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was moving the mind of men. He was grace and beauty personified.

But he didn't know it. He was genuinely modest and instinctively proud. It never occurred to him that there could be any temptations leading us away from simple beauty and devotion to the best, such a complete devotion to the best that he didn't think about it.

This sounds as if I was attending a eulogy of Oliver Chaffee, but I am not. I am trying to suggest the character of his art. I will leave to able analysts than I am to explain how this living being was communicated to his art work. I only know that it was. I have no doubt that if Chaffee had lived, he would have worked out a form so assured and concrete that the world would have seen the essential beauty and genuine artistic quality of his activity. But his existing work shows it just as completely as his full product, if he had been allowed to complete it, would have shown. But what exists now will show it to fewer people, who it is to be hoped, will show it to others. The dawning light is there, the whole of his vision and his message is there now, but only for those who somehow are able to grasp it, perhaps because they knew the man, and could see the union of the artist.

The sense of maturity which this work of Chaffee conveys is not at all inconsistent with the quality of the child, also conveyed by it. Some of the highest artistic performance is of this nature, some of Blake's poetry for example. Intense purity means intense imaginative experience. The imaginative experience of an adult, when it is as intense as the simple experience of a child, is an indication of extreme maturity.

Nobody can predict what will happen to a man's work in the appreciation of the future. Fortunately, however, it is possible for us to recognize an artistic success in the plastic realization of the true, the beautiful and the good. I only know that there is a permanent possibility of Oliver Chaffee's form to be seen and felt long after his death; and possibilities are the only realities of the future.

tive wife Betty, whose instinct for art and temperament went dan-
gerously beyond her physical and nervous strength; Oliver Chaffee
a delicately artistic and bacchanalian character whose paintings
are of the essence of individual reactions, ignoring conventional
form, and his ~~interesting~~ wife Ada; Susan Glaspell of whom I have
much to say in other parts of the book; one of the most reamrkable
of men, DR. Hammett, an unconventional scietist, a vigorous civic
personality, very ill, yet a true sport, one that never dropped
into melancholy or despair, instinct with almost incredible nerve;
then there were the Waughs and Clymers, painters or workers in art
with the husbands of which family group I used to play chess;

Although this party was on e of the gayest and wildest
in my memory of Provincetown, yet there was another small affair
which stands out in memory as the strikest and most extravagant
that I have ever been present at. It was the occasion when Fred
"arvin invited me, Charley Kaeselau, Oliver Chaffee and Phil Swords
to dinner at Cesco's restaurant. Cesco gave us a swell dinner, as he
well could when he wanted to, but unless he liked his guests he
wouldn't waste his best on them. He too was ruled entirely by his
temperament.

After the dinner, Cesco served us all with an unlimited
amount of his home-brew which was good and potent. At a certain
social-psychological moment of inebriation, the bacchanalian spirit
spized us all except Fred and Cesco; and I think I never saw such
a wild and spontaneous dance in all my experience, on the stage or
off. It was as if the savage tribes and the inspired ancients were
let loose on the modern world. Every trace of self-consciousness
vanished; the wildest most barbarous rhythms controlled us. And yet
our sophisticated instinct insisted unconsciously upon a form rarely

achieved.

My old friend Alice Palmer told me a day or two after,
that a young man of her acquaintance who passed by Cesco's early in
the morning, gazed spellbound at the show, which he said had never
been equalled in his experience, with these words:

Then there was Eben Given, also an artist