AXIOMATICS
The Mask. By John Cournos. 12mo. 320 pages. George H. Doran Company. New York.
THERE are dreadful people I have met who think that to be of any value, a work of art must have magnitude. They appraise art by its bulk and its momentum if hurled, while a symphony for eighty pieces would, in their scheme of judgements, be eighty times as important as a sonata. To have concocted Big Moments, to have dealt in everybody's heart-throbs, to have approached some sort of exaltation, is to have merited their ultimate benediction. They have waded through Dreiser, wallowed in English trilogies, and gulped great waves of 1850 Russian epilepticism. But it never occurs to them that a horn tooting away for dear life might be ridiculous. . . . Over against their almost universal trombonism, if one is to plead that the world still has taste, can be mentioned a scraggly number of tinkerers with the harpsichord. The harpsichord was a frail instrument, somewhat glib, although not more so than the Moralités Légendaires of Laforgue, or some of de Gourmont's excursions. We are in sad need of a trombone here in America to toot the value of the harpsichordists.
But the harpsichordists do not belong in a discussion of The Mask. I mention them simply because Up induces the thought of Down, and systole is accompanied by diastole; because I couldn't read Cannan without remembering Les Chevaux de Diomède. Mr. Cournos, that is to say, plays the trombone; and for a comparative beginner, he plays it well.
Mr. Cournos is very seriously immersed in the floods of life. In a novel that is evidently the redoing of a vivid personal experience—d'Aurevilly said that we all had two or three of such plots in our sack—he writes with all the fervour of a Dostoevsky. For like Dostoevsky, he is manipulating the throbbing realities. Life is a struggle for adjustment, a painful attempt to resolve things. These efforts begin when the new-born sees blurred movings with unfocused eyes, and end, I suppose, with death. All of which is a banal outlook on life, and has produced masterpieces.
