f humanism,
they can answer that it is not the province of the artist to decide
whether a given sensation is an asset or a detriment to the commu-
nity. They accept the sensation simply as a fact, and exploit it.
Which they can do with impunity, provided that they are content
to leave art on the plane of chess playing or baseball, simply one
more outlet for human energy. (This fact underlies the growing
prevalence among the intellectuals for the detective story or the
adventure story, where the display of skill without content is
"purest.") Because there is a great deal of this element in art, they
postulate (if they are thorough enough) a special aesthetic sense,
and see art as the minister to that sense.
In either case, both Seven Arts and skyscraper primitive have
gained the faith to turn intently upon their own situation. For
they are aware that the machine is the dominant factor in contem-
porary life, and that America is the most highly mechanized coun-
try in the world, so that for better or worse the course of society for
the next era is most likely to be settled in American terms. Per-
haps this is the one allowable form of patriotism.





Courtesy of the Galerie Alfred Flechtheim, Berlin
BY HENRI MATISSE

CEIL NUAGEUX.



THE
VI
VU
DIAL
VU
K
OXX ITO
OCTOBER 1923
THE MAN WITH THE FLOWER
IN HIS MOUTH
A Dialogue
BY LUIGI PIRANDELLO
Translated From the Italian by Arthur Livingston
CHARACTERS
THE MAN WITH THE FLOWER IN His Mouth
A CUSTOMER (With TIME On His Hands)
Twice, during the Dialogue, a melancholy woman, in a black
dress, and an old hat with drooping feathers, will appear round the
corner.
An avenue, lined with trees; electric lights gleaming through the
foliage. On either side, the last houses of a street crossing the ave-
nue. Among the houses to the left, a miserable all-night café, with
tables and chairs on the sidewalk. In front of the houses on the
right a street-lamp lighted. Astride the angle made by the two
walls of the house to the left, which has a front both on the street
and on the avenue, a street-lamp, also lighted. It is shortly after
midnight. Faintly, from a distance, comes at intervals the thrum-
ming of a mandolin. As the curtain rises, The Man With the
Flower in His Mouth is seated at one of the tables, silently observ-
ing the Customer, who, at a neighbouring table, is sipping a mint
frappée through a straw.


314
MAN WITH THE FLOWER IN HIS MOUTH
.
MAN WITH THE FLOWER: Ah !—I was just going to say!
So you are a good-natured sort of a fellow.
You lost
your train?
.
.
THE CUSTOMER: By less than a minute. I get to the station-
and there it is—just pulling out!
MAN WITH THE FLOWER: You might have caught it by running!
THE CUSTOMER: I suppose I might. It's absurd, I know. If I
hadn't been all cluttered up with a dozen packages, more or less
-huh! worse than a pack-horse! .. Oh, these women!
One errand after another—world without end! Why,
it took me three minutes, after I got out of my taxi, to get my
fingers through the strings of all those packages! Two on every
finger!
MAN WITH THE FLOWER:
I'd like to have seen you!
You
know what I would have done? I would have left the blamed
things in the carriage!
THE CUSTOMER: And when you got home-eh? .. How
about the old woman-and my girls—not to mention those
from the neighbourhood!
MAN WITH THE FLOWER: Let 'em shriek!
I'd have en-
joyed it—I would!
THE CUSTOMER: Guess you don't know what it's like to have a
brood of women with you on a vacation in the country!
MAN WITH THE FLOWER: Oh, I guess I do—in fact, I say so be-
cause I do.
(A pause.) They all say they won't need
to take a blessed thing!
THE CUSTOMER: And you think they stop there ? According to
:
them, they go to the country to save money. Well, the
moment they get to some place out there, in the backwoods-
the uglier it is, the dirtier it is, the more they insist on dressing
up in all their Sunday togs. Oh-women, my dear sir!
But, after all, dressing is their profession! “The next
time you run into town, dear, I wish you'd stop in at So-and-
So's. And then, if you don't mind, dear, on the way back-no
trouble, is it, really?—will you stop at my dress-maker's and—”
and they're off! "But how am I going to get all
that done in three hours ?" you say.
“Oh, that's easy,
take a taxi!”
And the worst of it is, that in my hurry
to get away, I forgot to take the keys of my house, here in town.
I
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.


LUIGI PIRANDELLO
315
MAN WITH THE FLOWER:
Ah-that's a good one!
And
.
SO-
.
.
THE CUSTOMER: I left that pile of bundles in the parcel room at
the station. Then I went to dinner in a restaurant. Then, to
get my temper back, to the theatre.
Hot ?
Hot
was no name for it! On coming out, I say to myself: What
next?
Midnight.
And the next train leaves at
4 a. m.-three hours left for a bit of a nap.
Not worth
So here I am!.. This place doesn't
shut up, I hope
MAN WITH THE FLOWER: Never shuts up, this place. (A pause.)
So you
left your bundles in the parcel room—eh?
THE CUSTOMER: Why not? Safe, aren't they? All pretty well
a
.
.
the money
tied up!
.
.
.
.
MAN WITH THE FLOWER: No-no—I didn't mean that.
(A pause.) Well tied up, eh? Oh, I imagine so. Boys in the
shops these days can wrap a bundle up quick as scat. (A
pause.) What hands they have! Here's a long strip of
doubled paper-pink-with wavy lines—Ah! a sight for sore
eyes! .
! How smooth it is! You'd almost like to put
your face on it to feel the cool! And they roll it out, there on
the counter, as nice as you please! And they put your cloth in
the middle of it, all neatly folded up. First, they take the back
of the hand, and they raise one edge of the paper. Then they
bring the other hand down from above, and–how clever and
graceful they are! They fold down one strip—a strip they
don't really need—just for the art of the thing! Then, first on
one side, then on the other, they fold the corners down, to make
two triangles. Then they turn the points under.
Then
they reach for the twine with one hand. They pull out
just what they need—to an inch-and they have it tied up for
you before you've really had time to admire their skill!
And there you have your bundle, with a ring to put your finger
through!
Aha!
You seem to have watched clerks
in the stores pretty closely!
MAN WITH THE FLOWER: I?
Huh! ... I've watched
them whole days at a time. Why, I can spend an hour in front
of a store, looking through the show window! Helps me to for-
.
.
.
THE CUSTOMER:
.
a


316
MAN WITH THE FLOWER IN HIS MOUTH
.
.
•
0
.
it up.
o
.
THE CUSTOMER:
.
get myself.
Why—I feel as though
oh-I'd
like to be that piece of silk in there—that strip of braid—that
red or that blue ribbon, which the girls in the dry goods stores,
after they've measured it with their tape-measure
did
you ever notice what they do? . They make an “” of it
around the thumb and finger of their left hand before they wrap
(A pause.) And I watch the man or the woman,
when they come out of the shop with the bundle either hanging
to one of their fingers, or held under one of their arms. And I
watch them till they are out of sight . imagining-uh-h!
all that I imagine! .
I
You couldn't guess half of
it! (A pause.—Then gloomily, reflectively, as though speak-
ing to himself.) But it does me good—some good at least.
Good? That's interesting. What good does it
do you?
MAN WITH THE FLOWER: Oh-it helps to attach me in my
imagination, I mean-attach me to life-much as a vine clings
to the bars of an iron gate. (A pause.) Oh. I never
let it rest a moment-my imagination! I cling with it, per-
sistently, to life—to the lives of other people! Not of people
I know. Nono. I couldn't—with people I know. That dis-
gusts me, somehow. Sort of sick to your stomach, eh?—No,
I cling to the life of other people of strangers, with whom my
,
imagination can wander freely—But not capriciously, you un-
derstand-oh, no!
On the contrary-taking careful
account of the least things I notice in them! And
you
have no
idea how it works! I get right in on the inside track with
some of them.
I can see this man's house, for instance.
I live in it. I come to feel quite at home there-down to the
point of noticing-say, you know, every house has a certain
faint odour peculiar to it? There's one in your house there's
one in mine. But in our houses, of course, we don't notice it-
because it's the very breath of our lives—understand! Oh-I
can see that you agree!
Yes. Because—well—you must have a good
time-just imagining all those things!
MAN WITH THE FLOWER (wearily, after some reflection): A good
.
time? I?
THE CUSTOMER:
Yes.... I suppose-
THE CUSTOMER:


LUIGI PIRANDELLO
317
MAN WITH THE FLOWER:
.
.
.
a
MAN WITH THE FLOWER: A good time! : I should say!
Tell me—have you ever been to see a good doctor?
THE CUSTOMER: I? ... No. Why? I've never been
sick.
No no.
I meant, have you
ever noticed, in a doctor's office, the waiting-room where the
patients sit until their turn comes?
THE CUSTOMER: Ah, yes. I once took my daughter to see
a doctor.
Something wrong with her nerves-
MAN WITH THE FLOWER: Well-I wasn't prying, you know. I
meant that those waiting-rooms. (A pause.) Did
you
ever notice?-a black horse-hair sofa in some old-fashioned
style
upholstered chairs, that hardly ever match
an arm-chair or two-huh-second-hand stuff-picked
up where they can find it. Put there for the patients.
Nothing to do with the house, you see.
The doctor-
huh!
for himself, his wife, and his wife's friends, he
has a fine parlour, comfortable, done up in style. And
what a noise one of those chairs in the parlour would make if
you stuck it in there in the waiting-room! Why—you
need things about as they are-good, decent stuff, of course-
not too showy-stuff that will wear. Because it'll be used by
all sorts of people who come to see the doctor. I wonder.
When you went to the doctor's with your daughter that
time-did you notice the chairs you sat on while you were
waiting?
To tell the truth, I .
.. I didn't!
MAN WITH THE FLOWER: Oh, of course you didn't
because
you
weren't sick.
(A pause.) But even sick people don't
always notice—all taken up as they are with what's wrong with
them. (A pause.) And yet, oftentimes some of them sit there,
looking so carefully at one of their fingers, which is going round
and round, making letters and numbers that have no meaning,
on the varnished arm of the chair where they are sitting.
They're thinking. They don't really see. (A pause.) But what
a strange impression it makes on you, when, as you go through
the waiting-room again, after you are through with the doctor,
you catch a glimpse of that chair where you were sitting just a
few moments before-anxious to have some opinion on your
.
.
THE CUSTOMER:


318
MAN WITH THE FLOWER IN HIS MOUTH
mysterious disease. There it is empty, indifferent, waiting for
somebody—anybody at all—to come and sit down in it. (A
pause.) What were we saying ?-Oh, yes. I remember. The
pleasures we take in imagination-how do you suppose I came
to think of a chair in one of those waiting-rooms in a doctor's
office, where the patients sit waiting for their turn?
THE CUSTOMER: Yes—in fact-
MAN WITH THE FLOWER: You don't understand ?-Neither do
I. (A pause.) But the fact is that certain mental associa-
tions-oh! between things worlds apart—are so peculiar to
each of us, and they are determined by considerations, expe-
riences, habits of mind, so individual that people would never
understand one another unless they avoided them when they
talked. Nothing more illogical, sometimes, than these associa-
tions. (A pause.) But the relation, perhaps, may be this,
funny, eh? Do you suppose those chairs get any pleasure out
of imagining who the patient is to be who will next sit down in
them, waiting for his turn to see the doctor?—what disease he
will have ?—where he will go?—what he will do after he has
been examined ? ... No pleasure at all! And so it is with
No pleasure at all! So many patients come, and
they are there, poor chairs, to be sat on!
Well-my
job in life is something like theirs. Now this thing, and now
that, occupies me. This moment it happens to be you, and
pleasure ?—Believe me, I find no pleasure at all in
thinking of the train you lost—of the family you have in the
country—all the annoyances I can imagine you have.
THE CUSTOMER: There are a lot of them, I can tell you!
Well, you ought to thank God that
you've nothing worse than annoyances !-(A pause.) Some of
us, you know, are worse off than that! (A pause.) I'm telling
you that I need to attach myself in my imagination to the lives
other people lead. But—in my peculiar way-without pleas-
ure—without any real interest, even-in such a way, in fact-
yes, just so—in such a way, precisely, as to sense the annoy-
ances they encounter.
In such a way as to be able to
understand how stupid and silly life is, so that no one, really,
ought to care a snap about being rid of the thing! (With sul-
len rage.) And that's a good deal to prove, you know. It takes
me.
.
MAN WITH THE FLOWER:
.


LUIGI PIRANDELLO
319
Yes-yes-
arguing and proof-continual examples, which we have to keep
impressing upon ourselves—mercilessly—because, my dear sir
—we don't know what it is, exactly—but it's there, just the
same—it's there—and we all feel it, every one of us, catching
us—hereby our throats—a sort of anguish—a thirst for liv-
ing that is never satisfied, that is never quenched—that can
never be quenched. Because life, as we live it from moment to
moment, is always such a hurrying—such a stuffy thing—that
it never lets us get the full taste of it. The flavour of life is in
the past, which remains always as something living within us.
Our enjoyment of it comes from back there—from the memo-
ries which hold us bound—but bound to what? Bound to these
stupidities, precisely—to these annoyances—to all these silly
illusions, all these insipid occupations of ours.
this little bit of foolishness here—this little annoyance
little ?—why little? Even this great misfortune—a real mis-
-a
fortune-yes, sir—four, five, ten years hence will have, who
knows, what flavour for us? Who knows what keen enjoy-
ment, mingled with its tears! And life-God! Life—the mo-
ment we think of losing it—especially when it is only a matter
of days—(At this point, a woman, dressed in black, appears
around the corner on the right.) Say-do you see that
-I mean, over there at the corner? You see that woman?
Ah! She's gone again.
A woman?—Where? ... Who was it?
You didn't see her?
She has
gone now.
A woman?
MAN WITH THE FLOWER: My wife... Yes.
THE CUSTOMER: Ah!. Your wife!
MAN WITH THE FLOWER (after a pause): She keeps her eye on
Sometimes, you know, I feel almost like getting
up and giving her a kick! But what good would that do—after
all?
She's like one of those stray dogs you take into
the house.
Obstinate! The more you kick them
and beat them, the closer they stick to your heels. (A pause.)
What that woman is going through on my account, you can't
imagine, sir!
Goes without her meals—rarely ever
goes to bed—just follows me around, day and night—that way
.
THE CUSTOMER:
.
MAN WITH THE FLOWER:
.
THE CUSTOMER:
.
1
.
me.
.
.
.
.
.


320
MAN WITH THE FLOWER IN HIS MOUTH
.
a
.
.
.
.
.
.
-at a distance!
I wish she would be a little more
attentive to her appearance! She might brush her clothes once
in a while, at least
and that old hat she wears! She
looks more like a rag doll than like a woman!
Ah!
and the dust!-the white dust has settled on her hair, too, here,
around her forehead
and barely thirty-four at that!
(A pause.) I get so mad at her sometimes—you've no
idea! .
And I lose my temper—and I go up to her, and I
almost scream in her face—"Idiot!—Idiot!"
and I
give her a shaking! Nothing! She swallows it all,
and just stands there looking at me, with eyes
with
eyes
Well—I could choke the life out of her, then!
But no-she waits till I am some distance off—and then
she takes up the trail again! (At this point the wom-
an's head again appears around the corner.) Look !-Look!
There she is again!
See her?—Did you see
her?
THE CUSTOMER: Poor thing!
MAN WITH THE FLOWER: Poor thing! Huh! ..
Do
you
know what that woman wants of me? She wants me
to stay quiet-peaceful-like-at home where she can cuddle me
and humour me with her tenderest and most affectionate atten-
tions! .
every room in perfect order
• every piece
of furniture in its place—and the varnish clean and polished.
Silence
deadly silence
broken only by
the tick-tock, tick-tock of the grandfather's clock in our dining-
Huh!
That's her notion of life!
Well—I'll leave it to you. Isn't that about the limit of absurd-
ity! . . . Absurdity?-Ferocity, I would say rather.
A kind of ghoulish cruelty! Do you suppose, sir, that the
houses of Avezzano, or the houses of Messina, knowing that
the earthquake was going to topple them over within a very
few days, could have been persuaded to sit still there, under
the moonlight-all in nice straight lines, radiating from the
squares-eh?—the way the Town Planning Committee decided
they ought to be? ... No, sir!-Brick and stone though
they were, they would have found legs, somehow, to run away!
And the people who lived in them—do you think that if they
had known what was going to happen to them, they would have
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
room.
.
.
.
.


LUIGI PIRANDELLO
321
.
MAN WITH THE FLOWER:
.
Here you
.
.
.
.
gone to their bedrooms every night as usual—folded their
clothes up nicely, set their shoes outside their doors, and then
crawled comfortably into bed between their nice white sheets
-knowing for certain that in a few hours they would be dead?
Do you think they would?
THE CUSTOMER: But, perhaps your Signora.
Just a moment.
If death, my
dear sir, were like one of those strange, loathsome insects you
sometimes find walking up your coat sleeve.
are, going along the side-walk.
A man comes up to
you, all of a sudden-stops you, and then, cautiously, holding
out two fingers of his hand, says to you—“Beg pardon-may
I ?"
And with those two fingers he skips the insect off!
Ah!
That would be fine! ... But death
isn't like one of those loathsome insects. Many people walk by
you, but no one notices anything. They are all absorbed in
what they are going to do to-morrow or the next day.
Now, I, my dear sir-look! (He gets up.) Just step this way
-(He draws the man aside till they are standing in the full
light of the street-lamp.) Look! I want to show you
something. See this
my moustache ?-Pretty
violet colour, isn't it!
Do you know what they call
that?—A pretty name!-like a verse from a poem-E-pi-the-
li-o-ma!
Epithelioma! Say it yourself, and
you'll notice how nice it sounds!—Epithelioma!
But
death-you understand-death! .. Death has passed my
way, and put this flower in my mouth—“A souvenir, my dear
sir! Keep it-no charge! I'll be back this way a few
months hence!” (A pause.) Now, you tell me, sir—whether,
with a flower like this in my mouth, I can sit quietly at home,
there, as that poor woman would like to have me do!
(A pause.) I scream at her—"Yes—Yes!
.. Don't
want me to kiss you?”
"Yes-kiss me!” she says.
And you know what she did, the other day? She took a
pin and scratched her lip, and then seized me by the head and
tried to kiss me—kiss me—here—on my lips-because she
wants to die with me, she says! .. (A pause.) Crazy
woman! (Then, angrily.) But I refuse to stay at home! I've
simply got to stand around, looking into the shop windows,
.
spot, under
.
.
.
.
.
Don't you
.
.
.
.


322
MAN WITH THE FLOWER IN HIS MOUTH
.
O
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
admiring the deftness of the clerks at the counters!
Because, you understand, if I should permit myself one single
idle moment—why, I might go mad! I might pull out
a revolver and shoot someone who never did me the least harm
in the world! ... Why, I might shoot you, for instance-
though all you've done, so far as I can see, is to have lost your
train!
(He laughs.) Oh, no!—no!
Don't be
afraid.
I'm only joking!
(A pause.) Well-
I must be going
(A pause.) At the very worst, I
might kill myself some day-(A pause.) But, you see, this is
the fruit season, and I like apricots.
How do you eat
them?—Skin and all, I suppose. Ah!—that's the way!
You cut them in halves, and you bring your two fingers to-
gether, and you suck in the juice, eh?—Ah! that's the way!
How good they are! (He laughs. A pause.)
Well-give my regards to your wife and daughters, when you
get back to the country. (A pause.) I imagine them dressed
in white and blue, sitting on the green grass in the shade of
(A pause.) Do something for me to-mor-
row morning, when you get home—will you?
1
I
suppose
your villa will be some little distance from the station. Well
—you'll get there about sunrise, won't you? And you'd enjoy
making the trip on foot. Well—the first tuft of grass you no-
tice on the roadside—just count the blades for me! The num-
ber of those blades of grass will be the number of the days I
still have to live!
(A pause.)
Choose a good-
sized clump, if you please eh? (He laughs.) Well
-good-night! good-night! (He walks away,
humming through his closed lips the movement played by the
distant mandolin. He heads at first toward the corner on the
right, but then, reflecting that his wife is probably there wait-
ing for him, he turns around and walks off in the other direc-
tion. The Customer sits there, looking after him in amaze-
ment.)
some tree.
.
.
.
.
.
CURTAIN


EXILE
BY RICHARD ALDINGTON
“Do you dwell on the snowy promontory of Mimas?”
How shall we utter
This horror, this rage, this despair?
How shall we strike at baseness,
Cut through disgust with scorn?
How rend with slashed fingers
The bars and walls of their lives
Which blacken our air and pure light?
What are they? Alien, brutish,
Base seed of Earth's ravished womb;
Shall we yield our light and our truth-
The flash of the helm
And the foam-grey eyes and the hair
Braided with gold,
Steel mail on a firm breast?
Shall we yield?
Their life, their truth?
O laugh of disdain!
If ours be a goddess,
Chaste, proud, and austere;
What is theirs ?
A boastful woman, a whore,
Whose vice is most stupid, most foul;
One
greasy of flesh, stale
With hot musty perfume-
While ours-
Firm-fleshed as the treeless hills
With her rigid breasts and hard thighs,
Cold and perfect and fresh-
Fields crisp with new frost-


324
EXILE
Sets the violet-crown in her hair,
Turns an unstained brow to the sky.
1
Let us stand by the earth-shaking sea
Unfurrowed by a hull,
Let us move among beeches and oaks
Unprofaned by loud speech;
Let us reverence the sacred earth
And the roar of unbridled falls
And the crash of an untamed sea,
Let us shade our eyes from the sun
And gaze through the fluttering leaves
Far, most far;
Shall we see her hill
And the marble front of her house
And herself, standing calm,
Many-coloured, triumphant, austere?



A NUDE
BY WILLIAM SOMMER





WALTER SCOTT
BY BENEDETTO CROCE
NO
one, writing early in the past century of the then contem-
porary history of European letters, would have hesitated to
classify Walter Scott among the stars of first magnitude in the
firmament of art and poetry. In the applause then accorded
Scott's name there were few dissenting voices indeed. His works
were travelling from land to land, everywhere inspiring followers
and imitators—rarely, in fact, has a writer ever had pupils at once
so numerous and so distinguished. It is not a question either of a
"popular” vogue resting on the enthusiasm of unthinking multi-
tudes; no less a person than Goethe spoke of Walter Scott as "a
peerless genius, who fully deserves the marvellous success he is
having with readers the world over.” In the England of the time,
it was a commonplace to compare Walter Scott with Shakespeare,
the only predecessor of the great Scotchman thought worthy of
mention in such connexion for fertility of inventiveness (so people
said) for infinite variety of character, scene, situation, episode, for
universality of human sympathy, for purity of moral tone.
Later on all this glory passed—even here in Italy; where, as
compared with the dozens of translations of Scott's “complete
works" issued in the first half of the Nineteenth Century, we find,
after 1850, only occasional reprintings of separate volumes in series
of "world classics”; while allusions to his books and his people,
once so frequent in the speeches of Italian orators and in the writ-
ings of Italian authors, became more and more scanty and finally
ceased. Our critics, especially after the famous strictures of Taine,
showed themselves harsh, not to say cruel and contemptuous toward
him-an attitude that has again been taken in Emilio Cecchi's re-
cent History of English Literature. It is, in very truth, a tax on
one's self-control to speak kindly of Scott after a conscientious
reading of all his works: he wrote too many books, and the labour
he imposes upon the reader of to-day—a reader quite blasé to the
graces of the old art and familiar with all its tricks that once
seemed so clever-fills us with a spite which betrays itself the mo-


326
WALTER SCOTT
ment we begin to talk of him. Had he stopped at Ivanhoe, Rob
Roy, and one or two others at the most, the modern critic might be
inclined to some indulgence. We would have patience left to
weigh Scott's objective values, and in some serenity of spirit piously
and gratefully acknowledge the few flashes of real art which, in
spite of everything, do shine in the mass of his whole production.
This serenity we must attain if we would apply to Walter Scott
even the methods of historical criticism. Approaching him from
this point of view (and, as I must warn again, in a spirit of justice
and serenity) we perceive that first of all we must take account of
the social function he so admirably fulfilled.
Walter Scott, to speak quite plainly, was a literary manufac-
turer. His task it was to supply a market with wares which were
in a demand as great as it was legitimate. Are not the needs of the
human imagination needs of stimulation or of amusement-real
needs? And is it not a healthy manifestation of such needs to de-
mand spectacles of virtue, of courage, of prowess, of generosity,
spectacles, moreover, which will not merely satisfy idle curiosity,
but prove profitable as well by imparting information about his-
torical events, customs, epochs? Walter Scott had a genius for
supplying such a market. He began by writing poems which were
a first answer to the demand. After a few years he discovered that
this particular brand of goods was growing stale, whether because
his own raw materials were depreciating, or because a strong com-
petition was growing up in the novelties offered by the
Lord
Byron. So he turned to prose, issuing a new trade-mark that had
the lure of mystery— by the author of the Waverley novels” —
and he made a great success, a success that attended him to the end.
Read the “Lives” written about Walter Scott and you will see that
they deal with a captain of industry and not, save incidentally,
with a literary man. His biographers expatiate admiringly on the
sagacity of his speculations; on the application and endurance
which enabled him to produce two or three novels a year; on the
estate which he created from his enormous royalties—building a
castle where he entertained with princely hospitality. Of his inner
life, meantime, not a word. Nothing of his experiences with love,
with religion, with philosophical problems. Less than nothing
about the travail of spirit which we think of as the artist's charac-
teristic domain. In Scott's biography the dramatic moment is al-
young


BENEDETTO CROCE
327
ways the failure of his publisher-partner, which left the novelist
penniless and thousands of pounds in debt; and lo, he rises indom-
itable above misfortune, courageously taking pen in hand. He
promises to pay that debt, to satisfy all his creditors to the last
shilling. And the promise he keeps; because when in the end he
collapses under the heroic effort, he has redeemed most of his obli-
gations, leaving the rest to be provided for after his death by the
gratitude of a nation. This gratitude, notice, was addressed prob-
ably less to the great writer than to the great business man who had
furnished an immortal example of British probity and rectitude.
The life of Walter Scott belongs not to the history of literature,
but to that of “Self-help.” It goes well with the books of Smiles
and the like.
In the second place, Scott's work again fails to enter the province
of art since its character was determined by the specific manner in
which the demand of the British—of the European consumer was,
presented and by the nature of the goods he aimed to supply. It
was a question of the new historical-moral-political consciousness
that had sprung up in reaction to the rationalism of the Eighteenth
Century and to the Jacobinism of the French Revolution, a reac-
tion that implied a new reverence toward history, stress on tradi-
tion and custom, emphasis on nationality (as opposed to superficial
and unilateral cosmopolitanism). Of all this Scott was surely not
the author. He had numberless predecessors in Germany, France,
Great Britain, and even in Italy. But just as surely he was the
great popularizer of these tendencies, and by all odds the shrewd-
est of those who exploited them commercially.
We must not underestimate the importance of Scott's influence
in this connexion. He was a great educator. People whom the
singing of the poets, the thinking of the philosophers, the learning
of the historians, failed to touch, found easy access to the facile ro-
mance of Walter Scott. The Scotland of his imagination engen-
dered a whole series of other Scotlands; the nations of Europe, I
mean, going back into their own pasts, reviving their ancient cus-
toms and traditions. Even professional historians were not im-
mune to his influence, and this influence was a good one in the sense
that it forced history away from the monotonous and colourless
methods of the Humanists and the "Illuminati”-its defects ap-
pearing largely in the temptation it fostered to confuse history with


328
WALTER SCOTT
the historical novel, glitteringly coloured, but superficial and insig-
nificant. Criticism, however, was eventually able to correct such
exaggerations, and the benefits alone were left. No one can write
a sound history of historical writing in the Nineteenth Century
without giving generous credit to Walter Scott.
In the third connexion we must keep the problem of Scott dis-
tinct from the problem of art, in so far, that is, as we are interested
in Scott's technical skill as a novelist. This deftness we must not
measure with the ingenuity of our own day—a comparison from
which it suffers badly (because Scott's methods are now quite fa-
miliar and outworn, so that a cry of "old stuff” would greet any
one trying to revive them); but rather with the devices in vogue be-
fore him and with the expectations of the public to which he sold.
Goethe, for example, notoriously awkward and unimaginative in
plot-construction, had profound admiration for Scott as a story-
teller. The "new art” he found in the great Scotchman, a "new
art governed by its own inner laws,” gave him “much food for
thought.” Scott studied his subject matter carefully as an anti-
quarian and a tourist. He described landscapes, based his action
on manners and customs, maintained "suspense” by the use of mys-
terious characters endowed with extraordinary powers, created the
“illusion of reality” in tales of Norman, Saxon, Puritan, and Ja-
cobite, by making people of other times talk and act as they really
talked and acted. The epic he lightened with comedy, benevo-
lently smiling at personages limited to one idea, one desire, one mo-
tive. And unfailingly he kept his main people in the foreground,
people noble and valorous, certain to hold the sympathy and inter-
est of the reader.
In the fourth place the artistic criterion fails for Scott for the
simple reason that art—or poetry, if you wish—was a secondary
matter with him. The critic who looks for the artist in Scott in-
evitably ends with what we Italians call the "stroncatura"—the
slashing, the flaying, which, however apposite it may be in the lit-
erary campaigns of our own day, becomes sheer bad manners, sheer
ill-temper, when used on men of the past. Certainly when a writer
like Gosse steps forward and denies anybody's right to find defects
in Scott, asserting that “England can challenge the world to pro-
duce in its literature a purer spirit, a more brilliant mind, a creator
of more heroic works, a more marvellous painter of historical pic-
tures," the impulse to indulge in a bit of mirth becomes almost ir-
a


BENEDETTO CROCE
329
resistible. But is there much really to quarrel about? Gosse him-
self is not quite so sure of his ground. He says that if Europe will
have nothing of Walter Scott, his own England may keep him for
herself, exulting in her possession of him as the author of the most
perfect style in the national literature, as a writer who never wrote
a word that was morbid, impertinent, mean, or low, as the most
perfect exemplification of the English gentleman.
Gentleman, yes, but poet?
Scott's poetic vein, never gushing with a very copious flow, soon
was clogged by his essentially prosaic temperament. Even when he
was writing in verse, there was little of the poet's inspiration in
him, as may be verified by recalling any one of the most famous
poems. Here is what he says of the Last Minstrel:
passages of his
“The way was long, the wind was cold,
The minstrel was infirm and old:
His withered cheek and tresses gray
Seemed to have known a better day;
The harp, his sole remaining joy,
Was carried by an orphan boy.
.
Or savour this decription of Melrose Abbey:
“If thou would'st view fair Melrose aright,
Go visit it by the pale moon-light;
For the gay beams of lightsome day
Gild, but to flout, the ruins gray.
Where the broken arches are blank in night,
And each shafted oriel glimmers white;
When the cold light's uncertain power
Streams on the ruined central tower
Then go—but go alone the while,-
Then view St. David's ruined pile;
And home returning, smoothly swear,
Was never scene so sad and fair!
Quite as superficial is the art of his prose novels, replete with
characters and cases known in the jargon of Latin critics as “inter-
esting.” Think of all the adventures, mysteries, duels, battles, in-
trigues, hairbreadth escapes, bandits, beautiful women, jolly friars,


330
WALTER SCOTT
Black Knights, and what not, that constitute the thrill of Ivan-
hoe. But in the end we go away with empty hearts. There is
neither an epic feeling, nor a religious feeling, nor even a lyric sen-
timent of love in this famous novel. The characters stand before
us as spectacles for our eyes, or at least for our imaginations.
There is no real idea behind all that happens except the idea of
supplying a series of attractive scenes. Strike, if you choose, a
,
chord of deeper resonance—the celebrated love passage between the
Templar and the Jewess Rebecca. But that episode, too, is little,
at bottom, but a riot in the “picturesque.” The character of the
a
enamoured knight and the exchanges between the Templar and the
Jewish girl are treated in a conventional and often absurd manner:
we have the set for a drama of the soul, but the soul fails to ma-
terialize. The best touches, certainly, are a few impulses of gener-
osity in the Templar's heart, and especially his death in combat-
not under the enemy's joust, but from the violent tension of his
conflicting passions. There is some merit-flashes of delicate and
noble brilliancy—in the portrait of Rebecca, notably in the last
visit she pays to the Lady Rowena and in their farewell. It is the
figure of a Jewess who remains such out of loyalty to race, but with
a successful outreaching to pure humanity.
Similar moments are not lacking in other novels of Scott, Old
Mortality, for instance, in the conception of the crude and licen-
tious Sergeant Bothwell, made ridiculous by his constant harping
on his descent from the Stuarts, and on whose breast, when he had
fallen in battle, Morton finds a wallet containing the Stuart family
tree, two love letters written in a woman's hand twenty years be-
fore, a wisp of hair, and poems indited by this same Bothwell.
Morton is moved to reflection on the destiny of this singular and
unhappy wretch, who, from the depth of failure and poverty, could
still cherish his dream of the grandeur to which birth entitled him,
and who, from his debauchery and licence, looked back with yearn-
ing toward the one pure passion of his youth. Rob Roy has a few
hints at poetry—themes of travel and unexpected meetings-in its
earlier chapters; so does Waverley in an occasional evocation of
traditional semi-barbarous life. But they are soon lost in insignifi-
cant intrigue again. This is one's inevitable experience with Scott.
His novels start promisingly—I am thinking of Saint Roman's
Wells particularly—but before long we are caught in the "ro-
a


BENEDETTO CROCE
331
manesque,” the pastiche, the imbroglio, and interest ends—not al-
together, to be sure, for we are certain to encounter here and there
figures like that of the Curate of Saint Roman (since I have men-
tioned this novel) drawn with a moving and delicate kindliness
that has a very real charm.
This kindly smile of Walter Scott is perhaps the most truly po-
etic thing about him. It illuminates even his comic characters who
tend toward the "fixed type,” but are sometimes kept within proper
bounds. By virtue of it, The Heart of Midlothian surpasses, so it
seems to me, all the other novels. This story, known on the Con-
tinent as The Prison of Edinboro, is penetrated through and
through with kindliness, not in details only, but in the very com-
position of the plot. Even here there is intrigue galore, with the
usual brigands (brigands, who are not brigands so much as gentle-
men of supernal delicacy) and other make-ups from the travelling
bag of the melodramatist. But how escape the spell of the gentle
Effie, falsely accused of infanticide, or of her sister Jennie, who
will not lie to save her, but who does save her in the end by per-
sistence in the face of every danger? The sentimental "Laird,”
Dumb Dikes, the malicious and generous, the shrewd and jealous
Madge, are handled in the most realistic, and yet pitiful, truth.
Scott spares David Deans none of the latter's pedantry and self-
conceit; but the man's sterling nobility in the midst of bitter trial,
his tenderness, his humility for all of his religious austerity, do not
fail to move us. Even the good-natured Saddletree is presented in
a singularly subtle blend of unselfishness and pride. I note as a a
matter of curiosity that the scene at supper in the fisherman's hut
where David Deans, about to say grace, pushes Effie's empty chair
away from the table as though to remove every earthly association
from the reading of the Scriptures, had a great fortune in Italy in
the plagiarism made of it by Grossi in his Marco Visconti.
This stream of very human goodness, this undercurrent of smil-
ing sympathy and charitableness, finds its way through the bulk of
Scott's work, here and there breaking to the surface in what may be
called real art, a modest, unpretentious art, to be sure, where all the
rest is erudition, skill, business; but with poetry enough to let us
depart in good humour from an author who delighted our fathers
and grandfathers, and who, for this reason if for no other, deserves
courteous treatment from their children and grandchildren.


TWO POEMS
BY ANTHONY WRYNN
PROUD
Call it a palfrey, this small horse;
The sweet pasture, that grass eaten to the roots;
Call those wind-punished fruit trees the shade;
The mud a brook; call them that and kill them.
You chanter bat-eyed with print, rotten
With euphemism, you can call the manure
In the rock-gnarled orchard what you want,
But someone is coming to see you some day
And when you stand there, your hand
On the cold knob of the open door, the pen
That murdered so many young bony horses, so many
Desperate orchards, behind your ear,
You won't call the black suit a robe
And cowl, you won't tell the gentleman
That his eyes are caves of forgetfulness. Slowly
It will all come back to you
And you will say no
The way everything else says no
When he steps back
And motions down the stairs.


ANTHONY WRYNN
333
HE WOVE HIS NEST IN THE PORTICO
Jet threaded with tincture of the violet,
This is the quill of the crow.
Softly across the net-work of bone
The thin feathers spread
Into the tail, catching the light
Of the bright air. Jet slender, gnarled
Like winter twigs, these are his legs
And feet, and his eyes
Are quick jet full of storms.
The crow goes home to a white tree
Or a green. He eats from snow
Or summer rocks. He speaks in the morning
From the quiet copse
With wild stark voice. At night
He is a token of the day.
Such a bird, though he steal your paltry seed,
Will counsel you when delight
Covers your eyes and holds your wrists
At your side, or his wing
Will flutter the pool of your heart
When its waters
Are deadened by the wind-break of wisdom.


PRINCESS CHALCONDYLAS
BY LOUIS COUPERUS
Translated from the Dutch by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos
A
a
NY mention of Princess Chalcondylas and her son Basile in
Rome always provoked a smile: a cruel smile, perhaps; cer-
tainly a smile which casts a cruel light upon both their portraits.
Princess Chalcondylas bore an ancient Graeco-Byzantine name,
but she was no princesse lointaine and she was once plain Marie
Delestre. She came from nowhere more remote than Paris and her
maiden name was that of a respectable family of teachers, a family
which, though middle-class, yet seemed to contain a heritage of in-
tellect, for it had enriched mankind for years, if not for centuries,
with tutors and governesses, even as another family will breed
clergymen, a third give the preference to men of business, a fourth
supply the military element, and a fifth play-actors, civil servants,
hairdressers, sailors, or what not. Marie Delestre proved herself a
chip of the old block: as a girl of barely nineteen, she took the cou-
rageous resolve to seek a situation as a governess, in order to contrib-
ute to the support of her elderly parents. Governesses are always
better paid abroad than at home; so Marie Delestre, with a couple
of certificates in her pocket, looked out for a situation in Germany,
Russia, or America. As luck would have it, the agency to which she
applied found her a position as governess in a half-Greek, half-
Roumanian family, who lived at Bucharest and wanted a French
teacher for their children, two boys of fifteen and fourteen and a
girl of twelve. The family enjoyed the princely title of Chalcon-
dylas and owned extensive estates in Roumania in addition to their
palace at Bucharest.
a
а
II
Marie Delestre set out for Bucharest. She was a plucky girl with
good qualities all her own. She was not pretty, but capable and
confident, young and healthy, a fresh blossom of the Delestre fam-


LOUIS COUPERUS
335
ily, thanks to the less intellectual blood of her mother, who came of
a family of provincial countryfolk. Zola has accustomed us so
thoroughly to examining the hereditary problems of the persons
whom we evoke in literature that we novelists, writers of short sto-
ries, and painters of cruel portraits can never lose sight of them.
And so Marie Delestre did not look in the least like the decadent
offshoot of a family of teachers who had overdone her studies. She
was a short, bright, lively, sonsy little woman, with a wealth of
dark, curly hair; and, as her certificates showed, she had sufficient
intelligence to teach young people French and the first principles of
music. She herself played the piano very well. She was absolutely
likable, in spite of a touch of professional pedantry which she had
inherited on her father's side. She was a pleasant, capable girl of
nineteen, who intended to make her way in the world and cherished
a dutiful and affectionate feeling for her old people. No one,
painting her portrait as a young girl, could have introduced any
cruel emphasis, however much he might have wished to do so.
a
III
a
a
Marie Delestre arrived at Bucharest. She was tired after her
long journey, just a little nervous, and, now that she had come so
far, frightened of this foreign princely family. She would be
fetched at the station, they had written to tell her; and her eyes
were looking out for a footman, for the face of a clean-shaven foot-
man, when a charming young man came up to her, hat in hand, and
asked:
"Are
you
Mlle Delestre ?"
Marie said yes. And the young fellow introduced himself as
Prince Basile Chalcondylas, who had come to meet the new govern-
ess at the station. Marie was surprised and did not understand;
and Prince Basile had to explain that, besides the two sons and the
daughter whom she was to teach, there was also an eldest son, who
of course had not been mentioned in the letters. He, Basile, was
this eldest son. He led her to his little car, which he drove himself,
and took her home, where Marie was received by the parents, the
prince and princess, and made the acquaintance of her three pupils,
two big, unruly boys and a naughty girl who put out her tongue at
her.


336
PRINCESS CHALCONDYLAS
IV
Marie had a difficult time at the Chalcondylas palace. She had
the greatest trouble in maintaining her authority, she, a girl of
barely nineteen. The two young princes of fourteen and fifteen
looked seventeen and eighteen and were youthful sprigs of full-
blooded virility, on the point of budding and bursting into full
bloom. Not every princely race is bloodless and, if I adopted Zola's
theories of heredity, I could explain to you why these young princes
were so warm-blooded, but I dare say that you will agree that it
was because of some warm-blooded grandfather or grandmother.
And they were decidedly troublesome to their young governess,
with their impudent efforts to romp and take liberties with her.
While Marie was defending herself, the naughty little princess
would peep inquisitively through a chink of the door. The Chal-
condylas palace, however princely, was not exactly a model resi-
dence nor noted for its austere manners and strict code of morals:
when the princess went to Vienna, now and again, to replenish her
wardrobe, the prince would also disappear for a few days, in mys-
terious company, to his hunting-box; and the three children and the
host of servants, like so many savages and cannibals let loose, re-
mained masters of the house. Everyone slept as long as he pleased
and had his meals when he felt inclined; there was dancing below
stairs; and Marie Delestre, generally so plucky and self-possessed,
was as much scared as though her last hour had struck, especially
when the two young princes came rattling at the handle of her
locked door, while the little princess did Heaven knows what
Heaven knows where.
Of this house of noble and semi-oriental modern barbarians,
Prince Basile was, to the perplexed Marie Delestre, the most under-
standable element. She understood neither the trips to Vienna nor
the idylls at the hunting-box; and she would never have had any
suspicion of a child-life such as that led by her pupils. But Prince
Basile at any rate was understandable: he was a fashionable youth,
with plenty of money, who used to come home late at night from
mingling in society, respectable or other. He was polite and charm-
ing; and lately he seemed to surmise that he was not employing the
French subjunctive quite correctly. He felt this defect in his edu-
cation so strongly that he asked Marie's permission to attend the
.


LOUIS COUPERUS
337
French lessons which she was giving to the three young reprobates.
These lessons never taught him the correct use of the French sub-
junctive, but the fact that he was attending them had certain
results, especially when Marie unbosomed herself to him one day.
The young princes ceased trying to take liberties with their terrified
governess and the little princess no longer put out her tongue at her.
It was during one of the trips to Vienna and one of the idylls at
the hunting-box: the prince and princess, so irregular in other re-
spects, displayed in this particular both regularity and co-operation.
Marie Delestre, owing to Prince Basile's temporary absence, had
had a most difficult day with her unmanageable pupils. They had
emptied a decanter of wine into the piano and made Marie's life un-
bearable in every possible way. That evening Marie sat up for
Prince Basile, who came home very late, just a little merry and not
quite steady on his legs, but otherwise delightfully polite and
charming. Marie, in tears, confessed her sorrows to Prince Basile,
with the result that Prince Basile confessed his to Marie. There
was a strange feeling of thunder in the air. There was a strange,
early-morning feeling indoors. The servants had been drinking and
dancing below stairs; and the din had ceased only when the chauf-
feur, who had been posted as sentry, heard Prince Basile's key in
the latch. The children were in bed.
You can guess the rest, reader. It was perhaps only the fault of
the French subjunctive; but Marie Delestre had to leave Bucharest
a few months later
to go to Paris and replenish her ward-
robe; for her simple, tasteful little frocks, cut to her brisk, neat,
lively little governess figure, no longer fitted her at all.
V
We must not take things more tragically than the occasion war-
rants, lest we become more tragic than tragedy. A moment can be
tragic, life never. Life is humorous rather than tragic, as witness
the story of Marie Delestre, who is now in Paris, feeling a little sad
about her tragic moment and replenishing her wardrobe. Humour
has its eye on her-dear, kind humour, which does not admit the
least shade of cruelty. In Paris she meets Jean Damour, an elderly
man, a worthy younger colleague of her father's. Jean Damour is
a credit to his name: he was already in love with Marie when she


338
PRINCESS CHALCONDYLAS
set out for Bucharest. During her absence abroad he has come into
a legacy: he is well off. Marie tells him her tragedy and the good
fellow marries her and
and even adopts her son, who is
born three months later, as his own.
You can't paint cruel portraits of such good people as that. And
so I shall not go on painting Jean Damour. Besides, he dies after
ten years of a happy and peaceful life with his wife and his adopted
son Jean.
VI
a
.
a
Marie Damour, née Delestre, now a young widow in Paris pos-
sessed of a comfortable fortune, reads in the papers that Prince
Basile Chalcondylas has arrived. He is her seducer of ten years
ago! How could her thoughts do other than fly to him? Mixed
thoughts, it is true, thoughts which exert a certain influence, espe-
cially when Marie learns incidentally that Basile, who is now just
turned thirty, two years older than herself, is a ruined man, without
even being able to boast that he is the author of his own ruin: the
trips to Vienna, the idylls at the hunting-box had already brought
the ruin about; and on the death of his princely parents Basile was
left without a penny. He is now looking out for a rich wife.
Marie calls on the prince at his hotel. He does not refuse to see
her and the interview is even pleasurable. Basile admits that he is
looking for a rich wife, the daughter of some American millionaire.
But will he find her? He confesses his doubts to Marie. His
health has gone snap; for that matter, you can see as much by look-
ing at him. Though he is young in years, it is not only his purse
,
that has suffered. In a word, for all his princely title, he is no
great catch as a husband, as he himself honestly admits. My read-
ers know that I appreciate these little flashes of honest illumination
which fall upon my cruel portraits.
But Marie, after those mixed thoughts of hers, has made up her
mind about what she will propose to Basile. Look at her: she is not
a transatlantic millionairess, but she has a very pretty income. She
is the last woman to make herself a nuisance to Prince Basile, but,
if he consented to marry her and acknowledge their son, she would
be prepared to give him a handsome allowance, an allowance big
enough to enable him to vegetate in a bachelor's flat in Paris or at
a


LOUIS COUPERUS
339
a
.
son, but
.
.
the hunting-box in Roumania—Prince Basile's only possession-
until the health that has gone snap says “Snap!” for good and all.
It would mean a quiet existence for Basile: no hunting for an
American bride, with doubtful chances of success, but a safe income
for the rest of his life.
And Prince Basile accepts. He marries Marie Delestre, who now
becomes Princess Maria Chalcondylas; he sees his son, a pretty,
dark-haired Roumanian lad—the very image of Basile's younger
brother—whose name is to be changed from Jean Damour to Prince
Basile Chalcondylas the younger.
.
But stop, stop! Let us not hurry on too fast. I am no expert in
French and Roumanian law. See here: old Jean Damour married
Marie Delestre, who gave birth, a few months after the wedding, to
a son registered in Paris as Jean Damour the younger. Now there
is no doubt whatever that young Jean Damour is Prince Basile's
• but has the law, the French or Roumanian law,
anything to say in the matter? True, Prince Basile acknowledges
Jean Damour the younger as his son and gives him the right to call
himself Prince Basile the younger
but is everything all
right in the eyes of the law and of society? Maybe it is, maybe it
is not: the reader cannot expect me, a mere painter of cruel por-
traits, to decide.
But, without learning of the decision, you will understand the
smile that is always provoked in Rome by the mention of Princess
Maria Chalcondylas and her son Basile, a good-looking, pleasant
boy whom his mother would like to marry to a Pallavicini or Odes-
calchi. For I have kept my cruelest touch for the end. You must
know that Princess Maria has always remained a scion of the
French teacher's family. She has remained middle-class: and her
short, thick-set, buxom figure, now that she is growing older, lacks
any trace of aristocratic languor: remember her wholesome, provin-
cial, countrified mother. She does not speak a word of Roumanian,
which is odd in a Graeco-Roumanian princess. Also, young Prince
Basile, who was never at Bucharest in his life, is a true Parisian,
notwithstanding his classic, oriental features. That strikes the
Odescalchis and Pallavicinis—families born with proud, age-old
traditions—as very peculiar. They don't know what to make of
it all.
In any case, Prince Basile the younger, with his personal charm
a


340
PRINCESS CHALCONDYLAS
a
and old Jean Damour's little fortune, will never make a brilliant
marriage. Perhaps he does not mind, but his mother does. On the
simple, practical, and erstwhile filial soul of Marie Delestre vanity
has set its seal. She is a princess: her son is a prince. She is un-
doubtedly admitted to the drawing-rooms which are not excessively
strict and which have cosmopolitan at-homes on Thursdays, where-
as they receive the real set quietly on Mondays. On Thursdays
Princess Maria is received. Is she not a sensible woman, a good
mother, a talented musician, and, moreover, is she not really Prin-
cess Chalcondylas? She has to be received on the Thursdays
although she is never there on the Mondays.
This makes Princess Maria very unhappy, both because of her
son and because of her vanity. They are her son and daughter.
Vanity is her younger daughter, almost as dear to her as her son.
When Princess Maria is alone, she thinks of the old days and
sometimes forgets her vanity. And then she gives a little smile and
shrugs her shoulders. For in reality she is a sensible woman with
good qualities all her own. And she herself feels that life is never
more tragic than tragedy; and she realizes at the same time how
humorous it all is, that she, Marie Delestre, the little governess, has
become Princess Chalcondylas and her son Prince Basile.



FONS VITAE. BY RUDOLF VON HUHN


.



1923
THE MANDARIN.
BY RUDOLF VON HUIIN





GEORGE MOORE AND JOHN FREEMAN
BY GEORGE MOORE
MAID: Mr Freeman, sir.
FREEMAN: I am afraid I am interrupting.
MOORE: You are welcome to interrupt my reading. I am always
willing to lay aside a book to talk.
FREEMAN: To anybody?
MOORE: I prefer a man of wit like yourself; but since I am con-
fessing myself I will disclose all. I would lay aside the wisest
book to talk to a stupid woman.
FREEMAN: Or man?
MOORE: Yes; or man, for I have lost my taste for reading, and
there are few greater misfortunes. We cannot always be talk-
ing, we cannot always be at the theatre, we cannot always be
listening to music or visiting exhibitions of pictures; and to
lose one's taste for reading is really like losing one's taste for
bread.
FREEMAN: But I find you reading.
MOORE: Reading with a purpose, which is a very different thing
from reading for pleasure. I am reading one of George Eliot's
novels.
FREEMAN: Reading George Eliot, and for a purpose? I shouldn't
have been surprised if I had found you reading Jane Austen
or the Brontës, but Daniel Deronda!
MOORE: The story I am reading is less purposeful-Silas Marner.
Ah, if she had been less purposeful!
FREEMAN: Yet in spite of her purposes, which are fatiguing, you
find something to admire?
MOORE: The book has only just come from the library. I am in
the first pages and am surprised to find that she has a better
conception of what a story should be than most English writers.
I remember her first book, Scenes from Clerical Life, and one
story has haunted me ever since.
FREEMAN: You do not intend to write something like it?
MOORE: My dear Mr Freeman!


342
GEORGE MOORE AND JOHN FREEMAN
FREEMAN: Forgive me. You intend to write an essay about her?
Moore: An essay I must write about somebody, for I am short of
copy. You remember that I withdrew Impressions and Opin-
ions from the list of books that Liveright is publishing in
America.
FREEMAN: I have heard that Mr Arthur Symons speaks of Im-
pressions and Opinions as your best book.
Moore: Arthur Symons speaks out of vague memories. If he were
to open the book again he would see at once that it lacked unity
of subject and language. How could it be else, for I was glad
then to collect articles that I had written for various news-
papers; and so long as I was saying something that seemed en-
tertaining I was satisfied.
FREEMAN: Unity of subject and language is an almost grandilo-
quent view to take, one that George Eliot herself might have
taken.
Moore: You think it too purposeful? It may be; but if we are
artists our lives are spent in a continual striving after perfec-
tion, and in this striving we very often lose something that we
have already won; but that can't be helped.
FREEMAN: So the new book which will replace Impressions and
Opinions will be a unity?
Moore: You put a meaning upon my words that they have not. I
said I would strive towards some sort of unity, something that
would not seem at a first glance like flagrant journalism. You
asked me if I am writing an essay. No; I am weary of essays,
and I don't write them well; perhaps that's the reason why I
am weary of them.
FREEMAN: And the name of the new book?
Moore: Conversations in Ebury Street.
FREEMAN: Ah, I like the title. But why in Ebury Street ? Why
not simply Conversations? Since Landor nobody has attempt-
ed conversations, and after the long interval it has come to you
to revive a form in which criticism can be conducted more agree-
ably than in the essay.
Moore: My admiration for Landor is without limit; I place him
above Shakespeare, and to imitate him would be honour enough
for me. But it was not Landor that prompted me to go and do
likewise; the form rose out of what I had to say quite naturally.
I was tempted, I know not why, but I was tempted to examine


GEORGE MOORE
343
the novels that had come down to us from Defoe one after the
other, to compare them to our poetry and to find them deficient
in seriousness. This I could not do in an essay; the constant
change of subject would have been impossible, or was impos-
sible to me. Of course, I might never have thought of the dia-
logue if I had not known Landor; and perhaps Landor would
not have thought of the dialogue if he had not read Plato.
FREEMAN: Who is your interlocutor in the present instance?
MOORE: You are, as the manuscript on the table tells: “Maid: Mr
Freeman, sir. Freeman: I am afraid I am interrupting—”
FREEMAN: So you have begun the conversation?
?
MOORE: Yes; I have sketched some pages.
FREEMAN: Pray read them to me.
MOORE: The sheets on the table are only a beginning. I am at the
stage of feeling my way into the subject, and the conversation
may have already taken a wrong turn.
FREEMAN: So we discuss George Eliot together?
Moore: George Eliot and Thomas Hardy are contrasted, or will
be, in the dialogue that I am meditating.
FREEMAN: They are contrasted in the Confessions, and very vio-
lently.
Moore: Has it come to be held as a crime to do else than to voice
public opinion ? To strike up with the little boy going down the
street whistling gleefully in defiance of time and tune?
FREEMAN: Public opinion changes slowly, but it changes. Lord
Byron and George Eliot are examples of how public opinion
sees black where it once saw white, and to find an example in
our own time we have only to remember Tennyson. No doubt
public opinion will change regarding Thomas Hardy, but I
doubt the wisdom of treating the public like a whistling boy-
Moore: Ordering his breeches to be taken down and you to hoist
him? Of course, if you don't like the subject I shall abandon
it at once; but will you tell me why? ?
Freeman: It seems to me that I have already given a reason. But
if you want another, here it is. You have just told me that you
are willing always to lay aside a book to talk, a thing which you
are doing now, forgetful that George Eliot is a voluminous
writer, and of the length of Middlemarch, which I think you
will find difficult to finish before the winter. And then there
is Romola, another long book.
a
a


344
GEORGE MOORE AND JOHN FREEMAN
MOORE: A book that I read at a time when I considered seriously
the claims of Lord Leighton to be a great painter.
FREEMAN: He supplied the illustrations.
Moore: And a better choice of an illustrator could not have been
made. Both were workers in wax. Daniel Deronda I have
never opened, and I shudder at the name of Felix Holt, a very
leaden book that I stopped in the middle of long, long ago.
You are quite right; I shall not be able to read all George Eliot.
But that is not a reason why I should abandon my subject. I
have read George Eliot, and if I send the book on the table
back to the library at once, I shall be able to speak to you out
of my memories of her, which will be more agreeable than to
read Felix Holt and ask you to dinner to argue about a defunct
a
literature in which neither of us is in the least interested. So
true is this that I am beginning already to regret having opened
the book on the table; that first paragraph has biased my mind.
You were going to ask me?
FREEMAN: It was certainly in my mind to ask you if your memo-
ries of George Eliot are sufficient for the dialogue you propose
to write.
Moore: You have come from her writings later than I have. Be
my examiner.
FREEMAN: Tell me about Silas Marner.
MOORE: Silas Marner is about an old man, a miser, who discovers
a foundling at his door, boy or girl, I have forgotten which. He
must have heard the child cry and risen from his bed, for he
found the child by the light of a lantern. I am sure of that;
I remember the lantern. Or am I inventing?
FREEMAN: I see that you still keep some faint memory of the story.
Moore: I can speak more precisely of some of the others.
FREEMAN: Of Middlemarch?
Moore: Of Middlemarch I remember the delight with which I
read each volume, and there were six or eight in the edition
that I came upon in my grandfather's library when I was twelve
or thirteen, mayhap fourteen. You may have caught sight of
the portrait of an old gentleman on the wall of the lobby as
you came up stairs-my grandfather, the historian who in his
preface to his history of the French Revolution (I give the pre-
face in Ave) speaks with delightful resignation and humility of
his failure to obtain recognition. Compelled by a presentiment


GEORGE MOORE
345
that the house was going to be burnt, I wrote to Tom Ruttledge
to have the portrait packed up and sent to me, and the very
night it arrived a band of incendiaries came to my steward's
house and demanded the keys.
FREEMAN: The manuscript of the French Revolution was not
saved?
Moore: No; everything was lost except this portrait, and I rue
the accident that saved it, for I can no longer go up or down
stairs without remembering a long past, more real to me than
the present moment—the recollections of certain rooms, my
grandfather's library, with the old gentleman's portrait over
the chimney-piece, the wire-netted bookcases, the round table,
the telescope, the view of the lake winding sadly mile after mile
by low wooded shores, and my disappointment when I returned
the last volume of Middlemarch to its place on the shelves.
My memories of Adam Bede are more explicit. I can still hear,
almost hear some of the young squire's words in the scene in
which the parson tries to dissuade him from what, I have for-
gotten; probably from walking out with Hetty-and I can re-
call how the story lost its humanity for me when the dairymaid
was taken by the police and tried for the murder of her child.
The story of a crime is never a good story. Some years ago I I
read The Mill on the Floss, a well-modulated narrative, with
the aunts of Maggie Tulliver, each in her house, and her habits,
and Maggie Tulliver going to meet a cripple or a hunchback in
a pine wood. A delightful, intellectual companionship this was,
one that George Eliot's readers thought should continue and
end in marriage; but George Eliot knew better than her readers
how life is made, and she chose that Maggie's bodily instincts
should be awakened by a commonplace young man, who takes
her away somewhere in a boat or a barge, I have forgotten
which. I was delighted when the young man seized Maggie's
bare arm and kissed it, a very natural act, one which a girl
would expect who was eloping with a young man, and disap-
pointed when, despite the young man's apologies, tears, and
promises of amendment, Maggie returns home.
FREEMAN: You remember the flood, with Maggie and Tom Tulli-
ver in a boat?
Moore: Yes; and I have nothing to say against the end; it's harm-
less, it's almost good. But I am thinking now of the passing of
a


346
GEORGE MOORE AND JOHN FREEMAN
a
all this literature, as well built as the mill itself, for George
Eliot constructed well and wrought well and solidly; her prose
is rich and well balanced. But these qualities were not enough
to save her from the whirling, bubbling flood of time; her books
have gone down like the mill; lighter things have floated; hers
have sunk out of sight. And I would seek a reason for the sud-
den overthrow of one who in her day was looked upon as almost
Shakespeare's equal.
FREEMAN: You have known more old Victorians than I have, but
I doubt -
Moore: Doubt not, for I heard Professor Tyrrel, a great scholar,
whose Latin and Greek verse was as perfect as such things can
be, speak the words that you have just heard me speak: Almost
Shakespeare's equal!
FREEMAN: Whereby we may deduce the moral that learning is in-
sufficient.
Moore: We may, indeed. But I would look into the soul and see
why this woman's mind has passed into a dust hardly less anon-
ymous than her body.
FREEMAN: The bent of her mind was towards philosophy rather
than imaginative literature, and it was George Henry Lewes
who drew her attention to prose narrative as an outlet for her
genius.
Moore: I understand. Even genius is dependent on accident. The
accident is always passing; talent misses it, but genius avails
itself of it instantly, and George Eliot availed herself of her
chance. But that is a side issue; we are seeking the reason why
she should have passed into sudden oblivion and others, the
Brontës, should remain.
FREEMAN: You admitted that her prose was rich and well bal-
anced, and I agree with you. But there is no pleasure in it.
Moore: You are quite right; there is very little pleasure in it.
But why is there no pleasure in it?
FREEMAN: Something in her character, perhaps.
MOORE: Let us seek her failure in her character. I know she met
George Henry Lewes and that is about all I do know of her.
Whence came she? Was she a townswoman or a countrywo-
man? Did she come from the north or the south or the east or
the west? Was Lewes her first lover, her second, her third?
Tell me all you know about her.
.


GEORGE MOORE
347
a
FREEMAN: Her name was Marian Evans, and she came from War-
wickshire.
Moore: From the middle of England, like Shakespeare. Balzac,
too, came from the middle of France.
FREEMAN: Her father was land agent to Mr Francis Newdigate,
a Warwickshire squire.
Moore: And she was sent to school. But to what school?
FREEMAN: That I can't tell you, but without doubt to some school
in the neighbourhood, perhaps in Warwick. Do you know it?
Moore: Yes. In my boyhood it was a lovely old English town
full of gardens and gables, and associated with the Middle Ages
-Warwick Castle, with a bad picture of a man in a cave shown
to travelling folk, the very town in which there would be a fine,
large, handsome school for young ladies. Birmingham is over
the border, but not more than twenty miles away, and she may
have been educated in Birmingham.
FREEMAN: Be that as it may, she remained at school till her moth-
er's death, and was then recalled home to look after her father's
house; and the change, I have always heard, was welcomed by
her, for even in her teens she resented direction in her studies.
And at Arbury Farm she applied herself to the French and
Italian languages, and I think music was a hobby of hers.
Moore: I shouldn't have suspected music from her writing. But
Nature is ever capricious. Tell me more.
FREEMAN: At Arbury Farm she refused to go to church and nearly
quarrelled with her father, and afterwards she began to write
for the Westminster Review.
Moore: I am beginning to understand. And after the publication
of two or three articles the Editor wrote asking her to call at
the office when she came to London; and in London she made
the acquaintance of John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, the in-
evitable Harriet Martineau, and the desirable George Henry.
Can you give me the date when she left Arbury Farm?
FREEMAN: I will inquire the matter out in the library.
Moore: No matter. She came up to London to participate in the
discovery that pleasure was a mistake, almost a vulgarity, and
that life would be better without it; for in the 'fifties, and still
more in the 'sixties, the philosophers thought they had at last
found Nature out. And the arts, determined not to lag behind,
became serious; the eighteenth century was spoken of as the


348
GEORGE MOORE AND JOHN FREEMAN
mischievous and shameful century, and the worship of ugliness
began in France. I would tell you who began it if I could;
there must have been somebody before Courbet, who spoke
about truth of effect and local colour. Be this as it may, he
was committed to it, and Troyon still more so, and these were
followed by Millet, who took it upon himself to explain the
miserable lot of the peasant; and whosoever saw it, remembers
L'Homme à la Houe, a detestable object, but which so stirred
the bowels of compassion in everybody that everybody was cer-
tain something must be done to relieve the monotony of the
peasant's lot. Philanthropy entered into art from that mo-
ment. And it is believed that Rosa Bonheur never wore a
crinoline, preferring to walk about in breeches and a blouse.
She wore clogs and led a life more laborious than that of the
cart-horses she painted. Rosa Bonheur-how well the name
goes with her pictures! The syllables tramp just like the great
grey cart-horse that the peasant rides into the middle of the
fair. Rosa Bonheur—was there ever a more cynical name?
She only just escaped Rose. Rose Bonheur—a woman in whose
life a rose never flourished, and who repudiated happiness! Do
you tell me, and quickly, when Marian Evans changed her
name to George Eliot.
FREEMAN: But you do not believe that the character of a human
being is modified by a name, inherited or assumed? You said
just now that Rosa Bonheur's name was in direct contradiction
to her character.
MOORE: The name tramps like a cart-horse, and I cannot believe
she would have painted the same pictures if her name had been
Rose. But Rosa Bonheur is a side issue; we are speaking of
George Eliot. Tell me when she changed the name of Marian
Evans, a splendid name, and how well it goes with Arbury
Farm! I can see myself in my imagination directing an envel-
ope: Miss Marian Evans, Arbury Farm, Warwickshire. Can
you tell me when she changed her name?
FREEMAN: I have no exact information. Have you an encyclo-
paedia?
Moore: An encyclopaedia in this house! No.
FREEMAN: We may assume for the moment that her first book, the
translation of Strauss' Life of Jesus, was published under the
name of George Eliot.


GEORGE MOORE
349
MOORE: Why should we assume that?
FREEMAN: I have told you that her father was much distressed by
her refusal to go to church-
MOORE: Had I been her father, I should have said: Marian, I will
allow you to omit church if in return you will choose some other
name than George Eliot.
FREEMAN: What name would you have suggested to her?
MOORE: Oliver Brunskill.
FREEMAN: There's not much beauty in that name.
Moore: We mustn't seek beauty in names—character. Do you
think my writings would have been the same if I had adopted
Annie Grey as my pseudonym? George Henry Lewes, her
guide and bugle-call (it was he who first suggested that she
should turn her hand to fiction) should have said, when they
were debating the pseudonym necessary for Scenes from Clerical
Life: I do not urge you, Marian, to choose Annie Grey-indeed,
I urge you not to choose it; and we can imagine Marian an-
swering: But why, dear George, are you averse from the name
George Eliot? It is so uncompromising.
FREEMAN: And what answer would you set down for George
Henry Lewes ?
Moore: A name too faintly genteel for you, Marian. The phrase
might have risen up in his mind as genteel as an omnibus, but
he would not have spoken it, and continued: Hardly a man's
name, hardly a woman's, without any sex on it. The word
sex would have frightened Marian, and she would have said
that the name was chosen, before she knew him, as a suitable
name to go on the title page of a translation of Strauss' Life
of Jesus. But why continue it? George Henry would have in-
terposed. Scenes from Clerical Life, by Marian Evans. To
which Marian would have answered drily: I have to consider
my father.
FREEMAN: I do not know if the translation was made at Arbury
Farm or when she went to London.
Moore: It can't be helped. In London she adopted the morality
of her circle: morality without God, a fantastic theory if ever
there was one. Even with God's help men and women stray
into the primrose path; how then can we expect them to remain
in the strait and narrow way if there be no promise of reward
or punishment ? An altogether impracticable morality, as is


350
GEORGE MOORE AND JOHN FREEMAN
proved indeed by Marian herself, who went to live with a mar-
ried man and wrote under his roof Scenes From Clerical Life
and other admonitory works, hanging herself out like a banner
from the roof on which is inscribed the magic word: Excelsior!
FREEMAN: Lewes was her single transgression from the moral law.
Moore: Our information on the subject is too slight to warrant
literary investigation, and further transgressions, could they be
proved against her, would weaken my argument.
FREEMAN: You think then that the foundations of her style are to
be discovered in Lewes?
Moore: Not in Lewes' writing, but in the double life she was lead-
ing
FREEMAN: You trace George Eliot's style to a conflict between
theory and conduct, and I think you are on surer ground now
than you were in that fantastic theory that the name we bring
into the world or that we assume is accountable for all our acts
and thoughts.
Moore: Encouraged by your sympathy I will venture a little fur-
ther into a theology which some will regard as casuistical, say-
ing that if she had transgressed oftener her style would no
longer be the same. You see, she may have gone to live with
Lewes (indeed, it almost looks as if she had) for doctrinal rea-
sons, false doctrine, of course. But if further transgressions
could be urged against her we might assume that she was pur-
suing happiness, and happiness being in her mind would have
found an outlet in her works. You see, my dear Mr Freeman,
a woman who transgresses frequently, escapes (for some reason
which we will not attempt to explore) the Christian conscience,
and not having the Christian conscience we must acquit her of
the sin against the Holy Ghost, a sin unforgivable on earth or
in heaven, the one sin that the Pagan and the Christian world
are agreed upon, their detestation being the same.
FREEMAN: If a man or woman cannot accept Christian doctrine
you would advocate that he or she should lead a licentious life,
escaping thereby from setting a bad example?
Moore: Licentious life! You fall into the makeshift argument of
the preacher who would have us look upon Antiquity as a de-
grading past of which the least said the better.
FREEMAN: Antiquity affords the highest instances of morality.
Moore: As I have said, Antiquity and Christianity hold one sin in


GEORGE MOORE
351
equal detestation, and I think I am guilty of no paradox if I
say that her style is the outcome of the moral conflict in which
she found herself involved, for the thought to defend herself
was never out of her mind. But relieved of her load of sin by
Christianity or by Paganism (a subtlety which we cannot dis-
cuss here, our discussion being confined to discovering the source
of her style) she might have written-well, it's impossible to
say how she might have written, but certainly more delightfully
than she has written.
FREEMAN: You would distinguish between a moral man and a
moralist, and I think you are right. And I would add that the
moralist is seldom happy.
MOORE: If she had been a happy woman her happiness would have
crept into her writings, for what is in the mind finds its way
on to the page, an almost needless amplification of your criti-
cism that the moralist is seldom happy. Indeed, an essay might
be written by some philosopher, poet, painter, and critic, who
would discern in Velasquez an icy spirit who saw no more in his
fellows than subjects for portraits or pictures. The critic of
whom I am thinking would cry, on turning from Velasquez to
Rubens: A happy man! His paintings tell the tale. He medi-
tated no doctrine, and to be free accepted Catholicism outward-
ly, thereby getting his freedom to wander among nymphs and
satyrs without receiving reproofs from Spain. Among modern
writers your enemy Stevenson-
FREEMAN: My enemy? No. If, as some people think, I have
criticized Stevenson harshly it is because he seems to be taking
a place in public estimation higher than he deserves, getting a
great deal that was due to Pater. Moreover, the happiness that
he expressed seems to me a very superficial kind of happiness,
cudgelling a little donkey in the Cevennes!
MOORE: At once you bring in a morality which casts a gloom upon
the radiant pages of Travels With a Donkey.
FREEMAN: He did not keep religion out of his writings; he re-
mained a sour Protestant. He could not visit the monks with-
out commenting, and adversely, on the mode of life they chose
to adopt, and in the Inland Voyage he is also ready to advance
the claims of Protestantism against those of Rome; and in his
essay on Villon he never ceases to thank God that he was not
himself like Villon. No; I think you would have done better


352
GEORGE MOORE AND JOHN FREEMAN
to have left Stevenson out of this argument. Morris would
have supplied you with a better example, for men fight and love
and wander in his poems as they do in Homer.
Moore: The visible world was enough for the Greek and the Eng-
lish poet, and all that you say in praise of Morris I will ap-
plaud, hat in hand. A greater poet than Stevenson, I grant
you; still— But let us not wrangle, but agree that ancient lit-
erature was happier than modern. Homer's fighting, though
heavy-handed, is always light-hearted. The wanderings of
Odysseus are untouched by melancholy, and Virgil, too, and
Horace are free from this bane.
FREEMAN: Your chronicle runs too fast, for we have come to im-
perial Rome, overlooking Sicily.
Moore: Yes; you are quite right. I had forgotten Sicily, and
thank you for reminding me. How the very name of Theocritus
brings up before our eyes sunny hillsides, with shepherds gath-
ered under tamarisk trees, and for single ornament a torrent
dashing over the face of the high rock. More real, more true
are these than George Eliot's Norfolk farms. The shepherds
and shepherdesses have come down to us from more than two
thousand years, gaining in every generation, it would seem, a
new and more intense life. Battus is clearer to us now than he
was, perhaps, to his creator, certainly more real than Tom Tul-
liver is to me, or his sister Maggie. And the incident of the
thorn that Corydon plucked from Battus' foot under the ankle
we would not exchange for the story of the flood.
FREEMAN: I would certainly not give up Amaryllis for Maggie
Tulliver.
Moore: All her walks with the cripple in the pine wood are not
worth the verses in which we read that Battus goes to Amaryl-
lis' cave to plead his love, saying that if she refuses him he
will die at her feet. He says some lovely things to her: Lo, ten
apples I bring thee, plucked from that very place where thou
didst bid me pluck them, and others to-morrow I will bring
thee. Ah, regard my heart's deep sorrow! ah, would I were
that humming bee, and to thy cave might come dipping beneath
the fern that hides thee, and the ivy leaves!
FREEMAN: In such words as these we reach immortality.
MOORE: Ah, lovely as thou art to look upon, ah heart of stone, ah
dark-browed maiden, embrace me, thy true goatherd, that I may


GEORGE MOORE
353
kiss thee, and even in empty kisses there is a sweet delight! In
the simple words, even in empty kisses there is a sweet delight,
he reaches to the very heart of the sensual instinct. The un-
fortunate goatherd continues to plead, but for the moment I am
at the end of my memories.
FREEMAN: Theocritus records not the answers of Amaryllis; not a
word do we hear her speak. And in the next Idyll Battus and
Corydon, two neatherds, meet, and after some random banter
their talk turns on the death of Amaryllis.
MOORE: Ah, gracious Amaryllis! Thee alone even in death will
we ne'er forget. Dear to me as my goats wert thou, and thou
art dead! Alas, too cruel a spirit hath my lot in his keeping.
That is all we know of Amaryllis, and the scene of this great
love grief is described in an anecdote—the plucking out of a
thorn that has run into Battus' foot under the ankle. Battus'
sighs for Amaryllis were the first, but they were not the last.
The world has continued ever since to sigh for Amaryllis. Is
it her name that has given her an immortality that has endured
for more than two thousand years, and given immortality to a
hind like Battus? For we like him when he says: I will sing no
more, but dead will I lie where I fall, and here may the wolves
devour me. This rough goatherd was a true lover. Why are
these hinds and shepherdesses immortal, Mr Freeman? Why
are they real? Why are they enough? Because his Idylls tell of
happy days and men and women who lead happy lives, follow-
ing their flocks and their instincts. It would be hard to find
an unhappy day in his pages, not even the two fishermen who
wake up in their broken hut with nothing before them but an-
other toilsome day in search of food, two old men at the end of
their lives who will one day be unable to put forth again. What
is sadder than this end of old age? Yet Theocritus brings into
his story a dream. Tell me, says one old man, the vision of the
night; nay, tell all to thy friend. And the fisherman tells of
the dream in which he hooked a fish with golden scales, and
the great difficulty he had to bring it on shore. You remem-
ber?
FREEMAN: Yes; and the answer to forget the dream and seek the
fish of flesh, lest thou die of famine with all thy dreams of
gold!
MOORE: To that answer, so beautiful and so wise, a modern writer


354
GEORGE MOORE AND JOHN FREEMAN
would add a sickly page of homilies. Even the genius of
Wordsworth could not redeem him from the curse of morality.
You remember his Leech-gatherer? Had we to choose between
The Leech-gatherer and the fisherman, we should choose the
earlier story, with regret, perhaps, but we should choose it.
Wordsworth we read in his own metre; Theocritus we read in a
translation in which much must be lost; yet how much remains
in the most beautiful translation ever made! You were saying?
FREEMAN: I was going to remind you of a story in verse by George
Eliot of a girl who loved a king, and who for the king's sake
refused to marry her lover; but the king, hearing of her broken
faith, sent for her and kept her in his court till she began to per-
ceive that he was only a man like another-
MOORE: And robbed of her illusions, she returned to her betrothed;
and with him George Eliot leaves the girl, satisfied that she has
acquiesced in all the prejudices and conventions of her time,
that she has paid homage to them. Of Nature there is not a
trace, poor, outcast Nature!
FREEMAN: You don't think that the intimacy of the king would
have checked the girl's admiration of him and turned it back to
its source, the young man that she had discarded?
MOORE: No, indeed, I do not think so, not unless the king had pos-
sessed himself of the girl's affections and wearied of them; then
of course, she might have picked up the thread she had dropped.
FreeMAN: Is not your view very cynical ?
FREEMAN
MOORE: That is how you like to take it—do you prefer truth or
lies? Ah, here is Mabel bringing in the tea; you'll stay and
have a cup with me, won't you?
II
Moore: You will have another cup?
FREEMAN: No, thank you.
Moore: A cigar?
FREEMAN: No, thank you; I don't smoke.
Moore: Not even a cigarette?
FREEMAN: No, thank you.
MOORE: So you like Mr Hardy's poems better than his novels?
FREEMAN: Yes; I think he writes verse better than prose, occa-
sionally somewhat awkwardly; but in both, in verse and prose,


GEORGE MOORE
355
a
a
he has helped the ordinary man to realize pessimism as a theory
of life. He has massed it, brought it before us in a solid block.
Moore: But pessimism as a theory is as old as the world. To go no
further back than Ecclesiastes, we find not a few admirable
phrases depicting the worthlessness of life; and in Shakespeare
we find phrases even more beautiful. If you had said that Mr
Hardy popularized pessimism and coaxed his readers into drink-
ing from an old tin pot a beverage that had hitherto been of-
fered to them only in golden and jewelled goblets, I should
have agreed with you. You were speaking just now of Mr
Hardy's stories in verse. I have read one of these, and as an ex-
ample of how to make pessimism seem trivial I think it would
be difficult to find a better story than the one telling of a dead
woman's dog that cannot be persuaded to leave her
how disappointed all the family are when they discover that he
is not trying to scratch up his dead mistress, but a bone that he
has buried.
FREEMAN: You have not chosen a happy example of Mr Hardy's
art. I could show you some poems that I think even you would
find some merit in. I remember that in speaking of a certain
Irish writer you say he is sufficiently a poet to become a great
prose writer.
MOORE: The best prose is usually written by poets-Shakespeare
wrote the best seventeenth century and Shelley the best nine-
teenth; and I do not think I am going too far when I say that
Mr Hardy has written the worst, I will hear your protest after-
wards. Allow me to read:
grave, and
a
“The persistent torrent from the gurgoyle's jaws directed all its
vengeance into the grave. The rich tawny mould was stirred
into motion, and boiled like chocolate. The water accumulated
and washed deeper down, and the roar of the pool thus formed
spread into the night as the head and chief among other noises
of the kind created by the deluging rain. The flowers so care-
fully planted by Fanny's repentant lover began to move and
writhe in their beds. The winter violets turned slowly upside
down and became a mere mat of mud. Soon the snowdrop and
other bulbs danced in the boiling mass like ingredients in a
cauldron. Plants of the tufted species were loosened, rose to
the surface, and floated off.


356
GEORGE MOORE AND JOHN FREEMAN
The pool upon the grave had soaked away into the
ground, and in its place was a hollow. The disturbed earth was
washed away over the grass and pathway in the guise of the
brown mud he had already seen, and it spotted the marble tomb-
stone with the same stains. Nearly all the flowers were washed
clean out of the ground, and they lay, roots upwards, on the
spots whither they had been splashed by the stream.”
FREEMAN: From what book are you reading?
MOORE: Far From the Madding Crowd.
FREEMAN: One of his best books!
Moore: Then I have done him no injustice in quoting from it.
The gargoyle may direct its vengeance, but not the torrent.
Freeman: Would you mind reading the passage again?
FREEMAN
Moore: "The persistent torrent from the gurgoyle's jaws directed
all its vengeance into the grave.”
FREEMAN: I suppose you are right.
MOORE: “The rich tawny mould was stirred into motion, and
boiled like chocolate." Can that image be defended?
FREEMAN: Nobody seeks to defend it.
Moore: A pool does not roar, and flowers do not writhe, and when
Mr Hardy tells us that the violets turned slowly upside down,
my thoughts are directed to ducks in a pond, despite the fact
that ducks turn quickly upside down. "Soon the snowdrop and
other bulbs danced in the boiling mass like ingredients in a caul-
dron.” Is a cauldron the image that would rise up in the mind
of a poet, and would he use the word ingredients? "Nearly all
the flowers were washed clean (sic) out of the ground, and they
lay, roots upwards, on the spots whither they had been splashed
by the stream.” You appreciate the whither, I hope?
FREEMAN: Slips occur in the very best writers.
Moore: Good writers do not usually slip in every line, and of all,
when they are attempting a purple passage.
FREEMAN: Do you think that he chose Fanny Robin's grave as
suitable for fine writing?
MOORE: Had there not been purple in his eye, he would have writ-
ten: The pour of water from the gurgoyle washed away the
grave-mound. A simple statement was all that was needed, and
perhaps the very first among our literary instincts is the one that


GEORGE MOORE
357
tells us the theme that may be developed and the theme that
offers no opportunities for development. A writer who de-
scribes an omnibus after having said it was red lacks the literary
instinct. And I think that even if we overlook the extraordi-
nary number of grammatical mistakes, we find the essential Mr
Hardy in the description of Fanny Robin's grave. It has be-
come a habit to limit style to a choice of words; but it's much
more. We can have style though the choice of words may be
casual and undistinguished. Pater speaks of style as unity of
subject and language; there was something else, too, but hav-
ing forgotten what is the third quality that makes for style I
will add something of my own: that style is a summary of all
the writer has seen and heard and thought, wherefore if the
style be confused and turgid the story will limp painfully from
a feeble beginning to a dim and confused close.
FREEMAN: If you do not like Far From the Madding Crowd I am
afraid you will not like The Trumpet Major, and I doubt if
your patience will bear you to the end of The Mayor of Caster-
bridge. It begins well, but halfway through-
Moore: I do not propose to read Daniel Deronda, and neither do
I propose to read all Mr Hardy's novels, for has it not been said .
that to have eaten a crust of bread is to have tasted of all the
stars? I have read Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and my doubts
began when Alec came riding by and called her to jump up be-
hind him, and rode away with her into a wood. A wood may
be large or small; it may wander hither and thither, or grow in
patches. A wood may be dense, dark, solemn, forbidding, or it
may be blithe, enticing, with delightful interspaces; it may be
overgrown with scrub, littered with uncouth rocks, or it may be
smooth. A wood may have the wet, close smell of an ancient
marsh, or it may be fragrant as a garden.
FREEMAN: It was not the wood that mattered, but Tess, and a
long description-
Moore: A wood may be described in two words. When Scott
wrote: “Land of brown heath and scraggy wood,” we are in
Scotland. But the woods and fields that Mr Hardy speaks of
are never before our eyes. I think he tells us that Alec rode
some distance into the wood and made a couch for Tess in the
dead leaves. He buttons his overcoat round her shoulders and
9


358
GEORGE MOORE AND JOHN FREEMAN
a
goes away for a little while, and returns to find her asleep. The
situation is one which seems to Mr Hardy opportune for a med-
itation, wherefore he begins:
“But, some might say, where was Tess's guardian angel? where
was the providence of her simple faith? Perhaps, like that
other god of whom the ironical Tishbite spoke, he was talking,
or he was pursuing, or he was in a journey, or he was sleeping
and not to be awaked. Why it was that upon this beautiful
feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as
snow as yet, there should have been traced such a coarse pattern
as it was doomed to receive,”
a sentence, Mr Freeman, that nobody but a poet could have
written. The French have a good word for this kind of story:
coco, and coco may be translated into English as Mother Goose.
After the incident in the wood Tess returns to her home, and
about a year afterwards we read of her in a cornfield with a
baby, who is taken ill and whom she baptizes herself in the
middle of the night. When the baby dies Tess continues to
work in her parents' house, and then becomes a dairymaid; and
in the dairy she meets Angel Clare, whom she marries, without,
however, telling him that she has had a baby. But on the night
of the wedding she makes up her mind to confess everything to
him, and is glad when Angel Clare confides to her the fact he
had once: “plunged into eight and forty hours' dissipation with
a stranger,” and that he has “never repeated the offence.” You
will see, Mr Freeman, that the interest of the story concentrates
not so much on Tess' confession, but on the character the au-
thor gives to the confession, for, like a wood, a confession can
take every kind of shape. George Eliot would have said to
herself: Angel Clare may persuade her to confess; he may be
anxious to know the truth for pure motives, or he may be anx-
ious to know the truth for impure motives; he may be willing to
hear, and then unwilling to hear. It may be that Mr Hardy
did not consider the different sides from which the scene might
be viewed, or it may be that he considered them all and came to
the conclusion that his imagination could not reveal to him the
words that Tess would speak to Angel Clare. Discretion is said


GEORGE MOORE
359
to be the better part of valour, and Mr Hardy's discretion was
a rapid retreat into the past indefinite:
“And pressing her forehead against his temple she entered on
the story of her acquaintance with Alec D'Urberville and its re-
sults, murmuring the words without flinching, and with her eye-
lids drooping down.”
FREEMAN: You are of opinion, then, Mr Moore, that if a man
loves a woman he would just ask her: Is it all over? Do you
see the man now? And if she said no, that she now loves for the
first time, he would say: Don't let's speak about this any more.
You have repented of your sin, and I have repented of mine.
Moore: You cast searching glances into my soul, Mr Freeman,
and I admit willingly that this is how I think George Eliot
would have written the scene; or if she felt she couldn't write
it, for one reason or another, she would have contrived a con-
struction of the story that would have enabled her to speak
truthfully. I am willing to believe that Mr Hardy felt the
story had begun to stagger a little and required some romantic
incident to restore the reader's confidence in it. Angel Clare is
given to walking in his sleep, and one night picking Tess out of
her bed he carries her quite a long way—if my memory does not
trip me—several hundred yards, crossing the river by means of
a narrow plank. What I am going to say seems incredible, but
I remember certainly something about an Abbey and a stone
coffin, in which he lays Tess. I have forgotten for how long she
lies in the coffin, but remember that she takes her sleep-walking
husband by the arm and leads him home. As I read how they
approached the house, I said to myself: We are coming to
something more original than a wedding night parting due to a
confession. He will put Tess into his own bed, and on awaken-
ing he will take her in his arms—a daring piece of craftsman-
ship! and
my mind softened towards Mr Hardy. But only for
a moment, alas, for Tess persuades Angel Clare to lie down on
his bed and retires to her own room. The next morning they
drive a little way together; he leaves the carriage, bids her good-
bye, and Tess returns home to her mother, and henceforth we
see her getting her living as best she can in the fields.


360
GEORGE MOORE AND JOHN FREEMAN
got mixed
FREEMAN: You do admit that we see Tess at work in the turnip
fields.
Moore: A solitary figure in a turnip field is a distinct feature in the
landscape, and Mr Hardy did not miss it; indeed, we could
almost wish that he had, so often have we seen this figure in pic-
tures, as often, or very nearly as often, as we have seen harvest-
ers returning with a dancing step from the fields, scythes over
their shoulders, and a moon three times too big behind their
heads.
FREEMAN: You are thinking, surely, of George Mason's picture of
harvesters?
Moore: Perhaps I am; it would not surprise me if the picture you
speak of
up
in my memories of Tess, so entirely in
keeping are the dancing harvesters and the moon three times
too big with the seducer, who returns in clerical garb and dis-
appears from the story, returning again for Tess to murder him
with a carving knife and the blood to soak through the ceiling,
and for Tess to be hanged later on, after spending a splendid
honeymoon among the monoliths of Stonehenge, with Angel
Clare waiting outside the prison to see the black flag run up.
FREEMAN: Have you ever seen any plays by Mr Henry Arthur
Jones?
Moore: Yes; I have seen a good many.
FREEMAN: You know what Oscar Wilde's advice to dramatists
was? He said that there were three rules to be observed; the
first rule was not to write like Mr Henry Arthur Jones.
Moore: And what were the second and third rules?
FREEMAN: They were the same as the first. And if you were
called upon to give advice to young novelists, I think you would
adopt Oscar Wilde's formula.
Moore: It's curious that you should mention Mr Henry Arthur
Jones, for if Henry Arthur had written novels I think they
would have been very like Mr Hardy's, only better written. I
remember speaking these words to William Archer, who asked
me if I had ever seen Mr Hardy. I said that I hadn't, and he
answered: Well, you'd be surprised at the likeness. I am not
speaking of the mental likeness, but of the physical likeness,
which is very striking: same height, same build, same type of
face, same complexion. A few days afterwards in the Academy
Mr Hardy was pointed out to me going round the pictures with


GEORGE MOORE
361
>
a
his wife, and I said: Archer is right; the two men are very like
each other.
FREEMAN: The subject of your charge is that Mr Hardy is often
melodramatic; but I don't think anybody would deny that he
does, on occasions, avail himself of exaggeration, of emphasis.
His admirers, and I know one or two, would answer you that
Mr Hardy was only following in the footsteps of Shakespeare,
and they would speak of the three witches in Macbeth, of the
two murderers interrupted by the comic porter, of Banquo's
ghost, and many other melodramatic scenes. Nor would their
inquiry be limited to Macbeth. Hamlet rises frequently into
melodrama, or, as you would put it, lapses frequently into melo-
drama. It seems to me that you are bringing into this criticism
a great deal of your own temperament. You don't like melo-
drama, and you are right not to like it, for whenever you get an
effect it is by understatement rather than by overstatement; but
that is not a reason why you should condemn a method which is
employed by both Mr Hardy and Shakespeare.
Moore: The charge is often brought against the critic that his crit-
icism is no more than a reflection of his own temperament. How
else could it be, since all he sees, hears, feels, and knows, is but
a reflection of his temperament? We have no exact knowledge
of anything. But I think my best answer to your defence of
melodrama is that there is melodrama that rises into the em-
pyrean, and melodrama unredeemed by poetry. The first walks
with divine gait, in silken raiment and with stars in her hair,
whilst the other proceeds with shambling gait from ale-house to
ale-house, and the deeds that are done appeal to the eye and ear
rather than to the mind. Shakespeare appeals to all the senses,
it is true, but he never fails to appeal to the mind. Macbeth's
deeds and Hamlet's are transported into art, and are therefore
only understood by the few, though they may be undoubtedly
relished by the many.
FREEMAN: You remind me of Don Quixote charging the wind-
mills, mills that only exist in his imagination. Nobody com-
pares Tess and Jude the Obscure with Hamlet or Macbeth. .
MOORE: Oh, yes, they do! Several articles have appeared in which
analogies are discovered between Jude the Obscure and Prome-
theus Bound, and I would not advise any critic who valued the
world's opinions to challenge these appreciations.


362
GEORGE MOORE AND JOHN FREEMAN
FREEMAN: I certainly hope that you do not speak to others as
openly as you do to me.
MOORE: You would not like, then, truth to prevail ?
FREEMAN: Like Pilate, I ask you: What is truth? Your judge-
ment is at variance with opinions that proceed from the highest
to the lowest. Everybody believes-
Moore: The entire Press believes, and would shed the last drop of
its ink in defence of the literary opinions of the many.
FREEMAN: You would then set aside the literary opinions of the
many? Even that of your friend, Mr Edmund Gosse, who sa-
lutes Mr Hardy as “the poet who is, without dispute, the head
of the literary profession, and, so I believe, the first of living
men of letters in the world?”
Moore: Mr Gosse speaks out of his lights, and I speak out of
mine, and I do not think that anything would be gained by my
decrying his as a false light and mine as a true.
A great deal
of what I am saying, Mr Freeman, will appear in print as soon
as Mr Hardy steps on board Charon's boat.
FREEMAN: You think that others share your opinions and are prob-
ably at this moment anxious to utter them, but refrain. .
Moore: But refrain from good taste. Like many another, Mr
Hardy is surrounded by misguided friends, who only think of
his mortal life, but I am concerned with his immortal life and
would save him from the wrath of Apollo. I would send him
over in Charon's boat to meet Apollo in a more devout spirit
than Mr Gosse's words inspire. I am thinking of what possible
indiscretions Mr Hardy may be guilty of when he advances to
meet the God; it may be hardly possible for him to restrain
some words or gestures of familiarity. It may be that with con.
fident air he will ask the God to point out his (Mr Hardy's)
seat to him; or it may be that he will seek his seat himself, and
not finding it next to Shakespeare or Aeschylus, he will return
and complain to Apollo, who will ask: Who is this one ? One
of the God's messengers will answer: This is Hardy, the author
of Tess, and Jude the Obscure. And the author of these works,
the God will reply, would seek a seat next to Aeschylus and
Shakespeare! It would be vain for the messengers to try to
!
pacify the angry God--but I will not look further into the fu-
ture. The depths of Hades may not be reached by human eyes.
.



o
A DRAWING.
BY WILLIAM ZORACH





THE CRYSTAL SUN
BY YVOR WINTERS
Lean spring came in,
A living tide of green,
White foam of blossom;
I, a child,
Barefooted on the clear sand,
Saw the sun fall
Straight and sharp in air;
And I, afraid of horses,
Screamed in surprise
As the mare spun
Knee-high in yellow flowers.
The stones
That held the hills,
The sky that held
The sun and all its
Spreading rays were of one
Substance
and my God
Lay at my feet
And spoke from out
My shadow, eyed me
From the bees.
And he was not, or
Else I-none could
Say.
The Chinamen
Amid the lemon grove
Lived with pale women
And ate dogs and sang
All night.
What wonder, then,
That I went mad


364
THE CRYSTAL SUN
Amid the cloudy stone
And looked at
Print
more beautiful
Than women, till
The earth took form
In my place,
at my feet.


ARISTIDE MAILLOL
BY WALTER AGARD
BOG
ORN in Provence, a country of all Western lands most like
Greece, Aristide Maillol has among moderns come closest to
achieving the Allgemeinheit of the Olympia pedimental sculptors
and Polyclitus. Banyuls-sur-Mer gave him in his youth serene
skies, clear outlines, a sinewy countryside of drowsy orchards shim-
mering in the hot sun, wrapped in violet mist at dusk, silver in
moonlight; and people who now, as in the days of the princes of
Les Baux, live a full-flavoured, sensuous life. “For the waves of
the centuries and their tempests and their horrors in vain distract
the people and efface frontiers. Maternal Earth, Nature, always
nourishes her sons with the same milk; from her hard breasts she
will still provide for the olive the fine oil.” These are the words of
Frédéric Mistral, their poet, who speaks of his countrymen as a race
of eagles, an ancient people, proud and free.
“Di grand famiho prouvençalo,
Raço d'eigloun, jamai vassalo,"
with their soul joyous, fiery and vigorous.
“Amo de longo renadivo,
Amo jouiouso e fiero e vivo."
It has been frequently pointed out that the regeneration of
French art has come from the provinces. None of them can claim
so great credit in the visual arts as Provence: witness Cézanne and
Maillol.
Paul Gauguin was Maillol's early master in design, a teacher of
spacious effects, forms broadly conceived and generously grouped.
But although he was interested in painting and more especially in
tapestry design, Maillol recognized that only in stone and bronze
could he secure the amplitude and suavity that he most cherished.
No sculptor has ever better loved stone as stone, or shaped his ex-


366
ARISTIDE MAILLOL
a
pression in stricter conformity to his material. As Roger Fry has
pointed out, Rodin's unity lies in the perfection of each part, the
subtlety of modelling within the morceau, whereas Maillol's lies in
the proper relation of all the parts to a completely realized whole.
Eliminating all but the essential planes, employing splendid gener-
alizations, he creates figures which are indivisible entities. Like a
potter, someone has said, he moulds his clay always with a vision of
the final form in mind.
Compare his Flora with Antenor's Kore. Both have the same
plastic volume. They differ chiefly in the fact that the Kore has
characteristically Greek intellectual clarity, whereas Maillol's is
more sensuous. The sixth century B. C. figure is also of a more
aristocratic stamp; her garment is more mannered; she is a sister of
those coquettish maidens in the Acropolis Museum. Maillol's is
more rustic in type, disdainful of tribute, placidly offering her
plenty. Study the head. Every feature is simplified; the eyes,
with their narrow, sharply-cut lids, the hair a smooth, undifferen-
tiated mass, the frank and fearless face, with its broad brow, full,
sober lips, and ample cheeks in planes that fuidly merge into each
other. So also in the body; over the full breasts and the flanks the
drapery clings like wet silk, with only a few folds indicated, and
those in quietly undulating curves. Like the flesh planes, it is con-
tinuous, without one rigid line, one distracting angle. The figure
is invested with dignity; the arms are permitted no gesture; even
though displaying the girdle of flowers they remain pressed to the
sides; and the feet are planted surely, with the left advanced only
to relieve the effect of rigidity. This is no agitated Flora, rioting
with Cupids and cornucopias. She suggests, instead, the expansive-
ness and inclusiveness of the earth itself.
For another suggestive comparison, place Maillol's Adolescence
beside Rodin's Age of Bronze. Maillol's modelling is not so resto
lessly realistic; his figure is set quietly, without strain, and all the
planes are subdued. The lower part of the body rises as surely as
a column, in a long, elegant line, while the graceful detail is re-
served for the upper part. The hair is indicated by a very few
blunt incisions. This is realistic only in comparison with such a
figure as the so-called Idolino in Florence, a work of the Polyclitan
school and a masterpiece of cool simplification.
This same sense for graceful line and continuous volumes
may
be


WALTER AGARD
367
studied in his bronze girl swathed in clinging drapery. Her form
is revealed by the garment she wears, yet the drapery is an indivis-
ible
part of the figure, and one can hardly tell where the flesh leaves
off and the undulating cloth begins. Her face, too, is placid, yet
firm; the hair is merely a mass; the planes of the face melt into
each other, the arms, torso, and drapery unite to form an organic
whole. The figure is indivisibly one.
Maillol's apprenticeship was served in the museums. He learned
especially of the Greeks and the Egyptians the values of mass, of
closely-related volumes. His later expression has been more orig.
inal and shows a discipline, self-imposed, in simplicity. He has
cared especially for figures of nudes, representing them sitting plac-
idly with one arm gently raised, standing with arms raised to the
head, kneeling, or crouching. In all of them the positions are obvi-
ously symmetrical ones; there is no apparent effort, not the least
suggestion of agitation or strain. This is that continuity, that lu-
minous serenity, sought in vain by Rodin.
If the faces seem stolid and not only unfeeling, but positively in-
capable of passion, turn to his work in bronze to see another expres-
sion of his rich nature. Monsieur M is a head charged with the
rude vigour and dramatic intensity of that race of bronzed men,
the natives of Provence. This face is one foursquare to all winds,
with deep caverns of eyes in the swarthy cheeks, almost a diagram-
matic scheme of blunt wrinkles, a mass of hair with only a few
summary indications of separated masses. Maillol is not quiescent,
even if his forms are ample and expansive. In him a deep fire
smoulders. He has stored his serene shapes with vitality.
Perhaps the most definite impression one gets from Maillol's
work is the sense of poise, of perfectly-adjusted balance. Of this
the best figure is his delightful Seated Woman. It is a figure de-
signed in a sequence of flowing curves which are perfectly related.
See the indication of security in the right arm and the firmly-set
left leg, the grace of the belly line reinforced by the left arm, the
quiet repose of the pensive head. Regarded from different angles,
this figure presents a constantly changing series of soothing con-
tours, of epic rhythms. It avoids an extreme of which Maillol is
sometimes guilty. Like so many of his contemporaries, he has
often chosen fat models, pudgy, and positively ugly. This is true
of his Pomone. The type has appealed in an unfortunate way to


368
ARISTIDE MAILLOL
many of the moderns; they have been carried away by a passion for
sheer bulk. Luckily Maillol's work is not limited to this type.
It is fitting that Maillol should have been given the commission
for the memorial to Cézanne. For while it is true that Constantin
Meunier was the pioneer in modern sculpture, as Cézanne was in
painting, it may be said that Maillol has followed the lead of Meu-
nier and has perfected that technique more intelligently than any
other sculptor. He has never received proper recognition. But we
need not wonder at that. His temperament is too equable, his tech-
nique too unspectacular, his synthesis seemingly too simple, to put
him in tune with our times. But it may be that he is doing that
sort of work, luminous and serene, which Rodin predicted would be
the art of the days to come.



KINNA.
Photograph: Druet
ADOLESCENCE.
BY ARISTIDE MAILLOL






til
Photograph: Druet
FLORA.
BY ARISTIDE MAILLOL






d
PENNA.
CARA
Photograph: Druet
GIRL.
BY ARISTIDE MAILLOL





GERMAN LETTER
September, 1923
.
O"
a
UR theatre
oh, do not let me spend many words on
our theatre! It is in decay, like our highways, and like the
whole martyred nation whose economic and social collapse the
world awaits with such astonishing indifference. Christianity!
Have you not yet learned that the cry over “Huns and Barbarians”
was not seriously meant, that it was an implement of war, a piece
of pious lying propaganda ? Shall a noble member of the family
of white peoples perish and die before the eyes of her phlegmatic
cousins through the fault of an effective but stupid advertisement?
I beg forgiveness. I am already quiet. I am speaking of
our theatre and am announcing that its condition leaves much to be
desired. For some time you have known more about the great
voices from our operas than we. Our corps of singers is a little like
.
Demeter's daughter, the lovely Persephone, who was stolen by
Pluto (the god of wealth, if I am not mistaken) and persuaded to
taste the fruits of his realm, whereby she became his for at least the
half of each year. Meanwhile the divine mother (the German
public) wanders disconsolately through the devastated fields. Not
a bad picture, these devastated fields, to give an idea of the German
opera in its entirety. It is going downhill. Naturally the national
impoverishment shows up first in this de luxe article. It is threat-
ened with shabbiness, and of all things that is the last quality
which can fit with the notion of the opera, the notion of splendour
and material luxury. The leaders of this institution are struggling
against this depletion; and so the strongest and the most brilliant
of them—who are not compelled to struggle under this depletion
and to whom the world stands open—are not to be held at their
posts, nor is there any adequate substitution for them.
Such was the case with Bruno Walter, who left the Munich
opera-house some time ago amid endless ceremonies of departure,
after ten years of the most triumphant guidance there as general
music conductor. I name him because a short time ago he visited
America, where--unless our papers exaggerated patriotically--he


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met with extraordinary suecesses. He is undoubtedly a composer
of the first rank, a musical genius of great power and intensity.
Trained under Mahler in Vienna-Mahler's bust by Rodin adorns
his work-room, and he has made his friendship with Mahler and his
recollections of him into a glowing cult-he is certainly a softer,
less abrupt and Caesarian nature than the master; but his relation-
ship to his art is just as absolute in earnestness and fervour, and he
is an incomparable interpreter of the symphonic struggles which
this tragic worshipper had with genius. Walter's services to the
art of the Bavarian capital deserved all the honours which were af-
forded him at his departure. He enlivened the orchestra, dignified
the repertoire, and enriched the ensemble with distinguished tal-
ents, such as Frau Ivogün, Frau Reinhardt, and the baritone Schip-
per. His restorations, particularly of works from the German ro-
mantic sphere, as Undine, Hans Heiling, Oberon, were events. It
was he who stood godfather to Pfitzner's Palestrina, a work which,
regardless of how one now feels towards its mild melancholy, its
unfriendliness to life, stands in any case head and shoulders above
all the rest of contemporary opera as an intellectual accomplish-
ment. Walter laid the way for it. Further, he was no less effec-
tive in the concert hall than in the conductor's chair at the opera.
Many critics felt compelled to insist that there are more rigorous
rhythmists; but no one disputed his unparalleled sense of sound-
values. He is the most subtle, the most thoroughly musical ac-
companist at the piano, I have ever seen. No one who has heard
Schubert's Winterreise done by him and Van Roy can forget it. In
Vienna I saw an audience of two thousand deeply moved at his
playing in company with the violinist Arnold Rosé.
Walter's last act as conductor of the Munich state opera was an
evening of one-acters which captivated as much by their inherent
charm as by their rich significance historically. He played Han-
del's Acis and Galatea, this tragic pastoral in which more than
one accent gives a premonition of Wagner; he followed with Per-
golese's charming Serva Padrona, which prepared the way for the
opera bouffe and Mozart; and he finished with a German musical
comedy of the eighteenth century, Schenk's Dorfbarbier, which
leads in a straight line to the Waffenschmid and Nicolai's Lustige
Weber. I hardly need to excuse myself for speaking of an opera
performance which took place so long back; for the mere fact that
I return to this subject after so great a time indicates the unusual


THOMAS MANN
371
pertinacity of the impression which it produced. For the costumes
and decorations an artist had been secured who, long known as an
original graphic artist, has only recently begun employing his imag-
ination and his taste in the service of the theatre: Emil Preetorius,
a native of Darmstadt who is living in Munich. What he gave us
to look at was, in its gradation from the idyllic and the heroic
through the bourgeois and the elegant to the humoristic and the pop-
ular, extraordinarily delicate and felicitous. And since Walter had
given the whole of his industry and love to the study of the musical
part, and furthermore since the best resources of our theatre were
brought forward, a truly glorious evening resulted. I should like
especially to say something about Acis and Galatea, this splendid
work which one hardly ever met with in the theatre, and which
Walter has restored to it by this production of his. For all the ten-
derness and sorrow with which it is filled is aroused in me again as
I think back on it; and the tragic humanness which it represents
has, in my mind, much to say to our feelings of the present day.
But if I am to tell anything at all about our drama this time, I must
take account of my space.
The popular power which overshadows and threatens to stifle the
theatre of the spoken word is the cinema. With the prodigality of
a parvenu, it can attract the mimetic talent. It breaks up the en-
sembles. Indeed, art communities such as played Ibsen and Haupt-
mann twenty years ago in the Berlin Lessingtheater, or even such
as I found as a young man in Munich when Possart developed his
drastic virtuosity, his highly amusing art of speech, in the Hofthe-
ater—such a stylistically fixed and disciplined body of players
really no longer exists in Germany. Berlin, the leading theatrical
city of Europe a quarter of a century ago, has suffered great losses;
it is not only since Max Reinhardt retired to his castle near Salz-
burg that it has deteriorated in the attractiveness of its theatre. (I
hear that you are receiving a visit from him in America. Oh, he
will undoubtedly show you very remarkable things!) The Rein-
hardt-Theater! I do not forget how I first became acquainted with
it. Gorki's Night Lodging, the comedies of Shakespeare, Schiller's
Die Räuber! Those were rousing evenings, full of a charm which
lost none of its intensity despite a certain intellectual, or shall we
say artistic-moralistic, distrust which we brought to them; perform-
ances which dealt a radical blow to the Protestant temperance, the
strenuous inwardness of Brahmsian naturalism with its poverty of


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gesture-a blow of the theatre, a breaking through of the will
primitive spirit of comedy, and at the same time a new step in mod-
ernity, an irresistibly charming mixture of intellectualism and ex-
aggeration, sensuality and wit. In short, the most interesting
theatre which had ever existed; a theatre which one might say was
executed on the basis of sheer virtuosity; and a theatre which ben-
efited by appealing to the sense of criticism, since one could not
help considering as an asset the intellectual pleasure derived from
the exercise of the critical faculties. It has been fifteen or sixteen
years since Reinhardt was a guest director for two or three summer
seasons at the Munich Ausstellungspark. Corruption and decay,
the degeneration into the sensational, developed rapidly under the
scourge of Wilhelm's turbulent metropolis with its vulgar hunger
for excitement. When, some years ago, Reinhardt handed over to
his managers and dramaturgists the theatres which he had united
under his authority, and withdrew into a private life interspersed
with guest plays given abroad, he certainly did not do this through
personal weariness, but because he had felt that his contribution to
German culture had already been fulfilled.
What one sees to-day in the Berlin Deutsches Theater and the
Grosses Schauspielhaus shows occasional remains of the old charm,
but it lacks true intellectual scope. For in addition there is the fact
that the theatre, in accordance with its adaptive, sympathetic na-
ture, indicates most clearly the lowering of level which our public
taste has undergone through war, revolution, and the emerging of
new social classes. In the Grosses Schauspielhaus, where the audi-
ence sits in a space resembling an enormous cave of stalactites, and
where there are accommodations for five thousand people, I re-
cently saw a performance of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew
which was worth thinking about in this connexion. I confess that
I
got but slight enjoyment. The talent and the personal appeal of
some of the actors was estimable, but the spirit of the organization
was thoroughly brutal. Their principal joke consisted in Petruc-
chio's continually taking his wild little wife over his knee in front
of the footlights, pulling up her skirts, and spanking her black and
blue. This amused a public which is filling the seats now that our
educated middle class is hungering or has become proletarian. In-
deed, after fifty years in Germany, one can no longer feel quite at
home there. It has become a country to excite the curiosity, but
very foreign.


THOMAS MANN
373
In any case, in order to be able to discuss the condition of our
theatre, one does not have to reside in the capital. The "provinces”
-I place the word in quotation marks since there has never been a
"province" in our culturally uncentralized country which corre-
sponds to the bleak sense of the word in French-are not seldom to
be taken more seriously in this respect than that gigantic market
place in the North. This fact is also known to our dramatic au-
thors, who are certainly not so keen as formerly on having their
premières in Berlin, but often give preference to one of the smaller
state or even city theatres. As to the South-German Centrum, as to
Munich, it really never was, in the truest sense of the word, a the-
atrical city, any more than it was ever a literary city, or more ac-
curately, any more than it was ever a city in which intellectual con-
cerns could lay claim to any special domestic privileges. Yet is it
an art city? Certainly; or essentially not so much a city of art as
a city of the higher applied arts, of an art which is employed for
festivity and is primarily decorative. The Munich type of artist is
not the intellectual type; rather, he is a cheerful fellow of sensu-
ous culture, with the instincts of a born arranger of feasts and car-
nivals. This trait, it will be objected, should be an asset to the art
of the theatre in Munich. It is an asset. The Munich Künstler-
theater stood for the most complete expression of everything which
is meant here by dramatic art. The designer was absolute master
in the house, the piece an opportunity to display a culture of ap-
plied arts, the actor a spot of colour. The scenic artist forbade the
red-robed king in Hamlet from kneeling to make his prayer
which
never to heaven went. He had to stand upright, and precisely be-
cause the artist, as he declared, "needed the red vertical line.”
That is Munich. In As You Like It, Olivia, on whose very antip-
athy for the colour yellow the funniest scene of the play is based,
wears a canary-yellow dress during the entire evening. This had
suited the artist from the colouristic standpoint, and the good man
had quite frankly not read the play. That is Munich.
It is not always so bad as that, but what really interests Munich
in the theatre is neither the word nor the play, nothing intellectual,
that is, but the incidental of the plastic arts. This is even true of
our most literary theatre, the Kammerspiele which, under its artis-
tic director Otto Falkenberg, is often able to captivate powerfully
the theatre lover. I recently saw there a comedy by the lyric writer
Josef von Eichendorff, Die Freier. The evening was stimulating


374
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and highly Munichese. The piece is an amiable nothing made up
of love, vagabondage, and the humour of disguise; but the scenery,
which once again Emil Preetorius had undertaken, was rich in
funny and delightful inventions. To be sure, on the last evening I
spent in this theatre all the emphasis was laid on the literary, even
the literarily historic. They gave part of Swinburne's Mary Stuart
cycle, the Chastelard, and tormented themselves righteously with
the hyper-aesthetic pre-Raphaelite style of poetry, in which the
confused passion and psychology of chivalry acquired a somewhat
aloof sympathy—but this will hardly grace the repertoire for long.
I love Munich too much to risk being the least misunderstood in
my judgement of this city which was once so jolly, but which is
now saddened by the general fate of Germany and is torn by po-
litical hatreds. The “spirit” which I spoke of as not being at home
there is really the critico-literary spirit of European democracy
which is represented in Germany chiefly by Judaism, although this
movement hardly exists in Munich, and so far as it does it is ex-
posed to a popular disfavour which on occasion takes the most dras-
tic forms. Munich is the city of Hitler, the leader of the German
fascisti; the city of the Hakenkreuz, this symbol of popular defiance
and of an ethnic aristocracy the aspects of which are genuinely aris-
tocratic and which above all lacks every connexion with the feudal-
ism of Prussia before the war. Bavaria, and Munich in particular,
was democratic long before there was any talk in Germany of “de-
mocracy” in the revolutionary sense. It was and is democratic in
the national, racial sense of the word. That is to say, in its spirit
of conservatism; and herein lies its opposition to the socialistic
North, its anti-Semitism, its dynastic loyalty, its obstinacy in mat-
ters to do with the republic.
Generally speaking, our modern repertoire has undergone slight
rejuvenation in recent years. Since Gerhart Hauptmann no new
dramatic talent has appeared of sufficient vastness to captivate the
nation. For a time Ibsen was completely crowded off the German
stage by Strindberg; yet lately there have been signs of something
like an Ibsen renaissance—which can be taken as an indication of
restorative tendencies, of the longing for set forms. Wedekind is
losing in popular interest. Shaw is still a favourite. It is to be re-
gretted that Schnitzler's graceful, melancholy, and technically so
perfect masterpieces are not demanded more often. The comedies
of Hermann Bahr continue to please.
a


THOMAS MANN
375
a
The new growth, the young school, what is called dramatic ex-
pressionism, has as a theory aroused a great deal of discussion or has
discussed itself a great deal; from the standpoint of production it
has been greatly disappointing. Still a few names from this sphere
have gained an international reputation, although without having
touched the heart of their own people. In foreign countries one
knows of the social theatrics of Georg Kaiser, the penetrating sa-
tires of the bourgeoisie by Carl Sternheim, whose talent for com-
edies criticising his times is undeniable, but is absolutely without
warmth. There is much more heart and feeling in Ernst Toller
who, since he was a leader of the Munich communists of 1919, has
been languishing for some years in a Bavarian prison. Yet un-
fortunately his artistry falls greatly short of his humanity; and his
drama, Die Maschinenstürmer, which received demonstrative ap-
plause in Berlin, is a very weak imitation of The Weavers.
By a piece of daring—which one may, by the way, construe dif-
ferently–Arnold Bronnen aroused tremendous respect from the
youngest generation with his drama, Vatermord (Patricide) a crass
and gloomy work which represents stylistically a kind of neo-nat-
uralism, and in which all offences from incest through homosexu-
ality to the dereliction mentioned in the title keep a solemn tryst.
Similarly, there is much storming and stressing in the dramas of
young Bert Brecht, whose first play, Trommeln in der Nacht, the
bitter story of a soldier returning from the war, has two good acts,
but then falls flat. Munich's state theatre, Das Residenztheater,
felt called upon to accept his second play, Dickicht, although with
all its ability it was inferior to the first from the standpoint of ar-
tistic discipline and intellectual fineness. The popular conserva-
tivism of Munich was on its guard. It will not stand for any Bol-
shevist art. At the second or third performance it entered protest,
and this in the form of gas bombs. Frightful fumes suddenly filled
the theatre. The public wept bitterly; yet not through emotion,
but because the expanding gases had a strongly sympathetic effect
on their tear ducts. The theatre had to be aired, and ushers ap-
peared with ozone sprayers to purify the atmosphere. It was half
an hour before the public could return to their seats in the parquet
and the boxes in order to hear the piece to an end, although still
crying from purely physical reasons.
That also is Mu-
nich. And with this cataclysm I shall close my present letter.
a
THOMAS MANN


BOOK REVIEWS
THE MEMOIRS OF MONSIEUR DE CHARLUS
Les Pas EFFACÉs. Mémoires de Robert de Montes-
quiou. Three Volumes. Emile-Paul. Paris. 25 francs.
OBERT DE MONTESQUIOU, to whom Le Secret de
Tolède was dedicated by Maurice Barrès in the words:
“AU COMTE ROBERT DE MONTESQUIOU
au Poète
à l'inventeur de tant d'objets et de figures rares,
à l'un des premiers apologistes du Greco,
et qui lui-même,
trouvera, quelque jour, son inventeur et son apologiste,
Hommage amical de son admirateur et voisin."
a
died two years ago. He was the author of some thirty books the
value of which was in his opinion gravely underestimated by his
contemporaries. Posterity, he was confident, would judge them at
their true worth. Nothing is more probable. But if the poet is
likely soon to be forgotten, the man, by a chance which does not
befall many equally remarkable beings, seems bound for the im-
mortality which his extravagant character deserves. A nobleman
and an aesthete, his pride and insolence attained a fine excess which
the most robust figures in Comedy have never surpassed. In spite
of this it seemed that after his death oblivion must close upon him
as upon so many another writer of minor verse, and patron of the
arts. But his destiny brought him into touch with the only con-
temporary writer whose genius is comparable with that of Ben Jon-
son and Molière. Already as a young man Montesquiou had been,
it was said, the original of des Esseintes in A Rebours. Certainly
the book described many details in his apartment, but Huysmans
founded the character of his hero, not so much on a personal knowl-
.


RAYMOND MORTIMER
377
edge of Montesquiou (which he did not possess) as on his own idea
of the complete aesthete. In Edmond Rostand's Chantecler, the
Peacock, "Le prince de l'adjectif inopiné," was more directly in-
spired by the same model, but this is only a slight sketch and a car-
icature at that. Even his own recently published Memoirs in them-
selves give only an incomplete picture of the man, though they
form a document as fascinating as would be the recollections of
Volpone or the diary of Alceste. Montesquiou found, as Barrès
prophesied, “son inventeur et son apologiste”; but by a pretty irony
he will owe the immortality for which he so deeply cared, to a
writer whose art he neither admired nor understood, Marcel Proust.
There was little of the eventful or publicly dramatic in the life
of Robert de Montesquiou-Fézensac. He was born in the year
1855 of one of the oldest and most noble Houses in France. There
was hardly a Duchess with whom he did not call cousins, and the
first volume of his Memoirs is entirely occupied with his ancestors:
Montluc, a great soldier of the sixteenth century, d’Artagnan,
whose life Dumas so scandalously garbled, the Maréchal de Mon-
tesquiou, whose rivalry with Villars over the victory of Denain fills
some pages of Saint-Simon, and the Abbé de Montesquiou, the first
patron, and perhaps even the father, of Théophile Gautier. Robert
de Montesquiou's great-grandmother was the gouvernante at Schön-
brunn of the Roi de Rome, his grandfather was a prolific writer of
undistinguished verse, and his mother was a converted Protestant
from the petite noblesse of Geneva. He gives delightful accounts
of his old homes Courtenvaux and Charnizay, of the Abbé Papillon
who was his childhood's tutor, of the domestics, and of his imme-
diate family. Even when describing the closest of his relations he
does not omit the touches of feminine malignity which are habitual
to his pen. Of particular interest is the description he gives of his
first cousin, who was known as “Place à table” owing to the im-
portance he attached to the questions of precedence. It was he
who, when told at a party which he was enjoying, that a near rela-
tion of his had just died, dismissed the inopportune news with the
words "On exagère.” (Good Proustians will remember the Duc de
Guermantes.) The chapter devoted to Montesquiou's schooldays
he entitles Mes Prisons, and he applies to himself Stendhal's de-
scription of Julien Sorel, “Il ne pouvait pas plaire--il était trop dif-
férent,” and Baudelaire's phrase, “le plaisir aristocratique de dé-


378 THE MEMOIRS OF MONSIEUR DE CHARLUS
)
plaire." Like so many sensitive and unpopular schoolboys, he prob-
ably made a virtue of necessity; it was the intolerance of others
which soon made him intolerable. And as one reads the endless
story of his quarrels—there was hardly a friend or relation or even
acquaintance, of whom he did not come to speak with venom and
contempt-one begins to wonder what secret unhappiness or weak-
ness lay hidden under this protective covering of insolence. “Si
vous aviez voulu," he was once told, "tout le monde vous aimerait.”
“Vous me faites peur !" was his answer, sublime, and yet how piti-
ful! The truth is that he suffered all his life from the delusion
that he was being persecuted.
As soon as he left school, he started to organize the existence that
he led for nearly fifty years. From the first he deceived himself
with regard to the value of the verse which he wrote with such as-
siduous accomplishment. It was never really more than a by-prod-
uct of his activity. It gave him a certain literary status, it enabled
him to turn graceful compliments for his friends, and afforded him
a pretext for the feeling of self-satisfaction which it was the ruling
passion of his life to gratify. But interior decoration was at least
as important a method of self-expression. The descriptions in the
memoirs of his early furnishing schemes make a document for the
history of taste even more curious, and fearful, than Goncourt's
Maison d'un Artiste. Pseudo-mediaeval lamps and Japanese ob-
jects from the Paris Exhibition jostled Morris wallpapers and ro-
coco confessionals. It is possible that as he grew older his taste be-
came less catholic. The two houses at Versailles in which he passed
his later years apparently were charming: one was called Le Pavil-
lon des Muses, and the other Le Palais Rose. When towards
the end of his life he found he could no longer participate in the
current artistic enthusiasms, he suddenly realized that for him life
was over. He had once set the fashions in the aesthetic world,
but an insurmountable barrier lay between the apostle of Gustave
Moreau and Burne-Jones, and the appreciation of Picasso and of
Negro Art. Seeing therefore that life had passed him by, he turned
from the contemplation of his past to the possibilities of his future.
And we have this Catholic aristocrat and aesthete finding comfort
in a theological work translated from the English, Dieu, l'Invi-
sible Roi, by H. G. Wells. It was characteristic of him to like the
idea that God is not omnipotent: it placed Montesquiou himself in
a less undignified position.


RAYMOND MORTIMER
379
a
His literary career opened with a volume entitled Les Chauves-
Souris, consisting of verses in the most precious manner of the
Decadence, remarkable for the expression of a legitimist's contempt
for the Empress Eugénie, and an aesthete's cult for Ludwig II, the
mad King of Bavaria. His next book was Les Hortensias Bleus;
thenceforward these flowers, hitherto little known, became an aes-
thetic symbol comparable to the green carnation. Another book
of his verses was entirely consecrated to the memory of Gabriel
d'Yturri, who lived with him for twenty years in an intimacy which
no other friend could pretend to replace. Le Chancelier de Fleurs,
as it was called, was read aloud by its author to a carefully selected
"compagnie de notables” at one of the most elaborate and superb
receptions that he ever organized. It has not yet been printed ex-
cept privately, but Montesquiou thought it his most important
work. Lastly he wrote three books of war-poems, of which the
first, Les Offrandes Blessées, induced a newspaper to call him the
Rupert Brooke of France. He was in his sixties when he wrote it.
Most of the famous literary and artistic personages of his time
were known to Montesquiou. He says little of the Impressionists,
but he was painted twice by Whistler (and once by Laszlo). Le-
conte de Lisle, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Hérédia, Mirbeau, Bourget,
and Barrès—he knew them all, and quarrelled with most of them.
He fought a duel with Henri de Regnier. He introduced Duse to
Bernhardt, and Ida Rubinstein to d'Annunzio. He was famous for
the fastuous magnificence of his many entertainments. Some dis-
tinguished author would be the guest of honour; the saloons would
be decorated with symbolic flowers; the more aesthetic inhabitants
of the Faubourg, and the more presentable celebrities of the literary
world, would be invited; and Réjane, Le Dargy, or some other star
from the Comédie Française would recite stanzas written by Mon-
tesquiou in honour of the guest, who then usually honoured their
author with a grateful accolade. Living in a more informal age,
and belonging to a more self-conscious race, one finds it difficult to
estimate properly the effect of such deliberate pomps. One has to
suppose that the guests, whose behaviour was severely regulated,
enjoyed them. In any case, what matter? “N'oublions pas,” Mon-
tesquiou writes, “que je donnais ces fêtes à principe égoïste, moins
pour satisfaire mes invités que pour me plaire à moi-même.”
The Faubourg St Germain is a world apart. The minute partic-
ulars of etiquette which exercised the mind of Saint-Simon had in


380 THE MEMOIRS OF MONSIEUR DE CHARLUS
his time their own concrete importance; precedence was related to
power, and the privilege of les grandes entrées, for instance, car-
ried with it the likelihood of material advantage. Access to the
King's ear was by no means a vain thing, when the King still gov-
erned. The present Royalist society in France is the unsubstantial
wraith of the Ancien régime: the divorce between rank and power
is complete. A King without a Kingdom, a Court without a Gov-
ernment, and an Aristocracy without immunities—they continue to
conduct themselves as if they controlled the destinies of France.
The remoteness from actuality of the values on which this society
is based lends it the mystery and charm of an oriental fairy-tale.
And it was this fantastic element which fascinated Proust, and in-
duced him to study, with the passion not of the snob, but of the
entomologist, every fine shade and hierarchical distinction in this
complicated survival of a vanished world. Of this society Robert
de Montesquiou was a prominent member, and one of the most
curious features of his life was the way he managed to regulate it
by both the unreal values, which he retained from his noble birth,
and the aesthetic values, which he acquire from his literary and
artistic tastes. Indeed it was this double system of values which
made possible his prodigious, his preposterous, his fascinating pride.
The aesthete never knew an aristocrat whom he could not despise
as a Philistine, the nobleman never met an artist whom he could
not look down upon as a roturier. (The only contemporary Eng.
lishman who has enjoyed a similar situation appears to have been
Lord Alfred Douglas.) Of all Montesquiou's contemporaries,
d'Annunzio was the man he admired the most, and whose slights,
real or imaginary, he would most easily forgive. A love of splen-
dour, a boundless vanity, and a certain cabotinage were common to
both their characters. Even so it is doubtful if the Frenchman ever
forgot the obscurity of his idol's origins. "Je vous aime, Mon-
tesquiou,” Anatole France said, “parce que vous êtes fier.” Many
readers of the Memoirs will be of the same sentiment. Pride so ex-
travagant ceases to be fatuous: it becomes sublime and when the
genius of Proust was inspired to immortalize it, there resulted a
creation which can hold its own with the greatest characters in
literature.
The Memoirs are disappointing in the meagreness of their ref-
erences to Proust. They contain however a long note on the first
two volumes of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, in which Mon-
a


RAYMOND MORTIMER
381
tesquiou calls the author (whom he knew intimately) a praiseworthy
arriviste, and his book, “un livre tatillonissime," pushed into undue
prominence by a conspiracy between Léon Daudet, Robert de Flers,
and Reynaldo Hahn. The character inspired by himself he admits
to be "un personnage extrêmement bien peint,” and he promises to
supplement these remarks with "nouvelles observations fort curi-
euses.” Alas, this promise seems never to have been fulfilled. But
the recent sale of his library included some two hundred letters
from the correspondence between him and Proust. It is earnestly to
be hoped that the purchaser can quickly publish them. There is
evidence that Montesquiou exerted considerable influence upon
Proust, particularly in the matter of style, by his conversation as
well as by his writings. When reading the Memoirs one is con-
tinually reminded of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu by their
preciousness and precision, and by the elaboration with which some
particularly evasive sentiment is pursued in all its ramifications,
and eventually defined with the help of the most unexpected com-
parisons. It must be impossible for those who did not personally
know Montesquiou to decide how directly he was portrayed in
Proust's book. The creator of the Guermantes always maintained
himself that his characters were composite. And in the volumes of
his work which have so far appeared, there is little reference to
Montesquiou’s literary and artistic activities. But no one who has
.
read his Proust properly can look at the Memoirs without realizing
that in essentials the portrait in the novel is a masterpiece of re-
semblance as well as of art. As a sample, here is Montesquiou's
description of a young pianist who had set to music some of his
verses:
“Cette première rencontre appréciable de ma poésie avec son
adaptation musicale m'avait causé assez de surprise, et je l'avoue,
d'agrément, pour me donner le désir d'exalter celui à qui je les de-
vais. J'allai le voir, dans un appartement assez bas, mais assez
vaste, du quartier d'Antin, assez obscur et triste aussi, garni de
meubles quelconques, parmi lesquels l'immense Erard apparaissait
comme un dolmen de palissandre, teint du sang luisant et noirci des
victimes du concert payant. D'une telle emprise, exclusivement ex-
ercée sur deux existences, disons-le, dignes et pures, par un meuble
sonore, je ressentis alors plus ou moins nettement ce qu'elle offrait
de noble, sous forme de conviction, de devoir accompli, de dévoue-


382
THE MEMOIRS OF MONSIEUR DE CHARLUS
.
ment à une profession et à un art; mais aujourd'hui je le sens mieux
encore. Une veuve honorable, hypnotisée par la valeur réelle d'un
fils unique, sur un point précis, et de cet enfant, l'offrande de sa
vie à la culture de son don particulier, puis, de tous deux, la résolu-
tion de sacrifier à l'exercise tyrannique d'une carrière aussi exige-
ante qu'une religion, et requérant comme celle-ci, l'abandon des
plaisirs, sous peine de vengeance cuisante par diminution consentie,
cela me parait toujours quelque chose de respectable, digne de sus-
citer les sentiments dont je lui fis la faveur. . Le pianiste
se montra reconnaissant de ce que j'avais fait pour le mettre en
lumière, mais reconnaissant avec toute la sécheresse qu'il ne mettait
pas dans l'exécution de ses morceaux. Il fit partie de mon exist-
ence, au cours des années qui suivirent. Je lui disais, bien entendu,
sous couleur le plaisanterie: 'Tâchez que mon amour pour votre
art l'emporte sur mon horreur pour votre personne!' mais, au fond,
c'était vrai, et le contraire eut lieu. Je décidai de ne plus le voir,
ce qui m'était agréable, mais forcément aussi de plus l'écouter, ce
qui ne l'était point.”
Is not this the voice of Monsieur de Charlus in all its power and
luxuriance?
Looking back upon his life, Montesquiou found only one thing
to regret: he had never travelled further west than the Escorial or
further east than Capri. For the rest, he had culled everything ex-
quisite that life had to offer him. He had been for nearly fifty
years a prominent figure in Paris society: he had lived in charming
houses, decorated them with passionate care, and entertained in
them with appropriate magnificence the contemporaries he most
admired: he had revealed to the world a new flower, the hydrangea,
and a new poet, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore: he had written
thirteen books of verse, and seventeen of prose: he had executed
some two hundred drawings in water-colour: he had offered the
homage of a violent adoration to things of beauty, and often he had
been able to acquire the things that he adored. That he had loved
persons as well as things, and with the same possessive egoism, we
cannot doubt. But in this matter his memoirs are uninstructive.
In his youth he invented the maxim: “il n'y a de supportable que
les choses excessives.” In every respect he lived up to it.
RAYMOND MORTIMER


WALDO FRANK'S HOLIDAY
Holiday. By Waldo Frank. 12mo. 233 pages. Boni
and Liveright. $2.
T
a
HOUGH southern materials make up the body of this novel,
the primary approach to it should not be sectional. Rather,
one should come to it through the artistic personality of Waldo
Frank. This attitude is natural to those who have experienced the
author's Rahab and City Block. For these works frankly eschew
geographical and naturalistic fidelity in favour of a reality more
individual and more essentialized. In like manner, Holiday is first
of all a subjective design; it has utilized certain elements of the
South because these seemed most suited to its purposes. Hence
whatever local or racial truth or untruth the work may contain,
must be considered as a purely secondary factor.
The design is stark and clear enough. It is concerned with re-
pression and release, with repression and expression, as consequent
and contrasting realities of human life. But the design, as achieved
in novelistic form, is dynamic. Therefore it manipulates the ef-
fects and frictions of these realities to create its movement and its
climaxes.
Frank is too subtle for an arbitrary portioning of repression, in
a block, to the whites of the South; for a rigid symbolizing of the
blacks as expression. He sees the Negro as free within a very strict
oppression. He sees the white-half, respectably restricted, half,
frankly-hypocritically loose-compressed by an equally strict free-
dom. Each race then, within itself, contains the contrasting ele-
ments. And he knows that the Negro often serves as outlet for the
pent energies of the dominant race. In contrast with each other,
however, it
may
be said that in this novel the blacks generally rep-
resent a full life; while the whites stand for a denial of it. The
black church, the white church; niggertown, whitetown, are simi-
larly opposed. This opposition gets its statement in the opening
passage: "Sunset at Nazareth. Niggers go home through the cop-
per-glow of pines. Niggers sing home. White men stand lean in
the doors of paintless houses, White men stand still.” And by


384
WALDO FRANK'S HOLIDAY
a
means of swift chapter juxtapositions, and the Frankian crystalli-
zations of unspoken consciousness, it is sustained throughout the
book.
For the purpose of a novel, and likewise in order that Frank's in-
tentions be completely realized, it was necessary that two bodies,
a white and a black, be set in movement, through the contrasting
states, towards each other. Virginia Hade and John Cloud, vehi-
cles for a need conscious beyond the local taboos placed upon sex
and race, move towards each other. Away from Nazareth, where
nature is still innocent of the divisions that spring to life with ex-
ploitation, they meet. For the first moments their contact is as
clean as nature is. And then the inevitable differences and dis-
cords assert themselves. Having exchanged knives with her, the
black man suddenly recalls, “I am John Cloud. Nigger.” Where-
upon he straightway leaves her. She, pressing his knife into her
waist, cuts herself. The wound is a mere body-outlet. Deeper re-
lease has been denied. Conscious that her own world is the real
cause of her frustration, she nevertheless fastens upon John as the
immediate instrument of it. And, impelled by a force, clearly
greater than volition, with John's knife still in her hand, and blood
upon her, she marches into the town square. White Nazareth is
just coming from a revival which has whipped it to within an inch
of release. Full release, not quite. It sees Virginia, Cloud's knife,
and it immediately knows that a lynching will fulfil what the re-
vival failed in. “—U pon the black branch of the black tree let
there be Fruit! Let there be seed, let there be fruit for my passion.!"
It forthwith gets John Cloud and hangs him. “Nazareth beneath
him peers with grimed eyes through the murk of its spent lust.'
Virginia, comfortable in bed, makes no effort to avert the tragedy
she senses taking place, for, -Who made this wound? My hand.
Yet it is your wound, John.” Here, then, the design and motor-
plot of Holiday.
They are executed with a precision, an economy, a swiftness, and
a sense of form that spell artistic mastery. Generally, the aesthetic
employed is that so accurately analysed by Gorham B. Munson in
his Waldo Frank: a Study. The Frankian aesthetic of mobility
accomplished first of all by the abundant use of
very active verbs
generated by his shrewd calculation
of overstatements, by his thrusting and expanding figures of speech
worked up by lyrical crystallizations, by swift dramatic
66


JEAN TOOMER
385
presentation, by the alternating structure of the Whole”-adapted
to the given materials. In this review I shall concentrate upon
Frank's use of the unspoken consciousness, for in Holiday, more
than in any previous work, this is a major element of his aesthetic.
Considered as a structural mechanism, it provides the condensa-
tion, swiftness, and dramatic contrasts essential to such a design as
Holiday. The psychology of a repressed people, seeking release in
a revival tent, is given in seven lines, the last of which reads,
“Come, preacher, lash us! Make us leap!” Virginia Hade's con-
sciousness is unfolded in seven lyric pages. And whitetown and
niggertown, taken as entities, are vividly opposed in the same num-
ber. I quote from this section:
“How can I rest in you when you stand and shout? I am weary
I
with whiteness. To rule, to be civilized and chaste; you do not
know what weariness it is. My woman yearns towards me in
hunger, I am spent. All the world waves in darkling circles about
my white uprightness, I am spent. I must lean down on you, earth,
lie in you. O you are warmth and power, I am spent. Your pools
.
draw
my
blood: your red soils blanch me dry. I must lie in you!
But you who are my earth stand up and shout! How can I rest in
you? How can I shut my eyes?
-Leave me alone
Don' you see we is lovin'?
Leave me alone
Don' tell me nothin',
How kin I listen to you
When mah love's lips
When mah love's arms
When de soft breast ob mah love
Closes roun' me like de carth
all laughin' flowers
Comes roun' me like de air
all smilin' breeze."
As functions of the larger organism, these crystallizations are ef-
fective and admirable.
Considered in relation to specific characters, they operate fan-
wise. By their means, the figures expand to an awareness which


386
WALDO FRANK'S HOLIDAY
otherwise would be impossible to them. Because this extra-aware-
ness raises the conscious level of the book, because it contributes to
Frank’s general intention, it is justified. It nevertheless forces one
to accept the characters as essentially Frankian in origin. There
is no valid artistic reason why an author should not project por-
tions of himself into his characters. In fact there is a very definite
artistic reason why he should. For this is the method of great crea-
tion. But he should be fully determined in this position. And no
.
trace of an incongruent mode should be allowed to infringe it. The
figures, of whatever origin, should stand consonant and fused. In
Holiday, here and there are to be found breaks in texture, of the
dialogue, of the dialogue compared to the unspoken consciousness,
that make one question Frank's clarity, during the process of com-
position, on this point. For example, take these lines attributed to
John Cloud:
“Ol' woman--yo' getting lazy, yo' gettin' fat! Yo'cookin's too
good. Mammy, soon I'll have to h'ist you."
“-It is your skin!
-Your love's a white sun shinin' on a sea.
Summer blue sea
Summer blue sky
Da's your love!
It is
your
skin.”
“—I love you, mother. But it is your fault. You made me.”
“-An' I care fo' you. An’in my love fo' you, why is there blame?"
I do not of course refer to any superficial difference in the lan-
guage used, in the use of dialect. I refer to a psychological break,
a too obvious duality of origin which suspends one between the de-
sire to accept Cloud as a southern Negro, and the desire to accept
him as a character created by Frank for the specific purposes of his
design. This break is the one serious interior defect that I find in
Holiday. It does not, however, impair the structural finish of
this novel. Technically, it is solid and tight. And as an art form
it is clean, superb. Holiday therefore sustains Waldo Frank's high
achievement as a literary artist.
JEAN TOOMER


LATE VIOLETS FROM THE NINETIES
The Blind Bow-Boy. By Carl Van Vechten. 12mo.
261 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $2.50.
The FLOWER BENEATH THE Foot. By Ronald Fir-
bank. 12mo. 224 pages. Grant Richards. London.
MR
R VAN VECHTEN, in The Blind Bow-Boy, has tried his
hand at a kind of burlesque fiction which we have all too
little of in America: the satiric iridescent novel of the type of Zu-
leika Dobson and La Révolte des Anges; and, though he is at times
a little less fantastic and less surprising than one could wish, he
gets away with it, on the whole, very well. You must remember
that he has had the hardihood to go to New York for his rococo Sa-
tyricon; and you may judge if New York is recalcitrant. The re-
sult is, I think, in spite of all the green orchids and the rose-jade
cysts for cosmetics which Mr Van Vechten finds in East 19th
Street, a little closer to the prosaic reality-or rather to the reality
of ordinary fiction—than Mr Van Vechten probably intended.
Harold's marriage with Alice Blake, the rich, boring, well-bred
New York girl, might almost have come out of Mrs Wharton; it is
rather the figure of Campaspe Lorillard who reaches the stature of
high comic creation, and I am inclined to think the book should
have been about her and not about Harold. Campaspe craves no
other activity than the luxurious enjoyment of her mind, the play
of an exquisite taste, and the exercise of a ruthless intelligence; she
snubs her husband with a regal kindness, yet declines any other at-
tachment, and sees as little of her children as possible, thereby
trebling their interest in her. The only member of her family who
interests her is her mother, whom she always calls by her first name.
She is Mr Van Vechten's most successful achievement.
Of course, it is not in comparison with American books that I ac-
cuse Mr Van Vechten of being prosaic. Beside Floyd Dell and
Willa Cather, he is Ariel, Till Eulenspiegel. But I have been
reading The Flower Beneath the Foot by Mr Ronald Firbank, an
author whom Mr Van Vechten enormously admires and with whom
a


388
LATE VIOLETS FROM THE NINETIES
I am sure he will not think it inappropriate to compare him; and I
am struck by how much further Mr Firbank has got beyond the
commonplace world of commonplace serious fiction than even Mr
Van Vechten. With the first pages of The Flower Beneath the
Foot one is closed about by a new and vivid world, and a world so
complete in itself that, in all its artificiality and absurdity, one
feels sure it must exist somewhere: you stand in the high-windowed
rooms of the Winter Palace of Pisuerga; silk swishes and gossip
tinkles; the Queen lounges in a chaise longue; a maid of honour,
looking out from a window fringed with green-veined bougainvil-
leas, dreams of marrying Prince Yousef, as she watches the clouds
slowly speeding above the town like great knots of pink roses; all
about one feels the rustle of the court and the glitter of diplomatic
dinners, where the very hangings seem to be alive with an exquisite
insatiable sensuality which, beneath fashion and official functions,
provides one of the only incitements to activity, though even it is a
little phantasmal, a little fragile. I have heard Mr Firbank called
trivial and in one of his phases he is, but he is certainly far more
serious as an artist than he is commonly credited with being. He
can create an extraordinarily strong impression—about trivial mat-
ters, if you like—with extraordinarily few words; and it is not
merely a question of suggesting the improper so inobviously and so
lightly that it is almost impossible to put your finger on the phrase
where the indecent idea was raised; he is also able to make exquis-
itely selected details tell for effects of a certain aesthetic intensity
—as when Laura watches the royal wedding of her lover from the
spike-fringed walls of the convent.
Both these books represent the last survival of the spirit of the
fin de siècle: despite their occasional dallyings with the movies and
other features of the twentieth century, they belong essentially to
the Yellow Book era. But it is curious to contemplate the change
which has come over the decadence since the hey-day of Beardsley
and Wilde. The school which began with Baudelaire and is now
dissolving with Arthur Symons derived its prime vitality and force
from its extreme conviction of sin. The decadents talked much
about “paganism,” but their point of view was anything but
pagan: it was a reaction against Victorian Christianity by people
who were still Victorians and Christians. The fascination with
which they succeeded in investing certain pleasures and ideas was
directly dependent on the extent to which they could make you be-


EDMUND WILSON
389
lieve that they were sinister; they wanted you to be afraid of sin,
as sin—that is, as something to be detested—and at the same time
to celebrate it as something to be desired—an impossible moral
position, sure to involve insincerity on one side or the other. How
can you believe that sin is “the good” and at the same time believe
it to be sin? From the point of view of the person who really be-
lieves in the sinfulness of the flesh and of the uncensored exercise
of the intelligence, they are things to be sedulously shunned; from
the point of view of the real pagan they do not become an issue at
all. But Baudelaire had to pretend to believe in the Devil and at
the same time spend his whole artistic life endeavouring to make
the Devil attractive; and his successors followed his example.
This is why, I believe, the writers of the end of the century seem
inevitably to be diminishing in stature. Who can read Les Fleurs
du Mal, A Rebours, The Picture of Dorian Grey, or Swinburne's
Poems and Ballads with the same enthusiasm as their contempor-
aries? The whole effectiveness of the things narrated depends
?
upon one's being shocked by them and when the prejudices to be
shocked have been removed the works of art are no longer exciting.
I can think of only two writers of that period and school who es-
caped the moral confusion of the reaction against respectability:
Beardsley and Verlaine. Beardsley did, to be sure, in his drawings,
exploit the fascination of Evil, as evil; but he also wrote rather a
remarkable unfinished romance called Venus and Tannhauser in
which he does succeed in investing a sort of pagan world with the
artificial graces of the ’nineties without allowing it to become dark-
ened and tragic with the fumes of a burning orthodoxy; his Venus,
unlike the Venus of Swinburne or the Harlot of Oscar Wilde, is
not destructive and terrible, but girlish and agreeable. The orgies,
the perversities, and the grotesqueries of her court are to her all na-
tural and harmless; she approaches really much nearer the naïf cor-
ruption of the comedies and tales of the eighteenth century than
anything to be found in Wilde. As for Verlaine, he vacillated un-
questionably between “paganism” and piety; but, unlike Baude-
laire, he did not try to be pagan and pious at the same time; when
he was a faun he was completely a faun without any respectable
compunctions. And in these moods he created a neo-eighteenth
century erotic sceptical world rather like the world of Venus and
Tannhauser.
Now Mr Van Vechten and Mr Firbank are also able to take their


390
LATE VIOLETS FROM THE NINETIES
heresies and pleasures easily. It may be that Mr Firbank has gone
to school to Beardsley. But the real reason why they are not wor-
ried and feverish, as their predecessors were, is probably because the
time has gone by when it is possible to get into that state. The
generation of Beardsley and Wilde had been brought up on Ruskin
and Tennyson; but the generation of Firbank and Van Vechten has
been brought up on Beardsley and Wilde and their prejudices were
destroyed early. The conviction of sin has been removed and it is
possible for the corrupt to be amiable again. Their genre may be
destined to grow dimmer and dimmer, but it at least fades away
with a smile. In the meantime, as those qualities are growing rarer,
let us enjoy their urbanity and taste.
EDMUND Wilson


THE SQUIRE IN POLITICS
The Life of Sir William Harcourt. By A. G.
Gardiner. 2 volumes. 8vo. 1276 pages. George H.
Doran Company. $12.
IN
N a copy of Punch just after the resignation of Mr Gladstone in
1895, there appeared a cartoon representing Lord Rosebery
mounted and armed cap-à-pie, with Sir William Vernon Harcourt
on foot, as his squire. Did the cartoonist see in this strangely as-
sorted pair the revival of the immortal association of Don Quixote
and Sancho Panza? Did he in fact see the squire merely changing
his service from one Quixote to another? While Sir William Har-
court was remote enough in character from Sancho Panza, he shared
with him one trait—that of practical common sense. The essence
of Cervantes' comedy was in the association of the dreamer and the
realist; and this element gave the touch of comic relief to English
politics during Sir William Harcourt's long service under two
Quixotes. After the adventure with the carriers Sancho remarks to
his master:
“Sir, seeing these disgraces are of the essence of knighthood, I
pray you whether they succeed very often, or whether they have
certain times limited wherein they befall? For methinks, within
two adventures more, we shall wholly remain disenabled for the
third, if the gods in mercy do not succour us.”
This was the burden of Sir William Harcourt's complaint, ex-
pressed with a wit which brightened the House of Commons during
so many dull debates, a wit which consisted in touching with pre-
cision the discrepancy between the pretensions and the realities, be-
tween grandiose conceptions and the means of carrying them out.
William Harcourt entered the House of Commons, after a no-
table career at the bar, in the election of 1868, which resulted in
Gladstone's liberal government. He remained aloof from the min-
istry in many of its reforming enterprises, though in 1873 he en-
tered the Cabinet as Solicitor General. This elevation called by


392
THE SQUIRE IN POLITICS
precedent for knighting, to which proceeding Harcourt strenuously
objected. When Gladstone told him that it was necessary to keep
up the prestige of the order of knights he replied: "Then you should
take a knighthood yourself.” During the Tory administration of
1874-1880, with its Russian-Turkish imbroglio, he was out of sym-
pathy alike with Gladstone's idealistic humanitarianism and Dis-
raeli’s romantic imperialism. “Gladstone and Dizzy seem to cap
one another in folly,” he wrote, “and I don't know which has made
the greater ass of himself.” In 1880 he joined Mr Gladstone's
second administration as Home Secretary. In the subsequent Lib-
eral governments he invariably appeared as Chancellor of the Ex-
chequer, a position which gave him unmeasured scope for the exer-
cise of his realistic habit of mind in dealing with his colleagues of
the spending departments. In these years he drew much nearer to
his chief in the long struggle for Home Rule, which ended in defeat
by the House of Lords. We forget the figure of Sancho Panza and
remember instead the chivalric bearing of The Loyal Servitor. Nor
was this the only relation in which Harcourt's loyalty showed as
his supreme quality. Although a leading candidate for the succes-
sion to Gladstone, he made extraordinary efforts to retain within
the party men like Joseph Chamberlain and Lord Hartington who
would have been his leading competitors; and on Gladstone's re-
tirement in 1895 he consented to the selection of Lord Rosebery as
Premier, and served under him as Chancellor of the Exchequer and
Leader of the House of Commons. It gratifies the sense of sports-
manship, so large an element in British politics, that in these years
of declining Liberal power and the following ones of Tory rule,
when the Liberal party seemed hopelessly distracted, Sir William
Harcourt should have reached the height of his career, and a posi-
tion in the House of Commons equal to that held by any statesmarı
of the nineteenth century, from Canning to Gladstone.
Sir William Harcourt was the descendant of a family, like the
Cecils, Cavendishes, and Stanleys, long distinguished in the Eng-
lish oligarchy. It was always a matter of surprise to find him on
the liberal side, steadily inclining toward radicalism. The reason
for this attitude is to be found in his uncompromising realism, his
inveterate habit of seeing things as they are. He has been called a
man of the Eighteenth Century, but it was the matter-of-fact, posi-
tive school of the beginning of the century to which he belonged,
a


ROBERT MORSS LOVETT
393
a
not that of the revolutionary doctrinaires of its close. He con-
fessed once to wishing that he had been a member of the cabinet of
Sir Robert Walpole; and later in a letter to Morley, he wrote of
that minister, “It is all nonsense about his corruption. He paid
the fools to do what the wise men told them-a very good bar-
gain.” This is not a defence of corrupt practices—merely a recog-
nition of the fact that it was the way to govern England in the
Eighteenth Century. Practical rather than ideal considerations
constantly swayed him. It may be doubted if he had much feeling
for the abstract justice of Ireland's claim to freedom. "While you
have a hostile Ireland you can never have a friendly America,” was
sufficient wisdom for him. His tendency to fall back on the legal-
istic position was part of his belief in law as the codified common
sense of the ages. And his interpretation of law was steadily on
the side of the people whom laws were made to protect. For in-
stance, he brushed aside all the dunderheaded rubbish about inter-
ference with the liberty of making contracts. “A cabman is not al-
lowed to make what bargain he likes for the conveyance of a pas-
senger. The law is full of such examples, founded on the principle
.
that when one party has what amounts to a monopoly giving to him
an overwhelming advantage in the bargain the power of contract-
ing on the other side is not really free.” Although Harcourt was
thinking of the relation between landlord and tenant, it is obvious
that his reasoning applies equally to that of employer and worker.
His practical grasp of things as they are, frequently led him to a
position which we should describe as idealism. Take, for example,
his view of the outlawry of war, given in 1869.
"I believe that the idea of reducing war to a military and naval
duel between armies and feets is as chimerical and less humane
than the romantic project of chivalry to settle the fate of Moslem
and Christian by a single combat between Saladin and Richard.
These two nations are locked in the deadly embrace of war whether
they be fighting for empire or struggling for independence. They
will deal the fatal blow with every weapon which fortune places
within their grasp. Passion is deaf, patriotism is unscrupulous, fear
is cruel. To attempt to disarm war of its horrors is an idle dream
and a dangerous delusion; let us labour at the more practical task
of making it impossible.”


394
THE SQUIRE IN POLITICS
To say that Mr Gardiner's Life is worthy of its subject is saying
much, but not too much. These vast monumental biographies to
the Victorian dead have been frequently done in the spirit and man-
ner of mortuary sculpture, heroic size. Mr Gardiner is understood
to envisage his task under the more humble figure of the embalmer.
We can be sure that Sir William Harcourt under Mr Gardiner's
hands is “very like.” Mr Gardiner is of the modern school of biog-
raphy, and his realistic method finds an appropriate subject in Sir
William Harcourt. Nothing could be farther from the conven-
tional steel engraving of the statesman than Mr Gardiner's succes-
sion of photographs. He has constantly caught Harcourt as he al-
ways was—humanly natural in his temper, his appetite, his affec-
tion, his humour. It goes without saying that a biography which
does justice to this last aspect of Sir William's character cannot be
a dry book. A reviewer might satisfy his readers merely by quoting
the unexpected twists of Harcourt's mind and the happy turns of
his phrase. One of Harcourt's unpleasant duties as Home Secre-
tary was to act as jailer for devoted clergymen under sentence for
ritualism, and devoted Irishmen imprisoned for patriotism. It was
a bad situation, but Harcourt, seeking to find an excuse for releas-
ing them on the ground of ill-health, wrote an excruciatingly funny
letter to Gladstone, lamenting that they would grow so fat. In a
speech on Lord Salisbury's foreign policy he played a delightful
variation on Bismarck's description of that statesman as a man of
lath painted to look like iron. “It is all very well,” said Harcourt,
"to come in like a lion; but if you have to go out like a lamb it is
better not to come in like a lion. You will ultimately get more
credit in your capacity as a lamb if you have not begun the opera-
tion by roaring and lashing your tail.”
a
ROBERT MORss LOVETT


LUST AND HATE
The Left Leg. By T. F. Powys. 12mo. 311 pages.
Alfred A. Knopf. $2.50.
SEM
а
EVERAL years ago Mr T. F. Powys bade a peremptory fare-
well to the complex artifices of modern culture, and retired to
the country to save his soul. The first fruit of his rustication was
a small and mediocre tract called Soliloquies of a Hermit. When
that book was written Mr Powys was painfully conscious of his iso-
lation, and the very humility which he practised so diligently testi-
fied to the superior contentment of a man who at last was released
from the intellectual enigmas of the world. He was glad to get
.
close to the earth, to apostrophize crumbling fences and the waning
moon; he was thoroughly sick of the recondite formulas of litera-
ture and the barren inhumanities of art—he would look deeply
within the hearts of yokels for the secrets of salvation. “It is ter-
rible,” he wrote, “to think that the evil smell of modern oil has got
to me, and that the vile working-devils would try to pump petrol
into my soul.” Somewhat in the manner of Papini he began to re-
read the gospels, but unlike the Italian bigot, he neither inflated
nor capitalized his Christian spirit. But his book was a failure-
prolix adaptations from the New Testament, and the simple joys
of “youths and maidens sporting on the village green.” Appar-
ently Mr Powys was only another defeated young man who had
discovered in his retirement that he had nothing to say.
The Left Leg, however, has justified the author's seclusion. It
is a much better book than the ridiculous title would indicate; in
fact, a work of uncommon beauty, decidedly different from Solilo-
quies of a Hermit, and possessed of many of the qualities of fine
fiction. Mr Powys is no longer the preacher—a more intimate ac-
quaintance with the Dorset villagers has robbed him of his faith;
and though he has failed to save his soul, he has taken the raw ma-
terials of rural life and shaped them into literary forms, and that,
in itself, is one kind of salvation. There is no love in these three
stories: the author hates his characters, and the characters hate one
another; the book is a shrewd and contemptuous study of the


396
LUST AND HATE
a
avarice, stupidity, fatalistic lethargy, and bestial obsessions of an
ugly peasantry.
The title-story is easily the best. In this narrative Mr Powys
gives us a representative and convincing gallery of rustics: the
apathetic clergyman; the idiot; the amorous, accessible widow; the
praying visionary and his innocent daughter; and the terrible land-
lord. Farmer Mew, the landed despot, covets the earth, and with
silent, iron hand, reduces his tenants to slavery and rapes the vis-
ionary's daughter. The scene in which Mr Mew gains full own-
ership of Mary Gillet is extraordinarily effective; there is no elab-
orate preparation, no moonlight and dreamy fatigue and long rides,
as in the case of Hardy's Tess—it is a sententious description of a
cruel and deliberate act of animal mastery. Mr Powys is singu-
larly successful in his handling of sexual matters; the stolid repres-
sions of the Dorset folk are cleverly hinted at, and then suddenly
divulged with swift and unexpected fierceness. It is a relief to find
a writer who appreciates the significance of sex, and is not afraid to
discuss the subject honestly; and yet, at the same time, one who is
free from the pathological nastiness of the Freudian school. As a
sustained piece of fiction The Left Leg is severely crippled by the
preposterous Mr Jar. We are given to understand in the opening
paragraph that if this shadowy saint should ever turn up, some-
thing would happen. Finally, at the last minute, he does appear,
and the story collapses: Farmer Mew, in an inconsistent fit of re-
morse, blows himself to pieces, and Mr Jar leads the pregnant lass
into a strange new land. The second story has to do with a school-
mistress who goes into the country to escape the church bells and
rats and smells of her native town, and of the tailor lover who fol-
lows her—the tailor dies, and the girl returns to the rats and smells.
“God had sent her into the sunshine. But was there any sunshine?
Surely not.” The third story tells of young Luke Bird and the
great religious light that strikes him. Luke chucks his job at the
brewery, forgets his Winnie, and wanders into the peaceful vales to
preach the gospel. But the villagers are as immovable as clods,
and Luke finds it expedient to fall in love again. In the end Rose
is coarsely possessed in Luke's presence by the Squire; and the
young Bird takes the winding road which leads back to the brewery
and to Winnie.
Mr Powys has yet to learn the principles of solid construction.


THOMAS CRAVEN
397
The main objection to his work is its fundamental lack of coherent
action. For the most part all is clear and definite; but when we
might reasonably expect a dramatic culmination of some sort, the
narrative becomes tenuous and unimportant, and at length dissolves
into vapid fancies resembling the oddities of Mr James Stephens
in his less serious moods. The fault is largely the result of an in-
congruous mixture of genuine realism and whimsicality—the au-
thor is unable to control his imagination, and when pressed for a
solution drops into unseemly mannerisms—short sentences, illegiti-
mate surprises, and childish personifications. With a little altera-
tion the three stories might be woven into a satisfactory novel; but
the book as it stands is immeasurably better than the unreadable
crop of pot-boilers. Mr Powys is neither a windy romancer nor a
reporter of actualities; in his spiritual groping he has felt deeply
and hated bitterly; he has thrown a scorching light on the stingy
souls of the Dorset villagers, and has produced a shocking book-
shocking, that is, in the aesthetic sense.
THOMAS CRAVEN


BRIEFER MENTION
The HORSES OF DIOMEDES, by Remy de Gourmont, translated by C. Sartoris
(12mo, 249 pages ; Luce: $2). De Gourmont gives his ideas the outlines of
women, and offers them the caresses of Diomedes, Pascase, and Cyran.
Sophistication at its summit becomes a lucid naïveté. He builds a sad
Utopia wherein his mind blossoms in the restless colours of flesh. In an
immortal garden besieged by decay, Diomedes moves idly between Pascase,
his youth-acolyte yet alien, subtle but young-and Cyran, his age-a
tempting destination barely evaded; aesthete turning ascetic as his hair
whitens. Thus de Gourmont amuses himself with ghosts whose flesh is
still capable of embraces; and indulges the hesitations of his spirit among
amours that are exquisite, yet cannot relinquish their imperfections. He
woos thought like an ironical lover who knows how to make a banal whis-
per profound. Having evaded both the violence and the ennui of his time,
his imagination waits where only the monosyllable of the mystic is ade-
quate; his murmurings are one step from silence. Thought glides elu-
sively complete as all living things in the transparent pool of his style; a
moonlight style in which shapes are distinct yet pliant.
The Victim, AND THE WORM, by Phyllis Bottome (16mo, 292 pages;
Doran: $1.75) are two novels in one volume, each aptly described by its
title. The Victim is an American millionaire who has decided to pass the
last of his life in England as being the most peaceful place he can find.
His beautiful daughter interrupts this dream, and, presenting a front of
martyrdom to the world, manages to inflict suffering upon everyone about
her, until her father sacrifices his happiness to save others from being her
victims. It is vividly told, readable, and unimportant. The second story is
rather more complex, and with better relief. Two people, a man and a
young girl, adore a clever, domineering woman who shapes their lives for
them, until, almost unconsciously, they find themselves defying her in
small ways, and finally allying themselves for life against her. Phyllis
Bottome is distinctly the “popular appeal” writer, but here and there, one
comes upon evidences that she could write a better novel, even a realistic
one, if she so desired.
a
ELIMUS: A STORY, by B. C. Windeler, with twelve designs by D. Shakespear
(16mo, 45 pages; Three Mountains Press: $3.50) depicts without mercy
the collapse of a weak illusioned youth in a tough expletive pioneer world.
The psychology of Elimus Hackett is established directly, without com-
ment, in a few brief actions. He exists primarily as part of a firm design,
as a topic for solid chunky vigorous prose. The omission of articles, the em-
ployment of compounded words, the skilled use of alliteration speed up the
text which runs with an emphatic accent like that of an unmuffled motor
exhaust. Elimus is a proof that Joyce and Lewis have revivified the lan-
guage. In addition, the force of the prose is well translated in the black-
and-whites of D. Shakespear.


BRIEFER MENTION
399
The FLORENTINE DAGger, by Ben Hecht (12mo, 365 pages; Boni & Live-
right: $2). "Melodrama,” someone has said, “may be a drunken plausi-
bility,” but it is hardly that in Hecht's new book. He has raided the road-
house of popularity with the dexterity of a mutilated poet. Across the
cadaver of a Broadway mystery story he flings the violent costume in
which he dances best—and the effect is an accurate and illuminating por-
trait of Hecht. His glittering manikins are fantastically wilting tinsel,
cinema apparitions that collapse with the turning of each page. The book
is a danse macabre of Hecht's literary ambitions.
a
Grey Towers, anonymous (12mo, 286 pages; Covici-McGee: $2) might be
characterized as the small boy's pea-shooter in the act of being matriculated
in one of our larger universities. It demonstrates, with a great deal of
ardour and some effectiveness, that universities are controlled by human
beings whose weaknesses are not altogether academic. This has long been
suspected, and doubtless will continue to be the case much after Grey
Towers is out of print.
MODERN SWEDISH MASTERPIECES, selected and translated by Charles Whar-
ton Stork (12mo, 257 pages; Dutton : $2.50). What technical discoveries
are offered ? Has this particular mode of expression been driven further?
What contributions to noumenal knowledge have been made? These are
the likeliest questions an Anglo-Saxon, grounded in his own culture and
familiar with general European literature, would raise when reading an
anthology of Swedish short stories. The stories of Söderberg, Heidenstam,
Siwertz, and Hallström indicate a literature of normal vitality and con-
trolled execution, but produce no fresh conquests. Simple ironic tales, his-
torical or costume chapters, "sophisticate" dialogue, and allegories are all
done acceptably by them. Unfortunately, Mr Stork's ability to recognize
masterpieces is, judged by his conduct in American literary life, somewhat
open to question. Consequently, one's curiosity as to significant activity in
contemporary Swedish letters remains unsatisfied.
CHILDREN OF Men, by Eden Phillpotts (8vo, 471 pages; Macmillan : $2.50)
and BLACK, WHITE AND BRINDLED by Eden Phillpotts (8vo, 344 pages ;
Macmillan: $2). The first of these books ends the author's series of Dart-
moor tales. He draws here so largely upon Hardy and even upon George
Eliot that one has the feeling of having traversed his ground before in
greater company. The situations are well handled, and the backgrounds
convincing. The English countryside, however, seems to be as unpleas-
antly populated as the English town in Gilbert Cannan. The second
book, Black, White, and Brindled, presents a series of short stories entirely
different in character and with a setting as exotic as the earlier one was
dull. The dazzling white and blue of the West Indies, the atmosphere of
negro laziness and sudden, mysterious crime, come as a surprise--even a
pleasant surprise-after the grey inevitableness of Children of Men. The
tragedy in the first is a creeping palsy which claims its victims and leaves
no hope. In the second book, tragedy is only a way station, an obstacle,
beyond which the heroes of the various stories find their way to peace and
some degree of happiness at last.


400
BRIEFER MENTION
a
Fox FOOTPRINTS, by Elizabeth J. Coatsworth (12mo, 79 pages; Knopf:
$1.50) is a Cook's tour of the East, with halts in Siam, India, Tahiti, and
a stop-over of two months in China and Japan. Decoration, quaintness,
exoticism, images. The moon over the tropics is a white curved bud,
whereas the moon over Japan is compared aptly to a butterfly. There is
no property more stage-worn than the moon, and the dents of time persist
even when its cardboard disc has been painted over with all the nice colours
of Miss Coatsworth's lunar and exotic vocabulary.
CHARLATAN, by Louis Grudin (12mo, 62 pages; Lieber & Lewis: $1.50)
contains niceties of craftsmanship at the service, mostly, of fancy and fan-
tasy. Mr Grudin concentrates, not upon the direct conveyance of an emo-
tion, but upon the construction of a decorative, unexpected, and distorting
armour to encase his feelings, or rather he sews together “his good fur coat
of despair." We recognize the coat, but the despair is imperceptible: he
gets the armour, but fails to establish the emotions. Irony, the grim dis-
parity between a strong desire and its miscarriage in deed, cannot grow
from a bare assumption of the desire and an embroidery of the deed. Mr
Grudin, however, has more restraint than Bodenheim, his chief influence,
and a poem like Diary shows a trend away from the rhetoric of sheer in-
genuity.
APRIL Twilights, by Willa Cather (8vo, 66 pages; Knopf: $2) consists
largely of verses reprinted from an earlier volume with the same title. It
was the epilogue to that first voyage to Europe from which the poet returns
with a portfolio of classical memories : Antinous, Delphi, Poppies on Lud-
low Castle, the dialect of Robert Burns, and finally the expected Envoi,
which like the others is perfectly imitated, quotable, dead. Her later
verses are American, even Nebraskan in their subjects, but their form is
equally and coldly perfect. They give the impression of being cast, ac-
curately, into a mould which was not intended for them; they lack redeem-
ing inconsistencies and never vary from a pattern which is fixed by the
first line. It might have been Miss Cather who inspired Boileau to write:
“Un style trop égal et toujours uniforme / En vain brille à nos yeux, il
faut qu'il nous endorme.”
The Love-Rogue, by Harry Kemp (12mo, 229 pages; Lieber & Lewis:
$1.75) is a rather free rendering of the Spanish drama of Tirso de Molina.
The translator has been successful in catching the lyric qualities of the
work, no less than the dramatic; he has done a welcome literary service in
making available this source of all the multifarous Don Juan dramas, and
has rounded out his assignment by a lively introduction and an exhaustive
bibliography.
THE MODERN TRAVELLER, by Hilaire Belloc (illus., 12mo, 80 pages;
Knopf: $1.50) has satirical overtones of W. S. Gilbert and nonsensical
overtones of Lewis Carroll, although it does not strike quite the same vi-
brant cords in either mood. The lines have a sting to them, and the en-
tire expedition is a gay absurdity in verse of quick tempo and deft rhym-
ing. The narrative lacks, however, in urbanity, and consequently-one
hazards-in permanence.


BRIEFER MENTION
401
RAW MATERIAL, by Dorothy Canfield (12mo, 302 pages; Harcourt, Brace:
$2) is a score of instances out of human life, more trivial, surely, than
The author states with smooth coyness her rather smug hope that
these episodes will provoke original thought; but the conclusion of each is
implicitly obvious in its beginning, and the desired meditations are sug-
gested with all the energetic and unequivocal innuendo of a sermon. The
author's manner, which seeks effusively to enlarge the importance of her
subjects, completely neutralizes it. The sketches have neither the spare-
ness and elasticity of an outline nor the elaborated warmth of a fully de-
veloped short story.
Windows, by John Galsworthy (12mo, 91 pages; Scribners : $1). In this
play Galsworthy is to be seen at his best. Something of the social appeal
that vitalizes Justice stands forth in this drama, yet underlying and over-
spreading all is a subtle and skilfully woven strand of comedy that dom-
inates the action. The author's technical expertness is nowhere better ex-
emplified than in Windows, and only in a few instances have his charac-
ters been etched with more originality and reality.
THE MACHINE WRECKERS, by Ernst Toller, translated from the German by
Ashley Dukes (12mo, 113 pages; Knopf: $2) is a drama centring around
the Luddite rebellion in England in the early part of the nineteenth cen-
tury. The author, a communist poet and dramatist at present serving sen-
tence in a Bavarian prison for taking part in the Munich uprisings, is not,
like Hauptman, interested so much in the spectacle of the workers' rebel-
lion against the machines, as in the blind groping of the workers to estab-
lish a brotherhood of man, the painful awakening of class consciousness in
the birth throes of the modern industrial era. Borrowing freely from the
dramas of Shakespeare, of Hauptman, of Gorki, Toller has re-created the
bitter tragedy of the abortive English revolution killed so effectively by the
Reform Bill of 1830.
The LAW OF City PLANNING AND ZONING, by Frank Backus Williams (8vo,
738 pages; Macmillan: $5) is an exhaustive examination of the legal basis
for city planning in the United States, or rather, of the legal hindrances to
a more complete development of civic utilities. Mr Williams' citation of
foreign precedent, as well as our own more timid and tentative experiments
in America, gives breadth to a discussion which is, alas! a little too tech-
nical for any one but the administrator or the practising city planner; but
on the use of Mr Williams' data the orderly growth of our cities—to say
nothing of their beauty-will not a little depend.
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND MORALITY, by John Cowper Powys (12mo, 48 pages;
Colbert: $2.50). Mr Powys has the knowledge and the temperament for
speculation. He concludes that the findings of psychoanalysis will lead to
a relaxation of the sex-taboo and the god- or universe-taboo, and he dis-
cusses the "identity-lust” and a morality which disassociates sex-sensation
from sin, declares that evil implies “either cruelty or malice,” and retains
"the imaginative sympathy of Christianity and the loyal tenderness of
Christianity." His exposition is the more persuasive for being couched in
varied rhythms, lively accents, and surprising images.


COMMENT
IN
N looking about us to discover what is wrong with the world for
October, we decided that the most poignant ailment is a general
vagueness as to the function of criticism. We hungered after some
irreducible minimum, something of the nature of a cogito, ergo
sum, which might serve at least as the opportunity for someone to
come forth with a better one. And we felt safe in examining Aris-
totle, on the hypothesis that Aristotle is the formal literary critic
whose work has stood the test of time most substantially.
The irreducible minimum seemed to be this: That the contribu-
tion which the Poetics makes to Greek literature is nothing other
than the Poetics itself. That is, Aristotle's criticism did not serve
to improve Greek poetry; it was simply the parallel, in ideological
values, to the emotional values of Greek poetry, the translation of
one set of terms into another set of terms. And criticism becomes
an independent activity, the beauty of which consists purely in the
power and subtlety of its formulations.
Next, we found tentatively three phases in which such formula-
tions might conceivably manifest themselves, and these for conve-
nience we called interpretation, orientation, and judgement.
By interpretation is meant the critic's function of seeing more
deeply into the work of art than is to be expected of the layman.
His programme here is to understand the author's purpose and the
means utilized for effecting that purpose. This phase of criticism
tends towards the technical approach, and is usually done best by
critics who are themselves poets.
Orientation is the examination into the origin of the work of art.
As such it is quite aside from the high road of criticism, but is prob-
ably justified in that it does throw new lights upon the art work
itself. Under orientation come those various attempts to approach
art through sociology, biology, ethnology, biography, politics, ge-
ography, economics-in short, the approach through history, the
explanation of the art work as a result, as the miniature reflection
of some larger condition. This method is not very valuable in ac-
counting for excellence—which remains pretty much of an accident
--but it has proved very useful in giving us further insight into
why certain elements are to be found in a given work, and it is


COMMENT
403
9
especially adapted to the explanation of shortcomings and “taboos”
in the artist's subject matter.
The third of the categories, judgement, involves the statement of
a corpus juris, the clarification and justification of certain criteria
whereby whole tons of art can be either admitted or rejected. Ob-
viously, this is the most far-reaching aspect of criticism, and has
always been the one which has proved the most disastrous to its
devotees. It requires the critic to assert some clear relationship be-
tween art and life, entangling him in ethics, and even metaphysics.
Looking up, we discovered that a great deal of contemporary
criticism simply could not be fitted into these categories. But a
word was to hand which avoided the necessity of enlarging the
categories—"colyumism.” By colyumism we refer to that prac-
tice of writing about art which is based on the principle that just
as one might be interested in hearing what President Coolidge felt
about a certain book, so one might be interested in hearing what
any one felt about a certain book. And so one might; but we ques-
tion whether it is a branch of criticism proper. Colyumism is the
outcome of the nineteenth century's search for individual freedom,
a search which extended even to criticism, normally the most re-
strictive of pursuits. It is the sad end of impressionism, practised
by epigones who have inherited their method of improvizing from
an earlier generation which at least had enough vitality to invent
the method. The colyumist (nor do we refer to those honest souls
who have their columns and fill them: they perform their function
in society, and we are not discriminating against such people when
properly labelled; we are complaining rather against colyumism
when it masks as portentous and portly criticism) the colyumist
aims, by the "human touch” in his writing, to avoid the "aridity of
dogmatism.” Which would be sweet enough if it were at all pos-
sible to judge a work of art without relying on some implied prin-
ciple of judgement. The formal critic attempts to hold such a prin-
a
ciple up to the light of day, so that in time it
so that in time it may be disciplined
and tempered; but the colyumist's basis of judgement remains as a
latent assumption which, not being overtly expressed, is hardly
likely to undergo much discipline in its formation. Thus, whereas
one may square off to an authentic critic like Matthew Arnold in
all awareness as to the issues involved, there are hundreds of critics
to-day writing colyumistically whom it is much easier to forget
than refute.


THE THEATRE
a
THE
THIS (mid-August) is the morte saison of the theatre. It is
the period when there are a great many openings and almost
nothing that is worth seeing. It is the period when theatres are
easy to rent and when they are consequently used for trying out all
sorts of dubious and abortive productions with limited means at
their disposal. It is also the period when the dramatic critics, after
the theatrical intermission of the summer, return with appetites re-
freshed and appreciation revived. They enjoy an indifferent play
more in August than they do a good one in May. If you do not
believe this, read Mr Heywood Broun, who is under the impres-
sion that he has, since his vacation, witnessed a dazzling succession
of splendid plays all distinguished by the most brilliant acting.
But then August is the deadest, sultriest, stupidest, most prosaic
month of the whole year and, in the dull stagnation of the town,
one is perhaps inclined to be extravagantly grateful for the faintest
phosphoresence of wit or the meagrest twitch of emotional anima-
tion.— I have, to be sure, seen two quite amusing and very well
acted comedies—Tweedles, by Booth Tarkington and Harry Leon
Wilson, and In Love With Love, by Vincent Lawrence—but there
is nothing particularly interesting to say about them; and I hope
that the readers of The Dial will forgive me if I speak to them for
a few moments instead about the comedies of the Restoration.
Once or twice every year in New York there is a solemn and pre-
tentious revival of Sheridan. This year we had both The Rivals
and The School for Scandal. But why wouldn't it be a good
FOR SCANDAL
plan, for a change, to revive Wycherley or Congreve instead? The
comedy of the Restoration was much more interesting artistically
(if a little less easy to put over dramatically) than the comedy of
the late eighteenth century. Sheridan himself admits in The
Critic the tameness of the comedy of his own day, debauched by
the importation from France of the comédie larmoyante, and what
is most vivid and amusing in Sheridan is surely the part that comes
nearest to the vein of Wycherley and Congreve. But Sheridan, in
keeping English comedy wholesome in order not to offend the taste


EDMUND WILSON
405
a
of his time, had to sacrifice its peculiar force, which had lain in its
thoroughgoing cynicism. The School for SCANDAL is really little
more than a domesticated version of Wycherley's THE COUNTRY
Wife, with the difference that in The COUNTRY Wife Joseph
Surface is the hero instead of the villain. As it is, he remains about
the most amusing thing in the later comedy and expounds his sub-
versive point of view with far more wit and persuasiveness than
quite accords with the vindication of a latter-day morality. In
Wycherley, the rustic Mrs Pinchwife drops like ripe fruit for the
city gallant, as Lady Teazle should have done, too, if Sheridan had
carried out his comic logic.
Congreve and Wycherley were the supreme glorification of
Joseph Surface's point of view, except that with them Joseph Sur-
face was not under the necessity of becoming a hypocrite as well as
a cynic: he is frankly out to seduce an attractive woman or to in-
duce a rich one to marry him. And this, expressed with far greater
intensity and with far more literary brilliance than Sheridan was
ever able to muster, is what gives the comedy of the Restoration its
unique importance. There is in English drama no other equally
complete rendering of this comic point of view: even Maugham
and Oscar Wilde have had to compromise with the domestic vir-
tues. But in Congreve and in Wycherley all the conventional val-
ues are inverted: it is the holiday of the worldly and it has all the
exhilaration of a holiday. What could be more gratifying and
more cheerful than these husbands and wives who are never faith-
ful, these young men whose intentions are never honourable, these
coquettes who never want to marry? What could be more bracing
than this contact with a world where the most primitive of human
instincts are subjected in their nakedness to the scrutiny of the
subtlest and most civilized intelligence, where there is no interme-
diary of the spirit to bridge the gulf between the mind and the
body, where there is no obscurement by romantic emotion either
savage or sentimental ?
New York has now become sufficiently corrupt to enjoy these re-
markable comedies. The Phoenix Society in London has recently
revived Congreve's Love For Love. Why may we not do the
same? Sheridan has become very tiresome and was never quite
first-rate at best.
EDMUND WILSON


BEFORE A PICTURE BY PICASSO
IT
T was my great fortune just as I was finishing this book' to be
taken by a friend to the studio of Pablo Picasso. We had been
talking on our way of the lively arts; my companion denied none
of their qualities, and agreed violently with my feeling about the
bogus, what we called le côté Puccini. But he held that nothing is
more necessary at the moment than the exercise of discrimination,
that we must be on our guard lest we forget the major arts, forget
even how to appreciate them, if we devote ourselves passionately,
as I do, to the lively ones. Had he planned it deliberately he could
not have driven his point home more deeply, for in Picasso's studio
we found ourselves, with no more warning than our great admira-
tion, in the presence of a masterpiece. We were not prepared to
have an unframed canvas suddenly turned from the wall and to
recognize immediately that one more had been added to the small
number of the world's greatest works of art.
I shall make no effort to describe that painting. It isn't even
important to know that I am right in my judgement. The signifi-
cant and to me overwhelming thing was that the work was a mas-
terpiece and altogether contemporary. It is a great pleasure to
come upon an accredited masterpiece which preserves its authority,
to mount the stairs and see the Winged Victory and know that it is
good. But to have the same conviction about something finished a
month ago, contemporaneous in every aspect yet associated with
the great tradition of painting, with the indescribable thing we
think of as the high seriousness of art and with a relevance not only
to our life, but to life itself—that is a different thing entirely. For
of course the first effect-after one had gone away and begun to be
aware of effects--was to make one wonder whether it is worth
while thinking or writing or feeling anything else. Whether, since
the great arts are so capable of being practised to-day, it isn't sheer
perversity to be satisfied with less. Whether praise of the minor
arts isn't, at bottom, treachery to the great. I had always believed
I
that there exists no such hostility between the two divisions of the
arts which are honest--that the real opposition was between them,
allied, and the polished fake. To that position I returned a few
1
The Seven Lively Arts, by Gilbert Seldes, to be published by Harpers.


GILBERT SELDES
407
а
a
days later: it was a fortunate week altogether for I heard the Sacre
du Printemps of Strawinsky the next day, and this tremendous
shaking of the forgotten roots of being gave me reassurance.
More than that I am convinced that if one is going to live fully
and not shut oneself away from half of civilized existence, one
must care for both. It is possible to do well enough with either,
and much depends on how one derives pleasure from them.
Most of the great works of art have reference to our time only
indirectly—as they and we are related to eternity. And we require
arts which specifically refer to our moment, which create the image
of our lives. There are some twenty workers in literature, music,
painting, sculpture, architecture, and the dance who are doing this
for us now—and doing it in such a manner as to associate our mod-
ern existence with that extraordinary march of mankind which we
like to call the progress of humanity. It is not enough. In addi-
tion to them—in addition, not in place of them—we must have
arts which, we feel, are for ourselves alone, which no one before us
could have cared for so much, which no one after us will wholly
understand. The picture by Picasso could have been admired by
an unprejudiced critic a thousand years ago, and will be a thousand
years hence. We require, for nourishment, something fresh and
transient. It is this which makes jazz so much the characteristic
art of our time and Jolson a more typical figure than Chaplin, who
also is outside of time. There must be ephemera. Let us see to it
that they are good.
The characteristic of the great arts is high seriousness—it occurs
in Mozart and Aristophanes and Rabelais and Molière as surely as
in Aeschylus and Racine. And the essence of the minor arts is high
levity which existed in the commedia dell' arte and exists in Chap-
lin, which you find in the music of Berlin and Kern (not "funny" in
any case). It is a question of exaltation, of carrying a given theme
to the "high” point. The reference in a great work of art is to
something more profound; and no trivial theme has ever required,
or had, or been able to bear, a high seriousness in treatment. Avoid-
ing the question of creative genius, what impresses us in a work of
art is the intensity or the pressure with which the theme, emotion,
sentiment, even "idea" is rendered. Assuming that a blow from
the butt of a revolver is not exactly artistic presentation, that "ef-
fectiveness” is not the only criterion, we have the beginn
criticism of aesthetics. We know that the method does count, the


408
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BEFORE A PICTURE BY PICASSO
creativeness, the construction, the form. We know also that while
the part of humanity which is fully civilized will always care for
high seriousness it will be quick to appreciate the high levity of the
minor arts. There is no conflict. The battle is only against so-
lemnity which is not high, against ill-rendered profundity, against
the shoddy and the dull.
I have allowed myself to catalogue my preferences; it is possible
to set the basis of them down in impersonal terms, in propositions:
That there is no opposition between the great and the lively arts.
That both are opposed in the spirit to the middle or bogus arts.
That the bogus arts are easier to appreciate, appeal to low and
mixed emotions, and jeopardize the purity of both the great and
the minor arts.
That the lively arts as they exist in America to-day are enter-
taining, interesting, and important.
That with a few exceptions these same arts are more interesting
to the adult cultivated intelligence than most of the things which
pass for art in cultured society.
That there exists a "genteel tradition” about the arts which has
prevented any just appreciation of the popular arts, and that these
have therefore missed the corrective criticism given to the serious
arts, receiving instead only abuse.
That therefore the pretentious intellectual is as much responsible
as any one for what is actually absurd and vulgar in the lively arts.
That the simple practitioners and simple admirers of the lively
arts being uncorrupted by the bogus preserve a sure instinct for
what is artistic in America.
And now a detour around two of the most disagreeable words in
the language: highbrow and lowbrow. Pretence about these words
and what they signify makes an understanding of the lively arts
impossible. The discomfort and envy which make these words
vague, ambiguous, and contemptuous need not concern us; for they
represent a real distinction, two separate ways of apprehending the
world, as if it were palpable to one and visible to the other. In
connexion with the lively arts the distinction is clear, and involves
the third division, for the lively arts are created and admired
chiefly by the class known as lowbrows, are patronized and, to an
extent enjoyed, by the highbrows; and are treated as impostors and


GILBERT SELDES
409
a
as contemptible vulgarism by the middle class, those who invari-
ably are ill-at-ease in the presence of great art until it has been ap-
proved by authority, those whom Dante rejected from Heaven and
Hell alike, who blow neither hot nor cold, the Laodiceans.
Be damned to these last and all their tribe! There exists a small
number of people who care intensely for the major and the minor
arts and they are always being accused of “not caring really" for
the lively ones, of pretending to care, or of running away from “the
ancient wisdom and austere control” of Greek architecture or from
the intense passion of Dante, the purity of Bach, the great totality
of what humankind has created in art. It is claimed, and here the
professional lowbrow agrees, that these others cannot care for the
lively arts, unless they romanticize them and find things in them
which aren't there—at least not for the “real” patrons of those arts.
Aren't they there, these secondary qualities? I take for example
a sport instead of an art. Nothing about baseball interests me ex-
cept the newspaper reports of the games, so I speak without preju-
dice. In the days of Babe Ruth I took the sun in the bleachers once
and saw that heavy hitter do exactly what he had to do on his first
appearance for the day—a straight, business-like home run, much
appreciated by the crowd, as any expert well-timed job is appreci-
ated by Americans. The game that day went against the Yankees;
they were two runs behind in the ninth and with two men on base,
Ruth came up again. Again he hit a home run. And the crowd
roaring its joy in victory exhaled two sighs, for the dramatic qual-
ity of the blow and for the lovely spiralling of the ball in its flight
over the fence. "A beauty—a beauty”—you heard the expression
a thousand times—and "He knows when to hit them.” They
would have roared too if he had hit a single which, muffed, would
have brought in the winning run. But they would not have said,
"a beauty”—and as far as I am concerned that is proof enough that
the appreciation of aesthetic qualities is universal. It isn't, thank
Heaven, always put into words.
Take as another instance the fame of the Rath Brothers. They
are acrobats who do difficult things, but there are others doing
much the same sort of thing without approaching the réclame of
these two. Their appearance of ease is a delight, there is no strain,
no swelling muscles, no visible exploitation of strength. The Hel-
lenic philosopher who held that the arrow shot from the bow is
never in motion, but at rest from second to second at the succeeding


410
BEFORE A PICTURE BY PICASSO
points of its trajectory, might have seen some ancient forerunners
of these athletes, for each of their movements seems at once a
sculptured rest and a passage into another pose. And that is
.
pre-
cisely the quality which vaudeville and revue audiences care for,
and in a groping way recognize as distinctive and fine. They may
think that Greeks have been candy-vendors since the beginning of
time and that Marathon was a race-course; but they know what
they like.
I do not see, therefore, that recognition of these aspects of the
gay arts can in any way detract from actual enjoyment-on the
contrary it adds. You see Charlie about to throw a mop; the boss
enters; without breaking the line of his movement Charlie swoops
to the floor and begins to scrub. The first, the essential thing, is
the fun in the dramatic turn; but what makes it funny is that there
is no jerk, no break in the line—the two things are so interwoven
that you cannot separate them. And if any one were actually en-
tirely unconscious of the line, the fun would be lost; it would be
Ham and Bud, not Charlie, for such a spectator. The question is
only to what degree one can be conscious of it—for I have known
intellectuals who so reduced Charlie to angles that the angles no
longer made them laugh. They have done the same with Massine
and Nijinsky; they have followed the score so closely that they
haven't heard the music and they correspond exactly to the man
who bets on the game and doesn't see the play.
The life of the mind is supposed to be a terrible burden, ruining
all the pleasures of the senses. This idea is carefully supported by
"mental workers” (as they call themselves) and by the brainless.
The truth is, of course, that when the mind isn't afflicted by a de-
sire to be superior, it does nothing but multiply all the pleasures,
and the intelligent spectator, in all conscience, feels and experi-
ences more than the dull one. To such a spectator the lively arts
have a validity of their own. He cares for them for themselves,
and their relation to the other arts does not matter. It is only be-
cause the place of the common arts in decent society is always be-
ing called into question that the answer needs to be given. I do
not suppose that my answer is final; but I feel sure that it must be
I
given, as mine is, from the outside.
It happens that what we call folk-music, folk-dance, and the
folk-arts in general have only a precarious existence among us; the
“reasons” are fairly obvious. And the popular substitutes for these
a


GILBERT SELDES
411
arts are so much under our eyes and in our ears that we fail to rec-
ognize them as decent contributions to the richness and intensity
of our lives. The result, strange as it may appear to devotees of
culture, is that our major arts suffer. The poets, painters, com-
posers who withdraw equally from the main stream of European
tradition and from the untraditional natural expressions of Ameri-
ca, have no sources of strength, no material to work with, no back-
ground against which they can see their shadows.
At the same time the contempt we have for the lively arts hurts
them as much as it hurts us. We have all heard of the “great
artist of the speaking stage” who will not lower himself by appear-
ing on the screen; as familiar is the vaudevillian who will call him-
self an artist and has hankerings for the “legit”; we have seen good
dancers become bad actors, good blackface comedians develop
alarming tendencies toward singing sentimental ballads in whisky-
tenor voices, good comic-strip artists beginning to do bad book il-
lustrations. The “step upward” is never in the direction of su-
perior work, but towards a more rarefied acclaim.
As these artists suffer under opprobrium and try to avoid it by
touching the field of the faux bon, their work becomes more and
more refined, and genteel. The broadness, rough play, vitality,
diminish gradually until a sort of Drama League seriousness and
church-sociable good form are both satisfied. And all the more's
the pity for the thinning out of our lives goes on from day to day
and these lively arts are the only things which can keep us hard
and robust and gay. In America where there is no recognized up-
per class to please, no official academic requirements to meet, the
one tradition of gentility is as lethal as all the conventions of Euro-
pean society, and unlike those of Europe, our tradition provides no
nourishment for the artist. It is negative all the way through.
In spite of gentility the lively arts have held to something a little
richer and gayer than the polite ones. They haven't dared to be
frank for a spurious sense of decency is backed by the police, and
this limitation has hurt them; but it has made them sharp and
clever by forcing their wit into deeper channels. There still exists
a broadness in slapstick comedy and in burlesque, and once in a
while vast figures of Rabelaisian comedy occur. For the most part
the lively arts are inhibited by the necessity to provide "nice clean
fun for the whole family”—a regrettable, but inevitable penalty
for their universal appeal. For myself I should like to see a touch


412
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a
more of grossness and of licence in these arts; it would be a sign
that the blood hadn't gone altogether pale, and that we can still
roar cheerfully at dirty jokes, when they are funny.
What Europeans feel about American art is exactly the opposite
of what they feel about American life. Our life is energetic, va-
ried, constantly changing; our art is imitative, anaemic (exceptions
in both cases being assumed). The explanation is that few Euro-
peans see our lively arts, which are almost secret to us, like the
mysteries of a cult. Here the energy of America does break out and
finds artistic expression for itself. Here a wholly unrealistic, im-
aginative presentation of the way we think and feel is accom-
plished. No single artist has yet been great enough to do the whole
thing—but together the minor artists of America have created the
American art. And if we could for a moment stop wanting our ar-
tistic expression to be necessarily in the great arts—it will be that
in time—we should gain infinitely.
Because, in the first place, the lively arts have never had criti-
cism. The box-office is gross; it detects no errors, nor does it suffi-
ciently encourage improvement. Nor does abuse help. There is
good professional criticism in journals like Variety, The Billboard,
and the moving picture magazines—some of them. But the lively
arts can bear the same continuous criticism which we give to the
major, and if the criticism itself isn't bogus there is no reason why
these arts should become self-conscious in any pejorative sense. In
the second place the lively arts which require little intellectual ef-
fort will more rapidly destroy the bogus than the major arts ever
can. The close intimacy between high seriousness and high levity,
the thing that brings together the extremes touching at the points
of honesty and simplicity and intensity—will act like the conver-
gence of two armies to squeeze out the bogus. And the moment
we recognize in the lively arts our actual form of expression, we
will derive from them the same satisfaction which people have al-
ways derived from an art which was relevant to their existence.
The nature of that satisfaction is not easily described. One thing
we know of it—that it is pure. And in the extraordinarily con-
fused and chaotic world we live in we are becoming accustomed to
demand one thing, if nothing else—that the elements presented to
us, however they are later confounded with others, shall be of the
highest degree in their kind, of an impeccable purity.
.
GILBERT SELDES


MUSICAL CHRONICLE
W
a
ERE the queen of music a light divinity, like as not Pro-
a
VV fessor Sam Eliot, Jr of Smith would have been hearing
her, the last past months, play all sorts of nice little things to him
upon her harp. Being not one of the looser, but of the graver
Olympians, it is probable that she has merely been leaning over him
from out a window in heaven and addressing hallelujahs and
salves, gaudias and pax vobiscums from the pipes of a concert-
organ; fluting rapturously upon him many a brilliant morning,
and encircling his front many a sunset hour with tender-breathéd
thanks. Some marvellous expression of her gratitude, assuredly,
she has been making him. Few of late have been kindlier than he
to her congregation upon the earth, or more deserving of her smiles.
Not himself of the musical confession, he has nevertheless most ad-
mirably supported her cause. It seems he is a member of that race
which is falling more rapidly than leaves do in November, or Nor-
dics in the minds of neo-Hegelians: the race of American college
professors who have not yet permitted the environing elements to
annihilate intellectual curiosity and courage in them. In the course
of the last year this young man persuaded the class about to be
graduated from Smith to give Andreyev's The Black Maskers as
its commencement play; persuaded the faculty to sanction the
heterodox choice; and, most inspiredly of all, procured the right to
invite a certain unknown young composer to supply the incidental
music so richly invoked by the dramatist. In this fashion, he built
well; placed Polyhymnia in his debt. For he made himself the
immediate producing cause of one of the most important events in
the life of music in America. He made himself the midwife to an
event which commences a new time in it.
We have proof that, at length, for the first time since the colon-
ization of the Atlantic seaboard, an whole creative musicianship
has appeared among the Americans. The audiences which assisted
at the three performances of The Black Maskers in Northampton
in June heard an incidental music poorly performed, muffled by
the two circumstances that it was sounded from behind the stage,
and by a scratch body of instrumentalists; and nevertheless thrilling
and winged. Only those of the auditors quite shut in sensibility could
a


414
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
have failed to perceive, through the muffling matter, the living
stuff of tones. Music was there; there was an intention which
transpired, even off the instruments of amateurs. The nine num-
bers supplied by the composer brought perfectly to Andreyev's
drama the extension through music required by him. They are a
re-creation, in a sister medium, of the play itself; flowing from a
vision of it so profound and exact that it seems the composer must
have stood while composing close to the point at which the drama-
tist stood when he made the dialogue. From these pieces, we re-
ceive a joy and satisfaction not incomparable to that which we re-
ceive from the score of Pelleas, from the Psalms of Bloch, the
Möricke-songs of Wolf, or from any other musical composition in
which a composer has actually created toward a poet: stood upon
his own shoe-leather, and enormously enriched with his proper life-
blood a literary expression. They have indeed the wild sinister
pulse of Andreyev's dolorous fantasy, the sardonic and anguished
cries, the flow of inky depressive current. Their tones utter, too,
the chaos, the sorrow, the baffled frenzy of the mind which can
no longer harmonize its visions, its many cruel, irreconcilable truths
and lies disrupted in doubt. The music has the indefinite, vague out-
line of bitter, endless revery, of Hamlet-like melancholia stream-
ing densely silently through rocky wastes and mocking perspectives
underneath a sky eternally charged with murk. Lorenzo calls his
musicians to play; and what sounds from their pieces gibbers and
cavorts and shrieks like humiliating, destructive thoughts that will
not down. A wedding-procession is organized; and wedding music
is played fraught with the atrocious cries and furious irony con-
sequent to a suddenly shattered dream, a suddenly yawning abys-
mal vision. More than the words, the music of Lorenzo's song
curses life and confesses Satan. Music comes full of chill meta-
physical brooding; deathly beautiful with the wind from out the
inhuman spaces of the universe; stark and black with the sense of
crucifixion. And last, while the flames of death beat back the
storm of black maskers, the orchestra chants and exults and is trans-
figured with the cleansing, releasing resolving deed.
A psychic maturity, freshness of spirit, living culture, and tech-
nical control have opened into the realm of music in America. The
music to The Black Maskers is no happy hit such as many slight
talents make once in their lives; accidents liable as not never to re-
peat themselves again. The author is an artist. His workmanship


PAUL ROSENFELD
415
declares him marvellously in control of his resources, capable of
producing hard form which reveals itself the larger the more it is
heard. Broken as it sounds, elusive and mysterious as it is in out-
line, full of abrupt brutal resolutions and strange new sounds and
sudden suspensions and blinding blurs, his work has a fine clarity
and solidity of form. There is not a consonance in the work; the
ideas are subtle and delicate; nevertheless, we do not go lost in this
free, ultramodern style.
A living flow informs the structure. The clangorous and ironic
passages subside naturally into the weeping, dolorous, soft ones.
Nor has the music form in the American manner: at the expense of
robustness and vibrancy. There is great strength in the move-
ments; powerfully pulsing rhythms; long melodic lines that flow
and continue and extend in beauty; no padding, no waste. The
orchestral dress, too, is masterly. There were twenty-nine or thirty
instruments playing; the score calls for no more; yet musicians in
the audience found themselves deceived as to the number and char-
acter of the components of the band. One, an expert, went behind
the stage looking for bass-clarinets and contrabassoons; and found
merely clarinets and fagots: the brilliant handling of the lower
registers of these common instruments had caused the mistake. In-
deed, perhaps only one element which might have been present in
this art was wanting. That, was the absolute individuality of
style. Not that there was any plagiarism or even derivative ma-
terial in the score. Except for some moments, mostly in the final
fire-music, when vague resemblances to Moussorgsky and to Bloch
appear, the music is never reminiscent. It merely wants that final
sharpness of contour which the musics written by composers in the
fulness of their maturity beget. But taking into consideration the
youth of the composer, we see that it could not possibly have put
in appearance at this early time. It is thoroughly normal, even by
the laws of genius, that it should have absented itself.
Roger Huntington Sessions, the composer of this beautiful, mov-
ing work, is indeed still in his twenty-seventh year. He was born
at the close of 1896 in Hadley, Massachusetts, the residence of his
family during nearly two centuries. Whether or not there were
musicians among his ancestors is not known. There were clergy-
men, however; his maternal grandfather was Episcopal Bishop of
western New York. Sessions matriculated at Harvard at the age
of fourteen; was editor for a while of the Harvard Musical Maga-


416
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
zine. After graduation, he went to the Yale Music School to study
under Horatio Parker. He remained three years in New Haven;
then received the appointment of instructorship in the history and
theory of music at Smith College. While at Smith, he found time
to come to New York and study under Ernest Bloch. When the
Cleveland Conservatory was organized around Bloch, two and a
half years ago, Sessions accepted an engagement as instructor in
theory and orchestration, and has been associated with the institu-
tion since. A number of compositions preceded The Black Mask-
ers; among them a symphony. But the Andreyev music constitutes
an Opus 1.
The hour which strikes in it leaves us still a little stunned. Only
a brief while since, we had been wondering whether the arrival of
a musician with enough of chaos in him to make a world were truly
possible in America; wishing indeed for the tone such an apparition
would give to life, and nevertheless scarcely daring to expect to
witness it in our own day. Signs of an efflorescence in the musical
life were not wanting. Many young earnests of future perform-
ance had been made; and some were more than promises, merely:
respectable and heartening performances. Nevertheless, the ri-
pened, sovereign inner force was not yet present. Itself is such a
miracle that one could not predict its arrival. And yet, that golden
gift is among us to-day. About it, the musical life reconstitutes it-
self; gets a new gravity and solidness. It comes, as it must inevit-
ably have come, as the voice of the living young people in a com-
promised and shoddy world. No Indian or negro, or bastard Scot-
tish tunes. Absolutely, no red white and blue. Rather, the grey
on grey of Russia. That, is more American. The music speaks an
hundred ironic, pensive, conflicting moods. And we feel strangely
at home; strangely rich and potent.—Whether Roger Sessions' gift
is entirely for the theatre, we do not as yet know. The two best of
the numbers, the turbulent chaos of Lorenzo's thought in Scene III,
the prelude to Act II, symphonic as they are, were inspired directly
by the vision of the play. But that fact is not necessarily signifi-
cant. He may find himself even more richly in the absolute forms.
In any case, it does not much matter. Sessions goes to a great
career, whether he goes to the opera, or the ballet, or the symphony,
or to all three. It is we who are to be congratulated. He himself
is good luck.
PAUL ROSENFELD



THE
DIAL
OXXIIO
NOVEMBER 1923
LETTERS FROM W. H. HUDSON
TO EDWARD GARNETT
a
Martin
by Salisbury,
17th. (April 1903]
Dear Garnett
There will be another Tuesday when I shall not see you as I
don't think of returning just yet. The loneliness of this little
downland village suits my nerves. We are 3 miles from a tele-
graph office, 7 miles from a butcher, a doctor and a newspaper,
and
there is no public house so it is all dark and still after 8 o'clock and
everyone goes to bed. The only light is from the stars and the only
sound the faint far off tinkle of sheep-bells. It is a land of great
open downs, sheep-walks, and with no sheep on them yet, as it is
early in the year and the weather cold, and the sheep are still kept
down in the valleys feeding on "turmots” and such things. Pee-
wits, magpies, rabbits and such creatures are the only people I meet
in my long rambles on the hills. In spite of the cold winds and
frosts by night the furze is now in full bloom-a chaos of shining
-a
yellow blossoms, and the mossy turf below blue with dog violets.
Before coming this way I was at Salisbury and almost lived in the
I
Cathedral for two or three days because it was the only comfortable
sheltered place I could find. One warm day we had, and that was
on Good Friday, and that day I spent in the prehistoric Cathedral
I
These seven letters are selected from a correspondence stretching over
twenty years: 1901-1922.-E. G.
Note: We print the letters exactly as W. H. Hudson wrote them, although
the spelling and punctuation occasionally do not conform to our usage.
1


418
LETTERS FROM W. H. HUDSON
a
-Stonehenge. I was one night at Fordingbridge and paid a visit
to a farmer I know in that neighbourhood, and then came up into
this lonely place. When I enquired for a place to stay in people
stared at me and smiled at so preposterous a request. But looking
about I found a Carter and his wife who took me in. The carter's
wages is 12/—a week so you wouldn't think it a very luxurious
lodging but you would be mistaken. His "cottage” is an ancient
farm-house-timbered and thatched with large rambling rooms,
brick floors, big fireplaces, the biggest room, the one I am in, with
a wooden ceiling. Besides the old house they have a big old barn,
20 old apple trees, and 6 acres of meadow-land. They keep pigs
and 50 or 60 fowls, and the house is beautifully clean inside, linen
like snow, and the woman an excellent cook. The reason of it all
is that she was in service several years in a great house when being
pretty quick and willing to learn she found out how to do things
and keep her place nice. Rents here are almost nominal and the
landlord who owns the village is very generous. The book-case is
over my head, where I am sitting by a big wood fire: It has
two very small shelves, and the following works are all it con-
tains: Pilgrim's Progress: Uncle Tom's Cabin, Miss Edgeworth's
“Helen,” East Lynne, The Wide Wide World—which I read
once and that was enough—Science for Boys and Girls (edited by
Kingsley), Our Village, Waterton's Wanderings and Marianne
North’s “Recollections of a Happy Life”—a curious work to find
in such a place! Altogether a wonderful little collection of "Best
Books”—far better than Lubbock's I imagine.
And now I am on books—did you see last week's Academy, and
did you read the review of Traherne's poems which Dobell has un-
earthed and published? And if you did do you agree with the re-
viewer? I read it at Salisbury and sent it on to Mrs. Hubbard and
this is what she writes to me:-“thanks for the Academy, which I
have been reading with more interest than agreement.
In
bracketing Vaughan with Herbert I should put H. decidedly first.
As far as the idea of childhood goes with the three, though Vaughan
may get nearer the heart of it than Herbert, yet with both the main
point is to use childhood as a luminous background for the black
derelictions of after life. Whereas Traherne takes the glory of it,
as Blake does