s all too often in the body of publications. And we our-
selves have seen the results of adverse criticism in the case of books
where “millions” are being spent on advertising. It is agreeable to
attack a book which is becoming popular through advertising; but
few critics are in such a position that they can give themselves the
bad name of independence; few editors can remain permanently in
command of their papers if publishers can use advertising as a
weapon. As far as we know, no publisher has withdrawn adver-
tising from The Dial on account of adverse reviews; but we know
of cases elsewhere. We know that some publishers are so intent
upon the immediate good that they do not understand the cumula-
tive value of adverse criticism-if it is intelligent and honest—as
a basis for confidence when favourable criticism appears. One of
the most influential organs of criticism in America has praised
countless thousands of books—and sold them so. We are aware
of that power. But the number of individuals who are growing
sceptical, and who are caring for independent intelligence, is grow-
ing. Prizes and publicity will increase that number. Perhaps that
is their only function.


i
!



Picasso
Courtesy of the Galerie Paul Rosenberg, Paris
BY PABLO PICASSO
THE BULLFIGHT.



THE
M例如​阳​区​。
DIAL
IX
OXXXII
SEPTEMBER 1923
ON THE ISLAND
BY KNUT HAMSUN
Translated from the Norwegian by W. W. Worster
THERE
WHERE are many islands on that broken coast, and one small
one called Blaamandso, a place of barely a hundred souls.
But the next one to it is far bigger; three or even four hundred
people there might be, with some sort of official. And a church
a
there is too, by reason of which they call it Kirkeoen. Since I was
a child there's come a post office there, and the telegraph as well.
Among these island folk ’tis always reckoned a finer thing to be
from the big island; even those from the mainland were not reck-
oned for much by folk from Kirkeoen, though they came from the
biggest place of all. They are fisherfolk all, for miles round.
All the Atlantic washes the shores of Blaamandso, so far to sea it
lies. And every face of it sheer cliff, unscalable on three sides;
only the south, towards the sun at noon, is a track where God and
man have made a passable way up over the rock; a stairway of two
hundred steps. After every storm at sea a mass of timber, planks,
and wreckage comes in from the sea, and of this driftwood the
boat-builders make their craft. They carry the planks up those
two hundred steps, build the boats there in among their huts, to
wait till winter comes, and the northward cliffs are blue with the
smooth-polished ice; then, with pulley and rope, they send the
boats down over that glassy scarp and launch them so. I saw it
done myself when I was a child; two men stood up on the cliff
above, paying out the rope, while one sat in the boat, fending it off
wherever it threatened to catch. 'Twas a work of courage and care,


210
ON THE ISLAND
with now and then a quiet-voiced hail from above or below. But
when the boat took water at last, the man on board would shout to
his fellows: “Avast heaving now, she'll do.” No more than that he
said, though it seemed no little thing to have got her safely down.
The biggest hut on the island belongs to honest old Joachim, the
boat-builder. There the Christmas dance was held, year after year;
the place would hold four to six couples easily at a time. For the
music, there was a fiddler, and beside him sat a man by name
Didrik, whose office it was to make a sort of vocal harmony to the
tune, and beat time heavily with both feet. The young men danced
in their shirt-sleeves.
There was one young lad who went about playing host, as it
were, while the others danced, and that was Joachim's youngest
son, a boat-builder himself. He was looked up to by all for his skill
and his clever head: Marcelius, one maiden would think to herself,
and Marcelius, the next; his name was known even among the girls
of Kirkeoen itself. But Marcelius thought all the while only of
Frederikke, the schoolmaster's daughter, though she, to be sure, was
a lady, and talked like the people in books, and so proud a creature
altogether, he could never hope to win her. The schoolmaster's
house was a big place too, and being no fisherman, but a man of po-
sition, he had curtains to his windows, and it was customary to
knock at his door instead of walking straight in. But Marcelius
held faithfully and blindly to his love. He had been to the school-
master's house the year before, and he came again this, going in the
back way, by the kitchen.
“Godkvaeld,” he would say. “I've a word for you, Frederikke.”
“What's it you want with me?” says Frederikke, and goes out-
side with him, knowing well enough what it is.
"Only to ask if you couldn't-you know.”
”
“Nay,” says Frederikke, “that I can't. And you'd be better ad-
vised to think no more of me, Marcelius, nor put yourself in my
way.”
“Ay, I know the new schoolmaster man he's wanting you him-
self,” answered Marcelius. “But it's all to be seen what'll come of
your fine-lady ways.”
And it was true enough, that the new schoolmaster was after
Frederikke. He came from Kirkeoen, and had been to a seminary.
His father was only a fisherman like the rest, but a rich man, better


KNUT HAMSUN
211
off than most. There was always a store of fish on his drying
ground, and pork and butter in his larder. When the son came
back from the seminary, he looked as fine a fellow as the priest's
son himself, who was at the university; whiskers down his cheeks
and a handkerchief in his pocket and a string of elastic hanging
down from his hat, to look smart. The handkerchief in particular
brought him no end of chaff; 'twas a wonderful saving lad, said
folk, that Simon Rust, so careful he was to keep what common folk
threw away.
.
.
"He's ordered a new boat from us,” said Marcelius. "And Lord
send it may serve him well.”
“What makes you say that ?" asked Frederikke.
“Seems I can't help it," answered Marcelius. “A green strake he
wants, no less; well and good, I'll paint it green. But he wants a
name painted on besides, and that he'll have to do himself.”
“A name on it? Whatever for?''
“Ay, did you ever hear the like? And 'tis no pleasure craft
neither, but a common four-oar boat.
You'd better think it
over, Frederikke, if you couldn't make do with me after all.”
“But I can't, I tell you. I've given my heart to him.”
“Given your heart to him, have you?” says Marcelius. “Well,
well ..." And he walks away.
Nearing towards Christmas came Simon Rust across from Kir-
keoen, to paint the name on his new boat. He stayed at the old
schoolmaster's house, and Frederikke wore her Sunday dress every
day, with silk ribbons at the neck. And when the name was painted
on, 'twas not many could read the Latin letters, but what it said
was Superfine. That was the boat's name. And 'twas not many
knew what that grand word meant.
Then came a fine clear starlight evening, the night before Christ-
mas Eve. Marcelius went to the schoolmaster's house and asked to
speak with Simon Rust.
“The name's dry now,” said Marcelius.
"Then we'll launch the boat to-morrow,” said Simon Rust.
Said Marcelius again, “It is true you're to have Frederikke?”
“Don't reckon that's any business of yours," answered Master
Simon.
“Maybe not, but all the same, if you'll tell me whether or no,
you shall have the boat for nothing."


212
ON THE ISLAND
Simon Rust thought that over for a bit, giving good heed to
money, as had always been his father's way. Then he called Fred-
erikke, and said to her:
“Isn't it true we're to have each other?"
And Frederikke answered yes, she had given him her heart.
And the stars were so bright, and Frederikke's eyes seemed over-
flowing with joy as she spoke.
On the way home, Marcelius repented bitterly that he had ever
given Simon a boat for nothing. “But I'll see she's in a pretty state
when he gets her,” he said to himself, “I'll go down in her myself
to fend off when she's launched.”
He wandered on from house to house, entering none, just wan-
dering on in the light of the stars and the aurora. Right out to the
northern side of the island he went, where his tackle hung ready to
take the new boat and lower her down to the sea. The Atlantic
roared at the foot of the cliff. And he sat down.
Two small lights showed from a sailing vessel some way out at
sea; farther off, two lights again, from a steamer, heavy and black,
making to the eastward. And Marcelius thought to himself: may
be as well to get on board a ship one day, and away from all.
Frederikke was lost beyond hope; and a sorry business to be here
on the island when she was gone. Well, well.
God in
Heaven help and comfort her all her days.
And as for
damaging Simon's boat, the Lord forgive him for that evil thought;
never fear now, but he'd do his best to get her clear and safely
down. Ay, that was the way.
He got up and was turning to make for home, when there came
a faint call, a cry, and he stopped to listen. Someone was coming
towards him.
"Is it you, Frederikke?”
“Yes, I only came to say · you won't do anything
harm to yourself, Marcelius?”
“I was just walking a bit,” said Marcelius.
But she took his arm, and said again:
“For there's no sense in taking it so to heart. And besides, I'm
not quite sure myself yet.”
"Not sure ?"
“Oh, what's it to be ?” she exclaimed. "He was all different just
now. I can't trust him as I can you. He tries to get out of it some-
times. Only to-day he said, better wait and see.”
.
.
.
.
.


KNUT HAMSUN
213
Marcelius answered nothing to all this, and they walked on a
little. But Frederikke, kind and thoughtful for all her trouble of
mind, broke out suddenly:
"Anyhow, you mustn't give him the boat for nothing.”
“No, no,” said Marcelius.
At the cross roads she gave him her hand, and said, “I must go
back now, or he'll be angry. He may have seen the way I went.”
And they said good-night and went their ways.
Next day was calm, and the sea smooth. Honest Joachim and
his two sons had been up before daybreak, getting the boat over to
the tackles at the north side of the island; all the men of the place
had come to help, lest the fine new boat should be roughly handled
on the way. And there she hung now, a slender beauty, decked out
ready for the start.
The old schoolmaster had persuaded his smart young colleague
to put off the crossing to Kirkeoen until afternoon, and it was just
time. Matters between the newly betrothed seemed little bettered
from the night before; they walked far apart along the path, and
she that should have been his sweetheart seemed uneasy in her
mind. When they came up, Joachim and his men were there. All
bared their heads when the two schoolmasters and their companion
appeared.
“All ready ?' asked Simon.
“All ready," answered Joachim. “As far as we can see.”
Then suddenly Frederikke cries anxiously:
“Oh, Marcelius, be careful going down to-day. Can't someone
else go down in the boat instead?”
All turned to listen.
"He's well enough used to the work,” says Joachim, who was the
lad's father.
"It's an ugly thing of a boat with a name on,” says Frederikke.
"You don't understand, my child,” corrected her father gently.
“It's a very fine name indeed.”
Then
says Simon Rust sharply: "I'll go down in her myself.”
All tried to dissuade him, but Simon clambered up and took his
place in the boat. Still they begged him not to go, but Simon an-
swered proudly, with finality:
"No need for Frederikke to be anxious now."
"Well, make yourself properly fast,” says Joachim, handing a
length of line.


214
ON THE ISLAND
“Lower away,” cried Simon impatiently.
The ropes were loosened, and the boat began to move. Simon
found the end of his hat-guard and fastened it to a button.
A shout from Joachim, and Simon answers from below; he is
over the edge now, and neither can see the other. Simon, on his
dignity, answers the hails from above more and more briefly, as if
making light of such a trifle; at last no answer comes at all. Mar-
celius, having nothing to do, stands a little way off.
“He must be midway by now,” says Joachim. “A good lad
enough, for sure.” Then comes a hail from far below. A new sort
of hail, that the men are all unused to hear: instead of "Avast
heaving—she'll do,” comes a cry, "Au, au,” and a heavy jerking of
the signal line. Those above take it to mean “Haul up a bit," and
Joachim and his men start hauling. Then, sharp and piercing
comes a scream from out of the depths, and a thumping of the boat
against the rocky walls; as if the island itself were coughing all at
a
once.
All turned pale; the ropes hung suddenly slack. Then a confu-
sion of cries and questioning; “Lower a bit,” says Joachim, and
then again “Haul.” But all know it is to little purpose now; the
boat is empty; Simon has upset it and himself been dashed into the
sea.
Then suddenly the church bells from Kirkeoen over the water-
ringing Christmas in. A sorry Christmas it will be!
But Frederikke was thoughtful and kindly as ever; she went up
to Marcelius, and said: "Heaven forgive me for the sin, but I'm
glad it was not you.—What are you standing about up here for?
Why don't you go down to the south side and get out a boat to
look for him?"
All saw that she was right, and there was a hurrying of men
across to the other side. Only Joachim, the honest old boat-builder,
stayed behind.
II
“And I can't stand here holding her up for ever,” thought Joa-
chim to himself. “Either I'll have to haul up again, and that's
more than I can alone, or let her down to the water.” He thought
it over soundly for yet a while, then he let go.
But now a strange thing happened: the rope ran out for a bare


KNUT HAMSUN
215
a
half-minute, and then hung slack on his hands. He hauled in a
fathom and let go again; the boat took water once more. The old
man's face brightened, and he looked round eagerly for someone to
whom he might tell the news. If the boat were only a couple of
fathoms off the water, Simon Rust could hardly have been badly
hurt by the fall. Only a question now whether he might be drown-
ing down below.
“Hurry, lads,” cried Joachim, hailing across to the other side.
“There's a chance for him yet.”
And while he still held the slack line, there came a tug; as it
might be a hand grasping the side of the boat below. “Maybe it's
only the wash of the water,” thought Joachim. And he called
down:
"Are you safe?"
But the Atlantic drew its heavy breath, and there came no an-
swer from below.
Still he held the line. He might have made it fast meanwhile,
and waited at his ease, but 'twas no time to be at ease, thought Joa-
chim, when here was a learned man, knowing books and all man-
ner of things, maybe called away that very hour. A powerful
strange thing was life, beyond understanding.
A long quarter of an hour went by. When the wind carried that
way, Joachim could hear the bells from Kirkeoen, and the sound
came solemnly, mysteriously. Then he heard voices down by the
water; the boat with the rescue party had come round. His own
boys were rowing, and they, he knew, would bring her swiftly
enough. He held his breath and listened.
“There he is,” cries Marcelius.
"Is he there?" calls Joachim from above.
A little after, he can feel the line he holds being loosened from
the boat; he leans out over the cliff-edge and calls:
"Is he alive?"
And Marcelius calls back: “Ay, you can haul in your end now.”
”
“Praise and thanks to the Lord,” murmured Joachim. And haul-
ing in the line, he took a quid of tobacco, and set off to the south
side to meet the others on the way. An altogether honest soul was
Joachim. And as he went, he could not but reckon out in his own
way what had happened in the matter of Simon Rust and his nar-
row escape from death. . . Simon was a learned and a wily
humbug, that was about the size of it; like as not he'd tipped the


216
ON THE ISLAND
boat over on purpose, and jumped out himself, when there was
only a couple of fathoms to water, and no harm. “It was a rascally
trick,” thought Joachim to himself.
At the waterside he came upon the schoolmaster and his daugh-
ter.
"He's safe,” said Joachim.
"Safe,” exclaimed Frederikke. "What do you mean?”
"He's safe.”
The old schoolmaster said "Praise and thanks," as Joachim had
done, and was heartily glad. But Frederikke was strangely quiet.
When the two boats came in, there sat Simon Rust at the oars,
rowing with all his might; he was wet through, and feeling cold.
“Are you hurt?” cried Frederikke. “And where's your hat ?"
"We couldn't find it," answered Marcelius.
“Then you might have lent him your cap at least,” said Fred-
erikke, very thoughtful now for Simon's comfort.
“He wouldn't have it,” answered Marcelius.
“No, indeed, thank you,” said Simon himself. “I wouldn't have
it.” And he drew himself up haughtily, though he was shivering
with cold.
The old schoolmaster fell to questioning his young colleague and
fellow-teacher about the accident, and Simon gave his account.
'Twas a wonderful strange way of speaking, thought Joachim,
with the two of them together. Simon Rust explained that swim-
ming was part of the curriculum at the seminary, and this had
proved his salvation. But he had suffered the agonies of Tantalus
before the rescue party came in sight. He wished, he said, to re-
count the entire occurrence precisely as it had happened, so that no
unauthorized version should subsequently get about.
“There's just one thing I'd like to know," he said, turning to
Frederikke. "What did you feel like, Frederikke, when the boat
upset and you thought I was lost ?”
"What I felt like?” stammered Frederikke.
“And what were your first words?”
Frederikke pulled herself together quickly.
"It was I that got them to go down at once and look for you,”
she said.
“Good,” said Simon.
Marcelius said nothing. He understood that she had given her
heart to Simon Rust once more.
.


KNUT HAMSUN
217
C
"We'd better go back quickly and get him some dry things,” said
the old schoolmaster. "Truly a miraculous escape from peril of
death."
All helped to get the boats up on shore, and Marcelius made no
difference between the two, but set chocks under Simon's boat as
well as his own, to save warping. Then he let the others go on
ahead, and walked home, miserable at heart.
That evening, Frederikke came on some errand to the house next
door, but did not call in to see Marcelius. He went out on the step
himself to wait for her coming out.
“Godkvaeld,” he said, as she appeared. “Out walking this eve-
ning?"
“I'd an errand here," she said. “What did you think of that
miracle to-day?"
"Why,” said Marcelius, “I can tell you that at once. I don't
call that any sort of miracle at all.”
“Ho! And suppose you'd fallen out of the boat, would you
have managed to get saved ?"
“He didn't fall out. He jumped out when she was all but a
couple of fathoms down, that's what father says.”
“Jumped out? Well, that's more again than you'd have done."
Marcelius was silent.
“For you can't swim,” Frederikke went on. "And you haven't
learned all the things he has. You haven't learned to play the
organ.
“Then I suppose you'll have each other now?” said Marcelius.
“I don't know,” she answered. “But it looks that way.”
Then said Marcelius bitterly: "Well, it's all one to me then;
the two of you can have the boat for nothing, as I said.”
Frederikke thought a moment, then she said:
“Why, yes, if it comes to anything between us, we can have the
boat, as you said. But if he breaks it off with me, then it'll be you
and
me, and he'll have to pay us for the boat.”
Marcelius showed no surprise at this decision; he only asked:
"And when shall I know what it's to be?"
"He's going home to-morrow,” said Frederikke. “I suppose he'll
speak about it then. But I can't very well ask him myself, can I ?"
But Marcelius was to wait some months yet before he knew.
Simon Rust went home for Christmas, and nothing was settled
with Frederikke before he left; then he asked several of the girls


218
ON THE ISLAND
from Kirkeoen if they would have him, and everyone was willing
enough, by reason of his father's wealth. But Simon would not
bind himself to any, but kept himself free to choose. At last he
went so far as to try the governess at the vicarage, but she was a
lady, high up in the world, and would not hear of marrying Simon
Rust.
All this came to Frederikke's ears, and she fretted more than was
good for her over the news.
Twelfth Night was near, and there was to be the usual dance at
Joachim's, with Marcelius to play the host as he always did. The
fiddler was bidden, and Didrik whose business it was to beat time
with his feet was likewise warned to be ready. The lads had chosen
their girls to come, and Frederikke had promised Marcelius to be
there.
Then one day came a four-oar boat to the island, with a message
from Simon's father, bidding Frederikke to a dance over at Kir-
keoen the same evening. Frederikke got ready at once, and put on
the finest she had for the occasion.
Marcelius came down to the waterside. “Well,” he said, “I sup-
pose you'll be getting it settled this time?”
“Yes, it'll surely be settled this time,” said Frederikke.
And all the way across she sat in the boat looking as if she had
made up her mind for good.
Old Master Rust came down to meet her, and in the evening,
when the dance had begun, she was greatly in demand among the
lads that were bidden. But Simon, the son of the house, was the
same as ever, jesting with each and all, and most wishful to leave
things all unsettled still with Frederikke.
At intervals throughout the evening coffee and drinks were
served round, and old Master Rust saw to it that there was enough
and to spare. He himself sat in the little side room with a few of
the older fishermen. Simon took a glass now and again himself
just by way of showing he was not too proud, but for the rest, it
was beneath his dignity to go dancing with fisher-girls, now that he
was a pedagogue, entrusted with the care of youth.
At last, when all the others had gone, Frederikke was left alone
with Simon-she was to stay the night. But even now he was no
more affectionate towards her than before, and she would have been
foolish indeed to take an occasional nudge for the sign of a lasting
passion.


KNUT HAMSUN
219
“I just came out for a breath of fresh air,” said Frederikke.
a
“That's a thing to be careful about,” said Simon. “Night air's
not infrequently bad for the lungs."
"What's the barn door opened for, I wonder?” said Frederikke
pointing across.
Simon could not say.
"Hadn't we better go and shut it?" she asked.
They went across to the barn, and the night was bright with
stars and the northern lights.
Frederikke peeped into the barn and said:
"Have you plenty of fodder in now ?”
And they stepped in to see.
“There's a heap of hay there, and another over there,” said
Simon.
"Where?"
Simon stepped down into the hay and showed her.
And Frederikke followed after.
III
Marcelius was bidden to wait a little while yet, with a vague
half-promise that he might win her after all. And again he waited
patiently in hope. But when Shrovetide came, and that was in
March, Frederikke was no longer in doubt, and told Marcelius, no,
there was no help for it now; 'twas Simon was to have her.
“Ay, well,” said Marcelius.
And he said no word of the boat this time. She might have the
boat for nothing now, 'twas all one to him. Also, he had had time
to prepare for his fate, and all that spring Marcelius might be seen
stolidly at his work as before. But he was far from well in mind,
and kept much to himself.
Days were drawing out now, and sun and warmth clearing away
the snow; there would soon be an end of sending boats down
over the ice-covered cliff on the northern side. The boat-builders
lounged about idle for a week or so, but when the spring storms
were past, and the Atlantic calm again, they set to work at their
season's fishing close in round the island. On one of these trips,
Marcelius and his brother earned a pretty sum of money, salving
a dismasted schooner that was drifting derelict.
There was no gainsaying the fact that Marcelius was more looked


220
ON THE ISLAND
)
up to than ever by all on the island after this feat, and going down
each day to look at the wreck, that lay moored close off the landing
place, he might have been taken for the captain of the schooner
himself. The Danish owners wrote and paid over the salvage; a
big sum it was to the island folk, but they made it bigger still as the
story was told, till at last it grew to a fabulous tale. Marcelius had
made a fortune in salvage; Marcelius was about to set up in busi-
ness as a trader under the style of Marcelius Joachimsen & Co. . .
Marcelius went to Frederikke one day, and said:
"I
suppose you've settled now for good that it's to be Simon ?”
“Yes,” she said, “it's settled now for good.”
She took up her knitting and walked across home with him. On
the way she said:
“If it had been like the old days now, I'd have asked you to row
across to Simon and bring him back. But you're a great man now,
Marcelius.”
“Why as to that,” said Marcelius, “I'll show you I'm no more
than I was.”
And he went off faithfully and rowed across to fetch Simon.
After Simon had been and gone back again, Marcelius waited
his chance to speak with Frederikke again, and asked, in his blind-
ness:
"You're still set on it, I suppose, with him?"
"Yes,” said Frederikke. “And there's good reason now to have
it as soon as may
be.”
"Why, then, there's no more to be said.”
“You know what it is,” said Frederikke, "when you've given
your heart. I've never cared for any one really, but him.”
Marcelius made no answer to this, seeing it was only fanciful
talking like people in books. He asked her in to have a cup of cof-
fee, but she said no, 'twas not worth his while. Then as she was
going, she remembered about the boat.
“You'll hardly care about being paid for the boat now, of
course,” she said, “now you're so rich. Simon told me to ask you."
"I don't care about the boat," he said. "Thank the Lord, I've
,
enough of money and suchlike for now.—They will be asking in
church for you I suppose. When's it to be?”
“In a fortnight."
"What about the sheep that are out ?” he asked. “Have you
thought about getting them in ?”
a


KNUT HAMSUN
221
“Have you
"That can wait for a week or so yet,” she answered. “It's early
in the year, the snow's not gone yet."
“Ay, I was only asking,” he said.
They had a kind of sheep of the coarse-fleeced Iceland strain.
They were left to run wild on one of the small islets winter and
summer alike, getting their food as they might. Once a year they
were brought in for the shearing, in the spring, when the weather
had grown warm enough.
A fortnight later the bans were read for Simon Rust and Fred-
erikke in the church at Kirkeoen. At last it was really settled be-
tween the pair of them, and the neighbours had been waiting long
to see it. The very same evening Frederikke was over at Joachim's
house, light-hearted and merry now as could be.
“Good luck and a blessing," said the boat-builder's wife.
“I heard your name in church to-day.”
"Sure you weren't mistaken ?” said Frederikke jestingly.
“Luck and a blessing,” said Marcelius in his turn.
thought about the sheep yet?”
Frederikke laughed at that, and said:
“You're in a great hurry about the sheep this year. What's come
over you I wonder? You were talking about it ages ago.
“I only asked,” he said. “It came into my mind.”
“Anyhow, I was going to tell you, you can get someone to go out
with you to-morrow, if you
like?”
“Someone to go with me?" he repeated quickly. “But you'll
hardly care about going yourself now, I suppose ?''
Frederikke had half resolved not to go this spring, for reasons,
but at Marcelius' crafty question she flushed a little, and said:
"Oh, indeed? And why not, I should like to know?"
Frederikke was loath to admit she had grown less active these
last few weeks; she would go out this year as she had done before,
and help to bring in the sheep.
Then Marcelius went out, and did not return till she had left.
Marcelius walked down the few steps to where the boat-building
was done; a longish hollow, with slipways for all kinds of boats,
from a ketch to a ten-oar. He straightened up the place all round,
and cleaned the floor. It was towards the end of May now, and
light till eleven or later at night. Then he went to the landing
place, his boat was there, resting steadily on the chocks, as if it were
looking at him. It was midnight before he went home.
a
a


222
ON THE ISLAND
He did not undress, but sat on the side of the bed; his elder
brother was already asleep. Marcelius went to the window, and
looked out. "Herregud, Herregud,” he murmured softly, and go-
ing back to the bed, lay down, but without undressing. All night
he lay awake, then, as soon as he heard his mother lighting the fire
below, he got up, called his brother, and went down. It was only
four o'clock.
“You're early astir," said his mother.
“I was thinking of the sheep,” he said. “If we're to get them all
in for the shearing, we'll have to be starting out in good time.”
All three got ready, the two lads and their mother, and went over
to the schoolmaster's, waiting outside till Frederikke appeared.
Frederikke had only the serving maid with her. They were five in
all when they got to the boat.
The two brothers rowed steadily and easily, the women talking
together the while. The sun came up, and the islet where the sheep
were pastured lay there heavy and calm, as if afloat. The sheep
had marked the approach of the boat from afar, and stood now
staring in astonishment, forgetting to graze. The party in the boat
made as little noise as possible, not to frighten the shy beasts more
than need be.
But the sheep had forgotten the coming of just such a boat the
year before, and stared as if they had never in their lives seen such
a vision. They let the boat come in, and in their marvellous stu-
pidity made no move; not till the keel grounded on the shore did
one old shaggy wether fall to trembling. It cast a glance at its fel-
lows, and then again at the boat. Suddenly—just as the boat was
drawn up, and the five human beings stood still for a moment on
,
the beach—the wether decided that this was a thing perilous be-
yond all perils it had known; turning suddenly it dashed off wildly
across the island. And the others followed at once.
“They'll be none so easy to catch this year,” said the women one
to another.
The party moved up over the island. The first thing to do was
to get hold of a lamb, then the mother would be more easily taken.
They toiled all through the morning before they managed to cap-
ture a full-grown sheep. One flock made in a fright down towards
the boat, and maddened with fear, dashed into the sea; Marcelius
waded out and caught them, one by one.
“Now you're all wet,” said Frederikke.


KNUT HAMSUN
223
The women sat down to the shearing, while the two brothers
stood ready with three fresh beasts in leash. Marcelius was close
by Frederikke. And the spring sun shone warm and full upon
them all.
“That's my second,” said Frederikke. She stuffed the wool into
a sack and rose to her feet.
“Come and see if we two can get hold of one by ourselves,” said
Marcelius. His voice quivered strangely as he spoke.
Frederikke moved to his side, and they walked off together, out
of hearing of the others.
“They're over on the other side, I think,” said Frederikke.
"Let's look over here first," answered Marcelius.
And they crossed over to the north on the shady side, but there
were no sheep.
“They'll be out on the point there,” said Marcelius, hurrying
forward. But Frederikke was no longer light of foot as she had
been, and fell behind a little. Marcelius took her hand and drew
a
her on, talking in a loud, unnatural fashion:
“Come along and I'll show you. I'll show you.”
“Don't shout like that, you'll frighten them all away,” said
Frederikke, thinking of the work in hand.
“I'll show you," he cried again. “And I'll teach you to play the
organ.
“But—whatever's the matter?" she cried, looking at him keenly.
His face was changed beyond all knowing.
Then she tried to draw back, but Marcelius held her firmly,
dragging her till her shoes slithered over the rocks. And suddenly
she realized that he was dragging her to her death; her courage
failed her, and she grew helpless. Without word or cry she was
dragged to the edge of the cliff and flung over.
So paralysed was she that she did not even grasp at him to save
herself, Marcelius stood there safe and sound, though he had meant
they should go together.
He looked round anxiously, to see if the others were following,
but there was no one to be seen. He peered down over the cliff;
the heavy wash of the water came up from below; the sea had
taken her already. It was his turn now to follow: he pulled down
his vest and made to throw himself over, but drew back again, and
looked about for a path. And clambering down, he tried each foot-
hold carefully, lest he should slip. Then at half way, he remem-


224
CROCUS
bered that there was no need for such care-it mattered little if he
fell and hurt himself now—but he moved down as cautiously as
before.
The sea came right up to the face of the cliff. A few feet from
the water Marcelius stopped. He took off his coat and vest; they
might be of some use to another. Then clasping his hands, he
prayed God receive his soul, for Jesus Christ's sake. Then he
Leaped.
CROCUS
BY ALFRED KREYMBORG
When trees have lost remembrance of the leaves
that spring bequeathes to summer, autumn weaves
and loosens mournfully—this dirge, to whom
dues it belong-who treads the hidden loom?
When peaks are overwhelmed with snow and ice,
and clouds with crape bedeck and shroud the skies-
nor any sun or moon or star,
can wedge a path of light through such black dreams-
it seems,
all motion cold, and dead all trace thereof:
What sudden shock below, or spark above,
starts torrents raging down till rivers surge-
that aid the first small crocus to emerge?
The earth will turn and spin and fairly soar,
that couldn't move a tortoise foot before-
and planets permeate the atmosphere
till misery depart and mystery clear!
And yet, so insignificant a hearse?--
who gave it the endurance so to brave
such elements ?—shove winter down a grave ?-
and then lead on again the universe ?


HENRY JAMES: AN INTERNATIONAL
EPISODE
BY VAN WYCK BROOKS
"IT'S
T'S a wretched business,” said Roderick Hudson, “this vir-
tual quarrel of ours with our own country, this everlasting
impatience that so many of us feel to get out of it. Can there be
no struggle then, and is one's only safety in flight?” This was the
great question which, for a dozen years, had filled the horizon of
Henry James. Later, in his life of Story, he was to speak of it as
an inward drama that has enacted itself in thousands of breasts and
thousands of lives. “There is often,” he adds, in the same con-
nexion, "a conflict of forces as sharp as any of those in which the
muse of history, the muse of poetry, is usually supposed to be in-
terested.”
For several years he had been travelling uneasily back and forth
between Europe and America. “The great fact for us all there [at
home],” he writes in a letter from Florence, in 1874, "is that, relish
Europe as we may, we belong much more to that than to this, and
stand in a much less factitious and artificial relation to it.” Be-
yond everything else there was one consideration that must have
weighed heavily with him: the writers he most admired were sat-
urated with the atmosphere of their own countries. Of Turgenev
he observes: "His works savour strongly of his native soil, like
those of all great novelists." Like the works of Balzac, for ex-
ample, the greatest of his masters, like the works of George Eliot
and George Sand, like those even of Flaubert, Zola, Daudet, Mau-
passant, whom he was to meet, with whom he was to talk, and who
were to reveal to him so many of the secrets of the craft. Could
one advance very far as a novelist without that particular satura-
tion? There was Hawthorne, his own American Hawthorne: what
light did Hawthorne throw upon this perplexing question ? A
light, alas, that was anything but reassuring. Hawthorne, James
was obliged to remark, "forfeited a precious advantage in ceasing
to tread his native soil. Half the virtue of The Scarlet Letter and
The House of the Seven Gables is in their local quality: they are im-


226 HENRY JAMES: AN INTERNATIONAL EPISODE
pregnated with the New England air.” One had only to consider
The Marble Faun beside these works! "He has described the streets
and monuments of Rome with a closeness which forms no part of
his reference to those of Boston and Salem. But for all this he in-
curs that penalty of seeming factitious and unauthoritative which
is always the result of an artist's attempt to project himself into an
atmosphere in which he has not a transmitted and inherited prop-
erty.” Disturbing thoughts for a young novelist at the cross roads!
Yes; with the examples of all these other novelists in his mind,
Henry James was aware that he had much at stake. Not for noth-
ing, in spite of his fears, had he given his own country a "good
trial": all the great novelists had had worlds to interpret, it was
necessary to have one's world, and had any one ever heard of a
novelist-a serious novelist—whose world was not the matrix of
his own inherited instincts? Linger as one might in fancy over this
or that'alien paradise, could one ever be anything else than the
child of one's own people, could one truly engraft oneself upon an-
other civilization, engraft oneself so completely as to assimilate it
and live it and re-live it and create from it? Possibly; conceiv-
ably. Still, how much one would have to risk! At the lowest es-
timate, one would have as it were to be born again; one would have
to undergo a second education; one would have to learn the
ropes
of life anew; one would have to acquire by study, by concentrated
effort, those innumerable elements of the soul of a people which the
native absorbs with his mother's milk. Oh, one could make up
stories as readily about England or France as about the land of
Cockaigne! But to express the genius of the race in the manner of
!
the masters—was that compassable? How easily one might suc-
ceed only in losing one's own world without gaining any other!
How easily one might expend all one's energy in the preliminary
effort to grasp one's material! And one would be working quite
without precedent, one would be leaping in the dark.
These thoughts, we may be sure, presented themselves in their
full force to the mind of Henry James. They must inevitably have
arisen out of the situation in which he found himself and of which
the two outstanding elements were that he dreamed of being a nov-
elist after the pattern of the greatest and that he stood in the most
equivocal of relationships to the society in which he had been born.
They pressed upon his troubled consciousness: at least, it is difficult


VAN WYCK BROOKS
227
to explain otherwise why, as Mr Lubbock puts it, “the satisfaction
of his wish”—to return to Europe—"was delayed for as long as it
was.” He had ample means, and “his doubtful health,” as Mr
Lubbock says, “can hardly have amounted to a hindrance, and the
authority of his parents was far too light and sympathetic to stand
in his way." He had seen that he could not so easily relinquish his
heritage, that he must make every effort to find himself in relation
to the society that had formed his instincts and that stood behind
him as an infinite prolongation of his own deepest self, that some
profound principle, so to speak, of the novelist's life was involved
in his ambiguous position. A principle? Why was it that Dosto-
evsky had crushed in himself a similar dream of going to live in
Europe when he perceived that in Europe he became “less Rus-
sian,” when he realized that he was “capable of being absorbed by
Europe?” And why was it that Turgenev returned to Russia, for a
“strengthening bath,” every summer, to the end of his life? And
what was the significance of Renan's remark that a world lived in
Turgenev and spoke through his lips, that generations of ancestors,
lost and speechless in the slumber of the ages, found in him life and
utterance? “The silent spirit of collective masses,” said Renan, in
that wonderful valedictory to the body of his Russian friend, “is
the source of all great things.” The great writer is the voice of his
own people: that was the principle, the principle of which every
European novelist of the first order had been a living illustration,
and James had been too intelligent not to perceive it. Il faut vivre,
combattre et finir avec les siens! And he had lingered, he had
waited, he had hesitated
and it had been quite useless.
A fixed idea had prevented him from throwing himself into the life
that he feared, and that life, which he had never challenged, had
grown more formidable every day. Was it a choice between losing
one's soul and losing one's senses, between surviving as a spiritual
cripple and not surviving at all? In any case, principle or no prin-
ciple, there was only one course open to him: he must escape.
And as for principles, had any one ever yet explored all the possi-
bilities of the literary life?
It is improbable that James clearly formulated in his own mind
the possible consequences of his action. It is certain, on the other
hand, that what he felt, on his return to Europe, was an immense
relief, an immense delight. He had crossed the Alps in 1869, and


228 HENRY JAMES: AN INTERNATIONAL EPISODE
sweet.
.
“the wish—the absolute sense of need—to see Italy again” had op-
pressed him during the following year at home. He had come back,
to Rome, to Florence, to Venice, before he had at last settled in
Paris; he had come back, and with what sensations! Had he not
grasped there, truly grasped, "what might be meant by the life of
art”? Those elements of accumulation in the human picture, those
infinite superpositions of history, those fragments of the festal
past! Those mellowed harmonies of tint and contour, those clus-
tered shadows amid the ruins! And the starlit nights at Florian's,
and the rides on the Campagna, and the rambles over the Tuscan
countryside, with a volume of Stendhal in one's pocket!
“I have come on a pilgrimage,” says the hero of one of his early
stories. “To understand what I mean, you must have lived, as I
have lived, in a land beyond the seas, barren of romance and grace.
This Italy of yours, on whose threshold I stand, is the home of his-
tory, of beauty, of the arts—of all that makes life splendid and
Here I sit for the first time in the enchanted air
in which love and faith and art and knowledge are warranted to
become deeper passions than in my own chilly clime. I begin to
behold the promise of my dreams.
The air has a per-
fume; everything that enters my soul, at every sense, is a sugges-
tion, a promise, a performance.”
James' own salute-
was it not ?—to the "sublime synthesis” of Europe.
But Italy had not held him. He had fairly reeled through the
streets of Rome in a fever of enjoyment. Rome, Florence, Venice:
Italy and youth, youth and, if not love, at least moonlight-he had
known them all. But he had had his wits about him; he had been
systematic in the midst of his ecstasies; he had been alert. He had
written Roderick Hudson during those months, and not for himself
had fate and a forewarning conscience predestined such a career as
that luckless artist's! He had known sweet, full, calm hours, hours
in which everything in him had been stilled and absorbed in the
steady perception of that wondrous panorama. In those venerable
cities how life had revelled and postured in its strength! How sen-
timent and passion had blossomed and flowered! What a wealth
of mortality had ripened and decayed! His aesthetic sense had
seemed for the first time to live a sturdy creative life of its own.
Yet something had always been amiss there; it was, after all, a mu-
seum world-one lingered at one's peril. Had he not found in
.
a
a


VAN WYCK BROOKS
229
>
a
Rome the relics, the remnants of the ancient American group-
"much broken up, or rather broken down”-Story's, even Haw-
thorne's group, that little circle of easy artistry and sociability
which had had its high moments, moments of Mazzini, moments of
the Brownings, and had listened so long to the sirens that the slow
years had lapped it round and left it there, a shadow, an echo, a
dream? That, in the golden air, was the doom of the American
artist! And as for "Italian life," how could one ever grasp it?
Italy, for an alien, was like some strange, iridescent shell-fish in the
hands of a child: the living organism lurked too far within, and the
shell was irrefrangible, and the shape and the colour were so en-
trancing that one forgot everything else. Had not Hawthorne,
with all his perseverance and all his magic, shown just how help-
less, in such conditions, the American novelist was?
No,
Italy was the casket of gold, but the treasure was not hidden there.
He must try the silver casket next, and then the casket of lead.
It was to Paris that James repaired when, at thirty-two, he left
America for good, and "it does not seem to have occurred to him at
the time,” says Mr Lubbock, “to seek a European home anywhere
else.” Nevertheless, he remained in Paris scarcely a year: why did
he go there, what did he gain from his year's adventure, and why
did he leave so soon? Between the lines of his letters and his es-
says we seem to discern the story: to the end of his life James was
to look back upon this year as, in a certain sense, his annus mirabile.
a
,
Paris.
It had been the second, the more essen-
tial, nursery of his intellect: what secrets he had learned there,
secrets of the craft that he was never to forget! He had always
known that art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curi-
osity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the
comparison of standpoints; he had always felt that the best things
come, as a general thing, from the talents that are members of a
group.
And there in Paris he had been welcomed by the Olympi-
ans themselves—by Flaubert and Turgenev. Welcomed? Yes.
It was true that they had shown little interest in his own work:
they had found it—had they not ?-proprement écrit, but terribly
pale. The gentle giant from the steppes had even suggested that it
had on the surface too many little flowers and knots of ribbon, that
it was not quite meat for men. That was a pity: one liked to be
appreciated. Still, he had come to Paris, in all piety, for quite an-
.


230 HENRY JAMES: AN INTERNATIONAL EPISODE
other purpose; he had come to learn, and what surprising oppor-
tunities he had encountered! Madame Viardot's Sunday evenings
had not been very amusing, since he had no ear; but he had met
Turgenev there, not always on all fours in the act of presenting
some extravagant charade. And he had got the Théâtre Français
by heart: he had had his precious moments even behind the scenes,
behind the veil of the temple of decorum. And there had been
mornings at Auteuil, in Edmond de Goncourt's study, odorous with
the enchanting smell of old books and thronged with articles of
virtu, redolent of the eighteenth century. Best of all, there had
been Flaubert's Sunday afternoons. He had heard the old master
discourse upon Hugo and recite, with his beautiful accent, the son-
nets of Gautier; and he had met the disciples there, Goncourt again,
straight and tall, with his pointer-like nose and his sharp glance,
Zola, pale and sombre, and the indefatigable Daudet, and Guy de
Maupassant, still inédit, with his fantastic tales, Maupassant the
never absent, the apple of the master's eye. What conversation!
Could one ever, in the long future, hope to hear its like again?
Memories indeed, guardian memories, memories to store away in
one's mind, in one's conscience, against the famine years to come!
Thick-witted England would never provide such a feast for one's
insatiable craftsman's appetite. These besotted mandarins, with
their truly infernal intelligence of art, form, manner: well, theirs
was the only work that one would ever be able to respect. They
spoiled one for the English style-save the mark!--the puffy, stuf-
fy, hasty, padded three-decker, informe, ingens, which those ami-
able islanders slapped together and tossed into the face of the pub-
lic. Who could forget Flaubert's thundering objurgations on that
unendurable English lack of the sense of design? Design, plan-
that was the uppermost idea in every mind at those councils at
which one had assisted, silently, in one's corner--listening, while
the Olympians, old and young, with what passion and what convic-
tion, and how systematically and articulately, exchanged their free
confidences on the work of the day, on the pusillanimity, the super-
ficiality, the vulgarity of those who were not Olympians, and on
their own schemes and ambitions. Lightness and shapeliness, grace
and felicity in style, lucidity, logic, the clear image, the just word,
the precise observation: true, these were the arts with which to cul-


VAN WYCK BROOKS
231
а
tivate one's own garden. Counsels of artistic perfection—he had
gathered an inexhaustible store.
Yes, it had been the most wonderful of years. And yet, it was
,
strange, he had come to Paris with the idea perhaps of passing his
life there, and within a year he had wearied of it all. He had
found himself surfeited with the French mind and its utterance.
And why? He had been welcomed by the Olympians, in a sense;
but really welcomed? Had there not been abysses of mental reser-
vation on both sides? He had been privileged to listen: that was
the truth of the matter. He had had only to put in a rash word to
be reminded that his place was below the salt. Even Flaubert, the
huge, the diffident, the courteous and accessible Flaubert, had
abused him, unmercifully, when he had presumed to make some
depreciatory comment on the style of Prosper Mérimée. They
were so hostile and exclusive, at bottom, these Olympians; they
positively preaccepted such a degree of interest in their own behalf.
Even Turgenev, whom they so much admired, had remarked that
the French recognized no originality whatever in other peoples,
that, apart from their own affairs, they were interested in nothing,
they knew nothing. They were the people in the world whom one
had to go more of the way to meet than to meet any other, and did
they sufficiently requite one's effort? Did their conversation, on
such terms, and beyond a certain point, compensate for that ruth-
less abrogation of one's amour-propre? One adored them as crafts-
men, but otherwise? They were ignorant and complacent: they
would discuss by the hour some trifle of Daudet's while they neither
knew nor cared what the great George Eliot was doing across the
Channel. Yes, and they were corrupt! Turgenev felt that also;
quiet aristocrat that he was, he had been disgusted, again and
again, by their cynicism; he had never felt at ease in the atmosphere
of the Magny dinners. Flaubert was out of the picture most of the
time; he was in Paris only for a few months in the winter; and with
the younger men one simply could not become intimate. Was it
possible that he had come to Paris too late, that he would have
been more at home there in the old romantic days? If he had
grown up in France
if he had been still in his twen-
ties.
It was impossible now; and besides, there was some-
thing so harsh and metallic about these naturalists, who dissected
.
•
.


232 HENRY JAMES: AN INTERNATIONAL EPISODE
a
the human organism with the obscene cruelty of medical students,
to whom nothing, or rather everything, everything but art, was
common and unclean, whose talk savoured only of the laboratory
and the brothel. Ah, one's tender dreams of Europe, the soft illu-
sion, the fond hope—was this what lay behind the veil? Perish
the profane suggestion!
Such appear to have been James' sensations, face to face with
the literary Paris of 1876. He loved it and hated it, he was at
once fascinated and shocked by it. He had felt himself for the first
time on his mettle; his perception had been excited to the highest
pitch. Never was he to forget the “sharp contagion" of that su-
perior air, the mysteries of which he had been a witness. But that
was not all: if his artistic sensibilities had been stimulated, his so-
cial and moral sensibilities had been outraged, his pride had been
wounded, his romantic vision of Europe had suffered a cruel wrong.
Such later reminiscences as we find here and there in his Notes on
Novelists, for example, tell us very little about his real feelings at
the time: it is from his writings of the 'seventies, from the general
view of life revealed in those writings, and from the scattered re-
ports one has gathered of his private conversation, that his true at-
titude is to be discerned. Mr Hueffer, for instance, tells us that he
cherished for Flaubert, in reality, a “lasting, deep rancour," that he
"hated” him, that he referred again and again to Flaubert as hav-
ing abused him in the discussion of Mérimée, that he could never
forgive the master for having opened his own door in a dressing-
gown, and would talk of the other writers he had met "not infre-
quently in terms of shuddering at their social excesses,” that he
would relate "unrepeatable stories of the ménages of Maupassant.”
Turn to his own writings of the time, or of the years immediately
preceding it. Had he not, in one of his reviews, reproved Swin-
burne for not striking the moral note or betraying the smallest ac-
quaintance with the conscience? Had he not summed up his ad-
miration for George Eliot by saying that her touchstone was “the
word respectable?” And was he not to make it clear that, when he
dined with members of the Comédie Française, it was only with the
“more genteel” of them? In these writings of his own, as in these
reports of his conversation, we distinguish at least a few of the
"fifty reasons” why, as he wrote to Howells, he could not become
intimate with the literary fraternity of Paris or even “like their


VAN WYCK BROOKS
233
wares.” He had fled from Boston, but he had retained, as we see,
'
the stamp of a very small and homely world.
He had not been able to stomach these ferocious companions, not
for long. But how he had acclaimed their ideas, how he had mar-
velled at their way of doing the very things that he had so seldom
been able to like! He who had reproved Swinburne for not strik-
ing the moral note had also reproved Browning for his neglect of
form; he had remarked, in another review and on the same grounds,
that it was “an offense against humanity” to place Dickens among
the greatest novelists; and he had been repelled by Rubens because
of his wastefulness, his "careless grasp.” He had been ready, in
short, for this Gallic evangel of design, economy, method, and with
what rapture he had embraced it! And there was something else that
he owed to these mandarins, something a little painful, but at the
same time infinitely exhilarating. Why had he listened to them so
silently, so breathlessly? Had he not felt himself at a disadvan-
tage, he who had waited so long in that far-away America, hesitat-
ing, irresolute, chafing to be off, he who was no longer a child and
who had lost perhaps a little of his original capacity to adapt him-
self, to respond fully to this eagerly anticipated opportunity?
How assured these men seemed, even the youngest of them: it was
as if they had been born veterans of the craft. And what pace-
makers they were! How disconcerting, and at the same time how
enlivening!
He had been stirred to a passion of emula-
tion, a "rage of determination," as he was to call it later, "to do,
and triumph.”
Fear-if we must go back to that-fear had given him wings.
“There were 'movements' he was too late for,” Strether is conceived
as thinking in The Ambassadors; “weren't they, with the fun of
them, already spent? There were sequences he had missed and
great gaps in the procession; he might have been watching it all re-
cede in a golden cloud of dust." Strether was middle-aged when
at last he found his way to Paris; but had not James himself shared
and remembered that sensation of being perhaps too late? Had he
not always felt that the great life, the creative life, was a European
secret, that it was almost open to question whether an American
could be an artist at all? “We are the disinherited of art!” says
Theobald in The Madonna of the Future. "We are condemned to
be superficial. We are excluded from the magic circle. The soil


234 HENRY JAMES: AN INTERNATIONAL EPISODE
of American perception is a poor little barren, artificial deposit.
Yes! we are wedded to imperfection. An American, to excel, has
just ten times as much to learn as a European. We lack the deeper
sense: we have neither taste, nor tact, nor force. How should we
.
have them? Our crude and garish climate, our silent past, our
deafening present, the constant pressure about us of unlovely cir-
cumstance, are as void of all that nourishes and prompts and in-
spires the artist as my sad heart is void of bitterness in saying so!
We poor aspirants must live in perpetual exile.” How many times,
in hours of doubt, James must have shared these misgivings! One
thing is clear: he was convinced that he had a long inheritance to
make amends for, that he must win what others had by right of
birth. “He could never forget," as Mr Lubbock says, "that he had
somehow to make up to himself for arriving as an alien from a to-
tally different social climate: for his own satisfaction he had to
wake and toil while others slept.”
The traces of this intense preoccupation are to be found every-
where in his early writings. “I believe in you," says Rowland
Mallet to Roderick Hudson, as they set out for Europe, “if you are
prepared to work and to wait and to struggle and to exercise a great
many virtues.” And again: "For heaven's sake, if
you
have got
facility, revere it, respect it, adore it, hoard it—don't speculate on
it.” But aside from such mere fragments of dialogue as these, how
does it happen that so many of James' characters are represented
as having on their hands some more or less gifted protégé whose
education is their principal object in life? His first novel, Watch
and Ward, describes the bringing up of Nora, the exotic little
Western waif, by her future husband Roger Lawrence. Roderick
Hudson is largely the story of Rowland's endeavour to keep his ex-
travagant young friend in the strait path of self-development. In
The Tragic Muse, Sherringham devotes himself to educating
Miriam Rooth for the stage, while Gabriel Nash's function in life
seems to consist in serving as a sort of conscience for Nick Dormer.
And there is The Bostonians, the theme of which is the struggle
between Ransome and Olive Chancellor for the tutelage of Verena
Tarrant. Do we not distinguish, in the continual recurrence of this
motif, the vestiges of James' own absorption in the problem of edu-
cating himself? These characters are all engaged in remodelling
one another, in preparing one another for a career that involves in-


VAN WYCK BROOKS
235
a
)
finite difficulties, a career that is beset with dangers; and as we
glance at the Notes of a Son and Brother, at the passage on John
La Farge, we seem to discern the thought that lay at the bottom of
James' mind.
Many were the incentives that led to the
development of that steely will of his. There was the pledge that
he had virtually taken to make up in his work for having missed the
war. And how keenly he must have felt the necessity of justifying
his expatriation! We can see in his letters how.conscious he was of
the eyes of Cambridge, not to mention Boston and the “Higgin-
sonian fangs.” But to return to La Farge and those earlier days at
Newport: La Farge was "of the type—the ‘European,'” he re-
marks, "and this gave him an authority for me that it verily took
the length of years to undermine.” And what had been La Farge's
counsel to a fellow-American who had been presumptuous enough
also to dream of the life of art? “The artist's serenity”—so James
interpreted it—"was an intellectual and spiritual capital that must
never brook defeat—which it so easily might incur by a single act
of abdication.” And again: “There was no safety or, otherwise, no
inward serenity or even outward—though the outward came sec-
ondly-unless there was no deflection.” No deflection! The Euro-
pean artist, rejoicing in his strength and his abundant resources,
might permit himself an occasional lapse from the strait and nar-
row path, the American did so at his peril: for him a single act of
abdication might signify the end of all things. “It's a complex
fate, being an American," James wrote in a letter of 1872, “and
one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious
valuation of Europe.” That was the great battle of James' life,
and who can deny that he lost it? But the extremity of the artist
was the opportunity of the craftsman, and we cannot but trace to
this humility the dogged perseverance that was to make him one of
the great workers of literary history.
Meanwhile, to return to Paris, he had been faced with the prob-
lem of discovering a possible terrain. He had tried to take the
measure of his difficulties: he had watched himself as Rowland
watches Roderick—"as my mother at home watches the tea-kettle
she has set to boil.” Never had a man more thriftily learned the
art of nursing his own talent: he was in danger, had he but known
it, of one thing only, the cutting off at their source of the head-
springs of experience.
But now a great practical prob-
>


236 HENRY JAMES: AN INTERNATIONAL EPISODE
lem had risen before him: if he was to abandon America he must
have another field, and where was that field to be found?
There was, to be sure, the world of his fellow-expatriates, the little
world of the "colonies” and the tourists who, like himself, were
adrift in Europe. The Henrietta Stackpoles, the Daisy Millers,
the Christopher Newmans—how vastly amusing they were! He
saw them with the acute receptivity of a fellow-voyager, so to
speak, on shipboard: does one ever see people quite so acutely, quite
so memorably, as in that relation? How startling was the contrast
between these innocents abroad and the ornate, the established
background against which they moved and shifted! And how well
prepared he was to enter into their "predicament,” their thoughts
and their sensations! But after all he possessed here a very limited
domain; he could survey it, he could grasp it in all its aspects, in a
few months—and what then? Did not this parasitical world in-
deed presuppose, as it were, and all but inevitably pass one on to
the "host" upon which it lived? It could not serve him for ever
as a subject; he must have a more substantial, a more permanent
world to represent. And in which direction was he to turn?
He found himself excluded on every side. “I feel for ever how
Europe keeps holding one at arm's length,” he wrote in one of his
letters home, "and condemning one to a meagre scraping of the sur-
face.” And again: “What is the meaning of this destiny of deso-
late exile—this dreary necessity of having month after month to do
without our friends for the sake of this arrogant old Europe which
so little befriends us?” He had tested Italy, and he had found no
one but “washerwomen and waiters," as he remarks, to talk to,
waiters and sacristans and language-masters whom he had had to
pay for their conversation. Where was the great world upon which
his heart was set, or, rather, how was he to penetrate it? “Even a
creature addicted as much to sentimentalizing as I am over the
whole mise-en-scène of Italian life,” he observes, “doesn't find an
easy initiation into what lies behind it.” And what, in sum, had
even France yielded him? “A good deal of Boulevard and third-
rate Americanism; few retributive relations otherwise.” The Con-
tinent was closed to him. “I wondered of course who lived in them,
and how they lived, and what was society in Altdorf,” says the nar-
rator of another of his early stories, referring to the old burgher
mansions in a Swiss town through which he is passing; "longing


VAN WYCK BROOKS
237
ours.
)
plaintively, in the manner of roaming Americans, for a few stray
crumbs from the native social board; with my fancy vainly beating
its wings against the great blank wall, behind which, in travel-
haunted Europe, all gentle private interests nestle away from in-
trusion. Here, as elsewhere, I was struck with the mere surface-
relation of the Western tourist to the soil he treads. He filters
and trickles through the dense social body in every possible direc-
tion, and issues forth at last the same virginal water drop. 'Go
your way, these antique houses seemed to say, from their quiet
courts and gardens; 'the road is yours and welcome, but the land is
You may pass and stare and wonder, but you may never
know us.'” Ah, that arrogant old Europe! Turn where he might,
at the native social board there had been no place for James.
“I have done with 'em forever,” he wrote to his brother in 1876,
"and am turning English all over. I desire only to feed on Eng-
lish life and the contact of English minds—I wish greatly I knew
some. Easy and smooth-flowing as life is in Paris, I would throw
it over tomorrow for an even very small chance to plant myself for
a while in England. If I had but a single good friend in London I
would go thither. I have got nothing important out of Paris nor
am likely to.” But that was an exaggeration. Paris had not
given him a field for the exercise of his talent; on the other hand,
he had acquired there a doctrine, a faith, without which he could
hardly have confronted the future at all. He had grown up artis-
tically under the old dispensation in which the novelist was noth-
ing if not the child of his own people, the voice of his own people.
It was this belief, more than anything else—or so we are led to
assume—that had kept him so long in America; he had had no war-
rant to suppose that he could ever master another world, and his
leap to Europe had been largely a leap in the dark. And here in
Paris he had heard of nothing but “observation”: the writer had
ceased to be called a voice, he had become an animated note-book.
Was it not the burden of those conversations at Flaubert's that one
could “get up” any subject, any field, any world, if one set to work
with sufficient system and lived in one's eyes and one's ears? Had
not the whole Flaubertian brotherhood listened with unqualified
sympathy when Zola set forth the prodigious achievements of his
own sensory organism?
To the end of his life James
cherished for Zola a respect that we find almost inexplicable save
a


238 HENRY JAMES: AN INTERNATIONAL EPISODE
as the result of some profound impression that he had received in
his youth; and is it not the case indeed that Zola had given him the
cue for which he had been waiting? Was it true, after all, as Haw-
thorne had seemed to prove, that a novelist could not successfully
"project himself into an atmosphere in which he had not a trans-
mitted and inherited property ?” Was it really a fact that one's
"native soil” mattered so very much? Zola denied it—if not by
word, at least by every implication of his doctrine: was he not him-
self on the very point of “getting up” Italy with a Baedeker?
To be sure, Zola's Italy.
Even if one couldn't
quite compare the case with Hawthorne’s.
But James
was not in a position to look too closely into a faith that seemed to
assure his own artistic salvation. There is a certain truth in Mr
Lubbock's remark that he went to England “more by a process of
exhaustion than by deliberate choice”: he could not turn back to
· America, and he had found that the Continent was impracticable.
And how his heart leaped at the thought of England, England on
a
any terms!



WOMEN PRAYING IN 8 APOLLINARE NUOVO, RAVENNA.
BY ADOLPH DEHN


1



Paper
/h
DA
BY ADOLPH DEHN
STUDENTS IN THE BORGHESE GARDENS, ROME.


1
1
1


A MOSCOW REHEARSAL
BY MANUEL KOMROFF
Time
HE rehearsal had already begun. The orchestra was dark and
the stage so lit that the dust in the ornate plaster-work about
the lower boxes showed to its greatest advantage.
A humble cottage room was represented in a set painted entirely
with burnt umber. A door at the right, a window and stove at the
left, a table in the centre covered with a peasant blue-and-white
cloth, and one solitary figure in an arm-chair completed the scene.
In the front rows of the orchestra sat several people prominent
in the theatrical world. Hats and coats were piled along the
musicians' rail. The director stood in the centre aisle at about the
sixth row shouting his directions. His face seemed long and sour
as though it had been pressed in at the sides by a lemon squeezer.
From time to time he would turn his back upon the stage and walk
up the aisle bending over and nodding his head as though he were
climbing a hill.
The electricians would creep in now and again from the side and
change one or two of the amber lamps in the footlights. The
actress on the stage was made up with brown paint to give her age.
She rose from the arm-chair and walked up and down awaiting the
decision of the director. As she would turn or bend one caught a
line of bright white skin at the neck of her dress. The brown paint
had not been extended far enough.
“No! No! No!” yelled the director—“Take that line over
again.”
The actress seated herself in the chair, twisted her head about,
and said in a deep clear voice, “I think it is growing colder.”
“What is it growing?" shouted the director.
“I think it is growing colder," repeated the actress.
“I don't see you feel it ... once more.”
This time she shook her shoulders before turning to the window.
"I think it is growing colder.”
“No! No! No! Take it over again. Forget that you once played
Juliet. You are an old woman now; forget the romance. And


240
A MOSCOW REHEARSAL
.
.
.
.
don't make it tragic. Don't make it important. . . . You
are an old woman and it doesn't matter to you. Nothing matters
not even rats. Try it again.”
Now she rubbed her hands together. “I think it is ..."
“Just a minute, pardon me . . . Paul! · Hey Paul! ..
Will somebody please get him up here ... We are waiting. Hey
Paul!”
At last Paul appeared and looked out over the footlights.
"Where is your snow ?”
“It's all ready, sir.”
"But where is it?”
"It's ready for the performance.”
“But we want it now-now; don't you understand ?”
“If we use it now there won't be so much left for the perform-
ance.”
"Spread a sheet and use it over again."
"But the actors walk over it with their dirty feet—and kick it
all over the house."
"It doesn't matter. We must have snow now. The cue is—'I
think it is growing colder. Use what you have now and cut up
more paper for the performance."
"All the paper is already used up.
“Buy more.”
“Very well, sir.”
During this conversation an old actor crept into the theatre. His
coat was green, patched, and tattered. He walked leaning on his
staff, and putting his bundle under an empty seat he proceeded
towards the director. His hair was white like new snow, but mat-
ted in cords. He walked slowly and hesitated at each step.
"Once more," continued the director.
This time the actress walked over toward the window before she
said, “I think it is growing colder.”
Then one could see through the soaped glass of the window a
fierce fall of snow.
"Paul!-Pardon me a moment Paul! Where is he now?
· Hey Paul !"
At last Paul appeared.
"Who cut up the snow?”
?
"The snow?"


MANUEL KOMROFF
241
“Yes, the snow!”
"What's the matter with it?"
“Did you ever see snow flakes four inches square? Who cut it
up ?"
.
>
.
9
“The boys. But they had only one scissors so they tore a good
bit.”
"It won't do—I tell you now it won't do. Have it cut fine and
use some white paper. You have used too much newspaper—the
.
snow looks black like a blizzard in Hell.”
Paul left the stage.
“Sorry to trouble you—but once more.”
Now the actress had secured a plaid shawl and drawing it about
a
her repeated the line, “I think it is growing colder.”
By this time the old actor was behind the director. “Excuse
me,” he said tapping the director's arm. “I've played before three
emperors... I am still good. Give me a part.
I will
show you how I can blow the terror of my heart—"
"Sit down! Don't bother me now.” Then turning to the stage.
“That's better. That's much better. Now let's have it over again.
Are you ready, Paul? . . . All right, go ahead!"
Once more she shuddered in the shell of her shawl before say-
ing, “I think it is growing colder.”
But the old actor stood in the aisle and now declaimed to him-
self. “A man may fish with a worm that hath eat of a king, and
eat of the fish that ..."
"What do you say about fish ?” shouted the director turning
about sharply.
"I—I said that I played before three emperors, and I
"Don't bother me now. Sit down!. Paul! Where is
Paul?. .. What's the matter with the snow? No! No! No!
Don't cut it up now; let's have it as it is.
Now once more!
Beads of perspiration came to the forehead of the actress and
ran in wavy lines down her painted face. Again she drew the shawl
about her and spoke her line. “I think it is growing colder.” At
the side of the stage near the door of the set waited two middle-
aged men, dressed and painted to represent boys, ready to burst
into the room and shout, "Mama, it's snowing.” But they had to
wait long for their cue.
"Now that's better”--spoke the director. “But I was just think-
.
.
.
.
.


242
A MOSCOW REHEARSAL
.
ing that it might be improved. Now let me see.
.
Suppose
you try walking toward the stove. Then speak it not to yourself,
but to nobody in particular, as though it came unconsciously from
your lips."
Again the line was repeated and again the director hesitated.
Once more the old actor touched him on the sleeve. "I have
played before three”
“Don't bother me now! How many times must I ask you to sit
down?"
Then Paul came once more to the footlights and announced-
"Shake your own snow, I am going to eat.”
“Get off the stage!"
He left the stage unbuckling the straps of his overalls and his
exit was followed by a sudden fall of snow. A few stray flakes
futtered into the room as the actress again repeated her line. The
old actor leaned on his staff and watched the stage with eager eyes.
Passing out into the lobby you again heard as an echo: “Don't
bother me now!” And once more it was followed by the everlast-
ing "I think it is growing colder.”


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
BY ALYSE GREGORY
а
Up
P to the present time Mr Sherwood Anderson has published
four novels, two books of short stories, and a collection of
poems. He has been termed by respective critics "the Dostoevsky
of America,”� great and original figure in American literature, a
, a
"phallic Chekhov," and the link that at last connects the old world
with that of the new. M Fay, in devoting an article to him in a
recent French magazine, mentions his earlier stories as “purs comme
l'ivoire," and, unique among contemporary American writers, he is
being rapidly translated into Russian. With the final Dial award,
Mr Anderson issued completely from those dim recesses hitherto
penetrated only by enthusiastic critics and a small reading public,
into the safely entrenched ranks of the so-called “best sellers."
Anxiously and hospitably one feels one's way through the pages
of his novels in search for those especial qualities which have im-
pelled his admirers to shower so unstintedly upon him their ap-
proval. Yet it is at the command of a voice that one finds oneself
proceeding—a voice exhorting, suppliant, prophetic, simulating
stridency, sentimentalizing, and dwindling at recurring moments to
a bewildered whisper of inquiry. Never, no never, touching for
more than a fleeting second that subtle art of restraint and aesthetic
arrangement which we have come to associate with the most dis-
tinguished writing. Never, in spite of his continual use of the word
"clean,” which serves apparently all purposes, and plays over his
pages like an agitated pawn vainly seeking equilibrium on a tilted
chess board, giving one a sense of a technique sharp, pure, unmud-
died by the stirred sediment of somewhat impuissant emotions.
We
move among wraiths of “purposeful” or “wistful” men, “straight,”
“fine” women or women misunderstood, or dulled beyond reprieve.
Penetrating, imaginative passages there are, to be sure, an arresting
use of a word here and there, a sense of the beauty of old weath-
ered things, of the pitiless craft and hypocrisy of man in his most
predatory moments. “How cunning they were, the men who had
been successful in life. Behind the flesh that had grown so thick
a


244
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
.
upon their bones what cunning eyes.” And when he notes the rapid
growth of Chicago as illustrated by the marks of a lumberman's ax
on logs which, once part of an adjacent grove, now remain buried
under the debris of a slum district crowded with warehouses, he
presents with an economy of means a convincing picture which the
tediousness of his later descriptions comes near to obliterating alto-
gether. He phrases graciously his sensitiveness to country scenes,
to "the smell of violets beside woodland paths, of little fragile
mushrooms, of honey dripping from the sacks under the bellies of
insects. "LØr he shows us an old woman by likening her
hands as they hold a mop or broom handle to "the dried stems of a
creeping vine clinging to a tree.” But these chance felicities al-
though indicative of a certain poetic sensibility in Mr Anderson are
mere by-products and do not convey the real tone and temper of his
work.
With the possible exception of Poor White one feels that in his
novels Mr Anderson is subject to an ever recurring species of shell
shock which projects him volte face towards the prickly actualities
of life, and in his efforts to regain his spiritual poise he drags one
about with him in a cloud of splintering conventions and myste-
rious clogged desires through passages too cluttered to permit of
escape into the clear light of day. Or is it, perhaps, to change our
metaphor, as if Mr Anderson in a moment of somnambulism had
put to sea in a row boat and being suddenly tipped over in mid-
ocean manages to reach shore on a raft, having discovered in his
process of escape that he has a soul, and likewise through the loss
of his clothes, a body? These two facts he evulgates in his latest
novel through many pages to his readers while admonishing them
anxiously to help him solve the suddenly reared conflicts which sen-
tiency always deposits at the threshold of adolescence and which
only maturity through an informed scepticism can deal with ade-
quately. And it was at this darkest moment of his maimed awaken-
ing, so one feels, that, turning to more articulate authors in search
of solutions and methods, Mr Anderson permitted his own native
talent to become blighted by inattention, to wilt under the glaze
formed over it by the betraying phrases, thought processes, and at-
titudes of others. For surely this author would never have con-
ceived alone the possibility of a mid-Western manufacturer making
unmistakable love, “raping” is the word used, to his own daughter.


ALYSE GREGORY
245
G
One has but to recall Schnitzler's writings to realize with what a
fleeting and delicate touch perilous motives of this kind may be sug-
gested without offence to one's credulity or taste. And in a passage
where Mr Anderson writes of the decay and corruption which
ceaselessly attack life we can hardly be mistaken in detecting a re-
semblance to a recurring conception and manner of Mr D. H. Law-
rence's, although the American author lacks just that vulture-like
sharpness of insight which enables his English contemporary to
arrive so often at expression, prey clutched firmly in carrion claw.
It is only in turning to his short stories that we experience a
grateful though guarded relief. In his Winesburg, Ohio, and The
Triumph of the Egg he has recorded in varying situations the ob-
scure emotional states of people, wistful, restless, or maladjusted to
the crass routines of life, people who do sudden strange things seek-
ing release for thwarted desires, people who have clung lingeringly
to old "pure” ideals as they passed over the curve of puberty into a
world too raw for their troubled timidities.;- Why does one feel,
however, that these stories in spite of their eloquent reply to Main
Street, in spite of their occasional charm and originality, their gen-
tleness and pity, never fully achieve art? One has but to compare
even so moving and poetically conceived a story as The New Eng-
lander to de Maupassant's Miss Harriet, of similar theme, or Sen-
ility, so like Chekhov in conception, to one of that author's deli-
cate masterpieces, to perceive the difference between writing weak-
ened by a groping intellect and writing that arrives radiant and
ineluctable from the pens of great imaginative artists. Even Mr
Theodore Dreiser, with whose name that of Mr Anderson's has
been so often associated, achieves in his brooding candour a free-
dom from the dragging weight of self-consciousness. (47 am a con-
. "I a
fused child in a confused world” writes Mr Anderson in his Mid-
American Chants, but it is not from confused children, however
engaging they may be, that one looks for art. And with what
banalities he is content to fill his pages—"she is fine and purpose-
ful”_"hungry to the roots of her”—“He had lived clean body and
mind”—“filled with the white wonder of it.”
Then why, one asks oneself, in spite of so many lapses, so much
obvious awkwardness in the handling of his material, so little un-
derstanding of how the minds of certain women work under cir-
cumstances of repression, so much rhetorical self-indulgence and


246
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
lack of aesthetic arrangement has Mr Anderson created for himself
so large and unmistakable a following? It is, we believe, be-
cause of a certain perturbed integrity, a thwarted infantile idealism
which seeks to construct a new salvation for the human race and
cries out for new definitions, new sex emancipation. Where Mr
Dreiser like a giant mole with strong flat hands tore up the soil and
prepared the ground for a more liberal treatment of sex in Ameri-
can literature, Mr Anderson, nervous and mystical, follows along
like the anxious white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland clasping in-
stead of a watch the latest edition of Sigmund Freud. Dr Canby's
comparison of him to John Bunyan is not, therefore, as absurd as it
might seem on the surface, for there is in Sherwood Anderson a
great deal of the mid-Western evangelist, an evangelist whose big-
otry has been dissipated through intelligence, and whose intelli-
gence has remained, to quote an excellent phrase of Van Wyck
Brooks', "bogged and mired in adolescence.” He succeeds, how-
ever, in depicting with historical perspective the disorder and
meaninglessness of the American scene, the loss of our richer heri-
tages, even while permitting such explanations to obtrude upon
the
development of his characters—characters which, as Mr Edmund
Wilson aptly pointed out in his review of Many Marriages are, in
so many instances, more like the figures in comic strips than actual
human beings.
But unfortunately for American letters it must be conceded that
when all has been said Sherwood Anderson taps on occasions
deeper veins than almost any other of our contemporary novelists. .
Whether he will achieve a greater perfection in the short story,
that realm of literature in which he is most at home, depends
largely upon his ability to extricate himself from the debilitating
influences of other writers and to think out his problems alone. At
present, we feel, he somewhat resembles a man, who, having
planted a fine bed of radishes, tends them rather carelessly and
sells them before their time, so that when one comes at last to buy
them in the open market they turn out, unfortunately, rather softer
than any good radish has a right to be. To have attained their
legitimate freshness and pungency they should, one strongly sus-
pects, have been left to reach maturity in the promising and well-
manured soil of Winesburg, Ohio.
!



A DRAWING
Br W. R. RYCHTARIK






1
tioid
A LINOLEUM CUT.
BY W. R. RYCHTARIK





THE MAN'S STORY
BY SHERWOOD ANDERSON
D
a
URING his trial for murder and later, after he had been
cleared through the confession of that queer little bald chap
with the nervous hands, I watched him, fascinated by his continued
effort to make something understood.
He was persistently interested in something having nothing to
do with the charge that he had murdered the woman. The matter
of whether or not and by due process of law he was to be convicted
of murder and hanged by the neck until he was dead didn't seem to
interest him. The law was something outside his life. He simply
declined to have anything to do with the killing as one might de-
cline a cigarette. "I thank you, I am not smoking at present. I I
made a bet with a fellow that I could go along without cigarettes
for a month.”
That is the sort of thing I mean. It was puzzling. Really had
he been guilty and trying to save his neck he couldn't have taken a
better line. You see, at first, everyone thought that he had done
the killing; we were all convinced of it, and then, just because of
that magnificent air of indifference, everyone began wanting to
save him. When news came of the confession of the crazy little
stage-hand everyone broke out into cheers.
He was clear of the law after that, but his manner in no way
changed. There was, somewhere, a man or a woman who would
understand just what he understood, and it was important to find
that person and talk things over. There was a time, during the
trial and immediately afterwards, when I saw a good deal of him;
and I had this sharp sense of him feeling about in the darkness try-
ing to find something like a needle or pin lost on the floor. Well,
he was like an old man who cannot find his glasses. He feels in all
his pockets and looks helplessly about.
There was a question in my own mind too, in everyone's mind-
"Can a man be wholly casual and brutal in every outward way, at
a moment when the one nearest and dearest to him is dying, and at
the same time and with quite another part of himself be altogether
tender and sensitive ?"
a


248
THE MAN'S STORY
a
Anyway it's a story, and once in a while even a newspaper man
likes to tell a story straight out, without putting in any newspaper
jargon about beautiful heiresses, cold-blooded murderers, and all
that sort of tommyrot.
As I picked the story up the sense of it was something like this,
The man's name was Wilson, Edgar Wilson—and he had come
to Chicago from some place to the westward, perhaps from the
mountains. He might once have been a sheep herder or something
of the sort as he had the peculiar abstract air acquired only by
being a good deal alone. About himself and his past he told a good
many conflicting stories, and so after being with him for a time one
instinctively discarded the past.
“The devil-it doesn't matter the man can't tell the truth in
that direction. Let it go,” one said to oneself. What was known
was that he had come to Chicago from a town in Kansas and that
he had run away from the Kansas town with another man's wife.
As to her story, I knew little enough of it. She had been at one
time I imagine a rather handsome thing, in a big strong upstanding
kind of way, but her life, until she met Wilson, had been rather
messy. In those dead flat Kansas towns, lives have a way of
get-
ting ugly and messy without anything very definite having hap-
pened to make them so. One can't imagine the reasons. Let it go.
It just is so and one can't at all believe the Kansas writers about
the life out there.
To be a little more definite about this particular woman-in her
young girlhood her father had got into trouble. He had been some
sort of small official, a travelling agent or something of the sort
for an express company, and got arrested in connexion with the dis-
appearance of some money. And then, when he was in jail and
before his trial, he shot and killed himself. The girl's mother was
already dead.
Within a year or two she married a man, an honest enough fel-
low, but from all accounts rather uninteresting. He was a drug
clerk and a frugal man, and after a short time managed to buy a
drug store of his own.
The woman had, as I have said, been strong and well built, but
now grew thin and nervous. Still she carried herself well, with a
sort of air as it were, and there was something about her that ap-
pealed strongly to men. Several men of the seedy little town were


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
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0
smitten by her and wrote her letters, trying to get her to creep out
with them at night. You know how such things are done. The
letters were unsigned. “You go to such and such a place on Friday
evening. If you are willing to talk things over with me carry a
book in your hand.”
Then the woman made a mistake and told her husband about the
receipt of one of the letters, and he grew angry and tramped off to
the trysting place at night with a shotgun in his hand. When no
one appeared he came home and fussed about. He said little mean
tentative things. “You must have looked in a certain way at the
man when you passed him on the street. A man don't grow so bold
with a married woman unless an opening has been given him.”
The man talked and talked after that and life in the house must
not have been gay. She grew habitually silent and when she was
silent the house was silent. They had no children.
Then the man Edgar Wilson came along going eastward and
stopped over in the town for two or three days. He had at that
time a little money and stayed at a small workingmen's boarding-
house near the railroad station. One day he saw the woman walk-
ing in the street and followed her to her home and the neighbours
saw them standing and talking together for an hour by the front
gate. On the next day he came again.
That time they talked for two hours and then she went into the
house, got a few belongings, and walked to the railroad station
with him. They took a train for Chicago and lived here together
apparently very happy, until she died—in a way I am about to try
to tell you about. They of course could not be married, and during
the three years they lived here he did nothing toward earning their
common living. As he had a very small amount of money when
they came, barely enough to get them here from the Kansas town,
they were miserably poor.
a
They lived, when I knew about them, over on the North Side, in
that section of old three and four story brick residences that were
once the homes of what we call our nice people, but that had after-
wards gone to the bad. The section is having a kind of rebirth
now, but for a good many years it rather went to seed. There were
these old residences, made into boarding-houses, and with unbe-
lievably dirty lace curtains at the windows, and now and then an


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THE MAN'S STORY
utterly disreputable old tumble-down frame house, in one of which
Wilson lived with his woman.
The place is a sight. Someone owns it I suppose who is shrewd
enough to know that in a big city like Chicago no section gets
neglected always. Such a fellow must have said to himself, "Well,
I'll let the place go. The ground on which the house stands will
some day be very valuable, but the house is worth nothing. I'll let
it go at a low rental and do nothing to fix it up. Perhaps I will get
enough out of it to pay my taxes until prices come up."
And so the house had stood there unpainted for years and the
windows were out of line and the shingles nearly all off the roof.
The second floor was reached by an outside stairway with a hand-
rail that had become just the peculiar greasy black that wood can
become in a soft coal burning city like Chicago and Pittsburgh.
One's hand became black when the railing was touched and the
rooms above were altogether cold and cheerless.
At the front there was a large room with a fireplace from which
many bricks had fallen, and back of that were two small sleeping
rooms.
Wilson and his woman lived in the place at the time when the
thing happened I am to tell you about, and as they had taken it in
May I presume they did not too much mind the cold barrenness of
the large front room in which they lived. There was a sagging
wooden bed with a leg broken off the woman had tried to repair
with sticks from a packing box, a kitchen table that was also used
by Wilson as a writing desk, and two or three cheap kitchen chairs.
The woman had managed to get a place as wardrobe woman in a
theatre in Randolph Street and they lived on her earnings. It was
said she had got the job because some man connected with the
theatre or a company playing there had a passion for her, but one
can always pick up stories of that sort about any woman who works
about the theatre—from the scrub-woman to the star.
Anyway she worked there and had a reputation in the theatre of
being quiet and efficient.
As for Wilson, he wrote poetry of a sort I've never seen before,
although, like most newspaper men, I've taken a turn at verse-mak-
ing myself now and then, both of the rhymed kind and the new-
fangled vers libre sort. I rather go in for the classical stuff myself.
About Wilson's verse—it was Greek to me. Well now, to get


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
251
right down to hardpan in this matter, it was and it wasn't. The
stuff made me feel just a little bit woozy when I took a whole
sheaf of it and sat alone in my room reading it at night. It was all
about walls and deep wells and great bowls with young trees stand-
ing erect in them and trying to find their way to the light and air
over the rim of the bowl.
Queer crazy stuff, every line of it, but fascinating too in a way.
One
got into a new world with new values, which after all is I sup-
pose what poetry is all about. There was the world of fact we all
know or think we know, the world of flat buildings and Middle-
Western farms with wire fences about the fields and Fordson trac-
tors running up and down, and towns with high schools and adver-
tising billboards and everything that makes up life, or that we
think makes up life.
There was this world we all walk about in and then there was
another world that I have come to think of as Wilson's world: a
dim world, to me at least, of far-away near places—things taking
new and strange shapes, the insides of people coming out, the eyes
seeing new things, the fingers feeling new and strange things.
It was a world of walls mainly. I got hold of the whole lot of
Wilson's verse by a piece of luck. It happened that I was the first
newspaper man who got into the place on the night when the
woman's body was found; and there was all the stuff, carefully
written out in a sort of child's copy-book, and two or three stupid
policemen standing about. I just shoved the book under my coat,
when they weren't looking, and later, during Wilson's trial, we
published some of the more intelligible ones in the paper. It made
pretty good newspaper stuff—the poet who killed his mistress, and
all that.
To get back to the poetry itself for a moment. I just wanted to
explain that all through the book there ran this notion that men
had erected walls about themselves and that all men were perhaps
destined to stand for ever behind the walls, on which they con-
stantly beat with their fists, or with whatever tools they could get
hold of. One couldn't quite make out whether there was just one
great wall or many little individual walls. Sometimes Wilson put
it one way, sometimes another. Men had themselves built the
walls and now stood behind them, knowing dimly that beyond the
walls there was warmth, light, air, beauty, life in fact—while at


252
THE MAN'S STORY
the same time, and because of a kind of madness in themselves, the
walls were constantly being built higher and stronger.
The notion gives you the willies a little, doesn't it? Anyway it
does me.
And then there was that notion about deep wells, men every-
where constantly digging and digging themselves down deeper and
deeper into deep wells. They not wanting to do it, you under-
stand, and none wanting them to do it, but all the time the thing
going on just the same, that is to say the wells getting constantly
deeper and deeper and the voices growing dimmer and dimmer in
the distance-and again the light and the warmth of life going
away and going away, because of a kind of blind refusal of people
to try to understand each other, I suppose.
It was all very strange to me-Wilson's poetry, I mean-when
I came to it. Here is one of his things. It is not directly concerned
with the walls, the bowl, or the deep well theme, as you will see;
but it is one we ran in the paper during the trial and a lot of folks
rather liked it as I'll admit I do myself. Maybe putting it in here
will give a kind of point to my story by giving you some sense of
the strangeness of the man who is the story's hero. In the book it
was called merely number ninety-seven and it went as follows:
a
“The firm grip of my fingers on the thin paper of this cigarette
is a sign that I am very quiet now. Sometimes it is not so. When
I am unquiet I am weak, but when I am quiet, as I am now, I am
very strong
“Just now I went along one of the streets of my city and in at a
door and came up here, where I am now, lying on a bed and looking
out at a window. Very suddenly and completely the knowledge
has come to me that I could grip the sides of tall buildings as freely
and as easily as I now grip this cigarette. I could hold the build-
ing between my fingers, put it to my lips, and blow smoke through
it. I could blow confusion away. I could blow a thousand people
out through the roof of one tall building into the sky, into the un-
known. Building after building I could consume as I consume the
cigarettes in this box. I could throw the burning ends of cities
over my shoulder and out through a window.
"It is not often I get in the state I am now in—so quiet and sure
of myself. When the feeling comes over me there is a directness
a


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253
and simplicity in me that make me love myself. To myself at such
times I say strong sweet words.
“I am on a couch by this window and I could ask a woman to
come here to lie with me, or a man either for that matter.
“I could take a row of houses standing on a street, tip them over,
empty the people out of them, squeeze and compress all the people
into one person, and love that person.
“Do you see this hand? Suppose it held a knife that could cut
down through all the falseness in you. Suppose it could cut down
through the sides of buildings and houses where thousands of
peo-
ple now lie asleep.
“It would be something worth thinking about if the fingers of
this hand gripped a knife that could cut and rip through all the
ugly husks in which millions of lives are enclosed.”
Well, there is the idea you see, a kind of power that could be
gentle too. I will quote you just one more of his things, a more
gentle one. It is called in the book number eighty-three.
"I am a tree that grows beside the wall. I have been thrusting
up and up. My body is covered with scars. My body is old, but
still I thrust upward, creeping toward the top of the wall.
“It is my desire to drop blossoms and fruit over the wall.
“I would moisten dry lips.
“I would drop blossoms on the heads of children, over the top of
the wall.
“I would caress with falling blossoms the bodies of those who
live on the further side of the wall.
“My branches are creeping upward and new sap comes into me
out of the dark ground under the wall.
“My fruit shall not be my fruit until it drops from my arms into
the arms of the others over the top of the wall.”
And now as to the life led by the man and woman in the large
upper room in that old frame house. By a stroke of luck I have
recently got rather a line on that by a discovery I have made.
After they had moved into the house—it was only last spring-
the theatre in which the woman was employed was dark for a long
time and they were more than usually hard up; so the woman tried


254
THE MAN'S STORY
a
to pick up a little extra money—to help pay the rent I
the rent I suppose-
by sub-letting the two little back rooms of that place of theirs.
Various people lived in the dark tiny holes, just how I can't
make out, as there was no furniture. Still there are places in Chi-
cago called "Pops” where one may sleep on the floor for five or ten
cents, and they are more patronized than respectable people know
anything about.
What I did discover was a little woman she wasn't so young,
but she was hunchbacked and small and it is hard not to think of
her as a girl—who once lived in one of the rooms for several weeks.
She had a job as an ironer in a small hand laundry in the neighbour-
hood, and someone had given her a cheap folding cot. She was a
curiously sentimental creature with the kind of hurt eyes deformed
people often have, and I have a fancy she had herself a romantic
attachment of a sort for the man Wilson. Anyway I managed to
find out a lot from her.
After the other woman's death and after Wilson had been
cleared on the murder charge by the confession of the stage-hand, I
used to go over to the house where he had lived sometimes in the
late afternoon after our paper had been put to bed for the day.
Ours is an afternoon paper and after two o'clock most of us are
free.
I found the hunchback girl standing in front of the house one
day and began talking with her. She was a gold mine.
There was that look in her eyes I've told you of, the hurt sensi-
tive look. I just spoke to her and we began talking of Wilson.
She had lived in one of the rooms at the back. She told me of that
at once.
On some days she had found herself unable to work at the laun-
dry because her strength suddenly gave out, and so on such days
she stayed in the room lying on the cot. Blinding headaches came
that lasted for hours, during which she was almost entirely uncon-
scious of everything going on about her. Then afterwards she was
quite conscious, but for a long time very weak. She wasn't one
who is destined to live very long I suppose, and I presume she
didn't much care.
Anyway, there she was in the room in that weak state after the
times of illness; and she grew curious about the two people in the
front room, so she used to get off her couch and go softly in her


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
255
a
а
stockinged feet to the door between the rooms and peek through the
keyhole. She had to kneel on the dusty floor to do it.
The life in the room fascinated her from the beginning. Some-
times the man was in there alone, sitting at the kitchen table and
writing the stuff he afterwards put into the book I collared and
from which I have quoted; sometimes the woman was with him,
and again sometimes he was in there alone, but wasn't writing.
Then he was always walking and walking up and down.
When both people were in the room and when the man was writ-
ing the woman seldom moved, but sat in a chair by one of the win-
dows with her hands crossed. He would write a few lines and then
walk up and down talking to himself or to her. When he spoke
she did not answer except with her eyes, the crippled girl said.
What I gathered of all this from her talk with me and what is
the product of my own imaginings I confess I do not quite know.
Anyway what I got and what I am trying in my own way to
transmit to you is a sense of a kind of strangeness in the relation-
ship of the two. It wasn't just a domestic household, a little down
on its luck, by any means. He was trying to do something very
difficult—with his poetry I presume, and she in her own way was
trying to help him.
And of course, as I have no doubt you have gathered from what
I have quoted of Wilson's verse, the matter had something to do
with the relationships between people—not necessarily between the
particular man and woman who happened to be there in that room,
but between all people.
The fellow had some half-mystic conception of all such things,
and before he found his own woman, had been going aimlessly
about the world looking for a mate. Then he had found the woman
in the Kansas town and, he at least thought, things had cleared,
for him.
Well, he had the notion that no one in the world could think or
feel anything alone and that people only got into trouble and
walled themselves in by trying it, or something of the sort. There
was a discord. Things were jangled. Someone it seems had to
strike a pitch that all voices could take up before the real song of
life could begin. Mind you I'm not putting forth any notions of
my own. What I am trying to do is to give you a sense of some-
thing I got from having read Wilson's stuff, from having known
a


256
THE MAN'S STORY
him a little, and from having seen something of the effect of his
personality on others.
He felt quite definitely that no one in the world could feel or
even think alone. And then there was the notion that if one tried
to think with the mind without taking the body into account one
got all balled up. True conscious life built itself up like a pyra-
.
a
mid. First the body and mind of a beloved one must come into
one's thinking and feeling and then, in some mystic way, the bodies
and minds of all the other people in the world must come in, must
come sweeping in like a great wind or something of that sort.
Is all this a little tangled up to you who read my story? It may
not be. It may be that your minds are more clear than my own and
that what I take to be so difficult will be very simple to you.
However, I have to bring up to you just what I can find after
diving down into this sea of motives and impulses I admit I don't
rightly understand.
The hunchback girl felt--or is it my own fancy colouring what
she said?
it doesn't really matter. The thing to get at
is what the man Edgar Wilson felt.
He felt, I fancy, that in the field of poetry he had something to
express that could never be expressed until he had found a woman
who could, in a peculiar and absolute way, give herself in the world
of the flesh, and that then there was to be a marriage out of which
beauty would come for all people. He had to find the woman who
had that power, and the power had to be untainted by self-interest,
I fancy. A profound egotist, you sce, and he thought he had found
what he needed in the wife of the Kansas druggist.
He had found her and had done something to her. What it
was I can't quite make out, except that she was absolutely and
wholly happy with him in a strangely inexpressive sort of way.
Trying to speak of him and his influence on others is rather like
trying to walk on a tight rope stretched between two tall buildings
above a crowded street. A cry from below, a laugh, the honk of an
automobile horn, and down one goes into nothingness. One simply
becomes ridiculous.
He wanted, it seems, to condense the flesh and the spirit of him-
self and his woman into his poems. You will remember that in one
of the things of his I have quoted he speaks of condensing, of
a


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
257
squeezing, all the people of a city into one person and of loving
a
that person.
One might think of him as a powerful person, almost hideously
powerful. You will see, as you read, how he has got me in his
power and is making me serve his purpose.
He had caught and was holding the woman in his grip. Per-
haps too she was in her own way greedy also and he was making
actual love to her always day and night, when they were together
and when they were apart.
I'll admit I am confused about the whole matter myself. I am
trying to express something I have felt, not in myself nor in the
words that came to me from the lips of the hunchback girl whom,
you will remember, I left kneeling on the floor in that back room
and peeking through a keyhole.
There she was, you see, the hunchback, and in the room before
her was the man and woman; and the hunchback also had fallen
under the power of the man Wilson. She also was in love with
him—there can be no doubt of that. The room in which she knelt
was dark and dusty. There must have been a thick accumulation
of dust on the floor.
What she said-or if she did not say the words, what she made
me feel—was that the man Wilson worked in the room or walked
up and down in there before his woman, and that while he did that
his woman sat in the chair, and that there was on her face, in her
eyes, a look-
He was all the time making love to her and his making love to
her in just that abstract way was a kind of love-making with all
people, and that was possible because the woman was as purely
physical as he was something else. If all this is meaningless to you
at least it wasn't to the hunchback girl who certainly was unedu-
cated and never would have set herself up as having any special
powers of understanding. She knelt in the dust, listening and look-
ing at the keyhole, and in the end she came to feel that the man, in
whose presence she had never been and whose person had never in
any way touched her person, that he had made love to her also.
She had felt that and it had gratified her entire nature. One
might say it had satisfied her. She was what she was and it had
made life worth living for her.


258
THE MAN'S STORY
a
Minor things happened in the room and one may speak of them.
For example there was a day in June, a dark warm rainy day.
The hunchback girl was in her room, kneeling on the floor, and
Wilson and his woman were in their room.
Wilson's woman had been doing a family washing, and as it
could not be dried outdoors she had stretched ropes across the room
and had hung the clothes inside.
When the clothes were all hung Wilson came from walking out-
side in the rain, and going to the desk sat down and began to write.
He wrote for a few minutes and then got up and went about the
room, and in walking a wet garment brushed against his face.
He kept right on walking and talking to the woman, but as he
walked and talked he gathered all the clothes in his arms and going
to the little landing at the head of the stairs outside threw them
down into the muddy yard below. He did that and the woman
sat without moving or saying anything until he had gone back to
his desk, then she went down the stairs, got the clothes and washed
them again; and it was only after she had done that and when she
was again hanging them in the room above that he appeared to
know what he had done.
While the clothes were being rewashed he went for another walk
and when she heard his footsteps on the stairs the hunchback girl
ran to the keyhole. As she knelt there and as he came into the
room she could look directly into his face. “He was like a puzzled
child for a moment and then, although he said nothing, the tears
began to run down his cheeks,” she said. “That happened and then
the woman, who was at the moment rehanging the clothes, turned
and saw him. She had her arm filled with clothes, but dropped
them on the floor and ran to him. She half knelt, the hunchback
girl said, and putting her arms about his body and looking up into
his face pleaded with him. “Don't. Don't be hurt. Believe me I
know everything. Please don't be hurt,” was what she said.
And now as to the story of the woman's death. It happened in
the fall of that year.
In the place where she was sometimes employed, that is to say in
the theatre, there was this other man, the little half-crazed stage-
hand who shot her.
He had fallen in love with her and, like the men in the Kansas


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
259
town from which she came, had written her several silly notes of
which she said nothing to Wilson. The letters weren't very nice
and some of them, the most unpleasant ones, were by some twist of
the fellow's mind signed with Wilson's name. Two of them were
afterwards found on her person and were brought in as evidence
against Wilson during his trial.
And so the woman worked in the theatre, and the summer had
passed; and on an evening in the fall there was to be a dress re-
hearsal at the theatre and the woman went there, taking Wilson
with her. It was a fall day such as we sometimes have in Chicago,
cold and wet and with a heavy fog lying over the city.
The dress rehearsal did not come off. The star was ill, or some-
thing of the sort happened; and Wilson and his woman sat about
in the cold empty theatre for an hour or two and then the woman
was told she could go for the night.
She and Wilson walked across the city, stopping to get some-
thing to eat at a small restaurant. He was in one of the abstract
silent moods common to him. No doubt he was thinking of the
things he wanted to express in the poetry I have tried to tell you
about. He went along, not seeing the woman beside him, not see-
ing the people drifting up to them and passing them in the streets.
He went along in that way and she
She was no doubt then as she always was in his presence—silent
and satisfied with the fact that she was with him. There was noth-
ing he could think or feel that did not take her into account. The
very blood flowing up through his body was her blood too. He
had made her feel that and she was silent and satisfied as he went
along, his body walking beside her, but his fancy groping its way
through the land of high walls and deep wells.
They had walked from the restaurant, in the Loop district, over
a bridge to the North Side, and still no words passed between them.
When they had almost reached their own place the stage-hand,
the small man with the nervous hands who had written the notes,
appeared out of the fog, as though out of nowhere, and shot the
woman.
That was all there was to it. It was as simple as that.
They were walking, as I have described them, when a head
flashed
up before the woman in the midst of the fog, a hand shot
out, there was the quick abrupt sound of a pistol shot, and then the


260
THE MAN'S STORY
a
absurd little stage-hand, he with the wrinkled impotent little old
woman's face, then he turned and ran away.
All that happened, just as I have written it and it made no im-
pression at all on the mind of Wilson. He walked along as though
nothing had happened; and the woman, after half falling, gath-
ered herself together and managed to continue walking beside him,
still saying nothing.
They went thus for perhaps two blocks, and had reached the
foot of the outer stairs that led up to their place when a policeman
came running, and the woman told him a lie. She told him some
story about a struggle between two drunken men and after a mo-
ment of talk the policeman went away, sent away by the woman in
a direction opposite to the one taken by the fleeing stage-hand.
They were in the darkness and the fog now, and the woman took
her man's arm while they climbed the stairs. He was as yet, as far
as I will ever be able to explain logically, unaware of the shot and
of the fact that she was dying although he had seen and heard
everything. What the doctors said, who were put on the case after-
wards, was that a cord or muscle or something of the sort that con-
trols the action of the heart, that it had been practically severed by
the shot.
She was dead and alive at the same time, I suppose.
Anyway the two people marched up the stairs and into the room
above and then a really dramatic and lovely thing happened. One
wishes that the scene with just all its connotations could be played
out on a stage instead of having to be put down in words.
The two came into the room, the one dead, but not ready to
acknowledge death without a flash of something individual and
lovely, that is to say the one dead while still alive and the other
alive, but at the moment dead to what was going on.
The room into which they went was dark, but with the sure in-
stinct of an animal the woman walked across the room to the fire-
place while the man stopped and stood some ten feet from the door,
thinking and thinking in his peculiarly abstract way. The fireplace
was filled with an accumulation of waste matter, cigarette ends-
the man was a hard smoker--bits of paper on which he had scrib-
bled—the rubbishy accumulation that gathers about all such fel-
lows as Wilson. There was all of this quickly combustible mate-
rial stuffed into the fireplace on this first cool evening of the fall.


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
261
And so the woman went to it and found a match somewhere in
a
the darkness and touched the pile off.
There is a picture that will remain with me always. Just that-
the barren room and the blind unseeing man standing there, and
the woman kneeling and making a little flare of beauty at the last.
Little flames leaped up. Lights crept and danced over the walls.
Below, on the floor of the room, there was a deep well of darkness
in which the man, blind with his own purpose, was standing.
The pile of burning papers must have made for a moment quite
a glare of light in the room, and the woman stood for a moment,
beside the fireplace, just outside the glare of light.
And then, pale and wavering, she walked across it as across a
lighted stage, going softly and silently toward him. Had she also
something to say? No one will ever know. What happened was
that she said nothing.
She walked across to him, and at the moment she reached him
fell down on the floor and died at his feet, and at the same moment
the little fire of papers died. If she struggled before she died, there
on the floor, she struggled in silence. There was no sound. She
had fallen and lay between him and the door that led out to the
stairway and to the street.
It was then Wilson became altogether inhuman—too much so
for my understanding.
The fire had died and the woman he had loved had died.
And there he stood looking into nothingness, thinking, God
knows, perhaps of nothingness.
He stood a minute, five minutes, perhaps ten. He was a man
who, before he found the woman, had been sunk far down into a
deep sea of doubt and questioning. Before he found the woman no
expression had ever come from him. He had perhaps just wan-
dered from place to place, looking at people's faces, wondering
about people, wanting to come close to others, and not knowing
how. The woman had been able to lift him up to the surface of
the sea of life for a time, and with her he had floated on the sur-
face of the sea, under the sky, in the sunlight. The woman's warm
body, given to him in love, had been as a boat in which he had
floated on the surface of the sea, and now the boat had wrecked
and he was sinking again, back into the sea.


262
THE MAN'S STORY
to go
а
All of this had happened and he did not know—that is to say
he did not know and at the same time he did know.
He was a poet I presume and perhaps at that moment a new
poem was forming itself in his mind.
At any rate he stood for a time, as I have said, and then he must
have had a feeling that he should make some move, that he should
if possible save himself from some disaster about to overtake him.
He had an impulse to go to the door and by way of the stairway
down stairs and into the street, but the body of the woman
was between him and the door.
What he did and what, when he later told of it, sounded so ter-
ribly cruel to others was to treat the woman's dead body as one
might treat a fallen tree in the darkness in a forest. First he tried
to push the body aside with his foot and then, as that seemed im-
possible, he stepped awkwardly over it.
He stepped directly on the woman's arm. The discoloured mark
where his heel landed was afterwards found on the body.
He almost fell and then his body righted itself and he went
walking, marched down the rickety stairs and went walking in the
streets.
By chance the night had cleared. It had grown colder and a
cold wind had driven the fog away. He walked along very non-
chalantly for several blocks. He walked along as calmly as you,
the reader, might walk after having had lunch with a friend.
As a matter of fact he even stopped to make a purchase at a
store. I remember that the place was called The Whip. He went
in, bought himself a package of cigarettes, lighted one, and stood a
moment apparently listening to a conversation going on among
several idlers in the place.
And then he strolled again, going along smoking the cigarette
and thinking of his poem no doubt. Then he came to a moving-
picture theatre.
That perhaps touched him off. He also was an old fireplace,
stuffed with old thoughts, scraps of unwritten poems, God knows
what rubbish. Often he had gone at night to the theatre, where
the woman was employed, to walk home with her; and now the
people were coming out of a small moving-picture house. They
had been in there seeing a play called The Light of the World.
Wilson walked into the midst of the crowd, lost himself in the
a
a


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
263
crowd, smoking his cigarette, and then he took off his hat, looked
anxiously about for a moment, and suddenly began shouting in a
loud voice.
He stood there, shouting and trying to tell the story of what had
happened in a loud voice and with the uncertain air of one trying
to remember a dream. He did that for a moment and then after
running a little way along the pavement stopped and began his
story again. It was only after he had gone thus, in short rushes,
back along the street to the house and up the rickety stairway to
where the woman was lying—the crowd following curiously at his
heels—that a policeman came up and arrested him.
He seemed excited at first, but was quiet afterwards; and he
laughed at the notion of insanity when the lawyer who had been
retained for him tried to set up the plea in court.
As I have said, his action during his trial was confusing to us all,
as he seemed wholly uninterested in the murder and in his own
fate. After the confession of the man who had fired the shot he
seemed to feel no resentment toward him either. There was some-
thing he wanted, having nothing to do with what had happened.
There he had been, you see, before he found the woman, wan-
dering about in the world, digging himself deeper and deeper into
the deep wells he talked about in his poetry, building the wall be-
tween himself and all us others constantly higher and higher.
He knew what he was doing, but he could not stop. That's what
he kept talking about, pleading with people about. The man had
come up out of the sea of doubt, had grasped for a time the hand of
the woman, and with her hand in his had floated for a time upon
the surface of life, but now he felt himself again sinking down into
the sea.
His talking and talking, stopping people in the street and talk-
ing, going into people's houses and talking, was I presume but an
effort he was always afterwards making not to sink back for ever
into the sea; it was the struggle of a drowning man I dare say.
At any rate I have told you the man's story, have been compelled
to try to tell you his story. There was a kind of power in him, and
the power has been exerted over me as it was exerted over the
woman from Kansas and the unknown hunchback girl kneeling on
the floor in the dust and peering through a keyhole.


264
NAMED FLAMINGO
Ever since the woman died we have all been trying and trying to
drag the man Wilson back up out of the sea of doubt and dumb-
ness into which we feel him sinking deeper and deeper, and to no
avail.
And I have only told you his story in the hopes that among you,
the readers, there may be one who, like the woman from Kansas,
,
will know what we others do not know; that is to say that you will
know how to put an arm down into the sea and that you will have
the strength to drag the man Wilson back to the surface again.
NAMED FLAMINGO
BY GLENWAY WESCOTT
He stands
on a jointed stick;
his neck, the snake of snow
black-mouthed,
coiled on the almond-
shaped body
thatched with plumes.
First the yellow
rays break (Cézanne said)
leaving blue
for outline, as of his foot,
a flawless bone,
fixed in the unhorned water.
Hard bird, he prefers
with his eye
the oiled silk leaves,
the dome, and clouds like fur



6
Courtesy of M Paul Guillaume
NEGRO SCULPTURE (PAHOUIN)






Courtesy of M Paul Guillaume
NEGRO SCULPTURE (PAHOUIN)


1
1
1


MATTHEW PRIOR
BY LLEWELYN POWYS
MAT
ATTHEW PRIOR was undoubtedly one of the principal
precursors of the Augustan age of English poetry; however,
born as he was in 1664, his lighter verses are redeemed somewhat
from the tedious classical anaesthesia that we associate with the
eighteenth century by the fact that they still carry with them a sug-
gestion of the delightful sophisticated levity which belonged to the
Caroline epoch.
Matthew Prior, so we are assured by Dr Johnson, was "one of
those that have burst out from an obscure original to great emi-
nence.” Whether or not the ancient county of Dorset is justified in
claiming Wimborne Minster as the place of his actual birth, it is
clear that it was from the immediate vicinity of that old-world
country town that his progenitors sprang. Indeed it is within the
memory of our own generation that the last of the family, Martha
Prior, daughter of a simple shepherd, died at Godmanston.
The first authentic glimpse we get of the young poet is as a wine
carrier in his uncle's tavern in London. It was here that Lord Dor-
set discovered him, Horace in hand, and with that generous munifi-
cence, so characteristic of the restoration, paid for his schooling at
Westminster and later for his entrance to St John's College, Cam-
bridge. Matthew Prior it is quite evident made the best of his op-
portunities. He had a good "sense of direction,” if we may be per-
mitted to use that invidious modern phrase, and cultivated with the
utmost zeal useful friendships. In London during the vacations he
sought the company of the wits and was one of those who fre-
quented Wills' Coffee-House and who during the long drawn-out
evenings of the late summer would sit on the balcony of that fa-
mous resort "proud to dip a finger and thumb into Mr Dryden's
snuff-box.” This privilege, however, in no way prevented him
from cleverly parodying in his City Mouse and Country Mouse the
famous pro-Catholic poem of the Poet Laureate. It was, in fact,
upon this undergraduate exercise that his future career was found-
ed. He became secretary to the Ambassador at the Hague and, be-


266
MATTHEW PRIOR
cause of a series of chances, remained for several years as England's
chief representative "at this central cogwheel of the cumbrous en-
gine” of the Coalition.
From a pecuniary point of view the berth was not as satisfactory
as it might have been, and Prior's letters from now on are filled
with fretful references to the inadequacy of the Government's pay-
ment of twenty shillings a day with an allowance for “reasonable
extraordinaries.” He was never tired of deploring the fact that his
creditors, as he put it, “were brisker in business than the Treasury.”
"Who has ever heard,” he exclaimed, "of a professed panegyric
poet that was able to advance two guineas to the public ?” In vain
he pointed out to the preoccupied authorities at home “that a little
house, this winter, would be convenient in so cold a country as
‘Holland.” His agitated pleas were greeted with evasions and pro-
crastinations and the poet-diplomatist was left “to scramble at or-
dinaries with Switzers or French Protestants." One of his own
poems suggests, however, that his time was not entirely occupied
with his ambassadorial duties. He too had, we may assume, as well
as another, his margins, his moments, his golden week-ends when it
mattered not a rush to him whether or no the "disaffected” reached
the shores of England.
a
“In a little Dutch-chaise on a Saturday night
On my left hand my Horace, a Nymph on my right.”
a
As the years passed his financial straits were considerably relieved
by a sinecure secretaryship in Dublin, from which he drew for sev-
eral years, though never setting foot in the Island, remuneration to
the tune of nearly £1000 a year.
From the Hague he was eventually transferred to Paris. His
letters from that capital are full of entertaining gossipy informa-
tion. He was shown over the royal palace and as he viewed Le
Brun's gorgeous pictures representing the victories of Louis XIV
was asked whether Hampton Court could be said to rival such a
display. “The monuments of my master's actions” he replied appo-
sitely enough, “are to be seen everywhere but in his own house."
He visited the court of the exiled King of England and though the
account he gives of that fallen monarch was not exactly in the best
of taste it has its own interest: “I faced old James the other day at


LLEWELYN POWYS
267
St Cloud. Vive Guillaume! You never saw such a strange figure
as the old bully is, lean, worn and riv'led.”
On his return to England he abandons his friends the Whigs and
turns Tory, actually for a short time gaining a seat in the House of
Commons, for which act of treachery, on the death of Queen Anne
and the return of the opposition, he is held in custody for two years
and is, so he fancies, in no small danger of losing his life.
But even so he is still full of resource. He conceives the for-
tunate idea of issuing a “tall folio” of his poems done on “paper
imperial and the largest in England.” He manages to interest in-
numerable people in his project: Jonathan Swift even exerts him-
self and extracts not less than £200 from what he called the "he
country” of his residence. The volumes are sold for two guineas
each and Matthew Prior is soon rewarded by having four thousand
pounds in his fob and this with an equal sum which he owed to the
generosity of Lord Oxford and with the money due to him from
his fellowship at John's ensures the poet “his bread and butter at
the last.” And yet when one looks over this famous collection of
poems how few of them seem to us at this later date worthy of
preservation. How weary one grows of his Cupids and Chloes and
how truly gross and artificial so many of his poems appear! Their
only redeeming quality lies, it would seem, in a certain airy amor-
ousness which sometimes, but by no means always, carries with it a
happy distinctive tone derived, we may perhaps be justified in sur-
mising, from those wanton digressions in his private life which
were to be afterwards so deplored by Samuel Johnson. For there
can be small doubt that this "ambassador of meane extraction” as
Queen Anne used to call him, this "creature” of Dorset's, was ex-
tremely addicted to the pursuit of the not altogether intangible de-
lights which come to those who indulge in what the Elizabethans
were wont to name as the pastime of "wenching.”
Mat Prior was in fact a most incorrigible amorist. He would
spend an evening with Oxford, Bolingbroke, Pope, and Swift and
then go off gay and incontinent to this or that little midnight drab.
“Fair Thames she haunts, and every neighbouring grove
Sacred to soft recess, and gentle love."
“So when I am wearied with wandering all day


268
MATTHEW PRIOR
To thee, my delight, in the evening I come:
I
No matter what beauties I saw in my way;
They were but my visits, but thou art my home.”
However much one may regret in his poems the presence of a cer-
tain note of hard artificial and insensitive cynicism, one cannot but
accede that he is able in his own facile way better almost than any
other English poet to indicate the unwisdom of putting too high a
value upon the ungenerous temptation of inordinate chastity. The
iniquity of thus capriciously damming up one of the main streams
of human happiness seems to have lodged itself very firmly in this
Dorset man's brain. And he was at pains to whisper his perilous
convictions into the pretty conch-like ears of every young girl he
had to do with.
“Never fancy time's before you,
Youth, believe me, will away;
Then alas! who will adore you
Or to wrinkles tribute pay.
All the swains on you attending
Show how much your charms deserve;
But, miser-like, for fear of spending,
You amidst your plenty starve.
While a thousand freer lasses,
Who their youth and charms employ,
Though your beauty theirs surpasses,
Live in far more perfect Joy.”
His frolic philosophy shows scant respect even towards the state
of Holy Matrimony. It would seem that his profligate mind could
find an excuse to justify the most reprehensible indulgence. His
reasoning on this head cannot but be painful reading for married
ears! What home would be safe if punishment were made to fit
the crime at this rate?
"Since we your husband daily see
So jealous out of season


LLEWELYN POWYS
269
Phyllis, let you and I agree
To make him so with reason.”
But it would be a mistake to think that Matthew Prior was alto-
gether incapable of writing in a more moral vein. His book of
poems ends with the epitaph he composed for the tomb of Sir
Thomas Powys.
i
“Here lies Sir Thomas Powys Knight.
.
What by example he taught throughout his life
At his death he recommended to his family and friends:
‘To fear God, and live uprightly
Let who ever reads this stone
Be wise, and be instructed.”
It is, however, unlikely that the author of the inscription, gave,
if the truth were known, very much attention to this death-bed
exhortation, any more, with shame be it spoken, than does up to the
present time the author of this Essay—the humblest and least
punctilious of the large and graceless brood which owes its exist-
ence to the pious and potent loins of the Knight of Lilford Hall.
“To the grave with the dead
And the living to the bread.”
With the money he derived from his book and with the gift of
the house in Essex that he had from Lord Oxford, Matthew Prior
proposed to spend the last years of his life happily enough. He
had grown a little deaf for no other reason, as he explained, than
that "he had not thought of taking care of his ears, while not sure
of his head.” But apparently this slight physical handicap in no
way interfered with his relish for life. We hear of him planting
quincunxes in the garden of his manor, or spending long happy
months at Wimple, Oxford's country seat, delighted as much by
the grace of the little Lady Margaret as he had before been by the
manners “wild as colt untam’d” of the high-spirited Kitty, after-
wards to become the famous Duchess of Queensbury whom Beau
Nash is said to have treated so roughly and who living to the lat-


270
MATTHEW PRIOR
ter end of the eighteenth century died, at last, characteristically
enough, from a surfeit of cherries!
It was at Wimple that Matthew Prior himself ended his life on
September 18, 1721. His will was found to contain a legacy to a
woman whom Dr Johnson does not hesitate to describe as "a des-
picable drab of the lowest species.”
In a letter written at the time we read:
“I find poor Prior's will makes noise in town much to his disad-
vantage. Some malicious fellows have had the curiosity to go and
inquire of the ale-house woman what sort of conversation Prior
had with her. The ungrateful strumpet is very free of telling it
and gives such accounts as afford much diversion.”
Also from Arbuthnot we get a suggestive glimpse of this side of
the poet's life, which was, after all, so singularly removed from the
stately quincunxes, round which on August evenings “My noble,
lovely little Peggy” was wont to play and trip it. "We are to have
a bowl of punch at Bessy Cox's. She would fain have put it upon
Lewis that she was his Emma; she owned Flanders Jane was his
Chloe.”
Matthew Prior had long had Westminster Abbey "in his eye”
and in the end he indulged "a last piece of human vanity” by be-
queathing five hundred pounds towards the erection of the prepos-
terous monument which now stands above his grave.
The actual place of his burial is at the feet of Edmund Spenser
in the poet's corner.
It must be confessed there appears something curiously incon-
gruous
about a trick of fortune which could cause the wanton para-
mour of Mistress Besse Cox to lie down in the dust, head to heel,
with none other than the fastidious author of the Faerie Queene.
a


VIENNA LETTER
August, 1923
I
N this letter to the readers of The Dial I should prefer not to
discuss cultural and artistic matters in Austria, but to take an-
other point of view, and from this look out over another and a
broader mental surface. But this point of view will always remain
that of an Austrian, that is, of an individual who shares the lan-
guage and the intellectual concerns common to the German, with-
out belonging to that great political entity which was established
in 1871 and humbled in the world war: the German Empire. Per-
haps it is well to remind American readers, who are accustomed to
dealing with large, simple, and plainly demarcated political and
economic units, that in Europe there are many millions of Germans
outside the German Empire who take an active part in their na-
tion's essential and ultimate destiny-by which I do not mean its
political destiny. There are the German Swiss—and in numbers
they constitute the strongest part of the Swiss Confederation—the
Austrians, and the millions of Germans who are incorporated in the
Czecho-Slovak state, not to speak of the smaller and yet very con-
siderable minorities which are to be found in the other countries of
eastern Europe, and even in France.
Now it might seem that it would not be worth the trouble to
bother American heads with the complications and intimate details
of Europe; especially if one is not a politician, and the American in-
terested in such things would less likely turn to The Dial than to
the distinguished review which was founded a year ago with the
purpose of propagating knowledge of foreign politics in the United
States under the guiding spirit, if I am not mistaken, of Professor
Coolidge of Boston. But in this old and complicated Europe, intel-
lectual, historical, and political matters have the strictest and the
most indissoluble connexion with one another. And this bewilder-
ing but essentially quite consistent interplay gives rise to that mys-
tery which, if I were to turn a meteorological phenomenon into a
spiritual one, I should call the pan-European weather; and exactly
as with the weather, it has its maximum and its minimum tempera-


272
VIENNA LETTER
a
tures, its rains and calms, its darknesses and stagnations, while the
storms and cloudbursts are the European wars and revolutions.
But I fear that Americans must be forced to take an interest in this
weather, since somehow there will begin to be, not a European and
an American weather, each independent of the other, but one gen-
eral condition spreading over the whole planet. And I fear that to
understand this meteorology they must learn to read more and more
in the heavy tome of our (the European) intellectual life. Now to
be sure, this book contains an unending amount of things which
touch on the past; in fact, in the pages of this book the past and the
present seem almost inseparable—a disturbing factor for the Ameri-
can attitude, which is based entirely on the present and derives so
much momentary strength from this position. But nevertheless I
fear that the American I mean the American who wants in some
way to lay his hand on the hilt of present and future intellectual
forces—cannot avoid puzzling over this old and heavy book. And
his incentive will not be in the lukewarm pious deference which he
owes to the intellectual situation in Europe because it has always
lain behind his own experiences as a historical past, an hypothesis;
but a much stronger and more feverish motive will impel him. In
some day not far off, with the keenness of a besetting fever, with the
poignancy of a dream, and the oppression of a nightmare, he will
become conscious that all these European matters are by no means
things of an unrelated past, but the living and fermenting present,
a ferment in which so tremendously much of the past is a factor.
He will see that this European present is also his American future,
from which there is so little chance of his withdrawing himself or
withdrawing his great young sea-encircled continent; that, rather,
all the potentialities and catastrophes of geographic and racial des-
tiny which are slumbering in this young continent will be released
through no other conflagrations than that of Europe's intellectual
future. We are now facing such an effect of the intellectual under-
current of Europe upon the intellectual undercurrent of America.
(I speak of processes which are worked out on a quite different
plane from the relatively harmless economic crises and the almost
stupid and inane vicissitudes of current politics.) The symptoms
are manifesting themselves here and there, but to be sure they make
a tremendously innocent and, in comparison with such great mat-
ters of the world's future, an almost trivial showing. I mean the
gradual penetration of American imaginative life by the strong,
a


HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL
273
a
subtle dream-toxins of the European imagination-a process
whereby New York, the capital of the world (as it has now become
in a certain sense owing to the war) has begun magically to attract
all those individuals who are the carriers, in any sphere, of Europe's
artistic and intellectual life. It makes no difference to me whether
these individuals are called Bergson or France, or Chaliapine, Rein-
hardt, or Stanislawsky, or Anna Pavlowa, Elly Ney, or Maria
Jeritza; or whether these results deriving from Europe are obtained
through the subtleties of words and sentences with their spiritual
import, through the soaring of a voice, the tones of an instrument,
or the movements by which an inspired human body can display
the incomprehensible. Also I completely and intentionally neglect
the somewhat external and superficial forms in which this re-ab-
sorption seems to be taking place, and the primarily pleasure-seek-
ing spirit behind the classes of the public who are the receivers of
these influences. But no one who looks into such things can avoid
the analogy between this situation and the situation which began
with the last century of the Roman Republic and determined the
nature of the centuries following—an analogy of course which, like
any other, cannot be followed through too strictly. I refer to the
invasion of the young Roman metropolis by the graeculus histrio,
the Greek sophist, the Greek artist, the Greek dancer. With them
enter Plato and his dreams, Egypt and its secrets, Persia, Babylon,
Syria, Zoroaster, Mithras, and finally the gospel. The superficies
of this society over which the invasion first spread, were, to be sure,
only the rich classes, the pleasure-seekers, the sophisticated, and the
curious. But the spirit is the subtlest of all poisons; inside of a
century Rome was hollowed out, and in place of a relatively young
and naïve, half-peasant civilization, it housed the mightiest and
most portentous mixture of minds and religions that the world has
ever seen. For such an intellectual infusion swiftly penetrates the
blood vessels and the lymphatic chambers, and I believe that the
United States, in the obscure depths of its becoming, conceals all
those elements which are predestined, in making a contact with such
enormous ferment as is contained in the intellectual life of Europe,
to take on quite astonishing new extensions—especially of a reli-
gious nature, perhaps also artistic.
With this, by way of preliminary remarks, I shall try to outline
in very rough strokes the inner aspect of spiritual Germany after
the catastrophe of the war and of the peace which is continuing the
а


274
VIENNA LETTER
war, and above all, the mentality and the attitude of the youth who
are fully concerned in such crises. These young men do not see in
the war any single sharply outlined historical event, but they look
upon it as the climax of material and intellectual developments dur-
ing the five or six preceding decades, or even the summing up, the
symbolic and, one might say, the picturesque accomplishment of the
whole nineteenth century. Their attitude after such a catastrophe
is in every way entirely different from that of the young Russian
men and women when they saw themselves in a similar situation
after the collapse of the first Russian attempt at revolution in the
years 1906-7. Among the young Russians at that time, there fol-
lowed after a short but very acute exertion—for that revolution
was a liberal one, carried on by the highest intellectual classes, and
it was finally stifled by czarism with the help of the lower classes,
the same people who are now Bolshevist-after a short period of
activity, I say, there followed a complete relaxation of the nerves
and of the will, a sinking back into melancholic apathy or into sen-
suality. In some of his novels which have obtained a passing fame,
Artzibashev has described these circumstances. If I had to sum up
in a word the effect of the great catastrophe of 1918 on the younger
Germans, it would be the exact counter-concept of relaxation:
namely, the most intense exertion, an exertion of a political nature,
to a great extent—but I should like to omit here entirely the purely
political. Exertion, then, of the mind, exertion of all mental exac-
tions, exertion of the feeling of responsibility, and exertion of the
consciousness, and of the sense of fate and the cosmos.
This young generation finds itself on the ruins of a world; not
only the political world is a heap of ruins to them, but also the
world of the intellect. The rationalism in which the nineteenth
century thought that its world-outlook was organized indestructibly
for all times, has collapsed. The first great act of the young gen-
eration was to dethrone rationalism, and subordinate it to the irra-
tional. They abandoned the conceptions which the nineteenth cen-
tury respected most: the conception of complete individual free-
dom, and the conception of evolution by which all the mysteries of
existence have been more obscured than clarified. The conception
of authority rose higher and purer, when all the actual bearers of
authority had fallen. The effort was made as profoundly as pos-
sible to give the strongest possible foundation to the conception of
authority in feeling and thinking (for when we are young we strive


HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL
275
especially for a synthesis between feeling and thinking). All the
misfortune which had been suffered, the tragic incomprehensibili-
ties of the historic process to which one is subject, the awareness of
their own shortcomings—all this was put into the corner-stone of
the new belief. They tried to grasp the conception of fate as fully
as possible. Incited and consolidated by the urge to arrive at new
combinations of all things and to see something like order and sense
in a dual-political and spiritual-catastrophe, they devoted them-
selves to two streams of thought and feeling. One is more Chris-
tian or mystic: the fusion of all things in a recognition of God
which soars, so to speak, above and beyond the rational. The other
is more ancient, or rather, oriental and pagan; starting from a mag-
nificent comprehension of the material life, it arrives at the concep-
tion of life's flow, and likewise moves in a dark bed beneath the ra-
tional. But it is not as though each of these tendencies had pre-
cluded the other. Rather, they merged together, just as two ten-
.
dencies had done almost two thousand years before, when a pagan-
ism striving after spirituality and a Judaic Christianity inclining
towards a pagan outlook had really gone over into each other—and
with tremendous results. This neither purely spiritual nor purely
vitalistic attitude—which can no longer be reached by the catego-
ries of optimism or pessimism prevailing in the nineteenth century,
because it operates, figuratively, on an entirely new plane—holds
in thrall the minds of men who can be considered as forming one
generation, and who will determine by their pressure all intellec-
tual developments. It would be idle and trivial to desire to ascer-
tain the numerical ratio between these individuals and the totality
of available young men; yet I believe that there is a great body of
these people who are filled with a religiosity which is not dogma-
tized, but living and pulsating, that they have swept through all
classes of the nation, and are banding together in small conventicles
everywhere throughout the German-speaking countries. This might
be called a condition of pre-messianic religiosity. And it has even
conjured up for itself a leader, or forerunner of the leader: not in
the form of a human being of flesh and blood, but in the form of a
dead man, a single deceased individual who had been forgotten by
the nation for nearly a hundred years, but whose spiritual presence
and power seems so great and unusual to the present generation ral-
lying about him that we should rather speak of it as a religious phe-
nomenon than a purely literary one. This man who was reborn,
a
a


276
VIENNA LETTER
a
called back from the grave by the pressure of a whole generation, is
the poet Friedrich Hölderlin. It must seem strange to people who
are powerfully enmeshed in the notion of the immediate present to
think that a generation of living men allows its highest thoughts to
circulate about the figure of a youth who was born about a hundred
and fifty years ago (1771) and vanished from this world about
1803 or 1804; not through death, but through an almost fated
madness, under the cloud of which he lived on until after the year
1840. Thus, approximately, a contemporary of Shelley, evoked by
the faith and will of a whole generation to serve as the symbol of a
leader in one of the most sinister conditions in all history. And yet
I am speaking of things which are utterly real, in any case possess-
ing much more reality in thousands of heads than all that is going
on between ministers and ministers, party leaders and party lead-
ers, and which is filling up the ephemeral columns of the newspa-
pers; things also which have quite external and tangible effects, in
that throughout the German world one edition after another of the
works of this poet who was almost forgotten during his lifetime
and fifty years ago was hardly known by name, is being issued and
eagerly consumed by the public. It is not easy to tell foreigners
what it is that can take a long-dead lyric poet—whose hymns and
elegies are of a wonderful rhythmic strength, but at the same time
are linguistically very difficult and in places truly obscure—and
with a single stroke make him the leader of a whole fated genera-
tion, so that they recover themselves in him after a stupor of sev-
eral
years, and begin building the greatest structures in accordance
with him. So I must content myself with a few mere pointers.
But it is remarkable enough to think that in particular the strophes
of his last productive years when he was already in the shadow of
madness, strophes which passed for decades as completely incom-
prehensible or even as simply the senseless products of a maniac,
are now really understood, not only by scattered individuals, but
by many; and an unending content pours from these sibylline pages
into their hearts, while this content is such that it seems to be pre-
cisely the one possible solace for the present hour and situation.
He is especially fitted as the leader and the symbol of a tragic hour
for this reason: he was a tragic figure, and besides, of remarkable
purity, misunderstood, even completely disdained by the world of
his contemporaries, beaten by fate in every way, entirely alone and
therefore remaining entirely good, indeed—like the noble harp-


HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL
277
answering every stroke with always purer and higher tones. But
this declares only the pathetic element radiating from his figure,
and not the intellectual. But quite aside from everything which
makes him a touching, poetic figure, or a mystical one if you will,
he possessed great intellectual potency. Driven by a relentless but
genuinely German destiny to retire within himself, he made him-
self a world from within. Yet it was not at all—as with the ro-
mantics living after him—a world of the fleeting and music-like
dream; it was a world of crystalline vision in which all the spir-
itual, moral, and historical forces of reality had their place, al-
though not viewed coldly through the understanding, but with a
mythopoeic or religious eye. The more pitilessly and confusingly
the real world encircled him, the more powerfully his soul struggled
to construct within itself a vision embracing all the forces in the
world and reconciling them with one another. As I try to describe
for Anglo-American readers of The Dial the aspect of this mighty
supernatural presence, the name of William Blake comes spon-
taneously to my mind; and in fact an analogy does exist for those
who look more closely at the phenomena of the spirit. In any case,
abandoning himself to a pure and demoniacally powerful intuition,
Hölderlin perfected within himself a synthesis of the great histor-
ical past on which our intellectual existence rests; and in this syn-
thesis he produced the solemn union of the two great tendencies
which I designated above as the religious complexes in the con-
sciousness of this last living generation. He grasped Hellenism
with his whole soul; but precisely because he grasped it completely
and lived in it, towards the end of his life he also moved through
an evolution which transpired in Hellenism itself—if we see, glim-
mering through Plato, a light which is identical with that of Chris-
tianity. He grasped this youthful and still undogmatized spirit of
Christianity without, one might say, completely abandoning the
spirit of Hellenism. The great pagan conceptions of fate and the
gods live in his poetic world along with deeply Christian attitudes
and intuitions-Aether and Bacchus with Christ. So the genera-
—
tion of the living sees its deepest yearning, the germ of its new re-
ligious dream, pre-existing in this mystic leader. His star shines
over their spiritual world; and for the moment, as the stars will it,
this figure is nearer to the heart and affects the heart more power-
fully, than even the powerful and ever comforting vision of Goethe.
HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL


BOOK REVIEWS
A NEW SYSTEM OF PHILOSOPHY
SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL Faith. Introduction to a
System of Philosophy. By George Santayana. 8vo.
314 pages. Charles Scribner's Sons. $3.50.
THIS
a
HIS volume is only a prelude to a work on Realms of Being,
which will deal with the different spheres of Existence, Es-
sence, Truth, and Spirit. It is a brave thing in these days, to
launch a system of philosophy; there is everywhere so much detail,
so much bored familiarity, that few men have the comprehensive
ness for a large synthesis. Mr Santayana has the power of dismiss-
ing the irrelevant: "exact science and the books of the learned,” he
says, “are not necessary to establish my essential doctrine.
It needs, to prove it, only the stars, the seasons, the swarm of ani-
mals, the spectacle of birth and death, of cities and wars." He
claims, accordingly, that his philosophy is not merely an expres-
sion of the intellectual fashion of the moment.
.
“In the past or in the future, my language and my borrowed
knowledge would have been different, but under whatever sky I
had been born, since it is the same sky, I should have had the same
philosophy.”
This is more nearly true in his case than in that of any other living
European, but it is not quite true—probably it is not meant to be
quite true. It is true that the speculations of the last two centuries
leave him cold. Philosophy in modern times, he says:
.
“ceased to be the art of thinking and tried to become that impos-
sible thing, the science of thought.
The whole of British
and German philosophy is only literature.
Not one term
not one conclusion in it has the least scientific value, and it is only
when this philosophy is good literature that it is good for any-
thing.”


BERTRAND RUSSELL
279
>
He might therefore have had the same philosophy if he had lived
before Kant and Hume. But we cannot say as much of the three
men whom he really admires : Plato, Aristotle, and Spinoza. Plato,
especially, is woven into the very texture of his thought. I do not
know what his outlook would have been if he had been a contem-
porary of Heraclitus, but it would not have been the outlook which
in fact he has.
So much for the past. As for the future, will it be “the same
sky”? In Mr Wells' When the Sleeper Awakes, London has a
roof, it eschews daylight, and has only electric lamps; the Lon-
doner never sees the stars, or even the sun and moon; he knows
nothing of "the sweet approach of even or morn.” Such a man
would not have Mr Santayana's philosophy, or any other that is
proved by “the stars, the seasons, the swarm of animals.” Yet fu-
ture man will presumably be such, unless industrialism destroys
itself.
Mr Santayana's system, therefore, though not bound to the pres-
ent moment or to any one Western country, belongs to the Hellenic
tradition created by Plato and in process of destruction by modern
science; it belongs to about two thousand years of Western Europe,
and could not have been produced (short of a miracle) in another
age or continent. Of course, I include America in Western Europe
for this purpose.
Mr Santayana holds—and in this I agree with him—that all
our beliefs are matters of faith rather than reason. Applying the
method of Cartesian doubt, he finds no reason to stop short at the
ego, or any other existing thing; he arrives at last at "essence,"
which he holds to be indubitable but non-existent. The essence of
a thing, in his system, is its character, apart from the fact that it
exists; there are innumerable essences which do not belong to any
existing thing, such as "golden mountain,” "phoenix," "unicorn.”
There is no room for scepticism here; so he contends, because es-
sence is free, not wedged tight among rivals, like the things that
exist. But a philosophy which wholly ignores the existing world
is somewhat unsatisfactory; moreover, like Hume's doubts, it must
be abandoned when the philosopher leaves his study.
"Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to
surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in pre-
serving it coolly and proudly through a long youth, until at last, in


280
A NEW SYSTEM OF PHILOSOPHY
the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged
for fidelity and happiness.”
It is “animal faith” that prompts this exchange. By "animal
faith” is meant something that we share with other animals: the
belief of the cat in the mouse, and of the mouse in the cat; the
habit of taking our fleeting perceptions as signs of "things,” and
generally those fundamental beliefs without which daily life is im-
possible. Animal faith can be purified and systematized by phi-
losophy, but cannot be abolished except on pain of death. Accord-
ingly, it is to be frankly accepted where it is indispensable.
“I propose now to consider what objects animal faith requires
me to posit, and in what order; without for a moment forgetting
that my assurance of their existence is only instinctive, and my de-
scription of their nature only symbolic.”
The remainder of the book reports the deliverance of such ani-
mal faith as has survived in Mr Santayana.
There are three points in the system which fail to make them-
selves luminous to the present reviewer. The first is the treatment
of essence as something divorced from existence and independent of
it. The second is the belief in "substance." The third is the dis-
cernment of “spirit” as a separate realm of being. This last raises
such thorny problems that it will have to be left on one side. The
other two, however, can be briefly considered.
The distinction between essence and existence is one which, apart
from terminology, is familiar to common sense. Hamlet is merely
an essence; Julius Caesar has an essence, but was also an existing
being. For this reason Hamlet was whatever Shakespeare chose
that he should be; whereas Julius Caesar was what he was, and not
whatever the historians chose to invent. We can abstract his es-
sence by describing him, and leave it doubtful whether he existed,
just as it is doubtful whether King Arthur existed. When we do
this we are freed from the trammels of historical fact. It is doubt-
ful, however, whether this is a logically correct account of what oc-
curs. Let us take some simpler essence—say, a certain shade of
colour. Wherever this shade of colour exists, it seems to be the es-
sence itself that exists. All that we do when we call it an "essence"


BERTRAND RUSSELL
281
a
а
is to ignore its relations in space and time; it is the fact of having
such relations that seems to be meant when anything is said to "ex-
ist.” (This, at least, is one meaning of this very ambiguous word.)
It may be suggested that all simple essences do actually exist, in
the sense in which a shade of colour exists wherever there is a patch
having that colour. As for complex essences, they will not be sub-
stantives, but a collection of propositions—true in the case of Cae-
sar, false in the case of Hamlet. They become false through the
prelude "once upon a time,” which has to be supposed in every tale
if no more definite time is indicated. It would take us too far into
technical logic to elaborate this suggestion. But the question is
vital to Mr Santayana; perhaps it is a case where his dismissal of
“exact science” has its dangers.
The same may be said of “substance,” which apparently means,
in this book, much the same as what is ordinarily meant by “mat-
ter.” Some acknowledgement is made that this notion is now often
regarded as questionable, but arguments are advanced to show that
nevertheless substance is unavoidable.
“If Heraclitus and modern physics are right in telling us that the
most stable of the Pyramids is but a mass of events, this truth
about substance does not dissolve substance into events that hap-
pen nowhere and to nothing.
If an event is to have indi-
vidual identity and a place amongst other events, it must be a
change which substance undergoes in one of its parts.'
Again, we are told that events must be "things in flux” or “modes
of substance.” One is reminded of a famous argument of Kant in
favour of substance. But when Mr Santayana speaks of those he
is criticising as assuming events that happen "nowhere and to noth-
ing," the word "nowhere” is unwarranted, and the words "to noth-
ing” assume doctrines in logic and physics which demand a more
elaborate justification than is to be found in this volume.
The book has all Mr Santayana's well-known merits: beauty of
style, . truly philosophic temper, a wide survey of history and
thought. It is full of sayings that are profound, delightful, or
amusing. And it has the great merit of not pretending, by bad ar-
guments, to establish doctrines which we accept on instinct, but
cannot hope to prove.
BERTRAND RUSSELL


THE FIRST BOOK OF MARY BUTTS
SPEED THE Plough, and Other Stories. By Mary
Butts. 12mo.
222 pages. Chapman and Hall, Ltd.
London.
M
ISS BUTTS' collection of stories can be likened only to mas-
ter-work: Dubliners or Mr Lawrence's England My Eng-
land. It is the announcement of a new intellect, acute and passion-
ate, to scrutinize experience with an unfamiliar penetration and to
substitute for it, as it ceases, new form and light.
The light is tragic. Funereal mother, she hurries her exact heart-
breaking figures into rigid graves or silence; without explanation or
complaint; in a bare parti-coloured light, "all the epiphany you've
got for the fine clothes, and the fine movements, and the sensual
elegance, and the silly imagination, and the pain.” What is done,
is still; the memory can make these events a part of itself, but can-
not turn them into theory or proposal. The result in sorrow and
sweetness is great; halted by an aesthetic intuition at the exact
point where it would become sensational.
English to the core, her good is serenity. Something over and
above the décor of passion and inquisition of pain, like a David
and Jonathan pact, is its nearest equivalent in conduct. The elab-
orate genius of her race enchants or bewilders a foreign mind: of
two common labourers, “They were pleased that they recognized
without philanthropy, or commiseration their contrasted pride and
grace. Beyond that, there is no "impulse of malice, indignation,
despair,” and little comparative appraisal.
Therefore, the tales are sinister when not idyllic. No emphases
are made for the benefit of society; hungriest youth could not re-
gard these parables as aid. The fierce passions belong to the au-
thor's mind; it has not pretended, or spied on civilization. Partic-
ularly in In Bayswater, the absence of praise and blame gives a ter-
rific tragic tonality to the whole; one choir of instruments stilled,
for a purpose. The purpose is an artificial savagery, deliberate and
a
strong; furthered by Miss Butts' refusal to employ any modern
convenience of interpretation or terminology. The parent devour-
a


GLENWAY WESCOTT
283
ing its young; the cold girl warming herself by male catastrophe;
the erotic friendship, drawn out and frustrated; “Festus like a thin
rod incapable of evasion or compromise or the least adaptation,”
intolerably a suicide; the final reckoning of the friends—Homeric
waste and slaughter, needless, pitiful: it draws from her no remark.
The theme is a "hard, bright and sweet” male reality wasted and
wounded by old female instincts, not swiftly enough altered to a
new order—unrequired and perverted. The story is not as perfect
as later ones will be; but they also may present no solution and no
а
surcease.
a
For her work is an irresponsible evocation; the first and strangest
resource of the human intellect, and, in our literature, longest in
abeyance. Of all forms of utterance, narrative, the description of
a mobile cluster of experiences, is the least easily comprehensible;
the contrary appears to be true only because debased romancers have
too long imitated a redundant theatre. The latter's devotees are
bound to find "that which is done” in these stories much overlaid
by that which merely is, the plot by something as displeasing as
poetry. Their demands are in fashion; but fine writers have al-
ways differed from petty by understanding that the relation be-
tween experiencing itself and mere events is exactly that between
the music and text of an opera.
As to mechanics and her system of speech, she combines a mini-
mum of linear fluency with a maximum of swift continuity in emo-
tion. Each movement or image stands out crisply, in full relief;
intermediate phrases have been cut away. Very rarely her mean-
ing depends on grammatical relations which take place in the ellip-
sis, and a part is lost. The eye does not predominate, and anal-
ogies are not made to prolong its portion of experience; but to illus-
trate or to probe into meaning: "A huge motor gauntlet like a dead
animal.” This prose is not something stretched between one mind
and another, a mere telephone wire; it has weight and substance,
"definitely an object of whatever shape lying upon the paper” (Dr
Williams). In the dialogue, work of genius, the obliqueness of
talk, its wide palette of meanings, are used with brevity and ele-
gance; the violent atmospheres, the muscular haste, the sensual
tints, the symbols and diagrams are handled with the balance of
Congreve. The rhythm is subtle, short fluent jets retarded by spon-
daic forms. Never unnoticeable, it keeps the intellect nervous and


284
THE FIRST BOOK OF MARY BUTTS
watchful, before which the illustrative violence, the extremes of
tenderness and sweetness, bud and increase and burst, incredibly
primitive and bright.
Once more, beauty is not featureless. By these means of style it
has boundaries, differentiating figure and surface and scent: “By
the centurion's hard fire there was another arrangement of life like
a base scale played firmly.” To see and exist, and to see exist: the
appetite of a race of navigators, with large stone eyes:
)
.
“There were little pieces of meat classified and no carcasses.
The poor like thick gold watch-chains, and little earrings stuck on
cards."
“Into a city of charwomen. They climbed out
of deep areas. Soon he saw they were everywhere, descending, ris-
ing, in their rhythm; young in glazed cotton furs, mature and very
pregnant, old with scum in their eyes.
“Rain began.
Wetted at dusk, the streets' patina of filth gleamed like stale fish,
and out of the crests of the houses came noises of weeping that
never was, never could be comforted.”
a
Beyond these collected slums, England “hammered by the sea,”
its “naked sun” and “grey, savage grass” and “cows, that sharpen
their teeth on their sides”; the Holy Land's “pool of hot wood,” its
"grey tent and its gilt bird”; France full of trenches, and Greece-
'
a world heavy with characteristics.
Now that religion has been broken which lay embedded in faith,
the shivered emotion attaches again in crystals to objects: a kind of
awe and apprehension of meaning. This moody haughty mind,
essentially religious, collects no drawing-room symbols; but gathers
exactly the sense of ploughs, blades, and blood. It is rich in the
scholarship of a golden bough, of a stamen of wood twelve feet
long hung with a fox-pelt and feathers, of a dark grail. Strictly
contemporary experience is lit by an antique fiery light; life an “in-
coming up-to-date.” The racial memory,
the animal memory, has been strangely extended; and memory is
the identifiable soul.
fernal saga
9
.
.
GLENWAY WESCOTT


MR WELLS ANCIENTS
Men LIKE GODs. By H. G. Wells. 12mo. 327 pages.
The Macmillan Company. $2.
THAI
HE significance of Mr Wells' new essay in Utopianism is fully
'
indicated in the title. He has turned a little way from the
problem of what men ought to do, to the real problem of morals,
what ought to be? He has not, in effect, created imaginary super-
men, nor proposed ideal human figures. He has presented a group
of beings in the image of men and women, has sketchily indicated
what exists in their world, and has said, these men are like gods.
They have little enough relation to God, the Invisible King; there
are passages in the speech of Urthred which imply an atheism
touching even that deity. But the residuum of the argument is
clear. It is that the beings of this Utopia are godlike creatures,
and that the Earthlings remain in the age of confusion because they
do not recognize the attributes of the others as divine. In short
Mr Wells despairs of changing man until he has changed god.
This may be sacrilegious, but it is not stupid; it is too close to
the commonplaces of religious experience to be that, for it is only a
contemporary way of praying for a change of heart. With such a
theme the book must divide into two parts: the rendering of actu-
ality, the state of heart from which, and the rendering of Utopia,
the state of heart to which we must turn. The framework is classic
in one respect—the introduction of Mr Barnstaple, the modern
Gulliver; he is the pivot of both flanks, for he is of one world and
wishes for the other; near the middle of the book he tries, rather
awkwardly, to be the pivot of the action. The novelty of the book
is in presenting the right wing-the group of modern men and
women who reject the Utopia into which they are fung. The poli-
tician, the priest, the philosopher, the millionaire, the fool (aes-
thetes are fools as in Shaw) the silly women, present with a spe-
cious appearance of fairness the case against Utopia, and in a sense,
the case for the present.
Naturally the presentation of the actual world is done with
greater vigour, with more gusto, than the presentation of the ideal


286
MR WELLS' ANCIENTS
which lacks savour entirely. It is a beautiful, well-ordered, pur-
posefully-striving universe contrasted with our world of chaos, self-
ishness, and trust in God or Competition or Evolution. Conflict
exists in this Utopia-conflict with the still unsubdued forces of
nature. But there is no struggle of man against his fellow. There
is scope for the great ambition to acquire and to use knowledge.
There is room even for martyrdom.
The civilization of this Utopia is based upon Five Principles of
which the first is the principle of Privacy, the second that of Free
Movement, the third, Unlimited Knowledge, the fourth, that Ly-
ing is the Blackest Crime. Here Mr Wells interrupts the list; if he
had not long ago repudiated, in precise words, the title of artist, I
should imagine that the interlude is "for effect.” The effect comes,
in spite of him: the fifth principle is Free Discussion and Criticism.
It will be seen that three of these five are governmental, that only
the first and the fourth involve the individual, and the best thing
about the others is that two of them are negative, are inhibitions
against excessive interference with the private life. In other words,
an enlightened liberalism could do much for this Utopia. Even the
first principle is meagrely taken:
“All individual personal facts are private between the citizen
and the public organization to which he entrusts them, and can be
used only for his convenience and with his sanction. Of course all
such facts are available for statistical uses, but not as individual
personal facts.”
The principle of privacy hardly extends to what the individual
does, certainly not to what he is. It is understood that no individ-
ual would want to be or to do what would hinder the common good.
The “Crowd-mind” has gone for ever, Mr Barnstaple discovers; at
”
its best you could say that it has been displaced by the Universal
Mind. But I feel that the individual mind has gone also, and it is
characteristic that the Utopians communicate with each other sim-
ply by thinking; they do not talk.
The truth about Utopias is that they are all 110-proof. For all
of our arguments that they won't work, break on the rock of the
Utopian character which can make them work; and all our argu-
ments that they are silly or trivial or inhuman are shattered by the


GILBERT SELDES
287
direct rebuttal that the arguments only prove how much we are in
need of Utopia. Of Mr Wells' Utopias it may always be said that
they are not small private revenges, and I say this not from knowl-
edge of him or of his private life, but from knowledge of his books.
It is part of his pleasure in living to believe in perfectability
through science; his displeasure with monarchism, competition, and
the Soviets of Russia never for a moment alters his good humour.
He thinks life can be fine, must be made fine; he is more or less in
love with the material and has profound confidence in the machine
which is to transform it.
Why then is there a sort of blight over this new statement of his
belief? Why is it so lifeless! I confess that I share none of the
beliefs I ascribe to him, none I derive from his work; yet I am sus-
ceptible to his talents, to his almost ungovernable intensity and his
actual creative gift. Why doesn't this Utopia even exasperate me?
Is it possibly because Mr Wells doesn't care so much for it himself
and has only written it to add another illusion to the world which
(Anatole France has said) without illusion would perish of bore-
dom; or is it that something has knocked the whole idea of Utopia,
as well as all the special Utopias, into a cocked hat, and that that
particular direction of human thought and emotion has no longer
any bearing upon actual human existence ?
GILBERT SELDES


PRO VITA MONASTICA
Pro Vita MONASTICA. By Henry Dwight Sedgwick.
8vo. 164 pages. Atlantic Monthly Press. $3.50.
THE
a
HIS is a very significant book, but the reading of it is a pleas-
ure apart from this, for it is a model of literary style, delicate,
polished, reserved, while the format of the volume is perfectly con-
sonant with its matter, a very masterpiece of book-making.
Perhaps, indeed certainly, the quality of significance reveals it-
self in these respects as well as in the major fact that the book
itself is utterly out of key with all the dominant tendencies of the
time wherein lies its significance. So far as the present generation
is concerned-perfect style in the writing of English is not a com-
mon aim, and even good things come before us in slovenly, head-
long shape, or disguised in the cheap trappings of a rough colloquial-
ism. The beauty of English as such (and there is no language that
offers greater opportunities or more noble precedents) is almost a
lost art and a forsaken ideal, and the jargon of journalism or of the
scientific treatise is, if not the model consciously chosen, at least the
determining influence working through the sub-conscious mind. Few
indeed are the contemporary books like Compton Leith's Sirenica
or (for a different genre) Henry Adams' Mont-Saint-Michel and
Chartres, that are artistic triumphs of creative genius in the use of
language, masterpieces of great style, and it is in this slender gath-
ering that Mr Sedgwick belongs.
And again in the making of books, we have enough and to spare
of “precious” and “distinctive” productions with their exaggerated
effects in paper, typography, binding, but the volume that is in it-
self a work of art just because of its delicate composition of the
tempting, subtle, but betraying elements in the printer's craft
(some of Mr Updyke's publications for example) is rare, and
therefore when so admirable a thing as this from the Atlantic
Monthly Press comes before us, “as a stranger give it welcome.”
Style, form, and matter are all harmonized here, and all work
together to give the impression of escape, of refuge from a too in-
sistent life that in its present estate has little to commend it except


RALPH ADAMS CRAM
289
the bare and primal fact that it is. It is heartening that of late at
least a score of books have been published, all assailing our present
form of civilization with bitter irony, sarcasm, ridicule. The old
serene satisfaction of the fifty years that assembled around the turn
of the century, is gone, and in its place has come disillusionment,
,
with scathing depreciation following after. It is in America that
the attack is most fast and furious, but constructive vision does not
match destructive criticism, such as there is coming rather from
England. For this reason it is the more encouraging that a book
such as this should be put forward at this time, for it is essentially
constructive, and gets deep down to the roots of things.
What Mr Sedgwick has found is no more than that which was a
commonplace during the first fifteen centuries of the Christian Era,
lost altogether amongst those peoples that accepted Protestantism,
yet nevertheless of the very essence of Christianity, as Catholics
have always known and as Mr Sedgwick has discovered for him-
self. In his preface he puts it in few words, and thus:
“I merely wish to lay stress upon the fact that, for one reason
and another, Christianity, at least among Protestants, has cast
aside, or dropped out, a great part of the ancient practise that, dur-
ing many centuries, helped it adapt itself to human needs, enabled
it to produce heroic and radiant personalities, and shed over it a
poetry which it now lacks. I refer to the practise of withdrawal
from the world of ordinary life and from the usual occupations of
men, into some solitary or sequestered place, where in hermitage or
monastery they might give themselves up to contemplation, medi-
tation or prayer, and to such labours in library or garden as should
best fit the mind to be the dwelling-place of whatever thoughts
might seem to them the highest, best and most beautiful.
“And as, to my way of thinking, such sequestered habits and
practises are of the essence of Christianity, for without them it goes
about its tasks, halt and maimed, in helpless inadequacy, so also I
believe that the individual life, unless it takes advantage of those
practises, withdrawing apart to think high thoughts, and to recon-
sider by the light of such thoughts its hopes, ambitions, and desires,
is, and must be, imperfect.”
Through brief but penetrating studies of such as Saint Anthony,


290
PRO VITA MONASTICA
>
Saint Benedict, Saint Thomas à Kempis, Eugénie de Guérin, he
leads on to a consideration of the spiritual energy that brings the
clarifying of vision, to be derived by the solitary or the recluse
from the garden, the library, the oratory, and shows with great
sympathy, but equal force, how from these the recollected recluse
has achieved, and always may, “that peace the world cannot give,"
that world "absorbed in animal existence” where "cowboys afoot
might as well try to stop a stampede of maddened steers as the rea-
soning few to guide the course of the multitude." It is this clois-
tered life that reveals reality. “In the monastic system we shall
find recorded a great part of whatever success men have achieved in
their search for spiritual wisdom,” for "faith and imagination are
the two distinguishing habits of mind, the two factors of knowl-
edge, the two primal conditions of human existence; without them
the senses and reason would be the very shadow of vanity,” and it
is faith and imagination that are destroyed by life as it is lived
now, but edified in hermitage or cloister.
All this was and is a commonplace of Catholicism-not to speak
of the East whether Buddhist or Brahmin—but the significant
thing is that one should achieve this truth by paths in no way Cath-
olic and should give it forth in this day and generation. Nothing
could be dreamed of less consonant with contemporary methods
and motives than the life of withdrawal, meditation, prayer, and
intercession. All we think of, conceive of as desirable and potent,
is an everlasting doing of something, it really doesn't very much
matter what, so long as it means efficiency and mass-production;
commissions, conferences, committees, conventions, drives, cam-
paigns, and legislation. The spiritual quest, the retreat into the
wilderness unstained by radios, motor cars, advertising, newspa-
pers, bond-salesmen, and insurance solicitors; the desirability of
getting acquainted with one's soul, and through this, with God-
these are the things that at the most moderate estimate are regarded
with indifference by the world, which has gone its troubled way
with far other goals in view and by immeasurably alien paths.
That success has been the issue is a thesis hardly tenable, but in
the chaos of failure there are few that envisage the right way.
What happens, by some intractable fate, is paralleled by our po-
litical and social courses, where, in some nominal monarchy, a pop-
ularized parliamentary system breaks down in venality and incom-


RALPH ADAMS CRAM
291
<
petence, and a revolutionary progress is made into anarchy by way
of a theoretical “republic,” as in Portugal, China, Russia, and the
tottering states of the dismembered “Central Empires.” So, as
modernism shatters, the cry goes up for increased production,
greater "efficiency,” more mechanical inventions; for publicity,
mass-action, more laws, and increased activity of every kind, with
Mr Ford and Mr Edison and Dr Steinmetz and the “efficiency ex-
pert” as the prophets of regeneration.
Here is the significance of Mr Sedgwick's book, that it should
come at this time, when few indeed will understand, fewer still ac-
cept it; yet it is written, and this means that here and there light is
showing in darkness, and when after storm the clouds once break,
even for the moment, the break presages fairer weather, and the
clearing for a new day.
The truth that shines through the Vita Monastica (be it printed
book or way of life) is implicit in Christianity and still not inac-
tive in the Catholic part thereof. There are signs that it is reveal-
ing itself once more, and when it is given full emphasis where it is
retained, and recovered where it has been lost, then the world may
go on well for another period. Every development of formal mo-
nasticism (of which there are so many to-day) is welcome, but far
more so such an evidence as this that reveals the recovery of this
truth where it had been altogether lost.
There is nothing more interesting to-day than the watching of
that process whereby one man and another finds his way back to ul-
timate truth through study of some manifestation of the life of the
Middle Ages. It may be philosophy, economics, sociology, politics,
literature, architecture, or some other of a dozen different things,
the end is the same; the realization that here was a sane and rounded
and beautiful life in comparison with which ours is barbarous, or
worse. One fancies that in the present case the path to enlighten-
ment has been Dante, as with another it may have been St Thomas
Aquinas, or Chartres Cathedral, or the Statutes of the Latin King-
dom of Jerusalem. It is all curious and unexpected, but hearten-
ing to a degree; moreover it is cumulative, and in the end it may
mean redemption.
There is a danger in the process, and that is the chance that the
method may result in a certain over-intellectualizing of truths, the
building up of a theory that may be right and yet not closely


292
PRO VITA MONASTICA
enough related to life itself to achieve vitality. The result is that
self acquires too prominent a place, and questions are determined,
courses laid, in accordance with the reactions of this personal equa-
tion. If anything of this appears in the book under consideration,
it is of the slightest, and no more than a feeling that the author has
gone far, but has not yet quite achieved the great and vitalizing
element that through St Benedict entered into the practice of with-
drawal from the world, and from then on was the great glory of
Christian society. I mean fellowship in withdrawal, and the loss
of all sense of personal gain or gratification through this compan-
ionship and in the helping and saving of others. As Mr Sedg- .
wick says, “No man can save his own soul without necessarily help-
ing his brother save his soul likewise,” and it is equally true that no
man can save his brother's soul, or any part of him, without helping
to save his own soul. The greatness of the Christian monastic sys-
tem was that it balanced these two things in just equilibrium, add-
ing thereto the element of comradeship, which was the best protec-
tion against egotism and undue regard for one's own soul and one's
own immediate spiritual happiness.
RALPH ADAMS CRAM


GENTLE SORCERY
MOONSHINE AND CLOVER. A DOORWAY IN FAIRYLAND.
By Laurence Housman. 8vo. 219 pages. Harcourt,
Brace and Company. $2 each volume.
IN
N THESE tales selected from four volumes published previ-
ously, the outstanding impression is that of moral sensibility;
a heightened sense of the appropriateness of outward beauty to in-
ward—as in the case of Mr Housman's novel, The Sheepfold. But
whereas the austerity and calm but torrential force in The Sheep-
fold make it unique, there is variableness in the symmetry and in
the power of the telling of these later stories. The fairy-tale, like
the question, bespeaks faith in the outcome of what is not yet
evolved; and in their prime quality of illusory credibility, Mr
Housman's tales command belief. One reads eagerly until the end
has been reached, infinitesimally disaffected by an occasional flaw.
Although usually in the fairy-tale, good triumphs over evil and vir-
tue is synonymous with beauty, an appearance of moral insouciance
is essential; and in a number of these stories, one sees perhaps too
plainly, the wish to bless. Also, evolving from an affection for the
child mind and perhaps from a wish not to labour the matter, we
have from time to time a kind of diminutive conversation as of an
adult in the nursery, which is death to the illusion of make-believe.
There is poetic security, however, in the statement, "he closed his
eyes, and, with long silences between, spoke as one who prayed,”
and in the observation that Toonie's wife when her husband did
not return, “became a kind of widow"; the pace is especially busi-
nesslike in this story of Toonie. Minute rapier-like shafts of cross-
ing searchlights seem to play upon the “tight panting little bodies"
whose sentinel Toonie outwitted, “picking him up by the slack of
his breeches, so that his arms and legs trailed together along the
ground.” In The Traveller's Shoes, one is infected with the poison
of
“Sister, sister; bring me your hair,
Of our mother's beauty give me your share.
You must grow pale, while I must grow fair!"


294
GENTLE SORCERY
and sophisticated imagination in the metamorphosis by the blue
moon of a pale country, is no enemy to realness: "All the world
seemed carved out of blue stone.
The white blossoms of
a cherry-tree had become changed into turquoise, and the tossing
spray of a fountain as it drifted and swung was like a column of
blue fire.”
In the tradition of the house that Jack built, and of the stick that
beat the dog, the fire that burned the stick, the water that put out
the fire, there is newness in the evolving of the Prince's birth-day
present.
a
a cat.
“His fairygodmother had sent him a bird, but when he pulled
its tail it became a lizard, and when he pulled the lizard's tail it
became a mouse, and when he pulled the mouse's tail, it became
He pulled the cat's tail and it became a dog, and
when he pulled the dog's it became a goat; and so it went on till
he got to a cow. And he pulled the cow's tail and it became a
camel, and he pulled the camel's tail and it became an elephant,
and still not being contented, he pulled the elephant's tail and it
became a guinea-pig. Now a guinea-pig has no tail to pull, so it
remained a guinea-pig.” Intricately perfect as a pierced ivory
mosque, The Prince with the Nine Sorrows is a tale of nine sisters
enchanted into peahens. Eight having refused to regain their iden-
tity at the sacrifice of their brother's life, the ninth after pecking
out his heart, pecked out her own in remorse, substituting it for his
and he, “taking up his own still beating heart, laid it into the place
of hers so that which was which they themselves did not know.”
In these two books there is a disparity in favour of Moonshine
and Clover, there being perhaps but one story in a Doorway in
Fairyland, The Ratcatcher's Daughter, which may surely be de-
pended upon to remain in the mind. In this most civilized obverse
of fox-hunting ethics, a gnome having got himself caught in a trap
with a view to entrapping his captor, is found apparently "wrig-
gling and beating to be free.” As the price of freedom, he consents
to give the ratcatcher all the gold in the world and to make his
daughter pure gold so that the king's son will marry her. Then
when the ratcatcher finds that the prince will marry her only in the
event that she can be made natural, in order to effect a retransfor-
9


MARIANNE MOORE
295
a
mation, he is obliged to relinquish to the gnome his last penny.
The White Doe maintaining throughout the image of a creature
springing this way and that across a narrow forest stream, A Cap-
ful of Moonshine with its theme of the man who wished to know
“how one gets to see a fairy,” The Gentle Cockatrice monumen-
tally patient despite a recurring desire to identify its tail, and The
Man Who Killed the Cuckoo, are tales one does not forget. This
Mr Badman's progress, told with a laconic wonder and embodying
newly as it does, the moral contained in the story of Midas, is an
account of a man who "lived in a small house with a large garden”
and “took no man's advice about anything." Finding that the
poisonous voice that he had disliked at a distance proceeded from
himself, he "felt his eyes turning inwards, so that he could see into
the middle of his body. And there sat the cuckoo.” We find him
eventually “sailing along under the stars,” tied into a bed of cuckoo
feathers, “complete and compact; and inside him was the feeling of
a great windmill going round and round and round.”
One must not monopolize; one need not avenge oneself; in im-
proving the morals of the world, one should begin by improving
one's own; these are the mordant preoccupations about which Mr
Housman's fancy plays.
MARIANNE MOORE


PROPERTIES
The HUNDRED AND ONE HARLEQUINS. By Sacheverell
Sitwell. 8vo. 96 pages. Boni and Liveright. $1.75.
In
N England to-day, where the majority of poets are subjected to
the same literary and social influences, their verse has acquired
an irritating sameness. Virtues recur and faults recur, of which the
greatest is to lack distinction. Other poets, a minority, observe this
fault, and seeing the herd rush past them down a highroad, they
turn off deliberately into a lane. Their direction is determined by
that of the majority, being exactly opposite. They are apt to reach
a similar destination. Except in reference to the majority they
cannot be understood; they throw themselves to the other tip of a
balance; they aim to be corrective instead of total, and they per-
sist in this course even when it involves the suicide of their career.
Sacheverell Sitwell belongs to such a minority.
Imagine the background and his reaction. The room is too
full of furniture, too full of well-dressed people. Most of them
are bores. To escape them he conducts a conversation with his
friends, entirely in euphuisms, under the glare of a hundred elec-
tric lights. Suddenly the butler draws back the curtain and you
discover sunlight falling, “on far roofs, a sheaf of arrows." The
landscape is italianate, with arbours, fountains, trees, and a blue,
blue sky. It is ruled into squares by tight-ropes, over which harle-
quins perform. Looking closer you discover that the window is not
a window, but an oil painting. In a brief silence is heard the con-
versation of the bores. To escape, to horrify them, to do every-
thing in their opposite is Mr Sitwell's principal aim.
The bores are Georgian poets or people who write for magazines
and praise the Georgian poets. To contradict them is to be mod-
ern. To be modern is to be obscure. To be obscure is to be superior
to critics, who, failing to comprehend one's work, are reduced to
making remarks like the following: "Strange, rare, and subtly in-
triguing ... real, though brittle magic ... one's sense is snared
the mind is drugged: the senses get their pleasure.” Mr Sit-
well is really not half so bad as that.
а


MALCOLM COWLEY
297
His qualities are other than were mentioned; in reality he makes
little appeal to the senses. His magic is almost purely verbal. He
keeps a hundred bright words in the air at the same time, like one
of his own harlequins juggling. For this purpose he likes words
which have been worn smooth, words which slip through the fingers
and leave no impression. In opposition to the Georgians he avoids
too-definite phrases: he will mention ripe field, but never rye fields;
tall trees, but never ash trees or sycamores. And he runs intermin-
ably on, piling one faint image over another till they cease to con-
vey any image whatever, and never once abrading the wall of sense.
"And so, while smaller men may make
the soft singing and the golden shake
with which the ripe fields greet the sun,
into the joys for which they run
tired lives into a broken mould,
and then renounce the joy and fold .
And so for 268 lines, and this in a poem which is far from being
his longest. The Neptune Hotel has twice this bulk. He writes
with a fatal ease which leads him to dilate the matter of fifty or
sixty lines into the three or four hundred verses of a poem as vast
and as cluttered as an afternoon in a department store. His epics
are crumbly and diffuse. There is only one of them—The Hoch-
zeit of Hercules—which is held tightly together by the vigour of
its fantasy. And good as this poem is, it lacks the qualities of his
shorter pieces.
Here, where he confines himself to a page or two, there is no
question of glibness or being diffuse. Week-end, Fables, Mrs H...
the Lady from Babel. His poems like these are so frugal and so
complete that it is impossible to dissect them into quotations.
Their metres and images are fresh, their movement vigorous; they
have a strangeness which is not according to the formula of Mr X,
and hence they are more effective weapons against the Georgians
than a dozen volumes of polemic.
However, these latter are unaware of the attack. Having fin-
ished their act they quit the stage in a dignified manner. Mr Sit-
well rushes in to make a great bundle of their properties: moons,
trees, rivers in spate, a cage of nightingales, with all of which he


298
PROPERTIES
staggers into the wings. He returns with his own accessories, which
include italianate landscapes, a hundred and one pasteboard harle-
quins, and a stuffed unicorn suitable for a hat rack. Press on the
horn and he will stamp his silver hooves. The stage is too full of
furniture and well-dressed people, most of whom are bores. A
conversation dies in euphuisms. . . .. Now Mr Sitwell grows ex-
cited. He leaps into the wings and drags out new properties:
clowns, billboards, subways. The play continues. It has flashes
of a new brilliance, but it is “talky and unreal”; in general it bears
'
a surprising resemblance to the comedy of the Georgians. The au-
dience yawns. There is too much scenery which, though freshly
painted, remains painted scenery. The more it changes the more
it stays the same. ...
the same. . .. A man is the stature of his enemies. No-
body calls the Georgian poets gigantic. By force of combatting
them Mr Sitwell has assumed their likeness, but not in all respects.
The Georgians were dull, and yet with an effort they were read-
able. It takes someone more clever to be profoundly boring.
MALCOLM COWLEY


BRIEFER MENTION
ANNETTE AND BENNETT, by Gilbert Cannan (12 mo, 315 pages; Seltzer: $2)
is the third of a series dealing with the Lawries and the Folyats. One is
asked to listen to the same speeches from James Lawrie as he voiced in the
earlier volumes, as he glories in his failure and clings doggedly to being
treated as a leper in his own house. One can love Annette, and for her
sake put up with the Lawries, but they are bitter pills. And one can hope
that conditions in English towns will improve, and that Annette's children,
when it is their turn to have a novel written about them, will display an
inheritance of traits from their mother's rather than from their father's
side.
The Desert Horizon, by E. L. Grant Watson (12 mo, 302 pages; Knopf:
$2.50) is a simply-told tale of the Australian desert and of a boy who pre-
fers his sandy miles to any other place on earth. He is, so Mr Watson
tells us, “the willing slave of life and the desert
hardly as yet
aware of his captivity.” There is in this book, as in the author's earlier
works, a fitting of human life into an accepted pattern. Mr Watson is a
trained ethnologist, and has satisfied himself that men must make as simple
an adjustment to environment and to other men as animals make to their
jungles and their mates. His people are, with few exceptions, elemental,
animal-fibred, with their unhumorous minds focused on their sheep herd-
ing or their pursuit of a mate to share their incessant struggle to wring a
living out of difficult mediums. One misses something, however, in so di-
rect and unsubtle an account of life.
The Lone Winter, by Anne Bosworth Greene (12 mo, 379 pages; Century:
$2.25). All that is required of any reader of this thoroughly delightful
book, is a liking for open country and animals. The story is of a winter
spent on a Vermont mountain farm by a woman who is an artist, a writer,
and an expert in the raising of Shetland ponies. She is a most truthful
person, not rhapsodizing to the extent of concealing her occasional fits of
depression over remoteness and lack of human society, nor her delight in
the prospects of a visit from her boarding-school daughter, or from her
curious, kindly friends in the village below.
STORIES, DREAMS, AND ALLEGORIES, by Olive Schreiner (12mo, 153 pages;
Stokes : $1.75) may add nothing to the reputation of their author, yet they
contain much work in her happiest vein. They are characterized by the
same butterfly beauty, the same imagination and simplicity as mark her
previously published books; they range from the verge of realism to the
rainbow clouds of fantasy; at times they reveal a deep but unaffected emo-
tion, at times they are beautifully symbolical, and occasionally they are
warm and vivid in their criticism of life.


300
BRIEFER MENTION
The HIDDEN ROAD, by Elsie Singmaster (12 mo, 333 pages; Houghton, Miff-
lin: $2) led to mastery over the very impulses that had sent Phoebe Stan-
nard along it. The book is a delicately handled, finished study of a girl
whose mind was well above the average, but whose intellectual curiosity
had always to be whipped into action through her desire to captivate a
lover. There is no attempt to surround Phoebe with glamour. Her faults
are insisted upon, and yet she is a very delightful heroine. The minor
characters of the book are quite as artistically drawn as Phoebe; the back-
grounds are the habitat of real people. Indeed the book ranks high as a
well-written, genuine work of art, one of the best novels of the year.
BLINDFOLD, by Orrick Johns (12mo, 259 pages; Lieber & Lewis : $2) sets out
to be defiantly modern in theme and treatment, but gradually fades into a
background not much more revolutionary than that of Way Down East.
The ingredients are largely those of Newton Fuessle's recent Jessup—an
illegitimate child who “makes good” in New York, and a painter father-
although here the pattern is worked out to a tragic conclusion. Techni-
cally, the shift in the story from the father to the daughter weakens the in-
terest; the connecting thread is not strong enough. Briefly, a novel which
starts off realistically and ends melodramatically.
The attempt in CongUISTADOR, by Katharine Fullerton Gerould (12mo, 205
pages; Scribner : $1.50) at a drama of conflicting bloods, Scotch and Span-
ish, succeeds in adding a thin narrative to the already sizeable literature of
Puritan domination. For though the Spanish strain in Wharton Cameron,
engineer-caballero, ties him by pledge to the hacienda in Mexico, the Puri-
tan in him simply uses this setting for contrast and exploitation, and is in
every main instance the psychological determinant. At the first genuine
approach of passion, Cameron "threw back his head and stared at the dim
rafters,” saying to the charmer, Dona Flora, “You don't tempt me.” And,
even at the end, rejected by a one-time Boston sweetheart, forced to accept
a Mexican girl because of this, Wharton loves her, Manuelita, chastely,
only for one thing: a son and heir, and through him the perpetuation of
Santa Eulalia, the hacienda. One is tempted, however, to overlook this
failure of intention, for the book’s banalities : “Men are men. And women
are women”—“A caballero is a caballero still; cattle are cattle," et cetera,
are not often to be found in contemporary writing.
BALLOONS, by Elizabeth Bibesco (12mo, 168 pages; Doran: $2) is the re-
verse of literary. Its author has the faculty, capitalized in newspaper
serials and stories of the smart set and by all writers of ability, of getting
down to business at once, touching the patient where he lives. She goes
in for being frightfully subtle. In one breath she is perceptive, subtle,
ingenious, glittering, tinny, thin, and complacent. Her cleverness betrays
her. When she stops using people as mouthpieces for her dazzling little
phrases and turns her shrewd eye on them, putting her cleverness to the
laborious task of learning to project them dramatically, her books will be
worth waiting for.


BRIEFER MENTION
301
The HOUSE OF THE ENEMY, by Camille Mallarmé (12mo, 256 pages; Mc-
Bride: $2) is a highly-seasoned Spanish dish, served steaming hot with
passion and with a dash of Benavente sauce. What there is about these
La Mancha amours which renders them such family affairs is still more or
less of a mystery; marriage seems to be an avenue of intrigue dotted with
in-laws. Aside from its violent story, which doesn't quite compel credence,
this novel has colourful moments and a quick-paced narrative style.
The PUPPET Show, by Martin Armstrong (12 mo, 153 pages; Brentano:
$2) zigzags between fine, full-bodied descriptive prose and somewhat frail
cxcursions into the fantastic. When Mr Armstrong looks at life realis-
tically, he writes in vivid and incisive style, but when he interposes the
rose-tinted spectacles of allegory, things seem a little out of focus and not
half so much worth looking upon. One would suggest more work in the
mood of his admirable Old Alan and The Emigrants, and—if he insists
upon being intermittently fanciful—fewer fables and better ones.
LOYALTIES, by John Galsworthy (12mo, 110 pages; Scribner: $1). There is
less of thought and of meaning, less of dramatic vigour and power about
this play than about some of its predecessors. The author has nothing
either new or significant to say regarding loyalties; he tends toward the
commonplace both in plot and in theme; and one misses the energy and the
vitality of Strife, Justice, and The Mob.
OXFORD POETRY—1921 (12mo, 64 pages; Appleton: $1) and OxFORD Po-
ETRY-1922 (12mo, 48 pages; Appleton: $1) are collections of poems writ-
ten by Oxford undergraduates during the last two years. Although these
"poets of promise" can boast of such men as Robert Graves, Louis Golding,
and Edmund Blụnden in their host, there is not one unusual poem in either
volume. And their fulfilment has been like their promise-conventional,
dull, servile boot-licking of a hackneyed muse gone in the mouth.
In The Roving Critic, by Carl Van Doren (12mo, 262 pages; Knopf:
$2.50) "the sense of the vividness of life" is proclaimed as the all-inclusive
standard by which criticism should judge other forms of literature. The
author does not realize that vitality and verisimilitude are the easiest of
qualities to simulate. He has the habit, at once wasteful and penurious, of
stating a thought without either working it out or provoking the reader to
do so. His ideas, expressed in ungainly and distorted prose, are sufficient
to enliven the briefer papers, but they lack the durability, logic, and
subtlety that differentiates criticism from the more evanescent book review-
ing. He seems the victim of time, space, and "aliveness.”
DISENCHANTMENT, by C. E. Montague (12mo, 280 pages; Brentano: $2)
tries to do for the conduct of the Great War what Gibbon did for the
Church, with much the same manner and a fraction of the brilliance. The
fact that the author's allusive, elaborate, highly polished weapons are
turned against the conduct rather than the cause definitely places him.
a


302
BRIEFER MENTION
MUMBO JUMBO, by Henry Clews, Jr. (8vo, 276 pages; Boni & Liveright)
consists of sixty-one pages of introduction modelled closely upon Rabelais,
sixty-five pages descriptive of the characters of the play, this in the manner
of Shaw, and then four acts of a satirical comedy devoted to an exposé of
the modern pursuit of the aesthetic and ultra in art. A book along these
lines is undoubtedly in order, but in this instance, the remedy is worse than
the disease.
a
LOUISE IMOGEN Guiney, by E. M. Tenison (8vo, 348 pages; Macmillan: $5)
seems to have been composed with more material than equipment; it is ear-
nest but unorganized-an unassimilated memoir filled with documents,
divagations, and devotion. A reader with the leisure to do his own weed-
ing will discover, among much extraneous and some quite valueless matter,
an adequate summary of the life of the poet.
MODERN Colour, by Carl Gordon Cutler and Stephen C. Pepper (12mo, 163
pages; Harvard University Press : $2) is a bustling little tome spun round
a patent colour wheel. The authors have invented a magic disc which will
enable painters to reproduce nature swiftly and with automatic perfection.
The invention will be of incalculable service to belated Impressionists,
photographic painters, postal card colourists, admirers of Russian realism,
academic instructors, and undergraduates with a talent for copying.
LINE, by Edmund J. Sullivan (8vo, 190 pages; Scribner: $3.75). A suc-
cessful illustrator shows how it is done. The profounder problems of aes-
thetics are discussed and clarified: freehand drawing, reed pens, the legiti-
macy of cross hatching, formal perspective, gradation in line, shadows,
local colour, setting up a figure, et cetera. Mr Sullivan has literary ability
-if the book were not illustrated with his own drawings, we might wonder
if he were not also an artist.
a
Motion Pictures in EDUCATION, by Don Carlos Ellis and Laura Thorn-
borough (8vo, 284 pages; Crowell: $2.50). One does not quarrel with the
statement that "the more senses utilized in conveying knowledge, the better
the result" and one conceives through the presentation of certain subjects in
this book of practical information for teachers, the possibility of supple-
menting what seems to be poverty in the average child and adult, of knowl-
edge by association. Although in the case of "films purporting to be his-
torical and literary," one mistrusts a conception of the deluge in which a
lion cub is a tiny replica of the lion which carries it, and a Solomon's Court
with mural decorations which appear to be stencilled representations of
Alaskan tribal spirits, one perceives the value of films which portray scenic
wonders, plant and animal life, civic and domestic thrift, industrial
processes, progress in mechanics and the evolution of commerce. The
chapter, moreover, How to Use Films in Teaching with its insistence upon
repetition and supplementary reading, upon exact preparation on the part
of the teacher-with its pedagogic genius in exposition and the recapitu-
lating quiz-is an enthralling demonstration of the author's facile asser-
tion that "seeing is believing."


THE DEMONIAC IN THE AMERICAN
THEATRE
O
NE man on the American stage, and one woman, are pos-
sessed-Al Jolson and Fanny Brice. Their demons are not
of the same order, but together they represent all we have of the
Great God Pan, and we ought to be grateful for it. For in addition
to being more or less a Christian country, America is a Protestant
community and a business organization—and none of these units is
a
peculiarly prolific in the creation of demoniac individuals. We can
bring forth Roosevelts—dynamic creatures, to be sure; but the fury
and the exultation of Jolson is a hundred times higher in voltage
than that of Roosevelt; we can produce courageous and adventur-
ous women who shoot lions or manage construction gangs and re-
main pale beside the extraordinary "cutting loose” of Fanny Brice.
To say that each of these two is possessed by a demon is a me-
diaeval and perfectly sound way of expressing their intensity of
action. It does not prove anything—not even that they are gen-
iuses of a high rank, which in my opinion they are. I use the word
possessed because it connotes a quality lacking elsewhere on the
stage, and to be found only at moments in other aspects of Ameri-
can life-in religious mania, in good jazz bands, in a rare outbreak
of mob violence. The particular intensity I mean is exactly what
you do not see at a baseball game, but may at a prizefight, nor in
the productions of David Belasco, nor at a political convention;
you may see it on the Stock Exchange and you can see it, canalized
and disciplined, but still intense, in our skyscraper architecture. It
was visible at moments in the old Russian Ballet.
In Jolson there is always one thing you can be sure of: that
whatever he does, he does at the highest possible pressure. I do not
mean that one gets the sense of his effort, for his work is at times
the easiest seeming, the most effortless in the world. Only he never
saves up—for the next scene, or the next week, or the next show.
His generosity is extravagant; he fings into a comic song or a
three-minute impersonation so much energy, violence, so much of
the totality of one human being, that you feel it would suffice for
a hundred others. In the days when the runway was planked down


304 THE DEMONIAC IN THE AMERICAN THEATRE
the centre of every good theatre in America, this galvanic little fig-
ure, leaping and shouting—yet always essentially dancing and
singing—upon it was the concentration of our national health and
gaiety. In Row, Row, Row he would bounce up on the runway,
propel himself by imaginary oars over the heads of the audience,
draw equally imaginary slivers from his bottom, and infuse into
the song something wild and roaring and insanely funny. The
very phonograph record of his famous Toreador song is full of vi-
tality. Even in later days when the programme announces simply
"Al Jolson” (about 10:15 P. M. in each of his reviews) he appears
and sings and talks to the audience and dances off—and when he
has done more than any other ten men, he returns and blandly an-
nouncing that “You ain't heard nothing yet” proceeds to do twice
as much again. He is the great master of the one-man show be-
cause he gives so much while he is on that the audience remains
content while he is off—and his electrical energy almost always
develops activity in those about him.
If it were necessary, a plea could be made for violence per se in
the American theatre, because everything tends to prettify and re-
strain, and the energy of the theatre is dying out. But Jolson, who
lacks discipline almost entirely, has other qualities besides violence.
He has an excellent baritone voice, a good ear for dialect, a nimble
presence, and a distinct sense of character. Of course it would be
impossible not to recognize him the moment he appears on the
stage; of course he is always Jolson—but he is also always Gus and
always Inbad the Porter, and always Bombo. He has created a
way of being for the characters he takes on; they live specifically in
the mad world of the Jolson show; their wit and their bathos are
singularly creditable characteristics of themselves--not of Jolson.
You may recall a scene-I think the show was called The Midnight
Express, or The Honeymoon Express-in which a lady knocks at
the door of a house. From within comes the voice of Jolson sing-
ing, “You made me love you, I didn't wanna do it, I didn't wanna
do it”—the voice approaches, dwindles away, resumes—it is a swift
characterization of the lazy servant coming to open the door and
ready to insult callers since the master is out. Suddenly the black
face leaps through the doorway and cries out, “We don'want no
ice,” and is gone. Or Jolson as the black slave of Columbus, re-
proached by his master for a long absence. His lips begin to


GILBERT SELDES
305
a
a
quiver, his chin to tremble; the tears are approaching when his hu-
man independence softly asserts itself and he wails, “We all have
our moments.” It is quite true, for Jolson's technique is the ex-
ploitation of these moments; he has himself said that he is the
greatest master of hokum in the business, and in the theatre the art
of hokum is to make each second count for itself, to save any mo-
ment from dulness by the happy intervention of a slap on the back,
or by jumping out of character and back again, or any other trick.
For there is no question of legitimacy here everything is right if
it makes 'em laugh.
He does more than make 'em laugh; he gives them what I am
convinced is a genuine emotional effect ranging from the thrill to
the shock. I remember coming home after eighteen months in Eu-
rope, during the war, and stepping from the boat to one of the first
nights of Sinbad. The spectacle of Jolson's vitality had the same
quality as the impression I got from the New York sky-line-one
had forgotten that there still existed in the world a force so bound-
less, an exaltation so high, and that any one could still storm
Heaven with laughter and cheers. He sang on that occasion ’N
Everything and Swanee. I have suggested elsewhere that hearing
him sing Swanee is what book reviewers and young girls loosely
call an experience. I know what Jolson does with false sentiment;
here he was dealing with something which by the grace of George
Gershwin came true; there was no necessity for putting anything
over. In the absurd blackface which is so little negroid that it goes
well with diversions in Yiddish accents, Jolson created image after
image of longing, and his existence through the song was wholly in
its rhythm. Five years later I heard Jolson in a second-rate show,
before an audience listless or hostile, sing this out-dated and for-
gotten song, and create again, for each of us seated before him, the
same image--and saw also the tremendous leap in vitality and hap-
piness which took possession of the audience as he sang it. It was
marvellous. In the first weeks of Sinbad he sang the words of 'N
Everything as they are printed. Gradually (I saw the show in many
phases) he interpolated, improvised, always with his absolute sense
of rhythmic effect; until at the end it was a series of amorous cries
and shouts of triumph to Eros. I have heard him sing also the ab-
surd song about “It isn't raining rain, It's raining violets” and re-
marked him modulating that from sentimentality into a conscious


306 THE DEMONIAC IN THE AMERICAN THEATRE
bathos, with his gloved fingers flittering together and his voice ris-
ing to absurd fortissimi and the general air of kidding the piece.
He does not generally kid his Mammy songs—as why should he
who sings them better than any one else? He cannot underplay
anything, he lacks restraint, and he leans on the second-rate senti-
ment of these songs, until they are forced to render up the little
that is real in them. I dislike them and dislike his doing them-
as I dislike Belle Baker singing Elie, Elie! But it is quite possible
that my discomfort at these exhibitions is proof of their quality.
They and a few very cheap jokes and a few sly remarks about sex-
ual perversions are Jolson's only faults. They are few. For a man
who has, year after year, established an intimate relation with no
less than a million people every twelvemonth, he is singularly un-
corrupted. That relation is the thing which sets him so far above
all the other one-man-show stars. Eddie Cantor gives at times the
effect of being as energetic; Wynn is always and Tinney sometimes
funnier. But no one else, except Miss Brice, so holds an audience
in the hollow of the hand. The hand is steady; the audience never
moves. And on the great nights when everything is right, Jolson is
driven by a power beyond himself. One sees that he knows what
he is doing, but one sees that he doesn't half realize the power and
intensity with which he is doing it. In those moments I cannot
help thinking of him as a genius.
Quite to that point Fanny Brice hasn't reached. She hasn't, to
begin with, the physical vitality of Jolson. But she has a more
delicate mind and a richer humour-qualities which generally de-
stroy vitality altogether, and which only enrich hers. She is first a
great farceur; and in her songs she is exactly in the tradition of
Yvette Guilbert, without the range, so far as we know, which en-
abled Mme Guilbert to create the whole of mediaeval France for us
in ten lines of a song. The quality, however, is the same, and
Fanny's evocations are as vivid and as poignant as Yvette's—they
require from us exactly the same tribute of admiration. She has
grown in power since she sang and made immortal, I Should Wor-
ry. Hear her now creating the tragedy of Second-Hand Rose or
of the one Florodora Baby—“five little dumbells got married for
money And I got married for love. . These things are done
with two-thirds of Yvette Guilbert's material missing, for there
are no accessories and although the words (some of the best are by
>
.


GILBERT SELDES
307
Blanche Merrill) are good, the music isn't always distinguished.
And the effects are irreproachable. Give Fanny a song she can get
her teeth into, Mon Homme, and the result is less certain, but not
less interesting. This was one of a series of realistic songs for
Mistinguett who sang it very much as Yvonne George did when
she appeared in America. Miss Brice took it lento affetuoso; since
the precise character of the song had changed a bit from its rather
more outspoken French original. Miss Brice suppressed Fanny al-
together in this song—she was being, I fear, “a serious artist”; but
she is of such an extraordinary talent that she can do even this.
Yvonne George sang it better simply because the figure she evoked
as Mon Homme was exactly the fake apache about whom it was
written, and not the “my feller” who lurked behind Miss Brice.
It was amusing to learn that without a Yiddish accent and without
those immense rushes of drollery, without the enormous gawkish-
ness of her other impersonations, Miss Brice could put a song over.
But I am for Fanny against Miss Brice and to Fanny I return.
Fanny is one of the few people who “make fun.” She creates
that peculiar quality of entertainment which is wholly light-
hearted and everything else is added unto her. Of this special
quality nothing can be said; one either sees it or doesn't, savours it
or not. Fanny arrives on the scene with an indescribable gesture-
after seeing it twenty times I believe that it consists of a feminine
salute, touching the forehead and then flinging out her arm to the
topmost gallery. There is magic in it, establishing her character at
once—the magic must reside in her incredible elbow. She hasn't so
much to give as Jolson, but she gives it with the same generosity,
there are no reserves, and it is all for fun. Her Yiddishe Squow
(how else can I spell that amazing effect ?) and her Heiland Lassie
are examples—there isn't an arrière-pensée in them. “The Chiff is
. . he says I appil to him.
he likes my type”
it is the complete give-away of herself and she doesn't care.
And this carelessness goes through her other exceptional qualities
of caricature and satire. For the first there is the famous Vamp, in
which she plays the crucial scene of all the vampire stories, prelud-
ing it with the first four lines of the poem Mr Kipling failed to
throw into the wastepaper basket, and fatuously adding, “I can't
get over it”-after which point everything is flung into another
plane—the hollow laughter, the haughty gesture, the pretended
after me
.


308 THE DEMONIAC IN THE AMERICAN THEATRE
compassion, that famous defence of the vampire which here, how-
ever, ends with the magnificent line, “I may be a bad woman, but
I'm awful good company.” In this brief episode she does three
things at once: recites a parody, imitates the moving picture vamp,
and creates through these another, truly comic character. For satire
it is Fanny's special quality that with the utmost economy of
means she always creates the original in the very process of destroy-
ing it, as in two numbers which are exquisite, her present opening
song in vaudeville with its reiterations of Victor Herbert's Kiss Me
Again, and her Spring Dance. The first is pressed far into bur-
lesque, but before she gets there it has fatally destroyed the whole
tedious business of polite and sentimental concert-room vocalism;
and the second (Fanny in ballet, with her amazingly angular par-
ody of five-position dancing) puts an end for ever to that great
obsession of ours, classical interpretative dancing.
Fanny's refinement of technique is far beyond Jolson's; her
effects are broad enough, but her methods are all delicate. The
frenzy which takes hold of her is as real as his. With him she has
the supreme pleasure of knowing that she can do no wrong-and
her spirits mount and intensify with every moment on the stage.
She creates rapidly and her characterizations have an exceptional
roundness and fulness; when the demon attends there is nothing she
cannot do.
It is noteworthy that these two stars bring something to America
which America lacks and loves—they are, I suppose, two of our
most popular entertainers—and that both are racially out of the
dominant caste. Possibly this accounts for their fine carelessness
about our superstitions of politeness and gentility. The medium in
which they work requires more decency and less frankness than
usually exist in our private lives; but within these bounds Jolson
and Brice
go farther,
go with more contempt for artificial notions of
propriety, than any one else. Jolson has re-created an ancient type,
the scalawag servant with his surface dulness and hidden clever-
ness, a creation as real as Sganarelle or the figure behind all of
Chaplin's variations, the one the French call Charlot. And Fanny
has torn through all the conventions and cried out that gaiety still
exists. They are parallel lines surcharged with vital energy. I
should like to see that fourth-dimensional show in which they will
meet.
GILBERT SELDES


THE THEATRE
TWO
a
TWO new revues. The VANITIES OF 1923 is an attempt to do
the Music Box in terms of the Winter Garden, but it has a
subtle flavour of bad taste which is all its own. Joe Cook is the one
sound spot. His old act perhaps suffers a little in spontaneity by
being transferred from vaudeville to a revue: they have made him
wear shiny shoes and a correct blue serge suit, with a handkerchief
sticking out of the pocket, and I cannot but feel that his old high
vein of lunacy is a little cramped; but he reveals unsuspected
powers of burlesque acting in a skit with Peggy Joyce in which he
impersonates Wesley Brown, "of the Six Brown Brothers," a musi-
cian living in Paris, who lures an elegant lady to his apartment and
seduces her by playing the Jew's harp.—The Fashions OF 1924 is,
on the other hand, rather agreeable—nothing very dazzling: a
comic prize fight, some pretty girls in gym suits, a skit about the
servant problem, and a fantastic ballet depicting “the bewildering
fantasies of an imaginative man who, through continual puzzling
over the mysteries of life, becomes insane.” But it is one of the
better summer shows; it does not exhaust you with its banality.
Both of these revues seem to be produced in association with
prominent dressmakers and furriers, who use them as advertising
mediums. The advertisers have already laid waste the country-
side, achieved a censorship over the contents of magazines, and re-
duced the works of the great artists and savants to finely printed
little blocks of text, which are used to wad out large pages on
Campbell's Soup and Vacuum Cup Tires, and now, it appears, they
,
are beginning to determine the character of theatrical entertain-
ment. It is not inconceivable that the day will come when works
of art of all kinds will be produced to promote the sale of motor-
cars and canned salad dressing. This is a prospect which, I sup-
pose, will be hailed with cheers by Mr Matthew Josephson, who
regards the advertisers as the genuine artists and the people who
object to the commercial ideal as contemptible “small persecuted
colonies”; but I confess I am on the side of the persecuted. I can-
not get over the idea that people who pursue the arts for their own
sake deserve more respect than the people who hire themselves out


310
THE THEATRE
as ballyhoos for breakfast foods and deodorants. But now it seems
I have the literary snobs against me as well as the manufacturers,
and since I have read that the editor of Broom considers the copy
of advertising writers more artistically important than the poetry
of Elinor Wylie, I am a little timid about asserting in a magazine
as cultivated as this one that I am annoyed at seeing theatrical en-
tertainments run as adjuncts to the fur business.
But I will assert without hesitation that Seventh HEAVEN
ought to be censored—if anything is to be censored. I have just
seen this play for the first time after its triumphant run of a whole
season and I protest that it contains the most frightful moral idea
I have ever encountered on stage or screen-and it is only the other
day that I saw a movie heroine not only restored to perfect tran-
quillity herself, but also completely cleared of guilt in the
everybody else by discovering that her husband, whom she had
tried to poison, had actually died from some other cause. In Sev-
ENTH HEAVEN Mr Austin Strong shows us a faithful little French
gamine who falls in love with an atheist street-cleaner. This fel-
low sneers freely at "le bon dieu” and tries to dissuade his mistress
from believing in Him. But Chico goes off to war and the day
that the armistice is signed they tell Diane that her lover is dead-
whereupon she flies into a fury of grief and turns bitterly upon the
good old abbé who has been trying to comfort her: "He was right
after all!" she cries, "I know now there can be no bon dieu!" Then
immediately Chico appears; he has not been killed at all; and
Diane quickly changes her mind. “I know now that the abbé was
right!” she sobs. “There is a bon dieu after all!” –Well, my feel-
ing is that this idea, which is presented not merely as the cry
simple heart, but apparently as the moral theme of the play, would
be an excellent subject for suppression. I don't see why the essen-
tially truthful, if rather squalid, tragedy of The God of Vengeance
should be banished from the New York stage while it is permitted
to teach people that God is good because, in a war where seven mil-
lion men were killed, He has rescued one woman's lover.
eyes of
of a
EDMUND WILSON


COMMENT
a
PRONE
ROFESSOR MUENSTERBERG once defined the three
stages of a nation's development as provincial, cosmopolitan,
and national, and placed America—if we remember rightly—in a
phase of transition between cosmopolitanism and nationalism. But
nationalism is simply a fusion, a reconciliation, of the two preced-
ing stages: nationalists being men who see their environment from
both “close up” and “long shot.” At the present time there are
varying shades of such nationalists concerning themselves with
belles-lettres in America, the two prominent divisions being the sur-
viving members of the Seven Arts, and the "pure” artists, or whai
Gorham B. Munson has called the "skyscraper primitives.” There
are also several shades of people who are writing local colour
stories, or stories with or without happy endings, or stories with a
surprise in the last paragraph, or poems in dialect, et cetera—and
we pass on in haste and embarrassment.
Looking back over the old futurist pamphlets of 1909, one is
astonished to find that nothing new has come into the world since
that time, and the skyscraper primitives have taken over, more or
less articulately, the entire futurist credo. Their essential pro-
gramme is one of dogged optimism. They can find, in advertising, ,
movies, political buncombe, jazz, corrupt business tactics, bootleg,
Billy Sunday, and so on, an endless "wealth” of striking and pic-
turesque material. Leaving aside the humanistic consideration,
they try simply to re-give the sensational values which are thrown
into relief by such material. There is no beauty, there is only in-
tensity. And a city like New York can claim their enthusiasm, not
because it is a harmonious unit functioning in such a way as to pro-
duce the most widely developed type of human life (which they
know well enough it is not) but because it is so intensely, so charac-
teristically, itself.
The negative quality in the criticism of the Seven Arts group is
caused by their hankering after traditional beauty, beauty with the
connotations which the word has traditionally held. There is noth-
ing in Bertrand Russell's article of last month's Dial to conflict es-
sentially with their attitude. Indeed, any humanistic approach to


312
COMMENT
the present state of society must emphasize the negative quality of
criticism; so that the skyscraper primitives, in order to obviate this
negativism, have decided to alter their approach. One can enjoy
the whirr of a smoothly running motor, or one can see only the
wreckage in human life which lies behind that motor—and one is
respectively skyscraper primitive or Seven Arts. Or on a wider
plane, one could make the distinction between writing a book in
which there are good actions and bad actions, and writing a book in
which there are simply interesting actions.
It is no place here to toss up between the two. While pudency
forbids us to learn from The Literary Review and discover that yes
and no, both sides are right and both are wrong. But we do suggest
that the skyscraper primitives have taken the harder task, for they
must always tread on the uncomfortable verge of writing a Cham-
ber of Commerce literature. As to their omission o