THE poets are fortunate; they can express the most intimate of their experiences, and yet keep their secrets. We others, who work in prose, how can we avoid making ourselves a motley to the view? It does not lessen our embarrassment if the love we would express is not for a human being; to write of one's love for a dog is, almost inevitably, to get oneself relegated to the category of foolish sentimentalists. Yet what kind of love can it be that will not take the risks incidental to expression? Say it with flowers,' the florist's sign exhorts us. 'Say it with bones,' to the dog; and I endeavor to do so; but there remain things hardly to be said in that medium. True, I might talk to him, as I do, and leave it at that. But if you are accustomed to being in print, you seem hardly to have said a thing till it is in print. Besides, since he cannot understand more than my general intention when I speak to him, I am almost bound to address what I would say of him to people who can, and a few of whom, initiates, perhaps will.

His name is 'Wog,' though, like the dog in the classic advertisement, he 'answers, reluctantly, to "d-you, come here." He is a wire-haired terrier, old style. He is two and a half years old, with a genius for remaining a puppy. Abandoning no game of his infancy, he has given up only one habit, that of putting himself in the corner when scolded. As a puppy, at the first word of reprimand he would retreat to 1 From the Saturday Review (London BaldwinConservative weekly), February 6

the nearest corner, push his face against the angle of the walls, and remain there, only now and then turning a ludicrously woebegone visage over his shoulder, till some word of forgiveness was spoken to him. So comic was the exaggeration of sorrow in his expression that, I fear, we sometimes delayed pardon a few moments for the amusement of the spectacle. Alas, there is a lamentable truth in that masterpiece of the Marquis de Sade: ““O monsieur, il est donc possible qu'on puisse prendre du plaisir à voir souffrir?" "Tu le vois," lui répondait cet homme immoral.' I am glad he outgrew that penitential trick at six months.

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All other usages of his extreme youth he has retained, and notably a certain method of dealing with temporary superfluous bones. These, since it is his fate and mine to live on a very high level, without access to a private garden or yard, he can cover with none but imaginary dust. But he has imagination. The bone being deposited in the centre of the carpet, he circles round it, without haste, without rest, his nose shoveling on to it the dust that, as Walter Pater said of a possibly more important desideratum, is either not there at all or not there in any satisfying measure. After some five minutes the bone is, by convention, hidden. Both the high contracting parties observe the convention strictly: he takes no notice of the hypothetically concealed bone, glare it never so whitely, and I walk over it as though it were under a great mound of dust. Once

only has the convention been violated, by a charwoman, now I trust condemned to the task of cleaning the kennel of Cerberus while those three mouths nibble at the redundancies of her figure. The right of denouncing the convention during which neither 'Wog' nor I have official cognizance of the very obvious bone is vested exclusively in him, and he expands or contracts the period of observance at his absolute discretion. Sometimes he will find the bone, with every symptom of surprise, in twenty minutes; at other times he will let it rest quietly under the drums and tramplings of three days' carpet-sweeping. There is, thank heaven, no charwoman now, only an aged and dog-worthy man of all work, who is very mindful of Shakespeare's curse on the moving of bones.

It is part of the charm of my dog that he has a gracious manner toward any servant, and was polite even to Kate, of accursed memory, who once thought to feed him on curry I had rejected as being a fortuitous assembly of outraged condiments. He is, indeed, a good deal more demonstrative toward the people who come and go, and to chance-met people in the street, than toward me. 'You and I,' he conveys to me, 'are beyond all that outward fuss.' He will embrace me vehemently after any considerable absence, and he will sit in my chair by the hour, his chin on the lower right edge of my manuscript, while I work; but his formal waggings he usually keeps for others. See him in the Tube. He is convinced that I own every railway carriage in which he and I travel. Each passenger is taken for a guest of mine, and, so far as the length of his lead will allow, he ushers each to a seat, with the canine equivalent of smiles and bows. And children especially. Once no less than twelve little girls, some school party, got into our carriage, and he snapped his lead, and

was in the lap of each in succession. But he has regard for age. He will not lick the face of any child that is appreciably older than he is. On the other hand, in Kensington Gardens he will clamber up the side of any perambulator, after a diplomatic waggle at the nurse, to put his tongue across the face of the inmate. It is probably his worst disappointment that once, one Sunday morning, he encountered what was undoubtedly built as a perambulator but had been perverted into a local newsgirl's vehicle for the delivery of the Sunday papers.

A sentimental dog, you say. May I invite you to keep the ring when he next meets a bull terrier? 'Once bitten, twice shy,' is a proverb without meaning for him. He has fought a neighboring, unneighborly bull terrier three times, and so detests the whole tribe that he will fly at any member of it. Airedales he walks round stiffly, provoking no fight, but expecting one; with Alsatians, despite my own unreasonable mistrust, due to memories of wolves I knew in Northern India, he is very friendly; and he will run the whole breadth of Kensington Gardens to greet an old, bachelor Great Dane, whose austere objection to romping he broke down long ago. I may whistle till I am weary; if that Great Dane is in view, he is off to it.

You will have gathered that, with every other virtue, he lacks that of obedience. But who am I that he should obey me? Certainly not his superior; very probably, in most respects, his inferior. In the thing that matters most to us, we are on precisely the same level. For as we sit by this fire, he and I, and muse why it should be warming two of us instead of three, we are equally at a loss. He can but thrust a vainly consoling muzzle into my hand; I can but stroke his inconsolable face.

His gait is slow and measured as he walks upon the platform. Without haste, but without delay, he follows the traditional path. On all sides he is greeted by stormy applause. Arrived at his stand, he turns toward the audience and bows his head slightly in recognition, with a minimum of emphasis. The tense expectation that prevails in the concert hall seems to make no impression upon him. At least he gives no indication of being aware of it, and indeed, while he is on the platform, he reveals nothing of what he is feeling or thinking. As he steps on and as he stands there, with his supple and elegant figure, his calm severe countenance, he betrays none of the pleasant excitement that one notices so often in artists, particularly when they are young.

There is not the least trace in his manner of any love of the limelight; nothing but an iron self-possession, and a sense of the fact that now his work is to begin - important work that must be performed faultlessly. It is the manner of a young champion entering the ring or walking out on the mat, perfectly cool in the knowledge of his reserve power, and vividly aware of the job ahead of him.

Hardly more than a decade ago Jascha Heifetz was still a small boy whose talent had already attracted attention and whose astonishing skill in drawing rich tones from the violin seemed to promise great things. Since

1 From the Neue Freie Presse (Vienna Nationalist-Liberal daily), February 2

VOL. 329-NO. 4265

then he has outstripped all expectations, and to-day, at the age of twenty-six, he is far beyond all other virtuosos, a prodigy of perfected technique.

Only from certain slight and superficial indications could one detect that he takes any special pleasure in the fabulous wealth he has earned by his equally fabulous playing-from the sparkle of his brilliant cuff-links, from the watch-chain that dangles in a thin golden line across his waistcoat, from the carefully-cut dress-coat in the latest style, which he wears not without a touch of foppishness.

What one does n't detect at all is any special joy in his art. Such joy he must

the Ruliez

JASCHA HEIFETZ

[Neues Wiener Tagblatt]

certainly experience—indeed he must be wholly possessed by it. Yet one would never guess it from his manner.

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There he stands, adjusts the violin to its position, and plays. In all this he is quite as simple and matter-of-fact one might almost say as ordinary-as any mere orchestra violinist.

Kreisler, when he adjusts his instrument, tosses back the tails of his coat with an impatient gesture that betrays his excitement. Huberman bends toward the violin as he lifts it to his chin, and his countenance is on fire with a passionate devotion. Some sort of passion, some sort of 'frenzy,' or 'temperament,' shows itself in every violinist, every concert artist, according to his individuality. And they all let it be recognized that they have sensitive nerves. It is one of the greatest charms of an artistic personality—especially of a musician's - that one's own nerves respond so alertly to his. One of the greatest mysteries of art lies in this communication of nervous energy.

But Jascha Heifetz seems to have no nerves at all. The truth is, he has disciplined them so sternly that they never thrust themselves into notice. He simply stands there and fiddles. The bend of the left arm that holds the instrument, the movement of the left hand fingering the neck of the violin, are as simple and prosaic as if they were quite effortless, and in no sense the kind of thing that calls for 'nerves.' In the same severe way the right hand draws the bow. If anything in particular is to be observed, it is the obvious intention of the performer to make his gestures appear as graceful as possible. Even this intention is only very slightly perceptible as an intention, so swiftly is it transformed into a reality, and so swiftly is the reality raised to the point of perfection.

He stands there fiddling, as I say, and his countenance remains quite unmoved, preserving during the whole evening the same impassive earnestness, whether he plays the Kreutzer

Sonata, the Chaconne of Bach, Schubert's '‘Ave Maria,' or any little virtuoso piece. A handsome young face that strikes one as chiefly remarkable because it is never illumined by a smile throughout a whole concert. Neither before nor during the performance,even in the uproar of applause, - nor afterward when his work is done and his triumph secure, does the shadow of a smile flit over that visage. Never is the iron imperturbability of those features softened or subdued into a friendly expression.

The work that Jascha Heifetz has hitherto accomplished, and is still accomplishing, is written with powerful strokes in his countenance. It is the hardest kind of work in the world, and it demands the most relentless willpower and the strongest characterthe work on oneself. This accomplishment can be read in the fine lofty brow, somewhat wrinkled. A slight reddening is perceptible in its furrows, as if in response to the intense concentration within. Even his eyelids seem to be flushed as they hang somewhat heavily halfway over his great eyes. His thin cheeks, however, remain pale, and the noble oval of his visage remains apparently unmoved, in spite of the energetic forward thrust of his fine nose. Only his mouth, shut in a decisive line and yet suggestive of a sensuous temperament, is constantly alive with tiny and almost imperceptible twitchings. When difficult passages or showy movements are over, his full but by no means sensual lips come together tightly and are drawn in with a pronounced motion as if something had to be swallowed and then are again relaxed. The flush on his forehead and eyelids, the slight twitching of his mouth - that is all. The expression of his eyes has nothing visionary in it, and never dissolves in self-forgetfulness; they look straight ahead of him, fully