into faithful English. It would scarcely be accurate to call his work translation. In fact, he himself remarks that his rendering of the Fifty Stanzas of Chauras is to be considered as an "interpretation" rather than a translation. But Mr. Mathers's method is more than interpretation, even. It amounts transmutation, whereby Oriental structure and rhythm is metamorphosed into a form and mode of expression that the Western mind can grasp without losing the essential flavour and meaning of the originals. Anyone who has even cursorily examined Oriental writings is at once struck with the difference between Eastern and Western modes of thought and methods of expressing that thought. It is significant that whereas Western books are written and printed so as to read from left to right, Oriental manuscripts run from right to left, or just the reverse. There is a difference not only in result, then, but in starting point. It is one of the curious things about Mr. Mathers's work that he successfully gives us both ancient and modern Eastern verse, whether it come from China, Annam, India, Afghanistan, or Arabia, in clear, crisp, modern English without depriving the former of its bouquet-like flavour or permitting the latter to seem shiny or brisk. His selections have no age. They cannot grow old. They are sprinkled with deathless dew. For example, here is Mr. Mathers's rendering of one of the Chinese poems of J. Wing: The breakers far to the left at night, And I caught cold yesterday, Standing in the dew by the North wall, And who was J. Wing? A fat, sly, faintly weary old scribe living under one of the Ming emperors, perhaps. No, says Mr. Mathers in one of his dry little notes: "Mr. Wing is an Americanborn Chinese and practises the profession of a valet". In short, a contemporary; and yet there is nothing contemporary about Mr. Wing's verse. It does not date. It just is. And Mr. Mathers perfectly preserves its unaging spirit. Let us now see how Mr. Mathers treats a much older Chinese offering, one by Li Po himself (705-762)-: English language. It is a better instrument than we thought. The heavenborn singer can do what he likes with it. It can be stripped bare until it runs like a thin and shining brook; it will take and hold colour; or it can be laden with rich spices and delicate perfumes. It will even reproduce the ornaments and eloquence and repetition of the more passionate East, as Mr. Mathers proves by his translation of "Black Hair" from the Afghan of the half-mad Muhammadji (19th Century): 66 Afghan poem, and of the quaintness of the antiphony between the bass of the lover and the soprano of the loved (for she speaks, too); but then there is not space here to quote even a fair measure of the most noteworthy translations of Eastern poetry since Fitzgerald gave the world Omar Khayyam. Mr. Mathers, it should be said, admits responsibility only for the rendering of his selections, not for their first translation. He freely acknowledges his debt among others to Judith Gautier, to L. Cranmer-Byng, to Adolphe Thalasso, and to John Duncan, the thorny Scotsman who wellnigh lost his soul in Edinburgh but found it again, at least for a time, among the nomadic tribes of Arabia; but still, to Mr. Mathers must go the praise for introducing to this generation so many of the perfect lyrics of the Eastern poets and for putting them into perfect English with perfect taste. The Finder By LOUISA BROOKE ND where did you stand to take these pictures?" counsel asked the witness. "I rested my camera," the witness replied, "on the starboard raii amidships” My mind leaped swiftly to the finder of that camera. The deck below shook with the heavy tread of hurrying men. The air was full of death. The very paint on the rail blistered in the terrific heat. But in the finder appeared only a vivid scrap of blue, a tiny oil-barge on the opposite side of the slip, hung with two feathers of smoke, one white, one black, microscopic tugs scurrying across the field of vision, human disaster reduced, compressed, belittled-temporality flashed for an instant on the retina of eternity! By GRACE FALLOW NORTON I went, simple creature, to see the High Command; When he saw my posy he put his armor on But I leaped and loosed my armor from the air And when he saw me armed he pulled his visor down— So I pulled my visor down and lifted up my lance, I clumped out of doors and bumped against a tree, I tumbled, panting, upon the precious grass, When they saw me tumble, as clumsy as a bear, For what should I do with iron shoe, iron glove? Far, far off, where laughter keeps a school, Where I, simple creature, am the dunce and the fool. But I'll laugh like a wave until I shake the sea, THE A Thursday at Bagatelle By HENRY DE MONTHERLANT 'HE plain of Bagatelle: schoolboys playing football. The end of October. After the war. I, arriving.—It is terrible, my dear Abbé! It is a provocation to the public powers. All this plain in the hands of men in black. The Abbé.—I don't know by what tacit convention this vast field is delivered, every Thursday* to the exclusive use of Catholic schools. They tell me that the recruitment of ball teams is rather difficult this year in the high schools. The boys prefer to dance on Thursdays. Perhaps that is the reason why we have the plain to ourselves. I. How I love this place! Sometimes when I have been working the whole long morning at my desk, the sudden need of Life takes hold of me, sharply, like anger or thirst. Then, in remain a little apart, waiting till He make us a sign, and I murmur to myself: 'After all, it was true.' The Abbé.-Have you ever doubted it? I.-Near them? You make me think of something a great atheist once said to me: 'It is only before a child that I am sorry not be to able to believe.' The Abbé.-They emanate Christianity like a perfume, and we, their mas ters, are penetrated with it. Do you see that boy, so charmingly ill-dressed, with a certain natural chic, the chic of a child of the rich, neglected by his parents. Five minutes ago he bought some cakes; then making a face, offered them to one of his comrades, saying: 'Oh I do not like that sort. Will you have them....?' And this comrade, un three minutes, the jolly little tramway derstand, was not one of his friends, from Neuilly transports us, my dog and me, to this vast fresh plain. This corner of the Bois affords unfailingly the minimum of loafing which I need in order not to relax my hold on Life. O Thursday, divine day! Sunday is truly the festival of triumphant betise, the stupidest day of the week. But Thursday is the day of youth. If Jesus returned to the earth, it is on a Thursday He would come. I can see Him now, descending in the midst of players. They break off the game and come around Him, touching their caps, not at all astonished. We two (and the dog) In France it is Thursday, and not Saturday, which is the weekly holiday for schools. and it was a lie that he did not like the cakes. Yet there is a boy who is here, only by special favour. Really, he ought to be in detention for having cut out of paper silhouettes of bandits under their soft hats. Save for the grace of God, he might at the present moment be playing the part of his toys in some blackguardly bar. But I am sure that he is nearer than I to Jesus Christ. I. He receives more of His Grace, I can believe. It was not by chance that the youngest of the disciples was the one best loved. The choice has a general sense very clear to me. Charmides also and Lysis were only sixteen. There is nothing astonishing in that for those who believe in the divine mission of the Greeks. from the City, and we do not lack even a new Illisus which sparkles behind those The Abbé.-I am not one of them, I trees. And we have the advantage, unconfess. I. You can admire, at any rate, the coincidence of the two Wisdoms which have remained the common soil of our moral life. One has, in its own terms, proposed the child to us as model; the other has spoken primarily to youths who, in our time, would not yet have passed their entrance examinations. The Abbé.-You go too far, perhaps, I fear to see you working to produce a new sociological fad-Adolescentism, if you will, or Juvenilism, the rival of feminism, and, in the end, opposed to it -an evil which would engender a conception of the world where a minor could do no wrong, and the soul of a schoolboy of thirteen would be considered the richest jewel of the ages. It is a paradox which would find a secret sympathy in the intellectual anarchy of our time, but which is violently opposed to good sense. Moreover, I know already the formula that you would coldly propose to the priest as educator: that of creating an emotional crisis in young boys of thirteen to seventeen confided to him! All that demands, it seems to me, some explanation. above all, no tirades! And, I. Very well. I will explain as best I can. A god has prepared this moment. To feel near us the presence of these beings is sufficient to make us think, if not clearly, at any rate, cleanly. I am certain that Socrates would not have had the imperious desire of the truth, if he had not been surrounded by souls whom he loved, that is, whose very existence engendered in him that desire. Like him, we are here in the midst of the Games at some furlongs like Socrates, of not being distracted by the Games, for I might as well tell you, my dear Abbé: your boys are very nice but they play very badly. Are you aware that they have not the first notion of football? However, I pardon them willingly for the sake of those two who talked together a moment ago, during the half, their bare knees plastered with mud. I lent an ear, but could distinguish only one word... 'Virgil'. . . O my poet, the lime-tree of St. Dié which has flourished nine hundred Mays moves me less than your name, flowering autumn by autumn on the lips of children! The importance of the adolescent does not seem to me so relative. A contact is lost between him and the unknowable. To the sweet reason of the child succeeds a kind of madness which was justly named morbus sacer, words which denote both nature of the malady and also the respect we should accord it. And it is then that what is going to happen is fraught with most gravity for a young man. Thirteen years! Balzac has written 'forty years,' investing this age with a character having no equal. The age of thirteen seems to me also a thing apart, sharply distinct from twelve and fourteen, and though I do not find this observation in any of the most subtle books of psychology I have read, I persist in believing in its significance. Brief, exquisite year! Seneca said that the full splendour of childhood appears only toward its close, just as apples are never sweeter than just before they decay. At the age of thirteen, childhood |