When circumstances have permitted me to lift up my prayer to the gods, of whom there are several, and whose multiplicity has only been forgotten during the less felicitous periods, I have requested for contemporary use, some system of delayed book reviewing, some system whereby the critic of current things is permitted to state that a few books read with pleasure five or six years ago can still be with pleasure perused, and that their claims to status as literature have not been obliterated by half or all of a decade.

GEORGE S. STREET

There was in the nineties, the late nineties and during the early years of this century, and still is, a writer named George S. Street. He has written some of the best things that have been thought concerning Lord Byron, he has written them not as a romanticist, not as a Presbyterian, but as a man of good sense. They are worthy of commendation. He has written charmingly in criticism of eighteenth century writers, and of the ghosts of an earlier Piccadilly. He has written tales of contemporary life with a suavity, wherefrom the present writer at least has learned a good deal, even if he has not yet put it into scriptorial practice. (I haste to state this indebtedness.)

The writers of mœurs contemporaines are so few, or rather there are so few of them who can be treated under the heading "literature," that the discovery or circulation of any such writer is no mean critical action. Mr. Street is "quite as amusing as Stockton," with the infinite difference that Mr. Street has made literature. Essays upon him are not infrequent in volumes of English essays dealing with contemporary authors. My impression is that he is not widely read in America (his publishers will doubtless put me right if this impression is erroneous); I can only conclude that the possession of a style, the use of a suave and pellucid English has erected some sort of barrier.

"The Trials of the Bantocks," "The Wise and the Wayward," "The Ghosts of Piccadilly," "Books of Essays," "The Autobiography of a Boy," "Quales Ego," "Miniatures and Moods," are among his works, and in them the rare but intelligent reader may take refuge from the imbecilities of the multitude.

FREDERIC MANNING

In 1910 Mr. Manning published, with the almost defunct and wholly uncommendable firm of John Murray, "Scenes and Portraits," the opening paragraph of which I can still, I believe, quote from memory.

"When Merodach, King of Uruk, sat down to his meals, he made his enemies his footstool, for beneath his table he kept an hundred kings with their thumbs and great toes cut off, as signs of his power and clemency. When Merodach had finished eating he shook the crumbs from his napkin, and the kings fed themselves with two fingers, and when Merodach observed how painful and difficult this operation was, he praised God for having given thumbs to man.

"'It is by the absence of things,' he said, 'that we learn their use. Thus if we deprive a man of his eyes we deprive him of sight, and in this manner we learn that sight is the function of the eyes.'

"Thus spake Merodach, for he had a scientific mind and was curious of God's handiwork. And when he had finished speaking, his courtiers applauded him."

Adam is afterwards discovered trespassing in Merodach's garden or paradise. The characters of Bagoas, Merodach's high priest, Adam, Eve and the Princess Candace are all admirably presented. The book is divided in six parts: the incident of the Kingdom of Uruk, a conversation at the house of Euripides, "A Friend of Paul," a conversation between St. Francis and the Pope, another between Thomas Cromwell and Macchiavelli, and a final encounter between Leo XIII and Renan in Paradise.

This book is not to be neglected by the intelligent reader (avis rarissima, and in what minute ratio to the population I am still unable to discern).

"Others" Anthology for 1917. This last gives, I think, the first adequate presentation of Mina Loy and Marianne Moore, who have, without exaggerated "nationalism," without waving of banners and general phrases about Columbia gem of the ocean, succeeded in, or fallen into, producing something distinctly American in quality, not merely distinguishable as American by reason of current national faults.

Their work is neither simple, sensuous nor passionate, but as we are no longer governed by the North American Review we need not condemn poems merely because they do not fit some stock phrase or rhetorical criticism.

(For example, an infinitely greater artist than Tennyson uses six "s's" and one "z" in a single line. It is one of the most musical lines in Provençal and opens a poem especially commended by Dante. Let us leave the realm of promoted typists who quote the stock phrases of text-books.)

In the verse of Marianne Moore I detect traces of emotion; in that of Mina Loy I detect no emotion whatever. Both of these women are, possibly in unconsciousness, among the followers of Jules Laforgue (whose work shows a great deal of emotion). Or perhaps René Ghil is the "influence" in Miss Moore's case. It is possible, as I have written, or intended to write elsewhere, to divide poetry into three sorts: (1) melopoeia, to wit, poetry which moves by its music, whether it be a music in words or an aptitude for, or suggestion of, accompanying music; (2) imagism, or poetry wherein the feelings of painting and sculpture are predominant (certain men move in phantasmagoria; the images of their gods, whole countrysides, stretches of hill land and forest, travel with them); and there is, thirdly, logopoeia, or poetry that is akin to nothing but language which is a dance of the intelligence among words and ideas and modifications of ideas and characters. Pope and the eighteenth-century writers had in this medium a certain limited range. The intelligence of Laforgue ran through the whole gamut of his time. T.S. Eliot has gone on with it. Browning wrote a condensed form of drama, full of things of the senses, scarcely ever pure logopoeia.

One wonders what the devil any one will make of this sort of thing who has not in their wit all the clues. It has none of the stupidity beloved of the "lyric" enthusiast and the writer and reader who take refuge in scenery, description of nature, because they are unable to cope with the human. These two contributors to the "Others" Anthology write logopoeia. It is, in their case, the utterance of clever people in despair, or hovering upon the brink of that precipice. It is of those who have acceded with Renan "La bêtise humaine est la seule chose qui donne une idée de l'infini." It is a mind cry, more than a heart cry. "Take the world if thou wilt but leave me an asylum for my affection," is not their lamentation, but rather "In the midst of this desolation, give me at least one intelligence to converse with."

The arid clarity, not without its own beauty, of le tempérament de l'Américaine, is in the poems of these, I think, graduates or post-graduates. If they have not received B.A.'s or M.A.'s or B.Sc.'s they do not need them.

The point of my praise, for I intend this as praise, even if I do not burst into the phrases of Victor Hugo, is that without any pretences and without clamors about nationality, these girls have written a distinctly national product, they have written something which would not have come out of any other country, and (while I have before now seen a deal of rubbish by both of them) they are, as selected by Mr. Kreymborg, interesting and readable (by me, that is. I am aware that even the poems before me would drive numerous not wholly unintelligent readers into a fury of rage-out-of-puzzlement.) Both these poetriæ have said a number of things not to be found in the current numbers of Everybody's, the Century or McClure's, "The Effectual Marriage," "French Peacock," "My Apish Cousins," have each in its way given me pleasure. Miss Moore has already prewritten her counterblast to my criticism in her poem "to a Steam Roller."

The anthology displays also Mr. Williams' praiseworthy opacity.

THE NEW POETRY

CONVERSATION GALANTE[8]


I observe: "Our sentimental friend the moon!
Or possibly (fantastic, I confess)
It may be Prester John's balloon
Or an old battered lantern hung aloft
To light poor travelers to their distress."
She then: "How you digress!"

And I then: "Some one frames upon the keys
That exquisite nocturne, with which we explain
The night and moonshine, music which we seize
To body forth our own vacuity."
She then: "Does this refer to me?"
"Oh no, it is I who am inane."

"You, madam, are the eternal humorist,
The eternal enemy of the absolute,
Giving our vagrant moods the slightest twist!
With your air indifferent and imperious
At a stroke our mad poetics to confute:—"
And—: "Are we then so serious?"

Laforgue's influence or Ghil's or some kindred tendency is present in the whimsicalities of Marianne Moore, and of Mina Loy. A verbalism less finished than Eliot's appears in Miss Moore's verses called—

PEDANTIC LITERALIST

Prince Rupert's drop, paper muslin ghost,
White torch "with power to say unkind
Things with kindness and the most
Irritating things in the midst of love and
Tears," you invite destruction.

You are like the meditative man
With the perfunctory heart; its
Carved cordiality ran
To and fro at first, like an inlaid and royal
Immutable production;

Then afterward "neglected to be
Painful" and "deluded him with
Loitering formality,
Doing its duty as if it did not,"
Presenting an obstruction

To the motive that it served. What stood
Erect in you has withered. A
Little "palmtree of turned wood"
Informs your once spontaneous core in its
Immutable reduction.

The reader accustomed only to glutinous imitations of Keats, diaphanous dilutations of Shelley, woolly Wordsworthian paraphrases, or swish ful Swinburniania will doubtless dart back appalled by Miss Moore's departures from custom; custom, that is, as the male or female devotee of Palgravian insularity understands that highly elastic term. The Palgravian will then with disappointment discover that his favorite and conventional whine is inapplicable. Miss Moore "rhymes in places." Her versification does not fit in with preconceived notions of vers libre. It possesses a strophic structure. The elderly Newboltian groans. The all-wool unbleached Georgian sighs ominously. Another author has been reading French poets, and using words for the communication of thought. Alas, times will not stay anchored.

Mina Loy has been equally subject to something like international influence; there are lines in her "Ineffectual Marriage" perhaps better written than anything I have found in Miss Moore, as, for example:—

"So here we might dispense with her
Gina being a female
But she was more than that
Being an incipience         a correlative
an instigation to the reaction of man
From the palpable to the transcendent
Mollescent irritant of his fantasy
Gina had her use              Being useful
contentedly conscious
She flowered in Empyrean
From which no well-mated woman ever returns
Sundays            a warm light in the parlor
From the gritty road          on the white wall
anybody could see it
Shimmered a composite effigy
Madonna            crinolined              a man
hidden beneath her hoop.
Patience said Gina            is an attribute
And she learned            at any hour to offer
The dish            appropriately delectable
What had Miovanni made of his ego
In his library
What had Gina wondered            among the pots and pans
One never asked the other."

These lines are not written as Henry Davray said recently in the "Mercure de France," that the last "Georgian Anthology" poems are written, i.e., in search for "sentiments pour les accommoder à leur vocabulaire." Miss Loy's are distinctly the opposite, they are words set down to convey a definite meaning, and words accommodated to that meaning, even if they do not copy the mannerisms of the five or six by no means impeccable nineteenth century poets whom the British Poetry Society has decided to imitate.

All this is very pleasing, or very displeasing, according to the taste of the reader; according to his freedom from, or his bondage to, custom.

Distinct and as different as possible from the orderly statements of Eliot, and from the slightly acid whimsicalities of these ladies, are the poems of Carlos Williams. If the sinuosities and mental quirks of Misses Moore and Loy are difficult to follow I do not know what is to be said for, some of Mr. Williams' ramifications and abruptnesses. I do not pretend to follow all of his volts, jerks, sulks, balks, outblurts and jump-overs; but for all his roughness there remains with me the conviction that there is nothing meaningless in his book, "Al que quiere," not a line. There is whimsicality as we found it in his earlier poems. "The Tempers" (published by Elkin Mathews), in the verse to "The Coroner's Children," for example. There is distinctness and color, as was shown in his "Postlude," in "Des Imagistes"; but there is beyond these qualities the absolute conviction of a man with his feet on the soil, on a soil personally and peculiarly his own. He is rooted. He is at times almost inarticulate, but he is never dry, never without sap in abundance. His course may be well indicated by the change of the last few years; we found him six years ago in "The Postlude," full of a thick and opaque color, full of emotional richness, with a maximum of subjective reality:

POSTLUDE


Now that I have cooled to you
Let there be gold of tarnished masonry,
Temples soothed by the sun to ruin
That sleep utterly.
Give me hand for the dances,
Ripples at Philæ, in and out,
And lips, my Lesbian,
Wall flowers that once were flame.

Your hair is my Carthage
And my arms the bow,
And our words the arrows
To shoot the stars,
Who from that misty sea
Swarm to destroy us.

But you there beside me—-
Oh! how shall I defy you,
Who wound me in the night
With breasts shining like Venus and like Mars?
The night that is shouting Jason
When the loud eaves rattle
As with waves above me,
Blue at the prow of my desire.

O prayers in the dark!
O incense to Poseidon!
Calm in Atlantis.

From this he has, as some would say, "turned" to a sort of maximum objective reality in

THE OLD MEN

Old men who have studied
every leg show
in the city
Old men cut from touch
by the perfumed music—
polished or fleeced skulls
that stand before
the whole theatre
in silent attitudes
of attention,—
old men who have taken precedence
over young men
and even over dark-faced
husbands whose minds
are a street with arc-lights.
Solitary old men
for whom we find no excuses....

This is less savage than "Les Assis." His "Portrait of a Woman in Bed" incites me to a comparison with Rimbaud's picture of an old actress in her "loge." Not to Rimbaud's disadvantage. I don't know that any, save the wholly initiated into the cult of anti-exoticism, would take Williams' poem for an exotic, but there is no accounting for what may occur in such cases.

PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN IN BED


There's my things
drying in the corner;
that blue skirt
joined to the gray shirt—

I'm sick of trouble!
Lift the covers
if you want me
and you'll see
the rest of my clothes—
though it would be cold
lying with nothing on!

I won't work
and I've got no cash.
What are you going to do
about it?
——and no jewelry
(the crazy fools).

But I've my two eyes
and a smooth face
and here's this! look!
it's high!
There's brains and blood
in there—
my name's Robitza!
Corsets
can go to the devil—
and drawers along with them!
What do I care!

My two boys?
—they're keen!
Let the rich lady
care for them
they'll beat the school
or
let them go to the gutter—
that ends trouble.

This house is empty
isn't it?
Then it's mine
because I need it.
Oh, I won't starve
while there's the Bible
to make them feed me.

Try to help me
if you want trouble
or leave me alone—
that ends trouble.

The county physician
is a damned fool
and you
can go to hell!

You could have closed the door
when you came in;
do it when you go out.
I'm tired.

This is not a little sermon on slums. It conveys more than two dozen or two hundred magazine stories about the comedy of slum-work. As the memoir of a physician, it is keener than Spiess' notes of an advocate in the Genevan law courts. It is more compact than Vildrac's "Auberge," and has not Vildrac's tendency to sentiment. It is a poem that could be translated into French or any other modern language and hold its own with the contemporary product of whatever country one chose.

A DISTINCTION

PART SECOND

V

OUR TETRARCHAL PRÉCIEUSE

(A divagation from Jules Laforgue)

There arose, as from a great ossified sponge, the comic-opera, Florence-Nightingale light-house, with junks beneath it clicking in vesperal meretricious monotony; behind them the great cliff obtruded solitary into the oily, poluphloisbious ocean, lifting its confection of pylons; the poplar rows, sunk yards, Luna Parks, etc., of the Tetrarchal Palace polished jasper and basalt, funereal undertakerial, lugubrious, blistering in the highlights under a pale esoteric sun-beat; encrusted, bespattered and damascened with cynocephali, sphinxes, winged bulls, bulbuls, and other sculptural by-laws. The screech-owls from the jungle could only look out upon the shadowed parts of the sea, which they did without optic inconvenience, so deep was the obscured contagion of their afforested blackness.

The two extraneous princes went up toward the stable-yard, gaped at the effulgence of peacocks, glared at the derisive gestures of the horse-cleaners, adumbrated insults, sought vainly for a footman or any one to take up their cards.

The tetrarch appeared on a terrace, removing his ceremonial gloves.

The water, sprinkled in the streets in anticipation of the day's parade, dried in little circles of dust. The tetrarch puffed at his hookah with an exaggeration of dignity; he was disturbed at the presence of princes, he was disturbed by the presence of Jao; he desired to observe his own ruin, the slow deliquescence of his position, with a fitting detachment and lassitude. Jao had distributed pamphlets, the language was incomprehensible; Jao had been stored in the cellarage, his following distributed pamphlets.

In the twentieth century of his era the house of Emeraud Archytypas was about to have its prize bit of fireworks: a war with the other world ... after so many ages of purely esoteric culture!

Jao had declined both the poisoned coffee and the sacred sword of the Samurai, courtesies offered, in this case, to an incomprehensible foreigner. Even now, with a superlation of form, the sacred kriss had been sent to the court executioner, it was no mere every-day implement. The princes arrived at this juncture. There sounded from the back alleys the preparatory chirping of choral societies, and the wailing of pink-lemonade sellers. To-morrow the galley would be gone.

Leaning over the syrupy clematis, Emeraud crumbled brioches for the fishes, reminding himself that he had not yet collected the remains of his wits. There was no galvanization known to art, science, industry or the ministrations of sister-souls that would rouse his long since respectable carcass.

Yet at his birth a great tempest had burst above the dynastic manor; credible persons had noticed the lightnings scrolling Alpha and Omega above it; and nothing had happened. He had given up flagellation. He walked daily to the family necropolis: a cool place in the summer. He summoned the Arranger of Inanities.

II

Strapped, pomaded, gloved, laced; with patulous beards, with their hair parted at the backs of their heads; with their cork-screw curls pulled back from their foreheads to give themselves tone on their medallions; with helmets against one hip; twirling the musk-balls of their sabres with their disengaged restless fingers, the hyperborean royalties were admitted. And the great people received them, in due order: chief mandarins in clump, the librarian of the palace (Conde de las Navas), the Arbiter Elegantium, the Curator major of Symbols, the Examiner of the High Schools, the Supernumerary priest of the Snow Cult, the Administrator of Death, and the Chief Attendant Collector of Death-duties.

Their Highnesses bowed and addressed the Tetrarch: "... felicitous wind ... day so excessively glorious ... wafted ... these isles ... notwithstanding not also whereof ... basilica far exceeding ... Ind, Ormus ... Miltonesco ... etc. ... to say nothing of the seven-stopped barbary organ and the Tedium laudamus ... etc. ..."

(Lunch was brought in.)

Kallipagous artichokes, a light collation of tunny-fish, asparagus served on pink reeds, eels pearl-gray and dove-gray, gamut and series of compôtes and various wines (without alcohol).

Under impulsion of the Arranger of Inanities the pomaded princes next began their inspection of the buildings. A pneumatic lift hove them upward to the outer rooms of Salome's suite. The lift door clicked on its gilt-brass double expansion-clamps; the procession advanced between rows of wall-facing negresses whose naked shoulder-blades shone like a bronze of oily opacity. They entered the hall of majolica, very yellow with thick blue incrustations, glazed images, with flushed and protuberant faces; in the third atrium they came upon a basin of joined ivory, a white bath-sponge, rather large, a pair of very pink slippers. The next room was littered with books bound in white vellum and pink satin; the next with mathematical instruments, hydrostats, sextants, astrolabial discs, the model of a gasolene motor, a nickel-plated donkey engine.... They proceeded up metal stairs to the balcony, from which a rustling and swaying and melodiously enmousselined figure, jonquil-colored and delicate, preceded or rather predescended them by dumb-waiter, a route which they were not ready to follow. The machine worked for five floors: usage private and not ceremonial.

The pomaded princes stood to attention, bowed with deference and with gallantry. The Arranger ignored the whole incident, ascended the next flight of stairs and began on the telescope:

"Grand equatorial, 22 yards inner tube length, revocable cupola (frescoes in water-tight paint) weight 200,089 kilos, circulating on fourteen steel castors in a groove of chloride of magnesium, 2 minutes for complete revolution. The princess can turn it herself."

The princes allowed their attention to wander, they noted their ship beneath in the harbor, and calculated the drop, they then compared themselves with the brocaded and depilated denizens of the escort, after which they felt safer. They were led passively into the Small Hall of Perfumes, presented with protochlorine of mercury, bismuth regenerators, cantharides, lustral waters guaranteed free from hydrated lead. Were conducted thence to the hanging garden, where the form hermetically enmousselined, the jonquil-colored gauze with the pea-sized dark spots on it, disappeared from the opposite slope. Molossian hounds yapping and romping about her.

The trees lifted their skinned-salmon trunks, the heavy blackness was broken with a steely, metallic sunshine. A sea wind purred through the elongated forest like an express-train in a tunnel. Polychrome statues obtruded themselves from odd corners. An elephant swayed absentmindedly, the zoo was loose all over the place. The keeper of the aquarium moralized for an hour upon the calm life of his fishes. From beneath the dark tanks the hareem sent up a decomposed odor, and a melancholy slave chantey saturated the corridors, a low droning osmosis. They advanced to the cemetery, wanting all the time to see Jao.

This exhibit came at last in its turn. They were let down in a sling-rope through a musty nitrated grill, observing in this descent the ill-starred European in his bath-robe, his nose in a great fatras of papers over-scrawled with illegible pot-hooks.

He rose at their hefty salutation; readjusted his spectacles, blinked; and then it came over him: These damn pustulent princes! Here! and at last! Memory overwhelmed him. How many, on how many rotten December and November evenings had he stopped, had he not stopped in the drizzle, in the front line of workmen, his nose crushed against a policeman, and craning his scraggy neck to see them getting out of their state barouche, going up the interminable front stairway to the big-windowed rococo palace; he muttering that the "Times" were at hand.

And now the revolution was accomplished. The proletariat had deputed them. They were here to howk him out of quod; a magnificent action, a grace of royal humility, performed at the will of the people, the new era had come into being. He saluted them automatically, searching for some phrase European, historic, fraternal, of course, but still noble.

The Royal Nephew, an oldish military man with a bald-spot, ubiquitarian humorist, joking with every one in season and out (like Napoleon), hating all doctrinaires (like Napoleon), was however the first to break silence: "Huk, heh, old sour bean, bastard of Jean Jacques Rousseau, is this where you've come to be hanged? Eh? l'm damned if it ain't a good thing."

The unfortunate publicist stiffened.

"Idealogue!" said the Nephew.

The general strike had been unsuccessful. Jao bent with emotion. Tears showed in his watery eyes, slid down his worn cheek, trickled into his scraggy beard. There was then a sudden change in his attitude. He began to murmur caresses in the gentlest of European diminutives.

They started. There was a tinkle of keys, and through a small opposite doorway they discerned the last flash of the mousseline, the pale, jonquil-colored, blackspotted.

The Nephew readjusted his collar. A subdued cortège reascended.

III

The ivory orchestra lost itself in gay fatalistic improvisation; the opulence of two hundred over-fed tetrarchal Dining-Companions swished in the Evening salon, and overflowed coruscated couches. They slithered through their genuflections to the throne. The princes puffed out their elbows, simultaneously attempting to disentangle their Collars-of-the-Fleece in the idea that these would be a suitable present for their entertainer. Neither succeeded; suddenly in the midst of the so elaborate setting they perceived the æsthetic nullity of the ornament, its connotations were too complex to go into.

The tetrarchal children (superb productions, in the strictly esoteric sense) were led in over the jonquil-colored reed-matting. A water-jet shot up from the centre of the great table, and fell plashing above on the red and white rubber awning. A worn entertainment beset the diminutive music-hall stage: acrobats, flower-dancers, contortionists, comic wrestlers, to save the guests conversation. A trick skater was brought in on real ice, did the split, engraved a gothic cathedral. The Virgin Serpent as she was called, entered singing "Biblis, Biblis"; she was followed by a symbolic Mask of the Graces; which gave place to trapeze virtuosi.

An horizontal geyser of petals was shot over the auditorium. The hookahs were brought in. Jao presumably heard all this over his head. The diners' talk became general, the princes supporting the army, authority, religion a bulwark of the state, international arbitration, the perfectibility of the race; the mandarins of the palace held for the neutralization of contacts, initiated cénacles, frugality and segregation.

The music alone carried on the esoteric undertone, silence spread with great feathers, poised hawk-wise. Salome appeared on the high landing, descended the twisted stair, still stiff in her sheath of mousseline; a small ebony lyre dangled by a gilt cord from her wrist; she nodded to her parent; paused before the Alcazar curtain, balancing, swaying on her anæmic pigeon-toed little feet—until every one had had a good look at her. She looked at no one in particular; her hair dusty with exiguous pollens curled down over her narrow shoulders, ruffled over her forehead, with stems of yellow flowers twisted into it. From the dorsal joist of her bodice, from a sort of pearl matrix socket there rose a peacock tail, moire, azure, glittering with shot emerald: an halo for her marble-white face.

Superior, graciously careless, conscious of her uniqueness, of her autochthonous entity, her head cocked to the left, her eyes fermented with the interplay of contradictory expiations, her lips a pale circonflex, her teeth with still paler gums showing their super-crucified half-smile. An exquisite recluse, formed in the island æsthetic, there alone comprehended. Hermetically enmousselined, the black spots in the fabric appeared so many punctures in the soft brightness of her sheath. Her arms of angelic nudity, the two breasts like two minute almonds, the scarf twined just above the adorable umbilical groove (nature desires that nude woman should be adorned with a girdle) composed in a cup-shaped embrace of the hips. Behind her the peacock halo, her pale pigeon-toed feet covered only by the watered-yellow fringe and by the bright-yellow anklet. She balanced, a little budding messiah; her head over-weighted; not knowing what to do with her hands; her petticoat so simple, art long, very long, and life so very inextensive; so obviously ready for the cosy-corner, for little talks in conservatories....

And she was going to speak....

The Tetrarch bulged in his cushions, as if she had already said something. His attention compelled that of the princes; he brushed aside the purveyor of pine-apples.

She cleared her throat, laughing, as if not to be taken too seriously; the sexless, timbreless voicelet, like that of a sick child asking for medicine, began to the lyre accompaniment:

"Canaan, excellent nothingness; nothingness-latent, circumambient, about to be the day after to-morrow, incipient, estimable, absolving, coexistent...."

The princes were puzzled. "Concessions by the five senses to an all-inscribing affective insanity; latitudes, altitudes, nebulæ, Medusæ of gentle water, affinities of the ineradicable, passages over earth so eminently identical with incalculably numerous duplicates, alone in indefinite infinite. Do you take me? I mean that the pragmatic essence attracted self-ward dynamically but more or less in its own volition, whistling in the bag-pipes of the soul without termination.—But to be natural passives, to enter into the cosmos of harmonics.—Hydrocephalic theosophies, act it, aromas of populace, phenomena without stable order, contaminated with prudence.—Fatal Jordans, abysmal Ganges—to an end with 'em—insubmersible sidereal currents—nurse-maid cosmogonies."

She pushed back her hair dusty with pollens, the soft handclapping began; her eyelids drooped slightly, her faintly-suggested breasts lifted slightly, showed more rosy through the almond-shaped eyelets of her corsage. She was still fingering the ebony lyre.

"Bis, bis, brava!" cried her audience.

Still she waited.

"Go on! You shall have whatever you like. Go on, my dear," said the Tetrarch; "we are all so damned bored. Go on, Salome, you shall have any blamed thing you like: the Great-Seal, the priesthood of the Snow Cult, a job in the University, even to half of my oil stock. But inoculate us with ... eh ... with the gracious salve of this cosmoconception, with this parthenospotlessness."

The company in his wake exhaled an inedited boredom. They were all afraid of each other. Tiaras nodded, but no one confessed to any difficulty in following the thread of her argument. They were, racially, so very correct.

Salome wound on in summary rejection of theogonies, theodicies, comparative wisdoms of nations (short shift, tone of recitative). Nothing for nothing, perhaps one measure of nothing. She continued her mystic loquacity: "O tides, lunar oboes, avenues, lawns of twilight, winds losing caste in November, haymakings, vocations manquées, expressions of animals, chances."

Jonquil colored mousselines with black spots, eyes fermented, smiles crucified, adorable umbilici, peacock aureoles, fallen carnations, inconsequent fugues. One felt reborn, reinitiate and rejuvenate, the soul expiring systematically in spirals across indubitable definitive showers, for the good of earth, understood everywhere, palp of Varuna, air omniversal, assured if one were but ready.

Salome continued insistently: "The pure state, I tell you, sectaries of the consciousness, why this convention of separations, individuals by mere etiquette, indivisible? Breathe upon the thistle-down of these sciences, as you call them, in the orient of my pole-star. Is it life to persist in putting oneself au courant with oneself, constantly to inspect oneself, and then query at each step: am I wrong? Species! Categories! and kingdoms, bah!! Nothing is lost, nothing added, it is all reclaimed in advance. There is no ticket to the confessional for the heir of the prodigies. Not expedients and expiations, but vintages of the infinite, not experimental but in fatality."

The little yellow vocalist with the black funereal spots broke the lyre over her knee, and regained her dignity. The intoxicated crowd mopped their foreheads. An embarassing silence. The hyperboreans looked at each other: "What time will they put her to bed?" But neither ventured articulation; they did not even inspect their watches. It couldn't have been later than six. The slender voice once more aroused them:

"And now, father, I wish you to send me the head of Jao Kanan, on any saucer you like. I am going upstairs. I expect it."

"But ... but ... my dear ... this ... this...." However—the hall was vigorously of the opinion that the Tiara should accomplish the will of Salome.

Emeraud glanced at the princes, who gave sign neither of approbation nor of disapprobation. The cage-birds again began shrieking. The matter was none of their business.

Decide!

The Tetrarch threw his seal to the Administrator of Death. The guests were already up, changing the conversation on their way to the evening tepidarium.

IV

With her elbows on the observatory railing, Salome, disliking popular fêtes, listened to her familiar poluphloisbious ocean. Calm evening.

Stars out in full company, eternities of zeniths of embers. Why go into exile?

Salome, milk-sister to the Via Lactea, seldom lost herself in constellations. Thanks to photo-spectrum analysis the stars could be classified as to color and magnitudes; she had commanded a set of diamonds in the proportionate sizes to adorn nocturnally her hair and her person, over mousseline of deep mourning-violet with gold dots in the surface. Stars below the sixteenth magnitude were not, were not in her world, she envisaged her twenty-four millions of subjects.

Isolated nebulous matrices, not the formed nebulæ, were her passion; she ruled out planetiform discs and sought but the unformed, perforated, tentacular. Orion's gaseous fog was the Brother Benjamin of her galaxy. But she was no more the "little" Salome, this night brought a change of relations, exorcised from her virginity of tissue she felt peer to these matrices, fecund as they in gyratory evolutions. Yet this fatal sacrifice to the cult (still happy in getting out of so discreetly) had obliged her in order to get rid of her initiator, to undertake a step (grave perhaps), perhaps homicide;—finally to assure silence, cool water to contingent people,—elixir of an hundred nights' distillation. It must serve.

Ah, well, such was her life. She was a specialty, a minute specialité.

There on a cushion among the débris of her black ebony lyre, lay Jao's head, like Orpheus' head in the old days, gleaming, encrusted with phosphorus, washed, anointed, barbered, grinning at the 24 million stars.

As soon as she had got it, Salome, inspired by the true spirit of research, had commenced the renowned experiments after decollation; of which we have heard so much. She awaited. The electric passes of her hypnotic manual brought from it nothing but inconsequential grimaces.

She had an idea, however.

She perhaps lowered her eyes, out of respect to Orion, stiffening herself to gaze upon the nebulæ of her puberties ... for ten minutes. What nights, what nights in the future! Who will have the last word about it? Choral societies, fire-crackers down there in the city.

Finally Salome shook herself, like a sensible person, reset, readjusted her fichu, took off the gray gold-spotted symbol-jewel of Orion, placed it between Jao's lips as an host, kissed the lips pityingly and hermetically, sealed them with corrosive wax (a very speedy procedure).

Then with a "Bah!" mutinous, disappointed, she seized the genial boko of the late Jao Kanan, in delicate feminine hands.

As she wished the head to land plumb in the sea without bounding upon the cliffs, she gave a good swing in turning. The fragment described a sufficient and phosphorescent parabola, a noble parabola. But unfortunately the little astronomer had terribly miscalculated her impetus, and tripping over the parapet with a cry finally human she hurtled from crag to crag, to fall, shattered, into the picturesque anfractuosities of the breakers, far from the noise of the national festival, lacerated and naked, her skull shivered, paralyzed with a vertigo, in short, gone to the bad, to suffer for nearly an hour.

She had not even the viaticum of seeing the phosphorescent star, the floating head of Jao on the water. And the heights of heaven were distant.

Thus died Salome of the Isles (of the White Esoteric Isles, in especial) less from uncultured misventure than from trying to fabricate some distinction between herself and every one else; like the rest of us.

VI

GENESIS, OR, THE FIRST BOOK IN THE BIBLE

[1]

("SUBJECT TO AUTHORITY")

The sacred author of this work, Genesis, complied with the ideas acceptable to his era; it was almost necessary; for without this condescension he would not have been understood. There remain for us merely a few reflections on the physics of those remote times. As for the theology of the book: we respect it, we believe it most firmly, we would not risk the faintest touch to its surface.

"In the beginning God created heaven and earth." That is the way they translate it, yet there is scarcely any one so ignorant as not to know that the original reads "the gods created heaven and earth"; which reading conforms to the Phœnician idea that God employed lesser divinities to untangle chaos. The Phœnicians had been long established when the Hebrews broke into some few provinces of their land. It was quite natural that these latter should have learned their language and borrowed their ideas of the cosmos.

Did the ancient Phœnician philosophers in "the time of Moses" know enough to regard the earth as a point in relation to the multitude of globes which God has placed in immensity? The very ancient and false idea that heaven was made for the earth has nearly always prevailed among ignorant peoples. It is scarcely possible that such good navigators as the Phœnicians should not have had a few decent astronomers, but the old prejudices were quite strong, and were gently handled by the author of Genesis, who wrote to teach us God's ways and not to instruct us in physics.

"The earth was all tohu bohu and void, darkness was over the face of the deep, the spirit of God was borne on the waters."

"Tohu bohu" means precisely chaos, disorder. The earth was not yet formed as it is at present. Matter existed, the divine power had only to straighten things out. The "spirit of God" is literally the "breath" or "wind" which stirred up the waters. This idea is found in fragments of the Phœnician author, Sanchoniathon. The Phœnicians, like all the other peoples of antiquity, believed matter eternal. There is not one author of all those times who ever said that one could make something of nothing. Even in the Bible there is no passage which claims that matter was made out of nothing, not but what this creation from nothing is true, but its verity was unknown to the carnal Jews.

Men have been always divided on the eternity of the world, but never on the eternity of matter.

"Gigni de nihilo nihilum, et in nihilum nil posse reverti," writes Persius, and all antiquity shared his opinion. God said, "Let there be light," and there was light, and he saw that the light was good, and he divided the light from darkness, and he called the light day and the darkness night, and this was the evening and the morning of the first day. And God also said that the firmament, etc., the second day ... saw that it was good.

Let us begin by seeing whether the bishop of Avranches Huet, Leclerc, etc., are right, against those who claim that this is a sublime piece of eloquence.

The Jewish author lumps in the light with the other objects of creation; he uses the same turn of phrase, "saw that it was good." The sublime should lift itself above the average. Light is no better treated than anything else in this passage. It was another respected opinion that light did not come from the sun. Men saw it spread through the air before sunrise and after sunset; they thought the sun served merely to reinforce it. The author of Genesis conforms to popular error: he has the sun and moon made four days after the light. It is unlikely that there was a morning and evening before the sun came into being, but the inspired author bows to the vague and stupid prejudice of his nation. It seems probable that God was not attempting to educate the Jews in philosophy or cosmogony. He could lift their spirits straight into truth, but he preferred to descend to their level. One can not repeat this answer too often.

The separation of the light from the darkness is not part of another physical theory; it seems that night and day were mixed up like two kinds of grain; and that they were sifted out of each other. It is sufficiently well established that darkness is nothing but the deprivation of light, and that there is light only in so far as our eyes receive the sensation, but no one had thought of this at that time.

The idea of the firmament is also of respectable antiquity. People imagined the skies very solid, because the same set of things always happened there. The skies circulated over our heads, they must therefore be very strong. The means of calculating how many exhalations of the earth and how many seas would be needed to keep the clouds full of water? There was then no Halley to write out the equations. There were tanks of water in heaven. These tanks were held up on a good steady dome; but one could see through the dome; it must have been made out of crystal. In order that the water could be poured over the earth there had to be doors, sluices, cataracts which could be opened, turned on. Such was the current astronomy, and one was writing for Jews; it was quite necessary to take up their silly ideas, which they had borrowed from other peoples only a little less stupid.

"God made two great lights, one to preside over the day, the other the night, and he made also the stars."

True, this shows the same continuous ignorance of nature. The Jews did not know that the moonlight is merely reflection. The author speaks of the stars as luminous points, which they look like, although they are at times suns with planets swinging about them. But holy spirit harmonized with the mind of the time. If he had said that the sun is a million times as large as the earth, and the moon fifty times smaller, no one would have understood him. They appear to be two stars of sizes not very unequal.

"God said also: let us make man in our image, let him rule over the fishes, etc."

What did the Jews mean by "in our image"? They meant, like all antiquity:

Finxit in effigiem moderantum cuncta deorum.

One can not make "images" save of bodies. No nation then imagined a bodiless god, and it is impossible to picture him as such. One might indeed say "god is nothing of anything we know," but then one would not have any idea what he is. The Jews constantly believed god corporal, as did all the rest of the nations. All the first fathers of the church also believed god corporal, until they had swallowed Plato's ideas, or rather until the lights of Christianity had grown purer.

"He created them male and female."

If God or the secondary gods created man male and female in their resemblance, it would seem that the Jews believed God and the Gods were male and female. One searches to see whether the author meant to say that man was at the start ambisextrous or if he means that God made Adam and Eve the same day. The most natural interpretation would be that god made Adam and Eve at the same time, but this is absolutely contradicted by the formation of woman from the rib, a long time after the first seven days.

"And he rested the seventh day."

The Phœnicians, Chaldeans, and Indians say that God made the world in six periods, which Zoroaster calls the six gahambars, as celebrated among Persians.

It is incontestable that all these people had a theogony long before the Jews got to Horeb and Sinai, and before they could have had writers. Several savants think it likely that the allegory of the six days is imitated from the six periods. God might have permitted great nations to have this idea before he inspired the Jews, just as he had permitted other people to discover the arts before the Jews had attained any.

"The place of delight shall be a river which waters a garden, and from it shall flow four rivers, Phison ... Gehon..., etc., Tigris, Euphrates...."

According to this version the terrestrial paradise would have contained about a third of Asia and Africa. The Euphrates and Tigris have their sources sixty miles apart in hideous mountains which do not look the least like a garden. The river which borders Ethiopia can be only the Nile, whose source is a little over a thousand miles from those of the Tigris and the Euphrates; and if Phison is the Phase, it is curious to start a Scythian river from the fount of a river of Africa. One must look further afield for the meaning of all these rivers. Every commentator makes his own Eden.

Some one has said that the Garden was like the gardens of Eden at Saana in Arabia Felix celebrated in antiquity, and that the parvenu Hebrews might have been an Arab tribe taking to themselves credit for the prettiest thing in the best canton of Arabia, as they have always taken to themselves the traditions of all the great peoples who enslaved them. But in any case they were led by the Lord.

"The Lord took man and set him in the midst of the garden, to tend it." It was all very well saying "tend it," "cultivate the garden," but it would have been very difficult for Adam to cultivate a garden 3,000 miles long. Perhaps he had helpers. It is another chance for the commentators to exercise their gifts of divination ... as they do with the rivers.

"Eat not of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil." It is difficult to think that there was a tree which taught good and evil; as there are pear trees and peach trees. One asks why God did not wish man to know good from evil. Would not the opposite wish (if one dare say so) appear more worthy of God, and much more needful to man? It seems to our poor reason that God might have ordered him to eat a good deal of this fruit, but one must submit one's reason and conclude that obedience to God is the proper course for us.

"If you eat of the fruit you shall die."

Yet Adam ate, and did not die in the least; they say he lived another nine centuries. Several "Fathers" have considered all this as an allegory. Indeed, one may say that other animals do not know that they die, but that man knows it through his reason. This reason is the tree of knowledge which makes him foresee his finish. This explanation may be more reasonable, but we do not dare to pronounce on it.

"The Lord said also: It is not good that man should Le alone, let us make him an helpmate like to him." One expects that the Lord is going to give him a woman, but first he brings up all the beasts. This may be the transposition of some copyist.

"And the name which Adam gave to each animal is its real name." An animal's real name would be one which designated all the qualifications of its species, or at least the principal traits, but this does not exist in any language. There are certain imitative words, cock and cuckoo, and alali in Greek, etc. Moreover, if Adam had known the real names and therefore the properties of the animals, he must have already eaten of the tree of knowledge; or else it would seem that God need not have forbidden him the tree, since he already knew more than the Royal Society, or the Academy.

Observe that this is the first time Adam is named in Genesis. The first man according to the Brahmins was Adimo, son of the earth. Adam and Eve mean the same thing in Phœnician, another indication that the holy spirit fell in with the received ideas.

"When Adam was asleep, etc.,... rib ... made a woman." The Lord, in the preceding chapter, had already created them male and female; why should he take a rib out of the man to make a woman already existing? We are told that the author announces in one place what he explains in another. We are told that this allegory shows woman submitted to her husband. Many people have believed on the strength of these verses that men have one rib less than women, but this is an heresy and anatomy shows us that a woman is no better provided with ribs than her husband.

"Now the serpent was the most subtle of beasts," etc., "he said to the woman," etc.

There is nowhere the least mention of the devil or a devil. All is physical. The serpent was considered not only the subtlest of all beasts by all oriental nations; he was also believed immortal. The Chaldeans had a fable about a fight between God and a serpent; it is preserved by Pherecides. Origen cites it in his sixth book against Celsus. They carried snakes in the feasts of Bacchus. The Egyptians attributed a sort of divinity to the serpent, as Eusebius tells us in his "Evangelical Preparations," book I, chapter X. In India and Arabia, and in China, the serpent was the symbol of life; the Chinese emperors before Moses wore the serpent sign on their breasts.

Eve is not surprised at the serpent's talking to her. Animals are always talking in the old stories; thus when Pilpai and Locman make animals talk no one is ever surprised.

All this tale seems physical and denuded of allegory. It even tells us the reason why the serpent who ramped before this now crawls on its belly, and why we always try to destroy it (at least so they say); precisely as we are told in all ancient metamorphoses why the crow, who was white, is now black, why the owl stays at home in the daytime, etc. But the "Fathers" have believed it an allegory manifest and respectable, and it is safest to believe them.