1 THE DIAL @ BEDEE OXXOITO VOLUME LXXX . .. January to June 1926 THE DIAL PUBLISHING COMPANY NEW YORK CITY Mo -X С.- . АР БА? y.80 1926 ой Index cithdrawn 54329-H INDEX VOLUME LXXX 147 · · · · · · · · PAGE Bailey, MARGARET EMERSON ... Concerto (Fiction) ..... 137 BaldwIN, CHARLES SEARS. ... .. Bohemia . . . . . . . . 468 Lucian Once More . . . The Rhythm of Verse . . 317 BLUM, W. C. . . . . . .. Blake's Paintings . . . . . 413 BURKE, KENNETH . . . . . . Idiom and Uniformity .. 57 CHRISTOWE, STOYAN, translator . Guest (Fiction) . . . . 471 COLUM, PADRAIC. . . Lost Fatherlands . . . 61 Cowley, MALCOLM . . . The Mirror of Innocence . CRAVEN, THOMAS . . . . . . . George Bellows . . . . . . 133 EGLINTON, JOHN . . . . . . . Yeats and His Story . . . . 357 FRANCE, ANATOLE . . . : Last Pages . . . 25, 120, 223, 289 FRANK, Waldo . . . . . The Art of the Bullfight . . . 387 The Jesuit Relations . . . . 323 GORKI, MAXIM : : . : : : : The Song of the Storm-Petrel. : 485 GREGORY, ALYSE. . . . . . . The Picnic (Fiction) . . . . 458 GREY, CECIL . . . . ..., Evening (Fiction) . . . . . 299 ELIASBERG, ALEXANDER, translated into German by . . . . . . . .. The Bear (Fiction) . . . . . I HILLYER, ROBERT . . . . . . . John Masefield . . . . . 235 LEWIS, J. H., translator. . . . . Pierre Louÿs . . . . . . 43 LOVETT, ROBERT MORss . . . . . The Transatlantic Middle West. 517 LYESKOV, NICOLAI . . . . . . The Bear (Fiction). . . . . I McBRIDE, Henry . . . . . . . The Adventures of an Illustrator . 422 The Lincoln of the Plains . . 513 Rosbif et Mayonnaise . . . . 150 May, J. Lewis, translator . . . . Last Pages . . . . 120, 223, 289 MITCHELL, STEWART . . . . . . A Strayed Reveller . . . . . 157 MOORE, MARIANNE . . . . People Stare Carefully . . . . 49 The Spare American Emotion . . 153 Memory's Immortal Gear . . . 417 MORAND, PAUL . . . . . . . Paris Letter . . . . . . . 312 Paris Letter . . . . . NEWALL, N. . . . . . . Au 'Voir (Fiction) . . . . . 21 NOEL, ANNIE WEBSTER . . . . . Detachment (Fiction) .. 481 PELIN, ELIN . . . . . . . ... Guest (Fiction) · . · · · · 471 Powys, John CowPER . . . . . An American Tragedy . . . . '331 Powys, LLEWELYN . . . . . . Dutch Damozels . . . . . . 243 503 IV INDEX PAGE 510 475 RILKE, Rainer MARIA . . . . . Nine Prose Poems . . . . . 367 ROBIN, Max . . . . . . . . . . First Years (Fiction) . . . . 89 Winter . . . . . . . . 500 ROSENFELD, PAUL . . . . . An American Sonneteer . . . 197 RUSSELL, BERTRAND . . . . . . Leonardo as a Man of Science . Psychology and Politics . . . 179 SAINTSBURY, GEORGE . . . . . . Technique . . . . . . . 273 Xenophon . . . . . . Saxon, LYLE . . . . . . . . . Cane River (Fiction) . . . . 207 SELDES, GILBERT . . . . . . . The Director in the Theatre . . 487 The Negro's Songs . . . . . 247 SERGEANT, ELIZABETH SHEPLEY The Wood-Carver (Fiction) . . 397 THAYER, SCOFIELD · · · · · · Berlin Letter . . . . . . 407 THORPE, JULIAN . . . . . . . Tactics (Fiction) . . . . . 371 TRUEBLOOD, CHARLES K. . . . . Emily Dickinson . . . . . 301 John-Burroughs Verbatim . . . Lyric Tableau . . . . . . 241 VALÉRY, PAUL . . . . . . . . Introduction to the Method of Leo- nardo da Vinci Note and Di- gression. Part I . . . . Pierre Louÿs . . . . . . 43 VON ERDBERG, AMY WESSELHOEFT, translator . . . . . . . The Bear (Fiction) ... WESCOTT, GLENWAY, .. Sister of Hunters (Fiction) . . WILSON, MARGARET ADELAIDE . . . The Yaqui (Fiction) . . . . 281 WINTERS, YVOR . . . . . . . Mina Loy . . . . . . . 496 WRIGHT, CUTHBERT . . . . . . Au Pays du Mufle . . . . 53 Yeats, WILLIAM BUTLER . . . . The Need for Audacity of Thought 115 327 · 191 INDEX VERSE PAGE . 196 · · . · · · · . · ANONYMOUS . . . . . . . On an Old Painting of Portsmouth Harbor . . . . . . 404 Leo Arrogans . . . . . . 483 AUSLANDER, JOSEPH . . . . . . An Eye . . . . . . . . 202 BROWN, FORMAN . . . . . . . Transfiguration . . . . . 146 CAMPBELL, GLADYS . . . . . . Evening Walk . . CANE, MELVILLE . . . . . . . Fog. in. . . . . . 42 Snow Toward Evening . . . . 42 CRANE, HART . . . . . . . Again . . . . . . 370 CUMMINGS, E. E. . . . . . . Four Poems . . . . . . 17 Poem . . . . . . . . 300 DILLON, GEORGE H. . . . . . Biography . . . 279 Serenade . . . . . . . 280 JONES, E. CLEMENT . . . . . . Swans . . . . . . . . 222 KREYMBORG, ALFRED . . . . . . Pantomime . . LARSSON, R. ELLSWORTH . . . . The Savage Celebrants of Spring . 405 Song for Reeds. . 403 Who Waver in the Wake of Winds 404 Powys, John CowPER . . . . . The Ailanthus . . . . . . 119 SIMPSON, MABEL . . . . . . . Prayer . . . . . . . . 47 THAYER, SCOFIELD . . . . . . Chanson Gaie . . . . . . 495 Chevaux de Bois . . . . . 113 Des Choses qu'il convient de Lancer 385 The Fingers of the Night Wind . 189 On a Crucifix . . . . . . 267 A Poem . . . . . . . . 24 WINTERS, Yvor . . . . . . . Prayer Beside a Lamp . . . . 234 · · . VI INDEX ART . . ARCHIPENKO, ALEXANDER BAVARIAN MASTER . . BONNARD, PIERRE . . DEHN, ADOLF . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . DERAIN, ANDRÉ . . . . . . . Dobson, FRANK . . . . . . . ESHERICK, WHARTON HARRIS . . . Faggi, ALFEO . . . . . . FLANNAGAN, J. B. . . . . . . . GERMAN MASTER . . . . . . . GLINTENKAMP, HENRY J. . . . . . JAWLENSKY, ALEXEI . . . . . . . . . JOHN, AUGUSTUS . . . . . . . Two Torsos . . . . . . . April Trauernder Johannes . . . January Interior . . . . . . . March A Gent (Mediterranean) · . · June A Gent (Pomeranian) . . . . June Girl Seated . . . . . . January Girl Seated . . . . . . January In the Park . . . . . . January Landscape . . . . . . January Le Byron de Nos Jours ..June Leo Stein . . . . . . . June Le Lavoir à Castel Gandolfo . April Captain Osbert Sitwell . . . . May Two Woodcuts . . . . . March Christ Falls the Third Time February Simon Helps Christ Carry the Cross February St Veronica Wipes the Face of Christ . . . . . February Drawing for Carving . . . . May Drawing for Carving . . . . May . . April Two Linoleum Cuts . . . . April A Head . lead . . . . . . . February A Drawing . . . . . . . June Standing Figure . February A Drawing . . . · · June Edward Estlin Cummings . . January Scofield Thayer . . . . . January James Sibley Watson . . January Femme Accroupie . . . . March Femme Accroupie . . . . March Femme Assise . . . March El Torero . . . . . . . May Jeu de Pelote . . . : June La Chapelle St Michel à Vence · June Dans la Campagne de Nice February Gold Fish . . . . . . . June Two Drawings . . . . . March Hermann Bahr . . . . . . May Mother and Child . . . . . May La Bohémienne Endormie . . March Heraclitus and Callimachus February Virgil Bathing Dante's Face with Dew . . . . . . February Still Life . . . . . . . . May Portrait of the Artist . . . . April Village Street . . . . . . May KOKOSCHKA, OSKAR . . LACHAISE, GASTON . . . . . . . . ... . . MailloL, ARISTIDE . . . . . . MANOLO . . . MARCHAND, JEAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . MATISSE, HENRI . . . . . . . NAGLE, EDWARD . . . . . . . ORLIK, EMIL . . . . . . . . Picasso, PABLO . . . . . . . RousseAU, HENRI . . . . . . RUSHTON, MARTIN AMSLER . . . . SHEELER, CHARLES . . SINTENIS, RENÉE . . . VLAMINCK, MAURICE DE . . . . . . . . . . . . INDEX VII BOOKS REVIEWED 522 427 243 243 Chican arall Love YTICS . . . . . . . 428 520 428 72 N, MUSLidl01. VIT Petre . . . . . Authors and Titles PAGE ABBOTT, CHARLES D. Introduction by N. C. WYETH. Howard Pyle, A Chronicle . 340 A. E. Voices of the Stones . . . ANDREYEV, LEONID M., edited and with an introduction by Maxim Gorky. Sashka Jigouleff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160 ANTHONY, KATHERINE. Catherine the Great · · 71 ARTZIBASHEV, MICHAEL. Percy PinkerTON, translator. With a preface by Ernest BOYD. Sanine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . · · · · · 520 Ault, NORMAN, editor. Elizabethan Lyrics . . . . . . AYRES, HARRY MORGAN, translator. Introduction by ADRIAAN J. Barnouw. The Dutch Library: Esmoreit. . . 243 AYRES, HARRY MORGAN, translator. Introduction by ADRIAAN J. Barnouw. I Dutch Library: Mary of Nimmegen . . . . . . 243 BACON, PEGGY. Funerealities . . . . . . . . 252 "BARBUSSE, Henri. STEPHEN Haden Guest, translator. Chains. BARNOUW, ADRIAAN J, introduction by. Harry Morgan Ayres, translator. The Dutch Library: Esmoreit. . BARNOUW, ADRIAAN J., introduction by. Harry Morgan Ayres, translator. The Dutch Library: Mary of Nimmegen . . . . . . . . . . . BARNES, Nellie, selected by. American Indian Love Lyrics . . BARRINGTON, E. Glorious Apollo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . BARRUS, Clara. The Life and Letters of John BURROUGHS . . . . . . . . 327 BARTLETT, ALICE Hunt, editor. The Sea Anthology . . . . . . . BEEBE, WILLIAM. Jungle Days . . . . . . . . . . . . . . BELLOC, Hilaire. G. K. CHESTERTON, illustrator. Mr Petre.. 521 BENÉT, STEPHEN VINCENT. Spanish Bayonet . . . . . . . . . . BERCOVICI, KONRAD. The Marriage Guest . . . . 160 BERESFORD, John, selected and with an introduction by. The World's Classics. Let- ters of THOMAS GRAY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 430 Best, MARY AGNES. Rebel Saints .. 162 BIANCHI, M. D. Life and Letters of Emily DICKINSON . ' . .' . . . . 301 Bishop, Morris and Henry Longan STUART, translators. Beatrice Cenci, by CORRADO Ricci . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 415 , GEORGE. French Philosophies of the Romantic Period . . . . . . . 431 BODENHEIM, Maxwell. Replenishing Jessica . . . . . . . . . 68 BOSANQUET, THEODORA. The Hogarth Essays. Henry James at Work . . 176 BOYD, ERNEST. H. L. Mencken . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Boyd, Ernest, preface by. Sanine, by Michael ARTZIBASHEV ... , ,.:. 520 BRANDANE, JOHN. The Glen is Mine and The Lifting, Two Plays of the Hebrides . 429 BRIDGES, ROBERT. S. P. E. Tract No. XXII. Reviews and Miscellaneous Notes BRIDGES, ROBERT. S. P. E. Tract XXI. The Society's Work . . . . . . . 57 BROWN, J. MacMILLAN. The Riddle of the Pacific . . . . . . - 61 BROWN, Lawrence and J. RosaMOND JOHNSON, musical arrangements by. The Book of American Negro Spirituals, edited by James Weldon JOHNSON . . . . . 247 Bussy, DOROTHY, translator. The Vatican Swindle, by ANDRÉ GIDE . BUSTAMANTE, ANTONIO S. DE. ELIZABETH F. Read, translator. The World Court. 254 BYNNER, WITTER. Caravan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 340 CAPEK, KAREL. LAWRENCE HYDE, translator. Krakatit . . . . . . . . . 426 Carter, Morris. Isabella Stewart Gardner and Fenway Court , Cary, Henry FRANCIS. T. Earle Welby, introduction by. The Early French Poets CHESTERTON, GILBERT K. Tales of the Long Bow . . . : : : : : : : : : 67 CHESTERTON, G. K., illustrator. Mr Petre, by Hilaire Belloc ..... 521 521 · · 71 · · 444 W : 427 VIII INDEX PAGE 70 .. . 427 · · COT · 331 ,. 428 CLUTTON-BROCK, A., Percy DEARMER, A. S. DUNCAN-Jones, J. MIDDLETON MURRY, A. W. POLLARD, and Malcolm SPENCER. The Necessity of Art . . . . . . 70 Cook, George Cram. Greek Coins, Poems and Memorabilia . . Cooper, FREDERIC Taber, compiler. Fremont Rider, editor. Rider's California, Cortissoz, ROYAL. Personalities in Art . . . . . . . . . . . . . COVARRUBIAS, Miguel. The Prince of Wales and Other Famous Americans . . . 340 CRAWFORD, JACK R. and Thomas H. DICKINSON, editors. Contemporary Plays.. CULLEN, COUNTEE. Color . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161 CUMMINGS, E. E. & . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 CUMMINGS, E. E. XLI Poems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . DataLLER, Roger. From a Pitman's Note Book ... DAUDET, LÉON. Arthur KINGSLAND GRIGGs, editor and translator. Memoirs of Léon Daudet . . . . . . . , DEARMER, Percy, A. CLUTTON-BROCK, A. S. DUNCAN-Jones, J. MIDDLETON MURRY, A. W. POLLARD, and MalcolM SPENCER. The Necessity of Art . . . DE QUINCEY, THOMAS. Toilette of the Hebrew Lady Exhibited in Six Scenes . . . 532 Deutsch, BABETTE. Honey Out of the Rock . . . . . . . . . . . . DICKINSON, THOMAS H. Playwrights of the New American Theatre . . . Dickinson, THOMAS H. and Jack R. CRAWFORD, editors. Contemporary Plays . 70 DOBRÉE, BONAMY. The Hogarth Essays. Histriophone . . . . . . . . . 176 DOBSON, Austin, editor. Boswell's Life of Johnson . . . . . . . . . . 353 Douglas, NORMAN. Experiments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 340 DREISER, THEODORE. An American Tragedy. . . . . . DUNCAN-Jones, A. S., A. CLUTTON-BROCK, Percy Dearmer, J. MIDDLETON MURRY, A. W. POLLARD, and MALCOLM SPENCER. The Necessity of Art . . . . . EGAN, MAURICE Francis. Recollections of a Happy Life . . . . . . . . Eliot, T. S. The Hogarth Essays. Homage to John Dryden . . . . . . . 176 ELLIS, HAVELOCK. Sonnets with Folk Songs from the Spanish . . Evans, WAINWRIGHT and Judge Ben B. LINDSEY. The Revolt of Modern Youth : 71 Figgis, DARRELL. The Paintings of William Blake . . . . . . . . . 413 FIRBANK, RONALD. Vainglory . Fiske, Rear-ADMIRAL Bradley A., U.S.N. and Admiral Mark Kerr, C. B., M. V.O., forewords by. The Sea Anthology, edited by Alice Hunt BARTLETT... FITZGERALD, F. Scott. All the Sad Young Men . . . . . . . . . . . 521 FORD, FORD Madox. No More Parades . . . . . . . . . . . . . FORD, FORD Madox, introduction by. Transatlantic Stories . . . . . . 517 Fowler, H. W. S. P. E. Tract No. XXII. On the Use of Italic, Fused Participle, etc. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 444 Fry, Roger. The Hogarth Essays. Art and Commerce . . . . . . . . 532 Fry, Roger. The Hogarth Essays. The Artist and Psycho-Analysis . . . . . GARNETT, David. The Sailor's Return . . . . . . . . . . . 520 GEROULD, KATHERINE FULERTON. The Aristocratic West . . . . . . . . 164 Geyi, Dr, translator. The Dutch Library: Lancelot of Denmark . . . . . . 243 GIBBS, ANTHONY. Peter Vacuum . . . 339 GIDE, ANDRÉ. Dorothy Bussy, translator. The Vatican Swindle .. . . . 427 GOLDBERG, Isaac. The Man Mencken. . . . . 161 Gorky, Maxim, edited and with an introduction by. Sashka Jigouleff, by LEONID ANDREYEV . . . . . . . . . · · · . . : 160 Gosse, Sir EDMUND. Silhouettes . . . . . . . . . . . . 254 Graves, ROBERT. The Hogarth Essays. Contemporary Techniques of Poetry.. Gray, Thomas. Selected and with an introduction by JOHN BERESFORD. The World's Classics. Letters of THOMAS GRAY . . . . . . . . . . . 430 GREENE, Anne Bosworth. Dipper Hill . . . . . . GRIGGS, ARTHUR KINGSLAND, editor and translator. Memoirs of LÉON DAUDET . . GUERARD, ALBERT Leon. Beyond Hatred . . . . . . . . . . . . . 524 Guest, STEPHEN Haden, translator. Chains, by HENRI BARBUSSE . . . . . . 427 HARDY, Thomas. Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs, and Trifles . . . . . 417 HARMON, A. M., translator. The Loeb Classical Library. LUCIAN . . . . . . 147 DSEY. The Revolt of Minive 426 428 67 176 176 53 INDEX IX PAGE . . . . . . . . 205 · · 428 2 HARRIS, Cyril. The Religion of Undergraduates . . . Hart, Ivor B. The Mechanical Investigations of Leonardo da Vinci . . . . . 510 HENDERSON, A. E., ALBERT M. C. McMASTER, MME QUESADA, and others, translators. GUY DE MAUPASSANT, Original Short Stories . . . . . . . . . . . 252 HERRIOT, EDOUARD. Madame Récamier . . . . . . . . . . . . . 341 HILLYER, ROBERT. The Halt in the Garden . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 HYDE, LAWRENCE, translator. Krakatit, by KAREL CAPEK . . . . . . . . 426 INGPEN, Roger, editor. Boswell's Life of Johnson vell s Lite or Johnson . . . . . . . . . . 353 JEFFERS, ROBINSON. Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems . . . . . JEFFREY, WILLIAM. The Doom of Atlas and Other Poems . . . . . . . . JEPSON, SELWYN. The Sutton Papers . · · · · · · 339 JOHNSON, GUY B. and HOWARD W. ODUM. The Negro and His Songs . . Johnson, James WELDON, editor. Musical arrangements by J. RosaMOND JOHNSON and Lawrence BROWN. The Book of American Negro Spirituals... JOHNSON, J. ROSAMOND and LAWRENCE BROWN, musical arrangements by. The Book of American Negro Spirituals, edited by James Weldon Johnson . . . . . 247 JOHNSTON, SIR HARRY. Relations KALLEN, HORACE M., selected and with an introduction by. The Philosophy of Wil- liam James . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 430 KENNEDY, R. EMMET. Mellows. KENTON, Edna, editor. Introduction by Reuben Gold Thwaites. The Jesuit Rela- tions and Allied Documents. Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in America (1610-1791). . . KERR, ADMIRAL Mark, C.B., M.V.O., and Rear-ADMIRAL Bradley A. Fiske, U.S.N., forewords by. The Sea Anthology, edited by Alice Hunt BartLETT KEYNES, John MAYNARD. The Hogarth Essays. A Short View of Russia . . . 342 KLABUND. HERMAN GEORGE SCHEFFAUER, translator. Peter the Czar . . . . 162 KOMROFF, MANUEL. The Grace of Lambs. · · · · · · · · KREYMBORG, ALFRED. Scarlet and Mellow . . . . . . 428 LANKES, J. J., woodcuts by. May Days, edited by GENEVIEVE TAGGARD . . . . 160 LAVER, JAMES. Portraits in Oil and Vinegar . . . . . . . . . . . . LAWRENCE, D. H. The Plumed Serpent . . . . . . . . . . . 520 LAWRENCE, D. H. Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine . . . . . . 341 LAWTON, Mary. A Lifetime with Mark Twain . . 341 LEE, GERALD STANLEY. Rest Working . . 431 LE GALLIENNE, RICHARD, editor. The Le Gallienne Anthology of American Verse : LE GALLIENNE, RICHARD. The Romantic go's . . . LEONARD, WILLIAM ELLERY. Two Lives . . . . . . . . . . . . . LEWISOHN, LUDWIG. Israel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . LINDSEY, Judge Ben B. and WainRIGHT EVANS. The Revolt of Modern Youth. LIPPMANN, Walter. The Phantom Public . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165 LODGE, Henry Cabot. The Senate and the League of Nations . . . . . Loti, PIERRE. Rose Ellen Stein, translator. Notes of My Youth .. . Loy, Mina. Lunar Baedecker. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . LUBBOCK, ALAN. The Hogarth Essays. The Character of John Dryden. ... 176 LUBBOCK, PERcy. The Region Cloud . . LUCIAN. A. M. HARMON, translator. The Loeb Classical Library. LUCIAN... 147 MCMASTER, ALBERT M. C., A. E. HENDERSON, MME QUESADA, and others, translators. GUY DE MAUPASSANT, Original Short Stories . . . . . . . . . . 252 MAKEEF, N. and VALENTINE O'Hara. Russia . . . . . . . . . . . 254 Malo, HENRI. ELLEN PRESTON, translator. The Romantic Passion of Don Luis . MARCHANT, E. C., translator. The Loeb Classical Library. XENOPHON. Memora- bilia and Oeconomicus. . MARCHANT, E. C., translator. The Loeb Classical Library. XENOPHON. Scripta Minora : : : : . . . . . . MASTFIELD. JOHN Collected Works of Tour Murerin' 235 Maurois, ANDRÉ. Eric SUTTON, translator. Mape: The World of Illusion... 507 MEMBERS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND LETTERS. Academy Papers . . 150 · 523 241 475 IELD INDEX 20 0 254 1. Ncaucis and writers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 422 PAGE MENCKEN, H. L. Americana, 1925 . . . , . ... . . . . . . . . 342 Mill, John Stuart. Autobiography of John Stuart Mill . . . . . . . . . 430 Monro, HAROLD, editor. The Chapbook, A Miscellany, 1925 . . . . . . . 160 MONTAGUE, C. E. Dramatic Values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 MORAND, Paul. Closed All Night . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252 MURRY, J. MIDDLETON. Pencillings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . MURRY, J. MIDDLETON, A. CLUTTON-BROCK, PERCY DEARMER, A. S. DUNCAN-Jones, A. W. POLLARD, and MALCOLM SPENCER. The Necessity of Art . . . . . . NATHAN, ROBERT. Jonah . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nelson, John H. and FREDERICK C. PRESCOTT. Prose and Poetry of the Revolution ODUM, Howard W. and Guy B. Johnson. The Negro and His Songs . . OGDEN, C. K., I. A. RICHARDS, and James Wood. The Foundations of Aesthetics . O'Hara, Valentine and N. Makeet. Russia O'NEILL, EUGENE. Desire Under the Elms . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 ORAGE, A. R. Readers and Writers . . . . . . Osborn, E. B. The Heritage of Greece and the Legacy of Rome . . . . . . OSTENSO, Maria. Wild Geese 68 Paget, Sir Richard, Bart. S. P. E. Tract No. XXII. The Nature of Human Speech 444 Paine, Albert Bigelow. Joan of Arc, Maid of France. . . . . . . 341 Paul, Eden and CEDAR, translators. Passion and Pain, by STEFAN Zweig . . . 252 PenNELL, Joseph. The Adventures of an Illustrator . . . . . . . . . . PINKERTON, Percy, translator. Sanine, by MICHAEL ARTZIBASHEV . . POLLARD, A. W., A. CLUTTON-Brock, Percy DeARMER, A. S. DUNCAN-Jones, J. Mid- DLETON MURRY, and MalCOLM SPENCER. The Necessity of Art. POSTGATE, RAYMOND. Murder Piracy and Treason, A Selection of Notable English Trials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 342 Prescott, FREDERICK C. and John H. Nelson. Prose and Poetry of the Revolution. 522 PREston, Ellen, translator. The Romantic Passion of Don Luis, by Henri Malo . 68 QUESADA, MME, ALBERT M. C. McMaster, A. E. HENDERSON, and others, translators. GUY DE MAUPASSANT, Original Short Stories READ, ELIZABETH F., translator. The World Court, by ANTONIO S. DE BUSTAMANTE . READ, HERBERT. The Hogarth Essays. In Retreat. . . . . . . . . . Ricci, CORRADO. Morris Bishop and Henry LONGAN STUART, translators. Beatrice Cenci . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 415 RICHARDS, I. A., C. K. Ogden, and James Wood. The Foundations of Aesthetics. RIDER, FREMONT, editor. FREDERIC TABER COOPER, compiler. Rider's California . Roget, Peter MARK. Enlarged by John Lewis Roger. Revised and enlarged (1925) by Samuel Romilly Roger, M.A. Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases . . Ross, Martin and E. E. SOMERVILLE. Irish Memories . . . 523 Roth, Samuel. Now and Forever . · · · · · · · · · 165 Sachs, A. S. Basic Principles of Scientific Socialism . . . . . . . . . 254 Saltus, MariE. Edgar Saltus The Man . . . . . . . . . SANDBURG, CARL. Abraham Lincoln, The Prairie Years . . . . . SANTAYANA, GEORGE. Dialogues in Limbo . . . RGE. Dialogues in Limbo . . . . . . . . . . 429 SCARBOROUGH, DOROTHY. In the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs SCHEFFAUER, HERMAN GEORGE, translator. Peter the Czar, by KLABUND . . . . SCHNITZLER, ARTHUR. Robert A. Simon, translator. Fraülein Else . . . . . Scott, John HUBERT. Rhythmic Prose . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Scott, John HUBERT. Rhythmic Verse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Seitz, Don C. Under the Black Flag .. Seldes, George S. and Gilbert, translators. Plays of the Moscow Art Theatre . 429 SHAW, BERNARD. Imprisonment . . . Sherman, STUART P., editor. Letters to a Lady in the Country, Together with Her Replies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . SIMON, ROBERT A., translator. Fraülein Else, by ARTHUR SCHNITZLER . . . . . SITWELL, Osbert. Discursions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . SITWELL, OSBERT. Out of the Flame . . . . . . . . . . . . . . SMITH, CHARD POWERS. Along the Wind . . . . . . . . . . . . 427 252 254 176 431 INDEX XI 428 323 429 . . 163 PAGE SMITH, LOGAN PEARSALL. Words and Idioms . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 SOMERVILLE, E. &. and Martin Ross. Irish Memories . . . . . . . . . 523 SONNENSCHEIN, E. A. What is Rhythm? . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317 SPENCE, LEWIS. The Problem of the Atlantis . . . . . SPENCER, MALCOLM, A. CLUTTON-BROCK, Percy DEARMER, A. S. Duncan-Jones, J. MIDDLETON MURRY, and A. W. POLLARD. The Necessity of Art . . . STEIN, GERTRUDE. The Making of Americans being The History of a Family's Prog- ress . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 STEIN, Rose Ellen, translator. Notes of My Youth, by Pierre Loti . . . . . 162 STRONG, L. A. G., editor. The Best Poems of 1925 . .., STUART, HENRY LONGAN and Morris Bishop, translators. Beatrice Cenci, by CORRADO Ricci . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 415 TAGGARD, GENEVIEVE, editor. Woodcuts by J. J. LANKES. May Days . . . . 160 TERHUNE, ALBERT Payson. Wolf . . . 68 Thwaites, Reuben Gold, introduction by. The Jesuit Relations and Allied Docu- ments, selected and edited by Edna KENTON . TOLMAN, Albert H. Falstaff, and Other Shakespearean Topics . . . . . . . TORRENCE, RIDGELY. Hesperides . . ii . . in... . . ... . . . . . . TREVELYAN, R. C. Thamyris or Is There a Future for Poetry? . . . . . WARNER, SYLVIA TOWNSEND. The Espalier . . . . . . . . . . . . WATSON, LUCY ELEANOR. Coleridge at Highgate. Welby, T. Earle, introduction by. The Early French Poets, by Henry Francis CARY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Wells, H. G. Christina Alberta's Father . . . . . . . . . . . . . WHARTON, EDITH. The Writing of Fiction . . . . . . . . 163 WHITEHEAD, A. N. Science and the Modern World . . . WILLIAMS, WILLIAM Carlos. In the American Grain . . . . . . . . . . 253 WILLIAMS-ELLIS, AMABEL. Noah's Ark . . . . . . . . . . . . . W. L. Episodes and Epistles . . . . . . . .. . . . 253 Wood, JAMES, C. K. Ogden, and I. A. Richards. The Foundations of Aesthetics : WOODWARD, W. E. Bread and Circuses . . . WOOLF, LEONARD. The Hogarth Essays. Fear and Politics: A Debate in the Zoo. 176 WOOLF, VIRGINIA. The Hogarth Essays. Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown . . . . 176 WYETH, N. C., introduction by. Howard Pyle, A Chronicle, by Charles D. ABBOTT. 340 XENOPHON. E. C. MARCHANT, translator. The Loeb Classical Library. Memorabilia and Oeconomicus . XENOPHON. E. C. MARCHANT, translator. The Loeb Classical Library. Scripta Minora . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 475 Yeats, WILLIAM BUTLER. Early Poems and Stories . . . . . . . . . . 359 YOUNG, STARK. Glamour, Essays on the Art of the Theatre . . . . . . . 72 ZWEIG, STEFAN. EDEN and Cedar Paul, translators. Passion and Pain . . . . 69 339 475 252 XII INDEX COMMENT . . . . . . . . . . Altruism in the Civilized World . . . . Announcement . . . . . . . . . Announcement of Award . . . . . . Hogarth Essays, The . . . . . . . Johnson, Doctor Samuel . : Literary Fastidiousness, S. P. E. Tract XXII “The Religion of Undergraduates” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . PAGE . 532 . 532 . 84 . 177 . 353 . 444 265 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . THE THEATRE 107 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 169 345 . . 76 . . . . . . . . . . . 345 166 . . . . . 255 . . . . . . . : 168 74 . . . . . Androcles . . . . . . . . . . . Antonia . . . . . . . . . . Arms and The Man . . . . . . . Big Parade, The . . . . Carmencita . . . . . Charlot Revue, The ... Cleopatra . . . . . . . . . Cocoanuts, The . . . . Dybbuk, The . . . Fountain, The .. . Green Hat, The. Hamlet In Modern Dress . . . . Hedda Gabbler . . . . . . . . . In a Garden . . . . . . . International Theatre Exposition, The c . . Last Night of Don Juan, The . . . . . Last of Mrs Cheyney, The ..... Little Eyolf . . . . . . . . Lysistrata . . . . . . . . . Love and Death . . Moscow Art Theatre Musical Studio, The . National Winter Garden Burlesque, The . . Wise-Crackers, The . . . . . . . . Young Woodley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 . . . 345 . . . 73 . . 258, 432 . . . 75 . . . 166 · 432 . . . 345 . 345 . . . 343 . . 76, 345 . . . 169 . . . 257 . · · . . . . . . . . . . . · . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . MODERN ART . . . . . . . . . . . . . · · . · · . . Carnegie International Exhibition, The . Demuth, Charles . . . . . . . Eakins, Thomas . · · · · High-lights in the New York Season . . Homer, Winslow . . . . . . . . . . Intimate Gallery, The . . . . . . Jacob, Max . . . . . . . . La Bohémienne Endormie . . . . . Léger, Fernand . . . . . . . . Maillol, Aristide . . . . . . . . Marin, John . hn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . · . . . . . . . . . . . · . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . · . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . · . . . . . . . · · . . 347 . . 527 77 . . 436 . . 77 . . 436 . . 171 . . 262 . . 79 . . . 436, 327 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . INDEX XIII . . . . . . . . . . . . · . . . · . . . . Newer Artists, The · · · · · · . O'Keefe, Georgia . . . . . . Quinn Collection, The . . . . Rembrandt . . . . . . . . Stella, Joseph . . . . . . Tri-National Exhibition, The . . . Whitney Studio Club Exhibition, The . . . . . . . . . . . PAGE . . 525 . . 437 . 170, 260 . . 76 . . 525 . . 340 . 437 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . MUSICAL CHRONICLE · · . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173 . 529 · . : 174 . . . . . · . 441 . · · . 173 DIOCn, crnest. Bloch, Ernest. Concerto Grosso. . Concerto Grosso . . . . . . . . . Copland, Aaron . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Enters, Angna . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Furtwaengler, Wilhelm . . . . . . . . . . . Gershwin, George Hindemath, Paul . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Honegger, Arthur . . Koussevitsky, Serge. Concert for The League of Composers . League of Composers, First Sunday afternoon Concert of the Le Roi David, by Arthur Honegger . . . . . . . . Les Noces, by Igor Strawinsky . . . . . . . . . Mills, Florence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ruggles, Carl :. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Schoenberg, Arnold . . . . . . . . . . . .. Skyscrapers, by John Alden Carpenter . . . . . . . Three Jewish Poems, Koussevitzky's performance of ... . . Varèse, Edgar. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . · · · . . . 348 . 351 351 . . . . . · · · . . . 441 . . . . . . . . . . . . · · . . . 440 . 442 · 528 MISCELLANEOUS AE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 300 358 248 357 · . . . . · . . . . . . . . . · · · . . 80 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... 493 . 490 · . · · · · 261 358 · . . · . . Abbey Theatre, The . . . . . . . . . : : :_ . . . . . . . . American Folk-Song, The . . . . 8, The . . . . . . . . Anglo-Irish Literature . . . Bartók, Béla . . . . . . . . . . . . Bauer, Marion . . . . . . Beggar on Horseback . . . . . . . . . Belasco, David . . . . . . . . . . . . Belloc, Hilaire . . . . . . . Celtic Renascence, The . . . . . Changes in the Capitals of Europe... Chaucer's Pardoner . . . . . . . . . Claudel, Paul . . . . . . . . . . . Cohan, George M. . . . . . . . . Coleridge, Samuel Taylor . . . . . . Dialogue Concerning the Future. Anatole France Dialogue Concerning War. Anatole France. .. Dialogue on Astronomy. Anatole France . . . Dialogue on Old Age. Anatole France . . . . Evans, Donald . . . . . . . . . . . Gide, André . . . . . . . . . . . . Giraudoux, Jean . . . . . . . . . . . . · · . . . . . . . . . . . . · · · · · . . : 408 . 147 313 490 363 223 230 293 127 . . · · · · . . . · · · · . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . · · · · : . : : : : 197 . . . . . . . . . . . 503 506 . . XIV INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . PAGE . 80 . 533 . 289 . 258 . 313 152, 347 . 148 . 166 79 26 : 349 . . ........ .'. . . . . · . . · · : . . · · · . · · : · . : : 343 . . . . Gruenberg, Louis :. . . . Guggenheim, Simon, Memorial Foundation Fellowships.. Internationalism, discussion by Anatole France . . . . . International Theatre Exposition, The . . . . . . . Jacob, Max . . . . . . . . . . John, Augustus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lucian, The Fowler Edition . . . . . . . Marx Brothers, The . . . . . . . Matulka, Jan. . · Metaphysics, discussion by Anatole France · · · · Modigliani, Amedeo . . . . . . . Nemirovitch-Dantchenko . . . . . Moore, Marianne. . . . . Neo-Catholic Revival, The . Orpen, Sir William . Plato's account of Atlantis . .. Prussian Militarism . . . . Robinson, Lennox . . . . Sargent, John . . . . . Shaw, Bernard . . . . . S. P. E. . . . . . . Stepan, Vaclav . . . . . Stevens, Wallace . . . . . Strawinsky, Igor . . . . . Super-Realists, The . . . . Synge, John Millington . . . . . . . . . . . . Valéry, Paul . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Williams, William Carlos . . . . . . . . . . 313 152 . 61 . . 411 117 . .................. 2 . . . . . . 167 . : : : . . : : 80 . . 496 . .80, 351 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 361 . 503 . 490 DEPARTMENTS · . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Briefer Mention. . · · Comment . . . . German Letter . . Modern Art . . . Musical Chronicle . Paris Letter . . . Theatre, The . . . · · 67, 160, 252, 339, 426, 520 . . 84, 176, 265, 353, 444, 532 . . . . . . . . 407 . . 77, 170, 260, 346, 436, 525 . . 80, 173, 263, 349, 440, 528 . . . . . . . 312, 503 . . . 73, 166, 255, 343, 432 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Gallery of Sculpture, Frankfort TRAUERNDE HANNES. BAVARIAN MASTER THE oXXIII 101 DIAL JANUARY 1926 THE BEAR BY NICOLAI LYESKOV Translated From the German of Alexander Eliasberg by Amy Wesselhoeft von Erdberg. M Y father was, in his time, a well-known circuit judge. As I many important cases were entrusted to him, he was often away from home, my mother and I remaining behind with the servants. At the time of the incident which I am about to relate, my mother was very young and I was but five years old. It was winter, the weather being so severe that at night the sheep froze to death in their pens, and daws dropped dead and stiff upon the frozen earth. My father, who had gone to attend to professional business in Jelez, could not come home even for Christmas. My mother was therefore anxious to go to him, that he might not pass the beautiful and joyous festival alone. Be- cause of the intense cold she did not take me with her, but left me in the care of her sister, my aunt. My uncle, a great landowner from Orjol, had not the best repu- tation. He was rich, old, and extremely harsh. His most notice- able characteristics were vindictiveness and inexorableness. Nor did the possession of these qualities cause him unhappiness; on the contrary he liked to boast of them: in his eyes, they were the expression of manly vigour and decisiveness of character. He was anxious to bring up his children to a similar vigour and decisiveness. One of his sons, as it happened, was just my age. Everyone feared my uncle, I however most of all, for I, too, must be brought up to manly vigour. When I was but three years old THE BEAR and in terror of thunder, he locked me out on the balcony in a heavy thunderstorm, hoping thus to teach me to overcome my fear. Naturally, I did not particularly enjoy being a guest in the house of such an uncle. But, as I have said, I was at the time only five years old; and when plans were made by the family, my wishes and inclinations were not taken into consideration. There was on my uncle's estate a huge stone building like a castle-pretentious, tasteless, and even ugly, with a dome and a tower: all manner of abominable stories were told about it. Here the insane father of the present landowner had lived; it had then been made a store-house for apothecary supplies—and this later use for it was, for some reason, also considered uncanny. But the most uncanny thing of all was the so-called Aeolian harp in an arched window in the tower. When the wind passed over it, this in- strument gave forth sounds as strange as they were unexpected, ranging from soft, cooing notes to wild, despairing sighs, mad vibrations which rose at times to such pandemonium that it was as though a whole swarm of terrified spirits were sweeping the strings. The inmates of the house could not endure this harp. They be- lieved that it said to their stern master something irrefutable which made him more cruel and more sinister than ever. One thing was certain: when a storm broke and the harp set up a jangling that reverberated through the park and far out over the pond to the village, the master did not sleep the entire night, and was on the following day more stern and malevolent than ever. After such a night he was sure to issue some particularly vicious order which caused his underlings to shake with fear. It was the rule in this house that every misdeed, however insig. nificant, should meet with the severest punishment, and that no one should under any circumstances be granted mercy. This rule held for man and beast alike, and not even the humblest was exempt. Mercy had no attraction for this wealthy lord; it was to him weakness. And constant affliction was the lot of the inmates of his house, and the people of the many villages belonging to him. My uncle, who was a passionate devotee of the hunt, used to follow with his hounds wolves, hares, and foxes. In his kennels NICOLAI LYESKOV were dogs trained especially for the bear-hunt. These dogs were called “leeches": they fastened their teeth so firmly in their prey that there was no pulling them off. It sometimes happened that the bear into whose flesh one of the dogs had bitten, either killed the latter with a stroke of his terrible paw or tore it to shreds, but none of them was ever known to loose his hold. Nowadays, when the bear is hunted only with the spear and with game-beaters, there seem to be no more of these “leeches,” but at the time of which I am speaking every kennel contained some of them. There were a great many bears in our part of the country, and the bear-hunt was a favourite sport. When, as it sometimes happened, the bear's den itself was found, the young bears were brought home alive. They were kept in a stable which had massive walls and very small windows up under the eaves. These windows had no glass, but were heavily barred. The young bears used to climb up and hold on to the iron bars with their strong claws; it was their only way of getting a glimpse of the world outside. When we were taken for our morning walk, we liked to pass this stable, so that we could see the funny little bears looking out through the windows. Our German tutor, Kolberg, used to reach up to them, on a long stick, bits of bread which we had saved for them from breakfast. A young huntsman by the name of Ferapont took care of the bears. The simple folk around could not pronounce his name and called him “Chrapon,” or still oftener “Chraposchka.” I remem- ber him distinctly. About twenty-five years old, of medium height, supple, and strong, with his pink cheeks, very white skin, black curls, and large, black, somewhat prominent eyes, he was con- sidered handsome. He was, moreover, unusually courageous. His sister, Annushka, who helped our nurse, used to tell us about her plucky brother who slept in the bears' stable summer and winter- of his friendship for them, and how they used to crowd about him, laying their heads on him as if he were a pillow. In front of my uncle's house was a flower-bed, fenced in with an ornamental iron railing. Behind it stood a wide archway, and in the middle, opposite the archway, a tall, smooth pole, called the "Mast," upon the top of which was a platform. The cleverest TY nan THE BEAR bear, that is, the one that gave the greatest impression of intelli- gence and reliability, was singled out from among the young bears, and allowed to run about in the courtyard and park; but it was his duty to stand sentinel on the pole in front of the great archway. On this pole he spent the greater part of his time. He often lay on the straw at the foot, but generally preferred to stay on the plat- form, where neither dogs nor men could worry him. Not every bear was allowed this privilege. As I have said, only the cleverest and most good-natured were chosen, and even these not for life, but for only so long as instincts could be held in check, which en- croach on the rights of other creatures; that is, so long as they remained passive, and the bear molested neither geese nor hens, calves, nor human beings. If a bear were guilty in even a single instance of disturbing the peace, he was immediately sentenced to death and nothing on earth could procure him a reprieve. Chrapon was entrusted with the choice of this exceptionally clever bear. Since he had more to do with the bears than any one else, and was regarded as a connoisseur of bear character, he was naturally expected to make a good choice. Chrapon had, more- over, to take the full responsibility for his choice. The very first bear he chose proved quite uncommonly knowing and teachable, and was given a very fine name. Although bears in Russia are usually called “Mishka," this one was given the Spanish name of "Sganarelle.” Sganarelle had now enjoyed freedom for five years and had not been guilty of the slightest indiscretion. When it was said of a bear that he was "up to his tricks," it meant that his animal nature had begun to assert itself. This “trickster” was then put into a pit in a wide field between the threshing-floor and the woods. After a while a pole was put into the pit by means of which he could get out again, and at this moment “leeches” were loosed on him. If these hounds could not despatch the bear, and there were danger of his escaping into the woods, two experienced huntsmen sprang from cover, and with picked hounds, quickly put an end to him. Should these hounds by chance not be able to get the bear, and he be making for the "island," as we called that part of the wood adjacent to the great Bryanska forest, a good marks- man fired a shot at him from his long heavy musket. Оге. NICOLAI LYESKOV No bear had ever escaped all of these dangers. It would, indeed, have been dreadful if he had, for those in charge would surely as a result have been sentenced to death. Owing to Sganarelle's intelligence and to his thoroughly depend- able character, there had been no bear-hunt or execution for five years. He had become meanwhile an uncommonly handsome, tall, obedient bear. His snout was round and blunt, and he was of unusually slender build; in fact he looked more like an immense poodle than a bear. His haunches were somewhat too narrow and covered with short, shiny fur, but his shoulders and the back of his neck were magnificent; the fur was full and heavy. Sganarelle was, moreover, as knowing as a dog, and could perform certain tricks which very few bears can master. He could, for in- stance, run fast on his hind legs either forward or backward. He could beat a drum, and drill like a soldier with a long stick painted to look like a gun. But a thing which he enjoyed quite as much was to go with the peasants to the mill. He then shouldered cheerfully the heaviest sacks of corn, and on these occasions used to wear with an inimitable comic elegance, a high pointed felt hat, trimmed either with a peacock's feather or a tuft of straw. But for Sganarelle, too, the fateful hour arrived. His animal nature got the upper hand. Shortly before I arrived at my uncle's, Sganarelle had been guilty of a series of misdemeanors, each of which was graver than the last. The programme of his criminal proceedings was just that of his predecessors. First, to try his strength, he pulled the wing off a goose. Then he dropped his heavy paw on the back of a colt as it trotted after its mother, and broke its backbone. Finally he took offense at an old blind beggar and the man's companion, and tumbled them over and over in the snow, breaking their arms and legs. The blind man and his com- panion were taken to the hospital, whereupon Chrapon received orders to put Sganarelle into the pit. While Annushka was getting my little cousin and me ready for bed that evening, she told us of various touching incidents which had occurred as Sganarelle was being taken to the pit to await his penalty. Chrapon had not put a ring in his nose, as was customary with other bears, but had merely said: “Come along, Bear.” OTS THE BEAR The bear got right up and went with him. It was very droll to see him clutch his hat with the straw tuft, set it on his head, put his arm around Ferapont, and walk with him to the pit. There could be no question about it: these two were real friends. In spite of Chrapon's compassion for Sganarelle, he could not save him. At the house where all this happened, no misdeed was, as I have said, ever excused, and Sganarelle had already com- promised himself to such an extent that inevitably now, he must expiate his sins by death. With regard to the hunt which was to serve as an afternoon's entertainment for the various guests gath- ered at my uncle's house for Christmas, full directions had been given when Chrapon had been ordered to put Sganarelle into the pit. The method used for getting bears into the pit was a simple one. A few slight branches were placed across the excavation; faggots were then laid upon these, and snow shovelled over the whole. The trap was so deftly concealed that the bear suspected nothing. The docile creature was then led to the spot, and induced to go on. It took one or two steps forward and crashed into the deep pit, in which it then remained until the hour set for the open- ing of the hunt. A heavy beam about seven yards long was placed in the pit, on this the bear climbed out, and the hunt imme- diately began. If, however, the clever beast suspected danger and would not come out, they forced him to do so by thrusting at him with spiked poles, by throwing burning straw into the pit, or by firing off blank cartridges. Having got the bear into the pit in the manner described, Chrapon returned in sore distress, thought- lessly telling our nurse—his sister-how readily the bear had fol- lowed him, and how after it had fallen through the faggots into the pit, it had sat down on the ground, and holding its front paws together like hands, had begun to cry. Chrapon told his sister that he had run from the pit as fast as he could, that he might not hear Sganarelle's groans and cries which wrung his heart. "Thank God,” he added, “they haven't picked me out to shoot him if he tries to run away. I would take any punishment; noth- ing under the sun could induce me to shoot that creature!" NICOLAI LYESKOV 7 Annushka told us this, and we told it to our tutor Kolberg, who, thinking that it would amuse him, told my uncle. My uncle, on hearing it, remarked: “Chraposhka is really too funny!” and clapped his hands three times, to summon Ustin Petrovich- Ustin Petrovich, or rather Justin, the old French lackey, who had been a prisoner of war since 1812. When Justin appeared in his carefully brushed lilac-coloured livery with the silver buttons, my uncle gave orders that a certain huntsman, Flegont, who never missed his mark, should be reserve marksman with Chrapon at the approaching hunt. My uncle apparently promised himself considerable entertain- ment from the conflicting emotions in the breast of the poor fellow. If it should occur to Chrapon not to shoot at all, or intentionally to miss his mark, why Flegont would be there anyhow to bring the beast down. Ustin bowed and went off to deliver the orders. We children were only now aware of the mischief we had done, and felt that a terrible catastrophe was approaching. Who could tell how all this would end? Under these circumstances we could neither enjoy the delicious dishes which it was customary to serve at a late hour on Christmas eve; nor had we any interest in the guests, many of whom had been accompanied by their children. The thought of Sganarelle and Chrapon pained us, and we did not know for which of them we suffered more. We two, that is my little cousin and I, tossed for a long time in our beds. We did not get to sleep until late, and then only to dream of Chrapon and the bear, and to wake up from time to time with a start, screaming. When our nurse told me I need not be afraid of the bear because he was safe in the pit, and would be there till the following afternoon, my restlessness was only augmented. I asked the old nurse whether you could pray for a bear. This question, however, was beyond her theological knowl- edge, and she answered, yawning repeatedly and crossing herself, that she had never asked the priest about it. The bear, of course, was one of God's creatures and had been in Noah's ark. This mention of Noah's ark suggested to my mind that the infinite mercy of God reached out to and included not only all human beings, but every living creature. I knelt in my little bed, THE BEAR as pressed my face into the pillow, and implored God in all His majesty not to account my prayer sinful, but to spare Sganarelle. Christmas-day dawned. We came down to breakfast in our best clothes in the company of our governess and tutor. Besides the many guests assembled in the dining-room, there were the priest, the deacon, and two sextons. As my uncle entered the din- ing-room, the priests began a Christmas carol. Then a light breakfast with tea was announced. Dinner was served earlier than usual; immediately after dinner the bear-hunt was to begin. It would never do to postpone it until later in the day, as at this time of year it soon became dark, and in the dim light the bear could easily escape. Everything went exactly as had been planned. Right after dinner they dressed us in rabbit-skin jackets and boots of shaggy goat-skin, to drive to the hunt. We were put into sleighs, which stood in a long line before the house. Upon the seats of each, rugs had been thrown, and each was drawn by three horses. Two grooms held an English grey mare by the bridle. My uncle now stepped out of the house in his short fox-skin jacket and cap. As soon as he had mounted and was in the saddle—which was covered with a black bear-skin and ornamented with turquoises and snakes' heads—our long procession of sleighs began to move forward. In ten or fifteen minutes we had arrived. Drawn compactly together on the wide expanse of snow, the sleighs were encircled by a chain of mounted huntsmen which was densest toward the woods. Cover for Chrapon and Flegont had been erected, close to the woods in some bushes. The two marksmen themselves could not be seen, although our attention was called to the points of their muskets. The pit in which the bear sat was not visible, so we turned our attention to the smartly clad huntsmen who were provided with the very best weapons of the time, manufactured by the Swedish firm of Strabus, equivalent to the German Morgenrath, the English Mortimer, or the Warsaw firm of Kolett. My uncle took his place in front of the huntsmen. The leash of two young hounds was handed him, and a white cloth was laid on the saddle bow. VICCL. NICOLAI LYESKOV Young "leeches” anxious to exhibit their prowess manifested the greatest impatience, whining, barking, and jumping about the horses, while the whippers-in kept snapping their whips in an attempt to call them to order. The hounds were, however, con- sumed with a desire to attack the beast of whose proximity their keen noses made them aware. The moment had come when Sganarelle was to be let out of the pit. My uncle signalled with the white cloth which had been placed before him on the saddle, and shouted: “Ready! Go!" A group of huntsmen withdrew from my uncle's staff and made their way straight across the field, stopping when they had gone about two hundred yards, to lift from the snow where it had lain concealed—a long, heavy beam. One end of it was pushed into the pit, until the beam lay crosswise, so that the bear could get out without any particular difficulty, as though he were going upstairs. The other end stuck out above the pit about a yard. All eyes followed these proceedings which brought the great event still nearer. Sganarelle was expected to come out at any moment. Sensing danger, however, he stayed where he was. Hereupon they began to pelt him with snowballs, and to prod him with long poles. You could hear him growl, but he did not emerge. A few blank cartridges were fired into the pit. Sganarelle growled more sav- agely, but even then did not come out. There now appeared from behind the chain of huntsmen, a sledge of a kind used for conveying manure. With a heap of straw upon it, and drawn by one horse, this sledge was rushed toward the pit. The large gaunt horse accustomed to hauling grain from the threshing-floor, in spite of his age and emaciation, galloped with lifted tail and flying mane. It was not evident whether this fire and spirit were a remnant of his youthful vigour, or the result of terror caused by the nearness of the bear-probably the latter. Besides the curb, a tight cord attached to the bit cut into the old horse's grey mouth, and had already made it bleed. The stableman jerked pitilessly at the cord and lashed the flanks of the creature as it tore ahead like mad, lunging violently from side to side. 10 THE BEAR The straw was divided, set on fire, and simultaneously thrown into the pit from three sides. There was now but one spot safe from the flames—the one at which the pole stuck out. There burst upon us a deafening roar interrupted by groans, but still the bear did not come out. We were told that his fur was already singed, that he had pressed his paws tight over his eyes, and lay squeezed down in a corner of the pit so that it was im- possible to get him out. The horse with bleeding lips, galloped back at the same frantic pace. . . . Everyone supposed that it was to get a new supply of straw. Among the spectators reproaches were expressed: why had not sufficient straw been provided in the first place? My uncle raged and shouted something which, because of all the tumult, the whining of dogs, and the snapping of whips, I could not understand. The whole thing had somehow an atmosphere all its own. The old horse, breathing hard and swaying from side to side, lurched back to the pit in which Sganarelle lay. This time it brought no straw: on the sledge sat Ferapont. My uncle had given orders that Chraposhka should go down to bring his friend out. ... ven Ferapont now stood before the pit. Although terribly agitated, he acted with decision. Seizing the cord with which the straw had been bound together, he fastened it to the end of the pole, and with it in his hand, slowly started down. Sganarelle's growls stopped and gave place to muffled grunting. It sounded as though the creature were complaining to his friend of the base treatment to which he had been subjected; then, even the grunting ceased, and there was silence. "He is hugging and licking Chraposhka,” announced one of the men stationed on the edge of the pit. Among the people sitting in the sleighs some drew a deep breath, others showed impatience. It was plain that many felt compassion for the bear, and no longer expected pleasure from the hunt. These passing incidents were suddenly interrupted by an event even more unexpected and more moving than anything that had yet occurred. NICOLAI LYESKOV 11 Above the opening of the pit now appeared Chraposhka's curly head in its round hunting-cap. He came out as he had gone down, keeping the cord in his hand as he walked up the pole. He did not, however, come alone but was followed by Sganarelle who laid one shaggy paw upon his shoulder. The bear was cross and thoroughly forlorn. Weak and emaciated, less from physical dis- comfort than from mental suffering, he reminded one strangely of King Lear. His bloodshot eyes blazed with indignation; and like King Lear he was dishevelled, covered with straws, and partially singed. Curiously enough, too, like that unhappy King, he had retained a kind of crown. Perhaps to please Ferapont, perhaps merely from chance, he had taken into the pit with him and now carried in his hand, the hat that Chraposhka had once given him as a present. He had kept this token of friendship with him. His poor heart having found relief in the arms of his friend, he pulled the hat from under his arm and put it on his head. Some of the spectators laughed at the sight. To others it was painful. Many even turned away in order not to see the poor animal meet its horrible death. The excitement of the dogs was now at its height. Even the whips had no longer any effect on them. The hounds, young and old, rose on their hind legs when they saw Sganarelle, howled, and almost strangled themselves in their collars. When Chraposhka had gone back again to his former post on the edge of the wood, Sganarelle pawed at the cord, by which he had been tied to the pole, to free himself so that he could run after his friend; but in spite of all his cleverness he was as clumsy as any other bear: in- stead of loosening the cord, he only drew it tighter. He saw that he could not undo the noose, and began to tug at it, in an effort to break it. Whereupon, since the cord held, the beam was suddenly jerked half-way out of the pit. As Sganarelle turned to look at it, two hounds which had at that moment been unleashed, sprang upon him and sank their sharp teeth in his neck. He was so absorbed in freeing his paw, that he was at first more astonished than angered by this attack; but the next moment, when one of the “leeches” let go in order to drive his teeth still deeper, Sganarelle struck out with his paw and hurled the dog far afield, with its body ripped open. As the bleeding hound fell more 12 THE BEAR on the snow, with one hind leg Sganarelle stamped the life out of the second dog. ... A far more horrible and unexpected thing now happened. As Sganarelle struck out in order to free himself of the “leech,” by the same movement he pulled out of the pit the beam, to the end of which the cord was attached. Describing a circle around Sganarelle, it whizzed through the air and killed, in its single revolution, not two dogs or three, but a great number. The bear was too clever not to see what a useful weapon the beam had becomemor was he only actuated perhaps by the pain in his paw from the tight cord? In any case he gave a savage growl, tightened the cord, and set the beam whizzing so fast that it made a circle on a level with his paw and hummed like a great top. It could not but throw over and smash everything that came in its way. If, however, the cord were weak at some point and broke, the beam would be hurled far off by this centrifugal force. Heaven only knows how far it would then fly, and what it would crush! We were—those of us who formed the circle, men, horses, and dogs—in the greatest danger, and each hoped for his own sake that the cord upon which the great catapult was slung would not give way. What, indeed, would be the outcome? No one but a few huntsmen and the two marksmen who sat concealed at the edge of the wood, had the least inclination to stay to find out. The rest of the company—my uncle's guests and relatives—who had witnessed the spectacle, had lost all pleasure in it. They gave orders to their coachmen to leave as quickly as possible, and sleighs flew along, tearing after and overtaking one another on their way to the house. During this absurd and disorderly flight, there were several col- lisions and upsettings, much to laugh at, and much that was really terrifying. Those who were tipped out of sleighs imagined that the cord had broken, that the beam was whizzing over their heads, and that the infuriated bear was about to overtake them. The guests who reached the house were able to quiet down only by degrees; those, however, who had stayed behind, saw something more appalling than anything which had so far occurred. It was useless to set the dogs on Sganarelle, as, swinging his beam about him, he moved straight toward the spot where death awaited him—the very part of the wood where Chrapon and the C. NICOLAI LYESKOV 13 celebrated marksman Flegont sat concealed. Fate, however, seemed to side with the bear: having once taken his part, it was apparently going to see him through. At the very moment when he reached the snow fortifications from which the guns of Chra- poshka and Flegonţ were aimed at him, the cord snapped and the beam shot forward like an arrow, so that he lost his balance and tumbled to the ground. Those who had remained, now witnessed a terrible spectacle. The beam had swept away the supports for the muskets, demolish- ing, in fact, the whole snow fort by which Flegont was hidden. With one end protruding, it had fallen into a pile of snow. Sgana- relle lost no time; he fell down once or twice, picked himself up, and made straight for Chraposhka's hiding-place. . . . He recog- nized his friend immediately; already his hot breath smote Fera- pont, and he was about to lick his face when a shot sounded from Flegont. The bear escaped to the woods and Chraposhka fell over in a faint. They lifted him, and examined his arm, which the bullet had entered. In the wound was a tuft of bear's fur. So Flegont retained the rank of first marksman: he had shot in great haste from a heavy musket without support; it was no longer light enough to see well; the bear and Chraposhka were close to- gether. Under these circumstances a shot which had only missed by a hair's breadth could really be counted by no means a bad one. Be that as it may, Sganarelle had escaped. It was impossible to pursue him further that evening, and by the following morning a new spirit had come over him whose will was law in this great house. When my uncle came home after the disappointments which I have described, he was in a worse temper than ever. Even before dismounting from his horse he gave orders that at an early hour the next day the tracks of the bear were to be followed, and that the animal should be so hedged in as to leave no possibility of escape. A properly conducted hunt might really have been ex- pected to result differently. Everyone now anticipated anxiously my uncle's orders with regard to the wounded Chraposhka. All felt that some terrible thing awaited him. He could be accused of having neglected to thrust his hunting-knife into the bear, when it had laid its paws 14 THE BEAR on him. For there was reason to believe that he would never have raised his hand against his shaggy friend anyhow, and that he had purposely allowed him to go unmolested. The close friendship existing between Chraposhka and Sgana- relle made this supposition plausible, not only to those who had been present at the hunt, but to the guests besides. We listened to the conversation of the grown-up people gath- ered about the Christmas-tree which had been lighted for our benefit; we shared the general view with regard to Chraposhka's complicity, and the anxiety for his fate. From the antechamber by which my uncle had entered his private apartments, the rumour was passed that he had as yet not even mentioned Chraposhka. "Is that a good sign or a bad one?" was the anxious query of every heart. It reached among others Father Alexei, the old village priest who had been decorated in 1812. He sighed deeply and said, “Let us pray to Him who is born to us this day!" At these words he crossed himself, as did each of us, the grown- up people and the children, the masters and the serfs. And hardly had our hands dropped to our sides, when the door swung wide and my uncle entered the room-a light cane in his hand. He was accompanied by his two favourite greyhounds and by his valet Justin. The latter bore on a silver plate his master's fine white silk handkerchief and a snuff-box with a picture on it of Paul I. My uncle's arm-chair had been placed on a Persian rug in the middle of the room, in front of the Christmas-tree. He seated himself and took from Justin's hands the foulard handkerchief and the snuff-box. The two greyhounds immediately lay down at his feet, thrusting their long noses out before them. My uncle wore a blue silk house-jacket, richly embroidered, and ornamented with silver filigree buckles and large turquoises. In his hand he carried a supple cane of Caucasian wild cherry. He was using this cane to lean upon; for, perfectly trained though she was, even that model horse, “Lady of Fashion," had, at the bear-hunt, been seized with the general panic, and shying in her mad fright had crushed her master's leg against a tree. Pain as a result of the accident caused my uncle to suffer, and NICOLAI LYESKOV 15 even to limp slightly; and this added affliction naturally did not tend to improve his temper, which was just now particularly destructive. Nor had it made a pleasant impression upon my uncle that we had all stopped talking abruptly as he entered the room. Like all suspicious persons, he could not endure unflattering significances of that kind; and in order to break the awkward silence, Father Alexei at once began to speak. Turning to us children, the priest asked if we understood the meaning of the Christmas carol, “Christ is born to us this day.” Neither we nor the older people, as it seemed, really understood it. The priest now began to explain what was meant by the words "praise," "praise with song,” and “lift up your hearts." When he came to these last words, he himself seemed to experience a mysterious exaltation. He spoke of the gifts that each of us, even the poorest, might bring to the manger of the divine child, and of how such gifts were more precious than the gold, frank- incense, and myrrh of the three wise men. But the most precious gift of all, he said, was the heart that is born anew through His teaching. He spoke of Love, of Forgiveness, and said that in Christ's name every one of us should comfort friend and foe alike. His words were extraordinarily impressive. ... We realized his deep conviction, and listened to him, strangely moved. At the same time we prayed earnestly that his words might be experienced in very truth, and the eyes of some of us were filled with tears. ... Suddenly something dropped to the floor. . . . It was my uncle's cane. . . . It was picked up for him, but he did not touch it; he sat deeply bowed, his hand hanging from the arm of his chair. In his fingers was one of the big turquoises; he dropped it, but no one picked it up. All eyes were upon his face. And it was a strange thing we saw: he wept! The priest gently motioned us children aside, made his way over to him, and bestowed on him the priestly benediction. My uncle raised his face, seized the old man's hand, and as he unexpectedly kissed it, said very softly, “Thanks.” He then signed to Justin, and Ferapont was summoned. The latter appeared, noticeably pale, with his arm in a bandage. “Come here,” commanded my uncle, pointing to the carpet. Chraposhka came nearer and dropped upon his knees. 16 THE BEAR “Stand up,” said my uncle. “You are pardoned.” Chraposhka fell upon his knees again, and my uncle began in a nervous, agitated voice: “You loved the beast as few know how to love their fellow- men. You have touched my heart and surpassed me in mag- nanimity. Listen-this is what I propose to do for you: you are from now on a freeman and I give to you a hundred rubles. You may go now where you please.” “Thank you, sir, but I shall not go anywhere," cried Chraposhka. “What?” "I shan't go anywhere,” repeated Ferapont, "What then do you want?" "You have been merciful to me; I shall prove my gratitude by serving you as a freeman more faithfully than ever I have done as a serf.” With a hand that shook visibly, my uncle pressed the white silk handkerchief to his eyes, embracing Ferapont as he did so. ... We all rose from our seats and covered our eyes, . . . It was enough for us that the highest honour was being paid the Spirit of the Most High, and that in the place of dread, the peace and goodwill of Christ had descended among us. Kegs of beer were sent by my uncle to the people of the villages; everywhere bonfires were lighted; and the saying passed from one to the other: "To-day we have seen that even the beast has withdrawn into the wilderness that he may praise his Maker!" Sganarelle's tracks were followed no further. Ferapont, who was now a free man, took over presently old Justin's office; and up to the last day of my uncle's life, was not only his most faithful servant, but his truest friend. He it was who with his own hands closed his master's eyes at the last and buried him in the Wag- anykov cemetery in Moskow, where the gravestone may be seen to this very day. At his feet lies Ferapont. There is no longer any one to put flowers upon these graves, but among those in Moskow who live in cellars and asylums, some few remember a spare, white-haired man who intuitively knew where there was real need and suffering, who hastened thither or sent his trusty servant with abundant relief. These true bene- factors were my uncle and Ferapont, Ferapont whom he sometimes called playfully the tamer of wild beasts. Сте FOUR POEMS BY E. E. CUMMINGS i go to this window just as day dissolves when it is twilight(and looking up in fear i see the new moon thinner than a hair) making me feel how myself has been coarse and dull compared with you,silently who are and cling to my mind always But now she sharpens and becomes crisper, until i smile with knowing —and all about herself the sprouting largest final air plunges inward with hurled downward thousands of enormous dreams if being morticed with a dream myself speaks FOUR POEMS (whispering, suggesting that our souls inhabit whatever is between them) knowing my lips hands the way i move my habits laughter i say you will perhaps pardon, possibly you will comprehend. and how this has arrived your mind may guess if at sunset it should, leaning against me, smile; or(between dawn and twilight)giving your eyes, present me also with the terror of shrines which noone has suspected (but wherein silently always are kneeling the various deaths which are your lover lady:together with what keen innumerable lives he has not lived. III how this uncouth enchanted person, arising from a restaurant,looks breathes or moves -climbing(past light after light) to turn:disappears the very swift and invisibly living rhythm of your heart possibly will understand; or why(in E. E. CUMMINGS this most exquisite of cities)all of the long night a fragile imitation of (perhaps)myself carefully wanders streets dark and, deep with rain. ... (he,slightly whom or cautiously this person and this imitation ressemble, descends into the earth with the year a cigarette between his ghost-lips gradually) remembering badly,softly your kissed thrice suddenly smile IV but if i should say goodmorning trouble adds up all sorts of quickly things on the slate of that nigger's face(but If i should say thankyouverymuch mr rosenbloom picks strawberries with beringed hands) but if i Should say solong my tailor chuckles like a woman in a dream(but if i should say FOUR POEMS Now the all saucers but cups if begin to spoons dance every- should where say over the damned table and we hold lips Eyes everything hands you know what happens) but if i should, Say, AU 'VOIR BY N. NEWALL M HE automobile had been running away from familiar things for hours. The first numbness of the senses had passed when the youth, with a half-surprised recognition of a world that had seemed lost, looked on the busy streets of an old town that still crowned a little hill, unwrecked, untouched; and then the swift, smooth descent from an arched gateway into the plain beyond had been like a plunge into a great sea of peace. The fields with the lumbering, browsing cattle; the tilled land, warm under the September sun; the trees that lined the road and clustered round undisturbed villages; the women, in their remoteness from the life just left behind: all had given him a delicious feeling of well-being. At times his com- panion the Major, though constantly brooding over the map of men and guns and trenches that filled the background of his mind, had shot out brief comments on the condition of crops and live-stock and buildings; but, as might a lover to whom actualities are phantoms, he had answered obliviously. Now, at the outskirts of a town, these hours of convalescence ended. Traffic grew thicker, and a tangle of vehicles held them up at a bridge. Women with ropes under their arms were hauling barges on the canal bank below; he looked, but a censorious thought faded before it took shape. This was ordinary life, warm and human and sweet for its ordinariness; above all, making, not destroying. They pulled up in a square, dotted with army lorries, but joy- ously astir with some of its old life, and with the line of its roofs intact against the sky, heavenly in its suggestion of permanence. It was the hour of the midday meal; and to their left a cobbled roadway between high houses swarmed with people who chattered and vociferated in the tongue that in old days spoke to him of holiday freedom and a swift response to impulse. His blood quickened, and when they stepped from the auto- mobile, he put a compelling hand on the Major's arm-now for 22 AU 'VOIR ten minutes in that street, with its shops, its crowds, its exotic sounds in the ear! The Major, caught unprepared in his first glance around, acquiesced good-naturedly enough; but such enthusiasms puzzled him, and when he had endured the jostling groups and the unfamiliar language and surroundings for the stated time, he led the way back to the square. un In a restaurant on the far side, in a small glass-roofed room, they sat at ease near the end of a meal. The few customers were in uniform, to all appearance bored by this as by other parts of their routine in this supply centre far from the Front; their talk was intermittent and without animation. But dull and faded though room and company were, the place was stimulating to a youth eager to snatch at any chance to regain contact with a lost milieu. The Major left the lead to him, being uncertain about the dishes; for he had not crossed to France until drawn by the war, and did not know the language. But his natural inquisitiveness led him to put his usual staccato questions about the things before his eyes—the town, the people, the food- and the youth, for his own enjoyment of memories, mixed with his replies as much talk as he reasonably could about old holidays in France and Italy. A slim, fair girl in the early twenties was the only waitress. She seemed delicate and over-tired and perhaps did not interest habitués, but the youth watched her move about as one long denied the sight of womankind, with an ear alert for the soft inflections of her speech. Now and then he invented a need to bring her to their table, and tried to keep her there by spinning out with some slight raillery their exchange of sentences. At first she answered expressionlessly—she may have been subjected often to a kind of badinage that wearied her—but when she perceived deference in his manner and friendliness in his eyes, her faint smile became less mechanical, and at the end of the last course she appeared al- most ready to credit his assurance that to see a pretty girl and hear her clear voice was a delight to exiles such as they. The customers departed while the pair lingered over wine, and the youth detained her when there was no one else to serve. For a time, in observing this foolishness, the Major was cold and de- tached, but as the wine warmed him, he became indulgent. If N. NEWALL 23 Urmu either laughed, he would interpose a not unfriendly "What was that?" But this caused no constraint to the youth. Gradually warmth crept into word and tone. The girl smiled a little wist- fully once and surveyed him before she bent to murmur that old "Vous vous moquez de moi !" But no, he did not exaggerate, he insisted; and she surveyed him again and stayed. At last the Major consulted his watch and they rose. The girl stood by while they collected caps and fingered belts and the youth sought in his mind for the fitting parting phrase; finding now that the presence of the Major was encumbering. They were hesitating thus over the final word when the Major, who had been looking down from his height at the girl, stooped forward and awkwardly put a hand to a locket that hung from her throat. The girl, confused, lost her smile. The youth, no less taken aback, stopped in the middle of a sentence. "From your young maneh?” queried the Major, fumbling at the locket. The rigid lines of his face relaxed a little; they seemed to waver. “From my mother," said the girl simply; uneasy and resentful, but unable to recoil. She avoided the youth's embarrassed glance. "Ahum-ah-very pretty," went on the Major, not quite sure what she had said, and turning the locket this way and that on the dress. The girl's face became more sombre. Unable otherwise to disentangle her quickly—for the Major, at a loss what to do or say next, continued to fumble—the youth touched his companion's arm and turned towards the door with a slight bow and "Au 'voir, ma'moiselle!” “Au 'voir, m'sieu”,” she said colourlessly. The Major recovered himself, dropped the locket, and broke away-relieved to step outside with a muttered "Um-Good- bye!" Cod As the automobile left the square the youth saw a slight figure at the door of the restaurant-too far away to catch a farewell salute, or to be noticed by the Major, who was again brooding over the business ahead. A POEM BY SCOFIELD THAYER Not forgetting Paul Laurence Dunbar Poets I have loved so deeply, Poets I have loved so long, Teach me, ah gravely teach me The wonder of broken song. Teach me the language of moonlight Which speaks on waters at Dawn, That I may syllable moonlight Ere my brief Dark is gone. Teach me the error of Twilight, The wilful change of the moon, Teach me the malice of April, Teach me the terror of June. Teach me the error of Twilight, Teach me to wander at Dawn, Teach me the vagrant knowledge Of why a heart was born. Teach me to utter that pallor Which is the lips of Day, Teach me the small, grave words Wherewith the flowers pray. Teach me to fold my heart In a little scrap of song, Teach me to tie it gaily, Teach me to weep long. GIRL SEATED. BY ADOLF DEHN GIRL SEATED. BY ADOLF DEHN راي NOVO ار 1 م IN THE PARK. BY ADOLF DEHN LAST PAGES BY ANATOLE FRANCE With Annotations by Michel Corday TO THE READER: I apologize for having inserted too many pages of my own among the too few pages, hitherto unpublished, which Anatole France wrote during his last years. But those who love his work and revere his memory will understand my double purpose. First, I wanted to show by the example of the work which he left in outline, his method of writing at the close of his life: his meticulous documentation, his extensive reading, and the successive sketches, rebegun as often as ten times. To the details relating to his Last Pages, I have added some remarks on his unexecuted plans, of which nothing remains but a rough draft, or a sentence jotted down in haste, or just the memory of a conversation. Further, breaking after a year the silence imposed upon me by his death, I wish to protest against the wanton procedure of certain historiographers and against the unjust assertions of his detractors. Most of the pages left by Anatole France belong to the dialogues which he intended to assemble under the title, Sous la Rose. He was fond of this old phrase. In the course of an article on the Emperor Julian in La Vie Littéraire, he writes: “One evening I heard M Renan say sub rosa, 'Julian! Julian was a reactionary!'” Previously, Anatole France had considered another title. In the margin of one draft there is the note: "Perhaps, as a title, Sous l'Olivier.” He had, in fact, begun writing these dialogues at the end of the war, and doubtless had been tempted to place them under the aegis of peace. Later one of his characters will be seen alluding to this happy era: “Let us celebrate to- gether, in these days of rest and peace, beneath the sacred olive, the serenc orgies of metaphysics, and let us grow drunk on wisdom.” It was a year earlier-during the autumn of 1917—that he had conceived the plan of the first Dialogue. Dismayed at the prolonging of the war, he said, “I should like to write a dialogue on God in which I would develop the idea that if God exists he is the most abominable of beings for permitting this war." This was the origin of Sous la Rose. The dialogue form attracted him. A note discovered in the file of the dialogues—one of those innumerable notes which he jotted down on any paper, the back of a letter, a catalogue, or a bill-explains his preference: the plans a year earlier and let us growce, beneath the sac "Montaigne did not need to write dialogues in order to present the diverse aspects of a question. He himself sufficed for that, he was so multiple, diverse, and fecund in contradictions. But I am not several, and I need your contradictions." 26 LAST PAGES After he had conceived the idea of a dialogue on the existence of God, he decided to extend his plans and to treat of other subjects. Towards the end of the war he classified the documents which had accumulated. Each subject has its notes collected in a "case" made of a newspaper carefully folded like the cover of a book. A label is pasted across each of these, and its title stands out clearly in a handwriting which charms the eye by its firm pure elegance: “God, Nature, Metaphysics, War, The Future, Language as a Means of Knowing Truth, Modesty, The Church.” Anatole France had to lay aside these notes and devote his attention to La Vie en Fleur. When that was finished, he returned to Sous la Rose. He added to the projects already enumerated, a Dialogue on Old Age, all the material of which has been brought together here, and a Dialogue on Astronomy, for which he was preparing the documents when forced to his bed. This was his last work. He thought of writing two other dialogues, on Love and on Death. DIALOGUE ON METAPHYSICS AND THE EXISTENCE OF GOD Originally there were two distinct dialogues on Metaphysics and the Existence of God; also, the characters were quite numerous, there being over six. But in the last version the two dialogues are fused, or, more accurately, are welded one to the other. And only two characters survive. The definitive dialogue seems greatly trimmed down in comparison with the two trial versions which preceded it—as will be evident on examining the principal discarded passages which are published at the end of the Dialogues. MINE THÉMINE: This world where we are cast in tragic ignorance of what it is and of what we are will it always remain unknown to us? Yet our senses, whose evidence is controlled by reason, inform us of the objects outside us. · FLORIS: Alas! This mechanism which informs us of surround- ing objects is a blundering one; it does not penetrate things, but knocks against them. Everything resists it. It stops at the sur- face; and the substance, however apportioned, remains for ever hidden. As to reason, it is something vague, indefinite, uncertain, confused, and fluctuant; it varies with the individual, it varies even in one person with the year, the day, the hour; it flares up and goes out of a sudden, and contributes nothing but uneasiness and conflict. Animals possess an apparatus similar to man's for knowing the external world, and a reason of much less scope than ours, but of the same sort. Also, man and dog, with slight ev ANATOLE FRANCE 27 divergences, look out upon the same Nature. Poor Mitzi, lying at my feet with his nose on his paws, turns up at me his lovely golden brown eyes, and knows as much as his master about life and the world. THÉMINE: But is there not, Floris, a kind of Reason known only to philosophers, Pure Reason, which perceives what ordinary reason overlooks? And can we not reach by this channel the knowledge I aspire to? FLORIS: That is, indeed, the opinion of those who deal in metaphysics, or, to speak more exactly, metataphysics. For by rights this old game, renovated by the Greeks, is called metata- physics, or the things which come after the physics. That is what it meant to Aristotle's editors. As far as I have been able to make out, the metaphysicians, to avoid the errors of the senses, to escape the universal illusion, provide themselves with a contrary illusion. We, vulgar spirits, imagine that we see, hear, and feel; but they imagine that they do not see, do not hear, do not feel, and thereupon believe themselves much advanced in their knowl- edge of Nature. THÉMINE: Has not this metaphysics which you ridicule a bit frivolously, Floris, become in modern philosophy the science of principles and—as my mentor, M Bulle, says—the knowledge from which all other knowledge draws the assurance of its unity? FLORIS: Ah! That is where the trouble starts. We came into the world too late, Thémine, to know the principles of things. Precisely one eternity.is needed if we are to grasp the universal principle (principem, primus capere, according to the etymologists). The reverse of Petit-Jean, what we know least about is our beginnings. First principles are as remote from us as the sea- shore was from those workmen who mistook for a winnowing fan the oar which Ulysses carried on his shoulder. And when M Bulle adds that this science is elevated, he is not a metaphysician, but a physicist, and among the most ignorant of physicists. For there is neither high nor low in the universe. THEMINE: Please let us say no more about principles. And let us discuss the truths which we can attain. And, to avoid as far as possible the errors of reason and the senses, we will be exact in our speech and will take care to define our terms as we use them. sea- 28 LAST PAGES FLORIS: How define them? With words, which must be de- fined by other words, themselves subject to definition. And what is a word? A sound, a murmur, a cry, a grunt, muttum. Philos- ophers have been at great pains to distinguish articulate speech, proper to man, from the speech of animals. The difference between them is undoubtedly great; but not total. It is always murmur, grunt, muttire. And however far it is between the harmonious lamentations of Antigone bemoaning the holy light of day, and the whimpering of a beaten cur, we have, in either case, a sequence of sounds breathed out by flesh in misery. Let us agree that we hold language in common with the animals. And you would re- veal the universe with the aid of these little noises which permit man and animal alike to express happiness, sorrow, fear, desire, to cry out in hunger, to threaten his enemy, to call his mistress, to air the tumults of his heart? What absurdity! Undoubtedly we find a meaning in the words we use; but only in those which indicate a sensory object and cling to it, I might say, like a poster. Words which are supposed to represent un- representable objects represent nothing. They are not attached, and they float in the void. Whatever definition is given them, they will remain for ever indefinite. These words by which the metaphysician claims to label his abstractions did not exist in the earlier stages of language; or, if they did, they were applied to sensory objects from which they have since become detached. For example, in primitive speech spirit (l'esprit) is the breath, soul (l'âme) the respiration. And when we say that animals have no soul, it is exactly as though we said that creatures which respire have no respiration. In metaphysics—I do not remember the occasion—they speak of "pure spirit.” What pure thing can they conceive of in a world where all is blend and combination? The word "pure” at first described that which is washed. It is devoid of sense if it comes to qualify a spirit, a breath. Often, to designate the objects of his pale speculations, the metaphysician takes words which he has robbed of all potency by means of a caponizing prefix, words like immateriality, infinite, indefinite, indeterminate, absolute, which are not truly words at all, but counter-words. Can he do otherwise ? His mistake is in wanting to express an imaginary world with modulations softened from the cries of terror and love which, long before the first man, re- sounded in the depths of unnamed forests. CU ANATOLE FRANCE 29 Thémine, I am going to entrust you with an important truth. Man is in no better position than his brother animals for under- standing things and their causes. Whatever the extent of his research, whatever apparatus he invents to bolster up the in- firmities of his senses, he will do nothing but multiply his kinds of ignorance. Enclosed within himself, all that he believes out- side him will deceive him and, by his points of contact with it, will still be part of him. Whereupon, go and devote yourself, if you must, to the investigations of experimental philosophy, or plunge into the abyss of metaphysics--you will find there nothing other than yourself. THÉMINE: You know, Floris, that the human language which you would derive from the cries of wild beasts had for M Renan a totally different, a mysterious, origin. Indeed, one philosopher of the nineteenth century considered language the organ of knowl- edge. It can express nothing but the true, M de Bonald asserts; and if error creeps in, it is, so to speak, through the intervals of the words and by their wrong assemblage. According to Bonald, language is the strongest proof of the existence of God. FLORIS: Say what you will, it will always be muttire, to grunt. But you are free to prefer M de Bonald's grunting to my own. THÉMINE: Since you allow me, Floris, I shall prefer it to yours which leaves me no chance of close reasoning. But though you are determined to do nothing but grunt, you grunt artfully and in accord with the laws of reason; so let us celebrate together, in these days of rest and peace beneath the sacred olive, the serene orgies of metaphysics, and let us grow drunk on wisdom. Let us investigate the causes of things, considering first, if you will, the cause of causes. Floris, do you believe in the existence of God? FLORIS: Thémine, your question looks simple, but it is not so at all. Existence is not a single, constant state. There are many ways of existing. A mountain, a valley exist; a palace, a hut exist; a tree, a lion, a man exist; a gas, a solid, a liquid exist; a right-angled triangle exists with all its properties; time and space exist, and it offends our reason to deny it. There exist passions, sensations, ideas. But not all these existences are of the same order. The existence of God differs in conception according to the choice of proofs. When it is deduced, for instance, from the necessity of a prime mover, it certainly does not appear the same as when approached from an idea of justice moving towards its nec e 30 LAST PAGES ess realization. It will be physics, mechanics, dynamics in the first case; in the second it will be morality. The ontological argu- ment tends simply to situate existence in the minds of a great number of people without attributing independence to it. If exist- ence is the same as the idea of infinity which we are said to possess (erroneously, I suspect) it is itself infinite, and consequently unlimited, indeterminate, without modes, and as though non- being. If, on the contrary, it is that of the creator of worlds, it is limited, bounded, finite, for it is impossible that God should not be to some extent compressed by His creation, however slight its substance. Thus, His manners of existence are of a rare diversity. THÉMINE: But we all agree in defining Him, although the term, when applied to Him, sounds bizarre and has something of that grunt which you were speaking of. FLORIS: Philosophers make of Him the Infinite Being. By that they do not define Him, they indefine Him. To affirm Him in this wise is to deny Him. All accounts of Him are contradictory. They take from Him all limits in space and time, then they reduce Him to the measure of a man. They credit Him with omnipotence and show Him ceaselessly held in check by an absurd maleficent adversary drunk with rage and hatred. The idea of God as creator of the world, an idea formed in humanity's childhood, no longer corresponds to our views on the constitution of matter, the plurality of worlds, celestial mechanics, and, in general, the con- ditions of knowledge. His universal creation has become an imperceptible point in the universe; and the earth is merely a grain of sand in the multitude of worlds which he is supposed to have made for it. They attribute to Him the physics of a child and the morality of a savage. And I say nothing of what the theologians have made of Him! THÉMINE: And yet mankind retains its faith in Him. FLORIS: Mankind believes in Him, and the reason for its belief is obvious. Le bonhomme Kant, who was meditative, found in the smoke of his porcelain pipe the principles of human knowledge and the conciliation of philosophical systems; but he did not find God there. Having in vain multiplied his investigations to discover Him, he had resigned himself to doing without, when, walking one day through the streets of his home town of Königsberg, ANATOLE FRANCE 31 he was witness of much disorder and sedition. In the tumult, so unbearable to a sage, God suddenly appeared before him, and the good philosopher promptly entrusted Him with the policing of the world—which is expressed in the language of philosophy by saying that Kant does not believe in God for theoretical reasons, but that he believes in God for practical reasons. Thus, great mind that he was, the sage of Königsberg reverted to the common belief of all men who, in their thirst after happiness and life, embrace an all-powerful Being, at once stern and chari- table, from whom they expect eternal bliss and the punishment of their enemies. Here is the solid foundation of the belief in God. It is based on personal interests, like morality, like all the most sacred beliefs of mankind. Man does not believe in things as they are, he believes in things as he desires them to be. . THÉMINE: A belief possibly fecund. As our master Renan has said, who knows but that mankind, on the strength of be- lieving in a just God, may eventually realize justice? Anatole France had drawn up this small annotated list of the characters in his Dialogues : The Baron Onarion de Ténar. He likes maid-servants. Old Ebener. Madame Paillet, surnamed Rodogune. Floris (A. F.) Thémine. Actors are due to arrive, among them the petite Paillet. Doctor Constant. Rodogune's son is an ecclesiastic. A series of erasures indicate that the Baron Onarion de Ténar was to have been called, successively, de la Taraudière, Rodônias, Rodonie, Podoria, Rodopide. Another erasure shows that Floris was originally called Jacques Salvage. The initials “A. F.” placed in parentheses opposite the name of Floris are evidence that this character will express Anatole France's own opinions. The same page contains the note: I have found my Platonist, in the man who believes he was an ass. He will expound his philosophy by reading his novel imitated from Apuleius. 32 LAST PAGES The imitator of Apuleius began his confession as follows: Several writers have told of Lucius' transformation into an ass. I do not know whether they have been attracted by the wisdom latent in this story, or whether their only incentive was to divert the public. As for me, I have the best reasons for telling it in turn. I am the one to whom it happened. I am as sure of this as one can be sure of anything of this nature; and the more I think on it the more the circumstances of this adventure present themselves to me with the vividness of a personal reminiscence. So I will give the most authentic version, which unfortunately may not prove the most agreeable to the reader. At times it approaches the accounts of Lucius and Apuleius, but I have made no effort at such points to deviate from these two authors. On the other hand, it varies considerably in some very important details. And I have not hesitated to contradict admirable authors whom I was not permitted to use as models since, I repeat, this is my own experience. Besides, how could I? Was it possible for me to abandon memories which have remained fresh and glowing, un- dimmed by the passage of time? IC The fragment ends here. The Platonist has been eliminated, as were Baron Onarion de Ténar, Madame Paillet, old Ebener, and Doctor Constant. We have only an occasional detail of these rejected figures. Of Madame Paillet we read a few words on the margin of a page: "The tragédienne: cynic and believer.” One of the group says of the Baron, “He is a very learned man. It is said that he went two years without hearing about the war.” Someone complained, on seeing old Ebener pass in the wake of a prostitute; whereupon: Say nothing of it. He is eternal, that fellow. It's the satyr. It's the Baron Hulot. It's La Bosse. He is wise: he braves con- tempt. What he asks of a woman is not love, not the propagation of life and its miseries, before which, on reflection, he would recoil in horror. He asks only for what she is capable of giving. Oh, wisdom of those who are jeered at by the herd and scorned even by harlots. Madame Paillet played bridge. This comes up in a conversation between Baron de Ténar and Floris: ANATOLE FRANCE 33 TENAR: It is hard to give a complete definition of a science so broad as metaphysics. Let us be content for the moment with the statement that metaphysics considers things in their essence, independently of all particular properties and all determinate modes. Floris: According to your definition, Ténar, Madame Paillet is a great metaphysician. For she spends half her days playing bridge, and considers the cards in their pure essence, independently of every physical or chemical property. What is more metaphysi- cal than a playing card? Another passage insists on the metaphysical character of cards: It is around the card-table that metaphysics reigns supreme. It is here that its most austere ministers hold their sessions. It is here that the essence of things is considered independently of the particular properties and determinate modes which establish a difference between one object and another. It is here that you obey pure reason. Playing-cards and dominoes are the most perfect instruments, the purest symbols, of metaphysics. What is more metaphysical than the ace, the six? And it is on a day when bridge makes us forget the war that you would deny metaphysics? Another fragment of dialogue has disappeared with Madame Paillet: MADAME PAILLET: That time I succumbed, I do not know just why. He was neither beautiful nor good. Perhaps it was because he was one of us, because he was an artist. He was a ticket agent. But he himself was so far from tempting that the devil must have tempted me. FLORIS: The devil or God. MADAME PAILLET: God tempt an unhappy woman? What an idea! God is not a tempter. FLORIS: If not, why do you say to him: "Et ne nos inducas in tentationem, And lead us not into temptation”? That is the prayer you address to God. What different prayer would you use if you prayed to the devil? 34 LAST PAGES OTHER TEXTS ON METAPHYSICS h were orterial for ace which beat the word It is impossible to decide with certainty which texts were deliberately dis- carded in the final version, which were omitted for some purely fortuitous reason, and which were laid aside as material for a new dialogue. So we shall give the majority of them, beginning with those which bear on meta- physics. Anatole France had considered at length the origin of the word metaphysics. In one of those documentary notes which he liked to gather about him he recalls that Aristotle's treatise on metaphysics owes its name to the place it occupied after the tracts on physics by the same author: A word derived from the fact that Aristotle, coming to his dis- cussion of metaphysics, which follows his discussions of physics, begins it with these words: “After the objects of nature.” In the Dialogue itself Floris indicated the vicissitudes undergone by this work: A beautiful book. But, between you and me, it has come down to us in a more altered state than lettuce served at table. You will find neither middle, beginning, nor end. But no one is unduly surprised, since it is metaphysics. Were it the wrath of Achilles or the wanderings of Ulysses, people would see immediately that everything is in a jumble. Floris noted also the distinction between physics and metaphysics : The name tells us nothing but what the dish is. It does not even distinguish metaphysics from physics. To make you feel this, we must digress a little. Ask a housewife what a purée is, and she will warn you that there are purées and purées. There is a purée thick enough to hold up the ladle. Now that is physics, nature. And there is purée put through a sieve, thin and clear as water. That is metaphysics, or metataphysics. Metaphysics differs from physics in that the best part has been left in the sieve. And Thémine reproaches Floris for his banter about the name of meta- physics : Floris, you are unreasonable, frivolous, insulting. You scoff at metaphysics for its name. Do we judge people by their names? What does it matter to you whether you are called John or Peter? Is geometry named with exactitude, when it measures not only ANATOLE FRANCE 35 the earth, but also the universe, and investigates the properties of forms? And it is none the less an exact science. Then Thémine undertakes an apology for metaphysics: The capacity for considering things independently of such and such particular properties and such and such determinate modes belongs to everyone. It is necessary. I will show it to you in the most superb geniuses, I will disclose it in the simplest of minds. ... The metaphysical processes, which you consider as imaginings, are so real, and conform so well with human nature, that every good soul has her share of metaphysics each morning as she goes to market. She considers the fowls, eggs, fish, and vegetables in their essence, and does not burden herself with particularities except when buying at a bargain. Floris agrees, and ironically reinforces the thesis of his interlocutor: She says, “Life is hard. There's no telling who's going to die and who will live on.” She abstracts, and abstracts, and abstracts. She generalizes. When she says, “I have lost my cat,” she is in physics. But let her add, “Cats are ungrateful animals," and she no longer sees a real cat, but the ideal cat (the sole reality, you understand, because only the ideal is real). In short, she avoids all contingency, she soars, she takes audacious flight into the serene realms of metaphysics. . . . Metaphysics, when rightly understood, is so necessary to life that I suspect the animals of practising it in their own vague way. At least it is true that they must think of food and drink metaphysically, conceiving of their nourishment in both specific and general terms; for if they considered it only from the physical standpoint, they could never recognize it again. Listen, Mitzi. Open up your mind, take heart, and learn how you can merit the respect of the metaphysicians. Lose all that makes you Mitzi, all that renders you dear to your mistress, agree- able to your friends, formidable to strange dogs, and pleasant to Mirza. Become indistinct, be merged with all other dogs, be no longer Mitzi, become, like the Hippolyte of Racine, formless and colourless—and the sober-minded Kant will place you among his intellectual treasures. But so long as you are left with one tooth, 36 LAST PAGES one claw, one hair, you will not be worthy of metaphysical contemplation. THÉMINE: What pleasure does it give you, Floris, to humiliate men by laughing at the things they consider important and by showing the emptiness of the things they believe profound? They will turn from you in indignation, whereas simply by reversing your propositions and putting them into fluent diction, you would become a respected philosopher, a popular moralist. You are throwing away your fortune. Restrain your caustic way of speak- ing. ... I want to know, I tell you, who I am, whence I come, whither I go. Floris explains his attitude: VO Let them go in for metaphysics like your housewife and like Mitzi, or even a little deeper-well and good. But without excess. It is excess that irritates me. And having conceded That he is as much of a philosopher as the next person; and that, when the notion strikes him, he can pass from the intelli- gible and cease to be understood, he resigns himself: So let us go into metaphysics, since we cannot always stop at physics. And it is too bad. Anatole France frequently considers the original resemblance between the language of man and that of animals: Let us admit that we do not know their language and that we do know our own. There is the greatest possible difference. Elsewhere, apropos of barking: Man cries and speaks, animals speak and cry. Is "hoot! hoot!" a cry or a word? “Oh” is a word when coming from the human throat. Why should it not be a word when issuing from the mouth of a dog? ANATOLE FRANCE 27 He carried this analogy between man and animal still further : Man was, if you will, better constructed than a grub. But if he had advantages over every other mammal, over an elephant, a dog, a monkey, he did not differ in essence from them. All the machinery of circulation, nutrition, and generation is more or less the same. The brain and the nervous system were an improve- ment, a prerogative for which he pays dearly by the obligation of being moral. ... To interpret the evidence of their senses animals have reason; and, though it is doubtless inferior to man's, they are guided by it as we are guided by ours. ... You know just about as much as I, poor little Mitzi, about the life and the world. But man is too haughty, Mitzi, to admit it. ... OIS. We set a high value on our knowledge. But a dog learns of the external world in the same way as we do. His methods are not the equal of ours, but they are of the same nature. His repre- sentation of the world is more imperfect, but in the matter of reality it is as good as our own. And it entails fewer errors. Ani- mals know no mathematics. But they also know no theology! A knowledge superior to theirs was required to conceive theology. Who knows but that the further progress of knowledge may lead us to conceptions even more false and more noxious, if possible, than those of the theologians ? Anatole France also emphasized repeatedly man's inability to go beyond himself: He is not built for discovering his origins and his end. He is built to feel happiness and pain, not to know and to understand. However ardently he conducts his research, he will know noth- ing but that infinitesimal fraction of the universe which is accessi- ble to his senses and which is a part of him. He will know nothing but the humanity of things. He will know nothing of his environ- ment but what is humanized by the process of entering him. He will never know the walls of his obscure prison except by the pain of knocking against them. To investigate first causes by the evidence of the senses is like 38 LAST PAGES enquiring of the pot where the clay came from in which it is fashioned, or who the potter was that baked it. He insists on the feeble power of expression which man has at his command: And if he did possess this knowledge, how could he transmit it? What means has he to express it, what instrument for translating anything but his sensations? The metaphysician seizes on words when they have been worn smooth like old pennies and their markings can no longer be dis- tinguished. And not content with taking these words devoid of all meaning, he introduces into his game a host of words which are pure negations. Ah! How right Diderot was when he said that a metaphysician knows nothing. His science deals with that which is not. He has taken the garb of the grossest sensualist and turned it inside out. ... When a word is not a sign for something, it is nothing but a sound. Concerning the expression “pure spirit,” Floris adds: We can still understand the word "pure” when applied to a wine or a girl, but it is robbed of all meaning when said of a spirit, a breath. Or this variant: By now "pure” is a perilous enough word to apply to wine or to girls, but it is devoid of all sense when said of a spirit, a breath. And Floris ends his reflections on the impropriety of words, thus: This is what metaphysics leads to. It is more sportive than you would think. Whereupon Thémine answers : Floris, I give you less than an hour to adjust your differences with metaphysics. When you grumble like this, it is a lovers' quarrel. ANATOLE FRANCE 39 But in any case, Floris was an exacting lover: Metaphysics is the only thing that acts on mankind. When a thing is understood it never raises difficulties nor conflicts. No one will lose his life for a clear idea. But for one which has no meaning. Observe the symbol of Nicaea. People got themselves massacred for this phrase: “Consubstantial with the Father," which does not convey the least possible meaning. in writing the secondit, approach each oanhysics. The Many readers will be aware that Anatole France had already written of metaphysics. In particular, The Garden of Epicurus contains a dialogue entitled, Aristos and Polyphilos, on The Language of Metaphysics. The two dialogues, actuated by the same spirit, approach each other, and even touch at times. But in writing the second, Anatole France took no account of the first. He forgot it, and began at the beginning. This is proved by the fact that before commencing his Dialogue he went back to original sources, consulted authors, verified the definitions of words, and surrounded himself with references, just as though he were attacking a new subject. It is difficult to give an exact impression of this work of documentation, scattered over innumerable loose leaves of every kind and size. First Anatole France notes the most important terms of the discussion: metaphysics, name, word, soul, spirit, being, principle, cause, reason, morality, sense, abstract, abstraction, concrete, infinite, indefinite, immortal, absolute. Before each of them he indicates the etymology, Latin or Greek, or even Sanscrit. Then he writes out at length the meaning, or meanings, of the word. Among these pages there are fifteen definitions of metaphysics alone. At times he has added brief comments. Thus, he notes that the words "being” (French, être, Latin, ens) and “essence” (Latin, essentia] have the same origin. Or, after having remarked that muttum means word, murmur, grunt, he adds, “It is the cry of the pig." Or again, in one corner of a page, he describes the difference between “indefinite” and “infinite": "In- definite, that of which we do not perceive the limits--as opposed to infinite, that of which we assert the impossibility of limits.” He does not stop at consulting grammarians like d'Olivet, and lexicographers like Boiste. He rereads the philosophers, as is evidenced by quotations from Pascal, Des- cartes, Buffon, Kant, and twenty others, copied in his own hand. OTHER TEXTS ON THE EXISTENCE OF GOD In the Dialogue on Metaphysics and the Existence of God, Floris says that, if God exists, He ceased to be infinite the moment He created the world, because He is henceforth limited, compressed, by His creation. 40 LAST PAGES Anatole France was especially attached to this idea, for it figures in eight drafts of this portion of the Dialogue, and in almost the same terms as in the definitive text. However, God need not regret very strongly the loss of His infinity: It must be recognized that His infinity caused him incon- veniences: as, for instance, the inability to change His place, since He was everywhere. But the creation of the world necessarily entailed other disadvantages : One cannot believe everything that is said of Him. Here is His history as told in some countries: A being, infinite in space and time, after an eternity of solitude was so imprudent as to create the world. What induced Him to do this? Love, they say, love-which inspires so much rash conduct. His creation did Him appreciable harm, and involved Him in hopeless difficulties. He lost His independence. His association with an imperfect world and creatures of low intelligence exposed Him to continual irritations. The creation of man caused Him the most painful disappointments. He could not rest, He grew irritable; he rebuked, and thundered. He repented—which never does any good. To govern men, He thought of becoming ethical—but lacked the training. For, having spent an eternity living alone and enjoying solitary pleasures, He had no morals, and could have none. With respect to man He adopted those of a savage chieftain, as might be expected. A large volume has been written on His cruelties and His excesses. On this morality which God imposed upon man, he writes : He was not fortunate in His choice. He acted like a puppet-man who has decided to reward and punish his puppets for the char- acter he has given them and the movements he has conveyed to them. If a puppet-man were so ill-advised, his puppets would say to him, “We did not ask to play in this play. We have played it in accordance with your own powers and wishes. We should be neither felicitated nor condemned.” ANATOLE FRANCE 41 Still another note insists on the mistakes of morality and the creation: Due to incredible avarice, or for some reason which, in its un- fathomable wisdom, remains mysterious, God did not provide liberally for the sustenance of His animals; and to preserve their wretched existence, they were obliged to feed upon one another. So that the world became a place of abomination, reeking of blood and offal. For the rest, there is no evidence that God concerned Himself much with the animals which people the earth, the air, and the water. On the other hand, He took man in earnest, although it is difficult to see the reason for this treatment. He imposed upon him all sorts of obligations in matters of nourishment and fecunda- tion, as though the poor creature were not already miserable enough. Finally, He obliged man to be moral—a state which did not come about of itself, but was upheld by the aid of punishments which He made proportionate to His own strength rather than to the frailty of His creatures. For God, despite the evidence, acted as though He were still infinite in all ways, and particularly in goodness. That is to say that he inflicted upon man eternal punishment. To be continued 61. TWO POEMS BY MELVILLE CANE SNOW TOWARD EVENING Suddenly the sky turned grey, The day Which had been bitter and chill Grew intensely soft and still. Quietly From some invisible blossoming tree Millions of petals cool and white Drifted and blew, Lifted and flew, Fell with the falling night. FOG Fog is a crawling monster. Soundless, unseen, With spidery stealth, A thousand clammy tentacles Surround, clutch, crush. Fog is a sucking monster. A thousand ravenous tongues Lap the blue from the sky, Lick the gold from the sun, Swallow the sea, devour the land. Land and sea and sky and sun Now are one, Slaty and dun; One and none. Horns moan terror. Bells toll death. LANDSCAPE. BY ADOLF DEHN . - - - PIERRE LOUYS 1870-1925 BY PAUL VALERY Translated From the French by J. H. Lewis IN THAT do you wish me to say about Pierre Louys? Do not suppose that I have at this time the heart to paint a portrait. To give praise, do a study, organize my surprised and utterly agitated memory-is that possible when I am in this confusion and pain? Can I deliver here the absurd monologue, the senseless psalm which speaks within us, of itself, of one who has just died; a death so near, so felt by me, so voluntary, still so tender, still thinking and talking, but in a world frightfully finished? . .. Yesterday, under the shock of some words, it seemed to me that an enormous fragment of existence had fallen from me, exposing I know not what great active and irritated wound where a thousand memories, rudely discovered and as though renewed by the sudden light of the dead one, stirred in an unspeakable disorder, as though to restore the loss experienced by my soul, and desperately recover the past. In place of the inconceivable event, all those memories which would have nothing to do with this death rushed forth. The friendship of Pierre Louÿs was a momentous circumstance in my life: a chance of chances brought us together, and my life was entirely changed. How often have we discussed that meeting! The consequence was for me to be almost instantly forced to write. My new friend demanded that I make a duty, a virtuous practice, of that pleasure which I had sometimes experienced without per- mitting it to become pain. Most of my first verses were only written to be exchanged for his own, or rather to nourish the little review which he had founded and which only nourished itself on poems. He it was who submitted to Heredia, to Henri de Régnier those first efforts of mine which I had attempted far from Paris. And it was he who presented me on a certain evening to Stéphane Mallarmé. In those days he was the most timid, the most imperious, the 44 PIERRE LOUYS CIT most delicate and obstinate of young men, having a fascination and an elegance I have never seen elsewhere. At first he showed himself full of reserve, of a mysteriousness almost diplomatic, exquisite in his manners, infinitely attentive to all the forms and nuances, mur- muring in a low voice the graceful words that protect from out- side listeners. Once confidence had been established, the real Pierre was revealed. His great gifts, his curiosities that were so numerous, his vast culture, surprising and always sustained, his enthusiasms sometimes even mounting to violence, his blasting and irresistible caprices, the charming surprises he knew so well, and all the sides of a character absolute in friendship, in admiration, in their opposite, dominated by that unchanging, unconditional, truly mystic attachment he felt for the perfection of our art, manifested themselves so strongly that we felt in his presence to some degree less young, less ardent, less wilful, less changing; and we felt our- selves at the mercy of this flame. Delicious tyrant, himself the slave of what he found fairest in works and things, he marvellously imposed his gods and idols. Of all his friends are there any whom he has not enriched ? The most illustrious, Claude Debussy, found in Pierre Louÿs support, counsel, instruction even, or the clarities essential in let- ters, and in fact the most precious prop of his career, under all forms, at all moments, and in all difficulties, even to renown. I might cite other names, invoke the living and the dead. ... Let it suffice to say that his wholly personal influence, his power of awaking enthusiasm, the resonance of his will and of his intellectual life have been great. He had the genius of recognizing his equals. Let us not speak now of the great artist that he was, or of his works. Neither emotion nor haste are favourable to viewing clearly, with the precision he would have loved, a work so subtle, so learned, so anxiously cultivated to the very extremity of grace, regardless of time, care, or the number of experiences and rework- ings. When one has put so much energy and desire, so much patience, and so many reflections into the preparation of one's work, one may demand to be studiously and painstakingly considered. The hour for this pious undertaking will come. To-day, and before the tomb of my friend, I feel the call of a duty. Since for the present it is a question of his memory, and because the future of his name and of his figure rests henceforth PAUL VALERY 45 as upon us who knew him well, I believe it obligatory to speak of something which tormented him for many years, often recurring to him in his study. Though famous, Pierre Louÿs felt himself to be misunderstood. Because of that part of his work which drew many readers over-responsive to images of love, he told himself that people mistook his spiritual nature and the principle of his thoughts. The luxury and pleasure in the pages he has written, all those charming bodies delicately portrayed in the tenderest attitudes, the gentlest beauties, in actions either graceful or dis- tracted, have easily seduced, with Bilitis and with Aphrodite, a mob of adorers. But they could see no further. The majority read in these lovely books only apologies for the flesh and for its delights. Neither the pains which such an admirable language demands, nor the erudition which its pictures presuppose, nor the bitterness and despair blent therein, revealed to their eyes the true features of the author. They came to think of him as a simple amateur of pleasure, albeit a writer of fineness and purity. And this error was shared by a totally different class of persons. I mean those whose cold or vexed temperaments and whose dislike of carnal things made them react so violently against the works of Louys. Pierre suffered from being reduced to the personage which both the one and the other so naïvely imagined. He complained that they misunderstood him and did not recognize his real passions, which were those of an artist. I am a witness of these complaints, and sufficiently informed to declare that they were well founded. Thirty years ago, artist signified for us a being separate and con- secrated, at the same time victim and Levite, a being chosen for his gifts, one whose merits and faults were not those of other men He was the servant and apostle of a divinity not yet crystallized. From the dawn of our thinking life, we found ourselves among the ruins of definite beliefs; and as for the positive sciences, the metaphysical abuse they had received and the deception caused by this paradoxical and imaginary usage of verifiable acquisitions put us on guard against them. But our unknown and incontestable god was he who manifests himself in works of man in so far as they are beautiful and free. He is a god who only performs miracles; the rest does not concern him. All the artifices of art please him. Like all the gods he inspires the spirit of renunciation and of sac- I 36 PIERRE LOUYS rifice, and one's faith in him imparts a universal and precise sense to the pure and naïve pride without which masterpieces cannot be produced. Martyr and elect of this god, the artist necessarily ascribes all virtue to the contemplation and cult of fair things, and all saintliness to their creation. This the greatest number of Pierre Louÿs' readers could not suspect; still less his adversaries. But he, plunged in solitude and darkness, sometimes returned to his youth, which was dedicated to the god of whom I have spoken. He invoked against a renown that seemed to him unjust and unworthy, the magnificent letters he had formerly written to me. They were filled with a wholly religious exaltation; all the great men of poetry and of music were celebrated there, invoked as names of the blessed, the most enviable of beings. One of those letters, particularly beautiful, told me of a sojourn that he had made at the Grande Chartreuse, a week of retreat, but a retreat after his fancy, a retreat with the thoughts and wishes of an artist, with a poet's vows and introspection. I believe that he had no more intimate or powerful desire, dur- ing his years of silence and isolation, than some day to make known his real heart. He wished to confess the faith of his adolescence, to show himself the man of this faith; and he conceived a book about himself and the ardent epoch of his life, whose title would have been At Eighteen. I do not know if any line of it was ever written. PRAYER BY MABEL SIMPSON O beauteous growth of all the earth Springing for ever into birth, Lighter of meadow and of hill, Journeying ever where you will, Sing to me! Sing to me, let me lie Under your loveliness when I die. Very silent a grave must be, Come O Grasses and cover me! Four little walls and never a light, Never a voice in the silent night, Never an open eye to see Moon on a meadow nor sun on a tree, Grasses, Grasses be near to me! O how the rain leaps overhead! Four little walls and a narrow bed, Down underneath in the secret ground Something changing with never a sound, Grasses, Grasses be near to me, Certain and sure the chemistry, Certain and sure there will arise Something of me in another guise, Something to hail the eternal skies! I am believing God will know All that will happen there below, Down in the darkness always He Watches His children lovingly; You will not see me when I wake Out of that sleeping, but I will break Open the ground with my bladed breast And side by side in your garments dressed PRAYER Rise again in another birth Changed into loveliness for the earth. Wait . . . Wait . . . Blow ... Blow ... Do not leave me, do not go! Wait ... Wait ... I will come, A grave is never a lasting home. O how the rain leaps overhead! Four little walls and a narrow bed, Down underneath in the secret ground Something changing with never a sound, Certain and sure the chemistry, Grasses, Grasses be near to me! EDWARD ESTLIN CUMMINGS. BY GASTON LACHAISE Photograph by Charles Sheeler SCOFIELD THAYER. BY GASTON LACHAISE PE CAMES SIBLEY WATSON. BY GASTON LACHAISE T ED GERA SH HELPS LR SED GO 32 SPE OR ELS BOOK REVIEWS PEOPLE STARE CAREFULLY XLI POEMs. By E. E. Cummings. 8vo. 54 pages. The Dial Press. $2. &. By E. E. Cummings. 8vo. 116 pages. Privately printed. $5. NE has in Mr Cummings' work, a sense of the best dancing and of the best horticulture. From his Forty-One Poems and lest one seem to stutter, seventy-nine, emerge the seasons, childhood, humanity selectly and unselectly congregated, war, death, l'amour with a touch of love, music, painting, books, and a fine note of scorn. In finding Picasso a sculptor among "uninter- esting landscapes made interesting by earTHQuake,” Mr Cum- mings is fanciful, yet faithful to that verisimilitude of eye and of rhetoric which is so important in poetry. Settling like a man-of-war bird or the retarded, somnambulistic athlete of the speedograph, he shapes the progress of poems as if it were substance; he has "a trick of syncopation Europe has," deter- mining the pauses slowly, with glides and tight-rope acrobatics, en- suring the ictus by a space instead of a period, or a semi-colon in the middle of a word, seeming to have placed adjectives systematically one word in advance of the words they modify, or one word behind, with most pleasing exactness. In being printed phonetically, although decorously spelled, these poems constitute a kind of verbal topiary-work; not, however, in the manner of the somewhat too literal typographic wine-glasses, columns, keys, and roses approved by Elizabethan poets and their predecessors. We have, not a replica of the title, but a more potent thing, a replica of the rhythm-a kind of second tempo, uninter- fering like a shadow, in the manner of the author's beautiful if somewhat self-centred, gigantic filiform ampersand of symbolical Ice one V SO 50 PEOPLE STARE CAREFULLY "and by itself plus itself with itself.” The physique of the poems recalls the corkscrew twists, the infinitude of dots, the sumptuous perpendicular appearance of Kufic script; and the principle of the embedded rhyme has produced in Post Impression XI and Portrait III of And, in the big A, the big N, and the big D, which mark respectively each third of the book, some sublimely Moham- medan effects. TUMTITUMTIDDLE THE BLACK CAT WITH THE YELLOW EYES AND THE VIOLIN, advances metronomically through the rest of the poem and sta ppin toe hip popot amus Back gen teel-ly lugu- bri ous" On descends the page "as fathandsbangrag." There is in these poems, a touch of love perceived in allusions to unconscious things-horses' ears and mice's meals. Also, there is a more egotistic and less kind emotion which has the look of being in its author's eyes, his most certain self. One wishes that it weren't. Love is terrible-even in the East where the Prince who wished to find a perfectly beautiful woman, commissioned the Arabs rather than the nobility to find the girl, convinced that “the quickest and best judges of a man or a woman are the very same persons who are the best judges of a horse or a cow.” But when love is presented under the banner of Watteau, as a philtre, not to say the menu, it is not terrible; it is merely circumstantial, or at most phenomenal. An admirer of the dead languages—“an Oxford Scholar in a scarlet gown" let us say, who reads no Latin but Petronius—lacks certitude. That the academy-tinctured, modern books of a western poet, should preserve no more than sar SON MARIANNE MOORE 51 the devouring, in the sense that it is the destroying passion of master for slave, robs testimony, even poet's testimony, of its terror. If there is not much love in these pages, however, there is glamour -verbal as figurative: ... "horses of gold delicately crouching beneath silver youths the leaneyed Caesars borne neatly through enormous twilight” ... ... "while the infinite processions move like moths and like boys and like incense and like sunlight” There is Spring like a "Hand in a window (carefully to and fro moving New and Old things, while people stare carefully moving a perhaps fraction of flower here placing an inch of air there and without breaking anything." The Woolworth building becomes “the firm tumult of ex- quisitely insecure sharp algebraic music.” “SNO” falls: “tiny,angels sharpen: themselves (on air) don't speak” ... There is verbal excitement in the renaissance of certain important words-of marvellous, of perfect, of beautiful, of wonderful: PEOPLE STARE CAREFULLY "And if, somebody hears what i say—let him be pitiful: because i've travelled all alone through the forest of wonderful, and that my feet have surely known the furious ways and the peaceful, and because she is beautiful” ma If we have not Karnak and the pyramids, we have in these pages, a kind of engineering which includes within it, the jewellery of Egypt and the panting sense of those who wore it. We have the spryness of Vienna—the spun glass miniature object, porcupine or angel-fish-and we have an object from Crete. There is in the art museum at Eighty-Second Street and Fifth Avenue, a late Minoan ivory leaper. Suspended by a thread, the man swims down with the classic aspect of the frog. As a frog startled, palpitating, and inconsequential, would seem in the ivory man to have become classic, so Mr Cummings has in these poems, created from inconvenient emotion, what one is sure is poetry. There is here, the Artificiall Changling of John Bulwer's Anthro- pometamorphosis—“the mad and cruell Gallantry, foolish Bravery, ridiculous Beauty, filthly Finenesse ... of most Nations.” MARIANNE MOORE AU PAYS DU MUFLE MEMOIRS OF LEON DAUDET. Edited and translated by Arthur Kingsland Griggs. 8vo. 304 pages. Lin- coln MacV'eagh, The Dial Press. $5. IN his translation of Léon Daudet's Memoirs, Mr Arthur Kings- 1 land Griggs has skilfully abridged in a single volume a series of reminiscences which were originally in six, extending from the grotesque apotheosis of Hugo in the 'eighties to the organization of L'Action Française almost on the eve of the war. In short, he rests from his labours just as the fun is beginning, the fun for M Daudet, be it well understood, but in the meantime he has so embellished the great man that the reader rubs his eyes with astonishment as if he were seeing a dangerous crocodile being transformed slowly into a friendly duck. For the benefit of the uninformed we may say that Daudet is one of the leaders of the royalist clique in France, and co-director of its newspaper, L'Action Française. He was born at the precise moment when his father, Alphonse Daudet, was putting the finish- ing touches to his romance about a Provençal braggart, Tartarin de Tarascon. There are certain coincidences that seem to explain everything. The present royalist pretender, the Duc d'Orléans, who, Bourbon though he is, is not sufficiently so to be taken in by his chief buffoon, once said to Daudet: "Eh bien, quand me faites-vous rentrer en France?" “Monseigneur ... dans un an!” “Tartarin,” said the Duke. That was the prevailing impression before the war. Observers of Daudet, even when they were not friendly, persisted in seeing in him merely an amusing pamphleteer of loud, indiscreet, meri- dional temperament, a fool no doubt, but on the whole, a lovable fool; in fact, the Hero of Tarascon transplanted to the Palais Bourbon. It required the era of arm-chair patriotism and Punic victory to transform him into something less pleasant even for the most indulgent eyes. So much for his character, seen in its most superficial terms. 54 AU PAYS DU MUFLE Now what does he stand for? What is the platform of this mountebank, the precise fashion of his cap and bells? They are decorated with the rather bedraggled lilies of France. M Daudet has been a royalist ever since the days when he dis- covered, as he says himself, that the Republic "would do nothing for him.” And what is royalism? It is the political formula of the people who believe that a chief, a king possessing considerable executive power, would remould a France nearer to their heart's desire. Their heart's desire, be it said, includes several things not particularly germane to the main issue, several little peculiar passions-hatred of Germany, anti-Semitism, clericalism, classi- cism, militarism, et cetera. Some of these causes link themselves to the history of the royalist sentiment in the past, while others are relatively new, and may be dated from the Dreyfus affair. Some of them are worthy of respect, and others are beneath contempt. The royalism of the past has a history, exasperatingly interest- ing. Of course it was the royalist who made, in greater part, the French Revolution. Privileges were not abolished; they were sacrificed with pentecostal fervour by the nobles themselves on the fourth of August in '89. From the moment when that perverse and troublesome ruling class laughed so loudly at the telling lines of Figaro, they doomed themselves and the Hereditary Monarchy as well. Having made the Revolution possible through perverseness, they assured its success through stupidity. They remind one of the White Knight in Alice, and never made a move, as a class, without tumbling off their horses. They were lamentable and fatuous. Throughout and after the Napoleonic régime they attempted to crush the new Liberty by the simple expedient of betraying their country. M Daudet's progenitors, the royalists of 1815, had no better friends than the hereditary Enemies, the King of Prussia and the Emperor of Austria. The older Bourbon branch having at last been expelled, the nation gave itself to the younger, in the person of Louis Philippe, son of a regicide, himself realizing the most happy personification of the bourgeois ideal, an eternal man with an umbrella, "always keeping his gig." He was the grandfather of the present pretender. It is not a very glorious background, and its modern implications are hardly more illustrious. The aggressive folly of royalism (Empire style) led to Sedan, and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine. The French, especially the French of M Daudet's temper, never TA CUTHBERT WRIGHT 55 forgot or forgave this humiliation. They were wounded in the profoundest of their passions, namely the national vanity. If any one in this country is still naïve enough to think that France was an innocent victim in the late unpleasantness, let him read Daudet's account of the programme of a nationalist lady of great influence, Madame Edmond Adam, during the ’nineties: "First, to keep up the courage of the patriots in Alsace; second, to overthrow Bismarck; third, to bring about a Franco-Russian alliance; fourth, to prepare diplomatic and military circles for the Next War-la Revanche. To-day we recognize that she achieved these ends. It. took forty years, but she succeeded.” Yes, it took forty years, and it took fifteen million dead, and as many blinded, mutilated, and incapacitated, and all in four years, while M Daudet and his friends surveyed the dazzling result triumphantly from the security of Paris, and when the danger drew near, from the greater security of Bordeaux. After that, who would dare affirm that these French are not lovers of peace? The Republican government, during the ’nineties, made the mistake of persecuting the French Church, a body only a shade less mediocre than itself, one which by all rules of health, should, if left alone, have died a natural death. Immediately, of course, it appeared the duty of the royalist clan to spring to the Church's defense, to go to mass, go to confession, enlist the curés as sub- scribers. A prodigy so incredible as to astonish the planets re- appeared in France the Catholic atheist. The delectable, the digestive Maurras, Daudet's partner, is the great example in point. Maurras does not believe in God, but since God is strangely a part of the national tradition, Maurras gravely assists at mass each year on the anniversary of Louis the Sixteenth's execution. As if the bad passions of revenge and racial hatred were not bad enough, the French royalist must now add that of pure Pecksniffery, of cant. One longs for a Carlyle to stigmatize properly these amateur Fascisti, these little Tartuffes. "It makes all the difference,” said Archbishop Whately in another connexion, "whether you give truth the first or the second place.” It also makes considerable difference whether you are disposed to give truth any place at all. There is an excellent instance of this wilful inconsistency in the Memoirs. If there was one period when France, thanks to an Italian, was truly royalist, in the sense of being truly and magnificently regal, it was the 56 AU PAYS DU MUFLE ven period of the Napoleonic wars. One does not have to be a militarist to admire the brilliant flight of that meteor, the tragic beauty of that storm. But this period, evidently, does not delight your modern royalists, poor small souls with their grey thread gloves and umbrellas, and their general spiritual air of shivering in the wind. Witness M Daudet: “A heavy veil of boredom hangs over the First Empire as well as the Second. The first Napoleon has become in spite of his victories and misfortunes a moth-eaten figure. He spilled rivers of blood in vain because of his errors of judgement, and his heroic actions served no purpose. Thank heaven we have finished with all this Napoleonomania! Nothing is uglier or drearier, nothing is less stimulating, less calculated to arouse the spirit of self-sacrifice and devotion to a cause." In contemplating Hereditary Monarchy and Empire from a Frenchman's standpoint, one may well say: “A plague on both your Houses," and agree with Anatole France that, despite all its muddy mediocrity, the parliamentary régime is the only pos- sible one, since it guarantees the greatest possible amount of liberty to the individual. Nevertheless it is interesting to turn from the casual impudence of the above quotation to a generous passage of Hugo, who, in the matter of régimes, knew whereof he spoke, for he lived through five, and was exiled by a Bonaparte to boot: “God forbid that I should lessen France, but it is not lessening her to join her with Napoleon. He was complete. He knew everything; he was everything, and this did not prevent him from laughing like a workman at the cradle of his little child. Then all at once armies set themselves in march; parks of artillery rolled along; bridges of boats stretched over. rivers; clouds of cavalry galloped in the hurricane; cries, trumpets, a trembling of thrones everywhere; the frontiers of kingdoms oscillated on the map; the sound of a superhuman blade was heard leaping from its sheath; men saw him standing erect on the horizon with a flame in his hands and a splendour in his eyes; he was the archangel of war. . . . To appear and to reign; to take his grenadiers and make kings of them; to send his legions flying like eagles from a mountain top; to conquer the world twice, by victory and then by peace and good laws, that is sublime. What could be grander than that? 'To be free,' said Enjolras." CUTHBERT WRIGHT mo IDIOM AND UNIFORMITY Η K . The Society's Work. S. P. E. Tract No. XXI. By Robert Bridges. Brochure. 8vo. 17 pages. Oxford University Press. $.70. WORDS AND IDIOMS. By Logan Pearsall Smith. 12mo. 300 pages. Houghton Mifflin Company. $2. THE SOCIETY'S WORK, by Mr Robert Bridges, is a modest, I and almost melancholy, pamphlet dealing with the motives, the hopes, and the procedure of the Society for Pure English. “Two primary considerations,” Mr Bridges writes, “called our Society into being.” First, the English language is spreading all over the world, "a condition over which we have no control.” During its evolution it has been “subjected to sudden violent changes of en- vironment, irruptions or interruptions so disconnected that they must rank scientifically as external accidents.” And while this has brought much wealth to the language, it has also caused defects, some of which are still corrigible and "have their cure ready to hand in existing dialects.” “Again, there are those abundant ab- surdities common to all receptive languages that can be corrected more efficiently by intelligent criticism than by unguided practice.” ... The second consideration is that the history of languages "shows that there is danger lest our speech grow out of touch” with our inheritance, “the finest living literature in the world,” and “losing, as it were, its capital, and living from bond to monill, iall from its nobility and gradually dissociate itself from apparent continuity with its great legacy, so that to an average Briton our Elizabethan literature would come to be as much an obsolete lan- guage ... as Homer or Aeschylus to a modern Greek.” This danger is increased by the fact that the central force of English is so dissipated over all manner of “unrelated environments”; while there is furthermore the "most noxious condition" that “whenever our countrymen are settled abroad there are alongside of them com- munities of other-speaking races, who, maintaining among them- selves their native speech, learn yet enough of ours to mutilate it, and establishing among themselves all kinds of blundering corrup- 58 IDIOM AND UNIFORMITY tions, through habitual intercourse infect therewith the neighbouring English.” The Society is, therefore, purely centripetal in its ambitions. Its work is essentially catholic, and attempts to arrest midway those very protestant tendencies to which English itself owes its original recognition as a means of dignified expression. The problem thus corresponds to that which, earlier in European history, beset an- other great imperialistic language. The power of a speech to spread over alien territories becomes, at a certain point, a weakness—just as yeast, flourishing in the fruit mash, multiplies with ebullience and fervour until, by its own processes, it has generated sufficient alcohol to kill it. Latin, like English, spread into “unrelated environ- ments” until the divergent particularities of the various conditions under which it was spoken attained their counterpart in correspond- ing divergent particularities of speech. With the example of Latin haunting us, we are constantly tempted to defeatism; yet not totally so, because instruments of standardization are much more in evidence to-day than they seem to have been during the hegemony of Latin. It is usual to con- sider, as Mr Bridges considers, that such things as compulsory education, journalism, and the radio are primary incentives towards standardization. But it seems probable that “all modern improve- ments” in living conditions, minimizing as they do divergencies of habit, are of much deeper utility. It is they which, for better or worse, promise an eventual sky-scraper hotel in Tibet, a macad- amized road through darkest Africa, and steam heat in the igloos. And the fact that English is spoken, with not too hopeless varia- tions, by the two nations best equipped to-day for carrying on this horse-evangelism, may enable the language to retain a reasonably uniform integrity while widening its geographical frontiers. If this is true, the Society's programme should become increasingly suc- cessful, since it will be profiting by, rather than militating against, natural forces. Just how much aesthetic preferences have to do with the settling of such matters it is hard to say. It would seem, however, that uniformity of speech would be best promoted by some such atti- tude as obtained in the eighteenth century, when the waywardness of idiom, grammatical turns of speech which were logically incon- sistent, and "expressive” words fighting their way from popular KENNETH BURKE 59 speech up towards formal recognition, were considered as a nuisance rather than a wealth. Every new candidate, it seems, should be ad- mitted grudgingly: and a circumlocution might even be preferred to the risk of using some new, more direct, more "forceful" method of speech which incurred the danger of remaining regional. Writers would—were individualism suddenly to burn out and conformity become the characteristic aesthetic trend—willingly impose upon themselves a kind of arbitrary restraint, as though a general attempt were made to write in the language of Chaucer. For, if the welter of new popular creations continues, uniformity would thrive best in an aesthetic of written words rather than spoken words, pom- posity rather than conversationalism, “Asiatic" prose rather than “Attic” prose, obscurantism rather than spontaneity. It could be done, and done with sufficient returns, if ever Europe were Chinese enough to do it. And for those who would complain against the "barrenness" of such a procedure, it might be well to point out that one age may find the art of a past age barren not because this past age lacked penetration in its art, but because the penetration was not of the sort which the new age demands. Needing bread, it cries out against those who amassed metals. However, whether it is bread or metal which we demand, the contemporary aesthetic seems directly opposed to the kind of uniformity suggested above- as Mr Logan Pearsall Smith's new volume, Words and Idioms, well indicates. Mr Smith's volume is an English equivalent to Remy de Gour- mont's Esthétique de la Langue Française. Both writers admire, not regionalism in speech, but those aspects of speech which by their very nature can originate only in regionalism. And whereas Mr Bridges, facing the "menace” of dissipation, complains against a statement in The New York Times (a blind optimism generated by despair, according to his diagnosis) that “the old lady may be trusted to take care of herself,” Mr Smith writes: "More and more ... standard speech, and the respect for its usages, is being extended, and there is not the slightest danger at the present day that its authority or dominance will be questioned or disregarded. The danger lies rather in the other direction that in our scrupulous and almost superstitious respect for correct English, we may forget that other and freer forms of spoken Eng- 60 IDIOM AND UNIFORMITY lish have also their value, and make useful contributions to our speech." It is quite possible, of course, that the modern appreciation for the dying folk-lore has no force as a movement at all, but is rather a kind of last gasp, the sudden jealous clinging to something which becomes most valuable at the moment it is being taken from us. It may be that the ambitions of the S. P. E. will be only too suc- cessful; although the sullen prejudice remains that if they are so, "conditions," rather than the efforts of the S. P. E., will be responsible. In the meantime, we seem in a strange antinomy, wishing with our minds a state of affairs which our palate is continually deny- ing; anxious lest our language develop to a point where Shake- speare and Milton write an English which is obsolete, yet delight- ing in the continual refreshment and generative power that remains with us; striving for "wealth at all costs"; and with a “poor but mine own” psychology following in our love of newness and inven- tion somewhat the procedure of the Dark Ages, when noble texts were erased from the parchment that contemporary creations, how- ever idle or ill-considered, might be placed in their stead. KENNETH BURKE LOST FATHERLANDS The PROBLEM OF ATLANTIS. By Lewis Spence. 4to. 232 pages. Brentano. $3. The Riddle OF THE PACIFIC. By J. Macmillan Brown. Illustrated with maps. 8vo. 324 pages. Small, Maynard. $6. DERSONALLY I have always thought, that although he left 1 off in the middle of a sentence, Plato said all that he had to say about Atlantis: “The divine portion in the Atlanteans began to fade away. It became diluted too often and too much with the mortal admixture; human nature got the upper hand. Then they, being unable to bear their great fortune, became in- solent and adopted unseemly ways; to him who had eyes to see they began to appear bare, as having lost their fairest and most precious gifts. To themselves they still appeared glorious and blessed, and that at the very time they were filled with unrighteous power.” Of course we should like to have been told how the judgement of the gods was fulfilled, and the ways by which Atlantis came to be overwhelmed. But what has a philosophic historian to do with all that? The cycle of Atlantean civiliza- tion was complete; it had grown as Spengler tells us all civiliza- tions grow, as a flower grows, by some inherent power. And then it had faded. Perhaps no one will ever tell us more than Plato has told us about the decay of a civilization. “The divine portion began to fade away. It became diluted too often and too much with the mortal admixture." And perhaps, philosophically speak- ing, that is as much as there is to be said about the Atlanteans, as it is as much as there is to be said about the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans. But where did Plato get the piece of history on which he philos- ophized? Or was it a piece of history? Did he invent Atlantis and its civilization, or did he make use of a tradition that was current in Egypt or in some other land? And if he did, how had that tradition grown up? Was it a reminiscence of Minoan Crete with its material civilization and its maritime power? Or had 62 LOST FATHERLANDS it grown up out of that feeling of catastrophe that comes over us all as we look across the Western Ocean at some set of sun ? The kernel of Mr Spence's argument is that Plato's account of Atlantis is the working-up of an old and authentic tradition, just as Geoffrey of Monmouth's tale of Arthur, or Homer's account of Troy, is the working up of an old and authentic tradition. Arthur existed, Troy existed, in spite of the fact that a great deal that is mythical comes into Geoffrey of Monmouth's account and Homer's account of the scene and the people. “Broadly speak- ing,” he writes, “it is now generally accepted by critics of insight -the others do not matter much—that when a large body of myth crystallizes round one central figure, race, or locality, it is almost certain to enshrine a certain proportion of historical truth capable of extraction from the mass of fabulous material which surrounds it, and when so refined, is worthy of acceptance by the most meticulous of historical purists." But in making this argu- ment and illustrating it by Homer and Geoffrey of Monmouth, Mr Spence, it seems to me, leaves out of account something that is very impotrant. That something is the time-element. Only a few centuries separated the period of Troy from the period of Homer, the period of Arthur from the period of Geoffrey of Mon- mouth. But between the time of the overwhelming of Atlantis and Plato's time there was a period vast enough to baffle all historical record, all historical memory. Atlantis was founded B. C. 7000, says Mr Spence. Let us say that it endured 1000 years, and was overwhelmed with the islands of which it was the capital B. C. 6000. From that time until Plato's time there was a period as long as from the First Egyptian Dynasty until to- day. Can we believe that the Atlantean tradition could have per- sisted through such a vast period of time? It might persist as a story of general disaster, likely enough, but it could not persist as a record holding the actual physical features of the lost land. Mr Spence would reply that the tradition embodying the physical features of the Atlantean country did not depend upon the folk-memory for its perpetuation; it was written down, and Plato's account was drawn from documentary evidence. His whole mass of speculation then really rests upon this hypothetical evidence. And it seems to me that not only the author of The Problem of Atlantis but all those who make claim for the authen- ticity of the tradition that Plato has embodied will have to discover PADRAIC COLUM 63 and bring into the light that very evidence. Where are the docu- ments from which Plato drew his account? They were Egyptian, and apparently it was next to impossible to destroy Egyptian docu- ments. And how is it that we have never heard about them ex- cept through Plato? There must have been a great deal of inter- est taken in the account they embodied in the Greece of Plato's time and in the Roman world afterwards. The Egyptian priests would surely find it profitable to gratify the curiosity of people interested, even if they were only interested in finding out how Plato's story ended. And yet Plato's is the only account of Atlantis that we have. Herodotus, who had a nose for just such a story, has nothing to say about it. The evidence that would have been salient is not in the posses- sion of the writer of The Problem of Atlantis, but a great deal of secondary evidence is brought into court. Mr Spence is an authority on the mythology and archaeology of South and Central America, and he is able to show us correspondences between the civilization noted in Plato's account and the Maya, Mexican, and Peruvian civilizations. It is part of his theory that Atlantis, the eastern end of a broken-up continent, and Antilia, the western end, were joined by an insular chain, and that civilizations went from Atlantis, not only into Europe and Africa, but into America as well. Peru, too, according to Mr Spence, had an Atlantean civilization which was taken over by the people who had the Incas for their leaders. And he brings a great deal of testimony to show that the earliest peoples in Europe who were capable of creating a civilization—the Cro-Magnon men, the Magdalenian men, the Azilian-Tardenosian men-had their first appearances in Biscay and the Pyrenees: “Why, it may well be asked, should all these races appear suddenly in the same area ?” The answer that he makes is that they were all colonists from a disintegrating Atlantis, bringing with them the Atlantean culture in its various stages. That answer may be the right one. But there may be another answer. In to-day's newspaper I read about discoveries in the Sahara that indicate that the part of Africa near the Pyrenees was the scene of human activities in incredibly remote times. "The hatchet, which both Professor Reygasse and Dr Pound identified as the second oldest of the period of the Old Stone Age, is estimated to have existed one hundred and fifty thousand years ago, ante- dating from five hundred to one thousand centuries the work of 64 LOST FATHERLANDS the Cro-Magnons in Southern France.” This would seem to dis- pose of the evidence that is based on the early civilizations in the Pyrenean area. But doubtless Mr Spence would maintain that the men of the Sahara had come into Africa from the contiguous Atlantis. If there was an Atlantis in the Atlantic there was also a lost land in the Pacific—Hawaiki. However, those who wish to establish the existence of Hawaiki do not have to go into such deep waters as the spokesmen for Atlantis have to go into. There is a clear tradition about Hawaiki. Not only have the Polynesians named many of the islands they came to after the land that they speak of as their fatherland, but, apart altogether from this particular tradition, it is evident that their uniform culture, their language, their racial type, were built up in some land in which the ancestors of the New Zealanders, the Hawaiians, the Samoans, the Tahitians, the Marquesans all lived together, having there the food plants and the few animals that they brought with them through the islands of what they have named as the Great En- gulfing Ocean. Hawaiki, that common fatherland, is now at the bottom of the sea: Professor Macmillan Brown so declared in his essay on The Languages of the Pacific. His new book has to do with Easter Island. Easter Island is at once the riddle and the key to the riddle of the Pacific. Part of the riddle of Easter Island is known even to those who take little interest in the wider problem of Polynesia. On the Island, ringing it around, are great statues; they have been overthrown since the European discovery of the Island, and they are now prone on the ground. It is true that these statues were made out of material that is easily worked; it did not require many workers nor a great deal of time to cut out in a crater-workshop even one of the statues that weighed thirty tons. But it did require a great many workers to transport the statues from the extinct volcano where they had been cut out, and to set up the platforms of cut stone that are associated with the statues. And it is impossible to think of Easter Island as ever producing food enough to suffice for a population adequate to the work of moving the statues. Moreover, the beams and rollers by which the statues might have been transported could not have been obtained on the Island PADRAIC COLUM 65 there are no forests and there never were any forests there. And the present population of Easter Island gives no evidence that they ever possessed enough directive ability to carry out such a work as the cutting-out, the transporting, and the setting-up of these great images. Who put up the statues and why were they put up? What relation have they, Polynesian as they are in the type they represent, to the present Polynesian population of Easter Island? And what bearing have the statues on the problems connected with Polynesian culture and the Polynesian dispersal through the islands of the Pacific? To the east of Easter Island, Professor Macmillan Brown de- clares, there was an archipelago known in Easter Island tradition as Motu Matiro Hiva; to the west there were islands known as Marae Renga and Marae Toiho. The archipelago and the two islands have gone down. Perhaps only those who have read The Languages of the Pacific will be puzzled by this subsidence. They will ask if Professor Macmillan Brown insists that the Polynesians had a succession of sinking fatherlands--Hawaiki and Motu Matiro Hiva-or if we are to take it that the archipelago and the islands to the east and west of Easter Island were the sur- viving fragments of the home land- of Hawaiki. If these were the fragments of Hawaiki, that would leave the Polynesian home land in a southern temperate zone, and I think Professor Mac- millan Brown on page 194 of The Riddle of the Pacific makes a very good case for their having had a home land in the temperate zone—the adventurous, the Viking strain in the Polynesians cer- tainly suggests a temperate and not a tropical origin. In The Riddle of the Pacific he puts forward the lost Motu Matiro Hiva as the seat of a Polynesian Empire. The archipelago had wealth, organization, a subject population; its rulers resolved to make the barren place that we now know as Easter Island the mausoleum for their conspicuous dead. They landed a slave- population on the place, and they kept them in subjection by con- trolling the food-supplies which were not grown on but brought to the island. The Empire-makers with their control of slave- labour had the statues cut out and put up; they were, according to Professor Macmillan Brown, arranging great avenues of statues and raising great platforms when the catastrophe came upon their 66 LOST FATHERLANDS own land. It went down in the ocean. On Easter Island the population promptly downed tools, and since that time they have never achieved any discipline or any real social order. His great contribution to the elucidation of the riddle presented by Easter Island lies in his analysis of the social order—or lack of social order—there, and its departures in culture from the Polynesian norm. He makes a case for his picturesque theory of a Polynesian Empire in the southern temperate zone. He spoils it from time to time by pressing too hard upon scraps of evidence. For instance, Easter Islanders call their little speck of land Te Pito te Henua which means the navel of the world. That seems tes- timony to the theory that it had an archipelago and islands around it. But then we remember that the Hawaiians call the volcano Kilauea by just the same name—Ka Piko ke Henua. As there were no lands surrounding the Hawaiian group, the title cannot imply there what Professor Macmillan Brown thinks it implies for Easter Island—a centre of lands. And in order to make it credible that great labours should go to the making of the island into a mausoleum, he has to declare that the men of Motu Matiro Hiva were an ancestor-worshipping people. There is no warrant in Polynesian tradition for saying this. The Polynesian stories, the Polynesian customs, the Polynesian myths do not give the impression that the Pacific Islanders were ancestor-worshippers. We know that their great reverence was not for ancestors, but for the Ariki, the Alii, the "Divine Ones," "The Heaven Born,” the liv- ing chiefs and kings who had the power of tapu. In Hawaii the bones of the great kings, instead of being marked, were carefully hidden away. The secret of where the great Kamehameha is laid is still carefully preserved. But these are books by important scholars, who know what they are writing about. What Mr Spence has said about The Problem of Atlantis applies also to The Riddle of the Pacific: “The purpose of the book is not so much to demonstrate the former existence of an Atlantean continent as to place the study of the whole problem on a more accurate basis than has yet been at- tempted in recent times. . . . If errors and false hypotheses are encountered therein, I must plead that these are due to a spirit of experiment and archeological enterprise.” It is in this spirit that we should read both books. PADRAIC COLUM BRIEFER MENTION No MORE PARADES, by Ford Madox Ford (12mo, 309 pages; Albert & Charles Boni: $2.50) magnificently continues the work superbly begun in Some Do Not, and by announcing in the dedication that further volumes in the series are planned, suggests that something preciously close to a great novel-epic of the war is being written. Tietjens is flatly described, by another character, as trying to be like Christ; the coil of circumstance winds as closely around him as before; his suffering and his intelligence are completely rendered. The book deals with a few significant hours at a base-camp of the British in France and the tedium and chaos of the war (excepting the front) are conveyed with the ultimate degree of inten- sity. The method is a little simpler than in Some Do Not, the windings and returns are not so devious. But it was clear in Some Do Not that Ford was writing a novel with a masterly technique, and its simplifica- tion now will only prove the case to those who failed to accept it earlier. Ford has irritated critics and even disaffected his friends; he has faults and is no doubt wayward; but he lays everything else aside when he is writing his novels, writes them with integrity, probity, and a single violence of passion that make them great. and re. The mos the the British the booke me; his hrist: eens is pasly chosolumes TALES OF THE LONG Bow, by Gilbert K. Chesterton (12mo, 278 pages; Dodd, Mead: $2) will instantly be recognized by ancient admirers of The Club of Queer Trades as a companion volume, a little more mechanical in the makings, but still full of the Chestertonian skill. In each of the stories a proverb suggesting the impossible is brought to life: one man sets the Thames on fire, another makes elephants fly, another eats his hat. Obviously this calls for ingenuity, and Chesterton's inventiveness has not flagged, even if his imagination fails to carry him to the heights of another Man Who Was Thursday. The enemies in this book are the same as in all the books, sanitation and slavery and capitalism, and prob- ably Jews and vegetarianism and prohibition. They matter little and do not clog the action of the stories. THE GRACE OF LAMBS, By Manuel Komroff (12mo, 221 pages ; Boni & Liveright: $2). In the contemporary sense of the word, these fascinating tales are not short stories; some of them are episodes, others are fables which seem to retain, rather than to acquire, an atmosphere of popular mythology. The background is fabulous and obscure-Russia, China, or the past—and the characters are a statement of fact without concession. The style is inferior. Mr Komroff should never have mentioned "this strange thing called life.” “The famous Yangtze-kiang” is equally un- happy. Still, the volume is an excellent example of the story-teller's art in its elemental, forgotten aspects, and Mr O'Brien, the anthologist, was more than usually keen when he compared it with something improvised in a bazaar, before a spell-bound audience. 68 BRIEFER MENTION WOLF, by Albert Payson Terhune (12mo, 236 pages; Doran: $2). A dyed- in-the-wool dog-lover can out-yarn a follower of Isaac Walton any day, but he has this advantage over the fisherman: that to all other dog- lovers his tales will be of absorbing interest. Mr Terhune has added another hero to his canine hall of fame; has placed another dog star in literature. Wolf's adventures are absorbing and almost super-canine. Whether you believe in coincidence of human psychology as accounting for the actions of animals will depend on your experience with your own dogs. We have been unfortunate; most of the dogs we have known have shown no sign of genius or even talent; but then the same might be said of most people we have known. REPLENISHING Jessica, by Maxwell Bodenheim (12mo, 272 pages ; Boni & Liveright: $2). There is sometimes the illusion of good writing—if one can have good writing that is not good reading—in this disillusioned exposition of what women like and of what men know. Said to be of social position enviably remote, although besetting and beset by every kind of man but the morally and socially fastidious; said to be "wealthy, symmetrical, and fairly intelligent,” although apparently without caste or culture—Jessica Maringold, married at last but soon divorced, proposes marriage to a mentally cowed, physically crippled, financially shattered museum attendant and is accepted. THE ROMANTIC PASSION OF Don Luis, by Henri Malo, translated by Ellen Preston (12mo, 340 pages; Lincoln MacVeagh, Dial Press: $2) is an historical romance of Spain and Flanders, of the epic voyage of the great Armada and the consequent disaster, all of which, we assume, was neces- sary to get the young cavalier, Don Luis, washed up on Flemish shores. There is also a story of the "tender passion of a Spanish gentleman for a lowly maid of Flanders,” of witches, black magic, superstition, intrigue, and adventure, told with considerable colour and gusto, and evident know- ledge of the sixteenth century. There are indications that Wild GEESE, by Maria Ostenso (12mo, 356 pages ; Dodd, Mead: $2) is escaping the stigma of the prize novel, and this is quite proper. It bears within itself traces of its dual purpose: to be a novel and to be a film-piece; and the critic familiar with both forms will correctly say that it is faulty in both. There are two lay figures acting as cogs for the advance of the action; and one has the complicated climax of bog and fire and the ride for help. But once these critical reserva- tions are made, there is room for genuine pleasure in the simplicity and vividness of the book, in the whole rounded character of the protagonist, in the weaving together of many lives, and in the way the author has communicated the special qualities of her somewhat exotic types while relating them to the common life of the American farmer in the West. The good things far outweigh the bad; one is worried by feeling that the bad things are acquired from bad novels, in an effort to be up-to-date. And is again encouraged by the certainty that the good things are native to the author and will probably develop and overcome the affectations. BRIEFER MENTION 69 UNDER THE BLACK FLAG, by Don C. Seitz (8vo, 341 pages; Lincoln Mac- Veagh, Dial Press: $4) is an admirable volume in the Rogue's Library. It contains the stories, briefly and graphically told, of some forty-odd pirates, most of them little known, the best known being not a pirate--Captain Kidd. Despite the similarity of some of the adventures, the author has managed to make the prosaic alluring. He has omitted the great John Esquemerling, possibly considering him not piratical enough, but he is surely interesting. THE EARLY FRENCH Poets, by Henry Francis Cary, introduction by T. Earle Welby (12mo, 219 pages; A & C Boni: $2). In spite of failing to anticipate the modern adoration for Villon, Mr Cary is an excellent critic of poetry, and his essays upon the early French poets ought to give general pleasure. One mistake does not kill a critic. If it did there would be no critics. His excuse for not liking Villon is that Villon depends too much upon badinage; he adds that although badinage be "the charm of life to a Frenchman,” to an Englishman it is insipid. THE ESPALIER, by Sylvia Townsend Warner (12mo, 103 pages; Lincoln MacVeagh, Dial Press : $2). The author of these engaging poems has the gift of the accurate line, but not of the revealing phrase. It would be just to say that hers is the rhymer's art, as opposed to that of the prophet or the image-maker. In this respect she might be compared to certain of the eighteenth-century poets, Henry Carey in particular. She has written a song, in his best vein, about a girl who marries a butcher, only to pine: “He is too skilled in bleeding hearts to turn this way and pity mine.” At other moments she writes in a mood which is said to derive from the Songs of Innocence; it is more likely to recall the small, neat, feminine touch of Edna St Vincent Millay.. VOICES OF THE STONES, by A. E. (12mo, 61 pages; Macmillan: $1.25). One whose “fancy soon forsakes all that is perfect to the eye,” can often depict the material world as the materialist can not. Surely A. E. gives us the “perilous magic mountains” of actuality and those “ice-tinted mounds of quivering malachite” which are the sea, in words as "holy" as those in which he speaks of "eternity," "survival," "resurrection," and "the flame within the body's lamp." HESPERIDES, by Ridgely Torrence (12mo, 105 pages; Macmillan: $1.75) will be read with respect, but in spite of its high moral tone and admirable simplicity, will excite little enthusiasm. The use of weak epithets partly accounts for this; partly it is the regularity of the metre, resulting in such lines as “When the loud pageant of the year's high noon," or else, "Powers and suns of endless might.” Verses like these are at best a broken shadow of the emotion which indubitably lies behind them, and their lack of distinct images makes the bulk of the volume difficult to read. A few bitter lyrics stand out from the rest : such are The Son, Survivors (for the last line) and Three O'clock, which, except for the sentimentality of one or two details, is a nearly perfect poem. 70 BRIEFER MENTION OUT OF THE FLAME, by Osbert Sitwell (8vo, 95 pages; Doran: $2). Equipoise of form and content encountered once or twice, and abundant sensibility, are insufficient compensation for lack of sentience and rigour of form, in these fox-trotting, sometimes ribald, unmirthfully satiric nursery-rhymes. The elms of Desire UNDER THE ELMs, by Eugene O'Neill (12mo, 166 pages, Boni & Liveright: $2) have "a sinister maternity in their aspect, a crushing, jealous absorption.” “They brood--are like exhausted women resting their sagging breasts." This is from the stage direction; O'Neill is so much better a dramatist than a literary man, that he ought never to subject his plays to the reading test; and ought always to let his drama carry its own emotions, without writing bad emotion into it. CONTEMPORARY Plays, selected and edited by Thomas H. Dickinson and Jack R. Crawford (12mo, 635 pages ; Houghton Mifflin : $4.50) contains sixteen plays of the years 1900 to 1923 and supplements the two series of Chief Contemporary Dramatists. The omission of Shaw, Barrie, Mase- field, Galsworthy, and the Irish dramatists "for external causes or by editorial design” does not diminish the value of the book; it could not, in any case, contain all. The choice seems to have been sensibly made, and if one no longer is moved by Paolo and Francesca, as Stephen Phillips wrote it, there is still good reason for knowing what it sounds like to-day; Alfred Sutro reads ridiculously—but so does the almost last night's latest, Drinkwater's Cromwell. The Voysey Inheritance, twenty years old, indi- cates the advantage of having a mind and a passion, for it is still powerful, almost as powerful as Waste. Perhaps the surprise in the book is The Mollusc, Hubert Henry Davies' excellent anticipation of this year's Craig's Wife. The Adding Machine and The Hairy Ape, among the American contributions, show how much more experimental in form American dramatists are than the British-that is, if these two and the contemporary British plays selected adequately represent their constituencies. DISCURSIONS, by Osbert Sitwell (illus., 8vo, 310 pages; Doran: $6). The antiquarian virus now and then rides Mr Osbert Sitwell as it rides the travel books of Mr Norman Douglas; never sufficiently, however, to harden a style which when it lingers lovingly on some seicento church or rococo garden, can be rather soft and ripe. He has wit and a certain generosity of writing, both of which qualities are brilliantly exhibited in his studies of D'Annunzio and King Bomba. His vocabulary is florid, and it is not for nothing that he finds in his temperament an avowed affinity with the baroque. THE NECESSITY OF Art, by A. Clutton-Brock, Percy Dearmer, A. S. Duncan- Jones, J. Middleton Murry, A. W. Pollard, and Malcolm Spencer. (12mo, 181 pages; Doran: $3). The title alone of this book is discouraging, and the reading of the argument does little to convince the sceptic, polite and reasonable though the authors be. The world, it is greatly to be feared, will not be scolded into loving art. BRIEFER MENTION 71 THE REVOLT OF MODERN YOUTH, by Judge Ben B. Lindsey and Wain- right Evans (1omo, 364 pages ; Boni & Liveright: $3). Judge Lindsey, in our opinion, has contributed more vitally to American civilization than has any one in our time. For some fifteen years he has sat in the office of the Denver Juvenile Court, and literally saved the souls and bodies of children from jail, malady, prostitution, and ruin. Against its back- ground, the upper bourgeoisie, which is morally so much more stupefying than the very slum, the Revolt of Modern Youth is presented in a book which is both searching and sensational. FROM A PITMAN's Note Book, by Roger Dataller (12mo,' 270 pages; Lincoln MacVeagh, Dial Press : $2.50) is a sort of latter-day foot-note to Zola's Germinal; Mr Dataller does not force life upon us quite so ruthlessly, but he has something of the Frenchman's sweep and insight. His pictures of life in and around the coal mines have been filtered through a literary screen; he has preserved the sweepings as well as the large lumps. They are done in nervous prose, admirably suited to the impressionistic sequence of scenes. H. L. MENCKEN, by Ernest Boyd (12mo, 89 pages; McBride: $1) is not a biography, and it is not in a complete sense a criticism. It is a compact, orderly, and rather deferential rationale of Mr Mencken's main character- istics. It expounds his valour, his common sense, his master certitude as to the invalidity of the democrat; it mentions the wit, humour, gaiety of his discourse, and calls him a "superb journalist.” Although it hints at his "American innocence of economic fundamentals," about the possible limitations—the lack of originality-of such a mind it delicately says nothing. As to the enduring qualities of this Walt McDougall of the typewriter, surely it is not premature for writers of books on Mr Mencken to try their mettle, for by his own announcement, his entertaining forays in literary fields are over. In a word, Mr Boyd talks rather sparely and politely about a very hearty phenomenon. What one would like in a critical volume on H. L. Mencken is a rationale and an estimate, some- thing round and complete, and since Mr Mencken himself has so enter- tainingly shown the way—not too deferential. CATHERINE THE GREAT, by Katharine Anthony (8vo, 331 pages; Knopf: $4). It is perhaps obvious that one who could set forth so soberly and admirably sophisticated a portrait of Margaret Fuller as “a modern woman who died in 1850,” would arrive without difficulty at an under- standing of Catherine II, an ultra-modern woman who died in 1796. Indeed, Miss Anthony's two studies, Margaret Fuller and Catherine II, seem in several lights to be cut from the same piece. They are both psychological, and make competent and tactful use of what appear to be large holdings in Freudian data. But more than that (and how much more!) they are studies in feminism. As was the case with Margaret Fuller, so in this study of Great Catherine we are not allowed to forget the emphatic sex of the high lost lady, nor her equally emphatic presence of mind. 72 BRIEFER MENTION JUNGLE Days, by William Beebe (illus., 8vo, 201 pages; Putnams: $3). For a scientist to acquire the knack of communicating his discoveries in a readable form to the general public is no small achievement. Mr William Beebe possesses this uncommon and valuable faculty and is at pains to make free use of it after each new excursion. Indeed, it is im- possible for him to turn over a stone or look at the under-side of a leaf in a tropical forest without presenting his readers with a fascinating and instructive narrative of what he has seen. His writings, however, can never really take a high place in the realm of imaginative literature for the reason that his mind in its ultimate structure is quite obviously com- monplace, a fact indicated by his practice of making jocular allusions to our own ephemeral modern environment, a trap into which all jour- nalistic minds fly direct. GLAMOUR, Essays on the Art of the Theatre, by Stark Young (12mo, 208 pages; Scribner: $2) indicates that Mr Young has a fine sensitivity and a mind keenly applied to the aesthetic question of the stage. This is criticism for the stage-director and for the spectator who wants, in addi- tion to the pleasure of observing the stage, the instruments by which to judge it. Mr Young on "feeling the scene," on "being the part," is excellent; he is one of the few critics with whose judgements one may dis- agree, yet whose reasons none the less command respect. And he does not himself judge plays by their moral or political significance. His emotions are often cloudy and one hardly knows after reading all he has to say about Duse, why he thinks Duse great. He remains, however, in possession of the critic's admiration. DRAMATIC VALUES, by C. E. Montague (12mo, 274 pages; Doubleday, Page: $2) is a collection of able and well-written play reviews and essays on the theatre. They are reprinted or re-written from The Man- chester Guardian. They must have been, as they appeared, corrective, inspiring, even constructive criticism, of the sort better known in our weeklies than in our dailies. Yet they are first-night impressions, largely, and testify to a discriminating taste. The fact that the book has been extravagantly touted here should not be held against it. THE HERITAGE OF GREECE AND THE LEGACY OF Rome, by E. B. Osborn (16mo, 192 pages; Doran: $1.25). Mr Osborn writes with an enthusiasm that holds our attention to the last page, and this in spite of the fact that we are occasionally teased by unworthy phrasing, as for example when he describes an Epithalamium as "a form of poetry invented by the Greeks to glorify the at-one-ment of man and woman.” There can be little doubt, however, that he is an extremely sensitive instructor as to the debt we owe to classical antiquity, and when H. G. Wells in true Board School fashion alludes to Latin "as a dead language, a skeleton language,” Mr Osborne is immediately provoked to exclaim in one of those sentences, the eloquence of which renders this simple primer such pleasant reading, "Latin that is the long voice of the great ages of Chris- tianity and is in a true sense the tongue and tocsin of Eternity!" THE THEATRE 1 DHILIP BARRY’S new play, IN A GARDEN, reveals some new I and some known qualities and a few not ineradicable defects. The magnificence of Robert Edmond Jones's settings in the grand manner has somewhat made us forget his trueness of taste, his sense of form, his unequalled capacity for making a simple modern interior live with beauty and seem to support and encourage the life of human beings. All of this, and a craftsman's expertness with materials, were visible in his setting. Mr Hopkins has at last fused the virtues and the peculiarities of his style of directing into a perfect piece of work, subdued and impassioned at once, not tricky, not depressed, but glowingly alive. Laurette Taylor and Frank Conroy, profiting by the direction and assisting it, both played as well as I have ever seen them, possibly better. Miss Taylor's grave lightness is matchless; there was only a touch too much of the plaintive. Mr Barry's chief defect was not the amount of words which flowed from all the characters; most of them were necessary words and all of them were far more deftly arranged than in his earlier work. There is no connexion between a serious, thoughtful work of this sort and the insignificance of THE YOUNGEST, except that in each the characters all but specifically say, "Watch me rig up some- thing which will create the big scene in the second act.” In the new play all this artificial pointing was really unnecessary; we saw the idea grow in the mind of a man that he must reproduce the setting of his wife's first romance, in order to cure her of her memories. We did not need to be told so plainly that the second act would be this reproduction. The play has the fascination of a delicate piece of surgery, and it is not surprising that at moments the characters dwindle into tenuous “subjects.” To me the lack of illuminating incident was surprising—I had thought that the substitution of incident for descriptive dialogue was a first prin- ciple in contemporary play-writing. But much more surprising and gratifying was the intelligence of motives and the mastery of a situation which was all equivocation and nuance, as the wife and the lover tremble between the memory of their first emotion and the growth of their new passion. 74 THE THEATRE WO The plain clothes Hamlet proved only what it set out to prove, that HAMLET is a great play and pleases when properly acted. The 'first act and a half impressed me as any rehearsal might: men and women in dressing-gowns reading the parts. But from the moment Basil Sydney delivered the advice to the Players, better than I have ever heard it spoken before, the play lifted; Hamlet was him- self again; the novelty was forgotten in the lasting intensity of the play. The actual objection has been made: HAMLET should be given not only in modern clothes but in modern manner. Psycho- logically Mr John Barrymore was more modern, more informed, that is, in the dissection and complication of motives, than Mr Sydney: witness the "nunnery” scene. Verbally HAMLET ought to be rewritten, for the purposes of experiment, in prose or, since the passion requires exaltation of expression, in free verse. H.D., let us say. Mr Sydney broke the measures of HAMLET by stopping after every two words; it did not sound like blank verse, but it lacked rhythm entirely until in the emotion of the play he forgot the trick. Actually Ernest Lawford's dry, fussy Polonius was the only complete success in the new manner; Helen Chandler's superb mad scene was entirely in the old. LS LE EN Mr Robert Benchley has described THE GREEN Hat as “out of Ouida by the doorman at the Embassy Club”; Mr George Jean Nathan calls it briefly “sex piffle.” Mr Benchley, again, is genu- inely critical in his guide to the theatres when he calls ABIE'S IRISH ROSE, "Michael Arlen's great success.” In England, I am in- formed, THE GREEN Hat was considered the sort of play the seri- ous weeklies would not review; although eventually they probably did. It was actually much more offensive to me than the book had led me to expect; offensive because of its exceptional dullness through long stretches, because of serious lapses of taste, because in spite of Katherine Cornell, it was so unbelievable. It is the quality of romance that although the world in which it takes place is not our world, it is a world of its own, with a logic of its own. THE GREEN Hat lacks that created world as much as it lacks refer- ence to ours. The direction was neat enough; leaving me only to question whether it is necessary, in order to thrill the matinée audi- ences, for Iris to switch off the lights at one side of the room when obviously she and her lover have to walk all the way across it, in as GILBERT SELDES 75 pitch darkness, to get to the bedroom at the other side. It is just the fault of The Green Hat that things like this seem ridiculous; if the play had real quality, one would not notice them. Miss Margalo Gillmore's performance, in the one observed and credible person of the play, was superb. Miss Cornell's virtuosity was a little surprising. She is the kind of great actress who so infre- quently shows it. The GREEN Hat does not diminish her stature; one only thinks that in a year or two she will be able to choose any play at all and be certain that her own genius will make it success- ful; and one hopes passionately that, when that time comes, she will not care to do THE GREEN Hat in special matinées. The true centre of the director's problem in The Last Night of Don Juan was in making our interest mount while the stage was crowded with the wraiths of Don Juan's mistresses; but our interest in what? In all the shades and subtleties of love that Rostand could think of. The designs woven by the shades, under the direction of Robert Milton, were marvellous; but they left no interest whatever in Don Juan and his torment. So that passed. ANTONIA, in case I failed to mention it before, holds the world's record, as no fault of direction known to man has been omitted. It is rumoured that scientists are at work trying to isolate another fault, and when they succeed, the discovery will be communicated to the directors of this play. A fairly tedious play to begin with, but I don't know what the last act brings. What I saw was more than I could bear. The CHARLOT REVUE I stuck out to the end. It is the dreariest imitation of a second-rate American revue I have ever seen; relieved by the exceptional merits of Miss Beatrice Lillie and one or two flashes of the intelligent wit which distinguished the earlier edition. I noticed at THE GARRICK GAIETIES last year that the amateur can do a fairly good burlesque of the legitimate, but fails lamentably when he tries to do a mere parody of musical show stuff. Even to burlesque technical effectiveness, you have to have a fund of tech- nical knowledge. To poke fun at the Tiller girls you have first to be able to dance with mechanical precision, so that when you fall out of precision you will have your effect. Actually this type of dull marching about the stage is the only thing the Charlot 76 THE THEATRE chorus does at all well. And the inroads which sentimentalism has made on the crackling satire of the first revue are too awful to con- template. There were some silly numbers then, but who would not have gone twice for the others? And who can go twice to see a succession of Gertrude Lawrence as a Russian émigré (hup! hup!) and the lassies in plaids, and the Apaches of Paris, and “poor little rich girl, you're a bewitched girl” ? The Cleopatra scene in the NATIONAL WINTER GARDEN BUR- LESQUE (foot of Second Avenue) is as good as it's cracked up to be. GILBERT SELDES MODERN ART T HE Thomas Eakins exhibition in the Brummer Galleries calls 1 for a word of comment, not so much upon the art of it, for that has already been gone into, but upon its presentation. This collection is of things not previously shown and corresponds to the Sargent exhibition in the Knoedler Galleries made up of odds and ends from the Sargent studio in London; but whereas the Sargent relics were pawed over affectionately by crowds of loyal devotees, I alone had to do what pawing was done to Eakins, for upon a chance visit to the gallery in the second week of the show I found myself absolutely alone. This was not an affliction. I like to be alone with good pictures. At the Academy, on the other hand, I love to be jostled. Where the art is unserious the comments of the unserious mob are enter- taining, but not so the struggles of the inexperienced with the work, say, of Rembrandt or Velasquez. What has the mob to do, now or ever, with the art of Rembrandt? Nothing, of course. Yet the name “Rembrandt” has gradually come to mean something- I scarcely know what—to the people, and the phrase "a Rembrandt shadow" is occasionally met with in the newspapers. How the bankrupt of Amsterdam who was not considered so very good by his contemporaries came to impose himself upon posterity in this fashion, makes excellent reading for those who like to consider not only fame, but the stuff of which it is made. Thomas Eakins is not a Rembrandt, but he is almost as serious. Circumstances, one may suspect, forced seriousness upon Rem- brandt, but Eakins was born unsmiling. Surely he is the most serious painter America has yet produced. It is a close race, I admit, between him and Winslow Homer, and it is merely because Homer wrestled with “the elements” and Eakins with the mystery of the human soul, that I incline to rate the latter first. Both were implacably honest. Eakins' honesty was his undoing as far as "quick results” were concerned, but Homer surmounted his to a recognition during his life, which is still another reason for suspect- ing his integrity to be less granite; for though the quality that Ernest Renan calls “myth” may not be essential to the final success, 78 MODERN ART an it does seem necessary for the first one, for the shattering down of doors. Eakins seemed incapable of myth, of play of any kind. He could not even sit before a mirror, as Rembrandt did, with a darling bonnet on his head, to show incredulous customers how much he could do with an unlikely subject. He was indifferent to cus- tomers, blind to everything save the solemn mystery of life itself, a mystery he pursued humourlessly to the end, and the more hungrily the more apparent its impenetrability became. In the later years Winslow Homer took on graces; unconsciously he acquired the art of saying it nicely. Thomas Eakins never did. There was no concession to any admirer. The holy secret, he knew, was just as likely to be found in the bosom of the deacon-like old gentleman who had the honour to be his papa-in-law, as in the debonair, hot- house creatures that Sargent was so glibly presenting to posterity. He seemed unaware, quite, of the aid fa