autobiographer and questioned him. He lied flawlessly, but they insisted that he go with them.

"We had now come to town. There I was taken to a hotel and asked if I knew the murdered man's brother. I said, 'Yes.' We went inside, and there we found him. The man greeted me and said, 'If you know anything about this affair and confess, we will not lock you up. You will be one of the witnesses. Even if it should turn out that you were one of them, we will not lock you up. I am not deceiving you. This man who is listening to us agrees with me.' with me.' He continued: 'Sam, I am acquainted with your father. He is a fine old man. Even if you were along with Peter, I will not have you locked up, if you will confess. It is merely because Peter is a bad man that I want to know it.' 'He must be telling the truth,' said I to myself. 'I'm going to tell.' I 'I'm going to tell.' I thought that in such a case they would let me go. So I said: 'Yes, I know all about it. I saw Peter when

he killed the man.'

"In the jail I found Peter. 'What did they say to you?" he asked. "They did not say anything,' I said. "They asked me many questions,' said Peter. "They asked me whether you had done it, and they said that if I told them, they would let me go home. I told them, however, that I did not know anything.' "They asked me very much the same,' I then said, 'but I also told them that I did not know anything.' 'That is good, for without witnesses they have only hearsay evidence and they will not be able to hold us,' said Peter. 'Anyhow, the man we killed was crazy and his brothers hated

The stage was now set for the scene when Peter should have discovered that his friend had confessed to the officers and then had lied to him. But among these primitive men there turned out to be no dramatic scene, perhaps because there was no dramatist. "After a time I was taken out and brought to the courthouse. There they again questioned me, and a woman, a shorthand writer, took down my answers. I was then told to tell everything again in detail and that as soon as time for the trial came, I would be freed. When I was through, they took me back and locked me up again, and the other man was taken out. When he returned, he had of course learned what I had done. He was very quiet. Then I said, 'Well, you said you were asked to kill him and you also said that they, the brothers of the murdered man, asked others to kill him. If that is so, you did it because you were asked to do so, and you are not to blame. If we can find other witnesses to this fact, we will surely get out. Indeed, I spoke about the matter because they had locked us up alone. I did not like it. The boys were so boisterous that I thought the others ought to be in jail, too. That is what I was thinking of when I spoke to the officers. Soon they will bring these others here, too, and when we are all here together, it will not be so lonesome." Peter was glad of it. Soon the other two were brought, and the four of us made quite a good deal of noise talking.'

Sustained by what the four seem to have regarded as a very good jus

tification of the murder, the Winnebago settled down to wait for trial. "We stayed in prison all winter. I was very tired of it, but I kept that secret because otherwise the other men would be likely to make fun of me. Sometimes I really felt like crying, but I acted as though I did not care at all. I was married at the time I had been imprisoned, and I hungered to see my wife and was in a terrible condition, but I told the others that I did not care in the least. ... After a while the spring term of court arrived, and we were happy. When the time for our trial came, however, we were told that our case had been bound over to the fall term. So, we had to stay in prison all summer. When the fall term came, the case was bound over until the following spring. It was enough to cause one to say 'Oh, my!' in impatience."

"Shortly after this we found out that my wife had married again. I did not feel like eating, but I tried hard to do so, because I thought the others would notice it. Then I said to them, 'I am glad to hear about this report that my wife has married again. When I get out of prison I will pay the one who has married her, for he is taking care of her until my release. Indeed I have felt quite uneasy about her for some time. Now I feel quite relieved, for she is being provided for.' This I spoke. But the truth of it was that I was as angry as I could very well be. made up my mind that I would take her away from whomsoever she might be living with. Then I thought that I would make her feel as sad as I could; I thought I would disfigure her, cut off her nose, then

I

take her to the wilderness, give her a sound beating, and leave her there. I could not think of anything else all the time, and I believe that for a time I did not even taste food. I often felt like crying. At night I would not be able to sleep, for I could not forget the whole affair. Sometimes I would dream of seeing her, and then in the morning I would tell the others about it and feel better. Throughout all this time I never thought of all those of my relatives who were really concerned for me. Not even that grateful was I. I only thought of the woman.

"Now the time for the next session of the court had arrived. It was the spring session. We were given a trial. They always took us to court in handcuffs. We each had a lawyer. At the first hearing one of us was freed, the other three remaining in prison. Then the lawyers pleaded the case of the others, and two more were freed, I being one of these. The man who had actually done the killing was the only one who remained in prison.'

Though Crashing Thunder led a life compared to which, as Mr. Radin says, that of Benvenuto Cellini was drab, he nowhere in his memoirs strikes a dramatic attitude. He knows he has been a notable man among his people, but the facts about his career are enough. And though he had, at the time of writing, left off his loose ways and taken to religion, he never strikes a moralistic attitude. He neither beats his breast over his sins nor mouths them with the relish of a convert. The facts themselves are somehow sacred to him; his sole obligation is to present them. He does not even have

the sort of pride, fatal to autobiographers, which urges most of them to try to reduce their lives, in retrospect, to a simple scheme, deliberately undertaken and resolutely carried out. When Crashing Thunder, after the loss of his elder brother, resolves to drink himself to death, he fails, not too heroically. And not too heroically he recounts the episode. "Soon I became a confirmed drunkard. By that time I had quite forgotten the fact that I wanted to die. Indeed I enjoyed drinking very much." Rousseau, if he had had such an incident to narrate, would have given to it a chapter full of agonies and protestations. Franklin, in a similar case, would have suavely pointed out that he had been wrong to resolve to drink himself to death in the first place and then would have included his attempt in the list of his errata for the benefit of his readers. Crashing Thunder resists all such temptations. There has lately been a good deal of critical argument to the effect that American poetry, the poetry, that is, produced in the United States by the English-speaking Americans, would do well to go to school to the poetry of the Indians. It would be odd and interesting if some historian of literature in, say, the twentysecond century should announce that the first American realist was a Winnebago named Crashing Thunder.

time, will rub his eyes, and then thank his luck for the blunder. Here, in the first convenient monograph devoted to Bruegel in English, is a painter about whom most of the standard manuals are reticent if not silent, but about whom Mr. Barker says: "Every other painter lacks something or has something in excess. Bruegel is the most comprehensive and the best balanced, the most energetic and the mellowest. Of all painters he is the greatest realist, and of them all the most humane." These might seem to be biographer's superlatives if the accompanying illustrations, though only black and white, did not go a long way toward supporting the ardent verdict.

The technical brilliance of this painter can, of course, not be judged without his colors. Yet even without them, in such an achievement as "The Carrying of the Cross," the splendor of his conception, the firmness and ease of his composition, the scrupulous execution of the details, the creative mastery of all his materials, cannot be missed. Jesus is in the exact center of the picture, but his position gives nothing mathematical to the look of the whole. The gibbets and the trees, the Flemish windmill and the Flemish Golgotha, break the horizon and distribute the weight without disturbing the equilibrium. The field is full of people streaming with a horrible gusto and reality to the place of execution, but there is a kind of pattern to their aimlessness, marked by the bold line of mounted soldiers sweeping across and through the picture, at once holding the rabble back and binding them all together in the unity of Bruegel's art. Though

the picture and the story are apparently of about the same importance, they cannot be separated. If the story furnished the picture with its spirit, the picture furnishes the story with its body.

Bruegel was too philosophic a man not to make, or to hint, a comment upon his theme. His Jesus is not the commanding radiant focus of the picture. Instead he is almost lost in the tumult, as the painter must have reasoned that the victim was on that occasion. The irony is not stressed; it is simply implied. Bruegel, who had doubtless witnessed enough executions himself, knew that the curious who came to them could as a rule hardly see the condemned person over the heads of the spectators. Why should he think it had been different when the soldiers were Romans and the rabble were Jews? As a solid Fleming, contemporary of Rabelais and Montaigne, he did not even try to think it. His comment was less a sharp stroke of historical irony than the natural exercise of his realistic bent.

In "The Fall of Icarus," however, Bruegel must have been more deliberate. It was well enough to imagine that because Icarus had survived in legend he must therefore have been a notable fellow in his day. But what, the painter may be imagined as having asked, did Icarus ever do but try to escape from Crete on wax-fastened wings, go too near the sun, lose his impertinent wings, and tumble ingloriously into the sea? Who thought much of him till the poets began to sing his fate? Nobody, Bruegel presumably concluded, at least not the Cretans who on the Icarian day were busy with their

affairs. So, in the picture, the sun shines superbly but indifferently upon the wide bright sea and a long stretch of coast; ships cross the bay under proud full sail; sheep graze as quietly as if nothing had plunged past the calm promontory on which they stand; a peasant with a clumsy horse and a rough plow keeps his eye on the neat furrow he is turning; another peasant, mouth dully open, stares unconcerned at the sky, with his back to the course which Icarus must have taken in his whirling descent; and Icarus is only, so far as the painting is concerned, one white desperate leg still visible above a splash of foam and feathers. The gulls alone show any inquisitiveness about the late son of Dædalus.

The ironical commentary is too sustained to have been an accident. Nor is it nothing more than peasant cynicism with regard to anything in the nature of high-flying. It is sophistication, like that of Anatole France in his story of Pilate unable to remember the young Galilean whom he had sent to the cross. Bruegel was a painter. He could see the pictorial elements in the Icarus theme. There was the Cretan coast, with its cliffs standing up from the ocean. There was the sky overhead. There were ships and sheep and peasants at work. But Icarus himself was only a flutter in that spacious world, only the seed of a myth still to be germinated. As an honest man, committed to what he could perceive and then communicate in a picture, Bruegel was no more tempted to pay premature honors to the Icarus who was to be than he would have been tempted to paint an acorn so that it would look like an oak.

A book, long expected and desired, which turns out to be unsurpassed, and some will say unequaled, by any book of the year in charm, loveliness, and gaiety.

The Autobiography and Memoirs of Benjamin Robert Haydon. Harcourt, Brace & Co. 2 vols.

Haydon had as much energy and assurance as Cellini, but no genius for painting, and not even any striking aptitude. He had, however, a talent for complaint which furnished him an outlet and made him a great autobiographer. If he painted less magnificently than he thought, he wrote more vividly and amusingly than he knew. This reprint of his one important book has an admirable introduction by Aldous Huxley. Anatole France: The Degeneration of a Great Artist. By Barry Cerf. Dial Press. Professor Cerf feels and argues that Anatole France would have been a greater man if he had been more solemn, more industrious, and less sensual. But there are a million solemn, industrious, chaste-spoken men to one Anatole France. Other qualities made him great. Those others have eluded Professor Cerf.

Edgar Allan Poe: The Man. By Mary E. Phillips. John C. Winston Co. 2 vols.

An unsystematic and uncritical compilation, in two enormous volumes, of all the miscellaneous matter about, or nearly about, Poe which the biographer has been able to scramble together during what must have been many years of eager labor. The work's chief merit is its illustrations, which, though not always particularly relevant, are diversified and instructive.

640

D. Van Nostrand Co.

The author calls his book "an outline of the worlds in which we live,” and he has managed to give an account, at once statistical and lively, of the present situation of mankind in the universe, on the planet, in the state, in industry, among the neighbors, at home, and in the mind and the imagination.

The Art of Being Ruled. By Wyndham

Lewis. Harper & Brothers.

The most provocative book on contemporary civilization that has been written in English, as far as the Roving Critic knows, since the war.

The Prairie and the Making of Middle America. By Dorothy Anne Dondore. Torch Press.

An impressive though verbose survey of the literature dealing with the Mississippi Valley from the Spanish explorers to the most recent poets and novelists of the region. The numerous descriptive quotations hold up a moving mirror to four centuries of landscape and life.