NO. XIV. MARCH, 1913 WITH LITERARY SUPPLEMENT. RHYTHM

ART MONTH­ MUSIC LY LITERAT- -URE 4- NET

MARTIN SECKER NUMBER FIVE JOHN STREET ADELPHI LONDON W.C. CONTENTS VOL. II. NO. XIV. Page Prologue to the Argive Women. By Maurice Hewlett 437 The Little Town. By J. D. Beresford. 440 The Mocking Fairy. By Walter de la Mare. 446 Chloe. By Albert Rothenstein. 447 From a Japanese Ink-slab. Part II. By Yone Noguchi 449 Sea Song. By Katherine Mansfield 453 The Clown. By Bernard Kellermann. Translated by Ethel Morris 455 Drawing. By R. Ihlee. 461 Drawing. By J. D. Fergusson 470 There was a Child Once. By Boris Petrovsky 471 Stupid Old Death. By Arthur Crossthwaite 472 Chronicles of the Month : Max and Moritz and Some Others. By Gilbert Cannan 473 A Design. By Derwent Lees 475 The Galleries. By Michael T. H. Sadler 477 Designs from the Russian Ballet. By Anne Estelle Rice 479 Reviews 484 Literary Supplement xvii-xxx

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13 BRUTON STREET BLIGH & CO., 79 Great Queen BOND STREET W. Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields, W.C. PROLOGUE TO THE ARGIVE WOMEN (Odysseus before the House of Paris.) OD. About this wicked house ten years The strife 'twixt Troy and Greece has surged Since rifling Paris, thief and traitor, Drew all men to the hue and cry Menelaus made after him ; And me, Laertes' son, my lands And wife and child forsook, he drew Into the weary insatiable years Of slaughter, man to man, and Doom Long-gathered, palsying heart and heart, And Valour pent in little room— Ten years abrim, but in this tenth, Now at the last, within this hour, To drown the city and the sin In one great well of blood, hence flooding Where Paris keeps her his delight, Soon to prove bane of Troy—and his. His, for her heart is changed ; she now Longs for her husband, for her child, For Lacedaemon, where she was born And wooed, and learned her shameful lore, The which now loathing, him her teacher, Him her sleek thief she scorns, being all Virgin for him who loved her first, Nor ever swerved through years denied ; And he, at last in sight Of his reward, kneels for the crown, He for the crown, a crowned king, Of his high heart and purpose. Yet Not he alone, nor Greece alone Made war in this high quarrel. Nay, The gods themselves flung into it Their pomp and panoply of storm, Terrors of sky and sea, great winds, Thunder and blown fire, and flood tides And irresistible surge of the main, Some to uphold the Dardan house, 438 RHYTHM And some the wile of Kypris even Whose sweet poison made Helen sinner ; And some, as raving Ares, thus Fulfill'd their natures, to whom men Are as a tilth to weed, with spear In visible hand, and battle shout In terrible mouth ; and met in shock Other celestial forms, and them Highest of all and most to us— Nearer to us for our more need— Who cried upon the sin : faith broke, Troth-plight made mockery, oath in vain, Shameful things shameless done—and them I serve, and with them plot the end Of Troy and of the war. So here Enwombed in wood, we wait the yeaning Of that great Horse, the which by wit Athene-given Epeios made And I conceived, hid up in arms, The greatest of us and the best Hidden here within the walls, Within the heart of obdurate Troy, Ready to issue forth, Seize gates and open, that the tide Even now girding at the walls Surge in and cleanse the iniquity Which to high Heaven has bared so long A braggart blasphemous head. But first There is a deed for her to do, Who by one wrong inuring wrong Must now requite it, she alone Before she can anoint the knees Of her offended with her tears, Before he dare to lift her up To his fair bed and board ; for Zeus Who set our world, set it in law Which not himself can break. Ye men Who live by labour, what ye sow PROLOGUE TO THE ARGIVE WOMEN 439 That ye shall eat, and what ye eat That ye shall win again by sowing. Therefore let Helen sow in tears And reap her joy, and eat with rue That which she shameful sowed. Thus she I serve, the gray-eyed Goddess, bids, And thus her messenger I await Helen within the wicked house In this last throw of Troy with Doom. (He hides himself. The curtains part and disclose the women's house in the House of Paris. The play begins.) MAURICE HEWLETT. THE LITTLE TOWN

i " It is quite a small place." That was all the information I could obtain. I had been referred to the omniscient Joe Shepperton, and this was all he could tell me. "St. Erth," he had said. " In Cornwall ? " And when I had ex­ plained that this was another St. Erth ; he had said, " Oh ! quite a small place." Probably he had never before heard of it. . . . As I looked out into the darkness and tried to dodge the reflection of my own face in the window, it seemed that we were passing through country of a kind which was quite unfamiliar to me. I had a vision of mountains and the broad roll of great forests ; an effect that may have been produced by clouds. The yellow lighted reflection of the now familiar interior jutted out before me, its floor diaphanous and tra­ versed by two streaks of shining metal. And my own white face peered in at me with strained, searching eyes, frowning at me when our glances met, trying to peer past me into the light and warmth of the railway carriage. Once we crossed an interminable bridge that roared a sonorous resentment against our passage. I could not explain that bridge. We were not near the sea and no English river could surely have been so wide. Yet the bridge was not a viaduct, for I caught the gleam of water below, some reflection of paler shadows from the lift of the sky. This adventure into unknown country was immensely exciting. It was discovery. I gave up my strained enquiry into the world beyond, and let my imagination wander out into mystery. I was in the midst of high romance when the magnificent energy of our triumphant speed was checked by the sickening grind of the brake . . . The little station was a terminus ; one forsaken, gloomy platform that stretched a grey finger into the night out of which we had come. I tried to see what was on the further side, across the metals, but beyond was a black void. I received the impression that I was on an immense height, that the dimly seen low stone wall was the parapet of some awful abyss. I could form no idea of the town during my minute's walk from the THE LITTLE TOWN 441 station to the rooms I had engaged. The whole place seemed to be very ill-lighted. All I could see was that it hung on the side of a hill. I went out when I had had something to eat. It was only a few minutes past eight, and I was eager for adventure. I told my landlady that I was going down into the town to explore. "It's very dark," she said, with a note of warning in her voice. The street in which I was staying dipped gently towards the town ; but as I went on the dip became more pronounced. I congratulated myself on the fact that there would be no difficulty in finding my way back. The lie of the land would direct me, I had merely to ascend again. My street was longer than I had expected. At first there were houses on one side only, but further down the roadway narrowed and there were houses on each side. I classified my lodgings as being in a sort of suburb grown up round the railway station which was detached for obvious reasons—no railway but a funicular could have been carried down that hill. I came to the bottom of the street at last and found another narrow street running across right and left. Opposite to me an alley con­ tinued the descent in nearly a straight line. Far below a dim lamp was burning. I decided to keep straight on and plunged down the alley. It was interminably long. At the lamp it twisted suddenly but still descended the hill. " The place is bigger than I thought," was my reflection. I saw, however, that as the road continually fell before me, I must be keeping a right line. The town was not deserted. There were movement and the sound of voices all about me ; figures loomed up out of the darkness to meet me and clattered past over the rough cobbles. I heard laughter, too, and whisperings in the dim black recesses of courts and doorways, and once or twice I caught the tinkle of some thin high music far away in the distance. Everywhere I was conscious of the stir and struggle of life, of unseen creatures as careless of my presence as I of theirs. And still I had not come as yet to the town itself. I had pictured to myself some wider streets, or open market, a place of lighted shops and visible life. I began to wonder if I had not passed by this imagined centre. I became a trifle impatient. I hurried on ; down, always down, through the wriggling maze of tiny narrow alleys and passage- 442 RHYTHM ways, lighted only by an occasional flickering lamp, bracketed out from some corner house. "A small place, indeed," I said to myself. "It is an enormous place." I received the impression that I might walk on for ever through that tedious ravel of streets. Yet I knew that I could not be walking in a circle, for I was always descending. I gave no thought now to the long toil of my return up the mountain —already I thought of it as a mountain—I felt that I must and would reach the bottom. It was not what I had expected to find, yet the reality, when I came upon it, was so inevitable that I believed it to be the thing I had always anticipated. I turned at last out of a passage so narrow that my body brushed the wall on either side, into a small square of low houses and the floor of the square was flat. On all sides it was entered by passages such as that from which I had just emerged, and all of them led upwards. About and above me I could vaguely distinguish an infinite slope of houses, ranging up tier above tier, lost at last in the black immensity. I appeared to be at the bottom of some Titanic basin among the moun­ tains ; at the centre of some inconceivably vast collection of mean houses that swarmed over the whole face of visible earth. " There is surely no other place like it in the world," I said to myself in wonder. II There was light in the square ; two lamps that flanked an open door. Above the door was a faded sign. I guessed the place to be a hall of entertainment, probably a ' picture palace." I walked over to it and read the sign ; it bore the one word " Kosmos." " Some charlatan," I decided. No one was taking money at the door, and after a moment's hesita­ tion I went in. It was a queer little hall. The bareness of the walls was partly hidden by pathetic attempts at decoration ; some red material was rudely draped over the raw brickwork ; and a few unframed, dingy canvases—the subjects indistinguishable—were hung on this back­ ground. At the end was a rough proscenium opening, and behind it a stage that appeared to me quite brilliantly lighted, after my long sojourn in the darkness. THE LITTLE TOWN 443 In the body of the hall some twenty persons were seated on rough benches staring at the still unoccupied stage. I found a seat near the door and waited. It came to me that the stage was disproportionately large for the size of the hall. And then out of the wings came wobbling a tiny figure, and I realised that this great stage was set for a puppet-show. The whole thing was so impossibly grotesque, that I nearly laughed aloud . . . Presently I turned my attention for a moment to the vague forms sitting round me, some of them silhouetted against the light of the stage. But none of them returned my stare. " Rustics ! " I thought, with a touch of contempt. " Men and women of such small intelligence and narrow experience that even such an amateur show as this amuses them." I turned back to the performance, though the foolishness of the dolls' actions was beneath criticism. Nevertheless, after a time, a certain fascinated interest began to grow upon me, and I watched the performance, chafing at its slowness —with increasing attention. I tried to disentangle some meaning, some story, some purpose from the apparently aimless movements of these tiny dolls staggering about their gigantic setting. Every now and again I thought that I understood, that there was an indication of some sequence of action, some development of a theme. But always the leading figures wavered or fell at the actual moment, and chaos followed ; a hopeless, maddening jumble. One piece of management, however, deserved and received my approbation. I had never in any marionette show I have ever wit­ nessed, seen the suspending wires so cleverly concealed. Stare and criticise as I would I could see no sign of any mechanism whereby the dolls were supported and animated. This did, indeed, give me a curious sense of reality, it made me feel that these poor ridiculous little figures had a sentient life of their own. Then some senseless action or helpless collapse reminded me of the invisible wires, and my pity for the feeble dolls was turned to contempt for the ineptitude of the operator. Dwelling on that ineptitude, I began to lose my temper and I became conscious that other members of the audience were being similarly affected. I heard impatient sighs and half suppressed groans of despair when some doll attempted to strut across the stage and col­ lapsed half way. I looked round me again and saw that men were twitching their 444 RHYTHM arms, hands and fingers ; leaning this way and that as if to influence the movement of the dolls—just as a man will strain and grimace in order to influence the run of a ball over which he has no sort of control. I discovered that I had been unconsciously making the same foolish movements, and, also, that our attempted directions were not con­ certed. There was no unison, no characteristic sway in this direction or that. It was plain that we wished to influence the dolls in contra­ dictory ways. But one feeling, I am convinced, animated us all: we were unani­ mously and angrily critical of the unseen operator ; we were all con­ vinced that we could work the unseen wires far more efficiently than that bungling performer. Indeed, the fact, so far as I was concerned, seemed clearly demonstrable. The actions of the dolls were so infantile, so contemptibly purposeless. That obsession grew upon me. The mismanagement of the whole stupid affair began to appear of quite transcendant importance. I could not watch without striving to help, and I was forced to watch . . . III The performance closed abruptly. The curtain descended without notice, apparently in the middle of the play, unheralded by any grouping or arrangement which might suggest a finale. The audience, almost in darkness, were left to stumble out as best they could. I could not find the exit and when I did find a door it was not the right one. It opened on to a flight of steep narrow stairs. It occurred to me that this must be the way up into the flies, to the place in which the operator sat and controlled his dolls. In a sudden mood of determination I decided to seek him out—I would give him some primitive instruction. He must be some ignorant countryman. I would give him a few useful hints in the conduct of his business ; suggest a story for his dolls to act, some sequent, purposeful story moving towards a climax. . . . I stumbled upwards in the dark, one hand on the cold rough wall, the other stretched out before me to guard against any obstacle which might be in my path. It was a very long staircase, for the proscenium opening was a high one. When I was nearly at the top, the stairway twisted unexpectedly, and I found myself looking down on the still brilliantly lighted stage. THE LITTLE TOWN 445 Before me in a great chair that was almost a throne, an old man sat gazing tenderly down upon the stage below him. There was a calm gentle wisdom upon his face and he moved his hands slowly this way and that. I looked down and saw that although the curtain had fallen and the hall was empty, the performance was still going on in the same, aimless, inexplicable manner. Perhaps the old man was practising his art, or perhaps he did not know that the curtain had fallen and the audience gone away—in any case he sat there with a sweet intent smile, passing his outspread hands slowly to and fro over the heads of those foolish, inept figures beneath. And even then I could see no wires, no connection between those mesmeric hands and the tottering figures. A strange diffidence had come over me. From where I stood it appeared an immensely difficult task to control and guide the move­ ments of those below. My anxiety to instruct died out of me. I began to marvel at the dexterity with which the old man would sometimes raise a falling doll by the lift of his little finger. And from my new point of view I thought I could at last discern some purpose in the play . . . For a time I stood motionless, watching, and then I looked again at the operator seated in his great chair. He was quite unconscious of my presence. He wore always the same serene, gentle smile. He was in no way perturbed when his dolls stumbled and fell. He sat serene, intent; and his hand moved ceaselessly to and fro over the great stage. I crept away softly and found my way out. When I reached the square again the moon had risen. I looked up and saw the little railway station a few hundred yards away. It was a stiff climb, but I reached home in ten minutes. The town was, after all, quite a small place. . . . In the morning I wondered whether the old man still sat in the same place manipulating his dolls. I wondered whether he was a charlatan or only very old, and very, very foolish. J. D. BERESFORD. THE MOCKING FAIRY " Won't you look out of your window, Mrs. Gill ? " Quoth the Fairy calling—calling in the garden, " Can't you look out of your window, Mrs. Gill ? " Quoth the Fairy, laughing softly in the garden ; But the air was still, the cherry boughs were still, And the ivy-tod 'neath the empty sill, And never from her window looked out Mrs. Gill On the Fairy shrilly mocking in the garden.

" What have they done with you, you poor Mrs. Gill ? " Quoth the Fairy brightly glancing in the garden, " Where have they hidden you, you poor old Mrs. Gill ? " Quoth the Fairy dancing lightly in the garden : But night's faint veil now wrapped the hill, Stark 'neath the stars stood the dead-still Mill, And out of her stone cottage never answered Mrs. Gill The Fairy mimbling mambling in the garden. WALTER DE LA MARE. / ! * i^.

CHLOE ALBERT ROTHEN5TEIN

FROM A JAPANESE INK-SLAB PART II. I overheard the other day some young man exclaim : " Friend, you reason too much ! " That remark made me think for a while, and then I exclaimed to myself : " Why ! Have Japanese come already to reason too much ? " Only forty years ago we were said to be bar­ barous ; and now we are too uncomfortable under the burden of know­ ledge. Growing, whether wiser or foolish, is certainly degeneration ; if we could stay too barbarous as in old time ! We have lost a per­ sonality after all.

It is not a question how to take you ; the most important question is how to arrive at the goal. Our Japanese saying has it that the ship will go up the hill where there are too many sailors. We have too much talk in present Japan, have we not ? Art has fallen, and poetry has fallen ; and the other hundred worthy things have fallen ; what we added to our original property was only a high hat marked a certain Chrysty and a frock coat. Oh what a farce !

" I by the grace of God am Yone Noguchi," I exclaimed. You be sure I was reading to-day the Life of Walter Savage Landor. By that exclamation I wish I might be able to speak out when the occasion comes. How many people really know that it has already dawned when the crows cry ? It is not difficult to make a frame ; the real issue is the picture itself. The Japanese Government has been making a frame for the country for many years past; and now when the frame is fairly done, she finds that there is the night already, too dark to draw the picture. 450 RHYTHM Where is a mountain deep enough to hide me ? And where is a river big enough to swallow me ? I say it, not because I am great, but because I am I. I beg you, however, not to mistake me as a so- called individualist. 1 found only lately how sweet is to sleep. Is there any more sweet word than good-night ? I said to my friend that I must live at any cost till seventy years old, perhaps ninety years old or perhaps one hundred and twenty years old. It was only yesterday I used to say I must not live to be more than twenty-five, better still, not more than twenty years. How beautiful is Life ! How the sun shines, how flowers bloom, how the river runs, how the birds fly, and above all, how grasses keep green !

I think that the best writing of the English language seems to mean to be read, while the best style of Chinese writing to be looked at. Oh how I wish to write my poetry to be smelled !

" If I were king," I exclaimed. And a moment later I said again : " You must not ask me what then."

The ancient Japanese always held the same attitude toward the world and life, whether with the frost-cold sword at the moment of Harakiri, or with the tea-bowl in the cha-no-yu rites ; their manner was never abrupt. And how they hated dispute and talk ! When they had to dispute, they let their swords settle the point; and for talk, they used the language of silence. They were quiet and discreet toward Life's object ; they moved around it as if an artist, and again like an excellent artist, they never separated it from its surroundings. Where they were faithful to tradition they well expressed their own eccentricity ; and where they were eccentric they were most conventional. How the times made us change ! We trust too much to words ; how we assert and deny when a question comes forth ! And like an amateur, we walk up on to Life's stage most ungracefully, often forget our lines ; oh what poor acting !

You must not come to see me till I tell you you may come ; I must be sure of the hour and day when the right light or proper shadow will be provided. Do you laugh at me over my having too great anxiety in FROM A JAPANESE INK-SLAB 451 my presentation as if a piece of art rare and old ? But what else am I, do you suppose ? When the first night bell rings out, I will loosen and let fall all my reserves ; it is the time when my head will turn toward my interlocutor. I will burn the incense which should rise as the silken folds of the world-wearied courtesy ; under them the ego in myself intent but aloof, will put a proper presentation or emphasis on my life's page. Come, my friend, as such an hour, as my own respect for myself will then be the very respect for my art and song, I will show you then my best; if you do not know how to come, my friend, I will tell you that you should ride on the cool breeze, or step on the shadow of the moon. Some one exclaimed to me the other day : " You are so awfully Japanese and so awfully English ! " That was good indeed. When I am so awfully Japanese, I might be a slave to my emotion ; but without my being so awfully English, my record of artistic development would not become visible. I confess, however, that I have a moment sometimes when I feel a secret regret at my being so awfully English ; is it not the reason why I, seeing greatness right before myself, cannot get it ?

If I can be called poet, that would be through the virtue that I carry it into my daily life ; when I am most poetical, I know I believe that poetry will least betray itself. When I am most conventional, I feel I am most eccentric, therefore finer and far truer.

To express my vehemence I always use the language of silence, that is the best, strongest when crushing rivalry ; in silence, when I am best and strong, I can be renaissance itself, and will create a peculiar tone and shade, let me dare say, the beauty of nuance.

If I look modern, it is because I am human. If I am inarticulate in song, that is because my heart is too full.

While I admire your brains, let me say that you are a little crude and flat ; isn't there any way for you to forget your reaching the same old conclusions ? Although I may appear to you alien, exotic, subtle, mysterious, often baffling, I do not mean to become different from you ; and I always deny when people say that my being here is rather a sacrifice and incongruity. My thought is only to become like yourself ; 452 RHYTHM if there is anything between you and me, it might be that I hope to grow plainer. Do you call that eccentricity ?

I am in truth a spiritual exile, not because I have no friend, but because I lost somewhere a tradition and environment to which I think I should belong. And I hear the voice calling from a hidden world where more than one moon ever shines ; alas, I do not know how to come there.

I have a few chrysanthemums to look at, that's one thing," I wrote to my friend. " I have an excellent tea to drink, and a few bad poems from the West to amuse me. A people who is fully content with such an eighteenth century will certainly live forever."

The other day my friend told me about his friend who ceased to be a poet when he grew fat. Oh! where is a really great fat poet ? And again, where is a really great fat artist ? Here turning over the pages of the catalogue of the Academy Exhibition I can tell you the physiques of the artists from their pictures ; many of them are quite fat, are they not ?

If I fail to make me understood by the present Japanese, that might be from the fact that they are less Japanese, or I am, in truth, more Japanese. How remote they are, being " un-Japanese," from me as I hope to put myself side by side with the old centuries (though I am not sure what century) who better controlled principle and flame for the unity in complexity ; I always think it is perfect nonsense to say that the older time was simplicity. The older age well understood how to collect the passion and force, to use another word, to put colour into the time's mind. When I say that the present Japanese are un- Japanese, I like to dwell on their hatred of freedom while professing love for it; in their anxiety of knowledge I see their cowardice.

The occasion when people find me a little too difficult always falls on when I myself feel a little too shy. It is strange that they think me delightful when I feel absolutely hating myself. How many people understand that pencils were to write their mind. There are people who think that the temples at Nikko were built in one day. YONE NOGUCHI. SEA SONG I will think no more of the sea ! Of the big green waves And the hollowed shore, Of the brown rock caves No more, no more Of the swell and the weed And the bubbling foam

Memory dwells in my far away home, She is nothing to do with me.

She is old and bent With a pack On her back. Her tears all spent, Her voice, just a crack. With an old thorn stick She hobbles along, And a crazy song Now slow, now quick Wheeks in her throat.

And every day While there's light on the shore She searches for something Her withered claw Tumbles the seaweed ; She pokes in each shell Groping and mumbling Until the night Deepens and darkens, And covers her quite, And bids her be silent, And bids her be still. RHYTHM The ghostly feet Of the whispery waves Tiptoe beside her. They follow, follow To the rocky caves In the white beach hollow . . . She hugs her hands, She sobs, she shrills, And the echoes shriek In the rocky hills. She moans : it is lost! Let it be ! Let it be ! I am old. I'm too cold I am frightened . . . the sea Is too loud ... it is lost, It is gone. . . . Memory Wails in my far away home. KATHERINE MANSFIELD. THE CLOWN

Eva used to accompany her husband to his school. She went every day. They usually stood and talked for a few minutes in the doorway. The last late-comers shot past them, each one giving his cap a hasty tug. In some classes the noise had not yet ceased ; in one there was quietness already, and only one voice was to be heard. " Well, goodbye, Eva. At five." " Goodbye, Peter." She stayed a few minutes longer. She heard a door close, the uproar in the class subsided, there was a shuffling of feet. And now it was all as quiet as a church and she heard his voice—he had a round, pleasant voice. She moved away with a smile on her lips : they must all be sitting as still as mice looking at him. Eva went down the street to the harbour—she went every day, down the same street. These afternoons were her own and she could do as she liked with them. The harbour was the most interesting place. There were always vessels there, just unloading, or going out to sea, and then the " Dorothea " started at half-past three. The captain of the " Dorothea " was sitting on deck on a camp-stool reading his newspaper. For five whole years Eva had never seen him do otherwise. He had white hair, closely shorn, and a fiery red face covered with warts and lumps. He was comic to look at, he was like a potato. A sailor was scouring the decks and the woman was singing at the buffet. A buzzing noise began in the interior of the " Dorothea " and the air about the funnel quivered like a swarm of gnats. Then a few passengers came. Sheep were loaded, and pigs that squeaked so dreadfully that Eva could not help laughing. But as soon as the train ran into the station close by, the captain folded up his paper and went up on to the bridge. For the mail might come any minute now. The gangway was drawn up, the railing closed, the old man with the limp who worked on the quay unwound the rope, the captain 456 RHYTHM shouted " Half steam ahead " down the speaking tube, the screw of the steamer churned up the water, and the " Dorothea " went a few yards backwards along the quay. The old man with the limp hobbled along beside her with the rope, threw it round another post, and the " Dorothea " heaved to. Then she steamed away. Eva gazed after her, and she always felt as though she had said goodbye to a friend : the quay looked so desolate now—sun, sea, and silence : Eva went away. She went slowly along by the harbour and looked to see if there was anything new among the sailing ships. Great masses of jelly-fish rose and fell between them : the yellow waves beat against the half-rotten timbers and brought up bits of wood and rags and all sorts of rubbish. There lay the brand-new sailing-boat belonging to the chemist— Oh yes ! the chemist. And beside it was the little steamer that brought the pigs—the " Armourbearer." The head of the engine- man was sticking out of the hatchway, with a pipe between its teeth. Then a black hand came through and seized the cap. " Good afternoon," said Frau Eva, and nodded. She found a sort of pleasure this particular day in being really gracious. But the head in the hatchway turned round and looked after her. She went through the building-yard, where shavings and wood- chips stood several feet high so that the ground was quite elastic to the tread, and then she went out along the jetty. Here she knew every stone. There were those that looked like big porous sponges and those that had " no face." There was one that looked like a great leaden heart with a crack through the middle ; and one on which the sea had written its runes, like a finger. She felt as though the jetty belonged to her, and to no one else in the world. Often when she was walking along there, she would bend her head a little, and a gentle melancholy would gradually fill her heart and she would imagine herself to be—yes, to be a little martyr, and a thousand eyes seemed to be directed towards her. There she is—there is Eva— Oh Heaven ! and yet she was so fortunate ! Eva had her own place at the far end of the jetty. It was a com­ fortable seat made of sun-warmed stones. The stone with the runes on it was her foot-stool. On this seat she sank down and she looked out to sea. Yonder in the distance went the "Dorothea," hidden in her own smoke. The sun was shining and Eva, with eyes contracted by the glare, looked into its light, and saw the bright colours of the rainbow trembling on THE CLOWN 457 her eyelashes : and she dreamed the waves splashed " Eva, Eva." Were not the waves calling her ?

There she sat, and suddenly her thoughts turned involuntarily to the light-ship. " Oh yes, the light-ship ! " she said. It was lying at this moment somewhere out at sea and swaying to and fro. She had seen how it was built, from beginning to end. First the keel lay there, then the bow was added. Then came the ribs, one behind the other, with scarcely an inch between them, and every one of them two inches thick, for it was a light-ship and it had to be strong. Before long the whole thing looked like a human diaphragm. Splinters flew, axes gleamed, there was plenty to look at in those days. And then came the weeks when the hammers thudded, and the whole town knew —" That's the light-ship having its steel casing put on." Then it was ready, and was pushed off from the slip, decked like a peasant-bride, and away it steamed. She had felt that day just as if a friend had gone away. For had she not watched the ship grow every day for a year and a half ? But now it lay by night in the black gloomy sea and flashed and twinkled and tooted in the fog. Heavy seas washed over its deck— the wind whistled in its cables. Such a brave ship it was, and yet it had no name. Light-ship Number Three. " Light-ship far out at sea," hummed Eva. Ah, well! it was getting time to go. On the way home Eva amused herself by playing a game. She said, " If you don't walk on a join in the pavement, something will happen to-day." She kept her eyes turned upwards and nevertheless she saw the joins quite plainly and adjusted her steps to them. She laughed because she was deceiving herself. Nothing ever happened, although she did not step on the joins—for of course she cheated ! Oh, how silly ! But never mind, the time was her own and she could do as she liked with it. It was half-past four when she got home. She immediately set about putting the things on the table for coffee. Then she waited with her hands in her lap. But just as it struck five she suddenly got hot all over. " Oh ! the shortbread ! " and she rushed back to the town. Peter was there before her : he came in rather warm after teaching, with a pile of exercise books under his arm. " Are there any letters ? " " No, no letters." But he went out again and looked in the letter box. 458 RHYTHM Peter brought home from school a collection of tit-bits, and told them while they drank their coffee. Bachmann had written quite an excellent essay. " What do you think of this, Eva ? Among the sources of artificial warmth used by man he has mentioned food." " That Bachmann is very clever. He's like his father, Peter." " Yes, he's a very gifted lad." The head-master had been talking to Peter in a distinctly friendly manner that morning. Indeed, he had been altogether more civil to him since the inspector had spoken so well of his class. Hitherto he had hardly as much as said " Good morning." Now he might even raise his salary. But there was another matter that had been the great difficulty for weeks. What was to be done with Michael, the Burgomeister's son ? It lay in Peter's hands entirely whether Michael was moved up or not. His German was good enough, but how about his mathematics ? " Can't you just wink at that ? " Peter shook his head with an air of conscientious reflection and scanned the marks. " If it were my own brother and it went against my conscience—" " Oh, of course, but perhaps " " Yes, perhaps " They talked a good deal every day about Michael. At six there was a knock at the door ; a private pupil came. Eva retired to the next room and took up some sewing. She drew the cur­ tains and soon the room was filled with a warm golden glow. Next door Peter was walking up and down, and the scent of his cigar came through the keyhole. Eva bent over her sewing and smiled. She could see him through the wall! Going to the window, bending over the table with the cigar between his fingers. He was so dignified and so good-looking, with his gold-rimmed spectacles and his clear-cut features—what did it matter that his hair was getting a little thin ? She listened for his voice, which rose and fell in cadences of earnestness and dignity and kindness and patronage. A sort of sadness came over her. She was as it were touched when she reflected how good he was ; he had never said an unkind word to her in all these years—never! She had certainly every reason to be satisfied with him. Good heavens! What nonsense ! Who said she was not satisfied ? Ha, ha ! And Eva plied her needle and smiled while the stammering, spasmodic voice of the pupil in the next room alternated with the kind deliberate voice THE CLOWN 459 of Peter. And thoughts chased through her mind. How different it all was long ago, long, long ago. When he was writing his book and it was printed and the critics came and he said, " Now, Eva, you'll see ! " nothing had come of it. And all the verses he had written her ! Every day! His heart was so rich with love and his brain afire with enthusiasm. And now, ? Yes, work, this stupid routine labour had drawn him under. You give him money, you who stand without and criticise. Give him money, and then you'll see ! Ho ! you'll see ! Now he was always nervous and tired. He didn't talk to her much, no, indeed he did not! He smiled to her whenever he looked at her and he stroked her hand. And at night he was quite exhausted and fell into a deep, heavy sleep : he never sat bolt upright in bed as he used to with " Eva, you must just listen to this idea—there are possibilities in it, eh ?" Yes, she saw that there were possibilities in it—it was a brilliant idea ! That was Peter once. Ah ! he was always tired now and slept straight away. He was always exhausted. He had only waked up once, and then he had said : " My boots must be soled, Eva." Haha ! Haha ! Eva laughed out loud. Peter opened the door and looked in with a smile, and put his finger to his lips. " I strike a circle," stammered the pupil. My boots. Yes, that was what he had said. Oh, how she had laughed. But suddenly Eva felt a pain at her heart, a sharp pain as though she had been cut from top to toe with a knife as fine as a hair. The pupil went away. Peter appeared in the door-way with his hat on his head : " We must be thinking about supper, Eva." " Yes, Peter." Eva bent low over her work. On the sewing there was a little wet spot. "I'll get it immediately, dear."

The days went by. The sailing-ships were lying in the harbour, the same ships seemed always to be there. The " Dorothea " steamed out at half-past three. Eva went her rounds. But it sometimes happened when she was sitting out on the jetty, and the sea came wandering on and the clouds fled by, that all at once a disquietude would lay hold of her. Then she jumped up and rushed into the town- For she suddenly felt as if she must go to Fraulein Geier, the music teacher, and tell her of the crisis. Oh yes ! yes ! quickly I Oh God I she could not stay in this town with the three crooked streets and the churchyard with the sloe tree in it for ever, this town where she knew 460 RHYTHM everybody and nodded to everybody, and where every flagstone of the pavement called to her, telling her its name. No, to-day or perhaps to-morrow she would pack up and go away to a big town where there were theatres and more people. She arrived at Fraulein Geier's house all out of breath and dragged at the bell. Her heart was throbbing in her throat: what if she were not at home ! And now Eva suddenly became calm. How extraordinary ! She had come flying along with her hat all on one side as though she were bringing the news of the end of the world, and now she had no idea what she really wanted to say. " How nice of you to call, Frau Professor." " Yes, I have been thinking what an age it is since we met." And so they sat and talked and laughed without any particular reason, and after an hour Eva said " Goodbye," and promised to call again very soon. Very soon. Yes, she would be certain to. Yet it might be weeks before she came back. But why should she do this ? She had Peter. And she did not need anybody. O God ! O God ! It was so good to be alone and to sit and look out to sea and to dream of what might happen. There was the Swede in dock, for instance, with its three masts that reached right up into the sky. Perhaps before the Swede went away—it was going to stop ten days—perhaps before then

And something did happen before the Swede with the masts that reached right up into the sky went away. One day Milano's Circus arrived and the whole town was in a fever of excitement. Eva went early—at four in the afternoon—to take tickets for the first performance. Everybody of importance was there : the Burgomeister and his wife and Michael came in and they all bowed to her in a most friendly and respectful manner. She knew, of course, that it was only because of Peter. Fraulein Geier nearly fell into the ring in her violent hurry to reach her seat. The Chemist was leaning against a pillar in the middle of the front seats and had fixed his eyes on Eva. She grew embarrassed, for everyone noticed him. Freda Marschner came in just in time, thank goodness—in a low evening frock and a huge hat with plumes—and he had something else to stare at. The audience began to whisper. This old Don Juan ought to get married. He was as rich as a Jew ; he had the pharmacy which was a regular gold-mine, a yacht, a motor —why in the world was he waiting so long ? The Chemist picked up DRAWING R.IHLEE

THE CLOWN 463 an opera-glass and with perfect coolness pointed it towards Fraulein Marschner. It really was ! At that very moment he turned his glasses on to Eva. Quite calmly. How dare he ! Her face glowed as though afire were scorching her through the opera-glass. Then the performance began. The first night of Milano's Circus was a complete success. Round after round of applause thundered through the tent. They were first-rate artists, everybody said so. Melano, the chief, with his wild horses, the acrobats, the backwoodsmen. Eva gave her hat incessant little tugs. " The Man with the Lion's Mouth," who bent bars of iron in his teeth—two men hung on to the bars—and lifted up a horse with the rider in the saddle—how splendid ! Peter ! Mddlle. Liane de Faubourg was certainly a most wonderful horsewoman. And the Chemist had another chance to play his game. He stood against the pillar and smiled at Mdlle. Liane and examined her from top to toe with his opera-glass. And Mdlle. Liane—Good heavens ! she stopped her horse and looked right into the Chemist's eyes. What tempera­ ment that Gypsy woman had ! But the Clown, everybody saw, put all the others in the shade. " Henri le Castele, the finest clown in the world." They could well believe it. They all burst into shouts of laughter as soon as they saw him. He invented tricks without end : he was excruciatingly funny —a perfect genius. A wonderful clown—just listen how he was dressed. He had bright green hair. He had a red nose which lighted up with an electric light whenever he turned round. But the most outrageous things were his trousers. They were sacks arranged so that you could not see his feet. They were so wide that he could hide hats and bottles or anything in them, and he even pretended to conceal the acrobats' mat in them. In these sacks he did his great leap right over the backs of eight men. One, two, three ... up to eight. There was no end to his tricks. He was fine. Just look at his walk. He was not walking at all, he was waddling, and when he bowed to Mdlle. Liane the whole theatre roared with laughter. He walked along on his heels, he was curved inwards like a reed with his head almost touching his toes— they screamed : Oh ! This clown ! in short he was the best clown in the world ! When he was thirsty he brought a regular array of grog-glasses out of his hundred pockets—all full—Ho ! Proset Mr. Porter—and a glass of wine to finish up with. But his next turn was the favourite. 464 RHYTHM He had a water flagon brought in and a tea-spoon, and he asked the attendant if he could make the tea-spoon dance in the bottle when he told it to. What ? He could not ? Now I will do it—ready ! He glided round and round the water bottle which was standing on a stool in the middle of the ring, and with the most outlandish gestures he adjured the spoon to dance : " Dance, little tea-spoon," and the spoon hopped and tinkled in the flagon. " Still, little spoon," and the spoon stood still. Was it magic ? Bravo ! No—it was quite a simple trick and the clown showed them how it was done. A thread was fastened to the spoon and a messenger was pulling it in the wings. " Dance, little spoon ! " Eva laughed even after she had got home. Oh, Peter, that clown was too funny ! Next day the town talked of nothing but Milano's and the clown. He had electrified the whole place. People were all agog. They greeted one another in the street with a gaiety and absence of for­ mality that was altogether unwonted ; they gave one another in­ vitations and arranged picnics. It was so long since there had been any diversion in the town—moreover they talked about something else, namely, the Chemist! How he had begun his game again. Scanda­ lous ! There was a rumour that he went to supper with the circus people after at the " Star "—Mdlle. Liane, of course. And a fine man like him, and in his position. Ha ! Eva laughed. She was in tre­ mendous spirits the whole day.

Yet what a strange creature man is ! Next day she was corres­ pondingly depressed. She knit her brows and her heart beat slug­ gishly. Had she expended several days' gaiety yesterday and had she none left ? Or was it the weather ? Perhaps it was. The wind blew, there were heavy seas, and the spray hissed against the jetty. She did not care if she did get wet. What did it matter ? What did any­ thing matter ? It was all the same to her. She wished people would leave her alone. And the eternal Chemist. And she thought she had heard enough for the present too of what the headmaster had said about how many marks Bachmann would get, and how hopeless Michael was at mathematics. What was it all to her—really and truly ? She might have been in Egypt riding a camel at this very moment, or perhaps talking to clever people in a garden. She might ... no, it was sad in this place! As sad as the sea that goes on and on saying the same thing and tossing to and fro . . . to and fro ... to and fro. . . . THE CLOWN 465 Suddenly Eva started. Did someone speak or was it she herself? She hesitated and looked round. Standing behind her was a young man, a Southerner from his appearance, dressed in well-cut clothes that made the Chemist's and Peter's seem old-fashioned and provincial, and wearing patent leather shoes and kid gloves. The young man was, however, not looking at her. He was gazing out over the gloomy sea. And Eva suddenly realised what he had said. He had spoken French : " How sad the sea is ! " " Yes, it does look sad to-day," answered Eva, without knowing why she answered so easily. Perhaps it was because they were both so entirely alone out there. The young well-dressed man turned and looked at her. Eva looked straight back at him, spell-bound and frightened. His eyes were wild, worn out, their life consumed, they were glazed, like the eyes of a man enduring an anguish of physical pain. The eyebrows stood high above them as if they did not belong to them, and gave them a surprised expression. " You are not German, Madame." He made a grimace as though something unpleasant had occurred to him. " O yes, I am ! But my mother was a Frenchwoman." The young man nodded. " I saw that at once," he said. " And what are you doing here ?" Eva smiled awkwardly. His manner was so free and unabashed. He did not raise his hat like the men in the town—there was an air of the world in every gesture. " What are you doing in this village ? " He cast a serious glance at her and shook his head. " Are you a stranger here ? " she said. He turned and looked out over the sea, and his eyelids half-closed over his restless, tired eyes. " A stranger here. A stranger everywhere. But it does not matter." Eva prepared to go. He was so extraordinary and his voice de­ pressed her. But he seized his hat and said : " Thank you. Thank you. Why, thank you." She went. She hurried. What a strange experience ! Her head was whirling. And he was a good-looking man in spite of the weary eyes, in spite of the expression of disgust about his mouth. And as Eva went through the ship-yard, which was particularly feathery that day, it suddenly became clear to her why she hated the people in this place : they all laughed—they laughed day and night—they were always cheerful. And the same silly jokes and puns were always in their mouths. Oh, they were only half human: they had never suffered. 466 RHYTHM What would Peter say to her experience ? If only she could describe those eyes to him. They were like the eyes of a condemned man looking about him for the last time to seek some means of escape. But when Peter came—in a good temper and armed with some new tit-bits—she did not say anything. But she scrutinised Peter. He was good-looking ; it was a keen face and there was plenty of ex­ pression in the well-cut nose and mouth—but it was empty—empty, miserably empty. He had had to give up his career as an artist and take up this pettyfogging work ; and he had not suffered—or if he had, what was there to show that he had ? In what lines were his sufferings written ? No, he would never understand the young man's eyes. And Eva kept her experience to herself. She did not like Peter to-night, and she was glad he had to go to his club. Goodbye, Peter. She made up her mind that the evening should be a pleasant one. She took up a book, but she did not read. She stared beyond it. Listen ! it was the wind moaning. Listen ! it was the bell-buoy out beyond the harbour. What a lonely, melancholy sound. The harbour lights were flashing, and when Eva went to the window she could see the great high masts of the Swede towering up into the cloudy night. And a thought crossed her mind. Had she not been thinking how sad the sea looked just when he was thinking it ? She had. She blushed. Next day Eva did not dare to go out on to the jetty. But the thought of going was in her mind the whole day long. On the next day, how­ ever, she took her accustomed walk. The quay was deserted, so were the ship-yard and the jetty ; there was not a soul to be seen. Of course the man who was a stranger everywhere was far enough away. She would like to have seen him again. She might have been able to find out why he was so extraordinary. And perhaps she might not! She was so frightfully lonely here, and it surely could not harm anyone if she enjoyed some imaginary experience. Eva was just going to sit down on the rune-stone—she saw a bit of white paper between the stones and something written on it in French. What was it ? She took the paper and unfolded it mechanically. "Madame," it ran, " I have been here yesterday and to-day. Do not be afraid. I want nothing from you. It was a great pleasure to me to speak a few words of French. An unhappy man is as helpless as a child." Eva was as still as if she had been stunned. She remained so for a long time. Then she moved away, her brain devoid of thought. She tore up the paper and after a time she came back again to see if she had left any tell-tale pieces lying about. "Madame, I have been here yesterday and to-day." THE CLOWN 467 Was it possible that a man who lived so many thousands of miles apart from other men had thought of her, just her ? Perhaps Peter felt and noticed that there was something wrong with her, although she laughed and chattered. Suddenly Peter disappeared and came back after half an hour with a ticket for the circus. " You are to go and amuse yourself, Eva." Eva blushed. That was just it, he was so good. " And what about you ? " " Me ? Oh, I have promised to go and play skat." Eva went without particularly wanting to go. However, the ticket was paid for and when she saw the crowd in the doorway and the tinsel of the ring, she began actually to enjoy herself. Of course the Chemist was there again with his opera-glass in his hand. And Mdlle. Liane—hm—you could think what you liked about her. The atmosphere excited her, and when the clown came in with " Dance, little spoon," she had forgotten everything, the letter, her anxiety, everything. She laughed, like everyone else. This time the clown was smashing plates : he came in with a regular column of them and smashed them right and left. Eva clapped with all her might. Then the clown made his comic bow to Mdlle. Liane, who was calmly cantering about in the ring on the white horse : and the whole circus sighed with laughter. Oh, it was too funny. But how dare anyone make such eyes ? And Mdlle. Liane was absolutely cool over it, arranged her hair and cast a glance over her shoulder at the Chemist in the meantime. Suddenly Eva felt that she was turning faint. The clown was right in front of her and all the time he was bowing to Mdlle. Liane he was looking at her out of his peculiar eyes. He made a grimace and showed his teeth—as though he were going to bite, and this finally drove the audience mad. Bravo ! Bravo ! How they clapped ! But Eva got up slowly, and quite slowly, as though in her sleep, she moved away. Then the clown laughed. Laughed ? He screamed ! Like a mad despairing animal. Haha ! Hoohoo ! and a round of wild applause followed his screams. Eva went out. " The clown, the clown," she said, and closed her eyes. " The clown," she said as she hurried home through the dark streets and stood in her unlighted house. " The clown," she sobbed, as she tore off her clothes and crept into bed as if to hide herself. 468 RHYTHM Eva stayed in the house for a few days. It was raining and she sat doing needlework. Her mind was calm and collected. Well ? What had happened ? Nothing. O God! such things . . . What time is it ? Let us look. Four o'clock. Another hour and Peter will be here. There was a noise at the door. Was it a knock? Eva opened. A little boy was standing outside, a boy she had never seen before. " The Frau Professor ? " he said. He was pert and no more shy than a grown-up. "Yes." He pulled a letter out of his pocket and before Eva could say a word he was down the steps and she was standing there with the letter in her hand. At first she thought of—she bolted the door—she thought of tearing the letter up. She was as hot as fire ; she went from one corner of the room to the other, with the letter in her hand the whole time. " Madame, you did not come. We are going away to-morrow. Where (we are going) is of no interest. Soon I shall be going on a far longer journey. I am done for. For years I have been battling with despair and I have exhausted my strength. To-morrow at ten I shall be there. Come, I beg of you. I should like to know a human creature again before my fate overtakes me. I beg of you ! I have not slept for a month. I do not want anything from you." Eva tore the letter in two. "Whatever is he thinking of? " What a miserable thing human nature is ! While she was seething with indignation and reviling him—a clown—a clown—she was counting—Wednesday, Thursday, Friday—this was the evening for chess. And then for hours she thought of nothing else. One thing she would certainly do—she would let him wait—absurd—the Clown. " Dance little spoon " Haha ! He could just wait! Peter went at eight. At nine Eva took a hairpin out of her hair and after half-past ten she turned out the lamp. People were walking about the street. The circus was over. Eva stood at the window. It was raining and the wind was blowing. No, she would not go. But at that very moment she saw a man standing in the street, and the blood stood still in her veins. There he was. O God ! She ought not to be left alone—a woman like her, so afraid of ghosts. No, no! He looked up, and turned in the direction of the harbour. And now a strange thing happened. Eva suddenly struck a match and looked in the glass : she slipped into a hood and went downstairs. THE CLOWN 469 She had a terrible shock right in her very doorway. A shadow rushed at her, but it was only the shadow of a tree. " I'll throw my arms round him and say, ' You poor sufferer.' " So much she thought and hurried out into the rain and along towards the harbour. And just by the steamer that carried the pigs—the " Armourbearer" —some one came quietly up to her : " Madame, I was quite certain you would come." Eva smiled and nodded. She felt at this moment a real affection for this foreign strange young man, for she could see quite clearly how glad he was that she had come. She would speak nicely to him, she would speak to him like a sister. " Yes, I have come,'' she answered and looked at him. His eyes flashed. " Thank you," he said, and his voice trembled. They walked together like old friends, both thrilling gently to an undefinable joy. "It is so good to walk beside him," thought Eva. And then she suddenly started. Some awful thing arose in front of her. A shadow, a gigantic shadow, standing between two dangling ropes. It was the Chemist standing on the deck of his ship. Eva stood still, stepped aside as though to defend herself from an undesirable companion. " Leave me," she shouted. " Go, or I will call the police ! " " Oh, Madame ! " said the tired, worn-out voice. How did Eva get home ? She did not know. She lay in bed, and covered her face with her hands. The Chemist! He had been steaming up his boat. And just at that moment! Oh, it was horrible ! the whole town would know in the morning ! And Peter! A key scraped in the lock. Eva pretended to be asleep. Then Peter came into the room, listened, and struck a light. She did not move. Then she heard him rattling the chessmen. She saw him with his foot up on his stool and his chin on his hand looking carefully at a move. " Peter," she sobbed. "Eva?" She sat up. " I have had a dream—an awful dream." "You silly little girl. Go to sleep! Bah! I lost the game to-night. ..." And Peter went back to the chess. BERNARD KELLERMANN. Translated by ETHEL MORRIS. DRAWING J. D. FERGUSS0N THERE WAS A CHILD ONCE There was a child once. He came to play in my garden ; He was quite pale and silent. Only when he smiled I knew everything about him, I knew what he had in his pockets, And I knew the feel of his hands in my hands And the most intimate tones of his voice. I led him down each secret path, Showing him the hiding-place of all my treasures. I let him play with them, every one, I put my singing thoughts in a little silver cage And gave them to him to keep. . . . It was very dark in the garden But never dark enough for us. On tiptoe we walked among the deepest shades ; We bathed in the shadow pools beneath the trees, Pretending we were under the sea. Once—near the boundary of the garden— We heard steps passing along the World-road ; O how frightened we were ! I whispered : " Have you ever walked along that road ? " He nodded, and we shook the tears from our eyes. . . . There was a child once. He came—quite alone—to play in my garden ; He was pale and silent. When we met we kissed each other, But when he went away, we did not even wave. BORIS PETROVSKY. STUPID OLD DEATH Death, you can't frighten me Waving your sickle, You're just as women be Flighty and fickle.

You lop a head or two, Carelessly cutting. I'm not afraid of you ; My head's not jutting.

You get the lanky ones— Titles and money. I'm one of them as runs Quick as a bunny.

You get the thistle heads Spiking and shoving. You miss the bugs abed Cuddling and loving.

So you can't frighten me Stupid old Death, Men die on top of me ; But I'm underneath. ARTHUR CROSSTHWAITE. CHRONICLES OF THE MONTH MAX AND MORITZ AND SOME OTHERS Max and Moritz are chimpanzees who have not the privilege of " topping the bill " at the Coliseum, though they move the audience to delight as none of the celebrated personages in the programme is able to do. They have the satisfaction of winning their audiences, or they would have if they cared about it. It is a part of their charm that they care so little about their audiences that they turn their backs on the applause. More than that, they despise the tricks which they have learned with so much sweat and do their best to evade them. These tricks, they know, are not at all expressive of the chimpanzee soul, while mischief is. Therefore they indulge in mischief to the top of their bent, and the audience, recognising the chimpanzee soul, salutes it and loves them. Max and Moritz are by no means awed by the machinery of the stage. In this they are unlike the Sisters Vanbrugh who appear in the same bill, the one in a sentimental piece of virtuosity by a modern author, and the other in a scene from a great play by an author who is never sentimental. Both these actresses, having some reputation in the " legitimate " theatre, with more solemnity than seriousness produce the tricks they have learned with much patience and deliberation, and exaggerate them for their new audience. The neatness and skill in weaving nonsense into a sort of semblance of sense of the modern author, the imagination and power in sweeping life up into drama of the ancient authors go for nothing. The famous actresses are on that stage to act, and they produce the tricks of the " legitimate " theatre, and, unlike Max and Moritz, do not recognise that those tricks are not at all expressive of the soul of their 474 RHYTHM species. They are awed by the machinery of the stage, have an ex­ aggerated sense of the importance of what they are doing, and, as the French say, they " plant the audience there," or, as we say, they " do not deliver the goods." The audience can recognise nothing except tricks, and having been taught by the chimpanzees to despise tricks, they can do nothing but pay polite homage to the obviously sincere intention of the actresses to do their best. " Scheherazade " is even worse. It is a bad version of what has been done magnificently else­ where. Here the audience realises that the performers are doing their worst and gives no salutation whatever. It is a galling thought that chimpanzees should be able to defy the hocus-pocus of the stage, while human beings are crushed by it; but so it is, and the only comfortable reflection is this, that, being chimpanzees, their minds are beyond the reach of the folly of the higher species. Also it must be remembered that the soul of a chimpanzee is a less mighty thing than the human soul and can more easily snatch at the passing opportunity for expression. The human soul needs discipline. On the other hand, at another music-hall, there is Mr. Frank Tinney, who could knock the chimpanzees into a cocked hat. There again you have a creature who is in no way awed by the machinery of the theatre, but, by an assumption of stupidity, has reduced his need of tricks to a minimum. He is, like Max and Moritz, but with intelligence, his own dramatist. And loyally he makes his every faculty serve the drama of his own creation. Whereas the famous actresses at the Coliseum are intent not on serving their authors, small and great, but on making those authors serve their personalities and their skilled but meaningless manipulation of the scale of actor's tricks, and they seem to be content to forego the spontaneous applause of their audiences so long as they can compel the homage which is always Britishly forthcoming for success and reputation. All the same, there is no gainsaying the fact, that at the Coliseum the honours are with Max and Moritz, chimpanzees, who, in spite of their trainer, insist on expressing themselves and their own joy in living. GILBERT CANNAN. A DESIGN DERWENT LEES

THE Lovat GALLERIES Fraser

In his studio at 45 Roland Gardens, Mr. Lovat Fraser has been giving an exhibition of his work. The amazing decorative quality of his painting showed off to great advantage in the genial irregularity of a studio, and was freed from that embarrassment which is exercised by even the most perfect gallery on the pictures it contains. Mr. Fraser has a very wonderful colour sense and, with it, great strength of line. He feels the power of walls, the immense energy of mere structure, and he sees behind the drabness of city externals the colours of vitality. Thus in a row of houses at Rotterdam the roofs are pink and blue, the windows framed in green. This is a perfectly legitimate way of giving blended colour-effects by massing them together. He expresses sunlight and hustle and gaiety more by this deliberate brightening of roofs and walls than by use of heavy shadows, or bright window-boxes or the multitude of coloured detail which a photographic analysis of the same scene would necessarily emphasise. On the other hand, when he wishes to give an idea of desolation, he deliberately kills his colour. " The Chapel, York " is a study in grey and black, built of severe, simple lines, flat, utterly forsaken. When he applies this supple colour sense to stage scenes, the results are, as can be imagined, of glowing brilliancy. His studies of Sche­ herazade are a blaze of red, orange, and blue. The blues and greens of Les Sylphides are phosphorescent. Mr. Fraser is at his best when he is uninfluenced by Gordon Craig— that is to say, in his later work. Perhaps it is because the subject is off my beat, but the designs for stage costumes left me cold. Besides, the dehumanised art of Craig, the clothing and setting of the " Ober- marionette " gives no scope for Mr. Fraser's love of colour, and his belief in life. Here is another industrial landscape painter (there was occasion to mention C. J. Holmes in that connection last month) but one who 478 RHYTHM loves buildings, gasometers, huddled roofs because they are structur­ ally rigid and make strong angles, more than because they are part of a new landscape.

VLADIMIR POLUNIN This discreet and attractive little exhibition, at the moment being held at Messrs. Goupil's gallery in Bedford Street, will probably be closed by the time the following lines appear in print. Although, therefore, I cannot help to swell the visitors' list, it is a pleasure to thank M. Polunin for the opportunity of seeing some of his skilful and conscientious work. He is above all an etcher—his drawings showing the same repetition of keen, nervous line that is required by the process of etching. It is probably for this reason that the black and white work is more satisfactory than the coloured. Coloured etchings always look rather like magic-lantern slides, and I felt before M. Polunin's coloured drawing the same sense of there being a light behind the original, somewhere out of sight. The only exception I would make is the landscape—" Autumn Clouds "—which has a beautiful flowing quality both of line and colour, which is, perhaps, rather needed in much of the other work. Of the two " Merton Streets "—one an etching, the other a tinted drawing—the first seemed to me much the finest. It had, to those who know the spot especially, that silent velvety darkness, cut with a blade of light, which is so characteristic of Oxford bye-ways. " Old Town," "The Abbey Steps," and "Captain Cook's House" (all belonging to the Whitby set) show such a mastery of drawing that one feels behind M. Polunin the artist, M. Polunin the architect. I think I liked the first-named of these three the best of anything in the show. The unfaltering strokes and direct simplicity of the treatment give one the same pleasure as those black-and-white drawings of Van Gogh, which show endless radiations of furrowed fields, and in the sky a petalled sunset. The restraint of M. Polunin's work is very striking. With such technique one feels he could do anything. But the truer the artist the more he dreads virtuosity. Still, the etching reproduced in the February number of this paper, shows that all the illusion of size and height can be expressed in small compass, and once that is mastered there is no cause for fear. Before his next exhibition, M. Polunin must, by some means or other, be made less modest, more aggressive. MICHAEL T. H. SADLER. DESIGNS FROM THE RUSSIAN BALLET

By ANNE ESTELLE RICE

1. Spectre de la Rose. 2. Scheherazade. 3. Scheherazade. 4. Thamar. 5. L'Apres-midi d'un Faune.

NOTE. As it is now difficult to obtain the August number of Rhythm in which these designs from the Russian Ballet appeared, we have pleasure in reproducing them separately.

REVIEWS

JELF'S, A COMEDY IN FOUR ACTS. By H. A. Vachell. John Murray. 1s. 6d. and 2s. 6d. net. " Jelf's," acted at Wyndham's Theatre, is a parasitic work. There is nothing original in it, nothing particularly interesting ; except perhaps the Butler, Gramshawe, who, when a female, being alone in a punt, is in a thoroughly female distress, stands watching the pro­ ceedings and remarks very leisurely, " We're doing all we can." I rather like him : but, alas ! he is a minor character. As we all know, there is a sort of play now in the air that deals with big busi­ nesses and financial smashes and fiancees that don't quite know their own minds, and accordingly are inclined to get in the way, and with people finding their souls and re-establishing the big businesses. It has been done very well, as in " The Voysey Inheritance." But " Jelf's " is only the faint commercial echo of art. Everything is watered down and second-hand. Dick Jelf comes back from Canada, takes over the ancestral bank, and gets engaged to Lady Fenella Mull, a former flame (le mot juste !) of Jim Palliser, who is a fairly fast young man, of Palliser's bank. There is a run on Palliser's. Out of a slight tangle of emotions it emerges that Dick will help them. Result: a run on Jelf's. Enter Deus ex Machina, Sir Jonathan Dunne, a city magnate, and announces that the Amalgamated Association of Bankers will stand by Dick. Fenella, who has been a little vague, comes round finally to Dick, when he decides to help Palliser's at all costs. For the rest, the Hon. Archie Mull gets fixed up with Dorothy Dunne, with Dick's help and against the wish of her father. And there is a Galsworthy head-clerk, a very sound man, Winslow by name. Not very interesting people. As for the dialogue, much of it is natural in the pedestrian way in which modern dialogue is natural. But much of it is strained in the effort after colloquialism. Dick's Canadian slang usually seems laid on patchily, not worked in. He is called the Kangaroo, because of his impulsive jumpy manner, and at one point, when collecting information how to dress in order to be one of the English upper classes, he remarks : "In short, a kangaroo may REVIEWS 485 draw big cheques, but he mayn't wear them." Now that sort of silly-cleverness is irritating in itself and not in character. And Archie has some most impossible affectations ; e.g., on the entrance of Jim Palliser in Act 2, he says : " The man himself ! Conspicuous and cool! " while of Dolly he exclaims : " Isn't she a little sprink " ? Personally, I have never moved among the upper classes, but I cannot imagine that sexual emotion makes them go like that. In fact, the general effect is uncomfortable ; rather like waiting for dinner with hungry, self-conscious people in a cold reception room. F.G.

THE VIGIL OF VENUS AND OTHER POEMS. By Q. Methuen and Co. 3s. 6d. net. All who care for good poetry will be inclined to treat with respect any work that bears the signature of Q. For his two well-known anthologies prove beyond doubt that Q both loves and understands real poetry.* Even an artist may learn something from a real connois­ seur, much more then should a mere critic speak with diffidence. Q, with his always genuine and graceful modesty, would be the first to say that he makes no claim to the High Title of Poet ; but he is always a conscientious, capable and elegant versifier, occasionally he has real inspiration, and has written some poems that belong to actual literature. This volume, as a whole, leaves a pleasing effect on one's memory, but except for the poem " Of Three Children Choosing a Chaplet of Verse," it is neither very important nor particularly significant In fact, after the earlier volume, " Poems and Ballads," it comes as a distinct disappointment. There is a certain lack of originality in both volumes, a result one often notices of wide knowledge and good taste, though these two qualities give many advantages which are very obvious in the work before us. The volume opens with the Latin text of " The Vigil of Venus," printed page to page with an English version ; this version is a little prolix, but it contains much graceful verse, and will appeal to all who care for Latin Poetry. The one-act play, " A Regent "—a story of love and murder in Italy in the year 1571—does not quite come off, and must be pronounced an exercise rather than an actual work of art. The rest of the volume consists of short poems, none of which are without distinction. The lines to " Alma Mater " express with a dainty and sincere sentiment, what so many of us have felt for * [This review was written before the publication of the Anthology of Victorian Verse.—Ed.] 486 RHYTHM ourselves but cannot express, and we should like to conclude this notice by quoting the last verses. Still on her spire the pigeons hover, Still by her gateway haunts the gown. Ah ! but her secret ? You, young lover, Drumming her old ones forth from town, Know you the secret none discover ? Tell it—when you go down. Yet if at length you reck her, prove her, Lean to her whispers never so nigh ; Yet if at last not less her lover You in your hansom leave the High ; Dawn from her towers a ray shall never Touch you—a passer by. A. H. J. JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGE. By Francis Bickley. Modern Bio­ graphies. Constable. 1s. This, one conceives, is exactly the kind of book that Synge would have liked to have written about him. It is not a monument. An artist needs no monument other than his work. It is not a paean. There can be no sadder reflection for an artist than that men need to be whistled and herded into appreciation of his work. It is rather a memorandum. It states barely that John Synge was born, worked, met W. B. Yeats, became a dramatist, and died. It presents the man in relation to his contemporaries, to the Irish literary movement, to Irish poetry, and to English written drama. Its niceness must give pleasure to those already acquainted with the facts it sets forth and its subject, while nothing could be better than its precision for in­ forming those who have heard of Synge only as a name that breeds enthusiasm with his importance and the beauty that he brought into the world. It was Synge's incalculable service that he brought back dignity into the theatre, the dignity of health and courage. Small in bulk as his work is, yet it stands as a rebuke to all those who have loved the theatre less and themselves more and used the stage not to create beauty but only to establish the ascendancy of their own personalities. By the creation of real joy he showed the tawdriness of the " false joy" set up by the theatrists. His dignity and sincerity remain for an inspiration and a touchstone to the young men now entering the theatre. This book is dignified and sincere and sober. It will be very useful. G. C. REVIEWS 487 POEMS OF LOVE AND EARTH. By John Drinkwater. David Nutt. 1s. 6d. net. Mr. Drinkwater is disappointing. He writes so well. His poetry is so good. But, somehow, it just is not good enough. He lacks, somewhere, ultimately, the divine touch in ordering his words. There is just enough final absence of distinction to make him, at pre­ sent, not a good poet. Yet it keeps recurring to me, he so nearly is ! Some of his poems are such good reading! There is a clean loveli­ ness about them, rare in modern poetry. His muse, and his goddesses, are " wise of cloud and star, And winds and boughs all blossom hung." The winds blow echoes of William Morris and Thomas Hardy about his orchards, his very English orchards. The orchards are his own, right enough. At present they grow only a sweet kind of apple with any success. His larger efforts, that is to say, are the less good. " Vegetable-marrow" would be unkind and rather unfair. He handles metre well ; as a poet. In the end his words will catch fire, one prays. Meanwhile there is a lot to be thankful for. D. W. THIS AND THAT AND THE OTHER. By H. Belloc. Methuen. 5s. Mr. Belloc is certainly a great genius. Only a genius could keep it up. Two books a year, or more ; and all written in better English than any other living writer can command ! For certainly, if it is possible to separate style from matter, Mr. Belloc is the best stylist we have now. What living, jocund, admirable stuff! Of this book it is only possible to say—with surprise, almost shockedly—that it is as good as the others of his in the same kind—collections of witty and serious short essays. Mr. Belloc is certainly our greatest satirist. But for him, irony and satire in all their branches would be extinct. So, in this collection, "The Book," "The Servants of the Rich," " The Spy," " The Human Charlatan " and the admirable " Obituary Notice," are especially to be praised. But there is also his fine writing on places (" The Little River " and " The Place Apart ") ; his fun " (On Omens " and " On Lying "); and his seriousness ("On Rest," " The Love of England," " On Dropping Anchor "). Besides such superb unclassified gems as the most tragic " The Pleasant Place." It is possible to disagree with or detest Mr. Belloc's views ; but only a eunuch could be blind to the merit of his writing. His poses have more reality than most men's sincerity. A noble writer. R. B. POETRY AND DRAMA

QUARTERLY periodical devoted to the criticism and appreciation of modern A poetry and drama of all countries, published on the 15th March, June, September and December, at The Poetry Bookshop, 35 Deronshire Street, Theobalds Road, London, W.C. Each issue contains: Articles on subjects relating to poetry. Original works by modern poets. Criticism of important current books of poetry, biography and the art of the theatre. A survey of American, French, Italian, and German literature, and the Drama. Annual subscription 10s. 6d. net, post free. Separate copies, 2s. 6d. net each. In connection with POETRY & DRAMA, a Bookshop has been opened for the sale of poetry, and all books, pamphlets, and periodicals connected directly or indirectly with poetry. Orders for foreign books and periodicals will be promptly executed. For further information call, or write to THE POETRY BOOKSHOP, 35 DEVONSHIRE STREET, THEOBALDS ROAD, LONDON, W.C. THE PARMA ROOMS LESLEY MOORE AND Specialists REBECCA RINSBERRY SCIENTIFIC HAIR-BRUSHING AND FACE TREATMENT

hours 59 SOUTH MOLTON STREET, W.

10-7 LA RASSEGNA CONTEMPORANEA A fortnightly illustrated review of politics, art, science and literature Edited by G. A. di CESARO, M.P., and VINGENZO PICARDI La Rassegna Contemporanea publishes articles by the best Italian writers and most prominent politicians. Subscriptions (post free for the readers of Rhythm) 27s. Quarterly and half-yearly subscriptions in proportion Editorial Offices: VIA DUE MACELLI, No. 9, ROME RHYTHM LITERARY SUPPLEMENT March 1913 CONTENTS Page The Georgian Renaissance. By D. H. Lawrence xvii Anton Tchekoff. By Gilbert Cannan xx The Influence of Baudelaire. By J. Middleton Murry xxiii The Canadian Kipling. By Frederick Goodyear xxvii Max Beerbohm's Parodies. By Richard Curie xxix Advertisements xxxi THE GEORGIAN RENAISSANCE By D. H. LAWRENCE. " Georgian Poetry " is an anthology of verse which has been pub­ lished during the reign of our present king, George V. It contains one poem of my own, but this fact will not, I hope, preclude my reviewing the book. This collection is like a big breath taken when we are waking up after a night of oppressive dreams. The nihilists, the intellectual, hopeless people—Ibsen, Flaubert, Thomas Hardy—represent the dream we are waking from. It was a dream of demolition. Nothing was, but was nothing. Everything was taken from us. And now our lungs are full of new air, and our eyes see it is morning, but we have not forgotten the terror of the night. We dreamed we were falling through space into nothingness, and the anguish of it leaves us rather eager. But we are awake again, our lungs are full of new air, our eyes of morning. The first song is nearly a cry, fear and the pain of remem­ brance sharpening away the pure music. And that is this book. The last years have been years of demolition. Because faith and belief were getting pot-bound, and the Temple was made a place to barter sacrifices, therefore faith and belief and the Temple must be broken. This time Art fought the battle, rather than Science or any new religious faction. And Art has been demolishing for us : *" Georgian Poetry." The Poetry Bookshop. Edited by E. M. 3s. 6d. net. xviii RHYTHM Nietzsche the Christian Religion as it stood, Hardy our faith in our own endeavour, Flaubert our belief in love. Now, for us, it is all smashed, we can see the whole again. We were in prison, peeping at the sky through loop-holes. The great prisoners smashed at the loop­ holes, for lying to us. And behold, out of the ruins leaps the whole sky. It is we who see it and breathe in it for joy. God is there, faith, belief, love, everything. We are drunk with the joy of it, having got away from the fear. In almost every poem in the book comes this note of exultation after fear, the exultation in the vast freedom, the illimitable wealth that we have suddenly got. " But send desire often forth to scan The immense night that is thy greater soul," says Mr. Abercrombie. His deadly sin is Prudence, that will not risk to avail itself of the new freedom. Mr. Bottomley exults to find men forever building religions which yet can never compass all. " Yet the yielding sky Invincible vacancy was there discovered." Mr. Rupert Brooke sees " every glint Posture and jest and thought and tint Freed from the mask of transiency Triumphant in eternity, Immote, immortal " and this at Afternoon Tea. Mr. John Drinkwater sings : " We cherish every hour that strays Adown the cataract of days : We see the clear, untroubled skies, We see the glory of the rose " Mr. Wilfrid Wilson Gibson hears the " terror turned to tenderness " then " I watched the mother sing to rest The baby snuggling on her breast." And to Mr. Masefield : " When men count Those hours of life that were a bursting fount Sparkling the dusty heart with living springs, There seems a world, beyond our earthly things, Gated by golden moments." It is all the same—hope, and religious joy. Nothing is really wrong. THE GEORGIAN RENAISSANCE xix Every new religion is a waste-product from the last, and every religion stands for us for ever. We love Christianity for what it has brought us, now that we are no longer upon the cross. The great liberation gives us an overwhelming sense of joy, joie d'etre, joie de vivre. This sense of exceeding keen relish and appre­ ciation of life makes romance. I think I could say every poem in the book is romantic, tinged with a love of the marvellous, a joy of natural things, as if the poet were a child for the first time on the seashore, finding treasures. " Best trust the happy moments," says Mr. Mase- field, who seems nearest to the black dream behind us. There is Mr. W. H. Davies' lovely joy, Mr. De La Mare's perfect appreciation of life at still moments, Mr. Rupert Brooke's brightness, when he " lived from laugh to laugh," Mr. Edmund Beale Sargant's pure, excited happiness in the woodland—it is all the same, keen zest in life found wonderful. In Mr. Bottomley it is the zest of activity, of hurrying, labouring men, or the zest of the utter stillness of long snows. It is a bookful of Romance that has not quite got clear of the terror of realism. There is no " Carpe diem " touch. The joy is sure and fast. It is not the falling rose, but the rose for ever rising to bud and falling to fruit that gives us joy. We have faith in the vastness of life's wealth. We are always rich : rich in buds and in shed blossoms. There is no winter that we fear. Life is like an orange tree, always in leaf and bud, in blossom and fruit. And we ourselves, in each of us, have everything. Somebody said : " The Georgian Poets are not Love Poets. The influence of Swinburne has gone." But I should say the Georgian Poets are just ripening to be love-poets. Swinburne was no love-poet. What are the Georgian poets, nearly all, but just bursting into a thick blaze of being. They are not poets of passion, perhaps, but they are essentially passionate poets. The time to be impersonal has gone. We start from the joy we have in being ourselves, and everything must take colour from that joy. It is the return of the blood, that has been held back, as when the heart's action is arrested by fear. Now the warmth of blood is in everything, quick, healthy, passionate blood. I look at my hands as I write and know they are mine, with red blood running its way, sleuth­ ing out Truth and pursuing it to eternity, and I am full of awe for this flesh and blood that holds this pen. Everything that ever was thought and ever will be thought, lies in this body of mine. This flesh and blood sitting here writing, the great impersonal flesh and blood, greater than me, which I am proud to belong to, contains all the future. What xx RHYTHM is it but the quick of all growth, the seed of all harvest, this body of mine. And grapes and corn and birds and rocks and visions, all are in my fingers. I am so full of wonder at my own miracle of flesh and blood that I could not contain myself, if I did not remember we are all alive, have all of us living bodies. And that is a joy greater than any dream of immortality in the spirit, to me. It reminds me of Rupert Brooke's moment triumphant in its eternality ; and of Michael Angelo, who is also the moment triumphant in its eternality; just the opposite from Corot, who is the eternal triumphing over the moment, at the moment, at the very point of sweeping it into the flow. Of all love-poets, we are the love-poets. For our religion is loving. To love passionately, but completely, is our one desire. " What is " The Hare " but a complete love-poem, with none of the hackneyed " But a bitter blossom was born " about it, nor yet the Yeats, " Never give all the heart." Love is the greatest of all things, no " bitter-blossom " nor such like. It is sex-passion, so separated, in which we do not believe. The " Carmen " and " Tosca " sort of passion is not interesting any longer, because it can't progress. Its goal and aim is possession, whereas possession in love is only a means to love. And because passion cannot go beyond possession, the passionate heroes and heroines—Tristans and what-not—must die. We believe in the love that is happy ever after, progressive as life itself. I worship Christ, I worship Jehovah, I worship Pan, I worship Aphrodite. But I do not worship hands nailed and running with blood upon a cross, nor licentiousness, nor lust. I want them all, all the gods. They are all God. But I must serve in real love. If I take my whole, passionate, spiritual and physical love to the woman who in return loves me, that is how I serve God. And my hymn and my game of joy is my work. All of which I read in the Anthology of Georgian Poetry. ANTON TCHEKOFF By GILBERT CANNAN. Tchekoff s work is only known to the English theatre by perform­ ances of " The Cherry Orchard," once in Glasgow, fortunately super­ vised by Mr. George Calderon, who has an understanding of Tchekoff's technique, the other at the Stage Society,—not so fortunately ; and by * "Two Plays by Tchekoff." Translated with an Introduction and Notes by George Calderon. Grant Richards. 3s. 6d. net. " Plays by Anton Tchekoff." Translated with an Introduction by Marian Fell. Duck­ worth. 6s. ANTON TCHEKOFF xxi productions of the " Sea-gull " in Glasgow, and London. When the much hoped for visit of the Moscow Theatre is accomplished, it is to be hoped that the series will be produced so that some intelligent person will perceive their full value in performance, and learn how to give them with greater effect in the English theatre, with English actors, before English audiences. I am afraid that " Uncle Vanya " and "Ivanoff" will have to be re-translated, for in their present version they are unactable, being without style. They have ceased to be Russian and do not achieve an English convention of " Russian- ismus." All the same, if they are not given such a form as to make them acceptable to the English public, yet they are and will be increasingly valuable to English dramatists and producers and actors. We in England are suffering from the rigid technique which has been used so successfully by modern play-makers ever since Robertson, a technique which has been worn so threadbare that critics and mana­ gers have ceased to look for anything in a play save what they call " construction," that is to say, that if the bones of a piece of stage-work stick out they can recognise it as a play, and if not, not. Now con­ struction is entirely a matter of machinery, and it must always be accommodated to fit the theme of each play. The rigid technique of the English theatre makes it impossible for a large number of themes to be brought into it, so that the English drama is being strangled, and from lack of variety is too weak to resist. The word " construction " has become an instrument of tyranny, and I would suggest that it be dodged by the adoption of another term—articulation. The plays of Tchekoff, for instance, are properly articulate—(he was a doctor and understood his anatomy and the value of the skeleton) ; their bones are properly fitted together to support and give free play to the flesh and blood, muscles, nerves and sinews which he wished to impose on them. His desire was not to have a scheme on to which he could pin characters, dialogues and situations, or ideas, and criticism and wit, but to present certain aspects of life in such a way, through the medium of the stage, as to wring the beauty out of them. He is said to have called his wonderful short stories " Tedious Tales," and these plays of his might be called "Tedious Plays." They are, at any rate, plays of tedium, of suspended action, of characters so helplessly enmeshed in trivialities as to be capable of nothing save negation. His Ivanoffs and Uncle Vanyas and Trigorins are driven by their futility further and further away from life, and often so far as to come by a despairingly translucent vision of life, which brings them to real xxii RHYTHM tragedy where their action must become positive, even if it be only in the renunciation of suicide. Analysis of these plays does reveal a very positive structure of the instinct for life seeking expression through the mist of unimportant talk and meaningless and vain activities with which existence is padded out, and how much more recognisably true is the inaction of Tchekoff's plays than the faked action of our drama­ tists. Perhaps that is only to say that Tchekoff had genius and our dramatists have not, and that Tchekoff was content to do his work for its own sake, while here in England our playwrights do their work to please the actors, for rewards, or credit, or reputation, or to avoid quarrelling with their colleagues, or for any of the thousand and one inadequate reasons why in this country so many people do set the machinery of the theatre in motion. Nearly all Tchekoff's plays end with a pistol-shot, not as a violent solution (a la Mrs. Tanqueray) of an otherwise insoluble problem, but as acceptance and realisation of the force of the world's purpose and man's sinfulness in cheating it by the setting up of his own conceited momentary illusions of pleasure or power in its place. Uncle Vanya ends thus in renunciation and resignation : "We must live our lives. Yes, we shall live, Uncle Vanya. We shall live through the long procession of days before us and through the long evenings : we shall patiently bear the trials that fate impresses on us : we shall work for others without rest, both now and when we are old ; and when our last hour comes we shall meet it humbly, and then, beyond the grave, we shall say that we have suffered and wept, that our life was bitter, and God will have pity on us. . . We shall see evil and all our pain sink away in the great compassion that shall enfold the world. Our life will be as peaceful and tender and sweet as a caress. I have faith ; I have faith. . . . My poor Uncle Vanya, you are crying ! You have never known what happiness was, but wait, Uncle Vanya, wait! We shall rest. . . . We shall rest." This spirit of compassion and tragic hope informs all the plays. At their most despairing the writer's humour never deserts him, but with its light fortifies the strength of weakness in dark places, dis­ covering faith, and leading to the final acceptance of life as a tragic business, a mighty opportunity for which we are so inadequately equipped, of which also, being the servants of the past and the future, we cannot even within our limitations make full use. In these plays one could go on almost indefinitely finding ethical and moral significance, an absorbing occupation which is in itself a THE INFLUENCE OF BAUDELAIRE xxiii tribute to the work that encourages it. These plays are art, a lense through which to condense the light of life and to throw upon the screen of the mind an idea, sound and round and fruitful, of life's meaning. To have achieved this through the study of the most really miserable and pitiful of human beings, those who are the most incapable of rising to their opportunity and yet in their failure do attain the heroism of living, is great. Depressing? Not a bit of it. It is only depressing to the sentimentalist, who must have a comfortable formula for life, but then, to such an one, all art must be distressing until it is sufficiently coated with tradition and superstition to be fitted into his formula. It is impossible to give a detailed account or analysis of these plays. They are so finely articulated, so closely woven of detail and thought and sympathy and emotion—all finely " warped " by the dramatic sense—that to take threads here and there would be to unravel the textile. They should be read by all playgoers in antici­ pation of the visit of the Moscow Theatre in the summer. There can be no doubt that in time they will find their way into the English theatre and will there help to destroy the tyranny of " construction " and give us the greater freedom of " articulation." THE INFLUENCE OF BAUDELAIRE* By JOHN MIDDLETON MURRY. One of Matthew Arnold's strangest critical delusions in which there was, as ever with him, an element of truth, was his treatment of something which he called the Zeitgeist as a person. Certainly, that such a thing existed in England to be reckoned with and fought against was one of Arnold's great discoveries ; but it was part of his insular pugnacity to insist on seeing Philistinism as a flesh and blood beef-eating Goliath, in the capacity of a Member of Parliament making self-congratulatory speeches to his Philistine constituents. Unique in England in his knowledge that there was such a thing as a Zeitgeist, at times he pretended to a kind of personal intimacy with it which led him astray. As a matter of fact, the essence of a Zeitgeist is to be elusive and vague ; it is, as it were, the least common factor of the mental attitudes of a number of individuals, with their personal attributes necessarily eliminated. Bad Zeitgeists do not make Jingo­ istic political speeches ; neither can good ones write transcendent lyric poetry. A Zeitgeist is a mental attitude. * "The Influence of Baudelaire in France and England." By G. Turquet-Milnes. Constable. 7s. 6d. net. xxiv RHYTHM Matthew Arnold's mistake was comparatively unimportant, a personal prejudice for anthropomorphism. There is a more serious one which personifies the mental attitude of a generation in a par­ ticular person, and, forgetting that the particular person owes his symbolic significance to the existence of a number of disparate in­ dividuals, tends to treat them as his dependents, much as a common or garden Member of Parliament will airily refer to his constituents as a portion of his personal property. A particular artist may well be the most eminent and most gifted of a number of artists who possess a certain community of mental attitude. It may be, for instance, critically convenient even to call a certain period of English literature the Shakespearean age ; but it must never be forgotten that such terms are nothing more than a kind of critical shorthand. In the end we must consider the individuality as more significant than the com­ munity ; and the universal as possessing its real existence only in the particular. To forget this is to open the way to critical mistakes of the most serious. This is the misconception which vitiates much of Miss Turquet- Milnes' valuable book, " The Influence of Baudelaire in France and England." That Baudelaire was an extremely significant figure in the artistic development of the nineteenth century cannot be denied ; but Baudelaire's significance is due to the fact that he was the most perfect embodiment of a mental attitude which supervened in Europe after the excitement and enthusiasm of the great Revolution had dissipated. 1789 and the reign of Reason had ended in military tyranny ; 1848 only paved the way for the coup d'etat. Europe had been shaken to its foundations ; but the aristocracy of the old regime had been supplanted by the timocracy of the Rothschilds. Somehow the old things re­ mained. Then the despairing cry was true : L'idealisme a cesse; le lyrisme est tari. Political idealism was dead and gave place to a crude material optimism, in essence the apotheosis of pessimism. The artist mind, seeing no way of escape to the ideal, turned in upon itself. Repelled by the charlatan extravagances of Honore de Balzac, despising the vulgar political patriotism of Victor Hugo, the artist found no liberation for the activities of his soul. Unable to enrich his consciousness by gathering into himself the life that lay outside him, he prided himself upon a false acquisition, and announced the dis­ covery that he had a soul, compact of strange unheard-of sensations. He was blind to the fact that the articulation of his soul was a piece of psychological mechanics which was of little importance compared with THE INFLUENCE OF BAUDELAIRE xxv his soul's true function, much as though a hen should seriously con­ sider herself the queen of a poultry farm if she could explain the physio­ logical process by which an egg was produced, and yet should neglect to lay one. But, though we may consider this mental attitude as wrong, we must at least accept it as the almost inevitable result of the general condition of France in the second generation of the nineteenth century. Miss Turquet-Milnes admirably analyses the elements of this Baude- lairian spirit as 1. The faculty of self-analysis and self-torment in love. 2. Pursuit of lust mingling with it a kind of sacrilegious pleasure. Pursuit of sensation at any cost, with its inevitable consequences : perversity and madness on the one hand, mysticism on the other ; —creation of a new language. 3. Moral anarchy, overwhelming pessimism, and terrible solitude of the soul. These characteristics are the expression of a certain mental attitude which it may be convenient to label the " Baudelairian spirit " ; but to contend that wherever in French or English literature this spirit makes itself manifest we are entitled to ascribe it to the influence of the author of " Les Fleurs du Mal," and to make this contention the fundamental idea of a book, is a really serious critical non-sequitur, and of this Miss Turquet-Milnes has been guilty. It would be impossible here to examine with the necessary detail the author's estimate of Baudelaire's influence in France. That it was considerable and intimate is certain ; but a certain broad simi­ larity in mental outlook is not sufficient evidence. We seek the influ­ ence of Baudelaire's great individuality upon the individualities of the generation that followed ; for surely Baudelaire's influence was pre-eminently stylistic. The " Poemes en Prose " possess a line of lineal descendants in virtue of their form alone, and their influence is at work to-day through Arthur Rimbaud upon one of the most interest­ ing of the younger French literary movements, that of the " Fantais istes." Miss Turquet-Milnes should have set herself this task before all others, to follow out stylistic clues to their modern conclusions. More obvious, however, are the shortcomings in her idea and her method when she proceeds to consider the question of the influence of Baudelaire in England. She finds it in a curious congeries of writers and artists, in Swinburne, Arthur O'Shaughnessy, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Machen, George Moore, Richard Middleton, Alfred Douglas and Aubrey Beardsley, as well as in Shelley, by anticipation. I myself xxvi RHYTHM cannot help thinking that Miss Milnes had her tongue in her cheek when she wrote that " Shelley has too a Baudelairian keen perception of the limits of utility." Or again, " There is another and less known Baudelairian side of Shelley—the side that found pleasure in cultivating weird fancies . . . ." At all events such phrases are as near down­ right critical absurdity as it is possible to get, not because they play the deuce with chronology—influences are not always chronological—but because they ignore the particular and individual excellences of Baude­ laire and Shelley. And so it is with Swinburne. In spite of the fact that Swinburne's elegy upon Baudelaire may be cited as concrete proof of influence, it shows a really mistaken estimate of the individual importance of the English poet to treat him as the English Baudelairian par excellence. Swinburne's importance in English literature, it must be repeated again, is the importance of a remarkably good style. Baudelaire's importance is of exactly the same kind. But no two styles in the world are more utterly unlike than those of Swinburne and Baudelaire. Swinburne's was never more happily described than by Mr. Gilbert Chesterton in his latest book, as " a sort of fighting and profane parody of the Old Testament." It is not subtle ; it is a blud­ geoning, pistolling, stand-and-deliver, and a very wonderful sort of style. On the contrary, Baudelaire's style is really subtle ; it is the concrete expression of the Baudelairian spirit. It does make manifest hidden sensations and articulate the soul. We believe,—and this is what the difference really amounts to—when Baudelaire writes of some strange emotion, that he really experienced it, and we feel it again. The monsters that he conjures are really there, for all that we would hurry to put them back again. But Swinburne's " Roses and raptures of vice "——. It is as though some Falstaff hit you in the small of the back with a flagon of sack and roared : " I'm a pervert, I am, my old buck." We want to laugh first. Then we think that the lines really are terrific after all, in an adroit buccaneering kind of way, as though Blackbeard had taken up one of his three-foot pistols and shot the pip out of a playing card. The manner and the matter do not fit. We never believe " Yea, with red lips the faces of them shine ; But in all these there was no sin like mine ; No, not in all the strange great sins of them That made the wine-press froth and foam with wine." The mere Saxon monosyllables of the first couplet give Baudelairian influence the lie. We never believe Swinburne's sensations. We always THE CANADIAN KIPLING xxvii believe Baudelaire. Baudelaire's matter and manner always fit. Swinburne's never. And if this is true of Swinburne, it is a thousand times more true of Wilde. The truth is that English aestheticism,and the so-called Renaissance of the " Nineties " derive from sources very different from Baudelaire. The true line of descent is English and insular, from Ruskin through Walter Pater. It is the triumph of English literature that only in England could style and matter be so discordant as in Swinburne, or Oscar Wilde, the leader of the aesthetic movement, be guilty of such execrable literary taste in the manufacture of his poetry. Baudelaire would have been foremost in disowning such disciples. We should never have heard so much of the so-called French influence upon our literature of the nineties if Oscar Wilde had not been able to take advantage of the abysmal ignorance of French literature then prevailing. Wilde treated the French as a professional secret, a privately printed book of pornography which he did not really understand, but yet vaguely felt was beautifully written. This he tried to live up to ; but the difficulties of the attempt were too much for him. The mere idea of Wilde understanding Baudelaire, or Verlaine, or Laforgue or Mallarme is something ludicrous. Even the French did not quite assimilate Baudelaire. Jules Laforgue, that most wonderful of poets and most exquisite of critics, divined this, when he says of Baude­ laire's successors : " Tous ses eleves ont glisse dans le paroxysme, dans l 'horrible plat comme des carabins d 'estaminets.'' The paroxysts of the English Baudelairians are the most ordinary pinch-beck con­ tortionists. " Baudelaire may be a cynic or mad ; he is never gross ; there is never a wrong fold in the impressions with which he clothes himself. He is always courteous with ugliness. He behaves well. . ." said Laforgue. The English Baudelairians never behave. There is a world of difference. THE CANADIAN KIPLING* By FREDERICK GOODYEAR Mr. Robert W. Service is known and advertised as the Canadian Kipling. The comparison, like all comparisons, is a challenge to the reviewer. Now it is perfectly true that Mr. Service deals in his poetry with the outposts of civilisation, the legion of the damned and various Kiplingeries of that kind. Moreover, his metres, his explosive - ness and his centripetal aim at those points of life where something * "Rhymes of a Rolling Stone." By Robert W. Service. T. Fisher Unwin. 3s. 6d. net. xxviii RHYTHM illuminating rises like an arc-light between strong desires and strong inhibitions,—all that, too, justifies the advertisement. Further, he confesses in one poem in this book to having a Kipling on his knee. On the other hand, he has not his model's clearness and craft in writing; that could scarcely be expected ; and to say he is not so good as Kipling is not of course to say that he is not of the Kipling clan. But there is something in the spirit of his verse, the angle from which he sees life, his implicit morality, that places him so far from Kipling as to make the juxtaposition of the two essentially deceptive, despite any lesser resemblances. It is something supersubtle ; otherwise it could not be important. But it amounts to this, that, although Mr. Service has a certain artistic plausibility, he certainly cannot attain artistic truth. I believe that it was Mr. J. M. Barrie who said that Kipling was " born blase." No doubt he said it plaintively. But what he really meant was that Kipling was born an artist. To the sentimental an artist always seems blase ; and it is difficult to prove that he is not merely blase, except by asking how on earth he turns out such thumping good stuff. The sentimental answer is that it is not good, because it is blase ; at which point the argument becomes passionate and physical. Now I cannot imagine any common man finding Mr. Service blase ; I cannot imagine him writhing in contortions of impotent envy because Mr. Service was a cut above him. True, Kipling does not get much writhed at; partly because he has disastrous lapses that reconcile the worst people, partly because he arms himself with humour, partly because his fondness for dramatic monologue allows him, very properly, to say what he does not mean. He is a liar, just as Homer was, according to Aristotle, the prince of liars. But poor Mr. Service could not lie ; he believes abjectly in white men and white girls and vicious fellows who get pitchforked into Heaven, where they would feel hopelessly contemptuous and superior, in virtue of turning up some physical kind of trumps in the end. If he went out to advocate or oppose women's suffrage, he could not achieve anything like " For the female of the species is more deadly than the male," which, bad as it is, is surprisingly philosophical in its context. In fact, Mr. Service is melodramatic and uncivilised. For all his trick of words, he cannot be any better than the other Sourdoughs and Cheechakos. He sees the Yukon sub specie Yukonitatis : he is parochial. No doubt it is something to have delimited a parish rather nearer the North Pole than any other litterateur. It is to me an interesting fact, which I appreciate much as I appreciate my dinner. But what has it MAX BEERBOHM'S PARODIES xxix to do with me when wrapt in my rhythmic cubo-spheroid ? Nothing at all. In so far as I want more Klondyke, I want it banausically ; my banausic self might go there,if my rhythmic self allowed it any energies. No, as a critic, I cast out Klondyke till it comes to me sub specie eternitatis. Mahomet won't go to the mountain, and the mountain must be considerably astralised before it can be brought along to Mahomet. Wanted in Alaska, a literary Picasso :—that's the gist of the matter. F. G. MAX BEERBOHM'S PARODIES By RICHARD CURLE. Will anyone who objects to this review please remember that I am writing it on board the " Caronia," within sight of the rocky Italian coast ? The sea is calm, the sky cloudless, and we are due into Naples bay in a few hours. These may be ideal conditions in one sense, but they are not the ideal conditions under which to write a review and, above all, a review of a book such as " A Christmas Garland." For caricature is about as artificial a form of literature as you could wish for—more suitable, let us say, for a London study on a winter night than for a fine morning in the Mediterranean. However, there are prejudices in all directions Of course, one can't help seeing the extraordinary cleverness of most of these parodies. I don't know which are the best—perhaps the Meredith, the A. C. Benson, and the Galsworthy. But it's hard to choose. The Bennett, the Henry James, the Wells, the Chesterton, the Kipling, the Frank Harris, the Belloc, the Shaw, and the George Moore are all brilliant, even astonishingly brilliant. That leaves but five unmentioned—the Hardy, the Hewlett, the Conrad, the G. S. Street, and the Edmund Gosse. Of these, the Hardy seems to me poor, and the Hewlett, though amusing, too exaggerated to be legitimate. As for the Conrad, it's pretty poor also. Mr. Beerbohm (or should I be calling him " the inimitable Max " ?) doesn't altogether get hold of Conrad. For him the swift subtlety of a Meredith rather than the romantic intensity of a Conrad—in other words, the drawing-room rather than the forest. Well, I don't mean that in any ill-natured sense —it's just interesting to note in passing. As a matter of fact, " the inimitable Max " is rather too finished a product for my taste, but I don't let that interfere unduly with my enjoyment. But was it worth while writing parodies of G. S. Street and Edmund Gosse—are they sufficiently well known ? The penetrating observation behind most of these little chapters * "A Christinas Garland." Woven by Max Beerbohn. 5s. net. Heinemann. xxx RHYTHM reveals itself to the reader in the most convincing of ways—in a sense of almost personal shame. As Mr. Beerbohm, unfolding an episode in the exaggerated manner of one of his victims, shows us with airy lightness the weak spots in his armour, we grow hot and cold all over. It's almost like watching a member of one's own family perform in public. He's got a devilish rapier touch has Max, a devilish touch and, generally speaking, a very sure one. Just listen to the beginning of the A. C. Benson—only, excuse me, this parody is but an added refinement to discomfort. To read the real Mr. A. C. Benson is not exactly exhilarating. However, here is the simulacrum : " More and more, as the tranquil years went by, Percy found him­ self able to draw a quiet satisfaction from the regularity, the even sureness, with which, in every year, one season succeeded to another. In boyhood he had felt always a little sad at the approach of autumn. The yellowing leaves of the lime trees, the creeper that blushed to so deep a crimson against the old grey walls, the chrysanthemums that shed so prodigally their petals on the smooth green lawn—all these things, beautiful and wonderful though they were, were somehow a little melancholy also, as being signs of the year's decay. Once, when he was fourteen or fifteen years old, he had overheard a friend of the family say to his father, ' How the days are drawing in ! '—a remark which set him thinking deeply, with an almost morbid abandonment to gloom, for quite a long time." How excessively clever of Max to have created this Benson atmo­ sphere with just that spice of exaggeration which turns his usual sentimental triteness into something unspeakably vapid. To seize the spirit and to lose the sense— that is the triumph of the caricaturist. Max is both malicious and good-natured. You feel the universal animus of a sprite but none of the bitter personal animus of a human being. He may give offence, but it will be against his intention—that, at any rate, is how it strikes me. I may be wrong—it doesn't much matter—but I hope I'm right, because I like to understand psychology. And the psychology of a caricaturist, and, in particular, a caricaturist who can write so well in the manner of Wells, and so comparatively badly in the manner of Conrad, must be worth understanding. But I'm afraid Max is an out-of-date product. He belongs to the Yellow Book of the '90s, and to the worshipping followers of George Meredith. He may still be inimitable, but nowadays he wouldn't find too many people who would want to challenge his position. When he can make a really successful parody of Conrad, we may begin to count him among the moderns. Till then, au revoir, as far as I am concerned.

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