Darkened Panes

A ‘Kwäker’ Looks into German Bookshops

TO-DAY there is a big colored etching of a Danish castle, sombre, thrown against a clear half-light of waning day, with a delicate line of foam, hinting the focus of the scene between sea and an omnipresent heaven. Beneath it lies a superb edition of Hamlet. A folio in white linen has Jovian thunderbolts in gold, radiating like an oriental sun, and covers a learned work on the Greek drama. There is much Shaw; some Molière in brown and cream; and down at the front, more frankly, daily advertising, the score of to-night’s opera, — Ariadne on Naxos, — and the texts of several of the evening’s plays, since they are first productions: Hamsun, Romain Rolland, and Molnar.

Yesterday there was a little cubist marble, which came to the retina in the same lines that are traced on the inner eye when the ball is rubbed. Stripped and austere. An ancient sculpture would have been fulsome and obvious in comparison. Here, in the surfaces, was something of higher mathematics, of optics, of metaphysics.

The books had been piled on one another, had been tucked into tight rows: tomes on the carvings of Hindu temples, excavations in Asia Minor, Flemish primitives, jewels and charms (ebon, with purple ends, an emerald bookmark and cabalistic end-papers); a green portfolio, with phallic symbols, illustrating costume in the light of the Freudian theory; lettering that an individual had evolved to express architecture marking a work on that interior decoration concerned so intensely with line, the splendor of materials, and untrammeled expression; medium-sized books on æsthetics — as good as a jug of bayberries or a piece of Copenhagen ware for a ‘touch’; booklets bearing no faintest physical resemblance to each other — on fountains, the lesser princely collections of Italy, Spanish cloisters; romantic old illustrators, and quaint woodcuts of mermaids and nightingales, Christmas trees and harps.

Inside, one of the neatly groomed young clerks steps forward and asks in English what he may show.

— From an ancient belfry three o’clock strikes and — five.

To the fore are economic and political works, shelf on shelf: pamphlets on taxation, tariffs, treaties, new legislation — an ache and weariness; novels, bewildering in number, bitten with black, erotic power and fantasy, picturing the syncopated dance of death of Europe, of blockaded souls; ethics, disease; travel — as if in present isolation every traveler and explorer had been impelled and begged to describe the Mediterranean, Africa, the East, South America, Siberia. A conspicuous case holds the best from British presses. Upton Sinclair represents the American. A collection of French standards in leather, and yellowbacks, fills no paltry section; besides, the Russians and Scandinavians in translation.

Back in the alcoves is poetry: slim volumes in pastel tints with garlands, centaurs, and marvelous scripts; children’s books; guides and walking maps of mountain and moor; technical treatises, bulky and solid as the steel, iron, and coal they treat; scientific charts; jolly schoolroom lithographs that take imagination by the hand.

And this shop is in some six, seven, or ten streets of any Central European city. The opera libretto may not be, but the ‘Ninth,’ Mozart’s ‘Requiem,’Brückner’s ‘Helgoland,’ or Pfitzner’s new cantata, to be given by the Street Railway Workers’ Chorus and the Ladies’ Song Union!

There are music-stores and numerous antiquaries’, into which the private libraries are dribbling. One can open flyleaf after flyleaf bearing an intimate inscription: —

‘To Lisbeth from Hans.’

‘Annerl, on her 12th Birthday, from Father,’ who has added some lovely Goethe.

‘With love to Little Mother from her Scaliwags.’

These things are bought — by covertly shabby folk, who find them more sustaining than gritty bread and turnip jam and cabbage soup; by thousands of Jews — the trained business heads of Europe, avid from their Eastern pales; by a solid block of the public, to whom they are necessities and to whom the movies are not, and who do not motor out to links, but sling on a mended knapsack, slip in a few volumes, and go tramping off, humming, —

‘ O greenwood — ’

There are many who regard this synthesis of perfection, this variety, this unthrottleable energy of creation, as a gauntlet flung down. There is peace in knowing it a hand outstretched — for understanding.