of the city comes Carl Sandburg. All have been honorably received, their books bought and read, their praises sung, their rival schools defended. Walter de la Mare says that we owe courtesy to living poets no less than reverence to the dead. We have given it, and given it gladly. Poets have been known to snub the public, but the public seldom dares to snub the poets. The Equator itself is not spoken of more respectfully.

What does this portend? Masefield, who has something of the prophet in his composition, is by way of thinking that it means the coming of a great poet. The time is ripe, he says, the signs are in the heavens; and it is on American soil that this poet will be born. I'd love to believe it, but I don't, because the genius of the age and the genius of the race-if we are a race-are developing along other lines. Science and finance-and it takes a deal of finance to give science a backing-rule the earth. The useful arts are costly arts, and the wealth of the world is theirs to spend for the ultimate good of mankind. But poetry blooms on the stony soil of Mossgiel where Burns plowed, and in the London garret where Chatterton starved and died. England was Merrie England when Shakespeare's comedies made it merrier; but England was sad England when Milton conceived Paradise Lost. Many a modern poet echoes Whitman's boast, and

avowedly chants the great pride of man in himself,

which is invigorating as a cold bath is invigorating;

but not as a great moral truth, or as a great principle of beauty, is invigorating. Will the genius whom Masefield sees winging his flight earthwards fall on evil days, and be "the joy of an unhappiness which confesses itself"; or will he hark back to the lusty combativeness of a time when Marvell's call to play was like a call to battle:

Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball;

And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life?

Or will he pass earth by in favor of some other planet badly in need of genius, and leave us as we are, with no great note sounding in our ears, but with an antiphone of lesser voices stirring us to a sense of beauty? There is nothing disheartening in this prospect. If we can keep up a good supply of minor poets for everyday use, the great poets of the past will suffice for the exalted moments when we are privileged to read them.

DU CÔTÉ DE CHEZ PROUST1

By EDITH RICKERT

THE GUERMANTES WAY. By Marcel Proust. lated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff. Two vols. Seltzer, New York.

T

Trans

Thomas

o A reader hesitating outside the strange landscape of Proust, one of the most alluring gateways-certainly from the Côté de Guermantes-is where the Red Shoes of the Duchess go twinkling over the page:

"I" am calling at the ducal residence. Swann comes in, superb in a "pearl-gray frock-coat," with "white gloves stitched in black," and carrying a "gray tall hat of a specially wide shape which Delion had ceased now to make except for him, the Prince de Sagan, the Marquis de Modène, M. Charles Haas, and Comte Louis de Turenne." When he laid this wonderful hat on the floor, it was seen to be "lined with green leather, a thing not usually done, because, according to him, this kept the hat much cleaner, in reality because it was highly becoming." "I" wondered whether in the old days he had not worn a clipped mustache or his hair brushed up 1 From The New Republic, September 30, 1925.

vertically in front, for he seemed strangely altered. The fact was that he was mortally ill.

The Duchess came in

tall and proud in a gown of red satin, the skirt of which was bordered with spangles. She had in her hair a long ostrich feather dyed purple, and over her shoulders a tulle scarf of the same red as her dress. "How nice it is to have one's hat lined with leather," said the Duchess, whom nothing escaped.

No, nothing but the patent signs that her friend was dying.

To this annoying fact Swann would naturally not have referred; but pressed by the offended great lady to say why he would not join them in a trip to Italy in the spring, he was compelled to reply: "But, my dear friend, it's because I shall then have been dead several months."

Swann

How embarrassing for the Duchess! politely reminded her that she must not let her concern make her late for dinner; but she "perceived in a vague way that the dinner to which she was going must count for less to Swann than his own death." As she hesitated the Duke cut the knot with an ax:

"Come, Oriane, don't stop there chattering like that and exchanging your jeremiads with Swann; you know very well that Mme. de Saint-Euverte insists on sitting down to table at eight o'clock sharp. . . the horses have been waiting for a good five minutes. I beg your pardon, Charles," he went on, turning to Swann, "but it's ten minutes to eight already. Oriane is always late, and it will take us more than five minutes to get to old Saint-Euverte's."

The Duchess yields and lifts her red skirt to enter the carriage, thereby enabling the Duke to make the terrific discovery that she is wearing black shoes. ("But, M. Proust, this is incredible!" says the reader.) The Duchess, who hates a scene before Swann, gently insinuates that since they are late already .

"No, no, we have plenty of time. It is only ten to; it won't take us ten minutes to get to the Parc Monceau. And, after all, what would it matter? If we turned up at half past eight, they'd have to wait for us, but you can't possibly go there in a red dress and black shoes. Besides, we shan't be the last, I can tell you; the Sassenages are coming, and you know they never arrive before twenty to nine."

There you have it-pure essence of Proust-the whole episode, far more delicious than the excerpts suggest, contained within about thirty pages-essence of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, distilled with irony, and with no small tincture of human nature at large. And so adieu, for the time, to the feudal race of the Guermantes.

But with what, then, have we been occupying ourselves for eight hundred-odd pages of their story? We begin with impressions of life in Paris, mainly in the mind of Françoise, the old servant (about forty pages); spend an evening at the OpéraComique and are waved at by the Duchess de Guermantes (about thirty pages); go to visit her nephew, Saint-Loup, an officer in a garrison town, for the purpose of getting an introduction to the Duchess