That is why the passenger, without knowing why, wants a ship to look like a house. He wants luxurious ball rooms sumptuously decorated with rugs and silks, which are out of place at sea but make him feel that he is in a comfortable palace rather than adrift in the middle of the ocean.

'You see, we have everything,' he says, naïvely satisfied. 'We can go to a concert or to a movie, to a library, to church, to a restaurant or a barber shop.'

He has cloaked himself in a city atmosphere, which, up to a certain point, isolates and protects him from the strange and hostile medium in which he finds himself afloat. 'Here we can almost forget that we are at sea

OUT the sea imposes itself on him in

the end. One phenomenon alone, small but fundamentally important, is motion. The perpetual, relentless, maddening movement of the boat changes our whole physical concept of the world. It is no more than a gentle swing, but it is enough to disorient us. Do what we will, we are living in a different sphere. Even slight motion is enough to show us that we have passed from a firm, terrestrial world to a watery, unstable one.

when some one said that one of the Bermudas could be seen in the distance, a hardly perceptible thickening of the horizon, we rushed anxiously to the rail. Even the invalids stirred. Land! That little dark blot consoles and moves us; merely because it is land, it is the native country of every man on the ship.

N

EVERTHELESS, this new waterworld slowly takes possession of the fatherless biped upon it. It captivates him, gives him the joy of dominating a new element, different from his own. It means a separation from one's past life. How far away seems the land we have left behind! It seems impossible that we were there only a week ago. Have you noticed how, on a long voyage, space takes the place of time? When we have sailed thousands of miles, even if it takes only a few days, it seems as if many months had passed. Psychologically, space and time are the same.

In mid-ocean, the traveler recalls his homeland as a fond but distant memory. He thinks tenderly of it, but he has left far behind him the pettiness, the compromises, the difficulties of everyday life. So would the soul, perhaps, regard at death the body that it leaves.

gait, you do not need to be told that he will automatically make his way down to the wharves. ¡Esa nostalgia del mar!

I

REMEMBER Don Antonio Roldós, a well-known and lovable old captain of the merchant marine who, in spite of his seventy-odd years, stuck fast to the bridge of a transatlantic liner. He wouldn't hear of retirement. At last the owners, perhaps in the interests of his own health, or because they realized that the guidance of a ship should not be trusted to the worn though expert hand of extreme age, obliged Don Antonio to go into honorable retirement. But do you think he could be happy in a house in old Barcelona, on the outskirts of Santa Maria del Mar, or even in his native village on the east coast where he could watch the waves of the Mediterranean from a terrace of palm trees, and gossip of sailing days with old sea-dogs? No. When Don Antonio said good-bye to his ship it was the first time he had ever left it. He came away from the dock, bent, depressed, his hands clasped behind his back. And they say his boat had scarcely reached the Canaries on its outward voyage when he died.

we call mares is called seasickness. This is indeed an accurate and pointed name for this type of maladjustment. Worry and irritation are part of it; but seasickness is also the sea's revenge on the earth-bound creature who has entered its kingdom.

For the first few days a liner is sometimes like a sanatorium with a well-to-do clientele. If the sea has been rough, the patients line the deck in their steamer chairs and talk about their ills, offering each other medical advice. They are obsessed with thoughts of the only cure, land; they lie back in their chairs, their eyes either shut or fixed on the sky, knowing that it is best not to look at the

We call it the open sea, and since ancient times men have connected liberty with it. Old tyrannies and slaveries were more likely to be found in the interior of likely to be found in the interior of continents; the coast is always progressive. Sailors, though religious, are inclined to be liberal; in the nineteenth century many of them carried scapularies of the Virgin, in spite of the fact that they were Masons. Religious liberals, too, are likely to be found among those who live in constant physical danger. On the other hand, those who surround themselves, their money, and their position with safeguards are, at heart, sceptical and reactionary.

undulating enemy makes them worse.

SEASI

EASICKNESS has its humorous side, like all phenomena of maladjustment, but it is nevertheless profoundly significant. It expresses the revulsion caused in man, a land animal, by the restless movement and the infinite distances of this liquid world that he was not born for; a revulsion which turns to nausea and anguish.

Man needs boundaries. Infinity exhausts him; he feels his soul leaking out like the aroma from an uncovered perfume jar. He needs variety about him, the minute and friendly details of his familiar landscape at home. That is why

ON man has conquered the sea,

however,

by it. Just as the passengers in the middle of the Atlantic unconsciously seek land, retired mariners are forever seeking the sea. While he is actually at seeking the sea. While he is actually at sea, perhaps, every sailor longs to return to land. Life on shipboard for the sailor is not luxurious; what seems to be adventure is only monotony; what seems romantic is all order, regularity, discipline. To us a sailor has the aura of a Don Juan; in reality he sighs for a bourgeois home, conventional happiness, and a house full of children. But finally he does go back to shore; and when you see him swing out of his house in some coast town, with his queer balancing

AF

FTER the conquest of water comes mastery of the ether and its invisible waves. To the officers' table in our ship's dining room came a boy to call the doctor. He was sent by the captain, who had remained in his cabin.

The doctor returned presently and told a simple but moving tale. A freighter, which was crossing our course many miles away, had asked him to prescribe for a seaman who had a high fever. The symptoms came by radio and the prescription was given by the same means, while the two ships sailed on, lost to each other on the ocean. The next day there was another consultation. The fever was rising; could it be pneumonia? Our doctor, from a distance, continued to advise the unseen patient. The third day the last wireless message came, a few words of gratitude and farewell. The patient was better . . . good-bye! And the two ships ploughed on their courses through the limitless ocean.

Not limitless, after all; for ours is a small world. As our ship floats on the dark water under the stars, the earth moves also in an incomparably larger sea. And perhaps the Universe itself with its millions of stars may be simply a drop in another vast ocean which is beyond comparison in size with this; another sea whose shores are beyond our power to conceive, although at times, as in the silence of this clear night at sea, we may sense and desire them.

WHAT HAVE THE MOVIES DONE TO PARIS THEATRES?

T

HERE are two kinds of theatres in Paris: the so-called théâtres d'avantgarde, the 'highbrow' theatres, which demand a certain amount of thought on the part of their audiences, and the théâtres des boulevards, whose patrons are likely to be seeking a more painless method of passing the hours between supper and bed time. The directors of the first type talk about art, and pretend not to think of the public at all. The directors of the second type tend to talk of the public to the exclusion of all else. One admittedly gives the public what it expects; the other tries to surprise the public with something new. The aim of both, not unnaturally, is to make money.

The curious phase of this situation is that in Paris to-day the highbrow theatres are actually finding it easier to make a living than the more 'popular' houses. It was not thus in elder days, when the old Théâtre de l'Oeuvre, heir to the famous Théâtre-Libre d'Antoine, was giving the first, ill-attended Parisian performances of Strindberg and Ibsen. But now Jean Giraudoux, with a graceful play called Siegfried that all the wiseacres of the theatre doomed to failure after seeing it in dress rehearsal - it has little action, long poetic speeches, few dramatic effects' has gained the fullest. success of the past season. Siegfried is Giraudoux's own dramatization of his novel Siegfried et le Limousin: the story of a wounded French soldier picked up on the field of battle by the Germans, naked, unidentifiable, his memory gone; then brought up as a German, his true nationality remaining unknown until he reaches the high office of President of the German Republic. It played to packed

brow' French theatre is due to the increased popularity of the moving picture. Fifteen years ago, Bourdet argues, those who were bored with looking at each other across their library tables during long evenings went to the theatre for relief; now they go to the movies. Thus a process of natural selection has eliminated the less cultured from theatre audiences. While there are still plenty of people who buy orchestra seats 'because we ought to see things that everyone is discussing,' or 'because it's time we went somewhere,' in general the director can count on an audience of a much higher average level of intelligence than heretofore, and can afford to aim his plays above the heads of the mass. Many of the people in his audience, too, are driven to him because they dislike the sound and fury displayed in the movies; he can please them by giving them plays which are as far removed from the motion picture in technique as possible, plays which avoid melodrama and forced dramatic effects. In a word, he can make a financial success as Director Louis Jouvet did when he produced Siegfried

of plays that give the audience something to reflect upon and that regard ideas and poetry as acceptable substitutes for action.

The Frenchman has always been rather pessimistic about his theatre. That,' said the dramatist Alfred Capus before the war, 'is the mark of a true theatrelover.' M. Bourdet considers the success of Siegfried as the first optimistic sign in many years; and, although he himself is one of those who purvey to the 'boulevard' theatres rather than to the intellectuals, he is not too proud to give the humble movie credit for it.

POET-PROFESSORS IN GERMANY

versity of Michigan brought him to the campus at Ann Arbor, and he was replaced at Amherst by Mr. David Morton. Later, Vassar added Mr. Edward Davison for a short time to its faculty, and the University of Illinois also is now said to be eager to secure a poet-inresidence.

The same plan is proposed for German universities by the poet Will Vesper, who publishes an article on the subject in the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung. 'Let us open the universities to the poets,' he says. 'Let us establish a special chair at every German university from which a German poet of distinction and importance may address youth. It is all very well to leave philological research in the hands of the professed specialist. But beside him let us place the poet, who, in his own, quite different way, will nourish the minds of the younger generation, will guide them, will set their imaginations aflame. We shall thus have fresh blood and a new enthusiasm where it counts most, in the universities.'

Herr Vesper, who apparently writes without any knowledge of American experiments of the sort he advocates for German universities, admits certain difficulties in his plan, chief of which is the conservatism of the Teutonic professor. But he holds that the advantages of his scheme are so great that they justify the trouble of overcoming initial difficulties. And a poet himself - he adds a rather plaintive practical note: 'It would provide a good many poets with a living.' THE LONDON APHRODITE IN NEW YORK

THE first number of The London

Aphrodite, edited by Jack Lindsay and P. R. Stephenson, the announcement of which was noticed in the October number of THE LIVING AGE, has now reached

summer. One might explain such a triumph as a succés de snobisme, were it not for the fact that in Paris such a success seldom lasts more than two or three weeks. What is the real explanation? Edouard Bourdet, author of The Captive, which Helen Menken played in New York two years ago until stopped by the harried city authorities, suggests a solution. He thinks the success of the 'high

and universities a few years ago hit upon an excellent plan for making literature a living and vivid thing to their students. They decided to add poets to their faculties. Mr. Robert Frost went to Amherst College for a part of the year, doing a little teaching, but spending most of his time writing verse, talking about it with the college boys, and occasionally encouraging the more talented among them to do likewise. Presently the Uni

magazine plans to issue only six numbers and then cease publication. It contains, in addition to a picture of the lady after whom the new venture is named (a reproduction of a painting by Lionel Ellis), poetry by Robert Nichols and others, a story by Liam O'Flaherty, and an essay by Jack Lindsay. In twenty pages or so, Mr. Lindsay rushes through the history of human thought, explaining why everyone is wrong except Beethoven

and Nietzsche and why even they are misunderstood-except by himself. He pins a neat label or obituary on each of our contemporaries, gives a cheer for something he calls the Third Kingdom, and signs off. The reader, a little ashamed of being bewildered, wishes he would start over again and not go so fast.

The trouble is that Mr. Lindsay has ideas and theories which give him a special outlook, a pair of queerly colored spectacles through which he can examine human activity. He puts them on, looks at things, and begins to talk. Without a key in the nature of a description of the spectacles, one is puzzled. Being puzzled, one is also interested.

Outrageous as it may seem to both of them, Mr. Jack Lindsay and Mr. Wyndham Lewis have a good bit in common. Each makes a mighty effort to lift himself by his bootstraps out of present time and particular place to some intellectual lookout from which absolutely everything can be seen from the outside. Thus each writes essays which are nearly always stimulating, even when they are not easily intelligible.

THE

MR. WYNDHAM LEWIS

HE followers of Wyndham Lewis are waiting with interest for his next move, since his moves in the past few years have been so many and so various that one wonders how it is done. Since 1926 he has published a work of Shakespeare on criticism called The Lion and the Fox, a long sociological study called The Art of Being Ruled, and a sequel to the latter called Time and Western Man. In January 1927, he issued the first number of a periodical, The Enemy, with the promise of more, not at regular intervals, but whenever he got ready. The second number was dated September 1927. Both numbers were written almost entirely by Mr. Lewis himself. Booksellers seem convinced that a third number is due soon, but no one seems to know

Courtesy Harcourt, Brace & Company WYNDHAM LEWIS

Courtesy Coward-McCann

AND D. B. WYNDHAM LEWIS

Two PORTRAITS offered in evidence that these much-confused English writers are distinctly separate persons.

published a book of short stories and essays called The Wild Body, and the first part of a massive work of fiction, Childermass, at least two more parts of which are to follow within a few months. It would seem that anyone who says so much must have something to say. No résumé of what this something may be, can be attempted here; we can only suggest that most of this flow of writing is criticism of this age and of leaders of contemporary thought, and that much of it is inspired by the quotation from Plutarch which appears at the beginning of each number of The Enemy, 'A man of understanding is to benefit by his enemies....

ONE

NE cannot discuss Wyndham Lewis of The

about his namesake, D. B. Wyndham Lewis, biographer of François Villon. Lewis, biographer of François Villon. The confusion resulting from the appearance of two men with such similar names before the public eye at the same time is perhaps unprecedented in English literature. It is as if Hudibras had been published six months before The Way of All Flesh. It is rumored that even so great an institution as the New York Public Library still insists that both men are the same individual. We are assured by persons who have seen them both in the same room that this theory has no basis. The portraits reproduced herewith are further evidence in the case.

The difference between the two Wyndham Lewises is made perfectly clear in the first number of The Enemy, in which the gentleman without the initials published a short essay entitled What's in a Namesake. This essay is as nice a piece of deliberate nastiness as this century has seen and is heartily to be recommended to those who like 'debunked' literary criticism.

FRENCHMEN JUDGE THE MIDDLE-AGED LITERARY GENERATION

CA

ANDIDE (Paris) has been conducting an inquiry among writers of 'the younger generation of yesterday.' Each author of the group of men who began to be active in the ten years after the war was asked these questions: 'What will be the work accomplished by your generation? Who among you will make the most significant contribution? Name the six who you think are most likely to be elected to the Academy.'

There are as many opinions as there are answers. One says, it is too early to tell, great works are still to come from these men; another says, it is all over, they have done their best and have nothing more to offer. One says, everyone is talking and thinking too much about the Academy; young men should do their best and pay no attention to the Immortals until the time comes to be elected or left out. Another says, the Academy is a group of dry old men whose predecessors failed to choose such writers as Stendhal, Balzac, Dumas, Maupassant, Flaubert, Alphonse Daudet, Zola, and others; it is insulting to say to anyone, 'Without doubt, Monsieur, you will one day enter the Academy.'

M. André Maurois, who is mentioned in the replies as frequently as anyone, answers, 'I do not think that one can find, at this period, and certainly not among the writers of my generation — those past forty- a school or welldefined group. There is nothing that can be compared to the romantic group which worked between 1825 and 1830. It is true that a critic who, for reasons of convenience, wished to make some classification of our present-day French literature could succeed in doing so. He would distinguish, for example, the group of the Nouvelle Revue Française, where he would have to include men as different as Jean Schumberger, Roger Martin du Gard and André Gide; perhaps he would find also a Carco-Dorgelès-Benoit group. But as soon as one goes a little deeper and studies the essence of the art of each of these writers, he sees that they are first of all individuals; they are united by no common doctrine.

'Ought we to regret this individualism?

I think not. Special movements and schools come into being when they are necessary; they are usually a reaction against some other worn-out school or type of literature. Such a movement means a combat of some sort, and everyone knows that to fight, it is well to unite. At this moment, however, authors are free; it is possible for them to express themselves in the elliptical and brilliant style of a Morand or in the sober and classical style of a Mauriac. Let us take advantage of our right to be ourselves.'

M. Maurois does not undertake to prophesy about the Academy; but his own name figures frequently in the lists suggested by others.

A MAN OF MANY LANGUAGES

Toa

O a man constantly before the public eye, one of the most annoying things in life is the absolute refusal of journalists and others through whom the public looks at him to believe what he says. An interesting example is Joseph Conrad. "The only thing that grieves me and makes me dance with rage,' he himself said in a letter to Hugh Walpole, 'is the cropping up of the legend . . . about my hesitation between English and French as a writing language. For it is absurd. . . . Is it thinkable that anybody possessed of some effective inspiration should contemplate for a moment such a frantic thing as translating it into another tongue?' Yet discussion of Conrad's language problem continues unabated.

In two articles recently published in Les Nouvelles Littéraires, for instance, M. André Levinson discusses the influence of Conrad's Polish blood and French education on his literary style. Conrad knew French thoroughly; French phrases cropped up naturally and unaffectedly in his conversation and in his familiar letters. His literary theories and methods were influenced strongly by such French masters as Flaubert and Maupassant. In his book about Conrad, published in 1924, Ford Maddox Ford says, 'It has to be remembered that he had to wrestle, not with one language only, but with three. Or, say with two and the ghost of one.' The ghost was Polish, which apparently did not interfere greatly in his struggles to write English. But while Conrad's own word can be accepted that he did not actually compose anything in French and translate it into English, it must have been true that his intimate knowledge of French often made composition in English very difficult. No one can read his letters without realizing that, for Conrad, writing anything in any language was a 'frantic' and difficult labor.

LETTERS AND THE ARTS

M. Levinson, in considering him as a Pole, points out that English critics have been inclined to minimize the Polish element in Conrad's character. After all, Conrad was born and brought up in Poland, and although he exiled himself voluntarily he never lost his interest in his country. As a member of a family which suffered terribly from Russian persecution, he hated Russia and preferred to think of Poland as a nation of Western Europe. So, while he never forgot he was a Pole, he did not want to emphasize the Slavic element in his nature. phasize the Slavic element in his nature. Here we have an even more subtle and difficult matter than the question of French influence. The real extent and character of the Polish influence on Conrad, the English novelist, needs study and clarification from some one capable of the task. M. Levinson recommends G. Jean Aubry, the editor of the Life and Letters of Joseph Conrad.

INTERVIEWING AN ACADEMICIAN

ABEL

BEL HERMANT of the French Academy, who twenty years ago was satirizing Americans in Les Transatlantiques while Paul Bourget was writing his own serious study of this country in Outremer, dislikes interviewers. Recently he was spending a vacation at Oxford, studying a little, writing a little, but mostly wandering along the peaceful riverside. It was the last place in the world to which one would expect a gentleman of the press to penetrate, but one quiet afternoon the French Academician spied a bright young Englishman, with the disarming smile of an interviewer, stalking toward him among the trees. The bright young man came to a halt.

'Allow me to ask you a question,' he said.

'Terribly sorry,' protested M. Hermant, but I don't answer questions. There are two reasons: one is altruistic, the other selfish. The first is that I am modest, and can't think in front of strangers. The second is less noble. I follow the example of M. Jourdain in the Bourgeois Gentilhomme, who "knew good goods when he saw it, gathered it from everywhere, and gave it to his friends for money." He didn't give something for nothing. I am like that.'

209

What the interviewer wanted, it developed, was an opinion on a rather academic question: Did M. Hermant believe that literature and art were the productions of an individual, bearing no relation to broader currents of social life; and did M. Hermant believe that there was such a thing as an art and a literature which expressed the aspirations of the working classes?

In answering, the famous Frenchman very neatly proved the falsity of his two objections to being interviewed. He showed himself fully able to think in front of strangers; for he promptly answered his interlocutor's questions with telling arguments to the general effect that it was quite possible for a writer to be an individualist and at the same time be influenced by the spirit of his time.

As for not giving something for nothing, after the young man had departed, Hermant proceeded to write up the interview himself and send it to the Parisian newspaper, Le Figaro, which bought it instantly, and paid well for it. THE PROGRESS OF THE FILMS

A

FILM has been shown in the moving picture theatres of London which ought to be brought to the attention of producers in this country. It is made up of extracts from the news reels of twenty or more years ago. The London Mercury, where we find it commented on, says that, though not very well done, it is nevertheless interesting and entertaining.

We do not often stop to think that the world has changed considerably in the short time during which the moving picture has been in commercial use. The film shown in London contained a glimpse of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, of King Edward VII shooting pheasants at Sandringham, of the London streets filled with horse-drawn vehicles and people in astonishing clothes. Thus we are beginning to taste one of the benefits (or ought we to say compensations?) of the moving picture. We can see the events of the past, and of a past far enough away to be interesting.

In Paris a few years ago a moving picture palace delighted its audience by

made in 1909 as a deadly serious drama. The plot was idiotic and the acting bad, bad enough to be very funny. The progress in technical matters of photography, enormous as it has been, is not enough to account for the difference which even the most cynical would find between this effort of 1909 and an ordinary production of the present day. In regular com