The Seacoast of Bohemia

Sir William Rothensten’s book of recollections, Men and Memories (Coward-McCann, $5.00), is as brightly starred as the firmament on a clear night, starred with the names of men of letters and of art whose lustre has increased in direct ratio to the distance in time when they first shed their rays. Sir William’s record has the suave candor of one who ‘belonged,’ and who was not merely a tolerated journalist. His book conveys an electric thrill: who touches it touches not only a man but an age. The author saw Swinburne plain; Sargent sat to him; Rodin chided him for inviting a favorite model to dinner; he laughed at (and remembered) some of Wilde’s best bon mots; Whistler revealed to him the petty vainglories of a great man; unintentionally, he fed De Goncourt gossip for his Journal and heard George Moore settle all disputes in art with the petulant ‘But I have known Degas!' or ‘But I have known Manet!’ Other men living to-day have walked with the kings and the vagabonds of the nineties and have put their recollections into print, but none other, of all the books on the nineties that I have read, has the grace, the sensitiveness, and the feeling for balance which Sir William expresses. His book, published at the crest of a career in art, shows that he has the gift of letters, as his paintings and drawings proved to his contemporaries of three and four decades ago his gift for form in the graphic arts.

His boyhood in Bradford, his student days in London, at the Slade, and in Paris, at Julian’s, are as beautifully recaptured as those latter days of work and talk, repartee and controversy, travel and achievement; first nights and travel days, in Morocco and Spain, and jaunts to Paris, where a corresponding Golden Age was weaving bright designs in letters and the plastic and graphic arts. On the last page, in 1900, a young sailor poet called John Masefield is sitting on the floor and recounting to a group of men his adventures on the sea. On the preceding pages we have seen and heard, in varying stages of intimacy, these among many others: Beerbohm, Beardsley, Wilde, Shaw, Burne-Jones, Sargent, Whistler, Swinburne, Pennell, Dowson, Pater, Henry James, Arthur Symons, George Gissing, John Davidson, Phil May, Cunninghame-Graham, the Daudets, Verlaine, De Goncourt, De Gourmont, Anders Zorn, Paul Bartlett, Richard Harding Davis (who reproved our sober author for his Bohemian ways of life), Leslie Stephen, Mallarmé, Gide, Degas, the elder Coquelin (who gave him his first commission), Toulouse-Lautrec, Ellen Terry, Gordon Craig (whose genius, he writes, got in the way of his talents), Huysmans, Fantin-Latour, Holman Hunt, George Moore, the Rossettis, Hardy, Robert Bridges (long before the laureateship), Henley, Ruskin, Yeats, Stephen Phillips, Watts-Dunton, Frank Harris.

Savage Messiah , by H. S. Ede (Knopf, $5.00), is the story of a young French artist and a middle-aged, unprepossessing Polish woman so mercilessly buffeted by poverty and ill health that she became a bundle of nerves screaming, at times, a litany of suspicion and hate. When they met, in 1910, at the St. Geneviève Library in Paris, the boy was eighteen, the woman thirty-eight. He fell in love with the woman; she, who had too often been betrayed in her finest feelings, took him to her arms, arms never anything but maternal. Henri Gaudier died, five years later, in battle; Sophie Brzeska died seven years after that, in a madhouse.

Mr. Ede, of the National Museum in London, has told their strange and tempestuous love story, a love story most horribly crossed by poverty, out of the letters written by Gaudier and the diaries kept by Miss Brzeska. The letters make plain that his was the ardor of courtship) and hers the (apparently) tentative submission to a purely spiritual ‘affair.’ Partly to give countenance to the pretense that they were brother and sister, he called himself Gaudier-Brzeska. They were never lovers, despite his supplications. To none but Gaudier did Miss Brzeska seem beautiful or desirable. Implicit in the story Mr. Ede tells is the inescapable conclusion (which Mr. Ede is too chivalrous to point) that, although her meagre means slightly dulled the edge of his poverty, she was a detriment to his health and a hindrance to his career. Patrons and those who knew the way to the doors of patrons were charmed by the young sculptor, repelled by the bundle of nerves that was his ‘sister.’

There is something morbid and unreal in this relationship; the reading of letters in which a boy pours out to a woman more than twice his age the pet-name tendernesses of an ardent lover leaves in the sensitive reader a feeling of embarrassment, akin to that which overcomes one during an unintended eavesdropping.

If Mr. Ede, who knew neither of the principals, could have forced us to look at Miss Brzeska with something like Gaudier’s eyes, we should have been vouchsafed a more sympathetic understanding of a relationship that seems at times grotesque, at other times pitiful. The reproductions of Gaudier’s sculptures and drawings bespeak the promise which he began to keep when his sentence took him to the trenches.

Prima ballerina of the Russian Imperial Ballet, Tamara Karsavina danced with the incomparable Nijinsky, against the glowing settings of Bakst, to the delightful music of Debussy and Rimsky-Korsakov, under the creative direction of that prince of impresarios, Diaghileff, and to the applause of the polite audiences of the St. Petersburg of the Tsars and to that of the transported audiences of Paris, where, for a glamorous season, Diaghileff made the Russian Ballet ‘the thing.’ Madame Karsavina tells the story of her life in art in Theatre Street (Dutton, $3.75), the name also of that street where she spent the years of rigid discipline and regimentation that lie before even the most gifted of dancers. Her story, fascinating as it is in many of its parts, is an excellent back-stage chronicle rather than the record of a rounded life, lacking, as it does, the perspective on her contemporaries and her social life that the more gifted chronicler Rothenstein, for example, gives us on his. We have several amusing glimpses of Nijinsky and we are told of how his unwillingness to subordinate temperament to discipline cost him expulsion; Isadora Duncan’s war on the overformalism of the ballet is rather cavalierly dismissed, and the tempestuous Chaliapine is vouchsafed an anecdote and a fleeting glimpse. Madame Karsavina’s record closes with the story of her escape from a Russia of Soviets and Commissars almost as thrilling as that related by the Grand Duchess Marie in her Education of a Princess.

In Men of Art (Simon and Schuster, $3.00) Thomas Craven, an erudite critic of the arts who has steadily opposed what he look-upon as the bloodless, dilettante æstheticism of the art for art’s sake school, tells the stories of those men who have shaped stone and clay into frozen music and transferred visions and realities to walls, canvas, and copperplate; tells their stories with reference to the times in which they lived and the nations and races of which they were part. In a style that may be described as one of vigorous seductiveness, Mr. Craven has illuminated for us Venice and Titian with the light which each sheds upon the other. We understand the Florentines and the Romans, the Medicis and the Borgias, a little better for the manner in which Mr. Craven has set the lives and works of Giotto, Leonardo, and Michael Angelo in their social-historical frameworks.

It must not be supposed that Mr. Craven chips away the least inch from the heroic statures of Daumier, or Rembrandt, or Hogarth, or El Greco by attempting lo reduce them to expressions of the time-spirit; he understands also that genius defies explanation and that the causes of a flowering of the human spirit at a certain time in a certain place cannot always be traced and ticketed; but he does make genius and the creations of genius more clearly comprehensible by establishing it four-square, not only in studio, but in social and historical time and place. ‘My whole book,’ he writes, ‘is a tribute to the power and the glory of artists whose work is impregnated with human meanings and interwoven with the fabric of the social structure, as opposed to the futile practitioners of art for art’s sake.’ Despite the exclusions, some of which the author regrets, Men of Art sounds forth as one of the most lucid contributions to the humanization of knowledge that it has been my good fortune to read in a long time. There are forty well-chosen reproductions to assist the understanding.

HARRY SALPETER

RUSSIA is the talk of this spring, and her FiveYear Plan an idea some say challenging, all admit disturbing, to the world’s equilibrium. Dr. Hopper, who reviews for us some of the latest estimates of the Soviet’s power, is a member of the Harvard faculty whose Lowell Lectures on Russia, based on first-hand evidence, had to be repeated, so heavy was the demand for seats.