ingly romantic myth, and who in consequence stay always real and always free of finding life monotonous.

Now, it is an ever-present reminder of our own impermanence to note that no human being stays real. In private annals a species of familiary canonization sets in with each fresh advent of the undertaker; no sooner, indeed, do our moribund lie abed than we begin even in our thoughts to lie like their epitaphs; and all of us by ordinary endure the pangs of burying ineffably more admirable kin than we ever possessed. Nor does much more of honesty go to the making of those national chronicles which Mr. Henry Ford, with a candor perhaps really incurable by anything short of four years in the White House, has described as "bunk". In history one finds everywhere an impatient desire to simplify the tortuous and complex human being into a sort of forthright shorthand. Alexander was ambitious, Machiavelli cunning, Henry the Eighth bloodthirsty, and George Washington congenitally incapable of prevarications. That is all there was to them, so far as they concern the average man; and thus does history imply its shapers with the most curt of symbols, somewhat as an astronomer jots down a four's first cousin to indicate the huge planet Jupiter and compresses the sun that nourishes him into a proof corrector's period. Always in this fashion does history work over its best rôles into allegories about the Lord Desire of Vain Glory and Mr. By-ends, about Giant Bloody-man and Mr. Truthful; and rubs away the humanness of each dead personage resistlessly, as if resolute to get rid in any event of most of him; and pares him of all traits except the one which men, whether through national pride or the moralist's large placid preference for lying, have elected to see here

uncarnate.

Quite otherwise fare those luckier beings who began existence with the advantage of being incorporeal, and hence have not any dread of time's attrition. The longer that time handles them, the more does he

enrich their experience and personalities. It was, for example, Euripides, they say, who first popularized this myth of Andromeda: and, for all that the dramas he wrote about her are long lost, it were timewasting, of a dullness happily restricted to insane asylums and the assembly halls of democratic legislation, here to deliberate whether Andromeda or Euripides is to us the more important and vivid person, in a world wherein Euripides survives as a quadrisyllable and wherein Andromeda's living does, actually, go on. You have but, for that matter, to compare Andromeda with the overlords of the milieu in which her fame was born, with the thin shadows that in pedants' thinking, and in the even gloomier minds of schoolboys upon the eve of an "examination", troop wanly to prefigure Pericles and Cleon and Nicias, to see what a leg up toward immortality is the omission of any material existence. These estimable patriots endure at best as wraiths and nuisances, in a world wherein Andromeda's living does, actually, go on. It is not merely that she continues to beguile the poet and painter, but that each year she demonstrably does have quite fresh adventures. Only yesterday Mr. C. C. Martindale attested as much, in his engaging and far too little famous book, "The Goddess of Ghosts"; as now does Mr. Nichols in "Fantastica". . . For it is, through whatever human illogic, yesterday's fictitious and most clamantly impossible characters who remain to us familiar and actual persons, the while that we remember yesterday's flesh-andblood notables as bodiless traits.

So it comes about that only these intrepid men and flawless women and other monsters who were born cleanlily of imagination, instead of the normal messiness, and were born as personages in whom, rather frequently without knowing why, the artist perceives a satisfying large symbolism,-that these alone bid fair to live and thrive until the proverbial crack of doom. Their living does, actually, go on, because each generation of artists is irre

sistibly impelled to provide them with quite fresh adventures. . . . And I am sure I do not know why. I merely know that these favored romantic myths, to whom at outset I directed the stiletto glance of envy, remain the only persons existent who may with any firm confidence look forward to a colorful and always varying future, the only persons who stay human in defiance of death and time and the even more dreadful theories of "new schools of poetry"; and who keep, too, undimmed the human trait of figuring with a difference in the eye of each beholder. For all the really fine romantic myths have this in common. As Mr. Nichols says, in approaching a continuation of the story of Prometheus one may behold in the Fire-Bringer, just as one's taste elects, a prefiguring of Satan or of Christ or of Mr. Thomas Alva Edison.

And this I guess to be-perhaps the pith of such myths' durability, that the felt symbolism admits of no quite final interpreting. Each generation finds for Andromeda a different monster and another rescuer; continuously romance and irony contrive new riddles for the Sphinx; whereas the Wandering Jew-besides the tour de force of having enabled General Lew Wallace to write, a book which voiced more fatuous blather than "Ben Hur"has had put to his account, at various times, the embodying of such disparate pests as thunderstorms and gypsies and Asiatic cholera.

Well! here just for one moment to recur to the volume I am supposed to be criticizing, here is Mr. Nichols with remarkably contemporaneous parables about the Sphinx and her latest lover, about Andromeda and Perseus, about the Wandering Jew and Judas Iscariot. They are, to my finding, very wise and lovely tales, they are, I hope, the graduating theses of a maturing poet who has become sufficiently sophisticated to put aside the, after all, rather childish business of verse making. But the really important feature, in any event, is that he adds to the unending imbroglios of these actually vital persons, and

guides with competence and a fine spirit the immortal travellers. Nor is this any trivial praise when you recall that, earlier, they have been served by such efficient if slightly incongruous couriers as Charles Kingsley and Euripides and Eugène Sue, as Matthew of Paris and Flaubert and Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Reverend George Croly.

JAMES BRANCH CABELL

Brandes and Croce

MAIN CURRENTS IN NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE, by Georg Brandes. New York: Boni Liveright.

POESIA E NON POESIA, by Benedetto Croce. Bari: Laterza.

THIS latest addition to the canon of Croce's works, "Poetry and Non-Poetry", reached me just as I had been looking through the new edition of Brandes's "Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature". The title by no means suggested what the books turned out to be, namely, a fragment of a study which might have been an Italian counterpart to the great Danish work. In his preface Croce explains that he had intended to "re-examine the literature of the Nineteenth Century", in order to bring out "conclusions still implicit in the writings of those who have discussed it, or to demonstrate other conclusions more exactly, or to confute current prejudices, or to propose some new judgments, but especially to keep in mind pure literature which-in spite of the ease with which the fact is forgotten by those whose business is criticism-is the real concern of criticism and literary history". Apparently these essays are all we shall see of this projected work, for other studies have made the realization of Croce's original plan impossible. As it stands, however, the book consists of a series of provocative chapters on such figures as Alfieri, Schiller, Scott, Stendhal, Manzoni, Balzac, Heine, George Sand, Musset, Baudelaire, Ibsen, Flaubert and Maupassant. Brandes stopped his survey

at the middle of the century, but within the limits where their work coincides both he and Croce necessarily discuss the same writers.

In the eyes of both their admirers and their detractors Brandes and Croce usually pass for the opposite extremes of critical method and attitude. The Italian stands for pure aestheticism; the Danish critic is accused of propaganda. Here in America, it is true, Croce is denounced as a subtle immoralist, but his crimes are more elusive than those with which the political radical, Georg Brandes, has been charged. "Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature" has been described by orthodox thinkers as an elaborate, prolonged and utterly ruthless indictment of all the ideals and conventions of bourgeois society. Croce is credited with being solely concerned about the intrinsic artistic qualities of the works he has studied.

At this stage, if life were not so short, one might begin again the eternal debate as to which of these two attitudes is right in a critic of literature. I prefer to point out the rather more interesting fact that, whatever the aesthetic theories of a critic may be, it is his practice that counts. In this case, as in most others, it would be difficult to show just wherein Croce's final estimate differs, in most cases, from that of Brandes, or wherein their judgments were actually governed by their politics. Just as some English and American novelists discourse airily and metaphysically about style, but produce works of their own remarkably similar to dozens of others, and quite unlike their theoretical ideal, so Messrs. Croce and Brandes agree in their judgments so often that I am left colder than ever by the disputes of the schools they are supposed to represent.

Their treatments of Walter Scott and George Sand supply two good examples of this similarity of judgment. Brandes is supposed to have belauded George because she was in revolt against the conventions of her sex. It is true, he gives a more or less sympathetic account of her

ideas on the subject of love and marriage, while Croce does not, but both critics see the artistic worthlessness of that part of her work and agree that the only books which deserve to survive are the simple idyllic studies of peasant life. So far as Scott is concerned, Brandes sums him up by saying that he is the kind of author whom "every adult has read and no grownup person can read". Croce also describes his work as unreadable, but ends with an appeal for mercy, on the ground that a writer who delighted our parents and grandparents "does not deserve harsh treatment from their children and grandchildren". Oh, aestheticism, where is thy sting? Oh, propaganda, where is thy victory? A critic must still be judged by his appreciation of specific works, and not by the theories which he evolves in vacuo. Whether in their treatment of the illustrious dead or of their contemporaries, neither Brandes nor Croce diverges from the all-too-human principle of personal taste and emotion, for that, in the last analysis, is the only basis of literary criticism. It then becomes a question of the quality of the mind employed, and this can never be disguised by aesthetic faith or propagandist good works.

ERNEST BOYD

Brazil from Within

PATRIA NOVA, by Mario Pinto Serva. S. Paulo: Companhia Melhoramentos de S. Paulo.

AND it comes to pass that after Brazil has been for one hundred years an independent nation, and for thirty-three years a republic, created in the image of its populace, Senhor Mario Pinto Serva looks upon it and finds it not good. Wherefore, in this "New Fatherland", he seeks to refashion a Patria nearer to his heart's desire, using his pen now as a pin to prick bubbles, and now as a sword to slash through shams. The President's in his chair and all's wrong with Brazil; the People, truly, does not yet exist; the Church is a perpetuator of illiteracy; the Intellectuals are lost in

vaporous meditations; the one hope is the School, but where is it?

Senhor Pinto Serva is the modern man of action. "It's not," he says, "with the intellectualism of the Academy of Letters that we are going to build the Brazil of tomorrow. We need an intellectualism that shall intensify our potential energies, which today are absolutely rachetic." In the meantime, help must come from outside. There are the Germans, with their genius for scientific organization; there are the North Americans, "plethoric with capital and activity"; there are the English, eager to win foreign markets. Above all, for the vitalization of the thin national blood stream, there are the immigrants; for Brazil is destined, in the Twentieth Century, to be for Europe that meltingpot which the United States was in the Nineteenth. And yet, how ill-suited to the task! "The parliament is a vast caravansary, where the most curious types of prattler forgather from the different States, for the purpose of gossiping, putting deals through and boasting about the sprees they were on the night before. As for their speeches, even the stenographers to which they're dictated hardly lend ear." There is no free press; the cultured class is so small that the greatest literary success does not mean a sale of ten thousand copies; there is no political morality; there are really no parties; there are no political ideas.

For balm we must look to the State of Sao Paulo; here lies the sole guarantee of the future. Were it not for Sao Paulo, Brazil would never have been free in the first place; were it not for that State, the struggle today would be hopeless. The Paulist genius has been developed by accidents of history and of position; it has been nurtured by immigration, by a determined struggle with that hinterland which Euclydes da Cunha has so vividly described in his "Sertões",-one of the outstanding books in the nation's letters.

"Like the Atlas of ancient mythology, Sao Paulo bears upon its shoulders the burden of the nation."

If Sao Paulo is the symbol of that energy, that realistic facing of fact which Pinto Serva exalts as the salvation of Brazil, the national danger is incarnated in the Brazilian Academy of Letters in Rio de Janeiro. Too much poetry; not enough prose. Too much mooning; not enough roads and schools. From France come boatloads of novels that deal with the thousand and one varieties of adultery, awakening in youthful Latin bosoms precocious desires that lead to unmentionable consequences. Brazilian youth, the Brazilian "intellectuals", form a legion of poetasters and novelasters who have become incapacitated for a life of action; "in Brazil there are persons who, simply because they have learned grammar, and nothing else, consider themselves finished writers, preeminent intellectuals superior to the society in which they live." Worse still; behind a passionate cultivation of the art of expression lies an encyclopedic ignorance; the result is a verbal materialism, a mere business of manufacturing phrases, a gymnastics of the word. "This windy ignorance has its chief exponent in the numerous academies of letters. There is, in Rio, the Brazilian Academy of Letters, which represents the enthronement of gossiping vacuity, an exposition of empty loquacity, a cenacle of verbal uselessness, a curia of declamatory futility, a congress of frivolous dilletantism. . . . As such, the Brazilian Academy of Letters is the exact exponent of the Brazilian mentality, in which the superior function of thought and ratiocination has been replaced by mere tittle-tattle and logomachy. . . . The future greatness of Brazil will depend entirely upon a vast, complicated series of unremitting efforts; the Brazilian Academy is incapable of the most insignificant initiative for the good of the country."

ISAAC GOLDBERG

HARRY E. BARNES is professor of historical sociology at Smith College and ad interim professor of economics and sociology at Amherst.

ERNEST BOYD is the well-known Irish critic, author of "The Irish Literary Renaissance" and other books. He came to America in 1914 and is now living in New York.

SAMUEL C. CHEW, author of the Conversation with George Moore, is a Ph.D. of the Johns Hopkins and Professor of English Literature at Bryn Mawr. He is the author of important studies of Byron and Thomas Hardy.

LEONARD L. CLINE is a member of the staff of the New York World and has done police reporting in many cities.

L. M. HUSSEY is a chemist and pharmacologist, and has had practical experience in the isolation of active physiological substances.

GEORGE PHILIP KRAPP, Ph.D. (Johns Hopkins), is professor of English in Columbia University. He is editor of the Oxford English Series and the author of half a dozen works on English.

C. GRANT LA FARGE is the well-known architect. His firm has designed many important buildings in New York and elsewhere.

JOHN MCCLURE is the author of "Airs and Ballads", a book of poems. He is one of the editors of the Double-Dealer in New Orleans. He was born in Oklahoma.

"MILES MARTINDALE" is the nom de plume of a man who, because of his official position, cannot sign his article on the results of the Disarmament Treaty. He has devoted a lifetime to the study of the matters he dis

cusses.

MARGARET MÜNSTERBERG is the daughter of the late Dr. Hugo Münsterberg and was brought up in the famous Harvard circle of which she writes in her paper on George Santayana.

JAMES ONEAL (The Communist Hoax") is the author of "The Workers in American History" and was on the staff of the New York Call.

JOHN W. OWENS covers national politics for the Baltimore Sun and is a frequent contributor to the New Republic.

ISAAC R. PENNYPACKER has devoted many

years to a study of the Civil War, and is a well-known authority upon its military history. He has written books upon the Valley and Gettysburg campaigns, and a life of

General Meade.

WOODBRIDGE RILEY, PH.D. (Yale), is professor of philosophy at Vassar. He has specialized in the history of American thought, and was the author of the suppressed chapter on Mormonism and Christian Science in the

Cambridge History of American Literature.

X- conceals the name of an American army officer.