VII. Fontainebleau and Vesey

W

Street

E SEEM to see a small but interesting cloud rising over the skyline, and we gird up our typewriter ribbon to utter a modest prophecy.

After consulting the stars, poking round in the back corners of foreign newspapers, and going into a pensive brief tranquillity, we are moved to say that we think we have spotted the next "sensation" in the intellectual world. By which we mean the newspaper Feature which will succeed M. Coué and various other horizonseeking movements that have been specially busy since the war.

Keep your eye on Mr. Gurdjieff and

his "Forest House" at Fontainebleau. Mr. Gurdjieff, we learn, conducts some sort of colony in the Forest of Fontainebleau, where with music, rhythmic gymnastics, quaint costumes, perfumed fountains, and "mystical" discipline, the inner secrets of life are resolutely pursued. With Mr. Gurdjieff, so it is said, is associated Mr. Ouspensky, the author of Tertium Organum, a book that has been very highly spoken of by competent authorities.

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A number of very well-known English writers have been mentioned (in the London papers) as disciples of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky; but as several of these have recently replied disclaiming the connection, we think it better not to give their names. We first heard of the "Forest House" when we read that the late Katherine Mansfield, that very interesting writer,

had been staying there. And her husband, Middleton Murry, a clearheaded critic, writes of the "Gurdjieff Institute” (in a letter to the London Daily News) that "there is no charlatanry about it. Something quite real is being attempted there. What that something real is cannot be defined in a letter, or in many letters. But the most important of my conclusions (to my own mind) was that, so far as I could see, that Institute did not solve the problem it professed to solve: It merely made its adherents unconscious of the problem for a time. In other words-highly metaphorical words, no doubt it was a drug, a very potent and searching drug, but one of whose ultimate beneficence no man living can speak with authority."

One realizes, of course, that in using the word "drug" Mr. Murry speaks as he takes care to warnfiguratively. And he exhibits his

usual sagacity in the distinction he 'draws. It is the function of almost all æsthetic and metaphysical rhapsodists to cause happiness by temporarily numbing the awareness of Insolubility. This-we say it in all sincerity is not something to be merely chaffed. We are heartily in favour of anesthetizing the reason as long as possible-provided you know what you are doing.

We are pleased also that Mr. Gurdjieff has chosen the Forest of Fontainebleau as the seat of his "Institute." We spent several weeks in the cherry-blossom season of our youth rambling round that forest; it has always had a curiously mystical and uplifting effect. There was a Scandinavian companion of ours in that spring of 1912 who was so hilarified by the loveliness of those sundappled aisles of woodland and the

clear, cool elixir of the April air that he behaved almost like a Sherwood Anderson character. He forswore food, lived on dry toast and lemon juice in water, and used to strip off his clothes and run stark in the lonely alleys of the forest, praying to pine trees and uttering uncouth Scandinavian outcries of demiurge and ecstasy. We ourself managed to keep our mysticism in check by bathing in the green ice-cold water of the stripling Loing: if Mr. Gurdjieff has tried it in early April he will agree with us that it will chill the most fiery frizzlings of the insurgent heart.

It appears from an article in the London New Statesman that Mr. Gurdjieff-"of Greek origin, but spent his youth in Persia"-organized an expedition thirty years ago to investigate "the wisdom of the East." He and other savants set out for Thibet,