d more Chaplinesque each year. Again and
again in the current show he is in Chaplin's vein, particularly in
the rapid creation of comic scenes out of inappropriate material.
For example, as he comes to the hotel desk to register, he suddenly
siezes two or three pens and tosses them at an imaginary target-
the desk clerk immediately handing him a cigar. The gravity and
skill of these ten seconds perfectly create before you the “Indian
game” of the county fairs. His eloquent silence, his mask of the
zany, his expressive gait, are all the marks of a great clown.
Irving Berlin's score for The CocoaNuts has, as usual, been
reproached for not offering a big hit. To me that is quite secondary.
Most of the music is airy and in keeping with the tone of the book;
some of it is hilarious and in keeping with the tone of the Marxes;
and the Tea number is as tidy and delicate, and incidentally as well
staged, a number as he has done in many years.
IS
ND T
Neither Androcles nor Napoleon comes off particularly well in
the Theatre Guild's double bill of Bernard Shaw, and Shaw comes
off worst of all. The fault is not, as it was in the production of
ARMS AND THE MAN, due to the fact that the direction was ap-
parently all at sea as to what Shaw had meant and had, without
taking the trouble to find out, simply produced the play for all
its surface value at the box office. In ANDROCLES there were two
definite purposes always clashing: the inadequately-worked-out
intention to have a holiday, to be gaily and intelligently burlesque,
and the intention to be severe and economical and intellectual.
Shaw, it happens, fuses his intentions perfectly. The Guild sepa-
rated them, gave half-hearted support to Covarrubias, so that his
décors were not supported by the costumes, and the Lion was
alternately not funny enough and too funny; and then played the
Christian morality without fervour or intensity. Of The MAN
Of Destiny, the less said the better.
MERCHANTS OF GLORY, the following Guild production, was
much better directed, in the ordinary commercial way. It is a play
about the spiritual profiteers of after the war, those who glory in


168
THE THEATRE
the sons they "gave”; and the theme is so quickly grasped that one
would say it was not necessary to change a word from the French
original. But I think the Guild would have been well-advised to
adapt the play, to lighten it and make it more interesting in the
intervals between the high moments, by localizing it. The French
political situation, however broadly suggested, remains alien to us
unless it is done with passion, with characters; whereas to the
French, the skeletons suffice. Give the play to the authors of THE
BEGGAR ON HORSEBACK, and you assure yourself something far
more entertaining without sacrificing any of its integrity.
was
as
It is quite possible that all the derogatory things said in the
press about The FOUNTAIN are true; but The FOUNTAIN remains
an intensely interesting play, produced with passion and beauty.
The formidable list of O'Neill's plays on the programme (so many
of them followed by the word "destroyed”) ought to make one
hesitate to quarrel with his method; I can only say that if it was
the only method possible to O'Neill, it remained a hard one for
the audience. It seemed awkward, in a play which in any case
was bound to be long and eloquent, to spend so much time planting
the seed of the legend of the Fountain of Youth; to connect it,
episodically, with an indeterminate love affair of Ponce de Leon,
so that the daughter of the woman who loved him might reappear,
in his age, as the personification of youth, seemed equally make-
shift. Yet there was no indecision; there was only a groping for
clairvoyance.
Toward the end of the play the illumination came. The play
was possessed of beauty, the thought was clear, the emotion throb-
bing; the dramatic expedients of the early acts gave way to inevita-
ble dramatic processes; and the language which had earlier been
uncertain sustained itself. Cadence took the place of diction, as
passion overcame action.
I was not happy with the cast; but even so, most of the players
suffered the sea-change which has in the past come over their com-
rades when brought under the direction of Robert Edmond Jones.
They were better than before. The direction was not flawless, it
seemed to waver a little between a stylistic presentation and a
matter-of-fact representation; but this, too, was in spots in keeping
with the uncertainty of the text. One thing, you may count on
er


GILBERT SELDES
169
it, was without flaw: the settings. If you can withdraw all the
tawdry and tricky associations from the word, you may call them
magical.
If I have ever made myself clear about the moving pictures in
these pages, I can be brief about The Big PARADE. As story it is
clogged, dislocated, commonplace. As picture it is superb. Not
merely mechanically, although the camera triumphs are impressive;
it is properly directed. There are comic and sentimental scenes
which left me indifferent or actively depressed, but they were taken
with a fuller use of the camera, and a more intelligent use of it,
than common. And the real picture, the war stuff, is magnificent.
With this report I lose my hitherto unquestioned amateur status
and, at the moment, am questioning whether the loss will be com-
pensated by any adequate gain. The unanimous displeasure of the
critics of the daily papers in their reviews of THE WISE-CRACKERS
startled, without pleasing, me. I can assure you that it isn't as bad
as all that; and if by a miracle it should still be current when these
pages are printed, I cordially urge all sound citizens to see it. But
not preferentially. I'd much rather see The CocoANUTS myself.
GILBERT SELDES


MODERN ART
A DRAMA is now being enacted in New York that vividly
1 recalls the closing chapters of Balzac's Cousin Pons and
though the dénouement may be reached before these lines appear in
print, nobody at present knows what is to become of the John
Quinn collection of modern art. There are no rascals in the story.
I don't mean that. But a horde of people with varying interests
are pulling strings in all directions in an effort to sway the heirs
and executors of the estate, and these latter, who appear to know
nothing of art, are in as fine a state of confusion as you could wish
to see. The chances are, therefore, that exactly those things will
be done to the collection that its late owner would not have wished.
The perfectly obvious procedure would have been to have sold
the pictures and carvings at public auction last winter in New
York City. The times were ripe for it and the stage was set. Mr
Quinn's library had already been sold with immense success
and the prestige of that event would have extended over to the
sale of the objects of art. It is well known to students of auctions
that the excitements of them are cumulative and the atmosphere
of a big sale breeds a frenzy of buying that ensures success. The
dealers, when consulted, invariably deny this. They say that to
unload a vast quantity of pictures upon an innocent public is to
invite disaster. As a matter of fact, what they dread is the effort
that is necessary "to protect themselves" at the sale, for the
modern dealer who has been selling certain artists for certain figures
thinks it extremely compromising if the said artist fetches less at
the auction than at the shop. This is an error both in fact and in
judgement. What they ignore is that the details of a great sale
linger in the public memory but for a few days and that chance
bargains to connoisseurs do not interfere with the prices of staple
goods. The records not only prove this but also that the dealers
seldom do have to protect themselves in great sales. On the con-
trary the orgy of buying that ensues on such occasions brings a
crowd of customers to the shops as well.
So of course there were dealers to advise the executors of the
Quinn Estate against a sale last winter. There were other experts


HENRY MCBRIDE
171
who thought certain works in the collection could only be sold in
Paris. It is true that the late Mr Quinn's taste was far in ad-
vance of the crowd and in particular that the cult for certain fine
artists such as Derain and Brancusi, whom he affected, has not de-
veloped impressively as yet in New York; but the réclame of a
famous auction reaches as far as Paris and the competition of
European collectors would be effective in preventing the sacrifice
of the newer men. ... Then some of the newer American artists
opposed the sale, needlessly fearing the public test of an auction
-but after all what could they lose in figuring in such a famous
event? ... And, finally, there were some ladies. Just who they
were and what were their claims upon the estate I have not heard
but I did hear that they assumed sentimental attitudes. They were
largely responsible for vetoing the auction last winter, holding that
the pictures should be kept together as a memorial to Mr Quinn;
which was a fatuous notion, for, interesting as is the collection, it
was too unedited to warrant being kept intact. Mr Quinn him-
self was continually editing it and would have thinned it still more
had he lived. His action in regard to his library is a fairly good
clue to his plans for his pictures, and so I think it a safe bet he
would have auctioned them off, for he was sufficiently shrewd to
have known that if he brought it off successfully, "the historical
event” would provide a fine enough memorial for any man.
To date, the sentimentalists have had their way, and a "memo-
rial,” and temporary exhibition of the collection has been arranged
for to take place during January in the rooms of the Art Center.
This will of course draw many visitors but when the fine fever
of curiosity has abated, do you suppose it can be re-kindled later on
to provide the excitements upon which auctions flourish? Mr
Quinn, himself, would have known better than to deliberately in-
vite, in this fashion, an anti-climax.
The man behind the gun, as Emerson and several others dis-
covered, is an important factor to be considered, and so the singular
life of Max Jacob adds to the interest of his paintings, a second
showing of which has just been launched in the Brummer Galleries.
We got to know him as a writer championing the new forms in
the company of the bellicose Guillaume Apollinaire, and were
so surprised when we learned that he had been practising painting


172
MODERN ART
on the sly that we had no surprise left when we heard that art
had, in turn, been abandoned for the religious life. Not but that
the two vocations can be, and often are, combined; but Max
Jacob with his inordinate love for the humble diversions of the
Parisian public as they may be studied in the music-halls, "jardins,"
and smaller theatres, seemed the last person on earth to become a
modern Fra Angelico. Just how complete a Fra Angelico he has
become is not yet settled, for though there are a few water-colour
glimpses of corridors in the monastic asylum in the south of France,
the bulk of the new show is still devoted to the earlier enthusiasms
for the theatre. Perhaps there is an increased feeling for land-
scape. Some of the little river views are quite precious; indeed all
the little pictures are charming, and so far from condemning the
artist for the modesty of his technique, we thank heaven that he
at least knew enough to escape platitudes.
HENRY MCBRIDE


MUSICAL CHRONICLE
UL
AARON COPLAND seems destined to surprise. A young Amer-
a ican possessed of a vibrant impulsion toward music, he shows
a momentum more matured and concentrated in every fresh work.
Some of the material in his new suite for chamber orchestra,
Music for the Theatre, is of a cast familiarized by him. The pas-
toral Interlude recalls the mood of the plaintive first part of the
symphony. One associates the two crass movements, Dance and
Burlesque, riotous with sidewalk parody, with the scherzo of the
symphony and the Dance of the Streetwalker in the ballet. In
none of the older compositions, not even the balanced, fuid
Passacaglia, is the attack as direct and keen as in this piece of last
summer, the material as tactfully, judiciously deployed, the form
as roundly fixed. Music which had a perceptible tendency to
wander into space has been shaped and returned to earth. The
strongly accented, hiccoughing trumpet-cry leading on the work
establishes a pregnant atmosphere resolved only with the final
measures of the Epilogue. An individually breathing, brilliant lit-
tle music forms the trajectory, a terse unsentimental sound-poem
of fateful pauses, abrupt accents, and solitary song for the wood-
wind, the stuff of a youthful American growing by its own law.
The artist's relation to life, letting a vital impulse, a living
rhythm coming as from the soil pass through him, remains the sole
medium of wonders. Four ultra-modern Europeans surrounded
Copland on Koussevitsky's programme introducing Music for the
Theatre. Utter was the confusion of Europe. The Tansman sin-
fonietta proved salon-music, orchestrally less interesting than La
Danse de la Sorcière given by Mengelberg. Honegger's concerto
for piano with orchestra is perfectly crapulous. Prokofieff's quintet
appears the expression of a musician in whom something is at work;
there is a keen ear for melodic queernesses, thematic chocolates
with centres of acid; but inarticulacy loses all. Ravel's settings of
three poems by Mallarmé, Soupir, Placet Futile, Surgi de la Croupe
et du Bond, of the ideality of blue silk, are not new even to New
York. Copland was the hero.
A few evenings after the Koussevitsky concert for the League


174
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
of Composers, Walter Damrosch introduced another keenly antici-
pated work by another American of talent, the piano concerto of
George Gershwin. Still, Copland's figure stood firm and sharp as
the line of his own music. His work's position amid the new music
of the fall is not debatable. A plume, solitary as the peacock
feather in the hat of the Emperor of Trebizond, adorns the bonnet
of the League of Composers. It is the production given his works,
and the encouragement his great talent. Now Gershwin's talent,
for its part, is unmistakable. Many of his ideas are startlingly
genial. The piano and the band possess a spontaneous attractive-
ness for him. He is a natural musician. His concerto merely
displays no unity of impulsion or conception, no abstract underly-
ing element. The feeling for style is completely inevident. Gersh-
win serves a ragout of many flavours, multi-coloured little pieces of
not too fine a quality. The instinct of the showman is not readily
suppressed. Opening choruses of musical comedies, closing choruses
of musical comedies mix and mingle with Gershwin, Liszt, and
Chaminade, all very smartly treated. Jazz beats and shuffles.
Blues add the Yiddish to the darky wail. Brassy sudden climaxes
recall the dance-palace and the moments when the band suggests the
swoon of love, pink girls just lying down and swooning amid their
tulle. Then in the midst of familiar moments appear ideas of a
bewitching shape, delicious and racy germs of music asking a
worthier setting. The inexpert hand which assembled the themes is
equally apparent in the presentation. Gershwin has a pathetically
maladroit way of introducing his thematic material. He cannot,
once he has stated his motif, refrain from repeating it instanter two
tones higher. Many of his charming bits strike one as Petrarchian
sonnets with faults of grammar in every line. He is merely not
the artist.
Art is Copland's distinction. When he wrote his Passacaglia,
his symphony and ballet, this young Brooklyn man was still feeling
through the Franckian forms of Europe. With Music for the
Theatre, he is seen in direct relation with the American soil, par-
ticularly with New York, treating his material in a free, fitting
way. Perhaps all the music for his imaginary play is not equally
important. The Dance and the Burlesque, intentionally jazzy, in
all their diablerie and vigour, do not gratify very deeply. Time's
quarrel with these movements will not, we are assured, be founded
SWOO


PAUL ROSENFELD
175
upon the essential quality of the material. Your American com-
poser has to use the musical material amid which he grew. That
is not folk-song, generally, but second-rate expression, rag-time
and Foster-songs. It is not to be denied that the intrinsic in-
feriority of the material renders his chances for freedom smaller
than the European’s. Utilize it none the less he must; but in a
first-rate fashion. We do not anticipate the future will much con-
cern itself with the circumstance that Stieglitz used gaslight paper,
no more than with the fact that Brancusi often employed “defective”
blocks of wood and stone. For the reason neither of them stooped
to the making of jazz, either innocently or parodistically. Jazz is
too exclusively the product of second-rate feelings. Fullness does
not speak so disproportionately.
Copland in this very suite has shown the first-rate method of
using native material by the side of the inferior. His Interlude,
with its two muted trumpets moving exquisitely in major sevenths,
pathetic and naturally perfumed in its tone, is actually based upon
a fox-trot rhythm radically slackened. The very individual trum-
pet motto of the Prologue, recalled in various moods throughout
the work, sprouts from the jazz repertory, and behind that from
out our manner of speech. What weight the bright little suite pos-
sesses rests on the backs of the movements bare of the formal
intention of jazz and jazzy in quite unconscious fashion-upon
the Prologue with its Attic suggestion of fate, upon the Interlude
with its shy, lonely feeling of life through and beyond the side-
walks to New York, real poetry of the city streets, and on the
Epilogue with its patient resolution of the tragic conflict stated by
the overture. Certainly these three movements would stand well-
nigh meaningless without the Dance and the Burlesque, with their
captivating crassness. Music for the Theatre is a whole, very clear,
positive, and well-balanced in structure. One merely suspects that
in the three caryatid movements the composer has found the first,
early state of his personal idiom, while in the two jazz episodes
he is still moving toward an ironic, barbaric scherzo-style equally
true to his clear balanced sensibility.
Paul ROSENFELD


COMMENT
ice
TN modern collections of short stories, in the would-be microcosm
I of aesthetic or political opinion, in anthologies of verse or of
prose, there is apparently none of that skilful anonymity which
was characteristic of definite periods in the past. Contemporary
audacity of dissimilarity recalls the assertion that opposition is
wise, since to be in agreement with everyone is as bad as being
alone. Certainly in The Hogarth Essays, ' we have an impressive
example of disparateness. The reader unforewarned must start,
at this fraternal confluence of sentiments and techniques as he
encounters variously, studiousness, experience, inexperience, ef-
frontery, decorum, dullness, inconsequence, discernment, wisdom-
indeed genius.
Those whose meditative enjoyment of art is always being
violated by the hasty, cannot but find consolation-as has been
intimated by The DIAL”-in Mr Roger Fry's The Artist and
Psycho-Analysis; and a similar sensitiveness is felt in Miss Bosan-
quet's essay, Henry James at Work, in which, unprofaning yet
observant, we have not merely a portrait of Henry James at work,
but what seems a "life" of him. Biographies of writers often read
as if they had unsuperstitiously been compiled by persons inno-
cent of the writings to which the author's life had been devoted.
And now when many a novel tells us what “has happened in life
but what cannot happen in a novel,” one is glad to be reminded
that Henry James used his friends "not as the material of his art,
but as the sources of his material," and remembers appropriately
that his present biographer had not only read his books but had
1 THE HOGARTH Essays. Vol. I: Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown. By Vir-
ginia Woolf. Vol. II: The Artist and Psycho-Analysis. By Roger Fry.
Vol. III: Henry James at Work. By Theodora Bosanquet. Vol. IV:
Homage to John Dryden. By T. S. Eliot. Vol. V: Histriophonie. By
Bonamy Dobrée. Vol. VI: In Retreat. By Herbert Read. Vol. VII: Fear
and Politics: A Debate in the Zoo. By Leonard Woolf. Vol. VIII:
Contemporary Techniques of Poetry. By Robert Graves. Vol. IX: The
Character of John Dryden. By Alan Lubbock. Brochure. 8vo. Published
by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, London.
2 Cf. Review by W. C. Blum, Improbable Purity. The Dial, April 1925.


COMMENT
177
actually written them. So impervious to "the American accent and
the English manner that he seemed only doubtfully Anglo-Saxon,”
Henry James is exhibited here as nowhere else outside of his own
books—"paternally responsible for two distinct families," "treating
the printed pages like so many proof sheets of extremely corrupt
text”-aware that "the tenderness of growing life is at the mercy
of personal tyranny"--with a horror of interfering, or seeming to
interfere with the freedom of others.”
The novel is the form of art which the public is least willing
to ignore; and loath as one is to brand this inherence of permanence
with the term Victorian, Edwardian, Georgian, modern, one is
involuntarily attentive to each new pronouncement upon progress.
With an occasional strange phase of syntax, or strong generaliza-
tion not entirely conclusive, the evolution of the novel is again
honoured under the assured and flippant label, “Mr Bennett and
Mrs Brown.” Mrs Brown—that is to say, character-making power
in the art of the novel-will, Mrs Woolf tells us, some day be
caught.
In his Journal of the Retreat of The Fifth Army from St
Quentin, Mr Herbert Read may surely be immune from the
literary asperities of those who find his workmanship tired, his dic-
tion not quite spare, and his sentences unmusical. Regarding with
a perhaps justifiable "bitterness," "certain states of forgetfulness
in the minds of non-combatants," he shows us much that is sorrow-
ful—men and horses "debonaire and well fed," "harness jingling,
the sun shining on well-polished accoutrements,”—“old men, many
old women, a few young women,” trudging along beside carts
“hand-pulled or yoked to bony horses.” Having thought to en-
counter ingenuities evolved in a bookman's retreat, we have more
valuably perhaps, a reiterating of the truism that really great things
cannot be accomplished with guns; we find soldiers to be, not con-
querors, but creatures with “hearts like taut drum skins, beaten
reverberantly by every little incident.”
Pained by the starkness of Mr Read's truthfulness, one needs
if one is fully to enjoy it, already to have read Histriophone. In
this dialogue on dramatic diction, Mr Bonamy Dobrée's willowy,
almost too educated fastidiousness, brings us now and then into the
atmosphere of what we like-although one's remoteness from the
acropolis and too great intimacy with the market, could lead one
ca


178
COMMENT
possibly to prefer impersonal treatment of what has here been pre-
sented in the form of dialogue.
By no means wearily yet warily, we examine generalizations
with regard to poetry, and unimpaired by their studious constraint,
T. S. Eliot's epitomes and hypotheses are in their inherent equi-
librium, detaining. It is our whim to enjoy in the essay on Marvel,
one of those “undesirable” images which in Mr Eliot's opinion,
“support nothing but their own misshapen bodies”:
"And now the salmon-fishers moist
Their leathern boats begin to hoist;
And, like Antipodes in shoes,
Have shod their heads in their canoes.”
By “notions of the critic's” here “preserved in cryptogram,” how-
ever, pleasure is revived in that omnipotence of Dryden's which
we prefer to a certain kind of lyric loveliness—although we know
it is not better. Mr Eliot re-infects one with a liking for satire
which has the fineness of stroke to "separate the head from the
body and leave it standing in its place.” And "that precise taste of
Marvel's which finds for him the proper degree of seriousness for
every subject which he treats," has never been presented more
firmly. In these three essays, Homage to John Dryden, The
Metaphysical Poets, and Andrew Marvel, the distinctiveness of an
age is revived—that “wisdom, cynical perhaps but untired,” of
the Elizabethan and Jacobean mind that “wit” which is felt by
Mr Eliot to be so nearly synonymous with wits.
To this collection of essays, others are being added. It is a
luxury to have large truths in modest form and gratitude should
perhaps hinder the beneficiary from being entirely sure that he
knows the difference between large truths and little ones.






in Wermany
E-
lur
2
CE
INTERIOR. BY PIERRE BONNARD
22
.
BE
SS
Se
SUR
deste
See


THE 1X
OXXEITO
VI
VI
DIAL

March 1926
PSYCHOLOGY AND POLITICS
BY BERTRAND RUSSELL
I WANT to discuss in this article the kind of effects which psy-
I chology may, before long, come to have upon politics. I pro-
pose to speak both of the good effects that are possible, and of the
bad effects that are probable.
Political opinions are not based upon reason. Even so technical
a matter as the resumption of the gold standard was determined
mainly by sentiment, and according to the psycho-analysts, the
sentiment in question is one which cannot be mentioned in polite
society. Now the sentiments of an adult are compounded of a
kernel of instinct surrounded by a vast husk of education. One
way in which education works is through influencing imagination.
Everybody wants to see himself as a fine fellow, and therefore
both his efforts and his delusions are influenced by what he con-
siders the best possible in the way of achievement. I think the
study of psychology may alter our conception of a “fine fellow”; if
so, obviously its effect upon politics will be profound. I doubt
whether any one who had learnt modern psychology in youth could
be quite like the late Lord Curzon or the present Bishop of London.
With regard to any science, there are two kinds of effects which
it may have. On the one hand, experts may make inventions or
discoveries which can be utilized by the holders of power. On the
other hand, the science may influence imagination, and so alter
people's analogies and expectations. There is, strictly speaking, a
third kind of effect, namely a change in manner of life with all its
consequences. In the case of physical science, all three classes of
cffects are, by this time, clearly developed. The first is illustrated


180 PSYCHOLOGY AND POLITICS
by aeroplanes, the second by the mechanistic outlook on life, the
third by the substitution, in a large part of the population, of indus-
try and urban life for agriculture and the country. In the case of
psychology, we still have to depend upon prophecy as regards most
of its effects. Prophecy is always rash, but is more so as regards
effects of the first and third kinds than as regards those which
depend upon a change of imaginative outlook. I shall, therefore,
speak first and chiefly about effects of this kind.
A few words about other periods of history may help to give
the atmosphere. In the Middle Ages, every political question was
determined by theological arguments, which took the form of
analogies. The dominant controversy was between the Pope and
the Emperor: it became recognized that the Pope was the Sun
and the Emperor was the Moon, so the Pope won. It would be
a mistake to argue that the Pope won because he had better armies;
he owed his armies to the persuasive power of the Sun-and-Moon
analogy, as set forth by Franciscan friars acting as recruiting
sergeants. This is the kind of thing that really moves masses of
men and decides important events. In the present age, some people
think society is a machine and some think it is a tree. The former
are Fascisti, imperialists, industrialists, Bolsheviks; the latter con-
stitutionalists, agrarians, or pacifists. The argument is just as
absurd as that of the Guelfs and Ghibellines, since society is in fact
neither a machine nor a tree.
With the renaissance, we come to a new influence, the influence
of literature, especially classical literature. This continues to
our own day, more particularly among those who go to the public
schools and the older universities. When Professor Gilbert Murray
has to make up his mind on a political question, one feels that his
first reaction is to ask himself, “What would Euripides have said
about it?” But this outlook is no longer dominant in the world.
It was dominant in the renaissance, and in the eighteenth century,
down to and including the French Revolution. Revolutionary
orators constantly appealed to shining examples of Roman virtue,
and liked to conceive themselves in togas. Books such as Mon-
tesquieu and Rousseau had an influence far surpassing what any
book can have now. One may say that the American Constitution
is what Montesquieu imagined the British Constitution to be. I


BERTRAND RUSSELL
181
am not enough of a jurist to trace the influence which admiration
of Rome exercised upon the Code Napoléon.
With the industrial revolution, we pass to a new era—the era
of physics. Men of science, especially Galileo and Newton, had
prepared the way for this era, but what brought it to birth was
the embodiment of science in economic technique. A machine is
a very peculiar object: it works according to known scientific laws
(otherwise it would not be constructed) for a definite purpose lying
outside itself, and having to do with man, usually with man's
physical life. Its relation to man is exactly that which the world
had to God in the Calvinist theology; perhaps that is why indus-
trialism was invented by Protestants, and by non-conformists rather
than anglicans. The machine-analogy has had a profound effect
upon our thought. We speak of a “mechanical” view of the world,
a "mechanical” explanation, and so on, meaning, nominally, an
explanation in terms of physical laws, but introducing, perhaps
unconsciously, the teleological aspect of a machine, namely, its
devotion to an end outside itself. So, if society is a machine, we
think that it has a purpose of an external sort. We are no longer
content to say that it exists for the glory of God, but it is easy to
find synonyms for God, such as: the Bank of England, the British
Empire, the Standard Oil Company, the Communist Party, et
cetera. Our wars are conflicts between these synonyms—it is the
mediaeval sun-and-moon business over again.
The power of physics has been due to the fact that it is a very
definite science, which has profoundly altered daily life. But this
alteration has proceeded by operating on the environment, not on
man himself. Given a science equally definite, and capable of
altering man directly, physics would be put in the shade. This is
what psychology may become. Until recent times, psychology was
unimportant philosophical verbiage-the academic stuff that I
learnt in youth was not worth learning. But now there are two
ways of approaching psychology which are obviously important:
one that of the physiologists, the other that of psycho-analysis. As
the results in these two directions become more definite and more
certain, it is clear that psychology will increasingly dominate men's
outlook.
Let us take Education as a case in point. In old days, the
as
ICC


182
PSYCHOLOGY AND POLITICS
received view was that education should begin at about eight
years old, with the learning of Latin declensions; what happened
before that was regarded as unimportant. This view, in essence,
seems to be still dominant in the Labour Party, which, when in
office, took much more interest in improving education after
fourteen than in providing nursery schools for infants. With con-
centration on late education there goes a certain pessimism as to
its powers: it is thought that all it can really do is to fit a man for
earning a living. But one finds that the scientific tendency is to
attribute far more power to education than was formerly done,
only it must begin very early. Psycho-analysts would begin at
birth; biologists would begin even sooner. You can educate a fish
to have one eye in the middle, instead of two eyes, one on either
side (Jennings, Prometheus, page 60). But to do this you have to
begin long before the fish is born. So far, there are difficulties in
the way of pre-natal mammalian education, but probably they will
be overcome.
But, you will say, you are using “education” in a very funny
sense. What is there in common between distorting a fish and
teaching a boy Latin Grammar? I must say they seem to me
very similar: both are wanton injuries inflicted for the pleasure of
the experimenter. However, this would perhaps hardly do as a
definition of education. The essence of education is that it is a
change (other than death) effected in an organism to satisfy the
desires of the operator. Of course the operator says that his desire
is to improve the pupil, but this statement does not represent any
objectively verifiable fact.
Now there are many ways of altering an organism. You may
change its anatomy, as in the fish that has lost an eye, or the man
that has lost an appendix. You may alter its metabolism, for
instance by drugs. You may alter its habits by creating associa-
tions. Ordinary instruction is a particular case of this last. Now
everything in education, with the exception of instruction, is easier
when the organism is very young, because then it is malleable. In
human beings, the important time for education is from conception
to the end of the fourth year. But, as I said before, pre-natal edu-
cation is not yet possible, though it probably will be before the
end of this century.
There are two principal methods of early education: one is by
chemicals, the other by suggestion. When I say "chemicals,”


BERTRAND RUSSELL
183
perhaps I shall be thought unduly materialistic. But no one would
have thought so if I had said, "of course a careful mother will
provide the infant with the most wholesome diet available," which
is only a longer way of saying the same thing. However, I am
concerned with possibilities that are more or less sensational. It
may be found that the addition of suitable drugs to the diet, or
the injection of the right substances into the blood, will increase
intelligence or alter the emotional nature. Everyone knows of the
connexion of idiocy with lack of iodine. Perhaps we shall find that
intelligent men are those who, in infancy, got small quantities of
some rare compound accidentally in their diet, owing to lack of
cleanliness in the pots and pans. Or perhaps the mother's diet
during pregnancy will turn out to be the decisive factor. I know
nothing about this whole subject; I merely observe that we know
much more about the education of salamanders than about that of
human beings, chiefly because we do not imagine that salamanders
have souls.
The psychological side of early education cannot well begin
before birth, because it is chiefly concerned with habit-formation,
and habits acquired before birth are useless afterwards, for the
most part. But I think there is no doubt of the enormous influence
of the early years in forming character. There is a certain oppo-
sition, to my mind quite unnecessary, between those who believe
in dealing with the mind through the body, and those who believe
in dealing with it directly. The old-fashioned medical man, though
an earnest Christian, tends to be a materialist; he thinks that mental
states have physical causes, and should be cured by removing those
causes. The psycho-analyst, on the contrary, always seeks for
psychological causes, and tries to operate upon them. This whole
things hangs together with the mind-and-matter dualism, which I
regard as a mistake. Sometimes it is easier to discover the sort of
antecedent we call physical; sometimes the sort we call psycho-
logical is easier to discover. But I should suppose that both always
exist, and that it is rational to operate through the one most easily
discoverable in the particular case. There is no inconsistency in
treating one case by administering iodine, and another by curing a
phobia.
When we try to take a psychological view of politics, it is
natural to begin by looking for the fundamental impulses of or-
dinary human beings, and the ways in which they can be developed
ce
0


184
PSYCHOLOGY AND POLITICS
by the environment. The orthodox economists of a hundred years
ago thought that acquisitiveness was the only motive the politician
need take account of; this view was adopted by Marx, and formed
the basis of his economic interpretation of history. It derives
naturally from physics and industrialism: it is the outcome of the
imaginative domination of physics in our time. It is now held by
capitalists and communists, and by all respectable persons, such as
The Times and the magistrates, both of whom express utter amaze-
ment when young women sacrifice their earnings to marry men on
the dole. The received view is that happiness is proportional to
income, and that a rich old maid must be happier than a poor mar-
ried woman. In order to make this true, we do all we can to
inflict misery upon the latter.
As against orthodoxy and Marxianism, the psycho-analysts say
that the one fundamental human impulse is sex. Acquisitiveness,
they say, is a morbid development of a certain sexual perversion.
It is obvious that people who believe this will act quite differently
from people who take the economic view. Everybody except cer-
tain pathological cases wishes to be happy, but most people accept
some current theory as to what constitutes happiness. If people
think wealth constitutes happiness, they will not act as they will if
they think sex the essential thing. I do not think either view quite
true, but I certainly think the latter the less harmful. What does
emerge is the importance of a right theory as to what constitutes
happiness. In such important acts as choosing a career, a man is
greatly influenced by theory. If a wrong theory prevails, success-
ful men will be unhappy, but will not know why. This fills them
with rage, which leads them to desire the slaughter of younger men,
whom they envy unconsciously. Most modern politics, while
nominally based on economics, is really due to rage caused by lack
of instinctive satisfaction; and this lack, in turn, is largely due to
false popular psychology.
I do not think that sex covers the ground. In politics, especially,
sex is chiefly important when thwarted. In the war, elderly spin-
sters developed a ferocity partly attributable to their indignation
with young men for having neglected them. They are still ab-
normally bellicose. I remember soon after the armistice crossing
Saltash Bridge in the train, and seeing many battleships anchored


BERTRAND RUSSELL
185
below. Two elderly spinsters in the carriage turned to each other
and murmured: “Isn't it sad to see them all lying idle ?" But sex
satisfied ceases to influence politics much. I should say that both
hunger and thirst count for more politically. Parenthood is im-
mensely important, because of the importance of the family; Rivers
even suggested that it is the source of private property. But parent-
hood must not be confounded with sex.
In addition to the impulses which serve for the preservation and
propagation of life, there are others concerned with what may be
called Glory: love of power, vanity, and rivalry. These obvi-
ously play a very great part in politics. If politics is ever to allow
of a tolerable life, these glory-impulses must be tamed and taught
to take no more than their proper place.
Our fundamental impulses are neither good nor bad: they are
ethically neutral. Education should aim at making them take
forms that are good. The old method, still beloved by Christians,
was to thwart instinct; the new method is to train it. Take love
of power: it is useless to preach Christian humility, which merely
makes the impulse take hypocritical forms. What you have to do
is to provide beneficent outlets for it. The original native impulse
can be satisfied in a thousand ways-oppression, politics, business,
art, science, all satisfy it when successfully practised. A man will
choose the outlet for his love of power that corresponds with his
skill; according to the type of skill given him in youth, he will
choose one occupation or another. The purpose of our public
schools is to teach the technique of oppression and no other; con-
sequently they produce men who take up the white man's burden.
But if these men could do science, many of them might prefer it.
Of two activities which a man has mastered, he will generally pre-
fer the more difficult: no chess player will play draughts. In this
way, skill may be made to minister to virtue.
As another illustration, take Fear. Rivers enumerates four kinds
of reaction to danger, each appropriate in certain circumstances:
I. Fear and Flight.
II. Rage and Fight.
III. Manipulative activity.
IV. Paralysis.


186
PSYCHOLOGY AND POLITICS
It is obvious that the third is the best, but it requires the appro-
priate type of skill. The second is the one praised by militarists,
schoolmasters, bishops, et cetera, under the name of "courage.”
Every governing class aims at producing it in its own members, and
producing fear and flight in the subject population. So women
were, until our own times, carefully trained to be timorous. And
one finds still in Labour an inferiority complex, taking the form
of snobbery and social submissiveness.
It is greatly to be feared that psychology will place new weapons
in the hands of the holders of power. They will be able to train
timidity and docility, and make the mass of men more and more
like domestic animals. When I speak of the holders of power,
I do not mean only the capitalists—I include all officials, even those
of trade-unions and Labour Parties. Every official, every man in a
position of authority, wants his followers to be tame: he is indig-
nant if they insist on having their own ideas as to what constitutes
their happiness, instead of being grateful for what he is good
enough to provide. In the past, the hereditary principle ensured
that many of the governing class should be lazy and incompetent,
which gave the others a chance. But if the governing class is to be
recruited from the most energetic in each generation, who are to
rise by their own efforts, the outlook for ordinary mortals is very
black. It is hard to see how, in such a world, anybody can cham-
pion the rights of the lazy, i.e., of those who do not want to inter-
fere with other people. It seems that quiet people will have to
learn fearlessness and energy in youth if they are to have any
chance in a world where all power is the reward of hustling. Per-
haps democracy is a passing phase; if so, psychology will serve to
rivet the chains on the serfs. This makes it important to secure
democracy before the technique of oppression has been perfected.
Reverting to the threefold effects of a science which I enu-
merated at the beginning, it is clear that we cannot guess what
use the holders of power will make of psychology, until we know
what sort of government we are to have. Psychology, like every
other science, will place new weapons in the hands of the authori-
ties, notably the weapons of education and propaganda, both of
which may, by a more finished psychological technique, be brought
to the point where they will be practically irresistible. If the


BERTRAND RUSSELL
187
holders of power desire peace, they will be able to produce a pacific
population; if war, a bellicose population. If they desire to
generate intelligence, they will get it; if stupidity, they will get
that. On this head, therefore, prophecy is quite impossible.
As to the effect of psychology upon the imagination, that will
probably be of two opposite kinds. On the one hand, there will
be a wider acceptance of determinism. Most men now feel un-
comfortable about prayers for rain, because of meteorology; but
they are not so uncomfortable about prayers for a good heart. If
the causes of a good heart were as well known as the causes of
rain, this difference would cease. A man who prayed for a good
heart instead of calling in the doctor to rid him of bad desires
would be branded as a hypocrite, if everybody could become a saint
by paying a few guineas to a Harley Street specialist. With the
increase of determinism would go, probably, a lessening of effort
and a general increase of moral laziness—not that such an effect
would be logical. I cannot say whether this would be a gain or
a loss, as I do not know whether more good or harm comes from
moral effort combined with faulty psychology. On the other hand,
there would be an emancipation from materialism, both meta-
physical and ethical; emotions would be thought more important
if they formed the subject-matter of a generally recognized and
practically efficacious science. This effect, I think, would be wholly
good, since it would remove the erroneous notions now prevalent
as to what constitutes happiness.
As to the possible effect of psychology in altering our manner
of life through discoveries and inventions, I do not venture upon
any forecast, as I cannot see any reason for expecting one sort of
effect rather than another. For example: it may be that the most
important effect will be to teach negroes to fight as well as white
men, without acquiring any other new merits. Or, conversely,
psychology may be used to induce negroes to practice birth-control.
These two possibilities would produce very different worlds, and
there is no way of guessing whether one or the other or neither will
be realized.
Finally: the great practical importance of psychology will come
in giving ordinary men and women a more just conception of what
constitutes human happiness. If people were genuinely happy,


188
PSYCHOLOGY AND POLITICS
were
they would not be filled with envy, rage, and destructiveness. Apart
from the necessaries of life, freedom for sex and parenthood is
what is most needed—at least as much in the middle class as among
wage-earners. It would be easy, with our present knowledge, to
make instinctive happiness almost universal, if we were not
thwarted by the malevolent passions of those who have missed hap-
piness and do not want any one else to get it. And if happiness
were common, it would preserve itself, because appeals to hatred
and fear, which now constitute almost the whole of politics, would
fall flat. But if psychological knowledge is wielded by an aristoc-
racy, it will prolong and intensify all the old evils. The world is
full of knowledge of all sorts that might bring such happiness as
has never existed since man first emerged, but old maladjustments,
greed, envy, and religious cruelty, stand in the way. I do not
know what the outcome will be, but I think it will be either better
or worse than anything the human race has yet known.


IN WHICH THE FINGERS OF THE NIGHT
WIND ARE MADE TO CALL
Martha's Vineyard Island
BY SCOFIELD THAYER
I think it is the ragged sailors
Which crowd against the wall,
I think it is their odd, blue waking
Has made those fingers call.
They have enmeshed his vagrant going.
More potent than the stars
From a minute and dank earth-corner
They have erected bars.
In him who was a vacant faring
Athwart a vacant world
They have emplanted Earth's own sorrow,
And wakefully encurled.
There is no sorrow in the heavens,
They have it honest there;
It is the worm and corpse corrupted
Earth which wrought this air.
It is her heart, made rich with vileness,
Which wails and mounts the wind,
It is her heart which leaning backwards
Puts fingers on my blind.
The stars are impotent to touch me.
The winds of God are winds.
It is the fibrous mesh of gardens
Which reaches me, and binds.


190
THE FINGERS OF THE NIGHT WIND
It is from flowers which grow so starlike,
And yet grow more than stars,
It is from gardens which are heavenly,
And yet are rangèd scars;
It is from the impetuous cryings
Of Dust that has no rest,
It is from salt-mixt Mould, and Living,
There pries this winding quest:
It is the drowned which clamour loudly
And speak a random mind;
It is the Masterful Hearts of Ship’s-men
Which have Impressed the Wind.
It is the worms which whistle wanly
And turn the air unkind;
It is the Lawless Dust of Seamen
Which has so used the Wind.



BY
:
ill
Sca
008
VIII !!!
1000
SI1000
2
.
W
!
suis..
2016
.
11
JAH
VN
BARNYARD : PENNSYLVANIA. BY WHARTON HARRIS ESHERICK






WIE
UIVII
CS
11
21
Hitta
no
IVOTION
1991
re
l'
Uw
W
W
/
ui
Mb Mulle
TUM
Vw
y
1
w
ا ر بار اس
uu
APRIL. BY WHARTON HARRIS ESHERICK





SISTER OF HUNTERS
BY GLENWAY WESCOTT
SO
DOSE HAMILTON came to Wisconsin in 1847 as a child of
TL three. She grew up among bearded men, hunters and trap-
pers. George, her eldest brother, could not read or write; Enoch
had lost one arm in a saw-mill; a cousin named Tom Gore also
made his home with them. The ironwoods around the large cabin
smelled of skunk whose striped pelts, with the skins of mink and
beaver, turned inside out on boards, swung from the lower limbs.
The three men shot squirrels, rabbits, young coon, and deer for
food, and hunted foxes and timber wolves for sport. They went
by night to the trees where the passenger pigeons roosted, picked
them off the branches like fruit, wrung their necks, and filled many
dripping baskets. They said, “Pretty soon, smart fellows like those
Towers'll spoil this country. Make a woman's country out of it,
just like Kentucky. We're goin' to git out then, west.” Fire-arms
and pouches hung upon pegs, wet boots stood by the fire, and veni-
son smoked inside the fire-place. Their grandmother, whom they
called "the old woman,” fingered her corn-cob pipe in one corner;
she was stone-deaf and hated the men. Their mother grumbled;
but indulged them as if they were sickly children; she said, “The
world is a man's world, women might as well make up their minds
to it.”
Rose and her sister Alma walked four miles through the woods
to attend school, stoning bushes where a fox or a badger had
vanished, terrified of stags. The school-house occupied a clearing
on one of the Indian trails; and two or three times a year the pupils
were allowed to stand outdoors to watch a tribe of Pottawottamies
pass. The ponies were unshod; their hoofs were split and spread
apart, their hocks deformed by spavins; and their ears, full of burs,
flapped with each stumbling step. Kettles in pairs, rude imple-
ments, and tent-poles lay across their withers. The round-headed
babies, borne like copper images by squat women on foot, gave no
sign of life though horse-flies crawled round their nostrils. A pack


192
SISTER OF HUNTERS
of dogs followed, one grey bitch running as if it were a splash of
quicksilver under the leaves. The men had formidable mouths,
and many of their hard eyes were veiled by cataracts. They rode
without saddles on folded blankets, the muscles of their bent knees
lying flat on the bone like thongs of leather. Rose remembered
how her grandfather had been killed in Kentucky: in the sugar-
bush, stirring the maple sap which boiled over the iron rim of the
kettle; when he looked up, he had seen two savages who sat in a
tall tree, watching him; he had shot them, one after the other;
their half-naked bodies had fallen in the underbrush; after that,
other Indians had waited their chance, and one day had scalped
him. Indians like these. . . . But these were harmless; why didn't
they fight? Rose wanted to fight for them or against them, because
they were male and emaciated, and looked neither to the right nor
the left. Down the corridor of light branches and stiff trunks they
vanished, leaving behind an odour of wild men, dogs, and dried
meat.
Rose walked up and down the trail, hoping to meet them by her-
self. One afternoon men galloped from village to village with
word that the Indians in Minnesota were on the war-path, burn-
ing and killing and coming south. She went to stay with a neigh-
bour, Mrs Aaron Smith, who had six children and whose husband
was absent. They watched for two nights with shotguns laid across
their knees, the little ones tossing in two beds, the elder wide-awake
with excitement. The mother trembled continually, but whispered
to Rose the news of the community. They listened and clutched
the oily guns, but could hear only the struggle of branches with
wind and the moss dripping in the well. Rose was frightened
when a child began to cry, or when dogs whined round a carcass
in the forest, but she would not show it; for she felt like a man,
defending the weak woman and her babies. Meanwhile, in the
far north, tuberculous tribes were howling to keep up their courage;
then all the ponies, spotted with sores, faltered, and they rode no
further; it was the last raid in that part of the West. Rose liked
Mrs Aaron Smith and was sorry to go home.
She and Alma played truant from school, creeping over the hill,
careless of punishment, but eager to enjoy a holiday before they
were caught. Their cousin, Tom Gore, was hoeing in the potato
wel


GLENWAY WESCOTT
193
patch; he shouted, “Get back to school, young hussies! Get back
there!” and chased them and pelted them with clods. They fled
all the way back, not stopping when they left him behind, panting
with pleasant excitement.
When she was thirteen years old Rose had a mature woman's
body, deep-breasted and awkward. Tom Gore tried to kiss her
one day when they were alone, and ran after her. She climbed up
an apple tree. He caught her ankle and threatened to tear her
skirt, but she whipped him with a small branch until he went away.
She complained to her brother George, and Tom Gore received a
thrashing. After that he called her a tattle-tale whenever he dared,
but seemed to bear no grudge.
In August and September the girls picked wild berries for the
market. One morning Rose caught yellow and pink spiders to put
in Tom Gore's bed, keeping them in her hat. They heard laughing
voices and went in the direction from which they sounded: boys'
voices at the swimming hole; they crept into a clump of elderberry
bushes. Alma whispered, “It's wicked, it's wicked!" and Rose
covered her mouth with one hand so she could not betray their
presence. Alma hid her face and would not look.
Sumach dangled its leaves like parrot feathers in the round black
pool. Shirts, trousers, and shoes lay on a mound of butternut roots
and sod. A naked boy stood there, white and gaunt; he splashed
in among the others. Rose wanted to be swimming with them; the
sight of male bodies did not trouble her, who had been reared in a
cabin of careless men; she was comparing their force and subtlety.
There were seven: one sat cross-legged on a log which lay over a
bed of cress; on the round chest of one, older than the others, red
hair glistened in the spotted light. One was too lean, one was
short and clumsy, one weak; and the strength of the strongest was
common. Six climbed up on the bank and put on their clothes;
under cover of their shouts, Alma, whose modesty had grown
tedious, slipped away in the woods. When Rose looked at the one
who was left, she no longer wanted to be swimming there, feeling
instead an acute embarrassment; it was the third of the Towers,
Leander. Alwyn, the youngest, lay in the grass, also watching his
brother, with sad bright eyes. The others did not wait. Leander
floated on his back, like amber in the water. He was two years


194
SISTER OF HUNTERS
older than Rose, and she preferred him to all the rest. The blond
curls washed in his eyes, and he laughed with a sound of little
splashes of water lifted and falling. Resting on one elbow, Alwyn
waited uneasily. Rose envied him because, by the accident of
birth, he was Leander's playmate; they worked side by side in
the fields, and slept in one bed. The bathers dressed, and ran down
an aisle of poplars.
As she walked slowly back to the berry-patch, a fox crossed her
path, like a dog whose pelt was on fire-she did not even throw
stones at it. She found the basket of berries and her hat; the gold
and rose spiders had returned to their webs, but she had forgotten
them.
She grew tired of the life at home. She wanted to look like a
lady, like young Mrs Henry Tower; and it was difficult to bathe
and dress amid the gibes of her brothers, under Tom Gore's agitated
eyes. She thought that short skirts made her resemble a boy who
is too fat; so a yellow taffeta dress was made, with a hoop and row
upon row of ruffles. She forced Alma to pierce her ears with a
hatpin, and her grandmother gave her a pair of gold ear-rings she
had brought from Kentucky. She put up her hair in a chignon
and trained a damp curl over each ear. Her cheeks, which were
rough and bright as a cinnamon rose, seemed brighter.
Then she took a school three miles from home. She was slow at
books; the schools she herself had attended had been unruly; so
each night she studied the exercise in the speller and the arithmetic
problems which she would have to teach next day. She was not
afraid of half-grown men, and understood tomboys; the school
board congratulated her upon her discipline. The tall girl in
yellow ruffles who returned to Hope's Corner at the end of the week
was proud.
On Saturday nights Henry Tower held a singing school in the
Hope's Corner school-house. He struck the key with a tuning fork
and taught them to sing by the scale: “Do re mi fa so la ti do."
All that family were singers; Henry led the men with a pure voice.
that sounded lonely among the rest, and his lovely wife Serena
led the trebles. Alwyn still sang with the women—his voice frail
and pointed, less like a voice than an instrument-sitting beside
Serena, seeming to sing only for her and Leander. Rose also sang
for them. She wanted nothing in the world, neither in the wilder-


GLENWAY WESCOTT
195
ness she knew nor in the countries she would never know, but to
be acceptable to that family, loved by that boy.
When the evening came to an end she said to him, “Will you
take me home, Leander? I'm frightened to-night.” He only
blushed; but Henry had heard and he whispered, “Leander, behave
like a gentleman.” Serena pressed her hand and said, “I hear
you're doing finely with your school.” Alwyn followed them as
if it were a matter of course, but in the dark she could touch
Leander's arm, and the tips of her fingers tingled.
Soon the neighbours said they were sweethearts, and they were
together wherever they went. A miracle took place: Leander
seemed not to see that she was less beautiful than Serena. There
were no caresses, but for the sister of hunters and trappers, love
was a simple thing. It meant gentleness and courtesy, it meant per-
mission to enjoy proudly his tireless grace, it meant forgetting that
she was too heavy and too tall. Her failure to understand him
moved her as nothing else could. And when that which passed
her understanding was kind to her-she did not require kisses to
feel a tumult like that of a swarm of wild bees over their honey.
They stood under a mountain ash in the autumn. He wore a
corduroy jacket the colour of his hair and skin. He had grown a
beard which did not hide the blush and the smile which took turns
in his face. She knew that Alwyn was watching them, perched
on a log fence; she did not care. The young tree drooped with its
clusters of mature berries, like drops of rain suspended over their
upturned faces, drops bright as blood, not human blood—the blood
of angels. “It's a beauty,” Leander said. Rose forgot that she
existed; there were only two things in the world: the tree and
Leander.
If she had been imaginative, if she had ever feared anything
which was not a physical danger, she would have feared Alwyn.
Staring at her, his eyes grew large, as a pair of tears swell when
they are about to fall; and he bit his lips until they bled. One
evening she thought it was love; another evening when he muttered,
"Girls who pretend to be afraid of the dark,” she knew it was
hate. When Leander was not there he was friendly and timid.
They met by accident in the woods and gathered mushrooms all
one afternoon, and she taught him to recognize a rare variety,
almost indistinguishable from others which are poisonous.
Tare
nous.


196
EVENING WALK
11
Then the Civil War began. Her brothers went quickly, well
pleased with the adventure; John, Harrison, and Henry Tower
enlisted. One night she stood with Leander by a gate; dreamily
he said, but with a tone which was like decision in a dream, “I
suppose I'd better go.” Rose turned sick, she had not thought of
that. She clenched her fists in hatred, he was so young, he was
hers. . . . Then she realized a new thing, new for the child of
stupid hunters: it was what Towers did, there were flags and ideas,
quite separate from themselves, which they cared about, so much.
... She would learn to care, she who wanted to be a Tower-it
was time now. So she laid her fingers against his chest, and felt
through the coarse flannel his breath going in and out in a miniature
tide; and one word was almost impossible to pronounce: “Maybe.”
she said.
Note: Sister of Hunters is a portion of Mr Wescott's forthcoming book,
entitled The Grandmothers.
EVENING WALK
BY GLADYS CAMPBELL
The sky was silent like a tongueless bell
Of glass, and following my feet the still
Half-circling waves slipped back with grains of stone.
The momentary beach I walked was gone.
I thought, “This is a place of ebb and flow.
Hot suns here leave a rosy afterglow
And two months more will pile this shore with snow.”
The shadow of a bright gull crossed my hand.
The shadow of a bright gull crossed the sand.


AN AMERICAN SONNETEER
BY PAUL ROSENFELD
THE veritable elegant is as rare in our letters as the able
sonneteer. And Donald Evans the Patagonian released in the
quatorzain and in other set and freer forms a personal rhythm,
jocundly dashing, reckless, and suave. It walks the Avenue,
swinging through all the world, blandest, lightest, proudest of
steppers. It is a peacock rhythm, alternately grandiose and non-
chalant; sustained awhile in its loud important march, then
capriciously, gracefully undercut; and marvellously spirited and
exciting to gusto. This exhibition, dandified manner, marmoreal
pose, has verve and fire. You may cart away the other dandies,
the fat, disgruntled ones. This one, leave; for verve and fire make
a music of dandidom.
He was a temperamental member of the Yankee tribe of
Thomases in doubt of beauty. “Beauty," to this sport from the
Puritanic stem, represented the state of faith known to the artists:
release into life vaster than the personal; apprehension of change-
less law through the individual adventure. “Could I enlist a
Battalion of Irreproachables,” he let the introduction to the war-
time edition of his Sonnets from the Patagonian say, “whose uni-
form should be walking suit, top hat and pumps, and their only
weapon an ebony stick, and sail to-morrow, we should march down
Unter den Linden in a month, provided wrapped in our kerchiefs
we carried the Gospel of Beauty, and a nonchalance in the knot
of our cravats.” That was his humorously affected fashion of
affirming the miraculous power of the religious sense, the deep im-
mutable impersonality toward which he groped but which eluded
him in life. The positive makings were present. The rhythm of
the Patagonian sonnets streams into the world at a brilliant eleva-
tion. Yet the feelings would not issue warmly. Perhaps we have
to do with one of the unfortunate sensuous devils perpetually in
trouble with themselves; aware of having sacrificed to perishable
emotions; familiar from the cradle with a sense of guilt and of


198
AN AMERICAN SONNETEER
0
damnation; prisoners to vanity's last and firmest shackles, the con-
viction of having failed of achieving what others had a right to
expect and was owing themselves. Evans' beginning to an auto-
portrait runs:
“Wistfully shimmering, shamelessly wise and weak,
He lives in pawn, pledging a battered name;
He loves his failures as one might love fame ..."
S
In this condition of torment, conscious of serene regions and
incapable of attaining them, sensitive feelings could not have the
strength flowing from the conviction which comes from universality.
Release was to be found only in the quasi-decorative use of the
talents, in agreeable self-exhibition, in the dashing and nonchalant
air of the fabled Bond Street walker absolved of all reproach
through the faultless conduct of a “clouded” cane. Hence, the
form of his poetry, the Patagonianism, the air of elegant hard-
boiling, the reckless fondling of the superior grotesques of modern
life: Igor Vyvian, the heuetontimoroumenos; the brilliant lady de-
structive in her hysterical self-indulgence and tragic mountainous
mole-hills; and the gentleman who "polished snubs till they were
regnant art.” The machinery gave his impulses a unity. The
flaunt of impassivity permitted him to visit the weak scenes of his
life in complete superiority; to portray the compromitments of
clever men, and the dangerous tricks of feminine amour-propre
which made it up; and to give out his riches and dance along
the boulevard” over the pain he could not quell.
“Masters are makeshifts and a path to tread
For blue pumps that are ardent for the air.
Features are fixtures when the face is fled,
And we are left the husks of tarnished hair.
But he is one who lusts uncomforted
To kiss the naked phrase quite unaware.”
It is a comedy he proposes, charming precisely for the reason
he wished to mislead none by his masquerade. The great fun of
the Patagonian sonnets flows from the excruciating solemnity with
which he advertises his emotions the frivolous attitudes of an
“incurable poseur," letting


PAUL ROSENFELD
199
"His calm moustache point to the ironies
And a fawn-coloured laugh suck in the night
Full of the riant mists that turn to white
In brief lost battles with banalities."
Observe how slyly he overplays the exaggerated, coxcomb, 1890
metaphor, adjective or noun:
“Forgetting her mauve vows the Fania fled
Taking away her moonlight scarves with her-
There was no joy left in the calendar
And life was but an orchid which was dead.
Even our pious peacocks went unfed. ..."
An impeccable art? Quite an uneven one, particularly in the
sonnets. Choppy lines tending to halt with the rhyme stand among
suavely flowing ones. Rhymes too facile, recalling the indissoluble
union of strife with life, clash with distinguished correspondences
of sound. Images and terms too aesthetic, florid beyond the ex-
perience of even an ironic cavalier, detract from the surprise of
images born of sensation:
CS
“The flutes were hushed that mimed the orange moon"
or
“Chastely he spends an hour every day
Erecting tombstones to carnalities."
Only the tenderness and quiet music of the birthday piece com-
mencing:
“There is what is, and what there is is fair,”
wins pardon for the unacknowledged debt to Gertrude Stein and
The Portrait of Mabel Dodge. The diablerie wipes all re-
monstrance out. Some of the sonnets are fanfares defiant in the
curve of trumpeted emotion. Or brigantines full-sailed and
aflutter with all the pennants of pride. The very lines of songs
of ruth tilt upward:


200
AN AMERICAN SONNETEER
“Time that had marked him for the least of sages
Pointed the hour ..."
Ultimate verses stand acrobats at the close of vaudeville turns,
“Voilà!” upon their lips, twisted wrists and fingers pointed star-
ward:
“And then I danced along the boulevard!"
and
CC
“She triumphed in the tragic turnip field!"
and
"He felt he had used the finest snub of all!"
The élan, mock-heroic in instances, in others approaches a pure lyri-
cism:
“Crapulous hands reach out to strangle thee,
And every moment is a winding sheet
With bats to chant corruption's litany.
Be thou a torch to flash fanfaronade;
And as the earth crumbles beneath thy feet
Flaunt thou the glitter of a new brocade!”
Burlesque, mock-heroic, or direct and lyrical, the feeling of life
moves recklessly, swaggeringly "across the rotting pads in the
lily lake."
Evans' luxurious touch deploys itself amidst the clear metallic
music. Kreymborg has remarked the precision and beautiful
modelling of his phrases. His senses must have been aware of
magnificent textures, billowing grain, voices "fleet-limbed and
immaculate," loveliness of pearls "sheer and shimmering.” The
words come suave as silk: "Song for the minnow and a crystal
pool," "Repeated payment of inutile toll," "haunting coins to
meagre beauty fung," et cetera. Evans' vocabulary had the free-
dom born of relativism. Although he did not commence making


PAUL ROSENFELD
201
poems in the frank spirit of relativism, he was one of the first
of contemporaries to find the new form of expression destined to
liberate not only himself; and he utilized the opportunity offered
by the new way of using words in synthesizing his rich little
orchestra of precious and mordant terms. While the timbres, the
textures of Stevens and Pound, may leave Evans behind, he stays
in the race of sensuous, "modern” poetry.
It is as a dandy, then, perhaps a unique example, that he figures
in American literature. True, his last little collection, Two
Deaths in the Bronx, introduces, in one single satisfying expres-
sion, a new aspect of Donald Evans. The poet of Two Deaths is
master of him of the Sonnets in several faculties. He indulges
more infrequently in emotional rhetoric, is obliged to find fewer
stopgap phrases. If there is greater poison and pain in his ideas,
there is greater polish and effortlessness of handling. Irritations
scream beneath an ivory surface. And in the shade of ironism a
simpler flower grows. The amazing new note, the truly major note
come at length to Evans, is found at its roundest in the first of
the two poems For the Haunting of Mauna, beginning
“Suave body of the Queen, she gave me you,
Misting in still warm rains of tenderness,
But kept herself, and we are each betrayed.”
Here for the first time passion was shot with warmth. There
had been sensuous feeling, but never an apprehension of beauty
as selfless and pierced with the pangs of tenderness and imperma-
nency. Had Evans managed to survive another decade, he might
have advanced broadly upon the positive high road reached at
last. Yet, in the words of a modern chronicle, "not many days
later, Donald was found dead in his room—and rumor reported
that his own hand had concerned itself with the end.” But if it
is in the figure of the "fawn-coloured laugh sucking in the night"
he must remain, it is to no disadvantage, and with a fine distinction.
“The ablest of our sonneteers,” Kreymborg has dubbed him, prais-
ing his quatorzains, “the form no American has ever surpassed
him in.” For us, if an American Lovelace exists, it is Donald
Evans. What matter what he said? The verve, suavity, reckless
music returns upon him permanently to clothe him.


AN EYE
BY JOSEPH AUSLANDER
In that pale hour taken
Only by the dense preliminary twitter
Of birds whose throats are shaken
As the dew's dust from the leaves
They shake or as the centaur heaves
His flank's dripping,
His hoof's glitter-
So I, slipping with the earth, slipping
Over the sleep-edge between sleep
And waking when the eyelids keep
The worn seams of their web from ripping,
Hung suspended in a dream
As the spider hangs, and in that station holds
Outstretched the groined arch that would seem
To hold him, held and was held in seven folds
Of a staring scheme.
I saw with the heart's throbbing centre (an eye
That did not see so much as feel)
Tremendously the whirlpool stream
Of men and motors boiling by
Out of a cauldron of steam and steel
Into a cauldron of steel and steam;
I stood at the cross-roads of the world
And watched with my heart the street
Churn traffic like a black surf, beat
With shoes and sticks and hands and feet;
I heard the heat i
And the horn's blare, the siren's scream,
The purr of rubber, the wrench of the wheel
Whistled from traffic tower to tower, hurled
Through short spasms of space, twirled
Like a spinning little top
From stop to stop.


JOSEPH AUSLANDER
203
I heard a thousand wheels wince
Under the throttle of brakes; I saw
Men and motors crash-the splints
Of wind-shield glass, the bleeding skull, the raw
Flesh torn by the Olympian claw:
I turned my head away in sick
Recoil, but my heart was rooted still
Against its will by a massive will
That made it stick;
And I cried, “Let me go!"
Something said, "No."
And I saw rain
Thudding and swirling down
Swarthily on the insane
And splendidly terrible town. ...
And I heard again,
Fogged by distance, twinkling as through a sieve
Of silver, the cool and tentative
Twitter of sparrow and chaffinch and lark
Splashing from wet leaves; and I smelled the dark
Smell of the steaming bark,
Pungent and novel, and the smell
Of young twigs and the yearning earth; and I heard
Bird after bird
Spill silver into a silver bell;
And I knew cattle were standing under the line
Of the living thunder,
Standing under
All the yellow lightning and the fine
White fury of water because I could smell the kine,
And my nostrils dilated, drinking the beevish wine;
And somewhere near at hand the shrill
Exultant snuffle of horses on a hill
And the good grunt of swine;
And the odour of straw
Rain-soaked, warm with dove and owl. ...
Then suddenly I saw, or my heart saw,
Machines and men churning in a black bowl


204
AN EYE
At the cross-roads of the world, and the howl
Of men and machines struck at my face like a claw,
And I cried, “Let me go!"
And heard, “Not so.”
And I looked and saw a jungle mocking
The leopard lozenged with gold who had sprung
Into a barrel's spit-
And I fell down with it;
And I heard a trigger click like a death's hand clocking
The second, and I was flung
On the trumpets of assault unlocking
The lion's lung;
And I saw the beauty of the lioness rocking
Behind green coals, bitterly blocking
The last yard to her young;
And I saw the panther when there is no help
Rolling a blind gaze on her whelp
And licking it with her tongue;
And I saw the bengal tiger charted black,
With lightning on his back
Shot down and stripped, or slung
Over a shoulder, or in the track
Of his long plunge and lone attack
Left for dung!
And the Eye in my heart glowed:
And I saw a ship in a shouldering sea
Strain at her strength,
And shudder through her length,
And spark her doom through the sky;
And I heard the metallic cry:
“Women and children first! Stand by!"
And I saw the life-boats lowered and smeared
Flat as you smear a fly;
And I saw some quick little fellow who feared,
Shot down gurgling in his beard;
And I saw the decks cleared;
And I saw them try again and try
Again, but the seas were running high;


JOSEPH AUSLANDER
205
ve
And I saw a-plenty jumpmand die;
And I heard the ship's orchestra strike up brave
Brass—and the ship went down with her load
Of people and bottles and plates, leaving the wave
In that place,
Leaving the stillness to rewrite, the water to erase.
And I heard the murmuring of all the surfs on all
the beaches of the world
Boom in the ear's hollow cave, and I cried
“Let me loose now! I have seen how men
and ships in their pride
Have gone down and died;
I have heard their drums and seen their colours curled
Under like shells--and then heard nothing beside,
Seen nothing but water divide
Decently and close once more and abide." ...
And my heart's Eye was turned
In on itself and eyed
Dirty corners there that burned
With many a horned lust, livid spots
That reeked of purple and flesh-pots,
Stamped with the hooves and chariots
Of the Assyrian treachery;
And on the wall a Hand that traced
In the dust and webs the words
“Thus Belshazzar was effaced
Though not his accusation !" . . . And
All at once a clamour of birds
Filled my heart like a hand
Filling a hole or like a ghost's
Form flowing through a room:
And I heard a sound like doom
Moving, and I knew the Host's
Breath: “Behold your puny boasts
With the worm in his lodge!
Salute your garrison of hawks!”—
And I could not stir,
I could not stir. ...


206
AN EYE
The Voice resumed: “Place-coveter,
Apparel-coveter, look upon
The hawk-thoughts of your garrison !
You that see and hear so plain
Others in their pride and pain,
What is it that lets you kiss
The icon of your cowardice?
Think you to escape the fault
By exalting me, exalt
Your own forehead, salve your soul
With my myrrh and aureole?
You have looked and you have seen
Man the tool of his machine;
Heard the valves and pistons groan
Mute, and leave their lord-alone
With his feeble blood and bone;
You have stared into your heart
And found your brother's counterpart:
For every stain on his head
You shall bleed as he has bled,
And the dead shall bury the dead;
Now I go—but I release
Your heart to desperate peace! ...
And I heard shouting in the street
Where men and motors meet;
And my eyes followed the tall
Blur of light from window-frame to wall
And that was all.



Photograph by Druet
FEMME ACCROUPIE. BY ARISTIDE MAILLOL






Photograph by Druet
FEMME ACCROUPIE. BY ARISTIDE MAILLOL






Photograph by Druet
FEMME ASSISE. BY ARISTIDE MAILLOL





CANE RIVER
BY LYLE SAXON
as
SC
QUSIE was not a native of Cane River country. She came here
with an old woman called Aunt Dicey, from somewhere
down Bayou Lafourche way, from southwest Louisiana. She was
a bad one, always a wild nigger girl with short hair that she
combed straight out; and she wore nutmegs on a string around
her neck, to ward off evil spirits. She was skinny and ugly; per-
haps it was her very ugliness that filled the black men with unrest,
as she went flaunting by. An untamed savage, that's what she
was. “Trick-nigger” they called her-little old Susie with her
scrawny arms, her rolling eyes, and her barbarous ways. Why,
you could hear her laughing as she went traipsing through the
fields, half a mile away. “Dat's dat Susie,” folks would say, as
they heard the shrill scream of her laughter coming across Cane
River at night, “Dat's a crazy chile!”
She and Aunt Dicey lived in a tumble-down cabin, not far from
the African Baptist Church, and Aunt Dicey washed clothes two
days of each week, for the white folks at Yucca Plantation. She
made a little garden, too, and kept chickens. She got along with
everybody.
But that Susie! Oh, she was a bad one. First one boy, and
then another: that long black boy of Papa Chawlie's, and the
mulatto son of Ambrose Jenks—and even Babe Johnson, bandy-
legged and undersized. But Susie favoured Big Brown. He was
six feet tall, and his profile was like that of Ethiopians in Egyptian
carvings. And Big Brown had a way with woman. Not that he
was the marrying kind. He wasn't. He had learned city ways
when he spent a year at Angola, the State Penitentiary, for shoot-
ing another negro one Christmas night ... just shooting for
nothing, being drunk and in a good humour.
Well, there's no stigma attached to the penitentiary, on Cane
River. Many of the black boys have been in for a year or two, for
bigamy, or a shooting scrape, or for some other minor offence like that
—and it is rather like sending a boy off to college. Lord! Some of


208
CANE RIVER
them are proud of it when they come back to the plantation again.
Or, at least, Big Brown was that way. He came back to Cane
River when Susie was fourteen, when her popularity was at its
height. There was little Babe Johnson, for instance. She flouted
him with her wild antics and her monkey-shines. But Babe fol-
lowed her, and used to slip up to Aunt Dicey's cabin on summer
nights, carrying a big watermelon for her, on his shoulder. And
Susie would eat it, there on the gallery, spitting out the seeds at
him and making fun of him.
Then Big Brown came slouching up. He would take her to
church, or to picnics, or fish-fries. She would come running.
Aunt Dicey hated Brown, and tried to make Susie behave herself.
But Lord! That Susie! Might as well try to make the sun stand
still.
ver
When trouble began to brew, well-Big Brown went off some-
where into the hills, and Susie was left alone with Aunt Dicey in
the cabin on the river bank.
"I tol' yer so! I tol' yer so!" Aunt Dicey said over and over, as
she sat rocking her ample body back and forth. But Susie, mis-
shapen and ugly, would stand looking out of the door, to where the
big red moon hung low in the sky over Cane River. Some-
times she would be racked with great sobs that shook her thin
body. At other times she would laugh shrilly and say: "I don'
keer! I don' keer!"
A month before the baby was born she married Babe Johnson.
For Babe loved her, and that was the only way he could get her.
Susie didn't love him, and didn't want to marry him; but Aunt
Dicey begged and argued, and talked of the disgrace, and of "get-
tin' read out in chu'ch”—a terrible punishment in the old woman's
eyes—and Susie gavę in.
That sort of thing happens oftener than one would suppose, on
Cane River where we plantation negroes know less of white folks'
conventions that other negroes do. Here, you do what you want
to do—and usually, that's the end of it. Babe had his dreams
doubtless. This bad start—well, they would get past it and Susie
would make him a good wife. And he would have her all to him-
self then-Susie, who turned the heads of all the nigger men, ugly
old Susie, with her woolly hair, that she disdained to straighten
with “ointment” as the other girls did, but which she wore standing
ne
·


LYLE SAXON
209
on end, like a savage woman-Susie, with her skinny, mis-shapen
body, and her big bare black feet, with charms dangling on dirty
strings around her ankles.
So they were married, the baby was born, and they lived in
a new cabin that Mr Guy built for them not far from Aunt Dicey's.
For Babe was a favourite with Mr Guy, who considered him the
best field-hand that he had. Oh yes, Babe stood well with the
white folks at Yucca Plantation, and they thought that Susie ought
to thank her lucky stars that she had found a man who was willing
to provide for her, who would buy her sleazy pink dresses, and
plenty of cheap white lace to sew on them, or would let her buy
red bandanna handerchiefs to sew together into dresses, Cane River
style.
Now Mr Guy was not entirely pleased with Babe's marriage,
because he liked Babe and considered him a fine boy. Even if he
was slow in his work, his slowness was methodical; if Babe set out
to do a thing he finished it. But Susie! Just one step from actual
madness, with her monkey-motions and her ape-like chatterings.
The mentality of a child of five. And who would have guessed that
quiet, stolid Babe would be taken in by one of these trick-niggers!
But the white man could never realize that the girl's very savagery
was more provocative than the charms of those negresses who had
taken on a veneer of civilization from the white folks. Just one
bold side glance from Susie would send the black boys nudging and
guffawing, as she swaggered barefoot down the dusty lane, a
watermelon balanced on her head, singing as she went.
Mr Guy's hard and fast code was: “Make your negroes work;
make them respectful; try to treat them fair—but hands off in
affairs among themselves, for these private things do not concern
you.” Mr Guy felt that he did not understand his own race any
too well, and there were things about negroes that were beyond
him--although he had been born on a plantation, and there had
been negroes around him all his life. The black folks liked Mr
Guy. He didn't "meddle them," as so many of the white planters
did. That was the reason Mr Guy never had labour troubles,
and why there was never a vacant cabin on Yucca Plantation.
And, as he always tried to play fair with them, he made no comment
when Babe threw himself away on Susie. He told Babe that he could
take that new cabin on the river bank, next door to Aunt Dicey's,


210
CANE RIVER
near the lane that led to the church-a cabin built under a big
Chinaberry tree, just across the river from the plantation store.
Babe and Susie got along fine for a while. The loiterers could
hear her laughing in the evenings. For it was upon the store
gallery that the black men gathered at night, loafing and “visitin'”
together; the deserted building, tight-barred and dark, was their
nightly meeting place; it was their club, their refuge from hot
cabins full of squalling black children.
"Susie done quiet down,” said Papa Chawlie, one night as
they sat looking across the placid water to the light that glimmered
in Babe's cabin.
“Babe's done bought him a 'cawdeen,” commented a shapeless
black shadow at his elbow.
An accordion, he meant. That was nice, too, because Susie could
play upon the mouth-organ, and they heard her often, playing
“blues” through the summer night. It was wrong, of course,
because folks that belong to the church have no business playing
the blues. It's ungodly. After you are baptized, you must give
up your sinful ways, and play and sing hymn-tunes, or spirituals,
or "ballots," or "jump-up” songs about folks in the Bible. Some
of them are lively enough. There's that one beginning:
"Delilah wuz a woman, fine an' fair,
Pleasant-lookin' wid her coal-black hair ..."
That was a grand one, with its surging refrain:
“Oh, if I wuz Sampson, I'd pull dat buildin' down!"
Law! But that Susie! No ballot-tunes and jump-up songs for her.
"I got a gal, so lean an' so tall,
Her big mouf flops open like a red parasol!"
Susie would shout shrilly, all thirty verses, some of them filthy,
and Babe's accordion would accompany her, with its irresponsible
whine. Sometimes, Babe would sing, too, tunes he had learned
in lumber camps long ago:


LYLE SAXON
211
“Oh, I got forty dollars, an' I got it fo' to spen',
If the wimmin don' wan' it, gonna give it to de men!”
That was all of it, two lilting lines, ending in a wail. Susie liked
that one and would join in with a wild shriek on the mouth-organ.
But the happiness was after all only transient, for Big Brown
came back. He came slouching up to the store gallery one night,
just as though he had never been away at all, and had never heard
of Susie or the other girls.
“Who's dat singin' de blues, ovah de rivah ?” he asked Papa
Chawlie, and the old man answered: “Yo'know widdout my tellin'
yoʻ, Big Brown, dat's Susie singin'.”
Brown said "Huh!” That was all, but the men on the gallery
knew that his return meant unhappiness for Babe, and they were
sorry, for they liked him.
And so it turned out, for Susie welcomed Big Brown with open
arms. Not before Babe, of course, for Brown chose times when
Babe was absent in the cotton fields; but he came to the cabin, and
Aunt Dicey saw him go. She went down, herself, later, to remon-
strate with Susie. But Susie just laughed and rolled her eyes.
Oh, she was a bad one; no mistaking that.
It wasn't long before Babe knew, for gossip spreads rapidly.
Well, on Cane River the proper thing to do, if you can no
longer ignore your wife's misdemeanors with another man, is to
pick a quarrel with him on some pretext, beat him, or kill him,
as you can, and then the affair is settled. And pretexts are always
easy to find. So Babe brushed against Big Brown, a little too
roughly, one noon on the store gallery, and the fight ensued.
But, of course, Big Brown had it all his own way. He beat Babe
as one would beat a mad dog, and finally grabbed him by the
shoulders and pounded his head against a roll of barbed wire that
lay there by the cotton scales. Mr Guy, hearing the scuffling, came
out to see what it was all about, and he was so angry to see such
brutality, that he picked up a club and gave Brown a crack over the
head that would have killed a man whose skull was thinner.
But Brown bore Mr Guy no grudge. Mr Guy had his conven-
tions, too, and both Babe and Brown knew that it was not the
thing to fight on the store gallery. After a time, some men took


212
CANE RIVER
wa
Babe home in a rowboat, and Susie tied up his head with a white
cloth, soaked in turpentine, the only antiseptic that was handy.
Brown got his senses back, after a while, and staggered off to
the cabin where he lived, down the lane that led to the gin.
The fight was over, and after that, when Babe and Brown
passed in the road, they spoke as before:
“Howdy, Big Brown!"
“How 'bout yo', Babe ?"
That was all. And not long after, Brown began slipping to
Babe's cabin again, in the day-time, when Babe was plowing out
in Mr Guy's field. And Babe knew it, and, before long, Susie
knew that Babe knew it.
But Susie didn't care. She was a bad one. Reckless, too, and
laughing out in her sleep at night, like a crazy woman, until the
sound waked Babe, and he would lie there in the moonlight that
came in through the open door, and curse his weak body ... Oh,
yes, Susie was a bad one, right enough, but Babe loved her. That
was what hurt. For Babe knew that Big Brown didn't love her.
He would lie awake until the moon set, and the grey mists hung
low over the water; and he could hear the first roosters crowing,
as they came fluttering down from the fig-trees by Aunt Dicey's
cabin. Then, sleepless, he would rise, and wake Susie to make
the coffee before he put on his overalls and hat, and went out
to his day of plowing.
It was hard to find a way to get at Brown. For he wasn't
employed on Yucca Plantation. He just lived there, as a good
many others did. He was a trapper, that was why he went away
into the hills and remained for days at a time. Sometimes, though,
he made shorter trips, into the swamps a few miles back from the
river bank. Bad places, those swamps, with their snakes and
fevers; but Brown trapped 'possums and coons and skunks and even
foxes there; and he sold the pelts. Sometimes he would be gone
for a week, and would come back with a pile of hides that he sold
to a man who came from New Orleans, once a month or so, to Mr
Guy's store. The man always paid in cash for the pelts, and so
Brown had, nearly always, some money in hand-not commissary
cheques, like the rest of us, to carry us over the periods of depres-
sion between the times when we sell our cotton, and, for a few
weeks, have money to throw away with both hands.
rive


LYLE SAXON
213
Once Brown gave a string of beads to Susie, red beads unlike
anything ever seen on Cane River before. The man who bought
the pelts, brought them from New Orleans to Big Brown, in ex-
change for a particularly fine skin. And Susie flaunted those beads,
although half a dozen negroes had seen Brown get them from the
white man. Oh yes, Susie was a bad one. In spite of Aunt Dicey's
prominence in the African Baptist Church, the members took a
stand, and had Susie "read out.”
That is supreme disgrace—and on Cane River, it means that you
are barred, not only from the church itself, but from all church
activities and festivities and these festivities of church folks are
the only entertainments we have. But Susie just flounced, and said
she didn't care. On Sunday, she sat on the gallery before her
cabin, wearing the red beads, and with the baby on her knee-
Big Brown's baby—and played on her mouth-organ. Played the
blues, mind you, over and over, while people were passing on the
way to church. . Aunt Dicey shuddered, and thought of the red
hell Susie was going to.
And Babe brooded. Day by day, he grew more morose, more
silent. Finally, even Susie, old foolish Susie, noticed it.
"W-what yo’ studyin' bout, Babe?" she asked him, once, with
something like fear in her voice.
“I'm studyin' bout Sunday,” he answered. Only that. It might
mean anything, but Susie asked no more. He had never asked
her why she had stopped attending church, and why she had sud-
denly lost her old passion for shouting and singing hymns on Sun-
day morning.
It was just at this time that Big Brown ordered the bear trap
from Mr Guy- a brutal-looking steel trap, a trap so large that it
came in a crate all by itself. For, back in the hills, miles away,
where Big Brown rode, beyond the scarey woods that were full of
malaria mosquitoes and bullfrogs and cotton-mouthed moccasins,
he had come across bear tracks. And a bearskin, nowadays, was
not to be despised. There were cubs, too. Brown had seen their
tracks in the soft mud by a spring. Yes, God only knows what
lies in those remote hills beyond the swamp, where no one lives,
and few go, and where buzzards breed in caves on barren hillsides.
“Carencro Roost” one hill is called—and from the Cane River
valley, on clear days, you can see the buzzards circling high in the


214
CANE RIVER
air, above its summit. But the buzzard hill seems as remote as the
moon, although it is hardly more than ten miles away, through the
swamp. On Cane River we do not wander too far away from the
watercourse. The barren hills and swamps are not for us. We
prefer to gather together in groups, where we can have our churches,
and our social life, and where our work is waiting for us. No, the
hills and swamps are not for plantation negroes, except of course
for those bold and reckless spirits like Big Brown. It was along
the dimly-marked trail to Carencro Roost that Brown toted the
bear trap, slung over the back of a white pack mule he had bor-
rowed from Papa Chawlie.
From the field, Babe saw him go, and bowed his head over the
plow: “Git up, Mule!” he said to the beast that stood with droop-
ing head in the simmering sun of August.
That night Babe asked Mr Guy's permission to get Papa Chawlie
to substitute for him in the field, while he went to town, twenty
miles away.
“Business ?” Mr Guy smiled quizzically, and almost asked a
question, but, remembering the Cane River code, merely nodded
assent. Better let him go now, and get it over with—whatever
it was for next month would be cotton-picking time, and Babe
couldn't be spared then, as he was a valuable man at the gin.
However, Mr Guy did say that he hoped Babe wouldn't be gone
long. The code permitted so much, at least. Babe couldn't
promise, exactly. It might be a week before he got back-he had
important business to attend to.
Now everybody knew that Babe had no business in town, unless
it was “legal business”—and that meant only one thing. So,
in the evening speculation was rife, there on the store gallery;
language was guarded, but the word “divo'ce” was bandied about.
It was after nine o'clock, almost time to go, when Papa Chawlie
said, suddenly:
"Fo' Gawd! Look at 'er, an' lissen at 'er!"
For Susie, brazen-faced Susie, was sitting on the gallery of her
cabin, sitting there in plain view, with Big Brown lolling on
the floor beside her; and she was playing for him upon the mouth-
organ, playing the blues. Across the narrow river, the wailing
strains came, whining with slow, suggestive undulation.
The watchers in the dark said no more than “Ump!" or "Aie-
0
1
dis


LYLE SAXON
215
Yie!” those two expressions into which the negro can pack all
human emotions, scorn, love, or mere lazy comment. After a time,
they saw the two forms silhouetted in the cabin doorway, against
the light of the smoky oil lamp. And presently, the light went
out.
Then, the men on the store gallery yawned, and said good-
night to each other; and mounting their sleepy horses, rode slowly
down the moonlit road, toward their cabins, dotted along the river
bank. Yes, surely, Babe was justified in getting a divorce from
that woman. She was just a low-down trick-nigger. No mis-
taking that.
But Babe was not, as they thought, riding toward town. As
soon as he was out of sight of the store, he stopped the old calico
pony and looked to the right and to the left. Then he turned the
animal's head into the cotton rows, and kept on through the field.
Nobody was plowing to-day, and there was no cabin from which
the spying eyes of a woman could see him. Presently, he drew
rein at the place where the cotton rows met the woodland. And
again he looked about. Only the field, simmering in the sun, and
the cool shadows of the moss-covered trees before him. He sighed.
Then he clucked his tongue, and the thin pony began to go forward
into the woods: “Git up, Hoss!” he said.
For hours he rode, the horse picking its way through the brush,
avoiding depressions and fallen logs. By looking at the wester-
ing sun, Babe was able to make the wide circle he intended. At
twilight, he had reached a point some eight miles back of his own
cabin, and in the heart of the swamp. It was too late to go further,
so he dismounted and unsaddled his horse, tying him with a rope
so the animal could graze. From a sack tied to the saddle, Babe
took a can of sausage, which he opened. He ate slowly. Then he
lay down under a tree, watching the rising moon, and slapping at
mosquitoes that whined over him-great black swamp mosquitoes,
that settled on his face and hands like a veil and remained there
until brushed off, dead. Finally, he put his bandanna handker-
chief over his face, slipped his hands into his pockets, and lay
on his back, looking at the moon through the red cloth. At last he
slept.
At the first streaks of dawn, he was on horseback again. This
time he rode forward, into the swamp, looking carefully to right


216
CANE RIVER
wa
and left. Twice he changed his course. Finally, he found the
trail for which he was looking—the tracks of two horses. This
was the way that Big Brown had taken the afternoon before.
Yes, surely, for further along, in a marshy place, Babe found
both trails, one going into the hills, one returning. Babe rode
carefully now, watching the ground intently, looking for some-
thing. It was nearly ten o'clock before he found the place where
Brown had dismounted and left his horses.
Before him rose a steep hill, thickly wooded, and full of little
ravines, depressions which had washed out in the tropical storms
of bygone years, and which were now full of a dense undergrowth.
Half an hour later, he found the trap, buried in leaves and soft
earth, near the mouth of a cave in the hillside. It lay in a gully,
a narrow place, approachable from only one side. The bait had
been partially eaten by a 'possum or a skunk, or some other small
animal, too light to spring the heavy trap.
Babe examined it carefully. Certainly, it was strong enough
to break the leg of a horse—or man. He worked there for an hour
before he succeeded in accomplishing his purpose; but, when he had
finished, the trap was covered with a light layer of earth and rot-
ting leaves, and was fully ten yards nearer the outer end of the
gully, directly in the path.
Then he went back to his horse, tethered in the woods, and rode
off. He hid the old pony in a thicket, a mile away–no use to be
betrayed by the whinnying of an animal—and crept back on foot,
to a point not far from the trail which he knew Big Brown would
follow. There Babe waited, listening, and watching the sun which
shone straight down.
Hours passed. The sun drew in and heavy clouds banked up
in the south. Big raindrops came pattering down on the leaves.
In the thicket, Babe smiled. All the better; no chance, now, for any
one to see the tracks he had made. It seemed as though nature were
working with him, for if this downpour had come yesterday, it
would have been impossible for him to find the trap. He was wet
through, as he sat there under the leaves. Toward twilight, the
sky cleared and swarms of mosquitoes whined about him.
He began to wonder why Big Brown didn't come—and then,
as his slow mind turned to possible reasons, he hung his head with
shame. And the night closed around him. Sometimes he dozed;
sometimes he sat motionless for hours, staring straight into the


LYLE SAXON
217
darkness; sometimes he swayed back and forth, as Aunt Dicey had
done in the cabin. He slept a little, too, lightly, like an animal;
waking at the slightest noise, only to stretch his body and doze
again. By sun-up, he was alert, lying motionless in the wet brush,
looking out through a tangle of wild grape-vines.
It was nearly nine o'clock, he reckoned by the sun, when Big
Brown passed on horseback, singing as he rode, singing Babe's
own song:
“Oh, I got forty dollars an' I got it fo’ to spen',
If the wimmin don' wan' it, gonna give it to de men!"
Babe heard it die away, and, peering out, saw Brown get down
from his horse, and tie the animal to a branch. Then the big
fellow disappeared into the woods, going toward the ravine.
A minute later Babe heard a sharp snap, and a wild cry. After
a time—a great while, it seemed—he heard calls for help.
At first they were sharp and frantic, then slower; finally they
ceased.
It was a long way back to his horse, but Babe reached him after
nightfall. From the bundle tied to the saddle, he brought out
another can of sausage, ate hungrily, and when he had finished,
drank from a spring, like an animal, lying flat on the ground. He
brought his horse to the water and saw him drink, then tethered
him where there was green, tender grass. That night Babe slept.
Shortly after daylight he crawled back to the hilltop. Brown's
horse, tied to a branch, was whinnying and pawing the ground.
Hum! He'd have to do something about that old white horse.
Couldn't let it stay tied there. The poor thing would starve.
Must be mighty thirsty right now, too. Another thing. Suppose
someone should happen to come riding by and see that horse, and
investigate.
Babe took the bridle from its head, and gave the beast a smart
rap with a stick. He stood watching as the horse went blundering
into the brush, stopping half a hundred yards away to grasp
greedily at the dewy grass. Babe followed it for half a mile or
more, driving it further and further into the woods. He threw
clods of earth at it, and the horse began to run, jingling the iron
rings fastened to the saddle.
That afternoon Babe dozed by the spring, near his calico pony
ve.


218
CANE RIVER
reams
as it munched the grass. It was pleasant by the spring. Little
birds came down to drink, and if you lay quiet, they came quite
close.
When he crept to the gully next morning, he saw long streams
of red ants in the grass, going towards the trap.
The day was unbearably hot. Babe fanned himself with a
bunch of dried grass, and dozed, and woke again to fight the mos-
quitoes and gnats. In the afternoon, he followed the stream that
ran from the spring, until he reached a place where there was a
bed of white sand. Here, he undressed and lay in the water that
did not cover him. However, the sand was soft, and with a little
labour, he was able to scoop out a depression big enough to fit
his body; and he lay there for more than an hour, watching the
leaves that drifted by in the slow-moving current: long green
leaves, that were like little snakes; round red berries, like Susie's
red beads.
ITU
That day was hot on Cane River, too. Mr Guy had given
notice that two full hours' rest be given the men and mules at
midday, instead of one, as usual, and it was nearly three o'clock
in the afternoon before the plantation bell rang for the hands to
go back to the fields.
Aunt Dicey, having come home in a flat-bottomed rowboat from
the store, carrying a piece of salt meat in an old meal sack,
turned in at the gate of Babe's cabin, deciding suddenly that she
would stop and talk to Susie. Lately, she had given the girl a
wide berth. But to-day, curiosity overcame distaste. She found
Susie sitting listlessly beside the table, the baby in her lap. She
looked—as the old woman said afterward—as though she were
listening to some sound from a distance.
"What ails yo', Susie ?” said Aunt Dicey, helping herself to a
gourdful of water, from the pail on a shelf inside the door; “Is
yo' worried becuz Babe ain't come back ?"
The black girl shook her head, and the red beads clicked against
a blue dish. The old woman bridled:
"It's scan’lous an' a shame," she said, “de way yo' wears dem
beads, Susie. Gawd gonna strike yo’ down. Yo' jus' wa
Instead of answering scornfully as usual, Susie raised one lanky
arm and pointed to the China tree outside the door: “Look at dat


LYLE SAXON
219
WO
leaf, Auntie!” she whispered tensely, “Oh my Gawd, jus' look
at it!"
The day was airless, no breeze stirred, but in the Chinaberry
tree, one leaf was waving rapidly back and forth in the mounting
heat-waves.
Aunt Dicey sniffed, as she saw Susie's shaking hands: "Ef yo's
lookin' for sperrits, I speck yo' gwine to see sperrits,” she said.
But, sensing suddenly the realness of Susie's fear, she temporized:
“Ah sho did heah a squinch owl in de tree, las' night. An' I heerd
de dawg howl, too!"
Susie nodded. She looked long into the older woman's face,
and then she said, in a hoarse whisper: “Auntie, sump'n done
happen to 'im!"
"Babe's done gone to town to get a divo'ce f'um yo', dat's wat
happen to 'im!" retorted Aunt Dicey. But Susie shook her head.
"Ah don' keer, ef he do ... I don' keer!" ... She gulped.
“Auntie, sump'n done kotch Big Brown. All las' night, an' all de
night befo', seems I heah 'im callin' ... He say: 'Susie ...
Oh, Susie!' ovah, an' ovah. It wuz like a dyin' man, Auntie. ...
It wuz like a dyin' man!"
Dicey rose. "So dat's whut's wurrying yo'!” she said. "Fo’
Gawd, Susie! Don' yo' know whut dey's sayin' bout yo’ at de
sto'? Dey say, Big Brown done foun' out dat Babe's gone off to
divo'ce yo’, and he's lit out again. ... Jus' like 'e done de fust
time! Ha! Dat man don'wan' yo', Susie. He's jus' bewitch
yo', dat's all!” And she moved toward the door.
"Fo' Gawd's sake, don' go an' leave me, Aunt Dicey ..."
Susie had taken the mouth-organ from the pocket of her apron,
and was twisting it over and over in her fingers. But a voice from
outside interrupted the words. Papa Chawlie was passing, and
seeing Aunt Dicey emerging from the door of Susie's cabin, he
hailed her:
"Hey, Dicey! Sump'n done happen to Big Brown! His ol'
w'ite hoss is come home widdout 'im!” There was in his voice
that joy which only evil tidings can evoke, “Yonder 'e is, grazin'
in de lane by de gin. Good riddance to bad rubbish, ef yo' ax me!”
And he shouted the last sentence, knowing that Susie would hear.
Suddenly, despite the stifling day, Aunt Dicey shivered, and
turned back into the cabin. Susie was cowering against the chim-


220
CANE RIVER
ney, the mouth-organ still clenched in her hand, her eyes rolling
wildly. A hoarse scream broke from her lips, and she put her arms
over her face, as though to ward off a nightmare.
"W-whut yo' seein', Susie?" Aunt Dicey asked in a whisper,
clutching the table's edge.
But the young black woman wheeled sharply about, and with
the spring of an animal, was gone through the back door. Aunt
Dicey could see her running, between the cotton rows, toward the
swamp.
came
It stormed that night. Babe, crouched in a hollow tree, watched
the blinding flashes of lightning, remembering how Susie feared it.
Well, to-night, he would be back at Cane River, back with Susie,
and master of his own cabin; in the morning that followed, he could
return to his mules again, a peaceful man.
He dozed at intervals, despite the storm. Once, just at day-
light he thought he heard screams in the woods, and lay listening,
his hair tingling on his scalp, but heard no more; only the soughing
of the wind, and the distant thunder.
By sunrise it was clear again; the rain had washed the air clean,
and the sky was blue; the first rays of sunlight turned the dark
tree-trunks to copper. Birds began calling in the thickets, and the
soft moan of the wood-dove came with melancholy regularity,
faint and sweet.
Shortly after the rising of the sun, Babe began his journey
toward the gully. He went slowly, this morning, creeping along,
keeping a sharp look-out, walking carefully in order to leave no
trace. As he came near he saw a buzzard perched in a dead tree;
and high in the air, another buzzard circling lower.
As his eyes descended from the tree to the path before him, he
shivered and drew in his breath. For there was the print of a bare
foot. Someone had walked with unerring step, directly to the
trap, down into the gully.
Crouching in the bushes, he listened. Only the humming of in-
sects came to him, and distant bird notes; the great song of the
day was beginning as the sun rose. There was no other sound.
Stillness, ominous silence. ... Over in the gully, someone was
lying in wait, spying upon him from behind the vines, for there
were no returning footprints.


LYLE SAXON
221
On hands and knees, Babe crouched, every nerve tense. Long
minutes passed.
And then a thin, ghastly sound came to him-an incredible
ripple, blown through reeds-music-a tuneless and discordant
strain from a mouth-organ. It whined on the morning ai ir, just
one broken bar, then stopped.
A moment later, there was the rustling of leaves, and Susie
appeared. She came staggering, slowly, her bare feet dragging.
She was quite close to him before she looked up, the mouth-organ
against her lips, her woolly hair full of dew drops which glittered
in the sunlight. She seemed incapable of controlling her eyes.
He was not sure that she had seen him.
“Susie!” He moved toward her, his hand outstretched.
She started back, her eyes fixed upon him for a moment, an
uncertain smile upon her face. Then, distressed and confused, she
turned away from him.
“Come heah, Susie . . . I ain't gwine to hu't yo' ..."
He advanced upon her, cautiously, as one approaches a fright-
ened dog: "Susie . . . Susie ... !! But she avoided him, run-
ning, foundering through the brush. Pursuing, he caught up with
her in a little clearing, and came close.
"Susie, I ain't ..." He grasped at her arm.
She jerked free and was off, under the trees, with a burst of
loud, witless laughter. As soon as she had run a little way, she
stopped and looked back at him, then raised the mouth-organ to her
lips again; but as he came up, ran deeper into the woods.
In the clearing, Babe stood stupidly. From far off, an im-
perfect thread of melody was carried back to him—fainter and
fainter--the same whimpering strain, over and over and over. ...
On


SWANS
BY E. CLEMENT JONES
Where water pauses full nor seems to move,
To recaress his eyes man placed us there-
Instating our suave nonchalance to prove
Some pure reiteration of the rare-
Making us twice an image in that glass,
Using awhile as mirror not as blade
His thought, watching our calm designs repass
The aged shore of time—repass and fade.
The willow through the golden eve unveils
To him some sad luxurious pleasure,
Though not for him, but for herself she trails
Her separate, her watery treasure.
Patterns serene—so old—to him reflect
Their ancient freshness in this blue reprieve.
Wistful they come, from streams of far neglect,
Remass their brightness here, and reconceive.
The fountain to her pool returns again.
Hiding new bones old bones are ſung to light.
Forgotten stars refall in showers like rain,
And in man's eyes retrace their ended flight.
Man still elaborates our simple ways
And simplifies our life's own subtle flood-
Inscribes the Swan in constellated rays,
But disregards the current of our blood.
He does us honour, but he makes us serve
His twy-formed need of some remembered core
With need to crush it, in reversing curve-
Putting us in, to take us out once more.


- NAGLE
A DRAWING. BY EDWARD NAGLE.





NAGLE
A DRAWING. BY EDWARD NAGLE.





LAST PAGES
BY ANATOLE FRANCE
With Annotations by Michel Corday
Translated From the French by J. Lewis May
III
THE DIALOGUE CONCERNING THE FUTURE
The scene of this dialogue was to be a promenade at Cannes, and its
characters the Baron de Ténar and his companions.
A young man was passing by, a young man of twenty, "fair as the day.”
Floris was amazed at the great number of such young men who take no
interest in women or in politics, and who live entirely for sport.
Said the Baron de Ténar:
That's nothing new. Such were the young Greeks in the Golden
Age. The young men belonging to a given district used to go to
the house of the Master of Music, marching along in a body, ob-
serving order, all in step, though the snow should fall like flour
from a colander. There they were taught the awe-inspiring Hymn
to Pallas, the destroyer of cities, and the sound of their singing
echoed far and wide. They retained the grave harmony of the
traditional airs handed down from their forefathers. If any one
of them took it into his head to play the buffoon or to sing with
effeminate or far-fetched modulations, he was chastised as an enemy
of the Muses.
At the Gymnasium, at the palaestrae, in the speeches in the
Market Place, they were told how one might have a powerful
chest, a clear complexion, broad shoulders, a short tongue. ...
They were taught to take delight in simple things. “Thou shalt go
to the Academy and wander at ease beneath the sacred olives, a
crown of flowering rushes on thy head, together with a sedate com-
panion of thine own age. In the midst of happy leisure thou
shalt enjoy the sweet odour that the smilax and the leafage of the


224
LAST PAGES
white poplar exhale, on the fair spring days, when the plane-
tree and the young elm mingle their gentle murmur. Happy the
young man who can recall such memories as these.”
Such were the young men of Athens when life was simple and
virtue regnant. They changed, as you know. Modesty did not
reign for ever.
The young men "went to see the women dancing, never heeding lest in the
midst of their ecstasy a harlot should toss them the apple. And their
faces were pale, their shoulders narrow, their chests contracted, their
tongues long, and their buttocks fleshless.”
And the decadence of Greek manners, that has endured ever since
the times when the Athenians “caught up their hair with golden cicadas,"
brought the Baron de Ténar to this conclusion:
It is true that races have a period of growth, maturity, and
decay. But these phases are not clearly differentiated. There is
much of maturity and old age to be discerned in the youth of a
race, and there is still a deal of youth in its decrepitude. Could
we discern straight away the age of any single country in Europe?
Anatole France denied that there was such a thing as progress, "save
in the sense of sequence and succession, in which succession there are both
gains and losses.” The idea of progress in the sense of a continuous, in-
definite advance, is a modern idea.
It belongs to the liberals of 1830. Nothing that we see in
nature, or in the social condition of man, affords any example of
it. What progress has there been, for instance, for those ferns,
which were once trees in torrid solitudes frequented only by insects?
In what way has the Ichthyosaurus, the Plesiosaurus, the Mastodon,
or the Aurochs progressed? Or the whale, whose race is nearly
extinct? The ants would long ago have been sovereigns of the
earth if they had progressed in intelligence.
But what of man?
For countless centuries man has shown himself capable of per-
fecting his tools, but not his mind; and all the varied apparatus
with which he arms himself will not save him from an oblivion
like that of the mastodon and the aurochs. His race will perish.
The fate of the race is inherent in the fate of the individual.
Man is not more intelligent to-day than he was of old. He


ANATOLE FRANCE
225
DIE
has accumulated resources of every kind and he employs them
in order to create others; but the inventor of wireless telegraphy
is not more intelligent than the inventor of the wheel.
He has more industry, not more brains. He makes war with
more devices, but not with more intelligence, than the savage.
You don't think that in the end we shall return to the stone age?
I did not say there was no such thing as evolution. It would
seem that the human race, like the individual, proceeds from in-
fancy to maturity, and from maturity to old age. It will not go
back to the stone age, but it will lapse into decrepitude.
All species begin; all species end. Mankind will have an end.
We cannot know what thoughts stirred in the mind of the last
of the mastodons, but may assume that they were not remarkable.
It is scarcely probable that the last man will have a mind like
Goethe's. He will die, and that will be the last stage of human
progress.
It is a certain fact that men will continue to be cruel and blood-
thirsty, so long as they go on eating the flesh of animals. Killing
animals and killing men—there is but a step betwixt the two.
But plants also have life. To eat vegetables is still to carry
out the law of killing which is imposed upon us. The vegetable
world presents forms of life, you think, that are more negligible
than the animal world? You are less impressed by them because
they are not brought so vividly before you, that is all.
Until the extinction of this miserable planet, life will go on
issuing from death. Eat nothing but salads, if you like; it makes
no difference. To live, is to kill, and if you don't kill animals,
you are still condemning them to death.
Man, like all other animals, only lives by slaughter. The first
of the arts is to kill, the second is to procreate. Round about
these two arts we have cultivated innumerable others which do
but subserve and embellish the first two.
The obligation to kill, which is laid upon all animals which
subsist upon this planet, the brevity of their cruel and painful
existence, this law of carnage which dominates the world, this
necessity for destruction, teaches us our nature and our end. We
are destined to manure the earth, so that better and fairer forms
of life may quicken on it.


226
LAST PAGES
But it was not only the extinction of the human species that Anatole
France foresaw. He envisaged also the end of the planet, and thus the
necessary curtailment of our hopes. The ultimate species which he thought
might follow man could not improve indefinitely.
The sun will go out, the earth will go rolling on in space until
the cataclysm which shall destroy it.
One of the characters then enquired whether it were desirable to reveal
to mankind the infirmity of its condition:
To begin with, they would not believe me. They believe only
that which flatters their hopes.
But some rare spirits, capable of realizing the truth, and of
looking their destiny in the face will learn from my philosophy
how to make the best of their unhappy condition and will find
solace in so doing.
view, revealed from the social sterest. It is an hot mean what he shining
Believing that human nature is not perfectible, Anatole France felt that the
conditions of social life could, and must, be ameliorated, and insisted upon
the distinction between intellectual and social progress—the former, impos-
sible; the latter, assured. The opponents of Socialism sometimes accept,
and sometimes refuse to accept, Anatole France as an adversary, explaining
his political attitude by saying either that he did not mean what he said, or
that he was actuated by self-interest. It is an undoubted fact that the
Dreyfus case, from the social still more than from the religious point of
view, revealed him to himself, deciding his course of thought and action.
Nevertheless, it did but precipitate and give a definite imprint to opinions
which he already held. Glance once more at Jérôme Coignard, which was
written before the Dreyfus case. He had always cherished within him the
hope of better things and he had never ceased to long for their advent.
As he conceived them they would accord with his need for harmony and
moderation.
Harmony and moderation—this twofold ideal which he fostered in his
heart was outraged at every turn by our existing social system with its
feudal basis. It was the monstrous inequality in the conditions of life that
had disappeared in the state of the future, such as he imagined it. In the
picture of the future with which he concludes The White Stone, he puts
the following words into the mouth of his apologists of the twenty-third
century:
We have but a single word to express our social system. We
say that we live in harmony. ... We have made life endurable to
all. . . . We see to it that each furnishes what he is capable of
giving and receives what he himself has need of.... We have


ANATOLE FRANCE
227
set up work in honour. We have assured to everyone the means of
livelihood. ... Our organization is not immutable. But the
progress of human civilization will henceforward be harmonious in
all its stages.
Anatole France loved the working-classes, and was beloved by them.
"He is one of us,” the working-men used to say. Every face would light
up with affectionate pride when he came to visit a workshop or a factory.
It may have been in 1917 that he was anxious to have some rebuilding
done at the Villa Saïd, which he had quitted a few months before the war,
without thought of returning to it. It was a difficult thing to get work done
at that time, for all building was at a standstill. The various workmen,
however, threw themselves into the work with a will, and when the house
was finished, Anatole France could read in several of the rooms, scored
with pencil on the plaster while it was still wet, the famous saying “The
union of the workers will safeguard the peace of the world.”
How, it may be asked, did Anatole France regard the prospect of a
revolution? It has been stated that in The Gods are Athirst he condemned
the French Revolution. Against that view he protested.
It was my design to show that men are not sufficiently perfect
to mete out justice in the name of virtue and that in all their ac-
tions, gentleness and kindness of heart should be their guide.
When the Russian Revolution of 1905 was crushed by the forces of
Tsardom, Anatole France gave public expression to his indignation, his
compassion, and his hopes.
Whatever may be the issue of an enterprise so vast and awe-
inspiring, the Russian proletariats have even now wrought a de-
cisive influence on the destinies of their country and of the world
at large. . . . When one accepts a doctrine, one must accept it in
its remotest consequences. When one belongs to a party, one must
be in the forefront where the fighting is thickest, at the point which
is nearest to the future and at which the main body invariably
arrives in the end. ....
Not every revolution is attended by bloodshed. We are still
brought up on the Classics, however, and we are given to dressing
up sedition after the pompous models bequeathed us by the Roman
historians.
It will be seen that he was still expressing the hope of a peaceful revolu-
tion in an address which he intended to make to the electorate in 1919.


228
LAST PAGES
Citizens:
By your votes it behooves you to condemn the bourgeois govern-
ments which have proved themselves alike incapable of preparing
for war, of preventing it, or of waging it. Deaf to the warning
voice of the great Jaurès and the Socialists, those governments
imperilled the safety of the nation by the enactment of the Three
Years' Military Service Law, a measure which reveals their com-
plete inability to understand the conditions in which the shock of
opposing nationalities would come about. When the hour struck
they showed that they possessed neither the clearness of mind, nor
the steadfastness of heart, nor even the honesty of purpose neces-
sary to avert a conflict. The sole contribution made by them
to the conduct of the war-what time the nation in arms was
saving France from destruction—was to conciliate the capitalists
at the risk of sinking the country beneath the burden of an ap-
palling debt. And to-day they insolently boast of having prolonged
this war of extermination beyond the limit necessary to secure the
safety of the nation and, as a piece of crowning infamy, actually
pride themselves upon having ended it by a peace as vague, con-
tentious, and insidious as it is inimical to the true interests of
France; a peace that is incomplete, and pregnant with fresh wars,
with suffering and ruin.
Citizens, it behooves you to condemn the bourgeois governments
who refused to disarm conquered Germany for fear of depriving
France and the Allies of a reason for maintaining armies and
arsenals and munition factories and all the criminal sources of
capitalistic wealth. It behooves you to condemn the bourgeois
governments, since, not content with suppressing in France all
freedom, all political life, nay, all independence of thought, all
semblance of thought even, they are at this moment doing their
utmost, at the cost of lives and treasure, to drown the Russian
Revolution in blood. They were not ashamed to ask Germany
to assist them in enforcing the blockade of a great people and to
bring about by starvation, the death, not only of the champions of
Russian freedom, but of old men, women, and children; a policy
so cruel that they were called upon by Germany herself to mitigate
their inhuman measures.
By your votes you must condemn them.
Citizens, who speaks to you? What voice is that which swells
ars


ANATOLE FRANCE
229
my own and lends to it a power so great, perhaps, as to find an
echo in every generous heart? It is the voice of Socialism.
The Socialists present themselves to the people, alone, without
alliances, without leagues, because they alone are innocent of the
errors and crimes that marked earlier Societies, because they can
suggest means of repairing ancient wrongs and have a concept
of a new social order.
This new Society will rest upon a better organizing of labour,
on a practical applying of syndical law; upon a resuming by the
nations of great metallurgical undertakings and upon their again
utilizing the chief means of transportation. That is the corner-
stone of the building.
Citizens, let us not close our eyes to realities. Class war will
not cease until the classes themselves have disappeared. This
war, though we did not want it, has brought the hour of that dis-
appearance appreciably nearer, and has created an economic situa-
tion that must prove fatal to that capitalist system which it, at first,
so monstrously inflated. All things are hurrying us onward in the
direction of Socialism, and the tide is bearing along with it, with
equal rapidity, those who struggle against the movement, those
who resign themselves to it, and those who fain would aid it.
Nothing will avert the revolution that must inevitably come,
and which is even now being effected beneath our eyes. How-
ever, Citizens, it depends upon you, whether this shall be a peace-
ful revolution or a bloody one. It will be gentle and kindly to
those who aid it and direct its course. Blind are they who cannot
see that a new order is evolving. May it, thanks to your wisdom,
unfold itself in tranquil majesty.
May the powers that be, strive to understand. Let them silence
the voices of arrogance and greed. May they allow Justice and
Peace to come to us.
What is Socialism? It is the conscience of the world!
VCI
He even foresaw the motto of the revolution that was to come.
All revolutions have their watchword. In the Revolution of
1789 it was the famous utterance of Siéyès on the Third Estate.
The Revolution of 1830 was effected under the refrain, “Long live
the Charter!” The Revolution of 1848 demanded a widening of
the electorate. The next revolution will have its motto also. It


230
LAST PAGES
will be accomplished in the name of co-operation. The workers
will demand a voice in the management of the great industrial
enterprises. Co-operation and participation will take the place of
salaries and wages.
THE DIALOGUE CONCERNING WAR
The notes for the Discussion of War date from the war itself:
I take sides with the Socialists. By the Socialists, of whatever
nationality, war was, of necessity, tolerated. But they were not so
inhuman, not so ferocious as the rest. In every country, they
were, as a whole, less bellicose. When they were bellicose it
was mainly through fear or motives of self-interest. A man
made cruel by fear I prefer to the other sort, for when he no
longer has anything to be afraid of, he becomes gentle again. And
especially do I take sides with the Confédération Générale du Trav-
ail, which to my mind seems to have attained a more than ordinary
degree of civilization. We look to the Confédération Générale du
Travail to give us the United States of the World, to put an end
to the era of international warfare. ...
And to substitute civil war for foreign war. That is what
progress will amount to, that the whole world shall in the end
form a single state. ...
Prodigious progress too. Civil war is not so detestable as war
with a foreign foe. We at least know what we are fighting for.
Ľ Internationale Ouvrière is distinguished by intelligence, fair-
ness of view, prudence, and sound sense. At the same time, it is
an organization which from its very constitution and composition
must, in its outlook upon industrial things, study the operative and
the operative's point of view, rather than the object and policy
of an undertaking itself.
When, in addition to labour questions, it takes into its purview
all those questions which now exclusively occupy the Boards of
Directors, L' Internationale Ouvrière will necessarily be split into
sections. Will not these sections come to look upon the finding of
markets, upon colonial problems, in fact upon all questions which
engender war, very much as a German, a French, or a British


ANATOLE FRANCE
231
manufacturer would look upon them? In solving questions, more-
over, as difficulties were solved by preceding directors, they will be
just as war-like.
What means will these sections possess for settling quarrels
by arbitration?
When armies are suppressed, won't they be re-established under
the disguise of police forces ?
Anatole France protested against the prolonging of the war.
m
We are easier in our minds at Tours. We are not afraid now
that the war will be concluded all of a sudden. Nevertheless the
weakness of the Central Empires is disturbing. Turkey has ceased
to fight. Her troops are yielding. Her Pashas are selling them-
selves for money. Austria is surrendering unconditionally, and
begging her adversaries to appropriate her. She still pours forth
prayers; but even now has ceased to exist. She is in pieces, and no
one knows which particular piece of her breathes forth these
prayers to her conquerors. Germany is not quite so weak, and
her resistance is encouraging; but she may crash down at any
moment, and she makes no secret of the fact. And then peace
might come about.
To avert that peril I put forward a proposal which is perhaps
a bold one, but which will command the approval of all patriots.
I wish to submit it to our Government. I demand that, with all
due circumspection, the Allies should provide the Germans, the
Austrians, and the Turks with the means necessary to enable
them to continue the war-munitions, money, even men. The
Allies have plenty of Blacks at their disposal, and could easily
divert some of them in favour of their unfortunate adversaries.
In this manner the menace of peace might still be postponed for
a considerable period.
It would, of course, be necessary to stipulate that the subsidies
so granted should be used by the Central Powers for continuing the
war, not for securing victory. It would be merely a question of
estimating the amount of the help to be given. As to their ready
accepting of it, there is no room for doubt. They, too, have their
war industries.
Enemy countries should not have any revolutions. The English,


232
LAST PAGES
IT
who have their wits about them, will see that the Kaiser is kept
on his throne.
In Europe and throughout the world the war has been con-
spicuous for bringing with it countless benefits; but of these,
economic prosperity is the most notable. It has multiplied wealth
and created an admirable financial situation—the workers being
paid in paper; the soldiers, in glory. By a liberal use of bank-
notes the various governments have ensured the welfare of the
greatest number and satisfied all appetites.
The war has made government easy by suppressing all forms of
freedom. It has buried in silence the mistakes of rulers and
military leaders, smothering all complaints. Some deeds which
we ourselves take pride in, become infamous when wrought by
the enemy. Thus actions are called by different names according
as they are in one instance, ours; in another, our foes'.
To love war because it makes heroes, is like loving croup be-
cause doctors and nurses have died in an attempt to save a child's
life.
Several versions of the following letter have been published. It was
written by Anatole France in 1917, and is here given as it appears in a
copy which he sent to one of his friends with these words : ,
Here is a letter which I have had copied for you, as I thought
it would amuse you. Show it to those who think as we do, if
there be any such ... A. F.
Cher ami:
I augur from your letter, that you are in good health, for it is
a sturdy epistle and reveals a firm soul. It appears that we can
make what terms of peace we like, and that it is merely a question
of time; otherwise the Allies would not have dictated the condi-
tions in advance, and you would not have confirmed them in your
letter. Well then, seeing that it is open to us to make peace with
or without victory, as may please us, I, following your example,
indignantly repel the idea of peace without victory.
Can there be any satisfaction in a peace without victory?
A peace without victory is bread without leaven, jugged hare
without wine, mullet without capers, cèpes without garlic, love
without quarrels, a camel without a hump, night without a moon,


ANATOLE FRANCE
233
a chimney without smoke, a town without a brothel, pork without
salt, a pearl without a hole, a rose without scent, a republic with-
out dilapidations, a leg of mutton without a knuckle, a cat without
fur, chitterlings without mustard, in a word, 'tis an insipid thing.
Is it possible that when there are so many sorts of peace to choose
from, those Socialists, with such an abundant assortment before
them, should go put their hands upon peace without victory, a
ramshackle peace, to employ your own original and powerful
expression? Nay, what do I say, not even a limping, halting,
hobbling peace, but a legless peace which will go and squat one
buttock on each party, a disgusting, foetid, ignominious, obscene,
excrementitious, fistulous, hemorrhoidal peace, or in one single
word, a peace without victory.
But what can we expect from rascals who would put a tax on
incomes and make the rich pay their share. And that is why, in
the article which you annex to your letter by way of voucher, Le
Temps has so relentlessly pilloried these enemies of the human
race. One is conscious of a stern delight in reading it. The
indignation of righteous men is beautiful and terrible to behold.
Oh, dear R–, how praiseworthy is this good taste of yours
which makes you choose a well-made, perfectly formed, plump,
fully developed peace, a peace that brings us honour and profit,
in short, a victorious peace! True this nice peace may keep us
waiting for it some time yet. But we are in no hurry. The war
is only costing France ten thousand men a day.
To be concluded


PRAYER BESIDE A LAMP
BY YVOR WINTERS
“Vasti quoque rector Olympi ...
Non agat hos currus.”
I pace beside my books and hear the
wind stop short against the house like
a pneumatic gasp of death.
The mind that lives on
print becomes too savage: print that
stings and shivers in the cold when
shingles rise and fall: 0 God,
my house is built of bone that bends.
ars
Beyond the roof
the sky turns with an endless roaring and bears all
the stars. What could you do?
Could you climb up against the whirling
poles alone? Grind through the ghastly
twist of the sphere? Could you maintain
a foothold on the rising earth for
night on night and walk the
creaking floor?
The steady courage
of the humming oil drives back the
darkness as I drive back sweating death:
from out a body stricken by this thought, I
watch the night grow turgid on the stair-
I, crumbling, in the crumbling brain of man.



Collection John Quinn
.
.
-
-
-
..
της
Ε
Α
τ
Ε
-
.
.
-
.
.
.
.
.
..
.
- το
Π
Ε
.
Α.
LA BOHEMIENNE ENDORMIE. BY HENRI ROUSSEAU
α
.
.
το





BOOK REVIEWS
JOHN MASEFIELD
COLLECTED WORKS OF JOHN MASEFIELD. Poems.
Two volumes. Prose Plays. Verse Plays. Iomo. The
Macmillan Company. $12.'
UNTITH the publication of his collected works, a writer would
V V say, in the words of Samuel Daniel: “This is my scene,
this part must I fulfill.” At this point book-reviewing ceases and
criticism begins. It is not now a question of setting a current value
on a current book but of sorting out from a profusion of works the
small remnant likely to be of significance to the future—a task, by
the way, which has always resulted in ludicrous error. One may
well hesitate in approaching thus the collected works of John
Masefield, for he is at once among the best and the worst of modern
poets. Praise has often settled on his least meritorious poems, with
the result that many intelligent readers turned away from him
before he had shown what he could do. And indeed it is difficult
to realize that the great artist who wrote King Cole, The Hounds of
Hell, Animula, and Wild Duck should have evolved from the
author of the Salt Water Ballads and The Everlasting Mercy.
As a rule, the romantic poet is like the peach-tree-his fruition
and decay are the earliest, he seldom survives the fourth decade.
The reverse of this order in Masefield's case and the extreme un-
evenness of his work indicate the importance of influences in his
poetic development. These are not hard to trace. The poet be-
gan work under the worst possible of all poetic auspices, Kipling;
he matured under the best, Chaucer. Hence the early works and
three of the long narratives are falsely virile, class-conscious, bitter
-"strong" in the rank sense employed by reviewers. These poems
1 A most slip-shod edition. A favourite arrangement with the sonnets, for
example, is to print seven lines on one page and seven on the next.
Mathematical, perhaps, but not effective. Parts of lines are run over
to the left margin and given initial capitals. Prayer is printed twice.
These are a few of many justifiable complaints.
st slip-shod fidhit seven lines effective
Parts Prayer is pt


236
JOHN MASEFIELD
were startlingly popular. In Salt Water Ballads we find a few
sensitive lyrics, Trade Winds, The Golden City of St Mary, Per-
sonal, On Eastnor Knoll—but the thumping jargon of A Con-
secration, A Night at Dago Tom's, and Cape Horn Gospel drew
the crowd. This influence from Kipling continued in the nar-
ratives after it had disappeared from the shorter poems; a rank
weed, difficult to uproot, it still ran wild in the larger fields when
the more intensively cultivated plots had been freed from it. The
three longest failures, The Everlasting Mercy, The Widow in the
Bye Street, and The Daffodil Fields make deep obeisance to the
laureate of the people. The old widow who, we are told, had
no joyous hours, never one (an observation more in fashion than
its antithesis, but no less tedious) strikes the key-note of the
monotonous “realism” which, by contrast, makes the verse form
merely absurd. In these poems and in The Tragedy of Nan,
which might better be styled her melodrama, we find a second
influence hardly less unfortunate than the first: Thomas Hardy,
classic in the novel, has no ear for the music of verse, its pos-
sibilities or limitations; and the same themes which raise his novels
high among the most poetic in the world, become, in his bungled
verse, unconvincing. Therefore, I can only count his influence as
another obstacle in Masefield's career. But Chaucer is already
at work, and if, in Reynard the Fox, his manner is perhaps too
clearly imitated not to induce unfavourable comparison, never-
theless it is to his lovely and wise humanism that we owe the salva-
tion of Masefield as a great poet from the late Victorian bathos in
which he was floundering. A. E. Housman's touch is apparent here
and there in the middle poems of Masefield. I ask a com-
parison of On Malvern Hill with Housman's On Wenlock Edge
the Wood's in Trouble. Robert Bridges has been given more than
a passing thought, and Conrad. And amid all the murk of The
Everlasting Mercy how clear this fine echo from Blake's Auguries
of Innocence:
“And he who gives a child a treat
Makes joy-bells ring in Heaven's street,
And he who gives a child a home
Builds palaces in Kingdom come,
And she who gives a baby birth
Brings Saviour Christ again to earth ..."


ROBERT HILLYER
237
na
W
King Cole, by all odds the best of the long poems, shows the result
of that alchemy by which these many elements are fused and come
forth unmistakably excellent, unmistakably the poet's own. Nor
should we forget two magnificent ballads, The Hounds of Hell
and Cap on Head, where the Kipling forces are thoroughly routed
on their own field.
Meanwhile there is Dauber. In the earlier narrative poems there
was an increasing emergence of good passages which the critics,
clamouring praise of qualities which almost proved the poet's un-
doing, never noticed. In Dauber the best predominates. The
effective background for its own sake, the heavy local colour, the
melodramatic assault on the nerves of the reader, all these faults
of the young poet who sat at the feet of Kipling diminish to give
place to a deeper understanding of human motives. Dauber be-
gins with the same painful uncertainty which preceded the collapse
of the other three poems. Then it lifts. The movement is surer.
It lifts to the yard-arm of the labouring ship in mid-ocean; it is
one with the lonely figure crouched on the spar. Then suddenly
it hurls him down with as sure a stroke as I know of in narrative
poetry. He thinks he is not falling, that it is his companion on
the yard-arm above him! The realization of this reversed sense
is Masefield's first climax.
But the achievement is King Cole, which starts at an elevation
and reaches an altitude undreamed of in the earlier narratives.
Its elements are simple enough: the old myth of the wandering
dead, the hurly-burly of a market town during a Royal Progress,
and a modern circus. Without stinting any of the lively scenes,
the poet yet contrives to invest each character and event with a
symbolism that is nobler, because more comprehensive, than
allegory. Furthermore, this is a long poem, not a rhymed nar-
rative touched up here and there with rhetoric. Realism and poetic
intensity interpenetrate; the beauties blend in a work which, I
venture to prophesy, will endure. Original in the best sense,
King Cole has about it the revelation of mystery in familiar things
that sets the Pardoner's apart from the other Canterbury Tales.
The tide of excellence which, in the narratives, reached its full
only in King Cole, had long since flooded the more accessible inlets:
the shorter poems. Lollingdon Downs is the least successful of
these, for here, as occasionally elsewhere, Masefield swoons before
abstract Beauty. I note that the continued effort to portray ugli-


238
JOHN MASEFIELD
ness realistically often unfits a writer for dealing as well with
the forms of beauty. It is not surprising that Masefield sometimes
suffers thus from the sordid excesses of his earlier work. But
more and more he has looked about him with new eyes which
recognize the living forms of Beauty that he was once content to
invoke by name. Incessu patuit dea. The list of the shorter poems
which show this growth toward perfection would be creditably
large. Certainly it would include many of the sonnets, Ships,
Biography, Cargoes, Wild Duck, The Wanderer, The River, Cap
on Head, The Hounds of Hell, and Animula. It is noticeable,
too, how much more powerful become the poems of the sea, as
his self-consciousness as a “sea poet" wanes. Cargoes is familiar
in the pages of The Oxford Book, The Wanderer is too long for
quotation, so it is not to the sea poems but to a sonnet that I
shall turn for an example of his perdurable works:
n
r an exa
"THE LEMMINGS
Once in a hundred years the Lemmings come
Westward, in search of food, over the snow,
Westward, until the salt sea drowns them dumb,
Westward, till all are drowned, those Lemmings go.
Once, it is thought, there was a westward land,
(Now drowned) where there was food for those starved things,
And memory of that place has burnt its brand
In the little brains of all the Lemming Kings.
Perhaps, long since, there was a land beyond
Westward from death, some city, some calm place,
Where one could taste God's quiet and be fond
With the little beauty of a human face;
But now the land is drowned, yet still we press
Westward, in search, to death, to nothingness."
The Masefield of the Salt Water Ballads would have been in-
capable of realizing the mood which this sonnet expresses so
strangely. He would, furthermore, have lacked the mere skill


ROBERT HILLYER
239
for transferring the sense from the third to the first person, drag-
ging the whole philosophical content with it. It is a small device,
we say, when our attention is called to it; nevertheless, between
the power to hit on that device and the early submission to in-
fluence, there lies the biography of an artist.
For Masefield's technique developed slowly. Delicate, but too
adaptable, his musical sense could not receive without damage
the influence of Kipling's metres—which afford the best justifica-
tion for free verse that I know of. Their harsh and obvious
rhythms continue to echo in Masefield's verse even after the jingle
melody has been done away with. Housman's weaker side, as in
London Town, and his better side, as in On Malvern Hill, did
no great harm, and perhaps served as a transition to the subtleties
of Chaucer, whose music saved Masefield's verse as his humanism
saved its content. Thus we find 'rhyme royal,” an excellent
narrative stave, as the stanza of The Widow in the Bye Street,
Dauber, The Daffodil Fields (with a final Alexandrine), The
Dream of Daniel, and in parts of King Cole. A new stanza form
for each new narrative would have been a wiser policy, for one
stanza, too long used, induces glibness and deprives the poet of a
fresh metrical experience. Perhaps an instinct for such variation
gave the poet the happy idea of using heroic couplets for the
dialogue in King Cole. This form the poet handles generally
with great skill, in the romantic manner. The Shakespearian son-
net, also, he has bent to his sometimes exacting purposes, and this
pattern employed stanzaically in Animula and The Haunted con-
tributes in no small measure to their beauty. Yet in three notable
instances—and two of them not in his early work—Masefield runs
by some of the brightest danger signals in prosody. The octo-
syllabic couplet, an essentially lyric measure, has been proved by
the failures of some of the best poets in the language to be in-
capable of sustaining a long work. In long passages it becomes
excessively tedious, and any effort at varying it merely roughens
it without relieving its monotony. The Everlasting Mercy and
Reynard the Fox add to the proof of this fact. Of course, modern
verse shows a strong tendency to shift its appeal from the ear to the
eye, but until the ear has definitely surrendered, poets are wiser
not to disregard it. The septenary is deadlier than the octosyllabic
couplet. Masefield's perception was at its dullest when he cast


240
JOHN MASEFIELD
Enslaved in that form. He himself revolted from it at last and
without any urging from the context fled first into octameter,
then to pentameter, in an effort to escape the horrid racket of the
septenaries. It was too late. His reader had long since turned
to another poem.
As I conclude this rather random appraisal of Masefield's work
-a task which, because of the profusion and unevenness of his
accomplishment, has been no light one-I am aware that I shall be
taxed with passing over his plays in silence. It is not there, I
believe, that his greatness lies. The Tragedy of Nan has its en-
thusiastic admirers, Pompey the Great is a more than usually
successful tragedy of its type, The Faithful has moments of power.
Among the plays in verse, Good Friday seems to me the only one
that has any excuse for being reprinted, and that but a faint ex-
cuse. Melloney Holtspur moves us as do some of Barrie's plays
-against our intelligence. The plays are poor, mediocre, or some
what above the average; they are never great. Whereas many of
the poems of his maturer years are indubitably great. Masefield
has failed in some of his largest attempts. In my opinion he has
succeeded in but one of them, King Cole. Yet even the failures
have accustomed him to large conceptions and have given him
a world that expresses itself in masses of material rather than in the
isolated tendrils and filigrees which come within the minor poet's
view. Even were his longer works swept away so that none
knew they had been, we could tell from the packed significance of
the shorter poems that we were dealing with a major poet. And
as a major poet, Masefield stands among the very few in this age
who will not become-to misquote the Greek Anthology—a hand-
ful of grey lyrics, long, long ago at rest. That is his scene, that
part must he fulfill.
ROBERT HILLYER


LYRIC TABLEAU
The Region Cloud. By Percy Lubbock. 12mo. 220
pages. Charles Scribner's Sons. $2.50.
CIICA
D ERHAPS the sum of Mr Lubbock's gifts is to be found in his
1 imaginative and very fastidious appreciation of life. To him,
it would seem, life is pictorial, proceeds as great scenes for the
memory, now shining, now overcast, now grand, now minute, but
always to be so discriminated and thought over as to yield some
treasurable beauty. Some attitude like this, at least, seems to
have coloured his methods of fiction, for his present novel might be
described as bearing a relation to novels in general like that born
by closet drama to the spoken. If novels in general are epic in
tendency, then here is one that is lyric. Mr Lubbock's remark,
elsewhere, that "an incident is of no value in itself, it is exactly
as interesting as the author can make it," seems to have an im-
portance here, in placing the emphasis not on the object of feeling
but on the subject who feels. Perhaps it locates the author of
The Region Cloud among those to whom the novel is not so much
incident as mood. Certainly the bodied, rich, discriminate impres-
sions which make up the whole substance of this tale seem not far
from pure mood, not far, that is, from the lyrical.
It is to be supposed, perhaps, in a story made more or less of
the stuff of dreams, that action, incident, will be insubstantial.
It is. The eloquence of The Region Cloud—it is a rare eloquence
-is spent upon the story, or we had better say, the scene, the
tableau, of two men and the world, the world of applause, the
world of glory, which, as the novelist resolutely notes, is trash, all
trash. Of the two men, one, John Channon, the grand creative
genius, is seen in the middle distance. The other, Austin, the
obscure youth, is seen more simply and immediately, for it is in
terms of his accomplished feeling that the tale is told. It begins
in the dining-room of a French inn, begins with an exchange of
glances by Channon and Austin, the one, so to speak, with the
world's applause all about him, the other all but submerged in
obscurity. Each discerns the mettle of the other, and they come at


242
LYRIC TABLEAU
dUNC
once to an understanding founded on their joint recognition that
the plaudits of the world are trash. In this understanding Austin
is to become the proper audience of Channon and his genius, an
audience select, sustained, apart, appreciating for what he is a
Channon compelled to live and work in a world of trash. Austin
carries out his part of the understanding, carries it out well, by
virtue of his integrity and mental quality. It is not long, how-
ever, before conflict arises between his integrity and Channon's
essential insincerity, an insincerity—it is implied—which is the
penalty of glory, an insincerity because of which Channon cannot
ever permit himself to be seen for what he truly is, cannot ever
bear separation from his grandeur. Austin's thought, however,
has gone too far, and too clearly; and when Channon spurns Austin
promptly from him, they both know it is because Austin has
mentally separated Channon from Channon's genius, and has dis-
covered Channon as he is.
In the slightness of this action, one might think, the novel is
drawn rather fine, if not rather thin; yet perhaps there are things
here to be weighed, if one will weigh them. It is true that the
tale seems not only deficient in action, as we are used to the word,
but undramatic in its persons. But if this be so, perhaps the suf-
ficient reason lies in its very lyricism, its devotion to things which
may be more ultimate than incident, which may create character;
for example, the timeless events of the spirit, or the significant
attitudes that truth takes. The persons of The Region Cloud may
appear to be less persons than bright profound studies in per-
sonality; yet in spite of their lack of created independence it will
not do to think they have no life. They live quite significantly in
the final beauty of the finished scenes, the succession of lyric
spectacles, to which they contribute abundantly and glowingly. In
fact, while this novel does not possess or seek the detailed life-
likeness that one is accustomed to expect in fiction, it certainly has
a spell of its own, which must turn out to be more than the spell of
style, though style shares greatly in the achievement.
CHARLES K. TRUEBLOOD


DUTCH DAMOZELS
The Dutch LIBRARY. Vol. I: Mary of Nimmegen.
Translated from the Middle Dutch by Harry Morgan
Ayres. With an introduction by Adriaan J. Barnouw.
78 pages. Vol. II: Lancelot of Denmark. Translated
by Dr Geyl. 49 pages. Vol. III: Esmoreit. Trans-
lated by Harry Morgan Ayres. With an introduction
by Adriaan J. Barnouw. 58 pages. Martinus Nijhoff,
The Hague. $ I each volume.
m o make a thoroughly sound translation into English of a
I mediaeval play, it matters not of what language, is no easy
task. Many of us to-day grow beyond belief weary at the first
glimpse of the well-worn stock-in-trade archaic words that in Eng-
lish are supposed to be, and perhaps are, necessary for recreating the
appropriate verbal atmosphere of the Middle Ages. Merely to
catch a glimpse of a word like damozel is enough to set us nod-
ding, so easy is it to remind us of the long hours of ennui that we
associate with the name of William Morris and the attempt that he
and his group made to reanimate "in soft raimant” a past that in its
time, God wot, had little enough delicacy or unction about it.
Those who suffer under the illusion that the difficulties of such
translating can be overcome by the free use of antiquated diction
are as simple as the clergy who disfigure our towns with mere-
tricious Gothic erections because, forsooth, they find it impossible to
disconnect their conception of an appropriate place of worship from
buildings put up in a sham fifteenth-century style and known
as “church architecture.”
Two out of the three little Dutch Plays that we are considering
belong to a fourteenth-century miscellany called the Halthem
manuscript and may be considered as examples of the romantic
secular drama of that age; the third, Mary of Nimmegen, a more
sturdy piece of work, was written at the end of the fifteenth cen-
tury. It is this last play that holds our interest and deserves our
attention. The author, an unknown Dutchman, writes in a broad
racy style that has nothing of, what we might term, the romantic
taint of the other two, and for this very reason offers little or no


244
DUTCH DAMOZELS
OUS
temptation to Professor Ayres to display his knowledge of old
English.
It is difficult to translate in flowery language when the manner
and matter of the original is so essentially natural and realistic,
and we therefore have in Professor Ayres' rendering of this par-
ticular drama a thoroughly satisfactory piece of work.
To read Mary of Nimmegen is to be reminded of the famous
corn-field picture by the elder Breughel which hangs in The Metro-
politan Museum of New York City. The same uncouth speech,
the same gross acceptance of actuality is in evidence in this play
as was, without doubt, favoured by those drunken farm-hands who
loll and “lie reclined on the hills like Gods together” with their
heavy codpiece bags shamelessly exposed, near the thick wall of
uncut wheat, which, in its golden solidity, leaves the mind with such
an unforgettable impression of living bread. Truly the particular
savour of the old-world life of the Netherlands comes to us direct
in Professor Ayres' translation as from the open door of some Jan
Steen interior. The uncle sends his niece into the town to buy oil,
salt, vinegar, and onions; condiments and victuals that it is diffi-
cult to imagine being even so much as mentioned in the two "ro-
mantic plays,” any more than we would look to find such straight
speaking as is indulged in by the aunt:
"Fy, niece, in the country Dickon or Will
Know well how to go with the lasses amids the rye.”
Such utterances do not lend themselves to high-flown speech.
Even in that most lovely and moving scene where Mary becomes
"crop full of contrition” at seeing the mystery-play enacted on the
"pageant-wain," a "hairy star” is mentioned as a suitable sign for
the Almighty to place in the sky to impress with a sense of his
omnipotence the sluggish imaginations of these honest Flemings.
The theological argument, even, is charged with good flat-footed
humour, as when the Creator, at a loss how to reason with the Holy
Mother in reference to the difficulty he finds in dealing with man-
kind, says bluntly:
"But the worse they are plagued the worse they be."


LLEWELYN POWYS
245
The Play of Lancelot of Denmark, written probably a hundred
years earlier, has nothing whatever broad-mouthed about it and
has been admirably translated by Dr Geyl with the minimum of
affectation. His simple method gives a simple delicacy to each
passage. The lovely Sandareen, when her lover importunes her to
go with him into a nearby wood, is made to answer in this exceed-
ingly charming and provocative manner:
11
anner
“I know on earth no man born
Whom I could so trust that I would
Go dally with him in the wood:
He would ever do his will with me.”
Also when Reynald, Lancelot's chamberlain, speaks, long after
his betrayal of her, of his master's true love, she answers, and it
is an achievement on Dr Geyl's part to have preserved the simple
words in their simple guise:
“I would not give for Lancelot's heart
A blade of grass the meadows grow.”
The danger of Dr Geyl's method, however, may show itself to
some critics in such lines as the following where the Knight is
made to deplore his ill fortune in the hunting field in a rhymed
doggerel almost worthy of the Ingoldsby Legends:
.
"And yet I shot not even a duck
I am ashamed of such bad luck.”
In the last play, Esmoreit, translated by Professor Ayres, we
have before us a striking example of the opposite method, of what
in our impertinence, we may perhaps be permitted to call the Pre-
Raphaelite method. The Play itself is a weak play, and the feeble
plot does little to relieve the infinite lassitude that comes over us
at the constant appearance of words like “Cedarn tree,” “eke,"
"muchel," "meseemeth," and "methinketh."
I will give two quotations which should make it clear to the
reader what the present reviewer is girding at:


246
DUTCH DAMOZELS
“This I have perceived plain
Sir Esmoreit be come again
A fair, well-waxen youngling ...'
“Come ye hither and look upon her
Who, fulfilled of love and honour
Hath to meward brought her heart ...".
Incidentally the preposition “to” is surely superfluous even in
this mock mediaeval verse. The Play ends with the fair "well-
waxen youngling" hanging his cousin, the wicked Robert, and tak-
ing for his Queen the fair Damiette, who, as the "well-waxen
youngling" put it, had come “meward” all the way from Damask.
It is extraordinary how necessary it seems to us in these "lone-
some latter years” to get down, so to speak, to brass tacks, and how
difficult it is for us to stomach anything but the most plain speech.
With this reservation, however, we can feel, and do feel, nothing
but gratitude to those who are responsible for bringing before the
notice of the English reading public “A marvelous History of Mary
of Nimmegen who for more than seven years lived and had ado
with the Devil.”
LLEWELYN Powys


THE NEGRO’S SONGS
ON THE TRAIL OF NEGRO FOLK-Songs. By Dorothy
Scarborough. 8vo. 289 pages. The Harvard Univer-
sity Press. $3.50.
Mellows. By R. Emmet Kennedy. Large 8vo. 183
pages. Albert and Charles Boni. $5.
THE BOOK OF AMERICAN NEGRO SPIRITUALS. Edited
by James Weldon Johnson. Musical Arrangements
by J. Rosamond Johnson and Lawrence Brown. 4to.
187 pages. The Viking Press. $3.50.
A TRITING about Dvorak's New World Symphony, Mr Philip
V V Hale, the witty annotator of the Boston Symphony pro-
grammes, once asserted that the Negro “is not inherently musical,"
held that he founded his folk-songs on "sentimental ballads sung
by the white women of the plantation or on camp-meeting tunes,"
“brought no primitive melodies with him from Africa,” perverted
the tunes he imitated, and that even if he had brought tunes from
Africa, they could hardly, even after long usage, be called Ameri-
can folk-song. (I get all this from Mr Lawrence Gilman's recent
notes on the programme of the Philadelphia Orchestra; "with a
slight lapse from urbanity,” says Mr Gilman, Mr Hale referred
to the belief that “the future of American music rests on the use
of Congo, North American Indian, Creole, Greaser and Cowboy
ditties, whinings, yawps, and whoopings.")
All of this constitutes a rather controversial beginning for what
ought to be only an essay in appreciation. But the dispute will
not down. Mr Johnson, upholding the inspirational theory of the
spirituals, suggests that the conversion to Christianity expressed
itself in melody, and that those who deny the Negro's claim to
his songs are like the Baconians; he does not, however, claim that
the Negro brought African melodies to any great extent. It is
universally agreed, I take it, that the purely African contribu-
tion is in rhythm, and on this, as on most points of technical in-


248
THE NEGRO'S SONGS
terest, the enthusiast need only go back to H. E. Krehbiel's es-
sential book, Afro-American Folk-Songs. Many collectors of negro
songs have discovered English ballad originals, for some spirituals,
but not for all, or nearly all. Dr Scarborough notes a Scot parallel
and this is especially interesting because, according to Krehbiel,
the characteristic syncopation which we call negro occurs in certain
Scottish reels.
The second point of controversy is not in the Shakespearean
parallel, but in the Homeric. Were the Negro's songs composed,
words and music, or words or music, by individuals, or are they
group creations? A good individualist, Mr Mencken discards the
group theory, admitting, no doubt, that the variations proceed
from the work of choirs and congregations on the original material.
Observers, again, record the seemingly spontaneous matching of
line with line, the elaboration of songs from moment to moment.
Finally, and getting closer to the music itself, can the Negro's
song become the American folk-song?
The American popular song, at this moment a significant part
of American music, is composed almost entirely by the descendants
of African Negroes and the descendants of Russian Jews. The
Negro, accepting Christianity, discovered for himself the parallel
between his own and the bondage of the Hebrews and among his
most poignant songs are those drawn out of Exodus. If the Rus-
sian-Jewish-American composers were at all affected by the poetic
themes of the Negro, the circle would be complete; but the typical
American composer of this type attaches himself almost exclusively
to the negro rhythm and, a little obviously, to his melody. The
longing which in the spirituals is a yearning for Heaven and salva-
tion is changed in American popular terms to a nostalgia for back-
drop “Sunny South” and Mammy. The genuine and exceptional
feeling of Irving Berlin, his sense of loneliness and separation, is
intensely personal and seldom is associated with the theatrical
scenery of the usual song writer; when he writes the usual song it
is, to be sure, in the usual way, but in a score of songs from When
I Lost You, to Remember, he finds the music which is definitely the
Negro's most appropriate to his personal themes.
That the peasantry, and not the higher orders, create the na-
tional music (at least until it becomes an art) is assumed. But in
Europe we think of a peasantry having history, prejudices, ways of
living more or less in common with their social or financial or political


GILBERT SELDES
249
superiors. But even if you combine the Negro and the Jew, where
are you to find the unbreakable bond between them and the Anglo-
Saxon American, or even the American of mixed descent who has
been here for generations? Can the Negro and the Jew stand in
the relation of a folk to a nation? And if not, can the music they
create be the national music?
There is this possibility: that as the American winds around
himself layer after layer of civilization, he diminishes a little the
vigour of his specific characteristics; and the immigrant, or the
Negro, fresher in the country or in the country's freedom, acquires
and retains the older qualities of mind and spirit. The hardy
American as pioneer may give way to the Scandinavian and Slav
who alone will be willing to struggle with loneliness and poverty in
making arable land out of forest. The Italian may stick to his
flask of Chianti after the American has given up the struggle for
hard liquor. The Negro, certainly, holds to a pace and a rhythm
different from these of our large cities; he still loafs, is carefree,
avoids business a little, remains a trace more primitive in the ex-
pression of emotions not altogether foreign to the white man.
Possibly, then, the outcast and the foreigner can apprehend certain
spiritual truths about America.
That hypothesis would explain a little; would explain, for
example, why bleary travelling salesmen find our sentimental
ballads so exactly right for their emotions. But it would hardly
explain the snap and surprise of current jazz. It is a rough general-
ization that the rhythm of jazz corresponds to the rhythm of our
machinery. Krehbiel's celebrated notation of the rhythmic com-
plexity in the drums of Dahomey and our recently acquired re-
spect for other African art forms would lead us to caution; we can-
not say that a simple civilization (the African) by accident hit
upon the rhythm of a complex one (our own). If we can hazard that
the African civilization preserved for us in their art was of a high
order, and that ours is of an equal intensity, expressed in the com-
plication of machinery, we can suspect a parallel which would make
the suitability of African rhythms not at all surprising. We
could then account for the dominance of the Russian-Jewish com-
poser, in the use of this material, as the advantage of one who
remains above the battle and holds fast, as those in the mêlée can-
not, to his artistic impulses.
What we have in the negro songs, as collected above, as sung in


250
THE NEGRO'S SONGS
concert or on records, is a body of beautiful music. It has been
neglected, distorted, made pretty, made tawdry, and now is being
presented in various approaches to its native beauty. There is
difficulty even in getting the original words; naturally the copying
down of music which varies a little from singer to singer, and the
efforts to harmonize suitably lead to differences of judgement. The
Johnson collection may seem, in rare instances, to show traces of too
much work, too much musicianship; but most of the songs as they
are presented would not tempt the singer to be arty with the song.
Mr Kennedy's arrangements are extremely simple and include
several songs of which I have never heard, one especially attractive
being If You Can't Come, Send One Angel Down; another note-
worthy portion of his book is that devoted to the street cries of
New Orleans, the vendors of buttermilk and potato-cake and black-
berries, the chimney-sweep, and the charcoal man. I wonder that
this work has not been done for our less picturesque cities; I have
heard the cry of “strawberries” in Philadelphia in such strange
musical intervals that after fifteen years I remember them; there
are street cries in New York, quite apart from "watch your step”
in the subway, and these too, I fancy, are available for the use of
musicians.
Dr Scarborough's book has quantities of work songs (text and
music in many cases) and is full of information. Texts alone were
published last year by the press of the University of North Carolina
and are noted in a recent issue of THE DIAL”; the work songs tell us
a great deal about the Negro, about his social aspirations, his every-
day feelings, and about the rhythm in which he does his labours.
They bristle with attractions to the psychologist and to the musi-
cian, and it is an easy guess that they will take the place, eventually,
of Swanee River and Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, as the raw ma-
terial for American composers. In any case more and more of them
are going to be available as the publishers of Mr Johnson's book
have announced further compilations of negro songs, one volume
of which will be devoted to these secular expressions.
I have omitted reference to the words of the negro songs, feeling
that they are well enough known already. One thing, however,
may be noted. Nearly everyone concerned with these songs feels
the danger to which they are exposed by evil rendition. In general
1 Cf. Briefer Mention, page 161. THE DIAL, February 1926.
d


GILBERT SELDES
251
two types meet with approval: the highly polished, genuinely
artistic singing of Roland Hayes and the utterly simple singing of
Paul Robeson. The middle ground is the danger zone, where the
singer can prettify or patronize his songs. And the same thing is
true even in reading the words; if we think of them always as
quaint, if we separate the spirituals from their original intention,
we lose entirely the sense of a great poetic impulse. We lose, too,
the tremendous dramatic appeal of the songs:
“O, gambler, git up off o' yo' knees (three times)
End o' dat mornin', Good Lord (twice)
End o' dat mornin' when de Lord said to hurry.”
The excitement in these songs, so often caused by the absence of
the logical steps, by the looseness of construction which lets events
run headlong into each other and changes the emotion even in the
midst of a phrase, we can only get by a simple acceptance of the
things as they stand.
And, possibly, when the present wave of enthusiasm subsides a
little, we shall discover that these songs, like everything else brought
to our shores, are part of the body of our arts, not the only possible
source of our music, but one of inestimable value.
GILBERT SELDES
Source
ir m


BRIEFER MENTION
GUY DE MAUPASSANT, ORIGINAL SHORT STORIES, translated from the French
by Albert M. C. McMaster, B. A., A. E. Henderson, B. A., Mme Quesada,
and others (16mo, 1505 pages ; Walter J. Black: $5.45). To hold in our
hands, in so convenient a form, all Guy de Maupassant's short stories is
a most fortunate privilege. What a master of his craft the great French-
man was! “They hardly seem like literature at all, these blocks from
the quarry of life, fung into one's face with an unerring aim.” If anybody
wishes to learn how to write short stories let him buy this admirable
volume. He will derive from his expenditure far more profit than can
be derived from any number of “Pitkin handbooks” or any number of
"Courses in composition.”
PASSION AND PAIN, by Stefan Zweig, translated from the German by Eden
and Cedar Paul (12mo, 266 pages; Bernard G. Richards: $2.50). The
author, by adapting certain psycho-analytic theories, has been able to
combine soul-delineation with the movement of plots. Upon some ac-
cidental, probably slight exterior event, there follows psychic trauma, or
transference, or, in one case, "transfiguration”; and the individual exposed
remains for years, perhaps for life, either a new character or some
previous lost self. The stories do not equally persuade that even poignant
incident has more weight than habit. However, in The Governess, the
immaturity of the victims makes credible their capitulation to a single
bitter fact; while in The Runaway, another story which sticks in the
mind, the situation per se is sufficiently overwhelming. The translation
is admirable; but no mere English can save these pages from appearing, to
use words of the author, anything but "lyrically diffuse.”
Closed All Night, by Paul Morand (12mo, 203 pages; Seltzer : $2). Im-
pressions seem to come straight from the retina of Mr Morand's wide-
awake eye onto the page before him without ever having been subjected
to the troubling discipline of the intellect. He mounts from one sensation
to the other much as the acrobat at a vaudeville performance steps up from
table to table and from chair to chair while he builds a pyramid from
which, to the consternation and nervous strain of the audience, he in the
end dexterously and monstrously falls. Though this Frenchman has
cleverness without imagination, vigour without intensity, brilliancy without
substance, he can still command our admiration by the very impudence
of his unashamed versatility.
FUNEREALITIES, by Peggy Bacon (4to, 59 pages; Aldergate Press: $10).
Miss Bacon is a wit. Her style is quaint and altogether pleasing, both as
versifier and artist. The ironic little poems are greatly fortified by the
mocking drawings which appear to have been lightly tossed off but will
not be lightly tossed away by those who relish fantasy mixed with fun.
To such the book will be a guarded treasure.


BRIEFER MENTION
253
Greek Coins, Poems and Memorabilia, by George Cram Cook (1omo, 142
pages; Doran: $1.75) is a collection of poems which are “the fragmentary
memorials of an extraordinary and memorable man,” extraordinary and
memorable as is apparent even without the engaging and corroborating
testimony of Floyd Dell, Edna Kenton, and Susan Glaspell, which has been
prefixed to the volume. The founder of The Provincetown Players is in
these improvisations and unassuming monologues unique, groping with
singular stubbornness for a vision which was so clear as to make him despise
the comfort of half measures. George Cram Cook's poems, like his voyage
to Greece, are symbols wherein we may read one man's quest for the
perfection of beauty.
of Floyd Pparent even and memorable hich are the facomo, 142
EPISODES AND Epistles, by W. L. (8vo, 80 pages ; Seltzer: $1.75). Despite
seeming unceremony and certain distractingly far from established tech-
nical novelties which sometimes resound rightly from another lyre, one
finds among these graphic poems-urban, suburban, sentimental, and de-
scriptive—a sure, delightful rhythm, a thought, a feeling, a phase of
experience, to which one cannot be indifferent.
LETTERS TO A LADY IN THE COUNTRY, TOGETHER WITH HER REPLIES, edited
by Stuart P. Sherman (12mo, 232 pages; Scribner: $2). This is an
interchange of adept, though somewhat academic pleasantry between Ken-
tucky Paul in Manhattan, and Manhattan Caroline in Kentucky. With
the flow of days and weeks the pleasantness heightens in amiability, for,
as we are made early to infer, they are but young, charming, and con-
temporary in spirit. And while one need not read closely to observe in
the expressions of Paul and Caroline an identical dexterity, a same wily
marksmanship, as of the prepared littérateur, this does not empty the two
points of view of their plausibility, nor subtract much from the spright-
liness of the by-play.
IN THE AMERICAN GRAIN, by William Carlos Williams (10mo, 235 pages;
A. & C. Boni: $3). Appraising in the name of beauty, Montezuma,
Christopher Columbus, Ponce de Leon, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham
Lincoln, Edgar Allen Poe, Aaron Burr, and others, Dr Williams finds in
these separate studies, interrelated proof of American aesthetic deprived-
ness, or is it depravity? "Morals arc deformed in the name of PURITY;"
he says, "till, in the confusion, almost nothing remains of the great
American New World but a memory of the Indian.” Unsubmissive to
his pessimism and sometimes shocked by the short work which he makes
of decorum, verbal and other, we wisely salute the here assembled phos-
phorescent findings of a search prosecuted "with antennae extended.”
În The Discovery of the West Indies and in The Destruction of
Tenochtitlan, in the giltheads, parrots, lizards, and wandlike naked people
of the one, as in the eloquent minutiae of the other, we recognize a
superbly poetic orificeria of meaning and of material in the idols, the
jasper, the birds of prey, the “lions and other animals of the cat kind,"
the wrought stone and wrought leather, the silver, the gold, and the
courtyard "paved with handsome flags in the style of a chessboard."


254
BRIEFER MENTION
SILHOUETTES, by Sir Edmund Gosse (12mo, 413 pages; Scribner: $2.75)
consists of numerous short essays on books, reprinted from The Lon-
don Sunday Times. Ranging a large field, from Dr Bernard Mandeville
to Louise Imogen Guiney, and from St John of the Cross to George Moore,
they bear graceful witness to the scholarship and taste for which their
author is well known. In them, in fact, we may see exercised a cultivated
pertinence, and a correctitude very elaborate and deliberate, but so thor-
oughly mastered that it appears quite easy and impromptu.
ISRAEL, by Ludwig Lewisohn (8vo, 280 pages; Boni & Liveright: $3) is at
once an analysis of the present status of the Jew throughout the world,
a vigorous criticism of the theory of assimilation, an engaging study of
the rebirth of Jewish life in Palestine, and an attempt to formulate a
programme for a scattered people. Mr Lewisohn has nowhere written more
lucidly, or with finer critical acumen. Writing of prophets, at least
the shadow of the mantle of the prophet has fallen upon him. His
book is the strongest evidence of his contention that only in the spirit
of Israel can the Jew create.
Russia, by Valentine O'Hara and N. Makeef (8vo, 346 pages ; Scribner: $3)
offers a brief summary of the history of this country_its sources and
origins, the latest manoeuvrings of the Soviet government, and the after-
math of the New Economic Policy. Notwithstanding their marked inability
to grasp the higher significance of the Bolshevik revolution as symbol of
historic mutation rather than as a record of the intrigues of individuals,
the authors have rendered a competent handbook on the old Russia and the
new United Soviet Socialist Republics.
Hort, this book is as likemillan: $3). Althonslated by Elizabeth
THE WORLD Court, by Antonio S. de Bustamante, translated by Elizabeth
F. Read (12mo, 378 pages; Macmillan: $3). Although abundantly re-
warding effort, this book is as likely to be read through by the layman, as
Blackstone is. All questions that could be asked concerning the great
tribunal established in accordance with the directions of Article 14 of the
Versailles treaty, are here answered by an expert. Antonio de Bustamante,
a judge of the World Court, and member of The American Institute of
International Law, has written a memorable and authoritative book-
enhanced by grace of diction. There is little doubt that its purpose is
to bring America to see the advantages of acknowledging and of using
the Court, a privilege which could be enjoyed without our becoming neces.
sarily a member of the League of Nations.
Basic PRINCIPLES OF SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM, by A. S. Sachs (16mo, 201
pages; The Rand School : $1.50) is a restatement of Marxian economics
whose chief distinction rests in its loyalty to the master. Mr Sachs writes
earnestly, but lacks the precision and the muscle which would make his
volume something more than a serviceable text-book. “Tens and hun-
dreds of thousands of workers are concentrated in gigantic factories, mills,
and mines for the production and manufacture of ... necessary com-
modities,” says Mr Sachs; and there are many similar delays.


THE THEATRE
THE sophisticated New Yorker in its three-line theatre guide to
The DYBBUK uses both “wondrous” and “beauteous," so you
will judge that something out of the ordinary is taking place at the
Neighborhood Playhouse. Life's guide says “impressive,” and I do
not recall in my time such a unanimity of excitement in praise of a
play in many a year (in dispraise I recall the same unanimity and
the same excitement quite well).
I have noted, before, the occasional mania, or group excitement,
which comes over New York's critics; in the present instance I
sincerely wish I could partake of it. Nothing pleases me less than
to find myself insensible to a beauty, a charm, a power so acclaimed
by critics, among them those whose judgement I admire. Dis-
counting hysteria, I went to the theatre with more serious hopes
of finding something strange and good than I had had since I
went to see The Gold Rush. And to me the production of The
DYBBUK is not only a disappointment, it is in many ways an
actively bad piece of work.
I have wondered often why the producers of Shaw do not take
the trouble to read what Shaw has to say about his work; but
what can you do when producers will apparently not read what
they themselves place on their programmes? “The DYBBUK,” says
Ansky, the author, "is a realistic play about mystical people.”
Is that direct, simple, decisive enough? Is it specific enough to
stop any one from making it into a mystical play about unreal
people? The people in The Dybbuk are of the heterodox sect
of Chassidim among the Russian Jews; the intensity, the exalta-
tion of their religious fervour marked them, set them apart from
the other Jews to whom Judaism remained a moral code and a
normal background to everyday life. The story is of a young
student, searching for ways not sanctioned by the Talmud of
comprehending the world, dying, and taking possession of the
soul of the girl who should have been his, but was denied him by
her father. The spirit which possesses the girl prevents her mar-
riage to another; when it is exorcized, she dies.
Obviously if this play were to be anything more than quaint


256
THE THEATRE
only one thing could not be spared: the sense of the reality of belief
in the people themselves. They might be queer in their customs,
odd in their dress, strange in speech; but an inner simplicity
had to go with the sanctity and the fervour of their faith. For
the play is not altogether a study in morbid psychology; it is as
much a study of Jewish common life, thrown into high relief by
the demon. And so long as the sense of reality was missing, so
long as its place was taken only by a sense of art, the effectiveness
of the play was marred. A witch on Walpurgis-night is a natural
phenomenon; it is only in Salem that a witch is impressive.
It will be said that Mr Vardi, who helped in the direction of
the play, was associated with the Habima in Moscow and may be
credited with knowing the tradition of The DYBBUK and the mind
of the play's author. This would mean, in effect, that the pro-
duction had to be stylized in order to be effective at all; possibly
-stylized, but not mannered. It was the calculated mannerism of
the production which ruined it for me, not its general style. In a
style it is reasonable that every character shall have a rhythmic
gait, rather than a simple walk; shall create specific lines, in a
specific sequence, instead of merely gesticulating; shall chant or
intone, instead of talking. But all of these things have to be
related to a definite conception of the play and, which may be more
important, have to be perfectly done. If they come off tardily or
partially, they lose all; they descend to mannerism. In this case
not the mannerism, the trick of style, of any particular player; the
mannerism of the producer.
It seemed to me that hardly anything except the handling of
the crowd in the second act came off at all. All the bearded Jews
posing in awkward positions were so consciously Chagall; all the
movements were so specifically Moscow Art Theatre Night's
LODGING; all the changes in voice were so operatic; all the gestures
so intentionally made pictures. At bottom no one believed in the
legend; the mistake was made which Jules Lemaître once complained
about to Pierre Loti: these people were being treated as if they
were exotics. But to themselves they were distinctly not exotics,
to themselves they were not even mystical. They were natural,
they were commonplace. A dybbuk, a soul possessed, was some-
thing strange and horrible and utmost anathema and the sacred
name had to be invoked to get rid of it; whereas in the play we


GILBERT SELDES
257
saw, it seemed as if everybody was from the first moment getting
ready for the dybbuk, as if the dybbuk were the natural thing and
not the people whom he spared. It may have been unity of tone;
but it sacrificed the whole illusion of the theatre.
I think that the thoroughness of the production, of mannerism,
fooled the critics and obviously fools the audience. Especially
those unfamiliar with Jewish life feel that every accent is correct,
and some of them have suggested that they are afraid they are
not getting all of the legendry and of the racial background of
the play. I fear they are getting far too much; although I have
no special knowledge of the Chassidim, everything I have seen
in the common Jewish theatre and read of Jewish life in Russia
leads me to this belief. There is, to be sure, no reason why an
outsider should not get the fairer impression; in fact, when deal-
ing with material foreign to us it is the duty of the producer to
create a world sustained by its own logic, regardless of our special
knowledge or ignorance. What I complain of is that the world so
created in The DYBBUK was, in essence, the world of the artistic
theatre, approaching the arty.
'I revert to the printed programme and find one further item
which seems to bear out my contention. The one not-realistic
character, according to the author, is the messenger-obviously a
character interpolated to point the underlying mysticism in the
acts following the death of the student. And this character was
acted, by Ian Maclaren, with almost complete realism. The play
was, then, inverted. Had it been able to stand on its head-or,
simply, had the production burned with an inner fire, even if fed
on other materials than the author intended-it would have cleared
its way. But it only fickered. Mr Albert Carroll and Miss
Mary Ellis at times nearly blew the flame out entirely.
NG
About another current enthusiasm I feel a deal better. Young
WOODLEY is a play far above the average in interest. The
audiences have been reproached for not recognizing that this study
in adolescence is not precisely by Booth Tarkington; but I can
hardly blame them entirely. Even in Tarkington, Glenn Hunter
was not so funny as moving; but the audiences were told to laugh,
and at certain poignant moments in the present play, Mr Hunter
fails to prevent them from laughing. It is a law of the theatre


258
THE THEATRE
that a man with a tea-cup and a plate is to be laughed at; so they
laughed. And there are strange lapses into trivial lines and situa-
tions in a play which generally holds to its own speech and rhythm.
Except for moments Mr Hunter's work is really extraordinary.
ac-
There will be current, at about the time this journal appears,
an International Theatre Exposition in New York. Although I
have been associated with the enterprise in a minor capacity, I feel
it no lapse of decorum to suggest that the exposition will be worth
seeing. It proposes to bring together examples of the best work
done in the theatre during the past twenty years, without regard
to schools and movements, but naturally emphasizing to an extent
the novelty of constructivism which lends itself particularly to an
exhibition of models. Readers who have seen LYSISTRATA and the
superb CARMENCITA of the Moscow Art Theatre Musical Studio
will be aware of the new scope the director of a play achieves
when his settings are built logically and solidly on the stage, “in ac-
cordance with the logic of the materials," as Mr Huntly Carter
says. These are only the beginnings of constructivism as the ex-
perimentalists practise it in Russia and Germany.'
The settings and designs should have some ästhetic interest in
themselves, but for those who care for the theatre there will be
another interest-in speculating as to the outcome of these feats
of engineering on the theatre as a whole, on the actor, and the
playwright. Tairoff, in the Kamerny Theatre, considers a play as
raw material and prefers to take plays of the classic or neo-
classic type, feeling freer to handle them than he might be with a
contemporary work. To him it is not a play to produce, nor is the
actor a person to act; they and everything else are combined to
create a new unity.
Obviously the most appreciable result, after one weighs the
whole theatre so conceived, is the elimination of the star-actor, and
I suspect that if we could be assured of this consequence, most of
us would accept the new scheme without a murmur. It tends, at
times, to the dwarfing of the play, and the fury of the French
reactionaries when a modernistic PHEDRE was produced by the
Russians in Paris is something to be remembered. The system
makes such requirements on the director as few of our own directors
can meet; it makes requirements on the audiences also,
EDRE was


GILBERT SELDES
259
The purely mechanical theatre-which disallows the actor en-
tirely—is a novelty, even in theory; but interesting. I fancy that
thoughtful Americans will discover in the more moderate con-
structivism a tendency to use the triumphs of mechanism as the
materials for art. And they may ask themselves whether this isn't
another, and possibly a better, way of mastering the machine.
Better than merely perfecting the instrument, which may lead
us, as we approach perfection, to a more abject dependence upon
the machine, a slavery to it. If we can do what the Europeans
can do, use our machine as material for art, perhaps we shall
arrive at something approaching mastery.
Unexpectedly I am compelled, with this chronicle, to give up my
observation of the local theatre for a few months. With the per-
mission of the editors I shall however continue to speculate a little
on its problems.
GILBERT SELDES


MODERN ART
Was
THE Quinn Collection, at this writing, is still the topic du jour.
1 In a case of general interest, such as this, the newspapers
may be relied upon to publish the cold facts to the world and so
it scarcely can be regarded now as news to state that the cold
facts are that finally it was decided to place the selling in the
hands of Joseph Brummer, one of our most able dealers, and to
exhibit certain chosen pieces in the galleries of the Art Center by
way of a memorial to the late owner.
These, I consider, are exceedingly cold facts, for