THREE MASTER CRAFTSMEN AND SOME UPHOLSTERY

Henry Brinsley

IN "MR. FAUST," a dramatic poem in five acts, Mr. Arthur Davison Ficke has given evidence of a poetic gift which in nobility of thought and eloquence of utterance surpasses that of any" of his American contemporaries with, perhaps, the single exception of Mr. George Santayana.

The hero, Mr. John Faust, is not merely our old friend dressed in modern evening clothes. The very fibre of his mind and heart is that of men about us, men of the finer breed, who, despite every attribute of success, are cursed with a clear-visioned distaste for the shams about them, intellectual and spiritual, and are driven by an inner exigency to seek, often ineffectually, some nobler solution of the purpose of life than those offered by the outworn, ready-made formulas of the past.

Here we have, then, our modern Mr. John Faust, a clean, cultivated, well-bred clubman of thirty, to whom, in a moment of utter weariness of life, enters Mr. Nicholas Satan. Over a Scotch-and-soda Satan offers several old solutions: a richer sensual gratification than Faust has hitherto enjoyed, a fuller measure of worldly power. Faust, unmoved, taunts Satan with being jejune, old-fashioned, of an ingeniousness gravely overrated. Neither of these earthly paradises is the one Faust seeks: his soul's satisfaction, while it must be here and now, of this earth, must yet be one that shall appeal to all that is noblest in him, otherwise real life, as he knows it, can have no meaning. Satan, stung to a subtler depth, makes a graver bargain,—he will find Faust such a paradise, or, failing, will be his abject slave. And with the second act the search begins. The scene shifts to the Orient, where Faust's temptation is one that comes to a few rare occidental minds—to forget self completely, to transcend it in the vast calm of mysticism. So great is the first reaction of the ruffled soul from the crass, noisy mechanism of occidental life, that Faust almost succumbs to the appeal of Nirvana. But he resists; and, in the third act, in a great cathedral, comes the second offer: to abandon self, in the utter surrender to the Catholic faith.

So far the appeal of the poem should be a wide one, for many ardent, fine-grained youths of to-day have trod this same thorny path. And if the measure of a work of art can be gauged by the adequacy with which it expresses a nobler phase of the spiritual struggles, hopes, and failures of its generation, and mirrors the ideal, Mr. Ficke's poem has in it many elements of "greatness." The, to me, tentative solution in the fourth act, and the final eloquently beautiful catastrophe of the fifth, I have not space to treat of. I can but urge upon the reader a consideration of the high quality of Mr. Ficke's blank verse, almost constantly colloquial as befits his characters yet never failing in essential dignity, varied and felicitous, fluent, and exquisitely beautiful.

MR. GALSWORTHY is also a most skilful craftsman. He has at his best a quiet distinction of manner that has not been apparent in the English novel so notably since Mr. Hardy's great period. Mr. Galsworthy has a fondness for picking out the fine flower of intensely English types, insular types, a predilection that increasingly restricts the range of his appeal, which is not always to our common humanity but to our instinct for specialization, if we have it. In "The Dark Flower" the central figure, Mark Lennan, a young Oxonian, is a singularly visionary youth, conscious of self to a degree that with us would seem slightly fantastic, physically strong, spiritually delicate, a sensitive lover of landscape and all animals. An older woman, his tutor's wife, falls in love with him: the dark flower of passion, as yet but a bud in him, swells but a little under the warmth of her regard. She withdraws, baffled. In a few years a younger woman, again another man's wife, falls in love with him. The flower unfurls slowly and its fragrance reaches him only when, through a wholly fortuitous catastrophe, the woman is lost to him. He marries, dispassionately, a girl friend of his childhood, and not till he is in his middle forties and a successful sculptor does the madness of the odor of the flower, now recognized under its true name, enter his blood. A young girl has fallen in love with him and thrown herself at him. At last, and tragically too late for dignity and self-respect, he feels the thrill of passion. A singular book, of a singular and unusual pathology, but a work of art, instinct with delicacy, tact, dignity and beauty.

"THE Truth About Camilla," I may say without preamble, is, in my opinion, the best novel of the past year (and there have been two or three pretty good ones). Camilla is an up-to-date Becky Sharp, an Italian Becky with a difference. In the beginning, for Miss Pinkerton's Academy, Chiswick Mall, we have the Institut Heller, Florence; at the end, instead of the soi-disante Lady Crawley, we have the greatly respected and still beautiful, highly authentic Marchesa Filiberti. In between we have a wonderful array of adventures, so acutely observed, so skilfully told that at times I have rubbed my eyes wondering if Miss Hall had not emptied all her treasures into this one book. I tremendously hope not. Camilla's sordid, aspiring youth, her passion for distinction at any price—truth being the least difficult sacrifice—her histrionic gift, her soulless and exemplary devotion to the old American authoress, Mrs. Northmere, to whom she becomes a paid companion, her opulent release at that lady's death, her splendid struggles as the Princess Elaguine, her turgid, emotional eclipse, and her final graceful arrival into the port of an artistocratic respectability—all these form an admirably designed, slow-moving, richly freighted novel of manners. Miss Hall's Italy is even more indigenous than the careless Crawford's or the didactic Mr. Richard Bagot's, for she gets nearer the soil; and at times, like Goldsmith, she can write like an angel,—read her description of a moonlit night at Amalfi, and acquit me of hyperbole.

TSS ELSIE DE WOLFE'S book, "The House in Good Taste." seems, to a mere layman like myself, a work as sensible and helpful as it is agreeably presented. Mrs. Wharton once lent her name to a book on interior decoration where nothing less imposing than palaces was offered to the eye. Miss de Wolfe is far more practical, and gives us glimpses of what I should call the petite moison in. its most refined form, a house in which a mere man is perhaps a bit out of place as a permanent denizen, but a house none the less attractive in its feminine and totally anti-feminist way.

MR. EDWIN BJORKMAN has said of Mr. Ficke's poem, "It is the expression of a well-rounded and profound philosophy of life. . . The work sprung from that philosophy is full of the new sense of mystery, which makes the men of to-day realize that the one attitude leading nowhere is that of denial. Faith and doubt walk hand in hand, each one being to the other check and goad alike. And with this new freedom to believe as well as to question, man becomes once more the center of his known universe."

Books Reviewed

MR. FAUST By Arthur Davison Ficke

Mitchell Kennerley, N. Y. $1.00

THE DARK FLOWER By John Galsworthy

Charles Scribner's Sons, N. Y. $1.35

THE TRUTH ABOUT CAMILLA By Gertrude Hall The Century Co., N. Y. $1.30

THE HOUSE IN GOOD TASTE By Elsie de Wolfe The Century Co., N. Y. $2.50