Chapter II: Introduction: , ix

HISTORY OF A LITERARY RADICAL, 1

OUR CULTURAL HUMILITY, 31

SIX PORTRAITS, 45
FIRST--KAREN, 47
SECOND--SOPHRONISBA, 57
THIRD--MON AMIE, 66
FOURTH--FERGUS, 82
FIFTH--THE PROFESSOR, 91
SIXTH--ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS, 98

THIS OLDER GENERATION, 107

A MIRROR OF THE MIDDLE WEST, 128

ERNEST: OR PARENT FOR A DAY, 140

ON DISCUSSION, 168

THE PURITAN’S WILL TO POWER, 176

THE IMMANENCE OF DOSTOEVSKY, 188

THE ART OF THEODORE DREISER, 195

THE USES OF INFALLIBILITY, 205

IMPRESSIONS OF EUROPE, 1913-14, 230

TRANS-NATIONAL AMERICA, 266

FRAGMENT OF A NOVEL, 300

HISTORY OF A LITERARY RADICAL

For a man of culture, my friend Miro began his literary career in a singularly unpromising way. Potential statesmen in log-cabins might miraculously come in touch with all the great books of the world, but the days of Miro’s young school life were passed in innocence of Homer or Dante or Shakespeare, or any of the other traditional mind-formers of the race. What Miro had for his nourishment, outside the Bible, which was a magical book that you must not drop on the floor, or his school-readers, which were like lightning flashes of unintelligible scenes, was the literature that his playmates lent him--exploits of British soldiers in Spain and the Crimea, the death-defying adventures of young filibusters in Cuba and Nicaragua. Miro gave them a languid perusing, and did not criticize their literary style. Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer somehow eluded him until he had finished college, and no fresher tale of adventure drifted into his complacent home until the era of “Richard Carvel” and “Janice Meredith” sharpened his wits and gave him a vague feeling that there was such a thing as literary art. The classics were stiffly enshrined behind glass doors that were very hard to open--at least Hawthorne and Irving and Thackeray were there, and Tennyson’s and Scott’s poems--but nobody ever discussed them or looked at them. Miro’s busy elders were taken up with the weekly _Outlook_ and _Independent_ and _Christian Work_, and felt they were doing much for Miro when they provided him and his sister with _St. Nicholas_ and _The Youth’s Companion_. It was only that Miro saw the black books looking at him accusingly from the case, and a rudimentary conscience, slipping easily over from Calvinism to culture, forced him solemnly to grapple with “The Scarlet Letter” or “Marmion.” All he remembers is that the writers of these books he browsed among used a great many words and made a great fuss over shadowy offenses and conflicts and passions that did not even stimulate his imagination with sufficient force to cause him to ask his elders what it was all about. Certainly the filibusters were easier.

At school Miro was early impressed with the vast dignity of the literary works and names he was compelled to learn. Shakespeare and Goethe and Dante lifted their plaster heads frowningly above the teacher’s, as they perched on shelves about the room. Much was said of the greatness of literature. But the art of phonetics and the complications of grammar swamped Miro’s early school years. It was not until he reached the High School that literature began really to assume that sacredness which he had heretofore felt only for Holy Scripture. His initiation into culture was made almost a religious mystery by the conscientious and harassed teacher. As the Deadwood Boys and Henty and David Harum slipped away from Miro’s soul in the presence of Milton’s “Comus” and Burke “On Conciliation,” a cultural devoutness was engendered in him that never really died. At first it did not take Miro beyond the stage where your conscience is strong enough to make you uncomfortable, but not strong enough to make you do anything about it. Miro did not actually become an omnivorous reader of great books. But he was filled with a rich grief that the millions pursued cheap and vulgar fiction instead of the best that has been thought and said in the world. Miro indiscriminately bought cheap editions of the English classics and read them with a certain patient incomprehension.

As for the dead classics, they came to Miro from the hands of his teachers with a prestige even vaster than the books of his native tongue. No doubt ever entered his head that four years of Latin and three years of Greek, an hour a day, were the important preparation he needed for his future as an American citizen. No doubt ever hurt him that the world into which he would pass would be a world where, as his teacher said, Latin and Greek were a solace to the aged, a quickener of taste, a refreshment after manual labor, and a clue to the general knowledge of all human things. Miro would as soon have doubted the rising of the sun as have doubted the wisdom of these serious, puckered women who had the precious manipulation of his cultural upbringing in their charge. Miro was a bright, if a rather vague, little boy, and a fusion of brightness and docility gave him high marks in the school where we went together.

No one ever doubted that these marks expressed Miro’s assimilation of the books we pored over. But he told me later that he had never really known what he was studying. Cæsar, Virgil, Cicero, Xenophon, Homer, were veiled and misty experiences to him. His mind was a moving present, obliterating each day what it had read the day before, and piercing into a no more comprehended future. He could at no time have given any intelligible account of Æneas’s wanderings or what Cicero was really inveighing against. The Iliad was even more obscure. The only thing which impressed him deeply was an expurgated passage, which he looked up somewhere else and found to be about Mars and Venus caught in the golden bed. Cæsar seemed to be at war, and Xenophon wandering somewhere in Asia Minor, with about the same lengthiness and hardship as Miro suffered in reading him. The trouble, Miro thought afterwards, was that these books were to his mind flickering lights in a vast jungle of ignorance. He does not remember marvelling at the excessive dulness of the stories themselves. He plodded his faithful way, using them as his conscientious teachers did, as exercises in language. He looked on Virgil and Cicero as essentially problems in disentangling words which had unaccountably gotten into a bizarre order, and in recognizing certain rather amusing and ingenious combinations, known as “constructions.” Why these words took so irritating an order Miro never knew, but he always connected the problem with those algebraic puzzles he had elsewhere to unravel. Virgil’s words were further complicated by being arranged in lines which one had to “scan.” Miro was pleased with the rhythm, and there were stanzas that had a roll of their own. But the inexorable translating that had to go on tore all this fabric of poetry to pieces. His translations were impeccable, but, as he never wrote them down, he had never before his eyes the consecutive story.

Translations Miro never saw. He knew that they were implements of deadly sin that boys used to cheat with. His horror of them was such as a saint might feel towards a parody of the Bible. Just before Miro left school, his sister in a younger class began to read a prose translation of the Odyssey, and Miro remembers the scorn with which he looked down on so sneaking an entrance into the temple of light. He knew that not everyone could study Latin and Greek, and he learned to be proud of his knowledge. When at last he had passed his examinations for college--his Latin composition and grammar, his syntax and his sight-reading, and his Greek composition and grammar, his Greek syntax and sight-reading, and his translation of Gallic battles and Anabatic frosts, and Dido’s farewell and Cicero’s objurgations--his zealous rage did not abate. He even insisted on reading the Bucolics, while he was away on his vacation, and a book or two in the Odyssey. His family was a little chilled by his studiousness, but he knew well that he was laying up cultural treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not corrupt, neither do thieves break in and steal.

Arrived at college, Miro expanded his cultural interests on the approved lines. He read Horace and Plato, Lysias and Terence, impartially, with faithful conscience. Horace was the most exciting because of the parodies that were beginning to appear in the cleverer newspapers. Miro scarcely knew whether to be amused or shocked at “Odi Persicos” or “Integer Vitæ” done into current slang. The professors, mild-mannered men who knew their place and kept it, never mentioned these impudent adventures, but for Miro it was the first crack in his Ptolemaic system of reverences. There came a time when his mind began to feel replete, when this heavy pushing through the opaque medium of dead language began to fatigue him. He should have been able to read fluently, but there were always turning up new styles, new constructions, to plague him. Latin became to him like a constant diet of beefsteak, and Greek like a constant diet of fine wheaten bread. They lost their taste. These witty poets and ostentatious orators--what were they all about? What was their background? Where did they fit into Miro’s life? The professors knew some history, but what did that history mean? Miro found himself surfeited and dissatisfied. He began to look furtively at translations to get some better English than he was able to provide. The hair-splittings of Plato began to bore him when he saw them in crystal-clear English, and not muffled in the original Greek. His apostasy had begun.

It was not much better in his study of English literature. Miro was given a huge anthology, a sort of press-clipping bureau of _belles-lettres_, from Chaucer to Arthur Symons. Under the direction of a professor who was laying out a career for himself as poet--or “modern singer,” as he expressed it--the class went briskly through the centuries sampling their genius and tasting the various literary flavors. The enterprise reminded Miro of those books of woollen samples which one looks through when one is to have a suit of clothes made. But in this case, the student did not even have the pleasure of seeing the suit of clothes. All that was expected of him, apparently, was that he should become familiar, from these microscopic pieces, with the different textures and patterns. The great writers passed before his mind like figures in a crowded street. There was no time for preferences. Indeed the professor strove diligently to give each writer his just due. How was one to appreciate the great thoughts and the great styles if one began to choose violently between them, or attempt any discrimination on grounds of their peculiar congeniality for one’s own soul? Criticism had to spurn such subjectivity, scholarship could not be wilful. The neatly arranged book of “readings,” with its medicinal doses of inspiration, became the symbol of Miro’s education.

These early years of college did not deprive Miro of his cultural loyalty, but they deadened his appetite. Although almost inconceivably docile, he found himself being bored. He had come from school a serious boy, with more than a touch of priggishness in him, and a vague aspiration to be a “man of letters.” He found himself becoming a collector of literary odds-and-ends. If he did not formulate this feeling clearly, he at least knew. He found that the literary life was not as interesting as he had expected. He sought no adventures. When he wrote, it was graceful lyrics or polite criticisms of William Collins or Charles Lamb. These canonized saints of culture still held the field for Miro, however. There was nothing between them and that popular literature of the day that all good men bemoaned. Classic or popular, “highbrow” or “lowbrow,” this was the choice, and Miro unquestioningly took the orthodox heaven. In 1912 the most popular of Miro’s English professors had never heard of Galsworthy, and another was creating a flurry of scandal in the department by recommending Chesterton to his classes. It would scarcely have been in college that Miro would have learned of an escape from the closed dichotomy of culture. Bored with the “classic,” and frozen with horror at the “popular,” his career as a man of culture must have come to a dragging end if he had not been suddenly liberated by a chance lecture which he happened to hear while he was at home for the holidays.

The literary radical who appeared before the Lyceum Club of Miro’s village was none other than Professor William Lyon Phelps, and it is to that evening of cultural audacity Miro thinks he owes all his later emancipation. The lecturer grappled with the “modern novel,” and tossed Hardy, Tolstoi, Turgenev, Meredith, even Trollope, into the minds of the charmed audience with such effect that the virgin shelves of the village library were ravished for days to come by the eager minds upon whom these great names dawned for the first time. “Jude the Obscure” and “Resurrection” were of course kept officially away from the vulgar, but Miro managed to find “Smoke” and “Virgin Soil” and “Anna Karenina” and “The Warden” and “A Pair of Blue Eyes” and “The Return of the Native.” Later at college he explored the forbidden realms. It was as if some devout and restless saint had suddenly been introduced to the Apocrypha. A new world was opened to Miro that was neither “classic” nor “popular,” and yet which came to one under the most unimpeachable auspices. There was, at first, it is true, an air of illicit adventure about the enterprise. The lecturer who made himself the missionary of such vigorous and piquant doctrine had the air of being a heretic, or at least a boy playing out of school. But Miro himself returned to college a cultural revolutionist. His orthodoxies crumbled. He did not try to reconcile the new with the old. He applied pick and dynamite to the whole structure of the canon. Irony, humor, tragedy, sensuality, suddenly appeared to him as literary qualities in forms that he could understand. They were like oxygen to his soul.

If these qualities were in the books he had been reading, he had never felt them. The expurgated sample-books he had studied had passed too swiftly over the Elizabethans to give him a sense of their lustiness. Miro immersed himself voluptuously in the pessimism of Hardy. He fed on the poignant torture of Tolstoi. While he was reading “Resurrection,” his class in literature was making an “intensive” study of Tennyson. It was too much. Miro rose in revolt. He forswore literary courses forever, dead rituals in which anæmic priests mumbled their trite critical commentary. Miro did not know that to naughtier critics even Mr. Phelps might eventually seem a pale and timid Gideon, himself stuck in moral sloughs. He was grateful enough for that blast of trumpets which made his own scholastic walls fall down.

The next stage in Miro’s cultural life was one of frank revolt. He became as violent as a heretic as he had been docile as a believer. Modern novels merely started the rift that widened into modern ideas. The professors were of little use. Indeed, when Miro joined a group of radicals who had started a new college paper, a relentless vendetta began with the teachers. Miro and his friends threw over everything that was mere literature. Social purpose must shine from any writing that was to rouse their enthusiasm. Literary flavor was to be permissible only where it made vivid high and revolutionary thought. Tolstoi became their god, Wells their high priest. Chesterton infuriated them. They wrote violent assaults upon him which began in imitation of his cool paradoxicality and ended in incoherent ravings. There were so many enemies to their new fervor that they scarcely knew where to begin. There were not only the old tables of stone to destroy, but there were new and threatening prophets of the eternal verities who had to be exposed. The nineteenth century which they had studied must be weeded of its nauseous moralists. The instructors consulted together how they might put down the revolt, and bring these sinners back to the faith of cultural scripture.

It was of no avail. In a short time Miro had been converted from an aspiration for the career of a cultivated “man of letters” to a fiery zeal for artistic and literary propaganda in the service of radical ideas. One of the results of this conversion was the discovery that he really had no standards of critical taste. Miro had been reverential so long that he had felt no preferences. Everything that was classic had to be good to him. But now that he had thrown away the books that were stamped with the mark of the classic mint, and was dealing with the raw materials of letters, he had to become a critic and make selection. It was not enough that a book should be radical. Some of the books he read, though impeccably revolutionary as to ideas, were clearly poor as literature. His muffled taste began to assert itself. He found himself impressionable where before he had been only mildly acquisitive. The literature of revolt and free speculation fired him into a state of spiritual explosiveness. All that he read now stood out in brighter colors and in sharper outlines than before. As he reached a better balance, he began to feel the vigor of literary form, the value of sincerity and freshness of style. He began to look for them keenly in everything he read. It was long before Miro realized that enthusiasm not docility had made him critical. He became a little proud of his sensitive and discriminating reactions to the modern and the unsifted.

This pursuit had to take place without any help from the college. After Miro graduated, it is true that it became the fashion to study literature as the record of ideas and not merely as a canon of sacred books to be analyzed, commented upon, and absorbed. But no dent was made upon the system in Miro’s time, and, the inventory of English criticism not going beyond Stevenson, no college course went beyond Stevenson. The Elizabethans had been exhumed and fumigated, but the most popular attention went to the gallery of Victorians, who combined moral soundness with literary beauty, and were therefore considered wholesome food for young men. The instructors all remained in the state of reverence which saw all things good that had been immemorially taught. Miro’s own teacher was a fragile, earnest young man, whose robuster parents had evidently seized upon his nature as a fortunate pledge of what the family might produce in the way of an intellectual flower that should surpass in culture and gentility the ambitions of his parents. His studiousness, hopeless for his father’s career as grocer, had therefore been capitalized into education.

The product now shone forth as one of the most successful and promising younger instructors in the department. He knew his subject. Card-indexes filled his room, covering in detail the works, lives, and deaths of the illustrious persons whom he expounded, as well as everything that had been said about them in the way of appreciation or interpretation. An endless number of lectures and courses could be made from this bountiful store. He never tried to write himself, but he knew all about the different kinds of writing, and when he corrected the boys’ themes he knew infallibly what to tell them to avoid. Miro’s vagaries scandalized his teacher all the more because during his first year in college Miro had been generally noticed as one with the proper sobriety and scholarly patience to graduate into a similar priestly calling. Miro found scant sympathy in the young man. To the latter, literary studies were a science not an art, and they were to be treated with somewhat the same cold rigor of delimitation and analysis as any other science. Miro felt his teacher’s recoil at the idea that literature was significant only as the expression of personality or as interpretation of some social movement. Miro saw how uneasy he became when he was confronted with current literature. It was clear that Miro’s slowly growing critical sense had not a counterpart in the scholastic mind.

When Miro and his friends abandoned literary studies, they followed after the teachers of history and philosophy, intellectual arenas of which the literary professors seemed scandalously ignorant. At this ignorance Miro boiled with contempt. Here were the profitable clues that would give meaning to dusty literary scholarship, but the scholars had not the wits to seize them. They lived along, playing what seemed to Miro a rather dreary game, when they were not gaping reverently at ideas and forms which they scarcely had the genuine personality to appreciate. Miro felt once and for all free of these mysteries and reverences. He was to know the world as it has been and as it is. He was to put literature into its proper place, making all “culture” serve its apprenticeship for him as interpretation of things larger than itself, of the course of individual lives and the great tides of society.

Miro’s later cultural life is not without interest. When he had finished college and his architectural course, and was making headway in his profession, his philosophy of the intellectual life began to straighten itself out. Rapid as his surrender of orthodoxy had been, it had taken him some time to live down that early education. He found now that he would have to live down his heresies also, and get some coherent system of tastes that was his own and not the fruit of either docility or the zeal of propaganda.

The old battles that were still going on helped Miro to realize his modern position. It was a queer, musty quarrel, but it was enlisting minds from all classes and of all intellectual fibers. The “classics” were dying hard, as Miro recognized whenever he read, in the magazines, attacks on the “new education.” He found that professors were still taken seriously who declared in passion that without the universal study of the Latin language in American schools all conceptions of taste, standards, criticism, the historic sense itself, would vanish from the earth. He found that even as late as 1917 professional men were gathering together in solemn conclave and buttressing the “value of the classics” with testimonials from “successful men” in a variety of vocations. Miro was amused at the fact that the mighty studies once pressed upon him so uncritically should now require, like the patent medicines, testimonials as to their virtue. Bank presidents, lawyers, and editors had taken the Latin language regularly for years, and had found its effects painless and invigorating. He could not escape the unconscious satire that such plump and prosperous Americans expressed when they thought it admirable to save their cherished intellectual traditions in any such fashion.

Other conservatives Miro saw to be abandoning the line of opposition to science, only to fall back on the line of a defensive against “pseudo-science,” as they seemed to call whatever intellectual interests had not yet become indubitably reputable. It was a line which would hold them rather strongly for a time, Miro thought, because so many of the cultural revolutionists agreed with them in hating some of these arrogant and mechanical psychologies and sociologies that reduced life to figures or organisms. But Miro felt also how obstructive was their fight. If the “classics” had done little for him except to hold his mind in an uncomprehending prison, and fetter his spontaneous taste, they seemed to have done little more for even the thorough scholars. When professors had devoted scholarly lives to the “classics” only to exhibit in their own polemics none of the urbanity and intellectual command which were supposed by the believer somehow to rub off automatically on the faithful student, Miro had to conclude an absence of causal connection between the “classics” and the able modern mind. When, moreover, critical power or creative literary work became almost extinct among these defenders of the “old education,” Miro felt sure that a revolution was needed in the materials and attitudes of “culture.”

The case of the defenders was all the weaker because their enemies were not wanton infidels, ignorant of the holy places they profaned. They were rather cultural “Modernists,” reforming the church from within. They had the classic background, these young vandals, but they had escaped from its flat and unoriented surface. Abreast of the newer objective, impersonal standards of thinking, they saw the weakness of these archaic minds which could only appeal to vested interests in culture and testimonials from successful men.

The older critics had long since disavowed the intention of discriminating among current writers. These men, who had to have an Academy to protect them, lumped the younger writers of verse and prose together as “anarchic” and “naturalistic,” and had become, in these latter days, merely peevish and querulous, protesting in favor of standards that no longer represented our best values. Every one, in Miro’s time, bemoaned the lack of critics, but the older critics seemed to have lost all sense of hospitality and to have become tired and a little spitefully disconsolate, while the newer ones were too intent on their crusades against puritanism and philistinism to have time for a constructive pointing of the way.

Miro had a very real sense of standing at the end of an era. He and his friends had lived down both their old orthodoxies of the classics and their new orthodoxies of propaganda. Gone were the priggishness and self-consciousness which had marked their teachers. The new culture would be more personal than the old, but it would not be held as a personal property. It would be democratic in the sense that it would represent each person’s honest spontaneous taste. The old attitude was only speciously democratic. The assumption was that if you pressed your material long enough and winningly enough upon your culturable public, they would acquire it. But the material was something handed down, not grown in the garden of their own appreciations. Under these conditions the critic and appreciator became a mere impersonal register of orthodox opinion. The cultivated person, in conforming his judgments to what was authoritatively taught him, was really a member of the herd--a cultivated herd, it is true, but still a herd. It was the mass that spoke through the critic and not his own discrimination. These authoritative judgments might, of course, have come--probably had come--to the herd through discerning critics, but in Miro’s time judgment in the schools had petrified. One believed not because one felt the original discernment, but because one was impressed by the weight and reputability of opinion. At least so it seemed to Miro.

Now just as the artists had become tired of conventions and were breaking through into new and personal forms, so Miro saw the younger critics breaking through these cultural conventions. To the elders the result would seem mere anarchy. But Miro’s attitude did not want to destroy, it merely wanted to rearrange the materials. He wanted no more second-hand appreciations. No one’s cultural store was to include anything that one could not be enthusiastic about. One’s acquaintance with the best that had been said and thought should be encouraged--in Miro’s ideal school--to follow the lines of one’s temperament. Miro, having thrown out the old gods, found them slowly and properly coming back to him. Some would always repel him, others he hoped to understand eventually. But if it took wisdom to write the great books, did it not also take wisdom to understand them? Even the Latin writers he hoped to recover, with the aid of translations. But why bother with Greek when you could get Euripides in the marvellous verse of Gilbert Murray? Miro was willing to believe that no education was complete without at least an inoculation of the virus of the two orthodoxies that he was transcending.

As Miro looked around the American scene, he wondered where the critics were to come from. He saw, on the one hand, Mr. Mencken and Mr. Dreiser and their friends, going heavily forth to battle with the Philistines, glorying in pachydermatous vulgarisms that hurt the polite and cultivated young men of the old school. And he saw these violent critics, in their rage against puritanism, becoming themselves moralists, with the same bigotry and tastelessness as their enemies. No, these would never do. On the other hand, he saw Mr. Stuart P. Sherman, in his youthful if somewhat belated ardor, revolting so conscientiously against the “naturalism” and crude expression of current efforts that, in his defense of _belles-lettres_, of the fine tradition of literary art, he himself became a moralist of the intensest brand, and as critic plumped for Arnold Bennett, because that clever man had a feeling for the proprieties of human conduct. No, Mr. Sherman would do even less adequately. His fine sympathies were as much out of the current as was the specious classicism of Professor Shorey. He would have to look for the critics among the young men who had an abounding sense of life, as well as a feeling for literary form. They would be men who had not been content to live on their cultural inheritance, but had gone out into the modern world and amassed a fresh fortune of their own. They would be men who were not squeamish, who did not feel the delicate differences between “animal” and “human” conduct, who were enthusiastic about Mark Twain and Gorki as well as Romain Rolland, and at the same time were thrilled by Copeau’s theater.

Where was a better program for culture, for any kind of literary art? Culture as a living effort, a driving attempt both at sincere expression and at the comprehension of sincere expression wherever it was found! Appreciation to be as far removed from the “I know what I like!” as from the textbook impeccability of taste! If each mind sought its own along these lines, would not many find themselves agreed? Miro insisted on liking Amy Lowell’s attempt to outline the tendencies in American poetry in a form which made clear the struggles of contemporary men and women with the tradition and against “every affectation of the mind.” He began to see in the new class-consciousness of poets the ending of that old division which “culture” made between the chosen people and the gentiles. We were now to form little pools of workers and appreciators of similar temperaments and tastes. The little magazines that were starting up became voices for these new communities of sentiment. Miro thought that perhaps at first it was right to adopt a tentative superciliousness towards the rest of the world, so that both Mr. Mencken with his shudders at the vulgar Demos and Mr. Sherman with his obsession with the sanely and wholesomely American might be shut out from influence. Instead of fighting the Philistine in the name of freedom, or fighting the vulgar iconoclast in the name of wholesome human notions, it might be better to write for one’s own band of comprehenders, in order that one might have something genuine with which to appeal to both the mob of the “bourgeois” and the ferocious vandals who had been dividing the field among them. Far better a quarrel among these intensely self-conscious groups than the issues that had filled _The Atlantic_ and _The Nation_ with their dreary obsolescence. Far better for the mind that aspired towards “culture” to be told not to conform or worship, but to search out its group, its own temperamental community of sentiment, and there deepen appreciations through sympathetic contact.

It was no longer a question of being hospitable towards the work of other countries. Miro found the whole world open to him, in these days, through the enterprise of publishers. He and his friends felt more sympathetic with certain groups in France and Russia than they did with the variegated “prominent authors” of their own land. Winston Churchill as a novelist came to seem more of an alien than Artzybashev. The fact of culture being international had been followed by a sense of its being. The old cultural attitude had been hospitable enough, but it had imported its alien culture in the form of “comparative literature.” It was hospitable only in trying to mould its own taste to the orthodox canons abroad. The older American critic was mostly interested in getting the proper rank and reverence for what he borrowed. The new critic will take what suits his community of sentiment. He will want to link up not with the foreign canon, but with that group which is nearest in spirit with the effort he and his friends are making. The American has to work to interpret and portray the life he knows. He cannot be international in the sense that anything but the life in which he is saturated, with its questions and its colors, can be the material for his art. But he can be international--and must be--in the sense that he works with a certain hopeful vision of a “young world,” and with certain ideal values upon which the younger men, stained and revolted by war, in all countries are agreeing.

Miro wonders sometimes whether the direction in which he is tending will not bring him around the circle again to a new classicism. The last stage in the history of the man of culture will be that “classic” which he did not understand and which his mind spent its youth in overthrowing. But it will be a classicism far different from that which was so unintelligently handed down to him in the American world. It will be something worked out and lived into. Looking into the future he will have to do what Van Wyck Brooks calls “inventing a usable past.” Finding little in the American tradition that is not tainted with sweetness and light and burdened with the terrible patronage of bourgeois society, the new classicist will yet rescue Thoreau and Whitman and Mark Twain and try to tap through them a certain eternal human tradition of abounding vitality and moral freedom, and so build out the future. If the classic means power with restraint, vitality with harmony, a fusion of intellect and feeling, and a keen sense of the artistic conscience, then the revolutionary world is coming out into the classic. When Miro sees behind the minds of _The Masses_ group a desire for form and for expressive beauty, and sees the radicals following Jacques Copeau and reading Chekhov, he smiles at the thought of the American critics, young and old, who do not know yet that they are dead.

OUR CULTURAL HUMILITY

It was Matthew Arnold, read and reverenced by the generation immediately preceding our own, who set to our eyes a definition and a goal of culture which has become the common property of all our world. To know the best that had been thought and said, to appreciate the master-works which the previous civilizations had produced, to put our minds and appreciations in contact with the great of all ages,--here was a clear ideal which dissolved the mists in which the vaguenesses of culture had been lost. And it was an ideal that appealed with peculiar force to Americans. For it was a democratic ideal; every one who had the energy and perseverance could reasonably expect to acquire by taking thought that orientation of soul to which Arnold gave the magic name of culture. And it was a quantitative ideal; culture was a matter of acquisition--with appreciation and prayerfulness perhaps, but still a matter of adding little by little to one’s store until one should have a vision of that radiant limit, when one knew all the best that had been thought and said and pictured in the world.

I do not know in just what way the British public responded to Arnold’s eloquence; if the prophetic wrath of Ruskin failed to stir them, it is not probable that they were moved by the persuasiveness of Arnold. But I do know that, coming at a time when America was producing rapidly an enormous number of people who were “comfortably off,” as the phrase goes, and who were sufficiently awake to feel their limitations, with the broader horizons of Europe just opening on the view, the new doctrine had the most decisive effect on our succeeding spiritual history. The “land-of-liberty” American of the era of Dickens still exists in the British weeklies and in observations of America by callow young journalists, but as a living species he has long been extinct. His place has been taken by a person whose pride is measured not by the greatness of the “land of the free,” but by his own orientation in Europe.

Already in the nineties, our college professors and our artists were beginning to require the seal of a European training to justify their existence. We appropriated the German system of education. Our millionaires began the collecting of pictures and the endowment of museums with foreign works of art. We began the exportation of school-teachers for a summer tour of Europe. American art and music colonies sprang up in Paris and Berlin and Munich. The movement became a rush. That mystical premonition of Europe, which Henry James tells us he had from his earliest boyhood, became the common property of the talented young American, who felt a certain starvation in his own land, and longed for the fleshpots of European culture. But the bourgeoisie soon followed the artistic and the semi-artistic, and Europe became so much the fashion that it is now almost a test of respectability to have traveled at least once abroad.

Underlying all this vivacious emigration, there was of course a real if vague thirst for “culture,” and, in strict accord with Arnold’s definition, the idea that somehow culture could be imbibed, that from the contact with the treasures of Europe there would be rubbed off on us a little of that grace which had made the art. So for those who could not travel abroad, our millionaires transported, in almost terrifying bulk and at staggering cost, samples of everything that the foreign galleries had to show. We were to acquire culture at any cost, and we had no doubt that we had discovered the royal road to it. We followed it, at any rate, with eye single to the goal. The naturally sensitive, who really found in the European literature and arts some sort of spiritual nourishment, set the pace, and the crowd followed at their heels.

This cultural humility of ours astonished and still astonishes Europe. In England, where “culture” is taken very frivolously, the bated breath of the American, when he speaks of Shakespeare or Tennyson or Browning, is always cause for amusement. And the Frenchman is always a little puzzled at the crowds who attend lectures in Paris on “How to See Europe Intelligently,” or are taken in vast parties through the Louvre. The European objects a little to being so constantly regarded as the keeper of a huge museum. If you speak to him of culture, you find him frankly more interested in contemporaneous literature and art and music than in his worthies of the olden time, more interested in discriminating the good of to-day than in accepting the classics. If he is a cultivated person, he is much more interested usually in quarreling about a living dog than in reverencing a dead lion. If he is a French _lettré_, for instance, he will be producing a book on the psychology of some living writer, while the Anglo-Saxon will be writing another on Shakespeare. His whole attitude towards the things of culture, be it noted, is one of daily appreciation and intimacy, not that attitude of reverence with which we Americans approach alien art, and which penalizes cultural heresy among us.

The European may be enthusiastic, polemic, radiant, concerning his culture; he is never humble. And he is, above all, never humble before the culture of another country. The Frenchman will hear nothing but French music, read nothing but French literature, and prefers his own art to that of any other nation. He can hardly understand our almost pathetic eagerness to learn of the culture of other nations, our humility of worship in the presence of art that in no sense represents the expression of any of our ideals and motivating forces.

To a genuinely patriotic American this cultural humility of ours is somewhat humiliating. In response to this eager inexhaustible interest in Europe, where is Europe’s interest in us? Europe is to us the land of history, of mellow tradition, of the arts and graces of life, of the best that has been said and thought in the world. To Europe we are the land of crude racial chaos, of skyscrapers and bluff, of millionaires and “bosses.” A French philosopher visits us, and we are all eagerness to get from him an orientation in all that is moving in the world of thought across the seas. But does he ask about our philosophy, does he seek an orientation in the American thought of the day? Not at all. Our humility has kept us from forcing it upon his attention, and it scarcely exists for him. Our advertising genius, so powerful and universal where soap and biscuits are concerned, wilts and languishes before the task of trumpeting our intellectual and spiritual products before the world. Yet there can be little doubt which is the more intrinsically worth advertising. But our humility causes us to be taken at our own face value, and for all this patient fixity of gaze upon Europe, we get little reward except to be ignored, or to have our interest somewhat contemptuously dismissed as parasitic.

And with justice! For our very goal and ideal of culture has made us parasites. Our method has been exactly wrong. For the truth is that the definition of culture, which we have accepted with such devastating enthusiasm, is a definition emanating from that very barbarism from which its author recoiled in such horror. If it were not that all our attitude showed that we had adopted a quite different standard, it would be the merest platitude to say that culture is not an acquired familiarity with things outside, but an inner and constantly operating taste, a fresh and responsive power of discrimination, and the insistent judging of everything that comes to our minds and senses. It is clear that such a sensitive taste cannot be acquired by torturing our appreciations into conformity with the judgments of others, no matter how “authoritative” those judgments may be. Such a method means a hypnotization of judgment, not a true development of soul.

At the back of Arnold’s definition is, of course, the implication that if we have only learned to appreciate the “best,” we shall have been trained thus to discriminate generally, that our appreciation of Shakespeare will somehow spill over into admiration of the incomparable art of Mr. G. Lowes Dickinson. This is, of course, exactly to reverse the psychological process. A true appreciation of the remote and the magnificent is acquired only after the judgment has learned to discriminate with accuracy and taste between the good and bad, the sincere and the false, of the familiar and contemporaneous art and writing of every day. To set up an alien standard of the classics is merely to give our lazy taste a resting-point, and to prevent forever any genuine culture.

This virus of the “best” rages throughout all our Anglo-Saxon campaign for culture. Is it not a notorious fact that our professors of English literature make no attempt to judge the work produced since the death of the last consecrated saint of the literary canon,--Robert Louis Stevenson? In strict accordance with Arnold’s doctrine, they are waiting for the judgment upon our contemporaries which they call the test of time, that is, an authoritative objective judgment, upon which they can unquestioningly rely. Surely it seems as if the principle of authority, having been ousted from religion and politics, had found a strong refuge in the sphere of culture. This tyranny of the “best” objectifies all our taste. It is a “best” that is always outside of our native reactions to the freshnesses and sincerities of life, a “best” to which our spontaneities must be disciplined. By fixing our eyes humbly on the ages that are past, and on foreign countries, we effectually protect ourselves from that inner taste which is the only sincere “culture.”

Our cultural humility before the civilizations of Europe, then, is the chief obstacle which prevents us from producing any true indigenous culture of our own. I am far from saying, of course, that it is not necessary for our arts to be fertilized by the civilizations of other nations past and present. The culture of Europe has arisen only from such an extensive cross-fertilization in the past. But we have passed through that period of learning, and it is time for us now to set up our individual standards. We are already “heir of all the ages” through our English ancestry, and our last half-century of European idolatry has done for us all that can be expected. But, with our eyes fixed on Europe, we continue to strangle whatever native genius springs up. Is it not a tragedy that the American artist feels the imperative need of foreign approval before he can be assured of his attainment? Through our inability or unwillingness to judge him, through our cultural humility, through our insistence on the objective standard, we drive him to depend on a foreign clientèle, to live even in foreign countries, where taste is more confident of itself and does not require the label, to be assured of the worth of what it appreciates.

The only remedy for this deplorable situation is the cultivation of a new American nationalism. We need that keen introspection into the beauties and vitalities and sincerities of our own life and ideals that characterizes the French. The French culture is animated by principles and tastes which are as old as art itself. There are “classics,” not in the English and Arnoldian sense of a consecrated canon, dissent from which is heresy, but in the sense that each successive generation, putting them to the test, finds them redolent of those qualities which are characteristically French, and so preserves them as a precious heritage. This cultural chauvinism is the most harmless of patriotisms; indeed it is absolutely necessary for a true life of civilization. And it can hardly be too intense, or too exaggerated. Such an international art exhibition as was held recently in New York, with the frankly avowed purpose of showing American artists how bad they were in comparison with the modern French, represents an appalling degradation of attitude which would be quite impossible in any other country. Such groveling humility can only have the effect of making us feeble imitators, instead of making us assert, with all the power at our command, the genius and individuality which we already possess in quantity, if we would only see it.

In the contemporary talent that Europe is exhibiting, or even in the genius of the last half-century, one will go far to find greater poets than our Walt Whitman, philosophers than William James, essayists than Emerson and Thoreau, composers than MacDowell, sculptors than Saint-Gaudens. In any other country such names would be focuses to which interest and enthusiasms would converge, symbols of a national spirit about which judgments and tastes would revolve. For none of them could have been born in another country than our own. If some of them had their training abroad, it was still the indigenous America that their works expressed,--the American ideals and qualities, our pulsating democracy, the vigor and daring of our pioneer spirit, our sense of _camaraderie_, our dynamism, the big-heartedness of our scenery, our hospitality to all the world. In the music of MacDowell, the poetry of Whitman, the philosophy of James, I recognize a national spirit, “l’esprit américain,” as superbly clear and gripping as anything the culture of Europe has to offer us, and immensely more stimulating, because of the very body and soul of to-day’s interests and aspirations.

To come to an intense self-consciousness of these qualities, to feel them in the work of these masters, and to search for them everywhere among the lesser artists and thinkers who are trying to express the soul of this hot chaos of America,--this will be the attainment of culture for us. Not to look on ravished while our marvelous millionaires fill our museums with “old masters,” armor, and porcelains, but to turn our eyes upon our own art for a time, shut ourselves in with our own genius, and cultivate with an intense and partial pride what we have already achieved against the obstacles of our cultural humility. Only thus shall we conserve the American spirit and saturate the next generation with those qualities which are our strength. Only thus can we take our rightful place among the cultures of the world, to which we are entitled if we would but recognize it. We shall never be able to perpetuate our ideals except in the form of art and literature; the world will never understand our spirit except in terms of art. When shall we learn that “culture,” like the kingdom of heaven, lies within us, in the heart of our national soul, and not in foreign galleries and books? When shall we learn to be proud? For only pride is creative.

SIX PORTRAITS

I--KAREN

II--SOPHRONISBA

III--MON AMIE

IV--FERGUS

V--THE PROFESSOR

VI--ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

KAREN

Karen interested more by what she always seemed about to say and be than by anything she was at the moment. I could never tell whether her inscrutability was deliberate or whether she did not know how to be articulate. When she was pleased she would gaze at you benignly but there was always a slight uneasiness in the air as if the serenity were only a resultant of tumultuous feelings that were struggling to appreciate the situation. She was always most animated when she was annoyed at you. At those times you could fairly feel the piquant shafts of evil-heartedness hitting your body as she contended against your egoism or any of the personal failings that hurt her sense of your fitness. These moments took you into the presence of the somber irascibility of that northern land from which she came, and you felt her foreignness brush you. Her smooth, fair, parted hair would become bristly and surly; that face, which looked in repose like some Madonna which a Swedish painter would love, took on a flush; green lights glanced from her eyes. She was as inscrutable in anger as she was in her friendliness. You never knew just what strange personal freak of your villainy had set it off, though you often found it ascribed to some boiling fury in your own placid soul. You were not aware of this fury, but her intuition for it made her more inscrutable than ever.

I first met Karen at a state university in the West where she had come for some special work in literature, after a few years of earning her living at browbeaten stenography. She never went to her classes, and I had many long walks with her by the lake. In that somewhat thin intellectual atmosphere of the college, she devoted most of her time to the fine art of personal relations, and, as nobody who ever looked at her was not fascinated by her blonde inscrutability and curious soft intensity, she had no difficulty in soon enmeshing herself in several nebulous friendships. She told us that she hoped eventually to write novels, but there was never anything to show that her novels unfolded anywhere but in her mind as they interpreted the richly exciting detail of her daily personal contacts. If you asked her about her writings, you became immediately thankful that looks could not slay, and some witch-fearing ancestor crossed himself shudderingly in your soul. Intercourse with Karen was not very concrete. Our innumerable false starts at understanding, the violence and exact quality of my interest, the technique of getting just that smooth and silky rapport between us which she was always anticipating--this seemed to make up the fabric of her thoughts. At that time she was reading mostly George Moore and Henry James, and I think she hoped we would all prove adequate for a subtly interwoven society. This was a little difficult in a group that was proud of its modernities, of its dizzy walking over flimsy generalizations, of its gifts of exploding in shrapnels of epigram. Karen loathed ideas and often quoted George Moore on their hideousness. The mere suggestion of an idea was so likely to destroy the poise of her mood, that conversation became a strategy worth working for. Karen did not think, she felt--in slow, sensuous outlines. You could feel her feelings curiously putting out long streamers at you, and, if you were in the mood, a certain subterranean conversation was not impossible. But if you did not happen to guess her mood, then you quarreled.

When I met Karen, she was twenty-five, and I guessed that she would always be twenty-five. She had personal ideals that she wished for herself, and if you asked what she was thinking about, it was quite likely to be the kind of noble woman she was to be, or feared she would not be, at forty. But she was too insistent upon creating her world in her own image to remain sensitive to the impressions that make for growth. As the story of her life came out, the bitter immigrant journey, the despised house-work, the struggle to get an education, the office drudgery, the lack of roots and a place, you came to appreciate this personal cult of Karen’s. She was so clearly finer and intenser than the people who had been in the world about her, that her starved soul had to find nourishment where it could. Even if she was insensible to ideas, her soft searching at least allured. It was perhaps her starved condition which made her friendships so subject to sudden disaster. Karen’s notes were always a little more brightly intimate than her personal resources were able to support. She seemed to start with a plan of the conversation in her head. If you bungled, and with her little retreats and evasions you were always bungling, you could feel her spirit stamp its feet in vexation. She would plan pleasant soliloquies, and you would find yourself in a fiercely cross-examinatory mood. She loathed your probing of her mood, and parried you in a helpless way which made you feel as if you were tearing tissue. You always seemed with Karen to be in a laboratory of personal relations where priceless things were being discovered, but you felt her more as an alchemist than a modern physicist of the soul, and her method rather that of trial and error than real experiment.

I am quite sure that Karen’s system of personal relations was platonic. She never seemed to get beyond that laying of the broad foundation of the Jamesian tone that would have been necessary to make the thing an “affair.” She was often lovely and she was not unloved. She was much interested in men, but it was more as co-actors in a personal drama of her own devising than as lovers or even as men. The most she ever hoped for, I think, was to be the sacred fount, and to have her flow copious and manifold. You felt the immense qualifications a man would have to have in the subtleties of rapport to make him even a candidate for loving. For Karen, men seemed to exist only as they brought a touch of ceremonial into their personal relations. I think Karen never quite intended to surround herself with the impenetrable armor of vestal virginity, and yet she did not avoid it. However glowing and mysterious she might look as she lay before the fire in her room, so that to an impatient friend nothing might seem more important than to catch her up warmly in his arms, he would have been an audacious brigand who violated the atmosphere. Karen always so much gave the impression of playing for higher and nobler stakes that no brigand ever appeared. Whether she deluded herself as to what she wanted or whether she had a clearer insight than most women into the predatoriness of my sex, her relations with men were rarely smooth. Caddishness seemed to be breaking out repeatedly in the most unexpected places.

Some of the most serious of my friends got dark inadequacies charged against them by Karen. I was a little in her confidence, but I could rarely gather more than that the men of to-day had no sensitiveness and were far too coarse for the fine and decent friendships which she spent so much of her time and artistic imagination on arranging for them with herself. I was constantly undergoing, at the hands of Karen, a course of discipline myself, for my ungovernable temper or my various repellant “tones” or my failure to catch just the quality of certain people we discussed. I understood dimly the lucklessness of her “cads.” They had perhaps not been urbanely plastic, they had perhaps been impatiently adoring. They had at least not offended in any of the usual ways. She would even forgive them sometimes with surprising suddenness. But she never so far forgot her principles as to let them dictate a mood. She never recognized any of the naïve collisions of men and women.

Karen often seemed keenly to wonder at this unsatisfactoriness of men. She cultivated them, walking always in her magic circle, but they slipped and grew dimmer. She had her fling of feminism towards the end of her year. She left the university to become secretary for a state suffrage leader. Under the stress of public life she became fierce and serious. She abandoned the picturesque peasant costumes which she had affected, and made herself hideous in mannish skirts and waists. She felt the woes of women, and saw everywhere the devilish hand of the exploiting male. If she ever married, she would have a house separate from her husband. She would be no parasite, no man’s woman. She spoke of the “human sex,” and set up its norms for her acquaintanceships.

When I saw Karen later, however, she was herself again. She had taken up again the tissue of personal relations. But in that reconstituted world all her friends seemed to be women. Her taste of battle had seemed to fortify and enlighten that ancient shrinking; her old annoyance that men should be abruptly different from what she would have them. She was intimate with feminists whose feminism had done little more for their emotional life than to make them acutely conscious of the cloven hoof of the male. Karen, in her brooding way, was able to give this philosophy a far more poetical glamor than any one I knew. Her woman friends adored her, even those who had not acquired that mystic sense of “loyalty to woman” and did not believe that no man was so worthy that he might not be betrayed with impunity. Karen, on her part, adored her friends, and the care that had been spent on unworthy men now went into toning up and making subtle the women around her. She did a great deal for them, and was constantly discovering godlike creatures in shop and street and bringing them in to be mystically mingled with her circle.

Naturally it is Karen’s married friends who cause her greatest concern. Eternal vigilance is the price of their salvation from masculine tyranny. In the enemy’s country, under at least the nominal yoke, these married girls seem to Karen subjects for her prayer and aid. She has become exquisitely sensitive to any aggressive gestures on the part of these creatures with whom her dear friends have so inexplicably allied themselves, and she is constantly in little subtle intrigues to get the victim free or at least armisticed. She broods over her little circle, inscrutable, vigilant, a true vestal virgin on the sacred hearth of woman. Husbands are doubtless better for that silent enemy whom they see jealously adoring their wives.

Karen still leaves trails of mystery and desire where she goes, but it is as a woman’s woman that I see her now, and, I am ashamed to say, ignore her. Men could not be crowded into her Jamesian world and she has solved the problem by obliterating them. She will not live by means of them. Since she does not know how to live with them she lives without them.

SOPHRONISBA

I should scarcely have understood Sophronisba unless I had imagined her against the background of that impeccable New England town from which she says she escaped. It is a setting of elm-shaded streets, with houses that can fairly be called mansions, and broad lawns stretching away from the green and beautiful white church. In this large princeliness of aspect the naïve stranger, like myself, would imagine nothing but what was grave and sweet and frank. Yet behind those pillared porticos Sophronisba tells me sit little and petrified people. This spacious beauty exists for people who are mostly afraid; afraid of each other, afraid of candor, afraid of sex, afraid of radicals. Underneath the large-hearted exterior she says they are stifled within. Women go queer from repression, spinsters multiply on families’ hands, while the young men drift away to Boston. Dark tales are heard of sexual insanity, and Sophronisba seems to think that the chastest wife never conceives without a secret haunting in her heart of guilt. I think there are other things in Sophronisba’s town, but these are the things she has seen, and these are the things she has fled from.

Sophronisba is perhaps forty, but she is probably much younger than she was at eleven. At that age the devilish conviction that she hated her mother strove incessantly with the heavenly conviction that it was her duty to love her. And there were unpleasing aunts and cousins who exhaustingly had to be loved when she wished only spitefully to slap them. Her conscience thus played her unhappy tricks through a submerged childhood, until college came as an emancipation from that deadly homesickness that is sickness not for your home but intolerance at it.

No more blessed relief comes to the conscience-burdened than the chance to exchange their duties for their tastes, when what you should unselfishly do to others is transformed into what books and pictures you ought to like. Your conscience gets its daily exercise, but without the moral pain. I imagine Sophronisba was not unhappy at college, where she could give up her weary efforts to get her emotions correct towards everybody in the world and the Three Persons in the heaven above it, in favor of acquiring a sound and authorized cultural taste. She seems to have very dutifully taken her master’s degree in English literature, and for her industrious conscience is recorded somewhere an unreadable but scholarly thesis, the very name of which she has probably forgotten herself.

For several years Sophronisba must have flowed along on that thin stream of the intellectual life which seems almost to have been invented for slender and thin-lipped New England maidens who desperately must make a living for themselves in order to keep out of the dull prison of their homes. There was for Sophronisba a little teaching, a little settlement work, a little writing, and a position with a publishing house. And always the firm clutch on New York and the dizzy living on a crust that might at any moment break and precipitate her on the intolerable ease of her dutifully loving family. It is the conventional opinion that this being a prisoner on parole can be terminated only by the safe custody of a man, or the thrilling freedom of complete personal success. Sophronisba’s career has been an indeterminate sentence of womanhood. She is at once a proof of how very hard the world still is on women, and how gaily they may play the game with the odds against them.

I did not meet Sophronisba until she was in the mellow of her years, and I cannot disentangle all her journalistic attempts, her dives into this magazine and that, the electrifying discovery of her by a great editor, the great careers that were always beginning, the great articles that were called off at the last moment, the delayed checks, the checks that never came, the magazines that went down with all on board. But there were always articles that did come off, and Sophronisba zigzagged her literary way through fat years of weekly series and Sunday supplements and lean years of desk work and book-reviewing. There are some of Sophronisba’s articles that I should like to have written myself. She piles her facts with great neatness, and there is a little ironic punch sometimes which is not enough to disturb the simple people who read it, but flatters you as of the more subtly discerning. Further, she has a genuine talent for the timely.

There has been strategy as well as art in her career. That feminine Yankeeness which speaks out of her quizzical features has not lived in vain. She tells with glee of editors captured in skilful sorties of wit, of connections laboriously pieced together. She confesses to plots to take the interesting and valuable in her net. There is continuous action along her battlefront. She makes the acceptance of an article an exciting event. As you drop in upon her for tea to follow her work from week to week, you seem to move in a maze of editorial conspiracy. Her zestfulness almost brings a thrill into the prosaic business of writing. Not beguilements, but candor and wit, are her ammunition. One would expect a person who looked like Sophronisba to be humorous. But her wit is good enough to be surprising, it is sharp but it leaves no sting. And it gets all the advantage of being carried along on a voice that retains the least suggestion of a racy Eastern twang. With the twang goes that lift and breathlessness that makes everything sound interesting. When you come upon Sophronisba in that charming dinner group that she frequents or as she trips out of the library, portfolio in hand, with a certain sedate primness which no amount of New York will ever strain out of her, you know that for a few moments the air is going to be bright.

How Sophronisba got rid of the virus of her New England conscience and morbidities I do not know. She must have exorcised more demons than most of us are even acquainted with. Yet she never seems to have lost the zest that comes from standing on the brink and watching the Gadarene swine plunge heavily down into the sea. She has expelled the terrors of religion and the perils of thwarted sex, but their nearness still thrills. She would not be herself, neither would her wit be as good, if it were not much made of gay little blasphemies and bold feminist irreverences. There is the unconscious play to the stiff New England gallery that makes what she says of more than local relevance. In her serious talk there lingers the slight, interested bitter tang of the old Puritan poison. But current issues mean much to Sophronisba. These things which foolish people speak of with grave-faced strainings after objectivity, with uncouth scientific jargon and sudden lapses into pruriency, Sophronisba presents as a genuine revelation. Her personal curiosity, combined with intellectual clarity, enable her to get it all assimilated. Her allegiance went, of course, quickly to Freud, and once, in a sudden summer flight to Jung in Zurich, she sat many hours absorbing the theories from a grave, ample, formidably abstract, and--for Sophronisba--too unhumorous Fraülein assistant. What Sophronisba got she has made into a philosophy of life, translated into New England dialect, and made quite revealingly her own. Before journalism claimed her for more startling researches, she would often give it for you in racy and eager fashion, turning up great layers of her own life and of those she knew about her. Many demons were thus sent flying.

Her exorcisms have been gained by a blazing candor and by a self-directed sense of humor which alone can support it. With the white light of this lantern she seems to have hunted down all the evil shadows in that background of hers. Her relentless exposure of her own motives, her eager publicity of soul and that fascinating life which is hers, her gossip without malice and her wise cynicism, make Sophronisba the greatest of reliefs from a world too full of decent reticences and self-respects. That heavy conscience has been trained down to an athletic trimness. I cannot find an interest or a realism or a self-interpretation at which she will cringe, though three centuries of Puritanism in her blood should tell her how unhallowed most of them are.

Sophronisba, naturally, is feminist to the core. Particularly on the subject of the economic servitude of married women does she grow very tense, and if anywhere her sense of humor deserts her it is here. But she is so convincing that she can throw me into a state of profound depression, from which I am not cheered by reflecting how unconscious of their servitude most of these women are. Sophronisba herself is a symbol of triumphant spinsterhood rejoicing the heart, an unmarried woman who knows she would make a wretched wife and does not seem to mind. Her going home once a year to see her family has epic quality about it. She parts from her friends with a kind of resigned daring, and returns with the air of a Proserpine from the regions of Pluto. To have laid all these ghosts of gloom and queerness and fear which must have darkened her prim and neglected young life, is to have made herself a rarely interesting woman. I think the most delightful bohemians are those who have been New England Puritans first.

MON AMIE