, on its own account, with no ulterior motives. He
does not utilize it, but triumphs in it. Andrew Marvell had some-
.


TO EDWARD GARNETT
419
a
thing of that joy and wonder in living, &c.” I quite agree with
her: I think that first poem in the book—The Salutation-one of
the most wonderful things ever written.
18th. I was interrupted and couldn't finish last evening, so an-
other day has gone by during which I sat down in a wood and gazed
on a splendid red fox, then had a talk with a gamekeeper, who is
eaten up with magpies. Then I spent an hour in the grand old
church of Cranborne, full of monuments to persons of importance
in their day and in their parish: and finally I got to a strange out-
of-the-world little village called Edmunsham-pronounced Ed-
sham. There is a well on a wide green place there and half the
women and all the children were congregated at it, the women with
big white sun-bonnets, with great old brown earthenware pitchers
to get their water. They were like Ancient Britons and made such
a hubbub and gave me so many directions when I asked my way to
Damerham-called Dam-ron, that I failed to understand, and
went how I could over miles of furzy common and by lanes until I
found Dam-ron, and then on to Martin.
I shall stay here till Tuesday next and then get back to Salis-
bury, and visit villages on the Wylie river before returning next
week.
With love to all.
Yours
W. H. HUDSON
3 June. [1903]
Dear Garnett,
So much time have I spent in these parts I fear I shall not see
Dorset this time. Up till now I have not been about my own busi-
ness, but running after County Councillors, and they are elusive
birds and hard I find it to put salt on their flying tails. I am now
going to Salisbury-in fact I'll post this letter there before 10
this evening so that you will not know where it was written in spite
of the address being there plain enough. I have had some days at
Marlborough, not a bad place, a small old red brick town with a
High Street a hundred feet wide. I was in the forest two or three
times and a few of the villages near. At Grafton I went to see a


420
LETTERS FROM W. H. HUDSON
a
nice woman of 55, who was born blind and has a curious history.
Her father was an illegitimate son blind from birth, but a fine
handsome man, remarkably clever, who built a business in the vil-
lage and married a nice woman and had 9 children. But all were
born blind. They all grew up and lived until about 30 or 35 and
then one by one died, except this one-Miss M. Miss M's mother,
they say, was a woman of a very beautiful character and very re-
ligious. When her children were growing up and the family were
all happy and healthy and prosperous in spite of so much blind-
ness, an old friend of the wife told her a secret which she had kept
in her breast for many years: it was that she-Mrs. M. and her
husband were children of the same father, this so affected the poor
woman's mind that she lost her reason and died in an asylum. Do
you know Melksham? I found it a little town of stone instead of
brick like the others, and was reminded that it is near Bath in a
stone-producing district. Not far from Melksham is Trowbridge,
another nice little old town where I have been twice lately in search
of a person I wanted to see. One day while waiting I went to pass
an idle hour in the church and when idly gazing at a marble mural
tablet on which a dying priest with a Roman nose, surrounded by
his sorrowing friends, is sculptured the name of George Crabbe un-
der it arrested my attention. Yes, it was the poet's monument: he
was vicar of Trowbridge 18 years until 1832 when he died. The
old verger then told me this story-has it ever been printed? Dur-
ing some repairs in this part of the building one of the workmen
Crabbe's
grave
and carried off the skull, which he sold
to a publican in the town for half a crown. He had it for some
time, then a Mr. Foley, a wealthy man of the town, hearing about
it, got the head and had it reburied, but not with the body. It was
placed in a casket made specially for it and buried by itself within
the wall just under the tablet. If you will send me a line addressed
to Post Office, Martin, Salisbury.
With kindest regards,
Yours,
W. H. HUDSON
broke open
a


TO EDWARD GARNETT
421
Martin
Salisbury.
June 11. (1903]
My dear Garnett
I'm here till Tuesday next but shall not be in London soon
enough to see you next week. Many thanks for writing: I shall be
curious to see your paper in the H. Review' and only fear you have
been too generous—that there will be honey on the rim of the cup
but not any bitter taste in the liquor. I have a letter from Graham
in which he speaks of the Academy's review of my book, and says
that “Garnett” probably wrote it. I have written to say that I
have not seen it, as I do not get any reviews sent but that you did
not write it.
Talking of Life-histories—in the neighbourhood of the village
where I visited the blind woman one very hot day I went over a
vast down to the village of Oare, and on the hill top got off and
sat in the shade to rest not far from a small lonely cottage. A very
old grey woman and a very small boy came out and took a long
look at me, and by and by the small boy came and presented me
with a spray of Southern-wood, and began to prattle telling me in-
cidentally his little life history. He appeared to be one of those
whose origin is "wrop in mystery.” A more beautiful little boy I
have not seen: he was 6 years old and that old bent woman, he
said, was his mother! His father was "a very old man," a farm
labourer, at Mr. Young's Farm. They kept no pig but they had a
yellow cat-only it was lost now. He went to school at Oare-
all down hill, and then all up hill to come back. The other small
boys plagued him but he always hit back so hard that they were
beginning to leave him alone. His sister Susan had 3 children, and
Fanny two. And he had a brother-a great fat man, who lived in
London, but they knew nothing about him. Mother knew, but she
wouldn't tell. His father's name was "Mr. Kent.” “And what's
your name?” I asked. He drew himself up, took a very deep
breath and said, “My name is Henry Jasper George Hicks Hal-
lam.” It was a fine name, I said, but why was he Hallam and his
father Kent? "I have two fathers," he said “—Mr. Kent and Mr.
Hallam."
On Sunday evening I had to go to Lyndhurst--some 24 miles
The Nature Books of W. H. Hudson. Humane Review. June 1903.-E. G.
1


422
LETTERS FROM W. H. HUDSON
from Martin-and did not return until Tuesday afternoon. A
funny business took me to that unbeloved place—something to do
-odd to say—with a review of my book: but the subject is not
worth going into just now. On my way back I crossed that wild
lonely street of pine and heath between Cadnam and Godshill
where you see no house for a distance of about 7 miles, and where
7
I encountered but two souls. One was a black cock—the first bird
of the kind I have seen in Hampshire. He rose before me from the
heath at the road side and fled away in proud style. The other
was a very tall fine looking old man sitting by the roadside smok-
ing his peaceful pipe in the wilderness. I sat down and had a long
talk with him. He was born close by, he told me, at a small village
near Fordingbridge. In the sixties he went out to America and
listed and went through the war; then got land on the upper Mis-
sissippi, and married and worked hard for many years cultivating
his land. It was flat marshy land and he worked too hard and
[ ? ) ague and had bad health generally. Then he lost his
wife and 2 children, and fell himself into consumption. One of his
lungs was completely gone. Then he came home to end his days in
his old native place among his kindred; but after 2 years more of
suffering began to mend, and finally got perfectly well and strong.
Now he works as a Road-mender and roams up and down the roads
that cross the heath on an old tricycle with his spade and pick and
other tools.
To judge from Blunt's own work-from this “New Pilgrimage,”
the series of sonnets telling of his own varied life and occupation
or rather amusements, you are perfectly right in what you say
of
him. He has had “too good a time.”
The Daily News is the paper I have oftenest seen in the country,
and Belloc and Chesterton have been in it a good deal. I am so
free from the vice of cleverness myself that I am not very tolerant
of it in others. Perhaps here I-
]
Compound for sins I am inclined to
By damning those I have no mind to.
B. amuses me, but irritates as well, and when I read C. I am in-
clined to exclaim with the young fellow after witnessing the old
man's feat of balancing an eel on his nose—“What made you so
wonderfully clever?” Perhaps he writes too much—perhaps a


TO EDWARD GARNETT
423
reputation for cleverness and paradox is bad for a man—a sort of
"heritage of woe” as Law said.
Pardon this long screed—my excuse must be that it is raining.
Poor little David !—but we have all had that sad experience in
some degree—to lose our own selves; but to boys sent far from
home to public schools for instance, it must sometimes be terrible.
Tell him, to console him, that by and by or in some future time he
will find it again—that it will seem all the more precious and
beautiful then.
With kindest regards to Mrs. Garnett,
Yours ever
W. H. HUDSON
3 Mansfield Cottage
Hunstanton
Norfolk.
17 Aug. (1904) ]
Dear Garnett
How, I wonder, are you and yours? I hope Mrs. Garnett has
,
been benefited, and I suppose David has been thoroughly Russian-
ized. I ought to have written to you before—when I came here-
for then I could have expected a line from you by now. We came
here a week ago and arrived on a pouring wet day and were told
that there was not a room to be had in the place. We tried the
hotels and they were full up, but after trudging about in the rain
and wind for some hours we “happened” on this cottage, a small
old house built of yellow-brown c--stone, and luckily the people
they had had had just left. (3 hads). The landlady is a poor tall
pale gaunt woman with a large nose, very sad looking, with one boy
of ten her only family. Her furniture was rather poor, and her
terms low, so we only took it by the day. But this poor soul is a
most interesting human being and we shall stay here all the time.
She is the daughter of a farmer near Lyne, and twelve years ago
married a mold man who took her to his town and was a drunkard
and bad fellow in all ways; so she took her boy and left him and
came back to her own country to make her living and her boys. She
is in spite of her ungainly outside a most worthy and even lovable
person, and her boy a curiously interesting little fellow, very grave


424
LETTERS FROM W. H. HUDSON
and serious, passionately fond of reading-history adventure—and
geology. He possesses Hugh Millar's works, and when his mother
takes a days holiday the two with their dinner in a basket go miles
away along the coast and spend the day together on the sands hunt-
ing for fossils at that point where there is an old submerged forest,
where branches and bits of amber and bones and shells are washed
up on the beach. The weather has been very bad since we came,
only yesterday we had half a day of calm and sunshine. Monday
we spent at Lyne, one of the most charming old towns I have ever
seen-one would like to live in it and forget the very name of
Progress and be at peace. It is altogether an interesting country,
but the Norfolk people are not attractive—they are to my mind the
most ungraceful unprepossessing people in England. Here, at
Hunstanton, at the height of its short season, the people that fill
the place are from Leicester, Bedford, Lincoln and several Mid-
land towns: very few Londoners. They are very nice looking peo-
ple of Saxon type: the children wonderfully fine-looking, with
very light hair, and many of the women large and fine, placid and
cow-like for all their blue eyes. They are of course the well-to-do
people of the towns they come from, Hunstanton being an expen-
sive place to stay at. You are, I am afraid, more interested in
humans than in birds. 'Tis the other way about with me; but I am
not well enough to go the long distances one needs to walk to see
the shore birds properly. A few days ago there were a few small
flocks of sandpipers, at different points along the beach where we
were walking—knots, dunlins, dotterell (dotterel) and [?]. We
stood some time watching one small flock at a distance of forty
yards. I remarked to my wife that they were always very tame
when they arrived at this season on the British coast, on their way
back from the arctic regions: “If you want to see their wingmark-
ings you must make them fly.” So she walked to them and got to
within eight yards before they rose up and flew a few yards off and
alighted again. There is no shooting yet here, and one would
think that man and birds had made peace.
I'm rather ashamed to send you this long screed about nothing.
I daresay we shall be a week longer here. I've had no proofs yet.
Kindest regards to Mrs. Garnett and David.
Yours
W. H. HUDSON
a


TO EDWARD GARNETT
425
40 St. Luke's Road, W.
Jan. 6. '14.
Dear Garnett
The Book you sent, Major's Early-Sussex has an appetising look
but I hav'nt been able to look at it yet (except the preface) so
must lie on the table until I can take it up or until you want it back
to lend to someone in a hurry. The Mrs. Wharton' I've also put
down after a few chapters—for the present. You didn't say
enough in your review: you damned the people described in the
book—the social state that can produce such creatures—and they
certainly are detestable, or would be if one could believe that Mrs.
Wharton is a true seer. Nothing in any of them to love or rever-
ence or pity or forgive; no beauty, sweetness, pathos; but they are
all like people made of zinc with their characters painted in big
black letters on their surfaces so that there shall be no mistake. To
read her book is like coming into a drawingroom, such as are com-
mon nowadays, overlighted with dozens of electric lights—all a
hard blinding glare with no faintest spot of shade anywhere. I
was going to say the only writer in England she could be likened
to is Frank Danby. But it would be an insult to Mrs. Frankau:
. detestable as most of her people are they are human, and even Dr.
Phillips of Maida Vale, the worst of the lot who poisons his in-
valid wife for the sake of his mistress, moves one's compassion as
any real human being does. However I can't suppose you had any
motive in sparing her notwithstanding her dog-like fidelity (if that
is the right word) to the master Henry James. To go back to the
subject I started with: I've had too many books tumbled upon me
the last few days, including Frazer's last two vols—Balder the
Beautiful. (You may want to read it some day.) But I've neglect-
ed them all to read a 3 penny book I picked up on a cheap stall
a few days agoLeigh Hunt's autobiography. Oddly enough I've
known L. H. since I was fourteen or fifteen, when owing to being
struck down with a fever which made me a prisoner for a couple of
months, I first began to look at books. Some of his books were on
the shelves. But I never knew till now that he had written his
own life. As an autobiography it has serious faults but it charms
and disarms me especially the early chapters and most of all those
about his mother. What a marvellously beautiful picture he gives
1 The Custom of the Country. By Edith Wharton.-E. G.


426
LETTERS FROM W. H. HUDSON
of her! Well, she was an American and must have been strangely
like
my mother, who was also American, and Hunt's mother's peo-
ple were loyalists while my mother's forbears were furiously anti-
English from the very beginning of the discontent which ended in
the Revolution. The Hunts were very poor when he was a small
boy, and he relates that one night he was with his mother some-
where in the vicinity of Blackfriars' bridge when a wretched wom-
an begged of them. His mother had no money to give but she told
the woman to follow her and going into a small dark side street
divested herself of the flannel petticoat and gave it to her. It
was bitterly cold and rheumatism and long illness followed as a
result of her action. Well, my mother did very many things far
far
greater than that. I remember after her death going into a na-
tive ranche one day, and the old woman of the house over eighty,
got up from the stool where she sat over the fire and said, with
the tears running from her eyes, "She always called me Mother
when she came to see me, but she was my mother and the mother
of us all and what shall we do now she has gone ?” How many
men-tens and hundreds of thousands of men—could say as much
as you and I and Leigh Hunt of a mother whose memory they wor-
ship: but all this has no existence in the world of certain fictionists
whose fictions are invariably hailed by the reviewers as the “real
thing," as "true to life" and all that.
Well, this is a long enough screed. As for what you say about
criticising one's friends of course I don't take it seriously: it is just
your fun-an attempt to draw me out. If I were to take it seri-
ously how if I were to ask you by way of retort—what would you
say of the man on the bench who allowed his judgments to be
swayed by his personal likes and dislikes? I take it that morally
the reviewer of books is in the position of the man on the bench,
that his brain and not his heart must decide and he has only to
judge justly—and “damn the consequences.
a
Ever yours
W. H. HUDSON


TO EDWARD GARNETT
427
a
23 North Parade
Penzance.
May 29. [1920]
Dear Garnett
I am now sending you the story' which you see is the old histori-
cal one of Edgar and Elfrida, a subject most unsuitable for me,
which was forced on me so to speak, and so I should not be sur-
prised to hear that I am out [?] of it here and that it is no good.
Well, you will tell me, and all I can say is I will not rewrite it as
I've now finished with it and very glad too, as I should have pre-
ferred one of my own natural history subjects—the book I had half
written before I came down in fact. But when I came down I put
some old envelopes, each containing some notes I had made on some
subjects which had interested me at one time. I thought it best to
bring them down and look over them to destroy most of them as
now useless when I turned out and looked at the Edgar and E. note
I had made years ago. I thought I might just try to make a little
thing of three or four thousand words and get rid of it in that way
instead of destroying it. But the confounded subject would not let
me go until I had made this long short story which runs to over
21,000 words. And now I'm fairly sick of it and can do nothing
beyond mending any glaringly wrong passage. But you will tell
me about that. I want it back in a few days if you can look at it
soon, as it is just possible that I may be able to go up pretty soon.
I haven't got much benefit from being here, though the London
winter would perhaps have carried me off before now if I hadn't
got away in November. I haven't been over to St. Ives yet, nor
to the Land's End, nor anywhere outside of Penzance as I haven't
felt well enough for anything.
What I feel about this thing is that I haven't succeeded in pro-
ducing the effect aimed at in the character of the woman as the
whole and sole interest is in that—the woman who was capable of
a horrible crime and who was yet essentially noble in spirit. But
as to its being a story of a thousand years ago, that doesn't matter
at all seeing that human passions then were what they are today
and always, and all the archaeology stuff is left out. You must
say Use it or Burn it and I'll obey.
Yours,
W. H. HUDSON
Dead Man's Plack.-E. G.
a


428
LETTERS FROM W. H. HUDSON
a
23 North Parade
Penzance.
June 2. '20.
Dear Garnett
Very many thanks for your helpful letter. I had seen when cor-
recting the MS. that a lot of sentences and phrases ought to come
out—and that Fisher allusion and things like that. But about
style—the moment it looks artificial it revolts me. I have never
conquered my dislike of Morris because of his Saxon words. You
did not notice, I dare say, as I don't use quotation marks, that the
concluding words of my Preamble are a quote from him. "With-
out external aid or compulsion, I say I could not make shadows
breathe, restore the dead and know what silent mouths once said.”
Well, why didn't he stick to his own principle and make the last
line: And know what mouths now dumb once said?
I suppose it was because his own diction without a Latin word
thrown in here and there was too distressing even to himself. If
you have ever succeeded in wading through the five huge volumes
of the Earthly Paradise you must have had a sickness of that kind
of writing. I'm glad you like the passages I like and think (best).
I sent a copy to Morley Roberts at the same time and he says those
are the wrong passages—that Elfrida's monologues must all be cut
short to make the story better.
I hope to go up next week and you will perhaps be able to come
somewhere and lunch with me. Today I went to Godolphin to
visit the Rector there, who last year when I was here was a poor
curate with not enough to live on at St. Erths. As he is a queer un-
conventional fellow I wanted to congratulate him. He told me of
a strange man who had spent thirty-two years in Patagonia, living
near Godolphin, and as I wished to see him we went off and paid
him a visit. He had lived in Tierra del Fuego and on the Straits
of Magellan and among the Andes, and also at the Rio Negre and
knew all my old friends there. I asked him why he didn't write
his adventures. He said he would get out pen and paper and start
writing them right away as soon as I left! But poor man, he is
past it, I fear, at seventy-eight after spending twenty years in Corn-
wall since he came home.
Yours,
W. H. HUDSON


TO EDWARD GARNETT
429
P. S. Ethelbold is one of about twenty varients of the name: I
chose Athelwold as it was Humes choice in his history and is most
familiar.
I asked Jenner-the old Brit. Museum man who lives down here,
the meaning of Plack but he couldn't say and was disturbed in
mind as he professes to know every English and Saxon word. Nor
had he ever heard of the tradition of Athelwold's death in Hamp-
shire.
I tell plainly enough where it is—Wherwell, a village on the
Test, and the Forest of Harewood is close by, on the Andover side.
About 2,000 acres of the original Forest remain till now, and the
owner, the lord of the manor is Iremonger, and it was one of that
family who put up the cross some 80 or 90 years ago at Dead Man's
Plack. Probably it means Dead man's place. Elfrida built her
monastery at the village where Athelwold's castle had stood, and it
continued down to the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry
VIII. But it was once partly destroyed during the horrible wars
of Stephen and Maud. But the stone walls remained intact I sup-
pose after it was burnt, as it continued as a nunnery after the wars.
And it exists still—or partly exists and is the dwelling house of the
Earls of Lovelace :—the present man is Byron's great grandson I
fancy. It is in the histories that Elfrida took the veil there and
died there. And some say it is still haunted by her ghost.
I was going to put that in a note at the end—but it would be
actionable as you are not allowed to say such things. But it was
rather an impressive ghost.


THE PHILOSOPHER KWANG
BY JOHN COWPER POWYS
TI
HE older texts of Taoism, as we get them translated by James
Legge in Max Muller's Sacred Books of the East, make up
but a small fraction of the two volumes in the Oxford Edition de-
voted to this cult. The larger portion of both these fascinating
books is filled with the writings of Kwang-tze, the “laughing phi-
losopher” of the kingdom of Liang.
The earlier texts are arresting enough to any mystical-minded
person; but one cannot help feeling, as one turns these
pages,
that
the real genius of the Taoist tradition is not the legendary Lao-tze,
its portentous prophet, but the much more whimsical and irrespon-
sible Kwang, its Voltairian high-priest.
This extraordinary and imaginative man of letters lived, it ap-
pears, about three and a half centuries before Christ and about two
centuries after Lao-tze and Confucius.
For some mysterious reason, however, Kwang, compared with
his great forerunners, still lacks the homage, still lacks the intel-
lectual recognition, that seems his due. And yet the quality of his
thought strikes us as more original, as more imaginative, than that
of either Lao-tze or Confucius. Perhaps it is that his chaos-loving
thought besieges our purer reason and—it may well be-corrupts it,
in the very manner against which the whole elaborate ritual of the
Confucian ethics was especially directed!
Very little is known of Kwang's life. He appears to have
guarded his freedom from official responsibility with a Montaign-
esque sagacity; for when a certain monarch sent messengers with
large gifts to bring him to Court his response is characteristic of his
habits of mind, both in its rudeness and in its quaint gaiety:
"Have you seen the victim-ox for the sacrifice? It is fed and
robed to enter the temple. When the time comes for it to do so,
it
would prefer to be a little pig; but it cannot get to be so. Go
away! Do not soil me with your presence! I would rather enjoy
myself in a filthy ditch than be subject to court regulations.”


JOHN COWPER POWYS
431
The most characteristic quality in Kwang's writings is his pecu-
liar sense of humour. This humour is something quite unique in
literature; and more than unique to our Western minds!
No doubt other Chinese classics approximate to its penetrating
flavour; but I doubt whether they attain it. It is certainly unmis-
takably Chinese in its quips and turns; but it is also-surely one
cannot be mistaken here-redolent of a certain saltish, turpentine-
like
pungency which is native to Kwang alone.
Everything that it approaches is given a little twist, a little turn,
a perceptibly new taste in the mouth. It is the body and pressure
of Kwang's whole mental vision. It is at once his rebellion against
what is intolerable in life and his way of escaping into a freer
world.
The closeness of the connexion between Kwang's humour and
Kwang's thought can be seen in his mania for the heterogeneous
and the casual, as contrasted with the homogeneous and the inev-
itable. His philosophy is nothing more nor less than a worship of
chaos, tempered by a sly and crafty salutation to whatever "Unut-
terable”—beyond all Monism and all Pluralism-may lie behind
chaos!
His humour therefore delights to concentrate itself upon the
most disconnected and inconsequential details; isolating such de-
tails arbitrarily and at random; and yet managing to squeeze out
of them a pungent metaphysical sap.
One might indeed compare the humour of Kwang to the fantas-
tic hoppings of a whimsical long-necked bird, who every now and
then stands gravely upon some object or another, one thin leg
curled up under its tail, with its head and beak twisted grotesquely
to one side, and makes its comment on the motley world! The Con-
fucian superiorities of Benevolence and Righteousness, with the
rather meticulous moral system which they imply, prove a most
provocative source of merriment to this "queer son of chaos.”
He is never weary of girding at the “Know-Alls” of life:
a
"Men all honour that which lies within the sphere of their
knowledge, but they do not know their dependence on what lies
outside that sphere;-may we not call their case one of great per-
plexity? Ah! Ah! There is no escaping from this dilemma. So it
is! So it is!"


432
THE PHILOSOPHER KWANG
The whimsicality of Kwang's bird-like hoppings through the
peat-bogs of chance assumes sometimes an enchanting picturesque-
ness; but this picturesqueness always seems to float and drift like
moon-lit sea-weed upon a bottomless ocean of mystery. The fol-
lowing passage, for example, is almost word for word a parallel to
William Blake's famous distinction between the power that creates
and the eye that records. It is interesting to note, however, the
difference between Blake's tempestuous anger with the unimagina-
tive and the querulous, supercilious little sigh with which Kwang
dismisses the subject:
“He who uses only the sight of the eyes is acted on by what he
sees; it is the intuition of the spirit that gives the assurance of cer-
tainty. And yet stupid people rely on what they see, and will have
it to be the sentiment of all men ;-all their success being with
what is external—is it not sad?”
There are many passages in these volumes that compel us to
think of Nietzsche's Zarathustra; but the terror of that silver bow
is always grandiose and Olympian; whereas the rogueries of Kwang
remain rusticated, quizzical, irresponsible, as if Pan himself were
scratching little moral vignettes on the bark of the beech-trees, in-
dulging now and again in a skip of his goat-shanks when his mis-
chiefs especially tickle his fancy.
“Tung-kwo asked Kwang, saying, Where is what you call the
Tao to be found? Kwang replied, 'Everywhere. The other said,
'Specify an instance of it—that will be more satisfactory.' 'It is
here in this ant.''Give a lower instance.' 'It is in this panic-
grass.' 'Give a still lower instance.' 'It is in this earthenware tile.'
'Surely that is the lowest instance? 'It is in that excrement!' To
this Tung-kwo gave no reply."
But there are passages too, where, as in some piece of discordant
Russian music, we grow conscious of a singular trembling of the
veil of Isis:
"Starlight asked Non-entity, saying, 'Master, do you exist? Or
do you not exist ?' He got no answer to his question, however, and
looked steadfastly to the appearance of the other, which was that


JOHN COWPER POWYS
433
of a deep void. All day long he looked to it but could hear noth-
ing; he clutched at it but got hold of nothing. Starlight then said,
'Perfect! Who can attain to this ? Non-existing non-existence;
and non-existing existence! How is it possible to reach to this?
Perfect!
It is a very nice and a very delicate question though one obvi-
ously beyond the scope of this sketch, whether the great doctrine
of the Tao was actually modified by Kwang; whether in fact,
Kwang's Tao departs from the original and orthodox Tao. One
suspects that it does depart from this not a little; but Kwang has
so plausible a manner of presenting his own temperamental vision
that it is very hard to catch him in the act of "glossing" the older
oracles.
For our part we are unable to see why the Taoism of Kwang
should not be a finer and a deeper philosophy than the Taoism of
Lao-tze. It is certainly more daring and more amusing. The Tao
probably had interpreters long before Lao-tze appropriated it; and
it
may
well be that what are called the “Classical Texts of Taoism”
represent a philosophical articulation of a much more primitive
and mythological cult, towards which the poetic imagination of
Kwang fumbles its own way.
His doctrine of the Tao remains in any case, as it is disclosed to
us in these extraordinary pages, a piece of human speculation that
may be enjoyed on its own merits. What it seems to reveal is noth-
ing less than what may well have been the religion of the human
race in some incredibly early period of its history; the worship in
plain words, of Chaos and Chance, combined with an awful recog-
nition of Something Unutterable—neither to be named as Exist-
ence nor as Nothingness, neither as the One nor as the Many-out
of the womb of which Chaos and Chance emerged and into which
they will sink.
It is the underlying presence of this Unutterable—a different
thing altogether from the Hindu Brahma—which makes it pos-
sible for Kwang to speak as if Life and Death themselves were only
temporary aspects of something that was beyond them both, and as
if neither Benevolence nor Righteousness could ever reach that
depth of clairvoyance which the mere "lying back” upon one's own
essential nature, such as it may be, in unmitigated simplicity and
sincerity, can enable us to attain.


434
THE PHILOSOPHER KWANG
Certain enchanting dialogues between mysterious figures that
seem to resemble those dehumanized persons that one sees on china
tea-cups, take place now and again. We will condense one of these
for the reader's benefit:
“Knowledge had rambled northwards to the region of the Dark
Water where he ascended the Imperceptible Slope, when it hap-
pened that he met Dumb Inaction. He addressed him, saying,
How do we know the Tao? Where do we find our rest in the
Tao? Where is the path to the Tao?' Dumb Inaction gave him
no reply. Not only did he not answer; but he did not know how
to answer. Knowledge then ascended the height of the End of
Doubt where he saw Heedless Blurter, to whom he put his ques-
tions. Heedless Blurter replied at once, 'Ah! I know and I will
tell you.' But while he was about to speak, he forgot what he
wanted to say. Knowledge returned to the palace of Ti and he
saw Hwang-ti, and Hwang-ti said, 'To dwell nowhere and to do
nothing is the first step; to start from nowhere and pursue no path
is the first step-Dumb Inaction was truly right because he did not
know the thing. Heedless Blurter was nearly right because he for-
got it. I and you are not nearly right because we know it.' Heed-
less Blurter heard of all this and considered that Hwang-ti knew
how to express himself on the subject.”
It is strange how, in the historic struggle for survival among
human ideas, a philosophy as delicately original as that of Kwang
should have fallen by the wayside. One cause of this, however, is
doubtless inherent in the doctrine itself. It is not for all men, it is
not for all moods, this fleeting phosphorescence of the great waters.
To many modern minds the naïveté of the style, the queer twists
,
of the humour, the smiling rigidity of the images, stiff and abrupt
as figures on an archaic frieze, will be all that emanates from the
writings of Kwang-tze. But to others, to a few here and there, it
may well happen that out of these whispered oracles from the im-
mense past, out of the Ailanthus groves of Mount Kwai-Khi, out
of the gardens of Hwang-ti, out of the rivers of Khu-yuan, there
will come a hint, a sign, a token, not altogether irrelevant, not alto-
gether without a deep philosophic significance, even for these days,
“so far retired from happy pieties”!



Photograph: Druet
LA COMTESSE ETIENNE DE BEAUMONT.
BY PABLO PICASSO





A LONG WAY ROUND TO NIRVANA
or, Much Ado About Dying
BY G. SANTAYANA
a
THA
WHAT the end of life is death may be called a truism, since the
various kinds of immortality that might perhaps supervene
would none of them abolish death, but at best would weave life and
death together into the texture of a more comprehensive destiny.
The end of one life might be the beginning of another, if the Crea-
tor had composed his great work like a dramatic poet, assigning
some lines to one character and some to another. Death would
then be merely the cue at the end of each speech, summoning the
next personage to break in and keep the ball rolling. Or perhaps,
as some suppose, all the characters are assumed in turn by a single
supernatural Spirit, who amid his endless improvisations is imagin-
ing himself living for the moment in this particular solar and social
system. Death in such a universal monologue would be but a
change of scene or of metre, while in the scramble of a real comedy
it would be a change of actors. In either case every voice would
be silenced sooner or later, and death would end each particular
life, in spite of all possible sequels.
The relapse of created things into nothing is no violent fatality,
but something naturally quite smooth and proper. This has been
set forth recently, in a novel way, by a philosopher from whom we
hardly expected such a lesson, namely Professor Sigmund Freud.
He has now broadened his conception of sexual craving or libido
into a general principle of attraction or concretion in matter, like
the Eros of the ancient poets Hesiod and Empedocles. The win-
dows of that stuffy clinic have been thrown open; that swell of
acrid disinfectants, those hysterical shrieks, have escaped into the
cold night. The troubles of the sick soul, we are given to under-
stand, as well as their cure, after all flow from the stars.
I am glad that Freud has resisted the tendency to represent this
principle of Love as the only principle in nature. Unity somehow
exercises an evil spell over metaphysicians. It is admitted that in
real life it is not well for One to be alone, and I think pure unity
a
a


436
A LONG WAY ROUND TO NIRVANA
is no less barren and graceless in metaphysics. You must have
plurality to start with, or trinity, or at least duality, if you
wish
to get anywhere, even if you wish to get effectively into the bosom
of the One, abandoning your separate existence. Freud, like
Empedocles, has prudently introduced a prior principle for Love
to play with; not Strife, however (which is only an incident in
Love) but Inertia, or the tendency towards peace and death. Let
us suppose that matter was originally dead, and perfectly content
to be so, and that it still relapses, when it can, into its old equilib-
rium. But the homogeneous (as Spencer would say) when it is
finite is unstable: and matter, presumably not being coextensive
space, necessarily forms aggregates which have an inside and
an outside. The parts of such bodies are accordingly differently
exposed to external influences and differently related to one an-
other. This inequality, even in what seems most quiescent, is big
with changes, destined to produce in time a wonderful complexity.
It is the source of all uneasiness, of life, and of love.
with
a
.
.
“Let us imagine (writes Freud'] an undifferentiated vesicle of
sensitive substance: then its surface, exposed as it is to the outer
world, is by its very position differentiated, and serves as an organ
for receiving stimuli. Embryology, repeating as it does the history
of evolution, does in fact show that the central nervous system
arises from the ectoderm; the grey cortex of the brain remains a
derivative of the primitive superficial layer.
This morsel
of living substance floats about in an outer world which is charged
with the most potent energies, and it would be destroyed
if it were not furnished with protection against stimulation. It
acquires this through
a special integument or membrane.
The outer layer, by its own death, has secured all the deep-
er layers from a like fate.
It must suffice to take little
samples of the outer world, to taste it, so to speak, in small quanti-
ties. In highly developed organisms the receptive external layer
of what was once a vesicle has long been withdrawn into the depths
of the body, but portions of it have been left on the surface imme-
diately beneath the common protective barrier. These portions
form the sense-organs. [On the other hand] the sensitive cortical
The following quotations are drawn from Beyond the Pleasure-Principle,
by Sigmund Freud; authorized translation by C. J. M. Hubback. The
International Psycho-Analytic Press, 1922, pp. 29-48. The italics are in
the original.
.
a
.
.
1


G. SANTAYANA
437
a
layer has no protective barrier against excitations emanating from
within.
The most prolific sources of such excitations are
the so-called instincts of the organism.
The child never
gets tired of demanding the repetition of a game.
he
wants always to hear the same story instead of a new one, insists
inexorably on exact repetition, and corrects each deviation which
the narrator lets slip by mistake.
According to this, an
instinct would be a tendency in living organic matter impelling it
towards reinstatement of an earlier condition, one which it had
abandoned under the influence of external disturbing forces—a
kind of organic elasticity or, to put it another way, the manifesta-
tion of inertia in organic life.
“If, then, all organic instincts are conservative, historically ac-
quired, and directed towards regression, towards reinstatement of
something earlier, we are obliged to place all the results of organic
development to the credit of external, disturbing, and distracting
influences. The rudimentary creature would from its very begin-
ning not have wanted to change, would, if circumstances had re-
mained the same, have always merely repeated the same course of
existence. But in the last resort it must have been the evolution of
our earth, and its relation to the sun, that has left its imprint on
the development of organisms. The conservative organic instincts
have absorbed every one of these enforced alterations in the course
of life, and have stored them for repetition; they thus present the
delusive appearance of forces striving after change and progress,
while they are merely endeavouring to reach an old goal by ways
both old and new. This final goal of all organic striving can be
stated too. It would be counter to the conservative nature of in-
stinct if the goal of life were a state never hitherto reached. It must
be rather an ancient starting point, which the living being left long
ago, and to which it harks back again by all the circuitous paths of
development
The goal of all life is death.
“Through a long period of time the living substance may have
had death within easy reach
.. until decisive ex-
ternal influences altered in such a way as to compel [it] to ever
greater deviations from the original path of life, and to ever more
complicated and circuitous routes to the attainment of the goal of
death. These circuitous ways to death, faithfully retained by the
conservative instincts, would be neither more nor less than the
phenomena of life as we know it.”
.


438
A LONG WAY ROUND TO NIRVANA
9)
Freud puts forth these interesting suggestions with much mod-
esty, admitting that they are vague and uncertain and (what it is
even more important to notice) mythical in their terms; but it
seems to me that, for all that, they are an admirable counterblast
to prevalent follies. When we hear that there is, animating the
whole universe, an élan vital, or general impulse toward some un-
known but single ideal, the terms used are no less uncertain, myth-
ical, and vague, but the suggestion conveyed is false, whereas that
conveyed by Freud's speculations is true. In what sense can myths
and metaphors be true or false? In the sense that, in terms drawn
from moral predicaments or from literary psychology, they may
report the general movement and the pertinent issue of material
facts, and may inspire us with a wise sentiment in their presence.
In this sense I should say that Greek mythology was true and
Calvinist theology was false. The chief terms employed in psycho-
analysis have always been metaphorical: "unconscious wishes,”
"the pleasure-principle," "the Oedipus complex," "Narcissism,"
"the censor”; nevertheless, interesting and profound vistas may be
opened up, in such terms, into the tangle of events in a man's life,
a
and a fresh start may be made with fewer encumbrances and less
morbid inhibition. “The shortcomings of our description,” Freud
”
says, "would probably disappear if for psychological terms we
could substitute physiological or chemical ones. These too only
constitute a metaphorical language, but one familiar to us for a
much longer time, and perhaps also simpler.” All human discourse
is metaphorical, in that our perceptions and thoughts are adven-
titious signs for their objects, as names are, and by no means copies
of what is going on materially in the depths of nature; but just as
the sportsman's eye, which yields but a summary graphic image,
can trace the flight of a bird through the air quite well enough to
shoot it and bring it down, so the myths of a wise philosopher about
the origin of life or of dreams, though expressed symbolically, may
reveal the pertinent movement of nature to us, and may kindle in
us just sentiments and true expectations in respect to our fate—for
his own soul is the bird this sportsman is shooting.
Now I think these new myths of Freud's about life, like his old
ones about dreams, are calculated to enlighten and to chasten us
enormously about ourselves. The human spirit, when it awakes,
finds itself in trouble; it is burdened, for no reason it can assign,
with all sorts of anxieties about food, pressures, pricks, noises, and
a


G. SANTAYANA
439
pains. It is born, as another wise myth has it, in original sin. And
the passions and ambitions of life, as they come on, only complicate
this burden and make it heavier, without rendering it less incessant
or gratuitous. Whence this fatality, and whither does it lead? It
comes from heredity, and it leads to propagation. When we ask
how heredity could be started or transmitted, our ignorance of na-
ture and of past time reduces us to silence or to wild conjectures.
Something—let us call it matter—must always have existed, and
some of its parts, under pressure of the others, must have got tied
up into knots, like the mainspring of a watch, in such a violent and
unhappy manner that when the pressure is relaxed they fly open
as fast as they can, and unravel themselves with a vast sense of
relief. Hence the longing to satisfy latent passions, with the fugi-
tive pleasure in doing so. But the external agencies that originally
wound up that mainspring never cease to operate; every fresh
stimulus gives it another turn, until it snaps, or grows flaccid, or
is unhinged. Moreover, from time to time, when circumstances
change, these external agencies may encrust that primary organ
with minor organs attached to it. Every impression, every ad-
venture, leaves a trace or rather a seed behind it. It produces a
further complication in the structure of the body, a fresh charge,
which tends to repeat the impressed motion in season and out of
season. Hence that perpetual docility or ductibility in living sub-
stance which enables it to learn tricks, to remember facts, and
(when the seeds of past experiences marry and cross in the brain)
to imagine new experiences, pleasing or horrible. Every act initi-
ates a new habit and may implant a new instinct. We see people
even late in life carried away by political or religious contagions or
developing strange vices; there would be no peace in old age, but
rather a greater and greater obsession by all sorts of cares, were it
not that time, in exposing us to many adventitious influences,
weakens or discharges our primitive passions; we are less greedy,
less lusty, less hopeful, less generous. But these weakened primi-
tive impulses are naturally by far the strongest and most deeply
rooted in the organism: so that although an old man may be con-
verted or may take up some hobby, there is usually something thin
in his elderly zeal, compared with the heartiness of youth; nor is
it edifying to see a soul in which the plainer human passions are
extinct becoming a hot-bed of chance delusions.
In any case each fresh habit taking root in the organism forms


440
A LONG WAY ROUND TO NIRVANA
a little mainspring or instinct of its own, like a parasite; so that
an elaborate mechanism is gradually developed, where each lever
and spring holds the other down, and all hold the mainspring down
together, allowing it to unwind itself only very gradually, and
meantime keeping the whole clock ticking and revolving, and caus-
ing the smooth outer face which it turns to the world, so clean
and innocent, to mark the time of day amiably for the passer-by.
But there is a terribly complicated labour going on beneath, pro-
pelled with difficulty, and balanced precariously, with much secret
friction and failure. No wonder that the engine often gets visibly
out of order, or stops short: the marvel is that it ever manages to
go at all. Nor is it satisfied with simply revolving and, whe
last dismounted, starting afresh in the person of some seed it has
dropped, a portion of its substance with all its concentrated in-
stincts wound up tightly within it, and eager to repeat the ancestral
experiment; all this growth is not merely material and vain. Each
clock in revolving strikes the hour, even the quarters, and often
with lovely chimes. These chimes we call perceptions, feelings,
purposes, and dreams; and it is because we are taken up entirely
with this pretty music, and perhaps think that it sounds of itself
and needs no music-box to make it, that we find such difficulty in
conceiving the nature of our own clocks and are compelled to de-
scribe them only musically, that is, in myths. But the ineptitude
of our aesthetic minds to unravel the nature of mechanism does not
deprive these minds of their own clearness and euphony. Besides
sounding their various musical notes, they have the cognitive func-
tion of indicating the hour and catching the echoes of distant events
or of maturing inward dispositions. This information and emo-
tion, added to the incidental pleasures in satisfying our various pas- .
sions, make up the life of an incarnate spirit. They reconcile it to
the external fatality that has wound up the organism, and is break-
ing it down; and they rescue this organism and all its works from
the indignity of being a vain complication and a waste of motion.
That the end of life should be death may sound sad: but what
other end can anything have? The end of an evening party is to
go to bed; but its use is to gather congenial people together, that
they may pass the time pleasantly. An invitation to the dance is
not rendered ironical because the dance cannot last for ever; the
youngest of us and the most vigorously wound up, after a few
hours, has had enough of sinuous stepping and prancing. The


G. SANTAYANA
441
transitoriness of things is essential to their physical being, and not
at all sad in itself; it becomes sad by virtue of a sentimental illu-
sion, which makes us imagine that they wish to endure, and that
their end is always untimely; but in a healthy nature it is not so.
What is truly sad is to have some impulse frustrated in the midst
of its career, and robbed of its chosen object; and what is painful is
to have an organ lacerated or destroyed when it is still vigorous,
and not ready for its natural sleep and dissolution. We must not
confuse the itch which our unsatisfied instincts continue to cause
with the pleasure of satisfying and dismissing each of them in turn.
Could they all be satisfied harmoniously we should be satisfied once
for all and completely. Then doing and dying would coincide
throughout and be a perfect pleasure.
This same insight is contained in another wise myth which has
inspired morality and religion in India from time immemorial: I
mean the doctrine of Karma. We are born, it says, with a heri-
tage, a character imposed, and a long task assigned, all due to the
ignorance which in our past lives has led us into all sorts of com-
mitments. These obligations we must pay off, relieving the pure
spirit within us from its accumulated burdens, from debts and
assets both equally oppressive. We cannot disentangle ourselves
by mere frivolity, nor by suicide: frivolity would only involve us
more deeply in the toils of fate, and suicide would but truncate
our misery and leave us for ever a confessed failure. When life is
understood to be a process of redemption, its various phases are
taken up in turn without haste and without undue attachment;
their coming and going have all the keenness of pleasure, the holi-
ness of sacrifice, and the beauty of art. The point is to have ex-
pressed and discharged all that was latent in us; and to this perfect
relief various temperaments and various traditions assign different
names, calling it having one's day, or doing one's duty, or realizing
one's ideal, or saving one's soul. The task in any case is definite
and imposed on us by nature, whether we recognize it or not;
therefore we can make true moral progress or fall into real errors.
Wisdom and genius lie in discerning this prescribed task and in
doing it readily, cleanly, and without distraction. Folly on the
contrary imagines that any scent is worth following, that we have
an infinite nature, or no nature in particular, that life begins with-
out obligations and can do business without capital, and that the
will is free, instead of being a specific burden and a tight hereditary


442
RAIN: ST AUGUSTINE
knot to be unravelled. This romantic folly is defended by some
philosophers without self-knowledge, who think that the variations
and further entanglements which the future may bring are the
manifestation of spirit; but they are, as Freud has indicated, im-
posed on living beings by external pressure, and take shape in the
realm of matter. It is only after the organs of spirit are formed
mechanically that spirit can exist, and can distinguish the better
from the worse in the fate of those organs, and therefore in its own
fate. Spirit has nothing to do with infinity. Infinity is something
physical and ambiguous; there is no scale in it and no centre. The
depths of the human heart are finite, and they are dark only to
ignorance. Deep and dark as a soul may be when you look down
into it from outside, it is something perfectly natural; and the same
understanding that can unearth our suppressed young passions, and
dispel our stubborn bad habits, can show us where our true good
lies. Nature has marked out the path for us beforehand; there are
snares in it, but also primroses, and it leads to peace.
RAIN: ST AUGUSTINE
BY ELIZABETH J. COATSWORTH
The rain is lisping at our blue umbrella,
Whispering against the silk.
The gardens smell of wet moss and ferns.
The little pools at our feet ruffle like pigeons in the breeze.
The streets are almost deserted. Everything is veiled,
And our fingers touch on the handle of the blue umbrella.


THE WERTHEIMER PORTRAITS
BY ROGER FRY
I
WENT to see the Wertheimer portraits now on view at the
National Gallery with some trepidation. I remembered so well
seeing them as they appeared year by year on the walls of the
Royal Academy. I remembered the chorus of praise with which my
fellow-critics greeted them. I remembered some of the acid and
disobliging phrases with which, in my youthful fanaticism, I had
denounced them, and I wondered whether, when once they were
enshrined in the National Gallery, I should be compelled in hon-
esty to say that I had failed to recognize a great master in the dawn
of his triumph or whether I should find myself once more a solitary
Devil's Advocate. Either alternative seemed to me disagreeable.
However, the sight of them relieved me of apprehension. I saw
that I had been both right and wrong, and I saw that the dispute
between my fellow-critics and myself arose from a misunderstand-
ing of the meaning of the words we used. I felt then that what I
had said was substantially true; that when I said that Mr Sargent
was "our greatest practitioner in paint” I had very nearly hit the
mark. But if I had been right from a purely aesthetic standpoint
I had none the less been wrong in pedantically insisting on that in
exhibitions of what ought to be regarded as an applied art. I had
used "practitioner in paint” as a term of abuse, comparing it with
the honourable title of artist. I had failed to see that just as there
is need both for pure and applied science so there is need for both
pure and applied art, and that the art of Mr Sargent is eminently
and entirely of the latter kind. It is art applied to social require-
ments and social ambitions. I see now that this marvellous series
of portraits represents a social transaction quite analogous to the
transactions between a man and his lawyer. A rich man has need
of a lawyer's professional skill to enable him to secure the trans-
mission of his wealth to posterity, and a rich man, if he have the in-
telligence of Sir Asher Wertheimer and the luck to meet a Sargent,
can, by the latter's professional skill, transmit his fame to posterity.
And as we must suppose that it is in the interests of society that
a


444
THE WERTHEIMER PORTRAITS
a rich man's wealth should be duly transmitted to his heirs, so we
may admit that Sir Asher Wertheimer was likewise conferring a
benefit on society, both now and in centuries to come, by transmit-
ting his personality and his entourage. Viewing the whole matter,
then, in this historical perspective and throwing over as irrelevant
the purely aesthetic point of view, I can see and rejoice in Mr Sar-
gent's astonishing professional skill.
We praise a great doctor though he has added nothing to the
knowledge of truth, and we should praise a great applied artist
though he has given us no new glimpse of beauty. Therefore, al-
though Mr Sargent is already more fully represented than any liv-
ing and almost any dead artist in our national collections, I for one
welcome the bequest by which the National Gallery becomes the
trustee of Sir Asher Wertheimer's fame.
I see that this record of the life of a successful business man of
the close of the Nineteenth Century has a profound historical inter-
est. It was a new thing in the history of civilization that such a
man should venture to have himself and the members of his numer-
ous family portrayed on the scale and with the circumstance of a
royal or ducal family, and I see that Mr Sargent has quite peculiar
and unique gifts for doing what both his patron and posterity re-
quired of him, and that such gifts are by no means common and de-
serve the fullest recognition.
For Mr Sargent was a brilliant ambassador between Sir Asher
Wertheimer and posterity. He managed on the one hand to give
these family portraits the sort of decorative splendour and éclat
which puts them in line with the princely portraits of the past and
which gave just satisfaction to his patron, and yet-and this is
surely a supreme merit—he has never flattered him or his family.
They are all seen with an almost coldly dispassionate and terribly
observant eye. There they are on just the particular social emi-
nence to which they had attained, and not altogether without traces
of the meritorious effort of attaininent. I used to imagine some
trace of irony in Mr Sargent's work. I think I was wrong: he is too
detached, too much without parti pris for that. But that detach-
ment has enabled him to miss no fact that might have social sig.
nificance, so that the record of his observations lends itself, if one
chooses, to an ironical interpretation. It requires rare gifts indeed
to make such a record-a keenness of eye, a skill of hand, and a


ROGER FRY
445
transparent honesty of purpose that do not often occur to this de-
gree. The record is indeed so well made that it will always be
legible, and what is to be read therein will have an ever increasing
historical interest.
To ask to have besides all this works of art is to be too exacting.
Indeed, it is asking almost an impossibility. No man who was
mainly an artist could have, so to speak, “delivered the goods.”
No artist could have treated one after another of all these mem-
bers of the family with almost equal success, with such certainty of
keeping to standard. His sensibility would have led him, here into
some more penetrating and curious inquiry, there it would have
been rebuffed altogether. From an artist, questions of composition
and design would demand more anxious research. He could not
have been satisfied as Mr Sargent was with a mere general ade-
quacy
of presentment. Questions of quality would have held him
up, made him repeat passages again and again and, perhaps in the
search for some more intimate expression, made him lose all that
freshness and élan which never deserts so competent a performer as
Mr Sargent.
Mr Sargent has not the distinctively artistic vision-he has, one
might say, no visual passion at all, scarcely any visual predilections
- he has rather the undifferentiated eye of the ordinary man
trained to its finest acuteness for observation, and supplied with the
most perfectly obedient and skilful hand to do its bidding. But
his values are never aesthetic values; they are the values of social
and everyday life. Naturally, such a vision would never force a
man to discover the means by which to record its experiences, and
here comes in the connexion between applied and pure art. For,
just as the man of applied science, having no particular passion for
truth, applies the results, discovered by those who have, to some
ulterior social end, so Mr Sargent has known how to use for his pur-
poses the discoveries of pure art. And he was not only very skilful
in seeing what could be of service, but very fortunate in what lay
to his hand. For the dominant influence when he was a student in
Paris was Manet. Now, Manet was very intensely an artist, an
artist who had a passionate feeling about certain oppositions of
tone and colour, and who felt these oppositions in such a way that
he had to discover a very abrupt and frank way of stating them.
He consequently invented a peculiarly straightforward and concise


446
THE WERTHEIMER PORTRAITS
a
technique. It was this technique which Mr Sargent had the quick-
ness to see might be turned to quite other purposes, namely, to the
rapid and incisive statement of the main facts of representation.
For Manet certain relations of tone and colour had a definite aes-
thetic significance; for Mr Sargent they were merely means to ef-
fective representation.
From Manet, too, he picked up ready-made, as it were, certain
colour harmonies—a chord of salmon pinks, oyster greys, and cela-
don greens to which he added, as a kind of universal medium, cer-
tain cool brown notes. This chord in all its varieties is adequate to
his purposes, but he never shows in his statement the positive con-
viction of a passionate apprehension. It is part of the generally
decorative effect of his presentment. Such, as I understand it, is
the art of Mr Sargent, a felicitous application of means to an end
quite different from that for which they were originally discovered.
I see that one of my fellow critics says that Mr Sargent has
ascended Parnassus so high that all can see him. I think he has got
wrong in his topography. It is not Parnassus that Mr Sargent has
climbed, but another mountain which frequently gets confused with
it when viewed at a distance. This mountain has not yet been
named. It is very high and has the advantage of never being lost
in cloud as Parnassus frequently is. A number of very celebrated
artists sit there, and Mr Sargent takes his place on it perhaps not a
very long way below Frans Hals, Van Dyck, and Sir Thomas Law-
rence.
If only this mountain could be properly named much confusion
would be avoided. I for one should not have had that long misun-
derstanding with my fellow critics in the early years of this cen-
tury. Moreover, it would save a painful feeling of injustice which
rankles unnecessarily in the hearts of many artists. It ought to be
as clearly understood in art as it is in science that those who pro-
fess the applied branches of these studies have a right to ten times
the salary and far higher honours than those who are obsessed by
the love of truth and beauty. The latter must also accept the fact
that those who are as pre-eminent in applied art as Mr Sargent,
may gain, besides present wealth and fame, almost as much post-
humous glory as the true Parnassians.



Courtesy of the National Gallery, London
BY JOHN S. SARGENT
ASHER WERTHEIMER.






Courtesy of the National Gallery, London
BY JOHN S. SARGENT
HYLDA WERTHEIMER.






Courtesy of the National Gallery, London
ESSIE, RUBY, AND FERDINAND. CHILDREN OF ASHER WERTHEIMER. BY JOHN S. SARGENT


1


MISS FLOTSAM AND MR JETSAM
BY ELISABETH SANXAY HOLDING
SHE
a
HE had scarcely closed the door of her room when the electric
lights went out. She was, however, prepared for this emer-
gency, which was not rare; in fact she had caused it to happen once
or twice herself while adjusting little devices for cooking and laun-
dering. She groped her way to the bureau and lighted a candle
always ready there, and instead of feeling annoyed, she was at
heart innocently pleased by the diversion and by the Aickering
candle light. Then, just as she would hurry to the window at any
unusual sound in the street, or would join any crowd, she went out
into the passage, to lean over the balustrade. It was not curiosity
that impelled her, but the terrible desire of her lonely and forgot-
ten spirit to plunge into life. She wanted to see, to hear any one,
anything.
Looking down the well of the staircase, she saw all the lodging
house black and still. With a little sigh she turned back, and no-
ticed that the door of the room next her own was open, showing in
the dark interior the glowing end of a cigarette; she hesitated,
struggling with one of those impulses which had given her so much
trouble. Often as she had been rebuffed, hurt, derided, she could
not stifle that violent longing to approach other human beings.
“No, I won't!” she said. “I won't
But it was too strong for her. Half reluctant, she approached
the open door. .
"Would
you
like a candle ?" she asked.
A suave and weary voice replied, amiably.
“Thank you. But unless this is going to be more or less perma-
nent, it doesn't matter."
"Well, you never know ." she said, mendaciously, for
she did know well enough that a new fuse would promptly be in-
stalled. “I've got a lot of extra candles.
Decency compelled the man to say that he would like a candle,
and she went off to fetch it. When she returned, he was standing
in his doorway, a slender young fellow with a fastidious and melan-
.
.
.
a


448
MISS FLOTSAM AND MR JETSAM
.
choly air. He watched her coming; the light she carried lent to her
face something long gone by daylight; she was lamentably thin and
haggard; in a few years she would be grotesque, but youth still
lingered with her now.
He took the candle from her with a word of thanks, but he could
not turn away from her pitiable eagerness.
“I suppose this sort of thing's a serious inconvenience to some
people,” he observed.
"Well,” she answered, with a nervous little giggle, “it is to me,
I must say. I know I'm not supposed to, but just the same, I do
.
I
cook my dinners in my room. And now I guess I'll have to wait.”
“Too bad!” he said. And still he hadn't the heart to go, even to
discourage her. “Poor little devil!” he thought. "Famished for
talk.” And aloud he said—“Won't you come in and sit down until
the lights are on again?''
Her hollow cheeks grew scarlet.
“Well
I don't think I'd better
she said.
“I'd like to, only
He didn't press the point; if necessary he could stand in the door-
way until the candle burnt out in his hand, anything rather than
this
poor creature.
“It's queer, isn't it?” she said. "A big house, all full of people,
”
and nobody ever talking to anybody else.
And if you do
try to be friendly, why
they think you're after some-
thing."
“I suppose they do,” he said, thoughtfully.
“There was a woman up on this floor last year,” she went on.
“She looked so kind of miserable that one night when I'd fixed up
a nice little supper, I knocked at her door and asked her to come in
and eat with me. But she was so disagreeable about it, you'd have
thought I was offering her poison. And then a little later she
turned on the gas. It didn't kill her. They took her off to the hos-
pital, and I saw in the paper that she said she'd done it because she
was so lonely.
That's why they haven't any gas now. I
guess a lot of people are lonely, like that.
Only, if they'd
be more friendly, and not so suspicious about people, they wouldn't
need to be."
"Oh, you poor little devil!” he thought, so moved that he could
not speak.
drive away
.
.
.
.


ELISABETH SANXAY HOLDING
449
9
She misinterpreted his silence.
"Well, I'll be going, I guess—” she said, and her smile was in-
tolerable.
“Please don't!” he said, hastily.
She looked at him, incredulous and delighted.
"I don't want to bother you—” she began, but he interrupted,
vehemently.
"You're not. Not in the least.
Look here! If you
can't cook your dinner, won't you come out somewhere with me?
I'd appreciate it very much.”
“Oh! I couldn't!" she cried.
He knew that she could and would, but that whatever pride she
had left required some urging on his part, and he made a creditable
attempt to do what she wished. Her perfunctory little denials
went down, one after the other.
“All right, then, I will!” she said, resolutely. “It's nice of you
to ask me, I must say."
“No; it's nice of you to come,” he retorted. “It's very-friend-
ly.”
She went back into her room to get ready. That did not take
her long, for she had lost interest in herself; she dressed her body
as if it had been a doll which must be made neat and presentable
for the street. But the magic of the candlelight still wrought its
charm; looking at herself in the mirror she remembered how pretty
she had been.
As she was adjusting her hat, the lights came on.
"Oh!" she cried, terribly grieved. "Now I can't go!” And she
went out into the hall, to forestall his saying that she could very
well cook her own meal now. But he was waiting for her, hat in
hand, and she decided to say nothing.
“If he really wants me to come
she thought. She
could not quite believe that he did, but if he would pretend, so
would she. And if he wished to pretend that he was not in all ways
superior to her, but was her equal in misfortune, she would do that,
too.
He asked her no questions, but nevertheless she told him lies.
Sitting across the table from him in the chop house, she grew gar-
rulous and she told him those things about herself which she had
often dreamed were true. With now and then a fact; she was


450
MISS FLOTSAM AND MR JETSAM
really cashier in a dairy, as she said, and she really had come from
Seattle.
“That's a long way,” he remarked, smiling. “Aren't you ever
“
homesick ?"
Again her thin face grew scarlet. He wouldn't have asked that
if he had known what her home or her life there had been.
“Well
it was lovely there,” she said, and, so that he
should not suspect, she invented still more wildly, an impossible
past existence; she tried to make him see a delicately brought-up
young girl leaving a home of marvellous luxury-
“Because I—I wanted to be independent,” she said.
“Quite right!” said he, absently. Didn't she know that all her
history was written plain on her haggard little face? Weren't there
thousands like her, everywhere, no mystery to any man? Inde-
pendent! Perhaps a ball in flight from one careless hand to an-
other might feel independent for a little moment, in mid-air.
Later on, when she fancied she had made the favourable impres-
sion she intended to make, she grew more candid.
“I haven't got on so very well,” she admitted. “I learned mil-
linery back home, and I thought I'd do fine with that. But,”
She paused. “I don't know,” she said, with a sigh. "I seem to
have just sort of drifted.”
A bit of flotsam, he reflected, helplessly adrift on a swift and
most merciless tide. Looking back, she could no longer see the ship
from whence she had come; looking forward, not discern the shore
toward which she was being carried; no use for her to struggle.
“If her life's flotsam,” he thought, “mine is jetsam-something
that's been deliberately thrown overboard. Anyhow we're in the
same current, and bound for the same rocks in the end.”
He pursued the fancy while she talked.
“I could swim back and climb on board the ship again, if I want-
ed. But I don't. I'd be one of the crew, helping to take her into
God knows what port. Nobody'd care where I wanted to go. I'd
rather float along alone.”
It was a pain to watch her, for beneath her uneasily dainty man-
ners, her nervous little laugh, her strained vivacity, he could per-
ceive an immeasurable lassitude. She had given up; even her van-
ity was gone, her finger nails neglected, her hair uncurled. She
was anxious enough to please—not as a woman, only as a comrade.
>


ELISABETH SANXAY HOLDING
451
“It's either despair or repentance,” he decided.
He wished with all his heart that she would go, for he had
become weary beyond endurance. The quality of mercy is not
strained, but pity is another and a more fragile thing. He was
tired of the pity she aroused in him; he wanted to be rid of her and
to forget her.
“I can't help her," he thought. "And I can't stand the sight of
the poor little devil. I'm not capable of an impersonal interest in
misery.”
But as surely as if she clung round his neck she held him with
her chatter. He saw clearly enough a monstrous claim being made
upon him, extending into an indefinite future. And he had already
paid so dear to be free of claims! In moody silence he brought her
back to the door of her room and said “good-night,” knowing well
that he could not avoid her, that he would have to endure the most
profound weariness and even unhappiness, not because of any faint-
est liking for her, but because he was by nature unable to hurt her.
The next evening she knocked at his door.
“I brought you a nice little bit of supper I just cooked," she
whispered, glancing round like a conspirator. With profuse thanks
he retired into the room, and locking the door, slid the stuff off the
plate into a paper bag.
“This must end!” he thought, scowling. Nevertheless, he had
not the courage to go out to dinner for hours, until he was nearly
famished, and when he returned, the certainty that she was wait-
ing and longing to speak to him was too much for him.
She opened her door instantly.
“Here's your plate," he said, “and thanks very much.”
His air of polite finality was only too successful; the look in her
eyes was terrible.
“Oh, that's all right!” she said, airily, and turned away to hide
her tears.
“No!” he said, hastily. "I— Look here! Please!"
“Oh, that's all right!" she repeated, still more gaily, and he saw
her shoulders twitch in a sob like a shudder. It was unendurable.
He came a step or two nearer and lightly touched her arm.
“You know we're neighbours,” he said, inanely.
She turned back then, with tears in her eyes, but smiling radi-
antly.


452
MISS FLOTSAM AND MR JETSAM
.
.
"I've got so silly,” she explained. “I'm so afraid of being a
“
nuisance.
He assured her that she wasn't that; he went on to say a good
many things which he didn't mean, and in the end, he asked her to
come out for a walk. She took up her hat at once and pinned it on
without even a glance in the mirror; her eyes on his face, garrulous
and happy again now.
As they descended through the silent house, her light voice seem-
ed to flutter like a scrap of paper in the wind—a lost voice, that
was never to alight in any heart.
It was a cold night and she was thinly dressed, but what did she
care for that? She would have walked on for ever, anywhere, in
any weather, so that he walked beside her. Without a word, she
made him aware of that, and it hurt and angered him.
“This can't go on!” he thought. “It's the worst sort of folly.
She's got to be made to see.
He began to talk a little at random.
“I shan't stop here long,” he said. “I'm old enough to know that
one place is very like another, and still I'm always looking for one
that won't be."
“Oh! You're going away?” she asked, with a little gasp.
“Yes. There's nothing to keep me here,” he answered.
They went on in silence for some time; now that he had made
her see, he had a very uncomfortable consciousness that she was see-
ing very clearly in the dark at that moment.
“Well. of course
you've got such a lot ahead
she said at last, in a trembling voice.
"Only what everyone else has,” he answered, impatiently.
“You mean—dying ?"
“Ending,” he said.
“Maybe it isn't ending,” she said, with an unconcealed sob. “I
hope it isn't.”
“Good Lord! Haven't you had enough ?” he demanded.
“No, no! I just wish I could have another chance.
“But have you ever had a chance ?”
“Yes, I did! Oh, I could have been different!" she cried. “You
don't know
I could have been
Now, you see,
I haven't anything.
Not anything. When I think how
different I could have been! .
•
.
.
of you
.
.
.


ELISABETH SANXAY HOLDING
453
Pitiable illusion!
“No, you couldn't have been,” he said, suddenly gentle. "Don't
think that.
And you're very sweet and dear as you are.”
“I? I?” she asked, with a sort of terror.
He was now utterly defeated, committed to the endless assuage-
ment of this hapless creature.
“Very well!” he said to himself, resigned and weary. “Apparent-
ly I haven't the moral courage to drown Miss Flotsam. And there's
no point in half-drowning her. I shall have to be humane—to
breaking point.”
He suggested turning back, and his docile companion assented
at once.
“But is there a breaking point ?” he reflected. “I rather think
there's not. Of all extraordinary things, the most extraordinary is
the endurance of human beings. There's nothing imaginable we
won't suffer without mutiny. Nothing! I'll take on the burden
of this very tiresome Miss Flotsam, for no reason at all. I don't
like her, certainly I don't admire her. I'm not even sure that I'm
Especially sorry for her. Simply, she makes a claim on my sym-
pathy, and I'm obliged to acknowledge the claim. I can't help her;
I've nothing to give. But I'll be the illusion she wants. I'll be the
carrot in front of the donkey's nose.
His long silence frightened her; she waited, terribly anxious, for
his next words. She sweet and dear? Oh, no!
"You didn't mean that, did you ?” she asked, and her effort to
sound careless and gay was a shocking failure.
“Yes!” he almost shouted. "Yes! I did!”
“Oh, but why?" she asked. “What makes you think that ?"
To save his life, he could invent nothing plausible, and she kept
on, desperate for reassurance, for a repetition of those words in-
credible and exquisite.
“I'd just like to know what you think is nice about me,” she en-
treated.
"Nothing!” he thought, ready to laugh at the insufferable farce.
And, in lieu of spoken words, laid a hand on her arm. To his con-
sternation, both her hands clasped his, she was trembling and cold.
“I can be a friend
she said. “I know, I know what
it means to be lonely and—I'll be the best friend you ever had.”
He was shaken with bitter mirth, grinning to himself in the dark,
a
.


454
MISS FLOTSAM AND MR JETSAM
a
99
.
.
99
moved by pity that transcended human limitations, that had grown
monstrous. It was what one feels at the sight of a butterfly, still
fluttering, but mangled beyond remedy; the overmastering impulse
is to destroy it quickly, to end its anguish—and one's own. But
this creature was human, and beyond such mercy.
They returned to the house, and on the landing he wished her
good night. But she did not go.
“You're so—so quiet
she said, faintly. "I'm afraid
-I hope you haven't anything very bad to worry you?
He was so mortally weary of this that he could no longer re-
spond.
“No, thanks, I haven't,” he answered, stiff and unsmiling.
“Good-night!"
He shut himself into his room with a sigh of relief. But through
the thin wall he heard her stirring, and it exasperated him; he im-
agined that she moved feebly, like a stricken animal; he imagined
her stumbling about because her eyes were blind with tears. He
couldn't sleep, couldn't rest, with that going on; he walked up and
down, angry, yet interested.
"Where's the line between cruelty and pity?” he thought. “I'm
not sure that they aren't sometimes manifestations of the same emo-
tion—the wish to get rid of what you don't like”
He was interrupted by a knock at the door which he knew to be
hers.
"Good God!” he exclaimed, half aloud. “Can't you let me
alone ?' And he flung open the door with a crash. The light from
his room was full upon her, and he was appalled at her face. But
she was without shame, utterly abandoned to her anguish, tears
running down her cheeks in streams.
"I can't help it ." she stammered. "I-oh, I heard you
walking up and down.
I was afraid-you-you were-
All alone—and—and suffering so.
He said nothing at all; there was a shocking relief in being silent,
in making no attempt at consolation. He looked at her with calm
indifference.
“This must end,” he reflected. "If I don't speak, she'll have to
go away.”
But apparently she didn't notice his silence; she came nearer and
caught his passive hand in both of hers.
.
like me.


ELISABETH SANXAY HOLDING
455
“I want you to know there's someone who's thinking of you,"
she said. “Someone who cares.
Don't feel lonely!
Don't!"
“No, I won't,” he assured her, a little dazed. “There's nothing
wrong
with I promise you. I'm not 'suffering.'
“But I'm sorry for you! I am! I am!” she cried, with a great
tearing sob like a hiccough. "You told me I—I was dear and sweet
Nobody else—for years and years
I want to
help you
“You do,” he answered, looking with profound apprehension at
all the other closed doors. “Please don't cry! You do help me-
very much. I don't know what I'd do without you.”
His insincerity seemed to him so patent and so brutal that he
would not have felt surprised if she had struck him. All he wanted
was to make her keep quiet at any cost. He was by no means so
far gone in pessimism as to be indifferent to the possibility of other
people observing or hearing this scene. The only thing he would
not do was to let her set foot in his room; that was his last strong-
hold, his one refuge, and she should never, never pass that thresh-
old. Otherwise, he was quite reckless; he would go to any lengths
to tranquillize—and to get rid of her.
She had grasped his hand tighter, and on her disfigured and
piteous face, still streaming tears, there was a strange light.
“Do I?” she asked. “Really? Does it comfort you to think-
to think—there's someone near you?”
“It does,” he said solemnly. “It's a blessing."
She dropped his hand, and stepped back, staring at him with
dilated
eyes. "You think that?” she said, so low he could scarcely
hear her. “Then you don't know—about me.”
"I don't care,” he interposed hastily, in terror of a confession
then and there. "I can see what you are—altogether gentle and
good and kind.”
"No, no!" she cried.
“Don't spoil everything!” he said, in a tone of sad entreaty.
“Only say good-night to me now, and let me think—what I like."
She took a step forward and a step back, in an odd, mincing way,
as if she were dancing. Then she rushed toward him and flung her
arms about his neck, her wet cheek was against his, her fine, dry
hair in his mouth and eyes.
a


456
MISS FLOTSAM AND MR JETSAM
"Good-night! Good-night, you dear boy! Oh, don't be sad!
Just you remember—I'm here. .
Her quavering voice
broke. “And thinking of you!” she ended in a gasp.
He stood like a stone, amazed, a little affronted. She drew back,
but her trembling hand lingered on his head, and her anxious,
troubled glance could not leave him.
“Will you try not to be sad?” she asked.
“I'm not sad,” he answered, mildly.
“That's right!” she said, patting his head, and smiling weakly.
“That's right.
At last she went, and he was closing the door, when she came
back, in great haste.
“I've got something that's wonderful for making you sleep!” she
whispered.
But the door was closed, and he leaned against it, grimly res-
olute.
“No, thanks!” he said.
Then he forgot her; not that he consciously repudiated thinking
of her, but because this thing was so incredible and nebulous that
it eluded him. If she wasn't before his eyes, she didn't, she couldn't
exist.
He waked the next morning with more energy than he had had
for a long time. He made up his mind to escape Miss Flotsam, to
give up his room at once, and to be gone when she returned that
evening.
“Without a word,” he decided. “That's the kindest way. Then
she can invent any sort of romance she likes to account for it. Poor
little devil!”
But he was not to be let off so easily. Under his door was a
note. In an infantile rage he put his foot on it.
"I won't read it!” he said.
Impossible! He had to read it, just as he was obliged to listen
to all that she said. He picked up the envelope with a mental
apology for the boot mark that sullied it, and, with a sigh, tore it
open.
Like every appeal she made, it was too long. The words that
might have touched him were repeated until they could only ex-
asperate; she was not content with a simple explanation of her
tormented life; she had felt obliged to lie a little, to ornament, and


ELISABETH SANXAY HOLDING
457
to cheapen every detail. A sickening letter, as if she were grovel-
ling at his feet.
He had known at the first glance that
she had suffered; that was enough to know of any human creature.
.
and you
“You can't think what it means to me to write this letter. I
know it may be the end of everything. But I couldn't let you go
on thinking I was different and better than I really am. You said
I was gentle and good and kind. You said it was a blessing to have
me near you. But if I deceived
you,
found out,
it would
be a curse. I know what it is to be deceived in people. I wouldn't
do that to you. I want you to know all about me.
“I think you know how hard life is for some people, and may
be
you can still go on being friends with me. I'm not trying to excuse
any of the wrong things I have done, but some of it was not my
fault. I am not going to work to-day. I shall stay in my room
and wait to see how you feel about it. If you don't come by noon,
I shall know that you feel you can't be friends any more. I won't
blame you. I promise you I won't blame you, not one bit. Only,
if you can't, I don't think I can go on any longer. I won't mind
not going on.”
/
She had signed this "Elaine,” and after the signature there was
a postscript:
“Please believe that I won't mind not going on. I am pretty
much discouraged anyhow and I know a very easy way.”
.
His hand was raised to knock at her door when he stopped.
“But what am I to say ?” he thought, in a panic. “What am I
to do? Friends! It's not quite that with her, poor little devil.
What can I do but go on hurting her for a little while longer? I
couldn't keep it up. She'd know
He turned back into his own room and walked
up and down, in
anguish, in intolerable longing to be free.
“I couldn't keep it up.
If I don't go to her, she'll think
that I loved her and that her letter overwhelmed me.
She'll think it's a tragedy. . O God! Isn't it better to
make it a tragedy, instead of playing out the farce? Go and tell
her the letter doesn't make any difference and I'm still her friend?
.
.
.


458
MISS FLOTSAM AND MR JETSAM
on
.
Then if she puts her arms around me—if she touches me again,
I'll hate her. And she'll see.
I can't do it."
Then a thought came to him of such exquisite relief that he sank
into a chair, suddenly grown weak.
"She doesn't mean it.
I'll put the letter under the door
again, where she'll see it from the hall. She's sure to come out
after me. And I won't answer; then she'll think I never got it.”
So he replaced the letter and sat down to wait.
What was she doing in there? Not a sound came through the
thin partition. What was she doing? What could she do? Think?
Her thoughts would be unendurable; he fancied that they were
drifting in through the wall in little invisible clouds, acrid, bitter
with tears, of no form or substance.
But if he went to her now, and set this right for a day, a month,
there would be the rest of her life to be passed in there, thinking.
"No! She'll come,” he thought. "She'll take her letter away
again, and nothing will happen. She'll simply go on. And I'll go
the natural course of events."
The phrase was soothing until he analysed it and recalled in-
stances of the natural course of events in certain cases he had ob-
served. He was ready to believe that a humane man might well
occupy his life in deflecting the natural course of events.
The clock in the Metropolitan tower struck eleven. What was
she doing?
"She's dropped asleep.
Or she's forgotten. She's cap-
able of forgetting anything, losing anything in that incredibly mud-
dled brain of hers. And last night she was—distinctly exaltée.
Very much so!”
For a moment he was able to see something amusing in this thing.
“It's a compliment,” he observed, with a faint grin. “A lady to
threaten to die for me. That's something, after all.”
Then he remembered her face. He sprang up, overturning the
chair and the crash it made seemed a new affront to her august and
terrible silence. He wanted to hurry to her and apologize. Apolo-
gize for pity?
“If I make a row, she'll come out,” he thought. “She'll want to
,
know whether I'm 'sad.'”
He moved about noisily, angrily, for a time, but she did not
.
come.


ELISABETH SANXAY HOLDING
459
9)
a
“It's a cheap, silly trick...” he muttered. “Nothing
more. She thought that would fetch me, that old, old tale about
'ending it all.' It won't though. It's despicable.”
On the fitful wind came the sound of the chimes ringing the half
hour, faint at first, and ending in a clear ringing note as a strong
gust blew. It chilled him. He stood still in the centre of the
room, everything so quiet, his watch and his heart racing together,
like nature and civilization in a laughable competition. And then
behind the wall came a little sound, something indistinct, a rustle
or a tiny sigh.
“This must be ended!” he said, aloud, and took a step toward
the door. There at his feet was the letter. 'Friends'
'Go on being friends! ” To go on—to go on to keep the flut-
tering tormented thing alive a little longer, only to meet the same
end. He could not keep it up; very soon she would see.
A farce, or a tragedy?
He flung himself into a chair and covered his face with his hands
-a mechanical and self-conscious gesture, done only out of regard
for the situation. He was not able even to think of her now; he
was lost in contemplation of a procession of doleful images, all the
brothers and sisters of Miss Flotsam, from the beginning of time,
all floating helpless in the current, their perishing faces turned
without hope, without reproach, toward those others who did not
drift, who were aboard their ship and bound for an unimaginable
port.
The clock struck twelve. It was the most tremendous clamour
he had ever heard, it rang in his own body with violent vibrations.
After the actual sound had died away, the waves still beat on his
ears with the brutal excitement of a tocsin. The terror, the ecstacy,
it must be for her! But for her it would end, and for him it would
go on ringing.
He got up when he could, when the deafening and sublime clan-
gour had grown fainter in his heart. He went out and knocked
upon her door. He waited, and knocked again, but there was no
a
answer.
He tore up the letter and left the house, not to return, without
advising any one of what had happened under that roof. Miss
Flotsam was washed up on the beach now, out of reach of the sea;
let her lie there in peace.


SIX MOVEMENTS
(For Mrs Edward MacDowell)
BY ALFRED KREYMBORG
NEIGHBOURS
Birds aren't people one has to walk to:
Stay where you are, they'll come to you, talk too.
What's in gadding in search of a neighbour?
Far too much distance, much too much labour.
Chat about trifles, argue a season:
Surely you'll find no roots to grow trees on?
The dark, steep, long way back—is it longer?
Wits any wiser, legs any stronger ?
Sit them right here in this very place, swayed
By idleness eyeing a fiery parade
Of robins, swallows, thrushes, sparrows,
Coming like lightning, going like arrows.
HERMIT THRUSH
It's hard to count what an air can do:
It cannot buy one a shirt or shoe:
It cannot bind a neat nest; find things
For leaving the earth on floating wings:
Nothing of twigs in it, nothing of roots;
But something of rivers, a little of flutes
That I've heard rippling a bodiless tune
That caught me up in a small balloon,
And took me high without writing a check;


ALFRED KREYMBORG
461
And let me down without breaking my neck:
No effort at all: I was absent-minded:
Don't even know now what the air or the wind did.
ROBIN
He takes a lot of staccato steps, stops-
Like a busy toe-dancer with dizzy tops
That never cease spinning, twinkling a minute
Until they come to the end of what's in it.
He runs on a line like a tight-rope walker-
Tries not to look scared-nor to answer a talker.
He might be as deaf as a man who surveys
Two spots
with a string for the high wire ways.
No matter how fast he may go or stop dead-
He holds his head still—an oblivious head;
But just down below, they twist and they squirm-
Like a terrified crowd or an angle worm.
CITY CHAP
Who's that dusty stranger ? —What's he doing here?-
That city-bred bird with the ill-bred leer?-
Perching on branches like telegraph wires ?
Chirping his slang above passionate fires ?-
Poking his head about, twitching his tail ?-
Getting drunk in our pools as though they were ale ?-
Never accepting, but stealing our rations ?-
Acting toward us as he would to relations?
Who asked him hither, what led him this way?-
With his critical carping, his mockery, eh?—
And worse than all these, he's a jerky reminder
Of winters, towns, and of people no kinder.


462
SIX MOVEMENTS
SWALLOWS
They're not going travelling for many a day:
They don't attempt branches, they seek it in clay:
First they start holes, and then dig in hollows:
Excavate caverns to lay future swallows:
A gray, crumbling chapel, best for the landing:
Too old for man—not too old to be standing:
A home no one visits, come west or come east,
Unless he be harmless, some hermit or priest,
Who walks in a plot shaded green, an arena
Between pater noster and ave maria.
If he should lift eyes and see birds, the chance is:
He'll be but a lover: another St Francis.
SONG SPARROW
He stutters and stammersma catch in his throat-
Chromatics falter—too many notes float-
Beginnings too eager-scales all uncertain-
Come to a cadence, too careful the curtain.
The thing that he studies—flattering, fluttering-
Might be called song could the fellow but sing
From the start of a phrase to the end of a sentence,
And not be pursued and be caught by repentance.
Who would consider such doings professional ?-
The little he does, does it sound processional ?-
And still, he persists and resists till he find
A channel for opening the way to his mind.


REMINISCENCES OF LEONID ANDREYEV
BY K. CHUKOVSKY
Translated from the Russian by Lawrence Hyde
HE
a
loved enormousness. In an enormous room, on an enor-
mous writing-table, there stood an enormous inkstand. But
there was no ink in it. It would have been useless to dip the enor-
mous pen in it. It was quite dry—“I haven't written anything now
for three months,” said Leonid Andreyev—"besides The Helms-
man I read nothing whatever.
The Helmsman-a paper for sailors. The last number of it lies
on the side of the desk; the cover has a picture of a yacht.
a
Andreyev paces up and down his enormous room and talks about
the sea, top-sails, anchors, sails. To-day he is a sailor, a sea wolf.
Even his gait has become nautical. Instead of cigarettes he smokes
a pipe. He has shaved off his moustache; his throat is bare like a
sailor's. His face is sunburnt. On a nail there hangs a pair of
nautical binoculars.
You attempt to talk about something else. He listens only out
of politeness.
To-morrow we are going aboard Savva, and meanwhile
Savva is his motor yacht. He talks about "averages,” submerged
rocks, and sand-banks.
Night. Four o'clock. You sit on the sofa and listen, and he
walks about and talks in a monologue.
He always talks in a monologue. His language is rhythmical
and flowing
Sometimes he stops, pours himself out a cup of strong, black,
cold tea, drinks it at a gulp, as if it were a glass of vodka, fever-
ishly swallows a few caramels—and again begins to talk, talk.
He talks about God, death, of how all sailors believe in
God, of how, surrounded by abysses, they are aware of the prox-
imity of death all their lives: how through contemplating the stars
every night they become poets and sages. If they could express
what they feel when they stand beneath the enormous stars some-
.
.


464 REMINISCENCES OF LEONID ANDREYEV
.
a
a
a
a
where in the Indian Ocean they would eclipse Shakespeare and
Kant.
But at last he becomes tired. The monologue is broken by long
pauses. His walk becomes listless. It is half past five. He drinks
another two glasses, takes a candle, and goes off to his room:
"To-morrow morning we will go aboard Savva.”
Your bed is in the next room in the tower. You lie down, but
you cannot get to sleep. You think: how tired he must be! To-
night in his room he has walked a distance of not less than twelve
miles, and his conversation, if it were written down, would make a
good sized book. What a senseless waste of energy!
In the morning in the long-boat Khamoidol we make for the sea.
And where has Andreyev got that leather Norwegian fisherman's
cap from? I have only seen them before in pictures, in the paper
Round the World. And high, waterproof boots, exactly like a ci-
nema pirate. Give him a harpoon in his hand and he would be one
of Jack London's magnificent whalers.
Here is the yacht. And here is the gardener Stepanitch, trans-
mogrified into a boatswain. We range about the Gulf of Finland
until late in the evening and I never cease being delighted with this
inspired actor, who has now played such a new and difficult part-
without a public; only for himself—for twenty-four hours. How
he stuffs his pipe, how he spits, how he glances at his toy compass!
He feels himself to be the captain of some ocean-going vessel. His
powerful legs planted widely apart, he gazes with silence and con-
centration into the distance; his commands ring out sharply.
He pays no attention to the passengers; as if the captain
of an ocean-going vessel would indulge in conversation with his
passengers!
In this playing there was much delightful childish simplicity.
Only very talented people—only poets—are able to be children to
the same extent. It is easy to imagine Pushkin's Mozart, playing
at horses with delight: Salière reveals his absence of talent just by
his incapacity for such play. When a child makes a railway out of
chairs one has to be depressingly unimaginative to be able to tell it
that the chairs are not really coaches. And the chief charm of
Andreyev lay in the fact that whatever game he happened to be
playing-and he was always playing some game or other—he be-
lieved in it firmly and gave himself to it without reserve.


K. CHUKOVSKY
465
When you came to see him again after a few months, you dis-
covered that he was a painter.
His hair was long and undulating, his beard the short one of the
aesthete. He wore a black velvet jacket. His room was turned
a
into a studio. He is as fertile as Rubens; the brush never leaves
his hand the whole day. You pass from one room to another and
he shows you his golden, yellow-green, pictures. Here is a scene
a
from The Life of Man. Here is a portrait of Ivan Byelusov.
Here again a large Byzantine ikon, representing Judas Iscariot and
Christ with naive blasphemy. They appear to be twins and each
has an ordinary nimbus around his head.
The whole night he tramps up and down his enormous room and
talks about Velasquez, Dürer, Vrubel. You sit on the sofa and lis-
ten. Suddenly he half closes his eyes, steps back, regards you with
a painter's eye, then calls his wife, and says:
"Anya, look, what chiaroscuro!”
You attempt to talk about something else. He listens only out
of politeness. To-morrow is varnishing day at the Academy of
Arts, yesterday he was visited by Ryepin, the day after to-morrow
he is going to Gallen. You feel inclined to ask, “What about the
yacht?”—but the members of the family sign to you, “Don't ask.”
Having become interested in something, Andreyev can talk about
nothing else; all his previous enthusiasms become repulsive to him.
He does not like to be reminded of them.
When he plays at being an artist he forgets his previous part as a
sailor; in general, he never returns to his past rôles, however bril-
liantly they may have been played.
And now colour photography.
It seems that not one man, but a gigantic factory, working in
shifts, has produced these numberless heaps of large and small pho-
tographs, which have been piled up in his room stored in special
boxes and chests, which hang in the windows and are stacked up on
chairs. There is no corner of his villa which he has not taken sey-
eral times. With some he has been extraordinarily successful; for
instance, spring landscapes. It is difficult to believe that they are
photographs, so full are they of elegiac music.
In the course of a month he has taken thousands of photographs
—as if executing some colossal order—and when you went to see
him he compelled you to examine them all, naïvely convinced that


466
REMINISCENCES OF LEONID ANDREYEV
for you they were a source of nothing less than bliss. He could not
imagine that there existed people for whom these pieces of glass
were uninteresting. He touchingly begs everyone to buy a col-
oured photograph.
That night, walking up and down his immense room, he indulges
in a monologue on the great Lumière, the discoverer of colour pho-
tography, and on sulphuric acid and potash. You sit and listen.
a
9)
a
Every one of his passions turns at times into a mania, devouring
him completely.
A whole period of his life was enriched by a love of gramophones
-not love, but insane passion. He became ill, as it were, with
gramophones, and several months were needed for his recovery.
Whatever trifle he grew interested in he distended to enormous
proportions. I remember once in Kuokallo he became absorbed in
playing gorodki.
“We can't play any more,” said his exhausted companions, "it's
dark, you can't see anything!”
“Light lanterns,” he cried, "we'll play by lantern light.”
“But we shall break them."
“What does it matter ?”
At the first go he hit a lantern and smashed it to atoms, but he
only cried:
“Light another at once!"
This lack of sense for limits was his outstanding characteristic.
He was attracted to everything that was gigantic.
The mantelpiece in his room was as large as a door, and the room
itself like a square. His house in the village of Bammelsu towered
above all the surrounding ones: every beam weighed about three
hundredweight: the foundation was of cyclopean blocks.
I remember his showing me, not long before the war, the plan of
some grandiose edifice. “What sort of house is that?" I asked.
"It is not a house, it's a table," answered Leonid Andreyev. It ap-
peared that he had given the architect a design for a storied table:
the ordinary writing-desk was too small for him and constrained
him.
A similar attraction to the enormous, magnificent, and pompous
was apparent in him at every step. The hyperbolical style of his
books reflected the hyperbolical style of his life. There was some


K. CHUKOVSKY
467
justice in Ryepin's title for him—Lorenzo. He should have lived
in a gilded castle, and have trodden on luxurious carpets, attended
by a splendid suite. This would have suited him: he was born for
the part. With what stateliness he awaited his guests at the top of
.
the wide, festal staircase leading from his room to the dining-room!
If some music had suddenly struck up, one would not have felt sur-
prised.
He wrote his letters on expensive paper in a broad, masterful
hand, as if they were manifestos and not letters, and in what an
elevated, triumphant, richly decorated style, in which every phrase
was adorned with a garland of magnificent periods!
His house was always full of people: guests, relations, a large
staff of servants, and children-crowds of children, his own and
others'—his temperament demanded a broad and full life.
There are people who seem to have been created for oppression
and poverty: it is difficult to conceive Dostoevsky as degenerate. To
do so would be unnaturally perverse. Similarly, Leonid Andreyev
was meant to be a magnate: every one of his movements suggested
the grandee. His beautiful, chiselled, decorative face; his grace-
ful, slightly stout figure; his dignified, light, step all fitted in with
the part of a magnificent duke which he later played so superbly.
This was his greatest rôle and he organically grew into it. He was
one of those talented, ambitious, pompous people, who thirst to be
the captain on every ship, the archbishop in every cathedral. He
,
would not consent to play second fiddle in anything; even at go-
rodki he wished to be the first and only one. He was born to march
at the head of some splendid procession, by the light of torches and
to the sound of bells.
a
His enormous fireplace consumed incredible quantities of wood,
but the room remained in such icy cold that it was terrible to go
into it.
The great stone blocks bore so heavily on the three hundred-
weight beams that the ceiling collapsed and it was impossible to
eat in the dining-room.
The huge hydraulic pump, used for bringing water from the
Black River, went wrong in the first month apparently, and re-
mained like a rusty skeleton, as if rejoicing in its uselessness, until
it was sold for scrap iron.


468
REMINISCENCES OF LEONID ANDREYEV
Winter life in a Finnish village is mean, uncomfortable, and
dead. Snow and stillness-even the wolves do not howl. A Fin-
nish village is not for dukes.
Anyway this magnificent life seemed at times theatrical. Behind
the coulisses there seemed to be hiding something else.
"You think that's granite?” said a drunken writer to me once,
standing in front of the facade of Andreyev's house. "It's not
granite, but cardboard. Blow on it and it will tumble down.”
But however hard the writer blew, it did not collapse; yet there
was truth in his drunken words; in actuality there was something
theatrical and decorative in everything that surrounded or reflected
Andreyev. The whole interior of his house had this character, and
the house itself—in the Norwegian style, with a tower—looked
like the creation of a talented scenic artist. Andreyev's costumes
suited him as they suit an operatic tenor-costumes of a sportsman,
artist, sailor.
He wore them as costumes are worn on the stage.
I don't know why, but every time I left him I experienced a feel-
ing, not of exaltation, but of depression. It seemed to me that
someone had offended him. Why was he struggling in the Gulf of
Finland when he was great enough to wade through the ocean?
How could such an exceptional soul be wasted on gramophones?
Yesterday he spent the whole night talking about war; for eight
hours he paced up and down the room declaiming a wonderful
monologue on Zeppelins, landings, bloody Austrian fields. Why
doesn't he go there himself? Why does he stick in the desert, see-
ing nothing, knowing nothing, and unburdening himself only to a
passing friend? If he could only use the energy which he spends
in his nightly pacing up and down his room—or even half of it-
for other purposes, he would be a remarkable traveller; he would
wander round the whole world, eclipsing Livingstone and Stanley.
His brain thirsted for uninterrupted work—it was a ceaseless mill
which ever needed more and more corn. But there was hardly any
corn to be had—no living impressions—and the great millstones
continued with demoniacal energy to grind not corn, but dust.
And where was he to get corn from? He lived in Finland as in
a desert. You travelled to distant countries, flew in aeroplanes,
took part in battles, and returned to find with astonishment that
Andreyev was still walking up and down his room, and continuing


K. CHUKOVSKY
469
the monologue of nearly a year ago. And his enormous room this
evening appeared suddenly very small—and his talk lonely. Was
it not sad that an artist with such attentive, sharp, and eager eyes
should see nothing besides snow, should sit within four walls and
listen to the howling of the wind? At the time when his beloved
Kipling, London, and Wells were wandering over four continents
he was living in a wilderness, without any external material for
creation. One was amazed at the power of the poetic streams in
him, which even in this desert had not run dry.
Leonid Andreyev gave himself up to writing with the same reck-
lessness as to everything else—until his strength was utterly ex-
hausted. Often he wrote nothing for months at a time and then
suddenly he would produce with incredible speed in the course of a
few nights an enormous tragedy or story. He would walk
up
and
down the room, declaim aloud, and drink black tea; his typewriter
;
would clatter as if possessed, yet still be hardly able to keep pace
with him. His periods were subordinated to the musical rhythm
which was carrying him along like a wave. Without this almost
poetical rhythm he could not write even a letter.
He did not simply write his works; he was devoured by them as
by a fire. He became for the time being a maniac and was aware
of nothing but the particular piece of writing he had in hand; how-
ever small it was he extended it to grandiose dimensions, loaded it
with gigantic images, for in his artistic creation as in his life he
went to extremes; it was not for nothing that his favourite words
in his books were "huge," "extraordinary," "monstrous.” Every
theme he touched became colossal, much larger than he himself,
and shut him off from everything else in the universe.
And it was a remarkable fact: when he was creating his Leizer,
the Jew from the play Anathema, he even in his private conversa-
tion, over tea, fell into a biblical style of speech. He himself had
become for a time a Jew. But when he was writing Sachka Zhegu-
lev his voice took on the bold tones of a Volga boatman. He in-
voluntarily echoed the voices and gestures of his characters, the
quality of their souls, entering into them like an actor. I remem-
ber, one evening, how he astonished me by his reckless gaiety. It
appeared that he had just drawn the character of Tsyganek, the
audacious character from The Seven That Were Hanged. In creat-
ing Tsyganek he turned into him himself, and out of inertia re-
a


470
REMINISCENCES OF LEONID ANDREYEV
mained Tsyganek until the morning—the same words, intonations,
gestures.
He became Count Lorenzo when he was writing his Black
Masks; a sailor when he was writing The Ocean.
It is for this reason that opinions about him differed so much.
Some said that he was a boaster, others that he was a wild, ungov-
ernable spirit. One person visiting him found him in the part of
Savva, another would encounter a student from The Days of Our
Life, another the pirate Khorre. And each one thought that this
was Andreyev. They forgot that they were confronted with an
artist who contained within himself hundreds of parts and who
sincerely and with complete conviction thought that each part was
a real individual.
There were very many Andreyevs and all of them were genuine.
Many of these Andreyevs I disliked, but the one which was a
Moscow student I was very fond of. He would suddenly become
childishly mischievous and playful, scatter round him jeux d'esprit,
frequently poor, but homely and affectionate in tone, and string to-
gether nonsensical verses. Once, in a malicious moment, wishing to
make fun of the Moscow writer T— who was extraordinarly
polite, he rang him up at dawn on the telephone.
"Who's speaking ?" asks the polite writer, half asleep.
“Boborykin,” answers Andreyev.
“Is that you, Peter Dmitrievitch ?”
“Yes,” says Andreyev, in Boborykin's senile voice.
“How can I oblige you?” asks the polite writer.
"I've a favour to ask of you; the fact is that this Sunday I'm go-
ing to be married
and I hope that you will do me the
honour of being my best man.'
“Delighted,” exclaims the polite writer, not daring, out of good
manners, to express any surprise at the marriage of an old man of
eighty, already, incidentally, possessed of one wife.
Others of his jokes were more happy. Thus he christened his
country villa Villa Advance, as it was erected with funds loaned
to him by a publisher.
But often his good spirits were—as with everything concerning
Andreyev_excessive and had the character of an attack: they
made one uncomfortable and one was glad when they were over.
A well-known Russian writer.
1
1


K. CHUKOVSKY
471
woman.
a
After them he always became sombre and more often than not
would begin one of his monologues on death. It was his favourite
theme. He pronounced the word death in a special manner—with
a
feeling and emphasis, as some voluptuaries pronounce the word
In this respect Andreyev possessed a great talent—he
knew how to fear death as no one else could. To fear death is no
easy matter: many attempt it, but without success. Andreyev suc-
ceeded magnicently: here was his real calling—to experience a
deathly and terrible horror. This horror is to be discerned in all
his books, and I think that his grasping at colour photography,
gramophones, painting, constituted attempts to save himself from
it. Somehow he had to protect himself from these sickening at-
tacks of despair. In the terrible years after the revolution, when
an epidemic of suicide was raging in Russia, Andreyev involun-
tarily became the leader and apostle of these abandoners of life.
They felt him to be one of themselves. I remember his showing me
a whole collection of letters addressed to him by suicides before
their death. It had evidently become a custom before doing away
with oneself to send a letter to Leonid Andreyev.
Sometimes it appeared strange. Sometimes, watching him as he
strolled about the yard, among his stables and outhouses, followed
by his magnificent hound, Tyucha, or posed, dressed in a velvet
coat, in front of some visiting photographer, one could not believe
that this man could be carrying within him a tragic consciousness of
eternity, non-existence, chaos, worldly desolation. But the spirit
bloweth where it listeth, and the whole of Andreyev's life was
soaked in this feeling of worldly desolation. It was this feeling
which gave to his work a special philosophical colouring, since it is
impossible to spend one's whole life meditating on such desolation
and not to become in the end a metaphysician. The same thing
gave a key also to his personality as a writer: in his books he always
handled-well or badly-eternal, metaphysical, and transcendental
questions. Other themes failed to move him. The group of writers
among which he found himself at the beginning of his literary ca-
reer; Gorki, Chirikov, Skitalets, Kuprin—was in reality strange to
him. They were describers of life, excited by the problems of life,
but not by existence itself; and he was the only one among them
who was exercized by the eternal and tragic. He was tragic in his
very essence and all his ecstatic, affected, theatrical talent, leading
a


472
REMINISCENCES OF LEONID ANDREYEV
as it did to pompousness in style and to traditional and exaggerated
forms, was admirably adapted to metaphysically tragic subjects.
What is one to say about the chief thing of all—his creation?
We know very little about it. He almost always worked at night:
I cannot recall a single one of his works which was written by day.
Having written and printed anything, he became extraordinarily
indifferent about it and, as if sick of it, thought no more of the mat-
ter. He was only really carried away by what was as yet unwrit-
ten. While he was writing any story or piece he could talk about
nothing else: it appeared to him that it would be his best, greatest,
unsurpassed work. He jealously compared it with all his previous
efforts: he was annoyed if you liked anything which he had written
ten years before. He was never able to modify anything: his taste
was much smaller than his talent. His writings, by their very na-
ture, were extempore. When he was possessed by a theme every
tiny circumstance became connected with it. I remember how once,
having arrived at Kuokallo at night, he hired a droshky and paid
the driver a rouble. The Finn was offended and said laconically:
"I don't want a rouble.”
Andreyev added another half rouble and in a few days in The
Seven Who Were Hanged appeared the dim-eyed Janson, obsti-
nately repeating to the judges:
“I don't want to be hanged ... I don't want to be hanged.”
The insignificant episode with the driver had become the central
effect in a theatrically pathetic story. This capacity for giving an
a
unexpected artistic value to what was apparently trifling and su-
perficial was always one of Andreyev's strong points.
One day he came across in The Odessa News the remark of the
famous aviator Utochkin in describing his flight:
“At sunset our prison is extraordinarily beautiful.”
This affection for “our prison” pleased Andreyev very much and
in a few days he had written his well-known story, My Diary,
about a man who had grown to love his prison. It concluded with
the very same words:
“At sunset our prison is extraordinarily beautiful.”
But he gave to the words an unexpectedly grandiose, metaphys-
ical, sense.
.



Weih
A WOODCUT.
BY D. GALANIS


{
1



A WOODCUT.
BY D. GALANIS






A WOODCUT.
BY D. GALANIS


!
!
1


PARIS LETTER
September, 1923
O
NCE more the curtain falls and liberty is rendered to the
spectators; at least to those who live by the profane clock,
who are "strongly attached to the world,” as the Jansenists said,
instead of imposing the rhythm of their own life on their environ-
ment. In other words the Paris season has ended.
Days without vacation, when the pleasures of vanity (a luxury
tax) succeed to the artificial duties of gossip and the fork; when
the social instincts-appetites or antipathies—dovetail perfectly
like a piece of joiner's work, are followed now, after tumultuous
departures, by those hours of liberty and work which are the best of
the year. You are alone, as if in a museum; everyone has aban-
doned you. At last you can work, or even stroll and listen to your
own heart; “full of a thousand essential causes of ennui," wrote
Pascal, whom we have been forced to re-read in all the newspapers.
To glorify his centenary they decided to reveal this young and
gifted writer to a public always greedy for the unknown. With
that indiscretion, smiling menace, which is one of the ornaments of
the after-war, they glorified not only Pascal, but his enemies and
his love affairs. And, unintentionally, with the help of certain
buried ladies, they brought us closer to portions of his work which
had remained obscure. They threw light with a modern violence
on several phrases of the Pensées, admirable for the profane ex-
periences which they resumed; maybe it was Proust who prepared
us to understand them. Gracious and irritated phantoms have
been brought to life: for example that lovely demoiselle de Roan-
nez whom Pascal loved, in spite of her being the victim “of idle-
ness, of the love of adornment, and of her attachment to companies
which she herself had recognized as being dangerous for her.” And
the mother-superior of Port Royal who wrote these lines has added,
"She cannot resist the furious instinct which drives her to cut her
hair.” If this garçonne were living to-day, I am sure she would be
weighing, like the others, on our consciences. To such a degree is
it true that certain subjects are always held at the disposition of
the public, in all good bookstores.


474
PARIS LETTER
At the moment when I strive to recall the events of the last two
months, I review my own life in a brief instant like somebody
drowning, and I am frightened to see that nothing remains but tir-
ing and inanimate pleasures. July is the period of examinations
and August that of examining one's conscience. I shall fail in the
second test as I was failed in the first.
Among other great endurance contests we had the bicycle tour of
France on the one hand and on the other d'Annunzio's Phedre and
The Martyrdom of St Sebastian, as played by Ida Rubinstein.
The lyric tragedy of antiquity attained its last acceptable phase, I
believe, in the musical form of the eighteenth century, with Gluck
and others; all efforts to renew it, with the exception of Hebbels,
have been useless and cruel.
I pass over in silence the antiquaries' fair which transformed the
palace of Versailles into a flea-market (even the fleas were out of
buying reach on account of the exchange); the Bal de l'Opéra,
where Chinese styles appeared to those who still only suspected the
fact as being definitely outdated; the Bal des Quat z’ Arts, a resur-
rection of Pompeii, where the items which are hidden from profane
eyes in the Museum of Naples were presented freely to the Boston
ladies who inhabit the hotels of the rue de Rivoli (these were in-
vaded at the dinner hour by slaves and freedmen, while drunken
helots, painted with minium, exacted vestimentary sacrifices from
Mlle Sorel to which she did not consent); a few concerts where
Paderewski, the great romantic magnetizer, poured forth on the
piano the same fluid which he uses to communicate with the gods
and his constituents.
Out of all these ephemeral ornaments, already oxydized, there
remain two authentic jewels of the sort we shall continue to enjoy
and wear. One of them is the new opera-ballet of Albert Roussel
-Padmavati-one of the best works of this charming composer, a
subject drawn from his study of the thirteenth century, where the
author does not always escape his Russian influences, but where
he writes with an amplitude and a perfection of technique superior
to those of the Festin de l’Araignée, the piece which made him
famous. He was not satisfied with writing only songs; he placed
soloists and choirs in the orchestra. It was an attempt analogous
to that which Strawinsky seems to have made for other reasons in
Noces. Written in 1917—after Le Sacre, that is, and before


PAUL MORAND
475
Mavra—this ballet marks one of the most important moments in
the career of the great Russian musician: a career which without
ceasing to be unified has been extremely rich in articulations. In
Noces one finds the same purity of inspiration, the same pursuit of
a simple theme, the same contempt for every picturesque quality
that was already marked in the revolution of Le Sacre du Prin-
temps. The ballet is the simple history of a country betrothal,
commented by mixed choruses, where simple percussions on the
strings, the woodwinds, the gongs, the brasses are enough to render
the most poignant emotion. “Briefly the principle is that of jazz,”
Darius Milhaud told me, “but without ever sacrificing the melody";
more an oratorio than a ballet. We are looking forward with im-
patience to the pleasure of hearing it in a concert room, or rather of
hearing it again, for the rehearsal of the piece at the home of the
Princess Edmond de Polignac revealed it to us with a perfection
which has not been equalled since. However, the stylized choreog-
raphy of Nijinska, against the sober monochrome of the settings by
Goncharova, was never harmful and often was a help.
I thought, as I left the Theatre de la Gaieté, that contrary to the
other arts, where the confusion of the last thirty years has persisted,
the ages of modern music seem to be as clearly separated already as
the reigns of separate kings. We should be thankful. Tristan,
Pelléas, Le Sacre du Printemps: are these not three accessions to a
throne (these three legendary forms of a same symbol, the abdica-
tion of the human will before the fatality of fecundation, before
the libido)?
Pierre Loti is dead. We have lost a great writer, but the whole
of his work had already been given us before the war, by a sort of
advance bequest, and the death of its author was not so much a
tragedy as a natural phenomenon. The only event to be mourned
with tears of blood is the death of an artist who still has something
to say. Along with Loti exoticism disappears from our literature.
Exoticism is a sort of coloured photography which is no longer
suited to our age. It is no more than a surprise-effect, absolutely
opposed to the new cosmopolitanism, the aim of which is not to
describe distant lands at random, by a selfish caprice and to the ex-
clusion or even at the expense of one's own country, but rather (and
here is its dignity and its use) to attempt to establish a closer


476
PARIS LETTER
union, a more honourable union than the old and immoral alliances
commanded by interêt d'État, between one's own country and the
others. If, in literature, we still make use of a background, it is only
to distract the reader, and profiting by his lack of attention to im-
pose modern truths upon him. Already a better educated public
knows enough to take the information it is given with a little grain
of salt. One of the achievements of realism was the fact that the
reader could believe everything, for everything was exact, even if
nothing were true. The public to-day is better schooled; it is in-
finitely more supple, more intelligent; it progresses from one hour
to the next. Among so many reasons to despair, we have this one
real comfort; I insist upon it. One can be inexact without being
called a practical joker. To take an example from the so-called
exotic literature (this second-class voyage within the reach of every
pocketbook) consider in what utilitarian spirit an ordinary reader
followed Loti thirty years ago into a description of the Pacific.
And put a reader of the present day before one of those foreign
landscapes raised to the second power (as in the case of Larbaud)
where everything is so impregnated with the atmosphere of another
nation that it is not even necessary to describe; set him before one
of these conscious "frauds" that are Giraudoux's Pacific, Mac-
Orlan's Germany, or the Russia of Delteil, and ask him if he does
not experience a rarer pleasure and, under these extravagant ap-
pearances, if he does not find a lesson that is much more profound,
a
more profitable? The realism of yesterday was only an infidelity.
The free invention of to-day is neither an imposture nor a con-
tradiction; it is art which truly, usefully, has attained its liberty.
The last dove to be released from our literary ark is the Prix du
Nouveau Monde, founded to bind the intellectual union between
France and America: a prize due to the generosity of Mrs Keep.
I was member of the jury. Our prize had the fortunes of a trap-
pigeon; it was fired at; this bird which we released fell like a boom-
erang upon our proper noses. I can speak about it more freely be-
cause—so it is said—I did not vote for the laureate, Radiguet. And
however his book, Le Diable au Corps, is an important document,
a revelation of the war spirit of a boy, and it is the first testimony
of a generation which, if I am not mistaken, will play us all sorts
of tricks. There is no reason to become indignant; one can only


PAUL MORAND
477
whole group
establish a fact and remain free, in case one wishes to remedy af-
fairs, to go back to the beginning. Under an apparent innocence
which will deceive only grown-ups, Radiguet seems cold, master of
himself, astonishingly precocious (perhaps he is normal and we
naïve, slow to develop ?) disabused, mistrustful, rational, and a
hedonist. Our reactions toward him are those of the father who,
in Le Diable au Corps, seems angry and supine. Associations of
French veterans have written to the American Legion to warn your
public against this immoral work; all the protests will change noth-
ing; Le Diable au Corps is an “unpleasant” book, but one which
deserves to be read. The faults I find with it are exterior faults,
the attempt to manufacture a masterpiece by following these re-
ceipts: a transparent plot, a serene style, a composition without
errors. It is a fashion and I mention it because it is spreading to a
of
young writers, under the influence of Gide, al-
though Gide himself is not directly responsible. The end of art is
indeed serenity and economy of means, but only after the sacrifice.
To reconstruct masterpieces synthetically is a mistake. Time acts
on a book to make it seem perfect, but these writers offer to take
the place of time. The haste is unseemly which delivers us master-
pieces a hundred years too soon. They make us think of a general
who says to his enemies, “Retreat, you can see that I have won the
battle.” The enemy might answer, “Not at all. The battle is still
to be fought, and to begin it we make you our prisoner.” A writer's
first duty is to live his books or at least his style; on this subject
Emerson has made excellent observations.
I was thinking of this yesterday as I watched, during the course
of a party—a "Montmartre rag,” which Darius Milhaud and I were
giving to end the season, before our friends dispersed, laden with
pencils and fountain pens and paper and white canvases, toward
countryside and inspiration—as I watched the young generation,
monocled, implacable, which stood in the doorways without offer-
ing to dance, and which was not amused. I said also, to comfort
myself, making a rapid inventory, that we had a fine lot of fresh
and powerful talents: painters like Picasso, Braque, Segonzac, L.
A. Moreau, Favory, Dufy, Pascin, La Fresnaye, Lhote, Leger;
women who paint deliciously-Marie Laurencin, Hélène Perdriat,
Marval, Irène Lagut; sculptors like Lipschitz, Archipenko, Bran-
cusi; young writers like Cendrars, Cocteau, Giraudoux, Larbaud,


478
PARIS LETTER
Jaloux, Salmon, MacOrlan, Lacretelle, Drieu la Rochelle, Aragon;
musicians like Strawinsky, Milhaud, Honneger, Auric, Poulenc:
clear spirits in a troubled age, rich with its spoils, knowing per-
fectly where to give rein, dominators, seductive, conquerors already,
forming an ensemble of which we can well be proud, and which, at
the present moment, can be found nowhere else. Let me be par-
doned for this testimony of my satisfaction which I give, if not to
my own friends, at least to Paris, this infinitely rich background for
the displaying of new values.
a
a
A certain number of publications, some of them literary, have
been agitated for meritorious reasons over the publication of a book
by M Félicien Champsaur, entitled Ouha Roi des Singes, in which
are delineated the amours of an American young lady with an in-
habitant of the trees of Borneo. With all the resources of the Dar-
winian theory one could hardly develop ancestor worship and the
Oedipus complex to this extreme. M F. Champsaur, who is a
writer of no value, is worthy of a relative immortality only for the
ingenious idea which he had in one of his early books, entitled
L'Orgie Latine (we spent our first pocket-money to buy it) of
printing the most scabrous passages in red, so as to save hurried
readers the trouble of reading the rest. It was recently demanded
in the Chamber of Deputies that Ouha be suppressed. However,
in our legislation there is no text (except those providing for the
case of the obscene publications whose suppression is regulated by
international conventions, which is a different story) to permit
that measures be taken against a writer-admitting that M F.
Champsaur has any right to this title. It is the privilege of the
American government to prohibit the importation of his book, and
such action could only be advantageous. Let us keep to our own
ground: no condemnation is as damning to a book as literary con-
demnation; it is without appeal. Where a book by Joyce is ac-
quitted, Ouha, after the first page, is sentenced to death.
As sign of the times I noticed this commentary, from the de-
partment of sales promotion, on the jacket of a French novel which
a
has just been published: “A distinguished novel-a new study of
Love as viewed by other methods than those of Freud-7 francs.”


PAUL MORAND
479
One of the coolest spots in Paris at this season when, pitiless as
reason, the sun cuts the city and makes the river tremble, is the Vic-
tor Hugo Museum, a romantic annotation on the margin of the
classical poem which is the Place des Vosges. My friend Raymond
Escholier, who, as well as being a good novelist, is its conservator,
offers us another pleasure at this moment: an exposition of Dau-
mier and Gavarni. (I must admit that during the hour I passed
there I saw only Americans.) Between two windows, under glass,
I stopped to examine the palette of Daumier, the one with which he
painted for the last time, covered with a thick crust of red clay, of
dried blood, of the dark tones of an ardent soil, colour of tannin.
What emotion! He could have painted with anything; he had no
need to charm; he had need to prove; he had no need to amuse, this
man who during his lifetime was never considered except as a cari-
caturist; he had to conduct the rudest and most complete inquest
which has been left us on an era. He did not escape the terrible
lot of almost all French painters of the nineteenth century, that
long martyrology, but the glory which he knows to-day consoles us,
in spite of Forain.
And now I am going to leave Paris for Athens. In the sea which
is catching fire I can see a white ship gliding already. It flies the
American flag. “I am taking you on board,” my amiable hostess
told me, “but on condition that you do not tell me the Acropolis
is ugly.” I shall not tell her; if it is true, I shall write it.
PAUL MORAND


BOOK REVIEWS
ULYSSES, ORDER, AND MYTH
Ulysses. By James Joyce. 8vo. 752 pages. Shake-
speare and Company, Paris. Limited edition.
ME
а
R JOYCE'S book has been out long enough for no more gen-
eral expression of praise, or expostulation with its detractors,
to be necessary; and it has not been out long enough for any at-
tempt at a complete measurement of its place and significance to
be possible. All that one can usefully do at this time, and it is a
great deal to do, for such a book, is to elucidate any aspect of the
book—and the number of aspects is indefinite—which has not yet
been fixed. I hold this book to be the most important expression
which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all
indebted, and from which none of us can escape. These are postu-
lates for anything that I have to say about it, and I have no wish
to waste the reader's time by elaborating my eulogies; it has given
me all the surprise, delight, and terror that I can require, and I will
leave it at that.
Amongst all the criticisms I have seen of the book, I have seen
nothing-unless we except, in its way, M Valery Larbaud's valu-
able paper which is rather an Introduction than a criticism—which
seemed to me to appreciate the significance of the method employed
—the parallel to the Odyssey, and the use of appropriate styles and
symbols to each division. Yet one might expect this to be the first
peculiarity to attract attention; but it has been treated as an amus-
ing dodge, or scaffolding erected by the author for the purpose
of
disposing his realistic tale, of no interest in the completed struc-
The criticism which Mr Aldington directed upon Ulysses
several years ago seems to me to fail by this oversight—but, as Mr
Aldington wrote before the complete work had appeared, fails
more honourably than the attempts of those who had the whole
book before them. Mr Aldington treated Mr Joyce as a prophet of
chaos; and wailed at the flood of Dadaism which his prescient eye
1
ture.


T. S. ELIOT
481
1
saw bursting forth at the tap of the magician's rod. Of course, the
influence which Mr Joyce's book may have is from my point of
view an irrelevance. A very great book may have a very bad in-
fluence indeed; and a mediocre book may be in the event most
salutary. The next generation is responsible for its own soul; a
man of genius is responsible to his peers, not to a studio-full of
uneducated and undisciplined coxcombs. Still, Mr Aldington's pa-
thetic solicitude for the half-witted seems to me to carry certain
implications about the nature of the book itself to which I cannot
assent; and this is the important issue. He finds the book, if I
understand him, to be an invitation to chaos, and an expression of
feelings which are perverse, partial, and a distortion of reality.
But unless I quote Mr Aldington's words I am likely to falsify.
“I say, moreover,” he says," "that when Mr Joyce, with his mar-
vellous gifts, uses them to disgust us with mankind, he is doing
something which is false and a libel on humanity.” It is somewhat
similar to the opinion of the urbane Thackeray upon Swift. “As
for the moral, I think it horrible, shameful, unmanly, blasphemous:
and giant and great as this Dean is, I say we should hoot him.”
(This, of the conclusion of the Voyage to the Houyhnhnms—which
seems to me one of the greatest triumphs that the human soul has
ever achieved.—It is true that Thackeray later pays Swift one of
the finest tributes that a man has ever given or received: “So great
a man he seems to me that thinking of him is like thinking of an
empire falling.” And Mr Aldington, in his time, is almost equally
generous.)
Whether it is possible to libel humanity (in distinction to libel
in the usual sense, which is libelling an individual or a group in
contrast with the rest of humanity) is a question for philosophical
societies to discuss; but of course if Ulysses were a “libel" it would
simply be a forged document, a powerless fraud, which would
never have extracted from Mr Aldington a moment's attention. I
do not wish to linger over this point: the interesting question is
that begged by Mr Aldington when he refers to Mr Joyce's "great
undisciplined talent.”
I think that Mr Aldington and I are more or less agreed as to
what we want in principle, and agreed to call it classicism. It is
because of this agreement that I have chosen Mr Aldington to at-
1 English Review, April 1921.


482
ULYSSES, ORDER, AND MYTH
tack on the present issue. We are agreed as to what we want, but
not as to how to get it, or as to what contemporary writing exhibits
a tendency in that direction. We agree, I hope, that “classicism”
I
is not an alternative to "romanticism,” as of political parties, Con-
servative and Liberal, Republican and Democrat, on a “turn-the-
rascals-out” platform. It is a goal toward which all good litera-
ture strives, so far as it is good, according to the possibilities of its
place and time. One can be "classical,” in a sense, by turning
away from nine-tenths of the material which lies at hand, and se-
lecting only mummified stuff from a museum-like some contem-
porary writers, about whom one could say some nasty things in this
connexion, if it were worth while (Mr Aldington is not one of
them). Or one can be classical in tendency by doing the best one
can with the material at hand. The confusion springs from the
fact that the term is applied to literature and to the whole complex
of interests and modes of behaviour and society of which literature
is a part; and it has not the same bearing in both applications. It
is much easier to be a classicist in literary criticism than in creative
art-because in criticism you are responsible only for what you
want, and in creation you are responsible for what you can do with
material which you must simply accept. And in this material I in-
clude the emotions and feelings of the writer himself, which, for
that writer, are simply material which he must accept-not virtues
to be enlarged or vices to be diminished. The question, then, about
Mr Joyce, is: how much living material does he deal with, and how
does he deal with it: deal with, not as a legislator or exhorter, but
as an artist?
It is here that Mr Joyce's parallel use of the Odyssey has a great
importance. It has the importance of a scientific discovery. No
one else has built a novel upon such a foundation before: it has
never before been necessary. I am not begging the question in
calling Ulysses a "novel”; and if you call it an epic it will not
matter. If it is not a novel, that is simply because the novel is a
form which will no longer serve; it is because the novel, instead of
being a form, was simply the expression of an age which had not
sufficiently lost all form to feel the need of something stricter.
Mr Joyce has written one novel—the Portrait; Mr Wyndham
Lewis has written one novel—Tarr. I do not suppose that either
of them will ever write another "novel.” The novel ended with
.


T. S. ELIOT
483
Flaubert and with James. It is, I think, because Mr Joyce and
Mr Lewis, being “in advance” of their time, felt a conscious or
probably unconscious dissatisfaction with the form, that their nov-
els are more formless than those of a dozen clever writers who are
unaware of its obsolescence.
In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel be-
tween contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr Joyce is pursuing a
method which others must pursue after him. They will not be imi-
tators, any more than the scientist who uses the discoveries of an
Einstein in pursuing his own, independent, further investigations.
It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and
a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy
which is contemporary history. It is a method already adumbrated
by Mr Yeats, and of the need for which I believe Mr Yeats to have
been the first contemporary to be conscious. It is a method for
which the horoscope is auspicious. Psychology (such as it is, and
whether our reaction to it be comic or serious) ethnology, and The
Golden Bough have concurred to make possible what was impos-
sible even a few years ago. Instead of narrative method, we may
now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step to-
ward making the modern world possible for art, toward that order
and form which Mr Aldington so earnestly desires. And only those
who have won their own discipline in secret and without aid, in a
world which offers very little assistance to that end, can be of any
use in furthering this advance.
T. S. ELIOT


ARTIST OR NUN
The Dove's Nest. By Katherine Mansfield. 12mo.
250 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $2.50.
NE wonders if Mr Middleton Murry is wholly aware of the
injury he is doing his wife's reputation by treating as sacred
every chance scrap of paper on which she recorded her most de-
nuded and transient moods. Like a somnambulent acolyte with
bowed head and reverential step he bears the chalice of her fame
unconscious that in replenishing it with ever thinner and thinner
dilutions he is imperilling the clear wine with which he began his
pilgrimage. Certainly, in Miss Mansfield's earlier books, Bliss and
The Garden Party, one could delight in so original and potential a
talent, while reserving judgement as to certain suggested limita-
tions. Like a cutter racing lightly over tossing waves her style car-
ried her mobile perceptions and if one waited somewhat anxiously
for the craft to turn full-blown for port one remained at least in
doubt as to just what port it was to be, after all, headed toward.
Now with the poems and excerpts from her journal appearing in
consecutive numbers of The Adelphi, together with the introductory
notes to The Dove's Nest, one sees Katherine Mansfield either as
a supplicating girl plundered pitifully of her dignity, her grief
mounting in distorted curves of rationalization, or as one reduced
by sheer thinness of inspiration into startling lapses of literary
taste. Both she and Mr Murry seem to discuss the art of writing
as if it were only to be attained through some mysterious purifica-
tion of one's inner being. “She purged the last vestige of rebellion
from herself
she was preparing to write stories of a new
kind with the whole truth in them,” he records in an article telling
of her death. Or, she herself cries out, “I haven't felt pure in heart, ,
not humble, not good
Lord make me crystal pure
for
thy light to shine through.” Is this, one asks oneself, an unhappy
novitiate for some strange religious order? For surely such rapt
supplications in the interests of "goodness” and “purity" are more
in keeping with the attitude of a nun than with the free and fear-
less pursuit of an artist who follows ever more attentively the dan-
.
.


ALYSE GREGORY
485
gerous implications of his own developing experience. Again, “I
look at the mountains, I try to pray—and I think of something
clever.” But if anything more had been needed to deliver her into
our hands we have but to listen to Mr Murry as he chants his pa-
thetic and monotonous litany. In the September issue of The Adel-
phi with complete solemnity he quotes as a final solution of that
mysterious secret which has baffled so many great minds—-namely,
"the essential of style”—Miss Mansfield's “simple and striking
metaphor”—“to speak to the back of the room.” One wonders just
how Walter Pater would have received such a relaxed and domesti-
cated formula.
Nowhere in The Dove's Nest do we find that "complex of fine
measurements” commended by Henry James which distinguished
Prelude, a story where each character gives out vibrantly yet drift-
ingly without attenuation or discord its own separate note. Here
are, indeed, many instances of her caressing insight, her own singu-
lar lightness of approach. Just as a child might imprison for a
moment in the cup of its hand a fledgeling fallen by the wayside
and then suddenly abandon it on some grassy plot, Miss Mansfield
seems to clasp in the circle of her thought a passing protest over
the crudeness of life, a sense of the fugitive unacknowledged dif-
ferences that lurk between the sexes, a sympathetic understanding
of adolescence, and then depositing her tremulous and explicit bur-
den hurriedly on the ground, with a toss of the head, is off down
the road whistling a bar from Bohême.
Perhaps the most interesting of the stories in this latest vol-
ume, although like most of the others, unfinished, is that entitled
A Married Man's Story. Here, as in a much discussed earlier
story, Je ne Parle pas Français, one detects in the composition a
tranced tension combined with an underlying confusion of purpose,
as though the mood that nurtured it, though fertile, though imagi-
native, had in the end served but to make glide stealthily through
the pages Miss Mansfield's own lambent or perplexed observations.
For Raoul Duquette, the little Frenchman in the former story, is
neither mad enough, shallow enough, nor deep enough to be con-
vincing, and the authentic ring in his suddenly enunciated misery,
which his facile articulacy negates, announces itself unmistakably
as a vicarious release for the author's own private anguish, just as
in A Married Man's Story she voices again her own insistent prob-


486
ARTIST OR NUN
if you
.
•
lem when she makes the husband say “Tell me! Tell me! Why
is it so difficult to write simply—and not only simply but sotto
voce, know what I mean? That is how I long to write. No
fine effects-no bravura
The most accomplished of these stories is The Fly. Here we see
Miss Mansfield at her best, her percipient eye undiverted gazing
through without prejudice to the secret sources of action of "the
boss” and exposing them with a few brilliant objective strokes.
There is here no suggestion of that exiguous world, a world some-
how softened and diminished, though so dazzlingly extended, which
many of her stories reveal; none of those clever strokes which she
herself deplored, but which her artistic prescience was not robust
enough to circumvent; none of those chance banal similes about
"ultimate porters” and “ultimate trains” which one could not be
altogether sure received her own condonation until one finds them
corroborated in the following manner—"Perhaps it is the way God
opens houses at dead of night when he is taking a quiet turn with
an angel,” or “They refused to realize that conversation is like a
dear little baby that is brought in to be handed round.”
To know Katherine Mansfield at her best one must really, then,
return to her earlier stories, to Prelude, to At the Bay, to Bliss, so
subtle in possibilities that one wonders if she herself caught at more
than the floating straw of her own intuition, to The Stranger, and
to Escape. Whether her work will live beyond our own genera-
tion or not is difficult to foretell, but it is perhaps not too much
to say that, in those exceptional instances where her own sensitive
psychology corresponded most exactly with that of the character
she portrayed, she could hardly have failed to please even that
great master of intricate thought whose four requisites of good
literature remained, "intensity, lucidity, brevity and beauty.”
ALYSE GREGORY


LIFE AS AN ART
The DANCE OF LIFE. By Havelock Ellis. 8vo. 248
pages. Houghton Mifflin Company. $3.
MORE
a
ORALISTS, in the main, have been a somewhat forbidding
race. Their main preoccupation has usually been to try to
prevent people from doing what they wanted to do, on the ground
—formerly explicit, but now seldom avowed—that the natural
man is wicked. Psychoanalysed, such moralists would be found to
be moved principally by envy: being themselves too old or too sour
or too stiff for the pleasures of life, they feel a discomfort, when
they see others enjoying themselves, which appears in consciousness
as moral reprobation. Accordingly the things they condemn are not
things which cause pain, but things which cause pleasure, and in
order to be able to condemn such things they put fantastic interpre-
tations on religious precepts. The commandment not to work on
Saturdays is interpreted as a commandment not to play on Sun-
days. This particular rule of morality is dying out, but many that
are still insisted upon have equally little foundation in reason.
Mr Havelock Ellis is a moralist, but not of the usual sort. He
is best known as the author of a monumental work of research,
which the authorities, in their wisdom, have seen fit to make unob-
tainable for ordinary men and women, on the ground that no one
would be virtuous except through ignorance, and that therefore the
spread of knowledge must be illegal. It is true that a host of wise
men, from Socrates onwards, have taught that wrong conduct al-
ways springs from ignorance, but that has never been the view of
the police, who have always believed that people must be either
ignorant or wicked, without telling us which of the two they con-
sidered themselves to be.
Those who know nothing else of Mr Havelock Ellis might ex-
pect to find in him the temperament of a rebel, with possibly some
bitterness against "folly, doctor-like, controlling skill.” But al-
though his views on most subjects are unorthodox, he is far too ur-
bane to be properly described as a rebel. He surveys the world
calmly and genially; he does not try to scold men out of their evil
a
a


488
LIFE AS AN ART
ways, but to win them to the life that he considers good by the por-
trayal of its delights. The holders of power, reinforced by their
sycophants among parsons and professors, view the lines of others
as consisting essentially of work, with only such intervals of rest as
are physiologically necessary. Mr Havelock Ellis views life as es-
sentially play, interrupted by the need of a certain minimum of
work to secure the necessaries of existence. He begins with a chap-
ter on the art of dancing, and goes on to maintain that all life
ought to be as like a dance as possible. This is not suggested in
Bacchic spirit, as a way of drowning our sorrows; the mood is not
that of:
"Is it not fine to dance and sing
While the bells of death do ring?"
The tragic facts of human life seem to have lost their sting for him,
and to have been somehow harmonized as they are in tragic drama.
This is explained by his very interesting account of his conversion
to mysticism at the age of nineteen—a conversion which was per-
manent in spite (or because) of its almost complete freedom from
dogma.
"My whole attitude towards the universe was changed. It was
no longer an attitude of hostility and dread, but of confidence and
love. My self was one with the Not-self, my will one with the uni-
versal will. I seemed to walk in light; my feet scarcely touched
the ground; I had entered a new world."
This mystic illumination underlies the views set forth on thought,
on religion, and on morals, all of which spring from the elimination
of Satan. There are many people—the present reviewer is among
them—who find it harder to give up Satan than any other item of
orthodox religion. Mr Havelock Ellis has given him up, and has
abandoned along with him all the sterner side of morals and reli-
gion and thought. He does not believe, with Jeremiah, that “The
heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.” Con-
sequently morality is not to be restrictive, but expansive: it is to be
more like the training of an athlete, designed to cultivate a natural
excellence. It is not, however, to be a matter of obedience to a set
of rules, but must at every moment depend on feeling.


BERTRAND RUSSELL
489
"No reasonable moral being may draw breath in the world with-
out an open-eyed freedom of choice; and if the moral world is to be
governed by laws, better to people it with automatic machines than
with living men and women. In our human world the precision of
mechanism is for ever impossible.”
This is one of the points where the author's optimism becomes
apparent, and where the Devil's Advocate sees his chance. “Auto-
matic machines” are what men and women are becoming; "the pre-
cision of mechanism” is what the industrial system is forcing them
to acquire. The present reviewer, as a devout believer in Satan,
holds that in our age he is incarnate in the captain of industry,
whether trust magnate or communist commissar. But to say to the
ordinary person: “Remain a living man or woman; do not become
an automatic machine,” is equivalent to saying: “Die of hunger,
and do not attempt to earn your living.” Advice of this sort is apt
to be coldly received. Moreover the state of an automaton, once
achieved, is pleasant; a life which is entirely habitual involves a
minimum of friction and responsibility. The Bolsheviks and the
Fabians, quite rightly, insist that love of spontaneity is anarchic
and aristocratic. All true democrats in the present day mean by
“democracy” the reduction of the few to the level of the many, not
the raising of the many to the level of the few; consequently they
welcome increasing mechanization, and wish it to become universal.
The power of Satan, therefore, is just as great as in past times.
To speak without diabolic metaphors, the question is whether
life is to be conceived as a game or a fight. In the former case, we
may agree with all that Mr Havelock Ellis says; in the latter case,
we shall import something of traditional morals into our outlook.
Let us agree at once that life ought to be a game, that there is noth-
ing intrinsically desirable about fighting, and that the disappear-
ance of the sterner virtues, if it were permanently possible, would
be an unmitigated boon. But if—to take an analogy-the game of
football were illegal, it could only be played by organizing a sub-
sidiary team to take on the police, and this team would have to be
much larger than the teams that were playing. In this case, the
preservation of football would require a high order of self-sacrifice
in those who faced prison to protect players. It happens that foot-
ball is not illegal, but many occupations quite as innocent and quite
as productive of a balance of pleasure are illegal. Bishops and other
a


490
LIFE AS AN ART
busy-bodies employ an army of detectives to spy upon couples in
the Parks, for fear they should not suffer from lack of housing ac-
commodation so much as is hoped. Female teachers, in most parts
of England, are required to be unmarried, which means that they
must be childless and either celibate or very skilfully deceptive. It
would be no more cruel to insist that they should be blinded or have
their hands cut off. Uncivilized races are compelled to work in
mines or other industrial enterprises, and are drilled to spread ter-
ror and starvation among the weaker nations of Europe. In China,
an ancient civilization which has almost all the characteristics that
Mr Havelock Ellis admires is being deliberately destroyed by the
military and financial ambitions of nations with stronger armies
and navies, to the accompaniment of cant about integrity and inde-
pendence and the Open Door.
In such a world, all who are not a menace to their neighbours are
bound to be exterminated by war or economic pressure. Art is al-
most extinct; science still flourishes because it ministers to homi-
cide, but must perish when it has perfected its work by destruction.
How is one to say, in such a world, “my will is one with the uni-
versal will”? Mr Havelock Ellis professes that his mysticism is
free from dogma; but if he supposes that we have anything to do
with a universal will other than that of organized mankind, he has
adopted all that is essential in the dogma of theism. The only
"universal will” visible to me is that of human groups, which are
all bent upon mutual destruction. With this universal will I am
emphatically not at one. Agreeing with Mr Havelock Ellis as to
the ends of life, I find it difficult to agree as to means. I believe
that those who value these ends must temporarily submit to the
yoke of organization and co-operation, since otherwise they will be
crushed in detail by clever energetic maniacs. If one could believe
in some cosmic purpose, worked out through the folly and wicked-
ness of men, it might be possible to wait patiently for the happy
consummation. But if one believes that there is no purpose in the
non-human world—at any rate in that part of it with which we are
in contact—it is useless to look to anything but human effort to ex-
tricate us from the dangers of the time. Science and machinery
have given men new powers over nature and over each other. Un-
fortunately, the more humane portion of mankind is also the less
executive portion, and therefore the new powers have fallen into


BERTRAND RUSSELL
491
the hands of men who use them almost wholly to produce misery
and crush out whatever is excellent and spontaneous or individual.
Unless the champions of humanism rouse themselves to enter the
practical world and make themselves masters of the new powers,
their cause is doomed.
It is possible, however, that this outlook is mistaken, and that
the serpent may be charmed by sweet songs. Men may grow weary
of strenuous futility; the ideal of “efficiency” may lose its appeal.
If so, what is most needed is to set forth persuasively the conception
of life as an art. The Dance of Life does this with great charm;
every page is interesting, and the author has our sympathy through-
out. May his words, and those of men who feel as he does, prove
potent beyond our expectation.
BERTRAND RUSSELL


THE MANTUAN
VIRGIL AND HIS MEANING TO THE WORLD OF TO-DAY.
By J. W. Mackail. 12mo.
159 pages. Marshall
Jones Company. $1.50.
Virgil: A BIOGRAPHY. By Tenney Frank. 8vo. 200
pages. Henry Holt and Company. $2.
ROFESSOR MACKAIL'S little book on Virgil, in the Our
poet to "the World of To-Day.” That such an attempt is in order
just now was recently demonstrated in the course of a symposium
on "the ten dullest authors” in which no less than two eminent lit-
erary characters—one of them a professional critic—voted Virgil
one of the world's greatest bores. It is to such an audience as this
that Professor Mackail's book is primarily addressed, and I am not
sure that he does not err a little in overpraising his author-or
rather in praising him uncritically. But on the whole the book is
admirable for its purpose; it infects the reader with the peculiar
glow of luminous enthusiasm which is characteristic of Mackail
and which makes him such a charming writer on the classics. I
wish, however, that the editors of this interesting series would not
insist so upon emphasizing the “Meaning” of their subjects to the
“World of To-Day.” In this case, the editor writes a preface ex-
plaining that Professor Mackail “has presented us with a study of
the significance of Virgil to the twentieth century”—and then
Mackail goes ahead-quite rightly—and writes a book which com-
—
mends Virgil to our attention on the strength of his absolute lit-
erary and intellectual merits-in other words, of his chief claims to
significance to the world of any day.
Professor Frank's book is quite different; it is a new biography
of Virgil from rather a fresh point of view. Professor Frank has
examined all the evidence for himself and deferred to no one else's
judgement about it, with the result that he accepts as genuine most
of the doubtful poems ascribed to Virgil and on the strength of
them reconstructs a very complete record of his movements and his


EDMUND WILSON
493
intellectual development. He concludes that Virgil was not a
peasant and the son of a humble potter, but the son of a landed pro-
prietor who also owned a pottery; that he sat at the feet of Epicu-
rean masters and was always Epicurean rather than Stoic; that the
pastoral setting of the Eclogues is not an impossible medley, as
Mackail, for instance, contends, but neither Mantuan nor Sicilian
and merely the scenery of southern Italy; that Virgil was not driven
out of his farm after the battle of Philippi, but was living comfort-
ably at Naples at the time that the evictions occurred and wrote
his poems on the subject merely as general protests in favour of
Mantua; and decides many other controversial questions in un-
orthodox fashion. No doubt Professor Frank is very certain about
a great many things which no one can know anything about since
the evidence on Roman civilization seems so incomplete as actu-
ally to make certainties in matters of this kind very difficult, at the
same time that it is considerable enough to arouse scholars with a
gift for the fiction of historical criticism into constructing any num-
ber of equally plausible and directly contradictory legends; but I
cannot help sympathizing with Professor Frank in his hospitality
toward the disputed poems, as I have been bored all too long by
editors who, never having written a line of poetry themselves or
known anybody else who has written one and consequently not
understanding that the noblest of poets write also ribaldry and non-
sense and that a man begins by imitating other poets and may write
half a dozen styles before he has mastered his own, insist that
Shakespeare could not have written the brothel scenes in Pericles
because they do not sound the way Cymbeline and The Winter's
Tale sound to people incapable of listening to what Shakespeare
actually wrote, and that Virgil could not have written the Aetna
because it sounds like an echo of Lucretius, when Virgil even in his
maturest work was always in the habit of dropping into the manner
of Lucretius when he wanted a passage of natural philosophy. In
any case, Professor Frank, though he may build some of his state-
ments about Virgil on rather an uncertain soil, brings Rome itself
much nearer than such books usually do; one feels that he has been
there to see and brought back a first-hand account. To him Maece-
nas and Cicero are contemporaries, not monuments. His forthcom-
ing history of Rome should be of unusual interest. My only objec-
tion to his portrait of Virgil would be that he has concerned himself


494
THE MANTUAN
almost entirely with the events of Virgil's public life and the de-
velopment of his ideas; he makes no psychological portrait; you
hear nothing of Virgil's emotional life-about which his poetry
suggests some curious speculations. I suppose someone will pres-
ently psycho-analyse him and poor pius Aeneas and his dreams will
stand naked in the lecture-room.
But in the meantime, what is of prime importance is to maintain
Virgil's reputation as a poet. Venturing to mention him about a
year ago in a company of literary persons I was greeted by hoots
and jeers; the grand manner was denounced; and it was generally
conceded that no celebrated writer-except Milton-had been so
thoroughly discredited. The explanation of the attitude of these
people, most of whom were certainly capable of appreciating poetry,
and of the two men I mentioned at the beginning of this article is
partly, I think, a phobia acquired in boyhood from having had to
read the Aeneid in school. We shy instinctively at Virgil in later
life, just as we do at the Bible, because we remember it as some-
thing intolerably dreary and largely unintelligible which we had
to slave over during pleasant afternoons when we would much
rather have been doing something else. And I do not much blame
schoolboys for being bored with the first few books of the Aeneid
which they are usually compelled to read: the fine things are at
that age beyond their comprehension and the pseudo-Homeric ma-
chinery—the repetitions and conventional formulas which in
Homer have all the romantic naïveté of a ballad refrain, in Virgil
sound stiff and artificial and are boring to anybody. Besides,
Virgil is such a poor story-teller and his characters are so pale. It
may be an infantile prejudice on my own part, but I have never
been able to feel that even the grand pièce de résistance of the
Fourth Book, the episode of Dido and Aeneas, is much of a dramatic
Dido is ordinarily described as passionate, but she is
fluent rather than passionate and, as H. W. Garrod says, even in
her most tempestuous outbursts she remembers all the rules of rhet-
oric. No real conflict takes place between her and Aeneas because
Aeneas is completely indifferent; he seems to have no reactions at
all one way or the other; and one cannot escape the notion that the
poet himself shared not a little of the indifference of his hero. I
see no reason for believing that Virgil, whom the Neapolitans called
Parthenias, was especially interested in women or that he was emo-
-
a
success.


EDMUND WILSON
495
tionally capable of dramatizing the Aeneas-Dido situation. To
me, Dido is far more real and charming when Aeneas meets her
afterwards in Hades and she listens silent to his excuses with her
eyes upon the ground and when he has finished simply runs un-
friendly away to the wood where her first husband will comfort
her.
And this illustrates the peculiar vein in which Virgil was particu-
larly successful—the vein of the lacrimae rerum, of the deep sad-
ness in all mortal life which “moves the mind.” In this elegiac
mood, which seems to have represented his most natural and his
habitual poetical reaction to life, he writes not narrative, but music;
he takes an incident or a figure and diffuses it into exquisite ca-
dences of tenderness; the theme is dissolved like the shapes of a
dream into the emotion of the poet. Dido in life is unconvincing;
among the shades she is lovely. And Palinurus, even before he
reaches Hades and in relating the simple story of his death seems
to breathe the pathos of the frustration of all human endeavour,
moves already in the vagueness of a dream—all alone on the sleep-
ing sea, tempted softly between sleeping and waking by the bodi-
less voices of the night. What is most moving, most felt, in the
Eclogues?—the eviction of the Mantuan farmers—Nunc victi,
tristes, quoniam Fors omnia versat.
What is most mem-
orable in the Georgics?-a poem which is supposed to have been
written as a glorification of the country, a piece of officially in-
spired propaganda for a back-to-the-land movement. Not, to my
taste at any rate, the conscientious exaltation of Bacchus nor the
elegant and rather conventional “O fortunatos nimium” passage;
in this latter he speaks of the “secura quies et nescia fallere vita,"
but the net effect of his poem is to make you feel with extreme
poignancy that the country life like any other both deceives and
fails mankind. It is a sad struggle to wring a living from Nature:
the sun dries up your crops; your orchards catch fire and burn
down; your cattle get stung by snakes or are wiped out by the
plague. All the greatest things in the Georgics are tragic: the de-
scription of northern Italy laid waste with the cattle-plague-
desertaque regna Pastorum, et longe saltus lateque vacantes; the
magnificent passage about the civil wars with its prayer to the gods
for peace and the pathos and longing of its vision of the quiet farm-
er some day turning up with his plough the naked bones and the


496
THE MANTUAN
empty helmets of Philippi; and finally the lovely, the incompar-
able legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. The circumstances of the in-
clusion of this last would seem especially to throw light on the
character of Virgil's poetic feeling in its pure state. According to
Mackail, the Georgics originally ended with an encomium of Gal-
lus, Virgil's brilliant friend and fellow poet, then vice-regent of
Egypt; but when Gallus disgraced himself, was recalled and exiled,
and finally committed suicide, Virgil cancelled his conclusion and
had to make shift for another. The episode of Orpheus and Eury-
dice seems so remote from the structure and style of the rest of the
poem that one may guess that it was something which Virgil had
written independently and merely happened to have about–in
fact, that when he was not labouring over the ambitious semi-offi-
cial themes of the Georgics and the Aeneid he dropped naturally
into the writing of sweet sorrowful charming idyls—the dim shades
drifting like birds driven by the winter storms, the rescued nymph
vanishing like smoke between her lover's helpless hands, the unpe-
titionable gate-keeper of Hades barring the muddy stream, and the
lover still vainly calling “Eurydice!" when his head has been riven
from his body, till the last echo of his love has died with her name
among the lonely river banks.
But what shall be said of the grand manner, which has been so
savagely outlawed among us since the realists and the imagists have
declared war upon rhetoric—which seems to prevent many intelli-
gent people from supposing that there can be anything in Virgil at
all? Well, there is probably a certain margin of rhetoric in every-
thing that Virgil wrote; but it is not like the pseudo-classic rhetoric
for which people probably mistake it; it is not like the rhetoric of
of the Renaissance. It is silly to say, as I have heard people do,
that Catullus is a genuine lyric poet and Virgil merely a goldsmith
of noble sentiments (I even know one man who contends that Ovid
was a more genuine poet than Virgil). The problem is to disengage
Virgil's own lyric strain, which, though less varied than Catullus',
is equally genuine. Besides, in the first place, Virgil should be for-
given even his emotionally uninteresting passages for his superb
artistic integrity. One must remember that, though in both ancient
and modern times he has exfloreated into all sorts of overpowering
blossoms, he has also inspired in Dante the sharpest, the most sin-
cere, and the least florid style which has perhaps ever been seen.


EDMUND WILSON
497
The Georgics is surely the Madame Bovary of the ancient world.
This composition, so different from the imperfect and unfinished,
the sometimes shadowy or wooden Aeneid, that epic which he him-
self on his death-bed had left orders that his friends should destroy,
is one of the most extraordinary pieces of literary virtuosity and
one of the greatest examples of the mastery over language ever
produced. Every line is a technical triumph; every word is the
right word. Even when the subject is quite dull or prosaic, as it
not infrequently is, the poet has bent all his energy to presenting it
in the most intense and concentrated form and in a manner exactly
suited to the matter. In seven years, the colours, the movements,
the sounds of the country life of ancient Italy were fixed for eter-
nity. The ravens still flap in the trees; the snake still glides out
in his new skin; the bees still buzz by their mossy ponds to their
oleaster-shaded nests. You will say perhaps that this is a mere
tour de force which no serious poet should ever have attempted,
that Virgil might better have gone on writing brief pastorals, like
the Eclogues, all his life. But there is a genuine poetic emotion
which carries off both the Georgics and the Aeneid, though it is not
of precisely the same lyric character as the lacrimae rerum. It is
the devotion to the idea of Rome. It is a little hard for us in
twentieth century America to understand this intense enthusiasm
for an official political and social ideal; we are inclined to think
that Virgil's outbursts about Rome are like our Fourth of July ora-
tions. But there is an actual poetic conviction about the rhetoric
of such passages as “O passi graviora!”; and from the time when
the peasant in the First Eclogue tells of having seen the imperial
city, and the hexameter, distending, resounds with a thunderous ru-
mour, to the climax of the Sixth Book of the Aeneid when Anchises
announces to Aeneas the supremacy and the moral grandeur of the
city which he is about to found (Tu regere imperio populos, Ro-
mane, memento) Rome stands behind all that Virgil wrote as a
passion profoundly felt. He conceived that the ideals of his civili-
zation were a proper subject for poetry and that a life-time devoted
to setting them to verse, though it involved the most interminable
patience and the most exacting labour, was a life-time well spent.-
Ah, Virgil, I am afraid that all Professor Mackail's eloquence will
never sell you to "the world of to-day": for one thing you took
life too slowly and for another you took poetry too seriously.
EDMUND WILSON
a


AN EAGLE IN THE RING
COLLECTED POEMs. By Vachel Lindsay. 8vo. 290
pages. The Macmillan Company. $3.50.
THE
HE outstanding impression made by Mr Lindsay's collected
poems is that the author pities the fallen, deplores misunder-
standings, and is saddened that the spirit should so often be at the
mercy of the body. One cannot but revere his instinctive charity
and determination to make a benevolent ordering of the universe
possible. One knows that it is not an assumed attitude which leads
Mr Lindsay to say:
“I want live things in their pride to remain.
I will not kill one grasshopper vain,
Though he eats a hole in my shirt like a door.
I let him out, give him one chance more.”
“Love's a gamble, say you. I deny.
Love's a gift. I love you till I die.
I .
Gamblers fight like rats. I will not play.
All I ever had I gave away.”
It is a fine courage that enables a writer to let himself loose in the
religious revival sense of the term at the risk of being thought an
unintentional clown. It is impossible not to respect Mr Lindsay's
preoccupation with humanitarianism, but at the same time to de-
plore his lack of aesthetic rigour. In a lover of the chant, one ex-
pects a metronomelike exactness of ear; it is the exception, how-
ever, when the concluding lines of Mr Lindsay's stanzas are not
like a top which totters, or a hoop which rolls crazily before it fi-
nally stops. We have:
“Murdered in filth in a day,
Somehow by the merchant gay!”
and as the final lines of a poem:


MARIANNE MOORE
499
“The urchins of the sky,
Drying their wings from storms and things
So they again can fly."
It is difficult to enunciate the words in such lines as:
"With my two bosomed blossoms gay"
L
“Like rivers sweet and steep,
Deep rock-clefts before
my
feet"
"You were a girl-child slight.”
One is disaffected even in the mood of informal discursiveness by
adjacent terminal words such as calculation, Appalachian; whole,
jowl; ore, floor; trial, vile; fire, the higher; and
"Join hands,
Poets,
Companions”
a
is a metrical barbarism. Why, in a Dirge for a Righteous Kitten,
a
"His shirt was always laundried well”? What of the prose lines,
”?
“A special tang for those who are tasty”? And in the phrase,
"when the statue of Andrew Jackson . . is removed," we
have that popular weak misuse of the present tense which we have
in such an expression as “I hope he gets there.” There is a lack of
neat thinking in such phrases as “Lining his shelves with books
from everywhere” and “All in the name of this or that grim flag.”
There is inexactness of meaning in
a
“The long handclasp you gave
Still shakes upon my hands."
Usefulness is contradicted by the copybook concept of Dante:
"Would we were lean and grim, and shaken with hate
Like Dante, fugitive, o’erwrought with cares,”


500
AN EAGLE IN THE RING
and to speak of “Christ, the beggar,” is inexact since it has never
been said of Christ that he begged; he did without. One questions
the cogency of Mr Lindsay's thought when he says in alluding to
the San Francisco earthquake, "Here where her God has scourged
her.” Not that San Francisco was or is a godly city, but many an-
other city has gone unscourged.
As a visionary, as an interpreter of America, and as a modern
primitive-in what are regarded as the three provinces of his
power, Mr Lindsay is hampered to the point of self-destruction by
his imperviousness to the need for aesthetic self-discipline. Many
poets have thoughts that are similar, in which case, only heedless-
ness prevents the author of the less perfect product from giving
place to the author of the stronger, and much of Mr Lindsay's col-
lected work is unfortunate in thus provoking comparison with at-
tested greatness. Unfortunate also, is the conscious altering of
great familiar expressions:
“The times are out of joint! O cursed spite!
The noble jester Yorick comes no more"
“What Nations sow, they must expect to reap”
“Within the many mansions,
[the hosts]
Slept long by crooning springs.”
.
“Did you waste much money
To deck a leper's feast”
a
and the context, provoke comparison with The Vision of Sir Laun-
fal. In The Mysterious Cat, the line repeated three times, “Did
you ever hear of a thing like that,” recalls The Three Blind Mice;
Eden in Winter recalls Ralph Hodgson's Eve. Star of My Heart,
At Mass, and Foreign Missions in Battle Array, recall such classics
as We Three Kings of Orient Are and Onward Christian Soldiers,
and The Last Song of Lucifer seems like a mild transcript of Para-
dise Lost.
a
“In that strange curling of her lips,
That happy curling of her lips,”
)


MARIANNE MOORE
501
comparison is simultaneously provoked, with E. E. Cummings and
with Poe. The Fairy Bridal Hymn embodies without the aureole
of distinguished effect of separateness, the feeling in Blake's ac-
count of a fairy's funeral and in The Wedding of the Lotus and
the Rose, the lines :
"Above the drowned ages,
A wind of wooing blows,”
unconsciously to Mr Lindsay no doubt, but suicidally, recall Swin-
burne.
Although it was not intended that the poems should be read to
oneself, they will, on occasion, be so read, and so surely as they
are it is inevitable that the author will in certain
respects
be
pre-
sented amiss. Certain repetitions suggest the pleonasm of the il-
literate preacher who repeats a phrase in order to get time to form-
ulate another:
“Love is not velvet, not all of it velvet"
“When a million million years were done
And a million million years beside,"
We have not that reinforcing of sentiment which we have in reiter-
ation by Yeats:
“She pulled the thread and bit the thread,
And made a golden gown.”
In his essay on Poetic Diction, Robert Bridges says, “the higher
the poet's command of diction, the wider may be the field of his
Properties;
and this is a very practical point, if a writer
with no command of imaginative diction, should use such Proper-
ties as are difficult of harmonization, he will discredit both the
Properties and the Diction.” Despite the fact that Mr Lindsay's
properties are abundant and often harmonious as in the fantasy of
the gipsies:
“Dressed, as of old, like turkey-cocks and zebras,
Like tiger-lilies and chameleons,"


502
AN EAGLE IN THE RING
the grouping is often conspicuously self-destructive. One feels that
“Percival and Bedivere
And Nogi side by side”
distract one from the poet's meaning as do the statesmen, artists,
and sages, in The Litany of the Heroes: Amenophis Fourth-
Hamlet and Keats "in one”—Moses, Confucius, Alexander, Caesar,
St Paul, “Augustine,” Mohammed, St Francis, Dante, Columbus,
Titian, Michael Angelo, Shakespeare, Milton, Napoleon, Darwin,
Lincoln, Emerson, Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Socrates. Like
paintings in public buildings of the world's cultural and scientific
progress, such groups sacrifice impact to inclusiveness. Johnny Ap-
pleseed is marred, one feels, by such phrases as "the bouncing
moon,” and
“He laid him down sweetly,
Like a bump on a log, like a stone washed white.”
We rejoice in the resilience of imagination in the idea of a grass-
hopper as "the Brownies' racehorse," "the fairies' Kangaroo"; and
in The Golden Whales of California, there is controlled extrava-
gance in the enumeration of "the swine with velvet ears," "the
sacred raisins," "the trees which climb so high the crows are dizzy,"
“the snake fried in the desert,” but “the biggest ocean in the
world,” and the whales “whooping that their souls are free,” sug-
gest the tired European's idea of America and the fantasy which
visualizes St Francis in the mere literal appropriateness of an ety-
mological pun, offends by its conception of:
“The venturesome lovers
In a year and a month and a day of sailing
a
Leaving the whales and their whoop unfailing
On through the lightning, ice and confusion
North of the North Pole,
South of the South Pole
And west of the west of the west of the west."
Objecting further, it is impossible not to say that Mr Lindsay's


MARIANNE MOORE
503
phrases of negro dialect are a deep disappointment. A familiarity
with negros and the fact that the adaptations are intentional can-
not absolve such Aryan doggerel as:
“And we fell by the altar
And we fell by the aisle,
And found our Savior
In just a little while.”
Such lines are startlingly at variance with real negro parallelism as
we have it in:
"Oh, Hell am deep 'n Hell am wide
an' you can't touch bottom on either side”
and are incompatible with that perfect fragment of negro cadence
which Mr Lindsay has combined with it, “Every time I hear the
spirit moving in my heart I'll pray.” A stentorianly emphatic
combining of the elements of the black genius and the white, but
emphasizes their incompatibility. In The Congo, the “Baboon
butler in the agate door,” “And hats that were covered with dia-
mond-dust” are pale substitutes for
“Baboon butler at the door,
Diamond carpet on the floor.”
In the Booker Washington Trilogy,
"the oak secure,
Weaving its leafy lure,
Dreaming by fountains pure
Ten thousand years”
recalls The Charge of the Light Brigade. The Daniel, and Simon
Legree have intermittently fantasy and beat, but the refrain, fabri-
cated or authentic, “Let Samson be coming into your mind” is in-
explicable from any point of view. In stage directions, the most
expert craftsmen such as Shaw and Yeats barely escape pedantry
and one feels that however necessary to Mr Lindsay's conception


504
AN EAGLE IN THE RING
of the spoken word particular information may be, when he asks
us “to keep as lightfooted as possible,” to read “orotund fashion,”
“with heavy buzzing bass,” et cetera, one can but feel, unfairly or
not, that he is subordinating a poorly endowed audience to wit
which he proposes to furnish.
Some of Mr Lindsay's work would lead one to infer that “a man
is out on three wide balls but walks on four good strikes.” The
literary reader tends not to be compensated by moral fervour for
technical misapprehensions, but there is life in any kind of beauty
and in these poems avoidance of grossness and the entirely venge-
ful, is fortifying. Why I Voted the Socialist Ticket is full of con-
tagious vigour:
“I am unjust, but I can strive for justice.
My life's unkind, but I can vote for kindness.
I, the unloving, say life should be lovely.
I, that am blind, cry out against my blindness,”
but in his Curse for Kings, Mr Lindsay gives the effect of an emo-
tional pacifism which is incompatible with earnestness.
“This whole book is a weapon in a strenuous battlefield,” Mr
Lindsay says; “practically every copy will be first opened on the
lap of some person
trying to follow me as I recite as one
follows the translation of the opera libretto.” He is not to be re-
futed. There is a perhaps not very exact analogy between him in
his rôle of undismayed, national interpreter, and a certain young
eagle conveyed by American naval officers to the Philippines,
styled “an American rooster,” and pitted invariably with mortal
consequence against Philippine gamecocks.
If a reader felt no responsibility for a writer, and were merely
culling felicities, certain of Mr Lindsay's poems would undoubt-
edly give complete pleasure; disregarding as a whole the poem,
How a Little Girl Danced, there is a fine accuracy in the lines:
“With foot like the snow, and with step like the rain.”
There is suggested fragility in the poem game of yellow butterflies:
“They shiver by the shallow pools.
They drink and drink. A frail pretense!"


MARIANNE MOORE
505
There is beauty in The Dandelion; especially also, in The Flower
of Mending:
“When moths have marred the overcoat
Of tender Mr Mouse."
And the lines:
“Factory windows are always broken.
Somebody's always throwing bricks,”
are expertly captivating. Lincoln is not added to, but he is not
travestied in Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight; there is glory
in the conception of Alexander Campbell stepping "from out the
Brush Run Meeting House”: and reality in Bryan:
.
"With my necktie by my ear, I was stepping on my dear.
The earth rocked like the ocean, the sidewalk was a deck.
The houses for the moment were lost in the wide wreck."
We have in this poem, some of Gertrude Stein's power of “telling
what you are being while you are doing what you are doing,” and
there is "blood within the rhyme” in:
“The banjos rattled and the tamborines
Jing-jing-jingled in the hands of Queens."
MARIANNE MOORE


BRIEFER MENTION
CAPTURES, by John Galsworthy (12mo, 305 pages; Scribner: $2) opens with
what is easily the most important story in the volume—A Feud. It is a
beautifully balanced tale, rich with the atmosphere of the English country.
side and the emotional implications so largely depending thereon. In a
sense complementary to this is The Man Who Kept His Form, apotheo-
sizing the quiet, triumphant changelessness of the English aristocrat despite
apparent failure. The sketches following these two stories, although
gleaming with the fine, reserved words that have power to convey subtle
insights, are disconcertingly slight and by-the-way. Galsworthy empha-
sizes the artificiality of the form he so competently, and sometimes ex.
quisitely, masters.
GREY Wethers, by V. Sackville-West (12mo, 328 pages; Doran: $2) has
its origin and validity in the setting. The author has tried to symbolize
the English downs by typifying their outstanding moods in the characters,
their grandeur and immutability in the action of her story. Although the
stern freedom that is their keynote is excessively romanticized, a greyly
glamorous generalization has been effected; but neither the downs nor
their personification have been arrested in any specific, distinctive dram-
atization. Miss Sackville-West has done well to limit her subject matter
more vigorously than in Challenge; her development of it has gained cor-
respondingly in directness and a well-contained richness.
a
Weird Tales, by E. T. W. Hoffmann, translated from the German by J. T.
Bealby (12mo, 344 pages; Scribner : $2.50). "But wonderful are the do-
ings of Accident !" the author is moved to exclaim in one of his stories,
while elsewhere a character finds that "accident came to his rescue.” With
this rather lenient attitude towards his craft, Hoffmann could let his parlour
fantasy play about a world of people who, while not subtle enough figures
to compel interest in their characters, usually possess sufficiently marked
attributes to interest us in their welfare. Hoffmann's "weirdness," how-
ever, is a little too much like the dungeon scene in one-night-stand opera,
where the massive canvas rocks sway slightly as the curtain rises. Much
more authentic is the appeal of an occasional passage which reconstructs
the somewhat ceremonious but amiable times in which the author lived and
for which his work was best adapted.
Malice, by Pierre MacOrlan (16mo, 242 pages; G. Crés : Paris). There
is a golem, a devil in shape of an old Jew, a young man who trades his
soul for a rope to hang himself: in short, all the machinery of German
romantic novels of the early nineteenth century, but employed ironically
against the strictly modern background of the city of Mainz in 1922.
Malice has the air of being an Expressionist poster to advertise the spec-
tacle of moral decay, naively vicious, but not unaesthetic, which is one
side only of Germany since the war.


BRIEFER MENTION
507
DOBACHI, by John Ayscough (12mo, 284 pages; Macmillan: $2). Prevail-
ing tendencies in fiction have not bothered Mr Ayscough; his novel is
about as old-fashioned as a felt boot, and put together with approximately
the same degree of grace. The narrative, with its setting a New England
village of Cornish puritans, fails to come to life under the prodding of a
laborious
pen; the author accepts defeat at the hands of his heroine with
only two-thirds of the book written and sighs: "All this happened long
before I was born: no record of her suspicions has been handed down, and
I do not choose to guess at her feelings in the matter.” Mr Ayscough, it
appears, is a novelist who takes no liberties.
:
Bread, by Charles Gilman Norris (12mo, 511 pages; Dutton : $2) may be
edible, but it is neither nutritious nor palatable. The author is an indis-
criminatingly voluble slave of the realistic school with no suspicion that by
showing the romance of the commonplace the commonplace itself may be
revealed. He has dedicated an egregiously drab book to the proposition
that existence is a bad business. In a style as formless as an amoeba he
emulates the specious exactitude of Sinclair Lewis and the mania of Upton
Sinclair for persecuting maladjustments. His report bears the same dis-
tortive resemblance to life that stenographic symbols have to the words
they stand for.
AN OUTLAW'S DIARY: Revolution, by Cecile Tormay (8vo, 291 pages;
McBride: $3) is a record of a patrician's reactions to the subversion of the
old order which took place in Hungary in 1918. Patriotism and conserva-
tism are the author's fetishes. There is no attempt at an unbiased view.
point in the book, and too little discrimination between fact and hearsay.
The unrelieved extravagance of emotions at times arouses the reader's im-
patience, until he reasons that probably it was in just proportion to the
tumultuous terrors of the time. And, since scepticism of the underlying
sincerity is inadmissible, he cannot shut out the hysterical cry of impas-
sioned resentment and cumulative despair.
The ANCIENT BEAUTIFUL Things, by Fannie Stearns Davis (12mo, 82
pages; Macmillan: $1). The author paints upon a narrow canvas, and
is at her best when picturing the fireside and the cradle; but, within her
limited fields, she writes with a directness and a genuineness of emotion.
The book is impressive because the impulse behind it is obviously authentic.
The DREAM AND OTHER POEMS, by John Masefield (12mo, 63 pages; Mac-
millan: $1.25). An old mood many times expressed in earlier poems runs
through Masefield's new book. The old richness and mellowness are here
too, but the poems seem slighter than those of the former volumes, and
the metre is so unvaried and so balanced as to be very slightly soporific.
Vision and interpretation have taken on a more sombre cast, but for all
that Masefield has little to fear in competition with any other poet among
either the older or the younger Georgians. It is only his own earlier works
with which this new volume does not bear comparison.


508
BRIEFER MENTION
The BALLAD OF ST BARBARA AND OTHER Verses, by Gilbert Keith Chester-
ton (12mo, 85 pages; Putnams: $2.50) prove that the author has never
captivated that subtle thing of melody and magic whose name is poetry.
The melody, indeed, he has mastered, but he has none of the magic of the
Muse; something prosaic and sodden weighs down the very spirit of his
book; and, in spite of all Mr Chesterton's apt rhymes and graceful
rhythms, one fails to find any trace of that graphic imagery or of that emo-
tional or imaginative fervour for which a poem may be memorable.
The Sun CHASER, by Jeanette Marks (12mo, 119 pages; Stewart Kidd:
$1.75). This play is marked by careful character delineations and by a
vague and poetic symbolism that at times seems in danger of losing itself
in skeins of imagination, but that for the most part is employed with
subtlety and restraint. Occasionally the author appears to be tiptoeing on
the verge of melodrama, but she never lets herself quite fall beyond the
verge. Her work on the whole is shadow-haunted, but impressive.
THIRTEEN WORthies, by Llewellyn Powys (16mo, 221 pages; American
Library Service: $1.75) is a pleasant echo of the virile voices of Chaucer,
Bunyan, William Barnes, Hardy, and other men intimate with the soil,
strong and whole-hearted in piety or gaiety. Simple, "earth-bound” spirits
they seem to Mr Powys; he disregards the complexities implicit in the very
existence of their works. The essays in their unpretentiousness and slim-
ness seem shy; and would seem youthful, but for a quality of gentle
melancholy. The author too modestly disavows original thoughts by the
frequent use of quotations, but he gives character to names lodged away
from every-day memory, and his genuine joy in his subjects is shared by
the reader.
Roman PICTURES, by Percy Lubbock (12mo, 221 pages; Scribner : $3) is in
every sense an exquisite performance—the work of a true stylist to whom
the English language is still a temple of matchless masonry, inviting the
hand of the craftsman decorator. There is not a careless phrase in the
book; the pattern is as intricate as it is beautiful. In mood, these reminis-
cences have the same tone which was to be found in Earlham, but here
there is greater richness, a more abundant ease, and a touch of high hu-
mour. Altogether, an accomplishment which the author—as an enlight-
ened disciple-might lay before Henry James and be confident of the
verdict.
SOME MAKERS OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, by William Lyon Phelps (12mo,
187 pages; Marshall Jones : $2.50). From this series of lectures, delivered
at Dartmouth, one learns that Emerson was an "ardent American,” that
Mark Twain was “the great American Democrat," that Hawthorne was
"a glory to American literature," and as for Jonathan Edwards and Ben-
jamin Franklin—“if we could take the best in both, and unite the com-
bination in one person, we should have the ideal American.” The lectures
must have been delivered from a flag-draped rostrum, or was there a
chautauqua at Hanover?


BRIEFER MENTION
509
Gods of MODERN GRUB STREET, by A. St John Adcock, with thirty-two por-
traits after photographs by E. O. Hoppé (12mo, 326 pages; Stokes : $2.50)
is a collection of notes documenting Mr Hoppé's photographs. Mr Ad-
cock furnishes the bones of biography, with some timid comments—this
book seems better than that, or a certain book is about this or that; but he
fails to possess, or submerges, any particular appetites in literature. His
writing lacks personality; and he is the perfect "book in breeches.” Mr
Hoppé's portraits are very plain and public—an identifiable mask and con-
ventional posing of hands and pipe in a moderate murk. Nevertheless cer-
tain faces, such as Hardy's or Hilaire Belloc's, are like to endure as he has
recorded them. It is pleasant to see Mr E. Phillips Oppenheim's mild
proletariat face, not unlike the late John Bunny's, Mr McKenna's ideal
aristocracy, and Miss Kaye-Smith's acrid sunniness. But in this case the
quality of godliness is success; and the book would have more interest if
they had sought certain distinguished faces which the great publishers have
not yet made as trite as the Smith Brothers'.
MEN OF LETTERS, by Dixon Scott, with an Introduction by Max Beerbohm
(12mo, 313 pages; Doran: $3). England's long alienation from construc-
tive movements in the other arts has intensified a remarkable impure de-
light in literature, in which a dim sense of design and formal beauty be-
came inextricably confused with accidental and social interests. That the
critic dominated the reader and not the writer is indicated by the fact that
a school of ornate romantic critics preceded a group of novels strictly de-
signed, of an intricate cold carved quality, which irritated and dismayed
the unprepared public. The late Mr Dixon Scott says that “one of the
chief joys of criticism is the joy of detection—an actual hounding-down of
a live human being," with no suspicion that this pleasure ought to be some-
what illicit. His comments are sensitive and shapely, but mostly a little
beside the point. True critical acumen, which reproduces in diagram
the process of creation, is a little overlaid by the irrelevant things he saw
in his subject. That he possessed it is clear in the Whitman note. He
observed Whitman's all but secure position between poetical rhetoric and
exact creation; and wrote of the poignance of his particular in sharp relief
against the universal, his image against a primitive atmosphere, as in Ori-
ental verse.
HARMONISM AND Conscious EvoLUTION, by Sir Charles Walston (12mo,
463 pages; Macmillan: $6). The sequel to the dictum that "everything
flows" is the discovery of the unchanging principle which underlies this
flow. Sir Charles Walston, then, is writing the sequel to pragmatism
when he attempts to bring the emphasis on the free creative will back to
some principle underlying this will. And he sees what the pragmatists
have missed: that the creative will involves first of all an aesthetic prin-
ciple rather than an ethical one. But we do wish that this really vital
formulation of aesthetic priority had permeated the author's style more
deeply, so that his plea for beauty in living might have been more a thing
of beauty in itself.


COMMENT
W
E are uncertain whether what we observe is a new New Hel-
lenism or merely a higher Hellenism. The Greek spirit is,
in any case, with us; and we are charmed.
;
The Greeks are supposed to have been lovers of beauty and of
wisdom; indeed it may be their peculiar and happy character to
have been able to love both. But, as an eminent philosopher once
informed an undergraduate, their love of beauty would never have
led them to tolerate, for a moment, such works of art as were dan-
gerous to the state. Again it would seem that fortune was kind to
them; except for peculations they found nothing in the Parthenon
hostile to good government and the Established Church.
But if we can't all be happy, we can be active; and it is good to
note that even in organizations which are avowedly unpolitical (yet
we fancy that a Greek would not have understood "unpolitical”
except as a term of reproach) there is a definite tendency to look
jealously upon works of art and to discover whether the political
organism may not deteriorate because of them. A hero writes a
wicked book and it is moved and seconded that he should lose his
medals; that is one of those famous first steps which count; we
shall presently impeach a President for using too many loose sen-
tences. The great thing for us is that all of the protests against art
and letters, protests which fancy themselves purely moral, concede
more than they withhold. They are abject in the presence of art-
a nice position to maintain
and even if they overvalue the influ-
ence of art, acknowledge its legitimacy and its relevance to life.
It remains for the arts to do the handsome thing—and they are
doing it. “Life” becomes the touchstone of literary endeavour-
not "true to life” but “serving life” the standard of measurement.
“Life” in these connexions means the present problem-not the
eternal; and it will presently be improper, if not impossible, for a
writer to concern himself with a theme which has no bearing on
revolutions, applied psychology, or, in general, the moral and phys-
ical catastrophe which, we have been assured, impends.
Over Mr T. S. Eliot's initials there appear in the current num-
ber of The Criterion, some brief words on this subject:


COMMENT
511
9
a
to
. For in our time the pursuit of literary perfection, and
the preoccupation with literature and art for their own sake, are
objects of attack, no longer in the name of ‘morals,' but in the name
of a much more insidious catchword: 'life.' I say ‘more dangerous,'
because the term ‘morals,' at worst, stands for some order or sys-
tem, even if a bad one; whereas 'life,' with much vaguer meaning,
and therefore much greater possibilities of unctiousness, may be
merely a symbol of chaos. Those, however, who affirm an anti-
nomy between 'literature,' meaning any literature which can appeal
only to a small and fastidious public, and 'life,' are not only flat-
tering the complacency of the half-educated, but asserting a prin-
ciple of disorder.
“It is not, certainly, the function of a literary review to provide
material for the chat of coteries—nor is a review called
upon
avoid such appeal. A literary review should maintain the appli-
cation, in literature, of principles which have their consequences
also in politics and in private conduct; and it should maintain them
without tolerating any confusion of the purposes
of
pure literature
with the purposes of politics or ethics.
“In the common mind all interests are confused, and each de-
graded by the confusion. And where they are confused, they can-
not be related; in the common mind any specialized activity is con-
ceived as something isolated from life, an odious task or a pastime
of mandarins. To maintain the autonomy, and the disinterested-
ness, or every human activity, and to perceive it in relation to every
other, require a considerable discipline. It is the function of a lit-
erary review to maintain the autonomy and the disinterestedness of
literature, and at the same time to exhibit the relations of literature
—not to 'life,' as something contrasted to literature, but to all the
other activities, which, together with literature, are the components
of life.”
a
The note is entitled The Function of a Literary Review. We
recommend the statement to our contemporaries.


THE THEATRE
HI
a
a
IGH Spots of the New Season: Ralph Barton's poster of the
Lady Pincushion on the side-show tent in Poppy and W. C.
Fields appearing for the first time in history in a speaking part (he
a
proves to have a high tremulous tenor rather like a refined and ap-
pealing eloquent preacher). The spiritualist-detective play Zeno,
which combines the sinister excitement of melodrama with the
agreeable surprise of a conjuring performance. In this play, a
man who wants to rob a safe commits a dangerous murder, stages a
fake spiritualistic seance, fills the pockets of a whole assemblage of
people with objects designed falsely to cast suspicion on them, and
with the aid of a whole army of accomplices succeeds in installing
highly complicated mechanical devices in a house in which people
are living. There is no nonsense about explaining why he went to
all this trouble—why, since he knew the combination, he didn't
simply go and open the safe, instead of spending days and weeks
filling the house with conjuring tricks; and that is why the play is
fascinating; it is fascinating like one of Goldberg's devices for kill-
ing flies or eating soup without a spoon. The take-off on spiritual-
ist-detective plays in the Music Box Review—also, in this latter,
Mr Benchley's great Endowment Fund speech and some of Irving
Berlin's jazz counterpoint, especially the curious modernized waltz
with its shivery opening descent, like sinking in an express elevator.
The colours and costumes of the GREENWICH VILLAGE FOLLIES
and some of the tumbling and trick dancing. Otherwise, the
GREENWICH VILLAGE Follies is not quite up to standard this
year: it re-echoes a little forlornly in the WINTER GARDEN, which
is much too big for it and seems, besides, to have infected it with
banality. Miss Katharine Cornell's gorgeous blue and rose crino-
lines in CASANOVA—which, however, are the best thing in the pro-
duction. Miss Cornell is extremely pretty in her eighteenth cen-
tury costumes, but her performance is rather hollow. I tried hard,
but I could not believe in her love affair with Casanova. But that
is perhaps not altogether her fault: in the first place, Mr Lowell
Sherman, though fairly plausible as a quick-witted knave, in emo-
tional scenes is impossible; and in the second, the play itself is so


THE THEATRE
513
hollow that I doubt if very much is to be made of it. What Mr
Woods and Mr Miller really need to carry off their investment in
such magnificent costumes and in a set for an eighteenth century
inn at Geneva which looks like the Japanese Room at the Ritz is
a new play about Casanova.—And finally, I would commend the
French screen version of Anatole France's Crainquebille—the best
film I have ever seen, which almost shook my faith in the impossi-
bility of the movie as a medium for dramatic art.
The LULLABY is a new play by Mr Edward Knoblock. Mr
Knoblock is, I am told, one of the three men in the English-speak-
ing world who knows most about the theatre. He is a master of
dramatic technique and has an unerring sense of the stage; he is an
encyclopaedia of all the plots and situations of the last fifty years.
The result is that, in The LULLABY, you know the end of almost
every one of Mr Knoblock's dozen or so scenes as soon as you have
seen the beginning and that you find your lips automatically pro-
nouncing with the actor the words of Mr Knoblock's speeches as
soon as you have heard the first phrase. Yet I would rather see
The LULLABY than THE CHILDREN OF THE Moon, which is, I
think, the most tedious play, bar none, I have ever sat completely
through. The author has evidently tried to do something in the
closely fitted, slightly symbolic later manner of Ibsen and the re-
sult is that he has reproduced the technique without either the
poetry, the insight into character or the genius for dramatic effect.
You sit there and watch the old Ibsen machine grinding along to
its relentless close—but unfortunately there is no excitement in
watching the wheels go 'round because it is evident that nothing is
going to happen which you did not know about in the first place.
The ITALIAN MARIONETTES at the Frolic are the best I have
ever seen. They are better than Tony Sarg's because they are less
realistic. Tony Sarg followed the great modern fallacy and tried
to make his puppets reproduce life-in one of his plays, I remem-
ber, he had a dog which might almost have been mistaken for a real
dog. But the Italian marionettes are conventionalized and gro-
tesque—what is the use of making artificial men if they are going
to be exactly like real men? The Italian ones still have some of
the naïve charm of the pre-realistic world. And their performance,


514
THE THEATRE
unlike that of Mr Sarg's, is throughout enlivened with music; in-
stead of a play with dreary spoken speeches, there is the score of a
little opera by Cesar Cui. But I really can't see a whole evening
of marionettes for anybody but children; I don't know how they
have got such a reputation in New York as an exotic and delightful
form of entertainment. No person over the age of twelve should
ever allow himself to get let in for a marionette performance.
a
I hereby relinquish this department back into the hands of Mr
Gilbert Seldes, lately returned from abroad. Mr Seldes has been
engaged in the composition of a series of essays—soon to be pub-
lished in a book-on “the Seven Lively Arts," in which he has dis-
cussed vaudeville, the jazz band, and the musical revue with a
flaming prophetic enthusiasm which 1—with all admiration for his
book-have sometimes thought a little excessive. Yet after wit-
nessing a year of the American theatre I really begin to understand
how he has arrived at his present opinions; “God knows," as Oscar
Wilde said about the martyrs, “I am with him in some things!” It
is true (though perhaps it has always been true) that a great many
of the favourites of the "serious" theatre have not half so much that
is genuine to offer-are, in fact, not half so near to being “artists”
-as the favourites of vaudeville and the revue. Al Jolson has
more dramatic conviction than Joseph Schildkraut. Gilda Gray
and Queenie Smith are more inspired than Eva LeGallienne. Ed
Wynn has a more interesting imagination than Mr Hartley Man-
ners. Florenz Ziegfeld is a better producer than William Brady-
or Arthur Hopkins. This doesn't necessarily mean that the jazz
people are great artists, as there is a tendency in some quarters to
believe; but merely that they come nearer to the mark than the le-
gitimate performers who have education and technique without
either personality or passion.—But I step aside for Mr Seldes, who
will tell you about it much better than I.
EDMUND WILSON


MODERN ART
HADO
a
.
AD I arrived two days sooner in Paris I should have seen the
décor that Juan Gris made for the Ballet Russe charity
performance in the Salle des Glaces at Versailles. Gertrude Stein
had a card to see it privately in the afternoon and could have taken
me. Gertrude liked it very much. From the description it cer-
tainly was new in idea-quantities of tin being used, covering the
floor, I believe, and the steps to the platform, and gilt joining in-
but startling only to those capable of being startled by ideas, for
the passionately fashionable charitable folk who paid immense
sums to attend seemed unaware that there was a décor there at all,
taking the setting casually as a part of the original salle. Alice
Toklas said it was not objectionable to walk upon—though any
one who has ever attempted to walk upon a tin roof would recoil
from dancing upon tin. But those Russians really are very expert
and recoil from nothing.
That Juan Gris should be known to Diaghilev and that Braque,
Picasso, and he should do décors for him is merely one hint that the
pre-war receptivity is still on. Indeed the receptivity is almost
frantic, but beyond the admittance of our own Man Ray to the
ranks of the magicians there seems to be no new name to be learned.
The Parisians are just dying to have an affair with some new artist,
but the boldness of the blandishments they offer seems to frighten
rather than attract, and young geniuses, if they exist, are incred-
ibly coy. One does not hear of them even at the Café du Dôme.
Speaking of blandishments, the Ballet Russe projects one of Mo-
lière's pieces with musique by Gounod re-arranged by Erik Satic
and with a décor by Juan Gris. It is a project and not a certainty,
but merely to think of such a combination is going some in the way
of liberality; is it not?
Pascin gave me a miniature banquet—moi qui vous parle. That
is, there were at least twenty at table and that, I think, entitles it
to be called a banquet. I had supposed I was dining seul, but when
I reached the top of the almost endless series of stairs on the Bou-
levard de Clichy I found ladies, exuberant children, a solid bour-
geois who had been rendered more distingué by the loss of one eye
a
a


516
MODERN ART
a
a
at the front—and a measurable family atmosphere that was a dis-
tinct surprise chez Pascin. In a minute we all descended to the
street made more than usually noisy by the Fêtes de Montmartre
then in progress and I did my share in marshalling the exuberant
children among whom and the most so, was a young mulatress of
about ten. As it couldn't possibly be a French party without some-
body getting lost we promptly discovered that three or four of us
were missing. But we soon found them. The one-eyed gentleman
—whose name I never mastered—and several of the children were
discovered astride the shiny fat pigs of the merry-go-round whirl-
ing in the air above our heads. Then we were re-united only to be
separated again into different taxis for it seemed we were to go to
the Café du Dôme for the apéritifs. The ride across town was ex-
tremely gay, made so by the children who were continually crying
and waving to each other from the various vehicles and inciting the
chauffeurs to race. Pascin and I had the young mulatress with us
and she was enchanted that we won the race. We made a distinct
sensation arriving at the Café du Dôme, and without in the least
meaning to boast I think I may say that I shared the honours with
I
the young mulatress. People did look at us. If there is receptivity
for art in Paris there seems even to be plenty of this commodity for
art critics and there was a constant stream of persons coming up to
claim acquaintance not only with Pascin, but with me. So much so
that we scarcely had a moment actually to sit and Mahonri Young
who had thought perhaps he might be of service to a newcomer re-
tired abashed after one curious glance at the
young
coloured per-
son. The café terrasse was crowded with the usual early Saturday
evening crowd of students, oh, so much more gaunt and hollow-
cheeked than they had been two years before; or so they did seem
to me, comfortable in the knowledge that I certainly was to have a
dinner. This festivity took place finally in a restaurant over near
the Bal Bullier and the eats and the spiritual uplift were quite all
right though the one-eyed gentleman took the host to task for al-
lowing the men to be seated at one end of the table solidly and the
ladies at the other; “If there is any possible way to bungle it trust
Pascin,” said he, with affectionate wrath. It was this gentleman
who owned the large touring car that awaited without and into
which about ten of us were whisked to the Café Suédois later on,
standing up or clinging to side-steps as best we could, college boy


HENRY MCBRIDE
517
style. Of the children who had gaily started out from Montmartre
with us only the young mulatress was left and she was still main-
taining a social status when I retreated from the Café Suédois at
the discreet hour of minuit. At this party I met among others Mac-
Orlan the writer and Laborde the artist, both of them keen and
delightful, with worldly success apparently staring them in the
face and André Salmon, the critic, equally delightful, but not so
certain to get on in this life; and renewed acquaintance with
Madame Pascin, one of the most remarkable women in Paris, which
is saying much, and Mina Loy, the poetess.
At the banquet I asked Pascin when I could have a second look
at his drawings and he suggested coming to lunch the Monday fol-
lowing Galanis was there when I arrived and two young women
who seemed not enthusiastic over my advent. Afterward I learned
that Pascin had forgotten having asked them for Monday or had
forgotten having asked me and they were promptly chased away.
However they said bon jour with the calmness of duchesses and
will have had it made up to them by Pascin later, doubtless. Then
after Galanis left I was allowed to look through piles of drawings,
including all the ones made in Tunis and which I like particularly,
and the series of mocking allegories in which "offrandes to Venus”
and hitherto suppressed details in the life of Scheherazade are
lightly sketched. From the débris on the table I turned up two
books, both of them inscribed. One was Paul Morand's Fermé la
Nuit which contained on the fly-leaf the author's wish that Pascin
might illustrate the work sometime. Morand is about to have his
wish, I understand, Pascin having undertaken to do the drawings.
The other book was by Cocteau also with compliments upon the fly.
leaf. Then, too, Meier-Graefe is to do a Pascin album; so here is
one artist at least who cannot complain of an indifferent press.
We lunched at the Café Manière. At the café we found Mac-
Orlan and Laborde, both of whom were charming as usual and full
of curiosity in regard to America. When I told MacOrlan that I
had dined at Brancusi's and that Brancusi himself had acted as
chef and had énormément de talent comme cuisinier, he said that to
cook was quite à la mode now.
The dinner was wonderful—but gracious heavens—I see I have
not left myself space enough in which to describe it. Believe me
it would require space!
Henry McBRIDE


MUSICAL CHRONICLE
J
a
AZZ is a series of jerks. In rhythm, you do not have to be con-
a
scious of the one two, one two; or of the one two three, one
two three. Not even in Mendelssohn. But in jazz, to get your
pleasure, you have to count the beat. Because jazz is every old
thing which has ever been, distorted. Anticipated a little; sus-
pended a little. It is the most banal with tobasco sauce; beans with
ketchup plentifully. Ten minutes of it used as entertainment,
makes a bore. For dance music, it cannot compare with Viennese
waltzes. You do not even have to go to Johann Strauss. Wald-
teufel, flat as he is.
But some people in Paris talk of the rhythms of jazz. Three
times in a century, to gratify some vaguest longing-people in
Paris have dreamed fantasies, and called them by the name of
America. First, nostalgic Chateaubriand and the Natchez. The
Apollo in the hide of the “peau rouge." Second, Baudelaire and
the great pale American Christ. The great pallid American Christ
wandering the streets of New York was Edgar Allan Poe. Third,
certain fatigued contemporaries who, more or less because Marinetti
stood on the prow of a dreadnaught in a Byronic frame of mind,
mistake material brutishly used in America for primitive art. A
steel-construction with Antwerp plastered over its flanks is archi-
tecture. “The Parthenon was built for use." The Parthenon, with
the plumb of its columns subtly varied that the eye may be en-
chanted! Then, Charlot, Fattie, and Mees Pearrrl White. The
Saturday Evening insensibility as the American story. And jazz.
The rhythms of jazz.
One wonders: have any of these charming dreamers ever seen or
heard the objects they mistake for beauty, or clarity, or signifi-
cance? They have seen Charlot. And, no doubt, his films are much
funnier than the shows in Paris, though you do see some very funny
ones at the Théâtre Nationale de l'Opéra, and at the Maison de
Molière. But what is it they have really seen and heard? Some
people opened a little place off the Place de la Madeleine, and
Cocteau, who had made quite a success with the pieces of the bat-
tery in the performance of Milhaud's Choephores, insisted on play-


PAUL ROSENFELD
519
ing something which he qualified with the name "Jazz Americain.”
A great many ladies heard, and seemed greatly edified at having
finally gotten the real right thing. But some friends, American-
persuaded Cocteau to desist. And still, jazz is the American music,
or the chrysalis of American music. And the machine and its prod-
ucts—must be accepted.
This Gerald Stanley Lee, Marinetti categorical imperative, has
no importance for any one doing work either in the field of me-
chanics or that of art. The creative mechanic no more than the
artist "accepts” the machine. Like his poetical brother, he has in
his mind an ideal objective. And for the purpose of approaching
that objective, he makes friends with his instrument, and drives it
relentlessly to the limit of its capacities. There have always been
machines, since ever the first humanoid took up a club and began
freeing his mind; and between the man who drives the machine
relentlessly to its limit and the man who tells a perfect story, there
is no opposition. Both are driven by the selfsame need, the need
of things of quality enrooted in the living human breast. Both
are moving toward the same ideal goal. Neither is responsible for
the mess rotting modern life. Responsible for that are, far more,
the people moved by no ideal objective. The good-enough people
in the field of machine-work. And the people who sit about, and
talk.
Whether French people wanted us to be savages or no would be
of no matter in the United States; all the talk of skyscraper prim-
itive art would be harmless, were work proceeding here, and voices
calling. The existing machinery, jazz, Charlie Chaplin, would
find the artist, for the artist never has to go find the raw stuff of
nature. But there is no faith among the American workers; and in
all ages wanting inner direction, a subjective sense of inferiority
drives men to searching for ready-made formulae before starting
off on their adventures; and to playing up to the eyes of certain
people whom they take pleasure in conceiving as superior to them-
selves. It is for this reason that the charming fantasies of con-
temporary France seem to us to contain a principle dangerous to
the young art-men in America. These fantasies are supplying a
number of embryonic artists with cheap formulae, keeping them
from working from their sensibilities. They are also persuading a
number of incipient advertising-men that they have something to


520
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
do with art, preventing them using their talents properly in selling
tomato-sauce and soap. No doubt, the will to worship a lot of
quarter-baked material will eventually be discarded by the deter-
mined artists, and lead the incipient advertisers to flattering mil-
lionaires more directly, and building up circulation for frankly mil-
lionaire-flattering journals. But much breath will go lost. And
we have so little breath to lose.
Paul ROSENFELD






LE CIRQUE. BY GEORGES SEURAT



THE
DIAL
VI
ITV
DX
OXXII
DECEMBER 1923
THE INJURED ONE
BY KAREL CAPEK
Translated From the Czech by P. Beaumont Wadsworth
VOJ
OJTECH slept soundly (it was a November night when it is
good for a man to be in his bed) when suddenly somebody
knocked at his window with a stick. There was still a moment for
the sleeper to finish his dream, in which the knocking played a cer-
tain rôle, both decisive and confused, and then he awoke. And
again, again. The sleeper pulled the blankets over his ears and
decided not to hear anything. But again the stick rattled on the
pane in a sharp and peremptory manner. Vojtech jumped out of
bed, opened the window, and saw, down below on the path, a man,
muffled up to the throat.
“What do you want here?” he cried, putting into his voice his
most violent anger.
“Make me some tea,” replied a hoarse voice from below.
The sleeper recognized his brother and woke up at last. The
bitter cold night seized him by the chest.
“Wait a moment,” he called down. He turned on the light, and
began to dress himself. As he dressed he remembered that he had
not spoken to his brother for two years because they had quarrelled
over a legacy. He was so surprised suddenly at his coming that he
forgot to put on his boots. Sitting with one boot in his hand he
shook his head. But why has he come? Evidently something has
happened to him, he finally decided, threw on his clothes, and
rushed to the window again. But his brother was not standing
there now; he was already at the corner of the street, going away;


522
THE INJURED ONE
.
"But ..
.
.
come
.
perhaps the waiting beneath the window had been too long for him.
Then Vojtech rushed down the passage, opened the front door, and
ran after him. His brother was walking away hastily and without
looking back.
“Karel,” shouted Vojtech, as he ran; and he was sure that his
brother heard him, but that he would neither stop nor slacken his
pace. So he ran after him and shouted in agitation:
“Karel, what are you doing, Karel
wait
wait
for me!" Karel went on his way quickly. Shivering with cold,
half-dressed, and excited, Vojtech stopped. Just at that moment
he felt the rain. Karel went on. Suddenly he turned, and with
,
the same quick steps, came straight to his brother. It was so unex-
pected, that for the life of him Vojtech did not know what to say.
They had quarrelled for two years. He was a stubborn man. Now
he stands here with flashing eyes, biting his lip.
"So you won't give me any tea,” Karel reproached him, angrily
and darkly.
of course I will .. with pleasure," and Voj-
tech breathed with relief, “I only wanted a moment
back at once, I'll boil some for you immediately.”
"So at last,” snapped Karel, bitterly.
“But, my God,” Vojtech ejaculated. “What then! You might
have come long before this. I'll . immediately, whatever
if
you want something to eat I'll always be glad
you've only got to tell me."
“Thank you, only a drop of tea.”
“I've bacon from Moravia, man, do you know that? Or eggs.
But I don't even know what time it is! It's such a long time since
we saw each other, Karel, isn't it? Would you like some wine?"
"No."
“What do you want then? Only tell me. Look out
be
careful ... here are the stairs !"
"I know.”
At last Vojtech got him into the house. He laughed and chat-
tered and offered him various things. Apologizing, “You know I'm
only an old bachelor,” gathered together some cigarettes for him,
cleared the chairs, hardly noticing that he himself was doing all the
talking. But all the time there stuck in his mind the watchful,
restless, inquisitive thought: something has happened to him.
.
.
.
.


KAREL CAPEK
523
Meanwhile Karel sat clouded and absent. A heavy silence was
in the room.
“Something has happened to you ?” Vojtech broke out.
“Nothing."
Vojtech shook his head. He did not know his brother in this
mood. The smell of wine and of women came from him. And yet
he is a married man. He has a young wife, mild as a sheep, meek
and pretty. For years he has stayed at home, a man of common-
sense and authority, a domestic machine, an example of a well-
ordered life, a little hard, methodical, precise, and esteeming him-
self immensely. Once he had been seriously ill; and ever since that
time had based his life on an amazingly regular, healthy plan, as if
life itself were worthy to be, day by day, redeemed by order and
self-control. And now he sits there, sullen, darkly sober, like a man
who is just awakening after a night of debauchery. He is sitting
there with an expression unspeakably strained and hard, chewing
something painfully. Do you not see how cruel it is, what is hap-
pening to him! It was three o'clock in the morning. Vojtech
struck his forehead.
“My God, that tea,” he remembered, running with housewifely
eagerness and anxiety to the kitchen. He shivered with cold.
Wrapping himself in a blanket like an old woman, he boiled the
water above a blue spirit-flame, much pleased that he could per-
form some mechanical action. He prepared the cups and the
sugar, satisfying himself with the familiar tinkling of the things.
Through a chink he looked into the room, and there, see, his brother
is standing at the open window, as though he were listening to the
roaring of the weirs on the Vltava, a bright and clear voice wrapped
in the cold rustling of the rain as in a veil.
“Aren't you cold?” asked Vojtech.
"No."
Vojtech stood at the door in a yearning mood. Here on the one
side, a quiet, dark hole, a warm drink, a joy to be at home, a pleas-
ure to entertain someone; and there, on the other side, a window,
wide-open, filled with the majestic voice of the river and the dark-
ness, for perhaps the night itself is rushing over the Vltava weir,
such is its roar; and at the window, a tall, erect man, incredibly
queer, strangely excited. Your own brother whom you do not
recognize. Vojtech stood on the threshold as though on the bound-
a


524
THE INJURED ONE
.
ary of two worlds: his own intimate world, and that of his brother,
which seemed extraordinarily vast and terrible at this moment.
But he knew that he would be initiated into it, that his brother had
come in order to tell him something extremely important. He was
afraid of it. He was almost terrified of it; while he listened with
microphonic attention to the hissing of the spirit-lamp and the wide
roaring of the river.
Like a mother Vojtech brings the hot red tea to the table with
the question—“Only tell me do you want something to
eat?”—at the same time bringing out bacon and cakes, asking his
brother to eat, running round like a woman, like a sympathetic old
woman. Karel only drank a little of the tea, and then it seemed
that he had forgotten his thirst.
“You see,” he began, and was silent. He sits there with his
face pressed into his palms, forgetting that he wanted to speak.
Suddenly he rose.
“Listen, Vojtech,” he began again, "I wanted to say this
Our quarrel was stupid. I beg of you, don't think that I care about
the money. Perhaps you did think so. It's all the same to me, but
,
it's not true. I only wanted things put in order. And then
I haven't such a great interest in money,” he shouted, excitedly,
snapping his fingers. “Not such an interest. Nor, if it comes to
that, in anything. I can do without the lot.”
Vojtech thawed at once. Deeply moved, he broke in, assuring
him that he had not thought about the matter for a long time, that
they had both made a mistake, and God knows what else.
But Karel did not listen to him.
“Be quiet,” he said, “I don't want to talk about it at all. It's
quite irrelevant, anyhow. I only wanted to ask you,” he
went on, somewhat irresolutely, “to do something for me. To tell
my wife that I've resigned my position.”
“But why.
why?" cried Vojtech, astonished. “Aren't
you going back to her ?”
“Not just at this moment, do you understand? And perhaps not
at all
oh, besides it does not matter. She can go to her
parents if she's unhappy. I only want peace. I must begin to do
something. I have such a plan. But the details do not matter for
the moment. The main thing is that I must be alone, do you
understand ?"
.
.
.
.
.
.
.


KAREL CAPEK
525
.
.
.
“I don't understand anything. What's the matter at your
office ?"
"Nothing a stupid affair. It's all the same to me now,
what was there and what will be there. Do you think that it makes
me unhappy ?”
“Then what is upsetting you ?"
“It's nothing. It's quite unimportant in any case. I don't think
about it at all. On the contrary. I'm very happy
very
happy, Vojtech.” He turned to his brother confidentially: “I beg
of
you, tell me the truth, but frankly. Do you think that I'm fit to
be an official? What do
you
think?"
"I. I... I don't know,” stammered Vojtech.
“I only want to say, you see, that if you know me a little from
old times, would you think that it is sufficient for me? That I
could be satisfied with it? Or perhaps I haven't the right or the
need to live otherwise. Do you think it's true ?”
“I don't think so at all,” said Vojtech, unwillingly and without
certainty, trying, at a glance, to catch the whole, regular, clearly-
limited life of his brother; the life which he had sometimes grudged
him, the life in which he had never had close interest.
"Perhaps, we can say, it was so,” Karel continued, reflecting.
“Or it was sleeping in me. Do you know, I have not even known
it myself, but now, Vojtech, I know it only too well.”
“What do you know so well ?”
"And all for what,” Karel waved his hand in the air, absorbed
in his own thoughts.
Vojtech hesitated for a moment.
“Listen, Karel,” he began, “something has happened to you.
You are angry or you are upset and ... and perhaps without
reason. Tell me first, what has happened to you. Perhaps it might
be put right. Surely we can do something about it. And that you
will not return to your wife or to your office is all nonsense. You
are not seriously thinking of it are you?"
Karel stood up and laughed.
“That's enough,” he said, and began to walk up and down the
room. Then he looked round, stood before the pictures, and recog-
nized all the permanent things. "Vojtech, poor man,” he
began mockingly, “so you live here? And alone? And have
you enough room for your whole life, your whole life? Look here,
.


526
THE INJURED ONE
suppose you were to marry! As I have done! To take such a good
wife. And if she were to slave for you as if you were a tyrannical
child. And if you were her little boy, because she is afraid of hav-
ing children, and has no children. To have such a nest with pil-
lows as I have! Why man, you don't know what happi-
.
ness is!”
“You wrong your wife,” protested Vojtech, quietly.
“I really wrong her,” answered Karel. “And more than that, I
am quite tired of her. I've had enough of her. You can tell her
that, but tell her also that I know how I wrong her. Tell her
that she was a perfect example of an official's wife. Oh, God, it is
almost a crime! Just imagine it. It is quite certain that she
a
waited for me to-night. The whole evening she keeps the fire
bright, looks at the thermometer, lays the table, and waits. Imagine
it, she has no idea yet. Even now she waits, shudders, and sits on
the bed, puzzled. · Until in the morning you will come to
her and say: 'Madam, your husband has run away.”'
“I shall not say it!"
“But you must say it. 'He ran away because he became loath-
some to himself. He became terribly tired of all that he knew
about himself. Just think of it, madam, suddenly he found in him-
self an unknown soul, something worse, strange and furious, and
he wants to begin to do something with it. He can't sleep with
you now, because your husband was quite another person; he was
just a domestic idiot, who drank warmed beer, and whom you
loved.' Just tell her that, Vojte