The Equinox (Volume III, Number I)

THE TANK Here is another: THE NEW PLEASURE Last night I invented a new pleasure, and as I was giving it the first trial an angel and a devil came rushing toward my house. They met at my door and fought with each other over my newly created pleasure; the one crying, “Itis a sin !’—the other, “Itis a virtue!” Good boy! A.C. InpIA AND THE Future. By Wittiam Arcuer. Alfred A. Knopf. $3.50 net. Mr. Arcuer has been through India, I should judge for as much as six weeks, with a typewriter and a provincial third-rate mind. Edmund Burke said: “This multitude of men does not consist of an abject and barbarous population. . (They are) a people for ages civilized and cultivated ; cultivated by all the arts of polished life while we were yet in the woods.” This obvious fact is not obvious to Mr. Archer. Like the clever journalist he is, he has documented himself with so many facts that he does not tell us that Indians are negroes, who throw their children to crocodiles, but on every page one can feel that he cherishes this view in his pate. His method of investigating India is the method of Count Smorltork; but Count Smorltork was a gentleman. His point of view is so ignorant and so bourgeois, that I am forced to quote pas- sages, lest it should not be believed that any biped could print such rottenness, “This senseless reduplication to infinity of one mincing, prancing figure pro- duces an indescribably nightmare-like effect; and what can be said for it, from the point of view either of art or of religion, I, for my part, cannot conceive. Who the figures represent I am not sure; . . . “Yes, the horror—thatis the only word for it. I do not mean that nowadays any particular horrors are perpetratedin the grim recesses of these giant fanes. I do not know that at any time they were the scenes of great cruelty or other abominations, though certainly they present the completest mise-en-scéne for such excesses. What I do know is that, from the corner-stone to the coping of the highest gopura, they are the product of gloomy, perverted, morbidly overwrought imaginations, revelling in the most extravagant features of the most monstrous of all mythologies.” This is all that Mr. Archer gets from the greatest temple, both from an artistic and religious standpoint, that is alive to-day. And in order that he may write him- self down an ass for all to see, he is stupid enough to publish photographs of temples, whose beauty would, one thinks, be evident even to the bovine readers to whom he doubtless appeals. Mr. Archer’s arrogance is equal to his ignorance. 297