Five Prose Sketches

By William Carlos Williams

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The ship was rolling heavily with a steady list to starboard from the force of the wind which carried her lower to that side on which his cabin lay. Down, down she went without a great amount of pitching but down, down, down till the trunk near the door squeaked in its lashings and all the loose objects in the cabin shuttled and slid about the floor. Then with a slight shudder the ship rose slowly leaning again for a brief moment to windward—and with this motion and joy in his heart, he slept like an angel.

His parents had come from the other side to America in ships. His uncle had died in a ship and been buried from one. To him the sea was the grave of all his cares, the one power hopelessly subtle and uncontrolled, unbridged, unbeaten—

"I am beginning to think we should have no mercy for anyone—unless we love him. Get all you can out of the other fellow before he takes it out of you."

Curious bits of conversation. "J'étais un homme très vulgair—j'étais un voleur"—"the twist of the years" —"Truth and Beauty married and the child was love."

"Deux cognacs, s'il vous plaît. Je suis polie, moi." French once more! His ear drank it in with avidity. Benedictine 10¢. Fine 10¢. That's something!

Then the wet and cold of the storm passed but the great waves continued, causing the ship from time to time to give three or four lurches deeper than the rest. The sky was blue overhead, the decks sanded. Evans stood by the weather rail watching the sea-gulls flying near the ship's side especially one, a beautifully marked Mackerel gull, larger than the rest, which with motionless wings was gliding, keeping pace with the ship not ten feet from his hand resting on the rail. He watched its eye watching him—and its head shifting slightly from time to time.

There was a hailstorm that afternoon. The wind was now due north, the weather cold and squally.

published shortly by the Macaulay Comp any.

These five sketches will be included in a novel entitled A Voyage to Pagany to be

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and when I heard my mother say: "You are excused, Ching-yü,"
I hurried away from the parlour.

Directly I went to my bedroom. I took from its red leather
box my silver neck-ring, and examined it attentively to see if it
really closely resembled the one worn by my girl cousin. Yes,
there was no mistaking! They were verily mates! I was elated,
for here at least was a symbol of kinship, and I felt as if I knew
my lovely cousin as well as if hours of playtime had been passed
together. I remembered, too, that the ring had been given me by
Second Aunt, now five years gone. It was on the day that I
had been given in Sonship to beautiful Kwan Yin, the Goddess of
Mercy. I had been a sickly child, and my mother had prayed
to the goddess, and had named me in her presence, and had asked
for me her mothering protection and fostering care. Perhaps my
cousin also had been devoted to Kwan Yin? Perhaps we were
both children of the Divine Mother? Surely, it was Second Aunt
who had given both rings, and surely it was for the one reason, and
surely we were for each other. . . . After some minutes of close
examination, I replaced the ring in its red leather box.

I went to the kitchen and asked the cook for two eggs.

"What for?" she questioned.

"To make fire-fly lanterns," I answered.

"Oh ho!" she jested, "I know! I know!"

"What do you know? You know nothing!"

I was provoked, fearing she had discerned my secret. The
whole world was too small for me! I could have nothing that I
desired. Even the cook had the right to interfere in my affairs!

I left the kitchen with the eggs, but I could not but overhear
the cook's laugh, as she joked with the kitchen-maid: "Fire-fly
lanterns! For younger cousin Yu Lian!"

Delightful! At least, I had learned my girl cousin's name!
This knowledge added immense richness to my idealization of her.

"Yu Lian!" I muted the name with pleasantness, thinking all
the while of its meaning. "Yu Lian! What name can better suit
her sweet form? Lotus of Jade! But she is far more lovely than
even her name signifies . . . more lovely, yes, more lovely than
the jade-green Foam Flower in the clear pool!"

The whole house was upset for the celebration of the arrival of

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Then swiftly, the sea, limitless, filling the imagination roundly on all sides, supporting, buoyant, satisfying--was damaged. Forward, as if the work of birds flying out from beyond the horizon, the thought of land! land! The seahold upon the imaginations of the ship's company had been broken.

England was there, little as a boat. One felt all England, all one had ever heard or felt of England, from old Mother Cobb to the last panting of discomfort in the daily press. There it was, pathetic, an island in the sea, powerless and naive as the small strength of a lion, or the boom of a big cannon. From the sea one could come to hold it as a god might hold an infant on his arm, for a moment. Later, the twin lights of the Scilly Islands gave an inkling, the only inkling, of the world beyond them, silent under the night sky.

Carcassone, a rock ruined by tears. It had to be rock-rimmed to give it credence, rock-shaped. It tapped the rock and the sweet water flew out--a hidden gentleness which had no certain name, in them without excuse--but like rain on armour. A brief advantage for which they panted. Water! Christ. Water all within themselves. Themselves. Their defences broken, out it comes. Tears. Which have now melted the rock which conserved it and caused it to run and disappear in the sand.

Forfeitures, murders, replacements--a passionate fountain--whose passion, coloured with the ground, was ready to be coloured from the air also, giving steel to that, and getting--air, sometimes full of light, and again full of mist and cloudiness--

The chapel was cold. On the uneven floor they walked about whispering. Very old it seemed but full of a strange assurance, because possibly, they were young and felt no part in it.

The garden was better, though best was to stand in the southwest wind that

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shown into her presence for the first time, and here were her Good
Fortune greetings to me.

"Ching-yü!" A familiar voice came from behind me. I turned to see my chum Hwa-yuan. "Can you guess why your aunt is paying her visit to your mother?"

"Why is it?" I asked indifferently. "I don't know."

"It is a secret. I won't tell you. I am not expected to tell any one." His manner was that of a merchant of precious goods, which, as a matter of fact, he would sell most cheaply. I was, therefore, not discouraged.

"A secret! Come, tell me! I have always told you what I have heard. Come, tell! Please!"

"Well, you must not disclose that you have learned it from me. And you must not blush."

"What is it? I won't do anything of that sort, you may be sure. The Thunder God blow me if I do!" I began to be impatient.

"It is about yourself," he said in a low voice. "Have you seen your *dear* Cousin Yu Lian? It is about her, too." He took on a jesting manner: "O child! I heard my sisters say that she is the prettiest girl in the world! She used to go to the new school, and was the best student of all! Her calligraphy is even superior to that of your Second Elder-Brother. What luck! O child! ... But I must be going. Elder-Sister sent me to borrow some brush-case patterns for embroidery. She is waiting."

I had been embarrassed while Hwa-yuan was talking. Now that he was gone I rejoiced. I felt that I should blush to see any one in the house. I wished to be alone. So I pretended to be reading a book, there in my bedroom.

Supper was over. Day embraced Night. Frogs began their Hastening-the-Farmers-to-Work song, which is always theirs when spring breaks and the rice-fields call for labour. The moon was yet behind the Eastern Hill. But the fire-flies were already abroad, wandering, wandering, and flecking the dusk with their momentary glows.

Equipped with a bulrush fan, I went out to the Drying-Rice Field, and there I caught many fire-flies. One by one I put them into the shells of the two eggs, from which the original contents

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tore at their garments as they went to the ramparts and looked out toward
the snow mountains across the valley to the southwest, mounting the archers'
galleries, peering through the slits of the meurtrières.

Do you remember anything of the history--

Not a word, never heard of it--

They looked long and silently, muffled from the past, at the far
Pyrenees, hiding themselves from the invincible wind. They leaped down long steps
from the ramparts--

Boso and Irmingard, brothers of Richard le Justicier.

The Arabs. Pippin the Short.

It can't have been an important place; I should have come across it in my
mediaeval history--

Hand in hand the two ran in the lice between the outer and inner fortification
and found tiny daisies pressed close to the ground, as earliest flowers always
are, for warmth.

They saw much of the place but their minds became stiffened and their faces,
too, with the force of the wind and the cold. They hid in sunny nooks of the walls
but sunless corners were desolate and they fled at last, up through a postern, out
again oppressed by the stones and the death of the place--the cold--hating the
obstinacy of the defences--too strong--senseless.

The arno (Avocado) tree

By dawn they were at Pisa. The train was still, in a freight-yard. The
stars were not yet gone. There was a moon in what Evans thought must be the west.
He got up and looked about as the train began to move again softly,
slowly in the grey light, thinking he might see the famous tower. Nothing. They
left Pisa behind. So much for Pisa. Again he slept.

Once more he woke. The sun was up.

218 THE GIFT OF THE FIRST PRESENTATION

head. I was not at all interested in her conversation with Third Aunt. There was another guest, who also was in the room. My heart was throbbing.

I could see only her dress—white linen printed with green bamboo leaf design. She was seated sedately, with her hands folded in her lap, and I could see her hands, little delicate hands adorned with lovely bracelets of jade as translucently green as the bodies of my admired Foam Flower in the clear water. She was seated close beside her mother, and I ventured—shielded from observation by the conversational interest of my elders—to take a brief, surreptitious glance at her face. Beautiful! beyond poets' words beautiful! My cheeks, my ears, my neck—I could feel them hot and red. I knew that I had been impolite, yet I did not wish to leave the place; I should have been content to stay if but for the hope of another vision of the cocoon-smooth hair and the bright black eyes and the lotus-petal cheeks of her! Once again I tried to look up—but manners had conquered courage, and I dared go no further than her shoulder, and the smooth curve beneath her chin. There, around her neck, was a silver ring, and suspended from it a pendant inscribed with the two characters which pray "Long Life" for their wearer. I was delighted. For I had had a neck-ring of the same kind. It was now two years since I had ceased to wear it. People regarded it as unbecoming for a boy to wear a neck-ring after he had passed his eighth birthday. Girls, of course, might continue with theirs until the age of ten. Nevertheless, I wished that I might show her my ring, and that I might closely examine hers. If we could only compare them intimately, she and I. . . . But I knew that this was impossible.

For the moment I was sunk in sadness. If I were but a girl! or she a boy cousin and not a girl cousin! It did not occur to me to rebel against the established code of a Confucian family, but I was conscious, and keenly conscious, of suffering from this ancient and honoured law of familiar deportment. Right though it might be, it was depriving me of a playmate for whom I longed . . . parlours and conversations and sittings-in-chairs were all well enough for grown people; they seemed to enjoy them . . . but for us, the two of us, my lovely cousin and my longing self . . . why, there might be Foam Flower in the pool even now! The thought was maddening, and no doubt I appeared to be tired and awkward;

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Leaning into the window he saw the world of form once more. He saw vineyards, trees in rows to which wires were fastened supporting grape-vines newly pruned, long reddish tendrils awaiting the sun of summer to grow new shoots and grapes. Peasants were coming into the fields. There were magpies, a bird he knew, in the young trees, magpies and crows in the furrows. Now there was/ was/ grain and garden truck and orchards, pruned and ready. Fields of mustard in flower there were and cows and goats, by the light of the early blinding sun. Italy! He did not think-- think of an ancient splendour but of morning and fields and vines.

Steadily the train took him into his delight.

The train which understands but a very few words and in the modern dialect only was approaching that ancient Tuscan city of Florence but without being impressed. Evans, however, was impressed and began to decorate his spirit with fitting clothes--saying, They speak of these cities as if they were dusty or dead; or with scholarly, abated voices--

The train was running beside a narrow winding rivulet. It was the Arno, flooding its banks, from whose liquorous bounty an army of sunbeams were drinking so that the air was luminous with mist and the grass and herbage were/ preparing/ everywhere was dripping. It was the Arno to bring all its country charm to pass under the old bridge.

It was the Arno, before Florence, gathering tribute from the fields--a workaday river--countryman, maker, poet--poetic river. River, make new, always new--using rain, subterranean springs/ to make a great bounty.

Florence, city of makers--

Sooner or later, they call us in, to make up choir benches out of oak trees, make lace out of daisies, the circles out of roses, the white out of our despair--white as despair--totally colourless--

River, you make "the Arno" every day fresher than the greatest artist's can make painted flowers: they may come to you every day for a lesson remembering only the sea that is greater.

BY KWEI CHEN

I was soon after breakfast. Stealthily I made my way out
to the garden house. There I folded back my sleeve-muffs;
I shook off my felt-soled shoes, held only by the toe-covering,
tugged at the cotton socks, and rolled up the long trouser legs
from my now bare ankles. I dug my toes into the warming earth,
just to try them—for it was spring and the saps were running.

"This morning I must complete my dam. Perhaps I shall find fish this very afternoon!" This I said to myself, imagining the speckled silver-green bodies—lithe and lacy like the scurry of finny Foam Flower on the painted roll in my father's collection . . . perhaps, he would hang the lovely Foam Flower picture to-day, for with us that is suitable to the walls which is seasonable to the year!

At the edge of our garden flowed a tiny streamlet, beyond which
extended the bamboo forest. To this I walked, and stood for a
while, hesitating. Should I indeed work on my dam this fine
morning? Or dig bamboo shoots? There were so many enticing
occupations! Springtimes not a single soul in our village is not
working. The men are in the rice-fields. The women are spinning
and weaving, and their clean, shrill voices penetrate the lattices
screening them from the eye. Not even the children are at leisure.
If you do not hear them from the schoolhouses, shouting out their
lessons, you will see them cowback, blowing famously at their
bamboo flutes, or barefoot like myself busily at work on dams for
the village brooks.

I decided to postpone bamboo-shoot digging to another day.
Somehow I felt that I should finish the work which I had begun.
Besides, Mother had told me often enough never to leave one work
unfinished in order to start another. Then, too, we might expect
rain at any hour—for it was spring—and after the rains come
sudden floods, swelling the village brooks into swift little rivers.
The speckled Foam Flower travel upstream at this season, up-
stream with the flood. So, if one have a cunning dam prepared,
with the retreat of the flood they are caught in the pool it creates.
I set to work at once, to complete my dam.

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VISION UNTRADUCED

reverence Mr Fry says that it "is, of course, as inimical to true
aesthetic experience as it is to the apprehension of truth." The
nearest he gets to reverence, in this sense, and without getting
very near it, is when he writes of M Rouault or of M André
Rouveyre's caricatures. But the usual accompaniments of irrever-
ence are not at all in his line. That is one reason why his essay
on Sargent, so cordial, so friendly, is a little masterpiece of genial
destructiveness.

Of course we expect to come across, in a book so rich in re-
sponses to so many stimuli, a few things not easy to reconcile
with Mr Fry's Aesthetic. "One would prefer," he says of Mr
Epstein, "to live with something less vehement in attack, rather
more persuasive. But this is a question of taste and perhaps of
individual temperament." Unless an aesthetician believes, as
Mr Fry deliberately does not, that every aesthetic question is a
question of taste, a reader always wonders, when the phrase is
used, what other question is begged. Here, at a guess, the other
question is as to the place of aesthetic responses in the hierarchy
of responses. One day while the war was still going on, Sir
Maurice Amos, who had come to this country to discuss Priority,
talked about this hierarchy. Somebody's theory of truth, Mr Ber-
trand Russell's perhaps, had been mentioned, and Sir Maurice
said something more or less like this: "At one end of the scale is
arithmetic. You say five times five is twenty-five. I say it is
twenty-six. You are right. I am wrong. At the other end of the
scale is—well, take nausea. We both go to sea. I am seasick, you
are not. But it cannot be said that you are right, and that I am
wrong. Neither reply to the motion of the ship is correct or in-
correct." It would be interesting to know towards which end of
this scale Mr Roger Fry would put aesthetic experiences, and how
near. If we knew this we should perhaps know why once in a
while, a long while, he isolates some one aesthetic question and
calls it a question of taste. And we might, if luck were with us,
be on our way towards an answer to an older question: How do
we know that the good judges are better judges than the bad
judges?

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of willow withes lying ready for the vine-tying. They walked on down a narrow path between small fields where women were dropping potato cuttings in rows fresh opened by men with mattocks going before them. They jumped a ditch with violets growing on its sides and came to the bed of a stream with a small sand-bar in it and so on for an hour.

Evans peered into the doors of peasant cottages as they passed. Churns, tubs, and the like lay about the back doors. The houses seemed wide open but deserted. It was growing late when they returned to the hotel for supper. The place was small, cold, and with but two or three guests in it. A solitary English woman of forty or more was sitting reading in the old-fashioned reading-room of the place, unmindful of the cold.

That night in his sweetly musty bed-room of a small country hotel, the window wide open, Evans could hear the silence of the cold night as he lay quietly staring up at the dark ceiling, faintly lit nevertheless by a light from somewhere--from the night itself it seemed. Death it seemed to him might be sweetly like this, lying there forever.

As if coming from a shell he say the cold, jagged, withered mountains cut out on the blue sky, snowcapped and with wind making a play of the snow on the high glissades.

He saw slanting ledges where his mind walked at ease aloof from the crawling world; V-shape- V-shaped gorges he saw and inverted fans of fallen rock and sand by the cliff's face. Into his spirit he drew, along with his breaths, the stillness and the cold which his body could not have reached. Or he saw a great knob of even granite, shaped like a rock to hold smoothly in the hand and to stroke. Rocks precipitous, perpendicular, measured only by a few thousand feet but straight up, to man most difficult. Now he saw the pine, the evergreen woods, starting up the slopes and stopping, or from the recent rains, finger-like spouts of water fell

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Alone I worked, with diligence and hopefulness. The morn-
ing sun of the late springtime was all loveliness. The water was
a little chilly, but only soothingly chilly. And it was so fresh
and clear! No sooner had I roiled it with the mud of the dam-
making than it became clear once more, all of its own flow. This
gave an added joy to my work. I liked to see the incessant
coming of the clear water, driving away the muddied water. . . .

“Ching-yü, Ching-yü!”

I heard my name called, and, a little frightened, I turned. It
might be my mother, who had warned me to stay away from the
stream. This was because the Astrologer had carefully cautioned
her to keep me far from the evil influence of the Water-Star
and all that was within his influence. For my part, I should tell
the Astrologer to mind his own stars, and sing to his *hu-ching!* To
my mind Astrologers know little enough either of stars or music!

But it was only my grandmother's nurse.

“Oh, here you are! Get out of the water quickly! I won’t
tell your mother this time—but I shall if ever I find you there
again. . . . Your mother wants you at once. Two very dear and
honourable guests have come.”

“Who are they? And why do guests always wish to see me?”
I am irritated. I do not like to have my work interrupted. It
might rain this very night, and my pool become an underwater
garden, filled with Foam Flower.

“They are from a distance. You’ll learn to know them. Come
on now and change your clothes.”

“Ching-yü,” says my mother when I have made my appearance
in the parlour—now with my handsomest flowered robe and jacket
and silk-topped shoes—“kotow to Third Aunt.”

“So this is Ching-yü,” observes the guest. “How well he knows
polite manners.” She turns to me: “You are in school, I
suppose?”

I shake my head, embarrassed, but my mother answers for me,
apologetically:

“I have not felt like sending him away with his brothers. At
present I devote whatever leisure I have to teaching him. And you
know that he has been adopted by the Merciful Goddess.”

I was standing beside my mother, motionless and with bowed

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from the tops of the visible mountains walls, showing cliffs higher, and melting snow.
The sun is growing warmer. Or on flat rocks, black stains of running water spread
out lacquerlike on the rock's face. To the north with the sun on them were great
pinnacles, sparkling, snapping, cut out with its sharp knife on the lakes of hard
blue. The minute features of the rock drew Dev from point to point, the particular
conformation of some slowly turning pinnacle. Eagerly he watched it turn, revealing
its person. So arose the personalities of the Gods, aloof, particular, visible,
deathlike, near but far, nothing between us and them but the same as between the
finger and the nose, air, space--frozen. . . /

So he sat for an hour, two hours, his face pressed upon the window-pane absorbed
in the mountains, while the train labored, and wound and stopped and started again
at the little hamlet stations. To the south side of the car he shifted and saw a more
gradual rise across pastures, green and flowery. But to the north a stream ran by the
railway, tributary to the Rhine, Its head-waters; I don't know. Rhine and Danube,
head-waters heheabouts, about the same parentage. One goes to Budapest; the other to
Holland. Parting of the ways. He went back to the mountains, once more rock-ledges
where no snow clings, a great snow field, then up, up to the forbidden forbidding
summit, snapping sunlight painting it orange, purple, black-- A hawk there, a hawk!

In the bark crevices of the trees, Evans could see ants running, their slight
antennae working nervously in and out--running perpendicularly--

Fish, trout--chamois too and ibex must be up there. On the railroad folder there
was a scene, an Alpine hunter with an ibex over the nape of his neck. In the center
of culture there is a wild park--Switzerland--

He could see and he knew the details of the flowers, from within the train, the
minute perfection of spot and fibril, the cold details of the mountains; though he
could see but the gross contours--yet the details came to him. Far off he recognized
the aching sense of a woman, far off, a woman whom he had known, outside, far outside,
going, not inside anywhere any more. A memory. Memory is the affirmation of genius;
a fast-fading memory. Once he thought he saw her in the car, a pair of green satin
slippers, and back he came with a start. Out of memory. She is in this train! Who?

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quotations. We all know how easily one gets remote from appearance in the act of describing it technically. From Mr Fry's essay On Some Modern Drawings I take this example of technical exposition:

"But to the pure visualist, or Impressionist, as we may conveniently call him, drawing presents, as compared with painting, a peculiar difficulty. The drawn line does not directly record any visual experience. It describes a contour, and that contour is presented to the eye as the boundary of one area of tone seen against another area of different tone and colour, and throughout its length there will be continued slight variations in this contrast. In drawing this sensational datum is, as it were, summarised and symbolised by a line which contrasts equally with the white paper on either side of its thickness. We have to accept this as a kind of summation of all the infinite number of points at which the sensation of one coloured area ends and another coloured area begins. Supposing these two areas are formed by a flat piece of paper lying on a flat table, this summation of the points is fairly adequate and the outline represents well enough the sensation. But in the majority of cases the boundary of one area in contrast to another represents for us the limit of one convex volume against a remoter and perhaps concave area. In such a case each point of the contour becomes the section of a line which is passing away from the eye at right angles to the plane of the paper, and from the point of view of the evocation of the plastic relief of the volume it is the fact of its disappearance that is important. And herein lies the chief problem and difficulty of the art of drawing."

That, for all its intricacy, stays close to the sources of sight. Contrast its technicalness with the charming humour of his praise—in Book Illustration and a Modern Example—of Mr McKnight Kauffer's illustrations to Burton's Anatomy, or with his remark that "we may give to Caravaggio the honour of having been the first purely popular artist, the real founder of the Royal Academy, the Salon, and almost the whole art of the cinema." The essay on Culture and Snobbism begins thus: "It is a nice point, and one on which I have never yet been able to make up my mind, whether culture is more inimical to art than barbarism, or vice versa." Of

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Should I know her if I saw her now? He tried to remember her features and remembering he had been trying, he found himself looking at the ridge of a frostcold distant peak-- having forgotten what he was trying to recall. To forget the pain, we lose memory itself until there is nothing more. Nothing should be forgotten, yet we must forget. The hooks of memory are worn smooth with the weight of pain that has slipped from them. I remember nothing. I see and it is forgotten. Only that is brilliant which is there, there. Everything else, good and bad, is slipping away, taught by the anguish. But that which is there--it is without memory and without pain. My life is an effort to avoid memory; an escape. Fasten I will upon the thing, there outside the window, that lives without pain and without memory.

All day they were in the train, going. It took a solidity away from them all, train goers. They became fluid from the excess of their passage and flowed together--the lines between them as individuals melting only to be redefined later.

Those that got out at noon were not in the same place cast with those going on.
The panorama of the day. More than half Switzerland, east to west, they saw.

All day, since five in the morning, the struggling and rolling train had moved with the sun through valley after valley, in mountainous passes until the mountains had seemed to enter the train possessing it so that it became a mountain train, a thing belonging to the rocks and snows-- All, nearly all day, the window pelted with these sights, he felt almost a mountaineer; he grew used to the melting winter of the Alps and the implications: Thus the world is and I am part of it.

VISION UNTRADUCED

BY PHILIP LITTELL

IN his preface to The Renaissance, with that abundance of commas by dint of which he liked to make slow prose go slower, Pater wrote: "To define beauty, not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible, to find, not a universal formula for it, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics." Mr Roger Fry, one of the "truest" students of aesthetics alive, goes far towards proving that this is not quite so. Though he does not define beauty, does not in fact go in for definitions, there is a sense in which one may say that he pursues both aims, seeks both kinds of formula. The abstracter's interest in discovering the fewest laws that will explain all his aesthetic experience; the enjoyer's interest in keeping each experience separate, in respecting its uniqueness, in doing justice to every shade of difference felt between this pleasure and that—both interests go with Mr Fry wherever either takes him. Each lights up and enriches the other. To realize how unusual this is, and how exceptional it makes Mr Fry's case, one has only to remember the writings of earlier aestheticians, most of whom are disloyal now and then to their own eyes, if they have eyes, so strong is the temptation to ignore or traduce an experience which won't fit in. Quite as exceptional is Mr Fry's tone. Sure of his experience, not at all sure of his explanation, he describes them with the same independence of mind, the same persuasive modesty.

As an aesthetician his hope is "to show certain reasons why we should regard our responses to works of art as distinct from our responses to other situations." Mainly by inspecting his own responses, and by looking for something which is both common and peculiar to them all and not for "any mysterious or specific

NOTE: Transformations: Critical and Speculative Essays on Art. By Roger Fry. 4to. 230 pages. Brentano's. $10. Cf. THE DIAL: June 1924, Mr Epstein's Sculpture; November 1925, The Hudson Memorial; December 1925, London Statues; August 1926, The Anatomy of Melancholy; September 1926, Seurat; November 1926, Plastic Colour.