
and they were works of art and had reference to contemporary life,
and to life itself.
GILBERT SELDES
! It is as well not to encourage misconception. The Dial will offer, pres-
ently, a collection of stories from its pages, under the imprint of Alfred
A. Knopf. So those who feel that my objections to other stories are chiefly
due to the fact that they haven't appeared in The DIAL can add that to
their justification. The objections remain; and Stories From The Dial
will only enforce their validity. They will, additionally, be good stories.


MR HOUSMAN'S LAST POEMS
Last Poems. By A. E. Housman. 12mo. 79 pages.
Henry Holt and Company. $1.50.
LA
AYING down this little volume, as bitter as it is wistful and
as gentle and strong to break futile things as a man's strength
on a twig, one muses back to its predecessor of nearly thirty years
ago. How A Shropshire Lad sang out honestly from gallows'
heights, how it gave sadness and the beauty of the countryside a
new hardness, and how, beside its clear, silver, inexorable voice all
the organ music of the aesthetes quickly hushed into dead velvet-
all this we remember. Last Poems speaks with a slightly new ac-
cent, while telling of the same spiritual country. The former vol-
ume drew exact lines on the land and noted carefully the passionate
steps
of
puppets, each on his given line, each to his useless point.
In Last Poems there is less drama, less interested amusement in the
process, a more explicit concern with the journey's end. Where A
Shropshire Lad was athletically grim and waved its pessimistic
formula with a blitheness that was not all mockery, the later poems
reflect and mutter and sigh. 'Tis the same tale, but there's a dif-
ferent telling on't. And so, while our memory of the more signifi-
cant book is as of a clear view in the cool, green morning, we come
out of its successor's pages with eyes half-closed and with a dreami-
ness of sunset.
The contrast finds illustration within the covers of the book it-
self, for some of it is pure Shropshire Lad, notably Eight O'clock:
a
“He stood, and heard the steeple
Sprinkle the quarters on the morning town.
One, two, three, four, to market-place and people
It tossed them down.
Strapped, noosed, nighing his hour,
He stood and counted them and cursed his luck;
And then the clock collected in the tower
Its strength, and struck."
9


EDWARD SAPIR
189
This is as tart and unwinking as you will, with all of its philosophy
carefully held down in the implications. There are no remarks,
there is no squeal. Its futility is not a meditated thing, rather
fate's impertinence thrust into the impatience and the lust of life,
for of the hours we are told that he "counted them and cursed his
luck.” They are still worth the counting. Futility has not yet
sunk into the heart of man. Elsewhere we are told:
“Could man be drunk forever
With liquor, love, or fights,
Lief should I rouse at morning
And lief lie down of nights.
But men at whiles are sober
And think by fits and starts,
And if they think, they fasten
Their hands upon their hearts.”
a
Explicit futility, a nicely cherished disgust that the poet has made
over into a pessimism too sweet to smart. Such poems as this make
of A Shropshire Lad a sort of protesting hillock on the smooth, ver-
dant plain of Victorian-Georgian poesy. The "continuous excite-
ment” of 1895 that Mr Housman speaks of in his preface had lifted
him safely above the plain. He walks the plain now, not in the
dead-earnest fashion of a real Victorian-Georgian, to be sure,
rather with a foreign grace, with a reserve which somehow fails to
realize the company he is in. We even find stratified poems, poems
in which an honest workmanship of any perfectly honest squire
("Oh, to the bed of ocean, To Africk and to Ind”) supports (or
undermines) another layer (“And the dead call the dying And
finger at the doors”).
A Shropshire Lad had in much of its imagery something cold,
sharp, precipitated, something of the momentaneous power that we
attribute to an unexpected rustle in dead leaves. There is less of
this quality in Last Poems, but it is
present. The first poem is full
of it:
“The sun is down and drinks away
From air and land the lees of day,”


190
MR HOUSMAN'S LAST POEMS
“The long cloud and the single pine
Sentinel the ending line,"
“Oh lad, I fear that yon's the sea
Where they fished for you and me.”
These strangenesses are not awkward, not sought. They have more
suddenness than ingenuity; they suggest omens, possibly, rather
than pictures. Even the slightly euphuistic passages ring true, such
as:
“And let not yet the swimmer leave
His clothes upon the sands of eve.”
It is ungracious and pedagogical to contrast, to mark off epochs.
Yet a brief glance at our current exasperation, the better to fix Mr
Housman for our envy, a cordial good-bye to what is no longer
strictly ours, and a vain question will not be thought too heavy a
load of analysis. For, having laid down the Last Poems and mused
of the lad, we find ourselves automatically closing the little book-
and the manner of its closing is a symbol-not curtly, with a busi-
nesslike indifference, nor too lingeringly, with many browsings back
and forth between the reluctantly closing covers, but slowly and de-
cisively. We should like to feel ourselves more excitedly in the
midst of Mr Housman's work, but it will not go. A truth that we
nearly hate whispers to us that there is no use pretending, that
these lines lilt too doggedly and too sweetly to fall in quite with
our more exigent, half-undiscovered harmonies, that many of the
magic turns catch us cruelly absent-minded. And, most disappoint-
ing of all, for we are a little disappointed, and vexed at being so,
we cannot seem to pool Mr Housman's pessimism with our own.
We seem to feel that our zero does not equate with his, that each
has a different mathematical "sense” or tendency.
We discover, as we probe into our puzzling disaccord, that we
already love the Shropshire lad as we love our Coleridge and our
Blake and begin to divine that we were a little hasty in dating our
modern drift from Mr Housman's first volume. Its flare and its
protest were a psychological, a temperamental, phenomenon, not a
strictly cultural one. Its disillusionment was rooted in personality,
a


EDWARD SAPIR
191
not largely in a sensing of the proximate age. Hence while Mr
Housman seems to anticipate and now to join with us in our de-
spair, he is serene and bitter where we are bitter and distraught.
His cultural world was an accepted one, though he chose to deny
its conscious values; our own perturbations, could they penetrate
into the marrow of his bone, would not find him a sympathetic suf-
ferer. In the larger perspective his best work is seen to be a highly
personal culmination point in a poetic tradition that is thoroughly
alien to us of to-day, and nothing demonstrates this more forcibly
than the apparent backwash in some of the Last Poems. There is
no backwash in spirit or in style, there is simply the lessened in-
tensity that allows general, underlying cultural traits to emerge.
His zero and our zero do not equate for the reason that his is per-
sonal where ours is cultural.
Finally, the vain question. Such work as Mr Housman's, ad-
mirably simple and clear, classical, as it is, once more raises the
doubt as to whether we can truly be said to be expressing ourselves
until our moods become less frenetic, our ideas less palpable and
self-conscious, and, above all, our forms less hesitant. Our eccen-
tricities have much interest and diagnostic value to ourselves, but
should it not be possible to cabin their power in forms that are at
once more gracious and less discussible? One wonders whether
there is not in store for English poetry some tremendous simplifi-
cation. One prays for a Heine who may give us all our mordancies,
.
all our harmonies, and our stirrings of new life with simpler and
subtler apparatus. There is room for a new Shropshire Lad.
а
EDWARD SAPIR


IMITATION AGAIN
PAINTER AND SPACE, or The THIRD DIMENSION IN
GRAPHIC Art. By Howard Russell Butler. 8vo. 178
pages. Charles Scribner's Sons. $4.
MR
a
R BUTLER'S writing is a confusion of pedantries. His
thesis is so heavily encumbered with solemn nonsense, so
highly saturated with academic ink, that the modern painter with
a sense of humour might get a laugh out of it, were it not for the
fact that it adds another cloud to the critical obscurity lying be-
tween the public and the creative artist. Any person of ordinary
intelligence, with a fair sense of human values and a flair for art,
who is looking for a little knowledge of the methods of painting,
would be profanely repelled by the assemblage of irrelevant me-
chanics herein presented. Reasonably he would exclaim: “If this
is representative of creative procedure, if this is the sort of stuff
involved in the technique of construction, then art is merely a
quasi-scientific plaything, ingenious perhaps, and somewhat amus-
ing, but not worthy of serious consideration !" It is hard to be tol-
erant with the author of Painter and Space. At certain happy mo-
ments, those of us who have advocated the human value of aesthet-
ics are inclined to feel enthusiastic over the advance of modernism
—and then Mr Butler comes along and puts us out of humour, and
forces us to return to the elementary stages of our efforts. It would
seem that the hypothetical person of average intelligence seeking
information must be led back to first principles—so let us cry out
once more in unison, "Art is not imitation, but reconstruction!"
We shall have need of this truth so long as books are written on
the assumption that reproductive accuracy, in any of its forms, is a
criterion of art.
Both Leonardo da Vinci and Aristotle were accustomed to speak
of art as the imitation of nature. It would be a simple matter to
annihilate that pernicious word by recasting their definitions in
modern terminology; but such an adaptation becomes unnecessary
when one compares Leonardo's monumental conceptions with the
photographic painting of to-day, and Greek tragedy with the un-


THOMAS CRAVEN
193
а
imaginative accuracy of journalistic description. The drama of
the Greeks and the plastic art of the Renaissance are obviously cre-
ative symbols and not mere records or imitations of experience—the
old writers on aesthetics were less explicit in their use of terms than
the psychological critics of the present time.
The completely equipped modern painter must, of course, be fa-
miliar with external nature, and to a certain extent with the laws
governing it; but to attach much importance to the latter in a book
devoted to structural problems is a waste of time. The study of
scientific laws belongs to a relatively narrow and insignificant field
of painting, a technical field which includes the chemistry of pig-
ments, the permanence of grounds, the qualities of media, and the
mechanics of intermixtures in tone and colour. What is needed
just now is not a discussion of general descriptive laws—works of
this character when applied to artistic activity always turn out to be
pseudo-scientific and false—but a psychological inquiry into the
relations between our direct perceptions of nature and the conse-
quent aesthetic expression.
Mr Butler's conception of realism has no basis in experience; it
is an old and academic set of laboratory deductions, bearing prac-
tically no connexion with our emotional contacts, and therefore of
little use either to artist or layman. It is a truism that art is born
only in our emotional contacts, and that it is forwarded and pushed
to completion, however intellectual the processes called into play,
by distinctly emotional impulses. To the author's credit it must be
said that he understands pure optics; but inasmuch as this branch
of science is mainly theoretical, existing only in text-books and
testing rooms, his knowledge is of small service to art. It does not
occur to him that the peculiarities of optical illusion are part and
parcel of our daily experience, and that we build up our world by
inference over and beyond them. The artist has no interest in the
dead level of scientific law; he aims to give us his own world with
all its special characteristics, and to him the important elements of
life are the emotional deviations forming the living fibre of experi-
ence. The world that confronts us on looking out of a window is
not simply an optical phenomenon; concentrate upon it for a mo-
ment and the entire range of visual sensations is dissolved in mem-
ories and a general psychic awakening absolutely inexpressible by
scientific optics as resumed in the laws of perspective and the grada-


194
IMITATION AGAIN
tions of colour-tones under atmospheric conditions. The simple
recognition of three dimensions is almost exclusively an imposition
of mind upon sensation—we construct the hollows of valleys and
the thicknesses of hills by inference from a thousand points which
go directly through vision into memory and imagination.
Is the artist to be only a camera, a machine to give us a fainter
and less vibrant nature? Is his space to be that of one particular
focus? Or is he to render what his mind has added to the scene,
the personal realization and reconstruction?
Mr Butler does not completely overlook the value of the per-
sonal equation, but he commits the common academic blunder of
separating it from the processes embodied in plastic composition.
He does not seem to grasp the fact that our various ways of seeing
things, of going up against the world, demand in our different ex-
pressions very special interpretations, and that a distorted
perspec-
tive and a violently forced tonality may be not only adequate, but
necessary to enhance certain emotions of depth. My own observa-
tion of painters working to attain great depth and high relief has
left me with little faith in geometrical perspective, and none what-
ever in natural tone; I have seen the laws of both constantly vio-
lated with an increase rather than a lessening of effectiveness in
achieving depth. Impressionism was essentially a tonal method,
an art of values (values in the technical sense, the relative intensity
of colours according to their constituent amounts of light and
dark); it contained little or no drawing, and was destitute of the
architectonic qualities which produce high relief; it impresses us
to-day as flat-emotionally flat—and yet it is infinitely closer to
the values of nature than are the profoundly recessive landscapes
of Rembrandt and Rubens.
Mr Butler explains the term values with unusual clarity, but
vastly exaggerates the participation of natural values in the con-
struction of the third dimension. The logic of composition—the
fundamental need for congruity-demands a balance of light and
dark throughout the canvas, a distribution of tonal areas approxi-
mately equal in intensity, but entirely at variance with literal val-
ues: nature, faithfully transcribed, reveals an unduly prominent
foreground and a blurred stretch of distance; and a picture thus
composed is inharmonious and unconvincing. Similarly, the pro-
portions arrived at by simple vision cannot function in any design


THOMAS CRAVEN
195
penetrating deeper than the surface of the canvas, for the reason
that the orientation of volumes, in a truly spatial art, is fully as
necessary as the placement of tones. In plain language, no intelli-
gent painter wishes to cluster all his important forms in the fore-
ground of his picture—an inevitable condition, if he adheres to sci-
entific descriptions, or isolates the purely visual parts of his experi-
ence. Actually, of course, objects near the eye are more sharply
defined; but if we followed this rule, there would be no rhythmical
connexion between the planes of a canvas; and I have yet to see a
good picture in which a pronounced orientation of light and dark is
not felt throughout its whole depth.
Our emotions of colour and volume are equally applicable to
things near and far; and since these emotions arise for the most
part from mental constructs, they must have mental rather than
visual modes of interpretation. In consequence, Cézanne's treat-
ment of landscape is eminently justified. Pictorially, the inter-
action of line and mass does not always conform with correct geo-
metrical perspective; and the most successful painter of depth is he
who combines his lines and masses so that the inherent dynamism
is one with the special problem of recession and relief. He is a
sort of sculptor in great extensions, carving in light and shadow
and colour instead of marble. Cézanne was such a painter—but
the author believes that “Cézanne did nothing to aid in the ren-
dering of the third dimension.”
Mr Butler's idea that pictures should be manufactured accord-
ing to the optical sensations of binocular vision is moderately in-
teresting as a tour de force, but it has no place in creative work. It
reduces art to the superficial mechanics of imitation; and until
writers have learned that the reconstruction of our emotional ex-
periences is a mental and not a physical process, we shall make no
progress in aesthetics.
THOMAS CRAVEN


PHANTASUS
CONTEMPORARY GERMAN POETRY. Translated by
Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinsky. 12mo.
201 pages. Harcourt, Brace and Company. $1.75.
A
BOUT modern German poetry, with its barbaric gravity,
with its goose-step from one philosophy to another: espe-
cially about the fantastic bulk of it there is something preposterous
and incredible; at least one has this feeling when reading the intro-
duction to the anthology compiled by Babette Deutsch and Avrahm
Yarmolinsky. They write as if they were describing something
imaginary. These poets they discuss, who attained “a heightened
emotional tonus,” who wore their "boutonnière with a difference,"
who wreathed "roses of cement about the brow of Berlin," obvi-
ously never existed; they were invented like Earl Roppel or the
Spectric School, as a vaster hoax. In face of such description to
believe in their reality demands an act of faith, and yet they can
be proved by the simplest empirical laws or by their collected vol-
umes, numerous enough to pave the highroad of their fight to Ber-
lin, after the suppression of the revolt in Munich. The introduc-
tion to Contemporary German Poetry is exact in spite of its affec-
tations and alembications; it defines a literature which is real but
improbable.
Naturalism in Germany followed sentimentalism and was fol-
lowed in turn by symbolism, mysticism, fantaisisme. The last of
these schools was founded by Alfred Mombert, or by Arno Holz,
who wrote lines of uneven length which he centred round a vertical
axis, giving his poems the silhouette of a pagoda. The title of his
principal work, Phantasus, might be applied to the whole of con-
temporary German verse.
However, the period described and translated in the present vol-
ume begins earlier, toward the middle 'eighties, with the naturalism
of Detlev von Liliencron. Miss Deutsch's own technique renders
him admirably into English, and her lyrical versions of his friend,
Dehmel, and of the mystical but straightforward poems of Rainer
Maria Rilke can be praised equally. With Stefan George, chief of


MALCOLM COWLEY
197
a
the symbolists, the translators have done badly; they chose his less
characteristic work and allowed the essence even of this to escape,
retaining little of the original except the curious punctuation.
They seem to lack sympathy for anything in the least obscure.
Liliencron, Dehmel, Rilke, George: these, such giants as they
were, loom as giants among the German lyric poets of the ’nineties.
Fatally, they lose most of their stature in a translation which comes
at the wrong moment, in the middle of a reaction against all forms
of naturalism and symbolism. It is too early or too late to judge
them fairly, and certainly it is too late to grow enthusiastic over
qualities which they borrowed from the French, or which a few of
our own poets afterwards borrowed from the German. In transla-
tion and at this moment they can give us nothing new. The same
objection should not hold against our own contemporaries, the ex-
pressionists. Contemporary German Poetry is a volume in two
parts, of which the second is devoted to this younger group.
a
War rages: a nation loses its young men, starves, goes down to a
defeat which is the defeat not of a nation only, but of a civiliza-
tion and a philosophy; out of the general indifference or debauch
the surviving poets lift their voices in a chorus which is louder,
more despondent and more hopeful than any imagined chorus, and
vowed more fatally to remain discordant, unfulfilled, being the
celebration of a fallacy.
The fallacy has often been expressed, but nowhere so clearly as
in the introduction to Menschheitsdämmerung (Berlin: Ernst Ro-
wohlt Verlag) which incidentally is the most complete anthology
of the expressionist school. Its editor says, explaining his choice:
"The reproach can easily be made that during the past decade
many poems have been written which are more complete than
these; richer, qualitatively better. But can a poetry which pre-
sents the pain and passion, the desires and longings of these years
can this poetry take a clean and pure shape? Must it not be
as chaotic as the epoch out of whose torn and bleeding soil it rose ?”
a
Verse composed before dinner should express no emotion other than
hunger. Our epoch is incomplete; therefore its poets should strive
to write incompletely, badly. Composition and style, to writers


198
PHANTASUS
a
who share this belief, are qualities which the present era should
avoid. They despise art, which perhaps is fortunate for their self-
respect.
The expressionist school is based on two general and contradic-
tory theories. One of them is a sentimental communism, a revolt
in favour of a new society. The other is an attempt to express the
pure Self, independently of every element imposed on the poet
from without; in other words it is a revolt against every form of
society. The two theories are to be found existing together in
many of the early romantic poets; from one point of view German
expressionism is no more than a violent restatement of romanticism.
It would be more exact to call it a simplification.
Man. God. Self. Brother. Cosmos. Purity. Buttocks. Rev-
olution. Write these eight words, and perhaps a few other gener-
alities of their nature, on separate cards and shake them in a hat.
Extract them one by one and place an exclamation point after each.
The recipe for making expressionist poetry is not remarkably com-
plicated. Instead of describing the infinite diversity of the ex-
terior world it confines itself to the soul, and souls are uniform and
simple. To express the inmost Self is the narrowest of all for-
mulas. One feels when reading Menschheitsdämmerung, which is
the work of two dozen poets, that the whole anthology could have
been written by any one of them. They are more viciously similar
than the Georgians.
Despising art they can write with ease, and voluminously. Jo-
hannes Becher has published ten volumes of verse since 1914,
Klemm seven since 1915; Rudolf Leonhardt, who was born in
1889, is the author of "some thirteen volumes of verse and prose
and also of a tragedy.” Klabund is thirty-one years old. He has
published forty volumes, eight of which consist of lyric poems. He
says in a brief notice: "What you know is only part of what I
composed. Often the wind scattered my pages. In my many wan-
derings I lost the manuscripts of two dramas.” Klabund, with his
sententiousness, must be an acquaintance of that other poet who
began a letter by saying: “Three years ago I was a dadaist. Now
I am a communist.” Gravely, as if the world and his own per-
sonality had been changed by his decision. Of all features of con-
temporary German verse this seriousness is the most incredible,
except perhaps for its unimaginable volume.


MALCOLM COWLEY
199
a
9
Miss Deutsch and Mr Yarmolinsky translate four of those
poems by Klabund which the wind failed to scatter. They print
Klemm, Becher, Leonhardt, Schickele, and worse. On the other
hand they omit Jakob van Hoddis, who left behind him not forty
volumes, but sixteen brief poems, finished roughly but perfectly,
remarkable for movement, for thunder, for a cruel extreme fantasy.
His peculiar qualities would be hard to recapture in English, but
they are worth the effort. The absence of Hasenclever is less im-
portant; he is repeated by the other expressionists. With Hans
Arp the case is different. He is sometimes called the greatest liv-
ing German poet, but he is also called a dadaist, which may explain
his exclusion even from an anthology which is designed “to convey
the mood and manner of current German verse.
Its picture of this mood and manner could hardly be just, but it
is not lacking entirely in force. It includes Mombert (the “lonely
cosmic tear") and Heym, whose poems have the imaginative bru-
tality of Munich posters. It prints a single poem by Theodor
Däubler and another by Alfred Lichtenstein. It translates Gott-
fried Benn, who believes in a return to primitive passions and who
writes with particular gusto about dissections in the morgue. Evi-
dently the translators do not fear the most brutal naturalism. On
the other hand, paradoxically, they have a weakness for the dec-
orative and are capable of prettifying passages where the original
is rough and new. They avoid real novelty almost as strictly as
they avoid obscurity: an attitude which, though honest, prevents
their doing justice to some of the best of modern poetry.
But happily not to all. If this wind which blew his pages from
the grasp of Klabund, if this providential wind arose to sweep
away everything which is pompous, verbose, sentimental, or care-
less from contemporary German verse, there would still remain a
considerable body of poetry, and it would retain a perfume of its
own, a combination of fantasy with barbarity, pessimism, and cul-
ture which can be found in no other literature, and which derives
neither from Whitman nor Mallarmé. The real task of Miss
Deutsch and Mr Yarmolinsky was to convey this perfume, and for-
tunately it was strong enough to endure a translation less honest
and even more fragmentary than theirs.
MALCOLM COWLEY


BRIEFER MENTION
SINBAD, by C. Kay Scott (12mo, 282 pages; Seltzer: $2) brings to the por-
trayal of a type of woman rarely found in fiction the accuracy of a dicta-
phone record; the unsparing, truthful revelation of a voluntary confes-
sional; the justness of widely-inclusive observation; the emotional, dra-
matic quality of human interest. But the book is more: it is a dynamic
and artistically harmonious interpretation of a section of life. Subsidiary
talents are not exploited, but, instead, are united to point the narrative.
Cleverness does not interfere with wisdom; an environment lending itself
easily to mere bizarreness is incisively, but passingly, criticized; passional
crises fall into place in character development. The style is exactly suited
to the mood of the book; it is pliant and tense, never loose or artificial.
a
DOWNSTREAM, by Sigfrid Siwertz, translated from the Swedish by E. Classen
(12mo, 405 pages; Knopf: $2.50) fails in its primary duty: it does not in-
terest. Its dulness is surprising and perverse, for the material staked out
-the rise of a family to mammonish power by the sale of its soul-would
seem to be a rich mine. Perhaps the reason for the failure to produce any-
thing of value, or even of entertainment, is that totally unregenerate people
like the Selambs are quite as stupid as Pollyannas. We are given their
measure in the first chapters; the others are an exposition of material
accretions, without corresponding internal development or decay. The
downfall of the Selambs and of the book consists in their never fighting
against their doom.
SOLILOQUY, by Stephen McKenna (12mo, 318 pages; Doran: $2) ploughs a
straighter furrow into the feminine psychology of its subject than did Mr
McKenna's previous novel, The Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman.
Where that book was unfolded episodically, this one has a rounded and
cumulative development; it is a more definite portrait, richer and shrewder.
It lacks somewhat in perspective, however, due to the author's election of
the soliloquy form. Life seen through a capital I is apt to be like a ball
game surveyed through a fence; the gap is seldom as wide as the field.
CABLES OF COBWEB, by Paul Jordan-Smith (12mo, 369 pages; Lieber &
Lewis : $2) is the story of a young man who follows his rebellious concepts
of freedom and equality through years of disagreeable experiences only to
find them unworthy of his idealistic concentration. It is worked out with
strict regard to the logical development of the hero and achieves ironic and
artistic unity. The delineation of the girl, who, however, plays a minor
rôle, is hesitant; the dialogue is somewhat stilted, and the sentence struc-
ture here and there twisted and awkward. But the book—which substitutes
theoretic discussions for love scenes—commands unfailing interest: it is an
exceptionally solid piece of work, calm, proportionate, dissenting, and skil-
ful.


BRIEFER MENTION
201
a
CHALLENGE, by V. Sackville-West (12mo, 297 pages; Doran: $2) might-
with a little less genuflection to Conrad-have become an even better novel
than it undoubtedly is. A great deal of brilliance has gone into it; a splen-
did setting devised for the enactment of drama, but the central figures in
the narrative-having a tragic intensity imposed upon them for which they
are ill-prepared-crumple up around the edges and disclose the cardboard
mounting. The author has concerned herself with a tenpenny revolution,
but her style is not scaled down to it; the emotional sweep is out of propor-
tion to the issues involved and the boundary line between idealism and
quixotism is crossed—but not with impunity.
THE BURNING SPEAR, by John Galsworthy (12mo, 251 pages; Scribner:
$1.50) shows the author as a master of pointed, fantastic caricature, a
realm into which his mordant dramatic comment on community problems
and the occasional quiet sallies of his novels gave no perspective. The an-
tics of John Lavendar, descendant of Don Quixote and Pickwick, the cred-
ulous victim of floridly patriotic propaganda, are staged with the skill of
a Barnum, supplemented by Galsworthy's admired sense of fitness. There
is much horseplay, but not the most insistent serious-mindedness could re-
sist such stringently selected, uproarious fun.
IN Dark Places, by John Russell (12mo, 285 pages; Knopf: $2.50) is a
second-rate imitation of its predecessor, Where the Pavement Ends. The
romance of the South Seas has become tediously vulgarized. Mystery has
been melodramatized into clap-trap, description has run into patter, glam-
our has been torn into shreds of tinsel. In place of power we have an effi-
ciency that is feeble and works far away from the mark. Mr Russell has
found his pattern; now he can turn 'em out by the dozen.
PLAYS OF NEAR AND FAR, by Lord Dunsany (12mo, 245 pages; Putnam:
$1.75) shows the author a little less inclined than usual to wander to dim
palaces beyond the sunset and to enter "faery lands forlorn." While the
fantastic elements are not lacking, and one may find much of the gloss and
shimmer with which Dunsany usually decorates his work, yet he succeeds
at times in coming down almost to earth; and he is as skilful in producing
an atmosphere of reality in one or two of his plays as he is in creating an
effect of beautiful unreality in the others.
PUPPET Plays, by Alfred Kreymborg (16mo, 133 pages; Harcourt, Brace:
$1.75). In his foreword to this volume, Gordon Craig hazards the opinion
that these highly individualistic little dramas would act better than they
read, but one who has seen some of them put to that test is inclined to the
contrary view. What appears on the printed page as fanciful, bizarre, or
poetic takes on a somewhat self-conscious pose across the footlights; the
flavour is charming, but a bit too precious. What the author himself ac-
curately terms "the contrapuntal ritual” of the plays is deftly indicated in
the text, but difficult to catch in the theatre. Mr Kreymborg bestows his
highest praise upon marionettes, for their greater fidelity to his mood and
purpose.


202
BRIEFER MENTION
The SARDONIC Arm, by Maxwell Bodenheim (8vo, 58 pages; Covici-McGee :
$3.50) is written according to the formula of his other volumes: words
tossed rashly about and sometimes hitting their mark, fantasy and fantastic
irony, a mob of excited metaphors. Though he never or rarely imitates
another poet, Bodenheim imitates his earlier verses frequently, with the re-
sult that his name is in danger of becoming the label on a package, certi-
fying that it contains honest goods of a certain expected weight and qual-
ity. Sometimes there is a prize in the package: a metaphor of unexpected
justness or the illumination of a new character. His work is sometimes
careless and sometimes exhilarating; it is never mediocre.
The Poems of Alice MEYNELL (8vo, 144 pages; Scribner: $2) contains the
whole of her poetry: a gross of lyrics of which the longest barely reaches a
hundred lines. Nothing she wrote was second-rate or careless. It is a
shock to realize that she was the model of the whole brood of female sing-
ers who have infested the past two decades, and that her austere quatrains
were the pattern followed by all the young ladies who embroider verses in
the spirit with which their grandmothers made doilies. She is immensely
better than any of her imitators. She has personality, a background, an
undeniable and unbelievable command of English metres. There is no-
body in England to-day who can write one sort of verse like Alice Meynell,
but if there were he would hardly choose to write that style of verse.
GOING TO THE SUN, by Vachel Lindsay (8vo, 101 pages; Appleton : $1.75)
is a book of happy doggerel illustrated with Lindsay's own drawings,
which are rather more amusing than the text and never much worse in
technique. Their lines are intricately drawn, and firm; his verse is written
sloppily. Flat rhymes and a vocabulary without surprises mar the expres-
sion of a fancy which is childlike and fresh at its best; at the worst it is
merely childish.
a
PRELUDES, by John Drinkwater (12mo, 61 pages; Houghton, Mifflin : $1.25).
This series of narrative and dramatic poems is dominated by an old theme,
and yet a theme perennially new—the triumph and the exaltation of love.
Mr Drinkwater writes with feeling, and at times almost with passion, yet
his poetry is noticeably uneven in quality; it is annoyingly interspersed
with passages of prose, and gives somewhat the effect of a green landscape
dotted with boulders. In tone and character his verse bears a certain re-
semblance to that of Edwin Arlington Robinson, but he has not Mr Robin-
son's tendency to tedious psychological discourses.
Rock-Flower, by Jeanne Robert Foster (12mo, 118 pages ; Boni & Liveright:
$1.75) contains a dedication to John Butler Yeats and verses to Michael
Collins, Brancusi, the moon, Oscar Wilde, and other international figures.
In addition there are Verses for Japanese Prints (four lines of decoration
on a blank page); Songs to Evin, of a primitive sexual symbolism; the
Celtic twilight of Winds in Wild Grass; finally, three poems in prose.
The book as a whole is full of echoes, but it possesses a sort of vigorous
and unsubtle charm, without surprises.


BRIEFER MENTION
203
MY THIRTY YEARS IN BASEBALL, by John J. McGraw (12mo, 265 pages;
Boni & Liveright: $2). "You can beat these fellows,” I told them. “I
don't think there is a question about it. We have a big advantage in that
they are the favorites.” In this way, McGraw is supposed to have shot the
drive into the Giants that won the World Series. But it is certain that his
men would have laughed at such stilted language. They'll laugh or yawn
when they read this book. And so will the bleachers. For by the omission
of quantities of aints, hells, and hurrahs, it is inferior to the prose of ball-
parks. Nor does the slangy, technical, dominant, athletic, racy personality
of McGraw enter into its grammatically correct and subdued pages.
CASUAL WANDERINGS IN ECUADOR, by Blair Niles (illus., 8vo, 250 pages;
Century: $2.50) is a charming travel narrative by one who realizes that it
is more blessed to receive than to retain ; her book brims with impressions
and doesn't bother about the statistics. As Thoreau said, “It's not worth
while going round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar"; grace and in-
telligence score higher than the honest minutiae of consular trade reports.
Here is that rare thing in narratives of travel : an absence of the spirit of
the self-anointed globe trotter.
:
YESTERDAY AND TO-DAY, by Ralph Nevill (8vo, 285 pages; Dutton: $5) is
one of those impostures which make it seem desirable that writers and pub-
lishers form a union and work on the closed shop basis. The author's
hobby is evidently collecting lists; he gives us lists of London clubs, of the
food and wine served there, of hotel decorations, of women's apparel, of
landmarks; prices are affixed wherever possible. The type is large, the
paragraphs short, the words one-syllable. Perhaps it is long-stored knowl-
edge he imparts: it has not mellowed into material for a book, but accu-
mulated into matter for an almanac.
The Book of My Youth, by Hermann Sudermann (8vo, 394 pages; Har-
per : $2.25) follows Cournos, Björkman, and numerous others in the field
of autobiography handled in the mood of fiction, and easily outdistances
them all in brilliancy and artistry. Here life is looked at with sufficient
detachment to make it valuable and with sufficient wit to give it relish.
Sudermann is gifted with a selective wisdom which makes every incident
a dramatic contribution; he sees the forces which shaped his early years
in their exact significance, and in consequence his narrative has a unity
and an emotional and intellectual solidarity which are as rare as they are
captivating.
THINGS REMEMBERED, by Arthur Sherburne Hardy (illus., 8vo, 311 pages;
Houghton Mifflin: $5) is a most tranquil book—the detached record of a
career which seems never to have filled out its possible boundaries. The
author says the expected things about the value of West Point training and
speaks pallidly of the compensations of old age, but few of his contacts
with life seem to have struck fire. As a diplomat, he served as United
States minister to Persia, Greece, Roumania, Serbia, Switzerland, and
Spain; his reminiscences are those of the typical American literary legate.
a


THE THEATRE
AM
MONG the summer shows, so far as I have seen them, the
Follies is the most satisfactory. Aren't We All? is an
amusing enough little English comedy which would be more amus-
ing if it were less good-natured. The Winter GARDEN has some
good comedians, but very few funny ideas. HELEN OF Troy, New
York, a musical comedy by Connelly and Kaufman, is only mild-
ly amusing in itself. The authors have tried to transplant to musi-
cal comedy the business satire of To The Ladies, but in rather an
indifferent and perfunctory fashion; and they have eked out their
satiric material with all the clichés of the machine-made show.
These devices, which carry SALLY to triumph, leave Messrs Con-
nelly and Kaufman fat. They have reckoned without the great
principle—amply illustrated by Helen of Troy—that the stupid
jokes of clever people can never hope to be so successful as the stu-
pid jokes of stupid people. Clever people have a way of spoiling
banality by betraying that they do not believe in it. They engage
in it without spirit and their lack of enthusiasm usually shows.
Right against a gag aimed at the boobs they will write a sarcasm
intended for the intelligent, with the result that the latter are left
unsatisfied while the fun has been spoiled for the former. I believe
that the authors of HELEN OF TROY would have been more success-
ful in having the complete courage of their convictions than in at-
tempting to guarantee themselves against failure by dragging in all
the old tricks.
The real vitality of Helen of Troy is supplied by Miss Queenie
Smith, who brings delicacy as well as verve to the rôle of the comic
second woman. A former member of the Metropolitan ballet, she
has learned a singular deftness of pantomime, and a genuine aes-
thetic instinct to which she subordinates all she does. Her bur-
lesque Pavlowa ballet is the best I have ever seen—better even than
Fannie Brice's or James Watts'—because it is graceful as well as
funny. She has a gift for swift changes of mood-rather perhaps
when she is dancing than when she is acting—which in its sureness
and its distinction even recalls a little Yvette Guilbert. Light and
shadow, awkwardness and grace flutter her tiny figure like a breeze.
a
а
>


THE THEATRE
205
One wonders if she will not be able to develop material which will
enable her to appear to even better advantage.
a
The "new edition" of the ZIEGFELD FOLLIES is a considerable
improvement on the old-in fact it is one of the very best Follies
I remember. The new acts which have been substituted are not
only, in general, more interesting than the old, but they also fit bet-
ter in the FOLLIES: in almost every case, you have a high pressure
act substituted for a vague or slowly moving one. Instead of Ring
Lardner's rather casual Rip Van Winkle sketch you have a terrific
team of rube dancers, and for the halting drawl of Will Rogers you
have the machine-like energy of Eddie Cantor. Furthermore, Ann
Pennington has been added, so that, with Cantor and Gilda Gray,
you have perhaps the three highest pressure performers in the city
all under the same canvas. The tempo of the show is now uniform
and it is the same as that of the life outside. It is New York in
terms of entertainment—the expression of extreme nervous intensi-
ty to the tune of harsh complicated harmonies. When you take the
subway after the theatre, it speeds you straight with a crash to your
goal, like a song by Eddie Cantor; and in the roar of the nocturnal
city, driven rhythmically for all its confusion, you catch hoarse
echoes of Gilda Gray singing her incomparable Come Along!
a
One instrument in the great jazz band of New York has sudden-
ly been silenced: Bert Savoy is dead. But the comic character he
created will never be forgotten by those who saw it. When he
used to come reeling on to the stage, a gigantic red-haired harlot,
swaying her enormous hat, reeking with the corrosive cocktails of
the West Fifties, one felt oneself in the presence of the vast vul-
garity of New York incarnate and made heroic. Well, we have
heard the last of Margy's wise-cracks and the thought is a gen-
uinely sad one. Still, in the brash nights of the city, between Rei-
senweber's and the Montmartre, we shall sometimes be haunted by
the accents of a gasping raucous voice, hard-boiled, shamefully ob-
scene, but in a continual tremor of female excitement: “I'm so glad
you asked me that, dearie! You don't know the half of it, dearie!
You don't know the half of it, dearie!”
EDMUND WILSON


COMMENT
H
IMSELF the winner, one had almost said victim, of one
prize and judge in another, M Paul Morand refers with
nocking tenderness in his first Paris Letter to the vogue of prize-
giving and prize-winning which has come over France. At the
same time, as M Morand mentions, the question of wholesale mar-
keting of works of literature is being carefully scrutinized there.
The two things are close; and they are both based on a misconcep-
tion which we, in connexion with The Dial's award, have been
compelled often to meet. It is, simply, a misconception of the rela-
tion between money and any work of art.
Our insistence that The Dial's award is not a prize is frequently
taken to be a characteristic pedantry on our part, almost as repre-
hensible as the use of the preferred spelling in our pages. We can
only reply that the dictionary and good usage are the pedants, not
ourselves; we are using words in their accurate and accepted sense
when we say that a prize is something contested for and that an
award is something given. In France books and manuscripts of
books are specifically entered for prizes; in America, as in the case
of the Pulitzer prize, publications of various sorts come automat-
ically within the scope of the prize and are considered by the
judges. But nothing, of any nature, is ever,
in
any
circumstance,
submitted to THE DIAL for its award. THE DIAL's award
“crowns” no book, nor does it imply any moral or even aesthetic
judgement of superiority. It indicates only that the recipient has
done a service to letters and that, since money is required even by
those who serve letters, since the payment in money is generally so
inadequate when good work is concerned, The Dial is in a way
adding to the earnings of a writer, diminishing, by a little, the dis-
erepancy between his minimum requirements as a citizen in a com-
mercial society and his earnings as an artist. We have never be-
lieved that the recipient has, or will have, done exactly two thou-
sand dollars' worth of service to letters. We haven't the standard
of measurement for such delicacy of judgement.
We dissociate ourselves utterly from the business of giving
prizes, and at the same time we call the attention of our publishers
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COMMENT
207
to the situation in France because the prize is an excellent method
of temporary publicity, and it is possible that publishers in America
will be tempted to use it freely. There are so many prizes in
France, the considerations are so varied, and political and literary
intrigue so constant, that among intelligent people a prize has al-
ready lost all significance. Even more. It was openly asserted in
a recent case that the part-recipient of one of the newly established
prizes was himself the donor of the money. Were that so, were it
even a friend who “put up," the conclusions are obvious. Rich
men are notoriously given to writing; and if one secretly supplies
fifteen thousand dollars and is awarded five, the rest going to two
shielding authors, one not only does a good deed for literature, but
one gets back thirty-three and one-third per cent—and there have
been financial investments in which that represents something more
than cutting one's losses.
The amount of publicity which a publisher can gain in a prize
of this sort would justify him annually in giving several thousand
dollars to an author on his list. It would justify all publishers
together in creating prizes, in furthering them when others are so
kind as to supply the funds; it is suspected that the rewards are so
great that subornation and intimidation have been used—as last
resorts. Every publisher in France, at this moment, must have a
prize-winner on his lists; and the awards fall so rapidly that one
doesn't know whether a newspaper headline refers to literature or
horse-racing. To be sure, the thing is killing itself; the wonder is
how many things it will drag down with it.
The nuisance about prizes is that they imply a contest and that
they are supposedly concerned with literary values. Publicity is
another matter entirely. It weakly uses critical words; but the
best publicity is sales. Advertise that a book is sold out and you
will sell it out; advertise that the sales have reached half a million
and unless the saturation point is reached, you will sell another
half-million. All of this has nothing to do with literature. We
suspect that the circulation of The Dial per month is twenty times
as great as the circulation, if you can call it that, of Plato's Repub-
lic in all the years of its author's life. But fond as we are of The
DIAL we do not offer that fact as evidence of superiority to Plato.
We are deliberately (and with some success) building up a circu-
lation which will enable us to pay our way and to raise our rates


208
COMMENT
for contributions; we are using the methods of publicity common
at this moment. It is only a question of taste whether publishers
shall have "stunt” advertising or no—there are books, wares as
they are called, to which the method is eminently suitable.
The danger, already envisaged in France, is in the effect upon
independent criticism. A common item in foreign reviews, for
example, is the "publisher's section” in which appear signed, crit-
ical reviews of books—with which the editors of the journal have
nothing to do; they do, in fact, print on the last page preceding that
section some note indicating that here editorial responsibility ends.
These arranged-for, or bought, reviews, are not fatal; the same
thing occur