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Title: Variations
Author: James Huneker
Release date: September 3, 2026 [eBook #79507]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1921
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79507
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VARIATIONS ***
VARIATIONS
_BY JAMES HUNEKER_
MEZZOTINTS IN MODERN MUSIC (1899)
CHOPIN: THE MAN AND HIS MUSIC (1900)
MELOMANIACS (1902)
OVERTONES (1904)
ICONOCLASTS: A BOOK OF DRAMATISTS (1905)
VISIONARIES (1905)
EGOISTS: A BOOK OF SUPERMEN (1909)
PROMENADES OF AN IMPRESSIONIST (1910)
FRANZ LISZT. ILLUSTRATED (1911)
THE PATHOS OF DISTANCE (1912)
NEW COSMOPOLIS (1915)
IVORY APES AND PEACOCKS (1915)
UNICORNS (1917)
BEDOUINS (1920)
STEEPLEJACK. TWO VOLUMES (1920)
VARIATIONS (1921)
_CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS_
VARIATIONS
BY
JAMES HUNEKER
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1921
COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Published November, 1921
COPYRIGHT, 1918, 1919, BY THE NEW YORK TIMES CO.
COPYRIGHT, 1919, 1920, BY THE PRESS PUBLISHING CO.
PRINTED AT
THE SCRIBNER PRESS
NEW YORK, U. S. A.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
Mr. Huneker’s literary career was at its flood when ended by his sudden
and unlooked for death. He was perhaps our only, certainly our chief,
literary journalist, and his instructive, penetrating, and, above all,
entertaining criticism in the field of what he liked to call the Seven
Arts was almost always first seen in the periodical press, daily or
weekly. Afterward it was sifted and the residue abridged or expanded,
burnished or simplified, in its assimilation into appropriate permanent
style and stuff. Needless to say it lost none of its brilliance in the
process which was always minimized by having been largely forestalled, as
it were, in the original composition. The result was not so much merely
eminent as literally unique. His books have not only no rivals but no
competitors. Alone among American belletristic writers he followed in
the French journalistic-literary tradition, illustrated and rendered
illustrious by the practice of a long and shining roll of littérateurs.
Such a practice tends of itself to popularize its product by inevitably
keeping the larger public more or less in mind and therefore eschewing
professional pedantries. The element of personality acquires prominence
as in conversation. Style itself becomes conversational. Huneker is as
familiar in address as if he were not often erudite in material. He
establishes first of all, however imperceptibly, his relations with his
reader. Whatever the effect, it is devoid of dulness, and accordingly
the interest of his writing is incontestable even when its value is
indeterminate.
Composed of essays written since the publication of his last
book—Bedouins—though of necessity lacking the advantage of his personal
selection and supervision, Variations is a worthy companion of its
shelf-full of predecessors in its possession of these qualities. Aptly
named, it presents perhaps better than any of them a wide-reaching
diversity of æsthetic material for the consideration, the illumination,
and—pre-eminently—the entertainment of the cultivated. Perhaps, too, it
shows a maturer treatment, a mellower temper without a whit less energy,
and a greater opulence than ever of the author’s stored acquisitions and
spontaneous, even exhilarated, exposition of them. And here and there
amid the wealth of literary and æsthetic miscellany which he displays
and expounds one comes, with greater frequency than ever, upon memorable
crystallizations of experience in the contemplation of these matters.
Such truths, too, he exemplifies as well as formulates. No one ever, for
instance, credited more completely his own maxim: “There is no disputing
tastes—with the tasteless,” or conformed more cordially to his own
injunction: “Write only for the young. The old will not heed you, being
weary of the pother of life and art.” There was nothing, however, of
which _he_ was less weary, as this his last volume copiously attests, and
the explanation, of course, is his unimpaired youthfulness of mind and
spirit.
CONTENTS
PAGE
VARIOUS 1
HOW NOT TO BE A GENIUS 11
THE RECANTATIONS OF GEORGE MOORE 20
CRUSHED VIOLETS 30
BAUDELAIRE’S LETTERS TO HIS MOTHER 37
THE TWO TEMPTATIONS 46
THE FLAUBERT ANNIVERSARY 52
ROOSEVELT AND BRANDES 57
PENNELL TALKS ABOUT ETCHING 67
IN PRAISE OF PRINTS 77
NEW RUSSIA FOR OLD 84
CÉZANNE 91
EILI EILI LOMO ASOVTONI? 99
SOCIALISM AND MEDIOCRITY 111
CHOPIN OR THE CIRCUS? 121
ART AND ALCOHOL 130
THE TRAGIC CHOPIN 137
PHASES OF THE GREATER CHOPIN 147
THE TWILIGHT OF COSIMA I 157
IDLE SPECULATIONS 166
THE MASTER BUILDER 173
VERDI’S OTELLO 181
FAUST AND MEPHISTO 189
BOHEMIAN MUSIC 195
THE MUSIC OF YESTERDAY? 203
LISZT’S ONLY PIANO SONATA 210
DREAMING OF LISZT 218
A BRAHMA OF THE KEYBOARD 225
CONTEMPORARY BRAN 233
A MOOD REACTIONARY 241
MUSICAL “POTTERISM” 248
MY “CHILDE ROLAND” 255
“OSCAR” AND DVORAK 263
ENRICO CARUSO 273
VARIOUS
Coleridge quotes Sir Joshua Reynolds as declaring that: “The greatest
man is he who forms the taste of a nation; the next greatest is he who
corrupts it.” It is an elastic epigram and not unlike the rule which is
poor because it won’t work both ways. All master reformers, heretics,
and rebels at first were great corrupters. “Corruption,” so-called, is
a prime factor in their propaganda. Buddha, Jesus, and Moses; Arius and
Aristophanes, Mohammed and Napoleon, Paul and Augustine, Luther and
Calvin, Voltaire and Rousseau, Darwin and Newman, Liszt and Wagner,
Kant and Schopenhauer—here are a few names of men who undermined the
current beliefs and practices of their epoch, whether for good or for
evil. Rousseau has been accused by Pierre Lasserre as being the greatest
corrupter in modern history; yet his name will always be associated with
the Constitution of the United States of America. Tom Paine has been
called a “dirty little atheist,” but he wrote The Rights of Man. In
prose of unequalled force and limpidity Pascal denounced the Jesuits as
corrupters of youth—poor, persecuted Jesuits, who were the “Yellow Peril”
of that time. Nevertheless, Dr. Georg Brandes, an “intellectual” and a
philosophic anarch, wrote to Friedrich Nietzsche: “I, too, love Pascal.
But even as a young man I was on the side of the Jesuits against Pascal.
Wise men, it was they who were right; he did not understand them; but
they understood him and ... they published his Provincial Letters with
notes. The best edition is that of the Jesuits.”
Were not Titian, Rubens, and Rembrandt the three unspeakable devils
of painting for William Blake? Loosely speaking, then, it doesn’t
much matter whether we consider a great man as either a regenerator
or a corrupter. It all depends on your critical angle of vision.
Taine called Napoleon a bandit, notwithstanding the idolatries of his
contemporaries. Nor does the case of Nietzsche differ much from that
of his philosophic forerunners. He scolded Schopenhauer, although he
borrowed his dialectic tools, as he later mocked at the sincerest
friendship of his solitary life—his love for Richard Wagner. We know
that the most “objective”—comical old categories, “objective” and
“subjective”—philosophies are tinged by the temperaments of their makers;
perhaps the chief characteristic of philosophers is their unphilosophic
contempt for fellow-thinkers. This trait Schopenhauer displayed when
he abused Hegel & Co., Berlin, Ltd. Nietzsche attacked Wagner after
writing that lucid and comprehensive study of him, Richard Wagner and
Baireuth. Wagner was a bitter polemist and didn’t spare Meyerbeer and
other operatic trusts. He was an amateur philosopher, his rickety
system adorned with plumes borrowed from Feuerbach, Schelling, and
Schopenhauer. But Arthur Schopenhauer was endowed with a more powerful,
more original intellect than either Wagner or Nietzsche. He “corrupted”
both, though it may be admitted that their intellectual and artistic
soil was primed for just such corruption. And Schopenhauer, gay old
misogynist, was materialist enough to echo an epigram attributed to
Fontenelle: “To be happy a man must have a good stomach and a wicked
heart.” In other words, if your stomach is sound your soul will take
care of itself. All Hobbes, Destutt de Tracy, Cabanis, Helvetius, and
Condillac are in that phrase.
But it is not my intention to stray among the pleasant groves of
speculation, taking an occasional potshot at the strange fauna of
metaphysic or admiring its many-colored flora. Some one wrote asking me
if Manette Salomon, by de Goncourt—the brothers Edmond and Jules,—had
been translated into English; also if it were the only fiction about
art and artists. I can’t say yes or no as to the translation; if it is
not, it should be; but it is safe to say that Manette is the best novel
dealing entirely with paint and painters that I know of. Fiction about
art and artists is rare; that is, good fiction, not the stuff daily
ground out by publishing mills for the gallery gods. A classic example in
American literature is The Marble Faun, by Hawthorne. Romola, by George
Eliot, is atmospheric with Florentine art and the genius of place.
However, it is to the French that we must go for such literature, Manette
being a notable example. It depicts the spiritual and physical decadence
of a splendid painting talent, Coriolis, and contains veracious pictures
of the pre-impressionist days in Paris. Balzac in the Unknown Masterpiece
has left a model. His Frenhofer is the first of the impressionists
withal, a fumbler of genius. In both Daudet and de Maupassant there
are stories clustered about the artistic guild. Strong as Death, by de
Maupassant, is long enough to be called a novel (roman), though it is
but an expanded episode, and a mighty interesting one, even a touching
one, for the usually impassive Guy. Daudet described a Paris Salon on
varnishing day in his accustomed facile, febrile style; but it stems
from Goncourt and Zola. Zola’s His Masterpiece (L’Œuvre) is one of his
best-written books. It was said to be a favorite of his, and it justifies
his taste. The much-belauded fifth chapter is a faithful transcription
of the first Salon of Rejected Painters (Salon des refusés) at Paris
in 1863. Napoleon III, after social and political pressure had been
brought to bear on him, had consented to a special Salon within the
official Salon at the Palais de l’Industrie, where the rejected work
of the young lunatics who wished to paint purple turkeys, vermilion
water, and black sunsets would be harbored. Ivory hallucinations and
girls with carmilion-colored eyes were not barred. It is an enormously
clever book, this chiefly deriving from Manette Salomon and Balzac’s
Frenhofer. Claude Lantier is said to be the portrait of Paul Cézanne, a
schoolmate and friend of Zola at Aix-en-Provence. When I made the trip
from Marseilles to Aix Cézanne still lived, but I had been warned not to
mention the name of Zola, who shows Cézanne in this novel as an impotent
groper after impossible ideals. The irritable Paul would go into spasms
of rage when Zola was referred to in his presence. Imbecile, traitor,
charlatan! These were sample expressions. A reading of L’Œuvre at once
convinces you that the artistic procedures of Claude Lantier and Paul
Cézanne are diametrically different. Claude failed and hanged himself.
There are contemporary critics who consider Cézanne the greatest master
of the impressionist group. But the struggle for artistic veracity on
the part of Zola’s sorry hero is not unlike the case of Manet. The
Breakfast on the Grass, described by Zola, was actually the title and the
subject of a Manet canvas that had scandalized Paris at this period. The
fantastic idea of nude females at an al fresco banquet upon the grass,
while the other figures were clothed and in their right mind—all this
was too much for a purblind public and hostile critics; although there
are many examples in Italian renaissance painting of the same style of
composition. The picture became notorious. Manet, like Richard Wagner,
knew the uses of advertising.
Poe, Hawthorne, Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, inter alia, have
dealt with the theme pictorial, and Paul Bourget, in his thrice-charming
story, The Lady Who Lost Her Painter. Henry James has written delightful
tales, such as The Liar, The Real Thing, and The Tragic Muse—this a
full-fledged novel in two volumes—in which artists appear and live their
lives. But it is the particular psychologic problem involved, rather
than theorizing about art, that steers the cunning pen of James. We all
recall the woman in The Liar, who destroyed the portrait of her husband
because it revealed to her, at last, the secret of his moral infirmity.
In this story John Singer Sargent has been accredited as the psychologist
of the brush. There is a nice, fresh young fellow in The Tragic Muse,
who, weak-spined as he is, prefers, at the last, his palette and brush
to the charms and wealth of Julia Dallow and her ambitious plans for
his political career. In The Real Thing we recognize—Henry James would
call it the “emotion of recognition”—one of those unerring strokes that
prove the writer to be master-psychologist among English novelists. Any
discerning painter will tell you that the value of a model who can take
the “pose” far outshines crude naturalism. It is the suggestiveness of
the pose with its pictorial implications that sets moving the imagination
of the artist. Upon this thesis the novelist has built a semi-pathetic,
amusing, and striking fable.
There are painters and sculptors scattered throughout English
fiction—shall we ever forget Thackeray and Clive Newcome? Ouida has
not missed weaving Tyrian purples into the gorgeous patterns of her
romantic painters. And Disraeli. And George Bernard Shaw—there is a
painting creature in his Love Among the Artists. (I contend that an
admirable novelist was killed in Mr. Shaw when he deserted fiction for
the playhouse. He won’t agree with me, but I should willingly part with
all his prefaces for another Byron Cashel’s Profession.) But it is to
George Moore we must go for fiction of this sort. He has devoted more
of his pages to paint and painters than other latter-day novelists.
The reason is that George Moore went to Paris, there to study art,
and he drifted into the Julian atelier just as would any likely young
chap with a well-filled purse and hazy notions concerning art. Those
early experiences were not wasted, they cropped up in his stories and
critical studies. He became the critical pioneer in England of French
impressionist art painters, the champion of Manet, Monet, Degas, and
the rest. He even declared, in an article of rare acumen, that if Jemmy
Whistler had been a heavier man, with more beef and brawn and beer,
as was Rubens, for example, the spider-waisted American painter might
have been as great an artist as Velasquez. To the weighing scales,
fellow-artists! retorted Whistler; nevertheless, the bolt of Mr. Moore
reached the mark. Whistler’s remarks about the Irish critic, especially
after the Eden litigation, were, so it is reported, not “fit to print.”
In Spring Days, the first volume of Mr. Moore’s trilogy—A Modern Lover
and Mike Fletcher are the other two—we are shown a young painter who
thinks more of petticoats than paint. Mike Fletcher, the most virile and,
for some of us, the quintessence of Moore, has its share of paint talk.
In A Modern Lover the hero is an artist who succeeds in the fashionable
world by painting pretty, artificial portraits, thereby winning wealth,
popular applause, and official approbation. He also makes love in a
fascinating fashion—the secret of his mundane success. This same Lewis
Seymour lives and paints modish London beauties in rose color. He may be
found in Paris and New York. He is a type. The sitter for this portrait
is said to have been Sir Frederick Leighton, a statement I accept on
its face value, and one that Mr. Moore would probably vehemently deny.
But his irony must have entered the souls of a hundred celebrated
humbugs; that is, if they had souls to boast. A Modern Lover, despite the
rewriting and consequent defacement of the original design, is distinctly
a painter’s novel and the best of its kind, were it not that subsequently
the novelist wrote a masterpiece, Mildred Lawson, to be found in the
volume entitled Celibates—a Balzacian title, by the way. Masterly in
analysis and description, this story chiefly deals with art. Mildred,
a selfish English girl without heart, soul, or talent, studies in the
Julian atelier and goes to Fontainebleau during the summer vacation.
Naturally, no one has ever described the Forest better than Flaubert
in Sentimental Education; Flaubert, who wrote better than any one else
save Balzac. In this great canvas of Parisian life there are marvellous
evocations. There is a semi-burlesque painter, Pellerin, who first reads
all the literature of æsthetics before he draws a line, and poses his
sitters à la Van Dyck, Rubens, Gainsborough, or Titian; in a word, the
man of precedent. De Goncourt, too, has excelled in his impressions of
the Forest and its painters; in particular, François Millet.
It is only just to Mr. Moore to say that you can’t find Mildred Lawson in
Flaubert or de Goncourt; no, not even in Balzac, whose work is the very
matrix of modern fiction. She is her own cruel, perverse, Moorovian self,
and she lives here or London or in the Philippines. Elsewhere I have
classed her as one of the most disagreeable heroines in fiction, an inky
sister of Hedda Gabler and Undine Spragg (in Edith Wharton’s Custom of
the Country).
All the one-time novel theories of “plein air” impressionism are
discussed in Zola’s His Masterpiece, yet the work as a whole lacks the
fine-fibred style and clairvoyance of Manette Salomon; that breviary for
painters which in 1867 anticipated the experimentings, the discoveries,
and the practice of the naturalistic and impressionist groups, running
the gamut from Manet, Monet, to Cézanne, Maufra, and Paul Gauguin.
The book is crowded with verbal pictures of art students, atelier and
open-air life; painting was still one of the romantic arts when de
Goncourt wrote. No such psychological manual of the painter has appeared,
before or since, Manette Salomon. The celibate bias of the brothers
is revealed in the leading motive—oh, that musty, fusty melodramatic
idea—which is the degradation of a man’s artistic ideals because of the
woman—Manette, his model—he marries. It was Goncourt who introduced
Japanese art to Europe; the brothers were friends of the late M. Bing,
a pioneer collector in Paris. And they foresaw the future of fiction as
well as painting.
HOW NOT TO BE A GENIUS
How not to be a genius nowadays is as difficult as it is to believe in
prohibition. Every other man and woman you meet on the sidewalks of life
is a genius; at least they admit it, or their disciples say they are.
People with mere talent are becoming rare. If you happen to write a best
seller you are acclaimed a genius. And when you think it over, a man who
can sell a million copies of a book compounded of sentimental slush and
slimy piety must be a genius. What else is he? An artistic writer? No.
Respectable? Yes. In Carlyle’s times a person was considered respectable
if he owned a gig; he was called a gigman. To-day it is the motor-car
that is the symbol of financial well-being. Carlyle had much fun with
his gigman. What would he write about those egregious humans who starve
themselves and their families in order to sport about the highways in
a mortgaged motor? Popularity may be for dolls, declared Emerson, but
it’s a mighty asset when all the world is a doll. Even the old Carlyle
definition was thrown out of court by Herbert Spencer, himself a prize
specimen of one who possessed an infinite capacity for taking pains in
his work. Nevertheless, industry is not necessarily an indication of
genius, although elbow-grease has been an underrated factor in the case.
The truth is that there are no royal paths to Parnassus.
In 1857 Dr. Morel published his Traité des Dégénérescences, and gave
modern psychiatry its initial spring-board. Then Guerensen pronounced
genius a disease of the nerves, and the floodgates of madcap theories
were wide opened. We learned much from Magnan, Ribot, the brothers Janet,
Maudsley, Esquinol, and Charcot. After their psychological plumber work
genius became a dangerous profession. You were likely to be either a
madman or a criminal, and such piffling busybodies as Lombroso and Nordau
tracked you to your lair, measured your ears, the cut of your nose and a
glance of the eye, Reginald! (Surely Beau Brummel was a clothes maniac.)
Luckily for the world, genius is still a scarce product, and the
charlatan theories were laughed off the map when Nordau wrote his partly
amusing and wholly ridiculous book on Degeneration. The late William
James walloped him into silence. But the vulgar error persists in the
mind of the half-baked of culture. Like Mahomet’s coffin, it hangs
suspended ’twixt earth and heaven. It bobs up in the so-called new
school of Freudian psychoanalysis, which exploits to the reductio ad
absurdum the von Hartmann theory of the subliminal consciousness, with a
little spice of soothsaying and dream-book twaddle thrown in to lend an
air of novelty. We learn from Dr. Freud that dreams are the result of
unfulfilled desires—which may mean anything—that authors unconsciously
reveal themselves in their writings. What an astounding discovery!
Important if true. O la belle histoire! Cut out the erotic element in
this “new” theory and the world would pass it by. Who would read Leaves
of Grass for its “poetry” if such chaste, odoriferous “poems” as The
Woman Who Waits for Me were absent?
Genius is a word that has fallen into disrepute because of its being
bandied about so freely by our makers of fiction. That burlesque of a
raw-head-and-bloody-bones, Strickland, the alleged painter in Somerset
Maugham’s melodramatic “shocker,” The Moon and Sixpence, is a case in
point. The clever author expects his readers to believe that a staid
business man is transformed into a great painter at the age of forty. To
be sure, Strickland was what the French call a “Sunday painter,” one who
potters with color tubes and canvas every seventh day, yet is supposed to
accomplish what such men of genius as Degas, Manet, Millet, couldn’t in
protracted daily toil. And the innocent public swallows such fairy-tales
because it believes in miracles. You may be sure of one thing—no one in
the history of the Seven Arts has mastered his material save in the sweat
of his brow. Works and days. You can’t change your psychology overnight.
Mr. Maugham suggested Paul Gauguin, the painter of South Seas landscapes,
rich in color, decoration and arabesques. But Gauguin was a real genius.
Augustus John too has been dragged in. Ridiculous! We mention Strickland
because he seems to embody the popular notion of genius. A bolt from the
blue, and a stupid Philistine becomes in a trice a scarecrow painter. No,
he won’t do, any more than Theodore Dreiser’s The Genius will serve as a
portrait of one. In Shakespeare you are jostled by genius, but, then, the
poet was a genius of geniuses. He englobed all forms of genius.
But is genius a disease, like the tenor voice, or the pearl in a
mollusk? It is, we know, a gift that seldom brings happiness to its
possessor. Either it is unmercifully flouted, or else unrecognized, and
no two persons agree as to its specific quality. There is in Poland a
poet-novelist-playwright who bears a name that sounds like an unconquered
Polish fortress. He is called Stanislaw Przybyszewski, and when his
story, Homo Sapiens, was translated and published here the unhappy man
was heartily hated by all proofreaders and compositors. Do you wonder?
Possibly that dislike was a factor in the suppression of the book, which
wasn’t a whit less moral in its implications than the Re-creation of
William J. Bryan Kent. Stanislaw—we mercifully omit the full name—has
wisely written of genius and has illustrated it in his exceedingly
vivid personal career. Readers of Strindberg’s Inferno, which contains
in compression more tortures than Dante’s epic, a sort of pemmican
hell, need hardly be reminded that the rival to the Swedish dramatist’s
affections is Stanislaw P. in the guise of a pianist who plays with
overwhelming power and pathos the F sharp minor polonaise of Chopin. That
is the way the super-subtle Pole courted one of Strindberg’s lady-loves;
it may have been a matrimonial rib, but that is a mere detail.
Stanislaw asserts in his brochure, Chopin and Nietzsche, that physicians
do not busy themselves enough with history; if they did they would
recognize that “decadence” has always existed; that it is not decadence
at all, but only a phase of development quite as important as normality;
normality is stupidity, decadence is genius. Is there, he demands, a more
notable case of the abnormal than the apostle of Protestantism, Martin
Luther? We are all children of Satan, he cries. Those rare men who for
the sake of their ideals sacrifice the lives and happiness of thousands,
such as Alexander or Napoleon—there are more modern instances, if we
cared to mention them; or those who dispel the dreams of youth, Socrates
and Schopenhauer; or those who venture into the depths of sin—because sin
has depth—Poe, Baudelaire, Rops; and those who love pain for the sake of
pain and ascend the Golgotha of mankind, Chopin, Schumann, Nietzsche—of
such material is genius compounded. Satan is the first philosopher, the
first Anarchist, and pain is the foundation of all art and, with Satan,
the father of illusions. I quote these luminous reflections to prove how
easy it is to twist a theory so as to suit one’s own point of view. The
decadence theory is nonsense. I may only refer you to Havelock Ellis’s
masterly volume of critical essays, entitled Affirmations, for a concise
refutation of the heresy; and equally fallacious is the contention of the
Polish writer that the normal always spells stupidity. The reverse is
often the case. Coleridge, you may remember, disputed, in his Biographia
Literaria, that antique sarcasm of Horace, the “genus irritabile vatum.”
He wrote: “The men of the greatest genius, as far as we can judge from
their own works or from the accounts of their contemporaries, appeared to
have been of calm and tranquil temper in all that related to themselves.”
Coleridge gives examples to uphold this belief. Taine has written in his
history of English literature of the sane genius among such old chaps
as Rabelais, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Goethe, all of whom performed
prodigies of labor. No neurasthenia hampered their literary invention.
Yet Shakespeare created Hamlet, the incarnation of a disordered will and
a poetic soul astray.
Schopenhauer has adequately dealt with the theme and with more
conviction-breeding results than many of the later explorers in this
field, at his time a field outside of the biological laboratory. He finds
that “talent is versatile and betrays more acuteness of discursive than
intuitive knowledge.” The genius beholds another world because he has a
profounder conception of the world which lies before us all, inasmuch as
it presents itself with more objectivity and distinctness than it does
to less favored mortals. Myriad-minded Goethe summed up the question in
a memorable phrase. “Genius is incommensurable,” he told Eckermann when
discussing Faust. Mozart confessed that music came to him without his
volition. So-called secondary selves exist in the subliminal mind, and in
certain circumstances may usurp the reign of the primary self for varying
periods of time, just as a saint and sinner may inhabit one soul. The old
theologians spoke of guardian angels and angels of evil. Some see God
in an ecstatic vision and others peer into the fiery pit of hell with
morose delectation. Don’t worry about this moral dichotomy. It’s only
your various selves at war. When the dissociation becomes a half-dozen
split-up personalities struggling for mastery then it is time to consult
a psychiatrist. That way lies the madhouse. But we are all of us the
victims of our cells.
A genius is a superman—a man, according to Dr. Jacobson (see his Possible
Clues to the Nature of Genius), plus a secondary personality, his genius
not residing in the primary self but in his secondary personality. In the
one case we have the spiritualistic medium—low mentality, irresponsible
secondary personality; in the other case we have genius—high mentality,
super-rational secondary personality. It might be well to remember this
fact just now when a wave of debasing superstition is rising everywhere,
of which the mildest symptom is the Ouija-board and other clotted
nonsense; the gravest symptoms, devil-worship and alleged communication
with spirits; after all cataclysmic events, war, pestilence, earthquake,
the prolonged nerve-tension causes “new” religions, witchcraft, healers,
and prophets of evil to flourish like toadstools in a damp, dank cellar.
Mock-turtle mysticism and ineffable silliness. It is not the denial of
such so-called “phenomena” that concerns us, for there are numberless
unexplained mysteries in nature; all occult research is not hocus-pocus;
but it is the interpretation, divine or diabolic, of these happenings
to which sensible thinkers object. Bateson, quoted by Dr. Jacobson,
“conceives of evolution and life as an unpacking of an original complex.”
Here we are knocking at the transcendental gates of the Fourth Spatial
Dimension. Life is an uncoiling. Humanity is a watch-spring of the
infinite. Our existence is the progress of a spiritual tapeworm. Death
is the grand vermifuge. Nevertheless, genius is a shy bird. Spear him
and put him under the microscope. But first catch your fish. And that is
always difficult.
Man has chartered the globe, but, probably by reason of an almost
ineradicable superstitious timidity, has left the human soul an
undiscovered country, or, at least, but partially explored. Genius,
whether manifesting its power in the arts or in the sciences, is the
worthiest theme for the philosopher; not reactionary metaphysicians like
Bergson, weavers of verbal dreams, spinners of futile cobweb systems;
but the biologist, psychiatrist, the practical scientist, for whom the
visible as well as the invisible worlds exist. “I breathe, therefore I
live,” said, in effect, William James. (Essays in Radical Empiricism.)
The mind of man has ever been a house divided in itself. Yet it is a
consolation to know that our several subliminal personalities may be the
cause of our conflicting thoughts. (The late Prof. Muensterburg declared
that such a thing as subconsciousness did not exist.) In Faust we read
of two spirits that abide in our breast, also the spirit that denied.
Mephisto then may be only our second personality. However, we haven’t
answered the question posed at the beginning of this Sunday morning
ramble through the tangled forest of minor speculation—how not to be a
genius. The answer is as easy as lying—never work!
THE RECANTATIONS OF GEORGE MOORE
I had intended writing of the tragic Chopin to-day, but George Moore
supervened; he and Atlantic City—an odd combination. Man cannot live
in music alone, and when Maurice Speiser met me on the boardwalk and
lent me his copy of Avowals (numbered eighty and privately printed
for subscribers), I shooed Chopin to the backyard of my consciousness
and proceeded to reread Mr. Moore. I say reread because much of the
subject-matter in this new, bulky volume saw the light of publication
years ago in various English and at least one American periodical:
Lippincotts’, the Fortnightly, et al. Still, it is, all of it,
worthwhile, notwithstanding the fact the old nurse of the County Mayo
author wouldn’t have blushed at a line therein. Why the book was
published as “wicked” by implication is difficult to discover. It should
be given to the world at large, after several minor excisions. The
one gay anecdote is related in France, and it is so mildly diverting
that it will bear repeating here. An eccentric nobleman adorns himself
with peacock’s feathers for the edification of his peahens! Yet people
subscribe for the pleasure of such innocent foolery. By all means, let us
have Avowals naked and unashamed. Only good Moorovians will endure its
leagues of technical literary criticism. The Story Teller’s Holiday of
last year was another kind of a book. Rather blistering than elevating.
But amusing always.
There was a time when Mr. Moore was content to be called the Irish
Flaubert; nowadays he is evidently after the title of the Celtic
Casanova, though hardly in these new avowals. They will never rank in
interest with Memoirs of My Dead Life; or, indeed, with his Hail and
Farewell Trilogy. For one thing, printed dialogue makes slow reading,
even when the prose is the incomparable prose of Walter Savage Landor.
The opening chapters are devoted to discussions, purely academic, between
Edmund Gosse and George Moore. English prose narrative is the weakest
part of English literature—a paradoxical contention. Mr. Gosse puts up a
good fight, but is pulverized by his opponent, who leaves him gasping on
a balcony wrapped in a shawl, feebly expostulating. The Moore dialectic
is fairly familiar to his admirers. It is one-third lack of logic and
two-thirds persuasion and browbeating. Need I add that the persuasiveness
is not wholly divested of a certain veiled Donnybrookishness? Mr. Moore
goes for the hated Sassenach, and only those Englishmen who seem to
resemble him are treated with consideration; the Rev. Laurence Sterne,
whose wheedling prose style is admirably wedded to his prurient themes
(“Are you Jewish or ticklish?” he was asked by a critic long ago), is
praiseworthy in the eyes of our critic.
I should have preferred to pose as an adversary to Mr. Moore the
redoubtable Prof. George Saintsbury, who with a Sam Johnson bluffness
would have smashed the Irishman’s arguments at the very first throw out
of the box. No doubt about that. Mr. Moore admits the genius of Landor,
Pater, Lamb, De Quincey, in the essay form; but it is fiction narrative
he centres upon, and despite De Foe, Fielding, Jane Austen, not to speak
of Dickens, Thackeray and Meredith, he finds no good has come forth from
that British Nazareth. Of the exquisite prose patterns which Cardinal
Newman has woven for us he speaks no word; elsewhere, years past, he has
expressed his dislike of Newman’s flowing style; the “style coulant”
abhorred of Charles Baudelaire, especially when it issued from the pen of
George Sand. Yet Mr. Moore’s Keltic prose (spell it with a K, Samivel!)
is like Newman’s in so far as both are subtle, sensitive, and rippling;
both avoid dynamic contrasts, both persuade rather than assault. And
there is a suspicion of the serpentine in the writings of both men. The
spiral prose of The Brook Kerith is a case in point. Can’t you see that
minotaur of English literary criticism—or should I say Torquemada?—George
Saintsbury frowning and thundering on Mr. Moore, and quoting from his
History of English Prose-Rhythms! A battle of the bookmen, indeed.
The recantations of George Moore become increasingly numerous with the
passage of the years. I had expected the inclusion in Avowals of his
top-notch in criticism, not dealing with the plastic arts—naturally
his stronghold—a criticism that appeared about twenty years ago in
_Cosmopolis_, an international magazine edited, if I remember aright,
by Lady Randolph Churchill. Far finer than his study of Zola is this
study of Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, entitled A Tragic Novel, the
tragedy of drab, commonplace living, not that of high heroics or tragic
and romantic gestures. But Mr. Moore violently repudiates his Flaubert
worship and explains why he doesn’t reprint the splendid pages of that
particular criticism. Flaubert, it seems, is not a novelist, only a
satirist—he says something of the same sort earlier concerning George
Meredith—and he places him far below Balzac as a creator of character,
below Turgénieff as a teller of tales; he even decries his style—the
sanity, simplicity, which, allied to its sonorous harmonies, is one of
the most fascinating in French literature. I fancy Mr. Moore suffered
from the revulsion which often attacks critical pioneers; as soon as the
public, wooed or banged into submission by the critic, begins to admire
them the critic moves on; his object accomplished, newer idols must be
sought, fresher victories achieved; the old idol is again become a block
of wood. Mr. Saintsbury fought for Baudelaire and Flaubert before George
Moore; nevertheless, Mr. Moore was the first English-writing novelist who
adopted Flaubert’s methods; recall Untilled Fields and Evelyn Inness—the
manner, of course, not the matter. And there is Swinburne, who after
extravagantly praising Walt Whitman violently repudiated the Camden
“bard,” later inventing the word “Whitmaniac” to signify his contempt
for Walt’s comical yawping. In humbler fashion I may give as an example
of this critical dog-in-the-manger attitude my own case. In 1877 I went
as a lad to visit Walt across the Delaware River from my home, and from
him received the kiss of peace and went away with the glowing brow of the
neophyte. I became an ardent Whitmaniac in my teens, and for two decades
or more I wrote of W. W. as if he were really a great poet. I can’t read
him now, nor can I read the effusions of his followers. He has been a
disruptive force, still is one; to imitate his “poetry” is so easy that
an entire new school of lads and lassies are murdering English prosody
and filling the urn with their lascivious caterwaulings. Walt is to
blame. He did it first in his Children of Adam.
Flaubert is not the only writer from whom Mr. Moore has seceded. Being a
peculiarly susceptible Celt, he is always changing his opinions, which
is a legitimate function of the male as well as the female intellect.
At one epoch Dublin never knew when beginning a fresh day whether her
favorite son was a Catholic or a Protestant. It was like a barometrical
puzzle. He recanted his Catholicism—decanted might be a better word—and
he changed his mind every morning about his best friend, the poet,
William Yeats. The New Irish movement was to be George Moore or it was
to be nothing. Finally John Millington Synge appeared, and the movement,
luckily enough, became Synge. Being dead, this master is spared from the
scarifications to which Moore subjected Yeats, Edward Martyn, and Lady
Gregory. Ireland is no longer Erin go bragh! and the Lord knows what he
thinks of Sinn Fein. In fact, since Ireland did not appreciate the genius
of George Moore, he abandons Ireland—as he abandoned England during
the Boer Rebellion. We hear no more of Douglas Hyde or the revival of
Erse—says the Shan Van Vocht!
He sharply criticised Jane Austen and women writers generally in articles
published in the _North American Review_, but in Avowals Jane is given
her just dues, which is well. George Eliot and the Brontës he won’t
have. He rightfully rates Tolstoy and his absence of true spirituality.
The great Russian writer is not a prober of the human soul, despite the
accepted belief to the contrary; that is, he doesn’t deeply probe. His
rendering of reality borders on hallucination. Simply prodigious is
his mastery of realism. Yet Dostoievsky is the profounder man of the
pen. He lived and suffered the life that Tolstoy only wrote about but
never experienced. His novels, tedious, explosive, tumultuous, may be
the “psychological mole-runs” of Turgénieff’s dictum; nevertheless they
are aglow with vitality, palpitating with pity for the downtrodden and
humiliated, and pullulating with humanity. Dostoievsky, an essentially
morbid man, as was Nietzsche, by reason of this very deviation from
normality, was enabled to sink his plummet into the darkest recesses
of the soul. His self-cruelty had a sadistic tinge. But he is the real
psychologist, not Tolstoy. Deploring Tolstoy’s dodging of psychological
issues—for his religion was of the old intolerant order and he was
suffering from an excess of moralic acid in the blood, which finally
killed his art—Mr. Moore yet refuses to give Dostoievsky a truly exalted
position. He better likes Turgénieff, nor need we quarrel with him on
this score. Turgénieff represents the almost perfect artist, blithe,
Greek, charming, while his rival, a Prometheus of the inkpot, groans in
travail as he shows us his wounded soul. In the Confessions of a Young
Man the author speaks of Dostoievsky as “Gaboriau with psychological
sauce.” When he wrote an introduction to a translation of Poor Folk
he had evidently seen a great light. But in Avowals he is back in the
Gaboriau trenches.
A more definite recantation is his present view of Tolstoy. The first
avowals, in periodical form, saw him a worshipper at the shrine. I
well remember his essay, Since the Elizabethans, and its contemptuous
comparison of Tolstoy and Thackeray. English fiction, he said, in effect,
never dives below the surface; it is an affair of decoration, never of
depth. Well and good. Tolstoy, like Balzac, has no counterpart in English
literature, Mr. Moore says, and maintains his argument with admirable
examples. Musical analogies are employed. Verdi or Donizetti, never the
passionately profound harmonies of Wagner, are overheard in English
fiction. With a sense of relief I find that Mr. Moore is still faithful
to Walter Pater. The best pages in the volume are those in which he
describes the art and personality of the shy, complex author of Marius.
It may be remembered, his eulogy of Marius in the early confessions.
From this faith he has never swerved. Of Henry James he was not an
admirer. He seems not to have gone further than The Portrait of a Lady.
He encountered Mr. James at the home of the Robinson girls, Mary and
Mabel. Here is a portrait of our famous countryman: “And these thoughts
drew my eyes to the round head, already going bald, to the small, dark
eyes, closely set, and to the great expanse of closely shaven face. His
legs were short, and his hands and feet large, and he sat portentously
in his chair, speaking with some hesitation and great care, anxious
that every sentence, or if not all, at least every third or fourth,
should send forth a beam of humor.” Apart from the fact that the eyes of
Henry James were not small, but large and heavy lidded, eyes in which
were pictured an entire social world, his description is not without a
certain malicious verisimilitude. The two men were, naturally enough,
antipathetic to each other. Mr. James failed to recognize the greatness
of Esther Waters, and Mr. Moore hated humor. He objurgates humor in a
writer. Yet he is, consciously or unconsciously, humorous. And what a bon
mot was his summing up of Bernard Shaw as being only the “funny man in a
boarding house.” Perhaps. But at the time that boarding house comprised
Europe and America.
Moore and Whistler were always clawing and scratching. Both feline, both
tenors, and possessing the tenor temperament, how could they be expected
to sing in amiable ensemble? Moore relates that James the Butterfly
presented him with a copy of his Ten o’Clock, inscribed: “To George
Moore—for furtive reading,” which is the epitome of irony. But George
never began to repeat the epigrams of “Jemmy,” as did Jemmy those of
Oscar Wilde. Whistler, according to friends who knew, would sit up half
the night manufacturing witticisms. It was to himself, not to Oscar,
that he should have applied the remark: “But you will, Oscar, you will.”
The Irishman was as spontaneous in his wit as the American constipated.
However, “furtive reading” is distinctly good. George Moore paid off his
score in his Modern Painting when he wrote of Whistler that if he had
been fifty pounds heavier he might have painted as well as Velasquez.
And weight and substance are precisely the qualities lacking in the
Whistlerian canvases, which are becoming more attenuated, more ghostly as
the years wear on. If it were not for the etchings the next generation
would have cause for wonderment over the exaggerated praise bestowed upon
a painter whose originality principally derives from his Paris friend,
Fantin-Latour, and from the Japanese.
But Avowals is good fun. It should be placed on the general market. It’s
too decent to be locked away in the “enfer” of a bibliophile. Apropos
of nothing, did you hear George Moore on the League of Nations? He is
convinced enough on that score to exclaim: “There’s only one way of
bringing about the League. Leave off talking about the President and hang
the Kaiser.”
CRUSHED VIOLETS
“Good God! I forgot the violets!” exclaimed Walter Savage Landor, after
he had thrown his cook out of the window. This happened at Fiesole, near
Florence, and within one year of a century ago. The great prose master
had a rather excitable temperament, as Charles Dickens has testified.
(The novelist put him in Bleak House as Boythorn—“with the genius and
much else left out,” as Havelock Ellis says.) Landor dearly loved his
flowers, and in his dismay he gave birth to a classic phrase. Nowadays we
would gladly put a chef on the throne, so debased has become the world’s
cuisine. But Landor was an aristocrat masquerading as a fierce democrat
and his gesture was a typical one, and in the gentlemanly interest; we
might say a gentleman’s prerogative, one that has gone quite out of
fashion.
I am minded of his despairing cry when I think of Walter Pater. A member
of the delicious Hermione’s family, indelibly recorded by Don Marquis,
asked me once upon a time if the prose of Pater didn’t remind me of
crushed violets. I related then and there the adventure of Landor’s
cook and the flowerbed. Her answer threw much light on her mentality:
“I wonder what the cook said?” she asked. But Pater prose and crushed
violets! For the life of me I can’t bridge this gulf of the dissimilar.
Some of Whistler is an indigestion of strawberries and cream; but Pater
and violets! Walter Pater wasn’t as “precious,” as insipid, as his
imitators.
On a certain occasion Matthew Arnold advised Frederic Harrison to “flee
Carlylese as the very devil,” and doubtless would have given the same
advice regarding Paterese. It is true Pater is dangerous for students.
This theme of style, so admirably vivified in Sir Walter Raleigh’s
monograph—the best we know of; Robert Louis Stevenson’s essay on the
technical elements of style is too technical, valuable as it is—has
been worn threadbare from Aristotle to Renton and his Logic of Style.
Pater produced slowly—he wrote five books in twenty years, at the rate
of an essay or two every year, thus matching Flaubert in his tormented
production. The chief accusation brought against the Pater method of
working and his consequent style is its lack of spontaneity; it is not
a natural style. But a “natural style,” so called, is not encountered
in its full flowering more than a half dozen times during the course
of a century; perhaps that figure is an exaggeration. The French write
all but flawless prose. To match Flaubert, Renan, or Anatole France we
must go to Ruskin, Newman, and Pater. When we say, “Let us write simple,
straightforward English,” we are setting a standard that has been reached
only by Thackeray, Newman, Arnold, and how few others? There are as many
victims of the “natural English” formula as there are of the “artificial”
formula of Pater and Stevenson. The first-named write careless, flabby,
colorless, undistinguished, lean commercial English, and pass unnoticed
in the vast whirlpool of universal mediocrity, where the cliché is lord
of the paragraph. The others, victims to a misguided ideal of affected
“fine writing,” are more easily detected and denounced by purists,
pedants, and other sultry professorial persons. A master, Renan, disliked
the teaching of “style” per se—as if the secret could be imparted—yet
he toiled over his manuscripts. We recall the Flaubert case. With Pater
one should not rush to the conclusion, because he produced slowly, that
he was of an artificiality all compact. For him prose was a fine art. He
could no more have used a phrase coined by another than he could have
worn the other man’s hat. He embroidered upon the canvas of his themes
the grave and lovely phrases we so envy and admire. Prose—“cette ancienne
et très jalouse chose,” as it was described by Stéphane Mallarmé—for
Pater was at once a pattern and a cadence, a picture and a song. Never
suggesting hybrid “poetic-prose,” the stillness of his style—atmospheric,
languorous, sounding sweet undertones—is always in the true rhythm of
prose. Speed is absent. The tempo is usually lenten. Brilliancy is not
pursued; there is a hieratic, almost episcopal, pomp. The sentences
uncoil their many-colored lengths; there are echoes, repercussions,
tonal imagery, and melodic evocation; there is clause within clause that
occasionally confuse; for compensation we are given harmonies newly
orchestrated, as salient, as mordant, and as subtly rare as chords in the
music of Brahms or Debussy. Sane prose it always is; but seldom simple.
It is extremely personal, and while it may not make music for every ear,
it is exquisitely adapted to the idea it garbs. Read Ruskin aloud and
then apply the same vocal test to Pater, and the magnificent harmonies
of the older man will conquer your ear by storm; but Pater, like Newman,
will make your ear captive in a persuasive snare more delicately varied,
and with modulations more enchanting. Never oratorical, in eloquence
slightly muffled, the last manner of Pater hinted at newer combinations.
Of his prose we may say, quoting his own words concerning another theme:
“It is beauty wrought from within, ... the deposit, little cell by cell,
of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions.”
The prose of Jeremy Taylor is more impassioned, Sir Thomas Browne’s
richer and full of flashing conceits; there are deeper organ tones in
De Quincey, and Ruskin excels in effects, rhythmic and sonorous; but
the prose of Pater is more sinuous, subtle, more felicitous, and in its
essence consummately intense. Morbid it is, sometimes, and its rich
polyphony palls if one is not in the mood, and in greater measure than
the prose of classic masters, for the world is older and Pater was often
weary of life. But suggestions of morbidity may be found in every writer
from Plato to Dante, from Dante to Shakespeare and Goethe. It is but the
faint spice of mortality which lends a stimulating if sharp perfume to
all literatures. Beautiful art is always challenged as corrupting. There
may be a grain of truth in the accusation. Man cannot live by wisdom
alone, so art was invented by him to console, to disquiet, to arouse.
Art may be a dangerous adventure and also an anodyne, like religion.
And unhappily we are losing our taste for adventuring amidst dangerous
ideas. Once deprived of moral self-determination, of the right of private
judgment, man soon relapses into a vegetable existence. Whenever a new
poet or philosopher appears he is straightway accused of tampering
with the moral currency. This is only mediocrity’s mode of adjusting
too marked mental disproportions. Difference engenders hatred. In this
period, when art and literature are violently despised and persecuted,
do not let us be frightened by the word “wicked.” For my part, as an old
practitioner in literary and artistic poisons, I have never encountered
a book or a picture or a sonata that was so immoral as to kill at twenty
paces. So let us cheer up, read Pater, Baudelaire, and the Bible—from
which they derive—and blench not before the dissonantal batteries of the
Neo-Scythian composers.
There is another Pater, one far removed from the weaver of colored silken
phrases. If he recalls the richness of Keats in the texture of his prose,
he can also suggest the aridity of Spencer. There are essays of his as
cold, as logically adamant, and as tortuous as sentences in the Synthetic
Philosophy. Luckily his tendency to abstract reasoning was subdued by
the humanism of his temper. There are not many “purple panels” in his
prose; “purple” in the De Quincey or Ruskin manner; no “fringes of the
north star” style. He never wrote in sheer display. For the boorish
rhetoric and apish attitudes of much modern writing he betrayed no
sympathy. His critical range is catholic. Consider his essays on Lamb,
Coleridge, Wordsworth, Winckelmann, not to mention those finely wrought
masterpieces, the studies of Da Vinci, Giorgione, Botticelli, Joachim du
Bellay. Even the newly gathered minor essays, slight as they are in theme
and treatment, reveal the master.
Somewhat cloistered in his attitude toward the normal world of work,
often the artist for art’s sake, he may never trouble the main currents
of literature; but he will always be a writer for writers, a critic for
critics. Little books may have their destiny. Pater was a thinker whose
vision pierces the shell of appearances, the composer of a polyphonic
prose-music which echoes a harmonious adagio heard within the spaces of a
Gothic cathedral, through the multicolored windows of which filters alien
daylight. It was a favorite contention of his that all the arts aspire
toward the condition of music. This idea is the keynote of Walter Pater,
mystic and musician, who, like his own Marius the Epicurean, carried, his
life long, “in his bosom across a crowded public place—his own soul.” And
yet——!
BAUDELAIRE’S LETTERS TO HIS MOTHER
When a well-known man dies in England they ask: What did he do? In
France: How did he do it? In the United States: How much did he leave?
But the Socialist in every land says: He didn’t do it! The poetic
production of Charles Baudelaire, if put to the same test questions,
might easily be conceived as evoking even more variety of responses.
Baudelaire has said that nations produce great men against their will.
While his position in the poetic firmament of France is that of a star
of the first magnitude, there are, nevertheless, dissidents, especially
among foreign critics, who either cannot or will not admit what is become
a truism in French criticism. And the critical literature concerning
the poet grows apace. His letters to his mother, recently published,
make a volume admirably calculated to illuminate the character of the
man. It contains a preface and notes by Jacques Crépet, who, it may be
remembered, assisted his father, Eugène Crépet, in the biographical
study of Baudelaire, a definitive study, one is tempted to add, for it
dissipated a lot of legends (most of them fabricated by the poet himself)
and put his house of life into some sort of order. Above all, it cleared
up the rather murky atmosphere of his relations with Jeanne Duval, his
Black Venus, who was in reality a young woman with hardly a moiety of
African blood in her veins. But she served as a peg for the poet upon
which to hang some of his most acrid and lovely verse, therefore she must
pass muster in any estimate of his disquieting genius.
Withal, the exegetical literature is not large. George Saintsbury
introduced him to English readers, although Algernon Charles Swinburne
had in practice, if not by precept, brought his “poisonous honey from
France”—Tennyson’s phrase. The Letters (1841-66) were published in 1907
by the _Mercure de France_, which also fathered a bulky volume devoted
to the posthumous works (1908). La Plume had in 1893 republished from
the Belgian edition the condemned pieces from Les Fleurs du Mal, with an
extraordinary frontispiece by the Belgian etcher, Armand Rassenfosse.
There are some poetic numbers in this rare plaque—eagerly sought for by
lovers of exotic literature—yet the majority of the pieces must be read
book in one hand, the other hand tightly closing the nostrils. These
suppressed poems are not the best Baudelairia. Féli Gautier’s illustrated
pamphlet (Editions de la Plume) is the most succinct account of the poet.
There is also a handy little volume by Alphonse Seché and Jules Bertaut,
garnered from various sources, yet of critical merit. And in 1917, during
the heat of conflict, Guillaume Apollinaire prefaced the definitive text
of the poems and said some pertinent things of Baudelaire. He calls the
poet the literary son of Choderlos de Laclos and Edgar Poe—a shuddering
combination, indeed.
The previous collection of Letters are of more general interest, for
they are addressed to his most distinguished contemporaries—painters,
poets, musicians—his friend Richard Wagner among the rest—men of
letters and aristocratic ladies. But in the Letters to his mother,
Mme. Aupick, the atmosphere is more dramatic, more intense. A duel is
fought from his school days to the year previous to his death; the duel
of a man, half crazed with alcohol and drugs, and a mother who failed
to understand the queer duckling of genius she had hatched out in her
first marriage. Demands for money fill the majority of these epistles.
Pleas for his poetic work also loom largely, but poverty is the leading
motive throughout. We catch more than a profile portrait of the mother;
it is not always winning or “motherly.” How could it be with such a son?
A half-Hamlet, he was jealous of his mother’s second husband. It was
one of the determining causes in his morbid growth. How has his case
so long escaped the psychiatrists of the psychoanalytic school? Albert
Mordell, in his Erotic Element in Literature, could have found him a
better subject than Stendhal for the Œdipus-complex. Notwithstanding his
Flowers of Evil, his diabolic and dandical poses, Baudelaire was not a
wicked-hearted man. Weak he was rather than depraved. And too curious of
certain matters. He did explore the subcellars of the soul, dive into
cesspools, and expose putrid sores. A scavenger poet, nevertheless a
great poet, the greatest since Hugo. To-day his successor to the purple
is Gabriele d’Annunzio.
There was decay in Baudelaire’s bones, a necrosis of the moral nature,
yet no more fervent believer among latter-day poets in God and his Mother
has penned their praises, except Verlaine. He did lay too much stress
on his admiration for Satan, an admiration well-nigh Manichean, but
he argued rightly when he said that one can’t believe in the Almighty
and not believe in the Adversary. Theologically speaking, this is an
inexpugnable position; in reality the world-experiences of the last five
years have uprooted a belief that Satan is bound and sealed in some
hellish solitude. Roaming about and seeking whom he may devour, would be
the consensus of opinion among pious folk. Baudelaire believed in the
devil because he had a personal devil. Hence his Litanies to Satan, later
imitated by Giosuè Carducci in his Hymn to Satan. “Salute, O Satana, O
ribellione, O forza vindice, Della ragione!” But in his Litanies the
French poet is more explicit; his refrain is “O Satan, prends pitié de ma
longue misère!” And this from the poet of De profundis clamavi and the
hymn, in Latin, to Saint Francis (Francisco meæ Laudes)!
A third person has a share in the new Letters, M. Ancelle, the advocate
and guardian of the errant Charles. Alternately cajoling and bullying,
the letters addressed him by his charge reveal a curious mentality. The
father of Baudelaire bequeathed his son about seventy-five thousand
francs, soon dissipated by the incipient dandy on pictures, furniture,
jewelry, bibelots, clothes, and light o’ loves; yet he seemed to think
that his guardian was robbing him, that his mother hated him. In the
mists and ecstasies of his wild life he saw nothing clearly—except his
shining visions, and being of an obstinate nature, he pinned these
visions to paper. The history of art can show few more laborious
workmen than Baudelaire; his was the technical heroism of which Henry
James speaks. Despite his drugs and drinks, he never ceased working,
the work of an intellectual galley-slave. He filed his poems. He wrote
criticism—Manet, Monet, Cézanne, and Richard Wagner are specimens of
his critical clairvoyancy—read his Salons and his splendid tribute to
the genius of Wagner in his Music of the Future. Luck seemed against
him. Like Balzac, he was forever in debt. His mother came to the
rescue; his friends were worn out helping him across perilous pecuniary
quagmires. Then he fled to Belgium, a country he loathed, and celebrated
that loathing in distasteful verse, there to be stricken with general
paralysis, and later to be brought back to Paris, to die cared for by
the mother he believed inimical to him. The mystery is that he didn’t
succumb earlier in his life to the perpetual assaults on his health.
When his mother married the father of the poet, Joseph Francis
Baudelaire—or Beaudelaire—she was twenty-seven, her husband sixty-two. By
his first marriage the elder Baudelaire had one son, Claude, who, like
his half-brother, Charles, died of paralysis. After the death of the
father the widow married within a year the handsome, ambitious Aupick,
then Chef de Bataillon, Lieutenant-Colonel, decorated with the Legion
of Honor, later General and Ambassador to Madrid, Constantinople, and
London. Charles was a frail, nervous youth, but, unlike most children of
genius, he was an excellent scholar and won brilliant prizes at college.
In this d’Annunzio resembled him. His stepfather was proud of him. From
the Royal College at Lyons Charles went to the Lycée Louis-le-Grand,
Paris, but was expelled in 1839. (He was born in 1821, also the birth
year of Flaubert.) Troubles soon began at home. He disdained his mother
and quarrelled with General Aupick. She has confessed that she was
partially to blame; in the flush of her second love she had forgotten her
boy. He could not forget nor forgive what he called her infidelity to
the memory of his father. Hamlet-like, he was inconsolable. The worthy
Bishop of Montpelier, an old family friend, said that Charles was a
little crazy; that second marriages usually bring woe in their train. The
young poet contented himself with muttering: “When a mother has such a
son she doesn’t remarry.” The reverse was probably the truth. He wrote in
his journal: “My ancestors idiots or maniacs ... all victims of terrible
passions”; which was another of his exaggerations. His father was a
student, a practical man, a steady-going bourgeois. On the paternal side
the grandfather of Charles was a Champenois peasant; his mother’s people
presumably were of Normandy, though little is known of her forebears.
Charles believed himself lost from the time his half-brother was stricken
with paralysis, as well he might. Like many others, Baudelaire was a
victim to a malady the origins of which were little known in his day. He
also believed that his own instability of temperament was the result of
the disparity of years in his parents.
In the heyday of his blood he was perverse. Let us credit him with
contradicting the Byronic notion that ennui can be best cured by evil
ways; sin, Baudelaire found the saddest of diversions. Despite Théophile
Gautier’s stories about the hashish club, Catulle Mendès denies that the
poet was addicted to the hemp habit. What the majority of mankind does
not know concerning the habits of literary workers is this prime fact:
that men who toil writing poetry—and there is no mental toil comparable
to it, not even the higher mathematics—cannot indulge in drink or opium
without speedy collapse. The old-fashioned ideas of “inspiration,”
spontaneity, easy improvisation, of the sudden bolt from heaven, are
delusions still hugged by the world. To be told that Chopin filed at his
music for years, that in his smithy Beethoven forged his thunderbolts in
the sweat of his sooty brows, that Manet slaved like a dock laborer, that
Baudelaire was a mechanic in his devotion to work, may be a disillusion
for the sentimental. Yet such is the case. Minerva springing full-fledged
from Jupiter’s skull is a pretty fancy, but Balzac and Flaubert did not
encourage that fancy. Work literally killed them, as it killed Poe and
Jules de Goncourt. Maupassant went insane because he would work and he
would play the same day. Baudelaire worked and worried. His debts haunted
him. His constitution was undoubtedly flawed, but that his life was one
prolonged debauch is a nightmare of the moral police in some white cotton
night-cap country. These letters to his mother are the most human of
documents and they prove the contrary. Charles Baudelaire is the saddest
and the profoundest poet in modern literature.
* * * * *
Speaking of Nietzsche, I am reminded of the study by William M. Salter,
Nietzsche the Thinker, which happened to be published here at an
inopportune time (1917). It is the most satisfactory exposition of the
ideas of the great poet-philosopher, who, even if he did not create an
inclosed system, has given birth to original and suggestive ideas. Mr.
Salter has, of course, exploded the erroneous notion that Nietzsche was
persona grata with the Prussians. A letter in my possession, though not
addressed to me—alas! I have but one written to me—begins thus: “Woe to
the victors, for they shall be vanquished!” A veritable prophecy. This
was dated 1875, and alluded to the Franco-Prussian War, the consequences
of which sorrowed the soul of Nietzsche. The Salter book is testimony to
American scholarship; cogent, bold, brilliant, and conclusive.
THE TWO TEMPTATIONS
The two Temptations! Sounds melodramatic, doesn’t it? But it only refers
to the various versions of a great book. All good Flaubertians will
rejoice to learn that the earlier draft of Flaubert’s Temptation of St.
Antony, has been given a fitting English garb. This translation is made
from the 1849 and 1856 manuscripts, edited by Louis Bertrand, and is
by René Francis. The preface is by Sir Gaston Maspero, distinguished
archæologist, and there is also a prefatory note by Louis Bertrand. This
version must not be confounded with the definitive one of 1874, Englished
in superlative fashion by Lafcadio Hearn and published here in 1910.
The new and bulky volume, admirably printed and copiously illustrated,
is a literary curiosity without which no Flaubert collection would be
complete. To be sure, Flaubert translated is Flaubert traduced, for as
Arthur Symons has written, Flaubert is difficult to translate because he
has no fixed rhythm.
“His prose keeps step with no regular march music. He invents the rhythm
of every sentence; he changes his cadence with every mood or for the
convenience of every fact. He has no theory of beauty in form apart from
what it expresses. For him form is a living thing, the physical body of
thought, which it clothes and interprets. Compare the style,” continues
Mr. Symons, “of Flaubert in his books and you will find that each book
has its own rhythm, perfectly appropriate to its subject-matter. In
Chateaubriand, Gautier, even Baudelaire, the cadence is always the same;
the most exquisite word painting of Gautier can be translated rhythm
for rhythm without difficulty into English. Once you have mastered the
tune you have merely to go on; every verse will be the same.” Not so
with Flaubert. His is truly polyphonic prose—a phrase, by the way, that
Amy Lowell uses to describe an amorphous form of prose and poetry. When
I invented the combination years ago I meant only prose, what George
Saintsbury would call “numerous prose.” See his valuable critical History
of English Prose Rhythm.
While on a visit in 1845, Flaubert visited Genoa. There, in the Palace
Balbi-Senarega—not at the Doria, as Maxime du Camp wrote with his
accustomed carelessness—the French writer saw an old picture by Breughel
(probably Pieter the younger, surnamed Hell-Breughel) that represents
a Temptation of St. Antony. It is dingy in color and far from a
masterpiece. But Flaubert, who loved the grotesque, procured an engraving
of this picture, and it hung till the day of his death in his study at
Croisset, near Rouen. I have seen it, as it still hangs in the Flaubert
Museum there. This picture was the spring-board for his two Temptations.
Their germ may be found in his mystery play, Smarh, with its demon and
its metaphysical coloring. But Breughel surely set into motion the mental
machinery of the Temptation, which never stopped whirring till 1874.
The first draft of the Temptation was begun May 24, 1848, and finished
September 12, 1849. The manuscript numbered five hundred and forty
pages. Set aside for Madame Bovary, this draft was again taken up and
the second version was made in 1856; when finished the manuscript was
reduced to one hundred and ninety-three pages. Not satisfied, Flaubert
returned to the work in 1872, and when ready for publication in 1874 the
number of pages was one hundred and thirty-six; even then he cut out
from ten chapters, three. When a few years later the 1856 version was
given to the world French critics were astonished to find it so different
from the definitive version of 1874. The critical taste of Flaubert was
vindicated. His was true technical heroism. Reading in 1849 the earliest
version to his friends Bouilhet and Du Camp he had been bidden to burn
the stuff; instead he boiled it down into the 1856 version. To his
dearest friend, Ivan Turgénieff, he submitted his 1872 draft. Thus it
came that the wonderfully colored psychic and philosophic panorama, this
Gulliver-like excursion round and about the master-ideas and religions of
the antique and early Christian worlds was at last published.
All the youthful Flaubert, the “spouter” of blazing phrases, the lover
of jewelled words, of picturesque and monstrous ideas and situations
is in the first turbulent version of the Temptation; in the definitive
version he is more critical, historical. As his emotions cooled with
the years, Flaubert had grown intellectually. The first Temptation is
romantic, religious; the 1874 is better composed and sceptical. Arranged
more dramatically than the first, the author’s leanings toward Oriental
mysticism and the dominating ideas of the classic world are better
revealed in the last version. The psychological gradations of character
are more clearly indicated in this version. We cannot agree with Louis
Bertrand, editor of the 1856 version, that it is superior to the version
of 1874. It seems more novel, that’s all. Flaubert was never so much the
surgeon as when he operated upon this manuscript. He often hesitated, he
always suffered, but he never flinched when his mind was fully resolved.
It is for the student a subject of enthralling interest to follow the
slow growth of these various versions.
“Since Goethe,” would be a suggestive title for an essay on the various
epics written since his death. The list would not be large. In France
there are only the barren rhetorical exercises of Edgar Quinet’s
Ahasuerus, the insurrectionary poems of Hugo and the frigidly faultless
verse of Leconte de Lisle. But a work of such profound depth and heroic
power as Faust there is not, except the Temptation of St. Antony, which
is impregnated by the Faustian spirit—though in its development poles
apart from the older poem—that we are not surprised when we learn that
the youthful Flaubert was a passionate admirer of Goethe, even addressing
to his memory a long poem in alexandrines. The Temptation is the only
poem—despite its prose it is poetic—that may be classed with Brand
or Zarathushtra. At times, in its sweep of execution and grandeur of
conception, it grazes certain episodes in Faust.
But though it may excel in verbal beauty or in its imaginative
presentation of the problems of volition, it falls short of Goethe’s
ethical vision. Faust is a man who wills. “In the beginning was the act.”
Antony is static, not dynamic. Faust is tempted by Mephisto, yet does not
lose his soul. Flaubert’s hermit resists Satan at his subtlest; withal,
we do not feel that his soul is as much worth the saving as Faust’s. Man
for man, Faust is the more significant; Antony is narrow-minded; indeed,
almost besotted by superstition. He crystallizes, also symbolizes, a
vanished period of mythology. Faust stands for the man of the present,
and in the second part of the poem the man of the future. Ideas are the
heroes of Flaubert’s epic, though St. Antony’s is a metaphysical history,
not a human one like Faust’s.
But to Faust alone may the Temptation be compared. George Saintsbury has
pronounced this masterpiece to be the most perfect example extant of
dream literature. And precisely because of its precision in details, its
astounding architectonic and its rich-hued waking hallucinations.
THE FLAUBERT ANNIVERSARY
It is a holy and a wholesome act to visit the grave of a genius, for the
memories there aroused may serve as a consolation and an inspiration in
our spiritually arid existence. I often thought of this at Rouen when I
went there to visit the tomb of Gustave Flaubert, so happily described by
François Coppée as The Beethoven of French Prose. A quarter of a century
ago I protested in newspapers and books against the tardy official
recognition accorded one of the great prose masters of France—which
means the world—and one of the most marvellous among novelists. In the
Solferino Gardens at Rouen there is the marble memorial by the sculptor
Chapu, and on the heights of the Monumental Cemetery, in the Flaubert
family plot—Flaubert’s father was a distinguished surgeon—and not far
from the Joan of Arc monument, lie the remains of the author of Madame
Bovary. His celebrated pupil, Guy de Maupassant, is also remembered
in the Solferino Gardens by a statue; another may be seen in the Parc
Monceau. But at the time I began urging some form of a memorial to the
master of masters nothing had been done. Since then the government has
made of the old Flaubert home at Croisset, a half-hour from Rouen, down
the Seine, a worthy memorial. The house in which such masterpieces as
Madame Bovary, Salammbô, Sentimental Education, The Temptation of St.
Antony, Bouvard and Pécuchet, and the Three Tales were created is now
a Flaubert museum. Abbé Prevost is said to have written Manon Lescaut
there. The old house still stands, though decaying. Flaubert’s study is,
however, in fair preservation. The paternal home, occupying a part of the
little park, was a dismantled manufactory when last I saw the place.
The faithful Colange, for twenty years servitor in the Flaubert
household, kept a café in the neighborhood, and was always ready to talk
of his master, of Mme. Flaubert, the mother. In vain I tried to get a
photograph of that lady. Colange would not sell it, would not even have
it reproduced. I have seen the picture of Dr. Achille Flaubert, but I
am more interested in the mothers of men of genius, and I can recall no
edition of the works containing the portrait of Mme. Flaubert. But I
recall her features. A sweet, mild, intelligent face, betraying evidences
of sorrow and resignation. The typical mother. Her son was a celibate,
and, with the exception of Louise Colet, he never gave his mother any
worriment over women. And it was that lady, whose portrait was recently
exhibited at the Courbet retrospective exhibition in the Metropolitan
Museum, who was the disturber, not Flaubert. There had been an affair,
and understanding the honorable nature of the man, the wily humbug Louise
endeavored to make trouble. She wrote Mme. Flaubert, a deeply pious
woman; she harried Gustave, who, like most literary psychologists and
sounders of feminine souls, was naïve in the practical conduct of his
love-affairs. The epitaph of Louise Colet was composed by Maxime Ducamp:
“Here lies the woman who compromised Victor Cousin, made Alfred de
Musset ridiculous, and tried to assassinate Alphonse Karr; requiescat in
pace.” A mean, spiteful masculine witticism this, though well deserved.
Of Ducamp a like epitaph might be fabricated: Hic jacet the man who
slandered Baudelaire, traduced his loving friend Gustave Flaubert, and
who was critically snuffed out of existence by Guy de Maupassant.
I have preserved a card sent to me by Mme. Franklin Grout, dated from
Villa Tanit, Antibes, in which she expressed her gratitude for several
things I wrote regarding the necessity of a Flaubert museum at Croisset;
also for the truth in the Ducamp matter. Mme. Grout was the Caroline
Commanville of the Flaubert correspondence, the beloved niece of the
master, for whom he sacrificed his personal fortune, a considerable one
for a man of letters forty years ago (about one million two hundred
thousand francs). Her husband, M. Commanville, had suffered from
reverses, and Flaubert, the supposed egoist, cold-blooded, self-centred,
an epicurean of literature, calmly deprived himself of his last franc
and, nearly sixty years of age, went into harness. His noble act was
accomplished without the flaring of trumpets. There were no publishers’
“blurbs” then; nowadays this transaction in hearts and bonds would be
yawped to the thousand winds of publicity; luckily, the sensitive great
man was spared that vulgar fate. After the death of her husband, Caroline
Commanville remarried; her second husband was the Dr. Grout who attended
Guy de Maupassant during his fatal illness at the famous Maison Blanche.
Think of it! I saw the great Flaubert in the flesh. I may quote Browning:
“Ah, did you once see Shelley plain, and did he stop and speak to
you?”... Set me down as hopelessly romantic, as a cultivator of the cult
of great artists in an age when there are only imitators or pigmies. It’s
born in me, this species of artistic snobbery. I can’t help it. Every now
and then some professorial rabbit pokes its pink snout from the academic
hutch and passionately pipes, “Romance is the ruin of the world!” and
retires on gliding paws. After his naughty proclamation I always take
down from the shelf Alice in Wonderland and read with renewed delight
the conversation of the Mad Hatter and the March Hare. No romance in
the world? Of that particular professorial rabbit Daisy Ashford might
say: Render unto Cæsar’s wife the things that are suspicious! Even
academic rabbits are romantic; else their breeding propensities have been
enormously exaggerated. Flaubert is my romance.
Above all, Flaubert was a musician, a musical poet. His ear was the final
court of appeal, and to make sonorous cadences in a language that lacks
the essential richness, the diapasonic undertow of the English, is just
short of the miraculous. Until the time of Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo
the French language was less a liquid, plastic collocation of sounds than
a formal pattern, despite the clarity and precision of the eighteenth
century; one must go back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
for richer, more pregnant speech. Omnipresent with Flaubert was the
musician’s idea of composing a masterpiece that should float because of
its sheer style. Lyric verbal ecstasy quite overpowered him. He was born
December 21, 1821. As Henry James has said, he is one of the glories of
French literature. Doubtless there will be a fitting commemoration of his
one hundredth birth anniversary two years hence, and I hope that America
will be represented at Rouen on that occasion.
ROOSEVELT AND BRANDES
My first meeting with Theodore Roosevelt, though brief, will be ever
memorable for me. I was not precisely “summoned” to Oyster Bay on
Election Day early in November, 1915, though I gladly accepted Col.
Roosevelt’s invitation in the light of a “royal command,” and went over
to Long Island in company with John Quinn, who had arranged the meeting,
and Francis J. Heney, once public prosecutor in San Francisco. I had
received several letters from the Colonel of Colonels, of which I recall
two significant sentences. One ended: “What a trump John Quinn is!” The
other begins: “I have just received your New Cosmopolis. My son Kermit,
whose special delight is New York, would probably appreciate it more
than I do, for I am a countryman rather than a man of the pavements.”
Now, I had always thought of Theodore Roosevelt as a “man of the
pavements,” notwithstanding his delight in rough-riding across Western
prairies. Personally I found him the reverse of either: a scholarly
man, fond of music and the fine arts—he showed me a number of canvases
by the late Marcius Simmons, a young American painter, who had been
greatly influenced by Turner. The colonel had an excellent library of
Colonial literature, and was fond of digging out pregnant sentences
for quotation in his speeches from early preachers and statesmen. He
appeared to be interested in my comparison between his prose style and
the prose style of President Woodrow Wilson: the one swift, concise,
full of affirmations, striking sentences, and notable for its absence of
glitter. For the colonel reality was greater than rhetoric; while the
prose of Mr. Wilson is eminently professorial, preserving as it does a
nice balance of sound and sense; above all, “literary” prose, the prose
of the study, never dynamic, seldom brilliant; prose “standardized,”
eighteenth-century, smooth, sinuous, flexible, and ever-illuding prose.
My distinguished host showed some of the trophies he had acquired in
Europe when on that historic grand tour; and, as I had not visited him
in the guise of a professional interviewer, I did not write at the time
of what I saw; but now I may do so without violating the intimacies of
private hospitality. One thing that interested me was a photograph of
the late Andrew Carnegie, taken in Berlin during the military manœuvres;
both Carnegie and Roosevelt had been guests of William Hohenzollern, then
Kaiser. I told the colonel that I had been present at the formal opening
of the Peace Palace, in September, 1913, at The Hague, and that the day
had been so hot that all Holland, there represented, had fled to the
beach at Scheveningen, adding that I believed the palace eventually would
be turned into the handsomest café in Europe; and I had printed this
prophecy (?) in _The Times Sunday Magazine_, when reporting the solemn
humbuggery of the peaceful house-warming.
War was discussed with all the zest of the wonderful man. One question
I permitted myself: “Colonel, would the Lusitania have been sunk if you
had been in the White House?” Snapping his formidable jaw, he exclaimed:
“There would have been no Lusitania incident if I had been President.”
Among other various topics the colonel descanted on the poetical merits
of George Cabot Lodge, son of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who died in the
very harvest time of his genius. In his introduction to the two volumes
of Poems and Dramas, Theodore Roosevelt has never written with such a
happy mingling of perspicacity and tempered enthusiasm. Among the younger
American poets I find Lodge of importance, not along because of his
potential promise, but because of his actual performance. An authentic
poet, his versatility is marked. In his sonnets and lyrics he paid the
admiring tribute of youth to Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning,
Meredith, and Swinburne. He could mimic Walt Whitman, who is fatally
easy to parody, and he early succumbed to Schopenhauer and Baudelaire.
In at least one of his dramas I found the cosmic ecstasy of Nietzsche;
also the doctrine of the Eternal Return. But young Lodge had assimilated
a half dozen cultures, and passed far out to sea the perilous rocks of
imitation, upon which so many lesser talents have come to grief. When as
an achievement we consider his Herakles we are amazed at its maturity
of thought and technical finish. The poet, the Maker, confronts us, and
in reclothing the antique and tragic myth with his own lovely language
he is, nevertheless, a “modern.” I know few poets of the new school who
may boast this sense of the vital present, added to a divination and an
evocation of “old, unhappy far-off things and battles long ago.” His
figures are not fashioned by academic black magic, but are vital beings,
loving, trusting, suffering, and in conflict with ineluctable destiny. He
had the lyric art, also the architectural. He was a singer and a builder
of the lofty rhyme. His handling of complex forms and abstruse rhymes
was remarkable. George Cabot Lodge possessed both voice and vision. His
life, by Henry Adams, shows him to have been a young man beloved by his
friends, among whom were Jonathan Stickney Trumbull, Langdon Mitchell,
and the late Sir Cecil Spring-Rice. When I met him in Paris he was a
student at the Sorbonne. It was about 1896. A charming youth. I may only
add now my humble mite of admiration to the manes of this dead genius.
* * * * *
When I saw Dr. Georg Brandes at the Hotel Astor a few months before the
outbreak of the Great War I told him that he resembled the bust made
of him by Klinger. It was the first time I had talked to the celebrated
Danish author, to whom I had dedicated Egoists. Then past seventy, as
active as a young man, I could see no reason why he shouldn’t live to
be a centenarian. An active brain is lodged in his nimble body. I had
made up my mind to ask him no questions about America. I found him in
a rage over the way he was misquoted by some of the interviewers. It
should be remembered that primarily he is a cosmopolitan thinker. He
writes in English, French, German, and Danish with equal ease. As to
the provinciality of our country’s literature and the seven arts he has
definite opinions; but he was polite enough not to rub them in on me.
He was accused of finding his favorite reading in the “works” of Jack
London! That idea amused him. Among our “moderns” it is Frank Norris he
likes; a slight difference, indeed. Emerson, Poe, Whitman interested him,
though not as iconoclasts or pathfinders. The originality of this trinity
he didn’t dwell upon; made-over Europeans, he called them; Emerson and
German transcendental philosophy; Poe and E. T. W. Hoffmann; Whitman and
Ossian—Walt’s rugged speech is a windy parody of MacPherson’s, and Ossian
himself is a windy parody of the Old Testament style.
Brandes is an iconoclast, a radical, a non-conformist born, and more
often a No-Sayer than a Yes-Sayer. The many-headed monster has no
message for him. As he was the first European critic to give us
true pictures of Ibsen and Nietzsche, I led him to speak of the
poet-philosopher. At Baireuth, where I had gone to hear the Wagner
music-drama at its fountainhead—and very muddy was the music-making, I am
sorry to say—I was shown the house where was born Max Stirner. My friend
said: “When the very name of Richard Wagner is forgotten, Stirner’s
will be in the mouth of the world.” Of course, this sounded improbable.
I know Stirner’s book, The Ego and Its Own, knew his real name, Johann
Kaspar Schmidt, and that he had been a poor, half-starved school-master
in Berlin, and, in 1845, imprisoned by the Prussian Government. This
intellectual anarch—rather call him nihilist, for, compared with his
nihilism, Bakunin’s is only revolutionary resistance—was to become later
the most powerful disrupting force in Europe! I couldn’t believe it.
But now I recall my friend’s prophecy when I read of the doings of the
Russian Bolsheviki. Not Nietzsche, but Stirner, has been the real motor
force in the contemporary revolution. No half-way house of socialism for
the Reds! And that is the lesson of Artzibachev’s Sanine, the import of
which the majority of critics missed, partially because of the imperfect
English translation—many suppressions—and also because they missed
the significance of the new man, who, while continuing the realistic
tradition of Dostoievsky and Tolstoy, was diametrically opposed to their
sentimental Brotherhood of Man—toujours that old fallacy of Rousseau!—and
preached the fiercest individualism, violently repudiating Nietzsche and
his aristocratic individualism. It may be said in passing that a reaction
to individualism is bound to come; the lesson of the war will not be
lost. Nor the teaching of Emerson. After the present overt suppression of
the individual, the pendulum will surely swing from tyrannical socialism
to the greater freedom of the individual. And it can’t come quickly
enough here in America.
Dr. Brandes sets more store by Nietzsche than Stirner; he was the first
to call Nietzsche a “radical aristocrat.” We switched to the theme of
Strindberg. Brandes said: “Yes, he was mad. Once he visited me and
told me of a call he had made at a lunatic asylum near Stockholm. He
rang the bell and asked the physician if he—Strindberg, the greatest
of dramatists—was crazy; to which the doctor replied: ‘My dear Mr.
Strindberg, if you will only consent to stay with me six weeks and talk
with me every day, I promise to answer your question.’” After that
Brandes had no doubts on the question. Brandes is not only the discoverer
of Ibsen, Nietzsche, and Strindberg, but he himself is a revaluer of
old valuations. Therein lies his significance for this generation. In
1888 he wrote to Nietzsche: “I have been the best hated man in the north
for the last four years. The newspapers rave against me every day,
especially since my long feud with Bjornson, in which all the ‘moral’
German newspapers take sides against me.”... To-day he is regarded
as a reactionary by the Reds. The affections of Brandes have always
been bestowed upon the literatures of England and France. Of his Main
Currents, Maurice Bigeon has said that Brandes did for the nineteenth
century what Sainte-Beuve did for the seventeenth century in his History
of Port Royal. What is vital, what makes for progress, what has lasting
influence in social life? asks the Dane in his Main Currents. He will
remain the archetype of cosmopolitan critics for future generations. A
humanist, the mind of Brandes is steel-colored. Ductile, when white-hot,
it flows like lava from a volcano in eruption; but always is it steel,
whether liquefied or rigid. Pre-eminently it is the fighting mind.
He objects to being described as “brilliant.” The model of Brandes
as a portrait-painter of ideas and individuals is Velasquez, because
“Velasquez is not brilliant, but true.”
Yet he is brilliant and lucid, and steel-like, whether writing of
Shakespeare or Lassalle. An ardent upholder of Taine and the psychology
of race, he contends that in the individual, not in the people, lies
the only hope for progress. He is altogether for the psychology of
the individual. Like Carlyle, he has the cult of the great man. The
fundamental question is—can the well-being of the race, which is the
end of all effort, be attained without great men? “I say no, and again,
no!” he cries. He is a firm believer in the axiom that every tub should
stand on its own bottom; and in our earthly pasture, where the sheep
think, act, or vote to order, the lesson of Brandes is “writ clear”: To
myself be true! that truth set forth with double facets by Ibsen in Peer
Gynt and Brand. Also by Emerson. Beware of the Bogy—the cowardly spirit
of compromise, with its sneaking prudent advice; Go around! For mobs and
mob-made laws Georg Brandes has a mighty hatred. He, too, is a radical
aristocrat whose motto might be: Blessed are the proud of spirit, for
they shall inherit the Kingdom of Earth! With his Hebraic irony he stung
to the quick the spiritual sloth of Denmark. His life was made unpleasant
at the Copenhagen University; but he had behind him the younger
generation. He knew that to write for the intrenched and prejudiced
class would be a waste of ink. He exploded his verbal bombs beneath
the national ark and blew sky-high stale and false ideals. He became a
national figure after he had been recognized as a world critic. Not the
polished writer that was Sainte-Beuve, not the possessor of a synthetic
intellect like Hippolyte Taine’s, Brandes is the broadest-minded man of
the three, and upon his shoulders their critical mantles have fallen.
Agitated as he was by the war—his letters to me were full of references
to it—he was philosopher enough to plunge into the profoundest work. He
has finished two studies on such divergent themes as Goethe and Voltaire.
Let us hope both books be given an English garb and speedy publication.
PENNELL TALKS ABOUT ETCHING
When an etcher of Joseph Pennell’s caliber talks about his art it
behooves both critic and public to sit up and listen. Mr. Pennell
is endowed with a special gift for making people sit up. He loves
to startle. He is occasionally choleric, he indulges in righteous
indignation over the blindness of critics and fumes betimes because of
the indifference of the world at large concerning the finer shades of
art. Nevertheless, he always says something pertinent, even when it
runs contrary to popular opinion, or sneers at critical canons. He is
well within his rights as an artist to attack professional critics, for
critics and their criticism are a perpetual nuisance—an incontrovertible
statement that will, we are sure, be smilingly indorsed by the majority
of the pesky critters. In his newly published and magnificently
illustrated Etchers and Etching, Mr. Pennell has rendered a genuine
service to students and amateurs, for not only does he reveal the
secrets of his prison house, but he also reveals with a frankness that
is fascinating his opinions of other etchers as compared with his god,
Whistler, and incidentally tells his readers that if they do not agree
with him they are unvarnished damphools!
Bully old Joe! He is the joy of honest reviewers and the terror of them
that are not firmly grounded in their artistic technique. Herein he puts
himself through all his familiar paces. Of all the graphic arts, etching
is the most superior! Of all etchers, living or dead, James McNeill
Whistler is the greatest! From this supreme judgment there is no appeal.
And the curious part is that Mr. Pennell gives you chapter and verse to
back up his argument. In all that pertained to the delicate and difficult
art of etching, Whistler was the master. Not Rembrandt, who was careless
as to the printing of his plates, careless as to finesse, and not given
to slicking up his work; not Méryon, who was, according to Pennell, an
indifferent etcher, and no artist—should be mentioned in company with the
peerless Whistler. There is but one Allah in etching, and Pennell is his
prophet. Salaam alaiekum! Rembrandt and Whistler? The Apocalypse and the
Butterfly!
There is no denying the enthusiasm of an expert. And there is no denial
of the proposition that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing in
etching as in criticism. Yet there is something to be said for the
much-abused critics. Artists who discuss their art are sometimes biassed,
to put it mildly. The principal critical pronouncements that have
endured were not made by professionals; on the contrary, such writers
as Winckelmann, Goethe, Diderot, Blanc, Gautier, Baudelaire—especially
Baudelaire—Zola (rather negligible), Goncourt, Roger Marx, Geoffroy,
Huysmans, Mauclair, Charles Morice, Octave Mirbeau, R. A. M. Stevenson,
George Moore, D. S. MacColl, Lionel Cust, Colvin, Ricci, Sturge Moore,
Bernhard Berenson, John Van Dyke, W. C. Brownell, Royal Cortissoz, and
others, have contributed more to the right understanding of the plastic
arts than any opposing list of painters, sculptors and engravers you may
assemble. Sift names and opinions, and for one Fromentin, one Whistler,
one Reynolds, you will find a hundred writers who, non-professional
as they were and are, have considerably added to our enlightenment in
matters artistic.
Not all critics are “men who have failed in literature and art,” as
Balzac said. The techniques of the various arts are, naturally enough,
best known to the practitioners thereof. Yet Curator Frank Weitenkampf
of our Public Library has written one of the most valuable books in the
arts graphic, How to Appreciate Prints. Its union of technical insight
and catholicity of judgment has been justly praised by all discerning
etchers. The Discourses of Sir Joshua are, take them by and large, the
best of their kind because most temperate. What wouldn’t we give for
the critical writings of Leonardo da Vinci, whose prose, what we have
of it, proves him a master. Vasari is an immortal gossip. William Blake
was narrow in his outlook. Fancy ruling out from court the pictures
of Rubens! Degas was a wit who abominated art critics more than Mr.
Pennell. He abused Huysmans, the first to make public his rare genius.
Millet, Rousseau, Constable said interesting things of their art, of
their contemporaries. “There is no isolated truth,” declared Millet. “A
good thing is never done twice,” wrote Constable; or Alfred Stevens’s
definition of art as “nature seen through the prism of an emotion,”
which epigram evidently Zola remembered in his Experimental Novel. Rodin
has also uttered much wisdom. Fromentin’s studies of Dutch masters is a
standard book, although he missed Vermeer—probably because the work of
that master of masters was attributed to other men, notably to Terburg.
Ruskin did much to muddle public opinion with his intemperate praise of
Turner and his purblind estimate of Whistler. Who shall deny that he was
a force making for good? Walter Pater painted with words, not only making
beautiful phrases but memorable criticism. Philip Gilbert Hamerton often
blundered, and Pennell impales him, also abundantly quotes from him. The
written and reported words of artists are alike precious to layman and
critic. That the artist, Mr. Pennell for example, prefers etching to
writing is natural; so might the critic if he had the pictorial gift.
Art is art, not nature; and criticism is criticism, not always art. It
professes to interpret the artist’s work, and at best it mirrors his art
unavoidably intermingled with the personal temperament of the critic.
At the worst, the critic lacks temperament, and when this is the case
Heaven help artist and public! Walter Raleigh sums up the question in a
sentence: “Criticism, after all, is not to legislate nor to classify, but
to raise the dead.” The magical art of evocation! Few critics possess the
gift, but, then, fewer are the artists who boast it.
That painters—or etchers—can get along without professional criticism we
know from history, but that they themselves play the critic successfully
is open to doubt. And are they any fairer to younger talent than official
criticism? It is an inquiry that should be fraught with significance for
professionals. Artists, great and various, have sent forth their pupils
into the world. As befits honest criticism, have they at all recognized
the pupils of other men; played fair with those whose practice and theory
were at the opposite pole to their own? The answer is a decided negative;
the examples that might be adduced, legion. Recall what Velasquez said
to Salvator Rosa, according to Carl Justi. Salvator had asked the
incomparable Spaniard whether he did not think Raphael the best of all
the painters he had seen in Italy. Velasquez answered: “To be plain
with you, Raphael does not please me at all.” In art criticism a Robert
Schumann is yet to appear; and notwithstanding his catholicity in taste,
Schumann missed Wagner, as did Berlioz. Perhaps Stendhal saw the weakness
in such criticisms when he remarked: “Difference engenders hatred.”
To leave historical generalities for the particulars of contemporary
criticism, let us open a book that has recently appeared, entitled De
David à Degas, by Jacques-Emile Blanche, famous portraitist, charming
causeur, brilliant penman, sympathetic and sometimes caustic critic.
M. Blanche, a painter by “the grace of God,” for his talents are many,
considers such diverse artists as Ingres, Manet, Renoir, Cézanne,
Fantin-Latour—a notably fine estimate—Degas—one of the best essays—Aubrey
Beardsley—a masterly miniature of a marvellous draftsman—and the
redoubtable Whistler. On page 35 M. Blanche writes of the etchings
and lithographs of the American artists, that they were not worthy of
their reputation; that the Paris series frankly lean on Méryon, recall
his work; others are freer, occasionally pretty, though weak, without
character in their picturesque quality of vignette, a genre wherein
later Mariano Fortuny excelled! We are here far from Pennell’s dictum
that Whistler is the greatest etcher that ever lived. What does Jacques
Blanche know about etching? probably will be his comment if he reads the
critique in question.
And we should quite agree with the etcher if he should make some
remark; such one-sided verdict, despite the fact that M. Blanche is to
be listened to with respect when he talks of art and artists deserves
rebuke! It again confirms the attitude attributed to George Saintsbury
that all discussion of contemporaries is conversation, not criticism.
Mr. Pennell, who also slaughters the reputations of the living and dead,
might put this witticism in his pipe and smoke up. The late William M.
Laffan, a practical etcher, one who etched for his bread and butter,
as he assured us, wrote in the _Sun_ newspaper, of which he was the
proprietor at the time of Whistler’s death, that the plates of the etcher
Whistler would outlive Whistler the painter. Mr. Laffan, who possessed a
_flair_ for criticism, prophesied aright. He said too that there were no
such things as replicas, which is the truth. Many Whistler canvases are
sadly deteriorating, critical enthusiasm concerning them is cooling—the
artist Whistler is now seen not to be an isolated apparition but a
synthesis of his own enthralling self, based on the art of Courbet,
Fantin, Albert Moore, the Japanese and the inevitable Velasquez; but the
etchings and lithographs of this truly versatile genius, being things of
beauty, will be a joy forever. They are his legacy to the elect. And yet,
must the “grand manner” of line-engravings irretrievably vanish to make
place for the sketchy, fussy etching?
Not only is Brother Pennell—a brother to dragons!—narrow in his
estimates of all the great etchers, but he is unjust to workers in other
black-and-white mediums. Old-fashioned line-engraving is mechanical,
and was so tedious to execute that the process was abandoned for still
more mechanical though simpler methods. Not, however, till the patient
engravers had bequeathed to art a gallery of stately portraits and
landscapes, minutely, if somewhat elaborately, recorded. Etching, be it
never so fine, so personal, cannot compete with the masters of line,
because etching lacks depth and substance. It is improvisation at the
best; at its worst it is almost feline in its scratchings. Mezzotint,
too, is a noble art. It is often smudgy, to be sure, but it has tonal
splendor, which etching has not, despite the magical suggestion of tone
in the Whistler plates. After reading Mr. Pennell’s exposition of the
pains and perils consequent upon the production of a perfect etching, the
finished plates of Marc Antonio, Richard Earlom or Masson’s gray-haired
man, do not seem a whit more mechanical. There are tricks in all trades.
Whistler’s supremacy did not alone consist in his virtuosity with
the needle, but in his personality as poet and mystic. Rembrandt was
greater artist than etcher; in his days the manipulation of material
was not so consummate as during the Whistlerian epoch, yet he is by all
odds the bigger man. A rude scratch of his and you see the glories of
heaven, the gloom of hell. There is a fulness, a richness, a solidity,
an architectural quality in Méryon missing in Whistler, Pennell to
the contrary notwithstanding. In the evocation of the intangible, the
evanescent, of the exquisite, Whistler has never had a rival, and as a
technician he is foremost; but George Moore was not far astray when he
said that if “Jemmy” had been fifty pounds heavier he might have painted
like Velasquez. In the last analysis his work lacks weight, substance,
virile power, though not imagination, and that quintessential quality is
worth a wilderness of beefy, brilliant, magisterial canvases.
All this is beside the mark, which is the superb Pennell volume. Agree
with him or not, he writes with vigor, demolishing shams and humbuggery,
and his words, if often intemperate, are prompted by burning sincerity.
He is never smug nor self-satisfied. He sees through the hole in our
national millstone of art. His ideal is the linear, and at a time when
sloppy drawing, barbarous color and grotesque composition have become
our shibboleth, his warnings are salutary. His is the cult of beauty for
beauty’s sake, the only culture in art. Etching to him is the still small
voice of an art abused by amateurs, too often tortured by artists (you
think of the big plates of Frank Brangwyn). He is fair to the Bohemian,
Wenzel Hollar, who, to be seen at his best, one must go to Prague, to
the Hollareum, there in the Rudolphinium, where his amazing work may be
studied in its entirety.
Mr. Pennell pays a rather grudging tribute to Seymour Haden, while
admitting the beauty of his plate, Sunset in Ireland, and he warmed the
cockles of our heart by his discriminating praise of the splendid etcher
that was Félicien Rops. At the conclusion he peremptorily exclaims: “I
know of no other great etchers.” Oh, yes, you do, Joseph Pennell! You
are too modest by half. Demme, sir, as old Joseph Bagstock would say, old
Joey B., begad, sir, you know a chap named Pennell who sometimes etches
like an angel. And also lithographs. We’ll eat our hat if his scraped
mezzotint, Wrens’ City, isn’t a beautiful plate!
IN PRAISE OF PRINTS
(TO JOSEPH PENNELL)
The gallery is rather narrow, but long and lofty; the light is diffused
and gentle. A tiny staircase leads to mysterious retreats where,
Piranesi-like, may be descried other galleries, though not peopled
by the prisoners of the fantastic Italian etcher. A familiar voice
welcomes the visitor who, weary of the monotonous mobs on the avenue,
finds here a haven where, surrounded by the ingratiating arts of
black-and-white—mezzotinting, etching, lithograph and line-engraving—he
may soothe his soul and rest his bones. The color-scheme is harmonious.
A dark panelling, and for the smaller galleries a more cheerful though
neutral tone, is observed. Moving slowly about he sees some black spots
on the wall; at close range they resolve themselves into ingenious
patterns. Stacked in portfolios are prints. On large tables more of them
sprawl. In the rear room there is, perhaps, an exhibition of etchings
or mezzotints, but seldom of line-engravings. A young Scotsman shows
his mettle—the Scotch take to the needle as ducks do to grass. Why are
line-engravings never hung nowadays? You are told that taste has changed
since the golden age of engraving ruled our walls. And changed for the
worse, thinks the fanatic of pure line.
Yonder, above a huge bin, in which are stored rare prints, hangs the
Moses of Philippe de Champaigne, engraved by Edelinck. It is a largely
moulded composition. The Hebrew lawgiver, on whose noble features
linger the reflections of Jehovah’s divine illumination, the horns of
light emanating from Mount Sinai, holds the rod in one hand, supporting
with the other the table of the laws. A picture in the grand manner.
Therefore, to be passed by in favor of some cryptic scratches on a small
plate, a signed proof by an artistic nobody, who designs and etches
in a mediocre fashion. Yet his work is eagerly snapped up, while the
rhythmic line of Edelinck is not even looked at, rich as it is as an
interpretation or artistic performance. “Engraving is so mechanical,
don’t you think so!” is the usual reason advanced for the neglect of this
branch of black-and-white. But, by the same token, no more mechanical
than the myriads of fussy little plates of the etchers, for the most part
without distinction in style or technique. Nevertheless, etching is a
swifter method for registering illusion, and in all the arts—George Moore
says there are nine, not seven—the chief thing is to create illusion.
Etching rules. Why? Because an artist of overwhelming genius set upon
the art his seal. Because it is a consummate medium for expressing
personality, and in all the arts personality is the slogan of the hour.
We must bare our souls in our work, cry young folk; the rest, art
included, can go hang! But the question is whether these same souls are
worth the bother of such exposure. When Rembrandt or Méryon, Whistler,
or Pennell exhibited their personalities on their plates the result
was: primo, art; secundo, personalities. In a word, not even the perky,
cantankerous side of Whistler intervened between his art and his public;
the nobler phases of his character, and there were many, shone clear and
truthfully. The massive bulk of Rembrandt’s personality is reflected
in his work with the needle; yet what magnificent art is his! Also a
dangerous beacon in a stormy sea for lesser etchers. We love etching.
It is the most concise and delicate of all artistic stenography. The
scratched line, its symbol, is less complex than the convention of the
so-called “steel” engraver, who works in a denser, richer medium, despite
the allegation that his is a chilly art. So is sculpture chilly. All
depends on the man handling the chisel, or in engraving the wielder of
the burin. The richest of the mediums is copper mezzotinted, or scraped
plate. It sometimes gives muddy results. Etching has more personal charm;
line-engraving is chaster, loftier in style, because more objective.
If a certain formal rigidity or hardness may be urged against the less
personal art of line-engraving, what cannot be said of the thin, facile,
shallow impressionism of the etched plate? Above all else, structure is
lacking, and it is too often a vehicle for piffling anecdote, or the
stamping-ground of the superficial dauber. Mezzotint is not always a
satisfactory means of expression. It too is mainly reproductive, while
its seductive, velvety surfaces may easily degenerate into monotonous
formulas. Between Valentine Green and his interpretations of Sir Joshua
Reynolds, or Richard Earlom’s evocation of an incandescent forge, and the
apocalyptic visions of a John Martin, there is the wide and ineluctable
gulf of technical mastery. Martin may have been half-mad, like William
Blake—as are most mystics viewed in the cold light of worldly reason—but
he possessed vision; while Green and Earlom, accomplished copper-scrapers
as they were, only saw the superficies of things eternal. To-day John
Martin’s crude prints may be had for a penny, and the fantastic Piranesi
is a drug in the shops. Neither this mezzotinter nor etcher reveals that
mysterious “quality” essential in the arts.
It is quality, then, that appeals in etching and mezzotint. It was
quality that appealed when the specimen plates of the master engravers
were in vogue. Well and good. But why doesn’t that quality continue to
make the same appeal now to our fastidious taste as it did a half century
ago? Naturally enough, the answer is Fashion, which has decreed that
the grand old line-engravings be hung in crepuscular hallways. To be
sure, there is a corridor in the Pitti Palace, Florence, a sun-flooded
hallway upon which sing the marvels of lyric line-engravings. Fashion
says: admire the signed etching, coddle the impertinent remarque proof;
Fashion has set top-notch figures for the English mezzotinters of English
portraiture. By leaps and bounds the prices of Green and a few of his
contemporaries have been mounting, so that to own a Gainsborough or a Sir
Joshua portrait in mezzotint is to proclaim yourself a person of means.
Nor should there be a protest against these exalted prices. Rare art can
never be high enough; besides, the domain of mezzotinting will soon be as
bare of practitioners as that of line-engraving. S. Arlent Edwards is a
name that occurs to us in mezzotinting. Joseph Pennell’s essays in that
medium reveal his mastery; while the artist that is Timothy Cole, stands
solitary as probably the last of distinguished wood-engravers, as Mandel
may be said to have been the last of famous European line-engravers.
The once haughty elder sister of the arts graphic is now become their
Cinderella. Who but an anonymous minority cares for the stately engraved
pictures of the past? How their dignified style reproaches the heedless
haste of latter-day photographic reproductions! Yet, what modern
mechanical process can match the slowly executed plates of Mantegna,
Marc Antonio Ramondi, Albrecht Dürer, or Nanteuil—who engraved after
his own designs? From the finesse of the Behams to the majestic sweep
of Bervic, or the virtuosity of Antoine Masson—consider his head of
Brisacier, the Gray-Haired Man—has not every manner, every mood, every
technique been reproduced—rather, let us say, interpreted—in the terms of
line-engraving? The engraved plate can state as succinctly as the etched
the linear fretwork and silhouette of forms. Among other resources,
the engraved plate is a method of the disposing of mass. It is more
subtle than mezzotint in the indication of character, and is seldom so
monotonous; while to the impressionism and often insignificant patterns
of etching it opposes a static quality, opposes with its synthetic
qualities of the permanent, the majestic, the gracious, and the powerful.
As a medium it is as supple as either etching or scraped copper, though
in this attribute it yields to wood-engraving.
What cannot line-engraving do in the way of interpretation? Think of
the variety of technical styles and artistic individualities. Ambushed
behind every laboriously engraved “steel” plate—steel is only in use
since 1820—there lurks a personality. Think of Mantegna, a master of
line in his painting; of Lucas, of the quaint Martin Schongauer, of
Altdorfer, Wierix—who aped Rembrandt in his version of The Three Trees—of
Sadeler and Goltzius; of Caracci, Wille, Nanteuil, Raphael Morghen,
Visscher, with his Sleeping Cat and his Rat-Catcher; of the Drevets,
of William Sharp, Robert Strange, and Woolet, the English trio; and
George Friedrich Schmidt is still a name to conjure with. A litany
of names might be recited of engravers who have made masterpieces.
To-day, when we are in such a hurry to go nowhere to see nothing, the
lenten and aristocratic art of line-engraving has lost its glamour,
its significance. Nevertheless, a beautiful art it will always remain,
beautiful notwithstanding the fluctuations of fashion. We feel that
the pendulum of popular taste will surely swing back to this method
of black-and-white, despite its slow, painful process of production.
After an optical debauch in color, line is regaining its old supremacy.
What else meant the apparition of cubism but a revolt against a too
fluid impressionism! If this be true of easel-paintings it will come
truer of line-engraving. The Sisters Five should walk abreast, not
processionally—line, mezzotint, etching, wood-cutting and lithography are
their names. And no one of this family is handsomer, more stately, more
decorative, less “spotty” on a wall than the classics of line-engraving.
NEW RUSSIA FOR OLD
A distinguished Russian diplomat, a visitor now in America, has asked
us not to judge Russia too hastily; above all, not to abandon hopes for
her future. The deposition of the Romanovs could not be accomplished
without a social cataclysm and the presence of what Nicholas Murray
Butler has so happily called “an inverted autocracy,” that is to say,
contemporary Bolshevikism. But the newcomers, after tumbling over thrones
and dynasties, cannot be expected to halt at any half-way house of
outworn political expediency. Their slogan is: All or Nothing. Everything
is permitted. Precisely the device on the victorious standards of that
strange Old Man of the Mountain, from whose followers we derive the
sinister word “Assassin.” Yet we are fain to believe that, as nothing
long endures, the tremendous Russian muddle will be straightened out
sometime. In the bad old days when the Russian moujik was not singing
songs saturated with vodka, he spun legends shot through with the
fantastic or grim with the pain of life. In the European concert his
formidable bass voice made the voices of his neighbors seem thin and
piping. Napoleon prophesied that before the end of the nineteenth century
Europe would be either republican or cossack, and a Moscow journal has
proclaimed that the “twentieth century belongs to us.” One need not be
a Slavophile to admire Russian patriotism. The love of a Russian for
his country is a veritable passion. And from lips parched by the desire
of liberty, though the Russian be persecuted, exiled, imprisoned, and
murdered, this passion is ever voiced with unabated intensity. What
eloquent apostrophes have their great writers made to their native land!
The youngest among the great nations, herself a nation with genius, she
must possess a mighty power thus to arouse the souls of her children. How
Turgénieff praised her noble tongue: “O! mighty Russian language!”...
Yet the Russian is a cosmopolitan man; he is more French than the
Parisian, and a sojourner among English ideas. Ivan Turgénieff, a
Muscovite doubled by a Greek artist, was called a cosmopolitan by
Dostoievsky—that profound and sombre soul—and it was a frequent
reproach made during his lifetime that the music of Tschaikovsky was
not sufficiently national; whereas to western ears it once smacked too
much of the Kalmuck. Naturally, Anton Rubinstein suffered from the same
criticism; too German for the Russians, too Russian for the Germans. The
case of Modeste Moussorgsky is altogether different. If Russian music,
the organized musical speech of the nation, owes much to Schumann,
Berlioz, and Liszt, nevertheless Michael Glinka was its father. Like
Weber, he lovingly plucked from his native soil its wild flowers of
melody, and gave them an operatic setting in his Ruslan and Life for
the Czar. In his turn and representing the elder school are Darjomisky
and Serov, while with New Russia blazoned on their banners follow César
Cui, Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, Balikirev, Glazounov, Stcherbatchev,
Rachmaninov, Arensky, Moussorgsky, and, last not least, Scriabin.
It might prove interesting to compare the cosmopolitanism of Tschaikovsky
with Turgénieff’s. George Moore insists with Celtic obstinacy that
Turgénieff is the greatest master of fiction, greater even than Flaubert,
because his art is effortless. Certainly, the Russian is the most
artistic among novelists. Tschaikovsky was suspiciously regarded by the
lesser native choir, while the big men, Gogol, Pushkin, Dostoievsky, and
Tolstoy had an army of imitators, who wore their blouses untucked in
their trousers. It was a symbol. Their watchword was: We are going to the
People! From the Intelligentsia, the students, to the peasant himself,
this ominous cry was heard. It is still sounded. Its echoes are in
Western ears. The Great White Czar would not heed the warning. Going to
the People is a phrase indicating a savage reaction against cosmopolitan
influences; Russia had successively suffered from the invasions of
English, French, and German ideas, customs, manners, costumes. The rabid
Slavophilist would have none of these. He disliked Italian pictures,
loathed German philosophy, despised French literature, and hated English
politics. Yet, from these seemingly disparate elements was born a
national consciousness, a national culture. Its eclecticism caused its
disintegration.
To comprehend latter-day Russian music we should remember that the
national spirit pervades its masterpieces. And that spirit is not in
a special compartment separated from the seven arts, but waters their
roots. With us art is a tender flower, isolated as if in a hothouse. The
artist in America lives in a vacuum, or else creates his own atmosphere.
In Russia, “barbarous” Russia, as we condescendingly refer to her,
an artist is first a patriot. The English critic, John M. Robertson,
wrote in 1891: “In that strange country where brute power seems to be
throttling all the highest life of the people ... there yet seems to be
no cessation in the production of truthful literary art, ... for justice
of perception, soundness and purity of taste, and skill of workmanship,
we in England with all our freedom, can offer no parallel.” Tyranny,
then, may be forcing ground for genius! From Gogol to Artzibachev
Russian literature achieved its spiritual freedom despite the Czar and
Siberia. The reason we speak of these writers and composers is because
to know them is to grasp the psychology of Russian music, which is so
often inspired by the poems, novels, and dramas of Pushkin, Lermontov,
Gogol, Dostoievsky, Turgénieff, Tolstoy, Ostrovsky, Gorky, Andreyev,
Artzibachev, and by the paintings of Repin, Perov, Verestchagin, and, in
the case of Prokofieff, by Boris Anisfeld.
We have elsewhere made a critical comparison of Dostoievsky with
Moussorgsky; no need to refer to it here, except to say that when
Dostoievsky wrote, “The soul of another is a dark place, and the Russian
soul is a dark place,” he accurately plotted his nation’s psychic curve.
And let it be said in passing that the author of Crime and Punishment
had developed the mystic idea (your Russian is nothing if not mystical)
that from Russia must come the salvation of the peoples of the earth—from
Russian Christianity. This notion became an obsession of the great-souled
writer, in whose Karamasov Brothers and The Possessed (Besi), may be
found the leading motives of Nietzsche’s philosophy: the superman,
the eternal recurrence, the fantastic idea that eternity may be in a
“boxed-in” bathhouse, an idea that Henri Barbusse, who is saturated with
Dostoievsky, develops in L’Enfer, that infinity is contained within us.
Eternity is Now. Tolstoy, who was best described by Count Melchior de
Vogué in his epigram as having “the mind of an English chemist in the
soul of a Hindoo Buddhist” (“On dirait l’esprit d’un chimiste anglais
dans l’âme d’un buddhiste hindou”) has not played as influential a
rôle among Russian composers because he was essentially tone-deaf. His
Kreutzer Sonata demonstrates how a man ignorant of music, great artist
that he is, may write himself down absurdly. In comparison Dostoievsky
is a spiritual reservoir of musical certitudes; while in Turgénieff,
thanks to a natural sensibility and years of musical cultivation while
sojourning in the household of the Viardot-Garcias at Paris—surely the
happiest as well as the most artistic “ménage à trois” in history—he
wrote of the art with sympathy and understanding.
The further one dives into the Orient the more chromatic become the arts,
especially the tonal art. The chromatic scale was once the shibboleth of
the Neo-Russian composer, and, being the artistic offspring of Liszt and
the Slav, he vainly sought to veil his paternity by painting it over with
local color. It was then a trackless and seldom explored country his,
full of yawning harmonic precipices, melodies that are at once heavenly
and hideous—like the mouth of a pretty woman with missing front teeth;
mountainous ideals, bleak surprises, and rugged vistas. To-day matters
have changed. The younger generation, headed by the astonishing Alexander
Scriabin, has thrown chromaticism to the dogs. The whole-tone scale is
monarch. Arnold Schoenberg declared the scale must escape the House of
Bondage and be free from scholastic shackles. Modulation is to be as Free
Love, which may supersede marriage—according to the recent programme of
the Reds. Rebikov, Stravinsky, Serge Prokofieff, and Leo Ornstein have
long ago nailed their color to the mast. It is unequivocally scarlet.
Notwithstanding the seeming anarchy in all these social and artistic
manifestations, we believe that to the Slav is the future. Out of darkest
Russia may emerge the next world-composer. Scriabin may be only the
Precursor of the new evangel. Dostoievsky is right. There is enough
fire of righteousness in the Russians to burn up the world and all its
wickedness. Russia is the matrix heavy with unborn genius, and who shall
bear down too heavily now on her sorrow and travail? Water seeks its
level. A country is no greater than her great men. And how truly great
are those we have just named! New lamps for old. A new and glorious
Russia for the old. Avos!
CÉZANNE
Cézanne was pre-eminently occupied with the problem of space and
its corollaries, bulk, weight, density, and with the still more
stupendous problem of getting on a flat surface the suggestion of a
third dimension—thickness. To achieve even a suggestion proves him a
genius. And he was a genius. His supreme technical qualities are volume,
ponderability, and a personal color-scheme. What’s the use of asking
whether he is a sound draftsman or not? He is a master of “edges,” a
magician of tonalities. Huysmans spoke to me of the defective eyesight
of Cézanne; but disease boasts its discoveries as well as health.
Possibly his “abnormal” vision gave him glimpses of a reality denied
to other painters. He advised students to look for the contrasts and
correspondences of tone. He practised what he preached. No painter was
so little affected by personal moods, by those variations of temperament
dear to the professional artist. Did Cézanne possess the temperament he
was always talking about? If he did, his temperament was not precisely
decorative or flamboyant.
An unwearying experimenter, he seldom “finished” a picture. His morose
landscapes were usually painted from one scene near his home at Aix. I
saw the spot. The pictures do not closely resemble it—that is, in the
photographic sense—which simply means that Cézanne had the vision and I
had not. A few themes with polyphonic variations filled his simple life;
art was submerged by its apparatus. His was the centripetal, not the
centrifugal, temperament. In the domain of his rigid, intense ignorance
there was little space for climate, charm, hardly for sunshine. Recall
the blazing blue sky and sun of Provence, the tropical riot of its
vegetation, its gamuts of green and scarlet, and then search for this
mellow richness and misty, golden air in the pictures of the master.
You won’t find them in his dim, muffled surfaces, though a mystic light
permeates his landscapes. It is the sallow-sublime in its apotheosis.
He did not paint portraits of Provence as did Daudet in Numa Roumestan,
or Bizet in L’Arlésienne. Cézanne sought for profounder meanings. The
superficial, the facile, the staccato, the merely brilliant repelled
him. Not that he was an “abstract” painter—as the self-contradictory
atelier jargon goes. He was eminently concrete. He plays a legitimate
“trompe-l’œil” on the optic nerve. His is not a pictorial illustration of
Provence, but the slow, cruel delineation of a certain hill on old Mother
Earth which exposes her bare torso, her bald, rocky pate and gravelled
feet. The hallucination is inescapable.
As drab as the orchestration of Brahms, as austere in linear economy and
as analytical as Stendhal or Ibsen, the art of Cézanne never becomes
truly lyric except in his still life. Upon an apple he lavishes his
palette of smothered jewels. And, as all things are relative, an onion
to him may be as beautiful as a naked woman. Taste is not one of his
marked traits. The chiefest misconception of Cézanne is that of the
theoretical fanatics who not only proclaim him chief of a school, which
he is, but declare him to be the greatest painter since the Byzantines.
This assertion I have read in cold type. There is a lot of inutile talk
about “significant form” by propagandists—usually rotten bad painters. As
if form had not always been “significant.” When the impressionists as a
school, now outmoded as the Barbizons, began to issue their prospectuses,
the emphasis was laid upon form; form having served its purpose must
go—at least become subordinate to color and its decomposition. The
suave line of Raphael had degenerated into the insipid arabesques of
Lefebvre, Bouguereau, and Cabanel. No denying these truths, since become
platitudes. Form is again in the ascendant, impressionism having in
its turn become deliquescence. No one denies Cézanne’s preoccupation
with form, nor Courbet’s, either. Consider the Ornan’s landscapes, with
their sombre flux of forest, painted by the crassest realist among
French artists, though he seems hopelessly romantic to our sharper,
more petulant mode of envisaging the world; yet what better example
of “significant form” and solid structural sense than Courbet’s?
Nevertheless, Cézanne quite o’ercrows Courbet in his feeling for the
massive—sometimes you can’t see the ribs of his landscapes because of the
skeleton.
Cézanne’s was a twilight soul. And a humorless one. His early painting
was quasi-structural, well-nigh modelling. Always the architectural
sense. His rhythms are often elliptical. He has a predilection for the
asymmetrical. Yet he is a man who lent to an art of two dimensions, the
illusion of a third. His tactile values are raised to the nth degree. His
color is personal. Huysmans was clairvoyant when, a half century ago, he
wrote of Cézanne’s work as containing the prodromes of a new art. The
handling of his material alone absorbed him, and not its lyric, dramatic,
anecdotic, or rhetorical elements. He despised “literary” painting. His
portraits are charged with character. But he sometimes profoundly ponders
unimportant matters—loses himself in a desert of sandy theorizing.
The tang of the town is not in his portraits of places. His leaden,
metallic landscapes seldom spontaneously arouse to activity the jaded
retina fed on Fortuny, Monticelli, or Monet. In his groups of bathing
women there is no sex appeal. Merely women in their natural pelt, as
heavy flanked as Percheron mares. They are as ugly as the females of
Degas, and twice as truthful. With beauty, academic or operatic, he had
no traffic. If you don’t care for his graceless nudes, you may console
yourself with the axiom that there is no disputing tastes—with the
tasteless. We have seen some of his still-life pieces so acid in tonal
quality as to suggest that divine dissonance produced on the palate by
a stale oyster, or akin to the rancid note of an oboe in a pantomime
score by Stravinsky. But what thrice subtle sonorities, what opulent
color-chords may be found in his compositions. His fruits savor of the
earth. Chardin interprets still-life with realistic beauty; when he
paints an onion it reveals a certain grace. Vollon dramatizes it, or
embroiders its homely shape with luxuriant decorations. When Cézanne
paints an onion you smell it. His apples are—seemingly—falling off the
table. How despairing are the efforts of his imitators to get those
slanting surfaces covered with fruit and vegetables that have just been
brought in by the cook. You say, Miraculous! and make a gesture to
prevent the ripe stuff from sliding to the floor. The “representation”
abhorred of the Cubists in its most pregnant shapes is there.
Cézanne did not occupy himself, as did Manet, with the ideas, manners and
aspects of his generation. With the classic retort of Manet, he could
have replied to those who taunted him with not “finishing” his pictures,
“Sir, I am not a historical painter.” Nor need we be disconcerted in any
estimate of him by the depressing snobbery of collectors who don’t know
B from bull’s foot but go off at half-trigger in their enthusiasm when
a hint is dropped as to the possibilities of a painter appreciating in
a pecuniary sense. Cézanne is the painting idol of the present crowd,
as were Manet and Monet a few decades ago. These æsthetic fluctuations
should not distract us. Henner, Cabanel, Bourguereau too, were idolized
once upon a time and served to make a millionaire’s holiday by hanging
in his marble bathroom. It is the undeniable truth that Cézanne has, in
the eyes of the younger generation, become a tower of strength which
intrigues critical fancy. Cézanne is sincere to the core, yet even
stark sincerity does not, of necessity, imply the putting forth of
masterpieces. Before he attained his synthetic power he patiently studied
Delacroix, Courbet, and the early Italians. At times he achieved the
foundational structure of Courbet, though I don’t think he had either
the brains or the painting temperament of his elder contemporary, whose
portée was at times tremendous. Hostile critics declare that the canvases
of St. Paul of Provence are sans composition, sans linear pattern, sans
personal charm. However, “popularity is for dolls,” says Emerson.
I saw at the Champs de Mars Salon of 1901 a large picture by Maurice
Denis, entitled Hommage à Cézanne, the idea of which was manifestly
inspired by Manet’s Hommage à Fantin-Latour, or Fantin’s Batignolle
School. The Maurice Denis canvas depicts a still-life by Cézanne
on a chevalet, which is surrounded by the figures of certain
painters—Bonnard, Denis, Redon, Roussel, Serusier, Vuillard, Mellério,
and Vollard. Cézanne is posed standing and is apparently embarrassed,
which was his natural condition. There was a special Cézanne Salle, as
there was one devoted to Eugène Carrière, but Cézanne held the place
of honor. With all his naïve vanity he was dazzled by the uproarious
championship of “les jeunes,” and, to give him credit for a peasant
astuteness, he was rather suspicious of the demonstration. But he
stolidly accepted the frantic homage of the youngsters, all the while
looking like a bourgeois Buddha. To-day a Cézanne of quality is costly.
Why not? When juxtaposed with many modern painters his vital art makes
other pictures seem linoleum or papier maché. The nervous, shrinking
man I saw at Aix and later at Paris would have been astounded at the
praise printed since his death; while he yearned for the publicity of
the official Salon—as did his school-friend Zola for a seat in the
Academy—none the less, he disliked notoriety. He loved hard work. He
loved his solitude. With a fresh batch of canvases he trudged every
morning to his pet landscape, the Motive, he called it, and it was there
that he daily slaved with genuine technical heroism. When I first saw him
he was a queer, sardonic old gentleman in ill-fitting clothes, with the
shrewd, suspicious gaze of a provincial notary. Like John La Farge, he
hated shaking hands. A rare impersonality.
Goethe has told us that because of his limitations we may recognize
a master. The limitations of Cézanne are patent. An investigator,
experimenter, even fumbler, he did not deem it wise to stray from his
chosen, if narrow, field. His non-conformism defines his genius. Imagine
reversing musical history and finding Johann Sebastian Bach following
Richard Strauss. The very notion is monstrous. Yet, figuratively
speaking, this order constitutes the case of Cézanne. He arrived on
the pictorial scene after the classic, romantic, impressionistic, and
symbolic schools. He is a primitive, not made like Puvis de Chavannes,
but one born with an unaffected crabbed simplicity. Paul Cézanne will be
remembered as a painter who respected his material, also as a painter,
pure, without preoccupation in schools or ideas. No man who wields a
brush need ask for a more enduring epitaph.
EILI EILI LOMO ASOVTONI?
“How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” I couldn’t help
recalling these words of the Psalmist, these and the opening, “By the
rivers of Babylon,” in which is compressed the immemorial melancholy of
an enslaved race, when I heard Sophie Braslau intone with her luscious
contralto, a touching Hebrew lament, “Eili Eili Lomo Asovtoni?” at a
concert last winter. Naturally I believed the melody to be the echo of
some tribal chant sung in the days of the Babylonian captivity, and
perhaps before that in the days of the prehistoric Sumerians and the epic
of Gilgamesh. Others have made the same error. Judge of my surprise when
in a copy of _The American Jewish News_ I read that the composer of Eili
Eili is living, that his name is Jacob Kopel Sandler, that he wrote the
music for a historical drama, Die B’ne Moishe (The Sons of Moses), which
deals with the Chinese Jews. Mr. Sandler had written the song for Sophie
Carp, a Yiddish actress and singer. The Sons of Moses was a failure,
and a new piece, Brocha, the Jewish King of Poland, was prepared. (Not
alluding to Pan Dmowski.) It was produced at the Windsor Theatre in the
Bowery. The song, not the play, was a success. Then the music drifted
into queer company, for music is a living organism and wanders when it is
not controlled. Finally Sophie Braslau got hold of it, and the composer,
who was directing a choir in a Bronx synagogue, was astounded to hear of
the acclamations of a Metropolitan Opera House Sunday night audience.
His daughter has listened to Eili Eili and brought home the good news.
After troublesome preliminaries “Meyer Beer,” the pen name of the
musical editor of _The American Jewish News_, was able to prove beyond
peradventure of a doubt the artistic parentage of the song, and Jacob
Sandler is in a fair way of being idolized in his community, as he should
be.
Eili Eili lomo asovtoni? may be found in Psalm 22, the first line of the
second verse in Hebrew. In the English version the words of David are
in the first verse: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” And in
the St. Mark’s Gospel we read: “And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with
a loud voice, saying, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’ which is, being
interpreted: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’” (Chapter 15,
verse 34.) The exegetists and apologists, as well as sciolists, have made
of this immortal phrase a bone of theological contention. Schmiedel, who
with Harnack believes the words to have been uttered by our Saviour,
nevertheless points out various details which prefigure the same things
in the crucifix—the just man hanging on the stake, the perforated hands
and feet, the mocking crowd, the soldiers gambling for the clothes,
everything takes place as described in the Psalm. Lublinski (in Dogma,
p. 93) and Arthur Drews (in The Historicity of Jesus, p. 150) demur to
the orthodox Christian conclusions of Harnack and Schmiedel. A beloved
master, the late Solomon Schechter, disposed of the question in his
usual open style. “The world is big enough,” he has said to me, for both
Jehovah and Jesus, “for two such grand faiths as the Hebrew and the
Christian.” But he saw Christianity only in its historical sequence, and
not as a continuator of Judaism; rather, a branching away from the main
trunk. If it had not been for Constantine, the world might be worshipping
Mithra to-day, was the erudite and worthy man’s belief. Enveloped in the
mists of the first two centuries Christianity seems to have had a narrow
escape from the doctrines of Mithraism. That Salomon Reinach practically
admits in his Orpheus, a most significant study of comparative religions
from the pen of this French savant.
Once upon a time I played the organ in a “shool,” a reformed, not an
orthodox, synagogue; played indifferently well. But my acquaintance with
the Jewish liturgy dates back to my boyhood in Philadelphia, where I
studied Hebrew, in company with Latin. The reason? My mother fondly hoped
that I might become a priest—the very thought of which makes me shudder
now. The religious in me found vent in music, and my love of change
was gratified by playing the Hebrew service on Shabbas (Saturday) and
the Roman Catholic on our Sabbath. Probably that is why I was affected
by Sophie Braslau’s singing of Eili Eili. Rosa Raisa has put the song
in her repertory, and only on Easter Sunday last did Sarah Borni sing
it, although it appeared on the programme as a composition of Kurt
Schindler’s, an error quickly rectified by Miss Borni, who did not know
the authorship till too late. “Such songs,” commented this soprano,
“come but once in a man’s lifetime.” Dorothy Jardon will no doubt sing
Eili Eili, as she sang for the first time a Jahrzeit, a Kaddish by Rhea
Silberta, at the Hippodrome last Sunday. Mr. Sandler has come into his
own, and it is gratifying to record that the credit is largely due to
Meyer Beer and _The American Jewish News_.
I have always entertained a peculiar admiration for the Jews and Judaism.
It began with the study of Semitic literature of the Talmud, above all
of Hebrew poetry, the most sublime in our language, as Matthew Arnold
asserts in his comparative estimate of Greek and Hebraic cultures. My
dearest friends have been, still are, of that race. Prejudice, social
or political, against the Jew, I not only detest, but I have never been
able to comprehend. My early playmates were Jewish boys and girls. I
have stood under the “Choopah” (marriage canopy), and have seen many a
Bar-Mitzvah; even sat “Shivah” for the dead father of intimate friends.
From Rafael Joseffy to Georg Brandes; from the brilliant Hungarian
virtuoso that was Joseffy—whose father, a learned rabbi, I visited at
Budapest—in Pest-Ofen—in 1903, when he was eighty-four, an Orientalist,
a linguist with twenty-six languages, ancient and modern, at the tip of
his tongue—to Professor Brandes, the Danish scholar, an intellectual
giant, and a critic in the direct line of Sainte-Beuve and Taine—both men
I knew and loved. Whether the Jew has attained the summits as a creator
in the seven arts I cannot speak authoritatively, although the Old
Testament furnishes abundant evidences that he has in poetry. Disraeli
(Beaconsfield), who liked to tease Gladstone by calling him “Frohstein”
and pointing to his rugged Jewish prophet’s features, has written of his
race most eloquently. I should like to quote a passage in its entirety,
but time and space forbid. But an excerpt I permit myself the luxury of
reproduction: “The ear, the voice, the fancy teeming with combinations,
the inspiration fervid with picture and emotion, that came from Caucasus,
and which we have preserved unpolluted, have endowed us with almost the
exclusive privilege of music; that science of harmonious sounds which
the ancients recognized as most divine and deified in the person of
their most beautiful creation....” He goes on: “There is not a company
of singers, not an orchestra in a single capital, that is not crowded
with our children under feigned names which they adopt to conciliate the
dark aversion which your posterity will some day disclaim with shame and
disgust....”
Lord Beaconsfield mentions Rossini, Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn as Jewish
composers, and Pasta and Grisi among the singers. Probably he had not
heard Rossini’s witticism uttered on his deathbed: “For heaven’s sake,
don’t bury me in the Jewish cemetery!” Nor did Beaconsfield look far
enough ahead when he wrote “dark aversion”—which is wonderful. To-day
the boot is on the other leg. It may be Gentiles who will be forced
to change their names to Jewish. I could easily sign myself “Shamus
Hanuchah”—leaving out the “lichts”—or pattern after the name Paderewski
jokingly wrote on his photograph: “For Jacob Hunekerstein.”
And I am ashamed to confess that I know Jews who themselves are ashamed
of having been born Jews. Incredible! In Vienna I have seen St.
Stefan’s Cathedral crowded at the 11 o’clock high mass by most fervent
worshippers, the majority of whom seemed Semitic, which prompted me to
propound the riddle: When is a Jew not a Jew? Answer: When he is a Roman
Catholic in Vienna. But you never can tell. As Joseffy used to say when
some musician with a nose like the Ten Commandments was introduced, as,
for example, Monsieur Fontaine, “He means Brunnen, or, in Hebrew, Pischa.
He is not a Jew, but his grandmother wore a ‘scheitel’” (the wig still
worn by orthodox Jewish women). The truth is that among the virtuosi,
singers, actors, the Jew holds first place. Liszt and Paganini are the
exceptions, and Paganini could easily pass in an east side crowd as
Jehudah. As to the Wagner controversy, not started by Nietzsche, but by
Rossini and Meyerbeer, who referred to Wagner as Jewish, that was settled
by O. G. Sonneck in his little book, Was Wagner a Jew? but only after I
had introduced to the columns of the _New York Times Sunday Magazine_ in
1913, a book by Otto Bournot, entitled Ludwig Geyer. Geyer was, as you
may remember, the stepfather of Richard Wagner. Bournot had access to the
Baireuth archives and delved into the newspapers of Geyer’s days. August
Böttiger’s Necrology had hitherto been the chief source. Mary Burrell’s
Life of Wagner was the first to give the true spelling of the name of
Wagner’s mother, which was Bertz, which may be Jewish or German, as you
like.
The Geyers as far back as 1700 were pious folk. The first of the
family mentioned in local history was a certain Benjamin Geyer, who
about 1700 was a trombone player and organist. Indeed, the Geyers were
largely connected with the evangelical church. Ludwig Geyer, virtually
acknowledged by Baireuth as the real father of Richard Wagner, looked
Jewish (which proves nothing, as I have seen dark, Semitic fisher-folk on
the coast of Galway) and displayed Jewish versatility. For that matter
the composer von Weber looked like a Jew, as does Camille Saint-Saëns.
When I ventured to write of this racial trait—much more marked in his
youth—the French composer sent me a denial, sarcastically asking how
a man with such a “holy” name as “Saint-Saëns” could be Jewish. But
Leopold Godowsky, who was intimate with him, has told me that he took
his mother’s name. As to Wagner, a little story may suffice. In 1896 I
attended the Wagner festival at Baireuth. Between performances I tramped
the Franconian hills. My toes hurt me. Looking for a corn-cutter, I
found one not far from the Wagner house. The old chap seated me in his
doorway, probably to get better light, and as he crouched over my feet
in the street I asked him if he had known Richard Wagner. “Know Wagner!”
he irascibly replied. “He passed my shop every day. Many the times I
cut his corns. Oh, no! not here; over yonder”—he jerked his head in the
direction of Wahnfried. I inquired what kind of a looking man was Wagner.
“He was a little bow-legged Jew, and he always wore a long cloak to hide
his crooked legs.” Enfin! the truth from the mouth of babes. This beats
Nietzsche and his “Vulture” Geyer.
Not religion, not nationality, but race, counts in the individual. Wagner
looked like a Jew. And there are many red-haired Jews with pug noses
and light blue eyes. Renan in Le Judaisme has shown us how non-Jewish
elements were in the course of time incorporated within the race. The
Chazars of eastern Europe are Jews, only a thousand years old. Dr.
Brandes in a confession of his views on the subject has said—in _The
Journal for Jewish History and Literature_, published at Stockholm
(_Teldscript for Judisk Historia_), and quoted by Bernard G. Richards in
a capital study of Brandes—“from the fifteenth to the sixteenth year of
my life I regarded Judaism purely as a religion.” But when he was abused
as a Jew then Georg Brandes felt himself a genuine Jew. Many a man has
found himself in a similar position. Atavistic impulses, submerged in
subconsciousness, may explain why certain men, Gentiles, scholars, by
nature noncombatants, have left their peaceful study, jeopardized their
life, ruined their reputation, to battle for an obscure Jew Dreyfus.
Zola, of Greek-Levantine origin, perhaps Italian and Jew, was one of
those valiant souls who fought for the truth. Anatole France, born
Thibault, another. Count Thibault, at the time of the Dreyfus uproar,
challenged the great writer who signs himself Anatole France to prove
his right to that distinguished Roman Catholic name. That the gentle
Anatole is the very spit and spawn of a Jew, so far as appearance goes;
that since Heine (baptized a Christian) no such union of mocking irony
and tender, poetic emotion can be noted in the work of any writer, are
alike valueless as testimony. Nevertheless, many believe in this Hebraic
strain; just as they feel it in the subtlety of Cardinal Newman’s
writing—he was of Dutch stock—and in the humor of Charles Lamb. Both
Englishmen are credited with the “precious quintessence,” as Du Maurier
would say.
I have had to stand a lot of good-natured fun poked at me for my Jewish
propensity. I can stand it, as I have a solid substratum of history for
my speculations. Some years ago _The Contemporary Review_ printed an
article entitled “The Jew in Music,” with this motto from Oscar Wilde’s
Salome: “The Jews believe only in what they cannot see.” The writer’s
name was signed: A. E. Keeton. Not even the assertion that Beethoven was
a Belgian is half so iconoclastic as some of the assumptions made in
this study. When Mozart first appeared as a prodigy before the future
Queen of France, Marie Antoinette, she announced that ‘a genius must not
be a Jew.’ The original name, Ozart, was changed. Mozart was baptized!
Which anecdote makes the scalp to freeze, though not because of its
verisimilitude. Beethoven and Rubinstein looked alike; ergo! But then
they didn’t. In the case of Chopin he was certainly Jewish-looking,
especially in the Winterhalter and Kwiatowski portraits. His father came
from Nancy, in Lorraine, thickly populated by Jews. The original name,
Szopen, or Szop, is Jewish. His music, especially the first Scherzo in
B minor, has a Heine-like irony, and irony is a prime characteristic of
the Chosen (or Choosing as Zangwill puts it) race! But all this is in the
key of wildest surmise. Wagner was born in the ghetto at Leipsic; yet
that didn’t make him Jewish, any more than the baptism of Mendelssohn
made him Christian. Georges Bizet was of Jewish origin, he looked Jewish;
but the fact that he married the daughter of Halévy (Ha-Levi), the
composer of La Juive, didn’t make the composer of Carmen a Jew. Neither
religion nor nationality are any more than superficial factors in the
nature of men and women. Race alone counts.
Once upon a time I wrote a Jewish story, The Shofar Blew at Sunset.
Maggie Cline liked it; so did Israel Zangwill. I preserve a letter from
Mr. Zangwill telling me of his liking. The story appeared in M’lle New
York, now defunct. It was afterward translated into Yiddish, though it
did not give general satisfaction in either camp, Jewish or Christian.
It revelled in the cantillations and employed as leading motive the
Shofar, or ram’s-horn blown in the synagogues on Yom Kippur or the Day of
Atonement. The scroll of the Torah also appeared. But these liturgical
references didn’t offend; it was my surprising denunciation of Jewish
materialism in New York that was the rock of offence. I say surprising,
for what is a Christian-born doing in another field and finding fault?
I’m sure I can’t say why, unless that in writing the tale I unconsciously
dramatized myself as a reproaching voice. There was much in my strictures
of that son of Hanan who prowled through the streets of the Holy
City in the year A. D. 62, crying aloud: “Woe, woe upon Jerusalem!” I
remember that I predicted because of the luxury of the American Jew the
lofty Jewish idealism might be submerged in a flood of indifference and
disbelief. Prosperity would prove the snag. In the heart of the Jew is
the true Zion, not in success nor in some far-away land. Naturally, that
didn’t please the Zionists. One professional Jewish publication, no
longer in existence, said that I preached like a Rabbi (Reb), but thought
like a goi. The word “Chutzpah” was also used. Yet, wasn’t I right? It
is the spiritual Ark of the Covenant, the spirit of the law, and not the
letter that killeth, which should be enshrined in the heart of the Jew.
He may dream of Palestine, of its skies of the “few large stars,” a land
overflowing with milk and honey; but in the depths of his soul it is the
living God to whom he must go for spiritual sustenance. God the eternal
reservoir of our earthly certitudes! Schma’ Ysroel!
SOCIALISM AND MEDIOCRITY
In these piping times of peace when the body politic is afflicted with
socialism, bolshevism, and other cutaneous disorders, it is a pleasing
and a profitable task to reread Socialistic Fallacies, by M. Yves
Guyot, who for years has been a determined and consistent opponent of
the bleak and dismal “science” and the author of a number of books
on the subject. Luckily for those who can’t read French, Socialistic
Fallacies has been translated and should prove a manual to combat and
confute the sophistries of socialism with the writer’s arsenal of
arguments. M. Guyot has been a deputy, a municipal councillor, minister
of public works. He advocated the revision of the Dreyfus case, and he
was political editor of _Le Siècle_ (1892-1903). He is also editor of
_Journal des Economistes_ (since 1909) and editor of _L’Agence Economique
et Financières_ (since 1911). He has written much about the great war
and its causes (also translated) and kindred themes. Therefore a man who
knows what he is talking about.
In his drastic attack on socialistic fallacies he thus concludes: “There
are three words which socialism must erase from the façades of our public
buildings, the three words of the republican motto: Liberty, Equality,
Fraternity. Liberty, because socialism is a rule of tyranny; equality,
because it is a rule of class; fraternity, because its policy is that of
class war.” M. Guyot might have quoted Napoleon, a realist, a cynic in
politics, for he knew its seamy side, who said: “Tell men they are equal
and they won’t bother about liberty.” And in this matter men may change,
mankind never.
Socialism, that word of so many meanings, has itself become meaningless.
Guyot shows us each variety, analyzes its particular fallacy, and though
not a victim to the craze for statistics, he furnishes many pages of
figures to match those of his adversaries. He attacks Karl Marx on
his weakest flank, and, incidentally, proves him not to have been a
proletarian, but the son-in-law of a Prussian Junker. The selfishness of
Marx, his tyrannical behavior, his unphilosophical wrath when opposed
by two such intellectual giants as Bakunine and Lassalle; his jealous
attitude toward Ferdinand Lassalle, especially after his tragic death,
are all well known. These traits do not reveal a man overflowing with
true brotherly love. Able, but frequently unscrupulous, men amuse the
idle and attract the multitude—such are the leaders of the cause which
has made such headway in Germany, adds Guyot, whose words in the light
of contemporaneous history are positively prophetic. These leaders
are plagiarists, with some variations, of all the communist romances
originally inspired by Plato. Their greatest pundits, Marx and Engels,
have built up their theories upon a sentence of Saint-Simon and three
phrases of Ricardo’s. Our author gives these examples: “German socialism
is derived from two sources: (1) The French doctrine of Saint-Simon, ‘The
way to grow rich is to make others work for one,’ which in Proudhon’s
mouth becomes ‘the exploitation of man by man.’ (2) Three formulas of
Ricardo, viz.: (_a_) labor is the measure of value; (_b_) the price of
labor is that which provides the laborer in general with the means of
subsistence, and of perpetuating his species without either increase or
diminution; (_c_) profits decrease in proportion as wages increase.”
Formula (_b_) became the “iron law of wages” enunciated by Lassalle.
Inverted dogmatism all these stale subterfuges.
The French doctrines and Ricardo’s three formulas were transformed into
the theory of Rodbertus, “the normal time of labor,” and the “surplus
labor” theory of Karl Marx and Engels. Guyot calmly demonstrates the
fallacies of these sonorous assumptions. He asks the whereabouts of the
Utopias of Fourier, of Cabet, of Louis Blanc’s organization of labor, or
of Proudhon’s bank of exchange—that Proudhon who has been permanently
saddled with Brissot’s famous phrase: “Property is theft.” (Philosophical
Examination of Property and Theft, 1780.) No Socialist has succeeded
in explaining the conditions for the production, the remuneration, and
the distribution of capital in a collectivist system. No Socialist has
succeeded in determining the motives for action which an individual would
obey. When pressed for an answer, they allege that human nature shall be
metamorphosed, but that the individual remains a constant quantity! Rank
materialism all this, and absolutely without vision.
Socialism is a hierarchy on a military basis imported from Germany. Karl
Marx did not concern himself with the incentives to action which are to
be placed before men in communistic society, and his followers carefully
evade the question. When they do attempt to deal with it, they fall into
grotesque errors, as did the late French leader, Jaurès. Kautsky asks
how the workman is to be made to take an interest in his work, and he
can find no incentive other than the force of habit. Like mechanical
toys, men will do the same thing every day because they did it the day
before. This is merely teaching tricks to animals, the organization
of reflex action causing the individual mechanically to do to-morrow
what he did yesterday. Nor is this a discovery of scientific socialism;
the organizers of churches, of armies, discovered the trait long ago,
employing it as a means of discipline under the sanctions of allurement
and coercion; allurement, by preferments, decorations, and honorary
distinction; coercion, by means of more or less cruel and rigorous
punishments. Bebel declared that “a man who will not work has not the
right to eat.” This is being condemned to death by starvation; and a man
who does less work than, in the opinion of the executive, he ought to
do, shall be put upon a restricted diet; so, after all, the collectivist
ideal ends in servile labor. To replace a king or a president there will
be an “executive,” which means several instead of one tyrant. Good old
King Log is always a better ruler than King Stork. For one thing, he is
not so voracious as the ferociously hungry feathered biped. Socialism,
then, is only one more strait-jacket to torture the individual.
It may be said that man is ready for every form of sacrifice save one:
nowhere and at no time has he been found to labor voluntarily and
constantly from a disinterested love for others. Man is only compelled
to productive labor by necessity, by the fear of punishment, or by
suitable remuneration. The Socialists of to-day, like those of former
times, constantly denounce the waste of competition. Competition involves
losses, but biological evolution, as well as humanity, proves that they
are largely compensated by gain. Furthermore, there is no question of
abolishing competition in socialistic conceptions; the question is
merely one of the substitution of political for economic competition. If
economic competition leads to waste, and claims its victims, it is none
the less productive. Political competition has secured enormous plunder
to great conquerors, such as Alexander, Cæsar, Tamerlane, and Napoleon;
it always destroys more wealth than it confers upon the victor. The
Socialist formulates a theory of robbery and calls it “restitution to
the disinherited.” Disinherited by whom? Disinherited of what? Let them
produce their title-deeds! They call it expropriation, but that is a
misnomer; what they set out to practise is confiscation. Georges Bernard
says that “socialism will be a régime of authority.” On this point
Guyot grimly agrees with him. In reality it will be the most oppressive
spiritual and material system ever invented by man.
Socialist action has a depressing effect on all fixed capital, and, he
continues, “in order to carry on a policy of preserving the political
equilibrium, of giving a few bones to the demagogues to gnaw, concessions
are made to the policy of spoliation.” What, then, remains of socialism
when we come to close quarters with it? And what are the prospects of
this spoliation and tyranny? The socialistic party cannot balance up a
governmental majority without destroying government itself, for it cannot
admit that government fulfils the minimum of its duties (this was written
before 1914). When a strike breaks out the intention of the strikers is
that security of person and property shall not be guaranteed. Socialist
policy represents contempt for law, and all men, whether rich or poor,
have an interest in liberty, security, and justice, as the private
interest of each individual is bound up with these common blessings. But
Socialists despise them all. “The socialism of Karl Marx’s disciples
betrays a long apprenticeship to servitude,” declares M. Reinach.
A law, the object of which is to protect each man’s property, is
supported by all who possess anything, and where is the man in advanced
societies who is incapable of being robbed because he possesses nothing?
A law of spoliation may be passed and carried into effect, but in the
event of its results becoming permanent it runs the risk of destroying
the government which has assumed the responsibility of it. Socialist
policy is a permanent menace to the liberty and security of citizens,
and, therefore, cannot be the policy of any government, the primary duty
of which is to exact respect for internal and external security. If it
fail therein it dissolves and is replaced by anarchy; and, inasmuch as
every one has a horror of that condition, which betrays itself by the
oppression of violent men banded together solely by their appetites,
an appeal is made to a strong government and to a man with a strong
grip, and then the risk is incurred of relapsing into all the disgraces
and disasters of Cæsarism. In several sections of this admirable work,
M. Guyot scrutinizes the various Utopias from Plato to Proudhon: Sir
Thomas More, the Kingdom of the Incas, Campanella, the Jesuits in
Paraguay, Moselly, Robert Owen, Fourier, the American Phalanx, the Oneida
Community, Cabet, the Icarians, and other unsuccessful experimenters.
Utopia is always within sight, but never reached. It is, in the charming
parlance of the hour, a pipe-dream; these Utopias always cut their
throats to spite their thirst. And precisely where socialism was expected
to be a buffer against world wars, it dismally failed.
From time to time the everlasting busybody asks himself why a plea for
mediocrity is not a fitting theme to interest ambitious essayists.
Supermen and supper-rogues have been done to the death in print, yet few
words are accorded to the garden variety of the human plant. Instead we
are keyed to the loftiest pitch; exaggeration is a national neurosis. We
are all professional altruists, and, as every one knows, altruism is the
art of making our neighbor unhappy because of our oppressive happiness.
And yet not a word for mediocrity, which is the backbone of our nation,
the staple of its political, artistic, and literary productions. Not a
word for the man in the street, whose collective opinion—King Opinion,
the most despotic of tyrants—rules us, whose vote counts heavier than the
vote of the “exceptional” being perched on the house-top. (A majority of
exalted souls would turn America into a wilderness.) And all because the
excellent word “mediocrity” is become debased in meaning. At one time it
stood for the golden mean, for a happy equilibrium of forces, moral and
physical. It spelled happiness to its possessor—we refer to the mediocre
temperament—and if a man had enough money to keep the wolf from the
door he was content. That is the precise word—content; to be contented
is a gift of the gods. But to us nowadays it means that you are merely
commonplace, without social ambitions, without intellectual eminence. And
this is not well.
Notwithstanding the fact that we are a united nation of over one hundred
millions of people, we are each in his own fashion endeavoring to escape
the imputation of mediocrity. Alas! in vain. Number is mediocrity.
We think and drink to order, vote as we are bidden by our wives, and
wear the clothes given us by destroyers of sartorial taste. Wherefore,
then, this mad desire to be exceptional? Whence this optimism that
shudders in the presence of genuine art and espouses the vulgar because
it better agrees with fat nerves? Let us acknowledge the truth. It is
because, happily for us, we are all mediocre; because genius is not a
normal condition of humanity, and that talent is much less rare than
our national vanity admits. However, let us pluck up courage. The
future—which is said by some to belong to socialism—will work out the
problem of mediocrity, especially if socialism is involved; mediocrity
and socialism are not poles asunder. Concrete houses filled with people
who will eat, drink, and think alike will cover the land. Everything will
be of concrete, even our political opinions. In his concrete Capitol a
concrete President will devise concrete laws. Art, music, and literature
will be so concrete that our native Gradgrinds, hungry for hard facts,
will be ravished into the seventh concrete heaven. Made a law, mediocrity
will do away with our present mortifying doubts, deceptions, and
pretensions. O Happy Time! And this coming age of concrete, wherein all
must walk and look alike, is it not a dream compared with which Dante’s
Inferno would be a Garden of Armida?
Said a great poet-philosopher: “And many a man has gone into the desert
and suffered from thirst with the camels rather than sit about the
cistern with dirty camel drivers.” No wonder William James wrote that
“the whole atmosphere of present-day Utopian literature tastes mawkish
and dish-watery to people who still keep a sense of life’s more bitter
flavors.” And how much more that is insipid and mawkish will follow
under socialistic regimentation! “Is it not the chief disgrace in the
world not to be a unit; to be reckoned one character; not to yield that
peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in
the gross, in the hundreds of thousands, of the party, of the section to
which we belong, and our opinion predicted geographically as the North or
the South?” These words were not uttered by a Socialist; they emanated
from the crystal-clear intellect of our greatest Individualist, Ralph
Waldo Emerson.
CHOPIN OR THE CIRCUS?
Rather hotly I argued the question with my editor: “After all, music
critics are men and brethren,” I said. “Except when they are sisters,”
he ironically interposed. I sternly resisted a temptation to blush,
and continued: “Because I love Chopin must I forever write of his
music—toujours perdrix! It’s an indigestion of strawberries, clotted
cream, and green-eyes. I’m suffering from spring-fever. Let me write a
story about the circus.” “Why not Ibsen?” interposed my editor, who is
subtle or nothing. “He was a grand man,” I assented, “but in the present
case he is only a red-herring across the trail. Suppose I mix up Chopin
with sawdust merely for the sake of the mélange?” My chief assented,
wearily. There are more important problems on the carpet than Chopin.
Had I ever been to the circus? What a singular question! Yet, yet—!
No, I confessed to myself, I had not been to the circus for at least
three decades. Critics are tame cats away from their regular guests.
In the concert room or at the play, armed with our little hammers, we
are as brave as plumbers; but on a roof garden, in church, at a circus,
or innocently slumbering, we are the mildest gang of pirates that ever
scuttled an American sonata or forced ambitious leading ladies to walk
the plank. We may go alone to the theatre with impunity and another
fellow’s girl, but at the circus we need a nurse to show us the ropes and
keep us from falling under the elephants’ hoofs. I know, because I went
one Sunday night to the Hippodrome and liked John McCormack’s singing
immensely; so much indeed that I forgot to criticise and nearly fell over
the edge of the box, so uncritically did I applaud. A private nurse—not
necessarily old—say I is the only safety for a critic out of his element;
otherwise a sense of the dignity of our calling is not maintained.
Therefore, I swallowed my Chopin scheme without undue fervor and went to
the circus. No matter which one. All circuses are in an attractive key
to me. Thackeray said the same thing about the play, and said it better.
Any circus will serve as a peg for my sawdust symbolism. Any Garden
will do, so that it has a capitalized initial letter. (No allusion to
Magical Mary.) The circus! What a corrective for the astringent Ibsen or
the morbidezza of Sarmatia’s sweet singer, Chopin! The circus! It is a
revelation. One thing I regretted—that I could not be a boy again, with
dirty hands, a shining brow, and a heart brimming over with joy. Peter
Pan! Oh! to recapture that first careless rapture, as Browning or some
other writing Johnny said; surely he must have meant the circus, which is
the one spot on our muddy planet where rapture rhymes with the sawdust
ring.
“Have you ever seen Hedda Gabler?” I asked of the Finland giantess. We
were wedged in front of the long platform at the Garden, upon which were
the Missing Link, the Snake-Enchantress, the Lion-Faced Boy, the English
Fat Girl—so fat—the Human Skeleton, the Welsh Giant, the Lilliputians,
tattooed men, a man with an iron skull, dancers, jugglers, gun-spinners,
“lady” musicians, and the three-legged boy. Eternal types at the circus.
The noise was terrific, the air dense with the aura of unwashed humanity.
This aura was twin to the aura in a monkey house. But I enjoyed my
“bath of multitude,” as Charles Baudelaire names it, and I should not
have bothered the tall creature with such an inept question. She coldly
regarded me:
“No, I haven’t seen Hedda to-day, but I remember George Tesman always
teased her with one question, ‘What do you know about that, Hed?’ Shoo!
Sardou for mine.” “Do you read George Blarney Shaw?” I persisted. “He
ought to be in a cage here. He would draw some crowds. But I’m told he
lives in Germany now on account of the beer.” I backed away quickly as
an East Side family consisting of a baker’s dozen, would allow. Why had
I asked such a question of a perfect stranger? This giantess, I mused
before the rhinoceros with the double prongs, is Finnish. That’s why
she knew the name of Hedda Gabler. Why didn’t I speak of Rosmersholm?
Rebecca West had Finnish blood in her veins. Careful, careful—this
Ibsen obsession must be surmounted, else I shall be inquiring of the
giraffe if neck or nothing is the symbol of Brand. All or Nothing! of
course. How stupid of me. Among the animals I regained my equilibrium.
Their odors evoked memories. Yes, I recalled the old-time circus, with
its compact pitched canvas tent on North Broad Street, Philadelphia:
the pink lemonade, the hoarse voice of the man who entreated us to buy
tickets—there were no megaphones in those days—the crisp crackling of the
roasting peanuts, the ovens revolved by the man from Ravenna, the man
from Ascoli, and the man from Milan. They followed the circus all the way
from Point Breeze, and I swear they were to me far more human than the
policemen who gently whacked us with their clubs when we crawled under
the tent.
The sense of smell is first aid to memory. As I passed the cages saluting
our pre-Adamic relatives, bidding the time of day to the zebu, nodding
in a debonair fashion to the yak, I could not help longing for my first
circus. Again I saw myself sitting in peaceful agony on a splintery
plank; again I felt the slaps and pinches of my tender-hearted Aunt
Sue—now in Paradise, I hope; again my heart tugged like a balloon at its
moorings as the clowns jumped into the ring, grimacing, chortling, and
fascinating us with their ludicrous inhumanity. Again we sat, a lot of
noisy rapscallions, on the stoop of Edwin Forrest’s home—the old Forrest
mansion is still on the west side of Broad Street—and how we tumbled to
the sidewalk when that terrific tragedian opened the door and transfixed
us with his glittering glance. I can still see his leonine head with
its shock of iron-gray curls, his exposed bull-neck, and hear his angry
roar: “Get to blank out of here, you blankety-blanks!” It was the giant’s
voice of Metamora, Coriolanus, Lear that we heard, an echo from the grand
period in the history of the American theatre; but we didn’t know that.
We were mischievous boys, and made mock of the mighty Edwin, no doubt
adding insult to injury by twiddling derisive thumbs at our noses.
Other days, other ways. I sighed as I tore myself loose from the
prehensile trunk of a too friendly baby elephant and passed into the huge
auditorium where Gilmore had played. Ah! the sad, bad, glad, dear, dead,
tiresome, poverty-stricken, beautiful days when we were young imbeciles
and held hands with a fresh “ideal” every week (sometimes two). Ah! the
sentimental “jag” induced by peanut eating, and the chaste, odoriferous
apes.
It is time. We seat ourselves. I look about me. Two resplendent gentlemen
wearing evening clothes at high noon, after the daring manner of our
Gallic cousins, toll a bell. I became excited. Why those three and thirty
strokes? What the symbolism! Chopin, or Ibsen; again, I groaned, and
turned my attention to my neighbors, one of whom I could feel, though
did not see. I raised my voice, employing certain vocables hardly fit
to print. The effect was magical. “Johnny, take your feet out of the
gentleman’s collar. That’s a good boy.” It was the soothing voice of a
mother. Bless her clairvoyance! I sat comfortably back in my seat. Johnny
howled at the interference with his pleasure. I felt sorrow for him.
Childhood is ever individualistic, even pragmatic. But I only had one
collar with me, and it was well the matter thus ended.
Hurrah! Here they come! A goodly band. The clowns! the clowns! Some
hieratic owl of wisdom has called the clown the epitome of mankind. He
certainly stands for something, this “full-fledged fool,” as good old
Tody Hamilton used to write, and “surcharged with the Roe of Fun,” which
phrase beats Delaware shad. Odds fish! There was only one Hamilton. What
a Rabelaisian list of names boast these merry clowns! If the years have
passed over the skulls of these lively rascals, jolly boys do not show
them. The same squeaks, the identical yodling, the funny yet sinister
expression of the eyes, the cruel, red-slitted mouths—not a day older
than ten did I seem as they came tumbling in and began their horse-play,
punctuated with yelling, yahoo gestures, ribald ejaculations, and
knockabout diversions. It must all mean something, this hooting, in
the economy of the universe, else “life is a suck and a sell,” as Walt
Whitman puts it. As in a dream-mirror I saw Solness slowly mount the
fatal tower when Hilda Wangel cries to him: “My—my Master-builder!” She
sings The Maiden’s Wish, and he hears the harps of Chopin hum in the air.
I rub my ears. It is not Hilda who is crying, but a pet pig in a baby
carriage, wheeled by a chalk-faced varlet. How difficult it is to escape
the hallucinations of the critical profession. I couldn’t forget Chopin
or Ibsen even at the circus.
It was with relief, after more bellmanship from the man with the shiny
silk hat and spiked coat, as the elephants majestically entered. Followed
the horses. Tumblers and wire-walkers, women who stood on their heads
and smiled—as they do in life. Something like the “inverted pyramid,”
as James Hinton called modern civilization—plastic poseurs, Oriental
jugglers, the show was let loose at last. Human projectiles were launched
through midair to the tap of a drum. My nerves forbade me to look at
them, so I read a programme advertisement of wall-paper for bathrooms.
Some people like such horrible sights. I do not. They dare not precisely
formulate to themselves the wish that “something” would happen, and when
it does they shudder with sadistic joy. I close my eyes when the Whirl of
Death or any other sensational act is staged. “Something” might happen.
The mad dancers delight our rhythmic sense as they make marvellous
arabesques. The chariot races stir the blood. The crash around curves,
the patters of gleaming metal excite so that you stand up, and,
brushing the feet of inevitable Johnny from your neck (notwithstanding
his remonstrances), you shout with woolly mouth and husky voice.
Instinctively you turn down your thumbs: “Pollice verso,” which Bayard
Taylor translated “the perverse police.” You remember the Gérôme painting?
“This beats Ibsen,” I hilariously exclaimed to Johnny’s mother. (She was
a comely matron.) “His name is John, and when he gets home his father
will beat him,” she tartly replied. With the prevoyance of boyhood Johnny
burst into despairing howls. I at once folded up my mind. A million
things were happening in the haze of the many rings. The New Circus is
polyphonic, or nothing.
Enough! Filled to the eyes with the distracting spectacle, ear-drums
fatigued by the blare and bang of the monster brass band, my collar
quite wilted by Johnny’s shoemaker, my temper in rags because of the
panting, struggling army of fellow-beings, I reached the avenue in
safety, perspiring, thirsty, unhappy. Like Stendhal, after his first
and eagerly longed-for battle of love, I exclaimed: “Is that all?” In
sooth, it had been too much. The human sensorium is savagely assaulted
at the twentieth-century circus. I was in pessimistic enough humor
to regret the single ring, the antique japes of a solitary clown, and
the bewitching horsemanship of Mlle. Léonie, with her gauze skirts and
perpetual rictus. As a matter of fact, we wouldn’t endure for five
minutes the old-fashioned circus and its tepid lemonade. Where are the
mullygrubs of yesteryear? But the human heart is perverse. It always
longs for the penny and the cake in company, while ineluctable destiny
ever separates them. Perhaps my editor was right. Render unto Chopin the
things that are Chopin’s; send Ibsen back to his Land of the Midnight
Whiskers. Smell the sawdust at the Garden, not forgetting that the
chilly, dry days are at hand when even Panem et Circenses shall be taboo;
when pipe and prog and grog will be banned; when these United States
shall have been renamed Puritania; when a fanatically selfish minority
shall take all the joy from life. Ergo, carpe diem! I thank you.
ART AND ALCOHOL
What will be the reactions among artistic men and women summarily
deprived of wine and malt beverages? I asked this of Manager
Gatti-Casazza the other day at the Metropolitan Opera House. He is not
a drinking man, but the contemptuous shrug of his shoulders showed me
his position in the thrice-vexed controversy. Singers, one and all,
are accustomed to mild alcoholic refreshment. If they go beyond bounds
the effect on their voices is soon made manifest, but usually being
foreign-born, they have been in the habit of drinking light wines at
meal time, perhaps beer after a performance, for good beer relaxes
nerve-tension. People don’t drink beer to become intoxicated; they drink
it because it lets down the pressure of a day’s work better than whiskey
or wine. Beer is not an intoxicant; it is a depressant. The cry that “the
workingman must have his beer” is far too exclusive. The professional
man, the brain-worker, needs beer, and the singer or musician—sometimes
singers are not musicians!—after a nerve-exhausting performance finds in
wine or beer a veritable solace. Matthew Arnold wrote that the American
funny man was a national calamity. What would he have said to the plans
of certain misguided females to found “recreation centres” where,
after eight hours’ exhausting daily grind, the workman could listen
to “instructive reading”—ye gods!—and drink non-alcoholic beverages
(super-taxed?). Little wonder Bolshevism is growing apace in an America
that soon will be a vast Dry Tortugas.
In one of her always interesting novels Gertrude Atherton depicts a poet
whose inspiration dried up when he stopped drinking. Swinburne is said
to have been Mrs. Atherton’s model; when the English poet ceased his
cognac his muse did not fly far afterward. If he had not become temperate
in regard to spirituous liquors the greatest Victorian poet would have
died. Walter Savage Landor, and after him Byron, wrote that brandy is a
drink fit only for heroes. The puny physique of Swinburne could ill brook
alcoholic excesses. His friend and protector, Theodore Watts-Dunton,
literally saved the effervescent Algernon Charles from sudden death.
As a rule lyric poets need no stimulant. Youth is the propulsive force
to their lyricism. If Byron drank heavily at times, Shelley was ever a
water-drinker. No rules can be formulated. There is Bernard Shaw, the
“Uncle Gurnemanz” and venerable busybody of international politics. He is
a fierce teetotaler. He has confessed that family reasons prompted him
to become so, although Archdale Reid in Heredity has shown that acquired
traits are not inherited; that the children of drunkards are seldom
drunkards (prohibitionists declare the opposite, but figures can be made
to lie). By the same token the sons of clergymen are not often pious.
Nature abhors uniformity. If Shaw had taken his ale like the British
workmen he harangues, he would not have been the pestiferous nuisance he
is to-day. But, like all “reformers,” “uplifters,” and public nuisances,
he has a weak stomach. Because he is virtuous!—the motto of all these
Malvolios, these tailless foxes. Mind your own business! Ah! that’s the
true golden rule. There would be no wars if this custom prevailed.
The late Lombroso-Levi, formulator of many ingenious and amusing theories
concerning the stigmata of genius, has collected some names of men who
drank, nevertheless who contrived to leave the world in their debt for
their art. Max Nordau followed his “master” with his absurd tome on
Degeneration, and then the system, chiefly framed for imbeciles, quite
collapsed. Professor William James sent the cardboard structure into
thin air when he revealed its numerous inconsistencies. Any stigma
applicable to genius or talent may be found in your shoemaker, butcher,
or policeman, from megalomania to alcoholism, from faun-like ears
with attached lobes to an unholy greed for other people’s money. Let
us look at Lombroso’s list of alcoholic men of genius. He writes that
Alexander died after having emptied ten times the goblet of Hercules
(some thirst!). Julius Cæsar was often carried home on the shoulders
of his friends—so was a certain highest dignitary in the United States
during the last century, and a mediocrity he was. Socrates, Seneca,
Alcibiades, Cato, Peter the Great, the Czarina Catherine were notorious
boozers. Tiberius Nero was nicknamed Biberius Mero. Septimius Severus and
Mahomet II died in delirium tremens. Jan Steen and Frans Hals were heavy
imbibers. Hals, who lived to an advanced age and painted masterpieces to
the last, was drunk every night. So was Monticelli, absinthe proving his
ruin. George Morland drank, and Turner, too; both drank to excess. As
for the poets and literary men, the litany is long. Henry Murger, Gerard
de Nerval, Alfred de Musset, Kleist, Poe, Hoffmann, Addison, Steele,
Carew, Sheridan, Burns, Charles Lamb, James Thomson, Hartley Coleridge,
James Clarence Mangan, Ernest Dowson, Swinburne—Rossetti, who drugged—and
Coleridge, De Quincey and Mme. de Staël abused opium.
In the domain of music examples are as thick as bombs were at Verdun.
Handel swallowed a mighty amount of firewater, for he was a mighty man.
Gluck drank far more than was good for him. It was a pleasing habit of
his to have a harpsichord placed in some pretty rural spot, where, with
a regiment of bottles, he played and composed. He died, so it is said,
of brandy. Tasso drank, Baudelaire drugged and drank, and Lenau, poet,
died from alcohol. Mozart and Beethoven abused wine. Beethoven was often
“a little how come ye so!” Modern instances multiply. Singers, players,
actors, authors, composers—how many there are about whose heads is the
aura of alcoholism! Alcohol has been the nursing bottle of genius, and of
many commonplace citizens may not the same be said? Woe to him who abuses
the priceless gift. He is doomed. And doomed, too, is the prohibitionist
who overindulges in flapjacks and fried steak. Native cookery has slain
more than the rum mills of the universe. And notwithstanding our vaunted
cosmopolitanism, a natural outcome of the great war, the village pump is
to be our national Totem. Butchered to make a prohibitionist holiday;
that prohibition which has elevated “legislation” to the dignity of a
sport.
Richard Wagner possessed an irritable stomach, but was comforted by a
glass of good wine (as apparently was St. Paul). Walt Whitman neither
smoked nor drank. Poor Guy de Maupassant began with wine, and, in the
wake of erotic excesses, he resorted to opium, even to ether, which he
would put on his handkerchief and apply to his nostrils. Such a hatred of
reality was his! He well deserved the appellation of “Taureau triste,” as
he was surly toward the end of a brilliant career. Flaubert, like Zola,
was chary of excess, except in literary work. Be chaste in your life that
you may be violent in your art! he enjoined de Maupassant. Turgénieff,
Daudet, Huysmans, Gounod, Goncourt, were not alcoholic. Bizet, it is
said, died of absinthe, not of disappointment over the failure of Carmen;
which didn’t fail, as Philip Hale has shown us. Goethe was wild in his
youth, drank wine, pursued the golden girl, yet he cannot by any stretch
of imagination be placed in the ranks of the drunkards. The alcoholic
neurosis exists in the individual, who drinks because he is neurotic,
and is not necessarily neurotic because he is a drunkard. As usual, the
prohibitionists have put the cart before the horse, being ignorant, or
pretending to be, of facts disclosed by modern biological research. These
fanatics suffer from what might be called psychical dandruff.
What am I trying to prove? Nothing. Alcohol inspired or spurred on
these men, and we are the inheritors of their visions. Naturally, to
the boneheads who engineer reforms, all art is dangerous, is immoral.
Art, like religion, is also an opiate. God made the dawn, but the devil
invented the evening. The Seven Arts are the invention of men in revolt
against the tedium of life. Killing time is only killing one’s self,
for we are crucified at the crossroads of Time and Space (with the
Button-Moulder lurking around the corner). To escape the eternal ennui
man created the arts, and music, the most soothing of the seven, has
drugged his dreams and made fantastic the rude angles of concrete life.
Perhaps music is only a majestic noise. Sometimes it bruises the soul
as do bells the air. It can retire majestically into the recesses of the
imagination, like the faint roar of surf withdrawn on the beach of Time.
It may be a ballet for triphammers or as splendidly sonorous as the color
chords of Picasso or the tortured mechanisms of Marcel Duchamps. But
always an opiate, a consoler.
The truth is that our existence without some buffer between our naked
souls and the chill wind of empty spiritual space would be inconceivable.
Man devised Time and Space—symbols of his terrifying ignorance in the
presence of eternity—and religion and the arts wherewith he might cloak
his nakedness. All the rest is vanity. Prohibition is only a symptom of
the everlasting propensity of intolerant minds to fashion others after
their own mean image. There is no need to worry over it. Like other
tyrannical devices to enslave the will of mankind, it will be tested,
found wanting, and dropped. And the best way to hasten the decease is
to enforce rigidly the law. But come what may, art and alcohol are
inseparably wedded, as in the Greek myth Apollo and Dionysos imaged
beauty and ecstasy.
THE TRAGIC CHOPIN
Chopin has bequeathed to us six scherzos. The four that comprise a group
are opus 20, in B minor; opus 31, B flat minor; opus 39, C sharp minor,
and opus 54, E major. The two remaining scherzos are in the second
sonata, opus 35, and in the third sonata, opus 58. They are in the
respective keys of E flat minor and E flat major. These six compositions
are evidences of the power, originality, variety, and delicacy of Chopin.
The scherzo is formally not his invention. Beethoven and Mendelssohn
anticipated him. But he remodelled the form and filled it with a
surprisingly novel content, though not altering its three-four measure.
With the Beethoven scherzo we realize the swing, the robustiousness and,
at times, the rude jollity. In the Mendelssohn scherzo we enjoy the
velocity and finish. Light without heat, true scherzando moods; indeed,
more scherzo-like than Chopin’s, Mendelssohn’s sense of elfin joy stemmed
from the early Italian masters of the pianoforte. Rossini voiced this
belief after hearing the scherzo a capriccio from the nimble fingers of
Felix himself, and said to the composer: “That smells of Scarlatti.”
And it does recall Domenico Scarlatti, whose compositions, slight as to
structure, are replete with gracious vitality and a surface skimming of
sentiment like the curved flight of a thin bird over shallow waters.
* * * * *
A terrible though beautiful domain is the Chopin scherzo. Only two have
the lightness of touch, clarity in atmosphere and bustling gaiety of the
conventional scherzo: the other four are fierce, grave, ironic, sardonic,
fiery, passionate, even hysterical, and most melancholy. In several the
moods are pathologic; in all, magical. The scherzo in E, opus 54, may be
best described by the thrice commonplace word, delightful. It is sunny
music, and its sweep and swiftness are compelling. The five preluding
bars of half-notes, unison, strike the keynote of optimism. What follows
is like the ruffling of tree-tops by warm southern winds. The little
upward flight in E, beginning at the seventeenth bar, in major thirds
and fourths, has been cleverly utilized by Saint-Saëns in the scherzo
of his G minor piano concerto, opus 22. The fanciful embroidery of the
single finger passages is never opaque; a sparkling, bubbling freedom and
freshness characterize this Chopin scherzo, a composition not heard too
often in public, possibly because there are few pianists, like Joseffy
or De Pachmann, to play it. Its emotional content is not deep; it lies
well within the category of the elegant, the capricious. Its fourth page
contains an episode which at first blush suggests the theme of the A flat
valse, opus 42, with its comminglement of duplex and triple rhythms.
Although the piu lento is in C sharp minor, it betrays little sadness; it
is but the blur of a passing cloud that shadows with its fleecy edges the
wind-swept moorland.
This scherzo in E is a mood of joyousness; as joyous as the witty,
sensitive, umbrageous composer ever allowed himself to become. Its coda
is not so forcible as the usual Chopin coda. There is a dazzling flutter
of silvery scale at the close. Altogether a charming work. Closely
allied to it in general sentiment is the E flat scherzo from the B minor
sonata. It is largely arabesque and its ornamentation is genial though
not surprisingly ingenious. It somewhat savors of Weber. It might go
on forever. The resolution is not intellectual; it is purely one of
tonality. The thought is tenuous. But it is highly embroidered relief
after the first movement of the sonata. Nor is the trio in B particularly
noteworthy. Truly a salon scherzo, which challenges Mendelssohn on his
native heath. It may be considered as an intermezzo, also as a prelude to
the lyric measures.
We are on firm and familiar footing when the first page is opened of the
B flat minor scherzo, the second in order of composition. Who has not
heard with interest those overarching and questioning triplets which
Chopin could never make his pupils play sufficiently “tombé”? He told
De Lenz: “It must be a charnel-house.” Alas! These same vaulted phrases
have since become banal. This scherzo, like the lovely A flat Ballade,
is cruelly tortured by the ambitious musical flapper. Yet how great,
how vigorous, it all is; how it abounds in sweetness and light when
the music falls from the fingers of a master! It is a Byronic poem—“so
tender, so bold, as full of love as of scorn,” to quote Schumann. Has
Chopin ever penned a more delicious song than this in D flat, with
its straying over the tonal borderland? It is the high noon of life.
The dark bud of the introduction has come to a perfect flowering, and
with what miracles of scent, shape, and color! The second section has
the quality of sane wit. It is serious to severity, yet its meanings
are noble. The brief excursion that follows is the awakening from a
wondering dream; no suggestion there of pallid morbidities. And how
supremely welded is the style with the subject; what masterly writing
evolved from the genius of the instrument! Then, fearful that he has
dwelt too long upon his ideas, Chopin, in a rapturous flight, soars away
to clear sky. After the repetition comes the development section, and
while it is ingenious and effective in a chaotic way, nevertheless it
is here that the composer is at his weakest. The Olympian aloofness of
Beethoven, which permitted him to survey his material from every point
of view, Chopin could not boast. He is a great composer, but he was also
a great pianist. He nurses his themes with constructive frugality, and
sometimes the mechanical limitation of the piano checks his imagination.
The well-sounding is considered as much as the clearly thought. There
is logic in his exposition, though it is often piano, not music, logic.
A certain straining after brilliancy, a falling off in the spontaneous
urge of the earlier pages, force us to feel easier with the return of the
first theme. The coda is brilliant. This scherzo in B flat minor bids
fair to remain the favorite among its fellows. It is neither cryptic nor
repellent, like the first and third scherzo. It is a perennial joy to
pupil and public. Like the soliloquy in Hamlet, the B flat minor scherzo
is become a popular quotation.
* * * * *
Its predecessor in B minor, opus 20, is the profounder of the pair, but
not so melodious. It is the most shrill and hysterical of the scherzos.
Though in the ironic vein, it is Chopin recklessly throwing himself to
the winds of remorse—a Manfred mood, a mood of self-torture, a confession
from the first chord to the last. Within the dream inclosed by its
gates of tonal brass there is the struggle of an imprisoned soul. It
is the unhappiest and the most riotous of the Pole’s works, and it is
also unduly long. Its emotional keynote is too tense to permit of the
repetitions marked by the composer. These repetitions are unsuited to
present taste, which, above all, demands brevity. Poignancy and prolixity
are mutually exclusive. The piece greatly gains when played without “da
capo.” Its first part is so drastically harsh that the succeeding melody
in B, with its lilting tenths—“the sweet slumber of the moonlight on
the hill”—after the tragic strain comes as benison. This scherzo seems
to possess a personal message. Chopin, like Robert Louis Stevenson, was
consumptive. Slender of frame, as was the Scotch writer, his spirit was
leonine. His was psychic bravery. He could write terrible music, conjure
up desperate images. A sense of stifled longing, of the inability to
compass his lofty ambitions, fill this first scherzo. It is the tragedy
of Chopin’s life compressed within a few pages; the tragedy of one whose
spirit was weaker than his flesh.
The arabesques after the eight-bar introduction—some of them muted bars,
as is Chopin’s wont—has a spiritual resemblance to the principal figure
in the Fantasie-Impromptu, opus 66; but instead of the ductile triplets,
as in the bars of the Impromptu, the figure in the scherzo is divided
between the hands, while the harshness of the mood is emphasized by the
anticipatory chord in the left hand. The vitality of this first page
is positively electrifying. The questioning chords at the close of the
section are as imaginative as any passage ever written by the composer.
The half-notes E and the upleaping appogiaturia are evidences of his
originality in minor details. These occur before the modulation into
the lyric theme and with some slight dashes before the dash into the
coda. The second section, in agitato, contains several knotty harmonic
problems; they must be skimmed over at tempestuous speed, else cacophony.
Here Chopin is bold to excess, as if his spirit would knock at the
very gates of heaven or hell. But the thunder and surge, after waxing,
soon wanes and spends itself. The soul has stormed itself into sheer
weariness. By critical consent, the molto piu lento is a masterpiece.
Written in the luscious key of B, it is like a woven enchantment. Chopin
attains most subtle effects with broken accords in tenths. The only other
slow movements comparable to this are the B major episode in the B minor
octave study, opus 25, and the largo of the B minor sonata. The Garden of
Armida or the Vale of Tempe are evoked by all three tone-poems.
Mark how the composer resumes his first savage mood. It is a picture
of contrasted violences. Beware of the “da capo.” Too many repetitions
provoke satiety. Rather attack at once the coda—that most dramatic of
Chopin’s codas. Bold, breathless, startling, is this impetuous ride
’cross country. The heavy accentuation on the first note of every bar
should not obscure one’s rhythmic sense to the second beat in the left,
which is likewise accented. This produces mixed rhythms, which add
to the murkiness, confusion, and despair of the finale. These daring
dissonances—so daring, so logical, so dramatic—how they must have rasped
the nerves of Chopin’s contemporaries! And they should be rigorously
insisted upon. No veiled half-lights. All bridges are burned. Naught
remains but catastrophe. To his doom goes this musical Childe Roland!
The Dark Tower crumbles as the poet dauntlessly blows his slug-horn. The
scherzo ends in overwhelming ruin. The last page is a supreme offering to
the god of pessimism.
* * * * *
Even though the sneering fretfulness of an unhappy sick-brained man
disturbs its sharp contours, the third scherzo in C sharp minor, opus 39,
is the most dramatic and the finest moulded of them all. It is capricious
to madness, but the dramatic quality is unmistakable. It seethes with
scorn—if such an extravagant expression may be allowed; but it is
extravagant, full of fire and fury, yet signifying something. A word as
to the tempo: The scherzos, with a few exceptions, are marked presto,
but we must remember that it is the presto of Chopin’s time, also of his
piano action. His favorite Pleyel piano was light and elastic in action.
To-day actions are heavier, the key dip greater, though the elasticity
is the same. Therefore the tempi of these scherzos—or should I write
scherzi?—ought to be moderated, otherwise the music loses its significant
ponderability, not to say dignity, when we adopt the old-fashioned
time markings. The first part of the B minor scherzo may be taken at a
presto pace—that is, a commodious presto, the scherzo in E major must
be played presto; also the one in E flat, as both are of the velocity
genre; but when the thought takes on a graver hue, where the mastery of
utterance and nobility of phrase are to be considered, then moderate your
pulse-beat. The scherzo in C sharp minor is a special sufferer from a too
hurried speed. Architectonics are blurred, details jumbled and grandeur
of style is absent. And if you start with such a fiery tempo, how shall
you secure contrast in the coda, which should be fairly shot from the
finger-tips? Or would you emulate Schumann in his G minor sonata, in the
finale, which begins prestissimo, and is later ordered by the composer
to become still more prestissimo? Achieve a presto, by all means, but
consider the heavier tonal mass of the modern piano.
This C sharp minor scherzo is a massive composition, yet replete with
fitful starts and rhythmic surprises. The chorale and its trio are
Chopinesque as to fioritura and in harmonic basis. Throughout the
narrative tone is dramatic; even in the “meno mosso” it never tarries.
The coda is built on an effect of persistent iteration. It is excellently
adapted to the keyboard. The composition has affinities with the dark
and grotesque conceptions of Hoffmann, Poe, or Coleridge. Its acid irony
recalls Heine. It is like fantastic architecture seen in a dream; about
it hover perpetual gloom and the despairing things that circle in the
night. It is like a tale from Poe’s iron-bound, melancholy volume of the
Magi and across its portal is written the word, Spleen.
Remains the E flat minor scherzo from the second sonata. It is the most
powerful of the set. To interpret, one needs breadth of style, heroic
spirit, abetted by wrists of steel. The big Rossinian one-bar crescendo
at the beginning taxes the strength. The composition is elemental; the
chromatic whistling of the wind in the chord of the sixth makes true
storm-music. There is menacing gloom in the initial bars; the blissful
song is not quite uninterrupted bliss; there is always a tempest that
threatens. The descending octaves, which seem to invite us to the
infernal regions, are swept away by the storm-theme, and once more we
are madly projected through space. Satanic pride, a challenge to fate,
the defiance of the microcosm to the threatening macrocosm; these and
other characteristics may be imagined in this profound work. It depends
on the listener. With Chopin as with Rome, you carry away what you fetch
to either man or city. But your little Peter’s pence of sympathy has
suffered a rich change in the return. We are the gainers. Some day, no
longer as remote as when the fallacious belief that the music of any
particular nation is better than another’s, perhaps Chopin may stand
where he should, next to Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. There is no such
thing as map-music; there is only beautiful music. And you can never play
Chopin beautifully enough.
PHASES OF THE GREATER CHOPIN
To-day the Impromptus of Chopin are well-nigh impossible in
the concert-room. Those delights of all true “flappers,” the
Fantasie-Impromptu in C sharp minor, and the A flat Impromptu are
played too often, that is, played badly. The first part of the
Fantasie-Impromptu is taken at too swift a pace, and, in consequence,
sounds too much like an etude, when in reality its arabesques do hint at
something more emotional. The figuration suggests that of the B minor
scherzo, not, however, so pregnant with dramatic meanings. And that
second section in D flat, how it is dragged, how it is sprawled and
drawled! In company with the second theme of the Funeral March, it is
the most sentimental of its composer. The greater Chopin is revealed in
the second Impromptu, the one in the key of F sharp major. It is a sheaf
of moods organically more bound together than seems at a first hearing.
Because of its true impromptu spirit, its vagrant moods, its restless
outpouring of fancies, it has been rather disregarded by some Chopinists,
who, hidebound as any academic critic, are shocked by the changes in
tonality, and, being unimaginative, are shocked also by the capricious
shifting of moods; one dream melts into another, and after a repetition
of those sweetly attuned chords at the close, a vigorous affirmation
awakens the listener as would a sudden clap of thunder during a peaceful
evening in June. There are several enigmatic bars of modulation that have
puzzled purists and still are disquieting even to excursionists through
the tangled harmonic underwoods of Ornstein and Stravinsky. I refer to a
transitional passage after the march-like measures and immediately before
the return of the principal melody. Elsewhere I have compared them to the
creaking of a rusty hinge in the dooryard where Walt Whitman’s lilacs
last bloomed. The G flat Impromptu, the third in the published order—the
Fantasie-Impromptu, opus 66, is posthumous—was seldom heard in recital
till Vladimir de Pachmann, master expositor of the more delicate phases
of the Polish composer, revived it in his programme. Since then it is
become more familiar. It is charming with its spiral figuration, though
less novel than its two predecessors.
The Mazurkas, those impish, morbid, gay, sour, dour, graceful little
dances, I need not dwell upon here at length. For the majority of
pianists they are a sealed book, and if you have not a savor of Slav
in you pray do not disturb them with your literalism. De Pachmann,
Godowsky, Paderewski, Gabrilowitsch, and Josef Hofmann play them
wonderfully, but how few others. I recall a story told me by Rosenthal,
whose colossal performances here are memorable. He wished to hear from
De Pachmann’s nimble fingers his own version of the Mazurkas and paid
the Russian a visit one evening. Pachmann did not greet Rosenthal too
sympathetically. “Ah!” he exclaimed, when Moriz, the octave-thunderbolt,
explained the reason for his unexpected appearance. “Ah! but I play
the Mazurkas so badly. Now, if I had your technique”—his eyes fairly
sparkled with malicious irony—“I might be able to play them!” However,
he was persuaded, and once seated at the piano he didn’t leave it till
he had almost finished the entire collection; and Chopin wrote many of
these dances. (At least fifty-one, if you include several of doubtful
authenticity). How did he play them, this perverse magical artist?
Rosenthal told me that he had never heard such beautiful, subtle, and
treacherous playing; the treachery was the manner in which he interpreted
the music. Not an accent was correct, the phrasing was falsified, though
the precise notation was adhered to, and all delivered with a variety of
touches positively exquisite. “There!” cried De Pachmann, as he finished,
“that is the only way to play the Mazurkas.” And he smiled with his eyes.
“Not!” thought Rosenthal, who thanked his colleague and hurried into
the open air where he could explode. Talk about camouflage! The joke
was later when Rosenthal teased De Pachmann about his trickery and the
Chopinzee absolutely grinned with joy. Surely, as Sam Johnson remarked,
the reciprocal civility of authors is one of the most risible scenes in
the farce of life. The splenetic doctor could have joined musicians to
authors.
Chopin has composed some marvellous music in the Mazurka form. Consider
the three or four of these dances in the key of C sharp minor, the poetic
one in B flat minor, the one with the morbidly insistent theme in B minor
or that sad, appealing example in F minor, the last which Chopin is
said to have put on paper. Its fixed idea, its hectic gaiety and acrid
gloom reveal a sick brain, the brain of a dying man. But there are many
other Mazurkas filled with daylight cheerfulness. Of the greater Chopin
posterity will probably acclaim the Polonaises in F sharp minor, A flat
major and the Fantaisie-Polonaise in the same key. There is a wealth of
fantasy in this Polonaise, opus 61; its restless tonalities, the beauty
of the first theme, the vaporous deliquescence later of this theme, the
violent mood changes and harmonic grandeur left this work to the elect
of the composer. The F sharp minor Polonaise and the so-called Siberian
in E flat minor, as well as the Polonaise in C minor are nothing if not
virile. They demand men as well as pianists to interpret them.
Liszt pronounced the F sharp minor Polonaise pathologic. As a matter of
fact, it surpasses in sombre grandeur the Heroic Polonaise, opus 53,
notwithstanding the thundering cannons and cavalry charges of the more
popular of the pair. The triplets in eight notes of the introduction
achieve a splendid climax of suspense before the entrance of the chief
theme. Soon octaves and chords supplant the single notes of the melody.
There is epical breadth which at each reiteration becomes bigger, so big
that it almost overflows the frame of the keyboard, in suggestion becomes
orchestral. The second subject in the major (D flat) is less drastic, is
an excellent contrast figure. The strange intermezzo in A which precedes
the Mazurka is not enigmatic if you hear it as a sinister roll of drums.
I think of Rembrandt’s Night Watch, and its muffled morning music.
Its intent is manifest, it leads to the second theme, now transposed
to the despairing key of C sharp minor; the Mazurka which follows
tempted Liszt—or his amanuensis, Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein—to the most
extravagant panegyric. Its brace of double notes, thirds and sixths are
lovely in hue and scent, but pray do not languish your tempo, else the
episode soon becomes sugary. Again the Polonaise resumes its elemental
chant, a chant which grows huger in rancorous woe until the very bottom
of the pit of desolation is reached, and, without a gleam of light, comes
the code with mutterings of the main theme, and only in the very last
bar we hear with positive relief a smashing F sharp in octaves.
What does it all mean? Some obscure psychological drama of the
composer’s soul in which he vents his spleen, indignation and defiance,
and rages against the ineluctable canons of destiny. In a sense this
Polonaise is pathologic. It appeals to the nerves. It lacerates the
pulp of our sensibility, it is morbid, but it is also magnificent. It
is not sensational like the two Polonaises of Liszt in E major and C
minor, though it is equally brilliant. Arthur Friedheim played the
Chopin Polonaise superbly at one time. It suited his saturnine mood.
I fancy, however, that Franz Liszt’s performance must have been the
supreme exemplar. There is a loftiness of mood coupled with the heroic
patterns of this piece which place it in the category of masterpieces.
It reminds one of a sullen, rugged landscape in the style of Salvator
Rosa, a solitary human in the foreground, distracted, who lifts suicidal
hands to the darkling, indifferent skies. It is the tragedy of Man,
who is no longer, as in the old-fashioned geocentric conception of the
universe, the centre of things, but discovers himself alone, deserted by
the familiar signs and stars in his cosey firmament, and despairs. The
tragedy of unfaith. The tragedy of love that slays. Unhappy Chopin was
baptized a Roman Catholic, so was George Sand. Both were, to put the case
mildly, slack in the practices of their church. Chopin was of a pious
bent.
He concealed his attachment to the French sphinx of the inkpot from
his mother in Warsaw because he feared to pain her. She was profoundly
religious. Madame Sand, who didn’t wear trousers and smoke all day,
as caricature proclaims, was cruel to her consumptive genius. She
appreciated his work, but his humors were antic. She called Frederic
“mon cher cadavre,” and this “corpse” must have grated on his nerves.
Oh! if he had possessed but a tithe of her saving sense of humor. But
Chopin was not given to jesting over his love. He flirted and mildly
diverted himself; the Sand affair was deadly serious to him. When the
spirit moved her she betrayed him (let us politely call it spirit
rather than temperament). Her final desertion didn’t kill him. It was
the liaison that slew the man, body and soul. She robbed him of love,
faith, and fatherland. His ending, though, was in the proper religious
key. According to Turgines, half the countesses in Europe sang him to
his death. (Many are still singing their hearers along the same road.) I
believe the F sharp Polonaise to be the most subjective from the pen of
its composer, even more so than the B minor scherzo, opus 20.
The nocturnes are done to death. Let us pass them by. The C sharp minor
nocturne is like the one in C minor; both are still free from persecution
at the hands of the young person who has decked the most virile spirit
of his age with Parisian millinery. These two nocturnes do not intrigue
the fancy of the amateur. In breadth of conception they are Beethovenian.
The E major nocturne, a favorite of Josef Hofmann, and the one in B, the
Tuberose, in which Paderewski proved so eloquent and whose very title
makes H. L. Mencken grit his teeth, are loaded with purest Chopin ore. I
admire, but with reservations, the transcription of various nocturnes to
instruments of the string family. Wilhelmj transposed the D flat nocturne
for violin and Leopold Auer has arranged the posthumous nocturne in E
minor, which Heifetz plays beautifully; yet, effective as they may be,
they are not truly Chopinesque. They are too saccharine on the strings;
we miss the cool, crystalline tones of the pianoforte.
The Berceuse! Of that wonder-child who came to us through the pink gates
of the dawn, and was rocked to rhythmic dreams in Chopin’s Cradle Song,
I may only say that in the hands of many pianists it has grown to be
a brat of banal visage and muscular proportions. An ululation of the
D flat tonality, it has now become a mere finger study. When Joseffy
played the composition a poem emerged from the ivories. What of the
Preludes? Alone the twenty-five Preludes would give their creator a claim
on immortality. There are technical range and poetic vision; above all,
there is humanity. Shades of feeling are explored, depths and altitudes
of passion explored. If all Chopin were to be annulled I should plead
for the salvation of the Preludes. The cameo-like stillness of some is
like softly spoken words overheard in a cloister. Truly religious. But
thunder-riven Preludes in D minor, in B flat minor, in F minor and E flat
minor stir our pulse to sharper vibration. Surpassingly sweet is the
elegiac Prelude in B flat. It recalls the nocturnes. The second Prelude
with its enigmatic questionings is for a rainy day; a day when the soul
is racked by doubt or defeat; about it, hovers a grisly something that we
dare not define. It may be Chopin’s Horla, this sinister music-making. A
ray of sunshine, but from a sun that slants in the west is the Prelude in
G. What marvels in miniature, what cunningly wrought jewels! Darker drama
may be found as the D minor Prelude with its elemental ground—bass—in
angry sea roars somewhere in the background; also in the glittering
scales of the B flat minor Prelude and the declamatory passages of the F
minor Prelude. In the C sharp minor Prelude, opus 45, there are marked
anticipations of the later manner of Brahms, not alone in spirit but in
figuration. This Prelude is a foretaste of Brahms, the familiar Chopin
note not missing.
The embroideries of the Barcarolle—a fully developed and dramatic
Nocturne—and of the Bolero are more Polish than Italian or Spanish. By
some critics the Fantaisie, opus 49, has been adjudged the most perfect
work of the composer. The grave, march-like introductions, the insistent,
climbing figures in triplets, the great song in F minor, followed by
the enchanting episodes in double-notes, and the powerful climax reveal
another Chopin from the sentimental dreamer, the conventional Thaddeus
of Warsaw. There is logical development. There are dramatic scope and
intensity. The lento is peaceful, the coda impressive. The entire
composition is massive, its phraseology long-breathed. It represents the
master at the peak of his powers.
THE TWILIGHT OF COSIMA I
When Cosima I, Queen of Baireuth, does enter the eternal shadowland,
her passing will not greatly intrigue the attention of a world whose
ears buzz with the rumors of mightier happenings. She has been a
dweller for years in the Twilights. (She was born December 25, 1837,
at Bellagio, Italy, and not in 1840, as the musical annals have it.)
She is the last of the famous dynasty founded by her husband, Richard
Wagner, greatest of modern composers. No one, not even his admirers,
dared pretend that Siegfried Wagner would ever succeed his father on
the musical throne. A brief span Cosima entertained high hopes for
her son’s future. He had been coached by Humperdinck and Richter. His
operas were produced in European capitals, but to no avail. He could not
fill the shadow of his sire, much less write a bar of music worth the
whistling. Wotan had fathered a Parsifal, Jr., and Baireuth sympathized
with Cosima’s disappointment. It was the second sorrow of a life crowded
with happiness. In 1883 the man she adored as a god died on her bosom
at Venice. That tragic event transformed her from a loving wife to the
sternly ambitious woman who ruled the destinies of Baireuth for thirty
years. In 1913 the third sorrow came to her in the unwelcome shape of
copyright expiration. The music of Wagner was free to every country.
Parsifal, the Rhinegold of Baireuth, already had been ravished by an
American Alberich; nevertheless, from the shock of the legal decision
which blotted Baireuth off the map of music Cosima never recovered. She
was become a shadow of her former grandeur. She had outlived her majesty.
I first saw her in 1894. It was the summer when Lillian Nordica made
her début in the historic opera-house on the hill. Zoltan Doeme, her
husband, also appeared. His Parsifal, too, is historic. Queen Cosima I
was a tall, gaunt woman with the familiar Liszt profile, her white hair
worn à la Liszt, her stride that of a grenadier. She ruled with an iron
hand, a hand not encased in a velvet glove like her father’s. A tyrant in
petticoats was the usual ascription. Not loved, indeed feared, she ran
the Baireuth machine with the shrewdness of a Tammany Hall politician.
Her contemporaries concur in that. A woman of brains, courage, audacity,
she recalled for me a second Margravine of Baireuth in her domineering
manner. She would tolerate no rivals. Conductor after conductor came and
went. When Lilli Lehmann toward the close of a glorious artistic career
sang, in 1896, then Gibraltar met Gibraltar. Lilli had been one of the
Rhine-Daughters in 1876. She knew her Wagner as well as Cosima. There was
warlike gossip then of which I got my fill. The ladies parted the best
of friends, of course. Olive Fremstad, a pupil of Lehmann, was one of
the Rhine-Daughters that year. Ellen Gulbranson was the Brünnhilde after
Lehmann. Alois Burgstaller made a clumsy début as Siegfried and Parsifal.
Mottl was the reigning favorite, Felix of Munich, the first man in whom
the inconsolable Cosima showed deep interest after the death of Richard.
Cosima, all said and done, was a daughter of Franz Liszt. The last time
I saw her was in 1901. With George Moore I stood on the esplanade facing
the Franconian valley, and during an entr’acte of the Ring we discussed
the mediocre conducting of Prince Siegfried Wagner and the fond, foolish
affection of his mother. She passed. This time she rode, but that rigid
spine, the proud pose of the head, the undimmed hawk-like eyes—I am the
widow of Wagner and the daughter of Liszt! they seemed thus to challenge
the gaze of the public—proved her still in possession of all her powers.
And she was then past sixty. Truly an extraordinary woman this, with
her name out of the Italian Renaissance, herself like some belated and
imperious apparition from the Renaissance.
Her forebears were just as remarkable. Liszt met her mother, the Countess
d’Agoult, in the brilliant whirl of his artistic successes at Paris.
Chopin had dedicated to her the first book of his Études. She was
beautiful, accomplished, though her intimates declare that hers was not
a truthful nature. She was born Marie Sophie de Flavigny, in 1805, at
Frankfort-on-Main, Germany. Her father was the Vicomte de Flavigny, a
French refugee, who had married the daughter of Simon Moritz Bethmann,
a rich banker, originally from Amsterdam and a Hebrew converted to
Lutheranism. Marie had literary ability, boasted of meeting Goethe once,
and in 1827 she married Count Charles d’Agoult of Paris. Social sedition
was in the air. The “Misunderstood Woman”—no new thing then, and still
with us—was the fashion. George Sand was changing her lovers with every
book she wrote, and the Countess d’Agoult began to yearn for fame and
adventures. Liszt appeared. He seems to have been the pursued one. They
eloped. In honor he could not desert the woman. They made Geneva their
home—temporarily, for both had the nomad heart and were doomed to pitch
their tents in many strange places. In her own right Marie had twenty
thousand francs yearly income. It cost Liszt exactly three hundred
thousand francs to keep up an establishment such as the lady had been
accustomed to; he earned this at the keyboard, a tidy amount for those
days. (There were pianistic money-kings before Paderewski.) And yet she
was not satisfied. Ever insatiable are artistic women.
Mme. d’Agoult bore him three children—Blandine, Cosima, and Daniel.
Blandine, the beauty of the family, married Emile Ollivier in 1857. She
died in 1862. Liszt greatly loved her. Ollivier was later Napoleon’s
war minister, and was fooled to the top of his bent by the Mephisto of
European politics, Count von Bismarck. He died a few years ago nearly a
centenarian, and busy to the last explaining that he was not to blame
for losing the tragic Franco-Prussian War. His hell was paved with good
intentions before he reached there. Cosima married Hans von Bülow, her
father’s “favorite pupil” (there were hundreds of them), in 1857. True
to family form, she ran off with Richard Wagner, and, to the despair of
her father, married that fickle gentleman. Her father’s discomfiture
was the result of Cosima’s defection from the Roman Catholic faith. She
renounced this faith and became of her husband’s religious persuasion,
_i. e._, nominally a Protestant, in reality a free-thinker. Daniel Liszt,
the hope of his father, died in December, 1859, at the age of twenty.
Liszt had legitimatized the birth of his children, had educated them, had
generously dowered his daughters, and all three were a source of sorrow
to him. The high light of comedy was not absent when the gallant Count
d’Agoult—we shan’t say “bereaved of his wife,” for who shall pretend to
analyze the mixed emotions of a man sorely wounded in his pride of race
and secretly overjoyed at being rid of a pernicious blue-stocking?—called
a family council, which, after due consideration, pronounced the verdict
that Monsieur François Liszt (they spelled it Litz in Paris) had behaved
like a “perfect gentleman” in a certain delicate indiscretion, thereby
absolving him from all blame in the matter. Recording angels on high must
have wept, and George Meredith lost a theme peculiarly fitted to his
ironic pen. But the injured husband calmly went to his club every day and
died in the odor of mundane sanctity.
As might have been foreseen, la d’Agoult quarrelled with her Liszt. They
parted bad friends. Under the pen-name of Daniel Stern she attacked
him in her souvenirs and novels. He forgave. A most irritating trait
in his character was his inability to hate his enemies. Of Heine alone
he spoke ill. When some one asked him if Heine’s name would be carved
on the portals of fame, Liszt replied: “Yes, in letters of mud”; which
is manifestly unjust. In 1860 Franz and Marie met for the last time,
and in Paris. He gently told her that the true title of her souvenirs
should have been Poses et Mensonges. She wept. He was quite right. She
was a detestable poseuse and a fibber. Tragic comedians, both. They
bored each other. Their union recalls Flaubert’s profound remark that
Emma Bovary found in adultery only the platitudes of marriage. Perhaps
other ladies had supervened in the cometary existence of Liszt. Like
Byron he was the sentimental hero of his day. A René of the pianoforte.
Read the recollections of Mme. Adam for a clue to the character of
Cosima’s mother. Liszt sensibly intrusted to the care of his own mother
the education of her three grandchildren. She was born at Krems, Lower
Austria, and a pious soul. Curious it is that the son of a Hungarian
magnate’s overseer should be by the force of circumstances and his own
genius allied with the aristocracy and high diplomacy in several lands
of his time, Liszt Ferencz, whose name translated into English would be
Frank Flour.
Unhappy with the intellectual but irascible von Bülow, Cosima was happy
with her Richard. If there were quarrels they were fought behind closed
doors. She was not beautiful like her sister Blandine, but she had more
brains. Anton Rubinstein loved her; Nietzsche’s last recorded writing
before his mental eclipse at Turin, 1889, was a passionate phrase meant
for her. He was closely allied with the Wagners at Triebschen, and had
corrected the proofs of Richard’s Autobiography, a garbled version of
which has been published with the blue pencil of Baireuth writ large
on every page. Some day all the secrets of that prison-house will be
divulged. Nietzsche surmised much, and many guesses have furnished
stuff for romantic commentators. Romance of the most lurid pattern has
enveloped the Liszt Wagner von Bülow d’Agoult group. And the greatest
influence in Wagner’s career was not Cosima but Mathilde Wesendonck, to
whom we owe the genesis of that lyric masterpiece among masterpieces,
Tristan and Isolde. For her spiritual collaboration with Wagner,
Mathilde was never forgiven by Cosima—after all, a real woman.
Liszt participated in the musical inauguration of Baireuth, in 1876;
the family dissension had been patched up in 1873; but he played second
fiddle to his son-in-law. His affectionate daughter saw to that; also
saw, in 1886, when her father had the bad taste to die during the
festival at Baireuth, that he was buried as quietly as possible, for an
imposing funeral might have disturbed the gate-money at the big barn on
the hill. Thrift, Cosima, thrift! At her husband’s death she declared
that her father no longer existed for her. Mention of his music was
snubbed at Wahnfried—in the back yard of which Wagner was buried like a
cat, as Philip Hale so blandly puts it. The awful part was to follow.
Liszt, instead of being interred at Weimar, or Budapest, lies under
the shelter of a hideous tomb in Baireuth, devised by his grandson,
Siegfried Wagner—who is also an architect. This, another of Cosima’s
tactless doings. She estranged the old friends of her husband, with the
exception of the faithful Hans Richter, who told me at London—in 1901,
where he conducted the Ring in Covent Garden—that Cosima was as great as
a woman as Wagner a composer; which was no doubt true; and she was also a
meddlesome blunderer. She put Baireuth on the map of Cook’s Trippers. She
botched artistically every performance she handled, but she made money;
her banker-grandfather’s business ability she must have inherited. There
is no doubt the tragedy of Germany added to her sorrows. With her will
pass forever the once powerful Wagnerian dynasty.
IDLE SPECULATIONS
If it had been hinted a half century ago that in the veins of Richard
Wagner there flowed Semitic blood, laughter would have ensued. The race
that Wagner reviled in speech and pamphlet—though he never disdained
its generosity—the hated Jew, daring to claim kinship with him might
have set in motion the spleen of the German master. Wagner’s hatred of
the chosen race is historical. “Das Judenthum in der Musik,” is not the
only expression of this contempt and dislike on the part of the man who
was born in a Ghetto at Leipzig. Benefits forgotten, he seldom missed a
chance to gibe at Meyerbeer or Mendelssohn or to flout some Hebrew banker
who was imprudent enough to advance him funds. The Wagnerian pedigree has
been subjected to critical microscopes. Bournot, who was patronized by
Baireuth, wrote concerning Ludwig Geyer, the true father of the composer,
that his family had been Lutheran since 1700. Which proves nothing; race,
not nationality, nor yet religion, counts. Geyer, from whom Richard
inherited his versatile aptitudes, was markedly Jewish in features and
temperament. So was Wagner. Of the putative father, a Police Magistrate,
we know little. In his autobiography Wagner avoids the subject.
But Wagner’s mother, born Johanna Bertz, reveals in her portraits marked
characteristics of the Jewish race. There is mystery concerning her
origin; even the name of Bertz was only discovered a few years ago.
Bertz, too, like Geyer, is a Jewish name. There is in the polemical
writings of Richard an almost insane hatred of the Jew; and, ironic
circumstance, in his music there are the sensuous glow and glitter of
the Oriental. It is certainly unlike any music made by a German, with
its vibratile rhythms, its dramatic characterization and magnificent
decorative frame. “Was Wagner German at all?” demands Nietzsche. “We
have some reasons for asking this. It is difficult to discern in him any
German trait whatsoever. Being a great learner, he has learned to imitate
much that is German. His character itself is in opposition to what has
hitherto been regarded as German—not to speak of the German musician. His
father was a stage player named Geyer. A Geyer is almost an Adler—Geyer
and Adler are both names of Jewish families [Vulture and Eagle, in
English]. What has hitherto been put into circulation as the ‘Life’ of
Wagner is a fable. I confess my distrust of every point which solely
rests on the testimony of Wagner himself. He had not pride for any truth
about himself; nobody was less proud. He remained, like Victor Hugo, true
to himself in biographical matters—he remained a stage player.”
Thus Nietzsche, who knew whereof he spoke, as he was the secretary of
the composer at Triebschen when Richard dictated his autobiography; not
an official secretary, but a dear friend and confidant. But Nietzsche
must be taken with reservations in the Wagner case. He alternately
adored and abused his idol. Another of his favorite contentions was
that Schopenhauer ruined Wagner’s art. The truth is that in Wagner the
artist was stronger than Wagner the philosopher. The reflective man
was usually overcome by the man poetic. Witness Tristan and Isolde,
composed, as Richard confessed, in direct opposition, nay, defiance, of
his life’s theories. Wagner began with Feuerbach and ended a victim to
the fascinating black magic of Schopenhauer. But now we know, thanks to
James Sully’s magisterial work Pessimism, that pessimism and optimism are
a question of personal temperament. Wagner succumbed at the last to the
Buddhistic quietism of the Schopenhauerian theories, though his elastic,
optimistic nature rebelled at the yoke. In the Ring the pessimism
never crowds out the vital dramatic power. In Parsifal the vigorous
affirmations of the earlier Wagner are absent. He said Nay to the life
that had exhausted him, and, bathed in a mystic atmosphere, his soul
found consolation in the mere contemplation of Roman Catholic symbolism.
Nevertheless, hold firmly in your mind that Richard Wagner the artist was
greater than Wagner the vegetarian, the anti-vivisectionist, Socialist,
revolutionist, Jew-hater, and foe of Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn, also
greater than Wagner the philosopher and poet-dramatist. He was first
and last the musician. For that reason he did not say the last word in
the music-drama. It is a mistaken partisanship that attaches to his
every utterance profound significance. We should gladly exchange his
collected prose writings for another Tristan. He dearly loved a paradox.
A versatile man, he wore many masks. Not that we doubt his sincerity,
but that his emotional nature, his craving for excitement, his agitated
life often led him to speak and write in misleading terms. He seldom put
his best foot foremost when he took up the pen. And the Jews he reviled
always proved his best friends.
We have often wondered where Wagner’s religion, metaphysics, his working
theory of life, would have led him had he lasted a few years longer. That
in his extraordinary brain there had been dimly floating the outlines of
a greater work than Parsifal we learn from his correspondence with Franz
Liszt. He died with the projected Trilogy incomplete. Tristan and Isolde,
Parsifal and the Penitent (Die Büsser) were to have composed this Trilogy
of the Will-to-Live, Compassion and Renunciation. That negation of the
Will-to-Live, so despised by Nietzsche, had gripped him after he became
acquainted with Schopenhauer’s theories in 1854. He eagerly absorbed
this Neo-Buddhism and at the time of his death he was fully prepared
to accept its final word, its bonze-like impassivity of the will. In
Parsifal he sought to transpose to tone its hopelessly fatalistic spirit,
its implacable hatred of life in the flesh. That the world has lost a
gigantic experiment may be true, but that it has lost the best of Wagner
we doubt. In Parsifal his thematic invention is seldom at high-water
mark, notwithstanding his mastery of technical material, his marvellous
moulding of spiritual stuff. Parsifal is an abstraction, while Kundry is
a “howling hermaphrodite,” as Hanslick tastefully called the poor hunted
hind and harlot. It is with Wagner’s power of characterization that we
might concern ourselves, as the composer had drifted into a philosophical
nihilism—that intellectual quietism which is a treacherous pitfall for
the thinker who strays across the borderline of Asiatic religions. The
Christianity in Parsifal seems like the last expiring glimmer of its
values. He deftly drew upon the ritual of the Roman Catholic Church, yet
in the essential Christianity of the result we place no faith.
He went to the Buddhistic roots of Christianity, perhaps for
philosophical reasons. However, Nietzsche’s attack on Wagner’s supposed
religious predilections is wide of the mark; no one was less likely to
indulge in sacerdotal sentimentalism than the musician. The fact is that
all was grist that came to his theatrical mill. Despite his mysticism
he never lost view of the box-office. After the rude knocks of his early
career he, like Balzac, realized that money is the Archimedes-lever that
lifts the modern world. Money is the leading motive of the Human Comedy,
and money it is that is the ruling idea of the Ring. The speculation is
attractive. He changed the title of his Trilogy from The Victors (Die
Sieger) to The Penitents. First considered in 1856, the name was altered
a quarter of a century later. In the interval Oriental philosophy had
supervened with its accustomed effect.
It was a critic of acuity who said of Tristan and Isolde that “the
thrills relieve each other in squads.” Wagner touched the top-notch of
his torrid imaginings in this apotheosis of lyric ecstasy. Nothing has
been written comparable with its intensity; its double, it is safe to
predict, will never be composed. He declared that when he wrote the
music he could not have made it otherwise. It is full-blown in its
imperfections, glaring excellences, noble turgidity, lack of frugality,
economy of thematic resources, dazzling prodigality, soggy prolixity,
riotous tonal debaucheries and almost superhuman enchantments. What
boots it to gird against a demoniacal art that thrills and makes mock
of theories concerning the divine in music? We are no longer on the
windblown heights with Beethoven, nor do we worship as in the vast
Cathedral of Bach. The Schopenhauerian philosophy hurled at us in the
pessimistic dualism of the low episode avails not to stem the turbulent
current of fashion. Tristan and Isolde is the very deification of
carnalism. Call it what pretty titles you may, wreathe the theme with
poetic garlands, yet the stark fact stares at you: The man’s desire for
the woman and the woman’s desire for the desire of the man, to put the
case in Biblical phraseology. The love potion does but unloosen their
tongues; both were mute lovers before Brangaene juggled with the fatal
brew. Wagner was the greatest poet of passion—odious, misused term—in
the history of the Seven Arts. And he had a more potent instrument than
words at his command, an orchestra that wooes and thunders, that achieves
in the surging undertow the very soul of love. A mighty master, but a
dangerous guide is this same Richard Wagner.
THE MASTER BUILDER
Thus far this season we have heard the Third Symphony of Brahms three
times, and once the Symphony in D, the second. These various performances
were respectively given at concerts by the Symphony Society, the
Philharmonic Society, and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Nor were they
unusual happenings. The symphonic works of Brahms are perennial favorites
in New York. There is a sufficing reason. Brahms is a transitional bridge
between the mighty Beethoven and the modern men. He is the last of the
classicists, though not precisely the first of the romantics. Schumann
was that, not Berlioz. But Brahms is more romantic than is commonly
realized. It always will be a mystery to the present generation why he
was called a pedant, a dry-as-dust composer. He has his dull moments,
when philosopher-like he contemplates the umbilicus of the universe.
He is not dramatic when drama is not demanded by his theme, and he is
occasionally drab in orchestral color, though never brilliant in the
meretricious sense. He is on the side of the angels. He stands for what
is sound, lofty, beautiful as opposed to shallow operatic trivialities
and melodramatic effects.
It was unfortunate that almost at the outset of his career Edouard
Hanslick, erudite, witty, malignant, should have posed Brahms as an
antithetical man of straw to Richard Wagner. Doubtless it was a tempting
contrast to make: Brahms, the serious symphonist, a reverent follower
in the broad pathway of Bach and Beethoven; and Wagner, creator of the
music-drama, of marvellous stage pictures—romantic, erotic Wagner. Yet
what a fallacy is there. Brahms, as his songs, symphonies, piano, and
violin music prove, was a poetic, a romantic, musician. He could not
paint as boldly as Berlioz, but he always had something vital to say,
while Berlioz, despite his grandiloquent rhetoric, like Victor Hugo,
displayed more manner than matter. As for Wagner—well, he, too, absorbed
as much of Bach and Beethoven as he could assimilate for his particular
usage, and was quite as learned as Brahms. Von Bülow had set the pace for
Dr. Hanslick and that detractor of Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner, indeed of
all the New Music—whenever he saw a head pop up on the horizon he hit
it, like the game of Aunt Sally—recognized his opportunity and promptly
pitted Brahms against Wagner, with the result that for a long period the
musical world labored under the mistaken notion that Brahms was a rusty,
musty old pedagogue, with bewhiskered counterpoint and a plentiful lack
of melodic invention. And he was just the reverse.
He died over two decades ago and his vogue has waxed with the years.
When we consider the list of his achievements we are amazed at the
slow, patient, yet fertile and versatile qualities of the man. “Their
impatience,” wrote John Henry, Cardinal Newman, in condemning the major
defect of heresiarchs. Brahms was ever patient. Patience might serve
as his epitaph. His was a genius that grew from accretions. His first
opus was far from the later Brahms, notwithstanding its potential
powers. It was but the acorn which became the great oak of the four
symphonies, the piano and the violin concertos, the songs, chamber
music, choral compositions, the Songs of Destiny and the Requiem. This
massed work is the sum total of a high ideal; stern, unyielding, betimes
frostily inhuman, yet logical and consistent. The philosophic bent of
his intellect extorts our admiration. For a half century he pursued
the beautiful in its most difficult and elusive form, followed it when
the fashions of the season mocked at such undeviating devotion, when
musical structure was called old-fashioned, sober thought voted down
as dull, when the theatre had invaded the tonal realm and menaced it
in its very stronghold, the symphony. After all, there is something to
be said in favor of the skeleton, whether concealed by human flesh or
embodied in religious dogma or encased within the formal walls of musical
compositions. Things must have structure to interest mankind; even
the prudish oyster has a shell. Otherwise the amorphous shreds of the
floating jellyfish or the primeval amœbæ would become our ideal. Brahms
was homo sapiens. He stood on his hind legs, as did our common forebears,
with “probably arboreal habits.” And he wrought the noblest music since
Beethoven.
He is the first composer since Beethoven to sound the note of the
sublime. Naturally, Wagner is excepted because he did not write absolute
music, and we are now dealing only with that form. Because of this trait
of sublimity Brahms has been called austere. His austerity and lack of
personal profile—sometimes—have made his loftiest music difficult of
comprehension. He never splits the ears of the groundlings. He never
makes any concessions to popularity. Like Ibsen and Manet, he goes
out of his way to displease. The facile triumph he despises. He saw
musical Europe filled with second and third rate men, and he noted that
their sole excuse was to give cheap pleasure to the tasteless. This
professional parasitism he abhorred; with him the reaction became a
species of puritanism. It is a gratifying proof of his flexible mental
operations that he understood and admired Wagner, whose ideals and
practice were the antipodes of his own. His workmanship is well-nigh
impeccable; formal and contrapuntal mastery marks it. His contribution to
the techniques of rhythm is considerable. He literally popularized the
cross-relation, rediscovered the arpeggio and elevated it to an integer
of the melodic phrase. Wagner did the same for the essential turn.
His trait of fidelity, his spiritual obstinacy, are characteristic.
There seems to be a notion because Brahms refused to swim the current
tendencies that he held himself aloof from humanity, a bonze, a Brahmin,
and not, as he really was, a bard chanting its woes and full-blooded
aspirations. It is platitudinous nowadays to say that his music throbs
with the rich, red blood of humanity. He is the greatest contrapuntalist
since Bach (pace Richard Strauss and Max Reger), and the supreme
architectonist since Beethoven. Nevertheless, in his songs he is as
simple and virile as Robert Burns. His topmost peaks are remote and
gleam in an atmosphere too rarefied for dwellers on the plains, but
how intimate, how gracious are the happy moments in his chamber-music.
Following the romantic side of Schumann, untouched by the fever of
the footlights, a realist with imagination, both a classicist and a
romanticist, he conducted music to its normal channel by showing that a
formal service and a mastery of polyphony are not incompatible with the
utterance of new ideas in a new way. Brahms is not reactionary any more
than is Wagner. Neither found what he needed in contemporary life and
art, so one harked back to the Greeks and Gluck, the other to Beethoven.
All progress is crabwise. In the past of the arts may be found the germs
of their future.
Study the massiveness of the Brahmsian tonal architecture; study those
tonal edifices erected after years of toil, consider his fertility in
invention, his patience in developing his ideas; consider the ease
with which he moves, though seemingly shackled by the most exacting
of forms, a form not assumed for the sake of overcoming difficulties,
but because it was the only form in which he could fully express
himself. The narrative-tone of the symphonic form—and this includes all
its practitioners from Haydn to Tschaikovsky—is like blank verse, it
has been the chosen field of the greatest masters; and who shall say
that either Shakespeare or Beethoven has suffered from its adoption?
Even such a Romantic, mad and morbid, as Charles Baudelaire employed
as his vehicles of expression forms as restricted and rigid as the
sonnet and the alexandrine. Note the leaven of genius which militates
against pedantry, scholastic aridity, academic music-making, and music
arithmetical. Consider the intellectual and emotional brain—for the seat
of the emotions is in the head, not the heart—of this composer, and then
realize that all art is the arduous victory of great minds over great
imaginations. Recall the introductions to the first and last movements
of the Symphony in C minor by Brahms. That magnificent work makes by
comparison other men’s efforts like facile improvising. Its bases are
laid for the brief “eternity” accorded to all things fashioned by mortal
hands.
Brahms ever consciously schooled his imagination. He was his own
severest critic. He worked slowly, produced as slowly, and, being of
the contemplative rather than of the dramatic, dynamic temperamental
type, he incurred the reproach of heaviness. There is enough sediment
in his collected work to lend truth to this accusation, but from the
very cloudiness of the ferment has come the richest of wines. And how
refreshing is a draft of this wine after the thin, frothing stuff
concocted at the vintage of every season! He has his metaphysical mood
when he wrestles with abstract speculations, as did Pascal or Spinoza. It
cannot be said that Brahms, the cryptic philosopher, is as interesting as
Brahms of the symphonies, the F minor piano sonata, the quintet for piano
and strings with the same key signature, or the fragrant lyrics. He has
the glorious simplicity of Beethoven, and, like that Master of masters,
he does not fear to employ such an elementary modulation-bridge as the
chord of the dominant seventh.
A full chord for his orchestra has not the rainbow tints of the first
or major chord in the Prelude to The Mastersingers, yet it can sink a
shaft into our consciousness quite as profound. He is a thinker, his
chilliness is rather in his manner than in his discourse, which often
is thrice eloquent. This plodder, at times without Promethean fire,
possesses shoulders wide enough upon which to drape the symphonic
mantle of Beethoven. He reminds us of a mediæval architect whose life
was a prayer, in marble; who patiently built Gothic cathedrals which
majestically flanked upon mother earth, whose thin pinnacles pierced the
vasty blue, and in whose marmoreal naves an army terrible with banners
could worship; while through the stony forest of arches music flowed as
the voices of many waters. Brahms is the master-builder of modern music.
VERDI’S OTELLO
The announcement that Otello is to be presented by the Chicago Opera
Association next Tuesday evening at the Manhattan Opera House is
interesting to lovers of Verdi’s hot-blooded music drama. That it is not
often heard is because of the difficulty in finding singing actors to
interpret the work. Since Tamagno and Victor Maurel, the ideal Otello
and the ideal Iago, we have had no two such interpreters. Antonio Scotti
was a remarkable Iago, and from time to time some unhappy tenor attempts
to bend the bow of Ulysses, but the two artists who set the town on fire
twenty-five years ago have not been rivalled. Tamagno with his barbaric
cry, “Sangue, sangue”—“Blood, blood!”—is unforgettable. In the killing of
Desdemona he fell short of his great dramatic model, the elder Salvini,
because, as we have elsewhere related, he left his spectators in doubt as
to the disposition of the pillow. But then his Desdemona was the lovely
Emma Eames, and that, no doubt, accounted for the indecision of the
murderous and amorous Moor at the fatal moment.
Otello in 1887 set the musical world agog with surprise, curiosity, and
delight. It reveals little of the narrow, noisy, violent, and vulgar
Verdi of 1850. The character drawing is by a man who is master of
his material. The plot moves in majestical splendor and the musical
psychology, especially in the case of Iago, is often subtle. Verdi has at
last flowered. Much of his earlier music, despite the admirable melodic
flow in Traviata, Rigoletto, Trovatore, smelling ranker of the soil,
showing abundant thematic invention, was but the effort of a hot-headed
man of the footlights, a seeker after applause and money. In Otello his
musical provincialisms have well-nigh vanished. The writing is clear, the
passion controlled, the effects aimed at easily compassed. The masterly
craft of Iago is cleverly contrasted with the fiery passion of Otello,
and Shakespeare is suggested; although an Italian Shakespeare. However,
the English poet is more Italian than the Italian in this moving drama.
Otello is veritable music drama; its composer seldom halts to symphonize
his events as does Wagner. Arrigo Boito, most intellectual of
librettists, has skeletonized the story; Verdi’s music endows it with
vitality, grace, fleshly contours, brilliancy. The Italian poet has
not gravely disturbed the original text. It is but a compliment to his
assimilation of the Shakespearian spirit to state that Iago’s credo, an
explosion of nihilism and hatred, does not seem out of perspective in the
picture. It is an intercalation of Boito’s, as were the Cypriote choruses
in Act II. The rest is Shakespeare undefiled, barring a few happy
transpositions from the Senate speech to the duo at the close of Act I.
As we have said, the characterization is masterly throughout. Do not
let us balk at comparisons, nor, for that matter, at superlatives. With
the exceptions of Mozart and Wagner, no composer has thus far lived who
could have painted the hot-blooded Moor and the cynical cannikin-clinker,
set them facing each other, allowing them to work out their fates,
musically speaking, as has Giuseppe Verdi. The key to Otello is its
characterization. The medium in which Verdi bids his puppets of destiny
to move, their fluidity, their humanity, with the complete dissection of
their secret springs of action—these elements are almost incalculable.
Criticism can only endeavor to disentangle them. Whether he is listening
to his cunning Ancient, or caressing Desdemona, or raging like the
hardy Numæan lion, it is always Otello, the Moor of Venice, a loving,
suffering, living man—Shakespeare’s Othello transposed to a fresco of
magnificent tones.
The character does not evoke a flashy, operatic ranter. Nor does Iago,
either as the bluff soldier or the loathsome serpent stinging his
chieftain’s soul, ever lag dramatically, ever mimic the conventional
attitudes of transpontine melodrama. It is always Iago, “the spirit that
denies,” perhaps underlined, for music must emphasize the emotions.
Desdemona is drawn in relief to her furious lover and warrior, and as a
white cloud of purity in contrast with her cold-blooded maligner. Verdi
has assigned her gentle music, the Ave Maria, the Willow Song. She is a
sweet background upon which was etched the darker, sinister motives of
the play. No masculine shadow but her lord’s has been projected across
her snowy, virginal soul. Delicacy and vivacity reveal, little by little,
the inner workings of her girlish nature. The other figures, Cassio,
Emilia, are sketches on the second plan, but figures that contribute to
the density of the dramatic scheme without detracting from our interest
in the protagonists.
From the opening storm to the strangling scene the music flows as swiftly
as does the action of the spoken drama. Rich, varied, eloquent, the
orchestra seldom tarries in its acute and vivid commentary. There is
scant employment of typical motives; the kiss theme in Act I is sounded
with psychologic fidelity when Otello dies. Only in the handkerchief
trio is there pause for instrumental elaboration; but in the main old,
set forms are avoided, and while there are melodic currents they seldom
crystallize. The duo at the end of Act I, the Credo of unfaith and
Otello’s frenzied exhortation in Act II; the tremendous outburst in the
following act, with Iago’s sardonically triumphant exclamation, “Behold
the lion!” as he plants his scornful heel on the recumbent Otello—then
the final catastrophe—these about summarize the high lights. Throughout
there are picturesque and poignant strokes, effects of massed splendor,
and hovering about the tempest-stirred souls is an atmosphere of gloom,
doom, guilt, and melancholy foreboding.
Verdi felt the moods of the poet and made them live again in his score.
Otello and Iago grow before our eyes and ears from act to act. The
simple-hearted, trusting general with his agonized cry, “Miseria mia,”
develops into a ferocious savage thirsting for blood. He is the jealous
male, who sees red. The multitudinous music is incarnadine with blood.
And it is all vocal. It is written for the voice, which is the centre
of gravity in this astounding drama of souls bedevilled, and not the
orchestra. The pedestal is not bigger than the statue, as is the case
with Salammbô. Another such Iago, subtle, sinister, evil incarnate,
withal a dangerously attractive fellow, such an impersonation as Victor
Maurel’s, may never be duplicated. And this remarkable singing actor
had the advantage of Verdi and Boito’s advice when the music drama was
produced at Milan, in 1887. Verdi’s first idea of a title was Iago. This
idea does not seem strange after a performance of Maurel.
The two most satisfying Iagos I remember were Henry Irving and Edwin
Booth. Maurel’s interpretation paralleled them at every point. Admitted
that the singing heightened the impression, though it weakens the
characterization, Maurel’s Iago never betrayed a tendency toward the
melodramatic; as difficult as treading on eggs without crushing them, he
held a middle course, and he was both a picture and a dramatic happening.
Malignant he was, but that is the “fat” of the part, but he underlined
the reasons for his wicked actions. Iago is also a human being with
a sound motive for revenge. I know you will remind me that critical
“whitewashing” is become the fashion, that Nero, Simon Magus, Judas
Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, Casanova—nay, even Lucifer, Prince of Morning,
has Anatole France for a defender (in The Revolt of the Angels)—are
only getting their just dues at the hands of various apologists. De
Quincey, a master casuist, has said that without Judas the drama of Jesus
crucified would not have occurred. Everything is necessary. Nero was a
much-abused monster, though Renan believes him to be the Beast mentioned
in the Apocalypse—it seems now that there were no “atrocities” during
the fabulous persecutions of the Christians, that Rome was not burned
by Nero, who had no fiddle technique; but in the case of Iago there is
something to be said in his favor. A pure devil, as we conceive devils to
be, he was not.
A rough, hard-drinking soldier of fortune, he admits himself to be, and
to call his advice, “Put money in thy purse,” cynical is to contravene
worldly wisdom. Otello had wronged him, Iago hated him for it, hated his
wife for her alleged infidelity—Emilia denies her treachery—therefore,
his revenge is credible. It is his method in achieving this revenge that
revolts our sensibilities. The innocent Desdemona is crushed between the
upper and lower millstones of inexorable destiny. Maurel did not paint
his conception all black, but with many gradations and nuances. Not a
movement but meant something; even that famous “psychological crook of
Iago’s left knee.” Maurel was economical in gesture. His was an objective
characterization. The drinking song was memorably, totally unlike
his drinking lyrics in Don Giovanni and Hamlet. Suffice to say that
Verdi intrusted him with the difficult task of “originating” two such
widely-sundered rôles as Falstaff and Iago. With them Victor Maurel made
operatic history.
And now what is the most surprising thing about Otello? I think that
it is the fact that it was composed when Verdi was past three score
and ten. This seems incredible. It seethes with the passion of middle
manhood, with the fervors of a flowering maturity. No one before him had
dreamed of setting Shakespeare in this royally tragic fashion. Rossini
but fluted with the theme. In Verdi, jealousy, love, envy, hatred, are
handled by a master music dramatist. It is a wonderful thing that Verdi
began it at a time when most men are preparing for the Great Adventure.
Reversing the usual processes, this extraordinary Italian wrote younger
music the older he grew. After Aïda, Otello. After grim tragedy, joyous
comedy—Falstaffio. If he had survived until ninety years, Verdi might
have bequeathed us an operetta that would have outpointed in wit and
sparkling humor the mercurial Johann Strauss. And when we think of the
later Verdi we should not forget his faithful friend and famulus, who
played Wagner to his Faust—Arriga Boito.
FAUST AND MEPHISTO
How does Faust wear in the flicker of the footlights? Do the monologues
sound with glorious resonance or are they only philosophical fustian?
The question is not difficult to answer. The thunder-words of the
poet-dramatist still thrill us with their meaning and with their music,
the clash of souls still makes thrall of our imagination. To read Faust
is to attain the summit of an intellectual peak of Darien. To witness
an adequate performance of Faust is to win fresh pleasure for eye and
ear. If Hamlet inspired Goethe and Marlowe before Shakespeare, his
Faust in turn created a memorable literature. The very title crowds
pages in encyclopædias. Sculptors chisel masterpieces after reading the
poem-play; the Mephisto of the Russian Antokolsky is not easily forgotten
and George Grey Barnard was inspired by the famous line, “Two spirits,
alas, reside within my breast” (the group is now at the Metropolitan
Museum). Painters, almost innumerable, from Ary Scheffer to the rawest
art student of yesteryear have traced on the canvas the loves of Gretchen
and Faust. Barbier and Carré mutilated the poem in search of effective
theatrical material, and Gounod melted with sensuous ecstasy when he
made the musical setting. Lenau presented a sinister, half-mad Faust,
a self-portrait; the conservative Spohr surrounded the story with
antiquated music. Wagner, perhaps more than other composers, realized the
travailing Faust spirit in his overture, which is a masterpiece. Franz
Liszt has of all men evoked within the walls of his symphonic palace both
the static and dynamic Faust and the Gretchen of our dreams. His Mephisto
is the cynical spirit of denial. Berlioz, as in a tremendous fresco, has
painted with torrential energy the infernal glories of the theme. He
even dragged his hero to Hungary so that he might give him the pleasure
of hearing the Rakoczy March as orchestrated by the audacious Frenchman.
Arrigo Boito, only half Latin, with Polish blood in his veins, has given
us the ideal Mephisto and dared the impossible by composing the second
part of Goethe’s master work.
In song Gretchen has been celebrated from Schubert to the troubadour of
yesterday. In romance, Turgénieff, that gentle giant, has depicted the
soul of Faust transposed to Russian soil. What the Faust spirit worked
in an unbalanced temperament may be noted in Nietzsche, whose later
rhapsodies stemmed from Euphorion’s song in the Second Part: “Let me be
skipping. Let me be leaping. To soar and circle through ether sweeping is
now the passion that me hath won.” Therein is the kernel of the dancing
philosopher, Zarathustra, who called man “a bridge connecting animal
and superman.” And recall the line in Faust: “Die ird’sche Brust im
Morgenrot,” which served as a title for one of the unhappy philosopher’s
sanest books. Goethe is the matrix of modern thought; he contained Wagner
as he contained Nietzsche. Wagner, of course, went to Schopenhauer for
his peculiar brand of pessimism. You can’t miss the Faustlike touches
in Tannhäuser; the thirst for illimitable pleasure, the redemption of
the eternal-womanly—all this is Faust redivivus. John Addington Symonds
laments that Marlowe did not follow his Doctor Faustus with a Tannhäuser.
“He assuredly would have not suffered this high mystic theme to
degenerate into any mere vulgarities of a sensual Venusberg,” wrote the
Englishman, with one eye fastened on Wagner’s version of the wonderful
legend. No trivial thirst for carnal pleasures but the desire for beauty
beyond human reach would have been Marlowe’s conception of the brave old
tale. Lohengrin is a Faust, so is Siegfried. Parsifal is Faust in the
vapors of mysticism, enveloped by a Buddhistic pity; surely the “Good
Friday spell” was born of that exquisite episode near the close of Act I
in Faust, where the poet-philosopher gives over his contemplated suicide,
ravished by sweet memories of his youth, his Sabbath wandering in spring
woods and meadows.
At one time Goethe thought of translating Marlowe. His music is magical.
It colored Shakespeare; it created a new dramatic school. Marlowe is
the father of English tragedy. What if Shakespeare had died at the
same age as Marlowe? “We may admit that in rhyme he never did anything
worth Marlowe’s Hero and Leander,” says Swinburne. Charles Lamb adored
Marlowe, though he mocked the “pampered jades of Asia.” Yet the hand
that fashioned the turgid and bombastic Tamburlane also penned that
lovely lyric “Come lie [‘live,’ in revised editions] with me and be my
love” (The Passionate Shepherd). It is as sparklingly pure as a bar of
Mozart. But Marlowe is more dramatic poet than dramatist. His characters
are set forth with a mass of psychologic details that recall some modern
masters. He is an early Browning with a mouth of gold. His words sing.
Yet he would never have written the last speech of Paracelsus: “I press
God’s lamp close to my breast; its splendor soon or late will pierce the
gloom.” Marlowe was not a believer. The desperate damnation of his Faust
chills the blood. “Where gods are not, ghosts abound.” Marlowe could
surround his unhappy hero with all the machinery of diabolism; Beelzebub,
Prince of Flies, the Seven Deadly Sins, imps and goblins. He could utter
that thrilling line, “See where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament,”
but he had not the talent of belief—for it is both a gift and talent,
belief in the unseen. If he had with Browning’s Childe Roland to the Dark
Tower come, he would have died hopeless, impenitent, as in reality he
did die. His Faust is the archetype of the explorer in the “unplumbed,
salt, estranging sea” of knowledge. He cries:
“Had I as many souls as there be stars I’d give them all for
Mephistopheles.” He craves eternal wisdom, “infinite richness in a
little room.” Mephistopheles has built for him the walls of Thebes with
ravishing music. He would fain have this devil “wall all Germany with
brass.” He sees Lucifer, “chief lord and regent of the night,” and still
are his longings unassuaged. This feverish simulacrum of a man who
aspired to know things terrestrial and celestial Marlowe incarnated in
his tragedy.
And what horrors he conjures up in Mephistopheles’s description of
Hades—a description less material, nevertheless revealing a grandeur of
conception second only to Dante’s. This damned creature of the English
poet stands for men who achieve victories or defeats by the force of
their intellect. Faust summons spirits from the vasty deep, converses
with them when they come, argues, even wrangles, and would circumvent
them in discussion. Spiritual explorers from Giordano Bruno to Spinoza
and Nietzsche are Fausts. And on the plane scientific so are Galileo
and Darwin and Einstein. All who slough off decaying half-truths are
Fausts who must suffer for their frankness the plagues of the world,
the flesh, and the devil. Sordello’s “Dante, pacer of the shore,” was a
mediæval Faust whose richly veined ore is half hidden in the clay of
scholasticism. And so the mountains converse with mountains, Dante with
Goethe, Bach with Beethoven, Marlowe with Browning.
Human insects, slowly toiling to the summits, from time to time catch
glimpses of trailing cloud-glories and overhear the far-off rumblings
of divine events. Then the mists part and another Faust comes to earth,
telling us of the strange secrets he has surprised. “A sound magician is
a mighty god,” sings Marlowe. Goethe said: “Gray are all theories and
green alone life’s golden tree.” To read Marlowe is to feel the itch of
quotation. Has there ever been anything more vivid or pitiable since
Dante than the English poet’s Edward II, in his “cave of care,” standing
in mire and puddle, “and lest I should sleep, one plays continually upon
a drum”? It is Chinese in its hideous suggestion of torture; we must
go to Octave Mirbeau’s Le Jardin des Supplices, or the newly published
fiction of Charles Petit, Le Fils du Grand Eunuque, for its match. Faust
is a fatalist; “his atheism has a background of terror thinly veiled
by the mind’s inquisitiveness.” Che sarà, sarà! he declares, and then
berates his satanic famulus for showing him so little. He knows that the
jealous gods have somewhere buried proofs of the origin of all things,
and, like Maurice de Guerin, he would have demanded: “But upon the shores
of what ocean have they rolled the stone that hides them?”
BOHEMIAN MUSIC
In New Cosmopolis I called Prague the most original city in Europe,
not perhaps so melodramatic as Toledo in Spain, yet quite as original,
when you consider that pretty, placid Dresden is only four hours away
and that further down the map lies Vienna. As the traveller approaches
the Bohemian city—as Praha it is known to the natives—the cathedral and
castles grouped on the hill form a fascinating silhouette against the
sky-line. At once the alluring prospects of wood and architecture are
evoked, and to the memory comes the sanguinary pages of its history.
Arthur Symons once wrote that to a Bohemian “Prague is still the epitome
of his country; he sees it as a man sees the woman he loves, with her
first beauty, and he loves it as a man loves a woman, more for what she
has suffered.” Needless to add, for me it was love at first sight, this
Prague, with its imperial palace and the Hradschin fortress so proudly
perched on the Hradcany; the pinnacle of the St. Vitus Cathedral, the
four Ottakan towers and the two towers of St. George, which swim so
gloriously in the air, a miracle of tender rose and marble white, with
golden spots of sunshine, form an ensemble that would intrigue the brush
of Claude Monet.
The city proper enchants with its bewildering jumbles of architecture,
its historical evocations. The Bridge of Prague, the Town Hall, the
Powder Tower, the historic Tyn church, the old Jewish cemetery, the
Belvedere, the Chapel of St. Wenceslas, the shrine of St. Nepomuc, the
Star Hunting Lodge, where in 1620 was fought the Battle of the White
Mountain, the Rudolphinium—to go on like this would send you to the
guide-books. There is the modern Representatives House, where you may
enjoy a symphony concert up-stairs, while in the restaurant on the first
floor you can eat an omleba royal, a Fogos fish, a Telec filet specanky
and Ledovy crème, ending with an Americky compôte, and—tell it not in
Gath—good light wine is to be had, or the incomparable product of Pilsen,
there pronounced Pizn. I stopped at the “Blauer Stern,” on the Hybernska
Ulice, which old-fashioned, comfortable hotel has probably changed its
name since the war. Even in 1913 anything German was anathema to the
Bohemians. There is the Bohemian National Theatre. Both Josef Stransky
of the Philharmonic Society and Artur Bodanzky of the Metropolitan Opera
House and the New Symphony Orchestra were some years ago conductors
at Prague. One afternoon in the Representatives House I listened to a
programme composed of national music—the Scherzo à Capriccioso of Dvorak,
a symphony by Smetana, a symphonic poem by Josef Suk and a work by
Sdenko Fibich, the latter a composer too little known here, whose piano
compositions were introduced to us more than a decade ago by Florence
Mosher and Emily Burbank at their lecture-recitals. One gray morning I
went astray while wandering about the twisting corridors of the “Blauer
Stern” and, tempted by the sounds of masterly violin playing, I stood
before a door which bore the legend: “Otokar Sevcik.” It might have been
his pupils, Jan Kubelik or Kocian, though it was neither. I had seen the
brilliant Kubelik at Marienbad, where I went annually to fight my fat and
also to war with the rum demon—temporarily. Since then Sevcik, the great
teacher of aspiring fiddlers, has removed to Vienna.
I mention these things concerning the delightful city of Ema Destinova,
Thomas Masaryk—who married a New York lady, one of the Misses Garrigue of
the well-known musical family; of the city wherein Mozart composed his
masterpiece, Don Giovanni—“in order to express the thanks of the great
master to his ‘dearest citizens of Prague’ for their ardent reception”;
that Prague which is so dramatic to gaze upon, the Slavic city further
west, the gateway to the Slavic lands—because I have just read with
considerable satisfaction a slender pamphlet of fifty pages entitled
The Music of Bohemia, by Ladislav Urban, published under the auspices
of the Czecho-Slovak Art Clubs of New York City. The author calls his
decidedly interesting contribution a sketch, but it is a sketch in which
is compressed much valuable matter. At the start he tells us that “Czech”
is the Slav name for the Slav people and language in Bohemia, Moravia
and Silesia. The terms used to designate the whole country, the state,
are ‘Bohemia’ and ‘Bohemian.’ The Czechs themselves do not employ this
distinction, continues Mr. Urban, but use the word Czech in both senses.
Slovaks are that people who live in the northwestern part of Hungary,
called Slovakia, which with Bohemia forms the present republic and nation
of the Czecho-Slovaks. Mr. Urban warns us not to confound Bohemians and
gypsies, and cites Balfe’s Bohemian Girl as an instance: a full-fledged
Czech folk-melody is introduced as a gypsy tune in the allegro theme of
the overture.
There has been bad blood between the Bohemians and Germans since the
reign of King Wenceslas (921-935 A. D.). After his assassination,
Wenceslas was canonized and is a national saint; a folk-song, known as
the Choral of St. Wenceslas, is one of the oldest among its kind. The
John Huss reformation also aroused the nation, and a battle hymn, “Ye
warriors who for God are fighting,” was another product of the folk.
Bohemia has always been a musical nation, as Mr. Urban proves by numerous
citations. Its folk-song literature is rich and varied. He quotes from
Seth Watson’s Racial Problems in Hungary: “Singing is the chief passion
of the Slovaks. Nothing will find its way so surely to the heart of the
Slovak people as a well-sung song. An old peasant woman once complained
to a friend of mine that her son was a useless, disappointing fellow.
‘What was the matter?’ inquired my friend; ‘did he drink or would he not
work?’ ‘Oh, no,’ said the old woman; ‘but nothing will make him sing.
It’s a great misfortune.’” Rather a companionable sort, we think—a young
man who doesn’t sing, whistle or make other disagreeable noises would be
a prize in our noisy Tophet of New York.
The polka must be credited to Bohemia; it was invented about 1830 by a
country girl. This sounds a trifle doubtful, as the dance—called polka,
rather pulka, because of the half step—is as old as the immemorial hills
of Bohemia, I have been informed by Bohemian critics. There is a polka
in Smetana’s The Bartered Bride, also a furiant, which means, we are
told, “a boasting farmer.” Dvorak in his first symphony introduces a
furiant in the place of a scherzo. But Mr. Urban is not seduced into that
most platitudinous of errors, to wit, that the people make a nation’s
music. He writes with admirable clearness on the subject: “It is no
wonder that the richness of folk-art was overestimated in Bohemia at
the beginning of the last century, and led to an error. Folk-art was
confused with nationality in art. A false principle was constructed
that ‘national art’ must be based upon folk-music. Thus the imitation
of folk-poetry and folk-melodies was approved as the real national art.
It is astonishing how long this principle, violating, as it did, the
national law of progress, could endure. All works of this feverish,
would-be-national period belong to history. They live no more, being but
imitations.” In a footnote to this inexpugnable statement the author adds
with his accustomed acuity: “The matter was also discussed in America,
where some people saw national American music under the guise of Indian
music. Nothing is easier for a composer than to imitate the melodies of
different nations, preserving their rhythmical or melodic mannerisms.”
He might have joined negro to Indian as our national, so-called, musical
characteristics. But there are no more Indians, in a tribal sense, and
as to negro music, the best of it was composed by white men, notably
Stephen Foster. Why should Afro-American folk-tunes represent America?
In MacDowell’s Indian Suite there are authentic Indian themes, while in
Dvorak’s From the New World the negroid tunes are mere suggestions; the
rhythms of Yankee Doodle are faintly heard as a contrapuntal device; in a
word, the Americanism of Dr. Dvorak’s plenary composition is as American
as his own name, not to mention the fact that its chief motto is taken
from Schubert’s unfinished symphony (Tchaikovsky went to the same source
for the principal theme of his E minor, the fifth, symphony, hence the
accusation that Dvorak borrowed from the Russian. Arcades ambo!) But
the negro folk-tune as a basic element for the American composer was
short-lived. Its logical conclusion landed us in the dubious and never
delectable region of ragtime, and there let it lie forever. The musical
culture of America must have its roots in more national soil, must stem
from neither the aboriginal natives nor yet from the one-time slaves.
It must be American or it will not be at all. At present our supreme
composer is Charles Martin Loeffler, by virtue of his individual genius.
I suspect all map-music; patriotism may cloak humbuggery—or worse (Dr.
Johnson says it does). So let us first make good music, and the national
ingredients will take care of themselves.
Mr. Urban devoted special sections to the chief composers of
Bohemia—Bedrich Smetana, Antonin Dvorak, Zdenko Fibich, Vitezslav
Novak, and Josef Suk. There are, of course, many others, but within
the scope of his little study these five suffice. Naturally, the palm
of superiority is awarded Smetana, whose music we heard last season,
thanks to Josef Stransky, himself a Bohemian. Smetana is the Bohemian
composer par excellence. There is a foreign alloy in Dvorak, especially
the later Dvorak, that rules him from entering into competition with his
fellow-countryman. Dvorak remained a peasant even in his best works,
which were written before he came to New York in 1892. The New World
Symphony is pleasing and wears well, notwithstanding its unblushing
plagiarisms—that excerpt from the Venusberg bacchanale in Tannhäuser
quite takes your breath away; quotation marks are sadly needed in
music!—but it remains presumably Czechish, and only faintly American. We
much prefer his earlier Slavic Dances, the orchestral scherzo and the
Husitzka overture. As for the newer men, it is to be hoped that Bodanzky
and Stransky and Stokowski—conductors nowadays seem to be sky-high—will
give them all a hearing. Quality, not quantity, rules Bohemian music, a
music racy of the national soil, nevertheless not without the larger,
profounder accents of universal music.
THE MUSIC OF YESTERDAY?
Notwithstanding the fact that he played the flute and ranked Rossini
above Wagner, Arthur Schopenhauer said some notable things about music.
Here is a wise observation of his: “Art is ever on the quest, a quest
and a divine adventure;” although this restless search for the new often
ends in plain reaction, progress may be crabwise and still be progress.
We fear “progress,” as usually understood, is a glittering “general idea”
that blinds many to the truth. Reform in art is like reform in politics.
You can’t reform the St. Matthew Passion music or the fifth symphony.
Is Parsifal a reformation of Gluck? This talk of reforms is confusing
the historic with the æsthetic. Art is a tricksy quantity and, like
quicksilver, is ever mobile. As in all genuine revolutions, the personal
equation counts the heaviest, so in dealing with the conditions of music
at the present time we ought to study the temperament of our music-makers
and let prophecy sulk in its tent as it may.
One thing is certain: The old tonal order has changed forever; there
are plenty of signs and wonders in the musical firmament to prove this.
Moussorgsky preceded Debussy in his use of whole-tone harmonies, and a
contemporary of Debussy and an equally gifted musician, Charles Martin
Loeffler, was experimenting before Debussy in a dark but delectable
harmonic region. The tyranny of the diatonic and chromatic scales, the
tiresome revolution of the major and minor modes, the critical Canutes
who sit at the edge of the musical sea and say to the modern waves, “Thus
far and no further!” and then hastily abandon their thrones and rush to
safety, else to be overwhelmed—all these are of the past, whether in art,
literature, music, or—let Nietzsche speak—in ethics. Even philosophy has
changed its garb and logic is “a dodge,” as Prof. Jowett used to say.
Every stronghold is being assailed, from the “divine” rights of property
to the common chord of C major.
If Ruskin had written music-criticism he might have amplified the
connotations of his famous phrase, the “pathetic fallacy,” for we
consider it a pathetic fallacy (though not in the Ruskinian sense) in
criticism to be overshadowed by the fear that, because some of our
predecessors misjudged Wagner, Manet and Ibsen, we should be too tender
in our judgments of our contemporaries. Here is “the pathos of distance”
run to seed. The music of to-day may be the music of to-morrow, but if
not, what then? It may satisfy the emotional needs of the moment, yet
become a stale formula to-morrow. What does that prove? Though Bach and
Beethoven built their work on the broad bases of eternity—employing that
tremendous term in a limited sense; no art is “eternal”—nevertheless,
one may enjoy the men whose music is of slight texture and “modern.”
Nor is this a plea for mediocrity. Mediocrity we shall always have with
us; mediocrity is mankind in the normal, and normal man demands of art
what he can read without running, hear without thinking. Every century
produces artists who are forgotten in a generation, though they fill the
ear for a time with their clever production. This has led to another
general idea, that of transition, of intermediate types. But after
critical perspective has been attained, it will be seen that the majority
of composers fall into this category of the transitional; not a consoling
notion, but an unavoidable conclusion. Richard Wagner had his epigones.
And so had Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven. Mendelssohn was a feminine variation
of Bach, and after Schumann followed Brahms—Brahms, who threatens to
rival his great exemplar. Yet I can recall the incredulous smiles when,
twenty-five years ago, I called the Brahms compositions “The Music of the
Future.”
The Wagner-Liszt tradition of music-drama and the symphonic poem have
been continued with personal modifications by Richard Strauss. Max Reger
pinned his faith to Brahms and absolute music, though not without an
individual variation. In considering his Sinfonietta, the Serenade, the
Hiller Variations, the Prologue to a Tragedy, the Lustspiel overture,
the two concertos respectively for pianoforte and violin, we are struck
not so much by the masterly handling of old forms as by the stark,
emotional content of these compositions. It is an error to dismiss
his music as merely academic. He began as a Brahmsianer, but he did
not succeed, as did his master, in fusing form and theme. There is a
Dionysian strain in him that too often is in jarring discord with the
intellectual structure of his work. The furor teutonicus in conflict
with the scholar. Yet at one period Reger was considered the rival of
Strauss, though that day has long passed. Arnold Schoenberg now divides
the throne. And there were many other claimants—Rezinek, d’Albert,
Ernest Boehe, Walter Braunfels, Max Schillings, Hans Pfitzner, Klose,
Ehrenberg, Noren, Franz Schreker, and the younger choir whose doings
are analyzed weekly by clever Cezar Searchinger in the pages of the
_Musical Courier_. Their name is legion. They enter the lists sounding
golden trumpets of self-praise and are usually forgotten after a solitary
performance of their huge machines, whether opera or symphony. Size
seems to be the prime requisite. Write a music-drama that consumes three
nights in its performance, a symphony that takes a hundred men, with a
chorus of a thousand, to play and sing. Behold! You are a modern among
moderns. But your name is as mud the following year. Exceptions are
Mahler and Bruckner, yet I have my suspicions that when the zeal of
William Mengelberg has abated, then the Mahler craze will go the way of
all flesh, despite the fact that he has composed some thrilling pages.
Otherwise, his symphonic structures are too mastodonic to endure; like
those of Berlioz, they are top-heavy with ennui, and many chambers are
empty of significant ideas or vital emotions. Musical intellectualism at
its extreme Kamchatska.
Our personal preferences incline us to the new French music. To be sure,
substance is often lacking, but you are not oppressed by the abomination
of desolation which lurks in the merely huge, by what Mr. Finck calls
Jumboism in music. The formal clarity, the charming color sense, the
sprightly, even joyful, spirit, combined with an audacious roving among
revolutionary ideas, all endear these youngsters to us. Debussy is their
artistic sire, Ravel their stepfather, and if d’Indy does not fall
into this category, being a descendant of Franck, he is none the less
admirable as a musician. Stravinsky outpoints them all in the imprévu,
as does the incredible Prokofieff—a man to be carefully estimated, one
who thus far hasn’t put his best foot foremost in America. The Richard
Strauss case is no longer a moot one. He has in all probability given his
best work, and superlative work it is, despite its slag, scoriæ, rubble,
and refuse. He is the chief of a school, a position from which he can
never be dislodged, and when history sifts the pretensions of all the
second and third rate men of his generation, his figure will be found
standing close to Wagner’s and Berlioz’s and Liszt’s. An epigone? Yes.
But an epigone of individual genius.
With Arnold Schoenberg freedom in modulation is not only permissible but
an iron rule; he is obsessed by the theory of overtones, and his music is
not only planned horizontally and vertically but in a circular fashion.
There is in his philosophy no such thing as consonance or dissonance,
only perfect ear training. (We quote from his Harmony; a Bible for
Supermen). He writes: “Harmonie fremde Tone gibt es also nicht”—and a
sly dig at old-timers—“sondern nur dem Harmonie-system fremde.” After
carefully listening to his “chaos” a certain order disengages itself;
his madness is methodical. For one thing, he abuses the interval of the
fourth and he enjoys juggling with the chord of the ninth. Vagabond
harmonies in which remotest keys lovingly hold hands do not dissipate the
sensation of a central tonality somewhere—the cellar, on the roof, in the
gutter, up above in the sky so high. The inner ear tells you that his D
minor quartet is really thought, though not altogether played, in that
key. As for form, you must not expect it from a man who has declared:
“I decide my form during composition only through feeling,” a procedure
which in other composers’ works might be called improvisation. Every
chord is the outcome of an emotion, the emotion aroused by the poem or
idea which gives birth to the composition. Such antique things as the
cyclic form or community of themes are not to be found in Schoenberg’s
bright lexicon of anarchy. He boils down the classic sonata form to one
movement and begins developing his theme as soon as it is announced. We
should be grateful that he announces it at all; themeless music is the
rage at present.
So, as it may be seen, the new dogmatism is more dogmatic than the old.
The absence of rule in Schoenberg is an inflexible, cast-iron law of
necessity as tyrannical as the Socialism that has replaced Czarism with a
more oppressive autocracy, the rule of the unwashed, many-headed monster.
Better one tyrant than a million. There is no music of yesterday or
to-morrow. There is only the music of Now.
LISZT’S ONLY PIANO SONATA
That two young American-born pianists, John Powell and Louis Cornell,
should have selected recently Liszt’s only piano sonata for their
programmes, and during the same week, is sufficiently significant to call
for comment. It is a sign of the times. Many of the innovations in modern
writing for the instrument may be directly traced to this same B minor
sonata, and when we name it as the composer’s solitary excursion into the
classical domain, it is with full consciousness that Liszt’s “fantasia
quasi-sonata,” after a reading of Dante, in Années de Pèlerinage, is
hardly to be described as a sonata. What is a sonata? Liszt answers the
question in his highly original work. He rejects the old order of three
or four separate movements, substituting a more complete organism. It may
not be, formally speaking, the Haydn, Mozart, or early Beethoven sonata.
Liszt employs as a spring-board the last sonatas of Beethoven to launch
him into novel territory (study opus 110 in A flat and you will recognize
the truth of this contention).
Charles Souilier has declared that the sonata expired with the eighteenth
century, which gave it birth. This is a rather risky statement. If true,
we should have missed such beautiful music in the form—Schumann, Chopin,
Brahms, Liszt. The Hungarian’s astonishing use of the leading-movement
and its metamorphosis, one theme of the slow introduction, as Shedlock,
in his book on The Pianoforte Sonata, is the source whence he derives the
principal part of his tone picture, and, adds Mr. Shedlock, “everything
depends on the quality and latent power of the fertilizing germ.” But on
the first page of the B minor sonata may be found Wotan’s chief theme,
the scream of Kundry, and a color scheme which Wagner later incorporated
in the Ring and Parsifal. So the “fertilizing germ” is not missing.
As for the form, that is easily discernible. Liszt has spun a complex
web, his sonata is an arabesque, and a logical one, for nothing is more
inexorably logical than a seemingly loose rhapsody. The chief fault
of this composition is not its form or lack of melodic invention, but
its length—it demands at least thirty-five minutes to play—caused by
repetitions, though in different keys, thus defeating the very purpose
for which it was composed, _i. e._, suppression of unnecessary episodes
and breaks in the continuity. The same criticism holds good for the
Symphonic Poems.
Liszt’s influence was not only profound upon his contemporaries—witness
Wagner—but on the latter-day school, headed by Richard Strauss, whose
tone poems are inconceivable without Liszt’s discoveries. He also
inspired the Russians, and his impressionism is the base of Debussy
and Ravel’s piano music. Rimsky-Korsakoff we long ago christened the
Russian Berlioz, yet he owes Liszt more; from Berlioz he learned how to
paint orchestrally, but in his manner of composition he leans heavily on
the Hungarian. Sadko comes from Liszt’s symphonic poem, Ce qu’on entend
sur la montagne, while Antar and Scheherazade come from Harold and the
Faust symphony. As a French critic has written: “The brand of Liszt
remains ineffaceable” on those charming works of Rimsky-Korsakoff. Like
Moses, Liszt saw the Promised Land, but was destined never to enter it.
He suffered the fate of intermediate types. He was recognized too late.
Dr. Frederick Niecks, the biographer of Chopin, has wisely said: “Be,
however, the ultimate fate of his works what it may, there will always
remain to Liszt the fame of a daring striver, a fruitful originator, and
a wide-ranging quickener.”
The eminently pianistic quality of Liszt’s original music commends it
to every pianist. Joseffy told the present writer that the B minor
sonata was one of those compositions that plays itself, it “lies” so
beautifully for the hand. No work of Liszt, with the possible exception
of his études, is as interesting. Agreeing with those critics who declare
that they find few traces of the sonata form in the structure, and also
with those who assert the work to be an organic amplification of the
old obsolete form, and that Liszt has taken Beethoven’s last sonata
period as a starting-point for his plunge into futurity—agreeing with
these warring factions, we find fascinating music in this sonata. What a
dramatic work it is! It stirs the blood. It is intense. It is complex.
The opening bars are truly Lisztian. The gloom, the harmonic haze from
which emerges that bold theme in octaves (Wotan’s theme), the leap from
C to the A sharp below—how Liszt has stamped this and the succeeding
intervals as his own! Power there is, sardonic power, like the first
phrase of the E flat piano concerto, so cynically mocking. How incisively
the composer traps your consciousness in the theme of the sonata, with
its four knocking D’s! What follows might be a drama enacted in the
netherworld. Is there a composer who paints the infernal, the macabre,
with more suggestive realism than Liszt? Berlioz and Saint-Saëns and Raff
come to the mind as masters of the grisly and supernatural. But the thin,
sharp flames of hell hover about the brass, wood-wind, and shrieking
strings in the Liszt orchestra.
The chorale, usually the meat of the Lisztian composition, now appears
and in dogmatic affirmation proclaims the religious belief of the
composer; our convictions are swept along until after that outburst
in C major, when follows the insincerity of it all in the harmonic
sequences. Here, surely, it is not a whole-hearted belief, only theatric
attudinizing; after the faint return of the first motive is heard the
sigh of sentiment, of passion, of abandonment, which engenders the
suspicion that when Liszt was not kneeling in prayer he was prostrate
before woman. He blends piety and passion in the most mystically amorous
fashion; with the cantando expressivo in D begins some lovely music,
secular in spirit, mayhap intended by its creator for reredos and pyx.
But the rustle of silken attire is behind every bar; sensuous imagery,
a delicate perfume of femininity lurks in each trill and cadence. Ah!
naughty Abbé, have a care! After all thy tonsures and chorales, thy
credos and sackcloth, wilt thou admit the Evil One in the guise of a
melody, in whose chromatic intervals lie dimpled cheek and sunny tresses!
Wilt thou permit her to make away with thy spiritual resolutions? Vade
retro me Sathanas! And behold it is accomplished. The bold theme, so
triumphantly proclaimed at the outset, is now solemnly sounded with
choric pomp and power. Then begins the hue and cry of diminished
sevenths, and this tonal panorama with its swirl of intoxicating colons
kaleidoscopically moves onward. Again the devil tempts our musical St.
Antony, this time in octaves and in the key of A major. He momentarily
succumbs, but that good old family chorale is repeated, and even if its
orthodoxy is faulty in spots it serves its purpose; the Satan is routed
and early piety breaks forth in an alarming fugato, which, like the
domestic ailment known as a bad conscience, is happily short-winded.
Another flank movement of the Eternal Feminine, this time in the
seductive key of B, made mock of by this musical Samson, who in stretta
quasi presto views his weakness with contrapuntal glee. He shakes it from
him, and in the bass triplets frames it as a picture to weep or rage over.
All this finally leads to prestissimo finale of startling splendor.
In the literature of the piano there is nothing more exciting. It is
brilliantly captivating, and Liszt the Magnificent is painted on every
bar. What gorgeous swing and how the very bases of the musical anvil
tremble under the sledge-hammer blows of this tonal Attila. Then follow
a few bars of the Beethoven-andante, a moving return to the earlier
themes, and softly the first lento descends to the subterranean abode,
whence it emerges, a Magyar Wotan, majestically vanishing not in the
mists of Valhalla but in the bowels of Gehenna; then a genuine Lisztian
chord-sequence followed by a profound stillness in the major. The B
minor sonata displays Liszt’s power, Liszt’s weakness. It is rhapsodic,
it is too long—infernal, not a “heavenly length”—it is noble, drastic,
cerebral, and it is blazing with exotic hues. It is also cynical and
insincere. Liszt, more than other composers, Meyerbeer and Berlioz
excepted, excelled in depicting a sneering, cynical sensuality. Also
insincerity. And when you come to think it over, it takes genius to
suggest in tones the insincere. This feat Liszt achieved. In his
symphony to Faust he succeeds better with the Mephisto picture than
in his characterization of Marguerite. But to deny the B minor sonata
a commanding position in the Pantheon of piano music would be folly.
And interpreted by an artist saturated in the Liszt tradition, such as
Arthur Friedheim—who has intellectual power and never resorts to mere
sentimentalism—the work almost compasses the sublime.
Away from the glitter of the concert-room this extraordinary Hungarian,
inspired after the loftiest in art, yet in the atmosphere of aristocratic
salons, or of the papal court, Liszt was not altogether admirable. We
have heard certain cries calling heaven to witness that he was anointed
of the Lord (which he was not); also that if he had not cut and run
to sanctuary to escape the petticoats—one was his egregious Polish
Princess—we might never have heard of Liszt the Abbé. This theory is
not far from the truth. Among the various penalties undergone by genius
is its pursuit by gibes and glossaries. Like Ibsen and Maeterlinck,
the composer Liszt has had many things read into his music which do
not belong there. He set great store by his sacred compositions, his
masses and his psalms, and he was bitterly disappointed because Rome did
not espouse his reforms in churchly music, notwithstanding his close
friendship with Pope Pius IX. But there is a vein of insincerity running
throughout this music, despite its ecclesiastic pomp and operatic
coloring. Perhaps the best estimate of Franz Liszt is the purely human
one. He was a virile musical genius, and was compact of the usual
pleasing and unpleasing faults and virtues as is any great man not born
of a book.
DREAMING OF LISZT
Philip Hale once wrote that they buried Richard Wagner in the back yard
like a cat; which is irreverent yet a bald statement of the fact. Liszt
is also buried at Baireuth, in a forlorn pagoda designed by his grandson,
Siegfried Wagner, who, at the time of his grandfather’s death, was a
student of architecture. After a pilgrimage to this tomb in the cemetery
in the Erlangerstrasse, for I count myself among the Lisztianer, and also
after hearing several operas of Siegfried I reached the conclusion that,
notwithstanding critical opinion to the contrary, the young man wisely
abandoned his architectural dreams. But it is another kind of dream that
I would describe this Sunday morning. When a young chap, I was crazy to
see, to hear, Liszt, and while I think that the old man with long white
hair and warts on his face was the real Liszt—I met him on the Rue de
Rivoli in 1878—still the possibility of a closer view haunted my sleeping
and waking hours, and, finally armed with letters of introduction from
a well-known French pianist, a pupil of the musical Merlin, and a Paris
music publisher, I found myself one evening at the Gare de l’Est, en
route for Strasburg, thence to Stuttgart, and Weimar. In those times,
forty years ago, we travelled slowly.
A lovely morning in May saw me walking through a sun-smitten lane on the
road to the garden-house where his Serene Highness was living. I had sent
my introductions to the royal household the previous evening. I had been
summoned. The hedges were white with spring blossoms, the air redolent of
bockbier. Ah! thronging memories of youth. Suddenly a man on horseback,
his face red with excitement, his beast covered with lather, dashed by,
shouting, “Make way for the Master. He comes. He comes!” Presently a
venerable being with a purple nose—a Cyrano de Cognac nose—appeared,
and walking. His hair streamed in the wind. He wore a monkish habit,
and on his head was a huge shovel-shaped hat of the pattern affected by
Don Basilio in The Barber of Seville. “It must be Liszt or the Devil,”
I cried, and the only Liszt smiled, his warts growing more purple,
his expression most benignant. He waved to me a friendly hand, that
formidable hand, which, like a steam-hammer, could crush steel or crack
the shell of an egg, so sensitive was it. “Both Liszt and the Devil,” he
grunted, and then I knew my man. I kissed his hand, made the sign of the
cross, for I was addressing an ecclesiastic, an Abbé, though one without
a tonsure, and created a deacon by Pope Pius IX, called Pio Nono in
Italy, but in Rome affectionately nicknamed “Pianino” because of his love
of piano music, Liszt’s in particular.
He invited me to refreshments at the Czerny Café, but as it was crowded
we went across the street to the garden of the Elephant Hotel, there to
be surrounded by a throng of little Liszts, pupils, male and female, who
mimicked the old, old gentleman in an absurd manner. They wore their hair
on their shoulders, they sprinkled this hair with flour, they even went
so far as to paint purplish excrescences on their chins and brows. They
donned semi-sacerdotal robes, they held their hands in the peculiar style
of the Master; they, too, sported shovel-shaped hats, and from time to
time they indulged in patibulary gestures. But, good Lord, how they could
down the beer!
Enfin, after some diplomatic skirmishing I was invited to the afternoon
musicale and went with the gang to the pretty little home of Liszt in
the ducal park. Liszt was amiable. He knew that I was nervous, so he
asked a few promising young beginners, such as Arthur Friedheim, Alfred
Reisenauer, Moriz Rosenthal, Emil Sauer, Richard Burmeister, to open the
ball. After I heard them I wished myself in Buxtehude. I had proclaimed
myself as an ardent upholder of the Thalberg school, which champions a
singing touch and pearly scales. I had studied all the Thalberg fantasies
on operatic airs with Charles H. Jarvis of Philadelphia, who could read
prima vista any music composed by man, god, or devil. You will estimate
my musical and intellectual equipment of those days when I tell you that
my battle-horse was the Prayer from Moses in Egypt, arranged by Thalberg,
and my favorite reading the prose of Chateaubriand; in few words, lush,
luxuriant, and overblown romanticism. The step to Ouida’s novels and the
Henselt études was not far. All that I detest now in music and literature
was then my passion. Like Ephraim I was sealed to my idols, and the
chiefest was Thalberg, natural son of Prince Lichtenstein, a handsome
piano virtuoso with aristocratic side-whiskers, a smooth pianistic style,
and a euphonious touch.
Liszt called to me. “Tiens! let us hear some music by an admirer of
my old friend Sigismund Thalberg.” I did not miss the veiled irony
of the speech, the slight underlining of “friend,” for I had read of
the historical Liszt-Thalberg duel in Paris during the third decade
of the last century. But memories soon annulled my agony. What a via
dolorosa I traversed from my chair to the piano—by the way, a Steinway
concert-grand. I shall not forget to my dying hour that chamber wherein
I stood the most fateful afternoon of my life. Liszt, with his powerful
profile of an Indian chieftain, lounged in the window embrasure, the
light streaking his hair, silhouetting his brow, nose, and projecting
chin. He was the illuminated focus of a picture that is burnt into my
memory cells. The pupils were wraiths floating in a misty dream, with
malicious points of light for eyes. I, too, felt like a disembodied
being in this spectral atmosphere of which Liszt was the living reality.
Urged by a hypnotic will I went to the piano, sat before it, and in my
nervous misery lifted the fall-board and paused to decipher the name
of its maker; that’s how I discovered Steinway. My act did not pass
unperceived. Whispering ensued, followed chuckling, and some one said:
“He must have begun as a piano salesman.” It was the voice of the witty
Rosenthal, and it utterly disconcerted me. Facing me on the wall was Ary
Scheffer’s portrait of Chopin, and doubtless prompted by the subject, my
fingers groped among the keys and I began, without rhyme or reason, the
weaving prelude in D of the immortal Pole. My insides were shaking like
a bowl of disturbed jelly, though outwardly I was as calm as growing
grass. Oddly enough my hands did not falter, the music seemed to ooze
from my wrists. I had not studied in vain Thalberg’s Art of Singing
on the Pianoforte. I finished. Not a murmur was heard. Then Liszt’s
voice cut the sultry air: “I had expected Thalberg’s tremolo study,” he
casually remarked, avenging himself with an epigram on his old rival a
half century after their battles. But Thalberg didn’t hear it. I did. I
took the hint and bowed myself out of the royal presence, permitted by
the boss to kiss his technique-laden fingers, and without stopping for my
hat and walking-stick in the ante-chamber I went away. Then tempted by
the cool of the woods I strayed across to Goethe’s Garden House. At the
moment I preferred poetry to music. Nevertheless, I had played for Liszt.
Rotten playing, of course, yet a historical fact. But when I compiled a
life of the Grand Old Man of Hungary I hadn’t the courage to put my name
in that long list of reputed pupils, though I dare say I didn’t play any
worse than some of them. Ask Arthur Friedheim.
My hat and stick I sent for. I was not precisely in a jubilant mood,
though I joined the Liszt lobby that night at the Hotel “Zum Elefanten.”
It was a goodly crowd, the majority of whom achieved musical fame later.
In the Weimar of those days Liszt walked and talked, smoked big black
cigars, drank his share of brandy, played, composed, and prayed—he
seldom missed early mass. Despite his Hungarian origin, his early French
training, there emerged through the palimpsest of his brilliant and
complex personality the characteristics of his mother, an Austrian born.
He loved German music, German ways. He liked to speak that tongue in
preference to French. Of the Magyar language he knew little. But his
music is Hungarian enough; Hungarian in the sense that Tchaikovsky’s is
Russian—_i. e._, cosmopolitan. However, there’s a lot of nonsense written
about that fetish of a certain critical school, the fetish of nationalism
in music. Liszt would have been invincibly Liszt even if he had been
born in Boston. And that tropically passionate town does not in the least
resemble Budapest.
At the Liszt museum his old housekeeper Paulina Apel—I must ask Albert
Morris Bagby if she still lives—showed me its numerous memorials. What a
collection of trophies, jewels, manuscripts, orders, pictures, letters,
and testimonials from all over the globe. I read a letter from Charles
Baudelaire to Liszt, which is not to be found in the volume dedicated
to his correspondence. Gifts from royalty abound. In glass cases are
the scores of Christus, the Faust Symphony, Orpheus, Hungaria, the
Berg Symphony, Totentanz, and Festklaenge. Besides the Steinway in the
music-room there was an old instrument dating back to the forties;
for the little piano upon which he studied as a child you must go to
the Budapest museum. At Weimar may be seen marble hands of Liszt’s,
Beethoven’s, and Chopin’s; also the long, nervous, spider-like fingers
of Liszt clasping the slender hand of the Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein.
Like Chopin, Liszt attracted princesses and other exalted personages in
petticoats as does sugar buzzing flies.
And then I woke up. I had been dreaming in my Parisian attic in 1878.
When I went for the first time to Weimar in 1896 Liszt had been dead ten
years.
A BRAHMA OF THE KEYBOARD
In a half-forgotten study of Flaubert’s masterpiece, L’Education
Sentimentale, which he rightly calls A Tragic Novel, George Moore
compares the great Frenchman to Brahma “creating the passing spectacle
of life to relieve his eternal ennui.”... Now, Leopold Godowsky is
not Brahma, and he has never suffered from ennui, thanks to his
tremendous capacity for work; yet I can’t help picturing him as a sort
of impassive Asiatic deity seated before the keyboard of his instrument
calmly surveying the eternal spectacle of music and its many masques.
All schools, all styles, he knows, but upon this vast knowledge he
has no desire to make any personal comment. Passionless, passionate,
objective and subjective, his crystal-clear comprehension of the musical
universe has made him apparently assume the attitude of an omniscient
spectator, though he is neither one nor the other. Louis Ehlert asked
Karl Tausig—probably the greatest of all piano virtuosi—why he did not
offer up a small sacrifice to the human needs of the masses. The Pole
replied: “I am not sentimental; neither my life nor my education intended
me to be so.” Ehlert persisted. “How would it be if you were to give us
an historical representation of the sentimental?” he suggested. Tausig
shook his head and shrewdly smiled. He never made concessions to public
taste, and he was called inhuman, cold, objective. His master, Liszt,
was the reverse, overflowing with the milk of human music, spontaneous
and prodigal in his play. Tausig the obverse of the medal; yet I believe
that Liszt and Tausig were the piano Dioscuri, and not Liszt and Chopin.
Chopin as a pianist has a niche all his own.
In an article several years ago and in the magazine section of _The
Times_, I wrote that Leopold Godowsky is a pianist for pianists, as
Shelley is a poet for poets. But everybody reads Shelley nowadays, and
no doubt compares him unfavorably with the ear-splitting verse of the
cacophonous young poets of the hour. Leopold Liebling took exception to
my ascription, and I fancy he is right; every musical person listens to
the alluring playing of Godowsky quite impervious to the fact that there
are aspects of his art which will always escape them. In his playing he
is transcendental. This doesn’t mean that he is frostily objective; he is
human, emotional, and has at his finger ends all styles. It is the fine
equilibrium of intellect and emotion that compels our admiration. No one
plays Chopin like Godowsky, no, not even that tricky kobold, Vladimir de
Pachmann. Paderewski is more emotional, Josef Hofmann extorts a richer, a
more sonorous tone from the wires; nevertheless, Godowsky is a Chopinist
in a class apart. He doesn’t drip honey in the nocturnes as does Ignace
Jan, Premier of Poland; he can’t thunder the polonaises like his friend
Jozio from Cracow; but these qualities he gives us in his own scale of
tonal values. He is a powerful man with muscles that are both velvet
and steel. When he wishes he, too, can sound the orchestral note; but,
then, he seldom wishes this. His feeling for the limitations of the piano
recalls the words of Rafael Joseffy: “I’m not a brass band”; Joseffy,
who, in his abhorrence of a smeary touch produced his legato with the
aid of the pedals, and what an aristocratic floating touch was his! What
poetry! What atmosphere!
Setting aside his Chopin interpretations, which we take for granted,
as he is Slavic, have you heard Godowsky play Mozart, or the neglected
Haydn; or Schubert, Schumann? Of his Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms I shall
not write. I can only repeat—all schools are at his beck, and if they
are “perfect pictures, perfectly framed and hung,” as Joseffy said of
his beloved master, Tausig, there is also the personal equation, for
me, full of magic. Sensationalism, the pianistic fracas, posing for the
gallery, all the bag of cheap tricks this great pianist eschews. He is
master of the art of playing the piano beautifully. His exquisitely
plastic phrasing, artistic massing of colors, above all the nobility
of his conception—little wonder I call him a Brahma of the keyboard,
far-fetched as the simile may sound. To Godowsky all other pianists
could go to school, if for nothing else but the purity of his style,
his kaleidoscopic tintings, his polyphony. And it must be admitted that
pianists I have spoken to about him admit his power. He does not boast
the grand manner of Josef Hofmann, yet Hofmann is reported to have told
his manager that he enjoyed listening in a room to Godowsky more than
playing to crowded and enthusiastic multitudes at his own concerts. Truly
a fraternal and noble sentiment! If it comes to sheer sensationalism,
then Godowsky easily leads them all, Rosenthal not excepted. I refer you
to his paraphrases of Chopin, Weber, and Johann Strauss, and the supreme
ease with which he conquers them. Brahma, indeed. Although as he plays
he looks more like Buddha under his Bodh tree conjuring beautiful sounds
from sky and air and the murmuring of crystalline waters.
It must be nearly twenty years ago, anyhow eighteen, that I entertained
Vladimir de Pachmann in my Dream Barn on Madison Avenue at Seventy-sixth
Street. The tenth floor, a room as big and as lofty as a cathedral.
Alas! where are such old-fashioned apartments to-day? After eating a
duck, a kotchka, cooked Polish fashion, and borsch, beet soup, with
numerous Slavic side-dishes, preceded by the inevitable zakuska—those
appetite-slaying bonnes bouches—De Pachmann fiercely demanded cognac. I
was embarrassed. Not drinking spirits, I had inconsiderately forgotten
the taste of others. De Pachmann, who is a child at heart, too often a
naughty child, cried to heaven that I was a hell of a host! He said this
in Russian, then in French, Italian, German, Polish, Spanish, English,
and wound up with a hearty Hebrew “Raca!” which may mean hatred, or
revenge, certainly something not endearing. But the worst was to come.
There stood my big Steinway concert grand piano, and he circled about
the instrument as if it were a dangerous monster. Finally he sniffed and
snapped: “My contract does not permit me to play a Steinway.” I hadn’t
thought of asking him, fearing Chopin’s classic retort after a dinner
party at Paris: “Madame, j’ai mangé si peu!” Finally I saw the hole
in the millstone and excused myself. When I returned with a bottle of
abominable cognac the little man’s malicious smile changed to a look of
ecstasy, and he was not a drinking man ever; but he was accustomed to his
“petit verre” after dining, and was ill-tempered when deprived of it.
Such is human nature, something that Puritans, prohibitionists, and other
pernicious busybodies will never understand. And then this wizard lifted
the fall-board of my piano and, quite forgetful of that “contract,” began
playing. And how he did play! Ye gods! Bacchus, Apollo, and Venus and
all other pleasant celestial persons, how you must have revelled when
De Pachmann played! In the more intimate atmosphere of my apartment his
music was of a gossamer web, iridescent, aerial, an æolian harp doubled
by a diabolic subtlety. Albert Ross Parsons, one of the few living pupils
of Tausig, in reply to my query, How did Joseffy compare with Tausig?
answered: “Joseffy was like the multicolored mist that encircles a mighty
mountain; but beautiful.” So Pachmann’s weaving enchantments seemed in
comparison to Godowsky’s profounder playing.
And what did Vladimir, hero of double-notes, play? Nothing but Godowsky,
then new to me. Liszt had been his god, but Godowsky was now his living
deity. He had studied, mastered, and memorized all those transcendental
variations on Chopin studies, the most significant variations since the
Brahms, a Paganini scaling of the heights of Parnassus; and I heard for
the first time the paraphrase of Weber’s Invitation to the Valse, a
much more viable arrangement than Tausig’s; also thrice as difficult.
However, technique, as sheer technique, does not enter into the musical
zone of Godowsky. He has restored polyphony to its central position,
thus bettering in that respect Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt. I have
called attention elsewhere to Godowsky’s solo sonata, which evokes
images of Chopin and Brahms and Liszt—only in the scherzo. Instead of
exhuming such an “ungrateful,” unpianistic composition as Tschaikovsky’s
Sonata in G, pianists of caliber might more profitably introduce the
Godowsky work. He is too modest or else too indifferent to put it on
his programme. It “lies” so well for the keyboard, yet there is no
denying its difficulties, chiefly polyphonic; the patterns are intricate,
though free from the clogging effects of the Brahms sonatas. De Pachmann
delighted his two auditors from 10 P. M. to 3 A. M. It is safe to wager
that the old Carrollton never heard such music-making before or since.
When he left, happy over his triumph—I was actually flabbergasted by
the new music—he whispered: “Hein! What you think! You think I can play
this wonderful music? You are mistaken. Wait till you hear Leopold
Godowsky play. We are all children, all woodchoppers, compared with him!”
Curiously enough, the last is the identical phrase uttered by Anton
Rubinstein in regard to Franz Liszt. Perhaps it was a quotation, but De
Pachmann meant it. It was the sincerest sentiment I had heard from his
often insincere lips. We were all three surprised to find a score of
people camping out on the curved stairway and passages, the idealist,
a colored lad who ran the elevator, having succumbed to sleep. This
impromptu Godowsky recital by a marvellous pianist, for De Pachmann was a
marvel in his time, must have made a grand hit with my neighbors. It did
with me, and when Godowsky returned to New York—I had last heard him in
the middle nineties of the previous century—I lost no time in hearing him
play in his inimitable manner those same works. A pianist who can win the
heartiest admiration of such contemporaries as De Pachmann and Joseffy
and Josef Hofmann—I could adduce many other names—must be a unique
artist. And that Godowsky is.
When he isn’t teaching or playing with orchestra or in recitals Mr.
Godowsky spends his leisure in pedagogic work. There is a wide-spreading
education scheme which has St. Louis as headquarters, the name of which
I’ve forgotten, though the name doesn’t much matter, as musicians the
country over know it. For this Mr. Godowsky is editing the classics
and romantics of piano literature. He is also composing the most
charming music imaginable for the earlier and middle grades of students;
music that has genuine musical values, with technical. Imagination
and instruction blended. Pegasus harnessed to the humbler draught
horse. If you think of Schumann’s various albums for the young you may
surmise the spirit of the Godowsky curriculum. I have been reading
through his Miniatures for four-hands (Carl Fischer, New York), three
suites, twelve numbers in all, in which the treble is for the pupil of
extreme simplicity yet demanding attention to the melodic line, and
amply developing the rhythmic sense. With their fanciful titles, tiny
mood-pictures, these Miniatures are bound to attract all teachers of the
instrument. Leopold Godowsky is a master pedagogue, as well as a master
of masters among virtuosi. He belongs to the race of such giants as
Paganini, Liszt, Tausig—and he is “different.”
CONTEMPORARY BRAN
Yesterday was housecleaning in my office, which I need hardly tell you is
situated under my hat. The principal débris to be removed and dumped into
the waste-paper basket were letters addressed to this department. Their
number was appalling, the accumulation of weeks, as the music editor
has little time for answering letters. A dozen concerts a day, opera
almost every night, do not make for the life tranquil. Now, letters,
anonymous or signed, are always interesting, especially those in the
first category. Praise and blame run neck and neck; cinquante-cinquante,
in classic parlance. Occasionally abusive missives arrive, breathing
fire and fury, and these are of psychologic import. You ask yourself
why? And lose yourself in an interesting labyrinth of speculation. The
small boy who chalks naughty words or figures on wall spaces during the
spring of the year testifies to the rising sap of the budding season;
it is an outlet for his nascent emotions. Presumably this is the case
with those whose handwriting reveals their uneasy sex. But why do they
select the present incumbent of this chair of criticism? William James,
when he dissected Dr. Nordau, twenty-five years ago, pointed out as a
major symptom of the too critical Max what is called by psychiatrists
coprolalia, or a tendency to indulge in vulgar, abusive language. When
certain inhibitions of polite society are removed the patient indulges
in vile speech, and writes nasty and usually anonymous letters for
reasons only known to himself or herself. Writers of anonymous letters
are described as cowardly, but this is only half the truth; they are also
sick-brained, suffering from mild hysteria, and as soon as they transfer
to paper the expression of their petty spite are temporarily relieved;
there is “a load off their minds,” as they put it.
This doesn’t mean that all anonymous letters are abusive; some of
them are pleasant reading. A blushing maiden records her admiration.
A “violinist” tells me that I have overpraised Raoul Vidas, although
I was not at the concert in question, Sunday being my day of respite
from the boiler shop; now and again pertinent criticism is received,
but, whether signed or unsigned, all these communications only prove
that their recipient’s casual writing is closely read, and that is a
minor consolation. Then there are the letters asking for advice, and
these contain harder nuts to crack. Why warn a young man or woman that
musical criticism as a profession is a delusion and a snare? Neither
one will believe you. Why suggest to an ambitious young composer that
any other avocation will bring him, if not happiness, then, at least,
bread and butter? But the stone hankers after the star, and who shall
mock its aspiration? How often have we felt like crying aloud: “Hats
on, gentleman, this is not a genius!” reversing the historic utterance
of Robert Schumann. A critic should be clairvoyant, but sometimes he is
not. And little wonder. Paste passes for diamonds, skim-milk masquerades
as cream. But it is always well to face the rising, not the setting
sun. Write only for young; the old will not heed you, being weary of
the pother of life and art. To the young belongs the future. Hurrah for
Ornstein and Prokofieff, or the ideals they represent! Progress always
traverses a circle, it is more imaginary than real, but we must have
the illusion of progress, else spiritually decay. Without vision people
perish. Nice copybook axioms, paste them in your bonnet.
In Emile Hennequin’s La Critique Scientifique—introduced to English
readers by John Mackinnon Robertson in his New Essays Towards a Critical
Method—the brilliant Frenchman, unhappily dead before his time, advanced
the idea that every critic should, in the preface of his book, set forth
not only his qualifications, but also his prejudices, his limitations.
This procedure might shed a dry light on what follows, although it
would seem unnecessary, as all these virtues and defects are implicit
in the critics’ work. However, Mr. Robertson has elaborated the theory
and frankly exposes himself. I am minded of this by a signed letter,
evidently written by a gentleman, which came to this department shortly
after a notice had appeared criticising the Oratorio Society. The critic,
it seems, must have been in a disgruntled humor when he declared that the
oratorio form was as obsolete as the mastodon, or some other prehistoric
monster; perhaps he meant hippopotamus. The writer of the communication
protests, and logically, against sending a man to criticise choral
singing when he is not in sympathy with such. Other people, numerous
people, find in oratorio the musical staff of life. Why, then, trample on
their feelings? The answer is an unqualified assent to the argument. As
I signed the criticism in question, and as I was bored to death at the
time, there is nothing left for me but to apologize—also put on paper my
objections, thus following the advice of the distinguished French critic.
And I fear I shall make out a poor case for the defense.
In the first place, on the night of the Oratorio concert, our oratorio
editor, yielding to a perfectly human impulse—about the fourth time
in his life—accompanied the sporting editor to a marvellous wrestling
match between El Greco, the Terrible Greek (his real name is said to be
Theototocopulous), and Goya, better known as the Man-Strangler. Which one
first went to the mat on that tremendous occasion need not concern us
now; suffice to say that I was butchered to make the oratorio editor’s
holiday. Why do I dislike oratorio? I meekly retort—I don’t. I love it,
and my correspondent is right when he asserts that the form has served
as a vehicle for most masterly music. Think of Bach, Handel, Mendelssohn.
I know it. I have heard and loved choral singing for a half century.
Masterpieces never weary, but, as Arthur Symons says, books about books
soon pass away, and there are some of us who prefer to read than “see”
Hamlet, although I agree with Brander Matthews that the only test of
a play is “the fire of the footlights.” In a word, public performance
may rob the masterpiece of its original grandeur—and we must predicate
grandeur for the B minor Mass, for the Messiah, for Elijah. This sounds
as if I were about to lay the blame on the particular performance of
the Oratorio Society—a cowardly evasion of my duty. On the contrary, I
confess that with the exception of the inevitable limitations of amateur
singing—Signor Setti choruses are not plentiful—I had never heard the
Oratorio Society sing with such refreshing vigor as the week before last.
Remember, too, that I heard the society under Leopold Damrosch, when it
sang The Damnation of Faust at the Academy of Music, Philadelphia, and
young Walter conducted a chorus in the wings.
You will ask, You love the noble music in this form, why write
deprecatingly of it? Because it is my unshakable conviction that such
music does not belong in the concert room, but in a church. After hearing
the Passion music in Bach’s old St. Thomas’s Church, or the Brahms
Requiem in a historical church, the anomaly of singers in festive array
singing in concert halls is too much for my sense of eternal fitness.
Yes, critics have “nerves,” and it needs a remarkable interpretation of
the Messiah or kindred compositions to stir me. I am only answering for
myself—qui s’excuse, s’accuse?—and do not presume to gainsay the feelings
of pious folk who regard the Messiah as a sacred function. But for those
who tell me that the mock-turtle Christianity of Parsifal is “sacred” I
merely retort: “A fig for the mystic capon.” Naturally, a concert room
better serves the practical purpose of singing organizations here than
the house of God; yet I prefer the church, for the spectacle of five
hundred humans, with their mouths wide open bawling the text—would it not
distract one? Sacred fiddlesticks! you exclaim when a tenor, faultlessly
clad, arises and solemnly intones, “And Jesus said,” the remainder of
the speech being uttered by some one else. Æsthetically, oratorio has
not a leg to stand on. It is neither fish nor flesh. How dull was Samson
et Dalila till sung in costume and before the footlights! And it is not
by any means very dramatic. Still, to many who do not visit the opera
for religious reasons, oratorio is a species of emotional outlet. It is
a half-way house, a compromise—you may enjoy both drama and religion.
Another thing—I am weary of the music, as I weary when I see Hamlet
or hear the Fifth Symphony, or look at the Dresden Madonna. I am not
apologizing for this weakness, only trying to explain its genesis.
William Gillette has written about the “first-time” element in acting;
or why an actor must ceaselessly renew the freshness of his original
inspiration. Would that some sympathetic writer deigned to take up the
cudgels for the ear-sick music critic. It is difficult, nay, impossible,
to recapture that first rapture when Tristan, or the C minor Symphony, or
Hamlet, swam into our ken. That is why I did not “react” the other night
at the Oratorio Society, and why, as my critique was reprehensible, I am
now making a clean breast of the matter and crying: Peccavi!
And here is my old friend Frank Sealey mildly complaining that it was
not his fault that his electric organ “ciphered” for a bar during the
evening. As I have literally sat at Brother Sealey’s feet for nearly
thirty years—since the opening of Carnegie Hall—it is not necessary to
assure him that I never doubted that it was the fault of the organ,
not his. He is a rock of certitude on the organ bench. But I did enjoy
Wolf-Ferrari’s Vita Nuova, a beautifully fashioned score, too sweetly
sentimental in spots for the austere and lovely sonnets of the deathless
Dante; nevertheless, a tour de force, happily illustrating my primal
contention that the oratorio form is as obsolescent as the epic; the
spirit, I mean, rather than the form, for the bony framework is there,
but the age of piety, the profound piety that prompted the composition
of such glorious music as Bach’s or Handel’s, has quite vanished, to
be replaced by machine-made music, the “movies,” and other stimulating
arts. Contemporary bran is filling, but it nourishes not the soul. Need
I add, when the Oratorio Society sings the Messiah at Christmas-tide,
that the regular oratorio editor, a singularly pious person, will report
the annual occurrence! That night, perhaps, I shall enjoy the brutal
but diverting spectacle of a wrestling match. It all depends on the
amiability of the sporting editor.
A MOOD REACTIONARY
I consider such phrases as the “progress of art,” the “improvement of
art,” and “higher average of art” as distinctly harmful and misleading.
How can art improve? Is art a something, an organism that is capable of
growing into a fat maturity? If this be so, then, by the same token, it
can become a doddering, senile thing, and finally die and be buried with
the honors due its useful career. It was Henrik Ibsen who asserted that
the vital values of a truth lasted at the longest about twenty years;
after that the particular truth rolled into error. Now, isn’t this
quibble concerning “artistic improvement” as fallacious as the vicious
circle of the dramatist from the Land of the Midnight Whiskers—or is it
the Land of the Midnight Bun? Contrariwise, Bach would be dead, Mozart
moribund, Beethoven in middle-aged decay. Instead, what is the musical
health of these three composers? Have we a gayer, blither, more youthful
scapegrace writing to-day than Mozart? Is there a man among the moderns
more virile, passionate, profound, or noble than Beethoven? And Bach
is the boy of the trinity. The Well-Tempered Clavichord is the Book of
Eternal Wisdom. In it may be found the past, present, future of music. It
is the Fountain of Eternal Youth.
As a matter of cold fact, it is your modern who is ancient; the ancients
were younger. Recall the Greeks and their naïve joy in creation. In
sorrow the twentieth-century man brings forth his art. His music betrays
it. It is sad, complicated, hysterical, morbid. No need to mention
Chopin, who was neurotic—an empty medical phrase—nor Schumann, who
carried in him the seeds of madness; nor Wagner, who was a typical
decadent on an epical scale. Sufficient for the argument to adduce the
names of Berlioz, Liszt, Tschaikovsky, and Richard Strauss. Some Sunday
when the weather is wretched, when icicles hang by the wall, and “ways be
foul” and “foul is fair and fair is foul,” I shall tell you what I think
of the “blond barbarian” who sets to music crazy philosophies, bloody
legends, sublime tommyrot, and the pictures and poems of his friend. At
present I am not in the humor nor have I the space. Good white paper is
become a luxury, like freedom of speechlessness and other indelicacies of
the national cuisine.
As I understand the jargon of criticism, Berlioz is the father
of modern instrumentation. That is, he says nothing original or
significant in his music, but he says it magnificently. A purple,
pompous rhetorician, a Chateaubriand of the orchestra. His style covers
a multitude of musical—or unmusical—defects with the flamboyant cloak
of chromatic charity. He pins haughty, poetic, high-sounding labels
to his compositions, and, like Charles Lamb, we sit open-mouthed at
concerts trying to fill in his big, sonorous, empty frame with an
adequate picture. Your picture is not the same as mine. I swear that the
young man who sits next to me, with a silly chin, goggle eyes, and a
cocoanut-shaped head, sees as in a flattering mirror, the idealized image
of a strong-jawed, ox-eyed, classic-browed youth, a mixture of Napoleon
and Byron. I loathe the music that makes its chief appeal to the egotism
of mankind, all the while slyly insinuating that it only addresses the
imagination. Yes, the imagination of your own splendid ego in a white
waistcoat driving a new model car through the White Light district on an
immoral afternoon in the puberty of spring.
Let us pass to the Hungarian piano virtuoso, who posed as a great
composer. That he lent his hard cash and musical themes to his precious
son-in-law, Richard Wagner, is undeniable. Liszt admits it himself.
But, then, beggars must not be choosers, and Liszt gave Wagner mighty
poor stuff at times. We believe that Wagner liked far better the solid
shekels than the notes of hand. Liszt would have had little to say if
Berlioz had not preceded him. The idea struck him, for he was a master
of musical snippets, that Berlioz was too long-winded—both in brass
and wood—that his so-called symphonies were neither fish, nor form,
nor good red tunes. What ho! cried Master Franz, I’ll give them a dose
homœopathic. He did, and he named his prescription Symphonic Poem, or,
if you will, Poème Symphonique, which is not the same thing. Nothing so
tickles the vanity like this sort of verbal fireworks. “It leaves so
much to the imagination,” murmurs the fat man with a 22-collar and a No.
6 hat. It does. And his kind of imagination—good Lord! Liszt, nothing
daunted because he couldn’t shake out an honest throw of a tune from his
technical dice-box, proceeded to build his noise on so-called themes,
claiming that in this method he derived from Bach. Not so. Bach’s themes
are subjects for fugal treatment, Liszt’s are used symphonically. The
parallel is uncritical. Besides, Daddy Liszt had no melodic invention.
Bach had, and in abundance; witness his chorals, masses, oratorios,
preludes, suites, fugues. However, the Berlioz ball had to be kept
a-rolling; the formula was easy. Liszt named his poems, named his very
notes, put dog-collars on his harmonies—yet no one whistled after them.
Whoever whistled a Liszt tune?
Tschaikovsky kept one eye on Liszt and Berlioz, the other on Bellini
and Gounod. What would have happened if he had been one-eyed I cannot
pretend to say. In love with lush, sensual melody, infatuated with the
gorgeous pyrotechnical effects of Berlioz and Liszt, also the pomposities
of Meyerbeer, this Russian, who began too late in his studies, succeeded
in manufacturing a number of ineffectual works. On them he bestowed
strained, fantastic titles, empty, meaningless, pretty, and as he was
contrapuntally short-winded, he made his so-called tone-poems shorter
than Liszt’s. He had little aptitude for the symphonic form, and his
development section is always his weak point. Too much Italian sentiment,
and a sentiment that is often hectic and morbid. He raves or whines
like the people in Russian fiction. I think he was touched in the upper
story, that is, till I heard the compositions of R. Strauss of Munich.
What misfit music for such a joyous name, a name evocative of all that
is gay, witty, sparkling, spontaneous in music. After Mozart, give me
Strauss—Johann, not Richard.
No longer the wheezings, gaspings, short-breathed phrases of Liszt.
No longer the sensuality, loose construction, formlessness and vodka
besotted peasant dances of Tschaikovsky, but a blending of Wagner,
Brahms, Liszt—and the classics. Richard Ostrich knows his little affair.
He is clever, he is skilled. He has his chamber-music moments, his lyric
outbursts. His early songs are singable. It is his vile, perverse orgies
of orchestral noises that wound my ears. No normal man ever erected such
mad architectural tonal schemes. He should be penned behind the bars of
his own mad music. He lacks melody. He dotes on ugliness. He suffers
from the uglification complex. He writes to distracting, unheavenly
lengths, worst of all, his harmonies are hideous. But he doesn’t forget
to call his monstrosities fanciful names. If it isn’t Don Juan—shades of
Mozart—it is Don Quixote—shades of Cervantes. This literary title humbug
serves as the plaster for our broken heads and split ear-drums. Berlioz,
Tschaikovsky and R. Strauss are not for all time.
The truth is that musical art has gone far afield from the main travelled
road, has been led into blind alleys and dark forests. If this art has
made no “progress in fugue, song, sonata, symphony, string quartet,
oratorio, opera,” who has “improved” on Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart,
Gluck, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin? Name, name, I ask. What’s
the use of talking about the “higher average of to-day?” How much higher?
You mean that more people go to concerts, more people enjoy music, than
fifty or a hundred years ago. Do they? I doubt it. Of what use all our
huge temples of worship if the true gods of art no longer be worshipped
therein? Numbers prove nothing. Majorities are not always in the
right. There has been no great original music composed since the death
of Beethoven, for, strictly speaking, the music-drama of Wagner is a
synthesis of the arts, and, despite his individual genius, in union there
is death—in the case of the Seven Arts. United we fall, divided we stand!
The multiplication of orchestras, opera-houses, singing societies, and
concerts are not indicative that general culture is achieved. Quality,
not quantity, should be the shibboleth. The tradition of the classics
is fading, soon it shall vanish. We care little for the masters. Modern
music worship is a fashionable fad. People go to listen because they
think it the mode. Alack and alas! that is not the true spirit in which
to approach the Holy of Holies, Bach, Handel, Mozart, and Beethoven.
Oremus!
MUSICAL “POTTERISM”
Potterism is a clever, amusing satire on the British philistine which
has had considerable vogue in London and New York. It was written by
Rose Macaulay, who is said to have a dozen novels to her credit. The
lady has evidently read Shaw profitably; that is, Nietzsche strained
through the Shaw sieve, for G. B. S. never had an original idea. She
defines Potterism as a frame of mind, not a set of opinions. Potterism
is only a new word for an old thing—cant, or, as we say, humbug, and, on
its more serious side, hypocrisy. Smug self-satisfaction is its keynote.
Will Irwin in a flash of divination defined the particular quality
as “highbrow,” a species of sterile intellectualism which irritates
sensible people because of the lofty, condescending attitude assumed
by certain persons who, terribly at ease in Zion, are seemingly in the
secret councils of the Almighty. Don Marquis daily tilts at æsthetic
sham in his stimulating Sun Dial column, and Gelett Burgess, the author
of the deathless Purple Cow, long ago hit out at the Potterism of his
time. Potterism, like the rich, is always with us. We are all of us
more or less Potterites. Dickens painted the tribe, beginning with Mrs.
Leo Hunter, not forgetting Podsnappery. Thackeray’s scimitar prose
cut through snobbish pretenses, while a French philosopher, Jules de
Gautier, in his Bovaryisme, has demonstrated that we are victims of the
world illusion—to pretend to be otherwise than we are. It is a law of
life, a superstition, this game of self-illuding, and superstition is the
cement of civilization.
Therefore, Miss Macaulay has dealt with nothing novel, but she has
written an agreeable variation on the theme of human weakness, and the
most engaging quality of her formula is its elasticity. No matter the
department of life, Potterism lurks thereabouts. Musical Potterism,
for example, is everywhere rampant. It bobs up in music criticisms and
peeps forth in daily intercourse. “Give me good old Mozart,” cries the
classical Potterite, “and keep your modern kickshaws. Mozart is good
enough for me!” Alas, we think Mozart is too good for this bonehead,
who no doubt prefers a Broadway comic opera to The Marriage of Figaro.
Another of the exasperating Potterites is the haunter of concert
halls who spends his time in comparing violinists, pianists, singers,
orchestras. Criticism thrives on comparisons. That we know; but the
infernal hair-splitting over this bald subject gets on your nerves.
Music and morals is another favorite grouping of two widely sundered
things. Not so, asserts the uplifter who seeks sermons in running Bachs
and usually finds immoral rubble. Of all the damnable nuisances in the
Vale of Tone, commend me to your moralizer. He is too much in evidence
nowadays, and his pernicious influence will, I feel certain, close every
theatre, opera-house, picture-gallery, and book in our present United
States of Slaves.
There is too much critical cant concerning the classics of music. How
uncritical we are! We say Mozart and Beethoven just as we say Goethe
and Schiller. Such bracketing is bubbling bosh. It is almost Hegelian
in its identification of opposites. We can understand the conjunction
of Mascagni and Leoncavello in Cavalleria and Pagliacci, a managerial
marriage, with our eye on the box office. But Bach and Beethoven. Or
Schumann and Chopin. How absurd and lazy-minded is such association of
names! One of the most ingrained of Potterisms is that the gallery at
the opera is the repository of the most precious criticism. For gallery,
read the standees at our opera—the rail birds, so called. As a matter of
fact, the most illegitimate applause comes from these quarters. Does a
tenor bawl, a basso bellow, a soprano scream, thunderous explosions prove
our contention. When Galli-Curci sang off key at the Lexington Theatre
last season she was hailed in an unmistakably cordial manner. We have
noticed the same lack of taste at the San Carlo, Naples; at La Scala, in
Milan; in Paris, Berlin, and London. Italian audiences, especially of the
top gallery, are supposed to possess finer ears than other people. More
musical Potterism. They applaud in Italy, as they applaud in New York or
London, the singers with the stentorian or extremely high voices; whether
they sing in tune or not, whether they rhythmically distort the musical
phrase or not, matters little to these fanatics for noise. And invariably
they drown the orchestra if the singer happens to end a few bars before
it. That the composition should be allowed to terminate logically does
not enter into their unmusical comprehension. To bruise their muscular
palms and shout is their idea of sensibility. We do not refer now to the
official claque, if there be one at the opera, but to the diabolical
hand-clapping and hurrahing which is becoming a formidable menace to
the enjoyment of the musical portion of the audience. No applause is
tolerated during Parsifal until act-ends, no applause is tolerated at
Tristan and Isolde until the curtain falls, and what a relief it is not
to be forced to endure the belching enthusiasm and vulgar fist-thumping
in the middle of a musical phrase! Why, then, are not Italian and French
operas given the same chance? We are indeed barbarians in this cult of
noise. We can’t even escape noise within our opera-house. It would be a
wise regulation if applause could be confined within legitimate limits—at
the end of each act. It might not please some singers, who are so avid of
applause that they actually hire it by the yard, but it would be a boon
to the occupants of the stalls and boxes at the Metropolitan. Hasta la
vista!
We blush to utter such Potterisms. There should be no necessity for
these obvious criticisms. Another annoying Potterism is the growing
hero-worship of conductors—nothing rare, by the way, in the history
of art. We remember Theodore Thomas in his palmy days; remember that
smoothly fitting dress coat of his. Yes, there were many women who
attended the Philharmonic Society concerts to gaze ecstatically upon
the shapely back and harmonious movements of this handsome conductor.
Another prima donna conductor was Arthur Nikisch of the Boston band. He
waved lily-white hands; his weaving motions fascinated the eye. They
seemed in their rhythmic variety the externalization of the music he
was interpreting, and, according to Delsarte and Dalcroze, they were.
But both Thomas and Nikisch were great conductors—Nikisch still is;
indeed, he is the dean of great conductors. His personal mannerisms were
and are taken as a matter of course. We do not include Arthur Bodanzky
among the prima-donna bâton heroes. Nevertheless, he is a hero, and a
hero always in a hurry. He is the most precise and business-like of our
conductors. He seems as if he were making a train to Eldorado. Yet it is
only a fancy. He is absolutely master of his technical and intellectual
resources. The enormous dynamic energy of the man, his driving power, are
concentrated at the tip of his stick. If the Boston Symphony Orchestra
boasts a demon drummer, the National Symphony Orchestra can boast a
demon conductor. Bodanzky is demoniacal when he cuts loose. At the second
Tristan performance he galloped his men at such a pace that the singers
could only pant after them. A great conductor is Artur with the Weber
profile and the propulsive right hand. If he had a calm left hand like
Thomas or Nikisch his readings would benefit thereby. But how stimulating
is his conducting! You swing along on the crest of exaltation and forget
the composer’s intentions in the tumultuous symphonic sea. A brilliant
apparition, a stroke of genius, but with brains, always brains. The dark
horse of American conductors is Ossip Gabrilowitsch. That young man will
bear watching.
His antipodes is Walter Damrosch, who is as familiar a spectacle nowadays
as Trinity Church. Walter leaves nothing to chance. He doesn’t believe
in the imprévu; with him the unexpected never happens. There is a sense
of security at his Symphony Society, the sort of security that appeals
to you when sitting under a long beloved preacher. Since 1881, on and
off, we have sat metaphorically at the feet of Walter Damrosch, and not
once has he startled, not once has he altogether disappointed us. He is
safe, sane, and—sometimes—soporific. But he never uses rouge or pencils
the eyebrows of his interpretations; perfume is to him abhorrent. Good
old Walter! His has been a long race, and his a sober victory. Leopold
Stokowski is a pocket edition of Nikisch, a Nikisch without genius. He is
the ideal prima-donna conductor and exudes sweetness and light (Einstein
says that light exudes), and as regards the technique of the bâton he has
all his contemporaries beaten to a frazzle—save one, Arturo Toscanini.
Such economy of gesture, such weighty significance in every motion are
praiseworthy. His musicianship is excellent, his memory remarkable,
although commanding intellectuality is absent. He too has a sinuous line
in his back that enchants his feminine audience. He is graceful, and
inevitably makes his entrance carrying his bâton as if it were a baby.
The Philadelphia Orchestra is largely composed of mediocre material, but
thanks to the admirable disciplinarian, that is, Stokowski, it sounds
at times as if of prime quality. And tonal quality is precisely what it
lacks. Its conductor hypnotizes his audience into thinking it is so. Ah,
these Poles! The Oriental mango magic trick over again. Stokowski is
young, blond, and has a Chopinesque head, but in profile his chin is as
diffident as a poached egg. Pierre Monteux, like a happy nation, has no
personal history. He is an accomplished chef. We enjoy his cuisine. There
is a savory touch of the Midi in his musical ragouts. And to my horror I
find myself indulging in the most reprehensible musical Potterism.
MY “CHILDE ROLAND”
If you keep good company too long it is difficult to remain a decent
member of society. This sounds like a faded paradox, but I mean it. No
doubt vaso-motor reflex action is the cause. Try it yourself. Frequent
the abodes of the self-righteous, of prohibitionists, of reformers
and uplifters generally, and you will soon crave moral wood-alcohol,
possibly the more vicious benzine. Too much opera drives me back to the
church, and thence to the House of the Flesh where the spirit sleepeth.
Because he was a clergyman’s son and brought up in a moral straight
jacket, dosed with moralic acid, Friedrich Nietzsche exploded such a
phrase as “Christianity, alcohol—the two great means of corruption” to
civilization. I have often wondered why he dragged in rum? (This is a
variant on Whistler’s epigram.)
However, I’m not attempting unimaginary conversations, nor describing
insurrections in oyster-shells. A Scotch proverb warns us: “Never tell
your foe when your foot sleeps”; nevertheless I shall make a confession
that involves both feet, also my sleeping cortical cells. The good
company mentioned above chiefly consisted of young, ambitious composers,
an approved gang of musical chaps who delighted in symphonically
setting poetic ideas, whether from Byron, Nietzsche, Ben De Casseres, or
d’Annunzio. And when I say symphonically I mean symphonic poems, for the
great symphonists were long ago voted by this coterie as “old stuff.”
Liszt and Richard Strauss were our springboards. The Debussy influence
was yet to come. It was Tchaikovsky who most appealed to us. Realism,
not imagination, was our shibboleth. As all my friends were composing I
took it into my head to go them one better, to be more realistic than the
ultra-realists. I had, so I fancied, the necessary science. I consulted
young Henry Hadley, who was quite a promising lad at that time, and he
advised—after putting me through a course of contrapuntal sprouts—to go
ahead and do my worst, which worst would only mean spoiling music-paper,
while my best—! Who knows?
I fancied that I had mastered the tools of my trade, that I knew
every form from a song to a symphony, and that my scoring comprised
the entire gamut of orchestral pigments—you see, false modesty didn’t
stand in the way—so I began to cast about for my poetic subject and
its musical counterpart, hoping—such is the audacity of youth—that the
appearance of the pair would be simultaneous, as in the dual-composing
of Richard Wagner. I didn’t expect much, did I? Well, one fine night,
as I wearily tossed on my folding bedouin, my musical imagination
began to work. I remember now that it was a spring night, the moon
rounded, lustrous, and silvering the lake beneath my window. I had been
re-reading for the hundredth time Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,
from my favorite poet, Robert Browning, with its sinister coloring, its
spiritual overtones. Yet until that moment it had never suggested musical
treatment. Perhaps it was the exquisite cool of the night, its haunting
mellow atmosphere, that fermented in my brain-box. I went to the window.
Suddenly I saw a huge fantastic cloud shadow project a jagged black
pattern on the water. Presto! I had my theme. It came with an electric
snap that blinded me for an instant. It would be the first motive of my
symphonic poem, Childe Roland. It was thought in the key of B minor, a
key emblematic of the dauntless knight who to “the dark tower came,”
unfettered by enemies, physical or spiritual.
How my imagination seethed the night through, as I am one of those
unhappy men who, the moment an idea comes to them, must develop it
to the bitter end. Childe Roland kept me on tenterhooks till dawn. I
heard the call of his “dauntless horn,” and saw the “squat tower.” The
knight’s theme, so it seemed to me, was Roland incarnated in tone. I
overheard its underlying harmonies with the instrumentation, all sombre,
gloomy, the note of gladness missing. I treated my theme with vitality,
announcing it on the English horn, with a strange rhythmic background
supplied by the tympani; the strings in division played tremolando,
the brass was staccato and muted. It was novel enough to me, although
this description must sound banal to modern ears. After seven months of
agonizing revision, pruning, clipping, cutting, and hawking it about for
the inspection of my friends, and getting laughed at for my pains, I
finished the unwieldy work. But the performance! Diplomacy won the day.
A music-critic, who could compose a symphonic poem was more of a rarity
in those far-away days than now, when children make fugues while you
wait. There was an interview with Herr Kapellmeister Schnabelowsky and a
definite promise. I shall spare you details of the seventeen rehearsals,
hours and hours in duration, when my amateurish orchestration was held
up to scorn by the conductor for the delectation of the band (though I
always paid for his beer at Lüchow’s). The audience at the concert had
the pleasure of reading in the programme-book the entire poem, Childe
Roland, no doubt wondering what it meant. My symphonic poem would make
clear the dark, dubious sayings of the poet. I believed then in the power
of music to portray definite soul-states, to mirror moods, to depict,
though indefinitely, common every-day physical facts.
My composition was adequately played, of that there was no doubt. Give
the Herr Kapellmeister his due. It was only ninety minutes long—remember
it was a symphonic poem, not a symphony—and I sat in nervous perspiration
as I listened to the Childe Roland theme, to the squat tower theme,
the “sudden little river” motive, the horrid engine of war motive, the
sinister grinning false-guide theme, in short, to the many motives of
the poem with its tremendous apotheosis, ending with the blast from the
slug-horn of the dauntless knight. I hope you are acquainted with this
extraordinary poem, for I have met confirmed Browningites who had never
read it. After Paracelsus and Sordello it is my daily sustenance. The
apotheosis theme I sounded with twelve trombones, twenty-one basset
horns, one calliope and a chorus of one thousand two hundred, with a
vacuum choir for celestial coloring. It almost brought down the roof and
I was the happiest person in the audience. As I went away I encountered
an old friend, the critic of The Disciples of Tone, who said to me:
“Mon cher maître, I congratulate you, it beats Richard Strauss all
hollow. Who and what was your Childe Roland? Was he any relative of
Byron’s Childe Harold? No, yes, no? I suppose the first theme represented
the ‘galumping’ of his horse, and that funny triangular fugue meant
the horse was lame in one leg and going it on three. Adieu! again
congratulations. I’m in a hurry.” He fled. Triangular fugue! Why, that
typified the crossroads before which Childe Roland hesitates. How I
detested that unimaginative critic! I was indeed disheartened. Then I was
saluted by a musical lady:
“It was grand, perfectly grand, but why did you introduce a funeral march
in the middle? You know in the poem Childe Roland is not killed till the
end.” I thanked her with a wry face. The funeral march she alluded to was
not a march but the Quagmire theme, that quagmire from which queer faces
threateningly mock at the brave knight. Hopeless, thought I, musical
people have no imagination. In the morning newspapers I was treated
rather roughly. I was accused of cribbing my opening theme from the
overture to The Flying Dutchman, and giving it a rhythmic twist for my
own ends—as if I hadn’t conceived it on the spur of an inspired minute!
I was also told that I couldn’t write a fugue, that my orchestration
was overladen, my part-writing crooked, while the work as a whole was
deficient in symmetry, development, repose, above all in coherence.
This last was too much. If Browning’s poem was pictured in my music,
why, then, Browning was to be blamed for the incoherence, not I. I had
faithfully followed his poetic narrative. Years later, when I became a
member of the critical guild, I saw in a clearer light the reasons for
those divagations. You can’t fool all the critics all the time.
Months afterward I read in his book, The Beautiful in Music, by Edward
Hanslick, that “Definite feelings and emotions are unsusceptible of being
embodied in music.” So I had been on a false track. Charles Lamb and
Hanslick had reached the same conclusion by diverse roads. I realized
that my symphonic poem Childe Roland told nothing to its hearers of
Browning’s poem; that my own subjective and overthrown imaginings were
not worth a rush; that as music the composition had objective existence,
though not as a poetical picture, which must be judged on its musical
merits alone; its themes, development, formal excellence, and not because
of its arbitrary fidelity to a literary programme. When I set about
analyzing, I discovered what poor stuff I had produced; how my fancy had
tricked me into believing that my half dozen heavily instrumented themes,
with their restless migrations into many tonalities were “souls and tales
marvellously mirrored,” when they were nothing of the kind.
In reality my ignorance of form, and lack of contrapunted knowledge, had
made me label the work a “symphonic poem”—an elastic, high-sounding,
pompous, and empty tithe. In a spirit of revenge on my fatuity I
rearranged the score for small orchestra and it is now played in the
circus under the better understood name of The Patrol of the Night-Stick,
and the critical press has particularly praised the graphic power of the
night-stick motive and the verisimilitude of the quick “get-away” of the
burglars in the elaborate coda. Alas! poor Childe Roland.
If our young composers would study Hanslick’s book much good might
accrue. It is all very well to give your composition a grandiose title,
but do not expect that your audience will understand your idea. We may
be thinking of something quite different, according to our respective
temperaments. I may enjoy the formal musical side; my neighbor, for all
I know, will, in imagination, have buried his rich, irritable old aunt;
therefore your pæan of gladness, with its clamor of brazen trumpets,
means for him the triumphant ride home from the cemetery and the
anticipated joys of the post-mortuary baked meats and the subsequent jag.
You never can tell.
“OSCAR” AND DVORAK
Well I remember the day when Oscar Hammerstein first entered the
office of the _Musical Courier_ and introduced himself to Editor Marc
A. Blumenberg. The year may have been 1888, perhaps 1889. He told Mr.
Blumenberg that he was worth a million dollars, which sum he had made
from a patent cigar-cutting machine; he also said that he was the editor
of a trade journal devoted to the tobacco industry. Blumenberg looked at
me, winked, and shook his head. The future impresario, with that ironical
smile of his, noticed the incredulous movement and asked: “You think I’m
meshugah? I’ll prove that I’m not crazy,” and he produced irrefragable
evidence that he was neither crazy nor poverty-stricken. He was worth
more than a million, and Marc immediately became interested. Who wouldn’t
have? Oscar was then dreaming of opera in English. The failures of
American operatic companies had only blazed a trail for him, a trail
that would be bound to end in success. He thought that good singing in
our native language at moderate prices would solve the problem. Every
experimenter starts out with that simple thesis, a dangerous one, as
opera has little to do with art, music, good singing, or vernacular
speech.
Opera is an exotic. It is a fashionable function or nothing. Oscar was
told this by Blumenberg, but he in turn shook his head. He proposed
to be another Columbus and show them the egg trick. He had a hundred
predecessors, and no doubt he will have a thousand successors. But
somehow the egg never stands; that is, in English.
There was much pow-wowing between the two editors that I can’t recall.
The less I understand a libretto the more I enjoy the music. I agree
with Harry B. Smith, who has said that when an opera is a success the
composer gets the credit; when a failure, the blame is saddled upon
the book. As the librettist of Robin Hood and a string of other De
Koven and Smith operas, Mr. Smith knows what he is talking about. W. S.
Gilbert was in the same rocking boat with Arthur Sullivan. Later, Oscar
Hammerstein was to settle the question by writing both words and music
for The Kohinoor, thus patterning after Richard Wagner. But at first
he was rather timid. I don’t believe he took Blumenberg’s advice, or,
indeed, the advice of any one, except Campanini’s. Opera at the Harlem
Opera House followed after an interval. It was not an enlivening affair.
When I read in some obituary articles that Hammerstein had engaged Lilli
Lehmann, Schumann-Heink, Alvary, Fischer, and others for his One Hundred
and Twenty-fifth-Street season, I also shook my head. I can’t remember
such an imposing array—as they say in funeral notices—at the old Harlem
Opera House. Does any one? I remember the burning mountain in Auber’s
Masaniello, or The Dumb Girl of Portici (what a film it would make, this
dumbness), and there were other mediocre revivals, not worthy of critical
consideration.
However, Oscar was not to be discouraged. He proceeded to play the
game with energy and recklessness. He was a gambler born. Organizing
opera companies, vaudeville shows, erecting opera-houses in New York,
Philadelphia, London, building theatres, playing with men and millions,
what were the achievements of Henry E. Abbey or Colonel Jack Haverly
compared with those of this shrewd, ever-witty, good-tempered Hebrew, who
was more prodigal with his own money than other managers were, and are,
with the capital of strangers?
Hammerstein’s original operetta was once upon a time as celebrated as his
hat. The composition was the result of a wager made by Oscar and Gustave
Kerker, the composer of The Belle of New York, Castles in the Air, and
a dozen other popular pieces. Kerker is a well-trained musician, and,
naturally, he was rather sceptical when Oscar boasted of his musical
genius. Whatever gifts Oscar may have possessed, modesty was not one of
his failings. I have heard him quote with gusto Goethe’s dictum as to the
modesty of fools. At a table one afternoon a quarter of a century ago,
at the old Gilsey House, in the café, sat Oscar, Kerker, Charles Alfred
Byrne, dramatic critic and librettist; Henry Neagle, then dramatic editor
of the _New York Recorder_—since defunct—and the present writer. Taunted
by some one, Oscar became excited and offered to compose an opera, words
and music, within forty-eight hours. Gus booked the bet—the amount of
which I’ve forgotten. Rooms were engaged in the Gilsey, an upright piano
installed, and, cut off from the world, Hammerstein began tapping out
tunes—he was a one-fingered virtuoso—scribbling verse, and altogether
making himself extremely busy. I forgot to say that Gus Kerker had agreed
to orchestrate the masterpiece.
Then we had lots of fun. Louis Harrison engaged a relay of hand-organs
to play under the composer’s windows, but Oscar never winced. The hotel
authorities had to telephone the police in order to get rid of a string
of Italian piano-organists passionately grinding out popular melodies
on Twenty-ninth Street. Plates of sinister ham sandwiches were sent
to his room, accompanied by a brigade of cocktails. And the tray was
always returned empty, with the composer’s thanks. I’ve forgotten the
other pranks we played, and all to no purpose. Complaints were made at
the hotel office that a wild man was howling and thumping the keyboard;
again, uselessly, for, barricaded, the composer refused to give up the
fort. Exhausted, but smiling, Oscar at the end of the allotted time
invited the jury on awards to listen to his music. It proved a tuneful
hodge-podge, also proved the composer’s retentive memory. Every operetta
composer was represented. The book was a joy. It would have pleased
little Daisy Ashford. (Why doesn’t some humor-loving musician set The
Visiters to music?) Kerker threw up the sponge. He had to pay the
bet. The curious side of the affair is that the operetta was actually
produced at the New York Theatre a few months later, reinforced by extra
numbers, considerably “edited,” and it met with some success. To be
sure, the composer was also the owner and manager of the three theatres
clustered under one roof. That first night of The Kohinoor was not only
notorious, it was side-splitting. The audience, of the true Tenderloin
variety, laughed themselves blue in the face. I can only recall that
the opening chorus consumed a third of the first act. Oscar knew the
art of camouflage years before the word was imported. Two comic-stage
Jews alternately sang, “Good morning, Mr. Morgenstern; good morning, Mr.
Isaacstein,” while the orchestra shifted the harmonies to avoid monotony.
I fancy that was a device of Kerker’s. Oscar “composed” a second
operetta, but it never achieved the popularity of The Kohinoor.
During a certain period the Hammerstein hat was without duplicate, except
that worn by William M. Chase, the painter. Nevertheless, the Hammerstein
hat was unique, not alone for the gray matter it covered, but because
of its atmospheric quality. It was a temperamental barometer. When the
glass had set fair the tilt of the hat was unmistakable. If storm clouds
had gathered on the vocal horizon the hat registered the mood and righted
itself like a buoy in agitated waters. Its brim settled over the eyes of
its owner; his people flurried into anonymous corners. Or else the hat
was pushed off his forehead: unbuttoned then his soul. You might dare
to approach and beg for seats. A weather gauge was Oscar’s hat. Ask his
one-time famulus, W. J. Guard. He knew. Or Mary Garden. Oscar had hurled
his hat at her head in the long ago. What a brim it had, this hat. Oh!
the breadth and flatness thereof. How glossy its nap, in height how
imposing. To have described Hammerstein without his hat would have been
as disastrous as to give the Ring without Wotan. Shorn of it the owner
would have been like Alberich sans Tarnhelm. As an Irishman would have
said: His hat was his heel of Achilles. Oscar sported it while sleeping.
Inside was stencilled the wisdom of Candide: “Il faut cultiver notre
Jardin.” (Mary, of course.) Many painters yearned to portray that hat
in Oscar’s dome of action. The impressionists would have painted it in
complementary tones; the late William M. Chase would have transformed
it into a shiny still-life. George Luks would have made it a jest for
Hades; Arthur B. Davies would have changed it into a symbol—the old
Hebraic chant, Kol Nidre, might have been heard echoing around its
curved surfaces, as echoes the Banshee on a funereal night in dear old
Tipperary. It was a hat cosmopolitan, alert, joyous, both reticent and
expensive. It caused a lot of people sleepless nights, did this sawed-off
stovepipe with its operatic airs. Why did Oscar Hammerstein wear it?
For the same reason that a miller wears his hat, and not for tribal or
political reasons. Requiescat in Oscarino! Pardon my Latin.
But Oscar musical? Oscar a man of fine musical tastes or intelligence?
Basta! He had the native wit to select as General for his operatic army
a skilled conductor and a musician of judgment and vision. That is the
reason New York had such a wide and novel repertory offered to it at the
Manhattan Opera House. When Signor Cleofonte Campanini left Hammerstein
his musical fortunes began to wane. But as a dynamic driving force I
cannot name his equal, except Jack Haverly, or Barnum.
* * * * *
When I was on the professional staff of the National Conservatory—the
only musical institution in this country that deserved the appellation—I
was intrusted by the President, Jeannette M. Thurber, with the care on
his arrival of Dr. Antonin Dvorak, Bohemian composer and musical director
of the Conservatory. For the “man in the street” his name means his
Humoresque as played by the inimitable Fritz Kreisler, or wheezed out by
some unmusical instrument of torture; canned music; in the consecrated
phrase of Arthur Whiting, “musical waxworks.” But Dvorak also composed
The New World symphony, and other trifles; these, however, do not trouble
or soothe the digestion of table d’hôtes. With “Old Borax,” as Parker the
composer affectionately called Dvorak, in tow I assured Mrs. Thurber that
he would be safe in my hands, and then I proceeded to show him certain
sections of our old town, chiefly the near east side. As he was a fervent
Roman Catholic I found a Bohemian church for him; he invariably began
his day by attending the first mass. Jauntily I invited him to taste the
treacherous national drink called whisky cocktail. He nodded with that
head which looked like an angry bulldog bearded. At first he scared me
with his fierce Slavonic eyes, yet he was as mild-mannered a musical
pirate as ever scuttled a pupil’s counterpoint. I always thought of him
as a boned-pirate. But I made a mistake in believing that American strong
waters would upset his nerves. We began our rounds at Goerwitz’s, then,
as now, Scheffel Hall, which stood across the street from the National
Conservatory. Later we went down to Gus Lüchow’s; for a musician not to
be seen at Lüchow’s argued that he was unknown in the social world of
tone. We traversed the great thirst belt of the neighborhood. At each
stopping-place Doc Borax absorbed a cocktail or two. He seemed to take
to them as a prohibitionist takes to personal abuse.
Now, alcohol I abhor. Therefore I stuck to my usual three-voiced
invention of hops, malt, and water. We conversed in German, for he knew
no English, and I rejoiced at meeting a man whose Teutonic accent, above
all whose grammar, was worse than mine. Yet we got along swimmingly—an
appropriate enough image, as the thirst-weather was wet, though not
squally. He told me of his admiration for Brahms and of that composer’s
admiration for Dvorak. I agreed with Brahms. After he had put away about
nineteen cocktails, maybe more, I said, rather thickly: “Master, don’t
you think it’s time we ate something?” He gazed at me through those
jungle whiskers, which met his tumbled hair half way. He grunted: “Eat! I
no eat. We go to Houston Street. You go, hein! We drink the slivavitch.
It makes warm after beer.” I didn’t go that evening to the East Houston
Street café with Dr. Antonin Dvorak. I never went there with him, for I
not only feared the slivavitch, but also that deadly Humoresque played
by a fake gypsy fiddler, attired in a red coat and wearing an ineffable
grin. Such a man as Old Borax was as dangerous to a moderate drinker as
a false beacon to a shipwrecked sailor. His head was like iron. He could
drink as much spirits as I could beer, and never turn a hair. I tell this
anecdote, not for a moral purpose, but as one of the rapidly vanishing
specimens of rum-lore, soon to become legendary. Next year the nation
will be put in cotton-wool and its feeble will coddled by noble precepts
and winning words from mouths smoking with fiery wisdom. And yet—it was
a better time when Hammerstein smoked or Dvorak drank than the dusty
prospect ahead for baffled thirsts.
ENRICO CARUSO
Enrico Caruso is dead. The enormous displacement caused by this
lamentable happening is not alone confined to the artistic sphere but
literally to the entire civilized world. We doubt if there are more than
a half dozen public men on the globe to-day whose demise would so stir
the universal imagination as has the passing of the incomparable tenor,
for it must not be forgotten that the voice of Caruso has been heard,
still is, and always will be listened to, from the equator to both poles,
thanks to his vocal records, meagre, mechanical things, if you will, yet
at least the simulacrum of his golden organ. It is a curious commentary
on Théophile Gautier’s famous poetic dictum that empires perish but art
endures; that many of the great names contemporary with Caruso’s wall
surely be forgotten, but the memory of his achievements not. Mankind
always recalls with satisfaction the artists who have given pleasure to
the senses. Kings are embalmed in deathless verse or live on the canvas
of poet and painter. Yet where to-day are the monarchs who patronized
Shakespeare, or Velasquez, or Molière? Their very titles would be
forgotten were it not for art.
But actor and singer have not the luck of creative artists; they do but
interpret, therefore, with their disappearance from the painted scene,
for the majority there is naught but oblivion. The happy few who seem as
of yesterday are, in the musical world: Patti, Rubinstein, Liszt, Rubini,
Chopin—as pianist—Paganini, Malibran, and Lilli Lehmann. Great exemplars.
To this brief list is now added Caruso. And he has one tremendous
advantage over his celebrated predecessors—his voice is a living reality,
after a fashion. That same voice has given profound satisfaction in
hundreds of thousands of homes scattered over the world; that voice
cheered the boys in the trenches during the World War. After all, it is a
sort of immortality, this record, about as vital as we may hope for in a
universe of changeless change.
Enrico Caruso is dead. There have been and will be other tenors, yet for
this generation his memory is something sacred and apart. It is doubtful
if the Metropolitan Opera House will again echo such golden music as
made by his throat—that is, doubtful in our time. When he first came
here, not two decades ago, there was a rich fruitiness to his tones that
evoked such disparate images as the sound of a French horn and a golden
autumnal sunset. Always the word golden comes to the lips. Golden, with
a thrilling human fibre. Not the finished vocal artist that he developed
into, nevertheless there was something indescribably fresh, luminous and
youthful in the singing of the early Caruso. I had heard him in London
before he sang here, which, alas! was to be his last home. Veteran as
I was I could hardly trust my ears when he poured forth a golden stream
of music, and with effortless art. It needed no critical clairvoyancy to
predict that a star of the first magnitude had arisen in the firmament of
art. That was in 1902, and since then this star grew in lustre and beauty
till the day of his death. Caruso had not even then achieved his grand
artistic climax. He was ever a prodigious student.
There will not be any critical dispute as to Caruso’s place in the
history of his art. Even in the brief span of life accorded the present
writer Caruso looms formidably. Originally a lyric, he ended as a
heroic tenor. His vocal range was extraordinary. In his repertory he
demonstrated his catholicity. From Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots to Flotow’s
Marta, from Rigoletto to Pagliacci, there are few lyric works that he
missed. La Forza del Destino was revived for him by Mr. Gatti-Casazza,
and he could squander his extraordinary art on such a trifle as
Mascagni’s Lodoletta. But to all his undertakings he brought a refreshing
sincerity and tonal beauty. It is not to be denied that he was happier in
Italian than French music; his Rhadamès outshone his Faust. Nevertheless,
he overcame the seemingly insuperable difficulties of a foreign style
and diction, and his John of Leyden in Le Prophète and Eléazer in La
Juive rank among his greatest achievements, not to mention his Samson.
There was the note of the grand manner in the assumption of John and
incomparable pathos in the delineation of Halévy’s persecuted and
vengeful old Hebrew. As an actor he grew amazingly the last decade of his
artistic career. Compare his lighthearted, frivolous Duke in Rigoletto
with the venerable Jew in La Juive. Then we realize how far intense
study intelligently directed may carry a singer. It has often been a
cause of critical wonderment why Caruso never sang the music of Richard
Wagner. What a Lohengrin he would have been, what a Parsifal, yes, even
a Tristan! He knew every note of these rôles. Once for my delectation
he hummed the plaintive measures of the dying Tristan. Tears came to my
eyes, so penetratingly sweet was his tone, so pathetic his phrasing.
I have heard tenors from Brignoli, so fat that he waddled, to the
Spaniard Gayarré; from Italo Campanini to Masini, Nicolini and the
stentorian Tamagno; no one of these boasted the luscious voice of Caruso.
Some have outpointed him in finesse, Bonci; Tamagno outroared him; Jean
de Reszke had more personal charm and artistic subtlety; there have been
fierier Turridùs and more sympathetic Don Josés, but Caruso’s natural
voice was paved with lyric magic, it was positively torrential in its
golden mellowness. When in his prime, full of verve and unaffected
gaiety—think of L’Elisir d’Amore and Marta—he was unapproachable. There
were many of us who would rather have been Caruso than ruler of these
United States.
The social man in him was irresistible. Generous, overflowing with the
joy of life, his sense of humor found one outlet in his caricatures—his
pencil was clever as well as witty—and in the company of his friends. He
was a good friend. No need here to speak of his ready response to those
in trouble. He was exploited, of course, yet his belief in humanity was
never shaken. An Italian patriot, he was also a lover of his adopted
land. He was always a boy. He really never grew up. The eternal boy in
him, mischievous, mirthful, coupled with his gift of mimicry, endeared
him to every one. He fairly bubbled with kindly humor, and not the least
among his many admirable traits was his conscientious attitude toward
his audiences. Not to disappoint an expectant audience often cost him
much personal suffering. He has sung when he should have been in bed with
doctors and nurses. In Brooklyn he persisted in singing until a ruptured
vein filled his throat with blood. The same desire, and not a craving
for more fame or money, impelled him to make long and fatiguing trips in
order that remote audiences might enjoy his matchless voice.
Like the majority of his countrymen, he was frugal in his habits, eating
little and drinking less. He abused the use of tobacco, and because
of his nervousness cigarettes were a sedative. However, they did not
fatally hurt his throat as has been asserted. And considering his
exalted position and his innumerable temptations, Caruso was hardly a
rake. Scandal clustered about his name. Cruel persecution pursued him,
but at the close of his life he was happily married and the father of
a passionately loved daughter. A democratic man, he at no time bore
himself with the arrogant airs of the traditional tenor. Beloved by his
associates, especially beloved by the chorus, he was accessible to all
and sundry. Truly a refreshing contrast to the proverbially haughty
signore with a high C in his chest.
Born of humble parentage, Caruso suffered a severe apprenticeship to
his art. In Naples we have met people who remember him singing in
the streets, around various cafes, in company with a strummer on the
guitar. Pasquale Amato, a fellow-townsman as well as a colleague at the
Metropolitan Opera House, has told me of the far-away days when Enrico
sang in two operas every Sunday at the Teatro Mercadante, at Naples,
and of the summers at Salerno when, during entr’actes he would drop a
string from his dressing-room window and draw up a fond prize—sardine and
cream cheese sandwiches. He was thin then and his appetite was that of
a growing youth. The local manager knew that the only way to be sure of
him for the two Sunday performances was to lock him in the theatre till
the last curtain had been rung down. He confessed to me that once as a
boy his mother had chastised him not gently because he let the household
bread bake till it burned. But enough. Books might be crowded with
interesting stories of the great man. A good comrade, a loving husband
and father, the giant tenor of his generation, Enrico Caruso is dead. But
to his admirers he remains the dearest memory in this drab, prosaic age.
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