poem. Then, too, one must know the details of the rite which the song accompanies if he would understand the song. Hence, we think the predicatory method of presenting ideas is made satisfactory use of only by people who are distinctly mystical, whose minds bridge the gaps between disconnected statements, seeing in these stated facts only the figures in the patterned web of emotion.

Perhaps the struggle between the Navaho dominant characteristics is more clearly discerned in the form of Navaho songs than in the content. Ritualization functions more strongly in controlling poetic form than does mysticism. The tendency to swing like a pendulum from left to right, almost never circularly, in the repetition of the song-idea is prominent. Because the Navahoes prefer the orderliness of horizontal lines, as it were, to the intricacies of the spiral, or the circular, or the curved, four types of parallelism predominate: complete and incomplete parallelism, through repetition; and complete and incomplete incremental parallelism. Through these four forms of parallelism an absolute balance of line to line is obtained; the idea is developed with strict regularity. The unity of Navaho songs lies in the constant use of parallelistic lines; the variety, in the use of different types of parallelism.

A typical Navaho stanza is built up block after block; it is not woven. One group of lines of a certain syllabic length, falling into a certain parallelistic pattern, developing a certain idea by repeated predications of that idea, is followed by another group of lines similarly presented. The final effect of such a stanza is like that of a Navaho blanket which has first, let us say, three black stripes, next three rows of zigzag lightning and cloud figures, and next three red stripes. In the parallelistic types of lines, and the arrangement of these types into a stanza we see clearly illustrated the organizing, ritualistic tendency of the people.

In the patterning of song, ritual plays its part. The patient actually walks, as the song states, the sacred pollen

trail in the footsteps of the god. The song's delivery must be timed to fit his action. The lines of the song are parallelistic because the ritual action is parallelistic. The song idea proceeds by leaps and bounds across wide gaps bridged only by the mystical emotion and by the accompanying, somewhat explanatory, ritualistic procedure. Song is woven into the pattern of all Navaho ritual; ritualism is in control of the pattern of all ceremonial song.

In spite of their formalism, the Navaho songs seem to be in a true sense of the word, artistic. In them there is just enough variety to make for distinction, and just enough unity of pattern to make for form. The mold of form in these songs is sometimes too rigid, but more frequently the idea finds its proper and complete expression in the parallelistic restraint put upon it. The tendency towards ritualization appears to make for a fitting of form to idea. The strong individualism of the Navahoes defeats the too great regularity of ritual. The Navahoes' mystical attitude towards all life, the desire to experience and express with renewed vigor and through new figures the true mystic vision, prevents the strong tendency towards ritualization from destroying the spontaneity and high poetic beauty of their songs. Hence, although the desire to seek through the artificial means of ritual the re-experiencing and the imparting of the mystic vision has given rise to a force which, because it is social and conventional, is apt to lessen the fresh, untainted flow of poetry from the source of mysticism; nevertheless the individualistic mystic vision is too strong to die in the thrall of ritualization for the sake of ritualization.

It would seem, then, that in the evolution of racial art, a tendency to ritualize in order to strengthen an exalted mood is aesthetically salutary only so long as it does not degenerate to more formalism. In Navaho art the source of poetry is mysticism; the source of poetic patterning and form is ritualization. Happily combined in the Navahoes these two forces work together to produce a poetry which is both varied in

form and expression, both unique and universal in its appeal. Its clear-cut phrases, its precision of form, are illuminated by the light of a people's mystic soul.

Could we know as we know our own poetry, the poetry of many races, we should see that "in spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manner, of laws and customsin spite of things silently gone out of mind, and things violently destroyed, the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society as it spreads over the whole earth, and over all time... Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge... It is as immortal as the heart of

"Wordsworth: Preface to Second Edition of the Lyrical Ballads.

NATIONALISM IN CONTEMPORARY FRENCH ART

BY AARON SCHAFFER.

The prevalent fashion in certain circles is to sneer at nationalism as at a something outworn, antiquated, which must be cast aside, along with religion and all other established forms that have developed under the dual yoke of authority and tradition. The cry for the past hundred and fifty years has been for freer play for the individual, for complete selfexpression, and this cry is being carried to its inexorably logical conclusion in our own age. Now the battle is not merely between radicals and reactionaries; for it is very simple for the radical to exclaim that whoever does not believe as does he is a reactionary, and vice-versa. Nor can one sum up the entire dispute by saying that there are three theories at constant war with one another-namely, the ethical, which believes that only that is good which is moral; the aesthetic, for which only that is good which is beautiful; and the utilitarian, which would have only that good which is useful. For one may be firmly convinced that the poems of Oscar Wilde are bad either because they are immoral (or, to use the expression current with a certain class of thinkers, "amoral") or because they are of no material benefit to mankind; and, at the same time, feel that they are good, because they have an element of outer harmony that allies them with the beautiful things of all time. In other words, very few men are pure moralists or pure utilitarians or pure aesthetes. Neither the first nor the last, we might be safe in assuming, would deny the value of sanitary plumbing.

One of the reliable criteria in this determination of values is clearly furnished by art-standards and by what I may be permitted to term art-attitude. Your pure social radical (of whom Tolstoi may be taken as the epitome), with his harebrained schemes for the betterment of mankind, has little sympathy with art, not only as something almost wholly useless in a world which needs bread for the hungry and shoes for the barefooted, but as something which, with its tendency

to lift the individual-even the sufferer-out of and above himself, actually prevents man from seeing his immediate physical needs and thus retards the establishment of the world-utopia. The man who believes that the appreciation of the super-sensuous is at least as important as the necessity for food and sleep is at once either mildly termed a "highbrow" or is branded, with the most formidable epithets at the command of the radical, as a conservative if not even a reactionary.

One of the radical's most vehement accusations against art is that it is a conservator of nationalism, and that nationalism like everything else that tends to raise barriers between men, is reactionary. Such people refuse to admit that there is any middle path at all; for them, the "golden mean" of Aristotle is anathema, and anyone attempting to defend classicism as the undying exponent of measure and proportion is a philistine. It is, therefore, fortunate that men still exist who have the courage to throw down the gauntlet to the ultra-moderns, and who boldly state that, "at the risk of being styled philistine," they are for classicism in life and art as opposed to the countless schisms and upheavals that both art and life have witnessed during the past century and a half. From this point of view contemporary France must be studied to be properly evaluated.

The assertion is often made that the France of our day is wallowing in a veritable mire of nationalism. Now, there are nationalisms and nationalisms, and one of these nationalisms is chauvinism. It is undoubtedly true that there runs today in France, as there ran throughout the nineteenth century, a strong current of chauvinism. Some in France would make the silly claim that no culture exists on earth that can take rank beside the French. But it remains to be seen whether this is the spirit that really dominates France.

During the theatrical season of 1919-20, the Comédie-fran

"See the work of Professor Irving Babbitt, passim, but more especially his Rousseau and Romanticism, Boston and New York, 1919.