shion might be to him.
He did not seek aid; all he asked was to do the work.
To such a hard character, how could there be a response from the
idle and gay who make up most of the world? His followers must
be recruited slowly from the like enquirers into the whence-comes-
it-and-whither riddle of humanity; and since there are always a
few in every age who are not deceived by ribbons and costume, it is
certain there will be some stern advocate near by when the moment
comes to uncurtain the Eakins work. When the moment comes !
That moment is scarcely now. In this Charles the Second period
no one cares to hear Cromwell praised. I was quite alone in the
Brummer Galleries in the second week of the Eakins show. As I
said, I did not greatly mind. On the contrary, I rather gloried in
having the pictures to myself.
Given such a man and such work, it seems peculiarly futile to
hold his methods up to gaze. The odds and ends from his studio
are not explanatory. (For that matter the anatomical manikins of
Michael Angelo are not enticing, either.) The Eakins life draw-
ings, made in school, are not a whit more indicative of genius-to-
come than the early water-colours of Winslow Homer. They are
honest, of course, but also stodgy. On the other hand, in this
neglected little exhibition, there were two or three portraits, such
as the Signora Gomez d'Artza, the Mr Harry Lewes (which I once
saw relegated to the "Morgue” in the Academy) and the study of
Dr Gross, which would, and some day will, hold their own comfort-
ably in any European collection of masterpieces.
Saw


HENRY MCBRIDE
79
The rumours spread abroad last spring so industriously that cub-
ism had vanished off the face of the earth prove to have been ex-
aggerations. The season has scarcely started—I write in Novem-
ber—and two cubists have appeared above the horizon. Fernand
Léger, under the careful chaperonage of Miss Katherine Dreier of
the Société Anonyme, exposes in the Anderson Galleries, and Jan
Matulka, whoever he may be, shows some agreeable but un-
doubtedly cubistic water-colours in the Artists' Gallery. The
Fernand Léger exhibition called out a valiant crowd of progressives
for its vernissage, and all those present seemed amiably disposed.
The general feeling was that Léger had gone on appreciably from
the over-refinements of his that were first brought to us, and that
now he was not only a robust painter, but a sincere one. The
rooms, which are lined with dull, brown burlap, are none too helpful
to modernists, but the Léger paintings surmounted that difficulty
and created their own atmosphere. Also, not a single soul was
heard to ask what the pictures were about. Either the cubist
language is now pretty generally understood, or M Léger practices
it in its most legible form.
HENRY MCBRIDE


MUSICAL CHRONICLE
I THOUGHT the fiery copper of the oaks had made me balk at
1 travelling to hear the two concerts. Seven hours of travel to
hear the first Sunday afternoon of the League of Composers and
Le Roi David had seemed excessive while oak-trees were standing
in kingly flame over the fields! The tower of steep stone build-
ings above the arrival platform gave my reason the first lie. The
lands in very brown October had a puissant rival; it could not have
been attachment to mere scenic impressiveness that had opposed
the trip to town. The Sunday sight of the auction room in the
Anderson Galleries gave my reason the second lie. I remembered
that however the music, you see all of your friends all together
all in one room at the concerts of the League of Composers, and
that is always ravishing; and this afternoon some of the music
again was far from negligible. The settings of the two Czech folk-
songs by Vaclav Stepan, and of the two Hungarian folk-songs by
Béla Bartók, preserved the freshness and inevitability of the ex-
pressions selected by the experience of the race. “Das Echte bleibt
der Nachwelt unverloren!” Marion Bauer's new sonata for violin
and piano shows progress, even though the goal is not yet clearly
in view. Some of the Jazz Berries (what titular contemporaneous-
ness!) by Louis Gruenberg are striking constructions, the more
because they seem products of will and perhaps of ill will. The
middle section of the string-quartet by the new young Italian
Mario Labroca would go very effectively in a veristic opera as a
night in Naples when there was absolutely nothing doing” and
a single taper burned stilly before the shrine of the Madonna. And
the pièce de résistance, the new Strawinsky piano sonata, made
listening agreeable. It recalls Bach fantasias and the Schumann
toccata with much archness of the rococo; and some day when I
am bored with everything the sun shines on and take to living on
ancient perfumes, it may possibly have something important for
me. None the less throughout the concert and among good friends,
ribaldry clutched my entrails. It might not have been the heraldic
trees and the gold-pelted hills that had disaffected me from the
market place of New York. Yet though my pretext was obviously
US-
e.


PAUL ROSENFELD
81
a poor one, sense was present somewhere, and I thought to discover
the true ground in the conventionality of most of the compositions.
They are all writing after a formula to-day. First comes a little
rushing, tinkling Petruchka, and after that some Chinese-laundry
music; and the three other movements are easy to write. No
thematic invention; a great desiccation of sensibility; no necessity;
no relation to life; the street outside gives you more aesthetic expe-
rience at any hour of the day; and after a few numbers, the soul
rears, and on its hind legs bellows exasperated: “Does it have to
be painted ?" Next day the conviction that it was the artists who
were making the market of New York detestable with their con-
ventionalism received a modification at the Bellows show in the
Museum. Bellows and Museums belong not in this chronicler's
province, but next door in Mr McBride's; but it happened that the
attempted establishment by the Muses' guardians of a painter
not one spark the artist reminded me that institutions of
art, particularly in America, operate against living art and
living artists and befog the issues of life; and that musical insti-
tutions, less generally reprehensible although they are, cannot
avoid the family traits. The final shape taken by these grisly
reflections came that evening, accompanied by indecent exhilara-
tion during the performance of Honegger's Symphonic Psalm.
While the really very bad numbers followed briskly upon each
other; while Mr Bodanzky fired his orchestra and exhorted the
chorus with summoning stick; while M Rothier declaimed with
the superb canned unction of the House of Molière; and the in-
telligenzia sat, and effort evaporated, it occurred to me I was assist-
ing at the comic triumph of the culture-philistines over old King
David. The children of Goliath have never forgiven the pebble.
Here in New York and perhaps in every city of the world they
are smiting the poor man of God hip and thigh, and fail to notice
the silhouette they cut. A mass of slight people strive to project
their personalities and attract importance by activity in the arts,
and it is vastly funny. Honegger, I am afraid, begins the train;
of the serious newcomers he is easily the least rewarding. His
work has the "modest” pretentiousness disgusting one with “clas-
sical" music-making. It is terse and clearly written, after the
manner of the Six; Honegger has a certain expertness in the orches-
tral processes, a kind of musical passman's unindividual cunning


82
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
with the timbres; but his music is of the nature of competent illus-
tration. There is still no veritable independence of experience
manifest in anything of Honegger's, not even in Skating Rink,
the best of his scores. At times one suspects “Honegger” of being
a syndicate, a name under which various musicians publish their
compositions. Few of the numbers of Le Roi David do not reveal
him the canny follower, industriously adapting established ideas
and processes to the requirements of his text. Few of the moderns
have not used series of low seconds and orientally sinuous wood-
wind like those in Honegger's introductory measures, and few have
not set dissonant trumpets against each other in depicting a military
camp. The best effects in the symphonic psalm are clever more
than moving. The ululation of women's voices in the Lament of
Gilboa pleases the ear, and the March of the Philistines with its
jazzy brass is heavily humorous. The clocklike tintinnabulation of
the celesta in The Dance Before the Ark contributes a charming
archaic flavour; the work as a whole suggests a pseudo-classic steel-
engraving. The dependence upon literature none the less assures
Honegger's music a continual success; people love to think of loco-
motives while the band plays on; and we anticipate a sensational
career for Le Roi David at Welsh eisteddfods and other provincial
Protestant assemblages of people who like their music to give them
opportunities for indulging conventionally religious sentiments.
... Alas, if I had been able to diagnose the general malady, it
was, I discovered in comic sudden despair, for the reason that I
myself was luxuriously tainted with it! All day it had been closing
on me, the measly self-consciousness, drawing the burning strait
jacket closer. I had been made defensive. I had found myself set
against people. Sitting at lunch; sitting in the club library over the
table of periodicals, I now remembered, I had been conscious of cen-
sure and of failure. Nothing had been said by any one; every-
body had been friendly; but it had come over me that all had not
been impressed. I had arrived nowhere with my work. There was
no doubt but my ideas were mossy and my style uncouth. I was
forgotten, that was plain. But I was not yet dead. If only a
certain article of mine would finally appear, they would look up.
I told myself I must hurry up and write something good. And
make it definitive, important. Well, that was the city in us all,
I saw there in the Town Hall; in me, thirty-six hours after return!


PAUL ROSENFELD
83
as
That was the product of the city, its rapid incessant crowds
coming against one like blows, its ambitious sky-line and frantic
competition. A place disposed one to the defensive, little con-
ducted the feeling, and perhaps not only the intellectuals were
affected by its disharmony; for all one knew, the working-classes
as well. It was to avoid this dissonance that I had hesitated
coming; it was for the burden lifted off the individual by ragged
chains of hills and spreading skies, and the harmony with forces
beyond himself brought in by them, that the copper oaks had stood.
Certainly there were people living at this very time in New York
whose lives were part of the impersonal processes of nature which
subordinate the personal will; and certainly men would eventually
live in cities in the presence of eternal things. But as I re-em-
barked in my train for the Hill, I knew that for myself and for
most of my fellows in this in-between-generation, a day spent out
of New York was a day of living joyous music.
Paul ROSENFELD
SENFELD


ANNOUNCEMENT
ve
THE DIAL AWARD for 1925 was offered to Edward Estlin
1 Cummings and we are happy to announce that he has accepted
it. His distinguished service to American letters will be obvious to
all who have read either his story, The Enormous Room (1922),
or any of his three books of verse, Tulips and Chimneys (1923),
XLI Poems (1925), and & (1925).
The two books of verse published this year ? are not as some
think, made up of poems written more recently than those of his
first volume. With the exception of a few poems written in 1915
and earlier, the whole lot is the result of six years of acute activity,
1917-1923, during which, to use his own expression, he wrote
literally "millions of poems." & does indeed contain more stylis-
tic experiments than the other volumes, but this is due not to any
recent development of the poet's, but to the fact that he himself
selected the contents of the book. These innovations could mean
a great deal to some other poet but are not I think the key to any
important change in his own quality or mood.
Some of the younger writers, the writers under thirty, who may
or may not yet be famous, but who belong after all to the only class
who will or for that matter can read a new book of poems with in-
sight, have preferred to see a new departure for Mr Cummings in
what they call his satirical verse. In spite of the excellence of
ms, notably of the four poems published
in Secession, 1924, nightmares of magnificent caricature, it seems
to us that they close an epoch rather than begin one.
And now let people chuckle all they have a mind to over the
solemn way in which we speak of epochs and developments. One
learns at school that much poetry called great has been written by
very young men. As for the public's "great poets” they are dead
1 The Enormous Room. 12mo. 271 pages. Boni and Liveright. $2.
Tulips and Chimneys. 8vo. 125 pages. Seltzer. $2.
XLI Poems. 8vo. 54 pages. The Dial Press. $2.
&. 8vo. 116 pages. Privately printed. $5.
2 Reviewed in this number of The Dial, page 49.
son
OV


ANNOUNCEMENT
85
poetsmor poets who have lived down two or three generations.
Meanwhile Mr Cummings is one of this generation's great poets.
THE DIAL AWARD therefore finds him when he has finished an
epoch, and no matter how much difference it may make to THE
Dial to see no more of this poetry at once over-ripe and with the
dangerous beauty of glare ice, it makes very little difference to Mr
Cummings. He has become more and more absorbed in painting.
If he has begun writing again by millions no doubt his new
millions will be different.
He was born in 1894 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, of that pure
New England stock which is said to be, if not the Klan's own, at
least the Klan's ideal. After getting through public school and
high school, he entered Harvard at the age of seventeen. Although
he took honours of some sort in the classics” and a master's
degree in English, he is hardly what one would call a scholar. One
does not need to be a scholar when one can translate the Choephoroi
at sight, without losing any of the vigour of the metaphors. After
leaving Harvard he spent six months driving an ambulance and
three months in a French prison (see The Enormous Room) and
was a private in the American infantry during most of 1918. Since
then he has lived, for reasons of economy, mainly in France.
The writer of this announcement has written and talked a good
deal in the last five years about Mr Cummings' poetry, and in
order not to repeat himself at length, he will make the following
paragraphs short and metaphorical, hoping that definitions will be
called for later, if at all.
As to the published poems, then, it is easy to see, easier now per-
haps than it was when they first began to appear, that like all good
poems they are thoroughly of their period. Strangeness is not
minimized, the essence is tirelessly pursued, and that odd thing
called art is kept well in view. Only, for Mr Cummings, art is
not a sacred phenomenon perfect in isolation, serene or cute accord-
ing as one lives in Maine or New Orleans, but is simply another
force like the force of gravity, to be manipulated for our fear and
our delight. If a work of art cannot compete in smoothness and
speed with, for example, a long fall, it appears to Mr Cummings to
be contemptible. So that we find him trying with his poems (and
his pictures) to beat the elements and the muscles and the machines


86
ANNOUNCEMENT
at their own game-any inventions being the result of an effort to
convey a new perception. “Picasso,” he writes,
"you give us Things
which
bulge:grunting lungs pumped full of sharp thick mind
you make us shrill
presents always
shut in the sumptuous screech of
simplicity
(out of the
black unbunged
Something gushes vaguely a squeak of planes
or
between squeals of
Nothing grabbed with circular shrieking tightness
solid screams whisper.)
Lumberman of The Distinct
your brain's
axe only chops hugest inherent
Trees of Ego, from
whose living and biggest
bodies lopped
of every
prettiness
you hew form truly"
To illustrate then how his poetry is at once like other modern verse
and yet more pliant, more organic, less theoretical, and hence more
able perhaps to live and walk for a long time in the world of forces,
I will quote with the poem above, which was selected purposely as
being one of his slowest and most interrupted, one of the most co-


ANNOUNCEMENT
herent poems of another modern American, who since 1915; when
he and Cummings and everybody were still writing in a sort of
standard Imagist rhythm, has done very well with his own modern
hop, skip, and jump
“ 'Money is emptiness
Curiously violated by colour.
Crown it with originality
That burns with careless discernment,
And amaze the limpid
Familiarity of Time.'
After thus accounting
For an improbable situation,
Abandon the farce and shrewdly
Tiptoe across the stage,
Peering down at your feet
And mistaking their lean mysteries
For possibilities in syncopation.
Having thus emulated
The tension of a psycho-analyst
Who confuses routines with causes,
Suddenly kneel upon the floor,
Limp with the collapse of sightless longing,
And raise one hand to the sky
While clenching the other at your audience,
Thus expressing the thoughtful perturbations
Of Occidental religions."
I think nobody can fail to see the superior sweep and go of the
poem about Picasso. This to me is the most evident virtue of Mr
Cummings' work; and if it appears a superficial virtue, that is prob-
ably the fault of my description. For the quality which I am try-
ing to specify includes at least the force and ease of the school-
books and perhaps as well their unity and clearness. It seems
also to place Mr Cummings, in this one respect at any rate, among
the very good poets.
When one has given one's ideas about the intentions of a con-
temporary and has tried to show in how far his performance carries


88.
ANNOUNCEMENT
themi out, there remains little but to paraphrase and quote him.
:Qne;can; of course, name the dead poets and the living industrial
magnates or politicians with whom he appears to have most in com-
mon, and one can be wrong; or one can make a list of his innova-
tions. But not in an announcement. ... A lively criticism would
begin to come up with him in about seventy years.
1 Cf. Off the Shoals, by John Dos Passos, The Dial, July 1922; Syrinx,
by Gorham B. Munson, Secession No. 5, July 1923; The Perfumed
Paraphrase of Death, by W. C. Blum, THE DIAL, January 1924; Flau-
bert and Flaubart, by J. Middleton Murry, The Yale Review, January
1924; Prophets of the New Age, by George Bond, Dallas Morning
News, May 24, 1925; First Glance, by Mark Van Doren, The Nation,
July 8, 1925.






DANS LA CAMPAGNE DE NICE. BY HENRI MATISSE



THE NDIAL
:ITO
VW
V
M
OXX)
FEBRUARY 1926
FIRST YEARS
BY MAX ROBIN
M HEIR first meeting was in Libau, a city of fat Jews and
fakirs. At least such was the impression one carried away
after a short visit. Who knows that it would not be worse after
a long one—unless it really be true of human nature that it does
in time, accommodate itself to anything. Our young travellers at
once became friends.
"So you are from Chernigov?” asked Jack, quite startled and
envious.
“Yes, from Chernigov," affirmed David proudly.
“I am from a much smaller place near Kiev."
“Kiev! That's a splendid city. In the heart of the Ukraine.
Were you ever in Kiev ?"
"I-never. Oh, yes—” Jack caught himself. “I was there
once! I was but a child. I had broken an arm, and my mother
took me to Kiev. They have the best doctors there."
“So I have heard. And did you see the Dnieper ?!!
"What a question! I lived near the Dnieper, and used to pass
by its shore every day.”
"And your town has schools and a high school ?" continued
David, his curiosity unquenched.
“We have two schools. Before I left, there was talk of build-
ing also a high school. Some even discussed the probability of a
railway line running through our town in the near future.”
"They need such things in Russia,” remarked David thought-
fully. “And your education was received privately ?”
"I graduated from school,” said Jack. “After that I gave lesa
sons. For three years I was a teacher. Teaching ruined my
sons
was


90
FIRST YEARS
health. The pupils exhausted my patience. A hard life in Russia,
but an honest life. For us Tolstoyans—”
“Tolstoyans!” interrupted David in a mocking tone.
"Why, yes, I am a Tolstoyan," maintained the other in his
innocence. “Aren't you?”
"I?— Of course not! Well, no wonder—you are from a small
town,” muttered David generously. “But weren't there any so-
cialists in your locality ?”
“There were, some.”
“And still you remained a Tolstoyan?- Strange.”
“Well, I believe in truth and love,” offered the boy from the
small town.
"Oh, truth and love!” flung back the Chernigovian. “These
are no more than attractive phrases. How will you free our
peasant with such sugared dishes, can you perhaps tell me?"
"So you are a revolutionist ?” timidly rejoined the other, his
deferential manner betraying the jealous fondness which had been
inspired by a revelation so absolutely exalted and staggering.
“Of course I am a revolutionist!" asserted David. “Do you
think that I would be going to America otherwise? They had
me expelled from high school, the police persecuted me every-
where, and this one recourse was left to me."
“And you have been arrested, too?" Jack was now looking at
his friend with a regard fairly worshipful.
“Arrested! I spent weeks in prison. I was the leader of my
high school.” Here David, becoming all flurried, pulled out his
trunk from under the bed. And having produced and untied a
daintily wrapped parcel of photographs, he modestly explained:
“This is I, still in high school uniform-it was during those first
years at school. You won't see me in uniform later. Here is
one! See, I am the only student with a civilian suit on.”
“And they allowed you!" Jack stood with patient, concen-
trated attention contemplating a picture post-card of a group of
young students, David, the civilian, prominently in their midst,
as they all sat with serious and unruffled mien against a wretchedly
painted canvas background of a tree near water.
When the ship moved from the harbour and the two boys saw
Russia for the last time, a silent tugging rent their hearts; they were
too dazed to speak. America—what sort of place was it? It was
.
.


MAX ROBIN
91
ruled by a president, but he, being elected by everybody, did not
amount to much. New York was of course a city of many fac-
tories—of jobs. But what was it like? How would they be re-
ceived there? A new world-new people—the air different, said
to be injurious to one's health. ... They were in constant dread
of the inevitablem of the unknown.
Meanwhile Russia was receding. A precious idealism was going
from them a mysticism of outlook-a subtlety of craving-a
seriousness of purpose it was all being left, rooted there in that
fertile black soil. Distressed with home-sickness, they were all the
time seen together, watching the far-away ocean, talking-ex-
changing confidences of home and friends—confidences even more
cherishable pertaining to noble acts of idealism and vows of early
love. And the ship was carrying them farther and farther from
home. The ship was carrying them fast, gracefully, swiftly dash-
ing through the waves, plowing ahead tirelessly in its exalted
triumph over this weird, unchanging wilderness, rushing furiously,
madly somewhere, somewhere—an unknown, unimaginable, and
terrifying somewhere it was, lying where the ocean ends and at a
point beyond which a ship can race no more.
as a
David had an uncle here, Jack his father, but David was dis-
appointed in his uncle, and Jack could no more agree with his
father. Plain people these “Americans” were. They understood
nothing of the drooping discontent and sensitive alertness which
gripped the two youthful arrivals at the start.
His uncle had allowed David two weeks in which to "green"
himself out—this, in accordance with his ideas, being the average
time required; and his aunt, who generally fared well enough with-
out a newspaper, now began to bring up The Morning Journal
regularly every day.
“Wanted—a boy in a butcher shop. Four dollars a week.
May be green.'” Here she would look up. “Well, David, did
you hear? For work in a butcher shop they pay four dollars a
week in America. Better than in Russia, ah? And the boy may
even be green. Not bad.”
“Yes, not bad,” David would mutter, feeling sick at heart,
utterly crushed and disillusioned about this life which he found
in America—about uncle and aunt as well.
Sa


92
FIRST YEARS
Yes, in Russia it was different, different-who cared to deny!
And as he walked along the unfamiliar streets of the East Side,
repulsively littered, a stench that rose through the heat stifling one
and making life intolerable, the boy, acutely self-conscious in his
abandonment and hardly able to see his way, felt an unrelenting
hatred for it all-all! The sights, everywhere so monstrously ugly
one was hard pressed indeed to conceive of anything more wretched
-with people seeming not to mind !-provoked his resentment
still further. So this was America! And would he, in the
manner of the rest of these immigrants, some day also resign him-
self to a state of contentment amid such surroundings ? Un-
thinkable! He had already decided to go back. He would look
for work. Then, by living sparingly, he would in a short while
manage to save enough money to take him back. But he would
set his friends' minds right about America; let them know.
Jack lived only a few blocks away. What an irreplaceable
friend he was! But how stupid to be called Jack! Everything,
even his name, must one abandon on coming here. What a
calamity and folly it is to change one's country altogether!
“My father thinks I am still the same as when he left me four
years ago," complained Jack. “He is of the old kind. Consider,
he thinks that because I am his son he can do with me anything
he wants. He threatened to have me sent back.”
"Let him. At home they must think that we are already estab-
lished here and that your father will be the next president. If
they had a look at these streets— And where did you get this
suit ?"
"My father got it for me. He went about among his friends
and brought together a whole collection of old shoes, trousers, ties,
and what-not. Our little bedroom looks like a junk shop. It goes
against me to put on these worn clothes. They may have belonged
to an invalid—who knows? But my father insists that I wear
them. I wonder what he takes me for. You are better off; you
wear what you want and do as you like. You at least have
freedom.”
"Freedom? We are both prisoners here. But wait! I have
hit on a plan. We must find work and live somewhere together.
Do you know that we could get along on twenty-five cents a day?"
“I think that twenty-five cents would not be enough.”


MAX ROBIN
93
"Wait. Wait. Let me show you. They have a fruit here
called banana. Have you tried it yet ?''
“Yes, but I don't like it very much.”
“What—you don't like bananas! I am surprised. They are
like our soft Russian pears—if you still remember them. For a
cent you get two. You can rely on me to select them-I know
when they are ripe. A piece of bread, a quarter of a loaf, costs
three cents. Bread for three cents and bananas for two will make
an excellent meal. We will not be hungry. We will put away a
few dollars every week, and when we have saved up in the neigh-
bourhood of a hundred, we go back.”
"But think how long it would take.”
“Not long. In half a year we ought to have the required
amount. Do you realize what it will mean then? In seven
months—seven months—we can be in Russia !”
The friends proceeded in silence. They had forgotten the heat,
nor did they see the streets and tenements, the intensity of their
longing having obliterated all else. They felt homeless, cheerless,
out of place here. Thus it must be with a young tree transplanted
from one climate into another; the sun shines colder, people's
eyes seem harsher, and the new soil is like a grave.
The two had managed to move out-Jack from his father and
David from his uncle, and had taken up residence-well, it may
readily be surmised where they had taken up residence. Certainly
not in Brooklyn, nor in Manhattan, not even in Harlem. Of the
five boroughs of New York, the Bronx is perhaps the most pic-
turesque. Take Brooklyn. A fine place it is, with any number
of trees, genuine green trees, straggling or stretching away end-
lessly. Then there are houses in Brooklyn, small houses, one as
exact and monotonous a reproduction of the other as to-day is of
yesterday. Brooklyn can also boast of a sky; and the streets,
especially those sparsely populated, are clean and ever quiet. You
walk amid this quietude. It's midday, spring. A large school-
house looms in the distance. You approach. And what do you
hear? The strains of a piano, joined by children's voices, chanting
the song of the mulberry bush. You stand listening; and it is
long ere you bethink yourself to stir and resume your interrupted
rambling. But Brooklyn, as everyone knows, includes cemeteries


94
FIRST YEARS
within its environs. And while cemeteries may be proper as a
repose for the dead, their proximity is not quite propitious for the
living. Hence, the sombre, grave-yard aspect of Brooklyn. A
borough set aside for the dead. Brooklyn has become synonymous
with the idea of the eternal home: “By and by Brookileen!” or-
“Oh, I'll rest in Brooklyn!"
Now the Bronx contains no cemeteries—except for some scat-
tered miniatures; and these have been tenderly preserved and con-
verted finally into— parks”! The Bronx is young, smiling, cheer-
ful. It is ever animated, New York's human borough, where the
sun shines always bright, where charming colours always glow,
of an evening, on the streets.
It was the Bronx, then, that the boys had chosen for their new
abode. They lived in a small room in an old unpainted house on
Union Avenue, their joint rent being five dollars a month. David
had a job—a job with a newspaper, and was paid six dollars a
week. He had been offered seven, but insisted on six. The
newspaper was poor, and he was not the one to take undue advan-
tage of people's kindness.
His duties, aside from being manifold and intricate, were, ac-
cording to his own assertions, singularly interesting. He had to
sweep the entire two-room establishment which the plant occupied,
run errands, correct manuscripts, and, occasionally, write something,
under an assumed name. Yet, he found time to converse with the
two other members of the staff-sometimes with the editor him-
self, whose salary was as considerable as it was conspicuous—
fifteen dollars a week. Unhappy man, this last-belying his
true nature-all his life constrained to go about with a face whose
positively unalterable aspect of grim ferociousness closely resembled
that of Peter the Great.
Jack was happy for his friend's good fortune-his heart too
big for jealousy. Nor was it long until he also had found
something to do. A would-be jeweller, he was earning a dollar
a week more than the prospective newspaper man, the sum of their
combined salaries comprising an odd figure.
It was David's part to prepare supper. Every day on his way
from work, he stopped in a delicatessen, and bought-not two
cents' worth of bananas—but a stale loaf of rye bread and a quar-
ter of a pound of corned beef. Entering the little room on Union
Avenue, he hastily threw off his coat; after which he stood still,


MAX ROBIN
95
2S
undecided, a wild happiness pervading his entire being and intoxi-
cating his senses. He was young, and in an ecstasy over something,
something mysterious, something enchanting and promising. He
leaped with joy. He sang. He admitted to himself that he was
crazy—but what of that? Then tucking up his sleeves with gusto,
he set himself seriously to his task of sandwich-making.
At this, his mastery was unchallenged; for, aside from being
neat, he contrived to turn out no less than eight sandwiches
from his fifteen-cent purchase. He picked out a double sheet from
a newspaper, which Jack and he had already read from the first
line to the last, and spread it correctly over the diminutive table.
He placed the sandwiches in the middle, a glass of water at either
end, and, with the pride and fastidiousness of a mistress, set the
chairs in position, one on either side. This completed his task, and
he sat down to wait. He was hungry, having eaten nothing since
noon, and then only an apple; but patiently he sat and waited.
And as he waited, he gazed with ravishment upon the enticing
table which he had laid, his ear on the alert for the sound of Jack's
steps.
Jack came late-not before seven o'clock. He worked till
six, and it was an hour before he reached Union Avenue by sub-
way. In his place down-town the air was not of the purest, nor
could the hours be called short, both of which factors sufficed to
drain the boy's cheeks of their once robust tint; and now that
they were nearly sallow, his cheeks had begun to cave in, with the
Slav bones protruding in emotional prominence. A change had
also been effected in Jack's eyes: a kindly native element still
lingered there; but gone was the freshness, the intensity, the un-
bounded faith which had been mirrored in them; they were dimmed,
their expression was uneasy, as if in dread of someone; Jack, in
his early years of youth, was fading away; and David, who fared
somewhat better-David was full of anxiety.
The bananas and quarter of a loaf of bread which he had once
been reluctant to accept as a diet, now constituted Jack's daily
lunch. Four cents it cost him-never more; but still he had appe
tite. Every ounce must have been converted into energy and
blood—or how else could he subsist?
To work he ran, not, like David, out of buoyancy, reaching his
shop-shop, shop, shop, detestable term-barely in time to avoid
an argument from the shrewd, nerve-racked boss, who, with his
10
me
was.


96
FIRST YEARS
hal
tallow complexion and hope-forsaken, smile-less eyes, might have
been mistaken for a Chinaman. The work was brutally tedious,
while the men seemed to try to outdo one another in being dis-
agreeable. And, occasionally, as he sat there, his mind wandered
back home to the woods and orchards of his native Ukraine. What
a contrast was this—this senseless manipulation with his fingers,
these bloodless, mirthless, close-shaven faces, the dust, the walls-
what a contrast, this dingy prison, to that broad, mothering nature
he had left at home. . . . He sat, looking out wistfully—a sombre,
immovable wall blocking his vision, his soul rent by the shrill re-
ports of a policeman's whistle and the incessant blowing of auto-
mobile horns. The boy who swept up in the morning refused to
sprinkle the floor, and all ridiculed the foreigner for insisting upon
such routine; so the foreigner gave up insisting, although the dust
penetrated his lungs, tickling them until he coughed. And the
boss treated him no better than a servant, never raising his pay
more than fifty cents at a time. But out of his seven dollars
Jack managed to put away three every week, till, when the middle
of the month was reached and he had twelve and a half dollars
saved, he went to the post office and sent the whole amount home
to his mother. There, on twenty-five rubles, and without other
assistance from her husband, she kept an almost comfortable house.
Jack's father was a presser at cloaks; cloaks, as it is universally
known, come in seasons; and the presser was at the time busy wait-
ing for his season, which was not due to begin before another three
months. The support of the family having thus fallen to his
hands, the boy-immigrant could afford little for himself, and he
still wore the misfitting suit which his father had collected for him.
The material was coarse; in the summer heat it became drenched
with sweat and heavy; yet he wore it, patiently, week-days and
Sundays.
On his way home Jack did not run. Overworked, underfed,
overheated, his nerves severely strained, he walked drooping with
exhaustion.
David heard him coming. In that house only he climbed the
stairs with slow, laborious steps.
“Jack!” he cried, out on the top landing to greet him.
And in his usual flat voice Jack answered, “Yes.”
David, holding the door open, came in after him. “You are


MAX ROBIN
97
wet-I'll take off your coat. Drink a glass of water-wash your-
self, Jack. I have made up the sandwiches."
The jeweller made a vain attempt to smile, and was powerless
to say anything. He was irritable, hungry, miserable.
The sink was in a corner of the hall, and he went out to wash
up-David following him like a mother, anxious to help and not
knowing how.
He offered him the towel, saying, “Here, use this end—the other
end is mine."
“Thanks, thanks.” Now Jack could smile.
"How your damned boss is exploiting you!" With brotherly
affection David stood contemplating his friend.
"It's all right—it's all right," the exploited one muttered, his
voice still too frail to be heard above a whisper.
The last rays of the sun pierced the neat chamber. A soothing
breeze blew upon Jack's face, and he closed his eyes in content-
ment. With his sleeves rolled up above the elbow, he had all the
appearances of a youthful proletarian.
Thus sat Jack and rested, waiting for his weariness to pass away,
as it did on other evenings. A scent of grass was wafted in with
the evening breeze, but it departed ere one could well inhale it.
The lamp across the street flared up. The day had gone; night
was beginning. Another night. And still our young friends did
not stir. It was good tranquilly to follow one's thoughts by the
light of a street lamp near an open window. A girl would laugh
out, a man, in passing, would give utterance to a weird exclama-
tion; then, once more, there was silence.
Jack felt tired, and as a true friend David must stay in and
feel tired with him. To-night they will not even speak of Russia,
or home, though David may impart to him briefly the news of
the day. It was not in vain that he was connected with a news
paper, and news-news especially from abroad—was something
one could not dispense with. It was ten o'clock in three minutes
rather than three hours.
ew
Sunday was a good day for the boys. David took his bath, then
they had breakfast; after which, their belts buckled tight, ties
clipped in the centre, hair combed back straight, and their trousers
half concealed by the table over which they stood posing, they


98
FIRST YEARS
looked youthful, even handsome, in the mirror hung on the oppo-
site wall. They were flushed with delight at the figures which
they cut in their own eyes. If they could only spare the money
for a photograph! There would be something worth keeping for
the future!
David had the papers of the week neatly arranged and waiting,
and they sat down to read. They read and discussed the political
problems of Russia, rarely contradicting each other; for Jack had
long parted ways with Tolstoy, and now he too had come to see
that only by means of the revolution would the salvation of Russia
be achieved.
A rain in the afternoon would keep them indoors. They would
sit near the window and watch the clouds—not those fantastic
storm-clouds that descend of a sudden upon the fair Ukraine.
They sat near the window and listened to the rain falling on
deserted Union Avenue. Thoughts swam up—tantalizing reveries.
What a change since last year! Russia—America. Truly a night-
mare. But at least they were cognizant of this one benefit: they
had achieved a state of independence undreamed of in the past.
They had made themselves self-supporting; they lived as they
chose, alone and unhindered. The struggle had been hard, dubious,
and was not yet over; but they were fairly resolved to go through
with it.
The rain stopped, the sky cleared, and the sun looked out timidly
on Union Avenue. From the houses came the children, boys in
knickerbockers, so enviably at home. Young men hurried to have
their suits pressed. There was animation. People were every-
where emerging, bright and cheerful again. Prospect Avenue was
calling: fashionable restaurants with alluring lights and chocolate-
covered cakes on display; glaring picture-houses, exhilarating ice-
cream parlours, Bronx Park, neighbours, friends, visits, calls.
Also cheered, our disconsolate foreigners combed their hair, gave
their clothes an extra brushing, and escaped into the street, wild
with the spirit of release. The little garden adjoining their house
beamed in the late sunshine. The inevitable sparrows were
everywhere, twittering artlessly in their gladness. Ungifted birds!
And there, half stooped amid the shrubs, was the red Irish owner,
his daughter above, looking out of the window. A glance at her-
and the boys sped on.


MAX ROBIN
99
They encountered more “American” girls—a species with which
they were as yet dreadfully shy; the girls' escorts, fresh shaven and
smartly attired, also disconcerted them. But in being together
their natural confidence was soon restored, and it was with disdain
that they walked about, making sport of the passers-by, jestingly
jostling their way past them. They went to Bronx Park, then
back, the lightness of their hearts unaffected.
The day was drawing to an end. The restaurants were busy,
though not boisterously gay. On such late afternoons the Bronx
had about it a peculiar calm, a tranquil serenity, a cleanliness and
charm unequalled anywhere in the city; perchance a trace of it,
but no more than a trace-has survived even to this day. Leisure
was in those days more extensively enjoyed and people were better
skilled in matters that have since lost a good deal of their sig-
nificance. Eating had been elevated to the dignity of an art,
which the younger set was wont to practise with decorous propriety.
The styles varied. One would take a bite, take it with the accus-
tomed precision of a man of superior breeding, then follow it by a
peep into the paper, which seemed to complete the desired effect.
Another style, more popular perhaps, consisted of assuming the
essential exterior aspects of a philosopher; the philosopher sits
and eats reflectively, as though immersed in weighty deliberation.
And as in all the arts, there was here also the rebellious, futuristic
group, eating in a detached manner, the manner of the absolute
superman, to whom such an occupation, an encumbering inheritance
from the jungle days of man and destined to be discarded in the
not too distant future, presented itself in the nature of an unavoid-
able drudgery.
In these restaurants men were scrupulous about numerous par-
ticulars—carrying canes, removing hats, and the like-expecting,
of course, to have this accepted as proof of an aristocratic, lofty
bearing. Young men managed to look somewhat sunburned. They
had hair on their hands and colour in their cheeks. They were
neat, their shirts plain-white, which went becomingly with their
complexion. There were idealists, of various shades, still left
among them. In spite of desperate exertions to forget Russian,
English was spoken with a pronounced accent. Bit by bit
these former immigrants were being dandified, polished, their
native ruddy coarseness gradually wearing away, a general irre-


100
FIRST YEARS
mediable flabbiness taking its place. Here were doctors in the
making—real estate dealers, business men, and shopkeepers. Cer-
tain things, cherished as sacred until recently, were being
abandoned; freedom, in its highest, most inviolable conception,
was being forfeited. And with it went the sweet torments, the
terrific unrealizable cravings of the soul. Sacrifice, sacrifice, sac-
rifice. A narrow fitting in, an incongruous readaptation, a brutal
process of elimination of some of the fittest-a crushing, a throt-
tling—then the survival of some of the unfittest, with, rarely,
a hero, who resists, who refuses to yield up his identity, and who
remains for ever without a home, without a language, without a
definite cultural background, without friends or the means of sub-
sistence-America in the making! The melting pot!
And behold now! A new class of men. These were losing their
hair, but they had begun to manicure their finger-nails. They had
discarded cigarettes, which seemed to go naturally with them, in
favour of cigars, which they hardly knew how to smoke. Blue
suits, protruding cuffs, rimless spectacles, spats. Coins jing-
ling in the right-hand pocket of the trousers, bills tucked away
securely in the left. A bank-book in reserve. And, quite in pro-
portion with the rise of their material welfare, some had started
to expand also physically. A current generation, commercialized,
corrupted, making the world safe for the next-bidding fair to be
a retrogression of the old.
For the present, at any rate, the skinnier and more romantic ele-
ment was still predominant in the restaurants of the Bronx.
And what would Jack and David not have given for the privilege
of eating in one of these "fashionable” restaurants! The lights,
the service, the food—but-those places were inaccessible to them.
Some day though—when their means permitted .
Side by side and speechless they sauntered through the Bronx.
An after-rain fragrance in the air. Small houses, reassuringly
old-fashioned. A light, subdued by a shade, the interior trans-
formed into a fantastic chamber. A phonograph playing. A
girl at the piano. Now a violin suffering at the hands of a be-
ginner. Crude notes, interspersed with sparkling bits of talent:
the pathos of belated anxiety compensating for the woeful lack of
finish. Then silence once more. The trees rustling in the dark.
The sky distant, dreamy, the stars tiny and deep-set. Andsud-


MAX ROBIN
101
denly—a voice, a voice on the phonograph, high-strung and limpid
as the air—the voice mounting-mounting upward, toward the sky,
from its invisible source. ...
“Pagliacci”-David mysteriously whispers.
Pagliacci!
"What does that mean?”
“Sh–I'll tell you later."
They walked on, David explaining to his friend the meaning
of “Pagliacci”-imparting to him his entire stock of knowledge
about opera. He had heard some in Chernigov. Chernigov was a
big city. But opera-
"It must be more interesting than the theatre," ventured Jack
in his eagerness.
“More interesting than the theatre!" David's tone was startled,
but devoid of derision. “Why, of course it is more interesting.
Here you have singing together with acting. Instead of speaking
their parts, the actors sing them. And the voices you hear! You
are easily transported. Chaliapin was once in Chernigov and we
all turned out to hear him. Ah, Chaliapin! Do you know,
when he sings he has his eyes directed toward the balconies, where
those who have pawned their coats to buy a ticket, sit.”
"So you have heard Chaliapin!" marvelled Jack.
"No, I did not actually hear him," David naïvely confessed, his
manner at once modified. “The house had been sold out way in
advance. It happened during the winter, and yet there were not
a few who gladly parted with their coats in order to hear him.”
"I wish we could hear an opera."
“We will. Wait- Later, when we begin to earn more money,
we will go often. Here they have Caruso.”
“Yes. But he can't be as good as Chaliapin.”
"We will hear him too."
“That would be wonderful!"
They were inspired by the visions—the golden dreams which
their youth spun for the future-spun out of their own souls.
Letters were coming frequently from Russia which the boys
would show each other. More striking than any were those of
David's sister.
"She is the most remarkable person you have ever met," observed


102
FIRST YEARS
David sadly. “She does not sing, talks little, and has not a single
friend. Even I used to neglect her, probably because I did not
understand her. Now it is different, and I am sorry.”
“Does she want to come here?” asked Jack.
"No. She never writes to me about it."
"I can readily imagine her type," Jack reflected. "Such people
are rare. Still, Russia has produced them. How well Turgenev
and Chekhov portrayed her kind.”
David sighed. “And what about your folks ?” he asked.
“Nothing new-so far. The situation is very bad. My father
will never go back. He is heavily in debt, and his season is nearly
over, but you can't tear him away from his America. I don't
know what to do. Take my oldest sister. She is somewhat like
your own. Ask her to come? Then what? The shop—what else?
And she is such a delicate girl.”
“No, no, that would not do,” David picked up, objecting
vehemently. “Consider the average working-girl in America, as
you meet her in the street. She is a petty, frivolous being. You
could never fall in love with her. Why? Because she is without
enthusiasm, without faith or an ideal-because she has none of
that secret daring and calm determination which motivate every
act of the Russian girl all through her brief career. Here nothing
is concrete. No one bothers to take even his own life seriously.
There are no foundations of the past, nor is there an outlook
into the future. Children all-overgrown children, fed constantly
on sensational trifles; hurrying thoughtlessly, uninspired, with-
out ever looking around; forming no permanent attachments,
there being hardly any among them capable of profound emotions
or of devotion. So the years would drag on, and what-if we
stay—can we find to do with ourselves? We will want to live
--and won't know what to live for. We could only drift.
And that is not for us—at least not here. If we must drift, let it
be in Russia.”
“True-true!” Jack expressed himself as being in complete ac-
cord with his friend's views. His mind was made up. In the
heat of enthusiasm all problems, however vexatious they had ap-
peared, seemed soluble. He would go back-back to Russia
and ...
It was a year and a half after the boys had come here, that


MAX ROBIN
103
the remainder of Jack's family followed, for ever parting with
their little place in the Ukraine. Thus, once again, had the
enigmatically magnetic force exercised by the masked, mantled,
imperturbable monster, America, prevailed-prevailed first against
vigorous, determined opposition, then against a weakened state of
tormenting indecision which had finally yielded to passivity and
resignation.
Jack had changed his place, and his pay now was eleven dollars
a week-round weeks, pale weeks, endless, monotonous, blunting
weeks. David, still with his paper, was earning nine. Twenty
dollars for the two enabled the boys to live in tolerable comfort
even if Jack did feel called upon to assist in the upkeep of his
home down-town.
And on a Sunday they treated themselves to the once promised
luxury of stepping into a restaurant of the second class, to begin
with. Once, however, unable to master the temptation, they tried
one of the very best. It proved beyond their means; nevertheless
they went a second and a third time.
They would come in and sit down, preferably at a table nearest
to the door. They would sit, eat absently, and say not a word.
They looked unhappy, strangely suspicious of one another, one
seeming to be in the other's way. And, at appropriate intervals,
now David, now Jack would cast a furtive glance toward the door
There, on a high stool, facing the complicated fort-like cash
register and effectually barring the exit, a girl was situated; and,
if exterior manifestations truthfully reflect a woman's heart, she
was not giving anybody on earth or in the restaurant-least of all
these two youthful nonentities—so much as a casual thought. At
her it was that our aesthetic diners kept directing their ill-received
attention.
As the weeks—the Sundays rather—wore on, the girl, with a
remarkable degree of success, which she seemed to achieve with the
least expenditure of effort, persisted in ignoring the obstinate,
soon grown desperate, attentions of her admirers. She was im-
perturbable notwithstanding the new suits and hats which they had
recently donned, with the intention of attracting her. She was
a plump girl: beautiful, plump, in every respect desirable—withal,
unattainable.
On coming out, the boys would not speak. Still incommunica-


104
FIRST YEARS
tive, they went home. And for the rest of that day-Sunday—
their relations would be strained. The hours would be dawdled
away, and they would feel foolish, at a loss what to do with
themselves.
Once David winked at the cashier. He had paid her, she had
rung up, giving him his change; and now she turned away her
head. Just that—turned away her head. He did not exist for
her any longer. Twice in succession David then hazarded some
rather careless remarks to her. In his desperation he had decided
to stake all on his boldness, in which he had implicit confidence.
She deigned to favour him with a sort of response—a glare so cold
and crushing that he was glad to be gone, while Jack—an inno-
cent onlooker—followed him, pale, toothpick in mouth, out to the
street. He blew his nose violently to regain some colour, of which
David, blushing to his ears, had too much as it was. They hur-
ried, Jack barely managing to keep up with his friend's pace-till,
having reached what they regarded as safe territory, they gave
vent to round after round of accumulated laughter. And never
again did they return to that restaurant.
Their adventures, however, had only begun.
David had had the good fortune to discover an ice-cream par-
lour on Prospect Avenue. There was a goodly number of such
places throughout the Bronx even then, as one may well imagine;
but in this favoured one, a girl, a Greek, a living Venus, was
working; and it was to acquaint him with the staggering charms
of his latest prodigy, that he escorted his friend there. Jack,
too, was captivated.
"But what's the use ?” he let fall moodily. “You'll never have
any success with her anyway."
"I don't care if I don't," retorted David.
Jack felt sorry for him. David had begun to act queerly. In
bed he would not speak, and in the morning he would stare list-
lessly, crack his fingers and sigh, or snort with sudden rage. Nar-
rowly missed by a shoe or some other handy missile hurled at him
aimlessly by Jack, he would at length be provoked to laughter;
but it was not the laughter of old. The boys avoided confiding
in each other about certain matters which they now held to be too
intimate.
Returning from work one evening, Jack espied David on guard


MAX ROBIN
105
in front of the ice-cream parlour, his figure noticeably dejected.
Jack turned into another street, then waited in their room on Union
Avenue. After what seemed like an hour's waiting, he went down,
and cautiously going past the store, saw his friend sitting inside.
Another half hour must have elapsed before he finally emerged,
and with shuffling gait, his hands in his pockets, started out, in no
definite direction. Jack overtook him.
“Where have you been?”
“Oh, I don't know."
"I waited and waited. I thought that something had happened
to you."
"Well, nothing happened.”
He took David under the arm, pulling and tripping him all the
way home.
“What, you here!” exclaimed David, when, one Sunday morn-
ing, shortly after, he surprised Jack patrolling the enchanted place
on Prospect Avenue.
"I have been here-looking for you," he faltered.
"For me!" David laughed out in his full throat-with Jack
soon joining in. "I am afraid she will drive both of us crazy,"
he added, himself in no danger of being driven crazy just then.
“I have never seen one with features as perfect as hers," Jack
offered.
"I know-you don't have to tell me. And you used to blame
me for spending hours here looking at her.”
“I am not blaming you for anything and keep quiet!"
"What are we going to do ?” asked David. “Take turns parad-
ing in front of the parlour?"
“Not I. I'll never go there again—never!” There was indeed
firmness in Jack's voice.
"Look out you don't come over while I am not watching."
"Well, I have given you my word. But what about yourself ?”
As heretofore the friends sat together in their room in the eve-
nings, finding it dreary to spend the time alone.
TOO
ve-
Once David came in all flurried.
"Jack, I have a surprise for you for this evening!” he announced,
as he Aung his hat aside and dropped heavily on the bed.
“What is it?' enquired Jack.


106
FIRST YEARS
“Sit down, young man don't be in such a hurry," counselled
David, to keep him in suspense. “You think I am fooling you?
Yes?"
"Who said that you are fooling me?"
David seemed to give a moment to honest reflection—then
brought out: "No, I don't see how I could tell you.”
"Now I am positive that you are fooling me,” exclaimed Jack.
David: “You know that I am a good friend of yours—the
only one you have—so why should I torture you for nothing? I
am not going to say anything except this: go and array yourself
in your choicest outfit. Oh–I forgot that you have no more than
one. Well, it will have to do. But at least, take a good shine, and
I think that the barber had better give you a shave. Believe me
you will thank me for this—"
"I have it!” cried Jack. "It's a girl.”
“A girl ?” David was impervious. “Do you think that for a
girl I would ask you to make these many preparations? I am sur-
prised!” And his secret he did not reveal.
Evening came. Our friends sat primed as for a carnival. The
atmosphere was tense, and the hearts of both throbbed in anticipa-
tion. They were finally at a point where they forbore to exchange
a word. Every few minutes David was up peering through the
window.
At last, after a glance into the street, he threw up his hands
and fled wildly out of the room. Jack remained motionless, pale,
shaking in every limb.
Presently David's voice was heard, scarcely recognizable, so
complaisant it was. The door opened and a girl, a beautiful girl-
an apparition—appeared. Jack's panic forthwith increased. He
felt himself without support, everything within him giving way;
while the girl stood motionless, her manner penetrating, fearless.
Then she stepped forward-forward—and David, radiating hap-
piness, closed the door noiselessly after her. Under his arm he car-
ried a mandolin; and no man could have looked more important.
“My friend—” he sputtered rapturously— "Sonia—Jack.”
The girl held out her hand. But Jack did not stir; did not
twitch a muscle or wink an eye.
Crushed by his friend's confusion, David still retained sufficient
presence of mind to interject, apologetically: “I forgot-Jack does


MAX ROBIN
107
not believe in shaking hands.” This helped somewhat; but of the
original Jack a mere shadow had survived.
"All right-let us sit down,” proposed David, acting ostenta-
tiously the part of host. "Sit on the bed, Sonia. Jack and I will
occupy these chairs.”
“Excellent! Now the mandolin ”
"Can you play the mandolin?" It was Jack himself actually
speaking. He was coming back to life, determined to make up for
the disaster of the beginning.
"A little.” Sonia gave a barely perceptible nod, favouring him,
individually, with a brief but significant look.
"Oh, she is modest!" caught up David. “She is one of the best
players you ever heard.”
“Don't you believe him!” Sonia protested, her lowered gaze
at once whimsical, caressing, and suppliant. She was a dark-com-
plexioned, bright-eyed, mysterious-looking girl, tall—and not at
all plump!
Sonia was in no haste about showing off her talents.
“Such a cute room you have!” she said-how, if not childishly.
“It's not very nice.”
“No, I like it,” assured Sonia.
The conversation was going on in English, which the girl spoke,
as she did everything else, to perfection. No trace of the foreigner
in her.
“Am I embarrassing you?" she asked, turning suddenly to Jack.
The latter had by this time almost fully recovered. He sat
up, embarrassed indeed, but not understanding what the question
implied. And again David, more alert, came to his rescue.
"Please don't use big words for us,” he pleaded.
As she picked up the mandolin, Sonia, with a glance at David,
remarked: “You have a nice friend.” She had been tuning up
her instrument inconspicuously. Her frame was bent, her whole
being concentrated. She was preparing, listening. Then, follow-
ing a few impetuous, preliminary twangs over all the strings of
the mandolin, the performance began.
She played long. And neither Jack nor David stirred. For
their eyes to have met, however accidentally, would have been an
act of desecration. So they sat, gazing distractedly, hopelessly-
while Sonia played on and on.


108
FIRST YEARS
n
Jack retained his ponderous attitude after the music had ceased.
Not so David. He was up with a start; and confronting Sonia,
he demanded, gruffly, scornfully, if not savagely: “What was it?"
Sonia, herself intoxicated, could not speak. She murmured
fortunately loud enough to make herself heard: “The Mad Scene
from Lucia.”
And while David, still on his feet and as imperious as a marshal
in the field, continued beside himself with ecstasy, Sonia, without
offering him time for respite, in an unaltered voice of solemnity
and fatigue, pronounced: “It will be enough for to-day.”
“What!” It must have been the severest shock which the young
man had absorbed in all his turbulent lifetime.
He started to wrestle with Sonia, she endeavouring to lay the
mandolin aside, and he struggling to prevent her.
"NowSonia—really—” His breath gave out.
“I am not going to play any more—I don't think you care
very much "
“Now listen, Sonia-listen ”
“Then your friend does not care”
Sensing danger, Jack stood up. His word was awaited with
eagerness, and he was in no hurry to speak. Why not prolong a
moment of importance? When he at last delivered his opinion,
he delivered it thus: “I am not one of those who shout bravo.'
David knows. But your playing was the best I ever heard in my
life.”
The tension had been eased, and Sonia invited them to sit around
her. David was up like a dart. “Both of you—both " insisted
Sonia. “Come-quick! I am going to play The Wind Blows
Over the Ukraine.”
Her eyes were closed, her figure bent double between her two
worshippers; and there came now an inimitable recitation of the
sadness and sorrow drenching the rich soul of the Ukraine. Jack
plunged forward with his elbows on his knees, while David, less
noiseless than a fly, fell back, his fingers clasped around his neck,
staring enigmatically at the ceiling. And the strings wept and
wept at the touch of Sonia's fingers.
After this no one moved; and other songs, plaintive and melan-
choly, whimsical and gay, followed. The Russian restlessness, the
Russian yearning, the space, the echo, the thrill of fields, woods,


MAX ROBIN
109
and impenetrable black nights, were here reproduced in one eve-
ning. Tschaikowsky's Barcarella concluded the performance, and
Sonia surrendered her instrument to David, with the memorable
words, "Here—that's all.”
"Well, God, I thought I was in Russia !" averred Jack.
David raised himself a trifle. No countenance could have sur-
passed his in the despair and unhappiness which it reflected. Was
she observing him—was she? ...
Sonia, standing, appeared to have diminished in size. Her hair
was impressively ruffled.
“Take me home," she quavered.
At once David and Jack were for detaining her.
“I enjoyed your company exceedingly," she assured them.
"Now I must go.”
Once more they were alone in their room, sitting speechless in
the dark.
“I never expected such a surprise,” muttered Jack as he would
after an insult.
"'Isn't she a wonderful girl ?” asked David.
Jack made an abrupt assenting sound.
“Aren't you in love with her ?”
No response.
"You are afraid to admit it?" One could discern keen disap-
pointment in David's voice. "I don't know who would not fall
in love with Sonia.”
They spoke English, both convinced that it was Russian.
“Of whom does she remind you?” asked David.
“Well”
"Don't you feel as though you had seen her many times before-
on paintings somewhere? She has eyes like the Madonna. Ah!"
"With such girls,” in turn contributed Jack, “Turgenev's heroes
must have fallen in love. You remember Assia ?”
“Yes," echoed David reminiscently.
"Only our Russians can love!"
"I foresee a great friendship for the three of us.”
"How we need money!” There was desperation in Jack's tone.
"It's all right-it's all right.”
Until morning this went on. And that day the boys did not go
to work. ...


110
FIRST YEARS
US
Alone over a little round table in a cafeteria sat two men.
It was in Madison, Wisconsin. Jack was a senior in the Univer-
sity; while David, a junior in the University of Nebraska, had
come from Lincoln to Madison to visit Jack, who was staying for
the summer courses.
"Have you heard from Sonia lately?" asked David.
"Not since I saw her two years ago," Jack replied.
“How did she look then?”
“Not much changed. Do you remember the open-air meetings,”
continued Jack, “the operas, Central Park? I can still see our-
selves leaving the Metropolitan with Sonia. We had gone to hear
Caruso. It's winter. The streets are covered with a transparent
sheet of snow. We walk in silence, for there is something between
us—that undefinable something. In the distance looms the back
of the library, the lights out, the Slavonic room abandoned within.
We go through Bryant Park, pass the dignified bust of Washing-
ton Irving. Then we stop, all three. We still do not speak. Sonia
lifts her face to the sky, and flakes like butterflies flutter over
her eyes. ..."
“Do you recall that first meeting in our little room?'' put in
David. “And when we took a day off and went with Sonia to a
restaurant where they had Japanese lamps. I wonder if you
remember?"
“Go ahead,” murmured Jack.
“Well, it's nothing—nothing.” Again a pause-a sigh. “We
may again take a girl to a restaurant-to a concert-but what
would it mean to us now? There is no more the tremor, the fresh-
ness, the earnestness, the flourish. That is gone.”
Gone. They no more spoke of Sonia and the past that night.
Nor did they sleep. There were memories, unforgettable, like
shadows overcasting the mind.
“Where are you going after Nebraska ?” asked Jack.
"I don't know. I don't care to think of the future.”
“I'll be through next year, and I don't know where I am going
either."
"But that is not the most important thing. I wonder if it ever
occurred to you that there is no future for us?” David hesitated.
"Are we really Americans now, Jack? What use is there of deceiv-
ing ourselves? Are we Russian-are we anything?" He sighed.
OCC


MAX ROBIN
111
e
“We have lost our identity. We are without a country—without
a social complexion—without a background. To live, we must
continue alone, relying wholly on ourselves, always on ourselves
till our resources are exhausted. And that can't take long."
It was new and alarming, this realization. It opened old
wounds, never properly healed. It revealed that though apart,
our friends had been thinking, maturing, and suffering—undergoing
experiences which were almost identical.
Over them spread the sky, the stars brighter and more numer-
ous than on those long-vanished nights they had been in the habit
of spending in the Bronx. But since then so much had changed.
... Years of youth and struggle, dreams and bitter disenchant-
ment had been left behind. The present seemed circumscribed, the
past exuberant, rich, while the future, if it mattered at all, had
little to offer.
"I am sad, infinitely sad,” proceeded David. "Sometimes, alone
in some unknown small place, where I am to this day a stranger,
a foreigner, I go about the streets, tired, tired from doing what I
shouldn't be doing; I go about, till a gnawing discontent sets in
and takes possession of me. I feel a storm gathering within. I
am anxious, but not afraid. Then, in a fury, it breaks loose. I
clutch my head in despair-clutch till it hurts, darn it! I stand
motionless, my shoulders stooped, a chill racing through my body.
I am all contracted with pain. Tears swim into my eyes. I feel
myself forsaken. No friends—nothing to live for-my youth
gone—and I am aging, aging fast, even at this moment. . . . My
God, what am I seeking! Even these words, these emotions, are
wasted-everything wasted. . . . And later-later-I feel as
though I had plunged deep into my soul and emerged with my
hands dripping—dripping with blood, and clenching the roots of
my agony. You and I are derelicts, Jack, out of time, everywhere
out of place. Our kind is extinct. Don't think that Russia would
have any use for us now—and I don't care to serve as an engineer!
The world has been moving somewhere very rapidly; while we
we have stayed behind. We are dazed, exhausted. Well, we shall
continue this way, alone, unmarried, without goal or hope." He
paused. “And yet, why is it, that these forebodings, so gloomy,
hold no terror for me?"
In a strain somewhat more cheerful, Jack recounted his expe-


112
FIRST YEARS
riences. Those years before he had finally persuaded himself to
prepare for, and enter, college. He had tried everything—failed
in everything. He had emerged from one spiritual crisis-only to
be cast, or to drift into another. Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman,
Lincoln—had had their influence upon him. Fundamentally, how-
ever, he was what he had been always. The faith of his youth,
which had made him an adherent of Tolstoy, had returned.
Utterly disillusioned and fatigued, he had tottered on the brink of
suicide. Then, with his back to the wall, he had turned to,
dropped, and again turned to the Bible. He sought consolation
there and was at rest, profoundly at rest.
David understood; although in his time, in scattered, redeeming
periods, he had been more of a sceptic. He had tried not to take
life too seriously. If not this thing, let it be another. Why not be
in France, then in Germany and Italy? He possessed self-con-
fidence enough to sustain his mental fancies. And there, enveloped
in a wide cloak, he would pass, in rain, through storm and night,
from one place to another. Whom did he need? He would eat
here, read there-wander on, on.- Ah, years of romance and
strength-they pass and never come again. ...
About them was the night-a crowding, chilly, western night.
Madison-America. There was the future waiting for them-
bleak, cold, intimidating. Without destination, homeless and
alone, they would have to falter through it. And again, as in those
first years in their little room in the Bronx-a much altered borough
now—they sought to regain a confidence, a warmth, that would
brace them against the inevitable—but in vain.


CHEVAUX DE BOIS
BY SCOFIELD THAYER
We spit and curse and scratch and kiss
And bind our shoes with that and this.
We jig and brawl, so leg and thew
Will stand the gaff and see us through.
Lacking a Leg, we take up Wit,
Or Virtue, as next best to it.
We clutch for Gods, who generously
Turn tail, and leave us fancy-free.
We huddle after Fools that lead,
And duck from Truth, as well we need!
We make some talk of Sentiment
For making children is our bent.
If these light crackers as we die
We may not hear our hearts cry.
And loving anyhow is good
If flesh be young and heart be wood.
So let us dance only in rings
Since we are links in noble things!
And let us pipe the matchboard way
Kissing our hands at Night and Day!
And let us raise our knees in air
And gaff the Moon at being there!


114
CHEVAUX DE BOIS
We'll dazzle all, both Moon and Man,
Also ourselves, if we can.
Preferring not to turn to stone
We kick our heels, if heels we own.
And some whose jaws were very strong
Have bit on Love, and bit hard long.
And some whose wits were very bright
Have had the thought to drown by night.
Ingenious trick! To snap one pin
And watch the whole Great Tent cave in!
Heroic trick! If trick it be
Brusquely to set one linked heart free!
And so we make what heart we may
On Life's inclement holiday.



II
m
AN
011717
VIRGIL BATHING DANTE'S FACE WITH DEW.
BY MARTIN AMSLER RUSHTON






HERACLITUS AND CALLIMACHUS.
BY MARTIN AMSLER RUSHTON





THE NEED FOR AUDACITY OF THOUGHT
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
COME weeks ago, a Dublin friend of mine got through the
post a circular from the Christian Brothers, headed A Blas-
phemous Publication and describing how they found “the Christian
number of a London publication in the hands of a boy”-in the
hands of innocence. It contained "a horrible insult to God ...
a Christian Carol set to music and ridiculing in blasphemous lan-
guage the Holy Family.” But the Editor of a Catholic Boys'
Paper rose to the situation; he collected petrol, roused the neigh-
bourhood, called the schoolboys about him, probably their parents,
wired for a film photographer that all might be displayed in
Dublin, and having "bought up all unsold copies ... burned
them in the public thoroughfare.” However, he first extracted the
insult—the burning was to be as it were in effigy—that he might
send it here and there with the appeal: “How long are the parents
of Irish children to tolerate such devilish literature coming into
the country?"
"The devilish literature” is an old Carol of which Dr Hyde has
given us an Irish version in his Religious Songs of Connacht. The
version enclosed with the circular was taken down by Mr Cecil
Sharpe, and differs in a few unessential phrases from that in The
Oxford Book of English Ballads.
“Then up spake Mary,
So meek and so mild;
Oh, gather me cherries Joseph
For I am with child.
Then up spake Joseph,
With his words so unkind;
Let them gather cherries
That brought thee with child.


116
AUDACITY OF THOUGHT
Then up spake the little child,
In his Mother's womb;
Bow down you sweet cherry tree,
And give my Mother some.
Then the top spray of the cherry tree,
Bowed down to her knee;
And now you see Joseph
There are cherries for me.”
OW
The poem is a masterpiece, because something of great moment
is there completely stated; and the poet who wrote the English
wordsmit may exist in every European tongue for all I know-
certainly wrote before the Reformation. It has been sung to our
own day by English and Irish countrymen, but it shocks the
Christian Brothers. Why?
The actual miracle is not in the Bible, but all follows as a matter
of course the moment you admit the Incarnation. When Joseph
has uttered the doubt which the Bible also has put into his mouth,
the Creator of the world, having become flesh, commands from
the Virgin's womb, and his creation obeys. There is the whole
mystery-God, in the indignity of human birth, all that seemed
impossible, blasphemous even, to many early heretical sects, and
all set forth in an old “sing-song' that has yet a mathematical
logic. I have thought it out again and again and I can see no
reason for the anger of the Christian Brothers, except that they do
not believe in the Incarnation. They think they believe in it, but
they do not, and its sudden presentation fills them with horror,
and to hide that horror they turn upon the poem.
The only thoughts that our age carries to their logical conclusion
are deductions from the materialism of the seventeenth century;
they fill the newspapers, books, speeches; they are implicit in all
that we do and think. The English and Irish countrymen are
devout because ignorant of these thoughts, but we, till we have
passed our grain through the sieve, are atheists. I do not believe
in the Incarnation in the Church's sense of that word, and I know
that I do not, and yet seeing that, like most men of my kind these
fifty years, I desire belief, the old Carol and all similar Art delight
me. But the Christian Brothers think that they believe and, sud-
Mo


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
117
denly confronted with the reality of their own thought, cover up
their eyes.
Some months ago Mr Lennox Robinson gave to a paper edited
by young poets a story written in his youth. A religious young
girl in the 'west of Ireland, her meditations stirred perhaps by her
own name of Mary, begins to wonder what would happen if Christ's
second coming were in her own village. She thinks first that the
people are so wicked they would reject him, and then that they
might accept him and grow good. She is pursued by a tramp,
becomes unconscious, is ravished, and returns to consciousness in
ignorance of what has happened. Presently she finds herself with
child and believes, and persuades her parents, that a miracle has
taken place, and gradually the neighbours believe also and turn
good. At last she dies bringing forth a girl-child; and the tramp
arrives in the village knowing nothing of what has happened, gets
drunk, and boasts of his crime.
This story roused as much horror as the Cherry Tree Carol. Yet
countless obscure Mothers have so dreamed, have been so deceived;
some of them born in Protestant communities have become Johanna
Southcotts and lost our sympathy, but if we imagine such a mother
as a simple country girl living amongst settled opinions, the theme
grows emotional and philosophical. I have myself a scenario upon
that theme which I shall never turn into a play because I cannot
write dialect well enough, and if I were to set it where my kind
of speech is possible, it would become unreal or a mere conflict of
opinion. Mr Lennox Robinson and I want to understand the In-
carnation, and we think that we cannot understand any historical
event till we have set it amidst new circumstance. We grew up
with the story of the Bible; the Mother of God is no Catholic
possession; she is a part of our imagination.
The Irish Religious Press attacked Mr Lennox Robinson, and a
Catholic Ecclesiastic and an Ecclesiastic of the Church of Ireland
resigned from the Committee of the Carnegie Library, because it
would not censure him. I think that neither the Irish Religious
Press nor those Ecclesiastics believe in the Second Coming. I do
not believe in it—at least not in its Christian form—and I know
that I do not believe, but they think that they do. No minds have
belief who, confronted with its consequences—Johanna Southcotts,
deluded peasant girls, and all the rest-find those consequences
cai
ei


118
AUDACITY OF THOUGHT
ar
unendurable. The minds that have it grow always more abundant,
more imaginative, more full of fantasy even, as its object ap-
proaches; and to deny that play of mind is to make belief itself
impossible.
I have worked with Mr Lennox Robinson for years and there
are times when I see him daily, and I know that his mind plays
constantly about the most profound problems, and that especially
of late his Art, under the mask of our brisk Dublin comedy, has
shown itself akin to that of writers who have created a vision of
life Tertullian would have accepted. I think of Strindberg in his
Spook Sonata, in his Father, in his books of autobiography, as mad
and as profound as King Lear; of James Joyce in his Ulysses
lying “upon his right and left side” like Ezekiel and eating "dung"
that he might raise “other men to a perception of the infinite”; of
John Synge, lost to the “dazzling dark” of his Well of the Saints
and of the last act of his Deirdre. I cannot deny my sympathy
to these austere minds though I am of that school of lyric poets
that has raised the cry of Ruysbroeck though in vain: “I must
rejoice, I must rejoice without ceasing, even if the world shudder
at my joy."
The intellect of Ireland is irreligious. I doubt if one could select
from any Irish writer of the last two hundred years until the
present generation a solitary sentence that might be included in a
reputable anthology of religious thought. Ireland has produced
but two men of religious genuis: Johannes Scotus Erigena who
lived a long time ago, and Bishop Berkeley who kept his Plato by
his Bible; and Ireland has forgotten both; and its moral system,
being founded upon habit, not intellectual conviction, has shown
of late that it cannot resist the onset of modern life. We are quick
to hate and slow to love; and we have never lacked a Press to
excite the most evil passions. To some extent Ireland but shows
in an acute form the European problem, and must seek a remedy
were the best minds of Europe seek it-in audacity of speculation
and creation. We must consider anew the foundations of existence,
bring to the discussion-diplomacies and prudences put away—all
relevant thought. Christianity must meet to-day the criticism, not,
as its ecclesiastics seem to imagine, of the School of Voltaire, but
of that out of which Christianity itself in part arose, the School
of Plato; and there is less occasion for passion.
V


JOHN COWPER POWYS
119
I do not condemn those who were shocked by the naïve faith of
the old Carol or by Mr Lennox Robinson's naturalism, but I have
a right to condemn those who encourage a Religious Press so dis-
courteous as to accuse a man of Mr Lennox Robinson's eminence
of a deliberate insult to the Christian religion, and so reckless as
to make that charge without examination of his previous work;
and a system which has left the education of Irish children in the
hands of men so ignorant that they do not recognise the most
famous Carol in the English language.
Note: The Irish periodical which has hitherto published my occasional
comments on Irish events explained that this essay would endanger its
existence. I have therefore sought publication elsewhere.
THE AILANTHUS
BY JOHN COWPER POWYS
The Ailanthus is my tree. Her buds are jets
Of greenish fire that float upon the air
They set my feet upon a Fosse-way, where
Old mills turn mossy wheels and wide sunsets
Redden the outstretched wings the heron wets
In old ponds that the day and darkness share.
Candles they are, that on a wayside bare
Re-gather what the human heart forgets.
Green lamps they are, whose life-sap sweet and strong
Brims from most brittle and most tender wood.
They leave their dusty branches. They float over
The houses and the roofs, a wild-goose throng.
High up they fly, a thin, free multitude,
Leaving their earth, their roots, their twigs, their lover!


LAST PAGES
BY ANATOLE FRANCE
With Annotations by Michel Corday
Translated From the French by J. Lewis May
II
ANATOLE FRANCE proposed a comparison of the one God of the Christians
with the gods of Olympus.
One God, if he makes a mistake, brings disaster on all who be-
lieve in him. Even if he be wise, he has but one sort of wisdom,
suitable to one sort of men.
The gods of the Greeks ... owing to the diversity of their
character are more fittingly adapted to the diversity of the human
temperament. Those gods lived in harmony together, although
they were not in agreement upon a single point. In the Trojan
war some took the part of Greeks; and some, of Trojans. This
catholic diversity taught the Greeks to have broad views. There
were divinities for every temperament. An Aphrodite for the
voluptuary, a Pallas Athene for the seeker after wisdom.
None of these deities was free from failings, but failings were
mutually corrective. In all there was more of beauty and re-
straint than of might and greatness. The gods did not by their
immensity overwhelm their worshippers. They were human.
Their history was credible and you were not compelled to believe it,
whereas to-day we are forced to believe in a deity which is in-
credible.
The great advantage of the Polytheism of the Greeks was an
absence of dogma. You were at liberty to think what you liked,
even about the gods, with nothing to fear save a temporary
fit of anger due to threatened interests or excited passions. In-
tolerance, with its dread consequences, was impossible.
Zeus had weaknesses; but he was wise, and manifestly so


ANATOLE FRANCE
121
V
As for the God of the Christians, he cannot transcend his Jewish
origin, and that accounts for his terrible ferocity and a whole host
of paltry meannesses. Even during all the years that have elapsed
since his sojourn on Mount Sinai he has not succeeded in acquiring
polish. He is a twaddler, and a lie-a-bed; he thinks a great deal too
much about cookery and love-making. Moreover he has one ter-
rible fault; he is a logic-chopper. For a word, for a syllable, he
would lay waste the world with fire and sword.
But the god of the Deists cannot be called One God. Every
Deist makes his own God and contemplates himself therein. This
sort of God does not obtrude himself upon one. The God of Plato,
of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, of Béranger, never did anybody any
harm. As for Victor Cousin's God, he had a strange adventure. In
his old age he turned Christian, and is not mentioned now.
As touching the difficulty of recognising the true God when there are so
many to choose from, Anatole France reverted to a story he had already
briefly recounted in an essay on Baudelaire, and which he developed as
follows in the notes for his dialogues :
One day, at Théophile Gautier's, Baudelaire saw his friend
Charles Asselineau handling a hideous little Congo idol carved
from the wood of a fig-tree. It was the figure of a man with a
head twice the size of the body, and a mouth stretching from ear
to ear.
“What a dreadful looking thing!” exclaimed Asselineau, putting
it down in disgust.
“Take care!” said Baudelaire, “suppose it were the true God!"
A discussion on Christianity opens with a sort of catalogue of grievances.
The Church, founded as she is on disastrous illusions, has per-
mitted Science and Beauty to be buried for eighteen hundred years,
and has shed torrents of blood.
She has dimmed the genius of the races that have adopted her.
Christianity is a reversion to the most primitive barbarism-
to the idea of atonement—with not even personal responsibility.
Crime must be paid for, no matter who pays. This brings us back
to the savages. The basic principle is horrible. It is not seen in
Jesus, but in Paul.


122
LAST PAGES
Speak no ill of Paul. Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and Positiv-
ists are unitedly upon his side. How is he to be refuted? He is
unreadable.
Anatole France felt that despite the important part which they play in
the history of man, religions have no influence upon morals.
Me
Favourable sometimes to Peace and sometimes to War, as
directed by its sentiments or interests, Christianity has no morality
of its own. It reflects the morals of the peoples that foster it and,
like the chameleon, acquires the colour of the ground on which
it rests.
In the same period, and in the same society, several religions
may exist; there can be but one system of morality. Libanius,
Julian, St Gregory, St John Chrysostom-all had the same
morality.
To-day, Jews, Protestants, Catholics—all have the same princi-
ples and the same prejudices. Morality depends upon the law.
It is more authoritative than a religion.
People desire to be saved. How do you account for it that they
have always chosen the most hazardous and difficult method?
It is the same with card-games. People disdain easy ones, and
like difficult ones like bridge, or the more dangerous ones like
baccarat. There's a great resemblance between cards and religion.
To believe in God or not to believe in him. Is there any differ-
ence? Not much. Since those who believe in him can form no
concept of him. They say that he is everything. To be everything
is to be nothing. But they invest him with a will, with ideas, with
views on the administration of the world, with a code of justice
involving terrible penalties for disregarding it. The ideas we as-
sign to him come from ourselves. We should have them whether
we attributed them to him or not.
We may therefore conclude that the existence of God is a
sentimentalism. That need not surprise those who deem that
man was made to feel, and not to know. In man, whenever the
intellect says one thing and the feelings another, so much the worse
for the intellect.
We render thanks to God for creating this world and praise
him for creating another quite different, where the wrongs of this
one will be righted.


ANATOLE FRANCE
123
The impotence
God is the focus of all human contradictions.
of God is infinite.
hodinute and meticulous contestable that his fasts, was
Perhaps a comparison of the various stages of his dicta concerning the
existence of God will afford the best idea of the patience with which Anatole
France wrought at his work. Be it remembered that, when he had gathered
about him a vast number of detailed notes and extracts, of detached views,
sketches, drafts, and fugitive suggestions—when he had thus collected his
raw material, he would sometimes re-write the same passage as many as
eight times over, often at long intervals of time. Such, at all events, was
his practice in his later years, and it is incontestable that his fastidious
taste, his insistence on minute and meticulous documentation, had long been
characteristic of his mode of work. There is extant a valuable illustration
of this connected with The Gods are Athirst.
In a big manuscript book bound in American leather, Anatole France had
drawn up a catalogue of the drawings, prints, and sculptures in his posses-
sion. Later on he used the back of the sheets, to compile a calendar of the
Revolution, from March first, 1793 to May twentieth, 1795.
In two parallel columns, he entered the dates of the Gregorian and
Revolutionary calendars respectively. Then, taking each day separately,
he noted down the events-military, political, financial, economic—which
took place on the date in question. He even recorded the state of the weather.
Thus the spring of 1794 was an early one. Opposite Ventose fifteenth
(March fifth) he writes: "Weather fine. You might think it was Germinal."
On Germinal seventh (March twenty-seventh) “Pear-trees and plum-trees
in full bloom. Peaches, apricots, and almonds already formed. Apples
well on." And for Germinal twenty-first (April tenth) he wrote: “Rye
in the ear, sainfoin in blossom.” These notes occur alongside Danton's
arrest and the sale of national property at double the estimated price.
This calendar was to guide him step by step through his work, after
assisting him to shape its general plan. The chapter numbers are recorded
in blue pencil.
Now to return to the comparison of the successive versions of any given pas-
sage. That about Kant affords an excellent example. This was the first draft:
The worthy Kant did not find God in his porcelain pipe. He
sent for him to play the policeman in Königsberg, and invested
this "pure spirit” with a constable's uniform.
The second version ran:
The worthy Kant, who was given to meditation, discovered the
principles of human knowledge and the reconciliation of the various
systems which share the territory of philosophy, in the smoke that
curled up from his porcelain pipe. But he did not find God in it.
He multiplied his efforts to discover him, but in vain. He had
made up his mind to do without him, when, walking one day


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through the streets of Königsberg, he beheld many scenes of dis-
order and sedition. Thereupon he resolved that God should be
kept to see to the policing of the world.
And this was the third version:
The worthy Kant, who was given to meditation, discovered the
principles of human knowledge and the reconciliation of the various
philosophic systems, in the smoke that curled up from his porcelain
pipe; but he did not find God there. Having with great industry
searched for him in vain, he made up his mind to do without him,
when, taking a walk one day through the streets of Königsberg, that
rich and populous city, he observed many scenes of disorder and
sedition. Amid this tumult, at which the mind of the sage revolted
in disgust, God suddenly appeared, and the good philosopher im-
mediately entrusted him with the task of policing the world. ...
Anatole France had no need, he used to affirm, of silence or solitude, in
which to write. ... Every chapter of the Bergeret books was dashed off of
an afternoon, sometimes amid the buzz of a fashionable “At Home.” He
used to say, in a joking way, “I must have an uproar about me. When I
am alone, I read. When I am disturbed, I cannot read; so I write.”
He made a great number of corrections in his proofs. But he did not
undertake any arduous and laborious operations with scissors and paste, for
he had already experimented with the order of his sentences in numerous
preliminary drafts. Thus in 1912, while making his tour of Northern
Africa, he corrected, at each successive stage of the journey, the proof-
sheets of The Gods are Athirst. But he employed no other instrument than
his pen.
Apropos of proof-reading, he made rather a striking remark to the
secretary of a review who, some time in 1921, brought some proof-sheets to
him to correct. The emissary, who was young and much overawed, requested
the Master to return the proofs as soon as possible—the next day if he
could. With a benevolent, fatherly air, Anatole France replied as follows:
Young man, you doubtless intend to take up literature as a
career. Well now, I will give you a little lecture on style; so your
morning will not have been entirely wasted.
You ask me to correct my proofs immediately. That is much
too soon. For it is necessary that I should first forget what I
have written. True, that won't take me long, for at my age, people
grow forgetful. Still, it is necessary that I should forget it, that
I may read it with fresh eyes. Then I shall see whatever can-
not be taken in at the first glance-whatever is not plain and clear.


ANATOLE FRANCE
125
Those are the things which I omit, the things which I correct. You
see the natural things are what go in last.
His feeling about style is well known. He summed it up in a short
essay on Stendhal which appeared in 1920. In his view, the golden age of
French literature was the seventeenth century. The model prose was
Bossuet's. He also rated the eighteenth century very high-scarcely below
the seventeenth.
"Of course,” he said, “I prefer Diderot to Bossuet for ideas. But I
prefer Bossuet to Diderot for style."
Nevertheless he had a special admiration for Rousseau. About the
Confessions, he used to say, “To start with, it's sound common sense, then
it grows beautiful, more beautiful, still more beautiful, amazingly beautiful.
Every single sentence is duly subordinated to the whole.”
The dark days of the French language, which began under Louis XVI,
grew darker during the Revolution and the Empire, were darkest of
all during the Restoration. Whoever still retained a taste for form must
needs compound for himself a style in accordance with his own notions of
what was seemly and befitting, after the manner of Paul-Louis Courier who
wrought himself a medium of expression with fragments of Amyot and La
Fontaine. Chateaubriand, unmindful of the simplicity and directness that
should characterize speech and composition, aimed at immediate effect. He
wrote, “The City, that desert of men.” Stendhal alone retained spontaneity.
Anatole France refused to manufacture for himself, an artificial language.
“I would not do so,” said he, “and so it comes about that my vocabulary
is poor. For example, I refuse to talk about 'mentality.' But I am compelled
to go round and round about the word, to find an equivalent for it.”
As to his authorities for The Dialogue on the Existence of God, they were
as numerous as they were for that on Metaphysics. The must curious docu-
ment in the whole collection consists of about ten pages or so in which Anatole
France has set down The Religious Ideas of Napoleon. He took them, not
from the Mémorial de Sainte Hélène, but from the unpublished Journal, by
General Baron Gourgaud. “In the Mémorial,” he used to say, “Napoleon
sometimes concealed his thoughts. He was speaking for posterity.”
Twenty-eight quotations, carefully transcribed, are followed by a re-
capitulation which sums them up and gives the volume and page from
which they were taken. There is no need to reproduce in extenso these
Thoughts of Napoleon collected by Anatole France, inasmuch as they have
already been given to the public. The hero of the Anointing and the
Concordat speaks his mind with singular freedom about the soul and about
religion. In Napoleon's view, the soul was composed of atmospheric fluids
which return to the ether after death and are then absorbed by other
brains. He is not sure whether the soul is immortal; at any rate it has
no memory. The Emperor returns again and again to the close resemblance
existing between man and the lower animals. He puts Islam very high.
One can at least see Mohammed at work, whereas he holds very decidedly
that Jesus never existed. If he had to choose a religion, Napoleon would
worship the Sun, that quickens all things, the true god of the Earth. He
did not believe in a god that metes out rewards and punishments, for mis-


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fortune frequently befalls the upright while the wicked flourish. “You will
see that Talleyrand will die in his bed.” And Napoleon concludes: "My
dear Gourgaud, when we are dead, we are dead indeed.”
In this same file, Anatole France included his notes for the preface which
he wrote in 1918 for the Thoughts of Heraclitus of Ephesus. Among the
materials which he was then collecting together for his Dialogue on God,
the cosmogonic conceptions of the Ephesian were intended to find place.
He laid great stress on the boldly prophetic views of his Ionian, as we
may see from the following fragment, not included in the preface.
What is really admirable about the early Greek thinkers is the
firm grasp they have of the forces that rule the world. They make
Fate the ruler of gods and men. Thus, they had already recognized
the laws of nature and laid the foundations of modern science.
These fragments on the Existence of God are stamped with an atheism
which in his later years Anatole France acknowledged with quiet firmness.
He confessed it in words which, though very simple, were nevertheless
invested with a kind of solemnity, because he uttered them dispassionately,
in the serenity of his old age and at a time when every man is led to sum
up, and to bear witness to, his own intimate convictions. He said firmly,
and without hesitation, “Certainly I am an atheist.” Then, in a pensive
tone he would add, “Yes, I have pondered the matter. I do not believe in
dualism in nature. The same laws govern all living creatures, and nothing
more survives of man than of any other creature. Could any one with any
reasonable degree of intelligence think otherwise ?"
Sometimes, too, he would explain how the gods are born in the imagination
of man.
The gods pass through various stages in the popular mind. And
these stages are always the same. At first the gods are gods,
creatures of the mind, invisible. Then they become human and
take on the behaviour of men, and finally come down to earth.
The last stage is no more real than the stages which precede it. All
are a fruit of the imagination.
Thus he was inclined to believe that Jesus had never existed. He told
how in his story of Putois he had by analogy, tried to explain the origins of
Christianity ; Putois, the notorious gardener, who came finally to be regarded
as a real personage, having been merely the invention of Monsieur Bergeret
and his sister.
Sometimes he would fling off a defiant jest, “We've plenty of duties to
perform, as it is. Why create imaginary duties towards a nonexistent
God?' And he would add, with a smile, that there was no merit in
his professing his atheism nowadays, whereas, even as late as the eighteenth
century a man could not openly express his convictions with impunity.


ANATOLE FRANCE
127
Catholicino doubt true that hehe background. ""Mes when religion is indone,
Even under Napoleon I men concealed their unbelief. In the Journal
Inédit de Sainte Hélène, which he was so found of quoting, Anatole France
had noted this saying of Napoleon's, “At the Institute neither La Place, nor
Monge, nor Berthollet, nor Lagrange believed in God. Only, they did
not confess it.” And he concluded by saying, “When all is said and done,
there have always been unbelievers, but in times when religion is in the
ascendant they keep more in the background.”
It is no doubt true that he found much to attract and interest him in
Catholicism. We may even go so far as to allow that even the influence of a
devout mother and of education at a semi-ecclesiastical college, hardly
suffice to explain his predilection. It was clearly not under the maternal
wing or in the class-room, that he acquired his prodigious acquaintance with
scholastic and theological learning. “I did not begin to learn,” he was wont
to say, "until after I had completed my studies.”
Nor can it be gainsaid that he loved Christian art, although he complained
of its gloom and its melancholy, rating it below the art of classical antiquity.
Certainly he has drawn for us many a simple and touching priestly character,
and the Abbé Lantaigne, despite his fanaticism, the Abbé Guitrel, despite his
subtlety, the Abbé Jérôme Coignard, despite his debaucheries, somehow
engage and hold our affection. Nor can it be denied that it gave
him pleasure to extend a welcome to churchmen. How. gracious and
delightful, for example, were the courtesies he exchanged at the Museum
of Carthage with Père Delattre. How charming the interplay of fine
manners and deep erudition that sparkled and coruscated above the mummy
that lay there full length in its open sarcophagus.
The Church, its art, its liturgy, its rites, its priests, possessed for Anatole
France an undeniable attraction. Yet, despite that attraction, grace, in
the theological sense, never found him.
THE DIALOGUE ON OLD AGE
In this dialogue, Floris and Thémine have disappeared. Anatole France
(A.F.) debates freely and directly with the interlocutor whom he denotes
by, the abbreviation Opt. (Optimist).
A.F. One evening during the present spring, I was crossing the
bridge of stone which leads to Tours when the sound of lamenta-
tions and imprecations broke upon my ear, and I beheld a pair of
arms waving desperately in the airy void. It was our common
friend, the friend to whom we are indebted for so many joyous
hours, our pocket Molière, the charming Georges Courteline, who
was denouncing old age as the arch-enemy of the human race,
old age of whose onslaught he so far bears but the earliest impress.
“What would you say, Courteline,” I enquired, “if you were as


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old as I am?” Courteline had the good sense not to reply, and I,
too, said nothing more. But be assured that my silence heaps
upon Old Age a heavier load of reproaches than is poured forth
upon it by the indignant outbursts of Courteline. Old Age in my
opinion is the worst of ills. It robs a man of strength and vigour,
of desire—of all the good things of life, aye, not excepting his
thirst for knowledge, which, in the case of most men, is the sole
thing that makes life worth living.
OPT. How unjust of you to complain of the progress of the
years, you for whom Fate has reserved the happiest and most
gracious senescence. Old Age has but touched you lightly with his
finger-tips, leaving you all your faculties, all your intellectual en-
dowment, and even that thirst for knowledge which, according to
you, is the only reason for living.
Then come several statements and rejoinders which are not definitely as-
signed to any interlocutor.
WITH
What is it that makes old age endurable, for we see that those
who have descended into the shadows of its gloomy realm continue
to live, and sometimes even discover pleasure there?
We get used to everything. The ills of old age are not new;
they are the ills inherent in existence, but aggravated. Weakness
belongs to all ages, so does the menace of death. We think little
about it when we are young; we think more about it in our de-
clining years, but we are not always thinking about it. You want
to know how man endures old age. I answer that he endures it
as he endures life, by thinking little, or thinking not at all. He is
not made to think. For centuries without number, the animals
have never thought. Animal life was already a thing of very
ancient date, when human intelligence came into being, and human
intelligence has but imperfectly adapted itself to life. Happily
this inconsiderable human intelligence was intermittent, and has
remained so. Nevertheless, by reason of it, man is the most wretched
of animals. It is only in the human species that old age is cruel,
even when it brings with it no physical suffering.
Old age is cruel in that it brings us nearer death. But the de-
gree of fear with which we regard it varies according as it presents
itself to our imagination. Believing that death will bring us


ANATOLE FRANCE
129
face to face with an angry god is a very different thing from be-
lieving that it will merely send us back into the nothingness from
which we came.
Just what do you mean? There are people who are in greater
terror of "Annihilation” than of Hell itself.
I quite believe it. We long to be eternal. But a man must
possess exceptional strength of mind to ponder for any length of
time upon what comes after death.
The Christian religion strikes terror to the heart. Pascal went
mad.
He was susceptible to terror; but the majority of men form no
clear concept of what they believe, and escape madness.
The optimist made a brief and diffident attempt to extol what was of
lasting value in life~Virtue, for example.
Or
Virtue somewhat satisfies our amour-propre. So does vice. But
neither vice nor virtue can make us happy.
What of you, who are said to be happy?
Leaving out of account the bed of mortal woman, and the table
at which one sits down in company with a few friends, my greatest
pleasure in life has been to say over to myself certain lines of
Racine. And even so, I have had some sapless days, during which
I felt no love in my heart for a poetry of which I recognised the
artifice. Then, I did not weep for Monima; then Josabeth ceased
to move me, even when she was making ready to cross the torrent
of Cedron with the infant Joas.
Concerning a definition of old age:
Here we are arguing about Old Age and it has never occurred
to us to define it.
Define Old Age. Be sure you never attempt such a thing. Blaise
Pascal tells us it is a mistake to define a thing which explains itself.
Pascal held that view because his was a mathematical mind,
indifferent to nature.
Concerning a love of life:
I do not love life, and that is what enables me to put up with


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Old Age. I may say, as Monsieur Dubois used to say in the last
century, that there has not been a single day of my life that I
would live over again. You can't call that loving life. But
knowing nothing else save life, I cannot say that it is entirely
bad, since it is life that has revealed to me Good as well as Evil.
Few men reach Old Age, and they don't remain in it long. This
ugly little tail counts for little in life. In bygone days it went for
less still. In primitive times there were no old folk. There are
none among the wild animals.
In man, Old Age begins at sixty. When I was sixty I felt none
of the symptoms of Old Age.
In the case of some people Old Age gives warning of its approach
by premonitory signs a long time in advance. Some, it takes un-
awares. When I was seventy-five I was not expecting Old Age;
nevertheless it was close at hand.
But is Old Age inevitable? Must everything that lives neces-
sarily become a victim to it? Some years ago there was discovered
in equatorial waters a huge mass of gulf-weed which had perhaps
lived for centuries, which was perhaps as old as the world and
which nevertheless exhibited no sign of decay.
I heard Vaughan say one day, “The oldest man is the man who
is nearest to death, and that is not always the man who bears the
heaviest burden of years."
Life is no shorter for the happy than for the unhappy. Suffer-
ing, like joy, gives occupation to the mind.
We must bear in mind that the memory declines with increasing
years. For the most part, we forget the landmarks in our life, and it
seems ridiculously short. In comparison, the few years, or months,
to which we may look forward, seem long.
We must also remember that we grow weary of living and that
we become less enamoured of life as its leaves begin to fall.
That eighteenth-century dame who could not bear putting on
clothes day after day.
Then finally there is the thought that growing old is an ac-
complishment and that a certain satisfaction is to be derived from
watching such as cannot acquire it.
There are as many kinds of old age as there are old men. There
are some that are bearable; there are some that are not. But all
alike denote the terminus of life.


ANATOLE FRANCE
131
W
en ar
e
Tuse
The intellect declines with the body. How could it be other-
wise? Celebrated men are no exception. If their later works are
admired, it is because their reputation is established and because
the public has become accustomed to their defects.
When he read my first book, Camille Doucet said to me, “You
are affected and your affectation makes you difficult to read.” I
told him that that would cease to be noticeable when people had
got used to my style, as now they have.
I am inclined to approve of that custom in force among savages
who make the old men of their tribe climb up a tree and then shake
the tree and kill those who are not strong enough to hang on.
Ah, if there were only another way of living a long time!
Anatole France had recourse to a certain friend of his—a man still in
his prime; of whom he was thinking when he wrote this note:
Put into the Dialogue a character that likes Old Age. See what
Couchoud has to say.
Old age is life’s best period. Old age is not a disease. On the
contrary we see old men whose health is more stable than it was in
their youth and middle age.
What is finer after a life filled with tasks well done than to
taste the sweets of well-merited repose and, with all one's physical
and mental faculties unimpaired, to enjoy the remainder of one's
life? One enjoys life calmly and steadily. Old age is a broad
river.
Amid all this agglomeration of notes and memoranda, Anatole France had
reserved an important place for the mystery of death and the future life.
We have seen that he had already broached the subject in documents relating
to his Dialogue on the Existence of God, in fragments of dialogue, and in
detached reflections upon the subject of old age.
But the documents which he did not use make it quite clear that he in-
tended either to develop the subject in a final revision of the Dialogue on
Old Age or to devote a special dialogue to the subject of Death.
First of all, in these notes of his, we come across a sort of tabular statement
of the darker deities of Mythology; Demons of the blue-black colour of meat
Alies; winged genii, Sirens, ravishing angels, Muses of Death, Harpies.
Then follow investigations concerning the migration of souls, metem-
psychosis, and India, where that belief first came into being, and where it
still flourishes.
Then we have a reference to that philosophy so dear to Camille Flam-
marion, which holds that souls flit from star to star and according to which
we become what Anatole France calls “moths of meditation.”


132
PANTOMIME
ensible of the Africa. camel, well, when
Then follows a passage from Lucretius beginning, “What then is Death,
and wherefore should we heed its terrors if the soul must perish with the
body? Were we sensible of the troublous history of Rome in the centuries
before we were born when all Africa came into violent collision with the
Empire ?” The passage ends thus: “Well, well, when we have ceased to
live, we likewise shall know nought of what is happening around us, or
rather we shall be no more, and the mingled wrack of sky and land and
sea will no more awaken feeling within us.” The whole passage is copied
out in Anatole France's own hand. He often used to quote it from memory,
right up to the very end of his life. It was, so to speak, his Credo, and he
used to say that nowhere else had the return into the void ever been ex-
pressed with such force and majesty.
Finally there was the prayer of Philoctetes, who, unable to cure his
poisoned wounds, calls upon “Thanatos, the God of Death, twin brother of
Hypnos, the God of Sleep, Death, amiable Death, sole cure for ills unbear-
able, for no pain can reach the dead forevermore.”
To be continued
PANTOMIME
BY ALFRED KREYMBORG
A pigeon stands outside her window-pane,
A puppet bobbing for bread or grain or nuts;
Craning and twisting his head within the frame,
Scraping his wings along the sill, he struts
And pouts and bows, wooing above, below,
Cooing chromatics up and down the glass,
Spreading his wings to fly, closing them slow:
Each wile parades a wish to let him pass.
The lass unfolds two fingers and a thumb,
Raises the transparent wall sufficiently
To let her palm release the modicum
Of food essential to his minstrelsy:
An open pantomime lays out the crumb
And gives the troubadour the balcony.



SW
FACCU
SIMON HELPS CHRIST CARRY THE CROSS. BY ALFEO FAGGI






ST VERONICA WIPES THE FACE OF CHRIST. BY ALFEO FAGGI






CHRIST FALLS THE THIRD TIME.
BY ALFEO FAGGI





GEORGE BELLOWS
BY THOMAS CRAVEN
YEORGE BELLOWS was the most popular of contemporary
American painters. At the age of twenty-nine he was ad-
mitted to the Metropolitan Museum, the youngest man but one to
be recognized by that august institution, and last autumn, at the
memorial exhibition offered by the same Museum, the attendance
surpassed all records for native artists. I was at pains to observe
the visitors: they were neither idlers bent on amusement, nor were
they fashionable admirers such as one sees before the canvases of
Zuloaga or some other international favourite; for the most part
they were young people Bellows appeals particularly to youth-
students of art and of letters who seemed to have discovered an
artistic language which they could understand. The secret of
Bellows' popularity is simple enough: in spirit he was essentially
American. He was gay and enthusiastic, brilliant in externals, fre-
quently vulgar and sentimental; his pictorial sense was garish and
spectacular, and his conceptions have the abounding vitality of
circus posters. But in all his work there is the full measure of
honesty-he meant what he said.
Though the public verdict has been unanimously in favour of
Bellows, critical opinion has remained sharply divided. The
opponents of modernism have lauded him excessively, attributing
to him qualities he did not possess—a mastery of draughtsmanship,
a freedom from eccentricity, a knowledge of design; on the other
hand, the stewards of pure aesthetics, those who talk only of
"plastic essentials,” and regard painting simply as a progression
of means, have denied that he was an artist at all. It is true that
in terms of mechanics Bellows was not original, that he borrowed
unreservedly from his associates and his predecessors, and that he
mixed and amplified the methods of others in the effort to acquire
an individual style. It is also true that he was easily imposed upon
by the manufacturers of formulae, and that not infrequently his
adaptations resulted in mere smartness and prestidigitation. From
the rich impasto of Manet, of which he was always enamoured,
to his last phase when he introduced the broken form into his pic-


134
GEORGE BELLOWS
CAIS
tures, somewhat in the manner of the Cubists, he was open to sug-
gestion. Having a limited critical faculty, he was open to the
bad as well as the good, and theories like those of Hambidge and
Maratta were swallowed with the same gusto as the sounder in-
fluences of good painting. Because of this many judges are scorn-
fully prejudiced against him: they point to the obvious sources of
his technique and deplore his lack of discrimination.
But there is another attitude toward art, an attitude which re-
fuses to restrict painting to an arbitrary consideration of means
and procedure. It is beginning to dawn upon a good many ob-
servers that the mechanistic aesthetics in vogue at the moment is
inadequate to tell the complete story of art. Those systems reduc-
ing the evolution of art forms to a development of plastic means
have terminated in formula or violent inconsistency, the inescapable
conclusion of all theories in which form is separated from content.
Critics, in mortal terror of identifying themselves with bourgeois
reactions to the subject-matter of pictures, have robbed art of its
primary human function, the conveyance of a message or meaning,
and have exalted it to an eminence inaccessible except to the
specialist. Not only has this supercilious point of view engendered
in critics a contempt for all art carrying an intelligible human
appeal, but it has also blinded them to one of the fundamental
elements of production—the motif, the character of the scene,
figure, or object which unlocks the experiences of the artist and
releases his creative energy. This question of character was so
fatuously sentimentalized by English writers of a generation past
that it came to be disregarded entirely by the modernists, but
slowly, after the barren postulates of the formalists to whom art
is a Euclidian science of organized planes and solids, it is rising
to importance again. Aesthetically we are in a cul-de-sac, and
unless we turn to a study of creative behaviour which takes into
full account the material interpreted and its social significance,
we shall not get anywhere.
George Bellows, as if by intuition, perceived the value of sub-
ject-matter. He had a flair for the right thing, and found in the
abundance of the world about him not only scenes and characters
of wide interest, but artistic material of genuine social significance.
He was on good terms with life and enormously fond of it; an
American to the core, he was exhilarated by the riotous and gaudy,


THOMAS CRAVEN
135
the loud and belligerent aspects of his background, and sinned
repeatedly against good taste. But his extraordinary enthusiasm
for his own country and his ability to discover dramatic material
in a hundred different quarters should be an inspiration to our
young artists. Bellows believed that one should stay at home,
work hard, and keep one's eyes open. He did not rush off to
Europe periodically to listen to the sceptics and doctors, and return
with a panacea for the plastic ills of America. He was not a snob.
He was not afraid of criticism or of making a mistake; he offered
his work for what it contained, and it never occurred to him to
read cosmic meanings into simple combinations of lines and colours,
or to pose as a hypersensitive organism superior to the ruck and
beyond the comprehension of the ordinary mortal.
On the whole his artistic impulses were healthy and spontaneous,
but he was never fully certain of the validity of these impulses, and
consequently was not content to allow his talent its natural free-
dom of development. Therein was his gravest fault. By no means
a profound student of the past, Bellows brought small critical ex-
perience to bear upon the multifarious influences which always beg
a hearing of great talent. Innocently he adopted aesthetic quack-
eries, and cheapened many of his best conceptions by a dazzling
parade of superficial knowledge. He is at his best in such canvases
as the Portrait of Mr and Mrs Philip Wase and the small piece
called Introducing John L. Sullivan. Accurately speaking, these
are not complete creative expressions—they will hardly stand com-
parison with Manet, or even the minor Dutchmen, or for that mat-
ter, to come nearer home, with Albert Ryder—but they are devoid
of sleights and are decidedly valuable as honest commentary on
American life. In them the artist forgot the mischievous advice
of his friends and the grand manner, and confined himself to the
demands of his subjects. The greater number of his studies of
character verge dangerously close upon what are known in the
academic trade as "swell portraits.” They glitter and strut with
an air of self-conscious richness that befits the salons of parvenus
rather than the halls of genuine art.
It is difficult to point specifically to the barrier that came between
the whole-heartedness and great talent of George Bellows and so
much of his work. Possibly it was success. The swift recognition
1 Reproduced in THE DIAL, March 1925.


136
GEORGE BELLOWS
and continual exploitation by a society flattered by the man's
ability “to put things over” may have rendered him careless of his
gifts and warped his judgement of human values. Also, it may
have been that his inability to follow up his excellent impulses was
the outcome of his early training. When Bellows began to paint,
the first naïve form of Expressionism had crossed the Atlantic-not
the Crocean system as we know it to-day, but a theory similar in
application to the "true-feeling" fetish—and any artist who re-
flected on his work was regarded with suspicion and branded
mechanical or old-fashioned. One should paint in the first heat
of emotion, boldly and without thinking. How speedily a practice
of this kind lends itself to mere surface cleverness and ingenious
nonsense is familiar to everyone now. The brilliant beginner who
does not learn to guide and control his impulses becomes eventually
a slave to caprice and to the suggestions of others. But for per-
nicious influences, subtly exerted, Bellows would unquestionably
have developed into a great painter. Had he been less gifted, had
he been forced to reflect and study, he would have based his foun-
dations in firmer soil, and would have been less susceptible to the
allurements of academic trickery and popular advertising.
Bellows never found it necessary to draw. His nudes reveal
this defect to a startling degree: at first glance they are bewilder-
ingly impressive, but the impression does not wear. Examine them
closely and they become only so many shapeless effigies, factitiously
solid and crudely put together, but saved from nullity by the un-
bridled confidence, the huge, undisciplined muscular enthusiasm of
the artist. In his lithographs and drawings, a neat edge or a
"snappy" shadow takes the place of genuine structure, and so far
as effectiveness is concerned, takes it beautifully. In his best
prints—and many of them are very fine indeed—the general ar-
rangement of black and white masses is admirably managed, but
the figures have the unreality of photographs and occasionally
appear as if they were actually made from photographs. In spite
of this, George Bellows is an important figure. He is important to
the young American; he has demonstrated that it is possible for a
man to paint without addressing himself to the fads and philoso-
phies of the Continent. With his keen sense of subject-matter and
his faith in the American environment, he has indicated the road
which our artists must travel in order to deliver themselves from
European masquerade and create something in their own right.
I



A HEAD. BY ALEXEI JAWLENSKY





CONCERTO
BY MARGARET EMERSON BAILEY
M HERE they sat at a little table in a restaurant. Not at all,
1 you were to understand, the kind of place that Fanny Barger
would have chosen. For really, when a man asks you for dinner,
you expect—well, something better than the sort of thing you
have to blow yourself to. Otherwise why bother? Frankly,
why not take it easy for an evening, save your clothes, and stay
at home?
But this place, as Josef Resnek had so often pointed out, had
its advantages. Not its cheapness, but its being next to the stage
entrance of the Auditorium. It did give them a chance to talk
right up to the last moment when he had to put her in a taxi and
dash off, alone, to make his concert. What's more, now, with the
check paid and all, they still had twelve whole minutes. ...
Twelve whole minutes. Some of them he knew she'd make her
own, for powdering her face like dusting pollen on a flower-
above an inch of looking-glass, for patting back her crisp, bright bob
that was the colour of a marigold, for slipping on her wrap, and
gathering up her small belongings. Still twelve minutes were
twelve minutes. In no more time than that, music often did it
-reached, penetrated straight through ignorance, straight through
indifference, touched comprehension suddenly. From the back of
the great stage, he'd often watched whole rows of faces. Pretty
much alike they looked until one lighted up, and then another.
Sometimes stupid, stolid faces that you wouldn't think could be
transparent, were kindled into flame a moment. The electric
beauty of a phrase escaping had struck a spark from the imagina-
tion, had lit a gleam of real response.
Only words weren't notes. Words you couldn't loose and
count on. You meant one thing that, uttered, sounded quite
another. This, for instance. Would she take it as conceit-the
theme for a trombone and not the need for solace and for under-
standing?
If he could only get her to the Auditorium this once to hear
him, it would make, he said, a world of difference. ....
12.


138
CONCERTO
Her mouth turned stubborn. But he didn't need to look at
her to know he hadn't reached her. He heard his words fall
toneless, flat.
Still if she'd only come, he would explain it all to her before-
hand. To-night they were to play the work of a new man—a
great composer. Genesis—that meant a poem of the Creation,
a symphonic poem of his own Jewish God, Jehovah. And for
the first time. ...
He couldn't urge her on that plea. It cheapened the great
honour which had come upon him. It made it personal and trivial
-to urge her just because the great crescendo fell to him.
And no, of course she wouldn't come. No, not for anything.
Not if he got her a whole box, let alone the best seat in the
orchestra. And he needn't think it was because she didn't care
for music. She adored it. What about her sense of time? Why,
she'd often taken fellows on who didn't know a thing, not even
the first principles. Half-way around the room, she'd had them
thinking they were leading. She had made them fall in step.
Of course she had. Of course. Who couldn't catch the rhythm
of a blowing willow? But even that he couldn't seem to tell her.
He could only blunder on, insisting stupidly. ...
If she'd only come, she'd see. She'd have to see.
· See what? Him sitting on a stage behind a kettle-drum? That
was the very reason why she wouldn't. Honestly, she knew that
it would be too much for her. She'd have to laugh right out.
That was the way things took you when you had a sense of humour.
Yes, with a fit of giggles, just like that.
A kettle-drum. They were not, he said, what he had wanted
most to play. Far from it—his tympani. The violin was what
he'd longed for, what he would have studied too if he had only
had the time and money for the training. But all the same he
wished she wouldn't laugh at it—the kettle-drum. It had served
him a good turn. It had let him in upon a world of dream from
which otherwise he would have been an exile. Just to sit there
listening, just to be the smallest part in a great scheme-why,
that was something, surely. And he couldn't be, without his
tympani. In the old days they had exacted almost nothing but a
sense of rhythm and of perfect pitch.
Yes, but of all the silly instruments. ... Not that there weren't
II


MARGARET EMERSON BAILEY 139
d
others that were foolish too. Oboes, for instance. She had
never seen one, not at least to know it. But when he spoke of
them a band of little Charlie Chaplins in derby hats and baggy
trousers came scuttling—if he could imagine it-right across her
mind as though it were the screen. Bassoons, too. Were those
the things they straddled? At any rate they sounded fat and
clumsy, utterly ridiculous. And flutes ... now you'd never
catch a woman playing on one, no sir; puffing out her cheeks until
you couldn't see her eyes and turning purple, all to make a little bit
of noise. But a kettle-drum seemed even worse for a grown man.
You'd think they'd get some kid to play it. And what good was it
to any one? It didn't even have a beat you could get on to. ...
But in some such voice he knew had spoken Zeus, Zeus, maker of
the storms when he had thundered on Olympus. In some such
voice had spoken Vulcan threatening under Aetna. Was there even
then some slim and dancing girl who hadn't understood, who
hadn't heeded, or who hearing wished the angry warning tamed
and timed as an accompaniment for her light feet?
Then how was he going to tell this girl that so too had spoken
Lucifer, boastful of his sins, venturesome, high-spirited, defying
God until-more grave—an octave lower-God had spoken out
His law triumphant? And how was he going to tell her that in
modern music this was sometimes the voice for passions that were
human, for the rebellion, the dissonance of life, for the hubbub of
the soul?
Zeus and Vulcan! Sure of her young beauty, she looked at him
and set off laughing. Who were the old ginks, anyhow, and who
had ever heard of them? Lucifer-he was a new one. And God
-say, you'd think he'd got her to a kosher Sunday school and
not a restaurant. If he was going to preach at her like that she
guessed she'd be going. When you had dinner with a man, you
didn't want a gloom, you didn't want to be reminded . . . As
for that human voice, if he expected her to get him, he would
have to speak more plain.
Speak plain. He couldn't, not when his hand lay lax upon the
table-cloth. It was that other voice that was to-night to speak
through him, that was tremendous, that was terrible and holy.
And her ears were used to Bacchus, a modern Bacchus playing on
the saxophone. No fault of hers if she thought music ought to


140
CONCERTO
be a syncopated riot of the senses. He wasn't blaming her. No
fault of hers if she could not conceive of Beauty lived for with
austere devotion, worshipped as men worship fame and money.
Beauty as he knew it-intellectual Beauty—had never had the
chance to brush the surface of her soul.
That was the reason that he wanted her to come. Not because
to-night he was to have his moment of high triumph. Glancing
upward at the clock he saw his time was getting short. He laid
his hand on hers, insisting gently.
If she would come and listen, listen to an orchestra, it must
bring them closer to each other. She'd know the things he cared
for, that he lived for. She would have to understand.
Well, there was no use not being frank. In order to be frank,
she pointed her slim elbows firmly on the table and looked at him
with eyes as clear as shallow water. She liked him—honest.
That was the queerest part of it. She liked him, she supposed,
because he was so different from the other fellows. He wasn't
always throwing out his chest and telling of his salary and com-
missions. She liked him, she supposed, because he talked to her,
and talked to her as though she knew so many things she didn't.
All the same and with the sharp prongs of her fork, she laid
four lines of emphasis upon the table-cloth—it was, you see, like
this:
It was so much easier to lie when she had never been and seen
him. For when people asked her what he did, she then could lie
and keep her face straight. She was ashamed to tell them and
you couldn't blame her. Imagine owning up that you were going
with a man who earned his living playing on the kettle-drum.
You couldn't tell-it might keep other fellows off who heard
it. He must admit it sounded kind of nutty, kind of strange. So
when they crowded her too far, she always said he played in
Somoff's orchestra. Not likely that a friend of hers would pay.
two-fifty for the privilege of proving her. And sometimes because
it sounded good, she said he played the first violin, and some-
times for a change, she said he always played the solos.
Played a solo. But he didn't. But he couldn't. He marked
the emphasis. At other times he kept the tempo. He underlay
the orchestra. Only violins and flutes and 'cellos-only any
instrument it seemed but his tympani might have the chance for a
sustained and solitary utterance.


MARGARET EMERSON BAILEY
141
That proved he wasn't much account, or otherwise, she said,
they'd feature him. Feature him? That brought back to his mind
the incredible new honour conferred on him by modern music.
To use the honour thus was a betrayal—yes, of something lofty,
something sacred. Yet he leaned across to tell her eagerly.
To-night he was to speak alone. The crescendo was to be his
kettle-drum's, his silly instrument's. The significance of the whole
symphonic poem depended on its single voice.
That made a difference. He could see it in her eyes, in the
brush of colour in her cheeks, in all her quick alertness. She was
like a burnished little humming-bird that he had brought to pause.
But supposing that she came, she'd like to know how much
she'd have to sit through, just to hear him.
To hear him play alone? His honesty compelled him. He
played alone just once, and almost at the very close.
And that too, it seemed, was funny if you had a sense of humour.
It made her laugh and laugh to think of it-to think of how life
fixed things with no sense of justice, none whatever. There she
was, banging a keyboard all day long for twenty-five a week.
There he was being paid as much or more for doing nothing, sitting
up behind a kettle-drum. Why, he could sneak an evening off
and the chances were they'd never miss him. And say—his guess-
ing she would come to hear him play just once. He flattered him-
self silly. Besides, to sit and watch the others putting it all over
him—if anything, it would make her hopping mad.
So then she wasn't going to come?
Not on your life, she wasn't.
He watched her powdering her face. Yes-it was like dusting
pollen on a flower. Her hair-it really was the colour of a mari-
gold. She was lovely, lovely with a hard, bright loveliness. But it
wasn't any use to plead with her. His time was over. He must
rush off to his concert. Shamed in her eyes, he had no more to say.
There at the left of the great stage they stood-his tympani.
If he had ever grudged the other instruments their beauty, then this
despisal might have justly come upon him. But he had admitted
it so gladly, with no envy and no bitterness. Hours and hours on
end, he'd listened to them, in admiration of a perfect rendering,
in disappointment at a faulty execution, following the score as
eagerly as though, page after page, it had been written down for


142
CONCERTO
him. And his tympani—he knew their place, he had never laid a
claim for them as instruments of prime importance. He had felt
grateful to them only, because they'd let him in upon a world of
dream.
There at the right of the great stage they stood. And looked at
with a sense of humour that stripped them of associations, he could
see for the first time that they were funny. Two burnished
cauldrons, round and squat. Two copper bellies set grotesquely on
their straddling, little legs. Moreover, outside himself, he watched
himself self-consciously and knew he looked ridiculous. Now
taking off the covers carefully, and blowing off a speck of dust,
he must look like a busy housewife. Now picking up his sticks,
he must look like a chef preparing a great stirabout. And now
screwing up the keys, leaning over, listening, he must look like
a fashionable doctor, called in in his evening clothes, and pre-
tending grave concern as he laid an ear close to a vellum heart.
Not that that mattered. He was willing-quite—to look
ridiculous, if he was only sure he counted. But to be ridiculous,
despised by her, of no account at all—that was another matter. It
was her ugly doubt of his own worth that slid into his mind, that
coiled and raised its head there. It was his value-never mind how
little—that he now had to prove.
And how prove you were of value? By being there? By
coming in? By giving of your best? That was expected of you.
If you did that, no one could ever tell the difference. But to
fail! That was a surer way to knowledge. To fail in some great
crisis of dependence! If you failed and nothing happened, if
things went on without you, that was your own peculiar tragedy.
You were done for. But if, by failing, you could mar, deface
the beauty of the whole then you were done for too. And still
you'd know that you had counted. Yes, you'd know.
But would there be an ugly gap, or would the other instruments
close in and fill it? The mystery of what would happen had now
begun to fascinate him. To fail, and at a crisis of dependence !
Never had a man a better chance. The musicians tuning up with
squeaks and screams and pulings of soft sound-suppose they
knew what he intended. Poor devils all—not one of them would
ever have the courage for such blasphemy, not one of them would
ever dare rebel and put his use to proof. And the conductor,


MARGARET EMERSON BAILEY 143
coming in, taking possession of his stage as though he knew his
power supreme and safe from insurrection-suppose that when he
turned from the applause his keen, all-seeing eye should search
the traitor in his orchestra?
Too late. With the catch it brings to each musician's heart,
Josef Resnek heard the tap of the conductor's wand, he saw the
baton lift.
Was it because his soul was deeply dipped in ancient lore
Was it because this was the poem of the Creation, of his own
Jewish God, Jehovah?
At once there came surging through his soul the chaotic tumult
of the orchestra. Vague, fluid shapes that never quite achieved a
form were running through the broken rhythms. "And the whole
earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face
of the deep.” Long drawn and deeply penetrating, he heard
the 'cello rise above the discords of the tumult. “And the Spirit
of God moved upon the face of the water." His God was slowly
brooding, seeking to project himself in endless shapes. But as
Josef listened, the 'cello's voice has changed. Still unhastening,
it had grown strident. It had taken on an accent of command.
"And God said, Let there be light.” The blare of the trombones
had answered Him. They had proclaimed the splendour of the
first amazing daybreak. “And God said, Let there be darkness.”
With a deep magnificence and resonance the contrabasses had
obeyed Him. They had curved out the hollow of first night. "And
God said, Let there be a firmament.” . . . His own God's voice
was calling, echoing through space; and whatsoever heard it, heard
it and responded. Separate entities were springing into being.
Group by group, the instruments built up vast shapes of power,
immense configurations. They were responding to a voice that
would not be denied. “And God said, Let the waters of the firma-
ment be gathered together.” A deep convulsive movement had
swept through the bassoons. Gradually, however, as the pouring
flood of sound dipped back, it settled into currents with a rhythm
and a steady pulse. “And God said, Let the earth bring forth.”
... With overtones and undertones, the woods and sedges
breathed out the first shivering wind sighs. The oboes had caught
up a melody that made the running water sing, the valleys mur-
mur. And as the cymbals clashed, the little hills were made to


144
CONCERTO
skip and dance and clap their hands for joy. “And God said, Let
there be lights in the firmament.” By clear, single clarion notes the
lights had set their pattern in the heavens. Sun, moon, and stars
were choiring. "And God said, Let the waters bring forth
abundantly." The trumpets and bassoons had spouted forth the
jubilation of whales, leviathans, and great behemoths. “And God
said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature.” Created life
was rushing up in every form. The sounds the 'cello listened for
had answered it; and some were primitive and fierce though still
in concord with others that were tiny, intimate, and sweet.
But when the 'cello spoke again, one heard in it the triumph
of a great conception that softened to a searching tenderness.
“And God said, Let us make man in our own image.” Until
the form was ready for the power that was to sweep through it,
the 'cello's voice was muted. God was breathing into dust the
breath of life.
The first violin at last. Josef Resnek listened to the wonder-
ing voice of Adam, tremulous, uncertain, at the moment of first
wakening. Mingling with it though always subdued below it,
were the chanting choirs of all the living things companioning
him. Only throughout the choirs there was still something lack-
ing, so that the voice of the violin went searching through the
canticles for that which was to blend with it and double it. Fail-
ing in its search it ceased. The 'cello pondered. Then rich,
pathetic, and a little languorous, the viola, the voice of Eve, spoke
out.
What little darting signs of joy and recognition, what melodies,
what harmony were blended in this new companionship. The
one merged with the other, doubling it and never separate in the
expression of a radiant joy that was all praise. And when the
'cello spoke, the viola and violin were muted. Adam and Eve
had bowed their heads and waited. Not in alarm, but wonder,
they had waited for the passage of their God who came so close.
The flute in solo. Resnek had never liked it. It was always
coaxing, wheedling, and intruding—with a covert eagerness
manoeuvring to be heard. And yet as it took up the melody, how
clear, untroubled were its notes, its tone how sweet and how
insinuating. How insignificant its motive and its purpose how
atrocious! No wonder that the viola grew thin and quavering
without the violin sustaining it. No wonder that it sharply broke.


MARGARET EMERSON BAILEY
145
The violin and viola—but they were not together now. They
had grown conscious of each other, and now knew each other
separate. The purpose of the Snake had been accomplished, for
it was a human love that Man and Woman now desired to give
and take.
“And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the gar-
den.” The beasts of the earth were cowering, the singing birds were
only breathing. The place was filled with a profound and awful
silence, the silence that precedes the storm.
And he-Josef Resnek-standing up behind his tympani-why
was it that he too was trembling?
The thought of what he was to do came back and overwhelmed
him with its bravery. His heart might leap against his ribs. But
what he felt at the Approach was but a high anticipation of de-
fiance. Not fear and not anxiety. It held the courage of re-
sistance. Nothing of alarm.
“The woman she gave me of the tree ..." The violin was
pleading, but so timidly.
Not so would Josef Resnek excuse his act of disobedience.
The woman, she had led him to the Tree of Knowledge. But
though eating of it meant his exile, he would take that exile man-
fully. He would proclaim his disobedience by silence. No, he was
not afraid.
The conductor had now turned to him, was urging him, com-
pelling him above the orchestra. Was it some trick of light that
magnified that slender figure on the platform?
Now was the time.
“Where art thou ?”
Josef Resnek saw the baton lift for him alone.
And suddenly against his will, he felt an undertow that was
too strong for him. The conception of the whole had taken him
in its possession. He was submerged, swept, gathered up by a
great tide of Beauty that enveloped him. There was no use in
rebelling. By yielding, letting himself go, he was a part of it,
as though on wings.
"Cursed is the ground for thy sake."
In a wild, splendid boom he heard himself shake out the first
and elemental anger. The volume of the sound he caused appalled
him.
"In sorrow shalt thou eat of it."


146
TRANSFIGURATION
Boom after boom, he was sending out a mighty judgement.
It shook his heart. The whole world throbbed with it, as though
with each deep vibration he had spoken the great name.
“Dust art thou and to dust thou shalt return."
Faint and lost and wandering, the voices of the violins. Out
upon the little teeming earth as though before the wind, he drove
them. And though they died away, the deep, imperious vibrations
still gave the words of the expulsion and farewell.
With a clash of cymbals, the Gates of Eden had clanged to.
Yet still there echoed the reverberations. No din of cymbals and
no cleaving of the flaming sword could still their mighty voice.
TRANSFIGURATION
BY FORMAN BROWN
as
Cold blue the night,
Steel blue the moon;
My breath was white
As moth cocoon.
A night so chill
My careful tread
Creaked—and was still,
Creaked—and was dead.
Then, window-glow.
Through festooned frost
Above, below,
Half seen, half lost
In forest lake,
In lake and fern,
In fern and brake,
A tendril's turn
Revealed your hand
And then your face
In fairyland
Of frozen lace.



Duke
M
Collection John Quinn
STANDING FIGURE. BY AUGUSTUS JOHN





BOOK REVIEWS
LUCIAN ONCE MORE
The LOEB CLASSICAL LIBRARY. Lucian. Volumes
I-IV. With an English translation by A. M. Har-
mon. 10mo. London: William Heinemann; New
York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. $2.50 each volume.
mo1
M HE fourth volume of the Harmon Lucian brings half-way
1 the new translation in the Loeb Classical Library. It is a
literary event not only because the pieces now added are keenly
interesting, but because from his own day to ours, from his first
exhibitions as a sophist, through his turning upon his masters in
parody and subtler satire, down the centuries through his fascina-
tion of the translators who have successively found that he chal-
lenged all their skill, Lucian has kept his literary significance. His
satire is so expert as to have been always modern; and his favourite
target, the professional orator, who appears again in this volume,
is perennial. Even the particular forms of the art of public spell-
binding which Lucian pillories are recurrent. The demagogue,
whether his trade be religious, political, or literary, is constant in
all highly civilized societies. We have ourselves heard Chaucer's
Pardoner; and the bag of tricks that he displayed to the Canter-
bury pilgrims will be recalled by reading Lucian.
Lucian even knew much of the art by which the Pardoner is
made to damn himself; but the comparison reveals his limitations.
Various as is his skill, it is neither creative nor generally sustained.
He advances his satiric dialogue almost to comedy, but not quite.
He is brilliant by flashes, analytically penetrative, not constructive.
Far more original than the professional orators whose artifices he
exposes, he is yet content to remain an entertainer of sophisticated
audiences. Chaucer's Pardoner is a creative characterization, dif-
fering from Falstaff only in degree; Lucian's aim and achievement
are more like those of the stage review. We are moved to delighted
e


148
LUCIAN ONCE MORE
пе
laughter; we relish each item separately; but we would not have
any of them prolonged, nor does Lucian compose them in any
onward movement. Like the tribe of declamatores which he de-
rides but never quite deserted, he prevails by making separate
single points. In Chaucer's Pardoner all the professional spell-
binders we have known are dramatically embodied; in Lucian's
Professor of Public Speaking their theory is cynically reduced to
its essentials: first and foremost, bluff, the only thing absolutely
necessary, then command and range of voice and acting, then a
store of strange words, then popular allusions, and for the rest
sheer gab. “Modesty, respectability, self-restraint, and blushes,”
says this professor, “may be left at home ... but you need also
a very loud voice, a shameless singing delivery, and a gait like
mine." 1 "Listen to the head tones," muttered an angry reporter
beside me a few years ago in a throng cowed by one of the tribe;
and I marked also the platform stride. Lucian is forever past
master of deflation.
When we ask more of his exposures of philosophers and prophets,
when we seek his own philosophy in the fluent dialogues which are
so clever with Socratic method that they seem always about to be-
come philosophical, he mocks us as well as the philosophers-and
himself. He is light-minded. If we accept him at his worth as a
keen wit and gay reviewer, we may find him, not suggestive indeed,
but tonic and corrective. The types of his sophisticated society
seem to differ from ours only in clothes. No satire has lost less
with the years. “He calls himself a Syrian,” says Professor Har-
mon to us who are wondering at Michael Arlen, and adds, as if
remembering a preoccupation of Anatole France, “he may or may
not have been of Semitic stock.”
The great boon of the Loeb Classical Library as a comprehen-
sive collection, and the distinction of this translation, need not
overshadow the value of the Fowler four-volume Oxford Lucian.
That is more compact for those who do not wish to refer to the
Greek, and has an ampler introduction than is permitted by the
1 Page 155. A complementary representation of the professional orator
has meantime been made available in the same Loeb Library by Wright's
translation of Philostratus. The Lives of the Sophists is so whole-
hearted a glorification as to become an unintentional reductio ad absurdum.


CHARLES SEARS BALDWIN
149
Loeb scope. But the sterner challenge of facing the original on the
other page, while it restrains the Harmon from those liberties to
which Lucian's ease perpetually tempts a translator, has not strait-
ened it. This fourth volume contains a pretty feat. . In order to
suggest Lucian's imitation of the Ionic of Herodotus, his Syrian
Goddess has been rendered in a style imitative of the Voiage and
Travaille which once bore the name of Sir John Mandeville. That
Lucian has provoked a modern translator midway in a long job
to write Middle English is striking evidence alike of his literary
expertness and of his enduring interest for all men and women of
the craft.
CHARLES SEARS BALDWIN


ROSBIF ET MAYONNAISE
PORTRAITS IN OIL AND VINEGAR. By James Laver.
8vo. 204 pages. Lincoln MacVeagh, The Dial Press.
$3.50.
M R LAVER uses more oil than vinegar in his portraiture. He
Topenly avows it in a quotation from Brillat-Savarin upon
his title-page aiming, under that noted guide's direction, at a
palatable salad; but the first nibble at his concoction—it happens
to be an estimate of the late Mr Sargent-betrays an error in the
proportion, or is it an inferiority in the brand of vinegar chosen,
or perhaps 'twas the salt that was forgot, but at any rate an
expected piquancy is lacking. The dish can be eaten. It's by no
means bad. It will be eaten readily enough by the English who are
not, to do them justice, fussy about salads, but residents of Brillat-
Savarin's own country who remember only too well the meticulous
care spent by Baudelaire and Gautier upon obtaining just the
right oils and just the right amount of vinegar—and also that
funny little émigré, Harry Heine who, to be sure, was a bit
wilful with the pepper-pot—but the French, I say, who remember
all this and have a standard for salads, will wonder just why
this particular one was brought forward for cosmopolitan con-
sumption.
Not that critics should be mean but that they should be choice
—they should choose. Mr Laver is so amiable that in the end he
inplies that all English painters—save, possibly, Mr Roger Fry and
Mr Wyndham Lewis--are great. All the vinegar at Mr Laver's
command fell apparently into Mr Fry's portion of the salad, for
he not only refers to that artist's work as a “somewhat watery
consommé” but hails him as Mr Clive Bell's "most distinguished
convert" and neither of these phrases is calculated to please. But
generally the compliments fly thickly. Such local favourites as
P. Wilson Steer, Henry Tonks, George Clausen, F. Cayley Robin-
son, and Sir Charles Holmes are treated as likely candidates for
international fame. Even that questionable personage Jacob Ep-
stein is handled with the greatest respect imaginable. This, as I
me


HENRY MCBRIDE
151
said, makes an acceptable dish to set before the English, but
sceptical outsiders will wonder if there really be so many artists
of the first class in that land at present, as Mr Laver would have
it appear.
All critics, obviously, are idealists though this is contrary to the
received idea. When Richard Strauss' Heldensleben Symphony
was first performed the audience, uncertain enough about most of
the themes, identified instantly and rapturously the snarling,
crabbed phrases that told what the composer thought of critics.
In general, present-day appraisers of art may be divided into two
divisions, those who use vinegar and those who do not—and by
“vinegar” I must hasten to say that I mean the habit of telling the
truth, even when it hurts. A vinegar-user is possibly an impatient
idealist striving to cut away all irrelevancies in order to present
his public with the heart of the matter. The prodigal purveyor
of oil, on the other hand, thinks art is something the populace
must be coaxed to take and that artists are feeble entities to be
coddled. Of the two sorts of critics the artists prefer the latter,
naturally. The hypocritical public, however, prefers the former
It hisses the critic vigorously in the theatre but a thousand will
chuckle over what is technically known as a "slam" and only
a dozen old women will read a "puff.”
If Mr Laver's book, then, turns out to be a hand-book, it must
be allowed that his style has more vivacity than one is accustomed
to meet with in such publications. A single quotation suffices to
prove its quality. Speaking of Blast and the Vorticist Move-
ment, he says: “Blast was to be a 'review of the Great English
Vortex. What was the great English Vortex? It is a little
difficult to say. In the old days an artist was supposed to be in-
spired by a Muse, then by a Vortex, and now, I understand, it is
a Complex that stands beside him and guides his hand, or jogs
his elbow. Vortex? Complex? We will content ourselves with
calling the mysterious impulse x. This is at least mathematically
accurate, even if, like most mathematical accuracies, it tells us
nothing."
The first essay in the book quotes a remark about Sargent,
apparently from Alice Meynell, that he tells us, in a portrait,
now and then, such a fact as that a man has or has not slept well.”
This is of an acidulousness far beyond Mr Laver's own powers,


152
ROSBIF ET MAYONNAISE
and he hastens to counteract it with the statement that Mr Sargent's
portraits are historical documents beyond price. They will be-
come, undoubtedly, historical documents, and at the present mo-
ment are, assuredly, high-priced. The argument then mounts by
easy stages to a consideration of the achievements of Augustus
John and Sir William Orpen whom he praises unrestrainedly, and
with a slight bias in favour of Mr John. American opinion will not
take exception to this. We believe Mr John at his best to be
England's present best; but we are not bowled over by him com-
pletely. As for Sir William he displays amazing accuracy but his
soul appears to be, in the words of one of Mr Firbank's countesses,
"très gutter.” For Mr Laver's own edification, should these lines
chance to meet his eye, I might add that a few of us Americans
have respect for the intellectual aspects of the English School-
or should I say the Slade School ?-and take pains to see all of it
that we can, but that we remain slightly chilled by its general
lack of charm. To the English men-of-letters we are as faithful as
ever we were, but between us and the painters there is a widening
breach since the war.
ve
HENRY MCBRIDE


THE SPARE AMERICAN EMOTION
THE MAKING OF AMERICANS BEING THE HISTORY OF
A FAMILY'S PROGRESS. By Gertrude Stein. 8vo. 925
pages. The Three Mountains Press. $8.
T XTRAORDINARY interpretations of American life recur to
U one—The Finer Grain, In the American Grain, The Making
of an American, The Domestic Manners of The Americans. We
have, and in most cases it amounts to not having them, novels about
discontented youth, unadvantaged middle age, American material-
ism; in The Making of Americans, however, we have “not just
an ordinary kind of novel with a plot and conversations to amuse
you, but a record of a decent family progress respectably lived
by us and our fathers and our mothers, and our grand-fathers, and
grand-mothers.” One is not able to refrain from saying, more-
over, that its chiselled typography and an enticing simplicity of
construction are not those of ordinary book-making.
By this epic of ourselves, we are reminded of certain early Ger-
man engravings in which Adam, Eve, Cain, and Abel stand with
every known animal wild and domestic, under a large tree, by a
river. The Making of Americans is a kind of living genealogy
which is in its branching, unified and vivid.
We have here a truly psychological exposition of American living
—an 'account of that happiness and of that unhappiness which is
to those experiencing it, as fortuitous as it is to those who have
an understanding of heredity and of environment natural and
inevitable. Romantic, curious, and engrossing is this story of "the
old people in a new world, the new people made out of the old.”
There are two kinds of men and women Miss Stein tells us, the
attacking kind and the resisting kind, each of which is often
modified by many complex influences. Mr Dehning who was of the
resisting kind, "never concerned himself very much with the man-
agement of the family's way of living and the social life of his
wife and children. These things were all always arranged by Mrs
Dehning." Yet "they could each one make the other one do what
they wanted the other one to be doing”—this “really very nice very


154
THE SPARE AMERICAN EMOTION
rich good kind quite completely successful a little troubled american
man and woman.” The insufficiency of Alfred Hersland who
married Julia Dehning, is shown to be largely a result of his
mother's anonymity, of incompetent pedagogy, of spoiling, and of
his father's impatient unconsidering wilfulness. The Dehnings
were happy; the Herslands were under the impression that they
too, were happy. As Miss Stein says:
"And all around the whole fence that shut these joys in was a
hedge of roses, not wild, they had been planted, but now they were
very sweet and small and abundant and all the people from that
part of Gossols came to pick the leaves to make sweet scented
jars and pillows, and always all the Herslands were indignant and
they would let loose the dogs to bark and scare them but still the
roses grew and always all the people came and took them. And
altogether the Herslands always loved it there in their old home in
Gossols.”
0
In persons either of the resisting or of the attacking kind, con-
tradictions between “the bottom nature and the other natures" re-
sult in hybrids; as in Napoleon—in Herbert Spencer-in various
other kinds of nature. Disillusionment, sensitiveness, cowardice,
courage, jealousy, stubbornness, curiosity, suspicion, hopefulness,
anger, subtlety, pride, egotism, vanity, ambition-each phase of
emotion as of behaviour, is to Miss Stein full of meaning. “Some-
one gives to another one a stubborn feeling," she says, "when that
one could be convincing that other one if that other one would
then continue listening,” and “it is very difficult in quarrelling to
be certain in either one what the other one is remembering.” Of
the assorting of phenomena in "an ordered system” she says, “Al-
ways I am learning, always it is interesting, often it is exciting.”
There is great firmness in the method of this book. Phillip
Redfern we are told, “was a man always on guard, with every one
always able to pierce him.” The living rooms of Julia Dehning's
house “were a prevailing red, that certain shade of red like that
certain shade of green, dull, without hope, the shade that so com-
pletely bodies forth the ethically aesthetic aspiration of the spare
american emotion.” Her mother's house was, on the other hand, of
a different period. “A nervous restlessness of luxury was through


MARIANNE MOORE
155
it all. ... a parlor full of ornate marbles placed on yellow onyx
stands, chairs gold and white of various size and shape, a delicate
blue silk brocaded covering on the walls and a ceiling painted pink
with angels and cupids all about, a dining-room all dark and gold,
a living room all rich and gold and red with built-in-couches. ...
Marbles and bronzes and crystal chandeliers and gas logs finished
out each room."
We “hasten slowly forward" by a curious backward kind of
progress. “Sometimes I like it,” Miss Stein says, “that different
ways of emphasizing can make very different meanings in a phrase
or sentence I have made and am rereading.” To recall her sum-
mary of washing is to agree with her:
"It's a great question this question of washing. One never can
find any one who can be satisfied with anybody else's washing. I
knew a man once who never as far as any one could see ever did
any washing, and yet he described another with contempt, why he
is a dirty hog sir, he never does any washing. The French tell me
it's the Italians who never do any washing, the French and the
Italians both find the Spanish a little short in their washing, the
English find all the world lax in this business of washing, and the
East finds all the West a pig, which never is clean with just the
little cold water washing. And so it goes.”
Repeating has value then as "a way to wisdom.” “Some children
have it in them.” “Always more and more it has completed history
in it” and “irritation passes over into patient completed under-
standing.”
Certain aspects of life are here emphasized-the gulf between
youth and age, and the bond between these two; the fact of senti-
mental as of hereditary family indivisibility—such that when
Julia Dehning was married, every one of the Dehnings had "feeling
of married living in them.”
The power of sex which is palpable throughout this novel, is
handsomely implied in what is said of certain uncles and cousins
in the Dehning family,
"generous decent considerate fellows, frank and honest in their
friendships, and simple in the fashion of the elder Dehning. With


156
THE SPARE AMERICAN EMOTION
this kindred Julia had always lived as with the members of one
family. These men did not supply for her the training and ex-
perience that helps to clear the way for an impetuous woman
through a world of passions, they only made a sane and moral
back-ground on which she in her later life could learn to lean.”
The ineradicable morality of America is varyingly exposited,
as in the statement that to Julia Dehning, "all men that could be
counted as men by her and could be thought of as belonging ever
to her, they must be, all, good strong gentle creatures, honest and
honorable and honoring.” Contrary to “the french habit in think-
ing,” “the american mind accustomed to waste happiness and be
reckless of joy finds morality more important than ecstacy and the
lonely extra of more value than the happy two."
There is ever present in this history, a sense of the dignity of
the middle class, "the one thing always human, vital, and worthy."
Of a co-educational college of the west, Miss Stein says:
"Mostly no one there was conscious of a grand-father unless as
remembering one as an old man living in the house with them or
as living in another place and being written to sometimes by them
and then having died and that was the end of grand-fathers to
them. No one among them was held responsible for the father they
had unless by some particular notoriety that had come to the father
of some one. It was then a democratic western institution, this
college where Redfern went to have his college education.”
As Bunyan's Christian is English yet universal, this sober, tender-
hearted, very searching history of a family's progress, comprehends
in its picture of life which is distinctively American, a psychology
which is universal.
MARIANNE MOORE


A STRAYED REVELLER
THE HALT IN THE GARDEN. By Robert Hillyer.
12m0. 40 pages. Elkin Mathews. London. 3/6.
ADS about poetry turn up with the picturesque fatality of
T financial panics. And the social consequences are scarcely less
interesting: persons of leisure and learning are turned out to write
books, established singers are cast forth, neck and crop, from some
one of the temples of Apollo; lecturers corrupt their flocks, and
ladies try to lead their own lives. Slowly the teapot simmers down
to cool bitterness (rivals having written too well for one another's
comfort) and a long season of dead calm prepares a next genera-
tion for being taken by surprise. But if ever anybody could per-
suade anybody else to read history in poetry, the discovery of the
long likeness of its tradition and its novelties would be nothing
short of shocking. One college course, at least, could be culled
out of these shells and sources. For there are deep reasons for
these periodic rows, if only we could get at them. Somebody ought
to examine the effect of natural forces on verse: Einstein, for
instance. Sun-spots, it has been suggested, spoil crops and ruin
banks; I submit the phenomena of modern poetry to students of
solar cyclones.
For whether or no drought inhabits certain holy hills, the water
level of the sacred springs is surely going down. Books are grow-
ing thinner and thinner: before long some week will slip by with-
out any poet's having published anything; seven lean years to-
gether are more than I should care to prophesy. Are conventional
forms really being resumed, with a difference? Then the best part
of our time is past: the harvest, as the pulpit says, has been reaped;
we have only to eat through our winter of history, wake up, and
find ourselves famished. Yet however weary of the world one may
affect to be, the finding of roses in autumn is a fact for emotional
record. For flowers out of season are perversely pleasant: even
October roses insist on smelling of summer, and thereby merchants
vantage. If poets were as canny, Mr Hillyer should
flourish, for The Halt in the Garden is an autumn rose or nothing.
eal


158
A STRAYED REVELLER
Out of style would hardly be too strong a description of this
strayed reveller, and reviewers ought to play fair. Short-winded
people who like to lose their breath before a work of art had better
not buy this book, for Mr Hillyer, according to the mode, has grave
faults, so obvious that any reader can spell them out for himself.
His verse is not cloudy, but indecently clear; he indulges instead
of discords a fine sense of sound and fitness; his figures of speech
are absurdly simple and likely; his moods lack bile and snap. I
pass over his business of making verses and stanzas, his tenderness,
his whimsicality, only because I have another cause for complaint:
I have searched in vain for one single reference to private life. If
lyric poetry, as some of Mr Joyce's characters were once agreed,
be lyric cry, Mr Hillyer needs another kind of name for his. Ges-
ture, contortion, and cantankerousness—these one is accustomed
to, but what can a reviewer do with this gentle, this pedestrian
want of strut?
Truth is, poets labour under a double and just suspicion. Seneca
observed of the practice of life:
usnes
“Curae leves loquuntur, ingentes stupent;"
whereupon most poets profess trifles. And there is another side
to this embarrassment: what Congress calls “leave to print.” From
these two difficulties, I take it, arises the distinction between minor
poets and major: great poets being heavy (and therefore unread)
the immodesty of their having appeared page after page is quite
forgiven them. For minor poets, consequently, creation cools off
into the art of learning what to avoid of shooting, not into a
reader's heart, but over his head, if possible; of tossing infant
fancies headlong into Moloch. To brains desiccated with doubt
and erudition, poems must be subtle conglomerations of guile, men-
tal acrobatics, and concealed quotation. Writing them is a matter
of matching wits—reading them is another matter. Mr Hillyer
cultivates nothing of all this, and so abstaining, is not wary: casual
critics, for instance, might think him a man of one language.
Thus Mr Hillyer falls between two stools of excellence: his
verse is too frank for the obscurities of minor poets and too pleasing
for the dullness of great ones. If he is easy to read and remember,
happy in phrase and feeling, a reviewer can only try to vex him


STEWART MITCHELL
159
by observing that Francis Thompson would have liked The Garden
on the Moors, that Tennyson would have read (and re-read)
Buddha, that his title poem would have made Landor prick up his
ears, that Swinburne would have relished the shifting, spiral
cadence of the best pentameters, rolling them on his tongue-and
wonder if the author will be so simple as to be pleased!
Stripped of its wordiness, criticism can walk as flat-footedly as
plane geometry. Granted the dubious hypothesis that writing re-
views is worth while, appraisal can best be stated simply as likes
and dislikes. Mr Arthur Machen, in an appropriate introduction,
points pleasingly to his own proclivities, finding these reiterated in
the great and continuous tradition of English verse. Doubtless
the art poetic is a changing art, yet a word of warning as to the
proverbial slowness of watched pots cannot be unkind. Mr
Machen implies this gentle reminder: and the actual vacuum of
time at the centre of fine art.
For such aloofness some future may praise Mr Hillyer's good
work, calling him an ancestor, or a sport, as chance will determine,
approving his "shrewd and accurate strategy." However much
his contemporaries may query his utter lack of mode, of physiology,
psychology, introspection, and all that, Mr Hillyer will obstinately
rest content, for even a rustic could tell him that dry wells always
look deep.
STEWART MITCHELL


BRIEFER MENTION
SASHKA JIGOULEFF, by Leonid Andreyev, edited by and with introduction
by Maxim Gorky (12mo, 294 pages; McBride: $2.50). This novel, the
only novel ever written by Andreyev, reveals in a most convincing manner
the limitations of its author, the limitations of this mock "cosmic pessi-
mist.” The story, a commonplace melodrama, seldom if ever holds one's
attention; one grows weary of such blood-and-thunder writing. "Andreyev
shouts 'Boo' but I am not afraid,” Tolstoy is reported once to have said,
and the rest of us “are not amused,” we might add.
The MARRIAGE Guest, by Konrad Bercovici (12mo, 285 pages ; Boni &
Liveright: $2) is the first novel by this writer of popular and "colourful”
short stories. Undistinguished in style, sensational in subject and intent,
it is not truly a novel at all. It is rather a conglomeration of highly
rouged episodes without particular form or purpose other than to graft a
lurid flower upon a stem of commonplace marriage. The fact that many
of the characters are supposedly Germans from “the old country" un-
doubtedly supplies the colour.
THE CHAPBOOK: A Miscellany, 1925, edited by Harold Monro (10mo,
114 pages; Jonathan Cape: 5/). An air of fervent fastidious per-
sonal eagerness, a general sense of animation behind the scenes, is
palpable in The Chapbook. That thanks are partial is due perhaps to
a feeling that the curtain has gone up too soon. Various readily proffered
lines seem not secure and one involuntarily wishes that contributions by the
same author might be adjacent. But wherever or however suddenly one
might come upon them, the many well-inked woodcuts and pen drawings in
this book would be enjoyed, and one is likely to read again, the poem by
H. D., The Lost Thrush by Liam O'Flaherty, A Note on Free Verse
by Richard Aldington, two poems by Harold Monro, and a poem called
Divers by Peter Quennell.
May Days, edited by Genevieve Taggard, with woodcuts by J. J. Lankes
(12mo, 306 pages ; Boni & Liveright: $3) is an anthology of verse chosen
from the defunct Masses and Liberator. It is true that this anthology
"contains poetry from almost every important poet of our era,” but it
cannot be said that almost all the poetry contained is important. On
the contrary, as the editor is aware, "much of the best is light verse,”
the effort having been made “to preserve everything that gave the flavor
of those days” rather than to restrict the collection to "verse of conspicuous
poetic merit.” What makes Miss Taggard's anthology significant and
at the same time gives it unity is the romanticism and the lyrical will to
revolt which distinguished the period it embraces and which in the twilight
longing of Max Eastman and the intense stuttering of Carl Sandburg
find a common expression.


BRIEFER MENTION
161
ROAN STALLION, TAMAR AND OTHER POEMs, by Robinson Jeffers (1omo,
253 pages; Boni & Liveright: $3) reveals in the quality of imagination,
strength of line, and conception of form a new American poet of dis-
tinction. Stemming from Walt Witman, Mr Jeffers yet achieves a
more intense objectivity, essaying with equal daring and conviction the
lyric, the narrative, and the dramatic mode. His poems are informed
with the terror and the violent beauty of man fulfilling his destiny, over
against "coldness and the tenor of a stone tranquillity; slow life, the
growth of trees and verse.” In fertility and in primitive strength his
poetry strikes a new and necessary chord in the chorus of contemporary
American song.
COLOR, by Countee Cullen (12mo, 108 pages; Harpers: $2). Despite a
sometimes too easy grasp of colossal themes and a mechanics more limber
than learned, these much crowned poems by a negro poet are in certain
respects impressive. One cannot evade the resoluteness of this author,
to whom "primal clay” is not dirt and to whom "glory,” in the evangelistic
sense of the word, is not ridiculous. One is, moreover, content to be
reminded that "the soul of Africa is winged with arrogance."
THE NEGRO AND His Songs, by Howard W. Odum and Guy B. Johnson
(8vo, 306 pages; University of North Carolina Press : $3) is an invaluable
piece of research work in the texts, the variations of texts, and the incidence
of negro folk music. The work is so thorough and so well arranged, that
it is to be regretted the authors could not publish the music with the
words. The three major divisions are religious, social, and work songs;
in each occur unfamiliar and highly interesting examples. The richness
of the quarry may be judged by the fact that the entire book is devoted
to songs.collected in but four counties, two in Mississippi and two in
Georgia.
PLAYWRIGHTS OF THE NEW AMERICAN THEATRE, by Thomas H. Dickin-
son (12mo, 331 pages; Macmillan: $2.50) begins with Percy Mackaye,
praising him in such terms that one thinks the author must be slightly
mad. But it turns out to be Mackaye as theorist and pioneer, not Mackaye
as playwright, who evokes encomium, and this display of critical sense
encourages the reader to continue. Eugene O'Neill is the actual hero of
the book, and he is well treated, but not always with illumination. With
a bias in favor of exalted and experimental work, the author treats with not
enough sympathy or respect the artisans of the straight commercial theatre,
not giving them sufficient credit for the expertness of their method nor,
since he deals with ideas too, for their occasional forays into satire.
THE MAN MENCKEN, by Isaac Goldberg (12mo, 388 pages; Simon &
Schuster : $4) is a triumph of loquacity; and it may be biographical; but
to say it is critical is to debauch a patient word. That thought seems not
to have occurred to the author, even as a heresy to be scotched, which is so
patently occurring to certain of his contemporaries—many of whom are
tentatively selling the Mencken stock short-namely, that the worth of Mr
Mencken may at present be as much over-estimated as it was once neglected.


162
BRIEFER MENTION
ISABELLA STEWART GARDNER AND Fenway Court, by Morris Carter (8vo,
255 pages; Houghton Mifflin : $6). Henry James said that Mrs Gardner
had had a “preposterously pleasant career," and the new biography proves
him to have been literally exact. In fact no one in her period can be
thought of as having a nicer time unless possibly it were Mr Teddy
Roosevelt. He and she, indeed, had much the same method of attack.
They came, they took pains to be seen, they conquered. If it were a
wedding, it was Mr R. that was looked at and not the bride ; if it were
a concert, it was Mrs Jack who focused attention rather than the musicians.
Ah, those good old times! Have they vanished irrevocably? It would
seem so. Mrs Jack Gardner was the last of the grandes dames; and
democracy, when it desires exhilaration, must content itself with movie-
queens. The biography is a good one. Nothing is held back. She is
all there. Read it.
since an unday
PETER THE CZAR, by Klabund, translated by Herman George Scheffauer
(12mo, 152 pages; Putnam: $2). Certainly a very able summary of the
most vivid of the czars, and since an undeniable and haunting music ac-
companies the narrative, the word "able” at times seems inadequate. Half-
way through, the careful appraiser is tempted to say “strong," but later
the book becomes too strong, there is too much blood, too much thunder,
and the distressing accents of the late war seem to be loudly heard as
the pedals thump out the concluding numbers of the melodrama.
Way through. Harrative, the
NOTES OF MY YOUTH, by Pierre Loti, translated from the French by Rose
Ellen Stein (12mo, 190 pages; Doubleday, Page: $2) consists of remnants
from Loti's Journal—that strange diary of a temperament, which was
begun in his childhood with cabalistic scratchings and pictures, continued
more coherently through much of his Odyssean life, and was the matrix
of his tales. It is arranged by his son, Samuel Viaud; and, while frag.
mentary, perhaps too fragmentary for sustained interest except to initiates,
it contains more passages that exhibit the main aspects of Loti's simple and
potent nature-his primal candour, his concernless vanity, his profound
pantheism, his elemental power of word.
Rebel Saints, by Mary Agnes Best (10mo, 333 pages; Harcourt, Brace:
$3). It would be impossible to undertake any research into the early records
of the Quakers without unearthing some nuggets of golden speech. Miss
Best has done this with great advantage for her readers. One regrets that
she herself too often writes of those stubborn times with a kind of modern
facetiousness. In spite of this weakness, however, she is fully alive to the
elevated style of the seventeenth century, apparently shared by king and
cobbler. She likes to let us hear once again the proud words uttered by
Charles I, “I have not been entrusted of the people, the people are mine
inheritance," just as much as she likes to let us hear the not less proud
words of George Fox, “My father's name was Christopher Fox and he
was by profession a weaver, an honest man, and there was the seed of
God in him. My mother was an upright woman of the stock of the
martyrs.”


BRIEFER MENTION
163
While The ROMANTIC 90's, by Richard Le Gallienne (12mo, 271 pages;
Doubleday, Page: $2.50) is composed largely of unexceptionable and some-
what trivial foot-notes to literary history, it possesses interest, for the
author's acquaintance among the lions of 1890-acquired partly by virtue
of his readership to John Lane of The Bodley Head—was unusually
rich. If one is interested to know how Meredith, Pater, Björnson, or Oscar
Wilde looked to a competent spectator, he will find it here; for with all
such personages the narrator appears to have lunched, supped, or spent the
week-end. The illustrations are facsimiles of letters to the author from
his distinguished friends.
THE WRITING OF FICTION, by Edith Wharton (12mo, 178 pages; Scribner :
$2). Probably no one writing to-day has brought to the composition of
fiction a more consecrated sobriety, a greater fastidiousness than Mrs
Wharton. It is therefore of unusual interest to have in so lucid and
condensed a form her considered theories on the craft she so honourably,
so effectively pursues. That many of these theories have been expressed
with a perhaps more searching divination in the prefaces of Henry James
does not lessen the value of the present admirable work. It is revealing
of Mrs Wharton's limitations, however, to discover that this high priestess
of the art of sensibility, when paying generous homage to Marcel Proust,
can herself betray a thickness of vision great enough to permit her to
term as a “deplorable lapse in sensibility” certain pages in which the
incomparable Frenchman, purged of moral preconceptions, gives expres-
sion to his piercing and delicate insights into certain of the more dangerous
aspects of life.
The nine addresses on language problems included in ACADEMY PAPERS
(12mo, 282 pages; Scribner: $3) were occasioned by the Evangeline Blash-
field Foundation, established to assist The American Academy of Arts and
Letters in fostering the beauty and integrity of the English language.
The academicians seem not very certain as to the proper methods of this
enterprise, and not very distinguished in practice; yet there is tangibility
in the suggestion of Professor W. C. Brownell that the Academy deal
with such subjects as slang and free verse, and of Professor Bliss Perry
that there be official recognition annually of the current American book
most distinguished for style; while the suggestions of Professor Brander
Matthews—including one that the Academy address itself to a suitable
demonstration of the futility of revolt for the sake of revolt—are ex-
pressed with great competence of rhetoric.
THAMYRIS OR Is THERE A FUTURE FOR POETRY? by R. C. Trevelyan (16mo,
89 pages ; Dutton : $1). Taking into its confidence the modern Thamyris
in revolt against the past; this gently didactic little book assures us that
we need not despair of poetry's “salvation”; that free verse is only by
exception unprosaic; that modern poetry has not the emotional potency
of performed ancient poetry; that one must not be impatient of rhetoric;
that long lyrics, comic poetry, narrative poetry, philosophic poetry, the
treatise, and the poetic satire, "have not been made our own.”


164
BRIEFER MENTION
The FouNDATIO (illus., 8vo, 95, pagests, the authors next
THE FOUNDATIONS OF AESTHETICS, by C. K. Ogden, I. A. Richards, and
James Wood (illus., 8vo, 95 pages; International Publishers: $2.50).
Classifying sixteen theories of beauty, the authors next proceed to ex-
plain, illustrate, and comment upon each in turn, arriving finally at
their own, the sixteenth, which affirms that “Anything is beautiful which
conduces to synaesthesis.” Synaesthesis is a state of equilibrium which
is not to be confused with "passivity, inertia, over-stimulation, or conflict";
it results from a systematization of impulses which are not naturally
harmonious, whereby they are given free play, "with entire avoidance
of frustration.” The authors are cautious in their advance, sensitive in
their citations, and spare, or almost gaunt, in their exposition.
PERSONALITIES IN Art, by Royal Cortissoz (8vo, 444 pages; Scribner:
$3.50). Courbet “never quite adjusted himself to the suaver modes of
urban life,” and it required an effort of will upon the part of Mr
Cortissoz, hedged in, perhaps, by the social amenities, to concede greatness
to such as he. Whistler, who also outraged public opinion, did it in the
manner of a club-man and was more easily forgiven. The peasant artists
of the new democracy, however, fare badly under this pen. Redon is
"somehow ineffective,” Cézanne "pathetically missed the mission of a
painter which is to create beautiful pictures,” Gauguin was "inadequately
equipped," and Van Gogh "spoiled a lot of canvases with crude, quite
unimportant pictures”!
THE ARISTOCRATIC West, by Katherine Fullerton Gerould (8vo, 220 pages ;
Harpers: $3.50) is no exception to the rule that the travel essay is a
severe test of a writer's intelligence and personality, proving that in
travel one takes away only in proportion as one brings. It is a mixture
of the banal and the real. If the discourse relapses occasionally into
such feebleness as "highbrow," "effete East," "doers of stunts," it is yet
contrived generally with competence, with gusto, and with awareness of
sentence-tune and rhythm. If the author deals heavily in obvious things,
they are yet often significant, and to that significance she can give italics,
as when she recalls the erstwhile cosmopolitan character of San Francisco,
or when she manages to invest Reno with an odour, as of festered sanctities.
RIDER'S CALIFORNIA, with 28 maps and plans, compiled under the editor-
ship of Fremont Rider by Frederic Taber Cooper (16mo, 667 pages; Mac-
millan: $5). We have not in this remarkably able guide-book, the
resplendent diction of Karl Baedeker; in certain instances one feels a
need for explicitness greater than that afforded by the asterisk of com-
mendation; the pronunciation of Spanish names has, wisely perhaps but
unkindly, not been indicated-editorial rigour in this respect being em-
phasized by a multiplicity of such grieving American names as Shake-
speare Rock, Ham Station, Rubicon Springs, Peanut, Dome Peak, Gibraltar
Dam. We have, however, in the clear type of these carefully ordered
pages, a genuine guide to California—a general and a circumstantial
description, a history, a bibliography, and a conscientiously impartial
appreciation of “a magnificent state.”
ultiplicity of such dal rigour in this resor perhaps but


BRIEFER MENTION
165
Now AND FOREVER, by Samuel Roth (12mo, 156 pages; McBride: $1.75)
is an imaginary conversation between Israel Zangwill and the author,
a dialogue for one, with Mr Zangwill conscripted to serve as inter-
locutor. The conversation, persumably concerned with The Jew and the
Future, has very little to do with either subject; it has to do almost
entirely with Mr Roth through whose always argumentative aggressive-
ness one knows a peculiarly Jewish and histrionic brilliance. Mr Roth,
however, protests entirely too much; his stridencies dismally lack charm,
producing in the reader an increasing margin of discontent with the not
uninteresting theme of the book.
THE PHANTOM Public, by Walter Lippmann (12mo, 205 pages; Har-
court, Brace: $2). Centralized democratic government, by Mr Lippmann's
interpretation, is a kind of oligarchy in which the leaders may be de-
posed by the bloodless revolution of the ballot; and thus, "a nation is
politically stable when nothing of radical consequence is determined by
its elections.” Strictly defining the imperatives of democracy in terms of
its potentialities, and seeking no potentialities beyond those evident in
current practice, his book is not an exhortation, but an analysis. And
the answer to the question, “Can the majority rule ?" seems to be that
the public is totally devoid of executive function: voting for some brand
of political behaviour in general, it must rely on its chosen representatives
to exemplify this brand in specific executive acts: it rules, not by participa-
tion in the processes of government, but by its periodic voicing of approval
or discontent.
IMPRISONMENT, by Bernard Shaw (12mo, 85 pages; Brentano: 75 cents)
is a paper-covered pamphlet, actually a preface to a monumental work
on prisons written by other hands. It is Shaw's purpose to "change the
vindictive attitude towards criminals,” and the proposals he makes will
be found startling and sensible. It will certainly startle some of the
Shavians to know that he is not opposed to capital punishment, although
he isn't, naturally, pleased at the thought of gallows and chairs. The
pamphlet is a masterpiece of argumentative writing; it was composed in
1924 and shows that one mind, at least, in England, is not degenerating,
not with the years, not with the peace. It is a fine preface for a play
Shaw has not yet written; possibly because Galsworthy has.
THE SENATE AND THE LEAGUE OF Nations, by Henry Cabot Lodge (8vo,
424 pages; Scribner: $4). Despite a desire to be, and a determination to
seem, patriotic in having assisted the Senate to oppose The Versailles
Treaty and The Covenant of The League of Nations as those documents
were submitted to the country by President Wilson, the late Senator Lodge
seems partisan. He is inadvertently a dependable historian in showing
himself to have been innately obstructive; in showing Woodrow Wilson
to have been a scholar and a statesman, although a man who liked to do
things without help; in recording the propriety and wisdom of the counsel
of Mr Elihu Root. Appended to the book are certain speeches and ad-
dresses which are historically most important.


THE THEATRE
W ENTLEMEN crooks with a lady accomplice who is pure in
I heart and defends her more technical purity at the risk of
her reputation—these are not the freshest ingredients for a play;
yet Frederick Lonsdale has used them with a careless gaiety and, by
introducing a "poison pen” letter for his third act, has given The
Last OF MRS CHEYNEY all that it needs to be a delightful comedy.
It is always a pleasure to hear his lines and to be certain that each
of his characters will say at least once in each of his plays, “The
reverse," and follow these words with something bright or absurd.
Miss Ina Claire is extremely clever as Mrs Cheyney, but when it
comes to acting, Roland Young puts the play in his pocket and
walks off with all the honours. His light vein, a little underplayed
in the past three years, is extraordinarily fine and he creates his
young rake without tricks, without memories and importations from
his other rôles. That is, on our stage, an exceptional merit. Let
an actor or actress develop a mannerism, and, if it is a pleasing one,
managers and public will conspire to make that mannerism the
chief thing in his or her art. Five years or so ago Mr Young was
threatened in this way; and showed both character and resource-
fulness in escaping, in remaining an actor, and in becoming a
fine one.
OUT
C
THE COCOANUTS, in which the four Marx Brothers returned to
town, gave me continuous, almost unalloyed, and certainly hilari-
ous pleasure. The touch of alloy was in the undistinguished nature
of most of the supporting cast. The book by George S. Kaufman
was not remarkable in plot, but was supremely witty in the lines
and provided beautiful comic situations, one of them communi-
cating bedrooms—carrying the door-and-bed farce to its last pos-
sible point in organized mechanical humour, a piece of vaudeville
or commedia dell'arte technique in noise and movement. There
was also a touch of parody on the author's own fondness for the
obligatory scene of the big speech, which was done twice, and the
second time the regular departure of Harpo Marx, with a sinister
and contemptuous leer on his face, was almost too good to be true.
OV


GILBERT SELDES
167
Of the Marxes one plays straight, competently; one varies and
achieves his best moment at the piano; that leaves Groucho whose
delivery of nifties and wise-cracks is perfect, and Harpo whose
comedy gets richer an