lovely terraces and immense garden, to Louis-Pierre Chauveau; and on April 18th following she ceded to an honorary councillor of parliament, Jean-Nicolas Guillaumie, another parcel of real estate that she owned at Passy. And so, thus sorrowfully turned, we reach the concluding page of the faithfully friendly intercourse between Benjamin Franklin and Mme. Brillon de Jouy.

The great American citizen passed away calmly at Philadelphia on April the 17th, 1790, at the age of eighty-four. His death was universally mourned. The Count de Mirabeau pronounced, before the National Assembly, a discourse couched in moving language, emphasizing the irreparable loss that humanity had suffered.

We again meet with Mme. Brillon at Paris, where, in 1801, she was residing at No. 10, rue des Vieilles Haudriettes. We may mention, as an interesting detail, that on May 26th of that year her eldest daughter, Cunégonde, aged thirty-six, whom Franklin had desired for his grandson, married, for the second time, AntoineMarie Paris Dillins, aged fifty-five, former commissioned officer, the divorce of the Dillins couple having been decreed on October 4, 1793, on account of "emigration."

(Translated by Theodore Baker.)

NOTES ON THE NEW ESTHETIC OF

T

POETRY AND MUSIC

By HENRY BELLAMANN

HERE are fashions in modernism. This is a weakness. Many of the "liberated" composers, painters and poets achieve a fine gesture. There is apparent freedom in the gesture-it seems to indicate arrival. There is something in it of Alpine finality: "This is the peak. Regard the view!" The stride, the gesture, the mise-en-scène invoke applause. There is the inescapable implication that such ardent ascents are not consummated in encumberment of academic regalia. Only after a thousand or so such manifestations does the agitated peace of criticism regain something of reflective placidity. The mind withdraws a little and perspective reasserts itself. There is a chill sense of familiarity as act succeeds act in this supervaudeville. The keen diagnostician perceives that initial sclerosis whose end is the fatal cliché. How quickly the daring of slang becomes academic speech with all the circumstance of orthodoxy!

Composer after composer, poet after poet, may be cited whose fancy is seized by single features of artistic revolt and who thereby exchanges one dogma for another. One composer holds fast to the rigidities of musical forms whose characteristics were never musical, but literary, and upon these fastens the decorations of a fantastic harmony no less severe in its exclusions than the textbooks of Ebenezer Prout. Another pours the old wine of conventional musical speech into the new bottles of unfamiliar form. Neither is one step nearer freedom than before.

We feel in all these procedures the drag of a fashion-the subtle pull of influence that converts the direct aim of force into the futility of trajectory. There is evident the aesthetic incapacity of immature thinking. There is the readily discerned inability to set up an abstract standard of form and speech for each new creation. And this is the crux of the whole matter. While it is obviously true that no one can write as though others had not written before him, it is certain that no work of art should derive in either form or speech. Pure idea is unique-however slight. Its form-"its ultimate and unique form"-lies within itself as

plant lies in seed. Its ultimate exact foliation is predestined in conception. Tradition, background and technique are but soil and sunshine. Everything should fall away (be weeded out) before the solitary growth of idea. The freedom, the genuine freedom, which implies freedom from even the author's preconceptions, involves the simultaneous creation of a special æsthetic. The poem, the sonata or symphony, has a standard fixed in the nature of truth. It has no right to stand upon any comparison. On the other hand, it submits itself to the test of an abstract ideal -the measurement by a unique standard which is inherent in itself.

The inability of any but the exceptional artist to attain to anything approximating this truth which in its essential nature is freedom itself, is evident throughout modern art. The very conception of such an extra-empyrean of free æsthetics is in itself the act of a first-rate creative imagination. We are aware that such a concept does exist in the collective mentality of the very few first-rate minds of contemporary art. Nor is this concept the exclusive property of a Benedetto Croce or a Ferruccio Busoni. It is the sum total of a tendency perceived in isolated and unrelated works. It is the overtone of a vast sub-bass of struggle. The struggle is the discontent of pure idea.

It has long been apparent that man's thought and feeling differ radically from their artistic expression. Emotion that flows into the human heart like a river, or like a wind, intricate with many hidden cross currents, has been forced to assume forms derived from other phases of experience-artificial forms to which these wild streams are shaped as diverted waters are shaped to elaborate lagoons, there to stagnate and lose entirely their original character. These forms are arbitrary forms designed to satisfy some phase of culture when symmetry was probably held to be the highest artifice, and the varied and complicate forms of nature were beyond the grasp of analysis or understanding. Form, I take it, includes every character and detail of the expression of an artistic idea. "In the Potter's Shop of Art the vessel takes its shape from the contents."

It is the rapidity with which these changes in modern writing have come about, rather than the actual character of the changes themselves, that has led to the cry of "artistic bolshevism." It is for the close student to trace the intimate

connection that exists between the vital forces of the old and the strangest novelties in the technique of the new. Revolution is but evolution moving with unwonted speed. The strange metamorphosis of seed, the bursting of buds into the waywardness of blossom, and the final miracle of fruit, have all of the externalities of revolution. It is most clear to those who know the old and the new equally well that the present efflorescent freedom within archaic rigidities does reveal the logic of a natural step in the evolution of art.

The great masters knew this and illustrated it in the fulness of their artistic achievement. Beethoven climbed heights untrodden in his time and beheld distances undreamed of by his contemporaries. The last sonatas and quartets-the story is so old!—were regarded as expressions of the disintegration of genius. To-day we see those compositions as freedoms surprisingly close kin to the aims of some of the most advanced and decried composers. Bach's Chromatic Fantasy is a peak so high that its shadow falls far into futurity.

The methods of comparative criticism are linking together these apparently isolated peaks into a range of related heights. In the knowledge of these relations, is it not time that we perceive the significance of certain craggy ascents on which our critical feet are stumbling?

Radical and simultaneous changes have taken place quite recently in the three great expressional factors of music and poetry— vocabulary, rhythm, and form. An examination of these three components may show whether we have departed from the way of artistic evolution, or whether we have returned to the great stream of primal sources.

The Imagist school of poets accomplished a much needed task of housecleaning in throwing out the ancient clutter of outworn poetic formula. Their rejection of words which had lost currency everywhere save in poetry that was an echo of songs sung long ago, their insistence upon extreme economy of means, and their return to a language made up of words found in the living organism of present-day speech-these were accomplishments of first-rate importance. The sum of their achievement was the creation of a technique that fitted the body of contemporary thought and feeling like a perfect garment. That the result in actual poetry was rather fragmentary is true. But in the group of Imagists were poets bigger than any school, and they learned the lessons of Imagism and passed on. Imagism in poetry, like Cubism in painting, left its mark. One or two Imagists became

lapidarists and spent themselves polishing microscopic brilliants. Every tidal ebb leaves empty shells.

A changed vocabulary means a changed music. One of the characteristics of the new poetry is the gracious fall of its suave music. Some of the new poetry, unfortunately, abounds in musical effects which are foreign to the nature of language.

Now I am not disturbed by the introduction of elements apparently foreign to an art when there is an immediately decorative effect, but I am aware of the danger in the introduction of elements destructive of those principles which preserve the exclusive character of an art. Music is a necessary element of good poetry, but it is a resultant. When a poet introduces musical elements which have no other reason for being than to make music independent of the carrying on or developing of the poetic idea, there is felt the immediate and dangerous presence of a disintegrating force. It is the cessation of the movement of idea for a whirligig pastime. It will be found that the proper music of a poem is not translatable into actual terms of music as such. It thereby proves its inherence in the poetic idea. Extraneous musical effects are always translatable into terms of mere music—they become music-making for their own sake and are usually musical effects of a decidedly third-rate musical character. These effects are instantly translatable into terms of every-day music and as such fall somewhat below the efforts of Mr. Irving Berlin. This is said with full realization of the danger of criticizing one art in terms of another, but with an equal certainty that whenever one art trespasses on the exclusive properties of another, it must be estimated in terms of the invaded art. Onomatopoeic repetitions are but the rosalias of musical composition-those facile devices of development barred from music by fundamental instincts of taste.

The point to be made is that through the use of a quite modernized vocabulary, a highly illustrative musical texture has been acquired by poetry and that the limitations of these effects are already sharply defined by those poets who have exceeded them.

The changes in the vocabulary of music have come much more gradually, but are marked with the advent of each composer of importance. The vocabulary of music (its tonal combinations) has always been harassed by academic restrictions crippling its natural exercise to a degree unknown in the use of language for poetry. Each composer felt the restrictions and each broke over the barriers to some extent. Only quite recently has the absurdity of the laws of composition aroused sufficiently