Wandering Russians
Paulding, Gouverneur
May 12, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 13 Cobbett was bitterly attacked in his own time for When he came across a...
...He is sleepless...
...There are many interesting legends consitting so miserably before the geometrical design necting it with the Virgin Mother...
...What has become of First in importance, of course, is the lily-always the Prebejenskies in whose house he sits...
...How could one do anything when it was the lake parades down the bare Swiss streets, and an impossible to hear oneself talk...
...Chesterton's capacity for swiftly seizing the heart hard" by that gentleman...
...He remembers, in Venice, the Pietro Longhi give the reasons...
...is of a piece...
...From the careful and accurate treatByzantium, and had so completely the old Russian ment of them, one may credit the artists with a sincere tenderness...
...She sees hundreds of twirl- swept plain...
...Their form is extremely Sonia starts her round of the brasseries to sell carnamodern-Victor Hugo transposed by Stravinsky...
...The furniture has gone...
...What has become of it now...
...In a vision, he was directed to strike the from a memory which is intact-while I, who have earth three times with his staff, to reveal her life...
...In In a silver sloop...
...He remembers as a student taking tea in those which have interested the painters...
...Chesterton, a book full of brilliant and elocorner of the mouth, expressive of anything rather quent passages...
...An entire group of the Russian form for Miss Patsy Burke...
...since, also, the young who foresaw or accomplished everything that can ever novelists have the tradition I have described, their be done with the French language, commenting on books form a curious modern romanticism...
...It is the only it may not choose where it goes, driven by its stern injustice one can still commit in regard to the exile...
...reverential treatment...
...In the present mental the flight of shot which might come from a fault in apathy of Europe this literary portrait has many the barrel...
...Then he will die at the sword-point And do you remember Giovanni di Paolo's Paradise, Who knew not how to live, with its animals, trees and flowers, the lily being repreWho thought his sins were phantoms sented...
...The percussion...
...this, the Virgin is a figure of girlish innocence whose Their faces fantastic and painted, grave face reflects the beauty of holy thoughts...
...I prefer night with the dynamos, his invention with its diagrams to give two examples of the exile who is fighting, and of shot distribution can only have an hour's attention...
...anything less than the Faith...
...Is it the are meeting it in that other way...
...A happy association, this, of the most ethereal Perhaps he was too old a man for the job...
...That there Cobbett faithfully records the fact, even in those cases are minor inconsistencies is true enough...
...Tonight of living things, with one who is purity itself...
...by the real wind without, which enters the room Yet surely not a rhythm of dissonance such as this, through the cardboard in the window replacing the she adds-and her program pauses, uncertain of the broken panes...
...so generally introduce the lily in their Annunciations...
...lack of perspective...
...For the frame and already half gone...
...this very room...
...The proof could, wadding...
...PerThe phantom marchers moving still . sonally, I presume to feel that the vase and flowers Moving upon me...
...who can deserve to have none...
...This painting is filled with detail, A look of anguish on my old white face and were the balance less perfect or in the hands of a As the smoke clears, and I see lesser artist, there might be a sense of crowding...
...Although the lily will always be the Virgin's typical And I will raise my musket flower, painters do not hestitate to combine it with For its last shot...
...But he will find the perfect cartridge...
...The Revealed to the look of the moon, Saint Michael seems a bit overwhelming to one familSilently they will disembark- iar with the older treatment of the subject...
...Shortly after, it existed as the salvation of will spread to the United States-as already it has France and of Europe in those early and momentous pervaded England-without a corrective...
...He tells biography is unsatisfactory, and though Mr...
...After the strain of a with success, be made a matter of statistics...
...Wires But these books which are the result of a false gen- tremble and an automatic switch goes over...
...The great electric supply station is still exile and the loss of family, are elements which con- much brighter than the dawn when, at seven, the nightstitute a strain...
...Weird platoon...
...After Anastasia has two ways of meeting it...
...These were where the squire openly disapproved of Cobbett's inevitable in a man who spoke and wrote so much as politics...
...Talk was essential absurd jingling chime rings from the empty Cathedral...
...Lewis Melville's to be anything else but an English farmer...
...Yet in good rifles, this fault must be taken chances of being taken as the observed and accurate as eliminated...
...to her...
...It breathes a spirit of geniality...
...they are brilliantly illuminated with the successful Rimbaud in his accurate and inventive noting glory of great names and the charm of very common of sensation, has confessed as the next step the ones-the Russian form for the Duchess of Norfolk tremendous influence of the Diaghileff ballet, pleasantly mingling in undocumented ignorance with Petrouchka, Sacre du Printemps...
...WANDERING RUSSIANS By GOUVERNEUR PAULDING A 1 PICTURESQUE theory of the fatalism and the war, Russia existed through its music rather than uselessness of the Russian exile has arisen in through its literature in the minds of young French France...
...Perhaps the loveliwhich had failed to take the wind and snow into est is that of Mary's faithful knight, Saint Dominic, account, that he, himself, was the real exile...
...Quite a number of novels, which I which Russian exiles take the leading parts...
...There was too mighty and multiform to have been fed with we have the man...
...The results were strange, called May in pagan mythology, should be set apart unbalanced compositions with women walking out of in the Christian calendar as the month of Mary...
...Petersburg of 1885...
...mir...
...A winsome thing with an unmistakably modGod, forgive...
...in the library is a camp-bed and a table when she heard it at court on the evening her husband littered with reports...
...Here we have, as always in the case he says, "with the cheek drawn upon from the left of Mr...
...The eralization create a general persuasion equally false Vintimille-Calais express-runs gracefully through and very cruel as to the character of the Russian exiles...
...I say that there is another way of the cartridge...
...Gradually one sees the design...
...After each stroke, a stalk of lilies appeared...
...and circulars...
...the theme of the waltz she hears the flutter of talk...
...It is the birth Hearsay: It is a night to make one think of stories of a waltz-the first ponderous, suffocating desire for of famine and wolves...
...The signal lights-green and red-become version to the historic blindness of the Duke of Bruns- pale precious stones set in a light mounting of wires, wick-can be defended and sustained with argument...
...He returned the look, as of his subject...
...He wrote all his books and pamphlets, and But anyone who will take the trouble to read Cobbett not only his English Grammar, "especially for the must be struck with the fact that all that he wrote use of soldiers, sailors, apprentices, and ploughboys...
...Then once again the waltz is triumphant in refuge in the house against the loneliness of the windhallucinated excitement...
...It seemed to him that all his work was THE MONTH OF MARY like the new perspective that painters were talking about-the perspective of motion which, in a room By ALICE T. A. QUACKENBUSH for instance, altered the accepted relations of objects T HE gracious season of spring is here and it seems on the theory that to a moving body they had a dyna- fitting that the month when flowers begin to bloom, mic and not a static value...
...that the ineffably imbecile attempts at inter- the heavy mists into the bare suburbs and the railway vention, Kolchak, Denikine, Wrangel, were a direct re- yards...
...accurate understanding of a large class of living and Wladimir can never get over the impression that he Christian human beings, is the application of one of is coming home after a dance...
...Undressing, Geneva: The baton is raised for the preliminary he sets the alarum so that Anastasia will find hot tea beat and the elbow comes in for the bass viols to at- when she returns...
...the pictures spaces of the years...
...It cannot be doubted that the majority shift wipes its hands on cotton waste, puts on all the of Russians living abroad are subject to this strain...
...They are his own difficult and exquisite prose, had said: "It is romantic with their fatal figures desperately careless as simple as a musical phrase...
...coats it can collect, and goes home along the tracks But what is intensely important to the generous and through the mud...
...It is a theory false and unjust...
...they are odorous and stimulated throughWar and Peace...
...I am choosing rather to speak of interiors...
...One he regrets the old values in painting and the old values might tell the flowers which are named for her and in life...
...would benefit by a softer background-decided imCold as the kiss of hell their steel- pertinence on my part...
...It was perhaps clearer and gentler have been taken...
...This extraordinary hosts of blooms, such as the marigold, bear her name, cerebral simplification of life, intensely earnest, indeed while others, such as the narcissus, have been dedicated resembled his work...
...It has left behind it for the study and pity of But one must first sum up the elements which have Europe its countless emigres ; and the young French erected the generalization in the minds of those men writers, still fascinated by the "Russian mystery," are in France who today are writing novels and plays in hard at work...
...In the beat against the doorways in the silent provincial top gallery, Sonia, widow of General , is a little street...
...Probably The kommissaar pokes up the fire and seeks an it is because of stories such as this that the masters answer to his own accusation...
...Thus, just before of life-with their love which is so near to hatred14 THE COMMONWEAL May 12, 1926 with their religion of fatality...
...left to take the early tram into the city and the dressThe literary portrait of the exiles shows them making shop where she is a mannequin, Wladimir atmeeting it with the assistance of drugs, indifference, tacks his problem once again-there is a deviation in and a great deal of style...
...It occurred to the man that he was May 12, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 15 getting bitter...
...The waltz, of course, should be broken, she that of the Princess Prebejensky, a man sits close to feels, coming as it does in bursts across the windy an open fire...
...Well, the elements are but fewof meeting the strain and that the majority of Russians is it quality of powder, quality of shot...
...people...
...Chesterton has written the best study of Cobto pretend that he had no ambition, he never wished bett that we have so far had...
...eloquent speeches against God-while the wind rattled Outside the concert hall, a cold mist rising from the windows...
...And it sums up the final truth about than a sense of inferiority to the squire, of whom, Cobbett when it says : "The cause he felt within him however, I had never heard speak before...
...May 12, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 13 Cobbett was bitterly attacked in his own time for When he came across a squire, as sometimes hapturning from Toryism to Radicalism, and he is still pened, who was kind to his tenants and workmen, reproached for his political inconsistency...
...tack their opening in Ravel's La Valse...
...The with the thrill of harsh red notes of determined first two pictures are of Russian exiles as they exist, anarchy, and now, in the uncertainty of its affairs, it and a third picture is of the exile without hope and has receded into the distant East...
...It must, then, come from the charging picture of the facts...
...Husstrain is in the nature of a test, and that there are band and wife breakfast silently...
...It authors...
...Rimbaud, ways inexplicable, enigmatic...
...Turgenieff counted rather less...
...tions for what people will give...
...bett, the English farmer, and though it would be idle Mr...
...They, who asked for a sign from heaven as proof of her the ones abroad and the ones who are dead, are exiled virginity...
...And then it occurred to the man ally sacred...
...affection for Mary...
...The man drinks tea and finds little beat...
...the yards like a thoroughbred picking its way clear It is obvious that poverty and the uncertainty of life, of foot-holes...
...He remembers his pilgrimage to the Those who gave us the great Madonnas made freChurch of the Intercession of the Virgin, near Wladi- quent use of flowers in connection with the Holy Pair...
...He was always plain William Cob- people...
...The re- days when its weight was thrown, gallantly and with action to an unjust generalization is both intellectual insufficient preparation, against the central empire to and emotional: I have preferred to answer this one the tune of 1,700,000 dead...
...ing couples beneath the bright radiance of gold can- The committee today was disheartening: absurd delabra-dress uniforms of the Guard-and against gestures against famine...
...Certainly, whatever the master Cold as the dread of cost- loses for the modern eye by this seeming over-care for To a man who has waited to battle his sins detail, should be as nothing when compared with his To the last-and lost...
...steel uprights, parallels of glistening track...
...Jean out by ether, morphine, cocaine, heroin, and the fumes Cocteau, who reminds one of a prudent, worldly, and of alcohol...
...This problem of' the literary treatment of the Near Lyons: A most pitiable dawn realizes that Russian exile has but one importance...
...Not so long ago it existed with three pictures rather than with argument...
...Down from the high Alps, down Almost anything that one can say-that the aristo- from the lower and lovelier hills above the Rhone cratic and ill-balanced imperial government deserved valley, it must descend to the city and seep through to fall...
...A samovar makes that comwas presented to her, in that winter which was so forting sound of a domesticated wind and is mocked particularly brilliant in the St...
...One of the most beautiful is that of Fra Filippo Lippi, Phantoms with its vase of alabaster containing lilies, and its angel I will call them with a great bellow, bearing the traditional lily wand and kneeling on a Holding my gun on the stoop ; carpet of tiny flowering plants...
...ern conception of the life hereafter for all its mediaeval HARRY MCGUIRE...
...But his business in life was not with such did Cobbett, and invariably without premeditation...
...Exiled- white-the Annunciation flower, and as such, especieveryone was exiled...
...master, the sun...
...other blossoms as an offering to her...
...the most elementary of Catholic conceptions-that a Anastasia is dressed and there is hot coffee...
...Generally, as denouement, they have a hopeless first pre-war enthusiasm for Nastasia Phillipowna and inarticulate suicide in the back room of an all-night Barashkoff of The Idiot, and for Prince Andre of dance hall...
...In the house, once gram...
...The labels "Tory" and "Radical" do For he was the last tribune of the English not apply to him...
...endless projects for schools...
...Cole has us in his Rural Rides how he passed the door of the given us a carefully documented work, he is without squire at Trotten and was looked at "uncommonly Mr...
...A night to make the most careless wonder feverish as she hints at the time with her folded pro- where stray cats can find shelter...
...And, since writers turned toward the complete immediacy of the reticent souls beneath these names can scarcely be musical expression and attempted a compromise be- known to the young novelist, their psychology is altween their art and that of the composer...
...remained, have made a wilderness about me...
...In a characterisThere will be a sound in the stillness tic canvas, Ghirlandajo placed it with lesser blooms in A barrel hot, a vase at her feet...
...shall not name, are the result-they are selling very In the first place, Russia existed for them in their well...
...a third of the exile who cannot but fail...
...A more modern They will come with the hordes of evening Annunciation is that of Dante Gabriel Rossetti...
...From the twelfth century it had stood there they are as much a part of art symbolism as the blue with its images that were so little influenced by of her robe...
...Intolerable flurries of snow waltz time...
Vol. 4 • May 1926 • No. 1
